Year in Review: 1989

There seems to be something about the final year of a particular decade that brings out the best in filmmakers. I have often noticed that lots of time, the best of the decade can be found in the final year. Probably no more than coincidence, but 1989 is certainly no exception – a great year where new filmmakers pushed themselves beyond where they had gone before.

10. The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke)
Idiosyncratic Austrian auteur Michael Haneke made his debut film in 1989 with this icy cold film about a family who decides to “drop out”. Told in three parts – the first two detailing a day in the life of the family two years and one year before their departure from society, days that are remarkably similar and show a family becoming increasingly isolated from modern society. The third part has the family quitting their jobs, selling their car, emptying their bank accounts – and then just going around their home destroying everything they own – but even then they cannot work up much passion in their exercise. The Seventh Continent is a stunning debut from a one of a kind filmmaker – and in my mind the best of his early work (he would surpass this until Code Unknown a decade later). Despite the fact that this is his first film, his style seems to be all there – as well as his outlook on life. The film is disturbing and shocking – one that gets under your skin and stays there long after it ends.

9. Roger and Me (Michael Moore)
Personally, I think Michael Moore’s best film is Bowling for Columbine – where he brilliantly captured America’s obsession with guns and violence. But Roger and Me, his first film, is a close second. Here, he was still relatively unknown to his target – GM and their CEO Roger Smith – and as such got dealt with much more harshly than he would in his later films. As well, Moore’s ego hadn’t quite run away with him yet – he was pretty much what he seemed to be – a guy in a baseball hat fighting for the little guy. Moore’s look at what happened to his hometown of Flint, Michigan following the closing of a GM plant is harsh and unblinking. He follows around the one guy in town with a stable job – the guy who is responsible for evicting people from their homes. He tries in vain to get an interview with Roger Smith, and never can seem to find him. He is kicked out of pretty much everywhere he tries to go, and he paints of picture of corporate greed and its effects on the lives of the people in community that is unforgettable. Moore’s penchant for the dramatic, and the humorous, was there from the beginning. He has tried to tackle bigger issues since Roger and Me, but this is the film where everything kind of fell into place for him – and is one of the best documentaries of the 1980s.

8. The Killer (John Woo)
The Killer is probably John Woo’s best film – more thought out than his earlier films, which were little more than gun battles, and not as stylistically over the top as much of his more recent films, The Killer sits somewhere perfectly in the middle. The movie is about a hit man with a conscience, played brilliantly by Chow Yun Fat. He comes out of retirement for one final job – in the hopes of making enough money to pay to fix a girl’s eyesight, who was blinded in a previous job. A cop (Danny Lee) swears to bring Chow down, but ends up seeing himself in the hit man – both of these men are sick of the lives they are living, of being so easily bought and sold, and are now trying to stand up for themselves. The gun battles in the movie are brilliantly stylized – better than pretty much any American action movie I can name – and they serve as tension breakers, as the dialogue driven sequences constantly build the tension up. The Killer is the best of John Woo’s films because in it, you understand precisely why everyone does everything they do – including killing. These are not just the mindless robots we get in most action movies killing without feeling or reason – but real people who kill to try and save their souls.

7. My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan)
Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot is usually the type of movie that wins a lot of awards, but I don’t warm to. It tells the story of Christy Brown, born to a poor Irish family in Dublin with cerebral palsy and had control only over one part of his body – his left foot. But Brown didn’t let that stop him, and became a painter and wrote his memoirs, of which this movie was based on. What separates his story from others of courage over adversary and handicaps (I’m thinking of someone like Helen Keller), is that Brown was far from a saint, and the movie makes no efforts to paint him that way. He is a drinking, smoking, swearing beast of a man. He was a genius in some ways, and like many geniuses, he was hard to live with. Daniel Day-Lewis is brilliant in the role of Brown – who plays him, flaws and all, and yet still manages to inspire us, and create a tremendous amount of sympathy for the man. Brown’s life was not easy, and although he was full of frustration and anger at times, he never let it get him down and he kept right on trying every day of his life.

6. sex, lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape is a movie about sex, yes, but more than that is about conversation. It is film in which we very rarely actually see anyone having sex – but is erotic in a more profound, and disturbing way. The movie centers on a married couple – Peter Gallagher and Andie McDowell, who no longer have sex – but that doesn’t seem to bother McDowell who feels that sex is overrated. It doesn’t bother Gallagher either, because he is having a torrid affair with McDowell’s sister, Laura San Giacomo. Into their lives comes James Spader, Gallagher’s old college roommate, who is very quickly able to get to the bottom of these people and their lives. He confesses to McDowell that he is impotent, which disarms her a little. He explains how he gets off sexually – by videotaping women confessing their sexual fantasies and feelings to him. And soon all of their lives are in upheaval. Soderbergh’s screenplay and direction are just about perfect, but the movie really depends on the performances to keep the film interesting. If one of these performances went wrong, the movie would fail. But McDowell gives her best performance as the seemingly perfect Ann, Giacomo is perfect as her jealous sister and Gallagher is wonderful as the man caught between them. Best of all is Spader who somehow finds the right mixture of charm and creepiness for his character. Spader has made a career out of being this sort of twisted, sexual man who somehow makes you willing to follow him anywhere – consider his work in Cronenberg’s Crash or in Secretary. Here he delivers perhaps his best performance – in a movie that is certainly one of Sodebergh’s best.

5. Say Anything… (Cameron Crowe)
There have been countless movies made about two high school kids falling in love. A lot of them share a similar plot to Say Anything in that a rich girl falls for a poor boy, much to the chagrin of her parents. And yet Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything is so unlike the rest of the movies in the genre that it feels constantly fresh and original. In a way, John Cusack has been trying to play Lloyd Dobler for the rest of his career. Dobler is the honest, heart of the movie who falls in love with Ione Skye’s rich girl and unlike most teenagers in love, he doesn’t lie to her at all. He tells her the truth from the beginning – he has no career plans, no goal in his life except to love her. She falls for that honesty, particularly when she discovers that her beloved father (John Mahoney) is not quite as honest as he seems. Crowe’s dialogue sparkles in the film, and is delivered to perfection by Cusack and Skye (what by the way ever happened to Skye, who was so good in this movie, and River’s Edge?). This is a film that respects its teenage characters, doesn’t sink to vulgarity or cheap laughs. It could just be the best movie about teenage romance ever made. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, it’s probably because you’ve never seen the film.

4. Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant)
Drugstore Cowboy is one of the best movies ever made about drug abuse – in fact, I would say that it was probably the best until Requiem for a Dream came out a decade later. The movie is about two couples on the run. They move from one roach infested motel to another, constantly on the prowl to find more drugs. Their favorites are prescription drugs, and they have a system that they use to score them when they need to. When they need money, they also sell drugs – but only the ones they don’t actually want themselves. The center of the movie is Matt Dillon, in the best performance of his career. He is like the father of this loosely connected “family” – he makes the plans and the others follow. He is married to Kelly Lynch, but they love drugs more than they love each other, and have for years. They have a goofy kid as a sidekick (James Le Gros), who has a teenage runaway girlfriend (Heather Graham) who doesn’t really know what she is getting herself into. In his first major film, Gus Van Sant finds the perfect tone for the movie – detached, ironic, sometimes darkly humorous and offering only the slightest glimmer of hope in the film. It is a masterful film on every level.

3. Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen)
Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of the best films of his career – right up there with Annie Hall and Manhattan in my books. It is essentially a two pronged story. In one, a documentary filmmaker (Woody Allen) struggles to get his films made and is hired by his brother in law (Alan Alda), a success in TV to make a documentary about him – which Alda uses to patronize Allen with his “insights” into comedy. Allen falls in love with a production assistant, Mia Farrow, and proposes marriage – even though of course, Allen is already married, and perhaps Farrow has her eyes on Alda. In the other, a successful doctor (Martin Landau) has been having an affair with Anjelica Huston – who has started to become clingy. He never wanted to leave his wife and family for her, but now she’s threatening to tell his wife about them. He reaches out to two people for advice – his gangster brother (Jerry Orbach) and a patient – a rabbi who is going blind (Sam Waterson) for advice (even though the conversation with the rabbi is all in Landau’s head) on how to handle the situation. He finds that he can justify anything, as long as he doesn’t get hurt. The two halves of the movie make a complete film – Allen’s half a funny examination of adultery and affairs, and Landau’s half quietly shocking as we see this respected man sink to murder, while God turns a blind eye. That Allen not only knew these two halves would make the whole movie better, but was able to pull off the balancing act so brilliantly is a testament to his skills. This is one of his very best.

2. Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone)
Born on the Fourth of July is the middle part of Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy (his recent plan to make a film about the My Lai massacre, thus making it a quartet has been put on the backburner indefinitely). This film follows idealistic young soldier Ron Kovic as he enlists in the army right out of high school, goes to Vietnam where he kills a fellow American in a friendly fire incident, and comes home from the war paralyzed from the waist down – bitter and angry at the government who sent him over there. He drowns himself in self pity and alcohol for a while, before channeling his energy into protests against the war. In a perfect piece of casting, Stone gave the role of Kovic to All American superstar Tom Cruise. In the early scenes, he plays the Cruise we already knew – energetic, sympathetic and idealistic, but the real feet of Cruise’s acting comes as the film progresses, and he becomes almost unrecognizable behind the wheelchair, the long hair and beard. Cruise has, in my opinion anyway, too often coasted on his charm, but when he wants to be, he can be a great actor – and here he perfectly captures Kovic in all his struggles and contradictions. Stone’s direction is assured from the start, keeping the film moving from one scene to the next, and brilliantly visualizing the story. There are other inspired pieces of casting – like having Tom Berenger as a gung ho recruiter early in the film, and Willem Dafoe as a fellow paralyzed vet who helps Kovic – they play off their roles in Stone’s earlier Platoon. Hal Ashby’s Coming Home was in part inspired by Ron Kovic – but Stone’s film is an even better, even deeper exploration of coming home to a country that hates what you have done – and how a soldier can hate himself even more.

1. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
Sometimes it feels like a filmmaker is put on the planet to make one film. No matter how great a career Spike Lee has, no matter how many great films he has made, his masterpiece will always be Do the Right Thing – the most incisive examination of race relations in America to ever make it to the screen. The amazing thing about Spike Lee’s film is how even handed it is – this is a film without heroes or villains, but about everyday people living one day of their lives in a Brooklyn neighborhood. The film ends with two shocking acts of violence – the murder of a young black man by two white cops, and the neighborhood blacks taking out their anger by burning Sal’s Pizzeria to the ground. The shocking thing about it is that you walk out of the film understanding precisely why everyone did what they did – you may not agree with it, but you empathize. Some have accused Lee’s film of being anger, and an incitement to riot, but none of that is actually in the film, which is thoughtful and masterfully written and directed. Lee spends most of his movie, which takes place over one extremely hot day, focusing on the characters, slowly building them up, so that we get to know each and every one of them. The casual racism – on both sides – is seething underneath and waiting to blow. Lee’s cast, including Danny Aiello as Sal the owner of the pizzeria, and the only white owner who has stuck by his business as the neighborhood demographic changes, his sons John Turturro, a more overt racist, Richard Edson, who likes the people in the neighborhood, Lee himself as Mookie, the delivery man, Giancarlo Esposito as the quick to anger Buggin’ Out, Ossie Davis as Da Mayor, who tries to keep everyone calm, Ruby Dee, as a old woman who spends her time out on the stoop and so many more that it would take too long to name them all. Lee captures them all in their joy and their pain, their happiness and their anger. Yes, the whole movie leads to two shocking acts of violence – but they do not come out of nowhere, they are ingrained in the film. Spike Lee is one of the best filmmakers in the world right now – and Do the Right Thing is, and always will be, his masterpiece. Other than the music, this film hasn’t aged a bit in the last 21 years.

Just Missed The Top 10: Batman (Tim Burton), Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir), Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford), The Fabulous Baker Boys (Steve Kloves), Field of Dreams (Philip Alden Robinson), Glory (Edward Zwick), Heathers (Michael Lehmann), Henry V (Kenneth Branagh), Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand), Violent Cop (Takahasi Kitano).

Notable Films Missed: A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami), Time of the Gypsies (Emir Kustrica).

Oscar Winner – Best Picture: Driving Miss Daisy
Driving Miss Daisy is an odd choice for Best Picture for a number of reasons. First, the film is considered a comedy, although it does touch on some serious issues as well. And second, for the first (and so far only) time since 1932, the Best Picture winner did not have its director nominated. But aside from those two things, Driving Miss Daisy is precisely the type of film the Academy always gives its Oscar to. I cannot complain too much – the film is certainly charming and entertaining – and both Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy are excellent in the lead roles. I do find it kind of sad though that in a year that saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing – the best, most honest film about race relations in America ever made – that the Academy gave it to a film whose view on the same subject is just about as opposite to Lee’s as you could get. True, the Academy was never going to give Lee the Oscar for his controversial film (they didn’t even nominate it for Christ’s sake), but it feels like a slap in the face nevertheless. I think that they would have done better to give the prize to Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July – but perhaps coming just three years after rewarding Stone’s Platoon with the top prize, it felt too soon (something that would happen in the 1990s to Spielberg and his WWII epics).

Oscar Winner – Best Director: Oliver Stone, Born on the Fourth of July
With no Bruce Beresford for Driving Miss Daisy gumming up the nominees, Stone was perhaps the only choice that the Academy could truly make here. They couldn’t very well give the award to Woody Allen or Kenneth Branagh after they didn’t nominate their films for Best Picture, and they couldn’t really give it Jim Sheridan for My Left Foot, because two of his actors already won, and it would silly to give it all those prizes and not Best Picture, and they couldn’t give it to Peter Weir for Dead Poet’s Society, because, well, it just wasn’t quite good enough. So Stone was probably a compromise choice. And yet, I have to say that of the nominees, they gave it to the right guy – Stone’s control of Born on the Fourth of July is total, and he made far and away the best visual film of the nominees. Yes, it is a shame that the Academy didn’t nominate Spike Lee, but given their error in the nominating round, they gave it to the right one in the winning round.

Oscar Winner – Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, My Left Foot
While I think Daniel Day Lewis’ first Oscar was well deserved, it still would not have been my choice. In my mind, Tom Cruise gave the year’s best performance in Born on the Fourth of July – and I think that he would have won the Academy award if not for a few factors. After all, like Day Lewis, Cruise played a handicapped person – something the Academy loves. But the history of the Academy has shown a bias against handsome, young male stars – something that kept Cary Grant from ever winning an Oscar, and delayed Paul Newman’s win for more than 30 years. Having said all of that, Day Lewis was excellent in My Left Foot, never pandering to the audience for sympathy or trying too hard to get them to like his ornery character. It is a great performance, and a worthy winner, but it would not have been my choice.

Oscar Winner – Best Actress: Jessica Tandy, Driving Miss Daisy
I find it hard to argue too strenuously against Jessica Tandy’s win for Driving Miss Daisy. She is excellent in the movie – hilarious and touching in equal doses, and she has tremendous chemistry with Morgan Freeman, her co-star. She is also an actress who had a wonderful career behind her working for such directors as Hitchcock, Howard, Ivory and having a tremendous stage career where she was among other things, the original Blanche Du Bois. And yet Miss Daisy has become the role for which she will forever be remembered. To me, she was neck and neck with another of the nominees – the sexy, seductive Michelle Pfeiffer who came between The Fabulous Baker Boys, but I will not argue too hard against her.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actor: Denzel Washington, Glory
Denzel Washington delivers a powerfully angry performance in Edward Zwick’s Glory as a former slave who joins the all black regiment of soldiers fighting for the North in the Civil War – and still having to face the racism of their so called heroes. The film itself is perhaps Zwick’s best – but it suffers the same problem I often find in his work – that is he tells the story of minorities from the point of view of white people, something I have always found patronizing. There is no arguing with Washington’s performance however (which oddly follows his Oscar nominated turn in Cry Freedom, a film that found the white man’s journey to smuggle the black characters memoirs out of Africa more compelling than the black characters story in the first damn place). Personally, I think Danny Aiello was the best in Do the Right Thing, and could argue that Martin Landau’s work in Crimes and Misdemeanors was also more worthy, but it’s still a good choice, even if it wouldn’t have been mine.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actress: Brenda Fricker, My Left Foot
This was inarguably a weak year for this category – especially since the Academy felt the need to overlook the single best performance in the category – Laura San Giacomo’s in sex, lies and videotape. And yet, I find I have no real problem with Brenda Fricker winning for her performance as Christy Brown’s ever supportive mother in My Left Foot. Her key scenes are early in the film, when Brown was still a child, and her decision to raise Brown not as a coddled child, but someone who has to take his lumps like everyone else, is perhaps the key to him turning out the way he did. Like all the acting winners this year, this would not have been my choice – but I have a hard time arguing too strenuously against it either.

Year in Review: 1977

To some, 1977 represents the official end of the decade of the director. The early 1970s was a time when American filmmakers had more freedom than ever before, and young exciting directors were being given free rein to do what they wanted to. Many blame George Lucas and Star Wars for ushering in the age of the blockbuster and ruining all that – but the process really started much earlier than people like to believe (for example The Godfather in 1972 was the first movie to open “nation wide” on the same day, a move that was followed the next year by The Exorcist). Lucas is too easy a target. But if 1977 represents the last gasp of dying era, or at best a mixture of the two, they sure did make a lot of great films that year.

10. 1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci)I cannot help but admire Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic 1900, even if at 311 minutes the film is overlong, and at times a narrative mess. The film opens on January 1st, 1900 with the birth of two boys – Alfredo, the son of the wealthy landowner Burt Lancaster, and Olmo, the son of a poor worker, Sterling Hayden. The two become childhood friends, and there is a wonderful innocence about these early scenes where neither cares who the others father is, or what social class they belong to. Thing change however during WWI, where Olmo (now played by Gerard Depardieu) joins the army to fight for his country, while Alfredo (now Robert DeNiro) learns how to run the plantation. After the war, with fascism on the rise, both men marry, and the plantation owned by DeNiro is run by Donald Sutherland – an ruthless, sadistic supporter of fascism, who treats the workers like slaves. Meanwhile, DeNiro is locked into a loveless marriage with Domnique Sanda, who grows suicidal because of their horrid relationship, and Depardieu’s beloved wife dies in childbirth. Yes, 1900 is overlong at five hours, and yes even at that length, the movie tries to cram too much into one movie. But there are scenes of such beauty in the film, and scenes of unforgettable savagery. Also the performances by DeNiro, Depardieau, Sanda, Lancaster, Hayden and Sutherland keep the movie interesting. 1900 is not a movie I love in spite of its excesses, it is a film I love because of them.

9. Opening Night (John Cassavetes)The films of John Cassavetes work best when they capture the messiness of life. His best film is A Woman Under the Influence, which starred Gena Rowlands as a woman who was constantly trying to fit in, to do the right thing, but never seemed to be able to – eventually leading her to a nervous breakdown. In Opening Night, Gena Rowlands once again plays a woman who is on her way to a breakdown – this one fuelled by alcohol, and enabled by everyone around her. She plays an actress who is starring in a new play about an aging woman, but she cannot seem to find her way into the character. They are trying the play out in New Haven before opening it in New York, but Rowlands is constantly drunk, forgets her lines and insults everyone around her. Ben Gazzara is the ever patient director, who tells Rowlands what she wants to hear, even if it isn’t the truth, Joan Blondell is the playwright, who is getting tired of Rowlands diva tactics, but tries to help anyway, and Cassavetes himself is the play’s leading man, and Rowlands former lover, who like everyone else is growing tired of her. Yet they all support her, the all feed into her ego, and above all, they all keep offering her a drink. Rowlands is just one step away from falling off the deep end – and that step may come early in the film, when a fan tries to run after her car after the performance, and ends up getting hit and killed. The girl, around 18, begins to haunt Rowlands – not is a ghost story sense, but rather that Rowlands keeps her around, perhaps because she is the only one who will tell her the truth. Opening Night is not one of Cassvetes very best films – it is too long, too ungainly and at times unfocused, and the ending confused me a little bit. Why does everyone seem so happy at the end? Is it because Rowlands has now turned everyone, even the audience, into her enablers? But the film is still alive, fresh and brilliantly well acted and directed, in a way that only Cassavetes could do.

8. Eraserheard (David Lynch)
What are we to make of David Lynch’s debut feature film Eraserhead? It is a film totally unlike anything you’ve ever seen – a sign that Lynch was an original talent. The film stars Jack Nance as Henry, who discovers that his estranged girlfriend has given birth to the most hideously deformed baby in human history. The two get married, but she cannot take like with him and his offspring for long, and leaves him to raise the baby on his own. What follows is a bizarre series of events, featuring the Woman in the Radiator, who literally lives in Henry radiator and sings and dances – crushing sperm shaped creatures as she does, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, The Man in the Planet, and a dream sequence where Henry thinks his head is being turned into erasers – and finally Henry’s murder of his own child, which seems to have catastrophic effects. What does all of this mean? I don’t have a clue. What I do know is that Lynch’s dark twisted vision – his dystopian view of the world – wraps you in its grip from the opening scene and never lets you go. It is a marvel, especially considering how little money Lynch had to spend on the movie. After making Eraserhead, Lynch disappeared into the Hollywood system for a few years – making The Elephant Man and Dune, which to my mind are his two least interesting films – before deciding to stick to his own twisted vision from then on. And nothing is more twisted than Eraserhead.

7. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel)Luis Bunuel was 77 when he directed That Obscure Object of Desire – his final film. And it must be said that right up until the end, Bunuel was pushing boundaries and not playing it safe. Has there ever been another director who has better captured the erotic power of women, and the games that men and women play together? He is known as a surrealist, a man who poked fun at Catholic and the bourgeoisie in equal measure. But when I think of his films, I think of the erotic power they have. As he did in Viridiana and Tristana, Fernardo Rey plays what could be called a dirty old man. He is rich, a widower, who lives a comfortable life, despite all the recent terrorist attacks around him. We first see him getting on a train, and when a beautiful young woman approaches the train, he bribes the conductor to allow him to get a bucket of water, and pours it over her head as she stands on the platform. The other people in his car see this, and wonder what could have driven this seemingly respectful man to do such a thing. So he tells them his story – and why pouring a bucket of water over the woman’s head is actually far less than she deserved. Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think of those other two Bunuel and Rey films, where he tried to possess a beautiful younger woman. In Viridiana, things do horribly wrong and he commits suicide. In Tristana, things go horribly wrong, and he ends up getting murdered. In That Obscure Object of Desire, although things go horribly wrong, I think by the end, he has got what he wanted – even as the world descends into chaos. The most daring thing about the film is that Bunuel cast two different women – Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina – to play the woman in the film. Oddly, this is not a distraction, but actually helps the film. It makes the woman more fluid, more mysterious, and provides Rey with the challenge of having to seduce both of them – something he can never quite do. Bunuel was playing with us right up until the end.

6. Rolling Thunder (John Flynn)Rolling Thunder is a mostly forgotten film written by Paul Schrader and directed by John Flynn. That’s a shame, because the film is one of the best, most violent revenge thrillers of the 1970s – and what’s more, it’s actually an intelligent movie as well. William Devane gives his best performance as a soldier who returns to his small Texas town after spending 7 years as a POW in Hanoi. He is given a hero’s welcome – a new Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars, one for everyday he was kept prisoner. However, his wife has moved on – she is engaged to a police officer, and has no plans to break it off. His son doesn’t remember him. Devane takes this all in stride – seething underneath, but giving an appearance that it doesn’t bother him, and continuing the same routine he had in that prison camp. Things kick into high gear when he returns home one day to find four criminals waiting for him – they want those silver dollars, and torture Devane to try and get him to talk. He has a flashback to his time in the camp, but doesn’t talk. But then his wife and son return home, and give the criminals what they want – who shoot all three anyway, with Devane being the only one who survives. What follows is as violent as any movie by Sam Peckinpah, as Devane, and his old army buddy (Tommy Lee Jones), facing similar problems, go out for vengeance. Despite the films violence it never becomes just a series of violent showdowns and gunfights. Like Taxi Driver, which Schrader wrote the previous year, this is a film about a Vietnam veteran who finds he cannot fit in with society anymore, and takes out his vengeance on the people who have harmed him. Taxi Driver is rightly regarded as one of the best films of all time – Scorsese’s direction and DeNiro’s performance elevate it high beyond Rolling Thunder. But this is a great movie as well, and deserves to be rediscovered.

5. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)How many films have we know seen about life in the ghetto of L.A.? I can’t tell you the exact number, but I can tell you that almost all of them involve gangs, drugs, guns and death. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep takes place in Watts during the 1970s, and shows us with an unblinking gaze the poverty that surrounds its character – but it never resorts to those kind of clichés. Instead, what it shows us is the portrait of a man (Henry G. Sanders) who has a horrible job at a slaughter house where he works himself ragged, and then comes home and works himself even harder. He is a good man who is trying to support his wife and his kids, but he’s just so damn tired. Every time it seems like he is going to get some relief – a day at the races, an new engine for his car – something comes along and ruins it. Offset against these scenes are scenes of his kids, and the others from the neighborhood, playing. These are on long, lazy, hot summer days. The kids don’t have any real toys, but kids often find a way to amuse themselves. Burnett’s film is really more about mood than anything else – there is no real plot to speak of – but it is about a time and place that Burnett knows well, and puts on the screen in all it details. The film reminded me of the Italian neo-realists after WWII, that simply liked to show their characters go about their daily routines surrounded by poverty. It is to Burnett’s credit that Killer of Sheep deserves to be mentioned alongside those film.

4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg)Steven Spielberg has said he doesn’t think he could make Close Encounters of the Third Kind the same way today as he made it back in 1977. That after becoming a father, he finds Richard Dreyfuss’ decision to leave his family at the end to travel into space unjustifiable. Well, he’s wrong. Besides, that ending sequence, as magical as it is with the spaceship and the people on the ground exchanging musical cues before revealing it’s peaceful, waif like aliens that bring Dreyfuss aboard, is only the final in what is one of Spielberg’s greatest directorial achievements. The film captures the wonder, the almost childish glee of its characters when they realize that something bigger then themselves is going on – something beyond their world is visiting them. Dreyfuss carries the movie, and it’s to his credit that we feel sympathy with him the entire film – even when he seems to have completely lost, and yes, even in that final scene when he abandons his family to see what lies beyond the stars. The other performances in the movie, Melinda Dillon as a mother who wants her son back in particular, are also wonderful. Like Spielberg’s best films, the special effects are second to none – I’m sure that if the film were made today, there would be different special effects, but I’m not sure they would necessarily be better special effects. But like Spielberg has done time and again in his career, he uses the special effects not to replace the story, but to enhance it. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a magical movie.

3. Star Wars (George Lucas)What more can be said about Star Wars that has not already been said? I know a lot of people are down on the film, because along with Jaws, it helped to usher in the age of the blockbuster – and the personal filmmaking of the early 1970s became a thing of the past because of it. But that isn’t George Lucas’ fault. The original Star Wars is still one of the best, most entertaining space operas ever made. It presented us with so many characters – Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Salo, Obi Wan Kenobi, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, C3P0, R2D2, Jabba the Hut etc – that have become classic examples of their type. The special effects were groundbreaking at the time, and remain wonderful today (stop tinkering with them George!). The story is a classic battle between good and evil on a large scale, the action sequences are wonderful well staged. It is quite simply one of the most entertaining films ever made – and I really don’t think anything else needs to be said about it.

2. Annie Hall (Woody Allen)Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is the film that turned the filmmaker from a promising comedic filmmaker, into the real deal. I do love some of Allen’s early films – Bananas in particular I find hilarious – but it wasn’t really until Annie Hall that he pushed himself further, where he really made a film about modern relationships that was both hilarious, and yet bittersweet. Allen stars as Alvy Singer, a standup comedian who meets, falls in love with, lives with and then breaks up with the title character, played by Diane Keaton. The movie is all about the dialogue – the characters rarely do anything other than talk – and Allen’s experiments with his visual style, and storytelling techniques. A movie like this would be unthinkable today, with its mixture of tones, it intellectual dialogue that is actually about something other than driving the plot forward, its references to pop culture that sadly most audiences would no longer get (do people still know Groucho Marx? Fellini? McLuhan?). Allen uses every visual trick in the book to get his movie across – split screens, animation, fantasy sequences, scenes where Allen addresses the audience himself, or the wonderful sequence where he starts asking people on the street what they think (I love the man’s response about the giant vibrating egg). But above all it is about the performances – Allen, playing really for the first time, his sad sack persona, a man who turns everything into a joke, and screws everything up because of it, and Keaton as the neurotic Hall, who puts up with Alvy as long as she possibly can. I’m not sure that Annie Hall in Allen’s best film – my vote would probably be Manhattan – but it shows a filmmaker pushing himself, and his audience, beyond what they normally expect. It is a masterpiece.

1. Three Women (Robert Altman)For some reason, when the great films of Robert Altman – one of the best directors in history – are discussed, Three Women doesn’t get mentioned alongside the likes of Nashville or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But for me, I think Three Women just maybe the best film Altman ever directed. Three Women is a film that came to Altman in a dream, and it plays like a dream as well. It does in fact revolve around three women – Shelley Duvall, constantly trying to make a good impression on everyone around her, yet seemingly unaware that everyone ignores her, Janice Rule as the pregnant wife of a drunken letch, who fills her days painting the bottom of the swimming pool at the apartment complex she and Duvall both live at, and young Sissy Spacek who still seems to be little more than a child. The film was inspired, in part, by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona – and we can certainly feel the echoes of that film in this one, especially when Spacek decides that she should steal Duvall’s identity. But Altman’s film is even better than Bergman’s – it is a deeper film, a film with many interpretations and hidden meanings, a film that drifts by us effortlessly, and yet hangs in your memory forever once you have seen it. Three Women is unlike most of Altman’s movies – he uses a much different style than his typical overlapping dialogue, observational style that captures the hum of life overheard. Here he does a better job than any film I can recall about creating a world that exists as it does in a dream. Three Women is a masterpiece.


Just Missed The Top 10: The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven), The Late Show (Robert Benton), Saturday Night Fever (John Badham), Slap Shot (George Roy Hill), Sorcerer (William Friedkin), Suspiria (Dario Argento).

Notable Films Missed: Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg), Providence (Alain Resnais),The Turning Point (Herbert Ross).

Oscar Winner – Best Picture & Director: Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
I know a lot of people are surprised when they look back at this year’s Oscar and realize that Star Wars did not actually win the Best Picture or Director Oscars. After all, it was clearly the biggest event in pop culture that year, and has become a film where you are hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t love. It never surprised me however. No matter how good films like Star Wars are, they never win the big Oscar – Avatar is the most recent example of this. What does surprise me is that Woody Allen’s Annie Hall won both prizes. Not only is it a romantic comedy – something that hadn’t really won the prize since Frank Capra’s It Happened Night in 1934, but is a rather daring, innovative one at that – and it was coming from a filmmaker that no one really took seriously before the film was released. But looking at things in another light – Annie Hall’s Oscar win actually makes sense. I mean, what else were they going to give the Oscar to out of the nominees? We already eliminated Star Wars, so what does that leave? Herbert Ross’ forgotten ballet film The Turning Point (which I have forgotten to see), another Herbert Ross film, the Neil Simon adaptation The Goodbye Girl, also a romantic comedy, but one nowhere near as good as Annie Hall, and Fred Zinneman’s dull “epic” Julia. So Annie Hall wins almost by default. Having said that, the Academy clearly made the right choice – they gave it to a great film, one of the best the genre has ever produced, and to a director who would go on to become one of America’s best. Good for them.

Oscar Winner – Best Actor: Richard Dreyfuss, The Goodbye Girl
I don’t much care for The Goodbye Girl, which is an average romantic comedy from Neil Simon, much like his The Odd Couple, except of course, this time the leads are of different genders so they can eventually fall for each other. Dreyfuss plays a struggling actor who, through a series of misunderstandings, comes to share an apartment with Marsha Mason, and her daughter Quinn Cummings. The two hate each other at first, but of course, will fall in love. I found the screenplay to be weak in places – and Mason’s character is extremely unlikable, so there’s a hole in the plot right there. Dreyfuss is fine in the lead role – particularly in the scenes where he plays Richard III as an over the top homosexual, but he has done much better work in his career – hell he did much better work this year in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Dreyfuss’ win was somewhat surprising – everyone assumed that Richard Burton would finally win an Oscar for his work in Equus (a film I have somehow never gotten around to seeing). The Academy has never been as fond of Woody Allen as an actor as they have as a director/writer – giving him his only acting nomination this year – and in my mind, he should have won (but since he won Director and Original Screenplay that year, we’ll let it pass).

Oscar Winner – Best Actress: Diane Keaton, Annie Hall
1977 was a great year for actresses – but the Academy only nominated one of the great performances, leaving out the great Shelley Duvall in Three Women and Gena Rowlands in Opening Night. Still however, I have to say that Diane Keaton’s win for Annie Hall would have been my choice even if those two women were nominated. She has become the prototypical Woody Allen woman – a little younger, demanding, neurotic, but also sexy in an offbeat way. Diane Keaton has gone on to have a wonderful career – delivering many fine performances, but her work in Annie Hall remains her best, and one of the best Oscar wins for Best Actress ever.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actor: Jason Robards, Julia
Jason Robards has a small role in Fred Zinneman’s Julia – and he is probably the best thing about the movie. Robards is the famed author Dashiell Hammett, who is a mentor and sometimes lover to the main character – Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda). When Lillian is enlisted by her childhood friend, she sets off on a journey across Europe – a dangerous trip for a Jewish intellectual when Nazi Germany was in power. Robards is essentially only in a few scenes at the beginning and end of the movie, but he leaves such an impression on the film, that I think the rest suffers as a result. We believe his relationship with Fonda – there seems to be a history there, and real feeling and emotion – something lacking in everything else in the movie. Given the crop of nominees this year, I can’t say this is a horrible choice – although Alec Guiness would have been mine from Star Wars – I just wish it had been in the service of a much better movie. Had all the scenes in the film been as good as the ones between Robards and Fonda, we would have had a great film. Because they aren’t, we have a mediocre one.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actress: Vanessa Redgrave, Julia
I’d bet that more people remember Vanessa Redgrave’s Oscar acceptance speech for this award then remember her actual performance. She commended the Academy for not giving into “Zionist hoodlums” who criticized her and co-star Jane Fonda for their pro Palestinian views, even as they were both playing Jews fighting against the Nazis in the film. The reason why no one remembers the performance is because it wasn’t very good. To hear Jane Fonda’s Lillian Hellman describe her friend Julia, it makes her sound like a fascinating person – but whenever Vanessa Redgrave is on screen, she seems anything but. Their scenes together, which should be the heart of the film, somehow fall flat – especially when compared to the ones Fonda shares with Robards. Given the nominees, I can’t say that anyone was robbed – Melinda Dillon is the best of a very sorry bunch – but the Academy overlooked some great work – particularly Sissy Spacek in Three Women. Redgrave is a great actress, and she probably does deserve to have an Oscar on her shelf – but not for this movie.

Year in Review: 1950

1950 was a wonderful year for the movies – both in America and across the world. This is one of those years where there is seemingly no shortage of great films – any one of my top 4 films could have easily placed at number 1 in a weaker year. But the number 1 film of this year is to me head and shoulders above the rest – and is one of the greatest films in history.

10. Wagon Master (John Ford)
Perhaps because John Ford’s Wagon Master has Ben Johnson in the lead role – and not John Wayne or Henry Fonda – it is not nearly as well known as many of his Westerns. But Wagon Master deserves to be mentioned right alongside Ford’s best entries in the genre. I know a lot of people accused some Ford Westerns (The Searchers for example) of being racist against the Natives (although in that case, I would argue that the movie is ABOUT racism, not racist itself), and that it wasn’t until the 1960s that Ford issued an apology of sorts in Cheyenne Autumn. But watching Wagon Master, I was struck by how sensitive his portrayal not only of the Apache is, but also of Mormons – a group that has often been ridiculed. That is not the only reason why Wagon Master is so good – it is an exciting Western, beautifully shot in Ford’s favorite Valley on the Arizona/Utah border, and Ben Johnson is excellent in the lead role, and is supported by a great cast (even Joanne Dru, who I usually do not like, is quite good in the movie). Wagon Master is not quite the masterpiece that My Darling Clementine or The Searchers is – but it is a Western that deserves a better reputation that it currently enjoys.

9. D.O.A. (Rudolph Mate)
D.O.A. has one of the great opening shots of all time – a man (Edmond O’Brien) walks into a police station in a long tracking shot to report his own murder. Strangely, the police seem to be expecting him, and already know what he is going to say. The movie then flashes back to tell us what happened. O’Brien is an accountant who goes out of town for a few days on business, and ends up in a nightclub where he has his drink switched. He wakes up the next morning terribly ill, and the doctor tells him he has been poisoned, there is no cure, and he’ll be dead in a couple of days. He then sets about trying to figure out who poisoned him and why. The movie moves at a frantic pace as O’Brien slowly figures out what happened to him. Rudolph Mate is best known as a cinematographer (and considering his credits there include Vampyr, Dodsworth, Foreign Correspondent, Gilda and unaccredited work on The Lady from Shanghai there is no doubt why), but in this, his directing debut, he crafted a merciless thriller. The film looks brilliant and his lightning quick and intense. This is a film noir worth tracking down.

8. Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan)
Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets is a gritty, realistic noir film shot on the streets of New Orleans. A body shows up in the water riddled with bullet holes – but that’s not the most troubling thing about it. Upon examination at the morgue, it is determined that the man had pneumonic plague, and so Public Health Officer Richard Widmark is called in to help investigate. Not wanting to cause panic, he teams up with a cop (Paul Douglas) to try and figure out what happened and immunize everyone who came in contact with the dead man before they have an outbreak. Of course the killers do not want to be found. The performances in the film are all good – especially Jack Parlance in his screen debut as the killer – but the movie is more about mood and atmosphere than the characters. Kazan’s camera has never seemed freer as it glides along the dark city streets of New Orleans, into the seedy underworld on its way to its wonderful chase scene finale. Sometimes movies need to be shot on location to give them the appropriate feel – Panic in the Streets is one of those movies, and the result is a wonderful little film.

7. Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann)
In the first of their 5 Westerns together Jimmy Stewart and Anthony Mann combine to make a fine Western, which is just a shade darker than it at first appears. Stewart wins a shooting competition against his long time rival Stephen McNally. The prize – a Winchester ’73 rifle – one of only 1,000 made, that is said to be the perfect gun. Angry that he lost, McNally steals the gun and flees town – and Stewart gives chase. The movie establishes what would become the trademark of the Stewart/Mann Westerns – men haunted by their own pasts, trying to overcome the violence in them and start fresh. Winchester ’73 is also an interesting movie because of all the great supporting characters. The gun goes through any number of them throughout the course of the film, with Stewart and McNally chasing it, and each other throughout, until the films violent climax which is wonderful. A great Western by a great director/star pairing.

6. The Furies (Anthony Mann)
The second Anthony Mann film on this list, this one stars Barbara Stanwyck as a head strong woman who helps her father (Walter Huston) run his large estate –The Furies – and the cattle on it. Since her mother died, Stanwyck has always been able to wrap Huston around her little finger, getting everything that she wants from her, and in turn allowing him to spend his money freely – he has enough of it after all. But then Judith Anderson enters the picture. Huston meets her on one of his trips, and brings her home to The Furies to make her his wife. Suddenly Stanwyck doesn’t have the control over Huston that she wants – it is Anderson calling the shots, until a shocking act of violence rips the family apart. What I found most fascinating about The Furies is how unsympathetic the characters are. None of the people in the movie can be classified as “good”, although they aren’t really evil either. They are obsessed with their own greed, their own standing, and their own desires, and their stubbornness is what will eventually ruin them all. I was a little disappointed in the films ending – it tries too hard to wrap everything up in a neat little package – but The Furies, fueled by its great performances, is still a wonderful film.

5. La Ronde (Max Ophuls)
Max Ophuls La Ronde is a wonderfully constructed, fluid movie told in ten different chapters – with one character from the previous chapter coming over into the next one. A prostitute takes a solider for a lover, who in turn falls in love with a maid, who sleeps with her clients teenage son, who takes an older woman for her lover, who husband suspects nothing while he carries on an affair with a younger woman, who is in love with a playwright, who sleeps with the star of his latest work, who is being courted by a count, who will end up with the prostitute we saw at the beginning of the film. All of this is narrated by the great Anton Walbrook who looks upon his people with a sort of detached glee. Out of this simple plot comes one of Ophuls’ best films – a wonderfully paced mediation on people who are constantly lying to each other, and just searching for love. His attention to detail is marvelous – the film, set in Vienna around 1900 has impeccable art direction and costume design. More importantly, Ophuls famed use on his long tracking shots are on full display here, giving the film a free flowing look and feel. The film was a homecoming of sorts for Ophuls – who made this film in Europe after a decade in America, and which set off the best period of his career with masterworks like this, La Plasir, The Earrings of Madame De and Lola Montes before he died too young. La Ronde ranks as one this great films seminal works.

4. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)
The knock on Humphrey Bogart has always been that he played the same character in every movie he ever made. The people who say this have obviously never seen Nicholas Ray’s masterful In a Lonely Place, where Bogart is much darker than he ever was before or after. In the film, Bogart plays an alcoholic screenwriter, who was once successful, and now seems washed up. He lives in a tiny apartment, starts drinking at noon, and regularly gets into fights. One of his neighbors is Gloria Grahame, an actress who sees the self pity, the loathing in Bogart, and wants to try and “save” him. But Bogart is beyond salvation. In a Lonely Place is often referred to as a film noir – and it is in a way. Bogart is the flawed hero – basically a good guy, but doomed by his own weakness. There is a murder that is central to the plot, as we don’t know whether Bogart committed it or not. The visuals, brilliantly photographed by Burnett Guffrey and Ray – certainly give the film a noir feel as well. But the film is really a love story. Bogart knew this character inside and out – he was in ways much like him, and Grahame, who ended up separating from her husband Ray on the set of this movie – was in many ways his equal – one of the great screen actresses of her generation. All three of these people made many great films in their career – but In a Lonely Place ranks among the very best than any of them ever touched.

3. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
All About Eve is one of the best, most cynical and savage, of all back stage dramas. It contains, among many other things, Bette Davis’ finest performance as an actress “of a certain age” who is successful beyond her wildest dreams, and has it all come crashing down on her because of an upstart. That is Eve (Anne Baxter), who convinces Davis that she is little more than a wide eyed fan, and worms her way closer and closer to her until she is her understudy. Davis remains the center of the movie however – and completely dominates the film with her brave performance, which I’m sure she felt close to, as it reflected her own life. Davis is one of those actresses who got better as she got older – she never played the naïve young woman very well, but was great as the wily veteran. But Baxter does a great job with Eve as well – completely convincing us of her underhanded ways as she stabs everyone who helps her in the back on her way up. There are other great performances – Celeste Holm as Eve’s biggest fan, who helps her get her big break, and then gets betrayed herself, Thelma Ritter as Davis’ ever loyal wardrobe lady, who sees through Eve in an instant. Best of all is George Sanders – who narrates the film as the newspaper columnist who observes everything, and comments on it wryly. He too falls for Eve, but at least he knows what she is from the beginning, which is more than anyone else can say. Joseph L. Mankiewicz was always a better writer than a director – and his screenplay for All About Eve is one of the great achievements in that regard of all time – a wonderful, wise, witty movie.

2. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)
People are not really capable of being truthful – least of all about themselves. We all have delusions about ourselves, how events in our past played out, and how others see us. That is the underlying point of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon – a film that shows us the same event from four different points of view, none of which agree with each other. And yet none of the people who tell the story is lying – they are telling the truth as they see it – as they remember it. A samurai is murdered, and his wife is raped. That is all we really know. What happens after is that the wife, a woodcutter and a bandit all tell their stories – and all say they are the murderer. A medium shows up and tells us the samurai’s tale from beyond the grave – and it doesn’t match up with any of the other three stories. What really happened? The movie never tells us the answer to that question. Instead we are left with the four versions of what happened, and yet no solution. That, of course, is precisely the point of the movie. We can never be sure of the truth because people lie all the time – even while they are telling the truth. Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest filmmakers in history. He made his international reputation off of this film, and it’s easy to see why. It remains one of his best films – an absolute masterpiece.

1. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder)
Sunset Blvd. is one of the best movies ever made about Hollywood – perhaps the very best. It resembles All About Eve in that both are about fading actresses – but while Bette Davis in that film at least understands that she has been betrayed, Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is completely clueless and delusional – and by the end insane. She plays a once great silent film star who now lives in a dilapidated old mansion with her butler – the great Erich von Stroheim – who was once both her director and her husband. William Holden is the struggling screenwriter who comes to stay at their place, and gets drawn in by Desmond – making himself a kept man, because he has nowhere else to go. The movie is dependent on its performances to make it work. Holden projects self loathing in his role as the screenwriter, but its more than that. He knows why he is there, and is more than willing to play the part. Von Stroheim is wonderful as the old director, reduced to be a servant, who is so in love with Swanson that he allows himself to be used the way he is. And Swanson is brilliant as Norma Desmond – risking going over the top into parody with her exaggerated movements and line deliveries, but somehow it all stays real. Billy Wilder was a wonderful director – and here he makes the film look like a film noir, although there is more to it than that. His screenplay is honest, cynical, clever and at times hilarious. Sunset Blvd. is one of the best films I have ever seen.

Just Missed The Top 10: The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston), Cinderella (Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske & Clyde Geronimi), Cyrano de Bergerac (Michael Gordon), The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rosselini), Harvey (Henry Koster), No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz), Rio Grande (John Ford).

Notable Films Missed: Born Yesterday (George Cukor), Father of the Bride (Vincente Minelli), King Solomon’s Mines (Compton Bennett), L’Chant D’Amour (Jean Genet), Los Olivados (Luis Bunuel), Night and the City (Jules Dassin), Variety Lights (Federico Fellini).

Oscar Winner – Best Picture & Director: All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
It is hard to get too down on the Academy for picking All About Eve for the year’s Best Picture Oscar. After all it is certainly one of the best backstage dramas of all time, features a fantastic, funny, clever screenplay and a host of great performances (they film received 5 acting nominations that year – tying a record that has not been broken).Obviously, I think Sunset Blvd. is the better film – it is darker, more dramatic, and features a screenplay and acting that is at least on par with All About Eve. In terms of which film is better, it really is kind of a tossup. But Billy Wilder was certainly the better director – telling his story in more cinematic terms than Mankiewicz. Still however, I find it impossible to complain about this win, so I won’t.

Oscar Winner – Best Actor: Jose Ferrar, Cyrano de Bergerac
Actors seem to love the role of Cyrano de Bergerac. After all, not only did Jose Ferrar win this Oscar, but Gerard Depardieu was nominated for the same role 40 years later – and the play is rarely out of production somewhere in the world. And yes, it is a great role – the ugly man with a heart and brains, who gives up what he wants most in the world for the sake of others happiness. Having said that, I found that this version of Cyrano, while entertaining, was also rather dull in points. Ferrar does a very good job in the lead role, but I find it hard to believe that people actually believed this was better than Holden’s work in Sunset Blvd., of Jimmy Stewart’s in Harvey – and those are just the fellow nominees who were better. A fine performance, in a fine movie, but certainly not Oscar caliber.

Oscar Winner – Best Actress: Judy Holliday, Born Yesterday
Poor Judy Holliday never seems to get any respect for her work in Born Yesterday – not even from me who has yet to even watch the film, although I am a fan of director George Cukor, so I probably should see it. The reviews of the film, and the performance, never fail to point out that Holliday’s win here came at the expense for two of the greatest female roles in cinema history – Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. I really should watch the film – and I plan to, one day – but just not quite yet.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actor: George Sanders, All About Eve
George Sanders is brilliant as the acid tongued newspaper columnist who observes the proceedings in All About Eve from afar, and never ceases to have a barbed remark on his tongue. It is a perfect merger of a finely written role, and an actor capable of delivering the lines with the kind of cruel gusto that they so obviously deserve. Sanders is the most obvious of the great performances in this category – but having said that, I have always liked Erich von Stroheim’s work in Sunset Blvd. even more. It is, in many ways, an autobiographical role, as von Stroheim plays the once great silent filmmaker reduced to work below his skill level (in real life, von Stroheim was reduced to playing comic supporting roles and Nazis in other peoples movies – only twice, here and in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, did he really get to shine). Not only that but von Stroheim really does hold the movie together – providing us with a much needed glimpse into the psyche of Gloria Swanson that prevents her from becoming a caricature. Like the films themselves, but of these men were deserving of an Oscar this year, so while I prefer von Stroheim, I won’t complain.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actress: Josephine Hull, Harvey
Josephine Hull’s win for Harvey is somewhat odd. Don’t get me wrong, I actually quite like the film where Jimmy Stewart spends most of his time talking to a giant, imaginary rabbit named Harvey, even while everyone around him thinks he has completely lost his mind. And Hull’s performance as Stewart’s sister, who is so tired of having her brother talk to the giant rabbit all the time that she tries to have him committed, is delightfully funny, and in her own way eccentric. A nomination was certainly worthy. But All About Eve contained two great supporting roles, both of which were nominated – Celeste Holm’s as Eve’s biggest fan, who still gets stabbed in the back, and Thelma Ritter as the only one who sees through Eve from the beginning. Perhaps it was the fact that Holm had already won an Oscar for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) that prevented her from winning, and internal competition that prevented Thelma Ritter – nominated6 times (this being the first), but never won. Hull is fine in her role – it certainly isn’t an embarrassing win by any means, but one of the two All About Eve women should have taken this one.

Movie Review: Vengeance

Vengeance *** ½
Directed By: Johnnie To.
Written By: Wai Ka Fai
Starring: Johnny Hallyday (Costello), Sylvie Testud (Irene Thompson), Anthony Wong Chau-Sang (Kwai), Ka Tung Lam (Chu), Suet Lam (Lok), Simon Yam (George Fung), Siu-Fai Cheung (Wolf), Felix Wong (Python), Ting Yip Ng (Crow), Maggie Siu (Inspector Wong), Vincent Sze (Mr. Thompson).

Johnnie To is among the most prolific directors working anywhere in the world right now. In the past decade alone, he has directed 23 films. While I would hardly call myself an expert on his films – having only seen a handful - I will say that To is among the best action movie directors in the world right now. While many of his compatriots from Hong Kong have fled and gone to Hollywood to make their films, To has stayed put in Hong Kong, and carried the torch, at times seemingly by himself. His films mark a refreshing departure from the trend in Hollywood action filmmaking towards making everything bigger, louder and faster – and the tendency to edit action sequences so fast that the audience becomes disoriented. In To’s films, there are always multiple action set pieces, and all of them are expertly crafted. He stages gun battles with more skill than anyone since the early days of John Woo. As an action filmmaker, he is second to no one in the world right now.

His new film Vengeance may not quite be the masterwork that his film Election, Election II, Exiled, Breaking News or even Mad Detective were, but it is still one of the most entertaining action movies in recent years. It stars the “French Elvis”, Johnny Hallyday as an aging man who comes to Hong Kong to avenge the murder of his grandkids and son in law, during an attack that also left his daughter barely clinging to life. For unknown reasons, he has not been close to his daughter in recent years, and had in fact never even met his grandkids. But, his family is still important to him, and he needs to find out what happened and why – and make whoever is responsible for it pay.

The added wrinkle in the movie is that Hallyday is losing his memory. He has to keeps notes of everything, or he forgets. When he gets a hold of the crime scene photos, he writes on each one a single word – Vengeance. When he meets a team of hit man – Kwai (Anthony Wong), Chu (Ka Tung Lam) and Lok (Suet Lam), and hires them to help find who killed his family, he takes Polaroids of them and writes their name, and the fact that they are his friend, on them. He tells these hit men that he is a chef in Paris, and owns a nice restaurant. He offers them a lot of money, and even says that he will give them his restaurant if they help him. The trio agree, thinking they’ve met an easy mark in this old French man, but quickly they realize that he is not who he appears to be. His expertise with guns makes it apparent that while he maybe a chef now, at some point, he may have done exactly what they do now. Once they start investigating, the trail quickly leads them to Fung (Simon Yam), a flamboyant gangster, who has employed the hit men in the past. The guilt associated with the fact that the three hit men could have easily had gotten the call to kill Hallyday’s family (and would have accepted it), makes them more loyal to him than they might otherwise had been. They genuinely like the guy, and feel sorry for his loss.

In many ways, Vengeance is a typical revenge drama and action movie. The storyline is fairly straight forward, and it’s not too long before the three hit men and Hallyday go out and start mowing down bad guys. The action sequences are certainly the highlight of the movie. A gun battle that erupts after a nighttime family picnic, the battle in a junkyard, with huge square of waste (think of what Wall-E produced, and just increase the size) as shields, and particularly the final showdown, where Hallyday, his memory pretty much gone, goes after Fung and his henchmen by himself in the streets of Hong Kong are all brilliant action set pieces, meticulously crafted and executed by To. This is how shootouts in the movies are supposed to be done.

But the movie is more than just a well executed action movie. Hallyday is a genuinely gifted actor (see his work in Patrice Leconte’s Man on the Train for example), and he makes his character into a sympathetic man, and a sort of tragic figure. He may end up getting his vengeance, but if he has forgotten why he wanted it in the first place, will it really matter? The great Anthony Wong (who Western audiences probably, unfortunately, know him best for his role in The Mummy 3 last year, but has done great work in Hong Kong for years, particularly in the Infernal Affairs trilogy, where he originated the role played by Martin Sheen in The Departed) is very effective as the leader of the hit men Hallyday hires. And Simon Yam, a favorite of To’s, is wonderful as the over the top gangster. He is not just a mustache twirling mad man, but something for more insidious – a businessman with no conscience.

So while the plot of the movie is merely incidental and by the numbers, the execution of the movie is anything but. Vengeance may not be the best film of To’s long career, but it puts to shame almost any American action movie you will see this year. This is a very entertaining film, with some dark undertones that elevate beyond the realm of the revenge thriller.