2012 Endy Awards, Revised

A year ago, I gave out a bunch of awards for the best films of 2012. Of course, due to the vagaries of film distribution, many great films from that year were only released (or became available to me) within the past year. So here is an up-to-date accounting of my 2012 Endy Awards. 

Other years can be found in the Endy Awards Index. Eligibility is determined by imdb date and by whether or not I've seen the movie in question. Nominees are presented in alphabetical order, the winner is bolded. And the Endy goes to. . .

Best Picture:

1. Like Someone in Love

2. The Master

3. Moonrise Kingdom

4. Night Across the Street
5. Romancing in Thin Air

Anderson's dollhouse, DIY, 90 degree angle aesthetic is the ideal match for a children's fantasy of adventure and escape. The need for the kids to create their own universe contrasts eloquently with the sad rigidity of the adults. Some of the other nominees are more mysterious, but no movie this year is more perfect.

Best Director:

1. Johnnie To, Romancing in Thin Air

2. Abbas Kiarostami, Like Someone in Love

3. Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

4. Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom

5. Raul Ruiz, Night Across the Street

Best Actor:

1. Sun Honglei, Drug War

2. Denis Levant, Holy Motors 

3. Tadashi Okuno, Like Someone in Love

4. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

5. Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

In the end, Levant's versitility and centrality to the film edge out Phoenix's remarkably physical, extreme-method performance, and Day-Lewis's uncanny ability to breathe life into an impersonation, either of which would be more than worthy winners in any other year.

Best Actress:

1. Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha

2. Isabelle Huppert, In Another Country

3. Anna Kendrick, Pitch Perfect
4. Sammi Cheng, Romancing in Thin Air

5. Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty

Supporting Actor:

1. Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained

2. Louis Koo, Drug War

3. Yu Jun-sang, In Another Country

4. Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

5. James Franco, Spring Breakers

Supporting Actress:

1. Amy Adams, The Master

2. Samantha Barks, Les Misérables

3. Amy Acker, Much Ado About Nothing

4. Rebel Wilson, Pitch Perfect
5. Lola Créton, Something in the Air

Original Screenplay:

1. Abbas Kiarostami, Like Someone in Love

2. Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

3. Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom

4. Wai, Ka-Fai, Yau Nai-Hoi, & Jevons Au Man-Kit, Romancing in Thin Air

5. Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty

The seemingly innocuous structure of Kiarostami's film, a series of apparently mundane conversations with wildly spinning depths that over time accumulate such weight, such possibility, that builds to a crescendo with the year's most shattering momentum, wins out over Boal's screenplay that is more than just the effective distillation of a decade of history, but a radical (for Hollywood at least) rethinking of character and a fascinating, open-ended exploration of what counts as evidence and certainty in the post-Iraq War world.

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Li Luo, Emperor Visits the Hell

2. Tony Kushner, Lincoln

3. Joss Whedon, Much Ado About Nothing

4. Raul Ruiz, Night Across the Street

5. Alain Resnais & Laurent Herbiet, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

In a year with unusually great films about argument and reason, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, it's Kushner's screenplay that is the best. He had me as soon as the President explained the complexities of the Emancipation Proclamation's post-Civil War legal status in three minutes or less. The later rhetorical flourishes are wonderful (Stevens's ripostes to his interlocutors, Lincoln's powerful clothing) but the trust and clarity and efficiency of Kushner's exposition is truly remarkable.

Foreign Language Film:

1. Drug War

2. Like Someone in Love

3. Night Across the Street

4. Romancing in Thin Air

5. Wolf Children

Documentary Feature:

1. The Act of Killing

2. Leviathan

3. People's Park

4. Room 237

5. Three Sisters

Tremendously great year for both categories. It pains me how many great foreign language films don't quite make the cut.

Unseen Film:

1. Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu)
2. Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap)
3. Life of Pi (Ang Lee)
4. Passion (Brian DePalma)
5. No (Pablo Larrain)

Animated Feature:

1. Brave

2. It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt)

3. Wolf Children

4. Wreck-It Ralph

Animated Short:

1. The Longest Daycare

2. Paperman

Live Action Short:

1. Lovers are Artists, Part 2 (Lu Fang)

2. My Way (Ann Hui)

3. Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang)

4. You Are More than Beautiful (Kim Tae-young)

Film Editing:

1. Drug War

2. The Master

3. Moonrise Kingdom

4. To the Wonder

5. Zero Dark Thirty

Cinematography:

1. Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel, Leviathan

2. Mihai Malaimare Jr., The Master

3. Robert D. Yeoman , Moonrise Kingdom

4. Inti Briones, Night Across the Street

5. Emmanuel Lubezki, To the Wonder

Using 70mm to film interiors and close-ups rather than, as was traditional, expansive vistas and landscapes was a stroke of genius, but The Master's images and the old school inventiveness of Night Across the Street's sepia tones and rear projections and Moonrise Kingdom's crystal-clear storybook aesthetic all come up short versus the "throw the camera on a fishing boat and see what weird horrors and beauties surround us" aesthetic of Leviathan.

Art Direction:

1. Blancanieves

2. Moonrise Kingdom

3. Night Across the Street

4. Resident Evil: Retribution
5. Tai Chi Zero

Costume Design:

1. Django Unchained

2. Holy Motors

3. Moonrise Kingdom

4. Night Across the Street

5. Something in the Air

Make-up:

1. Django Unchained

2. Holy Motors

3. Lincoln

4. Prometheus

5. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning

Sound Mixing:

1. Leviathan

2. The Master

3. Moonrise Kingdom

4. Neighboring Sounds

5. People's Park

Rarely is sound design more important to a modern movie than in Neighboring Sounds. Kleber Mendonça Filho's Recife is connected not by spatial geography, but by the way sounds bleed together in an urban environment, trumping class and racial barriers. But I've got to go with the revolutionary work in Leviathan. We're in the midst of a golden age of sound experiment documentaries, and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab is leading the way.

Sound Editing:

1. The Avengers

2. Django Unchained

3. Drug War

4. Skyfall

5. Zero Dark Thirty

Visual Effects:

1. The Avengers

2. Flight

3. Night Across the Street

4. Prometheus
5. Tai Chi Zero

Original Score:

1. The Master

2. Mekong Hotel

3. Moonrise Kingdom

4. Zero Dark Thirty

5. Wolf Children

I really want to give this to Moonrise Kingdom, for Alexandre Desplat's suite that complements and builds upon the Hank Williams and Benjamin Britten music on the soundtrack. Or Masakatsu Takagi's melancholically triumphant theme from Wolf Children that makes me tear up just thinking about it. But Chai Datana's guitar score for Mekong Hotel, a meandering bluesy acoustic guitar melody that wanders and noodles and swirls back on itself, is fundamental to that film's evocation of life by a river, where past and present, myth and reality fuse.

Adapted Score:

1. Holy Motors

2. Moonrise Kingdom

3. Pitch Perfect
4. Something in the Air

5. Tabu

Song of the Day: Everything Happens to Me

It's a Chet Baker kind of day here at The End. Here he is from Chet Baker in Paris:

Song of the Day: Ladies Auxiliary

Running through my head all the while I was watching Mrs. Miniver was Woody Guthrie's "Ladies Auxiliary".

Song of the Day: Balloon Dance

After watching Rob Marshall's Chicago tonight, I needed to see some Bob Fosse, so here he is with Debbie Reynolds from Give a Girl a Break:

Song of the Day: Rain Dogs

"Rain Dogs" by Tom Waits, from the album of the same name.

1934 Endy Awards

For the end of the year episode of The George Sanders Show a few weeks ago, we did a 1933 year in review, with awards and top 5s and reviews of a couple of films from that year. We had so much fun with it that we're planning to do the same thing this year, for 1984. In the meantime, I figure I'll go through the rest of the years ending in '4' that I can reasonably give awards to, starting now with 1934. In the Endy Awards Index you can find entries for 2011, 1932, 1939, 1964, 1957, 1994, and 1933, along with a bunch of much older, less good award posts. Eligibility is determined by imdb date and by whether or not I've seen the movie in question. Nominees are listed in alphabetical order and the winners are bolded. And the Endy goes to. . .

Best Picture:

1. L'Atalante
2. No Greater Glory
3. The Scarlet Empress
4. A Story of Floating Weeds
5. Twentieth Century

Best Director:

1. Jean Vigo, L'Atalante
2. Frank Borzage, No Greater Glory
3. Josef von Sternberg, The Scarlet Empress
4. Yasujiro Ozu, A Story of Floating Weeds
5. Howard Hawks, Twentieth Century

Vigo was a winner in 1933 for his short film Zéro de conduite. This is a posthumous Endy as the immensely talented young director died of tuberculosis shortly after L'Atalante was released.

Best Actor:

1. Clark Gable, It Happened One Night

2. WC Fields, It's a Gift
3. Will Rogers, Judge Priest

4. William Powell, The Thin Man

5. John Barrymore, Twentieth Century

Best Actress:

1. Dita Parlo, L'Atalante

2. Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night
3. Marlene Dietrich, The Scarlet Empress
4. Myrna Loy, The Thin Man
5. Carole Lombard, Twentieth Century

Colbert also starred in John M. Stahl's acclaimed Imitation of Life this year, but I haven't seen it yet (it just missed the cut for an Unseen Film nomination) and cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra, which I have seen. Dietrich and Loy both won Endys in 1932, Loy in the Supporting Actress category. 

Supporting Actor:

1. Michel Simon, L'Atalante

2. Boris Karloff, The Black Cat
3. Stepin Fetchit, Judge Priest
4. Peter Lorre, The Man Who Knew Too Much

5. Sam Jaffe, The Scarlet Empress

Supporting Actress:

1. Anne Dvorak, Heat Lightning
2. Glenda Farrell, Heat Lightning
3. Louise Dresser, The Scarlet Empress
4. Chôko Iida, The Story of Floating Weeds
5. Yoshiko Tsubouchi, The Story of Floating Weeds

A kind of a make-up Endy for Glenda Farrell as this is the third year in a row she has been nominated in this category, losing to Myrna Loy in 1932 and Ginger Rogers in 1933. The nomination for Stepin Fetchit is highly controversial, of course, as picketers protest that the star actor puts his comic gifts to use perpetuating horribly demeaning stereotypes, while supporters argue that Fetchit's persona is in fact subversive of those same stereotypes. The Endy ultimately goes to Karloff because the Endy Committee are cowards.

Original Screenplay:

1. Jean Vigo & Albert Riéra, L'Atalante
2. Robert Riskin, It Happened One Night
3. Charles Bennett & DB Wyndham-Lewis, The Man Who Knew Too Much
4. King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill & Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Our Daily Bread
5. Yasujiro Ozu & Tadao Ikeda, A Story of Floating Weeds

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Irvin S. Cobb, Dudley Nichols & Lamar Trotti, Judge Priest

2. Jo Sewerling, No Greater Glory
3. Eleanor McGeary, The Scarlet Empress
4. Albert Hackett & Frances Goodrich, The Thin Man
5. Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur, Twentieth Century

1934 is the breakthrough year for the screwball comedy, and three of the best examples of the genre see their screenplays nominated, with wins in both categories. This is the first (but surely not the last) win for Ben Hecht, who was nominated in 1932 for Scarface and 1933 for Hallelujah, I'm a Bum.

Non-English Language Film:

1. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo)
2. Liliom (Fritz Lang)
3. Les misérables (Raymond Bernard)

4. A Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu)

5. Street Without End (Mikio Naruse)

Short Film:

1. The Goddess of Spring (Wilfred Jackson)
2. The Grasshopper and the Ants (Wilfred Jackson)
3. The Big Bad Wolf (Burt Gillett)

Unseen Film:

1. Chapaev (Georgi & Sergei Vasilyev)

2. The Goddess (Wu Yonggong)

3. Le grand jeu (Jacques Feyder)

4. Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty)

Film Editing:

1. L'Atalante
2. The Gay Divorcee
3. The Man Who Knew Too Much
4. No Greater Glory
5. Our Daily Bread

Cinematography:

1. Boris Kaufman, L'Atalante
2. John J. Mescall, The Black Cat
3. Bert Glennon, The Scarlet Empress
4. Hideo Shigehara, A Story of Floating Weeds
5. Inokai Suketaro, Street Without End

Original Score:

1. Dames
2. The Gay Divorcee
3. Liliom
4. Our Daily Bread
5. The Scarlet Empress

Original Song:

1. "I Only Have Eyes For You", Dames
2. "The Continental", The Gay Divorcee

Soundtrack:

1. The Black Cat
2. Dames
3. The Gay Divorcee
4. The Black Cat
5. The Merry Widow

Art Direction:

1. L'Atalante
2. The Black Cat
3. Cleopatra
4. The Merry Widow
5. The Scarlet Empress

Costume Design:

1. Cleopatra

2. The Merry Widow

3. Les misérables

4. The Scarlet Empress
5. The Thin Man

Make-up:

1. The Black Cat
2. Cleopatra
3. The Scarlet Empress

Sound Mixing:

1. Dames

2. The Gay Divorcee
3. The Merry Widow
4. The Scarlet Empress
5. Twentieth Century

Sound Editing:

1. Dames
2. The Gay Divorcee
3. The Lost Patrol
4. The Merry Widow
5. No Greater Glory

Visual Effects:

1. The Black Cat
2. Cleopatra
3. Liliom

Song of the Day: Thrasher

Continuing on with Neil Young, this is "Thrasher" from Rust Never Sleeps


I don't have a list of my favorite songs anymore, but if I did, this would be in contention for the top spot.

Song of the Day: Cinnamon Girl

"Cinnamon Girl" by Neil Young, from Everybody Knows This is Nowhere




Had this stuck in my head all day. Enjoy.