Entries in the Category "james cameron"
Osssssssscars!
I am reading all these bloggers who’ve pledged to see all the Best Picture nominees, or all the films with a non-technical nomination (that’s Sarah Bunting, and she almost did it). Some of them spent two Saturdays in a row parked in a movie theater seat watching five wannabe Best Pictures back-to-back. My major regret going into Oscar night is that I haven’t seen enough of the nominated movies. Living virtually across the street from a limited-release haven like the Cedar Lee, just about every one of these movies has crossed my path (not something I could say back when I was living in Lansing, Michigan--sorry Lansing). I went to an Oscar party in which the crowd was generally well-versed in movies—not just the big ones, but independents, foreigns, documentaries—and I wished I could have given more opinions instead of continually saying, “That looked really good. I heard that was good. I was going to see that. Everything I’ve read online says that was overrated, actually.”
The real problem is this whole being-in-grad-school thing, which will be over soon enough. I’ll be a cultural civilian again by May, and then it’s seeing movies all the time, reading books all the time, just because I damn well want to. And maybe next February I’ll plan my own Oscar film binge.
This year, I had to content myself watching the Oscars having seen only Inglourious Basterds, Up in the Air, Julie and Julia, and one-third of The Hurt Locker. I'm catching up on the other movies at my usual snail’s-pace rate. (Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning movies I have seen in the past few months: Valmont, Mrs. Brown, Frozen River, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Gangs of New York.)
Anyway, here are my totally uneducated thoughts on the proceedings.
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Misleading Hope for Inglourious Basterds!
So, last week I wrote about the Golden Globes, and how Avatar is going to steal everything from Inglourious Basterds.
Well, here's the good news: Inglourious Basterds won the SAG award for Best Ensemble last night! (Because the SAG awards only award performances, the top award is Best Ensemble, the de facto Best Picture.) The movie now has huge momentum heading into the Oscar race.
The news that makes it less impressive: Avatar, which downplayed actors' performances in favor of sci fi and CGI, was not nominated. Tarantino's opus beat out four other films. More than likely, when Oscar noms are announced (Tuesday, February 2), it will be Avatar and four underdogs.
If Inglourious Basterds is one of them, I'll be rooting for its unlikely victory.
Golden Globes Recap
This will be shorter and less detailed than my usual next-day awards show extravaganza. I had family visiting this weekend, and both my mom and aunt joined me for the Globes viewing, so we were able to crack jokes and comment on the clothes in real time, which sort of took away some of the excitement of doing it here. What can I say? SO SORRY INTERNET. We still have the Oscars.
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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.
Entertainment Weekly's 100 New Classics: Summed Up
I’m coming closer and closer to finishing up the AFI lists—with the most minimal effort it will happen this week—but before that happens I thought I would sum up the EW list with my two favorite things, opinions and statistics.
Here’s how I felt about the list:
Least enjoyed: Blue Velvet, Drugstore Cowboy, Evil Dead 2, Fatal Attraction, Natural Born Killers
Most enjoyed: A Room with a View, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Ed Wood, Glory, Hannah and Her Sisters, In the Mood for Love, Schindler’s List, The Incredibles, The Lives of Others
Most enjoyed (pre-list favorites): Back to the Future, Clueless, Donnie Brasco, Edward Scissorhands, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fargo, Ghostbusters, L.A. Confidential, Lost in Translation, Memento, Men in Black, Moulin Rouge, Office Space, Rushmore, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Naked Gun, The Silence of the Lambs, The Truman Show, Thelma and Louise, Witness
Additionally, I’ve been compiling a list of Notable Omissions--movies which were released between ’83 and ’07, and thus eligible for the list, but which are unaccountably absent. The list will appear in a future entry (or, if it keeps expanding, in two of them).
Here’s some stats that interested me:
The breakdown of the list by decade is 30 films from the 1980s, 45 from the 1990s and 25 from the 2000s. Even so, the majority of the films I watched were from the 1980s, which is easily enough explained: while my movie coverage has been adequate in the ‘90s and ‘00s, I’m still playing catch-up to movies that came out when I was a child.
The directors whose films I watched the most of were Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Alfonso Cuaron, Sam Raimi and James Cameron, at 2 films each. Cameron actually had 3 films on the list, but I had already seen Titanic (January 1997, the afternoon after I took my SATs, in case anyone cares). Other twice-appearing directors were Tim Burton, Rob Reiner, and Paul Thomas Anderson--each of whom had one movie I had seen previously and one movie which I watched this summer for the list--and Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir, Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers, each of whom had two films I had already seen.
One benefit of the EW list which I have mentioned previously is that its horizons extended beyond American-made movies. Another feature of the list, which I didn’t notice until I began compiling these stats yesterday, is that the EW list includes female directors--only five of them, but that still trounces either AFI list at zero and zero, respectively. Three of the female-helmed movies were massive hits: Shrek (co-directed by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson), Clueless (Amy Heckerling) and Big (Penny Marshall). I had seen all of those movies, multiple times on multiple occasions.
The other two were critical darlings, and represent the only two Oscar nominations for Best Director that have ever happened to women. Ever. [Edited to add: I have since checked IMDb and realized that I misread Jane Campion's biography. One other woman received a Best Director Oscar nomination, Lina Wertmuller in 1975. My indignance is, I think, still warranted.] Those movies are The Piano (Jane Campion, in 1994—this was a list movie) and Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, in 2004, already seen). Though neither woman won the directing award, both took home the same consolation prize: Best Original Screenplay. At this rate, another woman should be due to lose Best Director in another five years. That’s not a fault of the list, of course, but of Hollywood standards in general.
One final observation: the Entertainment Weekly list feels, in general, darker and more gothic than the AFI lists. It seems densely populated with drug movies, mob movies, serial killer movies, sci-fi creature-on-the-loose movies. I don’t think this is necessarily because those darker genres are being made more of today. Look again at my Ed Wood entry and all those movies Bela Lugosi made.
The difference is that genre movies are becoming increasingly more respected; probably Francis Ford Coppola started things off by making operatic mob movies (popular since the 1930s) which so effectively utilized the concept of the American dream that the Corleones became a part of our cultural fabric. These days, any serious director can make a critically-acclaimed crime movie (see last summer’s The Dark Knight, or, from two summers ago, Zodiac). On the flip side, so-called “feelgood” movies are losing respect. Too many brainless romantic comedies which force two patently unlikeable characters to kiss in the rain and get married as the end credits roll, too many of those disposable kids’ movies where the kid discovers his dog can fly and that helps him stand up against a bully, or whatever.
Basically, it’s hard to scrounge up the sincerity that elevates a movie like It’s a Wonderful Life above its Hallmark-y premise, and they just don’t do it that much anymore.
Reviews: ALL! ABOUT! ACTION!
I am not the audience for this movie. I can complain about it until the day ends, but this movie is designed to hit particular, comic book-inspired notes that, to my ears, sound tinny and unpleasant. And that's nobody's fault; it's not inherently wrong. I just hated it.
The way the characters talk, for example. Almost every scene opens with a character monologuing their heart out, declaring their motivations aloud for no reason other than that the story wants to feel transferred directly from a panel in a comic to the screen. I found myself imagining these stupid lines in a bubble over the character’s head, and they fit that way, they made sense. It’s nothing personal, I just want dialogue that sounds like how people actually talk, not the expository snippets that tell a story in a comic.
What did sort of offend me about this movie was the emotional manipulation required to keep dragging Tobey Maguire (whatever his stupid alter ego was called) back into the fray. Example one: the elevated train sequence. One of the many “scared passenger” extras in this movie is a young, beautiful woman who is holding a baby. A baby wrapped in a blanket. Because nothing looks more vulnerable than a beautiful young woman holding a baby wrapped in a blanket. (Maybe if she’d had a kerchief on her head like a movie immigrant.) But there is no reality to this situation, OK? What woman gallivants around town holding her baby wrapped in a blanket? The kid would be in a stroller or in one of those backpacky things.
Example two: the building on fire sequence. Don’t ask me, first of all, why, exactly, this is Spider-Man’s responsibility, and not the responsibility of firefighters, who DO exist in the universe of the film but for some reason are unable to reach any crime scene until after all the shit’s already gone down. Also don’t ask me whether or not I think the firemen would later tell old Tobey, “You’re a hero!” because they wouldn't. I don’t speak from experience, of course, but I’m guessing that people who risk their necks on a regular, professional basis don’t take too kindly to amateurs, and that the more likely remark would’ve been along the lines of, “What the eff did you think you were doing?”
But worse, the whole “there’s a kid in there!” rescue sequence made no sense from beginning to end. First of all, the kid had parents—we see them, out on the street, huddled and scared—WHY THE HELL did those parents not get the kid out when THEY got out? I can conceive of no situation where the parents end up on the street and the kid is inside the burning building—IN THE CLOSET—that doesn’t immediately point to Child Protective Services. Don’t ask me to care about the parents of the kid, is what I’m saying, because if they had been doing their jobs, Tobey wouldn’t have “had” to do it for them. The problem is, this movie wants to draw explicit lines between hero and citizen, between good and evil, etc., which again, fits a comic book world, but which is just not a world I’m interested in seeing. There’s so much dramatic potential in questioning those roles—see Gone Baby Gone or The Dark Knight, for examples—and so I find these movies where everything fits into its little boxes just really disappointing.
I wouldn’t make such a big deal about it, but it was on the list, and some of the reviews I read afterwards really exulted over what a triumph this movie was (for example, Entertainment Weekly’s). And it made no sense to me.
A better movie than Spider-Man 2, because there was a little ambiguity involved, particularly with the question of whether or not the inventor (of the machines which would eventually rebel) should be killed. That’s all I’m talking about, Spider-Man! A little debate, a little ambiguity! It’s not hard! James Cameron can do it! The guy who said, “I’m the king of the world!”
This is one of the few list movies which Jeremy agreed to watch with me—and which, in fact, he already possessed on DVD. In keeping with the dictum that I’m allowed to watch the movies in whatever frame of mind I choose, I approached this one with a full glass of Jack and tea, and indulged myself in Arnold-themed ridicule throughout. With the accent and all, it’s just so much fun to attribute dialogue to him: “I ahm da tehrminehter; I cuhm fruhm da fewture wehring lehhther.” I know I had cleverer ones, incidentally, but I can’t remember any of them.
As for the movie itself, it was not as dumb as I thought, nor as good as it could have been. The narrative was a little looser than I liked. For example, the Robert Patrick liquefying-terminator-guy disappears for about half an hour while the movie is figuring out the whole Sarah Connors: ASSASSIN? thing. This guy is striding so purposefully every time we see him, giving the impression that he will not give up until all are dead; but when we don’t see him, it sheds some doubt on how dynamically he’s really searching. Personally, I picture him kicking back with an iced tea at some highway rest stop. Would it have been so difficult for Cameron to cut to a shot of Patrick, striding purposefully, once or twice during that 30 minute period? It would’ve built the tension and everything…
Also, the relationship between Arnold and the kid (Edward Furlong, later arrested for freeing some grocery store lobsters while in a drunken stupor). The way the kid was endlessly nattering on to this futuristic robot, about his childhood, about whatever was on his mind. It was a very awkward way to relate the history to the audience, and it just made the kid seem sad, like he needed a friend. Still, somebody clearly liked this “gruff accented giant” plus “talkative child” energy, because Arnold replicated it several times.
The movie did have potential, though. It didn’t really explore the technology versus humanity theme, but that hasn’t stopped scholars from doing it—want a link to “Making Cyborgs, Making Humans: Of Terminators and Blade Runners” from The Cybercultures Reader? (And by the way, isn’t academia AWESOME?) Another positive point, like I said above, is that the movie was not afraid to debate. To question what was right or wrong! All you need is a dollop, Hollywood. It’s like cayenne pepper. It goes far.
Incidentally, Jeremy went to see the fourth film in the series (the one in theaters right now) and found it only OK.