Day 23: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

Roald Dahl's novels have been adapted countless times into films by no less filmmakers than Nicholas Roeg, Wes Anderson, Tim Burton, Henry Selick, and Danny DeVito. Mel Stuart isn't a name that is likely to be associated with any of those directors as he was primarily a television producer and documentarian. In 1971 however, he stepped behind the camera for the first film adaptation of one of Dahl's children's novels, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

There are a couple of major misconceptions about this film that I would like to clarify before we go any further, many of them arose when Tim Burton's remake was released in 2005. Dahl himself wrote the screenplay, so there's no way he disowned the film and the film doesn't pander to children, talk down to them, or treat them as if they need a large set piece every couple of minutes to hold their interest. (Burton's film rather unfortunately falls into all of these traps).

Peter Ostrum plays Charlie Bucket, a boy living with his mother and four grandparents in utter destitution in England. They live near the chocolate factory of the world's premiere chocolatier, Willy Wonka, who has just announced that he is distributing five golden tickets in his chocolate bars that will permit the finders to tour the factory and have a chance to win a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie's world is turned upside down by the prospect of winning, and the film spends its first forty minutes with Charlie and his dreams. Burton's remake gets him inside the chocolate factory in under twenty minutes, leaving no time for us to really get to know Charlie and live inside his world. This instantly makes this the better adaptation of the book.

Spending time with Charlie, sharing in his heartbreak and devastation each time a golden ticket is found somewhere else across the globe, hoping against hope that he'll be the next kid to find one, builds up a solid protagonist worth rooting for. Ostrum is a rather adept young actor, never forcing us to feel empathy for him. He earns it solidly through his plucky optimism and drives the film forward by never sulking or feeling bad for himself. He feels blessed to have a family that loves him so much that the golden ticket seems like it would just be almost a hollow wish fulfillment by comparison.

The plot is almost universally well-known, so there's no point in going through it point by point. Gene Wilder is the very definition of brilliant as Willy Wonka. He goes out of his way to make himself simultaneously unlikable and charming. He rides the line so deftly that his motives are never really clear until the final moments of the film. Charlie's been given an offer, as have all the other children, by Slugworth, one of Wonka's competitors, to bring him an everlasting gobstopper in return for ten thousand pounds. When Wonka unloads on Grampa Joe (Jack Albertson) at the end of the film for having stolen the fizzy lifting drinks, Grampa Joe says to Charlie, "I'll get even with him if it's the last thing I do," and tells Charlie that they're going to go give the gobstopper to Slugworth. Charlie stops, knowing that no matter how bad of a person Wonka seems to be, he doesn't deserve to be subjected to a petty revenge like this, and he returns the candy to Wonka. This sends Wonka into a fit of elation as he realizes that Charlie is the exact child he had been looking for to give the grand prize to, which is to take over his operation as chocolatier.

Dahl is shrewd as a screenwriter because he saw a flaw with his novel and fixed it. There was no true motivation for Willy Wonka in the novel to give Charlie the factory other than by virtue of the fact that he was the last child left. By introducing the notion of Wonka testing the children by sending his assistant out masquerading as Slugworth to plant the notion of selling him the gobstopper in the children's heads, he has a foolproof way of figuring out if any of these children are worth his time. It's borderline psychotic when you think about it, but it's to be expected of a virtual shut-in with little to no human contact. His reasoning to find a child to teach his secrets to as they'll carry on his traditions, rather than doing things their own way, is sound. Testing their virtue is a bit extreme, but when you're trying to find the ideal child, I guess it makes sense.

The film is filled with wonderful character actors. All of the children are good, particularly Julie Dawn Cole as Veruca Salt. Roy Kinnear is also wonderful as her father, as is Leonard Stone as Mr. Beauregard (he has most of my favorite lines). It's also great to see Albertson and Wilder go toe to toe in the final scene, a nice little acting showcase in the midst of a kids' movie. I watched the movie yesterday with my five year old daughter Clementine and she really liked it. I thought she'd get bored, as I always remember myself as a child getting bored right around "Cheer Up, Charlie," but it held her interest for all 100 minutes.

Even though the effects and art direction seem archaic to me, she saw them as nothing short of the real deal and whimsical. She didn't notice the strings holding up Charlie and Grampa Joe in the fizzy lifting chamber, so I wasn't about to point them out. She thought they were really flying. At the end of the day, isn't that the real reason that films like this were made, to capture the imaginations of children and to reignite the child inside of adults? We talked afterwords about how awesome it would be to have one of those giant gummy bears from the chocolate room, bringing me instantly back to my identical desire as a child watching the film.

I'm happy to report that forty years on, Willy Wonka holds up, and likely will for another forty. As long as there's a generation of parents willing to share it with their children, when those children grow up to be parents, they'll want to share it with their kids. And isn't that what it's really all about?

Tomorrow I'll be reviewing The Boat That Rocked, released here in the US as Pirate Radio with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Kenneth Branagh, and Bill Nighy.

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Day 22: Midnight in Paris

"You can fool me but you cannot fool Ernest Hemingway!"

Woody Allen has made a movie a year since 1971. One would think that when you're on to your 40th consecutive movie, you'd have lost a little something, but Woody always knows what he needs to revitalize things. In 2005 he went to England and shot Match Point and created his best movie in a decade. Similarly this past year he went to France and shot Midnight in Paris, creating his best movie since Match Point, and more likely, since Bullets Over Broadway.

Owen Wilson plays Gil a screenwriter working on his first novel while on vacation with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) in Paris. On a lonely night when his fiancee goes off dancing with some friends, Gil takes a stroll, gets lost, and at the stroke of midnight, he's whisked into an antique car and taken to a party filled with people dressed like they're living in the 1920s. Gil has actually been transported back in time and here meets Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill & Tom Hiddleston) whom he befriends and in turn introduce him to Ernest Hemingway (the sensational Corey Stoll). When discussing his own novel with his hero, Hemingway suggests he show his manuscript to his friend Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). At Stein's he meets Pablo Picasso and his lover at the time Adriana (Marion Cotillard) with whom he becomes immediately smitten. He makes nightly trips to the 20s in an attempt to connect romantically with Adriana.

Gil has romanticized Paris of the 20s in his mind, and now that he's face to face with it, he sees it as just as ideal as he imagined. However through his conversations with Adriana, he discovers that she wishes she were living during the Belle Epoque time period at the turn of the century. When a carriage takes Gil and Adriana back in time to that period late in the film, they meet Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas & Gauguin who wish they were living in the Renaissance. Gil sees the folly of actual wish-granting and the power of nostalgia, and learns a lesson when he finally returns to his own time.

The film is fantastic with one major exception and that is the character of Inez. There is no earthly reason that I can see that would make Gil want to stay engaged to her. She's very clearly smitten with another man, the pedantic Paul (Michael Sheen) and treats Gil like shit at almost every opportunity. The film falls to pieces whenever the plot centers around any time spent in the present with Gil and Inez. Making her actually nice or having something in common with Gil would have made his decision of whether or not to break off his engagement more dramatic. Making her a one-dimensional shrew infuriated me and made at least a third of the film borderline insufferable.

The scenes in the 20s however are some of Allen's best work ever. A chance meeting between Gil and Dali, Bunuel and Man Ray is the highlight of the film. Adrien Brody is phenomenal as Salvador Dali whose current obsession is with rhinoceroses. This scene was hysterically funny and great to watch. Equally fantastic was the aforementioned Corey Stoll as Hemingway. Hemingway has all the best lines in the film, as to be expected, and Stoll plays him exactly how you imagine him to have been in real life.

The relationship that evolves between Gil and Adriana is very good and roots the film in an emotional core that it's lacking in the modern day scenes. The film is whimsical and finds Allen as sharp as he's ever been, and casting Wilson as his surrogate in the film was a brilliant move. Owen Wilson has a laconic manner that suits his predicament in the film well. If he had been a mensch like the typical Woody Allen protagonist, it likely would have added an unnecessary tension to the time travel aspect of the film. Wilson is so laid back that he just rolls with things as opposed to trying to talk his way out of the whole thing or reason with himself. It's a welcome change of pace and makes the film work all the more as a result.

Woody Allen will continue making a film a year until he can't anymore, I just hope we don't have to wait another six years for him to find something new and interesting to do. This is a master working at the top of his game.

Tomorrow I'll get back around to Doctor Dolittle. I tried watching it yesterday but turned it off after about 20 minutes. I'll give it another go tonight.

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Day 21: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

"It's not that I don't want to know you Hilary, although I don't. It's just that I'm afraid we're not really the sort of people you can afford to be associated with."

Much easier to digest than In the Heat of the Night, but no less prescient or ahead of it's time is Stanley Kramer's fellow Best Picture nominee Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? The films share a ton of common threads but the latter is more writerly and much more about dialogue and performance than the mood, atmosphere and intensity displayed in the former. The stakes are high, but you feel much more at ease when watching Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? because the characters are not dealing with life and death, they're dealing with something equally important but much less intense... love.

Joanne Drayton (Katharine Houghton) is a 23-year old woman returning home on a surprise trip to introduce her parents to the man she wants to marry, Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier). While this is a seemingly innocuous setup, John is black and Joanne is white and this is 1967, so we're only four years removed from the Civil Rights Act, and interracial marriage was still illegal in sixteen states (every single one of them save Delaware was below the Mason-Dixon line, so just saying...) Joanne feels fairly confident though that her parents Christina (Katharine Hepburn) and Matt (Spencer Tracy) will welcome John. You see, they're the model of the well-to-do liberal white Americans at the time. They raised their daughter to be accepting of all people, they just never knew how they would react when she fell in love with someone of another race.

While their initial reactions are equal parts shock and dismay, Christina finds herself being the first to be won over, because she is a proud mother, swept up in the love and joy she sees radiating from her daughter. Matt takes the position of overly concerned father, worrying more what the world will think of or, worse yet do to, the couple, and refuses to give his blessing. Giving the proceedings the necessary amount of urgency, John is leaving in the morning for Geneva where he is taking a position with the World Health Organization, and Joanne has resolved herself to leave with him, whether her parents give their blessing or not.

John's parents have decided to make a trip to San Francisco that night as well, ostensibly to see their son off before his trip, but also to meet his betrothed and her family. They are equally shocked to find out that she and they are white. The immediate worry for me became that the film would paint the problem of racism as being more on the side of the black family than the white family. The film spent so much time building the Draytons up to be the model of acceptance and progressivism that the only thing that would mount the tension again would be to have the Prentice family be the stereotypical "angry blacks." Thankfully Kramer and screenwriter William Rose aren't dumb enough to fall into so obvious a trap. The parents end up mirroring one another with the mothers being the solid voice of understanding and the fathers be the less accepting, more concerned voice of opposition.

My favorite moment in the film comes when Matt and John's mother (wonderfully played by Beah Richards) have a conversation in which she says that she doesn't understand what happens to men when they grow old. She sees her husband forgetting what it's like to feel passion, and while she had clearly thought it was just him, after hearing Matt's objections, she realizes that it's all men. This conversation is intercut with ones between both Christina and Joanne, and John and his father. All three wonderful conversations/arguments that sum up the myriad feelings that all of the parties involved are having. It's a truly remarkable piece of writing in that it manages to lay bare all of the feelings and anxieties that everyone is having and get them all explained so succinctly. Of course it all culminates in Spencer Tracy's wonderful final monologue where he delivers his thoughts, and the knowledge that it's his last moments on a movie screen ever give them even more weight, emotion and purity than even the brilliant script can provide. Watching Katharine Hepburn watch the love of her life deliver this speech is one of the more moving things you can see in a film.

The performances in the film are uniformly good, with Hepburn being the standout. She won the Best Actress Oscar for the film and was fully deserving. The quote at the top of the review is from her speech when she fires her assistant, and that moment is so incredibly wonderful, it's the perfect synthesis of writing and performing. Stanley Kramer's direction is very classically staged, lots of coverage, everyone is given the proper focus at the proper time. It's essentially a chamber piece, but Kramer opens things up enough (the excursion by the Draytons to get ice cream is particularly funny) so as to not make the film feel stuffy. My only complaint is the god damned score. The song "Glory of Love" was written for the film and the entire score is nothing but a variation on that piece, making it grating, cloying and downright maddening near the end. You should never notice a score in a film, and this one can't help but make you notice it every few minutes.

I would love to say that 45 years after this film was made that things are so much easier for the Johns and Joannes of the world, but they're not. There may be more interracial couples now thanks to Loving vs Virginia, but Americans as a whole seem just as apprehensive about the whole thing as they did then, and of course the raging debate over same-sex marriage shows how this country can skew even less tolerant when given another issue to fume over. The world will never be a perfect place, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? knew that then, just as we know it now. It's up to the brave souls who know the greatest thing in the world is love to continue blazing that trail, and maybe someday, we can all live in peace. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? has a lot of hope for the world and leaves you feeling like things can change. I hope it's right.

I'll be wrapping up my look at the 1967 Best Picture race tomorrow with Doctor Dolittle starring everyone's favorite speak-singer Rex Harrison.

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Day 20: In the Heat of the Night

"I got the motive which is money, and the body which is dead."

In the Heat of the Night is an undeniably groundbreaking film. The fact that it was made in 1967 gives it a verisimilitude that it wouldn't have had were it released further down the road from the Civil Rights movement. It's a first rate mystery and is filled with some of the best performances of the decade by an assortment of wonderful character actors. It still crackles with real racial tension, likely because portions of the American South have remained largely unchanged since the time of this film. It could be set in modern times and be thoroughly believable, a statement that speaks both to the timeless power of the story and the sad state of race relations in this country.

Based on the novel by John Ball, In the Heat of the Night tells the story of a small town called Sparta, Mississippi where a wealthy businessman who has come from the north to build a factory and create jobs, has turned up murdered on Main Street. The police chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) thinks this is a pretty open and shut case when one of his deputies, Sam Wood (Warren Oates) turns up with a black man who was found alone in the train depot shortly after the murder. The black man turns out to be Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a homicide detective from Philadelphia, who finds himself in the wrong place and the wrong time. After clearing up his identity, Tibbs is instructed by his police chief to stay in Sparta an help them solve the mystery.

Tibbs is an outsider by virtue of the color of his skin, but also because he seems to be the only sensible human being in town. He performs an autopsy, questions suspects, gathers evidence and actively tries to solve the murder, while everyone else on the police force of Sparta is looking for a quick and simple solution. The fact of the matter is that there is no simple solution to this crime. There are lots of people in town with motives, not the least of which seems to be Endicott (Larry Gates) the wealthiest man in town who doesn't cotton to outsiders and would likely want to stub out anyone he viewed as competition.

Several trails run cold, even as Gillespie seemingly tries to pin the murder on anyone he can, but Tibbs continues his investigation in spite of the overwhelming odds against him. I hadn't seen the movie before yesterday, so I don't want to spoil the ending, but it's a very satisfying conclusion and Tibbs' determination to find the killer carries the story along.

Rod Steiger won the Oscar for Best Actor and it's easy to see why. His performance is big, boisterous, showy and all the things that make for an award winning performance. He doesn't deliver the kind of nuance that Dustin Hoffman brought to Ben Braddock, but his performance is outstanding in spite of the fact that I was almost constantly aware that I was watching an actor give a performance.

Sidney Poitier is also outstanding in a role that was as dangerous as could be imagined at the time. The role, as written, requires him to be a model of virtue and truth because audiences of the day couldn't handle a black character with true depth of feeling, lest he end up being branded an "angry black man." Thankfully he doesn't play the character that way. His stoic demeanor is clearly concealing the rage he surely feels but can't express, and Poitier is a savvy actor who knows that he must walk a very thin line, and he does so masterfully, never turning Tibbs into the stereotypical "Magical Negro."

Much like Crash in 2005, I think that this film was awarded the Best Picture Oscar more as a pat on the back for Hollywood to give itself, than a virtue of its artistic merits. In the Heat of the Night is a very good movie, but the direction, editing and pacing are pedestrian at best. It breaks ground socially without ever bringing anything new to the equation of filmmaking. It suffers from being merely a very good movie that people could feel good about rewarding, rather than risk being labeled social pariahs for selecting a film that was truly groundbreaking in its reinvention of the style and business of film itself like The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde were. Even Cool Hand Luke which wasn't nominated for Best Picture had style in spades and is still viewed as a truly great film.

I'm underselling the film, it's really fantastic and will hold you riveted by the mystery at its core. When viewed through the prism of hindsight however, it's a good film surrounded by some great films. I can't begrudge the film that as it is a landmark and deserves its place in Hollywood history. Stirling Silliphant's screenplay is excellent and the film is populated with some great characters like Ralph Henshaw, the waiter at the diner, and Harvey Oberst, a kid who gets locked up as a suspect and ends up forming a solid relationship with Tibbs who is immediately convinced of his innocence.

Watch In the Heat of the Night, particularly if you haven't before, and marvel at how far ahead of its time it is. Tomorrow I continue my examination of the 67 Best Picture race with Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

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Quick diversion about Christopher Nolan's Batman Universe

So a friend wrote me yesterday with this long diatribe that two friends of hers had about Nolan's Batman movies and what I'm putting below is my response. What are other people's opinions on these movies?

Jesus Christ... okay, I don't even know where to begin with all this. Nolan's films are all set in a world where people have unlimited time, power, money and resources to accomplish goals (save for Memento and Insomnia). Inception... seriously who has time to do all that shit except the wealthy?
So to whit Batman is a noble hero out to save the city he loves only because he's really a billionaire with the time, money and resources to do it. So who he is really trying to save?
Yes he hates corruption and hates that there is a justice system in place that allows murderers to walk free, but the economic inequality caused by people like Thomas and Martha Wayne is the reason there are criminals like Joe Chill walking the streets of Gotham in the first place. Yes, Joe Chill is an extreme example as he is a murderer, but he started out just intending to rob Bruce's parents. He saw rich people and tried to make them pay.
Bruce Wayne is driven by his unfailing penchant for criminal justice and totally blind to his direct causing of societal ills and prevention of social justice. He's the ultimate dichotomy, and it's clear that they're introducing Catwoman as the Robin Hood character in the new film, the idealized version of what a superhero should be. But Batman's not a superhero, he's a crime fighter. He's a dude who picks up where the police can't and/or won't.
So that brings me to the most interesting point that I guess is unaddressed by these films... would Gotham be a safer place if Bruce Wayne took all the money he spends being Batman and poured it into an uncorruptable security task force headed by a guy like Jim Gordon? Clearly though this social inequality makes for a much less interesting villain as you need a guy who's blowing shit up and needs to be stopped.
I love the Nolan Batman movies because they're great escapist fair that masquerade as intellectual movies. They're the kind of movie that a moron can go watch and feel like they really got because they're able to follow a story that goes deeper than just good vs evil. Are they good movies? Yeah, kinda. Are they good comic book movies? Absolutely, they're some of the best. X2 is the best comic book movie ever made though because it deals with a real issue in a heightened way (being who you are in spite of overwhelming opposition). So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. I am really looking forward to DKR because I love spectacle that has at least a little more going on below the surface, but I do agree with your complaints that The Dark Knight betrays the fundamental structure of the superhero set up in Batman Begins (he goes from stopping an elitist terrorist to essentially becoming one), but Batman was blinded by The Joker killing the love of his life and was determined to stop him by any means necessary. It made it an even bigger Bush metaphor because the grudge was personal, just like Bush's grudge against Saddam.

Day 19: The Graduate

"Are you here for an affair sir?"

Continuing my look at the 1967 Best Picture race, I turn to the most financially successful of the films, and the one that launched nearly as many careers as yesterday's Bonnie and Clyde, Mike Nichols' The Graduate. Mike Nichols had a very successful and lucrative career in the late 50s and early 60s as half of a comedy team with Elaine May. When their act split up, Nichols turned to directing for the stage, starting with Barefoot in the Park for which he won a Tony Award. When it came time to make his film debut as a director, he was chosen for 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A daunting task for any director having to deal with the larger than life egos of its stars Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Nichols was more than up to the task, turning the film into a financial and critical success. It also gave him the clout he needed to tackle a project he'd been milling over since the early 60s, a film adaptation of Charles Webb's novel The Graduate.

The Graduate tells the story of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate from an affluent family in California, who returns home with no real direction in life; He might go to graduate school, he might go to work, he might lounge in his parents' pool for the rest of his life. On the night of his parents' party to celebrate his graduation, he drives home the wife of his father's business partner, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Upon arriving at the house, she seems to be doing everything in her power to seduce the young man and offers him the chance to sleep with her whenever he feels ready to. The next day he calls her from The Taft Hotel and asks to take her up on her offer. They begin an affair that lasts until Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) returns from school.

Ben's parents and Mr. Robinson are encouraging Ben to take her out on a date, but Mrs. Robinson forbids him to do so. Feeling forced by his parents, Ben eventually caves and takes Elaine out on a date that starts disastrously, but once he realizes that Elaine is a kindred spirit, another aimless wanderer like himself, they hit it off.  Mrs. Robinson becomes furious and controlling, telling Ben he has to stop seeing Elaine immediately or she will tell Elaine the truth about their affair. Scared of losing Elaine, Ben tells her the truth and is forced away by her.

What follows is essentially Ben realizing he's found something that he wants to do with his life, namely being with Elaine, and he fights for it with everything he has. This is the quintessential tale of the aimlessness of American youth. Anyone who's ever been young enough to have seemingly endless opportunities but either a lack of purpose or drive or desire will be able to relate to Ben.

Dustin Hoffman became a megastar after this film and it's easy to see why. He handles the comedy and the drama so deftly and effortlessly, he's a joy to watch on screen. He infuses Ben with the right amount of pity and empathy so as to make him a character worth rooting for. When he finally decides that he can't let Elaine go at any cost and is trying desperately to reach her before she marries someone else, we see in his eyes the purpose and drive he has lacked throughout the entire film. He's a man on a mission, determined, and nothing will get in his way.

What makes this quest even more brilliant however is the last 60 seconds of the film. Ben succeeds in tracing Elaine down at a church in Santa Barbara where she's just been married. The scene is so parodied and copied now that it seems ridiculous at first, but it's so effectively done. He screams for her from the top of the church repeatedly, until finally, wonderfully, Elaine screams back and they run off together. Ben uses a cross to prevent anyone from following them out of the church, they run down the street, elated, and hop on a bus, he in a torn jacket, she in a wedding dress. They draw curious stares from everyone on the bus and as the bus pulls away, they couldn't be happier. They are the picture of bliss. If the film ends here, it's a perfectly good movie. What makes the film a masterpiece however is the fact that the camera lingers on them for another minute. Their faces give themselves away. They are two terrified kids who have essentially just turned their backs on their families, and they are scared. Their smiles give way to looks of terror and finally resolve. These two kids that we wanted to end up together seem doomed to end up just as unhappy as the parents they're running away from.

Mike Nichols won the Best Director Oscar and it's plain to see why. He uses tons of angles and setups and the film is always incredibly visually interesting. His use of Simon and Garfunkle is also brilliant. I would wager to say you could set just about anything to Simon and Garfunkle singing "The Sound of Silence" and it would look amazing, but Nichols compliments the music at every given opportunity. He uses that song and "Scarborough Fair" multiple times in montages, and they never feel overused or hackneyed. This was one of the first uses of popular music in this way and, again, it's so copied in modern cinema that it seems like it shouldn't work, but it does.

Another lovely moment in the film is when Ben accompanies Elaine to the zoo, against her will, and she meets up with, presumably, her new boyfriend. The two walk off, leaving Ben standing alone by the monkey house. Right next to him on the fence is a sign that reads "Do Not Tease." It's a brilliant little moment and it's never called attention to, as the full sign isn't visible in the shot of Ben watching them leave, but if you look at the fence it's there and it's just one more example of Nichols' brilliant direction.

The Graduate, like Bonnie and Clyde, holds up incredibly well, and I hate to sound like a shill for blu-ray, but MGM's 2007 blu-ray looks and sounds fantastic. Do yourself a favor and watch The Graduate again. It's better than you remember it.

Tomorrow we'll continue the 1967 Best Picture race with Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night starring Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier.

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Day 18: Bonnie and Clyde

"Come on, put yer pants on boy, we gonna take some pictures."

I am currently reading a book called "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood" by Mark Harris. It's essentially about the development, production and aftermath of the five Best Picture nominees from 1967: Doctor Dolittle, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, and Bonnie & Clyde. The story behind Bonnie & Clyde is almost as interesting as the movie itself. It began in 1962 when two journalists, Robert Benton & David Newman, who fancied themselves screenwriters, wanted to write a screenplay for their favorite director, Francois Truffault, to make as his English-language directorial debut.

Truffault was involved with the project for a while, as was Jean-Luc Godard, but both eventually moved on to other projects and the fillm landed in the lap of one of the few American maverick auteurs at the time, Arthur Penn. Warren Beatty, who at the time was struggling to live up to his desired image of being more than just another pretty face, decided that he wanted to move into producing, and this film would make him the first actor/producer since Charlie Chaplin.

All fascinating, interesting stuff, but it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans if the movie weren't any good. Thankfully for us, the movie is fantastic. It truly is the first American feature to embrace the style of the French New Wave and it was the birth of a new wave of American independent film production. Beatty plays Clyde Barrow, a criminal who's just been released from prison when he meets up with a small-town Texas waitress named Bonnie Parker, played by the devastatingly gorgeous and talented Faye Dunaway.

She becomes turned on by his bad boy ways, thieving and robbing, and agrees to go with him, wherever it is that he's going, and live a life on the lam. Along the way they meet up with C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) a mechanic who they convince to join them as a getaway driver. The Barrow Gang is soon complete as they meet up with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons).

Bonnie and Clyde become the first mythologized American outlaws since Jesse & Frank James and Billy the Kid. Their reputation preceeds them wherever they go, and they find it harder and harder to lay low after robbing a bank. Everytime they end up somewhere waiting for the heat to die down, it flares up again, and they find themselves on the run. As a side note, I recently watched Terrence Malick's Badlands for the first time, and going back to watch Bonnie & Clyde again, it's easy to see the influence of the latter on the former, but Malick is more a director influenced by the stillness and calm of American directors like George Stevens, so his film plays more poetically than the visceral Bonnie & Clyde. It's no less a film and I suggest you make a double feature of it sometime.

All five of the actors were nominated for Academy Awards in 1967, and though only Estelle Parson won, it undeniably launched the others, save Pollard, into the stratosphere. Hackman would win his first Oscar four years later, Dunaway nine years later, and though Beatty never won an acting Oscar, he would win several as producer and director of Reds in 1981. Much like yesterday's review of Dazed and Confused, it's wonderful to see the birth of the careers of so many brilliant actors being traced back, essentially, to one film. Even Gene Wilder pops up in a small but brilliant role as an undertaker who finds himself and his girlfriend kidnapped by The Barrow Gang when they steal his car.

The film also won, rightfully, an Oscar for it's Cinematography which is fantastic, but I think the award it was most deserving of, it did not win, and that is Best Editing. Dede Allen created this style of editing that we've become so accustomed to in the ensuing decades, but it's truly breathtaking to see it come to life here. The quick cuts before the outlaws are finally gunned down at the end, as Clyde looks to the bushes, then to the flock of birds that fly away, finally the intense and all-too-quick last glances between the lovers before they are killed in a hail of gunfire are probably the best moments in a film filled with great moments. On a side note, Hal Ashby won for editing In the Heat of the Night, and he's one of my all-time favorites, so I won't begrudge him that.

Bonnie and Clyde is a brilliant film and one of the true touchstones of American cinema. It's a film that you can easily watch over and over again and never tire of. It's as much a landmark American film as Citizen Kane, Casablanca and other noteworthy trailblazers before it. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and Warner Bros. deluxe edition bluray that was released a few years ago is amazing. The transfer is incredible and it feels like you're seeing the film the way audiences in 1967 did.

Tomorrow's film will be another from that incredible Best Picture race, Mike Nichols' The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft & Katharine Ross.

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Day 17: Dazed and Confused

"Say man, you got a joint?"
"What? No, not on me man."
"It'd be a lot cooler if you did."

I'm still not entirely sure why I chose Dazed and Confused to review. More than likely because it's a challenging movie to review. It's not a great movie, but it's one that I love a lot. It's one of those movies that I watched so much in high school and college on VHS but have barely revisited in the ensuing decade even though I purchased Criterion's deluxe edition of it five years ago. It's like an old friend that you talk to once in a while and think about occasionally, but don't really spend any time with. But like an old friend, the second it starts, you get sucked in and find yourself wondering why you don't spend more time together.

Set in a small town in Texas on the last day of school in 1976, Dazed and Confused is nostalgic without being wistful, and that's why it's such an effective movie. It's the 70's in miniature. Rather than focusing on a long stretch of time, it focuses on one day and enables us to get to know and care about multiple characters without getting bogged down in exposition or the kind of character development that can sink a movie like this. A lot of that has to do with writer/director Richard Linklater choosing characters that are archetypes and so familiar to anyone who's been in high school that you can easily drop into the story and know immediately who everyone is. There's the jocks, the nerds, the bitchy girls, the nice girls, the stoners, the assholes, and they're all fully inhabited characters.

Jason London (not to be mistaken for his twin brother from Mallrats and getting kidnapped fame) plays Randall "Pink" Floyd, the (I would assume) Linklater surrogate and main protagonist. He's a graduating junior and soon-to-be quarterback of the football team and he's wrestling with having to sign a pledge from his coach that says he won't engage in any drinking, drugs or illegal activity over the summer. This is the main conflict of the movie and pops back in to view from time to time to provide a sense of conflict, but it's never overbearing and certainly never feels like a plot device.

The plot essentially involves a big end of the year blow-out party getting cancelled and a bunch of small-town kids scrambling to find something to do instead. Mostly they drive around and talk a lot, but they all end up at a big beer bash at a park called "The Moon Tower." There's also a through-line involving a freshman hazing ritual that carries some of the characters forward, but it feels a bit more superfluous than Pink's dilemma.

The cast is uniformly good with a few standouts. Rory Cochrane plays Slater, the school's biggest stoner who maintains friendships across several social groups. He is perfect and you almost wonder why he never became more famous as a result of his performance here. Ben Affleck is also great as O'Bannion, a senior who failed seemingly just so he could participate in the hazing again. He is a pure asshole and everyone went to school with a guy just like this, and Affleck's performance is particularly good in retrospect because he played characters like this to much lesser effect in the future, and this is clearly before he tired to playing this kind of character.

Parker Posey is great as always playing a total bitch named Darla who enjoys hazing the incoming freshman girls as much as O'Bannion does the boys. Again, this is an actress with tons of talent and charisma who has seemingly always been as good as she is now.

The true shining star of the movie however is Matthew McConaughey as Wooderson, a townie with an affection for high school girls. Here again is an actor that's become incredibly famous but has clearly always had a talent for creating fully formed characters. Even though he's a bit of a creep, he never comes off that way and has a very endearing and accepting quality to him that makes him the most fully realized character in the entire movie. He's got most of the best lines, he looks the part, sounds the part and is the true breakout here like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Harrison Ford in American Graffiti, two actors in two films that this one is clearly indebted to.

The soundtrack, costume design, art direction and editing are also incredibly good for such a low budget affair (I understand the soundtrack accounted for roughly a third of the movie's total budget). If I have one complaint, it's a small one and it's Adam Goldberg's character Mike. I don't fault the actor as I think he's doing the best he can with the most overly "written" character in the movie. He speaks in quips and seems the least like a real person. He's one of a trio of brainy kids along with Marissa Ribisi and Anthony Rapp, and while I liked all three of them, Mike's character bothered me as being too much of a caricature. He doesn't talk like a real person and seems to be more of an idea of a character than a real person. It's a small problem, but one I have nonetheless.

If you've never seen Dazed and Confused, I don't know how we're friends, but you need to see it immediately. If you saw it and didn't like it, watch it again and lower your expectations. This isn't an actual depiction of what it must have been like to live in the 70s, it's more like a memory, cooler than it probably actually was. This is all part of nostalgia though, things should never be just as they were, they should be representative and this movie captures that in spades. Lastly, if you haven't seen it in a while, do yourself a favor and watch it again (Criterion just put it out on bluray). It's aged so well and it's as good as, if not better than, you remember it to be.

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Day 16: Heavenly Creatures

"I'm not going to heaven. I'm going to the fourth world. It's like heaven, only better because there aren't any Christians."

Peter Jackson is one of the luckiest directors that ever lived. He started out the 90's making small exploitation movies in New Zealand like Dead Alive and Meet the Feebles, and ended the decade filming The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the success of which would send him skyrocketing to the top of Hollywood's A-list. In between this though he made what I feel to be his two best films, 1996's The Frighteners (a wonderful horror movie featuring a never better Michael J. Fox) and 1994's Heavenly Creatures.

Heavenly Creatures is based on a true story of two teenagers in Christchurch, NZ who murdered one of their mothers. The filmmakers used the actual diary entries of one of the girls to piece together the story, much as the police did when prosecuting the crime. Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) is a bit of an outcast at her all girls school in 1952 when a transfer student from England arrives. Her name is Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) and she is a free spirit who connects with the shy and reserved Pauline right away.

They have several mutual interests, namely fantasy and romance novels and begin writing a romance novel together set in a mythical land. As they continue creating the world of the novel, their fantasies begin to come to life and they find their time spent in this fantasy realm to be more rewarding than the more banal world they actually live in. They even begin referring to themselves as characters from their novel. Juliet becomes Deborah (pronounced De-bore-ah) and Pauline becomes Gina. Juliet creates clay figures of the characters who later take shape as life-sized clay people in their fantasy world.

Pauline begins romanticizing Juliet's home life and thinks that because Juliet's parents are rich and disconnected, that they're actually more loving than her own parents. Both sets of parents are painted with a fairly broad brush and it is easy to dislike them at first for their overbearing ways or their non-existent parenting respectively. But as the girls' fantasy world begins to take hold and they lose almost all touch with reality, the parents become sympathetic characters almost by default.

Juliet's parents end up divorcing and Juliet is going to be shipped to South Africa as her parents hope the warm climate will help her tuberculosis. This sends both girls into a mad tizzy as it will drive them apart forever in their minds, so Pauline hatches a plan to murder her mother so that Juliet's parents will adopt her and they can all live together. It's a half-assed plan at best and just the sort of thing that two delusional teenage girls would hatch. Needless to say, they succeed in carrying out their plan; The murder is brutally violent and harshly realistic in contrast to the rest of the violence in the film which has been part of their fantasies and has been presented as non-realistically as possible. Text after the film informs us that the girls were tried for murder and sent to separate prisons for five years and released on the condition that they never see one another again.
The film has its flaws to be sure, but it is an incredibly effective portrait of what the lives of two girls consumed with fantasy would actually be like. This is a bit diversionary but stick with me here. I remember seeing Babel and being particularly engrossed in the segments of the film involving the maid and her nephew.

Afterwords I realized that this was because it was the director working with actors, characters and subject matter he was extremely comfortable with and it made the rest of the film suffer in contrast. I felt the same way here as the film would drag whenever it would deal with the more drab and mundane aspects of the girls' lives, but it would come alive in their fantasy sequences. This was obviously done intentionally for stylistic reasons, but it also shows Jackson's flaws as a director. He flounders when not dealing in fantastical scenarios and he treats those scenes with an orgasmic glee that it forces the rest of the film to drag.

The performances by both girls are extremely effective and it's easy to see why they both became great actresses with incredibly diverse and long careers. Kate Winslet in particular is amazingly good, but Melanie Lynskey is no slouch. She's obviously given the less showy role, but she is extremely good even in scenes without Winslet. I guess I'm trying to say that she's definitely not Peter Scolari to Winslet's Tom Hanks. These are both fantastic actresses and they've been that way since the very beginning of their careers.

The only other lingering issue I have is the girls' sexuality. There is a definite suspicion on the part of their parents that the girls are romantically involved with one another. The film doesn't openly show this as a reality until their last night together. What's odd about all this, I guess, is that when the parents suspicion is first raised, it's very clear that they're just extremely close to one another and are likely not involved romantically, but when they later end up consummating their relationship, it just sort of drops the scene into the film and doesn't make any attempt to use it as a reason or resolution for their relationship. It's almost wholly superfluous. I'm not sure how intentional this was, but I would like to know what the reason for including the scene was when we're made to feel earlier that the parents were being unreasonably paranoid.

Either way, it's a very good film that I highly recommend. I think it has aged extremely well compared with a lot of films from the early 90s and will likely hold up for years to come. What did everyone else think? Let me know in the comments section below!

I haven't decided on tomorrow's film yet, but it will be fairly mainstream as I've done a few obscure ones in a row now.

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Day 15: The Future

"Are you digging a hole to China?"
"I think that's racist."

Miranda July is a multimedia performance artist who broke into filmmaking with 2005's Me and You and Everyone We Know, a movie which I rather enjoyed. Her follow-up effort as writer/director/star is 2011's The Future. If you've seen Me and You... then it should come as no surprise to you when I say that there are sections of the film narrated by a cat or that the character of Jason can freeze time. This is a movie that wears its quirks on its sleeves as badges of honor and treats the abnormal as banal and the banal as abnormal.

Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) have decided to adopt a cat (the one who narrates sections of the film, the voice of whom is also provided by July). The cat needs to stay in the hospital for a month with a broken paw and the vet tells them that if they nurture and care for the cat, it could live for up to five more years. The thought of having a day in-day out commitment for the next five years forces them to reexamine their lives and how stuck in routine they are. They both quit their jobs (he's in tech support, she's a children's dance teacher) and decide to be spontaneous for the next thirty days, and they embrace this spontaneity in totally different ways. The fact that a nominal task like caring for a cat would force these people to completely re-order their lives and turn everything upside down says more about them than I ever could.

Sexuality is handled very strangely in her films, more-so in her first film than this one, but she's definitely not interested in people with normal sex lives. Sophie begins having an affair with the much older Marshall (David Warshofsky) seemingly for no other reason than she's bored. The first time we see them have sex, it's bizarre and borderline brutal, but she definitely enjoys it and begins to have feelings for him.

Jason takes a volunteer job working as an environmental door-to-door solicitor. He becomes friends with an old man from whom he purchases a hair dryer. He discovers his ability to freeze time, but it appears he can only freeze time for himself, it keeps going for everyone else. This makes a lot more sense when you see it than it does trying to explain it.

It's an odd movie, but it's got a lot going on for as seemingly stagnant it is. It's about weird people that you can somehow relate to. It's like the old adage about freak shows and people being attracted and repulsed by them because they see the "freaks" as not so different from themselves. I'm not saying that there's a huge difference between myself and the characters in this movie, but I certainly hope that I have my shit together more than these people do. They want to embrace change and be spontaneous, but they take such ridiculous and measured risks that they don't change at all.

One scene in particular says more about the mundaneness of life than any I've seen in recent memory. Sophie takes up a job as a receptionist at her old dance studio when there are no other openings available to teach again. Two friends of hers come in, both of whom are pregnant, and they begin a conversation with Sophie. Every time the reverse shot cuts back to her friends, their kids age, until finally it's two adults standing there and the mothers are gone. It's everyone's nightmare that they're going to be stuck in some dead end job while everyone around them grows and changes. It's a beautiful microcosm of the movie as a whole and speaks volumes. Perhaps it's the reason July is a much more effective filmmaker when working on shorts because she can sum things up succinctly and beautifully, but when stretched to feature length, her films have a habit of over-explaining or dragging out the point.

I enjoyed this film a great deal and feel it's definitely worth your time if you're not turned off by the strange things she does as a filmmaker. Give yourself over to something new, the way the characters do, and you just may find yourself surprised. At the very least, you'll turn out better than they do.
Tomorrow's film will be Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures with Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet.

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