English Club Chatter

Ok, it's Oscar season, so now is the time to see the good movies. Tomorrow of course is Broken Flowers here on campus, and there might also be a joint venture with the Campus OutLoud group to go see Brokeback Mountain, which I really would like to see. So, when should we do it? I vote for Friday the 17th or sometime that weekend... any takers?

The 17th works well for me:)...but I really want to see that...not sure if I can wait that long...

ooo movie night....

sorry, i have a previous engagement

I can't quit this blog.

Okay, so what is everyone's movie of the year, at least based on the ones you've seen?

I haven't seen much in the way of movies released in 2005, so I'm going with Wallace and Grommet.

Got a hot date, Nic? With a cheesecake?

Best movie?... I don't know- I like to see all the best picture nominees before I say and I've only seen two so far. I really liked Walk the Line, and I just saw The Constant Gardener and it was decent. I liked Munich too, but I don't think it's Speilberg's best by far.

Okay, so I'm thinking about attending the shindig, but I won't be stopping by the writing center, so what should I bring?

You can bring anything you like, but to narrow it down, I don't think anyone is bringing dessert. I'm glad you're going to be there!

I think my vote for best film would be Brokeback Mountain. Syriana was also excellent (George Clooney is proving himself an outstanding filmmaker -- Good Night and Good Luck was also very good). I enjoyed Walk the Line, especially listening to all the songs (Wow -- Joaquin Phoenix can really sing!), but can a biopic be a great pic? Maybe. What else came out this year? I always find it hard to remember.

That's what the Internet is for, so that we don't have to remember much anymore. I'm confused as to why you would wonder if a biopic can be a great pic. This begs the question of what criteria matter most to each of us when defining greatness in any medium. In an earlier strand we seemed to find it necessary to separate movies into various genres in order to more-or-less rank them, though I'm not sure we were dealing with the question of greatness as opposed to listing our favorites.

Do the elements that make a great comedy great to us weigh less in considering the greatness of films in general? I think the AFI chose Citizen Kane as it's greatest film, but I don't recall seeing what criteria was used to rank the films. It is biopicesque, and a bit of a bore at times, though the camera work is fascinating.

Casablanca is my favorite film of all time, therefore it must also be greatester than Kane.

OK, well, "greatness" is a dubious criterion that needs to be defined. Usually I avoid it, though it's almost unavoidable. We probably all have films, novels, plays, poems, paintings we consider "great," though if challenged we'd have to sit down and work out what we mean. Public rankings like the AFI lists or the Academy Awards have clear biases that don't hold up well to criticism. The bias against comedy is one of these, one that I actually faced when I taught Film Comedy last year. For some, comedy is not something to be studied, not something serious, and not something deserving of Oscars. Yet some of the all-time great (there's that word again) artistic works are comedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Don Quixote, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice, the films of Charlie Chaplin and Billy Wilder. As for my biopic comment, I should clarify. There are lots of great (!) films that tell the life-story of someone or other -- like Citizen Kane. It's when a film is telling a "true life story" that it sometimes gets into trouble, or just doesn't take off. My feeling is that the problem is in the perceived need to stick to the "truth," which is often not as interesting as fiction. I thought Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was an interesting film, but I have no idea if it represented Chuck Barris's life accurately (he seems a nut). Johnny Cash's life, in Walk the Line, may have been told more accurately, but it struck me as a little flat. I enjoyed the music, but we didn't get that much depth of character or plot development. Maybe that's just a problem with this movie, but it seems to me it may be a biopic problem.

OK, what do you all think? Am I walking off the line? Are there biopics (by my definition -- biographical stories of real live people) that you consider great films? I'll see what you come up with and then see if I can contradict myself with a few exceptions.

I honestly feel Patton is a great movie, but one of the problems I see in this train of thought is whether we're dealing with biographies based (sometimes loosely, I suspect) on someone's life or strictly flat accuracy? Amadeus was a romp, and I thought it was a wonderful film, but I have no real sense how accurate it may have been. Gandhi was also a fine movie. A Beautiful Mind. Coal Miner's Daughter.

After I wrote my top-five list on the other thread, I realized they were all biopics (except for Taxi Driver)... I think they're all great, however accurate they are. And I think most of them were up for Oscars if that's a good enough indication of how good they were.
1- Taxi Driver/Raging Bull (I can't decide)
2- The Pianist
3- Elizabeth
4- The Straight Story
5- Schindler's List

You can browse movies on www.imdb.com according to genre too. I got a few more good ones that I really loved:

-Goodfellas
-The Elephant Man
-Cinderella Man
-Ed Wood
-Lawrence of Arabia
-The Motorcycle Diaries
-American Slendor
-The Aviator

Sometimes the true story makes it even more interesting, in my opinion!

I always enjoy seeing others' "top" lists, so I thought I'd chime in with my own top five films, though I've limited myself to post-1950 releases. (I'd need five more to go beyond that, I think!) In no particular order, then . . . Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Blade Runner, In the Heat of the Night, 12 Angry Men, Apocalypse Now.

As for "great" as it relates to film, literature and the like, it seems inevitable that people will use the term in different ways for different reasons. From a rhetorical perspective, what I find intriguing are the implicit criteria revealed by when and how people use the word. That is, we can see from which films, novels, etc. a person labels "great" a bit, though never all, of what motivates her tastes.

Which is not to say I'm a fan of over-analyzing why we like what we do, but better understanding how others (or we ourselves) make such judgments surely doesn't hurt and might even provide fodder for an interesting conversation of its own. If only such a conversation were had by Academy Awards voters *before* they cast their ballots!

Dion seems to find greatness in films that intelligently explore the intensity inherent in the human in tumultuous conflict within itself and also with some sort of society. The films he mentions are among my favorites, and ones that move me to want to discuss them (or to drink heavily). Okay, I'm not sure how to say this, but these are films which brilliantly match the aesthetic with the depth and breadth of the perspicacity. It takes awhile to get yourself to feel clean again after watching these films, and that's a good thing. I think all of these films are soul checks.
It would be interesting to see the next five or so on your list to see when some other sorts of criteria propel a film into your keen appreciation. Particularly as there are no Hitchcock films in your top five.

OK, I'm weakening on my biopic claim. Patton is great, and I love Ed Wood (especially for Martin Landau's Bela Lugosi!). Many of the others you mentioned I also like. Maybe we need to tweak our definition of "biopic." Is Ed Wood really a biopic? Maybe what I mean by "biopic" is "a film about the true life story of someone that adheres too literally to their biography and therefore cripples itself as a film." Of course, this is a shifty bit of critical slight-of-hand, since therefore any film I like is not a biopic, and any film that is a biopic is by definition unsuccessful and therefore a film I'm not crazy about. Hmmmm. There does seem something here, though. Lawrence of Arabia is a VERY broad adaptation of Lawrence's life, as, I suspect are Patton and Ed Wood. Maybe the problem is that few people have lives interesting enough (or shapely enough?) to make great films? Maybe -- and here's a teaser for you theoryites -- the whole notion of "biography" is a construct. Maybe "biography" is just another fictional genre (however "true to life") and bears no exact relation to actual life (whatever that is). My brain is tired. I'm stopping.

Wel, when I write my biography I am going to be sure to include the three years I spent painting in Paris, and the time I made out with Brad Pitt backstage at a concert, and when I was accused of murder and went on trial, and the couple years I spent training lions at the circus... oh wait, those all happened in my head.

I guess you're right, I don't think most people lead lives interesting enough to make for good moviegoing, without a little padding here and there. It reminds me a little of the current controversy about James Frey and his embellished memoirs- what about embellished biopics, why don't we get all up in arms about that?

About your biography question, perhaps it's become a construct because of our (movie-induced) preoccupation with excitement. Someone could have a very interesting life, but not as exciting as say, any blockbuster out this year. And so, they must embellish it to make it marketable. On the other hand, it also makes sense that in order to condense a life story into two and a half hours they probably have to cut out all the boring crap that happened to said person. You never really see the subjects of biopics eating, or reading the newspaper, or going to garage sales or the like. I don't think it would have necessarily added that much to Ed Wood to see him actually go shopping for women's clothes.

That's probably it. A biography in movie form, with all its limitations and expectations, is something unique. How does one get the major points across and the gist of a person in a couple of hours? That seems to be where the word 'dramatization' fits in nicely. It necessarily becomes impressionistic, implicative, and reliant on prior or future knowledge in order for the interpretive elements to become anything like a whole. Some do this better than others, and some lives seem shaped more conducively for a cinematic rendering. Does entertaining absolutely mean that the film is not 'serious' about its protagonist? Does that preclude or suggest an art form worthy of consideration in the valuative (I'm pretty sure that is not a sanctioned word) estimation of greatness? If I want a biography, I watch the Biography Channel. If I want to watch a film version of someone's life, I rent something like Capote. If I watch Capote and say "well done", can I not then consider it for a great filmmaking endeavor, based on the notion that it achieves what it likely set out to accomplish in a fabulous way.

This makes sense to me, though there's an inevitable conflict between our sense of what is historically versus literarily legitimate. In cases where we don't know much about the actual life, we don't worry about this. For instance, the story of King David in the Bible is wonderful, one of the great narratives of ancient literature. It's likely almost entirely fiction, but since we don't have the "authorized biography," this doesn't concern us too much. James Frey's memoir, on the other hand, creates a ruckus because the facts can be checked. People still find the story very moving, but are disturbed to discover he has made things up. hence Oprah's waffling -- I suspect she was struggling with competing impulses, on the one hand not wanting to give up a powerful reading experience, on the other not wanting to support some kind of fraud. Is it fraud? Is it fiction? What's the difference? Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote a treatise on poetry in the sixteenth century, felt that literature was superior to history, because history was bound to things that had actually happened whereas literature could tell things not as they were but as they OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN. An interesting idea.

It is interesting. My life is what it is, but my history, for many reasons, almost necessarily becomes a fiction. It's not that i'm a liar or even a king-hell embellisher, but more that my memory is a bit one-sided and not particularly detail oriented. Plus, I could tell the same history in many different ways, depending on the audience. This may lead to winks to others in the room who get the political rendering. Not only that, but who could listen to or read or watch the details of mundanity?

Sitting at my kitchen table I watch Tasha cat play
With all the joy and wide eyed innocence that my daughter at one processed;
The leaves flutter and tap against the pane of the patio door closed due to the cold.
I see the sparkle in golden feline eyes and I reflect upon the glow
that my toddler’s once would hold;
Baby Mary in her walker babbling and beating against the glass
We all have a toddler or kitten hidden within us yearning for the leaves once again to dance.

Also....I am sewing costumes for Melancolia...from what I have overhead during practices, it's a tounge-in-cheek dark comedy about the late 1700s early 1800s institutionalization of those of us who have suffered from the average breakdown to the severe...Robin

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