Tag Archives: Blue Velvet

Let’s Second Guess The Academy: Best Picture 1986

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet

Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet

Last week, we considered whether or not Out of Africa deserved the title of best picture of 1985.  As of this writing, the votes would seem to indicate that most of you feel that it did not.

For this week, let’s jump ahead one year to 1986.  According to the Academy, the five best films of the year were:

1) Children of a Lesser God, an adaptation of play about an angry deaf girl and the teacher who falls in love with her,

2) Hannah and Her Sisters, a Woody Allen film about three sisters and the neurotic people they know,

3) The Mission, a film about Jesuit missionaries in South America that also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes,

4) Room With A View, James Ivory’s super romantic adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel,

and finally, the winner,

5) Platoon, Oliver Stone’s autobiographical film about the Viet Nam war.

Unlike Out of Africa, Platoon has remained a fairly respected winner.  Still, was Platoon actually the best film of 1986?  If I had been a member of the Academy back in 1986, I would have been torn between A Room With A View and Hannah and Her Sisters with my final vote going to Room With A View.  How about you?

Now, here comes the fun part.  Let’s say that Platoon turned out to be a disaster.  Let’s say that Room With A View never made it over to American theaters and maybe Woody Allen decided to retire early.  Let’s say that none of the best picture nominees had been eligible to be nominated.  Which five films would have nominated in their place?

You can vote for up to five films and yes, write-ins are accepted!

(I voted for Blue Velvet, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, Betty Blue, and Something Wild.)

Scenes I Love: Blue Velvet (dir. by David Lynch)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

From David Lynch’s 1986 “mystery” Blue Velvet comes this scene.  Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) visits Ben (Dean Stockwell), who, we’ve been told previously, is “one suave fucker.”  Ben proceeds to prove it by “performing” In Dreams.  On just the basis of sheer perversity, this is one of the greatest scenes in film history.  Also appearing in this scene — the daughter of Ingrid Bergman (Isabella Rossellini), an actor who would play bad husbands on not only Sex and the City but Desperate Housewives as well (Kyle MacLachlan), an actor who had previously appeared in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and would later show up in The Two Towers (Brad Dourif), and my very distant cousin, the late, great Jack Nance.

(Jack is the little man with the mustache and the hat.  He had the title role in Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead.)

Dino De Laurentiis, R.I.P.

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I read earlier that film producer Dino De Laurentiis died on Wednesday.  He was 91 years old and he either produced or helped to finance over a 150 movies.  He started his career with Federico Fellini and went on to produce two of the iconic pop art films of the 60s, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella and Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik.  Then in the 70s he went through the most infamous stage of his career when he produced several overblown “event” films like the 1976 remake of King Kong.  However, even while De Laurentiis was devoting his time and effort to critically reviled attempts at spectacle, he was also supporting the visions of independent directors like David Lynch.  In the 21st Century, De Laurentiis was probably best known for producing the Hannibal Lecter films.

De Laurentiis, born in Naples, was a Southern Italian and, not surprisingly, was one of those legendary, larger-than-life moguls who built his career walking on the thin line between the Mainstream and the Grindhouse.  Hollywood is run by people who try to be De Laurentiis but De Laurentiis was the real thing. 

Dino De Laurentiis, R.I.P.

(On a personal note, De Laurentiis produced one of my favorite films of all time, Bound.  And I’m a fourth-Southern Italian myself.  Southern Italians are the best.)