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."
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.
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.
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.
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