No more deserts! "It Happened One Night" (1934)

We decided it was really time for something that didn’t feature sand or copious amounts of blood and death! So we went the polar extreme (time and genre-wise) and watched our oldest movie so far, 1934’s “It Happened One Night”.

This movie had so much trouble being made – with many of its stars being ‘loaned out’ by larger studios as punishment for large egos! Capra was considered a ‘renegade’ with his new fangled romantic comedy road movie and all the actors were embarrassed by the script and story with Clark Gable reportedly saying on the first day “Let’s get this over with”.
Despite this, “It Happened One Night” was the first movie to win the “Oscar Grand Slam” (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay); a feat that wouldn’t be repeated for another 41 years with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”!

It also forms the basis of so many modern movies like, “Forces of Nature” and “Spaceballs” most obviously (and oddly!); the spoilt brat runaway and the older, wiser (but of course secretly insecure and damaged) guide. Interestingly enough, Clark Gable’s character was also used as the basis for Fritz Freleng’s later creation of Bugs Bunny!

Capra’s dialogue and direction was snappy and really modern. The acting was naturalistic (no over the top soap opera type acting with the fainting and the swooning of the females) and it was really fun to watch. Despite the lead actors reportedly hating each other, their chemistry is flawless (if time-appropriately misogynistic and patronising) and it’s fantastic to watch what was probably the very first “mis-matched buddy road movie” (not to mention the origin of Bugs Bunny!).

This was highly entertaining and would have to hold a special place in the heart of any film historian – or film buff. Mat gave it 62/100 and I scored it 70/100. Highly recommended!

More war and more deserts! - "The Hurt Locker" (2009)

Ok, so we said we’d lay off war and desert movies for a while then headed straight to La Premiere for “The Hurt Locker”. The first Oscar winning female director and damn did she earn it! It was an incredible film. I think Mat may have stopped breathing a few times and I caught myself holding my breath like I was going to set off a bomb if I didn’t!

The shoot must have been a nightmare, everyone got sick and suffered under hideous desert heat, but they produced a really different movie looking at the life of a small number of soldiers in an extreme occupation and explored the idea of an ‘action junkie’ really well. One scene shows a recently returned soldier standing in the American ‘super sized’ cereal aisle; his ability to comprehend such a scene is as impaired as our ability to comprehend walking into a building and working out the most likely places to hide a bomb to cause maximum damage. It’s a great exploration of what we ask these soldiers to do and how they are fundamentally altered by their experiences.

There are some fantastic actors cropping up in small (and usually quickly lethal roles) but the leads are mainly unknown which actually helps the ‘everyman’ feel. These guys could be anyone and the constant wild swings between high intensity sheer boredom (e.g., waiting out a sniper trap) to high intensity, high adrenaline active disarming or explosions messes so much with the audience’s heads enough – it’s hard to imagine what it’s doing to these guys. The tension is expertly handled and there are some incredible and really innovative shots (watch out for the slow-motion shot of rust being blown off a car!)

We rated this really highly because we felt it was an important story being told in a quite a new way. We felt the innovations in story-telling and pacing should work to reach and affect an increasingly cynical and shock-proof audience because the film does a good job relating these ‘action junkies’ to other kinds of addictions, which may help to make it more accessible to modern (non-military) audiences.

Plus despite the free soft drink – neither of us even considered leaving for a bathroom break! That’s always a good sign and helps us rate “The Hurt Locker”, 91% (Mat) and 89% (Danielle).

More war and deserts! "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962)

We watched this over two settings, a Friday and Saturday night because this is a long one! A very long one and it's a bit of a trend we're noticing in the best picture winners already. Whatever happened to being concise?!!

Again this movie introduced us to a time and place and a person so different to what we see and hear in our everyday lives. But it holds a special resonance because from the period it was set (early 20th century) to when it was made (1962) to today, everything and nothing has changed in the Middle East.

This is not a political blog though!

So, as for the movie, it was visually spectacular, well acted and scripted with some really punchy dialogue. “Your mother must have mated with a scorpion” will remain a favourite insult at our place for some time to come! It’s amazing to think how much faith they must have had in Peter O’Toole (and how much pressure he must have felt) to carry such a monstrous movie. It was a long, painful movie to make and I can’t imagine the logistical nightmare continuity must have been. In one scene, as Lawrence starts walking down the stairs he is one whole year younger than when he is filmed walking away from the staircase. But the editors have done a great job and you really would never know that much time had passed.

They really aren’t kidding when they describe Lawrence as ‘epic’ and like “Patton”, you know it’s not CGI. Those people are really on those camels and they’re really in the middle of a big bloody desert! I’ll never complain about sand on the beach again! Peter O’Toole was apparently nearly trampled to death in a sequence where they’re charging a fort and the only way he could get back on a camel was for Omar Shariff to get him blind drunk – explains a lot, doesn’t it?

There’s a lot of controversy over how accurate a portrayal this is of T.E. Lawrence, his brother stated he didn’t recognise the person they portrayed in the film. But then I wondered how well my sisters would recognise me in a story of my life! We don’t tell our siblings everything!

Overall though it paints a really clear picture of one man’s struggle to keep his sanity in the midst of total insanity and the effect it has on him and the person he wanted to be. Some of the acting is a bit overwrought, we blamed that on the 1960s, but overall it’s a must-see movie that Mat scored 85/100 and I gave 83/100.

First off it's - PATTON (1970)

Patton is based on the true story of General George S. Patton and is one of the most unusual war movies we’ve ever seen. The General is a hard-arsed, renaissance-hearted poet who believes in reincarnation and sounds like one of the most brilliant military strategists of the 20th Century. He lived by the adage, “Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it”.

What we love about going through these movies is the snapshot of the time it provides and that it introduces us to people we’ve heard of but would never otherwise get such an intimate insight into. After watching the movie, we wanted to learn more about Patton the man and how accurate the film may have been. From what we were able to discover it’s a surprisingly accurate portrayal of a surprisingly complex hero. We thought it probably came at a very important time for America – they needed a war hero, an atypical war hero to see them through the fiasco that Vietnam was becoming and they looked to the past to find him. He would have loved that!

I love a story where the protagonist is his own worst enemy - it's probably the psychologist in me - but I really believe no one can do as much damage to us as we do to ourselves and Patton was the strutting, living proof of that.

As a general rule, we're not going to get into any spoilers on these films, so we'll just sum up our findings and scores.

We loved it. It was really entertaining, interesting and thought-provoking. And really different for an American war movie. We were quite worried when it opens on George C. Scott giving a 'rousing' speech in front of a 20-foot high American flag, but we were pleasantly surprised at how even-handed the filmmakers were, even the Nazis were portrayed with some sympathy rather than being fascist caricatures of soldiers.

Overall Mat scored it 90/100 and I gave it 82/100 (for the record, this is going to be a continued trend, I’m much harsher than Mat!)

Given the incredibly grand scale of this film (the producers hired most of the Spanish Army as extras) and some of the most incredible non-CGI fight sequences I think we’d ever seen, we believe it was a good choice over it’s contenders (“Love Story”, “MASH”, “Airport” and “Five Easy Pieces”). The fact that it didn’t shy away from some of the uglier truths about its main character helped it too.

Finally, this is a good time to mention that for the most part, we're not judging the movies as if we're seeing them for the first time in 1970, or 1930 even - we figured it would just be too hard to pretend we hadn't seen 40 or 80 years of other movies in the meantime. What we do take into account is the capability of the time, e.g., we'd never score a movie down for being in black and white before colour photography was widely available. That's an extreme example, but hopefully you get the point. But if a 1980s movie is set in the 20s and all the actors are wearing mullets and faded denim, well that's different - they're going to lose points!

Winners by Studio

I was going to put this up as a separate tab on the blog, but it's just too small to read that way.

So here's a breakdown of all the best pic winners by the studio that produced them - some interesting stuff, especially considering poor ol' MGM hasn't had a winner since 1959!

It seems the studios that move with the times and branch out into more independent ventures (like 20th Century Fox splitting into Fox Searchlight and producing "Slumdog Millionaire") are the ones raking it in now.

I think it's a nice graphical representation of 'group think'.

How it works

This is a sample of some of our movies, waiting to be watched.

At the moment we see how we feel on the night and go with it. The guy who wrote the book that inspired our blogging adventure used a mini-bingo machine he got on eBay - we haven't gone that far yet! Although I was looking longingly at a bingo machine in Kmart!

We may also be about to embark on a far more innovative approach to selecting the pics since one of our cats, Anya, has started sleeping next to the movies, then waking up and licking one or two cases. We don't know why, but why not!?!

We've also devised a scoring system, we'll rate each out of 10 across the following dimensions; script, story/plot, direction, photography, acting, soundtrack, relevance/social context, emotional response, did it make you think and entertainment value. We also make notes on best and worst actors, whether or not we think it deserved to win against that years contenders and the most memorable moments.

So now you know how it works, we'll post our reviews to date; Patton, It Happened One Night, Rebecca, Lawrence of Arabia, The Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather Part I and we'll see what Anya comes up with next!

So did we win lotto?

We do love our movies. Always have. This photo was our collection 3 years ago and doesn't include the old VHS collection out the back in the garage. (It's what we do instead of having kids).

Still when we came to looking at the list of academy award winners, we didn't own half as many as we thought we would.

This did cause us to question our taste and perhaps the wisdom of our investment in schlock movies!

Maybe we're totally out of touch with what really makes a good movie? I still love "Hudson Hawk" but it was universally panned and I'd rather watch "Transformers" or "Star Wars" any day than "Crash" or "Forrest Gump". So maybe the academy is hopelessly out of touch with what people want to see or what makes a truly 'best' picture?

That's what we tell ourselves as we search our shelves, "Showgirls", "Secret of My Success", "Scream", "Sibling Rivalry", "Shaun of the Dead" - no "Slumdog Millionaire".

Then, "Goonies", "Ghost", "Grosse Point Blank", "Glen or Glenda" - but no "Gone with the Wind"?!?!?

We could be in trouble!

In the end it turns out we already own 22/82 of the best picture winners, not bad for loud and proud lovers of all things trashy in moviedom! But the next step is to do some serious searching (and bank account depleting) on amazon.com

It's a fun search and within a week of deciding on our quest we're the proud owners of another 22 of the best picture winners (including "Slumdog Millionaire", but still no "Gone with the Wind").

More than half of the movies are ours, now it's time to start watching!

First on our list was Patton (1970) and we watched this with Mat's dad on our first Friday night at the movies...

Stay tuned for our review and where to from there
(and our frantic searching on BigPond DVDs in an effort to
stem the flow from our poor bank account!)