"You don't like me. You really really don't like me," Albert Brooks said after not getting an Oscar nomination for Drive.

There are Oscar snubs and there are Oscar surprises.  When Albert Brooks won four critics awards this year but failed to earn an Oscar nomination, it was clearly a snub.  But, since he had failed to earn a SAG or BAFTA nomination, it wasn’t actually that much of a surprise to those of us who were paying attention.  There are certain indicators that are more important than others when you’re trying to guess what the Academy will do.  The Globes have long been the one the major media sources pay attention to.  But SAG has always been a better barometer for acting and given that all nine Best Picture nominees were also Broadcast Film Critics Association nominees, it’s time people really paid more attention to the Critic’s Choice Awards.

So, I’m going to take a quick tour through the major categories and mention whether I think any of this year’s prominent non-nominees are worthy of either the term “snub” or “surprise.”  So that’s Picture, Director, the four acting, the writing and Animated Film.  I won’t be doing Best Foreign Film because it’s hampered by the idiotic Academy rules.  True, of the Top 20 films all-time in awards points specifically for Foreign Film, five of them were nominated for the Oscar and failed to win (in descending points order: Farewell My Concubine, Raise the Red Lantern, Pan’s Labyrinth, Amores Perros, Ridicule) and for that the general membership can be blamed.  But of those Top 20, 9 of them weren’t even nominated and 8 of those weren’t submitted, so blame the Academy rules (Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days is the only film in the Top 20 submitted but not nominated).

A brief word on what I mean when I talk about points and when I talk about percentages.  Points come from 11 sources: the six major critics groups (New York Film Critics, LA Film Critics, Boston Society of Film Critics, National Society of Film Critics, Chicago Film Critics and the National Board of Review) and the five major awards groups (the Oscar, the Golden Globes, the major guilds, the BAFTAs and the Broadcast Film Critics Association).  Wins are worth double the points of a nomination and all critics awards are wins.  Since there are far more groups than there used to be, I total up all the points in a category and figure out what percentage of the points someone / some film got.  That allows for a better historical analysis.

This not only helps to explain why it didn't get named. It is incredibly god damn true and funny.

Best Picture:

Mulholland Drive has the most points for Best Picture not to earn a nomination, having won four critics groups (NYFC, BSFC, NSFC, CFC) and earning Globe and BFCA nominations.  But Almost Famous had broader support, winning critics awards in Boston and Chicago, earning BAFTA, PGA and BFCA nominations and winning the Globe for Comedy.  It was passed over for Chocolat whose only previous nomination was its loss in the Comedy category to Almost Famous at the Globes.  Almost Famous also won Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, so it clearly had Academy support, just not enough.

This year, there wasn’t any particular egregious snub.  I know a lot of the media is complaining about the lack of a nomination for Bridesmaids.  But it really didn’t have that much support behind it.  In fact, no film had a lot.  The only non-nominee to win Best Picture at one of the six critics awards was Melancholia and it had nothing from any of the awards groups.  Plus it won the National Society of Film Critics, the awards group least like the Academy (of its 46 winners, only 19 have been nominated and only 4 – Annie Hall, Unforgiven, Schindler’s List and Million Dollar Baby have won the Oscar).  In terms of the four awards groups, 7 films received nominations from at least three of them and all 7 were nominated.  The last two (Tree of Life and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) were both nominated by the BFCA, which has become the best barometer for the Oscar nominations for Best Picture in the last decade.  Since 1996, when the BFCA started its nominations, only 6 films have been nominated by the Academy without a BFCA nomination.  Now that there aren’t 10 guaranteed nominees, look to the BFCA as the best guess for what will be nominated.  The only BFCA nominee not to make it in was Drive, which clearly the Academy didn’t go for at all.

The film that probably came the closest was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It had broad guild support (9 nominations), and it did what The Dark Knight did and was thought to never happen again after the Academy expanded the list of nominations – earned guild nominations from the PGA, DGA and WGA but earned nominations from none of those at the Academy.  In fact, of the 8 films to earn those three major guild nominations and not get a Best Picture nomination at the Academy, Dark Knight and Girl are the only ones not to at least get a Screenplay nomination, though, oddly, both had the most nominations in their respective years for a non-Best Picture nominee and both had more nominations than multiple Best Picture nominees.  It might have been the darkness of the story (see the poster to the left, which I got from here (also where I got the poster of The Help, below) and is hilarious), but that might have been countered by the new system.  Even a highly divisive film like Tree of Life or Extremely Loud can get in if you get that 5% of first place votes.

Best Director:

This one’s not even close, of course.  Ang Lee in 1995 for Sense and Sensibility: three critics wins (New York, Boston, NBR), DGA, BAFTA and Globe nominations.  And him not going nominated probably killed the film’s chances at winning Best Picture.  And lead to Braveheart winning, which is even worse.  Next is Woody Allen for Manhattan, who won the NSFC and NYFC and was DGA and BAFTA nominated.  As I mentioned after the DGA nominations, Allen has three times been nominated by the Academy without a DGA nom and here was nominated for the DGA but not the Oscar.

This year, this isn’t really a director who’s snubbed.  Of the DGA, Globes, BAFTAs and BFCA, only one director who wasn’t nominated by the Oscars earned more than one nomination.  That was Nicholas Windin Refn for Drive (BAFTA and BFCA noms) and since his film was almost completely ignored (had it not earned that Sound Editing nomination it would have had 731 awards points without an Oscar nomination, shattering the old record of 534 points held by Scenes from a Marriage) it’s hard to say that he was particularly snubbed.

I'm thinking the Academy wasn't all that comfortable with Michael Fassbender's penis. But that's just a guess.

Best Actor:

In terms of percentage, the biggest snub in Oscar history is Ralph Richardson for The Sound Barrier in 1952.  He won the New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and the BAFTA.  He is the only actor to win the Consensus Award without getting an Oscar nomination.  Until 1977, he was the only winner of the NYFC to fail to earn an Oscar nomination.  He is still the only person to win both the NYFC and NBR and not get an Oscar nom (out of 16 actors).

In terms of points, the biggest snub is Paul Giamatti for Sideways.  He won the NYFC, the Chicago Film Critics and earned SAG, Globe and BFCA nominations.  Giamatti was also the lead in a Best Picture nominee, making it an extra big snub.

Michael Fassbender would constitute a snub, but not that much of a surprise.  He had failed to earn a SAG nomination.  He’s also much younger than Gary Oldman and the full-frontal nudity probably didn’t help his cause in this case.  For Oldman, a key part of two huge franchises in the midst of ending (Harry Potter and Batman), this is a nice pleasure.  As for the Demian Bichir nomination?  Pay attention to the SAG nominees people.

You can't say the Academy hates Tilda Swinton. She won a surprising Oscar just four years ago.

Best Actress:

The biggest snub by far is Sally Hawkins in 2008 for Happy-Go-Lucky.  She won the NYFC, LAFC, NSFC, BSFC and the Globe – Comedy.  Yet, somehow she was excluded from SAG, BAFTA and the Oscar.  Given those previous exclusions (especially since she’s British), it wasn’t that big a surprise that she wasn’t nominated, but it was one hell of a snub.

Tilda Swinton’s snub (and yes, it is a snub) isn’t quite up there, but it is near the top.  Since 2001, there have been five awards groups giving out nominations – the Oscars, BAFTAs, SAG, Globes and BFCA.  Swinton is the only person in any of the four acting categories to be nominated by the first four and fail to get an Oscar nomination.  And yet, I was somehow not surprised.  It seems strange, since she was bounced by Rooney Mara, but something about the dark nature of We Need to Talk About Kevin made me think the Academy wouldn’t go for it.  Indeed, it has more awards points than any other film this past year not to receive any Oscar nominations.

Best Supporting Actor:

Albert Brooks takes the cake here.  He won four of the six critics awards (NYFC, National Society of Film Critics, Boston, Chicago) and earned Globe and BFCA nominations.  But, key of keys, he failed to earn a SAG nomination.  He also failed to earn a BAFTA nomination, even though Drive was nominated for Best Picture.  In fact, of the four biggest snubs, all of them failed to earn SAG noms – Brooks, Steve Buscemi for Ghost World in 2001, Bill Murray for Rushmore in 1998 and Christopher Plummer for The Insider in 1999.  They all won three critics awards and all but Plummer were nominated for the Globe, but it stopped there.  And Brooks was replaced by Max von Sydow, who had no precursors, whereas the others were all bounced for someone who either had at least a SAG or Globe nom.  Prior to the BAFTA and Oscar nominations, Brooks actually was in the lead for the consensus.  Now, Christopher Plummer is likely to sweep the remaining awards.  Everyone sees this as a big sweep, but Plummer’s consensus win will actually be less impressive than any of the last four winners, all of whom swept (or almost swept) the awards groups and won more critics awards.

Prior to Brooks, the highest percentage snub was Robert Morley for Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe in 1978.  He won the LAFC and NSFC and earned a Globe nomination.

Best Supporting Actress:

The biggest snub wasn’t a snub.  That’s the crux of the problem.  Mona Washburne earned four critics awards as well as Globe and BAFTA nominations for her performance in Stevie.  But, here’s the problem.  She won the LA Film Critics Award and earned the two nominations in 1978, when the film was initially released and was Oscar eligible.  It bombed, did nothing and disappeared and Washburne’s awards, though good, were hardly something to scream about.  But, then, three years later, when the film got pulled out of the mothballs and got a bigger release, she won awards from the New York Film Critics, Boston Society of Film Critics and National Board of Review.  But by then, she was no longer eligible for the Oscar.  This makes the biggest nub Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky in 2001.  She won in Boston and Chicago and earned SAG, Globe and BFCA nominations.

As for Shailene Woodley getting snubbed, well she barely makes the Top 20 list.  It is more glaring because of the major nominations for The Descendents, but hardly historic.  It is also not surprising that a television actress moving into films not get an Oscar nomination right away – look at what her co-star Clooney had to do (Out of Sight, Three Kings, O Brother Where Art Thou) before he finally got a nomination.

On the other hand, with her four critics awards (NYFC, LAFC, NSFC, CFC) and 5 nominations (SAG, Oscar, BAFTA, Globe, BFCA), Jessica Chastain has clinched the all-time highest point spot for someone not winning the Oscar.  Of course, she might still, but she’s lost head-to-head against Octavia Spencer twice already.  Chastain just eeks out over Virginia Madsen in 2004 for Sideways (four critics wins, BFCA win, SAG, Oscar, Globe noms) and Amy Ryan for Gone Baby Gone in 2007 (same resume as Madsen).

To me, this kind of sums it up.

Best Adapted Screenplay:

Drugstore Cowboy is the clear winner here of the biggest snub.  It won three critics awards in 1989 (NYFC, LAFC, NSFC), yet got nothing from any of the awards groups.  But the biggest surprise would probably be About Schmidt.  It earned WGA and BFCA noms in 2002 and won both the LA Film Critics and the Golden Globe, yet somehow didn’t make it into the final Oscar list.  It finished second in the consensus for that year above the actual Oscar winner, The Pianist.  But the consensus winner that year, Adaptation, which won four critics awards (NYFC, BSFC, NBR, CFC) as well as the BFCA and BAFTA is one of the biggest nubs at the actual Oscars.  It ties in overall points with Up in the Air (from 2009), but the latter film is the bigger shock.  Up in the Air is one of only five films to win the WGA, Globe, BAFTA and BFCA, but unlike Traffic, Sideways, Slumdog Millionaire and The Social Network, Up in the Air failed to go on to win the Oscar.

The Help‘s absence from the Adapted Screenplay category isn’t that much of a snub – plenty of films have had more points.  But it is rather surprising, given that of all the films to earn as many points for Adapted Screenplay and not get an Oscar nomination, only one of them, Jaws, was nominated for Best Picture.  And, in a year of more Best Picture nominees, The Help was passed over for two films, Ides of March and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, that didn’t earn Picture noms.  How odd is it that The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close weren’t nominated for their Screenplays but were nominated for Best Picture?  Well, since 2004, only one film had an adapted screenplay and was in that same position – The Blind Side.

It’s not really that surprising to me, though.  I didn’t have it listed when I jotted down my predictions before the announcement.  It plays on too many stereotypes and too many cliches.  They got it right rewarding the acting and it was too unstoppable for Picture.  But the Academy did a pretty good job with Adapted Screenplay.

Best Original Screenplay:

Nashville is the biggest snub of all-time here.  It won the LAFC in 1975 and earned Globe, WGA and BAFTA nominations and earned an Oscar nomination for Picture but nothing for its script.  It is one of only three films to earn Screenplay nominations from the Globes, WGA and BAFTA and not earn an Oscar nomination and the only one to earn a Best Picture nomination (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Mona Lisa are the other two).

This year the big film left out was 50/50 which earned WGA and BAFTA noms and won the NBR.  That ranks in the Top 10 in historical snubs, especially as it was passed over for Margin Call, which had no previous nominations.  But it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.  After all, Seth Rogen was a co-star in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and the lead in Knocked Up, both of which earned WGA nominations but were passed over come Oscar time.  Maybe the Academy just doesn’t like him.  God knows I don’t.

All the wonderful Tintin books. Expect a For Love of Books post on them soon. Stupid Academy.

Best Animated Film:

Until this year, there had never been a serious snub in this category.  Every consensus #1 has won the Oscar.  Every consensus #2 has been nominated for the Oscar.  There have been some surprises (the nomination of Shark Tale in 2004, the nomination of Surf’s Up over The Simpsons Movie in 2007, the lack of nomination for Waltz with Bashir, especially since it was nominated for Foreign Film in 2008, the nomination of The Illusionist over Despicable Me last year).  But this year brought a serious snub and surprise.  We already knew that the animators don’t think of motion capture as real animation.  They didn’t nominate Polar Express or Beowulf (not that I’m complaining).  But The Adventures of Tintin was the only film other than Rango to get nominated at the PGA, Globes, BAFTA and BFCA and had actually beaten Rango at the first two.  And Arthur Christmas had been nominated by all of them except the PGA.

The bigger problem here is the Academy rules.  The number of nominees is determined by the number of eligible films.  So last year, when there were five films that absolutely deserved nominations – Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, The Illusionist, Tangled and Despicable Me (I actually would have gone with the latter two over the previous two), only three films could be nominated.  This year, when only two films stand up them all, they didn’t nominate one of them.  So, the Oscar will go to Rango.

Woody Allen directing a scene in Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen made his first Oscar appearance in the Best Director race since 1994 and Martin Scorsese made it four of his last five feature films this morning.

Martin Scorsese making a cameo in Hugo

I only have to add one director to my all-time Oscar Best Director ranking list, since the other four have all been nominated before, and conveniently, Michel Hazanavicus’ last two films, his French spy farces, are available on Watch Instantly on Netflix.

As usual, I jotted down quick predictions for the major categories (except Picture, since we didn’t know how many nominees there would be) and generally went 4 for 4.  Surprisingly, I went 5 for 5 on Best Director, correctly getting the inclusion of Terrence Malick.

So here are the various notes from today’s nominations:

• There are an incredible 41 feature films nominated this year.  That’s the most since 1996 and the second most since 1956.
• This is the third year since they expanded Best Picture.  This year, with the new fluctuating number, they went with 9 films.  But, just like the last two years, we still don’t have 5 films nominated for Picture, Director and Screenplay.  The first year, it was Avatar that didn’t get a Screenplay nom, last year it was Black Swan and this year it’s Tree of Life.
• Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese are tied for third all-time in nominations, with seven.  William Wyler has 12, Billy Wilder has 8 and David Lean and Fred Zinnemann have 7 each.  They are tied for 7th in points (with Spielberg, who wasn’t nominated) and if one of them wins, they will move into a tie for 3rd with Lean, Zinnemann, Frank Capra and John Ford.
• Director, Screenplay, Actor and Actress all have former winners among the nominees.  But of the five Supporting Actor nominees, none have an Oscar and only Nick Nolte has more than one previous acting nomination.  In Supporting Actress, only Janet McTeer has been nominated before.
• But Glenn Close, after earning five nominations in seven years in the 80′s, has her first nomination in 23 years.
• Many prognosticators will point out that Hugo has the most nominations and that puts it in the best spot to win.  But, five times previously, Martin Scorsese had a film nominated for Best Picture.  Two of those times – 2002 with Gangs of New York (1o noms) and 2004 with The Aviator (11 noms), his film had the most nominations.  Once, in 1980 with Raging Bull (8 noms), his film was tied with the most.  Those all lost.  But, in 2006, when two other Best Picture nominees had more nominees, his The Departed won Best Picture and Director.
• Hugo also marks the fourth year in a row that a film has been nominated for the big five technical awards (Editing, Cinematography, Score, Sound, Art Direction) after a five year gap with no film doing it.  It’s the first time Scorsese has done it (Gangs of New York and Aviator both had ineligible Scores).  But, of the previous three only King’s Speech won Best Picture, while Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar both lost.
• The Artist is already in the pole position for the Oscars.  It has won the Broadcast Film Critics and the Producers Guild.  Of the previous 9 films to win both, only Saving Private Ryan and Brokeback Mountain failed to go on to win the Oscar.
• George Clooney is the Bret Saberhagen of actors – saves his best stuff for odd years.  This is the fourth time Clooney has received Oscar nominations (and the second he has received multiple Oscar nominations, but for different films) – all of them in the last four odd numbered years.
• After only twice in the first 29 years of its existence, this is the third time in the last eight years that the winner of the LA Film Critics Best Actor award (in this case, Michael Fassbender for Shame and three other performances) is not nominated for an Oscar.
• Albert Brooks had already become the only person to win four critics award for Best Supporting Actor and not earn a SAG nomination (for Drive).  But he also just became the only one not to get an Oscar nomination either.
• Interesting mix with Screenplay.  In the previous two years combined, with 10 Picture nominees each, only three Picture nominees didn’t get Screenplay nomination.  This year, with only 9 nominees, there were four: The Help, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Tree of Life and War Horse.  Since, of those four, only Tree of Life got a Director nomination, we have three Best Picture nominees with no directing or writing nomination – or, as many as the rest of the century combined (the only other three so far since 2000 are Moulin Rogue, Two Towers and Blind Side).
• War Horse was nominated but Spielberg wasn’t – making him now the only director since the Studio Era to have that happen to him three times (Jaws, The Color Purple).
• The power in Best Foreign Film has shifted.  Prior to 1993, there had never been back-to-back years with no nominee from either France or Italy (hell, there had never been back-to-back years without a nominee from France).  But after happening for the first time in 93-94, it has now happened in 06-07 and 10-11.  On the other hand, while we have three fairly newcomers (Belgium’s first nominee in 11 years, Iran’s first in 13, Poland’s second in the last 30 years), we have two new powerhouses.  After only two nominations prior to 2003, Canada has its fourth nominee in 9 years, and after a 23 year gap between nominations, Israel has its fourth in 5 years.
• A Separation is by far the front-runner to win Best Foreign Film, but be prepared for an upset.  Since Foreign Film was made a competitive category in 1956, 33 previous films have received a nomination in Foreign Film and a nomination in another category.  Of the first 9 (up through 1972), the only film that didn’t win Best Foreign Film was up against another film with multiple nominations.  But of the 24 films since then, only 9 have won the Best Foreign Film Oscar and none since 2004.  The list of films to lose Best Foreign Film while having multiple nominations include Amelie, Pan’s Labyrinth, White Ribbon and Biutiful.
• Rango was the front-runner for Best Animated Film until Tintin won at both the Globes and PGA.  With no nomination for Tintin, it’s safe to say the animators hate motion-capture films.
• The Best Picture race seems to indicate that the BFCA is still the best pre-cursor.  While Tree of Life and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close both got ignored by the guilds and Globes, they both had BFCA nominations.
• With its one piddly nomination for Sound Editing, Drive just barely avoided becoming, by far, the biggest film in awards points history to get blanked at the Oscars.
• Only two nominations for Original Song?  We knew that they couldn’t agree with the Globes, yet again (7th time in 8 years the Globe winner gets no Oscar nom) because Madonna’s song wasn’t eligible.  But only two?  It’s a slap in the face to all the eligible songs.
• It might have happened, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a film like Tree of Life, where both stars were nominated for Oscars, but for other films.
• History says Sandy Powell won’t win Best Costume Design for Hugo.  Why?  Both she and Colleen Atwood have 9 previous nominations.  In six different years (98, 02, 04, 05, 09, 10), they competed against each other.  In all six of those years, one of the two won.  Neither has won an Oscar when not competing against the other and Atwood isn’t nominated this year.  But this nomination does make Powell the most nominated costume designer who wasn’t part of the Studio Era.
• Stuart Craig gets another Art Direction nomination for Harry Potter.  This ties him for 21st all-time in points.  All 20 of the art directors above him are from the Studio Era and he is the only person that high on the list to have a nomination since 1974.
• After a five year gap, John Williams is back with two nominations for Original Score (Tintin and War Horse).  How strange was the five year gap?  The last time Williams went five years without a nomination was before his first nomination in 1967, when he was primarily a television composer.  These also mark his 15th and 16th nominations as Spielberg’s composer.  This also makes the sixth decade in which Williams has earned a nomination.
• Thelma Schoonmaker has just tied Michael Kahn for all-time points for Editing and tied William H. Reynolds for first all-time with her 7th nomination, six of them with Martin Scorsese (including this one for Hugo).
• Woody Allen already owned the all-time records for nominations (15 now) for Screenplay and points (680 now).  This just extends those records.
• Pixar is shut out.  For the first time, they have no film in the Best Animated Film race (twice before they had no film competing) and Cars 2 is their first film since the first Cars not to get a Screenplay nomination.
• It’s the Academy’s last chance to reward the amazing visual effects from the Harry Potter films.  They better do it.
• The Descendents, Hugo and The Artist are in it for Picture.  All of them have Director, Screenplay and Editing nominations.  Only one film since 1932 has won Best Picture without a Director nomination (Driving Miss Daisy in 1989), only three films have won since 1933 without a Screenplay nomination (Hamlet in 1948, Sound of Music in 1965, Titanic in 1997) and no film has won it without Editing since 1980.
• It’s the first nomination for Gary Rydstrom since 2003 and the first for Richard Hymns since 2002, but the two War Horse sound editors move up to second place all-time in the category with 220 points each.
• On the other hand, Rydstrom is also nominated for Best Sound for the first time since 1999.  Also nominated this year for Sound are Andy Nelson (War Horse), Michael Semanick (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Greg P. Russell (Transformers: Dark of the Moon).  Since Rydstrom’s last nomination, the three of them have earned a collective 27 Oscar nominations.  The Sound Mixers like their same people.  There are fewer first-time nominees (4) then nominees who were nominated last year (7).
• Woody Allen has 14 previous writing nominations.  The other 17 writing nominees have 10 previous nominations between them.  Ironically, though, they have more writing Oscars than Allen.  Allen has 2 (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters), while Steven Zaillian won for Schindler’s List, Alexander Payne for Sideways and Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network.
• Even though it got a Best Picture nomination, Tree of Life has still earned almost 80% of its points from the critics, a percentage unheard of for a film with that many awards points.
• On the flip side, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has 206 total awards points and had only 135 going into the Oscars – the lowest amounts for a Best Picture nominee since Three Coins in the Fountain had nothing going into the Oscar nominations back in 1954.

the original Thomas picture from our first post

We interrupt the regularly scheduled movie post (which isn’t finished anyway) to thank everyone who has ever come to the blog.

Thomas and Veronica in our most recent picture, from October.

This means family members, those who come for my movie pieces and those who randomly find us (usually looking for the best novels of the 21st Century).  Why am I thanking everyone?  Well, because this afternoon while I was at work, our blog passed 1,000,000 hits all-time.  It’s stunning to look at it and realize this.  When we started this back in 2007, we couldn’t have imagined this would happen.

The blog went live either in April (our stats begin there and that might have been when our About page went up) or in June (our earliest post is from the day after Thomas’ third birthday, which you can see here).  Our life was very different – one town and three apartments ago.  Thomas is now 7 and a half.

The blog started with updates to the family on what Thomas was doing.  My first contribution was in October of 2007, when I watched Across the Universe, loved it and wanted to write a review.  By the end of 2007, we had 754 hits on the blog.  Total.  That’s less than we get in a day now.  We were on pace to reach one million hits in 1125 years.

We had very few posts through the first four months of 2008.  Then we saw a preview showing of Prince Caspian, Veronica suggested I review it and then, after a year of such suggestions, finally got me to start regularly writing pieces on the blog.  The starts started to go up (238 hits in May, 260 in June), and then in July, I posted something that changed our blog.  I had been doing various posts about book lists and put up a post about my choices for the best books so far this century.  That post immediately became the biggest hit on the blog.  In July our hits exceeded 1000 for the first time and in August went even higher.  The Beyond the Modern Library post itself got over 500 hits that month.  As I started to add more posts, Google started picking up the images I used and the hits went up.  By the end of 2008, we were at 14,305 hits.  Not a ton, but now on pace to reach one million hits in only 27 years.

Then, in early 2009, something remarkable happened.  I wrote a piece that also was linked to on Awards Daily, and that piece got 1300 hits in one day.  One piece, in one day, had just had more hits than we had the whole first year of the blog.  After that, Google really started picking up the pictures and the stats took off.  By October, we were getting well over 1000 hits a day.  I had done my Top 100 Directors series and linked all my reviews on the IMDb.  We were almost to 250,000 hits by the end of the year and looking ready to hit one million in mid-2011.

That got even better in early 2010, especially when my Oscar nomination post with a little bit of trivia got picked up on Google.  I had wisely put a picture of Kathryn Bigelow in it and the morning after she won the Oscar, that post got over 8000 hits.  Things were looking great.  But then Google re-configured how images appear.  From our high in March of 2010 of 57,960 hits, we were down to 20,689 in August (in a weird coincidence, in both September of 2009 and September of 2010, the blog got exactly 21,751 hits.  Either side of the big peak, and exactly the same.).  Posts that had been getting double or triple digit hits in early 2010 were down to low single digits.  But by the end of the year we had passed 650,000 hits.

This past year was mostly pretty steady, with some various peaks.  When Elizabeth Taylor died, my Year in Film: 1958 (with her picture from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) spiked.  The same with Year in Film: 1973 when Romy Schneider died.  But other than that, mostly in the 700-800 range.  I had hoped to reach a million before the end of the year, but stats slid the last couple of months.

So, here we are, at a million hits.  Over 500 posts.  Most of them about film and lit (much more about film).  What began as updates on Thomas has mostly turned into the venting of my opinions on film and literature since I’m not yet published.

In the next year, I hope to get more Thomas posts in.  I plan to finish the Year in Film, Best Picture and Top 100 Novels series and will have to figure out what to do next.  I’ll continue the For Love of Books series, the Best Director posts and do a 3.0 Top 100 Directors update.  And we’ll move, hopefully, towards two million.

THANKS!

Our top 5 Posts:

#1  -  The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture (Ranked)  -  22 February 2009  -  76,772 hits

This is the post that started with over 1000 hits in the first day.  It quickly declined, but slowly built its way up through Google (it has lots of images).  It exploded back into popularity in early 2010.  In May it averaged 263 hits a day.  Then Google changed their images and by August it was down to 5 hits a day.  In 2011, it had barely more hits than it had on its first day.  But, because of the boom in late 09 / early 10, it is still, by far, the biggest on the list.

#2  -  Beyond the Modern Library: The 25 Greatest Novels of the 21st Century (so far)  -  20 July 2008  -  64,871 hits

This was immediately the big hit on the blog.  In August and September of 2008, as the blog went up, it accounted for over 30% of the hits.  Then, it rose slowly as the blog rose quickly.  So by mid 2010, though it was getting up to 50 hits a day, it was accounting for less than 3% of the blog hits.  But, as 2010 went on and the total stats got lower, its stats got better.  Since July, it has been again accounting for over 10% of the blog hits.  It is now averaging well over 100 hits a day and this month is accounting for over 15% of the blog as people continually Google various phrases of “21st Century” and “best books.”  I’ve got the list.  People keep reading it.  And I’ve updated it several times.

#3  -  Great Director #77: Tom Tykwer  -  25 April 2009  -  23,635 hits

This is doubly ironic.  First, all but 262 of these hits are from before August of 2010.  These were all hits from Google, all looking for Rachel Hurd-Wood, because I used a great picture from her in the post.  It sometimes got over 300 hits in a day, and now can’t get that in a year.  Second, he didn’t make my 2.0 Director list, so he wouldn’t even have a post if I did the list today.

#4  – The 100 Greatest Directors of All-Time: The Complete List  -  21 October 2009  -  22,892 hits

Like Beyond the Modern Library, this didn’t sink with the Google change.  It’s because these two were predicated on search terms (in this case “great directors”) rather than images.  So, it peaked a year later and went steadily down for a few months and seems to have hit a plateau.  Hopefully it will go lower as people find the 2.0 list instead, but it links to it, just in case.  This also has, by far, the most comments (103), many of which are unnecessary as they ask questions which are dealt with in the introduction that the post links to.  Seeing as how this post links to 102 other posts (the intro, all 100 individual director posts, the 2.0 list), I keep hoping people will explore from here, but it doesn’t happen much.

#5  -  Great Director #42: Hayao Miyazaki  -  19 July 2009  -  17,159 hits

This actually replaced another post in the hits.  For a while, my 10 Best Animated Films got lots of hits thank to Google searchers looking for Spirited Away images.  It was one of the most successful posts in 2008.  But, after this post went up, all those Google searches went here instead.  It also plummeted when Google changed.  Even though it’s been up for 2 1/2 years, over 98% of its hits are from its first year.

My bottom 5 posts:

note:  I don’t include family posts, because those are designed to be read at the time, not found later.  These are posts of mine designed to be read and have just not been.  They’re not even recent ones.  Many of these have been up for a very long time.  And they’re not just straight lists either, they have content.  Well, maybe someone will read them at some point.

#1  -  For Love of Books: The Little House Books  -  18 July 2010  -  30 hits

My book posts have never done as well.  This one just never took off – 13 hits in the first few days and 17 in the year and a half since.  Clearly my readers don’t care about the Little House books.

#2  -  Ghosts from the Past: A Review of Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From the Sky  -  3 March 2010  -  36 hits

I discovered this book thanks to a chance listening to NPR.  It made me miss Portland (“the place where young people go to retire” – don’t watch Portlandia?  Then start watching it).  I loved the book, had a nice e-mail exchange with the author and even tried to configure the title so Google would find it.  No luck.  20 hits the first month, 16 in the nearly two years since.  And the book didn’t sell as well as I’d hoped at work, even though it was also one of my staff picks.  I’d like people to read the review.  I’d like it better if people read the book.

#3  -  Pummeling Zombies to the Rhythms of Queen  -  25 November 2008  -  40 hits

Perhaps I should have included the subtitle in the title (or, 25 Reasons which Rock and Roll and Film are Beautiful Together), but I didn’t want a really long title.  This also had no images and even the Youtube clips I used are all gone now.  This was actually a re-post of something I wrote for CC2K long before the blog ever existed.

#4  -  new fiction: winter light  -  25 September 2010  -  44 hits

This is the only time I have put my fiction on the blog.  And it’s an abridged version – the version I did at a reading at the Booksmith.  The 44 hits are not an encouraging sign.

#5  -  Possibilities 2.0: A Review of David Louis Edelman’s Multireal  -  9 November 2008  -  46 hits

So, in November of 2008, I put up two of the posts which have the fewest hits.  I also put up my post on the best comic book movie villains and that’s got over 9000 hits so far.  Well, I really had hopes for this one.  First, I really like the book.  Second, David is a friend and I really try to push his books, partially for this reason, and partially for the first.  I think I might have gotten more people to buy his books at the Booksmith then I got people to read my review of his second book (oddly, my review of his third book had almost as many hits in its first month as this one has total, but even though I link to this review, it only got 3 hits that month).  So, again, I would like people to read my reviews.  I’d like it better if they read the books.

Two hardboiled Aussie L.A. detectives: Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce in L.A. Confidential (1997)

My Top 20:

1. L.A. Confidential
2. The Sweet Hereafter
3. The Ice Storm
4. Boogie Nights
5. Jackie Brown
6. Amistad
7. Oscar and Lucinda
8. Good Will Hunting
9. Grosse Pointe Blank
10. The Full Monty
11. Chasing Amy
12. Insomnia
13. The Fifth Element
14. The Wings of the Dove
15. Deconstructing Harry
16. Absolute Power
17. Donnie Brasco
18. Waiting for Guffman
19. Ponette
20. Kundun

A similar line-up to the year before: five great films, followed by six lower **** films, then the rest of the list is filled out with high ***.5 films.

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Director:  Curtis Hanson  (L.A. Confidential)
• Best Actor:  Jack Nicholson  (As Good as It Gets)
• Best Actress:  Helena Bonham-Carter  (Wings of the Dove)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Burt Reynolds  (Boogie Nights)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Kim Basinger  (L.A. Confidential)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Original Screenplay:  Good Will Hunting
• Best Cinematography:  Kundun
• Best Animated Film:  Hercules
• Best Foreign Film:  La Promesse

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  Titanic
• Best Director:  James Cameron  (Titanic)
• Best Actor:  Jack Nicholson  (As Good as It Gets)
• Best Actress:  Helen Hunt  (As Good as It Gets)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Robin Williams  (Good Will Hunting)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Kim Basinger  (L.A. Confidential)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Original Screenplay:  Good Will Hunting
• Best Cinematography:  Titanic
• Best Foreign Film:  Character

True, Boogie Nights finished a distant second in the Top 1000 for the year. But I can't put L.A. Confidential pictures everywhere.

Top 10 Films  (Top 1000):

1. L.A. Confidential  -  #431
2. Boogie Nights  -  #552
3. A Taste of Cherry  -  #702
4. Crash  -  #770
5. Lost Highway  -  #778

note:  Until this post, I have been using Top 1000 listings from a couple of years ago.  From here on out, they are brand new listings.

Top 5 Films  (1997 Best Picture Awards):

1. L.A. Confidential
2. Titanic
3. The Full Monty
4. As Good as It Gets
5. Good Will Hunting

Top 10 Films  (Awards Points):

1. L.A. Confidential  -  2977
2. Titanic  -  2050
3. As Good as It Gets  -  1145
4. Good Will Hunting  -  940
5. The Full Monty  -  922
6. Boogie Nights  -  759
7. Wings of the Dove  -  701
8. Mrs. Brown  -  546
9. Amistad  -  464
10. Wag the Dog  -  371

note:  L.A. Confidential has the second highest point total in history, behind Schindler’s List, and earns 59 total nominations, the most ever.  While only once from 1984 to 1995 did the five Oscar nominees end up with the top 5 spots on the points list, it happens here for the second straight year.  In spite of earning over 2000 points and winning the Oscar and being the second-highest #2 ever (behind The Piano), Titanic has the biggest distance between it and the #1 film in eight years and the fifth-highest gap ever (927 points).  Good Will Hunting becomes the only film to ever earn over 800 points without any point from critics or the BAFTAs.

Titanic becomes the all-time box office champ by a long way - as teenage girls make up most of the audience, this picture is not why, but it's the one I'm putting in here.

Top 10 Films  (Domestic Box Office Gross):

1. Titanic  -  $600.78 mil
   
2. Men in Black  -  $250.69 mil
3. Jurassic Park: The Lost World  -  $229.08 mil
4. Liar Liar  -  $181.41 mil
5. Air Force One  -  $172.95 mil
6. As Good as It Gets  -  $148.47 mil
7. Good Will Hunting  -  $138.43 mil
8. Star Wars  (Special Edition)  -  $138.25 mil
9. My Best Friend’s Wedding  -  $127.12 mil
10. Tomorrow Never Dies  -  $125.30 mil

note:  I saw these 10 films in the theater a combined 14 times.  But 7 of those were Star Wars and 2 of them were Titanic.  I didn’t see Lost World, Liar Liar or My Best Friend’s Wedding until they were out on video.  On the other hand, of the next 10, there are four films I have still never seen (George of the Jungle, Flubber, Conspiracy Theory, I Know What You Did Last Summer).

Top 10 Films  (Worldwide Box Office Gross):

1. Titanic  -  $1843.2 mil
   
2. Jurassic Park: The Lost World  -  $618.6 mil
3. Men in Black  -  $589.4 mil
4. Tomorrow Never Dies  -  $333.0 mil
5. Air Force One  -  $315.2 mil
6. As Good as It Gets  -  $314.2 mil
7. Liar Liar  -  $302.7 mil
8. My Best Friend’s Wedding  -  $299.3 mil
9. The Fifth Element  -  $263.9 mil
10. The Full Monty  -  $257.9 mil

note:  In a bit of irony, the two films I think are the best on the domestic list are replaced by two films that I still think end up the best on the worldwide list.  Of the 41 films to make $100 million worldwide, Good Will Hunting has the lowest percentage of its gross coming internationally (38.7%) and ends up 16th on the worldwide list.  But The Fifth Element makes 75% of its money internationally and The Full Monty makes a whopping 82% worldwide (as does Bean, which misses the list by only $6 million.  For any film after 1989 (when Box Office Mojo begins their Worldwide Box Office list), The Full Monty has the lowest domestic gross ($46.0 million) of any film in the Top 10 and it is the only film since 1989 to make the Top 10 Worldwide list while earning less than 20% of its gross in the States.

AFI Top 100:

• Titanic  -  #83  (2007)

note:  For its list of 400 initial candidates, AFI included Titanic, As Good as It Gets, Boogie Nights, Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential.  For a sixth choice, rather than go with The Ice Storm or Jackie Brown or Amistad, AFI decided to go with Austin Powers.  Go figure.

Ebert Great Films:

• L.A. Confidential

Nighthawk Golden Globes:

Drama:

• Best Picture:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Director:  Curtis Hanson  (L.A. Confidential)
• Best Actor:  Ian Holm  (The Sweet Hereafter)
• Best Actress:  Cate Blanchett  (Oscar and Lucinda)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Kevin Spacey  (L.A. Confidential)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Julianne Moore  (Boogie Nights)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Original Screenplay:  Boogie Nights

Comedy:

• Best Picture:  Jackie Brown
• Best Director:  Quentin Tarantino  (Jackie Brown)
• Best Actor:  Jack Nicholson  (As Good as It Gets)
• Best Actress:  Helen Hunt  (As Good as It Gets)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Robert Forster  (Jackie Brown)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Joan Cusack  (In and Out)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  Jackie Brown
  
• Best Original Screenplay:  Grosse Pointe Blank
  

I actually had passes to see Oscar and Lucinda and I couldn't keep my eyes off Cate Blanchett. It's the first of several Nighthawk Awards for her.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Director:  Curtis Hanson  (L.A. Confidential)
• Best Actor:  Ian Holm  (The Sweet Hereafter)
• Best Actress:  Cate Blanchett  (Oscar and Lucinda)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Kevin Spacey  (L.A. Confidential)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Julianne Moore  (Boogie Nights)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Original Screenplay:  Boogie Nights
• Best Editing:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Cinematography:  L.A. Confidential
• Best Original Score:  Amistad
• Best Sound:  Titanic
• Best Art Direction:  Titanic
• Best Visual Effects:  The Fifth Element
• Best Sound Editing:  The Fifth Element
• Best Costume Design:  Titanic
• Best Makeup:  The Fifth Element
• Best Original Song:  “The Sweet Hereafter” from The Sweet Hereafter
• Best Animated Film:  Perfect Blue
  
• Best Foreign Film:  Princess Mononoke
  

Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke - submitted but not nominated, yet clearly the best Foreign Film of 1997

Top 10 Foreign Films:

1. Princess Mononoke
2. Insomnia
3. Men With Guns
4. Abre Los Ojos
5. Character
6. Live Flesh
7. Ma Vie en Rose
8. The Thief
9. Winter Sleepers
10. Beyond Silence

note:  Character actually wins the Oscar while The Thief and Beyond Silence are both nominated.  Princess Mononoke and Ma Vie en Rose are both submitted to the Academy but fail to earn nominations (I have Princess Mononoke as the best film submitted but not nominated between 1966 (Persona) and 2002 (City of God)).  Live Flesh and Abre Los Ojos are both passed over by Spain for Secrets of the Heart which is weaker than either, but earns an Oscar nomination.  Winter Sleepers, the first film from Tom Tykwer, is passed over for Beyond Silence while Insomnia isn’t submitted by Sweden.  Men with Guns is actually a Spanish language film made by an American director, John Sayles.

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  Grosse Pointe Blank
• Best Line (comedic):  “What’s a nubian?”  Jason Lee in Chasing Amy
• Best Line (dramatic):  “I didn’t know you liked the Del-fonics.”  Samuel L. Jackson in Jackie Brown
• Best Opening:  Boogie Nights
• Best Ending:  The Full Monty
• Best Scene:  the “shared moment” between Banky and Holden in Chasing Amy
• Best Use of a Song (comedic):  “Hot Stuff” in The Full Monty
• Best Use of a Song (dramatic):  “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind (This Time)” in Jackie Brown
• Best Soundtrack:  Grosse Pointe Blank
• Best Ensemble:  Boogie Nights
• Funniest Film:  Grosse Pointe Blank
• Most Over-Rated Film:  Crash
• Worst Film:  The Saint
• Worst Sequel:  Batman and Robin
• Worst Line:  “It’s OK because I got to have you.”  Dina Meyer’s dying words in Starship Troopers
• Worst Ensemble:  Starship Troopers
• Performance to Fall in Love With:  Laura Linney in Absolute Power
• Sexiest Performance:  Cate Blanchett in Oscar and Lucinda
• Watch the Film, SKIP the Book:  Wings of the Dove  /  The Ice Storm
• Coolest Performance:  Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential
• Best Trailer:  Grosse Pointe Blank
• Best Original Song from a Bad Film:  “The End is the Beginning is the End”  from Batman and Robin
• Best Animated Character Performance:  James Woods in Hercules

Film History:  Titanic, the most expensive film ever made, also becomes the biggest box office champion of all-time, shattering the domestic mark ($600 million) and becoming the first film to earn over $1 billion worldwide.  Sunday wins the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance while In the Company of Men wins the Filmmaker’s Trophy.  The Apostle wins Best Picture, Director and Actor at the Independent Spirit Awards.  The Cannes Film Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary and the Palme d’Or is shared by The Eel and A Taste of Cherry.  Fred Zinnemann dies in March, Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart on back-to-back days in July and Toshiro Mifune in December.  Star Wars is re-released in its Special Edition, followed by The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; the three films together gross $250 million.  Steven Spielberg tries to repeat his 1993 double-whammy of box office and Oscars, but Lost World doesn’t do nearly as well as Jurassic Park and Amistad only manages 4 Oscar nominations and none for Spielberg himself.

Academy Awards:  Titanic ties the all-time record for nominations (14) and Oscars (11) and ties for sixth place all-time in points (625) – the most since 1959.  It is the second film in a row and sixth overall to win all five major technical Oscars.  It is the first Best Picture to get nominated for Best Song since 1976 and the first to win since 1958.  But it is also the first Best Picture winner without a Screenplay nomination since 1965.  Because of that, for the third year in a row the Best Picture winner fails to win Best Screenplay – the only time other than 1947-49 that happened three years in a row.  All five Best Picture nominees win an Oscar and every feature film Oscar except Makeup and Foreign Film goes to a Best Picture nominee.  The five nominees combine for 43 nominations (the most since 1977) and 18 Oscars (the most ever – still unbroken).  The Netherlands wins its third Foreign Film Oscar – making it the only country with less than 14 nominations to have won 3 Oscars (at this point they have 5, they will later go up to 7).  As Good as It Gets becomes the 7th film (and last to date) to win Best Actor and Actress.  After a stretch of 7 years where only 1 film released in December wins Best Picture, Titanic becomes the first of 6 December releases in the next eight years to win Best Picture.  Titanic is the first 20th Century-Fox film to earn a Best Picture nomination since 1988 and the first to win Best Picture since 1971.  Woody Allen earns his record 13th writing nomination.  With the dominance by Titanic, only 7 films win feature film Oscars – the lowest total since 1981.  And of the 37 nominated films, only 18.92% win an Oscar – the lowest percentage since 1944.

This was the third time in eight years where there was a clear divide between the critics and the awards groups, and the Oscars went with the awards groups.  In 1990, there was GoodFellas vs. Dances with Wolves, in 94 it was Pulp Fiction vs. Forrest Gump and here it was L.A. Confidential vs. Titanic.  Not much of a surprise, but I’m totally with the critics on all three occasions.  In a sense, Titanic was a triumph of Hollywood and therefore earned Hollywood’s awards, while L.A. Confidential was a triumph of art and therefore was admired by those who love film as art.  So, the biggest film in history wins 11 Oscars (tying a record) out of its 14 nominations (also tying a record) – though, because it didn’t win acting or writing awards, falls short of the biggest points by quite a bit.  And I understand (though massively disagree) with its Best Picture win.  And the Academy at least did itself credit by not nominating the wretched screenplay and by giving L.A. Confidential the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.  And there were other areas where the Academy screwed up in this year.  Only 1 nomination for Jackie Brown?  Only one for Oscar and Lucinda?  None for The Ice Storm?  Those three brilliant films combined for as many Oscar nominations as Con Air.  And three of my acting winners (Holm, Blanchett, Spacey) fail to earn nominations.  But they got some things right as well.  They nominated Deconstructing Harry for Best Original Screenplay after the WGA passed it over.  They recognized the brilliance in The Sweet Hereafter and rewarded it with two major nominations – Director and Adapted Screenplay.

• Worst Oscar:  Best Editing for Titanic
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Original Song for “Go the Distance” from Hercules
  
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Supporting Actor for Kevin Spacey from L.A. Confidential
  
• Worst Oscar-Nominated Film:  Starship Troopers
  
• Best Eligible Film with No Oscar Nominations:  The Ice Storm *
  
• Best Foreign Film Submitted But Not Nominated:  Princess Mononoke
• Worst Oscar Category:  Best Editing
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Costume Design
• Oscar / Nighthawk Award Agreements:  Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, Sound, Art Direction, Costume Design
• * footnote:  If you go here, you’ll see I list The Ice Storm as the eighth best film not to earn any Oscar nominations and the best since the sixties.

Golden Globes:  Titanic earns the most wins (4) since 1989, the most nominations (8) since 1991 and the most points (400) since 1985.  With Picture, Actor and Actress wins and six total nominations, As Good as It Gets has the most points for a Comedy (355) since 1985.  As Good as It Gets and Titanic are both nominated for the big 5 awards – the first time since 1979 that a film is nominated for the big 5 in both Comedy and Drama.  The Actor – Comedy winner (Jack Nicholson) goes on to win the Oscar (the first time since 1977) and the Actress – Comedy winner (Helen Hunt) goes on to win the Oscar (the first time since 1989) – the only time other than 1964 and 1977 when both would go on to win the Oscar.  L.A. Confidential also earns Picture, Director and Screenplay nominations but only wins Supporting Actress.  Good Will Hunting is nominated for Picture and wins Screenplay while Amistad and The Boxer are both nominated for Picture and Director.  In a year with Jackie Brown (Actor, Actress nominations), Chasing Amy (Actress nomination), Grosse Pointe Blank and Deconstructing Harry (no nominations for either), the Globes nominate My Best Friend’s Wedding for Best Picture – Comedy.

Awards:  L.A. Confidential crushes everything in the critics awards.  It beat GoodFellas record by amassing 1525 points.  It won all six Best Picture awards, all six Best Director awards, all five Best Screenplay awards (the NBR didn’t have one) and even added Best Cinematography from LA and Best Supporting Actor for Kevin Spacey from Boston.  In a very distant second was Boogie Nights, winning Supporting Actor in New York and Chicago and both supporting awards from the LA and National Society of Film Critics.  Titanic would have to make do with the Art Direction awards in LA and the Cinematography and Score awards in Chicago.  Meanwhile, Good Will Hunting and The Full Monty become two of the highest films in terms of total points to not win any critics awards.

Titanic sets new guild records for nominations (13), wins (10) and points (675).  Within five years, all of those records will have been broken.  Titanic loses the SAG Ensemble, Actress and the WGA, while winning the PGA, DGA, Supporting Actress at SAG, ACE (Editing), ASC (Cinematography), CAS (Sound), ADG (Art Direction) and three awards at the MPSE (Sound Editing).  L.A. Confidential is nominated for all the same awards (even all three MPSE) except Actress but only wins Supporting Actress (a tie) and Adapted Screenplay at the WGA.  All five eventual Oscar nominees are nominated for the WGA (with As Good as It Gets winning Original).  Four of the five get the PGA and DGA (with Full Mounty bounced in each for Amistad) and SAG Ensemble (As Good as It Gets bounced for Boogie Nights).  As Good as It Gets gets three SAG nominations and wins Actor and Actress while Good Will Hunting gets 4 SAG noms and wins Supporting Actor.  The Full Monty only gets the Ensemble nomination but is the winner.  Amistad does the best of the non-Best Picture nominees, earning PGA, DGA, Supporting Actor, ASC and ADG nominations, though it doesn’t win any of them.

For the first time since 1991 and the last time to date, two Oscar Best Picture nominees fail to earn any BAFTA nominations: Good Will Hunting and As Good as It Gets.  Romeo + Juliet becomes the first film since 1992 to win Director and Screenplay but not Picture and the only film to ever win Director and Screenplay without a Picture nomination.  Both Screenplay winners (Nil by Mouth wins Original) fail to earn Picture nominations – the first time this has happened since 1988 (though Nil by Mouth does win British Picture).  Titanic goes 0 for 10 – the first Oscar winner to go winless at the BAFTAs since Dances with Wolves and ties the record set by Women in Love, Ryan’s Daughter and All the President’s Men for most nominations without a win.  L.A. Confidential leads the way with 12 nominations, including Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor and Actress, but only wins Editing and Sound.  The Full Monty is second with 11 nominations, including Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and Actor and wins Picture, Actor and Supporting Actor (though loses British Picture to a film not nominated for Picture).  Mrs. Brown is the final Picture nominee and wins Best Actress but fails to earn a Director nomination among its 8 noms.

The Broadcast Film Critics continued with 10 Best Picture nominees, but just winners in all other major categories.  The 10 nominees included all five eventual Oscar nominees as well as Wings of the Dove, Amistad, Boogie Nights, Donnie Brasco and Wag the Dog.  L.A. Confidential won Picture and Adapted Screenplay but no other film won more than one award, with the awards spread out across Titanic (Director), Good Will Hunting (Original Screenplay), As Good as It Gets (Actor), Wings of the Dove (Actress), Amistad (Supporting Actor), In and Out (Supporting Actress) and Shall We Dance (Foreign Film).

Best Director:  Like Tarantino in 1994, Curtis Hanson wins all six critics awards, but loses the DGA, Oscar, BAFTA and Globe.  Still, it is enough for a dominant consensus win (and he easily wins the Nighthawk Award).  James Cameron comes in second, winning the DGA, Oscar, Globe, BFCA and Satellite (and earns a BAFTA nom).  Finishing a distant third is Gun Van Sant for Good Will Hunting (Oscar, DGA, Satellite noms), followed by Spielberg for Amistad (DGA, Globe, Satellite noms) and Peter Catteneo for The Full Monty (Oscar and BAFTA noms).  My own top 5 are Hanson, Paul Thomas Anderson for Boogie Nights (Satellite nom), Atom Egoyan for The Sweet Hereafter (Oscar nom), Ang Lee for The Ice Storm and Quentin Tarantino for Jackie Brown.  My 6 through 10 are Spielberg, Gillian Armstrong for Oscar and Lucinda, Martin Scorsese for Kundun, Van Sant, and then Cameron.

Best Adapted Screenplay:  L.A. Confidential, one of the best ever adaptations (read the novel and the script and see what a marvelous job they did) runs away with the consensus.  It takes all five existing critics awards (the NBR wouldn’t start giving it out until the next year), the Oscar and the WGA.  It loses the Globe to Good Will Hunting and, rather stunningly, the BAFTA to Romeo + Juliet.  It is followed in the consensus list by Wag the Dog (Oscar, WGA, BAFTA, Globe noms), Wings of the Dove (Oscar, WGA, BAFTA noms), Donnie Brasco (Oscar, WGA noms) and The Ice Storm (WGA, BAFTA noms).  My own list is L.A. Confidential, The Sweet Hereafter (Oscar nom), The Ice Storm, Jackie Brown and Oscar and Lucinda (which is an interesting list, in that not only are they all adapted from novels, but I have read all five novels and all five films are greatly superior to the source novels – the same of which is true for my #6 on the list).  My 6 through 10 are Wings of the Dove, Wag the Dog, The Winter Guest, Donnie Brasco and Absolute Power.

Best Original Screenplay:  Good Will Hunting wins the Oscar, Globe, BFCA and consensus.  But As Good as It Gets wins the WGA over Good Will Hunting, while earning Oscar and Globe noms.  The BAFTA’s ignore both films.  Their award goes to Nil by Mouth which finishes fifth in the consensus because it gets nothing else.  Tied for third are WGA, Oscar and BAFTA losers The Full Monty and Boogie Nights.  Boogie Nights, though, does win the Nighthawk, followed by Good Will Hunting, Grosse Pointe Blank, Oscar nominee Deconstructing Harry and The Full Monty.  Titanic, in spite of it ridiculous script, earns WGA and Globe nominations, but thankfully doesn’t earn an Oscar nomination and misses out on the consensus top 5.  Don’t even think about asking if it got a Nighthawk mention.  My 6 through 10 are Chasing Amy, As Good as It Gets, Waiting for Guffman, Ponette and In and Out.

Best Actor:  Jack Nicholson wins his third consensus award for Best Actor and a third Oscar (though one was for supporting where he also has two consensus awards) for As Good as It Gets.  He also wins the NBR, SAG, BFCA and Globe – Comedy.  He’s followed on the list by Robert Duvall (LAFC, NSFC, CFC wins, SAG and Oscar noms) for The Apostle, Peter Fonda for Ulee’s Gold (NYFC, Globe – Drama wins, SAG and Oscar noms), Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting (SAG, Oscar, Globe noms), and Dustin Hoffman for Wag the Dog (SAG, Oscar, Globe – Comedy noms), making Damon the youngest of the five by over thirty years.  My own list is headed by Ian Holm, for his magnificent, yet unrewarded performance in The Sweet Hereafter.  He’s followed by Nicholson, Hoffman, the also unrewarded Ralph Fiennes for Oscar and Lucinda and Damon.  My 6 through 10 are Kevin Kline for The Ice Storm, Globe nominee Daniel Day-Lewis for The Boxer, Stellan Skarsgaard for Insomnia, Clint Eastwood as the burglar on the run in Absolute Power and Djimon Honsou for his Golden Globe nominated performance in Amistad.  I was very underwhelmed by The Apostle on every level and thought that Fonda earned his plaudits mainly for making a nice comeback rather than a great performance.

Helena Bonham-Carter finally starts winning awards for her performance in Wings of the Dove (1997)

Best Actress:  Helena Bonham-Carter easily wins the consensus, taking home three critics awards (LA, Boston, NBR) and the BFCA, while earning SAG, Oscar, BAFTA and Globe noms.  Judi Dench comes in a distant second for Mrs. Brown, winning the Globe, BAFTA and Chicago and earning SAG and Oscar noms.  Helen Hunt wins the Oscar, SAG and Globe – Comedy for As Good as It Gets and comes in third.  The remaining two spots are taken by Julie Christie for Afterglow (NYFC and NSFC wins, Oscar nom) and Kate Winslet for Titanic (SAG, Oscar, Globe noms).  My own list is bookended by performances that got no nominations whatsoever: the luminous Cate Blanchett in Oscar and Lucinda and the wonderful Joan Allen as the suffering wife in The Ice Storm.  In between, I have Bonham-Carter, Hunt and Dench.  My 6 through 10 are SAG and Globe – Comedy nominee Pamela Grier for Jackie Brown, Christie, Emma Thompson in The Winter Guest, Winslet and Emily Watson in The Boxer.

Best Supporting Actor:  Burt Reynolds cruises to the consensus award for Boogie Nights, winning four critics awards (NYFC, LAFC, NSFC, CFC) and the Globe and earning SAG, Oscar and BAFTA nominations.  He’s followed by SAG and Oscar winner (and Globe nominee) Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting, NBR winner (and SAG, Oscar and Globe nominee) Greg Kinnear for As Good as It Gets, BFCA winner (and SAG, Oscar and Globe nominee) Anthony Hopkins for Amistad and BSFC winner (and BAFTA nominee in the lead) Kevin Spacey for L.A. Confidential.  Spacey, a huge Oscar omission, is my own winner, followed by Reynolds, Williams, Oscar nominee Robert Forster (Jackie Brown) and Hopkins.  My 6 through 10 are the subtle performance from Ed Harris as the shy cop in Absolute Power, Kinnear, BAFTA winner Tom Wilkinson for The Full Monty, the wonderfully evil James Cromwell in L.A. Confidential and SAG and BAFTA nominee Billy Connolly for Mrs. Brown.

Best Supporting Actress:  Kim Basinger wins the consensus by winning the Oscar, SAG and Globe and earning a BAFTA nomination (for lead).  It still boggles my mind as I still see her as the weak link in the film.  Julianne Moore finishes just behind, winning the LAFC and NSFC while earning Oscar, SAG and Globe noms.  She also, by a long way, wins the Nighthawk (I think it’s one of the best supporting performances ever).  Joan Cusack finishes third, winning the BFCA and NYFC for In and Out, as well as earning Oscar and Globe noms.  The consensus list is finished with Gloria Stuart (Titanic – SAG win, Oscar and Globe noms) and Sigourney Weaver (The Ice Storm – BAFTA win, Globe nom).  My own list, after Moore, is Weaver, Cusack, Sarah Polley for The Sweet Hereafter (BSFC win) and Christina Ricci for The Ice Storm.  My 6 through 10 are Anne Heche (Wag the Dog), Heche again (Donnie Brasco – she won the NBR for both roles), Judy Davis (Absolute Power), Phyllida Law (The Winter Guest) and Minnie Driver (SAG and Oscar nominee for Good Will Hunting).  I still have Basinger several slots down, below Judy Davis for Deconstructing Harry, Joan Cusack for Grosse Pointe Blank and Allison Elliot for Wings of the Dove.

John Cusack proves he's not just a good actor, but also a rather funny writer with Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

Under-appreciated Film of 1997:

Grosse Pointe Blank  (dir. George Armitage)

I can understand how the Academy passed it up.  First of all, it was released in April.  Secondly, it was not exactly an Oscar type of cast – only Dan Aykroyd had ever been nominated and that was for a Best Picture role that swept him in (although, ironically, both Minnie Driver and Joan Cusack would be nominated this same year for other films).  Third, it was a comedy; not just a comedy, but a very dark comedy.  But the Golden Globes have an entire section for comedies.  And even though this earns Nighthawk Golden Globe nominations in all seven categories (and wins Best Original Screenplay – Comedy), it was passed over by the actual Globes in favor of such films as Liar Liar and My Best Friend’s Wedding.

Grosse Pointe Blank is one of the funniest films around – certainly the funniest of 1997.  It also has one of the best soundtracks in film history.  These two things work together from the opening scenes – Martin Blank staring down the gunsight at his target, his secretary reading to him from his high school reunion letter and Johnny Nash singing “I Can See Clearly Now” in the background.  Things go well at first, then go very badly and that is how things will go for the course of the film.

We get most of what we need to know in those opening scenes – the calm, collected Martin just trying to do his job, the crazed Grocer, played with zeal by Dan Aykroyd and the very offbeat Joan Cusack as the very amusing secretary (the way she bounces back and forth later in the film between one phone call where she cusses out the arms dealer and the other one where she explains to her sister how to make soup is great).  What we don’t have yet is the romance.

The romance comes once Martin gets to Grosse Pointe, Michigan and is forced to deal with the images and people of his past.  When Martin explains to them all that he is a professional killer, the reactions are priceless, ranging from “Good for you.  It’s a growth industry.” to “Do you have to do post-graduate work for that?”  He’s come back for his 10th high school reunion (“I find it interesting to think that you came from somewhere,” his assistant says to him), but really it’s to see Debbie, the girl he abandoned on prom night, the one true love of his life.

The chemistry comes alive as soon as Martin sees Debbie.  They are alive in each other and it shows in both Cusack and Driver’s performances.  They are able to play off each other with surprising ease, not surprising as Debbie is in radio, but Martin is surprisingly quick-witted for a lone assassin (we do see him with wonderful chemistry with his secretary, but that’s to be expected since he interacts so much with her and because she’s played by his sister Joan).

In a sense, Grosse Pointe Blank is loved by so many people my age because it actually has the same kind of formula of success that Clerks and Trainspotting had.  It is incredibly funny, it is dark, smart, witty, hip and it has one hell of a soundtrack.  That the members of the Globes go for stale Hollywood formula laughs rather than something genuinely funny and enjoyable is their loss.  Don’t let it be yours as well.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Haruki Murakami's masterpiece

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle  (ねじまき鳥クロニクル Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru)

• Author:  Haruki Murakami
• Rank:  #25
• Published:  1995; 1997 (English translation)
• Publisher:  Shinchosha; Random House (English translation)
• Pages:  607
• First Line:  “When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.”
• Last Line:  “In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”
• ML Edition:  none
• Acclaim:  Yomiuri Literary Award
• Film:  none
• First Read:  Fall 2001

The Novel:  I was at my friend Jill’s apartment.  We had just gone on a long drive to find a Scholtzky’s for lunch and I was killing some time before picking Veronica up from work.  I was looking through her bookshelves because Jill had as good taste in literature as anyone I had ever met.  Looking through her shelves was a great way to find something to read – just being on the shelf was like a recommendation almost in and of itself.  My eyes were drawn to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  Jill and I had a friend, JB, at work, who was a huge Murakami fan, but I had never read him.  So I asked Jill if I could borrow it and I took it with me.  Then, waiting in the parking lot for Veronica I began to read.  Veronica eventually had to tap on the window to let me know she was there.

Two days later, I gave the book back to Jill at work.  “You’re already done,” she asked in amazement?  I told her that not only had I already finished it, but I had gone down to the Burnside store and picked myself up a copy.  Well, that was a decade ago.  And I’ve read it four more times since and before long, Murakami had entered my list of authors who deserve to have their books bought in hardcover without even knowing anything about them.  They are about pure story-telling.  You never know what is going to happen, what dark road (or well) you will find yourself in, what scars might find their way on to your body before your journey’s end.  But they are always worth the journey.  Through a dozen novels and dozens of short stories, he has taken us on a journey through modern Japan that is always unexpected.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle sucks you in from the first line.  It’s not just that someone is standing there making himself an early lunch.  All of the details immediately come to life.  You realize he is out of work, that he is not just making lunch, but is very specific about what he is making and what music he is listening to, and how well the two of them work together.  Those are two details that will often come to life in Murakami’s books – his love of food and music.  He rarely ever mentions background music without being very specific about what the characters are hearing.  It makes the scene jump to life, makes the music pour off the page and the very smell of the food floats into the air.

Then there is the phone call.  Poor Toru Okada’s life will change drastically with the increasing phone calls, with the women who take over his life (yet, Okada does not hate the women in his life – in fact, he comes to very much love too many of them; Murakami’s work can be linked in the men who hate women and the amount of violence they inflict upon them, something Murakami sees in modern Japan; while Steig Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy was originally titled Men Who Hate Women, it exploits that violence in horrific ways while Murakami makes the same men appear crystal clear without the need for the horrific violence that is the standard of genre works – this is why his 1Q84 is a superior alternative to the Larsson books).  Okada will find himself drawn to a wide array of characters, all of whom seem to have their own story to tell (and one of whom will actually reappear in the strange alternative world of 1Q84).  In the manner of their stories, we not only learn much about their characters (like when Creta Kano explains “Powers bestowed by heaven should not be exchanged for wordly goods.”), but we also get drawn into all of their stories.

The most fascinating story is the story told by Lieutenant Mamiya of his time in Manchuria.  On a secret mission that reveals much about the Japanese character, both in modern Japan and during the years leading up to the Second World War, he witnesses horrific acts of violence and represses them, only to draw them forth at the request of Toru Okada.  “Why did we have to risk our lives to fight for this barren piece of earth devoid of military or industrial value, this vast land where nothing lived but wisps of grass and biting insects?” Mamiya asks when he is on his mission across the Mongolian border.  “To protect my homeland, I too would fight and die.  But it made no sense to met at all to sacrifice my one and only life for the sake of this desolate patch of soil from which no shaft of grain would ever spring.”  But what he goes through scars him and he manages to pass on his scars to Toru Okada.

Scars, both physical and emotional, are a major part of the book.  Creta Kano has own problems with adjusting to life: “A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn’t find a place for myself within it.”  And poor Lieutenant Mimaya never really escapes from his captivity in Mongolia: “I feel as if, in the intense light that shone for a mere ten of fifteen seconds a day in the bottom of the well, I burned up the very core of my life, until there was nothing left.”  Toru Okada will make his own descent into a well and be scarred in a much different manner.

I have not said much about the story, but that is deliberate.  Part of what makes Murakami such a wonder to read is that journey through the darkness (even in his non-fiction we get that journey and his fascinating book about the Aum Shirikyo attacks is appropriately titled Underground) takes you places you never expected.  In his best novels, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, it is the journey, not the destination that is the point.  Murakami is first and foremost a storyteller, one of the most gifted at work in the field of literature.  When so many books seem to be telling the same stories over and over again, we can always look to Murakami for a fascinating new story.

This review, these brief words of synopsis, this bare introduction to the characters, to the gift of Murakami’s story-telling it is nothing more than what you might find on the surface.  The rest is underground, in the passages, in the dark.

note:  All quotes are from the translation by Jay Rubin

2010 DGA nominee Woody Allen directing Marion Cotillard and Owen Wilson on the set of Midnight in Paris

So, the Directors Guild nominees have been announced.  I haven’t been posting anything about the current year in film because I get to the theater so rarely anymore that I’m way behind and I have to catch up once everything hits DVD.  And while last year, I kept a running log of all the awards (which will come out when I reach 2010 in the Year in Film – a while from now at the glacial pace I’ve been at lately), I haven’t done anything this year.

But, since I pride myself on having all this knowledge in my head (or on my spreadsheets), I thought I would throw out a few tidbits of trivia concerning this year’s nominations.

The Nominees:

• With his nomination for Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen moves out of a large tie for 11th place in DGA points and into a tie for 7th place with David Lean, George Stevens, Robert Wise and Ron Howard.  Yes, until today, Ron Howard had more points from the DGA than Woody Allen did.
  • Who are those people still tied in what is now 12th place behind Ron Howard?  Clint Eastwood, Ang Lee, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Oliver Stone, Vincente Minnelli and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
  • By the way, though Woody Allen is in the top 10 for points at the DGA and the Oscars (where he is tied for 8th), his nominations don’t line up at all.  Since the DGA began its awards in 1948, he is one of five directors to earn three or more Oscar nominations when not having a DGA nomination (78 for Interiors, 84 for Broadway Danny Rose, 94 for Bullets over Broadway).  The other four are Fellini, John Huston, Norman Jewison and William Wyler (who did it four times).  But Woody also directed Manhattan, which earned a DGA nom in 1979, but not an Oscar nomination.
• Michel Hazanavicius is the only first-time nominee (for The Artist).  The last time we only had one first-time nominee was in 2000, when it was Steven Soderbergh, who was nominated twice that year.  Before that, you have to go back to 1989.
• Alexander Payne earns his second nomination (for The Descendents), seven years after his first.  But that’s not much of a wait.  Quentin Tarantino waited 15 years for his second, Roman Polanski 17 years, Taylor Hackford 22 years and Charles Crichton an incredible 36 years.
• On the other hand, David Fincher, with The Girl with the Dragon Tattooearns his third nomination in four years.
  • This makes him the 18th director to earn back to back nominations, after Vincente Minnelli (50-51), Fred Zinnemann (52-53 and again in 59-60), Billy Wilder (53-54 and again in 59-60), Elia Kazan (54-55), John Ford (55-56), Mark Robson (57-58), Robert Wise (65-66), Mike Nichols and Richard Brooks (surprisingly, both in 66-67), George Roy Hill (72-73), Sidney Lumet (4 straight, 73-76), Steven Spielberg (81-82 and again in 97-98), Barry Levinson (90-91), James Ivory (92-93), Ridley Scott (00-01), Peter Jackson (three straight in 01-03) and Clint Eastwood (03-04).
  • If I told you only four other directors have earned 3 nominations in 4 years, you could easily get Lumet and Jackson, because theirs were consecutive.  You might get Billy Wilder (57, 59, 60).  But would you have guessed the other one was Barry Levinson (88, 90, 91)?
  • Though The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo wasn’t that high on people’s radars for Best Picture, the guilds have gone for it strongly.  If it failed to earn a Best Picture nomination now it would only be the third film in the last decade to earn PGA, DGA and WGA nominations and not earn an Oscar nom for Best Picture.  The other two were The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Dark Knight, but both were before the expanded Best Picture lineup.
• With Hugo marking his eight nomination, Martin Scorsese is in second place for all-time DGA nominations and tied with Fred Zinnemann for second in points (Zinnemann won twice while Marty has only one win).  As one of only four directors win all six major critics groups Best Director awards (and the only one of the four to not do it with just one sweeping film – the other three are Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential) and David Fincher (The Social Network), Marty has cemented his place atop the all-time awards list.  He is already the all-time leader for the Broadcast Film Critics and BAFTA, is tied for second at the Golden Globes and if he were to go on and win the Oscar, he would leap into a tie for third place on that list.
  • This marks Marty’s fourth DGA nomination in the last decade (and four of his last five films to earn nominations).  He will probably also earn an Oscar nomination.  In 2001, Marty had been a director for 33 years and had directed 18 feature films.  He had earned 4 DGA nominations, 3 Oscar nominations, 4 Golden Globe nominations and 4 BAFTA nominations and of all of those, only won one BAFTA.  Since then, in 10 years, he has directed 5 films and earned 4 DGA nominations, 3 Oscar nominations (with another one likely coming), 4 Golden Globe nominations and 3 BAFTA nominations (with another one likely coming) and won the DGA, Oscar and 2 Globes.

The Notable Omissions:

• How odd is it that Terrence Malick didn’t get nominated at the DGA?  Since 1966, when the National Society of Film Critics began giving awards, only 17 times has a director won three critics awards in one year.  Of those 17, only twice before today did that director fail to earn a DGA nomination – David Lynch in 1986 for Blue Velvet, and, ironically, David Lynch again in 2001 for Mulholland Drive.  Today, Malick, who won the LA Film Critics, National Society of Film Critics and Chicago Film Critics Best Director awards for Tree of Life, made it three.
  • What are Malick’s Oscar chances?  Well, both times Lynch was nominated at the Oscars; in fact his nomination was the only one for both films.  Only one director has earned three critics awards and failed to earn an Oscar nomination – Ang Lee for Sense and Sensibility in 1995.  But he had earned a DGA nomination.  No one with three critics wins has ever failed to earn both a DGA and Oscar nominations.  Only 11 directors have even won two critics awards and failed to earn either nomination, though one of them was Malick in 1978 with Days of Heaven.
  • Tree of Life currently has 1046 awards points thanks to its BFCA nominations and overwhelming critics success.  It is already in second place behind True Grit for awards points with no Globe points (True Grit had 1163).  It is one point ahead of Going My Way for most points without guild nominations, but that was before the guild awards existed.  Day for Night is the record-holder with 920 points and Happy-Go-Lucky, with 779 is the most for an English language film.  Tree of Life might get out of that with a Cinematography nomination.  But it only made one BAFTA long-list.  Of films with over 1000 points, only three have earned more than 60% of their points from the critics: GoodFellas (60.73%), Mulholland Drive (69.81%) and Far From Heaven (71.20%).  Right now, Tree of Life is sitting at 90.85%, and unless it does really well at the Oscars, it is not changing much.  That is unheard of.  Of the 13 films that earned more points from the critics than Tree of Life (938), only Far From Heaven earned less than 1600 total points and it earned 1493.  With no BAFTA nominations forthcoming except maybe Cinematography and with the guilds basically over, baring a big day at the Oscars, Tree of Life will be lucky to make 1250.
• Steven Spielberg didn’t earn a DGA nomination for War Horse.  Some Oscar observers still think that War Horse is a good bet for Best Picture, even if Spielberg is a longer shot for Best Director now.  But, the Academy has always been colder to Spielberg than the DGA.  I can’t ever remember a serious Oscar contender from Spielberg that didn’t earn a DGA nomination.  He is the all-time DGA champ with 10 nominations (and three wins).  He was the first to ever win the DGA while not earning an Oscar nomination (in 1985 with The Color Purple) and four times, he has been nominated the DGA without an Oscar nomination (Jaws, Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Amistad).  True, there are more Best Picture nominees than there used to be.  But I can’t help but think that this badly hurts War Horse‘s chances at the Oscars.

A touching moment in the desert: "Am I K in your book?"

The 69th annual Academy Awards, for the film year 1996.  The nominations were announced on February 11, 1997 and the awards were held on March 24, 1997.

Best Picture:  The English Patient

• Fargo
• Secrets and Lies
• Jerry Maguire
• Shine

Most Surprising Omission:  The People vs. Larry Flynt

Best Eligible Film Not Nominated:  Lone Star

Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years:  #14

The Race:  The Oscars actually started looking at the Cannes Film Festival.  Miramax had begun their Oscar hopes twice at Cannes with back-to-back Palme d’Or winners in 93 and 94: The Piano and Pulp Fiction.  In 1996, the Best Director winner was Joel Coen (even though it was well known that all of the films were co-directed by the brothers) for Fargo, the brothers’ dark crime-comedy that critics were busy adoring in the States.  But the Palme d’Or went to Secrets and Lies, the new film from British director Mike Leigh.  All of Leigh’s films had done well by the critics but it usually ended there and no amount of critical adoration had yet earned any of his films an Oscar nomination.  The Coen brothers themselves had seen three nominations for their Barton Fink (though none for themselves), but otherwise the critical adoration for their own Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing had been completely ignored as well.

By the time Secrets and Lies opened the New York Film Festival in the fall, only three films aside from Fargo had really made a critical impression and all were art-house films that had not ever played in more than 1000 theaters: Lone Star, Trainspotting and Emma.  In fact, major studios seemed to be missing in action for the awards run.  Only four studios had films that were considered major contenders for the Oscars: Disney had Evita (though they also owned Miramax, it was considered an independent), Fox had the new film version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Columbia had The People vs Larry Flynt (the new Milos Forman film about the Hustler publisher) and Tri-Star had Jerry Maguire, the big new Tom Cruise romantic comedy from Cameron Crowe.  Of those, only Jerry Maguire managed any significant box office.

The great reviews and the awards attention was all headed towards the independent films streaming into studios in the fall.  Aside from Secrets and Lies, there was The English Patient, the new David Lean-like epic adapted from the Booker Prize winning novel, Shine, the Australian biopic of pianist David Helfgott that was earning great praise for its star Geoffrey Rush and Breaking the Waves, a film from Danish director Lars von Trier that was getting great reviews for its new star, Emily Watson.

The National Board of Review kicked off the awards season on December 10, giving Best Picture to Shine but Director and Actress to Fargo.  Many of the major films were in their Top 10: Shine, The English Patient, Fargo, Secrets and Lies, Evita, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Breaking the Waves and Jerry Maguire.  Two days later, the New York Film Critics gave Best Picture to Fargo, but Director and Actress this time both went to Breaking the Waves.  The LA Film Critics didn’t split their awards; Best Picture, Director and Actress went to Secrets and Lies, though Fargo did win Best Screenplay, while Geoffrey Rush had won Actor in both New York and LA.  The final major critics group, the National Society of Film Critics, gave Picture and Director to Breaking the Waves.

Fargo, Shine, The English Patient and The People vs. Larry Flynt all had their major contender status sealed with Picture, Director and Screenplay nominations at the Golden Globes.  Evita was right behind with Picture and Director nominations, while Breaking the Waves and Jerry Maguire were in with Picture and acting nominations.  The English Patient had 7 nominations making it the favorite, as only one film (The Godfather Part III) had earned 7 or more nominations in the past fifteen years and not won Best Picture.  But the night of the Golden Globes brought a lot of surprises.  The English Patient did win Best Picture – Drama, but lost both Director and Screenplay to Larry Flynt, while Evita managed to best both Fargo and Jerry Maguire in Best Picture – Comedy or Musical and, even more surprising, Madonna beat out Frances McDormand for Best Actress – Comedy or Musical.  Pundits couldn’t decide if it made Evita a legitimate contender or made the Golden Globes a non-factor.  Meanwhile, in their second ceremony, the Broadcast Film Critics Association named Fargo Best Picture, but gave both Director and Screenplay to The English Patient.

The guild nominations began to chime in and cemented The English Patient, Fargo and Shine as front-runners.  All three films were in the Producers Guild, Directors Guild and Writers Guild races.  Jerry Maguire and Secrets and Lies joined them in the DGA and WGA nominations (where The English Patient seemed to rule over the Adapted category), while Larry Flynt and Kenneth Branagh’s four hour version of Hamlet were the final two PGA nominees.  Emma, Trainspotting and Lone Star had all faltered at the awards line and didn’t have much besides WGA nominations, while The Crucible surprisingly didn’t even have that.  Headed into the nominations, The English Patient was clearly the front-runner, with Fargo running second and Shine a distant third.  Jerry Maguire, Secrets and Lies and Larry Flynt were all vying for the fourth and fifth spots with Breaking the Waves and Evita outside shots.

The Results:  The nominations pretty much ended any remaining suspense.  The English Patient was up for 12 Oscars and no film with the many nominations had lost Best Picture in 15 years.  It had been joined by Fargo, Shine, Secrets and Lies and Jerry Maguire.  But, though Jerry Maguire was the lone film from a major studio, it was also the only one without a director in the race – Cameron Crowe had been passed over for Milos Forman.

Though it would have a stumble on the way to the Oscars – losing the WGA to Sling Blade, it would take the DGA and ride that momentum into a night of Oscar success.  It would stumble on Oscar night, again losing Best Adapted Screenplay to Sling Blade, but would be so overwhelming in the other categories that Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice thanked it for not having any original songs when they won their Oscar.  It would go on to win 9 Oscars, the most in nine years.

David Lean redux

The English Patient

• Director:  Anthony Minghella
• Writer:  Anthony Minghella  (from the novel by Michael Ondaatje)
• Producer:  Saul Zaentz
• Studio:  Miramax
• Stars:  Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Juliette Binoche, Williem DaFoe, Colin Firth
• Oscar Nominations:  Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor (Fiennes), Actress (Scott-Thomas), Supporting Actress (Binoche), Editing, Cinematography, Original Dramatic Score, Sound, Art Direction, Costume Design
• Oscar Points:  620  (6th most ever)
• Length:  162 min
• Genre:  Drama  (Epic)
• MPAA Rating:  R
• Box Office Gross:  $78.67 mil  (#19  -  1996)
• Release Date:  15 November 1996
• Ebert Rating:  ****
• My Rating:  ****
• My Rank:  #3  (year)  /  #36  (nominees)  /  #15  (winners)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor (Fiennes), Supporting Actress (Binoche), Editing, Cinematography, Original Score, Sound, Art Direction, Sound Editing, Costume Design, Makeup
• Nighthawk Points:  530
• First Watched:  second day at Tigard Cinemas

The Film:  There is a moment in the middle of the film, in the desert in the night.  Katharine Clifton (played by Kristin Scott-Thomas) says to Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), “Am I K in your book?”  Almásy turns to her and stares, then touches her cheek, tenderly, with the back of his hand.  This follows on an earlier scene when Katharine had complained about him following her home and only when he didn’t respond, realized that he had fallen in love with her.  There is tenderness and genuine romance here, in spite of Katharine being married.  There is love.

The English Patient is a film that often finds itself compared to Lawrence of Arabia.  Ralph Fiennes, the talented British actor with the haunting blue eyes, had already played T.E. Lawrence in a television film, this was a large epic, set in the desert amidst a world at war, with magnificent cinematography and it won the same seven Oscars that Lawrence of Arabia had won (and also lost Best Actor and Adapted Screenplay, as Lawrence had also done).  But this moment shows the essential difference between this and Lawrence.  Lawrence was about one man and his experiences in the desert.  This is a story about a man and his experiences with a woman, most of which take place amidst the desert sands.

That is what we come to learn over the course of the film.  When the film opens, we see a man and a woman in a plane, high over the desert sands.  Then there is the battery that shoots them down and he is badly burned and the story proceeds to Italy, during the later days of the war.  It is not until much later that we learn who the people in the plane were, and much longer after that when we realize the circumstances of their flight.  The English Patient as a novel had won the Booker Prize, appropriate since it is a dense and complicated book, the very kind of work that the Bookers love to award.  But it is also one of the very best Booker Prize winners, a great novel in its complex story of a haunted love affair and the events that come after and the four people all affected by it.  The film itself moves in the same complex way.  The editing of this film, so artfully done by Walter Murch is a key to its construction.  We can only slowly realize the various strands of the story and how they weave in and out of each other.  In the meantime, we have those gorgeous desert sands, set to the strains of Gabriel Yared’s magnificent score.

Before we can ever come to that moment in the desert, before we even come to the story of Katharine and Almásy, we have the haunted nurse, Hana.  Everyone who ever gets close to her dies, and so she retreats to an abandoned monastery with her dying patient.  She slowly allows herself to heal as she learns his story of love and loss.  In Hana’s ascension (literally at one point, in a beautiful scene, where she is lifted by torchlight to look at paintings) and Almásy’s slow decay, they both find their stories overlapping.

Which brings us back to the desert, back to that tender moment that the two of them share, lit only by a flare in the desert night sky, bringing them help and security.  He believes that this touch is all he has, until after they return to Cairo and she returns to him, beautiful and angelic in a white dress and their passion for each other overwhelms their senses.

The English Patient is a beautiful film, brilliantly constructed at every level – writing, directing, editing, cinematography, score, art direction.  And perhaps there is nothing more crucial than the acting, then the looks in the eyes of Kristin Scott-Thomas and Ralph Fiennes during their moment, the look of desolation on Juliette Binoche’s face when she walks straight into the mines, not even knowing that death is a step away, the pain in Willem DaFoe’s face as he begs for his hands, the disgust in Colin Firth’s when it becomes apparent that he knows of his wife’s betrayal.  Yet, this film suffers from comparisons.  Film lovers compare it unfavorably to Lawrence of Arabia, in spite of their vast differences and complain that it won over Fargo, which quickly won a cultish following.  But this is an example of film-making at its very best.  It is not my number one film of the year because of the brilliance of Lone Star and Trainspotting.  But it is the best of the nominees, a truly epic film in a great year for films and it is the kind of film the Academy gives the Oscar to and which actually deserves it.  For all its technical brilliance, for all the ways in which it takes a complex and difficult book and makes not only a coherent, but a brilliant film, for the fine direction, and most of all for that look that the two of them share in the desert night.

The Coens win an Oscar for their "true" story

Fargo

• Director:  Joel Coen  (and an uncredited Ethan Coen)
• Writer:  Joel Coen  /  Ethan Coen
• Producer:  Ethan Coen
• Studio:  Gramercy
• Stars:  Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi
• Oscar Nominations:  Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress (McDormand), Supporting Actor (Macy), Editing, Cinematography
• Oscar Points:  325
• Length:  98 min
• Genre:  Crime  (Black Comedy)
• MPAA Rating:  R
• Box Office Gross:  $24.61 mil  (#67  -  1996)
• Release Date:  5 April 1996
• Ebert Rating:  ****
• My Rating:  ****
• My Rank:  #4  (year)  /  #46  (nominees)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress (McDormand), Supporting Actor (Macy), Editing, Cinematography, Original Score
• Nighthawk Points:  365
• First Watched:  Opening day at Tigard Theater with Kari Panger and Jonathan Miller

The Film:  It isn’t until 33 minutes into the film when it cuts to a painting of geese, pans across an artist’s workroom and we see Marge Gunderson asleep in her bed.  It’s weird to remember that this seminal performance, one that won the Oscar (deservedly) and instantly became a character out of film lore doesn’t even appear until 1/3 of the way through the film.  The character and the film itself leapt off the screen in early 1996 and immediately became one of the highest regarded American films of the decade.  It is an Ebert Great Film, it was the most recent film to appear on the initial AFI Top 100 list (though, oddly, didn’t make the second list) and at the Top 1000, no film since has been regarded as highly.

It deserves all of this praise.  That I rate it only at #4 on the year says much more about the year itself than the film.  In all the years since it would rank either first or second (except 2005, where it would rank third).  It is a film that manages to be a successful crime film while at the same time being one of the darkest comedies or funniest dark films of all-time, depending on which you want to take.  There was considerable discussion when it was first nominated at the Golden Globes because it was nominated as a Comedy, but in spite of the violence, in spite of the subject matter, the Globes actually got the category right on this one (even if they got it so so wrong by giving Madonna Best Actress over McDormand).

Like many Coen Brothers films, it is filled with fascinating secondary characters, all of whom are very well acted by lesser known performers, but the key to the film lies in two performances — Frances McDormand as Marge, the Chief of Police for Brainerd, MN and William H. Macy as Jerry Lundergaard, the car salesmen.  Both of them manage to inhabit characters without ever quite crossing the line into caricatures.  Both of them have scenes where you would think the lines were improvised, but both of them have been quite clear that what they were speaking was in the script – from Marge going “No, I just think I’m gonna barf,” to Jerry’s constant stuttering.  Both of them are also very believable in their marital roles – the way Marge lights up when she comes into her office and finds that her husband has brought her lunch to the way Jerry collapses inside when speaking of the future and he is told by his father-in-law that his wife and child never have to worry about money.

The relationship between Marge and her husband, Norm, is perhaps what keeps the film from going completely over the top.  Let’s face it – this is a profane and violent film.  We have several, quite brutal murders and we have a merciless beating that begins with fists and throwing people around and proceeds to being whipped by a belt.  But we also have that human heart of the film.  Look at the scene where Norm gets up to fix Marge some eggs before she goes out to look at the homicide.  In one shot, we see them together at the table.  Then, when she goes to leave, Norm takes her plate and proceeds to eat the food she didn’t.  In the same shot, without ever leaving the camera, we see her go out the door, try to start the prowler, then come back.  He looks up when he hears the door open again and he can already seem to guess that she will need a jump.  The Coens asked McDormand and John Carroll Lynch to decide on a back story for their characters and the time together obviously helped.  They seem more like a married couple than almost any other married couple in film history.

And even the violence is not without humor.  There is, of course, the woodchipper scene.  You don’t even have to explain that anymore.  It has become a part of film lore.  “I guess that was your accomplice back there in the woodchipper,” Marge says, so perfectly summing up the situation.  And look at what we are left with at the end.  In this film of violence, both physical and emotional, full of murder and ice, it is the beating human heart of the film that we end with, Marge and Norm lying there together in bed.

Mike Leigh's brilliance finally breaks through with the Academy

Secrets and Lies

• Director:  Mike Leigh
• Writer:  Mike Leigh
• Producer:  Simon Channing-Williams
• Studio:  October
• Stars:  Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn, Phyllis Logan, Marianne Jean-Baptiste
• Oscar Nominations:  Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress (Blethyn), Supporting Actress (Baptiste)
• Oscar Points:  200
• Length:  142 min
• Genre:  Drama
• MPAA Rating:  R
• Box Office Gross:  $13.41 mil  (#108  -  1996)
• Release Date:  25 October 1996
• Ebert Rating:  ****
• My Rating:  ****
• My Rank:  #6  (year)  /  #184  (nominees)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  Original Screenplay
• Nighthawk Points:  40
• First Watched:  Opening month at the KOIN Center

The Film:  Mike Leigh is unlike almost any other director in my Top 100 Directors of All-Time.  He does not have the flash of a Scorsese or a Spielberg.  He does not have great films built around the studios like Capra or Wyler or Cukor.  He does not take on the epic scope of Lean or Kurosawa.  He does not have the biting humor of Woody Allen or the morose depths of Ingmar Bergman.  But he shares a little something of a lot of them.  His films are smart and self-assured.  They revolve around a group of actors, changing, with sometimes one or two coming back for several films.  They are not flashy names, not the kind of actors that become big stars and rarely even the kind of actors that get Oscar nominations.  (Although, at least now several of them have become well-known; David Thewlis, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Spall were all starring in Mike Leigh films long before they were Harry Potter actors).  They have moments of depth and tragedy, but there is also humor breaking through.  Most of all, they have a human core.  This is because of the Leigh process, with the director conceiving of characters, then working with his group of actors to create the script as a process.  In a sense, there never is a finished screenplay, but what comes out of this process is always fascinating, always worth watching and almost always great.

Secrets and Lies is one of the best films from one of our best writer-directors.  It works so well because the characters are so real.  They don’t seem like movie characters.  They are real people, in the real world, trying to real with real family problems, the kind of problems that do crop up and linger, for years, for decades.  Every family has a few secrets of its own, no matter how much you might think they don’t (I was in my thirties before I learned that my grandmother’s cousin was a congressman who served for several terms before it came out that he had a wife in DC and a wife back in California).  And some of the things aren’t secrets – they are things that stare us straight in the face and we try to cope with.

“I have spent my whole life trying to make people happy,” Maurice (Timothy Spall) yells at his family at the climax of the film.  He is yelling because it is his family that he feels he is not making happy.  It is a good description of what he does.  We spend a large amount of the film following him in his work as a photographer.  He tries to capture just the right moments – like when he is trying to get a bride to buck up before the wedding, or find something kind to say to a woman who has been scarred in a car crash and wants pictures that make her look awful for the court case.  But outside of his work, he has a wife who suffers horribly when her menstrual cycle comes around (and is likely a reason why she can’t have kids), a sister who believes he has abandoned her after she, for the most part, raised him after their mother’s death, and a niece who doesn’t want to be around anyone, not even her boyfriend.  All of this comes amidst the revelation that there is another niece – one who was given up for adoption.  That the new niece is black is only relevant early on and barely plays a part of the later revelations.

It is the revelation that she exists at all that threatens to tear things apart.  The woman, now grown and a successful optometrist has sought out her birth mother after the death of the woman who raised her.  Now she is trying to go through her life while also working in this new film, one with a lot of its own problems.

That all of this seems to work out okay in the end for the miserable people involved has nothing to do with a Hollywood type ending.  It has to do with Leigh’s basic understanding of human nature, that anger will often fade, that love will win out, because what so many people want in life is to be loved, to be accepted, to have someone who cares for them.  So, the anger at discovering that the existence of a sister has been hidden from you will fade into the joy of finally having a sister to share things with.  The disappointment in a sister-in-law who has never given your beloved baby brother children will break down in the face of acceptance that a fellow human being is suffering and you never knew it.

Would all of this work in a Hollywood studio film?  Quite possibly not.  It relies on these actors that Leigh chooses to work with, some like Timothy Spall, brilliant and understated as ever, or Lesley Manville, so good and touching in a small role, to those that were new to Leigh (and to many of us), like Brenda Blethyn, who won the BAFTA for a performance that seems hard to take at first, until you realize it’s the role, or Jean-Marie Baptiste, so good in such an awkward position.

There is the tendency  (one I admit I indulge in) to over-rate films from directors who you love because of who the director is.  So you might be more accepting of trash from a favorite director than admit that the director made a bad film.  But with Mike Leigh, we don’t have to do that.  He’s simply never made a bad film.  And Secrets and Lies is one of his best.

Tom Cruise wasn't always known for being a crazy person

Jerry Maguire

• Director:  Cameron Crowe
• Writer:  Cameron Crowe
• Producer:  James L. Brooks  /  Laurence Mark  /  Richard Sakai  /  Cameron Crowe
• Studio:  Tristar
• Stars:  Tom Cruise, Renee Zelwegger, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bonnie Hunt
• Oscar Nominations:  Picture, Original Screenplay, Actor (Cruise), Supporting Actor (Gooding), Editing
• Oscar Points:  210
• Length:  139 min
• Genre:  Comedy  (Romantic)
• MPAA Rating:  R
• Box Office Gross:  $153.95 mil  (#4  -  1996)
• Release Date:  13 December 1996
• Ebert Rating:  ***
• My Rating:  ****
• My Rank:  #8  (year)  /  #203  (nominees)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  Original Screenplay
• Nighthawk Points:  40
• First Watched:  Opening week at the Evergreen Theater with my father

The Film:  I wonder what stereo-typical males and females think of Jerry Maguire.  Do guys think there is a bit too much romance in what is really a sports film?  Do girls think there is too much sports, especially just before the end with the results of the key Monday Night Football game?  Am I in a lucky position in that I am a sports guy who loves great romantic comedies?

I wonder what people think when they come back to this film now as well.  Tom Cruise, at the time this film was made, was one of the biggest stars in the world.  At a time when making $100 million was a much bigger deal, this was his fifth film in a row to do so.  And Renee Zelwegger was practically an unknown – I had never even heard of her before Jerry Maguire.  Today, Cruise is thought of as the lunatic who jumps on the couch, is a big Scientologist and hasn’t had a really big hit in years while Zelwegger, since winning her Oscar has been in consistently smaller and smaller films and been ignored more and more.

But they are absolutely perfect for this film.  Cruise absolutely embodies who Jerry Maguire is.  He is a the rich, good-looking guy who suddenly grows a conscience and figures out there might be more to life than just a whole lot of money.  When he comes running back to his office and he trips and falls, it works perfectly on two different levels; the other actors weren’t expecting it because they didn’t think it was something to expect from Tom Cruise, and the audience doesn’t expect it because Jerry doesn’t seem that vulnerable.  But Cruise gives one of the best performances of what is a more impressive acting career than many people want to remember (Born on the Fourth of July, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia) because he is able to find that core of vulnerability in someone who until that moment thinks of himself as indestructible.  On the other hand, Zelwegger is never more adorable – she clearly is in love with Jerry from afar long before she agrees to walk away from the company with him.  She is, as she describes herself, the “oldest 26 year old in the world” and she also finds a core of vulnerability.

Then there are the supporting performances.  Cuba Gooding, while he shouldn’t have won the Oscar, gave a performance that almost instantly became iconic because of the wonderful “Show me the money!” scene, Bonnie Hunt does a perfect job as the disapproving older sister and even Jonathan Lipnicki avoids becoming just another annoying child actor by giving lines exactly the way you would expect from a kid (one of the most wonderful scenes in the film is in the car when he and Jerry are bantering back and forth and he says “Did you know my neighbor has three rabbits?” which is exactly the kind of thing a kid would say and Jerry has the great line “I can’t compete with that.”).

One of the things about Jerry Maguire is that you have to believe in it (which isn’t so surprising – it certainly would become true of Crowe’s later films Elizabethtown and We Bought a Zoo).  When Jerry walks through those doors and says those words, you have to believe in it.  He does and what he finds out is that his wife does as well.  In real life, would such words walk?  They quite probably would – especially when you have had the kind of realization that Jerry has had.  But if you are too cynical, there is no way you will ever buy into it and the whole movie falls apart around it.  But if you do believe in romance, believe it when someone says “You complete me.”, then this is the film for you.

Australia makes the standard Hollywood biopic

Shine

• Director:  Scott Hicks
• Writer:  Jan Sardi  /  Scott Hicks
• Producer:  Jane Scott
• Studio:  Fine Line
• Stars:  Geoffrey Rush, Lynn Redgrave, Noah Taylor, Armin Mueller-Stahl
• Oscar Nominations:  Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor (Rush), Supporting Actor (Mueller-Stahl), Editing, Original Dramatic Score
• Oscar Points:  285
• Length:  105 min
• Genre:  Drama  (Musical Biopic)
• MPAA Rating:  R
• Box Office Gross:  $35.89 mil  (#41  -  1996)
• Release Date:  20 November 1996
• Ebert Rating:  ****
• My Rating:  ***
• My Rank:  #64  (year)  /  #370  (nominees)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  none
• First Watched:  Opening week at the Broadway Metroplex

The Film:  A strange man stumbles across the room to the piano.  After a couple of false starts, with a drunk man in the bar egging him on, he begins to play “The Flight of the Bumblebee”.  It is a powerful opening scene, one that establishes the enormous psychological problems facing the man (he clearly has severe problems interacting with other people), but also clearly showing his talent.  He is not just another drunk off the street – he is a man with a considerable amount of talent that lies hidden under layers of mental troubles.

But there are two problems here.  The first is that David Helfgott is not as talented (or at least not as capable of tapping his talent) as this scene would seem to imply.  He is not just a hidden genius and the magnificent ability shown here isn’t really quite accurate to the technical abilities that he currently offers on the piano.  The second is that this isn’t the opening scene.  It builds off the opening scene and doesn’t actually appear until halfway through the film.  By this time, we already know who he is and what he can do, no matter how deeply buried his talent is.

The actual opening scene involves Helfgott wandering into the restaurant and meeting the owner and showing, full-force all of his problems in communicating with other people.  The opening scene, combined with the last forty minutes are probably what managed to win Geoffrey Rush the Oscar for a performance that takes up less than half the film – if he is considered the lead than certainly Noah Taylor, who has a more difficult job as an actor and whose performance as the adolescent David takes up just as much screen-time, should also be considered the lead.  Rush’s performance is full of mannerisms and won over critics and Academy voters because it plays into everything that people think of when they think of acting.  But Taylor had to start out as a person under much more control and gradually lose ground against the mental illnesses straining at his brain.  To watch this performance in light of other Rush performances is to see a man who treads a fine line between great acting (Shakespeare in Love, The King’s Speech) and ridiculous over-the-top hamming it up (the Pirates films).  But to watch this film in between watching Taylor’s performances in Flirting and Vanilla Sky is to see a truly remarkable actor who never gets much publicity.

Getting back to that opening scene – it establishes all of Helfgott’s troubles, but only then flashes back to his career and then comes back to that opening scene with the next night, when Helfgott sits down in the bar.  That scene is a much better scene and clearly establishes Helfgott, yet they wasted it away in the center of the film.  Which is one of the problems with Shine – it constantly bounces back and forth between being a smaller arty film and a typical Hollywood biopic.  It was clearly the latter part that won sway over the Academy – the kind of film that they have loved awarding, going back decades.

Now, as to Helfgott’s technical ability.   Certainly biopics are well-known for stretching the truth and any film should be given at least some lee-way when it comes to pure fidelity to reality.  So is it nit-picking to say that you walk away from this film thinking that Helfgott has much more ability these days than he really does (as made clear in almost any review of his recordings or performances from the last twenty years)?  I don’t think it is and here’s why.  The film would have you believe that the wonderful thing is that Helfgott’s mental illness hasn’t killed his talent.  But I think the more important thing is that he has been able to deal with his illness to the point where he can actually perform in public.  It’s not the ability to play that’s important.  It’s the ability to function.  They undercut that remarkable achievement by over-blowing how well he can actually play.  It shouldn’t be about the triumph of the artist.  This film is really about the triumph of a man.

But what about the rest of the film?  There is a good (if overdone) performance from Armin Mueller-Stahl as the overbearing father and a good (if a bit silly) performance from Lynn Redgrave as Helfgott’s wife, who deserves a considerable amount of credit for getting him to the place that he is at.  But a lot of it is typical biopic stuff, lead by a performance from Rush that won the Oscar in a truly great year for lead actors but really is more irritating than anything else.

Kris Kristofferson threatens Matthew McConaughey in a tense moment from Lone Star (1996)

My Top 20:

1. Lone Star
2. Trainspotting
3. The English Patient
4. Fargo
5. Hamlet
6. Secrets and Lies
7. In the Bleak Midwinter
8. The Crucible
9. Jerry Maguire
10. Cold Comfort Farm
11. Romeo + Juliet
12. Evita
13. Emma
14. Star Trek: First Contact
15. Beautiful Girls
16. Everyone Says I Love You
17. Breaking the Waves
18. The Birdcage
19. The People vs. Larry Flynt
20. Ridicule

I would take the top 5 in this year and place them against the top 5 in any other year.  Any of the five of them would be worthy Best Picture winners.  There is a significant drop-off after that and only the top 11 films are **** films – the rest are high ***.5 films.

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  Fargo
• Best Director:  Joel Coen  (Fargo)
• Best Actor:  Geoffrey Rush  (Shine)
• Best Actress:  Frances McDormand  (Fargo)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Edward Norton  (Primal Fear / The People vs. Larry Flynt / Everyone Says I Love You)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Juliette Binoche  (The English Patient)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  The English Patient
• Best Original Screenplay:  Fargo
• Best Cinematography:  The English Patient
• Best Foreign Film:  Ridicule

note:  The English Patient becomes the most impressive Best Cinematography winner – it matches Schindler’s List total of 6 wins, but, unlike Schindler, wins both the Oscar and the ASC.  Oddly enough, of the five films to have won at least five Cinematography awards, only two of them (English Patient and Slumdog Millionaire) won both the Oscar and ASC.  Schindler’s List and Crouching Tiger both lost the ASC while Children of Men lost the Oscar.

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  The English Patient
• Best Director:  Anthony Minghella  (The English Patient)
• Best Actor:  Geoffrey Rush  (Shine)
• Best Actress:  Frances McDormand  (Fargo)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Cuba Gooding, Jr.  (Jerry Maguire)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Juliette Binoche  (The English Patient)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  Sling Blade
  
• Best Original Screenplay:  Fargo
• Best Cinematography:  The English Patient
• Best Foreign Film:  Kolya

Steve Buscemi gets fed into the wood-chipper by Peter Stormare in Fargo (1996)

Top 5 Films  (Top 1000):

1. Fargo  -  #288
2. Chungking Express  -  #328
3. Breaking the Waves  -  #383
4. Underground  -  #549
5. Trainspotting  -  #675

Top 5 Films  (1996 Best Picture Awards):

1. Fargo
2. The English Patient
3. Shine
4. Secrets and Lies
5. Jerry Maguire  /  Breaking the Waves

note:  The People vs. Larry Flynt finished just five points behind fifth place.  The English Patient wins four awards and earns 410 points – a new record for a film without a critics win for Best Picture.

Top 10 Films  (Awards Points):

1. The English Patient  -  2410
   
2. Fargo  -  1805
   
3. Shine  -  1482
   
4. Secrets and Lies  -  1242
   
5. Jerry Maguire  -  753
   
6. The People vs. Larry Flynt  -  705
   
7. Evita  -  631
   
8. Breaking the Waves  -  627
   
9. Romeo + Juliet  -  368
   
10. Sling Blade  -  327

note:  The Crucible finished with 324, almost making the list.  Shine becomes the second film (after The Remains of the Day) to get nominated for Picture, Director and Screenplay at the Globes, Oscars, BAFTAs and the guilds and lose all of them.  It tops Remains by getting a SAG Ensemble nomination as well (and losing that).  But, unlike Remains, which lost Best Actor at all of those as well, Shine wins Best Actor at all of these.  Shine wins a total of 10 awards, all but two of them (Best Picture from the NBR and Best Sound from the BAFTAs) for Best Actor.

Far and away the biggest film of 1996: Independence Day

Top 10 Films  (Domestic Box Office Gross):

1. Independence Day  -  $306.16 mil
   
2. Twister  -  $241.72 mil
3. Mission: Impossible  -  $180.98 mil
4. Jerry Maguire  -  $153.95 mil
5. Ransom  -  $136.49 mil
6. 101 Dalmations  -  $136.18 mil
7. The Rock  -  $134.06 mil
8. The Nutty Professor  -  $128.81 mil
9. The Birdcage  -  $124.06 mil
10. A Time to Kill  -  $108.76 mil

note:  I saw these films a combined 10 times in the theaters.  I didn’t see Twister or Nutty Professor in the theater, but I saw 101 Dalmations and The Rock twice (the former for work both times, the latter for fun).  Independence Day sets a new record for a Wednesday opening and the second highest opening day behind Batman Forever with $18 million.  It now sits as the 123rd largest opening day and is routinely beaten by films that don’t even make $100 million.

Top 10 Films  (Worldwide Box Office Gross):

1. Independence Day  -  $817.4 mil
   
2. Twister  -  $494.5 mil
   
3. Mission: Impossible  -  $457.7 mil
   
4. The Rock  -  $335.1 mil
   
5. The Hunchback of Notre Dame  -  $325.3 mil
   
6. 101 Dalmations  -  $320.7 mil
   
7. Ransom  -  $309.5 mil
   
8. The Nutty Professor  -  $274.0 mil
   
9. Jerry Maguire  -  $273.6 mil
   
10. Eraser  -  $242.3 mil

note:  The Hunchback of Notre Dame takes in almost 70% of its gross internationally while Jerry Maguire takes in less than 45% outside of the States.  The Birdcage and A Time to Kill earn less than 1/3 internationally of their worldwide gross (interesting, since The Birdcage is a remake of a French film).

AFI Top 100:

• Fargo  -  #84  (1998)

note:  This year was the last that was considered for the initial 1998 AFI list.  Only Fargo, The English Patient and Jerry Maguire were included on the initial 400 list in both 1998 (when Fargo was chosen) and 2007 (when no films made it).

Ebert Great Films:

• Fargo
• Secrets and Lies

Nighthawk Golden Globes:

Drama:

• Best Picture:  Lone Star
  
• Best Director:  Anthony Minghella  (The English Patient)
• Best Actor:  Ralph Fiennes  (The English Patient)
• Best Actress:  Winona Ryder  (The Crucible)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Paul Scofield  (The Crucible)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Kate Winslet  (Hamlet)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  The English Patient
• Best Original Screenplay:  Lone Star
  

The truly adorable Natalie Portman as "the little Lolita next door" in Beautiful Girls

Comedy:

• Best Picture:  Trainspotting
• Best Director:  Danny Boyle  (Trainspotting)
• Best Actor:  Ewan McGregor  (Trainspotting)
• Best Actress:  Frances McDormand  (Fargo)
• Best Supporting Actor:  William H. Macy  (Fargo)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Natalie Portman  (Beautiful Girls)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  Trainspotting
• Best Original Screenplay:  Fargo

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture:  Lone Star
  
• Best Director:  Anthony Minghella  (The English Patient)
• Best Actor:  Ralph Fiennes  (The English Patient)
• Best Actress:  Frances McDormand  (Fargo)
• Best Supporting Actor:  William H. Macy  (Fargo)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Kate Winslet  (Hamlet)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  The English Patient
• Best Original Screenplay:  Lone Star
• Best Editing:  Lone Star
• Best Cinematography:  The English Patient
• Best Original Score:  Fargo
• Best Sound:  The English Patient
• Best Art Direction:  The English Patient
• Best Visual Effects:  Independence Day
• Best Sound Editing:  The Rock
• Best Costume Design:  The English Patient
• Best Makeup:  The English Patient
• Best Original Song:  “Wise Up” from Jerry Maguire  /  “Walls” from She’s the One *
• Best Animated Film:  James and the Giant Peach
• Best Foreign Film:  Ridicule

note:  So why the two songs?  Because “Wise Up” was written for Jerry Maguire but cut from the film as it was shown in theaters (though added on DVD).  It was, I believe, the best song written for a film in 1996, but I don’t really know if it counts.  So I also included my second-place song, “Walls.”

Ridicule: my top foreign film for 1996

Top 4 Foreign Films:

1. Ridicule
2. Ponette
3. La Promesse
4. The Other Side of Sunday

note:  These are the best films eligible for the Academy – released in 1996 in their home country.  So why only four?  Because of the 19 films that are eligible here, only four of them earn ***.5 from me.  Ridicule and The Other Side of Sunday both received Oscar nominations.  Ponette and La Promesse weren’t submitted (La Promesse was passed over for The Eighth Day, which wasn’t nominated while Ponette was passed over for Ridicule).  These two years (this and 1997) are a mess – no film other than Ridicule really wins people over.  La Promesse, which would have been Academy eligible here, is the biggest winner in 1997, by winning two critics awards (and Ponette wins a third).

Elisabeth Pena in Lone Star - the sexiest performance of 1996

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  Trainspotting
• Best Line  (comedic):  “Some hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized by.”  (Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting)
• Best Line  (dramatic):  “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life.”  (Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting)
• Best Opening:  Trainspotting
• Best Ending:  Trainspotting
• Best Scene:  the opening of Trainspotting
• Best Use of a Song  (comedic):  “You Don’t Own Me” in The First Wives Club
• Best Use of a Song  (dramatic):  “Lust for Life” in Trainspotting  /  “Born Slippy” in Trainspotting
• Best Soundtrack:  Trainspotting
• Best Original Song from a Bad Film:  “Theme from Spy Hard” from Spy Hard
• Best Ensemble:  In the Bleak Midwinter
• Funniest Film:  In the Bleak Midwinter
• Most Over-Rated Film:  Sling Blade
• Worst Film:  Down Periscope
• Performance to Fall in Love With:  Renee Zellwegger in Jerry Maguire
• Sexiest Performance:  Elisabeth Pena in Lone Star
• Performance to Make Me Drool Much to My Wife’s Confusion:  Kelly MacDonald in Trainspotting
• Highest Attractiveness / Acting Ability Ratio:  Gwyneth Paltrow in The Pallbearer
• Best Guilty Pleasure:  From Dusk to Dawn
• Watch the Film, SKIP the Book:  Emma
• Read the Book, SKIP the Film:  The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Star of the Year:  Edward Norton
• Coolest Performance:  Matthew McConaughey in Lone Star
• Best Trailer:  Trainspotting
• Best Tag-Line:  “Choose Life”  Trainspotting
• Best Cameo:  Ed’s Redeeming Qualities in Ed’s Next Move

Film History:  Jeffrey Katzenberg sues Disney.  The Golden Globes are televised for the first time.  Krystztof Kieslowski dies of a heart attack at age 54.  Greer Garson dies in April and Claudette Colbert dies in July.  Marcello Mastroianni dies in December.  Welcome to the Dollhouse wins the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.  Secrets and Lies wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes.  Fargo sweeps the Independent Spirits – winning Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor and Actress.  In the initial Satellite Awards (then called the Golden Satellite Awards), Fargo wins Best Picture – Drama and Director while Evita wins Best Picture – Comedy or Musical.

Academy Awards:  The English Patient dominates to the point that when Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice win the Oscar for Best Original Song, they express thanks for The English Patient not having an original song.  It wins 9 Oscars (the most since 1987) and earns 620 points – the most since Ben-Hur in 1959.  But, like two other big winners – Ben-Hur and West Side Story, The English Patient fails to win Best Adapted Screenplay.  This is especially odd, as Sling Blade becomes the first film to win Best Adapted Screenplay without a Best Picture since 1952 and only the second ever.  On the other hand, it is the first time since 1977 that only one film is nominated for Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, and the only time in history that only one film was nominated for all three of those categories and that it failed to win Best Adapted Screenplay.  It is also the first Best Picture winner to get nominated for Adapted Screenplay but lose since 1968 (the previous five Best Picture winners to lose Best Screenplay were all original).  But it does win all five of the major tech categories – the first film to do so since 1987.  For the first time since 1987, all five Foreign Film nominees are from Europe (depending on how you define Georgia) while the Czech Republic and Georgia are nominated for the first time.  The Academy splits Best Original Score into two different categories; partially as a result of this is that there are more films nominated for feature film awards (46) than in any year since 1945, when there was no limit on the number of nominees in many categories.  In spite of The English Patient‘s dominance, 11 films manage to win Oscars, though Fargo is the only other film with more than one.  The English Patient is the first Best Picture winner to win Best Supporting Actress since 1979 and only the second since 1961, but starts a trend, and it will happen again three more times in the next six years.

Though the critical consensus was always pointed at Fargo and has swung there even more so, and the IMDb voters think The English Patient is one of the ten worst winners of all-time, I am perfectly okay with its win.  My top two films were both nominated for Screenplay, but nothing else.  Hamlet was also nominated for its script (a big surprise to almost everyone), but not for Picture, Director, Actor or Supporting Actress.  Outside of those misses, the biggest omissions from the Academy were the great performances in The Crucible (except for Joan Allen who was nominated), the amazing score from Fargo and the brilliant makeup that made Ralph Fiennes a burn victim in The English Patient.  They also go for more typical lame songs from One Fine Day and Up Close and Personal, but not the Tom Petty songs from She’s the One or the fantastic “Welcome to the Dollhouse.”

• Worst Oscar:  Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published for Sling Blade
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Original Song for “Because You Loved Me” from Up Close and Personal
  
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Picture for Lone Star
  
• Worst Oscar-Nominated Film:  Daylight
  
• Best Eligible Film with No Oscar Nominations:  In the Bleak Midwinter
• Worst Oscar Category:  Best Sound Effects Editing
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Art Direction
• Oscar / Nighthawk Award Agreements:  Best Director, Actress, Cinematography, Sound, Art Direction, Visual Effects, Costume Design

Golden Globes:  For the first time since 1991 and the last time to date, two films go head to head in the big five categories: Best Picture, Actor and Actress – Drama, Director and Screenplay: The English Patient and The People vs. Larry Flynt.  For the first (and only) time since 1976, one film wins Best Picture – Drama (The English Patient) while losing Director and Screenplay to the same film (The People vs. Larry Flynt).  For the third time in seven years, a film loses Best Picture – Comedy / Musical (Fargo) but gets nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars over the winning film (Evita).  The English Patient leads with 7 nominations but aside from Picture – Drama, only wins Score.  The People vs. Larry Flynt wins Best Screenplay but is the first film to win the Globe and not get nominated for the Oscar for Screenplay since The Mission in 1986.  Evita receives 5 nominations, wins Picture – Comedy / Musical, Actress – Comedy / Musical and Song and is nominated for Director and Actor – Comedy / Musical while Fargo loses all four of its nominations (Picture – Comedy / Musical, Director, Screenplay, Actress – Comedy / Musical).  Shine joines Fargo, English Patient and Larry Flynt in the Picture, Director and Screenplay categories but only wins Actor – Drama.  Jerry Maguire and Secrets and Lies both earn Picture nominations (in different categories), both earn a Supporting nomination (Actor for Maguire, Actress for Secrets) and win a lead award (again, Actor for Maguire, Actress for Secrets).  The Golden Globe for Madonna invites the media scorn, though I don’t think it’s nearly as embarrassing as the nominations for Mel Gibson (Actor – Drama for Ransom) over Daniel Day-Lewis for The Crucible or Glenn Close for Actress – Comedy / Musical for 101 Dalmations over Renee Zelwegger for Jerry Maguire.

Awards:  Fargo, Breaking the Waves and Secrets and Lies all win two Best Actress and two Best Director awards from the various critics groups.  But while Secrets and Lies wins one Best Picture and Breaking the Waves wins one Best Picture and two Best Cinematography awards, Fargo takes two Best Picture awards, as well as two Screenplay awards and a Best Score award.  Shine wins three Best Actor awards and one Best Picture while Trainspotting wins the final Best Picture award.  By the numbers, the National Board of Review goes for Shine (Picture) and Fargo (Director, Actress), the New York critics like Fargo (Picture) and Breaking the Waves (Director, Actress, Cinematography), the L.A. critics are taken with Secrets and Lies (Picture, Director, Actress) and Fargo (Screenplay), the Chicago ones love Fargo (Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actress, Score), the Boston critics split between Trainspotting (Picture) and Secrets and Lies (Director, Actress) while the National Society of Film Critics go with Breaking the Waves (Picture, Director, Actress, Cinematography).  The only other winner to take home more than 2 awards is Edward Norton who wins Best Supporting Actor from LA, Boston and the NBR for his performances in Primal Fear, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Everyone Says I Love You and The English Patient, which doesn’t win any Picture or Director awards, but does win Best Cinematography from LA, Boston and Chicago.

The English Patient sets a new record for guild nominations (12), points (600) and ties Forrest Gump‘s record of 7 wins (PGA, DGA, ACE – Editing, ASC – Cinematography, CAS – Sound, ADG – Art Direction, MPSE – Sound Editing), all of which will be broken the next year.  For the second time in three years, all five DGA nominees get Best Picture nominations at the Oscars and four of them are nominated for Picture and Director – the most since 1984.  The Birdcage wins the SAG Ensemble and sets a new record for guild nominations (6 – SAG Ensemble, two for Supporting Actor at SAG, WGA, CAS, ADG) without an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.  The English Patient and Shine are the only films nominated for DGA, PGA, WGA and the SAG Ensemble.  Fargo wins Best Actress at SAG and the WGA (Original), with PGA, DGA, ACE, ASC, and Best Supporting Actor (SAG) nominations.  Shine wins Best Actor at SAG, but also gets Supporting Actor and ACE nominations.  Jerry Maguire wins Supporting Actor at SAG and a MPSE award while earning Actor, Supporting Actress, DGA and WGA nominations.  SAG continues to differ from the Oscars in the supporting races – while it matches Best Actor 5 for 5, it only matches 2 in each supporting category.

At the BAFTA’s, The English Patient begins a trend; it is the first of five films in 8 years to win Best Picture at the Oscars and win Best Picture at the BAFTAs, but fail to win Best Director at the BAFTAs.  It wins 6 awards overall out of its 13 nominations: Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress, Editing, Cinematography and Music (tying A Room with a View for fourth place all-time with 570 points).  Evita, on the other hand, is the biggest loser in 6 years, losing all 8 of its nominations.  Secrets and Lies is nominated for 7 awards, including Best Picture and wins Best British Film, Actress and Original Screenplay.  Shine is nominated for 9 awards but only wins Actor and Sound while Fargo‘s only win among its 6 nominations is Best Director.

In its second year, the Broadcast Film Critics Association continues to only give winners in all the categories except Best Picture.  They hand out 10 nominations for Best Picture and get all the eventual Oscar nominees except Secrets and Lies (one of only three films prior to 2009 not to be nominated at the BFCA but to go on to earn an Oscar nomination – along with Chocolat and Gosford Park).  Fargo wins Best Picture, along with Best Actress, but The English Patient takes home Director and Screenplay.  The other winners are eventual Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush (Shine) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire) as well as Oscar nominee Joan Allen (The Crucible).  Ridicule wins Best Foreign Film.

Best Director:  The Coens (only Joel was listed as director but we all know they were both doing the directing) win the consensus by winning the Chicago Film Critics, the NBR, the BAFTA, the Golden Satellite and the Independent Spirit as well as earning DGA, Globe and Oscar noms.  They are followed by Anthony Minghella for The English Patient (DGA, Oscar, BFCA wins, BAFTA, Globe, Satellite noms), Mike Leigh for Secrets and Lies (LA and Boston wins, DGA, Oscar, BAFTA and Satellite noms), Lars von Trier for Breaking the Waves (NYFC and NSFC wins, Satellite nom) and Scott Hicks for Shine (DGA, Oscar, BAFTA, Globe, Satellite noms).  Minghella wins the Nighthawk for his epic direction, while the rest of my list are John Sayles for Lone Star, Danny Boyle for Trainspotting, the Coens and Kenneth Brangah for his magnificent Hamlet.  My 6 through 10 are Baz Luhrmann (who won the BAFTA over Minghella for his imaginative Romeo + Juliet), Alan Parker (who earned a Globe nom for Evita), John Schlesinger for Cold Comfort Farm, Neil Jordan for Michael Collins and Nicholas Hytner for The Crucible.

Best Adapted Screenplay:  In spite of losing the WGA and Oscar to Sling Blade (which I will never understand), The English Patient takes the consensus by adding on a Globe nom and wins from BAFTA and the BFCA.  With the two wins but nothing else, Sling Blade ties for second with Trainspotting (Oscar, WGA noms, BAFTA win).  The final two consensus slots go to The Crucible (Oscar and BAFTA noms) and Romeo + Juliet (BAFTA win).  My own list is Trainspotting, The English Patient, The Crucible, Hamlet (Oscar nom) and Emma (WGA nom).  I will point out the same thing I pointed out to people when Hamlet earned a surprise Oscar nomination — it doesn’t matter that Branagh used Shakespeare’s whole play; the screenplay process also involves where you choose to set your scenes and the actions involved (bearing in mind that Shakespeare had no stage instructions) and that is part of what makes Branagh’s movie so wonderful (see below for more).  My next five are very different: WGA nominee The Birdcage, Cold Comfort Farm, Mother Night, The Secret Agent and Star Trek: First Contact.

Best Original Screenplay:  With four wins (Oscar, WGA, LAFC, CFC) and two other nominations (Globe, BAFTA), Fargo runs away with the consensus award.  Secrets and Lies is the distant runner-up, winning the BAFTA and earning Oscar and WGA nominations.  There is a three-way tie for third between Shine, Lone Star (Oscar, WGA, Globe, BAFTA nominations for both) and Mother (NYFC and NSFC wins but no nominations).  Fargo comes in second on my list, but only because of how brilliant I think the script for Lone Star is.  My #3 is the brilliant In the Bleak Midwinter from Kenneth Branagh.  The rest of my top five are Secrets and Lies and Jerry Maguire (Oscar and WGA nominee).  My 6 through 10 are films that didn’t get any awards for their scripts but deserved accolades: Beautiful Girls, Everyone Says I Love You, Breaking the Waves, Citizen Ruth and Ridicule.

Best Actor:  Geoffrey Rush (whose performance in Shine I never really took to – finding it more mannered than anything else), wins the consensus easily – taking home the Oscar, SAG, BAFTA, Globe, BFCA and three critics awards – New York, LA and Boston.  Tom Cruise finishes second with NBR and Globe – Comedy wins and Oscar and SAG noms for his performance in Jerry Maguire.  The rest of the consensus nominees are Ralph Fiennes (SAG, Oscar, BAFTA, Globe nominations), Billy Bob Thornton for Sling Blade (Chicago win, SAG and Oscar noms) and Woody Harrelson as Larry Flynt (SAG, Oscar, Globe noms).

My own list contains five performances that I think are the equal of almost any other year, yet only one of them earned any accolades.  My winner is Ralph Fiennes, but my nominees are Kenneth Branagh for his brilliant Hamlet, Daniel Day-Lewis for his tragic John Proctor in The Crucible, Ewan McGregor for his drugged-up Renton in Trainspotting (which he earns just for his narration alone) and Chris Cooper as poor Sheriff Deeds in Lone Star.  My 6 through 10 are Cruise, Globe nominee Liam Neeson in Michael Collins, Nick Nolte in Mother Night, Leonardo DiCaprio for his modern Romeo in Luhrmann’s film and then Michael Maloney in In the Bleak Midwinter.

Oscar and consensus winner for Best Actress: Frances McDormand as Marge Gundersson in Fargo

Best Actress:  Frances McDormand wins the Oscar, SAG, BFCA, Chicago Film Critics and NBR, as well as as the consensus (and the Nighthawk), while earning BAFTA and Globe – Comedy / Musical nominations.  With LA, Boston, Globe – Drama and BAFTA wins, Brenda Blethyn comes in second in the consensus for her performance in Secrets and Lies.  She is followed by Emily Watson, who wins in New York and from the NSFC, as well as earning Oscar, BAFTA and Globe nominations.  Kristin Scott-Thomas shares the NBR win for Best Supporting Actress with her co-star Juliette Binoche and earns SAG, Oscar, BAFTA and Globe nominations.  A distant fifth place is Diane Keaton, with her Oscar and SAG noms for Marvin’s Room.  My own list is very different.  After McDormand, my second is Winona Ryder for her great performance in The Crucible, then Watson, then Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma, then Laura Dern in Citizen Ruth.  Following that, my 6 through 10 are the young, talented, beautiful and ignored by the awards: Kate Beckinsale for Cold Comfort Farm, Renee Zelwegger for Jerry Maguire (who was SAG nominated for Supporting), Kate Winslet for Jude, Claire Danes for Romeo + Juliet and Scott-Thomas (who is fully nude – an oddness in such a good performance, but shared on this list by Winslet and Watson and in the supporting category by Courtney Love and Kelly MacDonald).

I do think more highly of Blethyn’s performance than I once did – I see more of the character than an irritation.  As for Madonna’s win, well, I think Madonna did a good job, but to give her the award over McDormand was just stupid.  Worse, while Madonna did a good job, Platrow, Dern, Beckinsale and Zelwegger should have been the other nominees (as opposed to Debbie Reynolds, who was good in Mother, Barbra Streisand who was passable in The Mirror Has Two Faces and Glenn Close who was not particularly good in 101 Dalmations).  Hell, they also could have gone for Victoria Abril in French Twist (also nude) or Bette Midler in The First Wives Club rather than Close.

Best Supporting Actor:  Edward Norton wins the consensus a variety of roles: Primal Fear, The People vs Larry Flynt and Everyone Says I Love You.  The critics (LA, Boston, NBR) cited him for all three films, while he earned his Globe and his Oscar and SAG nominations for Primal Fear alone.  Cuba Gooding, Jr. finishes a close second with CFC, SAG, Oscar and BFCA wins (and a Globe nom) for Jerry Maguire.  Far behind are the rest of the list: Paul Scofield in The Crucible (BAFTA win, Globe nom), Harry Belafonte (NYFC win for Kansas City) and William H. Macy (SAG and Oscar noms for Fargo).  Macy is my winner, with Scofield my number two and Norton my number three (for Primal Fear).  But then I go with Jeremy Northam for Emma and Ian McKellen for Cold Comfort Farm.  My 6 through 10 are Norton again (this time for Larry Flynt), Hank Azaria (SAG nominee for The Birdcage), Ben Kingsley for Twelfth Night, Noah Taylor for Shine (SAG nominee) and then Gooding.

Oscar and consensus winner for Best Supporting Actress: Juliette Binoche as the haunted Hanna in The English Patient

Best Supporting Actress:  Juliette Binoche loses the Globe and SAG to Lauren Bacall, but her Oscar, BAFTA and NBR wins bring her to the top of the consensus list (but a close #2 on my list).  She’s followed by  Bacall (who also earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces in addition to her two wins), Barbra Hershey (LA and NSFC wins and Globe and Oscar noms for The Portrait of a Lady), Courtney Love (New York and Boston wins for The People vs Larry Flynt while the Globes nominated her as a lead) and Joan Allen (Oscar and Globe noms, BFCA win for The Crucible).  Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Baptiste is the sixth consensus nominee, but the fifth nominee for both the Globes and Oscars – the only time in their history that the two groups lined up 5 for 5 in this category.

I personally think that Bacall’s performance was more about sentiment than her actual performance and while Hershey is good, she’s not good enough for my list.  My own list is headed by Kate Winslet for her wonderful Ophelia (perhaps the last time she would be overlooked for awards), Binoche, Allen, Natalie Portman as the adorable girl next door in Beautiful Girls and Love (who I have trouble deciding which category she belongs in).  My 6 through 10 are mostly overlooked: Sophie Thompson as the busybody in Emma, Elisabeth Pena as the beautiful object of Chris Cooper’s affections in Lone Star, Baptiste, Kelly MacDonald as the sexiest catholic schoolgirl ever in Trainspotting and Katrin Cartlidge in Breaking the Waves.

Kenneth Branagh's brilliant but little-seen 4 hour version of Hamlet (1996)

Under-appreciated Film of 1996:

Hamlet  (dir. Kenneth Branagh)

It earns 4 Oscar nominations, including one of the most surprising the Academy’s history and earns a PGA nomination as one of the best productions of the year and it’s under-appreciated?  Well, yes, for a few different reasons.  The first is that this is a gorgeous and amazing film, a wonderful four-hour journey through the entire text of Hamlet and it earned as many nominations from the Oscar, critics, Globes, BAFTA, guilds and BFCA combined (10) as Braveheart earned from the Oscars, and won none of them.  The second is that none ever seems to have watched it.  I can’t get anyone to watch it because they are all frightened off by the four hour running time.  I’ve owned it on video and DVD and I still can’t get people to watch it.  That is reflected in the third reason, which is that people didn’t go see it in the theater when it was playing in gorgeous 65 mm (which it was actually shot in – the first British film in a generation).  In fact, though Branagh approached Hamlet in two different ways in 1996 – this and In the Bleak Midwinter (I very nearly wrote about that instead, but I already wrote a review of that here), together the two films appeared in only 120 theaters and earned just barely more than $5 million (in fact, all of Branagh’s films combined made just barely more than half of what Thor would make in the theaters).

Branagh makes some interesting choices in making the film and they all work out for him.  The first is the setting.  Rather than use an Elizabeth setting, Branagh moves it to the end of the 19th Century.  This is a Denmark preparing for war, complete with armory production and military dress.  The whole subplot with Fortinbras is not cut, as is so usual, so we get a whole different take on what is going on with this country.  He also brings in a lot of Hollywood star power, but doesn’t allow any of them to overwhelm the film. Though we see Jack Lemmon, Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, all of them in key roles, none of them are in major roles.  They provide an enticement, but not a distraction.  Instead, he trusts all of the major roles to the core group of actors that he had spent the previous several years working with: Derek Jacobi (Claudius), Nicholas Farrell (Horatio), Michael Maloney (Laertes) and Richard Briers (Polonius) – the last three even having been in In the Bleak Midwinter in different roles.  He then brings in Kate Winslet (whom he had almost cast in Frankenstein), who gives us the best film Ophelia we have ever seen, and to add to an Oedipal reading, the hottest woman in Britain from Branagh’s youth to play Gertrude: Julie Christie.  (Don’t believe that description?  I am reminded of an episode of Top Gear where David Tennant says that he always wanted to be Doctor Who and didn’t everyone who grew up in Britain in the 70′s, and Jeremy Clarkson replies “I wanted to be Julie Christie’s underwear.”)  Branagh enjoys the Hollywood stars for what they bring, but it his actors that he trusts, that he knows understand the power of the play and won’t shy away from it.

But perhaps Branagh’s greatest strength is himself, both as a star and as a director.  Watch his rendition of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, watch him there staring into the mirror with the dagger at the side of his head, literally staring death in the face.  Then, followed quickly by his interaction with Ophelia – the first time they appear together in the play, watch his initial reactions, then how it changes when he realizes he has been betrayed.  Then, if you take the time, think about the camerawork here, how he goes around opening the doors, with all of those mirrors and we never spot the camera reflected in any of them.  All of put together is such an amazing work of craftsmanship.

But most of all, aside from the greatness of the film itself, and it is a truly great film, people should watch it because this is their chance to see Hamlet uncut.  Hamlet is the great play of the English language, the one in which Shakespeare dropped everything that he could, giving us sex, love, life, death, everything wrapped up in ornate, incredible language that the human language bears forward.  Since it is so difficult to find a theater troupe that would dare produce the entire play uncut, take this chance to see the full text, to marvel in the language, in the speeches that you never hear.

“We can’t stop here.  This is bat country.”  (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p 18)

It’s Nixon who started all of this and I can’t help but think that would make Hunter smile.  When I was first getting into a serious love of film, one of the first great films I watched was All the President’s Men.  Then I read the book, and I was just hooked.  I could do a whole For Love of Books post on books about Nixon and the Nixon administration.  And I already had the makings of a serious political junkie, having been apparently the only fifth grader at Taft Elementary willing to offer up support of Walter Mondale.  I followed the trail through the primaries in 88 and less than four years later, had a serious conversation with my best friend, John, and we decided that of all the candidates, it was Bill Clinton that was the best chance – both for the country, and for getting elected.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  And through it all, I was reading books about Nixon.  So, somewhere along the line, not long after Nixon died, I bought a book called Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.

“McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.”  (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, p 414)

This wasn’t like any book on Nixon I had ever read before.  Hell, this was unlike any book I had read before.  This was raw journalism, journalism that cut right to the core because the journalist not only was there to see it, but also became a part of it.  I didn’t know yet that this had a name: Gonzo Journalism.  He wasn’t afraid to report the truth as he saw it (even if some of what he saw he was clearly making up, such as the rumor that Ed Muskie was taking Ibogaine).  I was hooked and I wanted to know more about Hunter.  But mostly I wanted to read more from Hunter.  So I found Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I never looked back.

For a time I read Hunter and then I let it lay.  The work was great and in 1998, when the Terry Gilliam film came out there was a nice revival.  But all I had were the early books and I wasn’t mustering a serious collection.  But sometimes friendship can push you over the edge.

“But the edge is still out there.  Or maybe it’s In.”  (Hell’s Angels, p 271)

What is it about Hunter that drives people to him?  I looked at this question just the other day in my review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Well, for some it’s just the excessive use of drugs.  But for some of us, for three of us in particular, it’s the way he writes, the way he cuts to the core of reality and leaves us looking at it from another angle.  One of them was my friend John, who had found Hunter on his own at the same time that I had (and, in fact, borrowed my copy of Generation of Swine for two years at one point).  The other was my friend Terry, whose fanatical love for both Hunter’s work and for Johnny Depp’s acting found its perfect summation in Gilliam’s film.

For four years, the three of us found time to talk about Hunter.  Then, in 2005, a few months after Hunter left us all, I moved across the country and those talks sadly ended.  But there is nothing you can find like the love of a particular writer to talk about between friends, and earlier this year, reading Gonzo, the oral biography of Hunter, it made me miss Terry and John more than ever, because it felt like a large part of my soul was missing.

It was a Sunday night when Hunter killed himself, a Sunday night when John had been over at our house for dinner.  I had driven him home and I just walked back in the house when Veronica came over and looked me in the eyes and told me what had happened.  The news was that Hunter was dead, that he had shot himself.  I knew that Terry and John would both be coming over to our house just a week later to watch the Oscars.  The next day, I made several photo copies of the classic two-thumbed Gonzo fist and I brought them to a t-shirt shop.  I made certain that he could get the shirts finished before Sunday and I paid for them.  On Sunday, before the Oscars began, I handed wrapped gifts to both Terry and John and they opened them.  We watched the Oscars, the three of us, wearing those shirts.

In an era when the Vice President of the United States held court in Washington accept payoffs from his former vassals in the form of big wads of one hundred dollar bills – and when the President himself routinely held secretly tape-recorded meetings with his top aides in the Oval Office to plot illegal wiretaps, political burglaries and other gross felonies in the name of a “silent majority,” it was hard to feel anything more than a flash of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer setting fire to a Judge’s front yard at four o’clock in the morning.  (The Great Shark Hunt, p 591-92)

My Hunter books (before buying Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone)

What follows is not a complete bibliography of Hunter’s work.  It is what I have, complete with two copies of Hell’s Angels and three of Fear and Loathing (one of which is the Modern Library edition listed separately).

• Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga  (1967)
  • The amazing work of journalism that made Hunter a name.  This is the book that really draws the line between Hunter and Tom Wolfe when it comes to the new kinds of journalism emerging in the sixties.  Hunter was willing to dive into the story and take what might happen, including a brutal beating and the insanity of combining the Hell’s Angels with the LSD crowd.  One of the great works of journalism from the 20th Century.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream  (1972)
  • My #26 novel of all-time, as chronicled here.  I have tried not to over-load with quotes from the book, but instead to spread the wealth.  But it is a seminal book, a great work of fiction and journalism all at once and it has the wave speech.
• Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72  (1973)
  • Probably the best book on a campaign ever written, even beating out The Making of the President, 1960 and Game Change.  Frank Mankiewicz, the campaign strategist for George McGovern called it “the most accurate and least factual account of that campaign.”  Listed as one of the 100 Greatest Works of Journalism of the 20th Century by the New York University Department of Journalism.
• The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, Volume 1)  (1979)
  • His first collection of various pieces from magazines.  It is an absolute must, as it has “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” and “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat”, as well as parts from his first three books.
• The Curse of Lono  (1983)
  • A very strange book about Hunter’s trip to Hawaii for the marathon with Ralph Steadman illustrations.  Harder to find than most of his books and not as rewarding.
• Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80′s (The Gonzo Papers Volume 2)  (1988)
  • A collection of his San Francisco Examiner columns from 1985 to 1988.
• Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream (The Gonzo Papers Volume 3)  (1990)
  • His third collection of assorted pieces, much of it pertaining to his arrest and trial.
• Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie (The Gonzo Papers Volume 4)  (1994)
  • A collection of pieces that he wrote for Rolling Stone on the 1992 campaign, collected with assorted essays written after the fact.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories  (1996)
  • The Modern Library release of Fear and Loathing.  In addition to the novel itself, it contains the piece written for the jacket copy (which first appeared in The Great Shark Hunt), as well as “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan”, the piece on the death of Ruben Salazar that ended up with Hunter taking the trip to Vegas with Oscar Acosta in the first place as well as “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, the original piece of Gonzo journalism.
• 

  The Gonzo Letters

  The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955 – 1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume One)  (1997)

  • One of the sad things about the transition from the last century to the current one is that people no longer write letters.  The great collections of letters, of Fitzgerald and Faulkner, Joyce and Hemingway, those won’t exist for the generations of writers coming of age.  It will all be digital and it will disappear into the vapors.  But Hunter’s letters (this is the first collection) are a wonder and joy to read.  In this book, we have the short correspondence between Hunter and Philip Graham, dating from Hunter calling him a phony in a letter and actually getting a smart and funny response.  Then began a back and forth that ended, sadly, a few months later with Graham’s suicide.
• The Rum Diary  (1998)
  • For us Hunter fans, the existence of a book was not exactly a secret (it is mentioned quite a bit in the letters throughout the sixties).  We know what it was and we hoped for years and years that it would come out.  When it came out, it was what could be expected, a fictional framework that could be glimpsed from his early letters and was enjoyable to read.  But it was still a novel by a young man living an interesting life that he wanted to fictionalize a bit.
• Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968 – 1976 (The Gonzo Letters, Volume II)  (2000)
  • The second volume of letters (of a trilogy, according to the editor’s note, but over a decade later we have not seen the third volume, nor had an explanation for the change in collection title), covering the years for which he is best known.  These include his letters to Oscar Acosta (“Meanwhile, keep whacking on the bastards.  I just got back from 10 days with Nixon & now I have to write something”), Ralph Steadman (“I think this Rape-Series is a king-bitch dog-fucker of an idea.  We could go almost anywhere & turn out a series of articles so weird & frightful as to stagger every mind in journalism”), Tom Wolfe (“What else can I say?  Except to warn you, once again, that the hammer of justice looms, and your filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!”) and Jann Wenner (“This last time, I found the American Dream, and it might be necessary to go back and drill some wisdom out of the freak who put it together.”)
• Screwjack  (2000)
  • Another work that was well-known among fans before it finally came out.  This was the first time that as a fan I felt a little cheated, as the book is really small and the pieces could have easily been printed as part of a larger work (as one of the three pieces already had, in Songs of the Doomed).
• Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century  (2003)
  • A rather meandering sort of work that is sort of autobiography, sort of a memo for the current times (including a piece written on September 12, 2001 that foretells a lot of what would come in the years ahead)
• Hey Rube: Blood Sport, The Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness; Modern History from the Sports Desk  (2004)
  • Hunter’s last book before he died, a collection of his ESPN columns
• Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writings of Hunter S. Thompson  (2011)
  • In a sense, the title of this really does say it all.  This is a collection of his best work over the course of over three decades writing for Rolling Stone.  While there are some great pieces obviously missing (Hell’s Angels, “Kentucky Derby”), this really is a great greatest hits collection – including many seminal articles (“Strange Rumblings in Aztlan”, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat”) as well as substantial portions of both Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.
• The Joke’s Over: Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson and Me  (2006) by Ralph Steadman
  • A memoir by artist Ralph Steadman about his time with Hunter.  Steadman’s illustrations often accompanied Hunter’s work, beginning with “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” and they are key to both Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (where they also appeared on the cover) and Curse of Lono.
• Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson  (2007)
  • This is an oral biography of Hunter edited by Jann Wenner, who was his foil and friend for many years and Corey Seymour.  Many of the things that found their way into the wonderful documentary Gonzo came directly from the interviews conducted for this book.  A must read for anyone who has a serious interest in Hunter and his work.

“On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph.  I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz’ final words from the heart of darkness: ‘The horror!  The horror! . . . Exterminate all the brutes!’ “  (Hell’s Angels, p 273)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: our three copies plus the film

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

• Author:  Hunter S. Thompson
• Rank:  #26
• Published:  1972
• Publisher:  Random House
• Pages:  204
• First Line:  “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
• Last Line:  “I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”
• ML Edition:  1996  (gold cover Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories)
• Film:  1998  (***.5 – dir. Terry Gilliam)
• First Read:  Spring 1996

The Novel:  “As true Gonzo Journalism, this doesn’t work at all – and even if it did, I couldn’t possibly admit it.  Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true.”  Those are Hunter Thompson’s words in the jacket copy he wrote for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  “To actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird;” he continues, “like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.”

But it’s damn good that he wrote it.  As a piece of writing, he described it as something he would do to unwind while working on the more serious story about racial issues in Los Angeles.  But to read it is also to unwind, to find yourself in that Freak Kingdom and get an idea of the crazy trip that you will never take.  Just look at those brilliant opening lines.  We kick right into the story (and how many novels have as good an opening line? – it ranks up there with A Tale of Two Cities, The Princess Bride and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) with that opening line: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”  But, then, of course, we get that whole list on just the next page of exactly what those drugs entail:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

And if you think that inventory is frightening as all hell, just look what happens just a few days and 100 pages later, when he takes note of it again:

The stash was a hopeless mess, all churned together and half-crushed.  Some of the mescaline pellets had disintegrated into a reddish-brown powder, but I counted about thirty-five or forty still intact.  My attorney had eaten all the reds, but there was quite a bit of speed left . . . no more grass, the coke bottle was empty, one acid blotter, a nice brown lump of opium hash and six loose amyls . . . Not enough for anything serious, but a careful rationing of the mescaline would probably get us through the four-day Drug Conference.

It is all one hell of a strange trip and there are so many who look at this book as the ultimate drug trip.  And it’s not just that they use the drug, and all the hallucinations and insanity that follows.  But Hunter is first and foremost a journalist, and this book appeals to those people because he does such a brilliant job of describing exactly what the hell happens on the trip: “This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel . . . total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue – severance of all connection between the body and brain.  Which is interesting, because continues to function more or less normally . . . you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.” or “But nobody can handle that other trip – the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head.  No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs.  Reality itself is too twisted.”

But it’s not the drug excess that pulls in many of us.  It’s the reminder that Hunter was actually the foremost journalist of his time.  When he says things like “The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” it’s not just hyperbole.  He’s making an observation on the world around him.  “Some people say they like it,” he says about Vegas, “but then some people like Nixon, too.  He would have made a perfect Mayor for this town; with John Mitchell as Sheriff and Agnew as master of Sewers.”  Hunter gets right to the core because he observes everything around him and then dives right into the middle of it.  Thomas Wolfe’s New Journalism that observed the drug and hippie culture before Hunter became a big name on the scene never could have tolerated such closeness in a scene like this.  Can you ever imagine Wolfe in his starched white suit being in a situation which ends with this line: “The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we’d gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it.”

There, of course, is a great deal to laugh about in the book.  Think of the scene early in the book (that becomes absolutely pitch-perfect in the film thanks the magic of editing):  “It seemed like a reasonable place to park, plenty of space.  I’d been looking for a parking spot for what seemed like a very long time.  Too long.  I was about ready to abandon the car and call a taxi . . . but then, yes, we found this space.  Which turned out to be the sidewalk in front of the main entrance to the Desert Inn.”  It’s the slow realization that he comes to, that allows us to discover it as well, or when he is explaining why he can’t stop sweating: “When I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped.”

And then, of course, there is the wave speech.  It is two pages of pure magic, a love poem in a sense to a very specific time and place.  It is probably the single most well-known piece that Hunter ever wrote, made more famous by Johnny Depp’s recitation in the film version.  And in Gonzo, it is that speech that receives so much attention, and deservedly so.  As I have said before, I will not quote it in part, because it deserves to be read in full.  Pick up a copy of the book (page 66 of most versions).  Find yourself slipping into the words “San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of.”  Then follow that wave through the crest and roll on through to the high-water mark.  Then you will truly have an idea of the clear insight that Hunter had.

The poster for the 1998 Terry Gilliam film

The Film:  Some adaptations can strip the novel clean of the actual narrative.  The Jane Austen and Henry James novels work so much better for me as films because I am dragged down by their prose, but the story and characters can still shine through.  But other novels depend so much on that narrative voice.  There was never any possibly way that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could have been made without a voiceover.  You need that narration – that distinct Gonzo voice of Hunter Thompson.  It is a novel like no other, not because of all the craziness that goes on in the book, but because of the stark, clear way that Thompson makes this come through.

So, right away we are in good hands with Terry Gilliam.  After the brief introduction scene of the time period, complete with a soft, calming version of “My Favorite Things”, we get the Ralph Steadman designed title card (the first great sign that the film would make prominent use of Steadman’s vision – a vital part of the novel), complete with the epigraph to the book (hell, how many films actually make us of the epigraph from the source novel), then comes that line that every fan of the book was waiting for, every fan knew must come right away if this were going to be any sort of success at adapting such a work of crazed and determined art.  And there it is, complete in Johnny Depp’s eerie Hunter impersonation: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

Now, if you want to look around at other reviews, you will find that this film was disliked by many and savaged by more than one prominent critic.  But here I am talking about how brilliant it is, how perfect an adaptation it is.  So what the hell are you supposed to believe?  Well, it comes down to several questions.  The first is whether or not you have ever read the book and if the book had any impact on you at all.  This is a review, after all, to pair along with my review of the novel as one of the 30 greatest novels of all-time.  And I love the book and I love the film.  More importantly, I know several other people who love the book and without fail every person I know who loves the book also loves the film (especially Terry and John).  They go together.  And if there are many film critics who can’t seem to find anything worthwhile in the film, I wonder if they found anything worthwhile in the book (or if they even read it).

The film makes the novel come alive in ways I never would have thought possible.  Reading about all those lizard hallucinations, the insane things you can see on acid (“after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth,” Hunter writes in the novel) and the crazed levels of excess I always wondered how it could ever be a film.  But the wonders of CGI make those lizards come to life in the way that acid will bring it screaming into your face (in fact, this might be one film that really would be worth adapting to 3-D – can you imagine that receptionist morphing into a lizard and coming out of the screen straight towards you?).  And in Johnny Depp, Hunter found a kindred spirit, with a perfect voice to match, and Johnny’s audio recordings of Hunter’s work (especially his narration of various pieces in the documentary Gonzo) are some of the best I have ever heard.

Most amazing is the wave speech (preceded by the incredibly hilarious scene where Depp sees Hunter himself in the Matrix).  The clips are perfect, the music in the background is perfect (“Get Together”) and the way Johnny says those words, one of the most amazing pieces of writing that Hunter or anyone else ever put down on paper, is exactly the way to take two pages of a novel that don’t seem like they can really be filmed and make them come to life.

Then there is the way that the film makes perfect use of pieces not in the novel.  Those brilliant lines describing Dr. Gonzo, “There he goes.  One of God’s own prototypes.  A high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production.  Too weird to live, too rare to die,” aren’t from the novel.  They’re from the wonderful piece “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” about Oscar Acosta, who of course is Dr. Gonzo, and in earlier pages of the same piece you can see the hilarious libel problems resulting from Acosta demanding to be identified with what Hunter himself calls “one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature.”

And then there is the ending – that wonderful description of what it takes to get the hell out of Vegas, a drive I have done myself: “There is only one road to L.A. – US Interstate 15, a straight run with no backroads or alternate routes, just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo and then on the Hollywood Freeway straight into frantic oblivion: safety, obscurity, just another freak into the Freak Kingdom.”  Those are lines straight from the book of course, but the middle of the book when Duke is first trying to flee Vegas.  The book itself, of course, ends with him flying back to Denver.  But this line, straight from Hunter’s mouth, is the perfect end to this road trip that so many of us love to take with this film.