2005

In 2005 a movie came out that was bold, and unrelenting. It touched people across different spectrum's of life. The movie was polarizing and intensely criticized for its onscreen representations of taboo and raw material. The film was easily the best of the year. 

In 2005 the film Crash won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Crash tells the interrelated story of several major and minor public figures in modern day Los Angeles. The film is a triumph in storytelling and acting. The movie has very important themes such as racism, sexism, and discrimination. I highly recommend that if you have not seen Crash, that you should do so, because it truly is a great film.

But that film, was not the best film of the year. Brokeback Mountain was.

The late Heath Ledger gives one of the best performances in recent history and possibly of all-time in his heart wrenching portrayal of a closeted Homosexual cowboy in love with another cowboy portrayed by Jake Gylenhall.

The film was protested, hated, and criticized for bringing homosexuality to the mainstream media. Brokeback was said to have been a “gay agenda movie” and that Hollywood have been pushing homosexuality into people’s homes for decades.

Critics and the mainstream public themselves focused on the wrong thing here. Instead of a movie where two humans were in love and their struggles; everyone turned this film into a movie of two gay men and how Homosexuality is the plague of America which will bring about its downfall.

Hate and ignorance is actually the real wrong here. Brokeback is such a beautiful film that you have to be ignorant and discriminatory to not at least think the acting is good, or the scenery and cinematography is excellent.

Hollywood felt the same way, they gave the film 8 Academy Award Nominations and the movie won three. There is a bit of drama here though. Most of the time, actually 72 percent of the time, the Best Director winner also has their movie go on to win Best Picture. In 2005 Ang Lee won Best Director for Brokeback, but in an upset, his film lost to Crash.

Listen, I think Crash is an excellent film. But I don’t believe it is better than Brokeback Mountain. And I understand that I can’t go back in time and make sure that Brokeback or any of the films I’ve written about win Best Picture. But I do have a voice. I don’t agree with hating something because it is different or offends you. If you ever see something that you dislike then you shouldn’t watch it or pay attention to it. Don’t hate it because that only adds more fuel to the fire. Don’t see the negativity in things. Look at things and see how beautiful everything is because I promise you that if you look hard enough you can find it in almost anything.

Brokeback is immaculate. It is beautiful, and unrelenting. There are some scenes which are difficult to watch, but the love story shown on screen is brutally vivid and enticing to watch. The movie unfortunately caused polarization and discrimination in the public eye because of what it portrayed. I tend to look at a movie for its positives because every movie has negatives, and I try to not focus on that when I could be admiring on beauty.





Sources
Imdb.com
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.group.protests.brokeback.mountain.oscar.nominations/5560.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/01/03/most-people-dont-want-to-see-two-guys-get-it-on/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Directing
http://filmbuffhowsy.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pbear6150/2681911065/

Earn This

Romeo and Juliet is one of the greatest plays of alltime and was written by arguably the greatest writer of the English language. Bill Shakespeare. But the play has been done to death. Like everyone reads it in school. Everyone. Then you see it in movies and TV. West Side Story, Titanic, Pocahontas, Avatar, and Warm Bodies. And that’s just to name a few.

In 1998 the film Shakespeare in Love came out. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the movie served as a fictionalized background story of Shakespeare being in love (who woulda thought?) while he wrote Romeo and Juliet. The movie honestly isn’t all that great in my opinion. Shakespeare is one of my favorite authors and in the movie they say he suffered from writers block which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because the man wrote 100 plus sonnets and almost 40 plays in his career. He was always on fire and produced hit after hit after hit after hit. But for the sake of argument, I will say that him having writers block made sense.

The movie tells the story of Shakespeare falling for a Young maiden named Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow won the Academy Award for best Actress for her role) and their romance is filled with fiery passion but not meant to be, just like Romeo and Juliet’s. The film is a funny, lighthearted and quick romantic comedy which was pretty good. But it never should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1998.

Perhaps the greatest World War 2 movie of all-time came in 1998. Tom Hanks, Matt Damon and Steven Spielberg teamed up to give us Saving Private Ryan. The movie tells the story of a young soldier who is one of four brothers to enlist and fight in the war and the remarkable attempt of a team of soldiers to save him. Matt Damon plays Private Ryan, and Tom Hanks leads the team of soldiers tasked with getting him out of Germany alive. Hank’s team is ordered to get Damon out of Germany because his three other brothers all died in battle, and the United States Government wants him home so that he can carry on the family name.

The movie is a triumph. The story is simple, yet believable and enticing nonetheless, the acting is superb, the directing is visionary, and the boundaries are nonexistent. This movie may be one of, if not the best World War 2 movie ever, but it certainly is one of the most graphic. The first 30 minutes of the film are infamous for the horrifying depictions of war during the Normandy Landings. So real were these scenes and much of the violence in the movie, that it caused flashbacks and with many veterans walking out of the picture.

The praise for Ryan is great and long. It is said to be one of the best war films of all-time and one of the best movies of all-time among any genre. The critical consensus is fantastic. It is listed as the 8th greatest epic film of all time by the American Film Institute.

Into the Jaws of Death By Robert Sargent

But the reason it didn’t win is perhaps why it was so praised in the first place. The film was incredibly real. It portrayed the violence that people wish to see but did so in a way that it horrified viewers. Normally, people will go watch a horror film and want to see people’s heads getting cut off because it is scary and that is what they paid for. But Ryan is different. WW2 happened. It’s not a fantasy movie and millions of people actually died in this conflict. We live in an era of desensitizing movie violence, but still the academy had to give the award to the much more family friendly Shakespeare. People want to see violence, but there is a point when things get out of hand and become too real. Ryan was loved and hated for that reason.







Sources

Saving Private Ryan poster http://dimland.blogspot.com/2014_06_01_archive.html

Omaha Beach Landing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach#/media/File:Omaha_Beach_Landing_Craft_Approaches.jpg

Into the Jaws of Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach#/media/File:Into_the_Jaws_of_Death_23-0455M_edit.jpg

IMDb.com
Rottentomatoes.com
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-1998/translating-war-the-combat-film-genre-and-saving-private-ryan
by Jeanine Basinger

http://articles.philly.com/1998-08-06/news/25724660_1_omaha-beach-va-center-nearest-va-facility
by Lacy McCrary

http://www.afi.com/10top10/moviedetail.aspx?id=24&thumb=3

Say What Again

He taught Elvis how to dance, he was an All-American Football player for Bear Bryant who is arguably the greatest college coach ever, he met JFK and JBJ, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, he was the greatest ping pong player of all-time, he exposed Watergate, he ran across the country, and he invested in some kind of fruit company which gave him more money than Davy Crockett.

All in all, Forrest Gump was an American Hero. And in 1994 Tom Hanks portrayal of Gump won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. The movie itself is a hallmark. Everyone has seen it and it truly is a great film. I mean, this movie is really, really good. It was so good that it won The Academy Award for Best Picture in 1994 too. But it shouldn’t have.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Forrest Gump. The movie is one of my all-time favorites. And if it was released any other year, I would say that it should have won Best Picture. But not in ‘94. In 1994 not just one, but two other films came out which were arguably better than Gump. The Shawshank Redemption, and Pulp Fiction.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/heilemann/2402522719/

1994 was a phenomenal year, three of the greatest movies of all-time came out and only one could go home with Best Picture. I love Gump, and Shawshank is beautiful, but Pulp Fiction is a different breed of movie. It is smart, enticing, entertaining, and it is a cultural monument. So for the sake of argument, I will argue for Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus.

Pulp Fiction is a masterpiece of storytelling. The acting all round is top notch, and the film is consistently ranked as one of the best pictures of all time. And the energy of the movie is electric. You don’t know what is going to happen from one moment to the next. Tarantino creates this world of mystery in each scene where everything and anything can occur. And usually the characters experience extreme violence that is also heavily laced with pop culture references.

http://joaood.deviantart.com/art/Pulp-Fiction-Jules-Winnfield-193036276

As is expected of the academy, they once again chose the safer film to award with Forrest Gump. Both Shawshank and Pulp Fiction were rated R compared to the PG-13 rating given to Gump. And all in all, both Shawshank and Pulp Fiction were much darker in their scope than Gump was.

Pulp Fiction was especially dark, being described in some reviews as containing “Hyperreal Violence”. The academy awards giving this film the award for best picture would have been the right thing to do. But we don’t live in a perfect world. If the academy did give this film, or any other the other past films ive mentioned the best picture award, then they would have been harshly criticized. They academy has to give out awards to movies which are good, and don’t cross the line of being potentially politically and socially dangerous. This isn’t fair to the great films. But that’s just the way it is.

We all know the better film. It’s the one that says bad motherfucker on it.






Sources
https://darla0022.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/pulp-fiction-hyper-reality/
Melody

Imdb.com

Rottentomatoes.com
Apple.com

http://joaood.deviantart.com/art/Pulp-Fiction-Jules-Winnfield-193036276
https://www.flickr.com/photos/heilemann/2402522719/

How is This Funny

American History is presented in High Schools as a majestic and unerring path of national prestige from our founding fathers such as George Washington up until today.

But that’s not the case. There were hundreds of years of slavery, racism, and also the stealing of land then genocide of Native Americans which also happened before America became back-to-back World War Champs. A lot of Americans don’t really like to hear that we have a dirty history, but in 1990, America kinda embraced our wrongs when the film Dances with Wolves came out.

Dances with Wolves is a film directed by and starring Kevin Costner. The movie revolves around his character who is a U.S Soldier that is posted in the Western United States amongst warring Indian Tribes. Eventually, he becomes friends with the Sioux and they accept him into their tribe. The film is kind of like the Avatar, or Pocahontas, or The Last Samurai. However, even with the likenesses to other films, Dances with Wolves really is a good movie, and it even won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1990.

But I don’t believe that it should have though.

Dances with Wolves may have been a good movie that was semi-historically accurate and warmhearted all the while featuring the white man saving the Sioux and other Indians from slaughter and redeeming his race for the injustices they have committed for hundreds of years.

It’s just soooo corny. Like why does the white guy always have to come in and save the little poor colored people in every movie? But as I said, the movie is good. Great acting, directing and an interesting story (even though it is extremely common). I could see this film winning and deserving an Academy Award for Best Picture.

But not in 1990.            

Because, in 1990 one of the greatest living directors Martin Scorsese released a film which even today can be called his masterpiece. Because in 1990, the mafia and crime epic Goodfellas came out.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/drb62/416508896/

Goodfellas tells the true story of American Mobster Henry Hill and his exploits over a 25 year period. Hill's story is incredible as it tells of his rise from nothing to a major player in the Lucchese Crime Family in New York. The film is debated along with Raging Bull as being one of Scorsese's best films. With Scorsese himself being named one of the greatest living directors. The clout doesn't stop there though.

The praise for Goodfellas is through the roof. It is ranked 17^th in IMDb’s top 250, it holds a 96 % rating on Rotten Tomatoes, American Film Institute ranked it the 2^nd best gangster movie ever behind The Godfather.

Scorsese’s film is not one for children though. In fact it might not even be one for adults depending upon how comfortable you are with violence and hearing the word “fuck”, which is said over 300 times in the movie and averages out to about 2 f words per minute.

Even with the violence, murder, flagrant language, and psychopathic tendencies of pretty much every character in the movie, the film is a classic. The film is one which should be seen by anyone who can handle it.

There are no rules in the film, energy is everywhere, it is a glimpse into not only the life of the mafia, but into crime and human wickedness. Goodfellas should have walked away with the gold in 1990.

IMDB.com

http://www.afi.com/10top10/moviedetail.aspx?id=26

rottentomatoes.com

 http://americanmafiahistory.com/lucchese-family/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/drb62/416508896/

0 for 11

0 For 11

There were 23 Academy Awards handed out in 1985 honoring the best films of that year. 23 awards for each of the respective categories. Best Actor, actress, screenplay and so on.

Imagine being nominated for 11 of those 23 awards. Now being nominated in itself is an honor right? And by being nominated for 11 awards should mean that you have a pretty good shot at winning at least one right?

Then imagine losing. Every. Single. Award you were nominated for. No big deal, it happens all the time probably, right?

No. That almost never happens, except for two rare occasions. Once in 1977, the film The Turning Point was nominated for 11 awards and didn’t win any.

Then it happened one more time as well. In 1985 as The Color Purple went home empty-handed.

The Color Purple is a film directed by Steven Spielberg and when this film lost all of the awards it was nominated for, the Oscars were instantly criticized for snubbing the movie and being racist because the film features an almost entirely all black cast.

The film itself is hard to watch because of the themes it deals with such as racism, sexism, and misogyny. The fact that the film was overshadowed by Out of Africa is not as big of a deal compared to the fact that it went 0 for 11.

That is simply ridiculous. Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey both gave performances worthy of Oscar gold. The film should have won best adapted screenplay at least. That would have been proper respect to both the film and Alice Walker since the movie was based off of her bestselling book of the same name.

It is simply ridiculous that the academy could shun a film which is so important. The film gave a look into southern black life, and it pulled no punches. It was graphic and raw.

A common theme in my posts have been that audiences are scared to see anything too real. People go to the movies to be entertained. No one wants to see something too sad or too graphic. But let's be real, life is graphic. Real life is full of tragedy and when we see this pain onscreen we do get scared. We do cringe, but there is beauty and importance in it.

The Color Purple should not have been shut-out. Hollywood is racist. The Academy is racist. America itself is a country built on racism and the exploitation of ethnicities other than white people. Racism is nothing but a social construct designed to keep groups of people in line. In 2012 the Los Angeles Times did an investigation on the Academy. They found that the Judges for the Academy Awards were 94% white and 77% male. I don’t know the demographics for the 1985 ceremony, but I don’t believe it was any more diverse.

Voters from the first Academy Awards held in 1929 
https://trendyreel.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/countdown-to-the-academy-awards-show-history/

But I do believe that over time America and Hollywood have gotten better in dealing with everyone fairly. But the 1985 awards will forever be stained. They will forever be known as the time when racism prevailed. That’s the only excuse for going 0-11.

 

Sources

Imbd.com

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/76270%7C0/The-Color-Purple.html

By E. Lacey Rice

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/oscars/la-et-unmasking-oscar-academy-project-20120219-story.html#page=1

By John Horn, Nicole Sperling, and Doug Smith

Image

December 18^th, 2007

https://trendyreel.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/countdown-to-the-academy-awards-show-history/

The Bronx Bull

For thousands of year mankind has often resorted to physical violence to solve disputes and for entertainment. Violence is something which human beings could be naturally drawn to.

Watching people engage in physical combat or violence is the perfect form of entertainment to some people. That is why Boxing and prizefighting have been so popular throughout time.

Boxing is called the “Sweet Science”. It can be graceful, beautiful, and eloquent.

Jake LaMotta was a middleweight boxer from the Bronx who was the exact opposite of grace and beauty. LaMotta was brutal, rugged, and almost masochistic. He led a dark life of abuse, physical, mental, and substance wise.

In 1980, the film Raging Bull was released. Robert DeNiro portrayed LaMotta with Martin Scorsese directing. The film received universal critical acclaim with DeNiro even winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. But the film itself did not win anything. Scorsese didn’t win Best Director, and Best Picture went to a film called Ordinary People.

Ordinary People is a film about a broken family. The movie centers around a family suffering because of one of their sons deaths. The brother attempts suicide, his mother is a colossal wreck, and the father is trying the best he can to support and hold them all together.

It is easy to relate to the characters in this movie because family problems are something that we all have. Overall the movie is good, with great performances and good directing from Robert Redford.

But, the theme of my blog is about great films being overshadowed by good, sometimes even mediocre ones.

Raging Bull is seen today as a classic movie. In 2007 The American Film Institute ranked the film as the 4^th best movie of the last 100 years. It was also ranked by the AFI as the best sports related American movie ever.  Ordinary People on the other hand has received no such recognition. It was widely praised upon release, but has not received “classic” status. The film was a good one and that’s all. Raging Bull pushed boundaries and is still critically lauded to this day.

Even with all of the accolades though, Raging Bull is a very difficult film to watch.

With incredible violence, profanity, and sexual themes, the film is incredibly graphic. DeNiro’s performance itself was incredible, he gained nearly 40 pounds to play LaMotta in his later years and he gave a hauntingly dark show of acting. There are scenes of abuse and the extreme use of blood can be unsettling. But it is more than necessary and not done in a way to overcompensate for anything or to create shock value. 

The extreme violence throughout the movie mirrors LaMotta’s life, and how he beat himself up more than anyone else ever could have.

Jake LaMotta, Wikimedia.com, 1952

The Academy ended up not giving Raging Bull its due here because of the substantially graphic material which was portrayed. The Academy chose the safer film once again. And once again when you look at the cultural impact Raging Bull has had, it is safe to say the academy was wrong.

Sources

Imdb.com

http://afi.com/default.aspx

http://triplehelixblog.com/2014/09/the-neuroscience-of-aggression-why-humans-are-drawn-to-violence/

Youtube.com

Photo credit- no author, wikimedia.com

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-raging-bull-1980

The Horror

The year was 1979.

The 80’s were approaching. Personal computers, the end of the Cold War, and amazing hair metal 

bands were on the cusp of infiltrating radio waves and hair salons everywhere.

But before any of the glories of the 80’s could happen- Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam masterpiece Apocalypse Now had to be robbed of winning Best Picture.

Coppola didn’t just have a good film this year either by the way. He had a huge DECADE. He co-wrote Patton, the 1970 Best Picture winner and directed The Godfather Parts 1 and 2, which won best picture in 1970 and 1972 respectively.

Apocalypse Now was a well-documented film. The budget was insanely huge, it took way too long to complete, there were a lot of offscreen mess-ups and the actors didn’t get along with each other.

But for what it was worth, the film was a triumph.

Vietnam was the most polarizing and explosive time in our nation’s history up until that point. And the film represented the experiences of war, and the Vietnam struggle for what they are. Dark, visceral, scary, and often times disturbing.

Honestly, if you have not seen this movie, please do. It isn’t just a movie. It is a glimpse into the face of war, a look into the catastrophe which violence causes and it is one of the greatest films of all time.

With that being said, the movie which did win Best Picture in 1979 was Kramer v Kramer.

Kramer v Kramer was a film starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Two of the most well-known actors of all-time in their primes (even though Streep is still going ridiculously hard today).  Kramer was not as violent. It was not as disturbing. And it wasn’t as gripping. But it was an important film nevertheless.

Kramer v Kramer was a film about a couple struggling for the custody of their child. The film was the first major picture to bring the issue of divorce and its effect on children to the mainstream. Just as much as Apocalypse Now was about an important event in our nation’s history, so was Kramer v Kramer. The Divorce rate in America doubled from 1960 to 1980.

This left a lot of kids and families hurting. Kramer V Kramer resonated more with audiences going through the pains of separation. Apocalypse Now on the other hand brought up a time that most Americans wanted to forget.

But even still, the film is beautifully dark. It makes you almost feel that you were in Vietnam.

Napalm was featured heavily in the film during war scenes. 

And I believe that is why it didn’t win. It was too real. It represented the ugly side of humanity. It showed all of the horror which could occur.

But that’s why it should have won. It was not Hollywood trying to educate America about a problem in a dramatic way. It was Coppola giving Hollywood and the world a look into how insane war is. How insane we all can be when faced with horror.

Sources

The Evolution of Divorce- W. Bradford Wilcox

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-divorce

Poster

Free to use
Napalm

Andrew LCPL Pendracki, 2003

http://www.imdb.com/

When Goliath Should Have Won

1977 was a great year. Apple was founded, Kanye West was born, and gas was only 65 cents. Also, a small film named Star Wars came out.

Now let me first explain, I am not the type of person who goes to Star Wars conventions or dresses up as Obi Wan for Halloween. But I do believe credit is due to this film. When Star Wars came out, it shattered box office records, the cinematography was excellent, the story was something new and fresh, and the technology used in creating the film was revolutionary.

Star Wars was nothing short of a phenomenon, it spawned sequels, television shows, books, video games, and an entire culture.

In 1977 it was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture. Star Wars made over 300 million dollars in its original theatrical release. Adjusted for inflation, today, that is around 2.8 billion dollars. Everyone saw, and loved the movie. But Star Wars did not win best picture that year. A movie named Annie Hall won that year.

A movie directed by Woody Allen that was seen by 15 people. 

Woody Allen directed, wrote, and starred in this film which also starred Dianne Keaton. The movie is a romantic comedy and is actually quite good as it is seen as a textbook example of the rom-com genre.

Annie Hall won the best picture award because even though Star Wars was miraculous and earth-shattering when it came out, nobody knew the type of effect and culture shock that it would produce.

Annie Hall was a “now” movie when it came out. It represented the culture of the 70’s better than any film that came before it. It was quirky, funny, and thought provoking. The film even influenced the style of dress during the late 70’s.

Even still, Annie Hall represented a time period, whereas Star Wars shook cultural foundations and stunned audiences with glimpses of the future.

To fully appreciate Annie Hall, you have to understand American culture, and a good understanding of the 70’s is also necessary. Star Wars on the other hand is a giant. Anyone, from anywhere can view this film and be engrossed by the story. It gave glimpses of the future and its story had the ability to be easily understood by everyone.

Annie Hall was a good film. But Star Wars is a culture. It is magnificent and a giant of cinema. The academy shouldn’t have just looked at the “now”. Annie Hall represented a time period, whereas Star Wars shook cultural foundations and stunned audiences with glimpses of the future.  

That is why Star Wars should have won this race. That is why Star Wars is a better film which endures to this day.               

Sources

History channel

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/annie-hall-beats-out-star-wars-for-best-picture

Box Office Mojo

http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=starwars.htm

Star Wars poster

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Star_Wars_Schriftzug.jpg