My Favorite Movies… This Week

We were having a small, fun family dinner last week and one of our nieces wanted to know the answer to a very simple question:

What’s your #1 film?

Being who I am I had to answer a question with a question before I could answer the question.

Ummm, well, do you mean the film that I think is the best film ever made or the film that I personally like the best?

It didn’t help at all when she answered:

How about both?

Of course at this point I began explaining that either way I couldn’t narrow it down to one. There are so many different types of movies I love and watch again and again but couldn’t claim were the best for anyone but me. There were also others that I would place in the top five or ten that wouldn’t be my personal favorite but….

At which point someone else said, The Wizard of Oz and my husband interjected Day for Night..

As I then began sputtering out in no particular order All About Eve, The Way We Were, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Postcards from the Edge and Annie Hall (Note: The latter with the disclaimer that it used to be but now, well, it’s hard to watch, which led to a discussion of why, which I don’t want to get into for various reasons and is the subject of another blog).

I then quickly explained Hitchcock was one of my favorite filmmakers and that despite it not being his most artsy I just love Psycho.

As well as most every Almodóvar movie, and many of the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. But that I couldn’t leave out….Billy Wilder or Scorsese and that even though Gone With The Wind is so problematic from a contemporary lens I loved the book and the film as a teenager, which is ironic because of how pissed I was that BlacKkKlansman didn’t win the best picture Oscar that year over what I judged to be the far more retro Green Book and…

Well, you get it.

I’m a parlor game buzzkill because nothing is simple in my brain. But as a lifelong movie fan, there is especially nothing is simple for me about the movies.

So much to love for so many reasons.

And damn, what kind of gay man would I be if I didn’t include the restored Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born and Jacque Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg?

See, I can’t stop.

Which is sort of the point.

There is something about the movies.

Plays are great, books are wonderful when they are and nothing is better these days than a great season of a streaming show. (Note: Yes, Baby Reindeer and Hacks were fantastic but this year I was riveted to Carmy’s existential crisis all through season three of The Bear and couldn’t care less how many stars his fakakta restaurant got – that wasn’t the point!).

Don’t even get me started on the Tina episode!

Not to mention music, museums and one of a kind events like Luna, Luna.

But if you’re a pop culture freak of nature of a certain age like I am, films are… well… forever.

Something immersive that’s eternally branded in your mind.

Perhaps it’s because the second golden age of 1970s cinema was where I came of age.

Maybe it’s that movies run such a gamut, or require brain power from totally passive to you better f’n pay attention or you’ll miss something.

It could also be the special kind of escape they provide for a prolonged period of time without anyone else around – at home or in a darkened theatre – the latter being a place you can easily pretend no one else is around as long as no one’s brought their crying kid. #ChildlessCatPeoplePower.

Or thinks it’s their living room. #ShutTheFUp

In the more than a week since my niece asked her question I only today realized none of this matters because left to my own devices (Note: A dangerous place to be) films are my unwinding mechanism.

And there are not just one type nor do they have to be on my aforementioned “favorites”:

I happened to turn on TCM a few days ago and there were the beginning credits of Silkwood. A bunch of friends worked on it and I hadn’t seen it in years. But I doubted I’d re-watch a story of radiation, friendship and corporate corruption even with the help of Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep and Cher because it’d been a trying week. But it had me. And kept me. Not only did it hold up all these years but I found the sheer unabashed chauvinistic anger at the power of a strong woman like the late Karen Silkwood to be strangely energizing because of how absolutely infuriating and relevant it remains.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t equally into the new feature-length documentary on MAX entitled, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, a few days before. It’s an actual movie about THE biggest movie star of the 20^th century which she narrates via numerous reels of “lost “tapes she recorded in the mid-late sixties for a planned biography that never came to be.

She’s bawdy, funny, smart and clever but what she is more than anything else is honest. It’s a treat to hear the dish on the movies, the life, the triumphs and the tragedies from the source but it’s even better to see it unfold in the filmic images and real-life footage put together in motion picture form by a director as creative as Nanette Burstein.

I was busy this week but in the last couple of days the air sucked and my sinuses swelled so I chose to stay inside and read once I caught up on some politics (Note: Idiot). At which point, I changed channels and there was another really great contemporary film that should have won the Oscar for best picture – The Social Network. (The King’s Speech? Seriously????).

I know, who wants to see the Mark Zuckerberg story at this point, right? But I’d forgotten how much of an even-handed anti-hero Aaron Sorkin’s script made him and how well David Fincher’s frenetic filmmaking captured what, from our current rear view mirror, seems like a very strangely naïve era we couldn’t quite appreciate at the time. #MoviesCanDoThat.

Not knowing I’d be writing about movies but still staying hermetically sealed at home I continued, checking out the much maligned recent film The Bikeriders starring Austin Butler and Jodie Comer. Dismissed by many top critics and a few friends, it was bizarre, fascinating, funny and sort of touching. I’m not into 1960’s motorcycle culture and I never imagined an English actress like Comer could so convincingly pull off working class Chicago (Note: Though why not after what she did on “Killing Eve?”) yet it was fascinating. And Mr. Butler is just so much more enjoyable on a motorcycle than slithering his way through sand in Dune 2.

I guess now is the time where I admit that before I gave in and went outside on a walk/run this afternoon I spent two hours rewatching the critical and audience drubbed film version of Jersey Boys, directed by Clint Eastwood. Yeah, it’s sort of schmaltzy, a little cartoony and was definitely shot on the Warner Bros. backlot.

But jeez, it’s a movie fantasy musical melodrama. And the soooonnnggggs.

Sherry, Walk Like A Man, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Let’s Hang On, Working My Way Back to You… And the Italian guys from the neighborhood I grew up with that I seldom hung out with but loved from afar. Fuggedaboudit….

It was a time capsule back to an imagined version of the life of a real-life singer (Frankie Valli, of The Four Seasons) with movie mobsters, movie people and melodramatic movie heartbreak played against a purposely and infectiously nostalgic movie soundtrack.

It’s not Elizabeth Taylor, nor does it address corporate malfeasance, social media or the evolution of pop culture movements. We have those, as well as many other films, for that.

And for a lot more.

Jersey Boys – “Sherry” (at the White House)

02.13.22

by notesfromachair

Change for the Good

America is part of a global multi-racial community whether the insurrectionists of Jan. 6 like it or not.

This is a fact and it’s not going to change. Ever.

If anything, thanks in part to social media and social revolution, we are only going to get more multi-racial and more global.

Despite all the bellyaching from those preferring to benefit from our traditionally white, male heterosexual power structure.

Numbers don’t lie no matter how many times those doing their best to suppress the truth tell us a fork is actually a spoon…or a salad bowl.

If you want to put politics aside, and who doesn’t right now, one way to consider just how much things have changed is to look at this year’s Oscar nominations.

Flee, a mostly animated movie that tells the harrowing story of a young gay Afghan refugee’s nail biting escape from his war-torn country, was nominated for best documentary, best animated feature AND best international film.

That’s a first.

Japan’s Drive My Car received four nominations, including breakout ones for best picture and director, and Norway’s The Worst Person in the World nabbed an unexpected screenplay nod aside from the one it got for international film.

In the acting categories, four people of color received nominations (down from last year’s record high of nine). But among those are top contenders like Will Smith in King Richard and Ariana DeBose in West Side Story, both of whom are favored to win in their categories.

Bonus points for the openly queer nominees!

Though before we start to believe we’ve truly toppled the Oscar Confederacy and, in turn, the international Confederacy of straight white, American maleness (Note: Don’t worry guys, we still want to include you always), here’s a very brief recent history of Oscar numbers to chew on.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences began a real diversity push in earnest more than five years ago when #OscarsSoWhite became a shameful international hashtag due to the lack of diversity among that year’s nominees and winners (Note: Not a single Black actor was nominated in either 2015 or 2016 in any of the 20 possible slots).

But this had a great deal to do with the voting members in the Academy. At that time 92% of the membership was white and 75% was male.

After a push to recruit a more diverse membership, these days approximately 84% of the members are white and 16% are non-white. Its female membership also increased to more than 32%.

The statistics among new members are a lot better. For example, of the 819 new people who became Oscar voters in 2020, 45% were women and 36% were people of color.

If the Academy keeps going at this rate, who knows, it might not even be news when a woman receives a nomination as best director (Note: Jane Campion actually became the first female in history to be nominated twice in that category this year for The Power of The Dog, following last year’s nomination and win for Chloe Zhao (Nomadland), the first female POC to be so recognized).

Though it still might break a few insurrectionists hearts when Ava DuVernay or use your imagination finally, finally, FINALLY gets their turn at the podium.

Still, we digress.

The real story of this year’s Oscar contenders, and inevitably surprising winners, really lies in the number of new international members welcomed into the Oscar voting fold during the last five years. For a deeper dive, check out these stories in the Hollywood Reporter, Vox and Slate:

But if you want to truly understand the slow but steady shifting tide of one of our top entertainment cultural signifiers – the Oscars – and, in turn, all the kicking and screaming and spitting up from Fox News watchers– here is one simple way in.

The membership of the Academy has swelled to just about 9400 active members in 2021 compared to the 6261 it had in 2016. That’s a 47% increase.

But even more interesting is that a significant portion of those new members came not only from a minority population but from outside the U.S.

In 2022, more than 25% of all Academy members (nee voters) are from countries other than America, vs. a mere 12% just six years ago.

This gives deeper meaning to what Oscar-winning writer-director Billy Wilder was famously quoted as saying to the cameraman on one of his movies way back when:

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

Closeups remained in tact, Norma, don’t worry.

Now I love Billy Wilder as much as the next movie fan, perhaps even more. But he was speaking at a particular place and time. And as a European immigrant who embraced the style of American cinema while helping to significantly redefine it with lacerating wit, strong characterizations and unrelenting social commentary.

The Academy these days has wisely decided, though long overdue, to actively move forward from his now somewhat provincial, though still cringingly funny, dated point of view.

Its slow, somewhat steady embrace of international cinema (Note: Starting with South Korea’s Parasite best picture win in 2020), as well as its recognition of various minority and female viewpoints among this year’s nominated crop of films and members, is a welcome change and, yes, love overdue.

And though I clearly can’t be sure, I’d bet, as an immigrant, even Wilder would fully endorse it.

Because ironically, when you think about it, it’s just about the most American thing the Academy, in its new and present form, can do to move the industry and the culture forward.

Evolution vs. insurrection.

Sebastián Yatra – “Dos Oruguitas” (from Encanto — Disney’s first Spanish language song nomination, second in the history of the Oscars)

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: billy wilder

Change for the Good