A year ago, Sight & Sound magazine came out with its once-a-decade list of the greatest movies ever made, passing over the likes of Dr. Strangelove, Double Indemnity and Pulp Fiction, which didn't make the top 100, and skipping over past winners Citizen Kane and Vertigo as well, before settling on Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a French art film about a woman silently peeling potatoes for three and a half hours.
I've seen Jeanne Dielman and I've gotta tell you, its appeal mystifies me. But if by some miracle it really is the best movie ever made, then Delphine Seyrig definitely deserves the Oscar for best actress because she's on screen every single minute — the movie lives or dies on her performance.
Me, I'm going with Ann-Margret in Tommy. I can't say with 100% confidence that it's the best performance of 1975 but she had a great career, was a wonderful singer-dancer and deserves some kind of award for letting that lunatic of a director, Ken Russell, hose her down with a swimming pool's worth of Heinz baked beans.
As always, though, the choice is yours.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Chinatown is about seeing without understanding, and rushing headlong where angels fear to tread. Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a true-blue American — which is to say venal, well-meaning, blindly stumbling around, certain of his own abilities, confident of final victory, and the unwitting architect of his own defeat.
The mystery (centered on a real-life scheme to profit from L.A.'s water rights) is labyrinthine; the payoff, legendary. And personally, I think this, rather than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is Jack Nicholson's best performance.
Too often people associate the word "masterpiece" with the spinach your tenth grade English teacher made you eat. Chinatown is a masterpiece in the best sense of the word — enthralling, thrilling, moving, and yes, even occasionally thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
The Sting is fifty years old — fifty! — which means I'm even older. I saw it in a theater with my dad and little brother when it came out. Maybe my all-time favorite movie-going experience was hearing my dad groan at what was then the entirely predictable end of the movie then him laughing with pure pleasure when it turned out not to be. For years prior to that — thanks to the suffocating morality of the Production Code then the hipster nihilism of the New Wave — caper films always ended the same empty way. The Sting was something new.
Of course, now the end of The Sting is predictable and the nihilism of postwar noir feels fresh. These things run in cycles.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Just to clarify, yes, Marlon Brando won the Oscar for best actor in 1972 (and then declined the award for ... reasons.)
But here at the Monkey, we base our nominations not on billing or fame or wishful thinking but on what showed up on the screen. And anyone who has ever seen The Godfather knows that Al Pacino — a virtual unknown in 1972 — was the star of the show. So he gets the nod for best actor and Brando, who will no doubt decline the award anyway, is dropped to the supporting actor category where he belongs.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
It's not that the film expects me to root for an empty-headed sociopath like Alex (Malcolm McDowell) or that I object to the film's muddled message — that in a free society, individual liberty should trump collective responsibility even when the individual in question is cheerfully guilty of rape and murder — it's the film's slack narrative pace. Somehow Stanley Kubrick has stuffed three hours of boredom into a two hour package. I never fail to check my watch, something you should never feel the need to do when watching a movie.
And this from a guy who thinks 2001: A Space Odyssey — a virtually silent film that moves so slowly, it practically runs in reverse — is one of the most exciting movies ever made.
As Roger Ebert wrote in panning A Clockwork Orange during its original run, the film commits an "unforgivable, artistic sin. It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half."
But maybe that's just him and me.
Instead, I voted for The Last Picture Show, a modern Western based on Larry McMurty's novel about teenagers coming of age in a small Texas town on the raggedy edge of nowhere. Nothing muddled about its message: You can either waste your life trying to live up to a myth that wasn't worth living in the first place or you can learn how to be a human being — but you can't do both so make up your mind before it's too late.
Far and away director Peter Bogdanovich's best work. Stars Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms. Features Oscar-winning turns by Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman. Great movie, highly recommended.
Finally, I also want to mention the Academy's choice for best picture, The French Connection. It's the story of Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), a deeply-flawed cop obsessed with nailing a dapper French importer of high-grade heroin (played, thanks to a famous casting blunder, by Fernando Rey, a Spanish actor who spoke no French).
It's a good movie and boasts Hackman's most iconic performance, but if you haven't seen it (or haven't seen it lately), I strongly urge you to skip the version of it currently streaming within U.S. borders. The film's owner, Disney, is only showing a censored copy (even on the Criterion Channel!) excising a scene establishing Popeye's undeniable racism.
I don't know whether Disney's decision was driven by left-wing censors who want past works of art to reflect modern sensibilities; or by right-wing censors who want to stamp out any hint that Black Lives Matter might just have a point. Either way, they remind me of those (no doubt, apocryphal) Victorian prigs who put pantaloons on piano legs for fear that the instrument's shapely curves might inspire lustful habits.
I suggest you get thee hither to your local library and check out an old-school Blu-ray or even older school DVD. If your town still has a library, that is. The Puritans are everywhere — and they're coming for you!
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I wrote this when I was fifty, the same age as William Holden when he filmed The Wild Bunch:
I don't know anybody over the age of fifty who isn't a little startled, dismayed and embarrassed to realize that the upward trajectory of the life that they so took for granted in their youth has nosed over and is now on a permanent downward spiral toward the grave. For Pike Bishop (William Holden), the aging leader of a gang of Old West desperados, it's not just that he no longer understands the world that has changed around him; it's the realization that even if he did understand it, he no longer has the energy, stamina or reflexes to do anything about it.
But as Dylan Thomas pointed out, there's more than one way to grow old: you can go quietly into the night, or you can rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Pike chooses to rage. And oh how he rages.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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