Notes on the 95th Academy Awards Ceremony

I was holding on to these for a post-Oscars episode of A Night at the Opera where we’d go over our reaction to the ceremony at large, but we need to delay our next recording far longer than anyone will even want to hear about the last Oscar ceremony (in fact we are already past that point nearly two weeks out). As such, so that these doofy notes don’t go to waste, I present my unadulterated thoughts on the Oscar ceremony below.

FIRST THE SCOREBOARD FROM OUR PREDICTIONS:

• Britt had 17 correct.
• Erickh and I both had 16 correct.

We shall accordingly bully Britt for being a nerd.

Best Dress: Allison Williams

Also pretty fond of Angela Bassett’s dress

Most “That’s Gonna Be Annoying The Person Behind Them: Tems

Best Musical Performance: Lady Gaga singing “Hold My Hand”

Best wins of the ceremony:

1. Ruth Carter for Best Costume Design
2. Guillermo Del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s Pinocchio for Best Animated Feature

Worst wins of the ceremony:

1. Navalny for Best Documentary Feature
2. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse for Best Animated Short Film
3. Jamie Lee Curtis for Best Supporting Actress
4. James Friend for Best Cinematography

(None of these are really judgments on the speeches, I just thought they were collectively the worst of their category)

Best speech of the ceremony: M.M. Keeravani accepting Best Original Song for “Naatu Naatu” alongside Chandrabose by singing his thanks and hopes

Most “I hope this guy is alright” speech: Brendan Fraser hyperventilating whale metaphors, poor guy most have been so anxious when he knew this was not landing.

AND THE REST OF MY NOTES

• Speaking of Fraser, I’m happy if Ke Huy Quan and Brendan Fraser are happy but I hope this is the end of the internet’s very weird coddling of them two and specifically the industry’s sycophancy for them after blatantly ostracizing Ke and outright abusing Fraser. I hope they have the long careers they want from here on out and they seem legit grateful for the support, but the tone of the support has felt really condescending to me for a minute.

• Tom Cruise’s feelings evidently was so hurt by Judd Apatow that the greatest stunt he couldn’t surmount was the possibility of being in a room where Jimmy Kimmel says such softball jokes as “L. Ron Hubba Hubba” (yes, I know his reps said he wanted to avoid Nicole Kidman. I call bullshit. It’s far more likely he just didn’t attend because he was taking over for Lady Gaga on the set of Joker 2 thereby freeing her up at the last second to perform. Looking forward to the scene where Harley Quinn sky-dives off Mount Everest.)

• Too many winners being cut off at the mic: one of the makeup artists for The Whale Judy Chin, one of the winners for The Elephant Whisperers Guneet Monga, both non-white women like c’mon. Cut out your self-congratulatory commercials for Disney, WB, and the Academy Museum and let these people have their fucking moment.

• No tears for the most popular movie of 2022 and I’m assuming this is a flub, but the fact that the producer of Everything Everywhere All at Once accepted the Best Picture trophy saying one of the most important things he learned was “there is no one person more important than profits” was a nice Curb Your Enthusiasm moment and I’m sorry he fumbled that small part of his big moment.

• Speaking of “Naatu Naatu”, very amusing that a song whose thesis is explicitly “only Indians can dance worth shit” ended up performed at the Oscars with, I think, no Indian dancers.

• “Malala land” is a big time lowlight, Jimmy Kimmel was so annoying in this ceremony (after being pretty great with the ceremony for 2016 film) and him asking Malala Yousafzai to vamp an answer was the worst part. Please no more hosts unless those hosts are either:
  Vince Staples
  George Wallace
  Erykah Badu

• A hoarse-voiced Elizabeth Banks and a Cocaine Bear suit-fella (when he wasn’t annoying Malala ) discussing the Best Visual Effects nominees through pantomime was the highlight (for the record, Cocaine Bear would be a much better film with a dude in a bear suit, come on).

• In general, a lot more respect for the craft of film and interest by the presenters in talking about what it is they are presenting the award for. Several categories in which they actually picked out something in each nominee that earned their nomination. That’s nice, the Oscars usually pretends they’re above that shit. Best instance of this was Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors bring up talk about cinematography shortly after doing that Goku-Vegeta fistbump walking on-stage.

• The internet is still being annoying like it always is a couple of weeks after the Oscars, but I will say there are three potential instances that would have absolutely caused a shitstorm, in ranking of magnitude:

1. Women Talking going home empty-handed.
2. Cate Blanchett pulling the Best Actress upset, ESPECIALLY with Jamie Lee Curtis winning an Oscar earlier in the ceremony.
3. All Quiet on the Western Front taking Best Picture like it felt for a moment in the first half might have been a possibility. The internet would have gone fucking berserk.

• Hugh Grant was a real one for that red carpet interview that people are talking shit about. Some of the best facial reactions of his acting career.

• Sarah Polley is also so real for this take on Oscar winners crying during their speech.

• Sad there’s no gif of that early close-up on Pedro Pascal pointing at the camera when Kimmel is joking about the Mandalorian protecting him, that was probably the hottest moment at the ceremony.

• Possibly the shortest In Memoriam segment ever and this was pulled by leaving so many names out. Having Charlbi Dean missing when she’s the star of a movie nominated for Best Picture there and missing Paul Sorvino on the same montage that has Ray Liotta is a look. My set of most disappointing absences:

1. Sacheen Littlefeather (responsible for one of the most notorious events in Oscar history and she should have been acknowledged especially after the Academy’s public apology to her)
2. Gene LeBell (the legendary stunt coordinator who made Steven Seagal soil himself, especially given Brad Pitt won an Oscar for playing a character inspired by him)
3. Ricou Browning (the man responsible for some of my favorite underwater action in the form of maybe my favorite movie monster ever)
4. David Warner (one of the best actors of my age)
5. Fred Ward (one of my picks for the coolest actors of my age)
6. Kevin Conroy (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was a movie, it counts)
7. Pat Carroll (in the same ceremony where they advertised Melissa McCarthy taking over her role in The Little Mermaid remake)
8. Julee Cruise (maybe a stretch since Twin Peaks is more television than film but Angelo Badalamenti was on the montage and she did work on David Lynch’s films)

And then the other notable absences: Leslie Jordan, Anne Heche, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Phillip Baker Hall, Leiji Matsumoto, Tom Sizemore, Ginger Stanley, Gilbert Gottfried, Chaim Topol, Henry Silva, Leon Vitali, L.Q. Jones, Ruggero Deodato, Bert I. Gordon, Irene Papas, Albert Pyun, Lenny Van Dohlen, Clu Galagher, Jason David Frank, Taylor Hawkins, Joe Turkel and a whole lot of others I must be forgetting. Sure, some of these were longshots for a lot of reasons but some of these were very obvious.

• Very clean and well put-together designs this year (the color scheme of the theater, the deco lines with tasteful curves, the layout of the nominees behind the presenters as a mash-up) but otherwise this ceremony was overall extremely boring. Like, sure, it’s nice that no one got hurt this time, but I’d love to see shit needed to go down next year. These are fun when things are fucking up and the worst we got was Elizabeth Banks almost tripping on her dress. We need disasters and we need chaos for decent television, especially against the privileged members of the Academy. Will personally volunteer to drop kick a giant Oscar statue or shout fire in the crowded Dolby Theater next year if necessary.

My Favorite Movies of All Time, circa age 30 – #101-91

(Proof that I’m still messing myself up over this list… at the last second, I took a look at my Honorable Mentions and realized “Holy shit, I didn’t include THAT?!” Will not beat my self up anymore, this post will accordingly have 11 entries and you can consider it “one for goodluck”.)

101. The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998, USA)

On the one hand, you have a sober yet brilliant examination of what place free will has in the control of a cruel God. On the other hand, you have an ahead-of-its-time dissection of culture’s obsession with every facet of a public personality to the point of no privacy and braindead fixation on the tube. Around the edges is Peter Weir using Andre Niccol’s heady writing as a blueprint for realizing a disorienting facsimile of small-town life, populated with a cast very good at selling the plastic fakeness of the world while also cracking through those performances, and at the center is Jim Carrey channeling all of his goofy energy into a man who is trapped by his world and doing what he can to break the cage.

100. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938, USA)

The platonic ideal of the screwball comedy, driven largely by Katharine Hepburn’s unhinged performance. She’s just pulling out all the stops, unrelenting with her character’s breathless ability to quickly say something to get one up on them and with no real grounding or willingness to let the audience catch their breath. The perfect core for Howard Hawks to hone his sharp fast-paced filmmaking and the perfect aggressor towards Cary Grant’s befuddled victim of her wiles.

99. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008, USA)

Spoiler alert: this will be the only CGI animated movie that appears and I’m not quite sure I picked the right one for me. But WALL-E doesn’t just display a casual ability to treat animation as grounded cinema attached to the principles of focus, lighting and camera movement and applying those with sophistication towards storytelling. It also carries one of my greatest loves of visual storytelling: the charming ability of a character to communicate a full personality that has hopes and dreams without really speaking. And it carries one of my deepest personal loves: looking up at the stars at night by myself and thinking about what’s beyond that cosmic blanket. With those two anchors, it is no surprise that I’m a sucked for its romantic soul.

98. The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003, France/Belgium/Canada/UK)

A caricature in motion: sketching a variety of novel visual personalities just from the desire to make them look as bizarre as possible and centering around the such recognizable cultural institutions as the music hall and the Tour de France with backgrounds that can’t decide on a single real-world analogue for the very-French city it takes place in. From there, we get a story with just as much weirdness to match: a kidnapping, a conspiracy, the dogged pursuit of a warm and dedicated grandmother. I am willing to accept that I’m warmer to this movie than necessary on account of it having a good dog named Bruno, but I’m also glad that animators working outside of any studio like Chomet were making wholly unique works like this in the 21st Century.

97. Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982, USA)

Kind of corny having this in the same post as The Truman Show, isn’t it? In any case, as stimulating as cinema gets: the full impact of high-speed movement, the expanse of the natural and technological world, the thrilling hypnotism of Phillip Glass’ score. My first montage film and maybe it helps that it doesn’t have even a little bit of subtlety – thematically or atmospherically. But it is simply the ride that does it for me, if I may be forgiven for sounding like a dazed undergrad talking about this movie. I was a dazed undergrad when I first watched it.

96. The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924, Germany)

The camera and the face are such a perfect pair together and you’ll see a lot of movies on this list that stress that collaboration. The Last Laugh is one of the primary examples I think of regarding the representation of a face as an emotional anchor, given how the silent cinema necessitates the most expressive performances to function and Jannings was one of the most expressive performers of that era. Murnau’s guiding of the audience to intimate levels of watching the weary sadness on this poor humiliated man’s face is just the movie making no illusions about whose heartbreak we’re gonna feel. Assuming you cut the movie before the last scene, of couse.

95. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972, West Germany/Mexico)

Nowadays, Herzog stakes his claim as a crazy man who makes documentaries about volcanoes but once upon a time he was a crazy man who made movies about crazy men (often in the jungle). One could try and play dimestore psychiatrist about this approach to making art, but it resulted in a good crop of movies portraying the external collapse of an already dangerous mind within the pressures of an uncaring natural world. There’s not argument that the pinnacle of these portraits center around the infamously violent screen presence of Klaus Kinski and this always strikes me as the purest exemplar of Herzog and Kinski’s very volatile work together. Just leave a madman floating in the middle of the river and watch him break down as a mirror to the world.

94. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007, Canada)

If we’re to have autobiographical films, they may as well defer to their subjectivity on some level but Guy Maddin’s memoir is less deferential and more just jumping headfirst into a swirling mass of pseudohistories, Oedipal complexes, silent film, and a dream logic that really barely holds them together except by the strength of its associative momentum. My first introduction to Maddin, a much unreliable one that promised whether or not I could believe what was before my eye… I’d be thrilled.

93. Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952, USA)

All the President’s Men is normally the go-to choice for “Best Movie About the Press” and it’s certainly a masterpiece that made me consider a future in it. But when it comes to cheat-thumping passionate declarations about what the journalist truly brings to society, it has to be Samuel Fuller’s passion project where he uses all of his powers as a filmmaker of melodrama and masculinity to advocate for an idealized social honesty that could save the nation allegedly. Could a man who didn’t believe so passionately in this lost cause come up with something as hokey as beating a man against a statue of Benjamin Franklin?

92. The Fall (Tarsem Singh, 2006, USA/India)

If you ask me to talk about movie images that branded themselves in my brain, this will likely be the most recent movie I pull from. It’s not just gorgeous, but it’s fully audacious: Tarsem Singh used all that music video goodwill to shape a globetrotting adventure lifting in inspirational from nearly every culture in the world and the only thing that could bring the illogical heights is grounding it to a story of two friends translating the way they see hope and hopeless in their lives into a word game. On top of its marvelous location photography and florid colors and designs, it maybe boasts the best costumes of Ishioka Eiko’s way too small film career but one could say that of all Ishioka’s work.

91. The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925, USA)

The quintessential showcase of Chaplin’s deft ability to weave his sincere sentimentality and his uproarious sense of physical humor. So good that he can make light of the horrifying possibility of frost and cannibalism and the general bloodthirsty nature of desperate men without ever spoiling the fun or pretending the peril isn’t real. I can guarantee if you hear his name, the first image in your mind is something from this picture: his blank face hanging over dancing dinner rolls, the teetering house on the edge of the cliff, the casual repast of a boiled boot. For me, it’s his sad tramp standing in silhouette against a party all alone in the shadows. Don’t know what that says about me.

Final Predictions for the 95th Academy Awards

Just fresh off of watching the last of the 54 nominees, just fresh off of recording the latest episode of A Night at the Opera pre-gaming for tomorrow’s ceremony, and I’m pretty happy to say: I’m kind of jazzed over how uncertain my nominations are here. Not necessarily because I like the nominees – hell, the favorite of the competition is a movie I flat out do not like – but just the anticipation is intoxicating. It feels like we haven’t had this unpredictability since the 88th Oscars at least. Anyway, I’ll elaborate on my thought process for each prediction, my picks, what I think should have been nominated and for the rest of the fun, listen to podcast to listen to Britt, Erickh, and myself hash it out.

Let’s see how I fare at the end of tomorrow evening.

BEST PICTURE

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Avatar: The Way of Water
• The Banshees of Inisherin
• Elvis
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• The Fabelmans
• Tár
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Triangle of Sadness
• Women Talking

PREDICTION: Everything Everywhere All at Once
SPOILER: Tár
MY PICK: The Fabelmans
SHOULD BE HERE: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio

(Britt’s prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Erickh’s prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once)

It’s just the momentum behind it. I’m not nearly as outraged about this: I may not be a fan of Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I really hated the last two winners of Best Picture and EEAAO at least feels more unconventional and non-Oscarbaity than those two (or Green Book if we skip past Parasite being the only worthy winner of the last 5 years).

BEST DIRECTOR

• Todd Field – Tár
• Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Ruben Östlund – Triangle of Sadness
• Steven Spielberg – The Fabelmans

PREDICTION: The Daniels
SPOILER: Steven Spielberg
MY PICK: Steven Spielberg
SHOULD BE HERE: James Cameron – Avatar: The Way of Water

(Britt’s Prediction: The Daniels
Erickh’s Prediction: The Daniels)

A little less certain here than the Best Picture win but I can’t see the Academy seeing a reason to break the Picture-Director synchronicity to award it to an already twice-awarded titan, except that Spielberg is way better.

BEST ACTRESS

• Ana de Armas – Blonde
• Cate Blanchett – Tár
• Andrea Riseborough – To Leslie
• Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans
• Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once

PREDICTION: Michelle Yeoh
SPOILER: Cate Blanchett
MY PICK: Michelle Yeoh
SHOULD BE HERE: Viola Davis – The Woman King

(Britt’s Prediction: Michelle Yeoh
Erickh’s Prediction: Michelle Yeoh)

Would be the funniest shit if Andrea Riseborough wins and so I am rooting for it to happen. That said, I really do like all five performances on this slate with Yeoh being the single least objectionable win I can think of for Everything Everywhere All at Once. Won’t shed tears if it goes to anyone else, though. And to be clear… Davis’ performance in The Woman King is better than all of them.

BEST ACTOR

• Austin Butler – Elvis
• Colin Farrell – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Brendan Fraser – The Whale
• Paul Mescal – Aftersun
• Bill Nighy – Living

PREDICTION: Brendan Fraser
SPOILER: Austin Butler
MY PICK: Colin Farrell
SHOULD BE HERE: Daniel Giménez Cacho – BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

(Britt’s Prediction: Brendan Fraser
Erickh’s Prediction: Austin Butler)

Pretty confident on the hunger of the Oscars to have not just ONE happy comeback story but TWO of them. That said, my co-host Britt made a very good argument on Oscar’s allergy to Best Actor Comeback Stories after Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler lost to Sean Penn in Milk. If that bias shows up again, Butler’s the one fella who’s in the favorite genre of movies: biopics.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• Angela Bassett – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Hong Chau – The Whale
• Kerry Condon – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Jamie Lee Curtis – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Stephanie Hsu – Everything Everywhere All at Once

PREDICTION: Angela Bassett
SPOILER: Kerry Condon
MY PICK: Kerry Condon
SHOULD BE HERE: Lashana Lynch – The Woman King

(Britt’s Prediction: Jamie Lee Curtis
Erickh’s Prediction: Jamie Lee Curtis)

I think Bassett has got the exact right set of precursors and I’ll be honest, it never occurred to me that Curtis had any real shot until my co-hosts were predicting her. But I still have to think Chau and Condon have more conversation before Curtis among voters and I wonder how allergic they’ll be to giving Curtis an award over 3 women of color ESPECIALLY if Blanchett ends up succeeding at her upset and taking Actress over Yeoh.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• Brendan Gleeson – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Brian Tyree Henry – Causeway
• Judd Hirsch – The Fabelmans
• Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Barry Keoghan – The Banshees of Inisherin

PREDICTION: Ke Huy Quan
SPOILER: Will Smith walks right back up that stage with his hand ready.
MY PICK: Barry Keoghan
SHOULD BE HERE: Tom Hanks – Elvis

(Britt’s Prediction: Ke Huy Quan
Erickh’s Prediction: Ke Huy Quan)

The award I am the most confident predicting of the night. That’s happening.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

• Todd Field – Tár
• Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Ruben Östlund – Triangle of Sadness
• Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner – The Fabelmans

PREDICTION: Everything Everywhere All at Once
SPOILER: The Banshees of Inisherin
MY PICK: The Banshees of Inisherin
SHOULD BE HERE: James Gray – Armageddon Time

(Britt’s Prediction: The Banshees of Inisherin
Erickh’s Prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once)

It only makes sense to use this category to pad the pocket of whatever is winning Best Picture, so I’m feeling steady here. I’m not optimistic to imagine Banshees taking this home, though it’s so obviously the best of the set. Hell, even if we presume EEAAO gets spoiled out, I’m not convinced Tár won’t be the spoiler.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

• Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, & Ian Stokell – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Ishiguro Kazuo – Living
• Rian Johnson – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
• Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, & Christopher McQuarrie – Top Gun: Maverick
• Sarah Polley – Women Talking

PREDICTION: Women Talking
SPOILER: All Quiet on the Western Front
MY PICK: Living
SHOULD BE HERE: George Miller & Augusta Gore – Three Thousand Years of Longing (though certainly Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio had a better shot)

(Britt’s Prediction: Women Talking
Erickh’s Prediction: Women Talking)

All three Best Picture nods have a shot here but I can’t imagine the outrage the internet will roll out if Women Talking goes home empty-handed. Even though it’s probably among the least discussed nominees I can think of.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

• Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
• The Sea Beast
• Turning Red

PREDICTION: Turning Red
SPOILER: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
MY PICK: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
SHOULD BE HERE: Inu-Oh

(Britt’s Prediction: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
Erickh’s Prediction: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio)

I honestly think this is anyone’s game outside of The Sea Beast. I think there’s a real shot that Turning Red makes me look like a fucking idiot as the nominee that feels like it’s not even bothering campaign but y’know… the last time I had this vibe that a Disney movie wasn’t working to win was Big Hero 6 and that was an upset of a win. I expect beyond the overnight success of Puss in Boots or the prestige of Pinocchio, it’s that Disney money that will ensure its potential win here. In any case, still better a winner than the fucking shell that also has a good shot.

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM

• All Quiet on the Western Front (Germany)
• Argentina, 1985 (Argentina)
• Close (Belgium)
• EO (Poland)
• The Quiet Girl (Ireland)

PREDICTION: All Quiet on the Western Front
SPOILER: EO
MY PICK: This is a genuinely dire list, the worst I think we’ve seen for this slate in a long time. I guess, EO.
SHOULD BE HERE: Decision to Leave

(Britt’s Prediction: All Quiet on the Western Front
Erickh’s Prediction: All Quiet on the Western Front)

No real reason to expect disruption to the token Best Picture nominee taking it home, though I do hear a lot more praise for EO over it.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

• All That Breathes
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• Fire of Love
• A House Made of Splinters
• Navalny

PREDICTION: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
SPOILER: Fire of Love
MY PICK: All That Breathes

(Britt’s Prediction: Navalny
Erickh’s Prediction: Navalny)

Fire of Love is the easiest watch of the bunch by a lot. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has an Oscar alumni behind it and a sense of important messaging that had more staying power than either of the Ukraine/Russian related works (though Navalny is an “easier” watch than A House Made of Splinters – Splinters is a good movie though and Navalny is a piece of shit). Going with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed with a bit of uncertainty behind my prediction.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM

• The Elephant Whisperers
• Haulout
• How Do You Measure a Year?
• The Martha Mitchell Effect
• Stranger at the Gate

PREDICTION: Stranger at the Gate
SPOILER: The Elephant Whisperers
MY PICK: Haulout

(Britt’s Prediction: The Elephant Whisperers
Erickh’s Prediction: The Elephant Whisperers)

Same principle as the Doc Feature category: Elephant Whisperers is an easy watch enough to be a spoiler, but Stranger at the Gate has the sense of “social relevance”, specifically the condescending kind of white Oscar voters will pat themselves on the back for even though it tokenizes both Muslim people and PTSD-inflected veterans. That’s catnip for them.

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM

• An Irish Goodbye
• Ivalu
• Night Ride
• Le Pupille
• The Red Suitcase

PREDICTION: An Irish Goodbye
SPOILER: Le Pupille
MY PICK: The Red Suitcase

(Britt’s Prediction: Le Pupille
Erickh’s Prediction: An Irish Goodbye)

Straight up, An Irish Goodbye had the best audience response out of the nominees when I saw these shorts in the theater. Le Pupille does have the pedigree behind it and the last time I counted that out was last year’s win for The Long Goodbye but c’mon… it can’t possibly happen again, could it? Especially since Cuarón and Rohrwacher aren’t ON-SCREEN like Riz Ahmed was.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM

• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse
• The Flying Sailor
• Ice Merchants
• An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It
• My Year of Dicks

PREDICTION: The Boy, the Mole, Yada yada
SPOILER: An Ostrich Told Me the Yada was Yada
MY PICK: Ice Merchants

(Britt’s Prediction: The Boy, The Mole, and the other fuckers
Erickh’s Prediction: My Year of Dicks)

Again, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse had… some audience response. People laughed at a late reveal but people were also murmuring about how great it was. Clearly soulless people, but in any case, it feels like the most popular of this bunch despite being the only movie that’s a piece of shit and besides which the universe hates me enough to constantly let my least favorite nominee in this slate win.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

• Volker Bertelmann – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Carter Burwell – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Justin Hurwitz – Babylon
• Son Lux – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• John Williams – The Fabelmans

PREDICTION: Babylon
SPOILER: All Quiet on the Western Front
MY PICK: Babylon
SHOULD BE HERE: Michael Giacchino – The Batman

(Britt’s Prediction: All Quiet on the Western Front
Erickh’s Prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once)

I honestly was not expecting to predict Babylon for anything, looking at this slate. It just feels right. Maybe it’s blinding me from it being pit against four Best Picture nominees, including one as my spoiler with a really weird enough score to stand out (though in my opinion a terrible way). But it’s pure vibes for me here.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

• “Applause” from Tell It Like a Woman
• “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick
• “Life Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• “Naatu Naatu” from RRR
• “This Is a Life” from Everything Everywhere All at Once

PREDICTION: “Naatu Naatu”
SPOILER: “Hold My Hand”
MY PICK: “Naatu Naatu”
SHOULD BE HERE: “Carolina” from Where the Crawdads Sing if I’m sticking to shortlist items, but I think it’s ridiculous The Bob’s Burgers Movie didn’t make the shortlist at all.

(Britt’s Prediction: “Naatu Naatu”
Erickh’s Prediction: “Naatu Naatu”)

The internet is clamoring for RRR to get something at the Oscars, “Naatu Naatu” is the only song that is a musical number, and come on have you really heard anybody talk about the other nominees?

BEST SOUND

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Avatar: The Way of Water
• The Batman
• Elvis
• Top Gun: Maverick

PREDICTION: Top Gun: Maverick
SPOILER: All Quiet on the Western Front
MY PICK: Elvis
SHOULD BE HERE: She Said

(Britt’s Prediction: Top Gun: Maverick
Erickh’s Prediction: Top Gun: Maverick)

If Top Gun is taking any trophy, it’d have to be this one. Still if All Quiet on the Western Front will make anything like the fuss it made back at the BAFTAs, this seems the place to begin its upset run.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

• Rick Carter & Karen O’Hara – The Fabelmans
• Dylan Cole, Ben Procter, & Vanessa Cole – Avatar: The Way of Water
• Christian M. Goldbeck & Ernestine Hipper – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy, & Bev Dunn – Elvis
• Florencia Martin & Anthony Carlino – Babylon

PREDICTION: Elvis
SPOILER: Babylon
MY PICK: Avatar: The Way of Water
SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE: Akin McKenzie & Christophe Dalberg – The Woman King

(Britt’s Prediction: Babylon
Erickh’s Prediction: Elvis)

Sticking to my presumption that the only shot Babylon has in this awards is score, I’m picking Elvis as the next showiest of the bunch especially in tandem with Best Costume Design.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

• Roger Deakins – Empire of Light
• James Friend – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Florian Hoffmeister – Tár
• Darius Khondji – Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
• Mandy Walker – Elvis

PREDICTION: All Quiet on the Western Front
SPOILER: Tár
MY PICK: Bardo, in maybe my least favorite slate of the whole awards.
SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE: Janusz Kaminski – The Fabelmans

(Britt’s Prediction: Elvis
Erickh’s Prediction: Elvis)

Feels like anybody’s pick but All Quiet on the Western Front is the one that may make an upset sweep for sure and this would have to be square one.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• The Batman
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Elvis
• The Whale

PREDICTION: The Whale
SPOILER: Elvis
MY PICK: Elvis
SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE: Crimes of the Future

(Britt’s Prediction: Elvis
Erickh’s Prediction: The Whale)

If I picked Fraser for his transformation, it would only make sense to go with the make-up that facilitated that transformation. In turn, if Elvis wins this, we can be sure Butler is taking home that Actor trophy.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

• Jenny Beavan – Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
• Ruth Carter – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Shirley Kurata – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Catherine Martin – Elvis
• Mary Zophres – Babylon

PREDICTION: Elvis
SPOILER: Babylon
MY PICK: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE: Kym Barrett – Three Thousand Years of Longing

(Britt’s Prediction: Elvis
Erickh’s Prediction: Elvis)

Same principle as Production Design. Elvis takes that, it’s taking this one. If Babylon takes that one, mayyyybe it’ll take this as well (it’ll certainly deserve it more than Production Design) but also this slate has some pretty hard contenders with Mrs. Harris being the only certain loser. But really I’d have to go with a biopic portraying the most gaudily dressed stage performer outside of Liberace and Elton John.

BEST FILM EDITING

• Eddie Hamilton – Top Gun: Maverick
• Mikkel E.G. Nielsen – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Paul Rogers – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Matt Villa & Jonathan Redmond – Elvis
• Monika Willi – Tár

PREDICTION: Everything Everywhere All at Once
SPOILER: Top Gun: Maverick
MY PICK: Top Gun: Maverick
SHOULD BE HERE: Margaret Sixel – Three Thousand Years of Longing

(Britt’s Prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Erickh’s Prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Top Gun: Maverick definitely has a good chance here but Everything Everywhere All at Once needs good padding as the Best Picture favorite – I think my final tally of awards it’s taking is five – and it definitely has that show-offy MOST editing that usually takes this award.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Avatar: The Way of Water
• The Batman
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Top Gun: Maverick

PREDICTION: Avatar: The Way of Water
SPOILER: Someone busts into the Dolby Theatre announcing they object to this union.
MY PICK: Avatar: The Way of Water
SHOULD BE HERE: Nope

(Britt’s Prediction: Avatar: The Way of Water
Erickh’s Prediction: Avatar: The Way of Water)

One could argue the sole purpose of Avatar is to coo over bleeding-edge effects. There IS more to Avatar than that, but I mean on obvious glance.

My Favorite Movies of All Time, circa age 30 – An Introduction

I feel like a feature with that title shouldn’t really need an introduction post as it’s pretty self-explanatory. But this was cooking for about a year now and the ceremony of finally putting it to post does necessitate context to my mindset, I feel. In fact this was really simmering a little longer: on my 24th birthday 6 1/2 years back, I posted my 100 favorite movies around that time and THAT in itself was a response to a 4-year-earlier list that I acknowledged as being “immediately outdated”. I knew at the time I typed those words, the sentiment would hold true now to the 4 year list and thought about making a regularity of rewriting the list a la how Sight & Sound check in every ten years (and how appropriate for me to have been brought into the world in 1992, in pattern for S&S‘s practice). But even now I understand my unwillingness to bind myself to a selection of movies as unsteady as this very list that I’ll be spending the next few days breaking down into ten posts of ten entries.

Part of my problem taking so long by moving my target date – originally I entertained (but did not commit) to making it my 29th birthday post as five years after the last incarnation; then I decided on the occasion of my 30th birthday for the personal centennial factor; then I figured I could push it back as long as I did it while I’m still 30 – was how often I found myself neurotically second-guessing and re-arranging and removing and including movies all throughout, at points tempting myself with “do I really need to stop at 100?” But eventually there came an uncomfortable truth that I had to face: 9 months through my 30th year in life… I was not going to be physically able to write another word on this hear blog without finally posting this list, revisions be damned. And now I’m pushing myself to accept what I have and open it up.

How did I do that? Kind of by finally embracing the arbitrariness of such a task: my whims may have fluctuated within an hour, making this a never-ending game of musical chairs, that’s fine… it captures a precise moment in which my mind said “yes, this is a 100 movie list that I love” and that is sufficient for me. It’s a snapshot of a moment in the past that’s still near enough I can relate to the fella a few weeks ago that said “OK, this is the one I’m gonna post”. This certainly is not the list of 100 movies that I think are better than any other movie I’ve ever seen, but that’s fine… that’s the illusion of objectivity that I may entertain yearning for but deep down know is never achievable. And the biggest gripe is that maybe it’s not even THE 100 movies I love more than any other. Probably most of them, but not all of them… but that’s fine too because it is a list of 100 movies I love enough to consider personal masterpieces.

Anyway, even while trying to accept the whim of the listmaking, I still made myself abide by certain rules, some of which you may remember from the last incarnation of this list.

• No movies released in the last ten years. If I was talking shit about the Sight & Sound list having them, obviously I need to be my own example. Besides, y’all heard me talk enough about Mandy.
• 3 movie maximum per director. I was discussing this with a friend about a week ago but I feel like there was never any real threat to this rule – my three favorite directors represented on the list have two movies each – except for one particular silent filmmaker.
• No miniseries (though I will confess to two of the films on my list technically count as television). There’s a real difference between the two artforms, y’all. I love Twin Peaks, Scenes from a Marriage, Dekalog, and Fanny and Alexander. They’re all tv, though, and just because an acclaimed filmmaker is making them and they stand out above the usual form of television doesn’t disqualify them. Maybe I’m particularly eager to play fair with this because I mostly dislike television, so I don’t want to paint exceptions to my dislike as exceptions to the form.
• No movies I watched for the first time in the last year. This one is a new one I’m applying on the merit of feeling like I haven’t really sunk in with a movie if it’s too fresh in my mind, similar to the “no movie from the last ten years” rule. An attitude I sort of had 7 years ago as well, but back in 2016 I didn’t feel like I’d seen nearly enough movies to impose that rule on myself.

And I guess before we finally begin our hand, I guess I should give an impression of what movies are to come: since the last list, I’ve eased myself into adding 21st Century films, including one selection from the 2010s. I also found myself eager to shovel in as many silent and musical films without feeling the proportion would be contrived. In addition to that devotion to the silent era, there’s a good amount of post-War era pictures there. In spite of that post-War element, I do find myself shocked with only fitting in one true blue film noir (which I consider to be restricted to American cinema in the 1940s) with neo-noir outnumbering it in representation, but I don’t have any qualms with my one pick for that suite and I imagine that it’s a consequence of my preferred kind of post-War cinema being based in Japan. I surprised myself by the amount of short films on the list (two of which premiered on television) and haven’t decided if my horror fandom is adequately represented. And of course, I do devote space to animated films – shorts AND features – but I do wish I could have made room for films outside of the usual big studios one could name. I think the most conscious element was trying to represent some of my favorite filmmakers (a lot of whom simply did not make the cut and it’s killing me what the absences are), but what really threw me aback for some were the selection of movies I found myself more eager to have represent my taste than what I would have responded kneejerk maybe a week prior.

Hey, it’s all intuition. Would be absolutely no fun if I knew exactly what I was setting to pen here from the word go.

The resultant list is mine and will remain mine, even after I take a peek a month from now and go “Agh! What was I thinking not including such-and-such?!” and even after I determine the next instance where I’m going to revisit and update this list with all the new movies I just discovered and watched and all the new ways I look at the last ten years of moviemaking with appropriate distance. It’ll just be a different past version of mine.

Anyway, I gotta stop stalling. There’s no turning back from here. Let’s dive in!

Predicting the Nominations of the 95th Academy Awards

Goddamn, that shit really creeped up on me this month without realizing tomorrow sees the morning that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences names its nominees for this year’s Oscar ceremony. Since I wasn’t paying enough attention to the momentum (a lot of these felt like done deals for a while), you’ll forgive me for not elaborating too much on my predictions and merely present them so we can point and laugh tomorrow morning when I fucked up.

ETA 24 January 2023 – Post has been updated taking stock of what I got right and wrong. Items I predicted that did not make it through have received a strikethrough, items I did not predict that were added are in bold. Also in bold below are counts per slate of what I got right and my respective comments towards the results.

BEST PICTURE

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Avatar: The Way of Water
• The Banshees of Inisherin
• Elvis
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• The Fabelmans
• Tár
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Triangle of Sadness
• The Whale
• Women Talking

9/10 Correct. I’m not too surprised with Triangle of Sadness‘ success here, but I hoped against hope for it to falter. Not that I was a Whale fan either. In any case, the result here is a Best Picture slate where – for the first time since the 87th Oscars – I actually love at least half of the nominees.

BEST DIRECTOR

• James Cameron – Avatar: The Way of Water
• Todd Field – Tár
• Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Ruben Östlund – Triangle of Sadness
• Steven Spielberg – The Fabelmans

4/5 Correct. Absolutely mad that Cameron was snubbed for arthouse Adam McKay.

BEST ACTRESS

• Ana de Armas – Blonde
• Cate Blanchett – Tár
• Danielle Deadwyler – Till
• Andrea Riseborough – To Leslie
• Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans
• Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once

4/5 Correct. That manic celebrity-driven campaign by Riseborough to get nominated for a film almost nobody saw actually landed. I can’t say much since I have yet to see either Till or To Leslie, but it’s maybe not a great look since that slot would have otherwise gone to either Deadwyler or Viola Davis (for The Woman King which is fucking awesome and we failed).

BEST ACTOR

• Austin Butler – Elvis
• Colin Farrell – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Brendan Fraser- The Whale
• Paul Mescal – Aftersun
• Bill Nighy – Living

5/5 Correct. Wiping dust off my shoulder.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• Angela Bassett – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Hong Chau – The Whale
• Kerry Condon – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Jamie Lee Curtis – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Dolly de Leon – Triangle of Sadness
• Stephanie Hsu – Everything Everywhere All at Once

4/5 Correct. Pretty wild that despite the rise in nominations for Triangle of Sadness, Dolly de Leon missed out. She was maybe the only good performance in that piece of shit.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• Paul Dano – The Fabelmans
• Brendan Gleeson – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Bryan Tyree Henry – Causeway
• Judd Hirsch – The Fabelmans
• Barry Keoghan – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Eddie Redmayne – The Good Nurse

3/5 Correct. Much deserved nomination for Henry certainly, though I imagine Dano will make this his villain origin story when he becomes the Jok– the Riddler.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

• Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Todd Field – Tár
• Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Ruben Östlund – Triangle of Sadness
• Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner – The Fabelmans
• Charlotte Wells – Aftersun

4/5 Correct. I wasn’t rooting for Aftersun in anything really, but man is Triangle of Sadness a downgrade.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

• Edward Berger, Ian Stokell, & Lesley Patterson – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Guillermo del Toro & Patrick McHale – Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
• Ishiguro Kazuo – Living
• Ehren Kruge, Eric Warren Singer, & Christopher McQuarrie – Top Gun: Maverick
• Rian Johnson – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
• Sarah Polley – Women Talking

4/5 Correct. While Top Gun‘s nomination is deserved, I’m a little peeved – barring Living, which I haven’t yet seen – the only good screenplay in my prediction slate was sacrificed.

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Argentina 1985
• Close
• Decision to Leave
• EO
• The Quiet Girl

4/5 Correct. Decision to Leave‘s snub is not as much a surprise to me as it appears to others – given Oscar’s chilly history with South Korea, Parasite aside – but it does disappoint me.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

• The Bad Guys
• Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
• The Sea Beast
• Turning Red

4/5 Correct. Anything I was rooting for outside of Pinocchio and Puss in Boots honestly never had a chance. If Marcel the Shit with Shit On wins, I will slap every person I know who loves it. Backhand and fronthand. Somebody better crush that tiny shell before I grab a hammer and find it.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• All That Breathes
• Bad Axe
• Fire of Love
• A House Made of Splinters
• Navalny

4/5 Correct. Honestly surprised I got so close. All I knew was Moonage Daydream wasn’t getting that shit.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

• Roger Deakins – Empire of Light
• Greig Fraser – The Batman
• James Friend – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Florian Hoffmeister – Tár
• Darius Khondji – Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
• Claudio Miranda – Top Gun: Maverick
• Mandy Walker – Elvis

3/5 Correct. Top Gun missing this slate is a major shocker (though I’d be lying if I said I lament this, great as the movie is). Khondji’s work makes sense as an entrant here, but I’m at a loss on what made Tar a nominee. Better than All Quiet‘s cinematography, though.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

• Jenny Beavan – Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
• Ruth Carter – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Shirley Kurata – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Catherine Martin – Elvis
• Sandy Powell – Living
• Mary Zophres – Babylon

4/5 Correct. I guess Oscar don’t love Sandy Powell THAT much. Kurata’s the only nominee who ain’t about the old guard.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

• Rick Carter & Karen O’Hara – The Fabelmans
• Dylan Cole, Ben Procter, & Vanessa Cole – Avatar: The Way of Water
• Daniel M. Goldbeck & Ernestine Hipper – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Rick Heinrichs – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story
• Jason Kisvarday – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy, & Bev Dunn – Elvis
• Florencia Martin & Anthony Carlino – Babylon

3/5 Correct. No real comment except it wouldn’t have been a bad thing for Glass Onion to have made it here.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

• Volker Bertelmann – All Quiet on the Western Front
• Carter Burwell – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Alexandre Desplat – Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
• Hildur Guðnadóttir – Women Talking
• Justin Hurwitz – Babylon
• Son Lux – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• John Williams – The Fabelmans

3/5 Correct. No love for Desplat, I guess. I’m glad the three predictions I loved most survived.

BEST FILM EDITING

• Eddie Hamilton – Top Gun: Maverick
• Michael Kahn & Sarah Broshar – The Fabelmans
• Stephen Rivkin, David Brenner, John Refoua, & James Cameron – Avatar: The Way of Water
• Mikkel E.G. Nielsen – The Banshees of Inisherin
• Paul Rogers – Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Matt Villa & Jonathan Redmond – Elvis
• Monika Willi – Tár

3/5 Correct. I really love The Banshees of Inisherin but its entrance into this slate baffles me. Terrible editing.

BEST SOUND

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Avatar: The Way of Water
• The Batman
• Elvis
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Top Gun: Maverick

4/5 Correct. No real comment.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIR

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Amsterdam
• The Batman
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Elvis
• The Whale

4/5 Correct. Man, I was fucking goofy thinking Amsterdam was getting any nomination.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Avatar: The Way of Water
• The Batman
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
• Nope
• Top Gun: Maverick

3/5 Correct. Genuinely embarrassing that Nope got snubbed in this specific category but Black Panther – featuring the ugliest visuals in the entire MCU – got the nomination.

BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT

• An Irish Goodbye
• Ivalu
• Le Pupille
• Night Ride
• The Red Suitcase
• Sideral
• Warsha

3/5 Correct.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

• 38 at the Garden
• As Far as They Can Run
• The Elephant Whisperers
• Haulout
• Holding Moses
• How Do You Measure a Year?
• The Martha Mitchell Effect
• Nuisance Bear
• Stranger at the Gate

1/5 Correct.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse
• The Flying Sailor
• Ice Merchants
• My Year of Dicks
• An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It
• New Moon
• Save Ralph

3/5 Correct. I never fucking know what I’m doing with the goddamn short categories.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

• “Applause” – Tell It Like a Woman
• “Carolina” – Where the Crawdads Sing
• “Ciao Papa” – Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
• “Hold My Hand” – Top Gun: Maverick
• “Lift Me Up” – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• “Naatu Naatu” – RRR
• “This Is a Life” – Everything Everywhere All at Once

3/5 Correct. Should have known better than not to predict the Diane Warren entry.

X Triple I, Friday Night

WARNING: Some of the below clips are NSFW

It’s that day again: the unlucky day, the day from which comes misfortunes, the day the Earth got dark, Jason’s birthday… of course, this long-superstitious date has been the namesake of one of the most iconic of horror franchises: Friday the 13th. And long time friends are also aware that it’s a franchise that is pretty close to my heart in an idiosyncratic way: my attitude and relation to it has changed in the 20 years since I first saw a Friday the 13th picture and that change feels like an anchor to how I’ve developed as a slasher AND a horror fan.

I’d of course love to go into further detail movie by movie on that personal history, but I’ve felt like I’ve watch several of these movies WAY too many times in the last five years (including a full binge between 2020 and ’21 when that awesome Scream! Factory set dropped) so I think that’ll have to be left for a distant future when I’ve given them enough space to hit me again. Still, I simply did not want to let a Friday the 13th pass me by without some acknowledgement of the franchise.

I figured what better than to list my favorite examples of that franchise’s raison d’etre: the continuous body count in creative and ludicrous ways, playing into my thrill watching special effects transform a muted bit of play-acting into an awe-inspiring work of grisliness.

2 Honorable Mentions from the unearthed Part 2 gore footage so they don’t count really:
– Alice Hardy (Adrienne King), whose pick to the temple was way too tame and finding out the full shot revealed the point poking out on the other side of her nose turning it into a genuinely disturbing effect.
– Jeff Dunsburry (Bill Randolph) and Sandra Dier (Marta Kober), speared mid-coitus in a way that is way too obvious a rip-off of Twitch of the Death Nerve but still absolutely disorienting in its marriage of this subgenre’s fascination with sex and violence.

1 Honorable Mention from the first movie just to round this list fully to thirteen entries:
– Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) – the villain of the first film – getting decapitated by Alice. Less for the actual decapitation effect, impressive as it is, but for the grim aftermath of watching her hands come out and try to reach where her head used to be before her corpse falls.

(FTR, if you happen to own the Scream! Factory set, I HIGHLY encourage you to watch the uncut gore effect footage of both Part 2 – which was at one point thought lost and has a fascinating story as to its recovery – and The Final Chapter. They are very much the most thrilling special features in a very jam-packed set)

10. Tina (Camilla More) in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter – Defenestrated from outside, landing on a car

Real talk: there’s two other deaths from this fourth entry coming but I could easily make half of this list using only this movie (big ups to Crispin Glover taking a cleaver to the face – I just really love a classic backwards-run film effect – as well as Alan Hayes being lifted up by a harpoon gun to the groin and Lawrence Monoson getting stabbed in the back of the head against a projection screen and leaving a trail on it).

Being the triumphant return of movie gore genius Tom Savini so deep into his career, he seemed to genuinely treat this opportunity as a real homecoming ceremony. And yet I chose one of the least gory deaths for my number 10 largely because of how… honestly, how stately it feels: utilizing what I expect was the stunts background of both Ted White (the actor who plays Jason) and Savini*, there’s a real sense of pose to each shot of this scene amplified by the slow-motion and punctuated by the illogical explosion of the car Tina lands on. It makes no sense but each visual is high impact: the hands crashing through the window, the outstretched crouch of Jason on the roof, the horizontalness of Tina’s final landing. Elegant and brutal without feeling as exploitative as the series usually goes.

9. Amanda (America Olivo) and Richie (Ben Feldman) in Friday the 13th (2009) – Sleeping bag immolation for her and machete to his brain after being caught in a bear trap

Yeah, ok, I included two people dying in the same scene as one setpiece. Sue me, I had a lot of Friday the 13th kills to talk about and this pair is a brutal set and among the meanest. Since the opening 20-or-so minutes of this remake operate as a little fan film, there’s no time to waste dilly-dallying. By having Amanda and Richie killed in such close proximity that one of them watches the other die, it brings a grim fatalism and involving the bear trap as a bit of pre-murder torture for Richie reintroduces the earthy human woodsman that Jason originally was before the franchise transformed him into an impossible zombie halfway through. A physical personality we are more intimately introduced to once Jason himself appears in the movie and promptly jams that machete blade into Richie’s head.

8. Axel Burns (Bruce Mahler) in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter – medical saw to throat and head twisted 180 degrees

Apologies to Colby Johnson, a bit player in Freddy vs. Jason, whose head twisting death was on an earlier draft of this list until I revisited this clip and found “oh no… this is the superior effect”, even in its abrupt cutting (for the record, the poke to the chest Jason does to Johnson in the Freddy vs. Jason variation is the only beat I love out of Ken Kirzinger’s Jason performance). I think there’s maybe an argument that the ridiculously short screentime the killing blows have (compared to the uncut footage in the special features) suggest a bleak abruptness to the act but I’m not that convinced for the saw part of the death (there’s so much fake blood letting we could have gotten out of it). The head twist, though… just suddenly cutting once the turn is complete is a real “lights out” attitude.

7. Deborah (Michelle Clunie) in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (unrated home video cut) – Bisection mid-coitus

The most puerile one of my list, which is just fine. The subgenre and franchise are both puerile and did way too much to run away from that (because otherwise the MPAA would punish them), but this is the high watermark of marrying that sex and violence altogether. It’s also simply the case that a good bisection death is among my favorite ways to play a horror movie death and while this may be among the fakest (if you slow the clip down, you can tell the fake torso already has a path for the impaling spear cut out of it), it’s that wonderful grindhouse attitude that endears the sequence to me. Right down to the final crash zoom between the cut pieces of the boyfriend freaking out as he’s sprayed with blood.

6. Jack (Kevin Bacon) in Friday the 13th (1980) – Arrowhead poking through the throat

Come on, you can’t beat a classic. Savini’s work on the first film may have been inhibited by a few things – his relative green status even with Dawn of the Dead already behind him, the miniscule budget, the ruthless cutting of the MPAA – but the arrow death never fails to impress me as a small-scale and uncharacteristic work of patience from this franchise: watching that dark little point break its way through the fake neck and just move around so the fake blood can rise up to a puddle. Extremely slow sequence implying a whole lot of misery just from one neat trick. And the amusement that the person who got such a death went on to be such a huge movie star.

5. Mark (Tom McBride) in Friday the 13th Part 2 – Machete to the face

Twice in a row, a relatively minimalist kill whose memorable aspect is more from the aftermath than the actual blow (in fact, it is unbelievable that the machete would hit Mark at such an angle without him seeing the assailant in advance, but anyway…). After the straightforward slamming of the machete right across Mark’s face, his being in a wheelchair means that the swing gives him enough momentum to slide backwards lifelessly down an endless amount of stairs in the rain. That image is really what delivers graveness to the scene, even with the corny freeze frame and flash to white. Impressive how well the effect survives the MPAA’s notes.

4. Julius (V.C. Dupree) in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan – Head gets knocked out in boxing match

The bravest motherfucker on this list and in turn the stupidest. It’s a long rooftop gag to have Jason mutedly execute a rope-a-dope on this character’s barrage of haymakers. But the final note of it pays off when we see Jason throw a punch that decapitates Julius with cartoonish cleanliness and lands right into an open trash container on the streets below. This is one of the four Friday the 13th movies I’ve seen in a movie theater and the audience was quiet and reserved throughout (which makes sense… this is my pick for the most boring entry, if not the worst). And then this sequence happened and everyone lost their hea– uh… went wild. Saving grace.

3. Jason Voorhees (Ted White) in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter – Machete to the skull

The big man himself, finally taking what he spent three movies dishing. And in a particularly grisly fashion that suggests Savini saved his most grotesque trick for Jason, less out of watching that machete get stuck halfway through his face by fellow 80s movie icon Corey Feldman but watching Jason fall so the handle sticks the machete upwards and his head just slides slowly and gruesomely down that blade until it looks like the entire top of his head is about to slide off. Among the masterpieces of Tom Savini’s career, just as much as that arrow death.

2. Adrienne Thomas (Kristi Angus) in Jason X – Face frozen in liquid nitrogen and then smashed open

Come on, how could this not place so high? In a franchise full of creative deaths, this one is the most creative: playing into the futuristic science fiction elements to suggest just how much worse things can get with the advent of progress. You have your face shoved into an instantaneously freezing substance that instantly kills you inside so you don’t have to feel your skull shatter into a million pieces against a nice hard worktop surface. If I were Kane Hodder on that set playing Jason, I’d be excited for multiple takes of multiple fake dummies having their multiple fake heads slammed on that counter. It looks very stress relieving.

1. Judith Williams (Debora Kessler) in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood – Sleeping bag swung into the tree

My list changes throughout the years, but this always remains my single favorite scene in the whole franchise even in its relative bloodlessness (I mean, the body is covered when it hits the tree so there’s no ability to exhibit that until the aftershot). Obviously, a big part is the novel use of something as quintessential to camping as the sleeping bag for a weapon against the flora of the grounds, representing an underappreciated part of this franchise and its fascination with the arboreous setting and outdoor activity. But really what ensures it’s place at number one is what it establishes about Kane Hodder’s portrayal of Jason, my favorite of all the fine burly actors to have portrayed the hulking brute, in his very first movie under that mask. He’s big, he’s direct, and he’s very very pissed off. I imagine having to drag Kessler’s weight in that bag was a very exhausting activity even for an already veteran stuntperson like Hodder. But he really transforms that frustration into a merciless carriage that he maintains for the remainder of his time in the role. When he finally connects that bag against the tree and walks away, the message of the scene was made clear: Kane Hodder’s Jason was not here to fuck around.

*In fact, I was endeared three years ago to learn about a confrontation between Savini and White over the blocking of a kill sequence turning into them bonding over each other’s stunt experience.

Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht

Belated Happy New Year round Motorbreath parts. I’ve been taking it easy for the past week or so staying with a relative in an apartment without a tv and whose work desk does not feel as intimately familiar and comfortable to me as the one at home in Chicago for me. But I am currently sitting at the airport preparing to go back home sweet home and in turn have a couple of writing plans I’ve had simmering in my brain for quite a minute. A bit too many, it would appear so I’m not about to pretend my lazy ass is ready to complete all of them sumbitches. So there’s a couple that are definitely set in stone for me and a couple that I want to leave up to the tenor of my friends and readers as stuff that they might be interested in looking at the headlines for and then abandoning after half a read. Below I boldly elaborate on some of the writing I’m hoping to do round these parts through the upcoming year.

• Definitely next on the plate is a dual review of Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water (the former may post later tonight), but I’m wondering if that would be an opportune moment to review the full list of movies that at one point were the recorded highest-grossing picture of the year (un-adjusted for inflation): The Birth of a Nation, Jaws, Star Wars, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial were already reviewed so those’ll be off the table and what’s left to fill that out is Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, The Godfather, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Avatar, and Avengers: Endgame (assuming The Way of Water doesn’t take the top spot by the end of its theatrical run, which is a likely possibility).
• Also a certainty on account of how much I really want to do this – I was hoping to begin this with Memoria but that half-written review is still on draft – I will be going backwards chronologically with every movie I consider a five-star masterpiece and giving it a review. First up on this review will be what is currently my pick for best movie of 2022, so y’all can brace for when that list happens.
• I think I’m a bit too burnt out of Friday the 13th to do a full retrospective on that series (I have a specific intended date in the distant future – not this year – to begin maybe a Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street dual tackle), BUT you can expect a fun list on the series on the occasion of the first Friday the 13th of the year.
• It looks like I’m returning to Chicago from my holiday trip at a moment where the winter is a bit uneventful – after my initial flight out was delayed by a snowstorm – but once the snow comes back with a vengeance proper and I’m there to see it: I have a couple of my favorite portrayals of snow in film that I want to give their proper due with reviews. One of them happens to be a horror remake with its own horror prequel, so I’m likely to throw in the original and prequel to round it out to three. The other… well, we’ll see below…

Now here’s where we get to the stuff I’ll leave to how people seem to be responding to the idea:

• This probably would have been more ceremonious to begin yesterday on the birthday of Miyazaki Hayao but it’s only today that I am returning to Chicago and therefore will have access to my blu-rays including Future Boy Conan: In anticipation of How Do You Live? coming out later this year – potentially Miyazaki’s final word – I would like to do a bit of double duty… what will start as a retrospective on Miyazaki’s directorial career will in turn transform around Nausicaa to a retrospective on all major Studio Ghibli film productions (I’ll be including The Red Turtle when I say “major”, but not ie. Recess: School’s Out). Obviously the sole exceptions to those are the Ghibli films directed by the late great Takahata Isao since that’s already covered, though I may think about throwing in his pre-Ghibli works.
• Speaking of anime filmmakers, 2023 will see the year when the late Kon Satoshi would have seen the age of 80. That’s only a pretext for how I’ve been looking for an excuse to review his full canon, given how ostensibly undemanding you’d think four features, a tv show, and a short would be (and yet look how long I took to do that for Takahata Isao). Still such an outrageously small body of work almost entirely made up of masterworks of animation make it look really insistent for me to do a Kon retrospective.
• One of those favorite portrayals of snow in movies I’m being coy about not naming is in fact the work of my favorite living filmmaker(s) and with 19 released features directed by them either together or separately (a 20th is due for this year after a festival premiere last year), absolutely all of them fascinating in one way or another, and absolutely none of them having been reviewed by me, I figure it would hurt to suggest a surprise retro for them.
• Just for the sake of it, I’d like to tackle any movie I caught in theaters in high-frame rate while the experiences are still fresh in my weirdly good memory: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Gemini Man, and Avatar: The Way of Water (my apologies to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, it appears I left New York City – the only place where it was possible to see it the way it was intended on release – at the wrong point and now it’s unlikely I’ll ever watch it without the opportunity of 120 fps 3D).
• In addition to that, the much longer list of any movie I caught in IMAX since theaters re-opened in 2020: Tenet, Jaws, and E.T. the Exterrestrial are already accounted for but that leaves Dune, Ghost in the Shell, Moonfall, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water.
• It is officially the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Animation Studios. And I’m marking that ceremony by watching a little of the early pre-Silly Symphonies shorts before I jump right into the full corpus of their Silly Symphones. I am not insane enough to suggest I would review every single one of those shorts beyond the customary letterboxd log (…yet) BUT! once I get to their feature films… it’s been a long intended run of writing for me to do and I figure there’s no better time to get it done: all 61 features leading up to this year’s Wish, plus I’ll throw in the 4 short segments originally intended for the cancelled Fantasia 2006.
• With the recent news dropping in and out about the shaking up and dismissals of DCEU creatives after James Gunn and Peter Safran have been made the new heads of DC Studios, it’s looking very likely that the DCEU as it began in 2016 (Man of Steel don’t really count) shall no longer be. I don’t have nearly as pessimistic an attitude on this as some of the most annoying parts of the internet and it seems an inevitability given how little success that franchise had financially (Aquaman aside), but I do have a not-small amount of sadness as it seemed to eschew the forced-interconnectivity of most cinematic universes and the movies were almost always interesting – the more unwieldy, the better. With that, I suppose it’s time to finally fill in my gaps for the DCEU in anticipation of what look like the final movies coming out this year: the Snyder trilogy – Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and the Snydercut – are all covered along with the first Wonder Woman. The first Suicide Squad got reviewed back in 2016 but that shit is unreadable, so I’d like a chance to rewrite that one and in turn kick-start what will be followed up with Justice League (that is the original theatrical released version that has since been understood as belonging to Joss Whedon in spite of being credited to Snyder), Aquaman, Shazam!, Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 1984, The Suicide Squad, Black Adam, and then the four upcoming theatrical releases that are likely to be the final DCEU works. I’m also willing to plan a heist with the appropriate motley crew for the shelved Batgirl, but let me keep my ambitions low right now.

Anyway, as I run through them motherfuckers, there’s a bit of miscellanea gap-filling that may happen. In order of likelihood of happening:
– Top Gun in tandem with Top Gun: Maverick
– Completing the Indiana Jones series (after writing two posts for Raiders) for the momentous occasion of a fifth Indy picture that’s definitely going to be the first bad one.
– The notorious 1993 Super Mario Bros. in expectation of that upcoming animated movie.
– With Ghost in the Shell, throw in not only the sequel and remake but also Ninja Scroll to wrap up the “mature anime Western breakouts” that started with Akira. Also maybe Angel’s Egg, just ’cause
– Robert Eggers’ three features – The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman – just ’cause.
– Assorted 2022 releases I loved.
– Wes Anderson retrospective in anticipation of his two upcoming movies.
– The first two Magic Mike movies in anticipation of Magic Mike’s Last Dance
– The full Conjuringverse in expectation of The Nun 2
– At least the first two Creed movies – if not the full Rocky franchise – in expectation of Creed III
– Scream franchise to get them out of the way before the 6th movie drops.
– The remaining Insidious movies preceding the already reviewed The Last Key in expectation of Fear the Dark.
– Taika Waititi feature film retrospective in advance of the much delayed Next Goal Wins to remind me of back when I loved him and map out his fall from grace.
– Mission: Impossible series in anticipation of Dead Reckoning – Part One (which I feel I could procrastinate since… we definitely have a Part Two coming)
– James Cameron full feature filmography (I feel like I could procrastinate this ’til at least the release of Avatar 3 in 2024, which might even give me space to include his produced films like Point Break and Alita: Battle Angel)
– Wrap up those Ghostbusters movies I didn’t review after the first one since a sequel to Afterlife is slated for this year (and fucking why?)
– Any Star Wars feature films I have not yet reviewed ever since Disney murdered that franchise so hard they transformed it into a fucking tv franchise.
– The full Jurassic Park franchise so I never have to watch those sequels again.
– The full Godfather trilogy
– The full Jaws franchise
– Fill up those MCU gaps ever since I stopped post-Avengers: Infinity War ruining my will to live.

Don’t hold your breath on these, especially the lower they’re listed on this post but it’s nice to have everything I want to do with this fucking blog staring at me so intimidatingly.

/

Life Goes On…

Ozu Yasujiro was one of the most consistent directors one could think of when it comes to the principles he applies to his framing, his cutting, and his circle of cast and crew. Between his 1949 feature Late Spring and his final film in 1962 An Autumn Afternoon, the only notable amendment to his comfortable aesthetic was the inclusion of colour in the late 1950s. This does not restrict any of those films from feeling less than perfect masterworks of a confident filmmaker or from feeling indistinct from one another. Because it may have been obvious that the man was using the same formal tools over and over again (and even the same themes), but different combinations of them were constantly applied to different moods, simply by perhaps a shift in the duration of certain shots or an uncharacteristic change in blocking or a drop of a smile establishing the difference between the tragedy of Floating Weeds and the comedy of Ohayo.

In the 13 movies ‘round that mature phase of his prosperous career, Tokyo Story is perhaps the most effective utilization of these features and most illustrative of his interests in deepening the stories he and frequent co-writer Noda Kogo would draft. In this particular instance, inspired by Leo McCarey’s 1937 elderly classic Make Way for Tomorrow, Tokyo Story gives us a picture of Japan just at the cusp of blowing off all of the ashes left from World War II as elders Hirayama Shikuchi (Ryu Chishu) and his wife Tomi (Higashiyama Chieko) prepare for a trip from their hometown Onomochi to visit the titular city and see the nuclear families of their son Koichi (Yamamura So), daughter Shige (Sugimura Haruko), as well as seeing daughter-in-law Noriko (Hara Setsuko), who remains a reminder of the son they lost in the war. This trip leaves behind their youngest child Kyoko (Kagawa Kyoko) in the Onomochi home they reside in and hopes to pass by their second-youngest child Keizo (Osaka Shiro) who resides in Osaka.

Tokyo Story of course has a premise that notoriously lends itself to much sadness in the form of Shikuchi and Tomi observing the sort of distance that has grown from the children that have left to their own lives (little distance at all with Noriko however, as the loss between the three of them appears to have amplified their need to remember their late son and husband Shoji together). And being a movie with very little incident in itself, it’s through the reliability of Ozu’s regular troupe and the script’s chilly pleasantries that they must enact that the movie can communicate the sort of annoyance and guilt that the characters hold as Koichi and Shige try to impatiently figure ways to fill the parents’ time after coming all this way.

But what about the places where they don’t speak and just sit? Because Tokyo Story is a movie filled with those types of scenes, recognizable from our own life of moments where we just don’t know what to say, where our body language betrays our intentions, where our smiles might What does Ozu do to actively involve in the stillest and most muted moments of this domestic drama?

One of the two signature characteristics of Ozu’s filmmaking – collaborating here with Atsuta Yuharu as he occasionally did – would be the elevation of the camera at the eye level of the characters if they were to sit down on tatami mat that made up the flooring for most traditional Japanese households, as though to establish the camera as an inhabitant of these domestic spaces joining in on the interactions that make up the film and often at an angle that takes note of the empty spaces surrounding these characters, especially if it’s only one of them in the room at the time. This decision would be quite complementary to the other signature characteristic in which Ozu often framed shot-reverse shot sequences of dialogue with the camera specifically placed in the middle of the people involved in those conversations with each of the conversants centered in their own shot.

The style specifically rejects arguably the most fundamental of Western cinematic staging and cutting, the 180° rule that stresses a clear definition of every character’s geographical relation in scenes. But by breaking that rule, Ozu uses direct address to force us to see every nuance in the performers’ faces, stresses the shallow smalltalk and the shallow reactions to that catching up, and specifically places us in the middle of that intangible empty space between these characters growing more and more distant to each other, taking one box of them all sitting together and dividing them artificially. Editor Hamamura Yoshiyasu does just as well to arrange these shots in a manner that provides this function and yet allows the conversation to smoothly run as though the breaking of that line is unnoticed, while also taking great patience in drawing out the sort of gaps between each character’s statements before moving on to the next close-up with a response to give, betraying the conversation as dull and betraying the characters as having to take time to construct banter under which they hide their true thoughts.

Ozu’s Tokyo Story is precise filmmaking without the slightest bit of conspicuousness to itself, in spite of its rule-breaking, and effectively delivers on devastating domestic tragedy that way enhancing the already brilliant work of its cast. The notoriety with which Tokyo Story effortlessly perfects all the aspects of film possible for little more than honest character drama and makes it count is undeniably the reason why that movie ended up voted by the Sight & Sound Directors’ Poll in 2012 to be the Best Film of All Time (and Third Best in the film critics’ poll). And yet it’s also easy to imagine that it may not be the actual strategy through which its constructed but the bullseye way that Tokyo Story KNOWS how families talk (or don’t talk) and the simple pain that is left from those talks that just hits its viewers on a gut level and brings it to those accolades. Who knows? Maybe it’s just left unsaid.

Over the Moon

A little prelude: For years I’ve been playing with the idea of a video essay series, but we do not have enough time to do everything we’d like to do in our lives. What follows is basically what I’ve intended as one of the first batch of those videos so don’t be surprised if in the future I finally find myself with the free time to put them together and I lazily recycle this post for that video.

A further little prelude: I am aware that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is among the most beloved and popular films by that most beloved populist of cinema Steven Spielberg. It would have to be: it was the highest-grossing picture of all-time until Spielberg decided to make dinosaurs walk the Earth and its titular alien character is one of the quintessential icons of pop culture in the 1980s. And yet I never encountered very much of that love in my personal life: I certainly adored the movie since I first saw it at 10-years-old and I’ve seen the movie numerous times in cinemas but while seeking out people in my life who share my affinity for the movie, I come up short. Even when I took a course in film school on the films of Spielberg, the professor just straight up dismissed that movie. So objectively it’s the case that E.T. does not need defending, but in my experience… that movie gets endlessly shrugged off. Maybe I keep terrible company.

The most obvious point of criticism is that it is the most blatantly sentimental and emotionally manipulative movie of Spielberg’s, a showcase of all his most characteristic and romantic saccharine moods. And well… yes, of course, it is. Art functions that way: it is meant to provoke a response out of you and a majority of that art (particularly cinema) already has an specific reaction it considers ideal to itself. Maybe that’s not a strong excuse if it’s not your flavor and Odin knows I have my share of movies that I completely reject their cloying approach to it. But I consider Spielberg to be among the best storytellers of the modern age because he knows the exact right arrangement of ingredients to get the most profound passionate reflexes out of my heart and when it’s firing on as many cylinders as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial does, I can’t intellectually resist that. I am wholly vulnerable and in awe of the power Spielberg flexes in making one of the ultimate emotional experiences in all of film.

What I can try to do intellectually is to break down how I believe it works, but first of course the acknowledgement on what E.T. is for those who have lived under a rock for the last 40 years: Written by Melissa Mathison and very clearly owned by Spielberg the whole way through, the screenplay begins with a scouting group of aliens that land quietly in a forest outside of Los Angeles. Ostensibly this landing was not quiet enough to avoid government officials chasing back into the ship and off the ground, leaving behind one unlucky member who rushes into the suburbs and is found by a young boy named Elliott (Henry Thomas). As Elliott gives shelter to the creature – whom is named E.T., of course – we learn about his broken homelife with his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton), baby sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore), and recently divorced mother Mary (Dee Wallace). Such a life has left Elliott with an unspoken empty feeling that’s filled by E.T.’s friendship with him, a bond that appears be psychically compelled. Still E.T. of course is not on this planet to stay and Elliott with his family and friends assist to get E.T. in contact with his ship.

That magical friendship connection at the center of the movie is its own awareness of what it’s doing: it’s telling us how to feel in every moment, through a variety of strategies all of them successful to me. This begins with Elliott’s perspective and the way the movie manages to align with him. Cinematographer Allen Daviau – in the first of his three collaborations with Spielberg – fills the movie with all sorts of hazy exterior atmospheres whether the soft darkness of the forest, the foggy light of the backyard, or the sleepy oranges of an autumn sunset (this happens to have my second favorite Halloween sequence in any movie not about the holiday for the reason of those colors, the first place prize going to Meet Me in St. Louis). There’s a whole lot of beautiful sunset and night skies captured unlike anything in Spielberg’s filmography in their comforting shimmering darkness. But the secret weapon of his camerawork is how much of it remains eye level with Elliott, most impressively in the long takes where a variety of angles will need to be taken to intersect past Elliott’s head to reach the subject he’s looking at (the biggest reason I wish I could have made this a video essay: there’s a specific shot about a quarter into the film that demonstrates this impeccably, where E.T. is obscured and covered but Elliott if looking at an empty door frame and then following his hands over a work bench). It is perhaps responsible for being the most dignified a child’s perspective could be without losing that character’s inexperience or condescending to Elliott as an expressive human being, inviting us to see the world from his level.

What I really didn’t recognize until the most recent watch (the 40th anniversary IMAX re-release in August) is how Spielberg and Daviau use that camera level technique to properly shift between human perspectives. Because certainly Elliott is the main protagonist but E.T. turns out to be a film also dedicated to how this one little creature impresses upon every member of that family (all of whom are meeting Thomas’ level in sophisticated performances – Wallace’s labored maternal tension is my pick for best-in-show but I wouldn’t also hesitate in claiming Gertie’s eager fascination is my favorite performance in Barrymore’s life-long career). In the below clip, you can easily tell by eye levels who is taking over this wildly variable sequence as constructed by the wise measures of Carol Littleton’s editing – the best of Spielberg’s many “dinner” sequences, which is a thing he does great and often, it turns out – from Elliott and Michael’s argument to Gertie’s earnest repetition of what’s said to Mary’s attempt to control things and the spot where it all collapses.

Anyway, that was a lot of rambling about only one of the major tools Spielberg has in his arsenal to control the viewer’s emotions in synchronicity with Elliott. And it’s wild how many of those words spared describing E.T. himself as designed by Carlo Rambaldi. Rambaldi in all his wisdom made an absolutely ugly creature whose ugliness is in the right gauge to make him absolutely adorable in his extended neck, his squat body, and his marvelous large eyes. Those eyes are easily the closest this creature comes to expressiveness and it’s never anything other than unthreatening in the relaxed open-and-close of his eye lids combined with his lazy smile and piercing blue eyes. It is not impossible to recognize how such a pudgy thing could appeal to children in its benign weirdness even before we see the magic of that glowing finger and in turn to the credit of Rambaldi’s animatronic puppet and the imagination of the child cast to work together as scene partners.

But just as there’s only so far we can get before having to talk about the titular entity in E.T., it is impossible to discuss a Spielberg film from his most successful era between the late 70s and early 80s without talking about the man behind the music: John Williams, who used many of Spielberg’s productions to craft together his most iconic melodies and E.T. is no exception. In fact, much like one can say that Star Wars is emotionally driven by Williams more than anything, it’s no doubt that E.T.‘s emotional tenor is determined by Williams’ compositions and this was legendarily something Spielberg recognized to the point of having the climax from the famous bicycle chase on to the final cut to black entirely re-edited AROUND Williams’ score rather than force Williams to compose to the film’s rhythm. This turned out to be the perfect directorial call to allow Williams the grounding to carry all the thrills and awe and sensations of that very packed finale without sounding like the music is straining one bit, letting its spirited themes build up to a climax that wallops me. The last few minutes of quiet in the final shots before the last note is blasted is probably what I find most disarming as I try collect myself in the dark of the credits against sprinkling piano notes playing. In those final moments, Williams and Littleton as collaborators truly hit the sweet spot between triumph of helping your friend and the tragic sadness that they will now leave your life in a beautiful powerful way.

And if I could backtrack a bit, just as Williams is the star of those big emotions of that finale, the place-setting he makes with the first half of the film is responsible for setting us up for that intense sequence of sounds. Indeed, he helps guide us through Elliott and E.T.’s kindred recognition that they have a companion to help their lonely souls find their place again. The first hour finds Williams under the sequences shaping tonal moods rather than letting coalesce into a musical vocabulary, that’s what the action-packed second hour is for.

Somehow it doesn’t feel like I’m ruining the trick by recognizing these components to Spielberg’s direct aim into the viewer’s core. Even when I’m thinking about Daviau, Littleton, Rambaldi, and Williams’ contributions during my later adult watches, the full picture still remains intact and sophisticated even knowing the hands behind the veil. That’s a picture about a specific group of people failing to connect and learning by the luck of a small alien who landed into their lives, specifically able to align the perspective of an isolated young boy and a divorced mother and even a distanced government functionary (as I must give it up to one more cast member: Peter Coyote is probably the closest we come to an antagonist** in the film but his interrogations are so concerned and betray a history of fascination that generously give him as much sympathy as any other character) with limitless grace. And that fluidity through which E.T. uses its construction to understand and appeal to every member of its central cast is probably why it remains as impactful to my core as an adult as it did when I was a child watching it alone in the dark.

Even in a year that has seen Spielberg literally make his semi-autobiography, I am still pressed to suggest E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains clearly his most personal film: it taps into his full powers as a crafter of cinematic marvel, his deepest anchors to childlike amazement, and his effortless understanding of how to tell specific and complex feelings by a specific arrangement of compositions, visual and audial. So what if he’s laying it on thick? He gets the job done just the same and better than any other storyteller I can think of. When you’re the best at something, I don’t think you should have to apologize for a damn thing.

*It’s also to the point where originally for that movie’s 40 year anniversary, I pitched a central episode on the movie for A Night at the Opera and one of my co-hosts who shant be named expressed reluctance due to not caring for the movie. Ah well.

**I will confess if there’s any specific issue I have with the movie it is the sudden presentation of the villains, specifically their costuming in the scene where they confront the family and invade their home.

Sight & Sound 2022

(NOTE: if you live in Chicago, it might be fun to know that the Gene Siskel Film Center already happened to have scheduled screenings of four entries in the Critic’s list INCLUDING the number one Jeanne Dielman.

Parasite – Monday 5 December
Stalker – Friday 23 December
In the Mood for Love – Saturday 24 December
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – Tuesday 27 December)

So it’s been a day since the BFI’s movie magazine Sight & Sound published the eighth edition of their list of the Greatest Films of All Time. For those who may not know, every ten years since 1952, the magazine had been reaching out to an extensive amount of professionals in the film industry – critics, programmers, curators, and directors (the last set of whom have their own list released with it) – and pooling their ballot of ten best films into a definitive consensus.

We just received our 2022 iteration, with the top ten spots taken up by the below ten films:

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman)
2. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
3. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
4. Tokyo Story (1953, Ozu Yasujiro)
5. In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
7. Beau Travail (1999, Claire Denis)
8. Mulholland Dr. (2001, David Lynch)
9. Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)
10. Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen)

And do I have thoughts? I certainly do. Personally I haven’t yet determined if they’re a net positive or negative, maybe I can hash that out through this sprawling rant.

I’ll start with the positive first: that top ten is pretty damn unimpeachable. All ten in fact are jostling for spots on the upcoming edition of my top 100 favorite movies list (Spoiler Alert: I’m hoping to finish that up by New Year’s). Including and especially Jeanne Dielman. Such a radical choice for number one, dethroning Vertigo only one decade after THAT film took Citizen Kane‘s long-reigning top spot.

Jeanne Dielman‘s entrance, let alone its top spot, seems to be indicative of a major shake-up to the list that cannot be understated: there’s more films by women. 11 films by 9 different filmmakers out of 100 movies is not a major amount, but the last edition had only two in a set of 93 (Jeanne Dielman and Beau Travail) and now it’s representing over 10% in the 2022 list. Plus, of the 10 I’ve seen (Wanda is the single blind-spot I have on the whole list), they’re all quite marvelous and among the movies I’d use to introduce someone to the art. Plus some choices are delightfully idiosyncratic: I know we all love Agnès Varda now (later than we should have) but I’d never expected The Gleaners and I to be her second best according to consensus. And Daughters of the Dust shoots me over the fucking moon as a movie. Neither Gleaners or Daughters are better than Portrait, but surprisingly Portrait is one of the items I’m most muted in my enthusiasm for and I guess I may as well address the reasoning as one of the negatives.

4 films out of 100 should be insubstantial, one would think, but there’s just something that does not sit right with me on movies younger than 10 years being considered one of the best movies of all time. My admittedly arbitrary attitude is that any serious consideration should stand a test of time to qualify “all time”, but I’m also a bit thrown by the blatant populism of the selections. Two of those movies from the 2010s – Moonlight and Parasite – are Best Picture Oscar winners, Get Out is another Oscar winner that broke multiple box office records, and all three with Portrait of a Lady on Fire are pretty big time internet favorites.

I’ll confess: part of my stance is a projection of my own insecurities regarding blurred lines between impossible objectivity and inevitable subjectivity. I’m never even close to 100% certain that movies from the 1920s or 1940s are the Best of All Time. But I’m a little more confident in the context of everything I’ve watched and the sort of legacy they’ve left behind that lead to my exposure with them than by the great movies of the 2010s, which at least share the excellent high of loving and enjoying movies like Portrait or Parasite (both being among my Top 100 of the 2010s, mind you) but neither yet having the length of time to really feel like they left a transformative quake. 3 years – 2 of which had the movie landscape completely transformed so that we’ve had a significant depletion of movie releases – feels like some voters saw they had free spaces and just scanned their favorite movies of the last ten years.

That said, I don’t think recency bias is a new thing to Sight & Sound, I just think the degree is more severe in 2022 than it’s ever been. People have already been pointing out on twitter that the first edition of this list in 1952 had a four year old Bicycle Thieves as its choice for Best Movie Ever, but there’s a newfound expansion of film history and film accessibility in 2022 than we had with feature films not even being 50 years old in 1952 and I think that summons us as film lovers to try to engage with that vast wealth. And sure recency bias was still going on as the list entered the 21st Century with Pulp Fiction, All About My Mother, and Yi Yi. All three are great movies but did 2002 was too soon and I now welcome all three with open arms (congrats to Yi Yi for sticking around, it’s the best of those three).

I also don’t think recency bias is something unique to movies from the 2010s. Consider that we recently lost Varda and Akerman – though Varda I think it’s safe to say had received a growing lens on her since the 2017 Oscar nomination for Faces Places – and they each receive two very deserving films apiece. In turn, it’s tempting to attribute that same postmortem respect to the whopping 4 that Godard has on here now if not for the fact his death occurred shortly after voting ended so I don’t know, something’s in the water with that one. And I’d be shocked if Věra Chytilová’s death was all that registered as being something recent, though it was only 8 years ago. Anyway, I’m not complaining for this: four great filmmakers got their masterpieces pushed in.

There’s also another side of recency bias in the inclusion of Daisies, Black Girl, Wanda, and Daughters of the Dust. Those almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if not for the recent restorations of the last 6 years making them much more accessible. But you won’t catch me claiming a single one of those movies are out of place on this list, despite only having seen Black Girl and Daughters of the Dust within those last 6 years. I guess largely because we know why it was so critical that the reinvigorated distribution of those films be paid attention to. That said the “recent restoration” rule isn’t infallible either. Did Touki Bouki need to find its way into the Scorsese World Cinema Project to already exist on the list by 2012? Or fellow 2012 entrant Beau Travail when it only just landed in the Criterion Collection 2 years ago? Plus, consider the films from the 2012 iteration that dropped off in this new list – conveniently reported by the below tweet – which includes The Mother and the Whore, Greed, The Color of Pomegranates, and The Magnificent Ambersons, all of whom had major restorations and re-releases through the past decade.

the films that have dropped off the #SightAndSoundPoll – some very big hitters pic.twitter.com/zrRZxplwkz

— Tom Davidson (@TomDavidson09) December 1, 2022

I’ll confess the biggest blows to me are the drops of Greed and Intolerance – not only because they’re silent movies, but because they mark a level of ambition that fits very well with the best entrants of the list. In addition, I’m a bit relieved to see Fanny and Alexander fall off as one of those “television =/= movies” prigs and shocked to see The Godfather Part II dislodged entirely from its previous dual placement with The Godfather to fall furthest from grace. And yes, I feel a special sadness for Nashville and Rio Bravo fully kicking Robert Altman and Howard Hawks off the list. Most of these movies I shall mourn quietly, so let’s turn to what we have remaining the 100 list before us.

No use beating around the bush: The 100 movies in the Critic’s List and the major shifts in both the entrants and the placements look like they are representative of the cultural atmosphere beyond movies. Or to use the term a lot of reactionary responses have had: if the ballots themselves aren’t political (which one can never determine), the full consensus feels like that on surface. So, let me begin with addressing this is not a bad thing in itself, I don’t think. A consensus like this was always representing and betraying certain things about its voters and the world they live in, especially when Sight & Sound made a point of expanding its voter base majorly from 2002 to now. A new variety of backgrounds from which people respond and put themselves into art means a final result that can resemble those perspectives in a singular way. And frankly a lot of these movies are long overdue: Do the Right Thing is the most obvious instance and that should have been showing up by 2002, though it’s clear in 2022 why it’s especially angrily relevant.

The angle of that singular presentation bugs me a bit, though. By shifting the usual center of film criticism from Europe (France particularly) to America, we’ve honestly moved even closer towards Anglo- and Euro-centric arenas for the most part. Of the increase in woman-directed films, we have one non-white women (Dash – Daughters) and the only one whose movies aren’t in either French or English is Chytilová. Of the black filmmaker-directed movies, only two are non-American (Sembene – Black Girl, Mambety – Touki Bouki). There’s stagnation in the films from Japan (only real newbies are two films by Miyazaki Hayao and both are deserving, but boy would I like more animated movies), China, and Iran. The only Indian film is the obvious one (Pather Panchali). And we are absent any Latin American films. Is this the responsibility of the more diverse entries? Fuck no, they’re still outnumbered by films by white men if we’re going to import that something HAS to be replaced by these marginal areas on the basis of representation and I don’t think I’m committing to that attitude. I just note these deficiencies as a quiet observation of what has been given priority over the list’s outcome of ostensibly broadening its range.

Back to the list’s representation of culture circa 2022 and its values: This may be a brand-new path for the Sight & Sound list, but it also felt like we were headed this way ever since Citizen Kane showed its reign was not infallible after 50 years. I can understand the abrupt feeling but while 3 years is not a long time, 10 years is. That 7-year difference is, I think, what makes this list feel at least more thoughtfully put together as social mirror than would seem on first glance.

That said, I read a take online about preferring a stodgy list as the primary canon by which new cinephiles may launch their exploration into the medium and I think I mourn that particularly. When I first caught the 2002 edition of the list around 2005, that was how I dived into my movie gateways: Intolerance, The Seventh Seal, Seven Samurai and so on codifying what I look for in cinema and why I love the films I love. Those movies aren’t deep cuts by any means: you can’t tell me with a straight face Citizen Kane or Singin’ in the Rain are underseen gems. But… in 2022, if I’m trying to use a list as a ground level for a nascent cinephile’s survey of its history and potential, it’s more likely the case that whoever is reading the list has already seen Parasite or Get Out than they have Singin’ in the Rain or Man with a Movie Camera. Y’know why Wanda is one of the few new entries that really energizes me? Because it’s the only one I haven’t seen and its placement is a challenge to me, hearkening back to that 13-year-old I was wanting to know what the hype is on this here Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. And sure, maybe some people will catch Jeanne Dielman and wonder what the fuck was the fuss, but y’know what? I think that risk and tension is a big part of actually breaking into your own viewpoint on art in general. There’s a lot on the 2002 list I found overrated upon first watch: Batteship Potemkin and Out of the Past and they actually grew on me over time. I think we need to give the space for overhype, disappointment, and reconsideration for filmgoers. It allows the film fan to be a dynamic and changing force able to hold its own against the moving image. Sadly, I think we lose that risk the closer the entries come to the present day or feel representative of movies everybody has already caught so it can reconcile that “your taste is valid”.

But we also lose that risk even more when one of the last reliable and steadfast big movie lists to maintain its core spine goes this wildly in flux. Sight & Sound’s transformation into a time capsule of the new decade’s extra-cinematic attitudes might be less annoying if the Critic’s list wasn’t mostly resembling the same takes I can catch in a scan of letterboxd or film twitter. Or maybe if there were more gaps for me personally to square a potential new “Definitive Oversight on How Movies Evolved and Developed in Form”. Maybe some can find excitement in the way that this suggests further shaking up in another ten years when some of the contemporary selections will drop (not to say they’ll age badly: All About My Mother is still a masterpiece in my eye and if Portrait waves goodbye – I fear it will, it’s the largest recipient of “Actually Not Good” twitter takes since the list dropped – it’s still easily one of the great masterpieces of the 2010s). And if the number one remains continuously changing, we should be so lucky if they maintain the five-star masterpiece track of Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Jeanne Dielman.

Anyway, I ask to be permitted my sense of discomposure by this new reality and the lack of real import the list is going to have as a recommendable start point if there’s no real stability to it from here. I’m sure I’ll learn to live with it by the time another ten years passes.

Most important of all: At least there’s now 8 more silent movies, which is a miraculous growth since 2002 had only 1 and 2012 had only 3. If I had my way, it’d be at least 75 silent movies and I guess we can give a couple to them talkies.

Anyway, that’s a lot of talk just for the Critic’s list. But what of the Director’s Consensus List, top ten listed below…

(Note there are ties between 4 and 5, between 6 and 7, and between 9 10 and 11)

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
2. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
3. The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
4. Tokyo Story (1953, Ozu Yasujiro) TIED WITH
5. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman)
6. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock) TIED WITH
7. 8 1/2 (1963, Federico Fellini)
8. Mirror (1974, Andrei Tarkovsky)
9. Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman) TIED WITH
10. In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai) ALSO TIED WITH
11. Close-Up (1990, Abbas Kiarostami)

Honestly, the top ten is on-par with the Critics’ Ten in unimpeachability. Personally I prefer Jeanne Dielman to 2001, but it makes sense why director’s would favor the magnificent craft of 2001 compared to the exercise in watching that Jeanne Dielman represents. I bet I just doomed myself to forever be a guy who talks about movies instead of making movies with that claim, fuck!

But maybe not as this is yet another instance where I find myself more aligned with the directors’ entries and absences than the the critics’ version. More Iranian films (including Taste of Cherry), more Tarkovsky, Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga rolling up, Don’t Look Now, A Woman Under the Influence, Jaws (and ain’t it something that the Critic’s list disrespects Spielberg so close to his birthday?). Even the only two movies that are from the last ten years to switch over are the two that I’d without a doubt call capital-G Great: Parasite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Heck, the only true objection outside of that and Michael Haneke’s existence (though there could be worse choices for him than Caché) is Fanny and Alexander being there since it’s television but it’s still a masterpiece so boo me. It doesn’t lose the same sense the Critic’s list has on being a representative of The World as Seen in 2022, but I think it approaches it at least closer from being Western-centric and with more movies I’d both be giving five star ratings to and feel like deep cuts. And yes, I accept that such a sentiment – like every letter of this post – says more about me than it does about the list. Plus it has one additional gap for me outside of Wanda, Ken Loach’s Kes.

Finally, since I’m likely to never be invited to submit a ballot on this thing, I guess I may as well have some fun by submitting what my pick for the ballot would be, not necessarily meeting “Best” or “Favorite”, just the ten I’m feeling at the time. Not even sure I bothered thinking up an order besides number one.

1. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
2. Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein)
3. I Am Cuba (1964, Mikhail Kalatozov)
4. Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)
5. L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)
6. Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
7. Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard)
8. Nostalghia (1983, Andrei Tarkovsky)
9. The Wizard of Speed and Time (1979, Mike Jittlov)
10. Tale of Tales (1979, Yuri Norstein)

Yes, I’m aware that only three movies on my list are silent films. I’m a quitter.