Re: Best Cinematography 1963
Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2018 12:20 am
Choosing among the Color slate this year is like choosing whether I'd rather die by flesh-eating bacteria or dismemberment from a chainsaw. What a grisly set of films.
There were, of course, numerous superior options -- The Leopard, The Birds, Tom Jones (perhaps the most puzzling of the omissions given its overall dominance that year).
Even by the standards of most bloated white elephants, Cleopatra is an interminable, insufferable snooze. It's obviously a BIG production, but there's not an ounce of artfulness to any of the visuals. The only tolerable aspect of its win here is that the other nominees aren't much either.
Irma la Douce falls under "be careful what you wish for" territory -- you thought there couldn't be anything more fun than an Apartment reunion, but boy were you wrong about that! Nothing about the movie really works, and the candy-colored images create a portrait of the underbelly of Parisian life that feels utterly phony and way too cute.
It's possible that time has simply dulled the humor, but I've never found It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to be all that funny. You have to assume the travelogue aspect of the film helped it land the nomination here, but I think it's a pretty slapdash affair visually, which I guess makes sense for such a chaotic movie. But I simply don't find it especially impressive as a cinematography candidate.
The Cardinal covers quite a lot of visual ground -- it had to, given the movie's attempt to tackle virtually every social issue of the 20th century -- but I find it a thoroughly impersonal historical epic. There are shots of clear visual beauty along the way, but on the whole it's such a dull affair, and the images aren't adding much in the way of personality at all.
How the West Was Won is another total bloat-fest, with nothing about the film's images of the American West rising to the level of the era's most artful westerns. I guess I'll give it my vote based on the sheer technical achievement of it all -- I didn't see it in Cinerama, but there's an obvious majesty to the film's images that's hard to deny, even if in many cases it's the natural beauty of the landscape that's doing much of the heavy lifting. Still, it also basically sucks, and I wouldn't spend that much time defending this choice beyond the fact that I had to pick something.
There were, of course, numerous superior options -- The Leopard, The Birds, Tom Jones (perhaps the most puzzling of the omissions given its overall dominance that year).
Even by the standards of most bloated white elephants, Cleopatra is an interminable, insufferable snooze. It's obviously a BIG production, but there's not an ounce of artfulness to any of the visuals. The only tolerable aspect of its win here is that the other nominees aren't much either.
Irma la Douce falls under "be careful what you wish for" territory -- you thought there couldn't be anything more fun than an Apartment reunion, but boy were you wrong about that! Nothing about the movie really works, and the candy-colored images create a portrait of the underbelly of Parisian life that feels utterly phony and way too cute.
It's possible that time has simply dulled the humor, but I've never found It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to be all that funny. You have to assume the travelogue aspect of the film helped it land the nomination here, but I think it's a pretty slapdash affair visually, which I guess makes sense for such a chaotic movie. But I simply don't find it especially impressive as a cinematography candidate.
The Cardinal covers quite a lot of visual ground -- it had to, given the movie's attempt to tackle virtually every social issue of the 20th century -- but I find it a thoroughly impersonal historical epic. There are shots of clear visual beauty along the way, but on the whole it's such a dull affair, and the images aren't adding much in the way of personality at all.
How the West Was Won is another total bloat-fest, with nothing about the film's images of the American West rising to the level of the era's most artful westerns. I guess I'll give it my vote based on the sheer technical achievement of it all -- I didn't see it in Cinerama, but there's an obvious majesty to the film's images that's hard to deny, even if in many cases it's the natural beauty of the landscape that's doing much of the heavy lifting. Still, it also basically sucks, and I wouldn't spend that much time defending this choice beyond the fact that I had to pick something.