Talking 3 (Unique) Personal Favourites

Now that Oscar season is over I realized I have to start thinking up new blog topics.  I thought to myself "where should I start?".  Well,  I'm looking to change the foundation a bit by picking three films that are some of my personal favourites, but that others may not have known I liked.

1) Misery (1990)

This is the film that introduced me to the unstoppable force that is Kathy Bates.  Seriously, she nailed this role (and got an Oscar for it too).  Ms. Bates plays Annie Wilkes, super-fan to James Caan's Paul Sheldon, the writer of her favourite series of books.  Annie rescues Paul after a car wreck in a secluded Colorado town.  To his knowledge it's Annie's intention to look after him until the authorities can pick up Paul and take him to a hospital.  That wouldn't make a fun movie though, would it?  No, instead Annie decides to keep Paul.  Literally.  She decides to keep her favourite writer, injured in her home.  When Paul starts to get wise to her game she decides to induce one of the most cringe worthy methods of torture on Paul by taking a sledgehammer to his knees in order to keep him put.  This film holds up as one of my favourite thrillers mostly due to how convincing Kathy Bates was.  She presented such an unbalanced and lonely individual that can change with the flick of a switch.  To this day I consider it one of the greatest performances I've ever seen.  I also can't help but think how this scenario might someday happen to Stephanie Meyer and a crazy Twilight mother/daughter fan club.

2) Halloween (1979)

Halloween was the film that kick-started the slasher craze into the 1980's.  Although many attempted to imitate, none ever duplicated the scariness or the success of John Carpenter's horror classic.  Starring Jamie Lee-Curtis,  Halloween is about an escaped mental patient by the name of Michael Myers (no, not that Mike Myers) that comes back to his hometown on Halloween night only to stalk and kill a trio of babysitters.  I wrote in an earlier blog post about the importance of music in film.  I don't think there is a greater example of how necessary the musical score is to a movie than Halloween.  Without the music all we'd have is a cheesy, somewhat boring 1970's exploitation horror flick.  Carpenter's score adds that extra ingredient that sends chills up our spines and has gone on to be one of the most iconic themes in film history.  Halloween went on to become one of the most successful independent films of all time raking in over $60,000,000 worldwide on a budget of $325,000.

3) American Beauty (1999)

Director Sam Mendes and writer Alan Ball gave us a glimpse inside the imperfect lives of the seemingly perfect Burnham family.  Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, and Thora Birch, American Beauty aims to analyze where something in one's life can go so wrong.  When did the beauty in life get lost in between dead-end jobs, routines, social status, and all that other crap that people worry so much about.  I remember seeing this film when it first came out...so I was lets say at best 8-years-old.    I had no idea what the hell was going on in this movie.  It was confusing and seemingly had no real plot, but then again I was eight and a) wasn't the intended audience & b) probably shouldn't be watching a movie with so much dysfunction.  Again, I'd like to thank Mom & Dad for letting that one happen.  In all seriousness though I commend them for believing I was mature enough to watch that film at my age.  Anyways, a few years ago this came on television and I re-watched it.   It instantly became one of my favourite films.  It was something different that begged to be analyzed and questioned.  It's the kind of movie that requires a discussion after watching it with a group of people.  It was a film in every sense of the word because it welcomed us to sit back and look at this family as it crumbles before our eyes and attempt to figure out why this happened.

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Talking Oscar Night

So it has come and gone.  Arguably the most important night in Hollywood, the 85th Annual Academy Awards.  And what a night it was.  Overall I'm happy with whom the Academy chose as the winners and I although I managed to see only four of the nine nominated films for Best Picture, Argo was one of those four and needless to say I was happy to see it take home the top prize.  It was nice to see Ben get a lot of the recognition considering his Best Director snub.  I'm somewhat surprised that he spoke so quickly during his speech though.  I'm just saying, if I won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, I would take my time with the speech.  After all, there's no higher honour than Best Picture.

Other notable mentions were Quentin Tarantino taking home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  Nobody deserved it more, especially after his speech where he humbly thanked the cast that delivered his words on screen perfectly.  Christoph Waltz managed to once again snag the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, which was again well deserved as he has now proven that he is one of the absolute best actors working today. We also got to witness my future wife, Jennifer Lawrence make her fall up the stairs to receive her Academy Award for Best Actress, which proved to be one of those moments that was bound to happen considering some of the dresses those ladies were wearing.  She recovered gracefully however to accept her award.  Of course, Daniel Day-Lewis winning in the Best Actor category was a shoe in, especially after seeing Lincoln earlier that day.  He truly embodied the spirit and body of good ol' Abe.  Lastly, Anne Hathaway was able to scoop up her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Les Misérables.  I have yet to see the film, but from the clips I've seen, Anne seems to have truly put on her best performance and deserved the recognition for it.  If it wasn't for her turn as Catwoman, I'm glad it was for her playing a French prostitute.

I also liked how this year had the theme of music in cinema.  I'm a huge believer that music adds so much to film.  If you were to take out some of the musical scores to some of our most beloved films, they wouldn't be nearly as good as they are perceived to be.  Scores from horror films such as Jaws, Halloween, and Psycho define the unsettling tone of the movie.  The heart-pumping scores from so many of the actions films that are released today provide us with that sense of excitement when we see James Bond fighting a thug on top of a train or seeing Batman chased through the streets by dozens of police cars.  Film scores are some of the most underrated pieces of music. They can often be inspiring, exciting, frightening, etc...  I was very happy that some recognition was finally aimed toward them.  How awesome was it that people got played off the stage to the theme from Jaws?

How about Seth MacFarlane as host?  I get that a lot of people don't seem to care for Seth's humour, but I love it.  Understandably he had to tone it down to an incredible degree for the Oscars but he still managed to get a few dark humoured jokes in there.  That Lincoln joke was amazing.  I also thought it was a nice change of pace to open the show right up with Seth, followed by that skit with William Shatner.  Lets face it though, no matter who hosts,  nothing can be worse than when Anne Hathaway and James Franco took the stage in 2011.  Anne tried her best, but Franco definitely wasn't feeling it.  I'm hoping that Seth is asked back for next year as he managed to provide an entertaining and fresh sense of humour to a night that at times can be kind of boring.  I'm looking at you technical awards.

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Talking Nolan

It's time to depart from the macabre world of Tarantino and walk into a world filled with wondrous spectacle brought to you by Christopher Nolan.  The one man that is tied with Quentin as my favourite director.  He has managed to reinvent the Blockbuster film as a film that can balance action and story simultaneously while keeping the audience wanting more.  His films, like Quentin, have a tone that he has mastered.  You know when you are watching a Chris Nolan movie that you should expect an epic experience.

I would be remised if I didn't mention that this past July, Nolan and company brought us the epic conclusion to his Batman saga, The Dark Knight Rises.  The people reading this that know me well enough are probably rolling their eyes right now.  Truth is, I'm a gigantic Bat-Fan.  I'm a comic book fan and Batman is undoubtably my favourite superhero.  I've read countless Batman graphic novels and am enamoured with the mythology that surrounds the character.  So, I suppose you may think that I'm biased in general to Nolan's Batman films as some of my favourites simply because they're Batman films.  That isn't the case.  Chris Nolan is somebody that truly knows how to get this icon across on screen.  He takes the best parts of the comic books and puts his own spin on it to the point where fans have coined the term "Nolanize" (e.g., How will Nolan Nolanize Catwoman?).  As in taking something from a comic book, normally considered unrealistic making it more realistic.  He finds the happy medium between fantasy and realism, which is why he (in my opinion) was responsible for creating the perfect Batman trilogy.  

Lets pump the breaks a minute and go to Nolan's first mainstream foray into cinema; Memento (2000).  Starring Guy Pierce, this is an innovate neo-noir film about a man with short-term memory loss trying to track down his wife's killer.  If anything, it's incredibly different than the movies that Nolan makes today.  Likely due to the $9,000,000 budget that he and the crew were working with.  Yes, that amount seems like a lot, but when comparing it to the estimated $250,000,000 budget of The Dark Knight Rises, it doesn't really hold up.  Even so, Memento was Nolan's true introduction to movie-going audiences.  I mentioned earlier that the film was innovative.  That word is thrown around freely these days, however I honestly couldn't think of a better word to describe this film. That's because Memento is presented backwards.  You may be wondering how this could be, but the best way to understand is to sit down and watch the movie. 

There's a lot more I could say about Chris Nolan, so perhaps I'll save it for a later blog entry.  I'm somewhat ashamed to call him one of my favourite directors without having seen his first film Following (1998) and The Prestige (2006).  Something I plan on doing something about in the next few months.  With that said, he is another director that seems to top himself every time he puts out a new film.  I appreciate a director that evolves and takes risks.  Nolan's style takes a turn towards old Hollywood where the audience can marvel at a film with tremendous scope and storytelling that once the credits appear at the end, you know that you have witnessed something special. 

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