classic film

Worst Best Picture: Is Chariots of Fire Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: the guardian

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 1981 winner Chariots of Fire. Is it better than Crash?

Your typical sports movie is the story of an underdog either defeating a superior enemy or competing valiantly and losing. Chariots of Fire doesn’t exactly follow the template, but it’s assuredly still a sports movie that is about a bigger struggle.

It’s the story of a Christian missionary and a Jewish student at Cambridge and their struggles as they prepare to run in the 1924 Olympics. The actual running itself is iconic, you almost certainly know the training scenes and the song even if you haven’t seen it, but it mostly doesn’t deserve commentary. It’s standard sports-movie fare: one guy beats the other, the other trains hard in suspect ways, they meet again in a final showdown for personal glory and country and all that. It’s the background of Chariots of Fire that is much more interesting.

Most commentary on the movie uses the same word to describe it: quiet. That’s not a bad word, for sure, since most of the other Best Picture winners are about war or a great struggle, but while no great army descends on France in Chariots of Fire, there’s plenty of struggle. Harold Abrahams, the Jewish runner, faces continual antisemitism that ranges from some teasing on his first day at Cambridge about the ethnicity associated with his last name to some deeper insinuations about why he wants to train so hard to win Olympic gold. One of the great strengths of the film is the ability to sell the difficulty of being Jewish in this life — Cambridge, the Olympics, and Britain in the 20s — without being too heavy handed.

The missionary, Eric Liddell, faces his own off-track problems. He’s Scottish and comes from an intense family full of people who wish he would quit running and go be a proper missionary. I found myself particularly moved by the idea that this man who had a chance to become one of the all-time greats in his field was being constantly reminded that “his field” was supposed to be something altogether different. Parents just don’t understand, even 90 years ago in Scotland.

Liddell has to balance his running with his dedication to his faith, and as in all things one has to lose. His ultimate test comes when he is told at the last second that the most important race of his life is not on a normal day as he was told, but on Sunday. It’s a particularly interesting idea of a personal challenge, as most movies wouldn’t be able to handle the tone required.

The Best Part: After insisting that he will not race on a Sunday, Liddell is met by a series of increasingly important people who try to lean on him. It’s understated — no one yells at him — and that’s a great strength of the sequence. They respect his convictions, but they’ve got to win this damned race. The scale of the Olympics in 1924 is also pretty wonderful. It looks more like a high school football game in a very small town, which is charming.

The Worst Part: A lot of the Scottish missionary scenes tend to feel out of place in a narrative that otherwise goes very directly towards the final race. It’s important to establish Liddell as conflicted, but it may not be necessary to do it to this degree. The Americans towards the end also feel a bit silly, but that’s me speaking as one of them. It’s amazing how consistent “Americans” are treated in films like this, and at least my countrymen get out of Chariots of Fire mostly as silent plot points.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s certainly better, if for no other reason than that “quiet” distinction. Chariots of Fire isn’t a template a lot of movies can reuse, but it’s a tone that anyone attempting to get a message across like this could stand to benefit from. It’s a way to tell a story and make a point without yelling into the camera. Crash is terrified you won’t “get it” and Chariots of Fire trusts that you can watch the movie and take it in on your own.

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 Deer Hunter Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: director’s guild of america

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 1978 winner The Deer Hunter. Is it better than Crash?

The most common element in a Best Picture winner is either Dustin Hoffman or war. This one’s a war movie, but it’s so much more than that.

We are fascinated with war because it’s the biggest, craziest thing we can think of. One whole loosely defined group goes up against another loosely defined group and they duke it out over something. In The Deer Hunter, a group of Pennsylvania steelworkers has a lavish wedding party before serving in the Vietnam War. They drink and dance and then go off to war. It feels inevitable.

The Vietnam War is the one we don’t really know how to talk about the most, perhaps, and it certainly was in 1978. Every single element of The Deer Hunter is designed to feel like a march towards something terrible. The men go through a wedding but are gripped by the thrill/fear of going to war. They go hunting but are more consumed by their thoughts than by the hunt. They go to war and are made to not just shoot at other people, but to turn the guns on themselves. Through iconic Russian roulette games, Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken are as chilling as anything in any other movie on this list. The Deer Hunter will break you down into your smallest pieces.

The Hurt Locker, Platoon, and The Best Years of Our Lives are all “war” movies that are about the external struggle as well as the internal struggle, but the “war” itself in The Deer Hunter almost doesn’t matter. The guys have to go to war to have their psyches opened, but they were always, partially, these people. It’s traditional in that it has the whole “your own worst enemy” thing going on where the internal struggle plays a larger role than the literal war, but it’s almost surprising how little Vietnam there seems to be in this Vietnam War movie.

It’s depressing, intense, and dramatic. It’s probably too much of all three of those things, though that will depend on what you want out of The Deer Hunter. Even if you think the whole thing is too much — and some of the symbolism can’t be said to be anything but “too much” — you will get something out of it. It will make you feel something for this unfortunate group of men. It’ll definitely do that.

The Best Part: The performances here are all spot-on: peak Robert De Niro, 30-year-old Meryl Streep, stone-serious and terrifying Christopher Walken, and the final film role of John Cazale. Everyone’s perfect here, which is good, because they have to pull off some insane stuff. I found it tense in a great way, but it’s definitely possible that the entire thing will feel too ridiculous to you. That seems to be the primary rethinking of The Deer Hunter, though I think it goes right to edge of madness without tipping over.

The Worst Part: The film works in thirds: America, trip to Vietnam, back to America. That first third is supposed to set up the characters, but they don’t really matter until they are changed. People always come at Tarantino for not editing, but this has to be the most unnecessary act in film history. It’s nearly an hour long and does about five minutes of work. There’s something to be said for establishing a tone, but “happy at a wedding before the war” does not need to be as long as the war itself.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? The Deer Hunter has been rethought a lot since it came out and shocked everyone, and I think that’s probably the only thing that could have happened. Most of what makes it so great is the shock. The Russian roulette scenes are all terrifying, the brutality of the war scenes are terrifying, the trip home is terrifying. Everything truly excellent in The Deer Hunter is excellent because you can’t believe what you’re seeing. I’ve mostly skirted the specifics here to try to keep this what it needs to be: something that you don’t see coming. Even if you have a vague awareness of The Deer Hunter, it’s much like needing to see Rain Man. Just knowing what it is isn’t enough, you have to witness it. You don’t need to see Crash, you can just take my word on that one.

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 West Side Story 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 1961 winner West Side Story. Is it better than Crash?

Before watching it recently, almost all of my specific West Side Story knowledge came from this Curb Your Enthusiasm clip:

I’ve talked before about my relationship with musicals, and I don’t know how much there is to really say on the subject in general. There’s a handful still to go, but the quintessential American musical just might be this one. It has three songs in the American Film Institute’s top 100 songs in film list: “Somewhere,” “America,” and “Tonight.” The “Sharks vs. Jets” pairing has been mocked in every form of media that exists. West Side Story is ubiquitous, I just didn’t really know how much I knew. I’d heard versions of “America” and “I Feel Pretty” before, but I think I was only loosely aware of their source.

All of that makes for an interesting first viewing in 2014, on par with movies that you somewhat know but don’t really like Driving Miss Daisy and Rain Man. You have a basic understanding of what’s up in West Side Story even if you haven’t seen a moment of it: forbidden love, dance fighting, and race in New York City. You’d end up writing a pretty terrible book report without more details than that, but you really do have most of what you need there. I guess the Driving Miss Daisy version of that is “a black guy drives an old white lady around and they learn they’re not so different after all,” but that would leave out the all-time-terrible performance from Dan Aykroyd, which would be a mistake.

So what’s under the surface of the dance fighting in West Side Story? Well, while “America” may be a pretty straightforward critique of race in the United States, it is a solid update of the Romeo and Juliet class dynamic. There’s some interesting smarm in “Gee, Officer Krupke” about the nature of being latchkey kids and what contributes to “troubled youth.” While it’s primarily an update of Shakespeare, it’s also something a little bit more. I can’t really judge the singing and dancing — reviews of musicals often have strong takes on the matter, and I just don’t have an eye for it — but the storyline is compelling and the pacing carries the nearly three-hour epic better than expected. It won’t be something I revisit very often, but I found myself caught up in an update of a story that I already know. That’s an accomplishment, so my bold take on West Side Story is that it’s “an accomplishment.” Really going out on a limb here.

The Best Part: Probably “America,” but I was really interested in the reaction to the climactic fight. I don’t think it’s possible to “spoil” an update of Romeo and Juliet, but someone dies. It’s not supposed to get that bad, and the reaction of a bunch of kids — that they act like a bunch of kids for the first time — is eye-opening. It adds a touch of realism to a movie that’s mostly people jumping off stoops and throwing their arms wide to show how tough they are. These kids don’t want to be “tough” but they see no other option, and when it all goes bad they can’t handle it.

The Worst Part: Is it bad that it’s the love story itself for me? I don’t care about Tony and Maria. I get that it’s the construct around which the rest of the world turns, but I was never that interested in it. Even the absurd love story of Gigi drew me in more than Tony/Maria, but that’s probably a failing on my part.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Finally, a movie that is directly about race to compare with the worst of the worst. The difference between the two is that in West Side Story race is a complicating factor for an existing plot and in Crash the plot stands in the way of a discussion of race. Race feels a little inserted into West Side Story, so even when the complication of “white vs. Puerto Rican” does come up, it comes up alongside “Sharks vs. Jets.” The battle lines are drawn along racial lines, but sometimes it feels more like they’re talking about the gangs than about the difficulty of race in America. That complication leads to some conversations where everyone appears to be talking about one thing, but really it’s a discussion of race. Race informs the entire movie, which allows for a deeper viewing of what is otherwise a fairly straightforward musical. Crash never lets anything go unsaid. If two people of a different race have a conversation, they both bring it up, angrily, to the other one. The tension of race is something everyone understands without it being shouted at them, but Crash is not at all interested in subtleties.

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 American Beauty 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 1999 winner American Beauty. Is it better than Crash?

When I first saw American Beauty I thought it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen. I was probably about 16. Those two things are connected.

From the ridiculous plastic-bag-in-the-wind scene to the rose petals that go so far past symbolism into being something else entirely, American Beauty is relentless with its style. If it connects with you, it probably does so very intensely. It’s a bit of a strange watch now, and I can’t say I’m not embarrassed by how much I liked it as a teenager. It’s the kind of movie that demands you ignore the edges to focus on the center. If you can do that, there’s a lot to love.

That was easier as a teenager. I looked past the super obvious mid-life crisis Kevin Spacey goes through and the first-year-creative-writing-student details of buying an expensive car, quitting your job in dramatic fashion, and smoking pot all the time. Typing it out feels ridiculous. Kevin Spacey is an incredible actor and he pulls off the sad-sack character well, but how is that not deeper? How did they get away with making such a surface-level movie that everyone called complex?

My best guess is because they tried to cover everything: sad loner with a secret warm heart, angry teenage daughter who just wants to connect, confident girl who secretly isn’t, sad housewife who seeks agency, etc, etc, etc. There’s a lot going on among the sad cast of American Beauty, and even for all the obviousness of the main traits of everyone involved, the gchat-status tagline of “look closer” actually works. I don’t buy the teenagers’ interactions with each other anymore, but the response of “don’t give up on me, dad” as a way to cut through Chris Cooper’s brutal discipline of his son really, really works. It’s not that he’s responding honestly, it’s that he’s figured out what his father wants to hear. Who ain’t been there?

American Beauty hasn’t aged well and it probably still has a ways to go before a historical consensus happens. It’s big on “art” in a way that can feel cheap at times — the roses coming out of Mena Suvari’s cheerleader uniform especially may as well have a “GET IT?” flashing over the screen — but I don’t hate it. I can’t really see why this was my favorite movie for so long, but that’s how a lot of these go. Hell, I think I kinda liked The Boondock Saints for a little bit, and oh my God, no.

The Best Part: In a last-ditch effort to save whatever remains of their love life, Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening very nearly have sex on a couch. She interrupts him with a shocked “don’t spill beer on the couch” and he responds with a tirade about how the couch doesn’t matter, everything else matters. It’s the entire ethos of American Beauty, and though there are many more hamfisted ways the message is expressed over the rest of the film, I really love this interaction. Honorable mention to Allison Janney, whose character is more haunting than I even remembered. It’s a terrifying display of more-from-less how she’s able to sell the misery of how life doesn’t always end up how you want.

The Worst Part: It’s gotta be the bag, right? The iconic scene in American Beauty is one character showing another video he shot of a bag floating in the wind. I don’t hate it as much as other people do — people really hate it — but I understand the feeling that “sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world that I can’t take it” isn’t the home run line that it seemed like to a teenager.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Someone terrible might draw a connection here between two movies that wanted to sell a simple idea and were caught up in the idea that you might miss the point if they ever let off the gas. I get that, because the most reasonable criticism for both of them is that they’re just too blunt. American Beauty has some interesting takes on the everything-isn’t-as-sunny-as-it-looks idea, but Kevin Spacey smoking pot and ranting around about how suburbia has a dark underbelly is… yeah. The ties between these two aren’t great, but American Beauty has some smart elements. It’s likable for all of its frowning and grousing, and Crash is decidedly not.

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 How Green Was My Valley 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 1941 winner How Green Was My Valley. Is it better than Crash?

They aren’t all fun. Hell, most of them aren’t any fun, but How Green Was My Valley is the distinct opposite of “fun.”

You’re forgiven for not knowing anything about it. For years it was just my default guess at bar trivia whenever I had no idea about a movie from the 40s. It is the ur-movie-from-the-40s, really. It’s a sad, voiceover-filled retrospective about a time gone by. There’s really no better way to sum up this subset of Oscar history, so at least that can be said for this one. It’s about mine disasters and the death of the mining economy in Wales in the 19th century. Feelgood story it ain’t.

Through the perspective of young Huw Morgan, we follow the travails of the Morgan family as they are injured, degraded, humiliated, shamed, and abused by the impossible economy of brute force underground in a mine. The light moments are all about how the family came together even in the face of misery and a lack of hope. If I sound like I’m describing something Hard to Watch then I am doing a good job.

How Green Was My Valley exists these days mostly as a good sign of what things were like in film decades and decades ago. The tone is bleak throughout. The narrator gets beat up at school and the solution offered by his family is to reward him for getting hurt fighting. If you need to know how bleak this all is, the “good” solution to “our kid is getting beat up at school” is to send some family members down there to kick his teacher’s ass, which they do in front of the class. The problem is thus solved, we out.

How Green Was My Valley isn’t bad, but it’s a relic. It doesn’t really make sense anymore. It fills you with sadness for a people you can’t help. For an economy that has already bottomed out. In America we bemoan the death of our industrial cities, but How Green Was My Valley will put it in perspective: it has been thus for a long damn time.

The Best Part: Watching the dudes beat up a teacher in a classroom — even though I was very nearly a teacher — is hilarious. We deserve it. But for real, it’s an insane scene. It really deserves to be seen.

The Worst Part: There’s some good stuff in here, but it’s overshadowed by the relentless darkness of it all. At one point the patriarch of the family is challenged for wanting to stand by his ethics of “hard work” in opposition to a strike. There’s a chance to make a statement, but most of the movie is spent on darker, less complicated material.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Better, but slower. How Green Was My Valley and Crash are definitely at opposite ends of every spectrum. Crash may be more interesting to a modern viewer — it’s in color — but it’s a dumber message that doesn’t deserve to be listened to. You’re better off slogging through the sad history of Welsh mining, and I realize how insane that sounds. Take that as a slight to Crash and put it on the box: less interesting than the history of mining.

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: Halfway Through the List, Let’s Revisit Crash. Is it Really that Bad?

Alex Russell

I just wanted to find an excuse to watch all the Best Picture winners. That’s all this was supposed to be, and now it is breaking me. Crash is winning. How did we get here?

There are 86 movies that have won Best Picture, though technically some of them won before it was called that exactly. The point is that there are 86 movies that The People That Make Such Decisions have said are the best of the best. There are other ways to watch 86 of the supposed greatest movies of all time, but there are no other ways to think about Crash, the 2005 winner, every single week for a year.

It’s an inane project to compare the other 85 to Crash — clearly — but it serves a purpose to me. It forces my hand. It’s much easier to give up on something when you don’t have to represent yourself publicly. For that reason, these are sometimes just for me. No one really cares what I thought about Mrs. Miniver or You Can’t Take It With You, I don’t have any delusions about that. What I do have is a need to see all 86 of these damn movies in 2014, and the way to do that is to have a space to come talk about each one. Hopefully I’m doing so in a way that’s interesting, albeit it Crash-filled. You be the judge of that.

The point is this is the halfway point. At the bottom of the page you’ll see 43 links to 43 articles about 43 movies. Some of them, like It Happened One Night, Midnight Cowboy, and Kramer vs. Kramer, will stick with me for the rest of my life. Some of them, like Amadeus, Shakespeare in Love, and The Last Emperor, are already beginning to fade in my mind. As with any list of things, it is not a perfect summary of greatness in film history.

But is that the rub with the entire project? Has anyone ever said “these are the best?” I’d argue that they have, even though some of them have rightfully faded from memory. You have to get real deep in film history for anyone to care about Cavalcade or Grand Hotel, both rightfully so, but on the flip side some modern films on the list, like The Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men, are instant classics. The list must be considered to at least be a summary of what people found great at the time, and thus can be used as a functional canon for what has constituted a “great film” over history.

So why in the hell is Crash on there?

None of the first 42 other movies came close to Crash. I hated The Artist, I was bored by Shakespeare in Love and A Man for All Seasons, and I can’t wrap my mind around the inherent strangeness of You Can’t Take It With You, but none of those came even close. They all have merits, and after watching Crash again last night, I still contend that Crash has none.

The weirdest part is that this is a divisive opinion; not everyone hates Crash. It’s certainly the movie that comes up the most in lists of the worst, but it’s by no means considered a “bad movie” on its own. The hate seems to have come from people putting it on a list with Casablanca and The Godfather.

I originally felt that way. I thought Crash was a little dumb, but not offensively so. It’s only after spending so much of my free time considering what Crash is and what it hopes to be that I feel a real hate for it, like an embittered ex-spouse. We are having a prolonged, public divorce and I never loved you, anyway, movie about racism.

After 43 straight posts about it, I got worried that I was losing touch with the source material. Rewatching it unearthed some new feelings, which I will now share with the class:

The very first scene of Crash opens with a car crash, where a white woman asks an Asian woman if she noticed her “blake lights” instead of brake lights. It sets the tone early, in the way that a fire will eventually be a pile of soot. It is completely unnecessary.
It’s moments like “blake lights” that make you wonder just how worried the writers of Crash were that people would miss their DEEP AND COMPLICATED MESSAGE about racism. There are films on this list that talk about race better than Crash. Some of them are six decades older than it. That is inexcusable.
“Hey Osama, plan a jihad on your own time” is said in scene two of Crash. I’m not going to go scene-by-scene, but you have to understand that these things happen essentially while there are still credits rolling on the screen. It feels like a tonal suckerpunch. You haven’t even had time to understand this world yet, but you already know that everyone is terrible all the time.
Ludacris enters the movie with a monologue about not getting offered coffee while eating spaghetti. This may be the best part of the movie, because no one ever addresses that these things are incongruous. When I was 15 I had to find a fancy dish to add some specificity to a short story I was writing and I went with something insane — turkey parm, I think — the point is that any decent editor would fix that, but they left in this insane coffee/spaghetti pairing. No one has ever had coffee with spaghetti.
The general direction for the acting in Crash seems to have been “no, even angrier.” Everyone is mad at everyone for every reason. This is supposed to feel “gritty” and “tense” but it feels “forced” and “ridiculous.” People treat the attempted murder of their children with less malice than a door not closing right.
Tony Danza. Don’t watch Crash, but if you do, watch it just for the scene where Tony Danza confronts Terrence Howard about someone not sounding “black enough.” Within the narrative of the movie it’s supposed to feel racially uncomfortable, but Tony Danza is a little too silly for how shameful this is supposed to be. It also happens after a much more intense white vs. black racial interaction with Terrence Howard, but this breaks him. Maybe being berated by Tony Danza is the most shameful thing possible. I take this back.
Don Cheadle does a good job with a complicated role. They make him say some really stupid things because Crash was written without an editor (“can’t talk mom, I’m having sex with a white lady” is hall-of-fame-bad) but he’s a tragic figure that I actually really connected with this time around. Great job doing more with less than less.
Brendan Frasier is married to Sandra Bullock and their storyline is terrible. Sandra Bullock may play the least compelling character in film history in this movie. Every single line she says is supposed to establish that she’s a terrible racist, but everyone is a terrible racist, so she just seems to be some kind of sociopath.

We have 43 movies to go. There are some classics on the remaining list, like The Deer Hunter, West Side Story, and The Godfather II. There are also some famous duds, like Around the World in 80 Days, Cimarron, and Dances With Wolves. All 43 will be compared to Crash. All must be judged. We came here to find something worse than Crash. So far, the task has been unfinished. I’m going back into the breach.

The Best Part: Don Cheadle.

The Worst Part: Sandra Bullock. Or Brendan Frasier. Or Tony Danza. Or Matt Dillon. Or the writing. Or the editing. You pick.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It is Crash. It is terrible.

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 Amadeus Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: virtual-history.com

Alex Russell

If you haven’t seen Amadeus yet, are you going to? Are you, really? Yeah, see?

I would have gone my entire life without seeing this, and I’m still trying to process how I feel about it. I don’t think I’m done with Amadeus, even a few weeks later. It’s an insanely long movie, but unlike a lot of the longer slogs on the list, there’s a ton to cover. Mozart is a young buck who just wants to flirt and get drunk and act like an asshole, while Salieri wants to create the music that will secure his legacy. Just as in life, in Amadeus the asshole is rewarded.

It’s complicated, though, which makes this worth your time. The movie happens in the framing device of an elderly Salieri detailing the sins of his life to a priest. It’s a neat device — and it’s done much better than the nearly identical one in The Last Emperor — and it allows for the telling of a ton of absurd stories. All it needs to be is the central Mozart vs. Salieri conflict, but it’s largely the story of Mozart’s sad life behind his giggling demeanor. There’s some heavy stuff with his dad and his family that feels much more compelling than the standard “he only cares about his work!” stuff in your typical movie about a mad genius. It’s not impressive because it’s risky, it’s impressible because of the scope of the story.

That said, I led this off the way I did because this is definitely what you think it is. It’s a movie about two men battling with classical music, so don’t expect it to wow you if that kind of thing doesn’t wow you. You’re not going to give an eighth of a day to it at this point if you haven’t already, but you will be missing something unique if you don’t.

The Best Part: I rolled my eyes a lot during Amadeus, but Tom Hulce is just a damn delight as Mozart. His laugh will stick with me for a long time, so here’s some guy on YouTube that made a supercut of all of it:

The Worst Part: Holy shit, this is a long movie. A significant number of Best Picture winners are more than three hours long, but few of them feel as long as Amadeus. The most important conflict of the film is that Salieri can’t handle Mozart at all. It’s a compelling conflict, but it centers on Salieri’s shortcomings compared to the great composer. Maybe this is crass, but it’s definitely a bit difficult to feel for a guy whose main failing is that he kinda sucks compared to Mozart.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? This is the halfway point with 43 down and 43 to go. I’m not entirely sure where my mind is at after talking about Crash for most of a year, but it’s nowhere good. I like Crash far less than when I started, which I certainly didn’t think was possible, but I also love a lot of these movies so far. Next week I’m going to do a rewatch of Crash to remind myself what even happens in it, because I’m much clearer on the list of great movies that follows this paragraph now. Comparing it to Amadeus seems impossible. One is the story of a man’s lifetime struggle with the reality that genius pays off more than hard work and one is a testament to how our process for rewarding movies with the “Best Picture” distinction made (at least) one tragic error. I guess they are alike. I did it. Don’t check my work.

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 Mrs. Miniver Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: nicksflickpicks.com

Alex Russell

If Patton is the story of people who choose to make war their entire life, Mrs. Miniver is the story of people who don’t have a choice about it. It’s an entire movie about the homefront in war. It focuses on events at home — both mundane and not — and how they are complicated by the ridiculous nature of war. Cavalcade and The Best Years of Our Lives are also about that, but they’ve got much different messages than Mrs. Miniver.

This one is entirely about suffering and liking it. In another setting, a movie about being resilient in the face of strife on this scale would be a tough sell. A movie about the British resistance at home during WWII, though, we’re comfortable with that story. The entire international perception of England was changed by WWII. It is taken as fact that the British are tough and can handle the worst without complaint. It’s just one of those “things” now, and Mrs. Miniver was an important part of that myth-making.

There’s nothing going on in Mrs. Miniver other than the war. Men decide they need to go to war to protect Britain and the women need to stay home and be brave and true and good. It’s full on propaganda, but it’s distinctly Western propaganda (and Allied, I suppose, which is an even easier sell) so an American audience may not feel as manipulated. It’s just two hours of bad things happening and good people staring into the middle distance while they wonder how they’ll move on.

They’ll move on because they’re British and because they must, is the message, and it’s told again and again. There’s no real reason to watch this in 2014. You’ll get everything you need from any particularly badly written history book. The bombing of London is one of the iconic domestic tragedies of our time and a movie about the bravery and difficulty involved in surviving it is nothing to roll your eyes at, but at one point the entire family reads Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under a staircase and it’s just a ton. It’s heavy and it should be, but other than the patriotism, there’s no there there.

The Best Part: The titular Mrs. Miniver captures a German soldier in her garden and they have a terrifying conversation in her kitchen. She makes him a meal at gunpoint before getting his gun away from him. This scene is either the greatest or worst part of the movie, and it probably depends on what you want Mrs. Miniver to be. If you want to marvel at strangeness, look no further.

The Worst Part: The entire movie is “climax” but my least favorite dramatic scene is a flower competition, and I would write more about it, but it’s a flower competition. Right before it there’s an unexpected death and right after it there’s a bombing. You can skip the flower competition. Please skip the flower competition.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? I hate to say it, but I’m only 100% sure I’ll never watch Mrs. Miniver again, of the two. I’m going to watch Crash again this week for a rewatch, but I feel no need to watch Mrs. Miniver again. I got it. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s one-note and it’s fairly repetitive. Crash is much worse, to be sure, but only because there’s not really that much in Mrs. Miniver to love or hate. If you boiled down any movie to three words you’d be missing nuance, but I don’t think you miss anything with a three-word summary here: British people endure.

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 Patton Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: oscars.org

Alex Russell

I’ll say this: this was the easiest movie on the list to pick out a picture for.

Patton is dramatic, funny, and challenging. It’s a sweeping view of one part of one person, but it’s by no means simple. George C. Scott won — and refused — an Oscar for his portrayal of General George S. Patton, and I’m not sure anyone has ever done a better job of portraying a character.

It’s a character, for sure, because it’s such a thin version of a person. Patton doesn’t care about anything aside from military conquest. He can’t keep control of his troops because he keeps screwing up basic stuff, but he’s a brilliant tactician on the battlefield. He, like so many of us, can’t do the dumb things he’s gotta do every day — like, well, not piss off Russia — to get to the part of life that he cares about. He just wants his troops to follow him, unwavering, to battle. He cares about conquest and victory in a very romantic sense. He’s a warrior-poet, emphasis on both, and he needs his story told in blood.

What makes it work so well is that it isn’t a sort of un-Full Metal Jacket. It’s still not a very rosy view of military life or battle, it’s just a more complicated view of the men who care about such things. Patton isn’t the everyman and he isn’t supposed to be a suggestion of the proper way to feel about patriotism or war. He’s supposed to be an over-the-top view of the military. He’s what we’d all be if we actually gave ourselves to work. He’s too far gone.

War movies are almost always the story of why we shouldn’t go to war. Those are fine — many on this list are more than fine — but Patton wants to talk about George S. Patton more than war. It’s about how we love our heroes when they’re being heroic, but we don’t want to deal with the things that keep those people human. We want them to go back into a box until there’s more heroism needed. George C. Scott’s Patton wants to keep being heroic all the time, and when he runs out of villains to find he starts constructing them himself.

The Best Part: Maybe it came across here, but if there’s any doubt I shall put it to rest: GEORGE. C. SCOTT. Go watch the first 10 minutes of Patton. It’s the iconic “pep talk” scene in front of the giant flag. Go do it, right now. Don’t even read the rest of this section first. I could put anything here, because no one is reading it, because you are watching the first 10 minutes of Patton. I’m gonna put my Social Security number here.

The Worst Part: I hate to keep coming back to length. A good third of Best Picture winners are 2.5 hours or longer, and most of them definitely don’t need to be. Patton doesn’t sag under the weight of 170 minutes, but it’s impossible to not mention. It’s supposed to feel enormous, like the full weight of the man’s struggle against the system he so didn’t understand, and it does. It just wanders a little bit toward the middle; there’s some especially repetitive scenes of Patton losing his shit and losing his army that don’t add to anyone’s understanding of the General himself.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Patton, if nothing else, is the triumph of George C. Scott. He’s exceptional in Dr. Strangelove, but he’s all-time great, here. It would not be unreasonable to say that this is possibly the greatest single performance on the list, and this is one hell of a list. There are flaws with Patton, to be sure, but none of them come from Scott’s consistent, terrifying performance. He sells you on a difficult concept: that a man who loves war, and only war, is more than a monster. Exceptional art challenges the viewer, and Patton does. I’m not even going to talk about the other movie right now.

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 An American in Paris Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: classichollywoodcentral.com

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 1951 winner An American in Paris. Is it better than Crash?

“Well, you do hate musicals.”

I cannot tell you how many times people have told me this supposed fact about myself this year. If you hate a musical, you apparently hate all musicals. This isn’t true for any other damn genre — I hate Crash, if you haven’t picked up on it, but I don’t hate everything vaguely like it — but it’s apparently true for movies with singing and dancing in them.

I don’t! I swear I don’t! I even liked Gigi, and Gigi was BuzzFeed’s worst Best Picture winner ever. I thought it was charming, if a little misguided with regards to message. I mean, you can only sing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” so many times before it starts to sound odd. But as for other musicals, I think I like most of them. I like the ones everyone likes. I kinda hated Moulin Rouge!, but I saw that as a 15-year-old. It never stood a chance.

I’m now at the age where I assume that if I hate something out of my comfort zone, I’m the asshole. I assume that the problem is genuinely with me. I assume that I simply haven’t given myself over to the experience; I haven’t said yes to life. I decided that I was going to say yes to George Gershwin and Gene Kelly.

The result? Did I love An American in Paris? No. I powered through An American in Paris the way someone watches the reset episode of a drama they like. I made it to the credits because I wanted to see what was next. I probably wouldn’t have even finished it if not for this project, but then, that’s the whole point of the thing.

In An American in Paris, Gene Kelly has to dance a lot to delight children, win over a young woman, and discuss love with his friends. There’s a lot of dancing in this movie, which is sort of like saying a restaurant has a lot of food, but I really have to express to you just how much damn dancing is in this movie. There is an entire quarter of an hour of dialogue-less dancing in this film. In a movie that clocks in under two hours, that feels crazy. Gene Kelly is the best there ever was at what he does, but make damn sure you want to see a ton of it.

There is so much music in this — a musical with the creation of music as a story element is laying it on pretty thick — that some songs are interrupted by other songs. A traditional musical would interrupt a story element to cut to a musical number, but An American in Paris interrupts its own music for more music. You got your musical in my musical!

But Gene Kelly is Gene Kelly, so some moments are just “magical” enough to work. He performs “I Got Rhythm” while French children crowd around him and form a call-and-response group. That part really sticks with me, and it’s apparently the only song from the film to make AFI’s top 100 songs from film list. The love is love. It’s not annoying. Maybe I don’t love musicals, but I certainly don’t hate them. I’m lukewarm on the sprawling, ridiculous An American in Paris because I’m not very interested in what it has to say, not because I hate the whole genre.

The Best Part:

It’s kinda fun, isn’t it? The French kids don’t know any English beyond what they say in the song, either, so now you know that.

The Worst Part: “Risky” is as nice of a word as I can use to describe the ending. I hate this ending. I hate, hate, hate it. It’s not spoiling it to say it ends with a “daydream” sequence that plays out as a ballet. I know it’s iconic and it’s exceptional and dazzling and all that, but it’s exactly what people think of when they say they “hate musicals.” West Side Story is three hours long and nothing in it feels as shoehorned in as the ballet here.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? I’m not a big fan of this one, but I don’t think it would even make my bottom five. The visuals are bright, the characters are fun, and the dancing can’t be beat. I found myself really in love with moments of it, but it couldn’t keep me hooked from start to finish. Only the ballet really bored me, and that brings this all back to a debate had often in this space: is it better to be terrible or boring? We’re rapidly approaching the halfway mark here, and we’re going to have to find a good answer for that by then. I’ll say An American in Paris is better because the highs are much, much higher, but I was just about as angry at that ballet as I was at some of the mild awfulness in Crash. Nothing comes close to that police chase scene in Crash, though, so Crash retains the top (bottom?) spot in a walk.

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.

classic film

Worst Best Picture: Is Chariots of Fire Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is The Deer Hunter Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is West Side Story Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is American Beauty Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is How Green Was My Valley Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Halfway Through the List, Let’s Revisit Crash. Is it Really that Bad?

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

Worst Best Picture: Is Mrs. Miniver Better or Worse Than Crash?

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

Worst Best Picture: Is An American in Paris Better or Worse Than Crash?