One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

This was the second movie I saw in a row to win those five major Oscars I mentioned, and the second time one of those was a bit fishy. Louise Fletcher does a very good job playing the movie's strict authority figure Nurse Ratched, but it's hardly a lead role. Jack Nicholson's a much better fit for that kind of award, and gives probably the best performance of his that I've seen as McMurphy, a criminal who gets transferred to a mental institution, even though there might not be anything really wrong with him. I still don't quite get why he's one of his generations most beloved actors, because I feel like his whole manic persona is interesting but not particularly difficult for most good actors to pull off. But it's a good performance in the center of a movie filled with them.

Really, if nothing else, the film has a king's ransom of good actors plying their craft in one of the most easily respected ways: as an insane person. There's a variety of mental issues on display, and no one out of the group, famous or not, doesn't pull it off well. Some guys do a good job in their wheelhouse, like a very recognizable Christopher Lloyd, but a couple completely disappear into their parts and I was shocked to learn that they were in the movie after the fact. Brad Dourif is practically a teenager, also getting an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a troubled and suicidal young man, and Danny DeVito is also surprisingly invisible as Martini. Of course, Jack is the center of attention, as the movie is about how he shakes things up inside the ward after he gets admitted, and what impact if any he has on the men inside after he leaves. Another very good movie, and one that's nice to finally check off my list of shame.

Back to the Future Part III

So I guess it took me long enough to finish the trilogy. The original is a classic action comedy, and the second part feels like a dopey retread without an ending but still has enough fun moments to prevent it from being too bad. Part three is of similar quality, though it does have the nice bonus of wrapping up all the loose ends in the story that spans 130 years (We're only five years away from Marty's life in the future. I can't wait for flying cars that run on garbage!). The problem with this movie is sort of the setting, taking place mostly in the late 1800s. They do some interesting stuff with the western setting, but in general it just sort of justifies taking an entire two hours to return to the future and a lot of its best moments aren't its own. Like, it makes sense that they'd pay homage to Marty's new alias Clint Eastwood by redoing the ending of A Fistful of Dollars, but how many people are actually going to recognize that? I don't know.

In a lot of ways, it just sort of doesn't work as a time travel movie the way the first two do. In the first film, Marty and Doc Brown are constantly dealing with the ramifications of messing up the course of events, and in part two, they run all over the space-time continuum trying to undo their mistakes, but that's less of a concern here than just trying to survive long enough to get the time machine working. It's a decent steampunk western posing as science fiction. And I'm not sure it actually matters to me that the Doc got himself a lady. I don't begrudge him the happiness, but the movie would have been a whole lot simpler if he just listened to his own lectures on screwing with history. The epilogue where everything gets set right in the present and future is half satisfying and half too convenient, but the series spent its entire existence playing fast and loose with the laws of physics so it didn't bother me too much. I hate to say my enjoyment was affected by an unrelated film, but Primer just raised the time travel bar so much that a movie has to be somewhat outstandingly entertaining to get away with what Back to the Future does, and this one just wasn't really that good.