1972: The Emigrants

Editor's Note: We will now resume our intermittent investigation into 1972 films for the impending smackdown -- though it will not be this weekend due to unfortunate delays. Here's Eric Blume on the Oscar favored foreign epic The Emigrants, available to rent on Amazon or iTunes.

It’s fun (and by fun, I mean zero actual fun) to watch Jan Troell’s 3 hour and 20 minute epic film The Emigrants and try to figure out how this slow-burn, where nothing good happens to any of the characters for the entire running time, made it into the Oscar race, not in one year but in two!  Due to different rules than we have currently, The Emigrants was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1971, and then for the 1972 Oscars was nominated for a whopping four of the big eight categories:  Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Liv Ullman), and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Emigrants mostly follows a peasant family in rural Sweden in the mid-19th century. Despite back-breaking work, the father (Max von Sydow) and mother (Liv Ullman), realize that they cannot survive on their farm.  A series of horrible events befall them before they decide to leave for a 10-week boat journey to America in hope of a better life. Another family, who leave for the promise of religious freedom, joins them for the grueling ordeal...

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Thoughts I Had... while staring at the first photo of Taron Egerton as Elton John in "Rocketman"

by Nathaniel R

click to embiggen

Thoughts as they came without self-censorship:

Since he's wearing winged shoes we expect him to float up into the sky during a musical sequence, like a queer Mercules auditoning for the Griffiths Observatory number in La La Land...

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But why is it called "Bleach"?

by Nathaniel R

boys and their toys... i mean, superpowers.

How often do you have random streaming adventures where you watch something you've literally never heard of? This week on Netflix I caught a new Japanese flick called Bleach (2018) though for the life of me I can't figure out what the title means. It's one of those movies that's 1000% obviously based on a manga because it throws lots of random names, superpowers, and world-building terms and rules at you and assumes you'll be able to keep up. But nowhere in the entire picture does the word "bleach" factor in. I've turned it over and over in my head and unless I blinked during a crucial subtitle the title makes no sense whatsoever.

It was a fun popcorn watch but I had to share one moment near the beginning that had me howling...

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NYFF: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

Late in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation Stockard Channing's character, at her wit's end, says, "I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience; how do we hold onto the experience?" That's how I feel about writing up my thoughts on Bi Gan's dream-adjacent Long Day's Journey Into Night. It was an experience. An out of body one, sorta. How do I turn that experience into words?

Luo (Huang Jute, whose handsome face we come to know from every angle) is haunted by what else, a lost woman (played by Lust Caution's Tang Wei, for a time anyway), and he wanders the damp earth and the the even damper underworld and everywhere damp in between trying to find her - trying to hold on to fractions of dreams and memories; who can tell which is which here? It's all fractured - time, space, sound...

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Posterized: Warner Animation and "Smallfoot"

by Nathaniel R

The animated comedy Smallfoot opens today. It has a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, so a mixed response from critics but we expect audiences will like it since they're not always so picky about animated films. Plus the concept is cute and there are lots of big stars to promote it.

Let's take a quick visual perusal of Warner Brothers theatrical animated films. Warner Brothers is such a massive corporation that their subsidiaries are legion and "Warner Animation" as it is now is not exactly like "Warner Bros Animation" of the 1990s or what not but you catch the drift. The various animated subsidiaries of Warner Bros tend to have specialized in TV animation and direct-to-dvd titles which is one of three key reasons that the company has yet to land an Oscar nomination in the Best Animated Feature Film category. The second reason is quality. And the final reason is just bad luck. Surely their best film The Iron Giant would have been nominated had the category existed in 1999. And the snub of exceedingly clever blockbuster The Lego Movie ...well everything was NOT awesome when that happened, don't you agree?

How many of their 12 theatrically released animated features have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

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