Sunday, August 19, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Parting Thoughts


To begin with, I would like to send thanks out to everyone who voted. Obviously, this couldn’t have happened without all of you.

Jason Alley
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Donald G. Carder
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Steven Erickson
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Sam Juliano
Craig Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Scott von Doviak
Isaac Weeks
Bryce Wilson

And here are the results of this year's Hall of Fame voting:

2018 Muriels Hall of Fame Inductees
Play Time (1967, Jacques Tati, France) [50th Anniversary Award winner]
What’s Opera, Doc? (1957, Charles M. Jones, USA) [14 votes] {appeared on short films ballot}
A Trip to the Moon (1902, Georges Méliès, France) [13 votes] {appeared on short films ballot}
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming, USA) [12 votes]
Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur, USA) [11 votes]
Freaks (1932, Tod Browning, USA) [11 votes]
Scorpio Rising (1964, Kenneth Anger, USA) [11 votes] {appeared on short films ballot}
Wavelength (1967, Michael Snow, Canada) [10 votes] {appeared on short films ballot} {first year of eligibility}
Night and Fog (1956, Alain Resnais, France) [9 votes]
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler, USA) [8 votes]
Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio De Sica, Italy) [8 votes]
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks, USA) [8 votes]
Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir, France) [8 votes]
King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, USA) [8 votes]
Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau, Germany) [8 votes]
Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur, USA) [8 votes]
Point Blank (1967, John Boorman, USA) [8 votes] {first year of eligibility}

7 votes
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray, USA)
The Red Balloon (1956, Albert Lamorisse, France) {appeared on short films ballot}
Le Samouraï (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville, France) {first year of eligibility}

6 votes
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA)
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra, USA)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson, France)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder, USA)

5 votes
The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder, USA)
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju, France)
Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, USA)
The House Is Black (1963, Furough Farrokhzad, Iran) {appeared on short films ballot}
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst, Germany)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Robert Mulligan, USA)

4 votes
Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder, USA)
Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein, USSR)
Bigger Than Life (1956, Nicholas Ray, USA)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn, USA) {first year of eligibility}
Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné, France)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles, Spain)
The Crowd (1928, King Vidor, USA)
The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise, USA)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais, France)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk, USA)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick, USA)
Kwaidan (1964, Masaki Kobayashi, Japan)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli, USA)
Napoléon (1927, Abel Gance, France)
Seven Up! (1964, Paul Almond, UK) {appeared on short films ballot}
Stagecoach (1939, John Ford, USA)
The Thin Man (1934, W.S. van Dyke, USA)
The Train (1964, John Frankenheimer, USA)
Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966, Mike Nichols, USA)

3 votes
All My Life (1966, Bruce Baillie, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
Beauty and the Beast (1946, Jean Cocteau, France)
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel, France) {first year of eligibility}
The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor, USA)
Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks, USA)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith, USA)
A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan, USA)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy, USA)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin, USA)
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922, Benjamin Christensen, Denmark)
Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel, Spain) {appeared on short films ballot}
The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti, Italy)
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey, USA)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford, USA)
Mothlight (1963, Stan Brakhage, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor, USA)
Unsere Afrikareise (1966, Peter Kubelka, Austria) {appeared on short films ballot}
Week End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard, France) {first year of eligibility}

2 votes
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor, India)
Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard, France)
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR)
Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger, USA)
Fantasia (1940, various directors, USA)
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914, Winsor McCay, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
Gertrud (1964, Carl Th. Dreyer, Denmark)
Jules et Jim (1962, François Truffaut, France)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff, France)
One Week (1920, Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
Orpheus (1950, Jean Cocteau, France)
The Pawnbroker (1964, Sidney Lumet, USA)
Red Desert (1964, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
The Steel Helmet (1951, Sam Fuller, USA)
Sullivan’s Travels (1942, Preston Sturges, USA)
Suspense (1913, Lois Weber, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage, USA)

1 vote
L’Âge d’Or (1930, Luis Buñuel, France)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Robert Wise, USA)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Simon of the Desert (1965, Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
Very Nice, Very Nice (1961, Arthur Lipsett, Canada) {appeared on short films ballot}

See you this winter for the 2018 Muriel Awards!

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: What's Opera, Doc? (1957, Chuck Jones)


"Warner Bros. animation director Charles M. ‘Chuck’ Jones was known for his love of the snootier aspects of culture, specifically opera and ballet. He also craved far more lowbrow material like comic wordplay, violent slapstick and parody, characteristics for which the Termite Terrace brand of shorts were notorious. Jones’ 1957 Merrie Melodies feature What’s Opera, Doc? is the quintessential synthesis of these seemingly disparate elements, a take on Richard Wagner that is simultaneously a parody and a working example of what it mocks. Under all the jokes, there’s an earnest respect for opera and dance; Jones and his animators were serious enough to ensure the physical accuracy of the ballet moves of his characters, despite the fact that they are a rabbit in Bavarian drag and a lovestruck bald man armed with a spear and magic helmet."

~ Odie Henderson


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: a final salute to all of our participants, and this year’s complete results.

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: King Kong (1933, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper)


“Like many great films, King Kong is bottomless. It repays multiple viewings across a long lifetime. I first saw King Kong when I was nine years old on a Saturday afternoon when one of the television stations was showing a bunch of monster movies. I’m (mumble mumble) years old now, and when I watched it for this essay, it was just as fresh and compelling as it was when I was a kid. Maybe more so. So many films lose their magic when we age, but Kong remains evergreen."

~ Christianne Benedict


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: sing along with our final inductee of 2018, the top vote-getter in this year’s Hall of Fame polling.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: A Trip to the Moon (1902, Georges Méliès)


"Perhaps the most potent magic of A Trip to the Moon, certainly its greatest legacy for modern viewers, may be how effortlessly it transports the receptive audience back to a state where everything about the medium of motion pictures was new, marvelous, frightening, too much to process rationally. It leaves us in a mode of receptivity to the gorgeous, lunatic whims of its creator, to the true imaginative magic of seeing and believing, that should be the envy of anyone who, after having seen it, decides to try and tell a story on film."

~ Dennis Cozzalio


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: a beastly favorite that’s a real wonder.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur)


"Cat People wasn’t the first or last film to draw terror from a city street by night, but it does stand alone as a dense psychosexual tragedy. DeWitt Bodeen’s screenplay is a braid of digressions and sinister motifs. Through Jacques Tourneur’s direction, it became a masterpiece of desolate beauty.”

~ Alice Stoehr


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: we take a trip in the Wayback Machine to salute our oldest inducted film yet.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau)


“Among the most celebrated effects of The German Expressionist Movement was that of bringing to external life an interior subjective headspace. The nightmare, the hallucination, the vision of the madman. Nosferatu achieves something altogether more difficult and more insidious, that of the interior nightmare spilling over and breaching into the orderly rational world. Breaching the walls of reality and poisoning what it finds there."

~ Bryce Wilson


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: we honor our second inductee from this year’s only double-dipping director.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Night and Fog (1956, Alain Resnais)


"Resnais leaves the viewer with many questions, but he unflinchingly conveys the fundamental contradiction in the normalized conceptions of the Holocaust that persist to this day: it was (and is) at once unimaginable and inevitable.”

~ Ryan Swen


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: a movie that has appeared on all Muriels HOF ballots to date finally graduates to full Hall of Fame status.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio de Sica)


"De Sica's film combines a ruthless critique of post-war Italian society with the warm sentimentality of Chaplin or Capra. In this lies the key to the film's greatness, that De Sica and his collaborators found a way to walk the line between alienation and saccharine simplicity."

~ Jeff McMahon


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: The latest of our short film inductees this year is pretty harrowing stuff.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)


"When I think of what we mean by the phrase 'film noir,' chances are THIS is the film I'm thinking about. It’s got everything encompassed by 'noir:' deep and telling shadows, an inescapable past leading to a bitter doom, and the most fatal of femmes fatale. Robert Mitchum’ Jeff Bailey is the very model of a morally compromised noir hero, one who is tangled in the web of a criminal past, one whose easy morals lead him into a downward spiral. The film builds him out of shadows and into shadows he is consigned."

~ Christianne Benedict


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: a world cinema favorite that’s guaranteed to do a number on your tear ducts.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)


“The central mystery is messy, for sure (just ask Schrodinger’s chauffeur), with a lot of the original text’s more lurid and exciting details excised. But it’s okay, the film itself says to the viewer, what Will Hays doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and so we make a deal with the film, and it creates its own way of speaking the unspeakable."

~ Jason Shawhan


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: two of Hollywood’s most iconic cool guys face off in a smokin’ classic.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)


The Best Years of Our Lives is a film about a war, a war that changed the character and direction of an entire nation, told from the perspective of those that lived through it. Three men, each damaged in some way by the experience, and the women who waited, ‘steadfast and true,’ for their return. In somewhat of a departure from most war movies of its time, this one spends its time examining not the conflict itself, what comes after, once the blood has cooled and the body politic returns to a state of equanimity and peace."

~ Donald G. Carder


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: if you can puzzle out the plot of our next inductee, you’re a better man than I.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir)


“Based on the experiences of a flyer he knew during the war, Renoir’s La Grande Illusion is unquestionably one of the masterpieces of the silver screen, a film of incredible humanity set during a period of great inhumanity. In short, it’s probably the greatest anti-war film ever made (for me a flat footed tie in that regard with Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front), a film that cannot help but move people every time they see it."

~ Sam Juliano


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: believe it or not, our next inductee will be the first Best Picture Oscar-winner we’ve inducted since our inaugural year. However, it may not be the film you’re guessing…

Monday, August 13, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Point Blank (1967, John Boorman)


“Start watching Point Blank at any point in the movie and you'll immediately be able to tell that it was made in the latter half of the sixties... at the same time, a good fifty years on, the film feels startlingly modern. The past bleeds into the present, just as sound from one scene will bleed into another. Words are repeated, or sometimes omitted altogether; images are refracted."

~ Hedwig van Driel


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: A humanist classic from one of cinema’s true masters.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Wavelength (1967, Michael Snow)


"Films like this ask us to practice our gaze, literally, to get used to looking at the world, aware of every second going by. This is a lot to ask of human beings and so avant-garde cinema scares people. Meaning hides from plain sight, time ticks away, and we're watching something that doesn't resemble other films but instead resembles us. Breathing, blinking, organically functioning, going nowhere in a hurry, and getting there with only the accumulation of time arming us against the inevitable disappointment of returning to reality."

~ Scout Tafoya


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: the Muriels HOF honors a badass classic as laser-focused as its hero.

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Scorpio Rising (1963, Kenneth Anger)

Note: in a change from previous years, there was a separate category on this year's ballot for short films. This will be the first of several short films we've inducted this year. 


"Anger captures the solitary pleasures of assembling a persona, focusing on the reverie of the ritual. With Scorpio Rising, Anger once again begins by again fetishizing vanity... The camera watches as they assemble their custom bikes, chrome additions glistening in Anger’s loving light."

~ Kevin Cecil


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: we pay tribute to a true masterpiece of its kind, and a fundamental building block of a broad-based cinematic education.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Freaks (1932, Tod Browning)


“The film implicitly offers the uneasy exploitative thrills of a traveling freak show from its cast of known attractions, to its title and its sensational carnival barker opening moments which literally busts through the screen at you. But once it gets going, its perspective on its performer characters shows that exploitation is certainly not the first thing Browning had in mind. Browning, who ran away to work in the circus at 16, first and foremost sees the ‘freaks’ as people."

~ Patrick J. Miller


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: we honor our first short film of the year, a rockin’ tribute to bad boys and their toys.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)


“It’s impossible to imagine today: a studio greenlights a big-budget fantasy adapted from a popular series of books... Multiple directors come and go on the project, and one of the lead actors is replaced after filming has begun after the demands of the production literally make him sick... The production goes over budget and schedule, goes through reshoots and, after test screenings, is substantially recut. When it’s released, it gets generally warm reviews but fails to turn a profit. A couple of decades later, it’s one of the most iconic movies of all time."

~ Andrew Bemis


Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: one of the great outliers of 1930s Hollywood gets the Hall of Fame treatment.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati)

Welcome one and all to our annual Muriels Hall of Fame inductions. We started these festivities as a way for our loyal Muriels voters to remain active in the summertime (if they so desired), while honoring the great films of the past. And now, after six years, I think we've amassed a fairly good canon of movies, if I do say so myself!

Anyway, we'll begin in our usual fashion, by inducting the most recent winner of the 50th Anniversary Muriel Award. Check back at 7 PM and 9 PM every night for the next week or so for our latest honorees!

“In the category of ‘super-expensive personal visions that basically ruined a director's career,’ Play Time is hard to beat, leading Tati into debt for the rest of his life. And yet, what a glorious folly, a quiet, delicate symphony about the absurdity of everyday urban life that rewards patient observance and attention to tiny details, from the smirk of a waiter to the buzz of a neon light.”

~ Jeff McMahon


Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: one of the most beloved movies in Hollywood history finally gets some Muriels Hall of Fame attention.