482 Movies

52. La Haine (Hate) (1995) (IMDB236)

I have been neglecting this list for quite some time, due to both being the busiest person you know and also being in a frenzy of re-watching Doctor Who in order to ready myself for the start of Series Four, but also, I will admit, because a French movie about multi-cultural disaffected youth just seems like a chore to get through.

The DVD is a Criterion Collection disc, and it begins with an introduction by Jodie Foster which I watched a couple of weeks ago and which made me think hmmm, this actually looks pretty good! Why on earth does Jodie Foster introduce it? Because she loved the movie with all of her heart and Egg Pictures distributed it in the States, so of course she wants it to be seen on DVD, too. Between the clips of the beautifully shot film and her enthusiasm, I decided that maybe I would really like this. It still took me a few weeks to get around to it, but give me a break, I've been directing four shows in a row, there hasn't been any time.

Man, do I love a black and white movie. I don't think that an argument can be made that colour is better than black and white. When you see something shot like this film, with this creamy cinematography, all you can think is how vulgar colour is. Well, it's all I can think, anyway. The BW is the first thing that made me think that I wanted to see this after all.

It starts out with the opening credits over shots of riots in France, police in armour, kids with rocks, cars burning, all real, with a reggae tune playing sweetly over the images.

The story is about three friends, one Jewish, one of African descent and one of Arab descent, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd. As Jodie Foster says in her intro, they are all French, born and raised, but considered to be immigrants, with no future, living in the projects, bored out of their skulls.

Then, after a riot in which one of their friends gets badly hurt and ends up in the hospital, one of them finds a gun lost by a cop during the riot, and everything changes.

I love the subtitles, I mean, I don't understand much, but I know that it's all street slang, and it was translated so that we get the gist of what they are saying, but in a way that makes sense to Americans rather than a faithful word-by-word translation. Like, there is a character whose street name is Asterix, who is an extremely famous cartoon character in Europe (that I was introduced to by my college boyfriend, Greg, Asterix and Obelix, if you ever see the comic books, grab them, they are hilarious), but if wouldn't make any sense here, so in the subtitles, the guy's name is Snoopy. Very clever.

It's interesting to think if this were an American movie, how entirely different it would be. And I don't mean a studio movie, I mean an American indie, it would be so full of despair that you couldn't watch it. This movie, though completely true to the characters, their situation, their lives, still manages to show the sweetness and innocence of the characters, and somehow there is light and humour without it being saccharine or false. And of course I don't mean that the truth of their lives is underplayed, these kids have nothing and aren't getting anything anytime soon, but they are human beings and they have souls and their souls are beautiful no matter what.

See what black and white photography brings out of me? Lyricism.

When it comes right down to it, this is a perfect, beautiful, amazing movie and everyone should always listen to Jodie Foster's recommendations. Except for her Home for the Holidays, which I can't stand. But anything else she says is all right by me.

La Haine (Hate) (1995) dir. Mathieu Kassovitz
watched 4/14/08
Rating: ****
Does it belong on this list? Oui, absolument.

51. The Singing Detective (1986) (TM)

Boy howdy this is annoying,especially since I know for a fact that I started this review already, but that was when my computer kept turning off, so I suppose I could have managed to not save the file like an asshole, but who knows? No matter what, I have to restart writing it, so it doesn't matter the reason why.

The Singing Detective isn't a movie, it's a mini-series, but the Time Magazine list has a few of these, like Decalogue, that possibly were released as movies somewhere, but pretty much are considered mini-series no matter which way you slice it. On the other hand, I've always wanted to watch this and here's a good reason.

I don't know if it's awesome or annoying that every episode has commentary, because it's dangerous to watch commentary on a series until you have watched the whole thing, Buffy being the prime example of people seemingly having no idea that people might want to be surprised by the end of the season, let alone what happens several seasons in the future, so if I listen to the commentary of Episode One and they say what happens in Episode Five, I will be most perturbed. Which means that I'll have to hang onto all of the discs and watch the whole thing in order twice. So yeah, still both annoying that I have to be careful, but awesome that there is commentary on every episode.

The basic story is about Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon), a mystery writer with an astoundingly hideous and painful skin condition who can barely move without searing agony. He is in a hospital and keeps himself sane by reliving one of his mystery stories in his head and remembering things that happened to him as a child, so we see him in the hospital and the story and the childhood, but also we see the hallucinations of people singing and dancing as his body temperature goes higher and higher. Memory, imagination, and reality are the three parts of this show, all linked together by the music.

There is no way that this story could have been written by someone who has not spent a great deal of time in a hospital, not to mention by someone who knows what constant pain is. The hospital is a thief, it takes from you all privacy, your adulthood, the nurses treat you like a slightly stupid child, you cannot bathe yourself or go to the bathroom without asking, you can't work, it's a living nightmare. And that's without the constant pain that makes it that you can't even move enough to get one of your own cigarettes or hold a pen.

Michael Gambon is extraordinary as a thoroughly unlikeable character as well as the titular singing detective in his story, a remarkably young Imelda Staunton (but looking exactly the same as she does twenty-two years later) plays a mean nurse, Joanna Whalley plays a gorgeous somewhat nicer nurse, Patrick Malahide plays three roles, all entirely differently, the main character in the mystery story, a man having an affair with his mother in his childhood sequences, and a conniving producer in real life, and Janet Suzman as Marlow's estranged wife. She does an excellent job, but I have no idea why she got second billing when she only shows up for the first time in Episode Three. She gets pretty important, but still...

Hah, I just was wondering and wondering why Alison Steadman as Marlow's mother looks so familiar, and I just found out. It's Mrs. Bennet! From the real Pride and Prejudice, the mini-series. This was only ten years before PAP, but she looks about a hundred years younger, but anyone would not wearing a bonnet.

Dear Christ, I literally was just thrown into hysterics at the end of Episode Two, when Marlow hallucinates his father performing and that man in his hallucination tells him that his father has been dead for years, and Marlow can't believe him. "He can't be dead, not my dad." Admittedly, dead father stuff always gets me, but that scene was extraordinarily effective.

Another sort of wonderful surprise is Janet Henfrey as a real piece of work of a schoolteacher, whom I recognized immediately. She played Mrs. Bale in As Time Goes By, one of my favourite series ever, certainly my favourite British comedy.

Wow, that was really something special. I do know one thing after watching this, I wouldn't be seen dead watching the remake. I could be brilliantly performed, but the idea of cutting this amazing, sprawling story down from 415 minutes to 109 minutes is unthinkable.

Holy cow, I just realized something. I get to watch this whole thing again with commentary! I feel like I just won the lottery!

The Singing Detective (1986) (dir. Jon Amiel)
watched 1/25/08
Rating: ****
Does it belong on this list? Depending on your definition of the word "movie", but as far as quality goes, definitely.

83. Grease (1978) (BO90)

Well, the computer is down and I can't watch The Singing Detective, so I might as well watched a TiVoed movie and write my review with a pen and notebook. You know, like they did in the old west.

Grease is one of those weird childhood things that I didn't care for at the time, like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that I now love simply because it was a part of my childhood. At the time it came out, though, I had had the Broadway cast album for ages and knew it by heart so my little OCD soul was violently offended by the changes. Sandy is NOT Australian! Kenickie sings "Greased Lightning", not Danny! Where are half the songs? Stuff like that. And of course the lesson the sending teaches, i.e. "If a boy doesn't like you, change everything about yourself until he does!" or "If you're not a slut, there's something wrong with you!" is just the teensiest bit sexiest, but I have gotten over all that and now I just love it.

It starts out with Danny and Sandy on the beach together. My memory played a trick on me and I was going to complain bitterly about how ridiculous it was that Danny, a working-class boy from the 1950's, was vacationing with his family in Australia just to justify the casting of Olivia Newton-John, but apparently it was Sandy visiting the States all along. Okay, whatever, but she still shouldn't be Australian for crying out loud. Yeah, maybe I'm not over it after all.

But then we go into the opening credit sequence and the best change from the Broadway show, the title song as sung by the fabulous Frankie Valli, which gets us off to a flying start. You know right where you're going.

Then we're at the high school, clearly in Los Angeles, the most LA-looking high school ever captured on film, populated entirely by students with New York accents. Apparently, in the 1950's, if you put on the leather jacket you sounded like you were from Brooklyn no matter where you actually lived.

Not to mention, of course, that these were the most elderly high-school students in captivity, at least until 90210 where I think in the later seasons some of the performers were collecting Social Security.

We are introduced to the main characters, Kenickie as played by Jeff Conaway, now a reality show has-been, and John Travolta as Danny, already introduced in the pre-credit sequence, still getting a big fat movie star entrance. Which he frankly deserved, as he was shining like the sun back then. Not that I thought so when I was a kid; I never understood why people thought his thick, meaty features were attractive, but he certainly was at the height of his so-called beauty here.

And then we meet Didi Conn as Frenchie and ONJ (again) as Sandy, then Stockard Channing comes strutting up as Rizzo and it really doesn't matter one bit that she was about 50 when she made this movie and looks every minute of it (okay, she was 34, same thing), nobody could have played the part better.

One of the things that this movie got right was the casting of the adults, mostly played by actual celebrities of the 50's like Eve Arden, Sid Caesar, Alice Ghostly, Frankie Avalon, Dody Goodman, Joan Blondell, and, especially, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes. It gives it a real 50's flavour.

A joke that nobody born after 1970 gets, "You mean her jugs are bigger than Annette's?" "Nobody's jugs are bigger than Annette's!" and the only reason us post-1950 pre-1970 kids get it was because of the 50's nostalgia wave of the 70's included rerunning old episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club. The post-1970 kids are thinking, "Which character is named Annette?"

And here we have the first real number, "Summer Lovin'", with Sandy telling the girls about the romance she had with Danny at the beach that summer and Danny singing about nailing Sandy at the beach that summer. Little did they know when they filmed that scene that thirty years later there wouldn't be a karaoke night in America when that song wouldn't be sung. Quite a legacy.

Later at the pep rally, when Sandy is a cheerleader already, probably to make as much contrast as possible with Danny's leather and jeans. They see each other and he acts really excited to see her until he realizes how uncool that makes him seem, so he turns into Vinnie Barbarino, basically, so she runs away crying. "You didn't seem retarded at the beach! Wahhh!!!!"

The girls have a sleep-over where they peer-pressure Sandy into drinking, smoking and piercing her ears. This appears to be a bad thing, but that's only a blind, what with the whole point of this movie being, "What other people do is cool, emulate them is you want to be liked and happy!" Rizzo sings "Sandra Dee", where Annette is mentioned again. "Which one of them is Annette?" and the one lyric change is "No no no, Sal Mineo, I would never stoop so low," to "Elvis Elvis, let me be, keep that pelvis far from me," makes no sense at all. Maybe so that the whole list of men, (Sal Mineo, Rock Hudson and Troy Donahue), wouldn't all be gay. Dammit! Troy Donahue wasn't gay, that theory's blown. Ah, it turns out that Sal Mineo was just murdered before the movie was made. Okay, never mind.

Rizzo goes off with Kenickie, Danny makes a sloppy seconds comment that I didn't understand until about five years ago, Sandy sings "Hopelessly Devoted to You". She was such a huge star in the 1970's, I think it's funny that the two things that she will be remembered forever for are this movie and "Let's Get Physical", neither of which were the sort of thing that she was best known for. Songs like "Hopelessly Devoted", that was her forte.

Kenickie and Rizzo have sex with no protection, Danny (DANNY!) sings "Greased Lightning" (seriously, doesn't Travolta have enough songs in this movie?), Danny tries to become a jock to please Sandy, but he can kick that idea to the curb once she shows up ready to work on Hollywood Blvd., Frenchie drops out of beauty school and Frankie Avalon sings "Beauty School Dropout" at her. Appropriately.

Then is the school dance, which is going to be on TV thnks to National Bandstand, where couple start out in one configuration and end up all topsy and turvy. And, hilariously, Cha Cha DiGregorio was played by an actress named Annette Charles! So THAT was Annette!

What will happen by the end of the movie? Will Danny and Sandy end up together? Will Kenickie and Rizzo? What will happen at the big race at Thunder Road (aka the LA River)? Umm, have you never seen a movie like this before? It's a happily ever after/flying car movie if there ever was one, you know, as long as the girls all turn into the whores that they really are at heart!

Remember, happiness is not saying no!

Grease (1978) (dir. Randal Kleiser)
watched 1/21/08
Rating: *** 1/2
Does it belong on this list? Like dip da dip da dip do wop de dooby do!

Extra: How Green Was My Valley (1941) (AA14)

This is an extra only due to an error on my part, leaving it off of the list entirely for no good reason, since it won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941. I'm actually kind of shocked that it's not on any other list, as it's one of my favourite movies of all times.

Roddy McDowall was my favourite actor with absolutely no competition from when I was about ten until I was maybe twenty, I absolutely worshiped him. He's still one of my faves to this day, but maybe he is top five instead of number one. And when it comes to Roddy McDowall movies, the best ones are Lassie Come Home and Lord Love a Duck and The Cool Ones and How Green Was My Valley.

This movie is the story of a man looking back on his life as a child in a small coal-mining village in Wales, "There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember."

Huw is the youngest of the six Morgan brothers (and one sister) in about 1900, living an idyllic life with his adored coal-mining family, his brother gets married, a new preacher comes to town and falls for his sister, everything is wonderful. But then the colliery starts to cut the wages of the miners; the boys want to start a union, the father is against it, and that's when everything starts to change.

There is a strike, the village turns against the father, the mother and Huw fall into the freezing river and are badly injured, Huw may never walk again. But everyone comes through, because the Welsh are tough and hardy.

The music in this movie is glorious, this beautiful Welsh choir singing, there is nothing on this earth like it. I'm sorry I already used the Blackadder joke, it would be appropriate now. I honestly believe that one of the reasons that I cry so many times while watching this movie is that amazing four part male harmony. And Queen Victoria agrees, for she invites the choir, led by one of the Morgan brothers, to sing at Windsor Castle, as two of the other boys go off to America.

The mine owner's son falls for Huw's sister, and even though she is in love with the preacher, she marries him as he stands on the hillside and watches. It is a very very different wedding than the one that begins the film, joyless and loveless.

When Huw finally learns to walk again. amongst the daffodils, he goes off to school, but at school he is tortured by a vicious teacher who looks down on the fact that he is from a poor village.

"So you're the new boy."
"Yes, sir."
"You're late."
"Yes, sir."
"What a dirty little sweep it is. Who are your people? Where are you from?"
"Cwm Rhondda."
"Cwm Rhondda? Oh, a little genius from the coal pits. And they expect me to make
a scholar of it. All right, come in."

This all leads to the best scene in the movie, when Dai Bando comes to teach the teacher a little boxing, but I'll not spoil it.

The performances are outstanding, Donald Crisp as the father, Maureen O'Hara as the sister, Walter Pidgeon as the preacher, Sara Allgood as the mother, and of course the wonderful Rhys Williams and Barry Fitzgerald as Dai Bando and his buddy Cyfartha. And Roddy McDowall as the boy whose eyes see everything. Wonderful, perfect, lovely.

Similarly to how Ordinary People is despised for beating Raging Bull for the Best Picture Oscar, apparently people are annoyed for How Green Was My Valley beating Citizen Kane. Well, Citizen Kane is an undisputed classic, but How Green Was My Valley has my heart. And John Ford's only Best Picture winner, which is important, too.

How Green Was My Valley (1941) (dir. John Ford)
watched 1/15/08
Rating: ****
Does it belong on this list? It does! I certainly should have put it on!

50. My Fair Lady (1964) (AFI91/AA37)

Ah, an overture, they just don't do that anymore. The music plays over images of flowers for over a minute before even the Warner Brothers logo comes up! After the overture and credits, we see a bunch of society people leaving an event and trying to get cabs in the rain, and then we are introduced to all of the major players, first the fatuous Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy Brett), then the flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn and her dreadful cockney accent), whose flowers he accidentally spills into the mud, then Colonel Pickering (Wilfred Hyde-White), who Eliza tries to sell flowers to, and finally Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), taking down Eliza's words phonetically, all leading into the first number, "Why Can't the English".

Higgins and Pickering realize that they have always wanted to meet each other, Higgins throws a bunch of money at Eliza, who then sings "Wouldn't It Be Loverly". Personally, I'm counting the minutes until Audrey Hepburn gets a better accent, because, though she throws herself into the character with abandon, being lower class just isn't her forte and she kind of overdoes it. And I don't care if she was raised poor in real life as I think she was, there is a natural refinement in her bearing that just makes this whole guttersnipe thing a bit of a stretch.

Then the wonderful Stanley Holloway shows up as Eliza's father Alfred to get some money off of her and to try to steal the movie out from under everyones nose. He'd have done it, too, if anyone but Rex Harrison was playing Higgins, he probably would have made off with it handily, too.

Eliza goes to Higgins to have him teach her proper English and the plot begins, Higgins and Pickering make a bet that he can pass her off as a duchess at the Embassy Ball, and she is taken up and bathed against her will.

"Eliza, you are to stay here for the next six months learning to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist's shop. At the end of six months you will be taken to an embassy ball in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the king finds out you are not a lady, you will be taken to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls! If you are not found out, you shall be given a present of...uh...seven and six to start life with in a lady's shop. If you refuse this offer, you will be the most ungrateful, wicked girl, and the ANGELS will WEEP for you."

Pickering asks Higgins to confirm that he is a man of good character where women are concerned, so he sings "I'm an Ordinary Man" to explain that neither Eliza nor any other woman has the slightest thing to fear from him.

Back to Stanley Holloway's yeoman-like efforts to make the plot about Alf Doolittle, in which he sings "With a Little Bit of Luck". When he finds out that Eliza is now living with a rich man and doesn't want any of her clothes sent to her, he happily runs off to sing some more and put the touch on Higgins.

Eliza, sick to death of saying her vowels over and over again, dreams of Higgins' death and sings "Just You Wait". He drills her more and the household staff sings "Poor Professor Higgins". And finally, after Higgins tells her how wonderful the English language is, she says "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" properly, so, of course, they sing "The Rain in Spain"! Mrs. Pierce, the housekeeper, puts Eliza to bed and she, having just fallen in love with Higgins, sings "I Could Have Danced All Night".

Higgins and Pickering decide to take Eliza on a trial run to Ascot, where the ensemble sings "Ascot Gavotte". They bring her to Higgins' mother's (Gladys Cooper) box where she meets Freddy for real this time and enchants him while talking about her aunt who died of influenza with dreadful grammar and beautiful vowels and startles everyone by actually paying attention to the race and telling a horse to move his blooming arse!

Freddy, on the other hand, is Smitten with a capital S and hangs around outside the house singing "On the Street Where She Lives", including what has always been one of my favourite rhymes, if only because it's so beautifully British, "People stop and stare, they don't BOTHER me/For there's nowhere else on earth that I would RATHER be!"

Pickering does his best to talk Higgins out of the whole Embassy Ball situation, that Eliza will embarrass herself and all will be ashes, ashes. Higgins refuses to listen, and, six weeks later, Higgins offers her his arm, and off they go.

And then there is an actual intermission! With an entr'acte, my God, a few people might still write the occasional overture, but entr'actes have absolutely gone the way of the dodo. And for the non-musical fans out there, an entr'acte is like a second act overture, before the curtain rises after the intermission, to get everyone back into the mood of being at a musical.

And in the second act of this movie, we are at the Embassy Ball, where Eliza is, of course, a smashing hit. There is another phonetics expert (Theodore Bikel) there, a former pupil of Higgins' who is dete