skimpole

Gentleman's Agreement loses adapted screenplay to Miracle on 34th Street Hamlet is not nominated at all. All the King's Men loses adapted screenplay to A Letter for Three Wives. Ben-Hur loses adapted screenplay to Room at the Top. West Side Story loses adapted screenplay to Judgement at Nuremberg. Lawrence of Arabia loses adapted screenplay to To Kill A Mockingbird My Fair Lady loses adapted screenplay to Becket The Sound of Music is not nominated at all.

Before I begin, you'd think that the best picture of the year would also be a strong contender for the best director, best lead performance, and best relevant screenplay. That isn't always the case: Wings, Sunrise, The Broadway Melody, nominated for nothing. All Quiet on the Western Front loses to The Big House, when it appears the award is being given to the best overall screenplay, though there is still a best story award. Cavalcade, Grand Hotel not nominated. Mutiny on the Bounty loses to The Informer. The Great Ziegfeld loses best story to The Story of Louis Pasteur, which also wins best screenplay. You Can't Take it With You loses to Pygmalion. Rebecca loses to The Philadelphia Story How Green was my Valley loses to Here Comes Mr. Jordan. More unsuccessful best picture nominees later.

I've got nothing for 1940. Darn Nazis for conquering most of Europe.

1. Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, France, 1937 2. The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir, France, 1939 3. M, Fritz Lang, Germany, 1931 4. Vampyr, Carl Dreyer, Germany, 1932 5. Les Miserables, Raymond Bernard, France, 1934

I'm going to use this thread to list my choices by For Best Adapted/Original Screenplay. However looking at it, I realize that while the adapted screenplay has always existed, the best original screenplay only began in 1940. There was an Academy Award for best story which goes back to 1927/1928, and which lasted until 1956. Adapted screenplay 1927/1928: Three nominees 1928/1929 Eleven nominees 1929/1930-1930/1931 Five nominees 1931/1932-1935 Three nominees 1936-Present Five nominees Original Screenplay 1940-Present Five noninees Best Story 1927/1928 Two nominees 1929/1929-1929/1930 No award 1930/1931 Five nominees 1931/1932 four nominees 19321933-1934 Three nominees 1935 Four nominees 1936-1956 Five nominees

Meg Ryan was actually fairly impressive in her supporting role in Top Gun.

It's not as though TCM never showed Psycho, Imitation of Life or Thoroughly Modern Millie

Three movies this week. Ruby in Paradise contains a striking performance by Ashley Judd as the eponymous character, trying to make a new life in a Florida town in the off season. It's subtly observed and provides a real sense of what living in such a place in such a profession would be like. Sholay is one of the most famous "curry" westerns. Like many Bollywood films the film borrows a lot from more famous movies (most obviously a key scene from Once Upon a Time in the West). Yet it works on its own terms, with some competent chase scenes and Hema Malini standing out as a great dancer and chatterbox love interest. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri suffers in contrast to Ruby et al, since it doesn't really take place in a particular time and place. Nor is it really about police brutality. Indeed, the movie is more about the pleasure of Frances McDormand's outrage. We soon learn, that this is outrage is based on guilt and her own feelings of failure as a mother. One reason her outrage burns so fiercely is that, except for Harrelson and Rockwell, the other characters are just ciphers and don't actually respond the way actual people would in such circumstances. (That includes the priest McDormand insults, in itself a sign of how little director Martin McDonagh cared about getting Missouri right. But it also includes her son, her ex-husband, her cipher of a best black friend, the other police officers who seem rather incurious once McDormand attacks their station with molotov cocktails.) The movie is more like a play with a limited number of characters opened up for the screen, and not with the best results.

1. The Rules of the Game Jean Renoir, France 2. Daybreak Marcel Carne, France 3. The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums Kenji Mizoguchi, France

Braveheart is, along with Crash, at the bottom of my list of Best Picture winners by quality. However, viewers will get to watch the amazing feet of Sir William Wallace fathering Edward III of England five years before he was born.

I'd prefer Fonda over Chaplin, but Cary Grant would win for His Girl Friday, followed by Grant for The Philadelphia Story. Out of several worthy performances from Stewart that year, I'd nominate him for The Shop Around the Corner.

Now that I've just rewatched it, I believe it's clear that Remick is supporting. The movie is 160 minutes long. The first hour or so introduces the case and the characters. Much of it is spent switching back and forth between Stewart talking to Remick and Gazzara. Remick has four major scenes. First, she talks to Stewart about taking the case. Then there's her big scene, roughly lasting 0:22-032 where she tells Stewart about her rape. There another conservation about forty minutes in, then there's a scene about fifty-three minutes in where Stewart meets he at a juke joint and warns her to dress conservatively and not be seen hanging out in such disreputable places. The next hour consists of the trial, which is dominated by Stewart, Walsh and increasingly George C. Scott. Gazarra and Remick are present in the court. Remick whispers something to Stewart (1:13), and there's another scene once a witness mentions that Gazzara asked Remick to take an oath on her rosary (1:38). but basically she doesn't do anything for an hour, before her big testimony scene (1:58-2:13). Before and after that Gazzara testifies, the second time rebutting the jailbird witness. We see Remick again briefly before the verdict is heard.

Three points: (1) Judgement at Nuremberg is not a well acted film. In particular, Richard Widmark and Maximilian Schell don't talk like counsel before a military tribunal. They talk like they're auditioning before Oscar voters. As such they make big rhetorical flourishes that shouldn't convince a judge. (Widmark brings up the Holocaust which begs the question of how much his ex-judges actually know about and are responsible for. Schell argues that Germans shouldn't be viewed as collective guilty. Which given the narrow range of people he's defending, they clearly aren't be treated that way.) Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland's roles are designed to be extra pathetic. (2) The Montgomery Clift role that deserved to be nominated for best supporting actor of 1961 is his role in The Misfits. (3) The real best supporting actor of 1961 was Sacha Pitoeff in the indelibly strange Last Year in Marienbad.

I saw four movies this week. Ex Libris: the New York Public Library may be the best movie of 2017 I've seen. It provides a rich, complex portrait of an invaluable and indispensable institution. It includes cameos by Richard Dawkins and Elvis Costello, as well as from other scholars and artists. We get to see children read "Old MacDonald hold a farm" and the recording of an audio version of Laughter in the Dark. The Shape of Water is overrated, but more acceptable than other Del Toro films. Hawkins is good, Richard Jenkins is better as her gay friend. The misc-en-scene is good, with an acceptably waterlogged feeling, if not as good as, from this year, Song of Song, Valerian the City of a Thousand Planets, mother! or Wonderstruck. This helps mitigate a somewhat simplistic plot, which flatters viewers for being more liberal than people 55 years ago, as well as a lack of chemistry between Hawkins and the amphibian man. The Subjects was Roses asks the question what if you looked at the domestic drama of O'Neill, Miller, Williams and Albee and then took out everything in it that was interesting about them? And also what if, while doing this, you learned nothing from previous attempts to film those plays. The result is a filmed play which looks very much like a filmed play. The film sticks very closely to the three main characters. The only attempt to open up about the stage is an awkward, sequence where Patrica O'Neal wanders around outside. Jack Albertson won an oscar for best supporting actor, though he is really a lead. The result is rather bland. Beach Rats deals with the trouble of growing up in the unfashionable parts of Brooklyn, while not dealing honestly with your homosexuality. Madeleine Weinstein is more interesting than the protagonist as the girl he pursues with little enthusiasm.

JamesStewartFan

1. The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, Mark Donskoi, Soviet Union 2. La Marseillaise, Jean Renoir, France 3. Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union

Four movies this week: Skippy is best known for having the youngest nominee for best actor, in a year where several classic performances were egregiously overlooked. Notwithstanding that, it's fairly amusing, Cooper does a good job, and it's one of the first sound movies where most of the cast are children. Lady Bird is a coming of age movie whose main quality is that, in retrospect, the mother is always right. Indeed, if Pence rather than Trump had been elected president, one might view this as independent film's olive branch to the Republican party. Kapo was Italy's nominee for the best foreign language film of 1960. Considering that this year saw L'Aventura, La Dolce Vita and Rocco and His Brothers this is not an easily defensible choice. This movie about a young Jewish girl who manages to pass as a gentile long enough to get to a concentration rather than an extermination camp, and then become the titular official, is best known as being the subject of one of the most famous critical reviews in movie history. (By Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinema.) Certainly in The Battle of Algiers, director Giles Pontecorvo would learn how to present traumatic material with a more successful realism. Meanwhile, The Story of Qiu Ju marks a temporary change of pace for Zhang Yimou. Instead of the more stylized trappings of Raise the Red Lantern and the more open dramatics of To Live, he has star Gong Li waddling around in the ordinary, unfashionable clothes ordinary rural Chinese women wear when they're heavily pregnant. Less a simple tale of justice denied, the movie offers a more cinema verite approach as Gong Li's character seeks justice in a fight involving her husband where he is mostly, but not entirely in the right. This is an interesting approach, but not to me the most engaging.

1. Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, France 2. Humanity and Paper Balloons, Sadao Yamanka, Japan 3. Street Angel, Yuan Muzhi, China 4. Pearls of the Crown, Sacha Guitry, France

Lovers on the Bridge The Best Intentions

Queen of Hearts Days of Being Wild

(1) Is there a reason why Ordet isn't a regular Easter movie? Not that I'm complaining that TCM is showing Fanny and Alexander, but one would think it's more of a Christmas movie. (2) Is there another reason why The Towering Inferno isn't shown on TCM very much? Or why TCM couldn't show Fedora?

Say Anything

I saw five movies this week: three best picture nominees, one Palme D'Or winner, and one in the apparently endless series of Marvel comic book movies which was actually the best of the week. Zorba the Greek is a bit more tough-minded than its "happy southern European peasant bursting with life" reputation would suggest. I just don't think it's tough-minded enough. Irene Papas does a better job than oscar-winner Lila Kedrova, and it might have been better to develop Bates more than Quinn. Darkest Hour left me unimpressed. The fall of France is quickly compressed, Halifax is scheming to gain the premiership just days after renouncing it, and he and Chamberlain are planning to throw in the towel even before the debacle has begun. George VI is given a heroic role he didn't deserve, and Churchill has so little support until the last day of the movie, he appears oddly pathetic and uncharismatic. And for all the praise for Oldman's performance his final speech is less impressive than the actual Churchill's. Apparently John Wayne did not originally intend to take the large role in The Alamo, but his financiers insisted on it. That's the best defense for the fatuous speeches he has his David Crockett speak. There's the "republic" speech, which forgets that not only that Mexico was already a republic, but that much of Texas was fighting for a compromise within Mexico. And then there's the latter speech where he says Santa Anna's aggression ultimately has to be stopped, as if the United States feared Mexico, and not the other way around. Leaving aside the many historical inaccuracies, such as the fact that the Texans were fighting to expand slavery, the first half of the movie takes an inordinate amount of time to get started. A contrast with the other three hour plus movie about questionable independence victory of 1960, Exodus, shows the former's weaknesses. The Square starts by showing its protagonist is a meretricious twit, and then spends the next 140 minutes being superior to him. The movie has a certain style and craft, but its view of the art world is banal and reactionary. The protagonist is a museum curator who knows nothing about art, but just spouts fashionable babble and supports obviously empty provocations. It's chic misanthropy, and nothing about the actual Sweden is allowed to complicate the movie's smugness. Thor: Ragnarok is not as Ragnarocky a movie you might expect. But the movie does find a way to provide its divine hero with a good deal of wit. Benedict Cumberbatch has an amusing and inventive cameo, Jeff Goldblum makes his decades old Marvel villain considerable more amusing than fans have any right to expect, and Tom Hiddleston acquits himself well.

1. The Story of a Cheat, Sacha Guitry, France 2. The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Jean Renoir, France 3. The Only Son, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan 4. By the Bluest of Seas, Boris Barnet, Soviet Union 5. Cesar, Marcel Pagnol, France

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