- Ciara Moloney
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- The biggest film awards of the year, plus more
The biggest film awards of the year, plus more
A tribute to David Lynch and an ode to a Rob Reiner masterpiece
Last night saw the winners announced for the best annual awards in cinema: that’s right, the ninth (ninth!) Sundae Film Awards. It was a pretty weird year for film, but Dean and I found plenty of films that we loved and loved writing about. Some of our winners were also up for Oscars, some of them were up for Razzies. Some of them were overlooked by losers and philistines. We’re right, though. Check ‘em out, give it a read, celebrate the movies.
I have a new article at Crooked Marquee about The Sure Thing, Rob Reiner’s second feature, for its fortieth anniversary this week. A preview:
It’s easy to forget when he hasn’t directed a good movie in thirty years, but Rob Reiner had a 1980s as good as Francis Ford Coppola had a 1970s. His 1984 directorial debut, This Is Spinal Tap, is one of the funniest films ever made, and in the next five years, he helmed all-time best-of-their-genre contenders across coming-of-age drama (Stand By Me), fantasy adventure (The Princess Bride), and romantic comedy (When Harry Met Sally…). It’s a deck so stacked with beloved classics that a precious film got lost in the shuffle. His sophomore feature, The Sure Thing – released forty years ago this week – is a forgotten masterpiece.
Roger Ebert dubbed The Sure Thing “a small miracle.” Ebert’s review, like many on the film’s release, favourably compares its emotional sophistication to teen sex comedies like Porky’s. “One of the unique things about the movie is that the characters show a normal shyness about sex,” Ebert writes, unlike “most movie teenagers” who are “not shy, not insecure, not modest, and occasionally not human.” From the present, it sounds like he’s overstating the ubiquity of Porky’s-style sex comedies – The Sure Thing came out just weeks after The Breakfast Club, which is razor-focused on the internal emotional lives of its sometimes shy, insecure, modest and always human teenage characters. What makes The Sure Thing unique is how it bridges the insurmountable gap between Porky’s and Pretty in Pink. It is, as Jasper Sharp writes for the BFI, “sassy yet never bawdy and sentimental while never mawkish.” Its teenage characters have sex, not as fodder for dirty jokes, but as part of their complex emotional lives. It is a film that bridges, and whose characters must bridge, the gap between sex and love.
You can read the rest of the piece here. I hope you enjoying reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
The most recent episode of The Sundae Presents is a tribute to the late, great David Lynch, one of both my and Dean’s favourite directors. I got Dean to watch a Lynch he hadn’t seen, The Straight Story, and we had a great conversation about what Lynch called his most experimental movie.
Listen and subscribe on:
Oh, by the way, it’s Dr. Ciara Moloney now. I passed my viva without corrections. Pretty dope.
I accept that you’ll mostly use “Dr” sarcastically when pointing out my many typos and mispronunciations.
parting recs
Watch: A Francis Veber comedy movie about Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu accidentally becoming a cute little family. Probably Les Fugitifs.
Listen: Street Legal by Bob Dylan. Eat your heart out, Neil Diamond!
Read: I’m reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and if you enjoy a spot of silly nonsense, you should check it out. I’m on volume two and he hasn’t gotten around to his birth yet. Some all-timer good Catholic jokes, also.
Check out otherwise: This YouTube video about how no films made today look as beautiful as The Parent Trap (1998).
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