Best Picture #12 Review: Gone With the Wind (1939)

Well, on one level I was right to dread Gone With the Wind (Oscar Best Picture #12). It is a heinous piece of Confederate propaganda. The entire thing is nothing but an argument for how great things were in the South if the war hadn't ruined it all. The poor stupid black people were happier as slaves anyway, says this movie, and the few smart ones kept right on loyally serving their white betters whether they were "free" or not. A privileged white woman like Scarlett could have lived out her life as the spoiled, vapid rich girl she was always meant to be with her pretty little head never troubled by deprivation or worse, business. The war is blamed for ruining everything innocent and robbing everyone of the happiness they should have had if them mean ole Yankees hadn't wrecked Paradise itself where everything was beautiful and everyone knew their place.
Scarlett O'Hara is of course the high-spirited, conniving bitch for which the character name has become synonymous. I actually sympathized with her more than I thought I was going to, at least in the middle of the movie when she was the only one who had the inner strength to keep going when everything was falling apart. She actually managed to turn her flaws into virtues. The rest of the time she was very hard to like. She was cruel, shallow, proud, spiteful, and breathtakingly selfish. She didn't deserve anyone's loyalty, and yet had everyone else dancing to the tune of her fiddle. Like the spoiled child she was she only wanted something when told she couldn't have it.
Rhett Butler is a rapist and this movie is probably responsible for a lot of rape fantasies for both men and women. It typifies the "if the woman says no in no uncertain terms, she secretly wants the man to force her" attitude because that's the crux of every interaction Rhett and Scarlett have. Rhett also seems to serve as a weird spokesperson from the future, predicting everything that the filmmakers knew in hindsight actually happened but someone in that time wouldn't know. For example, he correctly sees Gettysburg as the turning point of the war before the battle even happens, when in reality the armies meeting at Gettysburg was an accident and he in Georgia couldn't have known there was going to be a battle there at all, let alone whether the outcome was important. It bugged me even though I knew it was a storytelling device.
All that aside, the production itself is incredible when compared to all the Oscar winners that preceded it. It is such a huge leap forward in every way. It's in color. It's almost four hours long, and I was never bored. The shots were all gorgeous, especially the ones with the characters in silhouette. I can see why people in 1939 were swept off their feet by the sheer scope and spectacle of the thing. It and The Wizard of Oz, which came out the same year, are true cinematic achievements. Even if I find the subject matter of this particular piece utterly despicable.
Watched: September 16, 2017

Mini (Personal) Oscars #20: Best Picture

• Black Panther
• BlacKkKlansman

It's here!

Readers asked for it, and here it is:

Click here to order a physical copy of Poppies & Roses

Mini (Personal) Oscars #19: Best Director

• Peter Jackson, They Shall Not Grow Old
• Joe & Anthony Russo, Avengers: Infinity War

Mini (Personal) Oscars #18: Best Actor

• Josh Brolin, "Thanos" Avengers: Infinity Wars
• Paul Rudd, "Scott Lang/Ant-Man/Janet Van Dyne" Ant-Man and the Wasp
• Rami Malek, "Freddie Mercury" Bohemian Rhapsody

Physical Copy of Poppies & Roses

A physical copy of Poppies & Roses: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast will be available starting 2/23/2019!
It's taken some time to get it formatted and get the cover ready, but I have a proof copy and am very pleased with the result. Stay tuned!

Mini (Personal) Oscars #17: Best Actress

• Danielle MacDonald, "Willowdean Dixon" Dumplin'
• Emily Blunt, "Mary Poppins" Mary Poppins Returns

ReSounding the Archives Project

This is a really neat joint project by several of the big Virginia universities. They digitized World War I-era sheet music, performed it, and wrote essays giving context. Several of the songs are even available as recorded download. The song 'The Little Good For Nothing Is Good For Something After All' might have been written for my English character Clara Prescott, though I didn't know about it when I created her and it's an American song.
It's good to be reassured sometimes that the research one did was not in vain.

ReSounding the Archives Project

Best Picture #11 Review: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

You Can't Take it With You was cute. We laughed out loud several times, and the husband remarked of the main character (played by Lionel Barrymore, who we've seen before in Grand Hotel) "I like him. He's chaos personified."
The youngest scion of a family of free-spirited eccentrics has been dating the son of a wealthy banker. Turns out unbeknownst to either party the banker has been wanting to buy the family's house and tear it down to build a munitions factory. Needless to say when the families meet, hijinks ensue.
Jimmy Stewart, seven years before his iconic role as George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, plays the banker's lovestruck son. It's actually a surprisingly subtle performance given how cheerfully uninhibited the character is, and Stewart does a good job portraying a brash, spoiled young man who has to figure out what's really important.
Watched: September 2, 2017

Mini (Personal) Oscars #16: Best Supporting Actor

• Michael B. Jordan, "Eric Stevens/Killmonger" Black Panther
• Adam Driver, "Flip Zimmerman" BlacKkKlansman
• Nicholas Hoult, "Lord Harley" The Favourite

Mini (Personal) Oscars #15: Best Supporting Actress

• Danai Gurira "Okoye" Black Panther
• Letitia Wright "Shuri" Black Panther
• Rachel Weisz "Lady Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough" The Favourite

Mini (Personal) Oscars #14: Best Onscreen Duo

• Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon, The Spy Who Dumped Me 
• Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, Destination Wedding
• Hailee Steinfeld and Bumblebee, Bumblebee

Mini (Personal) Oscars #13: Best Ensemble Cast

• Solo: A Star Wars Story
• Tag
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Best Picture #10 Review: The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

The biopic The Life of Emile Zola is on the surface a highlights reel of the life of one of the late 19th century's leading writers. Zola is best known for his connection to the infamous Dreyfus Affair in France, and that's the main focus of this movie, though it does spend a little time on Zola's early adulthood, his friendship with painter Cezanne, and attainment of fame as a muckraker-style writer.
Then comes the Dreyfus Affair, in which (for those who slept through this lesson in history class on the leadups to the first and second World Wars) an army captain is falsely accused of passing intelligence to the Germans and when their mistake is revealed the French High Command desperately tries to cover it up in order to save face. Zola eventually takes up the cause, and the movie's high point is his trial for libel in which he is eventually found guilty thanks to enormous pressure from the military and the French government. Zola flees to England, but eventually new people come to power who force the truth to come out. Zola and Dreyfus are eventually exonerated, but the day before Dreyfus is publicly acquitted Zola accidentally dies of carbon monoxide poison.
This movie is probably most interesting to examine in context rather than for its actual content, though Paul Muni admittedly gives a stirring performance as the titular character and the guy playing Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut) has long-suffering pathos for days. But this movie, while set in late 19th century France, was made in America in 1937. The Dreyfus Affair is one of the best-documented examples of European anti-Semitism prior to Hitler and his ilk, yet this movie conveniently forgets to mention that Dreyfus was Jewish, let alone that he was targeted *because* he was Jewish and therefore an easy scapegoat as a traitor and saboteur. Hitler didn't get his ideas about the Jews out of a vacuum. So it makes it an interesting move for those making this movie in 1937 to make Dreyfus such a sympathetic character who is to be pitied, yet fail to mention Dreyfus' Jewish heritage. No opinions from me on what it means, just an observation.
The character of Zola also makes several impassioned speeches directly to the camera about fighting tyranny and upholding the torch of liberty and justice and so on. Clearly a barely disguised reference to current events in 1937, though WWII would not begin for another two years and the US would not enter it for yet two more years after that. My favorite is the moment when the camera is placed in the jury box. We, the audience, are the jurors left to decide whether it is more important to let truth prevail or allow a few people get screwed over in the name of preserving public faith in the system and its leaders (here we are again, as in Mutiny on the Bounty, with the idea that the World's Worst Human Being is the man who decides to double down rather than admit to a mistake).
Mr. Trump, this whole Russia thing may get to you yet. (Which is a big jump from talking about a movie about the Dreyfus Affair. Or perhaps it isn't. Hmmm... I leave it to you, dear readers, to perhaps watch this currently overlooked film for yourselves and draw your own conclusions.)
Watched: August 3, 2017

Mini (Personal) Oscars #12: Best Cinematography

• Mission Impossible: Fallout
• BlacKkKlansman
• Aquaman

Mini (Personal) Oscars #11: Best Production Design

• A Wrinkle in Time
• The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
• Mary Poppins Returns
• Special Awards: Ocean's 8 for the Crown Jewels setpiece

Mini (Personal) Oscars #10: Best Visual Effects

• A Wrinkle in Time
• Ready Player One
• Avengers: Infinity War
• Bumblebee
• Aquaman

Mini (Personal) Oscars # 9: Best Original Song

• "Ashes" Deadpool 2 (Petey Martin, Jordan Smith, and Tedd T, performed by Celine Dion)
• "Busy Doing Nothing" Christopher Robin (Richard Sherman)
• "Can You Imagine That?" Mary Poppins Returns (Mark Shaiman, performed by Emily Blunt)
• "A Cover is Not the Book" Mary Poppins Returns (Mark Shaiman, performed by Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda)

Best Picture #9: The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

While not quite as insufferable as Broadway Melody 1929, the biopic The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar winner #9) is yet another movie about show business where we wander around following unlikable people. Namely, one person, Florenz Ziegfeld. This guy isn't even smarmy, he's just an asshole. He goes around lying and cheating everyone he knows, but always gets away with it because he's charming.
The movie is way too long to be enjoyable--over three hours. The overture alone (in which there's nothing on the screen but the word 'Overture') is probably more than five minutes long. The thing that probably clinches the Oscar for this one is all of the elaborately staged musical numbers, including the crown jewel of Ziegfeld's signature "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" with the huge spinning wedding-cake set piece. We keep taking time outs from the plot for these things; for someone used to modern Broadway shows where the songs move the plot forward or tell us about the characters, it feels like everything comes to grinding halt every time this happens.
The most interesting scenes in the movie are those with Frank Morgan as Jack Billings. He gets the best witty repartee. Morgan would go on a few years later to play the Wizard (plus various other small roles) in the Wizard of Oz. In an interesting coincidence, his future Oz costar Billie Burke, who plays Glinda the Good, was the real-life widow of Ziegfeld--and is portrayed in younger form by someone else (Myrna Loy) in this movie.
The women in this movie are either naive fools, sweet, biddable doormats, or both. There is the requisite early 20th century showbiz blackface act, though it's done in such a thoughtless kind of way that it seems like force of habit rather than actually trying to racially stereotype in a demeaning way. This doesn't excuse it, of course, but it's much less in-your-face Racism with a capitol R as the watermelon jokes in Cimarron.
Watched: July 15, 2017

Mini (Personal) Oscars #8: Best Original Score

• Incredibles 2
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse

Mini (Personal) Oscars #7: Best Soundtrack/Use of Music

• Ready Player One
• Deadpool 2
• Bohemian Rhapsody
• Dumplin'
• Bumblebee

Mini (Personal) Oscars #6: Best Documentary

• Won't You Be My Neighbor?
• They Shall Not Grow Old

Mini (Personal) Oscars #5: Best Animated Feature

• Incredibles 2
• Ralph Breaks the Internet
• Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse

Mini (Personal) Oscars #4: Best Costume Design

• Black Panther
• A Wrinkle in Time
• Ocean's 8
• Mary Poppins Returns
• Aquaman

Best Picture #8: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Mutiny on the Bounty is kind of hard to form a strong opinion about. It's another Clark Gable movie--he seems to be typecast as men who are mild assholes with good hearts. Here he plays Fletcher Christian, the eventual lead mutineer against the tyrannical Captain Bligh. Not that we don't take forever to get to the actual mutiny. We spend a massive amount of time establishing Bligh as the World's Worst Human Being (recall Hitler was in power when this movie was made in 1934, though no parallels are ever drawn between the two; this movie's idea of World's Worst Human Being is "Dude Who Refuses to Admit to a Mistake and Instead Doubles Down"--Bligh reminds me more of Trump than Hitler). Then we get an extended period with the crew just fooling around on Tahiti before we finally get to the titular mutiny. I assume this was to give Gable someone to ravish for the benefit of the women in the audience--he spends about ten seconds with a Tahitian woman (played of course by a white woman in an attempt at native dress) before they're having sex. Oddly, the publicity images for the movie seem to have mostly focused on this relationship rather than what the movie's actually about, which is the conflict between Bligh and Christian where neither of them really comes out ahead at the end even though Christian is clearly the one whose ideals are in the right place. Bligh doesn't get his revenge--Christian escapes capture--but Christian and the rest can never return to England and instead have to live out the rest of their lives on a tiny dot in the Pacific.
The movie takes an odd turn after the mutiny of having us almost sympathize with Bligh, adrift in his little boat with some of the men loyal to him, showing him inspiring them not to give up and actually displaying something resembling compassion. Then it's right back to World's Worst Human Being. I assume this was done to show us Bligh is more complex than he first appears, but it mostly feels out of place since we spent so much time before and after this sequence establishing his Worst Ever-ness. There are of course issues with historical accuracy, and though the mutiny did indeed happen, there has been much debate about how awful Bligh really was--certainly not as tyrannical and coldhearted as this movie depicts. In real life the mutineers who survived in the Pacific mostly finished each other off Lord of the Flies-style, so they certainly weren't saints. Indeed, they seem to have taken their freedom from the rule of law a bit far. But this movie is in fact based on a novel, which was based on the real life story, so most of the gross inaccuracies are overlook-able if not forgivable for the sake of telling a story.
Watched: July 6, 2017

Mini (Personal) Oscars #3: Best Hair and Makeup

• Black Panther
• A Wrinkle in Time
• Dumplin'
• The Favourite

Mini (Personal) Oscars #2: Best Fight Choreography

• Black Panther
• Avengers: Infinity War
• Deadpool 2
• Ant-Man and the Wasp
• Mission Impossible: Fallout

Mini (Personal) Oscars #1: Best Stuntwork

It's Mini Oscar time!

Counting down to the Oscar ceremony, I will be revealing my personal picks for movies I saw this year. I use some actual Oscar categories, and some I make up. Some Oscar categories, like Sound Mixing, I know so little about that to try to come up with nominees is pointless so I don't do those.
I only give my nominees, not winners, in part because in some cases it's like comparing apples to oranges. Picking "best" at that point becomes so subjective as to be almost meaningless, especially since there's rarely such a thing as perfect.
For context, I saw 32 movies total that were released in 2018.
The first one I will do is one of my made-up categories:

Best Stuntwork

• Mission Impossible: Fallout
• The Spy Who Dumped Me
• Black Panther

Best Picture #7: It Happened One Night (1934)

For the first time since Wings, we've seen a Best Picture winner that was actually engaging throughout. It Happened One Night starring Clark Gable is a rom com, the last before the MPAA cracked down on things like sexual innuendos and bare chested men. This one actually felt like a movie to us: there was actual acting instead of people just speak-shouting lines as has been the tendency in Best Picture movies that were talkies. There was a plot that was tight and didn't meander. The writing was good and got in some witty lines.
Clark Gable plays a smarmy (I seem to use that word a lot in these reviews) reporter who is a bit of an asshole in a clever sort of way. He meets on a bus traveling from Florida to New York a spoiled heiress played by Claudette Colbert who has run away from her father to impulsively marry a man that she loves but is unaware he is only marrying her for her money. In exchange for his help reaching New York undetected by her father, she agrees to give the reporter an exclusive on her story. Of course they go from fighting to falling in love. There is the classic rom com misunderstanding that threatens to keep them apart forever (including the "what do you mean he didn't take the reward for my safe return? that means he loves me!" that Spaceballs later directly parodies. In fact, Spaceballs could be considered a loose sci fi remake that of course parodies a lot of other things in the process) but eventually they sort that out.
There are of course some misogynistic things that might be a little uncomfortable for the modern audience (including ass-slapping as punishment when the woman is a little too sassy and Clark Gable's character starts off as kind of a creeper who won't hear "leave me alone"), but this was made in 1934 and women, especially wealthy women, were still largely viewed as delicate objects who needed a man to look after them. Claudette Colbert's character has spunk, and she sets off on her own to traverse the entire East Coast by herself despite her sheltered upbringing, so she does have an independent streak and proves decently resourceful once she's done making naive mistakes.
Watched: July 1, 2017

Best Picture #6: Cavalcade (1933)

Ever wondered what Downton Abbey would look like if it had been made in the 1930s? That's Cavalcade in a nutshell, aka Oscar Best Picture winner #6. Two English families, one wealthy, one working class, live through the defining moments of the early 20th century. The wealthy family has two sons, the working class a daughter. As the story opens, the working class family are servants to the wealthy, but they eventually move out on their own. Both fathers fight in the Boer War, and both mourn the death of Queen Victoria with equal sadness at the passing of an era. The working class father becomes a drunkard and is eventually killed by being run over by a carriage. The kids grow up; one of the wealthy sons dies on the Titanic on his honeymoon (of course), the younger falls in love with the working class daughter (who has become an actress and a singer) and they have an affair all through WWI, but before they can decide whether to surmount the social barriers between them and marry he is killed on the day the Armistice is signed. We then fast forward to the "present," 1933, as the movie looks back on all the social changes the century has seen and wonders whether the future holds peace.
The irony. You people have no idea what's waiting down the road.
So yeah, it's basically Downton Abbey, including all the tragic deaths, if it were made in the 1930s with the benefit of living-memory hindsight instead of looking back a century. It's also probably the second-most entertaining of the Oscar winners thus far barring Wings. The silent film, the very first Oscar winner, still remains at the top of our list.
Watched: June 22, 2017