1001: A FILM ODYSSEY (2017 UPDATE)

It's that time of year for this blog to look at the new edition of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Book and see what new movies have been added to the old list. In preparation, I watched most of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture as well as the Foreign film and Documentary winners, figuring some of these titles would be added...And the results are in...and there are twelve new entries this year and it turns out that five of these are from the Oscar list. And they are...

 Moonlight

1. Moonlight (Best Picture Winner)

Moonlight is a little movie about a young African-American who has to deal with growing up in a poor neighborhood as well as having to struggle with the acceptance of his sexuality. Moonlight neatly avoids obvious angles the story can take and the effectiveness of the story benefits from this greatly. I'm glad this little movie got the accolades it received.

La La Land

2. La La Land (Best Picture Winner for about five minutes)

Due to this film being initially identified as the Best Picture Winner, this film will always be linked in a way to the eventual winner Moonlight. As far as content goes, La La Land is pretty much the opposite from that film as far as presentation goes. Big, splashy with impressive production numbers, La La Land is undeniably robust entertainment, but hindsight makes me think more and more that the Academy got it right when they picked Moonlight (even belatedly) as  Best Picture.

 Manchester by the Sea

3. Manchester by the Sea (The acting tour de force-Male)

Atmospheric and gut wrenching story of a man trying to cope with the accidental death of his family. Not light entertainment in any way, this drama got the Best Actor prize for Casey Affleck.

Hell or High Water

4. Hell or Hight Water (The Audience Picture)

Modern day Western featuring a sheriff Jeff Bridges playing a cat and mouse game with bad guy Chris Pine in modern day Texas. You can also add this one to my ever growing list of recommended heist films.

 Arrival

5. Arrival (The Cerebral Science Fiction choice)

Challenging sci-fi movies like Under the Skin and Solaris have found its way into the 1001 movie book in the past, so why not add this intriguing story of a linguistics professor trying to figure out the message that aliens are trying to us? No reason not to!

Four of the Best Picture Nominees didn’t make the 1001 cut: Hacksaw Ridge, Fences, Hidden Figures and Lion.

--------------------

Here are the remaining new films that made the 1001 movie list:

Victoria

Victoria (The artsy-fartsy choice)

When I think of movies filmed without a single edit or cut, the two I think of are Russian Ark and Hitchcock’s Rope. This film goes the same route. The first half of Victoria features the titular character getting involved with some petty hoods that are about to get in on a caper that is way over their heads. The first section of the film is pretty slow, but if you manage to stay with it, the slow pace nicely sets up the actual heist and its aftermath in the second part of the story.

Jungle Book

Jungle Book (The family favorite)
Live adaptation of my old animated favorite from the 60’s. This new version does harken back to the older film, but is certainly distinctive in its own right. And certainly any movie with Bill Murray as Balou the Beart singing Bear Necessities is worth seeing just for that.

Jackie

Jackie (The Acting Tour de force-female)

Character study of Jackie Kennedy during the aftermath of the assassination of her husband manages to be an effective character study of a big event and makes us look at it from a different perspective. Natalie Portman would have been my choice for Best Actress over Emma Stone, but nobody asked me.

 

Toni Erdmann

Toni Erdmann (The offbeat foreign film)

What I got out of this two hour and twenty minute film is that we have a middle aged man who is a guy that likes to play practical jokes and has a daughter who is a more serious minded businesswoman. At the end of Toni Erdmann, the daughter thinks that her father has the right idea about things and decides to take life a little less seriously. Did I miss something else about this one? Asghar Faradi’s Oscar winner The Salesman would have been my choice for this slot on the 1001 list. (But once again, nobody asked me.)

Under the Shadow

Under the Shadow (The critically acclaimed foreign film)

Interesting mix of horror, political intrigue, family drama and a bit of feminism thrown in all set during the Iran/Iraq War! Also features the charismatic Narges Rashidi in the lead role!

I, Daniel Blake

I, Daniel Blake (The Indy film hardly anybody has seen)

...But they should see it. Ken Loach's film of a fifty-nine year old carpenter who has just had a heart attack moving through the miasma of English bureaucracy is a moving, depressing but dramatically satisfying film.

13^th (The documentary film)

The Oscar winning documentary for last year was the excellent (but long) O. J. Simpson: Made in America. Another nominated documentary about race was the one that made the 1001 cut. The 13th Amendement refers to the 13th Amendment to the constitution which outlaws slavery. Director Ava Duvernay links slavery through the Jim Crow period to the modern day penal system in a very convincing way. The film is enhanced with interviews running the gamut form Angela Davis to Newt Gingrich! Highly recommended.

I'll take a look at the next post on how many movies I have left to watch.

DILLINGER (1945)

Lawrence Tierney as Dillinger

I've enjoyed highlighting the character actors and actresses of the 30's through the 50's on this blog under the title of the imaginary Elisha Cook Jr. supporting performer award. It seems I've now run out of Hollywood movies from this era from the 1001 list, but thought I might like to add one more off the list.

Dillinger (1945) is a fictionalized account of the crime life of Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger. It's low budget Republic Picture release that has elements of film noir and biography and also boasts the early career casting of future Reservoir Dog leader and by all personal accounts out of his mind Lawrence Tierney in the lead role.

And the final Elisha Cook Jr. supporting player award from this blog goes to...(of course) Elisha Cook Jr. Elisha plays one of the Dillinger gang that the noted criminal meets in prison and eventually helps him on his later crime spree. About midway through the film, a train robbery goes awry and guess who gets killed of the group? The always expendable Mr. Cook...In very few of his films, did he make it to the closing credits. 

Elisha Cook Jr. prepares to spit at Dillinger before coming

around and joining his gang.

Elisha had a much better survival rate on his television appearances...

Elisha Cook Jr. with William Shatner

in the the 60's Sci-Fi Star Trek

 Elisha Cook Jr. in the 80's Sci-Fi ALF

Elisha Cook Jr. as master criminal Ice Pick 

in Magnum P. I.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930)

MORE 1001 MOVIES FROM THE 30's

(Post 20 of 20)

Lew Ayres and a fallen adversary in
All Quiet on the Western Front

There is a lot of criticism of a lot of the early Best Picture Academy Award choices, but the 1930 Best Picture choice of All Quiet on the Western Front is a decision that has stood the test of time. Even prickly alternative Oscar writer Danny Peary thinks the Academy got this one right.

The film is of course based on the anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque and depicts a group of young soldiers excitedly joining the German army during World War I only to find their dreams of heroism brings them mostly horror and death. I don't think that there were any war films like this in the early talkie era and one can only imagine the impact the sounds of warfare had on audiences of the time.

Read the book...see the movie.. then.go do something to make the world a better place.

 

And the Elisha Cook Jr. supporting player award goes to...Tall and lanky Slim Summerville got his start in movies during the silent era as a supporting foil in numerous the comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Sydney Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckile, as well as one of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops.

Once the talkie era came, Slim continued to have numerous supporting roles in many films and even teamed up with comeddiene Zasu Pitts for a series of low-budget comedies. The interesting caveat to Slim's career seems to be that he occasionally got a good supporting part in dramas, including All Quiet on the Western Front. His scene in this film of trying to woo the local French girls with goodies is a rare light moment in the film.

Slim was actively performing  in films up until his death in 1946 at age 53.  

Slim Summerville in All Quiet in the Western Front

 Zasu Pitts and Slim Summerville in
Miss Polly (1941)

CAVALCADE (1933)

MORE 1001 MOVIES FROM THE 30's

(Post 19 of 20)

Clive Brook and Dana Wynyard

in Cavalcade

On Noel  Coward…

When I was a kid, I’d sometimes hear jokes about some slapstick or low rent comedy skit or movie being criticized as “not exactly Noel Coward.”  I always got the impression from this that a Noel  Coward comedy was probably about a group of rich people in tuxedos sitting in a room sipping martinis, puffing on pipes and making caustic observations about the monarchy or the working class. I’m not sure if this was quite right and realized I haven’t really seen that many Noel  Coward movies or plays over the years to confirm or reject this impression.

Coward’s theater input spans from World War I all the way up to the 1960’s, with Blithe Spirit being the one I’m most familiar with. He also wrote many musical revues beginning in the 1920’s of which I confess to not being familiar with any of the titles.

Many of Coward’s plays have been adapted for film over the years, including David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise.  He also contributed screenplays to the works of others including Our Man in Havana and Around the World in 80 Days.

Coward’s only original play that was adapted to a film that won Best Picture was Frank Lloyd’s Cavalcade in 1933. It has to rank as one of the least seen (I’m just guessing with this observation, but I’ll bet I’m right) of all the Best Picture winners over the years. The film’s plot involves the lives of a well-to-do (naturally) London family over the years whose life is dramatized amid the backdrop of important historical events. The film starts during the Boer War in 1899 and proceeds to the sinking of the Titanic, World War II and culminates to modern times (1933 modern times, of course). It is largely a well done film (If not exactly riveting) and the presentation of a multi-generational drama has been done many times since.

Oscar Note: According to the book Inside Oscar by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, the voting totals for Best Picture of 1933 was actually announced at the ceremony! Cavalcade won the vote by nearly fifty percent over the runner up A Farewell to Arms.  I think it would be interesting if the Academy would do that today, but doesn’t seem very likely.

And the Elisha Cook Jr. supporting player award goes to Una O’Connor. The diminutive, high strung Miss O’Connor served as comic relief in at least every movie I’ve seen her in. She may be best known for The Bride of Frankenstein (providing some memorable screaming), but she had many others, including as the maid with the shaky testimony in her last film, Witness for the Prosecution in 1957 .She has some amusing and a couple of poignant moments as the maid (I wonder how may times she played a maid) in Cavalcade.

Una O'Connor makes a point

in Cavalcade

Una O'Connor in a lighter moment from

Bride of Frankenstein