I don't have anything really special to offer, but I might as well poke in....
Oscars! I didn't watch the thing (I did last year for the first time in 20, 25 years; I will when they get aroudn to giving David Lynch a lifetime achievement award - meanwhile, I can find better things to do with a Sunday night.) Martin Scorsese wins the big ones, best picture and director - reasonable choices. Unlike a lot of bloggers, I had no problem with any of the nominees - nothing great, but nothing embarrassing, not even Babel or Little Miss Sunshine, which both took a lot of lumps. I don't know - Babel is a mess, but - the direction, and in a lot of ways, the individual stories, save it. And Little Miss Sunshine was funny, and fairly clever, with a great cast - it went in the tank down the stretch (after Arkin's departure), but was amusing getting there. The worst I can say about the nominees is that a lot of better films, that were as popular, mainstream, etc. as these, were available - United 93, Children of Men (I can't expect Inland Empire to get any notice, so I won't complain there) - but unnominated. (Oh - and the three best Foreign Language films I saw, Indigenes, Lives of Others and Pan's Labyrinth - were themselves probably all better than the best picture nominees. So was Volver - how did that get missed for either award?) But that aside - given the Acedemy's track record through the years - the crap that has been nominated and won - I have nothing to complain about this years' crop.
Anyway - with Scorsese's win, I expected an outporuing of "greatest American living director" posts - haven't seen so many... Maybe a decade of complete mediocrity has taken the edge off the Scorsese fans. Still - I must say, the Lawyers, Guns and Money post raises a couple questions I'm interested enough in to answer: who are America's greatest living directers? and, what was the last time the best American (fiction) film won the Oscar?
Director? That's easy, friends. Consider this: I made me a list, the best American film of the year, from 1970 or so on: what do 1977, 1980, 1986, 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2006 have in common? You guessed it - David Lynch films, best of the year, as far as I'm concerned. He has lost nothing - he is still experimenting, exploring - he's as vital as he ever was. So - easily.
2) Scorsese, yes: he has a powerful body of work, and though he is not the director he was in the 70s, he still works, still does good work....
3) This is where things get difficult - actually it's kind of a straight up choice, I think: between Clint Eastwood and the Coen Brothers. The latter get the edge, because, I think, they have simply made the better films. Fargo, Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Big Lebowski are first rate - they have no bad films on the resume (even the Ladykillers is amusing). I tend to overlook them - loving their films - taking them for granted. Odd.
4) Eastwood, then - for the opposite virtue - for his classicism, his work ethic, his ability to make strong, well crafted films that explore big questions (and small) seriously and soberly. His empathy, his modesty - and a series of very good films. None of his films is quite a masterpiece - a couple though, creep into the back of the mind... Since seeing Letters From Iwo Jima, it has been growing in my mind - thinking about things like - the lack of conventional heroism in combat: I thought of that while watching Indigenes - how it builds to a fairly conventional heroic last stand, everything clear and straightforward - there's nothing like that in Letters, the fighting is all dark and confused and, most of the film, you don't see the enemy. It's an interesting choice - more interesting than I gave it credit for when I saw it.... I also want to note, with Forest Whitaker taking home an Oscar himself - that Bird is one of those films I love far more than I ever quite acknowledge....
5) Jim Jarmusch - sounds good - though like some of the others, he seems to have faded a bit. His 80s films are extraordinary - and Dead Man is one of the best films of the 90s - and he's never really made a bad film - but... Yet... I'll take him over the competition - Spielberg? Whose great films are scattered among plenty of mediocrity, and who often ruins his best work, not trusting the audience... Spike Lee? at his best? sure - but there's lots in between the peaks. Coppola? not since the 70s. Hartley? I'll listen to arguments. Anderson and Anderson? The best of the 90s and 00s - though PT has disappeared - and Wes sometimes seems in danger of spinning his wheels. Tarantino? as washed up as Scorsese and he's 20 odd years younger. Gus Van Sant? which Gus Van Sant? might get back into it, I guess. Todd Haynes? Charles Burnett? Noah Baumbach? Terry Gilliam? Lots of choices - it's a pack, behind the leaders....
So - there you have it. I don't think there are any old timers I have forgotten - a few years ago I made a list like this and was reminded, after I did it, that Billy Wilder was still alive - that sort of thing can put a damper on the fun. I don't know how hard I'd fight for this list - other than Lynch and probably Marty...
As for the other question - the last time the best (American) film of the year won the Best Picture Oscar? 1972? The Godfather? I think so.
Anyway - that's that. This is one of those posts that ends up going in a completely different direction than I originally thought. I actually started it looking for a way to post this - a link to a Google video of Todd Haynes' banned classic, Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story. (Via Tram at Talk to Me Harry Winston.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hm. On Iwo Jima-- I was gonna say, back when you initially dismissed it...
While it probably isn't all that ground-breaking relative to Rivette, "nothing that isn't a cliche" is a bit of an overstatement, I think. Although most of what Eastwood shows you've likely seen before, he's arranged the furniture in a new way, at least. Plenty of directors got a lot of mileage out of this--every great filmmaker working within a classical tradition between 1930 and 1960, say)--and I'm glad someone's still doing it, if not as well as, say, Ford or Ozu. I'm glad to see someone working in the tradition without getting to postmodern about it...
The film, briefly-- more than just making battle scenes dark & incomprehensible, it is, more than any other American war film I can think of, singularly devoted to showing how war puts people in an impossible/hopeless situation--which sounds grand and stupid, but consider: American war films come as bleak as Vietnam, where they (a) are about the insanity of the experience or (b) find victory in surviving with one's conscience (representative of a generation's-- or whatever) intact. Eastwood set the agenda with the 'digging our own graves' line. I'd object to the line being too obvious and weighted if the film didn't spend the next couple of hours showing not much more than people ending up in graves...
More specifically, the use of time is interesting. The terms/objectives of the battle are set out early on--every minute the Allies are delayed is a victory. The Japanese forces lasted over a month, and the film could've--pretty safely, I thought--coded that as some sort of victory. But we don't get any sense of time in these terms... instead-- we mostly get people waiting to die.
I was pulling for Clint to beat Marty again.
Post a Comment