I’ve written before about a cinematic injustice that several decades later I can’t forgive. Maybe that’s why I’ve dawdled at seeing the updated version of True Grit despite positive reviews and an admirable cast. Now Salon weighs in with its Top 10 of Oscar oversights, eight of which I’m old enough to remember but doesn’t include mine. As for my favorite movie of 2010, no way it wins the best movie Oscar. At least academy members saw fit to nominate Winter’s Bone, which has grossed a modest $6.3 million. I’ve encountered no other film as rich in its faithfulness to a memorable novel, capturing so vividly its place and people and the forces that shape them. Both book and movie convey an unrelenting desperation from which no escape seems possible — until an unlikely character’s determination creates cracks in the bleakness, and glimmers of hope shine through.
Forty-one years after the fact, I’m still incensed that John Wayne won the best actor Oscar for his starring role in the ho-hum True Grit, despite Dustin Hoffman’s mesmerizing portrayal of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. But after watching the trailer for an upcoming Coen brothers remake of True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges in the role that Wayne played, I might end up forgetting this cinematic injustice. But I’ll never forget the unlikely bond that Rizzo developed with Joe Buck, played by Jon Voight, who was also nominated for best actor. The loyalty and friendship — love, actually — between these down-and-out strangers remains palpable all these years later. As palpable as Rizzo’s unfulfilled yearning to feel the Florida sun on his upturned face.
As guest curator for a recently opened exhibit, “Tall in the Saddle: the Pendleton Round-Up at 100,” I worked with dozens of people across the Northwest. Sometimes the project intersected with the creative work of others. Among them was fine artist Shirley Morris of Bend, Oregon, who’s making a documentary that I’m eager to see. It’s about the cowgirls who starred in rodeos early in the last century. Not only did Shirley tailor an excerpt of her film for the exhibit, she also helped lead me to artifacts — personal items that belonged to one of the most famous cowgirls, Bertha Blancett.
The cowgirls, America’s first professional female athletes, performed around the world to huge audiences. They were tough and often glamorous. These “bucking horse suffragettes” represented new freedoms that women claimed for themselves even before winning the right to vote in 1920. Shirley’s film, Oh, You Cowgirl!, will illuminate the lives of women who in her words “left a legacy so steeped in American lore, you wonder, ‘Could it be true?’ ”
I’ll be among the first to buy the DVD. Here’s the trailer:
I’m no movie critic but love the medium. That’s why my wife and I yearn for a three-movie day. We squeezed in three on the Friday and Saturday before the Oscars. (Each received a top award: best actor, actress, and movie.) Thus my interest in “The greatest movie scenes ever shot,” touted on the eclectic kottke.org. Compiled by film makers and a critic, the list includes several films I’ve seen. The description of a French movie I had never heard of, Jules et Jim, intrigued me enough to order it from Netflix.
As I read the list and scene synopses, a film that should have made the cut flickered to life. But I admit my objectivity is compromised, considering my emotional attachment to The Graduate. Then again, how a movie makes one feel has to count for something, even with critics. Read More
I can’t imagine a more poignant or tragic portrayal of classroom chaos than that depicted in the French film The Class. Fictional but shot documentary style, the story shows a teacher’s persistent but futile attempt to reach students mired in pubescent rebellion and complex culture clashes.
Throughout the film I kept thinking of my school days, serene and boring in comparison. But that was the 1960s in Central Florida, when classroom order and conformity resembled the symmetry and prevalence of orange groves. Everything has changed there, too. Read More
Last night during a concert of earnest and ethereal harmonies, I struggled to keep another sound at bay.
Pressed against the stage at the Crystal Ballroom, five feet from Fleet Foxes‘ lead singer Robin Pecknold and bathed in his melodic voice, I occasionally heard in my head not him but the quavering wail of a toothless derelict. Read More
Until seeing Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler last week, I thought only Daniel Day-Lewis could so completely inhabit a movie character. Or Robert DeNiro when he did serious roles.
Battling frailties and demons galore, Rourke’s character makes one ponder the fates of wrestlers once age and countless poundings have taken a despairing toll. Read More
Hard to correlate these two disparate ideas: airplane crash victims lost high in the Andes resorting to cannibalism, and stark humanity imbued with love.
But that’s what played out on the movie screen tonight in the documentary Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. After the plane carrying the Uruguayan ruby team went down in October 1972, sixteen of the forty-five passengers survived for more than two months. Had they not eaten from the bodies of their dead companions, they too would have died in the aptly named Valley of Tears. They were rescued when two team members trekked for days through towering peaks. Read More
Sometimes, rarely actually, a movie stuns me. Leaves me in awe. Not fully grasping what I’ve just seen, I want to watch it again and again.
That’s how I feel twenty-four hours after watching “A Christmas Tale.” The French film examines the complexities of a dysfunctional, estranged family reunited for the holiday. Typically that subject wouldn’t interest me. But there’s so much more to it in this film. Read More
Until HBO’s True Blood, I can’t recall a television series with an opening sequence more riveting than the show itself. A foreboding mix of lust, religion, and evil, the montage casts a memorable spell. With each viewing, I’m drawn deeper into the stark settings.
While I enjoyed the series’ first season, which wrapped up Sunday, it fell short of HBO classics The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos. I learned tonight via MetaFilter that a documentary inspired the opening, propelling Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus to the top of my must-see list.
The visceral appeal of True Blood’s opening isn’t the sex. It’s the southern swamps. I trudged through them in my youth. They entered my blood. Read More
On the radio, Garrison Keillor says writer Charles Webb turns sixty-nine today. Webb wrote The Graduate, the book on which the 1967 movie was based. News to me is Webb’s sequel, published in January.
A little research shows Home School is a sequel in name only. Not worth reading, not worth risking the original story losing its special status. Good stories end; finality keeps them very much alive.
My first encounter with The Graduate was the movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and Katherine Ross as Elaine Robinson. I didn’t read the book until I had seen the movie five times — the first with guy friends, the last four alone — before graduating from high school in 1968.
I imagined myself as Benjamin after his affair with Elaine’s mother, Anne Bancroft’s iconic Mrs. Robinson. I loved his Alfa Romeo sports car, the way he drove it balls-to-the-wall, how good he looked unshaven and disheveled, how he questioned his advantaged life, how he did whatever it took against impossible odds to win Elaine’s heart from the superficial, pretty-boy college guy.
I wanted to be Benjamin the intellectually gifted outsider, the rebel whose persona exuded a secret charm that attracted girls like Elaine. At Winter Park High in Florida, such girls were my friends but beyond my romantic reach. Read More
How strange to stumble upon photos of my childhood house of the 1960s on a movie web site. I was searching Google images for a picture of Lake Sybelia in Maitland, 
Florida. Once a quaint hamlet of citrus trees and lakes, Maitland was long ago consumed by the tourist monster that ate Orlando. During my search, up popped the house — white columns, veranda, and canopy of live oaks — under siege by a phalanx of movie cameras and crew.
Interlopers! was my first thought, irrational given that my family rented the house and moved out thirty-eight years ago. Then the movie title tugged at me: The Way Back Home. Read More
