A Faulty "Foundation"

I'm familiar with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels, but don't count myself as a fan.  They were too heady for me when I read them as a teenager.  I only got through two volumes before giving up.  Still, they made enough of an impression on me that when I learned that David Goyer and Josh Friedman were going to turn the books into a series for Apple TV+, I expected they were going to face an uphill battle.  "Foundation" is a series about the fall and rebuilding of a galactic empire, where a group of "psychohistorians" are able to predict and help shape the course of history through their study of higher level mathematics.  Their thousand year plan is called the "Foundation." 

What Goyer and Friedman have elected to do with the first season is to take stories from multiple "Foundation" books and have them all happen simultaneously, or in very compressed timelines, to avoid having the action take place over massive time scales the way they originally did.  We start with the central figure of the Foundation, Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) recruiting his protege Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobdell), and presenting the plan for the Foundation to the Galactic Emperor.  The Emperor is actually a triumvirate of young, mature, and old clones of Cleon I, who refer to themselves as Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), Brother Day (Lee Pace), and Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton and Cooper Carter).  From this meeting and subsequent events, multiple storylines unfold.  One follows the unravelling of the Empire with the Cleon clones.  One follows Seldon's followers on the remote planet Terminus, led by Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey).  And then there's Gaal Dornick, separated from both, travelling a very uncertain path forward.     

Apple certainly spent a lot to make the first nine-episode season of "Foundation" look impressive, but too much of it ends up derivative of every other science-fiction show of the past few years.  The first episode, set on the galactic capitol of Trantor, and Gaal's watery home planet Synnax, is full of beautiful visuals of otherworldly civilizations, thoughtful concepts, and interesting dilemmas.  By the seventh episode, we're watching a bunch of characters dressed in grungy military outfits having shootouts in corridors with bad lighting.  To be fair, this isn't the only thing going on in the episode, but I found it roundly depressing how quickly "Foundation" went from talking about these bigger, more challenging ideas to fairly rote sci-fi action squabbles.  The Terminus storyline is completely revamped to turn Hardin from a politician into an action hero, and issues of statecraft into showy guerilla warfare.  And it's kind of a bore.  

Much more successful is the clone storyline.  From what I can tell, the idea to turn the Emperor into a triumvirate of clones is an invention of the series, and allows the actors to play a succession of different characters over multiple eras.  The show's exploration of the clones' relationships with one another, their absolute power, their obsessions with their legitimacy, and their ritual-bound existence all works very well.  Lee Pace is the show's MVP, playing each Cleon at the prime of his life and power.  A lot more finagling is deployed to keep characters like Gaal and Hari in the show.  I don't mind Gaal's role being expanded to give us an additional POV character for future seasons, but she didn't have nearly enough to do.  Meanwhile, Hari had a very set, very purposefully limited role from the outset, and adding all these other appearances and ongoing questions about his actions was a mistake.  There's so much material that was straightforward in the books, but set up to be big mysteries in the series, and I find it very aggravating.

What else could have been done to improve the show?  A shorter season, for one, that would have removed the need for so much filler.  More than surface level exploration of the franchise's themes for another.  I quite like that Gaal and Salvor were both gender and race swapped, which is oddly touching in a series where predestination and genetic destiny are seen as major forces.  However, this is very much a show focused on spectacle over science-fiction, and full of characters who talk the way that not-smart people think smart people talk.  I still have hopes that the creators can figure out ways to improve in future seasons, but it's going to take a lot of work.        

      

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"Passing" and "King Richard"

Still getting through the award season titles.

"Passing" is the directing debut of Rebecca Hall, a small, lovely film about two African-American women in the 1920s who reunite when they recognize each other while both passing for white women.  Reenie (Tessa Thompson) lives in Harlem, married to a black doctor, Brian (Andre Holland), and passes on a whim during a shopping trip.  Clare (Ruth Negga), is visiting from Chicago, where she lives as a white woman, and is married to a bigoted businessman, John (Alexander Skarsgaard).  Clare is totally isolated and uses her renewed friendship with Reenie to reconnect to African-American culture, but her presence brings tensions, and eventually danger to Reenie's family and community.

I was wary of writing anything about "Passing" because it exists in such a specific cultural milieu, and addresses so many thorny issues like colorism and privilege that I don't feel remotely qualified to talk about.  However, I can talk about the performances of the two leads, which are wonderful and fascinating.  Negga and Thompson do such layered, evocative work, always carefully balancing so many unvoiced needs and concerns.  And then there's the complicated relationship between Reenie and Clare, with its shifting balance of power and eventual turn into hostility.  Negga has the more memorable  role as Clare, who is absolutely miserable under her well-constructed facade of gaiety and liveliness.

And I can talk about the filmmaking, which is minimalist and delicate.  The cinematography is black and white, helping the film to look like period photographs of the era, and also to emphasize how Clare exists in this tenuous space between black and white, light and shadow.  I especially appreciate the way that the film depicts Harlem in the 1920s, and the way that African-American culture is portrayed as something so positive and so important to many of the characters.  However, Hall also uses a very light touch, and the script is very interior, so the film never feels like a "black struggle" movie.  It's awfully strong work, and I look forward to more from her as a director.     

Now, on to "King Richard," and I admit that I'm guilty of questioning why a movie about the rise of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams should be focused on their father, played by Will Smith.  Then again, I knew very little about the Williams sisters or their background.  It turns out that they grew up very working class in the rougher part of Compton, California.  In the film, their father tongue-in-cheek refers to it as "the ghetto."  He and his wife Brandy (Aunjanue Ellis) have their hands full raising five girls, including Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton), who Richard is coaching on his own with very limited equipment and facilities.  Their dedication and sacrifice, along with a few shrewd managerial decisions, and a lot of luck, are what ultimately lead to success.

  

The film was designed as a showcase for Will Smith, but it also succeeds at being a feel-good sports movie, and I can't think of a significant one about tennis since "Wimbledon."  "King Richard" is very much a crowd pleaser, and the scenes of melodrama and the suspenseful tennis matches are all handled well by director Reinaldo Marcus Green.  However, it's the script by Zach Baylin I find the most impressive, for managing to address themes of race and privilege in a way that feels genuine while still staying mostly audience friendly.  Also, the depiction of sports culture and the business around rising young players is very good.  A potential sneaker deal becomes a big plot point late in the movie.

Richard Williams is not a particularly likeable figure, but he makes for a great film protagonist.  He's almost the only one who believes in his children for so long, and remains so protective, that he regularly clashes with coaches like Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) and Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), and even starts second-guessing his daughters at critical junctures.  He strikes me as someone who would be exasperating in real life, but Will Smith's charisma is still a force to be reckoned with, and it's impossible to resist when he turns on the charm.  And this sort of movie is a rarity these days, and Smith is really very good here, so it won me over eventually.   

   

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"Better Call Saul," Years One and Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

With "Better Call Saul" finishing up this year, I can't put this show off any longer.  After enjoying "Breaking Bad," I fully intended to watch "Better Call Saul," but never made it past the first episode the first time around.  Waiting this long has made a binge possible, and very overdue.

You do need to have some familiarity with "Breaking Bad" to enjoy it best, since several characters in addition to Saul Goodman cross over between shows.  A big reason why "Saul" works as well as it does is that while we're following the career of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), who will one day become the title character, in the background our old pal Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) is engaging more directly with Albuquerque's criminal element.  It's not that Jimmy's journey from a criminal lawyer to a *criminal* lawyer isn't exciting on its own, but it helps every few episodes to have a gunfight or a break-in that Mike is better positioned to deliver.

Jimmy in "Better Call Saul" has the same rough character arc that Walter White in "Breaking Bad" does, where we watch a man in less-than-ideal circumstances slowly lose his soul to the dark side.  Jimmy has never been entirely on the straight and narrow, however.  We first meet him as a struggling public defender, trying to make a go at a legitimate legal career after a long stint as a con-artist in his youth.  A huge influence on him is his older brother Chuck (Michael McKean), a much more successful lawyer who is now housebound after becoming hypersensitive to electronic signals, and is reliant on Jimmy as a caretaker.  The ailment might all be in his head, but Chuck is too afflicted to work, and is technically on sabbatical from the firm he's a partner at with Harry Hamlin (Patrick Fabian).  The other major new character is Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), an associate at Hamlin, Hamlin, & McGill, who is Jimmy's love interest and moral compass.  When Jimmy is tempted to break the rules or stray into criminal activity, Kim is the one who encourages him to do the right thing.

Of course, we know that Jimmy's dark side is going to win out.  So far, each season has started with a brief sequence that takes place in the present day, where Jimmy is a fugitive after the events of "Breaking Bad," hiding out as the lowly manager of a Cinnabon in Omaha.  The big question is what happens to Chuck and Kim, and some of the other characters who don't appear in "Breaking Bad."  Mike has some dealings with Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), a shrewd, likable member of the Salamanca gang who seems destined for tragedy.  Jimmy, however, feels like he could go either way after two seasons.  We watch him struggle mightily to be a lawyer on his own terms, deal with the demons of his past, and juggle his various schemes.  He's a fascinating character - incredibly clever and competent, but also clearly not able to fit into the mold of the straitlaced lawyer that Chuck does.  The performances of Odenkirk and McKean are dynamite stuff, and the exploration of Jimmy and Chuck's complicated relationship is the best part of the show so far.

I also really enjoy slipping back into the "Breaking Bad" universe.  The creators are so self-assured in handling the production and stylistic choices.  They're comfortable enough to have long sequences of no dialogue where Mike is surveilling a criminal operation, or to throw around references to very old movies like "Ice Station Zebra" and "All That Jazz."  Taking place in the early 2000s, with a cast populated by many older actors, "Better Call Saul" has a certain quality of old fashioned, Clint Eastwood-esque, romanticized American masculinity.  Conflicts are often framed as Jimmy against the system, or Jimmy against the snobs, but it's also very clear that it's Jimmy's individual choices that land him in hot water.  "Better Call Saul" continues the tradition of Vince Gilligan and his fellow writers writing themselves into corners that require a lot of ingenuity to write their way out of again, and it's very entertaining to watch everyone hustle for those big twists and thrills.

I think the first season outpaces the second by a pretty wide margin, mostly because it moves so fast and has so much work to do in setting up all the characters and laying out their backstory.  Mike's history as a police officer and his reasons for moving to Albuquerque are covered in a single, heartbreaking episode.  There's another where Jimmy goes back to his old hometown to relive his con-man days, before embracing an even riskier future.  The second season is very good, following Jimmy's attempts to integrate into a more formal law firm setting, and fighting his way out from his brother's shadow, but it also moves more slowly and is clearly a chapter of a larger, unfinished story.   

I think it's safe to say I'm in this one for the long haul.  I'll be back soon with more.

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"Prisoners of the Ghostland" and "Malignant"

So, a Sion Sono movie finally happened to me.  I know, I should have seen one of his films before now - and it's become clear to me exactly how long this guy has been around - but better late than never, right?  And where better to start than his long-awaited collaboration with Nicholas Cage?  Cage is in over-the-top cartoon character mode, playing a convict in a post-apocalyptic world who is coerced into undertaking a mission to retrieve a missing girl, Bernice (Sofia Boutella).  The movie enthusiastically tries to live up to him.  

The chief joys of "Prisoners of Ghostland" are in its worldbuilding.  The post-apocalyptic world of Sion Sono consists of a mostly intact Samurai Town, ruled over by the corrupt Governor (Bill Moseley) and his enforcer Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi).  Not too far away is the "Ghostland," inhabited by roving bands of evil mutants and an oddball group of outcasts, led by the bookish Enoch (Charles Glover) and priestess Chimera (Cici Zhou).  Samurai Town is a mixture of western frontier town and geisha district, full of eye-popping colors and stylized images.  The Ghostland is Sono's take on a "Mad Max" style desert wasteland, with similarly incredible costuming and production designs.  There are "rat men" who salvage and construct machinery.  There are catatonic depressives who encase themselves in mannequin parts.   

So, it's a terrible shame that none of this gonzo excess is much fun.  Sono is constantly tripped up by the awful English language dialogue and the half-baked characters.  Way too much time is taken up by the Governor's "granddaughter" Susie (Yuzuka Nakaya), a crazed victim of all these bad men in power, who has regressed to childhood - and the performance is just awful.  To make matters worse, the film's pace is punishingly slow, and there's not much action until very late in the story.  Cage's character is haunted by his past, specifically a bank heist he carried out with his former partner Psycho (Nick Cassavetes), that resulted in a massacre.  The recurring image from this event is an exploding gumball machine that sends candy flying everywhere in hypnotic slow motion.  And that's really the metaphor for the whole movie - beautiful pieces of genre candy bouncing around, making a mess, that you don't get to enjoy as it was intended.         

Now, on to James Wan's "Malignant." 

A woman named Madison Lake (Annabelle Wallis) suffers a supernatural attack that kills her abusive husband Derek (Jake Abel) and her unborn baby.  The killer, a psychiatric patient named Gabriel (Marina Mazepa and Ray Chase), has an array of powers including electrical manipulation, super strength, and a strange psychic bond to Madison.  On the case are a pair of detectives, Shaw (George Young) and Moss (Michole Briana White), while Madison and her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) look into clues from Madison's past to try and find Gabriel.

"Malignant" is a film that relies totally on its third act twist, and it's a good enough twist, executed with enough enthusiasm that I think many horror and action movie fans will enjoy it.  However, it does take ninety minutes to get there, and those ninety minutes are pretty dire stuff.  They reminded me of nothing so much as a sub-par episode of "The X-files," except without any strong characters to follow and a strange lack of atmosphere.  "Malignant" is pretty slick and flashy for a film that's supposed to be horror - well, I suppose it's less straightforward horror and more of a creepy creature feature.  The biggest issue is really the cast.  Madison and the detectives are pretty thinly written, but I think stronger actors could have breathed more life into them.

What we're left with is the monster, Gabriel, who isn't all that original as far as monsters go, but James Wan finds enough interesting body horror angles and fun images to help him make a heluvah impression.  The best scenes in the movie are the action set pieces, and "Malignant" would have been so much more enjoyable if there had been more of them.  I'm all for a good, slow buildup, but in this case, the more monstrosity, the better.  I wouldn't mind seeing Gabriel again, but in a movie that is maybe half an hour of buildup and ninety minutes of thrills next time.    

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Tonight at Eight/Seven Central

Life after traditional broadcast television has occasionally made me nostalgic for the oddest things, like certain commercials or programming blocks.  Lately it's been time slots.  The whole way that I figure out what to watch from day to day has changed completely.  Appointment television hasn't exactly disappeared, with many streaming services sticking to a weekly release model for shows.  Netflix is still a holdout, but even they're starting to dole out shows in smaller batches instead of full seasons at once.  

However, the concept of time slots is becoming irrelevant.  Practically the only people who watch media the second it premieres are either the die-hard fans or the poor entertainment journalists who are obligated to binge whole seasons of shows so they can publish their articles in a timely manner.  There's still a fairly entrenched population of casual viewers who watch programming because it happens to be on while they happen to want to watch television, but that kind of passive viewing is no longer considered the norm.

In the analog era, I used to spend every Sunday morning with the weekly television listings, mentally making notes on what shows and movies were airing at what times, and sometimes making plans around anything really important, like the Oscars or a new episode of "The X-files."  I was enough of a nerd that I kept track of premiere dates for new and returning shows, but individual episodes were impossible to really pin down more than a week ahead of time.  During sweeps and premiere months, the episodes would mostly be new, and over the summer they'd be repeats, but sometimes shows were cancelled early, or they never showed the reruns, so if you missed an episode, you might have missed it for good.  Especially if you liked the more obscure, less popular shows, you had to keep an eye on the listings in case the time slot moved, or there were pre-emptions. I feel like fans had much more intense relationships with television pre-streaming, because you had to commit more.  You had to be on time every week, or reliably know how to program a VCR or DVR.  You associated certain shows with certain days and times.  Thursday was "Friends" and "Seinfeld."  Sunday was "The Simpsons."  

In the streaming era, I keep calendars now, instead of referencing listings.  I prefer to make my own so I can combine different media - VOD and streaming premiere dates for feature films, streaming premiere dates for various series and specials, and occasionally those few remaining broadcast-only events that I'll eventually figure out how to watch online.  Everything, even "American Crime Story: Impeachment" will eventually find its way online, because if it doesn't, for a good portion of the population that means it's simply not worth watching.  If I didn't maintain my calendars, though, I'd be in no danger of missing out.   I can watch these shows whenever it's convenient for me, not when it's convenient for the majority of potential viewers.  I don't have to worry about choosing between shows because they happen to occupy the same time slot.  I don't have to watch them as they premiere if I don't care about following the discourse - and yes, the discourse is still a thing.

It didn't really occur to me until my calendars started merging with my "To Watch" lists that streaming content hasn't just bust out of time slots or traditional seasons, but viewers really have been left to program their own lineups entirely, and it's now perfectly normal to be discovering older shows years after they were cancelled, or to be devoting as much time to watching Youtube creators as it is to be following studio-produced shows.  We've gone way beyond the old dream of the "a la carte" model of choosing your own bundles of specific channels you wanted from the pay cable stations.  Today, it's closer to having the ability to choose the specific shows, and the specific episodes.

But strangely, I can't quite shake the habit of thinking about shows in terms of timeslots, even after all this time.  I'll end my night with late show clips around 11PM.  I tend to save genre shows to watch on Friday nights because that was always when they would air the nerdy science-fiction programs like "The X-files" and "Doctor Who."  I really don't miss appointment television, but I'll admit the instant gratification is less fun, in a way.  

Saturday morning cartoons watched on Thursday afternoons just isn't quite the same.    

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Rank 'Em: The Best Picture Winners of the '20s and '30s, Part 2

Continued from the previous installment.

6. You Can't Take it With You (1938) - I can't resist a romantic comedy starring Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart, especially when it's from Frank Capra organizing the screwball hijinks.  However, it's hard to make a case that this is better than all nine of the other nominees, especially when those nominees include "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Boys Town," "Pygmalion," and Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion," which was the first foreign language film nominated for Best Picture.  And though "You Can't Take it With You" remains very watchable, it's not one of Capra's best.  

7. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - The beloved WWI novel is brought to screen with wonderfully evocative imagery.  However, the film is very old, very long, and despite all the thunderous effects and explosions, it doesn't match up to more modern depictions of warfare.  However, for 1930 it was a standout, and none of the other nominees even comes close.  1930 was an odd, transitional time for Hollywood, and this was only the third Oscars, so the quality of the films in contention wasn't great.  It's only real competitor was the Maurice Chevalier comedy, "The Love Parade."  

8. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) - Charles Laughton was one of the most dependable portrayers of villainy in the 1930s, so of course he played the tyrannical Captain Bligh to perfection, Clark Gable (sans moustache) played Fletcher Christian, and the film was a huge box office hit.  I don't have particularly strong feelings toward this version of "Mutiny on the Bounty" otherwise, but I will note that it was up against some really iconic films for Best Picture, including "Top Hat," and "Captain Blood," and very good versions of "David Copperfield" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream."  

9. Grand Hotel (1932) - This is one of the films that Greta Garbo is best known for, especially the famous "I want to be alone" line.  The cast also boasts two Barrymores, Wallace Beery, and Joan Crawford.  It's a perfectly fine romantic melodrama of the era, with some notable production advancements, but 1932 was the first year with an expanded number of Best Picture nominations - eight this year, and ten from 1933-1943 - and I absolutely would have picked Josef von Sternberg's adventure film "Shanghai Express" or Mervyn LeRoy's newspaper noir "Five Star Final" over this.    

10. The Great Ziegfeld (1936) - Frankly, this wasn't a great year for the Oscars.  "The Great Ziegfeld" is a perfectly decent showbiz biopic that features some of the most elaborate song and dance production numbers of all time.  It's nearly three hours long, and absolutely smothered in excess.  However, I didn't find any of the other nominees particularly deserving either.  Maybe I could make an argument for Jack Conway's "A Tale of Two Cities" with Ronald Colman, or  Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town."  However, "Ziegfeld" wasn't even close to the bottom of the barrel for this decade.

11. Cavalcade (1933) - A remarkably maudlin chronicle of an upper class family's eventful history from the turn of the century to after the end of WWI.  There's nothing objectionable about the film aside from laying on the syrup too thick, but I have no idea how this movie managed to beat out some of the other nominees.  1933 had some of the best nominees of this era, including "42nd Street," "The Private Life of Henry VIII," "Lady for a Day," "She Done Him Wrong," and the only adaptation of "A Farewell to Arms" worth anything.  "Cavalcade" isn't the worst of this lot, but it's close.    

12. The Broadway Melody (1929) - The general consensus is that "The Broadway Melody" won on the strength of its technical achievements.  It was the first sound film to win, one of the first sound musicals and one of the first to feature a technicolor sequence.  It helped usher in the sound era, but the content is pretty mediocre stuff - your standard showbiz tale of a group of up-and-comers who put on a big show.  Still, it didn't have much competition.  "The Patriot" is lost, but the other nominees are pretty rudimentary - "Hollywood Revue" is essentially a filmed theater show.  

13. Cimarron (1931) - Finally, my pick for the worst of the decade (and really, the worst in any era) is "Cimarron," a western about the Oklahoma land grab.  It morphs into a family epic and melodrama about the taming of the frontier.  It's very unfocused, badly paced, and fundamentally doesn't work as the feminist narrative the book was.  What really kills the film from a modern POV, however, are the unfortunate racist caricatures of the African-American and Native-American characters, who are patronized relentlessly by all the white characters.

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Rank 'Em: The Best Picture Winners of the '20s and '30s, Part 1

I've finished watching all the available Academy Award for Best Picture nominees, the exceptions being "The Patriot" (1928), considered a lost film, and "East Lynne" (1931) and "The White Parade" (1934), which are only available to view in person at the UCLA film archive.  

I've been debating about the best format to write about these films, since I'm honestly not too interested in analyzing most of them.  My yearly posts on Best Picture nominees are done as Rank 'Em posts.  Originally, I was planning to rank all 93+ Best Picture winners in one list, but that didn't seem quite fair.  How on earth are you supposed to compare the merits of a silent film like "Wings" to modern films?  Heck, some of these movies are so wildly outdated, I struggle to see them as anything more than historical curiosities.  So, I've resolved to divide up the films by time period.  I'm doing lists for each decade of Best Picture winners, and will talk about additional nominees, and who I think should have won various races in the individual write-ups.  I could do year by year ranking lists and discuss every single film, but right now I want to do a shorter series.  However, I'm leaving the door open for that in the future. 

I'm going to start with the '20s and '30s and work my way up to the present day.  I think it's best to combine the '20s and the '30s in a single post because there would only be two entries for the '20s.  I'm also listing thirteen entries here, because awards buffs will remember that Best Picture was actually split into two different categories: "Outstanding Picture," won by "Wings," and "Best Unique and Artistic Picture," won by "Sunrise.    

Here we go.

1. Gone With the Wind (1939) - 1939 is considered one of the greatest years for movies of all time.  "Gone With the Wind" remains the clear winner, but other contenders included "The Wizard of Oz," "Ninotchka," "Love Affair," "Stagecoach," and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."  "Gone With the Wind" tops this list because it's got such indelible characters and the epic filmmaking still wows to this day.  It was such a cinematic touchstone for so long that I still hold tremendous affection for it, though it seems to have finally reached its cultural expiration date.    

2. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - The only "Best Unique and Artistic Picture" winner is widely recognized as one of the greatest silent films ever made, and F.W. Murnau's masterpiece.  It's a dreamy, impressionistic film about a couple's rift and eventual reconciliation.  Leading lady Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress trophy, and Charles Rosher and Karl Struss got Best Cinematography. "Sunrise" competed against "Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness," an ethnographic story of Thai farmers done in a similar style to "Nanook of the North," and King Vidor's classic, "The Crowd."

3. It Happened One Night (1934) - One of my favorite romantic comedies pairs Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in a gleeful Pre-Code romp.  The leads are fantastically charismatic and sexy throughout, and Frank Capra knows exactly how much to show (and how much not to show).  It's legendary at the Oscars, as the first film to win all five major awards (for Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Writing). The other contenders for this year included rival screwball farce "The Thin Man," and another Claudette Colbert picture, the lavish Cecil B. DeMille version of "Cleopatra." 

4. The Life of Emile Zola (1937) - This one surprised me, because it's such a typical biographical melodrama, about writer Emile Zola and his part in the famous Dreyfus affair.  However, it tells a truly compelling story and Paul Muni is excellent in the lead.  I also admire how screenwriters in the '30s were able to pack so much more story into films of the time.  I think the right picture won here, but I'm also very fond of some of the other nominees: screwball comedy "The Awful Truth," Katherine Hepburn showbiz film "Stage Door," and the earliest version of "A Star is Born."  

5. Wings (1927) - The other winner of the first Academy Awards is a silent film more impressive for its technical accomplishments than its artistry.  However, it's also notable for being one of the first films to show nudity, for LGBT content, and for its ambitious staging of WWI aerial battles.  However, "Wings" became such an obscurity over the years, it was considered a lost film until a print turned up in France in 1992.  It remains very watchable today because it was designed to be an adventure spectacle.  And it's Pre-Code sensibilities often make it feel more modern than later films.   

Boy, this got long.  Looks like I'll have to break this installment up into two parts.

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