100 Years...100 Movies 28-30: All About Eve, Double Indemnity, Apocalypse Now

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

The posters for these three movies sure have a lot of warm colors, don't they? Must've been sales on yellow and red ink back in '44, '50, and '79.

28. *All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
Watching All About Eve now for the first time, my general impression is that it is a film that feels not unlike The Dark Knight in execution. Unfortunately, by that comparison I don't mean that All About Eve is an ultraviolent crime film about urban decay, social order, and a caped hero's battle with laryngitis, though that would have been something all right. No, what I mean is that, like The Dark Knight, All About Eve is a merely good movie buoyed to greatness by a single, titanic supporting character who not only is more charismatic and interesting than all other aspects of the film combined but gets all the best lines to boot. The Dark Knight has Heath Ledger's Joker; All About Eve has Bette Davis's Margo Channing. It's a tired thing to say, but I'll say it anyway because it's true: every time Bette Davis was onscreen, I could not look away. She plays Margo with an electric spitefulness undercut by just the tiniest bit of sadness, and it's riveting. As for the rest of the movie... it's fine. I enjoyed it. Anne Baxter's Eve (you know, the one the movie is all about) is a distant second for most interesting character, but the rest of the cast never even comes close to either the gripping venom of Davis or the coy puppeteering of Baxter. That's not to say they're bad; it's just the hazard of playing workman parts in a movie dominated by one or two larger-than-life ones. Also, that ending is awfully neat, being all symmetric with the beginning of the plot and all. I'd say it's at least a little too cute for the movie, although if you're looking for great final shots, this film certainly has one for the ages.

29. *Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
So, this turned out to be pretty much great. I can't decide if I'm surprised or not, given my sometimes enthusiastic but more often reserved feelings for film noir, but this movie riveted me from beginning to end. It delivers solid thrills and cool twists and be-u-tee-ful camerawork and lighting (per usual for ol' film noir), and the plotting is refreshingly straightforward. Something I'm embarrassed to be realizing just now: Billy Wilder is a great director. I don't know how I've never put it together before doing this series, but if nothing else, I should have been clued in by his credits on both Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Still, if this is the movie that finally caused me to stand up and notice that name, well, I guess I'm okay with that. The only gripe I have with Double Indemnity is maybe not even a gripe at all but more of a misreading. For about ninety percent of the film, I thought I was seeing something of an anomaly in film noir in that I thought I detected a fully formed moral conscience in the voiceover narration of our hero, Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff. At various points in the story, the film returns to a framing device of a visibly perturbed Walter recounting the story of his criminal liaison with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) into his boss's audio recorder. With each return to this frame, Walter appears more and more distressed, accumulating sweat and rumpled hair, while his voice in his narration becomes increasingly strained. I interpreted this decay of his physique (as well as the whole act of confession) as a sign of Walter's feeling remorse for the murder, fraud, adultery, et al. that he commits over the course of the film. As it turns out (spoilers) he isn't remorseful for his actions after all; he's merely dying of a gunshot wound he got when committing yet another murder. His confession isn't an attempt to do the right thing, just a final taunt to his boss. So yeah, Walter's just about as amoral as the rest of the canon of noir heroes. That that internal conflict wasn't actually happening was a tricky move by an already tricky movie, and I'm not sure that it makes the movie worse exactly. I suppose I'm just feeling a little foolish. And come on, wouldn't it have been at least a little cool for him to show some moral compunction?

30. Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)
People throw around the word "nightmarish" to describe all sorts of movies, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Donnie Darko. But Apocalypse Now is one of the few movies that I can remember actually giving me nightmares. And I was twenty-two years old when I first saw it. Now, there's the distinct possibility that I'm just a wimp, or that my mind was just in a weird state the night I saw it. I certainly wouldn't call it the scariest movie I've ever seen, at least not during the actual viewing. What Apocalypse Now is, though, is a particularly unsettling intersection of philosophy and technique, where the ideas at play in the narrative feed off the technical aspects of the film like cinematography, music, etc., and those aspects in turn feed off the ideas in the narrative until the whole thing is a kind of Möbius strip of filmmaking where it's hard to separate the fictional elements (e.g. the whole story) from the nonfiction elements (the process of making the movie). In most movies, the obvious artifice of the filmmaking provides a buffer between us and the events playing out onscreen; we can intuit that it's fake, so we can engage the film's ideas more obliquely than we could if we encountered them in real life. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but something about Apocalypse Now obliterates that buffer. The fact that the filming of Apocalypse Now was, by all accounts, one of the worst filmmaking experiences of all time for those involved surely plays a hand in this. Watching the movie, I feel like I am brushing up against a reality of man's essential depravity so tangible that I could reach out and touch its feverish face if I wanted. It's been called a war movie, and I suppose it does take place during a war, but really, it's not about just war. It's about something baser, something sick and colossal clawing up from our unconscious. And unlike most movies, I can't turn off the screen and feel better about it any more than I can close the blinds and feel better about a thunderstorm outside my apartment. Heart of darkness indeed.

It's going to be a while until I post next (like, at least a week), so hopefully this post can tide over all y'all rabid readers out there. As always, feel free to discuss any and every aspect of these movies with me. It's great to hear from folks.

If you want, feel free to read the previous entry in the series, #s 25-27, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next entry, 31-33, here.

100 Years...100 Movies 25-27: To Kill a Mockingbird, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, High Noon

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

More movies. Y'all know the drill.

25. *To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Robert Mulligan)
I watched To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time just a few days before deciding to embark on this blog series, so what the heck, I'll give it the ol' first-time asterisk. And you know, I pretty much loved it. The story of To Kill a Mockingbird (both here and in the original Harper Lee novel) is simple enough that it should be easy to out-think. I've seen some critics try: the plot is naive, the morals are too neat, the racism is too clean, the black characters are thinly drawn despite being key in one of the focal threads, that mockingbird metaphor is, well, that mockingbird metaphor, and if we're talking about the movie specifically, the direction is kind of flat and unremarkable. So on and so on. I understand what they're saying, but try as I might, the sheer magnitude of the work's humanity just bowls over any reservations. There's an uncondescending sincerity about To Kill a Mockingbird that makes the film feel tender and real in a way that is super rare in movies. Plus, I think those criticisms are overlooking how the story is couched entirely in the perspective of an elementary-school-aged child. Our glimpses of the courtroom come from an eight-ish-year-old girl peering in through the door window and over the balcony-seat railings. Scout is a girl who, even at the film's end, is still in the process of coming of age, so the bits of the adult world that trickle down into her realm of understanding are of course a little simple. That the directing is so indistinct (the critics are right about that—Mulligan could sure learn some lessons from E.T. on how to shoot a child's POV) does kind of obscure this perspective, but it's a perspective nonetheless. I've been weirdly backhanded in my compliments in this response, so let me end on a note of strong positivity: this movie is beautiful, not in a flashy way but in an unpretentious way that makes the outgrowth of tragedy from both human depravity and decency in the film's final act all the more profound. High praise from this reviewer.

26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939, Frank Capra)
This is one of those movies that it's been a long time since I've seen. Like, a really long time; think family movie night ten-to-fifteen years ago. And yet, for all that distance between me now and my viewing of this movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington remains vivid in my memory, with little of the afterimage or detail distortion that sometimes plagues my movie watching even now. Some of that memorial vividness probably has to do with the fact that I watched way fewer movies back when I was in middle school than I do now, thus making my head less crowded with movies to blur together. But I'd guess the main reason it's stuck with me is the sheer winsomeness of the picture combined with the heft of its subject matter. Jimmy Stewart is charming as ever, but all that charm might come off as kind of smarmy on the movie's part if his performance weren't paired with such a bleak picture of our nation's politics. Not that it's a bleak movie; we're dealing with Frank Capra here. But it's a movie that is uncommonly successful at mixing optimism for the promise of our political system with cynicism at the reality of how things play out. I think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is plenty aware of the fairy-tale-esque "man against the odds" plot that takes the titular Mr. Smith from small-town bumpkin to political white knight—those scenes with Mr. Smith first laying eyes on the dazzling monuments in Washington, D.C., are just a tad too rose-colored (especially when compared to the actual corruption in the movie's D.C.) to be read as completely sincere. Yet the film also seems to be saying that in some iteration of our government's reality, this plot could happen, if we all somehow did the right thing. It's a tricky line to walk, to be both cynical and optimistic, but Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is proof that when pulled off, it's a powerful combination.

27. High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)
Can one lousy song ruin an entire movie? Well, not really. I mean, I still like High Noon and everything. But "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'" sure does try its darnedest to spoil the whole thing. I mean, for crying out loud, what is the deal with "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'"?? First of all, it's dull as already-dried paint. I like old country music, but "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'" apparently found the exception to that rule. Second of all, the lyrics are just so heavy-handed. Do we really need a song that not only explicitly states the major and minor themes of the film but also recounts specific incidents from the film as evidence? I don't think so. Imagine if Spider-Man 2 (we're talking the Sam Raimi one, because they didn't make any more Spidey movies after that one, right?) had integrated the cartoon theme song into the most dramatic sections of its score instead of just making it a one-off joke in middle. That would be awful and cheesy and undercut a lot of the tension, right? High Noon, ladies and gentlemen. Listen, I get it that the technicalities of "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'" are pretty cool; the movie's score was pretty innovative in its seamless use of both mood music and a pop song. And look, High Noon is a great movie otherwise, a deceptively simple one-act drama with layers and layers of metaphorical meaning. But that song, y'all.

It's weird, but the hardest part of this series has turned out to be writing these stupid introductions/conclusions to bookend my responses to the movies. So, I'm sorry if the housekeeping perfunctoriness of these bits is getting lame. Really, though, I'm running out of ways to say "Here are three movies and my thoughts on them. See ya!" So, well... yeah. Let me know what you think about these movies. Until next time!

If you fancy a look back, you can read the previous post in the series, #s 22-24, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next post, #s 28-30, here.

100 Years...100 Movies 22-24: Some Like It Hot, The Grapes of Wrath, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

I got to watch another new one: the good ol' Grapes of Wrath. I'm starting to run out of things to say in these little preambles, so I'm just going to jump right into the movies.

22. Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)
Is Some Like It Hot the funniest American movie of all time? It's the highest-ranked comedy on the 100 Years...100 Movies list (as well as #1 over at their 100 Years...100 Laughs list from back in 2000), so it seems like the folks over at AFI think so. I'm inclined to disagree with that assessment, although I'm not strongly inclined. Some Like It Hot is a very, very funny movie, and considering the generally short shelf life of film humor, that's an even more impressive feat than it would be anyway. A good deal of the credit has to go to the screenplay, which is as razor-sharp as one has ever been; nobody's perfect, the movie reminds us in its final seconds, but golly if Some Life It Hot's screenplay doesn't come close, especially with that closing line. It's all too common to have a frontloaded comedy, with all the best jokes in the first forty-five minutes, but even with the best, most consistent comedies, how many leave their biggest laugh to the very last sentence of the movie? I'm not always as head-over-heels for famous movie quotes as the rest of society seems to be (I'll admit, I was expecting a little more from "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"); "Nobody's perfect," though... even I can't knock that. It's also a line that gets at another reason this movie's humor has aged particularly well: that gender roles are treated with a level of fluidity uncommon even in modern comedies. Being a complete non-expert on the topic, I'd guess that you'd have to look to somewhere in European cinema to find a movie of the era more ahead of its time on the subject. What's cool about all the subversion of gender is that it puts Some Like It Hot into that rare class of comedy films that work not just on the merits of their jokes but also on their intricate thematic merits as well. It's even rarer for a non-satirical movie like Some Like It Hot to work this way. So yeah, great stuff.

23. *The Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford)
This movie is dark. Not in a thematic or narrative sense (and maybe that's a problem—more on that later), but like literally dark, as in dimly lit. So much of this film's action is obscured by night and shadow; there's a supercut to be made of all the shots in this movie that present characters speaking with their mouths completely hidden by blackness. Maybe not a particularly interesting supercut, but hey, you heard it here first! All that darkness is quite visually arresting, and it's by far the most striking feature about this movie for me. Really, it's frequently beautiful. And yet, for all of its literal darkness, I can't help but feel that the movie could do with more thematic darkness. Either that, or I'm just having trouble separating the film from the John Steinbeck novel it's adapting. Here's the thing: this movie ain't nearly as good as the book. As much as I realize how that's a tiresome evaluation to make of a movie, considering they're different media and all, but this movie navigates such a distracting dichotomy between being absolutely faithful to the novel and completely disregarding the novel's thematic intent that I can't ignore the comparison. It's unfortunate that the film has lost almost all of the biblical/mythic feel of the novel; however, I can deal with that. If it makes your movie better, whatever. The real sticking point is that darn ending, which just feels like a big, fat lie to me, although again, my judgement may be impaired by my prior associations with the novel. I suppose I shouldn't have been expecting anything as utterly strange as the novel's real ending (spoilers: it involves a young woman breastfeeding a starving man), but why is the film's conclusion so intent on optimism and that you-can't-crush-us spirit when one of the main threads of the novel was that yes, you can crush us? While the novel rails against a society that destroys its lowest economic tier, the movie just kinda shrugs and says, "Eh, the problems are bad, but those guys will find a way to survive." Despite the novel's best attempts, I'm not a socialist, but it's still depressing to see such a strongly felt sentiment as Steinbeck's watered down like that.

24. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Steven Spielberg)
By my reckoning, E.T. is the single best movie Steven Spielberg has ever made. It's certainly the most best "Spielbergian" feature in his filmography, by which I mean that it has the most successful employment of his trademarks: suburban melancholy, cinematic lyricism, sentimentality, brisk plotting, and, most of all, people gazing upward in awe as the camera approaches their face. Schindler's List might be a "better" movie in strict terms of craft and gravity, but it's mostly better in a way that subdues those Spielberg hallmarks, as it should given the weight of its subject matter. That being said, E.T. is way more subdued than a lot of people give it credit for. I feel like people retroactively graft the tone of the film's final fifteen minutes (i.e. the post-resurrection chase, by far the most flamboyantly Spielbergian sequence of the film) onto the movie as a whole. That's certainly what I did for years. But you know what? Most of E.T. is way not like the movie's rambunctious, fanciful, tear-jerking, sort-of-silly-but-still-wonderful last fifteen minutes. Maybe you guys remember all this better than I did, but upon rewatching this movie a year or two ago for the first time since maybe middle school, I was seriously taken aback by how quiet and stark most of the movie is. It's not so much a movie about a boy and his magical alien friend as it is a movie about a lonely, confused, bullied boy whose childhood is disrupted by the messiness of the adult world and his lost, lonely, equally confused alien friend. I remembered all that loneliness and confusion being in the subtext of the film, but I had totally forgotten (or maybe even not realized—I was not the most observant middle schooler) the hushed, beautiful way that Spielberg's direction thrusts those emotions to the foreground of like eighty percent of the movie [1]. Such is the tremendous power of the movie's still moments—Elliott letting the dishwater's steam obscure his face, for instance, or the many snippets of his mother's phone conversations that slip in and out of the background throughout the film—that it almost feels like a mistake when the movie breaks free of such restraint at the end and becomes a loud action setpiece, backlit by a positively deafening John Williams score. Almost. For all its messiness and tonal whiplash, that last sequence infuses E.T. with exactly the joy, catharsis, and sheer wonder that it needs, flying bikes, rainbow exhaust, and all. And dang it, I cry every single time.

Another three down! Next time: three movies about heroic white guys bucking the system. Until then, be sure to let me know what you think!

If you want, you can go back and read the previous post in the series, #s 19-21 on the list, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next post, #25-27, here.

1] Not to overstate the quietness or anything. You won't find Ingmar Bergman's name in the credits. I mean, it's still a movie in which we get E.T. flying Elliott's bike across the biggest moon you've ever seen, which holy cow, if that isn't one of the greatest images in film ever, I don't know what is. Still, the relative stillness of the film is striking.

100 Years...100 Movies 19-21: On the Waterfront, It's a Wonderful Life, Chinatown

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

As promised last time, this post is full of movies I've already seen: one that I'm intimately familiar with and two others that I know a little less thoroughly. It'll be obvious in the write-ups which is which. And now here we go—hold on to your butts.

19. On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan)
First of all, how cool is that poster? There are plenty of sweet movie posters out there, but this one really takes the cake, especially when compared to the usually pretty but less dynamic posters from other movies of the era. Another thing about that poster: doesn't it kind of look like a propaganda piece? The evil unions are here to crush the American Individual with a red fist of Communism! Thankfully, the movie isn't like that at all, although it's notable for being one of the few politically conservative "message" movies that I think is legitimately great. A question that plagues me at least monthly: why are there so few talented artists who are politically conservative? Setting aside demographic quandaries for now, though, this movie is a triumph of moral storytelling, and a rousing thriller/character piece as well. Regardless of how you swing politically, this movie has a way of winning you over with its likable characters, who have a real Springsteen-esque desperation to them. Oh yeah, and I've read that Marlon Brando basically re-wrote the acting book with his method performance in this movie. I don't know enough about acting to confirm or deny, but dang, he sure is riveting here.

20. It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
I have seen this movie so many freaking times. Like, at least once a year since I was around five, and during several of those years, the number of viewings far surpassed just once. And unlike Star Wars or Toy Story (the two distant runners up for most-seen film on this list), most of those viewings were forced upon me by my parents, who decided to make a tradition of rounding up the family every Christmas to watch a movie about a man whose life is so calculatedly against him that he considers committing suicide even though he's married to Donna Reed. So, needless to say, my relationship with this movie has been quite the tumultuous one. As of right now, though, I've pretty much come full-circle on my feelings regarding the films, from my adoration of it as a youngster, to my jaded, smarter-than-thou teenaged years of hating it (the money I would pay to go back in time and punch the past me in the face), to now, my early twenties, when I realize that hey, it's a pretty great movie after all. A lot of ink has been spilled analyzing the many, many strengths of It's a Wonderful Life, so rather than being comprehensive, I'm going to wax specific in what's left of this response. One strength I noticed for the first time in my most recent viewing of the film is just how natural and loose everything feels. Not really the story so much (I mean, we're dealing with talking galaxy angels here), but the acting and structure of the individual scenes feel so alive and uncalculated, in a way that seems so lively when compared to the relative staginess of most films of the era. Just look at any of the several scenes that takes place in a crowded environment: characters meander drunkenly in and out of the shot, actors have to yell at one another to be heard over the ambient noise, snippets of dialogue come from every which direction, overlap, not one of them aimed at the microphone. Capra allows the chaos of human interaction to slip into these scenes, and it's marvelous. The same goes for the acting, especially of Jimmy Stewart, who makes his role feel so lived-in by inhabiting perfectly the natural choreography of someone's interactions with people he knows very well. The most convincing argument for this life being wonderful comes not from the magical fable at the film's end but rather in the film's depiction of the beautiful, uncontrollable vibrancy of everyday human existence. It's sentiment done exactly right.

21. Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
I've only seen Chinatown once, and I'm not sure that I got it. Like, don't get me wrong, I see exactly what everyone is talking about when they praise its screenplay and especially the acting and all that. Jack Nicholson has never been better, and the only other role I can think of in which Faye Dunaway's topped hers here is her Oscar-winning television mogul part in Network. The cinematography and direction are uniformly excellent, too, though I do prefer Polanski's tense, showier stuff like Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby. Nevertheless, it's a fantastically put-together movie, and I'm not here to contest that. When I say I didn't "get" Chinatown, I mean that I had a hard time following the plot, which is not only multi-layered but also understated. And there you have one of my most embarrassing characteristics as a movie-watcher (or book-reader or television-viewer): I'm often terrible at keeping up with plotting. I love a good story, but if there's not a certain amount of hand-holding, exposition, and/or a clear emotional through-line, you've lost me. Consequently, film noir and its modern offspring (which includes Chinatown) are often challenging viewing experiences for me. Given enough time and re-watches, I can usually sort everything out, but that's not a courtesy I've allowed Chinatown. So I'm left admiring the film a good deal without really connecting with or even understanding it. I'm ashamed.

Now I'm more than one fifth of the way through the list! Woot woot! Slightly less iconic films to come, though nothing too shocking. Feel free to let me know whatever thoughts you guys have so far. It's always great to hear from the readership. Until next time!

You can read the previous post in the series, #s 16-18, here.
Update: Read on to the next post, 22-24, here.

100 Years...100 Movies 16-18: Sunset Boulevard, The Graduate, The General

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Okay, finally there's another movie I'm watching for the first time. Other than that, more oldies but goodies. Without further ado...

16. Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)
I love this movie. The acting is phenomenal, the plot is both propulsive and thematically complex, and the production details have a pleasingly meta quality that appeals to the film geek part of me. It's also a notably weird movie, juxtaposing the stylistic excesses of silent-era fame with the hard-boiled pragmatism of more modern screenwriters in a way that is deeply unsettling. Chimpanzee funeral, anyone? The odd thing is, for as rich of a movie as Sunset Boulevard is, I really don't have a lot to say about it. That's not to indicate that it's in any way a lesser movie or one unworthy of discussion; I just can't think of an angle right now. So, uh, moving on... nothing to see here...

17. The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols)
For me, The Graduate is basically a certain kind of pop album. What I mean is, there are albums with deep cuts, where the interesting music stretches beyond the well-known hit songs, and then there are albums in which the hits are unquestionably the best things the disc has going for it [1]. More and more I'm feeling that if The Graduate were an album, it would be of the latter kind. The parts you remember—the humor, the ennui, the Simon and Garfunkel, "Plastics," "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me," the final scene (and good golly that final scene, it never ceases to hit me like a truck [2])—are all great and totally deserving of their spaces in your memory. As for the rest of the movie, though, the problem is that The Graduate has no deep cuts. I don't mean that it's a bad movie or anything; I quite like it. But save for the famous bits, I think it's a merely good movie, not a great one. The cinematography and editing, for example, are competent, but not remarkable outside the iconic scenes. And there's the use of the music, which in many spots really hasn't aged very well at all—not the songs, mind you; those tunes are pretty timeless, if you ask me, and perfect for this movie. However, the way those songs are employed in the film (particularly their repetition; poor "Mrs. Robinson" is wrung dry) seems occasionally artless and primitive to these modern ears, and yeah, I know that The Graduate was doing a lot of innovation in this area, but still. You won't hear me knocking the use of "Sound of Silence," though, which again, that frikkin' final scene! I'm going on and on about it, I know, but the film's conclusion is so good it almost makes me forget that most of the preceding hour and a half isn't quite the classic that the final moments deserve. I suspect a lot of other people share that experience, too, which explains AFI's putting this film in the top twenty.

18. *The General (1927, Buster Keaton)
A thought occurred to me while watching Buster Keaton's fantastic The General. Now, I'm not really a silent film guy. It's not that I don't like them; I just haven't seen that many. I say I love Charlie Chaplin, and I do, but I haven't even watched close to half of his feature-length films. What I'm getting at is, take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, given that I know even less about the silent era than the rest of cinema. That being established, the idea is this: that the most direct inheritor of silent comedy's legacy is the modern action movie, especially in its contemporary, CGI-laden form. The nimble choreography, softened violence, stunts that bend the laws of physics, the controlled uncontrollability of environmental details on said stunts—these are all characteristics shared by both the silent-era comedy and the CGI-era action flick, characteristics that rarely appear together in other contemporary genres. If you ignore obvious differences in production and culture, it's not that hard to draw a line from the staging of the setpieces in The General to those in Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies or the Marvel superhero films. Of course, ignoring production differences is ignoring a huge aspect of what makes The General so incredible: that they're real, and they're spectacular, and I'm not talking about anything to do with Teri Hatcher. I mean that those are honest-to-goodness real trains in the movie, not models or CG polygons or whatever. Real trains! Buster Keaton is jumping from car to car on an actual moving engine! He's on a legitimate cowcatcher! They crashed an actual locomotive on that bridge scene! Modern special effects can be super cool, but they would improve nothing about The General. It's cinematic derring-do at its best.

Do you agree with me on any of these films? Disagree? Want to add something more insightful than my non-response on Sunset Boulevard? Let me know! Next time on this blog series: more movies I've already seen. I promise we'll get to a point where the unseen movies are more plentiful, but first we've got to work our way through the more popular first quarter of this list. Until then!

If you're interested, you can read the previous post in the series, entries 13-15, here.
Update: Read the next post, 19-21, here.

1] Yes, I just used the words "album" and "disc" to describe a collection of music. Yes, I still buy CDs. Come at me, bro.

2] Plus, it's also responsible for spawning my favorite recurring joke from last year's new season of Arrested Development. Now that's what I call taking ownership of a pop culture reference.

100 Years...100 Movies 13-15: Star Wars, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Lots of sci-fi this post. And a horror movie. Good to see AFI giving attention to some less-critically respected genres, even if they did pick the safest, most obvious works in each genre. Still, sci-fi and horror are sci-fi and horror, and their presence is a rare treat on this list. Let's savor that for a minute.

13. Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)
Ah, Star Wars. Holy cow, Star Wars. If The Wizard of Oz was the first movie on this list to hold a significant nostalgia-factor for me, Star Wars is the movie that holds the biggest nostalgia factor on the list, give or take Toy Story way back at the end. Whole swatches of my life are defined by the original Star Wars trilogy and the accompanying novelizations (plus all those Extended Universe works—Thrawn Trilogy all the way!), and I'm sure there are at least a couple other generations of kids who could say the same. I could write volumes in response to this movie. But I won't. Instead, I just want to point out the significance of AFI's preservation of the film's original title. Nowadays, this movie goes by Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, but the episode number and subtitle weren't added until after The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. That's important to note because it emphasizes how in 1977 Star Wars hadn't yet acquired a lot of the self-serious, mythological elements that came to define the series, like the nature of the Force, the specifics of Jedi philosophy, and the broader socio-political sweep of the titular Wars. Sure, there are hints of all that in Star Wars, but I get the feeling that a lot of those hints gained retroactive significance only after George Lucas and the sequels culled them into the scope of a larger series by adding Episode IV: A New Hope to the title [1]. What sometimes gets lost within the larger context of the sequels and prequels is just how childlike everything is in the original Star Wars. Not childish, mind you, but childlike, in the sense that the whole movie seems constructed with the sincere, innocent excitement of a child at play. With Star Wars, George Lucas has a singular vision of trying to recreate his childhood experience of watching sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon, so of course the movie plays out with wide-eyed attention to thrills and swashbuckling. People talk a lot about the heavy nostalgia of Lucas's other major early work, American Graffiti, but Star Wars is just as nostalgic an enterprise, if not more so; it's a movie about going to the movies as a kid, awed at the darkness of the theater and the striking light of the projected image. Fittingly, the film opens with the words "A long time ago," as if it's not just the plot but also the viewing of onscreen space battles that happened so many years in the past.

14. Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
Psycho is still terrifying. It's not a shock-a-minute thrill ride or anything like that (in fact, there are really just three "scares" in the entire film), but when Hitchcock does decide to let rip with the horror, oh man, does he. And for a fifty-four-year-old horror movie in a genre whose scare factor doesn't tend to age that well (The Wolf Man, for example, is a fine movie, but not one likely to frighten modern audiences), that's saying something. Critics have done tons of analysis on how the cinematography and editing and sound design make moments like the infamous shower scene so viscerally frightening, and I agree with them wholeheartedly; the rapid cuts and screeching score in particular are scary in a way that I can't shake, even when I know to expect them. But I also have another, more subjective theory on why this movie continues to scare to add to all that fancy film school analysis: Psycho is still scary because it operates outside the cinematic conventions of its own subgenre. Here's what I mean by that: Psycho basically invented a whole new kind of horror movie, the slasher (in which pretty young people are murdered one-by-one by some menace; see also: Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc.), that ended up dominating the genre for a few decades. During all this domination, the slasher movie developed its own visual shorthand to scare audiences: killer POV camera, slow-building score that cuts silent right before the actual scare moment, and a whole host of other techniques that became so common that they became more of a signifier of fear than any sort of real scare. "Something scary is about the happen," they say. But Psycho, being the foundational text in the subgenre, doesn't have that convention to inform its cinematic style, so the frightening events happen in a way that feels completely alien—and therefore more startling—to modern audiences. Or maybe that's just me, and I'm a wimp. Either way, this movie rocks.

15. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
Out of all the films on this list, 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the one most hurt by my decision to not rewatch any movies I've already seen. Here's the deal: as of my most recent viewing, I did not like this movie; I found it tedious and needlessly glacial in its pacing, and the use of classical music in the score seemed overblown and portentous [2]. And then there was the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence, which felt horribly aged to me, a relic of psychedelia rather than the (what I then considered) superior, majestic sweep of the book's ending. I was a big fan of the book. And don't get me wrong, I respected things about the movie. I recognized that the camerawork was generally excellent, the special effects somehow still looked amazing (save for those awful color filters in the "...Beyond the Infinite" sequence), and I totally got behind the film's general philosophical—even religious—ambition of depicting mankind's encounter with the sublime transcendence of a power totally beyond human reckoning [3]. But that's all it was: respect. In the end, I reservedly respected the movie a whole lot more than I enjoyed it, and the parts I disliked, I disliked more than the parts I liked. And that's been my general feeling on the movie ever since. The thing is, though, I saw the movie as a senior in high school. A lot of things have changed about me since then, most relevantly to this discussion that I'm now much more likely to enjoy a movie based on its technical artistry and imagery than I was then. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that I would kind of love it if I saw it again. I probably will revisit the film soon. But I also think it's a valuable exercise in honesty to write down my long-held opinions on a film without altering them last-minute to something more in-line with the critical climate. Hence this post sans rewatch.

Next post, we'll finally hit a movie I haven't seen yet (The General, if you're curious). Until then, feel free to chastise me for my opinions about any of the movies here. Or you could agree with me; that's cool, too. Either way, I'm looking forward to hearing y'all's opinions. Until next time!

Read the previous entry in the series, #s 10-12 on the list, here.
Update: Read the next entry, #s 16-18, here.

1] Look no further than the novelization of each of the original movies for proof of this retroactive culling. Since the novels were written immediately following the release of each movie, each book is a fascinating time capsule of what the Star Wars series envisioned itself as at different times in its development. There's some weird, noncanonical stuff in those books, enough that it's clear that Lucas didn't exactly have a grand unification theory for the series until maybe Return of the Jedi. Throw in the totally bizarre (at least, in the context of what Star Wars would become) direct-to-paperback sequel, 1978's Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and you've got one head-scratching series identity.

2] Honestly, I think a big part of my problem with the classical pieces was my familiarity with them before seeing 2001. Pieces like "Also sprach Zarathustra" and "The Blue Danube" have been used in so many different cultural contexts (not the least of which is this cartoon, which I watched early and often in my childhood) that it was hard for me to separate those associations with the music. It's a weird and slightly parodic experience to picture cartoon ducks when I'm supposed to be in awe of waltzing spaceships. Now that I think about it, that may have been a large part of my problem with the film as a whole. It's such a famous, iconic movie that long before actually seeing it, I was already familiar with much of its imagery and signature moments through pop culture referentiality and parody. You can only see so many spoofs of that bone-to-spaceship cut, only so many Simpsons jokes, only so many tongue-in-cheek "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" appropriations, before the whole movie starts to feel a little laughable itself.

3] Say what you will about Arthur C. Clarke, but this recurring theme is his work knocks me flat every time. It's an incredibly powerful idea to me, and one that rings true not only with my Christian beliefs but also with my day-to-day experiences with creation. Humanity is so freaking tiny, man.

100 Years...100 Movies 10-12: The Wizard of Oz, City Lights, The Searchers

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

As I said in the last post, I've already seen the next eight entries on the AFI 100 Years...100 Movies list, so I didn't actually have to watch any of these films again to write the commentary. Hence the speedy posting. I really, really like all three of these movies, so I'm sorry if there's some gushing of praise here. But honestly, these are some seriously good movies.

10. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)
In my treatment of Singin' in the Rain last week, I mentioned that there is at least one musical on this list that I love. Well, here it is. And it's not just because I love The Dark Side of the Moon [1]. Like no other movie I can think of, The Wizard of Oz is a display of the pure joy of cinema. This is a movie that is in love with the magic of filmmaking, and every aspect of the film radiates this playful energy that makes it the rare work to successfully combine beauty with upbeatness without being cloying. Take that famous scene (really, is there any other kind of scene in this movie?) when Dorothy walks out of her house into Oz for the first time, and the movie blossoms into Technicolor. In the shot panning out from Dorothy's black-and-white door into the vibrant Munchkinland, the great thing is not just that Dorothy or we the audience is awed by the wonder of color but that the movie itself seems amazed by what's unfolding onscreen. What could have come off as silly or hokey (especially to modern eyes—are those flowers made of wax?) instead feels captivating, a magic show somehow without the cynicism of deception. Such unbridled enthusiasm characterizes pretty much the whole movie, from the songs (which, c'mon, how can you not love?) to the acting to the set design to the cinematography itself, and it's all so successful in its exuberant straightforwardness that I'm forced to admit (albeit begrudgingly) that it was probably a good choice to ditch the more complicated mythology of L. Frank Baum's novels. In the interest of transparency, I should also mention that The Wizard of Oz is the first movie on this list that brings with it a hefty dose of nostalgia for me. I have very pleasant memories from early in childhood of me being super excited any time the movie came on TV. So there's the chance that I'm looking at this movie through a slightly tinted lens. Do with that what you will, I guess, but as me for, I'll go on loving this film.

11. City Lights (1931, Charlie Chaplin)
Ah, here we have our first Charlie Chaplin film. I'll be honest: City Lights isn't my favorite of Chaplin's. Don't get me wrong; I like it plenty, but it doesn't quite reach the heights of either the immaculately timed staging of The Gold Rush or the pitch-dark social critique of Modern Times (both of which appear later in the list and are about tied for my favorite Chaplin film). It's perhaps a little unfair to call it a "flaw" of City Lights to not be The Gold Rush or Modern Times, though, since clearly the film isn't trying to be either of those. Sure, there are elements of mild social commentary in the film's mocking of the bourgeoisie (mocking that would later flower into full-on rancor in Modern Times), but what the movie does try to be is largely a romance. And on that level, I think it's a success. Modern Times has the social commentary, The Gold Rush has the comedic setpieces, but City Lights is unquestionably (for me, at least) the peak of Chaplin's humanism among the films of his that I've seen, and it's the central romance between the Tramp and the flower girl that allows for it. Plenty of other Chaplin features had romantic interests, but the beautiful sincerity with which this one is portrayed make it emotionally naked on a level that's rare, even in Chaplin movies. I do feel that parts of this film dip too deeply into sentimentalism at times, but man, if the film's ending doesn't make up for it in spades. I don't think it's a perfect movie, but that final scene is cinematic perfection, for sure.

12. The Searchers (1956, John Ford)
And speaking of perfect endings: ladies and gentlemen, The Searchers. And it's not just a perfect ending but perfect ending shot: the frame slowly collapsing into the doorway as the characters exit the screen to leave John Wayne's character walking away from the camera, alone in the small field of vision remaining. And that's what we as an audience are left with, too: the lingering image of this titanic, cruel, iconic character who is this dually off-putting and magnetic version of the all-American hero. I don't think of John Wayne as a great actor, but he has a tremendous screen presence in any movie he's in (and heck, that might as well be enough to make him a great actor); here in The Searchers, that presence is at its most fascinating. Along with True Grit, The Searchers is the most self-reflective role the Duke ever played, an intriguingly non-partisan depiction of both the brutality and nobility inherent in the gunslinger archetype in the same way that True Grit's Rooster contrasts the mockable, showman aspects of the character type with his eventual heroism. That non-partisan aspect of The Searchers is the darnedest thing, too, because it also makes the film extremely slippery to interpret. I for one think that the anti-racism often ascribed to the movie by modern critics is slightly overstated—making Ethan Edwards as cruel as the archetypal Native Americans in Western movies is not quite the same thing as making a statement against the cruelty against that people group, although I do think that the movie has one of the more sophisticated depictions of race relations among classic Westerns. It's a morally ambiguous work of art for sure, and not one of those works that belabors its moral ambiguity by repeatedly calling attention to it (e.g. Breaking Bad [2], to jump media for a moment) either. In The Searchers, we don't see the formation or philosophical mechanics of a moral framework, just the grim (and maybe even successful?) application of a system so ingrained in a man that he performs it automatically. And that's powerful cinema, no matter how slippery.

That's all for now. I'll be posting about the next three movies shortly, maybe in the next couple days. As always, I encourage discussion here. Do you, for example, nourish a virulent hatred of The Wizard of Oz? Well, feel free to explain the inexplicable and tell me about it! I hope it's apparent that I'm not trying to be any sort of authority on this blog, so I look forward to alternative points of view. Until next time.

You can read the previous entry in this series, #s 7-9 on the list, here.
Update: The next post, #s 13-15, is up, and you can read it here.

1] For the record, I found the whole Dark Side of the Rainbow thing where you play Pink Floyd alongside this movie to be pretty disappointing, save for two points: 1) the beginning of "Money" where the bobbing munchkins match the cash registers and 2) the "black...blue" moment of "Us and Them" when the Wicked Witch of the West and Dorothy correspond to the respective colors. Other than that... I guess I needed to be in an altered state of consciousness or something.

2] Just to be clear: I don't think calling attention to moral ambiguity is necessarily a flaw. It's just that Breaking Bad advertises itself as a rumination on morality much more loudly than The Searchers does.

100 Years...100 Movies 7-9: Lawrence of Arabia, Schindler's List, Vertigo

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Onward through the AFI 100! You know what all three of these movies have in common? They are all long, dangit. I'd already seen Vertigo and Schindler's List, though, so I only really had to watch one. And who am I kidding? It's a privilege to watch movies, not a chore; I need to stop complaining so much.

Interested about the details of this series? Check out my commencement post. Otherwise, read on.

7. *Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)
Of the three movies on this list so far that I've just now watched for the first time, Lawrence of Arabia is the first one that I've felt is legitimately great. For sure, it's a '60s Epic with a capital E, and thus has all the usual trappings: exotic locales, historical setting, "cast of thousands" battle scenes, excessive runtime. I probably should have mentioned this back in my Gone with the Wind response, but I'm generally not the biggest fan of the old Hollywood epic style; so many of those characteristics I've listed above (especially the exoticism and length) tend to feel excessively cumbersome to me. And yet... Lawrence of Arabia pulls it off magnificently. Seriously, the film almost—almost—earns its nearly four-hour length, which is really something coming from me. The biggest factor in the film's success has to be its cinematography, which is gorgeous—I mean, holy crap is it gorgeous. In a movie full of battles and tense political conversations, it's a testament to the utter beauty of the camerawork and direction on display here that the moments that thrilled me most in the whole picture were the silent ones when the camera lingers on a landscape or a stunningly composed detail. The desert—filmed, Wikipedia informs me, in Morocco, Jordan, and Spain—is practically a character unto itself, such is the vibrancy of the imagery; whenever the camera captures a low sun splaying its light over dunes cut by the long shadows of some desert riders: perfection. Another thing that sets Lawrence of Arabia apart from its epic brethren is the line delivery, which is probably equally indebted to the smart screenplay and sharp acting. Peter O'Toole is no Charlton Heston, and his more naturalist portrayal of the titular Lawrence within already more natural dialogue does a lot to help the film avoid the stagey and portentous aspects of a work like Ben Hur (which we'll get to a little while later in this project, actually). So yeah, great acting, neat script, beautiful cinematography: it's a winner in my book. Man, that cinematography.

8. Schindler's List (1993, Steven Spielberg)
There's a certain corner of film criticism out there that will dismiss Schindler's List as emotionally manipulative. And they're right. But you know what else is emotionally manipulative? Every single movie ever made. To paraphrase Picasso, filmmaking is a lie. Every cut, every note of score, every bit of acting is part of an overarching scheme to manipulate an audience into feeling a certain way; the trick is to justify that manipulation with beauty, philosophy, entertainment, sophistication, or some other content that makes the moviegoing experience worth something to the viewer, which is the hard part. So is Schindler's List manipulative? You betcha. Does it justify it? I'd argue that it does in bucketfuls, but that, of course, is a matter of taste. I've heard people argue that touches like the girl in the red coat or Schindler's "one more person" speech at the end are thudding examples of uncalled-for manipulation that compromise the impact of the film, but for me, moments like those are among the movie's most powerful. I think the film is a masterpiece, a powerful statement about the cruelty of humanity against itself and the small pockets of light that try to push back against that cruelty. Stanley Kubrick may be right in noting that Schindler's List is less about the Holocaust's six million deaths than the six hundred survivors in the titular list (though for a movie about the living, Schindler's List spends a whole lot of time showing people die), but I don't think that's a failing on the movie's part. Schindler's List wants to contrast what humanity should do against what it's done, and on that rubric, it's a moving success.

9. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
You won't hear me saying that Vertigo isn't a great movie, 'cause it certainly is. It is an exceptionally clever, complex film that straddles an impressive number of genres, from the thriller/mystery of its opening beats to the romance of the middle passages to the arthouse touches of the film's more experimental moments, and it's definitely the most thematically dense of the Hitchcock movies I've seen (which are numerous). The mirroring of those themes in the film's cinematography is fantastic, too. I'll admit that this is one of those movies that I last watched a long time ago, so I can't recall many of the specifics, but I do remember that it's got probably the all-time greatest use of the dolly zoom ever. So there's that. But even considering all those wonderful things, Vertigo is still not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I sometimes feel that its recent critical reappraisal as not only Hitchcock's best but one of cinema in general's best is maybe just the tiniest bit inflated. It's too long, for one, and shaggy in ways that Hitchcock movies usually aren't. Also, while I'm not one of those people who considers black and white film to be inherently superior to color, I do think that Hitchcock is a director whose work is much better suited to b&w, especially given the color film tech popular at the time. Something like North by Northwest is fine because it's a fun romp, but the darker tone of Vertigo suffers from the more pastel aspects of the film's coloring. It's a personal thing, I guess, but I much prefer the tighter genre pictures in Hitchcock's filmography, to Vertigo. Don't get me wrong: I really, really like Vertigo; it's just that if given the choice between it and something like, say, Psycho, I know which one I'd choose.

Well, that's it for the first nine. There's a long stretch of movies coming up on the list that I've already seen, so I should fly through those responses pretty quickly. Until next time!

If you want to look back, you can read #4-6 in the series here.
Update: You can read ahead to #10-12 in the series here.

100 Years...100 Movies 4-6: Raging Bull, Singin' in the Rain, Gone with the Wind

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

So, last time I was writing about movies I pretty much love unconditionally. This time, not so much. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy the reflections. Remember, I'm putting an asterisk next to the titles of movies I'm watching for the first time for this project.

4. *Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese)
Ah, here it is: the first movie of the list that I haven't seen previously. And... I like it. Not love, but like. Here's the thing: Raging Bull is one of those films that New Hollywood was so fond of making back in the '70s—let's call it a stylistic character study, where the movie's interests lie almost entirely in the twin peaks of cinematic craft and the titanic personality of its lead character, to the exclusion of all else. And while I can't deny the considerable strengths of any of those films, I also can't help but admire them from a distance rather than truly embrace them. Such is the case with Raging Bull. It's a beautifully shot movie with plenty of cool cinematic tricks (more on that in a second), and De Niro is mesmerizing to watch, but aside from that, I had a hard time getting into it. Maybe the blame is the slack plotting, which kind of lumbers from one year to the next without much more driving it than the self-destructive urges of De Niro's Jake LaMotta. Which is fine—a movie doesn't have to be a narrative powerhouse to be good. However, it's not just the narrative that makes the movie feel a little slack; almost every scene not centered around a boxing match felt kind of meandering to me. I know I might be losing some film geek street cred here, so now that I've mentioned the fights, let me go out on a positive note: those fight scenes are incredible. And not because they're violent, although oh boy, are they ever. The cinematography and editing surrounding the boxing just feels so electric, using slow-motion, framing, negative space, and lighting in a way that makes each fighter's movements seem simultaneously ferocious and poetic. A fantastic example of this poetry comes early in the movie in what is maybe my favorite shot in the whole thing: when a chair is thrown into the ring, the camera follows its arc through the air, and at the apex of its flight, the chair is high enough for the boxing action to fall below the frame of the shot, making the chair seem suspended, surrounded only by the blackness of the arena ceiling. It's a strikingly gorgeous moment of abstract imagery, and I've never seen anything like it. Seriously, scenes like that one make the whole movie worth watching. As for the rest, though, maybe I need to give the film some time to sink in, because I'm missing something. 

5. Singin' in the Rain (1952, Gene Kelly)
After my kinda-sorta critique of Raging Bull, I'm a little worried about going after another sacred cow, but in the interest of journalistic (bloggeristic?) integrity, here it goes: I don't care for Singin' in the Rain. I know, I know, I'm the worst. It's not the movie's fault—not exactly, anyway. In fact, if I'm trying to be objective (whatever that means), I have to admit that it's actually a pretty good movie. The problem is that I'm just not a big fan of movie musicals. If I see musicals live on a stage, I love them, but there's just something lost for me once they're filmed. Whereas stage musicals feel real and close and engaging, I feel sort of distanced from movie versions; they feel flat and fake, even when (as is the case with Singin' in the Rain) it's obvious there there are real, impressive performances unfolding right in front of my eyes without any cinematic trickery. I honestly think it's the lack of environmental noises in movies—the total curation of sound design that edits out the incidental stomps, clicks, rustles, and creaks that characterize live performances. You can't hear Gene Kelly's feet slam on the ground unless the sound engineer wants you to hear it. I watch Singin' in the Rain, and all I can think is how much better this would be if I were seeing it in person. Don't get me wrong: there are movie musicals I like (and at least one of those is coming up in the next few entries on the list), but Singin' in the Rain is not one of them. 

6. *Gone with the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming)
I don't know if I've ever seen a movie more in evidence of the phrase "They don't make 'em like they used to" than Gone with the Wind. And I mean that in both the positive and negative senses of the expression. First of all, for all my griping about the bloated length of modern blockbusters, they certainly don't make mainstream movies 230 minutes long anymore. And thank goodness. Let me say this once and for all: if your movie is 230 minutes long, it's probably too long [1]. That said, Gone with the Wind is definitely an epic in the grand tradition of Old Hollywood that, for all its excesses, has a breathtaking scope and majesty to it that most modern movies can't hold a candle to. It helps that it's gorgeously shot; the visual motif of silhouettes against a clouded red backdrop is fittingly iconic, as are the scenes of the sack of Atlanta. For all the advances in movie possibilities that modern special effects have brought us, there's still a grandeur to these "cast of thousands" scenes that feels irreplaceable by any sort of technology. Another thing "they" don't do anymore: make movies with this level of casual racism. It's such a common criticism nowadays that I almost didn't mention it, but seriously, Gone with the Wind's depiction of slavery as idyllic is horrifying and toxic. The problem isn't necessarily that all the slaves in the film are happy—I'm not saying that black slaves never showed happiness in real life [2]—but that this movies doesn't seem to have any sort of understanding that slavery was a very bad thing is a huge, huge issue. Heck, the film (in addition to the characters) feels nostalgic toward slavery. Thanks, revisionist history. Make no mistake, this movie is a revisionist fantasy of the old South in the same way that depictions of the Middle Ages as some golden age of high chivalry are of medieval England. Gone with the Wind's glasses are practically opaque with all the rose-coloredness. Still, accepting all those significant flaws (and don't get me wrong: those are super significant flaws), I found the film at least a little rousing. The movie works in two modes (the battle-torn loss of innocence in sections before and immediately after the intermission, and the Mad Men-esque domestic drama of cruel people sniping each others' marriages to pieces that fills out the movie's final 100-ish minutes), and I'm not convinced that those two modes actually cohere into a thematic whole, but there's a lot of great, rich stuff in those two parts. Not that any of that makes the horrible racism okay. But Gone with the Wind's merits are also considerable. They don't make 'em like they used to indeed.

I got a little rambly this time, so sorry for that. Not sure how long it will be until I post again (Lawrence of Arabia is coming up, which is another four-freaking-hour epic—not sure how many of these I can take in quick succession), but it should be sometime next week. Until then!

You can read #1-3 in the series here.
Update: you can read the next three, #7-9, here.

1] I say "probably" because I don't want to rule out the possibility that I'll see a movie that length that justifies its runtime. It's unlikely, given my preference for movies under two hours, but I guess I shouldn't make blanket statements like that. Not yet at least.

2] Though who are we kidding: there's no way slaves were that happy, ever, and there's no way that slavery (i.e. the owning of another human being) is ever anything but awful, even at its most genteel.

100 Years...100 Movies 1-3: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Casablanca

Hello, all! I'm working my way through AFI's 2007 list, 100 Years...100 Movies. For more details on the project, feel free to look back at the original announcement. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy my commentary. These first three movies are old favorites of mine, so let's hope I have at least a few interesting things to say about them.

1. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
Is there a worse thing you can do to a movie than declare it the best movie ever made? Yeah, I suppose I can think of a few things (burning all existing copies, for instance, or crayoning all over the negatives), but really, once any sort of consensus builds up around a work of art that it's the best of its medium, it's doomed to an eternity of "Yeah, it was good and all, but the best ever?" Such is the case with ol' Citizen Kane, which has topped not only this list (and the original '98 list) but also the Sight and Sound & Sound critics polls for decades (until Vertigo took the prize in 2012—watch out, Hitchcock! Here come the inflated expectations!). The effect is paradoxically that people become so concerned with how Citizen Kane is or is not the best movie ever that the fact that it's a really flipping good movie sort of gets lost in the shuffle. Which is a shame, because it really is a flipping good movie, regardless of whether it's the greatest ever or not. There are many, many great things to single out in the movie (and gallons of ink has already been spilled doing so), but one thing I've always enjoyed about Citizen Kane is how deftly it privileges both its technical and human aspects. A whole lot has been said about what a technical masterpiece the film is, and you won't hear me disagreeing; it's incredible that cinematic techniques the film basically invented in '41 still feel cutting edge seventy-three years later. Just take a gander at that opening sequence and marvel at how fresh everything feels. But all technical mastery would be just whizz-bang showmanship if it weren't for the intensely tragic story of the eponymous Charles Foster Kane, in the same way that that story would feel ham-fisted and moralizing if it weren't for the beautiful technicalities of the film's craft. Put together, though, the narrative and cinematic complexity form a film of real philosophical, aesthetic, and humanist depth. That's something I think is pretty rare in cinema, so let's cherish it, regardless of its status in the film canon.

2. The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
Here's something that I've always been a little bit surprised at: a whole lot of people like The Godfather. And by a whole lot of people, I don't just mean that a lot of movie buffs and critics like it (something that's true about many, if not all, of the films on the AFI list). What I'm talking about is that The Godfather is one of the highest grossing movies of all time in North America (#23, if you can believe this Wikipedia article). That's more ticket sales than The Avengers. More than any Pixar movie. More than any of the Lord of the Rings films. It even sold more tickets than most of the Star Wars movies! That's some serious cultural cachet, folks. None of that would surprise me if The Godfather were a movie as accessible and friendly as, say, Finding Nemo or Star Wars. But Finding Nemo The Godfather ain't. It's a distinctly prickly movie with a dense plot built on the subtext of coded conversations and camera angles, a movie with a slow, methodical pacing to even the most explosive events. That's not to say that I don't like The Godfather (I think it's fantastic), but slow, dark, subtle movies with lots of ambition and little exposition don't usually end up appealing to more people than the latest Marvel film. I know that the early '70s were a different time for the movie industry than, well, most other times; I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around that, though. I guess that's just me being cynical about the movie-going public, and I'm sorry if this whole rant is coming off as a little arrogant (as if I'm somehow better than people who see fewer movies than I do!). But still... it's surprising. And that's all I'll say about that, I suppose.

3. Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
You know, it's harder than you might think to say something interesting about some of the most beloved, analyzed movies ever, which is why I've spent a good portion of the last two entries talking about the cultures surrounding the films rather than the contents of the films themselves. But I can't shirk that task forever, and after all, isn't talking about movies the whole point of this project? So, here's something I really admire about Casablanca: its economy. I'm sure it's been said before, but I find it remarkable how huge this film feels despite that its runtime doesn't even clock two hours and its action is mostly relegated to a single location. Part of that, I'm sure, is the historical context of the plot (and, for that matter, the movie's production in general), which plops the characters right down in the middle of World War II, and how do you make anything to do with Nazis feel anything less than epic? However, I think the bulk of the credit has to go to what is probably the film's greatest strength: the screenplay. I know there's nothing revolutionary in praising it, but seriously, Casablanca earns the heck out of that praise. The screenplay—which is one of the all-time great English-language screenplays (if not the all-time great) in the history of the medium—does such a wonderful job of imbuing every bit of dialogue with an immense sense of history that each moment of the movie's final act feels like it's predicated by years of narrative rather than just the preceding eighty-ish minutes. There's a reason why the lines from this movie stick in people's minds; "Play it, Sam" (I'll admit I almost added "again"), "Here's looking at you, kid," "We'll always have Paris," et al.—those bits of dialogue have the feel of a larger life lived behind them, the sort of shorthand that couples develop after being intimate, showing so much about Rick and Ilsa by saying so little. It's storytelling economy at its best. And living in 2014, when at least half of the movies that come out seem half an hour too long, I find that economy refreshing and exhilarating.

That's all for now. Be sure to let me know what you think. Obviously, I believe all three of these movies are stone-cold classics, but I'm sure some of you out there disagree. Or maybe you just want to add something to what I've said. Either way, I wanna hear about it! I've said it before, but one of the valuable things about lists like these is the discussion they encourage. So, discuss.

Three movies down, ninety-seven to go! Until next time.

Update: Read #4-6 in the series here.