The Best Movie Ever | Parties

Everybody is entitled to a party on New Year’s Eve, whether you go pub crawling, gather en masse at the homestead or just sip champagne with a loved one. The shared cultural tradition of uniting in a single location to fraternize, intoxicate, and possibly make some very, very bad decisions is fodder for good times, bad times and wonderful entertainment. “Party movies” may not be the world’s most prolific or recognized genre, but everybody has their favorites. Usually it’s Animal House.

But that’s not the case for our team of film critics: Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and Colldier’s Brian Formo. This week on The Best Movie Ever, on the eve of New Year’s Eve, we asked them to pick the best party movie ever produced and none of them picked a film about a frat house. None of them picked a film about rowdy teenagers. They couldn’t agree on a single motion picture (as usual) but they could at least agree that the best parties, the most meaningful parties, or even the craziest parties are the ones thrown by adults who should know better (or, in one case, who already do).

Find out which films they picked, let us know your favorites, and come back next Wednesday for an all-new, highly debatable installment of Crave’s The Best Movie Ever!

William Bibbiani’s Pick: Auntie Mame (1958)

Warner Bros.

“Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!” So speaks the gospel truth of Mame Dennis, the titular Auntie of Morton Dacosta’s effervescent comedy Auntie Mame. Based on the stage play, which was itself based on the novel by Patrick Dennis (who modeled Mame after his own peculiar relative), this ode to Roaring Twenties is about an orphaned boy who comes to live with his rich and constantly partying Auntie. He arrives in the middle of a party that would make even the great Gatsby jealous. Mame, well-meaning but rather busy at the moment, gives the kid a pad and pencil and tells him to wander around hotting down every word he overhears and doesn’t understand. When he finally rattles them off, they include “libido,” “free love” and “monkey glands,” and Mame dismisses his curiosity. She tells him he won’t need those words for months. 

Auntie Mame is a movie about partying, literally and figuratively, and follows our grand dame of life itself (played with impossible verve by Rosalind Russell, Oscar-nominated) as her life gets crashed by The Great Depression, and as she proceeds to live to the fullest anyway. The phrase “madcap” doesn’t get trotted out very often in the context of modern comedies, but Auntie Mame sums it up rather well. When her nephew eventually grows up and sticks himself firmly in the proverbial mud, Mame pulls out all the stops to prove that life is a manic wonderland of cheerfulness, offensiveness and arguable insanity. Life is a non-stop party. He learns the lesson well.

So Auntie Mame is, I am arguing, the best party movie ever. (It was also the highest-grossing film of 1959, after opening in December of 1958, so I suspect I’m not entirely alone.) It teaches us all to keep the champagne flowing even when we cannot afford champagne. ESPECIALLY when we cannot afford champagne. It’s so easy to lose sight of life’s silly wonders when the tides the turn against us. In those unfortunate moments, Mame is there, being wonderful and inviting us to join her.

Witney Seibold’s Pick: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

20th Century Fox

I’ve always had an aversion to party movies, probably because I never personally encountered the kinds of parties typically depicted in them; I was not cool enough to be invited to the kinds of high school parties where everyone was on drugs, having sex in back bedrooms, and destroying someone’s house. I eventually attended theater parties, which were far sexier. But in movies, there is a destructive youthful abandon on display in party movies that leaves me wincing. I feel there is no high hilarity in watching people get wasted and wreck stuff. Indeed, I tend to openly loathe movies like Animal House for this very reason. 

So when it comes to party movies, I need to see a movie that either deconstructs the very notion of partying as a virtue (I came awfully close to selecting Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers for this assignment), or that pushes the hedonism to a logical – and absurd – extreme. As such, I will fall to Russ Meyer’s seminal sleaze epic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as my final selection. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, infamously penned by Roger Ebert, is about a group of young women in a band whose brush with fame leads them into a spiral of drugs, parties, and infidelity. 

Released in 1970, this is a campy satire of JD scare pictures of the 1960s, complete with a preachy epilogue from the survivors, and a bizarre sexual twist that doesn’t make any sense. On top of it all, we’re treated to all the prurient eye candy our twisted little hearts desire, from buxom nudity to extreme violence, to delicious overacting. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is the best kind of cult crazy. Don’t watch it during the day. 

Brian Formo’s Pick: Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Sony Pictures Classics

There’s a lot of melodrama in Rachel Getting Married. The laundry list of needed healing includes drug addiction, sex abuse, anorexia, a dead child, an unforgiving mother, an intense sister competition and a closed-mouthed dad. It’s all expertly performed by Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt and Debra Winger, who relish the drama and make it feel real. But what stands out the most in Rachel Getting Married is the dinner party and the wedding. 

Usually, movie weddings are over-sized, over-dressed, over-vowed, and over-emphasize the oceanic locale. It’s extremely rare that a movie creates a wedding that I’d actually like to attend. Rachel‘s director, Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), films the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, and the reception as a melting pot of people. And he does it by observing. With little interruption, the WASP side of the party say their toasts, the African American side say their toasts, and he allows the couple’s desire to visit India to explain the Indian colors, music and food, despite no one being Indian. There’s singing, there’s dancing, there’s smiling faces. Even though we’re watching a familial melodrama with numerous shouting matches, the gatherings largely not only go off without a hitch, they’re full of intelligent, interesting people. 

Demme made this film in 2008, an election year. Following his 2004 Manchurian Candidate remake (which critiqued the first Iraq War and the handling of vet PTSD, right when the same war is being repeated) and his 2007 documentary about former president Jimmy Carter, Demme had made his politics clear. And I can’t help but feel— watching all these people of different ethnicities and backgrounds coming together to put their dramas aside and dine and dance with one another in a Connecticut backyard—that Demme staged a wedding as a way to show that America can put Bush’s incorrect war(s) behind us and rejoin the global (familial) world, not as combatants, but as people who can ask forgiveness and start anew. 

I’d much rather be at this party than any of the celebrated high school/college movie keggers.

Previously on The Best Movie Ever:

Top Photo: Warner Bros. / 20th Century Fox / Sony Pictures Classics