Lots of gin, lots of chatter

Forget the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party or the Elton John one, the pre-party over at Nat's Film Experience site is the place to be seen, and I was honoured to be inducted into the inner circle for the first time this year. The company was peerless, and they all had sharp and funny things to say, particularly about Juno, milkshakes, meta-performance and orange tic tacs. Come join us! I feel I was nitpicking about too many of the nominated films, but tried to get some love across for the performances...

The boys who came in sixth

It feels awful to post anything above that picture of Heath, so I hope I've managed a respectful pause before saying: I know I'm not the first to point this out, but wow, what a great year 2007 was for supporting actors. If this is some indication of how good, Heath Ledger himself was borderline-great in I'm Not There and he still got nowhere my list. My final five took an unusual amount of whittling down this year, so I've been planning to give a shout out to a few more fellas who were jostling for a slot, and who at various times (right after I'd seen their movies, usually) would have made it in. 

I was this close to singling out Vlad Ivanov in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days for playing the anti-Vera Drake, an abortionist less likely to ply you with tea than, well, drown you in it. Sydney Pollack was nearly in, too, for doing his Changing Lanes thing again in Michael Clayton and being so unpretentiously perfect at it that he's the second best thing in the movie. If I had to pick one actor from the I'm Not There ensemble and we weren't counting the ladies, it would have been Bruce Greenwood, whose BBC interviewer, unlike Geraldine Chaplin in Nashville, actually seemed like a BBC interviewer, and visibly relished being an uncool foil to the whole film's studiously constructed Dylan-ishness.

Excellent though Casey Affleck was in The Assassination of Jesse James..., I think it's a pity no one's noticed how good, and how much more genuinely supporting, Sam Rockwell is in the background of half his scenes -- Robert Ford can whinge on about being overshadowed, but imagine being Charley. 

On a second viewing I'll concede that Paul Dano's acting in There Will Be Blood wobbles a little towards the end, but he's not budging from my list, not even in favour of the eerily still Dillon Freasier or -- though it's close -- the shabby, sad-eyed, more-cadaverous-than-ever Kevin J O'Connor, an actor I've long loved, for giving away all his character's secrets in that beach scene while outwardly hiding them and barely moving a muscle.

Two other actors had astonishing moments but not quite enough screen time to crack the big five. I'll find it hard to think back on 2007 without remembering William Hurt's single-shot collapse onto the street at the end of Into the Wild, the single most powerful thing I've ever seen him do. Nor will I quickly forget the year's most inspired line reading, which came courtesy of eighth-billed Benedict Cumberbatch in his big Atonement paedo creepathon: "You have to bite it..."

UPDATE: Oops, and I missed off Devid Striesow, not only a capable lead in Yella but a smiling wonder as the cherubic Nazi officer in The Counterfeiters. Sorry Devid!

Heath Ledger, 1979-2008

For the record...

Because it's list season, and because Oscar nominations are announced on Tuesday, and, well, really, just for the heck of it, I'm going to interrupt my best/worst countdown with acting citations for the year just gone. Those, and one other category -- my favourite in movies last year -- which is Best Original Score. (Incidentally, the way the pictures taper off in size has nothing to do with the stature of the performances. I'm just being lazy and can't be bothered to crop them further.)

BEST ACTOR

Chris Cooper (Breach)

Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood)

Philip Seymour Hoffman (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead)

Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises)

Benicio Del Toro (Things We Lost in the Fire)

Worst: Ed Harris (Copying Beethoven)

BEST ACTRESS

Helena Bonham Carter (Conversations With Other Women)

Marina Hands (Lady Chatterley)

Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart)

Laura Linney (Jindabyne)

Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days)

Worst: Gong Li (Curse of the Golden Flower, Hannibal Rising)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood)

Joseph Gilgun (This is England)

Hippolyte Girardot (Lady Chatterley)

Fabrice Luchini (Molière)

Alfred Molina (The Hoax)

Worst: Jeremy Davies (Rescue Dawn)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Seema Biswas (Water)

Charlotte Gainsbourg (I'm Not There)

Deborra-Lee Furness (Jindabyne)

Jena Malone (Into the Wild)

Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton)

Worst: Alexandra Maria Lara (Youth Without Youth)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Marco Beltrami (3.10 to Yuma) clip

Carter Burwell (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead) clip

Nick Cave, Warren Ellis (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) clip

Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood) clip

Wojciech Kilar (We Own the Night) clip

(A word also for the year's two best song scores, for Once and Into the Wild...)

Election googling

Want to get the low-down, readers outside the US, on those sinister, grinning Republican candidates all jostling for position in the primaries, and their respective policy ideas? I have an easy google browsing solution. Where the candidate's name is "X", simply type the words "X is scary" into your search engine, and all the facts will be revealed. It really works! I just tried it.

The Best of 2008: #1

I should have known it. You draft your top ten, start the posts... and then finally get round to seeing Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which clearly belongs way in the upper reaches of anyone's list. Technically, the film's UK release date is the 11th Jan, so I could fudge it and wait till next year, or bump another entry to #11, I guess... But it will be easier, I propose, to hold on to a film which isn't scheduled to come out anywhere for a good few months yet -- Tarsem's wonderful The Fall, which I caught last February at the Berlin film festival -- and reshuffle the list to accommodate Mungiu's masterly abortion drama. Consider The Fall a ghostly presence in the backdrop of this top ten: it was way, way up there at #3, and there's no film I'm looking forward to revisiting more in the coming months. In truth, my memory of this haunting fantasy metanarrative could do with a refresh anyway. Let's just say that, for the time being, it occupies my number one slot for the best films officially being distributed in 2008, and it will be a damn fine spring for the movies if it's dislodged any time soon.

The Best and Worst of 2007: #9

9th best -- Les petites vacances

This year's Red Lights prize for underheralded French drama that I could hardly have liked more goes to Olivier Peyon for his subtly disquieting granny-and-tots road movie. New wave veteran Bernadette Lafont, as the disobedient gran indefinitely prolonging a day out with the kids, offers a smiling enigma of a performance that's calibrated beautifully, and Peyon, a new name to me, has something of that Cédric Kahn/Laurent Cantet/Ray Lawrence knack for creating a kind of abstract unease by letting the camera linger: the sustained rear-view shot of a slow-moving log truck as the movie opens is a case in point, setting up a lot of the film's tensions by both obstinately stalling progress and prompting a dangerous urge to overtake.

9th worst -- Good Luck Chuck

After a grimly appropriate performance as a sleazy voyeur in Mr Brooks, Dane Cook returned to default obnoxiousness in the year's most calculatedly vile -- if not quite its creepiest -- mainstream rom-com. Jessica Alba "broadened her range" by playing a pratfalling penguinologist, and the penguins did not look impressed. They looked vaguely appalled. Worst bit: Cook testing his romantic mojo on the least attractive female he can find, whereby we discover that if you're over a size six in this movie, you lick your own warts, stuff yourself to farting point, and are barely human. This was like an STD infecting multiplexes.

The Best and Worst of 2007: #10

I'm paring down the year-end lists to bare essentials here. 10 of the good, 10 of the not, side by side. Even if no single film I've seen has been quite as addictive or satisfying as Season 3 of HBO's The Wire, I think this has been a really strong year -- maybe the second strongest this decade, after 2004 with all its Eternal Sunshines, Before Sunsets, Spring, Summers, Incredibles and Supremacies. Selection-wise, I'm going by the only list I can live with, which is what I've seen in cinemas in the 12 months since the last top ten; by "seen in cinemas" I include festival screenings and press screenings, but not repertory ones. As a result, some of these films have yet to come out in the UK, and this first pick came and went in the US some years ago. It's true that this doesn't exactly make for a level playing field for comparison with other lists, but I find the release-date approach frustrating and no less arbitrary: it means deliberately leaving stuff off that you're itching to evangelise. Which won't do. This is what I came up with:

10th best -- Funny Ha Ha


This was my introduction to the vivid, dorky, and emotionally astute moviemaking of Andrew Bujalski, pioneer of the movement now annoyingly dubbed "mumblecore" by the kind of folks who strike me as frustrated minor characters in his movies. Narrowly better than Bujalski's follow-up Mutual Appreciation, it was the sweetest relationship comedy I saw this year, full of painful conversational circling around the point -- the point usually being "I like you, and want to hang out with you, and hope that would be OK. Would that be OK?". It's anchored shyly and beautifully by leading lady Kate Dollenmayer.

10th worst -- Hannibal Rising

Probably the most unwelcome sequel or prequel of the year, which is saying quite a lot in a 12 months which brought us Rush Hour 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Day Watch, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Hostel: Part II and Gordon Brown's premiership. Just re-typing those titles sends me into a renewed fug of depression and resentment at how little creativity any one of them expended on already dog-tired concepts, but this one was bad beyond all need or comprehension, with its kindergarten Freudianism and across-the-board hopeless acting doing full justice to an egregious "Nazis ate my sister" backstory. Thomas Harris is not escaping blame. Neither is Girl With a Pearl Earring director Peter Webber for taking a terrible gig and making it visually revolting to boot. 

Reaction to Globes nominations

Keira posts that vote for Laura Linney in Jindabyne

First up: that's way, way, waaaay too much love for Atonement. Only Saoirse Ronan's supporting actress nod is one I can fully get behind, and she's not even my favourite supporting actress in the movie. (Neither's Vanessa Redgrave, and neither is Romola Garai. So there!)

I'm in a spluttering rage over Wright AND Scott AND Schnabel getting Best Director nods over Paul Thomas Anderson for the monumental There Will Be Blood, but at least it's holding out in the picture and actor categories. The lack of anything bar Blanchett for I'm Not There is miserable but a little more predictable; the lack of anything major at all for Into the Wild has got to count as a significant blow. I mean, The Great Debaters? Really? I haven't seen Charlie Wilson's War yet, but it always looked more Globe-friendly than Oscar-friendly, so the Julia Roberts star-fuckery is, again, not that surprising. Ditto the whole American Gangster thing.

Where's Laura Linney? This has got to be the rare year where Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) has been harder fought than Drama, but, all the same, it's criminal that she's been crowded out by the singing contingent (good though they all are) and that Blanchett and Foster luck in with routine nods for such wretched films. Double nominee Philip Seymour Hoffman's fine in The Savages, but better in the overlooked Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, precisely because he's standing back, most of the time, to give Linney room.

There are good mentions scattered around here -- Jolie, Cotillard, Swinton, Mortensen -- but not much to get the pulse racing. Let's hope for an Oscar shake-up and some proper wild cards come Jan 22.

There Will Be... updates (and close shaves, and blood)

Imagine the usual fraught pre-Christmas scramble -- the organising and attending of various social events, the fulfilment of job duties, the buying of presents, the reviewing of Fred Claus, under pain of death. You know, the usual. Now try doing it without having anywhere to live. That's the situation I'm in -- "between flats", I guess you'd have to call it -- and it's wreaking havoc on this blog. (Or rather silence, if one can really wreak silence.)

So there's hardly been time to talk about how good There Will Be Blood is -- how likely this brazenly ambitious, brilliantly acted and in general quite scarily inspired movie is to be my film of the year, beating even the likes of I'm Not There, my other straight 'A' from the last few months. Nor has there been a moment to deal with the many successes and minor structural failings of the Coen bros' No Country for Old Men; the sense of stuffy self-inflation wedded to unignorable technical virtues in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; the nifty narrative gimmickry and addictive dialogue in John August's underrated The Nines, featuring Ryan Reynolds's first three attempts at acting; the exasperating yet perversely exhilarating mess that is Southland Tales; or, perhaps most pleasurably, the uncompromising grimness, sure-footed sense of the macabre, and smashing musical dexterity with which Sweeney Todd has been brought to the screen, and which I think make it Tim Burton's best film since Edward Scissorhands.

No time for any of this yet, or for another task I've set myself: the updating of my top 100, to be found at the bottom right of this blog, which is a couple of years old now and needs at least 10-15 new films squeezed into it somehow. By new I don't necessarily mean recent, and they won't all be surprises, if you've followed this blog and its sidebars from time to time. One or two of them might be. We like these guessing games, right? Comment away on what you think my new entries might be, which films you insist I must keep or scrap, or anything else you want to sound off about. Go on! Mi casa su casa, except in the real world, where mi casa isn't even mi casa...

The Oscar Race – A Pre-Season Analysis

I’ve got to admit I’m more than usually excited about this year’s Oscars, and I say this before I’ve even seen There Will Be Blood or No Country for Old Men, both of which I’m expecting to be among the heavy-hitting contenders. I like a lot of the other work I’m expecting to get nominated, I think there’s going to be some overdue recognition of terrific actors, and to throw some spice into the mix I have a feeling I’ll be spitting fury about at least one or two of the eventual winners. All of which makes for the kind of derby I like, in contrast to last year’s dreary pile-up of mediocrities.

This is how I think things are shaping up, based on early buzz, reviews and the stuff I’ve seen:



BEST PICTURE


There Will Be Blood – PTA’s recognition is well past due, and it looks like he’s played a blinder
No Country for Old Men – Rapturous festival reception, and rare literary pedigree for the Coens
Charlie Wilson’s War – Gives me that slight Primary Colors feeling, but Aaron Sorkin knows what he’s doing
American Gangster – Don’t think I’m gonna love this, but it’s getting Scott’s best reviews since Gladiator
Sneaking in fifth: Into the Wild – Voters will rally behind its spectacle and sincerity, as long as it gets that b.o. push


The backlash starts here:

Atonement – Come on, it’s thuddingly overdeliberate and unevenly acted. I may be wrong, but I sniff that Cold Mountain cold shoulder…

Hope is alive:

Once – The little train that could?




BEST DIRECTOR

Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood – In the bag, I think
Joel Coen, No Country For Old Men – The Coens are respectable again
Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead – There’s room for this old man
Sean Penn, Into the Wild – Will get recognised even if the movie doesn’t
Sneaking in fifth: Todd Haynes, I’m Not There – aka the Lynch/Kieslowski/Almodovar slot, aka go Todd!

Snubs in the offing:

Joe Wright, Atonement – Competition’s stiff, and he’s such a show-off
also: Nichols, Scott


You never know:

Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Haven’t seen it yet, but festival reports were fawning




BEST ACTOR

Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood – From the trailer alone it’s a total lock
James McAvoy, Atonement – Only just a nom-worthy role, but he impresses plenty
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead – Too good to be ignored, and the film’s gathering steam
George Clooney, Michael Clayton – A slightly vague character, but he's the man of the moment
Sneaking in fifth: Mathieu Amalric, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Getting the nom Bardem missed for The Sea Inside

I think not:

Denzel Washington, American Gangster – He’s been here before, so have we, and AMPAS seems to be going off villains
Also: Hanks, Depp, Jones, Hirsch

Say prayers for:

Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises – Just as deserving as he was for AHOV, if not more so. He’ll need a big campaign though…

AND

Benicio Del Toro, Things We Lost in the Fire – The performance of his career, but the film is looking busted




BEST ACTRESS

Laura Linney, The Savages – On glowing form here, and the movie’s a nice vehicle
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart – Divisive star (and flick) but she’ll have passionate supporters
Marion Cotillard, La vie en rose – I maintain that she looks like Ronald McDonald, but she’s good and many adore her
Ellen Page, Juno – Can’t stand her acting, but it’s looking inevitable
Sneaking in fifth: Julie Christie, Away from Her – Christie’s best work in decades, though I didn’t love the script

Crazy talk:

Keira Knightley, Atonement – Gave the same perf in those Chanel ads. Pride & Prejudice was a one-off, and the role's too skimpy


A dark horse:

Julianne Moore, Savage Grace – If this gets distribution in time, she shouldn’t be ruled out



BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men – This category’s Day-Lewis – you can guarantee the nod, and a win looks likely
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War – A double-whammy year for PSH, I say, but this is the more certain mention
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild – Has “Richard Farnsworth” written all over him
Paul Dano, There Will Be Blood – Hugely talented, and they say it’s not just the Dan show
Sneaking in fifth: Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Everyone’s singling him out, even if it’ll be the film’s lone non-technical nod


Careful not to overrate:

Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton – Bizarre role and erratic perf, both damaging to the movie


In with a shot:

Philip Bosco, The Savages – I’m not sure he has enough to do, but look where Alan Arkin went with that

AND

Ethan Hawke, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead – No one predicted that Training Day coup, and he’s much better here




BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There – All the makings of another win, but it’s the Haynes nod I’m more psyched about
Saoirse Ronan, Atonement – Deserves her buzz for anchoring the front, better half of the pic
Vanessa Redgrave, Atonement – Excellent for mere minutes: poor Romola Garai!
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton – Strikingly brilliant in a rotten part
Sneaking in fifth: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Margot at the Wedding – Her husband’s film, but more importantly she’s sympathetic for once

I’m doubting it:

Julia Roberts, Charlie Wilson’s War – Looks inessential verging on decorative, and the film’s going to be scraping its other noms

Coming through:

Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone – She’s wonderful in The Wire and I’m hearing great things about this performance

Surely, for all that's holy, no:

Abbie Cornish, Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Review: The Nanny Diaries

You know something’s going seriously wrong with a movie when you spend most of it looking forward to the next screening, and that screening is Resident Evil: Extinction. I had no great hopes for The Nanny Diaries, from the American Splendor team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, but no earthly idea that it would be quite this terrible; if my negativity has a trace of glee to it, I would confess that amid a stodgy diet of comparative mediocrities like The Kingdom, Michael Clayton and Death Proof, the sheer awfulness of this childcare comedy actually feels like something worth commenting on.

Imagine lobotomising Sofia Coppola and asking her to remake The Devil Wears Prada for the au pair profession, and you might have something close to this lamebrained mess, but its singular ability to be shrill, smug and amazingly vapid at the same time owes just as much to the casting. Scarlett Johansson is coerced into all her most listless affectations and coy mannerisms – imagine her saying “I was the Chanel bag of nannies” and you can hear how ruinously the film goes down a dim, Sex and the City-fied voiceover route as opposed to, say, being funny, perhaps by adopting any workable comic vocabulary of its own.

Still, a far more precipitous disaster is Laura Linney, as the Upper East Side, murders-as-she-smiles Stepford Wife to whom Scarlett’s Annie becomes summarily indentured. Her brilliantly concise high society gorgon in The House of Mirth gets unpacked into feature-length caricature, swaddled in unwise Christian Dior, trussed up with nonsensical hair, and unleashed, mercilessly, at an audience who want her dead within minutes. Linney, otherwise enjoying a terrific year at the movies, proves not that she can marshal the delicious, grandstanding condescension of a Streep in Prada, but that she’s quite capable of lapsing, in a role this weakly sketched, into the calcified and witchy nastiness of bad Anjelica Huston.

Going on to outdo Igby Goes Down for upscale misanthropy, the movie is mainly enamoured of its luxuriant bedlinen, shoe racks and Chris Evans’s biceps – certainly not of its actual people, who are given mere letters for names (in the case of Linney and Paul Giamatti’s characters, “Mr and Mrs X”) or have them bleeped off screen (that’s Evans, thereafter dubbed “Harvard Hottie”). Don’t ask me if this is to protect the innocent or a way of fessing up to the roles’ obvious one-dimensionality, but, either way, it’s annoying. So’s the framing gimmick with a supposed cross-section of New Yorkers frozen in street tableaux at the Natural History Museum, their genera stencilled on as “Park Slope Lawyer”, “Central Park Bag Lady” and whathaveyou. The movie’s pretensions to anthropological commentary aren’t just glib and childish but a criminally lazy excuse for wall-to-wall stereotyping – if Alicia Keys’s character were among the exhibits, for instance, I can’t imagine what label they’d find for her except “Standard-Issue Black Best Friend”. Annie’s fantasies of floating above the Manhattan skyline, a red umbrella in hand, tip the wink oh-so-knowingly to the doyenne of film nannies, but you’d need a whole crateload of sugar to help this medicine go down. It’s supercalifragilisticexpialatrocious. F

Supporting Actress Smackdown: 1990

My gradual return to the blogosphere has been selfishly occasioned, I'll admit – how else would I participate in Supporting Actress Sundays? Our host is the ever-redoubtable StinkyLulu, whose commitment to the cause of actressing at the edges ought to be world-renowned by now.

As my tally of hearts might suggest, I found 1990 an eye-catching but faintly disappointing year for the category, if only because there are so many other performances I'd love to have been arguing about instead. Stinky welcomes alternative lists of personal nominations and here's my first shot at one, though the struggle I'm having to whittle it down to five names only underlines the very middling quality of the eventual ballot. From Oscar's nominees, only Whoopi Goldberg, barging her way hilariously through the mush of Ghost, would have a shot at making my fantasy five, in a year of rich pickings for British actresses in particular.

Honourable runners-up for me include Glenn Close's must-have-been-nearly-nominated Sunny von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, both sustaining the mystery and sneakily enriching it with her comatose narration, and, in a slightly more indulgent register, Frances Sternhagen's sardonic old coot of a local sheriff's wife in Misery. I love both Mai Zetterling's protective granny and Anjelica Huston's scary villainness in Nicolas Roeg's ace The Witches, though either performance could just about qualify as a lead, so that would be cheating.

My finalists are:

Laurie Metcalf in Mike Figgis's Internal Affairs – smashing, credible and sceptical as a tough lesbian cop
Lindsay Duncan, seductively ambiguous as a possibly-vampiric next-door neighbour in Philip Ridley's The Reflecting Skin
Billie Whitelaw as the controlling mother of two psychopaths in The Krays, from another Ridley script
Jennifer Jason Leigh's brilliantly fresh, un-actressy hooker in Miami Blues
and (edging out Whoopi) Harriet Walter as Michel Piccoli's flirty, bilingual sister-in-law in Louis Malle's marvellous Milou en mai

Any to add? Fire away!

2007, so far

Nick beat me to it this year, but it seems about time for a post-Toronto round-up fielding the best of 2007 as of September. Here's my reply in kind:


BEST PICTURE

1. I’m Not There
2. The Fall
3. Lady Chatterley
4. Conversations with Other Women
5. Yella



BEST DIRECTOR

Pascale Ferran (Lady Chatterley)
Todd Haynes (I’m Not There)
Christian Petzold (Yella)
Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo (The Night of the Sunflowers)
Tarsem (The Fall)



BEST ACTOR

Chris Cooper (Breach)
Aaron Eckhart (Conversations with Other Women)
Ethan Hawke (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead)
Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises)



BEST ACTRESS

Helena Bonham Carter (Conversations With Other Women)
Marina Hands (Lady Chatterley)
Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart)
Laura Linney (Jindabyne)
Catinca Untaru (The Fall)



BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Joseph Gilgun (This is England)
Hippolyte Girardot (Lady Chatterley)
Fabrice Luchini (Molière)
Alfred Molina (The Hoax)
Devid Striesow (The Counterfeiters)



BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Seema Biswas (Water)
Charlotte Gainsbourg (I’m Not There)
Kelli Garner (Lars and the Real Girl)
Deborra-Lee Furness (Jindabyne)
Imelda Staunton (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)



BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

2 Days in Paris
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Conversations with Other Women
Funny Ha Ha
The Gigolos



BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Counterfeiters
Jindabyne
Lady Chatterley
A Mighty Heart
Zodiac



BEST EDITING

28 Weeks Later...
The Fall
I’m Not There
The Night of the Sunflowers
Yella



BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

28 Weeks Later...
Black Snake Moan
Hallam Foe
I’m Not There
Lady Chatterley



BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

The Fall
Hallam Foe
I’m Not There
Sunshine
Zodiac




BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Blades of Glory
Drawing Restraint 9
I’m Not There
La vie en rose
Yella



BEST SOUND

The Bourne Ultimatum
Drawing Restraint 9
I’m Not There
Lady Chatterley
Sunshine




BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

3.10 to Yuma
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
The Counterfeiters




THE TALLIES

I'm Not There: 8
Lady Chatterley: 7
The Fall: 5
Conversations with Other Women; Yella; Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: 4
The Counterfeiters; Jindabyne: 3
A Mighty Heart; Zodiac; The Night of the Sunflowers; Sunshine; Hallam Foe; Drawing Restraint 9; 28 Weeks Later...: 2

Unfinished business

At around the point when I jacked in this blogging enterprise, what, eight months ago, there was a post missing: my year-end top ten. Before I offer any mid-term assessments for 2007, here, after a needlessly long drum-roll, is what 2006 would have looked like.

1. Inland Empire A

A nightmarish (not to mention doomed) quest for lost marbles, utterly forbidding and quite mesmerising.

2. The Death of Mr Lazarescu A

The systematic erasure of "Mr L" (identity, I think) before medical death ensues.

3. Black Sun A

A haunting disquisition on what it means to see, narrated by a philosopher who no longer can.

4. Requiem A—

What happens when an illness can't be cured because the cure is the illness.

5. Red Road A—

Stalker cinema par excellence, driven by multiple ambiguous agendas for most of its length.

6. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada A—

An Arriaga jigsaw which worked, in part because the pieces weren't just tossed to the winds but carefully gathered, and lovingly rearranged.

7. Frozen Land A—

Finnish desperation as a virtuoso relay race.

8. A Scanner Darkly A—

Linklater and PKD: a paranoiac's delight, and a riot of free-associating.

9. Deep Water A— (pictured)

The British national psyche at sea in a shattering, superbly crafted doc.

10 United 93 A—/B+

Still one to grapple with on all sorts of levels, and a technical triumph.