Believe it or not, this year’s class of inductees brings us to a nice round 100 films in the Muriels Hall of Fame. And despite a few blind spots (I’ll get to those in a bit), I think we’ve built ourselves a pretty darn good list of classic films. If someone was trying to learn more about film history, I’d proudly point them to our list as a good starting point.
Before we get to this year’s voting results, here’s something for all you statistics geeks out there:
- All but three of our inducted films appeared in the most recent “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” compilation of the greatest films of all time (the holdouts: Duck Amuck, Gojira, and What’s Opera, Doc?). 49 of the inductees are among TSPDT’s top 100. The highest-placing films that we haven’t inducted yet are: Battleship Potemkin (#14), Some Like It Hot (#28), La Dolce Vita (#29), Ordet (#33), and L’Avventura (#37).
- 75% of our inductees ranked in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll’s top 250 films list. Highest-ranked holdouts include: Battleship Potemkin [again] (#11), Late Spring (#15), L’Avventura (#21), Contempt (#21), and Ordet (#24). Hey, what do you folks have against Eisenstein?
- Twelve of our inducted films were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Three of them won (Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Lawrence of Arabia).
- Only two documentaries have been inducted thusfar. Not awesome, but maybe not surprising either. A lot of eligible documentaries are in a style that’s pretty different from what we generally associate with non-fiction filmmaking today, thus rendering folks like Robert Flaherty out of fashion. Side note: Pretty much every Frederick Wiseman film can be found on Kanopy!
- Muriel’s favorite filmmakers are: Howard Hawks (six inducted films), Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa (5 apiece), and Luis Buñuel (3).
- Three of our inducted films were directed or co-directed by women. That doesn’t sound like a lot, except that directing jobs for women weren’t exactly plentiful 50+ years ago. So hey – not too shabby!
- Five directors who’ve been inducted are still alive: Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising), John Boorman (Point Blank), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless and Weekend), Roman Polanski (Repulsion), and Michael Snow (Wavelength). Two more- Stanley Donen and Agnès Varda- were inducted while they were still alive but have since passed away *sniff*.
- 51 of the inducted films contain dialogue that is primarily in English. The next most-spoken languages are: French (16, not counting Battle of Algiers), Japanese (8), and Italian (3). Thirteen of the films are silent.
- 56 out of the 100 inducted films have been released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Criterion Collection or, in the case of Daisies, by Eclipse. This includes, believe it or not, every film with a primary spoken language other than English. I supposed that says something about the “Criterion-ization” of world cinema history, with the good folks at Criterion largely shouldering the burden for bringing classic foreign films to American audiences. However, that would be a job for a better writer than I, and someone with rather more space than I’ve given myself here.
- Finally, here’s the breakdown of the inducted films by decade: 1 from the 1900s (take a bow, Georges Méliès!), 9 from the 1920s, 13 from the 1930s, 20 from the 1940s, 26 from the 1950s, 30 from the 1960s. I could speculate as to why the distribution has been weighted toward more recent work, but one obvious factor is the 50th Anniversary Awards automatically inducting films, and considering we’ve only been voting in this category since 2007 (for 1957 releases), that certainly would skew the results.
Anyway, for those of you who are still with us, here are this year’s voting results. This year, we divided up the final ballot into three categories, as shown below. An asterisk denotes this year’s inductees.
Category A - Directors of Previously Inducted Films
* Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks, USA) [8 votes]
* Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks, USA) [6 votes]
* Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa, Japan) [6 votes]
* Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone, USA) [6 votes]
* Week-End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard, France) [6 votes]
5 votes
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk, USA)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski, USA)
4 votes
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles, USA)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson, France)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford, USA)
One Froggy Evening (1955, Charles M. Jones, USA)
Strangers on a Train (1951, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch, USA)
Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
3 votes
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles, Spain)
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
Gertrud (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin, USA)
I Was Born, But… (1932, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, Alain Resnais, France)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray, USA)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder, USA)
2 votes:
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel, France)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick, USA)
Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, France)
Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick, UK)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Preston Sturges, USA)
Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio de Sica, Italy)
1 vote:
The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
Summertime (1955, David Lean, USA)
Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
Category B - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (English-Language)
* Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero, USA) [12 votes]
* It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra, USA) [10 votes]
* Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, USA) [8 votes]
7 votes
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich, USA)
6 votes
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA)
5 votes
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn, USA)
A Hard Day’s Night! (1964, Richard Lester, UK)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer, USA)
4 votes
The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols, USA)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli, USA)
Portrait of Jason (1967, Shirley Clarke, USA)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage, USA)
3 votes
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone, USA)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith, USA)
Report (1967, Bruce Conner, USA)
Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer, USA)
The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, UK)
A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor, USA)
2 votes
The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise, USA)
Park Row (1952, Samuel Fuller, USA)
Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes, USA)
1 vote
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Ida Lupino, USA)
Category C - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (Non-English-Language)
* Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju, France) [12 votes]
* La Belle et la Bête (1946, Jean Cocteau, France) [11 votes]
* Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné, France) [11 votes]
* The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti, Italy) [10 votes]
8 votes
Black Girl (1966, Ousmane Sembène, Senegal)
Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Louis Malle, France)
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin, France)
6 votes
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst, Germany)
4 votes
Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff, France)
Unsere Afrikareise (1966, Peter Kubelka, Austria)
3 votes
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR)
2 votes
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor, India)
Fires on the Plain (1959, Kon Ichikawa, Japan)
The Human Condition, Part I: No Greater Love (1959, Masaki Kobayashi, Japan)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Orpheus (1950, Jean Cocteau, France)
Thanks to everybody for follow us for this year’s festivities. The site should be updated within the next week. See you this winter for this year’s Muriels!
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju)
“I first saw George Franju’s Eyes Without A Face on a gray market dupe under the title ‘The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus.’ It’s a title that, broadly speaking, fits the film even if the name of the doctor isn’t ‘Faustus.’ To describe the plot of the film, in which a mad plastic surgeon murders women in order to graft their faces onto the ruined face of his daughter, is to conjure up a lurid picture of an exploitation film. And the film lives up to that title, too, in a stomach-churning surgical sequence that’s filmed with a dispassionate, clinical clarity. It’s a film that is an affront to an unprepared audience.
“Certainly, continental directors spent a fair amount of time and energy making rip-offs of the film in the 1960s. The Spanish exploitation director, Jess Franco parlayed his own rip-off of Eyes Without a Face into a series of films about ‘The Awful Dr. Orloff.’ It borrows the plot and echoes the alternate title, but misses the poetry. It’s the poetry of Eyes Without a Face that lingers long after the bruise of its initial impact has faded. Its later imitators are more rarified (most famously, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky). But even these are grasping after a phantom, an ineffable otherness that haunts the images in Franju’s film that cannot be replicated.
“It’s a film of primal images translated from the darkest European myths into a contemporary (in 1959) post war France. Dr. Genessier would have been a familiar figure to an audience for whom the Nazi doctors were a fresh memory. It’s a film, too, about identity. Genessier himself presents one face to the world while his true self is something else entirely. Like the Nazis, Genessier is an upright pillar of his community when he’s not committing atrocities. His nurse, Louise, presents a different picture: in his home, she’s the loyal servant, perhaps in love with Genessier to the point of madness. Out in the world, she’s something more sinister, dressed in her rain slicker, picking up potential victims. She’s a serial killer who believes in her crimes. Love is prime mover of this film’s plot, and it is well aware of the fact that horrors without number have been committed in the name of love. The film frames its images in a narrative that is by turns dreamlike and crystal clear. It looks backward to the symbolists and to Jean Cocteau and sideways at Alain Resnais, but in a French cinema that never made all that many horror movies, it is sui generis.
“I need to own up to personal elements of my relationship with Eyes Without a Face. When I had the opportunity to choose my own name after my gender transition, I chose to name myself after Edith’s Scob’s character, Christiane Genessier. She’s the masked princess drifting through the gothic castle of her mad sorcerer of a father. Obviously, the film is meaningful to me in a way that might not resonate with all audiences. For me, it strikes a deep chord of melancholy because it’s fundamentally about the imposition of gender norms on subjugated women by a patriarchy that has determined that a woman’s worth is found in what she looks like. It’s a microcosm of the concerns of feminism and humanity itself balled up inside a dark fairy tale, touching on the agency of women, women acting as the kapos of the patriarchy (this is Alida Valli’s sinister nurse), of bodily autonomy, of some women being disposable once men get what they want from them. I feel a deep kinship with Christiane Genessier, who is subject to a society and a father who believe her body has to appear one way even when that one way is impossible. In the end, she can’t live with the monstrosity in either such an oppressive family life or in herself. It’s every bit the same kind of nightmare as The Handmaid’s Tale or ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Issues of bodily autonomy are literally the thread of life for me. If I was imprisoned in the body I was issued at birth, I would be dead. Christiane Genessier has no prince charming to save her, but she eventually takes control of her own destiny and saves herself, wandering into the night like a ghost, drifting to an uncertain future.
“This is one of the greatest of all horror movies.” ~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow: this year's voting results, plus maybe some remarks if I'm feeling chatty. We'll see.
“Certainly, continental directors spent a fair amount of time and energy making rip-offs of the film in the 1960s. The Spanish exploitation director, Jess Franco parlayed his own rip-off of Eyes Without a Face into a series of films about ‘The Awful Dr. Orloff.’ It borrows the plot and echoes the alternate title, but misses the poetry. It’s the poetry of Eyes Without a Face that lingers long after the bruise of its initial impact has faded. Its later imitators are more rarified (most famously, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky). But even these are grasping after a phantom, an ineffable otherness that haunts the images in Franju’s film that cannot be replicated.
“It’s a film of primal images translated from the darkest European myths into a contemporary (in 1959) post war France. Dr. Genessier would have been a familiar figure to an audience for whom the Nazi doctors were a fresh memory. It’s a film, too, about identity. Genessier himself presents one face to the world while his true self is something else entirely. Like the Nazis, Genessier is an upright pillar of his community when he’s not committing atrocities. His nurse, Louise, presents a different picture: in his home, she’s the loyal servant, perhaps in love with Genessier to the point of madness. Out in the world, she’s something more sinister, dressed in her rain slicker, picking up potential victims. She’s a serial killer who believes in her crimes. Love is prime mover of this film’s plot, and it is well aware of the fact that horrors without number have been committed in the name of love. The film frames its images in a narrative that is by turns dreamlike and crystal clear. It looks backward to the symbolists and to Jean Cocteau and sideways at Alain Resnais, but in a French cinema that never made all that many horror movies, it is sui generis.
“I need to own up to personal elements of my relationship with Eyes Without a Face. When I had the opportunity to choose my own name after my gender transition, I chose to name myself after Edith’s Scob’s character, Christiane Genessier. She’s the masked princess drifting through the gothic castle of her mad sorcerer of a father. Obviously, the film is meaningful to me in a way that might not resonate with all audiences. For me, it strikes a deep chord of melancholy because it’s fundamentally about the imposition of gender norms on subjugated women by a patriarchy that has determined that a woman’s worth is found in what she looks like. It’s a microcosm of the concerns of feminism and humanity itself balled up inside a dark fairy tale, touching on the agency of women, women acting as the kapos of the patriarchy (this is Alida Valli’s sinister nurse), of bodily autonomy, of some women being disposable once men get what they want from them. I feel a deep kinship with Christiane Genessier, who is subject to a society and a father who believe her body has to appear one way even when that one way is impossible. In the end, she can’t live with the monstrosity in either such an oppressive family life or in herself. It’s every bit the same kind of nightmare as The Handmaid’s Tale or ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Issues of bodily autonomy are literally the thread of life for me. If I was imprisoned in the body I was issued at birth, I would be dead. Christiane Genessier has no prince charming to save her, but she eventually takes control of her own destiny and saves herself, wandering into the night like a ghost, drifting to an uncertain future.
“This is one of the greatest of all horror movies.” ~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow: this year's voting results, plus maybe some remarks if I'm feeling chatty. We'll see.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero)
"I know you're afraid. I am too."
“The first time I saw George A. Romero's landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead, I was sixteen. I was staying over at my best friend Jim's place, as I often did in high school. His mother, though usually home, was away for some reason this particular evening, and though we'd often go downtown and hang out at the various coffee shops on Main Street, this night we'd decided to stay in and fart around. Flipping channels, we came across a local station filling time with a cheap horror film - Rospo Pallenberg's Cutting Class. That film, a dumb and clumsy thing that never quite figures out if it's intending or not to be funny, activated our natural teenage tendency towards mockery, and we had a good time riding it as hard as we could. Having built up a good head of steam, we decided to stick around for the next film, fully expecting to continue with our fun. That film turned out to be Dead. Jump to 2 AM, where we have be stunned into silence, our only reaction to be to slowly turn to each other and utter, ‘Whoa.’ I did not sleep well that night.
“Almost a quarter century later, after a dozen viewings, my most recent watch of Dead this past week still left me stunned into silence. I have over the years shown it to other people, people who aren't film buffs, and seen the same reaction happen. I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation on this one - few films have been as poked, prodded, pulled, dissected, deconstructed and blown apart as this - so all I can do is concentrate on my specific reaction and what that says about the film. And beyond the vituperative social commentary, beyond the groundbreaking casting, beyond the fact that Romero straight-up invented an entire genre, beyond everything that makes this a game-changer... strip all that away, get down to the meat and bone of the thing, and you still have the most terrifying film ever made, a film that retains its cruel and incomparable power to disorient and disturb even after double-digit viewings.
“Therein lies the extraordinary power of Dead - it's a destabilized film for and from a destabilized time, a work of narrative art in which the narrative is a series of shock waves meant to wreck the audience's sense of expectation. And within those shock waves lies its suffocating sense of dread, the mounting panic that stems from its eventual succumbing to the sense that everything is wrong and nothing will be okay. Cutting through the accumulated detritus around the film to find its core, this is the elemental truth to be found there - Night of the Living Dead works at a level most horror cannot hope to touch because, for any number of reasons relating to the time and place it was made, it posits a future where Nothing Will Be Okay. Fear is the only option. There's no road out. These are terrifying times, and this might be The End. I know you're afraid. I am too.” ~ Steve Carlson
“The first time I saw George A. Romero's landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead, I was sixteen. I was staying over at my best friend Jim's place, as I often did in high school. His mother, though usually home, was away for some reason this particular evening, and though we'd often go downtown and hang out at the various coffee shops on Main Street, this night we'd decided to stay in and fart around. Flipping channels, we came across a local station filling time with a cheap horror film - Rospo Pallenberg's Cutting Class. That film, a dumb and clumsy thing that never quite figures out if it's intending or not to be funny, activated our natural teenage tendency towards mockery, and we had a good time riding it as hard as we could. Having built up a good head of steam, we decided to stick around for the next film, fully expecting to continue with our fun. That film turned out to be Dead. Jump to 2 AM, where we have be stunned into silence, our only reaction to be to slowly turn to each other and utter, ‘Whoa.’ I did not sleep well that night.
“Almost a quarter century later, after a dozen viewings, my most recent watch of Dead this past week still left me stunned into silence. I have over the years shown it to other people, people who aren't film buffs, and seen the same reaction happen. I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation on this one - few films have been as poked, prodded, pulled, dissected, deconstructed and blown apart as this - so all I can do is concentrate on my specific reaction and what that says about the film. And beyond the vituperative social commentary, beyond the groundbreaking casting, beyond the fact that Romero straight-up invented an entire genre, beyond everything that makes this a game-changer... strip all that away, get down to the meat and bone of the thing, and you still have the most terrifying film ever made, a film that retains its cruel and incomparable power to disorient and disturb even after double-digit viewings.
“Therein lies the extraordinary power of Dead - it's a destabilized film for and from a destabilized time, a work of narrative art in which the narrative is a series of shock waves meant to wreck the audience's sense of expectation. And within those shock waves lies its suffocating sense of dread, the mounting panic that stems from its eventual succumbing to the sense that everything is wrong and nothing will be okay. Cutting through the accumulated detritus around the film to find its core, this is the elemental truth to be found there - Night of the Living Dead works at a level most horror cannot hope to touch because, for any number of reasons relating to the time and place it was made, it posits a future where Nothing Will Be Okay. Fear is the only option. There's no road out. These are terrifying times, and this might be The End. I know you're afraid. I am too.” ~ Steve Carlson
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: La Belle et la Bête (1946, Jean Cocteau)
“Fangs and bristly fur obscure the handsome face of Jean Marais, who plays both blowhard suitor Avenant and the title monster in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. He menaces Josette Day, who plays Belle, from either end of its pastoral romance. She's in the thrall of patriarchy within both mortal and mystical realms.
“The Beast wears glittering fineries, shot by Henri Alékan in inky blacks and luminous whites. His castle is a dreamland of surrealist effects work. Disembodied hands grip candles in its hallways; reversed footage and slow motion render bodies uncanny. The decor, like its master, is achingly vulnerable. Little else in film fantasy is as seductive as Cocteau's sui generis fairy tale.” ~ Alice Stoehr
Coming tomorrow: Our final day of inductions is Horror Day! Oooooohhhhh scaaaaaary!!! We spotlight a couple of creepy classics, introduced by two of Muriel’s finest. Come back and see the late two honorees… IF YOU DARE!
(Also, there'll be a little wrap-up piece with voting results and such. Sliiiiiightly lessssssssss scaaaary!)
“The Beast wears glittering fineries, shot by Henri Alékan in inky blacks and luminous whites. His castle is a dreamland of surrealist effects work. Disembodied hands grip candles in its hallways; reversed footage and slow motion render bodies uncanny. The decor, like its master, is achingly vulnerable. Little else in film fantasy is as seductive as Cocteau's sui generis fairy tale.” ~ Alice Stoehr
Coming tomorrow: Our final day of inductions is Horror Day! Oooooohhhhh scaaaaaary!!! We spotlight a couple of creepy classics, introduced by two of Muriel’s finest. Come back and see the late two honorees… IF YOU DARE!
(Also, there'll be a little wrap-up piece with voting results and such. Sliiiiiightly lessssssssss scaaaary!)
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa)
“Even if Ikiru is one of the most beautiful, humanist and transcendent pieces of work ever created (directed by one of cinema’s great humanists), its outlook on life isn’t necessarily as hopeful as it appears at first glance. Sure, the movie’s inedible image is the bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe (character actor Takashi Shimura making his best work here) sitting on a swing, as he knows his own demise is approaching. But one forgets that this is a film that opens with an X-ray image of a cancer-riddled stomach, the stomach of the man that we soon see working at the city hall, filing away complaints, denying funds and moving on with his life. He’s already dead.
“Of course, the film shows us the moment in Watanabe’s life when he decides to make a difference, to make amends with his past as the ‘living dead’ and, instead, to really make the effort ‘to live’ (which is the translation of the title, Ikiru). But just when we’re about to see how he’s trying to create something good for the community, the film jumps forward… to his funeral. The mourners discuss his life, completely unaware of the changes he made in the shadows of government bureaucracy. So, he’s not only dead, he’s deader than death itself, as he won’t be remembered by anyone. Another anonymous death, another body turning to dust in the ground.
“But the way Kurosawa approaches the dead man fills us with hope all the same. Maybe it’s the feeling deep inside all of us that we’ll be forgotten, or that we’re not living the lives we should. It’s nice to think that one last act might redeem us, but is that really the truth? Kurosawa has the perfect answer for that: the kids laughing and playing in the park Watanabe made possible. Their energy escaping into the air, filling the screen – it’s the breath of life itself.
“If you seek Watanabe’s monument, look around you.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
“Of course, the film shows us the moment in Watanabe’s life when he decides to make a difference, to make amends with his past as the ‘living dead’ and, instead, to really make the effort ‘to live’ (which is the translation of the title, Ikiru). But just when we’re about to see how he’s trying to create something good for the community, the film jumps forward… to his funeral. The mourners discuss his life, completely unaware of the changes he made in the shadows of government bureaucracy. So, he’s not only dead, he’s deader than death itself, as he won’t be remembered by anyone. Another anonymous death, another body turning to dust in the ground.
“But the way Kurosawa approaches the dead man fills us with hope all the same. Maybe it’s the feeling deep inside all of us that we’ll be forgotten, or that we’re not living the lives we should. It’s nice to think that one last act might redeem us, but is that really the truth? Kurosawa has the perfect answer for that: the kids laughing and playing in the park Watanabe made possible. Their energy escaping into the air, filling the screen – it’s the breath of life itself.
“If you seek Watanabe’s monument, look around you.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
Friday, August 9, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti)
“Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece The Leopard is one of the most celebrated period dramas in cinematic history, and for good reason – every set, every prop, every stitch of clothing looks and feels impeccable. What distinguishes Visconti’s film, adapted from a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, from so many other films like it is that the settings and costumes don’t seem glamourous or lush. Indeed, everything feels a little worn, as if one might pick up a random candlestick to find a discolored patch underneath, the tablecloth faded from too much sunlight and dust over the years. This is very much in keeping with the tale the film has to tell, that of an aging Prince in the autumn of his days, on the cusp of outliving the society he’s belonged to since before he was born.
“The Prince, known as Don Fabrizio, is played by Burt Lancaster, who then as now seems an unlikely choice to play an Italian aristocrat. And yet it works (despite the obvious ethnic differences), because Visconti recognized the intangible qualities that Lancaster brought to the part. Lancaster’s athletic background allowed him to inject a masculine virility into his roles, even as age took over, and this helps him cut a slightly larger-than-life figure as the renowned Don. Combining this with the touch of aloofness Lancaster conveyed lets him glide just above the proceedings, seeing the larger context of the story in a way the characters around him can’t.
“And then… he dances.
“When he accepts an offer to dance from Angelica (Claudia Cardinale!), the fiancé of his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), the Prince suddenly (if briefly) changes back into the Don Fabrizio that society once knew, and the Burt Lancaster the audience knows from his younger days – dashing and romantic, a beautiful woman in his arms, at the center of the action. But with this comes another change, this one within the Prince himself. As he gets another taste of the life he once enjoyed, it only serves to drive home emotionally what he previously was able to acknowledge intellectually – that his world, such as it is, no longer belongs to him.
“Not long ago, I caught up belatedly with Visconti’s 1954 classic Senso. Watching that film, I was struck by how similar its ending feels to The Leopard’s final scene. In both cases, we see the protagonist (Alida Valli as Countess Livia in the earlier film, Lancaster in this one) walking through the streets alone, trying to deal emotionally with the dramatic changes that have occurred in their respective lives. But unlike Livia, sobbing and wailing into the blackness of night, Don Fabrizio ponders his future silently in the early morning sun. A new day is dawning in Italy, a world for young opportunists like Tancredi, for middle class families like Angelica’s. As for the Prince, all that’s left for him to do in the story is to duck down an alleyway and disappear.” ~ Paul Clark
Click here for more information.
Coming tomorrow: No cool unifying factor between our next two inductees. I mean... they're both more than 50 years old, and... uh... they're awesome. But hey, isn't that enough?
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
“Bringing Up Baby is the slightly askew story of a boy, a girl and her leopard. The leopard’s name is in the title, but she escaped blame when Howard Hawks’ frenetically paced screwball comedy flopped back in 1938. Audiences didn’t know what to make of this aggressive comedy of aggravation, a film whose main characters were allegedly described by its director as ‘crazy.’ The inspired lunacy of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn cemented the latter’s status as box-office poison, a distinction she shook off two years later when she reteamed with Grant for The Philadelphia Story. That film had a famously drunk Jimmy Stewart; this film has Stewart’s co-star from After the Thin Man, Asta the dog.
“Asta is tasked with burying the film’s MacGuffin, the intercostal clavicle bone that will complete the dinosaur skeleton built by Dr. David Huxley (Grant). The pooch is owned by Susan Vance (Hepburn), whose constant run-ins with Huxley form the basis of every mishap he will suffer. Vance is an intense and destructive force of nature whose Meet Cute with Huxley begins with her playing his golf ball on the course and ends with her inadvertently stealing his car. Things go rapidly downhill from there. Vance keeps misreading Huxley’s antagonistic reactions to her as romantic intent, because her shrink told her that ‘the love impulse in men frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.’ Vance is further confused by Huxley’s profession—she thinks he’s a zoologist—so she introduces him to Baby, a tame leopard with a narcissistic penchant for songs that include her name. Huxley’s attempt to escape Vance’s clutches is thwarted once that dinosaur bone goes missing. Huxley has to get it back by any means necessary while also avoiding the possibility that he might be eaten by a leopard. Mucho mayhem ensues.
“The comedic impulse in Bringing Up Baby frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict, and Hepburn and Grant practically drown in conflict. Much of the humor stems from Grant’s exasperated response to whatever fresh Hell Hepburn tosses at him. Susan Vance is one of Hepburn’s most daring performances—she’s as exhausting and demanding as the slapstick in a Tex Avery cartoon. If viewers aren’t on the screwball level Hawks’ direction demands, Vance can be extremely off-putting, which might explain the original box office numbers. Yet several decades later, Bringing Up Baby has deservedly earned vindication: it appears on multiple AFI lists and has been designated a classic of its genre. In addition to ‘going gay all of a sudden’ thanks to Hepburn’s lingerie, Grant also engages his acrobatic talent for pratfalls and double-takes. Hepburn proves equally adept and limber with the verbal humor scripted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde. Both actors alternate as the straight man in their comedic duo, and their flexibility is just one of the numerous, impressive feats performed by this bonkers contraption of a movie.” ~ Odie Henderson
Thursday, August 8, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim)
"No other film in the history of cinema fills us with such a sense of both awe and loss. Loss because of what the characters go through during the film’s duration, but even more for the loss of the director’s original intention. Greed was butchered like no other film was butchered, and unlike many such films of the modern era, there is no chance of a director’s cut ever emerging. Von Stroheim’s masterpiece was edited down from well over a hundred hours of stock footage to an original length of 8½ hours, from which it was cut to exactly seven for its premiere. When Irving Thalberg insisted he cut it down to a commercial length, Von Stroheim sent it to another artist on the MGM roster, his friend Rex Ingram, whose editor Grant Whytock helped him cut it down to 3¼ hours. Refusing to cut any more, Ingram handed it back, but it was then further cut by June Mathis to 2¼, as it survives to this day. It’s amazing it still stands as a masterpiece.
“The story is made into a tragedy of human despair and greed worthy of Hugo and Zola, as we follow McTeague from his beginnings in a gold mine in 1908 to his being sent away by his mother to learn dentistry from a charlatan. Setting up in San Francisco, he comes to know Marcus, who introduces him to Trina, a delicate young girl whose teeth he fixes. Marrying her, their life is thrown into turmoil when Trina wins an illegal lottery and she hoards the money from husband and friend alike, while McTeague is slowly driven to madness and violent retribution.
“Von Stroheim always said he could never cheat the audience, and so he sent crews out to film on location in San Francisco, even shooting the interiors on location. It certainly led to a realism that was rare for this period (as in the sequence where his dentist’s office looks out over the street and we see the trolley car taking Trina away from him go past the surgery window). More impressive still is his visual command, from the contrasts of the gloomy interior of the goldmine to the green splendor of the surrounding forests and to the final immortal sequences in Death Valley. Shot on location in temperatures pushing 125 degrees, with actors and crew alike almost driven mad, Von Stroheim gave us the most savagely ironic of endings, one ingrained on the psyche of American cinema itself. Yet this is only one of many great sequences; who can forget the incredibly dark, forbidding and almost funereal wedding ceremony, or the dissolves into glorious richness as Pitts dreams of her golden gains?
“Much of the credit here must go to his crew, particularly the photography of Daniels and Reynolds, but the performances are equally grand in stature. Gibson Gowland’s Mac is one of the great silent performances, full of a repressed anger and horrific in the way he is slowly driven to domestic violence and murder, and Jean Hersholt, too, was never better than as the ultimately treacherous and doomed friend Marcus. But topping all in the memory is ZaSu Pitts’ Trina, refusing her husband sexual favours, hair rolled up like a turban, rolling her eyes and rubbing her hands with avaricious glee at her hoarded wealth, literally stripping off into bed to roll around naked, to feel the cold touch of the coins on her skin. As one caption says, ‘gold was her master’, and as long as such monetary lust exists in the world, Greed will continue to astound and amaze. A four-hour version with two hours of still footage was released in the late nineties, and it only serves to whet our appetite for the lost masterpiece, the greatest film probably ever made and lost, slithered away like gold dust through a prospector’s sieve.” ~ Sam Juliano
Coming tomorrow: One’s a zany comedy! One’s a period drama! What could they possibly have in common?
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné)
“Even if it had just been a film made by craftspeople as a standard, hourly job under traditional-if-artistic custom, Les Enfants du Paradis would be one of the most remarkable films ever produced in the first five decades of cinema as we know it. But it was never just a film as a job. And if time has elevated the circumstances under which it was made, that’s perfectly fine, because it has kept one of the most endearingly beautiful works of art about the creative impulse and the ability- no, the imperative- to create art by whatever means you can.
“But in the midst of the Nazi occupation, what Carné, and Prévert, and Arletty and Barrault and Kosima, and each of the staggering array of people involved managed to create was something transcendent- a film that existed, and exists, as a period piece, an expose, and a vision of a better future. In Theodore Roszak’s epic novel Flicker, Les Enfants du Paradis is ‘a thing of beauty that had been bravely raised up in an act of defiance by its creators against the barbarian intruder.’ And it endures as one of the preeminent works of resistance art in the twentieth century, Beset by Nazis, the anti-Jews Vichy laws, collaborators, international financing issues, and the very elements themselves, the film survived, rightfully held as a superb example of emotionally epic cinema.
“A love pentagon of both epic and tragic proportions, the array of men pining for O.G. model/actress/hooker/waitress (to quote the great philosopher Courtney Love) Garance span all social strata. Desire is one of the most enduring of common denominators, and it is in the way that Baptiste, Lacenaire, de Montray, and LeMaître are each captivated, changed, and reinvented by their time with Garance. She is a woman of beauty, yes, but also a character of will and agency who shakes the very Boulevard du Temple to its stones.
“The epics by their nature become absorbed into the subconscious. They are part of the artistic world around us for long enough that their influence becomes something elemental, and the legacy supersedes the actual work. But here, not so. To fall under its spell is a phenomenon one never becomes immune to. The DCP of this film, prepared by Gaumont during the earlier days of digital restorations, is an atrocity. Shorn of all texture and grain, the image seems waxy and artificial, which is a grotesque slight against the film, which has always brimmed with life and fire. But I watched this restoration in the old Film Forum seats, fearful of an aneurysm or blood clots or persistent numbness, knowing that what had been done to this film was not quite right.
“But still it enthralled, holding me in its tender, severe embrace. It was 2012, so it’s not like I had to fight Nazis like I would have had to do to make the film, or to enjoy it today. But I hold it in the special vault where the heart and the brain and the eyes all agree on the essential, and I recommend it to all.” ~ Jason Shawhan
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Weekend (1968, Jean-Luc Godard)
“Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 scathing black comedy, has lost none of its bite over the decades and perhaps has gained even more relevance in the current rancid political climate as 2020 draws near. It was a fin de siecle moment in Godard's career marking the end of his New Wave period, but as an avant-garde contemplation of society's descent into apocalyptic barbarism, it holds up a challenging mirror to society in any era.
“Opening with a bourgeois couple, Corrine (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne), each having an affair with someone else and each hoping and planning for the death of the other, Godard's bourgeoisie are neither discreet nor charming but rather creatures of their ids, powered by assumed privilege and lust for material wealth, an illusory soulless symbolism of success.
“Godard generates laughs at them and society through absurdist sight gags like a woman trying to fend off a man by hitting tennis balls at him or Corrine and Roland haplessly trying to steal a car. The dark comedy comes in the form of a casual mention from Corrine that she's been poisoning her father for 5 years or Roland getting out of the car to inspect a hitchhiker, staring at her legs, hiking up her skirt, before he decides to let her in. When a proletariat's words, ‘We're all brothers, as Marx said,’ bothers Corrine, Roland corrects her, ‘It wasn't Marx. Another communist said it. Jesus said it.’ Also Godard, as he is wont to do, breaks the fourth wall and has Roland claim, ‘What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people,’ after they encounter Emily Bronte.
Weekend is made up of numerous memorable set pieces, the first of which is an intimately framed conversation with Corinne, half silhouetted, as the camera pans across her body only in bra and panties in front of white drapes. Corinne tells an intense erotic story of her engaging in a kinky menage a trois, perhaps Godard's response to Ingmar Bergman's Persona released the year before. The film's most famous set piece and one of the most famous in all of cinema is the audacious tracking shot of a traffic jam. It occurs in two unbroken takes, the first 2 minutes and 40 seconds, the second 5 minutes 10 seconds. This is Godard's version of a Hieronymus Bosch triptych with all of society is on display.
"’The Extermination Angel’ segment, named after the Luis Bunuel film, is perhaps the most hilarious in Weekend. Joseph Balsamo, named after the Alexandre Dumas character Cagliostro, kidnaps Roland and Corinne after they stop to pick up his hitchhiking companion, Marie Madeleine. Balsamo explains that he is the son of Dumas and God, an old queer. He proves his divinity by having Corrine pull a hare out of the glove box and tells them he can give them anything they desire if they drive him to London. Roland asks for a ‘big Mercedes sports car’ while Corinne requests ‘an Yves St. Laurent evening dress’ or to make her a natural blond. The comedy is all in Godard's deadpan delivery.
“The ‘Musical Action’ segment is, in its own way, as equally audacious as the traffic jam. A pianist plays Mozart's final piano sonata, K. 576, while delivering a tirade against post-war classical music, which he describes as the ‘biggest disaster in the history of art.’ He cites The Beatles and Rolling Stones as the true inheritors of Mozart's melodies while Roland yawns to the music. All of this is in a single 6 1/2 minute take while the camera pans around and around in circles culminating in one of the film's most memorable lines, ‘Mozart's too easy for beginners and children, too hard to virtuosi.’ The scene could be seen as an early bit of experimental formalism that would soon be practiced with greater rigor by the likes of Michael Snow.
“The movie is essentially a road trip delving into the hearts of darkness 12 years before Apocalypse Now with Weekend's forest dwelling revolutionary cannibals and animal slaughter. The latter portions of the film will divide most viewers as Godard foregrounds political polemics while becoming ever more abstract. The New Wave Godard finally disappears and the radical, militant Godard of his next period emerges. Though Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu's underrated and far more apolitical Happy End has a few similarities, there's nothing else in cinema quite like Weekend. It's Godard's caustic outburst culminating eight of the most fruitful years by any creative force in film history. Before the film's final title card, ‘End of Cinema,’ Weekend displays a boldness rarely seen before or since.” ~ George Wu
Coming tomorrow: two of the all-time great big-screen epics.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone)
“Once upon a time, in Hollywood, about 10 years ago, I took my daughters, then aged 10 and 8, to see a screening of The Magnificent Seven (1960), and my eldest surprised me on the way out. She was moved by the death of the Charles Bronson character and the response of the two Mexican boys to it, and she said to me, ‘I didn’t know cowboy movies could be so emotional!’ I think of that moment and my daughter’s comment almost every time I see Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which might be one of the most emotional movies of any genre that I’ve ever seen. I encountered it for the first time cropped, panned-and-scanned, and stuffed to the gills with used car lot commercials on Sunday-afternoon TV when I was a kid. But I didn’t see it projected in 35mm until I was in college, and that’s where the love affair truly began. Just about every screening of this movie I’ve been privileged to see since that first one has been accompanied by a vision of its super-charged vistas and operatic visual and aural flourishes warped and blurred by inevitable tears.
“Much has been and will continue to be written about the movie’s two justifiably lauded opening set pieces—the ecstatically extended confrontation at a train station between three hired gunmen (Western icons Jack Elam and Woody Strode, alongside Canadian character actor Al Mulock) and a mysterious loner with a harmonica (Charles Bronson), and the brutal slaughter of a family of immigrants by a group of assassins in long duster coats, led by a man with an ice-cold stare and an even more dispassionate demeanor who turns out to be Henry Fonda, cast about as against type as any actor ever has been, who pulls the trigger on a young boy unfortunate enough to hear one of the killers utter his name.
“But for me the movie really becomes Sergio Leone’s vision of movie-fed memory and desire, greed, manifest destiny and revenge, in the sequence that follows. Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), the woman who belongs to that slaughtered family, an ex-prostitute who has secretly married its now-dead patriarch, arrives at the train station expecting to be greeted by her new son, daughter and husband. She glances disconcertedly at the train station clock, and then her own watch, as the first strains of Ennio Morricone’s incomparably lovely theme begins to waft onto the soundtrack like tiny fragments of shattered glass born on an ominous breeze. She makes her way across the vast, virtually empty station yard and enters the station, while the camera tracks along with her, eventually framing her in a window (one shaped in the same aspect ratio as the expansive Panavision of Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography) as she queries the stationmaster about the missing party whom she expected to greet her.
“The stationmaster points the way toward the main street where she’ll catch a coach to take her to her new home, and as she and the station workers make their way toward the front door, the camera elevates toward the roof, Morricone’s beautiful music swelling in anticipation. That swelling builds to a perfectly choreographed moment, cresting precisely as Delli Colli’s camera lofts over the station roof to a grandiose wide shot of Jill making her way through the bustling main street and into a new world that will entirely justify the vaulting melancholy of Morricone’s theme. I have not been able to watch this passage as an adult without bursting into tears. When I hear cinephiles (especially young cinephiles) proclaim this moment as one of the greatest in all cinema, I quietly roll my eyes—yes, but how much have they really seen? And then I see the sequence and the movie again and think, if they’re not right, then at least they’re damned close. From this point on the waterworks seem to come in different places, at different moments throughout, but always to the same overwhelming end, an involuntary response to the passion Leone has infused into every frame of this masterpiece.
“In the introduction to Christopher Frayling’s gorgeous new book Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, the Italian novelist and journalist Alberto Moravia is quoted on the subject of Italian westerns (and no, he doesn’t call them ‘spaghetti westerns’):
’The enterprising directors who have acclimatized the Western to Italy have found themselves facing problems of expression which are somewhat different to those of their American colleagues. There is no West in Italy; no cowboys or bandits on the frontier; no frontier; no gold mines; no Native-Americans; no pioneers. The Italian Western was born not from an ancestral memory, but rather from the middle-class Bovaryism of directors who had loved American westerns when they were children. In other words, the Hollywood Western was born of a myth; the Italian one of a myth about a myth… And so often you end up asking yourself, So many stories and then what? Just a fistful of dollars? Or is there more?’
“It seems obvious in the face of Leone’s ultimate Western and its enduring legend (it was not a hit upon its initial release, at least not in the country where its emotions are securely rooted) that there is much more. That Leone and his screenwriters, Sergio Donati, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, in indulging their deepest feelings about a world of the past which had no connection to their own youths beyond its representation as cinema, high and low and all points in-between, should emerge with one of the two or three greatest Westerns ever made as a result certainly speaks to the presence of Moravia’s ‘more.’ That it is a movie which looms so large in the imaginations and regard of so many people 50 years after it was first seen only confirms that Once Upon a Time in the West speaks most eloquently in that shimmering zone where myth and history comingle to carry on a battered storytelling form forward, a zone where it has properly mesmerized several generations of film lovers ever since.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
“Much has been and will continue to be written about the movie’s two justifiably lauded opening set pieces—the ecstatically extended confrontation at a train station between three hired gunmen (Western icons Jack Elam and Woody Strode, alongside Canadian character actor Al Mulock) and a mysterious loner with a harmonica (Charles Bronson), and the brutal slaughter of a family of immigrants by a group of assassins in long duster coats, led by a man with an ice-cold stare and an even more dispassionate demeanor who turns out to be Henry Fonda, cast about as against type as any actor ever has been, who pulls the trigger on a young boy unfortunate enough to hear one of the killers utter his name.
“But for me the movie really becomes Sergio Leone’s vision of movie-fed memory and desire, greed, manifest destiny and revenge, in the sequence that follows. Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), the woman who belongs to that slaughtered family, an ex-prostitute who has secretly married its now-dead patriarch, arrives at the train station expecting to be greeted by her new son, daughter and husband. She glances disconcertedly at the train station clock, and then her own watch, as the first strains of Ennio Morricone’s incomparably lovely theme begins to waft onto the soundtrack like tiny fragments of shattered glass born on an ominous breeze. She makes her way across the vast, virtually empty station yard and enters the station, while the camera tracks along with her, eventually framing her in a window (one shaped in the same aspect ratio as the expansive Panavision of Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography) as she queries the stationmaster about the missing party whom she expected to greet her.
“The stationmaster points the way toward the main street where she’ll catch a coach to take her to her new home, and as she and the station workers make their way toward the front door, the camera elevates toward the roof, Morricone’s beautiful music swelling in anticipation. That swelling builds to a perfectly choreographed moment, cresting precisely as Delli Colli’s camera lofts over the station roof to a grandiose wide shot of Jill making her way through the bustling main street and into a new world that will entirely justify the vaulting melancholy of Morricone’s theme. I have not been able to watch this passage as an adult without bursting into tears. When I hear cinephiles (especially young cinephiles) proclaim this moment as one of the greatest in all cinema, I quietly roll my eyes—yes, but how much have they really seen? And then I see the sequence and the movie again and think, if they’re not right, then at least they’re damned close. From this point on the waterworks seem to come in different places, at different moments throughout, but always to the same overwhelming end, an involuntary response to the passion Leone has infused into every frame of this masterpiece.
“In the introduction to Christopher Frayling’s gorgeous new book Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, the Italian novelist and journalist Alberto Moravia is quoted on the subject of Italian westerns (and no, he doesn’t call them ‘spaghetti westerns’):
’The enterprising directors who have acclimatized the Western to Italy have found themselves facing problems of expression which are somewhat different to those of their American colleagues. There is no West in Italy; no cowboys or bandits on the frontier; no frontier; no gold mines; no Native-Americans; no pioneers. The Italian Western was born not from an ancestral memory, but rather from the middle-class Bovaryism of directors who had loved American westerns when they were children. In other words, the Hollywood Western was born of a myth; the Italian one of a myth about a myth… And so often you end up asking yourself, So many stories and then what? Just a fistful of dollars? Or is there more?’
“It seems obvious in the face of Leone’s ultimate Western and its enduring legend (it was not a hit upon its initial release, at least not in the country where its emotions are securely rooted) that there is much more. That Leone and his screenwriters, Sergio Donati, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, in indulging their deepest feelings about a world of the past which had no connection to their own youths beyond its representation as cinema, high and low and all points in-between, should emerge with one of the two or three greatest Westerns ever made as a result certainly speaks to the presence of Moravia’s ‘more.’ That it is a movie which looms so large in the imaginations and regard of so many people 50 years after it was first seen only confirms that Once Upon a Time in the West speaks most eloquently in that shimmering zone where myth and history comingle to carry on a battered storytelling form forward, a zone where it has properly mesmerized several generations of film lovers ever since.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks)
“The 1953 comedy Gentleman Prefer Blondes begins with an explosion of music and Technicolor wonder as stars Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe sing ‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’ while dressed in glittering red gowns. The pre-credit sequence promises joy and sexy fun and pure giddiness, and luckily the film, a Howard Hawks helmed adaptation of a 1949 Broadway hit starring Carol Channing, delivers. The rather nonsensical plot follows these showgirls on a cruise to Paris, zeroing in on their taste in men. The cynical Dorothy (Russell) likes them to be tall, good-looking, and handsome. What's in their wallet doesn't matter. Meanwhile, the more starry-eyed Lorelei (Monroe) is quite blunt about what makes her heart tick. She loves diamonds, and plenty of them.
“Throughout the movie, potential love interests appear: Lorelei's nerdy daddy's boy rich guy fiancé Gus (Tommy Noonan), a private investigator (Elliott Reid) who develops a thing for Dorothy, a wealthy older man nicknamed ‘Piggy’ (the priceless Charles Coburn) smitten with Lorelei, and a whole bunch of athletes who make up the US Male Olympics team on board the ship. But ultimately, what matters here, and what the movie work so well, is the chemistry between Russell and Monroe. They work beautifully together, developing a bouncy comical rapport that makes the viewer grin. Even as the story takes some creaky but still entertaining turns (a missing tiara, a young boy passing himself off as a worldly gentleman), Russell and Monroe command attention throughout.
“People most remember the musical numbers from the film, and for good reason--two of them are especially unforgettable. What's interesting to note is that there are only 5 songs in the movie. And only 3 (‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock,’ ‘Bye Bye Baby,’ and ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ written by Leo Robin and Jules Styne) are from the original song-heavy Broadway musical. Two of the songs (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ and ‘When Love Goes Wrong,’ written by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson) were written for the movie. There is a long stretch between musical number #3 (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’) and #4 (‘When Love Goes Wrong’).
“In this regard, Gentleman Prefer Blondes reminds me of the 1944 classic Meet Me in St. Louis, another movie remembered for its music but not really containing many actual numbers. Thanks to Charles Lederer's witty, innuendo-heavy screenplay (up for a Writer's Guild of America award for Best Written Musical; it lost to the Leslie Caron vehicle Lili), the non-musical scenes crackle. Yet when those musical numbers happen, the movie soars to another level.
“Much has been written by ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ the transcendent Monroe number with the star in an iconic pink dress surrounded by suitors under her spell. Many stars have paid homage to this glorious sequence, with Madonna's clever ‘Material Girl’ video perhaps the most memorable. Equally fun and vibrant is Jane Russell's hilarious ‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ which has her playfully delivering sports-punny lyrics about needing some affection while the aforementioned stoic jocks, dressed in nothing but their flesh-colored briefs, perform impressive gymnastics routines around her. Oh, what naughtiness do they get away with here! Both songs capture the stars at their best, and represent their characters' POV about love. The other numbers are also quite good, and Russell's Dorothy, dressed as Monroe's Lorelei for a courtroom scene (love her Monroe impression), does a knockout ‘Diamonds’ herself in a reprise.
“Monroe and Russell are so good together, you wish that they too had a reprise. Another match-up. They make a great comic team. Alas, that never happened. A project fell through in 1954. But at least we have this sunny charmer with its subversive sexiness and lovely happy ending. The chameleon-like director Hawks (who could do comedy, gangster films, westerns), brought out the strengths of all involved, and delivered a memorable comedy with music that still stands the test of time.” ~ Brian Wilson
Coming tomorrow: two films that benefitted from the 1960s’ loosening of the restrictions of onscreen violence, and which approached their violent scenes in very different, but equally vivid, ways.
“Throughout the movie, potential love interests appear: Lorelei's nerdy daddy's boy rich guy fiancé Gus (Tommy Noonan), a private investigator (Elliott Reid) who develops a thing for Dorothy, a wealthy older man nicknamed ‘Piggy’ (the priceless Charles Coburn) smitten with Lorelei, and a whole bunch of athletes who make up the US Male Olympics team on board the ship. But ultimately, what matters here, and what the movie work so well, is the chemistry between Russell and Monroe. They work beautifully together, developing a bouncy comical rapport that makes the viewer grin. Even as the story takes some creaky but still entertaining turns (a missing tiara, a young boy passing himself off as a worldly gentleman), Russell and Monroe command attention throughout.
“People most remember the musical numbers from the film, and for good reason--two of them are especially unforgettable. What's interesting to note is that there are only 5 songs in the movie. And only 3 (‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock,’ ‘Bye Bye Baby,’ and ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ written by Leo Robin and Jules Styne) are from the original song-heavy Broadway musical. Two of the songs (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ and ‘When Love Goes Wrong,’ written by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson) were written for the movie. There is a long stretch between musical number #3 (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’) and #4 (‘When Love Goes Wrong’).
“In this regard, Gentleman Prefer Blondes reminds me of the 1944 classic Meet Me in St. Louis, another movie remembered for its music but not really containing many actual numbers. Thanks to Charles Lederer's witty, innuendo-heavy screenplay (up for a Writer's Guild of America award for Best Written Musical; it lost to the Leslie Caron vehicle Lili), the non-musical scenes crackle. Yet when those musical numbers happen, the movie soars to another level.
“Much has been written by ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ the transcendent Monroe number with the star in an iconic pink dress surrounded by suitors under her spell. Many stars have paid homage to this glorious sequence, with Madonna's clever ‘Material Girl’ video perhaps the most memorable. Equally fun and vibrant is Jane Russell's hilarious ‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ which has her playfully delivering sports-punny lyrics about needing some affection while the aforementioned stoic jocks, dressed in nothing but their flesh-colored briefs, perform impressive gymnastics routines around her. Oh, what naughtiness do they get away with here! Both songs capture the stars at their best, and represent their characters' POV about love. The other numbers are also quite good, and Russell's Dorothy, dressed as Monroe's Lorelei for a courtroom scene (love her Monroe impression), does a knockout ‘Diamonds’ herself in a reprise.
“Monroe and Russell are so good together, you wish that they too had a reprise. Another match-up. They make a great comic team. Alas, that never happened. A project fell through in 1954. But at least we have this sunny charmer with its subversive sexiness and lovely happy ending. The chameleon-like director Hawks (who could do comedy, gangster films, westerns), brought out the strengths of all involved, and delivered a memorable comedy with music that still stands the test of time.” ~ Brian Wilson
Coming tomorrow: two films that benefitted from the 1960s’ loosening of the restrictions of onscreen violence, and which approached their violent scenes in very different, but equally vivid, ways.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
“In the first two minutes of Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life the credits turn like pages of a Christmas storybook, voice over prayers seep in for the troubled protagonist George Bailey and his suicidal ideations, newly engineered fake snow envelopes a small town built entirely upon a studio lot, angels in the form of heavenly bodies discuss Bailey’s fate: the film’s setup immediately sweeps one into a fable of pure cinematic magic. An embodiment of the holiday spirit, the movie hurtles forward full of miracles and joy but, naturally, with the bubbling conflicts of any great story. It’s A Wonderful Life takes on the prototypical battle of good versus evil but it is how these two concepts are defined that make it the quintessential American classic it has become.
“Evil is portrayed by Potter, the greedy banker out to destroy the lives of everyday folks just trying to survive. Good takes on the form of love and opportunity, a fight for the American dream embodied by Bailey and his community of Bedford Falls. In the face of a lost bank deposit and the possibility of financial ruin, it is spiritual forces and what-ifs that reset Bailey to recall a truth he used to hold sacred: it is through human kindness that life is made worth living, not money. Yet, one cannot ignore that ultimately money does play an integral role in reviving Bailey into seeing his future: individuals touched by Bailey’s caring hand raise high their hard-earned dollars to save the fate of his loan office. Constant selfless acts add to Bailey’s list of reasons to live but, in a scene of original crowd funding, he is upheld through the kindness of others waving the power of the almighty dollar.
“Fittingly, what saved It’s a Wonderful Life from near obscurity was also the driving force of capitalism. After the film fell out of copyright in 1974, forgotten due to its financial failure and a clerical error, PBS began airing the aging masterpiece during the (commercially produced) holiday season. Like the town of Bedford Falls, people united to celebrate this lost gem of humanity and filmic wonder but, like the menacing rich man threatening their peace, other broadcasters and distributors followed suit in the name of profits, producing everything from multiple chintzy colorized versions of the luscious black & white film to one of the first ever CD-ROM home releases. The on and off-screen conflicts of It’s A Wonderful Life feel just as-- if not more-- relevant today. Anyone can end up grappling their fate like George Bailey but it is the tiny town of Bedford Falls collectively striving for a future that can give everyone the life they deserve to live.” ~ Donna Kozloskie
“Evil is portrayed by Potter, the greedy banker out to destroy the lives of everyday folks just trying to survive. Good takes on the form of love and opportunity, a fight for the American dream embodied by Bailey and his community of Bedford Falls. In the face of a lost bank deposit and the possibility of financial ruin, it is spiritual forces and what-ifs that reset Bailey to recall a truth he used to hold sacred: it is through human kindness that life is made worth living, not money. Yet, one cannot ignore that ultimately money does play an integral role in reviving Bailey into seeing his future: individuals touched by Bailey’s caring hand raise high their hard-earned dollars to save the fate of his loan office. Constant selfless acts add to Bailey’s list of reasons to live but, in a scene of original crowd funding, he is upheld through the kindness of others waving the power of the almighty dollar.
“Fittingly, what saved It’s a Wonderful Life from near obscurity was also the driving force of capitalism. After the film fell out of copyright in 1974, forgotten due to its financial failure and a clerical error, PBS began airing the aging masterpiece during the (commercially produced) holiday season. Like the town of Bedford Falls, people united to celebrate this lost gem of humanity and filmic wonder but, like the menacing rich man threatening their peace, other broadcasters and distributors followed suit in the name of profits, producing everything from multiple chintzy colorized versions of the luscious black & white film to one of the first ever CD-ROM home releases. The on and off-screen conflicts of It’s A Wonderful Life feel just as-- if not more-- relevant today. Anyone can end up grappling their fate like George Bailey but it is the tiny town of Bedford Falls collectively striving for a future that can give everyone the life they deserve to live.” ~ Donna Kozloskie
Monday, August 5, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
“Half a century later, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn't lost its power to inspire awe. It's still a divisive movie, but it can't reasonably be dismissed. Special effects have evolved - particularly in the depiction of space vehicles - without making 2001's look silly. The pacing of entertainment has sped up, only making its long, meditative scenes feel even more hypnotic.
“It has a reputation as a cold and distanced movie. Its human characters aren't much more emotive than its A.I. antagonist, and Kubrick seems to put us in a God's-eye perspective, stepping far back enough to see a continuum from primitive apes to mankind's discovery of a space vortex. Yet it's joyful in its use of image and sound, turning a space walk or the movements of celestial bodies into ballet.
“Everything about it feels enormous, demanding the biggest screen available. A single edit spans millions of years, suggesting a story about the entire history of the human race, or at least a topic as broad as ‘man's use of tools.’ Yet it ends intimately, with one man alone inside the vastness of space, of time, of his mind. Maybe. I'm not sure. Luckily you don't have to be able to follow 2001 to feel it deeply. There doesn't seem to be a shelf date on the potency of pure cinema.” ~ Vern
Coming tomorrow: we induct two Hollywood crowd-pleasers, including the only film that has appeared on the final ballot every year since the Muriels Hall of Fame began.
“It has a reputation as a cold and distanced movie. Its human characters aren't much more emotive than its A.I. antagonist, and Kubrick seems to put us in a God's-eye perspective, stepping far back enough to see a continuum from primitive apes to mankind's discovery of a space vortex. Yet it's joyful in its use of image and sound, turning a space walk or the movements of celestial bodies into ballet.
“Everything about it feels enormous, demanding the biggest screen available. A single edit spans millions of years, suggesting a story about the entire history of the human race, or at least a topic as broad as ‘man's use of tools.’ Yet it ends intimately, with one man alone inside the vastness of space, of time, of his mind. Maybe. I'm not sure. Luckily you don't have to be able to follow 2001 to feel it deeply. There doesn't seem to be a shelf date on the potency of pure cinema.” ~ Vern
Coming tomorrow: we induct two Hollywood crowd-pleasers, including the only film that has appeared on the final ballot every year since the Muriels Hall of Fame began.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: An Introduction
Okay, everybody! It’s time for the unveiling of this year’s Muriels Hall of Fame inductees!
We’re going to kick off this year’s announcements in earnest tonight at 9 PM with our 50th Anniversary Award winner from 1968, previously announced in February of this year. From there, we’ll be announcing two inductees every day, at 7 PM and 9 PM, until we’re finished. We’ve got some great films on the way, and a few surprises.
But before we begin, I’d like to offer my gratitude to everyone who was able to contribute to the Muriels Hall of Fame voting this year:
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Steven Carlson
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Molly Faust
James Frazier
Caden Mark Gardner
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Eric Henderson
Odie Henderson
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Craig D. Lindsey
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Bridgett Taylor
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
George Wu
Enjoy!
We’re going to kick off this year’s announcements in earnest tonight at 9 PM with our 50th Anniversary Award winner from 1968, previously announced in February of this year. From there, we’ll be announcing two inductees every day, at 7 PM and 9 PM, until we’re finished. We’ve got some great films on the way, and a few surprises.
But before we begin, I’d like to offer my gratitude to everyone who was able to contribute to the Muriels Hall of Fame voting this year:
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Steven Carlson
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Molly Faust
James Frazier
Caden Mark Gardner
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Eric Henderson
Odie Henderson
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Craig D. Lindsey
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Bridgett Taylor
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
George Wu
Enjoy!
Sunday, March 10, 2019
Mur13l Awards 2018: A belated thanks!
Sorry it's taken me so long to put the finishing touches on this year's Muriels. It's hard to find time to post when you're working full-time and you have tech week for a show. But as of tonight, the site has been updated with all of this year’s categories. And of course, I would like to send out special thanks to all of this year’s voters!
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Steven Carlson
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Andrew Dignan
Kevin Dufresne
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Steven Erickson
Molly Faust
Shayana Filmore
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Caden Mark Gardner
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Russell Hainline
Glenn Heath Jr.
Eric Henderson
Odie Henderson
Daniel Cook Johnson
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Peter Labuza
Adam Lemke
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick Miller
Matt Noller
Rob Patrick
Mark Pfeiffer
Marcus Pinn
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Bridgett Taylor
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Vern
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
Bryce Wilson
George Wu
Thanks to everybody! See you this summer for Muriels Hall of Fame voting!
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Steven Carlson
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Andrew Dignan
Kevin Dufresne
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Steven Erickson
Molly Faust
Shayana Filmore
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Caden Mark Gardner
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Russell Hainline
Glenn Heath Jr.
Eric Henderson
Odie Henderson
Daniel Cook Johnson
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Peter Labuza
Adam Lemke
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick Miller
Matt Noller
Rob Patrick
Mark Pfeiffer
Marcus Pinn
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Bridgett Taylor
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Vern
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
Bryce Wilson
George Wu
Thanks to everybody! See you this summer for Muriels Hall of Fame voting!
Mur13l Awards 2018 Addendum: Best Films of the 1980s poll
In conjunction with this year’s intensely serious Muriel Awards voting, we had a purely unofficial and fun-ish poll of our favorite films of the 1980s. We used to do stuff like this in the past, so I decided to bring it back this year. Next year – our best films (and performances) of the 2010s!
Here’s the full list. By now, the winner should surprise no one. I was, however, surprised by the high placement of the film at #15.
1. Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch, USA) [228 points/20 votes]
2. Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee, USA) [202/18]
3. Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese, USA) [110/9]
4. The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick, UK) [109/11]
5. Videodrome (1983, David Cronenberg, Canada) [93/9]
6. Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker, France) [91/8]
7. The King of Comedy (1982, Martin Scorsese, USA) [77/8]
8. Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott, USA) [77/7]
9. Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam, UK) [73/7]
10. The Thing (1982, John Carpenter, USA) [72/8]
11. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Spielberg) [70/6]
12. Fanny and Alexander (1982, Bergman) [65/5]
13. Stop Making Sense (1984, Demme) [61/6]
14. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Spielberg) [60/6]
15. Possession (1981, Zulawski) [52/6]
16. Blow Out (1981, De Palma) [49/6]
17 (tie). L’Argent (1983, Bresson) [47/5]
17 (tie). The Fly (1986, Cronenberg) [47/5]
19. My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Miyazaki) [43/5]
20. Ran (1985, Kurosawa) [43/4]
21. The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Kershner) [42/4]
22. Broadcast News (1987, J.L. Brooks) [40/5]
23. The Princess Bride (1987, R. Reiner) [36/4]
24. Paris, Texas (1984, Wenders) [36/3]
25. Raising Arizona (1987, Coen) [33/4]
26 (tie). Come and See (1985, Klimov) [32/4]
26 (tie). The Killer (1989, Woo) [32/4]
28 (tie). The Green Ray (1986, Rohmer) [31/3]
28 (tie). A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985, Hou) [31/3]
30 (tie). Blood Simple (1984, Coen) [29/4]
30 (tie). Back to the Future (1985, Zemeckis) [29/4]
32 (tie). Tootsie (1982, Pollack) [27/3]
32 (tie). Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, Allen) [27/3]
34. Love Streams (1984, Cassavetes) [26/3]
35 (tie). Stranger Than Paradise (1984, Jarmusch) [26/2]
35 (tie). City of Sadness (1989, Hou) [26/2]
37. This Is Spinal Tap (1984, R. Reiner) [25/3]
38 (tie). Full Metal Jacket (1987, Kubrick) [24/3]
38 (tie). Dekalog (1989, Kieslowski) [24/3]
40. The Evil Dead (1981, Raimi) [24/2]
41 (tie). Taipei Story (1985, Yang) [23/2]
41 (tie). Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987, Iran) [23/2]
43 (tie). The Road Warrior (1981, Miller) [22/3]
43 (tie). À Nos Amours (1983, Pialat) [22/3]
45 (tie). Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Reggio) [22/2]
45 (tie). Evil Dead II (1987, Raimi) [22/2]
45 (tie). Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Davies) [22/2]
48 (tie). Amadeus (1984, Forman) [21/2]
48 (tie). Hope and Glory (1987, Boorman) [21/2]
48 (tie). Withnail & I (1987, B. Robinson) [21/2]
51. The Terminator (1984, Cameron) [20/3]
52 (tie). El Sur (1983, Erice) [20/2]
52 (tie). A Nightmare on Elm St. (1984, Craven) [20/2]
52 (tie). The Terrorizers (1986, Yang) [20/2]
52 (tie). Die Hard (1988, McTiernan) [20/2]
52 (tie). Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989, Allen) [20/2]
57. sex, lies and videotape (1989, Soderbergh) [19/3]
58 (tie). Tenebrae (1982, Argento) [19/2]
58 (tie). White Dog (1982, Fuller) [19/2]
58 (tie). Aliens (1986, Cameron) [19/2]
58 (tie). Empire of the Sun (1987, Spielberg) [19/2]
58 (tie). Wings of Desire (1987, Wenders [19/2]
63 (tie). The Elephant Man (1980, Lynch) [17/2]
63 (tie). Heaven’s Gate (1980, Cimino) [17/2]
63 (tie). That Day, on the Beach (1983, Hou) [17/2]
63 (tie). Once Upon a Time in America (1984, Leone) [17/2]
67 (tie). Day of the Dead (1985, Romero) [16/2]
67 (tie). Re-Animator (1985, Gordon) [16/2]
67 (tie). Akira (1988, Otomo) [16/2]
67 (tie). Hairspray (1988, Waters) [16/2]
67 (tie). Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988, Almodovar) [16/2]
67 (tie). The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989, Greenaway) [16/2]
73 (tie). Airplane! (1980, Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker) [15/2]
73 (tie). Drugstore Cowboy (1989, van Sant) [15/2]
75 (tie). Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984, Miyazaki) [14/2]
75 (tie). Manhunter (1986, Mann) [14/2]
75 (tie). RoboCop (1987, Verhoeven) [14/2]
78 (tie). Toute Une Nuit (1982, Akerman) [14/1]
78 (tie). The Right Stuff (1983, Kaufman) [14/1]
78 (tie). Heathers (1988, Lehmann) [14/1]
78 (tie). The Little Mermaid (1989, Clements/Musker) [14/1]
78 (tie). The Seventh Continent (1989, Haneke) [14/1]
83 (tie). Ms.45 (1981, Ferrara) [13/2]
83 (tie). Mystery Train (1989, Jarmusch) [13/2]
The following films received one vote apiece:
84 Charlie MoPic
Batman
Beetlejuice
Berlin Alexanderplatz
The Big Red One
Big Trouble in Little China
Body Double
Boris Godunov
Born in Flames
Christine (Carpenter)
A Christmas Story
Cinema Paradiso
The Color Purple
The Company of Wolves
Crime Wave
Daniel
Dead Ringers
Diner
Diva
Down by Law
Dressed to Kill
Eating Raoul
Excalibur
Explorers
The Falls
A Fish Called Wanda
Fitzcarraldo
Flash Gordon
Full Moon in Paris
Gloria
Grave of the Fireflies
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Inferno
Jean de Florette
Kiki’s Delivery Service
The Last Temptation of Christ
Law of Desire
Local Hero
The Long Riders
Loulou
Made in Britain
The Makioka Sisters
Meantime
Midnight Run
Modern Romance
Mommie Dearest
Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
Near Dark
Night of the Comet
The Night of the Shooting Stars
On the Silver Globe
One From the Heart
Passion
Pauline at the Beach
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
Peking Opera Blues
Personal Problems
Platoon
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Repo Man
Return of the Jedi
The Road (Clarke)
S.O.B.
The Sacrifice
Shoah
Shoot the Moon
Sid and Nancy
Smithereens
So Is This
Something Wild
Stand By Me
Starman
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
Tampopo
Terms of Endearment
Three Crowns of the Sailor
To Live and Die in L.A.
Trading Places
La Traviata (Zeffirelli)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbelievable Truth
The Untouchables
Victor/Victoria
When Harry Met Sally
Yeelen
Here’s the full list. By now, the winner should surprise no one. I was, however, surprised by the high placement of the film at #15.
1. Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch, USA) [228 points/20 votes]
2. Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee, USA) [202/18]
3. Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese, USA) [110/9]
4. The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick, UK) [109/11]
5. Videodrome (1983, David Cronenberg, Canada) [93/9]
6. Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker, France) [91/8]
7. The King of Comedy (1982, Martin Scorsese, USA) [77/8]
8. Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott, USA) [77/7]
9. Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam, UK) [73/7]
10. The Thing (1982, John Carpenter, USA) [72/8]
11. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Spielberg) [70/6]
12. Fanny and Alexander (1982, Bergman) [65/5]
13. Stop Making Sense (1984, Demme) [61/6]
14. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Spielberg) [60/6]
15. Possession (1981, Zulawski) [52/6]
16. Blow Out (1981, De Palma) [49/6]
17 (tie). L’Argent (1983, Bresson) [47/5]
17 (tie). The Fly (1986, Cronenberg) [47/5]
19. My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Miyazaki) [43/5]
20. Ran (1985, Kurosawa) [43/4]
21. The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Kershner) [42/4]
22. Broadcast News (1987, J.L. Brooks) [40/5]
23. The Princess Bride (1987, R. Reiner) [36/4]
24. Paris, Texas (1984, Wenders) [36/3]
25. Raising Arizona (1987, Coen) [33/4]
26 (tie). Come and See (1985, Klimov) [32/4]
26 (tie). The Killer (1989, Woo) [32/4]
28 (tie). The Green Ray (1986, Rohmer) [31/3]
28 (tie). A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985, Hou) [31/3]
30 (tie). Blood Simple (1984, Coen) [29/4]
30 (tie). Back to the Future (1985, Zemeckis) [29/4]
32 (tie). Tootsie (1982, Pollack) [27/3]
32 (tie). Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, Allen) [27/3]
34. Love Streams (1984, Cassavetes) [26/3]
35 (tie). Stranger Than Paradise (1984, Jarmusch) [26/2]
35 (tie). City of Sadness (1989, Hou) [26/2]
37. This Is Spinal Tap (1984, R. Reiner) [25/3]
38 (tie). Full Metal Jacket (1987, Kubrick) [24/3]
38 (tie). Dekalog (1989, Kieslowski) [24/3]
40. The Evil Dead (1981, Raimi) [24/2]
41 (tie). Taipei Story (1985, Yang) [23/2]
41 (tie). Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987, Iran) [23/2]
43 (tie). The Road Warrior (1981, Miller) [22/3]
43 (tie). À Nos Amours (1983, Pialat) [22/3]
45 (tie). Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Reggio) [22/2]
45 (tie). Evil Dead II (1987, Raimi) [22/2]
45 (tie). Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Davies) [22/2]
48 (tie). Amadeus (1984, Forman) [21/2]
48 (tie). Hope and Glory (1987, Boorman) [21/2]
48 (tie). Withnail & I (1987, B. Robinson) [21/2]
51. The Terminator (1984, Cameron) [20/3]
52 (tie). El Sur (1983, Erice) [20/2]
52 (tie). A Nightmare on Elm St. (1984, Craven) [20/2]
52 (tie). The Terrorizers (1986, Yang) [20/2]
52 (tie). Die Hard (1988, McTiernan) [20/2]
52 (tie). Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989, Allen) [20/2]
57. sex, lies and videotape (1989, Soderbergh) [19/3]
58 (tie). Tenebrae (1982, Argento) [19/2]
58 (tie). White Dog (1982, Fuller) [19/2]
58 (tie). Aliens (1986, Cameron) [19/2]
58 (tie). Empire of the Sun (1987, Spielberg) [19/2]
58 (tie). Wings of Desire (1987, Wenders [19/2]
63 (tie). The Elephant Man (1980, Lynch) [17/2]
63 (tie). Heaven’s Gate (1980, Cimino) [17/2]
63 (tie). That Day, on the Beach (1983, Hou) [17/2]
63 (tie). Once Upon a Time in America (1984, Leone) [17/2]
67 (tie). Day of the Dead (1985, Romero) [16/2]
67 (tie). Re-Animator (1985, Gordon) [16/2]
67 (tie). Akira (1988, Otomo) [16/2]
67 (tie). Hairspray (1988, Waters) [16/2]
67 (tie). Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988, Almodovar) [16/2]
67 (tie). The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989, Greenaway) [16/2]
73 (tie). Airplane! (1980, Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker) [15/2]
73 (tie). Drugstore Cowboy (1989, van Sant) [15/2]
75 (tie). Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984, Miyazaki) [14/2]
75 (tie). Manhunter (1986, Mann) [14/2]
75 (tie). RoboCop (1987, Verhoeven) [14/2]
78 (tie). Toute Une Nuit (1982, Akerman) [14/1]
78 (tie). The Right Stuff (1983, Kaufman) [14/1]
78 (tie). Heathers (1988, Lehmann) [14/1]
78 (tie). The Little Mermaid (1989, Clements/Musker) [14/1]
78 (tie). The Seventh Continent (1989, Haneke) [14/1]
83 (tie). Ms.45 (1981, Ferrara) [13/2]
83 (tie). Mystery Train (1989, Jarmusch) [13/2]
The following films received one vote apiece:
84 Charlie MoPic
Batman
Beetlejuice
Berlin Alexanderplatz
The Big Red One
Big Trouble in Little China
Body Double
Boris Godunov
Born in Flames
Christine (Carpenter)
A Christmas Story
Cinema Paradiso
The Color Purple
The Company of Wolves
Crime Wave
Daniel
Dead Ringers
Diner
Diva
Down by Law
Dressed to Kill
Eating Raoul
Excalibur
Explorers
The Falls
A Fish Called Wanda
Fitzcarraldo
Flash Gordon
Full Moon in Paris
Gloria
Grave of the Fireflies
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Inferno
Jean de Florette
Kiki’s Delivery Service
The Last Temptation of Christ
Law of Desire
Local Hero
The Long Riders
Loulou
Made in Britain
The Makioka Sisters
Meantime
Midnight Run
Modern Romance
Mommie Dearest
Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
Near Dark
Night of the Comet
The Night of the Shooting Stars
On the Silver Globe
One From the Heart
Passion
Pauline at the Beach
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
Peking Opera Blues
Personal Problems
Platoon
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Repo Man
Return of the Jedi
The Road (Clarke)
S.O.B.
The Sacrifice
Shoah
Shoot the Moon
Sid and Nancy
Smithereens
So Is This
Something Wild
Stand By Me
Starman
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
Tampopo
Terms of Endearment
Three Crowns of the Sailor
To Live and Die in L.A.
Trading Places
La Traviata (Zeffirelli)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbelievable Truth
The Untouchables
Victor/Victoria
When Harry Met Sally
Yeelen
Sunday, March 3, 2019
And the 2018 Golden Muriel for Best Picture goes to...
“Writer-director Paul Schrader has made a career out of writing (Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ) and directing (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Patty Hearst, Cat People) challenging, unforgiving movies about desperate souls on the outside, looking in at a world of fulfillment, of connection, of purpose, the attainment of which they always seem to fall short. With First Reformed, he breathes life into what amounts to a career summation, a crystallization of obsessions and themes of redemption and the shortcomings of belief, and among an often brutal oeuvre I think he’s finally made a film which could be accurately described as exquisite, without betraying any of the rage and paranoia and unsettled psychological terrain that has earmarked both his finest and even his most flawed work. That word “exquisite” should in no way imply preciousness, as if anyone describing Schrader’s work could ever make room for that adjective. First Reformed is a tormented consideration of faith (and the lack thereof), the difficult possibility of transcendence, and the seemingly even more difficult act of holding ostensibly opposed impulses of hope and despair in balance without completely losing one's shit.
“Which, of course, makes it a perfect piece with Schrader’s long-expressed vision and a perfect movie for our particular moment. First Reformed speaks to the faithful in terms of what even the faithless see directly in front of them. Ethan Hawke’s tortured pastor counsels the husband of a parishioner who is despondent over the dire implications of climate change, and the transference of that burden of responsibility from counseled to counsellor addresses one of the pastor’s central spiritual crises, a profound insecurity over whether God can ever forgive us for what we’ve done, on both global and intimately personal levels. Schrader has crafted a brilliantly sustained act of tension between the spiritual and the corporeal (and the influence of each on the other), which inexorably builds toward an act of desperate release, of a man trying to make a mark on the world, on his own soul.
“The movie moves toward what seems like the emotional fulfillment of a career’s-worth of concerns given flesh which, in movies like American Gigolo and Hardcore, have often felt chilly and academic rather than truly embodied. Hawke’s pastor, exiled within his own doubt and overseeing a historically significant house of worship made into a sparsely attended tourist trap under the stewardship of a corporate-style megachurch, truly is God's lonely man.
“There have been complaints that Schrader borrows too heavily from Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, another examination of an existential crisis of faith and the hollow church where God seems to no longer dwell, in working his way through First Reformed’s winter-scarred psychological landscape, and to these ears those grumblings sound a lot like the accusations often raised against Brian De Palma as being a facile Hitchcock copycat. Like De Palma, Schrader visits the perspectives of another visionary, but he’s hardly a shallow mimic picking over the corpses of Bergman’s greatest hits. In First Reformed he’s synthesized his own obsessions into a style that seems graced by Bergman, but in the shattering end something uniquely his own emerges, slouching toward upstate New York to be born.
“Of all of Schrader's most personal work, including Taxi Driver (with which it also shares stylistic devices and a suffocating sense of isolation derived from transcendental filmmakers like Robert Bresson) this film seems Schrader’s most piercing, the one that hurts the most, the one that offers the possibility of mortification and the bearable weight of an earthly yoke in equal measure as penance for divine deliverance.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #2
“I consider myself a lucky person, as I managed to see my favorite film of 2018 not only once, but twice, and both times it was in a theater setting, which is surprising considering the Netflix logo that opens the film. I’m not here to bludgeon you with the same points made over and over again for the past months by Alfonso Cuarón and the critics that loved Roma, but I believe there’s no turning it around; it’s a film with the big screen in mind, made for that canvas and that overwhelming capability that usually films shot in 70mm hold onto the viewer’s mind and eyes. Cuarón managed to made a film about the routine of a Mexican maid in the early 1970s that’s as visually imposing and emotionally involving as 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Master, just to name just two classics shot in 70mm.
“There’s a clear intention behind the use of the space inside the frame in Roma. Most of the time the characters are relegated to the background, so we get the time to fully explore the surroundings, trying to capture any period detail (or fault in it), expanding upon the ambience, helped through the impeccable sound design (which puts the camera as a physical entity where the ears capture sound as much as a person in that position is able to). This isn’t because the period detail or the sets are more important than what’s happening to the characters that inhabit them, but because those objects and sounds inform of the choices they end up making. It speaks of their social, racial and gender positions inside society. But it’s not an explicit dig by Cuarón to make these apparent or obvious, as he just decides to make a portrait of the normalcy of that moment.
“Of course, the camera doesn’t always shy away from doing close-ups, or shots where the characters are near the lens. It doesn’t happen often, which is essentially strange for a film that bases most of its raw force in the emotions it can produce in the viewer, but it happens enough times for it to matter and make an impact. We see Cleo (the maid) and her face, her dark eyes, looking at us or at someone or something that’s right behind the camera in essential plot moments, the times where we most need to know what’s inside of her: her smiles, her eyes brightening, the way she looks down when she can’t say something she wants. All of it speaks volumes of both her position and draws us closer to her life.
“Most of the criticism aimed at Roma is related to its supposed lack of class awareness. If anything, Roma is exactly a film about class privilege and how that is stagnated in a lifestyle that is never willing to change, not even in the face of tragedy. There are many tragedies represented in Cleo’s body, face and movements. She will be the servant: no matter what happens, no matter how many times the kids she takes care of says that they love her, no matter how many times the mother says that things will change around the house. No matter what happens, there’s a chasm between them that can never be salvaged, not even by Cuarón homself. Some people read the ending as wiping the board and showing how Cleo is now part of the family. But if you look closer you’ll see that it’s entirely sad, an admission of guilt on Cuarón’s part.
“To act like a movie where a rich man admits that he’s a piece of shit isn’t the best movie of the year is bewildering to me.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #3
“Perhaps the biggest injustice of last week’s Oscar telecast wasn’t that Green Book, a movie where a walking Italian stereotype teaches an African-American gent how to eat fried chicken, won Best Picture over BlacKkKlansman and Black Panther, movies directed by African-American filmmakers that handled race and racism in a far more insightful, challenging, entertaining manner. (Don’t get me wrong — seeing Driving Miss Daisy 2.0 win was still fucked up.) It was that If Beale Street Could Talk, the latest from writer/director Barry Jenkins, wasn’t even in the running. (At least the movie received several honors at the Film Independent Spirit Awards the day before, including Best Director and Best Feature.)
“The movie was nominated for three well-deserved awards — Best Adapted Screenplay (the movie is based on James Baldwin’s 1974 novel), Best Original Score and Best Supporting Actress, which Regina King thankfully snagged. I guess Academy voters are still twitchy and shellshocked from the last time a Barry Jenkins movie won Best Picture. It’s a shame; I found Beale to be Jenkins’s finest work so far.
“Apart from being an immaculate portrait of an African-American couple in love (Stephan James and Kiki Layne killed it as the young lovers), it was a multi-layered view of how African-Americans survive in America. Like nearly every movie that was made by a person of color last year (and that includes Sorry to Bother You, Widows and the vastly underrated comedy Blindspotting), Beale astutely addressed how Black men are still seen as unfortunate targets in this systemically oppressive society. Even though James and Layne’s characters are beautifully in love — they got a baby on the way and everything — can it still survive once he gets wrongly charged for rape?
“The movie is a wonder. Everything — the cast, the script, the cinematography, the score — is marvelously done. Now that all this Oscars bullshit is done, hopefully people will watch this film and start asking why the hell this didn’t get all the gotdamn Oscars!” ~ Craig D. Lindsey
Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #4
“In her 2015 Dissolve interview with film critic Tasha Robinson, Debra Granik, commenting on her documentary Stray Dog (2014) about a Vietnam veteran, notes the richness of the things she wished her documentary had time to cover: ‘There could have have been a whole film that could have gone much more in-depth on therapeutic discussion, on what it takes to manage PTSD, or to face ghosts, and figure out how to live the next chapter of your life.’ Leave No Trace, Granik’s third feature-length narrative film, is, perhaps, a beautiful expression of that other film that Stray Dog did not have the space to be. At its heart, Leave No Trace is about a father and a daughter, the father, Will (Ben Foster), a military vet suffering from PTSD, who has fled with his daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), into the vibrantly green, forested public land near Portland, Oregon, where, when the story begins, they’ve been living for years, off the grid, in quiet, companionable existence. Granik, with deft efficiency and a gentle rhythm, sets up their way of life--the ways they gather or grow food, collect rainwater, build fires for cooking and warmth, practice hiding from intruders who might happen upon their camp, and trek periodically into Portland for supplies.
“Peaceful though this father-daughter existence is, the film establishes the conflict at the heart of the narrative with a couple of key moments early on. The most overt threat is the threat of discovery from the outside world, but the sustained emotional center of the film is in the father and daughter's relationship, and it is there that the main conflict resides. In one early scene, Will awakens in a suppressed panic one night, as a helicopter flies overhead; we realize he is experiencing a flashback, the distress of a war time experience we cannot see. We understand, in this small moment, the immense depth of Will’s trauma: Will cannot easily go back to living among other people. But Tom is not her father. At 13, on the cusp of womanhood, we see hints of her desire for the outside world, for new connections. In another moment early in the film, Tom discovers a necklace alongside the forest trail and delightedly, eagerly, wears it. In their frugal, survivalist existence, it is a luxury, a pretty thing that has no practical value. But she wants it for herself in a way that Will cannot really understand. Even before the inevitable discovery comes and the outside world steps in to tell them their way of life is not allowed, we see the hairline fracture between father and daughter. Tom quietly longs for something outside the isolated forest. Will cannot bear to live elsewhere. But the father and daughter’s lives are inextricably linked, so much so that that they often communicate as sparsely as they live, a click of the tongue to say ‘I love you,’ a look or a gesture to express humor or tenderness. We cannot imagine how these two can live without each other, but we cannot see how they can continue either, each person getting, fully, what he or she needs.
“In the same gentle way that Tom and Will live, Granik develops her story and the conflict gradually, matching their rhythms with her filmmaking. When the rupture in their way of life comes, we watch as Tom and Will react subtly but dissimilarly to what they experience. The pain they feel when they are separated and the closeness they feel is never undermined, but slowly the fracture between them, the things they need and feel as separate human beings, widens. Tom wants to learn new things, form new connections, find a community; Will, try though he might, working at a job, living in a traditional home, cannot bear the constant reminders of a trauma that sometimes forces him down to the ground, where he cradles his head in his hands, in a pain he quietly hides from others. The entire film is a quiet one; Granik gives her actors very little dialogue, but frames them, with beautiful work from DP Michael McDonough, in such a way that their faces and bodies communicate the emotion, the things that cannot be said but only deeply felt. Granik trusts the images to do the talking and allows room for the eloquence of silence. An unassuming but assured answer to the frantic editing and frenetic images that so often fill our cinema screens, Granik offers us space to breathe and feel, to learn to love our characters and feel with them their complicated emotions.
“In the same 2015 interview Granik noted, ‘I am always interested in anybody’s roadmap of how they’re making their life work. For many people, there’s no easy path. . . . When people share insights, or reveal whatever they’re doing to be able to live their life and not be weary of it . . . I’m there. You can sign me up for any of those projects.’ That the Academy has not signed up to recognize the brilliance of her project this year is, perhaps, a sad testament to the way un-showy a film like Granik’s about society’s outliers, might be often overlooked. But I trust that, in posterity, Granik will be recognized for the humanity and the brilliance in filmmaking her work demonstrates. And many in the critical community, not least myself, eagerly await whatever project Granik decides to take on next. We’re there; please sign us up.” ~ Melissa Tamminga
Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #5
“There’s nothing like waiting on a film for years that actually delivers (in the case of Zama we’ve waited almost a decade for Lucrecia Martel to put out a new feature). This movie delivered tenfold in fact. This isn’t exactly something I’d blindly recommend to anyone (although I wouldn’t be mad at this being someone’s introduction to Lucrecia Martel’s work) but at the same time you don’t have to necessarily belong to the (“arthouse”) audience that this movie is primarily geared towards in order to enjoy it. If you’re a history buff or watch those expedition shows on A&E or the history channel then there’s no reason a Lucrecia Martel novice couldn’t enjoy Zama.
“This is new territory for Martel given that this is a period piece. The basic plot centers around the existential plight & loneliness of our main character Diego De Zama - a court councilor stationed on a remote colonial outpost waiting to be transferred back home. At the start of the film he’s already somewhat miserable & alone and things only go downhill from there (he agrees to take on a vague mission that truly tests his will).
“Race is also a secondary plot. It should be noted that the Black characters in the film (who are all slaves of course) say either nothing or very little but their presence is still profound. The way the camera focuses (and lingers) on the Black characters is very intentional.
“But while this is Lucrecia Martel's first movie set outside of modern times, it still fits with the rest of her filmography. La Cienaga may not to be a traditional “history lesson” but it is a peak in to Latin-American culture much like Zama. Diego De Zama is also going through the same kind of existential crisis as Veronica in The Headless Woman.
“The biggest strand of connective DNA is the element of loneliness & isolation. Diego De Zama is very detached. This is also a common theme in the work of fellow Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso who, like Lucrecia Martel, recently delved in to the acid historical genre with Jauja (2015). From La Libertad to Jauja (which is a first cousin of Zama) the characters in Lisandro Alonso’s universe are often alone and/or isolated just like Diego De Zama.
“Zama is the personification of complex as it is both dreary & beautiful. I’m not usually one for hyperbolic statements, but this is one of the best films I've seen in years.” ~ Marcus Pinn
Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #6
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad...
During the opening sequence in Hirokazu Kore-eda's extraordinary Shoplifters, young Shibata Shota is about to drop a package of food into his backpack in full view of a clerk when dissolute patriarch Osamu quickly appears from offscreen, successfully blocking the clerk's view of the child's actions. This brief moment of petty-crime synergy feels representative of the film's project, in which that which we should be seeing is hidden from our view. It's fascinating how much happens yet how little of it we see - through the first half of the film, we're coming into things as they've just happened offscreen (e.g. the workplace injury that sidelines Osamu) or as they've happened long before this. The beats that, in another film, could provide tumultuous and full-throated melodrama - kidnapping, abuse, theft, sex work - are instead given the same weight as the mundane, equalized with the day-to-day existence of this family just scraping by.
“The concentration, then, is on how they (Shota, Osamu, mother figure Nobuyo, grandmother Hatsue and teenager Aki) function as a group, as a family, and how they eventually coalesce and absorb a new member - quiet and morose six-year-old Yuri, first found exiled, cold and hungry on a porch while her real parents shriek at each other inside - into their dynamic through patience, generosity and an impressive unflappability. At one point, feeling spurned and at unease with the new living arrangement, Shota runs away, and another film could use that as a fulcrum to spin an entire narrative out of; Osamu, however, affects a knowing attitude of, ‘Well, he'll come back,’ and indeed the thread is resolved not two scenes later. It's astonishingly placid, given the circumstances and social pressures, and Kore-eda wrings maximum charm and emotion from this gentle approach. Yuri responds to this environment positively - the moment around the forty-minute mark where she first smiles is akin to a sunbeam bursting through a blanket of cumulus and shining directly on you - and who wouldn't? If this is indeed his rumination on what makes a family, you couldn't make a much stronger argument for the Shibata family being a loving aspirational goal - a bulwark of security and support guarding against the shit and horror of the real world.
“But everyone has something to hide, and one aspect that ultimately makes Shoplifters feel so emotionally draining is the way Kore-eda, under the surface, was weaponizing that warmth. In retrospect, the avoidance of drama is pointed, less a healthy fallback against a cold world and more a shutting-out, a deliberate ignoring of reality in service to a way of life that was always bound to collapse under lies and economic pressure and loss of employment and the insistent, encroaching summer heat, covering everyone as it does in sweat that stains clothes and hangs like a sin unacknowleged. (Using the lovely scene of the Shibatas at the beach, joyfully splashing in the surf, as the crux of the marketing feels a bit cruel.) As circumstances shift, truths start to spill out and dissolve the bonds we've seen forged, and Shota finds himself questioning whether these people actually have the best in mind for him and Yuri.
“Shoplifters is an ensemble piece, grating equal narrative time to all its family members, and the actors do wonders with Kore-eda's desire to play this as grounded as possible (Sakura Ando gets a beautiful moment where she manages to mine sorrow, grief, apology, self-abasement, relief and release out of a beatific smile, a slight eyebrow twitch and a brightly-delivered ‘Bye’), but the center of the film is where we began, with Shota and Osamu, and it's fitting that the revelation of things deliberately elided about their relationship should lead to other, less savory revelations, combined with Shota's brotherly desire to protect Yuri (‘Don't make your sister do it’), that detonate the placidity. It then follows that we should end there too, and if Kore-eda cut to black on Shota's last line, the idea of ‘family is what you make it’ would be cemented. But the film ends instead one shot later, on a crestfallen Yuri once again exiled outside, playing with aquamarine marbles and staring over the ledge of a balcony into an uncertain, painful future. And suddenly, things aren't so cut and dried. And suddenly, I'm crying.” ~ Steven Carlson
Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #7
Note: In addition to placing in the top 10 in the Best Picture category, the Muriel Awards have also chosen to give The Other Side of the Wind and its producers, Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall, an honorary Muriel Award for their work in bringing Orson Welles' legendary project to completion.
"Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind has been seen by cinephiles as a lost or unfinished masterpiece that it has achieved urban legend status. Every so often there would be an abortive effort to bring the project to fruition, only for the effort to fizzle out just as quickly. I remember attending a talk by Welles' cinematography Gary Graver back in 2006 - before I was married, before I was a dad, and when the Muriels were in their infancy. Graver mentioned his recent meetings with Showtime to finish the film, and showed us a few scenes of edited footage from the project. We all sat, transfixed, simultaneously excited for the prospect of the movie finally seeing the light of day, and also resigned to the idea that, if these plans were anything like the others, this might be all of The Other Side of the Wind we'd ever end up seeing.
"As it turns out, we were right to skeptical - Showtime dropped the deal, and Graver died a few years later. But thanks to the deep pockets of Netflix and the tireless efforts of producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall (the latter of whom had assisted on the film's original shoot), The Other Side of the Wind was finally, astonishingly, completed for cinephiles all over the world to see this past year. And, quite frankly, it's awesome. One can argue until they're blue in the mouth as to whether the film could have possibly lived up to the mystique it accrued over the past half-century. But the fact that it's really, truly out there in the world now, in spite of everything that's happened, is something of a miracle.
"I could talk all day about what makes The Other Side of the Wind such a major and vital piece of work, and one that proves that, even thirty-plus years after his death, Orson Welles still has plenty to teach all filmmakers who care to pay attention. But there's nothing I could say that the film itself couldn't say twice as well as I ever could. I'll just say that, with all the garbage that the world had to offer in the year 2018, it also gave us a brand-spanking-new Orson Welles movie. And that, like the fella said, ain't nothin'." ~ Paul Clark
Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #8
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs compels viewers to examine the oeuvre of Joel and Ethan Coen from a new angle. Cinema’s pair of existentialist tricksters have always brought a certain sadness to their work: the bittersweet melancholy of The Big Lebowski’s final moments; Marge Gunderson’s bafflement at Fargo’s bloodshed; the injured existentialism of Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. But through these six stories set in the American West, their filmography gets its saddest, most tragic entry yet, an elegiac contemplation of death in a world that may or may not be indifferent to our suffering.
“Consisting of six short stories set in the American West, each with a beautifully distinct aesthetic and tone, the anthology format allows the Coens to thread together a dazzling range of their stylistic and thematic elements; profound ironies, absurdist wit, unanswered philosophical inquiries, sudden and catastrophic violence, a sense of humor and style that blurs the line between earnest and cynical.
“In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, death doesn’t just hang in the air, it’s something so close it takes on a tactile quality. It’s so inevitable that even the one victory the film allows isn’t so much because the character won his prize, but because he skirted death (for now). We’re all sharing a stagecoach ride to the end, and we all have a story about how we got there. Exploring this truth through the eyes of Buster Scruggs’ eclectic characters, the Coen Brothers present something that’s as thrilling, resonant, and meaningful as anything they’ve ever done.” ~ James Frazier
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)