THE BEST:

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)



When it comes to second-guessing the Oscars, few Best Pictures raise Hollywood’s hackles like Shakespeare in Love. The legend goes something like this: way back in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant war movie Saving Private Ryan was a cinch to win the top slot, but sometime between the announcement of nominations and the opening of envelopes, Bob and Harvey Weinstein (the evil geniuses behind Shakespeare’s Oscar campaign) flew the invisible Miramax blimp over Hollywood and fired their diabolical Hypno-Ray at the helpless population, thus forcing all the innocent Who’s Who down in Whoville to vote for the wrong movie. As John Foote posts at InContention.com (reflecting an apparently common consensus), “Is there anyone left out there who truly believes that Shakespeare in Love, a lovely film, was actually better than Saving Private Ryan?” Well...uh, yes, actually. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Shakespeare in Love was MUCH better. Ryan, for all the slam-pow-gasp shock & awe chaos of its opening battle scene devolves shortly thereafter into a standard-issue World War II potboiler, circa 1952, complete with “Brooklyn,” “Redneck” and all the rest of the colorfully standard-issue Hollywood band of brothers fussin’ and fightin’ their way across Europe under the command of a tough but secretly tender-hearted father figure (played by a wildly miscast and completely unbelievable Tom Hanks). Shakespeare In Love, meanwhile, presented an Elizabethan world more fully-imagined than fellow Best Picture competitor Elizabeth, thanks to a remarkably literate and inventive screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. And, while it’s easy to mock the GOOP-tastic Gwyneth of today, Paltrow generated palpable chemistry with co-star Joseph Fiennes in a well told, old-school love story, surrounded by a flawless supporting cast, all of them at or near the top of their games. True, movies this smart don’t usually win Oscars...which is probably why so many Academy voters are still baffled by Shakespeare’s victory.

Read More...

What made City Slickers a hit?: The Western was one of classical Hollywood’s most popular genres. But while the greatest Westerns have endured in the American consciousness to this day, the popularity of Western films went downhill during the 1960s. By the 1980s, the number of Westerns made by Hollywood had dwindled to a handful of titles per year, and only a few of these (Young Guns, Dances With Wolves) made any money. At a time when people sat through long commutes to work and sweated the economic recession, it was hard for most audiences to relate to the old-fashioned cowboy mythos.

Read More...

The Library of Congress has announced its annual list of new additions to the National Film Registry.. Every year since 1989, the Registry has named 25 films--everything from Casablanca to the Zapruder home movie of President Kennedy's assassination--to be permanently preserved owing to their being deemed to possess cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. Among the inclusions this time: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Grand Hotel, Days of Heaven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 12 Angry Men, In a Lonely Place, Wuthering Heights, Bullitt the Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs, the Robert Benchley comic short The Sex Life of the Polyp, the Oscar-winning Sinatra-does-tolerance short The House I Live In, and Dances with Wolves. (We have no idea whether that last one is supposed to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, but maybe somebody at the Registry just doesn't think that Native Americans have suffered enough.) The most recent of the new additions to the Registry, which now tops out at a total of 525 titles, are the Kevin Costner thing and Back to the Future (1985), which has the enduring distinction of being the only time-travel teen comedy ever directly referenced by name in a presidential State of the Union address. (Ah, the eighties!) For the record, the newest movie listed in the Registry overall is still 1996's Fargo, the subject of a recent "Face/Off" column at this site by the Corsican brothers of on-line film writing, Leonard Pierce and myself. The Registry declined comment on rumors that plans are underway to commemorate this event by constructing a life-size bronze statue in front of the building showing a couple of geeks having a shovel fight.

The truth actually was out there all along: the rumored X-Files sequel now has a release date. July 25th, 2008 will see Mulder and Scully on the big screen for the first time in a decade.

Terry Gilliam's next movie will star Heath Ledger and is titled The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (I swear to God). This reminds me heavily of, well, Terry Gilliam movies, but also a certain notorious Troy McClure project.

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen will reunite (having costarred in Closer) for Tony Gilroy's drama Duplicity. (Gilroy directed Michael Clayton and wrote the three Bourne films.)

Just what we were all waiting for: a Dances With Wolves sequel. Actually, I know one formerly huge star who probably was waiting for this. And what can I say — I kinda like the goofball after all these years.

And for some truly good news, the amazing Meryl Streep will play the amazing Julia Child. Okay, it's from Nora Ephron, and seems to be focusing on a relationship between Child and a would-be apprentice, instead of on the way that Julia Child changed American cooking forever. But still.

— Peter Smith