Talking Movies

May 22, 2019

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XII

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

Films of the Decade, already?!

I was horrified when Paul Fennessy sent me a Films of the Decade list that had appeared on the World of Reel website on the 30th of April. April?! Can we not start obsessing over this until 1st of December?! I am dreading the end of the year and all these fevered lists and attendant arguments enough as it is without having them blunder into my consciousness in early summer. As I’ve said before on this topic, way back in October 2009, lists are generally easy when you don’t think about them too much. I found it far easier in 1998 to make a list of the single film that defined each decade from the 1930s to the 1990s than I did in 2009 to make a Top 10 Films of the 2000s list. The agonising questions from October 2009 are equally valid now I feel: Should you simply pick the films you liked best? Or should it be films that in some (in)tangible way summed up the decade? If you choose the latter route do you pick films that were influential over later, better films that needed the precursor’s breakthrough? (Do you pick films you didn’t like/really see because they’re ‘important’?) Do you load the list with films that only 100 people in the country ever saw? Is it permissible to introduce quotas for foreign films to get round the popular imagination being defined by America? Do you even need to get round that? Does a film need to be set in its own decade or can it define it by allegory? Do you try to be comprehensive by shoe-horning in as many genres as possible? If a genre dominates a decade does it deserve disproportionate weighting? I ended up thinking that films which have stood the test of time and have matured deserves place most. I then offered a Top 20 Films of the 2000s. I’m not going to do that now because this is May. I don’t think much of World of Reel’s list, not least because it includes an entire season of a TV show as a film of the decade. I’d like to revise my 2000s list please to include season 2 of The West Wing on that idiotic basis.

 

Oscar bait is temporary, Benny Goodman is forever

I was ecstatic watching this advertisement with my Dad in February to note that Benny Goodman’s rendition of ‘Sing Sing Sing’ has now lost all association with dire 2011 movie The Artist to which it was forcibly yoked during its prolonged Oscar-campaign. Benny’s swing has ascended once again to the realm of glorious music, and The Artist has been mercifully forgotten as the inept worthless gimmick it was. Seriously, when was the last time you heard anyone rave about that movie? Stitching together elements of A Star is Born and Singin’ in the Rain while using Vertigo’s music to generate emotion a film about a four year sulk could not manage on its own is not to be applauded. Mugging in the way silent movie actors had to because of the lack of sound is not to be applauded anymore than someone forgetting how to paint with perspective. ‘Ah, they don’t make ’em like they used to.’ What?! This film was far too popular with critics because it massaged a peculiar obscurantist spot, that one which is akin to someone saying theatre was never as good after they took the masks off. This film was always a spurious silent movie, and nobody cares to remember they were made to root for this film as a feel good throwback by the fallacious aggressive marketing of one H. Weinstein.

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