Every year when they announce the Oscar nominations I get excited.  Don’t ask me why; it’s not something I can easily explain.  Sure, once upon a time, in a different century, I had dreams of being nominated and I’ve sort of figured out by now that’s not likely to happen.  I know the Oscars are political, I know they’re driven by mass opinion and by advertising dollars and I know that in many years the most deserving often didn’t win.  Nonetheless ….

Best Picture – 9 nominated films this year – Tree of Life, Moneyball, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Hugo, Warhorse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Descendants, The Artist – I’ve seen 5 of the 9 so far.  I’d love to see Tree of Life win; not that it was the best picture but it was the most wildly ambitious and partially succeeded.  The Artist (which I watched last night) probably doesn’t stand a chance.  Maybe Spielberg’s Warhorse, which I haven’t seen, or the feel-good mush of The Help or a nod to Woody Allen’s film – it is the top-grossing film in his long career.

Best Director – Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne, Michel Hazanavicius, Malick.  They won’t give it to Hazanavicius for The Artist simply to spare the presenter from having to pronounce his name.  I love Payne but haven’t seen Descendants yet.  It could come down to a New York war – Scorsese vs. Allen – each of their films set in Paris, Scorsese’s a love letter to cinema, Woody Allen giving advice to Luis Bunuel on film-making.

Best Actor – Demian Bichir (A Better Life), Jean Dujardin, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Gary Oldman.  I think it’s Clooney’s year. I haven’t seen A Better Life so I can’t say about Bichir but all the other nominees did really strong work.  Actually I don’t know who Bichir is and I think most people were expecting Michael Fassbender to get nominated here.

Best Actress – Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Rooney Mara, Viola Davis, Meryl Streep (her 17th nomination!), Michelle Williams.  I’ve only seen 2 of the films here and it does seem to be Ms. Davis’s year.

Best Supporting Actor – Kenneth Branagh, Nick Nolte, Max von Sydow, Jonah Hill, Christopher Plummer.  I’ve only seen 2 of the films and thought that both Hill and Nolte gave great performances, Nolte’s all the better because no one thought he had anything left at this point.  But all the attention is going to Christopher Plummer who is old, has been good for decades and I think never won.

Best Supporting Actress – Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Melissa McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Janet McTeer.  Two noms for The Help might cancel each other out.  I absolutely loved McCarthy in Bridesmaids and could have watched another hour of her.  But I fell in love with Bejo in The Artist.

Original Screenplay – Midnight in Paris, The Artist, Bridesmaids, Margin Call, A Separation.  Bridesmaids won’t stand a chance because most voters will think it was mostly improv.  Margin Call was an exceptionally strong piece of work, balanced and nuanced.  But this one is a sure win for Woody.

Adapted Screenplay – Moneyball, The Descendants, Hugo, The Ides of March, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  Not having seen The Descendants, I think it’s a strong contender here.  But Moneyball has names that Oscar likes – Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian (and Stan Chervin).

Foreign Language Film – Bullhead, Footnote, In Darkness, A Separation, Monsieur Lazhar.  Everyone is going to say A Separation.  All I’ll note is that the only Asian films nominated this year come from Iran and Israel.

Animated Feature – A Cat in Paris, Chico & Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, Rango.  I don’t even know what the first two films are.  I’m hoping for Rango.

Okay, there’s 14 more awards, but not going to run them down here.  But here’s the scoreboard:

Hugo – 11 nominations

The Artist – 10 nominations

Moneyball & Warhorse – 6 each

The Descendants – 5

Midnight in Paris – 4

Studio-wise, Sony did the best with 20 nominations.

So what are your picks for the winners?

The Golden Globes is the most bizarre awards show year after year.  It’s the awards given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and there are less than 100 voters, allegedly influenced in their voting by perks and junkets, and since these are the men and women writing about films for foreign newspapers and magazines, they are perceived to wield a lot of influence.  But every year, many of their choices are just downright bizarre, the most famous being when they voted Pia Zadora as the best new actress or talent or whatever.

Not even having seen all of the nominees nor some of the winners, some of the results this year are wacky.  Meryl Streep for her impersonation of Maggie Thatcher over Viola Davis’s outstanding performance in The Help (a movie I didn’t care for but she’s amazing) or Rooney Mara for Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?  Okay, Christopher Plummer is 83 and never won one of these awards so if they’re going to give him one rather than Albert Brooks for Drive or Jonah Hill for Moneyball, I’m not gonna complain too much.

Here’s the one that strikes me as the oddest.  Best actor in a TV drama series. The nominees included Steve Buscemi for Boardwalk Empire.  Perennial Emmy winner Bryan Cranston for Breaking Bad.  Jeremy Irons in The Borgias.  Damian Lewis for Homeland (I’ve never watched this – is it something I need to catch up on?).  The winner?  Kelsey Grammar for something called Boss.  Really?

And now let’s look at best performance by an actor in a TV comedy series.  Was it Alec Baldwin for 30 Rock?  David Duchovny for Californication? Johnny Galecki for Big Bang Theory?  Thomas Jane for Hung?  Try Matt LeBlanc.  Seriously.

Anyway, best drama film was The Descendants, best comedy film was The Artist, best animated film was Tin Tin, best foreign film was A Separation.  As the Globes go, so go the Oscars?  We’ll know soon enough.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything related to films I’ve watched.  That’s mostly because most of the ones I’ve seen have been extremely unremarkable.  Here are brief reviews and I’m saving the best for last.

Last night we went to see David Fincher’s remake of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  I remember watching the original Swedish film and thinking that the story was okay but that the film itself was artlessly made, ran far too long (this was before an extended director’s cut edition was made available) and was poorly paced.  When I heard that David Fincher would be doing an English language remake of the film, I was dismayed that he was doing a remake and revisiting what for him would be old territory.  Yet I was certain that he was the one director who could turn this into greatness.

I was wrong.  Okay, we get the star power of Daniel Craig – to which I say, why?  He has almost nothing to do here and exhibits about the same level of charisma as Michael Nyqvist.  The changes from the previous film are mostly subtle and it still runs too damned long.  Yes, they had to keep this in Sweden – especially for reasons that become more apparent in the following films – but it’s distracting to listen to all these people speaking English in Swedish accents (and all written material displayed on screen is in Swedish).  Tech credits are solid but overall I found the best thing about the film to be the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and the performance by Stellan Skarsgard (one of those guys I just love to watch onscreen).

Rise of the Planet of the Apes – Simply put, I wanted to hate this, I expected to hate this, I should have hated it – but I didn’t.  It may be faint praise to say that this is the best of the 7 Planet of the Apes films but it is.  It probably works well if you haven’t seen any of the others but it’s even better if you’ve at least seen the original.

Drive is a low budget crime film that just oozes style.  It’s not quite as good as its admirers will tell you; it stands out mostly because 2011 was such a shitty film year.  Ryan Gosling stars as a guy who works as a mechanic, drives get-away cars in heists and occasionally works as a stunt driver in films.  Gosling’s pretty good but it’s the supporting cast that’s worth mentioning here – Albert Brooks in particular is so completely convincing and so different from any other role he’s ever played, I can smell Oscar nomination here.  Bryan Cranston’s quite okay but is there some new rule in Hollywood that says he has to be in every picture made now?  Christina Hendricks is wasted, Carey Mulligan isn’t given too much to do, Ron Pearlman stands around and acts scary.  At its best moments, it seemed the film was reaching to be on the level of Michael Mann’s magnificent Thief but it never quites get there.  Even so, it’s an entertaining diversion and director Nicolas Winding Refn is clearly someone to watch.

The plot of Warrior is so over-the-top preposterous that you keep waiting for someone to tell you it’s based on a true story but it’s not.  A family split apart by the actions of an alcoholic father, two brothers who haven’t spoken to each other in years both fighting for the UFC championship.  It seems like something a 12 year old might write and who would think that a “sport” like UFC could yield an Oscar caliber film – and yet that’s what this is.  Start with an amazing comeback performance from Nick Nolte (although his character seems to fade into irrelevance in the final third of the film) and a nuanced and controlled performance from Tom Hardy.  Then there’s the script which manages to rise above its B-movie material in the way it looks at the disintegration of the family, the ravages of alcoholism, the way Americans are coping with the 21st century.  The fight scenes are appropriately brutal, the editing is tight – on the other hand the open 20 minutes or so are more than a little clumsy in terms of exposition and the film runs long.  Nolte will probably see an Oscar nomination (if he manages to stay out of prison and the gossip pages) and director Gavin O’Connor has a real winner here.

I loved Moneyball even though I really couldn’t give a shit about baseball.  Maybe it’s because I’m a computer geek but I found myself actually caring about something that I don’t ordinarily do – this tale of a baseball manager trying to figure out how to build a winning team by using computers and statistics.  Brad Pitt gives a great performance but even more surprising is the chemistry between him and Jonah Hill.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent and the script comes from two Hollywood heavy hitters – Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian – and it’s one of those films that manages to transcend its subject and is worth seeing even if you don’t understand anything about the game.

Probably the best movie I’ve watched in the past month is Margin Call.  Taking place mostly in a single night, an analyst at an investment bank discovers just how leveraged the bank is.  The senior staff meet through the night trying to figure out what to do.  First of all, this is the best that Kevin Spacey has been in years.  And the two scenes in which he goes toe to toe with Jeremy Irons are about as good as film acting seems to get these days.  Paul Bettany and Zachary Quinto also turn in great performances, smaller roles filled by Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci are also well-handled.  It’s the debut feature film from J.C. Chandor, who also wrote the original script.  The script is brilliant in the way that it allows every character to get his or her moment in the spotlight and the way in which all sides are presented relatively fairly.  Irons’ character may be monstrous and yet he is almost sympathetic and when he explains why he’s about to destroy the economy of the world in order to save his company, you can at least understand his motivation.  This is the first great fiction film covering the financial meltdown of 2008 (Inside Job of course being a great documentary on the subject).  There’s only one minor flaw here – these are all insiders talking to each other.  They all know what these financial terms mean and there’s no one “on the outside” whom they have to explain it to.  I worked for investment banks in the 90s and I know this stuff all too well but others might have a hard time wading through the jargon.

Here they are, with US box office grosses, via Pajiba:

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2: $381 million
2. Transformers Dark of the Moon: $352 million
3. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1: $275 million
4. The Hangover Part II: $254, million
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides $241 million
6. Fast Five: $209 million
7. Cars 2 $191 million
8. Thor: $181 million
9. Rise of the Planet of the Apes : $176 million
10. Captain America: The First Avenger: $176 million
11. The Help $169 million
12. Bridesmaids: $169 million
13. Kung Fu Panda 2: $165 million
14. X-Men: First Class: $146 million
15. Puss in Boots: $145 million
16. Rio: $143 million
17. The Smurfs: $142 million
18. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol: $134 million
19. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: $132 million
20. Super 8: $127,004,179
21. Rango: $123 million
22. Horrible Bosses: $117 million
23. Green Lantern: $116 million
24. Hop: $108 million
25. Paranormal Activity 3: $103 million

I count 6 movies out of 25 that are neither sequels nor based on comic books.  You have to get down to #11, The Help, to find a film targeted at an adult audience – that’s if you don’t count the R-rated Hangover II.  (Frankly, I’d sooner sit through Hangover II again than The Help.)  I’ve seen 15 out of these 25 and enjoyed some of them well enough I suppose but still, it’s a pretty vacuous list of escapist crap.

It should be noted that 2011 represented the lowest box office performance in the US since 1995.

Red State, the latest film from Kevin Smith, is not a good film by almost any definition. And yet I found my eyes glued to the screen, unable to look away and I suspect I’m going to end up watching it again.

What is it with Smith? He shot out of the gate in 1994 with Clerks, his low budget self-financed hit, filled with promises for subsequent greatness that have never been realized. He had a pretty good run for awhile after that, no major commercial success but his films were always worth watching, at least for awhile – Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.  And then something seems to have gone wrong, starting with the misbegotten Jersey Girl, not quite as bad as the critics said, but not that much better.  Clerks II didn’t come close to the original.  Zack & Miri Make a Porno – Smith teaming with Seth Rogen should have been a win win but just misfired.  And then came Cop Out and let’s face it, there was simply no excuse for this.  In the past few years, he’s become more famous for his blogging, his activity on Twitter, and 4 DVDs of him telling stories to college crowds that are only a hair away from stand-up comedy performances. It’s not where I expected him to go.

And so now we have Red State. A film that Smith not only wrote, directed and edited but also distributed himself, with almost no screenings for critics.  For those who don’t know, those states that tend to vote for the democratic party and have more progressive agendas are called Blue States while those that vote Republican and are conservative are referred to as Red States.  The film takes place in such an unnamed state, presumably somewhere in the U.S. midwest.

There are spoilers ahead.

The film starts off in what seems like typical Smith territory. Three horny high school kids find an ad on the internet from an older woman who says she’ll sleep with all three of them, but only if they do it together. And so off they go.  But the mood is not as light as it ought to be and obviously we’re being set up for something.  I was thinking maybe zombies or vampires.

So of course it turns out to be a trap. Preacher Abin Cooper hates gays so much that he and his flock (mostly members of his family) kidnap them, torture them and kill them, secure in the faith that this is their path to salvation and heaven. The three kids have of course been set up (they’re deemed gay even though they’re looking for sex with a woman because they’re willing to all take part at the same time). And for awhile, the film seems poised to descend into torture porn, perhaps not as graphic as the Saw series but not for the weak of stomach.

And then federal agents surround the church and there’s an extremely bloody confrontation.  Clearly Waco is in Smith’s mind here. And it’s here that Smith makes his biggest wrong turn. Just as the shoot-out is reaching its climax, there’s an abrupt cut to the aftermath.  The head ATF agent being grilled by his bosses. Smith doesn’t want to show us how things end, he has a character tell us. It’s an astonishing let down.

Aside from that, the film looks cheap. The cinematography by David Klein (I’m guessing this was shot on digital) never reaches any sense of style; it just looks quick and dirty. Smith’s editing is all over the place, frequently resorting to jarring jump cuts that don’t make a whole lot of sense.

So why watch this film? Really, it comes down to Smith’s dialogue (one gift that he hasn’t lost) and some amazing performances. Melissa Leo is incredibly convincing as one of Cooper’s psycho daughters. John Goodman is excellent as always as the head of the ATF squad, a lot of small details in his performance that he’s really nailed. And then there’s Michael Parks who is simply astonishing at Abin Cooper. Smith was clearly in love with Parks’ charismatic performance and lets his scenes run on for far too long, completely destroying any rhythm the film might have had.  We get to his sermon in his church and it just goes on and on and the film grinds to a halt.  But clearly if you took Parks’ performance here and put it into a better film, there would be Oscar talk. Stephen Root and Kevin Pollak are both good in smaller roles.

Kevin Smith is clearly angry at many things. Angry at homophobia. Angry at religion (big shocker there, eh?). Angry at the government. But he’s unable to channel all of this anger into a coherent narrative. He can still write great dialogue and can still coax great performances from his cast. And after Cop Out, I suppose he couldn’t have gotten worse.

And yet, as bad as Red State is, I think this is one that I’m going to file away in the guilty pleasure file.

Warning, there may be spoilers ahead, not that this is a movie with a conventional plot that could be spoiled.

There’s a family. And a messenger arrives and delivers a telegram and runs off.  Clearly the telegram says that someone has died.  The woman, likely the mother, is overwhelmed by grief.  And then …

Then we get a 15 minute sequence with very minimal dialogue that asks very basic questions.  Questions about god and life and death.  And a sequence that shows the creation of the universe, the creation of the earth, the dinosaurs, the asteroid crashing into the earth that changed the climate that killed the dinosaurs.  It’s amazingly, achingly beautiful, and one of the wizards behind this is Douglas Trumbull, the man responsible for the special effects in the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which this bears some resemblance.

And just when you think it’s going to go on like this for two hours, the film shifts gears.  A baby is born and grows up.  The father is Brad Pitt, the mother is Jessica Chastain.  The boy, who eventually has two younger brothers, will eventually grow up to be Sean Penn.  And it takes two hours but you realize that what’s happening is that Penn has received word of his brother’s death and is pondering the Meaning Of Life.  He remembers back to his childhood, a very normal childhood in Waco, Texas.

Memory is a funny thing.  You don’t always remember the things that people think are going to be significant.  It’s the little things that shape us; those are what we recall.  The boys have a domineering father.  It’s the 1950′s of Eisenhower and Life Magazine.  The father dominates the family.  The boys are taught to obey, to call him sir.  He imparts the lessons of life to them but sometimes these are hard lessons because life has often let the father down.  A failed musician and a failed inventor, he works in a factory and as he gets older, he sees his dreams slip away.  These kids go through all of the normal childhood stuff and it’s all mundane and yet it’s fascinating to watch because it is common to almost all of us and it is so beautifully presented.  The film ends, inside Sean Penn’s head, everyone reunited again and happy.  (I’m try to remember; I don’t recall Penn having a single line of dialogue and I think his total screen time ends up at under 10 minutes.)

That’s essentially the whole film.  What that synopsis doesn’t convey is the stunningly beautiful cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.  The absolutely seamless editing, credited not to one person but a team of 5 in alphabetical order.  The lush soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat that merges perfectly with a large selection of classical music.  (Berlioz’s Requiem figures heavily in the finale.)

Tree of Life is, of course, written and directed by Terrence Malick.  It is only the 5th feature film he has created since he debuted with Badlands in 1973.  (The others are Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World.)  This is the film he’s been building up to.  It is, on some levels, kind of insane while on others it’s pure visual poetry.  There are perhaps heavy psychological meanings as the dynamics of the family relationships are presented.  None of the big questions are answered because, well, they’re unanswerable.

I suppose the movie might sound boring and many people probably won’t have the patience for it.  I remember when it hit HK theaters, I showed the trailer to my gf and she said she didn’t see anything special about it.  But she watched the film with me last night and she was transfixed.  Every time her phone rang, she didn’t take the call.  She didn’t once ask how much longer there was to the end.  And … she told me this morning, she dreamed about her father.

For me, I think I made a journey from “what the fuck is going on here?” to “I think this is a movie I’m going to pull out and watch again and again,” one of those films where I’m going to get something more out of it each time I watch it.  It made me think about my own childhood, my own relationship with my parents.  It made me think.  Apparently it had the same effect on others – not just an 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes but also the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.

I’ve read several reviews of Tree of Life.  I think Mick LaSalle came closest to capturing how I feel about the film.

If someone gave you, as a gift, a bag of diamonds and rocks, you would not see it as “a mixed bag.” You would see it as a bag of diamonds with some rocks that can be easily pushed aside, and you would be happy to be rich. In the same way, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is at times trying and perplexing, but it also contains some of the most psychologically insightful and ecstatic filmmaking imaginable.

Malick shows you the world that you know, but he shows it in such a fever that you see it, not differently, but completely. It’s a vision so alive to the mystery in everything that the simple depiction of a man walking into an office building feels like a feast of limitless possibility and geometric variety. To see “The Tree of Life” is to wish you could go through life seeing things in this way. There would be no fear of death because each moment would be so full as to contain lifetimes.

From the first moments, Malick presents his film as a contrast between two ways of understanding human existence. There is the way of nature, which sees only struggle and looks for reasons to be unhappy, and there is the way of grace, which is in touch with love and the broad movements of the universe. The way of nature is embodied by Brad Pitt as a hard-charging husband and father – it’s a lovely performance from Pitt, whose control-freak facade never completely hides the vulnerability motivating it. Jessica Chastain, as his wife, embodies the way of grace. They live with their three children in a Texas suburb in the 1950s and are seen through the memory of their eldest son, Jack (Sean Penn), looking back from the present.

As in “The New World,” voice-over narration, to the accompaniment of subjective shots of trees and sky, gives us the characters’ inner thoughts. These produce a unique effect. It’s as if we’re seeing a dream of the past and hearing mental vibrations that, either randomly or because of their particular strength, happened to survive time. The feeling is one of privilege, to be picking up on precious currents of consciousness, seemingly lost to the world.

At its most basic, “The Tree of Life” vividly replicates, in cinematic terms, the way we remember. There are general memories, moods and sensations, and then there are incidents and bits of conversation that are recalled with absolute present-tense lucidity. And so the incidents of voice-over are interspersed with straightforward scenes showing this 1950s family. Malick is trying to give us life as it is consciously experienced, the unceasing inner monologue and its interplay with the outside environment, the thoughts of the past mixing with the suspended and yet always available present.

The ambition behind such an attempt is enormous, and Malick’s success is complete. But he doesn’t stop there. In “The Tree of Life” he doesn’t only want to show what life and consciousness feel like. He wants to capture the nature of life – what life is. To this end, he films waterfalls and mountains, gives us long minutes of churning, multi-colored ooze floating in space, and even includes a brief dinosaur interlude. He is trying to give us the mind of God. No, more than that. He is trying to film God.

When he stays within the multiple minds of his various characters, Malick is working here at the level of genius. His handheld camera hovers with a sense of impending revelation. The beauty is beyond description. But when he ventures into explorations of the universe and its origins, the work becomes general and less interesting, liked warmed-over Kubrick.

Still, there is little doubt that “The Tree of Life” will stand as the cinematic achievement of the year.

(BTW, this was the second half of a double feature on Sunday.  The Double Feature From Hell. The first half was Transformers 3.  Unbelievable that this film has John Malkovich, John Turturro and Frances McDormand in the cast (and they’re clearly having a good time, perhaps thinking about what I’m sure is one of the largest paychecks of their careers.  And Ken Jeong is in it, too!  And Ken Jeong’s tongue!  Two good things to say about Michael Bay and this film:  Bay is expert at instantly setting up the emotional response he wants to get from the viewer, though often that’s done via the choice of pop song on the soundtrack – or the absence of music plus slow motion.  And there are very few directors who can combine live action and computer animation so effectively.  But the dialogue, characters and plot are squarely aimed at 10 year olds, despite the presence of the luscious Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.  The technical ambitions on this film are huge and are achieved.  The dramatic ambitions are non-existent.  But come on.  It’s a film based on a series of toys that can transform from trucks and cars into battling robots.  What else should you expect?)

In 1968, film critic Andrew Sarris wrote The American Cinema, still one of the most important books of American film criticism ever written.  I don’t know how I came to have a copy soon after it was originally published, but I went through that book forwards and backwards and sideways.  The book’s central thesis expounded on the French critics’ notion that the director, the auteur, was the person most responsible for a film and that one could track film history (as well as one’s likes and dislikes) by following the careers of directors rather than actors.  This theory wasn’t universally true then or now, as there have always been producers who put their stamp on films and films taken away from their directors to be recut according to some distributors’ whims.  But mostly this holds true.

The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, certainly fit the definition of auteur.  And while I can’t say that they’re my absolute favorite film makers, they’re pretty close to the top of my list.  One reason is that I can watch most of their films repeatedly and get something different, something more, each time I watch them.  So here’s my very personal guide to their films:

The Coens’ hit a home run with their very first effort, a low budget film noir called Blood Simple, released in 1984.  The Coens wrote and directed this (and also co-edited under a pseudonym, Roderick Jaynes, that they would continue to use many times).  The film marked the debut of Frances McDormand (who would later marry Joel Coen).  It also marked Barry Sonnenfeld’s first feature film as director of photography and the first soundtrack by Carter Burwell.  The biggest stars in the film were Dan Hedaya (Carla’s husband on Cheers) and character actor M. Emmet Walsh, who gives a great performance.  This is a dark film about infidelity and murder with that amazing end sequence that told you right away to keep an eye on the Coens.

It was three years to their next film, Raising Arizona.  This is a very broad comedy about a convict married to a cop.  When they discover they can’t have children of their own and someone nearby has quintuplets, they decide to kidnap one of the kids.  Believe it or not, the chief inspiration for this film was the Road Runner cartoons.  They assembled an amazing cast for this film – Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, William Forsythe and Randall “Tex” Cobb.  If you look closely you’ll also spot M. Emmet Walsh and Frances McDormand.  Sonnenfeld is back as DP and Burwell wrote the score.  ”Give me that baby, you warthog from hell!”

Three more years go by and it’s 1990 and Miller’s Crossing.  Some people get this film, a lot of people don’t, I consider it a masterpiece.  It’s a 30s gangster film, starring Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito and if you look really hard you’ll spot McDormand and Sam Raimi.  And yes, Sonnenfeld and Burwell are also back.  It’s an intricately plotted film with immense pleasures, not the least of which for me are the invented gangster slang (“Hello Tom, what’s the rumpus?”) and a great, hammy performance from Polito.  And as always, an astonishing sequence, the attempted assassination of Finney set to the tune of Danny Boy.  After Lebowski, this is the Coen film that I watch the most often. “Look in your heart!”

A year later, Barton Fink.  When this first came out, very few people got it and even today I suspect most people won’t have the patience to sit through this.  Ostensibly the tale of a pseudo-intellectual Jewish playwright brought out to Hollywood to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery, it is in fact the best screen meditation to date on writer’s block.  The relatively slow pace and the lack of clarity between “real” and “fantasy” in the film probably put off a lot of people.  Those who never made it to the end of this film miss an astonishing sequence – John Goodman running down a hotel hallway that’s engulfed in flames, holding a shotgun and screaming, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”  John Turturro has the title role and aside from Goodman the cast also features Judy Davis, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Tony Shalhoub, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi and the voice of Frances McDormand.  The Coens were the editors, the great Roger Deakins steps in as cinematographer, Burwell is back for the soundtrack. Another masterpiece in my opinion.

The critical success of their films to date brought them big name producer Joel Silver, big star Paul Newman and what I think of as their first failure, 1994′s The Hudsucker Proxy.  Done in the style of a 1930s screwball comedy, I’ve watched this two or three times and it just doesn’t work for me, though I can’t say exactly why.  Along with Newman, the film stars Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh (doing a reasonably good Rosalind Russell impression), Charles Durning, John Mahoney, Bruce Campbell, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito, John Goodman and doomed Playmate Anna Nicole Smith.  The Coens co-wrote this with their friend Sam Raimi. Burwell and Deakins.

In 1996, the Coens came back from the failure of Hudsucker with their first massive public and critical success, Fargo, which brought the brothers their first Oscar for the screenplay and another Oscar went to Frances McDormand as best actress.  One of the great things about this film is that the Coens didn’t go mainstream to achieve this success.  This is pure Coen Brothers with all their quirky goodness, in a bloody comedy/drama about a kidnapping and murder gone very, very wrong.  McDormand is wonderful here and William H. Macy is just amazing.  And then you get Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, Bruce Campbell and even Jose Feliciano.  Burwell and Deakins again.  An American classic.

Whoops, there it is.  1998′s The Big Lebowski.  I’ll admit it.  The first time I watched this film, I had absolutely no idea what was going on.  But there was just something about the characters and the dialogue that kept pulling me back, again and again, to the point where I could probably recite the entire film by heart.  There have been millions of words written on this incredibly popular and incredibly bizarre film.  And what an amazing cast – the lead trio of Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi are aided, abetted and thwarted by Julianne Moore, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reid, Peter Stormare, Flea, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, John Turturro (nobody fucks with the Jesus), Dom Irrera, David Thewlis, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazzara, Jon Polito, Aimee Mann, Asia Carrera.  Deakins and Burwell, of course.  And the Coens edited under their Roderick Jaynes alias.  The dude abides, as does this film.

In the year 2000, it was O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a comedy about three escaped convicts in the 1930s that the Coens swear is a remake of Homer’s Odyssey.  George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Black Nelson are the three cons. The rest of the cast features Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Charles Durning and Stephen Root but the real star of this film turned out to be the soundtrack album compiled by T Bone Burnett, which won a Grammy.  Roger Deakins got an Oscar nomination for the cinematography.

The following year brought a black and white film, The Man Who Wasn’t There, a critical success starring Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand.  If you look closely you’ll spot James Gandolfini, Jon Polito, Scarlett Johansson (who is on the receiving end of one of Thornton’s very few lines in the film, “Heavens to Betsy, Birdy!”), Tony Shalhoub and a cameo from Jennifer Jason Leigh.  Burwell and Deakins again, Roderick Jaynes is co-editor.  The film was not a commercial success but is well worth seeing.

2003′s Intolerable Cruelty was another star-powered comedy that simply didn’t work for me.  Maybe it’s a case of the Coens picking up someone else’s story idea and screenplay, but whatever the reason, the film falls flat.  But with a cast led by George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones and featuring Geoffrey Rush, Cedric the Entertainer, Edward Herrmann,  Billy Bob Thornton and a Bruce Campbell cameo, it did well enough at the box office.

From bad to worse, 2004 saw them do their first remake – and it was a remake of a film that didn’t need remaking.  They moved the locale of The Ladykillers from England to the southern U.S.  But try as he might, Tom Hanks couldn’t do what Alec Guinness did.  Irma P. Hall provides the few pleasures in this film.  Also look for Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, George Wallace, Stephen Root and Bruce Campbell.  Deakins, Burwell, Jaynes.  But there’s little here that’s worth your time.

In 2007, the Coens came back from one of their worst films with one of their best, an adaptation of No Country For Old Men that hit all the right spots with the critics and the public and won 4 Oscars, including best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for Javier Bardem.  Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson.  Burwell, Deakins and Jaynes.  Bardem was easily the most menacing screen villain since Hannibal Lecter.

I have no idea why 2008′s Burn After Reading scores so highly on IMDB.  I think it’s a trivial film at best, horrible at worst.  I found it to be a lame comedy with Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, George Clooney and John Malkovich, one of those films in which the best moments are all in the trailer.

On the other hand, I absolutely loved A Serious Man.  Some nostalgia for the Midwest where they grew up, this somewhat philosophical comedy about a Jewish professor who watches his life completely unravel seems to have been inspired by the Book of Job.  It’s very similar to Barton Fink in tone and pacing.  Plus there’s that great opening sequence, a made-up Yiddish folk tale.  You need to be patient with this one but it’s very rewarding.

When I heard that the Coens were doing a remake of True Grit, all I could think was “Why?”  And then I saw it and I knew.  Their first true western, reportedly more faithful to the original novel, this surpasses the John Wayne/Glen Campbell/Kim Darby film in almost every conceivable way.  Jeff Bridges – the Dude as the Duke? – and Matt Damon are left standing in the giant shadow cast by the young Hailee Steinfeld.  Burwell, Deakins and Jaynes.  Yes, it’s a remake and yet it’s pure Coen Brothers all the way.

So there you have it.  27 years, 15 films, 10 of which I’d rate among my all-time favorites.  Of course if I had to pick just one, it would be Lebowski.  My #2 would depend on my mood at that particular moment.  I might go for Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, Blood Simple, No Country, True Grit ……

I don’t know what the next Coen project is.  There’s a screenplay called Gambit that they wrote (is it a rewrite of the old Shirley MacLaine film?) that someone else is directing.  One thing’s for certain.  Whatever they eventually do come out with, I’ll be first in line to see it.

July 26th, Kubrick would have been 83 years old.  The most brilliant film director ever?  No such thing.  My all time favorite film director?  Depends on my mood.  The greatest film director to come from The Bronx?  Okay.

I think 2001 was the first film to have a major impact on my life.  I’m pretty sure it was the first film that I went to see in a cinema more than once.  I loved it in 1969 and I love it still.  Strangelove is still unequaled.  And all the rest.

I never met him but I did get to talk to him on the phone quite a bit but ours was never the kind of relationship where I could say, “Okay, Stan, what were you thinking when you cast Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon?”

I’m sure he had at least one or two more films left in him.  I wonder if he had lived, would he have thought that CGI would allow him to go back and finally do Napoleon?

Anyway, here’s a great montage of clips from most of his films (via Dangerous Minds).

So Harry Potter took the record for top grossing weekend in the US, with a take of $168 million, beating out the last Batman movie.  Both are WB films and a testament to WB’s crack marketing squad.  But also HP benefits from the extra amounts charged for IMAX and 3D and the ever-increasing number of screens in the US.  Internationally, it took in $307 million.  That means that the film grossed close to $500 million in just its opening weekend.  However you want to look at it, that number is staggering.

So the theatrical business remains healthy even as home video is dying because the fools at the studios wasted years debating around DRM delaying a full entry into digital distribution.  So now DVD is dying, Blu-Ray isn’t picking up the slack, legal digital is still in its infancy.  These people have no one but themselves to blame.

I want to write more about the whole Murdoch thing but haven’t had the time to fully collect my thoughts and cite sources.  I’m sure the scandal will not end at the borders of the UK.  The FBI is said to be looking into things now.  Plus, one report has it that MySpace was just sold for $32 million – Murdoch bought it 6 years ago for $580 million.  Karma is a bitch, dude.

Also wanted to transcribe some bits of this past week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen.  Guests included Dan Savage, Mark Cuban, Marc Maron.  Savage calls Bachmann and Palin “grifters and scumbags” – I think he was being too polite.  When they talk about the debt ceiling, about what might happen if the US defaults on bond payments, how the US is missing the boat on climate change, even the opening bit with that doctor who co-wrote The China Study talking about how the Republicans have even managed to politicize nutrition for fuck’s sake, well it’s an hour worth watching.

Anyway, here’s one statistic I remember from the show, hope I’m remembering it right.  In 1995, there was only one state in the US that had a population in which more than 20% were classified as obese.  Today there is only only state in the US in which less than 20% of the population is obese.  Why do you think that is?  It is the relentless mass marketing of garbage food.  I love my Double Stuf Oreos and Krispy Kremes as much as the next guy, maybe even more, so I’m pretty guilty of this shit, but I do try to balance it by otherwise trying to eat as much natural, unprocessed stuff as possible.  I’m not in great shape, true, but I’m just about 6 feet tall and usually weigh under 180 pounds, so I’m not doing that bad, though I could be doing better.

Anyway, long day, rainy day, Monday.  Time for sleep.

Not really a whole lot to say about this.  At this stage, the series is essentially review proof – it is what it is.  If you liked the first 7 films in the series, you’re gonna like this one.  If you didn’t like the first 7 films or ignored most of them, there’s probably not much here to convert you.

I never read the books, I only know the series through the films.  I found the first part of the film slow and I wanted the mega-battle sequence to be longer and more detailed.  Actually it’s a bit surprising – unless I’m mistaken this is the shortest film in the series and I was expecting quite the opposite.  The film does provide an emotionally satisfying ending to the series (if this is indeed the end).

The chief pleasure for me, and for many I think, is getting to see just about every actor who has ever graced the British stage buried under tons of make-up and having a good time as compensation for earning probably the largest paycheck of their career.  Ralph Fiennes finally gets significant time in the spotlight but it’s Alan Rickman who walks away with the film.  He has such a good time wrapping his voice around each individual word; I almost wouldn’t be surprised to see him get a supporting actor nod come Oscar time.

Production values are of course strong and special effects are first rate but the 3D is a total waste of time and money.  I suppose it was worth it to me because going to see a film on an IMAX screen in Hong Kong is about the only way you know for sure you’ll be getting a screen that’s larger than your TV at home.  But the glasses were uncomfortable and actually there were huge stretches of the film where I completely failed to take notice of 3D effects.

So basically it comes down to this: if this is the sort of thing you like, you’ll like this.