Happy Weekend Everyone. Make Good Choices.

I've been struggling with a thrown back this week but I hope to be up to my best speed again soon since I know the posting has been a bit thin of late. Fall Movie Season is just a week or so away but in the meantime there are plentiful beautiful choices for moviegoing pleasure. So make good ones.

NEW YORK & LA 
If you live in or driving distance near one of the two top film markets, make it your top priority this weekend to see Short Term 12. It's an absolutely beauty (interview & review forthcoming). Indies tend to go wider faster if they have strong per screen averages and everyone deserves a chance to see this one at their local theater. Get to this early since you'll want to share in the thrill of discovery and play missionary for it as shamelessly as I'm doing now. (I can't stop recommending it to people, even near-strangers! Especially people who I think would never go see something like it and the last time I did that was, jesus, I dont know... Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon?) The point is this: Get out there and support strong filmmaking that doesn't involve visual effects and multi-gazillion dollar P&A budgets or our cinematic culture will be reduced to endless loops of "who'll play Batman next?".

(I also hear really good things about Una Noche but can't vouch for it personally just yet.)

EVERYONE ELSE
This weekend stars the wide release of Blue Jasmine but people with good taste who've already seen it will probably be hitting The World's End from the team that brought you the hilarious genre-riffs Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I'm seeing it tomorrow. One of my friends who only sees two or three movies a year and almost always under duress (I know!) calls me up and says "so there is this movie I would like to see..." I practically passed out from the shock.

STAYING IN?
Make sure to instant-watch Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (1969) in time for Wednesday night's penultimate Season 4 Hit Me With Your Best Shot episode. It's also your last chance to watch Oscar's Supporting Actress nominees of 1952 before The Smackdown on August 31st. So queue up: Singin in' the Rain, Come Back Little Sheba, The Bad and the Beautiful (just discussed), Moulin Rouge, and With a Song In My Heart so that you can enjoy the conversation even more and vote in the parallel reader ranking. Joining me on the panel next Saturday will be Nick Davis (Nick's Flick Picks), Matt Mazur (Pop Matters), and Brian Hererra (Stinky Lulu herself!) Next month's Smackdown year will be announced very soon. 

"In the dark all sorts of things come alive"

I'm a day late getting to The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) for Hit Me With Your Best Shot but I think the drama queen players onscreen would understand: they're often behind schedule and over budget themselves, victims of their own masochistic impulses and grandiose ambitions!

To understand my choice of best shot, a brief preface as spoken by the film itself. About twenty minutes into the film the fledgling producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) and his hungry director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) are trying to figure out how to transcend the limitations of their budget on a B movie called Attack of the Cat Men. If they're movies are always terrible they'll never get out of B pictures. The cat suits look shoddy and cheap but Shields has a stroke of genius when he suggests that they never show the title characters at all. 

Shields: When an audience pays to see a picture like this what do they pay for?
Amiel: To get the pants scared off 'em.
Shields: And what scares the human race more than any other single thing

[TURNS LIGHTS OFF]

Amiel: The dark
Shields: Of course. and why? because the dark has a light all its own. In the dark all sorts of things come alive.  

And a final question

Now what do we put on the screen that will make the backs of their necks crawl?"

Once we've moved away from the context of this conversation (the B picture calling card) and into the shark-infested waters of their subsequent powerful Hollywood careers, this final question begins to haunt us properly. 

Though it might not be popular to say I find The Bad and the Beautiful something of a muddle in its impulses between melodrama and satire. It wants to swim with sharks but it lacks that final killing bite. Perhaps it's the way it which its three stories dovetail in the final scene which suggests that we ought to admire the shark and excuse all the blood in the water. I wish the movie had found a way to end shortly after its scary Act Two finale. For its then when we get the answer as to what would make the back of our necks crawl: Human Nature. 

BEST SHOT

GET OUT. GET OUT. GET OUT"

Kirk Douglas's ugly soul-baring in a vicious pitiful monologue hurled at both himself and his star and love Georgia (Lana Turner) culminates in this moment when he is reduced to animalistic snarling in the shadows. It's a great inversion of the playful showmanship at the beginning of the film, and more terrifying than any supernatural beasts in B pictures could ever hope to be. In this superb sequence, which stands your every hair on end, Minnelli and Surtees have found a way to riff on both the frequent visual motifs of their movie (where figures in shadow are often watching brightly lit movie creens) and illustrate the lurid thrill of the movies themselves. They only come alive in the dark.

see seven other "Best Shot" opinions from this classic

Don't forget!
On August 31st we'll discuss Gloria Grahame's Oscar win from this movie iin the return of the Supporting Actress Smackdown! Next week we're Best Shot'ing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Join our movie-loving club!

Visual Index ~ The Bad and the Beautiful

In Hit Me With Your Best Shot, an open source series if you will, movie-lovers are asked to select their choice for the pre-selected movie's finest visual moment. Movies are both communal and private experiences so its rewarding to look at them through multiple sets of eyes. This week's film is Vincente Minnelli's Hollywood-on-Hollywood drama The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) which holds the odd distinction of winning the most Oscars ever (5) without a corresponding nomination in the Best Picture category. (The Academy was weird about the Movies About Movies genre that year since they practically ignored the all time classic Singin' in the Rain) The most deserved of TBATB's historic five Oscars was surely for its stunning black & white cinematography by Robert Surtees, an enduring presence in Oscar's roll call from the mid 40s through the late 70s.

I think you'll really like these nine pieces on the movie (on seven different shots)... even if you haven't seen it! Click on any of these "Best Shots" to read why it was selected by these movie lovers.

Antagony & EcstasyWe Recycle Movies

Minnesota Gneiss - FIRST TIME BEST SHOT'ER !

I Want to Believe

Film ActuallyThe Film ExperienceAllison Tooey

Dancin' Dan

The Film's The Thing

NEXT WEDNESDAY NIGHT AUGUST 27th
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) available on Netflix Instant Watch, so please consider joining us. All you need is a pair of eyeballs, movie love, screen capture capability, and a web place to post your choice for the chosen film's very best image.

Coming Soon... Supporting Actress 1952

On August 31st the Return of Stinkylulu's Supporting Actress Smackdown!
(in case you missed the announcement) 

We'll be talking... 

• Gloria Grahame, The Bad and the Beautiful (the film is our "Best Shot" subject on the 21st)
• Jean Hagen, Singin' in the Rain
• Collette Marchand, Moulin Rouge
• Terry Moore, Come Back Little Sheba
• Thelma Ritter, With a Song in My Heart 

Have you seen all the films? If not, get on that! We'll also do a "reader's choice" as supplement so if you'd like to vote please send me your ranked ballot by Wednesday the 28th with "1952" in the subject line, your rank (of those you've seen), and a sentence or three if you'd like to explain.

The Rebellious Evolution of Natalie Wood

It's Natalie Wood Week as we celebrate what would have been her 75th birthday (today!). Here's Abstew from 'The Film's The Thing'...

I love the tag line: "...And they both came from good families!" Oh, no! Where did we go wrong?!?The legend of James Dean looms large over the seminal 1955 teen-angst film, Rebel Without a Cause. With his red windbreaker that would soon become his trademark, furrowed brow and pensive gaze, his hobby of drag racing goons that would dare to call him chicken, and dealing with square parents that just don't understand, Dean cuts an impressive figure. The film is so closely linked to the star's iconic status that you'll forgive me that sometimes I forget the other talented stars that also occupy the film. (But, then again, I'm a huge James Dean fan. I've even been to his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana where there's not one, but three different museums dedicated to him. You can compete in the annual James Dean look-alike competition! It's also where he's buried. You can still go to his family farm and see his tombstone.) But, of the three films that Dean starred in, Rebel is the only one he didn't receive an Oscar nomination for.

The film was, however, nominated for a trio of awards including a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Sal Mineo as his pal, Plato, and a Best Screenplay nomination for the Director, Nicholas Ray. Has any film captured the superb agony of being a teenager so precisely?

I don't know what to do anymore. Except maybe die."

It's final nomination was for Best Supporting Actress, giving Natalie Wood her first bit of Oscar recognition. Hers is not, maybe, the first name that spring to mind when you think of Rebel, but her career owes as much to it as Dean's does...

Click to read more ...