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Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has posted his latest movie quiz, this time holiday-themed! And I, as per usual, would rather accept a flunking grade than give a witless answer. Hope everyone had a safe and fun holiday this year, preferably with a lot of movies!
1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?
Tell No One, House Bunny and I'm choosing to just say no to Blu-Ray until I own a tv that I didn't find on the street.
4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks
David Bowie.
5)
It’s been said that, rather than remaking beloved, respected films,
Hollywood should concentrate more on righting the wrongs of the past
and tinker more with films that didn’t work so well the first time.
Pretending for a moment that movies are made in an economic vacuum,
name a good candidate for a remake based on this criterion.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but I just saw Samuel Fuller's Underworld USA and it's totally a predecessor to the Wire. That would be a fun one to see modernized.
6) Favorite Spike Lee joint.
Do the Right Thing, a cliche choice because it's true! She's Gotta Have It is also pretty amazing.
8) Are most movies too long?
Yes!! But not because there's anything wrong with a long runtime. I just don't need to sit through 2+ hours of something that's dumb and repetitive.
9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.
John Travolta & Emma Thompson as the Clintons in Primary Colors.
12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?
Because it rocked? Because there's nothing on tv? There's plenty of great reasons so long as it's not New Years Eve.
13) Favorite road movie.
Daytrippers.
16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.)
American Psycho [link], I remember the whole theater was (in on the joke and) loving it and laughing.
18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other.
The answer to the question 'is Jean Luc Godard just cranky?' is always "yes". In any context. Dude, take a pill. And preferably not Adderall, kthnx!
19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie.
I really hope someone says the Manchurian Candidate re-make.
21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.)
I'm not even sure what irony means anymore but the scene in Children of Men where Clive Owen's cousin says "I just try not to think about it" still gives me the giggles. Also, everything Slavoj Zizek says in A Pervert's Guide to Cinema.
23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid.
881, it's a crime this film doesn't have US distribution. RIP, Tartan. I also loved FLOW: For Love of Water but a documentary about the impending water crisis is a tough sell.
25) Favorite movie about journalism.
Shattered Glass is really under-rated.
26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?
If Hitchcock was still around I think he'd have a lot of fun with them. People forget how funny he was. Also, I don't know why Mira Nair never does them, there's a dvd extra on the Namesake of a lecture she gave and she's brilliant & engaging.
27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood.
I loved Gran Torino but clearly the answer to this question is Unforgiven. Play Misty For Me is also sublime.
29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.
5 million people will Twitter "I didn't know Hugh Jackman could sing and dance!" Twitter will crash. Then 5 million people will complain about Twitter crashing because no one bothered to do their research on Hugh Jackman.
30) Your hope for the movies in 2009.
I hope the indie producers and distributors that have managed to hang on this long are able to weather this economic storm we're facing. Also, I'm inexplicably enthusiastic about the Friday the 13th remake.
31) What’s your top 10 of 2008? (If you have a blog and have your list posted, please feel free to leave a link to the post.)
TBA!
BONUS QUESTION (to be answered after December 25):
32) What was your favorite movie-related Christmas gift that you received this year?
Movie tickets and a book on the works of Andrezj Wadja are pretty awesome but hands down the best was my grandmother giving me 3 copies of my dvd she had purchased because none of her friends wanted them as gifts.
Seven Pounds is a parade of high-pitched misery viewed through a honey-soaked lens with a December release date, otherwise known as Oscar Bait.
But even though every year we get five or six films positioned the precisely same way, as David Poland writes, the knives are out for this particular film for a particular reason:
The Playlist has cataloged many examples of this campaign, including the NY Post's decision to spoil the highly guarded ending and the Village Voice breaking Sony's review embargo to write: "Dispiritingly obvious and phony from top to bottom".
To say Seven Pounds is hokey melodrama is like complaining that there's too much coffee in your coffee. It gives a B-movie pulp treatment to the romantic drama formula, I'm not sure if that's exactly what the genre needed. But after sitting through Australia anything seems fair. And I don't know which America these critics are residing in, but a film being phony or cliche is not a mutually exclusive concept to box office or Oscar success. And such focused disdains begs the question, is anything about the premise or execution of Seven Pounds really anymore absurd than anything about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (a film no one can discuss without mentioning Forrest Gump), The Wrestler or The Reader?
Here's a cliche for you: the movie business is just that, a business. And as much as as some of us having poking fun at the grotesque display of self-congratulation and excess winning an Oscar means something in that business (even if in recent memory, its benefits have not seemed all that tangible). Every actor who achieves any modicum of success sets a goal to win an Oscar at some point in their career, they would be a fool not to (we should all be so lucky to have such clear metrics for achievement in our chosen enterprises). And to accomplish that goal there are certain films that are going to get an actor across the finish line and some that won't.
The roles that are available to black actors are proven to be more histrionic. There just are not roles for black actors in films with the lofty literary cache of Brokeback Mountain or prestige of The Departed. There has never been a black Queen of England.
The roles that have seen black actors get Academy wins in recent memory have been the genocidal dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker), Ray Charles (Jamie Foxx in not such a terrible role but Ray was such an abysmal film it was beneath any kind of human dignity) and let us never forget that poor Halle Berry had to be molested twice to get her Oscar.
There's no need to lay all the blame for this phenomenon at the feet of the big studios either. The scrappy Sundance darlings that have made it to Oscar night of late have been Little Miss Sunshine (Alan Arkin was nominated), Transamerica (Felicity Huffman was nominated), Junebug (Amy Adams was nominated) and Juno (Ellen Page was nominated). The indies with black characters? Hustle and Flow (Terrence Howard was nominated).
Now Will Smith, long reviled by some critics because of his massive box office successes, has chosen a racially neutral role where he gets to cry, make bad choices, lash out with violence, mourn and wind up the hero all without having to wear an obnoxious prosthesis, take steroids or be a Nazi. But suddenly all the world's a hater.
This week we embrace chaos and discuss 8 1/2 (dir: Federico Fellini) and Synecdoche, New York (dir: Charlie Kaufman) a conversation that winds up including Lars von Trier, JJ Fad, broken hearts, burritos, Walk the Line and Judd Apatow.
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One of the most famous unknown films of all time finally comes out of the shadows of bootleggery and gets the Criterion treatment. Samuel Fuller's White Dog, a story about the re-programming of a dog that's been trained to attack black people, was considered such volatile subject matter in 1982 that the NAACP threatened boycotts while the film was still shooting. Paramount Studios eventually cowed and shelved the film entirely which only served to generate a long-lasting ignominy against Fuller. Eventually the director was forced to relocate to France where at the very least, people actually watch movies before labeling a film-maker as a virulent racist. Even then he was only able to make one more film, the extraordinarily bitter Street of No Return, about a great opera singer who has his throat cut out by powerful mobsters.
White Dog's genesis was nearly as seedy and tortured as its (to date) shelf life. Adapted from "Chien Blanc", Romain Gary's semi-autobiographical novel about he and his wife actress Jean Seberg's adoption of a stray dog that they later discovered had been trained to attack black people. Seberg became committed to curing the dog and Gary used the incident, as well as his wife's former involvement with the Black Panther movement, as a jumping off point to examine the need to quash bigotry. The story went through the usual studio channels (at one point set to be directed by Arthur Penn), eventually being assigned to Roman Polanski who had to abandon the project after fleeing criminal charges for sex with a minor. It was screenwriter Curtis Hanson (who would go on to direct Wonder Boys, L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile) who suggested the studio brass consider the legendary B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who'd had a minor hit with his World War II film The Big Red One. With a writers' strike looming, Paramount was confident Fuller could get a script in working shape and complete the film on time and on budget.
Read the rest of this review at Greencine.
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