skimpole
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Now it's time for 1944:
Best Adapted Screenplay
Raymond Chandler, Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity, based on the novel Double Indemnity in Three of a Kind by James M. Cain
Jay Drafter, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt, Laura, based on the novel of the same name by Vera Cropsey
Irving Brecher, Fred L. Finkelhoffe, Meet me in St. Louis, based on the novel of the same name by Sally Benson
Jules Furthman, William Faulkner, To Have and Have Not, based on the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway
Clive Brook, Terrence Young, On Approval, based on the play of the same name by Frederick Lonsdale
Best Original Screenplay
Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible (Part One)
Preston Sturges, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale
Albert Valentin, Charles Spaak, Le Ciel est a Vous
John Steinbeck, Lifeboat
I have not seen Two Girls and a Sailor, Wing and a Prayer (original screenplay), A Guy Named Joe, None Shall Escape, The Sullivans (original story)
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Ivan the Terrible is one of my favorite films of the forties. Here's Matthew Dessem's post back at his blog, the Criterion Contraption:
I was wrong about Sergei Eisenstein. What I'd seen of his work had led me to believe he was only of historical interest: a master of technical innovations that have since been so thoroughly absorbed into cinematic grammar that they no longer seem remarkable. The person who invented the wheel undoubtedly changed the world of transportation forever, but that doesn't mean you'd like to spend two hours cruising along in Caveman Ug's first cart. Watching Ivan the Terrible was a bit like discovering that, just before he died, Caveman Ug also built a Ferarri. So: I was wrong about Sergei Eisenstein. The Ivan the Terrible films are masterpieces.
Not all masterpieces are things you want to see every weekend, however, and I'd recommend not popping these in when you're looking for a bit of lighthearted fun. Ivan the Terrible is a claustrophobic nightmare, the biopic reimagined as horror film by way of Disney and German Expressionism. Usually when someone says "You've never seen anything like this!" they really mean, "I haven't seen any of the hundreds of similar films, and I'm hoping you haven't either!" I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but I'll say with some confidence that you've never seen anything like the Ivan the Terrible films. They don't seem to have been made by the director of Alexander Nevsky. Actually, they don't seem to have been made on this planet. The first adjective that comes to mind is diseased. Most viewers won't make it through the long, slow opening scene. That's a shame, because the second adjective that comes to mind is indispensable. There are more insightful films about the way power corrodes those who would wield it, or the dangers of giving oneself away to an abstract idea, or even Russia and other totalitarian regimes. But there's something about these two films; they burrow into your head and stay there. And I do mean burrow; the movement of the film is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into. Every frame the film advances moves its characters closer to a point of absolute malignant stasis. And in virtually every scene, Eisenstein undercuts the traditional tropes of heroic biography, creating one of the most unsettling movies ever made.
The first scene is as good an example as any; Ivan, Prince of Moscow, is being crowned Tsar of All Russias. It's a giant set piece of imperialistic pageantry, and Ivan, wearing the crown for the first time in his life, looks as idealistic and regal as we'll ever see him. It doesn't hurt that he's being portrayed by Nikolai Cherkasov, who audiences would be primed to think of as a straightforward hero, thanks to Alexander Nevsky.
This scene is in dozens of movies, in one form or another. But Eisenstein keeps cutting away from the ceremony to reaction shots of the crowd, of which a few examples will suffice. Notice how carefully composed these images are; the only other film I can think of where every shot is so visually striking is The Passion of Joan of Arc:
Beautiful photography, all in the service of making a viewer ill at ease. I'll go ahead and say it: this movie will make you paranoid. Or in my case, even more paranoid. Even Mikhail Nazvanov's Andrei Kurbsky, nominally one of Ivan's close friends, seems less than pleased by the ceremony.
Eisenstein doesn't give us any context for these disconnected shots of malice and contempt at first, just plunges us into Ivan's landmine filled court. Ivan seems pretty indifferent to the hostility that surrounds him; he just stares off into the distance in the manner of someone who's above it all. Which is literally true, naturally. His first speech at the coronation ceremony has three main planks: he's going to end the "pernicious power of the boyars," he's forming a standing army and giving citizens a choice between conscription and taxation, and he's ending the church's tax-exempt status. Yep: it's basically how Hugh Hewitt imagines Obama's Inaugural Address. The point is not the specifics of his platform, so much as the fact that he's immediately asking his citizenry to sacrifice in the name of the Russian State. You can see in his eyes that he's the kind of person who dedicates himself to noble goals. Or at least that's what he tells himself. We get to see one more moment of pomp and circumstance for Ivan, his wedding to Anastasia Romanovna.
Once again, Ivan is surrounded by people who aren't even trying to conceal their contempt for him, with one exception, his cousin Vladimir Staritsky. Vlad doesn't have an evil bone in his body, mostly because he's a complete moron. Here, he's yelling "Kiss her!" to Ivan, with a mouth full of food.
Naturally, Vladimir is the patsy that the boyars want to put on the throne in Ivan's place. They're led by his charming mother Efrosinia, played by Serafima Birman as almost comically untrustworthy.
Ivan's wedding ends in classic Russian style: Moscow is burned to the ground, the peasantry storm his castle, Kazan declares war on Russia, and Ivan leads an army off to war. Presumably, the royal wedding planners were all beheaded. From here on out, everything moves downhill and inward, although the early scenes are actually relatively open and broad. The battle of Kazan features some large-scale exteriors that are positively sweeping:
Of course, what we're seeing there are the artillery and troops led by Kurbsky. The battle is won because Ivan relies, instead, on a team of sappers:
As elsewhere in the film, it's all about digging in. The leader of the sappers is one Malyuta Skuratov, who begins the film as a bit of a dunce, a man of vigorous passions and actions; he's always doing things like wiping the sweat off his brow, or enthusiastically rallying people to Kazan:
Ivan senses potential in Malyuta's dumb obeisance before power, and promptly employs him to run his intelligence-gathering operations. The work isn't good for his working-class vigor; by halfway through the first film, he moves through the courts like a wraith, just taking everything in.
Note that only one eye is in the frame: long before Sauron, Eisenstein had figured out the sinister effects of disembodied eyes.
I suppose living in a surveillance state makes one particularly sensitive to questions of observation, particularly when you're making a movie about another surveillance state. Eisenstein takes every opportunity to shoot his characters with one eye obscured, using props, costumes, and lighting to make cyclopean monsters of his cast.
The shots don't seem to have any significance to the film's internal mechanics: a one-eyed shot doesn't have much relation that I could see to a character's moral status at that point in the film. Instead, the cyclops shots are just a pervasive image that Eisenstein goes back to again and again, heightening the paranoia the films are steeped in. It's worth mentioning at this point that one of Ivan's signature achievements was the creation of the Oprichniki, Russia's first secret police squad. They're led by Malyuta, and they get the same faraway look in their eyes Ivan does when he talks about the Russian State. Here's Fyodor Basmanov, a representative sample:
He's looking pretty happy for someone whose father has just disowned him so he can join the Oprichniki. In the Ivan films (as in life), anytime someone's looking off into the distance, you'd be well advised to stay the hell away from them. When you're looking long-term, a little bloodshed in the here and now isn't worth losing any sleep over. Here's the trifecta:
There's exactly one character who doesn't become more and more corrupt every time we see her, and the narrative treats her just about as kindly as Efrosinia does.
That's Lyudmila Tselikovskaya as Ivan's wife Anastasia, the only character who seems more or less blameless (though like all women in the film, she's been kept from any real power—but leave the question of virtue without agency for another post). Anyway: Anastasia is the film's repository for positive values. She doesn't make it out of the first movie. She asks Ivan for water; he finds a conveniently placed poisoned goblet, and that's that. Efrosinia is to blame, although it should be noted that Malyuta, the "Eye of the Tsar," is looking in exactly the wrong direction when Ivan finds the poison.
The problem with surrounding yourself with people who worship you is that they'll kill your wife (or do nothing to stop her murder) if they think it will bring the two of you closer. And Malyuta, it should be remembered, quite literally kneels at Ivan's feet panting and slavering like a dog.
Things just keep getting grimmer, more constricted, and above all more paranoid. By the opening of the second film, Eisenstein has abandoned any pretense that he's making a biopic. Kurbsky's betrayal of Ivan and surrender to the Poles pretty clearly takes place in some kind of homoerotic fairy tale, not sixteenth century Europe.
Eisenstein had originally planned for his film to open with the murder of Ivan's mother and a lengthy sequence of Ivan's rule as a child, manipulated by the boyars. Mosfilm told him he had to start with something uplifting (the coronation), so Eisenstein used the footage he'd shot in the second film, which is where it belongs. Like Kurbsky's surrender, it's from the world of fairy tales, where parents are lost and guardians are wicked.
The film works better by slowly degenerating into a fairy tale; starting there would have been a mistake. The may be the only instance of a Soviet bureaucrat making a decision that improved art. Except for one other: they gave Eisenstein some Agfacolor stock that the retreating German troops weren't using any more. So at just about exactly the time the film hits the bottom of its moral abyss, Eisenstein gets to use color. He rose to the occasion, and so did Prokofiev: "Dance of the Oprichniks" is the best part of the score. Ivan the Terrible, Part II is the only film besides The Producers to feature a showstopping musical number with a chorus line of mass murderers.
It's not played for laughs. Like Lolita, Ivan the Terrible is filled with "travesties of familial feeling" (Martin Amis's phrase), and Ivan's revels are no exception. Here's the dancer the choreography is built around:
Fyodor in a mask is a pretty obvious example, but Eisenstein goes so far as to create travesties of earlier scenes in his own film. In doing so, he asks more of viewers than most directors. It's impossible to overstate the sheer visual craftsmanship on display throughout these movies. When you see Vladimir—drunk to the point of stupefaction—rest his head on Ivan's lap:
You're meant to think of an earlier shot of Vladimir and Efrosinia:
But that shot was already a travesty of the Pietà. See what I mean about knotting into? Does Eisenstein go all the way back around to sincerity? Well, shortly after Vladimir passes out, we get this:
That looks an awful lot like Ivan as a boy, down to the eye movement; which doesn't bode well for Vladimir. Eisenstein's not done with the Pietà just yet.
Beyond the painstaking visual craftsmanship and the relentlessly self-devouring narrative structure, the staggering thing about Ivan the Terrible is that it's only two-thirds complete. What could Eisenstein possibly have done in the third film to continue Ivan's decline? Well, the historical Ivan beat one daughter-in-law into miscarrying, tried to rape the other, and bashed his son's skull in, so Eisenstein had room to play with. Or rather, he would have, if Stalin hadn't decided that perhaps Eisenstein's portrait of a diseased survelliance state and its batshit crazy, megalomaniacal autocrat wasn't the kind of Russian mythmaking he was aiming for. But even incomplete, Ivan the Terrible is an unqualified masterpiece, a perfect union of form and function. Every scene, every shot, every frame presents a unified vision of humanity in which everyone is a jackal, an imbecile, or both. Happy New Year, everybody!
Randoms:
- Ivan the Terrible, Part II features probably the best subtitle in the entire Criterion Collection. I'm not really sure how this even happened:
- Eisenstein had clearly given some thought to the question of how to make the third film even more unsettling than the last, as a few surviving fragments make clear. For one thing, he'd cast Mikhail Romm, then the chairman of the Film Union, in the role of Queen Elizabeth. Cate Blanchett eat your heart out.
- I think it's safe to assume that Ivan the Terrible, Part III would have been as unnerving as its predecessors.
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Now it's 1943! This may change if I ever find enough movies from this year that I truly like.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard E. Koch, Casablanca, based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Carl Theodor Dreyer, Poul Knudsen, Mogen Skot-Hansen, Day of Wrath, based on the play Anne Pedersdotter by Hans Wier-Jenssen
Samson Raphaelson, Heaven Can Wait, based on the play Birthday by Leslie Bush-Feteke
Curt Siodmak, Adrel Way, I Walked with a Zombie, based on the article of the same name by Inez Wallace
Paul Osborn, Hans Rameau, Walter Reisch, Madame Curie based on the novel of the same name by Eva Curie
Best Original Screenplay
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, Shadow of a Doubt
Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon
Pierre Laroche, Jacques Prevert, Lumiere D'Ete
Noel Coward, In Which we Serve
I have not seen Princess O'Rourke, So Proudly We Hail (original), Holy Matrimony (adapted), Action in the North Atlantic (story). I think I've seen The North Star, but I can't be sure.
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Four movies this week: Quo Vadis is sort of a mixed bag. The Christians are insufferably noble, and Deborah Kerr is wasted in the general sanctimony. They're also perfectly orthodox, which they weren't likely to be in the age of Nero, and Paul argues for Rod Taylor to free all his slaves (the actual opposite of the one time he gave advice on the subject.) But Mervyn Le Roy has an eye for both pacing and spectacle and I was genuinely surprised at the end. Peter Ustinov got fame for his portrait of an insufferably pretentious Nero. He's good but Leo Genn is better as the sardonic, self-hating Roman who flatters him. The odd thing is that while Hollywood had no trouble realizing that this was not the best movie of 1951, why did it insist that a poor imitation like Gladiator was the best movie of 2000?
The Star was one of the five best actress nominees of 1952, one of the last acting categories I had yet to see a nominee from. It starts with Bette Davis giving a poor imitation of Margo Channing and Norma Desmond. As the movie goes on, she shows signs of subtlety, but the movie is ultimately kind of repulsive in suggesting that Davis' character--Davis was only 44 at the time--should basically just give up. I'm not why Way Out West was on a list of movies to see. It may have been because I confused with a Laurel and Hardy movie with the same title. Certainly, there's little in this early talkie comedy that's funny and memorable, about a con artist forced to work on a farm by the people he's cheated. (After they nearly lynch him--hilarious!)
That leaves Loveless, certainly the movie of the week and certainly tougher than a movie like Three Billboards outside. It's certainly an indelible portrait of both emotional, moral and economic bleakness. It's striking that civil society provides the highly competent and professional assistance in finding the lost child that the police can't--all to no avail. Certainly love and pregnancy doesn't provide a happy solution for the divorced parents at the end of the movie.
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1. Ivan the Terrible, Part One Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union
2. Le Ciel est a Vous, Jean Gremillon, France
3. Army, Keisuke Kinoshita, Japan
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Glenn Kenny's review of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya:
Now nearly 80 years old, the Japanese animation director Isao Takahata has ever forged his own path over the course a half-century of work. A legendary perfectionist, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli (also the home of the great Hayao Miyazaki) has broken molds by, for example, creating an animated feature completely lacking in any “fantastic” element, the tender 1991 “Only Yesterday.” His new film, his first in 14 years, is a staggering masterpiece of animation based on a very old Japanese folk tale. “The Tale of The Princess Kaguya” is both very simple and head-spinningly confounding, a thing of endless visual beauty that seems to partake in a kind of pictorial minimalism but finds staggering possibilities for beautiful variation within its ineluctable modality. It’s a true work of art.
The movie begins with a gruff bamboo cutter in a forest. The colors are pastel and watercolor; the drawing resembles charcoal sketches. Cutting away at bamboo, the farmer sees a shaft of light; then a plant yields a doll-like creature that, once he spirits it off to his cabin to show his wife, transforms into a human baby. Despite being in middle age, the wife discovers she can feed the baby (the breastfeeding depictions are very matter-of-fact); the little girl is growing at an accelerated rate. She soon starts playing with some of the males who live in the neighboring area; they nickname her “L’il Bamboo.” The leader of the boys is the slightly older Sutemaru, and all seems right for L’il Bamboo in the pastoral paradise where she runs and plays and laughs and sings a song about the nature of all living beings, a song she can’t remember having learned but which she’s always known.
Her adoptive pop has other ideas, especially after “the gods,” as he believes, bestow a lot of gold upon him; he goes and buys a castle in the capital, and venture to make the little girl into a genuine princess. L’il Bamboo’s heart breaks, but she wants to honor her father’s wishes. Here’s where the movie’s story takes a rather infuriating turn. As the girl, soon given the name “Kaguya,” is trained and then visited by a quintet of ostensibly noble suitors, the story turns into a kind of nightmare of patriarchy. Kaguya, bright and talented and beautiful, suffers through multiple squelchings of her own desire, and then acquiesces to the venal wishes of the authority figures she loves. The movie is so emotionally roiling because it, too, is of two minds. It wants Kaguya’s unfettered spirit to have its way, but it also recognizes the almost primordial obligation that binds us to family and convention. Kaguya’s got her oafish father’s number, and when she stands up to him it’s thrilling: “If I see you in a courtier’s cap I’ll kill myself,” she tells him calmly at one point. And the father’s ignorance is startling: he truly believes that what he’s putting Kaguya through is for her own happiness, that this status is something she covets as much as he. Things take an even more jarring turn once Kaguya finds out just where she’s from.
Even if you have trouble hooking into the scenario’s cultural idiosyncrasies—the concerns of this movie, while not “Japanese” in and of themselves, are addressed in a very specifically Japanese way—every frame of “Princess Kaguya” is astonishingly beautiful. What looks rather rudimentary at the film’s opening is revealed to have a depth that never stops yielding beauty; check out the shadows that fall over the bamboo cutter as he runs from the forest with his discovery cradled in his arms. The movement animation of the baby “L’il Bamboo” is some of the best depiction of infant development ever in any medium: so much study, care, and artistry. Creatures both found in nature (insects, birds) and not (storm clouds that become dragons) are drawn with remarkable sensitivity.
I believe the movie is best experienced with its original Japanese-language soundtrack; its widest release, however, will be in an English-language dub featuring James Caan voicing the bamboo-cutter, Mary Steenburgen as the wife, and Chloe Grace Moretz as Kaguya. Due to a screening snafu I was able to experience about fifteen minutes of this version and can report that it sounds as if these performers honor the material well, so either way, don’t miss this if you are an animation fan.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/apr/06/studio-ghibli-co-founder-isao-takahata-dies-aged-82
Oscar-nominated Japanese anime director Isao Takahata, who co-founded the Studio Ghibli and was best known for his work Grave of the Fireflies, has died aged 82.
“[His death] is true, but we can’t comment further as we are trying to confirm some facts around it,” a Studio Ghibli spokeswoman said.
Citing unnamed sources related to him, public broadcaster NHK said he had died at a Tokyo hospital after a recent bout of ill health.
Takahata’s latest film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, earned him an Academy Award nomination in 2014 for best animated feature.
It was also selected for a slot in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar to the main competition at the 2014 Cannes film festival.
However, most consider the 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies, a moving tale of two orphans during the second world war, to be his best work.
A still from Grave of the Fireflies Photograph: THE RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE
Born in Mie prefecture in central Japan, Takahata started his career in animation at the Toei studio in 1959, where he met long-term collaborator and rival Hayao Miyazaki.
With Miyazaki, he co-founded in 1985 the Japanese animation Studio Ghibli, which went on to produce several blockbusters.
The pair are often described by media as friends and rivals at the same time.
Over a long and distinguished career, he produced around 20 films, including Only Yesterday (1991) and Pom Poko (1994).
He also produced the Miyazaki-directed 1984 film Kaze no Tani no Naushika (The Valley of the Wind), a science fantasy adventure that describes the relationship between nature and human beings.
He is also well-known for animation series Alps no Shojo Heidi (Heidi, Girl of the Alps) and Lupin Sansei (Lupin the Third).
Takahata also dabbled in politics, co-signing with around 250 other film celebrities, a petition against a controversial state secrets law in 2013.
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Now it's time for 1942! The distinction between adapted and original screenplay is still a little wonky since for three of the Academy's nominations for best adapted screenplay that year, 49th Parallel/The Invaders, The Talk of the Town and The Pride of the Yankees, seem to have no independent existence outside a studio lot.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Orson Welles, The Magnificent Ambersons, based on the novel of the same name by Booth Tarkington
Vincent Lawrence, Horace McCoy, Gentleman Jim based on the memoir The Roar of the Crowd by James J. Corbett
Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, The Man Who Came to Dinner, based on the play of the same name by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
James A. Fields, Jerome Chodorov, My Sister Eileen, based on their play of the same name
Laurence Stallings, The Jungle Book, based on the story collection of the same name by Rudyard Kipling
Best Original Screenplay
Preston Sturges, The Palm Beach Story
Robert Buchner, Edmund Joseph, Yankee Doodle Dandy
Melchiir Lengyel, Edwin Justus Mayer, To Be or Not To Be
Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu, Takao Anai, There was a Father
Peter Viertel, Joan Harrrison, Dorothy Parker, Saboteur
I have not seen One of our Aircraft is Missing, Wake Island, The War Against Mrs. Hadley (original screenplay) or Holiday Inn (original story)
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Well there's the dinner scene in Tom Jones and there's probably half a dozen better one from Lubitsch movies.
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Now it's time for 1941
Best Adapted Screenplay
John Huston, The Maltese Falcon, based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett
Nat Perrin, Warren Wilson, Alex Gotlieb, Helzapoppin', based on the play of the same name by H.C. Potter
Otto Englander, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Dumbo, based on a toy storyline by Helen Aberson, Harold Pearl
Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve, based on the story "Two Bad Hats" by Monckton Hoffe
George Bernard Shaw, Marjorie Deans, Anatole de Grunwald, Major Barbara, based on the play of the same name by Shaw.
Best Original Screenplay
Herman K. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles, Citizen Kane
Aeneas McKenzie, Wally Klein, Lenora J. Coffee, They Died with Their Boots On
Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels
John T. Neville, Prescott Chaplin, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
Walter Reisch, R.C. Sherriff, That Hamilton Woman
I have not seen The Devil and Miss Jones, Tall, Dark and Handsome, Tom, Dick and Harry (original screenplay), Night Train to Munich (original story)
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I saw four movies last week. The Red Light Bandit is a Brazilian movie from the late sixties which tells the story of its titular criminal in a way influenced by New Wave techniques. If the version I saw had proper Portuguese subtitles perhaps i would have enjoyed it more. The Diary of Anne Frank is a prestige picture by George Stevens that has some effective scenes, such as them trying to be quiet while someone is sneaking below, but suffers from an uninteresting lead performance and several histronic scenes. Shelly Winters is blander than one might think. I would have to watch it again to see if Joseph Schildkraut acquits himself with dignity.
I remember seeing a preview of In Search of the Castaways when it had a 1978 re-release. In retrospect, Disney live-action movies don't quite fit. Chevalier's charm is a bit irritating, Hyde-White isn't used to the best of his ability, Mills' love interest isn't very interesting, and Sanders doesn't do anything original. Still the special effects, if obviously dated, still have a certain charm and it's more enjoyable than the other 60s Disney live action movies I saw recently. So I suppose Happy Hour is the movie of the week, It's very well acted, very well thought out, and very long (more than five hours) about four Japanese women in their late thirties and the problems they face when one of them gets a divorce.
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1. Day of Wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark
2. Lumiere D'Ete, Jean Gremillon, France
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I should point out that while two of the seven sequences in Fantasia are clearly inspired by the music about, five are not. I should add that I have not seen Angels Over Broadway, Foreign Correspondent (best original screenplay nominees), Arise my Love, Comrade X (best original story).
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OK, I'm going to start with 1940, since it's the first year with original screenplays: I might go back in time, although the difficulty of finding which film is nominated in which year before 1934 is such a hassle.
Adapted Screenplay
Charles Lederer, His Girl Friday, based on the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
Donald Ogden Stewart, The Philadelphia Story, based on the play of the same name by Philip Barry
Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner and Aurelius Battaglia, Pinocchio, based on The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Nunnally Johnson, The Grapes of Wrath, based on the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck
Samson Raphaelson, The Shop Around the Corner, based on the play Perfumiere by Miklos Laszlo
Original Screenplay
Joe Grant, Dick Hummer, Fantasia
Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator
Emeric Pressburger, Contraband
W.C Fields, (as "Mahatma Kane Jeeves"), The Bank Dick
Howard Koch, Seton I. Miller, The Sea Hawk
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37 minutes ago, TopBilled said:
I am wondering if the history of the Hollywood musical stuff is another course with Ball University. If so, then I imagine it will continue into July.
Anyone know?
If it would continue into July, that would mean it would have to deal with the last four decades. And it's not likely TCM has any interest in the subject, or that there are that many musicals for that time.
A quick look doesn't reveal anything other than Stalker. If you had to choose seventies Hollywood musicals, couldn't you choose something other than Mame?
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Gladiator loses original screenplay to Almost Famous.
Chicago loses adapted screenplay to The Pianist.
Million Dollar Baby loses adapted screenplay to Sideways.
The Artist loses original screenplay to Midnight in Paris
The Shape of Water loses original screenplay to Get Out.
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I saw five movies this week: two oldies and three more recent ones. The Seventh Cross is a very effective wartime thriller, actually taking place a few years before the war. Tracy is quite good in a more understated role as a desperate escapee. Hume Cronyn is particularly effective as the acquaintance who seems to have accepted the third Reich but who then does everything he can to help Tracy. I would imagine there is a good movie to be made about the romance between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. But The Barretts of Wimpole Street is not that movie. I can sort of understand why people loved Frederic March and Norma Shearer together, since they are a physically attractive couple. But they're not convincing as poets, let alone Browning as the greatest poet of the Victorian age. Even Charles Laughton is surprisingly bland as the ogre Barrett patriarch.
Call me by your Name is arguably more effective than the best picture winner, and the acclaimed Lady Bird and Three Billboards, etc. It's certainly more effectively directed, with the movie have a real sense of space and atmosphere. But I found Chalomet's character more callow than sympathetic and wondered why Armie Hammer and two attractive Italian girls wanted to be with him. There is an element of entitlement that is not all that attractive. The Party is sort of like Carnage, only with seven people instead of four, and with Sally Potter not quite earning Roman Polanski's critical attitude towards them. But it is beautifully shot, and usefully brief. Timothy Spall spends most of the movie being catatonic, and while Bruno Ganz and Cillian Murphy are amusing caricatures, Kristin-Scott Thomas is better as the politician heroine whose world falls apart. Patricia Clarkson is good as the tart, sympathetic friend, while Cherry Jones does a good job as the bien-pensant lesbian whose world has its own problems. After the Storm has Hiroshi Abe giving a good performance as a man whose marriage had already collapsed and his ties to his young son are about to fall apart. It's a good, realistic, family drama with Abe not being an all out loser, but a private detective and a novelist with writer's block.
I just want to remind myself that I rewatched The Wages of Fear.
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There was a Father, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan
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I saw three movies over the last two weeks. The Valley of Decision seems intended to remind us of How Green was My Valley. The latter may be a good film and a deserving Oscar winner. It's certainly a great film compared to this simplified version. I prefer Gregory Peck when his reserves are strength are challenged, as in Twelve O'Clock High or The Gunfighter, or subtly revealed, as in To Kill a Mockingbird. Dangerous is not one of Bette Davis's best performances, but it's competent enough in its picture of a talented actress who drags down the men attracted to her. The first half is clearly more competent. Beatriz at Dinner stars Salma Hayek in an untypical role as an ordinary movie who is invited to dinner when her car breaks down at the house where she has an appointment as a masseur. John Lithgow has a more typical role as a vain and obnoxious businessmen who is a guest at dinner. Their confrontation evolves in a way that is less predictable than one might expect from the trailers, but not necessarily more interesting.
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1. The 47 Ronin, Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan
2. Remorques, Jean Gremillon, France
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Oliver! loses adapted screenplay to The Lion in the Winter
Rocky loses original screenplay to Network.
The Deer Hunter loses original screenplay to Coming Home.
Platoon loses original screenplay to Hannah and Her Sisters.
Unforgiven loses original screenplay to The Crying Game.
Braveheart loses original screenplay to The Usual Suspects
The English Patient loses adapted screenplay to Sling Blade.
Titantic is not nominated at all.
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I was going to say Elizabeth Taylor's great performances begin and end with Who's Afraid With Virginia Woolf. But I would say that Cleopatra is one movie that is actually underrated.
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Well, they're having Danton and The Scarlet Empress right when I'm going to Europe for vacation. If this was done on the three month instead of the two month alert I wouldn't have this problem.
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If I say Taylor's greatest performance was in National Velvet, would TCM Canada actually show it?
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Isao Takahata 1935-2018
in General Discussions
Posted
And here is Glenn Kenny's review of Only Yesterday. The Grave of the Fireflies is viscerally stunning, and Princess Kaguya is full of magic. But it's important to note that Takahata could do more "ordinary" stories:
2014’s U.S. release of Isao Takahata’s amazing animated swan song “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” was a gift and a miracle in and of itself, but it’s also yielding some dividends. The first great movie of 2016, as far as U.S. releases go, is an animated picture that was made in 1991: Takahata’s breathtakingly beautiful and quietly but devastatingly moving “Only Yesterday,” seeing its first screenings here in both its original Japanese-language version and a scrupulously English-dubbed edition featuring the voice talents of Daisy Ridley, Dev Patel, and Ashley Eckstein.
“Only Yesterday” is one of a very distinguished handful of feature films that Takahata directed for Studio Ghibli, the outfit founded by Takahata’s friend and frequent collaborator Hayao Miyazaki. Takahata’s work has been marked by a determination to take on stories that U.S. viewers wouldn’t necessarily associate with animation, for instance his 1988 World War II survival drama “Grave of the Fireflies.” He’s also shown interest in expanding and changing up the aesthetic of anime, as in his 1999 “My Neighbors the Yamadas,” designed in the seemingly minimalist style of Japanese comic strips. “Kaguya,” which Takahata announced would be the last film he would direct, was a kind of grand summation of his work in terms of both form and content. “Only Yesterday” is a good companion piece for a number of reasons—like “Kaguya,” it functions as a highly sensitive and empathetic consideration of the situation of women in Japanese society—but it’s also a breathtaking work of art on its own.
There’s no fantasy or supernatural element in the movie, but that’s not to say that it entirely eschews the fantastic. The main character is a kind of young Japanese everywoman, or everywoman nonconformist. Taeko is a 27-year-old single salarywoman in 1982 Tokyo. The movie begins with her telling a work colleague that she’s off to visit relatives in the countryside. Truth is, she has no actual close relatives there, but rather has signed up to help the family of her brother-in-law’s older brother in her destination to harvest safflowers.
“I didn’t expect to bring my fifth-grade self along for the trip,” Ridley, speaking with a U.S. accent (for those keeping track, Ridley is British and speaks with her native accent in this independent film called “The Force Awakens;” her costar in that film, John Boyega, also hails from England but speaks in that film with an American accent; it’s called acting, in case this all worries you), muses on the soundtrack of the English-dubbed version. And yet here she is. On the train, Taeko relates and relives events from her childhood. Some funny and charming, but most of them sad and disturbing. The mockery of more popular girls, the awkwardness of waiting for first menstruation, the cruel coldness of a father who refuses to allow her to participate in a semi-pro theatrical endeavor. The persistent squashing of her hopes and dreams helps make her eventual adult solitude make some kind of sense, but the film is not so crude as to make an overt insistence on cause-and-effect. The movie allows Taeko to keep some secrets, in a sense. As I mentioned, there are no overt fantasy elements in the story but the animated format allows visual metaphors for feelings to come to life. On the rare occasion when fifth-grade Taeko feels like she’s floating on air, she floats, and a big pink heart appears in the sky. In the flashback sequences, Takahata’s spectacular use of negative space—the details of a softball field stretching out into a big field of white in the frame, for instance—gives a palpable sense of a world only partially regained to the senses.