Only three films have won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress at the Academy Awards: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Silence of the Lambs, and It Happened One Night. It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra and written by Robert Riskin, was released in February 1934, and it remains one of the best Great Depression-era escapist romantic comedies.

Ellie Andrews, played by Claudette Colbert, is a rich, bored socialite who has married a man her father disapproves of, mostly for the sake of having something to do. After her father tries to force her to annul the marriage, she literally jumps ship — straight over the side of her father’s yacht. Ellie hits the road in disguise, with a grand plan to make it all the way from Miami to NYC to reunite with her beau. On the bus she boards, she meets a journalist named Peter Warne, played by Clark Gable, who decides to help her in the hopes of breaking the big story about the missing socialite. Along the way, of course, they fall in love, and lots of hijinks ensue.

The film especially picks up after Ellie and Peter get off the bus and are forced to make their own way north. Cue an especially amusing hitch-hiking scene and the always entertaining predicament in which two people who ostensibly dislike each other must share a room under the guise of being a married couple. Like I said, hijinks. The jokes hold up pretty well, and there’s even a hint of a class critique: yes, Peter, a man of the people, falls in love with a wealthy socialite, but only after she’s (temporarily) in almost dire financial straits. Although the first half of the film very much treats Ellie like a naive little girl, it eventually allows her to come into her own as a character who is more than capable of keeping up with the sarcastic but golden-hearted Peter. That shift in their relationship also allows Colbert and Gable’s chemistry to shine through. If you’re looking for a warm and charming film to get you through the cold and dark month of February, look no further than It Happened One Night.

Revisited: It Happened One Night was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who doesn’t love a good 12 year anniversary? It’s not the nice, round decade marker, but the hour hand has made it all the way around the clock, which seems as good a time as any to reevaluate.

The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America was released on Oct. 3, 2006, and was one of the best rock albums of the decade. I say this as someone who too regularly bemoans the marginalization of rock-n-roll in popular culture, so feel free to take my opinions with a grain of salt — but I am correct. The album is a bar rock concept album about three sad people named Holly, Gideon, and Charlemagne, but even more than that, it’s an album centered around the complicated, emotional experience that is youth. The first track, “Stuck Between Stations,” opens with the lines that give the album its title: “There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” I understand that referencing On the Road in the lyrics of any song is pretentious at best, but “Stuck Between Stations” rules as an ode to the disaffected and sometimes tragic nature of youth.

The other songs on the album to which I find myself most regularly returning are “First Night” and “You Can Make Him Like You.” “First Night” is a softer, piano-driven meditation on the troubles of Charlemagne, Gideon, and Holly, the three main boys and girls of America. It falls near the middle of the album and provides a moment of rest within the neurotic energy coursing throughout the entirety of the song list. “You Can Make Him Like You” is probably my favorite song on Boys and Girls in America and it’s a short — but not sweet — glimpse into the melancholy possibilities of being at once inadequate and invincible. “There’s always other boys / There’s always other boyfriends / There’s always other boys / And you can make him like you.” The song is upbeat but not optimistic, and I love it so much. Every song on the album is a little bit like that. They seem to say, Sometimes it’s great to be alive and sometimes it’s scary and not fun, but maybe rock-n-roll can save us.

My brother maybe made a good point when he remarked that it’s a good thing Tinder didn’t exist when this album came out, since a certain kind of indie boy would certainly overuse lyrics from the album in his Tinder bio. On the other hand, how many indie boys actually listen to music that involves both drums and electric guitars? In this case, we’ll never know! But Boys and Girls in America continues to rock on, so I’ll catch all of you contemplating the nature of what it is to be young at the bar down the street.

Anniversary Blurb: Boys & Girls in America was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who doesn’t love a good 12 year anniversary? It’s not the nice, round decade marker, but the hour hand has made it all the way around the clock, which seems as good a time as any to reevaluate.

The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America was released on Oct. 3, 2006, and was one of the best rock albums of the decade. I say this as someone who too regularly bemoans the marginalization of rock-n-roll in popular culture, so feel free to take my opinions with a grain of salt — but I am correct. The album is a bar rock concept album about three sad people named Holly, Gideon, and Charlemagne, but even more than that, it’s an album centered around the complicated, emotional experience that is youth. The first track, “Stuck Between Stations,” opens with the lines that give the album its title: “There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” I understand that referencing On the Road in the lyrics of any song is pretentious at best, but “Stuck Between Stations” rules as an ode to the disaffected and sometimes tragic nature of youth.

The other songs on the album to which I find myself most regularly returning are “First Night” and “You Can Make Him Like You.” “First Night” is a softer, piano-driven meditation on the troubles of Charlemagne, Gideon, and Holly, the three main boys and girls of America. It falls near the middle of the album and provides a moment of rest within the neurotic energy coursing throughout the entirety of the song list. “You Can Make Him Like You” is probably my favorite song on Boys and Girls in America and it’s a short — but not sweet — glimpse into the melancholy possibilities of being at once inadequate and invincible. “There’s always other boys / There’s always other boyfriends / There’s always other boys / And you can make him like you.” The song is upbeat but not optimistic, and I love it so much. Every song on the album is a little bit like that. They seem to say, Sometimes it’s great to be alive and sometimes it’s scary and not fun, but maybe rock-n-roll can save us.

My brother maybe made a good point when he remarked that it’s a good thing Tinder didn’t exist when this album came out, since a certain kind of indie boy would certainly overuse lyrics from the album in his Tinder bio. On the other hand, how many indie boys actually listen to music that involves both drums and electric guitars? In this case, we’ll never know! But Boys and Girls in America continues to rock on, so I’ll catch all of you contemplating the nature of what it is to be young at the bar down the street.

Anniversary Blurb: Boys & Girls in America was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to Calcio e Pepe, where we discuss all things soccer (calcio) and all things food (e pepe). Our name may be Italian, but this week we’re looking to Spain, where another installment of an iconic rivalry is brewing.

With all the crazy shit going on in the world right now, including the very real fact that we may be living in the worldbuilding preamble to a climate apocalypse movie, it’s easy to forget about the two things that really matter: European soccer (we are Americans and will not be referring to it as “football,” thank you very much) and delicious food.

This Sunday at 11:15 a.m., Real Madrid and FC Barcelona face off at Camp Nou, Barcelona’s home stadium, in what has historically been one of the fiercest club football matches of the year. In Spain, the day of El Clasico has the feel of a holiday, except with more bad blood and road flares. Abroad, as many as 400 million people watch the game on television. Almost no one is a neutral when El Clasico comes along. Whatever your main team is, you’ve almost certainly got a preference. Madrid-Barcelona is one of those delightful rivalries where the intensity of the hatred is matched by the quality of the football: Madrid has won 33 Spanish championships since La Liga was founded in 1929, Barcelona 25; Madrid has won 13 European championships, and Barcelona 5. Both are among the richest, most popular, and most talented teams (of any sport) in the world. None of that precludes good old-fashioned shithousery, like the iconic 2011 fight where then-Madrid manager Jose Mourinho calmly poked then-Barcelona assistant coach Tito Vilanova in the eye while players brawled around them.

For much of the twentieth century, what separated the two teams’ images was clear enough. During the years of dictatorship, Franco favored Madrid for political reasons, as an example of Spanish nationalist glory (“Real” means “Royal” in Spanish, after all). It didn’t hurt Franco’s cause that Madrid won five European Cups back-to-back in the 1950s. In contrast, Barcelona was seen as scrappier, more anti-establishment: the team has been and continues to be closely identified with Catalan nationalism, so rooting for them was once a genuine act of resistance against Franco’s attempts to homogenize Spain under Castilian language and culture.

Well into the 21st century, Barcelona was still generally considered the good guy, even if they were a little annoying about it. They were defined by homegrown canterano players (i.e. from the academy, like farm teams in baseball) rather than by expensive, glitzy galactico signings (pricey players, often foreign, who were already superstars for other major teams). Barcelona’s lead man was the quiet, unassuming Lionel Messi rather than the brash, arrogant Cristiano Ronaldo; they either had no shirt sponsor, or their shirt sponsor was UNICEF, and they paid for the privilege. In the late aughts through the early 2010s, Barcelona played an untouchable, incredibly influential tiki-taka style of short-and-quick-passing football that centered around dominating possession, defined by players like Andres Iniesta and Xavi and enabled by Messi’s explosive genius. They won a treble — three trophies in one season — in 2009, and then again in 2015, the only team to have done so twice.

In 2018, the tides have ever so slightly shifted. Madrid has won the last three European Champions League titles, the only team to have done that. Barcelona now has about as many galacticos as Madrid and their shirt advertises Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant. Xavi and Iniesta have retired. This will also be the first Clasico in eleven years without either Messi or Ronaldo — Messi is out of the game for three weeks with a fractured arm and Ronaldo has transferred to Juventus. (Ronaldo has also been accused of raping an American woman, Kathryn Mayorga, who recently went public with her story. This is an allegation too serious and important and horrific to appear only in the context of a piece about a soccer rivalry, but we would be remiss to ignore it — as so much of soccer media has.)

The stakes of the game are high, though. Barcelona is top of the table while Madrid languishes in seventh place, but it’s early on in the season. Only four points separate the two. If Barcelona wins, that widens the gap to seven, but if Madrid wins, they’ll squeeze the gap down to one point — and then, as the saying goes, hay liga.

To prepare for this momentous occasion (Barcelona and Madrid only meet twice this season) and because the one thing we love more than raucous sideline brawls is consuming delicious food, we’re going to celebrate by putting together some regionally-inspired cuisines to eat while we watch the match. And so should you! Based on our meticulous research, for those rooting for Barcelona (both of us), you’re on theme if anything you make involves cod. The Catalonians eat a lot of cod, or so we’ve learned from the Internet, which would never lie to us. Maybe try esqueixada, or salt cod salad, which is fun to say and funner to spell (although it features raw fish, so if, like us, you have a $20 weekly grocery budget that you spend at Stop and Shop, maybe be a wee bit careful). The Catalans are also big into canned fish like sardines and anchovies; only indulge if you plan on watching the game alone in a smell-proof room.

If you don’t want fish then try making pa amb tomàquet, which is basically glorified garlic bread spread with a thin layer of fresh tomatoes and drizzled with olive oil and salt. It’s a Barcelona staple (even served in the Barcelona youth academy cafeteria, rumor has it), a central motif of Catalan identity, and so delicious that we will be eating this every day for the rest of our lives. If you want to make something more involved than that then try la bomba, which is a potato croquette served with either a garlic white sauce or a spicy red sauce. The dish is inspired by the grenades thrown by resistance fighters in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, so this dish is literally anti-fascist and therefore good praxis!

If you happen to be rooting for Real Madrid instead (don’t talk to us), then you should make huevos rotos, a fried potato dish, tossed in olive oil and salt, and topped with an over easy egg. We will not be eating this meal this week, but we will eat it the next time we are rooting for Atlético Madrid, because it sounds [bleep]ing delicious and also well within our limited culinary abilities. For something even easier than that, just eat manchego cheese! It’s delicious and very Spanish! Get some from the “fancy” cheese section at Stop and Shop, the one near the bakery — or Elm City Market if you’re feeling ~fluUUuush with cash~. We take our job here very seriously. Ole-le, Ola-la, ser del Barça és el millor que hi ha!

Calcio e Pepe: El Clasico edition was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s easy to get lost in this summer’s romantic comedy releases, though some were better received than others. It may not have made the same splash on Twitter as some of the summer’s releases, but Juliet, Naked was a joy to watch. Directed by Jesse Peretz, the movie is based on one of Nick Hornby’s lesser known novels (but don’t worry, it still features delightfully dysfunctional characters).

Annie (Rose Byrne) is stuck in her small English hometown in a long-term relationship with Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), an obsessive fanatic of Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), a particularly elusive American musician. Annie can’t stand the music, and by this point in their relationship, she can barely stand Duncan. In a fit of rage after a singularly nasty fight (over — what else? — Tucker Crowe), Annie posts an angry comment on Duncan’s fansite message board and receives an email from the elusive folk singer himself. This unlikely set-up leads to a truly charming transatlantic romance in which every character has to figure out what it means to finally grow up.

Tucker and Annie make for an unexpectedly sweet couple, which is especially surprising in light of Tucker’s history of disastrous relationships and neglectful parenting. The first time Annie and Tucker meet face to face, they’re surrounded by every member of his family yelling in a hospital room — an auspicious beginning that blooms into a mature and thoughtful depiction of an adult relationship. I walked out of the movie theater feeling buoyant with possibility. Go watch Juliet, Naked if you get the chance.

Juliet, Naked was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The story of the troubled artist is nothing new. Vincent Van Gogh cut his own ear off, after all, and Edgar Allen Poe died destitute in the streets of Baltimore. Paul Cézanne was no exception to the trope. Cézanne et Moi, directed by Danièle Thompson, paints a searing, although sometimes disappointing portrait of the friendship between the eponymous artist and writer Emile Zola, which lasted for much of their lives but ultimately ended in heartbreak.

Cézanne et Moi uses the conversation that definitively ends Cezanne and Zola’s friendship as a backbone for the narrative structure of the film. In some ways, I was reminded of the musical Merrily We Roll Along while watching this film. Both pieces play a similar narrative game that starts with the dissolution of a friendship and works backwards. Merrily We Roll Along progressively rewinds back to the very beginning, to the moment the three main characters meet. Instead of rewinding, the film intercuts this crucial conversation between flashbacks to their initial meeting and progressive flash-forwards, until the narrative catches up to said conversation and eventually moves past it. This construction mostly works, although it does have the effect of occasionally choppy pacing as we jump across large periods of time in their lives.

When done right, heartbreak hurts to watch, and this film can be gut-wrenching. The convincing portrait of a tenuous and ill-fated friendship is the film’s true strength. The pain shared by Cézanne (Guillaume Gallienne) and Zola (Guillaume Canet) is palpable. In the first scene of the movie, Cézanne and Zola see each other for the first time in two years (although the audience doesn’t know the context) and immediately Gallienne and Canet reveal, in the hesitation on their faces, the tension radiating from their eyes, and their stiff body movements, the extensive and painful history between the two men. That moment best encapsulates the tension that this film revolves around: that of a friendship between two people so constantly threatened by each other that the only way of escape guarantees mutually assured destruction.

A lovely moment of circularity reveals itself at the end of the film. Cézanne brings a woman named Alexandrine (although she goes by Gabrielle) to the bar to meet his friends, and Zola falls in love with her nearly the minute he sees her. After a falling out over her, Cézanne quietly delivers a line that will come to haunt both of them: “In love, you forgive betrayal. With friendship, it’s harder.” Flash forward some thirty-or-so years and a perceived betrayal of a different kind ultimately ends their friendship. Again, Zola is cast in the role of the betrayer and Cézanne in the role of the betrayed, but the film also highlights Cézanne’s tendency to be overly sensitive, though he’ll never openly admit it. The situation cannot be read as an instance of miscommunication, but instead as an instance of willful misunderstanding, one that ultimately comes down on Cézanne’s shoulders alone. There’s a reason this film is titled Cézanne et Moi and not Zola et Moi or Cézanne et Zola. Cézanne plays the role of the catalyst in everything.

Cézanne was an impossible man to get along with. The two people who loved him most, Zola and Hortense (the woman with whom he would have a child and eventually marry) barely knew him and often barely liked him. Although Cézanne’s general unfriendliness shines through clearly, Thompson fails to critically look at Cézanne’s blatant misogyny and disregard for the people around him. He strings his mistress along for years before he eventually marries her. According to this film, he was an alcoholic and possibly an abusive one, but the film treats that as a footnote and nothing more. By only examining the relationship between Zola and Cézanne, the picture drawn of the two men unsatisfactorily glosses over their glaring personality flaws. Both men slept around with impunity, and while there could have been an interesting social critique of two of the most influential French figures of the nineteenth century, the troublesome aspects of both men go largely unexamined.

At times in the film, the plot is propelled by overly-convenient perchance situations. Zola frequently just happens to overhear Cézanne saying something about him, or vice versa. Besides being probably unfactual  (although this film is a biopic and not a documentary, so some wiggle room can be allowed on that front), those interactions cheapen the legitimate drama in the story of these two men. Using the plot mechanism of the overheard conversation isn’t just lazy—such moments actively jolted me out of the world of the film because they felt so untrue.

The final scene strikes a false note with its delivery. Cézanne and Zola no longer talk. The friendship they once had no longer exists—Cézanne made sure of that. Nevertheless, there is no one in the world who Cézanne loves more than Zola, or at least that is what the film wants us to believe. Their fraught relationship was always going to veer into tragedy, and so it does. But fast-forward past the fateful conversation around which the film revolves to 1899, when Zola arrives in Aix-en-Provence—the hometown of both men—where Cézanne still lives in near reclusion. For a moment, we think that this is it: the moment of reconciliation. Instead, we get another cheap eavesdropping situation where Cézanne hears Zola trash-talking him to the mayor and decides not to contact him after all. This moment almost certainly never happened, as there is no record of any contact between the two men after 1888. The film ends with Cézanne walking through the hills in despair, after which title cards informing viewers what happens to the two men materialize on top of a landscape that transforms from the actual scenery into the paintings that Cézanne made of the landscape. The whole thing feels overwrought and too neatly wrapped up. The movie takes us through nearly their entire lives; by the time it concludes, Cézanne and Zola don’t have much left to do before they die, and so the conclusion title cards feel even more unnecessary and silly than the end-credits-explanation trope usually does. The film would have been better served by an ending that embraced its own lack of resolution, since the real relationship between the two men ended in just that way.

Every landscape shot in this film is rendered beautifully. It may be a common standard that movies about artists have to have good cinematography and art direction, but Cézanne et Moi does not disappoint in that respect. Numerous scenes give us views worthy of Cézanne’s paintings themselves, which is certainly part of the point, since we so often see him painting in those very landscapes we are supposed to admire. The film feels much like a painting in that way. On the other hand, the smaller, more personal moments are a bit jarring in their cinematographic style because many of those shots are hand-held and shaky, but it’s a fitting contrast to the stable, picturesque panoramas of the French countryside. The conflict between shots reflects the conflict between Cézanne’s messy and small personal life and the great works that he created.

Despite the problems of Cézanne et Moi, the film paints a compelling portrait of two interesting and complicated figures. By the nature of their personalities, Zola always comes off as the smaller presence in the room even though he finds more success artistically in his lifetime than Cézanne does. This film makes a case for the necessity of recognizing the value in other people. Great passion without humanity only ends in tragedy. Maybe that’s art, but is it worth it? This film tries to, but ultimately cannot answer that for us.

This Monday afternoon, Apr. 3, about thirty people showed up to the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium to hear four film critics talk. Though all four critics were male, and did not address the gender imbalance, their discussion presented a healthy difference in opinions as they debated the state of film criticism today. The panel, organized by Yale film professors Dudley Andrews and Charles Musser, was split into two parts: one focusing on international cinema and one focusing on American cinema.

The first section was a lecture given by Jean-Michel Frodon, a French film critic and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, the most important film journal of the second half of the twentieth century. Inappropriately titled “The International Situation: Iran and China in Focus,” Frodon had quite a bit to say about the current situation in film criticism, but didn’t speak about Iran or China at all. Instead, most of Frodon’s commentary focused on his native France, and its strong historical tradition of film criticism. Specifically, he reflected on his tenure at Cahiers du cinéma and his attempts to bring it smoothly into the 21st century.

Frodon emphasized the need to distinguish between writing that critiques film and the actual profession of a film critic. Very few people manage to make a living giving their opinions about film, but many more people write amateur film criticism; Frodon does not see bloggers as film critics. People have always talked about movies with their friends and, with the advent of the Internet, moving that discussion into a more visible sphere is easier than ever. Jackie Ferro, BR ’17, a Film and Media Studies major agrees that “anyone with a WordPress account can self-identify as a critic.” Your blogger suitemate probably cannot provide the same insight or scope that a professional critic can, though. “People rely on criticism to cut through the impossibly dense Netflix feed,” Ferro says. Frodon goes even further, in his belief that because the Internet has made many films more accessible than ever, film criticism is more important today than in the past.

The second section was more of an actual panel. Titled “The American Situation,” it featured Wesley Morris of the New York Times (and formerly Grantland, may it rest in peace), Bilge Ebiri of the Village Voice, and Gerald Peary of The Arts Fuse. Both Morris and Ebiri graduated from Yale College in the 1990s, and Peary has been a film critic for various Boston publications since 1978.

Their discussion focused on the role of film criticism in American culture and the ways that criticism is changing in the 21st century. Unlike France, the US has never had an all-consuming collective passion for cinema, so film criticism has never held an integral cultural role. Nonetheless, they agreed with Frodon that the Internet makes it easier than ever to write about film and have people see it, but harder than ever to get paid for that writing. Morris specifically focused on the ways the social media now allows for greater interaction between critics and readers. All three agreed that aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes are just one aspect, and not the be-all end-all, of film criticism in this decade.  A number score eliminates the nuance on which the best, thoughtful film criticism thrives. Even great movies have flaws, and even terrible movies usually have some redeeming qualities, but numbers cannot illuminate them for us; only critics can.

The consensus in the room seemed to be that film criticism is alive and well, even if, as Ebiri said, “staff film critics at print papers are like the Supreme Court. There are like nine of them and all you can do is wait for one of them to die.” For all the aspiring film critics out there, the going is tough, but not entirely hopeless. As Peary said near the end of the panel, “Critics are the canary in the coal mine for America.” There is value in expertise and there is value in passion. Film criticism will keep moving forward as long as people still care about film.