Thursday Movie Picks - All in the Family Edition: Stepfamilies

Written as part of the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You should join us - all you have to do is pick three movies that fit the week's theme and tell us about them!

This month's All in the Family edition of Thursday Movie Picks is the hardest yet... partially because I didn't plan. I already picked my favorite (evil) stepmother (Anjelica Huston in Ever After), and my favorite step-siblings (Patrick and Sam from Perks of Being a Wallflower) in previous weeks. So, that leaves me with...

Well, let's just say I had to get a LITTLE bit creative.

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) In May 1944, Ofelia and her pregnant mother travel to the country to move in with her new stepfather... who just so happens to be one of the most ruthless Captains in Franco's army. Then she wanders into the labyrinth on the Captain's property, and... well... there's this... faun... who tell Ofelia that she is the Princess Moana, lost from home for years. But in order to prove it, Ofelia must complete three tasks, each more difficult than the last. Pan's Labyrinth is del Toro's masterpiece, a fantasmagoric wonder show seamlessly intertwining the childish world of fairy tales with the all-too-real adult world of the Spanish Civil War and uprising.

Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) When teenager Juno asks her father and stepmother to sit down because she has something important to tell them, they thought it would be that she was expelled, or into hard drugs. But no, it turns out the idiot got pregnant (by Paulie Bleeker - didn't think he had it in him!), and now she's dealing with things way beyond her maturity level. There are many things I love about Juno, but the casting is probably my second favorite (after Diablo Cody's getting-even-better-as-it-ages script). They may be very staunchly middle American middle class, but wouldn't you want J.K. Simmons as your Dad and Allison Janney as your stepmom?

The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) Fraulein Maria is the worst nun ever in the history of nuns: She spends her time singing and twirling around on mountaintops when she should be inside praying, she engages in all sorts of activities outside that get her dirty and ruin her habit, and then when the Mother Abbess sends her out into the world to serve as governess to the seven children of Captain Georg von Trapp, what does the bitch do? She falls in love with the man... who is in a relationship with the stunningly fabulous Baroness Schrader. But, this being a musical (even if it does take place in Nazi Germany), the Baroness sees the writing on the wall and leaves so that the not-so-star-crossed lovers can get together and possibly add to their happy brood... although really. SEVEN children? Nobody needs that many. I wrote plenty about this a while back for Hit Me With Your Best Shot, but I will say this again: This is Julie Andrews's best performance and I always think she won an Oscar for it. She should have.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - The Sound of Music

Yay! The Film Experience's Hit Me With Your Best Shot series is back! In order to play, just select your favorite shot from the week's film, share it, and write a bit about it. It's fun, I promise!

There are two things that immediately pop into my head whenever I think of Robert Wise's Best Picture winner The Sound of Music. It seems odd that there are only two, when you consider how iconic the film has become, but I am what I am, and whenever I think of the film, I always think of that opening shot of Julie Andrews spinning on the mountaintop (a vision of pure joy matched only by Gene Kelly on the lamppost singing Singin' in the Rain) and the gazebo.

Yes, the gazebo. Not the sailor uniforms, not the clothes made from drapes. Not the marionettes, not the nuns. Not the gorgeous location shots of Vienna, not the stained glass windows of the abbey. The gazebo.

The gazebo on the von Trapp family property is where declarations of love are made. And coming out of the coldest February in memory in NYC (thanks, Mother Nature, for making my first winter living here such a delight!), and my first Valentine's Day as a singleton in eight years, I find myself needing the warmth of movie romance right now. Thankfully, The Sound of Music delivers on that front spectacularly.

Early in the film, the gazebo is the site of our first real glimpse into the character of anyone in the von Trapp family, as eldest child Liesl excuses herself from dinner to meet her paramour, letter-delivery boy Rolf. They have a lovely duet, "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" to declare their love as it starts to rain, and Liesl gets a lovely moment of joy in the rain to herself.

In keeping with the film's two halves (or acts, as it were, this being an adaptation of a stage show), the next time we see the gazebo is for a meeting between adults, postulate-nun-turned-nanny-to-seven-children Maria and Captain Georg von Trapp. They've been slowly needling their way into each other's hearts, almost without knowing it, but they finally confront each other (at the urging, it must be said, of poor Baroness Schrader, and the fact that you can even say that about the woman who callously tossed off a line about sending those adorable children to boarding school just so she could have the Captain all to herself is a testament to Eleanor Parker's great, great performance). As joyous as Liesl and Rolf's first kiss is, that of Maria and the Captain is muted, thoughtful, and mature. And beautifully, defiantly soft focus.

BEST SHOT

I'm sure this isn't the first time kissing lovers have been filmed like this, but it's one of the defining images of The Sound of Music for me, mostly for just how old-fashioned romantic it is. It's as though cinematographer Ted D. McCord applied a whole jar of Vaseline to the camera lens while filming this entire scene (is this where RuPaul's Drag Race got the idea for its first season?) - everything bleeds into each other, the colors are a gorgeous palette of pastels, and we see our two lovers in complete silhouette, their bodies very nearly creating a heart shape. It's the silhouette that does it for me. These people could be anyone. They were your parents, or grandparents. They could be you. It's a classic vision of cinematic romance. Everything else melts into the background and all you care about is this person standing in front of you loving you. Whether or not they should.

It's also interesting in how it mirrors the earlier, younger kiss. The women in flowy, almost sheer dresses, the men buttoned up; the men on the right side, the women on the left... but in this case, Maria and the Captain are equals. No games, no shyness. They come to each other openly and honestly and sing their love for each other in as beautiful a song as Richard Rodgers ever wrote.

It's shots like this one that lead people to deride The Sound of Music. "It's too sickeningly sweet!" they say. "It's dull and boring!" they cry. "The Sound of Mucus" they call it. But I think that shots like this are exactly why the film not only works, but has become an enduring classic. Yes, the image is a cliché, but it is also deployed thoughtfully, meaningfully. This is a sweet film, no doubt about it, but it rises above any stage version (despite the lessening of the show's two liveliest characters, the Baroness and "Uncle" Max and the removal of their duet "How Can Love Survive", one of the show's best songs) because it brings out an intimacy and maturity the stage show so often lacks.

The other reason the film works so well, of course, is Julie Andrews. I always think she won an Oscar for this, and frankly, she should have. Point blank, the film does not work without her. It's not just her golden singing voice, but her presence, and the thoughtfulness behind her acting. She works with the (seven!) children astonishingly well, and also paints an always-vivid picture of Maria's inner life. Her eyes and body language tell you absolutely everything you need to know about how Maria is feeling and just how much she cannot bring herself to say. It's a remarkably full performance from a character who can read extremely simple on the page, and far better than most people realize, because Andrews makes it all look so effortless. Which is a perfect word for the whole film, really. The Sound of Music breezes through its 174 minutes with effortless scene after effortless scene. It takes real skill to make a film look as effortless as this one feels. And oh, what a feeling!