skimpole
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Here's my top ten for 1957:
1. 12 Angry Men
2. The Seventh Seal
3. Throne of Blood
4. Wild Strawberries
5. The Nights of Cabiria
6. The Sweet Smell of Success
7. Letter from Siberia
8. The Snow Queen
9. Paths of Glory
10. White Nights
With The Incredible Shrinking Man as runner-up. Admittedly I'm not a big fan of Hollywood this year, with only three movies from the United States.
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1932 is the first year of the decade in which I can honestly say I have a favorite ten:
1. Vampyr
2. Trouble in Paradise
3. Freaks
4. Me and My Gal
5. Horsefeathers
6. I was Born but?
7. I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
8. Love me Tonight
9. One Hour with You
10. Red Headed Woman
Runner ups: Boudu saved from Drowning, What Price Hollywood
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Well here's my top 10 for 1959:
1. North by Northwest
2. The World of Apu
3. The 400 Blows
4. Some Like it Hot
5. Pickpocket
6. The Virgin Spring*
7. Anatomy of a Murder
8. Rio Bravo
9. Hiroshima Mon Amour
10. India
Runner ups: The Letter Never Sent, The tiger of Eschnapur, Imitation of Life and Black Orpheus.
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Went the Day Well? plus Jacques Demy's Lola and Nights of Cabiria. Now if we could only get The Young Girls of Rochefort.
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I've probably done this before, but here's my classification of the best picture winners. I should point out that I haven't seen Gentleman's Agreement.
Winners that were actually the best Picture of the year: All Quiet on the Western Front, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons, The Godfather, Annie Hall, Schindler's List, The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King
Winners that were worthy of being nominated for best picture: Gone with the Wind, The Best Years of Our Lives, All About Eve, Around the World in Eighty Days, Oliver!, The Sting, The Godfather, Part II, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, The Silence of the Lambs, The English Patient, The Hurt Locker
Winners that almost deserved to be nominated for best picture: An American in Paris, The Apartment, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Midnight Cowboy, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Unforgiven
Winners that are perfectly enjoyable: Grand Hotel, It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty, You Can't Take it With you, The Bridge on the River Kwai, My Fair Lady, The Departed, Slumdog Millionaire, The Artist
Winners that are perfectly reasonable: Hamlet, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Patton, The French Connection, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ordinary People, Amadeus, Out of Africa
Winners I'm largely indifferent to: Cavalcade, Rebecca, How Green was My Valley, The Lost Weekend, All the King's Men, Marty, In the Heat of the Night, Terms of Endearment, Rain Man, Million Dollar Baby
Irritating Oscarbait (benign edition): Wings, The Great Ziegfeld, The Greatest Show on Earth, Gigi, Driving miss Daisy, Dances with Wolves, Shakespeare in Love, Chicago, The King's Speech, Argo
Irritating Oscarbait (malign edition): The Broadway Melody, Cimarron, The Life of Emile Zola, Mrs. Miniver, Going my Way, Tom Jones, Rocky, Kramer vs. Kramer, Chariots of Fire, American Beauty, Gladiator, a Beautiful Mind
Special talented but meretricious category: Ben-Hur, Forrest Gump, Titanic, No Country for Old Men
Just bad movies: Braveheart, Crash
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I saw several movies this week, starting with Starman. I've never been that interested in John Carpenter's tributes to Howard Hawks, and this quasi-Spielberg exercise isn't an improvement. Nor is it clear why Karen Allen is romantically attracted to Jeff Bridges' alien, since simply looking like her husband, without in any way really being like him is hardly an appealing prospect. It was Bridges who got the Oscar nomination, but his role is basically oscarbait weirdo. It's Allen who's really the heart of the picture. I wish I paid more attention to Magnificent Obsession while I was watching it, since I don't think I fully appreciated Sirk's misc-en scene. That's Dancing was fun to watch, but a bit insubstantial. I saw two silent movies, but watching Ozu's That Night's Wife with Italian subtitles, and watching Lady of the Night while working on my compute at a 90 degree angle from the TV was not the most successful experience. So in the end I suppose the movie of the movie was Raoul Ruiz's eccentric valedictory movie Night Across the Street.
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Gravity: Apollo 13 with a higher body count.
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Well, I'll repeat my choices for 1940:
Best Picture
*His Girl Friday*
Fantasia
The Philadelphia Story
Pinocchio
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Dictator
The Shop Around the Corner
The Thief of Baghdad
The Broadway Melody of 1940
The Bank Dick
Best Actor
*Cary Grant, His Girl Friday*
Cary Grant, The Philadelphia Story
Henry Fonda, The Grapes of Wrath
Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator
James Stewart, The Shop Around the Corner
Beat Actress
*Katherine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story*
Rosalind Russell, His Girl Frdiay
Margaret Sullavan, The Shop Around the Corner
Bette Davis, The Letter
Eleanor Powell, The Broadway Melody of 1940.
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I have never walked out nor demanded my money back.
Edited by: skimpole on Dec 30, 2013 9:06 PM
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I saw five movies this week, three of them from this year. Three Godfathers is the kind of Ford film that I don't particularly care for (and I was actually more impressed with Wagon Master when TCM recently rebroadcast it) as three not particularly roguish rogues are redeemed by the baby they find. All this, and heaven too is the kind of movie Hollywood would prefer not to make, over-romantic costume drama. Yet Bette Davis and Charles Boyer help carry it with conviction. All is Lost is sort of like Gravity in the Indian ocean, and is arguably better for it. Watching Sandra Bullock float through a space station is a remarkable image, and the message of All is Lost that being extremely prepared sometimes isn't enough isn't a profound one. But I think it wins more on points. Upstream Color is a deeply strange movie, and like Shane Carruth's earlier movie arguably incomprehensible. But I think this elliptical, opaque and strikingly shot and scored movie in worth paying attention to. The Wolf of Wall Street is boisterous, often brilliant and very funny in parts. My main reservation for it is whether it really does anything more than Goodfellas, aside from having a protagonist who is arguably more repulsive than Henry Hill.
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Not to be a stickler for rules, especially with a fellow competitor Lydecker, but we're only allowed to use Disney animated movies for this challenge. They're not exempt from the premiere limitations.
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Barry Lyndon
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Five movies this week. Good Sam is in fact a good movie, and a good use of Gary Cooper's talents. Three musicals on Wednesday: while Astaire is great in Royal Wedding, his partner is less interesting and the British lovers are rather dull. Much better is Easter Parade with many great numbers. It's Always Fair Weather has a somewhat more mature attitude than one usually associated with musicals. The musical is both good and entertaining, though one regrets Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse not dancing together. While making horror movies in the context of the Spanish Civil war is an unusual genre, I don't think The Devil's Backbone is much more than competent.
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I thoroughly endorse this thread, and encourage everyone to watch it.
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I wanted to watch Othello today, but it got cancelled for the Eleanor Parker tribute. I wanted to watch the premiere of Mouchette and it gets cancelled for the Fontaine/O'Toole tribute. Bleh.
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Six movies this week, and they're a fairly respectable lot. Memories of Murder is a fairly good procedural, not unlike Zodiac except that it takes places under an authoritarian pseudo-democracy. You were never Lovelier and Yolanda and the Thief were the two Astaire movies I saw for the first time last week. Both were good, and the back stories were amusing, but while Rita Hayworth was very beautiful, the colour cinematography does put Yolanda in a class by her own. Howard Hawks once said that a great movie has three great scenes and no bad ones. By that standard, The Wiz has one great scene, a couple of good songs, some clever variations on the classic story, and the replacement of Fleming's sentimentality with egregious self-esteem babble. The silent Peter Pan is a charming movie everyone should see (and it's available on youtube). Millennium Mambo is an interesting movie about youthful inertia and anomie in modern Taipei. It's not a very accessible movie, and from the last decade I prefer Three Times.
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My only remembrance of Popeye is the muddled memory I saw as a disappointed 11 year old. But I do recall that Paul Thomas Anderson uses one of the songs in Punch Drunk Love.
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Personally I don't think Judgement at Nuremberg is a very good film, and it muddles all kinds of things together. (Why include a film about the Holocaust, as Richard Widmark's prosecutor does, when the judges on trial were only marginally connected to it? And when Marlene Dietrich's Wehrmacht widow says most Germans didn't know about Nazi atrocities, this is misleading in two respects. First, there were enough rumours around to note to most Germans that something very wrong was going on with the Reich, even if the full force of Nazi genocide was kept secret. Second, there's no excuse for Wehrmacht officers, since it's clear they were involved in the key Nazi atrocities.)
If you want to look at a great history film, try The Leopard.
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Roverrocks you mention the five daughters of Nicholas II flittering through the halls. But Nicholas only had four daughters. I thought that when the Custine character encountered the girls he was seeing the Tsar's daughters. But looking at the scene more closely it must be Anastasia with four friends. Her three older sisters must be already sitting at the breakfeast (?) table that we see later on.
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Tonight TCM will have its premiere of Russian Ark perhaps the most remarkable movie of the millennium. (It certainly puts Gravity in the shade.) Put your comments here.
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Incidentally it should be Easy Living in the last post. Four movies this week with The Crimson Pirate being loads of fun. Roberta while not a bad film is as underwhelming a movie with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire playing second fiddle to Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott might suggest. Blonde Venus has interesting touches, but Herbert Marshall and Marlene Dietrich do not make a good couple and the plot is sentimental codswallop. Finally, there is Bastards an interesting, elliptical movie about revenge, sexual exploitation and a corrupt businessman.
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It's nice to see My dinner with Andre, and Fists in the Pockets is an interesting choice. Seeing Let's Spend the Night Together makes we wonder whether we will ever see Stop Making Sense.
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Great Debuts
#1 Citizen Kane
#15 Breathless
#26 The 400 Blows
#51 Pather Panchali
#93 The Mother and the ****
#117 Un Chien Andalou
#121 The Spirit of the Beehive
#154 Performance
#199 Meshes of the Afternoon
#233 Night of the Living Dead
#250 Nanook of the North
#295 Killer of Sheep
Valedictions
#70 Gertrud
#143 Come and See
#160 L'Argent
#168 Yi Yi
#171 Once upon a Time in America
#176 Salo or the 120 days of Sodom
#229 Tabu
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Four movies over the last two weeks, starting with East Living which I think is the best of the Mitchell Leisen comedies I've seen. The Return is a very good 2003 Russian film about two teenage boys whose long lost father returns out of nowhere and takes them on a disconcerting trip. The Cousins was an interesting film, and so I suppose was Oasis, a Korean movie about a love affair between a misfit and a women with cerebral palsy. (It's not as sentimental as the description suggests.)
OSCAR worthy?
in General Discussions
Posted
It's also worth pointing out that the best picture nominations leave something to be desired as well:
Nominees that won and were actually the best Picture of the year: All Quiet on the Western Front, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons, The Godfather, Annie Hall, Schindler's List, The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King
The best nominees that were actually the best picture of the year: The Thin Man, Top Hat, Grand Illusion, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, It's a Wonderful Life, Sunset Blvd., 12 Angry Men, Cries and Whispers, Barry Lyndon, All the President's Men, Apocalypse Now, Tess, Raiders of the Lost Ark, JFK, Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential, Saving Private Ryan, The Pianist, There will be Blood, The Tree of Life
The best nominees that deserved to be nominated for best picture of the year: One Hour with You, Little Women, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Awful Truth, the Philadelphia Story, Double Indemnity, Great Expectations, The Red Shoes, Around the World in 80 Days, Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, Oliver!, Z. Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather Part II, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, Born on the fourth of July, Goodfellas, The Crying Game, Secrets and Lies, The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring, Up, Toy Story 3, Lincoln
The best nominees that almost deserved to be nominated for best picture of the year: The Heiress, An American in Paris, The Quiet Man, Mister Roberts, Anatomy of a Murder, The Apartment, West Side Story, Doctor Zhivago, Bonnie and Clyde, The Last Picture Show, The Deer Hunter, The Right Stuff, The Killing Fields, The Mission
The best nominees that are perfectly enjoyable: The Bells of St. Mary's, Cleopatra, Dangerous Liaisons, The Insider, Erin Brockovich, The Aviator, The Departed, Slumdog Millionaire
The best nominees that are perfectly reasonable: Trader Horn, From Here to Eternity, Out of Africa, Babe, Capote
The best nominees that are actually irritating oscarbait: Wings*, The Broadway Melody*, Gigi
(I haven't seen the other nominees for 1927-1928, and 1928-1929, hence the asterisks. Sunrise, of course, deserves to be nominated for a best picture.)