Oscars 1970!!--An Introduction to the Year and the Movies

The soon-to-be creator of the "Godfather" films pens an Oscar-winning screenplay about a controversial U.S. General; a Harvard jock loves the doomed daughter of a poor Italian baker, and Kleenex sales reach record proportions; a Grand-Hotel-of-the-skies packs 'em in and thus the popular Disaster Film genre is born; an oilfield roughneck returns to his privileged origins and struggles to find himself; and a subversive group of Korean War surgeons hilariously offend the establishment, in what knowing young viewers see as a savage commentary on Vietnam.

It's finally here...my second annual 40-year retrospective on the Academy Awards!  In time for Tuesday's 2010 Nomination announcement.

I loved the movie year 1970.

No sooner did the schizophrenic 1969 Oscars honor the old guard while recognizing experimentation and taboo, than the cinema of 1970 continued breaking boundaries while seeming to hold fast to old formulas and crowd-pleasers.  Creativity won the day, and the results were some of the most original and interesting films ever made.  Though a few have dated poorly, the best movies of 1970 remain as innovative and exciting to today's audiences as they were in their original release.

I'll devote the following series of posts to the major categories: Best Picture and all the Acting categories.  First, tomorrow I'll start with an overview of movies in 1970, and look at some really interesting races in all the other categories:.

For instance, Scorsese's favorite film editor is nominated for a groundbreaking Documentary; the world's most famous rock group wins its first and only Oscar; a Swedish master wins the Thalberg Award; an Italian visionary goes toe-to-toe with a Hollywood maverick; and the last surviving member of the blacklisted Hollywood 10  wins his second Oscar, nearly 30 years after his first victory.  (Any guesses as to the identity of the aforementioned?)

Let's set up the series with a brief look at 1970, a year of upheaval and milestone.

The Vietnam War spilled into Cambodia.  Anti-war protests swept the nation, and on the campus of Kent State University four students were killed by National Guardsmen trying to quell a riot.  President Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency, and signed the 26th Amendment, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote.  Hard-hat construction workers clashed with protesters on Wall Street in New York. 

Nixon later announced the withdrawal of 40,000 troops from Vietnam before Christmas.  1970 saw the very first Earth Day.  Apollo 13 Astronauts uttered the famous line, "Houston, we've got a problem". Anwar Sadat was named the President of Egypt (and would be assassinated in 1981).  Ronald Reagan wins a second term as Governor of California. Muhammad Ali testified before the supreme court after refusing induction into the Army.

In 1970 The Beatles released the album "Let It Be", and the movie of the same name.  1970 saw the premier of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and Monday Night Football, the first appearance of the "Doonesbury" comic strip, and the formation of the US Animal Welfare Act.  1970 saw the birth of actress Uma Thurman and Hamburger Helper.  (No connection between the last two...)

In 1970, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of drug overdose; Gypsy Rose Lee, a queen of Burlesque, dies.  "Hello Dolly ends its Broadway run after 2,844 performances; The Beatles go their separate ways (and George Harrison scores the first solo hit of the group with "My Sweet Lord".)

Native American author Dee Brown publishes the hugely influential "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee". 

And Alvin Toffler published "Future Shock," and argued that technology was changing so rapidly that individuals could find themselves strangers in their own cultures. This prophetic work might have its logical result 40 years later in films like "Inception" and "The Social Network."

Let's start our look back at Oscar year 1970 with a listen to that year's Best Song, "For All We Know", from the movie "Lovers and Other Strangers".  A lighthearted contemporary (for its day) story about love and marriage, it boasted a cast including Gig Young, Richard Castellano, Bea Arthur, Anne Meara, Cloris Leachman, Diane Keaton, and Bonnie Bedelia.  The song is sung during the wedding scene.

I included the popular and excellent version sung by "The Carpenters". (Click on the link to hear the song)

Welcome aboard....I look forward to sharing this look back....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmFiCf_yBnA



"Hu?"...Bears vs. Packers...Saturday Madness

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Why Football Scares Me:



The President of China visited Chicago yesterday, but the really BIG news all week has been the Chicago Bears/Green Bay Packers game tomorrow (Sunday) at 2pm Chicago time.  Since the two teams are in the same division, they will never meet in the Super Bowl; so this super-rival matchup is as close to a championship faceoff as they can possibly achieve.

Everyone seems to be in on the madness.  A radio station in Green Bay has banned all music by the band Chicago.  Mayor Daley and Green Bay Mayor Jim Schmitt have a wager: Daley's 15-pound corned beef on rye sandwich against Schmitt's bear steaks, chocolate football, and a pound of cheese for every point in the margin of victory.

Even Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki is putting up a basket of Wisconsin cheese against Chicago Cardinal Francis George's deep dish piza.

And then there are the fashion statements as seen above (with my sincere apologies.)

I wish Chinese President Hu Jintao had stayed in Chicago long enough to attend the game at Soldier Field.  It would have been a public relations gesture on a global scale.  Bundled up in the grandstands in 20-degree temperatures, eating a hot dog, wondering what exactly was going on....

Given the state of the world economy, perhaps before long the Chicago Bears mascot will look something like this.....

"前往熊!!"

(Go Bears!!)

A Special Book: "Just Kids" by Patti Smith

Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids", is so intimate, I felt like she was looking at me while I was reading it.  Her story of New York bohemians living in an atmosphere of self-discovery and commitment to art made a gentle and indelible impression on me. 

It was a world I have romanticized; one that I yearned to have been a part of.  The late 1960's. A time of creative, social and political ferment. 

It was a world of Andy Warhol and "Midnight Cowboy";  a world of Automats and Nathan's hot dogs and poverty and idealism; of the Chelsea Hotel and the Factory; of Janis Joplin and Sam Shepard and Alan Ginsburg and Viva and so many others still finding their way; of "Hair" and Woodstock, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix.

Of 1967, 1968, the drug culture and poetry and turning discarded objects into works of art.


(Names are dropped casually, like they were just neighbors.  Names and places that are are heavy with significance, that blossom with nostalgic connotations.)

Of mysticism and fashion, and books and art and sexual discovery and anything goes.

The world of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.


This is Patti Smith's story of her days as a young artist, moving to New York to pursue her poetic dreams.  Living on the street, she meets the charming and sexually ambiguous Mapplethorpe, and thus begins their sweet loving friendship, and a vow that they would always be there for each other.

Amid their developments, their triumphs, their failures, their artistic experiments and soul-searching, their separate love affairs, their travels and their squalid rooms which they made into a home, they kept that vow.

These two people, with the souls of poets, one a future rock star and the other a soon-to-be photographer-provocateur, supported one another's fledgling artistic visions.

Among many other things, this is a terrific story of love and friendship.


The writing here is exquisite.  I hung on every sentence, written simply, clearly, bejeweled with detail of the everyday as well as the unusual.


I loved her delicate descriptions of their processes of creating art;  and pondered with awe their philosophies.  For Mapplethorpe, art was like holding hands with God and singing.  For Smith, the challenge is to create something significant, as art must illuminate.


Smith  describes her family and that of Mapplethorpe's, creating  full portraits in small sketch-lines.  Both came from religious backgrounds, which each rejected, but that yet still infused their art.  She perfectly blends this straightforward personal narrative with musings on creativity that went straight to my core and inspired me.


I especially adore Patti Smith's love for the book as an object of art, as well as a vessel for artistic expression.  She describes having supported herself by working in various bookstores and by buying obscure books and selling them to collectors for profit.  I was proud to see her champion the humble book, which I maintain will not soon die.

"Just Kids" is a marvelous, special work about creative struggle and poetry and finding ones' artistic soul, set in a time period which always fascinates me.  It is certainly one of the best memoirs I have ever read. 

I loved this book.  It rightly deserved to win this year's National Book Award.

And it put me in the right frame of mind for my next series: The Movies and Oscars of the Year 1970.

"Blue Valentine": A Film Review

Prologue: There is one beautiful shot in "Blue Valentine" in which a bus, carrying the two protagonists, is seen in long-shot driving down a city street.  At the beginning of the shot, a half of a rainbow is seen in the upper left corner of the frame.  As the shot ends, the other half of the rainbow is seen in the upper right corner.  It appeared to be a raw shot, without CGI or any other special effect.

It would be impossible to write this into the script, without assuming that a process shot would be needed.  
And its inclusion in the film would be almost too coincidental if it were an accident.
I wondered if someone just happened to capture a shot of a bus and a rainbow, and then built a whole film around it.  (Such are the things that intrigue me about the creative process.)
~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~  

It is a credit to the film "Blue Valentine" that its stars, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, are so good.  There is little else besides them in the movie, as they nakedly inhabit two complex and troubled individuals.  I don't think there is any point in which either of them do not appear, and most of the time they are examined closely, in various stages of emotional dissolution.


While "Blue Valentine" is often difficult to watch, a viewer comes away reflective, somber, but thankfully, not devastated.  This is not a movie for the ages, but an effective contemporary telling of a universal story of lost intimacy.  It is probably a classic of some kind,  creating new  rules for the cinematic treatment of a troubled marriage. 


"Blue Valentine" takes a look at why one marriage disintegrated,  juxtaposing its final, painful moments with scenes of tenderness and support at the relationship's beginning.  As it progresses we slowly learn about the couple's fragile arrangement, and find clues about what would eventually destroy them.  The things they initially found charming about one another become repulsive to them by the end.  Missteps in communication (as the marriage is ending) begin to make sense as the details of early crises (later in the film) bring the relationship into focus.


Ryan Gosling's character, Dean, is an aimless, goofy, deceptively simple sort of guy, who lacks ambition, instead finding satisfaction, to his surprise, as a husband and a father. Williams' character, Cindy, is riddled with baggage and hurt: raised in a home with an emotionally abusive father and ineffective mother, she is intelligent enough to finish medical training, but finds her plans almost derailed by the affections of a handsome but coarse and violent lover.


An early sequence, in which the family dog has run away, and the couple's young daughter stands alone in a field calling the dog's name, has an undercurrent of resignation and resentment.  William's in particular shows enormous skill in her reaction to the dog's fate, trying to balance her regret and sadness with acceptance of Gosling's angry outburst at her. For a while, the film is unclear about what brought these seemingly impossibly-matched people together in the first place.


Soon, these questions are answered by flashing back (and changing the grain of the film, and the lighting and color schemes) to the more plot-driven early sequences.


In Dean, Cindy finds an escape from her oppressive home life and brutally carnal ex-boyfriend.  She is drawn to Dean's gentleness and his non-judgmental regard for her.  She also finds a possible father for her child.  Dean is charming, and admires Cindy's beauty and ambition, and is himself charmed by her appreciation of his quirkiness, his humor.  She also accepts his spontaneity and doesn't judge him. The film also suggests her acceptance of his seeming impotence.


The film cuts between the beginning and the end of the relationship, eliminating anything in the middle that may explain their changes of character along the way.  The movie asks us to believe that there were no turning points in their marriage, but merely that old resentments and  annoyances slowly festered into major explosions of frustration.  Given how the characters have been shaped and portrayed, I think this works.


As we learn more, Cindy's motivations seem less clear, and we begin to sympathize more with Dean. In fact, the viewer is likely to form a love/hate relationship with both of the characters. Each clearly made sacrifices, and bad decisions along the way, yet we hope that they can find common ground.  (It just feels like Dean made the bigger sacrifice and Cindy's rejection appears ungrateful.)


Dean, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage their relationship, reserves a room in a cheesy sex-themed hotel, choosing the "Future Room", which (from what we can tell) looks like a 1950's sci-fi movie set, bathed in blue light, but with a rotating bed.  The scene provides a microcosm of their entire marriage: playful at times, sentimental, then the old habits kick in, he doesn't listen to her and twists her words, she is impatient and wants him to "do something" (career-wise? sexually?). She finally locks him in the bathroom to sleep on the floor while she leaves for work.

 
 I wish the film breathed a little here, and SHOWED us the entire room.. I guess, giving the benefit of the doubt, the relentless closeups effectively represent the characters' own sense of claustrophobia and entrapment and inability to see the world around them...especially the "future". 

Actually, the symbols in the film fall with a light thud.  Why does Dean sport a t-shirt with an  American Eagle on it? And why does the film end on the 4th of July?  Something, perhaps, about the pain involved in gaining independence?  No political interpretation seems to work, and would be inappropriate here anyway.  More effective is the parallel between the missing dog and Dean's departure: the sadness of both situations has come full-circle.

I am mystified by critics who felt Gosling's performance is as slack as his character.  Actually, I think both actors have done some of their best work here. Gosling's slow recovery after being bested in a fight, as he crawls to a ringing telephone, is breathtaking.  His soon-to-be classic number with a ukulele makes a potentially trite scene very warm and memorable.  The physical transformation of his character (look at his hairline in the "later" scenes) is as effective as Gosling's muddled fast-talk and his insecure, middle-aged desperation.  He is terrific.


Williams has matured since "Brokeback Mountain", and is believable, first as a young student, and later, an impatient, weary spouse.  Her self-ministrations after painful sex, her overwhelming emotional decision in an abortion clinic, and her outpouring of pent-up frustration during a climactic shouting match, show her amazing range while remaining within the parameters of her character.


In its ultimately sad and cathartic message about love and loss, I was reminded of George and Martha's emotional brutality in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf".  What prevents this from being a modern-day "Virginia Woolf" is a slackness in the writing. Albee's language was precise and profane, and every line, every word, carried weight.  Here, the actors have been given more freedom to improvise, and some of the scenes go on well after the point has been made.  Dean and Cindy will endure as modern flawed heroes, but will never achieve mythic status.


Whereas "Virginia Woolf" was verbally shocking, "Blue Valentine" is street-wise and physical in ways "Woolf" would never have dared to be.  The MPAA originally gave "Blue Valentine" the extreme NC-17 rating (adults only) for a couple of love scenes similar to those found in other films rated R ("Monster's Ball" and "Black Swan" come to mind). The rating was silly, but the prolonged scenes probably scandalized the ratings board, because of the genuine expression of pleasure portrayed in one sequence.  While no genitals were exposed, there was no doubt about what was going on.  Kids who make it to this point in the film without losing interest probably would not be traumatized, like they might be in any number of torture-porn films released with an R (available for children if an adult accompanies them).


"Blue Valentine" is a really good film, a difficult film but a rewarding one, because of the commitment and skill of its two leads.  Based on this picture, I am interested to view new work by director Derek Cianfrance. I believe this is his first feature, having done a number of documentaries and short films, and studied avant-garde filmmaking under the likes of Stan Brakhage.  (Funny how much Gosling's character resembles Cianfrance!) 

Acceptance Speeches I Would Like To Hear Tonight--Golden Globes 2011

*****

I would love to hear the following say "Thank You" tonight to the Hollywood Foreign Press.    These are preferences (not predictions)....

Colin Firth

Annette Bening

Natalie Portman

Geoffrey Rush

Helena Bonham-Carter

Darren Aronofsky

David Seidler,  or

Lisa Cholodenko  (or maybe a tie!!)

Alexandre Desplat

Iain Canning/Emile Sherman/Garethe Unwin

It is twenty minutes before show time. It seems I still have the same excitement in the pit of my stomach that I had at age 12....when I would plan my own acceptance speech for someday...and was inspired to work in earnest on a screenplay that I knew could not lose....

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POSTSCRIPT:  Bening's win, and classy speech, made my night.  Ditto Colin Firth's gracious remarks.  Portman was nervous and I smiled. Cholodenko at least made it to the stage.

So not a bad evening on the whole.

Ricky Gervais has got to go.

I wonder what they bleeped out of Christian Bale's final remarks. 

And Paul Giamatti....who cares what he said, bleeped or otherwise....

My favorite line of the evening was from Jane Lynch: "I'm nothing if not falsely humble. "  And she singled out the creator of "Glee", Ian Brennan, 
a neighborhood kid whose parents live around the corner from Mark and me.