Julia, where are you?

Word of the day : upbraid : to criticize or reproach

First full day without Julia in a long while.  It sucks!  Gabriel and I are troopers, though, going about our business in a playful, guys kinda way.

I stayed up (too) late watching Hugo last night.  Good movie.  I thought it was an excellent adaptation of an excellent book; I had no complaints with it.  I felt as if it were as personal and deeply-felt a passion project for director Martin Scorsese as anything he's done in quite a while (Kundun, maybe?).  Dante Ferretti's production design and Robert Richardson's gorgeous cinematography were immaculate, and I felt the movie maintained the themes of seeing, wonder, and discovery that loomed so large in the novel.  The movie recreated the texture, the gilded, bright yet shadow clinkingness that I held in my mind when I Brian Selznick's book.  The cast was really good: Asa Butterfield as Hugo, the wonderful Chloe Grace Moretz, Sir Ben Kingsley, and, of course, Sacha Baron Cohen as the station inspector. For Scorsese, America's most famous advocate for film preservation, it was evidently a joy to pay tribute to Georges Melies, an the scenes in which Melies and his crew make their movies are full of wonder and joy.

New Feature #1 on this blog:  A daily bit of history - for your sake and mine

 
Today, let's give a shout-out to the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War, which lasted from May 1967 to January 1970.  Nigeria, which in 1932 gained independence from Britain in 1963, was divided into regions.  Because Britain carved Nigeria out of a western chunk of Africa without regard or attention to linguistic, tribal, ethnic, sociological, or cultural division, there were many sects and subsets of people in Nigeria who couldn't live together in peace.  There was no unified nation.  In 1966, the southeast region of the country (the Igbos being the dominant ethnic group in this region) carried out a successful coup of the federal government.  Dominant ethnic groups in the north and west began to take issue with the Igbos and fought against them.  Many Igbos were murdered.  This caused the Igbos to separate from the rest of the rest of the Republic of Nigeria and form their own their own nation in 1967 - Biafra.

The federal government, and the rest of Nigeria, wanted this issue resolved.  Negotiations and compromises went nowhere, however.  The federal government in Lagos (located in SW Nigeria) declared war and invaded Biafra.  The Nigerian Army and Navy bombed and blockaded Biafra, killing many civilians.  Biafra, lacking resources and international aid and support, held their own, their general, Ojukwu, encouraging his troops.  The Nigerian Army kept advancing, however, and eventually Ojukwu fled to the Ivory Coast.  Between 3000 and 5000 Biafrans died daily because of the blockade on food and resources.   Defeated, Biafra renounced their secession, and Reconciliation, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction began.

By 1976, Nigeria was divided into 12 states.  Today there are 36 states, plus the federal capital territory of Abuja (sort of like our Washington D.C.).

Tomorrow: "Bring us salt, Gandhi"

Feature #2 on the blog.

This month will officially end my Academy Award-related blogs.  So I want to do something fun.  I get tired of the old saying, "Older is better," or "They don't make 'em like they used to" (said by someone who hasn't gone to a movie since 1974 or who thinks The Andy Griffith Show is the highlight of western civilization).  Folks, movies have gotten better.  TV has gotten better - vastly better.  So as a way to segue... What was I talking about?  I'm not sure, but I do have a point.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that art ages and sometimes not very well.  Most of what was once labeled good or great in terms of movies... maybe isn't so great anymore.

There have been 52 Best Pictures since 1960; I've seen 47 of them.  (There have been 84 Best Pictures all together; I've seen 62 of them).  So what's this feature about?  Each day I'll pick a different decade starting chronologically from the 60s and tell you briefly whether or not the Best Pictures from that decade still hold up and our worth watching.

The 1960s:

- The Apartment (1960)  Should you watch it?  Maybe.

This film (*** out of 4) from the great Billy Wilder had a taboo subject (a man tries to rise the corporate ladder by loaning his apartment to his colleagues for their extra-marital trysts) that's not so scandalous anymore.  Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine have killer chemistry, and any movie with a plum part for Fred MacMurray can't be all bad, but it's not particularly that funny anymore.     

- West Side Story (1961)  Should you watch it?  Absolutely not.

How can a movie (*) that has aged this poorly ever have been that good to begin with?  As soon as the Jets and Sharks appear, we're aware that we have now a lifetime of parody and mockery at our disposal.  I guess Natalie Wood is cute, but Rita Moreno is irritating (at least, here she is), Richard Beymer has terrible teeth and no charisma... Laughable.  Go away!

- Lawrence of Arabia (**1/2)  Should you watch it?  Nah.

Sure, Peter O'Toole's to die for and Freddie Young's cinematography is exquisite.  The film is so BIG, and the framing and scope are overwhelming, often beautiful.  But talk about a drag of a story.  The damn thing never ends.

- Haven't seen Tom Jones (1963), My Fair Lady (1964), or all of The Sound of Music (1965)

- A Man For All Seasons (1966)  Should you watch it?  No.

Well, only if you are at any point assigned Robert Bolt's play and want to, so to speak, accentuate (?) the experience.  As Thomas More, Paul Scofield, he of the magisterially elocution, is a great actor and its a rich cast (Orson Welles, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller), but as a film (**) its talky and cinematically uninteresting.  As a history lesson, fine.  Dramatically, it's flat.

- In the Heat of the Night (1967)  Should you watch it?  Couldn't hurt.   

Known as the film that beat out The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, this once-topical, fiery murder mystery (**1/2) set in the deep south gives Rod Steiger a plum, chewy role as the racist sheriff assigned with Sidney Poitier's enlightened, dignified Northerner to solve a racial murder.  Not bad, with a good Ray Charles title song, sultry ambience.  Poitier (hear his "They call me Mister Tibbs" line here, guys) is as boring as ever, though, and there's not a whole lot of dramatic ambiguity in a story that calls for it.   

- Oliver! (1968)  Should you watch it?  No.

What was the Academy thinking?  Terrible songs sung in washed-out British accents, grubby sets, overlong, no characters to really care about.  Carol Reed was a wonderful director, but this is a really forgettable, bland update (*1/2) of the Dickens perennial.

- Midnight Cowboy (1969)  Should you watch it?  Yes.

Some of it has dated very badly, but the performances are still excellent, the seemy milieu well-evoked, the Fred Neil-penned, Harry Nillson-sung "Everybody's Talkin'" still great.  Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are really at their best here, scraping and bouncing off each other.  (***)

Tomorrow: the 1970s

Walker Evans (#9)

Born in St. Louis in 1903, Evans was one of the most renowned American artists of last century.  From 1945 to 1965, he worked as a staff photographer at Fortune magazine, but he is best known, of course, for the his post photographing for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression.  He traveled all through the southern U.S., shooting its people, its architecture, documenting the workers and roads, conditions, buildings.  In 1936, he collaborated with writer James Agee for Fortune on a book about tenant sharecropper families in the south, a class of people neglected and forgotten (and treated cruelly) by a large part of the country ; Agee wrote the pieces, Evans photographed the families.

Here is a well-known image from that book:

  

Until toms, people...