Best Picture (Academy Awards) Archives - Page 2 of 4

TIFF ’12: Argo

September 7, 20122012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Ben Affleck

by Bill Chambers Ben Affleck's films as a director are no longer surprisingly good–they're expectedly good. The surprise of his latest, Argo, is twofold: first, put a beard on Affleck and suddenly he's an actor of gravitas; second, that this directing detour his career took may have been born of not just self-preservation, but real movie love. You can see it in his hoarding of genre staples for one-scene (Adrienne Barbeau) and in some cases one-line (Michael Parks) roles, but more importantly, you can see it in the gentle Hollywood satire Argo briefly–perhaps too briefly–becomes. Set in 1979, the picture is suffused with a passion for filmmaking, if also a tinge of wistfulness for that bygone era in filmmaking. Though it may be period-authentic when Affleck shows the Hollywood sign in a state of disrepair, I think it's meant as commentary on the present. Argo is the second Warner release this year to revert to the golden-age Saul Bass logo–it fits better here.

Amadeus: Director’s Cut (1984/2002) – [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD + [DigiBook] Blu-ray Disc

May 23, 20121980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Musical

Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: Director's Cut
***/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

by Walter Chaw Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God; Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums–he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, after all) and because of Abraham's deeply-felt performance.

Rebecca (1940) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2012****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama

****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison;
adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
–“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens

Let’s take a moment to talk about water.

Unforgiven (1992) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook)

April 19, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Western

***/**** | Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Webb Peoples
directed by Clint Eastwood

Even if time and HBO's "Deadwood" have made Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven into something less revisionist and more just a furthering of the Siegel/Leone mythology, the fact remains that the picture's earned its place in the company of other flawed masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man from Laramie. At the time of its release in 1992, as my editor Bill once ably laid out, its pending release was actually seen as a joke, earned at the expense of a trio of legendary, completely-indefensible flops. Its serious-mindedness–what appeared to be an unsentimental accounting for the remorseless bastards Eastwood had parlayed into immortality–therefore took audiences expecting another Heartbreak Ridge, "western edition," by surprise.

Casablanca (1943) [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD|[Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc + [70th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

***/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A
BD (Ultimate Collector's Edition) – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
BD (70^th Anniversary Edition) – Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains
screenplay by Julius J. Epstein & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett, Joan Alison
directed by Michael Curtiz

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Whenever I watch Casablanca (and there's a lot of pressure that comes with watching Casablanca (the chorus from Freaks rings in my head: "One of us, one of us, we accept you, one of us")), I'm stricken by what the film would have been had Orson Welles or John Huston (or even Billy Wilder–Rick is, of course, the prototypical Wilder outsider) sat at the helm instead of the madly prolific Michael Curtiz. Schooled in German Expressionism, Curtiz, by the time of Casablanca, had lost much of anything like a distinctive visual style, and on this film, a troubled production from the start, there's a lack of imagination to the direction that contributes, at least in part, to the way that Casablanca just sort of sits there for long stretches. For all of its magnificent performances (Claude Rains, best here or in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious; Peter Lorre, a personal favourite; and let's not forget Sydney Greenstreet), Casablanca is curiously sterile: its politics are topical, but its love story is passionate by dint of history rather than proximate ardour. Ingrid Bergman arguably gave off more heat in Victor Fleming's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and inarguably did so in Gregory Ratoff's Intermezzo. Casablanca is legendary, and that forgives a lot of its blemishes.

Annie Hall (1977) + Manhattan (1979) – Blu-ray Discs

February 20, 2012****/****, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

ANNIE HALL
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

MANHATTAN
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

by Bryant Frazer I’ve fantasized for a good twenty years now about Anhedonia, the 140-minute workprint of what eventually became Annie Hall. The original title of the project–which seems in its reflexive analysis of Allen’s public persona to have been intended as something akin to an essay film–referred to an inability to experience pleasure. As unseen movies go, it has a lower pedigree than Tod Browning’s London After Midnight, Hitchcock’s The Mountain Eagle, or Orson Welles’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons; the few who have seen it would agree that the released version was infinitely superior. But it’s tantalizing, because Woody Allen in 1976 and 1977 was such a formidable comic.

The Artist (2011)

January 25, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Silent, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to dismiss Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist as fluff. It’s tempting to take the side of Kim Novak when she complains about this fluff using Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score in vain, and a few critics and Internet memes have done exactly that. Yet The Artist is more than a passing fancy precisely because it uses the Vertigo theme correctly in a sentence. Indeed, it even has its way with film preservationists and other snobs (the kind who champion Hugo, for instance) by suggesting that obsessive movie love to the exclusion of all else is the same sort of illness, ultimately, as necrophilia. In the fluffy course of its runtime, in fact, The Artist manages to be as subversive and scabrous a Hollywood artifact as Sunset Blvd., finding its monkey funeral towards the end instead of at the beginning but presenting a close-up Mr. DeMille at its conclusion almost as ambiguous and doomed. It’s popular because it keeps its edges carefully sheathed…but they’re there. And I think people are offended once they realize–most of them long, long after the fact, and through other avenues–that Hazanavicius had the temerity to peanut-butter a little obsessive, consumptive, solipsistic love in there to gum up all the crevices. I’ll be honest: I think that if you don’t believe The Artist is correct in its use of Vertigo, you probably also thought that Vertigo was a love story.

Ben-Hur (1959) [Fiftieth Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|[Fiftieth Anniversary] Blu-ray Disc

November 24, 20111950s, 2011, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd
screenplay by Karl Tunberg, based on the novel by Lew Wallace
directed by William Wyler

click any image to enlarge

Editor's Note: Warner has just reissued Ben-Hur on Blu-ray minus the third disc and material bonuses of the box set, although this release does include the commentary and isolated music score. Technical specs remain unchanged.

by Jefferson Robbins Charlton Heston's Judah Ben-Hur is a Jew in a Roman world, but his emotional journey is all Greek. It's 26 AD, and Judah's bond of friendship, his philia, with Roman noble Messala (Stephen Boyd), is sorely tested. When this bond breaks and Judah's entire family suffers under the Roman version of justice, his romantic love, eros, for his servant's daughter, Esther (Haya Harareet), is smothered by hate and vengefulness. What is left him? Only a really bitchin' chariot race–the paramount action-chase scene in movie history, not matched for twenty years (see below) and still never bettered–and the hope of agape, the love and yearning between Man and God. This faithful but frustrated son of the Torah must learn that path through brushing contact with the new rabbi in town: a humble carpenter's son, bound for glory on the Hill of Skulls.

Rain Man (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2011****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Tom Cruise

****/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Valeria Golino, Jerry Molen
screenplay by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow
directed by Barry Levinson

by Alex Jackson From its opening shot of a Cadillac craned across the smoggy Los Angeles skyline as The Belle Stars‘ iconic cover of “Iko Iko” plays on the soundtrack, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man announces itself as one of the very best films of the 1980s. The ultimate high-concept movie, it has a fashionably icy Adrian Lynne/Michael Mann/Ridley Scott aesthetic that’s semi-parodied by way of an absurdist, non-sequitur twist. Pauline Kael called Rain Man “a piece of wet kitsch” while paradoxically impugning its “lifelessness.” In terms of content, it certainly sounds like sugary glurge, but as rendered in the emotionally-detached lexicon of ’80s advertising, all the irony, all the junkiness, has been bled out. The film equates Yuppie materialism with autism, and in a subtle, underhanded way, this humanizes the alien while undermining the film’s own pretension. Once we see this hip disengagement in terms of pathology, we’re no longer attracted and/or repulsed by it.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) + Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979) – Blu-ray Discs

March 30, 2011****/****, 1930s, 1970s, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Herbert Mundin
screenplay by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson, based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
directed by Frank Lloyd

KRAMER VS. KRAMER
****/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jane Alexander, Justin Henry
screenplay by Robert Benton, based on the novel by Avery Corman
directed by Robert Benton

by Alex Jackson Frank Lloyd's 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty and Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer don't have much in common other than that they both won the Oscar for Best Picture and that they are both totally fucking awesome. I know it sounds weird for me to apply fanboyish hyperbole to such conventionally middlebrow fare, but I love these films in much the same way I love Star Wars or the Indiana Jones movies. One is a lavish, two-million-dollar literary adaptation starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton; the other is a minimalist Issue Movie about divorce (apparently aiming to do for the dissolution of marriage what Gentleman's Agreement did for anti-Semitism) starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Evidently, they represent what the Academy believed was quality cinema at the time.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD + One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (’08 release + ’10 reissue) – Blu-ray Discs

December 7, 2010****/****, 1970s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
'08 BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
'10 BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Will Sampson
screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey
directed by Milos Forman

by Bill Chambers Philosophically sound, motivational, inspirational, Czech director Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of a small number of Best Picture winners to actually deserve the statuette. Arriving at the crest of a European-influenced period of filmmaking, before "brats" Spielberg and Lucas hijacked Hollywood once and for good, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is not popularly considered a seminal movie of its cinematically lauded decade, though it did change the tenor of Jack Nicholson's career (he'd always played loose cannons, but of a squarer breed) and became the first film since 1934's It Happened One Night to sweep the five major Oscar categories: Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay.

American Beauty (1999) [The Awards Edition] + Forrest Gump [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVDs + American Beauty [Sapphire Series] – Blu-ray Disc

September 20, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, DVD, Romance

AMERICAN BEAUTY
**/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
BD – B Sound A- Extras C
starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Alan Ball
directed by Sam Mendes

FORREST GUMP
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Sally Field
screenplay by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw People who say the Oscars suck aren't entirely wrong, but saying this tends to obscure the fact that most Best Picture honourees aren't terrible so much as dedicatedly mediocre. They're masterpieces of toeing the centreline, and in so doing they manage to offend neither side of the divide overly: The great American strive, Hollywood-style, isn't to rewire the mousetrap, as it were, any more than it is to produce a pile of crap on purpose. No, the goal is to achieve medium buoyancy. Too bloated to float, too fat to sink; if you don't reach too ambitiously, you won't get slapped down–and a career constructed around formula-prestige, 140-minute pictures is suddenly within your grasp, Ron Howard-like. The trick is to appeal as broadly as possible without appearing to do so–to recast convention in vague middlebrow hot-button terms and neither speak above the heads of your audience nor be obvious in your condescension.

Seattle International Film Festival ’09: The Hurt Locker

May 18, 20092000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, War

***½/****starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearcescreenplay by Mark Boaldirected by Kathryn Bigelow by Jefferson Robbins It's either a shame or a blessing for Kathryn Bigelow's tense Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker to emerge now rather than in 2004, the year of its setting. Back then, war fury was all the rage and might have doomed the movie--we had to believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, or why else had we buried 1,100 soldiers by the time George W. Bush won reelection? But just the same, we could have used this reminder of…

Gigi (1958) – Blu-ray Disc

April 20, 20091950s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Musical, Romance

GIGI (1958)
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Hermione Gingold
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Vincente Minnelli

GIGI (1949)
**/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Gaby Morlay, Danièle Delorme, Jean Tissier, Yvonne de Bray
scteenplay by Pierre Laroche, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Jacqueline Audry

by Alex Jackson How weird is it that Vincente Minnelli's Gigi won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1958, when four years later Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita barely got the seal of approval? I suppose we shouldn't underestimate the power of sex to scandalize when it isn't disguised as love. In Gigi, wealthy Parisian playboy Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan) is fixated on 15-year-old Gigi (27-year-old Leslie Caron), the granddaughter of family friend Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold). He likes her precisely because she is still a child. Most of the women Gaston goes with are accustomed and entitled to a certain standard of living. By contrast, Gigi can appreciate being spoiled. Gaston also admires her irreverence–how she can cheat at cards and tease him about it, or how she can effortlessly tell him off after he insults her dress. She hasn't learned how to be a lady yet; her rough edges haven't been smoothed out and she's capable of challenging him. There's a life to her that's drained out of most of the other women he meets long before he gets there.

American Gangster (2007); I’m Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men [’08 BD + 2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

April 15, 2009****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Coen Brothers, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Gangster, Germany, Music, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

AMERICAN GANGSTER
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Steven Zaillian
directed by Ridley Scott

I'M NOT THERE
***½/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere
screenplay by Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
directed by Todd Haynes

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
****/****
'08 BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
CE – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment when an overly enthusiastic police search results in the demolition of a replica dresser commissioned by Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) for the Carolina plantation he's bought to house his extended family. In one canny instant, there's the suggestion that nothing ever changes: the things we lose in time we will always lose. The image Ridley Scott provides for us as he moves the Lucas clan into their new digs is loaded and dangerous, with a group of African-Americans walking up the lush green lawn of an antebellum plantation–usurpers of a corrupt American Dream that, American Gangster posits, is still corrupt and in essentially the same way. True, there's a cartoon bogey in a New York cop (Josh Brolin) erected as the straw man for all of New York's Finest who's profiting off French Connection junk (gasp, he shoots a dog, and probably also smokes)–but the real villainy in the picture is the idea that the path to true status and achievement in the United States is on the backs of not just others, but entire groups of others.

The French Connection (1971) [Five Star Collection] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 10, 20091970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
BD – Image D+ Sound B- Extras A+
starring Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco
screenplay by Ernest Tidyman
directed by William Friedkin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no denying the skill that went into The French Connection. It's the runner-up exciting film about people doing almost nothing, second only to All the President's Men–and I'm only half-joking when I say that. It takes a director with vision to make a couple of guys tailing a couple of other guys interesting, and William Friedkin definitely has the vision: he single-handedly creates the meaning that holds the sketchy script together and keeps us caring about whether our heroic flatfoots get their dubious man. That meaning, however, ought to give us pause, as it makes that same year's hit Dirty Harry look like Easy Rider by comparison.

Gomorrah (2008) + Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

February 20, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Drama, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Gomorra
***½/****
starring Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco, Vincenzo Fabricino
screenplay by Maurizio Braucci & Ugo Chiti & Gianni Di Gregorio & Matteo Garrone & Massimo Gaudioso & Roberto Saviano, based on the book by Saviano
directed by Matteo Garrone

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
*/****
starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup
directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan

by Walter Chaw Dropping us in the middle of Italian slum Scampia, itself smack dab in the middle of nothing, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (Gomorra) is the Hud of gangster flicks, all deglamourized, harsh, expressionist stripping-away of illusions and idealism to reveal the gasping, grasping emptiness underneath. Like Hud, the source of that idealism is years of cinema supporting a romanticized iconography: the American western in Martin Ritt's film, the collected works of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese in Garrone's peek inside the ways of this thing of ours. Unlike Hud, there's no intimation of a "happy" ending for the sociopaths of Gomorrah–no feeling that for whatever the cost to a normalized (idealized?) existence, the outcasts and opportunists living their lives in imitation of Tony Montana are doomed to their tough-guy surfaces and the anonymous deaths predicted for them during a brutal prologue. Non-narrative and populated by a non-professional cast of locals and unusual suspects, the picture, however steeped in naturalism, is finally a formalist piece about as free of structure as Sartre–and every bit as meticulous. This "No Exit" (and the French title of Sartre's play fascinatingly translates, when applied to a discussion of a film, as "In Camera") and its unlocked oubliette is Scampia: The players in organized crime are imprisoned there by choice, trapped by the validation they desire from one another.

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection (1934-1965) – DVD

March 12, 2007****/****, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, War, Western

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Robert Wise

THE KING AND I (1956)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Martin Benson
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on Margaret Landon’s play “Anna and the King of Siam”
directed by Walter Lang

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
*½/**** Image A+ (Theatrical) A (Roadshow) Sound B Extras C+
starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston
screenplay by Paul Osborn, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
directed by Joshua Logan

CAROUSEL (1956)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the Ferenc Molnár’s play “Liliom”
directed by Henry King

LILIOM (1934)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray, Robert Arnoux, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Robert Liebmann, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer, based on the play by Franz (a.k.a. Ferenc) Molnár
directed by Fritz Lang

STATE FAIR (1945)
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine
screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Philip Strong
directed by Walter Lang

STATE FAIR (1962)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye
screenplay by Richard Breen; adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sonya Levien, Paul Green
directed by José Ferrer

OKLAHOMA! (1955)
***/**** Image A (CinemaScope) C (Todd-AO) Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gene Nelson
screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Walter Chaw God, The Sound of Music is so freakin’ nice. Nazis are the bad guys, no controversy there; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens–have you no heart, man? But when I like Rodgers & Hammerstein–and I like them quite a lot, truth be wrenched–I like their ambiguity, their irony, their goddamned fatalism in the face of eternal romantic verities. Consider the animal (jungle?) heat of “Shall We Dance,” cut off like a faucet by the fascistic abortion of The King and I‘s secondary love story; or the persistence of love despite abuse and abandonment in Carousel; or the slapdash kangaroo court that justifies love in Oklahoma!. This is all so much more than the slightly shady (and ultimately redeemed) shyster of The Music Man–this is reality in the midst of the un-, sur-, hyper-reality of the musical form. Yet what The Sound of Music offers up is a military man shtupping an ex-nun with no corresponding sense of fetishistic eroticism. How is it that the two most popular adult Halloween costumes engaged in naughty Alpine sexcapades could be totally free of va-va-va-voom? It’s so relentlessly wholesome that of course it’s the most beloved artifact of its kind in the short history of the movie musical: If you’re of a certain age, the plot of the thing is almost family mythology, resurrected every holiday like a dusty corpse at a decades-long Irish wake gone tragically awry. That ain’t a grin, baby, it’s a rictus.

A Man for All Seasons (1966) [Special Edition] – DVD

February 27, 20071960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, DVD, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Robert Shaw, Paul Scofield
screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on his play
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Assessing A Man for All Seasons is no easy task. In its favour is the fact that it’s quite sensitively directed: Fred Zinnemann lays on a level of melancholy largely unheard-of in the costume-movie sweepstakes, making the film plenty more affecting than the twilight-of-Old-Hollywood clunker it could very well have become. Alas, Robert Bolt’s screenplay (and presumably his stage play) is resolutely impervious to directorial manipulation–and also completely full of crap. Bolt’s hilariously over-the-top deification of Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and More’s opposition to the divorce of Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) is so emptied of contemporary meaning that you can project anything you like onto it. Such care has been taken to shift the discussion away from political matters and towards “personal ethics” that an atheist like me can groove to More’s rigid refusal to indulge Henry’s transgression over God’s law.

Platoon (1986) [20th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

November 6, 20061980s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, UK, War

***/**** Image A Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B
starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker
written and directed by Oliver Stone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A watershed in American cultural history, Platoon parsed the Vietnam subject in ways that broke from the defensive trend, trading Sylvester Stallone's hard, unyielding Rambo physique for the infinitely penetrable bodies of various poor sods on their way to destruction. This was the moment when Americans let go of the past and resigned themselves to the war's negative impact–so much so that the quality of the movie proper now seems irrelevant. Let it be known that Platoon is far from perfect: it's often schmaltzy, sometimes schematic, and burdened by a director's innocence that would later curdle at the altar of a "dying king" in JFK. But its accumulation of details distinguishes it from the efforts of message-mongering artists like Coppola, Cimino, and Kubrick. It's not a statement so much as a list of indignities on the road to nothing at all–a life in Hell rather than a glorious campaign that as we know led to pointless ruin.