Shortly before this year's Academy Awards an OP-ED piece appeared in the Los Angeles Tims that caught my eye. It asked the question, "Are Too Many Oscar pics too moody for you?" Clearly she had not seen an Ingmar Bergman movie.
In the piece Virginia Heffernan discusses the fact that even in color many of the nominees looked drained. Here is the article:
But after the Oscars, and I didn't see them all, I did reflect on them. American movies for the past few decades have been little more than rehashes of an original premise that goes on year after year. ROCKY morphs into ROCKY 51, where they battle each other in wheel chairs? STAR WARS 235 where the great grandchildren of Hans Solo fight the grandchildren of Darth Vader. You get the picture. This leads me to the discussion of this years nominees:
1. TOP GUN:MAVERICK. This one WAS a stretch. Twenty years later, really? For an action film it was heart pounding but, and it is a BIG but, we've seen it all before.
2. WOMEN TALKING was truly an original, gem as it may be. Mennonite Women in Bolivia were given cow tranquilizer then raped by their men. After the mens arrest the woman have to decide whether to leave or not. As I watched I could not help but think of men in this country attempting to control the bodies of women. There is a line from THE KING AND I where the king says, " it's alright for the bee to fly from flower to flower but NOT flower from bee to bee."
3. EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE is a fantasy and reality for the 1,000's of immigrants that come to this country. I have Chinese friends and hear and watch their struggles to make sense of what happens to them. It was a brilliant ploy to focus on the IRS and the dehumanizing processes it uses. Trump paid $750 in taxes the year I paid over $8,000. I'm a year older and certainly a great deal poorer. No matter what was said Michele Yo and Jamie Lee Curtis deserved their Oscars for playing the every woman to the Tramp's everyman.
4. THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN was certainly one of the grimmest movies I have ever seen. That a friendship could go so horribly wrong and take the twists and turns to its bitter end ... well, it's not a world or friendship that I would want to have. To me it made no sense, yet it certainly was original and not American.
5. TÁR tells a sad disintegration of a brilliant female conductor who thought too highly of herself as she explored the music she so deeply admired. I didn't feel she was so evil as obviously others in her medium thought. I felt the young man who cared less for Bach and was into "modern" music still had a lot to learn. But, as in every generation, the young have no time for the past. And I question if that is why societies around the world are in the moral morass they are in as they forget the past only to have to rediscover it again.
6. I didn't see ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT as I had read the book and seen an earlier movie. While well intended to remind us about the evils of war (from the previews) an even gorier version was made to remind us of this fact. Nightly news reports of Ukraine bring this fact home to us every day.
7. AVATAR I also didn't see. I didn't much care for the original and didn't plan on spending 3+ hours more seeing its sequel, another sequel years away from the original.
I also didn't see THE FABELMAN'S, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS or ELVIS. The first two weren't shown locally here long, if ever, and I grew up with Elvis and have spent an entire day at Graceland seeing everything you could ever want to see. Biopics tend to gloss over the less desirable aspects of the person and blow-up the known. As a Boomer Baby, almost, I will never forget his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show where they would not show him below the waist!
I love movie's and have built up my own DVD collection because you always CAN'T see it on Netflix or Prime. I had a wild hair to see CHARADE recently with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It was a $5.00 rental on Prime. Five dollars for a 60 year old movie? A few days later I was Big Lots and looking through their DVD items found the movie for $3.00. Not only did I get it cheaper, it is now mine to watch whenever I please!
I was lucky that my parents loved movies. Every Friday or Saturday from the second grade on we would go. I saw NIGHT TO REMEMBER and cried when the Titanic went down, saw all the Esther Williams swimming fantasies, SINGING IN THE RAIN and in the 8th grade saw PSYCHO a movie I couldn't get through again until last year when terrified of the shower scene, wrapped in a blanket like a mummy, I sat through the movie. I still remembered the college guys behind me screaming like girls!
Movie's can be a significant force in our lives. It can show the best and the worst of humanity. It can uplift like the recent RRR or it can bring us down as SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. As a movie lover, I may not and should not agree with say Rotten Tomatoes. I have found what the "critics" like or dislike is often at odds with the general audience and myself. A case in point was the movie DROP DEAD FRED. It was considered a terrible movie by Siscal and Ebert. Desperate for something to watch something when my kids were small, I was shocked to discover I could identify with Phoebe because in many ways I had a mom like that as well. While I never had an imaginary friend like Fred I did have an imaginary world like Jack Lemon's DAD who escaped to his imaginary world to escape his harpy wife.
We all have movies we love and those we avoid. In a testing, it was discovered it only took a few first bars of movie themes for the listener to identify the movie. Movies can be an escape or they can reflect our lives and often solutions and pitfalls to our own daily lives. Yet the past few years have been staggeringly sterile, a collection of Marvel or super hero tales with no end. That's why I enjoy both the Palm Springs Movie Festival and Cinema Diverse where films from all over the world are shown and we get a glimpse of other cultures and ideas. Often a foreign film will be made in America but rarely with the same impact as the original because it has to be morally correct. THE LAST TANGO IN PARIS was a perfect example. A widower meets a man in Paris after the death of his wife and they become lovers. Too scandalous for Americans, the male lover becomes (to me just as scandalous) an underage female and it went on to titillate Americans the way LOLITA had.
Finally, I would like to remind you that movies and the world's they create are still "designed." Once watching the extras on the movie MONSTERS INC. they showed all the errors and problems with the software to create their "monsters." It was at the moment I realized just how much a movie, a cartoon takes at least 5 years to make, is created, designed if you will.
In this vain I urge you to look for original movies and don't accept more of the same old thing!
Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!
Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!
Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed!
