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| The Best Movie of 1930 by Brody Wilder Yesterday, 8:46pm PDT | ||||
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| WINNER: Animal Crackers
An adaptation of the Marx Brothers' second narrative stage show, even better than the first. They got the audio issues all figured out and I managed to find a great restoration at my local second-hand store. Oh shit, I just realized, it's 2026! As of January 1, movies from 1930 are now in the public domain. I'll just put a magnet link in the title then. "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know. But that is entirely irrelevant to what I was talking about. We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren’t developed. But we’re going back again in a couple of weeks." HONOURABLE MENTIONS Best Western: The Big Trail Rugged man's man director Raoul Walsh (he had an eyepatch!) tried to kickstart the epic western genre 20 years before it was practically feasible with this legendary failure. Filmed on location and in pioneering 70mm widescreen, this bloated oater told the story of a wagon train traversing the perilous Oregon Trail of Apple II fame. Shot in five languages at once with different international casts, the budget necessitated a worldwide hit. Unfortunately, the script just wasn't there, and the acting was somewhere else entirely (notwithstanding a credible performance from 23-year-old first-time leading man Marion Morrison, under his assigned stage name "John Wayne"). Flopped disastrously, relegating the western - and Wayne - to cheap children's entertainment for the remainder of the Great Depression. Worth watching for a scene in which they dramatically lower their wagons and livestock down a cliff on ropes without the aid of miniatures or special effects of any kind, one of many such Fitzcarraldean feats in the film. Wikipedia wrote: Please, Sir, I Want Some War: All Quiet on the Western Front Like all creative works from the interwar period, All Quiet was stridently anti-war, viewing the One to End All of Those as a futile and stupid endeavor, a crime perpetrated by greedy old men against their own children. The prevailing attitude was one of isolationism and disarmament - why spend money on battleships for dick measuring contests with foreign moustache men that could be better spent at home, building a ladder out of poverty for millions disenfranchised by the one-two punch of economic and environmental collapse (forget the market crash, the dust bowl alone was cataclysmic). The fact it's called the interwar period should tell you where this seemingly sensible strategy ultimately led. Anyway, I don't know if Paul Verhoeven read the novel before he made Starship Troopers, but he definitely watched this movie. Giant Women's Faces: Ladies of Leisure Director Frank Capra's first of five films with leading lady (and, for my money, inventor of acting for sound) Barbara Stanwyck. It's been said that the essential pleasure of cinema is sitting silently in a dark room, staring at a girl who doesn't know you're there. Babs' trailblazingly naturalistic performance here makes that voyeuristic thrill all the more bonerrific. Otherwise a fairly typical - though beautifully shot - example of the pre-code women's picture, about a prostitute with a heart of gold who falls in love with a handsome rich guy who couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. Try not to cum. Faggot Shit: Morocco Director Joseph von Sternberg's (born Jonas Sternberg to lower class Jewish parents, the von was an affectation) second collaboration with the Steven Seagal of melodrama, Teutonic beauty Marlene Dietrich. (Their first was Der blaue Engel, which wasn't as good, and even in its English form contains long stretches of untranslated German.) Easily the best picture of the year by any objective metric of filmmaking, it's got themes and motifs and cinematography and all that jazz. I just thought Animal Crackers was funnier. It's worth watching for a lot of reasons, but I put it here in the queer cinema category because Marlene wears a tuxedo and kisses another lady - a stunning display of bisexual akido. It's okay to cum for this one. |
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The Best Movie of Every Year by Yesterday, 8:42pm PDT  The Best Movie of 1930 by Yesterday, 8:46pm PDT Do you have a job/family NT by Today, 3:16am PDT |
