National Film Registry: A Sirk, Some Ghostbusters, and Zorro

Nooooo. I almost forgot to share the National Film Registries new titles. Each year they add 25 pictures  that are deemed historically, culturally or aesthetically important. Each year I suggest that we should watch all the titles together. Well, the ones we can find at least. Perhaps we'll actually do that for 2016 -- you never know! Getting a spot on the National Film Registry is more symbolic than active. It does not guarantee preservation or restorations but it does suggest that these films should all be preserved and/or restored.

The 2015 additions are:

• Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894) - watch it now. it's six seconds long... the earliest surviving copyrighted film
• Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) -watch it now. (7 minutes) from a short Winsor McCay comic strip
• A Fool There Was (1915) -watch it now. (66 minutes) Theda Bara tempts a married man! It's always the woman's fault, don't you know 
• Humoresque (1920) - not the Joan Crawford film inspired by this story!
• The Mark of Zorro (1920) -watch it now (88 minutes) the Douglas Fairbanks version
• Black and Tan (1929) -watch it now -(15 minutes) short jazz film with Duke Ellington
• Dracula (1931) - the Spanish language version
• Our Daily Bread (1934) - King Vidor's socialist drama
• The Old Mill (1937) - animated short Oscar winner
• Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) - Preston Sturges comedy
• The Story of Menstruation (1946) - documentary short
• John Henry and the Inky-Poo (1946) - animated short Oscar nominee
• Winchester '73 (1950) -western with Jimmy Stewart and Shelley Winters
• Imitation of Life (1959) - Douglas Sirk's awesome melodrama
• Seconds (1966) -thriller starring Rock Hudson
• Portrait of Jason (1967) - LGBT documentary
• Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) - a documentary about filmmaking
• The Inner World of Aphasia (1968) -documentary about aphasics
• Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975) - a biographical doc
• Being There (1979) - the Hal Ashby dramedy with Peter Sellers
• Ghostbusters (1984) - the comic blockbuster currently undergoing a gender flip
• Top Gun (1986) -you feel the need. the need for speed
• Sink or Swim (1990) - documentary about formative childhood
• The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - that insanely beloved prison drama
• LA Confidential (1997) - the awesome neo noir

Big thanks to Matthew Rettenmund of Boy Culture for pointing out this insanely cool bit of trivia about the list:

Of special note: Mother and daughter Lupita Tovar (the world's oldest living actress at age 105) and Susan Kohner were in the Spanish-language Dracula (1931) and Imitation of Life (1959), respectively.

You may recall that Mexican actress Lupita Tovar recently took up the throne or oldest living screen star after the death of Luise Rainer. The super cool thing to know about Lupita Tovar is that she is the grandmother of Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz, both filmmakers (Paul wrote and directed Grandma this year) so her cinematic legacy lives on.

Though the titles are selected by the National Film Preservation Board and Library staff, the public can nominate titles here if you wanna get a jump start on their 2016 list. The movies have to be at least 10 years old so no "OMG THE FORCE AWAKENS WAS AMAZING!" because they will shut that right down. 

Happy Birthday, Giorgio Moroder

Tim here. Today's the 75th birthday of Giorgio Moroder, pioneering electronic-dance-pop mastermind, and winner of four Grammys. But this being a film site, what we're interested in is his work in movie scoring, for which he won three Oscars. And what stellar work it is!

Moroder's soundtracks - and even more than that, his songs - are absolutely definitive. Any child of the '70s or '80s can't help but associate Moroder's compositions with a certain kind of glossy, high-concept spectacle. Moroder's sleek, borderline-campy music brought pop-art grandeur to everything from the political drama Midnight Express (his Best Score Oscar) to the smutty musical Flashdance and from the kitschy Superman III to the sparkling black fantasy The NeverEnding Story. His compositions for these films are the opposite of timeless; they are emphatically and proudly mired in a specific period of pop culture history.

But for the same reason, his scores and songs are the best imaginable fit for the giddy, playfully shallow cinema of that decade, bringing the energy and dazzle of the first years of the Blockbuster Era to life with style and flair whose period-specific artificiality is their greatest strength, not any kind of weakness. But let's allow the man's music to speak for itself. Here are my three personal favorite from his 80s soundscapes.

From Cat People (1982): "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", later used to magnificent effect in Inglourious Basterds

From Flashdance (1983): "Flashdance... What a Feeling" (his second Oscar, the first for Best Song)

From Top Gun (1986): "Danger Zone" (he won his third Oscar for "Take My Breath Away" from the same movie)

What are your favorite Moroder film scores and songs?

Posterized: Tony Scott (1944-2012)

As you've undoubtedly heard, director Tony Scott, youngest brother of Ridley, died Sunday after throwing himself off a bridge at the age of 68 just two years after his latest huge hit (Unstoppable). The internet was awash with morbid rumors about why (an inoperable brain cancer diagnosis chief among them) but when it comes to private struggles of the soul, you never can expect to know so we stick to the facts. Facts: A lot of people saw and liked his movies; His feature career as a director spanned from 1971's Loving Memory (not the type of movie you'd associate with his filmmaking persona) through 2010's Unstoppable (exactly the type of you'd associate with his filmmaking persona).

Tony Scott with his preferred leading man Denzel Washington. They made five films together.

Somewhere along the line I decided I wasn't interested in him as a filmmaker but not every filmmaker is for ever moviegoer (nor should they be). My disinterest was partially spurred on by a me-imposed sibling rivalry with his older brother Ridley Scott -- rather silly since Ridley and Tony worked together often and no love was ever lost. But Ridley already had two indisputable classics under his belt (Alien and Blade Runner) by the time Tony Scott was making his Hollywood debut so the die was cast. If Tony had continued making movies like The Hunger chances are I would never have tuned him out but his bread and butter... in fact his entire diet... was the kinetic multiplex-ready A list male-driven shoot em up. Not enough actresses! But looking back through his filmography brought back more memories than I expected.

How many Tony Scott pictures have you seen?

Loving Memory (1971) | The Hunger (1983) | Top Gun (1986)

The Hunger is the Scott films I've seen the most often, a favorite of my best friend's and thus in regular rotation on VHS for the first decade of its life. Bonus Points: Deneuve & Sarandon making sexploitative vampire love long before True Blood repopularized vampires as sex gods....er, devils. It was also impossible to live through the 1980s without absorbing Top Gun into your very pores (my oldest brother loved it).

more posters and memories after the jump

Click to read more ...

Still Top Gun? 25 Years With "Maverick"

Michael C here to commemorate an auspicious occasion. This week marks the 25th anniversary of Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986). Having managed to navigate this last quarter century having never seen Scott’s slick recruiting poster of a movie, I though it might be interesting to evaluate it with fresh eyes. Up until now my only experience with Top Gun was as an enormously frustrating Nintendo game from the late 80’s.

So I was eager to finally catch up with it. This is a film, after all, that Avatar only just bumped off the all time 100 highest grossers (adjusted for inflation). Surely there was some core entertainment value that held up underneath all the dated Berlin songs and catch phrases.

So I watched it.

Ummm….

Okay, let’s start with the stuff that holds up.  The aerial dog-fighting scenes remain beautifully executed. If anything, with their clarity of action and still-convincing effects they may actually play better in the current age of cartoony CGI and hyperactive film cutting.

And for the record Tom Cruise performance remains as slickly effective as ever. I noticed no evidence that his current cultural infamy intrudes on Maverick. He basically has two poses – smug smirk and jaw-clenched intensity, each in sunglasses on and off varieties – and Cruise executes both about as well as humanly possible.  

Two Poses: Smug Smirk and Jaw-Clenched Intensity

As for the rest of the film, let’s just say it was tough to get involved in. 

Here is an incomplete list of the subsequent pop culture landmarks that intruded on my viewing of Top Gun:

Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988)
Top Gun really suffers when compared with the legacy of its ultra-violent action contemporaries. All these films have been ripped off ad infinitum but Top Gun offers nothing like that the Gibson-Glover chemistry or Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber that holds up despite the familiarity.

Rain Man (1988)
Cruise’s personal life doesn’t detract from the movie but that doesn’t mean Cruise’s other roles don’t haunt Maverick at every moment. I could name any of a dozen talented, yet arrogant wild cards with Daddy issues, but I singled out Rain Man because Levinson’s film has the wherewithal to peg Cruise's character as an insufferable prick in need of redemption from frame one, whereas Top Gun seems to think he’s a charmer.

Speaking of which…

Frank TJ Mackey approves of Maverick's mastery of the muffin

Magnolia (1999)
I couldn’t shake the impression that Cruise's Pete Mitchell had just completed a Frank Mackey seminar. Seriously, he is one of the most unlikable protagonists I’ve encountered outside a Neil LaBute film. Kelly McGillis's character seems to drop 50 IQ points in the process of falling for him. I kept siding with Kilmer’s Iceman and his entirely reasonable requests that Cruise stop showboating before he kills everybody.

Quentin Tarantino
So, yeah, I was never able to forget QT’s notorious monlogue on Top Gun’s gay subtext and it pretty well destroyed the volleyball scene which was ridiculous to start with. If anything it built it up too much for me. Homoerotic, sure, but I was expecting a cross between 300 and a number from Showgirls.

Team America World Police (2004)
You would think Hot Shots would be the one to distract but Parker and Stone were the ones who conclusively eviscerated the action clichés present in every moment of Top Gun. Try to get through Tom’s serious speech about his father’s past without thinking of Team America’s CATS monologue.

And as long as we’re on the subject…

Every Action Movie Ever
From the end of act two crisis of confidence to the evil black-helmeted pilots who flew in from the nearest Bond movie they really do leave no action trope unturned. If you had a drinking game where you took a shot every time someone yelled at Maverick for being too damned awesome you'd be blotto by the thirty minute mark.

Links: Penélope & Javier, Guy & Kate, Mavericks & Vampires

 Penélope & Javi
EW Penélope Cruz to headline Woody Allen's upcoming untitled Rome picture.
US Weekly First photos of the Blessed Babe of Penélope and Javi. His name is Leo. Awwww. Love the photo of Penélope with the pacifier in her mouth.
The Wrap Javier Bardem in final talks for Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower.

Awwww. Look at Baby Leo.

More News
Awards Daily Boon Jong-Ho (of Mother and The Host fame) will head the Camera D'Or at Cannes this year (they're the ones that pick the "Best First Film")
Gold Derby the Grammys are shedding 31 awards in a streamlining effort. The weirdest switch is dumping the gender specificity. I would die if the Oscars did this. Actresses would never get nominated for everything.
Movie|Line attempts to keep track of the competing Snow White projects, currently scheduled to open within six months of each other next year.

Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell in the FRIGHT NIGHT remake

80s Mania
Cinema Blend Top Gun is returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary. Ride into the Danger Zone!
NY Post shares new photos from the remake of Fright Night.

Finally...
Cinephilia & Sass names his 5 favorite Guy Pearce performances. Agreed fully on #s 1 & 2. Last weekend while watching Part 3 of Mildred Pierce a rather funny R-rated conversation from both straights and gays in the room erupted (It was awesome. As is his ass in Mildred Pierce. Unfortunately I can't share it, the conversation; I've been told by a girlfriend that the convo is strictly off-blog limits. Damn her!). The Guy/Kate scenes are the best ones in Mildred Pierce because they have more life pulsing through them, and not just because half of them erupt into tetchy sex scenes. The series is best when Mildred is angry and Monty & Vida (soon to become Evan Rachel Wood) are the only ones who significantly raise her temperature.

Doesn't it always feel like Guy is going to have a breakthrough that never quite comes? He has these big seminal movies and then... Shouldn't he be as famous as, like, oh Russell Crowe? Well, maybe not that famous. But it does seem like Hollywood has been inattentive? Or hasn't Chris Nolan been inattentive? For someone who reuses actors why not throw Pearce another plum role?

Not that he isn't busy post-King's Speech.

After piercing Pierce (sorry) he'll co-star in the Nicolas Cage thriller The Hungry Rabbit Jumps, headline the Australian drama 33 Postcards, appear in the sci-fi film Lockout with Maggie Grace and then reunite with John Hillcoat (who obviously loves him: The Road, The Proposition) for The Wettest Country in the World.