Update

I haven't forgotten about this blog, and I hope you haven't either. I've just been really stuck on Dances with Fucking Wolves, which is really boring. It's like four hours long, but I've only got one to go, and then I can post about the early '90s. Thanks for following.

In the meantime, check out my other blog, where I'm about to post my top 10 albums, films, TV series, and comics of the decade.

Late '90s: Lie Back and Think of England

Aaaand it’s the ‘90s! Still not history for us, but by the time my cousin Ellen is of blogging age, it will be.

Four films, all of them period dramas, all of them in some way relating to Britain/England during periods of serious colonialism/imperialism, three of them three hours long, and all of them in some way romance films. There is no need for me to emphasise how different all this is from the subsequent decade (even though I sort of just did). For a start, the closest thing we’ve had to an English film since is Slumdog Millionaire. Clearly, after Shakespeare in Love was over the Academy had had its fill of Anglophilia. Judy Dench is, after all, capable of producing excessive Anglophilia all on her lonesome.

Braveheart

In which a motivational speaker fights the English and almost wins.

It’s true; Mel spends the entire film giving inspiring speeches to one person or another. That’s what happens when you turn a historical figure into a through-and-through hero. To return to the subject of Hollywood’s complete contempt for historical accuracy, the film’s “revelation” that Edward III was William Wallace’s son is more like Shakespeare in Love – a cheeky and unprovable “what if?” that only very stupid people would believe to be historical fact, rather like Daleks emptying the Mary Celeste – except that apparently the Princess would have been about two years old when William Wallace was executed. They’re not even trying! You only have to look at the cabbie-like boatmen to see that Shakespeare in Love is in no way attempting to be biographical, whereas that is exactly what Braveheart claims to be. Realism is surely still a criterion by which we judge fictional characters, therefore a historical figure should be a gift to filmmakers and screenwriters: a real, complex, multi-faceted person. But no.

Paramount, 20th Century Fox, 1995. Directed by Mel Gibson. Written by Randall Wallace.

The English Patient

In which, oh no, he’s not English. BAM! Irony.

We have now reached the stage where the way I watched this movie – streaming from the Netflix website – was very much not possible when it was made. Actually, this is the first pre-Netflix BPW (Netflix was founded in 1997, even though it didn’t launch until 1998), which is exciting…possibly just to me but that’s okay. Ah, the days when the Internet was young; when we still talked about it like it was a thing rather than a space/mode of communication/lifestyle. Actually, The English Patient came out the same month that the DVD format was introduced. Maybe the ‘90s are history after all.

I’m really not sure what else to say about this movie. I found it rather bewildering. It seemed to have no structure I could follow, nor clues as to where it was heading; characters seemed to just do things with no motivation or reason. During, it felt like the English movie to end all English movies, but probably actually belongs to Remains of the Day or Room with a View (not that I’ve seen either of these), especially since this film spends no time anywhere near England and only the Cliftons are English, so it must have just been a feeling and a style. I bought the book; I’ll see where that gets me.

Miramax, 1996. Written and directed by Anthony Minghella, from the novel by Michael Ondaatje.

Titanic

In which we see Kate Winslet’s breasts before she enters a life-threatening wet t-shirt contest.

I wish that I hadn’t been hearing “My Heart Will Go On” everywhere since I was 11, because then at many points I would have found the incidental music breathtaking. Instead the feeling was more, “Oh hey, it’s the theme again.”

The first BPW that I hadn’t seen before, because I avoided it like the plague in 1997 when it seemed to be creating mass hysteria. I also feared that if I saw it, that before long I would be weeping into my pink frilly diary and putting a heart instead of a dot above the “i” in my name. Anyway, I’m finally old enough that conventions of masculinity have loosened enough for me to watch this film, and even to tear up a bit. The film didn’t need to be 3 hours, because I really couldn’t care less about Bill Paxton’s treasure hunting, and if I wanted to see long shots of the actual wreck (though it made a good title sequence) I would have watched a documentary on the subject. However, the framing device did allow the ending to have a note of happiness, since we see Rose meet Jack in the great Titanic in the sky, and her granddaughter and Bill Paxton are totally going to get it on.

Paramount, 20th Century Fox, 1997. Written and directed by James Cameron.

Shakespeare in Love

In which a place that superficially appears to be Elizabethan England is instead more like contemporary London infused with Shakespearean in-jokery…9 years later a Doctor Who episode would do the same thing but with more Harry Potter references.

Yeah, what is going on? The revelation that this film won BP at all, let alone the fact that it won over Elizabeth, Life is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, and The Thin Red Line, was met with bafflement from my friends (I’m not here to judge, that’s the Academy’s job). After we’d watched it, the film’s endearing nature had got the better of them, and their views had softened a little. As my girlfriend put it, “It must have been a very different world for a comedy romance like this to win Best Picture.”

Miramax, Universal, 1998. Directed by John Madden. Written by Marc Norman, Tom Stoppard.

Episode 4 of our ongoing story can be found in the side column.

Millennial Texts

You remember the Dawn of the Third Millennium, don't you? Planes fell out of the sky, cats gave birth to snakes, the Daleks invaded...no? Well, it made a change from the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s, and talking to psychopathic computers in 2001. Anyway, taking us into the 21st Century were a frightfully contemporary film, and a film set soon after our dating system begins.

In other news, many of you have probably already heard that that Disney bought Marvel the other day. Since Disney seems to have forgotten how to make things for anyone other than tweens, get ready for Slightly Angsty But Not Too Frightening Wolverine Goes to High School. Spider-man on Broadway (that one’s already happening). Hulk might actually work as a Pixar film.

And we still don't have hoverboards.

American Beauty

Hey, a movie with layers! Alright, the more subtle of the '00s BPWs (that's No Country for Old Men, The Departed, and Million Dollar Baby in case you haven't been paying attention) are just as multi-faceted, but the others seem a bit like one-level, song-and-dances about issues - literally in the case of Chicago, figuratively in the case of Crash or A Beautiful Mind. That's how I feel, but I know that other people find American Beauty as heavy-handed as Crash, so perhaps it's just taste, in which case I must say that this is one of my favourite movies and seeing it again only reinforced that.

In a parallel universe American Beauty is a mediocre Jim Carrey or Robin Williams movie with a happy ending, or it's an unrelenting, hard-hitting family drama. These films are a dime a dozen, but American Beauty is a tragedy written with a comic structure. It's written by a sitcom writer, Alan Ball, who would go on to make tragicomedy his thing in Six Feet Under. It starts with the premise of "What if a middle-aged man decides to do whatever he wants?", then hilarity and complications ensue, all of which come to a head as everyone converges on a single location...but instead of everything very neatly coming together and being resolved, all the elements just miss each other, and the result is tragic. Imagine what would have happened at the end of Twelfth Night if Sebastian hadn't appeared in the nick of time.

Another reason American Beauty is better than its imitators: most of the latter fall into the trap of presenting throwing one's office papers into the air and abusing the boss to be the solution to all the protagonist's problems. Lester may be happier, but his new approach to life is selfish and ends up hurting those around him, as well as being inspired by his desire to sleep with an underage girl. His daughter still hates him at the end, and out of spite he prevents his wife from being happy. Ultimately Lester fails to help anyone, makes everyone's lives worse, and dies. Yet this is hidden behind comedy, and our sympathy for all of the characters, including Lester. Look at the climactic scene between Kevin Spacey and Mira Sorvino. Is this his lowest point, or his highest point? American Beauty is not heavy-handed in my opinion, because it treats everything with ambiguity (and beauty).

Then we have the iPhone ringtone incidental music, which oozes some sort of "day in the life" documentary. This, combined with Lester's "from the grave" voice-over, allows the film to remain cheerfully nihilistic, or at least poignantly understated, about everything.

Dreamworks, UIP, 1999. Directed by Sam Mendes. Written by Alan Ball.

Gladiator

The ‘00s kicking off with an action movie should have signalled that the kinds of movies chosen for Best Picture were changing. However, until I watch previous decades of BPs, I can’t say how, or indeed whether, there was actually a big change. It just…sort of looks like it might have judging from the list. Yay, thank you, internet, for allowing me to publish unfounded statements. Also this: a Chaser sketch/fake trailer for a film called Oscar Bait. Before I started this project, a group of people asked me what I expected to find when I watched all the BPs in series, and I said that I hoped to be wrong but expected a lot of Oscar bait. And they didn’t even have to ask what Oscar bait was; all I had to do was mention that The Chaser had done this fake trailer, and THEY started correctly guessing all the elements in it. But really the only stereotypically Oscar bait movie nominated in the ‘00s was The Pianist, and that didn’t win.

Okay, Gladiator is kind of Oscar Bait because it’s supposedly an “epic”…except that it’s not. Yes, it’s set in Roman times, but most of the film takes place over the course of a few days, or even if it is meant to represent Commodus’ entire reign, it might as well have happened in a few days. Doctor Who’s 1965 story “The Romans” is more epic than Gladiator, partly because Gladiator is far more interested in doing the sort of fight scenes they just couldn’t do in Kirk Douglas’ time than it is in lengthily chronicling the passage of time and the lives of our protagonists. This isn’t a criticism; my point is that Gladiator is an action movie that happens to have a Roman setting. It doesn’t even try to fit in with actual historical events, and it’s one of the shortest films up for discussion this week.

But the biggest departure from traditional Oscar material? You are welcome to disagree, but I don’t think Gladiator is trying to win an Oscar. It’s trying to pay homage to the classic Roman films, while also modernising the sub-genre. It’s trying to be an exciting and moving action film, and in 2000 action films did not win Best Picture. If you don’t believe me, look at the other films I watched this week. The only other action film is Braveheart, which is basically the same film but with more crying (without the crying it wouldn’t have won). Blockbusters don’t have to win Oscars, because critical acclaim is not the measure of their success. But it’s nice when they do, because it gives diversity to the BPW canon, it discourages Oscar-baiting, and it shows that films that a lot of people liked have a chance of winning. This is why, after all, for the first time since Casablanca won, there will be ten nominations this year for BP rather than five. The five spots are always going to small, independent films, and the ratings for the Oscar ceremonies suffer as a result. I hope small, independent films keep finding success, but there being more opportunity for blockbusters to be nominated and occasionally win will benefit everyone. Also, I hope District 9 gets nominated, though I wonder if it qualifies as a foreign language film given that half of it’s in prawn-language.

Dreamworks, Universal, 2000. Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by David Franzoni, John Logan, William Nicholson.

Episode 3

Jamal, upon reaching Mordor, is captured and forced to fight CGI tigers for the entertainment of unhappy suburban Americans.

Post-9/11

We (the royal "we" at this stage, but maybe some of you will be inspired to follow along) have now watched all post-9/11 Best Picture winners (BPWs). Conclusions? Well, A Beautiful Mind probably shouldn’t count, because it was surely in the late stages of post-production when the attacks happened. Chicago was probably also well underway, but it’s perhaps telling that 2002 brings us a film that takes a play that is essentially about the ugliness of humanity, and turns it into a glitzy feelgood movie. Looking at the winners and nominees from the early years of this decade, it seems inconceivable that something as critical of American society as American Beauty had won BP just a few years earlier. I mean, I love The Lord of the Rings movies, but the years between 9/11 and the Iraq War did give us a rather bloody trilogy about going to war against evil and people of Middle Eastern appearance (the evil men from elsewhere who ride elephants).

But then, as the decade and the war wore on, we can see a change from films almost exclusively set in the distant-enough past (Gosford Park, Moulin Rouge, Chicago, The Hours, The Pianist, Master and Commander, Seabiscuit, Finding Neverland, Ray…LotR being an extreme of this, not an exception), to films that are very, very close to home. Million Dollar Baby, The Departed, and NCfOM are all set in cruel, gritty, unforgiving American worlds. And another kind of film makes a dramatic comeback: Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, Babel, The Queen, and There Will Be Blood are all unapologetically political. Not all of these are necessarily examples of the left-leaning media finally being angry enough to make some movies. I can’t help feeling, for example, that if someone had just given Stephen Frears some pictures of Her Majesty, a box of tissues, and some alone time, we might have all been spared the horror of The Queen. But that’s beside the point. Everyone wonders why Crash won. Well I didn’t see that film until a few years later, but I remember the sheer joy I felt when I saw Good Night and Good Luck in 2005 (there’s a comma in the title, but if I put it in it would be confusing). The relief of feeling I wasn’t alone in a screeching, desolate, Republican-ruled world of fundamentalists of every religion. And the thrill of righteous anger, or just righteousness. Crash is secretly a feel-good movie – a very specific kind, the feel-good-about-feeling-bad movie. Swept up and carried by the liberal frustration and pessimism of the times, being aware of racial tensions has never felt so good.

So of course it seems a bit silly now, and I don't believe Crash would receive such high praise now, but whether or not it succeeded I think the film is attempting to do more than just make liberals feel good. Usually these sort of works succumb to the Crucible Effect. Glad you asked: it's basically what I was describing before - the pleasure of being the converted who is preached to. It's what makes high school drama departments feel the need to put on The Crucible so their audiences can bask in the righteousness and say "You're right! McCarthyism is bad!" which is obviously a very topical and important message to be giving audiences of 2009. Actually, I was reading something recently that suggested that by the time The Crucible was performed, McCarthy's popularity was in decline anyway, so it's always been preaching to the converted. But anyway, Crash doesn't demonise its characters, and it presents a lot of moments of beauty and hope. I can't decide if this means that there is something for us to take away from it in the Obama Age, or whether it just serves my contention that it won in 2005 because it leaves audiences feeling kind of warm inside. Regardless, in 2008 we have already seen the first of quite a different set of BPWs: Obama + recession = the first romance since Shakespeare in Love.

Sidenote: I was just looking at the Golden Raspberry Awards, and after I’m finished the BPs I’m tempted to watch all the Worst Pictures (there are considerably fewer). However, that will involve me watching The Love Guru.

And since the summer is almost officially over (Labor Day, rather than the Autumn Equinox, seems to be the indicator that summer is over in the US. Unlike Australia, where it is Tim Bailey on the 1^st of March erroneously telling us it’s the first day of autumn and everyone believing him. But if everyone says it’s autumn then maybe it is.), COMMA, I will tell you that the new movies I saw this summer were, in order of quality:

District 9

(500) Days of Summer

Public Enemies

Inglourious Basterds

Meryl Streep (formerly Julie and Julia, but let’s be honest)

Harry Potter and the Strong Desire to Claw Out My Own Eyes

Just because Julia and Julia was No. 5 does not mean it was bad. The fact that HP was No. 6…let’s just say that if it doesn’t win Worst Adaptation, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel at the Razzies this year, there will be no justice in this world.

A Beautiful Mind

I'm wary of "biopics." I'm not sure about that word either - it's a bit newspeak for my taste. The problem is that, while some minor reshuffling of events for the sake of telling a compelling story is, I think, acceptable and expected, films like A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator, and - dear Lord - Braveheart just make stuff up for two hours and claim to be "based on historical events." Alright, true, none of these films actually states this, but it's the assumption of everyone viewer that a film about John Nash will be about John Nash. "Based on" needs to have a different meaning when real people are being used. Anyone who expects a film adaptation of a novel or play to be 100% faithful is either deluded or Zack Snyder. A film adaptation, like a production of a play, needs to be an approach - a particular vision - and hence a discrete artwork. Good adaptations: Adaptation, The Dark Knight, Casino Royale. Bad adaptation: Watchmen, which you don't need to see, because the film adds nothing, so you should just read the book. This also means that people who gripe about the differences between the book and the film are missing the point, unless it's an interesting discussion based on the relative merits of the two versions' events, such as Spider-Man 3's shameful under-use of the Gwen Stacy character, the discussion of which got me into comics - always a good place to find interesting adaptations and reinventions.

But I digress. So, a work "based on" another work of fiction needs to make significant changes. A work based on historical events has to be a lot more careful. Apparently, John and Alicia Nash are the only characters that have any correspondence to real people, Nash never had visual hallucinations, and even events that seem to relate to the storylines that the film draws out - such as Alicia and John's divorce in 1963 and remarriage in 2001, and Nash going medication-free from 1970 onwards - were changed. I could see the film being better if these facts were accurately included. Clearly screenwriter Akiva Goldsman saw himself as writing a work of fiction based on the stories in Sylvia Nasar's book, but if that was the case then the film's protagonist should not have been named John Nash. A film about a fictional schizophrenic mathematician would still evoke John Nash - in the same way that The Departed has similarities to real events and people - without telling the world that John Nash had visions of Paul Bettany.

Universal, Dreamworks, 2001. Directed by Ron Howard. Written by Akiva Goldsman, from the book by Sylvia Nasar.

Chicago

Bloody musicals winning BP. I thought we were done with that in the ‘60s. Fortunately though, 2002’s Chicago moves at almost subliminal speeds by ‘60s standards. However, there are a few things that disturb me about this movie.

Chicago is about the media; how, by successfully manipulating it, one can get away with murder. That the people who are best at “razzle dazzling” the public are the ones who avoid hanging. Is no one else a little offended that the first War on Terror film is presenting that as wonderful and fun for all the family?

From what I can gather, the original stage production was a darkly comic vehicle for Bob Fosse’s self-loathing – knowingly and, apparently, scandalisingly immoral. But Rob Marshall’s version is, as the documentary on the DVD stated, is a love letter to showbiz. So the showbiz machine takes awful, self-serving, narcissistic people (except Amos) and makes them national heroes, and when we’re watching the movie we think that to be an excellent state of affairs. WE, the viewers, are duped in exactly the way Richard Gere dupes the reporters and the Chicago public. The film razzle dazzles us so much with pretty colours and sexy dances that we forget Roxie is a murderess and start cheering for her. Chicago pokes fun of people who do exactly what we’re doing by enjoying the film. This movie turns us into stupid puppet people! I don’t think this was intentional, but I think Rob Marshall was so concerned with over-sexualised jazz dancing and artistic use of cigarette smoke that he forgot he was directing a musical with an edge.

Actually, Gladiator does the same thing. Portraying as barbaric the practice of violence for entertainment is a very curious thing for an action movie to do.

That’s another thing. I know we’ve all seen Cabaret, but not everything in a Kander and Ebb musical has to be about sex! Several dance numbers or moments in the film were doused with completely unnecessary and often non-sensical sexuality. The worst example, in my opinion, is “If You’re Good to Mama.” When I first saw this film, it took me the entire number to realise that the favours Mama was seeking from the women were monetary rather than sexual. Yes, I know there’s a lot of rubbing together of fingers, but she asks them to pepper her raccoon, for Heaven’s sake. Again, concentrating on the story and the characters’ actual motivations and situations would probably have been a better choice.

Miramax, 2002. Directed by Rob Marshall. Written by Bill Condon, from the musical by Bob Fosse, John Kander, and Fred Ebb, from the play by Maurine Dallas Watkins.

The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King

Clearly, it wasn’t Return of the King that won BP in 2003, it was the trilogy. Both Fellowship and Two Towers were nominated, and despite the fact that The Two Towers could kick Chicago’s ARSE…yes, I want to see that. I want to see Gandalf beat up Richard Gere with his staff, Aragorn and Queen Latifah in a sword fight on horseback (either that or the two of them battling hundreds of orcs together), and Roxie Hart vs. four angry hobbits. And then Legolas and Velma Kelly could have a girl-fight. Maybe that’s unfair. I mean, Catherine Zeta-Jones is definitely a thousand times more bad-ass than Mr Bloom, but Orlando tries so hard that you’ve got to give him some points for effort. Or at least a weak, encouraging smile.

What were we talking about? Oh yes, DESPITE the military and cinematic superiority of Two Towers to Chicago, they obviously wanted to wait until the end to recognise the trilogy. So I'd never been to an "Oscar commentary" site, and given that I sort of have one now, I thought perhaps I should. I can't remember how I found this thing, or even what it was called, but it was the first on whatever list I was looking at. This site had a page of statistics documenting genre bias in the BPWs and nominees, and no prizes for guessing what the findings were. And yet virtually in the same breath, this site had LotR on their list of films that omg like totally shouldn't have won. Even a site that knows that action films will always have an uphill battle against "serious drama" can't help but question Return of the King's win. And I'm no saint: I haven't even seen Mystic River and there's part of me that feels that it has more right to a BP because it's set in Boston rather than Middle Earth. Being aware of it is not enough to counteract genre bias, because all we really have to judge a film are the purely subjective question of whether we liked it or not, the supposedly objective but actually totally arbitrary ideas of what is high and low art, and the technical aspects, which in a sense are so objective that they can't really tell you whether the film as a whole is good.

New Line, 2003. Directed by Peter Jackson. Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Million Dollar Baby

Hate on Crash all you want, but this needs to be said: Paul Haggis also wrote Million Dollar Baby. And Letters From Iwo Jima. And rewrote Casino Royale after those idiots Neal Purvis and Robert Wade tried their best. All the best bits in it that weren’t Ian Fleming’s were probably by Haggis, and…were there any good bits in Quantum of Solace? I can’t remember, I’m trying to pretend that film never happened, which is probably what Barbara and Michael G. should do if they want anyone to see Bond 23.

At the Something For Kate concert Dad and I went to in 2006, Paul Dempsey introduced their song “Cigarettes and Suitcases” with “This used to be a single, but thankfully it’s now just a song again.” When I saw Million Dollar Baby in Italy in June or July 2005, it was “just a movie” in that sense. In fact it was one of the most “just a movie” movies I’d seen for quite some time. I had never heard of it, and I was just there because it was the film they were playing in English that week. I’m not saying that that's how all movies should be seen. (In fact it’s quite dangerous, since for all I knew Million Dollar Baby was a ghastly “family” movie about a baby that becomes a millionaire, or is made bionic and costs less because it’s a baby.) What I am saying is that for this movie, in my mind, to go from the most extreme kind of “just a movie” to a Best Picture Winner, made me realise the inherent bias of watching all these films this way. Not only is it a BPW, but since I’m only watching BPWs it becomes film’s sole representative for 2004. And lucky it was a great movie that deserved to win over its fellow nominees, otherwise its very identity would be changed, like CrashBrokebackMountainshouldhavewon.

By the way, this is our first female protagonist film, although it could very easily be argued that MDB is more about Clint Eastwood’s character than Hilary Swank’s.

Warner Bros, 2004. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Paul Haggis, from the short stories by F.X. Toole.

Episode 2

Jamal, knowing he must fight Aegisthus for the money, convinces Clint Eastwood to train him. But a great darkness is coming, and Jamal must use his newfound boxing skills to travel to Mordor and throw the entire boxing ring into the fires in which it was made. Along the way, however, Jamal has a violent disagreement with that guy from The Wire, and is arrested for murder. But the love of Jennifer Connelly and the ability to light up letters and numbers with his mind allows Jamal to be released and continue his quest.

The Late '00s: Everybody Hates Crash

I mean, we were sitting around drinking…what were we drinking? Bacardi cocktails. It’s just gold rum, fresh lime juice, and grenadine. Simple, (a bit girly) but delicious. Anyway, we were doing that, and I said that No Country For Old Men is the best film to win best picture this decade. (I waver between that and The Departed.) “Come on! What about Crash?” said Dennis sarcastically. Turns out Crash is the go-to “What Was The Academy Thinking?” movie. Yes, it won over Brokeback Mountain, so it might be good old-fashioned homophobia, but it also beat Capote, Good Night and Good Luck, and Munich. Munich, the only film (unless you count Star Trek) in which Eric Bana has been interesting since Chopper! (Americans, look up Chopper. It’s not about motorbikes.) So 2005 was not a quiet year at the pictures. I sense other forces at work.

Crash

I’m sure there are Terence Howard fans out there, but I can’t help but not be sad that Don Cheadle will now be the black Crash star to be playing James Rhodes/War Machine in the Iron Man movies. (I just accidentally typed Iran Man. Now that would be a different film. Might be interesting though, as long as he’s not Captain America’s lightsabre-wielding Middle Eastern counterpart from The Ultimates comics.) Terry’s great, and can obviously act, but we’re talking about War Machine – sorry, WAR MACHINE, because I don’t think you can write his name in lower case. The fast-becoming-more-arsenal-than-human, one-man army. Compared to Tony Stark the millionaire playboy, Jim Rhodes is supposed to be the militaristic, take-no-prisoners one. Instead Terence Howard manages to always give off this impression that there’s something he’d rather be doing, like filing his nails, which sort of worked for Crash, but in Iron Man just seemed rude to the pole-dancing flight attendants.

Lions Gate, 2005. Directed by Paul Haggis. Written by Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco.

The Depahted

Scorsese finally gets a Best Picture. What if Scorsese had made Slumdog? Now that would have been a good movie, with much better gangster scenes. His new film, Shutter Island, looks pretty awesome. Scorsese does horror, starring Leonardo DiCaprio’s Boston accent. Could be good. Hey, remember when LDiC used to be that annoying little shit from Titanic and Romeo + Juliet? (Romeo plus Juliet? Really, Baz?) Well what happened? The Departed happened. And those other Scorsese films and Blood Diamond, but mainly The Departed. This film not only has a fantastic cast, but it they’re all giving some of their best performances. Want to forget the remake of Planet of the Apes? Watch Mark Wahlberg in this. Just saw Team America: World Police? See Alec Baldwin and Matt Damon in this. Yeah, sorry NCFOM, but I think this film gets my Pick of the Decade.

Warner Bros, 2006. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by William Monahan, based on the film Infernal Affairs.

No Country For Old Men

Oh, God it has no incidental music! I like Carter Burwell though, and the credits music was sort of a Texas-themed Twilight (Burwell also did the Twilight soundtrack, and it’s the best part of the movie). Actually, I’m imagining that now. Josh Brolin plays a whiny teenager whose life is so hard because he’s the new boy in town, and therefore attracting the amorous attention of Kelly Macdonald and Mexican drug-runners, until he meets serial killer Javier Bardem who sparkles in the sunshine (all serial killers do that, didn’t you know? Sex offenders turn golden, and drug dealers turn to smoke), while Tommy Lee Jones plays baseball. I can see the scene at the prom where Moss begs Chigurh to shoot him with his cattle gun. Get ready for the sequel with Woody Harrelson as a werewolf.

Miramax, Paramount Vantage, 2007. Directed and written by the Coen Brothers, from the novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Slumdog Millionaire

Somehow they managed to take a protagonist who gets what he wants largely through destiny and make that interesting. Probably because the characters have to overcome a lot of obstacles in order to get to the right place at the right time, so when we’re in the thick of it the conclusions don’t feel foregone even thought we’re told “it is written.” But it’s so bloody feel-good that I think I’m going to end up hating this film. Slumdog does acknowledge the ugliness of the world, but ultimately we’re seeing the story of someone who’s been kind of lucky all his life. It’s that thing about chance in a story: it’s a lot harder for an audience to accept chance or coincidence when it favours the protagonists. We want to see our protagonists struggle against their fates, and succeed through wit and ability, not destiny. This I think is where a lot of the criticism that the movie presents a dolled-up or easy vision of poverty in India comes from. Jamal is rich and we’re left with the question, so what? Personally, I was left with the strong desire to become the presenter of the Indian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or any program in which it is appropriate to dance in celebration of the contestant’s success.

Fox Searchlight, Warner Bros, 2008. Directed by Danny Boyle. Written by Simon Beaufoy, from the novel Q+A by Vikas Swarup.

Storytime!

These films and plays were obviously intended to tell individual stories, but seen together they tell a much bigger story of the development of theatre and film and culture and all that. So keep that in mind. But also, let’s that literally and make a story out of this week’s media:

Jamal Malik, a child of the slums, finds 20 million rupees in a bag after a botched drug operation. The money belongs to a crime boss, who sends his men after Jamal, including a crooked cop and a hired thug who is secretly also a cop. Salvation appears to come in the form of a film director, but his wife murders him in his SUV, and her lover Aegisthus takes all the money.

Why Am I Doing This?

I like doing things in order, because an order makes me treat every item on that list equally. For example, I wear my pants in order, because otherwise I would wear my favourite ones all the time and never wear the uninteresting brown cords, and that just wouldn't be fair. I tell that to people (not often), and they think I'm a bit strange...which you must now as well, BUT the point is that there are films that won Best Picture that I would not have otherwise seen/read. There are also a lot of classics (only time will tell for the newer ones, but certainly for the older works, just being in the list suggests that they are classics) that I have always meant to see, but never gotten around to. I've never seen Casablanca (1943), Rocky (1976), or Titanic (1997). But I bet you haven't seen them all either.

Which is why, dear not-yet-existent readers, I invite you to come along with me on this merry, completionist, canon-adventure. Let us see the films that everyone has, or studiously pretends to have, seen. You, out there in the blackness, should read and watch along with me, and you can respond to my posts, and then we can have wonderful DISCUSSIONS. Or not. You can just read the blog. And I think I'll find my own life, and certainly my own biases and long-held opinions, creeping into the mix - not in a self-centred way, just in a what I'm thinking about way.

Something I should make known: I was a theatre student, not a film student. My knowledge of film is at a purely amateur level. Watching movies has always been a great love, but only recently have I started to look at them more critically, and learn more about the construction of story, screenplays, etc. But I love stories, and movies, and I hopefully know a thing or two about making art.

Aaaaaaaaand....GO!