It's been a while........now where were we?

"Sorry I got held up....."

Coat!

The above is a quote from one of my favourite ever films - which is never otherwise going to appear on a blog about the Oscars. It was released in 1972, so wasn't going to get a look in with those Italian gangsters and Berlin nightclubbers! - but it has just appeared in Mark Kermode's list of the greatest films for children ever, which has made me very happy indeed! (It is also one of two films that feature the best coat in the history of coats ever - top of my list of movie memorabilia I would love to own. Where is it? Did Jenny Agutter get it back? Does one of Lionel Jeffries kids have it? Did one of Peter Sellers kids take it in revenge when Lynne died? I'm a bit obsessed....)

Anyway, it seemed an appropriate heading, because I've not blogged for a while and it's bothered me. I have three main excuses - one is feeble and the other two are linked.


Feeble Excuse 

Lots of A Level, lots of GCSE, too many late nights prepping and marking. The last thing I wanted to do when I finished was sit down and write more things.... Even I don't quite buy that one, but the fact that my last post was in March, when things really kicked in exam-wise, suggests that there's probably something in it. Anyway, it's the summer holidays now. So that excuse has gone!


Better Excuses....
Ok, these two are definitely linked - and sort of took over my whole mindset when ploughing through the next few films on the list.

Firstly, I was not looking forward to the 90s. The 70s had been great, the 80s were ok (and brilliant in
parts) and I was enjoying the personal nostalgia. However, the 90s was the decade that I really got into films. I bought Empire every fortnight, I went to the cinema regularly and several of my favourite films of all time are from the 90s. However, most of them didn't win Best Picture. And a lot of stuff that I either didn't really like or didn't really want to watch again did win.

Secondly, I started watching lots more films from the 30s and 40s and I would much rather be blogging about them instead - but I've got to finish this challenge first. The more the 90s films were annoying me (apart from a few gems) the more I watched the old stuff!

At the time of writing this, we've just watched 2005 (an absolute classic!) so I have a lot of catching up to do. Therefore - I need to get the following out of my system:


Six Other Classic Best Picture Nominees from the 30s and 40s:

Ok - here are my rules: 
1. Must have been nominated for Best Picture (so not Laura or Now Voyager!)
2. Must be something I hadn't seen before starting the challenge (so not 42nd Street or Top Hat or Double Indemnity!)

I've watched about a dozen or so that fit these criteria - here's my favourite six (I couldn't get it down to five). And, yes, they all star strong women doing feisty things! Something that is sadly lacking in the 90s (Kate Winslet in a ballgown with an axe is the feistiest it gets!).

In chronological order....


Jezebel (1938)

Lady in Red.....

We've watched a lot of Bette Davis since Margo Channing topped off the female-dominated 40s in grand style! This is not my favourite of them (after All About Eve, that's probably Now Voyager) but it's the only one that was nominated for Best Picture and it won Bette an Oscar.

A year before Gone With The Wind, Bette plays a mid-19th Century stroppy Southern Belle (Julie) that could give Scarlet a run for her money. In fact, the central maguffin for the first half of the film is a scarlet dress which she wears to deliberately cause a scandal. Although the film is in black and white, you can just tell how scarlet that dress is!

Anyway, Julie's scandalous behaviour scares off her suitable (but wet) suitor and then, with yet more inappropriate clothing, she behaves very badly again when he brings his new wife home a few years later. This would have been enough melodrama in itself, but then everyone starts dying of yellow fever and it all gets rather dark.....

It's a very 30s drama, with a dark and depressing edge that had generally gone by the middle of the 40s (maybe a consequence of WW2?). Without Bette it would probably have been too overblown and overacted, but she is superb as usual.

This one lost out to You Can't Take It With You - and was also up against The Adventures of Robin Hood. Never a real contender, but worth watching for Bette.


Gaslight (1944)

Paula suspects something

This film is now most notable for being the origin of the term "gaslighting" which is officially defined as "a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception and sanity". And that's pretty much the plot of the film.

Paula (Ingrid Bergman) brings her new husband Gregory (Charles Boyer) to live in the house where her Aunt had been murdered several years earlier. Various things start to happen, she loses things and lets her husband down - things aren't going well between them. She starts to notice that the lights dim in the house at certain times with no explanation. When she questions this, Gregory tells her she's imagining things - and she starts to think she must be going mad.....

This is a great film in its own right. It's a good psychological thriller (there's also Joseph Cotten as the detective investigating the Aunt's murder) and has superb performances at its heart, including Bergman's Oscar winning triumph. It's also a really important film and, despite being old and in black and white, it should really be shown and watched more often - because, sadly, the concept of "gaslighting" is at least as relevant and prevalent now as it was when the film was made.

This is one of two films that are far superior to that year's winner, Going My Way (the other being Double Indemnity). Oh, and it's got Angela Landsbury in it too!


Mildred Pierce (1945)

Daughter Dearest

If we've got Bette Davis, there has to be Joan Crawford in there somewhere - so here she is, winning her Oscar (just the one, Joan, and don't you forget it!). I'm Team Bette all the way, but I don't begrudge her this one. By 1945, Joan was "box office poison" and, in real life, was already in full "mommie dearest" mode. This film marked the first kick start to her career, still more than a decade away from the psycho-hag films she ended with.

This is a great film. It's directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and, along with Joan, we also have an Oscar-nominated Eve Arden, a fabulously bitchy Ann Blyth (and a forever typecast Butterfly McQueen!). Thus showing yet again that the lack of good movie roles for women isn't a legacy of a bygone era, it's something that happened AFTER the golden age of Hollywood.

This is another psychological thriller - did Mildred shoot her husband, and if so, why? Told through flashbacks it's an almost perfect mix of whodunnit and whydunnit. The hard edge that Joan has works well here, as we wonder how far we are meant to be sympathetic towards her. The film shows family breakdown and family politics really well and, in Ann Blyth's Veda, a really complex and interesting relationship between mother and daughter (ironically, considering how Joan played her real life role of mother!)

Joan won the Oscar but the film lost out to Lost Weekend. Lost Weekend is the better film (my Billy Wilder bias only gets thrown when Joe Mankiewicz shows up!) but this one is also a corker!



The Razor's Edge (1946)

This is not going to end well.....

This is one that I knew very little about, but it sounded intriguing so I bought it! It's directed by Edmund Goulding, whose most famous film is the wonderful Grand Hotel more than a decade earlier. It's based on a Somerset Maugham novel and is quite a complicated (and arguably overlong) saga focusing on the complicated and failed relationships of a group of people - spanning several decades, at least three continents and the 1929 stock market crash. A lot goes on in two and a half hours, and I can't even begin to try and explain it here, so I won't try.

It has a cracking cast - Tyrone Power is very serious (and very good) with not a swash in sight to buckle. Gene Tierney is fabulously selfish and bitchy in the lead female role and Anne Baxter is also superb as their tragic friend, in the role for which she won her Oscar. Somerset Maugham appears as a character in the film (as he does in his own book) providing a clever narrative link - and it all ends tragically, yet wistfully, in the South of France.

Of course it's nowhere near as good as Best Years Of Our Lives, or It's A Wonderful Life (which it clearly isn't, at least not for the women in the film), but it's worth a watch, particularly for the performances of the three mentioned above.

(Apparently it was remade in the 80s with Bill Murray and Theresa Russell. Not even Bill Murray liked it. I'll give that one a miss!)


The Heiress (1949)

The joys and pains of love

It is quite remarkable to think that, at the time of writing this blog, the star of this film is still alive. 103 year old Olivia de Havilland made her first film 84 years ago, and won her Oscar for this film, 70 years ago. I'd never heard of it before we started our Oscar challenge, but I've now watched it twice and I really like it.

It's based on the Henry James book Washington Square and centres around Catherine, the nearly-not-quite-an-old-maid daughter of an overbearing father (played by Ralph Richardson). She is constantly compared unfavourably to her dead mother and is made to believe she is plain, awkward and lacking in personality. Along comes a young Montgomery Clift who falls for her - and she falls back. Dad reckons he's just after her money and does all he can to break up the relationship. Catherine's aunt Lavinia thinks otherwise, and does all she can to try and keep them together.

Catherine eventually decides her fate for herself.....and I'm not going to give the ending away!

Olivia is fabulous in this film. She is, of course, a beautiful woman in real life - and yet she manages to act plain and unattractive rather than being made up to look that way. This really adds to the idea that her misfortunes are all nurture rather than nature - and it's all about the acting. The way she walks, holds herself, looks at people, speaks apologetically etc. Wonderful stuff!

One of Andy's absolute favourites, All The Kings Men, won Best Picture that year. Probably the right decision, but this one is also a classic!


A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

Does what it says on the tin!

My last choice is also from 1949. Joseph L Mankiewicz proved himself a worthy rival to Billy Wilder across two years in which he won two Screenplay awards and two Best Director awards. The other two were for my absolute favourite Best Picture winner, All About Eve. However, he did the same thing the year before with this film which seems to have been nearly forgotten about - possibly because it didn't bag the big prize.

It's not as good as All About Eve (few things are) but it has a lot in common with it. There are three strong women as the focus of the film (with a fourth just as a voiceover, voiced by AAE's Celeste Holm) and their husbands play second fiddle in the plot, but are still strong enough characters to not be caricatures. Thelma Ritter is also thrown into the mix as a wisecracking housekeeper. So far, all things I love about AAE!

The plot is a clever one - as the title suggests, three wives all receive a letter from a friend of theirs, the unseen Addie Ross, who tells them all that she is running away with one of their husbands. The three women receive this letter just as they board a riverboat for a day-long school picnic. They spend the day wondering which husband it's going to be - leading to flashbacks of how each of them got to know their husbands and each other.

The rest of the film feels like a bit of a dress rehearsal for All About Eve. It's got the same feel to it, including great dialogue between women and other women, and women and their men. It's got a lovely mix of drama and comedy and characters that are likeable enough for you to be rooting for them, but not so much that you really care too much about their fate. It's not as slick as AAE and it does wander and drift a bit in the middle, but I really like it. It's a shame that it doesn't get seen more.


Well - that turned out to be very cathartic. I feel that I now have the strength to get back to Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson etc..... Oh joy!

Review of the 80s

The 80s - Extraordinary People

Considering the glitzy materialism of the decade, every single one of these films has something much more personal at its core. They are all, first and foremost, about people dealing with the situations they are put in. Four of them are about famous people - athletes, musicians and political leaders. The other six are about people dealing with what life has given them and coping with the relationships they are forming. They are all quite different films so I was surprised to find this common thread running through them. I was also pleasantly surprised by the decade as a whole - but this focus on relationships in these films is probably why, with just two "meh" exceptions, I liked all these films.

This is the first decade in our challenge that I remember personally. In the 70s I generally visited the cinema to watch Disney films, but by the 80s I was watching some Oscar nominees on first release. ET is probably the earliest of these - and by the second half of the decade I was visiting the cinema pretty frequently and buying Empire magazine each month. Rain Man is the first Best Picture winner I saw on first release (twice) and I am so pleased that I still love it as much as I did at the time.

Here's my awards for the 80s - bring on the 90s!

My Top Ten (as they stand today!) is as follows:

1. Rain Man
2. The Last Emperor
3. Chariots of Fire
4. Amadeus
5. Gandhi
6. Driving Miss Daisy
7. Platoon
8. Terms of Endearment
9. Ordinary People
10. Out of Africa

(numbers 6,7 and 8 are fairly interchangeable!)

Best Picture

Nominees:   

Rain Man
Chariots of Fire
The Last Emperor
Amadeus
Gandhi

And the winner is.....

Rain Man

Amadeus is more impressive, The Last Emperor has completely knocked me sideways by how much I loved it - but with me and Rain Man it's personal.

Best Director


Nominees:   

Richard Attenborough
Milos Forman
Bernardo Bertolucci
Oliver Stone
Barry Levinson


And the winner is.....

Milos Forman and Bernardo Bertolucci

I'm going with a tie. I can't decide between the two. Both of them completely inhabit the film that they are directing and put themselves through a fair bit to get the film that they want. The stories of the actual shoots, being on location in some interesting and difficult places, working with diverse sets of actors - both of them would make fascinating films in their own right. (I suppose I could also put Dickie in that category, but his directing feels less passionate than these two.)


Best Actor


Nominees:   

Ian Charleson
Ben Kingsley
Dustin Hoffman
Tom Cruise
F Murray Abraham
Tom Hulce
Timothy Hutton

(I'm cheating here with the number of nominees, but I couldn't leave any of them out - and, technically, two of them count as Supporting actors, so that's ok!)

And the winner is.....

F Murray Abraham - for totally stealing the show from its title character!


Best Actress

Nominees:   

Shirley MacLaine
Deborah Winger
Meryl Streep
Jessica Tandy
Mary Tyler Moore

And the winner is.....

Shirley MacLaine

Another decade where most of the best performances by women were in films other than those that took the big prize. It was a struggle to find five nominees - and I'm not really that keen on the performances of two of them! Sissy Spacek, Jodie Foster and Sally Field all won Best Actress Oscars in the 80s for great performances - but not for any of our ten films. Shirley MacLaine and Jessica Tandy were the only two actresses to win Oscars in Best Picture films this decade - and Shirley had the edge!

Best Non-Winning Picture

Nominees: 

Dead Poets Society
The Mission
The Color Purple
ET
Raging Bull

And the winner is.....

The Color Purple - because it really should have won something!

(I've limited this category to films that got a nomination but didn't win. If I'd widened it to all films I don't think I would have been able to cope. But if I had, I would probably have given it to Do The Right Thing.....)

Worst Picture

Nominees:    

Out of Africa

Ordinary People

And the winner is.....

Out of Africa (probably)

Neither of them are actually bad. I just found them both a bit boring, although they both had lots of redeeming features. I keep changing my mind between the two....

Driving Miss Daisy 1989

The Film:

This is widely considered to be the worst winner ever. Not necessary the worst film to have ever won, but the worst decision ever made. One look at the other nominees (and a few non-nominees) and I'm inclined to agree. Mark Kermode points out that not only is it not the best film of the year, it's not the best Morgan Freeman film of the year.                                                                                                                                          Having said all that, I'm quite fond of it - I really like both the leads and I love the soundtrack (another great bit of Zimmer, that wasn't even nominated!). However, it's been a long time since I've seen it and I'm very aware that time has probably not been kind to it. It is, after all, a story about a black man chauffeuring a white woman around everywhere - a story that would have felt nostalgic and worthy in the eighties, but is likely to reek of stereotypes, white virtue-signalling and the clumsily well-intentioned "magic negro" trope in the far more enlightened present. I can't see any reason why I would ever think it was a worthy winner, but I'm going into it with an open mind and I hope to be pleasantly surprised!

EDIT: I'm putting the finishing touches to this post in the week following the 2019 Oscars - where Spike Lee yet again lost out to a film about a chauffeur. The general consensus at the moment is that Green Book didn't deserve to win Best Picture and it has been pointed out (including by Spike Lee himself) that the only thing that has changed in nearly thirty years is that it's now a white guy chauffeuring a black guy around. I'll let you know what I think when we get to the 2018 films....(although I am still gutted that Roma didn't win, for many reasons!)

The Ceremony:

After the fiasco of the year before, the ceremony on 26th March 1990 switched back to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and got itself a new producer and an actual host. This was the first of a total of nine ceremonies hosted by Billy Crystal (second only to Bob Hope) and you can see from this opening monologue why he kept being invited back. The last minute of this clip is a little musical montage of jokes about the Best Picture nominees - the first of several such "bits" in Crystal's ceremonies.

Despite the far superior ceremony, the ratings didn't pick up this year. It seems that people just weren't willing to take a chance after the horrors of the year before!

Other Notable Winners That Night:

Driving Miss Daisy is one of only three (ed - now four!) Best Picture winners to not have even received a nomination for its director - and the first since Grand Hotel in 1932. Best Director went where many people thought Best Picture should have also gone, to Oliver Stone for Born on the Fourth of July. Jessica Tandy became the oldest person at that time to win a competitive acting oscar, and Daniel Day Lewis took the other big prize (the first of his three) for My Left Foot.

Two of my absolute favourite non-English language films were nominated this year. I'm sad that Jesus de Montreal didn't win, but it was beaten by an absolute classic that still tops lots of lists of Best Foreign Language films ever. Cinema Paradiso is an absolute delight of a film - it's been far too long since I last saw it. It needs a rewatch!

Best Song:

We get to the end of the decade and we enter a new era of Best Song winners. Throughout the 90s pretty much every other winner is from an animated Disney film - here's one that jumps the gun slightly!

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Fight the power!

I don't dislike Driving Miss Daisy. However, I like every other one of the nominees more - Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society (which I was obsessed with at the time!), My Left Foot and the lovely Field of Dreams.

There's also a fair few other films that I'd put in the mix. The aforementioned Cinema Paradiso and Jesus de Montreal for starters. And The Little Mermaid for that matter. And Morgan Freeman's other film, Glory. Not to mention one of the greatest romcoms of them all, When Harry Met Sally.

However, I have to go with the criminally non-nominated Do The Right Thing. Spike Lee's early masterpiece. Not just because it's the done thing now to say that it was robbed, but because it is an amazingly good film. The first really hot and sticky day of the year (they do happen sometimes in Yorkshire!) and my first thought when I get in from work is to stick this on. I love it!


Our Verdict:

Road trip!

Ok. I feel I should start this with a few disclaimers. I am neither black nor Jewish. I'm not American and I wasn't born until the very end of the timeline this film spans. I'm not from a social background that would either have servants or be servants (well, not for several generations). This is not, in any way shape or form, my story. I take on board everything that critics say about the awkwardness of the way this story is told - especially the "magic negro" character that is portrayed as the hero and therefore makes everything else ok. I get that - however, I think there are other points being made in this film that get overlooked because of these criticisms, and it's these points that make it a good film (not a great film, but a good film).

One of many reasons why making America
great again is a nonsense

Firstly, there are a lot of parallels between this film and last year's winner, Rain Man. They are both basically Road Trip movies about two characters, their relationship with each other and the effect it has on them both. If you look at it this way, Driving Miss Daisy has a lot to say and a lot to like about it. Just as Rain Man worked because it wasn't a film about disability, this film also works as something other than a film about race. It's more of a stretch here because the story directly refers to race as an issue, but I see this as just part (a necessary part) of a wider story being told.

I admit, I had a teacher moment here....

And this is where one massive plot point makes all the difference. I'd completely forgotten (and, arguably, so have modern critics) that Miss Daisy is Jewish. She has also experienced racism and she understands it. She doesn't see the difference between her and Hoke as one of race at all, but more one of economics or just general circumstance. This is seen most clearly in the way she reacts when she realises that Hoke can't read. No pity or distain for a poor unfortunate "lesser" human but a little bit of righteous anger as a former teacher, and a resolve to fix this particular injustice because she can. Jessica Tandy's Oscar-winning performance really helps here, as it does throughout the film. Morgan Freeman's performance is also excellent. Because these characters are played by these actors the whole thing just about works.

Friendship takes many forms

In conclusion, Driving Miss Daisy is probably not as good as it should be, and is definitely not as bad as it could be. It's also a better film than film history remembers it to be. In terms of the way its themes are handled, it is very much of its time. In terms of the themes themselves it is sadly still all too relevant.

(Which, ultimately and ironically, is probably the strongest argument for Do The Right Thing as best film of the year.....)

Rain Man 1988

The Film:

I was sixteen in 1988 and I saw a *lot* of films at the cinema that year. Rain Man was by far my favourite and it has been in my Top Ten of all time ever since.

So, whilst I also have previous winners such as All About Eve and The Godfather in my Top Ten, this is the first in our challenge that I have been pretty fanatical about since it first came out. Which means I'm not sure what I'm going to make of it in the context of this challenge.

I've not been keeping count of how many times I've seen it, but it's somewhere between ten and twenty times. Out of all the films on our list, there's only (possibly) The Sound of Music that can match up to that.

However, it's been a few years now and we are in a time of very different sensibilities when it comes to the portrayal of disability. I know a lot more about Autism now (as do most people!) and have more personal experience through students and friends. I am really worried that Hoffman's portrayal of Raymond Babbitt isn't going to cut it for me any more - and even the possibility of that makes me really sad.

The Ceremony:

I'm writing this on the eve of this year's Oscar ceremony. After various controversies, it's going ahead without a host this year. The last time this happened was on March 29th 1989 at the Shrine Auditorium. In the greater scheme of things, the ceremony should be remembered as the first time the words "And the Oscar goes to...." were used instead of "And the Winner is...". Also, it's the first year that Bruce Vilanch took on main writing duties - a role he has held ever since.

However, it's always going to be more remembered for the Opening Sequence (the BBC even wrote an article about it this year!) and the fact that it practically killed Allen Carr's career (not that Alan Carr, the other Allen Carr...). It's gloriously awful - have a drink or two before you watch it, or be prepared to pick your jaw up from the floor!

Other Notable Winners That Night:

Dustin Hoffman won the second of his Oscars, and Jodie Foster won the first of hers (for The Accused). Supporting Oscars went to Kevin Kline and Geena Davis. Rain Man took home four awards all together, but didn't even get a nomination for Tom Cruise - and Hans Zimmer missed out on the Best Score Award (even though it's one of my favourite scores of all time - but what do I know!)

Probably the most notable winner of the night was in the category of Animated Short. The winner was Tin Toy - the first of 19 awards (to date) for the mighty Pixar. Here it is, serving both as a marvel of technology and reminder of how far we've come in thirty years:

Best Song:

Three of my favourite ever Theme Songs to films are sung by Carly Simon (the other two are Nobody Does it Better and Coming Around Again). This one won her an Oscar and it still sounds wonderful today, even if it does mean that the first five minutes of Working Girl are by far the best five minutes!

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

I'll leave you to write your own caption for this one....in French!

Obviously I'm happy with the winner here - it's one of my favourite films! However, there are some other worthy contenders.

The other nominations were for The Accidental Tourist, Working Girl, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons. Objectively, Mississippi Burning is the best of those films, but I had nearly as much of a thing for Dangerous Liaisons as I did for Rain Man - so it's getting the runner up prize for me. (I liked to make out that my love for Dangerous Liaisons was entirely due to studying French literature at A Level at the time. I bought the book in French and went on about it in a really pretentious way. However, I never actually read it - and I've since seen Cruel Intentions far more often than Dangerous Liaisons, so I'm guessing there were other reasons....)

Our Verdict:

He's an excellent driver!

Counting cards

I know times are changing and both the understanding and portrayal of disability has come a long way in thirty years. However, I am going to continue to defend this one to the hilt. Firstly, this isn't a film about autism - it's a film about a particular autistic person. Raymond's character is based on Kim Peek, who worked closely with Hoffman to help him prepare for the role. This makes all the difference - particularly because it means I can get down off my defensive high horse and focus on what the film is really about - the relationship between two brothers and how one needs the other in order to see and experience the world fully, to understand his emotions and how to interact fully with other people. And - clever but gloriously subtle twist - the brother that needs that is Charlie, not Raymond. That, in a nutshell, is why I love this film so much and why I still love it thirty years later. It's also why I think Tom Cruise should have won Best Supporting Actor. I can't believe he wasn't nominated: if you compare his performance with Kevin Kline's in A Fish Called Wanda, how can you possibly give KK the award?

The screenshot that sums up the whole film!

Ok - I've got my big bugbears about other people's takes on this film off my chest. I'll calm down now. However, the relationship between Raymond and Charlie and the stunning performances of both actors are, in my view, the best things about Rain Man. The film could so easily have been overly-sentimental and mawkish, but it isn't. It could also have been really insensitive and ill-informed (even if it was well meaning) but it isn't. It could have been far too serious and sure of its own importance, but it isn't. The script (which also won an Oscar) makes sure this doesn't happen.

Twelve minutes to Wapner.....

I still find Rain Man an easy film to watch, and an enjoyable one. It's incredibly quotable and much parodied but it stands up to both of these things. It has a lovely streak of humour running through it and yet it reduces me to tears at the end every time I watch it. The cinematography is beautiful - for a film that is so character-driven, so much loving attention is paid to how it looks. The musical score is one of my favourite of all time and gave Hans Zimmer the first of his eleven nominations to date. The score is a good example of what I like about the film this time round - it's incredibly 1980s, but it hasn't become dated.

Ultimately, Rain Man is a variation on one of my favourite film tropes - the Road Trip Buddy Movie. It comes a close second to Priscilla Queen of the Desert in this genre. The two films have more in common than I previously realised! And I recommend them both to you.

The Last Emperor 1987

The Film:

This is not one I'm particularly looking forward to. I don't know a great deal about it, but what I've heard makes it sound very much like it's "not my sort of thing".

First of all, it's very long - over three hours in the version we've got. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (Gone With The Wind, The Godfather) - but it also gets praised for its sweeping cinematography and cast of thousands, which makes me think rather more of Lawrence of Arabia or Ben Hur.....

All the reviews I've read talk about how beautiful it looks - and all the pictures I've seen show a two year old emperor dressed up to the nines in front of several hundred troops of beautifully attired minions. It doesn't bode well. But I'll keep an open mind!

The Ceremony:

April 11th 1988 at the Shrine Auditorium. It was moved to the new venue mainly because it had a larger audience capacity. Everything bigger and better in the 80s! It was hosted by Chevy Chase and went on for three and a half hours.

The show was affected by the big Writers' Guild strike, which was about one month in to it's five month run. Some of the script for the event was already written, but the rest of proceedings were covered in less formal fashion by a variety of Stand-up Comedians.

Other Notable Winners That Night:

And very tasty it was too.....

None of the actors in The Last Emperor were even nominated, so the acting awards went elsewhere. Moonstruck took the female awards, for Cher and Olympia Dukakis. The male awards went to Michael Douglas for Wall Street (which was criminally overlooked for Best Picture!) and Sean Connery for the also shockingly overlooked The Untouchables.

Best Foreign Language Film went to a personal favourite, Babette's Feast - adapted from a novella written by none other than Karen Blixen (as seen a couple of years ago wafting aimlessly around Africa). It's a beautiful film and I am very fortunate to have spent an evening in excellent company sharing as close to the exact menu as is human(e)ly possible. (No actual turtles were consumed!)

The Animation award went to something else that I have a fairly strong nostalgic memory of. Probably from a retreat or something. It's called The Man Who Planted Trees and it's a beautiful thing:

Best Song:

There can't be many people in the western world that don't know this one. The number of people of about my age who had this as their first dance at their wedding must be pretty high. Here's Baby, definitely not in a corner:

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline - what's not to like!

If ever there was a year to argue that the Best Picture List should be lengthened again, this is it. Until I actually watched The Last Emperor, I not only reckoned that it probably wasn't a worthy winner, but I had a whole different list of five nominees in my head.

The actual other four nominees are: Broadcast News, Fatal Attraction, Hope and Glory and Moonstruck. Nothing really wrong with that, but I would have gone for Wall Street, The Untouchables, Good Morning Vietnam, Babette's Feast and - the one that gets my vote - Cry Freedom. Attenborough's other big epic. I actually do think it's better than Gandhi. The two leads are both incredibly good, the story is compelling and really well paced - and the funeral scene is the reason I cry whenever I hear the South African National Anthem (it's happened several times at athletics events!)

Our Verdict:

Ahhh. Grasshopper!

Ok, I admit it. I was about as wrong as I could possibly be. In fact, I don't think the difference between my expectation of a film and what I actually thought of it has ever been so vast! With the greatest respect to Gordon Gekko, Eliot Ness and all the others mentioned above, I was so wrong in thinking they had all been robbed blind. Puyi is the rightful heir of all things Oscar in 1987!


I have absolutely no idea why the marketing for this film was the way it was - yes, it's gorgeous to look at, it's got massive crowd scenes, beautiful costumes and amazing cinematography. And it's got a small child dressed up to the nines - for about the first half hour or so of the three hours plus running time. But it's got all sorts of other, far more impressive and interesting things going on that I was never told about. And it is a fantastic film!

Not just a three-year-old in a dress.

Firstly, this is a film with a lot of heart. It follows the life story of Puyi from his birth through six extraordinary decades of personal discovery and political change. We see most of it through his eyes, and this really captures the feeling of constantly being a pawn in everyone else's political games. Puyi - at all stages of his life - is such a compellingly written and acted character that I got sucked into his story very quickly. For a character whose life was so extraordinarily different to that of most people watching the film, his struggles and reactions are very relateable.

Sumptuous film, complicated story - but ultimately
just about flawed characters in difficult situations

Because of this, the political story that runs alongside - and gathers pace as the film unfolds - is totally compelling! Although I profess to be fascinated by early 20th Century History, I know shockingly little about how events unfolded in the Far East. This film has gone a long way to fill those gaps for me. It could have ended up being very complicated, technical and wordy - but it didn't. Mainly because we saw things as Puyi did, but also because of a few other equally compelling characters that really made the film for me.

Peter O'Toole is, quite famously, the only Westerner among the main cast (another red flag before I watched film!). He did his job well, but was quite underwhelming. Apart from Puyi himself, it is the women who steal the show. Puyi's wife, "secondary consort" and cousin (the wonderfully named spy, Eastern Jewel) are all superb - again, both in the way their parts are written and how they are played. Between them they hold the second half of the film together - not because they are female characters providing some sort of light relief from the political shenanigans, but because they are right at the heart of all the political shenanigans. And they are brilliant!

Sisters (well, cousins sort-of) doing it for themselves.

In conclusion then - what a fantastic film! Which leaves me wondering what on earth was going on with the marketing? Nothing I had ever read or seen about The Last Emperor gave me any real reason to want to see it. I even decided to buy a cheap import DVD rather than the more expensive lavish BluRay, because I reckoned we'd probably never watch it again. How wrong I was! - anybody want a cheap import DVD version, because next time I want to watch it on remastered BluRay!

Platoon 1986

The Film:

It's another 'Nam film. And one that I haven't seen (although I feel as though I should have). Whilst it would never be a genre I would automatically choose to watch, I've been pleasantly surprised and impressed by the war films we've watched so far, including the 'Nam one (The Deer Hunter).

However, from what I know about it, I'm not sure that this is going to be quite the same. First of all, it's Oliver Stone so it's going to be brutal and serious - the word "visceral" springs to mind. Secondly, I know that it all takes place actually out in Vietnam, so I'm guessing it's not going to focus on the wider back story of these men at all. That might be what makes it great, but that doesn't really appeal to me.

Other than that, I know we've got Barber's Adagio, raining bullets, lots of sweaty jungle scenes and a very young Charlie Sheen (and possibly several other soon-to-be-famous 20somethings?). I'm determined to keep an open mind!

The Ceremony:

There was continued concern this year about ratings, leading to all sorts of production interference. Probably the most significant was the attempt to reduce the running time of the ceremony by introducing a 45 second limit for acceptance speeches, much to the annoyance of several recipients then and since. The broadcast still ran to nearly three and a half hours. The ceremony was co-presented by Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn and Paul Hogan in an attempt to keep it fresh, funny and appealing to younger viewers. I'll let you be the judge:

Other Notable Winners That Night:

About time too!

Of course I'm slightly biased here - but this is the year to celebrate the fact that the lovely Mr Newman finally did get his Oscar! For playing Fast Eddie in the sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money. He's sixty years old in this picture and still very handsome.

Best Actress went to Marlee Matlin, who I know more for her unfortunate lipreading mistakes in Seinfeld and for being a kickass politician in The West Wing. She won for Children of a Lesser God, her first acting credit. Some people cried political correctness, but I think that's unfair - she's really good.

The other big winner this year was Hannah and Her Sisters - Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest took the other acting awards and Woody Allen got Original Screenplay.


Best Song:

The thing is, I love Berlin (both the city and the band). I could give you a list of at least a dozen songs by Berlin that I much prefer  to this one. And it wasn't even the best song on the Top Gun Soundtrack (hooray for Kenny Loggins) But it was everywhere in 1986 and it was the one that won the Oscar. (Although it is now always sung along to in our house with the words to Walking On The Moon - thanks Peter Kay!)

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

It's an RE thing....I can't help it!

I don't really disgree that Platoon was a worthy winner, but there were so many good films released in this year. I'm finding it hard to pick a favourite out of the nominees and I may still change my mind. I've seen all the other nominees and like them all - Hannah and Her Sisters, Children of a Lesser God, A Room With a View and The Mission. I'm going to honour my roots as a Catholic and an RE teacher and go with The Mission. But it's a close call.

It was also the year of Aliens, which is arguably a better film than all five nominees put together - certainly if you consider impact, longevity and technical achievement as well as good acting, directing and storytelling. We also had Stand By Me, Blue Velvet and My Beautiful Laundrette, among others. Take your pick!

Our Verdict:

My irrational dislike of both these two really helped!

As I hoped, this film is firmly in the category of films that I rate as really good - and yet can't really say that I like. It is a great film and I'm very pleased that I finally watched it. I recommend it to others that haven't seen it yet. But I won't be in a hurry to see it again.

It's Oliver Stone - and if you know his work and know what Platoon is about then you can pretty much work out exactly what the film is going to be. Considering this was the first time I watched it, the feel of the whole thing, the storytelling, the characters and the shocking scenes were all things that I was expecting. That's not to say that it was any less impressive or shocking because of this - I was both impressed and shocked in equal measure.

It's difficult not to compare Platoon to the previous 'Nam winner, The Deerhunter. I think I still prefer the earlier film, but this one is very different and all the better for it. Unlike Deerhunter's three-act structure of home-away-home again, Platoon is just one relentless, claustrophobic trek through the jungle and the horrors within. We get to know something about our main characters, but we hear it directly from them - we never actually see them in their natural setting, just in their titular Platoon. It makes for a very different film, and I like that.

The horrors of war

There is no flinching from the reality of the brutality of war - and it is very clear that, if there is a classic "baddie", it is war itself rather than one side or the other. Our so-called heroes (and, to an American audience they would have been "our boys") do some horrific and inhuman things to innocent civilians that they come across. Stone tries to suggest some of the reasons for their actions, but never tries to excuse them.

If this image had sound, it would have
been written by Samuel Barber

Several of the characters are also ambiguous in their morals. We're left to wonder if they really are that evil and heartless - or if their fear and false bravado is the reason. Of the three main characters, two are played by actors I have an irrational dislike of. In the case of Tom Berenger (I can't get over the ending of Looking For Mr Goodbar, so he just gives me the creeps) this probably helps. He plays the psychotic war-addled Sgt Barnes brilliantly. With Willem Dafoe I feel a tad unfair - he's great as someone who shows almost the flipside reaction to that of Barnes, which leads to the epic image (and soundtrack) that most people associate with Platoon.

Charlie Sheen pre-Tiger Blood

The real revelation is 20 year old Charlie Sheen showing what a chip off the old block he had the potential to be before the sex, drugs and tiger blood got in the way. He's the real heart of the film for me and his character made all the difference. There were some great films in 1986. This one isn't my favourite, but I'm happy to agree that it might just be the best one.

Out of Africa 1985

The Film:

This is one that I've not seen before. Or if I have then I've completely forgotten about it. I'm actually not looking forward to it very much at all - but I'm hoping that my preconceptions will be proved wrong.

The think is, I don't know why I'm not keen, except that all I've seen or heard about the film is lots of moody shots of people on African plains. And Meryl Streep's slightly un-nerving accent.

Firstly, I like both Streep and Redford. If the film is mainly these two, then it can't be that bad. Secondly, I like the director, Sydney Pollack. He did They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Tootsie and the lovely remake of Sabrina. (And he was Will's dad on Will and Grace!).

I also really love Babette's Feast, which was written by Karen Blixen, the character that Streep plays in this. That should be enough to keep me interested and happy. Surely?

The Ceremony:

Exactly fifty-two weeks after the previous awards - March 24th 1986, at the Dorothy Chandler pavilion. This time it was a triple-header of presenters. Jane Fonda, Alan Alda and Robin Williams. It ran only one minute longer than last year, coming in at 3 hours and 11 minutes. There were concerns about falling TV ratings in recent years, so a lot of time and money was thrown at this year's ceremony which included various song and dance numbers - including the one here, which included Howard Keel, Debbie Reynolds, June Allyson, Leslie Caron, Esther Williams, Cyd Charisse etc etc.

Oh, and it wasn't the year that Cher won an Oscar - but it was the year that she wore *that* dress (see below).

Other Notable Winners That Night:

One of these two won an Oscar - the other
one won all the headlines!

First of all, we need to talk about the notable non-winner of the night. The Color Purple had eleven nominations, but didn't win a single Oscar. Some people have put it down to the Spielberg effect (he did crowd-friendly blockbusters, not Oscar films...) and others blame the predominant African-American theme of the film and the predominant Whiteness of the Academy - a criticism that still has some justification today. Maybe it was just bad luck - who knows!

On the plus side for diversity, Best Actor went to William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman - the first time an acting award was given to someone playing an openly LGBT character. Don Ameche was one of the oldest ever winners, taking Supporting Actor aged 77.

However, he wasn't the oldest nominee - John Huston was 79 when he was nominated for directing Prizzi's Honor. His daughter Anjelica won Supporting Actress, becoming the first ever third-generation winner (Grandad Walter won back in 1948, before she was born)

Best Song:

We're still in a golden era of Movie Songs. My choice this year would have been Huey Lewis and the News (but, then, I'm a Back to the Future geek, so it would be!). The Academy went with Lionel Richie for Say You, Say Me from White Nights. But it does mean we get to look at some cross-genre dancing with Hines and Baryshnikov! 

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Poor Celie....

Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Prizzi's Honor and Witness were all nominated. Of those I've only seen Witness - and I really like it. And then we have The Color Purple which would have been my winner. Great film, shockingly overlooked in favour of a bunch of white people in Africa! I think Steven, Whoopi and Oprah have probably just about got over it by now, but it's still not right. (And I shall return to this theme in a few years' time when the best film of the year is almost completely ignored for possibly similar reasons.....)

1.21 gigawatts of awesome!

On a lighter note, this was the year of Back to the Future which is still in my all time Top Ten. Spielberg again (producing this time) and definitely not regarded as Best Picture material (although director Bob Zemeckis went on to direct a winner a few years later). However, it is now regarded as a classic and is still watched and loved by new generations. And it wipes the floor with Meryl and co!


Our Verdict:

Take two bottles into the shower? Nope, just
Robert Redford and a great big jug of water!

Meh. Can I just leave that as my review? Just "Meh"? I'm struggling to say very much more about it. If I had really disliked it (like "Tom Jones", "Gigi" etc) then I'd have plenty to say. If I'd really loved it I could tell you all the reasons why. But there's actually very little wrong with this one. It's just "meh".

I'll try and put it into pros and cons to explain why I pretty much come out entirely neutral about the whole thing.

Pros:
1. The acting and directing is all great. I can't really argue with that. I like Redford, Streep and Pollack - and they all do what they do very well in this film.
2. The landscape is beautiful and it is really well shot. This film is lovely to look at - and that does make a difference. Add in the John Barry score and the overall effect is impressive.

Ok, I admit, the interactions with the tribespeople
are great!

3. It is a film about a strong woman and that character comes across well. (Said woman is also the writer of Babette's Feast, which is a plus for me!). This is shown particularly well when she meets with the local tribes people and Streep just about redeems the film in these scenes. Apart from Aurora and Emma, there haven't been many strong women in our winners since Margo, Eve and co - so this is definitely a plus!
4. There is a fabulous wind-up gramophone that appears in several scenes. It's just that little bit nicer than the one I own, and it perks me up every time I see it.

The star of the film is the one on the left. The far left.
That beautiful gramophone........

Cons:

1. I suppose the fact that my favourite thing about such a lavish big-budget film is a small prop that appears now and then counts as a big mark against it!

2. In the year that The Color Purple went away empty handed, the winner is a film set in Africa that is basically a bunch of rich white people behaving as though they had sole rights to the place and complaining about how hard their lives are because of this. It's not the fault of OOA that it is forever set against TCP in my head (and the heads of many others) - but I came to this film knowing what lost out to it, so it definitely counted as a minus.

A bunch of white people striding around talking

3. Ultimately the men are really boring. Even Redford's character. I couldn't muster up much emotion for him, or for his relationship with Karen (which is meant to be at the heart of the film) - so much so that the poignant ending did very little for me.

4. Linked to that last point - I got bored with the story as well. I need to have some sort of reaction to the characters in a film to be bothered about what happens. And I didn't. So I wasn't.

There - I did have something to say after all. But ultimately, my verdict is: Meh.