Easily the best film about two people you want to punch in the mouth.  Especially the wife.  The husband?  Not as much.  I actually feel sorry for him, but since he’s her enabler, he has to get one.  Just for good measure.

Screenplay by Fredric M. Frank &  Barré Lyndon   &  Theodore St. John, story by Fredric M. Frank   &  Theodore St. John   & Frank Cavett

Starring Charlton Heston,

It’s a fact: sit around and talk to anybody about the Oscars long enough and eventually you’ll get around to arguing over which was the worst Best Picture Winner – that I s, which was the worst film to win in a given year.  Inevitably, people in my generation, or at least those with no sense of history, will make strong arguments for Crash, Shakespeare in Love or maybe Titanic being the worst choices in recent memory.  Those with any real sense of history will instead bandy about two other choices:

1. Citizen Kane, one of which is arguably the greatest film of all time,  being bested by How Green Was My Valley, a film that isn’t even one of the five best films by its own director – for John Ford, his best films obviously include The Grapes of Wrath, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and one of about ten other films not named How Green Was My Valley.
2. The Greatest Show On Earth winning Best Picture over Ford’s own The Quiet Man and a little Gary Cooper movie called High Noon.

It’s hard to decide which of the two is the most egregious win.  On the one hand, the Citizen Kane loss was expected, because Welles’ hubris and his clashes, his clashes William Randolph Hearst and inability to play the Hollywood political game rubbed everybody the wrong way.  Plus, How Green Was My Valley wasn’t outright terrible – it just wasn’t very good – and the industry loved John Ford.  After all, they loved him so much they gave him six Oscars.

On the other hand, The Greatest Show On Earth win sticks out because the film is a big, bloated, boring mess of clichés and melodrama, mixed with documentary footage and wooden characters, that would be completely forgotten today – and rightfully so – if not for the fact the damned thing won Best Picture.

The strange thing is, at the time, neither film couldn’t actually have seemed like that bad of a choice – but The Greatest Show On Earth especially.  After all, leading up to the 1952 Oscar ceremony there really wasn’t much consensus as to what film should be Best Picture.  The Photoplay Gold Medal was given to With a Song In My Heart, The National Board of Review gave theirs to The Quiet Man, the New York Film Critics gave theirs to High Noon and the Golden Globes handed theirs out to The Greatest Show on Earth – they even gave best director to C. B. DeMille.  Given no film seemed to have a stranglehold on the awards leading up to the Oscars, in context the victory for The Greatest Show on Earth at least seems reasonable, condemning How Green Was My Valley to the status of worst Best Picture ever.

Although, perhaps The Greatest Show On Earth winning isn’t all that reasonable.  After all, there’s an argument to be made that High Noon didn’t win Best Picture because of its anti-McCarthy overtones and the fact High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman had just been blacklisted.  In other words, it lost the award because the Oscars lacked the nerve to honor a commie.  But honestly, if that were true, The Quiet Man should have won in a walk.  And yet it didn’t.

Whether it made sense at the time or not, The Greatest Show On Earth winning seems unfathomable today.  After all, there is the melodrama and the terrible acting, plus, the movie is paced terribly and bloated – I already said it was bloated before, but it needed to be said again.  Never mind it’s a weird mix of documentary, puff-piece and soap opera.  Or the special effects work in the train sequence could not be less convincing and look more like a Lionel Train being crashed than an actual train being crashed.  Or the matte shots are glaringly apparent and shoddy – compare the photographic work on Gone With The Wind, which recreated the old south on the back lot in Hollywood through matte paintings and process shots and the process shots here and you see just how shitty it really looks.  Or that…or that everything.  And I mean everything.

Or, how about this: the movies trailer is almost seven minutes long?  Don’t believe me – watch it yourself.

And yet – and yet – the win for The Greatest Show On Earth will never be as bad as How Green Was My Valley simply because High Noon, or The Quiet Man will never be Citizen Kane.  In that respect, How Green Was My Valley will always be worse.

In Fairness

In fairness, though, as lousy as I make it sound, The Greatest Show On Earth isn’t entirely terrible – there are indeed things about it I like.

1. Charlton Heston.  I know lots of people think his acting style is terrible and antiquated, that he couldn’t emote worth a damn and was all square-jaw toughness.  Never mind his politics are completely off-putting – especially his gun-craziness.  But I’ve always liked him and even when the movie’s awful or cheesy, I still find him watchable.  I guess I’m just a sucker for the kind of tough-guy he used to play.  Besides, the guy was in at least five movies that everybody thinks – or should think – is great: Touch of Evil, Planet of the Apes, Will Penny, The Big Country and The Omega Man.  And even in dreck like The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur, he’s still fantastic.
2. The intermittently trashy dialog and innuendo.  Consider two of my favorites:

Sebastian (to Holly, as his blood is being transfused into Brad): “If he should make love well after this, pay no attention – it will be me.”

Or this:

Phyllis (washing her hair when a handsome man walks by): “Why is it that whenever he’s around I’m all wet?”

I suppose, on the whole, while The Greatest Show On Earth is definitely not the greatest movie ever, and could certainly use a judicious amount of editing – you could easily lose about a half-hour from the film and never miss it – but if you had to sit through it and didn’t fall asleep during the most boring parts, you’re not going to be completely un-entertained.

For other entries in the Best Picture Project, please go here.

To be a pal and buy my books, jump over here and have a look.  I promise, buying always makes you feel good.

I came to this movie after digesting the first season of Veep over the course of two days with my wife on DVD — Veep and In the Loop share the same creator, if you didn’t know.

Anyway, think of In The Loop as being like Veep, only with a different cast of characters, and where the stakes aren’t whether the vice-president is pregnant or getting a clean jobs bill passed – in this instance, it’s war.

For those who haven’t seen Veep, think of In The Loop as being The Office – American or British version – only more insane, and instead of selling paper, they’re selling war.

Also, as a creepy, there-are-some-thoughts-you-should-keep-to-yourself side-note — definitely into Anna Chlumsky.

I know this is going to sound absurd, in the same way as saying that of all the mass murders in the world, one of them is not as bad as the others — because can any mass murderer truly be better or worse than another? — but seriously, Pain and Gain might just be the best movie Michael Bay ever directed.

In the past I’ve had a mixed relationship with Michael Bay — see this for proof — and I had good reason to feel the way I did.  After all, of late he’s done nothing to really inspire me to change my mind.  I mean, with three straight Transformers movies to his name, it was starting to look like he’d basically given up any shred of integrity he ever had.  If he ever had any to begin with.

But with Pain and Gain, which I only saw because the tickets were basically free, I was pleasantly surprised  — I guess that’s the advantages of lowered-expectations.  Sure, it’s got all the usual over-the-top excess and fetishization of women and cops and guns his other movies have, but for once Bay’s style and the subject matter come together perfectly.  And as much as I loved The Island, and as much as I liked Pearl Harbor — I’m not ashamed to admit I liked it, even if I might’ve been the only one — Pain and Gain might just be better than both.  It’s energetic, it’s witty, it’s fast paced, has chemistry and charisma to spare, all held together by deliriously-unhinged and intensely-watchable performances from Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson, and catchy supporting turns from Stanley Tucci and Rebel Wilson.

My only issue: it’s too long.  Sordid excess has it’s limits and in this case, clipping out about ten minutes of the film wouldn’t have hurt it at all.

Directed by

Written by Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, from a story by John Monk Saunders

Starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Richard Arlen, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper

Some movies deserve the scorn heaped upon them.  After all, they’ve been given every chance to succeed, been given all the money to succeed, and failed and deserve to whither on the vine and die.  These would the pretentious, the superficially-important, and the later-career Michael Bay movies — in other words, films that could have — should have — been better, but just weren’t.

Other movies, lacking in technical excellence as they might be, should be free from such scorn, or at least granted a certain level of immunity by virtue of extenuating circumstances — i.e. what madman would seriously criticize the special effects at the end of Beasts Of The Southern Wild be when the entire movie was made for less than what the catering budget was on a Transformers film — obviously, there’s a bit of Michael bay angst running through the post today, but you get the point.

Some movies though deserve no consideration at all because they simply lie outside the bounds of the generally accepted standards of what a movie should be, either by being too revolutionary or too counter to what the norms are.  As an example, when I weighed The Artist for The Best Picture Project I generally found it impossible to classify as good or bad simply because, in terms of modern movies, it exists on such unique, individual and singularly individualistic plain that anything that can be said about it  will always be tempered by the fact that everything you love or hate about it stems explicitly from it’s one-of-a-kindness.

Except, as it turns out, in terms of Best Picture winners The Artist  isn’t so  one-of-a-kind after all, but exists in the company of one other movie, that would be the first Best Picture winner, Wings.

As I said when I weighed up The Artist, Wings is a hard movie to judge, simply because it’s a movie from another time, made to fit different standards of what movies were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do.  Sometimes, when you watch older movies you know they were made at a different time — duh — but you can see some part of it that translates to today.  For instance, the kitchen-sink approach to Marty seems replicated in all manner of indie-dramas today, while the sheer elegance and grandeur and spectacle of Gone With The Wind was clearly the inspiration for more-than-a-few Best Picture winners in the 1980s.  In other words, while you can see bits of lots of films carrying through to today, this seems lost from Wings.

And yet, though it seems beyond classification — a fact I explicitly acknowledge now and which will later lead me to call it ‘unclassifiable’ in this post — the whole point of this series, of The Best Picture Project is to classify and judge films, either against the collective group of Best Picture Winners, or the group of losers from a given year, so that’s what I’ll do, even as I acknowledge the inherent difficulty in doing so.

In case you didn’t know it, Wings is a silent film, which inherently makes it a difficult movie. — as much as I love them, the fact that you cannot hear what the characters say means you can’t look away for more than a moment, for fear of missing something you couldn’t get from the context of the dialog.  This means that a normal 90 minute movie tends to be an exercise in self-punishment, staring at the screen and processing what is happening, and a 150 minute movie like Wings comes across as pure torture.  By the end of the movie I was left so weary by the experience that when I joked with my wife we should turn around and watch it again, just for fun, she didn’t even think about cracking a smile.  And thank goodness that I saw it on DVD with a new score and sound effects — I can only imagine how interminable it would have been if all there was had been that old organ score.  Ugh.

When you think about it, the real problem with silent movies is the very silence — it’s what defines them.  Not only does it change how you are forced to view the movie, but it also changes how the filmmaker makes the movie.  Because there are no words to convey meaning, the actors have to use their faces and bodies to suggest it, but because this is the movies there is little subtlety — everything is big.

In Sunset Boulevard Gloria Swanson derides modern movies because back in the days of the silents they didn’t need dialog: they had faces.  This thought ran through my head all the while I was watching and boy, she wasn’t kidding.  The three leads in Wings never met an outsized facial expression they didn’t like, which strangely has the effect of turning this melodrama — let’s face it, it’s a melodrama — into an unintentional comedy.

Except, this comedy isn’t really all that funny.

Thinking about it, it occurs to me that maybe it’s not so much the silence that is the problem with silent movies — it might not be the problem, but it’s a problem — but the acting.  Rather, the overacting.  Maybe, in retrospect, that’s what made Buster Keaton such a popular and engaging lead.  He didn’t mug for the camera and always strive to pull a face.  No, while most everybody around him descended into wave after wave of over-emotion — acting like their very lives depended on it — he was the great stone face, further intensifying just how ridiculous all those people around him were.  It’s also probably why neither of the male leads in Wings were known for their acting careers — at least, generally speaking — and the female lead is known more for her beauty.  Curiously, the most enduring member of the cast is Gary Cooper — never one known to go big with his emotions — who makes a small appearance here as the doomed White.

That Being Said

That being said, tiresome as Wings could be, there were definitely historical things — by ‘things’, I mean ‘technical achievements’ — which jumped out of the movie and demanded recognition.

Usually silent movies suffer from a static camera, in that the director just plops the camera in one spot and has the actors go perform in front of it — this was clearly the way people experienced the live theater and was the same when they saw photographs, so why shouldn’t movies be that way, too?  But even if that’s the way it seems, Wellman didn’t tie his camera down, but actually got it out there and movie.

The first I noticed it was at the beginning, in the scene when Jack goes to see Sylvia and take her for a ride in his jalopy.  When he rolls up on her she’s in a swing with David and instead of just filming them from the side as the swing went back and forth in front of us, the camera was actually on the swing, filming the two of them in motion, while Jack’s car arrives in the background.  Watching it, I was actually reminded of the scene in East of Eden where Kazan tracks James Dean back and forth at a canted angle while he’s on the swing.  Yes, I know it’s not a direct corollary, but it’s what was in my mind, just the same.

Another scene that jumped out at me for the camera work took place in the Folies Bergère and opens with a camera dollying across the tops of several tables, splitting the dining patrons apart one after another as it pushes across, eventually finding Jack at the last table, drunk.  Of all things, when i watched it, the dolly immediately brought to mind — of all things — the dolly under the swing in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Somehow I doubt an intentional connection, though I freely made it.

Plus, as primitive as the dogfight sequences were filmed — either by literally strapping a camera to the wing or front of the plane, giving you mostly headshots, or by filming from the ground, both of which made the scenes interminable — I was reminded that back in 1927 when you wanted a special effect, you couldn’t just CGI it.  You actually had to do it.  This meant when a plane crashed, some poor fool had to get up in it and crash it into the ground.

And the effects that couldn’t be accomplished through practical means, such as two planes crashing in midair — probably something that would work out bad for everybody involved — the scene was staged by following the shadows of the plane on the ground, until they came together.  In terms of the times, it was a quite ingenious solution.

As much as I didn’t really like the film, there were other touches here and there to note:

1. In general, the film was shot in sepia — not actually black and white — but when it came time for ‘night’ scene, the film was tinted blue and slightly underdevloped, to give the hint of darkness.
2. While filmed in sepia, there were splashes of color that came in, particularly the flames that shot from all the guns mounted to the airplanes whenever the pilots fired them.  Given this coloring to be done by hand, I can only imagine how laborious a process it must have been.
3. The split-screen effect early in the film, as the boys arrive in Europe — of course I noticed it, because I love split-screen, especially when it’s done well.  What makes this split-screen interesting is usually you see it used side-by-side, but here it’s an over/under.

Final Analysis

When all is said and done, the truth is that Wings is unclassifiable — I told you I’d come back to that — and cannot be judged alongside modern movies, or even other Best Picture winners.  It, and The Artist, really exist in their own world and can only be taken on their own terms.

Still, the hard reality is that the movie would only appeal to people today who fall into two categories:

1. Completists.  In this case, I am a completist, because I’m watching all the Best Picture winners.  Other completists might be for war movies, Clara Bow movies, or whatever.
2. Historical value.  If you care about where the Oscars got started, or what early films looked like, you might want to check it out, but if not, then it’s not for you.

In the end, if you want to sit down and watch a film to pass the time, don’t bother with Wings – you’ll be bored silly.  But if you’ve got some other agenda and have to watch it for that reason, knock yourself out.

Trivia

In truth, there were two Best Picture winners in 1927/28.  Outstanding Picture was won by Wings, while Unique and Artistic Production went to Murnau’s Sunrise.  It was only later the Academy decided that Wings’ award was the true Best Picture.

Wings was the first Best Picture with nudity.  If you look closely in the scene in the hotel room after Jack and Mary leave the Folies, and she takes off her dress, you can catch a snippet of Clara Bow’s goodies.  However, given the snippet is so quick, you might as well not bother trying.  But, if you really have to see it, and I’m saying you don’t, try here.

For other entries in the Best Picture Project, please go here.

To be a pal and buy my books, jump over here and have a look.  I promise, buying always makes you feel good.

Well, actually not a double feature, given that it would have made for 8 hours or more of viewing in one day if I’d taken in these two films back-to-back, though I did watch them over a successive number of days during the course of one week.  Still, it was close enough.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, dir. by Tomas Alfredson (2011)

I watched this when it was first out on DVD — it was in and out of my local theater so quickly I never even had time to realize what I’d missed before it was gone — and loved it before my daughter took a copy from the local library.  When she tried to watch it she could hardly make it all the way through, because she thought it was boring.  Now, you can make the argument that because she’s 16 she’s probably got a short attention span and prefers Justin Beiber and MTV-style editing, etc.  Except, when I watched Tree of Life she watched the whole thing with me and then, when I bought the DVD, she watched it again.  Obviously, she’s not afraid of challenging movies, though I don’t know what conclusions I should draw.

I, on the other hand, have see TTSS twice now and could go on watching it again and again.  And why shouldn’t I?  What better way to unwind the mystery and the story and the nooks and crannies than actually exploring them again and again?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy dir. by John Irvin (1979)

Because they tell the exact same story, I was obviously not surprised by the revelation in the mini-series, but even so, the mystery of the entire story is so dense that even having another chance to try to puzzle it out added all the drama to the story that I needed.

Anyway, as much as I enjoyed the 1979 mini-series — almost all of it — it could not hold a candle to the remake.  Yes, it managed to get more of the story and the nuance and subtlety of the story and everything else in — I have no doubts it’s closer in spirit to the book than the remake — but it also took 6 hours doing it and, in delivering it, ignored the fact that movies/TV mini-series need to work cinematically first, story-wise second.

So, where the remake was mysterious, and cinematic, and left the viewer to draw their own conclusions on many points, the original mini-series was overlong, bland, and unimaginative, with an ending that just when on and on and on until it couldn’t get any more obvious.

Still, despite that, I enjoyed it.

(Sorry, guess this isn’t exactly a Terse Movie Review, given the length.  Still, sometimes you just gotta let things breathe.)

]]> http://thelastblognameonearth.com/2013/05/01/terse-movie-review-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-the-double-feature/feed/ 0 jlh3 http://thelastblognameonearth.com/2013/04/29/new-cover/ http://thelastblognameonearth.com/2013/04/29/new-cover/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:51:36 +0000 jlh3 http://thelastblognameonearth.com/?p=1662 Continue reading →]]>

All right, so here’s the cover for my latest book.  There isn’t quite a timetable yet on a release date — still have to write a blurb and coordinate other stuff — but as always, I will let you know when I have it.

To see the evolution of the cover, you should look at the pics on my Facebook page and especially my comments on them.  It’s a little clearer why I chose this over other, abandoned ideas.

In the meantime, follow the Best Picture Project.  Or, go here and buy my other stuff — my advice, buy Goliath.  You won’t be sorry.

This might honestly be the most terrifying movie I saw in recent memory — and there is not one speck of blood, nobody hits anybody else, and no threats of grievous bodily harm were made. If not for the fact that the ‘based on actual events’ tagline turning out to be true, you’d think this was a far-fetched joke.

But knowing that not only did it happen in real life, pretty much as it happened in the movie, but that it has a scientific explanation behind what went on, makes it all the more shocking.

Oh, but the real kicker: the perp on the phone was acquitted.

It will never be mistaken for a ‘great’ film, but given what Shepard — co-Director, writer, star — set out to do, it’s great for what it is.  Uncomplicated, unpretentious, breezy, silly, fun and filled with good repartee and dialog.  Plus, the soundtrack is fabulous, not to mention a show-stealing performance by Bradley Cooper.

I’ll just say it: better than Smokey and the Bandit.

]]> http://thelastblognameonearth.com/2013/04/19/hit-and-run-dir-by-dax-shepard-and-david-palmer/feed/ 0 jlh3 http://thelastblognameonearth.com/2013/04/16/attention-all-freeloaders/ http://thelastblognameonearth.com/2013/04/16/attention-all-freeloaders/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:42:12 +0000 jlh3 http://thelastblognameonearth.com/?p=1643 ]]> Over at Smashwords, I made something free.  So, if you’re not interested in paying for what you read, you could go on a scavenger hunt and find it…