Wanderlust, gangster dialogue, and a really ratchet Western costume. It must be the Oscar Couch review of the first Western to win Best Picture: Cimarron!
So what are some of your favorite Westerns? Have you seen Cimarron? What makes a good Western anyway? Join the conversation below.
My review of the classic war film “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the Best Picture winner from 1930.
In this episode, Jason reviews the first ever winner of Best Picture (or ‘Outstanding Production’ as it was called in 1927) – Wings! It was the only silent film to ever win Best Picture. That’s right, a silent film. This should be interesting…
View Wings on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007B8G7U6/ref=wtls_list_pr_2
So what do you think? Oscar good? Oscar Bad? Oscar Meh? Take the fight to the comments section below!
So there’s this thing I’ve always wanted to do: watch every Best Picture winner ever. That makes a list of about 35 movies. So then for the years I’ve actually seen the Best Picture winner I pick a film that was nominated in either the Best Picture or another category. Here is the way the list breaks down:
1927 – Wings
1928 – Broadway Melody
1929 – All Quiet on the Western Front
1930 – Cimarron
1931 – Grand Hotel
1932 – King Kong
1934 – The Thin Man
1935 – Mutiny on the Bounty
1936 – The Great Ziegfeld
1937 – Life of Emile Zola
1938 – Adventures of Robin Hood
1939 – Stagecoach
1940 – Rebecca
1941 – How Green Was My Valley
1942 – Mrs. Miniver
1943 – The Ox-Bow Incident
1944 – Gaslight
1945 – The Lost Weekend
1946 – The Best Years of Our Lives
1947 – Miracle on 34th Street
1948 – The Red Shoes
1949 – All the King’s Men
1950 – Sunset Boulevard
1951 – An American In Paris
1952 – Greatest Show on Earth
1953 – From Here to Eternity
1954 – The Caine Mutiny
1955 – Marty
1956 – Around the World In 08 Days
1957 – Witness for the Prosecution
1958 – Gigi
1959 – Anatomy of a Murder
1960 – Apartment
1961 – West Side Story
1962 – To Kill A Mockingbird
1963 – Tom Jones
1964 – My Fair Lady
1965 – Doctor Zhivago
1966 – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1967 – Bonnie and Clyde
1968 – The Lion in Winter
1969 – Midnight Cowboy
1970 – Airport
1971 – A Clockwork Orange
1972 – Deliverance
1973 – American Graffiti
1974 – The Towering Inferno
1975 – Barry Lyndon
1976 – Bound for Glory
1977 – Goodbye Girl
1978 – Deer Hunter
1979 – All That Jazz
1980 – The Elephant Man
1981 – Reds
1982 – Gandhi
1983 – Terms of Endearment
1984 – The Killing Fields
1985 – Out of Africa
1986 – The Mission
1987 – Fatal Attraction
1988 – Dangerous Liaisons
1989 – Born on the Fourth of July
1990 – Goodfellas
1991 – Bugsy
1992 – The Crying Game
1993 – In The Name of the Father
1994 – Quiz Show
1995 – The Postman
1996 – English Patient
1997 – As Good as it Gets
1998 – Elizabeth
1999 – The Cider House Rules
2000 – Billy Elliot
2001 – In the Bedroom
2002 – The Hours
2003 – 21 Grams
2004 – Million Dollar Baby
2005 – Brokeback Mountain
2006 – Half Nelson
2007 – Atonement
2008 – Milk
2009 – A Serious Man
2010 – Black Swan
2011 – War Horse
2012 – Lincoln
Enjoy!
j
The subject line was “An Angry Conversation with God.”
It was a poem I was writing on my iPhone Notes one morning in the teacher workroom before school started.
I would love to tell you that this was one of those “angry” Christian poems. The kind you write when you just want to feel cool and “real” with God. It seems to me that those “real” moments are usually fueled by the fact that we don’t feel anything about God at all and we jump to an extreme emotion to ignite things again.
That wasn’t what this one was. I was really angry at God. I wanted to lay into him.
I really wanted to hurt God.
Here’s a bit of it:
I woke up this morning and the clouds
Were that perfect shade of pink as if you
Had colored them just for me and I hate you for it.
I would call you a son of a bitch but you have no mother
Calling you a bastard is too in line with scripture
I will call you the worst thing I can think of: God
See? I wasn’t having a very good day. In fact, I hadn’t had a good day in a long long time.
For the past year I’ve been stuck in a job I really hate. In reality, hate may be too strong a word. Something about my job just pokes at my deepest vulnerabilities to the point that every day feels like a slow trauma leaving me in a pretty solid state of depressed shell-shock.
And I blamed God for it.
You see, I was a grad student before this and I have to admit I was pretty happy there. I loved doing what I was doing then and I can remember having conversations with my wife about how blessed I felt to get to do what I got to do everyday.
I miss that feeling.
I took this new job as an in-between thing after getting a second Masters degree. The plan was to lay low here and apply to PhD programs with the hopes that I would get in and leave the job after a year.
The funny thing about this plan was that I thought I could end up loving the new job so much that I didn’t even apply for PhD. Or if I got rejected I could simply be content to stay where I was for a long while.
Not so much.
From Day One I was pretty unhappy. The unhappiness only built as work-related pressure mounted and stress built up.
To make matters worse I began to get rejection letters towards the end of my work year.
First came the “hail mary” schools – places I had no business getting in to but had to go for because of their name: Yale, Chicago, Duke.
I applied to 10 schools: 3 had already rejected me by February.
By March I had been rejected by 4 more. The thoughts of having to repeat this process and having to deal with the complete and utter failure that would come along with it only piled on to an already bleak outlook on life.
On my Spring Break vacation I was rejected by what was probably in retrospect my top choice. At that point there were only two schools left.
Later, during the same vacation, I was rejected by another school. Only one program remained.
It began to feel like God had tricked me into thinking this new job was the best thing I could do only to revel in how tormented I was at this job. It was like God had planned to get me stuck in something I hated and be miserable for basically the foreseeable future.
And I got really, really angry at God.
—————————————-
Sometimes I think you only know you love God when you can get really angry at God.
If marriage is meant to be a sacramental vision for the Church then this makes a lot of sense to me. No one can hurt you and hate you the way your spouse can, and this ability is precisely the proof of a deep, abiding love.
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The subject line was “Good News.”
It was email that came to my phone two days after I wrote the angry poem in the Teacher Workroom.
I caught the email during dismissal. All of the kids were standing around, laughing way too loud and yelling at each other. And I began to buckle as I read the email over and over again. I calmly walked away around the corner of the school and called my wife.
Then I said the words we’d both been dreaming of saying for 5 years:
We’re in.
Looking back, I should have seen it coming. God is the master of the unexpected but God’s also the master of giving to takers, and angry takers at that.
Jeremiah ran all the way to the place his fathers made their first promise to God. He ran all the way there just to yell at God. God didn’t yell back. Jeremiah found God in the silence after the fire and the thunder.
Sometimes when you spit in God’s face God breathes on you instead. I did that. And God gave me good news.
I really should have seen it coming.
I’ve said it nearly every year for the past four years but this time I think I’m serious.
I’m giving up on my team.
I will now root for them to lose almost every game, and I believe I am well within my rights as a true fan to do so. Let me explain why.
In order to bring about systemic change within a broken system there are only two possible routes:
1.) you can nudge the system into the path you want. In other words, you make small changes and piece by piece things get better. Think of this as the “everyone does their part” paradigm. If we all give our money or our time then this problem will get better.
2.) you break it apart. Sometimes the problems are so deeply embedded within the system itself that your nudges are no match for the maladies of the system. The only way the system will get any better is if you tear it down and start from scratch.
I believe UGA suffers from a systemic malady within its football program and the only way to change the system is to shut it down completely. In other words, we have to fire Mark Richt.
Now I am not your typical fire Richt crazypants UGA fan. I’ve never wanted a man to win more. I’ve been the biggest proponent to keep Richt from the beginning of his tenure. I’ve hoped and begged UGA to do well so that Richt could be recognized as the truly wonderful person and coach that I believe he is. He will be a very successful coach wherever he goes. But he has to go somewhere else.
Last nights defeat was so bad as to defy characterization. The Dawgs were completely and utterly dismantled in every single facet of the game. This is just another in a long line of big loses in big games under Richt. Since 2008 UGA is 0-10 vs. teams that finished the year ranked. In other words, UGA hasn’t beaten a team that finished the season ranked in 3 years.
Let me say that again: UGA hasn’t beaten a team that finished the season ranked in 3 years.
The Richt era has to end because UGA is showing an alarming tendency towards mediocrity despite the incredible talent that Richt recruits and develops year in and year out.
UGA has shown a deep seated apprehension towards letting Richt go so I’m going to root for what I believe is best for the program: a clear pretext to fire Richt.
Therefore, I am giving up on this season and rooting for UGA to lose most all of its remaining contests. I say “most all” simply because I can’t root for Florida in any context, even if its for my program’s own good. If we lose enough and badly enough we will have the necessary pretext to fire Richt and bring in fresh blood to right the ship.
Now some will call me a “fair-weather fan.” I hate this term. It’s a term that sometimes gets thrown around the second you show any remorse over how awful your team is. I hate the term because somehow it doesn’t allow me to be dissatisfied with my team. It expects me to continue to suffer through emotional pain when my team is a rancid turd. And if I dare give up on them then when the good times come back I’m just “jumping on the bandwagon” as I’ve lost my status as a “true fan” when I gave up on them.
I think this is stupid. My team is awful. I don’t want to care about them anymore. I want them to lose so that things can get better. I dont think this makes me a fake fan. It makes me a realistic one. I love this university and I love this football program. Things have to get better. So long as the status quo remains the same they will never get any better. It’s time to tear off the band-aid, but the university just won’t do that unless things get bad enough.
I’m not a fair-weather fan. I just want the weather to get foul.
I’m giving up on my team so that nights like last night never happen again. Or at least don’t seem to happen so often.
Here is another excerpt from my Thesis. I’m dealing with the idea of death in this passage and how it relates to the type of reasoning that became dominant during the Enlightenment. Lots of smarter people who came before me called this type of reasoning “subjective” or “technical” reason. The best way I can describe this idea to you is to say that in the Enlightenment reason shifted fundamentally from an activity concerned with ends (i.e. what ought we do) to an activity concerned with means (i.e. how can we do what we want to do effectively). The philosopher I use to get at this problem is Max Horkheimer. You can find a really good summary of his work here. Death creates a problem for Reason that is focused solely on means as you will see below. To get at that idea I’m using a guy named Theodor Adorno. If you’re into heavy German philosophy I highly recommend both of them. Enjoy!
Begin excerpt:
“Underlying the prevalent health is death.”[1] This statement by Theodor Adorno is perhaps the most succinct statement of both the prevailing notion within Enlightenment thinking and the counter-statement made by the Old Testament. It is an undeniable fact that the Enlightenment has lead to prevalent health, at least if we assume the definition of health as a beating heart, moving bowels, and a median amount of brain waves. Human beings are able to live longer than ever thought possible. Yet, we are faced with the continual problem to which Horkheimer turned our attention in his essay on means and ends.[2] Enlightenment reason can calculate accurate and effective means ad infinitum, but true and good ends transcend its ability to compute. In our culture of “prevalent health” we, in fact, have not found health at all. We have found a beating heart, but not the thing for which our heart ought to beat. The constant critique to our blithe celebration of “prevalent health” is what truly underlies, undercuts, and undermines it: death.
Death is the constant critique of our prevalent health because it swallows up any and all of the final calculations of technical reason. Technical reason’s functioning is dependent upon live data. Once the data has lost its viability it is no longer functional within the calculations, precluding said data from participation in and enjoyment of technical reason’s results. Death, thereby, is the ultimate constant for technical reason. It ensures that its calculations are true since it can only calculate for those to whom its results will be relevant. Technical reason, in a sense, requires and affirms death even in its supposed negation of it. Death, however, is the ultimate critique of technical reason in that technical reason can give no help to the dead and no connection with the dead for the living.
The fact that technical reason’s truths no longer hold as universals upon the dead shows that its truths will always come to irrelevancy.[3] The goal of objective reason, now a bygone relic, was ends which correspond to a metaphysical order, but the prowess of technical reason, after the loss of any confidence in metaphysics, is to find the most effective means in order to accomplish a given human purpose. Death makes this latter task impossible as it eliminates the human element from which the purpose emanates. In short, if the focus of technical reason is means and not ends then death will inevitably swallow up the entire process. Therefore, the one thing technical reason must always deny, even though it is an undeniable fact, is that all of its truths will come to utter irrelevance for all subjects due to a single, indubitable fact: all subjects will die.
[1] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978) 59.
[2] Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 3-57.
[3] For this reason, Metz defined truth itself as “that which is relevant for all subjects—including the dead and the vanquished.” See Metz, Faith in History and Society, 69.
Since I’ve descended into the cave of this new Master’s degree and it has taken away any will I have left to blog, I thought I’d show you guys a bit of what I’m working on. This is an excerpt from my thesis in which I lay out a parable for how we think about the Church’s general misuse or neglect of the Old Testament. As my first draft is due Monday, expect more of these throughout the week. Enjoy!
“Finally, I would pray the reader again to indulge me, this time for a parable. It is perhaps more like a nightmare. If you will permit me, I dreamed a dream that the church was once trapped inside Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. We were Rochester. We were enthralled at the beauty and plainness of Jane Eyre. She made everything clear for us, and offered us our true salvation. Yet, we feared what we had locked up in our attic. The wildness of Bertha, the stark contrast between the two was unnerving. So we kept her locked up in our attic, away from our theology, our sermons, and our liturgy. We still had to answer quite a few awkward questions about her. Two creation accounts, incest, genocide, and many others like them plagued us. But we knew what we had to do. We shored up our defenses, kept a resolute face, and gave the best answers we could, or simply talked about Jane enough that the people asking forgot their questions. Yet, we still hear Bertha’s howls in the night, and we all know the horrible truth – that she will one day break free only to burn our house to the ground. Perhaps we already smell the smoke, and its scent is tinged with something much fouler than wood.”
Someone asked me to post my Top Albums of 2011 as I’ve been sharing quite a few “Top Albums” lists that I find either on the mark or absolutely ridiculous. Rolling Stone is leaning to the latter but not entirely. I won’t bore you with a top 50 because I honestly haven’t listened to that many records this year. I also am not going to give you a reason why I chose each record. If you want one then comment
Before I give you the top of the line I thought I’d point out the records NOT on this list and why:
Wilco – The Whole Love. – Not sure I get Wilco either way, but this record is obviously not better than the self-titled record from last year and that record was nothing close to the greats (cf. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Being There). Miraculously, Rolling Stone didn’t select this album number one. Probably because U2 didn’t release a record this year….
Radiohead – King of Limbs. – I’ll admit I’ve returned to this record quite a bit this year (thanks Spotify!), but that still doesn’t make this a Top 10 record. Anyone who says so is still high from In Rainbows.
I haven’t listened to either the new PJ Harvey or Kate Bush record. Apparently they are awesome, but haven’t jumped in yet. Mea culpa, hipsters, mea culpa.
The List
10. James Blake – James Blake
9. Cults – Cults
8. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
7. Civil Wars – Barton Hollow
6. Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation
5. The Weeknd – House of Balloons
4. Adele – 21
3. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine
2. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
1. Bon Iver – Bon Iver, Bon Iver
Honorable Mention: Belle Brigade, Seryn, The Roots, Kanye & Jay-Z, Wye Oak, Gungor, Kurt Vile, Das Racist, Julianna Barwick.
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The blog of a wandering academic...
The blog of a wandering academic...
The blog of a wandering academic...
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