Catch as Catch Cannes: Class of 1995!

Ed Wood and gang take a closer look at Ulysses' Gaze.

Today, powerful people in the south of France will announce the Main Competition line-up for the 68th Cannes Film Festival.  This occasion has become almost as exciting to me as Oscar Nomination Day, and I'm pretty diligent in seeking out as many Cannes titles as I can in the months that follow, including from the so-called "sidebars," which easily outclass the center rings of so many world festivals (sometimes including Cannes itself). I don't see a prayer on the horizon of me ever actually attending Cannes, and all the stories about color-coded badges and pushy queues and huffy guards and ubiquitous industry chatter suggest I might not want to.  Instead, for each of the past few years, I have mounted my own Croisette Staycation here in Chicago, acquiring as many films as possible that showed at some past festival and watching them in the order they screened.  One year I covered 1986 and even churned out a bunch of new reviews.  After that I revisited 1973, though I petered out just before I finally got around to finally seeing The Mother and the Whore and Mean Streets. So, as delicious as a lot of my discoveries were, especially A Bigger Splash and Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, I think we can agree I sort of did it wrong.

This year, I'm horning in on Cannes' big announcement day to unveil my own plan to revive Cannes 1995. Beyond the 20th-anniversary angle, this is an especially resonant year for me.  1995 is when I finished high school, moved to a big city, and started seeing many, many more movies in theaters, archive titles and new releases alike, including much more challenging fare than the suburbs of Virginia could host. It's a really special time capsule to me, and some of the non-Competition programming at Cannes, especially Todd Haynes's Safe and Ulu Grosbard's Georgia, nearly broke my personal Richter scale as I fell into all-new levels of love with the movies.

Curiously, though, of the seven movies I've seen among the 24 that competed for the Palme—a low tally for me, against an unusually huge roster for Cannes—I don't have many passions, or even many opinions that I myself would trust. As you can see here, the group includes two films I haven't seen in two decades, three I saw in grad school to hazy or ambivalent effect, one I love but can barely remember, and one turkey I recall fairly clearly. Every one of them is keenly worth revisiting, even Jefferson in Paris, which is up to something important even if it fails in most areas of execution.

Meanwhile, though three Competition titles have eluded all my best attempts to locate subtitled copies (Romania's The Senator of Snails, Spain's Stories from the Kronen, and, most disappointingly, Mali's Waati), I've got a lot of tantalizing titles before me. They include work I've long wanted to catch by Terence Davies (The Neon Bible), Zhang Yimou (Shanghai Triad), Emir Kusturica (Underground, which took the Palme), Theo Angelopoulos (Ulysses' Gaze), Ken Loach (Land and Freedom), Larry Clark (Kids), Masahiro Shinoda (Sharaku), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (The City of Lost Children), Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Good Men, Good Women), and Manoel de Oliveira, who died just two days after my new DVD of The Convent arrived in the mail.  I'll be posting thoughts on each movie on whatever date the film originally unspooled for Jeanne Moreau's jury. Having learned the virtues of an early start, I'm already through 10 of these 21 pictures, and the kickoff isn't until May 17, so the schedule is looking good.

But that's not all. It's not even the best part!


Me, spreading the word about my big plans.

In the grand tradition of superhero sequels, except this one won't suck, I've added a lot more characters... meaning, I have lured more than a half-dozen other film writers to play along with me, some of whose names you see a lot on this site and some never before.  They'll be posting their thoughts about these movies on the same timetable I am, and at the end of the ten days, we'll deliberate and release our own jury awards, which may or may not coincide with Jeanne's.  We're already in full swing, swapping Google docs and sharing rare copies of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Don't Forget You're Going to Die, and making dates to see the Hou Hsiao-Hsien when it fortuitously passes through the Siskel in two weeks. I'm so excited to be working in league with other fanatics who also happen to be cinephiles I deeply admire.  Plus, we all know I can flag with solo voyages (the rest of the Top Ten of 2014 will come, I promise...), but group projects with internal deadlines keep me honest.  I'll release the names of my co-conspirators when Joel and Ethan Coen release their fellow jurors. It's a season of cliffhangers.

As one more treat—my own version of a good Cannes press-conference—I'll publish a few conversations along the way with some fellow academics and noted movie-people who have particular expertise on the specific films, real-world stories, or broader movements reflected in the 1995 mix.  I've already found a Victorian literature professor to talk to me about Angels & Insects, a Bloomsbury aficionado to discuss Carrington, an expert in Japanese culture to illuminate parts of Sharaku, a well-known Terence Davies enthusiast to illuminate The Neon Bible, and an eminent critical race scholar prepped to chat up Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. As I'm redesigning, updating, and reanimating the website after two especially dormant years, I'm hoping to mobilize it more effectively to introduce you to other voices in the academy, especially some of my favorite colleagues.  I see this as an ideological gesture of distributing scholarly discourse and specialized knowledge to people who can't easily access the institutions where these folks work, but also as a general blow against the idea that academic exchanges are esoteric or impenetrable.

Updated: The major, putative "sidebars" won't go uninvestigated in this feature, though Competition films are taking priority. I'll still be looking at 1995's entries in Directors' Fortnight (which included Safe, Le Confessionnal, a Katrin Cartlidge thriller, a Hugh Grant drama, and The White Balloon) and Un Certain Regard (which opened with my beloved Georgia and also exhibited the Burkinabe milestone Haramuya and exhibited a major Makhmalbaf film, despite being seen as having a slow-ish year). Critics' Week welcomed a pulpy thriller with an odd backstory, an Afro-Canadian drama, and an American indie that got good press at the time but has largely disappeared now.  Some of the best-remembered films held down Out of Competition and even midnight slots: To Die For, The Usual Suspects, the Caruso-Cage Kiss of Death, the Banderas-Hayek Desperado, and Sam Raimi's festival closer The Quick and the Dead, which sadly was only one of those things.  Area specialists in Iranian and West African cinema have already agreed to help us unpack The White Balloon and Haramuya, so I'm hoping you'll offer eager ears for them, too.

So, bookmark this page for Cannes '95 updates, follow me on Twitter for news and posts, especially from May 17-28, and by all means leave your comments below if you, too, lack the money for an Air France flight and have no claims to any dossiers de presse but still want to savor a Cannes experience.  You've got a month to do some strategic renting before we smash a bottle on the hull of this mega-feature.  Thanks in advance to all the friends who are either indulging me or allowing me to enable their own obsessive compulsion (or both), and to all of you for reading.

And what, may I ask, is your favorite movie from this cohort, and what are you most excited to hear me report on, or to see for yourself?


Me, holding court with my fellow jurors.

Welcome, Class of 2018!

Northwestern University, where I teach, runs on the quarter system (elsewhere called the trimester system), so classes don't start here until next week.  Admittedly, this timely welcome I'm offering to our incoming first-years will be belated for students on most other campuses, though I wish everyone in school, at any level, a fantastic year.

I was so happy to score the gig giving the opening-day address to all 1150 first-years in our Arts and Sciences college.  My remarks were inspired equally by questions and worries I've heard from my own freshman advisees over the years, and by my own memories of excitement and uncertainty my first year in college, and by things I never stop thinking about.  For example, Project Runway.  And the Oscars.  Frequent readers of this site or listeners of Nathaniel's podcasts won't be surprised by any of that.

I wish I could give this advice to many more college students, and maybe other students as well, about controlling stress, admitting vulnerabilities, cultivating patience, and prioritizing happiness, even amidst hard work.  In hopes of doing that, I'm posting the text here, complete with what every campus address needs: a full-scale FYC for Secrets & Lies and a couple sung bars of "Let It Go."  Make the most of the coming year, everybody, or the coming four years!

Wildcat Welcome Address – September 17, 2014 – Nick Davis

If you have further or different advice you'd offer to entering undergraduates, please share it in the Comments.  And feel free to circulate, with attribution.  (Don't just lift it, or I'll be all up in your business like a Wendy interview.)

Eyes on the Critics' Prize: Safe

During the latter half of the 1990s, when my movie habit was really entering its mainlining stage, the Boston Society of Film Critics was the most excitingly off-consensus of the major American critics' groups, which was a particular pleasure to me because Boston is where I was living at the time. I have written before about my love for this group and their invigorating choices during this period, made all the more interesting by the lists of people who almost won during those years (like Katrin Cartlidge and Tilda Swinton in 1997, running close behind Helena Bonham Carter for very offbeat projects, and way out in front of Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Julie Christie).

The first Boston citation that really made me sit up and take notice of the group, during the first year I was attending school and absorbing cinema in that city, was the Best Cinematography prize for Alex Nepomniaschy's lensing of Safe in 1995. That season, the bulk of the prizes were being posted to Shanghai Triad, a typically dazzling light-show from the Zhang Yimou factory. The Oscar eventually went to the emerald greens, flying dirtclots, and battlefield immersions of Braveheart. At a stage in my movie education where "best cinematography" still meant "prettiest pictures," the Boston crowd's recognition of Safe's intimidating symmetries, its freezing pastels, and its wide-angle hyperbolizing of banal Valley interiors was a real wake-up call. Clearly, I would need to rent the movie as soon as the VHS bowed (!), motivated not just by a plotline that sounded so nervy and elliptical but by a panel-certified promise of visual imagination.

Granted, the indelible visuals of Safe have a great deal to do with the director's labors of framing the shot and placing the camera. How much this prize ought to have been shared between Nepomniaschy and Haynes is up for debate, yet it's notable that no other Haynes film has really looked like Safe, not even in the moments of Velvet Goldmine (shot by Maryse Alberti) or of Far from Heaven, I'm Not There, or Mildred Pierce (all shot by Ed Lachman) that evoke the antiseptic domesticities or the deoxygenated atmospheres that are so crucial to the earlier film. Those tropes get a very particular and brilliantly effective workout in Safe, and all the more so since the film was made for almost nothing, inside relatives' houses and a lot of other existing, creatively marshaled locations. Beyond the 2001/Clockwork Orange-style vertical lines, flat planes, and rectilinear severity of so many shots, and beyond the Fassbinder-ish way that Nepomiaschy and Haynes frame characters within nested boxes and under flat light (such that even casual encounters feel depersonalized and stagy), look how often the air just hangs there in Safe. Julianne Moore's line readings constantly suggest that Carol is being asphyxiated, but for reasons that make sense if you've seen the film, we have to feel that Carol is definitely getting air, and that something weird might be in that air.

There's a subtly frizzy quality to the light in Safe—making sunrays and pools of color diffuse a bit even in brightly lit rooms and sharply lensed shots. This lighting casts a slight blur in the women's locker room, the hair salon, the living room with the wrong-color couch, the sitting room with its DNA-shaped staircase, and even the "restorative" ceramic igloo where Carol eventually winds up. This quality of the light, not dry but not damp, not gaseous so much as atomically dense, makes the airspace in Safe matter in an almost literal sense, holding its own against the man-made structures and objects that are made so conspicuous in Haynes's shots. Carol moves through a vacuous, plastic universe, and later proceeds to an ostensibly cleansing, fresh-air retreat, but in all of them, she is constantly and unnervingly touched by vaguely visible, vaguely palpable molecules. What are those molecules? What do they bear within them or convey between them? Is there something inside them that makes Carol sick? (All the white noise in the sound design immeasurably assists this quietly creepy dimension of the lighting schemes.)

Nepomniaschy frequently has to help us locate Carol within very long and wide-angled shots, particularly by the standard of most interior shooting. Yet at the same time, Carol White is the last person in the world who should attract a spotlight, or a key light, or a backlit halo, which would feel all wrong for this profoundly recessive woman. Nepomniaschy is really ingenious, then, at helping us pinpoint Carol without violating the invisibility and insubstantiality that are fundamental to Haynes's and Moore's conception of her, using geometries within the frame or the softest caress of color or glow to highlight her when necessary, just the littlest bit. In other scenes where the camera is closer, as when Carol attends the allergist's office, the ugly, fluorescent lighting of the space is somehow just soft enough around Carol that we feel some compassion for her, some human weight and latent loveliness in her body. In this way, lighting itself extends an invitation to empathize, counteracting the institutional chill that encases her (including, for some viewers, the chill of the script itself, though Haynes's writing doesn't register that way with me). Something impalpable in these shots provokes us to worry and hurt for Carol, not mock her as a Barbie doll, or reject her as a zombie, or think of her only as a rhetorical stand-in for ourselves. Nor do we just sit there, helplessly perplexed as we might well have been by this soft-spoken San Fernando cypher. The light warms Carol as much as possible, even as it refrigerates her. I love, by the way, how Nepomniaschy allows Moore her freckles in scenes like these, more so than a lot of D.P.'s have done, and he doesn't adopt the easy strategy of making Moore's natural pallor register melodramatically as a signal of dangerous anemia.

Equally marvelous are Safe's shots in daringly low light: the overhead sex scene between Carol and her husband, the late-night prowl in the garden, the testy marital exchange across a mile-wide bed, the final straight-to-camera shot. In these moments, little except the crest of a cheekbone, the angle of a brow, or the copper sheen of her badly permed curls stands between Carol and a kind of Stygian oblivion. That such details communicate from within such broad, wide, grayed-out canvases, and that Carol's last, indelible lines ("I love you... I love you...") resonate as both encouraging and harrowing from within this world of shadow, have a lot to do with Moore's and Haynes's genius. But again, some of the credit is due to the precise calibrations of pessimism and hopeful sympathy that the cinematography invests in Carol's anxious days and in her waning, bruise-colored nights.

Safe's micro-budget miracles and nifty visual tricks don't stop here. Maybe that disastrous baby shower gets a little too pink/orange toward the end of the sequence, but there's a nice against-the-grain kick to any LA sunset that's allowed to look like lox that's been sitting too long at the buffet. I also love how the potted palms in the corners of those baby-shower shots don't remotely suggest a cute, predictable oasis of greenery and fresh air. If anything, they look brackish and black-leafed, as though the plants have got environmental illness, too, but like so much else in Nepomniaschy's shots, the effect isn't so strong that you notice right away. In general, Nepomniaschy cooperates well with the movie's smart production design, delicately highlighting props, shapes, and other visual triggers that make a suburban kitchen look subliminally close to a therapeutic center, or that foster a rhyme between a living room and a hospital room. The images guide our eyes in these and other ways, despite an overall aesthetic and a thematic framework that absolutely require the austere dehumanization of the film. The camera can't look like it's guiding us, or gratifying us at all, or even speaking our language.

Nepomniaschy hasn't had nearly the career one would project for the guy who made Safe look like a million bucks, despite having nothing but nickels to work with. He gave Joe Carnahan's Narc a nicely enervated texture and tint, but there's not much in it you haven't seen in other policiers. He filmed Julia Stiles falling in love with a prince, Drew Barrymore with a teacher, and a multi-culti group of high-school students with Antonio Banderas's dancing. He was the second-unit photographer on Country Strong and on most of D.J. Caruso's movies. I have no idea what to make of this successful but undistinguished résumé, but clearly, the most important signs of Safe's legacy fall elsewhere than the D.P.'s own filmography. I have thought a lot about Nepomniaschy's work in Safe while noting the rise of recent indie phenom Jody Lee Lipes, whose lensing of the apartment in Tiny Furniture recalled the deadening homespaces of Safe, but just a bit more preciously. His low-lighting of Martha Marcy May Marlene is often clever or evocative, and a few times, as in the swimming/diving scene, extremely resourceful, yet his images don't "stick" with me in the same way, and his visual strategies for coaxing inchoate, internalized trouble out of Elizabeth Olsen's remarkable face seem just a shade coarser and more obvious than how Nepomniaschy's camera interacts with Moore's equally remarkable face. Even the images I think I know best in Safe continue to pay new dividends the longer I dwell on them. I'll never know why Nepomniaschy doesn't have more filmmakers begging to work with him, but I'm glad he has one critics' prize to call his own, in recognition of one of the best and best-lensed American movies of its decade.

Previously in this series: Dead Ringers ('88)

DTs With Bats, Dances With Wolves

NICK: As I write this, I'm sorry to say it's been exactly five months since the last installment of Best Pictures from the Outside In, my regular series of rotating conversations with Mike and Nathaniel. The Lost Weekend turned into The Lost Winter and The Lost Spring. How did this happen? Well, I'll tell you. We each popped the full Director's Cut of Dances With Wolves into our respective DVD players on January 16, the morning after we published the last episode, and the movie wasn't over until yesterday. But we kid, Kevin, we kid, and if you really do have the technology that might help to clean up the Gulf, I'll never make a joke about you again. Anyway, if you're looking for the real culprits, check out this film festival, these 408 women, and the most joyous, indefatigably creative film blog on the web.

You need surfeits of joy to deal with The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder's lugubrious drama about a writer's-blocked alcoholic named Don Birnam (Best Actor winner Ray Milland). You need just as many to hold up through Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner's long, sobering chronicle of how the Lakota Sioux—depicted at first as the heirs of a hardy, reverent, and gallant way of life—are catastrophically displaced by the encroachments of post-bellum White America. Neither movie was a project that Hollywood studios were dying to make. In the final months of World War II, The Lost Weekend was trying to hawk a horrific story about an unsympathetic drunk that almost every major actor had declined to play. Dances With Wolves dropped the sexy, rising star of Bull Durham and No Way Out into an expensive three-hour epic that isolates him on an open plain for most of the first hour, then renders itself in large part in subtitled Lakota Sioux. And it sends people from the theater feeling sad and guilty. And did we mention the matinée idol in question had decided to direct it himself, despite no previous experience?


Milland's Don is a raving drunk. Costner's Dunbar is just... different.
With a lot of the movies we cover in this series, especially among the recent entries, I have a fairly strong idea of whether we'll gravitate toward enthusiasm or dismissal. Excitingly, though, I actually have no idea what either of you guys thinks about either film. Most reviewers at the time and more recent critics have identified some mixture of strong and weak elements in both movies, so before we each tip our hands as to our overall admiration for Weekend and Wolves, I want to ask: what, for both of you, is the single strongest element of each film? I'll answer, too, but it's my party to host this time, so I get to go last. And if only to teach Kevin a lesson about brevity, let's prove how much we can express in just a handful of sentences, maybe two or three per movie. Go!

NATHANIEL: We're rusty at this and you'd like us to start on a positive note and you'd like it to be brief? Quite the taskmaster! I'm afraid that when it comes to dishing out compliments to one Mister Costner the first description that came to mind was "neat." That's his own shallow compliment of choice to Madonna in Truth Or Dare, a compliment which she instantly gags on despite proving the lack of gag reflex later in her film.

You don't want me to start with the gagging so I'll say that I like that the look of the film isn't overly "neat". Despite the kind of duly saturated sunsets that win cinematography Oscars sometimes the film is content to look dusty and humble, particularly in regards to Costner's Little Hut on the Prairie. And I dig the wolf, an exquisite animal actor. I'd dance with it, too.

←BOTTLE: They like me, they really like me!

As for The Lost Weekend, I keep thinking about that hidden bottle, hanging outside Don Birnam's (Ray Milland) window by a string. Few movies offer up an early image that beautifully concise and versatile: it's a plot device, it's a literal representation of alcoholism, and it's a visual metaphor for Don himself, hiding away in shame and hanging by a thread.

NICK: A haiku: Taskmaster I am, / But those are gorgeous answers. / Mike, your turn to Dance.

MIKE: Brief I can do. Positive... we'll see.

I'm going to Stand with a Fist and name Mr. Costner the Actor as the best thing about Dances With Wolves. His complete ordinariness fit the character perfectly, not adding much nuance but serving as a representation of an average but smart Indiana boy stuck by himself in a mud hut. It's not a great compliment that his artless "acting" won the prize here, but a compliment nonetheless.

For The Lost Weekend, Nathaniel already nailed the best single element of the film—that bottle on the string is such a perfect encapsulation. So I'll expand by praising its attention to Don's obsession with acquiring and concealing bottles, the hyper-detailed strategy of which ones to leave for his brother to find and how to use his good nature against him, the increasing lengths he'll go to get them. It's a nice, small attention to detail in a film that tends toward big speeches and arm-waving.

NICK: Big speeches and arm-waving indeed, which is why my favorite moment in The Lost Weekend is easily the most comical, when Don Birnam gets caught attempting to rob the woman next to him in a fine restaurant, and the whole place erupts into a loud chorus of "Somebody stole a purse, somebody stole a purse!" I love how they all know the song, and they sing it with such merry, mocking gusto.

My Wolves answer is also musical: I completely adore the score. I realize John Barry pilfers a bit from his own Out of Africa compositions, but I think the music has a genuine, dark majesty to it, and an epic scale of feeling that helps the film earn its sense of scope and energize its runtime.

Honestly, I think Dances With Wolves is, all in all, a pretty strong film: flawed in all kinds of moments, but technically very accomplished and engaging at the level of story. But am I sensing I'm alone in this?

← Costner entices Oscar by stealing his favorite ensemble. Give or take the hair.

NATHANIEL: Well, I can't back you up there. I remember liking it well enough in 1990, though I never wanted it in the Best Picture race, and being vaguely irritated that Kevin Costner wasn't nominated for Best Actor. Twenty years later, I can't imagine what I was thinking in terms of the latter. Apologies to Mike but I think Costner is nearly disastrous in the lead role, especially in regards to the ever-present journal narration. We should be experiencing someone opening their soul up: new experiences, new cultures, new land, new language. That's a lot to take in. Dances needs a Lt. Dunbar with really expressive eyes and voice, capable of conveying inquisitive feeling and depth of conviction (though depth of intellect or feeling are not required). But there Kevin Costner always is, looking like he just stepped out of a late 80s hair salon and loosing all those flat bored Californian vowels on us. If the film hadn't been so famously his, I would have to assume it was a paycheck gig based on the evidence. Where is the passion? He's much better in the physical sequences, whether it's comedy (the naked discovery, his problems with low ceilings, or riding a horse in general) but for facility with a character arc this was a huge step down for him from Bull Durham and No Way Out.

It's the voice that I hate most. The hair is runner up. It only gets worse with the running time when he loses the only thing keeping him in period—the mustache—and meets that kindred spirit salon aficionado Stands With a Fist. I know this sounds incredibly facile but it's just so distracting to me... especially because the aesthetics of costume, set, and camerawork otherwise seem committed to time and place. The bored voice and the 80s hair just remind me that this was always a vanity project for a star at the peak of fame.

NICK: You might hate the performance so much, Nathaniel, that you're repressing the info that Kevin actually was nominated for Best Actor for this... though he was a sort of pioneer of the Blanchett-Tucci School of grimacing at one's own performance during the nomination reel. I like Mike's point about Costner's "average" quality desisting from making Lt. Dunbar some kind of saint or prodigy, but otherwise, I have to admit to subscribing to everything Nathaniel just said. His voice is the single thing I cannot stand about the movie, with or without a fist.

But the movie overall? Has it declined in other respects for you, Nathaniel? Mike, I take it you're also a detractor?

MIKE: I Stand With a Fist against the two of you. (How many times can we make that joke? as many times as we want to!) Maybe I'm letting my opinions about the film color my reception of Costner's performance, but pretty much everything Nathaniel said about him (aside from the 80s hair salon stuff—you got me there) makes me more convinced that he's perfect. The film is a fumbling, well-meaning attempt to show us Native American culture and the effects that whites had on it. It gets so much wrong, but its heart is in the right place, even if it is a little stupid sometimes. Costner's shallowness fits into that perfectly. And even though I, too, hate those godawful journal readings, his complete lack of inflection fits his very gradual change from his weird devotion to duty in the face of its pointlessness to his devotion to the culture that accepted him. If Hare Krishnas instead of Lakota Sioux had moved in next door, I think he would have joined them with just as much fervor.

As for the rest of the movie, I loved a lot of the acting around the edges, especially Graham Greene's befuddled nobility and Tantoo Cardinal's watchfulness. It tries mighty hard to avoid exoticizing the Lakota, which I appreciate, even though it's at heart about how much better the Exotic Other is than mainstream white culture. I'm torn. I genuinely liked it, but it's an embarrassed liking.

NATHANIEL: Allow me to elaborate on the nuances of my position—nuances, while discussing Dances With Wolves. I actually agree that the shallowness is not a problem. I like that he has such a facile understanding of the culture and that he's not a deep thinker. My problem with the film, I suppose, is that I don't really believe that it's aware of its shallowness. I think it believes in itself as a great social message movie and Dunbar as some great martyr/savior. Note that strange crucifixion pose in that early scene where he rides his horse into that sea of guns, certain of death but willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. But what is he saving? The whole movie is a delay of the sad, inevitable crushing of the Native Americans.

I guess the self-importance and the obviousness of its message rub me the wrong way. Which is why I like it best when it's a little bit uncomfortable with itself. Like when Dunbar gets squeamish about the Sioux killing his fellow frontiersmen or when it allows you to sit in on the tribe meetings and everyone's opposing points seem valid in some way. I admire that the ending accepts defeat, even if it only does so in that familiar epilogue text-based way: "This is what happens after the movie ends," it says, in order to edify you. "In case you get your history from the movies!"

I'm feeling churlish now, because the movie does mean well. That's a prerequisite for winning Oscars, yes? If I rode into that village they'd rename me Bitches About Movie.

NICK: Agreed that the movie's heart is in the right place, but I also think it has enough strong scenes and a solid enough technical bedrock—sound, lighting, score, editing—that it roundly eclipses a lot movies with "heart in the right place." The heart is worn so close to Costner's own sleeve that I believe this film more than I do a lot of other movies with similarly naïve and exoticizing tendencies, whose politics often seem worked out by committee.


I do think Dunbar matures a bit over the course of the film. His early attempt at a cruciform suicide, brave but grandiloquent, doesn't seem to me to typify his more humble self-conception in the prairie scenes. Not that the earlier scene makes much sense, anyway. But I loved the shots of all the other soldiers' boots in that scene, so soon after we'd just gotten so down and dirty into the nasty truth of Dunbar's own injured foot. Little accents of montage and visual emphasis like that are gratifyingly frequent within the filmmaking; Costner seems legitimately to have thought in cinematic, image-based terms, even if they're awfully old-fashioned and sometimes ham-handed.

Are we required to address the buffalo hunt before getting drunk with Ray Milland? Mike, does the movie snag your attention in other respects than Costner's performance or its wobbly attempts at PC sincerity? Signed, Manages the Discussion.


And we'll be back, after this 60-hour buffalo hunt!
MIKE: I wish we could get drunk with Milland before addressing that buffalo hunt, which is, I think, the only time I was absolutely sure I was seeing footage from the extended edition. It went on FOR.EVER. And so extendedly brutal, too—even with the special film versions of arrows that drop buffalo instantly, instead of helping them bleed to death slowly. I don't know what the point was, actually, to how godawful long that sequence was. It reminded me of the five-minute "Yee-hah, get 'em going!" scene from the beginning of the cattle drive in Red River. OK, I get the point.

That said, you guys have covered most of what I like about DWW—the score, its willingness to be both gorgeous and ugly, the tribal meetings. I liked its only attempt to tie the first half of the film in with the ending, when Wind In His Hair reprises his "Can you see that I am not afraid of you?" in the shape of the more distant but more heartfelt "Can you see that I am your friend?" Actually, with a film that runs over three hours, I'm surprised there's not more back-and-forth referencing to create some kind of continuity. Aside from beautiful shots of waving grass, that is.

OK, I'm buying the first round, and it's good stuff, too: someone has to talk about Ray Milland. My mouth is full of whiskey and grandiloquence, so it's gotta be one of you two.


And we'll be back, after this 60-hour buzz hunt!
NICK: I sort of can't deal with Ray Milland in this movie. He has his moments, but the teeth-baring, wild-eyed approach to drunkenness feels more Reefer Madness to me than Academy Award. He does not seem comfortable conveying any emotional or psychological complexity, much less any charm or appeal to offset his obvious disastrousness as a romantic partner for the Jane Wyman character.

But then, I think Wyman and Phillip Terry are pretty woeful in the other lead roles, and the film keeps waffling between looking cheap and under-produced and looking gimmicky and over-worked. Wilder throws almost anything he can think of at this script, and some of it clicks okay, but a lot of it doesn't. The movie, like the lead performance, just seems so hysterical and cooked-up to me.

NATHANIEL: Hysterical and cooked-up? You mean you haven't hallucinated small animals devouring each other after a bender?

I can't really argue with this assessment—any of it—but in a way I liked the hysterical bits most. I know you're not exactly a fan of Requiem for a Dream, either, so maybe this is a personal thing? For myself, addiction stories work best onscreen when they're operating at opposite poles of stylization. They can be incredibly moving when they're dour and naturalistic (I think immediately of that 'let's get high one last time together' scene in High Art) but if I can't have them that way, I need them to be elaborately stylized like Requiem. I think that's the best way to get at the headspace of addiction, which isn't exactly rational or sane.


So, for me, the film worked best when it went a little off the rails. I'm not talking about the rather elaborate strategies for hidden bottles and cash grabs. Those scenes offered more rococo-cuckoo detailing than mere stylization. But I definitely liked the DT hospital trip and that overly sweaty walking tour of the city... on account of, 'What the hell?'

I hope I'm making sense. Basically I enjoyed the things that distracted or interrupted all the speechifying the most.

NICK: Requiem is an interesting comparison, and probably more apt than my own unexpected free-associations over to Precious. That movie's flourishes of fantasy and pure directorial conceit sometimes work and sometimes don't, and I can sympathize with the filmmakers' attempts to get "cinematic" mileage out of downward-spiral narratives (addiction, poverty, disease, what have you), which are so frequently inert on screen. But the reason I thought of Precious is that its swerves into fantasy almost always feel related in some way to the headspace of the character. Whereas, for example, the Dance of the Trenchcoats that suddenly overtakes the scene at the opera in The Lost Weekend just feels so arbitrary, and utterly unconnected to Don—although the initial conceit, that he's watching La Traviata and all he can "see" is the stage-drinking, plays pretty well. More importantly, where Precious, for me, earns its leaps into exaggeration or abstraction by handling the "straight" scenes and the performances with such force and insight, The Lost Weekend feels like it's on wobbly legs even when it's trying to be spare and candid, or to handle pretty basic three-character dialogue scenes.

I do agree, though, about the scenes in the DT ward, filmed in Bellevue Hospital. Those are pretty harrowing, and I like that Frank Faylen, as blond Nurse Bim, is the only actor who slyly insists on the homo-panic subtext that the screenplay basically excises from the novel, with its new emphasis on "writer's block."


MIKE: Weird, Nick, because I, too, thought of Precious during Milland's freakouts, but it was not a good thing. The flourishes in both films seem like just that—directorial flourishes, and completely unearned. The dead-serious straight scenes in Precious make the jumps to fantasy even more jarring (again, in a bad way), but oddly enough I don't think I minded the ones here as much because the general tone of The Lost Weekend is one of arm-waving and hand-wringing.

I, three, liked the DT ward scene in Weekend, and now that I think of it again, I think there's an interesting parallel between that scene and the one in DWW where the US Cavalry is holding Lt. Dumb-Bear in his mud hut, surrounded by grinning toothless chaps with southern accents (why, if they're Union troops? oh, never mind...) who are taking turns beating him. This is one spot where DWW veers a little away from realism, I think to emphasize the shock that Costner's feeling: "Is this what I was supposed to be loyal to?" And over in The Lost Weekend, Milland gets his strongest taste of the downside of binge drinking. Although, could this really have been his first case of the DTs?

That's all for me this round—I'm off to become Hobbles on One Leg—but I just noticed that you two actressexuals have neglected to mention Mary McDonnell (aside from her hair). What's up with that?

NICK: I can see that argument that The Lost Weekend's more florid conceits meld better in a movie that's generally pretty florid, whereas they stand at greater odds with a movie that elsewhere aspires to a kind of realism. Then again, The Lost Weekend was praised more than anything in 1945 for its gut-wrenching, unvarnished realism—it's all over the reviews of the time—so it just goes to show that one generation's "realism" is another's bag of splashy directorial flourishes. (Unsurprisingly, one of my favorite reviews from the film's initial release was this one by James Agee, who was unusually skeptical among his peer group in 1945.)


Jane Wyman co-stars as Accessorizes With Leopard.
Mary McDonnell co-stars as Stands With a What the F**k?
As for Mary McDonnell, she's at least a better target for idolators of actresses in Dances With Wolves than Jane Wyman or Doris Dowling is in The Lost Weekend, and I find her thoughtful and technically skilled, particularly with the Lakota Sioux dialogue. Still, it's clearly apprentice work from an actress who really started hitting her cinematic stride two years later in Passion Fish (a full generation, in entertainment years, before she assumed presidency of the galaxy, brilliantly). Still, the fact that neither author Michael Blake nor Costner could conceive of a Sioux love interest for Dunbar signals one of those important limits in Dances With Wolves's extravagant liberal piety.

Nathaniel, what are your closing thoughts?

NATHANIEL: I've liked Mary McDonnell better in just about everything else, which is why I was avoiding the topic. Even the following year in Grand Canyon, I was onboard. "What if these are miracles?" she asked her husband in that We're All Connected movie (speaking of liberal piety...). And she did so with all the directness and full-spectrum humanity I came to love so much in her work in Passion Fish and Donnie Darko and beyond.

If there's a miracle occurring anywhere in Dances With Wolves, it's that she's able to keep a straight face while trying to sell that character. I'd say it's a thankless role but an Oscar nomination is quite a lot of thanks for playing Stands With a Fist Token White Woman. She can bring all the technique she likes to it; I did like watching her struggling to make English words. It's very actorly but totally watchable. Still, it's just an impossible task. Especially since, as you insightfully note, the very presence of Stands With a Fist is a textbook example of the embedded racism in White Guilt movies.

I feel like I Lost a Weekend (hardy-har-har) watching Dances With Wolves, and what did I have to show for it? Epilogue text to tell me that the Native Americans were going to have it real hard after the movie? Thanks, Professor Costner. One sign of a movie's strength is how far it extends in your imagination beyond the last scene, or before the first. Do the characters live outside the frame? In that respect, I'm not sure I can fully get behind either film. The Lost Weekend doesn't offer much closure unless you buy Don Birnam's renewed "I'll beat it this time" vow. I'm not sure Billy Wilder is asking you to, given the final shot. So it's easy to feel those characters living on, but in a nightmare loop of the same movie you've just watched, complete with DTs, pawn shops, and broken promises. But I find it impossible to imagine a life for Stands With a Fist and Dances With Wolves beyond that slow ride into winter. Maybe that's the (elegiac) point... but I needed to feel something more than a history lesson as they faded out.


Tags:
This Week: Nathaniel's post on the other Best Picture nominees from 1945 and 1990 and Mike's post at his newly reactivated blog!

Previously: ep.1: Wings & No Country; ep.2: Broadway Melody & Departed; ep.3: All Quiet & Crash; ep.4: Cimarron & Million Dollar Baby; ep.5: Grand Hotel & LOTR:ROTK; ep.6: Cavalcade & Chicago; ep.7: It Happened One Night & A Beautiful Mind; ep.8: Mutiny on the Bounty & Gladiator; ep.9: Ziegfeld & American Beauty; ep.10: Zola & Shakespeare; ep.11: You Can't Take It with You & Titanic; ep.12: Gone with the Wind & The English Patient; ep.13: Rebecca & Braveheart; ep.14: How Green Was My Valley & Forrest Gump; ep.15: Mrs. Miniver & Schindler's List; ep.16: Casablanca & Unforgiven; ep.17: Going My Way & The Silence of the Lambs

Compendium: My ongoing "Best Pictures" Special Section, with reviews, rankings, polls, and links to all of our discussions

The Paranormal Activity Project

And furthermore, I have lived through one of those incredibly canny midnight screenings in order to tell you that this is as terrifying as this, if not quite its equal in low-fi ingenuity and craft. I can't imagine that Paranormal Activity will work nearly as well without the room-thickening tension of being packed in a multiplex at the witching hour with a group of largely confused patrons, who all file in saying to the smuggest-looking member of their respective groups, "So, how did you hear about this? What is it?"



The theater where I saw it exhibited it simultaneously at midnight at its three largest screens, all of which stand consecutively to each other, so that 99 minutes later, a throng of stricken souls filed out amid shared jitters. I will admit to experiencing a dip in my estimation of my fellow man. It might be snobby, but I was not quite prepared for the sheer number of conversations I overheard that had fallen hook, line, and sinker for the already-hoary marketing device of "These are the real tapes! This really happened!" But nitpicking seems less important in the face of a few truly Richter-scale jolts. The worst for me: the leg. (Click here for Kris Tapley's take.)

I came home at 2am, keyed myself into my apartment, and my partner, expecting my arrival and knowing where I had been, had the sweet disposition but the extraordinarily bad luck to be standing in three-quarters shadow in the first doorway you see as you enter from the hallway of my building. I am not proud, but Reader, I shrieked like a mandrill and stumbled backward all the way into the elevator door.

P.S. Resist the urge to watch the trailer for this film, if at all possible. I gather from Kris's piece that a key bit of action is spoiled, and an incredibly starkers moment in the film would have been spoiled entirely for me if I'd known what to expect.

'Georgia' on My Mind

Still immersed in a long bout of writing and revision in my professional life, but as usual in these moments, through some bizarrely homeopathic logic, the most sustaining activity during my daily breaks turns out to be more writing—as long as it's about something I love. And since I've had no time to watch or re-watch for the Films of the 00s feature, I am turning to the next film up on my Favorites countdown, which seems to be one of the most popular features on this site anyway. Which means a trip back to Georgia, a film that generated a surprisingly robust love-it-or-hate-it conversation among critics and audiences in 1995, given the brevity of its release and its undeserved short-shirking by awards bodies, notwithstanding Mare Winningham's Oscar nomination (which should have netted the actual trophy) and Jennifer Jason Leigh's prize from the New York Film Critics Circle. Georgia got under a lot of people's skins, but that's part of what love is, as the movie is only too ready to show you. I wish the film and its actors had maintained even more momentum in the last few years, though Leigh, Winningham, Ted Levine, and Max Perlich keep fighting the good fight with dedication and purpose in character parts, and somehow that's a great legacy for Georgia to have. It's like an ideal, often-ignored album by a group of artists who have only united that one time, and have flirted off and on with the cultural radar even in their solo careers—but if you're receptive to it, you'll never stop spinning it. And of course, the musical metaphor isn't an accident:

"Georgia's key tool for dissecting and complicating the sisters and their relationships is its completely unerring gift for intensely focused realism, a completely unerring gift for intensely focused realism, a deep familiarity with character and environment that one rarely sees outside of a Mike Leigh movie, and with a deeper, richer palette and a sophisticated approach to rhythm and concision that Leigh's films, in their thespian virtuosity and their thinly laminated improvisations, sometimes miss. Ulu Grosbard, a solid actor's director who hasn't made another movie to touch this one, uses the songs ingeniously to carry the scenes and guide their textures, to include his pitch-perfect recognitions of the kinds of wanderlusters, make-doers, drop-outs, long-distance runners, and swaggering, self-conscious 'legends' who combine to scratch out a living or a niche, or a phantom-image of both, in the traveling world of music. And without making a movie that makes an issue of shattering any conventions, Grosbard still plays as though there are no rules, dilating the song performances for much longer than usual in a non-concert film, and often back-to-back, almost the way David Cronenberg used the sex scenes in Crash..."

Keep reading for more on Georgia's unimprovable acting, terrific music, and terse but adventurous direction, and for why all this matters to you if you loved Rachel Getting Married, or if you loyally love the Oscars but don't always know why.

How Stupid Were My Chocolates

Head over to Mike's house for our latest three-way installment in the Best Pictures from the Outside In series, archived here and here. You won't be surprised that we get a little more into John Ford than Bubba Gump, but as always, we had a great time with our conversation, and the comment thread has already been rich and provocative.

As an extra Saturn-ring of cinephile context, Nathaniel returned to the hit factory of 1994 and put himself back in touch with his love for Pulp Fiction, Queen Margot, Heavenly Creatures, and two Nick's Flick Picks favorites, Bullets over Broadway and Vanya on 42nd Street. My 1994 retrospective page is here, but I mostly tipped to the other half of our BP dossier and got caught up on 1941. Best Picture-wise, I'd break things down this way:

1. Citizen Kane: Innovative in technique, articulate with form, juicy in narrative, acted like gangbusters, contentious among the power caste... what could be better? What more do I really need to say? A+

2. The Maltese Falcon: Never a favorite but it's grown on me tremendously, especially as the profound amorality of the narrative and the marked perversity of Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to say nothing of the rogue's gallery surrounding them, have become clearer to me. The direction remains pretty cold and some plot turns can feel formulaic, but most others feel heroically unromantic and excitingly twisty, and Sydney Greenstreet is a dream of a villain. A–

3. How Green Was My Valley: Well, you know now what I think of this one. B+

4. The Little Foxes: Can be a bit overbearingly acted and staged, and Teresa Wright botches a pivotal role, but the muscle and ambition of the piece are fantastic. It's a bold thesis about what cinema can do for stage works, arranging characters along concrete sightlines and in complex formations of power and visibility, and Marshall and Collinge are superb. B+

5. Here Comes Mr. Jordan: Undistinguished in style but scripted, paced, acted, and shot with warmth, pizzazz, and improving notes of melancholy. The kind of movie you can share and enjoy with just about anybody, I'd guess. Goofy and endearing without being too screwball for some tastes. Full review here. B+

6. Sergeant York: More than a little hokum in the story and staging and in Gary Cooper's performance, but there's also plenty of meat in both, and Hawks injects enough humor and unexpected, inventive angles that the movie is less of a sell-out than I'd feared. B–

7. Hold Back the Dawn: Another Wilder-Brackett script characterized more by conceits and genre interrogations than by a truly layered or engaging story, and Mitchell Leisen struggles to get the story out from underneath the weight of the "moody" photography and the Boyer narration. But it's more interesting the second time around, and Paulette Goddard's quite good. C+

8. Blossoms in the Dust: Beautiful color photography and MGM frippery ornamenting this standard-issue biopic of a plucky and pretty moral crusader, this time Greer Garson serving the cause of American orphans and illegitimates. C+

9. One Foot in Heaven: How to be a narcissistic minister while imagining yourself to be a caretaker-provider in service of your family and the lord. Adequately acted by Fredric March and Martha Scott (she's better here than in Our Town), but a pretty gratuitous film. The opposite of memorable, and not the least bit advancing of the art or of the audience. C–

10. Suspicion: Hitchcock adrift, without a solid beginning or a coherent ending, and only indifferently managing the long bout of marital alienation in the middle. Props to the glass of milk and to the seriocomic approach to the idea that you never really know who your partner is. But Fontaine's even milkier than the drink that the oddly clunky Grant is serving her, and the whole thing is stranded between lazy executions and nervous bouts of ostentatious formalism. C–

And here's the cherry on top, even if it forces us to keep engaging with the frustrating Suspicion: if you're wondering what I think of the leading ladies of 1941, after such a long absence from this feature, here's your chance to find out... and here 's your chance to vote your own conscience!

I'm Buying What Merchant's Selling

Wow, no love for Solaris, huh? Awful quiet around that entry. Maybe this one'll fare better.

No Longer in My Thirties...

...but only insofar as Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai was my last entry in this bracket before we move up to the 20s. The oxygen is getting thinner—and not just because we're climbing higher. We're actually prepping for a quick launch into outer space. But Ghost Dog would advise us to be cool and stay in the present moment. Don't rush. Read and absorb. And I'm sure he'd tell you to leave a comment.

Toddie Gets Listed

We've done a Campion short, so why not a Haynes? In fact, why not two?

Hey, Shanna, You Made My Cut!

So, one last reminder: we've been leap-frogging and lily-padding up the list in order to fill holes that were created by my reshuffling, a necessity after resuming this hibernating Favorites project. If we were advancing step by step, as we'll soon have the luxury to do, we would have advanced from the Woody Allen duo I unveiled yesterday at #48 to everyone's favorite water-safety crusader at #47, then to three barely consolable women at #46, and then to yet more Woody, at his dearest and most delicate, at #45. I'm hoping all these new entries are luring people back to the ones I wrote before the great Rip Van Winkle nap of 2006-2008.

But any cheerleader who's worth her high kicks is also up to a huge, bounding jump now and then, so if you're vaulting straight from #48 to #44, you're in good company. Just watch your back, and be careful not to upstage anyone who cares even more wildly than you do... (P.S. Slightly edited, since I forgot to explain why I often only want to watch the first half.)

Thanks for the Memories, Jane!

December 3: To you, just a Wednesday, with perhaps a gleam of specialness for being Julianne Moore's birthday (very commendable of you to remember). But for me, the 15th anniversary of the first time I saw The Piano, alone, at a matinée screening across the street from my public high school in Fairfax, Virginia. Nothing was ever the same afterward, and it still isn't. A giant (tuning?) fork in my road. My "mind's voice," in Ada McGrath's terms, is still hugely influenced by this film.

So, please permit a day-long interruption in the Favorites entries while we celebrate 15 gorgeous and clickable images from my actual favorite movie ever made, which would certainly top the countdown if it weren't disqualified by also being one of the best movies ever made.