Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1942

The Contenders:

Greer Garson: Mrs. Miniver (winner)
Rosalind Russell: My Sister Eileen
Bette Davis: Now, Voyager
Teresa Wright: The Pride of the Yankees
Katharine Hepburn: Woman of the Year

A List Update

It seems a little late this year, but the new version of the 1001 Movies list is out. As tends to be the case these days, I've seen most of the entries already. The 2019 version includes 12 new listings. I've seen eight of them and have posted reviews of seven, so I guess I'll be watching Avengers: Infinity War again.

Anyway, here's Wonderwall:
The Greatest Showman (2017)
Phantom Thread (2017)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Capernaum (2018)
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Hereditary (2018)
The Favourite (2018)
Roma (2018)
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
A Star is Born (2018)
Vice (2018)

A few thoughts--

It's nice to see another superhero movie make the list that isn't a Batman film, but I'd have genuinely perferred to see Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse on the list rather than Infinity War. This is not because I've posted a review of the former and I have to rewatch the later now. It's because it's genuinely a better movie, and arguably the best MCU-related film so far. But, The List has always been biased against animation, and that's not going to change this year, evidently.

I haven't seen the latest version of A Star is Born (it's sitting on the table next to me), but I'm a little disappointed that it's here. Maybe it's great, but do we need another version of this story? It'll be the third version I watch for this blog, and while I was going to watch it anyway, it seems that there's plenty of space for movies that tell a new story here instead of something we've all seen before. Honestly, I could say the same thing about Crazy Rich Asians. It's a fine movie, but aside from the all-Asian cast in an American-financed movie, this is nothing that hasn't been seen a hundred times. It feels a lot like the sort of "rich people romance" movies that were so prevalent during the Great Depression. It's a fine movie, but is it really required viewing in any real sense?

Off the top of my head, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Quiet Place, Annihilation, and Won't You Be My Neighbor? all seem like better choices. But hey, who am I to tell the Listmakers what to do (other than once a year at Christmas)?

It's also interesting to see that, as far as I know, the previous Best Picture winner did not make the list. Green Book is not here, and that feels off. Then again, I wouldn't choose to have it here, either, so maybe this is a good thing.

So, assuming I can find Capernaum by the end of the year, I should be able to knock these out before New Year's.

Wednesday Horror: The Mummy's Hand; The Mummy's Tomb

Film: The Mummy’s Hand; The Mummy’s Tomb
Format: DVDs from Cortland Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

My friend Dawn is a librarian at the public library in the town just east of where I live. The Cortland Public Library is tiny, just two rooms, but it’s got a fantastic movie collection in no small part because of Dawn’s work. For the last few months, Dawn and I have had a movie night on the first Saturday of the month. She brings snacks, I bring beer, and we invite the public. We ask for a $1 donation, the idea being that we’ll use that money to help improve the library’s movie collection. Well, we made our first purchase recently—the entire Universal monster collection. It hasn’t even been put into the catalog yet, but they let me walk out with the Mummy collection—three discs holding six original movies. It’s good to have connections, after all. I’ve seen the original, of course, so I took this opportunity to start watching the rest of the series, starting with The Mummy’s Hand.

This is pretty standard stuff, and like many of the early horror movies, it’s barely long enough to qualify as a feature-length film. It comes in at a mere 67 minutes, which is just to give us a plot, a few close-ups of the mummy in question (Tom Tyler) and the obligatory romance that isn’t really necessary but seems to be a part of every film of this era.

Off Script: La Cabina

Film: La Cabina (The Telephone Box)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

It feels like ages since I’ve actually written about a specific film at length. The few reviews I have posted recently are ones from an archive I created months ago, there to fill in gaps when I didn’t feel like I had much to say. Even then, it’s been difficult to motivate myself to post. I’m trying to correct that, working my way out of whatever malaise I’d fallen into about four months ago. It’s not even the writing that has felt like a chore to me; it’s all of the bookkeeping that accompanies it. Anyway, I figured a short film might be a good start in getting back to regular posting, so I tracked down La Cabina (The Telephone Box) on Vimeo and had a watch. It’s worth noting that this appears on YouTube as well, but without subtitles. If you speak Spanish, knock yourself out. Turns out there’s not a ton of dialogue, and even if you can’t understand what is being said, you’re not missing a great deal in terms of story.

A man (Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez) and his son (Antonio Moreno, I think) are walking to the bus. The boy’s soccer ball bounces into a phone booth and he retrieves it, then gets on the bus and rides away. The man, needing to make a call, enters the phone booth and discovers that, despite the fact that it’s new, the phone doesn’t work. The door closes behind him, locking him in.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1973

The Contenders:

Jack Nicholson: The Last Detail
Marlon Brando: The Last Tango in Paris
Jack Lemmon: Save the Tiger (winner)
Al Pacino: Serpico
Robert Redford: The Sting

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1960

The Contenders:

Billy Wilder: The Apartment (winner)
Jules Dassin: Never on Sunday
Alfred Hitchcock: Psycho
Jack Cardiff: Sons and Lovers
Fred Zinnemann: The Sundowners

Wednesday Horror: The Last Exorcism

Film: The Last Exorcism
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

I wanted to like The Last Exorcism. I really did, even though on its surface it’s evident that it’s going to go somewhere that’s really going to bother me. There are a lot of great ideas in the start of this film and they are carried through, more or less, for the first two acts of the film. Everything falls apart in the third act, though, when rather than finding an interesting way to handle the end of the film, we’re dropped into a series of clichés that are, sadly, exactly what you’d expect from a film called The Last Exorcism.

Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) is a fire and brimstone preacher in Baton Rouge from a long line of preachers. The difference with Cotton is that he’s not merely started to have doubts, but has embraced those doubts and wants out of the ministry. Rather than simply signing up for The Clergy Project, he decides to call in a film crew to openly display his lack of faith. In fact, he wants to provide a clear demonstration of just how wrongheaded he now finds his earlier beliefs. What he wants to do is accept a random plea to perform an exorcism, demonstrate that it’s all smoke and mirrors, and then go on with his life.