Screencap 1 (Unborn Elephant)

(Stealing an idea from Nathaniel, among others.) (I'll identify the movie in a few days.)

Charley Chase's 1925 film Isn't Life Terrible? isn't up to Chase's usual standards, at least judging by what I've seen of his work. The Leo McCarey-directed short unfortunately depends for much of its running time on racial humor, as Chase and his wife inadvertently swap their daughter for a little black girl while embarking on a cruise. I'm assuming that the repeated closeups on the child (who, incidentally, is cute as a button) are supposed to be hilarious, but I didn't find them so funny. Overall, the film is sloppy. The scene from which I extracted this intertitle is typically confusing: Charley and a camping-gear salesman are lying together on a foldable camp bed, and one of them says the line about the unborn elephants, which is a lead-in to a punchline: "I can feel their tusks in my back." It appears that they're both talking before the intertitle comes up, and while it's obviously Charley's punchline, it's unclear who sets it up. Plus, it's not very funny anyway.

Travis deserves special mention: he guessed Big Red Riding Hood, a Charley Chase short from the same year (released a mere 90 days earlier) and also directed by McCarey.

Order Me Around

As a break from the top-down, "I choose all the reviews I'm going to write," autocratic site-management style I've been using since 2000, I've decided to ask readers to pick some movies for me to review. Another way to put this is that I've been having a hard time convincing myself to write reviews lately, but I seem to do all right when I have an externally imposed deadline. However you want to look at it, I'm asking you for reviewing assignments.

Post a suggestion in the comments. When I get five of them, I'll have Random.org's integer generator choose the winner. I'll post a review of that film within two weeks. Then I'll repeat the process with a new batch of suggestions.

Your suggestion should be available on Netflix (while you're at it, become my Netflix friend). Also, it should be something I haven't seen, or at least something I haven't seen in a long time. If I've seen your suggestion, I'll ask you for a replacement.

No Uwe Boll films, please.

The Last Ten

Becket (1964)
Doctor Dolittle (1967)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Ordinary People (1980)
The Dresser (1983)
Hold Back the Dawn (1941)
Imitation of Life (1934)
Seventh Heaven (1927)
Nashville (1975)
Gone with the Wind (1939)

(Eleven, really, but The Patriot (1928) is lost, so I'll never see it.)

This is the approximate order in which I plan to watch them. The last two are set in stone; any suggestions/favorites/least favorites among the other eight?

Short Takes

Jet Li is the patron saint of elegant, physics-defying wire-fu. Jackie Chan is the patron saint of a knock-down, drag-out, near-comedic form of the martial art. The prospect that they would finally, near the end of their respective careers (Li is 45, Chan is 54), do a film together was incredibly inviting. I was excited to see such a film. I'd have gone opening night. The fact that the vehicle chosen featured a gawky white kid transported back in time dampened my enthusiasm only a little: it's still Jackie Chan facing off against Jet Li, a battle between philosophies of filmmaking and of stunt work. I imagined an epic battle in which Chan fends off a graceful, flying Li with pieces of a broken stepladder and a dustpan. Then I saw the trailer. Jackie Chan's on wires, doing triple back-flips. I'm crushed; I'm staying home.

Self-Styled Siren offers an impassioned defense of melodrama. I was a tad confused at first; many of the films mentioned in her essay and in the articles she links to wouldn't fit my definition of melodrama. Then I realized that if I love a film, I wouldn't call it a melodrama; thus, it must be that "melodrama" is a label I reserve for films I don't like.

But my real issue is with the Tom O'Neil article that prompted her essay: he says that "Oscar Nazis" (his ill-chosen and hysterically repeated phrase) insist that Sunrise is the first "real" Best Picture Winner, instead of Wings. Of course we know that the Oscars had two apparent "Best" categories back then, and neither of them was called "Best Picture." But the Acadmey has long since cleared up the confusion: Wings won the first Best Picture Oscar, and Sunrise won an award that was discontinued the next year. It's their award ceremony, so they get to decide. My question is, what "Oscar Nazis" are attempting to change this? I know quite a few Oscar obsessives, and none of them has ever made this argument in my presence. Any discussion of the relative importance of the two categories seeks to elevate Sunrise to an equal plane, not a superior one. (Of course I mean in terms of Oscar importance, not in terms of quality.) So who is Tom O'Neil talking to, except himself?

In an attempt to help parents decide whether their children should see a particular film, Kids In Mind catalogs each film's potentially offensive content. It's a noble gesture, I suppose, but it results in unintentionally hilarious reading. The Big Lebowski: "Reckless driving, lots of scenes of property damage. A frenzied ferret is thrown into a tub with a man and nearly scratches and hurts the man as a result. Threatening with a gun." Bad Santa: "A woman wears a low-cut top that reveals cleavage, and a woman wears a short top and low-cut pants that reveal bare abdomen and cleavage. A man lies in a bathtub and we see bare shoulders and legs and a boy sits in the room with him (nothing sexual)."

Best Actress Corrective Drive Volume 1

Unlike many of my favorite bloggers, I am not an actressexual. I unjustly ignore the finest females the Oscars have to offer. There are two notable holes in my Oscar obsession: Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. To put it bluntly, in numbers: I've seen 72% of the Best Supporting Actors but only 65% of the Best Supporting Actresses, and 73% of the Best Actors but a lowly 59% of the Best Actresses. The "why" is easy: the Best Picture nominees, which have been my primary focus, contain more solid, nomination-attracting roles for men than they do for women, and I'm not especially drawn to the kinds of films that tend to earn lone Best Actress nominations. But I'm in the process of repenting by making a concerted effort to watch enough of my remaining Best Actress nominees that I don't have to feel ashamed when the Oscar conversation comes around to percentages (and it always does).

So far, the results have been iffy: one pretty darned good, if overpraised, performance in a film that made me want to throw things at my TV; one nearly unwatchable performance in a film that is nearly unbearable; and an intermittently great performance in a patchy, made-for-TV-style film. Finally, though, a pioneering women-in-prison flick saved me from utter despair.

Diane Lane, Unfaithful (2002)
Lost to Nicole Kidman, The Hours
Performance: 3 goats, film: 0.5 goats

Although she gives it her all, Diane Lane can't save Unfaithful from its need to pin all the problems of the world on women's unfettered sexuality. No, I'm not overstating the case: this film actually sees a moral equivalency between a woman intentionally an affair and a man murdering his wife's lover. "What did you do?" a horrified Lane asks her husband Richard Gere; "What did you do?" he shoots back, and the film is on his side. That said, Lane's performance is half showy and half naturalistic. There are the obvious "Oscar scenes," like her hundred-expression trip down memory lane on the way home from her first assignation and the aforementioned horror at hubby, during which she shows a nice range of mannerisms that all the same announce themselves as mannerisms. She's better in the loose, playful (though sometimes borderline-idiotic) seduction scenes, in which she's basically the only actor in the film, as Olivier Martinez gives her as much to play off as a sculpture would.

Maggie McNamara, The Moon Is Blue (1953)
Lost to herself Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday
Performance: 2.5 goats; film: 2 goats

Maggie McNamara is in full Audrey Hepburn-as-plucky innocent mode; if, by the last reel, you're not calling her "Audrey" in your head, you're a better movie watcher than I. McNamara would have been fine, I guess, if Hepburn hadn't already hoed this row. She's playing a naïf who produces "shocking" statements about sexuality to the delight and/or horror of those surrounding her. Childlike in deportment, dress, and speech, she produces "virgin," "seduce," and "mistress" for the first time on movie screens, but the conceit of her character softens the blow each time: it's a shock, I suppose, but it's the shock of a child asking her mommy "what's intercourse?" instead of the knowing and subversive shock I think the playwright intended. The film repeatedly trips over its self-conscious daring, and William Holden reminds me again why I hate him, with few exceptions, between Sunset Blvd. and The Wild Bunch.

Jane Alexander, Testament (1983)
Lost to Shirley MacLaine, Terms of Endearment
Performance: 3 goats; film: 2.5 goats

I'm going to join the small but distinguished group of people (OK, one other person and his household) who don't share the adoration of Jane Alexander's performance or her film Testament, the tale of domestic nuclear apocalypse that was made for TV but released in theaters. The film itself is barely competent: it contains some great scenes, and then huge misfires, especially that cemetery kiss, the teddy bear hunt, and the gimmicky late-movie reveal of Daddy Devane's Final Call. Blech. Alexander's performance is the best thing in it, but it's a careful, studied performance in search of a real movie to inhabit, and nearly sunk by two ill-advised scenes of histrionics (see above). She's so much better at shell-shocked waiting and quiet determination than she is at screeching. Her performance is clearly the weakest of the '83 nominees I've seen (although I haven't seen Educating Rita).

Eleanor Parker, Caged (1950)
Lost to Billie Holliday, Born Yesterday
Performance: 4 goats; film: 4 goats

And finally, an outstanding film featuring most of a great performance: Eleanor Parker plays a naive girl processed by a corrupt prison machinery into a hardened crook. By "most of a good performance," I mean that the beginning and the ending are exceptional; it's the middle that's lacking. Parker transforms from a quaking child into a flinty con (with a weird but stunning stopover in Falconetti-as-Joan of Arc territory) over the space of a single scene change: she's denied parole, she freaks out, and then she's a spitting tigress, trading hair-pulls with Hope Emerson's formidable prison matron. But it's too sudden; there's no buildup to the transformation. This is more the screenplay's fault than Parker's, of course—given the script's limitations, Parker's inclusion in the best Best Actress lineup in Oscar history (Baxter and Davis in All About Eve, Swanson in Sunset Blvd., and winner Holliday in Born Yesterday) is well deserved.

Children in Exile

My friend Chris Swider's documentary Children in Exile (trailer) has its Chicago premiere at the Gallery Theater next Friday, April 18, at 7:00. Chris will be there to answer questions.

From the press release:

Children in Exile focuses on a lesser-known World War II tragedy, the deportation of millions of Polish children and teenagers to Soviet Siberia. While the atrocities carried out by the Nazis are well documented, this Soviet enacted crime has been relatively ignored by historians and filmmakers alike - until now. Interviews with actual survivors of the tragedy, coupled with historic photographs and artistic renderings of the terrible event, make for a chilling and heart-wrenching movie experience.

Those "artistic renderings" are artworks made by schoolchildren after a classroom visit by some of the survivors. It's a unique way of attempting to show, from a child's-eye view, what life was like in the gulag.

The film has already screened at the 10th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, the San Luis Obispo Film Festival (where it won the Best Short Documentary award), the Anchorage International Film Festival, and several other venues.

Waxing Poetic about BloodRayne 2: Deliverance

For my entry in Lucid Screening's Second Annual White Elephant Blog-a-Thon, I decided against a simple angry rant, which was my first, instinctive response to my assignment, Uwe Boll's BloodRayne 2: Deliverance, which is about a half-vampire fighting against a vampiric Billy the Kid in the Wild West. Instead, I wrote poems: one sonnet (Shakespearean, not Italian), two limericks, a villanelle, and a sestina. I chose these forms (well, except the limericks) to give the impression of structure and perhaps deep thought and skill, which would likely not have resulted had I chosen blank verse. Perhaps they still elude me. On to the poems.

Shall I Compare Thee to an Uwe Boll Film?

The vampire outlaw William Bonney wreaks
a trail of carnage spread across the West
(but of his Slavic accent we'll not speak).
But he's just BloodRayne 2's especial guest:
Natassia Malthe is the "dhamphir" Rayne;
be-sworded, bosomed, clad in leather cloak,
she's out for vengeance, dealing death and pain
to Bill the Kid and his undead cowpokes.
Director Uwe Boll is widely booed:
"incompetent"? Inadequately cruel.
Anachronism reigns! Ineptitude
of acting, scripting, lensing is the rule.
This film's a minor cinematic crime
entirely unworthy of my rhymes.

The Lass from Oslo

There once was an actress named Malthe.
In BloodRayne her presence is paltry.
Her waist is quite slim
but her acting is grim
and quite limited her career shall be.

She's entirely too soft-spoken.
She pales next to Kristanna Lokken.
She's not half as pretty,
her accent is shitty,
and her ass-kicking skills appear broken.

Do Not Go Gentle Into an Uwe Boll Film

My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell
for bringing forth another BloodRayne flick!
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel!

I'd rather choose to face armed personnel,
or Montresor to wall me up with bricks.
My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell!

Each line the actors speak is a death knell;
the overacting hams lay it on thick.
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel.

Film art is absent, vision, skill as well;
technique's the very opposite of slick.
My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell!

I'd vote to give this film a Prix Nobel
but there's no prize for cinematic ick.
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel!

At nothing does the cast or crew excel.
Just watching left me feeling vaguely sick.
My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell!
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel!

There Are No Well-Known Sestina Titles to Infest with Uwe Boll

You'll say I'm too hard on this movie
and perhaps you're right.
It's not, after all, trying to be great cinema;
it's just a straight-to-video sequel
that appeals to a certain collection
of people who will excuse its flaws.

But should they excuse those flaws?
Did they? It's in the bottom 100 movies
on the IMDB, an illustrious collection,
and while I'm not sure its placement there is right,
it's certainly a pointless and unskilled sequel
to a film that was itself a blight on the cinema.

(I don't understand the subset of cinema
that's "supposed to be bad"; if the flaws
of this BloodRayne sequel
are intentional, why is the movie
not funny? Because comedy is the only right
venue for intentional gaffes; this collection

of gaffes is unfunny.) So is a growing collection
of BloodRayne films inevitable, then? Will the cinema,
or at least home video, support Uwe Boll's right
(backed up by his fists) to slather his directorial flaws
on the screen in another half-dressed half-vampire movie?
Can he find a distributor for another sequel?

What a stupid question. Another sequel
likely featuring Malthe and a collection
of has-beens will bore and annoy movie
audiences in 2009. I'm sure the cinema
will survive; it's survived more disastrous flaws
than Uwe Boll can perpetrate. That's right:

Uwe Boll is harmless. People in their right
minds ignore him. Real damage comes from mindless sequels
bolstered by kadillion-dollar budgets and a flawed,
strictly commercial mindset. The collected
films of Brett Ratner, Michael Bay, et al. do more harm to the cinema
because studios hold up as triumphs their shitbag movies.

So let Uwe Boll make movies. Let him do a hundred BloodRayne sequels.
It's his right (plus he'll beat you up if you argue). Cinema's
real enemies perpetrate worse flaws. Michael Bay is in the Criterion Collection.

Suffer (from) the Children

(This is my day-late entry for Final Girl's Hey, Internet, Stop Being Such Cynical Effing Douchebags Blog-a-Thon! (which I didn't hear about until today), in which she's encouraged online critics to "wear your heart on your sleeve and tell us all why you love something." In honor of our host's dedication to horror films, I decided to praise a criminally underseen and misunderstood entry in the "scary little kid" subgenre.)

One can only imagine what awful child-related experience prompted Carlton Albright and Edward Terry to write a screenplay as horrific as The Children; perhaps they suspect their kids of being the mailman's progeny. The "scary little kid" subgenre has never been scarier or more nihilistic than this incredibly effective and incredibly nasty bargain-basement shockfest. Its premise is simple: a busload of kids drives through a toxic fog and turns into... into what? They still look like apple-cheeked, sweet-faced munchkins, except their fingernails are black, and if they touch you, they melt the flesh from your bones. To paraphrase the song, I believe the children are our future, and there ain't no future here.

After a prologue that establishes the source of the toxic fog, we follow the sheriff (Gil Rogers) as he tries to figure out why the school bus would be sitting empty on the side of the road. After he finds the first victim (the bus driver), his immediate concern is again with the children: who will protect them from whatever did this to the driver? It takes everyone concerned an inordinately long time to decide, finally, that the kids are the reason behind the rapidly accumulating bodies. But that's natural: we in the audience know we're watching a horror film called The Children, but it's almost against our instincts to suspect children of being capable of killing.

The acting and dialogue are standard for the horror genre, meaning that they're basically sub-par, but that fact doesn't detract from the movie's effectiveness a whit. Director Max Kalmanowicz's staging of scenes is nothing special during the first two acts, when it's still daylight and the adults are still trying to figure out what's going on. But once night falls, his true gifts come into play. Under cover of near-darkness, he exhibits an almost supernatural mastery of simple, evocative, and scary-as-hell shot framing, shock reveals, and pacing. He doesn't make the mistake, common in the slasher genre, of overlighting his shots: the lighting here is the familiar blindness-inducing pitch black of a moonless night, in which headlights, flashlights, and candles illuminate just enough to remind you of how cavern-dark everything else is. It's here, in the dark, where he uses his scary kids brilliantly. Smiling, arms outstretched, calling "mommy, mommy" in their piping voices, they loom out of the blackness like pretty little angels of death: this is the single scariest image I can remember from any horror film.

And if the soul-destroying horror of children turned into monsters weren't enough, the film bravely (if that's the right word; "sadistically" would fit too) follows through on its premise by making the destruction of the children necessary (i.e., there's no cure) and even more awful than the children themselves: only chopping off their hands will stop them. Both hands. That the camera pulls away from the scene of greatest carnage is no salve: the camera tracks slowly, sinuously out of a barn, into the yard, through a house, through the woods, as unearthly screams prompt our imaginations to supply pictures more nauseating than any makeup artist could create. And that's not even the most disturbing, or nihilistic, of the film's little horrors—it saves its biggest kick for last.

The unfair 5.1 rating on IMDB could reflect any number of things: disgust with The Children's awful nihilism, or failure to look past the low-budget aesthetics to the impressive way Kalmanowicz and company embrace and twist the genre's conventions and limitations. It's certainly not for everybody. It's probably not for most people. You know who you are.

Top Ten Films of 2007, or, Time to Move On

Yes, I realize that it's more than one-sixth of the way through 2008: it's still not too late to finally list my top ten films of last year. Especially because, if I don't do it now, I might never do it (see, for example, my incomplete 2006 list). I've recycled some of the descriptions from my unfinished Goaties because otherwise I might have never finished these.

So here goes: the best films I saw last year.

10. Honeydripper, John Sayles's latest, was dumped unceremoniously into the post-Christmas netherworld, and it's a damned shame, because it's among his best in years. Sayles presents an imaginative parable of the birth of rock 'n' roll, lets some of the best African American actors around chew on his meaty dialogue, and doesn't overreach by trying to cram in too many storylines.

9. No Country for Old Men. The Coens won their first Director and Picture Oscars for this modern western that springs from a slick tale of the aftermath of a botched drug deal into convention-busting shifts in tone and ballsy narrative surprises. It helped turn Josh Brolin into Hollywood's new post-ironic man's man, gave Tommy Lee Jones one of (apparently—I still haven't seen In the Valley of Elah) two memorable roles last year, and introduced one of the cinema's most memorable bad guys in Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh.

8. Red Road is a surprising, sometimes opaque non-thriller thriller about revenge and guilt. It's quarterbacked by Kate Dickie, in one of the year's best performances, as one of the people who monitor the countless privacy-sucking cameras that blanket Glasgow; one day, she sees someone who shouldn't be there. And that's all I can say: Andrea Arnold's film is so secretive and enigmatic for most of its running time that I wouldn't dream of revealing more than that.

7. In A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie gave the best female performance of the year, and part of what made it so great was her generosity: she and Michael Winterbottom, always an interesting director (except when he's wanking), position Marianne Pearl in the middle of an impressive array of supporting roles, and the film is more interested in how Jolie shares the scenes with her fellow actors than in being The Angie Show. All of this exists in a tense, expertly directed suspense film that was inexplicably dismissed by many critics and ignored by most awards.

6. No End in Sight explains, in agonizing detail (agonizing because it's so completely horrendous), why the situation in Iraq is as screwed up as it is; interviews with such surprisingly high-profile players as George Packer and General Jay Garner, whose short-lived tenure as top American in Baghdad showed the promise of success and whose quick removal illustrated the Bush administration's almost willful destruction of any chance of cleaning up the mess they started with the 2003 invasion. The documentary is insightful, informative, and the most depressing film in a year of notable depressing films.

5. Black Book is a sexy, old-fashioned spy thriller about a not-too-good spy (Carice Van Houlton) who falls in love with the not-too-bad Nazi she's been instructed to seduce. What's great about the film's depiction of this amateur Mata Hari is that Houlton sucks as a spy: she's obvious, nervous, and twitchy, and she doesn't fool anyone; what's great and surprising about Paul Verhoven's script and direction is that it shows the surrounding situation (Nazi occupation of the Netherlands) as oblivious to her merits or demerits as a snoop.

4. There Will Be Blood is an overambitious but fascinating achievement that's dragged through its rough spots by Paul Thomas Anderson's staggeringly assured directorial vision and Daniel Day-Lewis's earth-shaking performance. Its quirky take on American history leaves a lot out, but it succeeds as a parable of the role of greed and religion in American society. It's also frequently, and self-consciously, dazzling.

3. Zoo addresses its topic—men who have sex with horses—elliptically, by refusing to explain it, by almost refusing the very idea that it can be explained to someone who doesn't share that particular desire. There's an enigmatic scene in which one of the actors in the reenactments explains how he connected to his role by thinking of a particularly bad accident he witnessed; I was struck by what a tenuous and false connection he was creating, and I realized that the film was telling us the same thing: you think you can get your head around this, but you're wrong.

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a nightmarish odyssey into totalitarianism. Anamaria Marinca gives one of the best performances of the year as a young woman who attempts to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate; guided by Oleg Mutu's unforgiving and unsteady handheld camera, we follow her into a hell that tests the limits of her friendship and our ability to keep from screaming. (I staggered out of this screening, shaken to the core, and then dashed off to see Wes Anderson's candy-coated triviality The Darjeeling Limited, a transition I do not recommend.)

1. Once is the kind of film that the do-it-yourself digital revolution was supposed to provide but so often doesn't: a small, personal, heartbreaking film that emphasizes the interactions between characters in a compelling way. Its music is heavenly, and the characters (played by musicians) who create it on- and offscreen are convincing and lived-in.

Oscar Predictions

Picture
Will Win: I've already blogged about how Juno is a likely upset; although I agree that my prediction is crazy, I'm sticking with it so I can be the guy who was right on this one.
Should Win: I wouldn't be disappointed with either No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood, or even Michael Clayton when it comes down to it. But There Will Be Blood is currently highest on my top ten list, so that's what should win.
Better Not Win: Joe Wright's great step backward Atonement certainly is pretty, and some scenes are well acted, but Wright couldn't figure out how to use any of it.

Director
Will Win: Joel and Ethan Coen have never won a directing Oscar, not even for critics' darling Fargo. They're due.
Should Win: This is actually a pretty solid group of nominees. I'm going with Paul Thomas Anderson because he makes his film work by sheer force of directorial vision, but I'd be fine with any of these worthies.
Better Not Win: Despite what a lot of people think, Oscar didn't embarrass himself by nominating Jason Reitman—he shows uncanny skill at coaxing great performances out of his cast—and therefore I abstain.

Actress
Will Win: Call me crazy upset guy, but I'm going with Marion Cotillard, who seems to have narrowed the gap between Julie Christie and the rest of the pack. Did she narrow it enough to take the gold? We'll see.
Should Win: Well, Angelina Jolie should win, but they didn't nominate her. So I'm going with Julie Christie.
Better Not Win: Why, exactly, did Cate Blanchett receive a second nomination for failing to develop one whit on her performance from 11 years ago?

Actor
Will Win: I think this is the only category that's utterly and completely locked up, aside from perhaps Original Screenplay. Daniel Day-Lewis will win his second Oscar, and...
Should Win: I can't say I disagree.
Better Not Win: Part of being in a musical is singing. Johnny Depp forgot that part.
Haven't Seen: Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah

Supporting Actress
Will Win: Despite Amy Ryan's winning just about every critics' award, and despite Ruby Dee's status as an un-Oscared elder, Cate Blanchett pulls off the dual feat of playing the opposite sex and doing a bang-up job of it.
Should Win: But where's the love for Tilda Swinton, who's the yin to Clooney's yang, the opposite moral pole of Michael Clayton's universe?
Better Not Win: They nominated the wrong Briony; Saoirse Ronan is a competent child actor, but Romola Garai was nearly great.

Supporting Actor
Will Win: As implacable and unstoppable as his character is Javier Bardem's drive for Oscar; none dare stand in his way.
Should Win: Who am I to argue with the Prince Valiant haircut and the air gun? Javier Bardem.
Better Not Win: In perhaps the biggest instance of category fraud since Pigskin Parade, Casey Affleck, who is the main character of his film, just might win an award he does not deserve. He's good; he's not a supporting actor.

Original Screenplay
Will Win: The biggest lock of the season seems to be Diablo Cody's screenplay for Juno.
Should Win: Beyond all the name-dropping in Juno is a smart, funny, sometimes painful look at a girl floundering between the rules of childhood and the realities of adulthood.
Better Not Win: Abstain. All of the nominees I've seen are worthy.
Haven't Seen: Lars and the Real Girl

Adapted Screenplay
Will Win: There Will Be Blood because this is where Oscar awards the critical darlings? No Country for Old Men because the Best Picture frontrunner almost always wins? I have no clue. Flipping the coin: No Country.
Should Win: I'm going with No Country for Old Men, although I'm not sure how many of the film's narrative and tonal surprises were the Coens' invention.
Better Not Win: The screenplay may have been the least of Atonement's problems, but aside from that first act, it didn't impress.

Animated Feature
Will Win: OK, some things are more locked up than Juno's screenplay award. Ratatouille, of course.
Should Win: I was more impressed with Persepolis; the animation style made up for some narrative weaknesses.
Haven't Seen: Surf's Up

Cinematography
Will Win: Although it doesn't look like there's a front-runner, I could see it going to either No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood. Flipping the coin: No Country
Should Win: I'm going with There Will Be Blood, but I wouldn't be upset if No Country won.
Better Not Win: It's certainly full of pretty pictures, but Atonement can't figure out how to use them. The worst offense is that Dunkirk tracking shot. Why?

Art Direction
Will Win: Ooh, it's a tossup. The only weak nominee here is The Golden Compass, but I'm going to go with There Will Be Blood because a lot of people who know more than I do about art direction have been saying that Jack Fisk needs to finally win.
Should Win: As long as The Golden Compass doesn't win, I am fine with whoever they pick.
Better Not Win: See above.

Costume Design
Will Win: The green dress. I mean Atonement. It has to win something.
Should Win: Dear god I don't know. I'll go with La Vie en Rose.
Better Not Win: We've already seen the costumes for Elizabeth II: Elizabeth Harder, so why bother noticing them again?

Visual Effects
Will Win: Two words: Giant robots. Transformers.
Should Win: But I wanted to see the damn things transform! I abstain.
Better Not Win: Those cartoonish "animals" from The Golden Compass.

Sound Editing
Will Win: Giant. Robots. Remember back in 1999 when The Matrix won the second-most awards, all on the strengths of its special effects? Transformers is going to win the second-most awards on Sunday.
Should Win: The empty whoosh of the air gun, the agonizing hollow clanking of the tentpoles in the HVAC system at the hotel: No Country for Old Men had a wealth of memorable sound effects, which I'm pretty sure this category is supposed to honor.
Better Not Win: I abstain. I could go with any of the nominees.

Sound Mixing
Will Win: Robots. That are giant. Transformers.
Should Win: The entire Bourne series has been unjustly ignored by Oscar, so here's where the sound team behind The Bourne Ultimatum should receive its "series achievement" award.
Better Not Win: I abstain. This is a quality bunch.

Editing
Will Win: Despite the fact that No Country for Old Men will not win Best Picture (see above), this is the kind of award that goes to the Best Picture winner, unless it goes to a whiz-bang action movie. So obviously No Country will win. I think.
Should Win: Let's see some more props for the team behind The Bourne Ultimatum, who have advanced chaotic fight scenes to the point where anything more choppy will induce seasickness.
Better Not Win: I'm not wild about Into the Wild's overreliance on montages.

Makeup
Will Win: There's certainly a lot of makeup in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film.
Should Win: Beautiful Marion Cotillard's transformation into unique-looking Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.
Better Not Win: I will not watch that Norbit film.

Best Documentary Feature
Will Win: I have no clue. Will the mainstream non-Iraq documentary win? I haven't seen enough of the nominees to comment on their quality. I'll go with Sicko because people like a good acceptance speech.
Should Win: Of the two I saw, No End in Sight was clearly superior; in fact, it's one of the ten best films of 2007.
Better Not Win: I haven't seen any of the other nominees.

Original Score
Will Win: Can anything beat the typewriter-clacking in Dario Marianelli's Atonement score?
Should Win: I can't say I'd disagree with that choice.
Better Not Win: I shouldn't let my dislike for The Kite Runner influence my opinion of its score, but all I remember about it is vaguely "ethnic" wails.

Original Song
Will Win: "Falling Slowly" from Once just has to be their pick; they insulted it in every other category it deserved.
Should Win: See above.
Better Not Win: The songs in Enchanted fell into three categories: outright parody ("Happy Working Song"), is-it-parody? ("That's How You Know"), and cheeseball slacking by Menken and Schwartz ("So Close").

As for the rest, I haven't seen any nominees, so I'll dispense with the chatter. Here are my completely uninformed predictions.

Foreign Language Film: Katyn
Documentary Short: Salim Baba
Animated Short: Madame Tutli-Putli
Live-Action Short: Tanghi Argentini

So the awards count at the end of the night for fictional films of feature length will be thus:

No Country for Old Men: 5
Transformers: 3
There Will Be Blood: 2
Atonement: 2
Juno: 2
La Vie en Rose: 1
I'm Not There: 1
Ratatouille: 1
Pirates of the Caribbean: 1
Once: 1

It's probably not too late to place your bets in Vegas; tell them goatdog sent you.

Why Juno Will Win Best Picture

1. It's the biggest moneymaker of all the Best Picture nominees, at $119 million and counting. It's brought in twice as much as its nearest rival, No Country for Old Men.

2. A lot of people really love this movie. Cal of Ultimate Addict pointed out that in addition to Ebert, it has Oprah. Oprah.

3. The love people experience for it is largely emotional (with many intellectual, well-thought-out exceptions).

3a. Viewers respect and admire There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, but they want to take Juno home with them. Plus,

3b. There Will Be Blood is just too weird and eccentric for Oscar, and

3c. No Country for Old Men is too dark and too, um, what should I call it? Nontraditional in its story structure and almost unfinished when it ends. This makes voters say "wow, that was really avant-garde," but it won't make them vote for it.

3d. Of the other options, Michael Clayton feels like prestige filler, and

3e. Atonement is the kind of serious literary adaptation that would have won in 1985, had Mr. McEwan written his novel back then.

4. Last year, a high-style crime thriller, The Departed, won. It was an anomaly then; would Oscar really do it twice in a row?

5. Oprah.

6. It was the year of "should I keep/have a baby?"—4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days; Knocked Up; Starting Out in the Evening; Waitress; Bella; Lake of Fire—and Juno is that trend's cutest little poster child.

As you can see from these succinct points, no other film could possibly win Best Picture except for Juno, the 96-minute comedy about teen pregnancy. Did I just type that?

The No Norbit Book

My Oscar obsession takes me many places. One place it will not take me is to the fatsuit extravaganza Norbit. I've composed a children's book (of a sort) as a valentine to the one feature-length Oscar nominee from 2007 that I will never delete from my obsessive spreadsheets.

3rd Annual Goatdog's Movies Oscar Contest

Yes, it's time for the third annual Goatdog's Movies Oscar Contest. Click on the image for the ballot. The prize, as always, is either a DVD of the Best Picture winner or a DVD of equivalent price. Entries are due by 5:00 CST on Friday, February 22, and I'll announce the winner on Monday, February 25.

The 72-Nomination Long Weekend

Since I have little to do but nap and complain and watch movies, I've decided to take a figurative bulldozer to the Oscars. The 10 films I've watched since Friday represent 72 nominations in various categories, leading me to develop the important new measure, Minutes Per Nomination (MPN), which leads to more efficient Oscar viewing. I chose MPN instead of NPM (nominations per minute) because I don't like decimal points, although some worked their way in anyway. I chose mostly the long, nomination-bogarting epics of the 1950s and 1960s, with stops along the way for remarkably good films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Hud. In descending order of MPN, here they are.

State Fair (1933): 96 minutes / 2 nominations = 48 MPN
Picture, Writing–Adaptation

Proof that they'd nominate just about anything for Best Picture back in the early days of Oscar, this anonymously agreeable countrified hoo-haw is about a rural family at the state fair. Yep, that's about it. Will Rogers frets about his moody pig, Louise Dresser frets about her pickles, and the kids, Janet Gaynor and Norman Foster, find big-city love with Lew Ayres and Sally Eilers. Even the pig gets in on the action. 2 goats

A Free Soul (1931): 91 minutes / 3 nominations = 30 MPN
Actor, Actress, Director

Norma Shearer looked dazzling in a series of gowns and snazzy little flapper outfits by Adrian (it's a crime that there wasn't a costume design category yet), but aside from a first, lighthearted scene, my god did she stink when she talked. She pains me, because I like her so much in some parts, but so little in others. Also-nominated director Clarence Brown let her indulge all of her worst tics: she squints like she's staring into the sun and packs in all the, er, vogueing she can (strike a grimace!), and many of her line readings were howlingly funny. Lionel Barrymore, who actually won Best Actor, is little better; his bag of tricks included just one, "drunk," which he used whether his character was drunk or not. Clark Gable was good, though, and he and Norma certainly made a fine-looking pair. 2 goats

Cleopatra (1963): 243 minutes / 9 nominations = 27 MPN
Picture, Actor, Cinematography, Editing, Original Score, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Costume Design, Sound, Visual Effects

The loudest thing about this epic was the mighty slap in the face that Oscar delivered; despite nine nominations including the big one, notably missing were its million dollar star Elizabeth Taylor, her high-profile lover Richard Burton, and Joseph Mankiewicz as either a writer or a director. It's the film without stars that was neither written nor directed! It's also a colossal bore, too long by half. Rex Harrison (who was nominated) was very good and Burton was pretty good, but Taylor's more petulant than queenly. At least some of the spectacle was suitably spectacular, especially Cleopatra's entrance into Rome. 2 goats

The High and the Mighty (1954): 147 minutes / 6 nominations = 24.5 MPN
Director, Supporting Actress X 2, Editing, Original Score, Original Song

Recent archaeological studies have pushed the origins of the modern big-budget disaster flick back as far as 1954, when John Wayne saved a planeload of passengers and their personal problems from fiery or watery death. All the elements were already set in stone: the pilot with a hidden yellow streak, the washed-up copilot with a troubled past, the cute kid, the boozy floozies, the tormented businessmen, even the token minorities. And, of course, the screaming and crying and Best Editing nomination. Dmitri Tiomkin's score won, but the oddball is an Original Song nomination for a song whose lyrics we never hear, not even during the closing credits. 2.5 goats

Seabiscuit (2003): 141 minutes / 7 nominations = 20 MPN
Picture, Cinematography, Editing, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Sound Mixing, Costume Design

By the time I'd recovered from being yanked around by the bridle by unnominated director Gary Ross's hopscotch history lesson-cum-character development, I was thoroughly annoyed by the cutesy cutaways and near-jump cuts the editing favors, the gauzy sun-dappled cinematography (according to this film and Cinderella Man, the Depression sure looked great!), and the tendency of the screenplay to have a character tell us, at the very end of a scene, what we should already have gathered. At least the races were shot well, except for the closeups, which looked like Tobey Maguire on an animatronic hobby horse. 2.5 goats

Doctor Zhivago (1965): 197 minutes / 10 nominations = 19.7 MPN
Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Costume Design, Adapted Screenplay, Original Score, Sound

This wasn't as bad as I'd expected it to be. It certainly spent a lot of its time (and money) flailing for epic status, but it was quite good in smaller moments—most of them including Rod Steiger, who deserved the Oscar nomination that Tom Courtenay received mistakenly. The biggest blight was Omar Sharif, the appeal of whom I just don't understand, having seen him in this film and Funny Girl recently. He doesn't seem to want to be good, or even noticed. 3 goats

Hud (1963): 112 minutes / 7 nominations = 16 MPN
Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Adapted Screenplay

The best film of 1963 wasn't nominated for the top honor; it settled for a slew of other nominations, among them Paul Newman's poisonous title turn as a sexy, jarringly amoral layabout. Patricia Neal's flinty, flirty pseudo-lead won a deserved Oscar and is probably among my top 10 winners. James Wong Howe's stunning, dusty photography won, but Tom Jones (!!!) stole most of the other awards that Hud deserved. One of the most glaring omissions was Elmer Bernstein's haunting, lonely score, which wasn't even nominated. 5 goats

Sons and Lovers (1960): 103 minutes / 7 nominations = 14.7 MPN
Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction/Set Decoration

This somewhat gelded adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's scandalous first novel is still pretty good, if only because the screenwriters were able to transfer some of the novel's pages and pages of self-examination into the mouths of the characters. Especially effective was the expansion of the father character (Trevor Howard, who plays what's clearly a supporting part but was up for lead anyway) and Dean Stockwell's relationship with the nominated Mary Ure, but the all-important mother obsession takes a backseat, as does Paul's oddly spiritual relationship with Miriam. 3.5 goats

My Fair Lady (1964): 171 minutes / 12 nominations = 14.2 MPN

Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Costume Design, Adapted Score, Sound

This wasn't nearly as painful as I'd been led to believe. I can't quite believe that Rex Harrison won Best Actor for his one-note growl, and there were several superior films they could have lavished a bunch of Oscars on, but this was moderately enjoyable. I loved the unnominated Audrey Hepburn until her big makeover, and Stanley Holloway was a lot of fun around the edges. The songs are great, even if their staging was often unimaginative (except the one at the horse track, which was brilliant). Still, one thing the film really screwed up was the ending: they've spent 170 minutes convincing us that nobody could like Henry Higgins, so why should we believe it when Eliza Doolittle decides to stick around? 3 goats

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969): 120 minutes / 9 nominations = 13.3 MPN
Director, Actress, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Editing, Costume Design, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Score of a Musical Picture, Adapted Screenplay

One of the bleakest films ever made, it's as if they rolled up all the desperation of the Great Depression, unleashed it in one big dance marathon, and then forgot to nominate one of the best films of the year for the big award. Jane Fonda's tough, desperate performance is probably one of the best of the 1960s, but she didn't win, nor did Susannah York. The only win was Gig Young's brave take on the heartless bastard of a host. The biggest question is for director Sydney Pollack: what the hell happened? You were really great once upon a time. Yowza. 4.5 goats

2007 Goaties: Stay Tuned for Updates

I couldn't think of anything to say on this blog that others haven't said more eloquently elsewhere, but Heath Ledger's death left me shaken. We've watched him grow from a pretty kid with promise into one of the best actors working, and I'm sad that on Oscar nomination mornings to come, we won't wake up to hear his name listed.

Instead of attempting to write in-depth appreciations of all of my award winners (we saw how well that worked out last year, when I never got around to finishing them), I'm going to post shorter blurbs about them, with the intention of writing less about more films. I'll post them here as I get them done, so check back over the next few days or weeks as I complete them. Recent additions (1/26): Cinematography, Visual Effects

I haven't seen nearly as many films as certain other critics, but I'm faced with the prospect of having to wait until March or later for the chance to see the rest of the award-worthy films. Exactly how good is Lust, Caution? Does Benicio Del Toro give a better lead performance in Things We Lost in the Fire than my pick for Best Actor? I guess I'll find out in March. But for now...

Musical Moment: As a midnight thunderstorm rages outside and Christina Ricci cowers (no longer chained to the radiator) at his feet, Samuel L. Jackson thrashes out the title song of Black Snake Moan on an electric guitar whose overfuzzed tones intermittently turn tinny and metallic when the power flashes on and off. It's the climactic scene in Craig Brewer's deliciously overheated slice of southern-fried ham, and it's about the power of the blues to drive out your demons. Can I get an amen?

Original Song: OK, whereas I think that several of the songs from Once were among the year's best, including the soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated "Falling Slowly" but also the better song "When Your Mind's Made Up," I think that the brilliant "PoP! Goes My Heart" from the deservedly underseen Music and Lyrics deserves mention here. It manages to perfectly parodize 1980s synth-pop while actually being a great example of the music it's picking on. Unfortunately, it's also catchy as hell, and I expect the chorus to be stuck in my head for a few days now.

Supporting Actor: Hal Holbrook is getting all the critical raves, but I think he was outshined in Into the Wild by a non-actor named Brian Dierker, a guide and white water rafter who Sean Penn convinced to appear in the film as a middle-aged hippie who trades relationship advice and quiet companionship with Emile Hirsch. Dierker, speaking unscripted lines and guided by one of the best actors alive, brings an easy, unaffected realism to the role; his scenes with Hirsch, who I didn't particularly like, and Keener, who I did, are the best things about the film.

Foreign Language Film: Christian Mungiu's harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a nightmarish odyssey into totalitarianism. Anamaria Marinca gives one of the best performances of the year as a young woman who attempts to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate; guided by Oleg Mutu's unforgiving and unsteady handheld camera, we follow her into a hell that tests the limits of her friendship and our ability to keep from screaming and running out of the theater.

Original Score: Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood's modernist score for There Will Be Blood was recently disqualified for Oscar, and I'm sure a Goatie is a small consolation prize. His score's shrieking strings and droning chords, like Daniel Day-Lewis's iconic performance and Paul Thomas Anderson's whiz-bang shot compositions, demands to be noticed; it calls attention to itself both as something inseperable from the film it inhabits and as something apart from the film.

Costumes: From Jennifer Garner's J. Jill pastels to Jason Bateman's layered, ratty Soundgarden t-shirts to Michael Cera's bright yellow too-shorts and headbands to Allison Janney's softer side of Sears to J.K. Simmons's worn Carharts, Monique Prudhomme's costumes for Juno work as canny character statements, culminating in Ellen Page's riotous rag-picked ensembles.

Documentary: Zoo addresses its topic—men who have sex with horses—elliptically, by refusing to explain it, by almost refusing the very idea that it can be explained to someone who doesn't share that particular desire. There's an enigmatic scene in which one of the actors in the reenactments explains how he connected to his role by thinking of a particularly bad accident he witnessed; I was struck by what a tenuous and false connection he was creating, and I realized that the film was telling us the same thing: you think you can get your head around this, but you're wrong.

Actor: I sure hope there's still room on Daniel Day-Lewis's mantel after awards season is done. As much as I hate to jump on anyone's bandwagon, I can't deny that his performance as avarice personified in There Will Be Blood is such a staggering achievement that calling it one of the greatest male performances of all time doesn't seem so crazy, although I'd rather wait and see how it holds up after a few years.

Visual Effects: As much as I disliked the movie, I can't deny how great 300's visual effects were; it's one of the first films in which the vaguely incorrect feel I usually get from large-scale CGI (e.g., Gladiator, The Golden Compass) was an aid instead of a hindrance: from the giant beasties to the giant Rodrigo Santoro to all those gouts of blood, the general unreality of the effects (which, in fact, looked more "realistic," if that's a useful word here, than anything in The Transformers) added to the comic-book feel of the film. Because there were more visual effects artists listed in the cast than there were Spartans in the battle (or Persians, for that matter), I can't single out any one person's achievement.

Cinematography: Many people (including me, for a long time) think great cinematography is about pretty pictures, but it's really about finding the right images to tell the story. No film did that better this year than 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Oleg Mutu's wavering handheld camera, so often held in long, shaky, unbroken closeups on Anamaria Marinca's face as she builds the web of half-truths and evasions that will allow her to complete her mission and travels deeper into this film's hell, both gives us special access to Marcina's thoughts and cuts us off from others', adding to the increasing isolation that she feels (and we feel). Highlights (if the definition of "highlight" contains the phrase "made me want to run out of the theater") include the almost-surreal dinner party at Marinca's boyfriend's house and the final dash through Bucharest's labyrinthine, poorly-lit streets.

Earlier: Best Supporting Actress Jennifer Garner
Sooner: I'll get back to you on that
Later: The other 7 categories

The Leading Critics

According to this Reuters story, Leonard Maltin, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone), and, um, Richard Roeper are not only "leading critics," they're the leading critics. God help us.

And they're "almost unanimous" in choosing Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie as their best actor and actress, respectively, of the year. "Almost," in this case, means "not really," as Maltin has Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard, Travers has Johnny Depp and Christie, and Roeper goes out on a limb and picks an assortment of eligible male leading performers (Day-Lewis, Depp, and George Clooney) and then Laura Linney.

I'm going out on a limb and saying that I agree with the leading critics totally, "totally" meaning "here and there." It's good to be on the winning team. I await the arrival of my "leading critic" badge.

2007 in Review: Best Rentals/Revivals

I watch twice as many older films as new releases, and 2007 was a banner year on my couch and at the revival house. I saw four of my top ten as homework for Edward Copeland's survey of the top 100 foreign films of all time, and others resulted from my Oscar obsession (#7), a gift of a membership at Chicago's Siskel Center (#4), and my too-infrequent trips to the revival house in my own neighborhood (#8).

It physically hurt to have to leave off such films as Andrei Tarkovsky's poetic Andrei Rublev (USSR, 1969), Réne Clément's deeply disturbing Forbidden Games (France, 1952), the sublimely religious The Song of Bernadette (1943), and Charles Burnett's devilish To Sleep with Anger (1990). But it's a top ten list, and I couldn't quite figure out how to shove fourteen films into it.

10. The Narrow Margin (1952). Studio hack Richard Fleischer's minimalist noir is like a hypodermic full of pure suspense jabbed right into the heart, or something equally thrilling (but maybe less painful). A good cop has to shepherd a mob moll cross-country to testify, but which of the beggar's banquet of tough guys on the train is the assassin sent to kill her? Maybe they all are. It's surely the best suspense film set on a train, despite what you may have heard about a certain portly British director.

9. The Conformist (Italy, 1970). This fragmented masterpiece suggests that Tarantino wasn't just watching kung fu movies. The story of a regular guy who's so driven by the need to fit in that he ends up a Fascist hit man is driven to dizzying heights of directorial and photographic audacity by the 29-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci and his brilliant cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. This must be the coolest film ever made.

8. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). A three-hour lullabye to the film industry, this documentary looks at how Hollywood has chosen to depict its hometown. Its hundreds of movie clips are only the start of the fun; director Thom Anderson also provides a smart analysis of the interplay between architecture and cinema and the ways that films have rewritten the city's history. Most intriguing to me, however, is the complete absence of movies about the movie industry, but I guess that would be fodder for another three-hour documentary.

7. Shanghai Express (1932). Most of Josef von Sternberg's talkies leave me cold: they're so frosty and beautiful, with stylized mannequins who stand around talking about love and devotion but not demonstrating any of it. This one bowled me over because it combined von Sternberg's brilliantly realized visual flourishes with some real, human feeling. Dietrich was never again so divine as she was here.

6. Strangers on a Train (1951). OK, but this one takes place only partly on a train. Less than The Narrow Margin, at any rate. Hitchcock's masterpiece (which may be my favorite of his films) is filled with signature touches, my favorite being the tennis match. The audacity of how long that sequence takes is just one example of the Master of Suspense's mastery of timing. Who else would dare drag it out that long, and to such delicious effect?

5. Pickpocket (France, 1959). My first Bresson film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His stripped-bare version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment retains all the angst and grand ideas about supermen as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition; it could be that Michel is just blowing smoke to cover his addiction. The characters stand at obtuse angles from each other; they're only truly alive during the balletic pickpocketing sequences.

4. War and Peace (USSR, 1968). It's the biggest and most expensive film ever made, and will probably retain those titles forever (it helps when you can use most of the Red Army for a single battle scene), but the scale and spectacle are only part of this sweeping epic's charms. Sergei Bondarchuk is able to balance all that delirious excess with the sensitive performances of his sprawling cast, especially Lyudmila Savelyeva as Natasha and Bondarchuk himself as Pierre.

3. Come and See (USSR, 1985). Where War and Peace showed us war in all of its possible permutations, this nightmarish down-the-rabbit-hole film is about only one: the "hell" part of "war is hell." It's the story of one patriotic kid who joins the Soviet resistance against the Nazi invaders during World War II, and pays for his patriotism with his sanity.

2. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Germany, 1974). My first Fassbinder film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His reinterpretation of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows is one of the most beautifully depressing films I've ever seen, the story of how love triumphs over everything except our own pettiness and prejudice. Excuse me while I get some tissues.

1. Persona (Sweden, 1966). I'm not positive that I could explain more than a scene or two of Ingmar Bergman's modernist masterpiece; all I know is that it's emotionally shattering, an almost religious cinematic experience—religious in the sense that it's like developing an intimate relationship with something that's unknowable. It defies interpretation, or at least my fumbling attempts at it. I think it's one of the five or six greatest films ever made.

2007 Goaties: Best Supporting Actress

StinkyLulu has prompted me to get a head start on my 2007 awards with the second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon. Check over there for more Supporting Actress goodness.

Ellen Page's much-lauded lead performance left me cold—anything she did, Thora Birch did better in Ghost World—but what saved Juno for me was the veritable cornucopia of supporting work from such people as Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, and, especially, and especially unlikely, Jennifer Garner. I'd previously dismissed Garner as a low-talent pretty face that, in fact, isn't all that pretty. (I believe that I wrote a blog post about how unattractive she is. I believe I quoted, with approval, someone calling her a "Picasso guppy.")

But my god, I take it all back: Garner is brilliant, or at least she's brilliant here, with the right part. She gives the best supporting performance of 2007, slyly toying with our impressions of a character who starts out as an easy mark: the baby- and decor-obsessed frigid suburban yuppie housewife. Cue the guffaws, especially as the film presents her as little more than a Baby Gap monster, a comic foil for the thwarted ambitions of her wanna-be rock-star husband (Bateman). But the screenplay's finest quality is its ability to take these easy marks and flesh them out, making us gradually discard our first, or even second or third, impressions. Subtly, and slowly, Garner opens Vanessa up, turning the joke inside out.

The film first introduces her through shots of her hands, smoothing coverlets and arranging flowers; if the shot had opened up to reveal that the hands belonged to an employee in a particularly high-end home furnishings store, it wouldn't have been surprising. Garner's obsessed with creating the perfect household: anything untidy (like everything Bateman brought from his former life) must be hidden. When things don't fit her domestic fantasy ("You found us in the penny saver?"), it throws her, and we see the anxiety that knits her life together. Most of that anxiety comes from her desire to have a child; Garner helps us, over the course of the film, to understand her obsession with outward perfection—her wholesale purchase of the American suburban dream—as a manifestation of her thwarted desire to have a kid. I can't have this one thing that would make me whole, she reasons, so I'll take all of these other things that give the illusion of wholeness.

It's when that anxiety becomes apparent that Garner really shines. I felt little a twinge at her reaction to Juno's careless "Lucky it's not you" comment; that twinge grew sharper during the scene at the mall when, at first, the baby won't kick for her (she interprets this, in an instant, as confirmation of the cosmic curse against her), and then the uncertain "do I deserve this?" joy when she finally feels something. And that twinge turned into a punch in the heart at the end, when, still anxious and uncertain, she asks Janney "How do I look?", her new baby in her arms.

So Jennifer Garner has demonstrated incredible range here—an ability to play the part for laughs, and then to gradually flesh out the screenplay's skeleton. She succeeds, better than the woman in the spotlight, in selling the film's underlying heart.

Runners-Up: From Todd Haynes's messy I'm Not There, there's the obvious choice of Cate Blanchett, so gawky and adolescent and androgynous that she was the best Dylan imitator of the bunch, but there's also Charlotte Gainsbourg, so adept and moving as the thankless and unthanked deserted wife in the "this is the part of the biopic when there's domestic strife" part of the film. And let's not forget Tilda Swinton, elevating her role in Michael Clayton above the casual misogyny of the part and letting us watch her going through the process of building a character as the film progresses.

Not Dead, Just Nearly So

I had plans for blogging about all the year-end awards, my recent trip to San Francisco, and my giddifying attempts to watch all the 2007 movies I've missed along the way (I'm particularly fond of Black Snake Zoo and Before the Devil Knows You're on Horseback and Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Red Road), but I dot a told. Both my favorite art historian and I have been out of commission; we spent a nice New Year's Eve fitfully attempting to catch a few winks between coughing fits, and we're heading for Maine tomorrow, despite being still under the weather.

But when we get back, I'll plunge into these things I used to write, what are they called... movie reviews! And blog posts! My flight lands at 6:00 on Sunday, and by midnight I'll have a post ready for StinkyLulu's second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon on an unexpectedly moving performance from someone I've spent time dissing on this very blog.

1955 Supporting Actress Smackdown

Head over to Stinkylulu's place, where we're celebrating the 1955 Supporting Actress Smackdown. Join Brad of Criticlasm, Canadian Ken, Nathaniel of The Film Experience, Nick of the eponymous Flick Picks, Rburton of Adam Waldowski Doesn't Watch Non-Oscar Movies, and our gracious host, Stinkylulu, as we take a look at a youth movement of sorts.

But first, let's take a moment of silence to thank the Oscar gods for not nominating Betty Field, Susan Strasberg, or Rosalind Russell for their work in Picnic.

...

Because if they had, I would not be here today. Faced with the prospect of watching that meatball of a film again, I might have done myself harm, or declined to participate in this Smackdown. And readers, those are one and the same.

So, that youth movement. I'm stretching the term a little. The nominees are Betsy Blair in Marty, Peggy Lee in Pete Kelly's Blues, Marisa Pavan in The Rose Tattoo, Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden, and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause. Blair was 32, a veteran of several films, but also a victim of the blacklist—maybe the first instance of a blacklisted star receiving an Oscar nomination. (Someone else can do the research.) Lee was 35, a ten-year veteran of fame as a singer but appearing in her third and last film, and looking mighty relieved by the end of this one that she wouldn't have to do it again. (That's a lie—her expression never changes, even when she has to go crazy.) Pavan was 23, appearing in her fifth film but her first big role. Van Fleet was 41, a stage veteran winning an Oscar in her first film and helping herald the new world order of Method acting in Hollywood. And Wood was just 17, a former child actress. Their average age is 29. Does that count?

I loved Van Fleet's performance the most, but it wasn't the punched-in-the-gut love I felt for Maureen Stapleton in my last foray into Supporting Actressness. (Just had to work in a plug for that marvellous performance.) It was more of a clinical love, an admiration of her craft without the emotion. And yet I gave her the same rating. Rankings sure are capricious.

Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg

This post is part of Nathaniel's Montgomery Clift Blog-a-Thon, which is occurring today over at The Film Experience Blog.

Forty-one years after his birth, thirteen years after he burst onto American movie screens in The Search and Red River, five years after a near-fatal car accident left his face scarred, and five years before his death, Montgomery Clift took the stand in Stanley Kramer's post-WWII courtoom epic Judgment at Nuremberg. He plays Rudolph Petersen, a simpleminded man who had been forcibly sterilized by the Nazi regime.

The parallels are perhaps too easy for comfort: Clift plays a broken, semi-coherent man stuck in front of hundreds of people and asked to relive his emasculation; Clift was a broken man whose physical and mental deterioration, helped along by hearty drug and alcohol addictions, caused him to flub take after take. Stanley Kramer later wrote about Clift's difficulty with his lines:

"Finally I said to him, 'Just forget the damn lines Monty. Let's say you're on the witness stand. The prosecutor says something to you, then the defense attorney bitterly attacks you, and you have to reach for a word in the script. That's all right. Go ahead and reach for it. Whatever the word may be, it doesn't really matter. Just turn to [Spencer] Tracy on the bench whenever you feel the need, and ad lib something. It will be all right because it will convey the confusion in your character's mind.' He seemed to calm down after this. He wasn't always close to the script, but whatever he said fitted in perfectly, and he came through with as good a performance as I had hoped."

Unlike in his other post-accident films, there's no effort to hide his various maladies. Instead of favoring his unscarred right profile, Kramer's creeping camera executes its typical (and eventually annoying, but not by this point) slow circle around him, starting with a frontal closeup and moving to the right, showing off Clift's twitching left cheek and slightly sagging left eyebrow. As it creeps around him, we see that his head is nodding a bit, and his skeletal hands are twitching. How much of this is acting, and how much of it was unconscious?

Whatever it was, he's riveting. His seven-minute scene begins with him walking, self-consciously upright, to the witness stand before hesitating, in a curious pose that reminded me of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, before sitting down. Under the gentle questioning of the prosecuting attorney (Richard Widmark), he's composed, recounting the story of his trial and sentence, tiptoeing around the specifics of his forced operation. His wary face melts into childish pleasure when the audience or the judge (Spencer Tracy) shows approval, but for the most part he's closed up. But his composure shatters under the relentless cross-examination of the defense attorney (Maximilian Schell), whose theory of defense—essentially a version of the morally repugnant "we were just following orders"—holds that the defendants, all judges accused of enforcing immoral laws, were in fact justified in ordering his sterilization because it was the law of the land to sterilize "mental defectives."

Clift starts getting "fuzzy," for lack of a better word. His right eye seems to brighten, then to glaze over; he slumps further in his chair, almost hiding behind the sparse protection of the microphone, and several times has to remind himself to sit up straight. His shoulders hunch, and as Schell's questions agitate him further, he loses his tenuous cool: his movements become more exaggerated as he shouts about the essential unfairness of his treatment and Schell's insinuations about his mother; ironically, the physical symptoms I mentioned above disappear, the quivering and unconscious movements replaced by strong gestures. His responses become incoherent, and his breakdown, a combination of a spirited defense of his mother and a cry of anguish at the way he was treated, is difficult to watch.

Schell takes the fact that Petersen is proved to be not much smarter than a child as a win for the defense, because German law at the time said that it was right to sterilize him. But Clift's performance helps hammer home the point of the scene, which is that such a defense is an immoral sham. The horror this lost, confused man-child experienced in a courtroom a dozen years before is indistinguishable from the horror he's facing on the stand today, except that there was no chance at justice in the Nazi court. His testimony is helping to achieve some today, not that it's any consolation to him.

Al Gore's Oscar

In the wake of Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize, lots of news outlets have been mentioning other things he won.

Reuters: ...winning an Oscar in 2007 for his documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Times of India: ...and earned Gore an Oscar.

Times of London: Mr Gore had already picked up an Oscar for his climate change documentary...

Fox News: Al Gore now has a Nobel Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy.

CNN Money: The former vice president, Oscar-winner and now Nobel Peace Prize recipient...

Telegraph: Just after Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary...

And so on. But.

Al Gore did not win an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. Davis Guggenheim won an Oscar for his film about Al Gore. Just because he invited Gore up to the podium to make an acceptance speech doesn't mean Gore won anything. (At least that night.) The award goes to the director of the winning film, not to its subject. If the latter were the case, Michelangelo, Albert Schweitzer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Frost, and Robert S. McNamara would have Oscars. And you know who else would have an Oscar?

That's right. Hitler.

CIFF: Control

The Chicago International Film Festival kicked off this week, and for the first time in the six years I've lived in Chicago, I'm able to see more than one or two movies. I have tickets to seven, and I hope to provide up-to-the-minute updates, but, you know, I lack initiative. We'll see.

First up was Control, a disappointingly by-the-numbers biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, played here by Sam Riley. On the verge of stardom, Curtis committed suicide at the age of 23, leaving behind a wife, a baby daughter, and a band that became New Order. We've already seen much of his life story, which consistutes much of the first half of the superior Michael Winterbottom film 24 Hour Party People. Despite expanding on that half-hour or so into feature length, director Anton Corbijn, working from a screenplay based on Curtis's wife's memiors, doesn't manage to give us any more insight into the moody singer.

Read the full review.

The William Wyler Blogathon

Welcome to the William Wyler Blogathon headquarters. The blogathon, which occurred between September 21 and 23, was a rousing success. I want to thank everybody who participated, either in posts or in comments. Now that things have wrapped up, I have time to read everything, which is the best part of hosting.

In my announcement post (feel free to steal some of those images), I said "When I think of William Wyler, I think of the Oscars." So of course when it came to writing something for this event, I chose two early, non-Oscar films: 1929's part-talkie The Love Trap and 1932's wholesome Tom Brown of Culver.

The Participants (in order of appearance):

• operator_99 at Allure looks at actresses in Wyler's late-1920s and pre-Code films.
• Jacqueline at Another Old Movie Blog discusses Wyler's use of moments of silence.
• Emma at All About My Movies investigates The Children's Hour.
• Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee and More Coffee compares The Love Trap with another early talkie romantic comedy.
• Shane at Rocks That Move outs Wyler as an auteur.
• Shawn at Man With Towel drinks his way through How to Steal a Million.
• StinkyLulu makes a strong argument for Wyler's beatification.
• Bob at Forward to Yesterday finds it hard to ignore the anti-neocon stance of The Big Country.
• James at Rants of a Diva loves Babs in Funny Girl.
• Nick at Nick's Flick Picks was so inspired by The Good Fairy that he wrote his first full review since Wyler won his first Oscar.
• Odienator at Eddie's Blog-a-Thon Board takes on Bette Davis's three films with Wyler.
• Glenn at Stale Popcorn has four clips of Babs in Funny Girl
• Hedwig at As Cool as a Fruitstand admires The Best Years of Our Lives
• Self-Styled Siren thinks Jezebel needs a reappraisal.
• Brad at Criticlasm has loved Funny Girl at least since he was eight.
• Justine at Beyond the Valley of the Cinephiles compares The Heiress with Roman Holiday.
• Mike at The Bargain Matinee takes a second look at The Children's Hour.
• John T. at The Many Rantings of John praises Wyler's use of quiet moments.
• Thom at Film of the Year flies in on the Memphis Belle.
• Lylee wants to know why The Big Country isn't hailed as a classic.
• And to wrap things up, Brian at Hell on Frisco Bay interviews Wyler's daughter, Judy Wyler Sheldon.
• And to wrap things up again, Noel at Critic After Dark brings us Filipino versions of The Heiress and The Collector.

The Love Trap (1929)

William Wyler's third feature after graduating from his apprenticeship in Universal's two- and five-reel Westerns starts out as a sparkling romantic comedy; had it stayed that way, it might deserve discussion as one of the better sophisticated comedies of the late silent period. But the sound juggernaut started with Al Jolson's boastful "You ain't heard nothin' yet," delivered two years earlier in The Jazz Singer, was forcing a dramatic shift in audience tastes, and studios added talking sequences to films already in production or recently released. Just over midway through the slim 72-minute running time, Universal's sound revolution dampens The Love Trap's sparkle by amping up the melodrama when it turns up the volume. What started out as a very good film ends up fair-to-middling because the actors aren't up to delivering dialogue that in turn doesn't measure up.

Star Laura La Plante and her husband, director William Seiter, had final approval on choice of director for this film, so they screened Wyler's previous film, the comedy The Shakedown; Wyler snuck into the projection booth and guffawed loudly during every joke, hoping that La Plante and Seiter would be convinced that everyday people like projectionists thought he was a comedic genius. It must have worked. La Plante plays Evelyn, a chorus girl whose dancing is so out of step that her stage director uses her as an example of what not to do before asking that she perform "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," adding that she shouldn't stop until she gets there. She dabbles innocently in the escort-for-hire racket at a swank party, but the devious and amorous attentions of one Guy Emory (Robert Ellis) have her running out wearing little more than a wrap.

The screenplay pokes fun at mawkish "You must pay the rent! I cannot pay the rent!" melodrama when she ends up evicted, sitting in her settee on the curbside as rain pours down. But every cloud carries a silver lining, and this time it's in the form of the wealthy and handsome Peter Harrington (Neil Hamilton), who takes pity on her, marshalling dozens of cabs to save her drenched furniture and manufacturing every excuse to remain in her company, even to the point of driving all night, ending up in the middle of nowhere, fighting off the furious cabdrivers, and eventually marrying her. Then comes trouble in the form of Peter's disapproving mother and sister (Clarissa Selwynne and Rita La Roy), who can't believe Peter would marry some tart from Squeedunk, Illinois. Things get worse when Judge Harrington (Norman Trevor) arrives; the Judge, Peter's uncle and head of the family, was at the aforementioned party and saw enough to get the wrong idea about Evelyn.

Then the talking starts.

As is often the case, the stereotypical image of early-talkie actors crowded around the microphone hidden in a flower pot and delivering their lines to a motionless camera (as parodied in Singin' in the Rain) proves to be inaccurate. There isn't a marked difference in cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton's camera's fluidity, and some of the most dramatic shot setups come during the talking sequences. No, the real problem (which Singin' in the Rain did get right) is that the actors, who were fine, even wonderful in the silent half of the film, aren't up to the challenges of sound. At the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it) of this list is Laura La Plante, whose line readings are cackle-inducingly awful at times. She talks so slowly, and emphasizes so carefully, that it's as if she's reading from cue cards—and maybe she is, since she's not used to having to memorize dialogue. It doesn't help that she seems to dramatically increase the amount of mad gesturing and arm-waving that people tend to associate with silent acting (but which is notably absent from the first, silent half of this film). At one point, Judge Harrington tells her, "You're quite an actress," but he's responding to the wrong scenes; her best scenes are long gone by this point. More correct is her husband, who tells her just before the final fadeout that she's a terrible actress, and sadly he's not far off. The other actors, who are more or less adequate once they have to start talking, are strangled by the increasing melodrama of the screenplay, which abandons for too long the lighthearted tone of the first half. It recovers somewhat by the end, but La Plante's obvious performance and the sorry dialogue have damaged the film too much by this point to save it.

The last scene of the film looks good on paper: Evelyn tries to change the Judge's mind, and when that fails, decides to take him down with her. Had it stuck to silence (a misnomer, of course: there's a rich and witty score by Joseph Cherniavsky that all but disappears when the talking starts, a victim of early sound recording limitations), it might well have been hilarious; La Plante's increasingly fervent gesticulations would have argued against the self-seriousness of the dialogue, and La Plante, from all appearances a fine comedienne, would have been free to sell the comedy without having to worry about her lines. I think her performance has a lot to do with Wyler's lack of experience with directing dialogue: I haven't seen all of his films, but I can't remember any really bad performances in them—"90-Take Willy" wouldn't allow such a thing.

[A note of caution on using biographies for research: Jan Herman, author of A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, thinks Peter is a taxi driver, and that Judge Harrington "finally realizes she's not so bad after all" (p. 87). Apparently he didn't see the film.]

Tom Brown of Culver (1932)

In film after film of the pre-Code era, the generation who lived through the War to End All Wars looked backward in horror and forward with prescient fear. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) is the best-known and most powerful antiwar film of this era, but it wasn't alone. The following year saw The Last Flight, about a group of aviators drifting through Paris on a cloud of alcohol, trying desperately to forget their experiences. In I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Paul Muni is unable to sell his Croix de Guerre to buy a meal because the pawnbroker's case is already full of medals; and in Heroes for Sale (1933), Richard Barthelmess returns from Europe a morphine-addicted wreck. The twin aviation films The Eagle and the Hawk and Ace of Aces (both 1933) featured protagonists destroyed emotionally by their newfound ability to kill.

So I was surprised to find in William Wyler's filmography a pre-Code film that can't exactly be called pro-war, but lacks the antipathy of many other pre-Code films. The circumstances behind Tom Brown of Culver decreed that it be more rah-rah than the films I discussed above. Universal's intention was to make "a wholesome, virile picture to counteract the sensational gin-and-jazz pictures that were so sadly misrepresenting American youth" (quoted in Jan Herman, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, New York: Putnam, p. 107). Instead of the dissolution and misery that other screen soldiers experienced in the early 1930s, Tom Brown finds self-respect and a direction for his life in the Culver Military Academy.

The titular Tom Brown (played, oddly, by an actor named Tom Brown), attempting to earn some money in an open boxing event, is spotted by an Army major (Sidney Toler) who takes pity on him, especially after he discovers that his father, an army surgeon, earned a posthumous Medal of Honor. Tom isn't particularly proud of the medal—echoing Paul Muni, he says "What good is it? Try buying grub with one."—and he'd rather have had a father around to raise him. The colonel gets him a job at a lunch counter run by one of Brown Sr.'s army buddies (Slim Summerville, playing someone named Slim), and later arranges for him to receive a scholarship to the Culver Military Academy, where Tom becomes the archetype of the surly, rebellious student. He won't march in formation, he won't shine his shoes, and he belittles the other cadets for their patriotic fervor. But after a fight with a fellow cadet, Randolph (Ben Alexander), Tom gets his act together and starts to respect the military, finally showing some pride in his father's actions. The film's best scene occurs in Memorial Hall when Ralph reverently shows Tom a picture of his own dead father, and Tom shyly pulls Brown Sr.'s Medal of Honor out of his pocket.

From here on out, the film is defined by radical and often unprompted changes in characters' behavior, especially after Tom discovers that his father (H.B. Warner) was a deserter and is still alive. This causes him to doubt his newfound love for military school—but why? And Ralph, after going AWOL to see a pinup starlet, experiences a dramatic shift, turning in the space of one scene into the surly, rebellious kid he'd railed against when that kid was Tom—but why? But the biggest "but why?" comes when the Army brass find out about Brown Sr.'s desertion and pooh-pooh it away—he witnessed such carnage that he fled, a victim of shell shock, which isn't necessarily so crazy, but it's dropped into the film as almost an afterthought.

Despite the explanation for Dr. Brown's behavior, there's no effort to project from his experiences to any general statement on war. He had a rough time, sure, but these things happen, and the script manages to tie everything into a neat little bow with a rousingly patriotic message. This message, along with the screen image of the Culver Academy, was guaranteed: the studio shot much of its footage at the real Culver Academy, and the superintendent of the school had final approval of the film, making such demands as the elimination of hazing scenes from the final cut. I realize that I haven't seen every film made in the early 1930s, and there are likely fewer films that take a strong antiwar stance than there are films that don't register an opinion on the subject, but it's interesting that the antiwar films are the ones that are remembered.

Wyler wasn't excited about the project; he wrote to his brother that "it will make a lot of money.... It's not artistic in any way but purely commercial in subject and treatment, maybe a little too much so" (quoted in Herman, p. 107). He had already earned his reputation as a director who shoots entirely too many takes, so when filming ran behind schedule because of bad weather, the studio brass naturally assumed that "Ninety-Take Willy" had violated their direct orders limiting the number of takes a director could request. But the film was completed almost on schedule, and it was a critical and financial success.

(I can't believe I didn't mention that this film features near-cameos by such famous and should-be-famous Hollywood players as Eugene Pallette, Andy Devine, Tyrone Power, and Alan Ladd.)

Slapstick at the Altar

In honor of four months of wedded bliss, and as part of the spectacular Slapstick Blog-a-Thon hosted by Thom at Film of the Year, I thought I'd profile a handful of slapstick weddings and near-weddings: one from an unlikely director and one with an unlikely straight man, one featuring my favorite unheralded comedian and one featuring perhaps the best-known comedy pair in slapstick, and one unfunny, derivative snooze.

Balked at the Altar (1908)

When one thinks of slapstick, D.W. Griffith might be toward the bottom of the list of people who spring to mind, somewhere between Chester A. Arthur and Laurence Olivier. But Griffith, in his early days at Biograph, directed at least one film that fits the slapstick mold, and perhaps helped establish some of the film genre's conventions: 1908's Balked at the Altar. The scenario involves a young woman's attempts to snag a husband—any husband. She makes eyes at every man who passes by her doorstep (except the "elderly fat black man"; more on that later), and when that fails, her pappy journeys to town to recruit a likely suitor. When he brings the lucky guy home and then produces a shotgun to seal the deal, the new groom goes along with it until the crucial moment when he apparently yells "I don't" and leaps out the nearest stained-glass window. Thus commences a fall-down, drag-out chase in which the wedding party attempts to recapture the groom and finish the ceremony.

There's little here that screams "Griffith" or "first genius of American film"; there aren't any directorial flourishes, aside from one instance when a woman offscreen seems to wave her hand in front of the camera, which was the closest any of the actors get to the camera. There are no closeups (indeed, no shots that show less than the actors' full lengths), and the film is badly deteriorated, so it's nearly impossible to tell what anyone looks like, but most people of consequence have comical identifying traits that survive the ravages of age: the bride-to-be wears her hair in a summer-squash-shaped formation atop her head; the reluctant groom minces around, elbows cocked, and has a pointy beard; and the "elderly fat black man" is clearly a white guy in blackface wearing a pillow strapped around his stomach. This racist caricature seems to exist only to provide a running gag in which an older white lady beats him up at every opportunity.

The chase scene is something Mack Sennett would have been proud of producing in his Keystone days (and in fact, Sennett appears in this film, although I'm not sure in what role; Griffith appears too, but again, all the faces are washed out). The wedding party tumbles out of the church like clowns from a fire engine, and each phase of the chase is defined by some obstacle they must overcome: a wooden fence and the two boys lolling against it, a steep incline and the drunk trying to sleep it off at the bottom, and finally the tree where they bring their quarry to bay.

That Little Band of Gold (1915)

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle starred alongside Mabel Normand in dozens of Keystone comedies in the teens. In many of them they were married, but in this one, they get married, thus qualifying the film for my completely arbitrary category. Within the first three minutes, Fatty proposes in the back of a cab, she accepts joyfully, they get hitched at the courthouse, and then she's waiting in front of her mirror, tearfully, for her wastrel husband to come home. Which he does, drunk and falling down. Fatty Arbuckle has one of the best "drunk" walks in film history: the top of his body stays mostly still, as if he were sober, but his legs twitch fitfully, making it look like he has to take multiple steps to cover the same ground as one sober step.

Mabel and her disapproving mother (and she has a lot to disapprove of—she catches Fatty fondling the help, and he continues to do so as she lectures him) force the big guy to take them to the opera, but as soon as they're in their seats Fatty is causing trouble: sneezing loudly, laughing at the funny-looking singers, unbuttoning his pants to get comfortable, and making pantomime plans with Ford Sterling, who occupies a box across the auditorium, to sneak off with the two buxom beauties Ford has in tow. The four end up at a restaurant where the furious Ford has to watch Fatty woo the woman they both want (Ethel Madison).

I was surprised to see Fatty as essentially the straight man. He cedes the screen to Ford Sterling, whose pointy beard, wagging eyebrows, and grimaces make him look like the kind of guy who'd tie a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. There's not a lot of physical comedy involved; I was expecting repeated scenes of a drunken Arbuckle falling down, but he apparently wanted to go in a different direction here. The most interesting thing about the film (which is stellar throughout) is the almost self-referential nature of some of the jokes. Early on, when Arbuckle is about to get dressed for his night out, his butler points at the camera and Arbuckle slams a door in our faces. And I think the opera scenes were shot at a real opera, with an audience of civilians instead of extras. When Fatty and Mabel sit down in their box, people in nearby seats point at them in surprise; you can see at least one person mouthing "Fatty Arbuckle." Similarly, when Ford Sterling sits down, people point and stare at him. Later in the restaurant, many of the other patrons are staring at the foursome and the camera, but the line between civilian and actor blurs when some of them get involved in the escalating conflict over Ethel Madison's affections. I suppose these were "plants" of film folks among the patrons.

The only moment of "traditional" slapstick violence is a tad shocking, given the generally tame feel of the rest of the film. At the end of their sojourn at the restaurant, before Mabel and mom can drag Fatty away, he grabs a champagne bottle and smashes it over Sterling's head. Because of the muted comedy to this point, it almost feels out of place, like a real person was smashing a real champagne bottle over a real head, and maybe real blood would follow. Of course Sterling short-circuits any such thought with some patented grimacing and gesticulating, but for just a second, it felt like the goodwill was gone.

His Wooden Wedding (1925)

I chose this topic mainly because I wanted a chance to write about my favorite slapstick short, which is this Leo McCarey-directed Charley Chase two-reeler. A well-to-do man (Chase) is about to get married when his best man (Fred DeSilva) slips him a note warning him that his bride-to-be (Katherine Grant) has a wooden leg. Charley is horrified, and who wouldn't be? At least, in this film, that is. Of course, right at that moment (it is Friday the 13th, after all), she sprains her ankle, causing a distinct limp that seems like proof of woodenness to Charley. When he gets a splinter from a cane while attempting to verify empirically the presence of lumber under her dress, he's convinced, and runs off in a fright, consoling himself with a large bottle of brandy. Of course, all his best man wants is the famous Dhulip Diamond, an heirloom that's been in Charley's family for years and is now perched on Grant's finger. I won't go into how it ends up stashed in Charley's top hat aboard a steamer bound for the South Seas as Grant and her frantic father chase them down in a yacht.

The comedic sequences, much like Buster Keaton's "trajectories," work as self-contained gags but also feed into the next routine in logical ways (well, in the film's logic, at least). Thus DeSilva's attempt to knock Charley's top hat off to retrieve the diamond runs into Charley's experiment with tossing hats into the wind aboard the steamer, which in turn segues smoothly into Charley's effort to free the diamond from inside the dress of a homely woman, which culminates in an uproarious dance sequence where Charley teaches her energetic, wiggly dances, hoping to force the diamond to fall out of h