WTF, EW? Notes on the Best 100 movies of the past 25 years

Another day, another list. Actually, another day another 30 or 40 lists, courtesy of the desperate-to-stay-in-business folks at Entertainment Weekly.

In this week's issue, the magazine lists 1000 random things. It's a good way to get page-views on the website and to stir up debate on the Internet. And, like every other good lap-dog, I'll take the bait. Mmmm... Bait... WORMY.

Before we go any further, here is the list of EW's 100 New Classics, or "the 100 best films from 1983 to 2008." It actually has 102 moves on it, because despite having 100 potential positions, the cowards at EW still insisted on lumping the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy into one movie. They didn't do the same for "Spider-Man" or the "Bourne" movies. Weenies. But that sort of refusal to make an actual choice is part of why the list stinks anyway.

One of my favorite expressions is "neither fish nor fowl" and the EW Top 100 list is neither fish nor fowl. It is, indeed, so nebulous and bland a list as to actually defeat its very purpose. Yes, EW wants the list to stir up discussion, but it's such a meaningless assemblage of movie names that there's almost no cause to argue. I don't get the impression the EW editorial staff knew what they were listing, so how can one reasonably say their list is wrong?

But I like to complain... Follow through after the bump for that complaining.

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With the EW list, the first and biggest problem is one of terminology. Are these the 100 films of the greatest cinematic merit of the past 25 years? Are they the films that were the most influential of the past 25 years? Are they the films that had the biggest impact on the overall popular culture? Are they the films that hold up best in a retrospective glance back over the past 25 years? Are they 100 films you need to have seen to claim more than two decades worth of cinematic literacy? The list seems to go back and forth and loses all meaning.

Look smack dab in the middle to see the split personality at work. At No. 46, you find "Children of Men," a movie that perhaps deserves higher placement on cinematic merit, but didn't necessarily impact the popular culture. Two places later, though, you find Brian DePalma's "Scarface," an atrocious movie on qualitative levels, but a piece of obvious lasting influence, particularly in the hip-hip community. And then, smack in the middle at No. 47, you get "Men in Black," a movie of negligible cinematic merit -- after a fun beginning it snoozes for nearly an hour -- no cultural impact and no meaningful place at all in the cinematic landscape. "Men in Black" -- a bit like "Beverly Hills Cop," which inexplicably sits at No. 61, 10 spots ahead of "Unforgiven" -- is nothing more than a successful popcorn movie. But there it is between the masterful ("Children of Men") and the influential ("Scarface") making you wonder what the standard of measurement was that brought them together.

The list is populist and inoffensive in the way you'd expect an Entertainment Weekly list to be and, as a result, it ends up making saying nothing. Why do a list like this at all if you're going to pussy out at the end.

The top movie of the last 25 years? "Pulp Fiction." Yawn. Leaving aside that in my book, "Pulp Fiction" goes behind both "Reservoir Dogs" and "Jackie Brown" (both excluded here) in Quentin Tarantino's body of work. But magazines have been calling "Pulp Fiction" the best film of the year, the decade, the century since the week after it opened. It's a movie that has been recognized and honored and celebrated to the point that recognizing it and honoring it and celebrating it accomplished nothing other than a reaction of, "Well duh." It produces exactly the sort of indifference that compilers of a list like this *ought* to want to avoid.

If you're making a list like this, you want to go out on a ledge and thumb your nose at the world as you declare...

"The Best Movie of the Past 25 Years Is 'Do the Right Thing.'" Then you can write a feature on how Spike Lee's critique of race relations in America is every bit as relevant today as 19 years ago, particularly as an African-American man is in a race for the White House. You talk about the integration of rap into mainstream cinema and the use of the commercial and music video aesthetic in Spike Lee's work. Some people disagree, but darnit... You said it.

Or you declare...

"The Best Movie of the Past 25 Years Is 'Three Kings.'" Then you can write a feature on how David O. Russell's movie is the smartest film about the first Iraq war and how it's an even smarter critique of our current failings in the Middle East. Then you say how even if you ignore the politics, it's still a smart, funny action movie and those don't get made nearly enough.

Hell, you declare...

"The Best Movie of the Past 25 Years Is 'Toy Story.'" I can't defend this one, but EW has it in the Top 5. So stand by it. Put your name on the DVD box. Own the position.

Entertainment Weekly can't own the position of calling "Pulp Fiction" the best movie of the past 25 years. It's a subjective decision and they've been scooped on it 1000 times over. They're just another voice in the chorus and if that makes the EW editorial staff happy, good for them. They listed 100 movies and said nothing.

But again... the terminology is meaningless.

Best movie from 1983 to 2008?

By my count, the list includes exactly five films in a language that isn't English. Better they should have made this a list of just the 100 best English language films of the past 25 years, because otherwise the editorial staff of EW is saying that in the past 25 years, no French or Italian or Japanese or Indian or Finnish or Russian filmmaker has made a SINGLE movie the equal of "Napoleon Dynamite." Is that really what this magazine wants to say? And the token foreign language choices are a bit silly anyway. If you're working with a 25 year period and you have one Pedro Almodovar movie to pick and you only choose the sanitized simplicity of "All About My Mother," that's a sign that you didn't really like Pedro Almodovar anyway.

And, by my count, the list includes exactly two nonfiction films. I won't get into putting "Crumb" higher on the list than "Hoop Dreams," though "Hoop Dreams" would have made my Top 10. But maybe they should have called the list the "100 best narrative, English-language films of the past 25 years." Because otherwise you're saying that Errol Morris hasn't made a movie better than "Napoleon Dynamite" in 25 years. Given the mainstream sensibilities at EW, I'm amazed that there isn't a token Michael Moore movie on the list, much less "An Inconvenient Truth" or "March of the Penguins." But I guess that if you're making room for "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," it's hard to open things up for another couple documentaries. But since the list isn't called "100 movies that made us giggle and that were turned into popular t-shirts," I guess I expect more.

I'm amazed by the number of genuinely important or influential filmmakers who somehow didn't make the cute. So we include "Napoleon Dynamite" but not "Clerks" or "Chasing Amy"? You can't slip in something by Jim Jarmusch? No "Sweet Hereafter" or "Exotica" for Atom Egoyan? And no nod to David Cronenberg by putting "The Fly" at No. 100? No room for Michael Mann? And unless this has suddenly become 1996 all over again, putting "Natural Born Killers" as Oliver Stone's lone slot can't really be justified.

Since I can and would happily make the argument that "Three Kings" could have topped a list of this kind, I'm disappointed that it isn't actually here at all. And "Groundhog Day" should have been in the Top 20. If "Casino Royale," a solid action movie that runs at least 35 minutes too long, belongs there...

Strange. I think they're better movies than "Napoleon Dynamite."

25 other movies I might have included on the list: "Babe," "Quiz Show," "Pan's Labyrinth," "Election," "Before Sunset," "Hard-Boiled," "Shawshank Redemption," "The Usual Suspects," "Gremlins," "Something Wild," "Midnight Run," "The Untouchables," "True Romance," "The Return of the Jedi," "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence," "Se7en," "Almost Famous," "City of Lost Children," "Bullets Over Broadway," "Big Night," "The Ice Storm," "Election" and "Wonder Boys."

I wrote that list in roughly a minute without giving any real thought. None of them are snotty, intellectual films. They'd all fit with the EW populist brand. They're just better movies than "Beverly Hills Cop." With your usual AFI list, I'd say I might want to replace 15 or 20 choices with my own favorites. With this EW list, I'd ditch half of the choices and start again.

I could also play all sorts of other games replacing and swapping films by various directors, but if those are the Paul Thomas Anderson or Coen Brothers movies EW wants, it's their list. If they think putting "Napoleon Dynamite" on a list like this makes them seem "cool" or "edgy" or "hip," I hope they gave a good long look at "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

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WTF, AFI? Notes on 10 AFI Top 10s

It's a pretty pointless thing that movie bloggers do whenever the AFI launches its latest Top 100 list. We rant and rave as if any Top 100 list other than our own would have satisfied us. And, if I'm being honest, I probably wouldn't like my own Top 100 list very much either, depending on what side of the bed I happened to wake up on.

Thankfully, the AFI's new list-o-rama is typically contestable, as its broken things down to 10 individual Top 10 lists in a variety of genres. One could certainly get plenty irked by the choice of genres, but they categorization within each genre and then by the actual selections. Then there are all of the usual AFI problems about lamentably absent older films, lamentably absent recent films and the weird definitions of what constitutes an "American" film anyway.

Some of the genres I'm maybe 80% or 90% happy with. Then there are the two genres in which my favorite films didn't even make the Top 10. And then there's the genre that never should have been included at all.

I've already copied down each of the Top 10 lists for my straight-forward Zap2it news story, so I'm not going to do that again here. But after the bump, I'll do a quick assortment of complaints for each genre. It's what I do.

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Animation: I'm just going to say it: "Snow White" is overrated. Wildly. It's a movie with maybe two or three memorable sequences elevated by its "FIRST!!!!" status. But the AFI voters have always thumbed their noses at plenty of other "FIRST!!!" movies, things like "Birth of a Nation." I guess I'm fine with "Snow White" making the Top 10 in general, but it's in the top spot by default. Then again, I'm problematic because I happen to truly believe that "Dumbo" is the true and unrecognized peak of Disney animation and it would have received my top vote. I'd have given my top Pixar slot to "The Incredibles," which also didn't make the list. Plus I'm part of the group that figures "Toy Story 2" is a better movie than the first "Toy Story." So sue me. Would I have pulled "Shrek" and "The Lion King" to make room for "Iron Giant" and maybe "An American Tail"? Very possibly.

Romantic Comedy: The best romantic comedy ever made, if you ask me, is Billy Wilder's "The Apartment." It's not here so that AFI voters could vote for freakin' "Sleepless in Seattle." To my mind, that's inexcusable. I'd also advocate extremely strongly for "Bringing Up Baby," for something Rock Hudson/Doris Day-y ("Pillow Talk"?) and for "Say Anything." There also has to be something better than "Roman Holiday" out there, y'all. There has to be. But AFI voters love that dinky movie. I'm trying to think of other viable alternatives to "Sleepless in Seattle." Something with Julia Roberts, maybe? "Notting Hill"? Is "Sherlock Jr" a romantic comedy? I think it probably is and an addition silent film would help the list.

Western: This is perhaps my favorite of the AFI categories just because I have no problems keeping #s 1-9. I might do a little shuffling here or there, but I'm OK with them. "Cat Ballou" is just silly here. That does, however, leave just one position to be filled by something like "Rio Bravo," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "My Darling Clementine" or even "The Last Picture Show," which was categorized here by the AFI. Then you get into issues of why, exactly, "The Third Man" or "Lawrence of Arabia" are fair game and "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" isn't. I'd pick "Liberty Valance" for my #10 slot.

Sports: I know that it makes people like Billy Crystal get weak in the knees as the weep over their childhood Bronx memories, but "The Pride of the Yankees" is a bad movie. Not a so-so movie or a mediocre movie. It's BAD. Everything else in that Top 10 is lessened because of it, which is too bad, because eight of the 10 (assuming you happen to agree that "Jerry Maguire" is a sports movie) are perfectly satisfying. I'd pull "Yankees" and "National Velvet." That would then give me room for "Slapshot" or "Karate Kid" or "The Natural" or "Tin Cup" or "Miracle" or "The Rookie" or "Friday Night Lights" or, if we need an older movie, Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman."

Mystery: Even if I disagree with some of the ordering and some of the selections, this is a good list of 10 movies. VERY good. I'd put "Chinatown" over "Vertigo," but I won't hate you if you prefer the Hitchcock. I would also move "The Third Man" up to three and "North by Northwest" to four. I wouldn't cry over losing "Laura" entirely, nor "The Usual Suspects," though I really appreciate both movies. I'd also question how, exactly, "Blue Velvet" comes to be a mystery. But I'll leave it there. But you have to get the Coen Brothers onto one of these lists somewhere and Mystery would be the right home for "Blood Simple" or "Fargo" or even "The Big Lebowski." I also wouldn't quibble with something out of left field here, like Brian DePalma's "Blow Out." This could also be the home for something like "L.A. Confidential." Is "Touch of Evil" a mystery? It ought to be. Oooh and since "Citizen Kane" didn't make the cut anywhere else, how about putting it up here?

Fantasy: I really can't deal with the weird assortment of movies in this category. I have no way of comparing "Groundhog Day" to "King Kong" to "Miracle on 34th Street" to "Lord of the Rings." And I don't know how the voters did either. Perhaps this was the category, though, where a superhero movie could have made the cut? The Donner "Superman" maybe? Is this where "Babe" should have been? If so, that's Top 5 for me. Based on the other films that appeared to be on the ballot, I could have found room for one or two out of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?," "Purple Rose of Cairo" and maybe "Brazil."

Sci-Fi: Look, I just don't like "2001." Sorry. It maybe comes in at No. 10 on my ballot as a nod to convention. In fact? Pull it entirely. And pull "The Day the Earth Stood Still," which isn't a bad movie but still... I'd also replace the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" with the '70s Phillip Kaufman version, but that's just me. I'd also pull "A New Hope" with "Empire Strikes Back." But given two fresh spots, what would I add? The David Cronenberg version of "The Fly," for sure. Since the ballot included "The Invisible Man" and the list needs a bit more seasoning, I'd add that too. But I'd accept arguments for "The Matrix," Planet of the Apes" and, in particular, "Children of Men."

Gangster: I put "Godfather II" over "Godfather I" every time, but so it goes. The real abomination here, obviously, is the Pacino "Scarface," which goes far below "The Untouchables" on my list of 1980s DePalma gangster movies. That's gone from my list. I'm also not a huge fan of "The Public Enemy." And I'd put "Reservoir Dogs" in ahead of "Pulp Fiction." So again, that leaves me with two new spaces to fill. The first slot goes to "Miller's Crossing" and the second to "Touch of Evil," which was categorized here by the AFI. Strangely, the AFI also had "Some Like It Hot" in the Gangster genre. So be it. It still doesn't make my list.

Courtroom Drama: Why was *this* the genre AFI decided to do? Why not war movies? Prison movies? Movies about movies? Or so many others... Because this is a totally mediocre Top 10, compiled mostly of serviceable and boxy filmed plays with minimal cinematic merit. "In Cold Blood" may actually be the best of the flat lot and, if memory serves, it doesn't spend much time in the courtroom at all. But when you're stuck with "Kramer vs. Kramer" at No. 3, you've just got to go back to the drawing board. And the choices people didn't vote for weren't much better. This is just dismal.

Epic: First off, y'all, enough with the revisionist hatin' on "Gone With the Wind." If the category is "epic," it comes in right behind "Lawrence of Arabia" in my book. I don't think either of the Heston movies are good enough to deserve a place on this list and I don't think either of the Spielberg movies are really "epics" per se. The standard appears to have been "Long movies set in the past." Of the movies on the ballot that didn't make the cut, I'd have voted for "Apocalypse Now" and anything affiliated with David Lean, which means "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Doctor Zhivago."

[Finally, as I like to say, if you haven't read "Uncharted," go do that!!!!]

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Belated Top 10 Films of 2007: Part II

[Inevitable apologies for the show unveiling (and... er... writing) of the second part of this list. People have commented, IMed and asked doubting that the second half of the list was ever going to exist at all.

Mea Culpa.

Flua Culpa in the case of this week. After five days of being barely able to leave my couch, I'm finally back to maybe 50%. I've contemplated taking HGH or steroids to get me back to blogging faster, but I want to make it clear that I wouldn't have been trying to give myself any competitive edge. I'd just have been trying to help the team.

I still have increasingly dim hopes of doing a truncated Oscars prediction post also, but don't hold your breath.]

In case you've forgotten...

10)"Waitress"
9)"The Bourne Ultimatum"
8)"There Will Be Blood"
7)"The Lookout"
6)"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"

Follow through after the bump for my Top 10. It's predictable. It's almost certainly gonna be shorter than usual. I'm sick and lazy.

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5) "Once" (dir. John Carney) - There's a weird thing about "Once" that I have trouble explaining. It goes like this: Usually when I adore what's obviously a no-budget first film, I say "Boy, I can't wait to see what that director's going to do next," but despite loving "Once," I'm not bursting at the seams to see John Carney's next film. This is based on the completely unfair perception that I had walking out of the movie that "Once" was the product less of Carney's writing and directing and more of pure alchemy, that Carney's great stroke of genius was putting Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in front of the camera together. And resisting a traditional happy ending. I also don't know if I ever need to see Hansard and Irglova acting again, as honest and unaffected as their performances are. It's not a launching pad to other movies. "Once" is an 85-minute romantic, musical gem of a movie. I wouldn't add anything, polish anything or change anything to it. Is that weird?

4) "Atonement" (dir. Joe Wright) -- I guess my feelings for "Once" are no weirder than some folks already find my intense warmth for a certain breed of very classical, fairly British, epic filmmaking. I take no shame in my appreciation for Anthony Minghella's BIGGER works (I prefer "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain" to "The English Patient," though). I take no shame in owning and appreciating "Casablanca" and "Gone With the Wind." Viewing the word through a constant prism of irony doesn't preclude the ability to occasionally appreciate a masterful piece of earnest cinema. That's what "Atonement" is. If you put together a checklist of every technical aspect that goes into great filmmaking, it gets a mark in every category. The performances (with Saoirse Ronan as a well-deserved standout) are wonderful, as are the costumes, production design, cinematography, score and editing. Director Joe Wright shows that the camera control that elevated "Pride & Prejudice" wasn't just beginner's luck. The story problems that the movie suffers from are, I think, mostly a product of a difficult-to-adapt source material. Could I have felt a smidge more emotional pull at the end? I guess so. But I felt enough. This sort of filmmaking is done so very rarely and it's done badly so frequently that you want to honor the "Atonements" so that you aren't stuck with dozens more "Memoirs of a Geishas."

3) Judd Apatow FunPack: "Knocked Up" (Apatow)/ "Superbad" (Greg Mottola) -- Sorry for the cheat here. It happens. "Superbad" and "Knocked Up" were both the summer's best blockbusters and the year's best comedies and if any two films more permanently imprinted on the pop culture landscape this year, I don't know what they were. The remarkable thing is that despite outgrossing "Superbad," "Knocked Up" has probably taken a backseat in the collective consciousness, with the thousands upon thousands of teens now using "McLovin'" as their IM and message board handles. My feelings about the two films remain unchanged. Perhaps because Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl are just better actors, I buy the sweetness at the core of "Knocked Up" more than the last act attempt to grow a heart on the part of "Superbad." And yet "Superbad" almost certainly delivers more laughs, as it doesn't relent to soft-headedness until the last 10 minutes, while Apatow's self-directed effort starts pulling punches around half-way.

2) "Zodiac" (dir. David Fincher) -- When I first sketched out a hypothetical list at the end of last year (yes, I've been procrastinating for a long time), "Zodiac" came in at No. 10. Then I watched Fincher's director's cut on DVD. None of the additions were big, but a second viewing moved the film up to No. 5. Then I watched wealth of bonus features, which clarified and explained Fincher's vision and his maniacal attention to detail and it was all I could do to keep "Zodiac" out of the top spot. It joins "All the President's Men" as one of the greatest thrillers ever made about a professional process, treating the job of being a police officer or a journalist with so much respect that it can't give in to the normal beats that we would expect from a serial killer movie. Robert Downey Jr. was screwed out of a supporting actor nomination, though the entire cast is excellent. And Harris Savides' cinematography is some of the finest use of digital photography yet to make it to the big screen (right up there with the lensing of "Collateral," if you ask me). This is a film with a stature that's only going to grow and grow and in a decade people will be blown away that the members of the Academy saw fit to give "Zodiac" ZERO Oscar nominations.

1) "No Country For Old Men" (dir. The Brothers Coen) -- My favorite Coen Brothers movie remains "Miller's Crossing," but someday soon it'll be great to set aside an evening and watch "Blood Simple," "Fargo" and "No Country For Old Men" all in a row to soak up how the Coen Brothers have so totally reshaped the contemporary crime thriller. Not enough has really been made of how literal an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel this actually is. But as cinematic as McCarthy's novel was, the easiest thing for a filmmaker to do is to screw up a good book. The hardest thing is to fully realize that original potential. I wrote a lot about the movie and the book and the allegedly unresolved ending and all that other stuff that has some viewers all atwitter back when I first saw it. No movie got a higher rating from me last year, so nothing else had any chance of being No. 1 on my list. This one was easy.

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Belated Top 10 Films of 2007: Part I

Since 2006 was the only year that I spent as a full-time, see-every-movie film critic, that was the only year that I felt any inclination to deliver a Top 10 list in an orderly, end-of-year fashion. I all other years, I've accepted that just because a year reaches its end doesn't mean I've seen enough films from the year in question to put together a viable list.

Sometimes you're holding out for good movies, but other years you're wading through piles of awful DVDs that you're only watching so that you can feel you've given adequate time to the year's cinematic breadth and depth.

In this year's case, I was holding off until I'd seen "300." And I was holding off on "300" until I had a TV up to the task of doing minor justice to the movie. Having decided that my new 42" Vizio would do that job, I finally made it through "300" the other day and while it won't make my Top 10 list, it was a necessary speedbump.

Lists like this are a bit silly because if you're a regular or even semi-regular reader, you know what movie will be No. 1. If it's Roger Ebert composing the list and he's given 4 stars to 50 different movies this year, it's tough to know which one is going to be No. 1 ("Juno," in this year's case). But my ridiculous 100-point system is a spoiler.

But if No. 1 was easy, No. 10 was really a pain in my butt. I had many more films worthy of being No. 10 than I had of being No. 5 and the difference between No. 10 and No. 5 is completely negligible. Distinction-without-a-difference aside, I *did* put the movies in some sort of order and I only cheated with a single tie.

Follow through past the bump for the first half of my Top 10. The second half will follow when it's completed...

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No.10-20 (in no particular order): "Juno," "Breach," "Hot Fuzz," "Sunshine," "The Orphanage," "Away From Here," "Ratatouille," "Gone Baby Gone," "Eastern Promises" and, at No. 11, "3:10 to Yuma."

10) "Waitress" (dir. Adrienne Shelley) -- As "Waitress" became one of the few indie hits of the summer, the dark and sarcastic side of me (*yes* there is another side) reckoned that if Adrienne Shelly hadn't died tragically, nobody ever would have noticed the movie at all, that its success was somewhat ghoulish. That was part of what kept me from seeing "Waitress" in theaters. Having finally caught up with the movie, which is contrived and slight at times, but irresistible as a whole, I guess it's something that people saw the movie at all and that audiences were able to appreciate, however briefly and however late, that Shelly was, indeed, a gifted storyteller and an potentially impressive filmmaker. Shelly's gifts as a screenwriter exceed her abilities as a visual filmmaker and the "Waitress" script wildly cute and genuine and distinctive, but she also had a gift with actors and the performance by Keri Russell is as winning as they come. I would have loved to have seen Shelley's script and the performances by Russell and Andy Griffith get more Oscar attention than they did.

9) "The Bourne Ultimatum" (dir. Peter Greengrass) -- I still think that "Supremacy" and "Identity" are both better "Bourne" films than this summer's "Ultimatum." The attempts to close out certain mysteries from Jason Bourne's past are a bit clumsy, as is the weird/shocking revelation about Bourne's past with the character played by Julia Stiles. But I've watched "Ultimatum" twice now on DVD (once for the commentary) and the Waterloo Station game of cat-and-mouse, the chase through Tangiers and the maneuvering through Manhattan remain every bit as viscerally magnificent as they were in the theater. The set pieces in the first two movies are equally resilient, which is part of why I'd be happy for them to keep making a new "Bourne" film every four or five years, whenever Matt Damon -- so assertive, so subtle -- needs the money.

8) "There Will Be Blood" (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) -- This is a weird one, because "TWBB" came perilously close to not making my Top 10 at all. Then, though, having decided to put it in at No. 10, I started playing a game of "Are you honestly going to try to say 'Film A' is better than 'TWBB'?" That started a process wherein "TWBB" crept up my list. Well, the creep stops here. With "TWBB," the question comes down to the gap between how much I respected the movie and how much I really appreciated it. Perhaps the thing I liked most about Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love" is that it was a movie where the ambitions were positively bursting from the seams of a 90-minute comedy. With things like "Magnolia" and "There Will Be Blood," though, Anderson seems determined first to expand the movie to a length that justifies his thematic scope and then to underline the thematic score just to justify the length. What I'm saying is that "TWBB" is a massive movie, so Shakespearean or Biblical in its tragic scale that every line of dialogue is thuddingly subtextual (GREED!!! AMBITION!!! FAITH!!! MILKSHAKES!!!) and every actor shouts every line in case you didn't get the point. Daniel Day-Lewis is great, but it's not a performance that lets you discover its greatness in small steps. He arrives snorting and popping blood vessels and letting every line of dialogue rip from someplace deep inside. He sets the tone for every shot of the movie, for good and semi-ill.

7) "The Lookout" (dir. Scott Frank) -- I went back and watched "The Lookout" on DVD to make sure that I wasn't just particularly susceptible to its brand of densely plotted Midwestern noir when I saw it back in the spring. It played with a bit less power than I initially remembered, but that was only enough to push it out of my Top 5. Some viewers were disappointed by "The Lookout" and many critics were disappointed because it didn't deliver quite enough twists and turns in its final act. Nothing that happened was really shocking. Unlike, say, the movie above it on this list, "The Lookout" is a movie that keeps its intentions and its urges muted. For me, "The Lookout" was a character study in which the heist was incidental and treated as such. Joseph Gordon Levitt has now has "Mysterious Skin," "Brick" and this film hit theaters in consecutive years and it's hard to think of a young actor who has developed a comparable body of work with less mainstream media hype (stories about "Stop Loss" will STILL probably call Levitt the kid from "Third Rock"). I also liked the "Lookout" performances from Matthew Goode, Jeff Daniels and Isla Fisher. This may be the biggest oddball choice in my Top 10, but I think this is a movie that viewers will discover down the road at some point and I look forward to seeing Scott Frank try his hand at directing again.

6) "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (dir. Andrew Dominik) -- Dominik is obviously stealing from the Early Terrence Malick Playbook here, while missing one fact: "Badlands" was 95 minutes, "Days of Heaven" was 94 minutes and it takes nearly two hours to even recite the title of "Assassination." I kid, but "Assassination" could have held to its status as the most gorgeously shot film of 2007 (my cinematography Oscar goes to Roger Deakins), could have maintained its twisty character portrait of both celebrity and celebrity obsession (Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck are marvelous) and could have remained lyrical, haunting and tragic with a run-time of at least 30 minutes less than its theatrical 160 minute duration. A shorter version certainly would have made my Top 5 and maybe would have challenged for the top spot. I think you could, in fact, have lost 30 minutes without losing the great supporting work by folks like Paul Schneider, Garret Dillahunt, Sam Shepard, Jeremy Renner and Sam Rockwell. This wasn't a movie that over-estimated its worth, only miscalculated the best way to accentuate that worth. It's a very, very good movie that could have been great. For the purposes of this list, though, it's one to treasure.

Stay tuned for the Top 5. It'll probably appear by the end of the weekend. Knock on wood.

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Best and Worst Best Actor Oscar Winners

Another winter, another best/worth Oscar survey courtesy of Edward Copeland on Film, the always admirable blog that brought you the best and worst best picture winners two years ago and the best and worst best actress winners last year.

This year's survey? True to form, we're on to best actor! I look forward to the period 15 years from now when we can finally tear into the best and worst sound editing Oscar winners.

On the surface, this is probably the easiest of the surveys to date. Roberto Benigni's win for "Life Is Beautiful" is an embarrassment from which the Academy will never fully recover. His isn't just the worst performance ever given a best actor Oscar, it's the worst acting performance of any size for any gender ever given an Oscar.

As for the best best actor, even though he won't get my first-place vote, I can't see any circumstance under which Robert DeNiro doesn't win for "Raging Bull." It's more Method than Method. It's METHOd with capitals M-E-T-H-and-O.

Let's just say that I had an easier time with the Worst than the best. That's the sort of guy I am.

If you have opinions of your own, send 'em on to Eddie (contest rules and requirements available here).

Follow through after the bump for my Best 5 and Worst 5.

Click through...

Worst Best Actor Preamble: One of the things I have to take into account here is who these undeserving winners beat. These aren't just the Worst Best Actor winners because their performances were awful. They're the worst because in winning, they kept other superior performances from winning.

My Picks:

5) Jimmy Stewart for "The Philadelphia Story." Yes. I know. This won't be a popular vote. I love Jimmy Stewart. I love "The Philadelphia Story." Heck, I love Jimmy Stewart *in* "The Philadelphia Story." I just don't get the prism through which this likeable and charming performance is Oscar-worthy (I also voted for Audrey Hepburn in "Roman Holiday" last year for the exact same reason). Stewart didn't get Oscar nominations for "How the West Was Won," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "Rear Window" or "Vertigo," but of the five nominations he *did* get, this is the least interesting of his performances and I think this being his Oscar win is almost a disservice to his career legacy. I should also add that Stewart's win here probably came at the expense of the best performance of Henry Fonda's career in "Grapes of Wrath," which led to Fonda taking the 1982 best actor win away from both Burt Lancaster and Warren Beatty. With Oscar, it's a vicious circle. Or a slippery slope.

4) Yul Brynner for "The King and I." In the 1950s and 1960s, movies were getting insecure about their place in the entertainment landscape and the Academy fell into a weird rut attempting to prove its prestige by reaffirming praise on a bunch of Tony-winning performances brought to the big screen with only minor alterations. I quite like Paul Scofield's "A Man for All Seasons" performance. Ditto with Jose Ferrer's "Cyrano" turn. But Brynner and Rex Harrison (for "My Fair Lady") are examples of performances that weren't reformatted very well for the big screen. Brynner barks to the back row of the theater for two hours, which becomes mighty boring, though he and Deborah Kerr do dance very nicely together. Probably the best performance he beat that year was Kirk Douglas for "Lust for Life," though James Dean's work in "Giant" has some fans.

3) Art Carney for "Harry and Tonto." This is what I was talking about when I said that sometimes the worst winners aren't the worst because they're bad (Carney is very touching), but because of who they beat. In this case, Carney took best actor from Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown," Al Pacino in "The Godfather II" and possibly the best performance of Dustin Hoffman's career in "Lenny."

2) Al Pacino for "Scent of a Woman." Much of the blame here probably has to go to director Martin Brest. We all know that Pacino is capable of being understated and magnificent just as surely as he's capable of being bug-eyed and shouty and I think his Col. Frank Slade could have gone either way except that Brest must have kept encouraging him to go bigger... Bigger... BIGGER! This movie is like a greatest hits montage of Pacino's least subtle acting decisions -- the compulsive sneering, the inexplicable line-barking, the eyes that are meant to be both crazy and inexpressive. The win encouraged all of Pacino's worst tendencies -- has he given more than two or three good performances since? -- and rewarded one of our very best actors at his very worst. Plus, it wasn't like Pacino beat a weak field that year. Robert Downey Jr. for "Chaplin," Stephen Rea for "The Crying Game," Denzel for "Malcolm X" and Clint Eastwood for "Unforgiven" all were robbed.

1) Roberto Benigni for "Life Is Beautiful." Something very weird happened to award voters in the winter of 1998. It's one thing that they became entranced by a mediocre Italian comedian and his grossly superficial and sappy Holocaust comedy, but they also became really amused by what said Italian comedian would do if they kept giving him awards. It was like a psychotic babysitter thinking it was cool to give a six-year-old coffee and Pixie Stix knowing that the kid would be the parents' responsibility later. And, best/worst of all, Benigni willingly played monkey to Hollywood's elite, finding new ways of humiliating himself with each new ceremony, much to the ongoing terror of Helen Hunt, who had to keep presenting him with trophies. Meanwhile, Edward Norton ("American History X"), Nick Nolte ("Affliction") and Ian McKellen ("Gods and Monsters") had to keep watching this pea-brained Pagliacci urinate all over what should have been a competitive race just because his mere presence doubtlessly made Jack Nicholson giggle. I'd bet dollars to donuts that none of the people who voted for Benigni bothered to watch his "Pinocchio," but they all should have been strapped to a chair for the full experience -- dubbed and undubbed.

And now on to my much less passionate listing of...



The Best Best Actor Winners.

5) James Cagney for "Yankee Doodle Dandy." He sings! He dances! He emotes! He plays a real person! Seriously, how could Oscar voters not swoon? If you could bottle Cagney's energy in this film, you could power a small Midwestern town for a year.

4) Gregory Peck for "To Kill a Mockingbird." No offense to Harper Lee, but the reason why kids have spent 45 years wishing Atticus Finch was their father and why criminal defendants (particularly unjustly accused ones) have spent 45 years wishing Atticus Finch was their lawyer has everything to do with Gregory Peck. Perhaps no actor in history has ever played dignity and righteousness as well as Peck, with his rumbling voice and gentle-yet-fiery eyes. This is one of those performances that you can't imagine being improved upon. Or at least I can't. If not for Peck, my own high school turn as Atticus Finch would probably be the definitive interpretation of the role. My Southern accent was very convincing.

3) Robert DeNiro in "Raging Bull." Just cuz I'm not putting it at No. 1 doesn't mean I don't respect the snot out of this showy piece of acting, much moreso than I respect the overall movie it's in, actually.

2) Marlon Brando for "On the Waterfront." This is a performance that's a bit over-celebrated, to the extent that you can only see the iconic scenes and you often lose the quieter, less famous moments that make the movie. To some degree, Brando at that moment was like Wilt Chamberlain when he averaged 50 points-per-game for a season or Babe Ruth when he was hitting more home runs than most teams. He was simply playing a different game. Look at what Brando was doing and compare him to his Oscar competition that year, people like Bing Crosby for "The Country Girl" and James Mason for "A Star Is Born." It's like a whole other game.

1) Daniel Day-Lewis for "My Left Foot." This is a showy, Oscar-ready role and, pardon my French, Day-Lewis acts the shit out of it.

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Top 10 Films of 2006: Part II

One of the problems with having opinions and stating them frequently is that year-end lists generally end up being forgone conclusions. I haven't missed a chance to plug for the films I most enjoyed this year, so most readers of this blog (or people I talk to in the real world) know what my five favorites were. There was a little bit of pseudo-suspense to the second-half of the Top 10, but the first half? Oh, just the usual suspects. It doesn't mean I like them any less, but I'll keep this short, since I've made my point before.

To recap my previously posted list of No.10-No.6:
10)"Casino Royale" (Martin Campbell)
9)"The Descent" (Neil Marshall)
8)"Down in the Valley" (David Jacobson)
7)"Half Nelson" (Ryan Fleck)
6)"Inside Man" (Spike Lee)/"The Departed" (Martin Scorsese)

And now, my anti-climactic Top 5:

5)"Brick" (Rian Johnson)- The best narrative feature I saw in the first half of the year was a little genre film that Focus had been sitting on for over a year. It's a genre-bending hard-boiled treasure full of memorable dialogue, surprising performances (who knew that Joseph Gordon-Levitt had an inner Humphrey Bogart?) and the sense of near-limitless potential (can't wait for Johnson's "The Brothers Bloom"). The pacing isn't exactly what it should be. The over-looped dialogue is frequently sloppy. The visual style goes between indie-chic and sloppy. But talk about making the most of what's available.

4)"Dave Chappelle's Block Party" (Michel Gondry)- Focus Features had some great movies in the spring, but never exactly figured out what to do with them. While "Brick" was never going to be a smash, "Block Party" should have been. Then again, the Academy documentary branch didn't get it either, as "Block Party" wasn't even one of 15 finalists for an Oscar nomination. The movie isn't just Chappelle's comedy and the performances by folks like Mos Def, Common, the Fugees, Talib Kweli and Big Daddy Kane. It's a kickass party that also includes an examination of American urban life and contemporary race relations. But mostly, it's a "wave your hands in the air" good time.

3) "The Prestige" (Christopher Nolan)- I rewatched it again over the weekend and it held up so well that I contemplated moving it up to my second slot. I've read message board posts from people who are all "I saw the twist coming the whole time." Do those people go to magic shows and go, "Dude, I totally knew your assistant wasn't really sawed in half?" As Christian Bale's Alfred Borden observes, "The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything." In this case, the trick involves a career-best performance from Hugh Jackman, reliably excellent work from Christian Bale and suspenseful direction from Nolan that deserves the description "Hitchcockian." This is a movie that's only going to look better as time goes on. That being said, Nolan somehow blew that final shot. Weird.

2) "Children of Men" (Alfonso Cuaron)- If you had to chart out the perfect build to a movie, you could do worse than look at "Children of Men." The script is thin on characters and occasionally heavy-handed when it comes to dialogue (even by the standards of fable or allegory), but the journey taken by Clive Owen's character is fairy tale classic, from self-imposed slumber, through hell to rebirth. The Fugee Camp tracking shots will win Emmanuel Lubezki a well-deserved Oscar, but "Children of Men" warranted more Oscar attention (and box office) than it received.

1) "Pan's Labyrinth" (Guillermo Del Toro)- When I saw it at the end of September, I said "Pan's Labyrinth" would be the best movie of 2006 and I swear I wasn't just making a self-fulfilling prophesy for myself. There's a level of storytelling in this adult fairy tale that I haven't seen for any film in several years. It reaffirms all of the skill shown in Del Toro's "Devil's Backbone" and makes it a bit sad when such an obviously brilliant filmmaker feels content to only make masterpieces every few years will doing proficient, but unremarkable genre films ("Hellboy," "Blade 2") the rest of the time. What does it mean that both of my top two films are fairy tales from young Mexican directors? Hard to know.

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Top 10 Films of 2006: Part I

[It took a while, but I've finally reached the point at which I'm confident I've caught up on enough of the films I missed last year to throw a list together. I reserve the right to add or remove things at some point down the road, particularly since I'm really wobbly on several of these movies, especially the ones on this half of the list.]

Honorable Mentions: "United 93" (Paul Greengrass"), "The Proposition" (John Hillcoat), "Conversations with Other Women" (Hans Canosa), "Marie Antoinette" (Sofia Coppola), "Little Children" (Todd Field), "Volver" (Pedro Almodovar)

10)"Casino Royale" (Martin Campbell)- Granted that I've erased long stretches of "Casino Royale" from my mind -- Adios to the Miami airport sequence and the stairway brawl in Montenegro -- but the latest James Bond entry was far and away the year's most successful action. Daniel Craig was every bit as good as I'd hoped he would be, beating those Pierce Brosnan lean years into a lamentable, disappointing pulp. Throw in Eva Green as the best Bond Girl since I can't remember when and the requisite stunts and exotic locations and you have a 007 film worthy of repeat viewings.

9)"The Descent" (Neil Marshall)- Before Zap2it decided that movies weren't worth covering, I was subjected to 2006 films like "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Silent Hill" and "When a Stranger Calls" and "An American Haunting." None of those movies provided me with a single jolt, with a single nightmare, with a single moment of primal terror. With "The Descent," Neil Marshall had me nibbling on my fingernails and experiencing something resembling genuine fear. Horror-done-right is something worth respect.

8)"Down in the Valley" (David Jacobson)- ThinkFilm never figured out how to market this off-putting revisionist Western, though it's not as if it were ever destined to find a big audience. The great performances by Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse and Rory Culkin are undeniable, but so too is the off-putting tone, that has the film careening between mismatched romance, gritty Valley realism and a perfect portrait of psychological confusion. Jacobson doesn't exactly grasp the pacing himself and the movie has a whiff of post-production tampering about it, but it's still smart and genuinely challenging.

7)"Half Nelson" (Ryan Fleck)- Thanks to Ryan Gosling, "Half Nelson" is a mostly-unflinching character study of addiction. Like Maggie Gyllenhaal's similarly strong turn in "Sherrybaby," though, Gosling's performance is occasionally undone by a screenplay that on one hand is too conventional by a half and then has to work extra hard to cheat a few expectations. But I kept watching Gosling's eyes and his mannerisms and his interactions with the well-match Shareeka Epps. Gosling's performance -- the year's best by a leading actor, regardless of what Forest Whitaker's supporters would have you believe -- often seems more carefully considered than the movie around it and he pushed any hints of sentimentality far into the background.

6) "Inside Man" (Spike Lee)/"The Departed" (Martin Scorsese): I'm putting these two together for several reasons. The first is that I'm not sure I liked either enough after one viewing to put them in the Top 10 alone, but I get the feeling that once I watch them again, they may get better. The second is that I like that after years of attempting to make Important movies, both Lee and Scorsese had their biggest commercial and critical successes in years by just making good-old-fashioned genre pictures, proving that a well-made thriller is a well-made thriller and shouldn't be taken lightly. And finally, I like pairing these together because, for my money, both Lee and Scorsese made better movies this year, but they just happened to be documentaries for HBO and PBS. Thus, "Inside Man" and "The Departed" get bonus points from "When the Levees Broke" and "No Direction Home."

STAY TUNED FOR NO. 5-THROUGH-1, NOT THAT I'VE KEPT ANY OF MY FAVORITES SECRET.

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The Best and Worst Best Actress Oscar Winners?

Edward Copeland, who keeps threatening to rename his blog something other than Edward Copeland on Film, is compiling a survey on the best and worst Oscar winners for Best Actress. You may recall Edward's fantastic best picture winner survey earlier this year.

Because I'm an agreeable and helpful blogger, I've done my best to participate, though looking through the list of winners, I was shocked to realize how many of the honorees from the '30s, '40s and '50s I've managed to miss. Thus, if it turns out that Jennifer Jones ("The Song of Bernadette"), Helen Hayes ("The Sin of Madelon Claudet) or Shirley Booth ("Come Back, Little Sheba") deserve places on either of these two lists, I've been obviously delinquent.

I put the worst first here, because it was just a more competitive race. Skim through my choices and then feel free to zip over to Edward's site and submit your own opinions.

THE WORST:

1 [the worst]) Helen Hunt, "As Good As It Gets" (1998)- It's almost impossible to figure out what point the Academy was making with this award. Was it that TV actors are people too? Or was it just that Hunt was the only American against four far superior Brits (Julie Christie, Judi Dench, Kate Winslet)? Hunt's punishment came the next year when she presented Robert Benigni with the least deserved best actor trophy in Oscar History.

2)Katharine Hepburn, "On Golden Pond" (1982)- This takes nothing away from her other Oscars, frequently (but not always) deserved, but I shouldn't be laughing so hard at a performance that isn't intended to be funny.

3)Nicole Kidman, "The Hours" (2003)- Plenty of other best actress wins have come for supporting roles, but none have ever come for supporting roles fueled by a bad English accent and a putty nose.

4)Jessica Lange, "Blue Sky" (1994)- Perhaps the worst year for actresses in Hollywood history. Jessica Lange may have been twitchy and over-the-top in a truly bad movie, but her competition included Jodie Foster for "Nell" (Ouch) and Susan Sarandon for "The Client" (Really?) and Winona Ryder for "Little Women" (REALLY?!?!?)

5)Audrey Hepburn, "Roman Holiday" (1954)- Many supporting actress Oscars have been given just for being adorable and winsome, but how many lead trophies have been presented merely for being tremendously loveable? Oh and don't take this as a sign I don't like the performance or the movie, but is it really Oscar-worthy? [In retrospect, perhaps the greatness of this performance is in how bad I feel about listing it here?]

THE BEST:

1)Meryl Streep, "Sophie's Choice" (1983)- If you're grading on "Degree of Difficulty," this performance is impossible to top.

2)Jodie Foster, "The Silence of the Lambs" (1992)- It's a very internalized turn, but I admire it for this reason: Going opposite one of the hammiest best actor performances in history, Foster never loses control or ceases to hold every shot. That's impressive.

3)Jane Fonda, "Klute" (1972)- Oscar voters love to honor beautiful women for playing prostitutes, which may be the Academy's attempt to encourage other beautiful women to enter the Oldest Profession. Of all the Oscar-winning portrayals of hookers, though, this is the best.

4)Elizabeth Taylor, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1967)- I don't always like broad theatricality and shrieking, but for some reason this performance has an emotional core for me, even if Taylor is shouting to the back row at all times.

5)Claudette Colbert, "It Happened One Night" (1935)- Maybe not the most technically complicated of performances, but I just love the idea of an Oscar going for this kind of work. This goes on the list of most random Oscar-winning performances along with Julie Andrews in "Mary Poppins," Diane Keaton for "Annie Hall" and Kathy Bates for "Misery." Those three are great performances as well, but I'm going with Colbert here just for the historical value.

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