AFI 100 Best Movies

[Colin]

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Since I have seen almost all of the American Film Institutes 100 Best Movies, I used the library and Intelliflix to scout out the dozen or so films that I have not seen.

So far, I have not been disappointed. A Place in the Sun with Shelly Winters and Montgomery Cliff, The Third Man in Orson Welles style, An American in Paris with Gene Kelly, The Wild Bunch with William Holden, Cleopatra with Richard Burton, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover with Michael Gambon (Dumbledore) and Helen Mirren have all provided an evening,s worth of top notch entertainment.

Some of the old Chaplin stuff is next.

Watched Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with Myrna Loy last night. Long, but excellent film about three WWII veterans returning home to their women and jobs.

Considering that this was made a year after WWII ended, and one of the soldiers is severally maimed, this is an excellent portrait of peoples real day-to-day lives. Winner of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, director, actor and screenplay, William Wyler's brilliant drama about adjustment is one of the all-time classics of American cinema. It spans a complex range of honest emotions, from joyous celebration and happy reunion to deep-rooted ambivalence and reassessment of personal priorities.

In vivid contrast to the gorgeous lighting which decorates every scene in The Cook et all as if every scene is a carnival show, this B&W movie is brightly illuminated in every nook and cranny. All the rooms are sunny and happy, as if it is always mid-day: even the closet is lit, casting shadows into the room. The effect is the raw wood of truth; unvarnished reality for those three men and the women who love them.

Deus ex machine is a Greek and Roman dramatic trick, where a god/person/machine suddenly resolves the plot, extricating the protagonist from a difficult situation: in Westerns, the cavalry arrives to save the day. In a brilliant reversal of deus ex machine, the director shows just how much he really was involved in every nuance of this personal story.

Long before special effects, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Hollywood relied more on dialogue, emotional acting and sheer entertainment talent to tell a story. Here the director changed the script to employ a severally disabled non-actor, Harold Russell (in his one and only film role) as a sailor who lost both hands in an explosion. During the film, you marvel as Russell uses his metal hooks, but never see his arms without them. The director wisely keeps this for the end.

In a pivotal scene, the maimed Russell removes the machinery (his hands) from the plot, revealing his all too human self.

I hate when great books are made into mediocre movies (even though I have to see them). I hate when great movies are redone into mediocre ones. Yet I think this movie needs to be redone. If Dracula can be on stage, this movie might even be possible to reprise on the stage.

This movie needs to be redone because:

q as a war movie without violence is real and relevant today

q history has forgotten the actors

q the vintage small town footage is quaint, but outdated

q it needs updating: the risqué of divorce for example is gone

q the lighting makes it look as if the whole thing was shot on a sound stage

q it needs color
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[toddvj]

I'm also going to start working on seeing the films from the list that I haven't yet seen. There are quite a few I've yet to see. Funny that you had the same idea.