All About Bette Davis

I recently flipped on TCM right as a movie called All About Eve was beginning. It sucked me in and I watched the whole thing, later to discover it was on my top 100 list. How convenient.

The voice-over annoyed me in parts but Bette Davis (above) blew me away. What a fabulous actress! She was so real. She wasn't the usual glamour leading lady of the era nor was she some other archetype. She had a lot of dimension. I highly recommend checking out this flick. It's about fame, and relationships, and most importantly keeps you wondering about people's true intentions right until the last 20 minutes.

I'm back (The Silence of the Lambs)

Sorry for the big gap in posts.








So I finally saw The Silence of the Lambs. Spoiler alert (it is 17 years old though)....







Hannibal totally cut off that guys face and used it as a mask! Holy crap, yes he did.





That was crazy.

Terminal 13

This is the scene (above) where I died, well to say more correctly where I was laid out on a cold floor for 2 hours drenched in blood with pencils stuck in my chest.

2 years ago I worked as a PA on (and occasionally died in) a little low budget indie called The Signal. This film went on to play at Sundance and get a distribution deal which means it's hitting theaters this Friday. There is a list of theaters it will be playing on the site The Signal. I saw an earlier version almost a year ago, so I can honestly vouch for it and say, it's great.

Here's what Mike over at Thoughtmarker had to say: "If you enjoy survival thrillers like 28 Days Later or Dawn of the Dead, then you have no excuse not to see locally produced, critically acclaimed, triumphantly thrilling The Signal . It opens nation wide this weekend, but if you slept with the right people you'll be watching it with me at Thursday's premiere at The Plaza."

So you know where I'll be Thursday night.... Do you have the crazy?

"If I say I'm an oil man you will agree."

In the past I was never a person to rave about a performance. I appreciated good acting, but typically only mentioned it if it were bad. If the movie wowed me I usually took it to be because of great storytelling, execution, and acting, I thought of acting last and least (not that I didn't admire it, I just didn't consider it often). Today I cannot write another entry about an AFI film without first raving about Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. I feel like I met Daniel Plainview today. I sat in the theater and met a real person. He stunned me. I was desperate to see his reactions to life. I understood him, I was confused by him, I felt many emotions, but more than that I just sat in awe. His wonderful performance in no way took me out of the film (I didn't sit there analyzing him and not enjoying the movie) it only drew me in. This is not to discredit Paul Thomas Anderson's directing, or attribute the film only to Daniel Day-Lewis, a group effort is always involved; but today Daniel Day-Lewis just blew me away.

The Millennium ...I mean The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is one cool (though hard-boiled) detective film. Many consider it a film noir, and it does have many of those elements, but I don't think it is quite as dark and cynical as the typical noir (go google "film noir" if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about).Humphrey Bogart is at his most sly. He's a PI hired to find a lady's missing sister, and it get complicated from there. Everything Sam Spade (Bogart) does is calculated. Even when you think he's finally lost his cool in all the conniving, and hurls a glass across a hotel room, he leaves smiling; Sam's given just the performance he intended.You're never quite sure what he's planning, but you know that he's already two steps ahead. There are several interesting facts about this film. One, is it has three of the cast members of Casablanca (1945) in leading roles: Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet. This was Sydney Greenstreet's first film and the beginning of a sucessful career (he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for this film). Perhaps most notably this is John Huston's directorial debut. He was already an established screenwriter (he wrote this film as well) but had never been given the chance to try his hand at directing. The Maltese Falcon marked the beginning of a career that would span four decades and bring us such classics as: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo (both 1948) to name a few.

Sunrise

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) this silent film starring Janet Gaynor and George O'Brian was overall quite enjoyable. It had parts in the middle that got a bit long, but the scary parts (leading up to a murder) were still very intense. The music helped this feeling a lot and was Fox's first movie with a recorded score . The romance was sweet and the acting wasn't over done. So often a movie from the silent era seems over-acted and it's hard to get into the mood of the film because you're watching something practically for another world. This film however, holds up well. One thing about silent movies that some people don't realize, is that often the scenes are just that....silent. We don't know what they said. The cards slipped in with lines are often just one sentence like "I love you," while the lovers on screen are actually deep in a conversation of admiration for one another. Good acting has to carry these scenes. We have to feel like we know what is being exchanged between two people even though we're only told a little of what is said. I think Gaynor and O'Brian had a chemistry that did this wonderfully. Janet Gaynor reminded me quite a bit of Olivia de Haviland (one of my favorites). The movie had some cool and artistic camera tricks involving double exposures (all done in-camera). In 1927 the Best Picture oscar went to "Wings" but "Sunrise" won the top prize in the category of "Artistic Quality of Production" This was the only year that award was given out. Though "Sunrise" wasn't a huge commercial success, the Academy did recognize it's beautiful and artistic qualities.

What I've yet to see...

Here is a list of the movies that I have yet to see. Over the 31 days of Oscar on TCM I'm taping 28 of the movies needed, so after I work through those I'll reevaluate what remains...

At risk of being shocked and appalled by some classics that I haven't seen (sometimes a movie slips through the cracks you know) here is what I need to watch:

Raging Bull (1980)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Schindler's List (1993)
City Lights (1932)
The Searchers (1956)
Sunset Blvd (1950)
The General (1967)
On the Waterfront (1946)
Chinatown (1974)
Some Like it Hot (1959)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
High Noon (1952) ---I saw this as a child, but it was so long ago that I'm going to rewatch it
All about Eve (1950)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Bridge over the River Kwai (1957)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
King Kong (1933)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Shane (1953)
It Happened One Night (1934)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Intolerance (1916)
West Side Story (1961)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Mash (1970)
Jaws (1975)
Nashville (1975)
Duck Soup (1933)
Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Cabaret (1972)
Network (1976)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)
Unforgiven (1992)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
All the President's Men (1976)
Modern Times (1936)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
The Apartment (1960)
Sunrise (1927)
Easy Rider (1969)
Phantom of the Opera (1935)
Platoon (1986)
Swing Time (1936)
Sophie's Choice (1982)
Goodfellas (1990)
The French Connection (1971)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Do the Right Thing 1989)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

The Ones I've Seen...

Thanks for the suggestion Mike, I'd actually already planned to post a list of the movies I've already seen. So out of the 100, here they are:

Citizane Kane (1941)
The God Father (1972)
Casablanca (1942)
Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Vertigo (1958)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Star Wars (1977)
Psycho (1960)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The Graduate (1967)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
E.T. (1982)
To Kill a Mockinbird (1962)
Double Indeminity (1944)
The Godfather pt II (1974)
Snow White (1937)
Annie Hall (1977)
The Sound of Music (1965)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Rear Window (1954)
LotR: Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
North by Northwest (1959)
Rocky (1976)
The Gold Rush (1925)
American Graffiti (1973)
The African Queen (1951)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Tootsie (1982)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Spartacus (1960)
Titanic (1997)
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Blade Runner (1982)
Toy Story (1995)
Ben-Hur (1959)
.....a list of the ones remaining coming soon....

The Beginning

So I've thought about starting a blog for a while, but could never settle on what it would really be about. In the midst of the writer's strike (and at the suggestion of Entertainment Weekly) I decided to work my way through all of the American Film Institute's top 100 movies (the 10th anniversary list). I've always enjoyed writing about movies and the AFI list provides a solidified theme to the blog. I'll probably also include various entries about what I'm up to, what new clothes I've created, (I'm also tailoring friends clothes for good prices...keep that in mind) and other not-on-the-list-movies, but AFI is the thread that runs throughout.

I chose the AFI list as opposed to just the Best Picture winners because the AFI list was more inclusive, as Mike (the boyfriend, his name will probably come up often) pointed out more than one movie from a certain year can be on the list.

I downloaded the list, which you can do here: http://connect.afi.com/site/PageServer?JServSessionIdr004=pli90lk0c4.app46a&pagename=100yearslist (it's lame, they make you register to get the full list) and checked off the ones I'd already seen. Thanks to film school and a general desire to see older movies I've already seen 39 out of the 100 films on the list. This was a perfect time to start doing this because TCM is in the process of the 31 days of Oscar. I made a list of when AFI list movies would be on, got a bunch of old VHS tapes from my mom's, and have been taping films since the beginning of Feb. First review to come soon...