I Gotta Be Me #3 - Thoughts on Cinema

Have you ever taken a look at a list of the top ten movies at the current box office? If you have and you consider movies an art form rather than disposable entertainment, you must feel as disheartened as I do sometimes about the state of our culture. I would say on average that maybe 3 or 4 of the top 10 movies are actually worth paying money to see at the theater, for those of us who actually care about movies. The rest are usually either big, dumb action movies, romances built almost entirely on treacle, or comedies that seem to cater to undiscriminating 12 year olds, yet are marketed to adults. Rare are the films that are actually challenging, original, intelligent, with memorable stories and interesting characters. A few years ago, I actually overheard a couple of teenage girls lauding the classic film Citizen Kane at my local library. Maybe we yet have hope. Last week, on the blog, I wrote that I would only review contemporary films from now on. I have changed my mind and have decided that if I so choose to, I will review films from any and all eras, and any and all genres. I watch movies from all eras and genres, so I see no good reason to pretend that I watch contemporary films only, certainly not because I might gain more readers(yet lose myself in the process). I watch a lot of contemporary films, but I also love old black and white films, foreign films, silent films, and documentaries. Cinema is one of the great modern art forms:  less subtle and intellectually absorbing than literature, but perhaps even more empathetic and humanistic in its immediacy. To take the potentials of the art form and devolve it into entertainment to be watched today and forgotten tomorrow is to throw part of our cultural heritage into a wastebasket. If you love cinema like I do, avoid bad, even mediocre movies like the plague, because culturally, that's what they are.

Movie Review: Reds(1981)

10/10 Reds is Warren Beatty's masterpiece. As a director, he has only four films under his belt, but Reds easily trumps the other three  in seriousness, substance, and importance. It concerns the early 20th century journalist/radical revolutionary John Reed and his various relationships and dealings in politics. Reed (Beatty) was a converted socialist who believed that he could make a difference with his journalism and his direct involvement in party politics in both the U.S. and Bolshevik Russia and he was right. His book Ten Days That Shook the World is a classic in political journalism and his direct involvement in the U.S. and Russian socialist parties was ambitious and sincere. This film was obviously a labor of love for Beatty and it shows in every frame on the screen. Only someone obsessively fascinated with this story could have made a film this detailed and emotionally satisfying. At over three hours, never does it feel obligatory or boring. Interspersed with the fictionalization of the story are various short reminiscences of people who knew John Reed personally, and this adds gravity and humanism to an already humanistic story. But as John Reed travels the road of socialism to its logical conclusion in communist Russia, he eventually finds that the authoritarian system there is as insidious and malicious as the capitalism in his native land. Diane Keaton is just as impressive in her role as Reed's wife Louise Bryant, ever suffering and ever caring. Jack Nicholson is strangely enough perfectly suited to the role of  famous playwright Eugene O' Neil, onetime paramour of Bryant and friend of the Reed's. This is a film that almost certainly would not get made today, with the intense vilification of  Socialism in America since even before this film was made. It is, in fact, something of a miracle this film even got made at the time that it did. It treats the subject of socialism fairly and sympathetically while at the same time recognizing that authoritarian systems of all kind, whatever the name, are corrupt by nature. This film is something to be admired and treasured and deserves its place in the world film canon. Essential!