The Artist

   And this week's Friday night movie has been... The Artist!

Original image located here. Accessed 4th November 2024

Best Picture Oscar winner no.: 84 (2011)

Could this be one of the more forgotten Best Picture winners? I recall this getting a lot of praise form critics in it's day but the public was more frosty towards it. In particular, a lot of the criticisms were aimed at the gimmicky nature of the movie and the strategy of showing Hollywood celebrating itself is a guaranteed Oscar success. In regards to the latter, it should come to no surprise that this movie is another one with the Weinstein Company logo stamped across it.

So what do I make of this movie?

I think it's great.
Yes it's a simulacrum of the silent era but that's precisely the point: The amount of effort to replicate the films of the era is staggering, what with the setting, the technology and the filmmaking techniques used. The amount of playfulness with this movie and it's relationship to sound is also pleasing. 
I recall back in college I was reading up on film history and was struck by what a revolution the advent of sound was back in the 1920s: The silent era was officially over, various studios went out of business and many actors and actresses now had their careers ended (although how Charlie Chaplain managed to endure I have no idea). And this movie was effectively that transition come to life.

So yeah, I had a great time with this movie and it was certainly better than it's status of a 'lost' winner.

Wings

 And this week's Friday night movie has been... Wings!

Original image located here. Accessed 5th January 2024

This year marks a full decade since I started this series. So to acknowledge such a milestone, I'm going to attempt something ambitious:

For every week in 2024, I will be watching a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Certainly watching the Best Picture winners is something I've been wanting to do for a while so now is as good a time as any to do so. After all, these movies are the best of the best - or so it would seem so it would be interesting to see if such a notion holds up. Of course, it would be easy to kowtow to the ongoing joke that the Academy get wrong time and time again but at the same time, it would be interesting to see if said joke still holds up. 

So some ground rules:

• The one rule of this series - watch a movie I've never seen before - still applies
• At time of writing there have been 95 Best Picture winners. Already I have seen 28 of them. Of course I'm not going to get through all of the remaining 67 so I am allowed to be selective. 
• I have a rough plan mapped out but I am open to suggestions

And now, what better way to commence this year-long plan than with the very first Best Picture winner.

A lot of this movie's reputation is being the first winner as well as being the only silent movie to gain the top honour. It was also worth keeping in mind, in my approach to this movie, that time may not have been kind to it and it may come across as dated now (a notion that may be ever present as this plan continues).

So what we have here is a war movie where air combat is married to a human drama off the battlefield. As it turned out, I wasn't exactly thrilled with the latter (indeed you could easily have shaved half an hour off and no one would've noticed) but the former is where the movie shines. The aerial sequences are astonishing - moreso when considers this was all done with practical effects - and still hold up nearly a century later. Director William A Wellman was a WW1 pilot himself and he shows a great knowledge for realism and how to convey air combat into the screen. 

It looks like this is going to make for an interesting year.....

Man With a Movie Camera

And this week's Friday night movie has been... Man With a Movie Camera!

Original image located here. Accessed 23rd June 2023

Anyone heard of this? It's a Soviet movie dating all the way back to the silent era - 1929 to be precise - that has gone down in history as being one of the most influential movies ever made. Such a reputation rests on the fact that this movie employs many film-making techniques: cross-cuts, slow motion, fast motion, reversing, quick cuts, stop animation and more.
Granted this could yet another instance of me, so far this year, of watching yet another lesser known/foreign/arty film but then again, I have always relied on the notion that I talk about the movies I've seen and hope that what I type connects with someone. So I see no reason to stop now.

As for the movie, well, clearly it's reputation lies on how it managed to expand the vocabulary of film. At first glance it is a documentary what with it showing a day in the life of an Eastern European city, with it's occupants at work and play. Yet I personally felt that I was watching the distant progenitor of countless music videos.
Ultimately however, the strength of this movie lies in it's visuals and what the director, Dziga Vertov had managed to accomplish. There are some stunning visuals and some interesting narratives at work.
That being said, has this movie aged? I ask this as we are watching the same techniques that have been replicated many, many, MANY times since. I would say no as this movie's followers would no doubt take the 'I can do that too' approach. Here however I don't get the impression that Vertov was showing off - largely because this is still a documentary first and foremost.
So yeah, nearly a century later, this movie still has power.