100 Years...100 Movies 99-100: Toy Story, Ben-Hur

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.

This is it! These are the last two movies on the list, and this is the last post in the project. Not to rush things, but I say we just jump right into these movies. So...

99. Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter)
Otherwise known as the greatest entry in the greatest film trilogy of all time. That's right. I said it. Let's just skip over that big, baiting "greatest trilogy" statement (sorry, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Before..., and Three Colors—you're great and all, but seriously, Toy Story. End of discussion!) and move on to why I feel like this first entry is the best of the three Toy Stories. I love all three, obviously, but what I really appreciate about this movie in particular (setting aside the unprecedented technical feat that it was in '95) is how discretely it handles its thematic resonance. Toy Story manages a neat trick that most other movies fail to pull off: it explores real, philosophical depth without interrupting its own fun, instead using that very fun as the medium of conveying the depth. For a movie about mortality and existential dread, Toy Story is an astonishingly breezy watch. Don't misunderstand me; I adore the emotional weight of 2 and 3, and the trilogy as a whole is better off for it. But there's just something infinitely wonderful about the way that the first Toy Story gets at those very same emotions without a Sarah McLachlan song or a trash-incinerator-as-mortal-abyss scene. Let's face it: for all their good will and humor, 2 and 3 can feel downright heavy at times. Toy Story, on the other hand, isn't. It also avoids the later films' tendencies to underline their own profundity. Toy Story is a movie built on subtext—subtext not alien to its otherwise family-film format but so organically a part of the movie's plot and execution that it doesn't feel like it's there at all. I bring all this up not to fault Toy Story 2 and 3 (I like sad songs and staring into the abyss) but rather to point out how the first one is the movie that leaves its audiences with the most agency in responding to the film. Are you interested in an entertaining adventure movie with vibrant animation and endearing, hilarious characters? Toy Story will let you enjoy it completely on that level. Do you want to analyze how Toy Story is a complex, affecting study of an individual's worth in society, abandonment, the value of community, the terror of invisibility/non-existence, and the effects of technological innovation on the human spirit? You can do that, too. In fact, please do. I'd love to read that essay.

100. Ben-Hur (1959, William Wyler)
Here it is, y'all. The last movie on. this. list. And you know, I like it. I know the early posts in this blog series contained a lot of griping by me about Hollywood epics and the associated bloat. And those complaints still stand. In fact, a lot of those complaints still stand in specific regard to Ben-Hur. It's super long and super self-serious, for one, and, in the grand tradition of many of the worst epics (lookin' at you, Cleopatra), it tries to bolster its own significance by annexing stories and/or historical events central to the Western canon. In Ben-Hur's case, it's none other than the New Testament that gets annexed, and given that text's importance to my life, I'm sure there are all sorts of ways I could pick apart its appropriation in this movie and in the novel it's based on[1]. But... I've never really explored those avenues, and for as big and as messy as it is, I've always had a soft spot for Ben-Hur. For one, theology aside, it's a darn good adventure film, with the brisk pace of deterred justice propelling the narrative. The conflict between Judah and Messala is compellingly drawn, and the action scenes play a nice balance between sheer, enthralling spectacle (that ship battle is pretty dang cool) and emotional stakes (the chariot race, y'all--my goodness). For two, taking up theology again, it's always appealed to me that the grand narrative of this movie is one that points toward redemption and reconciliation, which is something that definitely does square with the general thrust of the New Testament and something that feels meaningful when tackled by the movie. That's more than I can say of a lot of film epics.

And... done! That's a wrap, folks. This project is hereby complete. Many, many thanks to everyone who stopped in to read and comment on Facebook, even if only occasionally. You've all been great and encouraging conversation. This has been a blast of a series for me, and I hope it's been the same for y'all.

I've been kicking around the idea of finishing out this project by posting my own 100 favorite American movies as a sort of response to AFI's list. I've actually made the list already, but as it turns out, my tastes are so boring and canonical that I feel like you might as well just be reading the actual AFI list. Still, if anyone out there is interested, let me know, and I can post my list anyway.

If not, this post will close out the project. It's been a great ride, y'all. Now to write on something other than classic movies for a while...

You can read the previous post, #s 97-98, here.

1] Yeah, I know that this film is technically more of a remake of a 1925 silent film than it is an adaptation of the novel, but since I haven't seen the original, I don't really have a whole lot to say on the value of the '59 flick as a remake. Also, now that I've brought up the novel, I want to give Ben-Hur props for being one of those movies that, in my estimation, definitely improves upon its original book. The book's okay, but it's got only a fraction of the narrative propulsion of the movie. Besides, I mean, c'mon, that chariot race was made to be put in a movie. Well, not literally, since the novel predates motion pictures by some years. But you know what I mean.

100 Years...100 Movies 97-98: Blade Runner, Yankee Doodle Dandy

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.

Counting the movies in this post, I have exactly four movies left on the AFI list, which means that I can't continue at my normal clip of three movies per post. So instead, you'll notice that I'll cover these last four movies over two posts of two movies each. Cool? Cool. Also, this post includes the very last movie I have to watch for the first time for this series. Woot woot! The excitement! The bittersweetness!

97. Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
Okay, so I'll be honest here: I think it's a royal pain in the hindquarters when movies have more than one version. I realize that all sorts of reasons go into the existence of multiple cuts/editions, including studio interference, directorial hubris, and MPAA ratings-board compliance. But you know what? It's still a major inconvenience that there are two different versions of, say, Apocalypse Now out there because it inevitably leads to the feeling that I haven't really seen this movie until you've seen x cut, and dang it, I shouldn't have to see two versions of the same movie to have really seen the movie. Most of that is just laziness on my part combined with my sometimes unhealthy prioritization of breadth over depth (e.g. I'd almost always rather see a movie I've never seen before than rewatch something), and I do feel a little bad about that. But seriously, seven[1] different versions of Blade Runner? All this tiresome rant is to say that no, I haven't seen every cut of Blade Runner, and yes, it does sort of bug me that I haven't, but no, I'm not making any real attempt to seek out the versions I haven't seen. I couldn't even really tell you which versions I've seen besides The Final Cut. So maybe this means that I haven't really seen Blade Runner. I don't know. What I do know is that in the end, it doesn't really matter, because the versions of the movie I have seen are amazing. The film is one of the best intersections of hard sci-fi, philosophic artistry, and special effects ever. The acting is uniformly phenomenal, too, and it's a real treat seeing Harrison Ford give a career highlight in one of the only roles ever to allow him to explore real existential depth in a character. Oh, and then there's the cinematography's unparalleled eye for catching incredible imagery out of the already evocative setting. It's great stuff, and one of my personal favorites, multiple versions be darned.

98. *Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz)
So, here's the last movie I'm watching for the first time for this series. It's... ehhh... Well, okay, I'll put it this way: on a technical level, it's fine—nothing too fancy, but also nothing totally embarrassing, either. Yankee Doodle Dandy is a mostly well-made movie, which is not a surprise if you remember that Michael Curtiz also directed none other than Casablanca[2], though I could quibble with the use of flashback and voiceover to build the film's story and with the cuts during the musical segments. The acting, too, is fine, with James "Made It, Ma" Cagney throwing himself into his role as famed Broadway mogul George M. Cohan with admirable enthusiasm. That level of technical proficiency in the production is nothing to sneeze at, so don't hear me calling this movie a complete failure or anything. But good night, folks, there's also the content of the film. Just how much unironic nationalism can one movie cram into a two-hour runtime? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Look, I realize that Cohan is a real-life figure and that these songs would have to be included in a film adaptation of his life. I also realize that this movie was made in the middle of World War II, which would have made any sort of critique of America's blind patriotism difficult to pull off. But man, the U.S.A!-U.S.A.!-ness of the movie really does rub my 21st-century perspective the wrong way, especially when it comes to the rah-rah-hang-'em-high nature of the movie's treatment of war. I'll give the movie this much: songs like "Over There" are way more fun, musically at least, than modern equivalents like "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" (legitimate question: is mainstream country the only genre that still writes patriotic anthems?), and as such, the lavish spectacle of the musical segments do have an engaging gaudiness to them. Still, that's not enough to rescue the film from the sort of unselfconscious grossness of its unexamined Americanism. All this would definitely be forgivable, though, if the movie were at least dramatically interesting, but alas, that's not the case. I'm sure Cohan, like all human beings, was a complicated individual with all sorts of interesting facets to explore. Watching this movie, though, you would be forgiven for thinking that his life was an inert series of successes, punctuated by only the most fleeting conflicts with those around him. So yeah, I'm not exactly thrilled with this one. It's a bummer that the last new movie on this list ended up being one I'm so unenthused with. But oh well. There have been plenty of other great ones I've seen along the way.

One more post, folks. This is getting real. If you want to add something, go ahead and jump right into the conversation. I love hearing from you dedicated readers, especially you lovely people who stuck it out this whole project. Until next time!

Feel free to read the previous post in the series, #s 93-96, here.
Update: You can read the final(!) post in the series, #s 99-100, here.

1] Admittedly, there are only four versions that ever saw significant releases on home media, but still. That's a lot of Blade Runners.

2] There's a cool symmetry to this list in that both the third and third-from-the-last movies were directed by Curtiz. Well, I think it's cool. Easily amused, I guess.

100 Years...100 Movies 94-96: Pulp Fiction, The Last Picture Show, Do the Right Thing

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.

Each of these three movies is legitimately great. I swear, the second half of this list has been way more interesting than the first half, and it now looks like AFI saved some of the best for last.

94. Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino)
One of the things that makes Pulp Fiction so hard to discuss in any sort of meaningful way beyond "Yeah, dude, that part was great!" is that it's a film that has almost completely separated the medium's form from its content. That's a boring, academic way to talk about the movie, but here's the gist of what I mean: We engage movies in two major ways, one way being aesthetic or formal (i.e. the components that make the film function—camerawork, dialogue, etc.) and the other being social or content-based (i.e. the elements that help us connect those aesthetic pieces to a larger context within our own experiences—for example, Schindler's List takes place during the Holocaust and features characters we are supposed to care for as we would people in real life). Or, to put it another way, you could say that one way concerns how a movie is about, while the other concerns what a movie is about. Pulp Fiction is a movie that manages to be almost completely about the how. I mean, really, there's almost no content in the film. I don't mean that nothing happens, per se, but rather that none of the things that happen have any real meaning except as they relate to the pure technicalities of the movie. Pulp Fiction is full of crime, but it's not really about crime (or violence, or race, or foot massages, or burgers, or the metric system, for that matter). It's about the dialogue that happens as that crime plays out, it's about the blunt composition and the jokey, referential way the camera moves, the elegance of blood splatters and men in black suits. That's the genius of Quentin Tarantino; he's figured out exactly what it is that makes certain kinds of movies fun to watch and boiled that down into a pure distillation of that aesthetic, with none of those pesky real-world emotions or social contracts to get in the way of the fun. Pulp Fiction isn't the first movie to do this (Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2 comes to mind, as does Tarantino's previous feature, Reservoir Dogs), but it's arguably the most famous and influential one. Even if it isn't, it's still one heck of an entertaining movie. It's got a chemistry that even Tarantino hasn't been able to replicate since (though he tried his darnedest with Kill Bill), and it remains the single most quotable movie in a filmography full of quotable movies, which seems appropriate for a movie that's most interested in quoting the "good parts" of other movies.

95. *The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich)
So, it looks like it's time to eat crow. I mean, not a whole lot of crow, but crow nonetheless, because, as it turns out, I've been attributing something to the wrong movie. For most of this blog, I've been citing American Graffiti as a sort of ground zero for the modern wistful coming-of-age film. Now that I've seen The Last Picture Show, that crown most definitely needs to be taken from American Graffiti and given to this stellar Peter Bogdanovich feature (though it remains a tentative giving, since, who knows, maybe there's some other ur-coming-of-age that I'm not aware of). Unlike American Graffiti and its progeny, The Last Picture Show doesn't take place over a single night (its action unfolds over several months), but the rest of it's here, right down to the period setting and near-constant soundtrack (this time, old country). Dazed and Confused in particular is indebted to The Last Picture Show all over, not the least of which in the way that they both demonstrate the effects of social pressures and limited opportunities in a small town on teens. But enough about influence. The Last Picture Show is an amazing film in its own right, a small, quiet movie that builds to a climax that, paradoxically, feels even smaller than the rest of the film and also somehow titanic and profound. There's a palpable feeling of encroaching mortality hovering over the movie, and this is only reinforced by the way the cast size begins to shrink alongside the population of the town as the film progresses. In its early stages, this work feels crowded and observational, a slice-of-life document of teen life in 1950s rural Texas. But as the minutes tick by, the setting becomes more and more abstract when characters and pieces of scenery fall away until, at the end, it feels as though Sonny is walking through a physical manifestation of his adolescence's empty husk. If I'm nitpicking, I'll say that this transition into increasing emptiness makes the back half of the movie a little less interesting than the first half, and if we're just talking Peter Bogdanovich, I'll add that I do prefer Paper Moon to this one. But nitpicking's no fun and not altogether useful when a movie is already fantastic. And yes, The Last Picture Show is fantastic.

96. Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)
Man, oh man oh man. Where to even begin with this movie? How about how it's a lovingly, beautifully, searingly rendered evocation of place? Spike Lee's Brooklyn (and specifically the neighborhood this film focuses on) is depicted with a kaleidoscopic intensity here, vibrant without being cartoonish, panoramic while still maintaining intimacy with each of its dozen or so primary characters, gorgeously poetic without sacrificing the film's essential realism. Or how about how the movie is a stylish, ecstatic celebration of music, from the opening dance number to the DJ stylings of Samuel L. Jackon's Mister Señor Love Daddy to the use of Public Enemy to the way that every line of dialogue and every piece of camera work feels alive with a musical lyricism? Or how about how the film takes the tropes of traditionally white, traditionally nostalgic coming-of-age tropes of films like American Graffiti[1] and adapts them into a distinctively diverse, distinctively modern, distinctly original context that feels both of a tradition and completely free from all tradition? Or how about how the movie is the great cinematic portrayal of racism in American society, full stop? The sensitivity, nuance, rage, sorrow, and conviction with which Do the Right Thing paints racial relations is unparallelled in the history of American movies, and what's more, it feels contemporary in an absolutely damning way. This isn't To Kill a Mockingbird's 1930s or 12 Years a Slave's antebellum years; this is now. Do the Right Thing is a member of that depressingly small class of films that actually examines racism in its own current society, and the horrifying, heartbreaking fact is that Do the Right Thing is just as relevant to 2014 as it was to 1989. So do the right thing and watch Do the Right Thing. Now.

Also, do the right thing and let me know what you think. I'd love to hear back from y'all! Until next time.

You can read the previous post, #s 91-93, here.
Update: You can read the next post, #s 97-98, here.

1] Or, I guess I should say The Last Picture Show now, though of all the children of American Graffiti, Do the Right Thing feels the least like a grandchild of The Last Picture Show.

100 Years...100 Movies 91-93: Sophie's Choice, Goodfellas, The French Connection

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 have literally nothing to say other than "Enjoy the writeups," so... enjoy the writeups!

91. Sophie's Choice (1982, Alan J. Pakula)
Sophie's Choice is one of those rare movies to have sort of become a punchline—not because of any real fault of the movie itself (as opposed to something like, say, the Star Wars prequels, which yes, definitely are at fault) but rather because the mere premise of the movie is so irresistibly referable that it's pretty much become a joke. For every time anyone has to face some sort of hard decision, you can bet there's going to be someone who calls it a "Sophie's choice." Choosing which one of your coworkers to let go—that's a Sophie's choice; deciding which books to put in your too-small backpack—that's a Sophie's choice; being able to fit only four of your days-of-the-week underwear into your suitcase—you better believe that's a Sophie's choice. I'm sure it'll differ from viewer to viewer whether or not the overexposure will diminish the power of the eventual reveal of what Sophie's choice actually is (I won't spoil it here), but the uncomfortable truth behind the reference is that it's essentially a joke about the Holocaust, which, yes, I'm definitely guilty of. That's maybe an issue to be taken up with the movie itself, too (and, I assume, the source novel). It's not that the film treats the Holocaust as a joke, per se, but there is probably a productive conversation to be had (and maybe it's already been had) about the film's making a sort of "gotcha" moment out of an Auschwitz-related event in the middle of what is otherwise a sort of three-character, non-party-filled version of The Great Gatsby. It's a powerful moment, for sure, but does the rest of the film provide a suitable scaffold for that power? I'm not sure. Anyway, I don't want to pick the film to death[1]. There's a lot to love here, from the uniformly excellent acting (is this pretty much the movie that vaulted Maryl Streep from '70s supporting actor to the revered powerhouse she is today? I'm not sure, but I can't think of an earlier role of such prominence and I-have-an-accent-and-lots-of-pain seriousness) to the stately direction to the often-captivating screenplay. The film may collapse just the slightest bit under its own weight by the end, but the journey getting there is a pretty good one.

92. Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese)
When I say that I like Martin Scorsese (a claim that you readers may find suspect after my qualified acceptances of both Raging Bull and Taxi Driver), this is the movie I'm thinking of. Scorsese's got a lot of good films (among which, for the record, I do include Taxi Driver and Raging Bull—not to sound too defensive or anything), but I don't think I'd ever hesitate to name Goodfellas as his masterpiece and possibly even the masterpiece of American cinema[2]. I say that because even if Goodfellas isn't his best movie (though I certainly think it is), it's the movie that best distills the Scorseseness of his filmography[3] into a working whole that feels like the product of both a single vision and egalitarian collaboration. The tracking shots, the richness of composition, the stellar marriage of soundtrack with film, the brutality, the hard-nosed worldview, the Italian heritage, the feeling that every bit of the film is just one match away from explosion—all those Scorsese hallmarks are here and in tremendous form. But more so than most Scorsese films, Goodfellas also gives the actors agency in building the movie's world. And not just the actors portraying the towering, existential, Travis-Bickle types either. Nearly all the actors onscreen, from the Joe-Pesci-challenging bus boy to the assorted one-off head nodders in the introductory tracking sequence, bring the improvisation and verve of reality to their performances, and the movie is generous enough to give them the space to do so, making every scene feel like an ecstatic rush to capture every bit of life around the camera. Of course, what makes that rush doubly great is that the film is well-constructed enough that even with its appearance of unpredictability, it never loses track of its ultimate social message either. It's not a moral film in that it matters whether or not evil-doers get their comeuppance in the end, but it is a movie that is meticulously focused on the mechanics and complacencies of the American lifestyle and particularly the ways in which that lifestyle informs organized crime. Yeah, Goodfellas is one of those movies that stares into the dark, rotten heart of the American Dream. Yeah, it's old thematic ground, but Goodfellas manages to find unexplored crevices of that ground time and time again. It's dazzling.

93. *The French Connection (1971, William Friedkin)
Going into The French Connection, I knew two things about the film: 1) It starred Gene Hackman, and 2) it had a really famous chase sequence in it. Well, now that I have actually seen the movie, here are a few things I most definitely didn't know about The French Connection: 1) It also stars Roy Schneider, aka Brody from Jaws; 2) it has a killer, killer score written by Don Ellis that dabbles in experimental and minimalist influences; 3) it's an extremely dark, not altogether pleasant movie that 4) features a cop (Gene Hackman) who is unapologetically bigoted and 5) also shows said cop lethally gunning down or attempting to lethally gun down perps; 6) it's a film that not only has the aforementioned famous chase scene but also includes so many other chase scenes that they make up what must be at least a third of its runtime. I only mention #s 4 and 5 to bring up a brief point about the effect of a viewer's personal context on the power of a movie—given recent events and a national climate that has nothing to do with this movie, I really wasn't in the mood to see a police officer shooting at fleeing suspects, regardless of how criminal or violent the suspects may be in the film. Consequently, I'm sure I would have enjoyed this movie much more if I had seen it a month ago[4]. It's not the movie's fault, of course, and that gets into #3, where a large part of the film's darkness comes from the complicated reality that the people responsible for conventionally heroic tasks like breaking up drug rings can also be capable of not-so-heroic things, too, with some of that not-so-heroism even enabling them to perform the heroism. Not to bog this writeup down too much, though, let's transition into #6, which is really the meat of the film anyway. See, probably the most surprising thing to me about this movie was the sheer abundance of action setpieces, to the point where The French Connection feels like as much of a forebear to the modern action blockbuster as Jaws itself. That's not a complaint in the slightest. I love a good action sequence, and The French Connection is full of them. It's essentially a New Hollywood update of the classic cops 'n robbers flick in the same way that The Godfather updates the old gangster movie tropes into the modern cinematic era, and for all its '70s cynicism and moral ambiguity, The French Connection still succeeds on basically the same rubric as those old pulp classics. It's a frequently thrilling movie, and that it manages to thrill without being "fun" is a pretty neat trick, too, one that movies can't always pull off when they want to be both socially serious and viscerally exciting. So, good on you, The French Connection.

Let me know what y'all think about these movies. Love them? Hate them? Inquiring minds want to know. Until next time!

Feel free to visit the previous post in this series, #s 88-90, here.
Update: The next post, #s 94-96, is up here.

1] Plus, given that director Pakula is of Polish Jewish decent, I don't want to question his decisions regarding the subject too hard.

2] "The masterpiece of American cinema"... Okay, okay, not really. You got me. But this is the sort of statement that's extremely gratifying to write, even if it is complete hyperbole, so, despite the ridiculousness of it, I decided to leave it in there for the pure critical pleasure of making such ridiculous claims. Not good form, I know, but hey, I really, really like Goodfellas.

3] In fact, there's an argument to be made that Goodfellas is the movie that solidified what "Scorseseness" is in the first place, given that it came on the heels of a decade in which the guy seemed to be self-consciously pushing his filmmaking beyond the Mean Streets/Taxi Driver/Raging Bull pillars of his early career with movies like The Last Temptation of Christ and The King of Comedy. With Goodfellas, he definitely makes a sort of return to the contours of his '70s work, and that's a return he's only occasionally ventured out from since.

4] Which of course speaks to how colossally entitled I am, that at times when things like this don't dominate the national news cycle, I can just sort of shrug off the existence of certain kinds of violence, but yeah. That's a whole other can of worms.

100 Years...100 Movies 88-90: Bringing Up Baby, The Sixth Sense, Swing Time

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.

Blah blah blah.

88. Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
Let me tell you a story. When I was growing up, my family would periodically have movie nights. My dad would go to the local Blockbuster or, in the way olden days, the local Hollywood Video (remember those?) and come home with some classic movie that we'd all watch together, arm-in-arm on the living room couch. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting, only with a lot more Star Wars. And you know what? My dad was really good at picking movies we'd all enjoy. Except for this one time. That fateful evening, he came home with this old screwball comedy that he'd never seen, "but it's supposed to be really good," he told us. "It's a classic." Well, we all sat down in front of the TV, my brother popped the popcorn, Dad put the tape in the VCR, and we watched the movie. And we hated it. All of us, including Dad. It's literally the only time I can remember a unanimous thumbs-down from the family on a movie-night movie. The name of that movie? Bringing Up Baby. Full disclosure: I haven't watched the movie since then (which was, by the way, probably twelve or thirteen years ago), although I have an unusually vivid memory of the film (such was the intensity of my dislike, perhaps?), so I feel at least semi-confident to say that I probably still wouldn't enjoy it today, although my hatred would probably be tempered to a "meh." The big sticking point for me is that I just don't find Katherine Hepburn's character funny. Like, at all. And that's a pretty big deal breaker for the movie, considering she delivers most of the jokes (give or take a few irate straight-man-turned-funny lines from Cary Grant's character). I'm not sure if I can explain why exactly I don't find her funny other than to say that her anarchic comedy becomes positively grating to me as the movie wears on. Irritation is a weird, inexplicable feeling, though; for instance, I love Spongebob Squarepants, Bugs Bunny, Groucho Marx, and Tina Belcher, all of whom are similarly nonsensical agents of chaos in their respective worlds. Why don't I find them irritating, too? I can't tell you. But whatever strange alchemy of factors it is that pushes a performance to the right side of the line between hilarious and aggravating, Hepburn just doesn't have it here. And that goes for the rest of the movie, too, unfortunately. Sorry, folks.

89. The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)
Honestly, I'm not sure of the reasoning that led to AFI's putting The Sixth Sense on this list. In the context of the rest of the list, the selection of this movie seems to go against the general character of films that made the cut, which, as I've discussed previously, usually tend toward Big Important Themes, epic scale, huge cultural import, sweeping romance, and/or showy, majestic cinematography. The Sixth Sense has none of these [1]. But oh well. No sense in belaboring the point since it did end up making the list, and anyway, it's a movie I like very much. For starters, it's a horror movie [2] that relies on clever use of atmosphere and practical effects, something I can always get behind. It's a darned entertaining, efficient bit of filmmaking, too, and also an appealingly personal one. So much of the discussion surrounding this movie has to do with the film-ending twist (and it's a doozy of a twist, too!) that the fact that the movie is, at heart, a poignant character study of two profoundly broken individuals often gets lost in the shuffle. Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment both give fantastic, haunting (heh) performances that flesh out the already psychologically sophisticated characters the screenplay provides, and the chemistry between the two (both on an acting and a writing level) is just as important to the movie's success as Shyamalan's excellent composition and command of tone. One of the great things about The Sixth Sense, in fact, is that it's still great without the twist. Future films of Shyamalan's would fail in part because the whole movie was in service of some endgame antics. With The Sixth Sense, you have the opposite, with the end in service of the rest of the movie. It's a character-based movie masquerading as a high-concept one, and a warmly redemptive one at that. For all of horror's nihilism, that redemption is a welcome anomaly.

90. *Swing Time (1936, George Stevens)
I'm not sure there's such a thing as a hangout musical in the same way that there are hangout sitcoms (e.g. Friends), hangout comedies (large chunks of any Apatow film), and hangout dramas (The Deer Hunter), but Swing Time is the closest I've seen any musical come to capturing the easygoing, elliptical vibe of that subgenre. There's almost no plot to speak of (well, characters fall in love, but in musicals, that's pretty much akin to breathing), and consequently, a large part of Swing Time's MO is just to let the characters sort of exist in front of the camera, bursting into song and dance numbers whenever they feel like it. It's surprisingly laid back for a musical, both in terms of adherence to the musical formula[4] (the first song doesn't appear until well past the 20-minute mark) and actual craft. And you know, that makes for a largely enjoyable viewing experience. The dialogue is light and fun, Fred Astaire is as dapper and charismatic as you could ever want a lead to be, and the songs are catchy, well-choreographed, and generally charming (particularly "The Way You Look Tonight,"[5] which is the charmingest of the charming and one of the best ever of cinema's musical creations, melodically). It's a movie that aims to delight by the sheer force of its fleet amiability, and it's largely successful in doing so. .... And then there's that blackface sequence. Okay, sorry, I just couldn't not mention it. Astaire doing a song-and-dance routine with his face smeared with dark shoe polish is one of those shocking old-movie moments that jolts you into realizing the uncomfortable truth that oh yeah, this movie is from the '30s, and things were like that in the '30s. Honestly, my first impulse (other than "WTF, Swing Time, seriously blackface???") is to give the movie a pass because of the film's otherwise amiable demeanor and that the sequence seems to be a mostly good-natured use of that sort of performance (i.e. not a whole lot of appeals to racial stereotypes other than the fact that, yeah, Astaire is painted black). But that first impulse is a bunch of crap. Given the ugly, destructive context of the whole minstrelsy medium, there's not really such a thing as a "good-natured" use of blackface performance[6], and no matter how nice the rest of the movie seems, the fact is that the blackface comes in the middle of a movie in which there is only one black character, a porter who has like two lines—that doesn't help the racial politics here one bit. And did I mention that the song Astaire dances to here is called "Bojangles of Harlem"? Yeesh. All of this is a shame, firstly because of the racism of course, but secondly because it blemishes what is probably the best-choreographed sequences in the entire film; Astaire dancing with his shadows in one of the most beguiling images from the movie, too, again made less palatable by the racism. Anyway, sorry for the rant. It's an unfortunate spot on an otherwise endearing trifle of a film.

My friends, we are now just a scant ten movies away from the end of this project. Just in time, too, since the school semester is just around the corner. Per usual, feel free to share your own thoughts on the movies here. Until next time!

If you feel so inclined, you can read the previous entry in the series, #s 85-87, here.
Update: You can read the next entry, #s 91-93, here.

1] As far as Big Themes go, for sure The Sixth Sense is a rumination on death and grief, but its treatment of those themes isn't the sort of capitalized portentousness that characterizes, say, Apocalypse Now.

3] Another bit of AFI counter-programming on The Sixth Sense's part. It's a horror movie, for Pete's sake—granted, an extremely classical, even Hitchcockian[3] horror movie, but a horror movie nonetheless. And if there's one thing that AFI doesn't put on its 100 Years...100 Movies list, it's a horror movie. How many times do you think I can use the word "horror" in this footnote? Horror horror horror horror horror. Ten. Ten times.

3] So, it looks like Alfred Hitchcock has directed the only other horror movie on the list (Psycho). There may be a link here...

4] Well, I guess I should say the musical formula that would be standardized by the '50s. Swing Time is probably the earliest musical I've ever seen, and, being mostly ignorant about the larger mechanics of the genre, I have to admit that it's possible that the conventions I'm familiar with didn't emerge until much later.

5] Am I an idiot for not knowing that this song came from this movie? I had always assumed it was some old pop standard or something.

6] Besides, good-natured racism is nonetheless still racism.

100 Years...100 Movies 85-87: A Night at the Opera, Platoon, 12 Angry Men

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.

Did You Know?: In typing up each of these posts, I've written "blah blah blah" up here as a placeholder for the intro until I could think of something clever to say. Sometimes (as you may notice in this post), it may have been better if I had just left it at "blah blah blah."

85. A Night at the Opera (1935, Sam Wood)
Ah, A Night at the Opera. It's a Marx Brothers movie, and if you've seen one, you know what that entails: about 90 minutes of barely connected scenes built around the slapstick of Chico and Harpo and the one-liners/general smartassery of Groucho. That description isn't a slight; Marx Brothers movies are consistently hilarious, even if the whole isn't always a landmark of formal complexity, and I enjoy them immensely. Oh, and did I mention that there's usually some random, semi-serious plot for the kind of dopey Zeppo to bother with while his brothers have all the fun? No? Well, that's because A Night at the Opera doesn't have Zeppo. It's in fact the first non-Zeppo Marx Bros. film, which I suppose is worth noting since the lack of Zeppo's sincerity makes room for the rest of the Marxes' silliness to spread throughout the plot proceedings. More than any preceding Marx Bros. movie, A Night at the Opera incorporates Groucho, Harpo, and Chico into the actual mechanics of the (still pretty thin) story. That change of direction for the team results in a movie that is slightly more plotty than normal, although it's still a film that relies way more on individual pieces than on narrative suspense or anything. Those individual pieces come in bigger chunks, though; there's much more continuity between the various jokes, and we've even got a few scenes that unfold entirely in the service of one joke (e.g. the scene where everyone crams into the small room on the boat), which is a relative rarity in Marx Bros. movies up to this point. It's not an enormous change in style, but I do appreciate the increased attention to long(er)-form joke telling. For my money, it's the funniest, most consistent Marx Brothers movie, and the stylistic tweaking probably has a lot to do with that.

86. *Platoon (1986, Oliver Stone)
This being the first Oliver Stone movie I've ever seen, I wasn't quite sure what to expect going in, although I knew the keywords of his work: protest, rage, conspiracy, violence, left-wing politics, etc. Well, as it turns out, those words do a pretty good job of describing Platoon, save "conspiracy" (though if you squint, I think there's a little of that going on, too, if only some intra-platoon conspiracy). Platoon is a furious primal scream of a film, a retroactive protest against everything the Vietnam War was, written and directed by a man who was actually there. As such, the movie feels a good deal more personal than any of the handful of Vietnam films that predate Platoon (though I could maybe be convinced that The Deer Hunter was similarly personal, even if it doesn't carry nearly the autobiographical weight of Oliver Stone's work). I wouldn't say the personal nature of the film necessarily makes it a better Vietnam movie than those that came before—Apocalypse Now is a pretty titanic work to usurp, after all—but I do appreciate the way Stone uses that narrative to illustrate the horror and utter meaninglessness of the Vietnam conflict. It's a bleak, bleak movie with only the faintest shades of hope in the end, and there's a lot of power in that sort of cinematic venom. I could nitpick this movie to death—Sheen's narration, like most voiceovers, is a mistake, and the movie as a whole is enormously unsubtle (which, of course, begs the question of whether or not a protest film should even be subtle, to which my answer is... maybe)—but honestly, the stark nihilism of Platoon is exactly the philosophical ground I prefer war movies to cover, and that goes a long way toward endearing it to me. Well, as much as a movie like this can endear itself to anyone. The point, after all, isn't charm or entertainment but terror; this is what humanity makes itself capable of, Platoon says as, in one of its most striking and unsubtle shots, the once-human eyes of an American soldier glow a demonic red. Please, Platoon begs, let's not make that of ourselves again.

87. 12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)
You know that awkward moment when one of your favorite movies comes up on a list and you can't think of anything intelligent to say about it? Well, I do, 'cause it already happened when I tried to talk about Sunset Boulevard way back at #16 on the list, and heavens to Bette Davis if it isn't happening again here at #87. 12 Angry Men is a marvelous movie, one of the best, and it's also one of those rare Hollywood movies that's actually improved by preserving the staginess of its original, well, stage material. So please, if you haven't already, go watch it. Now, rather than give up like I did with Sunset Boulevard, I'm going to fill out this post by spitballing a few unconnected ideas about this movie. 1) This movie actually had a profound effect on my views on capital punishment. That the accused only barely escapes a sentence delivered on a (possibly) incorrect verdict shook me to the core when I first saw the movie. It was one of my first exposures to the sometimes insane difficulty of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt someone's guilt or innocence. 2) You know what's kind of depressing, though? There's a chance that the rousing rhetoric of Henry Fonda's "Juror #7" may have led the movie's jury astray. Or, at least, so argues this essay. Discuss. 3) Anyone out there ever seen a production of the original play? If so, how was it? 4) In a way, I feel like Richard Linklater's 2001 play/film Tape is a spiritual successor (or maybe even an unofficial remake) of 12 Angry Men. It certainly engages a lot of the same themes of perspective, consensus, and guilt, although the end product is more considerably more tortured and twisted than 12 Angry Men ever tries to be, which is probably why 12 Angry Men is such a much better movie. Also, video tape is a majorly crappy medium for making movies; just saying.

And that's it for this post. Do you have anything interesting to add about 12 Angry Men (or, heck, any of these movies)? Well, let me know. Otherwise, until next time!

You can read the previous post, #s 82-84, here.
Update: You can read the next post, #s 88-90, here.

100 Years...100 Movies 82-84: Sunrise, Titanic, Easy Rider

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.

Two of these movies feature the sinking of a boat at their climaxes. How's that for synchronicity?

82. *Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F. W. Murnau)
In the moments immediately after seeing Sunrise for the first time, my overwhelming feeling was that this movie is jaw-droppingly beautiful in a way I haven't seen in other silent films (or even films in general). I mean that in a couple different ways. First of all, there's the pure philosophical beauty of its story, which ends up saying that love is infinitely more valuable than physical comfort or even happiness. I'll admit that that's not exactly the most sophisticated or original idea to place at a movie's center, but for all its misuse and overuse, it really is a profound sentiment worth repeating, especially when it's conveyed with as much conviction as it is here. I know I'm fresh off seeing this movie for the first time and that such gut reactions tend to be exaggerated, but right now, I sincerely feel that the forty-ish-minute sequence that follows the reconciliation of the Man and the Wife[1] (seriously, those are their names in the credits) is one of the most touching depictions of human affection ever captured in a movie. It's not complicated or even logical—they seriously make up mere minutes after the Man tried to kill the Wife?—but that's not the point, since the flow of the film is more that of a fable or fairy tale anyway. Which brings me to the second beauty in Sunrise: its formal eloquence. Sunrise takes the reality-bending set designs of German Expressionism and puts them to use in a romance, and the results are stunning, especially when coupled with the striking use of rear projection and the superimposing of footage. As in German Expressionism, the imagery is meant to show the characters' states of mind, though instead of Expressionism's usual horror, Sunrise is much more concerned with the twin poles of grief and joy, and to great effect. What's really special, though, is how much these two types of beauty in the film depend upon and deepen one another. The visuals help to flesh out the Man and Wife into living human beings capable of love and heartbreak, and the human elements add a gravity to the technical excellence often lacking in similarly technically meticulous films. In fact (and I realize the enormous anachronism of this comparison), the only other film I can think of that weds technique with romantic resonance so expertly is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is one of my favorite movies ever. We'll see what happens with Sunrise once it's had time to marinate in my mind.

83. Titanic (1997, James Cameron)
I prefer to think of Titanic as two separate movies, one of which I enjoy, the other I pretty much can't stand. The first is Titanic: The Operatic Tragedy, in which capricious nature, human hubris and good, old-fashioned stupidity culminate in the horrific wreck of the fateful ocean liner, ending hundreds of lives and forever altering hundreds more. In this film, director James Cameron does fantastic work capturing the visceral spectacle of the ship's destruction. As usual, Cameron knows his way around a setpiece, and to watch the RMS Titanic break to pieces is to watch some truly phenomenal filmmaking on both a technical and emotional level. In other iterations, the movie's basking in the spectacle of a real-life catastrophe could have come across as callous (and maybe it does a tiny bit), but the movie also depicts with impressive breadth and depth of the human tragedy of the sinking, mixing personal tragedy with the more effects-driven elements to give the action humanitarian weight. That's a good movie. The second movie, though, is Titanic: The Hacky Period Romance, in which two boring characters meet and do boring things for one night and forge a boring bond of eternal love that somehow transcends death, time, fathoms of ocean, and even the lengthy marriage (to someone else!) of the female member of this boring couple. I care not a whit for these two love birds, and I care even less for them when they're together, which, as you can imagine, distances me from the film considerably. It's not for lack of trying on the movie's part, though. No, for (literally!) hours on end, the movie puts on its Sunday best and tries with desperate sincerity to sell us on the life-changing power of the relationship between these two crazy kids (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, in case you've somehow missed out on the legacy of this movie). I don't care if the movie spends two-plus hours building that relationship, though. With a screenplay as brick-droppingly clunky as Titanic's, there was never any chance I was going to buy the love story. The half-hearted and entirely tone-deaf nods toward class and gender commentary don't help, either. Plus, there's the whole structural issue of this supposedly epic romance only taking place over the space of an evening!! There is no trope I would love to have a swifter and more permanent death than the two-people-know-each-other-for-an-improbably-short-time-but-fall-madly-and-permanently-in-love-anyway trope. It's the worst. Oh yeah, and did I mention that Celion Dion song? Let us speak of it no more. So yeah, one movie I really like, one movie I really hate. The problem is that the latter is at least double the length of the former. I guess I'll take a generous average between the two and say that overall, I like Titanic okay. That's fair, right?

84. *Easy Rider (1969, Dennis Hopper)
Titanic I am conflicted about; Easy Rider I am not. There are so few movies on this list I dislike entirely that it's notable when I come across a movie that bugs me as much as Easy Rider does. So let's establish something up front: I really, really don't like this movie, and thus far in this project, you'd have to go all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to find another movie I have a comparably deep level of antipathy toward. As with Snow White, I acknowledge the historical significance of Easy Rider. I understand that this film was a landmark and even foundational work in the New Hollywood movement, and that it also featured some important innovations on the cinematography front (in fact, I'll even go to bat for the acid trip sequence, which is a pretty interesting bit of filmmaking). And it's not lost on me that this movie ended up being one of those "voice of a generation" films. Oh no, that point in particular has never been lost on me, and that's a big part of the problem. Because oh my Godard, does this movie try way too hard to be the voice of its generation. Maybe it's my frustration with the cultural dead end of the late-'60s "hippie" movement or just that the movie's characters are generally self-obsessed and the blandest of authorial mouthpieces to boot, but I swear, if Easy Rider had thrown one more empty counter-cultural platitude (e.g. "doesn't matter what city [I'm from]; all cities are alike"—that's like... heavy, man) at me, I might have rage-quit the movie and had to come back to it in a few hours. It's not so much that I don't agree ideologically with the characters—that's true of plenty of movies I like. It's more that the movie is both determined not to say anything at all interesting about that ideology and simultaneously confident that it has—which isn't the zen-ish contradiction that it might seem to be as much as it is a complete failure at self-awareness on director/co-writer Dennis Hopper's part. That lack of self-awareness is death for this film, too. The movie sincerely postures itself as having captured the "real America" and poses its characters as wise pilgrims experiencing "real life," yet it doesn't seem to realize that (or have a problem with how) it completely withholds any coherent motive or psychology from the non-vagabond Americans and reduces rural residents ugly caricatures. Even more problematically, there's no narrative logic for why this film's protagonists should turn into "martyrs of the cause" at the film's end beyond a sort of shrugged off "just because" as a few random yokels gun down (and, ugh, canonize) our "heroes." So yeah, Easy Rider is a naive, narcissistic, self-mythologizing work that feels utterly false with forty-five years of hindsight. I guess it's another one of those "you just had to be there" movies, so maybe I should give it the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that I wasn't there. But man, this one just rubs me the wrong way.

And that's all, folks! Until next time!

If you want, you can read the previous post in the series, #s 79-81, here.
Update: You can read the next post, #s 85-87, here.

1] I can't find a good place to mention this in the writeup proper, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention just how fantastic the movie's acting is. The entire cast brings nuance and passion to the necessarily broad pantomime of Silent-Era acting, doing a ton of the heavy lifting in selling the film's sincerity. Janet Gaynor's portrayal of the Wife is especially moving, transitioning from terrified to miserable to incalculably happy with equal vulnerability and radiance.

100 Years...100 Movies 79-81: The Wild Bunch, The Apartment, Spartacus

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. Carry on, my wayward blog.

79. *The Wild Bunch (1969, Sam Peckinpah)
Now here's an interesting movie, though part of that interest just has to do with plain old luck, I'd wager. The (probably) lucky part: The Wild Bunch arrived at the movies at precisely the right time to make its grand thematic gestures, particularly those regarding the death of an era, serve as a sort of metacommentary for the American movie industry as a whole as it transitioned out of the clean, occasionally immoral Studio era into the purportedly more morally and artistically conscious (though perhaps more anarchic) New Hollywood era. I say "lucky" because I'm pretty sure Peckinpah didn't intend to make such a statement and that such a corollary is just the accidental effect of Peckinpah being an active participant in the New American Cinema movement. Don't get me wrong: there's definitely a media critique going on in this film, but judging from what Peckinpah's said and from the content of the film itself, the targets of this critique seem to be the news coverage of Vietnam[1] and the Western genre (not the studio system as a whole). I'll confess to being a little torn as to whether the film pulls off those critiques, though. Don't get me wrong; there's a ton of rich material in the film, particularly in how the violence obliterates all semblance of the "values" that the characters claim to have. Even in the non-violent portions, I love the amiable looseness of the film (for a good stretch, it's pretty much "just hangin' with the guys"[2]) and how that looseness is often undercut with a current of sadness and regret in the older characters that comes into full bloom once the shooting starts. But then there's the problem that, to me at least, the very violence that this movie is trying to critique often looks (is it just me?) kind of beautiful—not in an elegiac, cathartic way but an actual aesthetic way where the blood splatters look like flower blossoms and falling bodies take on operatic poses in slow motion. The film includes plenty of moments when the violence is very, very ugly (e.g. Pike blowing away that woman when her bullet grazes him[3]), but I don't know that its enough to counteract the formal glamor[4] of those slow motion shots. Maybe that's my fault as a viewer, maybe that's Raimi's fault or Tarantino's fault for teaching me to view violence that way, or maybe it's The Wild Bunch's fault after all. I don't know. Sorry... I'm making it sound like The Wild Bunch is a failure of a movie. It's not. In fact, I think it's pretty good. But when what's separating "good" from "great" is so in-my-face, I guess it's just easier to dwell on that instead of the numerous positives. So, in conclusion, here are four things I love about the movie: the screenplay, the editing, the acting, and the unusually unpatronizing depiction of rural Mexican culture.

80. *The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
Well, I've got no complaints about this one. I tell you, these last two posts have been absolutely gangbusters for new movies for me, what with All the President's Men last time and now The Apartment. And boy, I'm about ready to declare The Apartment a future all-time favorite, too. Maybe it's just the weariness that comes from being this deep into blogging about an AFI list, but The Apartment feels like one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, which is kind of funny considering that, on paper, this is exactly the kind of movie that gets the rom-com genre mocked. The Apartment is practically a slave to the technicalities of the romantic comedy formula. You've got a silly high-concept premise (man lets his coworkers use his apartment for their affairs—I mean, come one, dude!), misunderstandings that escalate into an end-of-second-act conflict, a happily-ever-after ending involving one lovebird running toward the other ("I hate you, Harry, I really hate you"... what's that? Wrong movie? Apologies)—heck, you've even got the climactic, epiphanic use of "Auld Lang Syne," which isn't just a rom-com convention but a convention of pretty much every movie genre ever. So shouldn't The Apartment suck? These are the reasons we're supposed to hate romantic comedies, right? They're formulaic? They're sentimental? They're contrived? Yeah well, with all due respect, screw that. The Apartment is top-to-bottom amazing, and it's made no less awesome by its formulaic elements, further proving something one of my English teachers told me in high school: it's the execution, not the bucking of convention, that makes a movie good. The detestable high school me of course didn't believe him, but it's seeming more and more like the truth as I get older. Rom coms (heck, let's just say movies in general) suck when the humor is tepid, when the leads don't have chemistry or charisma, when the cinematography is bland, when the pathos is passionless, and (especially) when the screenplay is dull. The Apartment is hilarious, magnificently acted, stylishly shot, alternately heartbreaking and rousing, and always whip-smart, screenplay-wise. So no, The Apartment doesn't suck. Not at all.

81. Spartacus (1960, Stanley Kubrick)
Well, dang, I forgot about this one. Back when I reviewed A Clockwork Orange, I lamented that AFI hadn't chosen any Stanley Kubrick movies that I like. I was wrong (also, I completely forgot that the peerless Dr. Strangelove is on this list, so... wrong on two counts). I really, really like Spartacus, though to be fair, it's not exactly a Stanley Kubrick movie in the sense that films like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining would go on to define Stanley Kubrick movies. Most obviously, Spartacus is sentimental as all get out, and if there's one thing that Stanley Kubrick Movies(TM) aren't, by golly, it's sentimental. And to be sentimental about human characters, you've got to have empathy for those characters and, you know, care about the human race in general, which, again, is right out for a Kubrick film. Spartacus is a great humanist film, and not only that, but one of the most powerful war epics ever. The closest Kubrick film to Spartacus (both chronologically and thematically) is Paths of Glory (another winner, in my book, and probably Spartacus's superior), both depicting the crucifixion—literal and figurative—of individuals who attempt to buck the cruel machinations of their superiors, both other than that, you'll have a hard time finding analogues to Spartacus in the Kubrick filmography. Of course, that's largely because Kubrick was much, much less involved with the filming process of Spartacus than he was with his other movies; he wasn't even the original director for the film, being brought in as an option after the first director fell through. Honestly, I think Kubrick is entirely the wrong choice for this film (Wikipedia tells me that David Lean declined an opportunity to direct it, which is a crushing disappointment on so many levels). His icier, more controlling tendencies are totally at odds with the sort of pure-blooded Hollywood epic this movie is, and while he never had enough control to make those tendencies prominent enough to be problematic, his choice to film a good portion of the movie's "outdoor" scenes in a studio (to, in a typical Kubrick move, be better able to control the filming) has not aged well, especially juxtaposed with the grandeur of the actual outdoor footage. But enough complaining; Spartacus is a majestic tragedy totally worthy of its classic reputation, regardless of its place in the Kubrick canon. Plus, even if everything else had been crap, there's that scene. You know the one. "I'm Spartacus!" *sniff*

Let me know what you guys think! As always, I love hearing feedback from you lovely readers, even (especially) when it's people telling me I'm dead wrong about films. Until next time!

You can read the previous post in the series, #s 76-78, here.
Update: Read the next post, #s 82-84, here.

1] This interpretation is something I totally got from excerpts from interviews with Peckinpah on the film's Wikipedia page. Honestly, it's a pretty obscure critique. Once you know that the movie's supposed to be about Vietnam, I guess it makes sense, but nothing in the film itself would have led me to interpret the film that way if I hadn't read his statements. The critiques of the Western are much more obvious, though.

2] Emphasis on "guys"—The Wild Bunch is a very dude-heavy movie. Which, unfortunately, leads to the film's sometimes troubling portrayal of women. Sure, the movie gets a few digs at misogyny (the scene where the men underpay the prostitutes is striking), but they're pretty shallow digs, not nearly the cutting interrogation I might have liked to see, especially considering how the women are often just pretty faces for the rest of the movie (when they're present at all).

3] The ugliness of the situation really driven home by his scream of "Bitch!" before he pulls the trigger.

4] For the record, I do think there are legitimate artistic and moral reasons to stylize (and even beautify) violence in art. But when one of the main purposes of a film is to make the audience realize the horror and ugliness of commonplace "movie" violence, it's hard to pull that stylization off well. One man's opinion.