Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Amadeus!

Spoilers are inevitable.

Yes, women look at you like this when you're a genius (you'll have to take my word for it).

Great Art is tricky to discuss. To endorse it as a concept runs the risk of being seen as either pompous or naïve. To deny, sneer at or trivialise it is to expose yourself as a resentful mediocrity, a little like the antihero of today's Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week. But I am old and don't much care what anybody thinks of me so I will offer you this pearl in hopes that you don't prove a swine: Great Art is joyous, transcendent and worshipful, or it is abject, painful and confessional. Amadeus ties this dualism into a neat bow.

If you doubt a virgin vs Chad meme can be sustained for three hours, here's a succinct summation.

That rarest of things, a highly acclaimed movie worth the hype, it must be understood that Amadeus is also flagrant historical fiction. Consider this a disclaimer to the effect that when I write of Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham, whose name is F.) henceforth, I'm referring to the character, not the real person. We must further address the inevitable question: is the director's cut better than the theatrical cut? It makes Salieri more of a dickhead, so, in my opinion, yes. For Mozart's fault is trivial if not justified: he's a grandiose narcissist. When he says he's the best, the dickishness inherent in such braggadocio is drowned out by the fact of Mozart himself: truth is an absolute defence. His nemesis has a much darker, more egregious fault: he's a covert narcissist; wounded, scheming; cloaking himself in phony self-deprecation, mad online when people take it at face value. Mozart (Tom Hulce, Slam Dance) can scarcely help his verbal diarrhoea, but Salieri weighs each word and gesture. His self-consciousness hearkens back to that of Adam and Eve who eat of the forbidden fruit and see their natural and brazen nakedness for abjection. If only he were good enough to brag and floss like Mozart.

eQuAlItY has always been the motte of the covert narcissist, against the bailey of his special pleading: let me be best, but if that cannot be, let no man say the other guy is better.

How more poisonous is this sophisticated pathology than the other? Of course, it doesn't matter that Mozart is a crass clown, because he really is a genius as well, just like it didn't matter that Trump was a crass clown, because he gave us an unprecedented four years of world peace - but seething, resentful Salieris connived to undermine and sabotage him and install a turbo-mediocrity in his place, at which point the world relapsed unto its baseline of war and genocide, because the chatterati couldn't bear that they were wrong. Thanks, assholes!

Yet in his confession, which makes up the chassis of a Great Film, Salieri finds the rapt audience Mozart could command, not only in the form of his well-meaning but libtarded priest (good performance by Herman Meckler in a thankless role), but of the viewer at home and at the cinema, and so earns his catharsis and applause. Big brained thematic analysis aside, however, Amadeus is as entertaining as any western or car chase flick. The stuffiness expected of a powdered wig picture is headed off at every turn with an attention to tone that tap-dances on the thin line between deft satire and broad parody. The recreation of 18th Century Vienna is fun to get lost in. Why go to the trouble to hire a guy to play a rando out walking his bear for two seconds? Cinéma, that's why.

I couldn't find the bear guy in the credits so I'm going to tell people it was me.

And, of course, we would be remiss not to mention the most kino aspect of the work of all, the soundtrack.

"It was like the Elizabeth Berridge's cans of music" - Salieri (the real one)

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 20. One Way Ticket to Midnight (Part 2)!

Previously...

Theme: Into the Lungs of Hell - Megadeth

To be continued...

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Chase!

1993's The Chase is what the average movie should be: an 88-minute car chase with stunts, laughs, romance, and nothing else. Only senior citizens even remember when Charlie Sheen was a meme, but long before then, in the 90s, he was a sort-of actor with a gift for deadpan that rivalled what the TV Troper neckbeards and Daria stans at your old high school earnestly believed they had. This gift paid off in '92's Top Gun parody Hot Shots!, but his finest hour was still to come.

It's not easy to be deadpan when you're dressed like Pogo the Clown.

Sheen plays Jack, an escaped convict on the run, who kidnaps a young heiress played by fellow Hot Shots! alum Kristy Swanson, hijacking her BM in a desperate bid to flee to the border, little guessing that this will excite the wrath of her billionaire father, Ray Wise (Dead End).

Least wet woman being kidnapped (trust me).

This completes the plot summary. Doubtless inspired by Cops and the popularity of high speed chases on the TV news, The Chase has Sheen and Swanson dogged by a succession of whacky police, news media and thrill seekers that seem tailor-written* for cameos by whatever famous names the producers had run into the other week and were like "hell yeah brother, I'm down", because that's the sort of vibe that permeates the movie.

I've been told these are the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

A well-balanced movie diet consists in equal parts of populist, contrarian and snob fare. In the game of rock-paper-scissors between the three, lowbrow populist entertainment done right beats would-be Important Cinema, and scarcely is it done better than in The Chase.

*Written by a tailor.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Cabiria!

<6'0" tinder profiles be like

The greatest movie of the 1910s may also be the greatest Roman epic ever filmed. Set against the auspicious backdrop of the Second Punic War (the one with Scipio and Hannibal), 1914's Cabiria so impressed D.W. Griffith that he ripped it off wholesale for his Intolerance (also worth a spin when you have four hours to spare). Nor was that the limit of its influence: Fellini named his Nights of Cabiria in tribute to it, and its breakout character Maciste became a staple of entirely unrelated spinoffs set in any and all periods in history. It's also likely that Fritz Lang ripped off the Moloch sequence for his Metropolis. Yet today Cabiria is rarely fêted among self-styled cinéastes, and unknown among normals. This is a travesty because not only was it a spectacular display of technique in its day, but it remains as pacy and exciting an adventure as you'll find (at least the two-hour cut I've seen is; versions up to 200 minutes long may exist or have existed).

These stills go harder than every movie since 2008 combined.

The plot consists in several grandiose setpieces loosely strung together with the common theme of buddy heroes Fulvius Axila and his slave Maciste trying to rescue the titular character from sacrifice at the hands of the priests of Moloch. Establishment ""historians"" tried to deny for decades if not centuries that the Phoenician colony of Carthage practiced child sacrifice before being utterly BTFO the fuck out by archaeological proof (the same thing would later happen with the Aztecs, with the spin machine proclaiming Spanish records of pillars of skulls mere fabricated propaganda, until the edgy decor in question was unearthed, prompting a sulky retreat to "well, it probably took them a long time to build them"). So while the conflation of Carthaginian rites with the worship of Moloch in particular might be artistic license, Carthage really was that bad.

When you watch the kino, blast some doom metal or "Night on Bald Mountain" or something over this sequence. The standard plinky-plonky piano music isn't going to cut it.

While Fulvius and Maciste provide us with a throughline, stumbling about amidst the chaos and upheaval of the war a bit like Frodo and Sam, whole sequences are offered up just for the spectacle of it all. The opening volcanic eruption sets a high bar, but the burning of the Roman fleet by the devices of Archimedes and the climactic siege are no less ostentatious or impressive.

Italy could pull this off in 1914 and you can't put down that Twinkie.

In the 1910s movie cameras weighed as much as the moon and camera movements were as rare in any given movie as in any given Ozu kino. Cabiria's camera movements were so frequent and ambitious for the time it feels less dated than a lot of 1930s flicks.

This was to 1910s viewers what 2001's star gate was to 1960s viewers or what Gollum was to 2000s viewers. For my younger readers, try to imagine anything being exciting. That's what it was like.

Anyway, watch Cabiria.