I've already seen all three of these movies, so sorry for the lack of asterisks and still-fresh-out-the-oven insights. Now, without further ado...
It's been a while since I dusted off this critique, so here it goes: The Sound of Music is too dang long. That's honestly my main problem with it. Back when I covered Singin' in the Rain, I discussed a few reasons why I tend to dislike musicals. Well, here's another reason I didn't mention: musicals, especially of this time period, are often draggy, bloated versions of the story they should be telling. Case in point: The Sound of Music. If some studio executive had burst into the cutting room and said, "For goodness sakes, why don't you make this movie about forty minutes shorter?", this movie would have been better by at least a factor of ten, provided that Robert Wise and his editors cut the right forty minutes. And by the right forty minutes, I mean that tedious middle third of the movie with the Maria-Elsa-Capt. Von Trapp love triangle and the happy family hand-holding and the endless, endless dinner parties. Oh, and "The Sound of Music" is a super boring song; just thought I'd throw that in there. It's a pacing issue, really, where most of The Sound of Music's plot happens at the beginning and end of the movie, and for that reason, I almost never watch the movie the whole way through, despite network TV's obvious desire for me to do so every December. The broken pacing is a pity because it mars what is elsewhere a delightful movie. Julie Andrews is, of course, as wonderful and winsome as ever (although if I'm being honest, I would have preferred that Mary Poppins replaced The Sound of Music as her representation on AFI's list, since Mary Poppins is awesome), and the songs not named "The Sound of Music" are all fun, well-choreographed, and super-duper catchy. Then there's the climax, where the film becomes a surprisingly tense action-thriller, and the nuns get to enact a great punchline at the end. All good stuff. But only like 110-130 minutes of good stuff, not 170-ish.
In the long run, special effects aren't really about making impossible things look "real." Okay, yeah, I know that isn't entirely true; the landmark effects in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Forrest Gump are cinematic touchstones to this day pretty much because they make clearly false images (interplanetary space ships, Tom Hanks mooning LBJ) seem as if they actually happened. And most special effects have that purpose at their initial inception, to allow us to see in a somewhat convincing way what we would never see otherwise. That may as well be a thesis statement for the movies: to let us experience something fake under the guise of it actually occurring in front of our eyes. But still, the older I get, the more I think that the ultimate worth of special effects isn't in how convincing they look but in their aesthetic merits as artistic images, in the same way that the worth of a painting isn't necessarily in its photorealism. Effects don't need to look "real," but they do have to look "good," and by that I mean they should be inventive, visually arresting, and make worthwhile contributions to the movie's style. All special effects will eventually look dated and unrealistic; however, if they're creative and interesting, they'll have staying power long past the shelflife of their convincingness. I say all this to point out that if you think special effects need to look "real" (as I did when I first saw King Kong—sorry, Dad, you tried), you're going to think King Kong's suck. Call it a hazard of being an eighty-year-old fantasy film. But if you can get past the obvious fakery of the stop-motion, rear projection, etc., there are bucketfuls of personality and artistry in the film's effects that makes them still pretty great even today. It's not real, especially when the creatures interact with the human characters, but it sure is fun to look at. Think of it like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but with stop-motion instead of cel animation. I have to admit that I didn't always view it this way. When I was younger, I just couldn't ignore how cheesy everything looked and, unfortunately, the uncanny resemblance between Kong and the Abominable Snow Monster from that old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special. But now, I've begun to feel that cheese is pretty nice. Especially when it's this much fun to experience. Realism be darned.
Before anything else, I just want to call attention to how fantastic that poster is. I love how the bullet holes on the windshield give Bonnie's expression just a twist of ambiguity, that she could either be in the throes of laughter or in the agony of a wound. Anyway, moving on to the actual film, my feeling is that Bonnie and Clyde is another one of those "you just had to be there" movies, though perhaps not quite as dire of an example as The Best Years of Our Lives. I like the movie and all, but I don't think it's great, and I wonder if my lack of strong feelings has to do with how removed the present cultural moment is from that of the late '60s, especially cinematically. I have no doubt that the violence and complicated sexuality were startling and impactful innovations in 1967; in 2014, they are not. Neither is the movie's apparent amorality nor its framing of outlaws as countercultural heroes. In the nearly fifty years since the release of Bonnie and Clyde, punk, hip-hop, Hot Topic, the American indie film movement, and a whole truckload of other cultural factors have thrust the youth-in-revolt movement so firmly into the mainstream American identity that Bonnie and Clyde's '60s-era brand of recklessness and desperation feels very far away indeed. That's not to say that people aren't still reckless and desperate, but the movie's concept of those feelings seems to manifest itself differently than that in our contemporary society [1], in the same way that I imagine that the political and emotional aspirations of something like the reimagined Battlestar Galactica TV series will feel a little incongruous to audiences forty years from now when the W. Bush presidency isn't something everyone experienced firsthand. Maybe I'm wrong about this, though. Maybe it's just me, and everyone else in my generation thinks this movie is the bee's knees. If so, maybe I'm just out of touch. Maybe I'm alienated from my society. Maybe I should start robbing banks.
Or maybe I'll just keep blogging. Until next time!
You can read the previous entry in this series, #s 37-39, here.
Update: The next post, #s 43-45, is up here.
1] That being said, the movie did gain some accidental relevancy a couple years ago when the whole bank robbing thing sort of aligned the film's protagonists with the Occupy movement.
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