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selenakBest overall: Lawrence of Arabia, by David Lean. Pace, Orson, your praises are sung below, but I can't help myself. The cinematrophy, the script, the acting - I fall in love again each time I see this movie.
Best Shakespeare adaptation: Othello, as directed by Orson Welles. I raved about it before. Striking, beautiful, and above all cinematic, without losing the poetry. Competitors for the second place are the Ian McKellen version of Richard III and Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado Nothing.
Best novel adaptation: a) Great Expectations, by David Lean. Who went on to become the "Rajah of the British Cinema" as an obituary named him, and it's easy to see why with this early opus.
b) Der Untertan, by Wolfgang Staudte, based on the novel of Heinrich Mann. See earlier raving in this journal.
Best historical film: The Lion in Winter, sixties-version, starring Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. An intense love/hate relationship between two middle-aged characters. The Plantagenets as the most dysfunctional royal family ever. And an excellent script by James Goldman.
Best biopic: Ed Wood by Tim Burton. A love declaration to the "losers" of Hollywood and a wonderful twist on the usual "great man" scenario of biopics, as what is being celebrated is Ed's deluded optimism when we know his movies really are awful, and his friendship with aged horror star Bela Lugosi. I'm also very fond of Danton, starring Gerard Depardieu before his international superstardom and subsequent decline in acting, but that's not really a biopic, concentrating on the Danton/Robespierre relationship and Danton's last weeks of life.
Best rom/com: Some Like It Hot, by Billy Wilder. Come on. You can't beat the master. Actually, I wasn't sure whether not to list this as comedy instead, but I have another candidate there. Anyway, Some Like It Hot was Wilder's trademark acerbic, witty script, great performances by Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, and amid the madcap farce one of Wilder's most tender and subversive scenes, as Curtis, disguised as a woman, steps towards Monroe's character who has earlier been dumped by his male alter ego, kisses her on the lips and says: "Come on, Sugar. No guy is worth this."
Runner-up: Bringing Up Baby. Katharine Hepburn in her youthful, zany glory as the excentric heiress, Cary Grant as the repressed scientist, and more one-liners than you can count, including the original "because I woke up gay!".
Best crime: a)The Third Man. Post-War Vienna, script by Graham Greene, starring Joseph Cotton, Trevor Howard, and, in what is one of the most famous cameos (he has no more than ten minutes or so of screen time) in film history, Orson Welles. Who ad-libbed the speech that sums up the film's cynical, witty noir soul: In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.
b) M, by Fritz Lang. Ah, the glorious 20s and early 30s, before what's-his-name, when German cinema was truly something to behold. See Fritz Lang directing what must be the first thriller about a serial killer. (Rhyme unintended.) See Peter Lorre have his break-out performance as said killer. See Gustaf Gründgens as the cool, sharp leader of the criminals. See Theo Lingen and a couple of other German stars who went on to play in endless comedies play crooks, cops and prostitutes.
c) Touch of Evil, by Orson Welles. Starring Charlton Heston as honest Mexican cop Vargas, Janet Leigh as his white wife (which constellation was nothing short of revolutionary for the 50s, never mind that Heston wasn't truly a Mexican), and Welles himself as corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan. Vargas is the virtuos hero, Quinlan is the corrupt villain who frames suspects and sets inconvenient people up. Guess who gets the directorial sympathy? Your haven't got a future, says Marlene Dietrich in a cameo to Quinlan/Orson Welles, your future is all used up. Later, her character speaks his epitaph. He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people? A lot of later movies, from Hitchcock's Psycho - Touch of Evil has the motel, the nervous motel owner, and Janet Leigh as a victim - to L.A. Confidential draw ideas and atmosphere from this masterpiece.
Best comedy: The Kid, by Charlie Chaplin. It was his first feature length film after thousands of serials, it's many decades old, it's silent, and it's glorious. You can play it today in front of a child who never heard of Chaplin, or an adult who might have seen some wrong-speed individual numbers on TV, and they'll fall for it. Funny, charming, and deeply moving.
Best American film: Citizen Kane. So what if I'm a Welles fangirl. It is. Actually, one of the working titles was American. Charles Foster Kane as seen by various people in his life - charming, tyrannical, hollow, longing, all of the above - and the young Welles let loose on a movie set for the first time in his life (and last time that he was ever to have a great budget, complete freedom, and full studio support). Yes, there is an element of "Let me play the lion, too" in it. But that's a part of it's charm, and greatness.
Runner-up: The Godfather, by Francis Ford Coppola. Which starts with the sentence I believe in America, and the Corleones are in their way the most fervently believing emigrant family, set in getting their American dream, which you can imagine. Which is part of their tragedy. Coppola took an entertaining but not particularily deep pulp novel and made it art.
Best British film: Err, can I bring up David Lean again? For Brief Encounter? That one was the epitome of his Noel Coward period (i.e. early in his career). And it's so very British. The two protagonists are without the glamour of film stars (although of course they're played by two rather famous actors of the day); you can imagine meeting them in the streets. The everyday-ness of their friendship evolving into romance and then stopping from the last step, the expressiveness of their faces is so endearing, and you can't imagine this film taking place anywhere else.
Runner-up: Alien, but I'm not sure whether or not it counts. I mean, it was shot in England, with a British director and a mostly British cast, but it was financed by an American studio. Anyway. Ridley Scott making his name. Best and most subtle of all the Alien movies, Cameron's marines and gigantic weapons be damned. And Sigourney Weaver creating one of the few and best female cinematic icons.
Best film not in English: That would depend on my mood. Today, I'm rooting for Wir Wunderkinder by Helmut Käutner. A witty and sad look at several decades of German history from the 50s, following the lives of two boys who on paper look like clichés (mild dreamer turning liberal journalist turning silent family father turning journalist again, and greedy bully turning Nazi turning black marketeer turning industrial boss) but on the screen manage to come to absolutely convincing life. Omniscient cabaret narrators who work. The absolutely adorable Danish wife of boy 1. Excellent acting all around.
Prettiest film: Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor or Luccino Visconti's Il Gattopardo. The former uses all the splendour of the Forbidden City but never in a dull, illustrating way - scenes like the child Emperor playing with curtains and sheets blown by the wind, or hiding faces, a visually gorgeous but also make a point about the child, and the artificial world he's living in. The later - ah, Sicily. Oh, Burt Lancaster dancing with Claudia Cardinale. And behold, Alain Delon acting.
Best musical score: It's almost impossible for me not to enter Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia here. Also in the run: Bernard Herrman's score for Citizen Kane. But ultimately I think I'll go with Charles Chaplin for City Lights. Both for his own melodies and the ingenious use of La Violeterra.
Best musical drama: West Side Story, by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. They took the musical with Bernstein's wonderful score and Stephen Sondheim's great lycrics and not only brought it very well on the screen but improved on the stage version by switching two numbers (Cool with Officer Kruppke in a way that made much more dramatic sense), and rearranging a third - America, which in the film version has even more bite.
Best Shakespeare adaptation: Othello, as directed by Orson Welles. I raved about it before. Striking, beautiful, and above all cinematic, without losing the poetry. Competitors for the second place are the Ian McKellen version of Richard III and Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado Nothing.
Best novel adaptation: a) Great Expectations, by David Lean. Who went on to become the "Rajah of the British Cinema" as an obituary named him, and it's easy to see why with this early opus.
b) Der Untertan, by Wolfgang Staudte, based on the novel of Heinrich Mann. See earlier raving in this journal.
Best historical film: The Lion in Winter, sixties-version, starring Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. An intense love/hate relationship between two middle-aged characters. The Plantagenets as the most dysfunctional royal family ever. And an excellent script by James Goldman.
Best biopic: Ed Wood by Tim Burton. A love declaration to the "losers" of Hollywood and a wonderful twist on the usual "great man" scenario of biopics, as what is being celebrated is Ed's deluded optimism when we know his movies really are awful, and his friendship with aged horror star Bela Lugosi. I'm also very fond of Danton, starring Gerard Depardieu before his international superstardom and subsequent decline in acting, but that's not really a biopic, concentrating on the Danton/Robespierre relationship and Danton's last weeks of life.
Best rom/com: Some Like It Hot, by Billy Wilder. Come on. You can't beat the master. Actually, I wasn't sure whether not to list this as comedy instead, but I have another candidate there. Anyway, Some Like It Hot was Wilder's trademark acerbic, witty script, great performances by Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, and amid the madcap farce one of Wilder's most tender and subversive scenes, as Curtis, disguised as a woman, steps towards Monroe's character who has earlier been dumped by his male alter ego, kisses her on the lips and says: "Come on, Sugar. No guy is worth this."
Runner-up: Bringing Up Baby. Katharine Hepburn in her youthful, zany glory as the excentric heiress, Cary Grant as the repressed scientist, and more one-liners than you can count, including the original "because I woke up gay!".
Best crime: a)The Third Man. Post-War Vienna, script by Graham Greene, starring Joseph Cotton, Trevor Howard, and, in what is one of the most famous cameos (he has no more than ten minutes or so of screen time) in film history, Orson Welles. Who ad-libbed the speech that sums up the film's cynical, witty noir soul: In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.
b) M, by Fritz Lang. Ah, the glorious 20s and early 30s, before what's-his-name, when German cinema was truly something to behold. See Fritz Lang directing what must be the first thriller about a serial killer. (Rhyme unintended.) See Peter Lorre have his break-out performance as said killer. See Gustaf Gründgens as the cool, sharp leader of the criminals. See Theo Lingen and a couple of other German stars who went on to play in endless comedies play crooks, cops and prostitutes.
c) Touch of Evil, by Orson Welles. Starring Charlton Heston as honest Mexican cop Vargas, Janet Leigh as his white wife (which constellation was nothing short of revolutionary for the 50s, never mind that Heston wasn't truly a Mexican), and Welles himself as corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan. Vargas is the virtuos hero, Quinlan is the corrupt villain who frames suspects and sets inconvenient people up. Guess who gets the directorial sympathy? Your haven't got a future, says Marlene Dietrich in a cameo to Quinlan/Orson Welles, your future is all used up. Later, her character speaks his epitaph. He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people? A lot of later movies, from Hitchcock's Psycho - Touch of Evil has the motel, the nervous motel owner, and Janet Leigh as a victim - to L.A. Confidential draw ideas and atmosphere from this masterpiece.
Best comedy: The Kid, by Charlie Chaplin. It was his first feature length film after thousands of serials, it's many decades old, it's silent, and it's glorious. You can play it today in front of a child who never heard of Chaplin, or an adult who might have seen some wrong-speed individual numbers on TV, and they'll fall for it. Funny, charming, and deeply moving.
Best American film: Citizen Kane. So what if I'm a Welles fangirl. It is. Actually, one of the working titles was American. Charles Foster Kane as seen by various people in his life - charming, tyrannical, hollow, longing, all of the above - and the young Welles let loose on a movie set for the first time in his life (and last time that he was ever to have a great budget, complete freedom, and full studio support). Yes, there is an element of "Let me play the lion, too" in it. But that's a part of it's charm, and greatness.
Runner-up: The Godfather, by Francis Ford Coppola. Which starts with the sentence I believe in America, and the Corleones are in their way the most fervently believing emigrant family, set in getting their American dream, which you can imagine. Which is part of their tragedy. Coppola took an entertaining but not particularily deep pulp novel and made it art.
Best British film: Err, can I bring up David Lean again? For Brief Encounter? That one was the epitome of his Noel Coward period (i.e. early in his career). And it's so very British. The two protagonists are without the glamour of film stars (although of course they're played by two rather famous actors of the day); you can imagine meeting them in the streets. The everyday-ness of their friendship evolving into romance and then stopping from the last step, the expressiveness of their faces is so endearing, and you can't imagine this film taking place anywhere else.
Runner-up: Alien, but I'm not sure whether or not it counts. I mean, it was shot in England, with a British director and a mostly British cast, but it was financed by an American studio. Anyway. Ridley Scott making his name. Best and most subtle of all the Alien movies, Cameron's marines and gigantic weapons be damned. And Sigourney Weaver creating one of the few and best female cinematic icons.
Best film not in English: That would depend on my mood. Today, I'm rooting for Wir Wunderkinder by Helmut Käutner. A witty and sad look at several decades of German history from the 50s, following the lives of two boys who on paper look like clichés (mild dreamer turning liberal journalist turning silent family father turning journalist again, and greedy bully turning Nazi turning black marketeer turning industrial boss) but on the screen manage to come to absolutely convincing life. Omniscient cabaret narrators who work. The absolutely adorable Danish wife of boy 1. Excellent acting all around.
Prettiest film: Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor or Luccino Visconti's Il Gattopardo. The former uses all the splendour of the Forbidden City but never in a dull, illustrating way - scenes like the child Emperor playing with curtains and sheets blown by the wind, or hiding faces, a visually gorgeous but also make a point about the child, and the artificial world he's living in. The later - ah, Sicily. Oh, Burt Lancaster dancing with Claudia Cardinale. And behold, Alain Delon acting.
Best musical score: It's almost impossible for me not to enter Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia here. Also in the run: Bernard Herrman's score for Citizen Kane. But ultimately I think I'll go with Charles Chaplin for City Lights. Both for his own melodies and the ingenious use of La Violeterra.
Best musical drama: West Side Story, by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. They took the musical with Bernstein's wonderful score and Stephen Sondheim's great lycrics and not only brought it very well on the screen but improved on the stage version by switching two numbers (Cool with Officer Kruppke in a way that made much more dramatic sense), and rearranging a third - America, which in the film version has even more bite.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 08:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 09:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 12:46 pm (UTC)I remember seeing West Side Story when I was young and dancing down the sidewalk all the way home.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-18 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-18 05:49 am (UTC)Very Wise Choices....
Date: 2004-11-17 09:54 am (UTC)While I absolutely agree on Lawrence, Citizen Kane and West Side Story, my own personal list would probably be bound to focus much more on "younger" movies, i.e pictures filmed between 1975 and 2000, because that's where my cinematic heart truly resides.
Best novel adaptation: Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. A rather mediocre novel turned into a brilliantly performed drama.
Best Crime: David Lynch's Blue Velvet. The merciless deconstruction of a peaceful pickett fence universe, seen through the eyes of a voyeuristic boyscout.
Re: Very Wise Choices....
Date: 2004-11-17 10:07 am (UTC)Re: Very Wise Choices....
Date: 2004-11-18 12:19 am (UTC)The Ice Storm is based on a novel by Rick Moody, and while Lee's filmic version took a serious approach to the protrayal of alienation, self-centredness and emotional coldness, Moody rather opted for black comedy/farce bathed in '70s nostalgia. So the book clearly has its moments, but never reaches the dramatic and metaphorical density of Lee's adaption.
poem #3
Date: 2004-11-17 10:32 am (UTC)But let me just say:
my own personal list would probably be bound to focus much more on "younger" movies, i.e pictures filmed between 1975 and 2000, because that's where my cinematic heart truly resides.
well, is this not a little bit narrow minded? Selena's list covers about 60 years, your suggestion only 35?!
Waht about 1914 to 2004?
F.
Re: poem #3
Date: 2004-11-17 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 01:37 pm (UTC)I surely would add Caligari. But with 1914 was referring to "Birth of a Nation", although I would not enter it for various reasons. But if one needs a date ...
Well, I think I make a list of my own ;-) (Comming from a concert by a string quartet I have had some time to ponder about it :-).
Re: poem #3
Date: 2004-11-18 12:43 am (UTC)Well, I guess you are basically right, but widening one's cinematic horizon is a rather slow process. Even if one may fully appreciate the master pieces of past decades intellectually, it can take an awful lot of time and practice to finally let these gorgeous movies into your heart ;-)
Re: poem #3
Date: 2004-11-18 09:34 am (UTC)well, it has worked fine so far I think, and it ahs worked in both ways really :-)
F.
Re: Very Wise Choices....
Date: 2004-11-17 12:24 pm (UTC)Mind you: if we're talking mediocre novels vs brilliant films, I'd also rank The Godfather higher, and that's a 70s film.
And then there are adaptions which aren't really, like Apocalypse Now or Blade Runner, which I both left out because they are too different from the original while being brilliant, brilliant movies.
Re: Very Wise Choices....
Date: 2004-11-18 12:55 am (UTC)Oh, Sense and Sensibility is absolutely wonderful, indeed. I guess, the fact that I prefer Ice Storm mostly stems from my innate love for the bleak, cruel and bizarre.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 10:01 am (UTC)I think The Lion in Winter crossed my mind, and I do love it, but I'm not sure it quite fits my definition of history, though as I'm sure Withnail doesn't fit anyone else's I'm not in a position to complain. And yes, Ed Wood is an excellent suggestion for the biopic, which I'd completely forgotten.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-17 12:33 pm (UTC)and you are SOOO right about "Cool" and "Officer Krupke"; plus the film version of "America" is much stronger. too bad about much of the casting, IMO, but Rita Moreno and Russ Tamblyn compensate for certain, um, deficiencies, of the 2 leads.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-18 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-18 05:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-18 05:48 am (UTC)Incidentally, if you've watched DS9, he also was a three-episode guest character named Li Nalas.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-18 06:00 am (UTC)You're missing a war movie category.
Date: 2004-11-17 05:05 pm (UTC)And Aliens kicks the first one's ass all over the map. I mean, the last twenty minutes has everyone acting like total idiots (especially the alien itself). It's a CAT, Ripley! Prioritize!
Re: You're missing a war movie category.
Date: 2004-11-18 12:37 am (UTC)As for Alien versus Aliens: I suppose it comes down to what you prefer. They're totally different genres. Aliens is an action movie, with the marines talking in snappy action movie dialogue, and the Cameronian penchant for big, big phallic guns plus transforming his female leads into avenging mother figures. (Nothing wrong with that, of course.)
Alien is a horror movie, not an action movie. There is no snappy dialogue; in fact, it's so strongly visually oriented that you could play it as a silent film, because Ridley Scott often is that kind of director. The crew of the Nostromo have an emotional reality for me which the characters in Aliens, except for Ripley herself, lack. They're not soldiers talking in recognizable action movie one liners, or with assigned types we equally recognize from action movies. They're basically, as one of the scriptwriters once said, truckers in space, tired, and getting on each other's nerves after being with each other just too long. Ripley herself isn't the warrior goddess she was to become yet. In her showdown with the Alien, she's barely holding it together, and when she sings to herself in order not to break down, I can totally identify.
Moreover, this being the first movie, Scott could afford to be leisurely and subtle. He didn't have to offer many monsters, many battles, bigger weapons etc, everything sequels are per definition obliged to. He could take his time, building atmosphere, introducing the Alien in glimpses and allusions mostly. Which fits - again, this is a horror movie, not an action movie. I like that.
Lastly, the finale: oh, please, if we're talking logic. The Queen showing up on the shuttle is a clear rip-off from the Alien showing up in same in the original. Actually, that became a cliché in a lot of other movies as well - the monster coming back one last time after the hero(ine) thinks he/she defeated it. But I can understand how the original Alien got on board the first shuttle, whereas figuring out how the Queen got on board the second always gives me a headache. Yes, Ripley's "get away from her, you bitch" is a powerful moment". Doesn't make the Queen's presence any more logical.
I once wrote two lengthy posts about all four Alien movies, which must be archived somewhere...
Re: You're missing a war movie category.
Date: 2004-11-18 09:49 am (UTC)In war films, Stalingrad or Das Boot would seem obvious choices.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-18 03:13 am (UTC)But for the best music I'll name "The Third Man", I just love it, the music is so medievalishly peaceful, so unfit for the ruined Vienna, that it makes you cry.