Narrative Junkie

My favorite films of the 1970s

40) The Story of Adele H. (1975, Francois Truffaut) - obsessive love, Truffaut style

39) Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola) - the iconic Vietnam War film

38) Dog Day Afternoon (1975, Sidney Lumet) - Pacino at his frenetic best

37) The Longest Yard (1974, Robert Aldrich) - madcap iconoclastic Burt Reynolds vehicle

36) Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick) - gripping violence w/ a purpose

35) Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (1971, Melvin Van Peebles) -  completely different aesthetic

34) Swept Away (1974, Lina Wertmuller) - provocative fable about class and sex

33) The King of Marvin Gardens (1972, Bob Rafelson) - low-key Nicholson in quiet gem

32) Save the Tiger (1973, John Avildsen) - Classic Jack Lemmon role in smart, sad script

31) Kramer vs. Kramer (1979, Robert Benton) - the agony of divorce

30) Days of Heaven (1978, Terence Mallick) - dreamy tale superbly directed

29) Nashville (1975, Robert Altman) - sprawling anti-Americana

28) Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979, Jeff Margolis)  - most-talented stand-up ever?

27) The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) - still frightening

26) Westworld (1973, Michael Crichton) - still great sci/fi

25) Interiors (1978, Woody Allen) - Woody's quite-effective Bergman rip-off

24) Cries and Whispers (1972, Ingmar Bergman) - a nightmare in red

23) All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse) - inventive self-indulgence, pulling out all the stops

22) Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham) - poignant look at a particular time and place

21)A Woman Under the Influence (1974, John Cassavettes) - nervous breakdown Cassavettes-style

20) MASH (1970, Robert Altman)  - a watershed anti-military comedy

19) Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski) - film noir in living color, updated and that much more creepy

18) Images (1972, Robert Altman) - a Bermanesque look at a dissolving personality, with a feminist slant

17) California Split (1974, Robert Altman) - Altman tears up the buddy film

16) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975, Milos Forman) - Nicholson's tour-de-force

15) The Honeymoon Killers (1970, Leonard Kastle) - almost documentary-like thriller about homicidal couple. Ahead of its time.

14) McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971, Robert Altman) - revisionist, elegiac western

13) Carnal Knowledge (1971, Mike Nichols) - a hard look at male attitudes and misogyny

12) The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicholas Roeg) - "E.T." for literates

11) Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir) - chilling, mysterious, and stylish triumph.

10) The Conversation (1974, Francis Ford Coppola) - privacy and paranoia in the Watergate era

9) Five Easy Pieces (1970 Bob Rafelson) - the great anti-establishment moment in American cinema

8) The Last Detail (1973, Hal Ashby) - desultory, quirky, character-driven anti-establishment film with a heartbreaking ending

7) Manhattan (1979, Woody Allen) - Woody's great comedy of manners set in the capital of neurotics

6) Network (1976, Sidney Lumet) - 20 years before Fox News, absolutely prescient

5) The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May) - horrifyingly funny. A unique comic performance by Charles Grodin.

4) Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese) - right actor paired with right director creates a terrifying look at a wounded heart of darkness

3) Godfather I and II (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola) - the medium of film working on all cylinders

2) 3 Women (1977, Robert Altman) - one of the more stunning portraits of personal alienation and cultural sterility

1) Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen) - What can I say? The bible on opposite-sex relations for heterosexual, Jewish, male, New Yorkers, of which I'm pone.

Also liked

The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)

The Candidate (Michael Ritchie)

Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg)

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog)

Play It Again Sam (Woody Allen)

The Ruling Class (Peter Medak)

Sleuth (Joseph L Mankiewicz)

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman)

The Wicker Man- (Robin Hardy)

Love and Death (Woody Allen)

The Wind and the Lion( John Milius)

Aguirre The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May)

Klute (Alan J. Pakula)

Day for Night (Francois Truffaut)

The Last Wave (Peter Weir)

Midnight Express (Alan Parker)

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer)

American Graffitti (George Lucas)

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese)

All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula)

Marathon Man (John Schelsinger)

Eraserhead (David Lynch)

Badlands (Terence Mallick)

Being There (Hal Ashby)

Bananas (Woody Allen)

Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese)

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich)

Deliverance (John Boorman)

Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg)

 

Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller)

Amarcord (Federico Fellini)

 

 

Stroszek (Werner Herzog)

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Werner Fassbinder)

 

Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie)

Sleeper (Woody Allen)

 

 

 

The Sunshine Boys (Herbert Ross)

 

Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks)

 

The Gambler (Karel Reisz)

 

Fingers (James Toback)

Rocky (John Avildsen)

 

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam)

Dawn of the Dead (George Romero)

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah)

 

Breaking Away (Peter Yates)

 

Husbands (John Cassavettes)

 

Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple)

Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman)

The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeiosie (Luis Bunuel)

Overrated

Jaws

Star Wars

Barry Lyndon

Last Tango in Paris

Shampoo

Harold and Maude

Play Misty for Me

Fiddler on the Roof

Dirty Harry

Young Frankenstein

The Deer Hunter

The Way We Were

The return of Alan Partridge

• Steve Coogan to reprise Alan Partridge role in new online series (Mirror)

It's here! It's here!

Just arrived in a Netflix envelope: Hot Tub Time Machine!

Please, no calls between 7 and 11pm tonight, in case I watch it twice.

Franzen speaks

I can't remember the last time a new work of fiction was the subject of as much anticipation as Jonathan Franzen's new novel. The guy is in serious danger of becoming overexposed, and doesn't have such a winning personality. But I did think The Corrections was one of the finer contemporary novels I've read in the past 20 years and look forward to reading Freedom.

Here he is mouthing off on a bunch of stuff, on BigThink.

Undercelebrated film gangster

William Hickey as the ancient Mafia don in Prizzi's Honor. Not many actors can chew scenery when Jack Nicholson's also putting on the feedbag, but Hickey outeats him in this unusual take on the gangster genre.

Not necessarily helpful

During a job interview today the song "You Can't Stop the Beat" from the movie musical Hairspray kept running through my head...over and over.

I don't know if I got the job, but at least I left the place humming.

Overlooked movie

The Devil and Daniel Webster,  directed by William Dieterle, is a real gem. Released in 1941, the same year as Citizen Kane, and by the same studio, RKO, it has an expressionistic visual style that is at times similar to Welles's masterpiece.

And you can't beat Walter Huston as one of the most entertaining Devils in film history.

Off the top of my head, some other actors who've played Satan in the movies:

• Al Pacino (The Devil's Advocate)
• Peter Cook (Bedazzled)
• Elizabeth Hurley (Bedazzled remake)
• Ray Walston (Damn Yankees)
• Mercedes McCambridge/Linda Blair (The Exorcist)
• Robert DeNiro (Angel Heart)
• Laird Cregar (Heaven Can Wait, 1943)

Literary "True Blood"

I am really liking "True Blood" this season, at least the storyline about Russell, the Vampire King of Mississippi. The writers have done a really good job in creating an arch-fiend who is, well, arch. Take for example his winning retort in this exchange with Sookie, from last Sunday's episode:

Russell: “Tell me what you are.”
Sookie: “I’m a waitress.”
Russell: “Yes, and I am Marie of Romania.”

That last line, of course, was originally penned by Dorothy Parker in her poem "Comment":

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Romania.

Lemme tellya, you wouldn't hear that in Twilight.

My new DVD obsession...

"Breaking Bad".

Unbelievably good. 

Is AMC the new HBO?

Review - Up in the Air

Crack-up USA

Some really smart people didn't like Up in the Air, director Jason Reitman's film about a corporate downsizing specialist who lives his life completely unmoored from responsibility. As far as I can tell, these are the main, inter-related complaints:

• Reitman imbued a veneer of relevance to a piece of Hollywood fluff by interspersing the action with interviews of real laid-off workers.
• While masquerading as a serious work about America’s financial implosion, the film is really just  a feel-good George Clooney vehicle exploiting the topicality of the recession.

Perhaps Clooney himself is the reason for such scorn. Though he's carved out a niche as a star of middlebrow message pictures -- laudable in this most philistine of cinematic eras, I would argue -- he may never escape the stigma of being a movie star's movie star. I think of him as sort of a poor man's Paul Newman, a solid minimalist who nevertheless relies too frequently on a handful of reliably charming mannerisms.

As to the movie itself, however, I think it actually offers more -- not less -- than meets the eye, to an almost subversive degree. The story is about a man named Ryan Bingham who works for a company that is hired by other firms to supervise mass job cuts. Bingham is a lay-off specialist who travels around the country setting up temporary office on corporate premises, delivering the bad news to employees and prefacing each dismissal with a company-approved inspirational speech.

Bingham supplements his income by conducting self-help seminars on cutting all ties to anything that creates an obligation. And he practices what he preaches. He loves his 322 days on the road but not his “43 miserable days at home.” He is so committed to non-commitment that he has no relationship, no car, and barely any furniture. He is completely rootless.

Credits as spoiler

Ever since my wife and I noticed that John Goodman's name wasn't appearing in the beginning credits of "Treme," we have speculated that his character was going to die. His disaffected college professor was as critical to the action as anyone else on the show, and he's the biggest star in the production. So why was he relegated to the end titles?

Still don't know the real reason, but in any case our suspicion panned out last night, when his character committed suicide (or at least appeared to). 

This is the only case I can think of where the placement of an actor's name in the credits tipped me off to a plot development.

Books to the rescue

From Salon:

Book owners have smarter kids

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.