Command Performance

With out-of-town company to entertain and end-of-summer errands to run, this blog has got little to show for itself today—nothing, for sure, that's remotely on the level of Nathaniel's extraordinary, exhaustive, and entertaining scene-by-scene commentary on Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! I love this movie, too—full review here—but I adored and appreciated Baz's masterplan even better after reading Nathaniel's piece. Which is also funny, and beautifully illustrated. And!, even if you're a Moulin Rouge! skeptic, you should know in advance that while Nathaniel is an out-and-proud disciple, he is not blind but rather quite savvy to the movie's lapses and questionable calls. Rejoice, all who enter here!

Speaking of nineteenth-century France (!), the latest full review on Nick's Flick Picks is my write-up of 1937's Best Picture Oscar winner The Life of Émile Zola. You may have gathered, hither or yon, that Zola is one of the least accomplished films ever to swipe Oscar's top honor. Sadly, you heard right, despite a hammily good performance from Paul Muni as Zola and a straightforwardly good one from Joseph Schildkraut as Alfred Dreyfus. Lament, all who enter here—though the side-benefit is that I only have two more Best Picture winners left to see, before this website can treat you to yet another list!

Speaking of lists, now that Bring It On has launched us into the next bracket of Picked Flicks, here's a preview of coming attractions between #31 and #39:

A word to the wise: no more cheerleading movies.

Enjoy your weekend!

(Images © 2001 20th-Century Fox; © 1937 Warner Bros. Pictures, reproduced from the American Rhetoric website.)

A Small World After All

Having heard from a little birdie that ModFab and Nathaniel were able to join forces last week for a Manhattan screening of Little Miss Sunshine, StinkyLulu and I decided that fair was fair, and we staged our own Second City secret rendezvous at a morning matinée of the same movie. Reader, it tickles me to report that Stinky is just as warm, witty, and movie-geeked in person as he is on the blog, and I was reminded all over again that making http://friends and then befriending them all over again in person is one of the most delicious pleasures of web life...even when you realize, "I could name this man's five favorite actresses in ranked order, but I'm not exactly positive where he lives."

As for Little Miss Sunshine, it's the kind of modest, yukky, well-acted, road-traveling American indie that elevates itself by insisting on character notes where a lesser movie would settle for punchlines...but then deflates a little whenever it makes the opposite choice. One scene begins with an unexpected death that was played impressively straight, brilliantly concentrating all of its slapstick impulses into the single exclamation "Linda!" But then, before you know it, a corpse is being tipped out a hospital window in a desperately farcical set-piece almost as unwelcome as the comatose kidnapping in Just Like Heaven. The whole movie is a sine wave—up, down, up, down—and if its peppy finish offers a winning tribute to the worn-down and halfway absurd American family, it's also the most visually slack passage in the movie, with the least convincing background players. Thank goodness all the main actors stay on their toes, and they keep us there, too. Fans of Toni Collette, so reliably inventive with all her little bits of business, will delight in the knowledge that despite being saddled much too often with the disapproving line "Richard!", she squeezes some cigarette acting, luggage acting, Sprite acting, pencil acting, and popsicle acting into the first fifteen minutes alone. She's still, in a swerve no one saw coming in Muriel's Wedding or Emma or Velvet Goldmine, one of the most convincing moms in the movies. Finally, a few extra props to costume designer Nancy Steiner, who knows exactly what each of the Hoovers would wear, and why, and in exactly what aisle of Target they found it. B–

P.S. Considering how StinkyLulu hails from the same state as the Hoover clan, and realizing that I've now met all of the ModFab 6 except for that dismayingly distant Antipodean, par3182, I led myself inexorably to these thoughts: six ModFab apprentices, six Hoovers. Two gals, four fellas in each, plus an Australian. Is Little Miss Sunshine secretly the Rosetta Stone of our dormant but fabulous sextet of culture wags? Is that why this movie keeps magically drawing us together? Dr. S and Melissa, is there any chance of you catching this flick in tandem? And, in the now obvious set of analogies, who is who? A hint: clearly ModFab himself is the Little Miss Sunshine of the title, the unseen beauty whom the rest of us find ourselves chasing, even hoping to be. After that, it gets harder, especially since any. one. of. us. could be the "Superfreak"—though I personally have a hunch that she lives in Ohio.

Image © 2006 Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Picked Flick #46: Titanic

When I first started teaching film, Titanic was invaluable to me, because every single student in my course had seen it, often more than once. As a result, for shared, shorthanded examples of camera angles, color filters, process shots, the comparative scope of a scene vs. a sequence, etc., and just as living proof that movies can unite people and endow us with common language and experience, Titanic was—in the treasure-hunting lingo of Brock Lovett & Co.—a trove, a jackpot. These days, it's hardly worth the trouble of invoking Titanic, because cracking the thick crust of derision or, at best, embarrassed affection is too arduous and digressive a task. Talk about hitting an iceberg: I recognize that even in 1997 and 1998, plenty of people were roundly unseduced by James Cameron's ballad of Jack and Rose. By now, though, Titanic seems to have sunk from a global preoccupation to an abashed recollection or a blacklisted memory.

Both the initial embrace of Titanic and its harsh disavowal, at least in the crowds where I hang out, betray a degree of emotionalism uncommon in the giddy world of movies—testament not only to how the film distinguishes itself from other epic-scale blockbusters by stoking emotion instead of cultivating detachment (it is, in this regard, the anti-Matrix) but to how the sinking of the Titanic itself, with all due respect to the people who died, resonates more in the history of affect than in any real chronicle of worldly consequence. Of course the event was triggered and conditioned by much vaster and more complicated forces—industrialism, social stratification, a booming market in luxuries, a new impetus behind global travel—but it's hard to feel as though any of these concepts operate in any truly complex way within the story of the Titanic, which unfolds as cleanly and simply as a parable. The poor paid for the luxuries of the rich, but death leveled them all. Idealism and ambition ran afoul of a major shoal of hubris. Many, many people died at once, and the foregoing circus of media jubilation around the ship's maiden voyage (as damp a phrase as anyone ever coined) made the deaths somehow more awful by making them so public—a bleak irony, too, since part of the horror of this story is the dark, freezing, lonely privacy in which the ship met its fate, so chillingly captured by that one extreme long shot of the distress flare, a pathetic white comma on the blank black sheet of the oceanic night. Titanic has an ideally sized plot for a movie, and for eliciting mass enthusiasm and identification, because despite the size of the ship and the scale of its infamy, the story's contours remain so manageable. In absolute contrast to something like the JFK assassination, the essential gist and ramification of the story can be quickly known, and since popular imagination has kept it afloat within an envelope of gently precautionary pathos, the tale offers a perfect porthole into broad fields and brushstrokes of feeling: romance, awe, sublimity, sentimentality, gravity, fear, manmade inequities as well as cosmic ones. Cameron's script isn't nearly as ambitious as those he wrote for the Terminator films or for the exemplary Aliens. Nonetheless, his extraordinary visual acumen and his keen regard for the audience's investments even in kinetic and logistic-heavy scenes prepares him perfectly as the director to animate Jack's doomed resourcefulness, Rose's coltish but galvanized resolve, the shipbuilder's avuncular regret, and all those "minor" moments of couples laid together in bed to their final rest, strangers gripping to handrails, waitstaff bolting through the corridors, deckhands crumbling in the face of the panicking crowd, "survivors" condemned to watch what they have just escaped. And he keeps all this in balance while presiding over a gargantuan, exacting, and detailed set, a mythic vision to hold alongside Griffith's Babylon.

Shame about the dialogue, and the high school lit-mag deployment of suicide as a plot device. I know, I know: that song. Many of the performances could stand some tweaking (more than that, in Billy Zane's case), even allowing that they've been evacuated of nuance so as to approximate the idioms of shipboard fictions, and also to purvey the script's distilled emotional states in as unobtrusive a way as possible. Too bad that, for all the justified finger-wagging at class oppression onboard, the world below decks is still something of a fratboy revue of gambols and beer steins, and the story still ends with a crafty and hardworking prole giving his life so that an aristocrat might live. If Titanic were truly building to an intellectual or editorial point, it would have a hard time persuading anybody that Jack's death offered the gorgeous, necessary precondition for Rose's rich, full life of riding ponies and turning pots. But palpably, these aren't the waters in which Titanic means to sail, at least not essentially. Every shot, every terrifically paced and judged cross-cut and interlude—increasingly so, in the film's formally heroic second half—squares the viewer right inside a romantic imagination of beauty and danger that movies almost never attempt anymore. The range of sentiments and the visual lucidity through which Titanic presents itself are tangible and recognizable to almost anyone of any age, and maybe that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it as an endorsement of the film's refusal to be cynical, or to be simply and flatly procedural like The Poseidon Adventure or Airport, or to wave the flag of its own virtuosity in as shrill and off-putting a way as James Cameron does in his public appearances. The movie knows when to stop showing us smashed hutches and looming rudders against the sky and to contract instead around moments like the one that always, always gets me: Rose, secured on a lowering lifeboat, realizing as Jack recedes in an extreme low-angle shot that the life she is saving for herself is not one she wants to save, and so she clambers back onto the dying animal of the Titanic and runs right back toward Jack. The most sophisticated dramaturgy in the world? No—but at least for me, it reverberates just as much as watching Dorothy walk outdoors into Technicolor or Luke discover that his archenemy is his father or a treasured, long-buried childhood toy melt away in a furnace. Call me crazy, but I'll go down with this ship every time. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1997 Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox.

Picked Flicks #47: JFK & Nixon

People often ask me when my addiction to movies began, and I think I'd have to trace it to the years 1990-92, when I was growing up on an Army base in Hanau, Germany, where one of the most reliable and accessible entertainments for people my age was the single-screen movie theater. Movies arrived from America on a 3-6 month time delay, which at the time only added to their mysterious allure, since hype built for so long and under such different, more relaxed, and more reliable word-of-mouth conditions from the hypermediated onslaught of today's advertising. Living in a foreign country with only one English-speaking TV station (commercial-free to boot) further slowed the faucets of standard PR. These were also the years when my family bought our first VCR, so I could finally see both old and new movies of my own choosing, and with relatively little cultural noise dictating my opinions about what I was seeing. The only impediment on the theatrical side of things—a huge consideration then, though it seems now like another life—was having to finagle admission into R-rated movies. The fellow who worked the ticket counter didn't give me too much trouble despite disliking me, growling once that "you sure seem to have a lot of aunts and uncles" (read: strangers in line who agreed to shepherd me inside). The only two times I really had a problem hurdling over the R-rating, when the sleepy theater on cobblestoned Pioneer Kaserne suddenly sprang into high alert, were for Madonna: Truth or Dare, which outraged my ardent fandom and confirmed the evident social panic about uninhibited women, and for Oliver Stone's JFK. The censorious, highly disapproving vigilance that swirled around this movie was an altogether weirder case to me. American talking heads only ever supply "sex and violence" as the Scylla and Charybdis waiting to assail wayward youth, but neither appeared to be at issue in JFK. Granted, the theater staff did attempt to couch their quivering stinginess about Stone's images in terms of gore, of all things: no teenager, ostensibly, could possibly handle those wrenching replays and closeups of the Zapruder film, even though the predatory flayings in The Silence of the Lambs and the cheek-biting, family-stalking, capsizing menace of Max Cady in Cape Fear had just come and gone without similar caveats. Synthesizing the bizarrely fraught atmosphere at Pioneer with the cyclone of debate echoing from American media, I was perplexed as to what particular candy, laced with exactly what barbiturate or perverting element, JFK was offering to its endangered, corruptible audiences.

I can't remember now if my parents were unavailable or just uninterested in JFK, but my brother (good man!), hooked me up on the underground railroad with his high-school government teacher, and I was in. The movie totally blew my mind, as the phrase goes, but without just circumventing or opiating it. JFK's unimpeachable technical brio and its breathless dicing together of what feel like millions of film-fragments are enormous achievements in themselves. I can see where, as rhetorical devices, and even more as historicizing methods, they would leave much to be desired, but to cite an axiom that somehow always needs defending, JFK is not a legal brief but a movie—admittedly a movie with bullish designs on levering open the locked and sealed government case files, but also, quite patently, a "movie-movie" whose self-conscious flourishes of sound, music, montage, visual embellishment, changes in film stock, exaggerated characters, a highly caffeinated supporting cast, and pivotal arias of exposition and deduction (Laurie Metcalf's, Donald Sutherland's, and finally Kevin Costner's) all flagrantly announce the artifice and constructedness of what Stone has assembled. He and his crack team of collaborating artists devise stunning visual and audio analogues not just of paranoia but of outraged collective justice and of the massive, wormy coral reef of history, with its infinite chambers and pores, many of which never see the sunlight. Yes, it's a flawed film: Costner is too lightweight, Sissy Spacek's perspective as the lonely and agitated wife is almost nothing when it could have been something, and every time the film comes within a hundred feet of homosexuality, the performances, dialogue, and filmmaking all start stinking like wilted Southern verbena. Still, in a strange way, the lapses of JFK have always corroborated what is artful and almost frighteningly earnest about it: Stone works so fearlessly from the gut, with such unembarrassed fidelity to his sensibility, that the warts-and-all pursuit of ugly truths feels truly impassioned in this film. Not for Stone the decorous boilerplates of most courtroom dramas or tasteful liberal-historical tableaux, and almost single-handedly, JFK eliminated any need to make excuses for detritus like Ghosts of Mississippi, half-efforts like Mississippi Burning, or even decoy denunciations of invented crises, like the decidedly minor Guantánamo crisis in A Few Good Men. Stone already knows that both literally and figurally, we can't handle the truth—we can't touch it, and we can't accept what we can't touch—but he's able to use far more than foot-stomping speeches to register the point and its implications. In fact, conjoined with JFK's scalpel-edged critique of mainstream historical record is an equally sharp dismantling of our most naïve habits of image-reception. Not only does Stone recombine fresh and archival footage with the fervor of a mad geneticist, but he gamely stages illustrated versions of Jim Garrison's conjectures as well as the Warren Commission's, and of several gradations in between. Even when the script is one-sided, the film never is. JFK drives so many nails into the comortable conflation of filmed imagery with reality, is it any wonder that the film was so willfully misunderstood?

As with the Minghella duo a few rungs down on this list, JFK stimulated new appetites and ideas in my filmgoing which were even better rewarded by a subsequent effort from the same creative team. I've already posted a full review of Nixon, but if you've got seven hours free to watch the two films back to back, they remain fascinating companions. Whereas the coin of the realm in JFK is its vertiginous scrim of lightning-historical collage, asserted as an inherently greater force than the individuals scurrying around with their treacheries and truth crusades, Nixon remembers that history is still shaped by people, and that the unease and extremes of history cycle backward as the groundwater in our psyches and our private biographies. Again, some of Stone's touches are just too much: summits in China and in Texas and at J. Edgar Hoover's poolside still feel like trips to the fruitstand. Still, the broad, stentorian strokes in the dialogue and the visuals are plausibly illustrative of Nixon's mostly unsubtle grasp of his own life, and of what he was doing with everyone else's life. The ensemble of actors feel more like a united organism, rather than a series of showy walk-ons, and by allowing us more time and a slower pace to absorb the film's structure and its ironies, Nixon achieves what film biographies almost never do: it proposes a complex, counter-intuitive, and intricate new idea about an extremely well-known figure, portrayed against a detailed canvas of his intimates and his era. Nixon is almost certainly my favorite film about American politics, but it's also my favorite film of a Shakespearean tragedy. That Shakespeare didn't happen to write it is the result only of his living at the wrong time—a 400-year historical accident, though of course, in Stone's world, there are no historical accidents. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Images © 1991 Warner Bros. Pictures/Ixtlan Corporation/Regency Enterprises and © 1995 Hollywood Pictures/Cinergi Entertainment.

Picked Flicks #50: The English Patient & The Talented Mr. Ripley

Anthony Minghella's The English Patient is a waning moon of a movie, full of terrible torture and recurrent explosions, but more powerful still in depicting the low sputtering of a candle, the dimming of a flashlight, the erosion of love, the wearing away of borders. The film's fundamental attitude, notwithstanding its multiple cataclysms and its memorable howls of bereavement, is of poignant, downcast serenity. Proceeding along a gossamer thread of slow fades and lingering dissolves, The English Patient doesn't plumb the horrors of war—the deaths, the displacements—so much as it radiates a pearly, sometimes choking sadness that is the plausible aftermath of war, but also of love, and even of life itself: a mournful tranquility with which we, like the world, absorb our shocks and weather our storms. Experiences, the terrible as well as the transcendent, disperse and ripple outward into the mundane and unknown. They melt each other's boundaries, even when we're working hard to distinguish them. Beauty and memory and knowledge recede even as they are awakened or unearthed. The morbid eventfulness of the opening scenes, full of rasping soldiers and felled planes and exploding landmines, sets up only a few of the maze-like inroads into the movie's concatenated narrative; more importantly, these scenes rush to provide a context for that mood of bruised, wistful grief that defines Michael Ondaatje's novel as well as Minghella's adaptation. The heart of the film, then, lies not in major story points but in seemingly ornamental shots like that of Juliette Binoche trimming her hair in the window of an abandoned monastery, or another in which she uses piles of books to fill the gaps in a decimated staircase. Later—though actually much earlier, in the film's serpentine temporal logic—when Ralph Fiennes' leonine Count Almásy and Kristin Scott Thomas' patrician adventurer Katharine Clifton are stranded inside a jeep during a terrible sandstorm, the emotional core of the scene is not the deep desperation of their circumstances, nor the lusty attraction blooming between them, nor even the inevitable chaos that will afflict their cohort once their affair begins. What that scene is really about is stealing a moment of unclaimed time, so that Almásy can tell this gilded beauty about the names of North African winds, and so she can hear him and be moved by what moves him. It is a rare, fleeting moment away from warmaking and mapmaking, away from worldly consequence, and it is precious for that very reason.

Granted, the film does not always benefit from Minghella's taste for romantic projections or his fervently literary emotionalism. His best visual and tonal ideas arise in that opalescent monastery where Binoche takes care of Fiennes, but not so his most rigorous concentration on plot or character; in fact, Minghella quite defies the emphases in Ondaatje's novel and inflates the Almásy-Katharine liaison into an erotic reckoning so potent it's almost embarrassing. Other problems emerge from the clash of impulses between aestheticism and political anatomy, and from Minghella's vague, uneven management of key characters like Willem Dafoe's Caravaggio and Naveen Andrews' Kip. But if all of this makes The English Patient a film of moments more than a sturdy whole, the moments are often glorious, and even as I confess my awareness of the movie's limitations, I maintain that its blend of bathos, adventure, contemplation, and cosmetic luster remains hard to beat. Kristin Scott Thomas fuses sexiness and intelligence in such layered, fascinating ways that she almost single-handedly validates the film's entire project of eroticizing ideas (or is it of intellectualizing eros?). Binoche finds an ideal film and character for her translucent style of acting; her early reading of the line "I don't know anything" tells you all you need to know about the character. The sound design is dense and often pristine, doing just as much as Stuart Craig's excellent production design and Ann Roth's typically subtle costumes to mask the film's low budget and, better, to foster its ambitions.

Three years later, Minghella returned with another prestige literary adaptation, and this time he had more money to throw around. But beyond being even more plushly outfitted than its predecessor, The Talented Mr. Ripley is in nearly every respect the more impressive, surprising film. Minghella tinkers with Highsmith even more than he did with Ondaatje, but rather than bend the material in more conventional directions as he did in The English Patient, he warps and weaves Ripley into an object of even more sidewinding, epicurean perversity than the novel is. Where The English Patient is suffused with death and immersed in the impermanence of things, The Talented Mr. Ripley has the guts as well as the chops to turn a story about killing into a parable of invention, of production, illuminating not just how Tom Ripley turns himself into someone else, but how each new imposture and each new murder actually creates something new—a new sense of who and what Tom is, of who and what he craves, of where he is going, of what he has been up to all along, of what the world must be, at essence, if Tom and his story are possible. Even though we, unlike any of the characters, know what Tom is doing and how he's managing it (often barely), we still end the film with an uncanny sense of several Toms existing, of not knowing where or how to fix him, of not quite believing there is only one Tom. And unlike The English Patient, the film takes perfect measure of every character and performance. Cate Blanchett's heartbreakingly gauche heiress and Jude Law's apollonian narcissist are the crowning glories, though Gwyneth Paltrow's seething anger at being so constantly abandoned, underestimated, and ungratified is a more impressive acting achievement than most reviewers admitted. I saw The English Patient four times in the theater, besotted by its conception and by the pure beauty of how it looked and sounded; Ripley, though, is the film I now dip into more often, and the one from which I learn more. Both films offer enticing signs that all is not lost in the territory of the upscale period drama, and that even within our illiterate age, ardent booklovers can both make and enjoy spectacular films. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Images © 1996 Miramax Films and © 1999 Paramount Pictures/Miramax Films.

Oscar Files: Best Picture

One last category to survey before I bound onward into more screenings. Recall again that I have a thing for round numbers: 100 Best Actress nominees left to see, 100 Best Supporting Actress nominees to see, and in Oscar’s top category, where 450 movies have been nominated as Best Picture, I’ve seen 300, a ratio of exactly two-thirds. Exquisite, like a lunar eclipse!

The wide range of quality for which Oscar is so notorious has been pretty well indicated by my last two forays—on the good side, George Cukor’s cheeky and genial Born Yesterday, in which Judy Holliday brings a minor explosion of inspired creativity to almost all of her scenes, and on the far side of sub-mediocrity, Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman wilting before the stultified camera and dead air of Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s.

Like most of us, I have the recent years in Oscar annals better-covered than the early history. I’ve seen every nominee from the past 21 years, a streak that halts at Norman Jewison’s A Soldier’s Story (1984), whereas more than half of the films I’ve missed date from 1943 or earlier—a.k.a., from the first 16 years of Academy voting, when the Best Picture list often encompassed as many as 10 or 12 films per year.

As I mentioned in the Best Actress post, Goatdog is way out ahead of me in covering the Best Pictures, and I gather from all of you who have posted comments recently that he’s probably not alone in having me beat at this game. But, to quote the title of one Best Picture nominee, the more the merrier! At this point, I’m having even more fun reading all of your lists than I am making my own, so I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, etc.

And, given that we're dealing with almost twice is large an archive with Best Picture than we were with Supporting Actress, allow me to expand the range of my lists:

Nominees I Have Left to See: 9 — The Broadway Melody (1929), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), The Life of Émile Zola (1937), Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Gandhi (1982)

My Ten Favorite Winners So Far:
1. Casablanca (1943)
2. All About Eve (1950)
3. It Happened One Night (1934)
4. Annie Hall (1977)
5. The Godfather (1972)
6. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
7. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
8. Rebecca (1940)
9. Gone With the Wind (1939)
10. Titanic (1997)
Note: I saw Hamlet (1948) and The Godfather Part II (1974) so long ago that I almost don't feel that I've seen them. I doubt Olivier's film will shake up these lists all that much, but upon revisiting, Coppola's well might. Oh, and I'm not offering any apologies about Titanic.)

My Ten Favorite Losing Nominees:
1) The Piano (1993)
2) Citizen Kane (1941)
3) Nashville (1975)
4) Chinatown (1974)
5) Grand Illusion (1938)
6) The Thin Red Line (1998)
7) Taxi Driver (1976)
8) Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
9) Apocalypse Now (1979)
10) The Conversation (1974)

My Least Favorite Winners:
1) Out of Africa (1985)
2) Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
3) Rain Man (1988)
4) Going My Way (1944)
5) Forrest Gump (1994)
6) Braveheart (1995)
7) Gladiator (2000)
8) Cavalcade (1933)
9) Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
10) You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Years in Which I've Seen Every Nominee: 27 — 1945, 1948, 1964, 1968, 1975, 1981, and every year from 1985 through the present

From Among These Years, the Best Overall Fields...
Privileging consistent high quality over peak contenders
1) 1975 — Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville (my pick), and *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for my money, the only non-masterpiece)
2) 1993 — The Fugitive, In the Name of the Father, The Piano (my pick, obviously), The Remains of the Day, and *Schindler's List (not a bum in the bunch)
3) 1996 — *The English Patient (a great literary epic), Fargo (a brilliantly mordant comedy, and my pick), Jerry Maguire (a great mainstream romance), Secrets & Lies (a great drama), and Shine (four out of five ain't bad)

Hon. Mention: Sorry for the cliché, but 1939: Dark Victory, Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and The Wizard of Oz are all stunners, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Wuthering Heights have their moments, and I have high hopes for Love Affair, Ninotchka, and Of Mice and Men

...and the Worst
1) 1945 — Anchors Aweigh (subpar Gene Kelly hoofer), The Bells of St. Mary's (lame proselytizing), *The Lost Weekend (awkward, overdone Expressionism), Mildred Pierce (enjoyably slick trash, and thus my pick), and Spellbound (subpar Hitchcock)
2) 1989 — Born on the Fourth of July (turgid), Dead Poets Society (mawkish), *Driving Miss Daisy (feeble), Field of Dreams (whaaa?), and My Left Foot (literally, the redeeming feature)
3) I don't think any of the others I've checked off deserve to be on this list, though there's a lot of pressure on M*A*S*H and A Soldier's Story to make up a lot of lost ground in 1970 and 1984.

Ten Remaining Nominees I'm Most Psyched To See...
1) I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1933)
2) The Turning Point (1977)
3) The More the Merrier (1943)
4) Dodsworth (1936)
5) Tess (1980)
6) Sons and Lovers (1960)
7) The Racket (1928)
8) M*A*S*H (1970)
9) Heaven Can Wait (1943)
10) Four Daughters (1938)

...and Ten I'm Putting Off
1) Doctor Dolittle (1967)
2) Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
3) Fanny (1961)
4) The Longest Day (1962)
5) Wilson (1944)
6) Here Comes the Navy (1934)
7) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
8) Cleopatra (1963)
9) Test Pilot (1938)
10) 100 Men and a Girl (1937)

P.S. I'll follow up some time with Oscar Files for Director (sooner than later), Actor, Supporting Actor, and Cinematography (truly, later). I've already got my work cut out for me in these categories, plus there are exceedingly few male actors who incite my loyalty, and there were sooo many nods for so many decades in Cinematography, my other favorite category, that it's an enormously daunting task.