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.
