Melodrama Recommended Viewing List

Stella Dallas (Vidor 1937)
Leave Her To Heaven (Stahl 1945)
Mildred Pierce (Curiz 1945)
All That Heaven Allows (Sirkn 1955)
Written on the Wind (Sirk 1956)
There’s Always Tomorrow (Sirk 1956)
An Affair to Remember (McCarey 1957)
Imitation of Life (Sirk 1959)
Two Weeks in Another Town (Minnelli 1962)
Love Story (Hiller 1970)
Terms of Endearment (Brooks 1983)
Beaches (Marshall 1988)
Sleeping with the Enemy (Ruben 1991)
The Prince of Tides (Streisand 1991)
Message In A Bottle (Mandoki 1999)
Girl, Interrupted (Mangold 1999)
White Oleander (Kosminsky 2002)
Where the Heart Is (Williams 2002)
The Notebook (Cassavetes 2004)
Dear John (Hallstrom 2010)

Western and Film Noir recommended viewing lists

Westerns
My Darling Clementine (Ford 1946)
Red River (Hawks 1948)
Rio Bravo (Hawks 1951)
High Noon (1952 Zinnemann)
The Naked Spur (Mann 1953)
The Searchers (Ford 1956)
3:10 to Yuma (Daves 1957)
True Grit (Hathaway 1969)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Hill 1969)
Little Big Man (Penn 1970)
The Cowboys (Rydell 1972)
The Shootist (Siegel 1976)
Heaven’s Gate (Ciminio 1980)
Young Guns (Cain 1988)
Dances With Wolves (Costner 1990)
Unforgiven (Eastwood 1992)
Dead Man (Jarmusch 1995)
Open Range (Costner 2003)
3:10 to Yuma (Mangold 2007)
Appaloosa (Harris 2008)
True Grit (Coen 2010)
Rango (Verbinski 2011)

Film Noir/Crime
Little Caesar (LeRoy 1930)
Scarface (Hawks 1932)
The Maltese Falcon (Huston 1941)
This Gun For Hire (Tuttle 1942)
The Lady in the Window (Lang 1944)
Detour (Ulmer 1945)
The Big Sleep (Hawks 1946)
Born to Kill (Wise 1947)
The Big Clock (Farrow 1948)
White Heat (Walsh 1949)
DOA (Mate 1950)
Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950)
Sunset Boulevard (Wilder 1950)
Pickup on South Street (Fuller 1953)
The Blue Gardenia (Lang 1953)
The Big Heat (Lang 1953)
Touch of Evil (1958 Welles)
Chinatown (Polanski 1974)
Blood Simple (Coen 1984)
DOA (Jankel, Morton 1988)
Kill Me Again (Dahl 1989)
The Grifters (Frears 1990)
Red Rock West (Dahl 1993)
U Turn (Stone 1997)
The Departed (Scorcese 2006)

The American Motion Picture

This summer I'm teaching a section of LIT 227, the American Motion Picture. The idea is to link significant movies made over the last hundred years to important ideas, movements, and events in American culture while also educating students about the basics of cinematic vocabulary.

For me, it's just a fantastic opportunity to fuse some of the things that I love most -- watching movies, talking about them, and teaching. The fact that I'm getting paid too is just gravy.

So a few people have asked what films we're watching, what concepts I'm covering, etc. so I thought I'd just post some of my materials here. Anyone who wants to follow along for the next six weeks is more than welcome.

So here's our schedule:

Genre/Western
July 1        Stagecoach (Ford 1939)
July 3        Lone Star (Sayles 1996) Quiz #1 - Genre

Mis En Scene/Film Noir
July 8        Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich 1955) Quiz #2 – Mis En Scene
July 10      Brick (Johnson 2005) Film Analysis # 1 due - Western

Cinematography/MelodramaJuly 15        Magnificent Obsession (Sirk 1954) Quiz #3 - Cinematography
July 17        Far From Heaven (Haynes 2002) Film Analysis #2 due – Film Noir

Editing/Musical
July 22        Singin’ In The Rain (Kelly, Donen 1952) Quiz #4 - Editing
July 24        Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along  Blog (Whedon 2008), Moulin Rouge! (Luhrman 2001)
                    Film Analysis #3 due - Melodrama

Screenwriting/Comedy
July 29        His Girl Friday (Hawks 1940) Quiz #5 - Screenwriting
July 31        Intolerable Cruelty (Coen 2003) Film Analysis #4 due - Musical

Acting/Horror
Aug. 5        Dracula (Browning 1931) Quiz #6 – Acting, Final Paper Proposal due
Aug. 7        The Blair Witch Project (Myrick, Sanchez 1999) Film Analysis #5 due - Comedy

Ideology/Sci Fi
Aug. 12        Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel 1956) Quiz #7 - Ideology
Aug. 14        District 9 (Blomkamp 2009) Longer Film Analysis due – genre of your choice,
                     Final Exam?

The idea is that we watch a traditional/classic example of a given genre or subgenre on Tuesdays and then a more contemporary alternate or revisionist example of Thursdays. We talk about how they're the same, how they're different, how they fit within the confines of the genre, how they don't, etc.

Each week, the students also have to watch an additional movie on their own outside of class. I give them a list of twenty or so for each category from which they can choose. They have to write 500-1000 word analysis of each film demonstrating that they understand both the conventions of the genre and film concept of the week.

So last week, we covered westerns and talked about how they are sort of the creation myths of American culture. They are the stories we tell ourselves about where we think we've come from. They primarily focus on the weird collision between how we value ourselves as rugged individuals and how we need civilization and community. Tough loners tame the west usually in the name of law and order but then rarely stick around to enjoy the peace and community that come from it. They always have to move on because they're too tough, too crabby, too untamable to be plain ol' town folk. So what westerns seem to suggest is that, as Americans, we see ourselves as both communal and individual.

We watched John Ford's Stagecoach, one of the urtexts of American westerns and American film. Apparently, when Orson Welles was making Citizen Kane, he watched Stagecoach forty times because he considered it essentially a perfect film and wanted it to inspire his own work. To modern eyes, it's a little draggy in places and the musical interlude seems a little inexplicable, but all the western conventions are firmly in place, the sweeping shots of Monument Valley are appropriately breathtaking, and the stunts during the chase scene toward the end are really impressive. It may seem old fashioned in some ways, but that's mainly because the film has been aped, stolen from, and imitated ad infinitum, Westerns being made today are still trying to be Stagecoach. (There are several segments of last year's pretty terrible The Lone Ranger that I could point to as blatant Stagecoach rip offs.)

We actually didn't end up watching Lone Star because of a scheduling error I made, but it remains one of my favorite revisionist westerns. It takes place in modern day Texas in a small border town where the reserved, somewhat hesitant Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) is the sheriff of a the same town where his tough, rugged father Buddy Deeds (young Matthew McConaughey) was sheriff years before. The film asks questions about western identity; about borders between countries, cultures, people; and about links between parents and children. The film shifts back and forth in time between the late 1950s and the early 1990s, and the ways director John Sayles manages the flashbacks/flashforwards is nothing less than masterful. Every time there is a shift in time, the way the film pulls it off gives me that little shiver of "that's so cool!" that I go to the movies for. And, may I point out, the transitions are accomplished in a way that could really only be done on film. I highly recommend it. 

Anyway, I'll post the additional film list for both westerns and film noirs in another entry. If there's anything on them that piques your interest, look around on your favorite streaming service or online and give it a try.

Coming up this week is film noir, my favorite film subgenre of all time. Cool, tough, with a dark heart that's equal parts gun metal and bumper chrome, it is the epitome of post war disaffection. It is the dark shadow of the cheerful, sunlit 1950s. I'm excited. Can you tell?

Godzilla

Warning: There are very minor spoilers contained below. Godzilla is back and he is pissed off. Or at least he looks like it, and that is something that I really appreciate about the new movie version of the titular beast that came out last week. I grew up watching old, poorly dubbed Godzilla movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and I always liked the look on the giant dinosaur creature's face. As he was smashing cities or beating the irradiated tar out of Ghidorah, our scaly friend's face always seemed to communicate, "I don't have time for this stupid foolishness. I need to barbecue these idiots so I can make it back to my subterranean lair for a nap." He looked simultaneously wise and really irritated -- and I liked that.

So, in 1998, when writer-director Roland Emmerich, hot off the blockbuster success of Independence Day, released his version of the classic monster movie, one of the many, many things he got wrong was the look on the main character's face. That Godzilla was based on a cross between some kind of sea iguana and a Jurassic Park velociraptor rip-off. And in a movie called Godzilla, if your star doesn't look right, not much else is going to go right. Despite the massive marketing campaign behind Emmerich's version, the film was lame. Lamer than a hamstrung sprinter. Lamer than Seabiscuit - after he died. Lamer than wearing socks with sandals. Lamer than a Phish concert.

So I approached this new version with some trepidation, having been burned before. (I stood in line in the rain with my little brother to get tickets in 1998. This time around I went with Fandango.) I reserved my judgement until I actually got a good, clear view of the monster himself. Wisely, director Gareth Edwards delayed that until a full hour into the movie, but when it happened, I was plenty satisfied. As computer generated as he is, Godzilla simply looks like a very realistic version of himself - silly, little T-rex arms; an almost jolly-looking belly, a mountainous ridge of jagged plates along his spine; and yes, that pissed-off, "I'm gonna cook you with my atomic breath and you are NOT going to like it" look on his face. Yay.

The film essentially has three sections and a star for each section. The first section is headlined by Bryan Cranston, late of Breaking Bad. He plays Joe Brody, a nuclear engineer at a Japanese power plant. He has a charming wife, a loving son, and a ton of responsibility sitting on his shoulders as a pattern of tremors is drawing closer and closer to his facility. One fateful day, bad things happen and Brody loses his wife, his job and possibly his sanity forever. The film fast forwards us to fifteen years later, where we see that he is isolated, paranoid, and obsessed with what happened at his plant that day. His son, Ford, also haunted by loss, has grown into a beefy Navy explosive ordinance technician. The two men are not close, but circumstances bring them back together, and they're both arrested while trying to infiltrate the contamination zone surrounding their former home.

It's at the end of this section that we see what caused the destruction of the plant fifteen years before. A MUTO (massive unidentified terrestrial object - fancy codeword for "giant freakin' creature") burrowed its way to the plant that day and has been feeding off the radiation ever since. It's a gargantuan flying mantis monster that looks like it's made out of black leather and lava rock. It breaks out of its cocoon and things go south for many of the humans nearby, including Cranston's character.  This is unfortunate because, though the character hits many of the cliched beats of the former-genius-turned-paranoid-nutball-who-isn't-really- paranoid-at-all-but-instead-right-all-along-! Cranston imbues his character with a humanity and believability that is a rare commodity in a monster movie. He doesn't play the character with a wink. He just plays the character. 

The middle section is by far the least interesting. It is mostly the tale of Ford trying to make it back to San Francisco where we know his lovely wife and cute child await his return as two MUTOs and Godzilla approach. Ford, as played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is basically a cypher. Taylor-Johnson shows very little emotional range in his role and instead of coming across as haunted, determined, awestruck, or any other real emotion that someone in his place might feel, he just uses the same frozen, blank eyed look for every situation. His passivity creates little emotional buy-in for the viewer. Therefore, the section of the film in which he carries the bulk of the story is a little limp.

The star of third section? You guessed it - the G-man himself. Godzilla and the two MUTOs face off as they plow through downtown San Francisco. It's massively scaled and and expertly produced.The other thing that's wonderfully entertaining about this sequence (besides Godzilla's "I'm sick of this crap" facial expression) is how the filmmakers used the most advanced modern technology to effectively ape the fight choreography from the original films. This sounds wrong to say and I don't want you to get the wrong impression - but the monsters fight as though they are guys in rubber suits. When one of the MUTOs jumps on Godzilla's back, G reaches over his shoulder with his tiny arms, futilely trying to grab it, just like in the old days. Sounds cheesy and stupid, I know, and maybe I just like it for nostalgic reasons. But I don't think so. I don't think a twelve year old kid who has never seen an actual Toho-produced Godzilla movie would watch the fight scenes and think twice about them. But I can watch and smile. The best part, of course, is when Godzilla pulls out his ace - his fiery atomic breath. It was the thing that made me cheer as a kid and it was a perfect crescendo to the long battle sequence. Godzilla blasts it right down the throat of the one remaining MUTO and burns its head right off its body. He then tosses the head in the water with monster body language that appears to say, "Yeah, that's right." It's pretty boss, as monster moves go, I have to say.

As a film, though it's epic in scale, this new Godzilla is pretty modest in its impact. It doesn't send viewers away shaking their heads in awe at what they've seen. It doesn't raise any particularly provocative questions. That's too bad considering the original Godzilla began as Japanese filmmakers' veiled response to the horrors of atomic warfare. Like a lot of science fiction in the 50s and 60s, Godzilla was a way of dealing with anxieties about rapidly developing technology, the Cold War, and the constant threat of The Bomb. Rather than serve as social commentary, however, this new version is largely just a smash-a-thon. Fun but little more. It's not a bad way to spend two hours and ten bucks, especially if you are old enough to have been disappointed and underwhelmed in 1998. Spend your money and cleanse your cinematic palate. And if you don't? Here's what you-know-who has to say about that:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Before I review Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in the interest of full disclosure, there's something you need to know about me. In junior high and high school, when my friends were talking about the homecoming dance or the big game, I was probably somewhere deeply involved in a debate over the differences between the Uncanny X-Men and its teenage spin off, The New Mutants. When my peers were busily studying for an important exam, I was busily arranging my comic collection into alphabetical and numerical order. In other words, my friends, I was a gigantic comic book nerd. I still am actually, and this means I am kind of already in the tank when it comes to comic book movies.

This is not to say that I love every film featuring superheroes. We all know there have been some terrible cinematic atrocities committed in the name of Stan Lee over the last few years. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner as Daredevil and Elektra? The two nightmarish, borderline fever dreams of badness that were the Fantastic Four movies? No, I haven't taken leave of my senses enough to approve of garbage water like that.

But I root for superhero movies, for them to be good, for them to succeed. I want to be swept up and exhilarated by them the way I was by the comics when I was a kid. So I'm less likely to analyze a comic book movie for its thematic unity or aesthetic accomplishment and am more likely to rate it on a fourteen year old teen age boy's scale of Awesome-osity.

So how does the new Captain America film rate? Quite well, actually.

It's a sequel to 2011's The First Avenger which was purposefully and gloriously square in its narrative and aesthetics. The movie was intended to echo the "Go get 'em, boys!" films of the World War II period in which most of the film is set.

Winter Solider finds Captain America reawakened in the 21st century and trying to adjust to life as the world's fittest 94 year old man. He works as an agent of SHIELD, the shadowy super-spy organization that makes the CIA and FBI look like the Keystone Cops, and he is generally the fastest, strongest, most moral guy in town. All of those characteristics make him stick out but some more than others.

This film hearkens to the past, but not the patriotic, up-by-your-bootstraps days of the 40s and 50. Instead, the film evokes the paranoid, corruption-behind-every-door-of-power vibe of the 1970s. The film cinematically name-drops All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor, and The Conversation. The Washington D.C. setting, unexpected double crosses from trusted friends, lean economical visual storytelling, and the clever casting of Robert Redford as an important government figure are all meant to make us feel as though we're meeting in a shadowy parking garage and a dark figure in the corner is telling us to "follow the money."

The film uses a not terribly veiled allegory to address ongoing questions we face as post-911 Americans. I don't think I'm giving anything away to say that SHIELD has developed a super weapon - new helicarriers (the flying battleships seen in the Avengers movie) that can target and kill literally millions at a time. Steve Rogers, Cap's civilian alter ego, questions the wisdom of having a weapon that powerful and far reaching. Who gets to decide who is an acceptable target? Who determines who is so great a risk that they warrant high tech death from above with no warning? The helicarriers could easily be read as superhero-sized versions of the drones we have patrolling the skies in war zones and who knows where else across the world. The characters are storyline are fantastic and spectacular in the truest sense of both of those words, but some of the concerns raised by the film are surprisingly real world.  It's a little on-the-nose at times, but any comic book movie that asks its audience to weigh the value of freedom versus safety is doing something interesting in my opinion.

For all that, it's still a superhero movie, and we are treated some pretty great action sequences. One of the opening scenes takes place on a hijacked ship, and the fluid camera movement follows Captain America as he almost single-handedly shuts down a small army of pirate-terrorists. The action is crisp, exciting, and importantly, comprehensible. Some directors in this genre, Christopher Nolan among them, seem to think that filming a fight sequence as though you're the one getting beaten up is a good way to go. Thankfully, the directing duo of brothers Anthony and Joe Russo are more of the "let's let the audience know what in the world is going on" school of thought when it comes to action. Cap's battles with Batroc the French mercenary, the Winter Solider, and an elevator packed with a dozen trained fighters all rate high on my scale of Awesome-tude.

The movie is a bit of a rarity - an exciting, well-made superhero movie that takes itself somewhat seriously and manages to pull off more than just snark and spectacle. Captain America is the most sincere and self-serious of contemporary heroes, and this movie manages to create a nice, fizzy friction between his "old fashioned" ethics and morals and the 21st century's cynicism and distrust. Scarlett Johnanson returns to the Marvel comic book movie world with her signature brand of unexpected violence and very expected sex appeal as the Black Widow, and Anthony Mackie makes an auspicious debut as the Falcon with one of the coolest movie jet packs I've ever seen.

So, in this case, the fourteen year old comic book nerd in me is satisfied and the forty year old movie critic is pretty pleased too. Lucky for me, even though both those guys are happy, I only had to pay admission once.