Do you know this guinea pig? She’s Muriel, the official mascot of (HYPERBOLE ALERT!) the online community’s most prestigious annual award, The Muriel Awards, organized and hosted by Paul Clark, he of The Screengrab and, of course, his own home turf, Silly Hats Only, from whence the Muriels originated three years ago. This will be my third year of having the honor of being among the voters, and this year the number has increased to nearly 40 excellent online film writers, each of whom contributed votes in 17 different categories, from Best Film to Best Cinematic Moment of 2009, to anniversary awards for the best films of 1998, 1983 and 1958. Each day Paul will be posting the winners in each category, along with short essays commissioned by some of the writers involved, leading up to Oscar Night, February 22. So don’t forget to check in each day for Muriel Awards updates—all you have to do is punch the Muriel Awards tab on the sidebar to your right. I’ll be posting my own ballot later on in the game, plus links to days on which Paul has asked me to write about a couple of specific awards (don’t ask; I ain’t tellin’).
It’s the 2008 Muriel Awards, and they commence today, so get prepared! It promises to be more fun, and certainly more all-over-the-map, than the Oscars could ever be.
Here's a sample of some of the fun Paul is having with Muriel-centric imagery over at Silly Hats Only.
God help me, I’m so late with these answers to Professor Kingsfield’s Hair-raising, Bar-raising Holiday Movie Quiz that I can’t imagine incurring anything but the quizmaster’s wrath at my arrogance in dragging my feet so. But I submit them nonetheless, and before I do, I want to thank everyone who has already done the work before me, especially Jim Emerson for inspiring me to get off my polished duff and get my assignment done as well as his promotion of the quiz and procurement of answers from visitors to his own site. Most happily, he even got a list of responses from an honest-to-God dean of cinema, Richard T. Jameson, whose answers I gladly offer now before I offer my own. Here they are:
1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (press screening in December) On DVD or Blu-ray? Kid Galahad (1937).
2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice? Naughty.
3) Ida Lupino or Mercedes McCambridge? Ida Lupino. (Does anyone ever answer MM?)
4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks Miguel Ferrer.
5) It’s been said that, rather than remaking beloved, respected films, Hollywood should concentrate more on righting the wrongs of the past and tinker more with films that didn’t work so well the first time. Pretending for a moment that movies are made in an economic vacuum, name a good candidate for a remake based on this criterion. Great question, but I'm way late with this, so I'm taking a pass.
6) Favorite Spike Lee joint. N/A
7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady? LT
8) Are most movies too long? These days, yes, absolutely.
9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician. I assume we're omitting, say, Lincoln (so not Henry Fonda). And people playing themselves (so not Fred Dalton Thompson in Marie). Let's say Michael Parks as Robert Kennedy, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. OK, that's what I get for being too precious--I just peeked at Jim Emerson's answers and he's quite right: Philip Baker Hall's Nixon, Secret Honor.
10) Create the main event card for the ultimate giant movie monster smackdown. ......Mercedes McCambridge's Exorcist demon vs. Ona Munson's Mother Gin Sling
11) Jean Peters or Sheree North? Sheree North. Especially Don Siegel's Sheree North.
12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once? What are you, a Palin supporter?
13) Favorite road movie. Im Lauf der Zeit.
14) Favorite Budd Boetticher picture. Seven Men from Now.
15) Who is the one person, living or dead, famous or unknown, who most informed or encouraged your appreciation of movies? Andrew Sarris.
16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.) I Know Where I'm Going!
17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar? KT.
18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other. JLG's point applies, more often than not.
19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie. Melvin and Howard.
20) Tatum O’Neal or Linda Blair? TO'N.
21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.) ......The sublime last few seconds of Christmas in July.
22) Favorite Claude Chabrol film. La Femme infidèle.
23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid. In Bruges, though everyone I know loves it. Awards-wise, Wendy and Lucy, though critics have mostly done right by it.
24) Dennis Christopher or Robby Benson? Robert F. Lyons.
25) Favorite movie about journalism. All the President's Men for real; His Girl Friday for surreal.
26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track? May I plead that I'm not that into DVD commentaries, period (question mark).
27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Unforgiven.
28) Paul Dooley or Kurtwood Smith? Not being a That '70s Show habitué, I didn't get this for a moment. For years my screen-saver crawl was KS's "I am enhanced."
29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season. It's well-embarked as I answer (2/4/09), so ... Michael Shannon takes best supporting actor away from Heath Ledger.
30) Your hope for the movies in 2009. Obama shames Hollywood into renouncing CGI.
31) What’s your top 10 of 2008? (If you have a blog and have your list posted, please feel free to leave a link to the post.) So many 2008 movies won't get released till 2009 (most of the best stuff I saw at Toronto) that my Ten Best is largely a bunch of placeholders: The Edge of Heaven A Christmas Tale The Secret of the Grain ......Let the Right One In I've Loved You So Long Wendy and Lucy In Bruges WALL*E The Visitor Tell No One
Thanks for participating, Mr, Jameson. It was an honor having you take part. (I hope you’re right about #29 too.) Now it’s time for me to take the plunge and go for the good grade. I hope no one takes my submission here as a signal that the due date has officially passed. I’d love to see many more answer lists drop in the comments column-- I never get tired of reading them. Please keep ‘em coming. And now, with no further stalling and hesitation, my answers:
1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?
Theatrical: Notorious, the Biggie Smalls story, which is in most ways a pretty standard-issue biopic—well-performed, dependent on cliché, and not above ladling on sentimental (and somewhat opportunistic) hero worship—that is somewhat redeemed by the dynamic performance of Jamal Woolard in the title role. The first half is much better at cluing in a hip-hop-ignorant audience as to what made Christopher Wallace’s raps special, and it’s alive with the kind of energy that accompanies the crackle of creativity on the rise. The second half, however, reveals the petty small-mindedness behind the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop wars and ends up, for all the portentous dramatics (and Angela Bassett’s absurdly overemphatic concluding narration), feeling like much ado about nuttin’.
On DVD: Bertrand Tavernier’s It All Starts Today, an excellent movie about a beleaguered kindergarten teacher working against overwhelming forces in a poverty-ravaged province of France. I’ll be writing more about it soon.
Revival: A great ‘70s double bill of Hickey and Boggs, starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, and Freebie and the Bean, starring Alan Arkin and James Caan. I have long sought outH&B and to finally see it on the big screen was a real treat. I will say that this sun-bleached L.A. noir, written by a young Walter Hill, was not the instant forgotten classic of my most intense preconceived notions, but that’s far from saying it was a bummer. It was just not as far-reaching and deeply felt as I was hoping it would be. Though he showed a steady hand here and an admirable tendency to play up the dissimilarities between this tough piece of work and the more popular I Spy format audiences undoubtedly were expecting, director Culp never helmed another feature, which, on the evidence of this solid action movie, is our loss. The real revelation, at least for me, was Richard Rush’s Freebie and the Bean. This one got scathing reviews upon its release in 1974 (Leonard Maltin deemed it “repellent”) and for the one screening I had of it back in 1975 the shadow of its co-feature, Blazing Saddles, dampened even its potent demolition derby antics and post-Archie Bunker racially oriented character comedy for me. But in 2009 it looked like a much better movie than the one preserved in my memory-- hilarious, screamingly well-choreographed in the stunt department, and featuring three pieces of acting—from Alan Arkin, James Caan, and Valerie Harper as “Bean’s Wife”—that are textbook examples of how to create strong characters amidst a Hollywood comedy most would have never deemed to take at all seriously. If this movie ever gets a proper DVD/Blu-ray release it might have a chance of reclaiming a spot in the ‘70s car culture pantheon right alongside the likes of Smokey and the Bandit, Death Race 2000 and Gone in 60 Seconds.
2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice? I like ‘em both ways. There’s room on my shelf for It’s a Wonderful Life and Bad Santa, Meet Me in St. Louis and The Ref. After all, aren’t most holidays themselves a mixture of naughty (or unfortunate) and nice anyway? So why not reflect that?
3) Ida Lupino or Mercedes McCambridge?
Mercedes McCambridge made unforgettable impressions in Johnny Guitar and The Exorcist (“It wants no straps”), but I would not be following my heart if I didn’t choose Ida Lupino who, as it has been noted here by others, was a pioneering and very strong director in the 40s as well as a brilliant character actress. And she was the warden in the very first women-in-prison movie I ever saw too (the ABC Movie of the Week, Women in Chains), so I have to give her credit for helping to lead me down that nasty path as well.
4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks
Well, there’s the terrific one-two punch of Harry Goaz (Deputy Andy) and Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran), and it’d be almost impossible to answer this question without at least mentioning Kyle MacLachlan and Ray Wise. But whenever I hear those twangy strains of Angelo Badalamenti’s music, I have to admit the first person I usually think about is the tragic, and tragically beautiful, Josie Packard, so divinely embodied by Joan Chen (She ended up trapped in a doorknob, for God’s sake! And for what? ‘Cause she liked Sheriff Truman?) I also cherished my time spent in the diner with Peggy Lipton’s Norma Jennings. Who wouldn’t develop a cherry pie addiction with her serving it up?
5) It’s been said that, rather than remaking beloved, respected films, Hollywood should concentrate more on righting the wrongs of the past and tinker more with films that didn’t work so well the first time. Pretending for a moment that movies are made in an economic vacuum, name a good candidate for a remake based on this criterion.
Even though I remember the original version quite fondly, I wouldn’t mind a new satiric sensibility being made to bear on Clair Huffaker’s novel about the last great Native American uprising, Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian, which was made by Carol Reed, of all people, into the 1970 movie Flap starring Anthony Quinn, Victor Jory, Claude Akins and Shelley Winters. Maybe Sherman Alexie could take a whack at the screenplay and turn it over to an ethnographically minded filmmaker like Michael Apted or Walter Hill. Or if we’re talking Hollywood narrowcasting, how about a live-action version of Jonny Quest stylistically retrofitted to the Hanna-Barbera aesthetic a la the Wachowski’s Speed Racer?
6) Favorite Spike Lee joint.
It took a while, but Kevin Olson finally mentioned the one that I love most-- Crooklyn. That was a beautiful, generous, painful portrait of a family which I suspect was very close to Lee’s heart. In general, Lee’s stylistic indulgences and tendency toward ranting as opposed to writing have always tarnished his obvious talent for me. But I still think very highly of 25th Hour. And School Daze (in the pantheon on the strength of "Da Butt" alone). And Do the Right Thing, of course.
7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady?
Tierney and Brady were two billy goats gruff, brothers in spirit and in the flesh. I knew of Brady first from genre fare like Destination Inner Space, Journey to the Center of Time and Fort Utah. (He was also in Johnny Guitar, and his last role was the sheriff of Kingston Falls, the little town besieged by Joe Dante’s gremlins.) But ultimately I have to say Hats Off to Larry, for Dillinger, Born to Kill, Andy Warhol’s Bad, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, The Naked Gun (he was the manager of the Anaheim Angels during the baseball game sequence!), Reservoir Dogs (“Okay, ramblers, let’s get ramblin’”) and Chris Gore’s hilarious Red. Tierney was a true character masquerading as a character actor, and as such was unforgettable.
8) Are most movies too long?
I’m definitely of a mind that a good movie is never too long—I’d love to see the version (near five hours?) of Nashville from which Altman whittled his 2½-hour masterpiece—and that a bad movie overstays its welcome almost immediately—I never thought Zach and Miri Make a Porno would end, and it’s a comparatively brief 101 minutes. A two-hour running time is an arbitrary benchmark anyway. When a movie like Zodiac sucks me into its vortex the last thing I’m doing is watching the clock and thinking, “Gee, this would have been great if it could only have been cut by a half-hour.” At the same time, some of my favorite movies are ones that, by today’s standards of length, practically qualify as haiku-- Curse of the Cat People lasts barely 70 minutes.
9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.
It’s hard to imagine a great performance being less concerned with impersonation and more with burrowing into a venal soul—and finding a sliver of unexpected sympathy—than Philip Baker Hall’s conjuring of Richard Milhous Nixon in Secret Honor. (It’s a piece of acting that puts honorable but less-inspired work like Frank Langella’s Nixon—in Ron Howard’s movie, anyway—in its place.) Nixon is perhaps the most caricatured political figure in recent history, and that Hall never goes to physical/vocal similarities in order to access his portrayal is remarkable in itself—think how difficult it was for the cast of Oliver Stone’s W to avoid that trap, particularly Thandie Newton as Condoleeza Rice. But Hall delivers the Nixon we think we know anyway—corrupt, paranoid, lost in a maze of historical obsession—and then expands on that image to expose secret “knowledge” of the man underneath the well-worn mask. Anthony Hopkins was in his own way brilliant as Nixon, in a movie that I think has never quite received its due—it’s probably Stone’s best, and perhaps his weirdest—but Hall belongs on a different plane entirely. Outside of watching Nixon himself in the Frost interviews, or reading the memoirs that the man himself pitched in order to make the case for his own posterity, there’s no better point of access to this man that the portrayal Hall offers in Secret Honor. Hall’s is the Nixon we deserve after the national nightmare he provoked. As this president’s legacy still ripples through our national consciousness 34 years after his resignation, this is the portrait the man himself could never consciously expose to the light, even if hints of it were always there, like his own perpetual 5:00 shadow.
10) Create the main event card for the ultimate giant movie monster smackdown.
Well, there’s always Lawrence Tierney and Scott Brady.
But seriously, folks—how about Eiji Tsubuyara’s three-headed Ghidrah versus the five-tentacled octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea, grudge match refereed by Ray Milland and Rosey Grier as the Thing with Two Heads? Or how about a Sahara-sized “terror-rarium” populated by the giant creatures from Tarantula and Them! (super-sized ants) in a no-holds-barred battle for insect/arachnid supremacy? (The winner would get to eat those little scorpion-torturing tots from the opening of The Wild Bunch!)
11) Jean Peters or Sheree North?
I do love Jean Peters, especially in Pickup on South Street and Anne of the Indies. (Thanks, Peter!) But there’s no replacing Sheree North in my heart, especially, as Mr. Jameson has so astutely noted, Don Siegel’s Sheree North. (She was impossibly sexy and sharp in Charley Varrick-- and she also starred for the director in Telefon and The Shootist.) Ms. North’s was a face and voice from my childhood that I cannot recall ever not being absolutely in love with. My best friend Bruce tells a wonderful story, which he has related a couple of times here, of meeting her while employed at a Santa Monica bookstore in the mid ‘80s, and the way he tells it Ms. North was exactly how I always hoped she’d be—friendly, modest, self-effacing and still quite lovely.
12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?
I doubt this see-a-movie-once-and-be-done-with-it notion originated with Pauline Kael, but she perhaps most famously perpetuated it. Kael has been a great influence on me as a person who takes appreciating movies seriously, but I’ve never been able to get behind her on this one. Seeing a great movie, or even just a good one, or sometimes even a bad one, can reveal moments or themes or thoughts or ideas that escaped your view the first time around and that can expand the experience of the movie and what it’s trying to do in your head. But of course probably the most interesting thing about seeing movies more than once is seeing films that meant a lot to me as a youngster or a young man and finding out how they seem different to me as an adult. Because as we have to acknowledge, it’s not the movies that change—except for the increasingly common instances of the “Director’s Cut,” they are encased in the celluloid skins in which they were originally released to the world. It is we who are different, and seeing a movie again after a long time can reveal as much about how we have changed, about the people we were and the people we are, than just about any other art form. I think of seeing Nashville at the relatively green age of 15 and not being ready for it at all. Three years later I saw it with just a smidgen more life under my belt and it seemed suddenly like a movie I could access, be seduced by, be overwhelmed by, and I gladly surrendered. Since then I’ve seen the movie 10 or 12 more times, and each time, though the movie is “the same” movie, it is also significantly different because I have changed. I love that reflective quality of the movies, the best and the worst of them; seeing them more than once is part of the pact the movies and I have made, and I don’t see that ever changing.
13) Favorite road movie
The road movie is a favorite genre of mine, one that evokes the ambience of the road and the countryside-- what it feels like being there-- as much as of travel, of forward motion, whether or not the destiny is known. One really good road movie, by this definition, that I revisited recently is Electra Glide in Blue, which ends on one of the most indelible, haunted images of the road (a highway, specifically, going through Monument Valley) I’ve ever seen. Another is Charley Varrick. Neither movie, however, necessarily fits the classic standard of a road movie in the same way that, say, Vanishing Point or Duel or even Kings of the Road does. But if I had to pick one—and it seems that I do—I’d have to say Two-Lane Blacktop for the total picture, with a genre shout-out to Race with the Devil for sheer velocity. (Both star Warren Oates, as good an emblem of the road as there is.)
14) Favorite Budd Boetticher picture.
Without a second’s hesitation, The Tall T, followed closely by Seven Men from Now.
15) Who is the one person, living or dead, famous or unknown, who most informed or encouraged your appreciation of movies?
The obvious answer is Pauline Kael. Nothing was ever the same for me after I bought a paperback version of Reeling (the Warner Books version with the orange rainbow design on the front, the first of at least five different copies I’ve owned) from the now-defunct Koobdooga Bookstore in Eugene, Oregon in 1977. It’s a story I’ve told before and probably will again. I’ve had other film professors that were influential in their own way as well, of course, and one in particular, William Cadbury, who encouraged me to write and made me believe that I could do it well and with purpose.
But the one person who encouraged my earliest interest in the movies, and in classic Hollywood in particular, was my paternal grandmother, Rina Trevisan Cozzalio, seen here in 1936 at age 15 (inset) and in 1939 at age 18, just after she got married. She loved all the old stars and never missed an opportunity to tell me about the movies she loved when she was young. Her house was the only one in our family that had cable TV when I was a child, which meant that in order to see some of the vintage titles that aired on stations out of Portland and San Francisco I ended up watching them with her in her living room. She’s also the one adult other than my parents who took me to the movies when I was too young to go by myself, everything from Roy Orbison in The Fastest Guitar Alive to The Singing Nun and The Greatest Story Ever Told. (She’s also the one who, years later, accompanied me to see Mandingo and Drum.) I might have still learned about the movies later on in life, but it was my Grandma Rina’s influence and encouragement which reinforced my growing interest, which said to me that my interest wasn’t just frivolous, that the movies could, and should, have a special place in my heart. And each time I see one, especially a classic film from Hollywood’s golden age, I always like to think that somewhere she’s watching with me and getting a kick out of the fact that I still love them the way I do, the way she did.
16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.)
Viewers of a certain age will remember well the K-Tel record ads that were pitch-perfectly parodied in the opening credits of Nashville, almost always the first movie I think of when I think of brilliant opening credits. (The actual credits extend over Haven Hamilton’s recording session and Opal’s visitation of another studio in which the gospel choir is letting the praises fly.)
I love the fevered hyperbole used to promote even the most unknown of the film’s many great cast members: “…the all-time great Dave Peel!” And of course this: “Be the first on your block to marvel at the magnificent stars through the magic of stereophonic sound and living-color picture right before your very eyes without commercial interruption!” God, what a great beginning to a truly great movie.
17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar?
These guys presided over so many movie monster memories and nightmares and late-night double features when I was a kid that I’m having difficulty making a choice. Though I saw him in The Thing (from Another World) and It Came from Beneath the Sea long before, my first conscious awareness of Kenneth Tobey came in Billy Jack, where he was cast as a racist deputy sheriff, the epitome of Establishment Evil, and in my mind he’s never quite shaken that bad first impression. John Agar, on the other hand, started off in Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Sands of Iwo Jima, and he went on to become the stoic face of American ingenuity in the face of a slew of giant Universal Pictures monsters, everything from Tarantula to Revenge of the Creature and The Mole People. He made such an impression on me that I swear he was in every Universal monster movie, even though, dammit, he wasn’t. (That was Richard Carlson in the original Creature from the Black Lagoon and Craig Stevens battling The Deadly Mantis.) I don’t care. John Agar it is.
18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other.
I think there’s little doubt that Godard is a crank who often says outrageous things just to hear the sound of his own voice, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that there are as many bad obscure movies in existence as there are lousy ones that have captured the public imagination, or their dollars at least. I think I first heard Godard’s “theory” posited by Richard Corliss in a Time magazine article considering the phenomenon of Platoon. It was Corliss’ contention (a correct one, I think) that Platoon was affecting people because of its programmatic, melodramatic nature as much as any universal truths it was accessing and that Godard might have had a point in regard to this specific picture. But I often think about Godard’s comment when a movie like Forrest Gump somehow seeps its way into popular consciousness. It’s a sweeping, sarcastic, somewhat cynical generalization to be sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not occasionally accurate.
19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie
Either Citizen’s Band or Melvin and Howard, though I’ve probably seen Stop Making Sense twice as many times as I’ve seen either of those two films. I’ll say Citizen’s Band because that was the first one I ever saw, in a completely empty movie palace in downtown Eugene, on the bottom half of a double bill with American Hot Wax. I suffered through Floyd Mutrux’s movie two more times just to see the Demme picture again.
20) Tatum O’Neal or Linda Blair?
I had crushes on both of these young ladies during their primes (when they were somewhere in the vicinity of 10-13 years old!). I also met Linda Blair about 10 years ago, and she was lovely and friendly. But Tatum O’Neal held her own with Kristy MacNichol in Little Darlings, and she’s in the greatest movie about baseball ever made, The Bad News Bears-- her pitches look good too. Advantage: O’Neal.
21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.)
It’s revealing how often I’ve come back to Altman and Nashville in this quiz. I did not design it to be so. Answer: Haven Hamilton’s “200 Years,” written by Richard Baskin and Henry Gibson, which contrasts shirt-sleeve patriotism and earnest country/western sentimentality with the garish personal style and harsh professionalism of superstar Hamilton (Henry Gibson) as well as the unflinching national portrait to come in the film itself:
“My mother's people came by ship And fought at Bunker Hill My daddy lost a leg in France I have his medal still My brother served with Patton I saw action in Algiers Oh we must be doin' somethin' right To last 200 years. I pray my sons won't go to war But if they must, they must. I share our country's motto And in God I place my trust. We may have had our ups and downs Our times of trials and fears. But we must be doin' somethin' right To last 200 years. I've lived through two depressions And seven Dust Bowl droughts Floods, locusts and tornadoes But I don't have any doubts. We're all a part of history Why Old Glory waves to show How far along we've come 'til now How far we've got to go. It's been hard work but every time We get into a fix Let's think of what our children faced In two - ought - seven - six. It's up to us, to pave the way With our blood and sweat and tears. For we must be doin' somethin' right To last 200 years.”
22) Favorite Claude Chabrol film.
Les Biches. I also really liked Story of Women, though I really need to see Le Boucher.
23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid.
Just a cursory glance down my own list reveals that the movie is most probably Shotgun Stories, though I think a case could be made that despite the critical laurels bestowed upon it, Wendy and Lucy, without a major presence in any of the critic group awards, is in its way just as overlooked.
24) Dennis Christopher or Robby Benson?
Ciao, bambini! Dennis Christopher all the way. The good will generated by Breaking Away alone has covered a multitude of sins and unmet expectations ever since that movie came out. (Anyone care to recall Fade to Black?) Robby Benson is married to Karla DeVito, I’ll give him that, but One on One is no Breaking Away.
25) Favorite movie about journalism.
Jeez, who writes these damn questions? Uh… dammit… I hereby invoke the Spineless Host Clause and submit a quadfecta (??!!) of the following titles (in alphabetical order, from A to Z: Ace in the Hole, All the President’s Men, His Girl Friday and Zodiac. I haven’t seen it all the way through, but I suspect that Sam Fuller’s Park Row may be a contender as well, which would make it a quintfecta, right?
UPDATE February 6 10:21 a.m.: I saw Park Row last night. It's officially a quintfecta. This is a terrific, punchy movie, one of Fuller's best. Keep an eye out on the TCM schedule for it, because, incredibly, it's nowhere to be found on DVD at the moment.
26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?
Several years ago I answered a similar question by suggesting that I’d like to hear Jesus Christ’s thoughts on The Passion of the Christ. I still wanna hear that commentary track, but I feel compelled to come up with a different answer this time around, so I’ll say Brian De Palma, who I believe has never recorded a commentary for one of his movies, talking themes and style and structure on a Dressed to Kill DVD.
27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood.
Robert Fiore suggested in his answers that the better question, given Unforgiven’s status in the Eastwood oeuvre, might have been, what is the second-favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood? I think Robert’s right-- Unforgiven is the clear answer to the question as written. And I’m a big fan of Eastwood, the star and the director, even though I can clearly see that some of his movies are, shall we say, better than others… just like every other director and/or star I can think of. But some of the movies Eastwood has directed are near and dear to my heart almost to the degree that Unforgiven is—I wouldn’t want to do without Play Misty for Me, High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Bird, White Hunter Black Heart, A Perfect World, Space Cowboys, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima or Gran Torino. (On the other hand, I don’t have a lot of use for The Eiger Sanction, Honkytonk Man, Sudden Impact, Heartbreak Ridge, The Bridges of Madison County, Absolute Power, Blood Work or Changeling.)
All of which brings me to my answer. It may not be the second-best Eastwood-directed movie, but there’s something about Bronco Billy and how it distills and comments upon the Eastwood persona that is, in its own way, just as effective and analytical and deeply felt as his first Oscar-winning masterpiece. Damned few stars could find the humor and the sincerity in Bronco Billy’s advice to the “little pardners” and “buckaroos” who make up the core audience for his traveling cowboy act: “I don’t take kindly to kids playing hooky. Every kid should go to school, at least up through the eighth grade.” (The kicker is that the kids who obligingly lap up Billy’s lecture then gingerly remind him that they’re not playing hooky, that it is in fact Saturday, and their hero nods sheepishly and carries on.) The movie is as likable and good-natured as anything the director has ever done, and its gentle endorsement of a value system that would gain traction and invite critical examination during the Reagan era (the movie was released during the summer of 1980) makes it even easier, more pleasurable to draw connections to the classic Hollywood forms (westerns, screwball comedies) that it slyly references. Bronco Billy seems fascinatingly of its time and completely out of it, and it’s one of Eastwood’s movies that most rewardingly holds up to repeated viewings.
28) Paul Dooley or Kurtwood Smith?
I had two angry, frustrated fathers in mind when I thought of this one—Dooley’s perpetually perplexed car salesman in Breaking Away and Smith’s repressive taskmaster in Dead Poets Society-- as points of comparison for the two actors. But once again, when it comes to answering my own question I am annoyed at the gall it takes to force someone to choose between two powerful screen presences as these. The relationship between Dooley and Christopher in Breaking Away most accurately reflects the one between my dad and I, at least up until my adulthood—Smith more closely gets at my dad in his role as Red Forman in That ‘70s Show, so much so that when I ran into him at a fish market here in Glendale several years ago I was seized with fear and intimidation, and no matter how much I wanted to say something to him in appreciation of his work I couldn’t bring myself to do it. They are both brilliant. But Paul Dooley, based on his work as the beleaguered Ray Stoller, who ultimately takes pride in his son’s achievement and his acceptance of his townie roots, wins the day. Refund? Refund?!! Refund??!!
29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.
The big surprises being hinted at by Sid Ganis for the Oscar telecast will, whether they are successful and/or entertaining or not, will be derided at water coolers everywhere the following morning as the Second Coming of Rob Lowe, or at the very least the Second Coming of Oscar Bumper King, Peter Coyote. And whether they are or not, the telecast will be declared by conventional wisdom as the worst yet. Oh, and The Reader will win more than one Oscar.
BONUS QUESTION (to be answered after December 25):
32) What was your favorite movie-related Christmas gift that you received this year?
I got lots of keen movies, but the best combo was getting Blu-rays of Speed Racer and the restored Godfather Saga to go along with my new Playstation 3, which apparently holds the keys to the universe and can do anything…
Yes, the game was a good one, but to these bleary eyes (surely made even less twinkly than usual by a heavy ingestion of five-layer dip during the first quarter) the much-ballyhooed line-up of ridiculously expensive commercials seemed a pretty tame bunch compared to past years. Ads by Doritos, Pepsi and Budweiser seemed to be trying too hard by two or three times over, and the execrable GoDaddy soft-core porn explosion tweaked bad taste with an almost completely dulled sense of humor. But three ads leapt out from the pack, so much so that I actually remember them a day later, and all three had movie connections that made me sit up straight while I was laughing. Here, then, my Super Bowl Top Three:
Jason Statham traces The Chase through a series of high-octane European sedans and lands in a little black number that looks suspiciously like Frank Martin’s ride.
Three goodfellas discuss their next job, punctuated with whipped cream shots for their happy pancake plates— a very funny knock on the IHOP-style super-sweet breakfast special, as seen through the David Chase prism, from Denny’s. A grand slam, indeed.
Is there nothing since embracing his status as a character actor that Alec Baldwin can’t do? Apparently not, including biting the hand that feeds him in this hilarious ad for Hulu, which casts the actor as a malign interstellar spokesman for the evil, brain-boiling influence of TV.
Before the sun sets on this most significant of holidays that take place during the first week of February (and there are so very many), it’s my pleasure to point you to a superb piece by fellow blogger and SLIFR reader Ali Arikan. Ali’s Cerebral Mastication, over which he presides all the way from the country of Turkey, is one of the highlights of the blogosphere, and his new piece, “Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A Groundhog Day Retrospective” is, like the brilliant Harold Ramis-directed comedy which it revisits, both specific and universal, a—yes-- cerebral and joyous examination of one man’s discovery of how best to live a life that has been, up till his moment of self-awareness, been wasted on bitterness and cynical self-satisfaction. In many ways, Ali’s piece, in addition to being an evocative re-viewing of a terrific movie, made me think of how this mind-bending picture works in tandem with Mike Leigh’s decidedly not-metaphysical-at all Happy-Go-Lucky to address how, in grim economic times as these, a positive outlook is not simply a harbinger of sticking one’s head in the sand, but instead a viable way of engaging with the tough winds and dark shadows that buffet and blanket us daily, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Here’s a taste:
“For 16 years, Groundhog Day has been hailed as a meditation on self-redemption. But to pigeonhole it into one overarching theme would be an insult to the layered precision, and perfection, of Harold Ramis’s 1993 masterpiece, which ventures into the heart of darkness and despair to ultimately emerge unharmed, but not unmarked. This story of a man doomed to relive the same day over and over again is not concerned about tomorrow. A true absurdist triumph, it cares not what the destination might be, for it knows that the pursuit of meaning is itself meaningful whether or not that pursuit is eventually rewarded. Life might very well lack purpose, and it might very well be a struggle. But that doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole about it.
Do yourself a favor: if you’re already one of Ali’s regular readers, get thee hence to Cerebral Mastication and make him a habit, and while you’re there rummaging through all of Ali’s archives you can also link up to his excellent piece over at The House Next Door.
Every so often I feel compelled to revisit Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford’s solid, powerful documentary on the 1975 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” When We Were Kings, largely because of my fascination not only with this period of sports history, but specifically because Ali is such a formidable, fascinating personality all on his own. His magnetic persona, and his status both as an iconic entertainer and a political force, sustains for me now, as it did when I was a teenager and watching his fights in the ring and his sparring matches with Howard Cosell on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, my interest in a sport—boxing—that otherwise compels relatively little interest for me. Ali is such a spectacular figure in America culture because he was so controversial, so polarizing during the peak of his career during the '60s and '70s—his refusal to fight in Vietnam and his embrace of the Nation of Islam gained him no quarter in the enclaves and on the front porches of white, middle-class Americans in the ‘60s—yet he has retained, perhaps even strengthened his stature by never apologizing for his political stands while the country seems to have adapted and changed around him.
One of the great coups of Gast and Hackford’s film is the interviews they scored with writers George Plimpton and Norman Mailer, who both brilliantly and compellingly elucidate the ambience of being in Zaire for the fight, as well as insights into Ali’s pre-fight psychology. Mailer suspects that Ali feared Foreman’s youth and prowess in his own private moments much more than his arrogant public persona would ever allow to be revealed, and Plimpton relates a story of a Congolese witch doctor who predicted that Foreman would be visited by a strength-sapping succubus who would open the door to defeat at the hands of his older, apparently weaker opponent. Both provide excellent analysis of the fight itself, and in the process provide a window through which to see boxing as a battle of balletic strategy as much as brute force, as well as specific insight into Ali’s lightning-fast moves (extensive use of the right-hand jab, which is telegraphed much more easily to the defender but which Ali successfully used on Foreman because it was the least-expected punch) as well as the deceptive craftiness of the rope-a-dope, which ends up seducing Foreman into punching himself out of the fight long before Ali lands the knockout blow.
Charles Taylor, considering Ali in this bout, and When We Were Kings upon the movie’s release in 1997, wrote the following:
“I think the key to why so many of us, and particularly so many writers, are stunned by Ali lies in this performance. He is one of the most perfect unions of thought and action anyone has ever seen. The conceptual beauty of his victory over Foreman is indistinguishable from the beauty of its execution. Athletes think with their bodies. Physically, Ali was able to express not just strength, but more intelligence and wit than any athlete ever has. The movie ends with Plimpton relating a story about Ali delivering a commencement address at Harvard. Responding to the cry, "Give us a poem!" Ali delivers two words: "Me. Oui!" But the movie has already made a stronger case for him as a poet in the ring. And it's poets who touch people more than kings.”
It is precisely this poetry—his pre-rap freestyling that enraptured so many along the color line in the 1960s, but also his poetry of motion, of thought, of choreographed beauty, of force, and of restrained force—that I’m drawn to whenever I think of Ali, his young self as seen in this film, and even the older version, enfeebled by Parkinson’s Disease. (Mailer intimates in Kings that the onset of this malady was a direct result of the brutality visited upon his beautiful frame in the 22 fights that ensued after the Rumble in the Jungle, a fight many speculated would be the one, win or lose, that would end his career.) The elderly Ali has none of the speed and grace of the man who once murdered a rock, killed a brick and who was so mean he made medicine sick. But he has the dignity that comes from a life which extended so articulately the principles of power he executed in the ring and brought into the social arena as an ambassador for social change and an icon of hope and pride, not only for African-Americans but all Americans. It’s easy to watch When We Were Kings and realize why Ali is thought of in some circles as closer to a god than a mere mortal. Even awareness of his mortality doesn’t get in the way of playing this game; if he’s a diminished god now, When We Were Kings provides ample evidence of his divinity in the ring.
Taylor also suggests that the musical elements of When We Were Kings ironically tend to bring the energy of the film down, and I can see what he means insofar as the film’s commitment to telling the story of the concert built around the Zaire fight seems half-hearted. (The energy having been relatively dialed down, Ali always returns and gooses things to life again.) But rather than excising them altogether, the film might have benefited from going further in the other direction. We get brief intercutting, snippets of B.B. King, a morsel of James Brown, and a thematic motif which casts Miriam Makeba’s somewhat sinister onstage persona as the spirit of the succubus that some (Plimpton included?) believe brought Foreman down. Had the movie allowed for a more expansive canvas that might have showcased complete performances, it too might have gained some of the epic quality that was surely present during the actual event. Taylor also quite correctly observes that the movie skimps a bit on the background which led to the murderous ascendance and foul continuance of President Mobutu Sese Soko, who provided the $10 million to stage the event that he hoped would promote his newly formed country, formerly the Belgian Congo, as a world force. It is in the interweaving of elements such as this that great documentaries are made, and the absence of a particular depth here harms When We Were Kings, keeps it in the realm of the geopolitically superficial, even with such galvanizing figures as Ali and Foreman at its center.
However, each time I see the movie I am captured once again by the slinky energy of The Spinners; I’m reminded of Brown’s inimitable force onstage; the pleasure to be had in watching B.B. King’s face in close-up as he wrings heavyweight emotion from Lucille’s strings; and perhaps most of all, and most frustrating of all, I’m reminded of the pre-fusion velocity of The Crusaders (pianist Joe Sample, drummer Stix Hooper, saxophonist Wilton Felder and trombonist Wayne Henderson) at their peak. Their nimble, super-swift “Young Rabbits” is heard punctuating the opening credits, which interlaces the jazz classic with newsreel footage of Congolese unrest and Ali at his funniest, during a press conference announcing the fight. But we get just a fragment of the song, enough to lodge that amazing sax-trombone syntax into the brain, and then it's gone. Not two minutes in I end up with a powerful desire to hear the whole piece, which the movie denies.
Here then to fulfill that jones is a YouTube clip which features a live recording (not the Zaire performance, unfortunately) of “Young Rabbits.” There is no video to go along with the thrilling music, but I’m grateful for it nonetheless.
I’ve also included a clip from When We Were Kings-- that hilarious press conference announcing Ali-Foreman in Zaire—in which the fighter displays once again the hilarious boastfulness that so polarized and captivated sports fans and regular humans alike back in the early ‘70s.
My next visit with Ali will be courtesy of Mailer’s The Fight, a full-scale accounting of the atmosphere and politics in Zaire as well as the events that led up to the fight itself; I’m expecting a book-length version of the kind of keen, entertaining observations that Mailer provided to raise the bar within the Gast-Hackford movie. And maybe someday someone will undertake to create the ultimate Ali documentary. But until that day, When We Were Kings slakes the recurring thirst for insight into and time spent in the presence of one of the most dynamic figures in American history, and it’s hard to be ungrateful for that even in the face of the movie’s occasional deficiencies.
At long last, my official goodbye to 2008, and not a minute too soon (in fact several thousand minutes too late, by my estimation). As always, I would never pretend to have seen it all. Those regular readers of this blog are undoubtedly well aware, in fact, of just how much I miss on a regular basis. Even so, and given a particularly grueling schedule of school and work that characterized most of the moments of the year for me, I still did manage to see enough to give a good go at a year-end round up. (Winter break was very helpful in this regard—I crammed in a lot of holiday movies in those two weeks.) Some fulfilled my expectations, some were big disappointments, some surprised me on both ends of the scale, but all in all I have to say that to my mind, unless the last impression of a less-than-stellar package of Christmas releases is what colors the entire year for you, 2008 was a fairly strong year across the board. It’s inevitable that in most years, good and bad, more lousy movies will end up on screens than worthy ones—that’s the law of averages when applied of the cutthroat business of modern movie production. But any year that produces a list like my top 20+, and showcases so many excellent roles for and films about women, has to have something going for it. So let’s begin this lengthy stroll down the path of the most notable triumphs and failures of the year from my perspective, with some hopefully entertaining side trips along the way. As always, we begin with the list—this year in ascending order, from 20-11, a brief break to consider one genre that was truly outstanding in 2008, and then 10 straight on up to number one.
20) WALL-E (Andrew Stanton) Pixar’s formally fabulous, at times almost Keatonesque science fiction fable isn’t as original as has been claimed (Silent Running is an obvious ancestor). I also found it less captivating than masterpieces like Ratatouille or The Incredibles, or even the far less ambitious Monsters, Inc. And I think there’s something to the argument that points out a certain degree of do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do hypocrisy inherent in a movie about a world suffocated in inorganic trash created by one of the movies’ most prodigious sources of marketing tie-ins and other such consumables. That said, Wall-E is still so visually splendiferous, its evocation of the loneliness inherent in even the most sophisticated technologies so moving, that the shortcomings of its satire and its point of view on global redemption don’t come into clear focus until after you’ve already left the theater swooning. (And I still can’t wait to see it on Blu-ray.)
18) KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL (Patricia Rosezma) I’ve had a lot of occasion to think about how many of the movies aimed at kids condescend to their audiences, about how many aren’t bothered about narrative or emotional shortcuts that dumb-down the material because the underlying notion is that most children won’t care for the meat of real experience to go along with the sweets of their entertainment. But this terrific picture strikes a real balance between kid-level sophistication and the need to reach deeper, and its themes of empathy for the many have-nots during the last Great Depression should have chilling resonance for adults as it simultaneously prepares the hearts of its younger viewers for an understanding of what it really means to give and receive during times of need. The fine cast, which includes Stanley Tucci, Joan Cusack, Julia Ormond, Chris O’Donnell, Wallace Shawn, Glenne Headly and Kenneth Welsh, is headed by Abigail Breslin in the title role. She sparkles at precisely the right level of real-girl incandescence, absent the kind of annoying precocity that might have been reasonably expected, and director Rosezma’s sure hand grounds the story with remarkable steadiness of purpose. This is a well-crafted, well-told movie rooted in that rarity or rarities, a realistic perspective on the point of view of a preadolescent girl, which opened on Independence Day and was lost in the media rush to anoint Hancock the movie of the weekend instead. May it find its true life on DVD.
17) MILK (Gus Van Sant) This terrific mainstream telescoping of the political life of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office, can’t hold a candle to Rob Epstein’s searing, complicated documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. However, as docudramas go it has unusual grace, an engaging lead performance by Sean Penn (no one’s first choice for the actor one takes to one’s heart), and the good/bad luck to find its great theme of empowerment through the political process reflected by the setbacks in the gay rights struggle v. 2008. Van Sant trades off his usual avant-garde leanings for a much more straightforward approach, one that makes room for a vivid portrait of the emergence of a political community, as led and encapsulated by Milk, whose most desperate fight is the one to finally emerge from the shadow of otherness and be seen as fellow human beings.
16) REDBELT (David Mamet) In which we see Mamet being Mamet, but with a much more commanding control of the camera and a much less clinical approach to both the dialogue and the usual mouse traps he loves to set for his characters. Chiwetel Ejiofor is riveting as a jujitsu instructor who must navigate the manipulations of the movie business and ultimately redeem his idealistic standards about what it means to fight. The plot elements are no less convoluted here than usual, but because the dialogue is less self-conscious and epigrammatic, and the acting uniformly strong (no consciously wooden stunts a la Lindsay Crouse and Joe Mantegna in House of Games here), Mamet seems freed to make a film rather than a specimen under glass, and the result is the most riveting, resonant movie of his directing career.
14) FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (Hou Hsiao-hsien) The spirit of Albert Lamorrise’ s 1956 film The Red Balloon shadows Hou Hsiao-hsien’s delicate expansion of its themes into a haunting, placid meditation on the contradictory impulses and inexplicable fragility of life as seen from the perspective of a tentative seven-year-old boy. Handed over by his distracted artist mother (Juliette Binoche), herself reeling from the disorientation of a broken relationship with the boy’s father, to a Taiwanese nanny (Fang Song ) who is also a filmmaker, the boy watches with bemusement as the nanny begins to adopt his methods of drifting through the Parisian streets as a way of finding her own footing in an unfamiliar world, and the two begin to forge a quiet relationship. Perhaps not as resonant as some of his other films, Hou’s near-invisible processes here still ripple with the quiet confidence of a master and result in a tone of unexpected tenderness and underlying sadness that makes each step through Paris, as conjured by Pin Bing Lee’s camera, a specific journey of these two hearts where we discover everything and nothing all at once.
13) HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY (Guillermo Del Toro) Del Toro’s gifts as a spirited storyteller come bound to the breathing of new life into overly familiar CGI techniques, imbuing them with a certain lovely, handmade quality that is his hallmark. The resulting designs and sensibility of the fully imagined worlds he offers up here, in a sequel that makes the bounty of the first Hellboy movie look positively stingy, offer no justification for their own rich pleasures, just grander and more gleeful indulgences in them. For sheer delight, there’s no moment in the movie that’s more alive than Hellboy and company’s tour through a bustling troll market in search of an evil forest prince, a hidden neighborhood of ogres and monsters where, unlike the streets of Manhattan, they can roam unnoticed; for spectacle and aching beauty, there’s the titular hero’s battle with a spore-spewing elemental god that looks like a giant, pulsating beanstalk, a creature which will be consigned to extinction should it be defeated. Hellboy II: The Golden Army taps into the plight of the outsider, the freak, but never with a heavy hand to match the one attached to our hero’s scorched-red right arm—it’s too busy showing all the other lead-footed fantasies how to entertain in style.
12) MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS (Wong Kar-wai) Never has the simple act of sitting at a counter in a bar or diner looked or seemed so seductive, so dense with yearning, as it does in Wong Kar-wai’s somber, subtly romantic mood piece. Norah Jones’ status as a fledgling actress works in her favor here—she drifts away from potential love with the owner of a diner (Jude Law) and across the radar of some outsized personalities, including a self-destructive cop (David Straithairn), his beleaguered, apparently insensitive wife (a career high mark for Rachel Weisz), and a gambler with delusions of grandeur and some serious daddy issues (Natalie Portman), all the while reflecting their insecurities and neuroses back on themselves as she attempts to make sense of her own rudderless life. Jones seems disaffected at first, but she’s really just a romantic without access to the means of expressing it. Wong enriches the frame with planes of shimmering, textured imagery meant to celebrate her and the other, lonely, sometimes tragic characters and to cocoon them in environments spun from their own haunted interior landscapes.
I saw enough excellent documentaries in 2008 that I decided to just give them their own category and celebrate them all. Alex Gibney’s GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON, locates the nexus between the journalist’s brilliance and his demons. MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh) celebrates the inspired dance of Philippe Petit along a thin wire stretched between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and, by silent extension, the ghosts of the Towers themselves. No movie, fiction or nonfiction, was as frightening or disturbing as TROUBLE THE WATER (Carl Deal, Tia Lessen), an examination of the spirit of a pair of Hurricane Katrina survivors built around extraordinary home video footage shot in the hours leading up to, and during, the devastating storm. The best of the bunch I saw was certainly Werner Herzog’s ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD in which the director finds fresh, visually expressive ways to contemplate the beauty and terror of Antarctica and the necessary eccentricities that enable men to survive there. (The film’s title is, as one might expect from the benign pessimist Herzog, charged with double meaning.)
Less perfect than these four, but still worthy of the price of a ticket, were YOUNG AT HEART (Stephen Walker), BILLY THE KID (Jennifer Venditti), UP THE YANGTZE (Yung Chang) and the polarizing, caustic and hilarious RELIGULOUS (Larry Charles), in which the debate over Bill Maher's status as an asshole (he probably ranks) takes a back seat to the host’s take-no-prisoners incineration of the function of religion. The movie, in a rather strangely moving way, makes a good case for the importance of doubt in opposition to the relatively fearsome surety of absolute belief, from which all forms of fanaticism are forged, and does so by giving the various representatives of God in the religion debate enough rope to, if not hang themselves, then seriously tangle themselves up. It’s always been true of satire, genteel or caustic, that it has no obligation to the rules of fair play in striving to hit its targets; therefore, complaints of Borat-style ambushing or Maher picking and choosing his “victims” based on their ability to argue their convictions with cogency seem beside the point. The highest praise I can give to Maher and Religulous is that it put me in mind of perhaps the most pitiless and clearheaded thinking on religious belief I can think of—that of Mark Twain. Of course Maher is no Twain, but they are kindred spirits in their impatience for the intolerance and illogical consistencies with which their holy subject seems to be regularly shot through. At the risk of preaching exclusively to the choir, Religulous gets an “amen.”
THE TOP 10
10) SHOTGUN STORIES (Jeff Nichols) Like Gran Torino, an examination of the snowballing effect of violence, albeit in a minor key that eschews much of Eastwood’s penchant for melodrama in favor of the poetry of silence disrupted, of the inescapable patterns of coarse prejudice and willful misunderstanding that hang in the air like humidity, infecting generation after generation. Michael Shannon’s deceptively quiet performance as the oldest of three brothers embroiled in an increasingly ugly conflict with the stepsons of their recently deceased father masks a lifetime of unease that seems to inform the entire landscape of the small Arkansas town in which their personal tragedy will play out. Shannon draws you in with his deadened eyes; he makes identification with this brother’s frustration seem effortless, palpable. It’s a major performance, but it’ll be overlooked, like the movie itself, because it lacks ostentation, the big look-at-me moment. And like Shannon’s intuitive, deeply felt work, the movie feels artfully lived in, a glimpse into the heart of a place of sadness from which some men will never return.
9) GRAN TORINO (Clint Eastwood) A bitter, bigoted retired auto plant worker who resents just about every intrusion into his life after the death of his wife reacts with frustration and annoyance at the Hmong family who moves in next door into his Detroit neighborhood, but soon becomes a protective force when the family’s teenaged son is threatened by a local gang. Eastwood sidesteps almost every pitfall in what sounds like just another white savior/unwashed peasant scenario and infuses the proceedings with humor, authenticity and a stab at redemptive grace. The reductive trailer may have helped sell this moody, conversation-heavy piece as a meat-and-potatoes action flick—an octogenarian extension of familiar Dirty Harry tropes—but the movie has the bittersweet tang of life and a measure of the real cost of violence, as well as the mournful classicism that Eastwood has virtually perfected in most of the films he has directed since White Hunter, Black Heart (1990)-- the inept Absolute Power (1997) and the heavy-handed Changeling (2008) hereby excepted. And if this is indeed Eastwood’s swansong as an actor, as has been hinted, he’s chosen perhaps his strongest performance to go out on.
8) IN BRUGES (Martin McDonagh) Two hit men on the run (Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell) are dispatched to the medieval Belgian city of Bruges and ordered to cool their heels after a bloody incident back in London. Farrell is randy, restless and haunted by the events from which the two are fleeing, and rails against the city’s ghostly resistance to modernity, while Gleeson settles in amongst the canals and Gothic architecture and begins to see life from a freshly minted perspective as he keeps a paternal eye out for his slightly loose cannon of a partner. These are two of the year’s best performances fleshing out a sharply stylized meditation on male bonding and the acceptance of responsibility woven from the fabric of the movie’s lyrical, slightly acidic dialogue. Playwright and first-time feature director McDonagh also has filmmaking chops—In Bruges glides along on a breeze generated by its patience, visual acuity and skewed comic perspective, all of which results in a shoring up of the film’s emotional investments when the boys’ boss (a foul and funny Ralph Fiennes) hits town and the check for their stay finally comes due.
6) THE CLASS (Laurent Cantet) One school year inside the classroom of a French linguistics teacher telescoped by director Cantet, working from Francois Begaudeau’s script, based on Begaudeau’s book (he also stars as the teacher, Mr. Marin). The verisimilitude of the classroom setting is at first shocking—those who crave the phony, comforting dramatics of To Sir, With Love or Dangerous Minds will have little to grasp onto here. The brilliance of The Class lies in its precise examination of the multicultural reality of that classroom—the intricacies of language and personal experience that can mask shades of meaning-- and how Marin’s failure to integrate and adapt his style to the needs of his students, to fully appreciate how their different backgrounds can shape how they see what they’re going through in the classroom, can sow the seeds of conflict—the kind that cannot be easily wrapped up within the confines of a narrative film. Respectful of Marin and his passion, as well as the students, even at their most resistant and indifferent, this is a movie that sheds rare light on the frustrations inherent in educational systems that transcend the limitations of language and enter into the realm of the universal.
5) RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme) This picture is probably closer to what I think of as being a Demme movie than anything since Something Wild, yet at the same time it feels, at least stylistically, like a new breed. Demme and cinematographer Declan Quinn employ an impatient hand-held style (the antithesis of the patience of a film like Melvin and Howard) that earns its keep because, as David Edelstein suggests, it becomes an extension of the jangled nerves and dysfunctional patterns of the characters. A moneyed Connecticut family of musicians and artists hosts a weekend wedding celebration that turns testy when the sister of the bride—a narcissistic junkie just out of rehab (Anne Hathaway)—arrives and immediately begins picking at the scabs that precariously bind her familial relationships together. The difference between this movie and a squirm fest like Margot at the Wedding is a matter of simple empathy—Demme is not in the business of pinning butterflies. The multiculturalism at the heart of the movie is not imposed by him either; it is dictated by the lives of these people, yet it accurately reflects his inclusionary attitude, one which extends to Hathaway’s Kym, her equally needy but more outwardly stable sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), and the family matriarch (Debra Winger), whose brittle countenance reads simultaneously as protectiveness (of herself and her daughters) and selfishness. Rachel Getting Married is Demme’s return to form, and he gets there by channeling his inner Altman and coming up with a challenging, exasperating and invigorating comedy that tests the limits of a family’s forgiveness.
4) HAPPY GO LUCKY (Mike Leigh) Is there a braver, more difficult-to-sustain stance to take in these increasingly grim times than that of the relentless optimist? In the female performance of the year, Sally Hawkins portrays Poppy, a kindergarten teacher whose positive outlook on life seems at first to border on the delusional. She floats through her nights with careless abandon and her days with professional passion undaunted by all evidence that might contradict her enthusiasm. But when she comes in contact with a surly, fanatically tinged driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) the limits of Poppy’s worldview are tested. Leigh shares his admiration for Poppy through the exuberance of Hawkins’ performance, which is never less than welcome, and it is a measure of just how tender are the director’s feelings that Poppy is never allowed to be seen as shrill or a receptacle of condescension, that her attitude seems mostly a natural byproduct of her general sensitivity, not a lack of intellect. Happy-Go-Lucky may in many ways be the polar opposite of a relentlessly bleak narrative like Naked, but that’s not a backhanded way of saying that it, like Poppy, chooses to ignore the dark side. When Poppy comes face to face with the rage she can’t understand, her sober assessment, and her fear, is palpable, a tonic balance for the happiness which, as it should, will eventually hold the day.
3) WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt) Of all the movies on this list that, in one fashion or another, reflect or are rooted in the acrid soil of the national economic disaster which we seem poised to endure for the foreseeable future, none expresses the attendant fears of that position with greater visual economy, obstinate dignity and plain poetry than Wendy and Lucy. The movie has, in its aching heart, the ability to make your own spirit soar even while it takes its share of that ache as its own. A homeless young woman, Wendy (the sublime Michelle Williams) on her way to a job in Alaska has car troubles in a small Oregon town and, over the course of waiting for the repair, loses her dog Lucy. Within that simple framework Reichardt orchestrates (from a screenplay she wrote with Jonathan Raymond) a wrenching, beautifully observed chorus of emotions as Wendy begins to face the very real possibility of a life completely, profoundly derailed. In this exceptional film every grace note is hit and sustained without an ounce of overstatement—in its unassuming way, Wendy and Lucy is devastating and pretty nearly perfect.
2) LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Tomas Alfredson) The wintry landscape that blankets and informs this softly spectral and unnerving horror film gives it a literal chill, but the chill in your bones comes directly from the fashioning of a prepubescent coming-of-age story in terms of perpetual night, the procurement of blood and, of course, the deceptive appearance of youth. And what’s so surprising is the immediacy of the friendship between mousy, violence-obsessed 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrandt) and the mysterious Eli (Lea Leandersson), also around 12, who feels no cold and hides in her bare apartment during the day while her grim-faced companion (a man of at least 60) goes trolling for victims to drain for her. The title of the film implies not only the finding of one’s soul mate, but also the lore which prevents a vampire from entering a house without a specific invitation from the intended victim. Alfredson and scenarist John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own book) connect us profoundly with Oskar’s longing to find a special person in Eli with whom to grow up. But just under the surface of the movie’s ostensibly liberating conclusion lays a disturbing undercurrent which suggests there can be no liberation for Eli or Oskar, only hunger, servitude and even longer, colder nights.
...and then there was one...
1) SPEED RACER (The Wachowski Brothers) For every one of us (and there are a few) who embrace this much maligned would-be blockbuster as a pop masterpiece of velocity, digital artistry and visual/aural inspiration, one concerned with the coexistence of family bonds and artistic principles as well as the heady rush of disorientation to be found racing in a world in which physics seems to be refined and redefined with every race, there are at least 10 who decry it as “candy-colored caca” (Owen Gleiberman) or some other manifestation of What’s Wrong With Movies. At this point I’m not going to convince anyone, nor should I even try, that Speed Racer is bound to be influential—there are those who think it might just end up being the Blade Runner of its time—or that it’s brilliantly, enthrallingly entertaining, shot through with visual poetry and comedy and resistance to camp or cynicism, the ultimate Funk Decimator for any occasion. No, I’ll just be happy to maintain my delusional stance that it’s a great movie and try not to worry about whether anyone else agrees. No other movie this year surprised me more, or more consistently, or gave me such pleasure over multiple screenings. I’m telling you, folks, it’s one for the ages. Cool beans.
************* OTHER GOODIES FROM 2008***************
FAVORITE SHORTS
MIKE GILBERT ON CINEMA (Andrew Blackwood, Mike Gilbert)
The lightning-speed mind of ex-stand-up comic Mike Gilbert is given more or less free reign to riff on everything from Paris Hilton to Michael Mann in this verite cross between stand-up comedy and a spectacular act of regurgitative rationalization. Sort of a mini-Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema for the attention-deficit age, Gilbert’s hyperventilated observations are often simultaneously absurd and exacting, precise and preposterous, and always shot through with the frightening electricity of the truly movie-obsessed.
GANDHI AT THE BAT (Stephanie Argy, Alec Boehm) Newsreel footage, previously suppressed and newly discovered, of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s once-in-a–lifetime experience pinch-hitting for the 1933 Yankees is the centerpiece conceit of this impressively mounted, Zeligesque comedy. It’s an admittedly odd joke, but no less funny for that, and the production’s recreation of both newsreel style and the details of a bygone era of baseball is worthy of a budget far greater than what was undoubtedly at the filmmakers’ disposal. Giddy fun.
MOST MEMORABLE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCES OF 2009
RUN OF THE ARROW/MERRILL’S MARAUDERS, Egyptian Theater, January 13, 2008, with Andrew Blackwood and Sam Fuller’s widow signing books in the lobby.
U2 3D, Universal City IMAX, February 3, 2008, with my wife Patty, losing ourselves in the multiple layers of visual and aural sensation.
THE MIST, Movies 12, Springfield, Oregon, February 22, 2008, with Bruce—because seeing a movie like this with a kindred spirit is essential.
HOT FUZZ/SUPERBAD, DVD, February 23, with Bruce—see above.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, DVD, March 23, 2008
JOE DANTE’S MOVIE ORGY, New Beverly Cinema, April 22, 2008, with Aaron Graham, Joe Dante, et al. The enthusiasm was so contagious, I think I floated on the fumes of this screening for at least a week.
DEATH RACE 2000/ZOMBIE/INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS, Mission Tiki Drive-in Tiki Invasion II, May 3, 2008, with Haruka Sometani-Straight, Max Straight, Paul Reilly and Steve King (only Haruka, Max and I made it all the way through the third feature; in fact, we were the only car left on the drive-in lot at 2:00 a.m.…)
SPEED RACER, Opening Night, May 9, 2008, Americana Glendale 18, with my two daughters, unexpectedly caught up in what I was expecting to be one of the year’s worst.
SPEED RACER, Universal City IMAX, May 19, 2008, with Don-- because seeing this movie with a kindred spirit was essential.
SANSHO THE BAILIFF, New Beverly Cinema, July 2, 2008
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, Americana Glendale 18, July 26, 2008, with my youngest daughter, who loves Hellboy because he loves cats.
BEND OF THE RIVER, DVD, July 26, 2008, late night with my sleepless older daughter, watching her discover the pleasures of old-fashioned storytelling.
EXPLORERS, New Beverly Cinema, September 28, 2008, with my oldest daughter, thrilling with her to the zippy comedy of my favorite Joe Dante film.
1941/I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND, New Beverly Cinema, October 26, 2008, with Sal, Mr. Peel, et al. Oh, yeah, and Nancy Allen and Bob Gale and the ever-present spirit of Wendie Jo Sperber. Sort of a dream come true.
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR, Americana Glendale 18, November 1, 2008, with my oldest daughter, discovering for myself just how much she’s begun to open herself up to the emotional side of going to the movies.
ROAD HOUSE (1947), DVD, November 29, followed by the audio commentary by Eddie Muller and Kim Morgan—like watching a great movie populated by old friends (Richard Widmark, Ida Lupino and Cornel Wilde) with two other good and wise pals. This commentary, which beautifully balances scholarship, camaraderie and sharp, possibly bourbon-fueled observations, is the best I’ve heard in a long time. (And speaking of Richard Widmark, who we lost during the past year, take a gander at who Fred “Hunter” Dryer is starting to resemble these days…)
EARTHQUAKE and THE TOWERING INFERNO on successive weekends during the American Cinematheque’s Golden Age of Cataclysmic Cinema series, with Patty, Don, Danny, Corey, David and special guests Genevieve Bujold, Laurent Bouzereau and Carlena Gower. I’d never seen Earthquake in Sensurround before, and it was a huge amount of fun. The movie itself is entertaining, but by no rational standard could it be thought of as good. It is, however, the pinnacle of disaster camp. The movie’s technical and miniature effects are still impressive today and go a long way toward offsetting the general lack of style and personality that director Mark Robson fails to provide during the lulls between rumbles and crumbles. (And it’s still a lot more fun than a serious catastrophe like The Swarm.)
The big surprise is the degree to which The Towering Inferno works as spectacle and suspense when you’re lucky enough to see a pristine ‘Scope print like the one the Egyptian Theater unveiled. Sure, it’s lumbering and kinda dopey at times, and there’s really no excuse for hiring Fred Astaire and giving him absolutely nothing to do. (His love interest, Jennifer Jones, is far more active and mobile, especially during her tumble out of that scenic elevator.) But even though it is inarguable that the events of 9/11 have led us to be more sensitive/empathetic/potentially horrified at the spectacle of people trapped in and falling from a burning skyscraper, the fact is that it is still possible to see The Towering Inferno on its own terms. (Relatively speaking, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center made me feel queasier over its transgressions and opportunism in dealing with the actual tragedy in question.) And those terms, silliness and occasional tastelessness and all (seeing Susan Flannery ignite and then take a flying leap still bothers me), are those of a well-constructed thriller that has a few aces up its sleeve: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and the relatively unsung director John Guillermin (The Blue Max, The Bridge at Remagen, Shaft in Africa the 1976 King Kong and, yes, even Sheena). I’ve always enjoyed Guillermin’s unpretentious presence as an action director, and when combined with credited “Director of Action Sequences” Irwin Allen the talented journeyman makes the most of his gigantic canvas. But whether or not you argue over who staged the action, the movie is anchored by the presence of its stars (who presumably fell more under Guillermin’s influence than Allen’s), and Newman and McQueen consistently give the movie the kind of human gravitas a monster-sized film like this needs. (I was most grateful for Newman’s performance in particular—I had forgotten just how good he could be even in a movie that few would consider an actor’s showcase, and this fiery blockbuster is as good a display of his movie star magnetism as anything he ever made.) I think The Poseidon Adventure is still the high-water mark of the golden age of cataclysmic cinema, but it made for an exciting movie night indeed to find out that there is, after all the years of not thinking so, another movie that could contend for the title, and The Towering Inferno is it.
DISAPPOINTMENTS
HANCOCK All except for that part Thom talks about below. (I’ll save it for her, since she reminded me of it again tonight.) Peter Berg overuses fast cutting between close-ups like no film since my old cropped VHS copy of Once Upon a Time in the West.
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA Standard-issue late-period Woody Allen, but in a new and exotic setting and with a Spanish fireball at the center. At times charming and involving, but really we’re traveling Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy terrain here without the nods to a far superior work of art.
CHOKE Pleasantly nasty at times, but ultimately much more conventional and sentimental than even it thinks it is. Sam Rockwell is terrific, but the movie’s dingy heart is reflected by its murky look and indifference toward its characters.
W. A superficial treatment of an everyman cipher. Entertaining, but dismayingly toothless.
DOOMSDAY Coming on the heels of The Descent, this may be one of the year’s biggest letdowns. Neil Marshall’s futuristic thriller is as derivative as his previous film was relentless and horrifying. It’s a testament to their good humor than neither George Miller or John Carpenter raised a huff over plagiarism.
MOTHER OF TEARS I like a busty, leather-clad demon matriarch as much as the next guy, but this Dario Argento potboiler (and flesh-ripper) takes the final plunge, one the director has been flirting with for years, into ridiculous self-parody.
THE RUINS A perfectly sadistic and engrossing book has become an uninspired (however beautifully rendered) gore fest on screen, no more, no less. And who among you will be surprised that Hollywood has adapted this inescapably bleak story and somehow seen fit to tack on a supposedly “audience-friendly” ending that betrays the entire spirit of the enterprise?
THE DARK KNIGHT What more needs to be said? I just don’t see how this is a better movie than Batman Begins or any number of interchangeable writ-large modern action movies (like say, Iron Man), and all the inevitable, audience-baiting Oscar nominations are unlikely to change that. Not disreputable by any means, but murky in its visual choreography as well as its arguments for illegal surveillance (only for those who warrant being spied upon, of course), and far too enamored of its own deep-dish pronouncements about the complementary qualities of good and evil, anarchy and order, desire and restraint that are supposedly encapsulated or magnified by the Joker/Batman dichotomy.
SHINE A LIGHT Yet another Rolling Stones vanity project in which the geezers trot out their hits, sidestep the dirty business, and come off occasionally inspired but more often bored and, finally, hypocritical about their own dark humor.
HAMLET 2 A comedy about relentless positivism among the untalented, the devilish humor loses focus just when it should be sharpest. There are few things more embarrassing than a movie that practically begs for points on shock value when the material in question—a ludicrous Andrew Lloyd Webber send-up called “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus” inside a play called Hamlet 2-- is as tame and thickheaded as it is here.
APPALOOSA Everything is in place here for a rousing western except for a surefooted hand behind the camera. Ed Harris, beside Viggo Mortensen, has the on-screen gravitas to play a self-appointed sheriff with a penchant for pulling the trigger, but Harris the director lets scenes and set pieces dribble on and on, mixing and matching tones without a sense of how to build atmosphere and tension. Some might suggest the aimlessness is intentional, a stab at a new tone for the genre, but I think it’s just ineptitude.
THE WRESTLER To paraphrase Pauline Kael, here’s a Darren Aronofsky movie for people who don’t like Darren Aronofsky movies. Except that I didn’t like this one any better than I did Requiem for a Dream. The director trades in his stock visual hyperkineticism for faux realism, all the better to follow around the specimen known as Mickey Rourke with a Steadicam and stay out of his way while he mines a roster of sports/relationship movie clichés for all they’re worth, simultaneously making the movie as much about Mickey Rourke as it is the titular “beat-up piece of meat.” Ultimately as phony, puffed-up and exploitative as the world of wrestling that it depicts, this movie congratulates itself (and audiences) for buying into its dime-store Christ mythology largely because it’s impossible not to notice that the guy selling it looks and talks like he’s lived anything but a pampered Hollywood life. That may be a novelty, but it can’t paper over a litany of tearjerker moves that would make Rocky Balboa blush.
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS The most prevalent argument for this movie (and it’s not necessarily a bad argument) is that it is the dumb, dopey action flick the red-eyed rogues played by Seth Rogen and James Franco would fancy themselves in, that they’d want to see, or that it’s all some kind of meta-joke, a tall, wild tale cooked up and embellished by the stoners in question at the breakfast table the morning after. Whether you buy into that or not, it seems to me that any comedy which apparently requires the audience to be as baked as the main characters in order to inspire a steady stream of laughter is probably lazier than it even wants to admit. Even Nice Dreams had more ambition than this, and it didn’t insist on elaborate rationalizations (on the part of the filmmakers or its fans) to explain the pungent haze where its good sense ought to be.
SURPRISES
SPEED RACER REDBELT IN BRUGES MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS ROLE MODELS WELCOME HOME, ROSCOE JENKINS THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN THE HOUSE BUNNY THE LONGSHOTS MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA TRANSPORTER 3 DIARY OF THE DEAD
and MEET DAVE: I can’t account for the wrath delivered upon this agreeable, well-performed family sci-fi comedy. Outside of one annoying bit (featured in the trailer) where Eddie Murphy’s humanoid-spaceship “Dave” does a Barry Gibb impersonation—nothing more timely than a stale “Stayin’ Alive” joke—this surprisingly funny movie doesn’t operate in the same universe as a howler like Norbit or even, for that matter, other family-oriented Murphy hits like Dr. Doolittle or >Daddy Day Care. Meet Dave (a lame title) was a huge flop theatrically and that fact, combined with low expectations in the wake of Norbit, apparently doomed this picture from the start. But the irony is, the movie, a kid-friendly wrinkle on a great Woody Allen sketch from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex…, is a hoot, and it features Muprhy’s best, most sustained and nuanced performance since his original turn as Sherman Klump (and Buddy Love) in the remake of The Nutty Professor. “Dave” is a spacecraft that takes human form, precisely mimicking the various forms of human behavior it encounters (with the added comic zing of wide-eyed, mechanized detachment)—Murphy plays the ship as well as its absurdly British-accented captain, who resides with his crew in the ship’s “brain.” (As in Allen’s movie, all the body parts have dedicated crew members, though apparently Spaceship Dave has no need to reproduce.) Murphy’s comic instincts seem sharper here than they have in years—roles like Klump and this one encourage the kind of physical identification, the full-bore commitment to a part that he thrives on as a performer when he’s hitting on all cylinders. (The lack of same was part of why he was such a drag in his overrated Dreamgirls appearance—just getting behind a mike and “doing” James Brown is apparently no longer enough.) The actor finds the absurdity in the premise and uses it to his advantage—every blip on the ship’s blank face, every quizzical, noncommittal reaction to outside stimulus, every attempt to mimic language and behavior is a tiny marvel. (Dave, incredibly, never even blinks.) The aliens’ quest to regain possession of a precious and life-saving, salt-extracting orb from their planet, which has landed in the hands of the requisite 10-year-old boy, is merely a device used to set Murphy down in the urban thicket of New York City and riff off the conflicts—interior as well as exterior—as he pinballs around the streets until the plot is forced to kick in at around 75 minutes in. Anyone silly enough to expect it to be more than that would probably count themselves among this movie’s many disappointed viewers-- director Brian Robbins has not delivered, nor would he be capable of or interested in delivering Eddie Murphy’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. But why all the hate based on the movie’s admittedly lowbrow humor? You either find Dave’s inability to modulate his braying impersonation of a friend’s (white) boyfriend funny, or you don’t; a set piece in which Dave ingests hot peppers, thus forcing the workers manning the stations of the tongue and tummy to endure a tidal wave of masticated jalapenos, is either clever or insufferably dumb. That’s why comedy is hard-- nobody’s funny bone gets tickled in quite the same way. But the effort exerted to condemn this genial and delightful picture seems misguided and over-scaled. Even if one insists that Meet Dave is tasteless or less than hilarious, it could hardly be called punishing or aggressively annoying. Could the same be said of Pineapple Express, or even Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? For those willing to give it a try (and I eagerly passed on it in theaters just like you probably did), Meet Dave might qualify as the year’s biggest surprise.
SCARIEST (Fiction Division)
THE STRANGERS I fancy myself a battle-hardened horror veteran, and when movies scare me they are most often in the get-under-your-skin category, of which this year’s Let the Right One In is an excellent example. But The Strangers somehow managed to bypass all my defense systems and sent me straight back to the hypersensitive brain of my ten-year-old self. This movie may not be a classic—hell, it may not even be reputable—but it surely is effective. There are set-ups and pay-offs here that are so rudimentary, so central to the iconography and structure of horror technique, yet so smoothly executed, with a slight tweak in timing or framing for good—or evil-- measure, that it often felt like I couldn’t close my eyes tight enough or sink low enough in my seat to hide from the horror. No greater praise, then, for a movie that takes its time anchoring the audience to empathetic, potentially off-putting characters via fairly subtle expository foundations and has no other agenda other than shaking the shit out of you. Mission accomplished.
SCARIEST (Nonfiction Division) TROUBLE THE WATER
ACADEMY OF THE UNDERRATED Speed Racer, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Burn After Reading, My Blueberry Nights, Meet Dave, Quantum of Solace
ACADEMY OF THE OVERRATED Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Changeling, The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, Pineapple Express
Best Director ANDY AND LARRY WACHOWSKI, Speed Racer (Runner-up: Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In, Laurent Cantet, The Class, Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky, Kelly Reichardt, Wendy and Lucy)
Best Actress SALLY HAWKINS, Happy Go Lucky (Runners-up: Gillian Anderson, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Anna Faris, The House Bunny, Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married, Elizabeth Pena, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer, Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy)
Best Actor MICHAEL SHANNON, Shotgun Stories (Runners-up: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Redbelt, Colin Farrell, In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges, Danny McBride, The Foot Fist Way, Sean Penn, Milk, Paul Rudd, Role Models)
Best Supporting Actress ROSEMARIE DeWITT, Rachel Getting Married (Runners-up: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Susie Essman, Bolt, Ahney Her, Gran Torino, Lina Leandersson, Let the Right One In, Rachel Weisz My Blueberry Nights, Debra Winger, Rachel Getting Married)
Best Supporting Actor ROBERT DOWNEY, JR., Tropic Thunder (Runners-up: Roger Allam, Speed Racer, Billy Connolly, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Emile Hirsch, Milk, Michael Kelly, Changeling, Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight, Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Role Models, Brad Pitt Burn After Reading)
Best Screenplay MIKE LEIGH, Happy-Go-Lucky (Runners-up: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, Martin McDonagh, In Bruges, David Mamet, Redbelt, Joel and Ethan Coen, Burn After Reading, Andy and Larry Wachowski, Speed Racer)
Best Cinematography CHRISTOPHER DOYLE and RAIN KATHY LI. Paranoid Park (Runners-up: Darius Khondji, My Blueberry Nights, Pin Bing Lee, Flight of the Red Balloon, Declan Quinn, Rachel Getting Married, Peter Zeitlinger, Encounters at the End of the World)
Best Editing ROBIN CAMPILLO, The Class (Entre les murs) Tim Squyres, Rachel Getting Married, Roger Barton, Zach Staenberg, Speed Racer, Barbara Tulliver, Redbelt, Jon Gregory, In Bruges, Chris Dickens, Slumdog Millionaire, Roderick Jaynes, Burn After Reading)
THE PICKINGS OF MY DAUGHTERS (Six-year-old Division)
Best movie of the year: HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY (“Because it was very action-y!”)
THE PICKINGS OF MY DAUGHTER (Eight-year-old Division)
Best movie of the year: SPEED RACER (It has romance, action, and it’s funny too. There’s nobody funnier than Spritle and Chim-chim doing so-so kung fu! The best!”)
2) THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR (“Exciting!”) 3) HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR (“Happy and full of good songs!”) 4) KUNG FU PANDA (“A little weird, but weird is good!”) 5) STAR WARS: CLONE WARS (“Very violent! And then there’s Jar Jar Binks!”) 6) KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL (“Mysterious! Who’s the bad guy?!”) 7) WALL-E (“A cute movie!”) 8) MEET DAVE (“Hilarious!”) 9) BOLT (“A very sweet movie! My favorite character, Rhino, was very strange!”) 10) GET SMART (“Very secret agent-ish!”)
THOM McGREGOR’S PICKS (Spouse Division)
1) WALL-E HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
2) MAN ON WIRE U2 3D
3) BURN AFTER READING 4) HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR
5) The first half of HANCOCK, if only for the moment, completely out of left field, when our stubbly, burnt-out superhero lands in jail and, in a super-Shawshank reversal, shoves a predatory convict’s head up his own ass, complete with squishy sound effect and—what makes the whole thing nonsensically delightful— to the musical accompaniment of Quincy Jones’ Sanford and Son theme song! It’s all downhill from there!
2008 MOVIES I REGRET HAVING NOT YET SEEN
A CHRISTMAS TALE GOMORRAH GHOST TOWN NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON THE READER MOVING MIDWAY CHRIS AND DON: A LOVE STORY EDGE OF HEAVEN STILL LIFE
I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG MAX PAYNE STUCK TELL NO ONE REVOLUTIONARY ROAD JCVD CHE SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK CADILLAC RECORDS THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES MY WINNIPEG WALTZ WITN BASHIR DEAR ZACHARY: A LETTER TO A SON ABOUT HIS FATHER THE ORDER OF MYTHS
Seattle film critic Robert Horton moderates a film series panel discussion at the Frye Art Museum on the best and sometimes worst films of the year. Kathleen Murphy (Queen Anne News, MSN.com), Andrew Wright (The Stranger), Jim Emerson (rogerebert.com) and Horton also provide their top ten movie lists of 2008.
And as if things weren’t already weird enough in 2009, how about A WEDDING AT TACO BELL?
Finally, belated goodbyes to Patrick McGoohan from Glenn Kenny, Ricardo Montalban from the Los Angeles Times and now, word of the death of Ironside actor Don Galloway from Allan R. Ellenberger. May these talented men, and all those who have left us over the past year, find peaceful rest...
And before I forget, the year's worst.
Second runner-up: The Happening (M. Night Shamaylan)
Posts
Do you know this guinea pig? She’s Muriel, the official mascot of (HYPERBOLE ALERT!) the online community’s most prestigious annual award, The Muriel Awards, organized and hosted by Paul Clark, he of The Screengrab and, of course, his own home turf, Silly Hats Only, from whence the Muriels originated three years ago. This will be my third year of having the honor of being among the voters, and this year the number has increased to nearly 40 excellent online film writers, each of whom contributed votes in 17 different categories, from Best Film to Best Cinematic Moment of 2009, to anniversary awards for the best films of 1998, 1983 and 1958. Each day Paul will be posting the winners in each category, along with short essays commissioned by some of the writers involved, leading up to Oscar Night, February 22. So don’t forget to check in each day for Muriel Awards updates—all you have to do is punch the Muriel Awards tab on the sidebar to your right. I’ll be posting my own ballot later on in the game, plus links to days on which Paul has asked me to write about a couple of specific awards (don’t ask; I ain’t tellin’). 
God help me, I’m so late with these answers to Professor Kingsfield’s Hair-raising, Bar-raising Holiday Movie Quiz that I can’t imagine incurring anything but the quizmaster’s wrath at my arrogance in dragging my feet so. But I submit them nonetheless, and before I do, I want to thank everyone who has already done the work before me, especially Jim Emerson for inspiring me to get off my polished duff and get my assignment done as well as his promotion of the quiz and procurement of answers from visitors to his own site. Most happily, he even got a list of responses from an honest-to-God dean of cinema, Richard T. Jameson, whose answers I gladly offer now before I offer my own. Here they are: 
1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?
Revival: A great ‘70s double bill of Hickey and Boggs, starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, and Freebie and the Bean, starring Alan Arkin and James Caan. I have long sought out H&B and to finally see it on the big screen was a real treat. I will say that this sun-bleached L.A. noir, written by a young Walter Hill, was not the instant forgotten classic of my most intense preconceived notions, but that’s far from saying it was a bummer. It was just not as far-reaching and deeply felt as I was hoping it would be. Though he showed a steady hand here and an admirable tendency to play up the dissimilarities between this tough piece of work and the more popular I Spy format audiences undoubtedly were expecting, director Culp never helmed another feature, which, on the evidence of this solid action movie, is our loss. The real revelation, at least for me, was Richard Rush’s Freebie and the Bean. This one got scathing reviews upon its release in 1974 (Leonard Maltin deemed it “repellent”) and for the one screening I had of it back in 1975 the shadow of its co-feature, Blazing Saddles, dampened even its potent demolition derby antics and post-Archie Bunker racially oriented character comedy for me. But in 2009 it looked like a much better movie than the one preserved in my memory-- hilarious, screamingly well-choreographed in the stunt department, and featuring three pieces of acting—from Alan Arkin, James Caan, and Valerie Harper as “Bean’s Wife”—that are textbook examples of how to create strong characters amidst a Hollywood comedy most would have never deemed to take at all seriously. If this movie ever gets a proper DVD/Blu-ray release it might have a chance of reclaiming a spot in the ‘70s car culture pantheon right alongside the likes of Smokey and the Bandit, Death Race 2000 and Gone in 60 Seconds.
2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice?
4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks
Even though I remember the original version quite fondly, I wouldn’t mind a new satiric sensibility being made to bear on Clair Huffaker’s novel about the last great Native American uprising, Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian, which was made by Carol Reed, of all people, into the 1970 movie Flap starring Anthony Quinn, Victor Jory, Claude Akins and Shelley Winters. Maybe Sherman Alexie could take a whack at the screenplay and turn it over to an ethnographically minded filmmaker like Michael Apted or Walter Hill. Or if we’re talking Hollywood narrowcasting, how about a live-action version of Jonny Quest stylistically retrofitted to the Hanna-Barbera aesthetic a la the Wachowski’s Speed Racer?
7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady?
But ultimately I have to say Hats Off to Larry, for Dillinger, Born to Kill, Andy Warhol’s Bad, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, The Naked Gun (he was the manager of the Anaheim Angels during the baseball game sequence!), Reservoir Dogs (“Okay, ramblers, let’s get ramblin’”) and Chris Gore’s hilarious Red. Tierney was a true character masquerading as a character actor, and as such was unforgettable.
8) Are most movies too long?
11) Jean Peters or Sheree North?
But the one person who encouraged my earliest interest in the movies, and in classic Hollywood in particular, was my paternal grandmother, Rina Trevisan Cozzalio, seen here in 1936 at age 15 (inset) and in 1939 at age 18, just after she got married. She loved all the old stars and never missed an opportunity to tell me about the movies she loved when she was young. Her house was the only one in our family that had cable TV when I was a child, which meant that in order to see some of the vintage titles that aired on stations out of Portland and San Francisco I ended up watching them with her in her living room. She’s also the one adult other than my parents who took me to the movies when I was too young to go by myself, everything from Roy Orbison in The Fastest Guitar Alive to The Singing Nun and The Greatest Story Ever Told. (She’s also the one who, years later, accompanied me to see Mandingo and Drum.) I might have still learned about the movies later on in life, but it was my Grandma Rina’s influence and encouragement which reinforced my growing interest, which said to me that my interest wasn’t just frivolous, that the movies could, and should, have a special place in my heart. And each time I see one, especially a classic film from Hollywood’s golden age, I always like to think that somewhere she’s watching with me and getting a kick out of the fact that I still love them the way I do, the way she did. 
17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar?
18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other.
19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie
26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?
29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.
Before the sun sets on this most significant of holidays that take place during the first week of February (and there are so very many), it’s my pleasure to point you to a superb piece by fellow blogger and SLIFR reader Ali Arikan. Ali’s Cerebral Mastication, over which he presides all the way from the country of Turkey, is one of the highlights of the blogosphere, and his new piece, “Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A Groundhog Day Retrospective” is, like the brilliant Harold Ramis-directed comedy which it revisits, both specific and universal, a—yes-- cerebral and joyous examination of one man’s discovery of how best to live a life that has been, up till his moment of self-awareness, been wasted on bitterness and cynical self-satisfaction. In many ways, Ali’s piece, in addition to being an evocative re-viewing of a terrific movie, made me think of how this mind-bending picture works in tandem with Mike Leigh’s decidedly not-metaphysical-at all Happy-Go-Lucky to address how, in grim economic times as these, a positive outlook is not simply a harbinger of sticking one’s head in the sand, but instead a viable way of engaging with the tough winds and dark shadows that buffet and blanket us daily, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Here’s a taste:
“For 16 years, Groundhog Day has been hailed as a meditation on self-redemption. But to pigeonhole it into one overarching theme would be an insult to the layered precision, and perfection, of Harold Ramis’s 1993 masterpiece, which ventures into the heart of darkness and despair to ultimately emerge unharmed, but not unmarked. This story of a man doomed to relive the same day over and over again is not concerned about tomorrow. A true absurdist triumph, it cares not what the destination might be, for it knows that the pursuit of meaning is itself meaningful whether or not that pursuit is eventually rewarded. Life might very well lack purpose, and it might very well be a struggle. But that doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole about it.
One of the great coups of Gast and Hackford’s film is the interviews they scored with writers George Plimpton and Norman Mailer, who both brilliantly and compellingly elucidate the ambience of being in Zaire for the fight, as well as insights into Ali’s pre-fight psychology. Mailer suspects that Ali feared Foreman’s youth and prowess in his own private moments much more than his arrogant public persona would ever allow to be revealed, and Plimpton relates a story of a Congolese witch doctor who predicted that Foreman would be visited by a strength-sapping succubus who would open the door to defeat at the hands of his older, apparently weaker opponent. Both provide excellent analysis of the fight itself, and in the process provide a window through which to see boxing as a battle of balletic strategy as much as brute force, as well as specific insight into Ali’s lightning-fast moves (extensive use of the right-hand jab, which is telegraphed much more easily to the defender but which Ali successfully used on Foreman because it was the least-expected punch) as well as the deceptive craftiness of the rope-a-dope, which ends up seducing Foreman into punching himself out of the fight long before Ali lands the knockout blow. 
It is precisely this poetry—his pre-rap freestyling that enraptured so many along the color line in the 1960s, but also his poetry of motion, of thought, of choreographed beauty, of force, and of restrained force—that I’m drawn to whenever I think of Ali, his young self as seen in this film, and even the older version, enfeebled by Parkinson’s Disease. (Mailer intimates in Kings that the onset of this malady was a direct result of the brutality visited upon his beautiful frame in the 22 fights that ensued after the Rumble in the Jungle, a fight many speculated would be the one, win or lose, that would end his career.) The elderly Ali has none of the speed and grace of the man who once murdered a rock, killed a brick and who was so mean he made medicine sick. But he has the dignity that comes from a life which extended so articulately the principles of power he executed in the ring and brought into the social arena as an ambassador for social change and an icon of hope and pride, not only for African-Americans but all Americans. It’s easy to watch When We Were Kings and realize why Ali is thought of in some circles as closer to a god than a mere mortal. Even awareness of his mortality doesn’t get in the way of playing this game; if he’s a diminished god now, When We Were Kings provides ample evidence of his divinity in the ring. 
Taylor also suggests that the musical elements of When We Were Kings ironically tend to bring the energy of the film down, and I can see what he means insofar as the film’s commitment to telling the story of the concert built around the Zaire fight seems half-hearted. (The energy having been relatively dialed down, Ali always returns and gooses things to life again.) But rather than excising them altogether, the film might have benefited from going further in the other direction. We get brief intercutting, snippets of B.B. King, a morsel of James Brown, and a thematic motif which casts Miriam Makeba’s somewhat sinister onstage persona as the spirit of the succubus that some (Plimpton included?) believe brought Foreman down. Had the movie allowed for a more expansive canvas that might have showcased complete performances, it too might have gained some of the epic quality that was surely present during the actual event. Taylor also quite correctly observes that the movie skimps a bit on the background which led to the murderous ascendance and foul continuance of President Mobutu Sese Soko, who provided the $10 million to stage the event that he hoped would promote his newly formed country, formerly the Belgian Congo, as a world force. It is in the interweaving of elements such as this that great documentaries are made, and the absence of a particular depth here harms When We Were Kings, keeps it in the realm of the geopolitically superficial, even with such galvanizing figures as Ali and Foreman at its center.
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5) The first half of HANCOCK, if only for the moment, completely out of left field, when our stubbly, burnt-out superhero lands in jail and, in a super-Shawshank reversal, shoves a predatory convict’s head up his own ass, complete with squishy sound effect and—what makes the whole thing nonsensically delightful— to the musical accompaniment of Quincy Jones’ Sanford and Son theme song! It’s all downhill from there!
I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG
Richard Corliss on Speed Racer and the inevitable smart-ass knock on him for putting it on his 10-best list.
Second runner-up: The Happening (M. Night Shamaylan)
