#8 The Graduate (1967): I thought parts of this film were brilliant and parts of it not so much.  There are some very familiar – one might say “well-worn” comic tropes in this movie.  I’d also argue it is uneven in tone in a way that isn’t so much unique as off-putting.  The sequence with the diving suit was funny (I couldn’t help but think of Ralphie and the pink bunny suit in “A Christmas Story”).  It was also on-point in that it emphasized the idea that Benjamin was insulated from his own life.  Still, it felt awkward to me – like a good idea that belonged in a different movie.  Still, the parts that are brilliant just shine.  The montage of Benjamin floating through his life by alternating between cuts of him floating on the pool and having sex with Mrs. Robinson was brilliant.  The camera work and editing made that effective.  Another piece of camera work I was really impressed by was the confrontation between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson outside of Elaine’s bedroom, where she is shot small and hunched in a corner against this large white angled wall and ceiling – emphasizing the idea of her vulnerability and the notion of a dangerous and cornered animal at the same time.  Finally that last shot – the young lovers ride away on the bus – but the shot doesn’t just end, it lingers… and lingers.  They never speak.  Is this really a happy ending?  Is there such a thing?  It is so deliciously uncertain.

#9 Singin’ in the Rain (1952): A Post-modernist classic, in the same sense that “Green Acres” was an Absurdist classic.  Here we have a film about the story behind the making of the film we just watched.  It features musical sequences as delightfully unconnected to the narrative flow of the rest of the movie as anything produced in Bollywood.  Beautiful.  Seriously, what’s not to love?  Gene Kelly doing his most iconic work.  Donald O’Connor at his best.  A young Debbie Reynolds holding her own on the screen with them both.  Romance, comedy, a loving mirror held up to itself – everything Hollywood was best at when it was at its best.  I just felt better after I watched it.

I’m going to save “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” for later.

Just for my own ego, I’m going to mention that I’m starting here with the twenty-some movies on this top 100 list I’ve never seen (although I’ve violated that with the first two, ”Casablanca” and “Citizen Kane”) and then am going to move on to about ten more that I’ve seen already but, for various reason, retain little impression of or saw so long ago I need to view them afresh (“The Apartment” is a good example of the former and “Taxi Driver” a good example of the latter.)  After that it is going to be a process of re-watching films I’m more or less familiar with.

Oh, and the numbers are just the order I’m watching them in.

So, onwards.  I’ve watched five more from the list since I last posted.  I’m going to be a bit brief with them in the interests of getting caught up.

First, two Billy Wilder films: #4 “Some Like It Hot” and #5 “Sunset Boulevard”

#4 “Some Like it Hot” (1959): I really enjoyed it, but I don’t have much to say about it.  It is funny (although I’ve never really been bowled over by the who mainstream drag-humor thing – I always found Milton Berle funnier in a tux than in a dress).  I think this is a movie where you can see that “Marilyn Monroe thing.”  Her character should be an instantly forgettable Hollywood stereotype blonde bimbo, but there is something more there.  Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were hysterical.  Wilder is at his best dealing with showbiz.  It is kind of like “Stagecoach” in that it uses but also invents a genre of films we’ve all seen a hundred times since.  Therefore it is simultaneously epochal and a bit familiar.

#5 “Sunset Boulevard” (1950): Where to start?  You have here a movie that manages to be both a loving tribute and a savage parody of Hollywood at the same time.  Gloria Swanson is funny, poignant, pathetic, and towering.  William Holden is playing that tarnished rogue he perfected and that no one has ever done quite as well since.  Erich von Stroheim, Jack Webb, cameos by half of Golden-Age Hollywood – including Cecil B. DeMille, and a dead chimp – all in a brilliant mishmash of film noir, romance, and Hollywood.  I loved it.

#6 “To Kill a Mockingbird”  (1962): Ever since my father’s death, I’ve become incredibly weepy at stories about fathers and children.  When the reverend tells Jem and Scout to stand as their father leaves the courtroom, I just lost it.  Cynics can call this manipulative, I call it moving.  This is a signature role for one of the greatest actors in American film (or anywhere – let’s face it) – Gregory Peck.  It has Robert Duvall’s first film role.  It combines a great courtroom drama with a great study of American racism, adds in an exploration of what it means to be ethical, what heroism is, and what it means to be a father – and the movie does them all well.  This is one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. 

It is late, so I’m closing this here.  I’ll try to finish the catch-up post tomorrow with #7 Psycho, #8 The Graduate, #9 Singing in the Rain, and #10 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (another I’ve seen many times, but happened to watch again a couple of weeks ago).

This was my first time watching the whole film, which may have colored my response to it.  As I said earlier, I liked it, but it didn’t inspire any deep thinking.  Elia Kazan gives us an excellent story incorporating some of the big themes in American films - particularly the little guy standing up against the system and the quest for personal redemption.  However, what I was most struck by were the performances.  Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando stand out, but this is a film filled with great actors.

Rod Steiger probably couldn’t land a role on TV now – I doubt anyone ever called him pretty - but he is a consummate actor.  As I watched him I remembered other roles of his, particularly as Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night (a movie I love and which we will be visiting again in a later post).  What I remembered was how completely different that character was from Charley, the cold and intellectual toady he plays in this film.  Steiger is an example of what I think is a dying breed – the true character actor, the professional who is more interesting in portraying another person than they are in reminding the audience who is doing the portraying.

I particularly enjoyed Marlon Brando here as Terry.  Like in The Godfather he creates a character through subtle touches (Vito Corleone also exhibits some unsubtle touches – but I think what makes Brando so great in that film are the subtle things he did with the character – minor gestures and expression changes. Again – to be continued at a later date…)  I can’t help contrasting two of his iconic scenes in film.  First, in this film we see the subtlety of the conversation in the car with Charley where we discover how he sold Terry out to the big mob boss Johnny Friendly.  Brando conveys deep pain and disappointment for the way his brother ruined his life – and the way he let it happen to himself – without screaming histrionics.  Then we look at the famous scene from A Streetcar Named Desire (a movie I am not in love with – but that is for another post) with Brando in torn shirt yelling “Stella” in the street.  It could just be my own emotionally minimalist esthetic, but I think there is more real emotion in Terry’s quiet monologue than in Stanley Kowalski’s passionate cries.

Behind all this, three solid supporting performances from other great actors.  First, Lee J. Cobb as Johnny Friendly was almost a prototype for Tony Soprano – the charming mob boss who we can never forget is a monster, even though he doesn’t believe he is one.  Second, Eva Marie Saint who won an Oscar for her role as Edie, the person whose sense of decency and desire for justice for her slain brother acts as a catalyst for everything that happens in the film.  She manages to shine through despite a very testosterone laden script.  Finally there is Karl Malden as Father Barry.  I think Malden was an actor who could take the lead, but he really shines in making great things out of smaller parts (Josh Brolin, who I just saw again in the Coen Brother’s adaptation of  True Grit comes to mind as someone who does the same thing).  Here we see Father Barry as the man who helps Terry find his conscience, but we also see his own transition from viewer to participant in the events at the docks – and in just a few scenes.

I’ve already watched film #4 for this project – Some Like it Hot (1959).  Film #5 – which I’ve just received from Netflix – will be To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

The second list film I watched was “Citizen Kane,” a movie widely hailed on such lists, usually at the top.  It is also one of the most written-about films ever produced.  I can’t hope to add anything my personal observations to that mass of work.

The first thing that struck me on this viewing is what struck me the first time I watched the movie, and that is how entertaining it is.  I came to this film late, when I was well into my 20s.  I’d been hearing about it for years.  Because of all the critical praise, I approached watching the film almost as a cultural duty.  If I was going to keep yapping at people about films I had to go watch this movie.  It was being shown at the student center at the University of Iowa one evening, so I went.  I expected to admire the film for all the reasons I’d heard – the cinematography, the editing, the directing…  What I didn’t expect was that I would simply like it as a movie.  But I did.

The film moves between moments: sorrow, despair, joy tinged with sorrow, simple joy.  It is fun and moving to watch.  It has a simple story; a wealthy man dies and a newsman tries to discover the meaning of his final words – the infamous “Rosebud” – by interviewing the people closest to him.  What follows is a semi-linear series of narrated vignettes showing the most significant moments in this man’s life.  Everything in the film works on multiple levels and I think you can carry away from it as much as you choose. 

One thing that really struck me this time was the acting talent of Orson Welles.  Biopics that age the actor with make-up are commonplace, but Welles conveys that stages of Kane’s life so effectively, especially with his changing physicality, from the exuberant young man dancing at an office party to the stiff older man throwing a tantrum when his wife leaves him. 

It is also fascinating how much of an enigma Kane remains at the end of the film. After over ninety minutes of scenes showing us the moments that made this man who he was as a person (the story of his rise and fall in business is almost secondary), I’m still left with the feeling that I don’t really understand him – and that maybe we can’t ever fully understand anyone.

Two further observations:

First – watching this soon after the holidays I was struck by how similar this story is to A Christmas Carol – but without the redemption at the end.  Still, I suppose that is because both touch on the reality that we move through life from the hopefulness of youth toward the inevitability of death, and many become bitter and empty along the way.  Also, both stories feature the idea that wealth cannot give happiness; either in its unrelenting pursuit (Scrooge) or in its inheritance (Kane).

Second – it struck me that Kane is a symbol of America.  He is sent away by his mother “for his own good” and never recovers from that sense of isolation – which I think is echoed in America’s sense of itself, including a traditional resentment of the European culture we borrowed so much from.  While resenting the European powers, and insisting we were “exceptional” and different, we eventually came to resemble them on the world stage – much as Kane seeks to be everything his adoptive father hates, but becomes a tychoon and dies old, and alone like him.  America constantly seeks to re-make the world in its image as Kane sought to use his wealth to make the world what he wanted it to be.  America demands the world’s love, as did Kane, and both try to purchase it.  America grew rich and powerful, in part on its own efforts, but also on a foundation of land and labor stolen from others and huge investments from the Europe it saw as old and decadent.  Kane tries to do many admirable things, and sometimes succeeds, but the foundation of his wealth is the mine he inherited from the mother who abandoned him.  I know someone who argues that John Wayne in “The Searchers” represents America’s view of itself.  Maybe Kane is more a representation of America as viewed by others, as in the film we never see him except through the eyes of others.

I’ve already seen film #3 – “On the Waterfront”.  I’ll post about that one soon.

We’ve hit an important moment of healing in the cultural wars that divide us.  I’m speaking here of the debate between the vast majority of people who thought that the new millennium and century began on Jan. 1, 2000 and those of us who can count who knew it didn’t start until Jan. 1, 2001.  Well, that is over now, because both sides would agree that the first decade ends tonight with the last day of 2010.  Our long national nightmare is at an end.  My thoughts tonight are more about the last 10 years than the last year alone.

I’m having trouble thinking of a single serious problem we’ve resolved as a species, or even as a nation, in the last ten years.  Climate change plows onward and our collective response is to take a page from the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook.  We keep trying to Disbelieve the problem away even as it eats us.  Ditto Social Security.  Perhaps we could all join together and watch the High Brazil sequence of Erik the Viking as an object lesson on the effectiveness of this strategy.

We were led in to the worse economic disaster since the great depression by businessmen, political leaders, and our own greed.  We’ve responded by allowing these same individuals to write the new laws governing their actions.

In 2001 we went into Afghanistan and in 2003 we went into Iraq.  In both cases critics used the word “quagmire” and cited our experiences in Vietnam.  In both cases those critics were attacked as un-patriotic and the comparisons to Vietnam were dismissed (the voices of dismissal included, I am ashamed to say, me – though not the questioning of patriotism).  It is 2010 and still our troops are there.

I’ve been waiting for the cultural and political pendulum to swing back towards the left and it shows no sign of doing so.  I’m increasingly afraid that things are going to get very ugly in this country.  I keep thinking about Farenheit 451, a novel I believe is widely mis-understood.  It isn’t the story of a society that was subjugated by oppression, it is about a society that willingly gave up its freedom in the name of safety, convenience, and entertainment.  Society gave up its books because they were boring and hard.  Next week I’ll go to an opening session of my college and will probably hear again about the need to accommodate our student’s unique needs and I’ll think of that anti-intellectual society Bradbury depicted, and then I’ll shiver a bit… and I’ll go back to my office and see what is happening on Facebook.  I’ll go home where I’ll see a mass emotional commitment to celebrities and the figures of reality TV and remember the talking walls of Montag’s house and I’ll shiver a bit… and then I’ll turn on Netflix.

On a more personal level, at the beginning of this decade I had two living parents and three living grandparents, none of whom are with me anymore.  I did not have a full-time job, now I do.  With a few exceptions I did not know most of the people I would consider my closest friends today.  I drove a 1982 Ford Mustang, I did not own a single dvd, and no one I knew owned a cell-phone.  I still had a computer with a Pentium I chip.  I believed in a god even though I had to keep jumping through hoops in my own thinking to do so.

I guess I was much more optimistic about the world in general and much more pessimistic about my own life a decade ago.  Now the balance has shifted the other way.

Finally, we are now one decade into the 21st century, and still I have one big question that I’ve had for ten years now:

Where the hell is my flying car?

Happy New Year.