Movies Of The Year: 1950

The pace has slowed significantly, but this is the 59th Movies Of The Year list I've done here, more than two-thirds of the way to completion. I find I've been a lot less motivated to write them since I figured out and posted all the lists in one spot (well, three spots) as The Big List. A large part of my motivation before was finding out what films would have to be ranked against each other with each new year. On the other hand, I really like having them all there for my own reference, if nothing else. Plus, I've already written about a lot of these older films in the roundups, which makes it more difficult as I'd try to not repeat myself. So I'm going to try quoting myself more and see if that speeds things up.

1950's not a bad year, but it's still only the 8th best of the decade.


15. Cinderella - Generic Disney movie, annoying comic relief animals, lame songs, though the animation manages to be nicely abstract at times.

14. Where Danger Lives - I wrote about this a little over a year ago:

Decent enough John Farrow noir starring Robert Mitchum as a doctor who gets suckered by a crazy woman. Her husband ends up dead and the two of them try to flee to Mexico, while Mitchum's got a concussion and the girl gets crazier and crazier. Great supporting actors are largely wasted in much too small roles, namely Claude Rains and Farrow's wife, Maureen O'Sullivan.

Honestly, I don't really remember much more than a wild car chase that was filmed such that the car actually looks like it's driving really fast.

13. The Baron Of Arizona - Transitional Sam Fuller film with a restrained performance from Vincent Price. The story is crazy enough to be true and the lynch mob scene at the end is funny, chaotic and exciting, like the best of Fuller.

12. DOA - Killer premise for a noir (guy gets poisoned and has a limited amount of time to find out who did it and why), but I didn't like Edmond O'Brien as the hero and the whole thing felt overlong despite being less than 90 minutes. Some great set pieces and the film is often visually stunning, director Rudolph Maté had been a great cinematographer (he shot Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc).

11. Born Yesterday - I wrote this, which pretty well sums it up, I think:

Corrupt capitalist hires four-eyed journalist to tutor his ditzy blonde girlfriend so she'll be less embarrassing in high society. Blonde learns a thing or two and realizes her tycoon is a crook and outs him, while running off with the geeky writer, who turns out to be William Holden. An iconic performance from Judy Holliday is the highlight, and director George Cukor never quite allows the film to descend into the filmed-theatre genre it so desperately wants to join.

10. The Father Of The Bride - Very pleasant light comedy from Vincente Minnelli and starring the always great Spencer Tracy and the very cute Elizabeth Taylor. Much better than the remake, of course. I want Tracy to make me a martini.

9. Rio Grande - The third part of John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy (it's not really a trilogy, just three films about the cavalry, but whatever) is the least of the three. Not as deep as Fort Apache, nor as entertaining and pretty as She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Still, it's Ford and it stars John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, who are always great together. Wayne's training new recruits, one of whom turns out to be his son. Complications ensue when mom shows up to take him home. And there's a war on.

8. Sunset Blvd. - Billy Wilder's very noir Hollywood satire has the classic performance from Gloria Swanson as the washed-up loony silent film star, and a clever opening with narration by the dead guy in the pool and great supporting work from directors Erich von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille and even a cameo for Buster Keaton. The problem is, as it often is, William Holden. I really don't like him, and the movie falls apart whenever Swanson's not there chewing things up.

7. The Asphalt Jungle - John Huston heist film that manages to be both overrated and underrated at the same time. Overrated because it's considered one of the best noirs ever by a lot of people who haven't seen a lot of noir. The characters are cardboard, hackneyed and cheesy (think Sterling Hayden and his horses), the direction textbook noir with little style and the plot silly. Underrated because while all those things are true, it's nonetheless very entertaining: the actors are terrific and Marilyn Monroe is at her most adorable in her small role.

6. In A Lonely Place - Nicholas Ray's film is the second show business noir on the list (I don't think you can make a case for there being three, but you're welcome to try). Humphrey Bogart plays a screenwriter with writer's block and an anger management problem who becomes the lead suspect in a murder case. Gloria Grahame plays the hot neighbor he becomes involved with, but it all ends, inevitably, in tragedy. One of Bogart's greatest performances, the anger and the drinking feel very real. This is a movie I've seen, I believe, three times, but I still don't fell I have a firm grasp on how great it really is. James Harvey writes about it at length in his great book Movie Love In The 50s. You should read it.

5. Stromboli - First saw this almost two years ago, it was my first Roberto Rossellini film and this is what I wrote:

stars Ingrid Bergman as a WW2 refugee who marries a young Italian man to escape the refugee camp. The young man takes her to his home island of Stromboli, a conservative little village dominated by an active volcano. The volcano metaphor isn't exactly subtle, but neither is Bergman's performance as she becomes increasingly hysterical in her struggle against the provincialism of small-town life. But somehow, teetering on the edge of camp, it manages to be sincere and moving.

Since then, I haven't been able to get the film's eerie final sequence out of my mind: Bergman staggering hysterically across the smoking volcano, as apocalyptic an image as anything in film.

4. Winchester '73 - Most schematic of the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns, but a lot of fun nonetheless. Stewart has the titular gun stolen from him, and has to track down the guy who took it along the way wandering through every Western plot point you can think of. As definitive a Western as Stagecoach, and as perfectly constructed. Even if Mann doesn't fill his film with the quite flair for iconic imagery that Ford does, he ain't bad.

3. Harvey - For those who wonder how I could contemplate placing these two entertaining, yet slight, James Stewart movies over the previous two auteur classics, I have this to say: In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. My love for this film may be wholly irrational, but I love it nonetheless.

2. All About Eve - Very difficult choice for the top spot this year, with two films that are not only among my all-time favorites, but also films that mark definitive stages in my cinephile life. Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film about Broadway and all its insecurities and manipulations is perfect: with an interesting structure, a brilliant script and a graceful visual style. Bette Davis's iconic leading role is justly famous, but Anne Baxter's Eve is just as good and George Sanders gives the most George Sandersy performance of his life. That the two other male actors are merely decent and not good as the leads (or Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter or Marilyn Monroe at her second most adorable either) is about the worst I can say about it. I remember very clearly being blown away by this film when I first saw it my freshman year in college, when every new movie was a revelation and I never knew old films could be so smart, so funny, so twisted and so . . . well, perfect.

1. Rashomon - This film, on the other hand, is not without its flaws. The hyperbolic acting (from Toshiro Mifune and Michiko Kyo particularly) can be off-putting, the Bolero-esque score is at best functional (it makes Donald Richie cringe at Kurosawa's generic taste in classical music, but my taste is just as bad, so it doesn't really bug me), and the addition of the coda (changing the original story) makes the film more uplifting and humanist and/or sentimental and cheesy, depending on how cynical you are. But I love it despite all these faults. I prefer the loud and crazy Mifune to the more normal, restrained Mifune, though all Mifunes are always awesome. Michiko Kyo and Masayuki Mori aren't as good as they would later be in their Mizoguchi films, but they don't bother me either. Takeshi Shimura is is usual brilliant self rounding out one of the greatest collections of actors ever in a single film. The puzzle of the film, about the nature of truth and whether or not everybody lies, to themselves and to others, is endlessly fascinating, and I'm simply not depressed enough to hate the ending. But the reason I owe Rashomon the top spot on this list is because it is the film that opened up foreign films for me. I'd seen The Seventh Seal before, and while I really liked it, it didn't make me rush out and watch a bunch of non-English language films. Rashomon did. I watched it one afternoon and immediately after drove to the store and rented an armful of Kurosawa and spent the next several weeks doing nothing but watching his films, along with Fellini and Bergman and Truffaut and Eiesenstein and Renoir and before long, I wasn't in college anymore. But I was much better off.


Some great Unseen Movies again this year. I sort of watched Wagon Master, but I need to see it again before I can properly rank it. Orphée I own but haven't watched. I don't know why I don't have The Flowers Of St. Francis yet. It's been near the top of my netflix queue for a couple of years now and there are reportedly great DVDs of it from both Criterion and Masters Of Cinema.

Stars In My Crown
Los Olividados
Stage Fright
Orphée
Broken Arrow
Night And The City
Wagonmaster
No Way Out
Where The Sidewalk Ends
Les enfants terribles
The Flowers Of St. Francis
Scandal
La Ronde
The Sound Of Fury
Panic In The Streets
The Gunfighter
The Flame And The Arrow
Annie Get Your Gun

Movie Roundup: Plumbing Problems Edition

After two weeks of a leaky house, a sick dog and a computer breakdown, let's get back to the roundup. I'll try to get through this quickly.

Two Rode Together - Late John Ford Western with a plot rehashed from The Searchers that was forced on him by his bosses. Suffused with the nostalgia that became so dominant in his last films and acted beautifully by Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark. The film makes The Searchers's anti-racist message much more explicit (to much lesser effect) as we see exactly what happens when the hero brings back the poor kids who had been kidnapped by Comanche (it ain't good). Worth watching if only for the now famous long shot of Widmark and Stewart by the river near the beginning of the film. The ending is great as well. The #11 film of 1961.

Tokyo Chorus - I don't know how he does it, but even in this early silent Yasujiro Ozu manages to combine rather mundane plot elements, decent but unspectacular acting with his distinctive camera style and turn what should be a generic light melodrama into a perfect film, the kind of movie that makes you wonder if there's anything else a film can possibly say about life. Again and again he does this: his films are all essentially the same, they vary in tonal shade but not in effect. This makes them extremely difficult to differentiate in memory (the generic titles don't help), and nearly impossible to rank on the Movies Of The Year lists, but I wouldn't change a single thing about any of them. Ozu, more than even Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Ford, Jean-luc Godard and Powell & Pressburger is the happiest discovery I've made since reconnecting with my cinephilia just over three years ago. The #4 film of 1931.

Our Daily Bread - Depression Era collectivist propaganda film from odd director King Vidor (who made The Fountainhead, the politics of which (if taken seriously) are exactly the opposite of this film's). Filled with mostly non-famous actors and shot in a semi-realistic style, the film nonetheless has a surprising amount of energy: the climax of the building of a canal manages to be almost movingly triumphant. The #8 film of 1934.

Bluebeard - Director Edgar G. Ulmer, as far as I know, preferred to make B movies, wherein he could exercise complete control over his shoddy material. The result as far as I can tell, was a series of pretty lame films enlivened by the director's expressionist style (Detour excepted). John Carradine plays a painter/serial killer in 19th century Paris. Cheap, fun, and often very cool looking. The #15 film of 1944.

Mother Joan Of The Angels - Interesting, highly stylized Polish New Wave film from director Jerzy Kawalerowicz about a group of nuns who believe they're possessed by devils. Mieczyslaw Voit plays the priest who's sent out to help them recover. Shot in a stark black and white, with the actors repeatedly isolated in their own frames, some really creepy images of crazy nuns (the long early sequence wherein the nuns are interrogated and exorcised is a miniature masterpiece) and a series of subjective tracking shots implicating the audience in the chaos, the film reaches a high point when the priest consults the local rabbi (also played by Voit) in a series of head-on medium shots. Either a profoundly moving theological story or a darkly funny joke about the evils of dogma, depending on how you look at it. The #10 film of 1961.

Nightfall - Fine film noir from Jacques Tourneur that was an obvious influence on Fargo. Aldo Ray and his amazing gravel voice star as a hunter who finds a case full of money in the mountains and is pursued by the thugs who own it. More flashily weird than his classic Out Of The Past, but not nearly as twisted as the greatest late 50s noirs like Touch Of Evil or Kiss Me Deadly. The #17 film of 1957.

The Red Balloon - Albert Lamorisse's classic short film about a boy and his balloon is everything its cracked up to be: funny, sad, technically impressive and ultimately, ahem, uplifting. The #7 film of 1956.

Fantastic Planet - René Laloux's pastel-pretty animated sci-fi film about humans enslaved by hyper-advanced giant aliens. The animation is surprisingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's work with Monty Python (the backgrounds, not the cutouts) as well as some of the odder Frank Tashlin Looney Tunes shorts (there's a surreal Porky Pig short in particular I'm thinking of). The plot's hippie hokum, but it's fun nonetheless. The #10 film of 1973.

Speed Racer - The Wachowski Brothers' biggest bomb yet is this adaptation of the popular cartoon series. The film's a mess, with a fairly simple plot endlessly repeated and explained in way, way too much exposition. The racing scenes, though, are stunning: a fast-cutting CGI color swirl leading to a critical euphoria of metaphors and similes. For the 45 minutes of car racing, the movie is terrific, for the other 90 minutes the visual style is a lot of fun (the interminable exposition is often filmed in an endless series of wipes) but it all drags on far past the point of enjoyment. Not even the monkey can redeem the scenes focussing on the misadventures of Speed's mind-numbingly annoying little brother.


Flight Of The Red Balloon - The exact opposite of Speed Racer is Hou Hsiao-hsien's tribute to Lamorisse's The Red Balloon. Juliette Binoche stars as a puppeteer who hires a Chinese filmmaker (she's remaking the Lamorisse) as a nanny to her young son. Befitting its inspiration, the film is the most sentimental of Hou's last decade of work, but his austere, realist approach to plot makes the film anything but melodramatic. Instead, his camera's implacable, drifting, objective point of view finds a perfect corollary in the eponymous balloon and its countless surrogates which constantly follow the main characters around (reflected out of focus stop lights and such) simply watching their lives unfold for a little while. Another masterpiece from the best director working today. The #2 film of 2007.

Keeper Of The Flame - Tonally misfit Tracy-Hepburn film, directed by George Cukor as almost a film noir. The style doesn't work for any of them. Tracy plays a reporter investigating the death of Hepburn's famous husband. It ends with a fun twist, but it's a hard, strange slog to get there. The #12 film of 1942.

Harlan County, USA - Barbara Kopple's verité chronicle of striking coal miners in Kentucky in the early 70s. The subject matter is certainly honorable, and Kopple's commitment to her film and subject is very admirable, but frankly, I was bored. I know it sucks to be a coal miner. I know that corporations exploit their workers and the unions are good. The only thing new here is the oldest thing in the film: the recordings of Appalachian songs that litter the soundtrack are a folk music fan's dream. The #7 film of 1976.

Earth - Aleksandr Dovzhenko's masterful chronicle of the conflict between collective farmers and rich landowners is never less than visually stunning. The farmers get a tractor, the rich guys get angry and someone gets killed. The plot, such as it is, is of minor importance. Instead, it's a beautiful combination of Soviet montage style and the kind of stylized imagery of German Expressionism, much like what Eisenstein did 15 years later in Ivan the Terrible. The hero dancing down the street at night is one of the most haunting images I've scene in awhile. The #3 film of 1930.

The Baron Of Arizona - Samuel Fuller's second film is a step forward from his first, with more flashes of his distinctive noir style. Vincent Price gives a restrained (for him) performance as a forger and conman who almost convinces the US government that he's the rightful owner of Arizona. Fuller shoots in in deep focus, and at least in the beginning shots, he uses it well, with multiple planes of action receding into the frame and objects looming massively in the foreground. It doesn't consistently keep this style, however, looking much more conventional as the film rolls along. Notable is the film's lynch mob climax, with the first hints of the antiracist message Fuller would return to again and again in his career. The #14 film of 1950.

Park Row - A vast improvement is this, his fifth film about the rise of the modern newspaper in the 19th century, journalism being a subject much-loved by Fuller (he started his writing career as a reporter). Gene Evans (from The Steel Helmet) stars as the (fictional) journalistic genius who starts his own paper and introduces headlines, bylines, editorial cartoons, and the mechanized printing press and manages to raise enough money to build the pedestal for the Statue Of Liberty while fighting off the attempts of the rich woman owner of the biggest paper in town to destroy him. The film features some of the most elaborate and impressive tracking shots of Fuller's career, running in and out of buildings and through the crowded street of his elaborate set. The #7 film of 1952.

House Of Bamboo - More conventional is Fuller's color noir set in post-war Japan. Robert Stack's infiltrating the criminal gang run by Robert Ryan to investigate the death of an American serviceman. Apparently a remake of The Street With No Name (which I haven't seen), it's an entertaining thriller (with the nice touch of a barely concealed homosexual subtext to Ryan's character), but it lacks the crazy charge of Fuller's best work. The #12 film of 1955.

Underworld, USA - Another good not great Fuller film, and the final in the mini-marathon I had, watching all the Fuller films that I'd had saved up on DVD or tivo over the last year or so. Cliff Robertson plays an excon out to get the crime bosses who murdered his father. A surprisingly conventional noir. The #16 film of 1961.

Easy Living - Very fine screwball comedy by director Mitchell Leisen from a screenplay by Preston Sturges. Jean Arthur plays a working girl (not that kind) who has an expensive fur coat fall on her head. Under the mistaken impression that she's the mistress of the influential financier who threw said coat from his window, people proceed to shower her with all kinds of expensive gifts, including an audacious art deco hotel suite. Hijinks ensue. More slapsticky than the best of Sturges, but all the chaos is a lot of fun. The #6 film of 1937.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull - There are two things I blame for the decline of Lucas and Spielberg in their entertainment (as opposed to "serious") films in the wake of their high points with The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders Of The Lost Ark: Lawrence Kasdan and ET. Kasdan wrote both of those films, and helped imbue them with the intelligent, dare I say Hawksian style they both share (frequent Hawks collaborator Leigh Brackett also did an early version of the Empire script). Other than the screenplay for Return Of The Jedi, after those films he focused on his own career as a writer/director. His absence is sorely missed in the childish sunniness of Lucas and Spielberg's subsequent films. ET was Spielberg's follow-up to Raiders, and its massive success I believe, convinced them that financial success lied in recapturing that film's audience: 8 year-old children. Subsequently, all the darkness and edge has gone out of their films, to be replaced by cute animals and annoying children. In Raiders, the cute animal turns out to be an evil Nazi monkey that gets poisoned and killed and there are no kids anywhere to be seen (there's a drinking contest instead). Temple Of Doom follows with baby elephants and a kid sidekick named after a Samuel Fuller character. The Last Crusade mercifully is animal-free, but John Rhys-Davies and Denholm Elliot see their grown-up characters from the first film reduced to silly comic relief. The Jurassic Park films are largely about children, and the Star Wars prequels provide not only a child lead for the first film, but a CGI abomination and some of the worst dialogue ever committed on celluloid. In Crystal Skull all the darkness and anger is purged from the Indiana Jones character, he wanders through the film passionless and uninspired, his dominant emotion is resigned bemusement. And CGI critters abound, from the opening prairie dogs that seem to think they're in Caddyshack 3 to some helpful monkeys that teach Shia LeBeouf how to navigate some cartoon treetops. The last act of the film is terrible, totally without tension and making little sense. Great actors like Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone and John Hurt are totally wasted in underdeveloped, pointless and annoying (respectively) parts. And the plot, such as it is, is so full of holes it makes the sloppily constructed, acted and filmed Last Crusade look like a Kubrick film. But still, I found the first 2/3 of the movie enjoyable enough and I had fun with it. My expectations were higher though, if only because Spielberg's matured so much as a director since Saving Private Ryan I'd hoped he'd put this kind of thing behind him and get back to his roots: make great entertainment films for adults (Jaws and Raiders being two of the best ever examples of that). Instead, it was silly, pointless, money-making trash.

Vera Cruz - Entertaining Technicolor Western by director Robert Aldrich, set during the Mexican revolution as two American mercenaries plot to steal the Emperor's gold on the way to the title town. Starring Gary Cooper, an actor I'm warming up to as the years go by, and Burt Lancaster and his shiny, shiny teeth, all three of whom give very good performances: Cooper with his quiet confidence and Lancaster one intensity notch down from chewing up the screen. An action movie filmed more in the conventional vein of Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen than his hysterical noir masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly (the next film he would make, one year later), but the plot's an entertaining series of twists and double-crossings. The #11 film of 1954.

Bunny Lake Is Missing - A twisted little puzzle film from director Otto Preminger about a woman (Carol Lynley) who loses her daughter on her first day of preschool after moving to London. The detective in charge (played with his usual charm by Laurence Olivier) begins to doubt the existence of the child as all evidence of her existence seems to have disappeared. Keir Dullea plays Lynley's brother and Noël Coward provides some hilariously perverse comic relief as her flaming BBC radio personality landlord. A fine combination of police procedural and gothic noir, I like this crazy Preminger so much more than the epic Preminger of Exodus and In Harm's Way. The #6 film of 1965.

Belle Starr: The Bandit Queen - Interesting attempt to make a Gone With The Wind-style epic as a vehicle for Gene Tierney. She plays the title Southern Belle who refuses to give up after the Civil War ends. Caught helping Rebel outlaw Randolph Scott, Union officer Dana Andrews burns her house to the ground. She marries Scott, joins the outlaws and becomes appalled when she learns the bandits are more interested in plunder than restoring the Glory Of Dixie. The plot's totally ridiculous, and Belle never does anything remotely legendary (as it's asserted she is in the prologue). The film is interesting though for it's treatment of race and racism. Either it's one of the most profoundly racist films I've seen since Birth Of A Nation, or it's a subversive act exposing the racist stereotypes of Hollywood films. All the caricatures are there, there's even a character called "Mammie". In one scene after the war ends, there are carpet baggers giving speeches to freed slaves while carrying bags made out of carpet while Belle and her brother look on in horror. During an uncomfortable dinner scene, Belle's brother (an honorable Southern soldier who accepts the surrender) attempts to break the tension by telling a joke that starts "So there was this old darkie. . ." whereupon he's interrupted for some plot-related dialogue. The scene concludes with him returning to his joke, saying the line again with the shot fading to black on the slur. Later on, after he's mistakenly shot by one of Scott's men, his dying words are the third repetition of this line, cut off by his death. Either the director, Irving Cummings (who I've never heard of) is making explicit these characters' racism, or he's blatantly indulging in it himself. Besides all of this, the film is terrible. Tierney's acting is laughably bad and in the final climactic sequence all sense of continuity is thrown out the window as Belle rides in one direction and Scott in the other. In one shot, Belle's in nighttime, followed by a daytime shot of Scott, the Belle in daytime, Scott in night, Scott in day, Belle in night, etc. I hope it's intentionally hilarious. The #16 film of 1941.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - My favorite Apatow-related movie, an emotionally honest comedy about a guy trying to get over a breakup while sharing a hotel resort with the woman who dumped him. Jason Segal gives a fine performance as the broken-hearted composer and wanna-be puppeteer, without any of the unrealistic flamboyance of Seth Rogan or Steve Carrell. That kind of restraint is the dominant mode of this film, more reminiscent of Peyton Reed's melancholy The Break-Up than the zaniness of previous Apatow productions. It's also the only one of those films that doesn't feel like it was 15 minutes too long. Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis make fine, adorable leads, Paul Rudd is reasonably funny as a stoned surfing instructor and Jonah Hill is occasionally annoying as a waiter infatuated with Bell's charmingly vapid rock star boyfriend. The best film I've seen from 2008 thus far.

Recount - Dramatization of the events around the 2000 Presidential election in Florida manages to be just as traumatic as it was watching it all unfurl in realtime eight years ago. An all-star cast gives some very fine performances, especially Ed Begley, Jr and Tom Wilkenson, but also Laura Dern, Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary. Directed by Jay Roach, who did the Austin Powers movies and written by Danny Strong, who played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who both manage to bring a touch of comedy to such a horrific bit of history. I would have liked more emphasis on the awful Supreme Court decision that concluded the election, as the account of David Souter's reaction to it reported in Jeffrey Toobin's great book The Nine is very moving. Hell, let's just have a movie about Souter, he might be the most fascinating person in American politics that no one knows anything about.

RIP Sydney Pollack

Movie Roundup: Early Summer Edition

No, I haven't seen any more Ozu recently, but instead it's summer in movie theatre-land as blockbuster season has begun. For the next several weeks, I'll be watching a bunch of film's hoping at least a couple of them end up ranked higher than 25th on my eventual Movies Of The Year: 2008 list.

Here's some of what I've seen over the last couple of weeks:



My Blueberry Nights - An egregious victim of critical groupthink, as apparently every critic at Cannes last year decided Wong Kar-wai was no longer "cool" and took this opportunity to whine about the flaws of this film as if they aren't as prevalent or more in every one of his earlier films. There's even a nice tinge of racism to the criticism, with repeated references to the "fortune cookie" nature of Wong's dialogue. They of course, conveniently overlook that this film's strengths are, again, the same as with Wong's earlier work: the breathless, dreamlike romanticism of the images first and foremost. The film can be seen as an exploration of what Faye Wong's character in Chungking Express might have been up to in the year between standing up Tony Leung at the California Restaurant and her return as a flight attendant. Norah Jones, bummed over a bad breakup, takes some time before committing to Perfect Guy Jude Law and walks the Earth for awhile, traveling to Memphis and Nevada, where she encounters a trio of film noir characters (David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz in the first place, Natalie Portman in the second). Of the reviews I've seen, only Michael Wilmington's at moviecitynews.com makes any connection to noir with this film, which is odd, considering Wong's co-writer is the crime novelist Lawrence Block. Anyway, by witnessing each of these characters noir adventures, Jones gets over her troubles and makes her way back to Law, a nifty analogue of the healing power of movies if ever there was. The actors are all just fine, though only Strathairn and Portman are close to great (Portman's work here is her most interesting in at least a decade). Chan Marshall (Cat Power) is also terrific in her single scene. The movie's actually a bit like the Cat Power and Norah Jones songs that dominate the soundtrack: moody, romantic and maybe a little slight. For an antidote to the poor and negative criticism of the film, check out Matt Zoeller Seitz's review at The House Next Door. The #6 film of 2007.

Monte Carlo - Part of the Criterion Eclipse boxset of Ernst Lubitsch musicals I've been slowly working my way through. Jeanette MacDonald stars as a countess on the run from a rich dud of a fiancé who ends up in the ritzy gambling mecca where she's pursued by a count disguised as her hairdresser. Some decent, if not totally memorable songs and some fun pre-Code wordplay makes for an enjoyable experience. These musicals are still more interesting historically than as movies, halfway through the box. The #6 film of 1930.



I Shot Jesse James - Samuel Fuller's first film is a solid, but unexceptional debut. It lacks the essential wild nuttiness of his best work and ascribes a conventional romantic motivation for Robert Ford's betrayal of his friend that leaves no room for the mysteries at the core of last year's The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (#6, 2007). Really, it's hard to think of two films that take such opposite approaches to the same subject matter. I preferred the new version.

Talk Of The Town - Cary Grant stars as a factory whistleblower framed for arson who escapes from prison and hides in the attic of the house Jean Arthur's renting to a stuffy law professor, played by Ronald Coleman. Not exactly screwball, it's occasionally funny, but is too long and at times even a little preachy. Coleman actually manages to give a better performance than Grant or Arthur. Not one of my favorite George Cukor films, but not bad at all. The #11 film of 1942.

3:10 To Yuma - A fine attempt at a Western that goes horribly, horribly wrong in the last 30 minutes. Christian Bale is very good as a disabled Civil War vet struggling to make it as a farmer who gets caught up in the capture of Russell Crowe's famous outlaw. Crowe, however, seems to be coasting, and Gretchen Mol, as Bale's wife, isn't in the film nearly enough. The ending is appallingly stupid and undoes almost everything good about the preceding hour and a half. The #33 film of 2007.

Iron Man - Better than any of the X-Men films or Spider-Man sequels, Jon Favreau's adaptation of the Marvel comic is, somewhat surprisingly, a lot of fun. Robert Downey Jr gives the best lead performance in a superhero movie in a long time, if not ever. Gwynneth Paltrow sparkles more than she has in years and jeff bridges seems to be enjoying the taste of the scenery. The final action sequence, however, is lackluster. Whatever its faults, at least Michael Bay's Transformers had the guts to film CGI action in daylight.



Casino Royale - This latest reinvention of the James Bonds series is really quite good. I loved the early action sequences (especially the first, parkour, sequence) and thought Daniel Craig was terrific. The last half hour or so was pretty bad, from the terrible dialogue between Craig and Eva Green to the final action sequence which was over the top and poorly cut and shot. Probably better than any of the Bourne movies, though, and certainly a return to form for the Bond series after the unfortunate Pierce Brosnan years. The #26 film of 2006.

The Importance OF Being Earnest - The Michael Redgrave version of Oscar Wilde's play, directed by Anthony Asquith. Very much a filmed play, but it's a great play and the actors are great with it. A little confused by the ending though: aren't they still short an "Ernest"? the Technicolor, at least on the print TCM ran, is pretty ghastly. The #10 film of 1952.

Our Man In Havana - Tonally, a weird mix between The Third Man (Carol Reed and Graham Greene) and the 50s Ealing comedies (Alec Guinness). I like both aspects, and the mixture is unique even if the movie never really comes together, or even makes any kind of emotional sense. Burl Ives and Noel Coward are really great in supporting roles, but Maureen O'Hara is kind of wasted, her character never really works. Would make a great double feature with I Am Cuba, or maybe The Quiet American. The #11 film of 1959.

Movies Of the Year: Best Of The 50s

As I was updating The Big List just now, I got to wondering what were the best movie years of all-time. In putting these lists together, of course, the big ones jump out (1939 being the most famous), but I've never gotten around to actually ranking the individual years. So I might as well do that now. I'll rank the years by decade, and when I've finished, come up with a Top 10 Years Of All-Time list.

The rankings are determined by considering both a year's depth (the sheer volume of good movies) and height (the greatness the movies). As always, these are limited by the films I've seen from each year. We'll start in the middle, with the 1950s.



10. 1951 - The weakest of a truly great decade for film, 1951 is topped by only two movies I consider truly great (Jean Renoir's The River and Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet), the weakest peak of any year this decade, though it does feature some solid depth, including a few films I know other people like more than I do (Dairy Of A Country Pirest, Ace In The Hole and Strangers On A Train). Other highlights include The Thing From Another World, Flying Leathernecks, An American In Paris, Alice In Wonderland and Tales Of Hoffman. Best: The River. Most Underrated: The Steel Helmet. Most Overrated: The African Queen.


9. 1956 - Four great films from this year, led by John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers, one of my favorite films, along with Yasujiro Ozu's Early Spring, Douglas Sirk's Written On the Wind and Budd Boetticher's Seven Men From Now. It's a shallow year though, with only a few more films I'd call really good. Best: The Searchers. Most Underrated: Early Spring. Most Overrated: Giant?


8. 1950 - A good peak but this year is sorely lacking in depth. Rashomon and All About Eve are masterpieces, and Harvey, Stromboli, Winchester '73 and In A Lonely Place are very god as well. After that are a few good but flawed films. With only 14 Movies I've Seen, this is my least watched year of the decade. Best: Rashomon. Most Underrated: Winchester '73. Most Overrated: DOA.


7. 1958 - Like 1956, this year is lead by a phenomenal top four: Touch Of Evil, Vertigo, Mon Oncle and Ivan the Terrible, Part 2. But unlike that year, there's a number of very good films backing up that great peak: The Tarnished Angels, The Hidden Fortress, Ashes And Diamonds, Some Came Running, A Night To Remember and Equinox Flower. Best: Touch Of Evil. Most Underrated: The Tarnished Angels. Most Overrated: Gigi.


6. 1955 - The most difficult year to rank, as there isn't a single film I'd call a masterpiece, but an impressive depth of very good films. Headlined by Kiss Me Deadly, Ordet, Mr. Arkadin, All That Heaven Allows and Lola Montes, there are at least 17 films from this year I really liked (Street Of Shame, Rebel Without A Cause, Bad Day At Black Rock, The Big Combo, Smile's Of A Summer Night, The Seven-Year Itch, It's Always Fair Weather, etc etc) leaving out at least one wherein I'm of the minority opinion that it's not all that good (Guys And Dolls). Best: Kiss Me Deadly. Most Underrated: Mr. Arkadin. Most Overrated: Guys And Dolls.


5. 1952 - A much better version of 1951, with two masterpieces at the top followed by a decent amount of very good films filling out spots 3-15, and even some films I may be underrating below that. Topped by one of my (and everyone's) favorites in Singin' In The Rain, and the film that even critics who don't like Kurosawa concede is great, Ikiru. Several other very good films, including The Quiet Man, Limelight, Othello, Bend Of the River, On Dangerous Ground, The Life Of Oharu, The Big Sky, and Europa '51 follow. Best: Singin' In The Rain. Most Underrated: Limelight. Most Overrated: High Noon.


4. 1959 - The decade went out with a bang with 6 masterpieces: Hitchock's North By Northwest, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour, Hawks's Rio Bravo, Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Preminger's Anatomy Of A Murder. A few other great films as well, with Ozu's Floating Weeds and Good Morning, Bresson's Pickpocket Wilder's Some Like It Hot and Sirk's Imitation Of Life, which I think is a bit overrated. Unfortunately for '59 partisans, the year just doesn't have the depth past the top 10 that the top three years do. Best: North By Northwest. Most Underrated: Sleeping Beauty. Most Overrated: Ben-Hur.


3. 1953 - Four great non-American films headline this year, with arguably the best films by Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu), Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) and Max Ophuls (Madame de . . .) and Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday. There's plenty of good American films as well: Samuel Fullers Pickup On South Street, John Ford's Mogambo and films by Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, Vincente Minnelli, Howard Hawks and Ida Lupino. 1953 also features what is possibly the scariest, most disturbing film of the 50s, if not of all-time: Ed Wood's Glen Or Glenda. Best: Ugetsu. Most Underrated: The Band Wagon. Most Overrated: Shane.


2. 1954 - 1954 has the highest peak value of the decade with two of my favorite films: my #1 film, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and my current favorite Alfred Hitchcock film (the fifth film to hold that honor over the last 15 years) Rear Window. Not far behind are another great Mizoguchi film (Sansho The Bailiff), Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront, Federico Fellini's La Strada, Billy Wilder's Sabrina, Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder, Joseph Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa, Anthony Mann's The Far Country and William Wellman's Track Of The Cat. there's even some decent if unspectacular musicals: Brigadoon, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers and A Star Is Born. Best: Seven Samurai. Most Underrated: The Barefoot Contessa. Most Overrated: Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto.


1. 1957 - The best year of the decade features the two most popular Ingmar Bergman films (The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries), the second best Fellini film (Nights Of Cabiria), classic films from Kurosawa (Throne Of Blood), Stanley Kubrick (Paths Of Glory), Stanley Donen (Funny Face), Alexander Mackendrick (The Sweet Smell Of Success) and Leo McCarey (An Affair To Remember). Lesser known, but nonethless amazing films from foreign directors Mikhail Kalatozov (Cranes Are Flying) and Ozu (Tokyo Twilight). There's a pair of films from Budd Boetticher, and a pair from Billy Wilder and some fine movies by John Ford, Samuel Fuller, David Lean, Sidney Lumet, and Vincent Minnelli. All in all, I count 22 films I consider worth seeing, more than any other year, with at least a half dozen masterpieces. Best: Throne Of Blood. Most Underrated: Tokyo Twilight. Most Overrated: Bridge On The River Kwai.

Series Of Tubes Of The Day

Still catching up after the vacation (pictured above is the actual faraway beach), I'm happy to have learned that Jonathan Rosenbaum finally got his new website online containing a vast archive of what appears to be everything he wrote for the Chicago Reader for the last 20 years, along with a bunch of other writings. I plan to spend quite a bit of time wandering around there, and recommend the same to anyone with any kind of interest in film.

Song For The Vacation

On Some Faraway Beach - Brian Eno

Given the chance
I'll die like a baby
On some faraway beach
When the season's over

Unlikely I'll be remembered
As the tide brushes sand in my eyes
I'll drift away

Cast up on a plateau
With only one memory
A silver sail on a boat
Oh lie low lie low, li-li-li-li li-li-lo

Movie Roundup: Pre-Overdue Vacation Edition

The wife and I are going on vacation this week for the first time in over a year. Yay! Since the Spring Classics ended, I've been trying to catch up with some of the movies I've bought but never seen. Here's a quick rundown of what I've seen.


Sans soleil - Chris Marker is much smarter than I am. I won't pretend that I understood more than a fraction of this dream of an essay film, but that didn't diminish my enjoyment of it at all. Chronicling some thoughts and ideas inspired by a pair of trips to Japan and Guinea-Bissau (along with side trips to Iceland and Vertigo). An examination of memory, time, film, vision, death, religion and the profoundest mystery of all: cats. I really want one of those cats. The #3 film of 1983.

American Gangster - Much like Ridley Scott's last movie (The Kingdom Of Heaven) it's a fine looking, well-casted film that's way too long and doesn't bring anything new to the genre or film in genreral. It's fine, really, but there's nothing we haven't seen before. The #32 film of 2007.

Tabu: A Story Of The South Seas - Director FW Murnau's final film is a collaboration with director Robert Flaherty (Nanook Of The North (2, 22)) set in Bora Bora (but filmed in Tahiti) filled with non-professional local actors. The plot's a fairly standard star-crossed lovers story, as The Boy is in love with The Girl, but she's been promised to the local god as a Virgin. So the two of them run away and are chased by a scary Old Warrior. Though the plot is as essentially generic as the character names, as with his masterpiece, Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1, 27), it's the technique that makes the material transcendent, though in this case it's more a matter of Flaherty's proto-documentary style and editing than the Expressionist special effects of the earlier film. The #2 film of 1931.


A Story Of Floating Weeds - I find it increasingly difficult to rank and therefore distinguish between Yasujiro Ozu's films. It's a cliché to talk of a director's work as a single long, interrupted film, but if that's true for anyone, it is for Ozu. This is the original, black and white silent version of the film he remade in 1959 in sound and color as Floating Weeds (#6, 59). This earlier film is shorter, more focused on the central plot as opposed to the more comic adventures of the supporting characters, and the setting is mountainous instead of oceanside. In most other ways, the film is the same. So which is better? I really have no idea. They're both great. The #2 film of 1934.

Stolen Kisses - The third of François Truffaut's semi-autobiographical Antoine Doinel films (the first two being The 400 Blows (5, 59) and Antoine and Collette (19, 62)). This one is an endearing, light comedy that follows Antoine's attempts at getting and holding both a job (desk clerk, private detective) and a girlfriend. Thematically quite similar to the film Jean-Pierre Léaud (who plays Antoine) made with Jean-Luc Godard just two years earlier (Masculin féminin (6, 1966)) though entirely different in tone and style. The #7 film of 1968.

The Passenger - Jack Nicholson stars in Michelangelo Antonioni's film as a reporter who fakes his death and proceeds to wander around Europe, hook up with Maria Schneider and not quite get involved in a gun-running conspiracy. Belongs to that group of post-60s disillusionment films along with Two-Lane Blacktop, Tout va bien and Five Easy Pieces. A fair amount of the film takes place in barcelona, I swear in the same hotel the wife and I stayed at 6 years ago. As appears to be Antonioni's signature, the film ends with a flashy bit of awesome filmmaking, this time a long, circular tracking shot. The #3 film of 1975.

Lola - Early Jacques Demy films that is, I believe, the first film set in the musical universe explored in his later Umbrellas Of Cherbourg (2, 64) and The Young Girls Of Rochefort (3, 67), though this one os not a musical, though it does have a great Michel Legrand score. The plot follows a series of recurrences and coincidences surrounding a bored young man as he attempts to woo the childhood sweetheart he hasn't seen in 15 years. The film is dedicated to Max Ophuls, and it's plot does to time what that directors swirling, dancelike camera movements do to space. The #3 film of 1961.

À propos de Nice - Jean Vigo' first film is a documentary short along the lines of Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1, 29), but in miniature and without that film Soviet montage style. Some nice bits, and Vigo has a real interest in unusual faces, not unlike the Coen Brothers. The #5 film of 1930.

Zéro de conduite - Vigo's first, and tragically penultimate, feature is this story of rebellious youth at a boarding school. The kids are bullied and constrained and robbed by their teachers, but get their revenge in the end. Notable, among other things, for its sympathetic treatment of a young homosexual kid. The #3 film of 1933.

The Forbidden Kingdom - Jackie Chan and Jet Li are great, unfortunately, in just about every other way this movie is crap. When Jet Li is the best actor in your film, you know you've got a problem. The director, Rob Minkoff (The Lion King, Stuart Little) not only has no feel for action, he appears to have never actually seen a real kung fu movie. Which is a problem, because his film seems to want to be a Last Action Hero-esque attempt to play with that genre. Instead, we get a cheap knock-off of a Karate Kid knockoff. But Li and Chan are terrific and the film is worth seeing for them alone and some real unintentional comedy from everything else.



Last Hurrah For Chivalry - This early John Woo film, a kung fu sword-fighting flick as opposed to the cops with guns films he became famous making with Chow Yun-fat a decade later is both an excellent contribution to the Hong Kong martial arts films of the 70s and an early draft of some of the same thematic and dramatic tropes Woo would spend much of his career developing variations on, namely the fluidity of good and evil and the friendship developed by a pair of equally matched professional warriors of varying degrees of morality. The #6 film of 1979.

The Amazing Transparent Man - This Edgar G. Ulmer film is as cheap as it gets, a silly tale of an invisibility ray and a bank robber, but the special effects are cool in a campy kind of way. The #24 film of 1960.

Sons Of The Desert - I guess I just don't think Laurel and Hardy are very funny. Maybe I'm not old enough. The #10 film of 1933.

The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek - We actually just finished watching this 20 minutes ago. This Preston Sturges film is a critical favorite (as are most of his films), but something about it didn't quite work for me. I like the film in theory, the premise is great, both funny and resonant, and the supporting cast, as always with Sturges, is outstanding (led by the always great William Demarest and Diana Lynn as sister). But I didn't like either of the leads. Eddie Bracken's stuttering and highly mannered performance was rarely funny, and after a good start, Betty Hutton disintegrated into whininess. But still, the deftness with which Sturges's screenplay manages to be salacious and Code-approved is impressive, as are the sequences at the beginning and the end when the supporting actors (Welles regular Akim Tamiroff among them) really let the dialogue fly. The #8 film of 1944.

Movie Roundup: Post-Classics Catching-Up Edition

Well the Spring series of Metro Classics is over and after its resounding success I get a couple months off before we start up again at the end of July. We'll be running two series back-to-back then, 18 straight weeks until Thanksgiving. Nothing's booked yet, and won't be until after the Seattle Film Festival, but I'll announce it here when it's all set.

During the series I didn't manage to watch many other movies, between working a lot and spending the last month reading the George R. R. Martin series (yes it's good, yes I'm a geek). But here's what I've seen and where each film ranks in its respective year, only one of them is really great:

The Spanish Main: 18, 1945
Texas Chain Saw Massacre: 8, 1974
Rocket Science: 18, 2007
I Am Cuba: 3, 1964
Colossus Of Rhodes: 19, 1961
The Rat Race: 19, 1960
The Music Box: 5, 1932
A Hard Day's Night: 10, 1964
Across the Universe: 16, 2007
Southland Tales: 11, 2006
Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street: 14, 2007
Purple Rain: 13, 1984
Into The Wild: 31, 2007

RIP Charlton Heston

RIP Jules Dassin

RIP Paul Scofield

RIP Anthony Minghella

Movie Roundup: Pitchers And Catchers Edition

Just two days until the first Mariners spring training game!

All About Lily Chou-Chou - A much longer film from director Shunji Iwai, who made the totally charming April Story (#5, 1998). A sprawling tale of seriously screwed up junior high school kids who escape into music and the internet to try to transcend the horrors of their everyday lives. The film is almost oppressively depressing, livened by some truly beautiful images and music, both of the fictional title technopop star (a seeming amalgam of Faye Wong and Björk) and Claude Debussy, from whom said star takes her inspiration. The image quality on the DVD netflix sent was subpar, which is a shame because I bet the film looks as good as anything made this century. The #6 film of 2001.

Helvetica - A documentary about a font that encapsulates the entire history of late 20th Century art in its movement from modernism to post-modernism to wherever we are now (post-post-modernism?) Far more than any other documentary I've seen recently, it tells its story not with talking heads (though there are several of those) but with images: countless shots of the eponymous font in all its ubiquity, demonstrating both the fonts formal elegance and beauty and the ways it has come to dominate our visual landscape. The film does a fine job of straddling the line between the admiration for the font's good qualities (which are also those of modernism in general) and condemning the bland uniformity its near-universal adoption has imposed. More than any documentary I've seen in years, this film changed the way I looked at the world: fonts, fonts everywhere. The #9 film of 2007.

The Lives Of Others - Fine melodrama seemingly overrated by the uniqueness of its setting and the competence of its acting and director. Not a great film by any means, the plot, especially by the end, vaguely resembles Swiss cheese and the visual style isn't especially interesting. I did like it better than Pan's Labyrinth, but I don't understand why Charlie Rose loves it so much. The #21 film of 2006.

Carnival Of Souls - Having watched a number of low-budget horror films thanks to the television's very fine TCM Underground series, I felt confident that what I'd get here was a cheap low-budget scarefest with slightly above amateur visual style and very bad acting. Instead, it's a quite disturbing story that appears to have been filmed by Michelangelo Antonioni disguised with the unlikely pseudonym "Herk Harvey". Seriously, not only are the creepy zombies scary, but the film's resemblance to the films Antonioni was making at the same time, L'Eclisse (also from 1962) in particular, is rather frightening as well. they even seem to have used the same music. The acting is, for the most part, pretty terrible, though the lead even looks a bit like Monica Vitti. The #11 film of 1962.

Passion - The first Jean-Luc Godard film I've seen from the 80s or later, it's more or less the story of a film not quite being made. And like all Godard films, regardless of when they were made, the story is barely half the story. But even more than his early work, Passion is a collection of sequences, of beautiful, investigative shots tracking through recreations of moderately famous paintings, of actors acting up a storm whether we know what they're talking about or not. In the end, it all makes a kind of sense. I look forward to watching this film again and again and again, as there's no way I could possibly comprehend it one one viewing. The #4 film of 1982.

Margot At The Wedding - I liked it and don't see much difference in quality between it and Baumbach's last movie, the much more highly acclaimed The Squid And The Whale (#13, 2005). Both are enjoyable, darkly comic films about totally insane people and their children. Neither is as good as Kicking And Screaming (#4, 1995), a personal favorite of mine. That film, liberated from Baumbach's apparent issues with his parents, seems much more universally relatable than these last two quite specific films (he's denied how autobiographical this one is, but it's really hard to look at this any other way than a film by someone who needs to have a long talk with their mother). Both Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh were very good, but Jack Black was, at times, truly awful (though that may have been intentional). The #13 film of 2007.

Sergeant York - Howard Hawks's fine biopic about the backwoods pacifist who became a WWI hero by killing and capturing an exorbitant number of Germans. Despite the promise of the poster of "Missiles! Jets! Tanks!" the film spends most of its time showing York in the two years before the war, when he transforms himself from a drunken lout to an honest, hard-working citizen and his subsequent religious conversion (to say nothing of the fact that, aside from some rudimentary tanks, those things didn't exist in World War I, belying the WWII propaganda purpose of the film's advertising campaign, if not Hawks's own intentions). The film doesn't really feel like a Hawks film, the setting and story are much more in John Ford's wheelhouse. Gary Cooper, who I'm not often a fan of, is very good in his Oscar-winning role as York, effectively capturing and making believable the characters many transformations. The #11 film of 1941.

Oscarfever! '08

Gonna zip right through this, as I've a Sonics game to watch. So no pictures! Here's how it works: I guess who will win, then I tell you who I would give it to, whether they were nominated or not.

Best Picture:

Will win: No Country For Old Men
Should Win: The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Best Director:

Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Should win: Todd Haynes, I'm Not There

Best Actor:

Will win: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Should win: Cillian Murphy, The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Best Actress:

Will win: Ellen Page, Juno
Should win: Tang Wei, Lust, Caution

Best Supporting Actor:

Will win: Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men
Should win: Bardem

Best Supporting Actress:

Will win: Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Should win: tie between Blanchett and Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Original Screenplay:

Will win: Diabolo Cody, Juno
Should win: Paul Laverty, The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Adapted Screenplay:

Will win: Joel & Ethan Coen, No Country For Old Men
Should win: The Coen bros.

Animated Film:

Will win: Ratatouille
Should win: Ratatouille

Art Direction:

Will win: There Will Be Blood
Should win: The Darjeeling Limited

Cinematography:

Will win: Roger Deakins, No Country For Old Men
Should win: Gokhan Tiryaki, Climates

Costume Design:

Will win: Sweeny Todd
Should win: The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Documentary Feature:

Will win: No End In Sight
Should win: Helvetica

Documentary Short:

Will win: Salim Baba
Should win: NA

Film Editing:

Will win: No Country For Old Men
Should win: I'm Not There

Foreign Language Film:

Will win: The Counterfeiters
Should win: Still Life

Makeup:

Will win: La vie en rose
Should win: Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End

Original Score:

Will win: Ratatouille
Should win: There Will Be Blood

Original Song:

Will win: Falling Slowly, Once
Should win: Does "I'm Not There" or "Can't Leave Her Behind" count?

Animated Short:

Will win: Peter And The Wolf
Should win: NA

Live Short:

Will win: Le Mozart des pickpockets
Should win: NA

Sound Editing:

Will win: No Country For Old Men
Should win: I'm Not There

Sound Mixing:

Will win: No Country For Old Men
Should win: I'm Not There

Visual Effects:

Will win: Transformers
Should win: 300