100 Years...100 Movies 76-78: Forrest Gump, All the President's Men, Modern Times

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.

Three very different movies in this post. And... that's all I have to say about that.

76. Forrest Gump (1994, Robert Zemeckis)
Look, everyone, unlike a lot of contemporary critics, I don't hate Forrest Gump (in fact, I even like it), and that whole "Forrest Gump vs. Pulp Fiction at the Oscars" is pretty dumb because, come on, I think we all know that the right position in that debate is actually The Shawshank Redemption. But I've never understood the huge, huge cultural cachet the film has with contemporary audiences. I mean, it's a pleasant movie that, somewhat amusingly, plays lip service to Baby Boomer culture while also positing that said culture is basically the accidental offspring of a mentally challenged man from Georgia. There are some truly groundbreaking effects used throughout, too, and consequently, the film has a winsomely, even at times anarchically, playful streak with history (e.g. Forrest mooning LBJ), which makes the whole affair a little less self-aggrandizing and more punk than the movie's detractors give it credit for. Oh, and the acting is uniformly excellent, too. So no, I'm not immune to the movie's charms. But a generation-defining movie? A great movie? One of the greatest movies movies of all time? I don't see it. Of course, people are allowed to have their own opinions, and I wouldn't dream of telling people they're wrong (or dumb or evil or whatever) to love this movie. But to those who do love Forrest Gump, I have a few questions I sincerely want answers to: 1) What exactly is profound about having Forrest experience or orchestrate so many of the late 20th century's cultural touchstones? It's funny, but what does it mean? 2) How is Forrest anything other than a blank slate of a character, and how does this make him a compelling protagonist? 3) What is the film doing with Jenny other than creating a love interest for Forrest? What's the point in transforming her from a character with personal tragedies (abusive father, etc.) into one who shoulders Society's tragedies (post-hippie fallout, etc.)? It seems like the movie really, really wants her to represent something about the Boomer generation, but what? 4) Why is "Run, Forrest, run!" one of this movie's go-to quotes? It's not funny, deep, clever, poignant, or anything. I mean, Forrest has to run away from kids pelting him with rocks (and pretty big rocks, too!); that's a dark context for a quote shouted willy-nilly at runners everywhere, isn't it?

77. *All the President's Men (1976, Alan J. Pakula)
You'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit over-the-moon about this one. See, when it's done well, the based-on-a-true-story thriller (e.g. Zero Dark Thirty), particularly in its more political shades (Charlie Wilson's War, Lincoln), is one of my favorite movie genres ever, and it's an even greater favorite when that genre mixes in a healthy excitement for journalistic rigor (Zodiac). Ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, All the President's Men is just such a thriller, and a masterpiece of one, too. It's definitely one of the best movies I've watched for the first time for this 100 Years...100 Movies project, and by golly, there's a really good chance that it will go on to become a new favorite of all time for me. It's funny, tense, insightful, and genuinely exciting, impressive characteristics in their own right made all the more impressive by the fact that this film achieves them almost entirely through dialogue. I mean, think about this: All the President's Men is a movie with no chase scenes and no killings (and that alone says volumes about what a cinematic feat this thriller is), a movie whose biggest setpiece is the buzzing office of the Washington Post newspaper, a movie with few (if any) dynamic characters, a movie in which the solution to its major mystery is one of the most well-known events in American history. This is not the typical blueprint for an "exciting" movie, and yet All the President's Men is unquestionably one (to me at least). I'm tempted to attribute that excitement to Dustin Hoffman's glorious, glorious hair (just look at those flowing locks!), but honestly, it's the partnership between the dialogue and the wholly unpretentious cinematography. Every line moves the film forward, and every shot frames that line's delivery in the most informative way possible. The film takes to heart the journalistic ideals of clarity and efficiency, which is only fitting for a movie whose centerpiece is a crackerjack bit of journalism. To that effect, All the President's Men is one of the great successes in translating journalism to film and a fantastic bit of proof for the theory that when you've got a good story, the best way to tell it is often to step back and let it tell itself.

78. Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)
Of all the Chaplin movies I've seen, Modern Times is by far the most caustic, preachy, and socially conscious (though, to be honest, I haven't seen any of his later films, such as The Great Dictator, that have a reputation for actually being preachy, etc.). This is a movie all about the oppression of the working poor by the machinations of management and, of course, the System as a whole, and while these themes are present in plenty of Chaplin's work, Chaplin really goes whole hog into them in Modern Times. This is definitely a Populist work (like, in the political sense), so if you have an aversion to that, I might suggest steering clear. Only... no, I'm not going to suggest that, because Modern Times is an awesome movie, regardless of its (or our) politics. In another movie, all that preachiness might have made the whole enterprise a leaden bore, but the good news about Modern Times is that in addition to being one of Chaplin's preachiest, it's also one of his funniest, and humor covers a multitude of polemics. More so than a lot of Chaplin, Modern Times (particularly in its famous factory scenes) is built around elaborate sets and special-effects-driven sequences; the Tramp's tussles with the huge machinery in these sequences of course serve as metaphors of society's exploitation of the lower class, but they are also hilarious, perfectly timed comedy routines. Futility is a concept that shows the intersection of comedy and tragedy perhaps better than any other, and it's a concept on full display here. Entire swatches of humanity are trapped in a cycle that makes their actions and desires futile, and that's tragic. But seeing Chaplin live out that futility? Comedic gold. I should note that, as with most of Chaplin's work, the human genius of Modern Times is that we are laughing with the Tramp, not at him, as Chaplin's trademark empathy gives him a sort of heroism that avoids making him the butt of the joke. I should also note that, while I've spent most of my time talking about the factory and related aspects of the movie, there's an awful lot more to this film that just that. For example, did you know that there is a subplot at one point, the Tramp does cocaine? Yeah, that one was a shocker when I first saw the movie, too.

Insert perfunctory sign-off/don't forget to let me know what you think. Until next time!

If you fancy, you can read the previous post, #s 73-75, here.
Update: The next post, #s 79-81, is up here.

100 Years...100 Movies 73-75: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Silence of the Lambs, In the Heat of the Night

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 crime in the movies in this post. Yep.

73. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969, George Roy Hill)
Now, this is a fun one. Admittedly, a lot of that has to do with the acting. Paul Newman and Robert Redford are at the height of their movie-starishness, and they have a great dynamic as the titular Butch and Kid (Harry Longabaugh, if you're curious—no, his mother did not name him "Sundance"). Despite being stuck in a quasi-tragic Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque plot, the two look like they're having the times of their lives, and the movie lets them have it. That's the other aspect of this movie's fun: it's playful to the end. I compared its story to Bonnie and Clyde, mainly because of the date of this movie's release and the western-antihero protagonists who, yes, rob banks and get all blow'd up at the end, but that's about where the comparisons end because this film's tone is entirely different than anything Bonnie and Clyde ever does. Well, I should say tones because really, there are more than one. This is a movie that jumps from goofy to serious to ironic to tense with complete disregard of historical accuracy and tonal continuity, which makes it a plucky, energetic film to experience, especially for the first time. If I'm being completely honest, I'm not sure all that pluck ends up justifying some of the film's more dead-end moments, making the movie more uneven than its placement on this list would indicate, and the whole thing often feels more fun than meaningful. But, hey, given that I just praised The Shawshank Redemption for lacking just such Importance, I should have room in my heart for this one, too. And I do. I like it.

74. The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme)
Okay, so here's another fun one. Yes, I am using that word loosely. The Silence of the Lambs is one of those movies that's kind of weird to call "fun" (I mean, it features not just a cannibal but also a dude who wants to wear women's skins), and that's probably not the right term, but there's no question in my mind that the film's primary MO is to entertain. That's the contradictory thing about so many movies, especially horror movies: they aim to entertain you with emotions that would not normally be entertaining to experience, such as fear (see also: tragedies and their invocation of sorrow). One of the things I love about The Silence of the Lambs is how deftly it navigates that contradiction. Whereas other films, including many of the horror thrillers inspired by Silence's success, are often sadistic, punishing affairs for not just their characters but also their audiences, this movie is often funny and humane in its treatment of the story. Silence also manages to avoid the other major pitfall of the crime genre in that, in spite of having a spirit of fun, it gives the criminal acts the weight they deserve. CSI this is not, and every death in the film have a gravity to it lacking in so many other cinematic criminal acts. It manages to pull off both the fun and the gravity because, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Silence of the Lambs has an excellent command of tone. In fact, it's pretty much a masterpiece of sustaining a singular tone throughout, which makes this film a remarkably cohesive, mesmerizing one in spite of its perhaps contradictory goals. That gives it an edge over Butch Cassidy in my book, if we're going to compare the films I'm (maybe misguidedly) calling "fun" in this post.

75. *In the Heat of the Night (1967, Norman Jewison)
This is definitely a monumental film. Monumental in the sense that this movie came out in '67 not only starring a black actor (no less than top billing, too!) but also featuring a plot and screenplay that depict with uncompromising condemnation the vicious racism of the then-contemporary American South. Heck, a movie like this would be monumental in 2014, too, which, sorry folks, is just disgraceful. Think about it: how many recent movies have seriously taken to task the racial strife in modern-day America and more specifically, the modern South? We've got plenty of films like The Help and 12 Years a Slave that loudly (and in The Help's case, perhaps arrogantly) proclaim that golly, our society sure used to be racist, but films that examine contemporary racism? Those are few and far between, and hotly contested when they do come around (just look at the embarrassing attacks that greeted Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing upon its release). All that is to say that yes, I acknowledge the historical importance of In the Heat of the Night. Now, in addition to being historically significant, is In the Heat of the Night a "good" movie? I'd say it is, though if I may split hairs, I'd have to say that is isn't a "very good" movie (and certainly not a "great" one). First, the good: Sydney Poitier and Rod Steiger are both fantastic, and they have a cool buddy-cop chemistry, the texture of which also does a lot to "show don't tell" the racial politics of the town. It's also a fairly spritely, exciting movie, with consistent action beats and that boring character development thingy mostly relegated to small moments that don't detract from the overall momentum. The bad: the character development, for one. Poitier and Steiger's characters are still good (if a bit broadly drawn), but hoo wee, the rest of the cast is stuck with the paper-thinnest of stock characters solely in service of the plot. And speaking of the plot, the mystery (the, ahem, "murder on their hands they don't know what to do with") isn't all that great. Not to give anything away, but it's way too dependent on some pieces of information that we get a scant half hour from the movie's end, so much so that I feel like it's jerking me around, and it's not even that cool of a reveal anyway. The film is also mostly rote, visually, though I suppose it could have looked a lot more interesting back in the late '60s. Who knows? Anyway, not a waste of time, but not, I think, an all-time classic either.

And I'm now officially seventy-five percent done with this list! Woo hoo! Let me know what you think of these movies. Until next time!

You can read the previous post, #s 70-72, here.
Update: You can read ahead to the next post, #s 76-78, here.

100 Years...100 Movies 70-72: A Clockwork Orange, Saving Private Ryan, The Shawshank Redemption

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, this post includes the second (and last) of the Stanley Kubrick movies on this list, and as with 2001, I'm less than thrilled with it, although I do like it better than that original film. Why oh why couldn't AFI actually pick the Kubrick films that I actually like? Anyway, all that is to say that I'm sorry for the overlong writeup of A Clockwork Orange. Hope the mostly reasonable length of the other two entries makes it okay.

70. *A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick)
This movie is such a mess that I'm struggling to find a good starting point for this discussion. It's not so much "bad" as poorly calculated, so I guess I might as well begin there, especially considering that Stanley Kubrick is one of the most calculating movie directors of all time. And that's not a bad thing! This being a Kubrick film, of course, A Clockwork Orange is a technical masterpiece, full of inventive camerawork, striking imagery, and some of the coolest frame compositions out there. The thing is, as I see it, that technical mastery is also what causes one of the film's biggest problems: it's intentionally filmed as a comedy [1], which of course begs the question of whether or not such a plot as this one (one, in case this work's reputation has eluded you, that is chock full of beatings, rape, torture, and grotequery) should be filmed as a comedy. That question gets into the whole issue of whether there are any subjects off-limits to humor, an issue I don't feel equipped to weigh in on, but I will say this: the jauntiness of the proceedings makes it terrifically difficult for me to figure out what to do with the film's violence. I have no doubt that Kubrick intends for this film to be against rape and gang violence, but it's also possible for there to be miles between authorial intent and actual effect. To be sure, Alex's leering gaze in the first shot makes it clear that our protagonist is as much villain as audience surrogate (though, troublingly, he's also that in the prison and rehabilitation sequences); that being said, there's also something undeniably seductive about the way the violence is situated from Alex's (often joking) perspective, a calculated choice that Kubrick has made to no doubt show the depravity of the character, but a calculation that also hinges so much of its impact on assumptions about the psyche of his viewers that I really think the power of those scenes has fumbled from the filmmakers' control. There's also the problem that many of Kubrick's choices in those scenes, even the more effective ones, often involve objectifying the (mostly female) victims [2]. I do recognize that this film is a satire and that this objectification often serves the satirical points of the film quite well (esp. in reflecting the effects of the hypersexualized society in which Alex lives), but objectification for a purpose is objectification nonetheless, and by gum, when you're dealing with victims of rape, I'm not sure if objectification should be on the table at all. I'm getting rambly, so let me close out by saying that I might be more charitable toward the unintended consequences of the satire if I had a feeling that the satire were serving a larger social point beyond pure nihilism, but I just don't think that's the case. The film, for all its unintended effects, does not want to be on Alex's side, but neither does it want to be on any other side or take any position at all, it seems, given the horrific (and often parodic) nature of the government's penal system. It's a movie that wants to be somehow against both criminal behavior and criminal rehabilitation. At its most constructive, it seems to say that individual autonomy is more important than morality [3], but even then, I'm hesitant to assign that interpretation for all the contradictions it makes in the movie as a whole. So again, it's not a bad movie (it's far too technically accomplished and smart for that), just one that seems horribly (dangerously?) messy to me.

71. Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg)
After the overlong response for A Clockwork Orange (sorrynotsorry, folks), I'll be brief here. The common critical narrative on Saving Private Ryan has become that it's a great movie in its opening Beaches of Normandy sequence and merely an okay movie for the other two hours of its duration. And, boringly, my opinion is basically just a variation on that idea. The first thirty minutes of the film are some of the most visceral, terrifying, and effectively anti-war war movie minutes ever put to film. It turns World War II (our "righteous" war, let's not forget) into the chaotic horror film that I feel most cinematic battle scenes should be. War is hell, goes the banality, and Saving Private Ryan's storming of the beaches is one of cinema's most hellish, with imagery right out of Dante's Inferno (or, you know, real life, which war movies are all too good at letting us forget). The rest of the movie, I have to agree with the critics, is pretty by-the-numbers, as far as war movies go, and it leans a little too hard on the stop-being-a-coward-and-be-a-man-and-kill-people ethic that rubs me wrong about some other war movies. That being said, I do think that in the final fifteen-or-so minutes, the film becomes near-great again, building to a powerful climax with the (spoilers) sacrifice of Tom Hanks's character [4]. So there's that. Yeah, overall, a movie I like with a few essential scenes, but so many other films in just Spielberg's filmography alone deserve this spot, so whatever.

72. The Shawshank Redemption (1994, Frank Darabont)
Well, what a nice surprise. I've spent a good deal of time poring over this AFI list, even before beginning this project (because, you know, I'm a horrible nerd for these sorts of things, which I realize is a bad habit and I should feel bad), but until preparing for this post, I had completely forgotten that The Shawshank Redemption was on this list. What's wonderful about that for me is that the movie is such a non-AFI movie, by which I mean that there is next to nothing Important about it. It's not the work of a so-called "auteur" like Kubrick or even that of generally well-regarded director like Spielberg; Darabont is, in fact, primarily known for directing inoffensive adaptations of Stephen King's work, which is about as glorious a populist legacy as I can envision. There's nothing particularly innovative about its cinematography, either. It's not a movie driven by Big Important Actors like Marlon Brando or Orson Welles playing self-important roles; the acting in Shawshank is top-notch, of course, but it's of the smaller, warmer variety that tends not to get lots of attention from the codifiers of Hollywood history. It's also not a movie with Big Social Themes; although it's set in a prison, the film (along with the Stephen King novella it's based on) has almost zero interest in saying anything socially relevant about the state of incarceration in the United States in the mid-20th century or in contemporary times or ever (compare that, for example, to A Clockwork Orange's hyper social awareness). No, more than anything, The Shawshank Redemption just wants to give its audience a fun, feel-good time. That's a mission statement sorely lacking from so many of the dramas on this list. Now, as I'm sure you can tell from some of the other posts in this project, I love me some self-important dramas, but the idea that films with weighty themes and historical significance are the only films worth honoring is so toxic to cinema culture that it's a genuine relief to me that something like The Shawshank Redemption (an antidote to that toxicity if there ever was one) has gathered enough critical inertia over the years and years of cable reruns to emerge on this list.

Agree with my takes on these movies? Disagree? I'd in particular love to hear someone call me out on my ideas about A Clockwork Orange, as I'm still very conflicted about the film. Or you could call me out on what I have to say about these other movies, too. It's all good.

Until next time!

If you want, you can go back and read the previous post, #s 67-69, here.
Update: The next post, #s 73-75, is right here.

1] There are a lot of indications that A Clockwork Orange is a formally comedic work, but the two main elements that I would cite are the abundance of wide-angle distortions (a technique often used to frame silliness) and the carnivalesque direction of the acting, both of which exaggerate the onscreen images to a somewhat humorous effect.

2] The first rape (the one Alex and his droods walk in on at the beginning) is a good example of what I'm talking about. The film is definitely indicting Alex's callous attitude toward the woman, but it's also a scene in which the depiction of the violence is bloodless enough to sort of emphasize the nakedness of the woman more than the violence itself, which again is keeping with Alex's perspective, but that's a mighty irresponsible stance for a film to take, even for the purpose of satire.

3] Which, again, I think is sort of an irresponsible and sloppy message to ground satire in, especially when the film adaptation lacks the (admittedly clumsy) final chapter of the original novel, in which Alex discovers that the purpose of that autonomy is to develop a moral awareness.

4] You know what bugs the heck out of me, though? That the death of Tom Hanks's character totally messes of the POV of the movie! Like, the whole film leads you on to believe that it's an elderly Tom Hanks in the graveyard at the beginning remembering all this stuff, and as a result, the whole movie is set in Hanks's perspective—only then it turns out that this isn't Hanks's memory at all because he's dead, so how on earth did we just remember everything from his POV?? It drives me nuts.

100 Years...100 Movies 67-69: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Unforgiven, Tootsie

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 AFI, y'all. Read on.

67. *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Mike Nichols)
Upon first seeing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (about 11 pm Sunday night, if you're curious), I was struck by what seem to me as the two most major aspects of historical import in this very historically important film. First of all (and this is something that has been noted time and time again), it's a tremendously taboo-breaking film, one of the first American films to include with such frequency the depths (or heights, I suppose, depending on your position) of profanity such as "goddamn" and "Christ," as well as a few phrases that have become a little more PG than R-rated in the near-fifty years since the film's release (for instance, um, "hump the hostess"). As I've said before, though, taboo-breaking is a meaningless (even irritating) action without some kind of philosophical or aesthetic purpose behind it, which is why I'm much more interested in what I see as the second major historical innovation of this film, which is that it's one of the first American films that appears steeped in an acute awareness of world cinema. My first idea for this writeup had something to do with comparing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the works of Ingmar Bergman, and although I'll admit that that idea probably came from dwelling on the obvious signifiers (marital strife, black & white cinematography, connections to stage drama) without actually analyzing anything deeper (there's got to be some significance to the fact that Woolf's camera is way busier than Bergman would have ever allowed), that I even thought to make that comparison at all speaks volumes about how strikingly different the craft of Woolf is from any of the other pre-'70s films on this list. In that regard, this film feels like a true ground-zero for New American Cinema. As for the content of the film beyond the craft, I did find it a tad bit overwrought for my tastes [1], particularly in the early goings, where the characters are introduced with turned-to-11 emotions. Still, there's no denying that the intensity builds to a baroque beauty by the third act. And as long as there's beauty, I can make peace with an awful lot of flaws.

68. Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood)
And speaking of beauty, mother of Spielberg! this movie has spades of it. One of the central premises of Unforgiven is that time-honored film tradition of using gorgeous cinematography to stage brutal violence. It's a technique that pretty much made the careers of Joel and Ethan Coen (although yes, I know that they don't only make brutally violent movies), and it serves Clint Eastwood and cinematographer Jack Green tremendously here. Cinematography aside, Unforgiven's other central premise is to be a sort of anti-western, pretty much the anti-True Grit, in fact (which was itself a kind of anti-western—there's like... layers, man). Like True Grit, Unforgiven features an aging gunslinger (played in both cases by actors who are themselves in the post-gunslinging end of their career) thrust into the young man's game of a traditional western scenario, and in doing so the man must not only confront his own mortality but also the death of the gunslinging way of life in society[2]. The different is that whereas True Grit is a funny, fist-pumping sort of send up of western tropes, characterized of course by the lackadaisical John Wayne, Unforgiven gives the western the long, cold Clint Eastwood stare, and by golly, that stare doesn't let up for fun send-uppery. The western has been declared dead so many times that it's accumulated quite its share of elegies, but for me, Unforgiven will always be the definitive one. It's a stark, uncompromising work that gazes into the abyss with an intensity that few movies of any genre do. One of the best, for sure.

69. Tootsie (1982, Sydney Pollack)
Fun fact about this AFI list: the most represented subgenre of comedy behind the romantic comedy is the gender-bending comedy [3], which tells me two things: first, that there needs to be more comedies on this list, and second, that yeah, gender-bending comedies can be freaking funny when they're done right. And boy, can they be done wrong; for every Some Like It Hot in Hollywood's history are at least three White Chicks, which, believe me, is an awful thing to foist on the world. And maybe Some Like It Hot is part of the problem, given that the majority of the genre's worst offenders end up taking that earlier film's only-joking-stakes approach, where everything is a joke. That approach wouldn't be so bad if those movies were half as funny as Some Like It Hot, but more often than not they end up being not only laughless and dull but also irritatingly gender normative (an especially disappointing characteristic considering Some Like It Hot's freewheeling take on gender). Tootsie, on the other hand (yes, I still remember that I'm supposed to be talking about this movie), takes pretty much the opposite approach to Some Like It Hot's jokiness. Don't get me wrong; Tootsie is plenty hilarious. But unlike its predecessor, Tootsie is also a serious study of the social forces influencing gender, particularly those that affect females in the workplace. As in Some Like It Hot, the protagonist (here Dustin Hoffman) accumulates would-be male suitors while dressed as a woman at work, but instead of the sweet-but-idiotic-but-mostly-harmless-anyway fellow that pines for Jack Lemmon, Hoffman's Dorothy is warned that a fellow male actor is known by the women on-set as "The Tongue," so named for his aggressively invasive behavior when acting out scripted kisses. It's a joke and a funny one at that, but there's also an undercurrent of darkness in that moment that is indicative of the more straight-faced subtext of the film. It's a very funny movie, but it's also one that wants to use its laughs to say something meaningful about the human experience.

And that's that. Let me know what you think. Until next time!

If you want, you can read the previous entry, #s 64-66, here.
Update: The next post, #s 70-72, is up here.

1] I haven't, by the way, read or seen the play this movie is based on, although if Wikipedia is to be trusted, it's not all that different from what I saw in the film.

2] Or at least in the fantasy society in which the gunslinger archetype actually exists. Which, thankfully, is mostly mythical, although I do mourn that the phrase "This town ain't big enough for the two of us" was almost certainly never used in a real-life context.

3] Most of which are romantic comedies, too, so maybe that's not the most interesting fact after all.

100 Years...100 Movies 64-66: Network, The African Queen, Raiders of the Lost Ark

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.

...in which I can't think of any introduction whatsoever. So...

64. Network (1976, Sidney Lumet)
It's been said before, but I'll say it again because I remain amazed: Network is an astoundingly prescient film, one that even borders on prophetic. I mean, get this: Network not only predicts the rise of both reality TV and the 24-hour news cycle at least a decade before either was a major cultural force, it also understands these future trends deeply enough to critique the exploitation that runs rampant in each creation. Even in 2014, Network is still a relevant, wicked-sharp media satire, which is incredible considering that the major targets of its satire didn't even exist in 1976 [1]. All that prescience wouldn't wouldn't be worth nearly as much, though, if the movie weren't also hilarious and fantastically acted, two characteristics that go hand-in-hand. Network won three of the four acting categories at the Academy Awards (Fay Dunaway, Peter Finch, and Beatrice Straight), and it probably should have won a fourth for William Holden's performance if that had been possible (Finch and Holden were both nominated in the same category, Best Actor). It's loud, showy acting through-and-though, but goshdarnit, it works. I can't stress enough how much the acting helps to turn what is really a bitter, caustic, ugly movie into one of the funniest comedies in American film history. Even so, Network is angry, shrill, and more than a little smug, and I can see how that did (and still does) turn people off—heck, I usually baulk against this sort of "television is the demise of civilization" tirade, because come on, there's a lot of great, intelligent, socially valuable TV out there, and that was true in the '70s, too [2]. And yet, for all the self-congratulatory airs of Network, there's still something pure about the righteous anger on display, pure enough that it sucks me in every time and reminds me that yes, this hatred of the disgusting reality of the media cycle is the reason why Network is one of my favorite movies ever.

65. *The African Queen (1951, John Huston)
For as long as The African Queen sat dormant on my Netflix queue, I had assumed that the film was a serious movie, the sort of straight-laced drama that tends to have Big Themes and attract Academy Awards, the kind of movie that's often kind of a bore to watch outside of the original cultural moment that birthed it. I'm not quite sure why I thought this (although its presence on both iterations of the AFI list surely bolstered this assumption of mine), and as it turns out, I was dead wrong. The African Queen is nuts. I mean, there's barely a serious bone in its cinematic body; to put it in perspective, I'm about to (sort of) discuss Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Raiders, with all its winking and exploding of heads, is only slightly sillier than The African Queen, as far as its prioritizing of swashbuckling over serious ideas (and realism) goes. No archaeologists-as-Errol-Flynn here, though; in The African Queen, the hero is clearly Katharine Hepburn's Rose Sayer, a Methodist missionary-turned-war-monger who, after her brother dies in the aftermath of a WWI-era German attack on their African village, becomes intent on turning the riverboat of friendly neighborhood captain Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) into a makeshift torpedo to blow the Germans' boat to kingdom come. Yeah, we're definitely not in the land of self-serious Hollywood. And that's not a criticism whatsoever. The African Queen is lots of fun, with both Hepburn and Bogart delivering charming performances. A welcome surprise of a film for me.

66. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)
You know, sometimes it's kinda hard to write about my favorite movies. Like, I'm not talking about writing about movies I merely love—if anything, this series has shown that I can yammer on for hundreds of words on movies I love. I mean those movies that have been a part of my life since childhood, movies I internalized deeply before I even knew what film criticism was. Maybe I'm too close to these movies to consistently find analytical footholds. Or maybe they are movies that I've already read so much critical discourse about that I'm paralyzed by the possibility of repeating those critics. I dunno. All that is to say that I have embarrassingly little to say about Raiders of the Lost Ark, even though it's one of my favorite movies ever. What makes writing about Raiders especially difficult is that it's also one of those movies that has little or no interest in making any sort of real-world point outside the joys of cinema culture itself, which, to be clear, is one of my favorite types of movies, but it also means that discussions are limited to the the purely allusive and technical aspects of the film. "Oh, this is cool because it alludes to x movie from Lucas's childhood," "Spielberg's direction is effective because of its efficiency with space," and the like. Those are valid, important discussions to have, but they aren't always discussions I feel especially equipped to engage in, particularly in the case of Indiana Jones, when the allusions refer to a cinematic form (i.e. adventure serials) whose heyday predates my birth by half a century. So yeah. I'm sorry for the lame "discussion about discussions" thing. I love, love, love this movie so much, but beyond gushing that sentiment, I'm all hot air.

That's all for now, folks! Until next time.

You can read the previous post, #s 61-63, here.
Update: The next post, #s 67-69, can be found here.

1] What's arguably more incredible, though, is that TV media rose (sank?) to the challenge of Network's colossal cynicism by actually making the sort of dreck the film cautions against. In a way, we have nobody but TV itself to thank for the intelligence of Network's screenplay. If television had become some completely high-brow medium in the years since '76, I think it's possible that we'd now dismiss Network as self-satisfied paranoia.

2] That's not to say that there isn't tons of crap out there, too, but overall I tend to prefer my film critiques of television (a dubious genre if there ever was one) to follow the path of Good Night, and Good Luck: TV is a medium with a rich potential, and it's sad that people don't always take advantage of that potential.

100 Years...100 Movies 61-63: Sullivan's Travels, American Graffiti, Cabaret

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.

Another few days, another few AFI movies. Yeah, that's about all I've got for an intro. Move along.

61. Sullivan's Travels (1941, Preston Sturges)
I'll be honest here: it has been a very long time since I last saw Sullivan's Travels. Consequently, this discussion is going to have to be kind of vague on the details of this film. I cannot remember, for instance, if the cinematography or direction is any good (though given that it's Preston Sturges running the show, I'd guess they're both at least functional, if not exemplary), so those are topics I'm going to avoid. What I do remember, however, is the plot. And man, that plot is good. It's not just an engaging, funny, slightly satiric story (although it is all those things); it's a story that has such a potent thematic thrust regarding the filmmaking establishment that its barbs are still poking modern-day Hollywood. It's actually kind of hilarious that this film made it onto the AFI list at all [1], given that Sullivan's Travels is an indictment of the self-serious prestige machine that fuels the Academy Awards, film criticism, and, yes, the American Film Institute. When the film's fictional filmmaker John Sullivan decides that comedies are just as socially valuable as prestigious social dramas with capital T Themes, he might as well be directly addressing this list, which, I remind you, is made up of (not counting musicals) less than 10 percent comedy and about 80 percent prestigious social drama with capital T Themes. Now, I like prestigious films as much as the next guy (and goodness knows I've praised plenty of them on this blog), but there's something sort of rousing to Sullivan's Travels's critique. To quote another film on this list, "Make 'em laugh," dangit!

62. American Graffiti (1973, George Lucas)
In discussing George Lucas, a lot of people focus on Star Wars, which is entirely reasonable considering that the original Star Wars trilogy and especially Episode IV are some of the biggest, most groundbreaking, most culturally significant, most aesthetically successful movies of all time. But what often gets lost in all the galaxy-far-far-away shuffle is poor old American Graffiti, the little movie that immediately precedes Star Wars in Lucas's filmography. And that's kind of too bad because not only is American Graffiti, like Star Wars, a great, distinctively personal film (as well as proof that at one time, George Lucas was actually a good writer), it also is pretty groundbreaking in its own right. The extent to which it incorporates classic rock and soul tunes into its soundtrack was pretty much unheard of at the time of its release, and it remains one of the most technically and thematically sophisticated uses of pop music ever in American cinema. The wall-to-wall-songs approach to its soundtrack has also been hugely influential on subsequent generations of filmmakers—you can bet that Dazed and Confused and Do the Right Thing, to name two of American Graffiti's biggest heirs, would sound a lot different without it. And speaking of those heirs, another piece of American Graffiti's groundbreaking legacy is that it (to my knowledge) pretty much invented the whole cinematic subgenre of wistful coming-of-age stories that take place over a single night. Movies like Sixteen Candles, Superbad, and yes, Dazed and Confused all work within this mode and basically follow the structure of American Graffiti verbatim, with a series of mostly episodic (and mostly comedic) events slowly escalating to catharsis at dawn. It's a killer way to construct a plot, and it's always a treat to see a movie adopt the form. I've talked so much about the influence of American Graffiti that I've run out of room to praise the actual movie itself. Don't let my lack of discussion fool you; American Graffiti is great, and, for what it's worth, I think it's better than at least sixty-seven percent of the Star Wars films. I'm guessing it's pretty obvious which sixty-seven percent.

63. *Cabaret (1972, Bob Fosse)
So this is the kind of musical American filmmakers made in the '70s. You know, for all the movie musicals I've seen (and, for all my tepid feelings toward them, I've seen quite a few), I don't think I've ever watched one from the '70s, unless you count something like The Aristocats, which I don't (and besides, it's rarely the animated musicals that I complain about anyway). Now that I've seen it, I'd say Cabaret fits perfectly within the decade, and, if we throw out auteur theory (which we should, because it's just silly), as representative of the New American Hollywood aesthetic and moral concerns as any work by Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. Social consciousness, grimy sets and costumes, dark lighting, beautiful cinematography (an especially pleasant surprise, given that musicals tend to pride themselves on inventive but not particularly beautiful camerawork), complicated sexuality, a bleak, bleak ending—it's all here, and I liked the film a whole lot. In fact, Cabaret is now probably my favorite musical on this whole AFI list[2] so far behind The Wizard of Oz (and Nashville, if you count that). Cabaret succeeds in taking that position largely because it works as an anti-musical, in the same way that films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Godfather: Part II could be called, respectively, anti-sci-fi and anti-gangster movies, in that it majorly tweaks or ignores many of the genre's conventions. The biggest nose-thumbing Cabaret gives the musical genre is that it almost entirely forgoes the device of delivering plot and character through song, instead relegating almost all of its music to the actual cabaret stage, which makes the music feel totally organic and integrated into the more serious intonations of the plot, an effect almost entirely foreign to most conventional musicals (where, I realize, the heightened artificiality is a good portion of the fun). The disconnect from plot development gives the songs a chance to relate to the characters in a more tangential, thematic way that pays especially well when the editing cuts from the stage to the characters going about their lives. Oh, and just so I don't give the wrong impression, this movie, for all its '70s dourness, is still a lot of fun. The cabaret performances are giddy, hilarious, catchy, and the performances, especially Liza Minnelli[3], are impassioned and charismatic. This one's a winner.

Per usual, I'd love some discussion on these films. Until next time!

If it strikes your fancy, you can read the previous entry, #s 58-60, here.
Update: The next post, #s 61-63, is up here.

1] In fact, Sullivan's Travels didn't make it onto AFI's original 1998 list, being only added for the 10th anniversary version that I'm working through now.

2] The irony is not lost on me that, when one of my perennial complaints of movie musicals is that they rarely capture the energy of a live stage performance, one of my favorite musicals ended up being a movie whose music is very self-consciously confined to an actual stage. For what it's worth, though, I should probably admit that I've never seen the stage version of Cabaret, so who knows how I'll feel about this film once I do.

3] aka Lucille Austero! I'd like to think that her character ends up escaping to Southern California and, late in life, developing crippling vertigo and an unflagging infatuation with one Buster Bluth. We can only hope—it's certainly a happier ending than Cabaret suggests for her.

100 Years...100 Movies 58-60: The Gold Rush, Nashville, Duck Soup

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.

Our fun run of thematically grouped entries in this series has been broken. Oh well, nothing lasts forever, tempus fugit, blah blah blah.

58. The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin)
First of all, sorry for the weird proportions of this movie's poster—turns out that studios in 1925 hadn't standardized the size of promotional material. Second of all, let's forget about the poster and focus on how completely amazing this movie is! If you know anything about Charlie Chaplin, chances are the bits you know are from The Gold Rush. The bear, the boot-eating, the teetering cabin, and like half a dozen (at least) other great sequences are all here. In fact, of all the Chaplin films I've seen, The Gold Rush might be the one most built on comic setpieces like those I just named (give or take Modern Times, which is just full of great setpieces), and whose success is most dependent on those moments rather than the connective tissue wrapping them together into a film. And boy, is it successful on that metric. Though it lacks the virtuosic timing of something like Modern Times and the soaring pathos of City Lights or The Kid, I'd argue that The Gold Rush is the most purely fun entry in Chaplin's filmography. It's less the sort of movie where the laughter sticks in your throat, which is definitely true of both Chaplin's more satirical and his more sentimental works, and it's more the kind that gives you permission to belt out the deepest, giddiest guffaws at any given moment during the action. This playfully inviting spirit—a sort of camaraderie with the viewer—gives the film much of Chaplin's typical warmth even though it lacks some of the more saccharine elements usually present in his work, and I'd probably rank it as my favorite of his. There's stiff competition, to be sure, but The Gold Rush is just that good.

59. *Nashville (1975, Robert Altman)
Well, this was unexpectedly devastating. I'd always heard Nashville described as either a comedy or a satire, sometimes both, and although I guess I should have known better than to expect a straightforward barrel of laughs from the director of M*A*S*H, I naively took those descriptions at face value. A barrel of laughs Nashville is not. That's not to say that it isn't funny (albeit usually funny in a sort of understated, observational way), and if we want to define a comedy as "a good time," then I suppose Nashville fits the bill, at least for about 95 percent of its duration. The film's characters are dim-witted and self-involved enough to be entertaining and often hilarious subjects to follow around; Altman and the actors (who actually wrote a lot of the movie's songs!) have also done a great job of capturing the feeling of live music, and the movie evokes a lively, if Looney-Tunesian, version of the old Nashville country scene that's a fun place to inhabit for 2.5-ish hours. But all those good times are really just window dressing for what is, at heart, an enormously cynical, bleak indictment of the state of America at its bicentennial. That dark heart wasn't clear to me until maybe fifteen minutes from the film's end, when the assassination attempt at the Parthenon concert pushes the violence and unrest percolating in the movie's subtext into the foreground. The truly damning moment is when the authorities shoo this violence to the periphery of the concert, and the audience all but ignores the events as new performers strike up a rousing, optimistic song, a giant American flag fluttering in the background. America isn't just ignorant about the problems that are ripping it apart; America doesn't care about the problems, so long as someone's there giving them a good time, telling them "don't worry." I mean, holy cow, that's just brutal. Once the ending hands you that thread, it's all too easy to pull at it until the fun of the whole movie unravels into the desperate state of the union address that it is at its core, a furious scream—"Wake up, America!" This is protest cinema at its most caustic, and it's also the kind of movie I wouldn't have been terribly receptive to even a couple years ago. But this is now, and at this specific moment in my life, even nearly forty years after its release, it hit me in the gut and made me want to cry. Does that mean I've gotten even more cynical than people told me I was a few years ago? Gosh. Hope not.

60. Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey)
And now for something completely different (thankfully—I don't want to bum y'all out). The thing about Marx brothers movies (and this is no original insight on my part) is that they pretty much live and die by their smallest distinct parts, e.g. the jokes. And I'm not just talking about the quality of the jokes either (though that's obviously important); no, the success of these movies is as much dependent on the quantity of jokes as it is on the quality. It's the theory of comic density: shove enough jokes into a short enough space of time, and the humor builds a sort of momentum wherein it becomes less important that each individual is funny and more important that the frenetic pace is maintained. In any scene (like, for instance, this one), the film rushes through so many jokes so quickly that it stops mattering that a good portion of them are howlingly unfunny because it takes only a few seconds to hit a hilarious one again. Moreover, the jokes spring forward with such relentless disregard for continuity or logic that the structure of the joke flow itself becomes a sort of joke; the separate jokes are funny enough, but what's really funny is the zigging and zagging of the script as it dashes from one moment of anarchy to the next. Look, I know I haven't talked very specifically about Duck Soup, but the thing is, there's not much distinguishing Duck Soup from the rest of the Marx brothers pack except that, of all their movies, its jokes probably have the highest funny-to-unfunny ratio. The Marx brothers' emphasis on individual jokes at the expense of pretty much everything else means that none of their films really work as distinct films so much as highlight reels. In Duck Soup specifically, I suppose that the political setting allows for a few unique bits of parody and satire, but no more so than, say, the opera at A Night at the Opera. The film has the same sort of bland-but-successful cinematography as all the other films, too, the primary strategy of which is to just set up a camera and let the Marxes just do their thing with as little editing and camera flair as possible. None of this is a criticism; Duck Soup is a hilarious, madcap film that's well worth the watch. I guess I just don't have that much else to say besides, "Yeah, it's hilarious."

We've hit the 60 percent mark in this project. Woot woot! I'll be posting the next entry sometime next week, but until then, don't be shy if you have something to say. Or not. That's cool, too. Until next time!

You can read the previous entry in this series, #s 55-57, here.
Update: The next post, #s 61-63, is up! You can read it here.

100 Years...100 Movies 55-57: North by Northwest, Jaws, Rocky

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.

You know, it's kind of funny how this list sometimes organizes itself into thematic clumps. Last time it was the '70s, and now this time, just in time to wash that auteur aftertaste from your mouth, it's blockbuster entertainment. I'm easily amused, I guess.

55. North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)
Okay, so it's a bit of an anachronism to call this movie a blockbuster, considering that it predates the blockbuster era (heralded by none other than the next entry on this list!) by a solid fourteen years. But outside of the realm of B-movies and maybe King Kong, I can't think of few pre-Jaws films that better embody the principles of that later era than North by Northwest. It's all here: the setpieces, the quick pace, the emotional remove, the violence, the wit (both verbal and visual), etc. North by Northwest is one monumentally[1] fun movie, which is something I think I'm going to be saying a lot about the films in this entry. It also ranks right up there with It Happened One Night among surprisingly dirty movies from the censorship era, though North by Northwest is more content to relegate the dirtiness to visual metaphors rather than the more literally minded sexual tension of that earlier Capra flick. That being said, a lot of those moments are so cheeky that they're just barely metaphorical, and that shot of the train entering the tunnel is as least as unsubtle as the falling curtain at the end of Capra's film (not to mention more anatomically informative). Overall, it's maybe a little too frothy and smug for me to include it in my shortlist of favorite Hitchcocks, but don't let that discourage you from seeing it if you haven't already. It's a blast.

56. Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)[2]
I've never really agreed with the people who call Jaws a horror movie. I mean, to be sure, it's full of things that are horrifying, mostly munching shark things like that monster in the poster. But it's not really a movie that is horrifying as a whole. And again, sure, there are plenty of moments that are scary (the image of Quint sliding down the boat into the shark's mouth is about as scary as they come). But it's not really a "scary movie." I dunno, maybe if I went to the beach right after watching Jaws, I'd feel differently. Or maybe I'm just cynical. But seriously, if I had to classify Jaws into a genre, I'd call it a thriller. That might seem like a nitpicking distinction to make, and I usually shy away from genre disputes anyway. In this case, though, I think it's an important line to draw, and here's why: horror is not, for the most part, about human beings, whereas thrillers most definitely are. If I may generalize for a moment, horror movies are about the sublime terror of the things beyond the scope of the mundane human experience—Cthulhu, Freddy Krueger, the Wolf Man, Satan; even those horror movies with human antagonists usually go to great lengths to dehumanize those villains, either visually (think hockey masks) or psychologically (think of the Otherness of Psycho's Norman Bates once the extent of his identity is revealed). It's not about humanity but about something huge and evil beyond us. Thrillers tend to be just the opposite, where the focus is on the human pieces of the story. Thrillers are about the Individual, and they often tell stories of humans with agency in their struggles—North by Northwest, to stay within the range of the AFI list. The antagonists are important, yes, but unlike horror films, thrillers position their protagonists as equally important to the narrative as (or even more important than) the villains. I realize that I'm inventing definitions that suit my argumentative purposes, but I really do think this is an important point to address with Jaws. Classifying Jaws as a horror movie puts the emphasis on the shark. And don't get me wrong, the shark is scary and cool and important, and the movie wouldn't work without it. As I see it, though, this isn't strictly the shark's story; it's Brody's. This is a movie about how this man responds to trauma, how he decides to fulfill his role in society in a crisis, how human resourcefulness (often his) "beats" nature. It's of course not boring and academic like I've just described it, because yes, there is a big, fat, literally scene-chewing killer shark on the loose. But I do think it's important where we direct our focus with this movie, and if it's only on the shark, we're missing out on a whole lot of other things Jaws has to offer. There's much more I want to say about this movie, but golly, this entry is running long. Maybe I'll blog about it more later. For now, though, moving right along...

57. Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen)
O Rocky. Poor Rocky. Of all the films on this list, Rocky may be the one whose stock has plummeted most since its release, give or take the look-at-these-shiny-happy-slaves Gone with the Wind. And almost none of that depreciation is the fault of the film itself, which is something you can't say about Gone with the Wind and its racism. Firstly, there's circumstantial misfortunes like its performance in the Academy Awards, where it won Best Picture over critical heavyweights like Taxi Driver and Network, forever dooming it to a reputation among film buffs as a movie indicative of the milquetoast taste of the Academy[3]. I don't subscribe to this point of view because 1. I like Rocky more than Taxi Driver anyway, and 2. I've never really gotten how the arguably poor decisions of a third party could affect the quality of the works they give awards to. Secondly (and this is probably the main problem Rocky faces with audiences nowadays), Rocky is one of those unfortunate movies cursed with way more sequels than it ever needed. The plethora of sequels is an absolute death knell for this movie's underdog spirit because it transforms Rocky from an endearingly scrappy upstart of a film into an Institution, and not just any institution but a fat, cheesy, even jingoistic institution often entirely at odds with the original film, one of those too-big-to-fail Hollywood Institutions that studios throw money into every decade just because they can (see also: RoboCop). All of that is just a crying shame, because Rocky really is a great little movie, with particular emphasis on the "little." I can't stress how much of the charm of this movie is banked on how small and personal everything feels, with Stallone's Rocky living one of those Bruce-Springsteen-Character lives that's impossible not to get invested in once the movie gives space to develop the minutiae of its day-to-day grind. Rocky's success in life really does feel like, as the tagline says, "a million-to-one shot," and not in an exploitative way that turns the mice in Rocky's apartment into stallions or anything but in a way that feels grounded in character and setting, not movie magic. That works on a meta level, too. Rocky is so ubiquitous now that it's easy to ignore that originally, the life of the movie itself was a million-to-one shot. Not only was it a low-budget production overseen by a mostly unknown actor whose major claim to fame by the mid-'70s was a starring role in a porno flick, the film was sentimental and optimistic in a decade of American cinema that was determined to be anything but. Oh, and lest this point get lost in all my blathering, let me say this once and for all: it's also a monumentally[4] fun movie.

As always, I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to stomp all over my genre definitions, my low placement of North by Northwest in Hitchcock's filmography, my defense of Rocky (or my dislike of its sequels) or anything else you'd like to stomp on. And, you know, you could be positive and stuff, too. It's whatever. Until next time!

You can read the previous post in the series, #s 52-54, here.
Update: You can read the next entry, #s 58-60, here.

1] Literally monumental, given that its climax occurs on the face of Mt. Rushmore. *rimshot*

2] I can't tell you how intimidating it is to write about this movie. Not only is it one of the most adored movies ever (and one of my personal favorites), but it's also been the subject of this week's "Movie of the Week" discussions over at one of my favorite film websites, The Dissolve (today's roundtable was a particularly great piece on some of the less talked-about aspects of the film). No chance I'm going to give you a better analysis than the Dissolve staff's. Apologies.

3] This is depressingly common when it comes to people talking about Academy Award winners. Other perfectly fine movies whose reputations became sullied after they won Best Picture over more critically acclaimed films: Shakespeare in Love, The King's Speech, Kramer vs. Kramer, Argo, Driving Miss Daisy, How Green Was My Valley, etc., etc.

4] Again, literally monumental, what with Rocky running up the iconic front steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. I must be butter, 'cause I'm on a roll.

100 Years...100 Movies 52-54: Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, M*A*S*H

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.

Three very '70s movies up to bat this time. Enjoy the cynicism and auteurism.

52. Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)
I have to tread cautiously here, because if I'm not careful, it's going to sound like I don't like Taxi Driver, and that would mean this blog would document me rejecting yet another of Scorsese's nearly undisputed masterworks (though I would like to say that I've warmed a little to Raging Bull since I first wrote about it). But I do. I might even go so far to say that I really like the film. It's a stupendously acted and directed movie, and for that it's probably worth seeing. It's also a movie that aims to stare deep into the dark, seedy heart of America and make a statement about why that heart kind of fails the rest of the body, so to speak, which is a purpose that usually endears me to a work of art. The thing is, though, for as much as I admire the intent and raw craft of Taxi Driver, I also have to admit that, for me at least, it's a hard movie to out-and-out love. On a visceral level, I've never been all that happy with how icy a film it is. If there's a humanity at the heart of Taxi Driver, I haven't found it, and golly, that's saying something for a movie that features not only a romance but a character's vigilante rage at child prostitution as major plot points. Everything about the cinematography and direction, as aesthetically interesting at they are, is just so darn removed from everything. On a more intellectual level, though, I also think the movie severely botches its ending and as a result compromises any critique of American society that the filmmakers intended to make. Travis Bickle is a monster, a racist, a fascist, someone who is not only aware of society's flaws but also fabricates several other nonexistent ones in his twisted mind. And that's a fascinating character to ground a film's perspective in, provided the movie is willing to interrogate just who this character is. The problem is that the ending does not interrogate Travis Bickle. What should be the cinematic equivalent of a biting and honest New York Times interview turns into a kind of Good Morning America featurette. I'm almost certain this was not the intent, but the effect of that climactic shootout when I see it play out on the screen is one of uncompromised heroism. It's a catharsis of Bickle's rage, and cinematographically, the film justifies that. This is his "real rain" to "wash all the scum off the street," and let's not forget that this scum includes not only pimps and child pornographers but also the black people Bickle stares down on the sidewalk throughout the film. I'm not saying the movie is complicit in Bickle's racism or militarism or whatever, but in its ending, the movie allows its viewers to be complicit in it if they choose. Call it Fight Club Syndrome, in which the cinematic depiction of something can often be so alluring that it undercuts whatever social point the filmmakers intend. That those newspaper headlines at the end are supposed to be ironic is not lost on me. The film just doesn't entirely earn that irony, though. At least, I don't think so, and as a result, I can't help but find Taxi Driver philosophically troubling once everything is said and done.

53. *The Deer Hunter (1978, Michael Cimino)
I have weird feelings about this movie, the bulk of which stem from my trying to reconcile two facts: first, that I found The Deer Hunter to be an indulgent, tedious slog, and second, that the film somehow manages to be sort of powerful anyway—at least, in parts. Good merciful heavens[1], is the bulk of The Deer Hunter tedious. I know I've been vocally opposed to long movies elsewhere on this blog, but I don't think there's a single movie on the rest of the AFI list that justifies its runtime less than The Deer Hunter. Scenes stumble on and on in meandering directions that do nothing to expand the scope of the movie, and yes, I realize that a big part of this movie's project is to capture with verisimilitude the ambling chaos of both everyday life and war scenarios, but come on, at least have a screenplay that's more than just intermittently interesting. It's not exclusively the script's problem, though; the editing throughout is slack, too. Case in point: in the funeral scene at the movie's end, we're treated to a wide-angle shot of all the main characters grieving at the graveside, followed by completely redundant closeup shots of each character sporting the exact same pose as in the wide shot. It only adds like thirty seconds to the movie, but these things add up. And yet I said up there at the beginning that this movie is powerful anyway. A good chunk of that power comes from the acting, which is stunning across the board and imbues even the more lethargic moments with life. There's sweetness to comradery in the film's opening third and weight to the tragedy of the final third that are totally not found in the screenplay itself, and I can only attribute it to the vibrancy with which these actors inhabit their characters. I'm even tempted to call Robert De Niro's role in this movie his career best, though there's still Raging Bull out there to contend with. Even if it isn't his absolute best, it's still immensely satisfying to see him play against type as a more sensitive kind of guy (though he does get his macho moments in there, too). The cinematography, too, has a great eye for images, and if nothing else, it's a beautiful film to look at. It's the darnedest thing, too: together with the acting, the visual beauty helps to give The Deer Hunter a depth in its handling of Vietnam and its aftermath that is pretty striking, despite my being restless the entire movie. There's a feeling of truth to everything that happens onscreen that feels big. So my question is: if a movie is a complete chore to watch but still manages to make striking statements, is it good? My second question: should that question even matter?

54. M*A*S*H (1970, Robert Altman)
M*A*S*H might be another one to chock up to the "you had to be there" class of movies, right alongside The Best Years of Our Lives. Mind you, I like this movie a great deal more than The Best Years of Our Lives, but it's still not one that I'd profess an undying love for or anything. And like that earlier film, it's a movie so rooted in not just a specific historical moment (this time, the experiences of army surgeons in the middle of a Korean War that looks a heck of a lot like Vietnam) but also a specific cinematic moment (when the film's rag-tag plotting and overlapping dialogue tracks were regarded as major innovations) that I can't help but feel that I missed a bus on this one by at least a couple decades [2]. That's not to say that I missed all the movie's buses, though, because there's still plenty here that I enjoy, despite not "being there." The juxtaposition of snark and wartime is still quite effective. As much as it's been imitated since, there's still a lot of power in the scenes of wise-cracking surgeons being playful in the face of ER intensity, especially when that intensity features war violence. And the film as a whole has a fun hangout vibe to it, with an endearing lack of pretension or heavy social commentary to "ground" the film in easily processed morals. It's entertaining simply to watch life unfold at the hospital, and for as much as I might complain about the relative slackness of the film's pacing (and I do complain about that, by the way), tightening the plot would have definitely sacrificed some of the comedic naturalism and easy-going attitude that I enjoy in the current version. Then again, it's also an astoundingly bitter movie, entirely cynical about the systems that dictate the lives of the characters at the hospital, so maybe I'm overemphasizing the hangoutness of M*A*S*H. It's a weird balance this film walks.

As always, let me know what you think. I of course welcome both dissenting and consenting opinions, so bring 'em on. Until next time!

You can go back to the previous post in the series, #s 49-51, here.
Update: The next post, #s 55-57, is up here.

1] Or, considering the director we're dealing with here, should I say, "Good merciful heaven's gate"?

2] Another bus I missed: I have only a passing familiarity with the TV series that this movie birthed, which means that I don't have all the "Hey look, it's the character who inspired that guy on the show!" moments that I assume the film is full of. Also, I've never seen another Robert Altman film (though that's going to change in a few posts), so maybe I'll gain a deeper appreciation for M*A*S*H once I've gotten a little further into his filmography. That being said, as I understand it, this film isn't generally regarded as one of his best by Altman enthusiasts, so maybe not.

100 Years...100 Movies 49-51: Intolerance, The Fellowship of the Ring, West Side Story

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.

Epics, epics, epics. Well, I guess West Side Story isn't truly an epic, but whatever. All three of these movies push the 2.5-3 hour mark, and that's all I'm going to say about that. I had my fill of griping about movie length way back at the beginning of the list. Anyway, enjoy the films! I sure did. Well, most of them.

49. *Intolerance (1916, D. W. Griffith)
So, this one's a biggie. Everything I've ever read about Intolerance points to it as a major innovation in the history of film, and its director, D. W. Griffith, is one of the giants of Silent Cinema. And then there's its colossal, ridiculous, utterly breathtaking ambition, a 3+ hour epic that cross-cuts between four distinct historical settings and storylines, which makes the film literally a biggie. On a more subjective note, Intolerance is big for me and specifically for this blog series because giving myself an occasion to watch Intolerance was one of the main reasons I started my trek through the AFI 100. I'll be honest, though: prior to (and even a couple hours into) this first viewing, my interest in this movie was primarily academic. I wasn't exactly itching to watch it (I mean, at the risk of sounding horribly prejudiced, it's an epic-length silent drama—if that description makes you want to drop everything and watch it right away, well, you're a more sophisticated viewer than I), but based on its reputation and influence, I knew it was one of those movies I had to see if I wanted to be serious about rounding out a knowledge of film. Well, Reader, I have seen Intolerance, and it pretty much blew me away. Now, I'm not gonna lie: stretches of the movie (heck, whole historical timelines—why is the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in here?) made me restless enough to glance at the clock, and I watched the thing in two sittings. But the payoff was magnificent. Foremost, Intolerance looks lavish. Back when I wrote about Gone with the Wind [1], I mentioned how awe-inspiring those "cast-of-thousands" shots are, but Intolerance's setpieces make Gone with the Wind's look like they were done with Fisher-Price toys. The grandeur of the Babylon sequences in particular is at a level I don't think I've seen in any other film, and Intolerance basically solidifies this idea that's been brewing in my head recently, that for all the advantages of CG-enhanced cinema, digital crowds and sets can't hold a candle to the majesty of those giant Hollywood shots of actual crowds from the old epics. All that spectacle is great fun to look at; however, the thing that pulls everything together is Intolerance's emotional power. It's a slow-builder for sure, but once it gets going, there's nothing stopping the panoramic humanity of the picture. The last ten minutes are deeply moving in a way that I never expected in my anticipation of seeing this film. All that is to say, if this can be said of a nearly ninety-year-old movie: believe the hype.

50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001, Peter Jackson)
And speaking of hype, if there's an Intolerance of my generation, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is it. By that I mean that it's a work of filmmaking so enormous in its ambition, so successful in its combination of sweeping spectacle and equally sweeping pathos, so influential in terms of how much it changed the tone and vocabulary of mainstream American cinema, that it's sure to be turning up on lists like AFI's from now on, if only for its sheer historical significance. For whatever reason, Jackson's LOTR has fallen in critical estimation in the years since its original theatrical run (just check out how few of those "Best of the Decade" lists from 2009 made room for any of the three films). I, however, still love these movies as much as when I was first seeing them (and Fellowship is probably the best of the lot—well spotted, AFI), so rather than dwell on the good and the bad of this movie, I just want to point out something that's maybe kind of obvious: the early 2000s was this weird wonderland of a time when studios made major risks by handing over huge, expensive genre projects to idiosyncratic, totally un-four-quadrant indie directors, and The Lord of the Rings is Exhibit A in this trend. I mean, Peter Jackson, a man who up to that point was known mostly for splatterhouse horror and black comedy, a man who had not had one major mainstream hit, was given the reigns to one of the single riskiest, most enormous cinematic undertakings ever. Like, holy cow, what divine accident caused one of those profit-counters at New Line Cinema to sign off on that?? And then you've got people like Sam Raimi (like, Evil Dead Sam Raimi!), Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro put in charge of big-budget productions of Spider-Man, Harry Potter, and Blade, respectively, only a year or two later. I mean, golly. What was even crazier was that each of those directors made movies out of those properties that felt true to their filmography. The Lord of the Rings movies feel like Peter Jackson movies, by gum, which is really saying something given the number of eyes those films no doubt had to pass by before reaching the final cut. All that is to say, the blockbuster world of 2014 feels a lot more committee-run and a lot less personal than it did even ten-to-fifteen years ago, and for as many successes as that's brought (I like the Marvel Cinematic Universe a whole lot, guys), I sometimes miss the days of The Fellowship of the Ring's production. Which is probably a judgement totally clouded by nostalgia and historical revision on my part, but whatever.

51. *West Side Story (1961, Robert Wise)
Basing the plot of a movie on Romeo and Juliet is one of the few ways to guarantee that I will not like a movie. Reader, I just don't like that play. One of the main reasons for this is that Romeo and Juliet are stupid, irritating, and (worse) insufferably dull characters. YOU GUYS JUST MET EACH OTHER, THERE'S NO WAY YOU'RE IN LOVE, GAAHH. Ahem. Sorry. I've heard people argue that that was Shakespeare's point, that Romeo and Juliet's cooperative vapidity is meant to show the foolish idealism of young love, blah blah. Well, maybe, but that doesn't change the facts that I just can't stand either of them and that they're uninteresting to read about/watch. So, given all that, it should come as little surprise to anyone that I did not really care for West Side Story. In all fairness to the movie, the deck was pretty stacked against it to begin with; in addition to everything I've already written here, there's also my well-documented tepidity for movie musicals in general [2]. And in further fairness to the movie, I enjoyed pieces of it. The social dynamics of both the gangs and the immigration issues are handled with an impressive degree of sophistication and honesty (especially for a mainstream Hollywood musical), with the film striking in interesting balance between fatalism and personal agency as instigators of tragedy. The show also has a few songs I enjoy, with my favorite probably being the surprisingly thematically complex "Gee, Officer Krupke," although I make room in my heart for the "Tonight Quintet" and "Jet Song," too. The majority of the songs, though, I find kind of boring and background-music-y, and the movie is far too fond of extended wordless dance numbers that are great fun live but rather a chore to sit through in a film. And of course, there's no saving Tony and Maria (your Romeo and Juliet proxies) from being boring as Elmer's glue, so their sections of the movie have all the vibrancy of a pile of rocks with no moss. That's a death knell for the film, which makes these sections its primary focus. Once their plot dovetails with the gang violence, it picks up a little, but by then, it's too late to make me feel anything for those two. Does that make me heartless? Maybe. But dang it if I just look at the clock whenever Tony shows his dopey face.

And BAM! I'm halfway through this list! Unfortunately, I'm more than halfway through the summer, which means that this project will carry over into the school semester... which means that my pace through these movies will slow significantly come mid-August. Oh well. As always, feel free to let me know what you think of these write-ups. Until next time!

If the spirit moves you, you can look back at the previous post, #s 46-48, here.
Update: The next post, #s 52-55, is up here.

1] If you want to feel weird things about the passage of time and cinematic evolution, think about this: there are twenty-three years between the release of Intolerance and the release of Gone with the Wind. That's about the same amount of time separating us from Terminator 2, Beauty and the Beast, and The Silence of the Lambs.

2] For the record, I've seen this performed live on the stage as well, and per usual, I enjoyed the show quite a bit. It's just movie musicals, man. They'll get ya.