One Year of Filmic!

I started this blog on September 11, 2008. One year later I have posted exactly one-hundred entries (this is one-hundred one) and received more than 18,000 hits. Thank you for reading.

To celebrate the anniversary, some statistics from my first year.

THE TOP TEN FILMIC BLOGS

1. “Slumdog Millionaire” (3,981 hits)

During the months surrounding the 2009 Academy Awards, the popularity of this entry exploded, receiving more hits per day than most entries have received in total. It attracted a thousand more hits than the rest of my top ten combined!

2. Academy Awards 2009: For Your Consideration (464)

Long after the Oscar season has ended, there remains sporadic interest in the films I lobbied — fruitlessly in most cases — to receive Academy recognition. Likely, Google searches for Oscar pics and dish turned up my blog.

3. “Revolutionary Road” (438)

I’ve gotten 97 hits searching for the film’s sheet music. A fine score by Thomas Newman, but I wouldn’t have guessed it would be the review’s primary source of interest. The entry received a comment from a reader asking for same. This is perhaps evidence that he has yet to find it.

4. “Taking Chance” (HBO) (421)

Wrote a short review on a message board and was so pleased with it that I decided to add it to my blog as well, expecting little interest. There are few reviews posted on the film’s IMDb page, so when I added mine it was placed at the very top, and I was inundated with hits.

5. “He’s Just Not That Into You”: The rules of the game (396)

I suspect that the title of the entry — an offhand reference to the Renoir classic — drew people in search of the dating rules promoted by the film and the book from which it was based. The irony is that those dehumanizing rules are part of what made the film such a cynical chore.

6. Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Nominees (290)

See above re:Oscar hits.

7. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (278)

Chalk it up to more rabid Oscar interest.

8. On DVD: “Snow Angels” (245)

A most pleasant and inexplicable surprise. It was released in spring of 2008, I rented it early this year on a whim, and it made my list of the year’s best films. My review was posted to mild interest, but in the early summer the popularity grew, mostly via search-engine hits for one of its stars, Michael Angarano. Is this great, under-seen film getting wider exposure than it did upon its release? I can only hope.

9. On DVD: “Sex and the City: The Movie” (226)

Hopefully readers found their way to the witty series and not the shallow feature film it inspired.

10. About the Author (181)

You want to know about little old me? Awww!

TOP TEN SEARCHES

1. slumdog millionaire (2,591 hits)
2. michael angarano (463)
3. amy adams (361)
4. academy awards 2009 (273)
5. justine waddell (228)
6. slumdog (221)
7. dev patel (141)
8. catinca untaru (125)
9. he’s just not that into you rules (104)
10. the fall movie (103)

Interesting to note: apart from Amy Adams, the most hits from searches of actors were for relative unknowns Michael Angarano (“Snow Angels”), Justine Waddell and Catinca Untaru (“The Fall”), and Dev Patel (“Slumdog Millionaire”), as opposed to, say, Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, and Angelina Jolie. It’s an honor to contribute, even in my small way, to increasing the exposure of those deserving actors.

TOP FOUR SEARCHES BY PEOPLE REALLY LOOKING FOR PORN

1. amy adams nude (40 hits)
2. freida pinto nude (24)
3. amy adams sexy (21)
4. amy adams nipples (17)

Not everyone reads Filmic for the articles.

The rise of DVD and the decline of the movie theater experience

Recently, I attended a showing of Public Enemies — not a very good film, but that was the least of its problems. I noted in my review that the picture was conspicuously underlit. And sitting several seats to my left was a man whose cell phone rang on perhaps the loudest setting available for such devices. Did he answer it? Of course he did.

I’ve got a million stories like it, though they’re usually worse. I paid good money to listen to heckling during Michael Clayton and Babel; if you go to the movies to talk back to the screen, why choose those films? The sound cut out during several minutes of Dreamgirls. Children literally tumbled through the aisle during The Others. A man seated alone shouted exclamations of “Hell yeah!” and “Oh damn!” during The Bourne Identity; for whose benefit?

The advancement of cell phone technology is a blight so pervasive it’s impractical to try to count all the interruptions. Common courtesy is no match for America’s intractable compulsion to reach out and touch or be touched at a moment’s notice, for no particular reason. The next breakthrough will be the waterproof iPhone you can take with you to the pool, the shower, and out into the pouring rain so you can post a Twitter update explaining, “Time to buy an umbrella.” Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in her Entertainment Weekly blog, “There’s no excuse for checking your phone in a theater unless you’re expecting a birth, a death, or a kidney transplant. And death can probably wait 90 minutes.”

A jerk at the movies

The poor behavior and technical problems are either the exception or the rule, depending on where you go for movies. I used to frequent my local Whitestone Multiplex theater in the Bronx, NY, at one time my home away from home. That is the theater that produced every negative experience referenced above, save Public Enemies. I have ceased to go. Now I travel most often to Manhattan. You won’t find egregious misbehavior in art houses like the Angelika and the IFC Center — the occasional insolent blue light from a cell phone — which by their very nature attract patrons who have come to see a film, as the ones that run there cater to specialized tastes.

I enjoy such theaters and would patronize them more if I could afford them. Last winter, I attended the French drama The Class and Israel’s animated film Waltz with Bashir at Angelika and Landmark’s Sunshine Theater, respectively, and paid a combined $24.50. That’s more than $12 a movie. I bought a pair of jeans for less than that around the same time. The movies are long over, but I’m still wearing the pants.

These days I frequent the AMC theater chain. They offer morning matinees for $6 on weekends and holidays. If I recommend them, it’s only good common sense. I’ll wake up early to hop on a train for that deal. I take advantage of the elite status of New Yorkers; when a film opens in “select cities,” we’re always selected. I got a jump on early Oscar bait like Juno, There Will Be Blood, and Slumdog Millionaire at the AMC in Lincoln Square before they rolled out nationally and was among the first to be able to discuss them.

My how things have changed! I began collecting ticket stubs twelve years ago, in the hope that one day they might be worth something, or at least accrue sentimental value. But now I can use them to trace that rapid upward climb of prices. When I first saw Titanic in the Bronx on December 28, 1997, the price of a matinee was $5, flat, and that was for anything that started before 5 PM. Regular admission in Manhattan was a then-pricey $9.50. Flip through the pages and you’ll ascend, in quarter or half-dollar increments, to $8.50 for a Bronx matinee and that $12.50 price tag for a regular showing in Manhattan, which before AMC’s morning matinees had few discount tickets at all.

The prices have gone up, but the experience hasn’t improved. I’ve probably lived my entire moviegoing life amidst this decline. Twenty, thirty, forty years ago, back when the only advertisements were the coming attractions and cell phones were science fiction, was it so hard for audiences to sit during a movie and just watch it? Was there still wonder in the experience of going to the movies? Was I born too late for the golden age?

A weekend at home

I go to the theater less and less. I rent more movies on DVD than I venture out to see, delivered to my mailbox from Netflix, and I can’t say I’ve missed out on much. On the contrary, I’ve gained. For $9.72 for one month, less than the price of a single ticket in Manhattan, I can usually turn around about four films, watch their special features, re-watch them with their audio commentaries — like mini film schools on disc. Computers and televisions have advanced to the point where the advantages of a big screen are negligible, and you don’t have to worry about the jerk sitting next to you checking Facebook on his Blackberry or Blueberry or Raspberry, or whatever. In a single month’s time, for a dollar more than the price of a Public Enemies ticket, I watched Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, the true-crime documentaries Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2, and Robert Altman’s Nashville. The turnaround for new films from theater to disc is getting faster and faster. If I recommend Netflix or similar delivery services, it’s only good common sense.

The upshot is that the movie theater feels farther and farther away. It’s a remarkable time for the movies because they have never been more accessible or affordable, even if the city you live in has never been “selected.” I would like to be a purist. Oh how I would like to be a purist! To tell you that movies are best experienced on the big screen with a like-minded audience of cineastes waiting to be dazzled. It’s true, after all. I fell in love with the movies staring in slack-jawed wonder at Alex Proyas’s masterly Dark City. But I reaffirmed that love watching Tarsem Singh’s The Fall on a computer screen, and Sidney Lumet’s Network, and Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, and David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels, and so on.

A great film doesn’t need extra square footage to astonish you, certainly not when you are compromised by factors out of your control. You only get one chance to see a movie for the first time; it is a sacred trust placed in strangers to respect the experience. Most do. Many don’t. Every once in a while you may be unlucky. If you are very unlucky, you will have missed your first chance to discover — to unwrap, as a gift — the sounds and images of a masterpiece. That is the true robbery. The ten bucks I’ll miss, but the experience comes once, and it’s priceless.

“Torchwood: Children of Earth” and the future of science fiction

I’ve been a fan of science fiction since I’ve been a fan of fiction. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation and then The X-Files on television from the late ‘80s through the ‘90s; they were a formative influence on my earliest writing. I remember the wonder with which I experienced Jurassic Park and Independence Day for the first time — though the latter hasn’t aged well. In 1998, the visionary Dark City firmly cemented my love of the movies. But this summer I have come to a believe that the future of science fiction is on the small screen, not the silver screen. I reached this conclusion as I watched the BBC miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth, which aired in the US from July 20-24 on BBC America. It’s a masterpiece.

Torchwood is a Welsh-set drama, spun off from sci-fi stalwart Doctor Who, about an elite group of alien hunters who monitor a rift in the space-time continuum. (They sure don’t make space-time continuums like they used to — they’re always rifting.) The series has produced two previous seasons, but it has never been better. The setup is simple, but diabolical. One day, the prepubescent children of the world — every single one — stop at the exact same time, frozen as if in a trance. When they are entranced again they repeat in unison a disturbing proclamation: “We are coming.” It’s an alien threat, using children to communicate, but what do they want? What will they do when they get here? I will reveal little else of the plot. Though the miniseries has already aired, it is available on DVD July 28 and I want you to see it for yourself. The breathless, moment-to-moment intensity of it is such that I don’t want to spoil a bit of it.

'Torchwood: Children of Earth'

You will seldom see anything like this in a movie theater. Because television operates on a relative shoe-string budget it must traffic in ideas more than effects, and that is evident in Children of Earth, which employs little CGI. We are shown only one alien creature on-screen, and it spends all its time in a glass chamber shrouded in a chemical fog. There are no intergalactic dogfights, no elaborately designed sets — the action takes place largely in British government buildings. Some stuff blows up real good, and the heroine, Gwen Cooper (the superb Eve Myles), double-wields pistols in a way that would make Quentin Tarantino proud, but this is not a showcase for special effects or makeup departments.

Instead, you get scenes rooted in character and theme. The Torchwood team leader is Jack Harkness (John Barrowman, in a dashing yet deeply emotional performance). He is immortal, and you might think that would deflate the tension, but then you’ve never watched a man get sealed in concrete and then dropped from a cliff — and walk away! He is in a relationship with fellow team member Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd), and the script takes time to deal with the reality of the characters, who know that one of them will still be alive long after the other is dead and gone.

Their relationship is treated matter-of-factly, but it’s groundbreaking. There is a decided lack of LGBT presence in science fiction — big screen and small — especially gay and bisexual men, as if the makers of current sci-fi cannot distance themselves from their adolescent fantasies enough to contemplate how human sexuality may evolve in future eras; Jack was once a time-traveler, and grew up in a distant future when human interaction with alien races renders the distinctions of human orientation irrelevant.

Consider also a scene from the fourth episode: a roundtable between members of the government, who must decide a plan of action. It evokes … no, I won’t reveal what it evokes. You’ll know it when you see it, and you’ll be horrified not just by its implications but by its plausibility. You won’t see a scene like this in any film intended for a mass audience, science fiction or otherwise. It’s a masterstroke that elevates the miniseries from escapist thriller to a meditation on the nature of evil. The writer and producer is Russell T. Davies, who created Torchwood and oversees the current Doctor Who series, and with Children of Earth vaults to the head of the class of modern sci-fi visionaries.

'Star Trek'

Compare it to the highest grossing science fiction films of the year: Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I will discuss only Star Trek at length because I have not seen either of the Transformers films, but even its fans are likely to tell you that its strong suits aren’t character, story, or theme.

Star Trek was greeted with overwhelmingly positive reviews and perhaps more importantly the approval of Trekkers. Well, most Trekkers. I consider myself among their number and could work up little enthusiasm for the reboot. I posted my review on Facebook and received a comment protesting that my two-and-a-half stars were unduly harsh. (I generally give that rating to a film I consider a near-miss.)

Watching Children of Earth, I understand all at once what Star Trek was missing: something new. The Trek franchise was taken over by director J.J. Abrams — whose TV work includes such creatively audacious gems as Alias and Lost — with the intent of refreshing a well-worn formula. But he only replaced the well-worn formula with other well-worn formulas. The screenplay by frequent Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman — who also wrote the latest Transformers film — is composed of familiar elements: a rakish hero, a by-the-books counterpart, and a villain hell-bent on revenge. There is one bold story development, but it’s taken straight out of the original Star Wars. Mostly, the plot is a clothesline for action sequences and CGI, which flash across the screen in choppily edited bits.

What an incredibly vivid world Torchwood creates with so few effects! Imagine what Star Trek could have created on a Hollywood budget! Instead, we get new variations of space ships shooting at each other. But that is the nature of the business of Hollywood these days. A studio will only bankroll what it thinks it can sell, and it’s a safer bet to feed the consumers more of what they’ve consumed before, especially when committing hundreds of millions of dollars to lavish production values.

CGI has taken over blockbuster films. Special effects themselves are not the enemy; they become the enemy only when they replace storytelling and imagination. It required intelligence and wisdom to make Children of Earth. It requires decidedly less to envision ships shooting each other, or robots clanging into each other, or a new spectacular disaster befalling a recognizable skyline like New York City. I’ve seen these things before, and long for things I haven’t seen.

'WALL-E'

There are notable exceptions in recent cinema. In the last ten years, Hollywood has produced WALL-E, Children of Men, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Minority Report, which are among not only the best science fiction films of the decade but the best films, period. Two of those were directed by Steven Spielberg; it takes the clout of a Spielberg to get a mystifying film like A.I. made at all, and even then its $78 million domestic gross is considered a disappointment. Children of Men received rapturous reviews and Academy Award nominations, but its entire worldwide gross ($69 million) amounts to less than what Star Trek earned domestically in its opening weekend ($75 million). Is that a genuine reflection of public taste, or a matter of aggressive marketing? WALL-E proved that there is an audience for sophisticated sci-fi — even kids! So why isn’t there more of it?

Most viewers who admire the Star Trek movie probably don’t know that a show called Torchwood even exists, or that from July 20-24 it produced some of the most compelling science fiction this decade. They may not know that elsewhere on the dial are other bold sci-fi programs, often neglected, that also explore provocative ideas; I could as easily have written this article about Dollhouse, Lost, the sadly canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the recently concluded Battlestar Galactica, or Davies’s own Doctor Who, and if we expand the topic to cover fantasy more broadly, the list grows even longer.

We could even include Star Trek: The Next Generation and The X-Files, which are long-ended but both still available on digital formats and in syndication. Still after all these years it is rare to find a film that is equal to them.

In Honor of Gene Siskel

Friday, February 20, marked ten years since the death of Gene Siskel in 1999. On February 23 of that year, I began to write film reviews. I remember because I’ve held on to all my writings and wisely dated them for posterity. That first review was of She’s All That; I was fifteen years old when I wrote, “After the heavy-handed Oscar-reaching material like the tepid The Thin Red Line, She’s All That is an excellent change of pace and an altogether well rounded picture.” Not long ago, I came across the film again on cable and it’s not very good at all, but that’s what ten years of moviegoing will teach you. I don’t know if I would hold the same opinion of The Thin Red Line, but I think I got that one right.

I had written reviews before February 1999, here and there, but it wasn’t until Gene Siskel’s death that I decided to do it regularly. It was my private tribute to the man who, along with Roger Ebert, introduced me to the movies. Watching their syndicated Siskel & Ebert program, I wanted to share an experience like the ones reflected in their glinting eyes when they discussed their mutual adoration of films like Fargo and Hoop Dreams.

And I did. There was no going back after Dark City and Saving Private Ryan, and over the years have come more and more elevating experiences: American Beauty, Wonder Boys, Angels in America, A.I., Million Dollar Baby, No Country for Old Men, WALL-E, and more. Siskel did not live to see any of those films. How I wish he could have, if only so I could know what he would have thought of them. I am better written, better spoken, better informed, more compassionate, more worldly, wiser, and wittier for having loved the movies. I do pretty well on Jeopardy! too. I owe Gene Siskel a great deal.

After his death, his seat on the balcony was filled by Richard Roeper, who to be honest is no Gene Siskel. After Ebert fell ill two years ago, his seat was filled by revolving critics, and now the balcony is occupied by Ben Mankiewicz and Ben Lyons, who to be honest are no Richard Roeper. On AtTheMoviesTV.com, you’ll find an invaluable archive of Siskel, Ebert, and Roeper’s televised reviews going back to 1986. I visit them regularly. As long as that precious resource is alive, the balcony will never be closed.

REMEMBERING GENE SISKEL, Part 1

REMEMBERING GENE SISKEL, Part 2

REMEMBERING GENE SISKEL, Part 3

Academy Awards 2009: Oscars in Review

How did you do in your Oscars pool? My guess is very well. Like the rest of us. I made predictions for every category except the short-film races, which I knew little or nothing about. Of the categories I predicted, I was correct on every race but two: Sound Mixing (I picked The Dark Knight, the winner was Slumdog Millionaire) and Foreign-Language Film (I picked France’s The Class, the winner was Japan’s Departures). Was the Oscar telecast predictable? Resoundingly so. Was it boring? No.

Host Hugh Jackman, who seemed on paper to be an unlikely choice for the gig after a string of comics like Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, and Steve Martin, proved an inspired choice for the role. His experience as a song-and-dance man — he’s a Tony winner for the musical The Boy from Oz and an Emmy winner for helming a Tonys telecast — served him well and indeed served us well, beginning with a comically downsized opening number that he filled with his outsize personality. His interaction with the audience was inspired, from serenading Kate Winslet to dueting with the winning Anne Hathaway. He was more than the match of Beyonce Knowles in a Baz Luhrmann-produced tribute to movie musicals, which featured teen idols Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens lending support rather than hogging the spotlight.

He guided us through a presentation of awards that was refreshingly relevant, walking us through the stages of filmmaking. It was perhaps wise to bunch some of the technical awards together to keep the show moving at a brisk pace, and even more inspired to give us presenters who breathed unexpected life into the usual patter, like Tina Fey, Steve Martin, Jennifer Aniston, Jack Black, and Will Smith.

However, the performance of the Best Original Song nominees was slightly muddled. The two nominated Slumdog tunes sandwiched Peter Gabriel’s WALL-E song, “Down to Earth,” sung by John Legend, but there was a moment where Legend sang his song over A.R. Rahman’s “Jai Ho,” as if they were engaged in a sing-off. I half expected Legend to change the lyrics “We’re coming down” to “You’re going down.” Actually, it might have worked better that way.

The acting awards — they were distinguished not just by the winners but by the presentation of the winners. Breaking from the usual format of naming the nominees and showing clips, the categories were introduced by a quintet of winners in each category, who warmly and graciously singled out every nominated performance for praise. To watch the faces of the nominees as they were honored by their anointed peers and then for one to be welcomed by them into Oscar history was an ingenious choice. Certainly a lot better than a couple of years back, when they trotted all the technical nominees on stage like victims for a firing squad to save time.

Oscars were awarded to Slumdog Millionaire, eight in total, and other films settled for whatever was left. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button won three (art direction, makeup, visual effects), The Dark Knight won two (supporting actor, sound editing), Milk won two (lead actor, original screenplay), and The Reader and Vicky Cristina Barcelona won an acting prize each, for Kate Winslet and Penelope Cruz respectively. The documentary feature award went to Man on Wire, the lovely film about daredevil tight-rope walker Philippe Petit. The Best Animated Feature was WALL-E, which in my estimation was the year’s best film, period.

Did Slumdog Millionaire deserve to sweep? It’s hard to begrudge the film and the talented, hard-working artists who made it. It’s effective, well made, a successful picture. But I have made no secret of not loving it as much as most critics did, and while it earned prize after prize I thought about all the great film achievements that were being ignored — those that were nominated and those that weren’t. I thought about the remarkable cinematography and editing of The Dark Knight. The lovely music from WALL-E. The terrific scripting of Doubt, Revolutionary Road, Snow Angels, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. The remarkable visuals of The Fall. The great score from Waltz with Bashir. The brilliant songs from Hamlet 2, The Wrestler, and Gran Torino. To watch the Oscars, you would think Slumdog was the only film of merit released in 2008. Not so.

The acting winners were satisfying, and so were their speeches. Heath Ledger’s family stoically accepted the late actor’s well deserved award for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight. The typically serious-minded Sean Penn cracked a grateful smile upon winning his second Oscar, for the biopic Milk, for which he accused Oscar voters of being “Commie, homo-loving sons of guns.” … And proud of it. I was rooting for Mickey Rourke for his extraordinary career resurrection in The Wrestler, but Best Actor was a category with no bad options, and Penn’s transformation into slain gay-rights activist Harvey Milk elevated the biopic into something special.

Winslet won lead actress for The Reader. I thought she was better in Revolutionary Road, but I’m glad she won for one of them. 2008 was a remarkable year for her, and after five previous nominations, she was overdue. At only 33 years of age, she has enough years ahead of her to one day be overdue again, and I suspect she may be the one to eventually catch or even surpass Meryl Streep’s ever-growing total of nominations.

A deeply touching speech was made by original screenplay victor Dustin Lance Black, whose winning Milk script was the first he has written. The openly gay writer was inspired by Harvey Milk and expressed his desire to one day be able to fall in love and get married.

Who were the best and worst dressed? Browse the many, many photos on the web and decide for yourself. I have ceased to be interested in dissecting gowns and designers. When Tilda Swinton won her Oscar last year for Michael Clayton, why was all the attention on the dress she accepted the award in, rather than on the performance that earned it? And why was she judged so harshly for it? Women are held to unfair standards, especially when some men fail to even comb their hair. Winslet looked beautiful. So did Penelope Cruz. And Anne Hathaway. It’s hard to come up with a Hollywood star who didn’t look beautiful. Mickey Rourke went rogue with an open collar and white jacket, but I think the picture of his late dog Loki he wore around his neck will mean more to him than anything Tim Gunn has to say about his attire. As it should be.

The Unsung Heroes of 2008

Highlighting those overlooked performances from 2008 that deserved greater accolades.

ASIA ARGENTO
The Last Mistress

Set in 19th Century France, Catherine Breillat’s film is not about love — it’s about addiction. Because as played by Argento, Spanish seductress Vellini is not a romantic heroine but a creature of obsessive need and hunger. The actress shows ferocious commitment in a performance that ventures into some of the ugliest realms of human desire. She is frequently nude, but it is her emotional nakedness that distinguishes her.

KATE BECKINSALE & SAM ROCKWELL
Snow Angels

As Annie and Glenn Marchand, Beckinsale and Rockwell inhabit an estranged marriage with great attention to detail, from the frazzled disappointment in her voice to the desperate fumbling of his religious faith — he’s going through the motions in the hopes that things will get better, and, well, so is she. A terrible event shakes them to their core, and the actors bravely follow their characters down a dark, dark path that is chilling in how inevitable it all seems.

STEVE COOGAN
Hamlet 2

High school drama teacher Dana Marschz, he of the unpronounceable name and indefatigable enthusiasm, is at the heart of a ribald film that threatens at every moment to spin out of control, but Coogan anchors it with a performance of such giddy comic abandon and unflagging sincerity that we come to admire him and root for him, no matter how ill-conceived his endeavor.

MINNIE DRIVER
Take

With tremendous urgency, Driver plays Ana, but really she plays a dual role: the Ana before her son’s death, a lioness who fiercely defends her developmentally challenged child, and the Ana after, cold, cynical, and subdued as she travels to confront his killer. As the film cuts between the two time periods, she poignantly expresses the deep-seated anger and anguish of her struggle to reconcile her past with her present, in the hope of clearing a way to the future.

EDDIE MARSAN
Happy-Go-Lucky

The best scenes of the film are the ones in which Marsan spars with Sally Hawkins’s unflappable Poppy. He plays driving instructor Scott, the yin to her yang, who is as hopeless about the world as Poppy is hopeful. Their conflict culminates in one of the best acted scenes of the year, in which Marsan reveals Scott’s wounded soul. His cynicism, we see, is not a stubborn choice, but the result of a long-suffered pain.

EMILY MORTIMER
Transsiberian

Mortimer’s placid, angelic face is the ultimate misdirection of Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian. She plays Jessie, a good-girl Christian missionary who conceals some sinister bad-girl inclinations. The actress’s performance is cagey, suggesting an inner wickedness, and she revels in Jessie’s dark, ambiguous psychology. We’re never quite sure whether the angel or the devil on her shoulder will prevail.

LEE PACE & CATINCA UNTARU
The Fall

The Fall would be just a pretty picture if Pace and Untaru weren’t able to bring such emotional resonance to it. As a depressive Hollywood stuntman and an injured fruit-picker, respectively, Pace and Untaru develop a natural rapport through heavily improvised scenes, creating a friendship that is at first based on deception but eventually turns towards redemption.

JASON SEGEL
Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Segel’s performance as sad-sack Peter Bretter, a composer recently dumped by his TV-star girlfriend (Kristen Bell), is uncommonly endearing in the current comedy climate, which favors mean-spiritedness, but it’s his screenplay for the film that deserves special notice. Attentive to character instead of to formula, he has written the funniest and most emotionally true film to come out of the Judd Apatow factory since The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

HANNA SCHYGULLA
The Edge of Heaven

We don’t notice her at first as Susanne (pictured, left), a disapproving German mother whose daughter has taken an immigrant lover, but in the third act she becomes key to the film’s themes of culture shock, grief, and compassion. When she meets a man connected to her daughter he tells her, “You’re the saddest person here.” We recognize it too, but there is also a tremendous warmth in her that rises to the surface when we least expect it, and it fills us with hope.

JESS WEIXLER
Teeth

Mitchell Lichtenstein’s graphic satire doesn’t quite live up to its lead performance, but Weixler, as Dawn O’Keefe, a devout Christian horrified to discover that she is afflicted with vagina dentata (“toothed vagina”), gets to the heart of the primal sexual anxiety of adolescence. Addressing an abstinence group after discovering her condition, we see in her wide, disoriented eyes the mortal terror of standing under the light of God’s judgment.

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
Wendy and Lucy

We know that Wendy is traveling from Indiana to Alaska to find a job to support her and her dog Lucy. We don’t know what she’s running from or why she’s placed all her hopes on the distant north, but in this small-scale drama we see her tenacity. Williams gives a mostly internal performance that nevertheless conveys the toughness of living hand-to-mouth. The only breach in her resolve comes when she makes a crucial decision about her dog, who I suspect is the only creature in the world she loves with her whole heart.

The Best Films of 2008

The Academy Awards announce their choices on Sunday. These are mine.

TAKE

Directed by Charles Oliver • When I saw it at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, I thought Minnie Driver would be nominated for Best Actress and that writer-director Charles Oliver would be greeted as an exciting new voice in cinema. However, in July 2008 Take was released to no fanfare and poor reviews — it deserves better. It’s an elegantly constructed drama about two lives that intersect in a moment of tragedy and intersect again in a kind of forgiveness. Its ending has been criticized as an anticlimax, but it’s not a film about an explosive catharsis. It’s about carrying the weight of the world, and in a moment deciding whether to hold on to it or let it go.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

Directed by Errol Morris • Detailing the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, Morris’s documentary is a lacerating indictment of pass-the-buck politics told through interviews with the so-called “bad apples” responsible for the scandal, a group of young scapegoats who posed for the pictures that showcased the abuse. Not all of them are blameless innocents, but it’s clear that the crime they were punished for was not the one committed against the prisoners; no, they went to jail for publicly embarrassing the military leadership and the Bush administration, who beyond the infamous photographs were guilty of far greater crimes they will never be held accountable for.

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

Directed by Fatih Akin • It tells three stories that are really one: a survey of the growing pains of globalization as seen through the eyes of characters exchanging love, death, hope, and forgiveness across borders between Germany and Turkey. As the world shrinks, cultures collide in messy variations, but this isn’t a dry lesson in geopolitics. Writer-director Akin tells his story on ground level and achieves intimacy through characters who cannot see how intricately their lives interconnect, but we can. Hanna Schygulla has the pivotal role, as a woman who learns firsthand how tragedy can result and shows us that redemption is equally within reach.

YOUNG @ HEART

Directed by Stephen Walker • Aging is a subject of dread for many, or contempt, or ridicule. Walker’s documentary, which follows an elderly rock chorus as they rehearse new songs for a concert, instead favors compassion. Promoted on the basis of its humor — old fogies sing edgy rock tunes! — it penetrates deeper to explore the singers’ thoughts and feelings about mortality. It becomes a full-hearted tribute to those who age gracefully despite their physical frailties and contains music that sounds altogether richer through their voices. Listening to Fred Knittle perform Coldplay’s “Fix You,” I felt as though I only then understood what it meant.

THE DARK KNIGHT

Directed by Christopher Nolan • I seldom get excited over superhero movies, but then this isn’t really a superhero movie at all. The Caped Crusader is a welcome guest in a drama that excites some of the same thoughts as the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Nolan, whose films from Memento to The Prestige have explored the theme of men at war with their shadow selves, explodes that notion to explore how the war shapes us all. Batman and the Joker (the unforgettable Heath Ledger) converge on a battlefield of the soul to determine if we are moral creatures or if indeed our inner heroes give way to villains when we are pushed to our limit.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

Directed by Jonathan Demme • Jenny Lumet’s remarkable screenplay is the centerpiece of Demme’s drama about family dysfunction, unfolding layer upon layer of pain in the subtlest, purest of ways. Upon her discharge from a drug treatment facility, black sheep Kym Buchman (Oscar-nominated Anne Hathaway) is thrown immediately back into the emotional murk that has shaped her destiny as an addict. The Buchmans’ lives have been driven by a loss that took place several years prior, and the actors, writer, and director are so attuned to the nuances of the family relationships that every word and gesture feels unerringly true.

SNOW ANGELS

Directed by David Gordon Green • It begins with two gunshots and then unfolds in an agonizing slow-burn towards tragedy. Written and directed by Green, from a novel by Stewart O’Nan, it establishes its small-town setting with perfect detail and pulls back gradually to show us more and more, until the story comes full circle and reveals itself with complete clarity. Starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale as the estranged parents of a young daughter and Michael Angarano in a breakthrough performance as a teen in a budding romance, the film presents characters we come to know so well they break our hearts.

THE WRESTLER

Directed by Darren Aronofsky • Mickey Rourke gives the performance of his career in the year’s best character study. With tender vulnerability and powerhouse physicality, he plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a Hulk Hogan-esque pro wrestler whose ‘80s glory days are long over. His story, which moves with the trajectory of Greek tragedy, is set against the backdrop of the underground wrestling circuit, which Aronofsky shows with an unsentimental eye — the broken bodies and faded careers, the injuries both emotional and physical, with Randy as its focal point. He’s got only one thing in the world he’s good at, but it may not be enough anymore.

THE FALL

Directed by Tarsem Singh • It was more a quest than a movie production. Singh flew his actors to extraordinary locations in two dozen countries, composed shots of unimaginable logistical difficulty, and with editor Robert Duffy assembled them into a narrative of peerless imagination and grace. It’s revolutionary filmmaking in how old-fashioned it is: no green screens, no digital effects, just the camera capturing images from untold corners of the world. But what elevates the film to greatness is the story at its core, about a young girl recovering in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s and the man who hopes to make her an unwitting accomplice in his suicide by telling her the story that incorporates the magnificent imagery. By the end, I felt grateful to have seen it. Sometimes they do still make movies like they used to.

WALL-E

Directed by Andrew Stanton • One of the decade’s great achievements in cinema art, it is the rare animated film that can take its inspiration from Charlie Chaplin and 2001: A Space Odyssey and earn them. It is composed of shots so expressive, so eloquent, so elevating in their effect that I was nearly moved to tears.

I will never forget the shot of a lighter’s flame reflected in the eyes of lonely robot WALL-E, or the celestial dance between WALL-E and the more advanced robot EVE, with whom he falls in love. I marveled at the opening third of the film, which with a precious economy of words expresses a profound criticism of a culture of mindless consumption. I felt sadness for those gelatinous blobs in the automated chairs, oblivious to the beauty around them.

There was no better romance last year than WALL-E, and no satire more incisive. It is an unqualified masterpiece and the best film of 2008.

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THE SECOND STRING
The runners-up — consider this a five-way tie for eleventh place.

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS
Directed by Alex Holdridge • Inspired by Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, writer-director Holdridge’s film follows Wilson and Vivian (the terrific Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds) in their search for someone to kiss when the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s. The dialogue is so good and the characters so winning that I wanted scenes to go on and on; it was bittersweet to bid them farewell.

MAN ON WIRE
Directed by James Marsh • A joyous documentary about Philippe Petit, the daredevil who walked along a high wire between the towers of the World Trade Center. Marsh wisely avoids any mention of 9/11; he understands that it isn’t a story about terror or loss. Simply, it’s about a remarkable event that happened under unlikely circumstances because a small group of people wanted to create something in the sky.

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY
Directed by Bharat Nalluri • Underneath a delightful screwball romance is a surprisingly trenchant look at women in 1930s London who adapt to survive. Failed governess Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) refashions herself as a social secretary. American country girl Delysia (Amy Adams) styles herself into a high-class singer and actress. And all around them a nation hurtles blithely towards its entry into World War II and the loss of a generation’s innocence.

RECOUNT
Directed by Jay Roach • Detailing the legal battles that followed the 2000 US presidential election, Roach’s HBO docudrama has dry subject matter — lawsuits, countersuits, statutes, precedents, and those infamous hanging chads — but as shown through the eyes of Gore advisor Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey) it has the exhilarating momentum of a thriller. It expresses outrage but is leavened by humor — political upheaval as an absurd comedy of errors.

TRANSSIBERIAN
Directed by Brad Anderson • Anderson channeled Hitchcock to co-write and direct one of the best pure entertainments of 2008, about a young missionary couple (Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson) who encounter danger on a train. It works so well because Anderson’s script (co-written by Will Conroy) demonstrates a great understanding of how to generate and sustain suspense throughout a story. It should be studied in screenwriting classes.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Winners (Picture and Director)

BEST PICTURE:
Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Frost/Nixon; Milk; The Reader; Slumdog Millionaire

BEST DIRECTOR:
Nominees: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire); Stephen Daldry (The Reader); David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon); Gus Van Sant (Milk)

Winner of Both: Slumdog Millionaire
Both director and picture have the same five nominees, and since they will have the same winner, we may as well consider them together. Slumdog Millionaire has won virtually every award it has been nominated for: Golden Globe, WGA, DGA, PGA, SAG, BAFTA — possibly also the KGB, QVC, and ASPCA. It’s a feel-good drama with the underdog spirit of other Best Picture winners like Rocky. It’s a critical darling. It’s not the most nominated film of the year (Benjamin Button leads with 13 to Slumdog’s 10), but you won’t be hearing late-night talk show jokes about how long and boring Slumdog is. Slumdog Millionaire will win — count on it.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Winners (Acting)

BEST ACTOR:
Nominees: Richard Jenkins (The Visitor); Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon); Sean Penn (Milk); Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

Winner: Sean Penn
After Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and delivered his touching speech, it appeared that momentum might have been shifting away from early favorite Sean Penn to the Comeback Kid. Penn’s victory at SAG put him back out front, but this is a tight two-man race.

Penn has other factors working in his favor. First, he plays a real person. Oscar is a sucker for stars transforming themselves for lofty biopics: Forest Whitaker (Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland), Helen Mirren (Elizabeth II in The Queen), Marion Cotillard (Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote in Capote), Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles in Ray), Adrien Brody (Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist), and so on. Second, Milk has widespread Academy support that The Wrestler doesn’t have: eight nominations, including Best Picture. But watch out for Rourke if voters decide that it’s too early for another coronation for Penn, who won this award just five years ago for Mystic River.

BEST ACTRESS:
Nominees: Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married); Angelina Jolie (Changeling); Melissa Leo (Frozen River); Meryl Streep (Doubt); Kate Winslet (The Reader)

Winner: Kate Winslet
Both Streep and Winslet won SAG awards for their performances, but Streep won as a lead actress and Winslet won the supporting race. Winslet was campaigned as a supporting actress for The Reader, hoping to earn a Best Actress nod instead for Revolutionary Road, but Oscar voters thought differently, so it’s tough to know which tea leaves to read.

Read these: Winslet is a six-time nominee and has never won. If she loses this year, she will tie the record for the worst Oscar shut-out among actresses. Her Golden Globes acceptance speech was one of the touching highlights of the night, and Academy voters may want an encore. Now her film is nominated for Best Picture, so in a race that never had a clear frontrunner it appears she is poised to finally have her moment.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Nominees: Josh Brolin (Milk); Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder); Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt); Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight); Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road)

Winner: Heath Ledger
It’s dangerous to call anyone a lock, especially in circumstances as uncommon as these, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine Ledger losing this prize. His Joker is widely considered an iconic screen turn. If he were alive today, voters might give themselves permission to let their snobbish biases lead them to a more traditional candidate (i.e. someone other than the comic book villain), but knowing that this will be the last performance of the actor’s tragically unfulfilled career, they couldn’t get away with checking off any other name.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Nominees: Amy Adams (Doubt); Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona); Viola Davis (Doubt); Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler)

Winner: Penelope Cruz
Is there a more confusing category than this? Kate Winslet won both the Golden Globe and the SAG Award for The Reader, but since Oscar nominated her for lead actress, there’s no way to be sure who their favorite is among these five. A case can be made for any of them.

Viola Davis’s 11-minute performance in Doubt had massive impact, and brief, impactful turns have won before (Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love, Beatrice Straight in Network). But her co-star Amy Adams has more screen time and is a Hollywood star on the rise; she was nominated three years ago for Junebug, and though she wasn’t nominated last year for Enchanted, she performed on the telecast for that film. The Academy is clearly fond of her.

Marisa Tomei’s upset victory for My Cousin Vinny is one of the most talked about in Oscar history, so she can never be ruled out, but The Wrestler is more a showcase piece for Mickey Rourke and Tomei’s role may be too subtle in comparison.

Taraji P. Henson has an advantage the others do not: she is in a Best Picture nominee, which means her film has Academy-wide support. And though her performance is relatively slight, it is more or less a version of the kind of role that won an Oscar for Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind.

Last is Penelope Cruz. Her comic turn in Vicky Cristina Barcelona did well among critics, earning awards from the New York and Los Angeles critics’ groups, but if critics were a direct indicator of Oscar Sally Hawkins would have been nominated for Best Actress. Still, the Academy has a history of affection for Woody Allen’s muses (Mira Sorvino, Dianne Wiest x2) and an even greater history of awarding sexy starlets. She just won Best Supporting Actress from the British Academy (BAFTA), which is as close to an indicator as we’re going to get. My money’s on her. But hedge your bets.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Winners (Writing)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
Nominees: Frozen River; Happy-Go-Lucky; In Bruges; Milk; WALL-E

Winner: Milk
A category with little suspense. Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay for Milk just won the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) Award. It’s the only WGA nominee also nominated for an Oscar. Most important, Milk is the only original screenplay this year nominated for Best Picture. If there is a dark horse, it’s WALL-E, which was ineligible for the original screenplay category at WGA. But despite several nominations this decade, no animated film has won an Oscar for writing, and if WALL-E couldn’t overcome Academy bias to get into Best Picture, it likely won’t prevail here.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Doubt; Frost/Nixon; The Reader; Slumdog Millionaire

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire
Almost a foregone conclusion. Slumdog seems to have unstoppable momentum in this Oscar race. It won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, and it was honored by the Producers’ Guild (PGA), Directors’ Guild (DGA), and Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay, based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, was awarded by WGA. It’s close to a slam dunk.