1970: Movies Pt. 1

As I stated in one of my very first blog posts, despite the fact I have seen a lot of movies, and I love 70's movies in particular, there are still a lot of great films from the decade that I have not seen.  I am going to try and rectify that.  I going to pick one year in the decade at a time and, using various movie lists on Wikipedia (Oscar nominees, top grossing, critics' year end lists), I am going to look for the notable films that I haven't seen (and probably a few I have seen that I want to re-watch).  I am going to start with 1970, but will probably pick the remaining years at random to mix things up...

Five Easy Pieces



This film brought Jack Nicholson is first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (he would be nominated 7 more times, winning twice), and he definitely turns in a fantastic performance that carries the film.   Nicholson plays a California oil worker that, unbeknownst to his lower class waitress girlfriend, actually comes from an upper class family of musicians (Nicholson's character was a child prodigy on the piano).  when he finds out his father is sick, he heads back to his family home after a long exile, reluctantly bringing his girlfriend with him.  Nicholson finds out that things really haven't changed and he still doesn't fit in, even though he had recently come to the revelation that he didn't fit in with his current life either.  That's pretty much it for the plot, but Nicholson turns in one of his bravura performances as a man capable of bubbling over with crazy rage at any moment (the slow burn in the scene with the waitress in the diner was fantastic).



Catch-22

Catch-22 is a movie with a similar intent to MASH (a movie I have already seen, but will be re-watching for this blog series) - use black comedy and an absurdist style (this is more so for Catch Than MASH) to show the horrors of war and use a previous war (WWII for Catch and Korea for MASH) as a standing for Vietnam. 

Catch-22 uses a non-linear style, and that makes the film a little hard to follow.  There was a point in the movie where, because of how the scenes were transpiring after the opening scene, I was sure that everything  that was happening was in the main character's imagination.  It turns out I was wrong, but  that just demonstrates how disorienting it was to try and follow what was going on.  The humor works for the most part, and the film boasts a pretty outstanding cast (Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Orson Welles, Anthony Perkins and a bunch of other recognizable faces).  However, I prefer MASH's attempt at the same subject matter (or at least I think I do - its been about 15 years since I saw MASH, so we'll see when I re-watch it). 

(I couldn't find an official trailer for this film - apparently, re-cutting the trailer into your own version, and filming your own trailer are popular school assignments, as that was all I could find on YouTube...)

MASH - Coming Soon
Airport - Coming Soon
Woodstock - Coming Soon

Other notable films that I have already seen - Patton, Gimme Shelter
Notable Films I am skipping - Love Story (I know that this is another milestone movie from 1970, and that it was nominated for, and won, a bunch of awards, but it just does not interest me in the least.  So, PASS.)