I was stuck watching it in the theater too. We were with another couple so we thought we couldn't leave. We got to the car after the movie and they both said " I wish we would have left after the first 20 minutes"
Yep. Gets my up, um, down? er, vote. Surfed the wave of hype into the theater to see it, and in less than 15 minutes decided that the entire movie was nothing more or less than the complete self-absorption/self-indulgence of everyone involved, right down to the third grip assistant.
Since then, hearing again and again how it was some kind of landmark of American cinema, I've tried to watch it. And come away with the same conclusion.
I've never seen it, precisely because it always gets called the worst and while I like to give the underdog a chance the odds are just too overwhelming.
another thing: that weepy liberal tag-teamer paved the way for one appalling multi character drama after another…and then, at last, the multiverse movie. Pick a damn story and stick with it!
I know. We all yearn for a simple drama of family strife – beleaguered parents struggling with money and family business, the daughter's relationship tense, the old man getting in the way, etc. Like Everything Everywhere All At Once.
We watched it, and were not impressed. I'd be hard pressed to think of a way they could have laid the "People are complex!" messaging on any thicker. I suppose if I could have ignored that I might have liked it a little bit more than I did if it hadn't also been kind of tedious.
Pierce Film Productions has some YouTube videos on the model work that went into Titanic. Apparently they built the largest scale model of the thing ever just to sink it!
Caught this on DVD rental when it first released and couldn't believe how much I disliked it. I think I stopped watching after 30-45 minutes. My wife (who is generally less critical or at least angry-critical than I am) watched the whole thing and had nothing good to say about it... which is quite damning coming from her!
I'll add that I have not seen all that many Best Picture winners.
Since you bring up Baldrick… Missus Hairless (a Southerner) would occasionally watch GWTW, and my coping mechanism was to enact Hattie McDaniel addressing Blackadder-style put-downs directly to her mistress, usually beginning with “Well fiddle-dee-dee, Miz Scarlett…”
I have never had turnip greens, but I do like collard greens. Devein and chiffonade them, then braise 'em in a mix of stock and white wine with a few crushed garlic cloves.
Oh, no, turnips are good! The big yellow winter turnips - rutabagas - are good in meat stews or braised with a little bacon, onion, and broth. The white ones come in small, salad types that are tasty in, well, salad, and the purple topped ones that are good braised in butter and a pinch of dill with the greens if you have the greens.
Plus those fantastic things an Ethiopian chef can do with a turnip. Do you remember the story of Sophia Loren patting herself on the hip and telling a reporter “it’s all pasta!” I suppose we’ll hear some Moldavian or Polish screen sex bomb saying, “ees all turnips”.
Seattle was stopping at a little shopping center in outer Belleview (that had a food court consisting entirely of local businesses) and buying a bunch of Slavic stuffed pastries (potato with or without meat; cabbage; mushrooms) from a pair of unsmiling women, and eating half of them in the car on the way back to Isaaquah
Erskine Caldwell' s famous book, Tobacco Road, about poor Southern sharecroppers during the depression is the most turnip oriented book ever written. The first five chapters are about a bag of turnips. And God.
"She could sometimes stand the pain of it in her stomach when she knew there was nothing to eat, but when Lov stood in full view taking turnips out of the sack, she could not bear the sight of seeing food no one would let her have."
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
The crazy thing is it's actually a comedy .
I prefer rutabaga to turnips, I love parsnips most of all! I'm going to plant a bunch of turnips this year. I'm pretty sure horse feed is going to be expensive AF. Turnips make good horse food. I've been making my dog food for the last 4 months. I'm told that there's a place for turnips there also.
This is parsnip slander. Sliced lengthwise, buttered, and baked until tender, they are slightly sweet, nutty, and tender. If you got a bitter one, it was due to bad luck, just like getting a horrible, bitter carrot in a bunch of otherwise good ones.
I like parsnips, done right, but none of those more aged varieties (turnips, rutabaga). That was today’s revelation to me: that parsnips can turn into those?!
And this is the version that got all the play on the radio, back when radio was still good enough to pay attention to. It is vastly better than the studio version.
White and purple-top turnips are objectively better, they are delicate and complex. I'vem cooked parsnips without getting a sense of what they taste like. But a properly prepared rutabaga is pretty robust. Gorgeous Steinbeck quote.
If I never heard “When You Wish Upon a Star” (the Disney cash-register anthem) again, that’s be marvy. But that tune is in Pinocchio…did Bernard Herrman ever get oscared? A great moment in turnip songwriting is that line , rich with Baha’i wisdom, in Seals and Croft’s “Diamond Girl”: “Can’t you feeel the whole world’s a turnip?”
I like WYWUaS in general but, like Somewhere Over the Rainbow, it's best as instrumental jazz. I like the contours of the melodies and how they are harmonized.
They are classic examples of how to prettify a mostly-diatonic melody by putting the right chords underneath. The chords aren't weird, either, but they intersect nicely with the melody, which has some big dramatic leaps set up with scalar motion.
Everything a jazz musician needs to know is in the blues and the standards. All the chord-scale pedagogy should be thrown out.
[This is the sort of thing that happens when I'm unable to follow Roy's prompt.]
By Republican Jesus, who cares any more outside movie marketing departments.
Funny. The Mrs was just complaining that her beloved Cillian Murphy didn't get a nomination for Oppenheimer. I had to remind her that Oppenheimer was 2023, he did get the nomination (and the W) and wasn't even in anything in 2024. If there's just one rule for an Oscar, it's one has to be in something.
Anyway, back to the subject...
My memory's undependable, great in some cases, non-existent in others. So in this case, absolutely no Best Pictures come to mind.
But that said, I don't buy Roy's nominee. He finds GOTW awful on substantive grounds. But it is, specially in a theater on one of them big screens gorgeous. Despite an army of scripters and directors, it's a gorgeous piece of mid-century filmmaking.
Which is to say Worst Best Picture should have two components: disgusting story poorly shot -- shitty filmmaking on both parts.
That aforesaid shitty memory tells me that in general, there've been a lot of just really bad movies getting tha Best Movie thing. And there the memory fails again...
Ah, but Murphy did indeed have a movie released in 2024: Small Things Like These, a drama in which he plays the owner of a small coal delivery business in Ireland in the early eighties who ends up in a confrontation with the nuns running one of the Magdalene Laundries. It is a quietly excellent and moving performance, definitely deserving of an Oscar nomination. He says very few words, unlike in Oppenheimer, but those expressive eyes speak volumes. Emily Watson is also very good in it, playing the Mother Superior with smiling menace. Highly recommended.
Was just going to say this. If you know the story of the laundries, the movie might not seem significant. Maybe it hits harder for those who don’t. Anyway, worth a watch!
GWtW is awful by "modern" (later 20th c) standards, with a 1-2 punch of a scenery-chewing melodrama about the suffering of the Southern aristocracy during the War of Northern Agression. Something to offend everyone. Modern melodrama has to be either an intimate family drama (ideally subtitled) or a superhero movie.
Ideally a worst movie has to be a professional production where everyone does their best. Something like Cats, which should have been nominated just for Rebel Wilson eating mice while she sang.
Agree on GWTW. My parents let me see a screening of it on a school night (this was in the late 1960s). I left the theater during the intermission - I thought it was over (at last) and one of my school friends yells out of the rear door, Hey, it’s not over! - and I reluctantly went back in. (I wished I hadn’t.)
My Mom took me to see it at the drive-in probably in the early 60s. She loved Clark Gable. I loved the torrid romance. Playing with it was 10 North Frederick with Gary Cooper and Suzy Parker which Mom wouldn't let me see because of mature content--older man, much younger woman. Sigh.
GWTW is every bit as bad as you say it is, Roy, but it does have one redeeming virtue: without it, we never would have had the immortal Carol Burnett parody.
Agree. First time I watched it I kinda enjoyed it, but later (thinking about it) began to have doubts, leading to skepticism, leading to disbelief, and later outright horror, etc.
OMG! Forrest Gump! My hatred knows no bounds. I remember sitting slackjawed in the theater and thinking “poor poor Sally Field” She was basically the same age as Tom Hanks and had to play his MOTHER. Sheesh. What an AWFUL movie. Great soundtrack tho
This is why I'm not a movie critic: my critical faculties vanish when Redford or Streep are on the screen, and even I recognized that he was hopelessly miscast.
But Streep went out of her way to tone down her own performance to match his, which I thought was an incredibly generous thing to do. And the cinematography was amazing.
Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang in Esquire: “Once I had a farm in Africa…once I had a farm in Africa…once I had a farm in Africa, ee I ee I oh!”
Something may come to me later, but while refreshing my memory on Wikipedia, I came across a 2020 nominee that I haven't seen, "Sound of Metal." Now on my must watch list, so thanks for that, Roy!
I am plowing – Ah Say PLOWING! – thru the list of all nominees & winners since forever, and shocked, SHOCKED! to see some of the flicks on the lists in the early days. And of course I am incapable of judging whether It Happened One Night (1934) was more worthy than The Gay Divorcee´, but surely we can agree that The Thin Man was at least slightly moreso than either.
This is my way of saying I dunno, man...haven't seen enough to have an informed opinion.
But...
Around the World in 80 Days?
GIGI??
Ben-Hur???
The Sound of Music????
Oliver?????
Rocky??????
Chariots of Fire???????
Forrest Gump????????
Braveheart?????????
Titanic??????????
...and, of all the above nominees, the Worst Picture winner is...
...
Around the World in 80 Days! Here to accept the award for...well everyone – they are all dead – is the rotting corpse of Cantinflas!
"Hola muchachos y GRACIAS! Que Paso? Esta loco, no? Pensé que se suponía que los muertos descansarían en paz, pero nooo..."
That's what I need for these exercises, a multiple-choice question, with a partially closed list to work from! I know for sure I've seen quite a few of these. I couldn't take GWTW seriously enough to get angry, I probably would walk out on it nowadays, but I don't like the score and my favorite moment is the portentous break when they announce the intermission, I like intermissions. I liked Around the World in 80 Days a lot because I was about 10 years old when I saw it, I liked Gigi because I was young enough to have no idea how depraved it was and the songs are good, and I hated The Sound of Music because I was old enough to hate it and the songs are dreadful. It looks like it's made from outtakes of 12 unrelated shows sharing a bunch of the same actors. The nuns, the comical but cute teenagers of the cheaper-by-the-dozen family, the sadistic Austrian aristocrat who falls in love with the babysitter, the Alps, the Nazis laundered from Cabaret, the celebrity biopic about an especially awful vocal group who are not actual celebrities, the dumped fiancée. I loved Titanic, because I watched it over my wife's shoulder on her airplane screen while I was watching something else on my own. Just that is incredibly skilled and impactful. The narrative is so strong you can get the whole thing as a silent film just glancing at it every couple of minutes. But I figure that makes it the most wasteful film ever made, if the score and the dialogue and the special effects and at least 90 minutes of film are completely unnecessary.
I watched Ben-Hur as a child, though, in awareness of all its Oscars, and it really awakened my critical consciousness at that early age, because the acting is so bad, so that's my winner.
Whenever I catch a glimpse of "Ben-Hur" on TCM (and I've never seen the whole thing) I grin remembering Gore Vidal sneaking in the homoerotic subtext while Chuck Heston swore up and down it wasn't there.
I've heard that was actually William Wyler's direction to Stephen Boyd, play it gay. I see it every time I watch it. And I like that movie. I like the way Jesus is portrayed. Bring on the corn!
I had no idea about the glories of the screenwriting, in which apparently Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, and Christopher Fry also participated. Makes me want to try it again, to look for more digs against the Church Militant garbage of the novel, which I remember really hating, except for the leprosy.
Gay subtext or not, the reunion of Heston and Boyd is awesome! They're goofy grinning best friends age 13 all over again and I love them for going "all the way" with it. Hugh Griffith rules in the sauna scene. And for god's sake how do you act while driving a fucking chariot? Dunno, but they do it! BTW Margot Robbie wuz robbed, but I guess in THE ACADEMY skating really well isn't considered acting.
I dunno, man, Rocky is amazing to me. Exactly the uplifting, hopeful, small scale human heart thing I want in a movie. And if you’ve ever thought you were a loser, you might have seen yourself a little differently - and been kinder - after watching Rocky. The fact that Paddy Chayefsky called it corny trash just makes it (chef’s kiss) to me. I get Network, but what a hateful poison piss pot to live in for 2 hours. I know capitalism sucks. I prefer the ham-n-egger southpaw’s story thanks.
Plus I'm a sucker for William Holden, and Faye Dunaway, pretty much any time. Plus, Ned Beatty as God in the dimly-lit boardroom is always my favorite scene.
Rocky is a great answer to a "which movie do you want to hate but you insist on the right to like it anyway" question. It's just really well done. It's tightly constructed and it's literally touching. I thought Network was a TV show, so focused on making its obvious point that the human characters dissolved.
I'd forgotten about Around the World in 80 Days. Boy was that a weak movie, now that I think of it. I do remember, I think, arrows bouncing off Cantinflas in one scene.
Yep! Terrible in every way. Even the clown bullfighting with a real bull was dull. One snippet of dialogue about a hair-raising turn at Whist upstaged the entire movie (see above)
GWTW needs no defense from me, because so much of it has enthralled viewers: it's a pretty dark film for something remembered as the golden age of American cinema. I did take a potshot at it, though (above), purporting to interview one of the rewriters of the saga. However, considering the awful films celebrated and genius films ignored, I wouldn't put GWTW in the top quintile of stinkers that won best picture. I was out of the game when CODA came out, and thus didn't get the satire of it in Curb Your Enthusiasm (when Larry pelts its star with a golfball--the unfortunate hadn't heard him yell "FORE"). And while one of the correspondents is right that Crash is swill (and plus it fucking steals a title from King Cronenberg)--it's obvious (except to people who hate QT) that the year Pulp Fiction lost and the reactionary Forrest Gump won was an outrage that made the fabric of reality almost split.
I'll tell you the same thing I told my husband when he caught me watching "The Devil Wears Prada" for the zillionth time: You watch that movie -- and GWTW, of course -- for the clothes. As for GWTW, I have come to see Prissy and her famous lollygagging as her own form of rebellion. Why hurry to fetch the doctor when Melanie was nearly dying in childbirth? Why should she give a shit about some white lady who doesn’t have the pelvic capacity to have a damn baby? Prissy was only years ahead of organized labor, which deployed work slowdowns to great effect in the next century.
Movies like "The Devil Wears Prada" do for women what war movies do for men, and I could happily sit down with you and watch it again. Also, it gave me the satisfaction of patronizing incredulity when Miranda, sitting back in her limo, says at the end, "Everybody wants to be us." Uh, no, Miranda — not everybody.
What I found memorable about GWTW was the triangle between Scarlett, Ashley, and Melanie. How many times have you known someone so obviously obsessed with someone who does not reciprocate -- but who drops just enough bread crumbs to feed that illusion? That moment where Scarlett says, "Why Ashley, you never loved me! It was Melly all along!"? That's some good shit. Better late than never, as my mother used to say.
She realizes Ashley only had the hots for her and would never have allowed himself to act on it. That's some "Real Housewives Of Atlanta:" moment right there.
Oh, c'mon. It has to be 2005's "Crash." I will accept no other opinion.
My pick. Crash sucked so hard.
I was stuck watching it in the theater too. We were with another couple so we thought we couldn't leave. We got to the car after the movie and they both said " I wish we would have left after the first 20 minutes"
As always, communication is key!
Yep. Gets my up, um, down? er, vote. Surfed the wave of hype into the theater to see it, and in less than 15 minutes decided that the entire movie was nothing more or less than the complete self-absorption/self-indulgence of everyone involved, right down to the third grip assistant.
Since then, hearing again and again how it was some kind of landmark of American cinema, I've tried to watch it. And come away with the same conclusion.
Get a grip! (no, really – everybody get a grip...zooms don't light themselves ya know)
Key grips be bad
I've never seen it, precisely because it always gets called the worst and while I like to give the underdog a chance the odds are just too overwhelming.
[firstly: loving that "likelike", "replyreply", "cancel cancel", "reply reply" and "Also share to NotesAlso share to Notes" glitch]
To the point re Crash: [imagine here big shrugimagine here big shrug]
another thing: that weepy liberal tag-teamer paved the way for one appalling multi character drama after another…and then, at last, the multiverse movie. Pick a damn story and stick with it!
I know. We all yearn for a simple drama of family strife – beleaguered parents struggling with money and family business, the daughter's relationship tense, the old man getting in the way, etc. Like Everything Everywhere All At Once.
You don't understand: It took all those story arcs to make White people feel good!
How it didn't work then??!!
CRT
Ruined life
For me!
We watched it, and were not impressed. I'd be hard pressed to think of a way they could have laid the "People are complex!" messaging on any thicker. I suppose if I could have ignored that I might have liked it a little bit more than I did if it hadn't also been kind of tedious.
Not even Titanic?
Titanic has some moxie! And I like the SFX. Big ol' boat tips over!
There was plenty of room for both of them on that plank, dammit! Where's the sequel where Winslet's character is charged with murder?
It's about buoyancy, not room. Rose was technically correct, acquitted!
A simply buoyant-meets-guirlant story...
Flotsam meets Jetsam.
But if she floats, isn't she a witch?
she got better
Let's see her calculations
Always show your work!
Pierce Film Productions has some YouTube videos on the model work that went into Titanic. Apparently they built the largest scale model of the thing ever just to sink it!
Caught this on DVD rental when it first released and couldn't believe how much I disliked it. I think I stopped watching after 30-45 minutes. My wife (who is generally less critical or at least angry-critical than I am) watched the whole thing and had nothing good to say about it... which is quite damning coming from her!
I'll add that I have not seen all that many Best Picture winners.
Yes, this movie was very bad. Especially having the racist cop have to rescue the black woman when her car crashed
Without a doubt!
Ah. Now we know exactly why it is Roy seems still to be acting it all out, after lo these many decades...
My mom took me to see Oliver! for my birthday.
I remember wondering if she was mad at me. I didn't say anything.
"Pinocchio beat Meredith Wilson, Aaron Copland, and Miklós Rózsa! "
You are the only person in the world that knows that.
Turnips, generally, do suck. Though, a well-made cream of turnip soup is delicious! That's all I've got to say about that.
I felt like that about Lean’s version, too. What’d this poor kid DO?!
Turnip greens, when prepared properly and/or mixed with mustard greens, are delicious. (I can't think of turnip bottoms without thinking of Baldrick.)
I derive immense moral satisfaction knowing that Baldrick has become Sir Tony Robinson.
Since you bring up Baldrick… Missus Hairless (a Southerner) would occasionally watch GWTW, and my coping mechanism was to enact Hattie McDaniel addressing Blackadder-style put-downs directly to her mistress, usually beginning with “Well fiddle-dee-dee, Miz Scarlett…”
Sometimes I am insufferable
I have never had turnip greens, but I do like collard greens. Devein and chiffonade them, then braise 'em in a mix of stock and white wine with a few crushed garlic cloves.
Oh, no, turnips are good! The big yellow winter turnips - rutabagas - are good in meat stews or braised with a little bacon, onion, and broth. The white ones come in small, salad types that are tasty in, well, salad, and the purple topped ones that are good braised in butter and a pinch of dill with the greens if you have the greens.
Plus those fantastic things an Ethiopian chef can do with a turnip. Do you remember the story of Sophia Loren patting herself on the hip and telling a reporter “it’s all pasta!” I suppose we’ll hear some Moldavian or Polish screen sex bomb saying, “ees all turnips”.
Lissen, fella, among my happiest memories of
Seattle was stopping at a little shopping center in outer Belleview (that had a food court consisting entirely of local businesses) and buying a bunch of Slavic stuffed pastries (potato with or without meat; cabbage; mushrooms) from a pair of unsmiling women, and eating half of them in the car on the way back to Isaaquah
Erskine Caldwell' s famous book, Tobacco Road, about poor Southern sharecroppers during the depression is the most turnip oriented book ever written. The first five chapters are about a bag of turnips. And God.
"She could sometimes stand the pain of it in her stomach when she knew there was nothing to eat, but when Lov stood in full view taking turnips out of the sack, she could not bear the sight of seeing food no one would let her have."
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
The crazy thing is it's actually a comedy .
I prefer rutabaga to turnips, I love parsnips most of all! I'm going to plant a bunch of turnips this year. I'm pretty sure horse feed is going to be expensive AF. Turnips make good horse food. I've been making my dog food for the last 4 months. I'm told that there's a place for turnips there also.
Parsnips are awful, and pointless. Why not just eat a regular carrot instead of a bitter white carrot?
"I'm pretty sure horse feed is going to be expensive AF"
This is the kind of hot stock tip I come here for. Should I sell horse feed short, or long? I'm new at this stuff.
I think it was a blanket statement.
This is parsnip slander. Sliced lengthwise, buttered, and baked until tender, they are slightly sweet, nutty, and tender. If you got a bitter one, it was due to bad luck, just like getting a horrible, bitter carrot in a bunch of otherwise good ones.
Parsnips get sweeter after a frost, or for store-bought ones, a couple of weeks in the fridge.
My son once made a parsnip pie, based on a pumpking pie recipe but sweetened with honey and seasoned with a little nutmeg.
"... couple of weeks in the fridge"
Why only weeks? I'm willing to keep my parsnips in the fridge for months, perhaps years.
Backing away slowly, I will not argue parsnips with a resident of the Dakotas.
You\re damn right
I like parsnips, done right, but none of those more aged varieties (turnips, rutabaga). That was today’s revelation to me: that parsnips can turn into those?!
No - they belong to different plant families. I guess the discussion is confusing.
Parsnips prepared well are sweeter than carrots IMO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8rfxWfflk
I had NO IDEA he did that song! Oh man, "everyone is in some sense or other." That's GREAT, thanks!
Yup. When he talks about "The Hawk" I felt that in my bones. Literally. 'Cause first-hand experience.
And this is the version that got all the play on the radio, back when radio was still good enough to pay attention to. It is vastly better than the studio version.
The guy could bring it with good material...
Roast some meat - lamb shanks will do nicely - on a bed of rutabaga; your life will never be the same
Thanksgiving tradition at my place is a rutabaga puree as a nest for the brussels sprouts.
EGAD that sounds aweaome
White and purple-top turnips are objectively better, they are delicate and complex. I'vem cooked parsnips without getting a sense of what they taste like. But a properly prepared rutabaga is pretty robust. Gorgeous Steinbeck quote.
If I never heard “When You Wish Upon a Star” (the Disney cash-register anthem) again, that’s be marvy. But that tune is in Pinocchio…did Bernard Herrman ever get oscared? A great moment in turnip songwriting is that line , rich with Baha’i wisdom, in Seals and Croft’s “Diamond Girl”: “Can’t you feeel the whole world’s a turnip?”
I like WYWUaS in general but, like Somewhere Over the Rainbow, it's best as instrumental jazz. I like the contours of the melodies and how they are harmonized.
They are classic examples of how to prettify a mostly-diatonic melody by putting the right chords underneath. The chords aren't weird, either, but they intersect nicely with the melody, which has some big dramatic leaps set up with scalar motion.
Everything a jazz musician needs to know is in the blues and the standards. All the chord-scale pedagogy should be thrown out.
[This is the sort of thing that happens when I'm unable to follow Roy's prompt.]
The best Somewhere Over The Rainbow is done on ukulele by a ~750 pound Hawaiian dude
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_DKWlrA24k
I remember that performance, I like it
That guy died very young if I recall
He died just past his 38th birthday
That is the best version of the best American song.
They are good in CousCous
By Republican Jesus, who cares any more outside movie marketing departments.
Funny. The Mrs was just complaining that her beloved Cillian Murphy didn't get a nomination for Oppenheimer. I had to remind her that Oppenheimer was 2023, he did get the nomination (and the W) and wasn't even in anything in 2024. If there's just one rule for an Oscar, it's one has to be in something.
Anyway, back to the subject...
My memory's undependable, great in some cases, non-existent in others. So in this case, absolutely no Best Pictures come to mind.
But that said, I don't buy Roy's nominee. He finds GOTW awful on substantive grounds. But it is, specially in a theater on one of them big screens gorgeous. Despite an army of scripters and directors, it's a gorgeous piece of mid-century filmmaking.
Which is to say Worst Best Picture should have two components: disgusting story poorly shot -- shitty filmmaking on both parts.
That aforesaid shitty memory tells me that in general, there've been a lot of just really bad movies getting tha Best Movie thing. And there the memory fails again...
I'm going to write a column about puppies just to hear you complain about it.
heartedhearted
Fucking dogs!
!!
Ditto
Nooooo, not you saying that!!!
Of course, it’s becoming clear that you like Amos more than you do any of the dogs so…
What have they ever done, huh?
Side eye
Gaze of Judgement
an' draggin' in alla the snow!
No, that would be unnatural, and hence very Republican
I don’t like them. They’re too cute and undisciplined!
Ah, thanks pal…
As we say around my part of the woods: I don't dislike dogs; they're just not cats.
I love puppies but appreciate the thought.
Reminder that the one bowl that matters 9 February will be the Puppy Bowl.
Use the Puppy Bowl as a prompt
Ah, but Murphy did indeed have a movie released in 2024: Small Things Like These, a drama in which he plays the owner of a small coal delivery business in Ireland in the early eighties who ends up in a confrontation with the nuns running one of the Magdalene Laundries. It is a quietly excellent and moving performance, definitely deserving of an Oscar nomination. He says very few words, unlike in Oppenheimer, but those expressive eyes speak volumes. Emily Watson is also very good in it, playing the Mother Superior with smiling menace. Highly recommended.
Was just going to say this. If you know the story of the laundries, the movie might not seem significant. Maybe it hits harder for those who don’t. Anyway, worth a watch!
The best gloss on the Magdalene laundries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X473kTKMY5Y
GWtW is awful by "modern" (later 20th c) standards, with a 1-2 punch of a scenery-chewing melodrama about the suffering of the Southern aristocracy during the War of Northern Agression. Something to offend everyone. Modern melodrama has to be either an intimate family drama (ideally subtitled) or a superhero movie.
Ideally a worst movie has to be a professional production where everyone does their best. Something like Cats, which should have been nominated just for Rebel Wilson eating mice while she sang.
Agree on GWTW. My parents let me see a screening of it on a school night (this was in the late 1960s). I left the theater during the intermission - I thought it was over (at last) and one of my school friends yells out of the rear door, Hey, it’s not over! - and I reluctantly went back in. (I wished I hadn’t.)
My Mom took me to see it at the drive-in probably in the early 60s. She loved Clark Gable. I loved the torrid romance. Playing with it was 10 North Frederick with Gary Cooper and Suzy Parker which Mom wouldn't let me see because of mature content--older man, much younger woman. Sigh.
GWTW is every bit as bad as you say it is, Roy, but it does have one redeeming virtue: without it, we never would have had the immortal Carol Burnett parody.
A fair point: who could not love the curtain rod?
And when she closes the door on Harvey Korman just as he's delivering "Frankly, my dear..."
"I saw it hangin' in the window and I just had to have it"
a sparrow?
The Simpsons parody of the famous wounded of Atlanta boom shot is pretty cherce..
I love the novel Gone with the Wind, but I have to agree about the movie version.
For me, the bottom of the barrel Oscar wise would have to be Forrest Gump. Hated it, as Men on Film used to say. 😂
With you on this one, 💯
Agree. First time I watched it I kinda enjoyed it, but later (thinking about it) began to have doubts, leading to skepticism, leading to disbelief, and later outright horror, etc.
OMG! Forrest Gump! My hatred knows no bounds. I remember sitting slackjawed in the theater and thinking “poor poor Sally Field” She was basically the same age as Tom Hanks and had to play his MOTHER. Sheesh. What an AWFUL movie. Great soundtrack tho
Thankfully another ultra-hyped movie I’ve never seen.
Field is ~10 years older than Hanks
My choice, too. An appalling pastiche of the plot of every Hollywood fantasy flick sewn together with mucilaginous strands of treacle. Ugh.
"Appalling Pastiche" ... Great band name 😂
In a triple bill with Blancmange and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
Surely we can squeeze Roid Rogers and the Whirling Butt Cherries in there!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7BbQ71rnTY
Sure, but it's Hanks. If it was anyone else I might not ascribe a certain (deeply hidden, but still) irony in there somewhere.
Maybe I am just projecting...
Hanks is the embodiment of the old punch line "Sincerity, that's the key. Once you learn to fake that the rest is easy."
Anybody here seen Benjamin Button? I don't think it won anything, just wondering.
A paean to both stupidity and ignorance. Also, Gary Sinise looked like a turtle in it.
Agree on Gone With The Wind. It's a, shall we say, sore spot among Black people of a certain age.
Out Of Africa is the reason I no longer follow the Oscars. (Yes, I hold long grudges.)
This is why I'm not a movie critic: my critical faculties vanish when Redford or Streep are on the screen, and even I recognized that he was hopelessly miscast.
But Streep went out of her way to tone down her own performance to match his, which I thought was an incredibly generous thing to do. And the cinematography was amazing.
Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang in Esquire: “Once I had a farm in Africa…once I had a farm in Africa…once I had a farm in Africa, ee I ee I oh!”
I always get Gone With the Wind mixed up with Birth of a Nation.
Well, GWTW is prettier, with all those colors. If that helps?
But Birth of a Nation, like many silent films, was almost certainly tinted when originally released.
wouldn't that make it a little too brown paper bag-ish?
Something may come to me later, but while refreshing my memory on Wikipedia, I came across a 2020 nominee that I haven't seen, "Sound of Metal." Now on my must watch list, so thanks for that, Roy!
You may or may not like Sound of Metal as a movie watcher, but I'm sure as a musician the guy's nightmare will absolutely get to you.
American Beauty folks.
OMG, did that thing suck balls!!!!
The Silence Of The Lambs. Massively overrated.
Yeah, but it didn't suck and was a pretty good movie
I am plowing – Ah Say PLOWING! – thru the list of all nominees & winners since forever, and shocked, SHOCKED! to see some of the flicks on the lists in the early days. And of course I am incapable of judging whether It Happened One Night (1934) was more worthy than The Gay Divorcee´, but surely we can agree that The Thin Man was at least slightly moreso than either.
This is my way of saying I dunno, man...haven't seen enough to have an informed opinion.
But...
Around the World in 80 Days?
GIGI??
Ben-Hur???
The Sound of Music????
Oliver?????
Rocky??????
Chariots of Fire???????
Forrest Gump????????
Braveheart?????????
Titanic??????????
...and, of all the above nominees, the Worst Picture winner is...
...
Around the World in 80 Days! Here to accept the award for...well everyone – they are all dead – is the rotting corpse of Cantinflas!
"Hola muchachos y GRACIAS! Que Paso? Esta loco, no? Pensé que se suponía que los muertos descansarían en paz, pero nooo..."
Ok, now it's getting a little weird, no? 'Cause I only posted ^^that Cantinflas quote ^^ en espagnol...
Yoicks! Weirder still – the English translation has now vanished!
Glad I don't have any stake in today's comments section!
Listen that's S.J. Perelman's Oscar-winner!
(Per the Randolph Scott chorale in Blazing Saddles): “S. J. PERELMAN!”
That's what I need for these exercises, a multiple-choice question, with a partially closed list to work from! I know for sure I've seen quite a few of these. I couldn't take GWTW seriously enough to get angry, I probably would walk out on it nowadays, but I don't like the score and my favorite moment is the portentous break when they announce the intermission, I like intermissions. I liked Around the World in 80 Days a lot because I was about 10 years old when I saw it, I liked Gigi because I was young enough to have no idea how depraved it was and the songs are good, and I hated The Sound of Music because I was old enough to hate it and the songs are dreadful. It looks like it's made from outtakes of 12 unrelated shows sharing a bunch of the same actors. The nuns, the comical but cute teenagers of the cheaper-by-the-dozen family, the sadistic Austrian aristocrat who falls in love with the babysitter, the Alps, the Nazis laundered from Cabaret, the celebrity biopic about an especially awful vocal group who are not actual celebrities, the dumped fiancée. I loved Titanic, because I watched it over my wife's shoulder on her airplane screen while I was watching something else on my own. Just that is incredibly skilled and impactful. The narrative is so strong you can get the whole thing as a silent film just glancing at it every couple of minutes. But I figure that makes it the most wasteful film ever made, if the score and the dialogue and the special effects and at least 90 minutes of film are completely unnecessary.
I watched Ben-Hur as a child, though, in awareness of all its Oscars, and it really awakened my critical consciousness at that early age, because the acting is so bad, so that's my winner.
Whenever I catch a glimpse of "Ben-Hur" on TCM (and I've never seen the whole thing) I grin remembering Gore Vidal sneaking in the homoerotic subtext while Chuck Heston swore up and down it wasn't there.
Oh yeah – I'd forgotten that. Vidal might have just been pullin' Chuck's chain, but plausible either way.
I've heard that was actually William Wyler's direction to Stephen Boyd, play it gay. I see it every time I watch it. And I like that movie. I like the way Jesus is portrayed. Bring on the corn!
I had no idea about the glories of the screenwriting, in which apparently Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, and Christopher Fry also participated. Makes me want to try it again, to look for more digs against the Church Militant garbage of the novel, which I remember really hating, except for the leprosy.
My Mom would cut you for your Sound of Music opinion
Gay subtext or not, the reunion of Heston and Boyd is awesome! They're goofy grinning best friends age 13 all over again and I love them for going "all the way" with it. Hugh Griffith rules in the sauna scene. And for god's sake how do you act while driving a fucking chariot? Dunno, but they do it! BTW Margot Robbie wuz robbed, but I guess in THE ACADEMY skating really well isn't considered acting.
Thank you. That's my choice too. Quite possibly the most boring big Hollywood spectacular ever made.
I dunno, man, Rocky is amazing to me. Exactly the uplifting, hopeful, small scale human heart thing I want in a movie. And if you’ve ever thought you were a loser, you might have seen yourself a little differently - and been kinder - after watching Rocky. The fact that Paddy Chayefsky called it corny trash just makes it (chef’s kiss) to me. I get Network, but what a hateful poison piss pot to live in for 2 hours. I know capitalism sucks. I prefer the ham-n-egger southpaw’s story thanks.
First you've got to get MAD!
Plus I'm a sucker for William Holden, and Faye Dunaway, pretty much any time. Plus, Ned Beatty as God in the dimly-lit boardroom is always my favorite scene.
Shout-out to Beatrice Straight for playing the betrayed wife with painful dignity.
Yeah. She shines.
Chayefsky said that? Oh, that's rich.
I’ll have to look up the citation - maybe he didn’t and I’m full of shit, but I did pick that up somewhere….
Rocky is a great answer to a "which movie do you want to hate but you insist on the right to like it anyway" question. It's just really well done. It's tightly constructed and it's literally touching. I thought Network was a TV show, so focused on making its obvious point that the human characters dissolved.
I'd forgotten about Around the World in 80 Days. Boy was that a weak movie, now that I think of it. I do remember, I think, arrows bouncing off Cantinflas in one scene.
Yep! Terrible in every way. Even the clown bullfighting with a real bull was dull. One snippet of dialogue about a hair-raising turn at Whist upstaged the entire movie (see above)
https://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/07.02.98/gwtw-9826.html
GWTW needs no defense from me, because so much of it has enthralled viewers: it's a pretty dark film for something remembered as the golden age of American cinema. I did take a potshot at it, though (above), purporting to interview one of the rewriters of the saga. However, considering the awful films celebrated and genius films ignored, I wouldn't put GWTW in the top quintile of stinkers that won best picture. I was out of the game when CODA came out, and thus didn't get the satire of it in Curb Your Enthusiasm (when Larry pelts its star with a golfball--the unfortunate hadn't heard him yell "FORE"). And while one of the correspondents is right that Crash is swill (and plus it fucking steals a title from King Cronenberg)--it's obvious (except to people who hate QT) that the year Pulp Fiction lost and the reactionary Forrest Gump won was an outrage that made the fabric of reality almost split.
I'll tell you the same thing I told my husband when he caught me watching "The Devil Wears Prada" for the zillionth time: You watch that movie -- and GWTW, of course -- for the clothes. As for GWTW, I have come to see Prissy and her famous lollygagging as her own form of rebellion. Why hurry to fetch the doctor when Melanie was nearly dying in childbirth? Why should she give a shit about some white lady who doesn’t have the pelvic capacity to have a damn baby? Prissy was only years ahead of organized labor, which deployed work slowdowns to great effect in the next century.
Movies like "The Devil Wears Prada" do for women what war movies do for men, and I could happily sit down with you and watch it again. Also, it gave me the satisfaction of patronizing incredulity when Miranda, sitting back in her limo, says at the end, "Everybody wants to be us." Uh, no, Miranda — not everybody.
What I found memorable about GWTW was the triangle between Scarlett, Ashley, and Melanie. How many times have you known someone so obviously obsessed with someone who does not reciprocate -- but who drops just enough bread crumbs to feed that illusion? That moment where Scarlett says, "Why Ashley, you never loved me! It was Melly all along!"? That's some good shit. Better late than never, as my mother used to say.
She realizes Ashley only had the hots for her and would never have allowed himself to act on it. That's some "Real Housewives Of Atlanta:" moment right there.
I'm a sucker for genuine virtue, and de Havilland carried it off.