Bob Racine's 100 Favorite Movies, Segment 1 of 7

AMADEUS (2 hrs & 38 min, color, 1984)

Peter Shaffer’s award-winning play pertaining to the tense encounter of the young Mozart (Tom Hulce) with much-older Italian court composer Antonio Salieri (a flawless F. Murray Abraham) is translated to the screen by Milos Forman, and he makes it worlds more than a two-hour plus aria.  In his hands it becomes an absurd, bleakly humorous, electrifying, explosive, thrilling and amazing story, in which Mozart’s death is orchestrated by the envious Salieri.   Largely fiction, the film is a morality play in which that sin of envy pays its drastic wages!  A stupendous production!

AMAZING GRACE (1 hr & 58 min, color, 2007)

William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd), a member of the English Parliament, hammered away at the minds of his political fellows for a quarter of a century before he finally succeeded in 1807 at putting a legal end to the slave trade.   He was inspired by John Newton (Albert Finney), a converted slave trader, composer of the famous hymn “Amazing Grace.”  For two heart-stirring hours we share Wilberforce’s passion and pain, his gains and losses, his spent youth and his spent health, en route to the noble objective.  A much-neglected footnote of history! 

BEATIFUL MIND, A (2 hrs &14 min, color, 2001)

          The struggle of Nobel Prize winning scientist John Nash (Russell Crowe) with paranoid schizophrenia starting at age thirty is a brilliantly acted out drama.  Under Ron Howard’s astute direction it celebrates the loving care of wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) and others, love that had to fight its way through many monstrous barriers to make the comeback he has experienced happen.   The frightening and bizarre dynamics of the disease during Nash’s darkest periods of delusion are portrayed in movie terms with great imagination.  A beauty of a story from every angle!      

BECKET (2 hrs & 28 min, color, 1964)

In 12^th century England, scholar/statesman/prelate Thomas Becket (Richard Burton) enters into a life-or-death warfare with King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) over church/state priorities and ends up a martyred archbishop.  The two men, carousing friends while Becket is Chancellor, are abruptly estranged after the King appoints him Archbishop of Canterbury.  Both actors are stupendous in their performances.  And the lucid script by Edward Anhalt, based on the Jean Anouilh play, gives the medieval drama strength and lasting quality, despite certain inaccuracies.   

BOUNTY, THE (2 hrs & 10 min, color, 1984)

What really happened in 1789 aboard that legendary British vessel?  Director Roger Donaldson and his writers give us the best of the four movie versions.  It is an immense tale of blind ambition, obsession and human failing, based upon research by a historian named Richard Hough.  Anthony Hopkins fills the role of Captain Bligh (not exactly the villain) and a young Mel Gibson portrays Fletcher Christian (not exactly the hero).  There is good and evil, sanity and insanity on everyone’s part, the outcome a strange mixture of tragedy and triumph in odd proportion to each other.  

BOYHOOD (2 hrs & 45 min, color, 2014)

          The chronicle of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), an American boy with one sister, a divorced mother (Patricia Arquette) and a somewhat loving though stumbling absentee father (Ethan Hawke), is traced from elementary school to college entrance, the film having been shot over twelve years with the same cast.  What a gamble, and it pays off!  “Life’s little moments!”  That is what writer/director Richard Linklater calls the focus of his attention in this modest gem.  The boy faces the “voluptuous panic” of choosing the road to his future, and it is all done seamlessly and with uncompromising realism.

BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE (2 hrs & 41 min, color, 1957)

Director David Lean took war pictures into a new dimension adapting Pierre Boulle’s novel, about the building of a bridge of strategic importance to Japan by the use of Allied POWs during World War II.  Two British officers (Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins), an American combatant (William Holden) and a Japanese colonel (Sessua Hayakawa) are the bedeviled souls that destiny brings together in this complex and brilliant masterwork.  Private wars within the War prove crucial in exploring the boundaries between human prerogative and military imperative. 

BROADCAST NEWS (2 hrs & 11 min, color, 1987)

Director/Writer James L. Brooks gives us a crazy satire about the world of television journalism.  The script is consistently razor sharp.  Holly Hunter is the superb center of attention as a workaholic, perfectionist production executive with a bit of a short fuse and a volatile personality.  Her co-leads, playing two of her character’s subordinates with whom she enjoys brief romantic dalliances, are William Hurt and Albert Brooks, each with remarkable talent and adorable limitations.  The interplay of these three produces nothing less than pure magic. 

CABARET (2 hrs & 2 min, color, 1972)

The festering life of Berlin, Germany just before the Nazis came to power is the setting for the famous stage musical, superlatively adapted for the screen by Bob Fosse.  Liza Minelli goes over the top as Sally Bowles, an amoral performer in a sleazy café.  Joel Grey is the devilish master of ceremonies, and Michael York is the young Englishman who gets involved with their antics.  Fine acting, brilliant juxtapositions of image, stupendous choreography, and electrifying music combine to give us a forceful evocation of the enemy around and within.  Is there, after all, a difference?

CASABLANCA (1 hr & 43 min, b&w, 1942)

The universally embraced classic has transcended its time.  It now belongs to the ages!  Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, parties to a love triangle, are brought together in the famed Moroccan city, which has been rendered a refugee center for anti-fascists during World War II.  But the socio-political crisis and the romantic crisis are all of a piece.  We have an account of people who are forced to live on the precipitous edge of destiny and make life-and-death decisions that transcend private problems of the heart.  We can thank the versatile skills of Director Michael Curtiz.

CHARADE (1 hr & 54 min, color, 1963)

In my opinion the greatest of the romantic thrillers!  Audrey Hepburn searches, with mysterious Cary Grant’s assistance, for a fortune her late husband has stashed away somewhere in France, with others in hot pursuit of the loot as well, James Coburn, Walter Matthau and George Kennedy among them.  Director Stanley Donen gives it just the right dollop of suave comedy, Hitchcockian intrigue and smiling affection to mix with a fine-tuned script, gorgeous music by Henry Mancini, and delicious atmosphere.  How perfect can the chemistry be among a movie’s many elements! 

CHINATOWN (2 hrs & 11 min, color, 1974)

A gutsy thriller from the hand of Director Roman Polanski!  Detective Jack Nicholson’s work on a domestic spying case leads him inadvertently into a cesspool of political scandal and corruption in 1930s Los Angeles.  Involved in the shadowy doings are mystery woman Faye Dunaway and a business tycoon John Huston.  Robert Towne’s screenplay takes us through a nightmare with a shattering climax, which almost defines bald evil itself. Film noir was given a new face and new stylistic form that has had a profound influence on the work of others in this genre ever since.

CITIZEN KANE (1 hr & 59 min, b&w, 1941)

          Charles Foster Kane is a flamboyant, egomaniacal, headstrong (and quite fictional) newspaper tycoon who shakes up the world – socially, politically, economically, financially, and theatrically over the space of a lifetime.  An unforgettable Orson Welles plays him, also directing and co-authoring the much-written-about screenplay.  Volumes have been composed about the awesome visuals invented for this masterpiece, ones that have had colossal influence on the way films have since been made.  A singular work of art from its somber opening to its stirring last frame!

CITY LIGHTS (1 hr & 22 min, b&w, 1931)

Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp gambles upon the precarious friendship of a high society sot and the affections of a young blind woman selling flowers, taking from the former to finance healing surgery for the latter.  At times the movie (silent with a musical soundtrack) is raucously funny, at others serene and gentle, at still others painful in its reminder of human cruelty and folly.  After some alienation and deprivation of dignity, the Tramp is not without his reward.  His final encounter with the blind woman he saves, as she sees him for the first time, is beyond words.

CONSPIRACY OF HEARTS (1 hr & 50 min, b&w, 1960)

During World War II, a convent becomes a secret refuge for Jewish girl children sought by the Nazis.  The endangerment visited upon the mother superior (Lilli Palmer), as she performs her ministrations of mercy right under the nose of the Fascists and in affiliation with the partisan underground, provides the basis for a gripping, heart-in-the-throat drama and a parable of mercy that will consume one’s soul and spirit.  The British film has been out of circulation for many years and I regret that I do not have the director’s name.  I never cease to pray and hope for its re-release. 

                             [To be continued tomorrow]

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Bob Racine's 100 Favorite Movies

Introduction

                                     

Those of you who read my blog entries with any regularity are aware of the fact that most of what I write about (though far from all) has to do with the movies – reviews of them, comments about them, essays that touch upon them, etc.  What I am about to do starting tomorrow and proceeding for seven consecutive days is share with you my favorite one hundred.  I have done this twice before on my church’s (KC’s) e-mail, long before I had a blog or had any expectation that I would ever have one.  That means that many of you have heard from me before on this subject.  The last time I sent forth a list was five years ago, and that one was the first since 2005.  So it seems I have started the habit of revisiting the selection process every half decade.  At 82 years old, I am not sure how many more half decades are left to me to keep up the habit or to update, but while I last, I expect the blog will most likely last.

                                     

For the sake of the newcomers, and as a reminder to the long time readership, let me be very clear about the category of media I am addressing.  These are my FAVORITE – ENGLISH – LANGUAGE – THEATRICAL – MOVIE – FEATURES, and ONLY those.  Not entered in this competition are foreign language films, short subjects, documentaries, movies made directly for DVD, network TV movies or TV miniseries.  I am dealing strictly with those dramatic and/or comedic feature films made in English for showing on the big theater screen.  Some refer to them still as “movie movies.”  (Actually the choices the American Film Institute has made in its previous listings, ones that were announced on television, were likewise limited to these criteria, even though nobody from the AFI has ever publicly said so.) 

                                     

Please do not interpret the absence of a film from my list as an indication that I do not like it.  These are nowhere near all the movies I have ever seen over my lifetime that I am fond of.  They would probably range in the hundreds.  It would take a multiple volume catalog to cover them all.  These are only my top 100, not a total list of what I would recommend. 

                                     

A great movie by my definition is one that has staying power, lasting value and lasting appeal.  Its richness beckons to my taste countless times; I gladly keep it in my sights, either purchasing my own copy to be kept on my shelf or at the very least keeping my finger on the sources from which it can be rented or borrowed or streamed.  They are jewels to be valued and revisited.  These are in great contrast to merely commendable movies I have somewhat enjoyed but would not go out of my way to watch a second time.  Once seen and experienced they become just a pleasant memory.   Poor and/or disappointing, commendably good or first rate great!  All that you will read about in the coming week in these postings fall into the third category.    

                                     

Any film evaluation, even on the part of a seasoned critic, is of necessity subjective.  You would not find any two reviewers on this planet who would pick out the same list of one hundred.  So I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself.  The remarks I make are mine alone.  The choices I have made were not made in committee with any other viewers or in collaboration with any source outside my own mind.  Nor do I call these “the best”.  They are FAVORITES of mine, not my divine, Sinai, Olympian, judgmental rulings.  Only God knows what is best, absolutely speaking, and God is not likely to tell me or any of us any time soon.  I am speaking out of my own mind and experience, not the mind of God. 

                                     

To be worthy of a place in my top drawer of quality a movie must transcend time and period and region.  It must be inspired and magical and substantive.  All the ones you will read about on the following list meet these tests to my satisfaction.  I judge them in terms of how effectively they reflect upon those humanistic values that give meaning and resonance to life’s struggles, tragedies, triumphs, blights and rewards.

                                     

Each movie will be treated in a short, thumbnail blurb.  There will be no in depth analysis this time around.  And there is one major difference in my arrangement from the first two listings.  EVERYTHING, I repeat EVERYTHING will be printed out in alphabetical order.  In those other years I displayed some or all in an order of priority.  Each title had a number next to it.  Not so this time!  All will be read in alphabetical order by title, A-Z.  And the same amount of space will be used for each and every blurb. 

                                     

The publishing will be spread over seven days, beginning tomorrow.  About fourteen or fifteen will show up each day, until I finish the list. 

                                     

I hope my comments about these selected motion pictures will be stimulating and enjoyable enough to take with you and ponder.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Calvary (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                 1 hr & 40 min, color, 2015

                            

An Irish Catholic priest Father James (Brendan Gleason) is catapulted into a crisis of faith, when he receives a death threat from one of his parishioners, delivered in person in the confessional.  The supposed killer is a hater of all things Catholic for past sexual abuse committed against him by the Church, and he has randomly chosen his own parish priest to answer for it. He gives Father James a little over a week before a set day and time in a set place “to get his affairs in order” before he dies.  Father James knows who the man is by voice, but his priestly vows require him to hold in confidence what has been said to him and the identity of the man. 

                            

Or do they???

                            

 Only a fellow cleric and the local police chief are informed about his situation but without disclosing any identity. 

                            

Sounds gripping does it not?  To be sure what we have here is a plot situation that is quite unique.  But something is not right about the way it is treated, and after two viewings I think I have figured out what keeps it from working, at least to my satisfaction.  More about that in a moment! 

                            

Undoubtedly Father James is an individual of considerable interest.  He pastors a very small church in a coastal village of Ireland.  He looks to be somewhere in the vicinity of 55 or 60, heavy set, thick of beard, not particularly demonstrative of emotion – until the death threat undermines his composure and drives him to erratic, irritable and slightly riotous behavior.  He becomes a bit abrupt with some of his parishioners and somewhat dismissive of others.  He even purchases a gun.  The only creatures to whom he displays any overt affection are his dog and his grown daughter.  

                            

He is a widower, married for many years; it was after his wife’s painful and lingering death that he entered the priesthood, a choice for which his daughter is having a difficult time forgiving him.  She feels that she lost both parents at once, her mother to the grave, her father to the service of God.  It is her untimely visit from Dublin that makes the death threat crisis even more unsettling for him.   

                            

Gleason is a good actor, and gives us some throbbing moments of confrontation with the man’s flock.  But despite this, I do not feel as if I ever got but so close to his heart, except for a tender interaction with his daughter in which they both confess to an abiding love for each other, before she heads back to her home.  This is the most gratifying moment in the whole film for me.  But what really drives this man?  What propelled him to take up the cloth at such a late time in his life? 

                            

There are other questions that nag at me.  In what kind of inner spiritual life is he engaged?  An individual clergyman, of whatever denomination, certainly has goals and objectives he wants to reach by means of his labors.  What is his vision?  Why do we never hear him preach?  What is he trying to accomplish in his community?  Or is his routine practice some kind of penance?  If so, penance for what?  What profession did he follow when he was a layman?  Not once in the footage does he recall experiences from his past.  Filling us in on some of this material would have given much more body and depth to the film.  The man would have come much more alive.    

                            

What does the script do instead?  It gluts us with an assortment of dreary, unanchored, desperate, depressed and depressing characters who do most of the scene chewing.  Just who is this movie about anyhow?  Among his parishioners we do not meet up with one single devout individual, one person who has something really important and insightful or supportive to offer him.  At best they give only a grudging respect, if even that.  They are self-loathing or morbid or vulgar or totally disillusioned – just plain stuck and going nowhere!  Not one of them lit any fire inside me or aroused my interest or fascination. 

                            

And just a passing comment: I was disturbed that the only woman parishioner in the bunch we ever meet is an adulterous, boozy, masochistic wife who flaunts her infidelity before everyone, even her priest.  All of the others are men.  That would not have been so defeating, if all the men had not been such moral and spiritual deadbeats.  It seems that just about everyone has something to flaunt that is distasteful to Father James.  At moments I felt as if I was viewing imitation Bergman, especially the celebrated Swede’s work “Winter Light”, another dark chronicle about a priest in a struggle with his faith.

                            

“Calvary” is an independent production, with original writing and direction by John Michael McDonagh.  What I would like to have seen him do is keep the story focused tightly upon the priest and his professed assailant.  McDonagh seems to prefer hiding the dangerous man away in the crowd until the climactic point.  He writes as if there would be some sense of inevitability heaped upon these two men.  But despite the tale of horror the professed assailant spews out, one that certainly reflects the scandalous contemporary crisis with which Catholicism is faced, the character is given no real airing.  He seems to come off as nothing more than a mortal threat, a man of venomous self-pity and an irrevocable death wish, who adds further to Father James’ agony by burning down his church building.  As with the priest, we are not allowed but so far into his heart and soul.  He is there and gone in a matter of minutes.  We are deprived of further character study. 

                            

McDonagh gets his feet stuck in the mud and has really covered very little ground, after all is said and done.

                            

The only dramatic value the movie evidences is that of suspense.  That may be enough for some viewers.  What is Father James going to do?  Will the threat get carried out?  We are kept on edge.  But the outcome that might have been a catharsis turns out to be only a grisly shock and little more. 

                            

The movie is the sort of thing that devout Christian thinkers are surely drawn to, despite the mess it is.  I saw evidence of that when a group of my church friends and acquaintances and I got together recently and discussed it.  I would not begrudge anyone the right to examine the film in fine detail for purposes of discussion.  Others are apparently more satisfied with it than I am, and I have no problem with that.  If I were as inclined to think theologically as I once was about a half century ago, I might have considered it a morality play or a tale of guilt and alienation, with the priest a Christ figure.  But I now approach any movie drama as an art form, not as an illustrated sermon, and as a work of art I find “Calvary” rather anemic.  

                            

This movie will most likely be viewed by very few individuals.  It certainly is not a general audience vehicle.  But it may have enough of a special audience appeal to give it a return on its cost, even though McDonagh is no Bergman.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

A Beautiful Mind (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                 2 hrs & 14 min, color, 2001

                                     

Finding one’s way back!  The way forward, many of us have found, is the way back and vice versa!  I know that I personally, and many friends with whom I am on somewhat intimate terms, have come back from what might have been crippling crises and been forced to navigate into our futures with a different set of bearings than the ones with which we once started out.  But no one in recent times has undergone this testing process more protractedly and painfully than John Nash, the famous Nobel Prize winning thinker and mathematical scientist who just a matter of weeks ago died in an auto wreck at the age of 86 with his wife Alicia. 

                                     

His struggle with paranoid schizophrenia, that began when he was thirty years of age and on the verge of a notable professorial career at MIT, was of epic proportions.  The movie about Nash’s life and struggle, however, is not an epic; it is a small-scale but marvelously composed and brilliantly acted out drama that celebrates the love that had to fight its way through many monstrous barriers to redeem him and make the comeback he has experienced possible.   

                                     

What Nash is noted for within the scientific community is his contribution to Game Theory and Economics.  It was, in fact, for Economics that the Nobel award was given to him.  He was a Princeton graduate, and it was at Princeton that he finally spent the life he had remaining after his recovery.  He did not ask to be taken back onto the faculty, only for the privilege of auditing courses and for the use of its library to do his own continuing research.  It took considerable time for the faculty to be convinced that he was indeed recovered enough to be trusted and before he began to gather about him a student following.  Late in life he was finally reinstated.

                                     

Paranoid schizophrenia is a subject of considerable interest to me, with two members of my extended family so afflicted.  It is difficult for the average person to fathom just how overpowering it can be.  The person literally hears voices and literally sees people and things that do not exist.  Those voices and those mirages can be so compelling that they impair one’s ability to grasp reality.  They can hold a mind and a body captive.  I shudder to imagine just how much of a nightmare its occurrence must have been before modern medicine and psychiatry came into being.  Those who suffered from it were placed under lock and key, written off as “demented” or “possessed by devils.”  It is one of the more rash illnesses that Jesus was supposed to have cured – by nothing more than ordering an “unclean spirit” to “come out of the man.”  But both of these individuals distantly related to me have demonstrated that even for them the real world makes sense when they achieve, however temporarily, a normal grasp of their circumstances. 

                                     

There are some so afflicted who have composed great poetry or painted classic portraitures or written brilliant music.  We have read in recent times about the lack of training the police are given in how to understand and handle such an individual, when s/he is out of control and is a danger to self and surroundings.  Some of these encounters have resulted in needless deaths, when the sick individual out of control is treated like a criminal.  There is a compassionate way to handle them, even if it of necessity involves a form of very tough love.  But it amounts to love just the same, not brutal subjugation.

                                     

Director Ron Howard and his Screenplay Writers Akiva Goldsman and the book’s author Sylvia Nasar had a challenge on their hands deciding how to portray in movie terms the dynamics of the disease, but they had the good sense and the imagination to ensnare the audience in Nash’s darkest periods of delusion.  We viewers for a while are inclined to believe that we hear the voices, that we see what he sees.  We share the fear that he really is being sought out by the FBI, that he really is being roped into Cold War intrigue and held accountable to his overlords for the protection of classified information, that his ability to decipher codes is something his country depends upon for its survival.  The cloak and dagger stuff has the grim feel of familiarity from our past acquaintance with spy novels and motion pictures.  After all, it would not be so unbelievable that our government would force someone of Nash’s genius into working for it. 

                                     

As biopics go, this is evidently more accurate than the average one, at least according to the book’s author Ms. Nasar.  There are details of his life that she developed that the movie omits, but she was generally pleased with the adaptation.  She called it “substantially accurate.”  Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the man is a powerful unearthing of anguish, raw nerve and self-torment giving way over very believable developments to blessed self-discovery.  His work should be a subject of intense examination by any student of acting.   Christopher Plummer also does his usual fine turn in the small role of the psychiatrist who treats Nash, helping him find out the difference between delusion and reality.

                                     

And Jennifer Connelly is quite magnetic in the role of the wife Alicia, who stuck by her husband and father of her child, even through an extended separation, maintaining the role of caretaker.  A most exceptional human being!  She exerts remarkable emotional control and vibrancy while in the grip of consuming emotions.  She and Crowe are a choice pair.  Their scenes together are an intense mix of romantic playfulness and candid confrontation.  They find humor where one would least expect it.  I do not remember two movie characters that I have ever cared so much about; walking with them was an elevating experience, despite Nash’s confessed disinterest in people generally – a solitary person whom Alicia coaxes out of his solidarity.

                                     

There are things that anyone who appreciates this film has to take on faith; I might even say a leap of faith.  How does the endless scrawl of mathematical equations come to serve and influence global trade negotiations, national labor relations and even Evolutionary Biology?  That is a puzzle I daresay my abstract mind could not get itself around. 

And just as demanding of our leaping faith is the claim that Nash has made about how he overcame his demons.  He insists that it was not medications that delivered him but the exercise of a disciplined mind or what he calls a “diet of the mind. I choose not to indulge certain appetites” that are harmful.  There has been much skepticism about this claim, and the screenplay tactfully avoids the controversy by stressing the healing process itself.  Some have voiced disappointment over this, but I have no trouble with it.

                                         

I must confess that it was Nash’s death last month from the accident (an ugly end to the beautiful mind) that revived my interest in the movie.  I had seen it at the time of its release fourteen years ago but had forgotten about it during the long interim.  I suspect that I am one of many in this regard, being as how I had to wait weeks before Netflix could send me a copy; they posted Very Long Wait next to the title on my queue.  But it was worth the wait, because I experienced it this time at a depth that I do not remember having reached the first time.  I can say most ardently that “A Beautiful Mind” is a beautiful motion picture.  It deserves to be rediscovered.

                                     

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.