watch the AFI Top 100 American movies

...since I’ve written an entry about this goal! Most recently, I watched Goodfellas (#94) and All About Eve (#16). Goodfellas I technically watched twice: I caught it when it was on the Spike Channel one night when I was at home by myself. I was kind of in and out because I was making manicotti at the time. I’m quite anal-retentive about when it’s appropriate to check a movie off the AFI list. I don’t count movies that are on TV when it’s obvious that they’ve been modified—i.e. having been cut for time, or had R-rated elements removed. This is why I love Turner Classic Movies (uncut! no commercials!) and loathe American Movie Classics (half the crap they show nowadays shouldn’t be counted as “classic” anyway). Anyway, I knew what happened in Goodfellas, but I also knew I needed to see it as Scorsese intended it, so I rented it from Netflix. Great, great movie – there’s some of the grit and unease of the Godfather films, but there’s also a great noirish feel and even a hint of playfulness. Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco’s characters flip back and forth as the narrators of the story. Also, this is surely the only movie that immortalizes the day I was born (May 11, 1980) with a desperate mobster’s coke-addled tear through the streets of the New York boroughs.

I watched All About Eve over the weekend. I wish I had watched it on my own, but instead I was in the same room with several members of my in-law family, and they kept talking over it. I was able to enjoy the story, but I knew that All About Eve is famous for its witty script, and I wasn’t able to catch the brilliance of the wordplay as much as I would have liked. I’ll have to rent it again sometime, but for now, it’s checked off the list.

I realize that one of these days, I’m going to run out of Billy Wilder movies to watch, and that’ll be a sad, sad day. Sunset Boulevard reminds us why we love movies - comedy! tragedy! clever narration! dramatic makeup! smoking! short bald butlers named Max! William Holden! - and also reminds us that a brilliant piece of escapism doesn’t have to be devoid of anything that’ll make a person think.

Billy Wilder leaves it up to the viewer to decide how to react to washed-up silent film star Norma Desmond. She’s hilariously tragic, but does that mean one should laugh at her? The ending (which echoed, for me, the ending of A Streetcar Named Desire) brings all of this to the forefront, letting the viewers twist about uncomfortably as we witness Norma’s grotesque “comeback.”

I loved watching this. I’ve got Bridge on the River Kwai up next. I’m almost finished with the top 20!

As a writer of fiction, I’m always on the lookout for examples of great storytelling. It’s good to be constantly reminded why some stories work and some stories don’t. The African Queen works - and brilliantly so - by keeping the conflicts simple, but adding plot layer after plot layer at just the right times. Observe:

Gruff laborer and prim missionary wind up on boat together on African river = endless opportunities for great dialogue

Gruff laborer and prim missionary on boat on African river wind up falling in love = Even better! It wouldn’t be any fun to watch them argue for 2 hours.

Gruff laborer and prim missionary who’ve fallen in love are on a boat on an African river that is also holding EXPLOSIVE MATERIAL! = Better still! What story couldn’t use some outside suspense regarding deadly weaponry?

Gruff laborer and prim missionary who’ve fallen in love while going down an African river on a boat carrying explosive material decide to use explosive material to blow up German boat = Obviously, this movie is irresistable. And I haven’t even come close to giving away the ending.

Next up: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is on Turner Classic Movies next week.

My dad told me that he saw Lawrence of Arabia in the movie theater shortly after its release in 1962. “I remember it making me really thirsty,” he said. Indeed. The desert is its own character in Lawrence of Arabia, posing as T.E. Lawrence’s first big foe as he attempts to lead an Arab tribal army across miles of sand. Despite the length and the general hugeness of this film, the viewer is still left to speculate on much of Lawrence’s personality and what drove him to rise from a somewhat bumbling low-ranked man in the British army to the adopted leader of the desert tribes. At times, he is compassionate, such as when he goes against advice to leave an injured tribe member in the desert. At other times, though, he’s ruthless and bloodthirsty.

This is a biography, and epic, and a true movie watcher’s movie. To make it a good experience, you’ll need four hours, a bottle of water, and a TV big enough to make the widescreen DVD look good. It’s a stunning film, and I’m glad I’ve seen it.

I watched this several weeks ago, over two nights. It is funny, and terribly so—the type of movie you’ll shoot wry smiles at while you watch, then laugh out loud about when you recount it later with your viewing companion, and then feel guilty about how much you laughed. Network is the story of several people at low-rated TV network UBS: the harangued, put-upon aging anchor Howard Beale, and three network executives who come at their jobs with different flavors of ambition: Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), who’s working his way up in the company and won’t have any prickly moral decisions getting in the way of better ratings; Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), who’s determined to combine network news and network entertainment; and Max Schumacher (William Holden), the aging news director who wants to protect both Howard and the integrity of network news. Brilliant storytelling ensues as it becomes obvious that the tug-of-war between Howard and Max and the other network bigwigs won’t end until one side relents.

Network rather eerily prophesizes the popularity of reality TV. It’s discomforting to watch in parts, but the fantastic script keeps you listening to every word as the movie progresses.

Peter Finch posthumously won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Howard Beale, but William Holden as Max is at least equally compelling.

I’m still not over this movie. It’s been three weeks since I finished it and I can’t even conceive of a time when I’ll be over this movie. Adam and I watched the first hour and a half one Sunday in early May and didn’t get back to it until two weeks later (Memorial Day, fittingly enough), but I think we could have waited two more weeks and I still wouldn’t have been ready for the emotional punch The Deer Hunter pulled at me. My dad told me he was going to call me up and warn me against finishing it (he knows I’m easily traumatized by movies and that I generally avoid violent films for this reason), but, he said, “I knew it was on your list and that you’d watch it sooner or later.”

The Deer Hunter is the story of several friends who all work at the same steel plant in Pennsylvania. The first hour is what your ninth grade English teacher would call exposition - straight character development with little lasting suspense. We see the friends getting off work, drinking at their favorite bar, getting ready for Steve’s wedding. We find out that three of the friends - Steve, Mike, and Nick—are heading to Vietnam very soon after Steve gets married. We experience much of Steve and Angela’s wedding and reception. We watch Mike (Robert DeNiro) promise Nick (Christopher Walken) that he won’t leave him in Vietnam. We watch the pals go deer hunting one last time. We watch their last get-together at the bar, with one of the pals playing a slow piano tune.

And then, without warning, we’re in Vietnam with Mike, Nick, and Steve. They’ve already gone through basic training and are buried in the chaos of combat. A village is burning. Women and children are trapped. The guys are taken prisoner and forced to play Russian Roulette with the Viet Cong. If you haven’t seen this movie, this is probably what you’ve heard about it: a game played with one bullet in the chamber of a revolver, and each player has to take his turn aiming the gun at his head and pulling the trigger. As to be expected, blood is spilled, but it’s not the physical violence that’s most alarming—it’s the emotional intensity that proceeds it.

Soon after this scene, our DVD started flipping, and I was too emotionally harrowed to want to wipe it off and see if we could finish the rest. Hence our continuation of the movie two weeks later, when I thought I might be able to handle it.

I think the pain of this movie is borne out of the fact that we spend the first hour getting to know so much about these characters’ lives; we know they’re simple and innocent, and we like them that way. We don’t want anything to happen to their enjoyment of wedding receptions and nights at the bar and deer hunting excursions in the mountains. We watch helplessly as the characters are put into peril and have their innocence lost. We fear that our enjoyment of life’s simplicities could be taken away with the same suddenness and inexplicability.

DeNiro and Walken are masterful in their portrayals of Mike and Nick. The rest of the cast (including Meryl Streep and John Cazale) is wonderful, as well. I’m glad I saw this movie, but I won’t feel the need to revisit it anytime soon.

Turner Classic Movies was showing Birth of the Nation tonight (AFI movie #44) for the first time since the AFI list came out in 1998. Sure, I knew it glorified racism, and I’m prepared for that, but what I didn’t know before I read an article about it today is that it’s over three hours long. So while I could have watched that tonight, I decided not to spend a perfectly good Tuesday night watching a long and racist silent film. I’ll probably get it from Netflix and watch it over two days.

I came into this movie with vague memories of reading the play, as well as the ability to do a word-for-word recitation of the Simpsons episode “A Streetcar Named Marge,” in which Marge stars as Blanche DuBois in the musical Streetcar!. Actually, I read the play because of that episode. I knew the story, but I discovered that the story isn’t the most attractive part of this film adaptation. If you compare its plot to that of a typical film today, you’d say that not much conventionally “happens.” Indeed, most of the film is set inside one very small house. I imagine that Tennessee Williams might have imagined the setting first, and then decided to see what happened if he plopped three emotional (but in different ways) and hot-headed (but in different ways) characters inside the house. The beauty of this film is in its character study, and in hearing Tennessee Williams’s dialogue being brought to life by three excellent actors. This was the first movie in which I’d seen Vivien Leigh besides Gone With the Wind. Also, you’ve gotta love the young Marlon Brando as directed by Elia Kazan—the same pair that made On the Waterfront what it is.

The worst part was when the DVD crapped out on me with seven minutes to go. It suddenly skipped six minutes, showed me the last couple scenes, and then stopped. I had to take it out, wipe it off on my t-shirt, and hope that I wouldn’t have to wait for Netflix to send me a new DVD so I could see the final minutes of the film. Fortunately, I didn’t!

Next up: Hmm, if I stay up all night on Monday to watch Turner Classic Movies, I can catch a couple AFI films. But I don’t think I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll rent Network next.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from this movie, but whatever it was certainly wasn’t what I saw last night. The stars (Jack Lemmon and Shirley McLaine), and the self-deprecating yet somehow chirpy humor in the opening sequence, and the fact that this is a fairly mainstream movie from 1960 don’t prepare you for the fact that this is a strangely funny movie revolving around a company’s higher-ups cheating on their wives with the pretty young women in said company’s New York office building. Jack Lemmon is C.C. “Buddy” Baxter, a low-level worker who finds that he can get in good with his bosses if he allows them to take their young dates to his apartment after work. Pretty soon, every night in his apartment is booked by one of his bosses, and he’s spending the night in Central Park instead of going home. The way this is presented is disarmingly humorous - if you don’t stop to think about the seamyness and darkness that fuels the plot, you’ll chuckle your way through the whole movie. (And you’ll probably do that anyway, because it’s quite funny.) I enjoyed this movie for its emotional complexity - at the way it makes you feel a little guilty for laughing at it, and yet at the same time, you can’t help yourself. I’m pretty sure this was the first Billy Wilder film I’ve seen, and I’m looking forward to seeing more.

Next up: A Streetcar Named Desire

Roman Polanski’s 1974 update of 1930s gumshoe movies starts out slow (I admit, I had to start this movie twice—the first time I tried it, I fell asleep within the first thirty minutes. My defense was that it was 12:30 AM on a Wednesday), but builds steadily to its stunningly nihilistic conclusion. The Netflix sleeve for the DVD notes that Chinatown’s plot unfolds like the layers of an onion. Indeed: this is masterful storytelling, with each scene revealing just enough new information, with each new development being both perfectly logical and perfectly surprising, with not a moment wasted for events that don’t elucidate the characters and advance the story. Cognitive dissonance runs amok in this movie: the comfortable structure and atmosphere of detective noir are torn apart most dramatically in the developments in the film’s ending, but the contrast builds throughout. It’s still getting to me days after I’ve seen it, and I’m already feeling the urge to rent it again.

Next up: All About Eve