2010 (1984)

 

2010, sometimes referred to as 2010: The Year We Make Contact, is a sequel to that enigmatic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. The second film features a team of American and Soviet (what we now call Russian) astronauts heading back to Jupiter and its moon Europa to discover what happened and to restart the HAL 9000 computer that caused all of the chaos nine years earlier. (That certainly seems like a bad idea given how the original film ended.) 2010, being a product of the 1980s, is filled with almost stereotypical Cold War fears and concerns. The Soviet Union and the United States are on the brink of war while the mission is underway, and there’s a palpable sense of tension and distrust between the U.S. and Soviet astronauts. The dialog in Russian is neither translated into subtitles or dubbed, which only adds to the sense of distance between the representatives of the two countries. The film features good performances from a cast that includes such talented actors as Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, and Helen Mirren (as a leader of the Soviet astronauts). Bob Balaban, always a reliable and welcome presence in the movies, plays the scientist who revives HAL and learns that the computer was being forced to keep a secret about the ubiquitous monoliths that our government had tried to cover up. He gets along well with HAL, and their conversations are intriguing when compared to what happened in the first film, but I feel like 2010 spends just a bit too much time inside that red glow-bathed control room. HAL’s red “eye” isn’t as mind-blowing this time around either. The sequel is rather stylish if slow-moving at times. It owes a clear debt to the first Alien film with the sharp contrast between the dark Soviet spaceship and the brightly lit American ship. The filmmakers also recreated some of the props and costumes from the 1968 film, which begs the question of just how original this Oscar-nominated costume design really is, particularly since the costumes of the original were not nominated. The film asks a lot of questions for viewers to ponder: Will the U.S. and the Soviet Union astronauts work together to get everyone back to Earth? Will HAL interfere again once it/he realizes the purpose of this mission? Will we ever learn what the monoliths are and why they appear when and where they do? What is Keir Dullea, so memorable as David Bowman in 2001, doing in this film? Is he a ghost or an apparition, and what is he trying to accomplish? I’m not certain that we care enough, truly, about the answers to these questions, but fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey might want to know more than I felt I wanted to know. To me, 2010 is almost as bewildering at times as that earlier film; it’s just not as powerful or awe-inspiring.

Oscar Nominations: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, and Best Makeup

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

 

Triangle of Sadness is an unexpected choice for inclusion on the list of nominees for Best Motion Picture of the Year. It’s certainly a very accomplished film from the award-winning Swedish director/screenwriter Ruben Ostlund. It’s also a pretty dark comedy with some rather bleak moments, and the audience keeps getting shocked by where the film goes. Overall, it’s quite an indictment of the rich and also a very stinging depiction of how badly we often treat each other. Maybe its inclusion is a sign that the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have become more open to considering more unusual films as being award worthy.

The film features what would ordinarily be a typical three-part structure, but here each of the sections is a very distinctly different kind of story. Our focus keeps shifting with the start of each new section, which certainly keeps a viewer on their toes when we have, essentially, three different film genres to connect. “Part 1: Carl & Yaya” features a young couple, both of whom are models. However, Yaya (Charlbi Dean) makes much more money as a female model than her boyfriend Carl (Harris Dickinson) does as a male model. They fight a lot about money and gender roles, and you begin to suspect that the film might be some sort of examination of these issues. They don’t seem to have a very happy relationship – it seems rather toxic, actually – so we could perhaps even expect the film to be an examination of the nature of these kinds of relationships.

However, when “Part 2: The Yacht” begins, we see that the number of characters we’ll need to follow expands. We have the crew of a very expensive private yacht and a range of incredibly rich (and incredibly stupid) people. These rich people are just awful; they have such dumb thoughts in their heads. One of them claims that everyone is equal and, thus, the crew should have a chance to swim just like the wealthy patrons on the yacht do, and the crew has to accommodate their demands, no matter how ridiculous they might be and no matter how much it will interfere with the crew’s ability to do their necessary work. Thus, the preparations for the evening meal gets delayed and the confused crew members slide into the ocean one at a time and then return to their more menial but essential tasks.

It's quite the collection of oddballs on this cruise. There’s a woman who can only speak one sentence in German due to a stroke. There’s a Russian fertilizer salesman who gets into a puzzling debate with the captain over the virtues of capitalism vs. communism. One couple has made their money from selling explosives and weapons used by some of the worst world leaders. And one woman swears that the yacht, which is motorized, has dirty sails despite being assured by the captain and members of the crew that there are no sails. The captain, by the way, is played by Woody Harrelson, whose performance is quite as off kilter as you might expect from him.

The centerpiece of Part 2 is a disastrous Captain’s Dinner. Thanks to some poor choices based on trying to meet the demands of the rich people on board, it occurs in the middle of a violent storm and the food has spoiled because it’s been sitting on hold while the crew was forced into taking a dip in the ocean. You’ve not seen so much vomiting and diarrhea in a film in a while. It’s quite the punishment for the out-of-touch people on this yacht.

“Part 3: The Island” shifts the focus to a survival film. The ship has been destroyed by pirates, and most of the guests and crew have died. Only one person among the survivors seems to know how do anything, and she was the former toilet monitor on the ship – in other words, part of the bathroom cleaning crew. Abigail (played by Dolly De Leon) upends the class system, forcing the wealthy passengers to accept her as “the captain” before they receive any food. She also starts a sexual relationship with Karl in order to grant him food and privileges that he can share with Yaya. De Leon is magisterial in her performance. We may return to focusing on Carl and Yaya a bit more in this third part, but really, we care most about Abigail. De Leon gives what would be an award-worthy performance in any other year.

The ending of Triangle of Sadness is unexpected and rather inconclusive. Given its enigmatic nature, the ending doesn’t especially engender any sympathy for the characters who are still around. I’m not certain what could happen to them next, but I’m also not quite sure that I’d care to know what happens to any of them other than Abigail. Several of the films nominated for Best Motion Picture this year had these rather puzzling conclusions. Maybe that’s a trend for the 2020s to watch out for.

It’s somewhat interesting to note that the sequences on the yacht were filmed on a yacht used by Aristotle and Jackie Onassis. Talk about the wealthy and privileged; that boat must have some wild stories associated with it. It’s also sad that the actress who plays Yaya, Charlbi Dean, passed away before the film received its Academy recognition. I might not like the self-involved character that she plays, but Dean was certainly a talented actress who was still very early in her career.

Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing (Ruben Ostlund), and Best Original Screenplay

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964; 1965)

 

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les parapluies de Cherbourg) is a gorgeously shot film from France’s Jacques Demy, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film. It’s a sung-through musical, meaning no one speaks any dialogue; they sing everything. I’ve often found this approach to musicals – both film and stage – annoying at times, but not here. This is a charming love story about a failed romance between two exceptionally beautiful characters: a garage mechanic named Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and a shopkeeper’s daughter named Genevieve (Catharine Deneuve in a career-making role). As is (too) often the case with young lovers in the movies, they want to marry but face opposition from their respective families. Genevieve’s mother (played with a flirtatious passion by Anne Vernon) and Guy’s aunt/godmother (played by Mireille Perrey) seem to want their charges to stick around and help them rather than live separate lives. It doesn’t matter, though, because Guy receives notice that he must complete his required military service, and at the time of the initial scenes of the film, Algeria is attempting to gain its independence from France. The plot is simple yet universal: Genevieve becomes pregnant after she and Guy make love, and then she doesn’t hear from him for long periods of time while he is away in Algeria. She misses Guy but is quite lonely. At the urging of her mother, she meets another man, the slick diamond merchant Roland Cassard, and begins contemplating marriage to someone other than her beloved Guy. The ending of the film is sad, not a typical Hollywood ending, but then many romances do actually end sadly rather than happily ever after. The cinematography is first-rate; this is a simply beautiful film to watch, and all of the pinks and blues on screen just dazzle the eye. Likewise, the musical score by the legendary Michel Legrand is touching and funny and perfect. It seems to rain a lot in Cherbourg, perhaps fitting the title of the film a bit too much, but that rain serves as a consistent reminder of the undercurrent of sadness that permeates the film’s narrative.

NOTE: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was submitted by France for Oscar consideration for Best Foreign Language Film of 1964 and then released in U.S. theaters later. That’s why it was also nominated for several Oscars the following year. It happened rather frequently in the past that foreign language films would span a couple of years of Academy Award consideration.

Oscar Nomination (for 1964): Best Foreign Language Film

Oscar Nominations (for 1965): Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Best Original Song (“I Will Wait for You”), Best Score: Substantially Original, and Best Score of Music: Adaptation or Treatment

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

 

Singing in the Rain features so many joyous moments. Everyone, of course, remembers Gene Kelly’s dazzling rendition of the title song, but there are lots of great performances throughout the film. It’s very easy to see why it’s considered one of the greatest of movie musicals. It also depicts a significant historical period in film, the transition from silents to talkies, and it manages to have lots of fun along the way. I’ll admit that the main plot itself isn’t particularly complex, but what Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor manage to do to “fill” the time is what makes it work so spectacularly. The film begins with the arrival of Kelly’s Don Lockwood and Jean Hagen’s Lina Lamont at the premiere of their new film, The Royal Rascal. Prompted by an interviewer who bears a striking resemblance to Louella Parsons, Don starts recounting their (well, mostly his) history. Interestingly, the verbal and the visual of his life story don’t quite match. Don claims his motto is “dignity, always dignity,” but the song “Fit as a Fiddle” with O’Connor’s Cosmo show that they certainly haven’t always lived up to that motto. We get to see a bit of behind-the-scenes filmmaking as Don and Lina prepare for their next film, The Dueling Cavalier, but everything gets interrupted by the arrival of talking pictures. The exaggerated style of silent film acting has to be replaced by the more subtle performances that would come to be associated with the sound era. And poor Lina, with her high-pitched, grating, low-rent voice, struggles the most with trying to fit in with the new expectations of stardom. After the film is completed – despite numerous ridiculous and hilarious problems with sound recording – preview audiences can only laugh at how awful it is and how badly Lina sounds and how silly Don’s overacting is. To “save” the film, Don and Cosmo and studio head R.F. Simpson (a deadpan Millard Mitchell) decide to reshoot it as a musical without letting Lina know that her voice will be replaced by Reynolds’ Kathy Selden, an aspiring actress Don met through one of the funniest “meet-cutes” in film history. It’s the musical numbers that stand out in your memory after watching this film. The performance of the title song is justifiably famous, but the film features a lot of great moments of singing and dancing. For example, “Make ‘Em Laugh” had to be painful for O’Connor, but what a feat of physical comedy he demonstrates. “Moses Supposes” takes the diction training to a new level of hilarity. Kelly’s Don creates a magical atmosphere on a soundstage to tell Kathy that he loves her through the song “You Were Meant for Me.” The biggest number in the film is probably the “Broadway Rhythm” sequence, which doesn’t really fit within what we know of as the plot to The Dueling Cavalier. But it features Cyd Charisse, a particular favorite of mine, in a showcase of her dancing ability. A journey through burlesque, vaudeville, and contemporary theater, the number dissolves at one point into a pure fantasy sequence on a soundstage, featuring the longest white veil in movie history. Again, what this has to do with a movie starring Lockwood and Lamont or, frankly, Singin’ in the Rain’s plot is a mystery, but it’s certainly a beautiful mystery. What strikes me when I watch a classic musical like Singin’ in the Rain is how long the takes last. They had to make movies the hard way in those days: you did all or almost all of the number, and if it took many retakes, you did it over and over again. These performances were not created in the editing room. It took real talent at singing and dancing. All of the stars are great here, and even Rita Moreno in an early and small part makes quite an impression. It’s interesting to watch the film and see Kathy Seldon and Debbie Reynolds become stars simultaneously. Reynolds certainly manages to hold her own in her scenes with Kelly and O’Connor, two of the Hollywood’s most famed dancers. Much has been made of the fact that only Jean Hagen was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, but it’s not as if she were going to compete with the three top-billed performers in the same category. Sometimes, the Academy overlooks people, frequently for decades, but that doesn’t diminish Hagen’s accomplishments here. She takes her few moments on screen and gives them a jolt of excitement and humor that serves the overall plot well. You try delivering the line “I make more money than Calvin Coolidge put together” and see if you can make it as funny as Hagen does.

Oscar Nominations: Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Jean Hagen) and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture

Tommy (1975)

 

Tommy, based upon the rock opera by the Who, is one bizarre movie. It’s not always easy to follow the possible meanings of what happens on screen, but it is certainly intriguing to watch. The film follows the life of a young boy who watches his father, presumed dead in World War II, get killed by his mother’s new lover. His mother, Nora (Ann-Margret), and her lover, Frank (Oliver Reed), convince Tommy that he didn’t see or hear what he actually saw and heard; they also tell him never to speak of what he saw or heard. When he then behaves as if he’s – in the language of the time – deaf, dumb, and blind, they seem shocked. I’ve found this odd every time I’ve seen this film; they demand that he behave as if he were deaf, dumb, and blind, then they try to figure out how to “cure” him of his deafness, dumbness, and blindness? Very peculiar of them not to figure that out for themselves. Nevertheless, the couple embark on a series of strange potential remedies. Nora takes Tommy to a meeting of a cult that worships Marilyn Monroe. Really, it’s an excuse for Eric Clapton to perform “Eyesight to the Blind,” but having all of those masked Monroe impersonators touching all of the people seeking cures is quite creepy. Frank then takes Tommy to a drug-addled prostitute called the Acid Queen. She’s played with great ferociousness by the amazing Tina Turner, a quite hypnotic presence on the screen. Her few moments are a highlight of the film even if some of the imagery is quite unsettling to watch. Nora and Frank then try to find appropriate babysitters for Tommy and make some awful choices: Cousin Kevin (Paul Nicholas), a sadist who tortures the poor boy, and then Uncle Ernie (the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon), who is some sort of pervert. Uncle Ernie’s portion is depicted as just weird sounds with a black screen; we should probably be grateful. I haven’t even mentioned that Tommy is played as an adult by Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of the Who, but to be fair, it’s not much of a portrayal for much of the film. He really seems more catatonic than deaf, dumb, and blind. He stares at a mirror a lot until he wanders away from home one night and finds a pinball machine – a working pinball machine at that – in a junkyard because, of course, there would be a working pinball machine in a junkyard atop a bunch of wrecked cars. Why wouldn’t there be? It turns out that Tommy is some sort of prodigy, and he has to face the Pinball Wizard (Elton John, glorious in that outrageous outfit with the enormous shoes, another highlight of the film) in a tournament. Tommy becomes rich playing pinball because, of course, you become rich playing pinball, so his family takes advantage of his success and starts making money from his fame. Later, when Tommy becomes a new messianic figure, the head of a new cult, Nora and Frank again make money off his fame. When the attendees at Tommy’s “holiday camp” near the film’s end revolt because he’s not providing them with anything useful, you sense that there’s some sort of commentary on capitalism going on, perhaps a critique of Great Britain’s post-war treatment of the working class, but gain, it’s tough to discern exactly what the film is trying to say because everything just seems so strange. The production design for Tommy is amazing, as is the costume design. Ann-Margret’s outfits become quite spectacular as the film progresses, but the costumes worn by Turner and John are certainly iconic as well. At times, Tommy calls into question what is real and what isn’t. For example, Ann-Margret’s infamous scene where the television she’s been watching spills out stuff like foam and baked beans and chocolate may be a figment of her imagination. It’s almost impossible to tell for certain. Given that this is the film version of a rock opera, you’d expect the performances by the rock stars like the Who and Clapton to be good, and they are. However, Oliver Reed is no singer, and Jack Nicholson as a doctor with a potential cure for Tommy isn’t a singer either. Daltrey himself doesn’t even sing until almost seventy minutes into the movie. Doesn’t it seem odd that the lead singer of the band that created the work upon which the movie is based would be relegated to just a few songs in the last third or so of the movie? Yes, I understand that the plot calls for Tommy, his character, to be deaf, dumb, and blind, but someone else could have played the role so that most of the singing duties weren’t delegated to Pete Townsend – not that I have anything against Townsend’s singing.

Oscar Nominations: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Ann-Margret) and Best Original Song Score and/or Adaptation

The North Star (1943)

 

The North Star features a lot more singing than you’d expect in a war movie set during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The film’s music was written by one of our greatest composers, Aaron Copland (who received an Oscar nomination for his work here), and the lyrics are by the renowned Ira Gershwin, so it’s pretty good music. The plot begins with about thirty minutes of idyllic life in a farming village outside Kiev (now Kyiv, the modern-day capital of Ukraine). It’s the last day of school for the year, and a group of five young people are planning their trip to the larger city. So the peasants sing a lot, and why not? They sing at the school, they sing in the village at what appears to be some sort of outdoor festival, and the five young travelers sing on their way to Kiev. The five include Dana Andrews as Kolya Siminov, a pilot trainee in the Soviet air corps; an impossibly young and beautiful Farley Granger in his film debut as Kolya’s younger brother Damian, who’ll be a student at the University of Kiev in the fall; Anne Baxter (always looking like she’s plotting her next move) as Damien’s girlfriend Marina Pavlov; Jane Withers (of all people) as Marina’s close friend, Clavdia Kurin; and Eric Roberts (no, certainly not that one) as Grisha, Clavdia’s younger brother. After they’ve journeyed for a while (and, naturally, sung a few songs), they hear airplanes. We too can hear the faint noise of the plane engines before they appear on the screen. The Nazis attack, killing everyone in sight; only a few people on the road (including, at least temporarily) our five travelers. The Nazis are on their way to the village, apparently the North Star of the film’s title, in order to take care of their wounded. The men of the village realize that the Nazis will kill everyone they encounter, so they leave to defend the village but also leave orders for those who stay behind to destroy everything if the Nazis make it through. You’ve certainly seen enough World War II movies to know that the Nazis do, indeed, make it to the village before it can be destroyed, and they commit such a horrific act that it’s impossible to believe that something like that could happen while simultaneously believing that it’s exactly what could have happened. They start draining the blood of the children of the village to save wounded Nazis, sometimes taking so much blood that the child dies. The men of the village plan an attack, and the film features some outstanding stuntwork during that counterattack by the villagers. The North Star is also beautifully photographed by the great James Wong Howe. There’s a stark brightness and visual clarity in the scenes of village life before the Nazi attack, and those moments are clearly contrasted with a darkness for the scenes where the villagers try to reclaim their homeland. Lots of famed character actors appear in the film, including Walter Brennan as a farmer/wagon driver. (He was always stuck driving a wagon in his movies, wasn’t he?). Walter Huston is the town doctor and father to Clavdia and Grisha. Even Erich von Stroheim shows up as a Nazi doctor who’s apparently supposed to be sympathetic because he knows that what he’s doing is wrong (and that what the Nazis are doing is wrong). Of course, that’s complete bullshit, and the film doesn’t exactly make him seem very human at all by the end of the first sequence where a child is drained of blood and collapses in Huston’s arms to die. SIDE NOTE: I find it interesting that the House Un-American Activities Committee, that fabled band of deep thinkers, considered this film to be too pro-Soviet during the early years of the Cold War when they were trying to find Communists under every rock they could. Of course, the Soviets were our allies during World War II, and the film is set during 1941 before the United States entered the war. Lots of films were made during the war years to show support for our soldiers and perhaps sympathy for our allies fighting against the Nazis and the Axis powers. I didn’t quite see the film as so much pro-Soviet as it is strongly anti-Nazi. The screenwriter, Lillian Hellman, was certainly known as a Communist sympathizer even though she denied being a part of the Communist Party. There’s apparently a heavily edited version of the film that was released in the 1950s where all of the allegedly collectivist village life was deleted, and all references to the characters being Russian in any way were removed. That must have made for a very short film indeed.

Oscar Nominations: Best Original Screenplay, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Black-and-White Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Sound Recording, Best Special Effects, Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

 

It’s a bit tough to classify The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. It is set in the West, but it’s hardly a typical western film. It borders on slapstick comedy at times, but the entire movie certainly isn’t set up to be funny. There’s even a lovely romance at the heart of the film, but I certainly don’t think that is the main focus here. I’d instead call it a surreal film experience, particularly when different characters start addressing the audience in voiceover narration, some just before they’re hanged (or perhaps, in retrospect, after they’ve been hanged?). The film is allegedly based upon the story of a real-life person named Roy Bean, who set himself up as an ersatz judge in a saloon he takes over from the gang of people who robbed him and tied him to his horse with the expectation of him being dragged to his death. It has to be very loosely based on anything realistic. Bean is played here by Paul Newman, a somewhat unexpected choice given the erratic tone of the film; Newman tended to pick movies that were, shall we say, more consistent? Bean gets help recovering from a local woman, Maria Elena (Victoria Principal, lovely in her movie debut), who decides that she will become his… wife? lover? co-conspirator? Again, it’s not easy to put a label on their relationship since he seems to be interested in other women besides Maria Elena. For example, he’s inexplicably attracted to the famed actress Lily Langtry, whom he’s never met or even seen perform, yet he puts posters of her on all of the walls of the saloon and frequently writes letters to her professing his love for her. Bean, using a single Texas law book as a prop, proclaims himself to be the ultimate determinant of criminality in the tiny town of Vinegaroon, so when a gang of outlaws rides into town, rather than arrest them or hang them (his preferred method of meting out justice), he instead deputizes them as his marshals. What follows is mostly a series of encounters with various famous actors in small roles. For example, Anthony Perkins shows up as the Rev. LaSalle, who encourages Bean to bury the people he’s killed; Tab Hunter is an outlaw captured by the marshals and quickly dispatched for killing a Chinese man (his defense is horrid, but a sign of what was permissible on screen even in 1972); and Stacy Keach appears briefly as an albino gunman who calls himself Bad Bob and wants to kill Bean. The most touching cameo appearance occurs when Ava Gardner, as beautiful as ever, shows up for the film’s final sequence as Langtry, making a stop at Bean’s saloon, now converted to a museum in his memory. She’s able to take her few moments on screen memorable even without much dialogue; what an expressive face she had, a very underrated talent. Other performers make more of an impact and garner more screen time. Ned Beatty is very good as an outlaw who becomes Bean’s bartender and trusted advisor. Jacqueline Bissett, still a relative newcomer to American film at the time, stars as Bean’s daughter Rose, who wants to carry on the family tradition of maintaining the saloon even after her father’s departure. Roddy McDowell as the lawyer Gass has perhaps the most significant supporting role for the second half of the film. Gass comes to town with a deed stating that he owns the property that Bean took from the saloon folk who tried to kill him; he slowly insinuates himself into the town’s life so that he can gain more control, even managing to befriend the ladies who were saloon girls (I think we know what that means) when they arrived in town. The oddest cameo has to be by John Huston, the film’s director, who makes a brief appearance in the film as mountain man Grizzly Adams (yep, just a couple of years before the movie and TV series with Dan Haggerty), never really showing his face but leaving behind a bear who likes to drink beer and who becomes a companion for Judge Bean. He even takes the bear on a picnic with Maria Elena, and at some point, everyone (bear included) has a turn in a swing and on a seesaw. It’s this random sequence that features the source of the film’s sole Oscar nomination, the song “Marmalade, Molasses & Honey,” which, despite its pedigree of having been written by such talented people as Maurice Jarre, Alan Bergman, and Marilyn Bergman, is instantly forgettable. It’s sung by Andy Williams as if it’s one of the filler tracks on an album of easy listening music that few people were going to purchase at that point in his career.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“Marmalade, Molasses & Honey”)