The 1931 western Cimarron is on a short list of Oscar's most obscure best picture winners, and in a year that included such award-eligible features as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, breakout gangster dramas starring Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, and Bela Lugosi's horror classic Dracula, also one of its most undeserving.
But if you like your American history uncomplicated and your movies pleasantly forgettable, Cimarron is not half bad.
The story begins in 1889 with the Oklahoma Land Rush — where 50,000 people lined up at the border and raced to claim the two million acres the U.S. government had opened up for settlement, a perfectly insane way to parcel out land — and ends in 1930 with the descendants of these settlers marinating in oil wealth.
Cimarron stars Richard Dix as a hard-luck rancher turned newspaper publisher, and Irene Dunne as his long-suffering wife. Dix kills an outlaw and flees the territory, leaving his wife to run the paper, winning her fame and social status, and eventually a term in Congress.
Cimarron's audience would have been old enough to remember the events depicted — which were roughly as distant in time to them as Ronald Reagan is to us — and the movie was a critical hit even though it lost money at the box office.
Dunne was nominated for the first of five Oscars (she never won) and she carries the movie. Dix, on the other hand, was on the fast track to oblivion, drinking his way to B-picture has-been status within a couple of years.
Based on Edna Ferber's best-selling novel, Cimarron is more about the myth of the American West than the reality — plucky settlers make good against the odds, and the right people find a fortune in the ground.
That the oil originally belonged to the Osage Nation is largely glossed over except to suggest that the previous owners were grateful that civilized white men had relieved them of the burden of managing all that money.
If you've got six hours to kill, might I suggest watching Cimarron as a double feature with Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon? The story of corporate theft and murder in the Osage Nation after oil is discovered on their land, Flower Moon's locale and time line overlaps with Cimarron's and provides a radically different perspective on the same moment in history.
Sure, after watching the two, you'll suffer a serious case of mental whiplash — what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" (which I've written about here) — but you're a smart crew, you can take it.
As hard as it is to believe — given that the intervening years would see the premieres of Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Shane, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch and many, many more — Cimarron was the last western to win the Oscar for best picture until Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves sixty years later.
If you ever wonder what motivates otherwise seemingly sane people like me to start handing out alternate Oscars, there's a good part of your answer right there.
dis·si·dent
noun
a person who opposes official policy, especially that of an authoritarian state.
I see that Google agreed to set fire to the Reichstag call the Gulf of Mexico something other than what it is in order to appease the latest whims of the Toddler in Chief. But don't fret — we here at the Monkey will continue to live in the real world, at least until they drag us off to the gulag.
Apparently it doesn't take much to become a dissident these days ...
Of all the people I've covered in this blog over the last fifteen years, no one has fallen farther in my esteem than Woody Allen. Not, mind you, because of the accusations against him (which may very well be true, I couldn't tell you), nor because the undisputed facts that have emerged lead one to conclude that he's, at best, creepy. Here at the Monkey — where I will happily praise the art while beating the artist with a hammer — the fact that Woody Allen might perhaps deserve to spend the rest of his life in jail doesn't mean he didn't make great movies.
No, the problem for me are the movies themselves.
The older I get, the more the "Woody Allen" character — not the screwball nincompoop of the early comedies, but the neurotic, cultured, "wise" Woody of the middle years, Manhattan especially — seems more like the kvetching of an immature, half-smart misanthrope than the epitome of New York sophistication the adolescent me (who knew nothing about nothing) seemed to think he was.
In that sense, the perfect actor to play the "Woody" character isn't Woody Allen but a young Timothée Chalamet in 2019's A Rainy Day in New York because if there's anything more annoying than listening to a teenage kid explaining the meaning of life to you ... well, it's probably reading an old man's blog complaining about teenage kids explaining the meaning of life to you.
And that's what "Woody Allen" sounds like to my ears now — snotty, self-absorbed, brimming with unearned self-confidence yet insecure as only a kid can be, and name-checking the classics without any real sense of what they're about, which can be amusing, even endearing, out of the mouth of a nineteen year old kid, but is ridiculous and sadly pathetic from a man in his forties, fifties and beyond.
Maybe that's why I've come to prefer the Woody Allen movies Woody Allen isn't in. Midnight in Paris, for example.
Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is an American writer traveling in Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her rich, pompous parents (Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy). Gil has romanticized notions about Paris, specifically Paris of the 1920s when Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein drank absinthe in the bars and argued about art and literature. His ever practical bride-to-be has romanticized notions only about the handsome know-it-all (Michael Sheen) lecturing at Versailles.
After an argument, Gil finds himself wandering the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter when, at the stroke of midnight, a time-traveling Peugeot pulls to the curb and the half-drunk couple inside invite Gil to join them at a fun little party their friends are hosting.
Friends like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein — and a beautiful French brunette (Marion Cotillard) who sparks something in Gil that his rich, stuffy fiancee never has.
Owen Wilson is the rare lead in a Woody Allen movie who doesn't play like he's doing a bad Woody Allen imitation — reportedly, Allen rewrote the part to fit Wilson when the actor came aboard, and you can tell: Wilson seems comfortable in his own skin in a way the likes of Colin Firth, Jason Biggs and Kenneth Branagh never did.
Equally good is Corey Stoll who is hilarious as Hemingway, macho and pretentious at the same time, and grumbling perfectly ludicrous Bad Hemingway to Gil's awestruck delight.
"And then the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face, like some rhino-hunters I know or Belmonte, who is truly brave. It is because they make love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds until it returns, as it does to all men, and then you must make really good love again."
As a lifelong Hemingway fan, I laughed so hard every time Corey Stoll was on the screen, I thought I'd have a stroke — because let's face it, while nobody was better at conveying action through words, when he started pontificating about life, nobody was more full of shit than Ernest Hemingway.
Pitch perfect takedowns of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Zelda Fitzgerald, Luis Buñuel, among others, played perfectly by, respectively, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Alison Pill and Adrien de Van.
And if that's all there was to Midnight in Paris, I'd still say it's the funniest movie Woody Allen has made since he saw his first Ingmar Bergman film.
But he also has some insightful things to say about the false promise of nostalgia and the trap of always living a life of "if only (fill in the blank), then I'd be happy."
First, be happy. Life will fill in the blanks.
Midnight in Paris is my favorite Woody Allen movie, and proof that no matter how false the artist, the art in this case is true.
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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. 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 ✱.
In between binge-eating and binge-napping, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I spent our Thanksgiving holidays binge-watching Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom, a short-lived cable series now streaming as part of our Amazon Prime subscription.
Made for HBO, The Newsroom followed the ups-and-downs of a band of idealistic cable news reporters trying to put on a worthwhile show in an era characterized by insipid junk-news pandering. Jeff Daniels won an Emmy playing the face of the franchise, the grumpily affable Will McAvoy; Emily Mortimer played his ex-girlfriend-turned-producer; Sam Waterston was their boss.
The series also featured fine supporting performances from Oscar winners Jane Fonda and Marcia Gay Harden.
By and large, the critics hated the show — finding it preachy and pretentious — and in the 25 episodes that made up its three seasons, it never attracted a large enough audience to make anybody forget The Sopranos.
Katie and I, on the other hand, liked it — a lot.
It's not that we're devoted fans of Aaron Sorkin. Back in the day, we occasionally dipped into The West Wing without ever really carving out time for it, and what little we saw of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, we frankly despised.
This, though, we fell in love with.
Katie thought The Newsroom was a warm, witty drama that didn't overstay its welcome. She liked spending time with the characters, especially Olivia Munn's intellectually-brilliant, socially-clueless, hilariously-deadpan Sloan Sabbith.
Me, I saw it as a screwball comedy in the tradition of His Girl Friday and The Front Page — tales of bumbling reporters, puffed up with self-importance and seriously lacking in self-awareness, who somehow manage to get a quality newscast out on a daily basis. The comedy is punctuated by moments of dramatic relief — war, death, national crisis — but the show never strays far from its classical Hollywood roots when fast-talking actors like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell wisecracked their way from scoop to scoop.
Absolutely nobody else read The Newsroom that way, but who are you going to believe, me or nobody's lying eyes?
Anyway, it's a freebie included with a subscription to Amazon Prime. If that's your streaming service of choice, check it out.
We here at the Monkey recently stumbled across this long-out-of-print audiobook version of Hunter S. Thompson's classic exercise in Gonzo journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's heavily-abridged and plays more like a radio drama from some parallel universe where Bob Hope dropped acid and Jack Benny was an axe murderer, but it's highly entertaining in its own right. Much better, in my opinion, than the Johnny Depp movie that followed it.
The late great Harry Dean Stanton reads Thompson's interior monologues and Jim Jarmusch and Maury Chaykin provide the dialogue.
If you've never read Fear and Loathing, it's Thompson's (ostensibly) non-fiction account of a long weekend he and his attorney spent in Las Vegas with a side trip to search for the American Dream.
They went well provisioned:
"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls."
I say "ostensibly non-fiction" because as Thompson himself later admitted, nobody could have done all the things they allegedly did and lived to talk about it.
As twisted and irresponsible and depraved as their behavior was, though, it was nothing compared to what passed as normal in Nixon's America. "The Circus-Circus," he wrote, "is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war" — the implication being that the Nazis had won the war, just in 1968 instead of 1945.
That's a point of view that seems hilariously quaint in retrospect and I can only imagine what Thompson would have made of our current state of affairs. Oh, well.
I'm giving Alabama the benefit of the doubt and assuming that when they saw the name "Moore" on the ballot, they thought they were voting for this guy:
Yesterday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I finally got around to seeing writer-director Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster, Dunkirk, in 70mm down at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland.
If you know your history, Dunkirk is a place name that conjures up one of the most pivotal moments of World War II, the evacuation of the British army during the fall of France in June 1940.
Surrounded on three sides by the advancing Nazi armies and on the fourth side by the sea, the British found themselves on the verge of annihilation. Rather than negotiating terms, however, thousands of civilians took to fishing trawlers, tugboats, and pleasure craft, crossed the Channel, and pulled 300,000 men off the beach to safety.
This "heroic defeat" rallied the British people to stand alone against Hitler's armies, a stand now rightly regarded as "their finest hour."
Dunkirk is not a typical history lesson, however, with Churchill and Hitler barking orders at the strategic level.
Instead, the tale is told from three very intimate points of view — a week in the life of a British soldier (Fionn Whitehead) stranded on the beach; a day in the life of a weekend boater (Mark Rylance) and his son sailing from England across the Channel to rescue said soldiers; and an hour in the life of a British fighter pilot (Tom Hardy) tasked with protecting sea and sand alike from marauding German bombers.
Each moment is observed in extreme close-up — that is to say, limited strictly to details within the character's immediate line-of-sight or concern — without any backstory, exposition, humor or any other traditional storytelling device to provide context or lighten the load. In that sense Dunkirk reminded me of the interstitial chapters in Hemingway's first short story collection In Our Time where a single paragraph served as a drop of water from which to extrapolate the existence of an ocean.
The movie crosscuts continuously between stories, but not on simultaneous action as you've been taught to expect since the days of Griffith, instead on simultaneous emotions running along converging narrative arcs.
It's an audacious storytelling device, but then Nolan has spent his entire career — from Following to Memento to Inception to Interstellar — playing with chronology and narrative.
The action is intense, the mood desperate. There is no respite, no breather. If you have a fear of drowning in a tightly enclosed space, either alone or with a hundred men screaming out their last around you, this movie may not be for you. If you have claustrophobia or abandonment issues, if you're afraid of heights or fire or the dark, stay home. If you don't like the idea of getting blown up or shot at, rent a nice rom-com instead.
Katie-Bar-The-Door found the experience relentless and a bit exhausting. On the other hand, my fourteen year old niece has seen it three times.
One question that kept buzzing around in my head before the movie, was why Dunkirk? Why now? It's not an anniversary, it hasn't been in the news. Afterwards, I added to that, why such a tight focus on a handful of nearly anonymous characters? Not that it doesn't work, but stripped almost entirely of its historical context, the story becomes an abstract outline — a compelling outline, but an outline nevertheless.
And then it hit me. An outline of huddled masses yearning to breath free, fleeing the horrors of war, hoping against hope for a rescue from across the sea. Stripped of the filigree, Dunkirk is at its heart not a war story but a refugee story. And what are there millions and millions of right now?
Refugees.
It's the great moral and humanitarian crisis of our generation, and our failure to act, our indifference, our outright hostility in the face of a tidal wave of desperation and human misery flowing out of the Muslim world threatens to crack the very foundation of the West as we know it.
Suddenly Dunkirk seemed to me very timely. Timeless, too. If you pull back even farther, you see not just the historical battle of Dunkirk, and not just a parallel to today's world, but the story of mankind writ large — the never-ending battle between chaos and culture, cynicism and compassion, cowardice and courage.
That Nolan can take such a grim story, tell it in such a radically experimental style, and still sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tickets, well, that's not just genius, that's art.
Dunkirk isn't a perfect movie, only, I suspect, a great one. Stay tuned, it just might be the best picture of the year.
America had a nice run — 240 years of top-flight democracy is better than most countries, and only one civil war! Okay, so now we're Argentina under the Perons, but you know, even that inspired a really good musical.
1) Best movie of 2016
I liked Hell or High Water and Love & Friendship. Haven't seen Manchester by the Sea yet, for which I have high hopes.
2) Worst movie of 2016
There were, according to imdb.com, 12,414 movies released in 2016. I haven't seen enough of them to have any idea what might be the worst.
3) Best actress of 2016
I thought Kate Beckinsale should have gotten more notice for Love & Friendship.
4) Best actor of 2016
Jeff Bridges got the nominations for Hell or High Water but Chris Pine did the heavy lifting. Heard good things about Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea.
5) What movie from 2016 would you prefer not hearing another word about? Why?
Since blogspot ate all my movie links in October and we dropped our subscription to New Yorker before that, I haven't heard or read much about anything movie-related. Have people been talking about movies?
6) Second-favorite Olivier Assayas movie
You flatter me by assuming I know who Olivier Assayas is.
7) Miriam Hopkins or Kay Francis?
Miriam Hopkins, although Kay Francis got the better of her when they squared off in Trouble in Paradise. Favorite Miriam Hopkins performance? Design for Living followed by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). I wrote about the latter here. Dig her in Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant, too.
8) What’s the story of your first R-rated movie?
A bunch of misfits join a college fraternity. Hi-jinks ensue. Although that's probably not what you meant. I want to say my first R-rated movie was Animal House, but I can't swear to it. Anyway, I saw it with a pal and his father. No sneaking around, no shy tittering behind raised hands, just three people watching a very funny movie.
9) What movie from any era that you haven’t yet seen would you be willing to resolve to see before this day next year?
I'm not committing myself to anything.
10) Second-favorite Pedro Almodovar movie
I don't know. Volver?
11) What movie do you think comes closest to summing up or otherwise addressing the qualities of 2016?
Apparently they never made a movie of It Can't Happen Here, so maybe A Face in the Crowd?
12) Chris Pine or Chris Pratt?
Like them both. If I were casting the movie running in my head, I'd cast Chris Pratt if I wanted to emphasize the comedic elements of the story, Chris Pine the dramatic.
13) Your favorite movie theater, presently or from the past
AFI-Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, particularly theater one.
14) Favorite movie involving a family celebration Hannah and Her Sisters revolved around a series of family celebrations (rather than celebrations of family). That might be the best. Still, the most under-rated is The Ref, starring Denis Leary as a thief who takes Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey and their family hostage at Christmas time. O.Henry style hilarity ensues. If you broke into my house and forced me to watch one of the two, I'd watch The Ref.
15) Second-favorite Paul Schrader movie Taxi Driver, I suppose, although I don't like it nearly as much as most others do.
16) Ruth Negga or Hayley Atwell?
Hayley Atwell. I thought the first season of TV's Agent Carter was terrific.
17) Last three movies you saw, in any format La La Land at the theater. Pleasantly meh. The Maltese Falcon on DVD. Classic. The Thin Man streaming. Classic.
18) Your first X-rated, or porn movie?
It's been so long since I've seen a porn movie, Ronald Reagan was president and porn stars had pubic hair!
19) Richard Boone or Charles McGraw?
Is this a trick question? Richard Boone.
20) Second-favorite Chan-wook Park movie
Ate a bagel in Bryant Park last time I was in New York, does that count?
21) Movie that best encompasses or expresses loneliness The Apartment is probably my favorite. The "Over The Rainbow" sequence of The Wizard of Oz may be my favorite scene on the subject.
22) What’s your favorite movie to watch with your best friend?
Well, my best friend is Katie-Bar-The-Door. I'd say my favorite movie to watch with her is whichever one we're watching together.
23) Who’s the current actor you most look forward to seeing in 2017?
Looking forward to seeing Kristen Bell in the season (and probably series) finale of The Good Place tomorrow night.
24) Your New Year’s wish for the movies
That Katie-Bar-The-Door and I actually make it to the movies with our pals from time to time.
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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