Eccentric Flower:200002/Unsolicited Film Comment

It occurs to me that, in order to speculate on Good Film and Bad Film, I really need a list of all the films which came out in a given year and are therefore in the theoretical pool for Oscar nominations. Yeah, even the schlock ones. Can anyone point me toward a list of all domestic films released in 1999? Preferably online?

Because, I have to tell you, I can only remember the two most recent films I've seen at any given time. That is, remember that I've seen them and reacted to them.

If you give me the title of a film I've seen at any point in the past I will be able to write you a thousand words of review and commentary right there on the spot - but you have to provide the titles. Otherwise it will never occur to me to speculate on it.

This is why I can't make a list of my ten favorite films. In order to do that, I'd need a list of every film I've ever seen, so I could compare my reactions to all of them ... and of course such a list will never exist; no one could make it but me, and I seem to be ill-equipped for the task mentally.

I'm also bad with timetables - and this business of sneaking a film in at the end of December so it's a 1999 film even though most people don't see it until 2000 does not help a bit. Diane, in her Oscar comments, talks about Three Kings. Well, I saw the film long after everyone else did, apparently, but still, I wouldn't have been sure that was a 1999 film. Time becomes more unreal the older I get.

Another problem with my commenting on the Oscars is that I approach films from the point of view of the audience, which is very retrograde in the circles I run in, because apparently I know a lot of people who are either screenwriters, aspiring screenwriters, or tend to be biased toward the screenwriter perspective.

Screenwriters frequently confess, as Diane has, that they're never sure what the director does. They know that the producer provides the money, the cinematographer and designers control what it'll look like, the crew does all the dirty work, and the actors get paid too much to recite what they've written, usually in the wrong inflection. So what does the director do? Stand around and wait for the catering truck to arrive?

I am not quite that bad. I do feel that a film is nothing without a snappy script, but a snappy script alone cannot make a film - something I think some screenwriters forget. On the other hand, I confess that I'm likely to wonder what the director does as well - on the set. To me, a director doesn't get to inflict his/her personality (or "vision," to be pretentious about it) until the editing room.

Of course the director also influenced the film by power over casting choices, vetoing set designs, et cetera, but it's hard to say how much. I mean, casting is often a matter of name and drawing power and nothing else these days - how else to explain so many of these dramatically miscast roles, or any of Julia Roberts' films? (Come to think of it, those just plain defy explanation.) And "name" set designers - of whom there are few - will design the sets the way they damn well please, since they were presumably hired to inflict their distinctive vision.

Seems like sometimes the director is a little like the President. Very little actual power except for the ability to nudge here and there, but takes all the blame when something goes wrong (and, to a lesser extent, gets all the credit when something goes right).

Strange, that. Anyway, the problem with being audience-centered is that you tend to favor the films which were fun and entertaining, rather than the ones which were obviously Great Films.

I mean, even the title "Best Picture" encourages this gap. I had the most fun in a movie this year at ... well, there, you see, that's a sentence I can't fill in because I don't remember which movies I saw this year. But take the two I saw most recently - Topsy-Turvy and Titus. Both were quite entertaining, each in a very different way. I'd see both of them again. I enjoyed both of them immensely. Would I call either one of them a "best picture"? Heck, no. They're not High Art, they don't make a Statement, there's nothing especially Profound about them. They were no one's masterpieces. They may not even have been particularly good films. They were entertaining films.

Whereas, by contrast, the most likely Best Picture films this year do not seem to be particularly pleasant to watch.

I am told that The Insider was a provocative picture full of Strong Ideas and Serious Acting. I'd like to have seen it - the subject matter interested me and the cast looked worth a bet - but I didn't. Because I couldn't drag Nonelvis to it, even though I tried about ten times.

I know for a fact that American Beauty was full of Strong Ideas, even though the film didn't seem to have a clue what those ideas were. And the film is so deliberately, viscerally unpleasant that I have no interest in seeing it again.

And the others in the category do not seem likely to be High Art. Well, John Irving can be, but filmed versions of Irving - a notoriously unadaptable man - are just too chancy a proposition. (No, I haven't seen it yet, but then it hasn't particularly dragged me in, either.)

The Best Picture nominee that everyone actually saw is The Sixth Sense, which was quite a good film, had a genuinely original script, and managed to coerce some acting from Bruce Willis to boot. But of course it won't win. Because it was just too entertaining. Besides, it's the movie that everyone actually saw.

(Despite what you may think, a huge number of people did not see Shakespeare in Love - at least not before it won. Most of the Ardent Readers here are urban, and therefore not representative of its actual attendance.

Saving Private Ryan, on the other hand - which many considered the favorite last year - was seen by far too many actual humans to win an Oscar. Not that it deserved one anyway, being two brilliant twenty-minute battle scenes with a whole lot of nothing sandwiched between. I'm not sure it's even a movie, although I'd see it again.)

Anyway. Color me cynical, what a surprise. Someone hand me that list of 1999 movies and I'll give you some real commentary.