2020 Muriels Hall of Fame: Full Results

This year’s inducted films:

Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin) [10 votes]
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray) [10 votes]
Frankenstein (1931, James Whale) [9 votes]
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz) [9 votes]
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman) [9 votes]
It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) [8 votes]
Stagecoach (1939, John Ford) [8 votes]
Late Spring (1949, Yasujiro Ozu) [8 votes]
A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan) [8 votes]
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni) [8 votes]
Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara) [8 votes]
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965, Russ Meyer) [8 votes]
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn) [8 votes]
The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols) [8 votes]
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski) [8 votes]
The House Is Black (1963, Forough Farrokhzad) [7 votes] {inducted as outstanding short film}

7 votes:
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli)
Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)

6 votes:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene)
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst)
The Thin Man (1934, W.S. van Dyke)
Pinocchio (1940, Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Nicholas Ray)
West Side Story (1961, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
Dragon Inn (1967, King Hu)

5 votes:
Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein)
Hellzapoppin’ (1941, H.C. Potter)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock)
The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)
Nights of Cabiria (1957, Federico Fellini)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles)
Faces (1968, John Cassavetes)

4 votes:
Les Vampires (1918, Louis Feuillade)
Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz)
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)
Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964, Richard Lester)
Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer)

3 votes:
Napoleon (1927, Abel Gance)
Rebecca (1940, Alfred Hitchcock)
Spring in a Small Town (1948, Fei Mu)
Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges)
Senso (1954, Luchino Visconti)
One Froggy Evening (1955, Charles M. Jones)
Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage)
Jules et Jim (1962, François Truffaut)
Gertrud (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel)
Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville)

2 votes or fewer:
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith)
The Phantom Carriage (1921, Victor Sjöström)
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, Lotte Reiniger)
Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939, Kenji Mizoguchi)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov)
Fires on the Plain (1959, Kon Ichikawa)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)
The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey)
Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Mike Nichols)
Kes (1969, Ken Loach)
Midnight Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger)
Z (1969, Costa-Gavras)

See everyone next spring for the 2020 Muriel Awards!

2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan)

“It’s no surprise that Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd has earned a Hall of Fame spot in the era of Donald Trump, American President. More than one writer has called out the similarities between the 1957 film’s influential man of the people, Lonesome Rhoades, and the man now occupying the Oval Office. Each has a persona crafted by and for television and uses it, with the help of enablers, to sell products and amass power. That the film’s story continues to resonate after 60-plus years is a clear sign of its enduring cinematic value. Nonetheless, A Face in the Crowd is a reflection of its time.

“Both director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg had been caught up in the Hollywood Red scare of the early 1950s. Bullied by the outsized influence of populist demagogue Joseph McCarthy, they went on to name names (Kazan more famously than Schulberg). But they came out the other side with the all-around success of 1954’s On the Waterfront.

“For A Face in the Crowd, their second collaboration, Kazan and Schulberg fixed on an actual enemy of the people. They traveled to locations in Arkansas, the ad agencies of Madison Avenue, and the nation’s capital, where they met with politicians including Lyndon Johnson. The research was knit together to craft this prescient view of how circumstance, media, marketing and politics can turn a fast talker in a drunk tank into a megalomaniacal king of all media.

“It’s Patricia Neal’s Marcia Jeffries, the daughter of an Arkansas radio station owner, who finds Larry Rhoades in that drunk tank and gives him the name ‘Lonesome.’ Andy Griffith, in one of the best-ever film debuts, brays at the nickname before you can see him trying it on in his mind and deciding he likes the fit. Marcia is looking for real-life stories for a new series, and in Lonesome, she finds a born charmer who dishes out common man parables between raw blues strummed out on an old guitar.

“Lonesome’s natural talent leads to his own show and it’s so popular, he’s able to successfully wrangle the locals into trolling the local sheriff who’d arrested him. The incident is Lonesome’s introduction to his new power over everyday people, and he likes the fit of that even better than the name. He dubs Marcia his Gal Friday through Thursday, leaning on her as he gets his own TV show in Memphis, then a network deal in New York, then a lucrative sponsorship deal for a worthless supplement and a consulting gig with a politician unschooled in populist spin.

“Marcia falls for the man and his manipulations, too, until she comes to realize their relationship is less romantic and more like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster (she gets a push from Walter Matthau’s sardonic TV writer and Lonesome’s decision to take up with Lee Remick’s teenage baton twirler). As she raised him up, Marcia ultimately takes Lonesome down in the rightfully famous scene of Lonesome spewing his contempt for his show’s audience into a mic she switches from cold to hot.

“For all the ways in which Lonesome’s story might bring to mind the former star of The Apprentice, there are a couple of essential differences. Lonesome is an American Dream of a corrupted soul, a man able to rise from literally rock bottom to a Manhattan penthouse in no small part through raw intelligence and instinct, which he deploys from the moment he pulls himself off the jailhouse floor and asks Marcia what he gets out of being on her show. The current reality showman followed a more classically aristocratic track, needing only wealth, privilege and the chutzpah that comes with them. And the character of Lonesome existed in a time before the melding of news, entertainment, and media splintered and warped what’s accepted as true, in which saying something heinous into a mic would virtually guarantee a backlash. Our nation has never been perfect, but back then, in this way at least, it was closer to great.” ~ Melissa Starker

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965, Russ Meyer)

“’Russ Meyer’s ode to the violence in women.’ ’Filmed in Glorious Black and Blue.’ How daunting the task of summing up something so suffused with epic and earthshaking energy that its very taglines are historic? The only film that ever came close to having two different taglines as immediate and immortal as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is Tom DeSimone’s Reform School Girls (‘So young- so bad- so what!’ and ‘Some fought to keep from being degraded- for about ten seconds,’ but even so, it’s not the same). Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is one of those films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Sorrow and The Pity or The Human Centipede where even if someone has never seen it, they have a stronger than vague idea of what it is.

“This is a film whose idea is so strong that it permeates the culture to an extent that is difficult to define but easy to experience. Wherever a burlesque troupe rules the night, or a group of friends find themselves led into intrigue by the baser instincts, or macho foolishness is hoist on its own petard, there the legacy of this 1965 film is secure.

“Russ Meyer was a kinetic editor, an incisive filmmaker, and a physician for the id prescribing archetypes at war and more sensation than the audience’s reptilian brain could process. But with Faster, Pussycat! he had collaborators who sank their manicures into the very chemicals of the emulsion, and from there into our hearts and minds. Tura Satana, Barbarella ‘Haji’ Catton, and Lori Williams are an iconic trio, and their volatile chemistry gives the tale of three go-go dancers out for kicks who find themselves in the middle of a mystery an impact that delivers gutbucket fun while also adding a touch of the mythic, empowering struggles and defining fetishes with elegant cruelty and boisterous energy. There’s as much Ovid and O. Henry woven into Jack Moran and Meyer’s script as there is jiggle and judo, and our central triad are where audience loyalty and focus remain. Many have tried (Meyer included) to recreate the earthy magic at the center of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but five and a half decades on, no film has. No film could.” ~ Jason Shawhan

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Frankenstein (1931, James Whale)

“It sometimes gets overshadowed by its pop culture footprint, but James Whale’s Frankenstein is a great movie. That pop culture footprint is so vast and so all pervasive that I think the movie is taken for granted most of the time. Certainly, film people take it for granted, often preferring its sequel to the original item (this is a preference I do not share). But behind all the Aurora models and colorful cereals and novelty songs and what have you, there is the film. And that film is great. It’s a film that is a confluence of cultural streams that combine into a mighty river, into a veritable cataract, a Niagara, a Mississippi. The great flowering of horror movies in the 1930s is unimaginable without it. So is the explosion of science fiction films in the 1950s and onward. It is ancestor to much of what makes cinema cinema.

“At the source is Mary Shelly’s novel, which continues to haunt the popular imagination as one of the very first transhumanist narratives in the Western canon. The question of what comes after human beings--of The Singularity--is one of the central concerns of science fiction. It’s a story that finds its way into apocalypses of varying degrees, from 2001 to The Terminator to Ex Machina to Her to Robocop to The Matrix. Prior to James Whale’s film, though, Frankenstein existed in the hinterlands of the pop culture meme pool. There had been a couple of attempts to film the story in the silent era and there was a dreadful stage play, but those productions have left barely a trace on the cultural imagination and those films have mostly vanished. Whale’s film, though…Whale adopts the central idea of Shelly’s novel and discards almost all the rest, welding it to an image born of German Expressionism and the electrical wonders of Metropolis and Karl Freund’s image of The Golem and the lingering trauma of the great World War to create an embodiment of The Creature that has all but eclipsed other interpretations, including Shelly’s. Whale caught lightning in a bottle, if you’ll pardon the image. All those other manifestations of the Frankenstein story flow through Whale’s film to one degree or another. It’s the perfect mating of image and archetype.

“Central to the film and its enduring influence is Boris Karloff, who made the film when he was 44 years old. He had been struggling as a film actor throughout the silent era. He isn’t billed in the film’s opening credits. A question mark has been left in place of his name. Karloff wasn’t even invited to the film’s premier. The film made him a star anyway, because his performance is one of the greatest in film. When you first see him, with his sunken cheeks and dead eyes, he’s an object of horror, a shocking sight even today. When the sun shines down on him, and he grasps at the light, that horror changes to pity. Neither Bela Lugosi, who turned down the role, or Lon Chaney, who would have played it had he lived, could have done any better. It is significant that when the cereal people gave Frankenberry a voice, it was a parody of Karloff’s voice despite the fact that he speaks nary a word in this film (and his voice sounds nothing like its usual sinister half-lisp in Bride). Karloff is inseparable from the monster.

“As a visual object, Frankenstein is unusually sophisticated. The places where Dr. Frankenstein haunts are places of madness. The gravestones in the cemetery at the start of the film are all akimbo, as if their inhabitants are particularly restless. Few horizons in the film are horizontal. None of the walls in Frankenstein’s laboratory rise at right angles. None of the bricks run in straight courses. The film is populated by memento mori even in places where reason holds sway. It’s a ghoulish and oppressive film, an effect amplified by the lack of a score. It has almost none of the humor that Whale imparted on his subsequent horror movies. It means business.

“There’s a sense of transgression in this film that’s absent in the subsequent Frankenstein films too. This was the only Frankenstein film Universal made during the pre-code era and it likely could not have been made after the production code was enforced. The code sent many films into vaults for generations, but Frankenstein was too big for that. They left in the drowning of the little girl because the film makes no sense without it, but cut lines of dialog like ‘Now I know what it means to be a god!’ Its commercial life was by no means finished by 1934, and when it was subsequently released as a double feature with Browning’s Dracula, it was a blockbuster all over again, with lines around the block to see it.

“Some of the ripples sent out by Frankenstein are in the real world. The success of the film rescued the teetering Universal Pictures, which remains in business today. It’s also partly responsible for the unionization of Hollywood. Karloff was one of the founders of the Screen Actor’s Guild. He was motivated by his experiences making Frankenstein, which exacted a physical toll that followed the actor for the rest of his life. Karloff recruited actors on the sets of his subsequent movies and offered his garage to the rest of the organizers as a meeting place.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Frankenstein. I don’t remember when I first saw it, though I’m sure I saw it on a Saturday afternoon before I was seven, back when the Shock Theater package was still offered to television stations around the country. It’s been a constant companion to me through a life with movies, and whenever I see versions of Karloff’s creature show up in The Munsters or in The Far Side or in The Spirit of the Beehive, I smile because I know that I am not alone in my affections for him.” ~ Christianne Benedict

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

“When it comes to legendary cinematic partnerships, the triple threat of director Hiroshi Teshigahara, screenwriter Kobo Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu deserve to be considered alongside, say, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, or even, more recently, the Coen Brothers. Throughout the 1960s, Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu collaborated on four feature films that remain fascinating in their consistent thematic, visual, and aural interests. Chief among them is a tilt toward moody existentialism that, in the cases of Pitfall (1962) and The Man Without a Map (1968), liven up what might have been mere genre exercises in lesser hands. That moodiness took a turn toward full-blown science fiction in The Face of Another (1966), which chronicled the psychological and philosophical implications of a disfigured man's desire to put on another face, and thus try on another identity.

“Of all their collaborations, though, their 1964 film Woman in the Dunes remains their peak: the most focused, mysterious, and disturbing of their cinematic explorations of the slippery nature of human identity. The plot, such as it is, is pure allegory: An amateur entomologist and schoolteacher (Eiji Okada, whose most famous previous role had been as Emmanuelle Riva's love interest in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour) vacationing and collecting bugs in a remote village is tricked by locals into becoming the captive of a woman (Kyoko Kishida) living in a sand dune whose existence is defined solely by the sand she shovels and raises up to the surface for the villagers to sell for money.

“But the allegorical implications of this premise and the ensuing relationship between these two characters are startlingly multifaceted. The existential import of a woman who has no conception of an existence beyond ‘shoveling sand to live’ will surely be obvious to those in ostensibly ‘civilized’ society who have little to sustain them spiritually beyond their 9-to-5 jobs. But then, despite the entomologist's evocations to the woman of the potentially enriching joys of living in Tokyo, is his own existence that much better: one in which his only goal in life is to get mentioned in a famous magazine for discovering a new kind of insect? Even the broader village community of which the entomologist, and by extension us in the audience, get only the barest glimpse suggests something real: a patriarchal society in which the literal higher-ups carelessly exploit those down below for the sake of monetary profit (and, in one particular instance, the possibility of some unsavory sexual titillation).

“Teshigahara brings a wealth of visual and aural detail in bringing Abe's richly imagined allegorical universe to the screen. Totesu Hirakawa and Masao Yamazaki's design of the woman's dwelling in the dunes is appropriately earthy, while Hiroshi Segawa's camera doesn't shy away from emphasizing the sweat, dirt, and grit on these characters. But even more so than the occasional insect sounds that punctuate the film's soundtrack, it's Toru Takemitsu's score—with its Penderecki-like dissonances at times evoking the screeching of insects—that helps infuse Woman in the Dunes with the visionary fervor that makes it viscerally unsettling rather than just intellectually stimulating. Rarely has the revelation of a person's name and fate felt so much like a punch to the gut as it does at the very end of Teshigahara's masterpiece.” ~ Kenji Fujishima

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: The House Is Black (1963, Forough Farrokhzad)

“I am depressed, O so depressed.

I go to the porch and extend my fingers

Over the taut skin of night.

The lamps that link are dark, O so dark.

No one will introduce me to the sunlight

Or escort me

To the sparrows' gathering.

Commit flight to memory,

For the bird is mortal.”

- ‘I’m Depressed’ by Forough Farrokhzad

“There’s a certain aura of sadness that surrounds The House Is Black, Farrokhzad’s only film as a director, starting with that particular fact. This strong directorial debut is also the farewell for this Iranian poet, who passed away in a car accident four years after the premiere of this short. There’s also the subject matter: the daily life of a leper colony in Iran isn’t exactly a cheerful prospect, but the film surpasses that gloom and manages to find the beauty of the unexpected through the use of clever editing and framing.”

“Dear stars,

dear paper stars,

how can one take refuge in the verses of defeated prophets

when lies blow through the air like wind?

We will meet like those dead for a thousand and thousand years,

and then the sun shall judge the state of our bodies’ decay.”

“One of the first elements that jump to attention is how the film opens with narration regarding the subject of ugliness in the world (done by collaborator Ebrahim Golestan), which clearly contrasts with the beautiful language used in the rest of the voice over of the film, done by Forough herself. Her work as a poet, considered among the most talented female poets of the 20th century and one of the strongest voices that have come from Iran, is always mentioned when trying to come to terms with the film, but it’s unavoidable. Her images depict the ravaged bodies of those affected by leprosy, but the words speak of thankfulness, flying, the sky, the moon and ravens, a common motif in her own poetry. But the images themselves are at odds with what they’re depicting, starting from the opening shot, a beautiful frame within a frame using a zoom that shows a woman looking at a small mirror in the wall, her eyes almost looking back at us, her face devastated by the sickness… but all of it rendered so beautifully.

“But that contrast in itself couldn’t possibly sustain an entire short film, as that premise becomes obvious as time goes on. There’s also a place for irony, a way in which Forough slides criticism towards the society in which she lived, through the scenes in which men appear praying and singing in the streets, praising God and giving thanks for the life they have, all of this while we see some of them lacking body parts or being blinded by the burden they carry. While this might seem cruel, the overall tone of the film isn’t entirely elegiac when depicting the sick, they have value, their lives have worth, but they don’t have it right now, but it’s not their fault.

“The film quickly establishes at the start that leprosy can be cured, that they can be treated, that there’s no need for them to live a life of endless repetition, where their children and their grand-children also get the sickness (after all, as the film says, it’s not hereditary). The problem is somewhere else, but it’s not taken care of. The fault lies beyond the frame, beyond the narration, beyond the deep eyes of the sick women that look towards the camera, asking not for compassion or understanding, but for something to live for.”

“And here I am

a woman alone

at the threshold of a cold season

at the the dawn of realizing earth’s sullied existence

and the sky’s blue despair

and the impotence of these hands made of cement.”

“Forough’s style absolutely comes from her own poetry, as each shot perfectly represents an idea or concept, to then weave itself to the next shot, as if they were verses that create a portrait of a reality that seems stagnated by the lack of attention it receives. The narration also helps to bring together the poetic tone of the work, but the strength of it all lies in the editing. If anything, if she didn’t completely pursue a career as a director, she could’ve been one of the most talented editors, as seen in a work by Ebrahim Golestan, A Fire (1961).”

“I am cold.

I am cold and I think I will never feel warm again.”

“While the film mixes the poetic style, with the factual elements and the critique of the system, one has to understand this particular work of Forough as complete in its own. As important as the context (historical and geographical), her work as a poet, or even her own demise, are important to understand and see new layers into The House is Black, it could also be only seen as a deeply beautiful, haunting work that shakes anyone to their core. The images and their timing are just that powerful.” ~ Jaime Grijalba

Note: *verses in the body of this article are from the posthumous poem ‘Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season’.

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra)

“It Happened One Night is, perhaps, a bit the victim of its own success. Watching it now, it may seem too familiar. The down-to-earth (and down-on-his-luck) male lead, the spunky-but-spoiled young woman on the run from her privilege. The lies and deceit and misunderstandings. The gradual bonding between the leads, discovering they can learn from each other. There's even a last-minute change of mind on a wedding day!

“There's a reason, of course, why the basic template of It Happened One Night was repeated so often, more so than that of many other romantic comedies of the 1930s: it works. Clark Gable is irresistible, Claudette Colbert is adorable, and so many of the scenes stay with you. There's the hitch-hiking scene, of course, in which Gable's thumbs turn out to be no match for Colbert's leg; but also the dunking lesson, the bus passengers singing The Dancing Trapeze, and, of course, The Walls of Jericho. My own favorite scene is the one wherein Ellie - Colbert's character - turns out to have unexpected acting skills, versions of which you can find in dozens (if not hundreds) of later movies and television shows. I'm not sure I believe that the sight of Gable's naked chest was really enough to crater sales of undershirts, but there's no denying the film's influence.

“Romantic comedies are a popular genre to mock or denigrate. Fluff for girls; not serious cinema. The fact that It Happened One Night is one of the few movies to have won all "big four" Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director for Frank Capra, and both best Actor awards) shows that the genre was not always so disrespected - and that it does, in fact, include masterpieces.” ~ Hedwig van Driel

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray)

“In Roy Chanslor’s novel Johnny Guitar, the character Vienna, is introduced as a ‘fine bold woman in black pants and a red silk shirt who...rode like a man with the Longergan bunch.’ Chanslor dedicated the novel to Joan Crawford, which may have helped lead her to shepherd the film adaptation into existence. The result is not only a bonkers revisionist Western, but one of our most enthralling films. The tumultuous production is delicious gossip; the rich thematic content lends itself to a variety of cultural lenses; and director Nicolas Ray’s bold colors, center framing, and stylistic idiosyncrasies are curious amenities for even a casual auteurist. But what truly holds the film together is Joan Crawford’s fierce yet vulnerable performance as Vienna.

“Crawford had been sleeping with Ray, and helped get him hired to direct Johnny Guitar with Republic Pictures, a studio known for producing low budget, but quality westerns. As detailed in the You Must Remember This podcast episode, the production was a miserable one for all involved. Crawford and Ray split up as shooting began and made life such hell for each other that Ray would often pull over on his way home to puke. Crawford was especially cruel to Mercedes McCambridge - who plays Vienna’s rival, Emma Small - reportedly throwing her costumes into the street in a drunken rage. After the film was finished Sterling Hayden, the titular Johnny Guitar, said ‘There is not enough money in Hollywood to lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford. And I like money.’ Crawford, in turn, described Hayden as ‘the biggest pill in Hollywood.’ The film was a modest financial success, still everyone involved viewed it as a professional and artistic disaster.

“American critics mostly agreed with that assessment. But the young critics of the French New Wave were entranced. Truffaut recognized it as ‘a Western dream’ where ‘cowboys vanish and die with the grace of ballerinas.’ Johnny Guitar also lends itself easily to feminist and queer readings, with its passionate and powerful women reflecting under-represented desires and ambitions. Another layer is its function as a parable of the HUAC witch hunt. In the novel the Longergan bunch is guilty of a hold up that leads to murder. In the film (ghost written by the blacklisted Ben Maddow) they are innocent of the crime, and only hunted down because of the cowardice of townspeople too easily swayed by McCambridge’s Emma, a McCarthyesque demagogue.

“As with everything about Johnny Guitar, the characters are mythic. Johnny is a mysterious loner who comes into a new town where he falls for Vienna, the headstrong girl romantically entwined with the popular leader of a gang. A young innocent boy, Turkey, is needlessly killed. Replace Johnny with Jim, Vienna for Judy, and Turkey for Plato and you have the basic outline for Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, released the following year. Only rather than Plato wearing Jim’s red jacket, Vienna wears Turkey’s yellow shirt.

“The story of the film unfolds like a mystery. Character details, backgrounds and actions are parceled out and often only revealed after the results of the unknown motivations have influenced the plot. That Johnny and Vienna had a past relationship is only revealed after the film’s first act. The dialog is incendiary. At times with a screwball comedy rat-a-tat: ’You’re a strange woman.’ ’Only to a stranger’; at times with poetic melodrama: ’When a fire burns itself out, all you have left is ashes’; and often with socio-political charge: ’A man can lie, steal... and even kill. But as long as he hangs on to his pride, he's still a man. All a woman has to do is slip - once. And she's a tramp!’

“In Chanslor’s book Vienna is a virgin who only meets Johnny during the course of the story. In the film she’s slept with many men, including Johnny, who is a past lover she hired for protection. The original screenplay ended with a gun fight between the men, but Crawford insisted the climax be rewritten to end with her facing off against Emma. Crawford, like Vienna, knows what she wants, and wields her power to get it.

“The film cues us into Vienna’s power from the start. She is introduced within her saloon which bears her name. In a low angle shot we see her walk onto her balcony. Her face stern but warm, she’s cognizant of every detail - down to what newspaper they are reading. She directs her roulette dealer, who we see from her God’s-eye POV, to keep the wheel spinning. ‘What for,’ he asks, gesturing at the empty saloon, ‘there are no customers.’ Her character defining response demonstrates her control over her business as well as her desires. Why should he keep the roulette wheel going with no customers? Because, she replies: ‘I like to hear it spin’.” ~ Kevin Cecil

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn)

"What’s there to say about Bonnie & Clyde that hasn’t already been said? A landmark film that took influence from the French New Wave, but added an American twist, it ushered in a type of film in Hollywood. Its iconic ending shocked and awed audiences with its violence. It’s a classic for a reason.

“As a viewer, though, with a somewhat terrible memory, the violence is all I remember. Recently, I did a rewatch of the film and was struck by something else. The frankness of Bonnie and Clyde’s sexuality, and the frustration of being a woman - especially a sexual woman.

“Setting the couple up to be a sort of ‘modern-day’ Robin Hood, the film plays around with ideas of poverty & depression. The main theme for me, however, became the struggle of women wanting to ‘have it all’. Even if your version of ‘having it all’ is having a happy life with a bad boy." ~ Wendy Mays

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols)

“Benjamin Braddock is a real motherfucker — in more ways than one.

“In the first half of Mike Nichols’s 1967 generation-gap classic The Graduate, Braddock (played to awkward, nebbishy perfection by Dustin Hoffman) returns home after finishing college and stumbles around in a nagging, ennui-fueled daze, ducking from responsibilities and trying to keep impending adulthood at bay. (Since this is the ‘60s, the music of Simon and Garfunkel follows him wherever he goes.) So, it’s no wonder he accepts the seductive advances of older family friend Mrs. Robinson (damn — Anne Bancroft had it going on back in the day!), as they both slink away to a hotel and have an ongoing dalliance.

“That immediately gets shaken up when Mrs. Robinson’s lovely daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) returns home from college and Benjamin, at his parents’ behest, reluctantly goes on a date with her. Of course, the forever-confused Braddock takes a shine to Miss Robinson, which Mrs. Robinson obviously disapproves.

“He eventually breaks the news to Elaine that he and her mom had a fling, which of course, like, destroys the family. But instead of realizing it would be best if Braddock severed all ties with the Robinson clan, he spends the second half of the movie stalking Elaine, even following her back to school, getting a room at a nearby boarding house (run by a pre-Three’s Company Norman Fell!) and pressuring her into dumping her current boyfriend and marrying him.

“For a movie whose iconic poster made audiences think they were getting some hot younger guy-on-older girl action, The Graduate is deceptively more conservative than counterculture. With Calder Willingham and Buck Henry drolly adapting Charles Webb’s 1963 novel, Nichols basically takes a time-honored male fantasy — getting both the girl and her hot mom — and shows how horrible an idea that is when it plays out in the real world. Also, it makes the argument that if you’re into that shit, you’re kind of a sociopath.

“Although The Graduate is a movie where the two main characters are morally bankrupt, your age bracket will ultimately determine where your sympathy lies. When I first saw this in my horny, impressionable youth, I thought Mrs. Robinson was a grade-A beeyotch for keeping young lovers Benjamin and Elaine apart. Now that I’m middle-aged and bitter as hell, I find myself sympathizing more with Mrs. Robinson. (Even the late Roger Ebert felt the same way.) She’s no saint, but she was a lonely, alcoholic gal in a loveless marriage looking for a tryst. Unfortunately, she chose the wrong paramour in Braddock, who — as the movie progresses — becomes less of a hero and more of an agent of chaos. Instead of learning from his mistakes, he creates more when he pursues Elaine, ultimately (SPOILERS) ‘rescuing’ her from her wedding day by whisking her away and hopping on a bus to, um, somewhere. But, as the final, lingering images of those two kids reveal, even they are wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into. (Am I the only one who thinks Braddock might’ve evolved into the marriage-destroying protagonist Charles Grodin plays in The Heartbreak Kid — directed by Nichols’s former comedy partner Elaine May?)

“By satirically killing two birds with one stone — slyly taking jabs at both bored, middle-class suburbanites and their children, aka the spoiled, then-aimless baby boomers — The Graduate became an influential, box-office smash that launched the careers of both its stars and its director (who eventually won a Best Director Oscar). It also made a lot of young idiots fresh outta college think they could land older chicks in their neighborhood. ~ Craig D. Lindsey

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)

“It's hard to know what to say about a film foundational to an entire genre, one that so crystallizes the genre's conventions that everything that came before seems to be a leadup, everything after an imitation or a revision. So maybe it's a better idea to look at 1939's Stagecoach through the career of its director, John Ford.

“Prior to 1939, Ford had become an established Hollywood hitmaker and won an Academy Award for directing 1935's The Informer. But for all that, his career seemed to lack consistency, ranging from prestige dramas to screwball comedies to big-budget spectacles and miscellaneous studio assignments. In 1937 he bought the rights to the short story ‘The Stage to Lordsburg’ and spent the next two years convincing producers to make it despite the general belief that the Western was a third-rate genre and skepticism of Ford's insistence on casting the little-known b-movie star John Wayne. But Ford stubbornly got the picture made, and it was the first of his films that truly could have been made by no other director, marking his ascent into the pantheon of American filmmaking.

“What Ford brought to the slim story was, to use an overused term, visionary. ‘The Stage to Lordsburg’ provided him with a bare narrative framework into which he could develop his own personal themes and obsessions, which here included broad comedy, left-leaning social critique, carefully modulated cinematography, kick-ass action sequences, and the notion of the Western as the definitive distillation of America, all assembled in a sleek, non-stop 96-minute package. Earlier Westerns of the '10s and '20s were made in the shadow of Buffalo Bill shows and events that were still on the fringes of living memory; by 1939 it was possibly to reconfigure the genre via Ford's use of archetypal characters and Monument Valley landscapes to take the genre out of the realm of the stale ‘oater’ and into something fresh and vital, bordering on fanstasical and mythic.

“This might make the film seem grander and more daunting than it is, but it's Ford's genius to keep his pretensions on a short leash and make a movie that also moves, that hardly has an ounce of fat on it. In today's world, every studio comedy and action movie is an undisciplined 130+-minute bloatfest. It's a pleasure to see a film of thought, feeling, and grace that is also a piece of entertainment of the highest craft.” ~ Jeff McMahon

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Rosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)

“’To 1966—the Year One!’ Unbeknownst to young Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), this New Year’s Eve toast spells doom for her and her unborn child. When the same words are repeated six months later at a black nativity celebration (it cannot properly be called a ‘christening’) held in the infant’s honor, they assume a horrifying new meaning. Rosemary’s elderly neighbors have since been revealed as a pack of Satanists for whom the year 1966 signifies the coming of the antichrist. And, as a result of their collusion with her aspiring-actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) to impregnate her with demon seed, the antichrist has turned out to be none other than Rosemary’s Baby itself.

“The real date that’s key to understanding Rosemary’s Baby isn’t 1966 but rather 1968, the year in which the film was released. 1968 could be called ‘Year One’ of the New Hollywood. It saw the death of the long-crumbling Production Code and heralded the birth of a modern cinema, one influenced by the so-called new waves that had already swept France, England, and Czechoslovakia—violent, cynical, ribald, edgy, paranoid. Helmed by Roman Polanski, at that time one of the hottest of all European directors, and by Robert Evans, the firebrand who had just taken control of Paramount Pictures, Rosemary’s Baby pointed the way to the future of American filmmaking. The American movies of the next decade would be young, hip, urban, cosmopolitan. They wouldn’t shy away from sex, nudity, or four-letter words (all of which Rosemary’s Baby treats with sophisticated matter-of-factness). Nor would they have to earnestly and soberly pay lip service to ‘good American values.’ Rosemary’s Baby is not only a blasphemous parody of the story of the virgin birth, as many have noted; it’s also a perverse black comedy, a religious joke in which the triumph of evil over good is treated ironically.

“Rosemary’s Baby also helped bring the horror film up to date. No more monsters lurching through foggy graveyards: Polanski’s witches look like the little old lady in the apartment next door, and their victims are modern Manhattanites who keep up with all the latest fads and fashions. The film’s terrors are grounded in an everyday realism. Guy appears in TV commercials for Yamaha motorcycles and reads The New Yorker; Rosemary gets a trendy haircut at Vidal Sassoon and gushes about seeing The Fantasticks off-Broadway. The villains of this newly fallen world don’t chase their victims through Gothic ruins; they ensnare them using manipulation and passive aggression. Next to the quietly menacing insinuations of Minnie and Roman Castavet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster look as quaint as children’s Halloween costumes.

“It’s the wicked ironical tone, though, that most sets Rosemary’s Baby apart from the horror films of the 1950s and early 60s (the schlockiest of which had been directed, incidentally, by Rosemary’s Baby’s co-producer, William Castle). Polanski’s movie is leavened by a sardonic sense of humor about itself, something absent from many earlier horror films as well as many later ones, even those it inspired. Where The Exorcist, for example, takes itself so seriously that it may strike viewers as unintentionally funny, Rosemary’s Baby sees the weird humor in its ludicrous premise, effectively inviting the audience in on its joke (the butt of which turns out to be poor unsuspecting Rosemary herself). This is perhaps why Rosemary’s Baby has aged so well over the decades, and why it remains so perennially relevant. It dares us to imagine the worst—and to laugh in horror at its coming true.” ~ Ian Scott Todd

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

“Mary Orr’s ‘The Wisdom of Eve’ was the appropriately titled source material for Joe Mankiewicz’s classic ode to ‘the thea-tuh,’ All About Eve. Orr’s title begs the question: What wisdom did its cinematic adaptation impart over the 70 years it has been in existence? That bumpy nights require seatbelts? That ‘everyone has a heart except some people?’ That pianos are particularly adept at writing their own material? Or that a good story should have ‘everything but the bloodhounds’ nipping at its rear end? That last lesson is most definitely taught by All About Eve; its Oscar-winning screenplay is a master class in telling a story through delectable dialogue and ripe situations, both of which are brought to life by a murderer’s row of legendary actors. The cast includes Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Thelma Ritter, Celeste Holm, a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe (as poor Miss Caswell) and, as that venomous fishwife, Addison DeWitt, George Sanders. That DeWitt is the cattiest character in a film filled with women is just one of the many surprises in store for viewers.

“Eve sets us down in the backstage world of the theater, where Eve Harrington (Baxter) is about to accept the Sarah Siddons Award for her latest role. In the audience is everyone she’s railroaded on her way to the top, including famed performer Margo Channing (Davis), whom Eve idolizes so much that she ingratiates herself into Margo’s life. Margo is about to turn 40, the apparent kiss of death for actresses. And while she still wants to act, there are younger, hungrier and yes, more conniving actresses hovering about, waiting for their moment to strike. Nobody recognizes that Eve is the enemy except former performer and current Margo caretaker, Birdie (Ritter) who, like some of this film’s detractors, sees Eve as a shoddily manufactured characterization. That Eve’s persona is nothing but a performance is a feature, not a bug, however, making her partnership with Addison all the more credible.

“Like the macho director Bill Sampson (Gary Merill) and the henpecked writer Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), Addison DeWitt is a Mankiewicz addition to Orr’s story, and each of the men serve as one-third of the director’s stand-in. But the writer-director is wise enough to know the women are far more interesting and unpredictable, especially Davis’ Margo, whose iconic characterization was strong enough to survive the camp-flavored trainwreck of Lauren Bacall’s Tony-winning recreation in Applause. Margo’s fears of aging out of her discipline are dealt with humanely, and she’s given further complexity when contrasting herself with her friend, the ‘happy little housewife’ Karen Richards (Holm). All About Eve is strong enough to support a happy or a tragic reading of Margo’s voluntary retirement and entry into Karen’s profession, as well as to support the additional irony of a new Eve mysteriously appearing to replace the old one.

“Though DeWitt is a critic and not an actress, he fits right in as a fellow shade-thrower, perhaps a symbolic representation of the woman his creator envisions he would be if nature had blessed him as such. He’s as quick as Margo is with a comeback, and just as deliciously catty, so much so that the Academy thought awarding the deserving Sanders would make up for shunning the equally deserving Davis. Of course, Miss Davis had a much more contentious category to deal with, but that’s another story. Since this piece is all about All About Eve, it should answer the question it originally posed. What does All About Eve teach its audience? The Wisdom of Eve may very well be that in life, everyone sees themselves as Addison DeWitt, but they are really all just poor Miss Caswells trying to eke out an existence by making the unhappy rabbits who rule the world happy. Whatever the lesson, All About Eve is magnificent despite not being, as the line goes, maudlin and full of self-pity.” ~ Odie Henderson

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Late Spring (1949, Yasujiro Ozu)

“Without generalizing too strongly, one of the core tenets of many informed viewers’ conception of the films of Yasujiro Ozu lies in contradiction. The traditional notion of his cinema is that of quietness and contemplation, using simple and repetitive notions and an unobtrusive style in order to explore family relations. The actual experience, meanwhile, can and often is radically different from this: his style of cutting together frontal medium shots at the level of the tatami according to highly metered rhythms would be frenetic under any other director’s hands, and indeed jars the viewer far more than one would expect. And yet this style, and the darkness and specificity of the post-war Japanese milieu, work in tandem with his more widely recognized tendencies; it is an expansive cinema, one that allows for as much lightness and even comedy as it does for tragedy and loss.

“All of these tendencies are readily present in one of Ozu’s greatest films, Late Spring (1949). Along with Tokyo Story, it is one of his most well-known works and exists within the loose Noriko trilogy that stars two of his most acclaimed actors, Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara. In a scenario that would be repeated at least a few more times by the director, Ryu plays a middle-aged widower who lives with his deeply devoted daughter, played by Hara; over the course of the film, he decides to arrange a marriage for her in order to ensure that she will not grow old taking care of him for the rest of his life.

“The storyline is simple to summarize, but the film experience is anything but, filled as it is with a dense network of friends and family, a delicate balance between city and small town, and above all as detailed a depiction of the subtleties of conversation and inflection as has been put to screen. Nothing is left to chance or wasted, and the digressions, like the famed bike ride that Hara takes or a seven-minute long Noh theater performance, serve to make this a whole ecosystem that is under threat of becoming upset at any moment. Late Spring, ultimately, is all about the sacrifices necessary in love, but Ozu enacts these overwhelmingly heartbreaking moments with grace and ambivalence, always seeing every second’s nuances with a clarity nearly unmatched before or since.” ~ Kenji Fujishima

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman)

“My name is Isak Borg, and I am 78 years old.”

“Sometimes, and it isn’t always this way, it feels like we don’t see certain films until we’re supposed to see them. When the current lockdown situation began, the result of the early days of a global pandemic, I made a list and resolved to catch up with at least ten movies I felt embarrassed to admit I’d never seen. At the top of that list was Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). On the day that begins and ends the film, its central figure, Isak Borg, a respected inventor and physician, is about to take an afternoon’s drive on his way to receive an honorarium celebrating his long and distinguished career. On the day I first saw the film, about two months ago, my own father, who will turn 80 years old before I finish writing this piece, was admitted to the hospital with heart problems which cast his immediate future in doubt. Bergman’s great work is a brief consideration of a man late in life disturbed by restless nightmares of mortality who, in discerning ‘an extraordinary logic’ in contemplating various memory scenarios of his youth, and being forced to reconcile them with echoes of people and places in the present day, finds a modicum of relief from the haunting imposition and aggression of time.

“In Wild Strawberries, which is essentially Bergman’s contribution to the ‘road movie’ genre, Isak, played with world-weary elegance by the film director and actor Victor Sjostrom (who made silent films such as Lon Chaney’s He Who Gets Slapped), sets out with his intellectually imposing daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) for the university where he will be feted. The two have a testy relationship, but it is one gilded by mutual respect, which is perhaps more than either have for Marianne’s husband, Isak’s aloof, financially irresponsible son Evald (Gunnar Bjornstrand).

“Along the way, Isak stops at the house where he often summered as a boy with his family, and Bergman effortlessly glides into a series of remembrances, the aged Isak witnessing scenes from his youth in which the cousin he once loved, Sara (played by Bibi Andersson), confesses her feelings for the young Isak (who is never seen), all the while being pursued by his older brother. Sara is first recalled by Isak picking the wild strawberries of the film’s title, a gift for her uncle on his birthday, and a psychological touchstone that will go unmentioned elsewhere in the film, yet reverberate sweetly, nonetheless. Later he is awakened by another Sara (this one also portrayed by Andersson), a flighty young woman whose father now owns the property. She inquires about him (‘I lived here once, 200 years ago’) and then asks if she and her two boyfriends might tag along with Isak and Marianne for a ride into the city.

“Thus Bergman further introduces the film’s dramatic strategy of reflecting in his day’s journey key elements of Isak’s remembrances—youth as embodied by Marianne, Sara and her friends; memory, an insistent presence in the present- and past-days Saras, as well as in the testimonies to his stature as a local figure of regard from a gas station attendant (Max Von Sydow) they encounter along the way; the sour underbelly of marriage in the personage of a couple the travelers briefly assist after a car accident who cannot keep their contempt for each other at bay; and even Isak’s own feelings as a grown child bristling against the stern personality of his own mother, still alive, to whom he brings Marianne for a brief visit.

“There’s a grace in Bergman’s imagining of Isak’s past and present that is its own testimony to the great director’s own youthful dramatic empathy (Bergman was half Isak’s age when the film was made). Equally important to the film’s easy access to a viewer’s senses are its cadences-- unhurried, yet strangely urgent, as if time itself were in the back seat, persistent, yet just another rider on the road trip, always felt, never acknowledged except in the glistening, aged eyes, themselves caressed by great puffy pillows of knowing flesh around their edges, of the honorable, soon-to-be-honored driver.

“I thought of my father, a man nothing like the intellectually accomplished, professorial, grand yet unpretentious Isak, often while watching Wild Strawberries two months ago—it couldn’t be helped, I suppose. Yet in the film’s journey, and especially its conclusion, in which Isak realizes the value of the comfort he draws from the bittersweet memories of his own childhood—less nostalgic, and more revealing of his own flaws of his character as well as surges of unexpected strength—lent support to my own worries in imagining (hoping) my own father might also be nearing his own sort of similar reckoning. As Isak deals with ghosts, with past yearnings and shortcomings, and with a present fast approaching its inevitable conclusion, the peace Bergman crafts for him feels appropriate, well-earned, perfectly right. That peace is yet another form of grace, which in Wild Strawberries is in rich supply. ~ Dennis Cozzalio

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)

“Over a shot of a clock shaped to the size of the screen a terrible fanfare wails. An introduction one might find more befitting a Universal horror film than the newest Chaplin masterpiece. So begins Modern Times, Chaplin's final film centered on his iconic Little Tramp character, as well as being essentially his last silent film. Really a ‘part-talkie’ with fully synchronized music, sound effects and brief speech, though released in 1936, nearly a decade since sound was introduced and rapidly adopted industry wide, making Chaplin at this point in danger of coming off as a dinosaur. A first though for Chaplin was the more specifically critical and political perspective he expressed of modern industrial society, politics and capitalism, themes that would run even more strongly in the films made subsequently and lead to strong backlash and reversals in popularity (especially in America) over the course of the rest of his life.

“Which speaks to why Modern Times remains one of Chaplin's most iconic, timely, and most seen films today, and contains perhaps his most beloved routine, the Little Tramp at the factory sequence at the beginning. Encapsulating some of the best physical comedy ever filmed, sight gags, innovative sound effects, ominous music, brilliant set design and biting satire, the opening sequence finds the Little Tramp as a human cog in the industrial assembly line, struggling to tighten bolts as the big wig sits in his office watching from his futuristic video monitor keeps demanding the line increase their productivity. The Little Tramp becomes a guinea pig for feeding machine, the purpose of which is to automatically lift food directly into employee's mouths while working, eliminating the need to provide lunch breaks, increasing productivity and lowering overhead (is it a stretch to guess this is a problem that continues to keep the Elon Musks and Bezoses up at night?). As the machine quickly begins to malfunction, horrifically and hilariously dealing abuse upon the poor little tramp, it highlights what a brilliant actor Charles Chaplin was as he comically reacts and out of sight of the camera operating the machine himself, instills a menacing personality onto every movement it makes. The sequence climaxes with the Tramp overwhelmed the repetitive motions and fast pace as becomes more and more insane and manic, not even noticing as he's literally sucked into the machine and wound though it's gears. It's a brilliant (and much copied) sight gag whose visual metaphor unfortunately still carries a sting of recognition for anyone who has found themselves punching a clock for a large corporation nearly 90 years later.” ~ Patrick J. Miller

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: L'Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)

“Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, simply put, is one of the most influential films ever made. Along with Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless, it helped usher cinema into modernism. It came out in 1960 a few months before Psycho. Like the Hitchcock, a woman opens the film and is established as the apparent lead before disappearing from the narrative altogether early on. The film sets this up as a mystery to be solved, but radically, Antonioni leaves it unanswered; instead, turning his attention to the affair that springs between her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti).

“L'Avventura was startlingly new when it made its debut at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival where the audience reaction was largely one of derision. But critics acclaimed it as an instant classic and in the 1962 Sight & Sound poll, it ranked behind only Citizen Kane among the best films ever made. Its impact has been so immersed in film language though that today, L'Avventura's innovation doesn't stand out so much even as it remains an indubitable achievement in film form.

“Antonioni's subject in L'Avventura is the decadent idle rich. Claudia may be the most sympathetic among them, and while Monica Vitti has great screen presence, none of the characters are particularly likeable. They are self-righteously privileged and morally vacuous. Claudia and Sandro only meet 3 days before Anna (Lea Massari) disappears during a trip to the Aeolian Islands and Sandro makes advances on Claudia almost right after his lover goes missing. Claudia resists at first, but they encounter infidelity everywhere and that resistance is fleeting.

“Instead of narrative or commiserative characters, Antonioni captivates through film form: composition/camera placement, extensive use of deep focus photography playing with foreground and background, imaginative blocking of the characters, and most of all, the usage of space, mostly to indicate the emptiness of these lives despite all the beauty around them. There are so many shots of lone figures dwarfed by their surrounding landscapes. The great scenes or shots come one after another - Claudia waking in the morning to a beautiful sunrise, she and Sandro talking with a stunning cloudscape behind them, Claudia delighted with the communication from other church bells, Sandro casually ruining the art of a young man in an act of wanton cruelty, Claudia pacing her room and making faces in the mirror when she is unable to sleep, and Claudia's run down the vast empty hall of the San Domenico Palace Hotel.

"Easily the best of the trilogy of existential ennui that Antonioni made with La Notte and L'Eclisse, L'Avventura pushed formalism to the foreground while narrative receded to the background. Earlier filmmakers like F.W. Murnau and Josef Von Sternberg with their striking sense of composition, camera movement, and indulgence with space and time presaged Antonioni and soon after L'Avventura, films like Last Year at Marienbad and Antonioni's own Red Desert would take this style much further. L'Avventura though was the lynchpin and its influence can also be seen from Theo Angelopoulos, Bela Tarr, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien to Kelly Reichardt, Jia Zhangke, and Andrei Zvyagintsev today.” ~ George Wu

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: The Wild Bunch (1969, Sam Peckinpah)

“Westerns, a staple since the early days of cinema, were still important in 1969. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the year’s highest grossing movie. True Grit won John Wayne an Oscar. But the world was changing rapidly, and many filmmakers were eager to move beyond simple games of cowboys and Indians, approaching the time-honored tradition with new approaches and perspectives. One notable example: Sam Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch.

“Maybe egged on by the envelope-pushing violence of Bonnie and Clyde, the stylish reinvention of the genre in Italy, disgust with the war in Vietnam, hunger to overcome recent professional failures, or some combination of those things, he made a film that was revisionist in both form and content. It was technically groundbreaking, experimenting with new lenses, filming speeds, editing techniques and even gun sounds. But since Peckinpah chose not to sanitize the gore and death of the west, many were too revolted by the bloody, high casualty shootouts to celebrate his masterful craftsmanship.

“Which was, of course, the point. The film unmasks Hollywood cliches of heroism with its regretful gunman protagonist and a tone that frequently shifts from thrilling to melancholic. Starting with the opening scene, where children gleefully feed a live scorpion to a mob of ants, Peckinpah takes aim at the brutality of humankind. Innocent bystanders, including a tuba player from the South Texas Temperance Union parade, are shot dead in the streets, caught in a greedy war between a railroad company and our team of outlaw protagonists. There are always children nearby, playing guns, riding alongside a general, smiling at the bandits’ jokes about whores, or being breastfed beneath a bandolier.

“It’s a portrait of human ugliness that hits you in the gut. Yet its band of reprobate anti-heroes manages to find some manner of honor in this world when they agree to risk it all for a friend they left behind. Somehow Peckinpah was able to cut open the western, pull out its guts, and still make a classic of the form.” ~ Vern

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame: Welcome!

Hey everybody! Welcome to the (counts fingers) eighth year of Muriels Hall of Fame inductions!

I had hoped to unveil this year’s inductees last week, but due to some tech problems I had to postpone the announcements. It’s boring – no reason to go into details.

Anyway, I’ll be posting three times every evening this coming week, at 7 PM, 8 PM, and 9 PM, until we’ve announced all the nominees. But before we get into that, I’d like to send out a warm thank-you to this year’s voters!

Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Scott W. Black
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Phil Dyess-Nugent
Steven Erickson
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Caden Mark Gardner
Sean Gilman
Luke Gorham
Odie Henderson
Jenna Ipcar
Daniel Cook Johnson
Sam Juliano
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Wendy Mays
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Melissa Starker
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Vern
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
George Wu

Stay tuned all week for this year’s Muriels Hall of Fame announcements!

2019 Muriel Awards: Thank you!

Well, that’s a wrap for this year’s Muriel Awards, theydies and gentlethem! Thanks to everyone who participated this year:

Josh Bell

Andrew Bemis

Christianne Benedict

Scott W. Black

Sean Burns

Kevin Cecil

Paul Clark

Dennis Cozzalio

Andrew Dignan

Kevin Dufresne

Philip Dyess-Nugent

Steven Erickson

Molly Faust

James Frazier

Kenji Fujishima

Caden Mark Gardner

Sean Gilman

Luke Gorham

Jaime Grijalba

Russell Hainline

Glenn Heath Jr.

Odie Henderson

Jenna Ipcar

Daniel Cook Johnson

Sam Juliano

Donna Kozloskie

Adam Lemke

Craig D. Lindsey

Matt Lynch

Sam C. Mac

Wendy Mays

Jeff McMahon

Patrick J. Miller

Matt Noller

Rob Patrick

Jason Shawhan

Melissa Starker

Ryan Swen

Scout Tafoya

Melissa Tamminga

Ian Scott Todd

Hedwig van Driel

Vern

Scott von Doviak

Clayton Walter

Bryan Whitefield

Brian Wilson

George Wu

See you all this summer for the Muriels Hall of Fame!

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #1

Justine Smith: “Why can’t all films be like Mad Max: Fury Road? Watching the trailers for Mad Max before it premiered, my blood pressure rose and my breath quickened. I didn’t want this to happen - experience had taught me the movie never lived up to the trailer: I was setting myself up for disappointment. But I was wrong. Mad Max delivered, and in doing so revealed that the blockbusters that I had given a pass to were not living up to their expectations, they were not delivering on their promises: we had been fooled for far too long to accept that our popular cinema was going to be mediocre at best. The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema. When was the last time a big budget movie wasn’t a bloated mess of fan service and convoluted story? I had forgotten it was possible for Hollywood cinema could be this good, this simple.

“Mad Max: Fury Road represents a strong vision of a dark future. Without resorting to cheap cynicism, it offers a troubling vision of a not-so-distant dystopia where environmental abuses have stripped the earth of life. Humanity has hung on by a thread, embracing water and mechanics as their new God. In an epic chase for freedom, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tries to set free the wives of a terrifying warlord, chasing towards a remembered greenland where women reign. With a constant forward momentum, the movie drifts left to right on screen with the epicness of a classical painting. The richness of detail and strength of desperation adding levels of nuance to the deceptively simple narrative trajectory.

“Without question, Mad Max is a rare blockbuster that will pass the test of time removed from nostalgia. It is a great film that inspires tremendous emotion and doesn’t undervalue the power of great ideas.”

Andrew Bemis: ‘The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema.’ I want to pass this on to everyone who dismisses Fury Road as a fun action movie with no real substance, when it's actually as much a triumph of sophisticated, economical storytelling as it is on a technical level. But George Miller's approach to advancing the narrative, the characters' arcs and the story's subtext (well, text, really) is so purely visual that it doesn't always register to viewers who are used to being told, rather than shown, what a movie is about. Not that there aren't plenty of wonderful dialogue-driven movies, but Miller's approach has more in common with silent cinema than other contemporary blockbusters. A simple image like a character who realizes that she's about to die protectively clutching a bag of seeds is more powerful than a lengthy monologue about the plight of our environment could have been. The movie works as brilliantly as it does because of Miller's extraordinary trust in images and gestures (big and small) to tell a story (it helps, of course, that he has impeccable taste).

“Fury Road also makes most other blockbusters look puny on a purely aesthetic level. In a movie filled with exhilarating images, one of my favorites is towards the beginning, when Max is trying to escape his captors. It's a dark, chaotic sequence that suddenly gives way to blinding light and silence as we get our first look at Immortal Joe's Citadel. It's a moment that has the same kind of power as Dorothy opening her front door and stepping into Oz. Mad Max has many moments like this, reminding that, though blockbusters offer plenty of loud spectacle, few even bother with trying to manipulate scale, perspective, light, sound or any of the other basic tools at their disposal to create a genuine sense of awe. For a movie that uses every state-of-the-art filmmaking tool at its disposal, Fury Road is surprisingly classical in its approach to visual storytelling.”

Justine: “One of the blessings of people appreciating Fury Road is that it has really cast George Miller’s entire filmography into light, and the fact is, he has always been an economic and dynamic filmmaker. From Mad Max to Happy Feet, dialogue is sparse and used with a lot of intention. I agree, there is a lot of trust in how he treats the image. This shows not only a confidence in his own abilities, but a confidence in the audience’s abilities to understand what he’s trying to do. One of the problems with modern blockbusters is that they aim for such wide universality that they lose their personality and nuance. Films like The Avengers need to be understood in equal measure by a New Yorker and someone over in China. As a result the importance of following story and focusing on subtext gets left aside, it’s too much of a risk that the audience doesn’t understand.

“I like your comparison to The Wizard of Oz, a personal favourite of mine. As a child I’d watch it almost daily, getting lost in that world. While Mad Max may not be a ‘children’s film,’ the way it uses images and sounds to guide forward the story has a purity that could be easily understood by a child. This is why the oversimplification of Blockbusters is so frustrating, there is an easier route that doesn’t compromise story or character - Miller has proved that. Popular cinema has a way of bringing the audience on a journey. Movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Mad Max have a way of inspiring the imagination and transporting us to a new and fantastic world. Mad Max has a darker bent, hidden beneath the thunderous music and fantastic universe is a dark story about oppression and personal responsibility. Mad Max was always a film about humanity’s ability to cast aside responsibility and watch the world fade to desert rather than try to fix it.

Andrew: I’m glad you brought up Happy Feet – those movies were in constant rotation on our TV when my kids were younger, and I thought I’d never want to see or think about them again. But about halfway through seeing Mad Max, I realized that it’d actually make a perfect double feature with Happy Feet Two. I don’t expect many of our readers to remember Happy Feet Two or have a strong opinion about it, but they’re basically the same movie. Also, I’m hoping Miller’s renewed popularity might inspire people to give The Witches of Eastwick, one of the first ‘grown up’ movies I loved as a kid, another look. It’s not as personal as the rest of Miller’s movies, but its ridicule of toxic masculinity points the way towards Mad Max’s full-blown assault on the patriarchy.

“As I write that, I can anticipate some readers rolling their eyes – after all, Mad Max is a car picture, not a nuanced dissection of gender roles. Its message is an all-caps cry that is literally written on a wall in the movie: ‘WHO KILLED THE WORLD?’ Men have poisoned the earth and doomed humanity, and the promise of women taking over is our only hope. It’s definitely not subtle, but it shouldn’t be. As a person who, in his most anxious moments, Googles phrases like ‘global warming worst case scenario’ late at night, Mad Max speaks to me and, oddly enough, it’s ultimately reassuring. As dark as it gets, it’s the rare post-apocalyptic movie that isn’t nihilistic. Though Miller’s vision of the future is one where much of what has been broken can’t be fixed, as long as there are people willing to work together, there’s still hope.” ~ Justine Smith and Andrew Bemis (originally posted March 6, 2016)

Note: Mad Max: Fury Road ranked #1 in the 2015 Muriel Awards.

Muriel’s Top 25 films of the 2010s

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller) [250/16]

2. The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick) [202/12]

3. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho) [176/13]

4. The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) [162/11]

5. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) [158/11]

6. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel and Ethan Coen) [155/13]

7. Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins) [143/10]

8. Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer) [133/11]

9. Carol (2015, Todd Haynes) [130/9]

10. Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan) [125/9]

11. Holy Motors (2012, Léos Carax) [124/8]

12. Phantom Thread (2017, Paul Thomas Anderson) [119/8]

13. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, Martin Scorsese) [116/10]

14. Certified Copy (2010, Abbas Kiarostami) [116/8]

15. Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele) [110/9]

16. The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer & Cynthia Cynn and [anonymous]) [110/16]

17. Meek’s Cutoff (2010, Kelly Reichardt) [94/7]

18. Inherent Vice (2014, Paul Thomas Anderson) [87/6]

19. Roma (2018, Alfonso Cuaron) [81/6]

20 (tie). A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) [77/6]

20 (tie). Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater) [77/6]

22 (tie). Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater) [76/5]

22 (tie). The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson) [76/5]

24. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Quentin Tarantino) [74/6]

25. Paterson (2016, Jim Jarmusch) [71/5]

Italics denote winners of the Golden Muriel for Best Picture.

Click here for complete results.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #2

"When you watch The Tree of Life, you’re seeing a vision of a family’s life experienced with an other-wordly, unfathomable sense of perspective. Writer/director Terrence Malick’s latest film is elusive, engrossing and just all-around big. There are discernible leitmotifs that run through the film, like the intrusion of chaos into order, the gentle realization that form does not always conform to essence, and the fleeting presence of radiant, context-free hopefulness.

“But the sense of spirituality that characterizes The Tree of Life is nothing if not pantheistic and all-accommodating. It’s an open container of meaning, which is partly why the film a minor cultural rift when it was first released last year. Some dismissed The Tree of Life by saying it was loaded with pretentious assumptions, specifically accusing of him of assuming the position of God in his film. Others said that the film’s vision of faith was too simplistic and that the film just regurgitates/reinforces Judeo-Christian imagery. So many of the film's most staunch defenders foolishly tried to combat this short-sighted criticism, but defending The Tree of Life against such claims is patently unnecessary: the complexities inherent in Malick’s film are defense enough.

“For example, in the opening image of the diametrically-opposed ways of grace and nature, Malick sets up and then exponentially complicates the notion that lived spirituality is inseparable from idealized faith. The two states of mind are opposite sides of the same state. The film’s protagonists are thus not totally in control of their memories, nor are they totally passive participants in the film’s dream-like reverie of past events. The Tree of Life presents the past as it might have been, not as it objectively occurred. We see events through the eyes of man-made Gods, the mother and father (Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt) of two children. One boy is dead while the other boy, now a man, wonders when it was that he first believed in God. And he seeks Him out again. And so does his mother.

“So, when one of the two boys asks, ‘Where do you live?’ he’s living the answer: in memories, in the past, in the design that unites the two and in dreams of simplicity and twilit beauty. God is fallible because he is us but He also exists outside of us. According to the film, the fact that we cannot always be united is what alternately motivates us towards and pulls us away from our faith. There is both great faith in doubt and in the presence of God in Malick’s latest masterpiece. It’s alternately a mirror of actively evolving ideas of the past and a flood of emotions that create its own order out of the inherently chaotic. Wow." ~ Simon Abrams (originally posted March 4, 2012)

Note: The Tree of Life ranked #1 in the 2011 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #3

“Parasite doesn’t exactly redefine the concept of the upstairs-downstairs satire so much as it infuses it with a dark-hued clarity about class structure, and it refuses to condemn anyone involved in navigating the implacable two-way system of social mobility it so pitilessly portrays, even if several of the key navigators might not be left standing by the film’s final fade. Bong Joon-ho’s previous, and horizontally oriented, Snowpiercer grappled with similar notions of imposed privilege and struggle, depicting an oppressed class’s attempts to move forward and depose the tyrannical political system keeping them at bay on a futuristic train hurtling through a forbidding, iced-over landscape, but with a far heavier touch. As Parasite’s Kim Ki-woo, the young man whose family occupies the charred heart of Bong’s unforgiving worldview, might say, that’s so metaphorical!

“Eschewing Snowpiercer’s more linear ham-handedness, Bong conjures this new film, which posits a social purgatory up from which the Kim family desperately (and literally) has to climb in concocting a scheme for survival which will prove to be both understandable and fatally flawed, with insouciance and acid purpose. Parasite’s protagonists, the denizens of a partially submerged basement apartment whose windows look directly out into the gutters of a crowded and filthy urban street, are looking for any way to survive. They stumble upon a way to insinuate themselves into a home of the Parks, a super-rich family residing in the hills, where Bong’s social critique is allowed to develop the real, sharp teeth laying in patient wait behind the good-natured smile of its opening third. There may be several moments during Parasite when Ki-woo’s astonished observation may be just as apt, but the movie’s built-in auto-critique defuses the relative obviousness of Bong’s dramatic strategies by serving them up with healthy doses of empathy and humor. By the point when the wealthy Park family takes off for a weekend camping trip, leaving the run of their spacious and modern mansion to the Kims, you can practically taste the glee with which Bong has taken to ensure that the hooks are in his audience, who will likely have no idea of the depths to which his demonically entertaining film is about to plunge them.

“2019 was widely considered to be a very good, very diverse year for movies, and even with all those great films to talk about, it still became the year of Parasite. Somehow, amongst strong, heavily praised work from Martin Scorsese, Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and a host of other celebrated directors, Bong Joon-ho’s film managed to secure close to a consensus among the most opinionated observers of film as the clear choice for the year’s best. The most award-averse among us would have never been able to predict it, even as Parasite emerged as a triumphant Palme D’Or winner from last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but one still has to wonder with delight just how Oscar managed to get it so right this year. You might have to go all the way back to 2007 and the decisive win of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men to come up with a more unlikely, more existentially despairing, and more completely right choice for the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year, despite what our orange-colored Film Critic in Chief thinks. (‘How bad were the Academy Awards this year? Did you see it?’ Trump recently asked a jeering crowd at one of his rallies. ‘And the winner is… a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give him best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know.’)

“But Trump’s cynical derision might inadvertently be more reflective of Bong’s point than 45 could ever understand. Fittingly, a movie about corrosive social division, division which stands as the norm in which all of us, rich and poor, might seem hopelessly mired, has become a massive worldwide hit at the same time those very same divisions are being sown for political and financial profit by bureaucratic hacks and the dangerous demagogues they empower. Who’s playing whom?

“Parasite ends on a note of desperate fantasy, detailing the musings of a young man who can only concoct elaborate projections of his own ultimate wealth and economic rescue conjured to assuage the guilt he feels over his family’s devastation and the cloistered imprisonment of his father. And that young man cannot sustain believe in those fantasies for more than a moment at a time before sinking back down into the cruel subterranean misery where we first saw him at the beginning of the film. The final descent of the camera which concludes Parasite, in what might be a prelude to genuine madness, is a cold slap of reality, what Bong Joon-ho has described as ‘a sure-fire kill,’ even as it displays the razor-sharp instincts of a born storyteller employed to send an audience back into the world exhilarated, on a melancholic contact high from 135-minutes proximity to absolute filmmaking mastery. When I jotted down my thoughts about the movie after seeing Parasite for the first time, the notion that it might be, on its own terms, a perfect movie occurred to me more than once. Five months, three screenings, and four Academy Awards later, nothing much has made me think to change my mind. It’s a sure-fire kill in just about every way.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio

Note: Parasite ranked #1 in the 2019 Muriel Awards.