GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK: 11th-HOUR OSCAR NOMINATION PREDICTIONS

UPDATED 1/31/06 12:19pm: Blaaagh has noted that I left Adam Baldwin off my list of pleasurable performances for his work in Serenity. That oversight has been corrected...

UPDATED 1/31/06 9:42 am: Click on the link to see how my Oscar guesses matched up with the actual list.

As I begin writing this post, we're about eight hours away from the announcement of the nominations for the 78th annual Academy Awards. In the days before the dawning of the age of the Internet, I would probably be in bed by now. Because back then I actually had to get up-- actually looked forward to getting up-- at 5:30 a.m. to watch on TV as the nominations were announced by the likes of Arthur Hiller or Frank Pierson or Robert Rehme and whoever it was that won the Best Supporting Actress the previous year (this year, Mighty Aphrodite herself, Mira Sorvino, returns, accompanied by current AMPAS president Sid Ganis). I'd then have to wait until a late edition of something called a newspaper, or perhaps even the next morning's early edition, before a list of the nominations would be available, and then only major papers like the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times or one of the trade papers, like The Hollywood Reporter could be relied upon to provide an accurate and truly complete list.

Of course, in these more enlightened times (and in case the link didn't completely sell it, I was trying to be ironic), the Internet provides instant access to the complete roster of nominees straight from Oscar's mouth. So, alas, no more need to get up even earlier than my rambunctious daughters just to hear the vaunted press gasp and applaud, as if they never would have guessed they'd have heard it, when Heath Ledger's name is announced. And oh, how I'll miss hearing breathless junket whore Sam Rubin and whoever KTLA has chosen to chirp alongside him as they ramble on and on about their own knee-jerk reactions to those who made the final five and those who did not, warming up for when they can really cut loose and embarrass themselves properly on the red carpet during the Oscar pre-show, and filling precious pre-dawn minutes that could instead be devoted to agricultural reports and who's coming to visit Aunt Tillie on the farm in Santa Monica this weekend. But maybe, just maybe, I won't even think about all this tomorrow morning, as I luxuriate in the precious couple of hours of sleep I would have lost had I gotten up to catch the Oscar nominations the old skool way.

So instead, I thought I'd make some 11th-hour predictions for the acting and directing categories, based on nothing so scientific or inside as the methods undoubtedly employed by Entertainment Weekly as they have methodically pored over and updated their own predictions leading up to tomorrow morning. (I'm pretty sure these pop culture gatekeepers started predicting this year's winners sometime mid-Governor's Ball, just after the conclusion of last year's ceremony.) No, where EW has computers and panels of experts and reams of insider information, I have only my own (quite prodigious) gut to rely upon. This year's abdominal resonations have been a whole lot less distinct than ever before, owing to the fact that the crop of movies undoubtedly waiting to be lionized by the Academy this year hold much less interest for me as a whole-- A History of Violence is likely to have minimal representation among the nominees, but I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of anyone from 2046, Kung Fu Hustle, Grizzly Man or The Ice Harvest making waves tomorrow morning (King Kong will make its roar known, but only from the back of the room, where the Academy sticks all the technical award nominees.) And the one movie that I admire almost without reservation-- Good Night, and Good Luck, which I finally saw this past Friday night, and which I would retroactively place fourth on my Top 22 list-- will surely be nominated, but will likely end up the most recognizable body crushed under the speeding locomotive that is Brokeback Mountain. Where Brokeback looks weakest is, ironically, in its most high-profile category-- Best Actor. Until this past weekend, I would have be the sheep herd on Heath Ledger's chances to go all the way to the podium. But given the way the Screen Actors Guild awards shook out this past weekend-- no love for Ledger, much love for Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Truman Capote-- I have a feeling either Hoffman's Oscar's man this year or, in a situation where Ledger and Hoffman split off enough votes, David Straithairn, unflappable and awesome (in an admittedly less complex role than either of the other two) as Edward. R. Murrow, might be the beneficiary of some Oscar glory.

Here I am talking like I already know who's nominated and, of course, I don't. But I am willing to step out, risk looking stupid, and perhaps even fatally damage my street cred with the Access Hollywood crowd by taking a series of ridiculous wild guesses in these final hours. So, without any further fuss and muss, here's where I pin the donkey's tail on the six picture, actor, actress and director categories before the 78th Academy Award nominations are announced tomorrow morning.


BEST PICTURE
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Crash
Good Night, and Good Luck
Munich


BEST DIRECTOR
George Clooney, Good Night, and Good Luck
Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
Paul Haggis, Crash
Terence Malick, The New World
Bennett Miller, Capote


BEST ACTRESS
Dame Judi Dench, Mrs. Henderson Presents
Felicity Huffman, Transamerica
Keira Knightley, Pride and Prejudice
Naomi Watts, King Kong
Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line


BEST ACTOR
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Terrence Howard, Hustle and Flow
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
Joaquin Phoenix, Walk the Line
David Straithairn, Good Night, and Good Luck


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Maria Bello, A History of Violence
Diane Keaton, The Family Stone
Catherine Keener, Capote
Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener
Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
George Clooney, Syriana
Paul Giamatti, Cinderella Man
Matt Dillon, Crash
Terrence Howard, Crash
Donald Sutherland, Pride and Prejudice

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Okay, now that that filthy business has been taken care of, it's time to invoke the spirit of Siskbert and revisit those same categories, only inserting the names of the pictures, actors, actresses and directors I would include If Only I Nominated the Academy Awards...


BEST PICTURE*
2046
A History of Violence
Good Night, and Good Luck
Kung Fu Hustle
The Ice Harvest

* I have bound myself by Academy rules and included only those movies that could actually be nominated in the respective categories. Therefore Los Angeles Plays Itself, number two on my year-end list, would not receive a nomination because it never received an official release, either last year or any year since its copyrighted date of 2003; also, Grizzly Man, number five on my list, would be in my hypothetical Best Documentary category, Tropical Malady-- retroactively, #6-- would be in the Best Foreign Film category, and Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit (the actual #6) would head up the short roster in the Best Animated Film category.


BEST ACTRESS
Kate Dollenmayer, Funny Ha-Ha
Rachel McAdams, Red Eye
Naomi Watts, King Kong
Reese Witherspoon Walk the Line
Ziyi Zhang, 2046


BEST ACTOR
Johnny Depp, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Min-sik Choi, Oldboy
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Viggo Mortenson, A History of Violence
David Straithairn, Good Night, and Good Luck


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Maria Bello, A History of Violence
Kerry Condon, Unleashed
Catherine Keener, Capote
Gena Rowlands, The Skeleton Key
Faye Wong, 2046


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Clifton Collins, Jr., Capote
Ralph Fiennes, Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit
Oliver Platt, The Ice Harvest
Andy Serkis, King Kong
Mathieu Amalric, Munich


BEST DIRECTOR
Stephen Chow, Kung Fu Hustle
George Clooney, Good Night, and Good Luck
David Cronenberg, A History of Violence
Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man
Wong Kar Wai, 2046

And now finally, in the waning hours before there is instituted an official embargo on talk of anything released in 2005 that is not on the Academy's invite card to the Kodak Theater, I just wanted to take a moment to remember one last time the names of the actors, some renowned, some unknown, who gave me pleasure at the cinema in the past year. These were almost all folks who stood not a chance in hell of being recognized by such an august body as the Academy, yet the moments and performances they gave to me, to us, last year were every bit as good and fully rounded and lived-in and exciting, sometimes even more so, than the ones given by the nominees whose names will be announced in about five and a half hours. They were (in no appreciable order whatsoever):

Tony Leung, Gong Li 2046

Ed Harris, Asthon Holmes, William Hurt, A History of Violence

George Clooney, Frank Langella, Ray Wise, Good Night, and Good Luck

Stephen Chow, Kwok Kuen Chen, Qui Yuen, Siu-Lung Leung, Zhi Hua Dong, Kung Fu Hustle

Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Sallis and the entire voice cast of Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit

Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Tropical Malady

John Cusack, T.J. Jagodowski, Connie Nielsen, Bill Noble, Randy Quaid, Mike Starr, Billy Bob Thornton, The Ice Harvest

Jack Black, Adrian Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, King Kong

Andrew Bujalski, Funny Ha-Ha

Brady Corbet, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, Mysterious Skin

Eric Bana, Lynn Cohen, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, Geoffrey Rush, Ayelet Zorer, Munich

Morgan Freeman, Bob Hoskins, Jet Li, Unleashed

Bradley Cooper, Rebecca De Mornay, Isla Fisher, Henry Gibson, Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn, Christopher Walken, Owen Wilson, Dwight Yoakam, Wedding Crashers

Elizabeth Banks, Gerry Bednob, Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Kat Dennings, Jane Lynch, Romany Malco, Shelley Malil, Leslie Mann, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer, Katie Holmes, Gus Lewis, Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Linus Roache, Ken Watanabe, Tom Wilkinson, Batman Begins

Hank Azaria, Shelley Berman, Mario Cantone, George Carlin, Pat Cooper, Wayne Cotter, Phyllis Diller, Susie Essman, Carrie Fisher, Gilbert Gottfried, Dana Gould, Dom Irrera, Paul Krassner, Cathy Ladman, Merrill Markoe, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Taylor Negron, Trey Parker, Don Rickles, Bob Saget, Sarah Silverman, Matt Stone, larry Storch, The Aristocrats

Jayma Mays, Cillian Murphy, Red Eye

Helena Bonham Carter, James Fox, David Kelly, Freddie Highmore, Christopher Lee, Missi Pyle, Deep Roy, Noah Taylor, Philip Wiegratz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Ginnifer Goodwin, Shelby Lynne, Robert Patrick, Joaquin Phoenix, Dallas Roberts, Walk the Line

Ralph Fiennes, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Gerard McSorley, Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener

Morena Bacarrin, Adam Baldwin, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nathan Fillion, Ron Glass, Summer Glau, Jewel Staite, Alan Tudyk, Serenity

Micahel Angarano, Bruce Campbell, Dave Foley, Cloris Leachman, Kevin MacDonald, Danielle Panabaker, Kelly Preston, Kurt Russell, Steven Strait, Kelly Vitz, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Sky High

Tobin Bell, Glenn Plummer, Shawnee Smith, Mark Wahlberg, Saw II

Nicole E. Bradley, Bill Chott, Brian Cox, Leonard Flowers, Katherine Heigl, Johnny Knoxville, Jed Rees, The Ringer

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Vince Vaughn, Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Dakota Fanning, War of the Worlds

Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman, Stephen Fry, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Maria Bello, Gabriel Byrne, Drea de Matteo, Brian Dennehy, Laurence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke, Aisha Hinds, John Leguizamo, Assault on Precinct 13

Jessica Alba, Michael Ciklis, Chris Evans, Ioan Gruffudd, Julian McMahon, Fantastic Four

Nicole Abisinio, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Rapp, Sharon Stone, Jeffrey Wright, Broken Flowers

Maxine Barnett, Kate Hudson, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard, The Skeleton Key

Jessica Alba, Jude Ciccolella, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Carla Gugino, Jaime King, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Nick Stahl, Bruce Willis, Elijah Wood, Sin City

Sasha Baron Cohen, Madagascar

Barry Corbin, Lynda Carter, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Willie Nelson, The Dukes of Hazzard

Georgie Hensley, Tilda Swinton, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

The Handsome Family, Jim White, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

Michael Berryman, Ken Foree, William Forsythe, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, P.J. Soles, The Devil's Rejects

Matt Dillon, Lindsay Lohan, Herbie: Fully Loaded

Jim Broadbent, John Cleese, Tim Curry, Ricky Gervais, Hugh Laurie, Ewan McGregor, Valiant

Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou, Scarlett Johansson, Ewan McGregor, Shawnee Smith, The Island

Jason Statham, Transporter 2

Brendan Gleeson, Eva Green, Liam Neeson, Edward Norton, Alexander Siddig, David Thewlis, Kingdom of Heaven

Asia Argento, Eugene Clark, Land of the Dead

Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Luke Wilson, The Family Stone

Tony Jaa, Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior

Jennifer Tilly, Saint Ralph

Ian McDiarmid, Ewan McGregor, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

And finally, in the year's worst movie, Duane "The Rock" Johnson, for bursting through a wall and uttering the year's most belabored tough-guy punch line ("Semper Fi, motherfucker!"), and Rosamund Pike, for exhibiting perhaps the worst, least convincing screams of terror ever heard in a "major motion picture," that MMP being, of course, Doom-- she sounds exactly like one of John Travolta's rejects in Blow Out, and you too, like Jack Terry in that film, will want to cover your ears.

UPDATED 1/31/06 9:42 am: Click on the link to see how my Oscar guesses matched up with the actual list.

THE FRIGHT CONNECTION, or How A Snarling Wolf and a Big "Gotcha!" Led To A Perfect Day

One of the most thrilling things about being a parent is seeing a new character trait emerge in one of your children that you can directly link to your own sensibility. I have many wonderful memories of taking both of my girls to the movies-- my oldest was just four months old when the missus and I took her with us in 2000 to the late, lamented Azusa Foothill Drive-in to see Mission: Impossible 2-- her very first visit to a cinema. She was not quite one year old when I took her to see Shrek indoors -- she hung in there for about an hour and then fell asleep, at which point we snuck out. And we had our first real father-daughter bonding experience at a movie when we saw Monsters, Inc. together for the first of what would be three times for her in a theater (I stopped counting when she received the DVD). Somewhere in the middle of the adventures of Mike and Sulley, my daughter reached up, hugged me around the neck and kissed me, then went back to watching the movie, as if to say, "Thanks, Dad, for bringing me here." I knew then that, whether she became a cinephile or not, going to the movies would still be something special for her, and maybe something that would provide a fond and lasting connection with dear old Dad as she got older and way too big to sit on my lap anymore.

The first real movie my youngest sat through with me, however, came in late 2004, when I took the two of them to see The Incredibles. A friend who was also there expressed amazement to me later that she could sit still for such a relatively long movie (two hours) and be obviously enjoying it, following along with it. But it was Pixar, after all-- no lack of wonderful things to see there, no matter what your level of life experience. I was just worried it might be too loud or scary for her, but even at just over two years of age I guess I needn't have worried about her at all.

There have been several since, most notably our return to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory together in a hardtop, after having had to leave the drive-in early the previous week because my oldest got a little freaked out at seeing Augustus Gloop take that chocolate dive and get stuck in a gigantic vacuum tube. The movie's perversities and various levels of creepiness were lost on her-- she just liked the candy colors and the music ("Willy Wonka/Willy Wonka/The amazing chocolatier...") and the oversized wonder of the whole image-and-sound thing.

This afternoon I finally found the time to sneak away with my youngest daughter, age three, to a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What I'd read about Narnia suggested that there were some potentially scary images and some loud action sequences, and my wife had never supported the idea of the little one seeing it at all. Not much need to worry about whether or not it would be appropriate for our oldest-- she proclaimed her desire not to see it loudly and clearly, at every opportunity. In fact, she is still shaking off the effects of Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit, as genial and gentle a horror parody as has ever been made, but one in which she immersed herself in the trappings of the films being lampooned, taking at face value the "scary" conventions that older children might at least be able to accept in the context in which the Aardman Animation film offered them. (On the other hand, the little one saw it twice and loved it.)

Finally, my youngest repeatedly expressed enough interest in Narnia that my wife's resistance broke down, the implicit caveat being that if it was too frightening for her I would hustle her right out of the auditorium. So the two of us headed to our local movie emporium right after a (very) late breakfast. We arrived to a darkened theater, the Disney logo already on screen, made our way to our seats. It didn't take long for us to settle in and begin munching popcorn, my arm tucked around her right side, her pony-tailed head tucked under my arm, as we enjoyed the suspenseful build-up to the Pevensie children's discovery of that snowy world at the back of the professor's wardrobe. My daughter was enthralled; I was less so-- I thought the movie competently made, but too generically imagined to sweep me away. Director Andrew Adamson's imagery doesn't pop off the screen or seduce you with lush grandeur and lurid landscapes surging with evil, the way Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films (Narnia's obvious influence and raison d'etre) do as a simple matter of course. Besides, there was far more at stake for me in seeing her reactions to the movie's moments of loudness and children in peril than there was in whether or not I thought the movie itself was a complete success.

But today, during Narnia, came one of those parental moments that made my heart soar, one that really connected me with my daughter, one where a special character trait seemed to pop up out of nowhere, like a roadside sign that assures a driver that he or she is not lost. And my daughter has no idea that it even occurred. There is a sequence where Edmund Pevensie, the boy who will betray his brother and sisters to the White Witch, is creeping through what appears to be a desolate, snowbound garden of statues, granite figures posed in various stages of battle and configurations of distress. The music hits all the right sustained notes and chords as the camera tracks Edmund making his way through this strange and inexplicable museum.

Then, midway through vaulting over what he (and we) takes to be a large rock, the audience is treated to a very effective "gotcha!" moment as the rock turns out to be the hunched figure of a very scary wolf, one of the White Witch's secret police, who leaps toward Edmund (and out toward us in the audience as well), snarling a murderous, meat-eating snarl, read to rip and tear away at Edmund's young flesh. The "gotcha!" made both my daughter and I jump several inches back and out of our seats, and it immediately occurred to me that I didn't ever remember seeing her have that visceral a reaction to a movie before-- most of the stuff she routinely sees at home is pretty genteel. So I turned to her, ready to be the concerned father and head her toward the exit. But before I could say anything, she looked up at me and said, "That scared me!" And then I noticed she was grinning. And then I heard she was laughing. And then I knew that this truly was my daughter, and that I loved her so much more than I could understand, and I began to hope that someday she and I would be looking at scary movies together and laughing as our hearts got caught in throats time and time again.

We left the theater, and my daughter was beaming with excitement, as if she understood on some level that she'd just seen something with a little more meat on it, in terms of what it required of her as a viewer, and what it put her through too, than anything she'd yet seen in her very young movie-going life. As we walked underneath the stained-glass dome that caps the courtyard entryway to the multiplex where we'd just seen The Chronicles of Narnia, my youngest daughter, whom I was carrying, put her arms around my neck, gave me a kiss and said, "That was fun! Thanks, Daddy, for taking me to the movies." I had to choke back more than one tear as I told her how glad I was that she wanted to come. We stood looking up through the dome, marveling at the colors and patterns, and it occurred to me that this had become a perfect day.

A FEARLESS EXPEDITION TO THE NEW WORLD

Last year I implored the Almighty to rain down blessings upon film critic Matt Zoller Seitz of the New York Press for being one of the only critics I knew of to sing the praises of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy on his year-end "best" list. This year I'm again grateful to Seitz, this time for his new blog, The House Next Door, an excellent addition to anyone's daily reading list. In particular, his enthusiasm for Terrence Malick's The New World has, to use his imagery, really poured some gasoline on the smoldering fire of my interest in the film, as well as thrown light on some pretty intriguing conversation about the movie and just how much critical respect this movie seems to be building.

Seitz declares, in his "Just Beautiful" post, that The New World "is this era’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — a musical-philosophical-pictorial charting of history’s slipstream and the individual’s role within it... It is nothing less than a generation-defining event. When your descendants ask you to describe the popular art called movies, this is one of the titles they'll ask about."

That, to me, is walking out on a limb, critically speaking, with only your real convictions to gird that limb, inviting real discussion, and perhaps derision from those who would dismiss the reaction as an emotional oversell. But, to look a the list of smart writers that Seitz provides in the "One World" post who have written eloquently about Malick's film, it appears he's not as alone as all that after all. Not that it would matter if he was, though. Seitz's fervor for The New World exemplifies the kind of criticism that I think is most valuable-- he makes infectious the power of his experience and articulates it with uncommon eloquence and a reliable foundation of close familiarity with the history of film. And he does so without feeling the need to denigrate other works or attempts at artistic expression in the process.

One of the common traps that dog film critics, especially when they first start out (and especially during those periods when there's not much good cinema to consider in the first place), is that writing about what you like is often harder than dashing off some smart-ass remarks about a film that may not even be worth getting angry or frustrated over. I've rediscovered, in writing on my own blog, the joy of expressing enthusiasm for a work and articulating how it goes about doing what it does, something that was always much more difficult for me to do than delineating just how a film failed to work. Of course, expressing the worth of a great film is a much more fulfilling achievement as well, for the reader and the writer, especially when the writer gets it right. And even before having seen The New World myself, I can tell that Seitz has, for himself, gotten this one right. Before reading his review and the subsequent pieces he's posted on his blog, the film was much further down on my list of must-sees. In fact, based on my rather indifferent response to Malick's The Thin Red Line, I had even thought that it would't be so bad if I missed it in theaters and instead caught up with it on DVD. (An asinine thought, I know-- good, bad or indifferent, Malick's movies demand to be seen theatrically.) But having witnessed just how moved Seitz was by the film, through his expressive talent as a film critic, I'm now fully excited to get to a big screen and then join in the discussion about The New World myself. I don't know what my own reaction will be, but I can guess that even if it's closer to how I felt about The Thin Red Line than my appreciation for Days of Heaven, I'll still have had a more enriching time than anyone who sat through Big Momma's House 2 this past weekend. Who says film critics can't make a difference? Who says film criticism is irrelevant? Not me. Critics like Seitz put the lie to those presumptions with almost every column. I look forward to following his thoughts throughout the year, and I hope you will too.

HAPPY 101st BIRTHDAY, CHARLES LANE!

UPDATED 1/30/06 2:26 pm: Over at Dodger Thoughts, Jon Weisman joins in the chorus celebrating Charles Lane's birthday and cites his favorite moment from Lane's multitude of TV and movie appearances.

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My apologies for posting this item so late in the day, but I have to pass along reader Snake Plissken’s “hijacking” this evening of the comments thread for “Tropical Malady and the Tiger in the Wind.” Snake dropped this happy shocker on SLIFR at around 6:00 p.m. PST:

“I absolutely must note that the legendary character actor MR. CHARLES LANE IS 101 today.

You will recognize this man from about a million (give or take a few hundred thousand) movies and TV shows from the 50s through the 90s. He's played the crotchety old SOB in almost everything you've EVER seen. You grew up with him. Unlike your gin-soaked, cookware-flinging parents, he's ALWAYS been there for you. If you're over the age of 40 (give or take a few), Mr. Lane's image is in your brain almost as indelibly as Dig-Em the Sugar Smacks frog or Bobby Sherman's black choker.

I just had to mark this major milestone. One-hundred-and-one freaking years on this earth, for crying out loud!

Congratulations, Charles Lane! Here's looking forward to another 101!”

Snake is right on the money: Charles Lane is about as ubiquitous and recognizable a “skinny, hatchet-faced, bespectacled” American character actor in television as there has ever been. (Description courtesy of those sensitive souls over at IMDb.) For those of our age group (that increasingly undesirable demographic that casts its net anywhere from the late 30s to the early 50s), the television shows of our youth just would not have been the same without the presence of the forever crotchety Lane, who played almost every known variety of family lawyer, prosecutor, process server, bank manager or cantankerous CEO that could possibly have been played, on, without much exaggeration, almost every TV show that ever aired. Take a look at the shows on which Lane appeared as a guest character (many of them multiple times): The Real McCoys, Perry Mason, The Lucy/Desi Comedy Hour, The Bob Cummings Show, I Love Lucy, Maverick, Mister Ed, Dennis the Menace, The Lucy Show, 77 Sunset Strip, Make Room for Daddy, Petticoat Junction, The Andy Griffith Show, Get Smart, Honey West, F Troop, Gomer Pyle USMC, Judd for the Defense, Green Acres, The Flying Nun, The Debbie Reynolds Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Nanny and the Professor, Bewitched, Temperatures Rising, The Odd Couple, The Rookies, Rhoda, One Day at a Time, Chico and the Man, Maude, Soap, Mork and Mindy, Lou Grant, Hunter, St. Elsewhere and L.A. Law. He also appeared in the popular TV movie Sybil.

And that’s just the TV stuff. As increased exposure to classic American films will have revealed to anyone who was paying attention, Charles Lane’s 40-year TV career came after he’d already been acting in films for 20-some years, in much the same size and type of role with which he would become so familiar on the tube. He played hotel desk clerks and luggage room clerks in his first six films, moving up to “Shoe Salesman” (uncredited) in Employees’ Entrance (1933). He also had uncredited bit parts in 42nd Street (1933) and Golddiggers of 1933 (1933). His first credit in a “major” motion picture came in Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century (1934), where he appeared on screen as Charles Levinson—and his character had, for one of the first times, a name instead of a job description (Max Jacobs).

Lane would appear in over 200 movies between 1933 and 1954, when he first appeared on television, and though a lot of them were programmers of little note, a bunch of them were considerably more than that. Peel your eyes and you’ll recognize Lane in not only Twentieth Century, but also Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes To Washington 1939), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), It's A Wonderful Life (1946) and State of the Union (1948) for director Frank Capra, as well as I Wake Up Screaming (1941; H. Bruce Humberstone), Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942; Richard Thorpe), Ball of Fire (1941; Howard Hawks), The Farmer's Daughter (1947; H.C. Potter), Call Northside 777 (1948; Henry Hathaway), Mighty Joe Young (1949; Ernest B. Schoedsack) and I Can Get It For You Wholesale (1951; Michael Gordon). And even after he’d established himself as a reliable character player in the early days of television, he kept on appearing in feature films like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963; Stanley Kramer), John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1965; J. Lee Thompson), The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966; Alan Rafkin), The Gnome-mobile (1967; Robert Stevenson), Get To Know Your Rabbit (1972; Brian De Palma), Movie Movie (1978; Stanley Donen), and two well regarded revisionist horror films in the mid-80s for director Michael Laughlin (and soon-to-be Oscar-winning screenwriter/director Bill Condon), Strange Behavior (1981) and its follow-up, Strange Invaders (1983). And though I would have sworn he did before looking at his extensive credits, Lane never did appear in any of the Disney/Medfield College/Dexter Riley series of sci-fi comedies, such as The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber or The Strongest Man in the World. His last appearance in a movie or television show came, however, in 1995, in a remake of the first Kurt Russell/Dexter Riley comedy hit, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

All that said, I can do little more than join Snake and the multitude of others who may not know Lane by name, but who certainly know him by his (hatchet-faced or, if your prefer, as I do, angular) mug, in wishing him all the best on his 101st birthday. Mr. Lane, you’re the face of small-minded bureaucracy to many of us, but I’d wager you were a whole lot more to those who were honored to know and work with you over your long and impressive career. May you indeed see the ripe old age of 202.

(And thanks, Snake, for pointing out Mr. Lane’s birthday to me and all of us. This must be what it’s like to have a stringer! And you’re getting paid as much to be one for SLIFR as I ever was when I did it occasionally in radio. That’s called the big time, sir!)

TROPICAL MALADY and the Tiger in the Wind

The Santa Ana winds have been raging in Los Angeles this week, looking for trouble, roaming the Basin like a restless beast, toppling trucks and tearing off roofs with almost instinctual abandon. On the freeway one morning a day or so ago, I moved along at a somewhat slower speed, my hands grasping the wheel a little more firmly than usual, buffeted by air blasts from both sides. The big gust, unexpected, of course, and shocking, lifted the minivan slightly, the weight of the vehicle's body rising off and rocking on the suspension system. Though the wheels likely never left the ground, it felt as though I would surely be upended by the air velocity equivalent of a body slam from a 300-pound line defender. The winds never really stopped, and they only gained in insistence and fury as the sun went down. From my office desk, I could hear mysterious, loose sections of the building continually crashing, helplessly caught in the jaws of the beast, as evening became nighttime, became morning. On the slow drive home, the city still in darkness, I dodged debris on the road and watched from behind the wheel as leaves and branches and trash swirled and lifted off into the star-dotted black. And as I arrived in my driveway, I had to wonder if I wasn't finally hallucinating slightly from a too-long workday. Was that really a gigantic branch torn free from the oversized tree along the north end of our house, fallen (harmlessly) to rest in our front lawn, the wounded end still propped up against the trunk of which it was once a part, the branches fanned out on the lawn looking like God's own leafy-green feather duster? (I wasn't, and it was.)


The next evening saw no relief from the drying, chaffing, noisy gusts, but there was a brief respite from work-- a good time, as it turned out, to settle in and begin catching up with some of the past year's films that had still managed to elude me. First on the list: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, a languid, lovely and unadorned romance that accumulates a quiet power almost by sleight of hand. In telling the story of Keng, a Thai soldier (effectively, a forest ranger on a fire watch crew) and his growing fondness for Tong, an aimless, slightly ethereal young man who works at an ice factory, the director teases out layers of sensory meaning and texture from a dense, invigorated Bangkok and its rural surroundings through which his protagonists meander as they while away summer days talking and laughing and slowly falling in love. There's a barely hinted-at mysticism underlying the lazy days that pass between these two, which, at first, seems almost found. They eat, talk, play and imagine a future together, and the first half of the movie has a seductive ordinariness about it; it sparks you to wonder how long Weerasethakul intends to keep these balls in the air before one inevitably drops onto the dusty street. But then the two encounter a cheerful woman who tells them a parable of a young monk, two roadside travelers and rocks that turn to gold and silver, and then invites them along to explore with her the darkest recesses of a open cavern. She tells them stories, which may or may not be true, about past explorations of the cavern ending in suffocation and other fearful experiences. The soldier is seized with an inexplicable fear, born not of claustrophobia but instead something far less tangible, which prevents him from proceeding.

That fear is also a prefiguring of the strange turn the movie will soon take-- the folkloric mysticism, which has been up till now quietly pulsating under the movie's lush surface, takes center stage when Tong literally disappears into the thick night and Keng, who has taken to the jungle in search of him, comes to believe Tong may in fact be the incarnation of a shape-shifting Khmer shaman responsible for the disappearance of cattle and some villagers. Tropical Malady surrenders its second hour to Keng's search, a near-wordless submersion into the dense, wet, living texture of that jungle which brings him closer to the sensually mysterious object of his pursuit, and to a aching, primal version of himself. The jungle not only cloaks the beast, it's a living system that facilitates the beast's hidden movements through the very fiber of its harsh environment-- through the mud, the rain, and the pounding, swirling, wind-swept trees that seem to bear up both pursuer and pursued toward a fateful meeting charged with eroticism, fear and divine magic.