Best Films of 2022

Lists of the year's top films often appear at this time of the year. Since I am too old to understand or follow today's films with their special effects and constant cutting, I present my own list of outstanding films that I have watched from my DVD collection this year. I prefer DVDs because they often come with commentaries and other special features, In addition, they are usually closed captioned for the hearing impaired. 

            

Brief Encounter: This 1945 British film is widely regarded as one of the best films of all time. It is the story of an affair between a suburban English housewife, and a married doctor who meet accidentally at a railway terminal. Playwright Noel Coward adapted his own play for the screen, and David Lean directed. The film stars Celia Johnson, one of the UK’s greatest actresses, along with Trevor Howard.  

    Enchanted April: Stifled British wives Lottie (Josie Lawrence) and Rose       (MirandaRichardson) rent an Italian villa for a husbandless vacation. Sharing the retreat are acerbic widow Mrs. Fisher (Oscar nominee Joan Plowright) and socialite Caroline d’Este (Polly Walker). The four spend a month savoring newfound freedom and the opportunity for self-discovery. This film also features Michael Kitchen, Alfred Molina, and Jim Broadbent at the outset of their notable film careers.    

The Queen: Famed British actress Helen Mirren stars in this 2006 dramatization of the events following upon the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Mirren claimed that she had to consider herself as painting a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in order to take on such a difficult role.  Her portrayal won a well-deserved Academy award for Best Actress. 

A Foreign Field: This British film features an acclaimed international cast including Alec Guinness, Leo McKern, Jeanne Moreau, Loren Bacall, John Randolph, and Geraldine Chaplin. Two British war vets meet an American vet when all three return to Normandy on the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Old rivalries resurface, particularly when two of the men discover they are searching for the same lost love. This disparate band of survivors eventually finds common ground in the memory of what they lost on that fateful day in 1944. 

Mid-August Lunch:  Gianni Di Gregorio stars in and directs this 2008 charming tale from Italy of great food, feisty old ladies, and unlikely friendships. The setting is a largely deserted Rome on the national holiday, Ferragosto, during the dog days of summer when most Romans have fled the city’s heat for the mountains or the shore. Four elderly ladies have to spend the holiday together sharing a sweltering apartment.

The Way. Martin Sheen stars in  a powerful and inspirational 2010 film about family, friends, and the challenges we face while navigating through life. Sheen plays an American doctor who travels to France after receiving the news of the death of his estranged son. Rather than return home, he decides to embark on the historical pilgrimage, “the Way of St. James”, to honor his son’s desire to finish the journey.  Directed by Emilio Estevez, Sheen’s real life son.

Twilight Samurai:  This 2002 film, set in a changing Japan of the late nineteenth century, takes a modern look at the traditional Samurai story. Hiroyuki Sanada, one of Japan’s leading film stars, plays a low ranking, poverty stricken samurai trying to support his family. However, he is caught in the shifting turmoil of the times and ordered to confront and kill a renegade warrior. The film won twelve Japanese Film Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. 

The Son’s Room: In this 2001 Italian film Nanni Moretti plays a psychotherapist who thinks he has all the answers until an unthinkable tragedy hits home and turns his life upside down. Moretti also directed this film that won great critical acclaim as well as the Best Picture award at the Cannes Film Festival. 

The Holly and the Ivy: Celia Johnson, Ralph Richardson, and Margaret Leighton star in this 1952 British holiday film. A widowed minister is torn between the needs of his family and his parishioners. The annual Christmas reunion of the minister’s family exposes long simmering family tensions until they all rediscover the true meaning of Christmas.

 

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Holiday Film Favorites 2022

Each year the Christmas season brings back to TV all the traditional holiday classics from Miracle on 34^thStreet on Thanksgiving Day to Frank Capra’s beloved It’s a Wonderful Life, right before Christmas. It’s hard for me to watch the latter anymore because I cry too much, but here are some other favorites for holiday viewing.

The Shop Around the Corner: This film premiered on January 12, 1940 but must be placed with the great films associated with 1939, the “annus mirabilis” of Hollywood’s Golden age. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, it received no Academy awards and appears to have been a box-office flop. Today, it has become an enduring holiday classic. The wit and subtlety of the famed “Lubitsch Touch” is clearly evident. Lubitsch turns All-American boy Jimmy Stewart, and co-star Margaret Sullavan into believable clerks in a Budapest dry-goods store who unwittingly fall in love via mail. Both actors gave unforgettable performances but neither gained even an Academy award nomination. The rest of the cast was equally fine, especially Felix Brassart as a co-worker, and William Tracy as a savvy delivery boy. The film ends fittingly as the two lovers are united on Christmas Eve as snowflakes fall on The Shop Around the Corner. 

I’ll Be Seeing You: This 1944 film is a Holiday drama with film noir trappings. Two strangers meet on a train, but she is a woman with a past and he is a soldier suffering from war wounds, both physical and mental. She is travelling home to spend the holidays with family, and he, with no particular destination in mind, gets off at her stop in hope of seeing her again . The film stars Ginger Rogers, who turned to dramatic roles after the break-up of her great dancing partnership with Fred Astaire. Rogers had won a Best Actress award in 1941 for her performance in Kitty Foyle, but I believe she is much better in this film. Joseph Cotton, fresh off his roles in Citizen Kane, and The Magnificent Ambersons, is equally fine. Director William Dieterle not only brings out the chemistry between the two stars, but also gets the most out of a fine supporting cast, including a teen-age Shirley Temple. The film’s theme song, the popular wartime melody, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” helped make it a huge hit at the box-office, but it is largely forgotten today. 

The Holly and the Ivy. Celia Johnson, Ralph Richardson, and Margaret Leighton star in this 1952 British holiday film. A widowed minister is torn between the needs of his family and his parishioners, but his three grown children must decide between their own needs and those of their aging father.  All comes to a head on Christmas Eve as the annual family reunion exposes the long simmering family tensions. Based on a hit London play, this film is not as well known as less serious holiday films.  

The Big Little Jesus: Dragnet was a hugely popular TV series that premiered in 1951. It’s film noir trappings and low key, realism made it a long-running police procedural, perhaps the most influential of all time. In its third season, it featured a Christmas special, entitled, “The Big Little Jesus.” Two police detectives, played by Jack Webb, the show’s creator and star, and Ben Alexander,  receive a call on Christmas Eve to investigate the theft of a figure of the baby Jesus from a creche in a largely Hispanic church in downtown Los Angeles. 

The half-hour episode begins with the familiar Dragnet theme over a panorama of Los Angeles, followed by the famous opening lines: “This is the city, I work here, I’m a cop.” The detectives dutifully track down the leads and interview the ordinary suspects in typical Dragnet style, but to no avail. Finally, they return to the church with the bad news that the beloved figure of the baby Jesus will not be part of the Christmas celebration.  Before every episode, it is claimed that “the story we are about to see is true.” If that is correct, this true story is far more moving than most of the other favorite fictional holiday stories. It can be seen on YouTube.

Radio Days: My favorite New Year’s film has long been Swing Time, the greatest of all the 1930s musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The beautiful dancing, the great songs, and the look at a world of class and elegance that has long disappeared makes it a wonderful way to usher in the New Year. However, I would place Woody Allen’s Radio Daysright up there as required New Year’s viewing. Allen wrote and directed this 1987 film that provides a nostalgic and often hilarious view of the world of his youth, a world that coincided with the glory days of radio back in the late 30s and early 40s.

Three Jewish sisters and their families live together with their elderly parents in a large house in the Jewish section of Rockaway, a remote beach community in New York’s borough of Queens. The story is narrated by Allen as the world in which these people live is seen through memories of his boyhood. Although the extended family and its life are far removed from glitzy Manhattan, they are connected with its life and culture through the radio which created a common culture for the extremely diverse city. 

Julie Kavner, Diane Wiest, and Rene Lippin play the three sisters. I grew up in Queens back then, and these three women reminded me of my mother’s three sisters who lived with their families in my Italian grandparent’s home. We tuned in to the same radio shows, read the same newspapers with their comics, and listened to the same melodies featured on the soundtrack of Radio Days. At the finale, the film takes us to a Manhattan night club where revelers are ushering in the year 1944 in the midst of World War II. Diane Keaton sings, “You’d Be So Nice to come Home To.”

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Chess and Basketball

 I learned to play Chess as a boy but never had much of a chance to play until I retired 15 years ago. Since then I have been an avid, if average, player, playing every Wednesday with a group of similar players at our local Senior center. Despite the common perception, I have come to believe that chess is a team sport. 

We all have the image of the solitary chess master hovering over the board and lost in thought while contemplating the next move. But to my mind the chess player is the coach and the real players are the pieces on the board. It doesn’t take much experience to realize that if these pieces don’t work together, they will not win.

It is the coach’s job first to get his players into the game. In other words, they must be placed out in the field of play as quickly as possible. In chess it is called development. The major pieces (knights, bishops, rooks) are more powerful than pawns and constitute the starting team. Not only must the coach put them into play quickly, he must place them properly so that they cooperate and defend one another. If they can’t work together, the game is inevitably lost. 

Even the Queen, the most powerful piece on the board, cannot capture the opponent’ s King by herself. She needs the support of at least one other piece to checkmate. Only the opponent’s Queen can confront her power alone, but she can be neutralized and sometimes captured by being double or even tripled teamed by less powerful pieces working together.

Team work is the key to success in most sports. Basketball, with only five players on the court, is no exception.  Despite the magnitude of the stars in the NBA, it is still a team game. Some think that Cleveland’s LeBron James is the best to ever play the game, but the LA Lakers are struggling this year as a team. The phenomenal success of  the Golden State Warriors has been due to the way in which they have integrated super-stars into their team concept. 

The NCAA collegiate season has just begun. Interestingly, the most successful college team in the past decade has been the University of Connecticut’s Women’s team. It is true that the success of the team has enabled UCONN Coach Geno Auriemma to continually recruit all-star high school athletes from all over the country. The team is usually loaded with talent and their average margin of victory often exceeds 30 points per game.

Nevertheless, Auriemma’s stature as a coach has enabled him to get his extremely talented athletes to play together as a team. I recall reading about a local high school men’s coach who urged his young studs to emulate the way the UCONN women play defense.  In other words, Auriemma has been able to get the UCONN stars to not just think of individual stats but to play defense as well as offense. A few years ago, one of the UCONN women remarked that Auriemma would find it difficult to coach men because they are so thick-headed when it comes to team play.

Even on the high school level it takes a strong coach to get young men to play together as a team. The natural desire of athletes to show their stuff is magnified these days by pressure to get college scholarships. Also, sports reporters often become star-struck and concentrate all their attention on the high scoring players and their stats. In a rare exception, an article in today's Wall Street Journal  reported on Tyler Adams, the Captain of the US Men's soccer team, who  though he scored no goals or assists in the recent victory over Iran, was the key to the team's success in making it to the final round of sixteen. "Everything this American team does in Qatar, sooner or later, runs through the heart of the midfield, Tyler Adams." 

It has often been said that legendary players like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan were able to bring out the best in their teammates. In doing so, they also won numerous championships. This is true not just in chess and basketball but in business, politics, and practically every aspect of life. It is certainly true in family life where mothers and fathers give themselves to bring out the best in their children.

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