The Movie Gourmet

How does a film get listed on my Best Movies of 2015?  Essentially, I look for two very personal reactions: 1) I am thrilled by the experience of watching the film (or feel another strong visceral reaction) and 2) I am still thinking about the movie for days afterward.

A few days ago I saw both Carol and Youth.  I found each of them to be exceptional films, and I enjoyed and admired them both.  But I was thrilled by Youth and am still thinking about it.  Youth made my top ten list.  Not so with Carol.

It hurts if I think of something else during the movie.  It helps to be original (Ex Machina, Wild Tales, Youth, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl). It helps to be authentic (Brooklyn, I’ll See You in My Dreams).   It really helps if I think that the movie is timeless and will stand up over time.

It helps if I would watch the movie again, but that’s not necessary.  One viewing of a challenging and uncomfortable film like The Look of Silence may be all that I can stomach.  On the other hand, I have a bunch of Guilty Pleasures that I can watch repeatedly without rating them as great films.

There’s no shame in missing my top ten list. I really enjoyed, and heartily recommend Carol, along with Legend, Meet the Patels, The Gift, Amy, Mr. Holmes, Sicario, Black Mass, Gemma Bovery, Spy and Seymour: An Introduction.  They’re just not on my list of the year’s best.

Bruce Sinofsky was a filmmaker who actually saved lives. His Paradise Lost trilogy resulted in innocent men being released from death row.

Lizabeth Scott‘s career was launched by her striking looks.  Often described as a “smoky blonde”, she proved herself a brilliant actresses playing smoky and smoking blondes in film noir, notably Dead Reckoning, Too Late for Tears and I Walk Alone. My favorite Lizabeth Scott role is in Pitfall. The married protagonist (Dick Powell) falls for her but she’s not the usual femme fatale. She’s not a Bad Girl, just an unlucky one. She has horrible taste in a boyfriend and the bad luck to attract a menacing stalker (Burr), but she’s fundamentally decent. Will her sexual promiscuity be punished at the end of this 1948 movie – and will his?

Anne Meara‘s death was noted in our celebrity-obsessed culture as the loss of Ben Stiller’s mom.  But she was – in her own right – a comedy pioneer.  In groundbreaking performances with her husband and comedy partner Jerry Stiller in the early 1960s, Meara influenced a whole new comic sensibility.  Her peers included Nichols and May, Mort Sahl, Woody Allen and Bob Newhart.  She was in the forerunner of Second City, and her sketches evolved into the SNL form of comedy that has dominated since the 70s.  She worked mostly in television, and one of her best recent roles was as Miranda’s demented mother-in-law in Sex and the City.

Fred Thompson is best known for his role as an investigative attorney during the Watergate Hearings and for his decade in the US Senate. But he was a pretty fair country actor, too, and my favorite Fred Thompson performance was in the very smart and funny corporate mockudrama Barbarians at the Gate.

Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles prosecutor, secured convictions of the Manson Family for the sensational Tate-LaBianca murders. His memoir of the investigation and trials, Helter Skelter, was adapted into the riveting 1976 miniseries of the same title starring Steve Railsback as Charlie.

Christopher Lee, with his 278 screen credits, is fondly remembered for entertaining roles at the beginning of his career as a horror heavy and at the end of his career as an imposing presence in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings franchises. My favorite Christopher Lee role is as the bad guy Rochefort (Charlton Heston’s henchman) in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974).

Leonard Nimoy was much more than Spock, with a career highlighted (in my mind) by the chillingly confident and authoritative Dr. David Kibner in the 1978 Philip Kaufman remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not everybody can be menacing in a turtleneck.

Maureen O’Hara was the durable star chiefly remembered as the Queen of Technicolor and for being forceful enough to match up to John Wayne.  I remember her most fondly in one of her first American films, playing against John Garfield in the noirish WW II spy thriller The Fallen Sparrow.   She doesn’t look 22 – does she?

Happy Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa The Love of My Life!

We shared some of my favorite movie experiences this year.

• She accompanied me to Noir City for a delicious double feature: Woman on the Run and Born to Be Bad.
• She hosted our friends at the funniest Cinequest movie, at a packed California Theatre screening of the hilarious Wild Tales.
• And she took me (all her idea) for my first visit to the Los Gatos Theatre.  The movie was the James Bond flick Spectre.  I loved the intimate and classy 30-seat theater with its black leather couches and ottomans!  (Movie okay; theater fantastic.)

She tolerated my spending huge chunks of time at Cinequest, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Noir City, the SF Jewish Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival.  As part of our vacation in Spain, she even tagged along to the Sevilla European Film Fest screening of Mustang.

And, of course, she teases me for “the Romanian abortion movie”, “the Icelandic penis movie” and “the Ukrainian deaf movie”.

She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog, and I appreciate her and love her.  Happy Anniversary, Honey!