Entries in the Category "david lean"
Movie Reviews: Listmania edition
So last summer, I decided to run through the AFI 100 Best Movies lists. There are several other AFI lists, among them 100 Best Thrillers, 100 Best Romances, 100 Best Comedies, 25 Best Musicals (the AFI was tiring at that point, I guess?) and so on. Here are some recent cross-offs.
It’s a Gift (1934)
AFI 100 Best Comedies # 58
Of all those lists, which I am always keeping track of, the Best Comedies is the one that appeals to me the least. Movies like It’s a Gift are why. Some old comedies are just not that funny anymore. Forgive me. W.C. Fields, in this movie, did not make me laugh, he made me bored. (The Marx brothers I also found atrociously unfunny, though as a peace offering, I present Chaplin and Keaton. Those dudes are still funny in 2010.) (Howard Lloyd, too. See below.)
There was also a certain tone to this movie—harried suburban dad type thing—which bugged me intensely. See the opening scene, where Fields is desperately trying to get to his bathroom mirror for a shave but his kids keep swooping in and getting in his way. The audience is supposed to be laughing at his frustration, but I’m like “JUST TELL THEM YOU WERE THERE FIRST. OR SAY ‘I’M THE DAD, THAT’S WHY.’ OR SOMETHING.” It’s kind of a common theme in movies, especially comedies: men who are so put-upon by their children and their harpy wives. I don’t like that theme when it happens today, but I especially can’t stomach it coming from the 1930s. I just have trouble feeling sorry for a guy whose mother couldn’t legally vote, whose wife could get arrested for buying birth control, and whose daughter can’t wear pants to school.
The Freshman (1925)
AFI 100 Best Comedies # 79
So this one, unlike the W.C. Fields movie, was hilarious. I sat there watching it really late one night, just giggling helplessly. It’s a silent film, starring Harold Lloyd, and he plays a guy going off to college who has a lot of weird ideas about how he’s going to make friends. For example, every time he introduces himself to somebody, he does a little dance. He thinks this works.
The intertitles (in silent films, those little cutaways to dialogue and necessary description) are clever and smirky. The college Lloyd attends is “Tate University, a large football stadium with a college attached,” and so, naturally, Lloyd decides that the thing to do to become popular is to join the football team. There’s a girl and a bully and this insane scene with a disintegrating tuxedo. At their best, silent comedies are the perfect combination of smart and silly, and (at least in my experience) this is one of the best.
Ball of Fire (1941)
AFI 100 Best Comedies # 92
Very funny love story with Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. He’s a straight-arrow linguistics professor who’s studying American slang, and she’s a saucy nightclub performer with lots to teach him. He lives with seven other doddery old professors who gawk around Stanwyck like she’s some delightful new species they’ve discovered. There’s sort of a Snow White and the Seven Dwarves-thing going on, plus a mobster-related subplot.
Plus Barbara Stanwyck! She’s awesome.
Click ahead for many more.
Continue reading "Movie Reviews: Listmania edition"
The AFI's 100 Greatest Movies (Pts. 1 and 2) Summed Up
Earlier, I wrote a sum-up of my experience with Entertainment Weekly's 100 New Classics list. I'm finally following up with a sum-up of the AFI lists!
Here's how I felt about the AFI lists:
Least enjoyed: A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup, MASH, Mutiny on the Bounty, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Platoon, Shane, Sunrise, Swing Time
Most enjoyed: 12 Angry Men, City Lights, Doctor Zhivago, Giant, High Noon, King Kong, Midnight Cowboy, Modern Times, Spartacus, Sullivan’s Travels, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather
Pre-list favorites: All About Eve, American Graffiti, Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove, Fargo, Jaws, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, The Graduate, The Maltese Falcon, The Manchurian Candidate, The Philadelphia Story
Other than the movies themselves, which of course were all new to me, I saw some interesting actors for the first time, notably Van Heflin, John Cazale, Omar Sharif, and Fay Wray. This was also my first exposure to directors David Lynch, George Stevens, D.W. Griffith and Sam Peckinpah. The Summer Movie Watch necessitated my first (and last) two Marx brothers movie viewings.
It’s harder for me to name all the movies I think should have been on the AFI list and that weren’t than it is for me to say what should have been on the EW list. This is simply because I have seen fewer films from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s than from the 80s, the 90s and the 00s. I can’t help when I was born, after all. But I have seen enough that I put together this short list of notable omissions: Roman Holiday, The Palm Beach Story, Notorious, His Girl Friday, Charade, Born Yesterday, It Should Happen to You, Advise and Consent, Brief Encounter, Gilda, The Shop Around the Corner, In a Lonely Place, and Reds. As far as I know, all of these films were eligible for inclusion with the possible exception of Brief Encounter, which is officially a British film (but then so is Lawrence of Arabia, River Kwai, and several others that the AFI didn’t mind taking credit for, so…).
Other list factoids: The AFI list presented me with the three shortest and the two longest movies I viewed: Lawrence of Arabia at 216 minutes and Ben-Hur at 212 minutes were the longest (the next longest was a tie, with Giant and EW’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King at 201 minutes each, and no, that’s not even the extended edition of LOTR). The shortest movie I watched was Duck Soup at just 68 minutes (68 long minutes, because Marx brothers sheesh), then Frankenstein at 70 minutes and The General at 75. The dates on those movies—1933, 1931, and 1926 respectively—are telling. Movies were shorter back then both because of the technology (innovations in film production made filmmaking basics easier and quicker, for example) and because movies were frequently shown in double and triple features. People spent a lot more time at the movies before they had TVs in their homes.
The most represented director on both versions of the AFI list is Steven Spielberg with 5 films. The second list swaps out Close Encounters for Saving Private Ryan (which was made the same year as the first list was released). I had already seen 4 of the first 5 and 3 of the second 5, so I actually only watched 2 Spielberg movies throughout the movie watch.
The next two most represented directors are Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, each with the same four films appearing on both lists. These are two of my absolute favorite directors, and I had seen all four of both sets of films. In fact, I believe I once watched three of Wilder’s (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, and Some Like it Hot) all in a row one rainy Sunday afternoon. I had also seen all three of the Frank Capra movies on the lists, and all three of the John Huston films.
The most represented director on my movie watch was George Stevens, who had four movies on the two lists, none of which I had seen, and then Robert Altman and David Lean, each with three movies I hadn't seen.
One thing I noticed is that only one director (James Cameron) had 3 or more films on the EW list, compared to the several who had 3 and 4 on the AFI lists—and, of course, Senor Spielbergo with 5. I can draw the conclusion that the EW list is more deliberately diverse than the AFI lists, or just reflect that the film industry has grown exponentially in every direction in the last twenty-five years and there was just more for EW to choose from. Probably both are somewhat true.
The EW list skewed my decade stats; I saw the most movies from the 80s and 90s simply because the EW list added an extra hundred of them to the total. For the AFI list, I watched films mostly from the 1970s, the 1960s and the 1930s. I needed to watch only two movies from the 1940s, considered by many to be the Golden Age of Hollywood, and well-represented on the list, because I had seen the majority of them already (Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca: already familiar).
Popular genres on the AFI lists are war movies and musicals, with a handful of westerns and mob movies. A lot of my favorites are the more unclassifiable ones: The Apartment. Fargo. All About Eve. The Philadelphia Story. Are these dramas? Comedies? I classify my absolute favorite genre of film as “the poignant comedy.” I wish it occurred more often in nature.