The MacGuffin

The MacGuffin crew discuss Defending Your Life, from director/writer/actor Albert Brooks and co-starring Meryl Streep.

This episode can be played online via the flash player below or it can be downloaded from here. It is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Zune.

I saw that everyone else was doing a top 10 for 2011 and wanted in on the fun, but then I realized I didn’t actually see all that many new movies in the theater last year. It turns out that I’ll see anything for a review, but when it comes to viewing for my own pleasure, I tend to stick to older movies or weird stuff. So, I’ve decided to create a top ten new-to-me list. These are movies that I saw during 2011 that I had never seen before that, for one reason or another, impressed the hell out of me. While I did have fun compiling this list, I need to keep better track of what I’m watching from now on. There was a lot of “What the hell did I watch last year?” going on. (I have started a spreadsheet for 2012.) What were your new-to-you favorites last year?

In Name Only (1939)

Wealthy businessman Alec Walker (Cary Grant) is unhappily married to Maida (Kay Francis), a schemer who married him for money, not love. He learned of her deceit shortly after they were married, but she has his parents and society fooled into thinking she is the perfect, loving wife. Alec has long decided to stop pretending he is happy, so Maida is trying hard to get his family and friends to control his behavior. While he is out riding one day, he meets Julie Eden (Carole Lombard), a young widow who charms him with her forthright and humorous nature. He begins to court her, but she pulls back when she discovers that he is married. Alec asks Maida for a divorce, and she pretends to acquiesce, but in the end, she refuses him, and informs Julie that she will not let him go without a scandal. Julie cannot risk exposing her daughter to a trial, so she asks Alec to let her go. All three characters struggle to get what they want, but only two of them are willing to address the moral ramifications of those desires. Who does Grant end up with? Watch and find out!

There are some films that have become so familiar to us that watching them again feels a bit like coming home. We know the characters, we know the sequences, and sometimes we can even say the lines of dialogue before they come. They are so a part of who we are that we associate the film with our own upbringing. That’s how I feel every time I see Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985). One of the essential films of the 1980s, I feel that it’s safe to say that just about everyone knows and has seen it, and for some of us, couldn’t fathom what growing up would be like without it. It does everything that you can expect out of pure entertainment—with names, places, and images that have lasted in contemporary popular culture. I’ve become so familiar with the film that I can’t remember the first time ever seeing it.

The common misconception about our society is that now we have iPods and antibiotics we are a more progressive, forward-thinking culture. But if we only look back into our inconveniently well-recorded history, we can see that might not have always been the case. When Americans think of Germany in the early-to-mid 20^th century, we tend to only remember Hitler, goose stepping, and The Rocketeer fighting that guy with the weird face on top of a giant red swastika blimp. The truth is, before the Nazi regime, Germany was one of the most important homes for forward-thinking Jewish filmmakers of the silent era. What they gave us was the Expressionist movement; dark, thematic, adult fantasies with a visual interest in jarring lighting contrasts and a kind of disorienting angular production design. Of these filmmakers, the name Fritz Lang has become iconic, as he made many emblematic Expressionist films, most famously the dystopian science fiction film Metropolis (1927). But before fleeing Nazi-occupied Germany in the ’30s to make genre movies in Hollywood, he made one of the most prescient and fascinating thriller precursors with M (1931), his moody indictment of the mob mentality. Living in a post-Psycho (1960) world of exploitation serial killer entertainment, we can only look at M and take it for granted, but even with this water being so thoroughly tread-upon, one can still recognize the complicated themes and characterizations as being anything but stock pulp archetypes.

Here’s what I’ve been watching recently:

Ah, winter. The time when my usual routine of watching a lot of stuff turns into “really watching a lot of stuff,” what with it being dreary outside most of the time. Here are a few things that have distracted me during the last stretch of particularly nasty days in Seattle:

The opening shot is as striking as any you’ll see. Up high in the Peruvian mountains, amongst the clouds and mist, a line of soldiers, animals, and workers snake their way down a steep path. While the shot is taken from a distance, it’s clear that this moment is not manipulated at any point—those are real people steadily going through the dangerous cliffs of the rock side, with the green canyon thousands of feet below. This is just one of the many haunting images that populate Werner Herzog’s daring and ambitious examination of human nature, Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972). It’s a film that examines the depths to which obsession can take a person, created by a man who has made a career out of his obsession for the cinema. There are some filmmakers who do the work as a job, others because they simply enjoy it. Herzog does it because it is ingrained in his very being.

The MacGuffin crew discuss Citizen Ruth, from director Alexander Payne and starring Laura Dern.

This episode can be played online via the flash player below or it can be downloaded from here. It is available on iTunes and Stitcher.

In a darkened space below the deck of the Orca, a fishing boat that probably isn’t big enough, the Ahabesque character of Sam Quint relays a chilling tale about a mission to deliver an atomic bomb to Japan during World War II. While drunk and still laughing, Quint (played by Robert Shaw) begins to deliver this strange and haunting monologue to his two fellow crewmates, and while the music fades and the camera pushes in closer to his face, the tone of the movie makes an important shift. Carefully worded and with deep sincerity, Shaw explains in great detail about the night his character watched the other soldiers get picked off one by one by a swarm of tiger sharks while they waited in the Japanese waters to be saved by the US military. To anyone who has seen Jaws (1975) more than once, this scene quickly becomes their favorite. Steven Spielberg himself has admitted that this scene, consisting of only dialogue and a few reaction shots, is the moment from Jaws that he was most proud of. What this now-famous boat scene underlines is the dichotomy of its creator.