In Contention

Tag: Lawrence of Arabia

  • Films for my father

    Last year, Kris celebrated Father’s Day with a lovely list of films that are, for him, inextricably connected to his old man. That day has rolled around once again, and because I’m lazy, I’ve resorted to a poster tribute instead. What follows are 10 titles that I have, in my mind, re-dedicated to my own father for one reason or another. Some are old favorites that he introduced to me, others are newer discoveries we made together. One is the first film he ever took me to see on his own, another is the first I took him to see after I’d left the nest. I only chose on the former occasion.

    All are films he’s very fond of, or at least claims to be; I can’t quite say the same, but I’ll keep trying with “Where Eagles Dare.” Happy Father’s Day, Tom.

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  • R.I.P. Maurice Jarre

    It’s taken a full day for me to get around to posting an appreciation of the late Maurice Jarre, who died yesterday at the age of 84.  Most will note his exemplary work on classics such as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “A Passage to India” and “Witness.”  Indeed they should.

    The esteemed composer landed nine Oscar nominations and three wins in a career that spanned five decades.  His last scores of note may have been the one-two Bruce Rubin punch of “Ghost” and “Jacob’s Ladder” in 1990, or perhaps István Szabó’s “Sunshine” a decade ago.  There is an embarrassment of riches in the man’s portfolio, but as a child of the 80s, I must go against the expected grain and give you 1985’s “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”:

    I don’t expect it to get any love elsewhere, do you? And I live to fill in the gaps. But in all seriousness, farewell to a legend.

    Additionally, Jon Burlingame, who generally covers the film music world for Variety among other outlets, has written up an appreciation in the Los Angeles Times.  French president Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, has paid tribute to his fellow countryman.

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 biopics

    It’s no real secret that the Academy is partial to the biopic. Big or small, intimate or epic, celebratory or critical, they never seem to tire of the allure of actors channelling real-life figures, past and present. Lately, in the performance categories in particular, biopics have been the surest route to voters’ hearts, with seven of the last nine Best Actress winners falling under the category, and Daniel Day-Lewis having just broken a three-year run of biopic winners in Best Actor.

    The genre is no less prominent this year, with titles like “Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Che” and “W.” all garnering varying degrees of awards buzz, for their star turns in particular. Meanwhile, from the arthouse, European titles like “Hunger” and “Il Divo” are significantly challenging the formal boundaries of the biopic, proving that the genre has far more adventurous terrain to cover than the solid, occasionally stodgy awards catnip the Academy frequently chooses to laud.

    Back in August, I wrote a post about how I was wearying of Oscar’s devotion to the genre; in turn, after my unenthusiastic “Frost/Nixon” review, a friend said to me, “Well, you do hate biopics.” I really don’t. But I am a little bored of the more linear, prosaic examples of the genre that reduce the narrative to CliffsNotes highlights in order to showcase a performance. (Step forward, “Ray” and friends.)

    Real life offers an infinite number of structural and cinematic possibilities, and it is the films that best take advantage of this fact that this week’s list is designed to celebrate. The ten films here take a wide range of approaches in portraying an equally diverse array of lives, but for me, they all pass the principal test of the great biopic: defamiliarizing the familiar. By creating living, breathing characters out of figures best known from history books and pop culture annals, they make real life as revelatory and surprising as fiction.

    It’s interesting to note how few of the films I’ve chosen qualify as the Oscar-bait that biopics are widely perceived to be — we have four Best Picture nominees here, and only one winner. It was by no means a deliberate or elitist move on my part, but the fact remains that a lot of the most interesting and audacious work within the genre doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

    The biopic is clearly maturing — as I was drawing up the shortlist for this piece, I was surprised by how recent many of my inclusions were, but it’s clear that filmmakers are getting more adventurous with time. For example, in the 1950s, a film like “La Vie en Rose” would have been made as a stolid music weeper in the “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” mold — today it comes in a considerably more fractured form, structurally and stylistically. It’s just one of several recent films, from “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” to “Marie-Antoinette,” to show that the biopic need never be safe cinematic territory. The following ten films prove that.

    10. “American Splendor” (Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, 2003)
    An ingeniously intertextual account of the life and work of comic book author Harvey Pekar, “American Splendor” goes against the grain of nearly every other biopic of a creative being by revelling in its subject’s ordinariness. Riffing off Pekar’s own autobiographical comics, Pulcini and Berman brought their keen documentarist’s eye to Pekar’s unremarkable world of beige offices and supermarket checkouts, making as much dramatically of the absences in his life as his achievements. Anchored by a quicksilver performance from Paul Giamatti, this achieves the rare biopic feat of matching its subject’s individualism.

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