Hit Me With Your Best Shot ~ Season 4

Oscar season comes to an abrupt end at the end of February which frees up our time. One of The Film Experience's most popular series, a communal viewing party of sorts, returns for another season. BYOE (Bring Your Own Eyes) to these blog-a-thon like events wherein participates choose their single favorite shot from movies from all eras. Watch, Read, Converse -- It's Edumucational!

Wed March 6th THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) since Oz, the Great and Powerful is about to hit 
Wed March 13th BARBARELLA (1968) ...I've been itchy to revisit
Wed March 20th ???
Wed March 27th JACKIE BROWN (1997) Quentin Tarantino Week for his 50th birthday

...and more to be scheduled including, as ever, a mix of genres, eras, and anniversary celebrations. It's a great way to have a virtual visual conversation from other cinephiles, catch up on classics you've never seen, revisit films you've never looked at in terms of cinematography, and curiousities of other sorts.

I'll take suggestions in the comments too!

...so, break out the bubbly! We begin again

These are all the previous episodes in chronological order of the films (though not the episodes). These group viewing parties bring such fond memories back... 1920s Sherlock Jr (24), The Circus (28), Pandora's Box (29)  1930s Tarzan the Ape Man (32), Snow White (37) 1940s The Woman in the Window (44), Black Narcissus (47), Possessed (47), Easter Parade (48);  1950s A Streetcar Named Desire (51), Singin' in the Rain (52), How to Marry a Millionaire (53), Night of the Hunter (55), Rebel Without a Cause (55), Picnic (55), A Face in the Crowd (57) 1960s Rocco and His Brothers (60), Psycho (60), La Dolce Vita (60), Bonnie & Clyde (67) 1970s Pink Narcisuss (71), The Exorcist (73), Dog Day Afternoon (75), Story of Adele H (75), Eraserhead (77) 1980s Ladyhawke (85), Aliens (86), Law of Desire and/or Matador (86/87), Peggy Sue Got Married (86) 1990s Edward Scissorhands (90), Beauty & the Beast (91), Raise the Red Lantern (91), Heavenly Creatures (94), Se7en (95), Showgirls (95) 2000s Bring it On (00), Requiem for a Dream (00), X-Men (00), Moulin Rouge! (01), Memento (01), The Royal Tenenbaums (01), Road to Perdition (02), Angels in America (03), Mean Girls (04), Serenity (05) 2010s Pariah (11)

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Dog Day Afternoon"

Forty years ago today, Sonny Wortzik held up a bank on a hot Brooklyn day. It did not go well. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) was nominated for six Oscars -- the kind of nominations that go to well liked contemporary pictures that aren't thought of as particularly "visual" achievements -- winning only for Best Original Screenplay, but it's actually quite beautiful to look at. Credit, then, to director Sidney Lumet who understood the frantic extremes of humanity better than most auteurs, the casting director and the fine actors who are riveting yet absolutely recognizable as people who might actually be bank tellers, cops or pizza delivery boys  and the cinematography by Victor J Kemper whose camerawork and lighting ably capture the flickering nuances on faces and add considerably to the film's sweaty moody desperation. 

Consider these two shots: the first is Carol Kane as a bank hostage and Lance Henriksen as an FBI man.

They're shots that define what "Character Actor" means or at least what it should -- God, what faces!

Click to read more ...

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Singin' in the Rain"

I'm multi-tasking with this, the penultimate episode of Season 3 of Hit Me With Your Best Shot, the series wherein we choose the single best shot of pre-selected movies and discuss. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's masterpiece Singin' in the Rain (1952) is also a member of my personal canon (top ten to be exact) and we're using it to kick off our Gene Kelly Centennial Celebration. I'll be looking at a few more Kelly features next week, but we're starting with his greatest achievement. Weirdly the far inferior An American in Paris which directly preceded Singin' won Oscar's heart with ease and yet they ignored this one. 'I caaaannnnt stan' it').

"Monumental Pictures"... Yep. It sure stands tall among them!

Singin' in the Rain more than earns its reputation as 'the happiest movie ever made.'  I am reasonably certain that I could write about Singin' in the Rain every day for a year and still not run out of things to say. I'm already sad that this article will not include an ode to Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen SO deserved the Oscar and nabbed one of the film's two nominations. Only two!) or an examination of the largely unheralded  "All I Do is Dream of You" number which I love beyond all reason and would be the best number in most musicals but is just a little toss off here. 

All things considered, the film is lighter than air and swift on its feet both of which are jaw-dropping accomplishments since it's actually incredibly dense. Take the structure for a prime example: this movie about the history of movies (and, oh so casually, the DNA strands the medium borrows from the stage) starts with a premiere of a movie and then flashes back to previous (multiple) films before moving forward to become a movie about the making of new movie which too closely resembles the previous movie "if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all" which then gets rewritten as an entirely different movie with another movie embedded inside of it !!! After all of that, it ends with a poster of a movie that's yet to come... or is possibly the movie we've just watched. Whew. (It's got as many dream layers as Inception, Synecdoche New York or a David Lynch movie but way less fussiness about them.)

"and I'm ready for love ♪ " - usually my choice for "best shot" or at least the moment which I fall the hardest for Gene Kelly each time

Singin' in the Rain's killer combination of joyful buoyancy, masculine athleticism and artistic grace as it leaps from scene to scene are perfectly paralleled in the face, body, and talent of Gene Kelly himself. Kelly is one of my two all time favorite male movie stars, the other being Montgomery Clift. As I watched the movie for the umpteenth time today it suddenly occurred to me that the two of them are a perfect bipolar representation of my own very particular Gemini cinephilia; they're my beautiful big screen avatars of Joy and Despair.  

My "Best Shot" choice last night

I bring this up because, curiously, for the first time while watching Singin' in the Rain I felt a wave of sudden sadness hit me. I was grinning from ear to ear as "Good Morning" began (the only sane response knowing the bliss to come from the scene's inventive choreography, perfect tripled performance and fluid feeling) when suddenly my eyes welled up and stayed that way for the entire number. This had never happened to me before! As Cosmo, Kathy and Don collapsed on the couch in a big heap of giggling, I felt as simultaneously elated and exhausted as the characters were meant to and as the actors might have been after multiple takes (so few cuts, so much dancing!). But I was laughing through tears because they don't make 'em like this anymore.

BEST SHOT PARTICIPANTS

What a glorious feeling, they're blogging again...
The Family Berzurcher "It’s impossible to ignore the ecstasy of Singin’, but it takes movies very seriously."
Dial P For Popcorn "it makes me shiver... it makes me swoon"
Serious Film "continually reframing the dancers, moving them in and out of shadow" 
Antagony & Ecstasy "the lies movies tell are part of what makes them work as movies" 
Coco Hits NYC "a playfulness that is just magnetic"
Okinawa Assault "a sequence where gray and black dominate, is just as happy as the scenes with brighter colours in them."
Film Actually "the suggestion of sex is never this overt"
Being Norma Jeane "Cosmo and Lina are just beautiful in this movie. So funny, so brilliant." 
Sorta That Guy "It made me laugh, made me want to learn tap dancing, and most obviously made me fall in love with Kelly." 
Encore's World "Lina, unable to discern the difference between real life and fantasy" 
Pussy Goes Grrr  "Show biz is not sophisticated. In fact, it’s crude. It’s stupid. But per Singin’ in the Rain, it’s a glorious, outrageous, beautiful kind of stupidity"

And welcome these 'best shot' first timers!
Arf She Said "I love how the whole film opens up as Don's heart expands." 
Kelli Marshall "the one shot of Singin’ in the Rain that gets me every time"
Allison Tooey "looking utterly at ease despite flimsy support"
Lerblacompo "Don and Gene believed in their fantasies so much that it's impossible for us not to believe them, too." 

If you didn't participate, tell us about your favorite shot in the film!
Do your feelings line up with any of these joyful to read articles?

[P.S. Next week is the Season 3 finale of "best shot" as we watch "Dog Day Afternoon" together. Best Shot will return in 2013 for a fourth season! Every episode thus far]

Singin' in the Dog Day Afternoon

As I type this I am slick with sweat and praying for rain, glorious thunderstorm born heavy-pellet rain. (In the interim I will crank up the air conditioner --f*** that gargantuan electricity bill! -- and stay inside until I'm forced to scurry off to the next movie theater.) So it strikes me as perfect that the last two episodes of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" this season are Singin' in the Rain (Wednesday night) and Dog Day Afternoon (Wednesday night August 22nd... the day of the actual events in the film!). Won't you join us?

This is the last hard sell for this series but I'm all keyed up because I'm so heartened by the response these past few weeks and I feel like I learn so much just by reading other people's takes on the same movie I'm looking at; 48 eyeballs are better than 2! 

Once Season 3 is wrapped we're entering  fall film season, Oscar's pre-season and with only 156 days to go until Oscar nominations we know that that familiar naked gold man will consume more and more of our thoughts. OSCAR CHART UPDATES COMING VERY SOON...

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Sherlock Jr"

This week's "Best Shot" selection iss Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), a 44 minute silent comedy. Silent comedies were often so swoony with romantic plots that I always want to call them melodramedies or maybe romantic slapsticomedy. Rom-Slapstick? The film opens with a title card that warns us against multi-tasking. 

There is an old proverb which says: Don't try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both."

That's an awfully funny thing to warn us against in a Buster Keaton film. The innovative entertainer was equal parts director, actor, star, stuntman and screenwriter. And he excelled at all of them.

The movie projectionist hero of Sherlock Jr isn't the great detective he'd like to imagine himself to be -- the crime at the heart of the movie has to be solved by another -- but that's what the movies are for, providing him with sweet escape until real life does come to rescue him. In a way, Sherlock Jr, is like the inverse of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in that our movie lover hero enters the screen to fantasize about being his idol rather than a screen idol entering the real world for the heroine who fantasizes. 

It's impossible to imagine the craft we've lost nowadays given that everything is computerized and visual effects are easier than ever. I have no idea how Buster enters and exits the movie screen with such panache and believability but for perhaps a trick of lighting. And even more impressive is the elaborate stunt sequences. Though this is "Best Shot" rather than "Best Setpiece" old movies don't differentiate between the two as much since there are so fewer cuts. So for my Best Shot I had to select the sequence / shot that made me laugh the hardest, even though out of context it's completely terrifying:

The Projectionist has been riding on the handlebars of his friends bike and has yet to realize that his friend has long since been knocked off. After a series of hilariously close encounters and dangerous obstacles besetting a mostly obviously hero, we get a title card that can't possibly be actual dialogue (given that no other characters are in the frame) so I like to think of it as a projection of what we the audience are feeling.

I thought you'd never make it."

Immediately after that, Buster goes careening towards a moving train that never once looks like a rear projection and it's only then that he himself becomes terrified and covers his eyes. His long delayed terror is part of the joke as is the covering of his eyes (so heroic!) and the train is the coup de grâce. After the narrow miss (Did he really do this? If so he was certifiable!) he keeps on covering his eyes and finally realizes that no one is controlling the bike. A beautiful extended joke and a thrilling bit of cinema.

And the Projectionist is still not out of the woods because Buster Keaton never rests; the multi-hyphenate multi-tasking genius is too busy doing everything at once... and doing justice to all of them.

More 'Best Shot' entries for your reading pleasure. Support movie-loving blogs that care about movies beyond their opening weekends!

Coco Hits NY proves its tough to escape the debate of Chaplin vs. Keaton
The Family Berzurcher details why Keaton is so often compared to Jacques Tati and the heart and brains behind the gags
The Entertainment Junkie "it's a miracle Keaton's characters make it to the end of the films"
Awww, the Movies the black and white rose of ... sherlock?
Film Actually 'low key by today's standards' but it has everything: chase scenes, explosions, stunts, and more...

Antagony & Ecstasy once wrote about this in his film school days!
Okinawa Assault would anyone insure Keaton today with his daredevil stunts?
Pussy Goes Grrr  "Its slim 44 minutes lampoon the genre conventions of romance, melodrama, and detective fiction" 
Amiresque on Keaton's perfect movie face 
Against the Hype a choreographic delight... 
Encore's World Escapism! 
Armchair Audience it's hard to capture a best shot in this fast moving Keaton vehicle 

Next week on "Best Shot":
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952) on the cusp of Gene Kelly's Centennial Week. It'll be a biggie so please join us Wednesday night, August 15th and select your favorite shot in the film many believe is the greatest musical of all time.

We're celebrating Gene Kelly from now through the end of August. 100th anniversaries for all time favorite movie stars don't come around so often, you know, so we Gotta Dance! Gotta Dance! Gottttaaaa Dannnccce! ♫