1969's Oscar Nominees

Watched Z for the first time maybe five years ago--at home, I think. Didn't make a great impression on me. Midnight Cowboy, as lopsided as the last one. I love the "Raindrops" scene in Butch Cassidy, will never see the other two.

Was gonna mention "If..." but apparently that was '68

like all of the three i've seen -- Z is terrific, midnight cowboy seems flawed in some ways but really has stuck with me, and butch cassidy's fun enough.

Voted for Z although I've never seen it. It has to be the best. Wtf is Anne of a thousand days?

Producer Hal B. Wallis had the weirdest career during this period, alternately making fancy-wardrobe British history stuff like Anne of the Thousand Days (and before it, Becket and after it, Mary, Queen of Scots), and some of the more patience-trying Elvis movies such as Paradise - Hawaiian Style and Easy Come, Easy Go.

Z. It was an easy vote for me.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Should be nicknamed Ratso: Dustin Pedroia.

Not mentioned so far:
The Joke (prob my fave Czech New Wave out of the ones I've seen; having the horrors of Stalinism inflicted on a crabby misanthope instead of a saint, and his totally puerile attempt at revenge, it all makes for a great dark comedy)
Goyokin (samurai cinema's answer to OUATITW)
Cemetery Without Crosses (not a real contender but it's entertaining)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

OK. Who voted for Hello Dolly!?

WALL-E

My library didn't haveZ.

I did finally watch Midnight Cowboy, though. There's definitely some embarrassing stuff: the sex scene with the TV changer was jokey in a particularly jarring sense. For a movie that (rightfully, at times) has been praised for its sexual frankness, a scene that feels like something that'd be more at home in one of the era's dumb sex comedies is particularly WTF. I also hated the Warholian party scene, though I've seen enough movies from this era to assume that scenes like this were as obligatory in the late 60s as dubstep drops were in pop songs of the early 2010s. Still, it was obnoxious and show-offy. I actually found that the whole movie kinda got tedious from that point forwards, which I'm not sure is as much a problem with the plotting as it was with that sequence sending the movie off track in a way that I didn't feel that it ever particularly recovered from.

Still, what's good is really good: Voigt (whom I'd admittedly never thought was anything special as an actor until I saw this), Rizzo's unspoken crush on Joe, the whole evocation of time and place via what is essentially an updating of a Dickens plot to late 60s NYC, the early hustling sequences (lets just say that I'm gonna find it difficult to see Bob Balaban any other way after watching him vomit up cum). At first I was annoyed that the film never provided any kind of dialogue re: Joe's past, but I eventually came around to appreciating this ambiguity. The flashback fragments that we do get--Joe massaging grandma, the enema (?), the rape (??), his girlfriend being carted off to an institution (???)--are suggestive enough that any further detail might have severely dulled their impact. I'm obviously of the opinion that Schlesinger's direction here is very uneven, but when he's on he's really on.

The remote-control overkill got complaints back then, too--Stanley Kauffmann, who gave it a mostly great review, singled that out as the film as its glibbest. I've seen it so many times, it doesn't bother me much anymore; I like the way the theme music comes in at the end (when they're dressing up the poodles, I think).

I love the party scene. I know it's a Coles Notes-tourist version of the Factory (think I read that Warhol tried to stop Viva and various people from participating), and that it steals shamelessly from lots of underground films of the day, but I think it does its job--driving a wedge between Joe and Ratso, and between Ratso and a changing world--and it produces a great line: "If it's free, I ain't stealin'." That line has resonance beyond the film itself.

For me, there are three things that dwarf everything else. Voight and Hoffman are brilliant--I can't think of an American film from the '60s or '70s with two better lead performances. (Balaban and John McGiver and Sylvia Miles are great too.) Adam Holender isn't famous like Vilmos Zgismond or László Kovács, but I think his work here is that good. (His other best films are The Panic in Needle Park and Smoke.) And both "Everybody's Talkin'" and Toots Thielemans' theme music are indelible.

Great film to imitate, too. A friend and I have an ongoing shorthand stolen from a number of films, and this would be one of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVpPsATDyy0

Voight's almost as good in another film that engenders lots of criticism, then and now--Coming Home. I've never seen Conrack, which is supposed to be one of his best.

That Kael impersonation is right on.

xpost

The very obscure Mary Charlotte Wilcox.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0928249/

Yeah, that's always been one of my favorite sketches.

I've enjoyed to varying degrees most of Voight's performances (even The Champ!) through Runaway Train, where he started stinking of ham but in retrospect was a sketch of his gonzo shit in Anaconda.

To say nothing of Baby Geniuses 2.

He just seemed to fall off a cliff after Coming Home. Maybe it was The Champ (I remember it as one of prominent big-budget debacles of its day, along with Hurricane), maybe it was that awful moment at the Academy Awards where he was rendered verklempt by Laurence Olivier's eloquence. I'm sure his creepy right-wing vendetta these days is tied in with perceived mistreatment by Hollywood.

just saw Midnight Cowboy for the first time, agreed on all the highs and all the lows. best unheralded line: ''the x's on the windows mean the landlord can't collect rent, which is a convenience, on account of it's condemned.''. the flashback stuff was dumb and hacky (maybe was stylish and arty at the time?) and took too much time away from really making sense of the characters... like trying to tell background rather than show who they are. hoffman's backstory material was much better handled.

I remember basically liking Butch and Sundance but it's been ten years and I don't really remember much besides the big jump, the ending, and the looming threat of the super-posse (made more visceral without losing the dread in spielberg's Duel). should pull it out for another viewing as I've gotten worn out on The Sting.

Hello Dolly is staggeringly bad and shockingly miscast, with such a sheen of production value that you can almost forget you're bored silly - the machine running full blast with nothing to actually carry. shave an hour off it and it might get away as a mild distraction but the oscar treatment is laughable. guess I should finally pull Z off the shelf!

fwiw I thought Z was an OK period piece based on my VHS viewing twenty years ago – until I watched the Criterion restoration.

For the record, I was NOT the Hello, Dolly! voter.

(slides VHS tape back onto the shelf)

(really!)

Trivia re: the Midnight Cowboy party scene. Warhol himself was first asked to play the underground filmmaker in it; he suggested they use Viva instead. Viva was talking to Andy on the phone about her prepping for the scene at the moment Andy was shot by Valerie Solanis.

think i probably voted Hello Dolly just out of drunken silliness btw

Josefa: thought for sure I'd read he was against the scene...maybe it was just the finished film he didn't like. (Who is Viva's sidekick--the guy who hands out the flier at the diner?)

I did too! But then I reread the relevant sections of Warhol's Popism and he says, "I felt like I was missing a big party, lying there in the hospital like that." In other words, he would've liked to hang around the set even if he weren't in the cast. But then when the film came out he admits he was "so jealous." He thought, "Why didn't they give us the money to do […} Midnight Cowboy? We would have done it so real for them."

I think Viva's sidekick was Gastone Rossilli

I like these, hope you guys do '77 and '78 soon

Kind of surprised I haven't done '77 yet tbh. I'll make that the next one.

Jean-Louis Trintignant in Z is like the ultimate hero in any movie and he spends half of it milling around in the background.