Venice Film Festival - Best Films

Golden Lion (Best Film) Winners at the Venice Film Festival (1946-2008)*: 1946 Best Film The Southerner Country: U.S. Director: Jean Renoir 1947 Best Film Siréna Country: Czechoslovakia 1948 Best Film Hamlet Country: U.K. Director: Laurence Olivier 1949 Best Film Manon Country: France Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot 1950 Best Film Let Justice Be Done Country: France Director: André Cayatte 1951 Best Film Rashômon Country: Japan Director: Akira Kurosawa 1952 Best Film Forbidden Games Country: France Director: René Clément 1954 Best Film Romeo and Juliet Country: Italy/U.K. Director: Renato Castellani 1955 Best Film Ordet Country: Denmark Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer 1957 Best Film Aparajito Country: India Director: Satyajit Ray 1958 Best Film Rikisha-Man Country: Japan Director: Hiroshi Inagaki 1959 Best Film The Great War Country: Italy Director: Mario Monicelli 1959 Best Film General della Rovere Country: Italy Director: Roberto Rossellini 1960 Best Film The Crossing of the Rhine Country: Italy Director: André Cayatte 1961 Best Film Last Year at Marienbad Country: France Director: Alain Resnais 1962 Best Film My Name Is Ivan Country: U.S.S.R. Director: Andrei Tarkovsky 1962 Best Film Family Diary Country: France/Italy Director: Valerio Zurlini 1963 Best Film Hands Over the City Country: Italy/France Director: Francesco Rosi 1964 Best Film The Red Desert Country: Italy Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 1965 Best Film Sandra of a Thousand Delights Country: Italy Director: Luchino Visconti 1966 Best Film The Battle of Algiers Country: Algeria Director: Gillo Pontecorvo 1967 Best Film Belle de Jour Country: France Director: Luis Buñuel 1968 Best Film Artist in the Circus Dome: Clueless Country: West Germany Director: Alexander Kluge 1980 Best Film Atlantic City Country: U.S. Director: Louis Malle 1980 Best Film Gloria Country: U.S. Director: John Cassavetes 1981 Best Film Marianne and Juliane Country: West Germany Director: Margarethe von Trotta 1982 Best Film The State of Things Country: West Germany Director: Wim Wenders 1983 Best Film First Name: Carmen Country: France Director: Jean-Luc Godard 1984 Best Film A Year of the Quiet Sun Country: Poland Director: Krzysztof Zanussi 1985 Best Film Vagabond Country: France Director: Agnès Varda 1986 Best Film The Green Ray (Summer) Country: France Director: Eric Rohmer 1987 Best Film Au Revoir les Enfants Country: France Director: Louis Malle 1988 Best Film Legend of the Holy Drinker Country: Italy Director: Ermanno Olmi 1989 Best Film City of Sadness Country: Taiwan Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou 1990 Best Film Rosencrantz Guildenstern Are Dead Country: U.K. Director: Tom Stoppard 1991 Best Film Close to Eden Country: France/U.S.S.R. Director: Nikita Mikhalkov 1992 Best Film The Story of Qiu Ju Country: China Director: Zhang Yimou 1993 Best Film Short Cuts Country: U.S. Director: Robert Altman 1993 Best Film Three Colors: Blue Country: France Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski 1994 Best Film Before the Rain Country: Macedonia Director: Milcho Manchevski 1994 Best Film Vive L'Amour Country: Taiwan Director: Ming-liang Tsai 1995 Best Film Cyclo Country: Vietnam Director: Tran Anh Hung 1996 Best Film Michael Collins Country: U.K. Director: Neil Jordan 1997 Best Film Fireworks Country: Japan Director: Takeshi Kitano 1998 Best Film The Way We Laughed Country: Italy Director: Gianni Amelio 1999 Best Film Not One Less Country: China Director: Yimou Zhang 2000 Best Film The Circle Country: Iran Director: Jafar Panahi 2001 Best Film Monsoon Wedding Country: India Director: Mira Nair 2002 Best Film The Magdalene Sisters Country: U.K. Director: Peter Mullan 2003 Best Film The Return Country: Russia Director: Andrei Zvyagintsev 2004 Best Film Vera Drake Country: U.K. Director: Mike Leigh 2005 Best Film Brokeback Mountain Country: U.S. Director: Ang Lee 2006 Best Film Still Life Country China Director: Jia Zhangke 2007 Best Film Lust, Passion Country Taiwan Director: Ang Lee 2008 Best Film The Wrestler Country U.S. Director: Darren Anorofsky *I think I started with 1946 because they were using the festival and its "Mussolini Award" for propaganda, so I responded to that with my own censorship and began with the post-Mussolini reign.

Wild at Heart: Lynch in Limbo

Written for LAMB, the Nicholas Cage blog-fest Dir: David Lynch, 1990 (Nicholas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, J.E. Freeman, Diane Ladd, Calvin Lockhart, Isabella Rossellini, Harry Dean Stanton, Grace Zabriskie, Sherilyn Fenn, Pruitt Taylor Vince) Ironically, the film starts in Cape Fear, "somewhere on the coast of South Carolina". Mother from hell Diane Ladd (Dern’s real mother) gets her boyfriend to go after Cage with a knife, who beats him to death, picks him up to throw him and the guys legs are still walking. "Hey, let’s do another take, his brains are hanging out already; second that.. it’s lunchtime". Laura Dern (totally hot eye candy here) plays "Lula", Cage "Sailor", but he likes to call Lula "Peanut", as in "rockin good news, Peanut!". Well, it ain’t rockin till Sailor does some time for excessive self-defense. When he gets out, Lula greets him with his snakeskin jacket. "This here jacket represents my individuality and my belief in personal freedom". They take off together, and we get to hear repartee like this: Lula: "One of these days that ole sun is gonna come up and burn a hole clean through the planet like an electrical x-ray." Sailor: "That’ll never happen, not in our lifetime… by then they’ll be driving buicks to the moon." Unfortunately, Cage delivers most of his lines like a stoned Elvis, he seems unusually uninvolved with this part, unlike some others where he seems perhaps too involved (National Treasure).

The mother gets boyfriend Harry Dean Stanton to go after them first, then she hires a hit man as well to go take out Sailor and bring her daughter back. Only this hit man, Santos, hates Stanton as well and figures getting to kill him is icing. Much of the story is told in flashback, which disrupts the continuity, especially since we’re constantly flashing to the same background scene, the manslaughter one. In between those, we get to see languid conversations while they smoke, gratuitous shots of Dern topless, Cage’s Elvis impersonation at a live punk club no less, singing "Please Love Me", complete with fake crowd screaming (why this odd effect I wonder?). Sailor tells Lula, "The way your head works is God’s own private mystery." Lula says, "You remind me of my daddy. Mama told me he liked skinny girls whose breasts stood up and said hello." She also tells him how her dad poured kerosene all over himself and set himself on fire. Yep, typical David Lynch comedy, and typical bedroom bantor.

The film becomes a road film, as the couple heads to New Orleans, but it has more style than pace or story. For a crime film it kinda oozes along, but it’s Dern that does most of the oozing, not Cage, he just kind of acts like he’s just hanging out. Lynch throws in some assorted freaks and "trailer trash", as usual, but he doesn’t seem to really know how to use them. Wild has some "Blue Velvet" touches, but this time instead of Rossellini singing, it’s a huge blues singer in New Orleans in a blue sequined dress with red hair. Then we get more hot love talk: Lula: "Sailor, you got me hotter’n Georgia asphault" Sailor: "Ok, but go easy on me baby, tomorrow we got a lot of driving to do." There’s a mysterious car wreck scene in the desert that Lula and Sailor come across, with several bodies, with Sherilyn Fenn running around with a severe head wound, and dies in front of them. I think at this point I was wondering if this was a comedy, or just David Lynch. Several times this film wavers between the light-hearted (wild punk dancing beside the highway) and supreme darkness, almost as if he couldn’t decide himself how serious this. In this regard, Lynch failed to capture the essense of the Barry Gilford novel, which was definitely lighter than this film. Eventually the road trip ends in hell on earth: Greater Tuna, Texas. There we run into an assortment of trash at a motor court, headed by Willem Dafoe, with the ugliest teeth outside of Austin Powers. We also are introduced to a unibrowed Isabella Rossellini, almost hard to recognize in her blonde wig, but the unibrow gave it away. Several times in the film we are almost introduced to the song "Blue Velvet", which of course Isabella sang in that film, but each time Lynch changes at the last instant and we never get the velvet. The characters, especially Laura Dern, are also referencing Oz quite often, but we never get that either, all we get is Greater Tuna. We are shown a more botched bank robbery than the Coen Bros put into Raising Arizona even, a guard’s hand gets shot off ("they sew it back on, it’ll work almost good as new") and before he can retrieve it a dog is carrying it away (OK, one funny image in the whole film!); Dafoe meets with the wrong end of his shotgun, and Sailor is being held to the ground by law enforcement. Aw, shucks… boys, "treat me right", it’s off to the can again. The epilogue is five years later when Lula, with little Sailor Jr. in tow, picks him up at the railroad "yard". Guess Lynch couldn’t find a real depot. A "real nuclear family unit", from hell or Greater Tuna, or now South Carolina, wherever trash is allowed outside. Lynch got lost somewhere on Route 66, and ended up in limbo, and we ended up there with him. Not a comedy, not a drama either, just a road film with Nicholas Cage sleep-walk.. er, sleep-driving through a nightmarish landscape we are forced to share with him. Unfortunately we don’t also get to share a naked Laura Dern, but at least Lynch got her naked onscreen as much as he could, otherwise this film would be very hard to look at. As Lula said, "This whole world is wild at heart, and weird on top." Wisdom for the ages, you bet…

World's Best Musical and Concert Films

• A Coal Miner's Daughter
• A Hard Days Night
• All that Jazz
• An American in Paris
• Amadeus
• Black Orpheus (France/Portugal)
• Bride and Prejudice (India)
• Carmen (Spain, flamenco version)
• Chicago
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
• The King and I
• The Music Man
• My Fair Lady
• Singing in the Rain
• Strictly Ballroom
• West Side Story

Concert Films

• The Cranberries: Live
• Dead Can Dance: Toward the Within
• Jimi Hendrix (documentary)
• The Last Waltz
• Led Zeppelin (2 dvd, live history)
• Peter Gabriel: Secret World Live
• Pat Metheny: Speaking of Now: Live (easily the world's best guitarist!)
• Police: Synchronicity Concert
• Stop Making Sense
• The TAMI Show
• Woodstock (documentary)

Runners-up: Cabaret, Dames, Damn Yankees, The Gay Divorcee, Golddiggers of 1933, Swing Time, Oliver! [Updated after seeing West Side and Music Man in widescreen! It makes ALL the difference, seeing the director's intended view.. they oughtta outlaw fullscreen in Hollywood] Most musicals are vastly overrated, some are downright unwatchable (anyone get through Tommy or Superstar without brain damage?). In Oklahoma they resorted to spelling out the state's name, now that's a lack of lyrical ingenuity. Sad that Marni Nixon sang in My Fair Lady, The King and I, and West Side Story and got NO billing credit at all! The best classic Broadway style musical for me is My Fair Lady. Incredible lyrics, so good that Rex Harrison didn't even have to be able to sing to win an Oscar and a Tony. Based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, it had a solid artistic foundation to begin with. Of course, the ripoff in the movie is that Julie Andrews, who made the stage role what it was, was passed over for Audrey Hepburn (Marnie Nixon had to dub her singing), everyone's box office darling; Andrews won the Oscar that year anyway for Mary Poppins. Listen to the original cast recording on CD to hear the difference with Andrews! Dames (34), not a great film, but is a great example of the insanity of early Busby Berkley; he's responsible for the musical numbers, original choreography, and inventiveness: neon violins played by dancers in the dark, all forming one giant violin; dancers forming a giant eyeball and a singer rising from the iris ("I Only Have Eyes for You"); floor cams sliding throught the spread legs of 100 grinning dancers; naked dancers bathing silhouetted behind shower curtains; the giant Carmen Miranda fruit hat - Busby was tripping 40 yrs before anyone else, and everyone else pales in comparison! Amadeus is of course, the play about the life and music of Mozart, not a classic musical but still full of music (maybe "too many notes", inside joke). Best Picture Oscars went to Amadeus, Chicago, and My Fair Lady. This Carmen, of the 18 or so, is Carlos Suare's flamenco version, where a dance troup is rehearsing for a flamenco performance of Bizet's Carmen and two dancers lives begin to mirror the story. This is easily the best dance film ever made. Bollywood's Bride and Prejudice is a total trip - who else could have thought of a musical comedy of Austen's Pride and Prejudice? The gigantic dance number with the women teasing the men is worth the price of admission alone (but lose the ballads); throw in world-class beauty Aishayra Rai and you're in nirvana! TAMI (for Teenage Awards for Music International) was an early concert film (from 66?) that had James Brown, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, many others, and kind of set the precedent for modern concert films.

World's Best Crime Films

The worlds best crime and mystery films Films in gold won Best Picture Oscars®

• Atlantic City
• Chinatown
• Chungking Express (China)
• City of God (Brazil)
• The Conversation
• The Departed
• Diva (France)
• Double Indemnity (bw)
• Gangs of New York
• The Godfather
• The Godfather, Pt. II
• Goodfellas
• The Grifters
• Heavenly Creatures
• House of Games
• La Femme Nikita (France)
• The Lives of Others (Germany)
• The Maltese Falcon (bw)
• Memento
• Night of the Hunter (bw)
• Once Upon a Time in America (long version)
• Out of the Past (bw)
• The Player
• Pulp Fiction
• Run, Lola, Run (Germany)
• The Silence of the Lambs
• Sleuth
• Sunset Boulevard (bw)
• Taxi Driver
• Traffic
• The Usual Suspects
• Witness

Runners-Up: American History X, Body Heat, Fargo, Gorky Park, Klute, The Last Seduction, Little Caesar, Mystic River, The Spanish Prisoner, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Topkapi, The Yakuza Let's see, four entries from Scorsese and three from Coppola, also Sergio Leone - wonder why Italians make great crime movies? Night of the Hunter is the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton, with Robert Mitchum as a villainous preacher so bad that he had both "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on his fingers. The Conversation and The Lives of Others both cover the subject of electronic eavesdropping, and Lives won both a US and a British Academy Award for Foreign Language film. Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity is given credit for inventing film noir in 1944, and was the first of Wilder's b&w masterpieces, which include Lost Weekend, The Apartment, Some Like it Hot, The Fortune Cookie, One Two Three.

Movies about Movies: The Player

This is part of the Goat Dog "Movies about movies blogathon", check it out at: Goat Dog Blogathon The Player is my favorite Robert Altman film, even surpassing the superb western McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Tim Robbins portrays a film producer looking for that "next major project", who, through an anonymous blackmailer, become involved in a mystery, and his character degenerates into one who may actually stop at nothing to protect his ego and his wallet, and perhaps find love as well; with the always delectable Greta Scacchi in his sights, who could blame him? The mystery begins when he gets the first in a series of threatening postcards, presumably from a writer that Robbins shined on rather than listen to him pitch his script. As the postcards continue, the plot becomes a twisty puzzle, involving blackmail, murder, infidelity, paranoia, guilt - all the games that make Hollywood tick, inside and outside of the films themselves. The film within the film is going to be "a different kind of Hollywood blockbuster, one without stars", as the writers proudly proclaim, and eventually includes both Oscar winners and a perfect parody of Hollywood film endings. The Player is not only peppered with movie references, it begins with an extremely long tracking shot where various studio people discuss everything from classic films to potential projects to the longest tracking shots in film history. An important plot element involves mistaken identity, a favorite Hitchcock device. The circular references don't stop there: the guest list of cameo acting appearances includes something on the magnitude of 16 Oscar winners; the dvd actually includes a special feature allowing the viewer to click any celebrity and bring up that person's scene in the film, even if they're just in the background or walking by. The fact that we may not ultimately care about the fate of these characters is a perfect mirror for an industry that doesn't care about the fate of the characters (or the audience) either, just the amount of revenue that the project may eventually attract. The only really sympathetic character drawn by Altman is perhaps Cynthia Stevenson, in probably her best performance, playing Tim Robbins' studio subordinate and girlfriend, who is apparently more attracted by his power than his less-than-winning personality or commitment. The Player is a perfect modern complement to Sunset Boulevard, as each presents the cynical and parasitic side of Hollywood and its shallow, self-centered denizens. This had to be the most fun Altman had making any movie, sticking the satirical dagger into his own industry, and it's certainly a treat for film fans as we are left to solve the mystery along with the main character. We are all made players in this particular game of Altman's. Other classic films about films include Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, Singin' in the Rain, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Day for Night (a French pastry), Fellini's "8 1/2" and the best film about a play, best picture winner All About Eve. Special mention must be made of my favorite Italian film: Cinema Paradiso is a wonderful tribute to the effect of movies on ordinary lives.

Double Indemnity and the Birth of Film Noir

Double Indemnity (1944) was Billy Wilder's first serious film, and is given credit for the birth of film noir, literally "night film", which describes a visual style and mood of a type of dramatic film, usually crime, that's much more gritty and realistic than most films prior to this era.

Film noir was mostly shot at night or in dark interiors; there's lots of use of shadows, dimly lit edges, light from Venetian blinds (which simulates bars across characters), backlit smoke (Indemnity uses both cigars and cigarettes, Out of the Past is a tribute to cigarettes, each star is always smoking onscreen, especially when it gets tense).

Film noir got its origins in 30's detective stories, often called pulp fiction, gritty stories with sex, violence and seedy characters. Even the heros were often common people with street wisdom, often with a tough upbringing. Soldiers returning from World War 2 and a cinematic audience that had survived the Great Depression demanded more adult films in theme, subject, and style.

Wilder was impressed by author John Kain's pulp novella of "Double Indemnity", the same author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it was considered unfilmable due the the Hayes Code (of censorship). The script went through years of re-writes and applications before being allowed to be filmed in 1944. The Hayes Code first suppressed sex in films, then violence, later socialism, and was used to pass judgment on over 28,000 works of art! Apparently no freedom of the arts exists, just more minor ones that don't affect as many people, such as the press (who reads?) Wilder then had a difficult time casting the lead parts, two murdering adulterers.

He wanted Barbara Stanwyck all along, but eventually had to challenge her to get her to take the image-shattering role, "are you an actress or a mouse?" After several refusals by actors, including George Raft, who had a knack for turning down breakthrough parts like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, he convinced Fred McMurray to break his screen image of light romantic comedies to attempt something serious. His first scene with Stanwick, when he meets her at her home in a towel, uses his comedic skills along with some terrific dialogue.

Wilder also convinced leading actor Edward G. Robinson to take a non-starring character role, meaty enough for at least two important speeches that Robinson absolutely nailed. Crime novelist Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) was brought in for his realistic dialogue, plenty evident here especially the opening scenes between Stanwyck and McMurray, but he, an introvert, and Wilder, an extrovert, didn't get along at all and never worked together again. Ironically,they were nominated for an Oscar together for their screenplay. Wilder later used Chandler as his model for his Oscar-winning Best Picture The Lost Weekend.

Double Indemnity was nominated for these 7 Oscars (but won none):

• BEST MOTION PICTURE - Paramount (Going My Way won!)
• DIRECTING - Billy Wilder
• ACTRESS - Barbara Stanwyck
• CINEMATOGRAPHY (Black and White) - John Seitz
• WRITING (Screenplay) - Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler
• MUSIC (Music Score of a Drama or Comedy) - Miklos Rozsa
• SOUND RECORDING - Paramount Studio Sound Dept, Loren L. Ryder, Sound Director

Other classic film noir: Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter, Panic in the Streets, D.O.A., The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man.

Modern Noir: Wait Until Dark, Diva (France), Chinatown, Shoot the Piano Player (France), House of Games, Taxi Driver, Blood Simple, Body Heat, The Silence of the Lambs. The style is also clearly evident in parts of other classic films such as In the Heat of the Night, The Godfather, Batman, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Hustler, and The Departed.

Thanks to Beth G for suggesting Double Indemnity