Best Adapted Screenplay: 1929-30

“So long as I don’t know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture.” All Quiet on the Western Front, p 224

My Top 5:

1. All Quiet on the Western Front
2. Lucky Star
3. Anna Christie
4. Au Bonheur des Dames
5. The Cocoanuts

Note:  Again, we only have a top 5.  It was originally more, but in re-watching some films, while I have found more to add in the acting categories, I have found more to subtract in the writing categories.  The Great Gabbo was here at one point, as was Hitchcock’s Blackmail and even Murnau’s City Girl but I ended up cutting all three of them.  This is what I am left with and it’s not an impressive top 5.  All Quiet would be a winner in most years but in a decent year, none of the others would even come close to my top 10, let alone earn actual nominations.

 

Great Read: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

The first volume in Del Rey’s awesome Fully Illustrated Library of Robert E. Howard.

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

• Author:  Robert E. Howard
• Published:  2003
• Contents Originally Published:  mostly 1932-1934 in Weird Tales
• Publisher:  Del Rey
• Pages:  463
• First Line  (sort-of):  ”Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs into dawn.”
• Film Version:  Conan the Barbarian  (1982  -  *** – dir. John Milius), Conan the Destroyer  (1984  -  **  -  dir. Richard Fleischer), Conan the Barbarian  (2011  -  *.5  -  dir. Marcus Nispel)
• First Read:  Fall, 2006

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 1928-29

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end.  If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category.  Films in blue were nominated.  But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the second year of the Oscars (and, in fact, several fewer than the year before).

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Nosferatu
2. The Wind
3. Steamboat Bill Jr
4. L’Argent
5. Lonesome

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1928-29

One of the brilliant scenes in Murnau’s Nosferatu that’s not in the original source.

My Top 5:

1. Nosferatu
2. L’Argent
3. The Wind
4. The Docks of New York
5. Street Angel

Note:  There is only a top 5 for this year.  There were more than enough adapted screenplays to have a Top 10 if the quality of the scripts had merited it.  They do not.  And there wouldn’t even have been 5 if I hadn’t seen L’Argent last week.

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 1927-28

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end.  If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category.  Films in blue were nominated.  But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the first year of the Oscars.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Sunrise
2. Metropolis
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Circus
5. 7th Heaven

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1927-28

One of the beautiful and haunting images from Sunrise. Nothing to do with the script, but great to look at.

My Top 10:

1. Sunrise
2. 7th Heaven
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Love of Jeanne Ney
5. The Cat and the Canary
6. Tartuffe
7. Sadie Thompson
8. The Lodger
9. Laugh Clown Laugh
10. The Scarlet Letter

 

Revisiting Childhood Movies: a new series

Look forward to a review. It won’t be as complimentary as one from Seth MacFarlane would be.

Why, you ask, are you starting a new series when you just started two new ones and have barely done any?

Well, for two reasons.

The first is that I had this idea before I even started the two current series (Adapted Screenplay and the Nighthawk Awards) and I want to be able to parse it in at certain points.

The second is that those two series are taking an agonizingly long time to write.  So, along with the Great Reads, I want something to be appearing other than long stretches without posts.  Plus, these are easier to write, and so they can be popped out quicker than the other posts.

So what is this series?  Well, I want to go back and look at a certain group of films.  These are all films which I watched a lot and had opinions regarding before I ever started thinking critically about film, before I had a rating system, before I started writing down all the movies I had seen.  So, to qualify, these have to be films that I first saw before February of 1989, and preferably saw a lot before then.  So, for the most part, films from the early to mid 80′s; I can’t imagine anything released after 1987 will qualify.  They will also be films I haven’t already written about with a critical eye.  So, there won’t be new reviews of Star Wars and Raiders, because what’s the point of that.  Some of them will be films I loved as a kid (Battlestar Gallactica, say), some will be ones I didn’t love so much as a kid (Superman III, perhaps) and some will be ones I enjoyed when I was younger, but dropped my opinion considerably when looking at them from a more critical eye (see that poster up above, for example).  Some of them will be movies I haven’t seen in a really long time that I’ll be going back to (The Secret of Nimh comes to mind).  But I’ll be trying to look at them anew and I’ll be writing about them both in terms of what I thought as a kid and what I think now.  They’re not Oscar nominees and not **** films (probably – I don’t know for certain what I will write about, we’ll have to see how it goes).  They’re fun films from when I was a kid.

So, while I try to get back to finishing reading The Man Who Laughs and getting my post on 1927-28 done, next up will be the first RCM film: Clash of the Titans.

 

Great Read: The Golem and the Jinni

The wonderful debut novel out now.

The Golem and the Jinni

• Author:  Helene Wecker
• Published:  23 Apr 2013
• Publisher:  Harper
• Pages:  496
• First Line:  ”The Golem’s life began in the hold of a steamship.”

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 1912-26

You can read more about this year in film here.  Since this is the pre-Oscar era, clearly there are no Best Picture reviews to link to.  So, without further ado, here are the initial Nighthawk Awards, covering the entire pre-Oscar era.  There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end.  If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture:

1. Greed
2. The Battleship Potemkin
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. The Gold Rush
5. The Phantom of the Opera

note:  A good year for films because there are so many.  The next five, in order, are The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Birth of a Nation, Faust, The Last Laugh and Foolish Wives and the **** films go all the way down to #16.

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: the pre-Oscar years (1912-1926)

I grabbed this banner from altscreen.com. They deserve credit, because it’s awesome.

My Top 10 Adapted Screenplays:

1. Greed  (1925)
2. The Phantom of the Opera  (1925)
3. The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1923)
4. Faust  (1926)
5. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (1921)
6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  (1920)
7. Ingeborg Holm  (1913)
8. Oliver Twist  (1922)
9. The Birth of a Nation  (1915)
10. The Avenging Conscience  (1914)