The last Oscar winner of the '90s (in the usual categories) that I had not yet seen was Howard's End, winner of the 1993 Oscars for Best Actress (Emma Thompson) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala). The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (James Ivory), and Best Supporting Actress (Vanessa Redgrave).
In early 1900s London, Margaret Schlegel (Thompson) befriends Ruth Wilcox (Redgrave), a meek older woman, in ill health, who has been left behind by her family while they enjoy vacation activities that are too strenuous for her. The two had been briefly acquainted before, and one of Wilcox's sons had, the year before, been involved in a romantic relationship with Schlegel's sister, Helen (Helena Bonham Carter), which had ended badly. Over the course of their budding friendship, Margaret mentions to Ruth that she will soon be losing her lifelong home. Ruth adds an informal addition to her will, stating her intention that Margaret should be given the family estate, Howard's End. The Wilcoxes agree that this addition was the product of an infirm mind, and that it would be best for the family to simply burn it and keep the house. Afterward, however, Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins), Ruth's husband, falls in love with Margaret, and tries to both make up for and keep hidden his act of duplicity.
And that was the stripped down, simplified plot summary. There were several other subplots that I didn't mention, most of which are equally convoluted. There is a lot going on in this film, probably too much for the already bloated 2 hour 15 minute running time. The story, which I suppose is intended to be a satire of the stuffy British aristocracy, is itself too stuffy and aristocratic to be enjoyed by most viewers. Aside from Ruth, who dies fairly early in the film, it is rather difficult for the viewer to find any characters to identify with, as their motivations are either too selfish and snobbish, or too self-righteously charitable, to be supported. Thompson's character sets herself up to be the only one to identify with, headstrong enough to stay true to her beliefs, but charitable enough to have beliefs worth staying true to... until Henry proposes marriage, and she suddenly abandons all of her principles out of a desperate wish to be a proper wife. I've seen other films like this before - stuffy British period pieces whose main goal seems to be baiting as many Oscar nominations as possible. (See the following year's follow-up, The Remains of the Day, which reunited the writer, director, producer, and two stars of this film) But most of the others that I have seen do at least have something to say, a story that is at least approachable, if not completely absorbing to me. This film didn't really have any of that - it came across to me as nothing more than Oscar-bait.
Movie trivia question: This film marks the only time in Oscar history that an actor was nominated for more than one award posthumously (after he died, he was nominated for Oscars for 2 films, in 2 consecutive years).
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
One away...
Today's entry puts me one movie away from having seen every Oscar winner (in the categories I write about) of the 1990s! The film is City Slickers, winner of the 1992 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Jack Palance).
Mitch (Billy Crystal) is a radio station advertising salesman in the midst of a mid-life crisis, searching for the meaning or purpose of his life. As a birthday present to him, his two buddies - Phil (Daniel Stern), a newly unemployed and divorcing loser, and Ed (Bruno Kirby), a perpetual adventure-seeker with commitment phobia - take him on a two-week vacation to participate in a cattle drive. Thrown in with a cast of wacky characters and a trail boss (Palance) whose gruff exterior hides a soul full of wisdom, the trio experience zany adventures and hardships, while learning the answers to their respective problems.
The film is entirely a Billy Crystal vehicle, with every scene being a set-up for Crystal to get the punchline, or the drama, as the case may be. It's light-hearted and fun, enjoyable, but shallow. The main characters seem to only be able to relate to each other, or to life itself, through the use of discussions about baseball. They find the answers to all of their problems in the span of their two week vacation, with all of their problems cleared up by the time they get home. Palance was entertaining, but the Oscar here seems to be more an apology for not rewarding him when he was nominated for a similar character in Shane than it was earned on the strength of this performance. City Slickers was an enjoyable way of killing a couple of hours, but not much more than that.
Look for Jake Gyllenhall as Crystal's son, complete with embarrassing early-'90s hair and clothes!
Movie trivia question: One more movie for me to close out the '90s... which film will it be?
Mitch (Billy Crystal) is a radio station advertising salesman in the midst of a mid-life crisis, searching for the meaning or purpose of his life. As a birthday present to him, his two buddies - Phil (Daniel Stern), a newly unemployed and divorcing loser, and Ed (Bruno Kirby), a perpetual adventure-seeker with commitment phobia - take him on a two-week vacation to participate in a cattle drive. Thrown in with a cast of wacky characters and a trail boss (Palance) whose gruff exterior hides a soul full of wisdom, the trio experience zany adventures and hardships, while learning the answers to their respective problems.
The film is entirely a Billy Crystal vehicle, with every scene being a set-up for Crystal to get the punchline, or the drama, as the case may be. It's light-hearted and fun, enjoyable, but shallow. The main characters seem to only be able to relate to each other, or to life itself, through the use of discussions about baseball. They find the answers to all of their problems in the span of their two week vacation, with all of their problems cleared up by the time they get home. Palance was entertaining, but the Oscar here seems to be more an apology for not rewarding him when he was nominated for a similar character in Shane than it was earned on the strength of this performance. City Slickers was an enjoyable way of killing a couple of hours, but not much more than that.
Look for Jake Gyllenhall as Crystal's son, complete with embarrassing early-'90s hair and clothes!
Movie trivia question: One more movie for me to close out the '90s... which film will it be?
Monday, September 27, 2010
Closing out the '80s
It's official! I have now seen every Oscar winner (in the categories that I blog about) of the 1980s! The last one that I had to see to close out the decade was Melvin And Howard, winner of the 1982 Oscars for Best Supporting Actress (Mary Steenburgen) and Best Original Screenplay (Bo Goldman). It was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards).
Melvin and Howard is the story of Melvin (Paul Le Mat - the drag racer from American Graffiti), a "lovable" loser who, in the first few minutes of the film, picks up a hobo-like old man (Robards) while driving through the desert toward Las Vegas. The man claims to be eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, though upon reaching Vegas he asks Melvin for his spare change. Melvin drifts through life for the next few years, constantly trying to regain the affections of his on-again-off-again wife (Steenburgen), only to screw it up again by trying to live beyond his means. She leaves him for good when, after she wins enough money on a game show for them to finally break even on the bills, he goes out and buys a Cadillac and a boat. After a few years have passed, Melvin sees on the news that Howard Hughes has died, and a mysterious man drops off what he claims to be Hughes's will at the gas station where Melvin works. Melvin inherits $185 million, but becomes a national laughing stock as everybody accuses him of forging the document.
This was one of the earlier films by Jonathan Demme, who went on to direct, among others, Oscar winners The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. This was not, in my opinion, anywhere near the quality of the later films. The story drifts as aimlessly as its main character does. The characters are all, across the board, too stupid to be believed in or cared about. Melvin is apparently supposed to be a lovable loser, but his misfortune is all brought on by his own foolish behavior, much of which involves buying himself things he can't afford and doesn't need, thereby making himself unable to provide for his family. His predicaments, in a film that was supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, were more sad than funny - or would have been had I been able to bring myself to care.
Movie trivia question: I may as well go for another streak. What 2 films are the last ones that I need to see in order to close out the '90s?
Melvin and Howard is the story of Melvin (Paul Le Mat - the drag racer from American Graffiti), a "lovable" loser who, in the first few minutes of the film, picks up a hobo-like old man (Robards) while driving through the desert toward Las Vegas. The man claims to be eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, though upon reaching Vegas he asks Melvin for his spare change. Melvin drifts through life for the next few years, constantly trying to regain the affections of his on-again-off-again wife (Steenburgen), only to screw it up again by trying to live beyond his means. She leaves him for good when, after she wins enough money on a game show for them to finally break even on the bills, he goes out and buys a Cadillac and a boat. After a few years have passed, Melvin sees on the news that Howard Hughes has died, and a mysterious man drops off what he claims to be Hughes's will at the gas station where Melvin works. Melvin inherits $185 million, but becomes a national laughing stock as everybody accuses him of forging the document.
This was one of the earlier films by Jonathan Demme, who went on to direct, among others, Oscar winners The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. This was not, in my opinion, anywhere near the quality of the later films. The story drifts as aimlessly as its main character does. The characters are all, across the board, too stupid to be believed in or cared about. Melvin is apparently supposed to be a lovable loser, but his misfortune is all brought on by his own foolish behavior, much of which involves buying himself things he can't afford and doesn't need, thereby making himself unable to provide for his family. His predicaments, in a film that was supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, were more sad than funny - or would have been had I been able to bring myself to care.
Movie trivia question: I may as well go for another streak. What 2 films are the last ones that I need to see in order to close out the '90s?
Sunday, September 26, 2010
My 40 year Best Picture winner streak
With today's addition, I have now seen every Best Picture winner from the present back through 1970! (It would go further than that, but the 1969 Best Picture never wants to work for me on Netflix Instant Viewer.) The last film that I needed to see in order to complete that streak was 2003's Best Picture, Chicago. The film also won Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and was nominated for Best Director (Rob Marshall), Best Actress (Renee Zellweger), Best Supporting Actor (John C Reilly), Best Supporting Actress (Queen Latifah), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Bill Condon).
In 1920's Chicago, Roxie Hart (Zellweger), a former chorus girl now married to boring schlub Amos(Reilly), would give anything to be up on stage, the center of attention. When the guy she has been having an affair with reveals that he doesn't actually have any connections at the music hall where they met (on the night that singer Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones) was arrested there for murdering her husband and sister), Roxie flies into a rage and shoots him. She goes to the same jail as Kelly, where, for a price, guard Mama Morton (Latifah) puts her in touch with shady lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere). Flynn takes Hart's case and makes her a media sensation, giving her the fame that she always wanted, and that she now needs in order to get away with murder.
I was kind of dreading watching this one. There was a reason that it was the only Best Picture in 40 years that I hadn't seen yet. Imagine my surprise when I found that I actually quite enjoyed it! It turns out that I am actually a person who enjoys musicals from time to time. The story is entertaining, and timely - a story about people who can't tell the difference between fame and infamy. The characters are engaging and believable - well, as believable as characters who spontaneously break into choreographed song-and-dance numbers can be. And the songs themselves are catchy, entertaining, and visually very inventive. John C Reilly is heartbreaking in "Mr Cellophane," Gere is a scene-stealer in a press conference number in which he uses Zellweger as a ventriloquist's dummy, and more so in his courtroom tap dance number. Zellweger manages to be both sympathy-inducing and coldly manipulative, and is equally entertaining in either mode. Zeta-Jones is as good here as I have ever seen her, although I think Latifah deserved the Oscar more. Chicago far exceeded my expectations, and it had me entertained and laughing throughout.
Movie trivia question: What was the first film to win an Oscar for a non-English-language performance?
In 1920's Chicago, Roxie Hart (Zellweger), a former chorus girl now married to boring schlub Amos(Reilly), would give anything to be up on stage, the center of attention. When the guy she has been having an affair with reveals that he doesn't actually have any connections at the music hall where they met (on the night that singer Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones) was arrested there for murdering her husband and sister), Roxie flies into a rage and shoots him. She goes to the same jail as Kelly, where, for a price, guard Mama Morton (Latifah) puts her in touch with shady lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere). Flynn takes Hart's case and makes her a media sensation, giving her the fame that she always wanted, and that she now needs in order to get away with murder.
I was kind of dreading watching this one. There was a reason that it was the only Best Picture in 40 years that I hadn't seen yet. Imagine my surprise when I found that I actually quite enjoyed it! It turns out that I am actually a person who enjoys musicals from time to time. The story is entertaining, and timely - a story about people who can't tell the difference between fame and infamy. The characters are engaging and believable - well, as believable as characters who spontaneously break into choreographed song-and-dance numbers can be. And the songs themselves are catchy, entertaining, and visually very inventive. John C Reilly is heartbreaking in "Mr Cellophane," Gere is a scene-stealer in a press conference number in which he uses Zellweger as a ventriloquist's dummy, and more so in his courtroom tap dance number. Zellweger manages to be both sympathy-inducing and coldly manipulative, and is equally entertaining in either mode. Zeta-Jones is as good here as I have ever seen her, although I think Latifah deserved the Oscar more. Chicago far exceeded my expectations, and it had me entertained and laughing throughout.
Movie trivia question: What was the first film to win an Oscar for a non-English-language performance?
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Hitchcock's Best Picture
According to Oscar, anyway. Though probably the most famous director in the history of film, Alfred Hitchcock, only directed one movie which won Best Picture. That film was Rebecca. It was also nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (Laurence Olivier), Best Actress (Joan Fontaine), Best Supporting Actress (Judith Anderson), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Sherwood), although it did not win any of those awards.
A young - and nameless - woman (Fontaine), working as a paid traveling companion to a wealthy but obnoxious old woman, meets widowed millionaire Maxim de Winter (Olivier). The two have a whirlwind two week romance, leading to de Winter asking the young lady to marry him in order to avoid losing her when her employer decides to travel elsewhere. The young lady is at first thrilled to accept his proposal, but begins to have her doubts when she realizes that she does not fit in at his elegant mansion, trying to engage with his friends and family and to maintain the house and its staff. Her doubts are intensified by Maxim's occasional episodes of sudden, uncontrollable rage, by the ever-present memories of his first wife, Rebecca, and by the intense hatred she gets from Mrs Danvers (Anderson), the main servant of the house, who was intensely dedicated to the first Mrs de Winter.
This is not a typical Hitchcock film. The light, yet macabre, sense of humor that is such a trademark of his style is almost entirely abandoned here in favor of a much darker, more serious tone. The change is not unwelcome, though, and it clearly worked for him as far as Oscar was concerned. The characters are much more developed than in most of Hitchcock's work - in many of his films, the characters are just there for the story to happen to, but here they are rich and realistic. The viewer can identify with and care about them, as opposed to just watching them on the screen. I mean, it's hard not to identify with the second Mrs. de Winter in her fear and discomfort at trying to fit into this new situation that bears no resemblance to the rest of her life leading up to it, or with Maxim once the viewer discovers the reason behind his strange behavior - a plot twist that I will not reveal here.
Rebecca is probably the least Hitchcockian of Hitchcock's films, and probably not the one I would choose to introduce a newcomer to Hitchcock's work, or to satisfy a craving to watch something Hitchcock. It is, however, a compelling and rewarding film, definitely worth watching.
Movie trivia question: Another unfair on, but I didn't hear any complaints last time. This film, for which I am currently being waitlisted on Netflix, is the only Oscar winner of the 1980s (for the 8 categories that I concern myself with here) that I have not yet seen. I'm about to close out a decade!
A young - and nameless - woman (Fontaine), working as a paid traveling companion to a wealthy but obnoxious old woman, meets widowed millionaire Maxim de Winter (Olivier). The two have a whirlwind two week romance, leading to de Winter asking the young lady to marry him in order to avoid losing her when her employer decides to travel elsewhere. The young lady is at first thrilled to accept his proposal, but begins to have her doubts when she realizes that she does not fit in at his elegant mansion, trying to engage with his friends and family and to maintain the house and its staff. Her doubts are intensified by Maxim's occasional episodes of sudden, uncontrollable rage, by the ever-present memories of his first wife, Rebecca, and by the intense hatred she gets from Mrs Danvers (Anderson), the main servant of the house, who was intensely dedicated to the first Mrs de Winter.
This is not a typical Hitchcock film. The light, yet macabre, sense of humor that is such a trademark of his style is almost entirely abandoned here in favor of a much darker, more serious tone. The change is not unwelcome, though, and it clearly worked for him as far as Oscar was concerned. The characters are much more developed than in most of Hitchcock's work - in many of his films, the characters are just there for the story to happen to, but here they are rich and realistic. The viewer can identify with and care about them, as opposed to just watching them on the screen. I mean, it's hard not to identify with the second Mrs. de Winter in her fear and discomfort at trying to fit into this new situation that bears no resemblance to the rest of her life leading up to it, or with Maxim once the viewer discovers the reason behind his strange behavior - a plot twist that I will not reveal here.
Rebecca is probably the least Hitchcockian of Hitchcock's films, and probably not the one I would choose to introduce a newcomer to Hitchcock's work, or to satisfy a craving to watch something Hitchcock. It is, however, a compelling and rewarding film, definitely worth watching.
Movie trivia question: Another unfair on, but I didn't hear any complaints last time. This film, for which I am currently being waitlisted on Netflix, is the only Oscar winner of the 1980s (for the 8 categories that I concern myself with here) that I have not yet seen. I'm about to close out a decade!
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Shared director Oscar
The first film for which two directors shared a Best Director Oscar was West Side Story. Jerome Robbins directed the heavily choreographed dance and fight scenes, while Robert Wise did the non-musical scenes. The film also won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (George Chakiris), and Best Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno), and was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Lehman).
Teenagers Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood) meet at a dance and fall in love at first sight. Problem is, Tony's best friend, Riff (Russ Tamblyn), is the leader of the street gang The Jets, and Maria's brother, Bernardo (Chakiris), is the leader of rival street gang The Sharks. Adding to the difficulty, Tony is white and Maria is Puerto Rican, and they live in a time of racial intolerance. Their troubles intensify when the gang rivalry escalates into a deadly brawl.
Romeo and Juliet, retold as a feud between New York City street gangs. In the form of a highly choreographed musical, where dances look like brawls, and brawls look like dancing. Sounds like kind of a train wreck, right? But consider the time it was filmed, and the subject matter. Shot in 1961, in the middle of the civil rights movement, the film focuses on the rivalry between the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The love story is actually the weakest part of the film - Beymer doesn't have much going in terms of personality, and Wood is about as Puerto Rican as apple pie. The film wisely makes their story more of a subplot, and pays more attention to the gang rivalry, through which it has a lot to say about race relations and about the plight of the urban working-class teenager. If you are in the right mood, and if you can get past the fact that these supposedly tough street gangs are introduced via dancing, then you will find a movie that is surprisingly entertaining, funny, meaningful, and contemporary.
Movie trivia question: Of the past 40 years, what is the only Best Picture winner that I have not yet seen? Admittedly, not a fair question, but it's not like the guesses have been pouring in from my readers on my previous questions.
Teenagers Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood) meet at a dance and fall in love at first sight. Problem is, Tony's best friend, Riff (Russ Tamblyn), is the leader of the street gang The Jets, and Maria's brother, Bernardo (Chakiris), is the leader of rival street gang The Sharks. Adding to the difficulty, Tony is white and Maria is Puerto Rican, and they live in a time of racial intolerance. Their troubles intensify when the gang rivalry escalates into a deadly brawl.
Romeo and Juliet, retold as a feud between New York City street gangs. In the form of a highly choreographed musical, where dances look like brawls, and brawls look like dancing. Sounds like kind of a train wreck, right? But consider the time it was filmed, and the subject matter. Shot in 1961, in the middle of the civil rights movement, the film focuses on the rivalry between the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The love story is actually the weakest part of the film - Beymer doesn't have much going in terms of personality, and Wood is about as Puerto Rican as apple pie. The film wisely makes their story more of a subplot, and pays more attention to the gang rivalry, through which it has a lot to say about race relations and about the plight of the urban working-class teenager. If you are in the right mood, and if you can get past the fact that these supposedly tough street gangs are introduced via dancing, then you will find a movie that is surprisingly entertaining, funny, meaningful, and contemporary.
Movie trivia question: Of the past 40 years, what is the only Best Picture winner that I have not yet seen? Admittedly, not a fair question, but it's not like the guesses have been pouring in from my readers on my previous questions.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Alec Guinness' first nomination
This one took me a while to get to. Sorry for the delay. I had the movie at the top of my Netflix queue, but it suddenly became unavailable. I'm sure, faithful readers, that you have all been breathless with antici...
pation!
Alec Guinness' early career was dominated by a series of successful comedies made by a little British studio, Ealing. Guinness was prominently featured in most, if not all, of these comedies, and was even given writing credit on a few of them. One such film got Guinness his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor. The film was The Lavender Hill Mob. Though Guinness lost, the film won that year's Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (T E B Clarke).
Guinness plays Henry Holland, a meek, fastidious, bureaucratic man who has spent 20 years working at a bank, in charge of security in the delivery of gold bullion to the bank. Holland is known for being a stickler for detail, kept on the job for his impeccable honesty, but never moved up because of his lack of imagination or ambition. He is also a man with a single goal for himself - to steal a load of the bullion that he has been protecting. Twenty years spent on the job, in the name of building an unimpeachable reputation for himself, and in searching for the perfect opportunity to steal the gold - gold which will be worthless to him without the perfect plan to smuggle it out of the country and exchange it for cash.
This is, in the British style, an exceedingly dry comedy. It has more of a general sense of amusement than a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, though it does have a few of those as well. Guinness is spectacularly subtle as a man seeking revenge of sorts for spending his entire career being overlooked, while at the same time being careful to act in precisely the way that he would need to act in order to continue being overlooked. The film is a bit light in terms of substance and story, but it is also light in terms of mood, so it is enjoyable even if it doesn't have much to say.
Don't blink during the opening scene, or you'll miss a small role by Audrey Hepburn, just one year before her breakthrough, Oscar-winning role in Roman Holiday!
Movie trivia question: In Oscar's first year, there were actually two films which won awards equivalent to Best Picture - one was for the artistic quality of the story, and the other was for the technical accomplishment of making the film. What were the two Best Pictures of Oscar's first year?
pation!
Alec Guinness' early career was dominated by a series of successful comedies made by a little British studio, Ealing. Guinness was prominently featured in most, if not all, of these comedies, and was even given writing credit on a few of them. One such film got Guinness his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor. The film was The Lavender Hill Mob. Though Guinness lost, the film won that year's Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (T E B Clarke).
Guinness plays Henry Holland, a meek, fastidious, bureaucratic man who has spent 20 years working at a bank, in charge of security in the delivery of gold bullion to the bank. Holland is known for being a stickler for detail, kept on the job for his impeccable honesty, but never moved up because of his lack of imagination or ambition. He is also a man with a single goal for himself - to steal a load of the bullion that he has been protecting. Twenty years spent on the job, in the name of building an unimpeachable reputation for himself, and in searching for the perfect opportunity to steal the gold - gold which will be worthless to him without the perfect plan to smuggle it out of the country and exchange it for cash.
This is, in the British style, an exceedingly dry comedy. It has more of a general sense of amusement than a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, though it does have a few of those as well. Guinness is spectacularly subtle as a man seeking revenge of sorts for spending his entire career being overlooked, while at the same time being careful to act in precisely the way that he would need to act in order to continue being overlooked. The film is a bit light in terms of substance and story, but it is also light in terms of mood, so it is enjoyable even if it doesn't have much to say.
Don't blink during the opening scene, or you'll miss a small role by Audrey Hepburn, just one year before her breakthrough, Oscar-winning role in Roman Holiday!
Movie trivia question: In Oscar's first year, there were actually two films which won awards equivalent to Best Picture - one was for the artistic quality of the story, and the other was for the technical accomplishment of making the film. What were the two Best Pictures of Oscar's first year?
Bogart's only Oscar
Though a Hollywood legend with countless unforgettable films in his filmography, Humphrey Bogart was not often honored by Oscar - three nominations in his career, only one of which got him a win (though one of those losses is one of the greatest mistakes Oscar ever made). The film that got him the gold was The African Queen. The film was also nominated for Best Director (John Huston), Best Actress (Katharine Hepburn), and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Rose Sayer (Hepburn) is a prudish British missionary, helping her brother bring God to the Congolese natives. Their only contact with the outside world is Charlie Allnut (Bogart), the captain (and entire crew) of the small boat that brings their supplies and mail. Shortly after Allnut informs them of the start of World War II, German soldiers show up, kill the brother, and burn the mission. Allnut takes Rose onto his ship, and she convinces him to help her sink the German boat that is holding a key position, blocking much of the water travel through central Africa.
This must have been a rather surprising role for Bogart to have taken at the time. It is one of the least glamorous roles he has ever played, a dirty, drunken bum, with little courage and less education, who has made a hermit of himself, drifting through the rivers of Africa so he won't have to try to make anything of himself. A scene in which Allnut gets drunk, crying and yelling in frustration that the woman he has taken into his boat out of pity is forcing him to take it down a difficult river and use it as a makeshift torpedo - a scene which could easily have been botched in the hands of a less capable actor - turns out to be one of the best scenes in the film, one which shows a vulnerability and cowardice not often seen from an actor known for playing tough guys. Hepburn is also astounding in this film, as her character inspires Bogart's to greatness while she herself learns a much-needed bit about humility. The story is thrilling, leading the characters through one challenge after another without ever seeming contrived or foolish. And even more interesting than the film itself is the story of its filming, done on location in Africa, which had even more adventures in store for the cast and crew than the story had for its characters.
Movie trivia question: The entire cast of this film got Oscar nominations for their performances, playing two married couples... both wives won, both husbands lost.
Rose Sayer (Hepburn) is a prudish British missionary, helping her brother bring God to the Congolese natives. Their only contact with the outside world is Charlie Allnut (Bogart), the captain (and entire crew) of the small boat that brings their supplies and mail. Shortly after Allnut informs them of the start of World War II, German soldiers show up, kill the brother, and burn the mission. Allnut takes Rose onto his ship, and she convinces him to help her sink the German boat that is holding a key position, blocking much of the water travel through central Africa.
This must have been a rather surprising role for Bogart to have taken at the time. It is one of the least glamorous roles he has ever played, a dirty, drunken bum, with little courage and less education, who has made a hermit of himself, drifting through the rivers of Africa so he won't have to try to make anything of himself. A scene in which Allnut gets drunk, crying and yelling in frustration that the woman he has taken into his boat out of pity is forcing him to take it down a difficult river and use it as a makeshift torpedo - a scene which could easily have been botched in the hands of a less capable actor - turns out to be one of the best scenes in the film, one which shows a vulnerability and cowardice not often seen from an actor known for playing tough guys. Hepburn is also astounding in this film, as her character inspires Bogart's to greatness while she herself learns a much-needed bit about humility. The story is thrilling, leading the characters through one challenge after another without ever seeming contrived or foolish. And even more interesting than the film itself is the story of its filming, done on location in Africa, which had even more adventures in store for the cast and crew than the story had for its characters.
Movie trivia question: The entire cast of this film got Oscar nominations for their performances, playing two married couples... both wives won, both husbands lost.
Inspirational film
Topkapi, a 1964 film about a jewel heist, was the inspiration for both the TV series Mission Impossible, and for an actual jewel heist, very similar to the one that takes place in the film, which occurred a few weeks after the film's release. The film won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Peter Ustinov, who had won the same award four years earlier for the movie Spartacus). It got no other nominations.
Master thief Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) sets her sights on a jewel-encrusted dagger. With the help of former lover and sometime partner in crime Walter Harper (Maximillian Schell), she assembles a crew of amateurs - no criminal record, so less chance of getting them caught - to steal it from the heavily guarded Turkish museum in which it resides. The pair recruit small-time grifter Arthur Simpson (Ustinov) to unknowingly smuggle the weapons they need for the heist from Greece into Turkey. Simpson is caught by Turkish officers and recruited to help them determine the thieves' plans, and is also recruited by the thieves to take a more active role in the robbery than they had originally planned.
Ustinov here gives probably the best performance in a bad film that I have ever seen. The film is not particularly good at all. The keys to a good heist film are an interesting heist and a build-up to the heist that shows the assembly of the team, the coming together of the plan, and hints at the cleverness of the heist to come. This film has none of these elements. For the assembly of the team, the viewer is told that they are assembling a team of amateurs, and then the team is together, with nothing to show how team members were selected or why. For the coming together of the plan, the viewer is shown the object that will be stolen, and one or two of the details of the plan are glossed over, but for the most part, the viewer is left in the dark about the plan until the robbery is actually happening. In fact, not much is accomplished in the first three-quarters of the film. The heist itself is almost laughably simple, so ridiculously low-key that it could only be the easiest part of the plan in any other heist film I have ever seen. On top of that, the film is filled with visual styles that are hopelessly dated, and with mediocre performances that don't convey even a hint of what needs to come across in order for the audience to care what happens to the characters.
And then there is Peter Ustinov. In the midst of this film that I couldn't care less about otherwise, Ustinov crafts a character who is believable, compelling, and even heartbreaking at times. As bad as the film was other than his performance, I still found it worth watching, even if it was only to see one scene, the one in which Simpson is caught smuggling the weapons into Turkey, accused of being part of a terrorist plot, and his only defense is that he couldn't be a terrorist because even his own father could see that he would never be or do anything important. Surrounded by mediocrity, Ustinov delivers a performance without a single false note, a performance that is far and away superior to the film that encompasses it. Ustinov richly deserved the Oscar that he got here, though I have to wonder, if he was a supporting actor in this film, who was supposed to be the lead.
Movie trivia question: Alfred Hitchcock, though widely considered to be one of the greatest directors of all time, only ever directed one film that won a Best Picture Oscar. What was the winner?
Master thief Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) sets her sights on a jewel-encrusted dagger. With the help of former lover and sometime partner in crime Walter Harper (Maximillian Schell), she assembles a crew of amateurs - no criminal record, so less chance of getting them caught - to steal it from the heavily guarded Turkish museum in which it resides. The pair recruit small-time grifter Arthur Simpson (Ustinov) to unknowingly smuggle the weapons they need for the heist from Greece into Turkey. Simpson is caught by Turkish officers and recruited to help them determine the thieves' plans, and is also recruited by the thieves to take a more active role in the robbery than they had originally planned.
Ustinov here gives probably the best performance in a bad film that I have ever seen. The film is not particularly good at all. The keys to a good heist film are an interesting heist and a build-up to the heist that shows the assembly of the team, the coming together of the plan, and hints at the cleverness of the heist to come. This film has none of these elements. For the assembly of the team, the viewer is told that they are assembling a team of amateurs, and then the team is together, with nothing to show how team members were selected or why. For the coming together of the plan, the viewer is shown the object that will be stolen, and one or two of the details of the plan are glossed over, but for the most part, the viewer is left in the dark about the plan until the robbery is actually happening. In fact, not much is accomplished in the first three-quarters of the film. The heist itself is almost laughably simple, so ridiculously low-key that it could only be the easiest part of the plan in any other heist film I have ever seen. On top of that, the film is filled with visual styles that are hopelessly dated, and with mediocre performances that don't convey even a hint of what needs to come across in order for the audience to care what happens to the characters.
And then there is Peter Ustinov. In the midst of this film that I couldn't care less about otherwise, Ustinov crafts a character who is believable, compelling, and even heartbreaking at times. As bad as the film was other than his performance, I still found it worth watching, even if it was only to see one scene, the one in which Simpson is caught smuggling the weapons into Turkey, accused of being part of a terrorist plot, and his only defense is that he couldn't be a terrorist because even his own father could see that he would never be or do anything important. Surrounded by mediocrity, Ustinov delivers a performance without a single false note, a performance that is far and away superior to the film that encompasses it. Ustinov richly deserved the Oscar that he got here, though I have to wonder, if he was a supporting actor in this film, who was supposed to be the lead.
Movie trivia question: Alfred Hitchcock, though widely considered to be one of the greatest directors of all time, only ever directed one film that won a Best Picture Oscar. What was the winner?
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Longest gap between nominations
Henry Fonda received his first Best Actor nomination in 1941, for his performance in The Grapes of Wrath. Despite his legendary acting career, he was not nominated again until his Oscar win in 1982 for On Golden Pond. At 41 years, Fonda holds the dubious honor of having the record for longest gap between Oscar nominations. In addition to Fonda's nomination, The Grapes of Wrath won Oscars for Best Director (John Ford) and Best Supporting Actress (Jane Darwell), and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nunnally Johnson).
Tom Joad (Fonda) is released from prison after 4 years to find that his sharecropping family has been pushed off of the land that they had been working for several years, victims of the Dust Bowl. He catches up with them just before they get pushed off of another plot of land, just before they leave Oklahoma for California and the promise of steady work and decent wages. The family faces a long, perilous journey, a dwindling supply of money, and death on their way across country. They arrive to find a lack of jobs, but a steady supply of injustice, prejudice, hostility, and more death.
The Joads' story is probably the definitive cinematic depiction of the Great Depression, produced at a time when Hollywood was still, for the most part, ignoring the event. The film was toned down quite a bit from the book, both for political reasons (the book's highly socialist viewpoint was not popular among the studio's financial backers) and for censorship code reasons (several of the events described in the book were deemed too shocking to be put in the film). Yet the film still manages to be powerful and intense, to not feel watered down. John Ford's direction, which earned him the second of his four Oscars, is masterful. His use of light and shadows, of sets and locations, does as much to tell the story as the performances that he gets from his cast.
Which, of course, is not to take anything away from the cast. Fonda delivers his performance with a quiet intensity throughout, making the audience accept him as a regular guy, much like themselves, even as he goes through events that few people could truly identify with, even after the first thing that the audience learns about him is that he was just released from prison for killing a man in a bar fight. Jane Darwell, winning the Oscar for her portrayal of Ma Joad, gives a mostly heartfelt performance, though she does tend to use an overly melodramatic tone of voice and expression in some of her key scenes. Not nominated, but worthy of recognition, is John Carradine in the role of Casy, a former preacher who becomes an outcast after losing his faith, but then finds redemption as he takes up the cause of the working poor.
Movie trivia question: This film was the first of only two films in Oscar history to have its Best Director win be shared by two directors.
Tom Joad (Fonda) is released from prison after 4 years to find that his sharecropping family has been pushed off of the land that they had been working for several years, victims of the Dust Bowl. He catches up with them just before they get pushed off of another plot of land, just before they leave Oklahoma for California and the promise of steady work and decent wages. The family faces a long, perilous journey, a dwindling supply of money, and death on their way across country. They arrive to find a lack of jobs, but a steady supply of injustice, prejudice, hostility, and more death.
The Joads' story is probably the definitive cinematic depiction of the Great Depression, produced at a time when Hollywood was still, for the most part, ignoring the event. The film was toned down quite a bit from the book, both for political reasons (the book's highly socialist viewpoint was not popular among the studio's financial backers) and for censorship code reasons (several of the events described in the book were deemed too shocking to be put in the film). Yet the film still manages to be powerful and intense, to not feel watered down. John Ford's direction, which earned him the second of his four Oscars, is masterful. His use of light and shadows, of sets and locations, does as much to tell the story as the performances that he gets from his cast.
Which, of course, is not to take anything away from the cast. Fonda delivers his performance with a quiet intensity throughout, making the audience accept him as a regular guy, much like themselves, even as he goes through events that few people could truly identify with, even after the first thing that the audience learns about him is that he was just released from prison for killing a man in a bar fight. Jane Darwell, winning the Oscar for her portrayal of Ma Joad, gives a mostly heartfelt performance, though she does tend to use an overly melodramatic tone of voice and expression in some of her key scenes. Not nominated, but worthy of recognition, is John Carradine in the role of Casy, a former preacher who becomes an outcast after losing his faith, but then finds redemption as he takes up the cause of the working poor.
Movie trivia question: This film was the first of only two films in Oscar history to have its Best Director win be shared by two directors.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Twelve O'Clock High
I couldn't find a good trivia question to preface this one. Winner of the 1950 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Dean Jagger), it was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor (Gregory Peck).
In the midst of World War II, the American war effort seems to be falling apart. Key to American success is a series of daytime bombing runs, a highly dangerous prospect for the pilots involved. Morale is down, and so is discipline. As a result, casualties and losses are up. Enter General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck), a hard-nosed, heartless flight commander who expects more from his soldiers than they think they are capable of. Savage sets out to revitalize the war effort, not by easing up on the men and allowing them to rest and recover, but by being even more strict. Regulations are upheld to the letter, to the extent that men are demoted for wearing their uniforms wrong. The flyers are retrained on the basics, relearning how to properly fly in formation. They are told to think of themselves as already dead, in order to think about their duties rather than their families or the idea that they might get home again. He even renames one of his bombers The Leper Colony, placing the worst of the worst in his group in that plane as punishment/incentive to improve. The pilots initially all request transfers, and Savage meets with resistance from above, but eventually the men begin to take pride in themselves and their effort again.
Peck excels in this role, tough enough to be believed as somebody capable of turning his soldiers around and enforcing discipline, but betraying just enough humanity in his private moments to keep the audience from feeling that he is just a heartless robot. Though he played a part in removing his predecessor from duty for becoming too close to his men to be an effective leader, Savage eventually finds himself in the same position, struggling to send men to possible death because he knows them too well, taking too many missions himself to keep from having to send others on them.
Jagger won his Oscar playing Harvey Stovall, Savage's right-hand man, a veteran of World War I now confined to a desk. I'm not really sure why he won the award here. He was good, but not particularly memorable, not a stand-out role. I don't mean to take anything away from Jagger, or to suggest that he didn't give a capable performance, but even knowing his character's name and that he won the Oscar, it took me well over halfway into the movie before I could even identify which one he was, and, having just finished watching the film, I am already hard-pressed to remember anything that he actually did in it.
Movie trivia question: This Oscar-winning heist film was the inspiration for the TV show Mission Impossible... and for a real-life jewelry heist which occurred a few weeks after the film was released.
In the midst of World War II, the American war effort seems to be falling apart. Key to American success is a series of daytime bombing runs, a highly dangerous prospect for the pilots involved. Morale is down, and so is discipline. As a result, casualties and losses are up. Enter General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck), a hard-nosed, heartless flight commander who expects more from his soldiers than they think they are capable of. Savage sets out to revitalize the war effort, not by easing up on the men and allowing them to rest and recover, but by being even more strict. Regulations are upheld to the letter, to the extent that men are demoted for wearing their uniforms wrong. The flyers are retrained on the basics, relearning how to properly fly in formation. They are told to think of themselves as already dead, in order to think about their duties rather than their families or the idea that they might get home again. He even renames one of his bombers The Leper Colony, placing the worst of the worst in his group in that plane as punishment/incentive to improve. The pilots initially all request transfers, and Savage meets with resistance from above, but eventually the men begin to take pride in themselves and their effort again.
Peck excels in this role, tough enough to be believed as somebody capable of turning his soldiers around and enforcing discipline, but betraying just enough humanity in his private moments to keep the audience from feeling that he is just a heartless robot. Though he played a part in removing his predecessor from duty for becoming too close to his men to be an effective leader, Savage eventually finds himself in the same position, struggling to send men to possible death because he knows them too well, taking too many missions himself to keep from having to send others on them.
Jagger won his Oscar playing Harvey Stovall, Savage's right-hand man, a veteran of World War I now confined to a desk. I'm not really sure why he won the award here. He was good, but not particularly memorable, not a stand-out role. I don't mean to take anything away from Jagger, or to suggest that he didn't give a capable performance, but even knowing his character's name and that he won the Oscar, it took me well over halfway into the movie before I could even identify which one he was, and, having just finished watching the film, I am already hard-pressed to remember anything that he actually did in it.
Movie trivia question: This Oscar-winning heist film was the inspiration for the TV show Mission Impossible... and for a real-life jewelry heist which occurred a few weeks after the film was released.
The Philadelphia Story
I watched this one the other night with my fiancee, so I decided to review it, despite my lack of asking a trivia question about it first. The Philadelphia Story won Oscars in 1941 for Best Actor (James Stewart, his only Oscar win - so there's your trivia for this one) and Best Adapted Screenplay (David Ogden Stewart - no relation, as far as I know). The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (George Cukor), Best Actress (Katharine Hepburn), and Best Supporting Actress (Ruth Hussey).
The film tells the story of Tracy Lord, a wealthy Philadelphia socialite who, having divorced her first husband, C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), 2 years before, is now planning to remarry to rags-to-riches former coal-miner George Kittredge (John Howard). Haven, a now recovering alcoholic hoping to stop the wedding from happening, uses Lord's father's indiscretion to blackmail the family into letting a pair of society-page reporters, Macauley Connor (James Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) stay at the mansion for the wedding weekend. Slapstick antics and witty barbs ensue, as Lord must learn to crack through her porcelain facade and accept human reality, rather than constantly expecting herself and others to live up to her unattainable standards of perfection.
Witty, heartfelt, and entertaining, this film manages an impressive feat of having almost all of its major cast get nominated for Oscars - the exceptions being Cary Grant (who, though highly entertaining, is honestly just playing the role of Cary Grant here) and John Howard (who has a rather thankless role here, existing more for the advancement of the story than to be a character himself). Though light enough to be funny and fun to watch, The Philadelphia Story has something to say about class relations, and about millionaire liberals. But most of all, it's just a fun, slapstick romantic comedy.
Movie trivia question: Though he has one win and one nomination for Best Director Oscars, acting legend Robert Redford has only once been nominated for Best Actor. For what film did he receive his acting nomination?
The film tells the story of Tracy Lord, a wealthy Philadelphia socialite who, having divorced her first husband, C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), 2 years before, is now planning to remarry to rags-to-riches former coal-miner George Kittredge (John Howard). Haven, a now recovering alcoholic hoping to stop the wedding from happening, uses Lord's father's indiscretion to blackmail the family into letting a pair of society-page reporters, Macauley Connor (James Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) stay at the mansion for the wedding weekend. Slapstick antics and witty barbs ensue, as Lord must learn to crack through her porcelain facade and accept human reality, rather than constantly expecting herself and others to live up to her unattainable standards of perfection.
Witty, heartfelt, and entertaining, this film manages an impressive feat of having almost all of its major cast get nominated for Oscars - the exceptions being Cary Grant (who, though highly entertaining, is honestly just playing the role of Cary Grant here) and John Howard (who has a rather thankless role here, existing more for the advancement of the story than to be a character himself). Though light enough to be funny and fun to watch, The Philadelphia Story has something to say about class relations, and about millionaire liberals. But most of all, it's just a fun, slapstick romantic comedy.
Movie trivia question: Though he has one win and one nomination for Best Director Oscars, acting legend Robert Redford has only once been nominated for Best Actor. For what film did he receive his acting nomination?
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Award agreement
The first performance to win both an Oscar and an Independent Spirit Award was Geraldine Page's turn in the 1985 film The Trip To Bountiful. The film was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (Horton Foote).
Page plays Mother Watts, an elderly woman living with her married son in Houston in the late 1940s. Her daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn), is a lazy shrew, with no ambitions beyond gossiping, stealing Mother Watts' pension check, and browbeating her husband into taking her for a night out that they can't afford. Her son, Ludie (John Heard), is too spineless to stop Jessie Mae from removing any joy from Mother's life. (The only thing Jessie Mae hates more than hearing Mother sing hymns when she is happy is seeing her pout when she is told to stop.) One day, Mother sees a rare moment of opportunity to break away from her demeaning, oppressive existence. She "steals" her pension check, and sets out to return to her hometown of Bountiful, hoping to stay ahead of her family and, eventually, the police.
Page was exceptional in her role. Mother Watts could easily have been a stereotype, the typical cranky old woman, had she not found just the right notes in her performance. Mother Watts is a sympathetic character - she feels she has outlived her usefulness and become a burden on her son, she longs to go home again, even though it is not the place that it once was, and she is constantly oppressed and disrespected by her daughter-in-law. But she is no angel, either - she is stubborn and hard-headed, she has a tendency to make herself a martyr, and, honestly, at least part of the reason that she sings those hymns is because she knows that it annoys Jessie Mae. She gets the viewer on her side, but without being too good to be believable. It is not surprising that she won the Oscar here. What is surprising is that John Heard, as Ludie, did not get a nomination for supporting actor. His scene where he confronts his mother near the end of the film is the emotional heart of the movie, and that scene alone should have gotten him in. Actually, it was a weak category that year (I mean, Don Ameche was funny in Cocoon, but was he really Oscar-worthy?), so that scene may have been enough for him to win.
Movie trivia question: What actor currently holds the record for the longest gap between Best Actor nominations? His first winning film will be reviewed here soon.
Page plays Mother Watts, an elderly woman living with her married son in Houston in the late 1940s. Her daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn), is a lazy shrew, with no ambitions beyond gossiping, stealing Mother Watts' pension check, and browbeating her husband into taking her for a night out that they can't afford. Her son, Ludie (John Heard), is too spineless to stop Jessie Mae from removing any joy from Mother's life. (The only thing Jessie Mae hates more than hearing Mother sing hymns when she is happy is seeing her pout when she is told to stop.) One day, Mother sees a rare moment of opportunity to break away from her demeaning, oppressive existence. She "steals" her pension check, and sets out to return to her hometown of Bountiful, hoping to stay ahead of her family and, eventually, the police.
Page was exceptional in her role. Mother Watts could easily have been a stereotype, the typical cranky old woman, had she not found just the right notes in her performance. Mother Watts is a sympathetic character - she feels she has outlived her usefulness and become a burden on her son, she longs to go home again, even though it is not the place that it once was, and she is constantly oppressed and disrespected by her daughter-in-law. But she is no angel, either - she is stubborn and hard-headed, she has a tendency to make herself a martyr, and, honestly, at least part of the reason that she sings those hymns is because she knows that it annoys Jessie Mae. She gets the viewer on her side, but without being too good to be believable. It is not surprising that she won the Oscar here. What is surprising is that John Heard, as Ludie, did not get a nomination for supporting actor. His scene where he confronts his mother near the end of the film is the emotional heart of the movie, and that scene alone should have gotten him in. Actually, it was a weak category that year (I mean, Don Ameche was funny in Cocoon, but was he really Oscar-worthy?), so that scene may have been enough for him to win.
Movie trivia question: What actor currently holds the record for the longest gap between Best Actor nominations? His first winning film will be reviewed here soon.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Beatty's debut
Film icon Warren Beatty got his acting debut in an Oscar-winning picture. The film was 1961's Splendor in the Grass, winner for Best Original Screenplay (William Inge) and nominated for Best Actress (Natalie Wood).
Beatty plays Bud Stamper, captain of the high school football team and son of a wealthy oilman. Wood plays Deanie Loomis, Stamper's girlfriend. Coming of age in 1920s Kansas, the two must balance their feelings for each other and their burgeoning sexuality against their families' expectations of them and the oppressive morality of their time and place. Class distinctions also come into play, as Loomis is from a less well-off family, and Stamper's father believes that she will drag Bud down. Though Mr. Stamper promises to send Stamper and Loomis to Europe as a honeymoon gift as long as Bud agrees to go to Yale before marrying her, it is clear that he hopes that Bud will find a more appropriate wife in the meantime. He even goes so far as to suggest that Bud find "another kind of girl" to satisfy his urges. Eventually, both Bud and Deanie crack under the pressures that are put on them, as Bud caves to his father's wishes, and Deanie has a nervous breakdown.
Beatty is very impressive in his debut performance, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that repressed, uptight Bud Stamper is so different from the womanizing playboy type that defined so much of his career. But the film really belongs to Natalie Wood. She is entirely convincing and heartbreaking as a young woman who, caught between her feelings and her desire to be a "good girl," between her love for her boyfriend and her wish to live up to the unfair expectations put on her by the society in which she lives, breaks under the pressure, and is then deprived even the "comfort" of madness, as her parents insist that nothing is wrong with her, even as they continue to insist that she is still their baby, their little girl.
Splendor in the Grass came at an interesting time for Hollywood. Its story of repressed sexuality and oppressive mores came at a time when Hollywood itself was just beginning the fight to break away from oppressive censorship, to begin to deal with sexuality and other adult themes in a more realistic manner. Films like this one broke new ground, made possible everything that was great about the Golden Age of Hollywood that took place in the 1970s.
Movie trivia question: What is the most recent G-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture?
Beatty plays Bud Stamper, captain of the high school football team and son of a wealthy oilman. Wood plays Deanie Loomis, Stamper's girlfriend. Coming of age in 1920s Kansas, the two must balance their feelings for each other and their burgeoning sexuality against their families' expectations of them and the oppressive morality of their time and place. Class distinctions also come into play, as Loomis is from a less well-off family, and Stamper's father believes that she will drag Bud down. Though Mr. Stamper promises to send Stamper and Loomis to Europe as a honeymoon gift as long as Bud agrees to go to Yale before marrying her, it is clear that he hopes that Bud will find a more appropriate wife in the meantime. He even goes so far as to suggest that Bud find "another kind of girl" to satisfy his urges. Eventually, both Bud and Deanie crack under the pressures that are put on them, as Bud caves to his father's wishes, and Deanie has a nervous breakdown.
Beatty is very impressive in his debut performance, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that repressed, uptight Bud Stamper is so different from the womanizing playboy type that defined so much of his career. But the film really belongs to Natalie Wood. She is entirely convincing and heartbreaking as a young woman who, caught between her feelings and her desire to be a "good girl," between her love for her boyfriend and her wish to live up to the unfair expectations put on her by the society in which she lives, breaks under the pressure, and is then deprived even the "comfort" of madness, as her parents insist that nothing is wrong with her, even as they continue to insist that she is still their baby, their little girl.
Splendor in the Grass came at an interesting time for Hollywood. Its story of repressed sexuality and oppressive mores came at a time when Hollywood itself was just beginning the fight to break away from oppressive censorship, to begin to deal with sexuality and other adult themes in a more realistic manner. Films like this one broke new ground, made possible everything that was great about the Golden Age of Hollywood that took place in the 1970s.
Movie trivia question: What is the most recent G-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture?
Friday, July 30, 2010
John Ford's last Oscar
John Ford, the most successful director to date in Oscar history, won his fourth and final Best Director Oscar for 1952's The Quiet Man. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Victor McLaglen), and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The Quiet Man tells the story of Sean Thornton (John Wayne), a "tourist" from Pittsburgh who returns to his childhood hometown of Inisfree, Ireland. He immediately makes an enemy of Will Danaher (McLaglen) by buying his childhood home, a parcel of land which Danaher was trying to buy in order to expend his estate. Just as quickly, he falls in love with Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara)... Danaher's sister. Thornton wins Mary Kate's heart, and, with the help of the town priest and the town drunk, Will's permission to marry her. But Sean's mysterious past and a deception made against Will lead to conflict, and eventually to a confrontation between Sean and Will.
As great a movie star as John Wayne may have been, he has never struck me as a very good actor. What I mean is, like him or hate him, you have to admit that he didn't exactly disappear into his characters. Every role that John Wayne played was the role of John Wayne. As such, to me, Wayne felt miscast here, setting aside his cowboy and war hero personae to take on a romantic comedy. Picture Sleepless in Seattle starring Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of Tom Hanks. It doesn't really work for Wayne, in my opinion, but he is not so bad as to spoil the rest of the movie, either.
John Ford was also better known for his westerns, but stories of the Irish and English countryside did very well for him, too. Of his other Oscars, one was The Informer, the story of an outcast from the IRA, and another was How Green Was My Valley, the saga of a family of Welsh coalminers. His direction here is wonderful, even in spite of the miscast lead actor. The visuals are filled with beautiful backdrops of the Irish countryside, and the story is told with fleshed-out characters, and with a deft comedic touch.
Interestingly, Victor McLaglen, nominated here for Best Supporting Actor, won the Oscar for Best Actor for The Informer - the first film for which John Ford won Best Director.
Movie trivia question: Who was the first person to win both an Oscar and an Independent Spirit Award for the same performance?
The Quiet Man tells the story of Sean Thornton (John Wayne), a "tourist" from Pittsburgh who returns to his childhood hometown of Inisfree, Ireland. He immediately makes an enemy of Will Danaher (McLaglen) by buying his childhood home, a parcel of land which Danaher was trying to buy in order to expend his estate. Just as quickly, he falls in love with Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara)... Danaher's sister. Thornton wins Mary Kate's heart, and, with the help of the town priest and the town drunk, Will's permission to marry her. But Sean's mysterious past and a deception made against Will lead to conflict, and eventually to a confrontation between Sean and Will.
As great a movie star as John Wayne may have been, he has never struck me as a very good actor. What I mean is, like him or hate him, you have to admit that he didn't exactly disappear into his characters. Every role that John Wayne played was the role of John Wayne. As such, to me, Wayne felt miscast here, setting aside his cowboy and war hero personae to take on a romantic comedy. Picture Sleepless in Seattle starring Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of Tom Hanks. It doesn't really work for Wayne, in my opinion, but he is not so bad as to spoil the rest of the movie, either.
John Ford was also better known for his westerns, but stories of the Irish and English countryside did very well for him, too. Of his other Oscars, one was The Informer, the story of an outcast from the IRA, and another was How Green Was My Valley, the saga of a family of Welsh coalminers. His direction here is wonderful, even in spite of the miscast lead actor. The visuals are filled with beautiful backdrops of the Irish countryside, and the story is told with fleshed-out characters, and with a deft comedic touch.
Interestingly, Victor McLaglen, nominated here for Best Supporting Actor, won the Oscar for Best Actor for The Informer - the first film for which John Ford won Best Director.
Movie trivia question: Who was the first person to win both an Oscar and an Independent Spirit Award for the same performance?
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Capra's Oscar spree
Yes, as Dorothy Gale guessed, Frank Capra's middle win of his 3 Best Director Oscars in 5 years, later remade as an Adam Sandler film, was Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. Capra's was the only win that the film got, but it was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Gary Cooper), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Riskin).
Mr. Deeds is a small-town guy, a greeting card poet and tuba player in the local band, who inherits a distant relative's $20million fortune. He is dragged away from town to New York City to go through the business of inheriting the money, whereupon he is immediately set upon by the vultures of society. Lawyers seeking power of attorney, "relatives" seeking their share of the fortune, reporters looking for the big scoop, the societal elite looking to humiliate the new-money rube. Deeds is initially ridiculed in the papers as the "Cinderella Man," even as he falls in love with the reporter who, unbeknownst to him, is writing the Cinderella Man articles. When Deeds eventually decides to give the money to those in need, he is brought to trial to prove he is insane and incapable of managing the fortune.
The film hits all of the typical Capra themes: celebration of small-town values over big city living, the idea that friends/people are worth more than money, etc... all of the anti-capitalist, communistic sentiments that make it so hard for me to believe that Capra was actually one of the most politically conservative people that Hollywood ever saw. Cooper is endearing here in the role that typically went to James Stewart in Capra's films, with a strange combination of enjoyable antics and quickness to violence. (Before seeing the film, I wondered what Adam Sandler could have seen in the role to have decided to star in a remake, as so much of his comedy depends on cruelty or violence. With the number of punches that Cooper's Deeds throws, I understand a little better now.) Capra's films always leave me with a bit of a warm, glowy feeling - sentimental without being sappy, old-fashioned without being dated, having a message without being preachy. And yet, they always seem to me to pale in comparison to his real masterpiece, It's A Wonderful Life. They always seem to have the same goal as that film, without quite managing to achieve it so eloquently and absorbingly as that one great film did. Part of me knows that it is unfair to hold that against his other films, but my gut reaction whenever I see any of Capra's other movies is "It's good, but it's not quite It's A Wonderful Life."
Movie trivia question: Another frequent Best Director winner, John Ford won his last of 4 Best Director Oscars (a record still held to this date), for this John Wayne picture.
Mr. Deeds is a small-town guy, a greeting card poet and tuba player in the local band, who inherits a distant relative's $20million fortune. He is dragged away from town to New York City to go through the business of inheriting the money, whereupon he is immediately set upon by the vultures of society. Lawyers seeking power of attorney, "relatives" seeking their share of the fortune, reporters looking for the big scoop, the societal elite looking to humiliate the new-money rube. Deeds is initially ridiculed in the papers as the "Cinderella Man," even as he falls in love with the reporter who, unbeknownst to him, is writing the Cinderella Man articles. When Deeds eventually decides to give the money to those in need, he is brought to trial to prove he is insane and incapable of managing the fortune.
The film hits all of the typical Capra themes: celebration of small-town values over big city living, the idea that friends/people are worth more than money, etc... all of the anti-capitalist, communistic sentiments that make it so hard for me to believe that Capra was actually one of the most politically conservative people that Hollywood ever saw. Cooper is endearing here in the role that typically went to James Stewart in Capra's films, with a strange combination of enjoyable antics and quickness to violence. (Before seeing the film, I wondered what Adam Sandler could have seen in the role to have decided to star in a remake, as so much of his comedy depends on cruelty or violence. With the number of punches that Cooper's Deeds throws, I understand a little better now.) Capra's films always leave me with a bit of a warm, glowy feeling - sentimental without being sappy, old-fashioned without being dated, having a message without being preachy. And yet, they always seem to me to pale in comparison to his real masterpiece, It's A Wonderful Life. They always seem to have the same goal as that film, without quite managing to achieve it so eloquently and absorbingly as that one great film did. Part of me knows that it is unfair to hold that against his other films, but my gut reaction whenever I see any of Capra's other movies is "It's good, but it's not quite It's A Wonderful Life."
Movie trivia question: Another frequent Best Director winner, John Ford won his last of 4 Best Director Oscars (a record still held to this date), for this John Wayne picture.
The House on 92nd Street
The House on 92nd Street won the Oscar at 1946's awards ceremony for Best Original Screenplay. It was not nominated for any other awards.
The film is a spy story, based on true events and made with the cooperation of the FBI, about a double agent working for the FBI while posing as a German agent. The agent's task is to both discover what the Germans know about, and to throw them off the track of, the development of the atomic bomb.
The performances are less than stellar, due at least in part to the fact that many of the FBI agents in the film were portrayed by actual FBI agents instead of actors. The film uses a documentary-like style, with a lot of voiceover narration to explain what is going on, and "actual footage" spliced in, and a narrative that is heavy on exposition, but light on action or dialogue or character development. It was an unusual stylistic choice, but one that seems to have been very influential... on famed "worst director of all-time" Ed Wood. In fact, bad films everywhere seem to have learned a lot about storytelling from The House on 92nd Street. It seems to have ridden the wave of post-WWII patriotism to its award more than having earned it for quality.
Movie trivia question: What film, Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay, marks the acting debut of film legend Warren Beatty?
The film is a spy story, based on true events and made with the cooperation of the FBI, about a double agent working for the FBI while posing as a German agent. The agent's task is to both discover what the Germans know about, and to throw them off the track of, the development of the atomic bomb.
The performances are less than stellar, due at least in part to the fact that many of the FBI agents in the film were portrayed by actual FBI agents instead of actors. The film uses a documentary-like style, with a lot of voiceover narration to explain what is going on, and "actual footage" spliced in, and a narrative that is heavy on exposition, but light on action or dialogue or character development. It was an unusual stylistic choice, but one that seems to have been very influential... on famed "worst director of all-time" Ed Wood. In fact, bad films everywhere seem to have learned a lot about storytelling from The House on 92nd Street. It seems to have ridden the wave of post-WWII patriotism to its award more than having earned it for quality.
Movie trivia question: What film, Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay, marks the acting debut of film legend Warren Beatty?
Ed Harris' directorial debut
The film in which Ed Harris directed himself to a Best Actor nomination was Pollock, the biopic about abstract painter Jackson Pollock. Harris did not win the award for this film, but his co-star, Marcia Gay Harden, did take home the award for Best Supporting actress for her portrayal of Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner. The film was not nominated for any other Oscars.
The film tells the story of Pollock's life, from his time as a struggling artist beginning to hone his craft and discover his style to his death. Harris is stunningly great as Pollock. I have been a fan of his work for a long time, and I don't think I have ever seen him give such a strong performance as this one. Understandably so, too, as this film was a real passion project for Harris, a project that he had been working on for about ten years before finally getting it filmed. He takes a role that has been done many times before, and that could easily fall into cliche - the role of the tortured artistic genius, struggling to find recognition for work that is far ahead of its time and to battle the personal demons that go along with his genius - and he finds a way to make it fresh and exciting and full of energy. Harden matches Harris note for note with her performance. She is entirely convincing in a role that hits multiple notes, some of which seem to contradict each other. Krasner seems genuine throughout, whether she is acting as a jealous contemporary artist, a loving wife, a domineering shrew, a parasite living off of her spouse's fame, or a verbal sparring partner who gives as good as she gets.
Pollock is thoroughly worth watching on the strength of the performances alone. Unfortunately, the story that the performances serve is not quite so strong. It is interesting, to be sure, but it just doesn't have much of a sense of narrative flow. There is no feeling that this encounter in his early life led to that development in his style and technique later. Instead, the film felt like a random collection of scenes from Pollock's life - here are a few scenes from when he was an unknown artist, skip a few years, here are a few scenes from when others in the artistic community started to know who Pollock was, skip a few years, here are a few scenes from when he started to become famous, skip a few years, etc. I was never bored, watching this, but I didn't come out of it feeling like it had really told me a story either.
Another shortcoming in my opinion, and one that tends to be shared by many biopics about famous artists, is that it tells the viewer that Pollock is a genius without explaining why he was a genius. It may all make sense to viewers who know something about modern art, but the uninitiated will not find any clues to help them to understand what made his work so revolutionary and important. Abstract painting is a style whose defenders have always said that it is not just random splatters of paint thrown onto the canvas, that there is meaning to the colors and patterns of each painting. And yet, in this film, Pollock, the father of that artistic style, says several times that he doesn't know what his paintings are of, and he is often unsure of whether they are finished. Can he really create meaningful works of art without knowing what the meaning is?
Movie trivia question: Performers winning Oscars for non-English language roles are pretty rare - it has only happened six times in Oscar history so far. Who is the only performer to win an Oscar for a performance given in French?
The film tells the story of Pollock's life, from his time as a struggling artist beginning to hone his craft and discover his style to his death. Harris is stunningly great as Pollock. I have been a fan of his work for a long time, and I don't think I have ever seen him give such a strong performance as this one. Understandably so, too, as this film was a real passion project for Harris, a project that he had been working on for about ten years before finally getting it filmed. He takes a role that has been done many times before, and that could easily fall into cliche - the role of the tortured artistic genius, struggling to find recognition for work that is far ahead of its time and to battle the personal demons that go along with his genius - and he finds a way to make it fresh and exciting and full of energy. Harden matches Harris note for note with her performance. She is entirely convincing in a role that hits multiple notes, some of which seem to contradict each other. Krasner seems genuine throughout, whether she is acting as a jealous contemporary artist, a loving wife, a domineering shrew, a parasite living off of her spouse's fame, or a verbal sparring partner who gives as good as she gets.
Pollock is thoroughly worth watching on the strength of the performances alone. Unfortunately, the story that the performances serve is not quite so strong. It is interesting, to be sure, but it just doesn't have much of a sense of narrative flow. There is no feeling that this encounter in his early life led to that development in his style and technique later. Instead, the film felt like a random collection of scenes from Pollock's life - here are a few scenes from when he was an unknown artist, skip a few years, here are a few scenes from when others in the artistic community started to know who Pollock was, skip a few years, here are a few scenes from when he started to become famous, skip a few years, etc. I was never bored, watching this, but I didn't come out of it feeling like it had really told me a story either.
Another shortcoming in my opinion, and one that tends to be shared by many biopics about famous artists, is that it tells the viewer that Pollock is a genius without explaining why he was a genius. It may all make sense to viewers who know something about modern art, but the uninitiated will not find any clues to help them to understand what made his work so revolutionary and important. Abstract painting is a style whose defenders have always said that it is not just random splatters of paint thrown onto the canvas, that there is meaning to the colors and patterns of each painting. And yet, in this film, Pollock, the father of that artistic style, says several times that he doesn't know what his paintings are of, and he is often unsure of whether they are finished. Can he really create meaningful works of art without knowing what the meaning is?
Movie trivia question: Performers winning Oscars for non-English language roles are pretty rare - it has only happened six times in Oscar history so far. Who is the only performer to win an Oscar for a performance given in French?
Saturday, July 10, 2010
'80s Oscar darling
Nominated for 4 Best Actress Oscars in the 1980s (in addition to 1 win for Best Supporting actress), Jessica Lange did not win the lead actress award until 1995, for Blue Sky. The film, which was actually completed in 1990, but not released until 1995 due to the studio's bankruptcy issues, was not nominated for any other Oscars.
Set in the early 1960s, Blue Sky stars Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Marshall, an army major and expert on radiation, whose outspoken beliefs that the army should put greater restrictions on their nuclear testing have made him unpopular and become an obstacle to his career. Lange plays Marshall's wife, Carly, whose promiscuity and mental instability become another. The coincidental timing of her affair with his commanding officer and his discovery of the cover-up of an accident at a nuclear test site lead to Hank being locked up in a mental hospital, leaving Carly as the only one who can save the day.
Lange does steal every scene she's in, and Jones does a decent job of keeping up with her, but their performances are the only things worth watching in this film. The other performances are not particularly good. The camerawork is sloppy and confused - the film's director had been directing for a few decades, but this felt like the work of somebody who had no experience at all. As for the story, it was pretty improbable, it relied too heavily on coincidence for a couple of major plot points, and it had a happily-ever-after ending that wrapped things up far too neatly to let a little thing like logic get in the way. Even Lange's performance, the main selling point of the film, is the weakest I have seen from her. This felt to me like basically a watered-down, more stereotype-driven version of the character Lange played in the film Frances.
Movie trivia question: In his directorial debut, character actor Ed Harris directed himself to a Best Actor nomination for this film.
Set in the early 1960s, Blue Sky stars Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Marshall, an army major and expert on radiation, whose outspoken beliefs that the army should put greater restrictions on their nuclear testing have made him unpopular and become an obstacle to his career. Lange plays Marshall's wife, Carly, whose promiscuity and mental instability become another. The coincidental timing of her affair with his commanding officer and his discovery of the cover-up of an accident at a nuclear test site lead to Hank being locked up in a mental hospital, leaving Carly as the only one who can save the day.
Lange does steal every scene she's in, and Jones does a decent job of keeping up with her, but their performances are the only things worth watching in this film. The other performances are not particularly good. The camerawork is sloppy and confused - the film's director had been directing for a few decades, but this felt like the work of somebody who had no experience at all. As for the story, it was pretty improbable, it relied too heavily on coincidence for a couple of major plot points, and it had a happily-ever-after ending that wrapped things up far too neatly to let a little thing like logic get in the way. Even Lange's performance, the main selling point of the film, is the weakest I have seen from her. This felt to me like basically a watered-down, more stereotype-driven version of the character Lange played in the film Frances.
Movie trivia question: In his directorial debut, character actor Ed Harris directed himself to a Best Actor nomination for this film.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Biggest Oscar snub
Many people would say that the biggest snub in Oscar history is that Audrey Hepburn did not get nominated for Best Actress for My Fair Lady. The film won 8 Oscars that year (including Best Picture, Best Director (George Cukor), and Best Actor (Rex Harrison) ) out of 12 nominations. It was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Stanley Holloway), Best Supporting Actress (Gladys Cooper), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner). And yet, the performance that is really the heart and soul of the entire film, Audrey Hepburn's portrayal of Eliza Doolittle, the street urchin transformed into an elegant lady, was not honored with even a nomination due to a technicality - the studio decided to dub in her singing with another woman's voice, and the dubbed in singing comprised a just high enough percentage of the role to disqualify her according to the Academy's rules. What makes the situation even worse is that it was a bad decision on the studio's part. Hepburn had not proven her talent as a singer, so the studio was not willing to take a chance on her voice. She proved in Breakfast at Tiffany's, however, that she was in fact a capable singer.
The story is simple enough. Around the turn on the Twentieth Century, linguistics professor Henry Higgins undertakes an experiment to teach flower girl Eliza how to speak properly, proposing that improving her speech will allow her to rise to a higher social class. Though they initially have an antagonistic relationship, the two gradually fall in love. Certainly not a complex enough story to really require the film's almost three hour running time, and yet it never really drags or bores. To be honest, while I am a fan of Audrey Hepburn, I was sort of dreading this film, fearing that a three hour musical would be one that I had to suffer through every minute of. Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Well, maybe not every minute... It kind of drags in a couple of spots in the third hour. The song "Get Me To The Church On Time," in which Eliza Doolittle's father goes out for a night of drinking and whoring the night before his wedding, is somewhat amusing at first, but is far too long and repetitive - it has 4 or 5 verses, begins to lose its charm by the 4th verse, and then goes on to repeat the entire song about 4 times through. And Professor Higgins' musical lamentation "Why Can't A Woman Be Like A Man" is simply not as funny as it thinks it is.
I can't say that I think My Fair Lady deserved to beat out Dr. Strangelove for Best Picture that year - Strangelove is on my short list of all time favorite films, and much as I may have enjoyed My Fair Lady, it is not as revolutionary and unforgettable as Strangelove. Rex Harrison, however, absolutely deserved his Oscar. He took a character who should have been irredeemably arrogant and condescending, and found a way to make him somehow endearing, and very entertaining. (On a side note, it is apparent after about a minute of listening to him that Harrison's Higgins is clearly the inspiration for Family Guy's Stewie Griffin's entire personality and voice.) Likewise, Hepburn, had she not been unfairly disqualified, would have been absolutely deserving of the Oscar that she certainly would have been a shoo-in to win. She made a character that could easily have crossed the line into being too grating, too irritating to want to spend three hours with into somebody the viewer truly cares about. And, though some may dislike the film for this very reason, I really enjoyed the fact that My Fair Lady took its time to get where it wanted to go, rather than just rushing through the plot as quickly as it could. Yes, there are some unnecessary scenes (more critical reviews at the time called the film cavernous, a vacuum, over-long because of its empty spaces), but I appreciated it's willingness to take the scenic route, to allow the viewer to just relax and enjoy the show, and not feel rushed to the end.
Movie trivia question: One of the most successful directors in Oscar history, Frank Capra won 3 Oscars in 5 years back in the 1930s. The second of these films was later remade as an Adam Sandler vehicle. What was that film?
The story is simple enough. Around the turn on the Twentieth Century, linguistics professor Henry Higgins undertakes an experiment to teach flower girl Eliza how to speak properly, proposing that improving her speech will allow her to rise to a higher social class. Though they initially have an antagonistic relationship, the two gradually fall in love. Certainly not a complex enough story to really require the film's almost three hour running time, and yet it never really drags or bores. To be honest, while I am a fan of Audrey Hepburn, I was sort of dreading this film, fearing that a three hour musical would be one that I had to suffer through every minute of. Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Well, maybe not every minute... It kind of drags in a couple of spots in the third hour. The song "Get Me To The Church On Time," in which Eliza Doolittle's father goes out for a night of drinking and whoring the night before his wedding, is somewhat amusing at first, but is far too long and repetitive - it has 4 or 5 verses, begins to lose its charm by the 4th verse, and then goes on to repeat the entire song about 4 times through. And Professor Higgins' musical lamentation "Why Can't A Woman Be Like A Man" is simply not as funny as it thinks it is.
I can't say that I think My Fair Lady deserved to beat out Dr. Strangelove for Best Picture that year - Strangelove is on my short list of all time favorite films, and much as I may have enjoyed My Fair Lady, it is not as revolutionary and unforgettable as Strangelove. Rex Harrison, however, absolutely deserved his Oscar. He took a character who should have been irredeemably arrogant and condescending, and found a way to make him somehow endearing, and very entertaining. (On a side note, it is apparent after about a minute of listening to him that Harrison's Higgins is clearly the inspiration for Family Guy's Stewie Griffin's entire personality and voice.) Likewise, Hepburn, had she not been unfairly disqualified, would have been absolutely deserving of the Oscar that she certainly would have been a shoo-in to win. She made a character that could easily have crossed the line into being too grating, too irritating to want to spend three hours with into somebody the viewer truly cares about. And, though some may dislike the film for this very reason, I really enjoyed the fact that My Fair Lady took its time to get where it wanted to go, rather than just rushing through the plot as quickly as it could. Yes, there are some unnecessary scenes (more critical reviews at the time called the film cavernous, a vacuum, over-long because of its empty spaces), but I appreciated it's willingness to take the scenic route, to allow the viewer to just relax and enjoy the show, and not feel rushed to the end.
Movie trivia question: One of the most successful directors in Oscar history, Frank Capra won 3 Oscars in 5 years back in the 1930s. The second of these films was later remade as an Adam Sandler vehicle. What was that film?
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