RCM: La Bamba

Revisiting Childhood Movies Part XXI:

La Bamba

• Director:  Luis Valdez
• Writer:  Luis Valdez
• Producer:  Bill Borden  /  Taylor Hackford
• Stars:  Lou Diamond Phillips, Esai Morales, Rosanna DeSoto, Elizabeth Peña
• Studio:  Columbia
• Award Nominations:  Golden Globe – Picture (Drama)
• Length:  108 min
• Genre:  Musical (Biopic)
• MPAA Rating:  PG-13
• Release Date:  24 July 1987
• Box Office Gross:  $54.21 mil  (#15 – 1987)
• Ebert Rating:  ***
• My Rating:  ***
• My Rank:  #30 (year)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  none
• Nighthawk Notables:  Best Soundtrack
• First Watched:  on video when first released
• Number of Times Watched as a Kid:  5 or so

As a Kid:  I wasn’t that much into music yet in 1987.  Yes, I had been watching videos on MTV for a few years but I didn’t know that much, especially about older music.  In fact, I had a tendency to believe that any song that I didn’t know who was singing it (“Eve of Destruction”, “American Pie”, “The Longest Time”) that it was being sung by The Beatles (when my brother John corrected me on these, he explained that he could understand if I had thought “Eve of Destruction” was sung by Springsteen, but by The Beatles?  I explained that I assumed every major song was sung by The Beatles.).  I hadn’t yet seen The Buddy Holly Story but I had a vague notion of The Day the Music Died because of growing up with “American Pie”.  Then this film came out.  More importantly, since I didn’t see this film in the theater, the soundtrack came out, a soundtrack that my brother Kelly bought during a summer that he and I shared a room.

 

Erik’s Totally Radical Tubular Awesome 80’s Music Lists (that might make you want to gag me with a spoon*): Part I

*:  Or, fuck me gently with a chainsaw, depending on your 80’s movie frame of reference.

 

Introduction:  This wasn’t intended to be a multi-part post or to be so damn long.  In fact, it was originally just going to be a list of my Top 100 Songs of the 80’s.  Then it grew and grew and Veronica kept saying I had to post it or I would never stop adding new lists.  Well, I finally got to writing the most significant part, the first list (the top albums) and the last list (the top songs).  Then, as I added more details in those lists and made them both countdown lists (ending with #1 instead of starting with it), I realized each of those really needed to be their own posts, for length reasons, if nothing else.  So, those two have been spun-off into their own, more detailed posts.  This post is mostly just lists, though there are a lot of them.

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 2007

Oh, Josh, that dog was the least of your concerns.

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  First 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 – it might be eligible in a different year.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category (or Globe, in the Globes section).  Films in blue were nominated.  Films (or directors) in olive are links to earlier posts that I don’t want to have show up in blue and be mistaken for a nominee.  Films with an asterisk (*) were Consensus nominees (a scale I put together based on the various awards) while those with a double asterisk (**) were the Consensus winners.

I’m listing the top 20 in the categories but only the top 5 earn Nighthawk nominations.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. No Country for Old Men  **
2. Atonement  *
3. Across the Universe
4. There Will Be Blood  *
5. Ratatouille
6. Eastern Promises
7. Michael Clayton  *
8. Gone Baby Gone
9. Juno  *
10. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
11. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
12. 3:10 to Yuma
13. Away from Her
14. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
15. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
16. Lust, Caution
17. I’m Not There
18. Persepolis
19. Charlie Wilson’s War
20. Once

Analysis:  Those are all **** films.  There are also a few more (24 in total), but they will be listed down below in the Drama and Comedy sections.  Both the 24 **** films and the total of 46 **** / ***.5 films are the second most ever, behind only 2005.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Animated Film – 2007

I so want to try that soup.

The 80th annual Academy Awards, for the film year 2007.  The nominations were announced on 22 January, 2008 and the awards were held on 24 February, 2008.

Best Animated Film:  Ratatouille

• Persepolis
• Surf’s Up

Most Surprising Omission:  The Simpsons Movie

Best Eligible Film Not Nominated:  The Simpsons Movie

Rank (out of 16) Among Best Animated Film Years:  #3

Oscar Score:  91.7

Alternate Oscar Score:  98.4

 

My Favorite Television Character of All-Time

Close, but not my actual favorite.

I’ve explained before that I don’t watch a lot of television.  And, over the last several years, I have picked up more by watching it on DVD or streaming and not when it originally aired.  We watch a bit more than we used to because of a wealth of good shows on cable channels.  In fact, this year, for the first time since 1990-91 and only the third time ever, I actually watched, as they aired, multiple nominees for Best Drama Series at the Emmys (Stranger Things, Westworld).  There was a stretch in the 80’s when I actually watched four of the five Emmy nominees for Best Comedy, but that was because they were all on the same channel in a row (The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court), and I must admit, as much as I enjoyed Night Court as a kid, it’s kind of appalling that it was nominated three times (and that it lost to The Golden Girls) while Sports Night was never nominated.  The only Comedy nominees I have watched as they aired in the same season it received an Emmy nomination since Seinfeld went off the air was one season of Malcolm in the Middle and the most recent two seasons of Modern Family.

So, there’s not a lot of range for this post.  But it doesn’t matter, because it has a definitive answer, one that couldn’t possibly have any other answer no matter how many television shows I were to watch.

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1960

“Det håller tre Wallare upå vår gård, De hafva gjort af med döttrarne vår.” (“There are three highwaymen in our yard, Who have our daughters slain.”)

My Top 10:

1. The Virgin Spring
2. The Cranes are Flying
3. Tunes of Glory
4. The World of Apu
5. Elmer Gantry
6. Our Man in Havana
7. Sons and Lovers
8. Inherit the Wind
9. Psycho
10. Spartacus

Note:  My full list is 18 films long.  The rest of the list is down at the bottom (in rank order by script).

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 2006

You definitely don’t want to be the other guy.

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  First 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 – it might be eligible in a different year.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category (or Globe, in the Globes section).  Films in blue were nominated.  Films with an asterisk (*) were Consensus nominees (a scale I put together based on the various awards) while those with a double asterisk (**) were the Consensus winners.

I’m listing the top 20 in the categories but only the top 5 earn Nighthawk nominations.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. The Departed  **
2. Pan’s Labyrinth
3. Children of Men
4. The Fountain
5. The Queen  *
6. The Prestige
7. Casino Royale
8. United 93
9. Army of Shadows
10. Perfume – The Story of a Murderer
11. Volver
12. The Lives of Others
13. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
14. Stranger than Fiction
15. The Painted Veil
16. Brick
17. Sophie Scholl – The Final Days
18. Blood Diamond
19. Babel  *
20. Joyeux Noel

Analysis:  The Departed has the lowest Consensus total in five years but that doesn’t mean it’s a competitive race.  It just means that there was a lack of consensus, with a record eight different films winning a Best Picture award (1974 is the only other year with more than six and that was because different eligibility years lead to three films winning the BAFTA).  The Departed wins the Oscar, BFCA, LAFC and CFC while Letters from Iwo Jima wins the LAFC, NBR and the Globe for Best Foreign Film.  The other award winners are The Queen (BAFTA), Little Miss Sunshine (PGA), Babel (Globe – Drama), Dreamgirls (Globe – Comedy / Musical), United 93 (NYFC) and Pan’s Labyrinth (NSFC).  Every Consensus winner after this (through 2016) will score at least 585 points (The Departed has 485) and every year will have at least one film that wins five awards.