Preview: TCM Classic Film Festival 2016

Preview: TCM Classic Film Festival 2016

Apr 26, 2016 | Arts, Culture, Movies, Television

This week, Hollywood returns to its idealistic, enterprising and glamorous origins, welcoming those who really power the motion picture industry with TCM’s seventh annual Classic Film Festival. I attended for the first time last year and wrote about it here.

80fd3868f6692b85f0c9a3cca2d9d1dbFor four days, the best movies (and, admittedly, others, too) take over Hollywood’s most legendary and best movie theaters to be seen, discovered and enjoyed uncut and commercial-free, to borrow the phrase made famous by Ted Turner’s namesake Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Films from the silent era with Buster Keaton to the Golden Age with Doris Day, Fred Astaire and Gary Cooper and through the modern era with Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett will be studied, examined and discussed by fans, filmmakers and movie stars.

This year’s event passes are sold out, though individual tickets are available as the festival encourages passholders to choose from among several competing movies.

For instance, on the festival’s first night, one can see 1964’s movie about interracial marriage One Potato, Two Potato with leading actress Barbara Barrie discussing it with a film historian afterwards or watch a 40th anniversary screening of All the President’s Men (1976) and hear thoughts on journalism from both the men who made Oscar’s recent Best Picture winner about journalism, Spotlight, Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy, and the Washington Post‘s Carl Bernstein, portrayed in the movie by Dustin Hoffman.

But one could also choose from among three other movies in the same time frame: Harold Lloyd’s 1925 classic The Freshman, Dark Victory (1939) starring Ronald Reagan and Bette Davis, and Elia Kazan’s 1945 adaptation of Betty Smith’s novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Here, the best is showcased in abundance.

Billy Dee Williams is scheduled to talk about Brian’s Song (1971). The boy who gave voice to Walt Disney’s Bambi (1947), Donnie Dunagan, recalls making the animated classic. Faye Dunaway appears at an anniversary screening of Paddy Chayefsky’s biting and brilliant 1976 satire, Network.

Guests include archivists, scholars, authors and other artists and intellectuals. See the actor who played the boy in 1989’s Cinema Paradiso. See 1989’s Field of Dreams. Indulge in discussion of dogs in films, an examination of the movie score, a conversation with Elliott Gould about acting, thoughts on playing opposite Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner from co-star Katharine Houghton or an appearance by Angela Lansbury at a screening of The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

Get to know Truth‘s Mary Mapes and James Vanderbilt, The King and I‘s Rita Moreno, Leonard Maltin, Children of a Lesser God‘s Marlee Matlin, Carl Reiner, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy, Trapeze‘s Gina Lollobrigida, Rocky‘s Talia Shire, or On the Waterfront‘s Eva Marie Saint remembering 1966’s The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

The theme for this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival is Moving Pictures, meaning there’s an emphasis on movies that move the audience to think, to feel, to act.

Many of the 100 featured films do exactly that and, in today’s disturbing times, several stand out as extraordinarily relevant. From questions raised and dramatized about so-called income inequality in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 classic All That Heaven Allows and blacks’ lives depicted in John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood to the penetrating portrait of media complicity in enabling the rise of a charismatic power-luster seeking government influence in Elia Kazan’s prophetic 1957 masterpiece A Face in the Crowd, the best pictures earn renewed respect over time.

Turner Classic Movies, honoring its creator, Ted Turner—a media titan who once bought billboards asking “Who is John Galt?” the philosophical challenge from Ayn Rand‘s Atlas Shrugged and created TCM because he loves movies, particularly Gone With the Wind (1939)—continues to earn respect, too. With a wine club, movie-themed Disney cruise, forthcoming app with the Criterion Collection for streaming classic movies and original programming and publishing, TCM skillfully brands itself as an expression of passion for movies which exists with outlets in reality, not as some obscurity for dilettantes pondering the avant-garde.

This week’s film festival is the best example, bringing together people who make and watch movies and doing so with a sense of joy, humor and especially with seriousness for thinking about what moves the world—which is exactly what ultimately moves and makes the best movies.

TCM fundamentally thrives as a source for great movies. But it also serves as a reminder and catalyst for today’s Hollywood to consider and honor its exciting and productive past and move the audience, studio and filmmaker alike to project into the future. Its annual presence in Hollywood gathers and converges the industry’s most loyal patrons and producers to worship what’s glamorous, grand and magnificent about movies, ensuring that industrialization carries on.

Rest in Peace, Omar Sharif

Rest in Peace, Omar Sharif

Jul 10, 2015 | Movies, Obituaries

OmarSharifZhivagoMovie star Omar Sharif has died. The actor, who was 83 years old, appeared in some of Hollywood’s most moving and grand motion pictures. Sharif made them more so.

Among his roles are the passenger ship’s captain in the terrorism-themed Juggernaut (1974), leading while balancing conflicting interests with an explosives expert played by Richard Harris. I think, too, of his blend of great potential and sadness as the daring entrepreneurial Jewish playboy—which nearly cost the Egyptian actor, reported to have converted from Greek Catholicism to Islam, his citizenship and career—in Funny Girl. From his role as the desert Arabian teaming against the Ottoman empire with Peter O’Toole’s title character in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to his role as a Moslem Turk adopting a Jewish boy in Monsieur Ibrahim (2003), Sharif dominates the screen.

OmarSharifLawrenceofArabiaBut three movies capture his dark, sensually masculine and physical magnetism. In David Lean’s masterful Lawrence of Arabia, Sharif strides between measured and raw with his backswept black hair. As the title character in Lean’s epic Doctor Zhivago (1965), based on Boris Pasternak’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Russian novel, Sharif is gentle, intelligent and aristocratically civilized yet kindling with passion to write poetry, defy the Soviets and exact justice while falling in love with Lara (Julie Christie) during the Russian Revolution, always holding life as the highest standard—his is an unforgettable and powerful performance that precisely measures the impact in pictures of the incalculable toll of dictatorship on the man of ability. Doctor Zhivago is so mesmerizing, enchanting, and beautiful with its brilliant score by Maurice Jarre (which Sharif thought was too sentimental) and everlasting scenes of Moscow, Yuriatin and Varykino that it’s easy to overlook the scope and talent of Omar Sharif as the crippled man of the mind. Zhivago is Sharif’s best performance.

OmarSharifTYRRPerhaps my favorite role by Omar Sharif is as Davich, the peasant European revolutionary in screenwriter Terence Rattigan’s 1964 film, The Yellow Rolls-Royce. It is as the radical idealist opposite Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca) in the tense, explosive, inspiring final vignette—probably more relevant than ever—that Omar Sharif matches hard, physical allure with kind, intellectual depth. His intensity is irresistible but it is also challenging. Bergman’s aristocrat is at the audience’s sympathetic center and one can’t blame her reticence to engage his character’s cause. But he is the embodiment in Rattigan’s short, polished featurette of the man of reason and the man of action. As the unconquered radical, he is every inch the hero.

Sharif lived privately as a playboy by his own admission, though was also one of the world’s top bridge players, creating a regular newspaper feature and, during his remarkable career, he portrayed Genghis Khan, Czar Nicholas II, Marco Polo and Che Guevara. He also played Captain Nemo in The Mysterious Island (1973). Omar Sharif made the audience think in nearly every role. His death is a great loss.

Mickey Rooney

Apr 7, 2014 | Movies, News, Obituaries, Television

MickeyRooney (courtesy Getty Images)From the Andy Hardy movies to his appearance as a security guard in Night at the Museum (2006), Mickey Rooney, for all of his wives, antics and flamboyance, was an actor who was capable of creating memorable characters in strong performances. I think I first noticed him during a TV showing of his movie Captains Courageous (1937) with Spencer Tracy, an excellent and powerful film to this day. I was always moved by his volcanic performance as Whitey in Boys Town (1938), also with Tracy as a Catholic priest, in the climactic scene when hero-worshipping Pee-Wee is downed. Rooney as Whitey makes the tragic scene feel like a sock to the stomach.

Whether he was playing iconic title roles in Young Tom Edison or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and later as an old horse trainer in The Black Stallion (1979), and even in those silly Andy Hardy pictures with Judy Garland, he was always a jaunty or pugnacious screen presence. He had an energy that was quintessentially American. The obituaries describe Mickey Rooney, who was 93 years old when he died this weekend, as America’s boy next door. But really he was more than that. He used his voice to perfection in several animated or stop motion Christmas movies for TV. He used his foulest language in new types of villainous roles in pictures such as The Domino Principle (1977). He became something of a regular guest like the late David Brenner or writer Truman Capote (whose novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s was adapted for the film in which Rooney played a racial caricature that does not age well) on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He played on Broadway in Sugar Babies and on TV as a mentally retarded man in Bill. Rooney could play opposite Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet and Judy Garland on her own TV show. The Brooklyn native had a rare, remarkable career.

Whatever his real personality and pitfalls, Mickey Rooney had talent and he was committed to a career of singing, dancing and acting, crafting roles that inspired generations of plucky – or sneaky – boys and cantankerous if wise old men. As an archetype, he embodied the spirit of a scrappy American youth, stealing away with a runaway slave down the Mississippi River or telling Father Flanagan off, getting naughty with Johnny Carson or nasty with Gene Hackman, or creaking with wisdom for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or a boy who wants to ride a stallion to victory. Shirley Temple Black was recently lost, too, and she was another child star who indelibly marked an American cultural standard that disappeared long ago. Mickey Rooney’s death marks the end of a line that traces back to Hollywood’s Golden Age.