1 January, 2013
A couple of star-making performances in the best film of the year.
My Top 20:
14 August, 2011
the first eerie shot of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The 64th annual Academy Awards, for the film year 1991. The nominations were announced on February 19, 1992 and the awards were held on March 30, 1992.
Best Picture: The Silence of the Lambs
Most Surprising Omission: Thelma and Louise
Best Eligible Film Not Nominated: The Fisher King
Rank (out of 83) Among Best Picture Years: #9
7 April, 2011
the lovely banner celebrating 50 Disney Animated Films
Now that we have finally seen Tangled this seems like a fitting list to do. After all, there have now been 50 Disney Animated Films (actually, there have been a lot more). So, with that in mind, I am here to rank all 50 of them – some of them are absolute classics and some of them, well, some of them are, shall we say, not good. I’ve seen all 50 of them. I almost started to write, “but there are probably a lot of people who have”. But now that I think about it, it might be less common than I think.
First of all, there are a bunch of films that you probably are thinking of for this list that, technically, according to the people at Disney, not part of this list. The first is of course, the Pixar films, all of which would be near the top of the list. The second group would be the Studio Ghibli films (Hayao Miyazaki’s films), many of which would also be near or at the top. There are of course films like Song of the South, Mary Poppins, Pete’s Dragon or Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which combine live action and animation. Then, finally, there are the DisneyToon films – like the recent Winnie the Pooh films, the films made from tv shows or the endless number of sequels to the actual Disney Animated Films. And there are many of these films – especially the package films from the late 40′s or the lesser quality films from the last decade that you might not have actually seen. But these are the films that count and we know which ones they are because conveniently, Disney numbers them. Well, so will I. But their numbering is in order of release. Mine is in order of greatness.
6 April, 2011
The Wonderful Worlds of Walt Disney
They aren’t just about films and bad tween television. They also used to do a lot of books. A lot of wonderful books.
Back in the days before videos, if you loved the Disney films, you had the chance to see them every several years when they were re-released (I, in fact, saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mary Poppins and Fantasia all in the theater). But, other than that, you had the books to get you through either what you were trying to remember or what you had never had a chance to see.
The Disney Company has released all sorts of books through the years, various tie-ins with all of their films and such. But I want to focus on two types of books, specifically, which we happen to have in our library. The first is the Little Golden Books that Disney released through the years (they had a tie-in with them for a long time). The other is the set of books called The Wonderful Worlds of Walt Disney that was released in 1965. (more…)
19 December, 2009
My Top 10:
The Academy sometimes gets it right. Casablanca is easily the best film of 1943.
3 February, 2009
Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit - the best animated film of 2005 (according to me and the Academy)
It took until 2001 before the Academy finally could be bothered to give a separate award for Best Animated Film. The Annies had started back in 1992. Various critics groups had been giving the award out for years. The switch also finally pushed the Golden Globes to give it its own category and stop throwing them in the Comedy / Musical category. (more…)
21 January, 2009
Max Von Sydow and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).
In 1957, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster introduced the Best Actor nominees with a song called “It’s Great Not to Be Nominated.” And if you look at this list, you might agree, because this is a great list of films and none of them received even a single Academy Award nomination. They all were completely shut out.
To show how much the Academy got it wrong I list each film, complete with the year it was eligible, and then list all the awards I would have nominated them for (I put the category in bold if I would have given them the Oscar). I played fair to the Academy and only list categories that existed in the respective year to each film. I also only include films that I have been able to verify were eligible (either through official lists, or counting on the research of Inside Oscar). And I give them the nominations I thought they deserved that year – which is why some films lower on the list I nominate for Best Picture, and others that are higher are not — some years are tougher than others.
2010 Update: (1 Feb) I am going to type everything I update in green, which for this is not much, but will be hopefully quite a bit with all the History of the Academy Awards series starting tomorrow. For most of the last year, I have tried to see more of the Oscar nominees that I haven’t seen, so there aren’t very many truly great films I’ve seen that I hadn’t seen before and weren’t nominated for any Oscars, but there are three that I want to mention. I’m not revising the list, just adding these three as an addendum. This is also a dry run to see how well it works to re-post things at the top. So, click on through.
26 June, 2008
The problem with AFI’s lists isn’t the final lists. It’s with the ballots they send out. Their recent top 10 genre lists had ballots of 50 films each from which to select their top 10. And for some reason, those ballots included mediocre recent Disney films like Pocahontas and Mulan rather than Lilo and Stitch, the best Disney film since Aladdin. They also, for some reason, even though it was eligible, didn’t include Ratatouille. Or Watership Down, a film I have always loved.
