Japan and the Foreign Language Film Oscar

Japan’s choice of Wim Wenders’ PERFECT DAYS (2023) as its submission for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards and its subsequent nomination got me to thinking about Japan and its 72-year-long relationship with the Academy Awards, especially in light of the fact that two major Japanese hits in the U.S. market this past season, Takashi Yamazaki’s GODZILLA MINUS ONE and Hayao Miyazaki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON, were passed over in favor of Wenders’ film. Both films at least got one nomination each in other categories. More on this below, but first some history.

Lee Marvin Centennial

“Lee was my kind of actor, a real tough-looking, tough-talking sonofabitch.” – Sam Fuller

Lee Marvin was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1924. Today marks his centennial. (He died of a heart attack in 1987 in Arizona at the age of 63.) He was the quintessential movie tough guy of the 1950s and ’60s, emerging alongside Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Palance, and Lee Van Cleef, all of whom, like Lee, would eventually become stars, as well as a rogues’ gallery of equally rough-hewn, battle-scarred visages found among such contemporaries as Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, Ralph Meeker, Jack Elam, Leo Gordon, and Claude Akins, among others, nearly all of whom had served in the military in World War II. (Marvin was in the Marine Corps and was seriously wounded at the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific, for which he got a Purple Heart.)

THE BIG RED ONE (1980) directed by Sam Fuller

For years, these guys plied their trade in crime pictures, war movies and westerns, both on the big screen and small, as well as dramas about working men far removed from the centers of power, and became favorites of grindhouse and neighborhood theater audiences everywhere. (Quentin Tarantino regards these men with great awe in his books, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Cinema Speculation.)

The Films of 1973, Part 1: Cops, Crime and Kung Fu

1973 offered a wealth of riches for regular moviegoers, particularly those at neighborhood theaters. Hollywood released a ton of exemplary crime films, alternating hard-nosed cops with career criminals. Westerns were still popular as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood continued to thrive at the boxoffice and Italian westerns continued to make their way to U.S. screens. Blaxploitation was peaking and the floodgates opened for Hong Kong kung fu films to finally reach the American market. My three favorite directors of the time, Don Siegel, Robert Aldrich, and Sam Peckinpah, were making some of their best films. Their contemporary, Phil Karlson, made his biggest boxoffice hit, while another contemporary, genre deconstructionist Robert Altman, was busy also. William Friedkin followed up the success of THE FRENCH CONNECTION with one of the biggest boxoffice hits of the era and newer filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Brian De Palma were making a splash. In addition to kung fu, foreign genre films from Italy, France and Japan were among the regular offerings at neighborhood theaters, while arthouse theaters showcased new works by acclaimed European directors like Francois Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci and Lina Wertmuller.

Hayao Miyazaki in New York: The Lost Interview (1999)

It’s currently Hayao Miyazaki season in the U.S. as the latest film of the Japanese animation pioneer, THE BOY AND THE HERON, opens wide and becomes a bonafide boxoffice hit, attracting the most audiences since SPIRITED AWAY opened in 2003 and became the director’s breakout hit for American audiences. Numerous pieces about Miyazaki have popped up in newspapers and magazines, including “A Beginner’s Guide to Miyazaki” in the current issue of Den of Geek, a free magazine available in comic book shops.

THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023)

I had hoped to write a piece about my discovery of Miyazaki and his work in the late 1980s and ’90s and the change in direction his films took in the 21st century, culminating in his latest film, but in researching it I found an article I wrote documenting Miyazaki’s trip to New York in September 1999 in conjunction with the showing of PRINCESS MONONOKE at the New York Film Festival and it includes quotes from the interview with Miyazaki I conducted at the time (with two other journalists). As far as I can tell, this piece was never published anywhere nor do I have any record of whom exactly I did it for. (I was writing at the time for Animerica Magazine and Family Wonder.com, a website that reviewed children’s videos. The latter site published my full transcript of the interview.)

Black-and-White Cinema in 1960s Hollywood

Black-and-white films were regularly produced and released by the major Hollywood studios right up through 1966, which happened to be the last year that the Academy Award categories of Cinematography, Costume Design and Art Direction & Set Decoration had separate divisions for Color and Black-and-White. Interestingly, the 1966 winner in the black-and-white division of all three categories was the last black-and-white film nominated for Best Picture in the 1960s, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, Mike Nichols’ film based on Edward Albee’s play and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a dysfunctional, bickering hard-drinking couple living on a college campus. The only other Hollywood studio releases in b&w to get Oscar nominations in any categories that year were THE FORTUNE COOKIE, SECONDS, and MISTER BUDDWING. Walter Matthau won Best Supporting Actor for THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Other b&w films nominated that year were all from Europe.

Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton in WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Ron Rich, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau in THE FORTUNE COOKIE

Rock Hudson, Richard Anderson in SECONDS

THE BLOB (1958): Criterion Blu-ray of a Sci-Fi Classic

When I was five, I remember standing outside my local movie theater, the Crotona, and seeing a poster for the movie, THE BLOB (1958), with this massive jello-like substance covering buildings and people and it looked genuinely scary. I was intrigued, but it wasn’t the kind of films my parents were likely to take me to.

CAPE FEAR: From Martin and Lewis to Martin Scorsese

For the record, CAPE FEAR (1962) is a black-and-white thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson and based on a novel by John D. MacDonald. It stars Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, a newly released southern ex-con who’d served a prison sentence for rape largely on the testimony of lawyer Sam Bowden, played by Gregory Peck. Cady blames Bowden for his troubles and after prison returns to Bowden’s southeast Georgia town and sets about stalking and terrorizing Bowden, his wife Peggy (Polly Bergen) and 14-year-old daughter Nancy (Lori Martin). He commits other crimes and wreaks havoc, all while carefully eluding any serious charges. Bowden’s attempts to counter him invariably backfire. Eventually, it comes down to a violent, murderous confrontation between the two men in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina. The movie was later remade, but that’s part of the punchline, so stick with this.

Robert Mitchum as ex-con Max Cady in CAPE FEAR (1962)

Gregory Peck as Sam Bowden, with daughter Lori Martin, as Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) watches.

The Bowden family: Sam (Gregory Peck), Nancy (Lori Martin), Peggy (Polly Bergen)

Jonas Mekas on the Joys of Hollywood Cinema 1960-65

Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) began writing a regular column, entitled Movie Journal, in the Village Voice of November 12, 1958. A filmmaker himself and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which he eventually curated and supervised, Mekas was a champion of what was then called “the New American Cinema,” including the burgeoning experimental and avant-garde films, many of which constituted the “underground film” movement of the 1960s and he chronicled their showings in scattered venues in Manhattan, often subject to police raids because of the controversial and “scandalous” nature of the films. But he also wrote about the pleasures of attending “people’s movies,” i.e. Hollywood movies meant for a mass audience, and disdained the “so-called American ‘art’ film” aimed chiefly at the middlebrow mainstream movie reviewers. He wrote about the more overtly commercial films with a fan’s delight, a breezy wit and a caustic tone aimed at the regular New York newspaper movie reviewers whom he often tangled with.

He collected his reviews in a book published in 1972 entitled, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971. I’m sure Mekas was still writing reviews for the Voice when I started reading the paper in high school. Mekas had brought in Andrew Sarris to cover mainstream cinema releases in order to free himself to devote more space to the likes of Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jean Genet, and Shirley Clarke, and recount his own filmmaking adventures and the movement’s constant battles with the police and the hidebound cultural establishment which rejected so much of the new work. As a budding auteurist, I was more interested in Sarris back then, but re-reading this collection reminds me of the turbulence of the era and Mekas’s singular voice, often laced with spirited outrage, pushing for acceptance of new ways of seeing the world through cinema and freedom of voice and vision.

Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, ca. 1963

Warner Bros. Centennial: 25 Favorite Classics

Warner Bros. is generally considered the most fondly remembered studio in the Golden Age of Hollywood by most critics and historians who have studied the studio system over the decades, as well as by film fans who’ve watched Warner films religiously in repertory houses, on broadcast TV, home video and eventually Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which has become the only reliable channel on cable where we can regularly find Warner films today. Other studios might have been seen as more prestigious once upon a time: MGM may have spent more lavishly and had “more stars than there are in Heaven” and 20th Century Fox may have had more high-profile literary-based productions and big-budget Technicolor musicals and historical dramas, but it’s the Warner films that regularly invigorated audiences with their crackling gangster thrillers, over-the-top musicals, sweeping melodramas, spectacular swashbucklers, detail-packed biopics, wartime displays of patriotism, hilarious animated cartoons, and topical themes. No other studio regularly connected so well to audiences and managed to find the stars and character actors who knew how to put over the urban rhythms and social concerns of the times. Indeed, “pulled from the headlines” was a phrase most associated with the company.

The studio, led by the three surviving Warner Brothers, Jack, Harry and Abe, after Sam had died on the eve of the groundbreaking success of the studio’s early sound feature, THE JAZZ SINGER (1927), also encouraged more innovation and creativity–within their budgets–among producers, writers, directors, stars, editors, and choreographers than the other studios seemed to. (Their stars also fought the most battles with their studio head, all part of a generally successful campaign to make better, more important movies.)

Greats or Favorites? How to Make a List of 100 Top Films

The recent Sight and Sound list of The Critics’ Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time and the Variety list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time got me to think about my own criteria for creating such a list, and the distinctions between “Best films” and “Favorite films.” The problem with the Sight and Sound and Variety lists is that they’re created by committees and are designed to appeal to a variety of different fan bases and constituencies. Choosing 100 gives plenty of room to placate as many different factions as possible, with cultural politics often playing a role and the ranking based on the number of votes the films get. A Great or Best film should be lauded, taught, studied, and viewed repeatedly. But, for me at least, there should be some unifying set of aesthetic principles linking the films and a recognition of their cultural, social and artistic importance within the context of their production and release, making their inclusion on the list obvious. This is hard to do when you’re relying on committee and other input for the choices. I agreed with 16 of Sight and Sound’s choices and 19 of Variety’s. While some of the odder choices, particularly on the Variety list, made me cringe (and I won’t name names), there’s a huge middle ground of films represented that I never felt strongly enough about to include on such a list myself but which I can accept as meeting the various criteria employed by this sampling of critics. And there are numerous non-Asian foreign critical favorites I never bothered to see. I also have much narrower criteria on which to base such a list than the folks involved in the creation of these.