BIG ANNOUNCEMENT

Maverick at the Movies will be recorded and broadcast from 89.5 KQAL FM in Winona, Minnesota, starting in the very near future. Details are soft at the moment, but the expansion is definite. The program will continue to be available on 89.7 KMSU FM in Mankato, Minnesota.

AFI's Top 10 Genre Films

The American Film Institute has released yet another list, this one selecting ten different genres and identifying their picks of the ten greatest films in each of them. You can find the lists and supplementary material here.

The Lists:

Animation

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937
2. Pinocchio, 1940
3. Bambi, 1942
4. The Lion King, 1994
5. Fantasia, 1940
6. Toy Story, 1995
7. Beauty and the Beast, 1991
8. Shrek, 2001
9. Cinderella, 1950
10. Finding Nemo, 2003

Not a bad list, although it's very Disney heavy and family friendly. I would prefer Beauty and the Beast closer to the top, if not at the top, since the animation in it is so well done. It also would be nice to see some more diverse films and pictures that aren't geared for children like South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut or Waking Life.

Fantasy

1. The Wizard of Oz, 1939
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001
3. It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946
4. King Kong, 1933
5. Miracle on 34th Street, 1947
6. Field of Dreams, 1989
7. Harvey, 1950
8. Groundhog Day, 1993
9. The Thief of Bagdad, 1924
10. Big, 1988

The top half of the list is fairly predictable and it's nice to see a film like The Thief of Bagdad included here. I'm also happy that they looked beyond sword and shield fantasy like Lord of the Rings and include Field of Dreams and It's a Wonderful Life. Big and Groundhog Day are a surprise. They are not bad films but I think something with more depth to it like The Fountain would be nice to see here instead.

Gangster

1. The Godfather, 1972
2. Goodfellas, 1990
3. The Godfather Part II, 1974
4. White Heat, 1949
5. Bonnie and Clyde, 1967
6. Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, 1932
7. Pulp Fiction, 1994
8. The Public Enemy, 1931
9. Little Caesar, 1930
10. Scarface, 1983

This is probably the best list. I'm very happy to see both versions of Scarface here. I think The Departed was actually superior to Goodfellas, but at this point it's probably too recent of a film to make an AFI list just yet.

Science Fiction

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
2. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, 1977
3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982
4. A Clockwork Orange, 1971
5. The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951
6. Blade Runner, 1982
7. Alien, 1979
8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991
9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956
10. Back to the Future, 1985

Any one of these are terrific examples of science fiction, but I would take the original Terminator over the sequel and Robocop over Back to the Future. Star Wars really does not belong on this list; the film is a fantasy with high technology, and should be on that list instead, probably in place of Miracle of 34th Street. Similarly, Alien is primarily a horror film.

Western

1. The Searchers, 1956
2. High Noon, 1952
3. Shane, 1953
4. Unforgiven, 1992
5. Red River, 1948
6. The Wild Bunch, 1969
7. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969
8. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971
9. Stagecoach, 1939
10. Cat Ballou, 1965

A pretty solid list, although I would recommend Dances With Wolves in place of Cat Ballou and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in place of Shane. I would love to see Soldier Blue, Tombstone, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance here as well.

Sports

1. Raging Bull, 1980
2. Rocky, 1976
3. The Pride of the Yankees, 1942
4. Hoosiers, 1986
5. Bull Durham, 1988
6. The Hustler, 1961
7. Caddyshack, 1980
8. Breaking Away, 1979
9. National Velvet, 1944
10. Jerry Maguire, 1996

I question placing Jerry Maguire on this list. Although it is about a sports agent, the football is primarily in the background. Also, Raging Bull is primarily a bio-pic, one of the genres ignored by the AFI.

Mystery

1. Vertigo, 1958
2. Chinatown, 1974
3. Rear Window, 1954
4. Laura, 1944
5. The Third Man, 1949
6. The Maltese Falcon, 1941
7. North By Northwest, 1959
8. Blue Velvet, 1986
9. Dial M for Murder, 1954
10. The Usual Suspects, 1995

The distinction between this list and the gangster film get a little muddled with films like The Usual Suspects, Chinatown, and Blue Velvet.

Romantic Comedy

1. City Lights, 1931
2. Annie Hall, 1977
3. It Happened One Night, 1934
4. Roman Holiday, 1953
5. The Philadelphia Story, 1940
6. When Harry Met Sally ..., 1989
7. Adam’s Rib, 1949
8. Moonstruck, 1987
9. Harold and Maude, 1971
10. Sleepless in Seattle, 1993

This is a very specialized category and there is not much I can challenge, although I would suggest Napoleon Dynamite in place of Sleepless in Seattle. I am happy to see Harold and Maude here.

Courtroom Drama

1. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962
2. 12 Angry Men, 1957
3. Kramer Vs. Kramer, 1979
4. The Verdict, 1982
5. A Few Good Men, 1992
6. Witness for the Prosecution, 1957
7. Anatomy of a Murder, 1959
8. In Cold Blood, 1967
9. A Cry in the Dark, 1988
10. Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961

Another highly specialized genre. Not much to argue with here although Judgement at Nuremberg at number ten could probably be flipped with A Few Good Men at number five.

Epic

1. Lawrence of Arabia, 1962
2. Ben-Hur, 1959
3. Schindler’s List, 1993
4. Gone With the Wind, 1939
5. Spartacus, 1960
6. Titanic, 1997
7. All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930
8. Saving Private Ryan, 1998
9. Reds, 1981
10. The Ten Commandments, 1956

This list has several films that don't belong here. Schindler's List, Titanic, and Saving Private Ryan are solid movies but they are not epics. They do not have the kind of narrative scope becoming of the genre. Dances With Wolves, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and Braveheart would be more appropriate.

Criticism of the AFI's List

As I have often said, I have problems with AFI and their lists. Like the MPAA, the AFI caters to studio and corporate interests with a preference for big Hollywood films by and staring major Hollywood figures. Hollywood is fine and big budget studio pictures are fine; I have no problem with large productions and I certainly would not dismiss a film because it made money. However, there are no independent films and some suspect titles on their lists. Last year's 100 Films list included The Sixth Sense and Titanic; while I do enjoy those films, I don't think they should be categorized next to Casablanca and Vertigo.

This particular list has some inherent problems. First, a lot of films, especially those made today, crisscross genres. For instance, Lord of the Rings is found on the fantasy list but it could easily qualify as an epic. Second, the selection of genres on this list is apparently arbitrary. Courtroom Drama and Romantic Comedy are very particular and do not match with the more general categories.

Alternative Lists

It's possible that the AFI ignored some genres, like Musicals, because they have dealt with the topic in another list, but in the cases of Horror and Documentary the AFI has refused to acknowledge them at all in their lists, and this is highly suspect because these genres are most independent of the studio system.

What follows are alternative lists for genres that the AFI ignored. These are not definitive list, just ten suggestions for each category, listed in no particular order. I've conformed to the AFI's rule of only American films.

Musicals

• Dreamgirls
• Chicago
• West Side Story
• Yankee Doodle Dandy
• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show
• The Doors
• Little Shop of Horrors, 1986
• The Sound of Music
• Pink Floyd: The Wall

Horror

• Psycho, 1960
• Jaws
• The Hills Have Eyes, 1977
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• The Silence of the Lambs
• Night of the Living Dead, 1968
• Frankenstein, 1931
• Halloween 1978
• The Exorcist
• The Thing, 1982

Comedy

• Stripes
• Ghostbusters
• Dumb and Dumber
• Some Like It Hot
• The Big Lebowski
• Caddyshack
• Duck Soup
• Annie Hall
• Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• The Gold Rush

War

• Platoon
• Apocalypse Now
• The Thin Red Line, 1998
• Saving Private Ryan
• The Longest Day, 1962
• Patton
• The Deer Hunter
• Coming Home
• Full Metal Jacket
• Letters from Iwo Jima

Action/Adventure

• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Die Hard
• Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• The African Queen
• The Adventures of Robin Hood
• Kill Bill
• Enter the Dragon
• Lethal Weapon
• Superman: The Movie
• First Blood

Romance

• Titanic
• Romeo and Juliet, 1968
• Gone With the Wind
• The Graduate
• Out of Africa
• The English Patient
• As Good As It Gets
• An Officer and a Gentleman
• Brokeback Mountain
• From Here to Eternity

Documentaries

• Vernon, Florida
• Bowling for Columbine
• When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
• The Fog of War
• Hearts and Minds
• When We Were Kings
• Woodstock
• Nanook of the North
• Jazz, 2001
• Why We Fight, 1943-45

EW on Sydney Pollack

Entertainment Weekly's website has a short but interesting piece reflecting on the career of Sydney Pollack, who passed away earlier this week. Here is an excerpt:

Sydney Pollack made movies for grownups. He didn't make movies about teenager-stalking slashers or CGI monsters or men in tights (well, except for Tootsie). The director, who died yesterday at 73, seems like the last of a breed, a filmmaker who specialized in old-fashioned, star-driven, sweeping romances and epics of the kind that used to win Oscars but that Hollywood has all but forgotten how to make. (About the only other director of recent years who still made such anachronistic spectacles was Pollack's producing partner, Anthony Minghella, who died just two months ago.) It's hard to imagine anyone trying nowadays to make a romance with the sprawl and scope of The Way We Were or Out of Africa, movies with artistic ambition, star-powered glamour, and faith that there are enough adult ticketbuyers to make them hits without pandering.

New Hollywood Series: Apocalypse Now

For this Memorial Day, and in continuation of the ongoing New Hollywood series here on Maverick at the Movies, today's episode features a condensed version of the two-disc, 96 minute the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now released by Elektra Records, trimmed to fit within the show’s length and edited to conform to FCC regulations on content. The soundtrack album is unique in that it includes the music, dialogue, sound effects, and narration, making the album play very much like a radio drama.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now was released in 1979 amid press stories of a chaotic shoot in south East Asia and the film had the distinction of being one of the first studio pictures to deal with the Vietnam War. Based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now tells the story of Captain Willard, an American soldier back on tour in Vietnam, who is given a secret mission to assassinate an American colonel who has gone insane deep within the South East Asian jungle. On Willard’s journey he confronts his own doubts about the war, his allegiance to his country, and even his own sanity.

The picture is structured to take its protagonist through the Vietnam War, but also through civilization, gradually stripping away social and technological signs of human advancement and returning man to a primal state of nature. By doing this film is able to take a look into the origins of violence and the nature of warfare, making Apocalypse Now a deeper exploration of the Thanatos drive.

As a technical exercise, Apocalypse Now has some great examples of visuals and sound working together. The helicopter attack is an iconic piece of film history with a sensory overload of explosions, camerawork, and music that satirizes the contemporary war film (and is quite clearly referenced—without irony—in Rambo: First Blood – Part II).

There are some great performances in the film. Marlon Brando gives the last great performance of his career as Colonel Kurtz, a tortured soul burdened with terrifying insight into the truth of war and the worst elements of human existence. Martin Sheen stars as Willard, a conflicted army captain who has lost his way in the amoral nature of warfare. Willard’s journey and his narration of the tale provides the film with direction and shapes the themes of the story, making them much clearer than if they were just presented visually and Sheen’s performance is the glue that holds the film together. Apocalypse Now also has some terrific supporting performances by Robert Duvall as the reckless Colonel Kilgore and Dennis Hopper as an eccentric photojournalist.

In 2001, Francis Ford Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux, a re-edit of the film that adds nearly an hour of footage. Unlike some other director’s cuts, Redux adds entire new sequences that build upon the themes and further develop the characters. The most interesting addition is a sequence on a French plantation in Vietnam. Admittedly, the new scenes to grind the narrative to a halt in places, but Redux makes for an interesting alternative cut of the film.

While it’s one of the most controversial war films of all time, it’s also one of best, a film that mixes art house style with Hollywood spectacle to create an engaging and sophisticated portrait of modern warfare set against the primeval barbarity of human nature.

Apocalypse Now on Memorial Day Weekend

A special presentation of the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now will air on Maverick at the Movies on Sunday, May 25th. The episode will feature an abridged version of the 2-disc soundtrack released by Elektra/Asylum Records which features not just the music but the dialogue and sound effects as well, playing out the story like a radio drama.

From the 50 Yard Line

The feature length film From the 50 Yard Line will be shown at Mankato West High School May 23rd, 2008 at 7:30p.m. Tickets will be $7 a piece. The screening is sponsored by the Mankato Area 77 Lancers.

LA Times on Spielberg

Peter Rainer has written an interesting essay on the career of Steven Spielberg. Dealing with a director who has come to epitomize commercial interests and contemporary Hollywood power, Rainer cuts between praising Spielberg's success as an entertainer and criticizing him for supposed lack of substance. Here are some excerpts:

The directors of Spielberg's generation who came up in the late '60s and early '70s, many of them film-school-trained, were the first in America to push their encyclopedic passion for movies right into the forefront of their work. Their rebellion against Old Hollywood was essentially a pose, since directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra were mainstays of their mindscapes. Old movies functioned for these filmmakers as primary experiences -- touchstones of inspiration -- in the same way that poetry or literature might have functioned for an earlier generation of artists.

*****

Spielberg, however, came from a somewhat different place. He never officially attended a major film school. His heroes were the big-picture guys like David Lean and Stanley Kubrick or versatile old studio hands like Michael Curtiz and Victor Fleming -- directors who could be counted on to deliver reliable commercial entertainment (and sometimes more than that). While many of his '70s confederates, who also were to include such directors as Terrence Malick, Jonathan Demme and Philip Kaufman, were attempting to work outside the industry, or subvert it from within through sheer force of artistry, Spielberg was directing episodes of "Night Gallery" and "Marcus Welby, M.D." and then moving on to sharks and flying saucers.

*****

The career trajectory of Hollywood directors before the '70s typically followed the winding path from unpretentious to "prestigious" (i.e., Oscar-worthy). Take, for example, George Stevens, who went from "Alice Adams," "Swing Time," "Gunga Din" and "The More the Merrier" to "A Place in the Sun," "Giant," "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Most of the '70s directors did their best to avoid this syndrome or at least held out for as long as they could. Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," a deranged movie about a deranged war, could never have been mistaken for a respectable war epic. Scorsese's biblical movie was "The Last Temptation of Christ."

But Spielberg, being the most attuned of his generation to the mojo of Hollywood, was naturally the director who most wholeheartedly fell into the prestige trap. Whatever their merits, and in some cases they are considerable, films such as "The Color Purple," "Empire of the Sun," "Schindler's List," "Amistad," "Saving Private Ryan" and "Munich" are all deeply conventional in terms of how the world is comprehended. Some of these films may be better made, or, in the case of "Schindler's List," more richly felt than their Old Hollywood counterparts. But all are afflicted with a kind of transcendent Stanley Kramerism. We are made to understand that moral lessons are being imparted and that, in the end, tomorrow will somehow be a better day.

*****

FOR A director of conscience who can make his camera do anything, the realization that he has it in him to inspire absolute dread must be supremely unsettling. (I'm not thinking of "Jaws," which was comic-book dread.) What surely must prey upon Spielberg as he gets older are not the bliss-outs he is uniquely capable of creating but the horrors. The Normandy Beach landing in "Saving Private Ryan" goes way beyond the usual technical exercise; it's a fury against the flesh. In "Minority Report," Tom Cruise's John Anderton, the chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in the District of Columbia, stands before a floating computer interface and, arms waving like an impresario, whisks around its midair crime scene visuals. It's a nightmare representation of the director as puppet master, and it comes with a kicker: Anderton, whose mind is a mausoleum of horrific images, is himself a murderer-to-be.

The filmmakers of Spielberg's generation wanted to take over Hollywood and change the face of an art form. And for a brief period, until the blockbuster syndrome kicked in in the mid-'70s, they did just that. Along with Lucas, Spielberg is often blamed for shutting down the renaissance, as if without "Jaws" and "Star Wars" it never would have occurred to anybody in Hollywood to come up with high concepts and saturation marketing. "I hate Spielberg," a young filmmaker told me at a movie festival recently when he heard I was going to be writing about him. "He killed the indie film." And then he added, "But I loved 'Jaws.' "

*****

This doesn't mean Spielberg gets a free pass. Some of the cottages in his cottage industry have all the allure of McMansions. He has yet to make a movie that revels in the commonplace; for him, the ordinary is always (yawn) a springboard to magic. He has never made a movie with more than a trace of carnality. His world view is cut-rate Manichean -- darks and lights and not much gray in between. It's a pity he shelved his plans to make a movie about his childhood idol, Charles Lindbergh, the all-American aviator and Fascist sympathizer. Now there's a character who would have put Spielberg to the test. Instead, he's gearing up to make "Lincoln" with Liam Neeson, which sounds like a snooze. And "Jurassic 4" is on the radar.

Spielberg is still the teacher's pet of his class, but the difference is that now he owns the schoolhouse. Maybe for a while he should try being a truant.

I don't think Rainer gives Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind enough credit, discounting them as comic book fantasy. I don't think that's fair or accurate; Jaws is a great horror story cast in the mold of a Corman film, but it reaches beyond that genre mold as a criticism of capitalism and the struggle of one man's conscience against forces of nature, both human and aquatic. Close Encounters, on the other hand, is really a religious film with science fiction symbols. Rainer's argument that the aliens are benign from the opening is not true; view the home invasion when the extraterrestrials kidnap a young boy. It is among the scariest scenes in any Spielberg film ever. The film is about faith and uses religious references (lights in the sky, visions, climbing a mountain to have communion with the gods) to tell a story of revelation just as Scorsese used these kinds of references in films like Raging Bull to communicate themes of sin and redemption.

Rainer's lament that Spielberg has never dealt with the commonplace is a silly but often floated argument against both the filmmaker and against the science fiction and fantasy genres. If one thing has marked Spielberg's entertainment, not to mention his most successful proteges like Robert Zemeckis and Peter Jackson, it is the ability to place the personal into the fantasy. I've already made the case for Jaws and Close Encounters. Indiana Jones reconciles with the father that was never in his life and Jurassic Park takes on the perils and responsibilities of technology. Minority Report and War of the Worlds are about our post-9/11 world and place issues like broken families and distrust of social institutions against an action-adventure background. It is significant to mention that nearly all of the 9/11 and post-9/11 narrative films have been unsuccessful at the box office, even some that were quite excellent like United 93, but both of Spielberg's films were big hits. And there are plenty of reasons for that (star power, Spielberg's name recognition, etc.) but the fact remains that the films that nestled difficult subject matter within supposedly escapist fare were best received by audiences.

It's true that Spielberg often puts entertainment before substance, the Indiana Jones films being the primary examples. And his filmography is certainly not perfect; consider The Lost World. But a creative writing instructor once told me, quite wisely, that a storyteller's first obligation is to be entertaining. An entertaining story with no substance will keep an audience's attention although it will be disposable. A substantive story with no entertainment value will reach no one. A great story, whether it's about a giant shark or a Greek myth, will both entertain us while telling us something true and substantive about the world. And just because a story is optimistic doesn't make it shallow. Optimism is not to be shunned if it's authentic, and Spielberg's films are box office successes partly because audiences respond to that optimism.

As it is, Spielberg has won two Best Director Oscars and made many of the most popular and successful films of all time, so he probably doesn't need to sweat what the bloggers and the critics and the columnists think. While some critics will hound his work to the end either because he's just too damn optimistic or because he's made too much money, I would liken Spielberg's legacy to John Ford or Frank Capra. Both made some great films that were widely entertaining and had substance to them.

Could Spielberg do something more challenging or extremely dark and depressing? Probably. And Salvador Dali could have painted a vase or a bowl of grapes. But that's not what marked Dali's work and to complain that Spielberg's films do not mirror the tone or point of view of Coppola's or Scorsese's work is a ridiculous condition.