Braveheart is a big budget movie of the 1990s, or as I like to call them, one thousand white men in period costume. 700 years ago, William Wallace helped start the First War of Scottish Independence, which ended with King Edward I of England granting Scotland their… independence.
Let’s face it, no one enjoyed being ruled by England. Except Canada?
When King Edward I decides to institute a Jus Primae Noctis, meaning that any lord may take the virginity of any woman he chooses on her wedding night… it basically starts a spiral of crazy events that leads to a revolution.
According to Wikipedia, that never happened though. Just fun imagination on the part of the writers. Because nothing gets a man more riled up for rebellion than avenging his woman!
So William Wallace starts a rebellion, and becomes a very successful military leader. Then he comes into contact with the French Princess Isabella.
Who is married to King Edward I’s son, Prince Edward. Who is of course… flamboyantly gay? Because why else would Princess Isabella be so swept up in the rugged masculinity of a Scottish rebel?
Have we already forgotten about Murron?
Yes. Yes we have. Because this movie is 2 hours and 57 minutes. I always used to confuse this movie with Gladiator and now I get why.
There is also a colorful cast of noblemen, warriors, and villagers who fill this titanic picture.
The film gets most of its historical knowledge from an epic poem, and it definitely maintains that level of immensity in the film. Mel Gibson gives at least ten speeches about the importance of freedom.
Is this what Drake is referencing when he says “Everybody dies but not everybody lives” in Moment for Life? Crazy.
So Braveheart did go on to win Best Picture, Best Director, and a bunch of other Oscars. It beat Babe! It lost Best Drama at the Golden Globes to Sense and Sensibility though. It’s also #77 on the IMDb Top 250. Personally, I can’t sit through war movies this long unless they introduce Matt Damon in the final act.
Oh Patton. I just… I am unsure as to where I should start here.
Good idea, Patton. So, back in April of 1971, a film about the U.S. General George S. Patton of World War II won seven Oscars. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Sound, Best Art Direction, and Best Actor. Fun Oscars Fact: George C. Scott (who confusingly enough played George S. Patton) is the first person in history to refuse an Oscar. He called the Oscars “a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.”
He’s not WRONG. Just dramatic as hell.
So apparently Patton is this ridiculously classic war epic covering the career of General Patton. Maybe I’d watch a Drunk History of this story… but not a 2 hour and 51 minute biopic of a controversial World War II veteran.
And not just because the film fails so spectacularly at passing the Bechdel Test (I’m serious, not a SINGLE woman has a line in this film, except for maybe one woman wearing a burka offering two chickens to General Patton out of respect). Now I know what you’re thinking, “It’s a movie about World War II, Saving Private Ryan doesn’t have female characters.” And to that I would say Saving Private Ryan has a surprise third-act Matt Damon, which could redeem anything in my eyes.
Here’s the only gif from the actual film I could find, which shows a pivotal scene in which Patton slaps a soldier for being too traumatized from the shelling to continue fighting. Patton gets in big trouble for berating the soldier by calling him a coward, and thankfully, his career goes downhill from there.
War movies and Westerns are not my thing, as I have stated countless times here, as I think they promote a type of masculinity that is incredibly harmful. But if you’re into war movies, you should give this one a try. It offers an extensive look at the politics behind World War II, plus Francis Ford Coppola was one of the screenwriters, so there’s that.
Also the first scene of Patton is iconic and allowed for this Looney Tunes bit.
Sometimes all it takes is a little research to learn that Netflix has some hidden gems you didn’t even know were hidden gems. The Apartment, a movie I had never heard of before I made this list, is not only a Best Picture winner or #99 on the IMDb Top 250, but is also #80 on the AFI 100 Films list. The triple threat! I maybe only have a handful of these films left.
None I promise. Okay! So Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon star in this comedy-drama about a man who lets his bosses use his apartment for their extramarital affairs in exchange for pulling him up the corporate ladder. But he falls for the elevator assistant and everything goes to shit!
Billy Wilder originally wanted to direct this film in the 1940s, around the time when he had directed Double Indemnity (and a few years before he directed Sunset Boulevard), but the production code at the time actually forbid adultery in films. We’ve come a long way! By the 1960s, Americans were seeing a lot more than the used to on film. By this I mean that in 1960, Psycho had finally shown the first toilet flush in American film history.
*Violins screeching*
So poor C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), must regularly vacate his apartment so that his superiors can screw the secretaries, phone operators, and elevator girls that work in this massive insurance company. I mean actually massive.
Fun fact: The wide shots of the office scenes were made to look bigger by using smaller and smaller desks and smaller and smaller people. The ones in the back (maybe not in this shot specifically) were actually children.
Anyway, so Baxter falls in love with Fran Kubelik, played by the amazing and beautiful Shirley McLaine. She’s often spouting sad one-liners about love.
Here she is today singing with Darren Criss on Glee.
She has an Oscar.
So when Mr. Baxter falls in love with Miss Kubelik (as they affectionately call each other?), Mr. Baxter’s arrangement with his employers becomes a problem. And crazy romantic comedy tropes come into play!
The film is comedic without ever being screwball, and dramatic without ever being disheartening. It balances nicely, and I think that’s what makes it rise above the comedies of its time. Shirley and Jack give real depth to these stock characters, the unattainable girl at work and the goofy man chasing after her. While exploring the bitterness of falling in love in addition to the harshness of the American corporate world, The Apartment feels like it’s actually trying to say something rather than just pull a laugh.
The film went on to win five Oscars, three of which went to Jack Lemmon (Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Original Screenplay). Only 10 people have ever won three Oscars in one year, including James Cameron, the Coen Brothers, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Peter Jackson, and Francis Ford Coppola. The ONLY person ever to win four Oscars in one year is Walt Disney. Oscar facts!
Okay so I don’t know why but Netflix seems to have more Best Picture Winners than IMDb Top 250 films so that’s just how this list is going to go. Which I don’t have a problem with because they’re all on my Watchlist anyway.
The French Connection! I feel like I had vaguely heard of this film, but it’s more or less on the list simply because it’s #93 on the AFI Top 100 as well as being on Netflix.
The film follows two detectives, Doyle and Russo, trying to stop a major drug deal between a giant French heroine syndicate and the mob. They have smuggled $32 million of heroine into New York by hiding it in a French television star’s car and have to outsmart the detectives before making the deal.
It’s kind of exciting? I don’t know, the plot is kind of predictable: detectives have one tiny lead to go off of, lots of stakeouts, reach a dead end when the villains are overly careful, detectives get thrown off the case for not following the rules, villains slip up, detectives win. Just hearing the title, The French Connection, made me sad that that connection wasn’t Alain Delon.
Oh my god I can’t even.
Anyway the inspiration for the film came when William Friedkin was living with Howard Hawks’ daughter, and he asked her if she liked his movies, and she said they were lousy. She said, “Make a good chase. Make one better than anyone’s done.”
And thus one of the coolest chases in film history is born.
Doyle avoids an assassination attempt by the French drug dealer’s hitman, who then boards a subway train and literally commandeers the train while Doyle chases it underneath in his car. It’s actually 15 minutes of pure intensity and it was the one time in the film I didn’t look like this.
And this is the director who directed The Exorcist two years later! Crazy. I’m sorry, cop movies are not my thing.
The film went on to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing at the 44th Academy Awards. Fun Fact, this Oscars included a 12 minute long standing ovation for Charlie Chaplin receiving an Honorary Award, the longest applause in Academy history.
So I quickly scrapped the idea of making a Summer 2015 Moviecation List in favor of making a Spring 2015 Moviecation List! I mean the summer solstice is June 21st this year, so I have plenty of time.
Ah yes. The film that has been on my Netflix Watchlist since the dawn of time… basically. The 72nd Academy Awards Best Picture Winner, American Beauty. Luckily for me, I managed to get 16 years without knowing what the hell this movie was about! I mean… the cover is a girl’s stomach with a rose in front of it. I assumed it was about sex? Well I was right.
Kevin Spacey plays a boring, unappreciated, uninteresting middle class father named Lester Burnham. The beginning opens with Lester narrating that he has just died, a direct reference to another Moviecation film, Sunset Boulevard! It all ties together, people.
So Lester is living a meaningless and passionless life. His wife doesn’t have sex with him, his 16 year old daughter hates him. Everything is ordinary. Until he falls in love with his daughter’s friend, Angela.
Yes, cue roses. Angela is aware of this obsession, teasing Lester’s daughter, Jane, about Lester’s infatuation with her. The attraction provides a sort of sexual awakening for Lester, and his life changes courses dramatically, starting with his marriage.
Meanwhile, his wife, Carolyn, played by Annette Bening, is described as being soulless and shallow by almost every character in the movie. She herself begins a passionate relationship with a fellow real estate agent. And then her husband finally starts standing up for himself in their marriage, but in an almost emotionally abusive way.
Needless to say, the Burnham family is not the most supportive of one another.
While Jane struggles with issues of feeling unappreciated by her parents, Angela is continuously toying with the idea of being attracted to Lester.
Which sparks her relationship with the new next-door neighbor, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), a dark videographer and pot dealer with a ruthless and violently homophobic ex-Marine for a father.
So the film situates three new relationships in the world of a seemingly ordinary middle class family. American Beauty continually addresses the connection between sex and performance, or the act of putting on a show to seem a certain way to someone. Especially Angela, who prides herself on being sexually adventurous and mature, but also trying desperately to be special.
Lester’s lust for Angela is the driving force behind Lester’s change of character. He quits his job and begins working at a burger place, remembering the days of his youth when all he did was “party and get laid.” This rejection of his responsibilities as a father and a husband reveals his own selfishness, but also his desire to feel truly alive in a world the continually tries to put you a box of materialism and monotony. Even the pristine nature of the Burnham house, the perfect rose garden, the $4,000 couch, the staged family dinners with diagetic music creating an atmosphere of sophistication, everything works to represent the Burnham’s as being an ordinary, functional American family.
The writer, Alan Ball, has stated that two events inspired him to write the film. First, a plastic bag floating in the wind, which is included in the film as a shot that Ricky has and wants to show Jane because it made him aware of all of the beauty in the world. Second, the Amy Fisher trial in 1992, where a 17 year old high schooler shot her 35 year old boyfriend’s wife. This does not happen in the film, although Lester does die.
Critics have been widely positive although divided on the film, many stating that they have a different interpretation every time they watch it. This is what makes a truly great film, so I decided to offer mine.
American Beauty affirms the inherent struggle between middle class conformism and the individual desire to feel unique. The only way around this battle is to find beauty in the everyday world, and therefore breaking free of the imprisonment of the ordinary.
Well that’s just my thought. The 90s were crazy and masculinity was in crisis, so different people see different things in this unique story. American Beauty is #61 on the IMDb Top 250, and won 5 Oscars: Best Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Picture.
I did it!! Oh god it feels good to finish a film bucketlist, because it means I get to make a new one!
The last film on my list is Best Picture Winner All About Eve. The story was originally a true anecdote told by actress Elisabeth Bergner, then written as a short story by Mary Orr, and finally written for the screen and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It tells the story of Eve Harrington, a renowned Broadway actress winning a fictitious theatre award, and how she climbed the social ladder to achieve her dream of fame and fortune.
After seeing Eve receiving her award, the story flashes back to the day the main characters meet Eve Harrington. She has spent weeks seeing every performance of the famous Broadway actress Margo Channing, and now the writer’s wife, Karen Richards, wants to introduce Eve to her idol.
The incomparable Bette Davis plays the egomaniac diva, Margo Channing. An aging Broadway actress, Margo is constantly obsessing over how others perceive her and how she’s going to remain in the spotlight. To her, Eve is an innocent little nobody who is in for a rude awakening in the theatre world she so desires to be a part of. So Margo takes Eve under her wing, making her her assistant, agent, secretary, and friend.
But things take a turn! I don’t want to give away too much, but the film is an entertaining look at the relationships between women in the workforce, how building one up means tearing another down, and how theatre is especially designed for this ruthless competition.
Margo’s obsession with age is constant, as she eventually reveals herself to have recently turned forty, while her boyfriend (who is also her director) is only 32. Her bombastic attitude and abrasive reaction to everything relating to her persona is at its peak when Eve starts to encroach on both her professional and personal lives.
Also every scene where Margo is drinking is amazing. But the film is also a lot deeper than its story about theatre prima donnas and the malevolent critics who make or break them. Its release less than a decade after World War II has created for some incredibly interesting interpretations on what it means to be a woman in America.
Many have argued that Eve’s invasion of everything Margo holds dear is a metaphor for the attack on traditional American values: women trying to assume agency in a patriarchal society, homosexuality encroaching on traditional heteronormative values, COMMUNISM! It’s all hinted at with the audience being left to decide which side they support.
I don’t know what to make of the LGBT reading of the film, since in 1950 any vaguely homosexual character is innately the antagonistic force in the story, while Eve to me is more of the generic woman trying to conquer an extremely unwelcoming and sexist industry.
Speaking of female empowerment! Marilyn Monroe appears about halfway into the film for no reason.
I’m going to be completely honest and say that I have never once seen a film with Marilyn Monroe in it… which is saying something since I’ve seen every episode of Smash!
But I was actually shocked at how much Marilyn shines on camera. Like it’s unthinkable that someone could steal a scene from Bette Davis, but I literally couldn’t take my eyes off her when she was on screen.
Iconic. Anyway the film is an impressive study on the power of theatre and performance in our lives, and how becoming the person we dream of being can mean sacrificing everything others believe about us. It almost reminded me of Birdman, the way it intertwined film and theatre and the way different walks of life view different types of artistic creation.
The film was nominated for a record fourteen Oscars (a feat not accomplished again until Titanic 47 years later. It won Best Picture, and is still the only film ever to have four actresses nominated. It currently is #98 on the IMDb Top 250 and #28 on the AFI 100 Films list. And that’s all folks! Stay tuned for my Summer 2015 Moviecation List!
I don’t know how my Fall 2014 Movie Bucketlist got to be 16 films, but don’t worry, there’s one more on this list! After that I’ll get started on my Summer 2015 Movie Bucketlist.
Yeah I know watching new movies is exciting. So this is probably the one on the list I was most nervous about, because it was by far the longest film on my list. The original cut that ran in Japan in 1954 was 3 hours 27 minutes. The American cut was barely two and a half hours, since everyone knows Americans can’t sit through anything. Thankfully the Criterion Collection has the full original cut…
So at literally over an hour longer than the second longest film on this list (Rosemary’s Baby, 2 hours 16 minutes), watching this film definitely seemed daunting.
On top of that, samurai films are not my favorite genre. I mean they’re not my least favorite genre either (cough Westerns). I had seen an Akira Kurosawa film before, Yojimbo, in a film class, so I knew I could count on a good story, even if the acting can sometimes be seriously off-putting.
Basically, as for the plot, a small town of farmers in 1587 Japan enlist a group of ronin (masterless samurai) to protect them from the bandits who threaten to steal all of their crops. The first hour or so of the film involves the farmers finding the first samurai, an experienced warrior by the name of Kambei, and then him helping them assemble the team of seven samurai with them. A hero-gathering montage!
That’s Kikuchiyo, the unwanted seventh samurai.
So the team of samurai decide that the farmers will finish their harvest, and then begin a war with the bandits to protect their crop yield. Cue Intermission.
Once the war begins, the film is a classic (although incredibly modern for its time) action movie. Kurosawa used almost four times the original intended budget for the film, shooting for 148 days in fully-constructed peasant village.
But it sure is one hell of a war. Over the course of a few days, the samurai continuously outsmart and outlast the bandits. At this point, the bizarre unity of the clever and courageous samurai and the terrified but ambitious villagers fighting to defend their harvest reminded me of something.
The similarities between A Bug’s Life and Seven Samurai are actually startling. A victimized village of poor farmers turn to what they believe to be a group of warriors to help defend their harvest from bandits. In A Bug’s Life, the warriors actually turn out to be circus bugs, but using their ingenuity and wealth of resources, the two groups work together to protect the villagers.
So the samurai aren’t circus-folk… but they do have their unique cast of characters that make them strong. There’s a love story, a massive rain-storm during the final battle, and even a harvesting montage. Pixar you are busted.
But I did some research, and apparently Pixar has never commented on these similarities. Instead, they explain that the source of inspiration for A Bug’s Life is none other than one of Aesop’s Fables, The Ant and the Grasshopper, a moralistic story about how it pays to be prepared. There’s not even a wise samurai leader spouting platitudes about things he learned in battle.
Oh well. The film was nominated for two Oscars, best Costume Design for a Black and White Film and Best Art Direction for a Black and White Film. It’s also #20 on the IMDb Top 250, the highest ranking Asian film. If you have three and a half hours you should give it a try!
