Week 13: Lightning Round Part 2

Let's continue the Lightning Round:

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How the West Was Won (Nominated 1963)

An impressive cast including Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, John Wayne and Debbie Reynolds. Unfortunately, not a very good movie. The narrative is long and confusing, and the dialogue is bizarre, even for a period piece. It might be more well known for how it was shot. The credits indicate three directors (including John Ford) and FOUR cinematographers. They used a three-projector, curved-screen Cinerama process. This was probably quite a spectacle in 1963, but unfortunately, today, it looks like an early Busta Rhymes video. Instead of watching this movie, you can just see how it ends here:

1963 is shaping up to have been a pretty dismal year. Along with this movie, Cleopatra was also nominated for BP, and Tom Jones was the winner. How the West Was Won kind of sucks. Score: 4.0.

Dances With Wolves (Won 1990)

No, I had never seen this film until watching it as part of the OP project. I wanted to like it, especially after having sat through How the West Was Won, which offers a very 1960's Hollywood (i.e. totally, unabashedly racist) perspective on Native Americans. For its part, I can see that Dances With Wolves was an important movie in 1990. Let's put that issue to the side for now.

From a filmmaking perspective, I can understand why Dances With Wolves won Best Picture. Much of it is truly breathtaking. There is nothing in Goodfellas that compares to the buffalo hunt scene. Sorry, there isn't. I almost can't believe that Kevin Costner directed this and Waterworld within the same five-year span. The Academy likes epic, sprawling movies with a little bit of heart. One of these wins BP every decade or so. Costner did his best impression of David Lean here. 

This movie, and the year 1990, is deserving of a broader discussion that I will try to save for later. For now, I will say I'm a little surprised that this film is constantly bashed as undeserving, poorly made trash. That's just not true. Reasonable people can disagree on the whole Goodfellas thing, but this is not a movie on par with truly bizarre winners such as Crash and Shakespeare in Love. I liked it, to an extent, and my score for Dances With Wolves is: 7.9.

Four Daughters (Nominated 1938)

Wikipedia says this movie is a musical drama, which is misleading. This is not a "musical," although the titular four daughters are all musicians and they are sometimes seen performing music. Three of the four daughters are played by the Lane Sisters, who were popular for a brief spell in the late 1930's and 1940's. I can't honestly represent that anything about the plot is particularly unique or important. The four daughters have a widowed father, and fall in love with men, and get into shenanigans. It is a fun movie. Like You Can't Take it With You, this is the type of film that would never be made now, because we have television sitcoms. Score: 5.9.

Boys Town (Nominated 1938)

In Boys Town, Spencer Tracy plays a priest who starts a home for troubled youth in Omaha, Nebraska. One of his more challenging projects is entertainingly portrayed by Mickey Rooney. He's sort of a wannabe, 1930's gangster kid. It is really great. The plot turns weird later when the future of the boys' home gets somehow intertwined with Mickey Rooney's character's older, gangster brother and whether he's caught robbing a bank. Who knew there was so much mob activity in Omaha back then? Score: 6.0. 

The Music Man (Nominated 1962)

This is a weird, wonderful movie. The main character is a traveling salesman/grifter who sets his sights on a fictional town in Iowa. He convinces the townfolk that he's a music professor and will create, for them, a fully functional marching band. (Why this is something particularly desirable for an entire town of people, I do not know.) He plans to skip town once the instruments and uniforms arrive, and without training anybody. It's a Broadway adaptation starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones, who are both great. The musical numbers are mostly good. Some of the songs are well known, for example:

If nothing else, after seeing this movie, I now more appreciate the Simpsons episode "Marge vs. the Monorail," which is mostly an homage to this musical and the "Professor" Harold Hill character.

Score for Music Man: 7.8. I like musicals too much.

Whiplash (Nominated 2014)

This is another movie about a Music Man, and will forever be famous for one reason only: J.K. Simmons' Best Supporting Actor-winning performance as the verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive jazz teacher. It's a decent film, and the music sequences are pretty thrilling. (This was an easy call for Best Sound Mixing.) The plot is oddly implausible at times. I don't believe that the main character would walk off the scene of a car crash. I don't believe J.K. Simmons would intentionally lure the main character into a professional music gig just to embarrass him, and I also don't believe that the main character would turn that situation on its head by playing a 10-minute drum solo. Still, fun to watch. Score: 6.8.