Classic Film Picks

The African Queen
Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton were originally slated to play the roles of Rose, an uptight English missionary, and Charlie Allnut, the grizzled riverboat captain who rescues her from certain death at the hand of Nazi soldiers in WWII Africa. Their personalities cut from divergent hardwoods of hickory and oak, Bogart and Hepburn are magnetic. In spite of their horrible conditions attempting to escape down the treacherous Ulanga River--leeches, rapids, and a boat that barely works--the characters never complain, but boy do they battle it out as an improbable romantic attraction brews like an inescapable hurricane. Rose wants Mr. Allnut to help her sink a German gunboat called the Empress Louisa, and by hook or crook she convinces him to play along with her dubious plan. John Huston directed this Technicolor masterpiece away from the Hollywood studio system. When viewed as an article of independent filmmaking, "The African Queen" is all the more alluring for its treacherous atmosphere and brilliant performances. Bogart and Hepburn are truly amazing together.

Apu Trilogy
"Pather Panchali," "Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and "Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) make up Satyajit Ray's trilogy of films about a young man growing up in '20 era India. Although not originally intended as a trilogy, the films, which took eight years to complete, were a cultural breakthrough that showed the rest of the world a different side of worldclass Indian cinema. Ray's ability to transfer a poetic justice to the life trajectory of Apu from a good-hearted child to a responsible adult, and father to his son, comes through in the director's patient and all-encompassing embrace of the mysteries of life. Set in Bengal, the engrossing trilogy transports the viewer into another world that we come to know and accept as our own. Ravi Shankar created the music for this unforgettable masterpiece of humanist cinema filmed by the incomparable cinematographer Subrata Mitra.

Ashes and Diamonds
Based on the 1948 novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, the story takes place on May 8, 1945, the last day of WWII in Europe when two members of Poland's nationalistic underground Home Army aim to overthrow the New Communist District Secretary. Actor Zbigniew Cybulski came to be known as the James Dean of Poland for the character of Maciek assigned to assassinate the insurgent Communist leader. "Ashes and Diamonds" finished Wadja's war film trilogy with a flourish. Beautifully filmed and percolating with the futility of violence "Ashes and Diamonds" is a treasure of Polish cinema from a master filmmaker.

The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo’s groundbreaking 1965 documentary styled black-and-white thriller about the Algerian resistance effort to overthrow the French Colonial Government occupation of 1957 is a suspenseful and sophisticated political allegory that speaks eloquently to the current American military occupation of Iraq. “The Battle of Algiers” traces the potent terrorist efforts of a small group of revolutionaries as they battle against the French military, led by a former French Resistance fighter (Jean Martin). Pontecorvo cast non-professional actors and used the real leader of the Algerian revolutionaries (Yacef Saadi) to play himself. “The Battle Of Algiers,” which was banned in France for some time, is a one of a kind masterpiece of pure cinema that you will never forget. It is further proof that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. 

Belle de Jour
Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film “Belle de Jour” starring Catherine Deneuve as the wife of a wealthy doctor who begins spending her afternoons working in a high-class French brothel specializing in the kinks of its clientele. Outrageous and yet anchored in desire and erotic fantasy, “Belle de Jour” is a fascinating cinematic achievement that dares to connect Deneuve’s porcelain beauty to a world of bourgeois rebellion. It is a sublime picture filled with surprise and nuance.

The Birds
Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 follow-up to "Psycho" (1961) is an ambitious adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story wherein the famed British filmmaker finds a full dramatic voice to connect his own fetishized sexual concerns to a socially sensitive satire of modern mores, as contrasted against a mysterious natural catastrophe. Groundbreaking on several levels of cinematic technique and dramatic form, "The Birds" combines forward-thinking special effects with an unconventional soundscape to instill a palpable lurking fear in the audience. Although not as horrifically shocking as "Psycho," "The Birds" is a more sophisticated film, and represents a high watermark in the prolific career of a true maestro of cinema. Tippi Hedren's performance as Melanie, a social butterfly that becomes caged by external conditions, is remarkable for the actress's ability to remain true to the stylized nature of the material's demands, while circumventing that limitation to render a pure vision of '60s era womanhood trapped by the affection of a man (Mitch-played by Rod Taylor) whose relationship to his mother darkly informs his troubled emotional make-up. Endlessly watchable, "The Birds" is a masterpiece that can be read on many levels, providing insight into every aspect of modern filmmaking and dramaturgy.

Black Book
"Black Book" is Paul Verhoeven's first film created in his native born Netherlands since 1985, and he brings to it valuable lessons he learned working for 20-years in Hollywood (see "Robocop," "Starship Troopers") to forge an unprecedented World War II-era masterpiece. The film’s iconic title comes from a secret list of Dutch collaborators. Much of its success emanates from the nimble performance of its leading lady Carice van Houten. In the role of a once wealthy Jewish singer, who joins a Dutch resistance group after barely escaping a massacre that claims the lives of her family, van Houten plays Rachel Stein with a naive blitheness that registers as a tour de force. Stein represents a quietly contained moral code wherein romantic loyalty is as much a part of her physiology as her determination to exact retribution from those responsible for her family’s death. At once the most expensive and successful Dutch film ever made, Verhoeven created the fast-paced script with his well-aquatinted screenwriter Gerard Soeteman (co-writer on "Soldier of Orange") based on historical events researched in the Dutch War Museum and in scholarly publications over a period of more than 20 years. 

Black Orpheus
Marcel Camus’ reinterpretation of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice reaches epic dramatic heights and dark emotional depths in this winner of the 1959 Palme d’Or at Cannes and of the 1960 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Attributed as the cultural milestone that introduced Bossa Nova music to the Western world (via Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa’s musical score) "Black Orpheus" sets its mythic tale against Rio do Janeiro’s Carnival where popular streetcar driver Orpheus (Breno Mello) falls madly in love with a lovely country girl named Eurydice (played exquisitely by Marpessa Dawn). A ‘snake bite’ from an electrical wire robs Orpheus of his dream lover and his is driven to explore the mysterious land of the dead to reunite with her. Infectious Samba and Bossa Nova rhythms permeate the beautifully filmed earthy Brazilian atmosphere of Carnival. "Black Orpheus" is an unforgettable classic of cinematic poetry, music, and myth.

The Blue Angel
Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 masterpiece launched Marlene Dietrich to international fame with her role as Lola Lola, a dance-hall singer and dancer who seduces and destroys the life of an aging professor played by Emil Jannings. One of the first films to usher in sound in cinema, “The Blue Angel” remains an outstanding cinematic achievement that has influenced untold numbers of artists in all avenues of performance and exhibition.    

Blue Velvet
In 1986 David Lynch broke the language of cinema wide open in the same way that Jackson Pollock did with the art world in the early '40s. Using a minimalist palate set in small town America, Lynch blended surrealist elements into a story of adult sexual awakening juxtaposed against violence, mystery, and mental illness. Using character names drawn from '50s Americana iconography, and a moody musical score to match, Lynch presents returning hometown boy Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) who promptly unearths a severed ear in a field that he crossed thousands of times in his youth. Jeffrey finds a willing ally for his private investigation into the mystery of the ear's owner in the local police detective's romantically inclined daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). However, Jeffrey is unprepared for the psychological and emotional upheaval that will devour him when he stalks the fetishized life of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a sultry nightclub singer used to playing rough with a very debauched criminal named Frank (Dennis Hopper). "Blue Velvet" is David Lynch's greatest achievement. His balance of symbols and montage is at its most poetic and powerful. Every role is perfectly cast, and the story carries an indescribable undertow that kicks like a spastic mule in heat. It is the closest that any filmmaker other than Bunuel has ever come to such daring perfection of simultaneously primal and sophisticated cinema.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Fermented in a tragic romanticism placed firmly in a no-man's land between liberation and capitalism, Sam Peckinpah's 1974 thriller is a film that sticks in your mind's eye like a lingering sun spot. Independently made outside the dulling influence of Hollywood, Warren Oates renders Peckinpah's alter ego as Bennie, an ex-pat piano player working for tips in a Mexican dive bar. The operatic-scaled drama is set in motion when El Jefe (Emilio Fernandez),a ruthless Mexican rancher, discovers that his teenage daughter Theresa is pregnant, and offers a million dollars for the actual head of the man--El Jefe's would-be successor--that impregnated his daughter. Bennie gets wind of the bounty from a couple of slimy hitmen (played by Robert Webber and Gig Young), and plots with his prostitute girlfriend Elita (played with gusto by Isela Vega) to take the head of the man who coincidentally loved Elita before dying in an accident. Although Bennie is unable to confess his love to Elita, their passion is evident in the mutual dream they share for living together once they recover the reward. Bennie spends the film's second half lugging around Alfredo's head in a fly-swarmed canvas bag that can be read as a metaphor for a film canister that Peckinpah would carry to deliver his latest finished product to greedy cigar chomping producers. The scenes of Warren Oates defending against the pursuing hit men trying to kill him, are substantial for his character's all-or-nothing approach to an increasingly virulent condition of corruption closing in from all sides. "Alfredo Garcia" is an unapologetically cynical film that captures the essence of a dying breed of an American male identity, of which Sam Peckinpah was a card-carrying member. Peckinpah and Oates were men made of hand carved hickory. You know it when you see it.     

Casablanca
Although it was made in 1942, "Casablanca" is still the greatest romantic drama ever made. The obsessive longing and regret that Humphrey Bogart's Rick and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa feel for one another is magnified by the relentless social conditions that they find themselves in when fate brings them together after many years apart. WWII Casablanca is a dangerous place for an ex-patriate American, and even more so for the girl of a French Resistance Freedom Fighter (even if they'd call a guy like Paul Henreid's Victor Laszlo a terrorist these days). Casablanca is an exotic location where a separated couple of dyed-in-the-wool lovers can reinvent their overpowering mutual love should they so choose unless the man, a apparent apolitical cynic, opts to sacrifice their once-in-a-lifetime chance in the name of a greater human cause. Such is the nature of director Michael Curtiz's film that features remarkable performances from Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Claude Rains. Broken into three clearly defined acts--the script was based on a stage play--and beautifully filmed with noir-inflected shadows by the great cinematographer Arthur Edeson ("The Maltese Falcon"), "Casablanca" has a way of refreshing itself the more times you view it. Between the heavily layered visual image systems at work, and the crisscrossing elements of social unrest and suppressed emotion, lies a movie that captures romantic lightening in a bottle. It doesn't hurt that Bogart and Bergman come together like flash paper to flame. The bitter sweetness of love never looked, or sounded, so good.  

Chinatown
Like "Casablanca," "Chinatown" represents a perfect storm of enormous cinema talent coming together under an intoxicating noir setting. Robert Towne's screenplay is the stuff of legend--a perfectly sculpted script without a scrap of fat on it. The setting is '30s era Los Angeles where political wrangling over water rights for the area is cause for more than a little criminal activity on every level of social strata. In a career-topping performance, Jack Nicholson plays private detective J.J. "Jake" Gittes, hired by a squirrelly dame named Ida (Diane Ladd), posing as Evelyn Mulwray, to follow her water commissioner husband Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) on suspicion of cheating. The web of deceit that Jake enters into costs him dearly on the way toward a downbeat ending that still shocks audiences. Conspiracy, incest, and murder triangulate in a real historical context of Los Angeles' scandalous past. For her part, as the real Evelyn Mulwray, Faye Dunaway plays a tragic figure of iconic proportions--a tainted heroine doomed to be violently misunderstood. "Chinatown" would be Roman Polianki's last American film, and as such carries a particular aura of the unavoidable hand of fate. The film was nominated in eleven Oscar categories in 1974, and won for Best Screenplay.

The Cincinnati Kid

This cinematic treatment of Richard Jessup’s novel, about an up-and-coming ’30s poker champ, benefited from screenwriting contributions by Ring Lardner Jr. (M*A*S*H) and Terry Southern (Easy Rider). However, it’s the film’s stellar cast, along with a gritty narrative and stylized direction, that makes The Cincinnati Kid the best poker movie ever. Hotshot poker player Eric Stoner, a.k.a. “The Kid” (Steve McQueen), goes up against old-guard poker master Lancey Howard, a.k.a. “The Man” (Edward G. Robinson), in a marathon game of five-card stud that will decide if The Man will be replaced. Roguish Rip Torn plays Slade, a spiteful local tycoon with a vested interest in seeing Howard beaten after being “gutted” in a poker game by The Man.

The film’s characters are clearly defined by their actions leading up to the final poker scene so that we comprehend Stoner and Howard as serious poker competitors who view money as a tool to poker as “language is to thought.” When the final hand is played, Stoner has cleverly quelled Slade’s attempt to fix the game in his favor with a cheating dealer (Karl Malden), and has worn Howard down in spite of The Man’s various attempts to psyche him out. McQueen and Robinson exhibit perfect poker-faced control in the scene as they each go “all in” with the makings of a full house against a straight flush. The big poker lesson here is that “sometimes the cards fuck you.” Neither Hollywood nor poker gets any truer than that.

Come and See
Stalingrad-born Elem Klimov's "Come and See" is an undiluted expression of cinematic poetry in the service of an unspeakably turbulent anti-war narrative about the 628 Byelorussian Villages burnt to the ground along with their inhabitants by the Nazis during WWII. The film is a disorienting vision of hell on Earth that would pale Hieronymus Bosch's most gruesome compositions. An electricity-buzzing stench of human death and social decay hangs over the remarkable picture's constant volley between neo-realistic, formal, and documentary styles that take the viewer on quick descent into the existential madness of war through the eyes of its fourteen-year-old peasant protagonist Florya. Alexei Kravchenko's phenomenal performance as Florya is of such an enormous dramatic magnitude that he physically transforms the audience.

Das Boot
German-born director Wolfgang Perersen might just as well have made only one film in his career because his co-written adaptation of Lothar Buchheim's novel, about the real experiences of a WWII German U-boat crew, is a perfect masterpiece of wartime suspense. Inside the thick hull of their creaking U-96 submarine, the Captain (Jürgen Prochnow) fearlessly leads his ship through the Battle of the Atlantic. The underwater ship dodges depth charges, braves a fierce storm, narrowly escapes a collision with another sub, and is forced to sit at the bottom of the ocean after being attacked by enemy bombers. And there's more. This is a war film in which the brutal conditions of the characters' circumstance blurs the lines between allied or enemy forces. We are with the men inside their giant iron casket. "Das Boot" is absolutlely a big screen film that plays better in the German version with English subtitles rather than the dubbed version. It is unlike any other war film in that it confines the audience in a confined submarine where we digest the fear and panic of the human beings on screen. In short, "Das Boot" is a religious experience.

Double Indemnity
Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir "Double Indemnity" stars Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff, a Los Angeles insurance salesman convinced by Barbara Stanwyck's sultry character Phyllis into murdering her husband in order to collect double the amount of her insurance policy. "Double Indemnity" received Seven Academy Award nominations and remains one of the best loved film noir movies for good reason. Edward G. Robinson stars as MacMurray's ethical associate, but it's Barbara Stanwyck that rules the roost as one of cinema's most cunning femme fatals.

Dracula
Ladies fainted when Bela Lugosi rose from his coffin as a vampire in the 1927 Broadway production of "Dracula" that preceded Tod Browning's brilliant 1931 film version that had an equally chilling effect on movie audiences. Playwright Hamilton Deane based his lean script on Bram Stoker's famous novel, and introduced horror to the era of sound film. Dwight Frye's eerie performance as Renfield, the hapless British accountant who dares set foot inside Dracula's foreboding castle, sets a tone of ghoulish insanity that the vampire instills in men. For his well-established part, Lugosi is positively blood-curdling as he stalks every scene with his thick native Hungarian accent and dapper tuxedo and cape. "Dracula" is more than a milestone of cinematic horror, it represents a marriage of nightmare and reality that establishes an American gothic sensibility for other dramatic genres that followed. Stark, cold, and deeply sensual, "Dracula's" atmosphere and intention is rooted in a fear of unknown lust and desire from which there can be no escape. To view "Dracula" is to be bitten by the vampire's desperate attack.  

Duck Soup
Leo Macarey's 1933 Marx Brothers movie was overlooked by audiences during its depression-era release but received a much-deserved re-release in the '60s that found a welcoming young audience. The tiny republic of Freedonia is in economic collapse and turns rich widow Mrs. Gloria Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) who promptly replaces the its President with one insanely irreverent Rufus T. Firefly (hilariously played by Groucho Marx). Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo (in his last appearance) deliver their anarchic slapstick satire with a vengeance. Groucho's famously sung line, "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait 'till I get through with it" promises a kind of comic uproar that Hollywood can only dream of. Watch for the famous "mirror scene" in which Harpo--dressed as Groucho--matches Groucho's every movement in a non-existent mirror--pure comic genius.

Easy Rider
With the prodigious assistance of author Terry Southern, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda created what would become the first water of an artistic independent cinema by and for young-minded people. Wyatt (AKA Captain America - Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) are modern-day cowboys testing the boundaries of American freedom circa 1969 on a cocaine financed cross-country motorcycle road trip toward their dream of an early retirement. “Easy Rider” is a scrupulously real and surreal cinematic experiment about the impotent ‘60s counter-culture movement that naively attempted to alter American prejudice and greed. "Easy Rider" stands up as a profound period piece that continues to reverberate with the despondent hostilities of modern American existence. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, "Easy Rider" is a masterpiece.

Eraserhead
David Lynch's immersion in the surreal world of his protagonist Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) comes through in a creepy black-and-white horror movie of sorts. "Eraserhead" provided an offset balm to the crush of 1977 Hollywood blockbusters like "Star Wars" when it was released. Hugely popular among the Midnight Movie crowd, the story follows fright-wig Harry through painfully slow and strange events centered around romantic relations with his none-too-forthcoming girlfriend Mary. It seems Harry has become a father--but how, and to what kind of freaky creature baby? Time drips like old paint in Lynch's surreal experiment, that revels in all things upsetting, disorienting, dark, and mysterious. 

The Exiles
Director Brent MacKenzie’s black-and-white documentary/narrative genre blender about urbanized Native Americans in 1961 Los Angeles is a cold glass of cinematic water drawn from the same well as Joseph Strick’s "The Savage Eye" (1960). MacKenzie uses editorial voice-over narration to elaborate on his reckless characters’ existential lifestyle during a night of carousing amid LA’s impoverished Bunker Hill neighborhood where the steeply inclined "Angel’s Flight" trolley car delivered passengers into the thick of its immigrant community. Bold in its visionary attempt to capture an essence of American Indian reality that is evermore significant today for its strangled condemnation of America’s betrayal of a people it murdered and displaced before such war crimes became articulated in our common vernacular, "The Exiles" is a one-of-a-kind film.

The Exorcist
On the day after Christmas in 1973, Oscar-winning director William Friedkin followed up the tremendous success he enjoyed with "The French Connection" (1971), with the most daring horror film ever made; an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel "The Exorcist." Blatty, a devout Catholic, had been inspired by a 1949 Washington Post article entitled "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held In Devil’s Grip," and carefully crafted his novel around the area in Georgetown where he attended Jesuitical Georgetown University. It was a classically compelling American Gothic legend that set up an earth-shattering physical and religious battle between good and evil over the possessed body of a young girl named Regan MacNeil (unforgettably played by Linda Blair). Regan’s possessed entity was, and is, the closest vision of sheer evil to ever appear in fictive film. It was only fitting that the two exorcists attempting to save Regan’s life, by expelling the demon within her, offered up and ultimately sacrificed their lives. The supernatural incidents are resolved in the closing scenes of the movie, but the potential for evil to grip mortal humans is a ghost that lurks in the memories of every audience that sees "The Exorcist."

Forbidden Games
Rene Clement's 1944 adaptation of Francois Boyer's novel is an exquisitely unsentimental movie about the corruptive effect of war on children. After her parents are killed beside her in an air raid, five-year-old Paulette (played by Brigitte Fossey) carries her dead dog with her as she attempts to reenact of the deaths that have traumatized her. Michel (Georges Poujouly), a young peasant boy, discovers Paulette wandering in the countryside and convinces his family to take her in. Soon, Paulette has Michel stealing crucifies and killing animals for her private animal cemetery, for which she wishes to include human corpses. "Forbidden Games" caused a scandal when it was released in 1952 because it co-opted a fictional story and embellished it with the recent tragedy of war. The film is every bit as controversial today for its transparently passionate view of the permanent damage that war inflicts on its youngest survivors.

The 400 Blows
Francois Truffaut's debut film not only galvanized the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement of French cinema, but also generated a personal language of cinema that Truffaut would elaborate on for the rest of his career. Based on Truffaut’s troubled childhood "Les quatre cent coups" represents a chapter of narrative history seemingly ripped from his personal diary. Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is the precocious yet well meaning child of ambivalent parents. Circumstances at school and at home conspire against Antoine when his every minor indiscretion is perceived as a sign of irredeemable delinquency. It isn’t long before Antoine is conforming to the color that his character has been painted, and finds himself in a reform school where he clearly doesn’t belong. Truffaut gives the audience a bold example of how youthful rebellion is fomented by myopic societal and parental authority figures. Jean-Pierre Leaud’s guileless performance is one of the most affecting and memorable renderings of character in all of world cinema. Antoine’s dire circumstances delineate a specific period of suppressive ideology that existed in Europe and America during the ‘50s and ‘60s. However, the cathartic power of "The 400 Blows" on its audience is timeless and all consuming. I would argue that Truffaut never again achieved the narrative clarity of his first film, because he infused so much individual passion and pain into it. "The 400 Blows" is a profoundly heartrending film that has inspired legions of audience members and would-be directors.

The Godfather
The great Hollywood producer Robert Evans is said to have been responsible for bringing the hammer down on Francis Coppola to shape "The Godfather" into the 1972 film that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. How much of Evans' genius went into the final cut is a moot mystery, because "The Godfather" stands as a masterpiece of American cinema that reflects the distinctive efforts of a particularly gifted ensemble of a cast, crew, and filmmaker. Mario Puzo's 1969 novel provided the ten-year narrative about the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family overseen by its patriarch Don Vito Corleone (magnificently played by Marlon Brando in the last truly great performance of his career). Luchino Visconti's influence, vis a vis his 1963 film "The Leopard," is apparent in Coppola's staging of social scenes like the wedding that serves to introduce the audience to the insular world of the Corleone family. Vito's son Michael (Al Pacino) respects his family's values and rules of conduct but suffers from an inner conflict about his participation in the family's crime syndicate until an attack on his father's life brings his sense of responsibility into perspective. Ideals of tradition and familial loyalty ring through Nino Rota's score to ensconce the audience in an atmosphere of unconditional involvement. Like a favored method of Mafia influence, "The Godfather" is an offer no audience can refuse.   

Harlan County, U.S.A.
One of the finest documentaries ever made, Barbara Kopple’s "Harlan County, U.S.A." is a brilliant exposé about the embattled history of coal miners in America as seen through the very personal prism of striking coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1972. With elegant use of archival footage, Appalachian coal mining songs, and intimate footage from the picket lines and union meeting rooms Kopple gives voice to the impoverished but steadfast miners and their wives who stood up for their family’s rights against the greedy coal mine owners and violent scabs. The film takes on an incidental feminist tone as union rabble-rouser Lois Scott galvanizes the women around her to picket against the gun toting "company thugs" that threaten their lives on a daily basis. The film is even more poignant today, considering how much exponentially worse conditions have gotten for today’s coal miners.

Harold and Maude
Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy "Harold and Maude." Bud Court and Ruth Gordon play the coolest oddballs on the planet. Death-obsessed 20-year-old Harold has a proclivity for staging fake suicides to get a rise from his maternally inept but filthy rich mother, when he isn't attending funerals for the fun of it. Maude is an 80-year-old freethinker who coincidentally shares Harold's fancy for memorial services. The pair fall into a romantic relationship that shouts in the face of societal mores as Cat Stevens's uplifting score does for the movie what Simon and Garfunkel did for "The Graduate." If there's one comedy to represent the woof and warp of the early '70s, "Harold and Maude" is it.

I Vitellioni
Before Federico Fellini began deconstructing narrative structure with "8 ½"  he made nine traditional narrative films of which "I Vitelloni" (1953) was the third. Fellini draws on the days of his youth by returning to his hometown of Rimini to play a kind of trick on the friends he left behind by making a movie about their rudderless ways of passing time. A group of four Italian men in their late '20s, and still living at home, dream of escaping their provincial '50s era Italian seacoast town. As the indolent men drink, carouse and lay about in a daze of postwar ennui we see the war's stark effects on the men's moral barometers. "I Vitelloni" is a visually and emotionally eloquent example of neo-realist filmmaking that captures a timeless quality of male experience in a very specific and pure way. Vitelloni means "young large calves."

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
In the face of low budget B-movie monster flicks, Don Siegel's 1956 filmic adaptation of Jack Finney's science fiction novel introduced a new kind of double-edged social satire to movie audiences. Filled with classic chase sequences and creepy character development, the story follows Dr. Miles Bennell (perfectly played by Kevin McCarthy) whose small California town's citizens are being duplicated by aliens. Hitchcock couldn't have done a better job of ramping up the suspense in a horror film that is as much fun today as when it shocked audiences in the '50s.

Jaws
Spielberg's opening sequence of "Jaws" pushes Hitchcock's second act shocker from "Psycho" up to the start of a terrifying horror movie that also borrows from Hitchcock's other masterpiece "The Birds." A sexy nude girl goes for a midnight swim in the pitch black ocean off Amity Island, where the most phallic of creatures lurks below. John Williams' pulsing musical score sends shockwaves of fear deep into the central nervous system of the audience. Suddenly all teetering apprehension erupts into sheer panic as the vulnerable girl is thrashed about in the open sea like a leaky rag doll by an unseen shark of enormous strength and fury. The tyranny of mother nature will return to attack children before the local police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) will call upon the salty dog shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) and a geeky oceanographer named Matt (Richard Dreyfus) to go after the vicious monster that threatens the livelihood of the resort town. In 1975 "Jaws" made Steven Spielberg a household name by delivering on an unpredictable primal threat and fear of the unknown. For as many women who refused to take showers after seeing "Psycho," just as many stayed away from the ocean after seeing "Jaws." Peter Benchley's characters are exquisitely fulfilled by Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfus, who carry out the literary portent of their archetypes to the letter. In the end, the shark is a MacGuffin necessary for the men to bond and test themselves against what they fear most--their own mortality.

La Dolce Vita
Before Federico Fellini's highly stylized "La Dolce Vita" won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1960 and introduced the world to modern Rome's decadent realm of paparazzi, pseudo-intellectuals and working class individuals against an urban wasteland of rootless existence. The film marked Fellini's break from neo-realism and conventional narrative structure, and stood as a defining and incalculably influential moment in cinema. Told over a period of seven nights and seven days, the story follows suave journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) as he flits between nightclubs, cafes, press conferences, churches and beds on an impotent quest for unattainable women. 'The sweet life' is shown as a hollow goal beyond the grasp even of those at its euphoric center. The satire on display is so simultaneously subtle yet blatant that the movie itself is intoxicating.

La Terra Trema
Luchino Visconti's 1948 "La Terra Trema." Visconti's third film is set in a poor Sicilian fishing port village being exploited by wholesale merchants. Based on Giovanni Verga's novel, the film centers on one family's attempt to break the economic stranglehold of their capitalist oppressors in spite of the crushing effect that such an effort might have on their town. As its title presages "La Terra Trema" is an earth-shattering example of neo-realist filmmaking that feels as much like a documentary as it does a fictional narrative film. Visconti used real Sicilian fishermen as non-actors expressing their circumstances and beliefs. The effect is a powerful portrait of graceful human dignity caught between the cruelty of the sea and opportunistic greed.

Last Year at Marienbad
Alain Resnais sumptuous 1961 film is a minimalist study in the ability of mise en scene to tell an inscrutable story of a love triangle. Resnais famously said that the film is “not a fixed work of art.” Indeed, “Last Year At Marienbad” is a cinematic puzzled filled with architectural compositions that dare the audience to penetrate their austere logic. The influences of Dadaism and surrealism play strongly in a hyper-visual context of porcelain beauty. Seeing the film is like being drugged with a pill that is the antithesis of the high audiences took away from Busby Berekely movies. It's a filmic parlour game that the fillmmaker plays very close to the vest. Ah, what sublime confusion.   

Leave Her To Heaven
Martin Scorsese famously called director John M. Stahl's 1945 post war Technicolor masterpiece "a film noir in color." Gene Tierney uses her pale blue eyes to stark unemotional effect as Ellen Berent, a femme fatale seductress who lays a marriage trap for successful author Richard Harland (played by Cornel Wilde). Ellen is an obsessive compulsive whose insular idea of wedded life excludes everyone except the man she holds onto with a death grip. Vincent Price plays Ellen's jilted former fiance in this lucious thriller filled with chewy dialogue, great costume designs, and lakeside locations to die for. Mental illness never looked so seductive or bit with such a ferocious over-bite as from Gene Tierney's demented character.   

Lifeboat
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 realization of a script started by John Steinbeck, and completed by Hitchcock, is an often overlooked cinematic treasure. Set in the claustrophobic confines of a lifeboat in the Pacific ocean, a group of eight survivors from a torpedoed freighter share their tiny vessel with the German commander responsible for their predicament. Hitchcock’s inventive use of cinema language to expand on the drama occurring within the limited confines of the boat is something to behold. Tallulah Bankhead steals the movie as a fur-wearing selfish journalist whose hair is barely ever out of place. Conceived as a wartime social satire, “Lifeboat” carries a boatload of conflicting ideologies that are still at issue today. Hitchcock's answer to the perpetual film school dilemma of making a movie on a boat as one of a filmmaker's biggest challenges, is a textbook example of how it's done right. 

The Maltese Falcon
John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. Although Dashiell Hammett’s “stuff that dreams are made of” novel already had two film versions under the title “Satan Met a Lady,” screenwriter John Huston chose the story for his directorial debut. Huston emphasized its suspense elements to create a noir that didn’t rely on spectacle, but rather on the intrigue of its amoral characters. Hitchcockian right down to its statuette maguffin of a black bird, “The Maltese Falcon” is considered the first “film noir” and launched Humphrey Bogart’s career. Every scene is something to savor thanks to great performances from Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet as “the fat man.”  

Matewan
John Sayles' suburb period drama is set in the '20s era West Virginia coal mining community of Matewan where union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) arrives with a group of black miners being brought in by the Stone Mountain Coal Company to break striking Italian miners. Sayles' meticulous script manifests the stark social influences of government, corporation, religion, race, and personal struggles pervading the Appalachian region at the time. James Earl Jones gives a powerful performance as a Black miner called "Few Clothes," and David Strathairn creates a distinctly un-stereotypical sheriff in the guise of Sid Hatfield. Layered with a beautiful musical score by Mason Daring, it's Chris Cooper's union leader that captures the imagination in an unforgettable picture of essential American history. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler contributes greatly to the look and feel of a truly special cinematic achievement.

1900
"1900" is Bernardo Bertolucci's crowning achievement of collectivist socio-political cinema. It is a grand scale, formally composed, Italian drama about a society of peasant farmers over a period of nearly 50 years, as seen through the eyes of two socially opposite boys. That the internationally-cast epic was made possible as a result of the vast success of Bertolucci's controversial "Last Tango In Paris" (1972) contributes to the mystique of "1900." The 35-year-old director's newfound status allowed his unhindered imagination, at the height of his powers, to finish his trilogy of fascist-themed films with an original script co-written with his brother Giuseppe and Franco Arcalli (both were co-screenwriters with Bertolucci on "Last Tango"). Where the first two films in the trilogy ("The Spider's Stratagem"--1970 and "The Conformist"-- 1971) live in a stylish bourgeoisie noir world of cloaked deceit, "1900" explores the familial identity existing between a group of socialist farmers, the landowners they work for, and fascist factions penetrating rural Parma, Italy. Its half-century scope provides a raw macro/micro slant on psychological, generational, political, and cultural changes in the region of Bernardo Bertolucci's birth.

 

Nosferatu
Werner Herzog's 1979 homage to F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent film is an appropriately chilling telling of the gothic tale derived from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Klaus Kinski delivers a spot-on performance that may be finest of his career as the bloodthirsty vampire Count Dracula who takes advantage of a real estate broker (played by Bruno Ganz). Isabelle Adjani brings her immutable beauty to bear as the broker's fearful wife fated to suffer Dracula’s bite. The movie is filled with delightfully scary touches and recreated camera angles from Murnau's original.

Overlord
D-Day--June 6, 1944--is as much a part of "Overlord's" enigmatic title as the Allied invasion code name to which it refers. Stuart Cooper drew from over three thousand hours worth of archival WWII footage from the Imperial War Museum to blend with his own separately shoe narrative to create a one-of-a-kind story structure about the journey of an everyman British soldier named Tom (Brian Stirner). Using historic war clips filmed during the exact time period leading up to the D-Day climax of the movie, Cooper seamlessly interweaves Tom's persona story with close attention to every detail of costume, atmosphere and behavior. It is a live action essay of the raw physical reality of one of the most significant moments in world history told from the recesses of a soldier's mind, and from a manifold vantage point that the character cannot himself comprehend.

The Pianist
Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” is the director’s finest achievement, and elevates Adrien Brody (Oscar win for Best Actor 2002) to eminence in his representation of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Polanski himself was orphaned as a 7 year-old boy during the bombing of Warsaw; he escaped through a hole in a barbed wire fence. Polanski uses his familiarity with the horrific subject matter in an unsentimental way to depict an occupation that diminished 10,000 Polish Jews living in Warsaw to 20 over a period of four years. Based on Szpilman’s memoir, which was suppressed by Poland’s Communist government for 53-years, “The Pianist” follows Szpilman from his job as a pianist for Polish radio, to separation with his family, and into a long period of desperate hiding. The muted heroism of Szpilman’s survival flashes as a fragile and determined pulse in Adrien Brody’s magnificently understated performance.

Pixote
Long before Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund made "City of God" in 2002, about Rio de Janeiro's youth-centric atmosphere of organized crime, director Hector Babenco set the bar for such explosive cinema with his brilliant 1981 film "Pixote." The film's full title , "Pixote: a Lei do Mais Fraco" translates as "Pixote: The Law of the Weakest," and was based on José Louzeiro's book "A infância dos mortos" ("The Childhood of the Dead Ones") in a screenplay adaptation by Babenco and his script collaborator Jorge Duran, about a young boy named Pixote (pronounced Pee-jo-che). Fernando Ramos Da Silva was the expressive young non-actor chosen to play his life as a ghetto child for Babenco's evocative subjective camera. The boy is sent to a cruel juvenile reformatory where he sniffs glue and learns the ways of prison survival that inform his life after he and two of his friends escape the jail. Pixote desperately seeks the attention a mother figure even as he falls deeper into an inevitable vortex of crime and violence. "Pixote" is Hector Babenco's masterwork. The film is a distressed and powerful cry for social change in a Brazilian society that feeds on its on children. It is a deeply affecting and haunting film that penetrates the skin of its viewer through the personal commitment to its subject that comes through in every frame. That Fernandos Ramos Da Silva was eventually murdered at 19 by police in Sao Paulo only emphasizes the sad fate of so many more Brazilian children just like him. "Pixote" is an amazing cinematic social document made with fury and passion by an uncompromising director. There has never been another film that approaches its depiction of Brazil's condemned youth, not even "City of God."

Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock should be credited with making the first slasher film for the ground-breaking narrative template he created for "Psycho." Regardless of how many times you've seen it, "Psycho" is a compulsively watchable horror thriller that builds layers of exponential suspense with every scene. Famously made on a shoestring budget, with a television production crew, "Psycho" is a horror movie that gains claustrophobic momentum from its desolate "Bates" motel location where Janet Leigh's Marion Crane makes her last stop. Anthony Perkins gives a career-topping performance as the motel owner with a nasty mommy complex, based on real-life psychotic Ed Gein. The 1960 film found Alfred Hitchcock working at the height of his powers. The famous shower scene is still studied by film students for Hitchcock's brilliant use of montage. "Psycho" is everything a horror movie should be, creepy, sexy, dark, and terribly shocking. In a word, perfect.

Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip
This filmed performance of Richard Pryor’s first comic routine after the immensely talented comedian set himself on fire while free-basing cocaine is an example of the most raw and funny comic material you will ever witness. Pryor hits the comedy running and doesn’t let up until he’s exhausted the audience with so much gut-wrenching laughter that you won't know whether to stand up or lie down. His honest, and therefore brutally funny observations, about racism and his own drug abuse become moral touchstones that explode with brilliant humor as he thoughtfully explores avenues of thought and universal human experience as a satirist of the highest degree. There will always only ever be one Richard Pryor, and his profoundly inspired performance shows exactly why.       

The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Like the hugely successful B-Movie that inspired it, Harry Novak's 1965 sexploitation classic "Kiss Me Quick!" "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is an exploitation film that draws on a grab-bag of social identifiers to expand on conventional hypocrisies with more than just a nudge and a wink. Writer/composer/actor Richard O'Brien's 1973 British stage play became a hit and the play's director Jim Sharman wisely insisted on using the original cast, with the exception of American newcomers Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, when time came to direct the film version in 1975. Famous as more of a social phenomenon than as a great piece of cinema, I would argue that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is both thanks to an inspired musical score, and unforgettable camp performances. As part of the '70s midnight movie craze that coincided with the advent of punk music, the film attracted a playful young audience more than prepared to interact with it's innuendo-riddled dialogue around a fetish-based story about an alien transvestite from the galaxy of Transylvania called Dr. Frank N. Furter (played with Mick Jagger charm by Tim Curry) who seduces two stranded newlywed visitors to his castle where he creates life in the form of a chiseled male named Rocky Horror. This is a movie you have to see with an audience.

Rosemary's Baby
Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby.” From its unforgettable musical motif to its actual gothic setting of Manhattan’s West Side Dakota building, “Rosemary’s Baby” is one of the best horror films ever made. Mia Farrow gives the performance of her career as a young newlywed bride to an ambitious actor (played by none other than John Cassavetes). The couple moves into an apartment inside the Dakota where a group of Satanists have set up shop and Cassavetes’ character falls for the bait. If you want a good scare, “Rosemary’s Baby” is a perfect horror movie.

The Rules of the Game
Jean Renoir's 1939 triumph The Rules of the Game. Adapted from Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne, Renoir used the music of Mozart to bookend the story about a country on the brink of war. The action is set in a large country mansion where guests gather for a party and observe the rules of society's game to varying degrees of success. Although on the surface the film plays out like an Oscar Wilde farce, albeit with a twist of an Agatha Christi-styled murder, it is one of the most scathing of political and cultural satires. Banned by the Nazis, and destroyed before being discovered and restored, "The Rules of the Game" influenced iconic directors like Orson Welles, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Robert Altman. It is one of best films ever made. 

Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa introduced Samurai to the Western world in 1954 with his epic Japanese 16th century period film about a group of Samurai hired by farmers to defend a peasant village overrun by bandits. “Seven Samurai” served as a template for such popular American westerns as “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Wild Bunch,” and “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.” Toshiro Mifune is in top form as a rowdy Samurai exhibitionist still in command of the ideals and values of his quickly disappearing noble class. The original "assemble-the-team” movie (think “Reservoir Dogs”) operates on several social and historical levels that give it a timeless quality. Kurosawa's intention of making his first period film "entertaining enough to eat" is brought to that palpable condition through Mifune's endlessly watchable peasant warrior.

Starship Troopers
Paul Verhoeven's cynical satire of American politics is loosely based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 science fiction novel which went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960. Verhoeven's outrageous sci-fi epic piles on layers of commentary about the nature of militarization in a story about young and lovely high school graduates going off to war against invading giant arachnid bugs from the planet of Kelndathu. In the film's near future American society has fully integrated political indoctrination through a constant barrage of propaganda to effect its fascist motives. In a world where "Service guarantees citizenship," even if the rich don't have to be citizens, every kid wants to do a great job for the Fatherland--and die!" "Starship Troopers" is a war satire that outshines even Kubrick's great film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

The Tenant
Roman Polanski’s 1976 psychological thriller  stars the director as Trelkovsky, a troubled man that takes over the former apartment of a young female suicide victim who jumped from its windows. Trelkovsky comes to believe that his neighbors were to blame for the woman’s suicide, and are now using the same bizarre methods to extract a similar response from him. Known as the last of Polanski’s apartment trilogy, following “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Tenant” contains one of the most outrageous double climaxes ever committed to celluloid. Nightmares will follow. 

The Third Man
Carol Reed’s 1949 noir The Third Man staring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles and based on Graham Greene’s screenplay. Post war Vienna is the setting for a city divided between American, Russian, French and British powers. Cotton’s character Holly Martins arrives to the promise of a job from his old college pal Harry Lime (played by Welles), but Lime’s funeral is the only welcoming Holly gets. Just how Harry died is a burning question that Holly explores in a city that breathes with corruption. The Third Man has one of the best chase sequences ever filmed—and it doesn’t involve cars. 

The Tim Drum
Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Gunter Grass' groundbreaking WWII novel is no less shocking in its representation of a boy named Oskar (brilliantly played by David Bennett) who, on his third birthday is given a tin drum. Oskar resolves to remain small and for the first 18-years of his life he remains the size of a 3-year-old boy, carrying around the tin drum that he protects with an unearthly shriek that will shatter glass. Resourceful Oskar is a tenacious survivor who uses his compact body-size as a perfect disguise during the Nazi's reign of terror. The Tin Drum encompasses a wing of Polish/German wartime history with an explosive cinematic nerve that contributed to a revitalization of German cinema in 1979 shared by Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Variety
Bette Gordon's independent psychological thriller, written by Kathy Acker, is a stunning proto-feminist noir experiment set in the sex shops of 1983 Times Square. During Manhattan's economic downturn Christine (Sandy McLeod), a Midwest transplant, takes a job as a ticket booth clerk at a Times Square porn theatre called the "Variety." Surprisingly, the sleazy urban atmosphere fires her erotic desires, and curiosities about the power of her own sexuality. Christine goes on a baseball game date at Yankee Stadium with Louie (Richard Davidson), a wealthy regular patron at the Variety with underworld connections, and secretly follows him after he's called away from their date. When she isn't stalking Louie, Christine tests the influence of her dirty imagination by speaking erotic fantasy monologues to her non-pulsed journalist boyfriend Mark (Will Patton). Daring, raw, and in tune with the social crosscurrents of the period, "Variety" achieves a cumulative effect of short-circuiting preconceived notions of taboo sexual stereotypes via Christine's journey of discovery. It's a thriller that takes poetic liberties equal to the harmonic leaps of John Lurie's evocative musical score.

The Wages of Fear
Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 magnum opus "The Wages of Fear." Based on Geroges Arnaud's novel, the fiercely anti-capitalist story follows four out-of-work loners (played by Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eych and Folco Lulli) hanging out in a desolate South American town. The men take on a highly dangerous job of transporting two truckloads of nitroglycerine over 300 miles of bad road to put out raging oil fires. William Friedkin  did an admirable but overlooked remake called "Sorcerer" in 1977, on which he squandered his enormous success with "The Exorcist." "Wages of Fear" is an uncompromising parable about money, greed, and man's jealous desire for that which he can never have. Yves Montand is outstanding in this gritty and unrelentingly suspenseful picture. 

The Wind That Shakes the Barley
As winner of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or, Ken Loach’s film enables a look forward by looking back in time. Set in West Cork, Ireland in 1920, the story fixes on the strife within a group of Irish freedom fighters, the IRA’s Flying Column, attempting to reclaim Ireland’s independence from Britain’s cruel Black and Tan squads occupying the land. The formerly apolitical Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) gives up a budding career as a physician to join the resistance with his fiercely idealistic brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) whose familial and political loyalties will be sorely tested by the story’s end. It evokes a lesson that governments refuse to learn—occupied people always fight back with more at stake and nothing to lose. The film is an exceptional work of vigorous cinematic art filled with dynamic performances by its all-Irish cast. 

A Woman Under the Influence
John Cassavetes’ 1974 “A Woman Under the Influence.” Cassvetes’ wife Gena Rowlands plays Mabel, the alcohol addicted and psychologically challenged wife to Peter Falk’s construction foreman Nick. The couple’s dysfunctional household, complete with their three kids, serves as an emotional lightening rod for their families and for their working class neighbors. Gena Rowlands gives a career-defining tour de force performance that is a pinnacle of film-acting in an earth-shattering film that is unlike any other ever made. If you've never seen a Cassavetes film, this is a great one to start with.

Your Cole Smithey Oscar Prediction Cheat-Sheet

As with all predictions, this is just one critc's best guesses. Bon chance!

1. Best Picture: "Slumdog Millionaire" -- should and most likely will win.

2. Best Actor: If more people knew about the Mickey Rourke on-set shenanigans that temporarily shut down production on "The Wrestler," he probably wouldn't have gotten a nomination. Sean Penn should walk away with the statue for his amazing performance as Harvey Milk.

3. Best Actress: Kate Winslet will win for "The Reader" even though she deserves it more for "Revolutionary Road." Melissa Leo does not belong in the noms for the mediocre indy film "Frozen River."

4. Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger for "The Dark Knight" --for a spectacular performance.

5. Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz for "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" -- an example of sexuality trumping everything else.

6. Best Director: Danny Boyle for "Slumdog Millionaire"--the right choice.

7. Foreign Film: "Waltz With Bashir" (Israel) will probably win, although "The Class" (France) is a better film.

8. Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy ("Slumdog Millionaire") should deservedly walk away with this one.

9. Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black will likely get the trophy for "Milk," even though Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon and Pete Docter are favored by critics for "WALL-E."

10. Animated Feature Film: "WALL-E" will win easily in this sparsely populated category.

11. Art Direction: Donald Burt and Victor Zolfo will win for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," but my personal favorite is Nathan Crowley and Peter Lando for "The Dark Knight"

12. Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle for "Slumdog Millionaire" is my best bet, even if I'd personally give it to Wally Pfister for "The Dark Knight."

13. Sound Mixing: A toss-up between "The Dark Knight" and "Slumdog Millionaire," "Slumdog" will take the prize.

14. Sound Editing: "The Dark Knight" should get the little gold man, just to split the baby with "Slumdog" for "Sound Mixing."

15. Original Score: "Slumdog Millionaire"--A.R. Rahman.

16. Original Song: "Jai Ho" from "Slumdog Millionaire" -- a very catchy tune.

17. Costume: "The Duchess" -- the costumes were the best thing about the movie.

18. Documentary Feature: "Man on Wire" -- no competition here.

19. Documentary (short subject): Your guess is as good as mine in this category. You're on your own.

20. Film Editing: "Slumdog Millionaire."

21. Makeup: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- the best thing about the movie was the makeup.

22. Animated Short Film: As most of the audience, I didn't see 'em. "Lavatory -- Lovestory" sounds just strange enough to be read out loud at the Oscars.

23. Live Action Short Film: "Manon on the Asphalt" - for the same reason as #22.

24. Visual Effects: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- behind makeup, this is the other reason to see "Button."

 

Academy Award Results for 2008

1. Best Picture: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

2. Best Actor: Sean Penn - "Milk"

3. Best Actress: Kate Winslet - "The Reader."

4. Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger - "The Dark Knight."

5. Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz - "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"

6. Best Director: Danny Boyle - "Slumdog Millionaire."

7. Foreign Film: "Departures" - Japan.

8. Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy - "Slumdog Millionaire."

9. Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black - "Milk"

10. Animated Feature Film: "WALL-E."

11. Art Direction: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

12. Cinematography: "Slumdog Millionaire."

13. Sound Mixing: "Slumdog Millionaire."

14. Sound Editing: "The Dark Knight."

15. Original Score: "Slumdog Millionaire" - A.R. Rahman.

16. Original Song: "Jai Ho" from "Slumdog Millionaire" - A.R. Rahman and Gulzar

17. Costume: "The Duchess."

18. Documentary Feature: "Man on Wire."

19. Documentary (short subject): "Smile Pinki."

20. Film Editing: "Slumdog Millionaire."

21. Makeup: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

22. Animated Short Film: "La Maison en Petits Cubes."

23. Live Action Short Film: "Spielzeugland (Toyland)."

24. Visual Effects: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

1900

Finding Utopia
By Cole Smithey

 

"1900" (made in 1976) is Bernardo Bertolucci's crowning achievement of collectivist socio-political cinema. It is a grand scale, formally composed, Italian drama about a society of peasant farmers over a period of nearly 50 years, as seen through the eyes of two socially opposite boys. That the internationally-cast epic was made possible as a result of the vast success of Bertolucci's controversial "Last Tango In Paris" (1972) contributes to the mystique of "1900." The 35-year-old director's newfound status allowed his unhindered imagination, at the height of his powers, to finish his trilogy of fascist-themed films with an original script co-written with his brother Giuseppe and Franco Arcalli (both were co-screenwriters with Bertolucci on "Last Tango"). Where the first two films in the trilogy ("The Spider's Stratagem"--1970 and "The Conformist"-- 1971) live in a stylish bourgeoisie noir world of cloaked deceit, "1900" explores the familial identity existing between a group of socialist farmers, the landowners they work for, and fascist factions penetrating rural Parma, Italy. Its half-century scope provides a raw macro/micro slant on psychological, generational, political, and cultural changes in the region of Bernardo Bertolucci's birth. Compared with the expressionist style of "Last Tango," "1900" is a 180-degree turn into a wide open direction.

For his thirteenth film Bertolucci wanted to express what he saw as Italy's "multi-culture" society becoming a "mono-culture," due to the influence of the industrial revolution and capitalism more precisely. The thick-layered chronicle doesn't sweep across time so much as it escorts the audience through indelible composite events that bristle with personal, social, and political characteristics. Luchino Visconti's influence, as well as that of Bertolucci's favorite director Jean Renoir ("The Rules of the Game"), arouse "1900's" particularly authentic sense of time, place, and attitudes of its eras. Bertolucci mentions following Renoir's advice to, "always leave a door open on the set, to allow reality to enter into the film." The result is a defiant naturalism and erotic candidness that colors the film with bursts of emotional energy.

Present also is a connection to Bertolucci's mentor Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his film "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom," with which "1900" shares elements of style, form, and themes of fascist oppression. Bertolucci's first film job was working as an assistant to Pasolini on his first film "Accattone" (1961), and he has pointed to Pasolini's death in 1975 as signaling the end of his utopian vision. However, Bertolucci's familiar cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ("Last Tango") captures an inspired color palate for a distinctly utopian vision in "1900" that goes from Van Gogh hues of golden hay to cold gothic grays that follow the story from spring through winter.

The film's Italian title "Novecento" (Twentieth Century) clarifies better than its American designation Bertolucci's bold intention of embracing the first half of Italy's 20th century through a utopic prism of poor Northern Italian socialist farmers living and working on the expansive country vineyard estate of their Padroné masters. We follow the trajectories of Olmo and Alfredo, born on the same day from opposite social classes. Three generations of historic Italian experience expose rural life in war-torn Italy. As "1900's" iconic deco-themed red and black poster implies, the story is a complex study of social decay under Mussolini's fascist ideologies. In spite of what some critics saw as a failed leftist screed, Bertolucci had no illusions regarding the potential for "1900," or any movie for that matter, to effect any degree of social change. For as passionate as Bertolucci's depiction of the peasant struggle is, he remains surprisingly ambiguous in representing matter-of-fact narrative threads that defy misinterpretation. For the sprawling amount of time covered, "1900" achieves an escalating, concussive dramatic punch through Bertolucci's use of montage to position polished scenes of a fictional history translated from stories shared by farmers living in the area.

"1900" is a movie that few audiences will ever properly see even if Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Bert Lancaster, and Donald Sutherland working together on a Bertolucci epic about fascist Italy might sound like a surefire recipe for box office success. Bertolucci's casting of Bert Lancaster as the Padroné Alfredo Sr. was as much a way of securing American production financing as it was a hat-tip to director Luchino Visconti who used Lancaster opposite Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in "The Leopard" (1963), about a dying aristocracy in 1860's Sicily. In it, Lancaster plays the 19th-century aristocrat Prince of Salina, whose luxurious way of life is on its last gasp. Bert Lancaster also appeared in Visconti's "Gruppo di famiglia in un interno" which was released in the same year as "1900" although it was made in 1974.

Lancaster's performance as Alfredo Sr. functions as a kind of Spaghetti Western abstraction, briefly giving the movie a sense of Hollywood familiarity. A scene of Alfredo Sr. aiming rifles inside the main house at imaginary family members with his grandson Alfredo displays a lacking connection with his own son (Romolo Valli). The role of the secular Berlinghieri patriarch carries a few indelicate actions that would have been difficult for a less established actor to make as empathetic mark as Lancaster does in the role. In a white suit and matching hat Alfredo Sr. calls a pubescent peasant girl named Irma away from the festivities of her community to follow him into the estate barn where he grabs her but is unable to get an erection. "Hey Senior Alfredo, nobody can milk a bull," Irma tells him after he asks her to put her hand inside his pants. He sends her away and tells her to report to the others when the dancing is over that he is dead. The Padrone's consequent suicide-by-hanging indicates the end of an era that Bertolucci finishes with the satisfied death of peasant leader Leo Dalco (Sterling Hayden).

At the time that Bertolucci contacted Gerard Depardieu to play the peasant socialist leader Olmo, the Gallic actor was already a star in Europe. Not one to pass up an opportunity to work in a challenging atmosphere, Depardieu brings a characterization that matches Lancaster's performance in the film for carrying the lion's share of dramatic weight. It is impossible to envision anyone else playing Olmo. Depardieu's performance is on a scale with a Marlon Brando or a James Dean. He gives Olmo a beating heart of youthful consciousness that comes through effortlessly, even if another actor dubbing his voice. In the scene where Olmo returns home from war and sees his mother for the first time in a long time, Depardieu generates volumes of silent subtext reflected in the eyes of Maria Monti playing his mother. Bertolucci's use of the long conveyer belt of a noisy hay-bailing machine, where the mother and son come together, denies the family the peace they deserve and puts a price on their existence.

Bertolucci was impressed with Robert De Niro's performance in "Mean Streets," and hired him over his other possible choice, Harvey Keitel. It was during this period that De Niro would film "The Godfather II" and "Taxi Driver." As the upstart Padroné Alfredo (Alfredo Sr.'s grandson), Robert De Niro peacefully coexists within the Italian setting of Parma but has the wrong voice for the part. His rhythms are too modern, too much of New York to convince us that he is the ineffectual Italian heir to vast riches. Nonetheless, De Niro's balancing act between Alfredo's masculine and feminine tendencies contains Alfredo's unclear motivations and inner turmoil. De Niro's constant game of catch-up with his character works to imbue Alfredo with a sense of self-doubt and impotency that enables his unconventional charm. The dubbing of Depardieu's voice works in a peculiar way to compensate for De Niro's inappropriate accent, and equalizes the characters in a sonic reality that could be construed as an intentional abstract touch by the filmmaker. That's not to say I wouldn't rather hear Depardieu's actual voice, but all things considered it works surprisingly well thanks in a large part to the unnamed voice-over actor that performed the voice of Olmo.

The film's producers failed to appreciate the saga's ability to create a unique bond with an audience, and releasing the film became a matter for the courts. Problems arose primarily from conflicts between the film's production and distribution companies (Artemis Film, Artistes Associates, Produzioni Europee Associates, and Paramount Pictures) which each owned shares of the 5-hour-30-minute film's nearly $7 million-dollar production cost. A trial ensued over the film's duration, and an Italian judge was given three different versions to choose between. Apart from Bertolucci's long version, there was a 4-hour-40-minute edit in which many scenes were shortened but none eliminated, and a 3-hour-15-minute version that the studios edited themselves, and which Bertolucci considered garbage. The presiding judge chose the 4-hour-40 minute rendering to represent the film's commercial product and on November 4, 1977, "1900" was given its limited release in America.

Predictable box office failure coincided with neglect from the studios to advertise or distribute the film properly. "1900" was christened an outsider art film destined to be lionized as a masterpiece of grand "folly" (Pauline Kael's word for it). When "1900" premiered at Cannes in 1976, its duration made critics like Roger Ebert believe it signaled the communist filmmaker's lack of control over a movie encompassing too much breadth of Italian experience. Since then, "1900" has come to stand as an organic cinematic journey through chapters of a rich apocryphal history that evinces an ongoing struggle between the world's rich elite and everyone else.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's famous oil painting "Il Quarto Stato," representing Italy's progressive movement ("The Fourth Estate" - 1901), announces "1900's" ripe climate of social struggle as a background for the opening credit sequence. A lush Ennio Morricone horn motif plays as the camera pulls back slowly from the squinting eyes of a bearded peasant who breaks the painting's fourth wall, staring directly at the viewer while surrounded by his drably dressed kith and kin. A sad-eyed woman, most likely the man's wife, walks behind the headstrong leader of the socialist group, holding a baby boy, her free hand outstretched in a inquiring gesture. Her troubled physicality is reflected in the many tens of oppressed farm workers that follow their self-assured leader marching them toward inevitable conflict. The painting foreshadows Bertolucci's brilliant eye for creating vast painterly compositions of communal action whose scale, tone, and palate reflect Italian art of the period. Ezio Frigerio's exemplary art direction and Gitt Magrini's precise costume designs aid in fleshing out cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's serene framing that envelopes everything. Storaro's artistic compositions and inspired use of natural light speaks of a deep understanding of the visual material at hand. Storaro would go on to do Warren Beatty's more commercially constructed epic "Reds" in 1981.

"The War is over." These objectively promising words from Liberation Day, April 25, 1945, are the first ones spoken in the film. A socialist peasant soldier crosses into the woods from a grassy field where a heard of cattle mill about. A presumably Nazi soldier shoots a machine gun across the young man's belly; the boy stumbles back into the pasture carrying his guts in his bloody hands as the bell-rattling cows disperse.

Fires burn in the distance and a peasant farmer on a bicycle passes rifles out to other farmers. A skinny young boy chases the man, begging for a rifle. "I want to kill too," he shouts after the man hands him a gun. The emboldened youngster goes into the home of the farm's white-haired Padroné, a complacent Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro), and takes the landowner prisoner to stand trial in the estate's open courtyard by peasants whose numbers have dwindled due to two World Wars and an oppressive government that has imprisoned many of their number. Bertolucci took inspiration for the impromptu tribunal that arrives in the film's final act from photos of the Chinese revolution. The red flags of revolt, that Bertolucci uses as an image system of socialist solidarity and revolution are a repeated motif throughout several of his films.

Peasant women carry pitchforks and chase an elderly man dressed in a suit escaping with his frumpy wife on bicycles loaded down with heavy suitcases. The man turns back to shoot at the approaching women with a small caliber pistol; they catch up with him and impale his arm and leg with pitchforks that they leave stuck in him so that he swings the long handles wildly while stumbling down a steep hill toward an angry peasant woman waiting with weapon in hand. Our initial reaction is to take pity with the elderly couple being attacked by a gang of blood-thirsty farm workers. Bertolucci crafted the sequence to engage the audience with a sadistic situation whose context will obtain a different response the second time it comes around in the framework of the story.

Broken into four periods to reflect the seasons, and split into two acts by an intermission the story picks up in 1901, forty-four years before Liberation Day. A drunken hunchbacked jester (ala Verdi's "Rigoletto") breaks the silence of dawn with a tearful announcement of composer Giuseppe Verdi's death. Rigoletto's archetypal voice of exposition establishes an operatic theatricality that bookends the picture. Symphonic music swells over night's lingering blue light in 1901 when the peasant bastard Olmo Dalco, and Alfredo Berlinghieri, the landowner's heir, are born. Olmo slips from the womb before Alfredo, causing sincere consternation in Bert Lancaster's uber Padroné, Alfredo Berlinghieri Sr.

Bertolucci suspends the boys' parallel childhood friendship in a capsule of familiarity when both are burgeoning on puberty. Against Storaro's wide-lens landscape, Olmo is a vision of an Italian Huck Finn, full of vigor with a brown floppy felt hat adorned with twenty squirming frogs on a piece of wire. These are the same frogs that Olmo uses to chase off a girl who insults him, and that Alfredo will later spit out that night at his family's perfectly set dinner table.

Olmo plays a game of oneupsmanship with Alfredo by lying down between railroad tracks to let an oncoming train roll over him. The dangerous act becomes a leitmotif regarding Olmo's emotional and physical connection to the sun-kissed Italian terrain as emulated by Alfredo when Olmo digs a hole in the ground to "screw the Earth." It establishes the intimate nature of Olmo's and Alfredo's friendship, which will reoccur when the men share a prostitute after returning from serving in WWI.

"Ding Dong, Ding Dong. The Devil cares, the Padrone's scared." Olmo replies to Alfredo's question about whether he's dead or alive after letting the train to roll over him. Unable to overcome his fear of the oncoming train, Alfredo escaped from Olmo's side before the locomotive arrived. Olmo's authentic-sounding children's rhyme carries an impression of voodoo that Olmo uses as a prelude to spitting in Alfredo's face. Nothing is sacred in Olmo's world.

Paradoxically, a girl cries inconsolably because the seminary wants to take Olmo away to the priesthood. Olmo's grandfather Leo Dalco (Sterling Hayden) strikes down the idea and silences a heckler calling Olmo a "bastard" at the peasants' nightly communal sunset dinner. Hayden's imposing patriarch quells the verbal abuse and seizes the moment to publicly indoctrinate Olmo into manhood with a directive speech that fulfills a tapestry of theme, character, and plot lines.

"Now that you are grown, remember this: you will learn to read, you will learn to write, but you will still remain a son of peasants. You will go off to the army, you will see the world. You may even learn to obey (with kicks in the ass from morning till night), you'll take a wife, you will work for the lives of your children. But you will always remain a peasant."

Leo Dalco represents the old guard of the socialist farmers' relationship to their employers when he preaches against striking. Dalco warns his fellow farmers that their "league" (union) won't prepare them for the grass they will have to eat when they are not working. It's a tune that he soon changes when he's relaxing in the summer shade watching the Padroné and his friends and family working in the fields because the workers are on strike. Dalco passes away peacefully on a sunny hillside knowing that his life has reached a new and different day. Even in death, the peasant Leo Dalco wins out against the Padroné, Alfredo Sr. (Bert Lancaster).

When a storm wipes out the farm's crops, Alfredo Sr.'s son Giovanni (Romolo Vali), the estate's acting Padroné, calls the workers together to tell them that they must sacrifice half of their pay to help compensate for his loss. The peasants reply that, "When we harvest double we don't get double pay." The insolent Padroné makes a pointed verbal attack at the day-laborers and goes too far when insults a farm worker about the large size of the man's ears. The peasant takes out a sickle-shaped knife, raises it to his left ear and slices it off in one swift motion before putting his severed ear into Giovanni's hand. It's a gut-wrenching moment that clarifies the desperation of the workers and their level of outrage with the Padroné. The seed of revolution is sewn. We follow the wounded worker back to his family's hovel where he quietly delivers a few pieces of bread that his mother, father, wife, and children will rub against the dried carcass of fish that hangs over their old dinner table with flies swarming around it. He quietly refers to the incident as an accident, and carries on with his life, singing to his children to make them forget their hunger. The self-destructive act shows a wretched attempt to hold onto some dignity that will overshadow his enormous sacrifice. There is no time for self-pity.

To Alfredo, Olmo describes himself a "socialist with holes in his pockets," and Alfredo later carries the enigmatic phrase with him after he returns from war, because it's how he wants Olmo to think of him. Alfredo could never in a million years be a socialist, even if he does refuse to contribute to a group of "New Fascists" at a church meeting that he's persuaded to attend. The assistance of the church to foment fascism registers as part of the patriarchy that the community observes. Donald Sutherland embodies the estate's arrogant foreman Attila Mellanchini who is abetted by Alfredo's contemptible cousin Regina (Laura Betti) to put himself forward as a self-fulfilled fascist leader afraid of "Mongol subversives who will kill and take over everything." Before making a gory public example of a cat that he equates as a communist, Attila tells his fascist comrades, "Communism is a disease that can destroy the world." Bertolucci makes a deliberate corollary between capitalism and fascism that helps explain the relationship of the peasants to the land they serve.

From a scene of the two boys watching a pro-revolution puppet show disbanded by stick-wielding police, to a red-flag adorned train platform where Olmo and Alfredo leave for war, Bertolucci establishes the shift of Olmo and Alfredo into grown men returning home from World War I, again by train. 

Still wearing his uniform, from the window Olmo witnesses his old friend Toro being hauled off by military police for striking.

Toro sees Olmo and yells, "Olmo, Olmo, The bastards got you. The country's in the hands of murderers! Goddamn the whole nation! Goddamn the King!"

It's a very short scene that contrasts the speed of modern transportation (Olmo's train), as a secondary form of cinematic movement, to emphasize the reality playing out in Olmo's beloved pastoral home that he is powerless to affect. The motif of peasants being inexplicably arrested repeats itself when Olmo's sense of purpose is stronger, and yet he is still just as unable to interfere.

Intermission comes with Attila (Sutherland) and his Black Shirts staring out into a vast public square where a battalion of soldiers on horseback have replaced red flag protestors, led by Olmo and his wife, yelling for the city to "Wake up!" while pulling the charred bodies of their families and friends burned to death by Mussolini's military. Olmo's and Anita's desperate pleas fall on deaf ears.

Act II marks a dark turn that finds the once bright Berlinghieri estate putrefying into a gothic and macabre atmosphere of fear and poverty. Alfredo ends having sexual trysts with his cousin, Attila's conniving wife Regina (Laura Betti), in favor of a manic-depressive socialite beauty named Ada (exquisitely played by Dominique Sanda). The couple's romance is kindled by Alfredo's wealthy uncle Ottavio Berlinghieri (Werner Bruhns) who indulges the couple in a glowing golden afternoon of luxury and cocaine. Ottavio gives Ada a white horse for her wedding present. The horse carries a meaning of control and mastery, but it also conveys an omen of darkness deep in Ada's wounded psyche. Bertolucci uses the equine symbol to embody a fleeting example of agrarian culture that is symbolically trapped in Olmo's hunting net ("a trap for brides") in which he captures Ada as she takes her wedding present for a ride just before a terrible act of violence puts a blood stain on the post-wedding festivities.

Out of jealousy Regina insults Ada at the reception, but the gracious bride merely replies by taking off her veil and placing it on Regina's head in front of the crowd of on-looking partygoers.Regina rushes off in a fit of rage that culminates in taking Attila with her into the property's wine cellar where she demands that Attila make love to her. The broken gothic episode reveals the danger of the fascist mindset. A boy named Patrizio, the son of one of Attila's Black Shirt accomplices, stumbles in on Regina and Attila in the midst of their coupling and the pair seizes him to become the subject of their dubious affection. After Attila has sodomized Patrizio, he lifts up the child and swings him around in a circle by his legs until the boy's head explodes against the beams of the cellar.

The wedding guests conduct a search of the estate grounds that lead them to Patricio's bloody corpse inside the wine cellar. Attila publicly accuses Olmo of committing the murder and his Black Shirt bandits encircle the peasant leader before ruthlessly beating Olmo while Alfredo looks on without attempting to stop the violence. Alfredo's betrayal of Olmo comes as a profound moment and displays Alfredo, now that he's married, chooses to fill the Padrone's shoes just like his father. The crowd yells for Olmo's death, and it's only when a mentally indigent drifter takes credit for the murder that Alfredo steps in to break up the fight. Alfredo announces the end of the reception amid the damp wooded area around the cellar. Ottavio complains to Alfredo about allowing Olmo to be beaten and observes that Alfredo "is becoming like them" [the fascists]. As Ottavio leaves, Ada begs him to stay; to which he replies that he will never set foot on the estate again.    

Although it encompasses the snaking reach of two World Wars, "1900" is not a war film. Bertolucci has said that he made "1900" as "a kind of dialogue" with his former mentor Pier Paolo Pasolini. By limiting the physical reach of the story, Bertolucci approaches his characters through a regional awareness of their communal significance as it diminishes against the developing industrial society. It is a story made from bits and pieces of anecdotal experience around Parma over a long period. Bertolucci created a cinematic style to contain and fill decades of experience telescoped through the images captured by Vittorio Storaro's observant camera. Bertolucci used local farmers as extras and their presence adds another layer of knowledge to the authentically tempered narrative. Just as Orson Welles created a new scale of film with "Citizen Kane," so to has Bertolucci defined what the epic form is capable of.

"1900" took a toll on Bertolucci. Making the film was a Herculean effort that went largely unrewarded even if it did turn a respectable profit in Europe where it made 18 million dollars. Bertolucci's passion for showing the struggles of the people that he grew up around resulted in an inevitably bittersweet dialogue between two-sides of the same coin--Padroné and peasant, Alfredo and Olmo. Bertolucci's films are famous for splitting audiences. For every person who thinks "Last Tango In Paris" is a masterpiece, there is another who thinks it irredeemable. Bertolucci's social analysis in "1900" festers inside the bodies of its characters. The devastating destruction that Attila reaps on his neighbors is nothing short of a one-man war against humanity that works insidiously, under the guise of a political abomination, to gut a community already treading a delicate truce with poverty.

For the film's coda, Bertolucci alleviates the ongoing struggle between Olmo and Alfredo (peasant and Padroné) with a stroke of envisioned magical realism that allows the aged friends to bully each other as representatives of their social classes. Their relationship is at once fierce and forgiving. The two old men fight near the railroad tracks where they once shared a childhood together. Their collective memories give them a public ground to communicate in a primitive way that releases their anger and mistaken ideas. But whether or not Olmo or Alfredo ever wakes up with an epiphany about resolving the nature of their disagreements matters not, because they continue to live in a collective spirit that represents the opposite of greed without being patronizing. 

"1900" is a deeply personal vision of Italian history that demonstrates the heart of a social struggle that has come to be waged between corporations and its weary consumers. The ongoing dance between Olmo and Alfredo (representing Italy's political Left and Right), becomes a neutralizing paux de deux. If oblivion is its final result, then at least it can have a sense of shared experience. In this sense, Italy's history becomes the province of all countries through Bertolucci's daring efforts with a film that was pushed into an exile that only the most adventurous audiences can redeem for its cathartic effect. As the extremes of class conflict become greater in the 21st century, "1900" is a tangible narrative synthesis that gets at the shadowy motivations and acts that perpetuate the inhospitable system plaguing our generations. When the farmers share their Padrone's estate with a group of arriving peasant refugees, we see the humanity of the communist ethos in effect and realize the humanitarian values at stake. For a fleeting moment Bertolucci finds utopia.

Cole Smithey's 20 Worst & Best Movies of 2008

By Cole Smithey 

2008 was objectively the worst year for movies in the 21st century. It wasn't so much that stinkers like "The Longshots" or "My Blueberry Nights" sucked the oxygen out of your local cinemas as it was the diluted barrage of mediocre independent films and marginal Hollywood formula flicks. I skipped seeing "Sex and the City" and "Twilight" just to give myself a small reward for having to sit through movies like "The Secret Life of Bees" or "Nights In Rodanthe."

Where cinema soared in 2008 was in the documentary genre. "U23D" blew audiences out of their seats while "Trouble the Water" gave a first-person voice to the tragedy and political abuses of Hurricane Katrina. "Bra Boys" gave audiences an energetic history lesson about the Australian surf crew wh o call themselves Bra Boys, and Errol Morris' barely-seen but essential Gitmo documentary "Standard Operating Procedure" will eventually find its audience.

Top 10 Worst Films of 2008

#10 Miracle at St. Anna
Spike Lee boxes outside his directorial weight-class with a war story bogged down by ham-handed smacks of magical realism and over-pronounced examples of racial prejudice. This a war movie that's all over the place. Its performances range from disappointing to mediocre in an overlong film that's more likely to give you a headache than any sense of thematic resolve.

#9 88 Minutes
From its inept cinematography to its barrage of hackneyed suspense contrivances and lead-weighted dialogue, "88 Minutes" is made watchable only by Al Pacino's mannered performance as FBI forensic psychiatrist and college professor Dr. Jack Gramm. Okay, so Al went slumming and all he got was a paycheck and a movie for his fans to ignore. All is forgiven. Just don't do it again Al. Please don't do it again.

#8 Filth & Wisdom
Gogol Bordello lead singer Eugene Holtz plays A.K. a Ukrainian London-dwelling BDSM prostitute by day and gypsy rock singer by night. A.K.'s friends--a ballet dancer-turning-pole-stripper Holly (Holly Weston), a martyr-complex-pharmacist Juliette (Vicky McLure), and an aged blind gay poet Professor Flynn (Richard E. Grant)--fill in muddled subplots that co-writer/director Madonna inflicts on her audie nce.

#7 Mister Lonely
If the future of American Cinema is, as Werner Herzog proudly states, Harmony Korine’s vision, then it is a tuna carcass dressed in a nun’s habit with a half-witted white guy standing over it yelling obscenities.

#6 Postal
An irredeemable exploitation satire, based on a videogame, from trash director Uwe Boll, "Postal" is an anti-Semitic, phallic-obsessed, childish movie about nothing.

#5 The Happening
One-hit-wonder M. Night Shyamalan made yet another pretentious "Twilight Zone"-inspired movie this year with "The Happening." Just because I have to sit through this hack's movies doesn't mean you do.

#4 Hounddog
An exploitation movie about people lacking common sense--writer/director Deborah Kampmeier's "Hounddog" is an insult to its audience. Every cliché stereotype of Southern dysfunction is on display as a substitute for any actual story.

#3 The Fall
This Tweet! Tweet! Arf! Arf! movie from Tarsingh, the director of "The Cell," masks its vapid narrative with painterly compositions that only add to the film’s sleep-inducing quality.

#2 The Signal
This apocalyptic schlock-fest refuses to admit that it's just another zombie slasher pic. Cheap, gaudy and mean spirited, The Signal is one best missed.

#1 Towelhead
As its openly racist title implies "Towelhead" is an exploitation movie that wears its shoc k value on its guilty sleeve. It is the most disgusting, ethically reprehensible, and irresponsible film to come out of the 21st century's first decade. As Roger Ebert said of the film "Dirty Love," this movie "wasn’t written and directed; it was committed."

Top 10 Best Films of 2008
Honorable mention goes to Bohumil Hrabal's eloquent "I Served the King of England," a rich black comedy steeped in wartime experience and sexual exploration in WWII Czechoslovakia. 

Director Sergey Dvortsevoy's "Tulpan," about a Kazakh soldier who returns from the Russian Navy to his family's remote life on the southern steppe of Kazakhstan, also gets an honorable mention.

#10 Slumdog Millionaire

Director Danny Boyle has made a cross-cultural milestone that plays with the edgy energy of "Trainspotting," albeit with considerable influence from its vibrant Mumbai locations and talented cast. The story pedals between the set of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," an Indian television game show, and the past life of 18-year-old "slumdog" orphan Jamal Malik (well played by Dev Patel) as it informs his correct answers to multiple choice questions that could win him 20 million rupees.

#9 Stop-Loss 
Co-writer and director Kimberly Peirce returns after her impressive 1999 drama "Boys Don’t Cry" with an equally empathetic film centered around the U.S. military’s current backdoor-draft, responsible for forcing 81,000 soldiers back into war after multiple tours of duty. What follows is an honest, patriotic soldier’s desperate attempt to find a way out of a malicious bureaucratic booby trap.

 #8 The Dark Knight
"The Dark Knight" packs in at least two films worth of action, suspense, spectacle, horror, and nuanced social commentary. Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman give muscular ensemble performances that support the late Heath Ledger’s undeniably finest acting achievement as the film’s suicidal anarchist villain The Joker.

#7 Frost/Nixon

At the heart of Ron Howard's adaptation of Peter Morgan's popular Broadway play is a study of two wildly ambitious men engaging in a public test of intelligence, wit, and strategy. Sheen's and Langella's pin-point precision of inner character development and range of facial expressions are the main reasons to see this well-written movie.

#6 The Class

Real-life Parisian junior high school teacher Francois Begaudeau plays himself in the adaptation of his nonfiction novel about his experiences as a teacher in modern-day Paris. "The Class" is a magnificent cinematic triumph from director Laurent Cantet.

#5 Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

Anita O’Day’s lasting influence as a performer and jazz musician is revealed in a priceless documentary that puts on display O’Day’s famed beauty and gutsy no-nonsense attitude that enabled her to survive against terrible odds. O’Day’s version of "A Nightingale Sang In Barkley Square" is the most moving rendition I’ve ever heard.

#4 Rachel Getting Married

A Last year's "Margot at the Wedding" gives way to Jonathan Demme's Cassavetes-styled uber family drama that centers around problem daughter Kym (Anne Hathaway) who takes a weekend leave from nine months in a rehab facility to participate in her sister Rachel's (Rosemarie DeWitt) biracial Connecticut wedding. "Rachel Getting Married" transcends a very specific moment in American experience with humor, honesty, hope, and a good dose of cynicism.

#3 Man on Wire
Filmmaker James Marsh's brilliant love letter to the late World Trade Center reinterprets the cruel fate of the twin towers via the daredevil artistry of Philipe Petit, who wire-walked between the buildings on August 7, 1974. No amount of description can transmit the passion and joy in this wonderful picture, assisted by a lyrical musical score by composer Michael Myman. See this movie.

#2 Mongol
Its elegant storytelling, powerful performances, and detailed attention to aspects of Genghis Khan’s brutal life make "Mongol" a cinematic history lesson for the ages. Asano Tadanobu plays Genghis Khan, with a controlled intensity and underlying intelligence that is as poetic as it is transparent. For anyone even slightly interested in Mongolian history or in the life of the man who would conquer a fifth of the Earth’s landmass, "Mongol" is a movie that commands repeated screenings.

#1 Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates' 1961 novel about a young couple staring into the abyss of the American Dream my th provides director Sam Mendes ("American Beauty") with plenty of emotional ammunition to fuel this gorgeous but devastating drama that barley allows the viewer to catch their breath. Leo DiCaprio and Winslet give stunning performances that resonate long after the movie is over. There will be tears.

The 2008 Alternative Fall Film Preview

By Cole Smithey

There’s no question that autumn is the best season for movies. It’s when the big studios trot out their Oscar nom hopefuls and water-cooler talk turns to all colors of movie-related speculation. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas conspire to press family members, kids, and best friends into cinema seats to soak up all the comic spills, dramatic chills, and thrilling frills that can be squeezed into a hundred-minute movie. While most audiences will only see a few titles from the list of 120 movies distributed between Labor Day and Christmas, alt weekly readers tend to be a more ravenous bunch of filmgoers, cramming in excess of twenty movies in the last four months of the year.

It’s important to eliminate as many dogs as possible so you don’t, in a moment of weakness, plunk down cash on Spike Lee’s latest turkey "Miracle at St. Anna" or Fernando Meirelles’ steaming pile "Blindness"—both films open on September 26.

In September, don’t even think about endorsing Nicolas Cage’s latest mortgage payment "Bangkok Dangerous." Likewise, skip the Dakota Fanning rape movie "Hounddog," the inexplicable "Mister Foe," the racist-titled "Towelhead," and the tellingly dubbed western "Appaloosa," even if it does star Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris. The presence of Renee Zellweger doesn’t bode well for this adaptation of a Robert B. Parker novel. You’ll be tempted to see Robert De Niro and Al Pacino on the big screen together in "Righteous Kill," but don’t give in. Director Jon Avnet proved he didn’t deserve to hold a camera with the unwatchable "88 Minutes," and his casting of 50 Cent opposite the two heavyweights further shows his disrespect for Pacino and De Niro as actors.

Rather, hang out with cool kids Joel and Ethan Coen for their follow up to "No Country For Old Men." "Burn After Reading" (Sept. 12) is a black comedy staring George Clooney, Francis McDormand, Brad Pitt, and John Malkovich. If anyone can cast John Malkovich in a role that his specific range demands, it’s the Coen Brothers.

If there are kids in your life, "Igor" (Sept. 19) provides a fitting PG-rated animated run up to Halloween with John Cusack voicing a hunchbacked lab assistant who enters the annual Evil Science Fair with a monster of his own.

Opening on September 17th is "The Duchess," starring the ever- delectable Keira Knightley as Georgiana, the 18^th-century Duchess of Devonshire who gets abused by her cruel husband (played by Ralph Fiennes) even as her public star rises. If you haven’t yet been won over by Knightley’s impressive acting chops in films like "Pride & Prejudice," here’s another chance to see the divine starlet in full melodramatic period mode.

Seek out surreal satire with "Choke" (Sept. 26), the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel in which Sam Rockwell plays a sex-addicted medical school dropout with a gift for choking on his food in restaurants to scam the people that come to his rescue.

Don’t be seduced by October’s cool breezes into thinking that Guy Ritchie’s latest Brit crime spree "RocknRolla" will rejuvenate his flagging career, or that his wife Madonna’s directorial debut "Filth & Wisdom" is worth sitting through even if you could watch it for free. There can’t be anymore ‘Secret Life of….Anything’ movies, so skip "The Secret Life of Bees" with impunity, especially because Dakota Fanning is in it. Ignore "Quarantine," "Sex Drive," "Max Payne" (it’s based on a video game), "High School Musical 3: Senior Year," (acid reflux) "Passengers" (it carries the stank of Anne Hathaway, who also appears in "Rachel Getting Married"). I know, Entertainment Weekly thinks Anne Hathaway will get an Oscar nom for Jonathan Demme’s "Margot at the Wedding"-themed indie effort. I say, wrong.

There’s much more fun to be had in October waving your atheist flag high in the face of Easter Bunny believers with Bill Maher’s anti-religious documentary "Religulous" (directed by Larry Charles – "Borat). Savor the saturated color of Wong Kar Wai’s reworked version of his only martial arts movie "Ashes of Time Redux." You can get super movie-groovy with Leo DeCaprio and Russell Crowe in "Body of Lies," based on David Ignatius’ novel about a CIA operative on the trail of a terrorist leader. Whatever you do, don’t neglect Oliver Stone’s George Bush bio "W." or Clint Eastwood’s Cannes Film Fest favorite "Changeling," starring Angelina Jolie in a ‘20s era Los Angeles drama. Finally, in October there’s Charlie Kaufman’s (screenwriter for "Being John Malkovich") directorial debut "Synecdoche, New York," a post-modern surreal take on love and death that puts Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, and Diane Wiest together with Philip Seymour Hoffman. Lastly, "Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist" looks promising if only for featuring Michael Cera ("Juno") opposite Kat Dennings ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin") in a romantic comedy with a cool title.

The fall movie season hits its stride in November with Daniel Craig’s return to the 007 mantle in "Quantum of Solace" (Nov. 7), starring French actor Mathieu Amalric ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") as leading villain Dominic Greene. Exotic locations, beautiful women, and Daniel Craig’s cold-burn intensity as the baddest ass James Bond make the latest installment in cinema’s oldest franchise a must-see-with-gusto.

It wouldn’t be autumn without a French movie on the menu. Arnaud Desplechin’s "A Christmas Tale" ("Un Conte de Noel" - Nov. 14^th) brings familial angst, social ennui, and the specter of death together in an irreverent, multi-layered family story starring the irrepressible Catherine Deneuve as its matriarch.

Whether or not you’ve seen any or all of the Harry Potter movies, pop-culture vocabulary demands regard for "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Daniel Radcliffe has matured as an actor, and so too has the series thanks to director David Yates who returns after directing the series’ last installment "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." If it’s younger kiddie fare you’re after, "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" should more than foot the bill with vocal performances from Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Pass over never-to-be-forgiven-for-Moulin-Rouge Baz Luhrmann’s "Australia" in favor of Aussie director John Hillcoat’s ("The Proposition") adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road," (Nov. 14^th) starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron in a post-apocalyptic vision of an America-yet-to-come.

Gus Van Sant may momentarily resuscitate his abysmal career with the Harvey Milk biopic "Milk" starring Sean Penn as San Francisco’s famous openly gay mayor, but from the outside the movie looks like pure bland formula. Although, as an acting class from Master Penn it should be interesting, and it’s one more chance to see late-bloomer hotshot Josh Brolin doing serious character work. For more gritty serious acting work, check out "The Soloist" (Nov. 21) staring Jamie Foxx as a schizophrenic homeless guy in Los Angeles who meets up with a troubled journalist played by the insuppressible Robert Downey Jr.

On the mandatory skip-it-list for November are the Paris Hilton vehicle "Repo! The Genetic Opera" and "The Other End of the Line."

December promises to keep avid movie fans busy with the Leo and Kate reunion movie "Revolutionary Road" by "American Beauty" director Sam Mendes. The film is based on Richard Yates’ 1961 novel about a disenchanted married couple that comes to question their life in America and move to Paris.

"Doubt" stars Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams in a 1964-set drama about a Bronx Catholic School where its parish priest is accused of sexually abusing a black student. This movie promises to be a very big deal.

Brad Pitt extends his title as a modern-day Robert Redford in David Fincher’s "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" in which Pitt plays a man who ages backward. After "Zodiac" David Fincher is super hot, and this movie looks to live up to his reputation.

Daniel Craig double-dips in the season with Edward Zwick’s ("Blood Diamond") "Defiance," a WWII movie based on a true story about three brothers (Live Schreiber, Daniel Craig, and Jamie Bell) who set up their own resistance group made up of Jewish refugees. This movie looks great!

Disregard Ron Howard’s "Frost/Nixon," "Seven Pounds" (directed by Gabriele Muccino – "The Pursuit of Happyness"), "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (poor Keanu), "Yes Man" (Jim Carrey is toast), and Adam Sandler’s latest formula comic effort "Bedtime Stories."

You’ll be much happier seeing Clint Eastwood’s year-ender "Gran Torino" (speaking of double dipping), Laurent Cantet’s Palme d"or winner "The Class," or even Frank Miller’s stylish animated noir thriller "The Spirit" (Dec. 25) with Scarlet Johansson and Eva Mendes.

In case you lost count of the movies you really should see.

September: "Burn After Reading" (Sept. 12) "Choke," (Sept. 26), "The Duchess" (Sept. 17^th), and "Igor" (Sept. 26).

October: "Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist" (Oct. 3), "Religulous" (Oct. 3), "Ashes of Time Redux" (Oct. 10), "Body of Lies" (Oct. 10), "W." (Oct 17), "Changeling" (Oct. 24), and "Synecdoche, New York" (Oct. 24).

November: "Quantum of Solace" (Nov. 7), "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" (Nov. 7), "A Christmas Tale" (Nov. 14), "The Road" (Nov. 14), "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (Nov. 21), and "The Soloist" (Nov. 21).

December: "The Class" (Dec. 12), "Defiance" (Dec. 12), "Doubt" (Dec. 12), "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Dec. 25), "The Spirit" (Dec. 25), "Revolutionary Road" (Dec. 26), and "Gran Torino" (late December).

The 2008 Academy Award Results

BEST DIRECTOR:  Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men

BEST PICTURE:   No Country for Old Men

BEST ACTOR:   Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood

BEST ACTRESS:  Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:  Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Diablo Cody, Juno

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:  Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM: Taxi to the Dark Side (Dir:  Alex Gibney)

BEST ANIMATED FILM:  Ratatouille (director/writer:  Brad Bird)

BEST FOREIGN FILM:  The Counterfeiters (Austria)

BEST ART DIRECTION: Art Direction: Dante Ferretti, Set Decoration: Francesca Lo Schiavo, Sweeney Todd

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood

BEST COSTUMES: Alexandra Byrne, Elizabeth: The Golden Age

BEST MAKE-UP: Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald, La Vie En Rose

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: Dario Marianelli, Atonement

BEST ORIGINAL SONG:  Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, "Falling Slowly", Once

BEST FILM EDITING: Christopher Rouse, The Bourne Ultimatum

BEST SOUND MIXING: Scott Millan, David Parker and Kirk Francis, The Bourne Ultimatum

BEST SOUND EDITING: Karen Baker Landers and Per Hallberg, The Bourne Ultimatum

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Michael Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris and Trevor Wood, The Golden Compass

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT: Freeheld (Cynthia Wade and Vanessa Roth)

BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT: Le Mozart Des Pickpockets (Philippe Pollet-Villard)

BEST ANIMATED SHORT: Peter & the Wolf (Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman)

DVD Release Dates

March 31, 2009 DVDs:

Autopsy

The Broken

Butterfly Effect: Revelation

Come Play with Me

The Cremator

D. Gray-Man: Season One, Part One

Danton

Darn Good Westerns Vol 1

Dennis Miller: The HBO Comedy Specials

Dying Breed

The Escapees

Evolve

Fallen Angels

From Within

The Fugitive Season Two, Volume Two

Generale Della Rovere

Hannah Montana: Keeping it Real

Happy Together

Hercules Collection

Holding Trevor

Hope & Faith Season 1

Horrorfest 8pk

In Plain Sight: Season 1

The IT Crowd: The Complete First Season

Manny's Green Team

Marley & Me

Modern Marvels: Energy

National Geographic: Journey to the Edge of the Universe

Negima: Season 2, Pt. 2

Ogre

Perkins 14

Planet Earth, Vol. 4: Seasonal Forests/Ocean Deep

Real Ghostbusters Collection 1

Restless Conscience

Ricky Gervais: Out of England - The Stand-Up Special

Same Old Song

Schoolhouse Rock: Earth

Seven Pounds

The Sexploiters

Shakespeare's an Age of Kings

Shigurui: Death Frenzy - Complete Series

Shuffle: The Complete Series

Slaughter

Slumdog Millionaire

Special

Star of David: Hunting for Beautiful Girls

Stomp! Shout! Scream!

Tell No One

Timecrimes

Ultimate Collections: World War II

Urban Legends: The Complete Season 1

Vampire Secrets

Voices

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Season 4, Vol. 1

World War I: The Great War

April 7, 2009 DVDs:

13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests

Alexandra

Ben 10 Alien Force: Volume Three

Bled

The Case of the Frightened Lady

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Donkey Punch

Down and Dirty with Jim Norton

Dynasty: Season Four Vol. 1

House

Loyal 47 Ronin

Max Fleischer's Superman

Mississippi Chicken

Murder Is Like Sex

Mysterious Cities of Gold

No Country For Old Men: Collector's Edition

The Paper Chase: Season One

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword

Shuttle

The Tale of Despereaux

Tigger, Pooh and a Musical Too

Vinyan

Yes Man

April 14, 2009 DVDs:

American Swing

Crude Impact

Decameron '69

Knots Landing - The Complete Second Season

Skins - Vol. 2

The Spirit

Splinter

April 21, 2009 DVDs:

Burrowers

Dallas: The Complete Eleventh Season

Dante 01

Frost/Nixon

House of the Sleeping Beauties

A Jihad for Love

Laid to Rest

Notorious

Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé

The Wrestler

April 28, 2009 DVDs:

Bride Wars

Empire of Passion - Criterion Collection

Frost/Nixon: The Complete Interviews

Gangland: The Complete Season 3 DVD SET

H2 Worker

The Hit: Criterion Collection

In the Realm of the Senses - Criterion Collection

JCVD

Martyrs

Ng-Ultimate Nature Collection

Ode to Billy Joe

Price of Sugar

Rookies: The Complete Season 1

Shadow Force: Season 1

Stranded

UFO Hunters: The Complete Season 2 DVD SET

The Waltons - The Complete Ninth Season

What Doesn't Kill You

X-Men: Volume 1

X-Men: Volume 2

May 5, 2009 DVDs:

Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Classic Collection - Set 1

Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Classic Collection - Set 2

Bleak House

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- Criterion Collection

Dr Who-Battlefield

Dr Who-E-Space Trilogy

A Grin Without a Cat

Incendiary

Jake & The Fatman: Second Season

Last Chance Harvey

McLeod's Daughters: The Complete Eighth Season

One Wild Oat

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin - The Complete Series

Smother

Stranded: Mississippi Chicken

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: John Wayne Westerns (The Cowboys / Fort Apache / Rio Bravo / The Searchers)

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: War - Battlefront Asia (Bataan / Back to Bataan / The Green Berets / Destination Tokyo)

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Western Adventures (The Wild Bunch / McCabe & Mrs. Miller / Jeremiah Johnson / The Train Robbers)

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: World War II - Battlefront Europe (Kelly's Heroes / Where Eagles Dare / The Dirty Dozen / Battleground)

Tibetan Book of the Dead

Under The Bombs

Wendy and Lucy

May 12, 2009 DVDs:

3 Mo' Divas

400 Years of Telescope

Alexander Korda's Private Lives - Eclipse Series

The Anatomist

B.T.K.

The Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation

The Dana Carvey Show: The Complete Series

Galaxy Quest: Deluxe Edition

The Grudge 3

Holy Flame of the Martial World (1983)

The King and Four Queens

Kingdom

Lovejoy: The Complete Season Five

Northwest Frontier (1959)

Of Time and the City

Passengers

Pie in the Sky: Series 1

S. Darko

Taken

Time Limit

Two and a Half Men: Season 5

Ultimate Western Collection

Wise Blood - Criterion Collection

May 19, 2009 DVDs:

17 Sinister Street

3 Seconds Before Explosion (1967)

The Bank Robbery Collection

Billy Jack

Bollywood Horror Collection, Vol. 3 (1986)

Charles Bronson Collection (St. Ives / Telefon)

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards! (1963)

Detective Story

El Dorado (Paramount Centennial Collection)

Fanboys

Fist of the North Star: The Movie

Friday Night Lights: The Third Season

The Friends of Eddie Coyle - Criterion Collection

Girl on a Motorcycle

Intimidad

Kobe Doin' Work

The Last Horror Film - Uncut Special Edition

The Legend of the Blood Castle (1972)

Malcolm McDowell Collection (A Clockwork Orange & O Lucky Man)

Man Hunt

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Paramount Centennial Collection)

Masaru Konuma: Debauched Desires (Wife to be Sacrificed / Cloistered Nun: Runa's Confession / Tattooed Flower Vase / Erotic Diary of an Office Lady)

My Bloody Valentine 3D: 2-Disc Special Edition

Nightmare Castle

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Peyton Place: Part One

Pigs, Pimps, & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamaura

Pufnstuf

Russell Brand in New York City

Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1960's

Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1970's

Steve McQueen Collection (Bullitt & Papillon)

Steven Seagal Collection: Above the Law & Hard to Kill

Titanic: How It Really Sank

Top Secret Trials of the Third Reich

True Blood: Season 1

Ultimate Vacation Collection

Valkyrie

Wandering Ginza Butterfly (1971)

Wandering Ginza Butterfly 2: She-Cat Gambler (1971)

Yonkers Joe

May 24, 2009 DVDs:

Blues Brother's 25th Anniversary Edition - Land of the Lost Movie Cash

The Flintstones Collector's Edition

King Ralph

May 26, 2009 DVDs:

BBC History of World War II

Don't Go in the Woods / The Forest

Falling Down (Deluxe Edition)

Gunsmoke-Season 3 Vol. 2

Jeeves & Wooster: The Complete Series

Killshot

Land of the Lost: Complete Series (Limited Edition Gift Set)

Land of the Lost: The Complete Series

Mark of the Witch / Devil Times Five

Military Combat Megaset

The Mod Squad: Season 2, Vol. 2

Philippe Garrel x 2

Powder Blue

Stomp! Shout! Scream!

UFO Hunters: The Complete Season 2 DVD SET

The Universe: Our Solar System

The Universe: The Complete Season 3

June 2, 2009 DVDs:

Cannon: Season Two, Vol. 1

Complete Abbott & Costell Show Seasons 1 & 2

Defiance

Drive-In Classics Collection

Last Days of the Fillmore

Legendary Heroes (2009)

Neil Young Archives Volume 1

Neil Young Archives Volume 1 10 DVD

Quincy, M.E.: Season 3

Revolutionary Road

Shinobi No Mono, Vol. 4: Siege (1964)

Spring Breakdown

Tender Mercies

Thrilla in Manilla

June 9, 2009 DVDs:

Chariots of the Gods/The Outer Space Connection

Destination Fame

Father Knows Best: Season Three

Gran Torino

In Love We Trust

The Inernational

Jack Lemmon Film Collection

Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 1979

Norman Lear TV Collection

Open All Hours: Complete Season

Perry Mason: Season 4, Vol. 1

The Shield: The Complete Seventh Season

Strike

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut

Zane Grey Theatre - Complete Season One

June 16, 2009 DVDs:

Black Magic 2 (1981)

Burn Notice: Season 2

Family Guy!: Vol. 7

Hopalong Cassidy

Jesse Stone: Thin Ice

Last Holiday

Murdoch Mysteries: Series 1

Operation: Valkyrie

The Outlaw (Special Edition)

RiffTrax: Carnival of Souls - Mystery Science Theater 3000!

RiffTrax: House on Haunted Hill - Mystery Science Theater 3000!

RiffTrax: Missile to the Moon - Mystery Science Theater 3000!

Rifftrax: Night of the Living Dead - Mystery Science Theater 3000!

RiffTrax: Plan 9 From Outer Space - Mystery Science Theater 3000!

RiffTrax: Shorts Vol. 1

RiffTrax: Shorts Vol. 2

Sergeant Preston - Complete Season Two

Seventh Seal

The Strange One

Suddenly - Special Editon (1954)

The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 6: 1949-1951

The Three Stooges Collection, Volumes 1 - 6

Transformers: The Complete First Season

What Goes Up

What's Up, Tiger Lily?

June 23, 2009 DVDs:

Catlow

Diary of a Suicide

Last Year at Marienbad - Criterion Collection

The Monster Squad: The Complete Collection

My Dinner with Andre

Tom and Jerry: The Chuck Jones Collection

Waltz With Bashir

June 30, 2009 DVDs:

Do the Right Thing - 20th Anniversary Edition

Eastbound and Down: First Season

Lookin' To Get Out (Director's Cut)

The Lucille Ball Specials: Lucy Gets Lucky/Three for Two

Nostradamus 2012

Number 10

Revolution: Revisited (1985)

Serious Charge (1959)

The Swiss Family Robinson (1976)

They Call Me Bruce (1982)

The True Story of the Fighting Sullivans

Women in Prison Triple Feature: The Hot Box/Escape From Hell/Women in Cell Block 7

Zabriskie Point

July 7, 2009 DVDs:

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Beau Geste

Callan: Set 1

Doctor Who, Episodes 11 & 12: The Rescue / The Romans (2009)

Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen (Episode 138)

John Barrymore Collection

Kath & Kim: Season 1 (USA)

Lonely Are the Brave

Matlock: The Third Season

Murder, She Wrote: The Complete Tenth Season

Mystery Science Theater 3000: XV

Peanuts: 1960s Collection

Petticoat Junction: The Official Second Season

Reno 911: The Complete Sixth Season

Sherlock Holmes (1922)

Trail of the Lonesome Pine

How to Avoid Bad Movies

By Cole Smithey

Nobody likes the feeling of spending hard-earned cash on a movie only to regret every second spent sitting through a worthless piece of tripe that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. There are some clues you can look for to help limit your exposure to crappy films. While this condensed list won’t insure that you never spend another two hours in a darkened cinema bored to tears, it does represent some shortcuts that I use as a critic in deciding which movies to avoid.

Pay attention to ratings and running times. In recent years, this has become a great shorthand way of sizing up action, thriller and horror movies. There aren’t too many modern winners from any of these genres that don’t have an R rating. So if a movie like "Cloverfield" seems at first glance like something you want to see, consider its PG-13 rating first. There’s an automatic cap on how much suspense and payoff this neutered rating will deliver. Add to that the film’s 84-minute running time, and it’s a fair bet that this little teen-peddled flick won’t mean much to a cinephile that’s been around the cinema block.

Adopt a favorite critic. I love to read reviews by Roger Ebert because he has an effortless style, and I’ve read enough of his reviews to know how to interpret them against my own tastes. It’s advantageous to have a critic that you enjoy reading and whose insights can help you get more out of specific films. Even if you end up hating a movie that your favorite critic supported, you can have an interesting internal dialogue during the experience.

January and February suck. The movies opening in wide release on February 1^st give a microcosmic glimpse into what we’re talking about. Disney is opening their diabolically manufactured "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour." New Line Cinema is trotting out an ill-timed romantic comedy that looks like a made-for-TV show that you might not return to after visiting your kitchen for a break. Lionsgate lets loose with yet another D-list Jessica Alba thriller ("The Eye") while Paramount puts up "Strange Wilderness," a comedy with Steve Zahn as an animal enthusiast. It’s a batch of movies you could skip with no regrets. None of these dandy options were press screened more than a week outside of their release, if at all. That sends up a red flag about a studio’s lack of confidence in the film’s ability to impress critics.

Most audiences are instinctively aware of the movie drought that occur in the first two months of the year when studios are still reaping the rewards of their Oscar-promoted Christmastime fare. This is a period when it behooves audiences to check out the overhyped movies that you’ll be sorry you missed when they win Oscars.

Consider the source. Films by first time directors automatically draw a stern eye. More often than not, movies from first time filmmakers wither on the vine. If it’s not a debut effort that you’re curious about due to positive reception from a film festival or some other notoriety, stay away.

You can also tell a lot by the studio. Keep track of which studios release the kinds of movies you like. I know that films from First Run Features, Focus Features, Fox Searchlight, Kino, IFC, THINKFilm, Paramount Vantage, Picturehouse, Sony Pictures Classics, and the Weinstein Company will typically pique my interest.

Don’t believe the hype. Here we get into the muddy waters of what to expect when you go to see a critical darling like "Atonement" or "There Will Be Blood." Everyone you know has told you that you absolutely have to run out and see it. But as you sit in your seat waiting for the earth to shake beneath you, you feel like there’s something missing, something that everybody else got that you’re not seeing. And there is. It’s called first-time identification. Because your identification to the film’s essence has been regurgitated to you, you’re not able to see it as you would if you had walked in knowing nothing about it. The simplest way to rectify the situation is to consciously disregard everything you’ve heard when you approach it. Go so far as to sit in a part of the theater that you wouldn’t normally occupy, and make sure that there are as few people around you as possible to enhance your sense of personal space. Make your mind a blank and let the movie wash over you on its own terms.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back with subtitles. It’s easy to be adventurous with foreign movies because you can treat part of the experience as a chance to brush up on a foreign language while getting a brief vacation to another culture. If it’s a movie like Ang Lee’s "Lust Caution," you might even get an erotic charge for your trouble.

Study the classics. There’s no substitute for visiting or revisiting the classics of world cinema, and if you’re fortunate enough to a have an art house repertoire cinema near you that shows films like Alain Resnais’ "Last Year at Marienbad" then you’ve got an ace up your sleeve. It’s no accident that great directors, like painters, constantly look at cinema masterpieces for inspiration and ideas. Seeing movies from the top 1000 films of all time will give you a greater appreciation of master filmmakers and make you more critical of dreck. Most movies are bad, but that doesn’t mean you have to see them. Think before you plop down ten bucks on the next pic from M. Night Shyamalamadingdong. The time you spend watching Bergman’s "Wild Strawberries" will make up for the time you spent watching Will Ferrell’s last comedy.

My OFCS 2007 Voting Ballot

BEST PICTURE
"There Will Be Blood"
2nd choice: Black Book
3rd choice: Zodiac
4th choice: No Country for Old Men
5th choice: Rescue Dawn

BEST DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson (-) "There Will Be Blood"
2nd choice: Paul Verhoeven
3rd choice: David Fincher
4th choice: Joel and Ethan Cohen
5th choice: Werner Herzog

BEST ACTOR
Daniel Day-Lewis (-) "There Will Be Blood"
2nd choice: Cillian Murphy (-) Wind That Shakes the Barley
The 3rd choice: Jake Gyllenhaal (-) Zodiac
4th choice: Sam Riley (-) Control
5th choice: Sebastian Koch (-) Black Book

BEST ACTRESS
Marion Cotillard (-) "La Vie en Rose"
2nd choice: Tang Wei (-) Lust, Caution
3rd choice: Keira Knightley (-) Atonement
4th choice: Charlize Theron (-) In the Valley of Elah
5th choice: Ellen Page (-) Juno

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck (-) "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
2nd choice: Javier Bardem (-) No Country for Old Men
3rd choice: Mark Ruffalo (-) Zodiac
4th choice: Vincent Cassel (-) Eastern Promises
5th choice: Paul Schneider (-) Lars and the Real Girl

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett (-) "I'm Not There"
2nd choice: Emily Mortimer (-) Lars and the Real Girl
3rd choice: Jennifer Jason Leigh (-) Margot at the Wedding
4th choice: Kelly Macdonald (-) No Country for Old Men
5th choice: Amy Ryan (-) Gone Baby Gone

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
"Black Book"
2nd choice: Wind That Shakes the Barley
The 3rd choice: In the Valley of Elah
4th choice: Knocked Up
5th choice: Juno

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
"There Will Be Blood"
2nd choice: Zodiac
3rd choice: No Country for Old Men
4th choice: Atonement
5th choice: Into the Wild

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
"There Will Be Blood"
2nd choice: Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The 3rd choice: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
4th choice: Black Book
5th choice: The Bourne Ultimatum

BEST EDITING
"There Will Be Blood"
2nd choice: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
3rd choice: The Bourne Ultimatum
4th choice: Zodiac
5th choice: Black Book

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
"There Will Be Blood"
2nd choice: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
3rd choice: Black Book
4th choice: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
5th choice: Zodiac

BEST DOCUMENTARY
"No End in Sight"
2nd choice: Terror's Advocate
3rd choice: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten
4th choice: Sicko
5th choice: ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway

BEST FOREIGN (NON-ENGLISH) FILM
"Black Book"
2nd choice: The Lives of Others
3rd choice: Persepolis
4th choice: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
5th choice: Lust, Caution

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
"Persepolis"
2nd choice: The Simpsons Movie
3rd choice: Ratatouille
4th choice: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters

BREAKTHROUGH DIRECTOR
Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi (-) "Persepolis "
2nd choice: Cristian Mungiu (-) 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
3rd choice: Joon-ho Bong (-) The Host
4th choice: Anton Corbijn (-) Control
5th choice: Craig Gillespie (-) Lars and the Real Girl

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE
Carice van Houten (-) "Black Book"
2nd choice: Wei Tang (-) Lust, Caution
3rd choice: Dillon Freasier (-) There Will Be Blood
4th choice: Nate Parker (-) The Great Debaters
5th choice: Michael Cera (-) Superbad