Month: December 2014

Worst Best Picture: Is Annie Hall Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. Posts will be relatively spoiler free, but there may be some details revealed. Today’s installment is the 1977 winner Annie Hall. Is it better than Crash?

Woody Allen is divisive, and even though he’s one of my favorite filmmakers, I can’t spend a year talking about Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson and not touch on Woody Allen. I’ve been dreading this one, and the reason it’s last is twofold:

Woody Allen is probably my favorite director, and while Annie Hall isn’t for sure my all-time favorite of his films (Manhattan and possibly a few others may rank above it), I once spent a summer watching every single thing he’d ever made and I love Annie Hall like I don’t love any movie on this list.
Like everyone else, I’m not sure how I feel about that. I really haven’t ever known how I feel about that.

I can’t say that I’m not going to watch Woody Allen movies anymore, because I think I’m still going to, but I can say that the experience is complicated. I think that Woody Allen’s legacy is not going to end up being a great one, no matter what part you’re talking about, and I want to be very careful in my praise for him and discussion of this movie. There are other, better places to talk about Woody Allen’s legacy. I want to be certain to not skirt the issue, but there’s nothing I can add to the discussion other than the fact that I think everyone should think very hard about the media they consume, even if they don’t mean to send a message by doing so.

Annie Hall is the story of Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), a neurotic Woody Allen-type that has been married twice before and can’t decide what he wants out of life. He’s consumed by dread about death and the purpose of life, and he can’t relax among the parts of life that bring his friends so much comfort. He famously sneezes into cocaine when it’s offered him. He just wants to stay in New York and fret and try to date until something sticks.

A criticism of Woody Allen that I think has a lot of credence is that the women in his movies can appear to lack depth. In Annie Hall, for instance, he’s married twice before he meets Annie, and neither woman really gets a ton to do. He dismisses them — one for just about nothing and another for a shared sexual problem — and that can read as misogynistic. I’ve always chosen to read it as realistic, because people aren’t very good to each other very often, and I’d argue that Allen’s Alvy Singer isn’t meant to be a positive force in the world. He’s a representation of Allen’s self, and mostly the parts of his self that he’s not all that happy about. It’s a similar problem to my generation’s reading of High Fidelity, where apparently people missed that Rob is supposed to be a pretty messed up guy, not a role model.

While a generation of men certainly views Woody Allen movies as templates for how to behave, that’s not a slam on the film. Just as you have to view Pulp Fiction without picturing the viewpoints of the 700,000 people with posters on their dorms, you have to look at Annie Hall as a piece of art. Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) has plenty to say about Alvy’s neuroses, his views on sex and death, and his ultimate treatment of women. She has agency in my viewing, and oodles of it. Her life is about her, and she’s capable of standing up to the stand-in for so many supposedly gentle, “good guys” and telling them to hit the damn bricks.

Annie Hall isn’t perfect, and subsequent viewings offer different ways to view their romance. It’s iconic because of things like Keaton’s look and Allen’s writing style, and those two things still shine through as superb. Watching Diane Keaton “la-di-da” on a New York street is always going to be a wonderful moment, even if Woody Allen’s legacy is more in question now than ever before.

The Best Part: It’s genuinely funny. People talk up the one-liners, but for me it’ll always be the lobster scene. I’ve never seen anything in a movie that’s closer to the actual high points of a relationship. Allen and Keaton make jokes as they try to live-boil some lobsters, and lines like Allen’s “Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side!” will stick with me forever. The real best part, though, is when they call the scene back in a future relationship where Allen can’t make the same spark happen.

The Worst Part: It’s a little preachy at times, even if you buy into Woody Allen’s style. His rants are supposed to help make the character unlikable, so they’ve always worked for me, but your mileage may certainly vary.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Annie Hall is one of my favorite movies of all time, so that should answer the question. Also, this is #86. We’ve now looked back at every single Best Picture Oscar winner to date and now I can firmly make a judgment about Crash as compared to every single other winner. Every single one is better than Crash in some way. Many of them are less interesting, but none are as purely frustrating or consumed by bad choices. The characters in Crash are abhorrent, even the “good guys,” and the message offers no hope for a better world or suggestion of how to get there. There is nothing to be gained from a viewing (or three viewings, apparently) of Crash. There’s something to be gained from every other movie on this list, even if I don’t recommend them all. Movies like Around the World in 80 Days, Cimarron, and The Greatest Show on Earth are uneven, boring, and overly long, but they all are worth discussion in some way. I do not believe there to be any good reason to watch Crash, and while that may change in decades to come as, with all movies, it is rethought, for now, it’s certainly the worst Best Picture winner of all time. I should know, because I absolutely checked.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is The Godfather Part II Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

All the discussion of The Godfather Part II centers around a more difficult question than if it is better or worse than Crash. People want to compare it to the original, and the comparison makes me wish I were older to be able to give a first-hand answer about hype. It’s much easier to tell you how something was received if you, well, were alive to receive it. I don’t have that luxury, but what I do have is the perspective of history and the sole negative review for what many people consider to be the greatest movie ever made.

There’s no way of knowing what people will like, and it can be alienating to hate something that everyone else loves. I imagine it must have been very difficult for Vincent Canby, the New York Times critic who hated The Godfather Part II. Apparently he was something of a curmudgeon, as the list of “movies he was critical of” could be a reasonable top 10 list for all-time great films. He’s also apparently one of the all-time greats in reviewing, something that I (clearly) don’t know much about.

Canby criticizes the two stories of the sequel as not fitting together. He says that a movie shot to be dark on purpose is “so dark you wonder if these Mafia chiefs can’t afford to buy bigger light bulbs.” He criticizes Pacino for looking “glum” in his portrayal of one of the saddest men in film history facing the inevitability of a life he’s built and destroyed. I would say “glum” is a prerequisite.

It’s a little unfair to take a movie review from 1974 and pick it apart. It’s the only review from this lion of the industry I’ve ever read, and I don’t excerpt it here to point out how stupid or wrong it is. I do so because it’s always interesting what time does to opinion. A huge, huge number of the 86 current Best Picture winners aren’t even remembered as good movies, much less the best of their era. When I’ve been doing this all year, people continually ask me what I thought of movies they think won Best Picture, only to be shocked that they aren’t on the list.

This isn’t a list of the best movies of all time. It’s not even a list of the best movies each year. It works as a tool because it’s the same body of people (or at least, their contemporaries in different times) picking movies on the same criteria, supposedly. That’s precisely what the list offers us: historical perspective.

In 1974 this was likely an unpopular opinion and in 2014 it is unheard of. He’d be labelled a troll now, a person baiting clicks by titling something with an outrageous title, like, say, “Worst Best Picture” or something equally odious. In all seriousness, I use this review in lieu of talking about The Godfather Part II because it’s not important that I sit here and tell you that one of the greatest achievements of acting, storytelling, and composition is incredible. It’s important that we consider that we are all capable of being wrong — so, so, so wrong — on a long enough timeline. Reviews are still a net positive, and this guy is no worse for being wrong, but that kind of thinking will explain things like The Artist, Braveheart, and Gladiator 50 years from now, when people wonder how we were ever so wrong. We were because we are human, and art hits us all differently. This is one you should see — dark light bulbs and all — for yourself. The odds are very low (but not impossible, apparently) that you’ll be disappointed.

The Best Part: Pacino’s Michael Corleone, who is just trudging towards whatever is happening next. He’s the engine that drives everything, but The Godfather Part II is just as much about what the powerful can’t make happen as it is about what they can. The sadness engulfs him and he walks around both about to explode in anger and about to dissolve in resignation, and the result would be enough to carry a much, much lesser movie.

The Worst Part: I really struggled to find something for this space. I love the structure of telling one story inside of another one, but I guess you could take issue with it. I don’t think there are problems with this movie, as much of a cop out as that may be.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s very possibly the greatest movie on this list, even if it isn’t my favorite. If you disagree, that’s okay, but you no doubt still hold the achievement of The Godfather Part II in high esteem. If you don’t, well, I know a guy in 1974 that would love to have a drink with you.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Ben-Hur Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

Charlton Heston is complicated. He’s got a reputation for being stern and serious, and he became one of the most famous conservatives in Hollywood. He’s everyone’s dad, but the version of him that’s grounding everyone all the time. This combination makes him a little unsuited for roles that require depth. He’s not a bad actor, but he’s very, very specific.

In the unbelievable bomb The Greatest Show on Earth, he’s a one-track minded character who only wants to see the circus keep moving, even at the cost of his own health and personal relationships. He’s playing against the rest of the movie there, and he’s one of the only interesting characters because everyone else is broad and silly and he’s really, really intense. He brings that same intensity to every role (“You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you!”) and you end up getting the sensation that all Charlton Heston knows how to do is act like Charlton Heston. It’s bizarre, considering how massive his success was, and it really stands out in Ben-Hur.

Though he won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Judah Ben-Hur, a contemporary of Christ (much more about that later), he was criticized by the press for being mostly physical rather than actually delivering his lines well. He mumbles and spits everything, and he sounds like an impression of his other roles when he gets angry. Even the director of the film went on the record to say he was unhappy with Heston’s performance. The film was the most expensive film ever made, so you have to wonder if at some point they didn’t just decide to make an epic around him and hope it worked.

I guess it does, mostly, though Heston is hard as hell to ignore. He’s Jewish in a part of the world that has abandoned Judaism, and even his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd) has issues with him now for standing by his faith. When a piece of Ben-Hur’s roof falls off and scares the horse of a Roman dignitary, Messala has him arrested and set adrift to die as a galley slave.

Ben-Hur saves the life of an important Roman leader and is granted his freedom, and he decides to exact revenge on Messala for his imprisonment (among other things). That gives way to the iconic chariot scene, and surely the majority of what makes Ben-Hur necessary now. It’s the original, and though it’s been done a thousand times in various formats, it’s still electric to see. It really does hold up like few action scenes can, and it’s though it’s a little brutal, it’s necessary viewing for anyone.

The pieces of the rest of the movie are a little weird. Even though it clocks in at just under four hours, even characters like Pontius Pilate don’t really get that much screentime. It’s just lots of Ben-Hur struggling with the idea of revenge and how to stay true to what matters (faith and family) and not what doesn’t (Rome, anything but faith and family). The heroes’ journey works, ultimately, and despite the shade I’ll throw at anyone who calls Heston a great actor I have to say he’s suited for the role. It’s a little much (a lot much when he’s saving his family in Part II, when he’s at about 400% Charlton Heston) sometimes, but it’s supposed to be that way. Ben-Hur has a terrible life filled with trials, and it’s all meant to build up to the moment when he’s confronted with a similar character.

Ben-Hur meets Jesus right after he is sold into slavery. Christ gives him water when no man will aid him, which is fairly direct messaging. The Roman in command of the slaves insists that Ben-Hur alone not be allowed to drink, and he stops everyone else from helping him, but he is literally staggered when faced with Jesus Christ. For the most part, the religious message of Ben-Hur is (a little) more subtle than you’d expect, but not with regard to Jesus. He doesn’t come back for about two hours, but when Ben-Hur is present at his death (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say how “The Greatest Story Ever Told” ends, at this point) it is brutal and intense on a level you will rarely see. Your enjoyment of the movie (and the extended, lengthy ending) will be determined by your feelings about Christianity in general, but no matter what you think of the quality of its message, its scale in telling it cannot be denied.

The Best Part: Hugh Griffith won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the sheik that owns the horses Ben-Hur uses for the chariot scene. He’s a bright spot in a relentlessly dark movie. I don’t think the story of a slave who values his religion so highly that he will fight for it needs to be “funny” per se, but Griffith is charming and definitely carries the few scenes they use him in.

The Worst Part: It feels absurd to say that it’s Charlton Heston at this point, but I think I have to. He’s fine as Ben-Hur, but I can’t believe some of the line readings. He’s yelling through clenched teeth and thrashing broadly like he’s in a play. It’s crazy. Everyone’s bad Brando and Walken impressions sound like impressions, but your bad Heston sounds like Heston.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s better, and it may be the iconic “epic” on the list, if not Lawrence of Arabia. I didn’t hate Ben-Hur, but it’s certainly not the movie I expected. It’s long but not bloated, but that’s only because it has exactly one thing it wants to say. The message of Ben-Hur is singular, like Crash (I did it!), and though your enjoyment of the movie will depend on your enjoyment of said message, I think it does a better job of getting one specific point across than Crash.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Gandhi Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

There’s kinda a lot going on in Gandhi. It’s an extremely detailed look at the man himself, but it’s also a broad morality play about race’s role in war and government. Gandhi has become history’s symbol for peace through resistance, and while the movie about his life is definitely interested in telling that story, it also wants to complicate the character a (very) little bit, which is ambitious.

When we look for a stand-in for evil we find Hitler, and Gandhi has become just as iconic of a symbol for good. It’s challenging to tell the tale of how someone became so good that we use him as a replacement for the very idea of goodness, and it’s even more challenging to do so any not come off a little bit preachy. Most of the modern reviews seem to take issue with how preachy it is, but I don’t see it. You can’t tell the history of “goodness” without being talking about how good the guy was. If it’s preachy to say that Gandhi wanted a better world and worked for it, well, then maybe I don’t mind that kind of preaching so much.

In the first five minutes, Gandhi is shot and killed. It then cuts back to his youth and spends three hours working up to his own death. Gandhi spent his life fighting against British rule of India, and while successful in one regard, his fame and success led him to be the face of many other resistance movements. He was never able to make everyone happy with every decision, and his inability to reconcile the different groups within India cost him his life. It’s a fairly straightforward portrayal, aside from the time jump after his murder.

Your enjoyment of Gandhi will depend on how complicated you want your biopic to be. Patton does a better job of this, for my money, and it’s a superior film because Patton in Patton is complex. He’s dark and misunderstood, but he’s also heroic and powerful. The only real diversions from “Gandhi was the greatest guy in history” are some youthful boasting and some mild run-ins with his wife. Gandhi likes the spotlight, but the movie doesn’t paint that solely as pride. I don’t know how much they really need to show the dark side of Gandhi, but it feels a little slight at times as a result. It’s possible that there’s no badness to show, and I’m taking issue with Mohandas Gandhi for not having enough faults. Jerk!

It’s a little difficult to talk about because there isn’t much to it beyond Ben Kingsley’s Oscar-winning role. He’s exceptional and the movie feels huge with a cast of hundreds of thousands, but nothing really sticks beyond him. Martin Sheen is totally out of place as a journalist covering Gandhi’s early life and a Life magazine reporter towards the end is even sillier. Other than Kingsley, there’s nothing really to talk about with regard to the acting. He’s everywhere, and the Patton comparisons continue because he consumes the screen in every shot. It’s really a lifetime role, and it’s especially strange to see right after Schindler’s List because his two roles are so different.

It’s worth your time, I think, but any review that says “it’s what you think it is” is also true. Gandhi is the story of Gandhi, and it doesn’t really go much deeper than that. They clearly wanted to, and Kingsley brings out just how truly annoying Gandhi must have been, which is worthy of note. Some of the sweeping shots of hundreds of thousands of people are breathtaking, but whether that justifies a three-hour run time or not, I don’t really know.

The Best Part: I touched on it briefly, but I want to restate here: Gandhi is annoying. It’s really a great choice to portray the man most consistently identified with “resistance” as being difficult to deal with. He’s a gifted leader and a man on a mission, but he’s also tough as hell to deal with.

The Worst Part: There is a lot of filler here. The movie opens with a shot that apologizes for leaving out so much of the life of Gandhi, but I can’t imagine what their ideal cut would look like, because it’s already painstakingly detailed. There’s nothing at all that comes from a 10-minute scene with a reporter from Life, but it happened to Gandhi, so it’s left in.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? The scene where a line of men all take a beating, one after another, in honor of the spirit of one of history’s greatest men is iconic and will endure in your mind long after you see Gandhi. The only scene like that in Crash is where Ludacris talks about coffee and spaghetti, because you will wonder why he wants coffee with spaghetti for the rest of your life.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Schindler’s List Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

When I set out to compare 85 movies to Crash, my goal was to legitimately see if any of them were worse. Some, like Casablanca and Gone with the Wind, become difficult to write about because the premise is so ludicrous. Movies like The Sound of Music, The Deer Hunter, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and It Happened One Night are entrenched, iconic pieces of film history, and when writing about them it can be easy to slip into a “duh, it’s Casablanca” mode. There are all of those movies, and then there is Schindler’s List.

I had seen bits and pieces of it through various showings when I was in school, but I’d never sat down and watched all of Schindler’s List. It’s powerful, as you know, but it’s remarkable how powerful it still is if you know everything. The challenge of making a movie like Schindler’s List is that your good guys and bad guys will be immediately and totally clear, and you need to find a way to make it more complicated than that. Who is Oskar Schindler and what is he doing? And how do you tell a story this delicate but still make it a massive, massive hit, like only Spielberg can apparently do?

If you’ve somehow missed it, it’s the true story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a rich German industrialist who fills his factories with Jewish workers to save on wages. It’s a shrewd move, and the film is about the developing humanity inside Schindler as his world becomes more and more about the Jewish plight inside Nazi Germany. He originally hires them because they’re cheap, but through the brutality of the (other, it’s import to note that Schindler is, himself, also a Nazi) Nazis, Schindler becomes deeply sympathetic and hatches a plan.

With the aid of his assistant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) he creates a list of Jewish names to be saved from transportation to Auschwitz. He creates his own fake factory where nothing is created, staffs it with Jewish “workers,” and bribes the guards and higher ups in the Nazi Party to avoid detection. His factory actively does not create weaponry for the Germans, which doubles up the amount of non-aid he’s able to provide. He’s using “workers” and not producing anything.

It’s a heroic story and it’s told in thrilling fashion. The Nazis feel both like people and like monsters, which is a nice touch to keep some humanity about the entire experience. One of the important lessons in an atrocity is to remember that many of the “enemy” forces aren’t deranged or psychopathic, they’re standard, normal people. That’s what makes evil so insidious, and it’s an important component here. Most of the Nazis in the film aren’t cartoonish, snarling, monsters, and just as in life it’s too complicated to just pick out maniacs. You need to fear the good man who will do nothing, one of the great lessons of the Holocaust.

The Best Part: Neeson’s role is incredible, and I’ll go with his portrayal rather than spoil any one scene, if you haven’t seen it. There’s one to mention — that one — but I don’t want to give it away, to preserve the horror.

The Worst Part: I mean what I said above about the humanity of evil, but if there’s a mistake in all this it’s in Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes). It’s a fine performance, but he’s clearly “crazy” and it takes away from the experience a bit.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s really difficult to talk about this one and it should be. It’ll always be called “powerful” and it should be. Crash never asked to be compared to it, but that’s why Crash shouldn’t be a Best Picture winner. That’s one of many reasons, there’s also dozens, dozens more.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Out of Africa Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

In 1985, Roger Ebert wrote a glowing review of Out of Africa. He summed up his review with this: “Out of Africa is a great movie to look at, breathtakingly filmed on location. It is a movie with the courage to be about complex, sweeping emotions, and to use the star power of its actors without apology.” It won Best Picture, Roger Ebert loves it, we’re good, right? That’s all we need to do, here?

Nah. Out of Africa has been rethought completely, and it consistently makes “worst” lists of Best Picture winners. I can see what Ebert loved about it — it’s certainly “a great movie to look at” — but while it may be complex and courageous, it’s pretty damned bland.

It’s the story of the rich Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) who needs a title and becomes a baroness by marrying the important-but-poor Baron (Klaus Maria Brandauer). They plan to move to Africa and start a dairy farm, but the Baron is an idiot and sets up a coffee plantation. This is the first of his many, many foolish mistakes, and it’s tough to determine if he’s supposed to be stupid or reckless. It doesn’t really matter, because he only stays on screen long enough to run poor Meryl Streep’s life.

He leaves her with a loveless marriage of convenience, a coffee plantation that can’t grow coffee, and a life that she doesn’t understand. The feeling of loneliness is real, and Meryl Streep of course sells it. She’s the lone redemptive quality of Out of Africa, and it’s impossible to not feel for her as her life gets destroyed rather early in the film. The Baron gets syphilis and gives the gift to her, so then she’s even out the ability to have children. Things look pretty dark, but she at least has the courage and ability to throw him out of the house. She may not be getting much from him, but he’s at least not going to get anything back.

She starts a school for local children in lieu of having her own, and things definitely look up when she meets the dashing, ridiculous Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford). Redford is pretty dreadful in this, but that may owe to the fact that his character is just a rugged outdoorsman who has no defining characteristics beyond “rugged outdoorsman.” They fall in love, but will her syphilis or his wanderlust ruin their love? Can they make a life together in the distant, unfamiliar land of Africa? Is he ever going to turn into a real character? You’ll have to watch all 161 minutes to find out!

Out of Africa has been rethought mostly because a 161-minute movie with (and this is a stretch) 2.5 characters is tough to pull off. Redford’s acting seems like it comes from many decades earlier, and it’s really hard to see how he got so much praise in the 80s for this one. Streep is great, but she’s always great, and she’s not enough to carry this bloated mess. If you’re looking for forbidden love, watch From Here to Eternity, or, and I hate to say this, The English Patient. This one just isn’t worth your time, though it seems to have tricked people when it came out.

The Best Part: Meryl Streep.

The Worst Part: Everything that is not Meryl Streep. The “dashing-I-got-this-watch-me-kill-this-jungle-cat” Robert Redford performance is especially bad.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? I don’t think Out of Africa is worse than Crash. The ending is pretty good, and honestly Meryl Streep’s depression is genuinely evocative. It’s a tough movie to watch, though, and I can’t suggest that you do it to yourself.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is The Great Ziegfeld Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

Before we talk about the three-hour musical The Great Ziegfeld, I’d like you to revisit the most iconic scene in the film. It’s gone down in history as the most familiar scene in any musical (possibly any film) and thus this might not even be the first time you’re seeing it today. I speak of course of the eight-minute epic “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody,” and I’m totally kidding what the hell, y’all:

It’s tough to be respectful of something like this. It’s so grandiose and so much bigger than it needs to be, but then again, that’s the idea. This was one of the most expensive scenes ever filmed at the time (adjusted for inflation, the set alone for this one scene would run you 3.7 million dollars today) and it was supposed to be a monument to excess. It’s the big, showy center to The Great Ziegfeld, the sorta-biopic of a showman in the early 1900s. Movies were just starting to take the place of stage shows, but one man believed in the cause enough to want to put on a last great show and prove to the world that enormous groups of people singing and dancing in sync were more interesting than any “plot” or “story” that you could show through a dumb ol’ movie.

The movie is mostly fine, but there’s huge chunks like this that could be cut. It’s a musical, but there’s also a twisting love story and lots of setup to each song, all of which contributes to the 177-minute run time. It’s disastrously long at three hours, and it must have felt long even at the time. Most movie theaters had only been air conditioned for a few years in 1936, so maybe people just liked a chance to cool off. That’s the only explanation for the sixth 10-minute song or the third repetitive “twist” in the fortunes of the main characters. Maybe you could stomach it all just to not be outside.

The characters are mostly interchangeable to the point that describing them doesn’t matter. Ziegfeld is brash and confident and the movie follows his successes and failures as he tries to develop the perfect performance. Modern eyes won’t recognize it when he “does,” however, since his greatest accomplishments are to “glorify the American girl.” The result, his “glorified Ziegfeld girl” is totally undefinable. It appears to be a woman that has hair of any color (but not skin of any color, it’s 1936), looks any way, has no personality that matters, and sings and dances. If there’s a point, I missed it entirely. Everyone acts like he’s doing some great work, but everything seems the same as everything else.

There’s really no draw here. It’s deeply, deeply boring, maybe beyond the abilities of anything else on the list. It would feel long at half the length, and there’s nothing to really sink your teeth into. The characters are all essentially the same (aside from Ziegfeld, who is zany enough to be interesting) and every scene feels like you just watched it. His fortunes fail and he’s forced to take drastic measures… again and again.

I’ll accept that I can’t really offer up a critical view of this movie’s place in musical history. There’s something to be said for a hugely expensive musical that set the standard for how big and how flashy you could be — the other early, early musical winner The Broadway Melody feels almost cheap by comparison — but that’s hard to be impressed by, now. The spectacle is still there, but without anything behind it the whole production feels hollow.

The Best Part: I actually like the first 20 minutes or so. Ziegfeld and his great nemesis have to find the perfect act to steal each other’s crowd away, and Ziegfeld decides to go with “The World’s Strongest Man, Sandow!” Both Sandow and Ziegfeld are real people, and this is the only part of the movie where everything feels cohesive and well-paced. It’s an interesting little bit of 30s film, but I think everything goes to hell after that.

The Worst Part: All of this music has fallen by the wayside. Some of the songs are in the “Great American Songbook” of sorts, but there’s nothing in here you’ll recognize. Even The Broadway Melody, another weird, dated musical from the early Oscar days has a few songs that feel somewhat familiar. A musical without songs to enjoy is a really tough sell, and that’s why it feels 27 hours long.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Where is the comparison between a musical from 1936 that feels dated and a drama from 2004 that feels dated? It’s right there. Both of these movies feel ridiculous and they’re both two hours too long (Crash is 112 minutes the joke is that Crash shouldn’t exist).

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is All Quiet on the Western Front Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

Just about all of the first 15 Best Picture winners are serious, but none of them are serious like this one. All Quiet on the Western Front is the original war movie, and its message is the message of every great war movie that followed it: “war is hell, don’t go to war.”

There are no names you’d know associated with it. No one involved in it has gone down in popular film history. It’s just a lone, strange piece of culture that is notable only because it’s a filmed version of a classic novel and because it’s one of the 86 “best” movies of all time. It holds up that end of the bargain well, its a monumental achievement that’s extremely watchable in 2014. It’s the story of young German boys who enlist for various reasons at the start of World War I. The film opens on their time in school, where a teacher gives a rousing speech about the need to prove oneself and the glory of fighting for country and for honor. They drink the Kool-Aid and they’re off to the front.

Every war movie has to decide what it wants to say, but I can’t think of any other one that is as determined as this one to say exactly one thing. Surely Full Metal Jacket doesn’t paint a positive view of war, but All Quiet on the Western Front is relentless. The boys fall under a brutal superior who tells them they are going to die. They meet older, seasoned soldiers who tell them they are going to die. They go to the front and then a bunch of them immediately die. Every single scene serves only that purpose: to dissolve the myth that war is anything other than the systematic killing of a generation of men by another country’s entire generation of young men.

This really can’t be overstated. A mortar lands in the open space near their trench early on in the movie and the camera holds on the removed hands and arms that are left holding on to barbed wire after the explosion. It’s a grisly shot, but for 1929 it seems unthinkable. It is striking 90 years later, but considering what the audience in 1929 thought of that is something I can’t even do. I suppose it may have been less shocking to some of them, considering that nearly four million Americans had just been to World War I. It’s hard to say.

There are too many war movies on this list. Humanity is obsessed with our most complete way of ending ourselves, and we tend to reward people that make us consider it in new light. All Quiet on the Western Front will mess with you if you watch it now, and I think that’s really all it takes to win an Oscar for a movie like this. It’s worthy of the honor beyond the shock value. There’s not really a lot of gore, most of the shocking scenes are reveals of character deaths off screen or tense moments in trenches and wilderness. None of the characters are particularly memorable, but many scenes stand out. I’ll never remember his name, but the man who loses a foot and asks his friends that “it hurts, what happened to it?” because he doesn’t know, yet, is ice-cold. In another scene, a man who charges a trench ready to kill anyone in it is forced to rethink his brutality when he’s stuck in that trench with the dying man all night. They’re human moments, and while they may come off as heavy handed to some viewers, they really work for me.

The Best Part: It’s the brutality of war, played out on screen. No one can walk away from this movie and say “yep, mow down an entire generation of men and we’ll fix all the problems.” War is complicated, but All Quiet on the Western Front takes a very “this can’t be your answer” approach.

The Worst Part: In one scene, the soldiers gather around to eat during a lull in combat and they discuss the causes of war. It’s the kind of scene that works well in literature, but when you’re forced to actually watch something that philosophical, you have to deal with the fact that people don’t talk like that. No one is sitting at Arby’s with their friend talking about the nature of absolute truth. Through the rest of the movie everyone deals with concepts through specifics, which always works, so the one time someone strikes up a “big conversation” with everyone about the “why” of war, it feels a little out of place.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Both movies want you to really think about a stark concept and both of them don’t want you to get distracted by characters. It’s effective in All Quiet on the Western Front, because it keeps the roster general. It doesn’t matter who these people are, because this experience will be true for all people. Crash doesn’t have that crutch, so it ends up giving too-brief back stories for everyone. I suppose a few connections are made that are the higher points of Crash (families love each other, cool, cool) but for the most part, no one is ever elevated to the point that I forget they’re Brendan Fraser or Sandra Bullock.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

The five major Oscars (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture) combined are called the “Big Five.” Only three movies have ever won all five: It Happened One Night, The Silence of the Lambs, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those three, if we’re still working from a thesis where the Academy knows everything, are in rarefied air. Gone with the Wind only got 4/5, because Clark Gable lost. Annie Hall managed the same 4/5, since Woody Allen is a lot of things, but Best Actor is not one of them.

That’s all some basic-level Oscar trivia, but I mention it because I want to point out how special this one is in film history. The Silence of the Lambs should make every top 20 list of Best Picture winners, regardless of era. It Happened One Night is certainly the best of the first few, and probably deserves inclusion in that same top 20. Cuckoo’s Nest is certainly a classic in its own right, but do we remember it the same way?

The tricky part about movies like this is that they’ve been redone to death. There’s no remake of Cuckoo’s Nest (insert “get-off-my-lawn” style rant about remakes in 2014) but the style and the tropes have been emulated so much that the movie will feel familiar even the first time you watch it. You need to come at Cuckoo’s Nest with as fresh a perspective as you can. Disregard everything you know about mental health. Throw out every mental hospital in a movie you’ve ever seen and forget who Jack Nicholson is today.

Jack plays Randle McMurphy, a mental patient who doesn’t actually have anything wrong with him. He realizes too late that his gamble of an insanity plea after being arrested is not the easy way out he expected. McMurphy intends to make the best of a bad situation, then, by either ruining the process for the staff in the hospital or being such of a pain in the ass that they decide to release him. These initially seem like good plans, as McMurphy is built as the kind of guy who can grease any wheel needed, be it with charm or with stubbornness.

He meets his match with Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), the archetype that’s been lifted most often for other things. She’s cold and terrifying, but her real power isn’t in how she controls the easily controllable, but in how she breaks the will of those who aren’t used to having their will broken. She effectively can control anyone they put in the hospital, and she represents a stronger antagonist than any gun-toting psychopath in a handful of the rest of these. Nurse Ratched is one of the iconic characters in film for a reason. Fletcher is icy, but not ridiculous. You’ll often see a character like this played so over the top that she’s less scary and more “menacing,” but that’s not what they’re going for here. She’s supposed to be a terrifying figure, sure, but the real fear is that she controls your freedom and she controls whether you even have the right to ask for it. AFI ranked her the #5 villain of all time — right behind Darth Vader and The Wicked Witch of the West — but she’s so much more than just a villain.

Both of them fight to control the hearts and minds of the rest of the ward, since majority rule at least appears to be important within their tiny world. McMurphy has to escalate his antics to get under her skin, while she has to exert more control to stamp out what he’s capable of. The beauty of the whole situation is that she doesn’t lock everyone down and rule by fear, she’s found a way to make the patients generate their own fear on their end. It’s troubling, and it’s a scary look into a process that is always a disaster, but was surely even more of one in the 70s.

The Best Part: McMurphy vs. Ratched is one of the all-time great psychological battles in film, and the best part is that they’re essentially working the same angles. Both of them have each other figured out, and they go to work on the other patients with the same tools of manipulation. It’s when Ratched really amps up that the movie starts to hum.

The Worst Part: I’ve never liked the scene where they steal a boat. Early on in his tenure, McMurphy engineers a temporary escape for the entire ward, and they all steal a boat for the day to go fishing. There’s an importance to this scene, because the patients have all told McMurphy that they don’t even want to return to the outside world, and the trip is his attempt to show them that they actually do. It’s funny as well, but it’s just too much for me. The tone of everything else seems much more “believable” than ten mental patients stealing a boat.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Crash won two of the “Big Five” Oscars, but did not win for directing or either acting award. Cuckoo’s Nest would probably still be a memorable adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel without Nicholson and Fletcher’s all-time performances, but with them it occupies a space very few other movies in history can. Even if you assume you know what it is, you should check it out. The specifics are impossible to explain, but I will say that there’s more in a blank stare from Louise Fletcher than there is in Crash.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Cimarron Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

Cimarron is an unmitigated disaster of a film. It’s slow, it’s weird, it’s boring, and it’s dated. There is absolutely no reason to watch Cimarron in 2014 aside from a desire to watch every Best Picture winner. This movie isn’t even fun to hate.

The answer to “what makes it so bad” is everything, but we’ll go piece by piece. It’s the story of Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), who is a newspaperman who also is a public speaker and is in politics and is a businessman and, honestly, I don’t know what Yancey Cravat is supposed to be. He’s mostly the editor of a newspaper in Oklahoma during the land rush of the late 1800s, so we’ll stick with that. Yancey Cravat (I can’t tell if that name was supposed to be serious or not for 1930) comes off like a madman. He’s supposed to read as a dignified, stately man in the wild, lawless West, but Dix plays him so silly that it’s impossible to feel that in the character. It’s full-on soap acting, and it’s way worse than in any of the other 30s movies. Plenty of them are bad, but none of them even approach the level of absurd, fake-deep voice that Richard Dix does in this movie.

Anyway, Yancey brings his wife and his kid to Oklahoma to get some land, but he has a tough time of it. His wife Sabra (Irene Dunne, who people mostly speak well of from this movie, but I don’t see it) also has a tough time of it, mostly because her husband has 17 jobs and leaves twice for five full years, each. This is where it becomes difficult to tell what is supposed to be weird within the world of Cimarron and what is weird because we live in 2014. He just up and leaves his entire family once after killing an outlaw and once for tenuous, mostly unexplained reasons. The former I can’t imagine would be a big deal, he walks around with a cartoonishly large pistol on his belt all the time anyway, and the latter is glossed over. He’s just out, bye, good luck, y’all.

No one else in the movie matters. There’s a really, really offensive black child character that rivals any moment of racism in any Best Picture winner and a Jewish shopkeeper that, well, the less said there, the better. Cimarron gets hammered in modern reviews for being offensive, which it definitely, definitely is, but I think the paper-thin structure and absurd acting are even worse. For real, you should look it up on YouTube if for no other reason than to watch some of Richard Dix’s acting.

Of course, a lot of this is just a sign of the times. People loved it in 1930, and most reviewers praised it for being dramatic and exciting. Those words mean different things now, and though a lot of the original Best Picture winners are strange in a kind of quaint, dated way, Cimarron is a bomb. At one point Yancey returns from a long absence to defend a prostitute in court, just… because. He hears that she’s in court and goes to defend her and it’s supposed to be a rousing, exciting moment of a good guy doing the right thing. But this is a guy who abandoned his family and came back basically that afternoon, and his first move is to go to court to defend someone. He’s also not a lawyer, but who cares, I guess? His first line is to say that the even-more-cartoonish-than-him prosecutor “is the only man in the whole Southwest capable of strutting while sitting down” and the entire courtroom including the judge and jury laughs uncontrollably for 10 full seconds. People wave their hats like he’s coming back from war, they love that joke so much. In that moment you have all of Cimarron: something that was probably pretty cool in 1930, but now is absurd at best and stupid and boring at worst.

The Best Part: There is nothing to like about Cimarron. It’s pretty short for a Best Picture winner. So, I guess there’s that. There’s not much of it, that’s the best part.

The Worst Part: The racist portrayals are pretty gross, but that should go without saying. I think the worst part has to be how convoluted it is. It’s possible to watch the entire movie and not really follow why everything happened.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? The only reason Cimarron is not worse than Crash is because people loved it when it came out. Everything I can find seems to corroborate this idea that Cimarron is a time capsule of what people wanted to see in the early 30s. It’s the ultimate example of those weird early Best Picture winners that were loved at the time but just don’t hold up now. It’s a mess and should be ignored at best now, but it escapes being the worst Best Picture winner because I can confirm that when Crash came out people did not love it, so compared 1:1 Crash is worse. Judged on overall quality, it’s a much harder discussion, and though there are a few to go, this might just be as close as it gets. The other major difference is that Cimarron is a confusing mess, and the worst bits of it are nonsensical. I know why everything happened in Crash, I just hate that it happened at all.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Reading at Recess

A blog about things we do when we're supposed to be doing other things.

Month: December 2014

Worst Best Picture: Is Annie Hall Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is The Godfather Part II Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is Ben-Hur Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is Gandhi Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is Schindler’s List Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is Out of Africa Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is The Great Ziegfeld Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is All Quiet on the Western Front Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is Cimarron Better or Worse Than Crash?