The English Patient (1996) - Anthony Minghella

Continuing to make my way through the 1990s Best Picture Winners (has anyone ever heard of Unforgiven?…. NOOO it’s a Western!!), I thought I would see this one while it’s still on Netflix.

The English Patient is simultaneously a love story set in the vast, unexplored continent of Africa during the years before World War II and a story of loss in the Italian countryside in 1944 up until the end of the war.

And yes I do use those descriptors of Africa ironically.

The movie opens on a plane being shot down in the desert, where one survivor is horribly burned but alive. Then, we are in Italy, where a Canadian nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), after experiencing the death of two loved ones, decides to stay behind and take care of a man who is disfigured from burns and does not remember his name. They settle in a bombed monastery in the countryside.

This is only gif of Juliette Binoche I could find from this movie! That’s her meeting David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who was a Canadian Intelligence Corps operative (thank you Wikipedia).

Meanwhile! Back in Africa in the late 1930s, the Royal Geographic Society is tasked with mapping out parts of Libya. There’s Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton, played by Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas. And there’s Count László de Almásy, played by Ralph Fiennes. The Count and Katherine soon have an affair.

Drama! I wasn’t expecting the “I’m a socially awkward and actually pretty rude white man, but you’re going to fall in love with me anyway,” but surprise! It’s here. They pretty much hate each other the first moment they meet. The Count is self-righteous, pretentious, and annoying.

Meanwhile, Hana is taking care of this man who is slowly remembering his life before his accident, with the help of Caravaggio’s suspicions that he is a traitor and a spy. Also we meet Hana’s love interest, Kip (Naveen Andrews), a bomb diffuser!

Besides the 2 hour and 42 minute run time, I think that I liked The English Patient. It definitely didn’t have an impact on me, but it wasn’t intolerable to watch, like it was for some people in the 90s.

I cared way more about whatever Juliette Binoche was doing than about the stuff going on in the desert, which I guess is why she won an Oscar and Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas lost.

The English Patient did go on to win 9 of its 12 Oscar nominations though, including Best Picture, which is insane, and also the same number of Oscar wins as Gone with the Wind, a movie that is 1 hour and 26 minutes longer than this one!

Braveheart (1995) - Mel Gibson

20 years ago we gave Mel Gibson two Oscars.

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.

Halloween 2015 #8: Sleepy Hollow (1999) - Tim Burton

Spoiler alert: Helena Bonham Carter is not in this movie.

Crazy, I know. Okay! The year is 1999. The world is ending on January 1st, 2000. People are afraid! Nothing like a good old fashioned horror movie to show everyone that what we should actually be afraid of is 19th century American literature.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving tells the story of Ichabod Crane, an awkward and lanky school teacher who is in love with the town’s most attractive and richest female, Katrina Van Tassel. After failing to propose to her at a party one night, Ichabod rides home, where he faces off with the mysterious headless horseman.

So the 1949 Walt Disney version, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, is actually a pretty faithful adaption of the story. Although Tim Burton did have his winks to the audience as well.

In this version, however, Ichabod Crane is a New York City police constable who is sent to the upstate town to investigate mysterious beheadings.

Johnny Depp really captures the sort of bumbling, flustered aspect of Ichabod well. He’s not inept, just kind of silly. Plus he faints a lot.

Which makes him perfect for the rich and mysterious Katrina, played by Christina Ricci.

Fun note: Christina Ricci was 18 when this was filmed (the age of Katrina in Irving’s original story) and Johnny Depp was 35. They play love interests.

Everyone in the film is a suspect, and the film does a good job of making us suspicious of every one of them. For starters, Katrina is a practicing witch.

The town all fully believes and accepts the origin story of the Headless Horseman, who was a Hessian mercenary in the Revolutionary War before he was beheaded and buried in the woods. Now he rises from the grave in search of new heads.

Oh and he’s also Christopher Walken.

The film is pretty gory, which caused some critics to criticize it for being over the top in its violence. But it has a lightheartedness about it that kind of makes some of the serious violence seem silly. I mean, watching a headless horseman chop someone’s head clean off is sort of comical, right? 

Ichabod focuses his investigation entirely in the realm of science, which leads him down several dead-ends. It’s only when he begins to accept the supernatural in his life that the picture begins to come together. There are interesting contradicting ideas about religion versus logic, or seeing versus believing at play, which makes for a good detective story with the added element of horror.

Sleepy Hollow went on to win an Oscar for Art Direction and is a fun film for any October movie night.

Halloween 2015 #6: The Birds (1963) - Alfred Hitchcock

Now how could I have a Halloween movie-cation without a film by the Master of Suspense?

Based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier, The Birds is Hitchcock’s first film after Psycho (1960). In the small, Northern California town of Bodega Bay, a mysterious force causes birds to be unusually violent towards humans.

The first attack doesn’t happen until 25 minutes until the movie, but the setup is absolutely amazing. Wealthy socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets a self-righteous lawyer, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), in a bird shop in San Francisco. He casually mentions wanting to buy lovebirds for his kid-sister’s birthday, but leaves when the store doesn’t have any. Melanie uses the power of her thirst to track him down to the small town of Bodega Bay and flirtatiously breaks into Mitch’s house to plant the lovebirds.

My reaction exactly. And who wouldn’t do that for Rod Taylor? P.S. He’s Australian. 

But since Melanie Daniels is basically the 1963 equivalent of Paris Hilton, repeatedly mentioned in the tabloids for her less-than-ladylike antics, Mitch’s mother does NOT approve.

Which makes Melanie even thirstier, to be honest.

Anyway, Mitch convinces Melanie to come to his sister Cathy’s birthday the next day, where the real horror begins.

A group of seagulls violently attack the children, and things only escalate from there. For some reason the town is super unwilling to believe that the birds are working in groups to attack humans, even after a third attack leaves a man dead with his eyes totally pecked out, and a fourth attack takes place at the elementary school.

This is probably the best scene. One, because crows are scary as hell, and two, because the special effects make it so that you are forced to watch a bunch of child actors cry while fending off what appear to be artificial crows. 

The action subsides in probably what is the most boring scene in the film, where Melanie, Mitch, and several townspeople including an ornithologist debate the validity of the “attacks.” After maybe ten minutes of discussion, the biggest and most violent attack takes place.

There are explosions, there’s death, there’s Tippi Hedren in a phone booth. What’s so great about this scene is that we get the vantage point of someone who is safe yet right in the middle of the action. Melanie hides in the nearest phone booth as she is forced to watch people die all around her. 

It’s very gruesome. She can’t even look away! It’s all around her.

But this isn’t even the climax. Melanie, along with Mitch and his sister and mother, hide out in Mitch’s house for one last final attack. There’s so much suspense in knowing that the birds are going to attack but not knowing when. My heart raced the entire last 20 minutes or so. 

Also Melanie and Mitch do that fun thing where two straight white people hate each other yet they fall in love due to some kind of trauma involving animal attacks. You know? 52 years before Jurassic World came out?

She can’t mean that! He’s a man and she’s a woman! They’ll fall in love, just you wait. 

But joking aside, the movie is awesome. The one thing that left me creeped out was learning that Hitchcock developed an obsession with Tippi Hedren where he essentially ruined her career after she rejected his advances. They would only make one other movie together, Marine (1964), and after that she didn’t work for years because he refused to let her out of her contract. Sad stuff.

The Birds was nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and currently has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Halloween 2015 #1: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) - Robert Wiene

Okay turns out summer is a time for relaxation, so I took the summer off from seeing movies in the organized manner that I’ve done in the past, which led me to believe that I was off the hook from writing reviews. Some of my favorite movies I saw over past three months, however, have been Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011), The Hours (2002), Nightcrawler (2014), and Thelma and Louise (1991). 

But now I had the crazy idea where instead of me coming up with just a random list of films to make my way through (which would actually be my sixth time doing that, which is insane!), I am doing a themed movie-cation list. In October! Can you guess the theme?

And what better way to start a scary movie-cation list with perhaps the first horror film of all time? The German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released in 1920, marks the so-called beginning of the horror genre. It tells the story of a hypnotist, Dr. Caligari, who uses a somnambulist (which is apparently a sleepwalker, like everyone knows what that word means?) to commit murders in the small village of Holstenwall. Dr. Caligari brings his spectacle to the town fair, where our protagonist, Francis, and his friend, Alan, first witness the bewitching gaze of the sleepwalker, Cesare. 

Scary, right? Well, Alan makes horror movie mistake #1, and asks Cesare how long he’s going to live, to which Cesare replies, “Until dawn.” Cue murder!

Also this awesome shot of their shadows. Who knew shadows could be so scary? I picture people in audiences fainting left and right, as they were wont to do in the 1920s. 

Those Germans really knew fear. The writers of the film, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, have actually stated that the film is a metaphor for the German people’s penchant for dictators, and how they are easily seduced by a powerful leader into becoming mindless drones for world domination. Both the writers were pacifists who were distrustful of the German government after World War I, so the character of Cesare represents the German people who are forced to carry out acts of violence in the name of a mad authority figure. 

He reminds me of Peter Pettigrew. 

But there’s a lot of stuff going on in this film besides the subtext that is really impressive. First, the set design feels like it took a page of out Tim Burton’s book… well… okay never mind.

I’m not sure why this gif is sped up, but you can get a sense of the shadows and jagged shapes that make up this spooky visual style.

Also cool to note is that the film features a frame tale, an incredible precedent for the medium of film, despite having been around for centuries in literature (including one of the first horror books of all time, Frankenstein). In it, Francis tells an old man how he had to leave his hometown with his fiancée (the woman in the first gif), but they are still haunted by the events that took place in Holstenwall. 

The twist ending actually contradicts this setup, which leaves the viewer questioning the validity of any of the storylines. Who can we trust if not our protagonist!? Is anyone safe from the psychological damage brought on by World War I? Spooky stuff.

I have a list of about fifteen or so classic horror films that I will see for the first time this month, so follow along as I try not to give myself nightmares until Christmas.

Spring 2015 #17: Battleship Potemkin (1925) - S.M. Eisenstein

Happy First Day of Summer! I finally completed my Spring 2015 Moviecation List. The theme was “IMDb Top 250, AFI 100 Films, and Best Picture Winners on Netflix.” 

Battleship Potemkin. I saved the shortest film for last, thankfully. At 69 minutes it’s barely longer than an episode of Orange is the New Black. Except instead of being about a prison, it’s about the 1905 mutiny by the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin. Russia was operating under a Tsarist regime at the time, and the crew of the ship finally took a stand against their officers, resulting in an even larger rebellion in the Ukrainian town of Odessa.

The film is actually an experiment in the theory of Soviet Montage, or the belief that the well-planned juxtaposition of shots can create an emotional response in an audience. Here we have three separate lion statues, but the response created from their alignment is one of growing fear and concern. Eisenstein, originally a film theorist, applied these ideas to his film to create one of the most powerful propaganda films of all time.

Here, in one of the most famous sequences in this film and possibly in any film, the citizens of the town run from a hired militia and are massacred by their own government. A combination of shots of robotic military men, dying children, and weeping women expertly come together to move the audience, making “The Odessa Steps” as influential today as it was back then.

One thing that amazed me was the sheer number of extras in this film. It reminded me of the Babylonian scenes in Intolerance. I guess people back then were really excited to be apart of this new medium called film.

Of the film’s five parts, three of them take place aboard the Battleship Potemkin. In Part 2, “Drama on Deck,” a fierce battle between the commanders and the crew takes place over the quality of the food served on deck.

I’m still not sure if this is God or just the ship’s priest like Wikipedia implies. He looks weirdly magical?

Anyway, Battleship Potemkin is a beloved exercise in montage and political manipulation. Orson Welles listed it as his favorite film (he died four years beforeThe Little Mermaid). But the film has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I guess it’s a big deal.

Thank you for following along as I work my way through every important film of the past 100 years! Summer 2015 Moviecation List is in the works!

Spring 2015 #16: High Noon (1952) - Fred Zinnemann

 A Western?! How many of these are there? 

On the bright side, this is the shortest Western I’ve ever heard of, at 84 minutes. It also flips the genre on its head by happening in real time, in one town, and without any chase scenes. Crazy right?

Oh yeah and Grace Kelly plays a Quaker!

Okay, so now that you’re probably down for this “barely longer than an episode of Game of Thrones” feature film, here’s what it’s about. High Noon tells the story of Will Kane (Gary Cooper), as he is about to leave for his honeymoon, when he learns that an old enemy of his, Frank Miller, is coming in to town on the noon train and wants to kill him. Apparently Kane tried to get Miller hanged for his crimes but he was released on a technicality. The whole town is mad at Kane for this and now no one wants to help him. 

Especially not his pacifist wife, Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly). They get married in the first scene, and Kane is about to give up his job as the town marshal forever, until he learns of the return of his rival.

And the entire movie takes place between about 11 and 12:15! Kane runs from the saloon to the church to his ex-girlfriend to his successor as town marshal, and no one wants to help him out. Either because they believe Miller should kill him for letting him get away, or because they are mad at Kane for coming back when he had just given up his position as marshal.

The film culminates in Miller’s arrival, and the two battle it out for good old-fashioned patriarchal supremacy. But don’t expect only the guys to have all the fun! Kane’s (and also Miller’s) ex-girlfriend, Helen Ramirez, is a total badass, and also Mexican! (Even the actress, Katy Jurado, is Mexican!) The film takes place in New Mexico Territory.

High Noon went on to win four Oscars, including one for Gary Cooper. It ranks at #211 on the IMDb Top 250 and #27 on AFI’s 100 Films.