The Bad and the Beautiful: Vincente Minnelli

It's around 10:30 on August 28, 2011.  I am writing this a few hours before leaving for graduate school at NYU - Tisch.  I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't terrified.  Thankfully, I have just finished Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful.  Films like these remind me why I wanted to get into film in the first place.  They energize, motivate, and provide me with some small sense of reassurance that maybe, just maybe, I can make it out there in the film industry.  Like many great films, The Bad and the Beautiful is about the film industry itself.  Kirk Douglas plays Jonathan Shield, the son of a notorious Hollywood film-maker who was so hated that mourners had to be hired for his funeral.  Jonathon is determined to make the Shield name famous again.  So he becomes a big name Hollywood producer.  He climbs the Hollywood ladder through his associations with three people: screenwriter James Lee Bartlow, movie star Georgia Lorrison , and director Fred Amiel.  He gives them all great careers, but he betrays them all in the name of his own ambition.  His pride gets the best of him when he fires the director of his most recent film and creates a clunker that bankrupts him.  Now, adrift in Paris, he desperately calls the three of his lost friends, begging them for another chance.  The Bad and the Beautiful is one of the most intelligent movies about Hollywood that I have ever seen, ranking up there with Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve.  It stares directly into Hollywood's vices, problems, and triumphs.  It is both a celebration and condemnation of the film industry.  It is a story of hope, challenge, and eventual redemption.  It is just the film that a scared young film student like myself needed to see the night before leaving for graduate school.

10/10