My Favorite Michelangelo Antonioni Film

Michelangelo Antonioni's films are the very definition of arthouse cinema.  They have unorthodox narratives, often contain heady themes, and the later ones were usually built around landscapes and environments rather than performances.  They require the viewer to let go of preconceived notions of film to even approach them.  He caused a sensation with "L'Avventura" by presenting a mystery that is never resolved, in a film full of long shots where nothing apparently happens.  All Antonioni films were about social alienation in one form or another.  However, as time went on his characters spoke less and the camera more.  He became less concerned with traditional narratives, and instead on mood, atmosphere, and tone.  I admit I haven't always had the patience or the concentration to appreciate his work.  However, when I did connect to one of his films, the experience was entrancing.

"Red Desert" was the one I found the most affecting.  A woman named Giuliana (Monica Vitti) has recently been through a traumatic car accident, and is suffering from loneliness and alienation.  She has a young son, and her husband Ugo manages a petrochemical plant near Ravenna, Italy.  The area has become heavily industrialized and polluted, perhaps mirroring Giuliana's new state of mind and attitude toward the world.  Everywhere she goes seems to be contaminated.  She gradually becomes involved with Corrado (Richard Harris), a visiting business associate of Ugo's, and reveals her troubles to him.  He's sympathetic, having many of the same feeling toward the state of the world, but has learned to cope.  Giuliana tries to reconcile herself with her surroundings, but the people she encounters in social situations, her family, and ever her dreams continue to cause her anxiety. 

There is no literal desert in the film, but rather a metaphorical one created in Giuliana's mind.  Antonioni presents the world as the character views it, a looming expanse, full of soft colors, devoid of life, and terribly empty.  The only major landmarks are the hallmarks of industrialization: the smoke-spewing factories, construction cranes, and pieces of large machinery.  Giuliana is left adrift in the landscape, constantly wandering from place to place, constantly compelled to separate herself from others.  This was the director's first color film, and he was determined not to be limited by reality, opting instead for more stylized, impressionistic visuals.  He went so far as to have trees and grass painted grey to fit his specific palette of muted tones.  The color red appears repeatedly, but mostly in the interiors, when Giuliana manages to connect with other people briefly.  It's one of the few bright colors in Giuliana's world of grays and pastels, where everything seems to be on the verge of disappearing into the fog of polluted air. 

Monica Vitti gained a reputation for detached, cool characters after appearing in three of Antonioni's previous films playing similar characters.  Giuliana stands out, however, because her alienation is the most extreme, and Vitti is excellent at getting across her growing neurosis.  All the other actors seem to have been cast to be slightly off balance with her.  Richard Harris, a British actor known for emotional, turbulent performances, is very cool here, clearly an outsider with all his dialogue dubbed in Italian.  Carlo Chionetti, a Milanese lawyer who appeared in no other acting roles, was cast as Ugo.  As in all of Antonioni's films, social outings only serve to drive the characters further apart and highlight their isolation.  The small talk full of innuendoes becomes part of the din of industrialization.  And while we're on the subject of the sound design, "Red Desert" has a very memorable one.  Like the visuals, the soundtrack is impressionistic.  It uses a combination of machine noises and an electronic music score to make the atmosphere even more uneasy and unsettling.

Antonioni's films have been compared to poetry in the way the it conveys themes and ideas.  You could watch "Red Desert" and conclude that Giuliana's mental ailment to be due to a fear of men, or sexual dysfunction, or a rejection of Italian social mores, or plenty more.  The film invites interpretation, suggesting that the scenes where nothing happens may actually be the most telling.  Antonioni actually strikes me as fairly accessible because his intentions are quite clear in much of his work, and the visuals are always so striking.  Even if you find "Red Desert" completely obtuse, it's still a lovely, haunting landscape to observe. 

What I've seen - Michaelangelo Antonioni

The Lady Without Camelias (1953)
Le Amiche (1955)

Il Grido (1957) 

L'Avventura (1960)
La Notte (1961)
L'Eclisse (1962)
Red Desert (1964)
Blowup (1966)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
The Passenger (1975)

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My Top Ten Warner Bros. Animated Shorts

I debated with myself for a long time about what format I should use to talk about shorts on this blog.  The iconic cartoon shorts from Warner Bros. and Disney are some of the most influential pieces of film from my childhood, as they were for pretty much anyone over the age of thirty.  I've finally settled on giving them their own top ten lists.  Bugs Bunny, Daffy, and the rest of the Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes gang will go first, and Disney will have their own list next month.  Yes, I picked all Chuck Jones directed and Michael Maltese written shorts, and will not apologize for it.  Entries below are unraked, and ordered by date of release.  I'm going to cheat a bit on one of them, though.  And off we go.

Fast and Furry-ous (1949) - You simply can't talk about the Warner Bros. cartoons without mention of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner.  Unfortunately, most of their shorts tend to blend together for me, so I'm going to pick their first outing as a representative.  It wonderfully set up the format for the long-running series and already has most of their best gags in some form: the malfunctioning ACME products, rampant misuse of dynamite, the demented cartoon physics, and of course the Coyote getting squashed and blown up multiple times.

Rabbit of Seville (1950) - A big contributor to some of the best shorts was composer Carl Stalling.  He was the one who rearranged "The Marriage of Figaro" and all the other music central to the escalating madness of Bugs and Elmer's feud in "Rabbit of Seville."  This one has so many of my favorite gags, from Bugs playing barber (and horticulturalist) on Elmer Fudd to the wedding that erupts out of nowhere.  Of course, Stalling and Chuck Jones' greatest opera-themed collaboration would come a few years later in another entry on this list.

Rabbit Fire (1951), Rabbit Seasoning (1952) and Duck! Rabbit! Duck! (1953) - Now Bugs and Elmer are a classic pairing, but when you add Daffy Duck to the mix, suddenly there's rivalries on top of rivalries, and all sorts of new angles to play with.  If push comes to shove, I'd probably pick "Rabbit Fire" as my favorite of the "Hunting Trilogy," but the hysterical variations in the two sequels are so good, it's too painful to separate them.  And special kudos to Mel Blanc - remember that the whole "duck season/rabbit season" argument was one man!

Feed the Kitty (1952) - Marc Anthony the bulldog's selfless love for the world's most adorable kitten makes for a heart-tugger beyond compare.  There had already been shorts with a similar premise - Disney's "Lend a Paw" comes to mind - but it's the little things that make this one hit so much harder: Marc Anthony's evolving reactions to the kitten, the various distractions he comes up with, and finally the visual gag with the cookie cat.  Watching this one again as a grown-up and a parent just made me fall in love with it all over again.  

Duck Amuck (1953) - The epic struggle between a cartoon duck and the unseen animator who controls his universe is one of the greatest pieces of animation ever made.  It's such a simple idea, but the metaphysical and comedic implications are endless.  Daffy was always my favorite character, for his massive ego and his stupendous outrage, and they're impossible to suppress here, no matter what the animator does to him.  The sequel with Bugs was a lot of fun, but it couldn't match the heights of the existential lunacy scaled here by Daffy Duck.  

Duck Dodgers of the 24½th Century (1953) - The pitting of Daffy and Porky against Marvin the Martian is so memorable in this "Buck Rogers" spoof, that I was surprised to discover that it actually only happened once during the original Merrie Melodies run.  Marvin's usual adversary was Bugs, who he had some great cosmic spats with.  I prefer Daffy's outing though, for the buddy comedy bits with Porky and the constant self-aggrandizement.  And take special note of the spectacular layout and backgrounds by Maurice Noble and Phillip DeGuard.

Bully for Bugs (1953) - The legend goes that Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese made "Bully for Bugs" in response to their producer declaring out of the blue one day that he didn't want any pictures with bullfighting, as there was nothing funny about it.  So Bugs Bunny took another wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up in the middle of a Barcelona bullring with Toro the Bull.  And now everyone knows the tune of "Las Chiapanecas," which must be accompanied by judicious slapping, and Bugs' famous line, "Of course you know this means war."

One Froggy Evening (1955) - I hated this short when I was a kid because I felt so bad for the poor construction worker who found the singing frog, and usually got upset when no one would believe him.  It took me years to appreciate that it was really a parable about letting things go and the dangers of greedy entitlement.  And that it's still really, really funny.  The short is so etched into my brain, I can still remember most of the charming old tunes sung by the frog. most notably "Hello! Ma Baby!" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry"

Double or Mutton (1955) - Ralph the Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog are fairly minor characters, but I just love all their appearances.  The joke about them only being mortal enemies while on the clock never gets old.  Also, the ridiculous sight gags with the sheep get me every time.  "Double or Mutton" is their third short together, the one where their formula finally gelled and the two characters fully established their cordial working relationship.  I also love the gags in this one, especially the use of the silly disguises and Sam's bad hair day.

What's Opera Doc? (1957) - "Kill the Wabbit!  Kill the Wabbit!"  Chuck Jones rushed other productions to buy him more time to work on this short, widely considered to be his magnum opus, and it shows.  The transformation of the Bugs and Elmer's feud into a six minute Wagnerian opera is opulent and gorgeous.  And though it's a pointed spoof of theatrical excess, I still find the melodrama quite touching, especially the ending.  I'd never felt so much empathy for Elmer Fudd as I did when watching him cry in remorse over that wascally wabbit.
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Is the All-Female Remake Trend a Problem? (Or Yet Another Frickin "Ghostbusters" Post)

The name is Bond.  Jane Bond.

While the impact of the female-led "Ghostbusters" on popular culture is still being hashed out, there have been rumblings of more gender-swapped versions of familiar films coming our way.  Gillian Anderson and Emilia Clarke have declared that if Daniel Craig is leaving the "007" franchise, they'd like a shot at the part.  There's also an all-female version of "Oceans 11" with Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lawrence picking up steam, and Ronda Rousey is headlining the remake of "Road House."  A female-led "21 Jump Street" spinoff is being considered, and somehow the "Expendabelles" isn't totally dead yet.   As the studios continue to reboot or spin off every last property in their back catalogues, some are trying to rejigger previously male-led hits to be vehicles for female stars.  Changing the gender of the main character in a story is not a new idea, and not a one-way street (see Jerry Lewis's filmography), but some nervous moviegoers are treating the newest batch of gender-swapped projects like it's the end of the world.

Now, if you've been paying attention to the state of pop culture, colorblind and genderblind casting is becoming much more accepted for most roles.  Nobody bats an eye if Scarlett Johansson plays Kaa in the new "Jungle Book," or Lucy Liu plays Watson in "Elementary."  By all accounts, the representation of anyone who isn't a white male in movies and television could still use plenty of improvement, so this is a good thing.  Where much of the controversy tends to come into play, however, is when more popular properties consider blind casting for lead roles.  And it's the lead roles that are particularly vital when it comes to representation and visibility issues.  Before this latest "Jane Bond" conversation, there was the female "Doctor Who" conversation when Matt Smith retired.  And there was the very different, but related black Spider-man campaign before that.  Whatever your opinions are on whether these particular roles are appropriate for race-blind or gender-blind casting, the conversations have been important because they highlight how few prominent roles are available to anyone who isn't white and male.  

Consider this.  All I could think about when I was watching the new "Cloverfield" movies, was that Mary Elizabeth Winstead would make a fantastic, scrappy young female MacGuyver, or maybe she could take over the aging "Die Hard" franchise, where she already plays John McClane's daughter.  Of course, I'd also love to see her in something original - if there's another "Cloverfield" sequel, I certainly want her involved.  However, starring in a more established franchise would boost her to better parts and more exposure much more quickly.  The trouble is that female-led action franchises are very few and far between, so her options are more limited than if she were Chris Pratt or The Rock, who seem to be constantly being considered for every reboot under the sun.  Flipping genders opens up more roles for women, and also gives at least the surface impression that something new and interesting is being done with an otherwise played out property.  It should be a win-win decision, right?

Well, not according to many fans of the original properties.  Now, I am absolutely not suggesting that everyone who's been throwing vitriol at the new "Ghostbusters" is a misogynist.  However, I am suggesting that there is an awful lot bias involved.  No matt how awful it was, the reboot would not have created the same firestorm of controversy if it had been made with an all-male cast.  Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Rob Schenider, and Tyler Perry in aggregate couldn't have managed it.  However, something about the new Ghostbusters team being all women really touched a lot of nerves.  Also, I don't think an unaffiliated female ensemble comedy involving ghosts would have been an issue for these fans, but the fact that they were touted as the new "Ghostbusters" was.  Some have brought up the issue of fan entitlement, accusing the unhappy "Ghostbusters" fans of being too resistant to inevitable change.  I don't think that's quite it either.

I think it has to do with who the target audience of the new "Ghostbusters" movie is, and who people think the target audience of the new "Ghostbusters" movie is.  For much of the current moviegoing audience, the assumption is that a movie with four female leads is meant for women.  Meanwhile, a movie with four male leads can be for anyone because male leads are the status quo.  So even though "Ghostbusters" is clearly intended to be a four quadrant movie, it's pinging for many of the established fans as a "chick flick" simply because of the cast.  That's the disconnect.  That's why many male "Ghostbusters" fans feel like they've been abandoned by the franchise - they no longer appear to be part of the right audience for it.  And until that mentality changes, I think we're going to need more of these gender-swapped movies, not less.

I'm certain that a "Jane Bond" movie is not going to happen.  Bond's appeal is intrinsically linked to his status as an icon of British masculinity, so there is almost no chance that whoever replaces Daniel Craig in the role is going to be anything but a heterosexual white male for a long time.  However, this is still an important conversation to have.  And maybe it could put Gillian Anderson in contention for an original female spy movie that some studio is on the fence about making.  Maybe Emilia Clarke would be right for a Bond girl spinoff.  We can't know the answers to these questions if they're never asked.

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Rooting for Filmstruck and Imzy

Time marches on, and new services and platforms are launching every day to replace the current ones.  I'm rarely an early adopter, but there are two new services that have gotten my attention in a big way, and I'm getting pretty excited for.

The first is Filmstruck, a new streaming service from Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection, offering titles from both libraries.  That means all the current Criterion titles will be leaving Hulu, and thank goodness.  The Hulu interface never functioned very well, and I depended on the Criterion site to actually navigate their offerings.  The Criterion titles being one of the only reasons that I subscribed to Hulu Plus to begin with, this will probably mean I can leave the whole service behind.  The catch is that Turner will be implementing a tiered system, so many titles will only be available on a "Premium" channel.  However, depending on what they've offering, that could still be well worth the money.  They've promised titles from "Janus Films, Flicker Alley, Icarus, Kino, Milestone and Zeitgeist," among others.  And supplementary material.

More specifics, like pricing and regional availability are yet to come, but Filmstruck looks like a cinephile's dream.  It's ad free, aimed at more discerning viewers, and will be run by the same folks who have kept TCM a bastion of sanity on cable television.  I was constantly watching TCM for the few years that it was available to me, and I'd love to have access to all that older Hollywood content again.  Having the Criterions on Hulu was certainly a good thing, but I always felt that the films weren't well served by the platform.  Partnering with TCM looks like a much better fit culturally.  And while the audience for Filmstruck will be more limited, I don't see many competitors.  There's Mubi, which also specializes in foreign and independent film, but they only offer thirty curated titles at a time and lean toward more contemporary programming.  Fandor has a bigger, more stable selection, but is similarly aimed at the die-hards and can be a little alienating.

The danger will be that the programming will be too niche for Filmstruck to attract enough subscribers to sustain itself.  Also, there's probably going to be less content offered than I'm hoping for.  TCM will certainly take pains to avoid cannibalizing the audience for its cable channel, and I suspect that many of the usual licensors of its most popular content won't be too keen on having their content available for streaming on Filmstruck when most of them are planning their own rival streaming services that need all the titles they can get.  Turner only owns the older Warner Bros and MGM movies outright, remember, and everything else comes from other studios.  Still, I'd pay for a Criterion-centric service on its own, and there are plenty of other fans like me out there.  Filmstruck officially launches in the fall of 2016 and I can't wait.

Now on to Imzy, which is a new link aggregation site that aims to be the new Reddit, except Reddit with more moderation and an emphasis on a "positive" culture.  It's currently in beta, invitation only, and being run by former Reddit executive Dan McComas.  Now if you've read previous posts on this blog, you know that I'm an active Redditor.  I really enjoy certain parts of the site, mostly the support communities and the IAMA Q&A sessions.  However, it's been getting harder and harder to ignore what are essentially hate groups that have been allowed to flourish on the site, and occasionally spill over into other communities.  There was a big kerfuffle last year that resulted in the banning of a few openly racist and harassment-oriented subreddits, but plenty of sketchy material remains.  As a thirty-something woman, it's especially hostile territory on certain topics like politics, social activism, and gender relations.

Frankly, Imzy sounds like a great response to the aggressively bro-centric Reddit culture.  However, as with all services that are built around user-generated content and interactions, it's hard to predict how the culture is going to develop.  Will Reddit end up looking like the female-dominated Tumblr and Pinterest?  Will we essentially have a Reddit clone with the more obnoxious elements removed?  Will it end up being adopted by a diverse collection of niche interests, creating a hodgepodge of different flavored spaces?  Or will everyone just ignore it?  Hard to say.  However, what's clear is that Imzy is going to be considerably more work than Reddit if it's going to remain a positive and inclusive environment.  Some less savory internet users take that kind of description as a challenge.  

Personally, I'm still out looking for the next great movie discussion site - Letterboxd just isn't what I'm looking for - and I'm hopeful it could be on Imzy.  It's probably wishful thinking, since Reddit's film and television related communities have been pretty disappointing.  However, from personal experience I know I'd be more willing to participate and contribute in a friendlier, more diverse environment.  Maybe Imzy could be the right place to foster a good community of film nerds that can actually carry on a conversation with a good amount of humor.  We'll never know until we try, won't we?

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Hail, Coens!

Now this is more like it.  After I was unable to connect to the Coens' last two films, "Inside Llewyn Davis" and "True Grit," I was worried that their charms were wearing off for me.  And these two are among my favorite directors who are still breathing, so that was a pretty alarming prospect.  Fortunately, along came "Hail Caesar!" their out-and-out comedic Golden Age Hollywood spoof.  And I couldn't be more thrilled.  This isn't one of their best films, but it's awfully entertaining, and absolute catnip to a classic film fan like me.  It falls into the category of their playful genre pieces like "The Hudsucker Proxy" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"  Actually, it feels like several all crammed together into one movie.

Josh Brolin stars as Eddie Mannix, the production chief and "fixer" at movie studio Capitol Pictures.  It's the early 1950s, and the studio currently has the following films in production: "Hail, Caesar!" a costly sword and sandals prestige epic starring Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who is kidnapped from the set by extras, "Merrily We Dance," an upper crust costume drama directed by the erudite Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) and starring an abruptly rebranded Western star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), and the latest feature of bathing beauty DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johanssen), who is secretly pregnant and needs to get married in a hurry.  It's Eddie's job to make sure that all of these productions stay on track and that all the various stars steer clear of scandal.  Also in the mix are Channing Tatum as a dancing sailor, Tilda Swinton as twin reporters, Frances McDormand as a film editor, and far too many cameos to count.

I'm hard pressed to think of a film that feels more like an excuse for the filmmakers to just recreate bits of old films that they enjoyed.  An Esther Williams-esque water ballet number featuring a mechanical whale and Scalrett Johanssen in a fishtail?  A beautifully choreographed comic dance scene reminiscent of "Anchors Aweigh"  with a delightfully swishy Channing Tatum?  A submarine captained by Dolph Ludgren?  Why not?  Around every corner there's a fascinating new character to spend a few minutes with, and unlike a few of the other Coens' films, I didn't mind that most of the stories didn't really have a resolution or add up to much in particular.  I had a ball just getting to meet all these characters and becoming caught up in their crazy problems for a little while.  "Hail, Caesar!" plays enough like a television pilot that I can dream of having a whole series where we'd check in on the further adventures of Eddie Mannix and Hobie Doyle every week.

Of course, you could never do a longer series with the same collection of talent.  For all the stars that show up in this movie, it was Alden Ehrenreich who ended up running away with it.  He plays Hobie as a good-natured Southern kid who is completely incompetent as an actor.  However, he's such a trouper and such a good guy, that you can't help rooting for him.  Late in the film he goes on a date with starlet Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio) and does the most charming things with a plate of spaghetti that I've seen since "Lady and the Tramp."  George Clooney plays another in his long line of great comic morons, and Josh Brolin is as dependable as ever as the weary straight man to all these over-the-top personalities.  And then there are the production values, which are gorgeous.  The Coens' period recreations always look fabulous, and their vision of Golden Age Hollywood film production is no exception.  I loved the Channing Tatum musical number just for the way it lets us peek in on what the crew is doing during the scene, while not taking away from the singing and dancing.

What I found the least successful were the allusions toward larger themes.  Religion and faith come up a few times in connection to the "Hail, Caesar!" film within a film.  A Communist study group also plays a major role, trying to lure various players away from the clutches of capitalism.  Mannix, struggling with his own questions of morality as he takes care of everyone's dirty laundry, spends a lot of the film weighing what it is he really believes and what his responsibilities are.  Except, none of these threads really come together well enough to feel like anything meaningful in aggregate.  A few nice sentiments are presented, but there's nothing much deeper there.

The same can be said of the film itself.  It's not a great film from the Coens, but a diverting and enjoyable one if you take it on its own terms.  It helps to be at least a little familiar with both the subject matter being skewered and the Coens' unique brand of skewering.
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"The Leftovers," Year Two

Mild Spoilers ahead

I'm a little taken aback by how dissatisfied I am with the second season of "The Leftovers," since the broad consensus seems to be that it was an important course correction for the show that made it much more accessible to a wider audience.  I suspect that I connected so strongly with the first season, that I wasn't as receptive to the changes as others who were cooler on it.  There's plenty that I did like about this season, and I'm certainly sticking around for the rest of the third one next year, but "The Leftovers" is turning out to be a different show than I originally anticipated.  

Where the first season was about dealing with grief and loss and the aftermath of tragedy, the second season is more concerned with moving on and trying to rebuild.  So several of our characters do that literally, picking up stakes and moving to the town of Jarden, Texas, nicknamed "Miracle."  It's the largest population that was untouched by the Sudden Departure, and has become a tourist destination and magnet for spiritual truth-seekers and desperate souls.  Central to this season's plot are the Murphy family, a picture perfect clan of Jarden natives: father John (Kevin Carroll), mother Erika (Regina King), and teenage twins Michael (Jovan Adepo) and Evie (Jasmin Savoy Brown).  However, there are signs that something is wrong in Jarden, and the mysterious disappearance of Evie and two other girls suddenly makes that impossible for the town to ignore.

It's hard to articulate exactly what I thought was missing from the second season of "The Leftovers."  All the characters are given plenty of good material to work with, and several are much improved.  Jill Garvey has ended her self-destructive tendencies, Kevin has a great new arc involving Patti, and Matt Jamison's strange and wonderful journey toward enlightenment continues to impress.  Justin Theroux and Christopher Eccleston have some of their best episodes here.  All the new characters are interesting and reveal hidden depths.  However, there's a lot less time spent with the Murphy's than I wanted. and they often feel like secondary characters in their own stories.  And then there are the characters from the first season who don't fare so well this year.  Laurie and Tommy have joined forces in a new venture that looks good on paper, but the execution is very underwhelming.  They simply don't pair well together.  And then there's Meg's new position as the leader of a splinter group of the Guilty Remnant that is bent on breaking all the rules.  I don't know if it's Liv Tyler's performance or the writing, but this didn't work for me at all.

It doesn't bother me that quite a few of the minor characters connected to Mapleton have been left behind, and that the Guilty Remnant is much less involved this year.  However, I miss what the cult brought to the show, the immense catharsis of watching characters process their pain in various forms.  A huge part of Nora Durst's character, for instance, was the psychological toll that her loss took on her.  Though she's clearly still struggling to adjust this season, the show has taken a big step back from charting her recovery, and it's a shame.  While watching the mystery of Jarden unfold is all well and good, and the creators warned up long in advance that most of the big answers would never come, it feels like "The Leftovers" abandoned a few too many pieces of its initial premise, and kept several that it really didn't need to.  I think part of the issue is also that the show has gotten much more crowded, juggling all these different characters and ideas, that a few important ones were inevitably neglected.

Maybe I expected too much.  "The Leftovers" is still without question a daring work of television, which starts off the premiere with a dialogue-free sequence with cave people and manages to incorporate international assassins and witch doctors by the finale.  It delves into questions of faith and denial and coping strategies from an entirely new angle than it did previously.  It should be pointed out that the source novel for "The Leftovers" was completely adapted in the first season, and the show's writers had to come up with everything this year from scratch.  No matter what I felt about some of the developments, this season consistently surprised me, kept me engaged, and I think it was exactly what it wanted to be.  I'm afraid I just wanted it to be something else.
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A Top Ten Project Progress Report

So it's been a little over a month since I set out on this new venture to write movie Top Ten Lists for the years before I started this blog, and it's been a fun ride so far.  Following my self-imposed rules that I had to watch the Best Picture nominees and at least fifty films for each year, I quickly worked my way through the 2000s and 1990s, mostly watching Best Picture nominees I'd never gotten around to.  It only took me eight films, from "Seabiscuit" to "Awakenings" to get through both decades.  I also took the opportunity to finally watch "Pretty Woman" for 1990.

However, the real challenge lies ahead.  I spent a good chunk of today working out exactly how many films, and which ones, I was going to need to watch to get through the 1980s and 1970s.  The numbers are pretty daunting:

1989 - 6
1988 - 3
1986 - 5
1984 -12
1983 - 13
1982 - 11
1981 - 14
1980 - 15

1979 - 15
1978 - 25
1977 - 12
1976 - 20
1975 - 17
1974 - 11
1973 - 15
1972 - 17
1971 - 13
1970 - 17

So that's 79 films to get through the '80s and 162 to get through the 1970s.  I'm missing exactly eleven Best Picture nominees for each decade.  There should also be an asterisk for 1988, where I actually have watched fifty films, but didn't see three of the year's Best Picture nominees.  This is actually fewer films than I was anticipating, as this whole exercise was started because I realized I'd only seen 25 films from 1978.  It turns out that's an outlier, and I've actually seen at least thirty films for every other year in that decade.  I'm not sure what happened in 1978, but my guess is that it's the point where my childhood memories of older films playing on television and my later exploration of classic films both reached their limits, and failed to overlap. Still, those numbers would be considerably higher if it weren't for Disney films and a lot of obscure anime.

I also started making lists of which films I wanted to see from each year, but this became more and more difficult the farther back in time I got.  For one thing, there were far fewer films being released thirty years ago than there are today, even when you factor in the foreign productions.  Also, I simply am not familiar with most of the titles, and my usual criteria - awards attention, box office success, and good talent involved - don't always help.  I expect as I get into the '70s and beyond, it may come down to what's available.  Home media wasn't prevalent until the late '80s, and quite a few major movies are still difficult to find.  I'm also trying not to be too narrow-minded about what I should be watching, and instead try to watch movies that I actually would have picked to see in theaters or come across on television if I had been around at the time.  I'm not going to get a real sense of the film culture if I only watch the award winners.  In more than a few cases, I've already watched all the award winners anyway.

This is going to be a fun challenge, though.  I've always had a fascination with films from the late '70s and '80s because I associate them strongly with my earliest childhood memories.  These are all the movies that my parents watched when they were my age, and would occasionally reference.     I was cognizant enough to understand they were part of the culture of the time, but never actually watched them.  So I'll be using this as an opportunity to finally see "An Officer and a Gentleman," and "Flashdance," and "Starman," and many, many Burt Reynolds movies.  I've already had a blast with the '90s movies, spotting a young Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Scent of a Woman," and rediscovering my love of Robert DeNiro in "Awakenings."

While I'm on the subject, I'm glad I didn't limit myself to the Oscar movies only, because some of them have aged terribly.  Good grief, "The Cider House Rules" was terrible.
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