As part of my (very slow, never ending) goal to watch all of the AFI Top 100 movies, I watched Tootsie last night and this morning. It was different than I expected; I mostly liked it, and I think Dustin Hoffman was amazing.
Anyways, the point of this post is to point out that Dustin Hoffman is credited twice at the beginning of the credits, one for Michael Dorsey and one for Dorothy Michaels. I thought it was very cute. (Also, don’t you love the composition of this shot? With the credits perfect placed between the DHoff and his lovahhh; it’s really quite nice.)
A little holy shit moment about John Williams, courtesy of Christian Clemmensen over at Filmtracks:
By the time Return of the Jedi opened in theatres in 1983, seven out of the top ten grossing films of all time featured a Williams score…
That’s incredible.
If it’s something you happen to be interested in, the National Film Board of Canada has its two Oscar nominated shorts online for free streaming. One, Dimanche (or Sunday in English), is about a little boy’s attempts to make his dreary church- and relatives-filled Sunday more entertaining. It’s decent. The other is called Wild Life and is about a British young man who migrates to live on the Canadian prairies. It’s phenomenally good; the script is fresh, the animation is very reminiscent of The Sweater (perhaps an homage), and it’s also a little bit of history lesson. I would definitely recommend watching both - free! - right here. Hopefully one of them wins come Oscar night.
Just as an aside, if you’ve never heard of the National Film Board of Canada, it’s a really interesting entity. The world’s first national film board, it’s won 12 competitive Oscars and, if I remember correctly, was given an honorary Oscar for its contribution to cinema. Their website is filled with movies you can stream for free, many of them REALLY GOOD documentaries. It’s an excellent way for Canadians to get in touch with their own country, and for non-Canadians to learn about Canada without (or with very few) mentions of hockey or peace keeping.
(That being said, a good place to start when learning about Canadian film and Canadian culture is with The Sweater; the film, and the book, are so iconic that there is a quotation from them on our $5 bill. It will give you a stilted image of Canada, and especially of rural Quebec before the Quiet Revolution, but if you’re going to sow our flag on your backpack, you may as well do a little research and watch it. You can do that for free right here.)
“End Credits” from Alexandre Desplat’s score for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
2011 Movies I Need to See Before I Feel Comfortable Making a Personal ‘Best of’ List
Margaret, The Descendants, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, My Week With Marilyn, War Horse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Shame, The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, Young Adult, Take Shelter, The Iron Lady
2011 Movies I Would Like to See Before I Feel Comfortable Making a Personal ‘Best of’ List but Which I Can Live Without Seeing
Pina, Into the Abyss, Senna, The Lady, Flowers of War, We Bought a Zoo, The Turin Horse, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, The Skin I Live In, Le Havre, In Darkness, Weekend, We Were Here, Coriolanus
In other words, I want/need/”need” to see so many movies!
I’m watching Rebel Without A Cause for the second time in my life, and it’s even worse the second time around. I really can’t stand James Dean at all - not only don’t I think he’s handsome, but he can barely act. Plus, if you know anything about me, you’ll know that the whole misunderstood, counter-culture, parent loathing teen theme/plot line doesn’t fly with me. If I wanted to watch a bunch of dirty adults pretending to be teenagers knife fight, I’d just watch West Side Story.
“Night on Bald Mountain and Ave Maria” sequence, Fantasia, dir. Wilfred Jackson (1940)
I saw two real life Academy Award statuettes today. No bigs.
The first is Grace Kelly’s Best Actress Oscar from 1955 for The Country Girl. The second is the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, awarded to Canada in 2003 for Les Invasions barbares.
