In Contention

Tag: The Lists

  • WEEKLY WRAP: Cannes unspooled, ‘The Road’ unveiled

    Opening night at Cannes 2009• Kicking off a Cannes-loaded week, we offered a two-part profile of this year’s contenders for the Palme d’Or.

    • Meanwhile, this week’s Top Ten list reflected on the greatest runners-up in the festival’s history.

    • As “Up” opened the festival, Pixar maintained its recent critical streak.

    • Within the competition, however, it’s two films from female auteurs — “Bright Star” and “Fish Tank” — that have critics buzzing.

    • Away from the Croisette, there was lots of talk about “The Road” this week, with a new trailer and early review.

    • In a neat coincidence, “The Road” was also the subject of this week’s Page to Screen column.

    • In a major week for debuting trailers, we also got a look at two very different hot properties: “Nine” and “Precious.”

    • Ahead of its June U.S. release, we reviewed Michelle Pfeiffer’s comeback vehicle “Chéri’.”

    • We looked into the box office success of “Star Trek.”

    • We revisited some buried treasures from the 1980s.

    • And finally: is the theatrical experience overrated? Have your say here.

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 pet peeves of the 2008-2009 Oscar season

    Rachel Getting Married

    The season is winding down this week.  The slow President’s Day holiday yesterday seemed to be more of a harbinger than a lull in the excitement.  This time next week, we’ll probably be over the fallout of the circuit and on to debating the contenders we’re likely to see a year from now.

    It’s a vicious, beautiful, sad, interesting circle.

    But before the 81st Annual Academy Awards telecast puts a bow on the festivities Sunday night, it seems a decent enough time to reflect.  And not to be too negative, but this became one of the most irritating seasons I’ve ever covered, both in the lack of excitement to the dichotomy that circumstance presented for me (given that my favorite film of the year has lead the field throughout).

    With that in mind, I fully expect this piece to grate the nerves of more than a few readers.  Then again, I’m sure plenty of these views are shared by a handful as well, but whatever the case, a list of pet peeves began to stack up early on in the season.  I thought it reasonable to collect them here, so feast your eyes (or roll them), this is what got under my skin this year.

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  • ‘Dark Knight’ tops our list of the year’s best

    The Dark KnightIn lieu of a proper Tuesday list, I thought I’d do something a little different this year, since we have a slew of contributors and In Contention is no longer the brain space of just one person.  I polled all our writers for their individual top 10 lists, which you can find detailed after the jump.  But with the lists in hand, I pulled out the trusty abacus and went about the painstakingly in-depth analysis of each to surmise a collective top 10.  The results were interesting.

    No film appeared on all five lists, which is already an accomplishment, I’d say.  Four films appeared on four lists and four on three.  The remaining two films on the collective appeared on two lists.  No film popping up on just one list was taken into account, so you don’t get to march with torches over a “Bolt” inclusion.

    “The Dark Knight” became the obvious victor early on, but Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” came a lot closer than you might think.  I used a simple point system per ranking, but in all scenarios, the number of lists featuring a film was given precedence over points.  This made for a good tie-breaker here and there and, in some cases, caused for this film or that to leap-frog another.

    Consider this my ultimate salute to our contributors who, I doubt I’m alone here, did a bang-up job in 2008.  Here’s to an equally splendid 2009.

    In Contention’s top 10 films of 2008:

    1. “The Dark Knight”
    2. “Synecdoche, New York”
    3. “Slumdog Millionaire”
    4. “WALL-E”
    5. “Milk”
    6. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
    7. “The Wrestler”
    8. “Let the Right One In”
    9. “Rachel Getting Married”
    10. “In Bruges”

    Honorable mention: “Gomorrah,” “Hunger,” “Pineapple Express”

    (Individual lists after the jump.)

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  • THE LISTS: My top 10 perennial must-watch Christmas movies

    Bill Murray in ScroogedTis the season, no?

    I found it rather perplexing that, with In Contention being on the scene for three Christmas seasons already, we’ve never set about putting together the obligatory “best Christmas films” list.  Well, I’m setting out to amend that oversight this holiday week with such a collective, but I don’t have the heart to call it a “best” list per se, so I’m giving it a different angle.

    Every year I have a few staples of the season that make their way into my DVD player or, in some instances — gasp! — my VCR, like new friends come home to visit before going back on the shelf for another 12 months stretch.

    Typically, I just can’t feel right about the holiday season without taking in the films on this list at least once.  They’ve slowly gelled into my “must-watch” Christmas movie list for various reasons: reminiscence, unavoidable television programming, uniqueness in the face of the typical seasonal film glut, etc.

    While there are a handful of classic, well-made staples that would be agreeable to the masses as far as quality is concerned, I think everyone’s list would be different when it comes to this kind of thing.  With that in my, my list of the top 10 perennial must-watch Christmas movies should give you some insight into who I am.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 biopics

    It’s no real secret that the Academy is partial to the biopic. Big or small, intimate or epic, celebratory or critical, they never seem to tire of the allure of actors channelling real-life figures, past and present. Lately, in the performance categories in particular, biopics have been the surest route to voters’ hearts, with seven of the last nine Best Actress winners falling under the category, and Daniel Day-Lewis having just broken a three-year run of biopic winners in Best Actor.

    The genre is no less prominent this year, with titles like “Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Che” and “W.” all garnering varying degrees of awards buzz, for their star turns in particular. Meanwhile, from the arthouse, European titles like “Hunger” and “Il Divo” are significantly challenging the formal boundaries of the biopic, proving that the genre has far more adventurous terrain to cover than the solid, occasionally stodgy awards catnip the Academy frequently chooses to laud.

    Back in August, I wrote a post about how I was wearying of Oscar’s devotion to the genre; in turn, after my unenthusiastic “Frost/Nixon” review, a friend said to me, “Well, you do hate biopics.” I really don’t. But I am a little bored of the more linear, prosaic examples of the genre that reduce the narrative to CliffsNotes highlights in order to showcase a performance. (Step forward, “Ray” and friends.)

    Real life offers an infinite number of structural and cinematic possibilities, and it is the films that best take advantage of this fact that this week’s list is designed to celebrate. The ten films here take a wide range of approaches in portraying an equally diverse array of lives, but for me, they all pass the principal test of the great biopic: defamiliarizing the familiar. By creating living, breathing characters out of figures best known from history books and pop culture annals, they make real life as revelatory and surprising as fiction.

    It’s interesting to note how few of the films I’ve chosen qualify as the Oscar-bait that biopics are widely perceived to be — we have four Best Picture nominees here, and only one winner. It was by no means a deliberate or elitist move on my part, but the fact remains that a lot of the most interesting and audacious work within the genre doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

    The biopic is clearly maturing — as I was drawing up the shortlist for this piece, I was surprised by how recent many of my inclusions were, but it’s clear that filmmakers are getting more adventurous with time. For example, in the 1950s, a film like “La Vie en Rose” would have been made as a stolid music weeper in the “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” mold — today it comes in a considerably more fractured form, structurally and stylistically. It’s just one of several recent films, from “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” to “Marie-Antoinette,” to show that the biopic need never be safe cinematic territory. The following ten films prove that.

    10. “American Splendor” (Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, 2003)
    An ingeniously intertextual account of the life and work of comic book author Harvey Pekar, “American Splendor” goes against the grain of nearly every other biopic of a creative being by revelling in its subject’s ordinariness. Riffing off Pekar’s own autobiographical comics, Pulcini and Berman brought their keen documentarist’s eye to Pekar’s unremarkable world of beige offices and supermarket checkouts, making as much dramatically of the absences in his life as his achievements. Anchored by a quicksilver performance from Paul Giamatti, this achieves the rare biopic feat of matching its subject’s individualism.

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  • THE LISTS: In Contention’s top 20 horror films of all time

    228 Days LaterYes, how trite.  Another list of the “best” horror films of all time.  But this really is the most subjective of genres, is it not?  What is scary to us all has slipped out of the realm of the universal and become much more of a personal thing.

    Certain films are inarguable, as our list certainly reflects here and there.  But across the landscape of horror filmmaking, you find perhaps the broadest range of creativity in the medium.  So it goes without saying that a list such as this ought to be varied.

    Unlike the other lists we’ve featured here at In Contention, our rundown of the 20 best horror films of all time did not spring from the mind of this writer or that, but is instead representative of the collective.  We’ve polled each of our six contributors to ascertain their high marks in the genre and, through a complicated process of tabulation that involved thorough computation, lots of late nights and perhaps an abacus as well, the list was whittled down to the 20 films you see here.

    There are mainstays aplenty, but we think you’ll be surprised by a few of the entries.  Each of us hold very different opinions, as should be expected when you get a southerner L.A. transplant, an Arkansas law professor, two Toronto natives 20 years apart in age, a north easterner who recently made the trek out west and a humble Brit.

    We hope you enjoy the list.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 actors who need a nomination, stat!

    Kevin Bacon in Mystic RiverA couple of weeks ago, we invited you to submit ideas for our ‘The Lists’ feature, and, true to form, the suggestions came thick, fast and occasionally puzzling. (The Ten Best Bond Actors, for example, would require a couple of rather inventive entries. But hey, we like challenges.) As I was sifting through the suggestions ahead of this week’s edition, I noticed that a couple of you brought up the ever-popular issue of under-rewarded performers.

    No surprise there. It’s a subject that has endless mileage because our relationship with on-screen actors is so personal and idiosyncratic — everyone has their own list of thesps who we feel that tiny bit closer to than anyone else, who we’ll watch and defend even in their lowest career troughs, and whose lack of formal recognition from the likes of the Academy is something we take very, very personally. With actors, our devotion may not always be rational (as any of my friends who I’ve dragged with me to see the latest Jennifer Aniston disappointment can attest) but it is unwavering.

    So it is that Oscar blogs are littered with impassioned posts about the overdue and the unfairly snubbed, with Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp seemingly the current patron saints of the ‘how have they not won’ brigade. But today I want to celebrate the victims of an even more fundamental oversight: The Un-nominated.

    From Buster Keaton to Dirk Bogarde, from Marilyn Monroe to Katrin Cartlidge, the list of gifted and/or iconic actors whose careers ended without so much as a single Oscar nomination is distinguished, baffling and surprisingly long. The Academy tends to ensure that most great actors get at least one bite at the cherry, even if it’s not always for their best work. (The fact that Tim Roth’s Oscar resume begins and ends with “Rob Roy” is but one embarrassing example.)

    But every now and then, for whatever reason, a worthy name continues to slip through the cracks, despite consistently doing the right work in the right films with the right people. (Just ask Mia Farrow.) For the list below, I’ve gathered 10 men and women for whom it’s not too late. All are fine, actively working actors who should have at least one — usually more — Oscar nomination by now, but thus far, the Academy has turned a blind eye. Wake up, guys.

    Steve Buscemi in Ghost World10. Steve Buscemi
    Indiewood’s go-to guy for neurotic, bug-eyed eccentrics ever since his immortal protest against being Mr Pink in “Reservoir Dogs,” and the comic high point in many an overblown Hollywood product, Buscemi’s Oscar drought is proof how slack Oscar can be in rewarding character actors. Passed over for his hilarious work in Best Picture nominee “Fargo,” he seemed to be on course for his first nod in 2001, when he picked up a slew of awards for his turn as sweet, socially inept record collector Seymour in “Ghost World.” Sadly, the Academy had other ideas.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 movie-related costumes for 2008

    Paramount Pictures' CloverfieldIt’s that time of year.  Candy fills the aisles of grocery stores, retail outlets are reaching that awkward phase when Halloween decorations lie next to Christmas items (they unleash them earlier and earlier each year) and, if you’re lucky to be some place where they actually have seasons, leaves are decorating the ground.

    It’s also that time when Halloween stores move into every vacated department store on the block with their latest array of timely Oscar costumes based on your favorite movies from the last 10 months.  There are the holdovers from years past, of course.  Captain Jack Sparrow here, Superman there.  And let’s not forget the ever-popular rubber Presidential likenesses.  So what can we expect?

    There will be plenty of “Dark Knight”-themed wear, each item more embarrassingly realized than the next.  Iron Man will be popular with a lot of the tiny youngsters, as older kids might feel strange in a plastic faux-metallic robot get-up.  They’ll stick with Napoleon Dynamite or another year of Borat before they subject themselves to that.

    Whatever the costume, one thing is always pretty much guaranteed: the costumes are gonna suck.  These things are mass-produced and don’t fly off the conveyor belt fast enough.  Creativity is lacking, it’s all a painful mess.  The only answer is good ole’ fashioned ingenuity…and we’re here to help.

    Below you’ll find our list of the top 10 movie-related costumes of 2008, with an eye toward some brand of originality throughout (though the unavoidability of obvious picks creeps in here and there).  Herewith is our guide to a memorable Halloween season:

    Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler10. Randy “The Ram” Johnson
    For all the little tikes who worship (or worshiped) the ground Michael Hayes, Dallas Page, Shawn Michaels and the Ultimate Warrior walked on, don your best set of tights and break out the fake blood for a tour around the neighborhood as the lead character in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler.”  For added “umph,” bring along a female friend, scantily clad as stripper/love interest Cassidy, or get some other kids to go in with you as nemesis wrestlers.  Accessories that’ll sell it: metal chair for out-of-the-ring clobberin’, entrance music accompanying you from house to house (maybe bring a boombox for the occasion).

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Paul Newman performances

    Paul Newman in The StingExpected or not, this week’s news that screen legend Paul Newman has broken through to the other side is deeply depressing.  But as I noted over the weekend, it’s best to take moments such as this as an opportunity to celebrate the man and his work.  So it is that this week’s list reflects the very best Newman had to give us…according to me, of course.

    Newman had an undeniable screen presence.  It wasn’t the piercing blue eyes, nor the tall, dark and handsome figure he cut into the celluloid.  It was the attitude.  His character dripped with a sort of soulful aroma that couldn’t quite be considered performance art so much as meditative experiences.  Right out of the gate with “The Silver Chalice” and all the way through to vocal work in “Cars,” Newman’s characters were more genuine than anything surrounding them.  It makes a list of ten nearly impossible to whittle down.

    Any list is going to vary, though a few staples are bound to pop up consistently enough (I’d wager my top four fit that bill).  But it’s ultimately a joy just to go back and revisit these portrayals, regardless of their ranked order.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 films of 1999

    (from left) Joe Pantoliano, Laurence Fishburne, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in The MatrixRemember that Entertainment Weekly cover from November of 1999?  The headline boldly proclaimed: “The year that changed movies.”  Indeed, it has become nearly a cliche to harp on and on about those 12 months of solid product as a time not equaled since the glory year that was, 1939, but to many, the truth was the truth.  1999 was the best year for films in a long, long time.

    And it wasn’t a microscopic view of “quality” either.  A broad net was cast, from genre successes aplenty to art house sensations, both finding equal play in the film awards circuit that year.  And so it is that hammering out a list of the 10 best constitutes to be a pastime of sorts for the movie lover, especially those like me who were experiencing an awakening of sorts around that time.

    1999 was my first year of film school — the dark ages, as I like to call them (because I’ve come to know film school as a fool’s errand of sorts, an education not easily passed from one person to the next but better learned through trial and tribulation).  But I was still an eager, unjaded soul and took a trip to the local theater one day with a troupe of friends for our own double feature: Sam Mendes’s “American Beauty” and David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.”  It was our first real understanding of the year that had been unfolding right before our eyes.

    “American Beauty” has, of course, aged quite poorly, though Russell’s Iraq war film remains a staple of sorts, a unique blip in a consistently uneven genre.  This was already the year that had seen the release of the first “Star Wars” installment in over 20 years (however disappointing), the last great exhibit from the portfolio of the cinema’s greatest artist (Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”) and a science fiction masterpiece that owed as much to William Gibson as anything else (at least those ideas were making it to the screen).

    Moreover, this was a cinematic year that would see releases from more top-tier directors than any other year: Kubrick, Scorsese, Lucas, Lynch, Allen, Fincher, Burton, Leigh, Minghella, Anderson, Almodóvar, Mann, Lee, Stone, Jordan, Sayles, Soderbergh, Forman, Burton, Pollack, Darabont and Howard, while simultaneously launching the exciting careers of untold newbies.  The range of quality, as expected, was certainly wide, but that all of these guys were in neck deep in their work during the same stretch of time had plenty to do with the perception of 1999, then and now.

    So with that, I felt that this week’s top 10 list (a Tuesday regularity now, if you haven’t been keeping score) would address 1999, the year that was.  Here are my picks:

    (from left) Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney and Ice Cube in Three Kings10. “Three Kings” (David O. Russell)
    David O. Russell is a visionary of sorts, but he seems to always be right at the surface, just about to break through with an unyielding brilliance, never fully harnessing the wicked talent he clearly has.  But for a brief moment in the fall of 1999, he discovered an outlet in this Iraq War dramedy that became more famous for its off-screen drama than what unfolded on-screen.  Pity, because I would rank “Three Kings” in a list of the 10 greatest war films ever made without flinching.  George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze and Ice Cube headlined a sprawling cast that probably deserved some ensemble attention.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 performances you’re underestimating

    Every year it seems there are a number of performers in the thick of an Oscar hunt that don’t get the same attention as the expected heavy-hitters.

    It’s no surprise, of course, that Oscar prognostication would lean toward the anticipation of what lies ahead, unseen, unproven.  The mystery stays in tact, if for precious few moments.  But a number of nominated actors and actresses, year after year, tend to bank on the underestimation of the masses, allowing those heavy-hitters to fall by the wayside and provide just the opportunity they were waiting for all along.

    Here, then, is an attempt to shine a light on 10 stealthy contenders that seem to be flying low on the radar so far this season:

    Richard Jenkins in The Visitor10. Richard Jenkins, “The Visitor”
    At the moment, “The Visitor” star Richard Jenkins might seem like the obvious bet for a list such as this.  But with Overture Films planning an Oscar campaign for the character-actor-turned-leading-man and a year increasingly giving credence to smaller films, this gem of a performance from way back in the first quarter of the year could find room to make a move.  A prime DVD release date will keep the film fresh in voters’ minds and perhaps divert some of the attention away from the Brad Pitts, Sean Penns and Frank Langellas for a spell.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 20 movie endings of all time

    Anthony Perkins in PsychoAlright, this was painstaking indeed. After The Times of London saw fit to rock out a list of the 20 best movie endings of all time last week, I thought I’d try my own hand at such a collective.

    There are some omissions that might surprise some folks (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Carrie”). At the same time, there are films that, on any other day, would easily slip into the list (“A Clockwork Orange,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “Reservoir Dogs”).

    Rest assured they were taken into account, but they didn’t speak to me on whatever levels must have been necessary to push into the top 20. But I can say these are the denouements that most affected me, be it viscerally or emotionally.

    Send in your picks for the top five movie endings of all time and I’ll publish a collective readers’ list in a few weeks. Email me or post your list below in the comments section.

    Here’s what I came up with:

    20. “The Iron Giant” (Brad Bird, 1999)
    “You stay. I go. No following.”
    Animation genius Brad Bird made his feature directorial debut with this effort, packing an emotional punch by film’s end with shades of “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” — and an energizing final shot to boot.

    19.”Jacob’s Ladder” (Adrian Lyne, 1990)
    “He looks kind of peaceful, the guy.”
    Capping off one of the most bizarre cinematic visions ever captured (and, ultimately, quite underrated as well), this closing scene is a twist that has been lifted in various other forms ever since. (see next)

    18. “The Sixth Sense” (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
    “I think I’m okay, really. I think it just went in and out.”
    Hot prospect M. Night Shyamalan tainted the original power of the twist ending by attempting to make a career of it, but in the final moments of this early effort, his buried talent poked through the surface.

    17. “The Shawshank Redemption” (Frank Darabont, 1994)
    “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’. That’s God damn right.”
    Less a closing scene than a closing sequence, the entire third act of Frank Darabont’s Stephen King adaptation manhandles the heartstrings and lifts the spirit.

    16. “Se7en” (David Fincher, 1995)
    “John Doe has the upper hand.”
    Andrew Kevin Walker crafted a near masterpiece that culminates as perfectly as it could have, death and despair, ambition and art, plus a Hemingway rebuttal for the ages.

    15. “The Conversation” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1973)
    “We’ll be listening to you.”
    The calmly paranoid conclusion to a mind-bender from a mid-“Godfather” Francis Coppola, this finale put Gene Hackman in a position to give perhaps the greatest performance of his career.

    The full list after the jump!

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