Many critics and film fans have suggested that John Wayne won his sole Academy Award as a result of a sentimental nod to his career, rather than for the actual performance in the original True Grit. There is nothing wrong with that if it is true, it often happens that the Academy seems to do make goods when they have failed to deliver in the past. I think however that the people who truly believe this about the 1969 Wayne performance must be blind. John Wayne does a comedic turn as a cowboy, much more effectively than Lee Marvin four years earlier, and he is bad-ass John Wayne to boot. Wayne did many westerns with strong comedy themes, although he was not usually the clown, someone else in the picture was. Here he was front and center as a near tragic washout, with a drinking problem and a pig headed attitude. You could laugh at what he said, what he did, and what he was. The tone was sentimental and the movie played for pure entertainment purposes. I saw this movie in theaters when I was a kid, I must have been just eleven, but I knew I was watching something special because I enjoyed it so much.

The Coen Brother’s version of True Grit is just as special, but with a completely different tone. When the shot for shot remake of Psycho came out several years ago, everyone wondered why do it? The answer is is this movie, to see how tone and performance can alter the way we see the story. True Grit is not a shot for shot remake, in fact the Coen Brothers claim it is not a remake at all. The word “re-imagining” has been invented by film-makers to justify taking old movies and doing them again, without sounding like you are simply trying to cash in on the same story twice. I first remember hearing the phrase used to describe Tim Burton’s version of Planet of the Apes. True Grit is the first time I have heard the phrase used where it is clear that there was a re-imagining of the story. Unlike the other remakes that tinker with the story and try to put a twist on it to make something new, this version of True Grit tells the exact same story, with much of the dialog exactly the same as the original, but it changes the tone of the story in subtle yet dramatic ways.

The music in the film is elegiac, at the start of the film it is mournful for the father that has been lost. At the end of the movie it is a tribute to heroes that have passed. Most of the film highlights traditions, ways of speaking and mores that are also dead and gone. In the original Wayne version of the film the cinematography was crisp and beautiful to look at but it did not call attention to time or place, it was simply workmanlike to move us through the story. In the current version, the cinematography tells a story also, about the harshness of the life in those days, the isolation and loneliness that a body would feel in a place that was not unknown, but was less than well traveled. The images, lighting and color palate suggest a way of life that is long gone. The dialog in the film highlights this tone even more. While many of the same lines were used in the original, there are more examples of the archaic speech patterns in this version. They turn the English language into a foreign sounding flow of syntax and adjectives. This is another reminder of how the world has changed.

Since the performances are the substance of the original’s strength, it is essential to compare the work done in these roles. Jeff Bridges’ take on Rooster Cogburn is substantially different than John Waynes. Wayne was likable, even when he said or did things that as an audience we might not approve of. There was never any doubt that he was a Hero, even if it was a tattered one. Bridges on the other hand is likable sometimes and despicable other times. We can believe that he has abandoned the chase and is leaving Mattie on her own. His intolerance of others is not just comedic contentiousness, but plain disdain for the opinion of others. He also sounds like someone who is drunk most of the time, phlegm in his voice and marbles in his mouth. His take may be the more accurate view of a lawman in the times, but it is not as iconic. It may suffer a bit in the Awards season because it is so similar to the role he played last year in Crazy Heart that he may not get credit for the hard work it takes to play this kind of a drunk. His character in last years film is much close to the John Wayne performance than the same character he is playing.

Matt Damon is a tool, but he is also a good actor and a bright guy. He has it all over Glen Campbell as an actor so it is really not much of a comparison. Glen Campbell was a singer/guitarist who was making his big screen debut, and as far as I can tell his only theatrical acting feature. Damon is an actor/writer with awards and dozens of feature film roles to his credit. The resolution of his character’s storyline is a little incomplete, but much more satisfying in the new version than in the 1969 version. Both times, the role was set up for comedic purposes, and both times it works as a way of injecting some sly humor into the story and providing a solution to a story element.

The character of Mattie Ross is pivotal to the new version of the story, in the long run the issue of “True Grit” is that she is the one that has it all along. Kim Darby was an actress that I don’t think anybody ever cared much for. She was well cast in some things but not especially versatile and her looks were a bit bland. I thought she was believable as a fourteen year old when I first saw this movie, when I see it now she seems a little old. Hailee Steinfeld is fourteen and plays older because the times seem to demand that sort of maturity in those situations. Darby’s take on the character seems petulant and obstinate while this new young actress comes across as steely and resolute. She is in nearly every scene in the film and stands up well next to professionals like Bridges and Damon.

Josh Brolin is third billed in the new version but his part is relatively small. He is perfectly cast as the prairie scum that kills Mattie’s father and sets the story in motion. There is humor in his role but the menace is much more in evidence than in the part as played by Jeff Corey in the Wayne version. Both takes on the character show us a low life who brings misery into the lives of those he has contact with, but the part adds just enough more in the new tale that we understand it a little better. Barry Pepper plays Lucky Ned Pepper in the new film, he has the unfortunate task of filling in for one of the great actors of the 2oth century, Robert Duvall. Both times the role is written for a fairly generic bad guy. Duvall added some charisma to Ned Pepper, and you can tell he was a leader, even if it was of horrible human beings. Barry Pepper works because he has a maniacal gleam in his eye. He uses the same manner of speech as the other main characters and delivers it with gusto. His retort to Rooster that his threat is “Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man” is acceptable but lacks the sense of superiority that Duvall used when he delivered it.

There are a dozen character parts in the original that were fleshed out more than in the new version. The members of the Ned Pepper gang get very little focus in the 2010 film, and the scene in the cabin while maybe more jarring, is limited by the absence of Dennis Hopper as Moon. Of course the background character I payed most attention to was Col. Stonehill the horse trader. The comedic interaction between he and Mattie is a chess game that everyone can watch and enjoy. This years version was fine, the actor Dakin Matthews has an expressive face and gets most of the laughs with his eyes, but frankly he is simply outclassed here. Strother Martin appeared in all three of the great westerns from 1969, True Grit, The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In each of those pictures he is hysterical, but the utter frustration, flummoxing, and final surrender he does in the original True Grit cannot be matched. His voice is so appropriate, and well developed, that all that arcane dialog sounds like it was written specifically with him in mind.

Either version of True Grit is something that is worth your time. If you are one of those people that worship at the feet of the Coens, you will not be disappointed, and if you think John Wayne is definitive, you are right, but that doesn’t make the new version any less valid. The new version is darker in tone and strains to be saying something that may not need to be said. It is also funny, dramatic and filled with lines that are simply fun to listen to good actors saying.

I have created a bit of a monster. My youngest daughter is as nuts as I am about movies and she has us on a movie a day schedule for the month of December. There is of course a Christmas theme and most of the movies are playing on a variety of channels if you look around hard enough, but she has a particular order and reason that she wants us to watch each film. I like that her mind works that way but I am a little frightened about the meticulous process that we must follow, “Can you say ‘Control’?”

We all have favorite movies that we see at Christmas, I am struck over how many of them are barely Christmas related. We started off our month with Die Hard, the quintessential action movie of all time. It is set at a Christmas party and most people barely remember that. The movie is sprinkled with references to the holiday but it plays so much like a summer movie that you may forget this. Of course the weather outside will do nothing to remind most of the country that it is Christmas, in Southern California we don’t have Winter Season, we have awards season. The closest we get to snow in the original Die Hard is at the end when debris if floating all around the Nakatomi Plaza. Later this month we have Gremlins, which contains the single most depressing Christmas story ever.

I mention the strange Christmas settings because my daughters favorite Christmas movie is not really about Christmas. There is one extended segment set at Christmas and that is what qualifies it for our list. She had a Cinema minor at U.S.C. and took a couple of classes in a series about Hollywood film genres. Her professor in the Musical class she took had this as his favorite musical, and she knows a heck of a lot about the movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis”. We watched this the other night and it is of course pure gold. Set nearly a hundred years ago, we get to know a family from St Louis and their loves and foibles. Judy Garland sings and looks wonderful, and the stories are heartwarming and funny. The Christmas segment has the amazing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, followed by one true moment of despair as Tootie, the youngest sister breaks down and frightens her whole family with the anxiety and hopelessness that the rest of them are feeling but can’t quite give voice to. When I hear kids today dismiss movies that are older than they are, this is one of the treasures that I feel bad for them missing.

I am in the afterglow of the Trojan Victory over the Bruins yesterday and I just felt like a little commentary was needed to start the morning off right. This is not a full review and I don’t want to promise an entry a day for the movie project, but everyone who reads this might want to know that I am still going to provide some regular insight on the Movie Day I am having. Maybe this next year the goal will be to comment on all the films we see in theaters. I am going to add a slideshow for the movies we are watching here during the holidays, if you keep your eyes open, you may find a post or two on them.

Here is a link to You Tube and the Movie Clip of Judy Garland singing.

New Star Wars Art by Steve Thomas

I have been busier than I thought the last two months so I have been unable to keep up with the blog. I still plan on posting about a couple more of the 80’s teen comedies, but I will have to wait a bit for an upcoming break. We are planning a Christmas themed blog during December, with some brief posts about the movies we are counting down as a sort of advent calendar. Hope you all make it back for some more reflections, and enjoy the links I manage to post until then. Happy Thanksgiving.

Seven Reasons Why Bruce Campbell Is the Ultimate Convention Guest – Los Angeles Art – Style Council

See a Montage of Famous Last Words in the Movies — Vulture

OK I promised I would follow up the movie a day summer project with a theme that you folks voted for. Despite the fact that it is October, the month of of Halloween, you choose teen comedies of the 80’s rather than Horror films. I think we can thank Allyson for pursuing this so relentlessly. I hope you all will enjoy these comments on the teen films. I was in my twenties and married when all these movies came out, so my perspective was always a little different. I am a big sentimentalist, I cry at commercials sometimes, so it is easy for me to get sucked up into a romantic comedy with some John Hughes drama layered on top. I am a lot busier than I thought I would be, so I don’t have as much time to write as I was hoping for, but I will try to get in an entry a week and if I can I’ll add some extras.

We are going to start with one of my wife’s three favorite films. I know we saw Valley Girl in movie theaters a half dozen times at least. In fact, we went to a double feature of Valley Girl and a Cheech and Chong movie (Still Smokin or Nice Dreams), and the stoner flick was so bad, we stayed and watched Valley Girl again to get the bad taste out of our mouth. Valley Girl is just plain sweet. There is a tenderness to the relationship between the two leads that sucks you in if you have a romantic bone in your body. This was Nicholas Cage’s first starring role and he hit it out of the park. He showed in this movie that he was an actor to watch, even if at times he was watchable simply because he was being himself. Here he is a real character and as an actor he makes us believe he is in love and suffering from the pain of uncertainty in his relationship. He is very funny in the section where he begins courting Julie and his casual charm in the Health Food store her father and mother run is really endearing. He has that shy smile and aw shucks manner that should make any girl think he was worth checking out.

Julie is played by Deborah Foreman, an actress that only make a couple of other films that I ever heard of. I can see immediately why she was so right in this role and may not have been right for other parts. She is cute pretty, with delicate features that look as if they will harden as she grows older. For a sixteen year old she was a perfect teen dream. I liked the relationship she had with her parents in the movie. She mostly disregards her friends, and with good reason, they are mostly shallow and don’t see the things in Randy that she sees. The whole opening scene with the girls at the mall was the catalyst for the movie. The song “Valley Girl” was created by Frank Zappa after listening in on his daughters phone conversations with her friends. He was fascinated with the slang they spoke and the cadence in their delivery. The movie came out a couple of years later, it had no official connection to the song and it does not appear in the movie, but it it clear that the girls in the movie are based on the sort of girl lifestyle that Zappa had lampooned with his work.

If you listen to the dialogue in the movie, you will hear many of the lines from the song being spoken in the mall scene and when the girls are together. As much as the Zappa song was an inspiration for the movie, the real basis of the film is Romeo and Juliet. This is a story of crossed lovers that pursue their passion despite the opposing forces of their families. Not their actual families but the cliques they have cast their lots with. Julie is a preppy type from the valley who’s life revolves around shopping and her friends. Randy is the brooding outcast that lives a decadent Hollywood lifestyle filled with clubs and music that Julie and her friends would think is too loud. Her friends disapprove of her relationship with Randy not because he is wrong for Julie, but because he is wrong for the in-group that they are part of. He threatens their connection to her, which threatens their vision of themselves. The connection to Shakespeare’s star crossed lovers is highlighted by a brief shot of them kissing under a movie marquee that features the film title playing in the theater.

The supporting characters add a lot of humor to the movie. Michael Bowen plays the boyfriend that Julie dumps right before she meets Randy. He is “the most bitchin dude in the Valley”, “What other dude can touch me?”. He is a stereotypical preppy smug Don Juan of the high school scene. We know he is a bad guy by the way he uses other girls to try to manipulate Julie and to boost his own ego. Beth, is the step mother of one of Julie’s friends and she has a Mrs. Robinson vibe going with one of the guys that her step daughter is into. Every time we see the movie and hear the song “Monster of Love”, we crack up. That story line has nearly nothing to do with the main plot, but it sets up some fun scenes and there is a pretty good payoff with it at the end. Finally, Fred is Randy’s best friend, he is part of that Hollywood outsider scene, but he is also a big goober who is more awkward and confident than a puppy. He throws himself into situations that are way over his head and can’t admit that he is basically clueless. I have seen the actor that played Fred in a couple of things over the years, I hope he has had a good career but it must be tough to peak with a performance like this in a movie where you will always be overshadowed by your co-star.

I taught at Cal State Northridge for three years from 1982 to 1985, so most of the people and places were very recognizable to me. During those years I was really into music, I listened to KROQ and went after my classes on Fridays to record stores to look for music I’d heard and enjoyed. There must be a dozen songs on the soundtrack of this movie that I bought the albums of the artists for before the movie existed. Sparks, Gary Myrick and the Figures, Modern English and the Plimsouls were all in my LP collection, and then the movie came and those artists were all featured. The Plimsouls especially since they are the band that plays in the nightclub that Randy hangs out in. The most overused song from a band in the early 80’s is Modern English’s “I Melt for You”, it is a wonderful song that has become something of a cliche. The cliche starts here because this was the first movie to use the song a romantic theme in a film. The end of the film has a “Graduate” vibe with a somewhat uncertain but hopeful expression on the faces of the leads, and then that song starts playing and everything is going to be OK.

This movie was championed by Siskel and Ebert on their movie review show. Both of them spoke of how much better it was then many films aimed at adults and really miles ahead of some of the dreck that targeted kids. I would have to look back but I think both of them had it on their top ten films of the year for 1983. I had always thought of 1984 as the best year for movies of the 80’s but two of my wife’s favorite films are from 1983, Valley Girl and The Right Stuff. I am really glad to have the memory of seeing those movies in theaters with her, and we still love them enormously, before the DVD of Valley Girl was released, I had to buy a copy for her for a gift, an out of print Laserdisc cost me $70 on ebay, but it brought a whole lot of pleasure to our lives. If you want a great teen comedy from the 1980’s, this is the gold standard..see it.

VOTD: 37 Movie Trailers Featuring Art Gilmore | /Film

Don LaFontaine of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Rest in Peace Mr. Gilmore