Month: March 2011

Bonus! The Best Best Picture Winners According to Koob

Koob’s Best Pic resume isn’t quite as impressive as Junior and Mike’s but it is pretty damn good. He’s seen 63 out of 83. So I thought it would be pretty fun to throw in his two cents. So w/o seeing Mike or Junior’s he threw in his Top and Bottom 5, and the results were interesting. He agreed with both Mike and Junior on Casablanca, and agreed with Mike on Godfather. Here are his other three best.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. This is my favorite film of all time, so of course it has to be on my list of the five greatest best picture winners.  Jack Nicholson’s best role hands down.  Perfect from start to finish with one of the best endings of all time.  Look for appearances from Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd as some of the mental patients.

JGT’s Take: I also love this film. The baseball scene is one of my favorite film scenes of all time.

THE GODFATHER PART II. I rank this slightly ahead of The Godfather, but just barely.  I go back and forth on this all the time, but I give the slight edge to Part II because of the way it masterfully tells both the story of Vito Corleone’s journey from Italy and rise to power, along with Michael Corleone’s transformation from a man doing whatever it takes to protect his family to a a cold-blooded and ruthless overlord who drives his family apart.  The betrayal of Michael by Fredo and it’s subsequent aftermath are some of the most heartbreaking and chilling scenes ever caught on film.
JGT’S take: As I stated earlier, I like this one a little bit better than the first one. (Here’s my review of it from a couple of years ago. Needless to say, after since rewatching Godfather I, I get the Marines scene at the end now.) They’re both brilliant, but the second one just covers so much ground in so little time, and ties together so brilliantly and heartbreakingly at the end.
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS . Choosing the 5th movie was hard as there are many deserving candidates, but in my own humble opinion, this movie gets the edge simply because Anthony Hopkins portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in this movie may be the best performance ever captured on film.  Ted Levine is also scarily convincing as the serial killer Buffalo Bill, but he was completely overlooked by the Academy.  I guess they were afraid to award such a creepy performance.
JGT’s Take. I am not a horror film fan. I don’t like spending my free time making myself scared. If I wanted to do that I would just walk 12 blocks south of my house at night time. That said, this is a really well done film that I enjoyed when it came out. Buffalo Bill has haunted my nightmares ever since. Another good reason not to watch horror films.

The Best Best Picture Winners of All-Time, According to Junior

Junior and Mike Minion agreed on two films, meaning there were three films that he loved that did not make Mike’s Top 5. I have not seen any of these three films, but I do have Mutiny on the Bounty on DVR and plan on watching it in the next week. I will review it after watching. Interesting to note that both Mike and Junior had Marlon Brando Best Actor films included. Here are Junior’s picks:

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.A Best Picture doesn’t have to be a sweeping epic to be worthy of accolades. This was a fun movie with a great script and lots of memorable scenes. I like movies from the ’30s that take place in contemporary times which are just as much escapist fare now as they were then. This solidified Frank Capra’s reputation and moved him along to a long and successful career.

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. Two consecutive Best Actor winners (1933’s Charles Laughton in ‘The Private Life of Henry VIII’ and 1934’s Clark Gable in ‘It Happened One Night’) team up for the best screen version of “Mutiny on the Bounty”. Laughton and Gable played magnificently against each other. All of the production values were great and holds up remarkably well after 76 years.

ON THE WATERFRONT. Very authentic look at the rough lives of dock workers and their corrupt boss and one guy’s turmoil as he is torn between his loyalties. Terrific work by Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, Lee. J. Cobb and Eva Marie Saint, all of whom were nominated for Oscars (Brando and Saint won). Brando gives his famous ‘I coulda been a contender’ speech in this film. The music score supports the film perfectly.

The Best Best Picture Films Ever, According to Mike Minion

You may have read Mike and Junior’s shared Oscar favorites last week. They both thought that Casablanca and Rocky deserved to be in the Top 5 Best Picture winners of all time. The three below are three of Mike’s Top 5 favorites. Keep in mind, Mike will be hosting an Oscar quiz tonight at the Westbury at 9 p.m.

THE GODFATHER. Greed, love, duplicity, murder, ambition, and cannolis: this film has it all. Great quotes, a wonderful roman a clef (which ties into another Best Picture winner: see footnote below**), and a stellar performance by Al Pacino in his first big role combine to make this a nearly perfect film.

JGT’s Take: No argument here. Brilliant film. That said, I think I like part II a little bit better (it also won Best Pic.)

PATTON: The opposite of Rocky, this film is big in every way. In an era full of larger-than-life characters, Patton was the largest. George C. Scott captures the essence of the man beautifully (check out You-Tube for some of Patton’s real-life speeches) and makes him accessible and more human at the same time. One of the greatest performances ever. Fun fact: Scott won, but declined to accept the Ocsar for Best Actor.

JGT’s Take: Embarrassed to say this: never seen it. I know. I know. Trust me, it’s on the short list.

GIGI: I can’t come up with any rational reason why I like this movie, so I’m not gonna try. More to the point, I’m not sure I want to know. It’s a corny musical (which generally annoys me) with a terrible social message (which REALLY annoys me) and worst of all, it’s set in France (which… well, you get the point). But for some reason, I really, really like this movie. Sue me.

JGT’s Take: Not embarrassed to say, I’ve never seen this. Mike encouraged me to DVR it, which I did. Will I actually ever sit down and watch it, or will it perpetually take up 7% of my DVR space? Only time will tell.

**It has been suggested that the character of Johnny Fontane was based on Frank Sinatra. The role he asks his Godfather to help him get is the fictional version of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, which won an Oscar for Best Picture and several others, including a Best Supporting Actor for Sinatra. This is much clearer in the book than the movie, but it’s hard not to make the connection in either case.

Week In Review


IN OTHER NEWS: The Spring Invitational kicks off next week! Details coming on Monday.

Some cool stuff on the site this week. In case you missed it:

The Best Oscar Winners of All-Time

Thought it would be fun to have a couple of guys who have seen EVERY single Best Picture winner to chime in on what the best and worst of them were. I had them each submit 5 of their favorites and five of their worst. We start with the best. These are the two films they both picked. I’ll post the other films they picked a little later today, and  I’ll post the worst films on Monday.

About the writers: Junior is a regular at Mike Minion’s Westbury quiz, and a HUGE movie buff. He has seen pretty much every Hollywood film ever made, including every film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Mike Minion has also seen every Best Picture winner except one, which he will explain later. They came back with separate lists, but they agreed on two films being one in the Top 5, and three films made both of their lists for Bottom Five. I then chimed in because, well, it’s my website, damnit. Here are the two films they agreed were among the 5 best:

CASABLANCA. Junior’s take: One of the most iconic movies ever. Loads of memorable lines: “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “Round up the usual suspects,” “Louie, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” etc. A great cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, Dooley Wilson, etc. Withstands the test of time. Warner Bros. has a great history and this is one of their best efforts. Could be one of the most quoted films of all time. The screenplay won an Oscar, too. A true classic.

Mike’s Take: So many movies seem dated and stale 5 years after their release. But Casablanca holds up incredibly well. The dialogue is witty and sharp and the love story is one for the ages. Great side characters (especially Claude Rains) help make this tale of a man “torn between love and virtue” one of my favorites.

JGT’s Take: I reviewed it a while back. I thought it was pretty good, but a bit overrated. (Continue reading below)

Continue reading “The Best Oscar Winners of All-Time” →

Who Killed the Lindbergh Baby?


At quizzo earlier this week, I asked, “Who was convicted and executed for kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby?” It was a tough question, and few teams got it right. However, it would have been an Easy Round question 70 years ago. After all, this was the Crime of the Century, as big of a deal then as the Simpson murders were in the 1990s, if not bigger. Charles Lindbergh was a much bigger star in America than OJ Simpson ever was, and the 1932 kidnapping of his child from their home in Hopewell, NJ (less than 45 miles from Philadelphia) was front page news for months. It returned to the front pages a couple of years later when an arrest was made.

Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the kidnapping and murder (and was the answer to the quizzo question). He vehemently argued for his innocence, and though most of the evidence against him was circumstantial, he was convicted and executed. He was probably guilty, but it certainly didn’t help his case that his lawyer, Edward J. Reilly, was a crazed drunk who did an awful job representing him.
He was florid, hulking, bombastic —he wore a swallow-tail coat and striped trousers —and something of a boozer. The lunch breaks during the trial often presented Reilly with opportunities to consume a number of drinks…While a resident of Flemington during the six-week trial, he had an endless stream of “stenographers,” all of them uniformly gorgeous, who visited his quarters each evening…There is little doubt that he invented and hired witnesses, fabricated statements to the press, and deliberately misled the jury. His incompetence even dismayed Hauptmann, who, during the long trial, had only one fifteen-minute private conference with his principal attorney. He alienated his own client, his co-counsels, the jury, and the spectators by his senseless bullying of prosecution witnesses. He missed a crucial opportunity to raise reasonable doubt when, to the complete mystification of his colleague, Lloyd Fisher, he conceded that the corpse of the child discovered by William Allen was indeed Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr…Two weeks after the verdict, drunkenly raving, he was taken away to a Brooklyn hospital in a straightjacket.

There are a lot of other fascinating facts about the trial. Amelia Earhart sent a letter to the Governor of New Jersey asking him to halt the execution. An eyewitness who placed Hauptmann at the scene of the crime was legally blind. The chief of the New Jersey State Police, who was among the first on the scene when the baby was kidnapped, was Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the famous Army General. Here’s another very fascinating look at the crime and the trial. And finally, a heartbreaking video of the young child shortly before he was kidnapped, a reminder that this was a very real, very tragic crime and not just a tabloid sensation.