skimpole
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Bertil Guve, with Pernilla Allwin in Fanny and Alexander
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Ana Torrent in The Spirit of the Beehive
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And here is Best Original Screenplay
Charles Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux
R.C. Sherriff, Odd Man Out
Cai Chusheng, Zheng Junli, The Spring River Flows East
Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu, Record of a Tenement Gentleman
Richard Brooks, Brute ForceI have not seen The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, A Double Life (original) A Cage of Nightingales, It Happened On Fifth Avenue (story)
This is the first year (going back to 1940) where neither winner is my best picture of the year.
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Now it's time for 1947. Here is Best Adapted Screenplay:
David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allen, Great Expectations, based on the novel of the same name by Charles Dickens
George Seaton, Miracle on 34th Street, based on a story by Valentine Davies
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Black Narcissus, based on the novel of the same name by Rumer Godden
Daniel Mainwaring, Out of the Past, based on his novel Build my Gallows High
Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean Ferry, Quai des Orfevres, based on the novel Legitime Defense by Stanislas-Andre Freeman -
I saw three movies this week. The first two are charming trifles. Four Daughters is directed by Michael Curtiz, stars Claude Rains, Mary Robson as his sister, and four women who never quite became big stars and four young men as their eventual husbands, plus John Garfield. Although the movie is engaging and occasionally amusing, it doesn't help that Garfield is the most interesting of the suitors and the one who uses the suicide solution to conservative divorce laws. Don Juan De Marco has another forgettable Bryan Adams movie song, Johnny Depp doing a good job as the heartsick lothario, while Marlon Brando amuses himself as his psychiatrist. There's not much for Faye Dunaway to do. Considerably more impressive is The Scent of Green Papaya. Shot on a French soundstage, this Vietnamese movie is about a maid living in an oblique angle to her country's long war of independence. Set in two parts, one where she is a child, the second ten years later as a young woman, the movie is exquisitely shot, with smooth vertical tracking shots, superb use of sound, finely etched decor and considerable detail. One might wish that the actors were a bit more robust.
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1. The Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica, Italy
2. Germany, Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini, Italy
3. A Hen in the Wind, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan
4. L'Amore, Roberto Rossellini, Italy
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And here's Best Original Screenplay:
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death
Ben Hecht, Notorious
Leo de Laforgue, Helmut Kautner, Walter Ulbrich, Under the Bridges
Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, Cesare Giulia Viola, Cesare Zavattini, Shoeshine
Jo Eisinger, Marion Parsonnet, Gilda
I have not seen The Seventh Veil, Road to Utopia (original), Vacation from Marriage, The Dark Mirror, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (story) Children of Paradise won the year before while Rome: Open City was nominated the previous year. -
Now it's time for 1946. Here's Best Adapted Screenplay
Jean Renoir, A Day in the Country, based on the short story of the same name by Guy de Maupassant
Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Jo Swerling, It's a Wonderful Life based on the short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern
William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, The Big Sleep based on the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler
Robert E. Sherwood, The Best Years of Our Lives based on the novella Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor
Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast based on the fairy tale by Gabrrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve -
For a start, I'm struck that Gordon Willis wasn't nominated for either The Godfather or The Godfather, Part II (or for Manhattan either, though The Godfather Part III was nominated.)
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Here are some trivia about my choices for nominees frm 1936-2016 compared to the Academy's (1936 was the first year supporting categories were held, and there were five nominees for each category).
As of December 31, 2017
Years that I saw the most Academy nominations: 2002, 2016 (20). Runner-ups 1939, 1943, 1967, 2004 (19).
Years that I saw the least Academy nominations: 1951 (8). Runner-ups: 1949, 1997, 2005 (10)
Years where I choose the most Academy nominations for my own: 1982 (10). Runner-ups: 1940, 1950, 1962, 1993, 2007 (8)
Years where I choose the least Academy nominations for my own: 1957, 1958, 1983, 1985 (1)
Years where a majority of my nominees were from foreign language films: 1955, 1957, 1963, 1967, 1970, 1985, 2004
Years where none of my nominees were from foreign language films: 1940, 1984
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This link will take you to the Wikipedia page for the Academy Award for Best cinematography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Cinematography
The Academy Awards are often criticized for the poor judgement, but technical awards get relatively less attention. Looking over this category which awards do you think are deserved? Which do you think are egregiously undeserving? What movies should have been nominated?
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I saw five movies this week. The Funeral, I am afraid, was the least of these. The imperfect patriarch of an imperfect family dies and they have to come to deal with it. Not a heavy drama, not a farce, it's not so much a combination of the two as a movie that alludes to the two concepts. It's not surprising that the director, Juzo Itami, decided that a livelier approach was needed in the future. Pickpocket is not the 1959 Bresson film, but a Chinese film by Jia Zhangke that points to the underside of the Chinese economic miracle, by looking at a young, bespectacled pickpocket of strictly finite competence. He listens to music, thinks of having love affairs, and is eventually arrested. It's a deserving, realistic film with Wang Hongwei giving a good performance as the title character.
One interesting thing about The Breaking Point is why this intelligent, well acted film noir that is exciting and deals with a real sense of time and place is not better known. It's not on Theyshootpictures.com top 1000 or even its top 2000. One can understand why it did not make a bigger splash at the time since star John Garfield was redbaited when the film came out. But other movies that suffered from the blacklist such as Limelight and Salt of the Earth have a bigger reputation. Yes, Michael Curtiz isn't exactly an auteurist favorite, but it's not as if he made the most admired movie in the history of Hollywood and then produced nothing of value. It might be that Garfield is just too good a person for the movie. He is a good person trapped in a horrendous situation. I suppose he doesn't heave William Holden's self-loathing in Sunset Blvd, or the way Joseph Cotten's niavete makes him an accomplice to evil, or the ambiguity of Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place or the way Gregory Peck is trapped by his past in The Gunfighter.
Isle of Dogs is both an amusing and inventive film that I would rate a little lower than Wes Anderson's last three movies. A lack of a strong lead performance hampers it just a bit. But there's much worth waiting for in its immaculate sense of detail from Greta Gerwig's character's silly blonde afro to the way Tilda Swinton's character is thought to be an oracle by her fellow canines when all she can do is understand television. I haven't seen many Israeli movies since Waltz with Bashir, but Foxtrot, with its po-faced sense of absurdism, self-serving callousness, and cruel irony certainly make it worth watching. One should note a distinct visual style, that is slightly and deliberately upsetting.
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1. Quai des Orfèvres, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France
2. The Spring River Flows East, Zheng Junli, Cai Chusheng, China
3. Record of a Tenement Gentleman, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan
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I want to see The Sand Pebbles. Of the three 1966 Best picture nominees I haven't seen, it sounds like the most interesting. Well it's an action movie, and it has Steve McQueen, and that sound better than two dated comedies. (Caine is a good actor, of course, but he's also been in rotten movies.)
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I thought there was something off about the four American movies, all to make a facile anti-authoritarian point. There is the way The People vs. Larry Flynt shows Flynt's crudeness, but not the considerable cruelty in his humor. There was the contrast between the anarchism of the characters in Hair and the banality in the music. There was the oversimplifications in Amadeus to support the dubious contrast between sober mediocrity and irresponsible genius. And there was the whole dubious metaphor of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where Nurse Ratched's treatment appears especially egregious because Nicholson's character (and several others) isn't actually crazy. (He's only pretending to be to escape a statutory rape charge.)
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Personally I thought The Sunshine Boys was one of the worst movies I saw in 2016. I mean the main joke is that the two lead characters are approaching senility.
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And here's the award for Best Adapted Screenplay:
Martin Goldsmith, Detour, based on his novel Detour: An Extraordinary Tale
Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, based on the novel Jacques the Fatalist, by Denis Diderot
Ronald MacDougal;, Catherine Turney, Mildred Pierce, based on the novel by the same name by James M. Cain
Robert Nathan, Joseph Schrank, The Clock, based on the story by Paul and Paula Gallico
Dudley Nichols, Scarlett Street, based on the novel La Chienne by Georges de La Fouchardiere
I have not seen Marie-Louise, Dillinger, Music For Millions, Salty O'Rourke, What Next, Corporal Hargrove (original screenplay), Pride of the Marines (adapted screenplay), The House on 92nd Street, The Affairs of Susan, A Medal For Benny (original story) -
Now it's time for 1945. Here is Best Original Screenplay:
Jacques Prevert, Children of Paradise
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, I Know Where i'm Going!
Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Rome: Open City
Irving Brecher, Yolanda and the Thief
Alvah Bessie, Objective Burma! -
I saw three movies this week. The Moon is Blue has William Holden, David Niven and Maggie McNamara, who got an oscar nomination as the woman who puts the "professional" in "professional virgin." It's not a bad movie, though McNamara is ultimately not an attractive figure, and Niven gives the best performance of the three. Girl Shy starts off like many Harold Lloyd comedies, with him desperate for money and in a not very engaging romantic relationship. And like many of them its ends with an elaborate series of slapstick gags. This one is actually very good, in what is not an exactly a car chase, but where Lloyd desperately races to prevent a wedding. You might think he could have called first, but it's certainly striking how ruthless and amoral he is in his quest, stealing several cars and modes of transportation. 24 Frames was Abbas Kiarostami's last film, 24 short films based on photographs (and Brugel's "The Hunters in the Snow") which subtly move. They involve rain, snow, birds, cats, cows. It's a strange, enigmatic movie.
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1. A Day in the Country, Jean Renoir, France
2. Beauty and the Beast, Jean Cocteau, France
3. Under the Bridges, Helmut Kautner, Germany
4. Shoeshine, Vittorio De Sica, Italy
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OK, Solaris was supposed to have started eighteen minutes ago. But some moron in programming thought it would be a good to run the four version of Greed as if they were running the two hour version. And then some other moron thought they'd just ignore the fact that they booked Solaris. So what is going on? I don't appreciate this kind of incompetence, and I don't appreciate having to watch foreign language films in the middle of the night.
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I saw three movies this week. Butterflies are Free has the engaging sight of Goldie Hawn in her underwear, and is best known today because Eileen Heckart won Best Supporting Actress for 1972 for her performance. The field was an uninspiring one (none of the nominees were from the best picture nominees--one of which, Sleuth, had no women at all.) It's not much of a movie. It's very much a filmed play, with an easy plot (will the handsome blind guy make out with Goldie Hawn, the lucky bastard, and will his mother let him?).
Annihilation has the advantage of being better than Arrival and more style than the latest version of Blade Runner. But a look at Natalie Portman's performance shows the movie's limitations. If you are trying to make a movie about the contact between humans and something inconceivably alien, should the humans be, well more human? One might compare Portman's reserved role to those in Kubrick's performance. But there was a reason the characters in those movies were often so cold. They lived in powerful hierarchies and used rhetorics of bureaucracy and ethics to hide their real feelings. Portman and her female colleagues are reserved because Garland doesn't really do characters very well. Each one has a clear trait to be tight-lipped and fretful. Jennifer Jason Leigh is dying from cancer, Gina Rodrigues and another actress are dealing with drug addiction and a suicide attempt (I forget which one has which), and Portman has an adulterous fling to feel guilty about. It's not enough. If you want to see a movie which really presents a clash between humanity and alien intelligence, as well as having the movie with the best Supporting Actress of 1972, see Solaris very late tonight.
Aquarius has Sonia Braga give the great performance one may have wondered she could give when she was promoted as Brazil's great sex symbol three and a half decades ago. Braga plays an intelligent, reasonably well off widow who has to worry that the people who own her building are trying to push her out of her condominium. Since this is Brazil, and Brazil is a country where rich people have rarely been inconvenienced for being corrupt, she does face genuine danger. It's an interesting, intelligent film.
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1. Children of Paradise, Marcel Carne, France
2. Les Dames de Bois de Boulogne, Robert Bresson, France
3. Rome Open City, Roberto Rossellini, Itally
4. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, Akira Kurosawa, Japan
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Robespierre.
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Neglected Performances by Young Actors in World-Class Films
in General Discussions
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Ana Torrent in Cria Cuervos. There are actresses who have given two oscar-worthy performances in three years. None were as young as Torrent.