Are the 70s All That and a Bag of Chips? Comparing this decade to the 60s

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 For as long as I've been into films, I’ve heard people incessantly building a hagiocracy around the 70s. For those not well‑versed in the difference, the 70s are remembered as a time of political message movies that reflected the turbulence of the era, an emphasis on action rather than character (with far less exposition than earlier decades), strong directorial signatures, and an overriding theme of generational angst that mirrored the social and cultural divides of the time.

As highlighted in the recent book I finished "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls" (an incredible read, no doubt), there were also some wild stories of the time. Dennis Hopper was a dangerous flight risk who got into a knife fight with a co-star and practically chased his wife into witness protection on the set of Easy Rider (1969). A decade later, Francis Ford Coppola gave Martin Sheen a heart attack on a horribly planned trip to the Phillipines that resulted in just 8 minutes of usable film for what would amount to the first of three grossly negligent trips that eventually became Apocalypse Now (1979). In between, everyone was on wild drugs and traded romantic partners like baseball cards. There's no doubt the lives of William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich (probably the best), Martin Scorsese, Warren Beatty, Bob Rafelson, Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Hal Ashby, and Francis Ford Coppola make for great narrative arcs and that's part of what makes them all compelling.

But what about the directors with more boring personal lives who killed it in terms of quality a decade earlier?

The Case for the 1960s 🎬

The 1960s were already breaking boundaries, experimenting with genre, and tackling social issues long before the 70s became mythologized. Directors like John Frankenheimer, Sydney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Robert Wise, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Ritt, Sam Peckinpah, and John Sturges were making their mark, while old masters Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, John Ford, and David Lean were in their primes.

Genre Experimentation 🎭

The 60s were a decade of bold experimentation across genres. Westerns matured under directors like John Ford and John Sturges, evolving from simple tales of good versus evil into complex stories of anti‑heroes and professional outlaws, while Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) redefined cinematic violence and morality. At the same time, psychological thrillers pushed boundaries with films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), which combined psychological tension with horror spectacle. And in science fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) shattered conventions with radical pacing, visual ambition, and philosophical depth. Taken together, these films show that the 60s were already experimenting with genre in ways that rival — and often surpass — the innovations credited to the 70s.

The unfilfilled ambitions of the 1950s were perfected in the form of the epic like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and there's no shortage of films that were heavy on social commentary:

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) confronted racism and justice with timeless resonance.

• Days of Wine and Roses (1962) explored alcoholism with unflinching honesty.

• Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) examined redemption and humanity within the prison system. I'm in the extreme minority on this, but I liked it better than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). In this case, it's the exposition and the central relationships that ground the former even if it's a little old-fashioned.

• West Side Story (1961) tackled race, violence, and love through the lens of musical storytelling. For god's sake, it even has a rape scene!

• Ship of Fools (1965) offered a microcosm of prejudice and human folly.

• It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1965) is fun as hell, but it's also a brutal indictment of capitalism. When the price is high enough, people are willing to do anything.

• In the Heat of the Night (1967) confronted racial tensions and justice in the American South. Do note that all of Sidney Poitier's best work is in this decade

• They Shoot Horses Don't They (1969) is a scathing indictment of the haves and have-nots. It also doesn't shy away from depression and suicidal ideation.

Beyond innovation and directorial signatures, the decade also carried a sense of elegance, wit, and sophistication that is hard to ignore. It was the first time films truly broke away from studio lots in terms of shooting locations. Works like Topkapi (1964), The VIPs (1963), Zorba the Greek (1964), The Pink Panther (1963), Walk Don’t Run (1966), and Never on a Sunday (1960) highlight this trend. This European sensibility even carried over into American films such as The Mating Game (1959), Pillow Talk (1959), and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Even the musical became more worldly in some sense with the All-Asian cast of Flower Drum Song or West Side Story which shot on the streets of New York.

The Case for the 1970s 🎥

So this is subjective, but many of the decade’s most celebrated films don’t resonate with me (I'm again speaking of what I've seen). I'll remove Star Wars (1977) and Spielberg from this equation because they were spiritually more like 80s films.

Without these overarching themes of generational conflict and the stories behind the stories, The Graduate (1967; I consider it a 70s film) is just a story of a love triangle with a killer performance in Anne Bancroft and a great soundtrack. Dog Day Afternoon (1975), stripped of its context, doesn’t feel much different than Smokin’ Aces (2006) or The Rundown (2003). Honestly, I'd take a heist film like Steve McQueen's Widows (2018) any day of the week. The French Connection (1971) is basically The Bourne Identity (2002) decades earlier. Shampoo is practically unwatchable: It reads to me like an overproduced Three's Company episode about a guy trying to wiggle his way out of screwing three women at once. Breaking Away (1979) was done several times better in the 1980s and 1990s.

Yes, I understand that hindsight is 20/20 and there's an entire trope about Seinfeld appearing unfunny to today's youth. But they are grounded in a specific cultural contexts.

To show I'm not a complete hater, here are several 70s Films I Love 🌟:

• Five Easy Pieces (1970) – Five Easy Pieces doesn't have a boat load of exposition (at least at the start), so I'm not entirely opposed to the 1970s style when done right. This is one where the pieces of Bobby DuPree's character are filled in as we go. A lofty comparison would be Citizen Kane. Plus, there are several unforgettable scenes.

• Network (1976) – the perfect storytelling mechanism of everything the 70s had to offer: sharp satire, generational tension, and a critique of media that still feels relevant.

• The Sting (1973) and The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) – See, I'm not allergic to a good film heist film. The Sting is an excellent period piece that indicated the director is having Sam Peckinpagh or Quentin Tarantino levels of fun (it's no coincidence that Tarantino has long championed George Roy Hill to the point of writing a book about him). The Great Waldo Pepper is a film of incredible stunts combined with thematic depth about the way in which we emulate our heroes in healthy and unhealthy ways.

• Airport (1970) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972) – I consider this more in line with the 50s style of spectacle, but I love these films and look forward to seeing more.

• Norma Rae (1979) – It embodies the 70s ethos of social justice and antiheroes while providing character depth and pathos.

• Taxi Driver (1976) – Not a film I relish every minute of, and I don’t consider it the masterpiece others do. There’s dead space in it, but it remains my favorite kind of intellectual film — one that sparks discussion long after the credits roll.

• Being There (1979) – Proof that when you have a truly great story, it’s hard to screw it up. The execution and the trio of lead actors elevate it into something timeless.

• American Graffiti (1973) – a vibrant snapshot of youth culture, capturing the joy of riding in a car before you get jaded by traffic and the anxieties about growing up too fast.

• Pretty much anything by Rob Altman - If there's an iconoclast in the 1970s I dig, it's gotta be Altman. I haven't seen Nasvhille, but I've seen five films of his from this decade and they all hold up upon multiple viewings as ensemble pieces, thematically clever works, and sharp commentary.

Timelessness

Everything great that people celebrate about the 70s — genre experimentation, social commentary, bold storytelling — was already present in the 60s. The difference is that the filmmakers of the 60s may have led less sensational lives, but they produced work that was no less daring and, in many cases, more enduring. Am I saying that one decade was better than the other. I also do admit that I have no experience with Peter Bogdanovich and my Coppola experience of this decade is extremely weak as well.

But on the whole, the mark of a truly great film is timelessness. Movies like The Magnificent Seven (1960), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Inherit the Wind (1960), Ship of Fools (1965), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and West Side Story (1961) don’t require you to understand the mindset of a disillusioned generation to be enthralled. They stand on their own, accessible and powerful across eras.

Themes of every 2012 Film I saw

This follows off a thread I last did in 2007 and will be continually updated but here's a sort of first stab at it. Also, I wrote this from a cell phone. So I expect many spelling errors here:

Quartet, Trouble with the Curve, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel:
Antithesis of Ageism/Old People are Rad-All three films are an unabashed celebration of the latter stage of life. I see all three is created out of a reaction to ageism, both metatextually (proudly employing older actors and tailoring to older demographics in an industry where that is not easy) and on screen. Dustin Hoffman, who just turned 75, likely chose to make a film about an old age home for artists for his directorial debut as a way to explore his feelings about old people. He even went so far as to use retired musicians in the background so that our ears are literally filled with the musings of old people. In both BEM and Quarter, major life decisions (which is the reason characters are made the center of storylines) are shown as continuous. Trouble with the Curve, on the other hand is a failure of a movie because it's anti-ageism makes no sense. Why exactly should a guy whose job it is to scout players, be able to continue his job when his eyesight is gone?

Zero Dark Thirty
The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions-The suggestion that torture was necessary to capture Bin Laden is what incited the controversy that moved people to picket the Academy Awards Luncheon today. A good question for discussion would be whether it was the theme that disturbed people or the presentation of that theme. I'd argue that whether it was torture or not, would anyone really debate that it was a road to hell for Maya? She clearly is drained by the process
Unsung Heroism-Read: Maya
In fact, Maya is representative of so many desk jockeys here in DC who shuffle through papers and are one small cog in the machinery of a large bureaucracy (I'm 97% sure I spelled that word wrong, give me a break, I'm blogging from my cell phone) and in a way she's the new everyman blue collar hero that the average worker in America can see themselves as and vicariously live through. Which brings me to..... Changing nature of terrorrism/the world-George W Bush said this was a new kind of war. I think if the new hero is a desk jockey and not a soldier, it signifies that the changing landscape of the world and specifically war is a larger theme of the movie. Therefore, people with knowledge of that changing world are the people who are now most essential in war. This might also be an implied justification of the torture: Yes, torture is inherently wrong but you are also seeing an unfamiliar world on screen you can't fully understand so who's to say whether something like the wrongness of torture is universal?

Bernie
Imperfect nature of the justice system- Bernie was generally a good man who did something wrong at his weakest moment to a woman everyone in the town hated. He would have never been driven mad enough to shoot her if he stayed away from her like everyone in the town. Essentially, he was punished for daring to be kinder then the rest of the town
The power of community-Bernie is the hero of the story and the victim of an imperfect justice system because the community loved him. Serving the community made him morally superior to even the concept of murder
Everyone has a dark side-It either just takes a little longer or more extreme circumstances have to arise for someone like Bernie to reveal his.

The Dictator
Corruption is all relative-Sacha Baron Cohen's films are strongly satirical so its a 99% certainty that if he is making a film, he will use comedy to make his points. Few people know that Cohen is a religious Jew who wrote his thesis on anti-semitism in Oxford. Thus, Borat was a subversive tool to spread the central message of his scholarly studies.
The dictator gives a speech at the end of the movie about how dictatorship is good because of reasons that double as a list of flaws with democracy. Throughout the movie, the lifestyle of a madman is depicted as morally normative.
The power of laughter-Its a story where the hero is a doppelganger for political figures generally considered too reprehensible and offensive to glamorize. Cohen suggests that if funny enough, discourse about these men and the heinous acts of brutality undertaken in their regimes can be successful.

Pitch Perfect
College is good-The protagonist Becca has an already-set end point in her life she knows she wants before she sets foot on campus. Hence, college is irrelevant to her. Although she still has the same end point, she is surprised to find that she has a life changing experience that teaches her how to be a better person. Score one for college! The film has a very pro-college message but ironically, Becca is never shown going to school or learning anything from her classes.
Friendship (particularly same sex friendship) is underrated and important-The practice of blending your voices together to create harmony is (very obviously, I'm not saying anything profound here) symbolic of Becca learning to coexist with other girls which she admits at the end of the film is something she's never done before.

Argo
The need for creativity-Filmmakers write what they know so the joy of filmmaking/art is a theme that pops up everywhere from musicals to biopics of artists to films about films. Argo expands on that a little bit by showing that creativity is curative from individuals like Tony Mendez and the two Hollywood producers, to the organizational health of the CIA. In the case of the two Hollywood execs (Alan Arkin and John Goodman), they make movies yet their creative outlet comes from abetting the CIA. Along this theme, the a-hole hostage who wouldn't initially cooperate among the six could be read as a non-believer of the curative power of creativity. It was also indicative of this theme that the Iranian officials at the airport were mesmerized by the pictures of the movie.

Silver Linings Playbook
Your work is the spoke to which you build the wheel around-I was once listening to two religious Jews in a conversation. One said to the other that he wasn't sure whether he was passionate about taking a job, and the other responded that a job or whatever you decide to pursue as your primary mode of activity isn't necessarily relevant, but everything else falls into place and has more meaning once you adopt some mode of activity. Pat was singularly obsessed with reuniting with his ex-wife Nikki and while it looked like an unhealthy obsession on the surface, it got him focused and organized on rebuilding himself. In the end, Nikki's irrelevance was highlighted by the penultimate scene in which we learned that she was no longer relevant to him on his journey.

Destigmatizing mental illness-Both Robert De Niro and director David O. Russell have a child with some mental illness and both were attached to the project for that reason. Pat scares people around him but as the viewer you also see he means no harm. Through both Pat and Tiffany, the viewers are being exposed to people with mental illness and forced to ask themselves if they're as bad or as repulsive as they seem. Likewise, various characters are forced to reconsider their notions  of craziness when deciding the degree of acceptance they want to have towards the two "ill" characters. Pat is even scared of Tiffany which brings some more complex dynamics and also illustrates that fear of people who are different is universal. Jennifer Lawrence's Oscar interview also further confirms that destigmatizing illness was a focus of the film or played a big role in the characters' minds

The Importance of the Support System-Kind of a no-brainer. It was through connecting and forming better bonds with old friend, his family, his new soulmate, and even his psychiatrist that Pat got better. One comment I'll add here for some depth to this bullet point, is that Pat only started to trust Dr. Patel and take his medicine when they began to bond.

Inherit the Wind and Kramer's preachiness

The two best courtroom dramas I've seen- Judgment at Nuremberg and Inherit the Wind- were directed by the same man, Stanley Kramer, and were released one year apart.

Having just seen Wind today, I've now seen six Stanley Kramer films: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Defiant Ones, Ship of Fools, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (the only one of his film to make it to  AFI's Top 100 at #99) in addition to the above-two mentioned films. 

With the exception of the decent-but-lackluster Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, I highly recommend all the other films, and think they have all held up well. Defiant Ones is better remembered than any other Sidney Poitier film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has been the template for all-star comedies, Inherit the Wind (along with the 1955 play) is the reason people still know about the Scopes trial today, and I've heard a Ship of Fools theory referenced in my film history courses.

All of his films are social message pictures. Even It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a comedy, can be easily read as a morality tale about the all-encompassing power of greed. For some reason I'm not too sure of, Kramer isn't a particularly well-respected director and I've even heard some backlash against him. Perhaps, his films are too preachy?

What's ironic about Inherit the Wind is that it's preachiest elements are taken from real life. The actual 1925 Scopes Trial was somewhat of a publicity stunt. The teacher, John Scopes (renamed Cates for legal purposes), was in cahoots with the prosecution the whole time, to boost publicity for the town by putting Scopes on trial:

According to this site from the University of Missouri Kansas City:

"The Scopes Trial had its origins in a conspiracy at Fred Robinson's drugstore in Dayton. George Rappalyea, a 31-year-old transplanted New Yorker and local coal company manager, arrived at the drugstore with a copy of a paper containing an American Civil Liberties Union announcement that it was willing to offer its services to anyone challenging the new Tennessee anti-evolution statute. Rappalyea, a modernist Methodist with contempt for the new law, argued to other town leaders that a trial would be a way of putting Dayton on the map....The conspirators summoned John Scopes, a twenty-four-year old general science teacher and part-time football coach, to the drugstore....Herbert and Sue Hicks, two local attorneys and friends of Scopes, agreed to prosecute."

It was after all this that stalwarts William Jennings Bryan (renamed Matthew Harrison Brady) and Clarence Darrow (renamed Henry Drummond) offered their services to the trial and made it more and more outrageous. The most cringeworthy moment, for example, when Drummond tried to disprove the bible by putting Brady on the stand, actually happened. This changes my whole view of the film: What I originally viewed as a blatant attempt to make a school teacher's trial as an excuse to espouse on the absurdity of the bible, I now see a historical recreation of what became an absurdist spectacle in and of itself.  

Similarly, Bryan/Brady seems painted as a straw man, but he appears to have been just as extreme in real life and insisted on reading his speech despite the fact that the trial was over. 

If anything, I found the film morally more ambiguous once I knew the real-life story. The past friendship between the two adversaries (the movie added the fabrication that they used to be professional colleagues) and the positioning of Brady as less extreme than the Reverend Brown is somewhat complimentary to the legacy of William Jennings Bryan.

I still think, to some degree, Inherit the Wind has somewhat of a bias against the Bible Belt, but it also works as an effective framing device because history has also rendered its own verdict about the validity of evolution (although, there are some small pockets still holding that debate today) so we're watching two different trials as the audience and two different sources of anticipation: 1) who will win the actual trial at steak and 2) who will look less embarrassing to our 21st century sensibilities. 

Of course, the closing scene in which Gene Kelley's cynical reporter Hornbeck and Drummond go at each other's necks only confirms that Kramer didn't want us to relate to any one character as the author avatar. Hornbeck, a charming storyteller played by a debonair matinee idol cast against type, would seem to be the best fit until he's torn into pieces by Drummond. 

At the same time, the closing scene was the one that felt the most false to me, because I never thought that Hornbeck deserved to be made out as the soulless villain. It might just be the fact that I'm a reporter and idolize them, but I do think that uncovering the truth behind false facades is a truth worth standing for and he was championing the rights of Cates. It should also be noted that the person who Hornbeck was based on Baltimore Sun reporter H.L. Menken who was a very warm and beloved figure.

Overall, I think pretty highly of the film. It's cluttered up with a number of characters and storylines, I wish the Reverend Brown-Rachel storyline got more attention, for example. The film clocks in at 2 hours and 7 minutes and ten minutes before the end, I was actually hoping that we'd see a whole second trial. In that sense, this is the mark of a good film: I can't complain about a 127-minute film if I wanted to watch another hour.

In the larger scheme of Kramer's filmography, Kramer's films don't conceal that they have a social slant but they're complex and thought-provoking. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner doesn't really have an easy answer and Judgment at Nuremberg isn't about defeating Naziism but rather the aftermath. The defense for the Nazi judges is portrayed in a respectful enough light that Maximilian Schell won an Oscar for Best Actor.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

From 1963, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World takes place over the course of a particularly eventful day along the highways of Southern California, where a group of strangers comes across a man's dying confession that a large sum of money is hidden in Santa Rosita, California. The group of four or five different cars and about a dozen people can't agree as to how they're going to split this money so it becomes every man for himself.

The film is also the loose inspiration for the 2001 film Rat Race except it was a far more solid film that doesn't compromise its audience with overly crude or pandering humor. It's based around a timeless concept: the humor of the chase, and that has been used by every great comic Buster Keaton's The General, to Harold Lloyd's vertical version of the chase in Safety Last. And it never gets old.

The film is also directed by Stanley Kramer who primarily made message movies (i.e. Inherit the Wind, Ship of Fools, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) and while it's tempting to think that Kramer was just taking a break from heavier themes and just having fun, the movie isn't entirely morally devoid of any theme. There is a certain undertone amid all the comedy of how money corrupts absolutely. Watching the film a second or third time with that theme in mind might make for a different viewing experience.Stanley Kramer made the film with the aim of casting as many comedians in the film as he possibly could, and he succeeds quite well, so the film ends up being a who's who of the '60's.

It is interesting to note that a great number of the stars of this film are completely unrecognizable to my generation today. They are unrecognizable to myself and I'd like to think I've seen my fair share of TV and movies from the old days. Here is who I knew and didn't know:-I had heard of Sid Cesar because he gave Mel Brooks and Woody Allen their starts, Carl Reiner I knew as the director of some films and I've seen him on Whose Line is it Anyway?
-I had heard of Phil Silvers because I knew he was the inspiration for Sargent Bilko, but I had never seen him in person
-I knew Buddy Hackett, Spencer Tracy and Ethel Merman
-The cameos of the Three Stooges and Don Knotts I recognized fairly instantly
-I had heard the name Milton Berle but couldn't recognize him
-I had not ever heard of Edie Adams or Dick Shawn. Dick Shawn, may I say, is quite funny.
-I knew Mickey Rooney but couldn't recognize him on sight
-I've heard references to Jimmy Durante in TV shows like the Golden Girls, Dick Van Dyke Show and I believe I Love Lucy, etc., but still wouldn't recognize him

Syrianna Review

Syrianna is a riveting political thriller about a very hot button issue, the oil crisis, that few people really know much about beyond the numbers that appear on gas station billboards. It was released at the right time of year so that its inevitable Oscar buzz considerations will give the material added weight which might have been what the exec producers (including the politically active George Clooney and producing partner Steven Sodebergh) were going for. Still, it's not an overtly political film.

It doesn't seek to point fingers at an administration although with our overly polarized political culture today, people are bound to dismiss it as left wing propaganda, and that's unfortunate because a work of art like this deserves to be treated as art rather than politics.The main criticism, as far as I can tell, is that the plot is too complex for the average viewer, but that's partially the point: that the oil crisis is a complex matter and that's why an easy solution isn't in the works. I'll concede that this wasn't necessarily a smart move on the filmmakers' behalf to clutter up the start of the film rather than provide an attention-grabbing opening, but the film gets easier to swallow as it goes along. Matt Damon deals with a strained marriage and the tragedy of his 6-year old son's death but sees an opportunity for an unlikely friendship and business pairing with an enlightened Arab prince. George Clooney plays a CIA operative with an estranged son and wife who treats covert operations and killing like any other 9-to-5 job until he gets betrayed by his government. Jeffery Wright plays a cold and methodical lobbyist hired to find and weed out the corrupt link in an oil merger and he's equally at ease playing a game of racquetball with his suspect as he is calling him out before the board on his corruption. And then there are the two Arab youths looking for jobs who befriend a shady man and eventually become suicide bombers. It's the human dimensions of these stories and the way Stephen Gaughan masterfully weaves them together that make the movie so engaging as the movie moves past a cluttered-up start.

Credit director Gaughan. Making his directorial debut after winning an Oscar as the screenwriter for Traffic, Gaughan appears to be a firm disciple of Stephen Sodebegh's school of film-making, as he copies some of Sodebergh's tricks: showing only parts of conversations to make it appear as though we're coming in midway, on-location shooting with an independent feel, bridging different places together illustrated by text, etc.

2006: The Year of the African Picture

10 Best Science Fiction Movies of All Time

This might just be me but I usually see a sort of pattern in each year’s slate of movies. The patterns aren’t entirely exclusive by the year but a case can be made that they are brought on by trends that ebb and flow:

2001 was the year of the dark storyline. Disjointed storylines were abound in Momento, Mullholland Drive, and Vanilla Sky. And In the Bedroom and Man Who Wasn’t There were both films with dark sides. In the Bedroom was nominated for best picture and Mullholland Drive received a best director nomination and Momento received attention for best screenplay. Dark films usually come in low-grossing thrillers but these five films were higher end products that at least all started out with potential for an oscar nomination.

2002 I really couldn’t find a pattern, other than the best picture win for Chicago solidified the Return of the Musical. There are no other films in that year that reflect that trend, however.

2003 was the year of the epic with Pirates of the Carribean, Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, Last Samurai, Cold Mountain and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Seabiscuit also had characteristics of an epic, in that it was a big budget period piece, but it didn’t involve any kind of fighting or battles. The number of big-budget blockbusters and tent poles per year has significantly increased in the ‘00s, but usually they’re constricted to the summer. Last Samurai, Master and Commander, Cold Mountain, and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King were all released in the Oscar Season and either received Oscar nominations or significant
Oscar buzz. One could argue that Lord of the Rings had been going on for three years but a) 2003 was the year in which Lord of the Rings won and b) Return of the King was the most action-packed. The epics that followed in the next year, Alexander and Troy, were far more poorly received.

2004 was the year of the biopic with Ray, The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Kinsey, Hotel Rwanda, Beyond the Sea and Vera Drake. Three of these were nominated for best picture, Hotel Rwanda was the perennial sixth candidate, and nine of the twenty acting nominations, with Kinsey’s Liam Niesson nearly making the lead actor category 5 for 5 in biographically-based roles for the first time in Oscar history. The trend continued to some extent the following with Walk the Line and Capote but Walk the Line was considered more of a love story than its 2004 counterpart, and Capote was more of a crime story than a biopic.

2005 was the year of the social statement film with four of the five best picture nominees in Good Night and Good Luck (the suppression of the press), Crash (interracial relations), Munich (the Palestinian-Israeli conflict), and Brokeback Mountain (homosexuality). In addition, among the other Oscar contenders, there was North Country (sexual harassment), Constant Gardener (corruption in the pharmaceutical industry) and Syrianna (the energy crisis/CIA corruption). Things were getting so ridiculous that political pundits were taking summer popcorn fare like Batman Begins and Star Wars III (whose storyline was conceived before either Bush got into office) and interpreting them as left-wing or right-wing statements about the Iraq war.

This brings us to 2006 which I might call the year of the Third World or more specifically the Year of the African picture with Last King of Scotland, Catch a Fire, Babel, and Blood Diamond. This might make sense considering the success of 2004’s Hotel Rwanda and 2005’s Constant Gardener and the fact that over the last couple years Africa has become a hot-button issue. One thing that comes to mind was the Worldwide 10-City Concert that preceded the G8 Summit Conference in the summer of 2005. Bono, the chief spokesman behind the movement, was named Man of the Year by Time Magazine. Increasingly, globalization and Internet 2.0 are taking storm and have surfaced on the National consciousness as of late.
Lastly, the popular thing for celebrities to do, as demonstrated by George Clooney and his dad, Brangelina, and Madonna, is to go visit Africa firsthand.

The four above-mentioned pictures all harbored serious Oscar ambitions and were shot on location, taking us first hand to the heart of the “Dark Continent.” Pictures have been set in Africa since the days of Beat the Devil, Out of Africa, Snows of Kiliminjaro and the African Queen but the African jungles served as nothing more than a background for stories about the Western colonizers. The latest wave of pictures that has surfaced since Hotel Rwanda has focused on problems facing the indigenous people of the continent which is a massive improvement.

What this means for the Oscars is that in such a close race Babel might have added weight for being part of the year’s movie trend. Voting for Babel would be a way of acknowledging this trend of shedding light on what has been commonly referred to as “The Dark Continent.”