worst oscar winner

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 Slumdog Millionaire 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 2008 winner Slumdog Millionaire. Is it better than Crash?

The poster for Slumdog Millionaire calls it “the feel-good film of the decade.” Most of the other 85 winners to date are decided not “feel-good” movies, so Slumdog at least has that going for it. Honestly, your enjoyment of Slumdog is going to come down to your answer to that basic question: was this fun for you?

Slumdog is the story of two boys who grow up together but fork off into different paths. They both grow up in the streets, but one, Salim, joins a crime ring and one, Jamal, ends up working in a call center. Jamal uses the call center’s database to look up a long-lost love and then uses the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to try to reunite with her. It’s an interesting plot point and likely the only thing you’d know about Slumdog without seeing it. As of now, the show is still on in the US (though it’s not the phenomenon it once was) and thus this doesn’t feel all that dated to me, yet. It’ll be interesting to see how that ends up in 20 years. Could you imagine if Midnight Cowboy had an extended scene in the middle based on Password?

Everything here is about the game show. Jamal works his way through the show’s questions because he miraculously knows every answer from some small moment of his life. He knows a question about cricket because he was in a dangerous situation where a TV was on, playing that cricket match. He knows a question about a $100 US bill because he got one, one time, from some American tourists. It’s all about coincidence — or fate! — and your tolerance for that sort of thing will determine if Slumdog is cute or tortuous for you.

I generally hate unexplained luck like that in a movie, but it works here. Slumdog is fun without leaning too heavily on why Jamal is so lucky. He knows all this stuff because he needs to know it to be on the show. He’s on the show because this is the only public platform he can think of to reach out to the girl he loves. Sure, okay, that all checks out. Without the internal doubt of the movie — Jamal is repeatedly accused of being a fraud, because no one would know all this stuff from his station in life — this is just a starry eyed movie about the triumph of love. With it, it’s an implausible story, to be sure, but it’s one that feels almost possible.

The Best Part: The performances are all pretty lackluster (most everyone is a teenager or a gangster in this movie) compared to the standard Oscar fare, so thankfully Anil Kapoor is exceptional as the host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He’s brash and cocky and does a good job of selling the show-within-a-film as real. It feels like a show people would actually watch; he is the ultimate “host” in this movie.

The Worst Part: Oh, man, do I not care about this love story. Jamal is a complete cipher for “goodness.” He never develops an opinion or feeling of his own, he’s just the prism through which good intentions bends into actions. Latika, the girl of his dreams, is a girl that he barely gets to know as a child. There’s something we buy as an audience about two people who met when they were insanely young and then lost touch being in love, but think about that person in your life. Think about “risking it all” for that girl or boy from the first decade of your life. People may be mad at the conceit of a game show where a boy knows all the answers — and only these answers — but I just wish there would be a love story where the people had time to actually fall in love.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Is a game show more convenient than a car crash as a catalyst? I guess that’s a push. The only non-Indian people in Slumdog Millionaire are two ridiculously stupid tourists that are either actually in fanny packs or just act like they are, so it’s difficult to offer a traditional “race” viewing of the movie. Certainly there is something worth considering in that Danny Boyle (a white British guy) directed the most iconic Indian Best Picture, but within the film itself there isn’t much to go on. The comparison here is one of believability. If you hate the main element of Slumdog (the game show) as much as I hate the main element of Crash (everything is connected, man) then you will see these as very similar. It’s possible that Slumdog is your pick for the worst on the list. I say it’s nothing compared to most of these, but it’s certainly less harmless than the assault-on-plot-and-character that is 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 The Life of Emile Zola Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: allmovie.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 1937 winner The Life of Emile Zola. Is it better than Crash?

I had to watch The Life of Emile Zola twice to really get it. It’s one of the shorter Oscar winners — almost none of them clock in at under two hours — but it’s still an unbelievable slog to watch in 2014. It’s a courtroom drama that mostly happens outside of the courtroom and it’s an exploration of race that never mentions race at all.

The film is a biography of Emile Zola and a look at his involvement with the Dreyfus affair, a French political scandal where a Jewish man was convicted by the court of public opinion (and, well, real court) and sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The film centers around Zola’s decision to speak out publicly for Dreyfus and to demand that the trial be reopened, but it’s also about the risk of challenging authority. The army has said that Dreyfus was treasonous, and challenging the army is challenging the state itself. It is not done.

The first half hour is all about establishing that Emile Zola doesn’t give a shit about what isn’t done. He writes dozens of books that challenge authority and is met every time by a different fanciful, official, French person that thinks he’s being a real asshole. He builds a life out of rebellion, though, even though his newly gained status and riches cost him his spot among the “battered” artistic class. There’s a quietness to this part of the film that I really like, and it’s a classic problem: how do you reconcile the fact that selling things to bring down the establishment makes you the new establishment?

The trial itself is much louder. Poor Paul Muni who plays Zola screams every word he says in court as he tries to stand up for Dreyfus. I can’t really motivate you to go see a political drama from before World War II, but if you see it you will be struck by the lack of one topic. Dreyfus is Jewish and it’s made very clear that the army believes him to be the traitor because he’s a Jew, but no one in the entire movie ever comes out and says so. The Dreyfus affair in history is 100% about some very ugly stereotypes and beliefs, but The Life of Emile Zola is 116 minutes about the Dreyfus affair without one mention of Judaism.

It’s sometimes necessary to talk about these early Best Picture winners with a caveat sentence. The Lost Weekend, a 1945 look at alcoholism, is pretty goofy in 2014. Gentleman’s Agreement, a 1947 movie where Gregory Peck pretends to be Jewish to write an article, doesn’t really know how to talk about everything it wants to talk about. Even when these films take on the right complicated, challenging subjects they sometimes do so like surgery with a shotgun. You have to watch The Life of Emile Zola knowing they mean Jewish, and that probably won’t be enough for you. It’s great that they wanted to make a movie about the unfair imprisonment of a man because of his faith, it’s just a shame they didn’t want to tell you that’s what they made.

The Best Part: The French officer that “captures” Dreyfus hands him a gun with the implication that he can choose to shoot himself rather than undergo the humiliation of a treason conviction. “I’ve been instructed to offer you the usual alternative.” is a line for the ages, as is “I’m not so stupid… as to provide you with a perfect case!” Awesome.

The Worst Part: After he first appears in the paper denouncing the army, Zola is met in the street by an angry mob. One of the hallmarks of early film like this is a fear that the audience won’t be able to follow motivations, but having a guy in the crowd shout “There’s Zola himself! Let’s kill him!” is a pretty hilarious moment in the middle of a lot of tension.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? The obvious connection here is race. Both of these movies are designed to shine a light on tough racial topics but neither of them really does a great job of doing so. Crash because of hamfisted dialogue and extremely poor character development and The Life of Emile Zola because they were terrified to come right out and say “Jew” in 1937. One exists as a relic of a time gone by and the other is from 1937. But seriously, the right way to make both of these movies is somewhere in the middle of the two, and The Life of Emile Zola certainly deserves more forgiveness because it is nearly a century old.

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 Hurt Locker Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: fanpop.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 2009 winner The Hurt Locker. Is it better than Crash?

The 82nd Academy Awards are especially memorable for me. It was the first year I watched the entire broadcast of the event, and I can tell you right now that is almost always a mistake. The actual 3+ hour event of the Oscars is generally brutal — it was even more brutal before Twitter offered up a much more interesting barrage of dumb jokes about it — but the 82nd one had a twist: Avatar was nominated for a truckload of things.

People ask me if there’s a way anything could be worse than Crash to me. If Avatar had won, this whole damn thing would be about that. Avatar is a horrible, horrible movie.

Just like Crash, the message of Avatar is read through a megaphone. Both movies are insulting and simple; both movies have no regard for subtlety at all. 50 years from now, people will be more embarrassed by Avatar than Crash, in a just future. We’re count on you, future people, to hate a movie where blue cat people tried to save the world from the evils of progress. Progress bad! Trees good! An environmental message does not necessarily tank a movie, but anything that sacrifices character and depth to be sure you aren’t missing The Big Picture has failed at a basic level.

I mention all this because it really felt foregone at the time. The Oscars had returned to a 10-nominee Best Picture category at the time, but most of the movies didn’t feel like they had a shot. An Education is a solid film but no real contender, District 9 is interesting but not the kind of movie people reward like that, and as much as I liked Up in the Air and A Serious Man, they just didn’t feel like movies for the ages.

I’m never any good at judging what will win. Maybe The Hurt Locker was the obvious choice. I jumped up and down in a hotel room when it won, half because it beat Avatar and half because it’s actually very well done. It hits a lot of the typical Oscar high notes: war film, film about a contemporary problem, moral questions. It is everything you’d want out of an Oscar winner, so why does it feel strange on the list?

Mankind is never good at immediate judgement of history, it’s kinda the nature of the beast. The Hurt Locker is about a small group of bomb disposal specialists that have to respond to reports of explosives around Iraq during the Iraq War. We’re not ready to talk about that yet. World War I and World War II certainly have their films on this list — and lots of them came out RIGHT around both conflicts — but this one is different. We want to view people who put their lives at risk for the greater good in a solely positive light, but everyone is complicated. Jeremy Renner’s character can’t figure out if he wants to live or die on the job or to stay in Iraq or go home, and that complication mirrors our difficult understanding of what is going on in the world. We’re not sure if all of this is necessary or a good idea, and the character aren’t either. They get up and go to work because they have to, but they aren’t sure that’s how this all should be.

A war movie that solely glorifies war is a bad war movie, and The Hurt Locker passes the test because it does as much to make you rethink the experience as The Deer Hunter. It’s not a screaming mess of “stop all the fighting and love one another” because it’s realistic. We need to do some soul searching about how we feel about war and the people who fight it. This movie is a good start.

The Best Part: Jeremy Renner is incredible in this. The entire movie is a series of brief, loud moments surrounded by long periods of quiet, but a particular scene where Renner and another soldier have to stake out a position with a long rifle with a scope is particularly tense. The exciting bits are exciting, but they work because they are buffered by enough time to let it all build back up.

The Worst Part: There is a thread of the plot where everyone is concerned that a well-liked Iraqi boy may have died. Jeremy Renner at one point goes into the city to look for him and breaks into an Iraqi professor’s house. There’s definitely a need to show “normal” people in Iraq, but I don’t know how well this scene accomplishes that goal.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It is better. Both movies want to lock their current worldview in amber and show generations in the future what their time was like. I’ve said it before, but I just don’t know what Crash adds to the conversation. The Hurt Locker may make you mad in a productive way, and at the very least it will complicate your view of what you think you know. The idea of people doing such a tense job also having to keep their personal relationships with each other up in the middle of a literal war zone? Yikes, yikes, yikes. It won’t be for everyone, but The Hurt Locker could not be said to be uninteresting.

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 Going My Way Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

The 1940s is the last decade where a majority of the films that won Best Picture feel significantly dated. Mrs. Miniver, How Green Was My Valley, and The Lost Weekend all have their charms, but they require significant suspension of modern film opinion to enjoy. Going My Way is dated, but in a different way. Let me be frank: the chief conflict in Going My Way is about if Bing Crosby can love both golf and God or if that’s a bridge too far.

Conflict drives all story, and Going My Way is the clash of Bing Crosby’s young, hip priest and Barry Fitzgerald’s old, stuffy priest. Bing Crosby shows up with a song in his heart and a desire to make the church a place the kids want to hang out and stay out of trouble. Fitzgerald wants Bing Crosby to shut the hell up about golf and baseball and all his other worldly nonsense.

It’s a simple enough plot, but it really hinges on how believable you find their disagreements and how much you like the two leads. Barry Fitzgerald’s character is supposed to be elderly, but he’s established as somewhere around 700 years old based on his personality. Bing Crosby is eternal to a certain generation, to be sure, but I was born too late to have the automatic reverence. I’m not going to sit here and say that he has a bad performance here, but the scenes that require the viewer to be shocked and aghast that he has a shirt with a baseball team’s name on it — such behaviors do not befit a man of the cloth! — don’t resonate anymore. Some of it is that Bing Crosby as the “young upstart” seems silly, some of it is that it isn’t 1944. All of it is that this movie is like looking into a dead civilization, lost to time.

Going My Way is mostly fun, though, so it has that going for it. The third act focuses on Bing Crosby’s character’s singing career, because of course it does. It would be a waste to put one of the great singers of the day in a movie and not have him sing, but within the narrative it feels badly shoehorned. It turns out the priest always wanted to write songs and his beautiful ex-girlfriend always wanted to sing songs and let’s get this show on the road!

The whole movie’s plot is fairly slight, though the ideas behind it aren’t. The ideas of a religion wanting to appeal to a new generation and the old generation being afraid to try new tactics still resonates all these decades later. The theme of giving way to your future is still universal, but the way it happens in Going My Way feels a little dumb towards the end.

The Best Part: While Going My Way isn’t a “musical” in the way we’d think of one now, there are a helluva lot of songs in it. Some of these are fun. There are other redemptive qualities, but I will say that the obvious “Bing Crosby sings some songs” vehicle has some good Bing Crosby songs, so that’s for the best.

The Worst Part: The setup to establish Bing Crosby as “cool” is pretty silly in the light of 2014. It’s not really fair to judge Going My Way for how cool 1944 Bing Crosby isn’t these days, but man, I really couldn’t stop myself from enjoying how out-of-date it feels now. “C’mon, kids, let’s go watch some baseball!” What teenager wouldn’t want to go to a baseball game with his priest?

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? I can’t honestly decide if I would recommend Going My Way to someone. It’s a middle-of-the-pack Oscar winner in that it’s fine, I guess, but it has a ton of problems that keep it from being a “classic” in my eyes. It’s better than most of the things you could watch, and Bing Crosby had the kind of career where you should watch his Best Actor-winning performance. It’s dated significantly these days, but so is Crash and that came out less than a decade ago. No discussion of race at all in Going My Way, so all we can compare them on is that this movie from 1944 is set in a world that you will recognize a little more than the one 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 Dances with Wolves 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 1990 winner Dances with Wolves. Is it better than Crash?

The director’s cut of Dances with Wolves is two minutes shorter than the longest version of Gone with the Wind, which would have made it the second longest Best Picture winner ever. The original version is significantly shorter — at the trim, tight running time of three hours long — so we’ll go off that, here.

No matter what version of the “modern classic” you watch, you’re in for a metric ton of Kevin Costner. Your enjoyment of Dances with Wolves will depend on two main things:

How much you like Kevin Costner
How much tolerance you have for a white guy saving a bunch of Native Americans

The plot is simple: Kevin Costner gets sent to the frontier and mans a military post. Through a series of freak accidents and occurrences, he ends up manning said post by himself. He meets some Native Americans. They take him in, because he is a Good White Person. He assimilates and meets the other Good White Person (Mary McDonnell) they have in their tribe. The Bad White People come back to find Kevin Costner, everyone fights, loyalties are questioned, etc.

It’s a simple plot and it results in a mostly insulting view of race. I capitalize my insulting terms in the preview paragraph because it feels so insulting in the film. Kevin Costner and Mary McDonnell are infinitely compassionate and patient, every other white character is an insane murderer. The reality of white/Native American interactions on the frontier is absolutely a terrible one, and the painting of there being only Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil with no in between is lazy. This is a tragic time in America’s history, and this portrayal is reductive.

There is a lot of controversy around the accuracy of the language in Dances with Wolves, but it fails at a much more basic level than specific authenticity. You don’t need to get into that sort of detail. Dances with Wolves is exactly the movie you think it is, and that’s not good. When Kevin Costner befriends a wolf, the lone wolf symbolism is like a battering ram. Every interaction will make your eyes roll. It’s just not very carefully done.

Like Driving Miss Daisy, you can tell that Dances with Wolves was a genuine attempt to make something that took on race relations in a historic context. It’s not fair to call either movie “racist,” at least with regard to intent. They won back-to-back in 1989 and 1990 and both have aged so terribly, so quickly, that it’s remarkable. The combo is bookended by Rain Man and Silence of the Lambs, so it’s not like the world was crazy for a decade. Race is challenging, and a lot of people refer to movies like this as “Oscar bait” because they try to tackle the topic. They may be right, but winning the Oscar and being remembered fondly are different accomplishments. Dances with Wolves is just too hamfisted.

The Best Part: The setup to get Costner’s Lt. Dunbar out to the frontier is memorable for its strangeness. The first 15 minutes or so sticks with me more than the last three hours.

The Worst Part: The return of the troops to look for Costner, definitely. Everyone’s playing their roles like they’re the pirates in Hook. It’s so gruesome and over-the-top that it’s silly.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s not worse, but it’s only because it seems like a more earnest attempt. They’re both unnecessary films that at least partially deserve their “Oscar bait” descriptor. Dances with Wolves and Crash both fail because they are unnecessary looks at topics better served by more care. If you are going to make a movie about the harsh treatment of Native Americans during the American expansion period or race relations in modern Los Angeles, fine, both of those are challenging topics. You need to remember you’re not making Gladiator if you’re going to do that, though, and make something with more nuance.

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 Tom Jones Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com

Alex Russell

It’s possible that Tom Jones is the strangest movie to win Best Picture, and that’s really saying something.

The story is pretty classic: a bastard son of two servants wants to marry a noblewoman but she has been promised against her will to a man of deserving status but undeserving character. Variants on that abound, and if that’s all this was it would be unremarkable. It’s partially remarkable because Tom Jones is about finding the comedy in a classic setup, but it’s mostly remarkable because it’s bonkers.

I watched Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers movie, a few years ago for the first time. It’s amazing how comedy evolves over nearly a century, both in what is still funny and what no longer is. Comedy isn’t timeless, not even good comedy. I’ve talked here before about how some references even in classic films don’t make sense in a modern content even when you can identify that they were intended to be biting commentary at the time. For all of Duck Soup that doesn’t work now, the beats are there to help you understand that that’s where the joke goes.

Tom Jones doesn’t care if you don’t live in 1963, it’s just gonna be nuts.

Watching Tom Jones feels like watching the strangest parts of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Tom Jones the character is sleazy and suave (to a point) and sleeps with four or five different women over the course of his hero’s journey. He is cast out of his castle by the evil man who intends to wed his beloved, sure, that’s a bummer for Tom, but he doesn’t seem all that broken up as he sleeps with women and narrates it into the camera.

If there’s another Best Picture winner that breaks the fourth wall this often, I can’t remember it right now. Once or twice is an interesting wink, but Tom narrates a lot of his journey, to the degree that it starts to feel like a “man, I’m awesome” speech towards the end. It’s supposed to be over-the-top, but it’s something else entirely.

Your enjoyment of Tom Jones will depend on your ability to forget that you’re watching something on a list with Casablanca. It’s a funny movie, at times, but it’s what a better publication would call “ribald” or “raunchy.” The joke consistently is that Tom Jones is in love, but he’ll just sleep with this woman in this patch of tall grass anyway. Comedy is in doing something so many times that it’s funny, then not funny, then hilarious, but I was pretty damn tired of Tom Jones the guy and Tom Jones the movie by the end of it.

The Best Part: The best part of Tom Jones is the strangeness. They break the fourth wall, there are huge action sequences that just die out into nothingness, characters run off screen without warning, people are motivated by nothing, it’s full-on madness like nothing else on the list. There’s a certain absurd joy to picturing the Oscars in 1963 and all those people in expensive clothes clapping for something that is often a slapstick comedy.

The Worst Part: Some of these movies are hard to find now, and a lot of them have variants of themselves that are either longer or shorter than the original release. Because of all that nonsense I take great care to be sure I’m watching the right version. In this case, I thought I might have the wrong movie entirely. The first 25 minutes of Tom Jones — before you understand that you’re watching a take-no-shit nonsense comedy — is frustrating and irritating. Go in expecting madness and you’ll avoid that.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? What will the iconic scene from Crash be? I’ve been trying to pinpoint the legacy of Crash and I can’t seem to do it. I think it will be the ending, but that’s certainly not the case for Tom Jones.Tom Jones isn’t a part of any canon of great comedies. If it has a legacy, it’s that they spent an absurd amount of money on special effects for a strange British comedy. Beyond that, it’s just one quintessential scene. Tom meets a woman he intends to bed, and they have a hypersexualized meal. Food has been sexualized before, but never like this. Watch three minutes of over-the-top-ness here and get a sense of what Tom Jones is all about:

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 Sting Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: theaceblackblog.com

Alex Russell

There really aren’t that many comedies that have won Best Picture. The Apartment was intended as a comedy, but because of the consistent message of suicide it certainly feels much darker to a modern audience. Annie Hall and It Happened One Night are romantic comedies, but that’s really a different beast. You Can’t Take It With You and Tom Jones are funny, but the jokes are mostly dated so badly that they seem more like odd time capsules of what comedy once was rather than actual comedies. That leaves really only one comedy in the way we still use the term: The Sting.

Robert Redford and Paul Newman play incredible con men who want to pull off one last big job to make it rich. They decide to try to con the un-connable Robert Shaw through a complicated series of fake horse bets in a fake OTB. The setup is the first of many complicated elements of The Sting, and it sets the stage for the two hours of twists and turns that comprise the film.

The basic plot is this: Robert Shaw is notorious for being a card cheat and a dangerous man. Robert Redford is a young gun who wants to take on whatever people say can’t be done. Paul Newman has retired from the illicit world, but he sees promise in the kid and agrees to teach him the more complex ropes of grifts and cons. That part is simple. What isn’t simple is goddamned everything else. To get into Shaw’s inner circle, they stage a situation where they convince him that Redford needs to double-cross Newman, when in reality they’re working together to get at Shaw. Everyone’s playing each other — or are they? — and everyone’s doing a damned good job of it.

Robert Shaw deserves special mention here, because Paul Newman and Robert Redford are already names you know. While Shaw’s most celebrated role is definitely Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, his role as the crooked Doyle Lonnegan is what I’ll always love best. A movie with lovable grifters needs someone worth taking down, but Shaw elevates the role beyond sneering rich guy. He’s a figure that you’ll want to see taken down, but he’s also a figure that you’ll fear. That mix is why he’s more interesting than a stand-in for “undeserving richness,” and that’s why this has more to it than some dumb heist movie.

Beyond the acting, which is unparalleled in the world of comedy, this one is all about the ending. As the police figure out the con that’s about to take place and step in to protect Lonnegan, the characters have to pull double- and triple-crosses to try to figure out ways to pull certain strings. They have to mock up entire fake offices in minutes, and a lot of the comedy comes from this scope. It’s exciting — Robert Shaw is going to figure this out and get you — but it’s also hilarious. It’s not hilarious in that “oh, I get it” way, either. It’s a legitimate string of jokes, big performances, and absurd doubling of situations that is still funny four decades later.

The Best Part: This has to be the original poker scene. Paul Newman’s character has to anger Robert Shaw to the point where Shaw will accept Robert Redford into his circle when they meet in the next scene. Shaw’s character tells Newman’s that everyone who plays at their poker table must wear a tie. It’s a respectable game, and Newman insults Shaw deeply by showing up (fake) drunk and tie-less. Watching Paul Newman stumble around fake-drunk and consistently get the notorious Doyle Lonnegan’s name wrong on purpose (Lonniman? Lonnham? Lonnigram?) is priceless, but watching him win…

The Worst Part: The movie uses “The Entertainer” to transition between the “acts” and it doesn’t really work for me. Everything’s already so crazy and so layered, this whole structure feels unnecessary. Apparently when The Sting came out the soundtrack was a huge hit, but it adds some extra silliness to it all. It’s not terrible; I just don’t love it.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Both are movies about layered events and how a big cast all ends up crossing paths. The Sting does a better job with it, but it’s certainly “the point” of both of them. I often spend this space discussing the “message” of Crash, but The Sting isn’t interested in being a morality play. There’s a surprise hitman and a series of cons that go mostly unpunished and a crooked cop and a not-so-crooked con-man and it all makes for a set of conflicting messages. What’s really going on in The Sting is an ode to the structure of the con itself. It’s a light look at what isn’t always a light topic, but roguish people doing roguish things for two hours is a better way to spend your Saturday afternoon than finding out that Crash thinks everyone is terrible, forever.

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.

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