The Screengrab : all about eve

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

Tilda Swinton & A Plate of Brownies

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Tilda Swinton didn't get a reputation as being one of the quirkiest women in the movie business by doing things the easy way. She's almost always chosen the odd role, the unusal acting choice, the baffling if ever so charming interview: in the absence of Bjork actually making any more movies, which she has vowed not to do after having been traumatized by Lars Von Trier in Dancer in the Dark, Tilda Swinton fills the role of the Bjork of the motion picture industry.

So it stands to reason that when she dipped her toe into the overcrowded world of film festivals, it wouldn't be your typical red carpet affair. Next month, Swinton and her collaborator, Mark Cousins, will be debuting the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams festival in her hometown of Nairn, Scotland. Admission will be three British pounds or a tray of baked goods (out of which an effigy of Michael Powell will be made); seating will be in beanbag chairs; and the theme of the festival, if it has one, is films with "highly colored, dreamlike elements." Cousins describes the festival as "having an element of punk about it", and says that the focus will be on mood and tone rather than celebrity-sighting and premiere-mania.

While the program for the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams Festival has yet to be announced, it's known that Joel Coen will be selecting the films on two nights of its run, so it should, if nothing else, be a cinephile's dream come true. Additionally, prior ot a screening of All About Eve, there will be a screening of...a Bjork video. Well of course there will.

DVD Digest for April 8, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cracked fantasy favorite finally gets the DVD it deserves, and DVD lovers can finally order their milkshakes to go.

For most moviegoers, the big news this week is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece There Will Be Blood in DVD. But while that's cause for celebration, be warned- as with Sweeney Todd last week, Paramount is releasing the film in two separate versions, a bare-bones single-disc release and a two-disc set featuring some deleted scenes and a number of featurettes about the making of, and history behind, the film. Normally, I'd be skeptical about the relatively slim pickings even on the two-disc set, but Anderson's recent DVD releases haven't contained too much in the way of commentaries and the like, so this was to be expected from him. Besides, it's not like you're NOT going to buy There Will Be Blood- it's awesome enough to stand on its own merits without all the snazzy bells and whistles.

But no less noteworthy is the release of a new version of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Munchausen, a notorious flop in its day, has since become something of a cult favorite, and it's good to see Sony finally giving it a good DVD treatment. Naturally, there's a Terry Gilliam commentary track, which should be reason enough to buy the DVD, considering that Gilliam's commentaries are never better than when he's talking about films that were mishandled by their distributors. The two-disc set also includes the three-part documentary "The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen," as well as storyboard sequences that supposedly feature "all-new vocal performances by Terry Gilliam and Chris McKeown." Dare I hope Gilliam drew the storyboards in Pythonimation style?

In other classics coming to DVD news, Fox is continuing the celebration of Bette Davis with a six-disc Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection that includes a new two-disc version of All About Eve along with bare-bones discs of The Nanny, The Virgin Queen, Phone Call From a Stranger, and the gothic-horror classic Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Other than that, not much to write about in the classics department, unless of course the Blu-Ray release of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day blows your hair back. In which case don't let me stop you.

More recent titles being released on DVD this week include John C. Reilly in the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the family fantasy The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Robert Redford's star-studded Iraq War dud Lions For Lambs (MGM), and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and -narrated tree-hugger documentary The 11th Hour (Warner).

Finally, David Huddleston's checking in again this week, this time to offer his condolences to Warner's HD-DVD release of I Am Legend. You know, Huddleston's condolences might make me feel bad for Will Smith's character in the film, except I'm guessing he'd be grateful for the company.

That Gal!: Celeste Holm

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

This week's That Gal! accomplishes something that we get to do all too infrequently in this feature: profile a character actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood that we're lucky enough to still have with us. Celeste Holm was born in New Jersey at the height of the First World War, but didn't attain fame on the motion picture screen until after the Second: the daughter of a painter and a Norwegian insurance salesman (whose sharp Nordic features were reflected in his daughter's own face) worked on Broadway for over a decade, including a long and celebrated stint as the lead in the original run of Oklahoma!, before she was signed to an exclusive contract with 20th Century Fox in 1946.

She made an immediate impact in a number of supporting roles, establishing herself as one of the few women attractive enough to carry a lead performance but strong enough as an actress to inhabit challenging character parts. The majority of her dozens of films, however, were made in the 1950s, before Holm realized that the acting she loved first was the acting she loved best: despite a star-studded and highly decorated career on the silver screen, she far preferred stage acting, and returned to it almost exclusively in the 1960s and 1970s, occasionally doing television work to pay the bills before heading back to the footlights.&

The 1980s saw a mini-career renaissance for the tony, aristocratic actress, and age had diminished her acting chops not a whit: younger viewers got their first glimpse of her when she appeared in the wildly popular domestic comedy Three Men and a Baby in 1987. She hasn't made a movie in several years, but she's hardly stood idle; she's touring with a one-woman theatrical show, she's won a lawsuit against Pedro Almodovar for unauthorized use of her image, and, in grand Hollywood tradition, she's moved on to her fifth husband, an opera singer almost 50 years her junior. Now that's showbiz!

Where to see Celeste Holm at her best:

GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT (1947)

In only her third motion picture, Celeste Holm comes through with a career-making performance in this prestige Gregory Peck vehicle where a reporter goes undercover to expose hidden anti-Semitism. Message films such as this have lost a lot of their highbrow factor, but Holm's performance as the working-class woman with whom Peck has a brief affair before abandoning her for the charmless Dorothy McGuire still packs a wallop; viewers at the time agreed, rewarding her with an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

Holm's second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress came when she played opposite of Bette Davis in this film about a woman's rise to the top of the Hollywood ladder, and terrifying fall back down. It also provided her with a classic anecdote: when she first met the elemental Davis on set, she greeted her with a police "Good morning", to which Davis responded with the last words she'd ever exchange with Holm: "Aw, shit! Manners!"

HIGH SOCIETY (1956)

A celebrated musical adaptation of the already successful play and film The Philadelphia Story, High Society had tons of great songs and a great singer to deliver them in the person of Bing Crosby. Playing C.K. Dexter-Haven's lady love and comic foil, Liz Imbrie, Celeste Holm delivers a terrific comedic and musical role, really showing off the talents she developed during a decade on Broadway -- and, not coincidentally, gets off some of the movie's cleverest and slickest lines.