All Racist on the Western Coast

Welcome to the third episode of Season One of Best Pictures from the Outside In. If you're just joining us—don't worry, you'll still count later on as a "vintage" fan from the infancy of this series!—Goatdog and Nathaniel and I are surveying Oscar's top prizewinners from inception forward and from this year backwards, leading to all kinds of bonkers juxtapositions... though episodes One and Two have convinced us, and hopefully you, that these arbitrary pairings can lead to fresh, lively takes on the movies. This week, we bunk up with All Quiet on the Western Front, a prestige adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about young German soldiers working hard to stay alive in World War I, which was the Academy's favorite movie released between August 1, 1929, and July 31, 1930. We also run into Crash, Oscar's anointee from 2005, tracking 20+ characters through the mean, bile-spewing streets of modern LA. If these two films were mashed into one, you might call it...


Nick: So, this week the inevitable finally unfolds, twice over. On the one hand, for the first time in this series, Oscar ignites a major uproar with its choice of the top prizewinner. Even more typically of AMPAS, and at both ends of our historical double-helix, Best Picture goes to a movie that huffs and puffs along with a Worthy Message. Without dodging the issue completely, I'm inclined to steer clear of the whole Crash/Brokeback passion play, partially because it was all so recent and so heated that we hardly need another rehearsal: you all know how you feel, and so do we. Partially because I'm the host, and I wouldn't have voted for either one of those movies; given Oscar's choices, I was all about Capote and Munich that year. And partially because our goal is to reassess the movies, not the conditions or controversies that surrounded their victories.

So, with that caveat loosely in place - the First Amendment does, after all, still prevail on this blog - I think we might begin more fruitfully with the moralizing aims of All Quiet on the Western Front (war is hell, and the homefront has no idea!) and of Crash (contemporary racism is as horrible as it is pervasive, and you, the viewers, have no idea!). Neither film leaves any doubt about its motivating ideology, although they position themselves a little differently with regard to their didacticism. All Quiet... is brazenly anti-war, as expressed through its stomach-turning battlefield scenes as well as its dialogues and voiceovers—but the film is also intent on making huge forward leaps in realistic "style" and in technical sophistication. Considering how alert we were last week to The Broadway Melody's crude fascination with its own soundtrack, it's amazing that All Quiet...—so much more ambitious in scope, depth, sonic density, and especially camera movement—is only a year older. Director Lewis Milestone makes a huge case for All Quiet... as groundbreaking cinema, which Paul Haggis all but refuses to do with Crash. That film is formally and technically modest, almost TV-like, as though this in itself will make the movie's elaborately contrived dialogue and dramaturgy more "believable."

So, while we grab our first round of cocktails, I have some questions: did you guys feel that the grand scale and artistic ambition of All Quiet... or the almost anti-cinema aesthetics of Crash made you take their implied "messages" more to heart, or less so? What IS the message of Crash, anyway, and does the movie have an artistic identity apart from its rhetorical points? And if I can ask a more pointed question than we sometimes have in beginning these chats, is there a single scene or moment in either film that sums up how you think the movie works, or how you feel about the movie? (I'll keep quiet about my answers till after I've opened the floor.)

Go to it, you crazy lily-white crackers!


Nathaniel: I love that it took us until episode 3 to get to the Worthy Message film... although I fear we shan't ever be granted a two week leave again. We'll be abandoned on the front lines from here on out.

I'm glad you mentioned the anti-cinema aesthetic of Crash. It's one of the reasons I have a problem with it. I'm not predisposed to hating anti-cinema cinema but I almost never take it as seriously as the Movie-Movie. Even in cases where I like the former kind more than in this case, I can never get truly passionate about them. I think it's charitable that you view this deficiency as an aesthetic choice... I'm inclined to view such films as merely lacking in visual creativity or technical skill. So my answer to the first question is that I can't take Crash's message as seriously as All Quiet's, even before we get to the other problem: Racism is Wrong! is hypocritical in delivery. One of the things I respect a great deal about War is Wrong! is that its message is not compromised. It doesn't wallow in the thrills of the battle and victories like many supposed anti-war movies do. The War is Wrong! soldiers actually look distraught whenever they win OR lose... which I think marks a brave commitment to the Message first and foremost. It's not interested in having and eating its cake. Meanwhile, over in Racism is Wrong!, the players and audience seem to be blatantly pandered too whenever the occasion permits. So often the movie seems to be saying, "It's wrong but we all do it—and that doesn't make us bad people!" I think we need a YouTube mashup of Crash scenes set to Avenue Q's "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", pronto. The movie is similarly "Oops, my bad!"-forgiving, if much less witty in the delivery.


When thinking on Crash, it's not a scene but a line that careens into me. It's the often lampooned but interesting (to me at least) moment when whitey Sandra Bullock has her inchoate breakdown: "I'm angry all the time and I don't know why." I much prefer the movie when its notions of widespread psychosocial sickness are vaguely expressed. I think Crash is more effective in these fuzzier moments than when it hits any nail (black, white, brown or yellow) on the head. We, as humans, may like easy explanations and diagnosis but that doesn't mean they're good for us. Easy categorizations are part of the problem. If I have to choose a scene I'm going with the bookend of Michael Peña and the bedtime story of the magic cape. The first scene is a beauty since Peña is a sympathetic and fine actor. [Note: producer/star Don Cheadle ventures on the DVD commentary that Peña's performance is "arguably the best thing in the movie."] But the payoff, potent as it may be, is manipulative. It works but the aftertaste is gross. That's how Crash plays for me throughout. I think it's well meaning. I really do. It's the delivery that's the real problem.

Goatdog: The scene from Crash that best illustrates why I think that movie is a train wreck is Sandra Bullock's post-sprain embrace with her sometimes helpmeet, sometimes whipping Hispanic, Maria (played by Yomi Perry). Crash structures itself around a series of accidents—of wrong-place-wrong-time meetings, of "there are only five cops on active duty in LA" coincidences, and of genuine accidents proving that nothing is more unsafe than the home except the outside. These accidents both (1) provide fodder for people to dig out their Racist Thesaurus and Old-Timey Book of Creaky Insults, and (2) provide opportunities to realize the errors of their ways. So Sandra takes a tumble, and none of her self-obsessed (presumably white) friends will help her, but her savior, Saint Maria, rescues her from her beige cocoon, takes her to the hospital, and brings her tea.


How lovely! How loyal! You know, the Maria whom Bullock pays to help out, who would likely get fired if she did not help out. In this grand rapprochement between representatives of the Unaware Racist White Union and the Long-Suffering Hispanic Union, Paul Haggis doesn't see fit to give her a single closeup without Bullock, and after Bullock makes her silly declaration, doesn't show her face at all. By that time, she's a prop, not a person. What. the. fuck? Is he making some subversive statement about how Bullock's self-deluded epiphany isn't real? If so, why not at least one little closeup of Maria rolling her eyes? (We all know Ang Lee would have given Perry her own closeup.) It doesn't matter to Haggis what Maria thinks of this, because he's already dealt with what Hispanics think about race in his Michael Peña storyline. This, like Matt Dillon's rapprochement with Thandie Newton in the flames of the burning SUV, strikes me as completely false in so many ways: it illuminates the silliness of the film's reductively interlocking circle of characters, it proudly brandishes the film's reductive view of how people deal with race every day, and it posits a reductive solution in which we only have to viciously stub our toes while running for the teapot in order to have a grand epiphany about how we're racists but we're not bad people and there's hope for us yet.

Which brings me to All Quiet on the Western Front. You know, because it stands at the opposite pole from Crash's technical, moral, and thematic deficiencies. The one scene I'd choose as being emblematic of everything it does right with its technique and message is the recruits' first outing with the lovably ugly Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim) to lay barbed wire. What struck me was the screaming. When people are shot or struck by shrapnel in this film, they don't fall over on their side and die quietly: they scream, they run around, they tear at their faces, they cry, they're in agony, and their friends have to watch because there's nothing else they can do. When they try to help, it's useless—heroism is useless. Like Nathaniel said, it never deviates from this message, not for a second. I don't think audiences had seen a film deal with war this way before (because the sound is so important to the effectiveness), and it would be another 15 or so years before a film dealt with war this honestly again.


The bumper crop of early-30s antiwar films this one kicked off (many of them written by John Monk Saunders, who wrote Wings) weren't this realistic, and from what I remember of the early WW2 films that dealt with combat, they chose the "slight grimace, then fall over quietly" type of battle death. This scene also plays up Milestone's mastery of all the tools available to him as a filmmaker, and at times it's almost as if the creaky-early-talkie period didn't exist, that he was able to meld some of the impeccable technique of the late silents with all the possibilities of sound without losing anything from either side of that formerly impenetrable boundary between sound and silent. It's a legitimately great movie, one of the ten best winners of all time.

Nick: I'm glad you highlight a failure of Crash's editing, Mike, because I do find it galling that the two specific crafts for which Crash won Oscars—the writing and the cutting—are the two things it misjudges more often than anything else. This might seem like nitpicking, but for me a defining moment in the movie is when Don Cheadle's character barks at his mother over the phone that he's "having sex with a white woman," but rather than move closer to Jennifer Esposito's reaction or even hold the full shot where they are lying on the bed in real time, editor Hughes Winborne actually cuts to an arbitrarily different shot as Esposito gets off the bed. This means we don't experience the moment as the character does, in any way; instead, the screenplay digs in its heels for another righteous monologue where a character describes what is structurally wrong with what someone else just did/said. The coarseness of the editing here is botchy in exactly the same way (for me) as the moment you describe, Mike, and works against the film's occasional strength (I agree with Nathaniel here) at showcasing human behavior and vulnerability without always underlining what exactly is most troubling or wrong with the person or moment or event we've just witnessed.

	+		=
Offending Dialogue + Anti-Reaction Shot = Freestanding Lecture

That said, I don't always think Crash is one-dimensional or totally overt. I don't experience the Matt Dillon/Thandie Newton scene on the highway as a "rapprochement," for example, because I find both of their affects—hers especially, when she subtly shakes her head at the end of the scene—interestingly inscrutable. Some of the writing works, both in the rare understated moment ("You embarrass me") and even some of the florid ones, if you take the movie as a Eugene O'Neill-ish exercise in forcing characters to speak their subconscious thoughts aloud, rather than a snapshot of alleged "reality." And the actors frequently save the movie, or parts of the movie: Terrence Howard's painful apologies to the police, Shaun Toub's and Michael Peña's fight over the door and the lock, Loretta Devine calling office security but then holding them off to hear Matt Dillon out. Strong scenes, sharply played. I do have to give Crash credit for being punchy and vivid and occasionally quite bracing, for all the other times when it's tripping over itself.

But I'm short-shrifting All Quiet on the Western Front! Ditto on its conviction that war really is ghastly and intolerable. I also love the palpable violence of some of the social encounters (Himmelstoss the mailman, converted overnight into a defensive and hostile automaton) and even the camera movements (tracking back as the soldiers rush into their barracks for the first time, underscoring their excitement but also sort of retreating from their painful naïveté). I agree it's one of the best winners Oscar ever chose... but are we going too easy on it? Does it have a Saving Private Ryan-ish problem of getting weirdly talky in the second half? Compared to something as visually and cinematically robust as that horrible scene where the bunker caves in on itself and Franz Kemmerich (Ben Alexander) goes stir-crazy inside, the scenes where the soldiers discuss what war "really is" by the side of the river or where Lew Ayres wrestles internally with his own guilt at killing an enemy feel like a different and slightly lesser movie to me.

Nathaniel: I do think All Quiet gets talky to its (very slight) detriment but it was pointedly moving all the same. The film works best when it's visually conveying the message... like that simple but effective journey of the coveted bad-luck charm boots, or the absolutely stunning ending, which merely recycles a shot from earlier in the film but double exposes it to remind you of the cumulative losses of the movie. It's a gut punch but a humane one, I think. I was also, like Nick, amazed at its technical control. This is only a couple of years into sound filmmaking? They learned very very quickly in Hollywood. Or at least Lewis Milestone did.

But here's where I get all Lew Ayres post-war disillusioned on ya. Perhaps it's distasteful to be this cynical but I've seen too much of the annual Western Fronting. Western as in Hollywood, California. Don't these two movies paired (and other wins too) suggest that the technical mastery and aesthetic sensitivity of a film like All Quiet on the Western Front are rather irrelevant to its triumph on Oscar night. Doesn't The Message film always win because of group sympathies for The Message?


Goatdog: I agree that the talkiness of a few of the late scenes detracts from All Quiet, but only a little: yeah, the "let's put all the leaders in a circle and let them fight it out" bit is belabored, but it's such a small part of the film. By the time of Lew's alienating trip back home, his return to discover that just about everybody he knows is dead, his tragic reunion with Wolheim, and that ending, I had forgotten my issues with those few too-talky scenes. I can't put Lew's soliloquy to his dead French foxhole-mate in the same category, because even despite the sometimes creaky dialogue, it's one of the most horrific scenes in the movie, one that drives home the general awfulness of everything Lew's been through. That dead guy sitting there with that half-smirk on his face... shudder. Plus, I just took a break from viewing next week's offering, and my god, All Quiet on the Western Front is a miracle, hallelujah! Although healing the problems of the other talkies around it is not part of its legitimate claim for canonization.


But with Crash, it's the other way around: the general morass of the hapless shooting and editing (my favorite [read, least favorite] being Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton fighting in their apartment, and Haggis deciding to shoot it through the patio doors because he's seen better filmmakers do that, but doesn't stop to wonder why it might work in some cases but not in others), the general preachiness and obviousness of the dialogue and scene construction, etc., make the good moments—I'll admit that there are a few, some of which are really powerful—seem to disappear.

What has Oscar done to make you so cynical, Nathaniel? I'd like to imagine that voters are familiar with their craft and they recognize outstanding work when they see it. That's the way it works, right? But this pairing (and so many other "message" winners, good and bad) (and, for that matter, their repeated demonstrations of their lack of familiarity with their craft) could suggest that they're blind to anything but the message, at least when they go for a message film. That's a therapy session I'd love to eavesdrop on. But at least sometimes, as we saw last week, they can look past clumsy sermonizing (like Babel) and go for something that seizes the brass ring through sheer, ballsy technique. Looking through the list of films we'll be addressing in the coming months, we'll be wondering a lot about what specific motives led to the choice Oscar made in a given year, even when, as here, they made the right choice. Sometimes it's a strong message or phenomenal technique. Or vast, overwhelming scale. Or a comeback vehicle for a director who doesn't get enough credit. Basically, Oscar needs something huge and noticeable to pin its medal to. It might be fun at the end to try to divide the winners into categories: technique, message, scale, comeback. And Ernest Borgnine.

Reader: Don't front. Don't be all quiet. Do you agree with us that the Milestone film is a milestone? Are you angry at Crash all the time, and do you know why? Though Oscar may have said it all with that interpretive dance of "In the Deep" before a blazing car, leave us your impressions in the form of a Comment...


Stats: All Quiet on the Western Front was nominated for four Oscars, winning Best Picture and Best Director. Crash was nominated for six, winning Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing in addition to Best Picture.

Tags:
Currently: Goatdog's and Nathaniel's posts on this week's films
Previously: ep.1: Wings & No Country; ep.2: Broadway Melody & Departed

Best Pictures from the Outside In: '29/'06

(The Broadway Melody + The Departed = Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd)

Today marks the second installment of the new Best Pictures from the Outside In feature that Nathaniel and Goatdog and I decided to inaugurate this summer—born largely out of a phone conversation Nathaniel and I had about our awe (mixed with jealousy) that Goatdog has so few Best Pic nominees left to see, and our collective urge to revisit winners that we each saw way, way back in our proto-Oscargeek childhoods. Plus, none of us could wait to see The Life of Émile Zola again, and this project seemed to furnish the right alibi.

Goatdog and Nathaniel both rang in the feature last week, when we jabbered about the earliest victor, Wings, and the most recent, No Country for Old Men. I missed my chance at joining in the full, six-pompom salute to our new endeavor, but suffice it to say: if you had told me in 8th grade, when I was still renewing Inside Oscar every two weeks at the public library but had only seen ten or twelve of the movies in the book, that I would one day have two friends who wanted to make this same tiptoe through the AMPAS tulips with me, and obsess over all the same talking points and triumphs and injustices, I would have been pulling my jaw off the floor and my head out of the clouds. And not just because I would have had no idea what the "internet" was.

This week's conversation, hosted by Goatdog, covers our varying levels of agitation about 1929's The Broadway Melody and our universal enthusiasm for 2006's The Departed, even if we all want to recast Jack Nicholson. After you're done reading the discussion, hopefully dropping us a comment, and pitying my predicament of never making a single graphic to rival Goatdog's or Nathaniel's, head back to my main site, where I'm archiving our march through Oscartime. I've got links to all of our discussions, and to my own grades and reviews of the winners, riders at the top of those reviews that commemorate each year's race (including deserving winners and non-nominees), and the required bouquet of gratuitous lists.

Enjoy! And visit this space next week, when we revisit the winners from 1930 and 2005 and inevitably rehash one of the great, tear-inducing miscarriages in Oscar's entire back-catalog. By which I mean, of course, the soul-sickening nomination of the gruesomely stodgy 1929 biopic Disraeli. Thank God it lost. (Hey, what did you think I was talking about?)

Let Them Eat Birthday Cake!

Back in effect, y'all. I still have some spring-quarter papers and projects to assess and then my final grades to tabulate and submit, but this website is eager to spring back to life. I meant to get an early start one week ago, to commemorate Nathaniel's birthday—even though certain snakes in the grass have recently informed me that too many of my recent posts are all about Nathaniel. But, I just survived yet another apartment move, and though nothing (amazingly!) was broken or lost, my internet connection was scuttled until about 48 hours ago. So here, better late than never, is the latest addition to the Best Actress pages. Far be it from me to imply how old Nathaniel just turned, but let's just say that I have selected 1938 as a fitting year of tribute—and all the more fitting because we saw White Banners for the first time together in my Hartford apartment, we both love Bette Davis, and we both really love Norma Shearer, earning her sixth and final Best Actress nomination for Marie Antoinette.

Bette copped the Oscar, but to learn who wins my vote, you'll have to click here. The usual poll has already been supplied to determine who you think should have won from Oscar's list, but I'm playing it a bit coy about my own favorite performances from that year, which is also slowing down the other two polls. I rented a lot of 1938 movies in preparation for this Nathaniel-a-thon, and despite wind or rain or sleet or U-Haul or AT&T, I intend to finish out my viewing list... or at least get a little closer. So, tune back in for my own 1938 Dream Team, and some remarks about Luise Rainer, Irene Dunne, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn x 2, Margaret Sullavan Redux, Sally Eilers, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and several other ladies who were bright lights in '38! (And it's never too late to wish Nathaniel a happy birthday!)

What's Going On?

You know, we got to find a way...
    To bring some lovin' here to-day-ay-ay...

But really, in all seriousness: what is going on? And what does it have to do with June 18? Nathaniel knows. And so do I. And as Yoda once rasped to a blond, bland proto-Jedi, There is – another.....

TGFN

That's a mash-up of TGIF (yay!) and TTFN (till soon!), but it also stands for "Thank Goodness for Network" and "Thank God for Nathaniel." I love to link up when I read a piece of film writing that really excites me, and Nathaniel's brilliant, witty, and gorgeously modulated take on Network is a total grabber. It deserves a hot rating in the triple digits and a 100 share.

If When I resume that long-interrupted favorites countdown, as I keep promising, I'm going to have to own up to the passage of time by reshuffling the order a bit, and dropping in some more recent fetish objects ... which also means phasing out a few of the originals. Network will be one of the titles that will have to fight for its life on that list—my most recent visit, to prep for my own write-up, dropped the film a peg or two in my esteem. But, if Network winds up in what Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen so memorably calls "the sh*thouse," I'll leave you to wonder whether I really didn't like it enough to keep it in, or whether I just want to retire my essay because I like Nathaniel's so much better. (The only point where we disagree? So long as Long Day's Journey into Night and Dog Day Afternoon are around, Network won't ever be Lumet's best movie.)

Photo © 1976 MGM/United Artists

FlickPicker in the Dark

Are you an academic? Does your school run on the quarter system? Is work raining from the sky every day? Yesterday, I thought all I had to worry about were my two classes to teach (about Children of Men and the egregiously out-of-print The Portrait of a Lady, so no complaints there), and the two stacks of essays I had to grade and return, and the senior theses I needed to read and write reports about, and the 25-page report I have to write for Friday, and the separate public talks I have to write and give next Wednesday and Thursday, and the packing of my apartment that needs to be finished by next week in order to move on May 31... Who knew I would leave the office with a new talk to write for next Friday, and another batch of prize-contender essays to judge (and write reports about), and a new batch of late-breaking admissions files to read (and write reports about)? Everyone who has ever wondered what your professors do when they aren't teaching or answering (or not answering) e-mails, or everyone who hopes to be a professor and wonders what that's like: smell the roses!

At least I love my job. (Cue Emily Blunt: "I love my job... I love my job...")

But, I must say, till the quarter's over in early June, it's still going to be slow going at this blog, which means I haven't gotten to say anything about my annual springtime obsession, the Cannes Film Festival, presided over this year with a steely glare and a messy haircut by my life partner. I am addicted to all the news flowing from the Croisette. As ever, the mainline for buzz, news, and early reviews is GreenCine Daily, which has assembled this index to all the Cannes-related articles, most of them updated as the days pass and more responses trickle in. Sounds like my gal Lucrecia and my buddy James hit a few snags, and Steven and Clint prompted responses all over the board, too. (No one even knows what Clint's movie is called anymore, or how Steven's will be released.) I'm a lot more interested in that Israeli animated doc than I had thought I'd be, and Arnaud Desplechin hit a home-run with every critic and audience member I've read, but I can't say it sounds like Sean's kind of thing. (I'm guessing it's headed for a Director or Screenplay citation, or maybe a Jury Prize, even if it's the movie lots of people like the best. See Volver, etc.) I'd be a little frustrated if the Dardennes copped another trophy, though their film sounds quite good (surprise!); I've somehow never seen a Jia Zhangke film; and I'm somewhere between indifferent to openly mistrustful of Walter Salles, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and mob movies. Out of the Competition, I'm most excited about the triumphant Terence Davies film, this coruscating film about Liberian child soldiers, and the Carax segment of the odd-sounding Tokyo!. And I love that the trailer for the upcoming Spike Lee Joint, Miracle at St. Anna, apparently wowed a lot of people.

You can use this schedule to see what's still coming up in Competition; I'm probably most eager to hear about the Kaufman and the Cantet at this point. Since I haven't seen any of it or been able to write more thorough posts as we go along, I can at least direct you back to two full reviews of two of my all-time favorite Palme winners, and shorter reviews of two others.

There's MUCH more to say, too. I still need to follow up on my exploits and juror deliberations at the Indianapolis Film Festival, which I promise I will not pass over; it'll just be a sort of Film Comment-style dossier on a festival that's a month or two in the past by press time. But I won't forget. I wanted to offer a sweet, properly worshipful elegy for the retired Modern Fabulousity, and a delirious description of getting to join Goatdog as he screened the first of only ten Best Picture nominees he has left to see from Oscar's entire back-catalogue. We both feel confident that things'll only get better from here. I was tagged for this book meme that I still haven't answered, I have the Best of 2007 to finish and the Favorites Countdown to resume, and more Best Actress races to judge and performers to profile. Keep your ear to the ground, dear reader, and pray for mid-June, when I Shall Be Released. And Relocated. And Resplendent in All Things Movie.

Photos © 2000 Zentropa Entertainment/Fine Line Features; © 2008 Aqua Films/El Deseo; and © 1967 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Goddesses, Pianos, Princes, and a Book You Should Must Buy

After being on quite the roll there for a minute, I haven't posted in over two weeks, so I may as well pack a lot into this entry. Yesterday was, after all, a High Holy Day: the birthday of my grandfather, but also of the late, impossibly great Katharine Hepburn, who would have turned 101 if she hadn't died five years ago. (Has it really already been five years?) I believe I have already made clear my semi-religious feelings about Katharine Hepburn here. May 12 is always a delicious day for me, but then Nathaniel came along to make it even sweeter, even as I sat languishing in bed with an illness so bad I had to cancel my classes and stay home from work. Telepathically aware that I needed as much restorative bliss as I could get, Nathaniel offered this sterling tribute to Jane Campion's The Piano, and though I still don't understand how or why Nathaniel loves eight movies even more than this one, I of course thrilled to his evocative, beautifully illustrated ode to the film—especially since it sounds as though he might like it even more now than he once did! Nathaniel's subsequent blog posting is about princes, but he is obviously a prince himself to be this publicly and appropriately worshipful of the most important movie in my life, and surely one of the best ever made.

I've shown even less restraint on my own list of the 100 greatest movies (a feature that needs a qualitative as well as a formatting overhaul), where The Piano still reigns at #1. Yes, I grant that its crucial arrival at the absolute, most poignant onset of my movie-loving life has a great deal to do with this unusually robust claim on the film's behalf, and I've never gotten around to writing the public defense of this position that I obviously owe. I'm getting there; I always mean well. Happily, another prince of the blogosphere, Tim R. of MainlyMovies—who keeps even more mum on his blog lately than I do on mine—furnished me with a brilliant occasion to celebrate The Piano in print. That occasion was a book he co-edited called The DVD Stack, now in its 2nd Edition, and not to put too fine a point on it, YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS BOOK. Within, you'll find succinct but searching reviews of over 350 movies that are either masterworks in themselves, or the welcome recipients of brilliant presentations on DVD, or both. The writers are mostly staffers of major British publications like the Daily Telegraph, Time Out London, the Sunday Times, and Sight and Sound, but they found room for me in that august group. I got to wax awestruck about 16 of my favorite movies, from Persona to The Cell to Daughters of the Dust to Singin' in the Rain to Harlan County, U.S.A.. If that small sampler doesn't sufficiently convince you that The DVD Stack breaks significantly from the usual All-Time Best roll call—but without petulantly avoiding some objects of universal and deserved adoration—then you haven't experienced the back-to-back tributes to DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (a surreally inspired DVD, apparently) and La Dolce vita. I would absolutely buy and treasure this book even if Tim hadn't edited it, and I would absolutely shill it even if I weren't in it. As an appetizer course, and as a reciprocal gesture to Nathaniel's lovely tribute, here's what I have to say about The Piano ... and yes, we are absolutely talking about that spectacular and affordably priced R2/PAL edition that completely wipes the floor with the despicable and un-extra'd U.S. print. I was limited to 400 words (a first time for everything!), but I hope you get the drift:

The film: Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is a 19th-century Scotswoman who has refused to speak since she was six years old. She arrives in New Zealand as the purchased bride of a taciturn colonist, but neither she nor her fatherless daughter (Anna Paquin) make any easy concessions to domestic custom. Ada's proud resolve is shared by the film, which forges ahead into tense, exotic circumstances and allows us, indeed forces us, to fend for ourselves within its fertile landscape of desire, violence, envy, and enigma. The piano in Jane Campion's magisterial film is an instrument, a voicebox, a prize, a symbol, a concept, a thing-in-itself, a means of communication, and a bulky rampart against it. Campion's ingenuity is to read all the same paradoxes into human personality and sexuality. Her film looks askance at daily life, brimming with unexpected angles and an almost subconscious language of images and tones, and yet it stares forthrightly into extraordinary conflicts: the worst of what people do to each other, and the remarkable, ambiguous ways in which we save each other. None of this, of course, would be possible without the flawless cast, the superb locations, the eccentrically beautiful score, and the utterly persuasive production design.

The DVD: Heretofore available only in an undistinguished and feature-free version, The Piano finally attains a proper showcase, with an impressive gallery of key creative personnel gathered for the occasion. Campion and producer Jan Chapman provide a chummy but detailed commentary track, but even more illuminating are the generous interviews with both women as well as composer Michael Nyman, all furnished on the second disc. Campion speaks for a full, congenial hour about her creative process (including glimpses at her sketchbooks), her casting decisions and varying methods with different actors, her close collaboration with her cinematographer, and her charmingly ambivalent response to the film's Oscar successes. Chapman elucidates with passion the role of an independent film producer, specifically when securing international funds for a risky screenplay, and Nyman, without winning any trophies for modesty, sheds valuable light on how and why the film was tailored to the score, rather than the more customary reverse. A shorter making-of featurette from the time of the film's production expands to include the lead actors' perspectives. Best of all, the print transfer exquisitely captures the rolling waves, the plashy mud, the burnished glow of the interiors, and the eerie, aqueous light of the New Zealand bush.

Thanks, Nathaniel; thanks, Tim; thanks, Jane; thanks, Holly, Harvey, Anna, Sam, Jan, Stuart, Veronika, Michael, Janet, Andrew, Tungia, Kerry, Genevieve...; thanks, Katharine; thanks, Opa; overwork and underpay and all-nighters be damned, all is full of love today on Nick's Flick Picks.

Photos © 1993 Miramax Films/Ciby2000; and © 2007 Canongate Ltd.

It Takes A Village Nathaniel...

...to get me blogging again, but seriously, how could I share a hotel room for a whole weekend with His High Holy Hyper-Productiveness and not get my act together? It's so late now that I don't have time to say much about the movies we've been seeing at the 2008 Indianapolis Film Festival, where we are both serving as jurors—he in the World Cinema bracket, and I in the American Spectrum competition for homegrown independent dramas. Suffice it to say that none of the first four features I've seen has quite blown my socks off, but they all have significant virtues, particularly the committed performance by Famke Janssen in Turn the River and some juicy pop arcana in the documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story. But more on those soon—and, later on, a little more on the features and the short films that I'm overseeing as part of my jury duties (with Sean Penn as my spiritual if not my practical leader). I'm not at liberty to say anything about these before awards are announced next weekend, but I'll allow myself these: you're missing a lot of good work if you live in the Hoosier State and you aren't catching these movies. Indiana may never again produce anything quite as great as recent birthday girl Dr. S, but this film festival would be a splendid achievement in any "small" city (and at 850,000, not that small), and the all-volunteer staff and supervisors have done a beautiful, generous job of hosting and coordinating. Come out and represent, Indiana!

Nick's Flick Picks watchers will also want to know that, with the fifth month of the year about to roll around, I finally have a Movies of 2008 page up and running, with pages and the usual screening log, though no reviews yet. I don't know where Ryan Phillippe came up with that sterling Stop-Loss performance or what so many other critics saw in the Oscar-nominated Beaufort (that 4 Months omission is officially a travesty), or quite what to say yet about the maddening half-successes of Teeth and Paranoid Park, but I'll (try to) get there. And yes, I still plan to finish that Best of 2007 countdown.

Best of 2007: Ensemble

Ever feel like you're stuck in a year that you can't get out of? I realize that it's March, for crying out loud, but I'm afraid that I am still not done celebrating the movie year we have now said goodbye to, over and over again. Perhaps early-childhood imprinting has shaped my awards-season metabolism around the late March calendar, even though the Oscars have been on their accelerated schedule for five years now. Or maybe I just have an incredibly demanding job. Either way, and perhaps because I am sitting in a faraway city attending an academic conference with two blogging buddies, and because I find conferences to be helpful reminders that we academics (especially in our home disciplines) really are In This Thing Together, I present you with the long-delayed Nick's Flick Picks Honorees for Best Ensemble. Apologies about length, but with this many delectable performances to cover, one tends to overween.

Another Category, Another Buddy

I couldn't help it: having shouted out Tim and Nathaniel in the categories I drafted last night, I couldn't have the world thinking that I had forgotten ModFab, who'd also have a Willy Wonka golden ticket to the stay-up-all-night sleepover I wish I could throw on the night before the nominations. ModFab's theater productions are always such arresting sights to behold, and he's always so attuned to production design in his film reviews, that the Art Direction category always makes me think of him. So, there went my lunch hour, but here you go. Tough choices this year, and a lot of swapping in and out right until the end, but I think I'm at peace with these as my final five.

By the way, as we've now hit the one-third mark of these Honorees, with 7 out of 21 categories announced, the multiple nominees thus far are Lust, Caution and There Will Be Blood with three apiece (and at least one honorable mention in each case), and The Aerial, Grindhouse (a four-time honorable mention, which means it's been in striking distance for every category except Costume Design), and Lady Chatterley. Since I'd argue that none of these movies, save There Will Be Blood, got anywhere close to their due while they were in theaters, I hope that somehow, somewhere, somebody's Netflix queue is newly a-churning.

The Great Work Continues...

Here are two more categories in my Best of 2007 feature that I here deliver as targeted treats to two of my favorite Oscar buddies: Tim, who actually remembers extended melodies and motifs from a film's score on the way out of the theater (which I have managed to do about five times in my life), and Nathaniel, who loves costume designers so much that they get their own shrine on The Film Experience, and their own page in his Oscar nomination predictions. Enjoy these picks, guys—I think you'll be sympathetic to both groups of choices, based on your own picks—and enjoy them, too, everyone else! (I really enjoy hearing from some of you lurkers in response to these announcements...) (And yes, "enjoy" is apparently the word of the day...)

Send a Happy Thought to Mainly Movies

Everybody knows that January is the hardest month to be an academic, right? If I weren't jump-starting my new classes and filing requests for courses to teach next year and attending job talks and reading admissions files and helping to organize a conference and writing a paper, I would be voicing my Oscar predictions and getting my Best-Of lists going. Please show up, even when the party inevitably starts late! (Those Oscar predix will up soon — necessarily, since the cat's out of the bag as of Tuesday morning.)

But for now: be thankful for Mainly Movies, an erratic blogger just like yours truly, but incomparably quick and incisive, and still my favorite mass-market print reviewer. (If you aren't keeping up with his real-job reviews every Friday at the Daily Telegraph, I can't understand why not.) In addition to posting his Best & Worst picks in the acting and Original Score categories for this year (and they're wonderful picks, especially the runts), today is Mainly Movies' birthday. So what better time to reiterate how we love him? Or to get caught up on his back catalogue of blog entries and lists, if you haven't been following along already?

Many happy returns, MM!

Bests of the Bests Keep Getting Better

After telling you yesterday about all the great year-end features happening around the Web, two Near'n'Dears of Nick's Flick Picks came through yesterday with really delicious treats. StinkyLulu hosted the second edition of his grand annual party on behalf of supporting actresses. How I longed (and intended!) to attend. Had I found the time, I was going to ask, why is everyone so mad at Knocked Up for selling out the smart, classy dame to the barely redeemable schlump when Marge Simpson has been consigned to the same fate for more than a decade? In case we didn't notice, Marge is still the best thing going in The Simpsons Movie, and Julie Kavner makes something heroically poignant out of Marge's video-recorded goodbye to Homer, which made me only a little less tempted to scream, "YESSS!! She's finally getting away from him!"

I know we're supposed to love Homer, and yeah, I sorta do, but does he have to be that idiotic and congenitally self-absorbed? Does he have to steamroll his whole town and pull every rug out from under his entire family three or four times in the space of 90 minutes, and still get to star in the heroic finale? Oh, well: at least he keeps setting up Marge/Kavner for her sad, beautiful, bizarrely affecting variations on patience and marital resilience. And yes, the movie is hilarious, if a little standard-issue for the big screen. Lots of the jokes are zesty, but Kavner's voicing of that farewell made for one of the few moments truly worthy of the big screen. Then again, speaking of Supporting Actresses: why is Lisa in so little of this movie? She catalyzes the whole environmental-crisis angle and then gets all but buried? The whole movie's about fathers and sons. It's the There Will Be Blood of Simpsons narratives. No country for female Simpsons. The Emancipation of Bart Simpson from the Imbecile Homer Simpson. Harrumph. Women couldn't get a break in '07. Then again... not a new story.

But try telling that to Marisa Tomei, who this year continues a bright and eclectic career on film in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and on stage in Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations. If two estimable artists like Sidney Lumet and Will Eno don't already constitute an amazing year for an actress, Marisa keeps her game high high high in '08 with Darren Aronofsky and Nick's Flick Picks idol Caryl Churchill. Wanna hear about it? And way, way, way more about from the enchanting and talented Ms. Tomei? Well, fire up the positraction, and speed over to Nathaniel's site for his first-ever podcast, which starts with a generous, revealing, and vivacious interview with Marisa Tomei and ends with Nathaniel, Joe Reid, and I coffee-klatsching over the Screen Actors Guild nominations (well, the film categories). Now, why Nathaniel had to cast a wee pall over this delightful 45 minutes with even a short clip of Helena Bonham Carter "singing" is a little beyond me... but he won those points back a dozen times over by asking Marisa my pre-submitted question about pet indie films from her back catalogue that she wishes had gotten more attention. If you want to know which ones, you gotta listen! And why aren't you already listening, anyway? (Seriously: way to go, Nathaniel!)

Bests of the Bests

With about a week to go before I can start posting my own awards—y'all know I'm out here working without critics' previews or screener DVDs to help me out—I thought I'd direct your attention to some of my favorite year-end stuff happening around the web. If you've got an hour or two, Radio Allegro out of British Columbia hosted a year-end wrap-up radio show with me, Modern Fabulousity, Queering the Apparatus, and the Allegrist himself, Ashley Foot. Tune in to hear about flops that should have been hits; left-field For Your Consideration ads; our thoughts on movie trends related to aging, pregnancy, gender, the Western, and the musical; and for QTA's imperious, uproarious riff on the sexual politics of Knocked Up (which we all laughed at before admitting that we liked the movie). Yours truly is a bit horrified to realize how loooooong I go on when someone asks me a question, especially compared to my gorgeously succinct conversation partners, but I think it's a great conversation.

I also urge you to read QTA's own Year in Review; ModFab has a great one, too, but he also whipped up a parallel list of the year's best films and performances by soliciting opinions from six of his pals (including filmmaker Q. Allan Brocka and GreenCine impresario David Hudson) and tallying them up. Look who won the acting derby! The heart melts.

Our discerning and beautifully incisive pal Mainly Movies also puts an unexpected twist on the year-end format: he is counting down the 10 best and 10 worst movies at the same time, so that (for starters) the observational sensitivity of Funny Ha Ha arrives in a package deal with the lurid grotesquerie of Hannibal Rising. Continuing the theme of the articulate and the unexpected, Nic Rapold's Top Ten List in the New York Sun is a great read, topped by the sensational and ridiculously underseen Day Night Day Night.

Doug Cummings and Rob Christopher both fill us in on their favorite new releases of 2007 as well as their favorite back-catalogue titles that they saw for the first time in the last twelve months. I still don't see what Rob does in Stuck, but I appreciate the eclecticism of his list.

Lastly, as you are all no doubt aware, the 8th annual Film Bitch Awards will be in full swing any moment now, but the preview attractions—a list of the year's most overrated darlings and an indictment of the year's worst movies and performances—already constitute a full-course meal. No sacred cows here; you know it hurt Nathaniel to say some of these things, but it probably hurt him more to watch them. Stay tuned for more, there as well as here.

And now, I take my leave to keep pondering that milkshake with the long, long straw.

Supporting Actress Smackdown: 1955

As always, StinkyLulu is the Anna Magnani of this month's Supporting Actress Smackdown, dedicated to the tier-two ladies of 1955. He is the centerpiece, the star, the grande diva, and he make-a the prom dresses for-a all of us-a. If Stinky could actress at his own edge, I'm sure he would, but you can only be so many places at once, so he invites his own supporting cast. Nathaniel is the Natalie Wood: colorful, wicked, impassioned with his clipreel of the nominated performances. Goatdog is the Jo Van Fleet: marvelous, versatile, and brilliantly concise. His one-line captions for all five performances had me rolling on the ground. I am not accusing anyone of being the Marisa Pavan, or by all that is holy the Peggy Lee (Actress Edition), though Canadian Ken, Criticlasm, and Adam Waldowski could proudly count as the Peggy Lee (Singer Edition), beautifully carrying the tune and shaking up the rhythms of the Smackdown.

I am nominating myself as the Betsy Blair, and not just because I (alone) think she should have won. Van Fleet, as Ken sums it up especially well, is "a submerged mountain of radioactivity" in East of Eden, and Oscar should be proud of counting her among his anointed. And, as you'll see, Natalie Wood has her vehement champions. Still, to me, Blair gives her whole movie a raison d'être—Marty is just loafing along, pleasantly but unimpressively, until she arrives both to comfort and unsettle him with a persuasively wallflowery romance, a girlfriend who is both appealingly bright and almost spookily recessive, but without overdoing the "appealing," the "bright," or the "spooky" part. There's a bookish loneliness as well as an ingratiating decency to Blair's high-school chemistry teacher that I haven't often, or maybe ever, seen evoked quite this lucidly on screen. She eventually becomes a character who, like Van Fleet, is discussed more often than she is seen, and she manages to give a performance that allows everyone's competing opinions to be correct: she is wonderful, she is a threat to an uneducated mother-in-law, she is a surprising and somewhat abrupt choice to be Miss Right. The one thing she isn't, despite frequent allegations, is a "dog," but I also love that Betsy Blair lets Clara be so average in looks and demeanor, and not one of those Hollywood "wallflowers" who's really just a beauty behind big spectacles.

But why else am I the Betsy Blair? Well, again, she is the bookish nerd in the group, and I am bookish and nerdy enough to make webpages like this one, expanding my website's year-by-year archive of past viewings. (None of those other pages from the 50s are live links yet, but just you wait.) From my 1955 Oscar ballot, you'll note that Blair is the only one of Oscar's actual nominees who qualifies. Jo Van Fleet still wins, but for her gruesome stage mother in the Susan Hayward corker I'll Cry Tomorrow, not for East of Eden, though she's a close 6th for that performance. In truth, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from Oscar's list, 1955 was a great year for supporting actresses: there's Shelley Winters' obedient, sex-starved, and vulnerable widow in The Night of the Hunter and Lillian Gish's steely protector in the same film, Agnes Moorehead's acerbic and unsettled friend in All That Heaven Allows (where her slamming of a door on a vacuuming maid is the single funniest thing in Sirk), Jean Simmons' righteous reformer in Guys and Dolls, Ann Doran's angry, inhospitable, and sensationally layered wife-mother in Rebel without a Cause, and Harriet Andersson's lusty servant in Smiles of a Summer Night. Smiles didn't open in the U.S. until 1957, so in more ways than one, my ballot is impossible, but it's all about fantasy anyway.

Lastly, about Blair: she was married for many years to Gene Kelly, which is reason enough to want to be the Betsy Blair. She was later married for even longer to Karel Reisz, an important actressexual in his own right. (Screw Pete Kelly's blues; try Patsy Cline's. No, really: try 'em.) Blair was one of the first to propose and organize a non-discrimination committee within SAG and later was blacklisted for her liberal-radical convictions, which would be awful to live through but easy to admire, on principle. She apparently wrote a hell of a memoir; the reviews were mostly raves a few years ago when it came out. And speaking of books, Betsy came this.close. to being in The Hours; she filmed all of old Laura Brown's scenes opposite Meryl Streep when Julianne had to go leave to make Far from Heaven, though Stephen Daldry & Co. eventually decided that, for emotional continuity, Laura needed to be played by the same actress we'd been watching for the rest of the movie. Even if she was the world's oldest hugely pregnant woman. Which I'm fine with. Still: poor Betsy. Never could get a career break, that one. Wouldn't you love to see that footage somewhere?

And can't you see in Betsy Blair's Clara, in Marty, the possibility that she might marry Marty, but she also might leave him and cut all ties with her children to be a librarian in Canada, alone with her books and her memories? Can't you draw a pretty straight line from Ernest Borgnine's Marty to John C. Reilly's Dan, and even though Betsy isn't playing hesitation or misery in Marty—quite the opposite, in many senses—doesn't this train of thought sort of call into relief that strain of sadness and of craving for solitude that's still there, glinting and upsetting, at the heart of her warm, generous, but frightened Clara? It all comes back to how much I like her in this movie. I am not the Betsy Blair because I wish I could leave everyone I know and go seek solace among my books as a librarian in Canada; as I've just finished explaining, it's Australia that I want to flee to. But I would love to give a performance this candid and quiet and articulate and be remembered for it decades later, despite a truncated career. And if my career is ever truncated, I hope it's for the reason of firm and unimpeachable principles.

Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: The Joy of Life

The Joy of Life is not just the title of the movie I am reviewing for QTA's Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: it also names the sensation I feel whenever I'm watching a queer film (even, in most cases, a bad one) or writing about queer films or reading about them or just thinking about them and appreciating that they exist.

Queer movies are the most important things in my life that aren't people. They are better than food, way better than drink. For me, they rank right up there with shelter and oxygen. I applied to graduate school so that I could write about them, and I devoted my entire Ph.D. dissertation to queer cinema: an ecstatic pleasure in itself, at least insofar far as "ecstatic pleasure" is the right framing concept for dissertation writing, but also a rare case of actually realizing a clear goal without wavering, after seven years of work. That's how much devotion and renewable wonderment they inspire in me.

I teach courses in queer cinema, around seminar tables and more recently in lecture halls, and many of my most delirious moments of professional joy come from the fresh discoveries of revisiting these movies, and from the ardent and sometimes unexpected enthusiasm—and even, just as much, the frustration and bewilderment and intellectual calisthenics—that these movies inspire in my students. I love that queer movies, truly queer movies, invite the viewer to delectate in style and aesthetics while simultaneously demanding intellectual engagement and exercise. Just like my favorite people, my favorite queer movies are smart and fun, and they never stop surprising.

Anyone in academia has surely had his or her moments of worrying about the potential gulf between scholarly theorizing and everyday life, and another reason I treasure queer cinema is not only that they bridge this gulf, but that they do so by insisting on the overlaps and contradictions and seductive connections between the scholarly and the everyday, instead of diluting them so much that they can neutrally get along. Queer filmmakers were and are often the same people as queer activists, and queer theory and filmmaking have influenced and challenged each other more consistently and more explicitly than one finds in almost any other vein of contemporary cinema, especially the commercial cinema. You don't get Velvet Goldmine or Boys Don't Cry or Brother to Brother or Swoon without Michel Foucault or David Halperin or Kobena Mercer or Judith Butler, but you also don't get, say, Judith Butler without Paris Is Burning—a film that almost single-handedly clarified her field-defining arguments between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter but also highlighted the continued controversy and ideological aporia within her own thinking.

And I love that there are always more queer movies around than we think. Well beyond the greatest hits that we all think of quickly, "queer" cuts so deep and wide as a concept, in such brilliantly category-shifting fashion, that seemingly "straight" movies, "classic" movies, even "weird" movies can turn out to be queer. Also, sexual daring and erotic insight and intellectual vitality are really inexpensive as far as filmmaking assets go, so queer cinema drives as much energy from local, university, amateur, and do-it-yourself filmmaking as it does from big crews with (comparably) big budgets. To celebrate that legacy of new talents and exciting discoveries, I wrote my review for this Blog-a-Thon about Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life, a movie that's still working out the kinks and limits of a distinctive and promising approach to form, but well worth a rental and a rah-rah for future work by this director.

Enjoy the rest of the Blog-a-Thon (I confess that ModFab's piece is already a favorite for me), thank Queering the Apparatus for hosting it, and thank all the queer films and filmmakers in this universe for giving us so much to love and reconsider and be inspired or angry or gleeful or mournful or informed or enlightened or troubled by.

Preview of Queer Attractions

Continuing yesterday's thread about inspiration, it's worth remembering that inspiration sometimes comes from looming prospects instead of past or present moments. Which is my way of hyping up the Queer Film Blog-a-thon that Queering the Apparatus, that Wilde of the Web, that passionate scholar and perfect wit, will be hosting this coming Monday. My whole Ph.D. dissertation and much of my teaching are devoted to queer cinema, so QTA knows that this blog-a-thon couldn't possibly be closer to my heart, and I love him for dreaming up this particular shindig. Since a "queer" film to me is politically invested and, even more than that, formally adventurous in a way that a "gay/lesbian" film isn't necessarily, I offer this quick review of the 1982 groundbreaker Making Love, a very earnest "gay" film that hasn't got a "queer" bone in its tastefully conventional body. I just saw Making Love for the first time and am trying to get into the habit of dashing something off after I catch things on DVD, though you know I've promised before...

Anyway: when next week rolls around, start your Manic Monday at QTA's house, and appreciate all over again one of the richest, most challenging, most politically ambitious, and most stylistically varied traditions in contemporary film!

It's Halloween, and I'm Not Dead...

...I'm just haunting a different house than I usually do. The typically tireless Nathaniel is taking one of his seasonal siestas from his own blog, so I'm helping to pitch in during his absence. My particular task is to maintain his daily 20:07 feature, for which I have so far pulled images from The Descent, Children of Men, United 93, INLAND EMPIRE, and – in commemoration of StinkyLulu's recent 1940 Supporting Actress Smackdown, which you've hopefully already visited – Rebecca, The Uninvited, and The Grapes of Wrath.

More to come chez Nathaniel, and here at home, too. I can vouchsafe for now that late October has been something of a zombie brigade: movies that are mostly dead but not entirely so. Dan in Real Life hangs itself on an infantile story arc that somehow manages to feel abrupt even though there's nothing else going on for most of the other 98 minutes. At least the movie emanates a rare and engaging vibe of family bustle that nicely pulls against and whistles around the false beats of the story. Reservation Road kills off a child in its first ten minutes but has no better idea of how to recuperate from this crisis than do the parents of the kid in the story. A lot of middle-class agony and New England art direction ensue, and the ending is jaw-droppingly truncated, but that knotted-stomach feeling of committing a titanic error and knowing you won't (and shouldn't) get away with it is convincingly evoked—often enough to count for something, even if the movie's still not very good. Rendition can't decide who or what to be about, finally, and the large cast cycles listlessly in and out of a script that would feel dry and programmatic if it weren't so bizarrely oblique. The movie is not without interest, primarily due to its subject matter, but for some reason, director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) has cast most of his actors and even some of his crew to play directly against their biggest strengths. This leaves Jake Gyllenhaal cramped and inexpressive, Meryl Streep embarrassingly vague and gormless, and redoubtable cinematographer Dion Beebe (Collateral, In the Cut) culpable for one of the year's most badly underlit movies. Sleuth is as bad as its box-office numbers, which are very, very bad. Director Kenneth Branagh treats the tacit banalities of Anthony Shaffer's play and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's sawdust-and-tinsel original film as though they were sleek subtexts just waiting to be jackhammered home. And I choose my metaphors deliberately. Determinedly diagonal in look without ever once achieving an "edge," the film marks the very definition of "pointless," except insofar as it confirms the overratedness of the play itself.

By far the nicest things I have to say are about Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, a sprawling but evocative documentary about abortion in the United States that eschews deep historical contexts but still approaches the issue from a gratifying diversity of angles and positions; its strongest sequences, including the macabre aftermath of a second-trimester abortion and on-camera interviews with the future assassin of a doctor who performed abortions, rank among the year's most indelible moments. Speaking of indelible, Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire may not qualify on the whole, and if she doesn't stop shooting eyelashes and cheekbones in extreme close-up as arbitrary inserts, I'm going to perform a citizen's arrest. However, for all its basically conservative impulses, the movie bravely occupies some mysterious and illuminating emotional terrains of passive aggression, well-intended exploitation, and the appropriation of nearly defenseless people as prosthetic substitutes for dead lovers and friends. Holding this tricky emotional ecosystem together is Benicio Del Toro, in what looked to me like one of the year's very best performances. I've read that some critics think he's showboaty and unpersuasive, but I loved watching him hover away from rage, away from despair, away from sexual ardor, and away from loutishness—all of which the character as written seems to court. The actor locates himself instead within quieter, gentler, more paralyzed, and dare I say more subtle states of being. He's funny, tetchy, warm, uneasy, charismatic, non-judgmental, and nonetheless unreliable in some way that feels impolite to acknowledge. Male leads in "women's pictures" are a sadly neglected bunch, but Del Toro will make my year-end shortlist without breaking a sweat.

(Photos © 2006 StudioCanal/Asymmetrical Productions; © 2007 New Line Cinema/Anonymous Content; and © 2006 Anonymous Content/2007 ThinkFilm)

Montgomery Clift Blog-a-Thon: The Search

I'm a few hours late, but Montgomery Clift has waited 87 years for this blog-a-thon, 41 of them posthumously, so I'm guessing three hours in Central Standard Time aren't going to make him roll over in his grave. Plus, Nathaniel's parties tend to run late into the evening. Trust me, I know. And, I have an excellent excuse for being otherwise occupied, but more on that tomorrow. Best of all, I only have nice things to say about Monty in his first released movie, The Search, which I finally screened this morning after many years of anticipation. I think it's a high point for Monty and even more so for its director, Fred Zinnemann, and if you surf through the comments on her own phenomenal post, you'll find that Self-Styled Siren agrees with me, and who could want better validation than that?

Here, then, is my full review of The Search, and here is the rest of the blog-a-thon. Read them, love them, and rent more Monty! (I have seen 8 of his 17 movies, and these write-ups make me want to see more, especially The Misfits, which I own on DVD but have never watched, Indiscretion of an American Wife and Wild River, whi