The Third Man Alternative Oscars

Two weeks ago, The Oscars handed out awards in 24 different categories, approximately one third of which the average person might actually care about. Of course, just because the average person doesn’t care who wins the Oscar for Best Sound Mixing, that doesn’t mean the award shouldn’t exist. It should. But the point is that the Oscars have actually given us comparatively few ways to really discuss the year in film via normal conversation. That doesn’t seem right, does it? We actually talk about movies in so many more ways, don’t we? Yes, yes we do.

So let’s double the awards slate and add 24 more categories, representing topics that people debate and care about when looking back on the year in film.

Without further ado, I present the inaugural Third Man Alternative Oscars.

Guidelines:

*The awards are presented alphabetically.

*The 24 categories are designed to be discussion points that exist every year, so some of them might not have particularly strong winners this year.

*Especially strong categories have second place and honorable mentions listed. Weak categories do not. 

Best Accent by an American Actor

Seriously, American actors tend to be terrible at accents. While British actors are staging a coup on American film and television, we’re completely incapable of exporting our most famous commodities because they’re completely incapable at sounding like they could ever be from somewhere else. But occasionally, a great exception emerges, like Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the Russian gangster and professional nude fighter in 2009’s Eastern Promises.

Winner: The dearly departed Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Günther Bachmann, the umlauted German intelligence officer in A Most Wanted Man.

Best Action Sequence

This was a bizarre year in which there were a lot of very good action films of all kinds—super-hero action, sci-fi action, and old school action—but very few of the films really had great individual action sequences. Except one.

Winner: The climax of The Equalizer, in which Denzel Washington sets up a Home Alone-style death trap for the Russian mob at a Home Depot, was pretty damn sweet. And Killing the main villain with a nail gun in slow motion while the sprinkler systems are on full blast made for some cool action flick imagery.

Best Animal

Last year’s Best Animal winner was obvious, because the cat in Inside Llewyn Davis became the first cat in the all-time history of cats to actually do everything it was supposed to. If animated animals were eligible, the dog from the Oscar-winning Animated Short, Feast, would be the clear winner. But I decided animated animals aren’t eligible, and these are my awards. So for lack of a better candidate…

Winner: The dog from John Wick, which may only have a few minutes on screen, but in death, became a great action movie plot catalyst. The lesson: You can steal a man’s ‘69 Mustang, but you just don’t fuck with a man’s dog.

Best Chemistry

Truly great star chemistry is a priceless commodity that appears born from film divinity when it happens. And it’s priceless because it happens so rarely. (See kids, that’s economics!) Because this year really didn’t have many great options, I was tempted to go with something snarky, like Reese Witherspoon and her hiking boots in Wild, which memorably opens with her violently screaming “Fuck you bitch!!” as she chucks one of them over a cliff. But this category is about romance!

Winner: In Love is Strange, Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play a recently married gay couple in NYC who must overcome losing their home and staying (separately) with relatives while they attempt to rebuild their lives. It’s a small, lovely story that partially works so well because of the deep affection you believe these two have for one another.

Best Climactic Scene

This is the easiest one on the board.

Winner: The final confrontation in Whiplash, when the sadistic Fletcher has set up Andrew to either reach true greatness or publicly die trying, and Andrew responds by launching a triumphant solo, shouting “I’ll cue you in” to the rest of the band, and then lip-syncing a particularly venomous “Fuck you!” to his nemesis.

Best Comedic Scene

And this is the toughest one on the board. The only good comedy of 2014 was Neighbors, which came out so long ago (and wasn’t quite that good) that I’ve forgotten nearly everything about it. 2013 didn’t even require a good comedy to make this pick a cinch, as anyone who saw The Wolf of Wall Street can attest to. The Lemmon Quaalude scene, which culminates in what the film refers to as “cerebral palsy phase,” was a time capsule worthy moment of hilarity.

Honorable Mention: The funniest scene of the year was actually on television, when the Silicon Valley team of stoner geniuses try to create an algorithm for how long it would take to jerk off 800 dudes, including such memorable quantifiers as “mean jerk time” and "dick-to-floor ratio."

Winner: The final sequence of Wild Tales, which takes place at a wedding reception in which the bride finds out the groom had been cheating on her with one of the guests, had me laughing out loud so hysterically that I actually shouted out the words “Oh, Jesus Christ!” in a packed theater. Part of me was hoping I wouldn’t have to pick this one because no one’s seen it yet, but it’s a deserved winner.

Best Credit Sequence

Credits, both opening and closing, often feel like waiting at a red light—an interminable but necessary part of getting where you want to go. But some movies make credit sequences key parts of their artistic arsenal, and when it happens (like in Apocalypse Now and Catch Me If You Can), it’s always particularly memorable.

Winner (Opening Credits): Mr. Turner was a fairly ho-hum movie that never lived up to its potential, partially because it gave us its most beautiful imagery during the opening credits, which showed J.M.W. Turner’s greatest paintings through swirling billows of smoke, playfully dancing across a black screen. Everything after was downhill.

Winner (Closing Credits): The end credits of 22 Jump Street, with the next 20+ sequels to the film quickly and ridiculously playing out on screen, was the best part of the movie.

Best Dance Scene

Winner: This.

Best Death Scene

Everyone that follows pop culture unanimously agrees that 2014’s best on-screen death was in the Game of Thrones episode “The Mountain and the Viper,” when the Trial by Combat between the two characters ended with The Viper gloating just a little too much, The Mountain seizing a brief opportunity, and then squeezing the Viper’s skull until it burst like a watermelon. Even for a show that’s conditioned us to be ready for any character dying at any moment, that was still pretty sobering and jaw dropping. It was the best TV moment of 2014.

But I digress. Even though 2014 didn’t give us a “Sonny at the tollbooth” level death, or anything as good as the dozens of memorable slayings in the Kill Bill films, there were still some good choices.

Honorable Mention: The gloriously insane Argentinian Oscar nominee Wild Tales has at least three on-screen deaths that would be contenders for this award if anyone had seen the movie. But it’s still a few weeks away from opening in most markets, so we’ll hold that thought.

Runner-Up: Edge of Tomorrow was kind enough to give audiences their movie wet dream: Tom Cruise getting killed dozens of times. Over. And over. And over. And over again. 

Winner: The Godzilla reboot was a decent movie with exactly two incredible moments. The first appears further down these awards. The second is in the climactic fight, when a struggling Godzilla gets his second wind, grabs MUTU’s jaws and pries them open, and then shoots an explosion of hot blue flame down MUTU’s throat. In what was mostly a pretty slow and methodical movie, that sudden moment of giving the people what they want prompted cheering in my theater.

Best Facial Expression

Sometimes, a perfect marriage between film/actor/character gives us a moment where a facial expression is forever seared into our collective brains. Think of the first moment Clarice Starling sees Doctor Hannibal Lector standing in his cell, unblinking and perfectly still, or the look on Michael Corleone’s face when Kay tells him she had an abortion.

Runner-Up: When Amazing Amy finally returns in Gone Girl, hysterically driving home in her nightgown, covered in the blood of NPH’s throat, she gets out of the car, limps over to Ben Affleck, and fake faints in his arms. Affleck fulfills our dreams by incredulously looking down at her and saying, “You fucking bitch.”

Winner: There’s a scene about a third of the way through Foxcatcher, where creepy billionaire John du Pont (Steve Carell) is asking wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) to get his brother Dave to train with them, no matter the cost. Mark tells John that Dave simply doesn’t want to come, and no amount of money will change his mind. Carell then just calmly stares at Tatum for a few moments, with his face and eyes completely unmoving, before uttering a high-pitched “Huh,” as though it’s the first time it’s ever occurred to him that money actually can’t buy everything. It’s an amazing moment, and one that stays with everyone who sees the film.

Best Final Shot/Moment

One of my favorite and underrated aspects of the cinematic arts is the way a film chooses to leave you. And I don’t simply mean a final scene, but rather a final few seconds, with a particularly powerful image before the credits start rolling.

Two recent great examples would be the final shot in Michael Clayton of George Clooney in the back of the cab, slowly coming to grips with what’s happened, and the ending of Zero Dark Thirty, where Jessica Chastain is sitting in the plane, Bin Laden’s corpse in front of her, with absolutely no clue what to do now that the singular obsession of her life has been eliminated.

Runner-Up: The two teenagers skateboarding off into the Brooklyn sunset at the end of Love is Strange is quite beautiful, signaling that the lessons of affection from the older generation have been properly passed down.

Winner: Mommy ends in such a perfect way that you can’t figure out whether to be sad for the fate of the characters or happy that they reached the tragically inevitable conclusion to their stories on their own terms.

Best First Appearance in the Zeitgeist

Some awards giving institutions like to honor things like Best Newcomer, but that’s always hard to pinpoint because most “best newcomers” have actually been working for a while, they just hadn’t been noticed yet. And even some people that receive huge accolades for their first film role, like Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, for example, already existed on the cultural radar in a different capacity. But what about those who made their first appearance on the Pop Culture radar in 2014?

Runner-Up: Whiplash’s Miles Teller and Damian Chazelle (respectively, the star and writer/director) did such amazing work on that film that greatness is now expected to be their new norm.

Winner: As comic book characters, no one had ever heard of The Guardians of the Galaxy before 2014. That will never, ever be the case again…

Best Franchise Opener

…And the reason the Guardians of the Galaxy can never again languish in character obscurity is because their namesake film of 2014 was the best popcorn movie in over two years. At a time when every Hollywood studio is trying to find old properties to dust off, reboot, and cash in on once again, Marvel reminded everyone that it’s actually still possible to create a franchise out of thin air if you just make a really damn good movie that appeals to mass audiences. It’s pretty much the polar opposite of everything that was 2013’s disastrous Lone Ranger reboot.

Winner: The Guardians of the Galaxy. Obviously.

Best Inanimate Object

ESPN’s Chris Connelly, who covered the Oscars for many years with ABC, recently said in a Grantland interview that he thinks the Oscars should have an award for Best Inanimate Object, and I enjoyed the idea enough to go with it. Wilson, the Volleyball from Cast Away, is probably the best recent-ish example. He totally should have gotten a 2001 Best Supporting Actor nomination.

Runner-Up: The poor lava cake that Jon Favreau demolishes in Chef. “It’s fucking molten!!”

Winner: When we find out Amazing Amy is actually alive in Gone Girl, and she dives into her immortal “Cool Girl” speech, she’s in the car, gleefully eating the shit out of a Kit Kat bar like she’d been waiting a decade for that exact moment. A Kit Kat has never looked more delicious.

Best Line of the Year

A lot of movies have great lines, but only the best become immortal, to the extent that they enter the cultural lexicon and eventually become spoken by people that don’t know the source material, like Daniel Plainview shouting “I drink your milkshake” to Eli Sunday before drunkenly beating him to death with a bowling pin in There Will Be Blood. That immediately became the most fun movie line for an entire generation to quote at bars.

Honorable Mention 1: “Everything is awesome,” from The Lego Movie. ‘Nuff said.

Honorable Mention 2: In Godzilla, when the scientists have basically figured out that Godzilla exists to have Mortal Kombat with the MUTUs, and everyone’s panicking about what to do, Ken Watanabe comes to the forefront, dramatically stares out into the distance, and calmly says “Let them fight.” It doubled as 2014’s best fist pump moment.

Runner-Up: Two quotes from Whiplash are gonna get a lot of cultural mileage over the next several years, both actually from the same scene of the film. “Not my Tempo” and “rushing or dragging?” are words that can fit a multitude of contexts.

Winner: In Birdman, when Edward Norton says to Michael Keaton, “Popularity is the slutty cousin of prestige,” it was love at first sight for me. I knew I’d found a quote I would utter over and over again throughout my life. Especially in the bi-weekly “art versus commerce” debates I have with my cousin. 

Best Movie No One Saw

Three criteria for this award: 1) No foreign films or documentaries. Most great foreign films or documentaries go heavily under-seen, so that’s too easy. 2) Can’t have been nominated for any Oscars. All Oscar-nominated films get extra attention. 3) Must have made under $10 million at the US box office.

Honorable Mentions: Blue Ruin, a great slow-burn revenge thriller, Locke, in which Tom Hardy’s entire life falls apart over the course of one car ride, and Only Lovers Left Alive, a Jim Jarmusch film about immortal hipster vampires who hang out in Detroit and collect old guitars instead of doing actual vampire things.

Runner-Up: Under the Skin, starring Scarlet Johansson as an alien taking the form of a seductive femme fatale to lure men and collect them, until the powerful experience of being a human woman makes her feel differently towards her mission. It’s not an especially new plot (human feelings are special!), but the images in this film will haunt you.

Winner: A Most Violent Year tried to be fashionably late to the Oscar party, but arrived so late that the bouncer had already locked the doors. Because the film’s business was meant to be dependent on awards attention that it never actually received, it went completely ignored by audiences. That’s too bad, because it’s a great story about the dark side of upward mobility and the American Dream, with an incredible and intensely restrained lead performance by Oscar Isaac.

Best Opening Scene

Everyone loves a flick that has us at hello.

Honorable Mention: The pre-credit wild tale in the glorious Wild Tales concludes with what Grantland’s Wesley Morris called the best freeze frame since Pumpkin and Honey Boney stick up the diner in Pulp Fiction, and the wordless opening to Starred Up, in which the main character gets indoctrinated to British prison life, is tremendously exciting.  

Runner-Up: Part of what made Get On Up such a great James Brown biopic was its willingness to portray the totality of who he was—good, bad, and ugly. The film started off with a bang, literally, showing us an aging James Brown barging in on a meeting group that shared office space in his building, and firing a shotgun at the ceiling because someone used his private commode.

Winner: It may be exceedingly vulgar, but Dom Hemingway opening with the titular foul-mouthed gangster (Jude Law) vividly sermonizing about his penis, only for his ode to finally culminate in the reveal that he’s been getting a prison blowjob, was, at the very least, quite memorable.

Best Scene of the Year

Sometimes this is an easy category, sometimes it isn’t. Last year was not only an easy one, but one people largely agreed on—the interminably long scene of Solomon Northrup hanging from a tree, barely surviving on the tips of his toes, as normal life continued around him, was the most unforgettable moment of the year’s most unforgettable film.

This year doesn’t have a clear choice, and I still didn’t know what I was going to pick as recently as two weeks ago. But then I saw Mommy, and the answer revealed itself.

Honorable Mentions: The two best moments in the two movies everyone likes to compare to each other—the croquet scene in The Theory of Everything and the scene in The Imitation Game where Keira Knightley consoles a depressed Alan Turing about to undergo chemical castration. In the former, the future Jane Hawking sees for the first time the difficult struggle she and Steven will inevitably face, and she chooses it anyway. It’s one of the most powerful moments of true love I’ve seen in films in a long time. In the latter, with Turing lamenting why he couldn’t have been normal, Knightley tells him that, “just this morning, I took a train through a town that wouldn’t exist if you were normal,” reminding both him, and us, that his being abnormal was one of the most important gifts of the 20^th century.

Runner-Up: The Are-you-rushing-or-are-you-dragging scene in Whiplash will be quoted and reenacted for years. It’s not as meaningful as the above scenes, but it’s a more visceral and memorable piece of filmmaking.

Winner: I won’t spoil too much about the scene in Mommy that won me over, because so few people have had the chance to see the film yet. While the majority of the film is framed in a 1:1 aspect ratio to maximize the emotional claustrophobia of the story, there’s one sequence just before the ending where the titular character imagines an alternative life for her son, in which she gets to celebrate all the typical parental life landmarks for her child, like graduation and marriage. For this sequence, the frame expands to the full 16:9 screen, the score crescendos with dramatic strings, and the wordless montage fades in and out of focus before crashing back to the square reality the characters face. It was a few minutes of cinema that mastered the elements which makes it my favorite art form.

Best Sequel

Honorable Mentions: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Captain America: The Winter Soldier were well done summer movies, and arguably better than their predecessors…

Winner: …But How to Train Your Dragon 2 was everything you could want in an animated family film—hilarious, visually inventive, a good story with nice thematic elements, and great voice work. The only way to knock it, to paraphrase NPH at the Oscars, is that the title implies the first movie didn’t adequately teach people how to train their dragons.

Best Sex Scene

A lot of movies have sex scenes. Most of them are just excuses for gratuitous nudity or to jolt audiences back to attention around the two-thirds mark of the run-time. But every once in a while, a sex scene comes along that’s actually sexy, heavily adding to the style of the film and the emotional arc of the characters. Sadly, this year didn’t have one.

Maybe the reason we didn’t get any great sex scenes this year is because we got some all-time great ones last year. Yes, I’m looking at you, Blue is the Warmest Color. In a three-hour movie about a young and passionate lesbian relationship, so much screen time devoted to explicit sex felt necessary for the emotional core of the film. It was also damn hot.

Winner: (More like an honorable mention, since it’s really not a sex scene.) When Steve Carell—as Foxcatcher’s creepy billionaire wrestling enthusiast John du Pont—tries to join Channing Tatum’s Mark Schultz in a wrestling demonstration for the assembled masses, Schultz obliges. What ensues is basically du Pont awkwardly dry-humping Schultz in front of a dozen people. It was really sexy, only the exact opposite.

Best Speech or Monologue

What 2014 film scene might future generations of high school students choose as the monologue they memorize for speech class? Some (inappropriate) choices…

Runner-Up: The scene in Birdman where Emma Stone goes to town on her dad, tearing him down—in one take!—for how unimportant he really is, would have probably won her an Oscar in most years. If this award were being handed out based on strength of delivery, this would probably be the winner.

Winner: From the moment Gone Girl hit theaters, the “Cool Girl” speech became one of the key talking points of the film. It may not be as showy a piece of acting as Emma Stone’s rant about human irrelevance, but as a piece of writing and dialogue, it’s amazing, to the extent that everyone who sees the film, male and female, find themselves wondering how often they’ve been seduced by the cult of the “cool girl” in their own lives.

Best Use of Non-Original Music

If I had the power to actually add any category to the Oscars, this would be it. For the 87-year history of the Oscars, we’ve been honoring original music in films for 81 of them, both via full scores and original songs. For over three decades, that was a perfectly adequate way of honoring film music. But ever since Benjamin Braddock (and Dustin Hoffman, for that matter) came into our lives on an airport people mover to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” in 1967’s The Graduate, a new breed of film soundtrack was born.

Ever since then, so many of the most memorable music moments in film—from “Tiny Dancer” in Almost Famous, and “You Make My Dreams” in (500) Days of Summer, to the entire filmography of Wes Anderson—the way directors use music in their films has heavily moved towards utilizing music we already know to facilitate specific emotional reactions that can often be more powerful than those created by music unfamiliar to us. Using non-original music has gotten to the point now where it’s one of the most potent weapons in a director’s arsenal, just behind editing and cinematography. We’re already several decades behind in honoring it, and it’s time to right the ship.

Winner (Single Scene): The Skeleton Twins was a good film that proved Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader—playing siblings with major issues to work out—have a lot to offer audiences in their post-SNL careers, but the emotional crescendo of the flick still arrived via the fucking Starship song from Mannequin. And it was awesome.

Winner (Entire Film): Guardians of the Galaxy was the best popcorn movie of the year, but part of me wonders if it would have been nearly as successful without a perfect trailer that presented the movie as a fun and ridiculous romp with bizarre characters rocking out to cheesy ‘70s pop songs. The way that film used its soundtrack may have been less artistically ambitious than what other films do, but it's the absolute pinnacle of how to create the appropriate mood within an audience.

For as well as the trailer used “Hooked on a Feeling,” that was just the tip of the iceberg. The opening credits wonderfully had Chris Pratt exploring an alien world to the sounds of “Come and Get Your Love” (even using a small creature as a microphone at one point), and the climactic battle halted its action for a dance-off to “O-o-oh Child.” Yes, that seriously happened. The soundtrack, which featured no original music, became one of the best-selling albums of 2014, eventually going platinum. There will be a lot of imitators.

Best Villain

A truly classic villain is a rare thing. This year had three.

Honorable Mention: Steve Carell created one unforgettably creepy billionaire in Foxcatcher. Anyone that sees the movie will forever remember the way he uncomfortably weaponizes silence and makes social ostracism look like the most dangerous quality someone can possess. The main reason he’s sitting in third place is that he lacks the same sense of motivation as the next two characters. Though the fact that Carell’s character never quite seems to possess actual motivation is horrifying in itself.

Runner-Up: Will Ferrell as President Business in The Lego Movie, demanding that all toys be played with precisely as they were intended, stifling the creativity and imagination of childhood. The revelation of who he is and what motivates him in the climactic scene of The Lego Movie is what vaults the film from highly entertaining to being an all-time classic kid’s movie.

Winner: J.K. Simmons as Terrence Fletcher in Whiplash (as though it could have been anyone else). No villain this year, or really, in any other year, better evoked the way the best of intentions can be turned into the most terrifying of realities. Believing that getting pushed to the brink is the only way to access true greatness, Fletcher took it upon himself to be the merciless One Who Pushes. Like so many of the great villains, he was the hero of his own story.

For three straight years from ’07-’09, the year’s best villain also won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (in order—Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight, and Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa—“The Jew Hunter”—in Inglourious Basterds), and after a few years of dormancy, it’s nice to see J.K. Simmons bring that tradition back.

Best Voice Work

Ever since Robin Williams memorably brought Aladdin’s genie to life in 1992, there’s been a steady groundswell about the possibility of this being added as a real Oscar category. The big knock on the idea is the question of having enough to choose from to field three nominees in any given year, let alone a worthy winner. But the very best voice performances really do rest on the creativity of a great actor at the top of their game.

Jack Black as Kung Fu Panda and Andy Serkis bringing Gollum to life in the second and third Lord of the Rings films surely would have won this Oscar had it existed in their respective years. And Scarlet Johansson’s turn as a computer operating system that speaks passionately enough to fall in love with in last year’s Her would be the reigning champ.

Honorable Mention: Virtually every voice actor in How to Train Your Dragon 2 was fantastic, but none particularly stood out from the pack. (And while we’re here, why are Vikings always voiced by Scotsmen?)

Winner: With all due credit to Vin Diesel, who was totally great at shouting “I am Groot” in about three different intonations (and probably received the largest dollar-per-word payout in acting history), this award has to go to Bradley Cooper, who brought Rocket Raccoon so memorably to life that an anthropomorphic, gun-toting raccoon became the breakout superhero of 2014.

The Great Scenes: Jason Bourne and Filmdom's Best Fight Scene

Grantland today posted a long piece by Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion about the greatest movie fighters ever. It's a really cool piece that I recommend everyone check out. Of course, there's no way anyone was going to agree with everything they chose (and omitted) , but it's a very good list with a nice mix of obscure stuff that I'd never seen before. It even highlighted a really cool moment from Jack Reacher, a decent action flick that no one seems to have seen. 

A list like Shea & Jason's is meant to provoke appreciation for its subject, not to be attacked via pointless argument, so before I start doing just that, let's all take a moment to celebrate how cool good movie fights are, and to thank Shea & Jason for reminding us. 

Overall, I don't find myself with too much to argue against. They definitely like Road House a little too much--and let's be honest, anyone that likes Road House likes it a little too much--and they somehow never mention anything featuring Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson, which feels like a tragic oversight. I know sergeants  John McClane and Martin Riggs aren't exactly the most graceful fighters ever to grace the silver screen, but they're the action stars that an entire generation was raised on, so they deserve a shout out. But those quibbles aside, the big gripe I have about the list is the absence of Jason Bourne. He should have been in the top 4 or 5 of Greatest Movie Fighters. 

What almost every fight scene on the Grantland list has in common is that--in some way or another--style trumps reality. Be it the soundtrack guiding our emotional response, long tracking shots, snappy dialogue among the fighters, exaggerated blood and/or sound effects, inventiveness in weapons that defy logic, blind protagonists, Jean-Claude Van Damme laughably screaming, Patrick Swayze ripping someone's throat out (literally!), Uma Thurman yanking out not one, but two eyeballs, Keanu Reeves doing Keanu Reeves things, Jackie Chan guzzling alcohol like he's Popeye power-upping through spinach, or someone backflipping off an elephant, every single one of the fight scenes highlighted in the Grantland column finds a way to deemphasize the possible reality of the situation. They all proactively act as entertainment, and find specific ways to make sure we're entertained beyond just the hitting. 

Okay, now hold that thought while I pretend to be an expert on something I know nothing about. 

Here's the best fight scene from The Bourne Ultimatum, which is the third film in the series and, for my money, the best action movie of the last 10-15 years. 

This is the most realistic fight scene I've ever seen in a film. I know this from my extensive experience in fights to death. (See, I told you I'd pretend to be an expert on something I know nothing about!)

Everything that I mentioned about being in the other fight scenes is completely absent from this one. Nothing jokey or hokey, ridiculous or self-consciously stylistic. The fighters never crack puns, scream dramatically, make cool poses to intimidate one another, or defy all logic of speed/movement/anatomy. There's no music to heighten the drama. It's simply two-and-a-half minutes of two people trying to kill each other with every ounce of savagery, efficiency, and concentration they can muster, and doing a damn effective job of it. No more, no less. 

I'm perfectly aware that there's a lot more editing in this scene, the shots are infinitely shorter, and that probably hides that the actors have a lot less skill than the actors highlighted in the Grantland piece. But the problem with the less-edited clips in the Grantland piece is that the choreography and scene prepping come across much more. We become more aware of the impressiveness of the craft. With the Bourne fight, the idea is that all awareness of absolutely anything in the viewer is eliminated except for the two characters trying to kill each other. It's all we can see, hear, or think about. 

It's also worth noting that Bourne's final disposal of Desh is far less showy and glamorous than any of the other fight scene climaxes. There's no Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. Bourne simply gets his opponent in a hold, and chokes him until he's dead. (Warning: I'm about to play an expert again.) That's how it would be! 

The pretentiousness often associated with critics of any discipline is that we try too hard to not be entertained. All of the fight clips in the Grantland piece are entertaining, and I truly love a lot of them. But they're all less impressive to me than the Bourne fight because the Bourne fight is the only one that isn't trying to entertain me--it's trying to show me truth. And I find that the most entertaining of all. 

Song of the Day: Hall & Oates - You Make My Dreams (1981)//The Great Scenes: Hall & Oates Make Dreams Come True in (500) Days of Summer

First, a disclosure: I do not think Hall & Oates deserved induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and "You Make My Dreams" is one of their only songs that I really like. If we're merely going to start inducting popular groups that made decent pop songs, then they should have started with Boston and Duran Duran. But whatever, it is what it is. 

Anyway, this is a good song, but more importantly, it's distinguished in history as one of modern film's all-time greatest uses of a pop song. I'm always impressed when a filmmaker finds a new innovative way to convey specific emotions. One of the best examples is the way Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" was used in Almost Famous. It's impossible to watch that scene without truly feeling the way music has the power to unite people, and that was the whole point. Here, we get a different kind of emotion: The "Hell yeah, I did it!" moment that people experience when they accomplish a long term goal… even if that goal is as simple as fornicating with someone. 

For anyone that's ever finally succeeded in requiting a long-unrequited crush, you know this feeling. It's like you expect the whole world to come out and high-five you and say "Way to go, champ!", like some Little League coach. It's stupid, but we all feel it under the circumstances. This scene in (500) Days of Summer conveys that emotion better than I ever thought it was possible to be conveyed, and Hall & Oates' best song is the key. Few films are able to do this: Use heavily formalized elements to get at real emotional truth. It's always great when it works, and this scene is an absolute delight.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on June 2, 2014

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The Great Scenes: Music Unites Shawshank Prison

Earlier this week, The Shawshank Redemption celebrated it's 20th anniversary from opening in theaters. I saw it in theaters at the time, as a 12-year old, with my friend A.J. Harra. As 7th graders just trying to be cool at the time, we loved watching horror movies, and we just thought we were going to see something based on a Stephen King story. What we got was radically different, but it changed my life. Shawshank has been one of my 3 or 4 favorite movies ever since (often alternating in and out of the top spot with Pulp Fiction and The Third Man), and it largely helped define within me why cinema is such a powerful art form. I wanted to somehow celebrate the film on its 20th anniversary this week, and such a piece of writing could have taken many forms. Artistically and technically, this film is a masterpiece, but those are things I probably didn't/couldn't realize twenty years ago. When the film first made a major impact on me, it was as a story, and I wanted to try and focus in on why. As a 12-year old, I couldn't possibly empathize with people serving life sentences in jail, but anyone, across all ages and all lives, can understand the power of finding hope in a situation that ought to be devoid of such a sentiment. That's the real power of this story, the way the main characters locate hope and meaning within small things. No scene better illustrates that than this one, where the main character, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), has just opened several boxes of materials donated to the new prison library he's organizing. 

The skill in a film like Shawshank is that it figures out subtle ways to manipulate you in manners that you don't even notice, but which build to incredible moments. When this scene begins, there's no score, and for most of the first half of the film, the score is very quiet and subdued, never drawing too much attention to itself. The effect means that when the Mozart record first gets turned on, the viewer emotionally responds to it the same way the prisoners do--like an aural beacon of hope that's been absent from our lives for far too long. 

The thing I notice more and more about this film every time I see it is the way the shots are composed. It relies on a certain stillness, and a way of using camera distance to emphasize both grandness and entrapment. The scene begins not just in the confinement of an office, but by the camera confining every physical action as the only element of the screen. Opening a record, dropping the needle, taking the keys, locking the door, turning on the PA system, the guard dropping his Archie comic. And then, as the voices begin to soar, everything opens up. The shot in the workshop at about the 1:25 mark of the video is the first one where the camera emphasizes scope, by slowly panning back until Morgan Freeman's character is revealed in the foreground. Then the same thing happens in the infirmary, beginning with a close-up of a face and moving sideways to show all of the patients stepping into the light and the music. But the truly great moment starts at 1:37, as the camera moves out into the prison yard, slowly craning upwards to show the entirety of the prison in complete unmoving thrall, before finally moving behind the loud speaker that they're all so intently focused on. It's just a perfect shot. 

When people think of this movie, Morgan Freeman's incredible narration is often one of the first things that comes to mind. Nearly every scene is punctuated by his words, and his voice is our gateway into thinking about these characters. But in this scene, director Frank Darabont wisely lets the music speak for itself before having Freeman enter the proceedings. By the time Freeman tells us that "for those briefest of moments, every man in Shawshank felt free," we've already seen the proof of that statement. 

After this scene, Andy emerges from his two week punishment in solitary confinement by telling his friends that it was the easiest time he ever did, because he had the music in his head to keep him company. It's a way of acknowledging that the power of great moments can stay with us, no matter how brief they were in the first place. This four minutes of filmmaking has stayed with me for twenty years and counting. 

Revisiting 1991's Hook, the Most Important Bad Movie of My Life

There are few movies that I liked better as a child than Hook, and there are also few movies that were bigger debacles in the careers of great directors. Steven Spielberg regards Hook as the worst movie he's ever made, and he's embarrassed to even watch it now. Roger Ebert panned it, along with most other major critics. The movie made money, but also fell hugely short of expectations.  All of the film education I've given myself as an adult should have prepared me to see it for the failure it is, and yet I can't. I acknowledge that huge chunks of it are an unmitigated disaster. The sets and production design are terrible. They make Neverland look like it was designed during Michael Jackson's worst kind of sleepover. The final set piece of the Lost-Boys-versus-pirates-war is reprehensibly cheesy. Dustin Hoffman gives what might be the worst performance of his career, so overacted that the titular character is turned into a Looney Tunes parody. It takes waaaaaaay too long to get us the hell to Neverland, spending almost 40 minutes with a cell phone as the movie's breakout star. And yet, there's so much magic here bubbling up from all of the bad decisions. 

The great French filmmaker Francois Truffaut once said that a bad film by Jean Renoir (who he regarded as the greatest filmmaker ever) was far more interesting than a good film by a lesser director. The takeaway is that hugely talented people reveal something to us through their failures that's still fascinating, and those failures allow us to see their genius in interesting ways. And so it is with Spielberg's Hook. Spielberg is not an art-house auteur, but he's almost inarguably the greatest mass-audience filmmaker of all-time. He's the auteur of the people. One thing Spielberg is fantastic at, even when everything else is going wrong, is making his audience (i.e.: everyone) feel the magic. There's a scene in Hook when the adult Peter first encounters the Lost Boys, and they refuse to believe he's their former leader. Peter doesn't believe it himself, until one particularly young Lost Boy dares to look past the obvious and find the extraordinary. 

Everything about this scene works. The lighting, the incredibly subtle and powerfully nostalgic John Williams score that envelops us in crashing emotion at just the right moment, the silly-putty ability of Robin Williams' face and the look of confusion in his eyes, and the excitement on the faces of the rest of the Lost Boys as they receive their first indication that maybe this really is Peter Pan. I have seen this scene dozens and dozens of times--I just watched it another three times while writing this--and it has never failed to give me goosebumps. But something that took me a long time to realize is that it's not the story that's giving me goosebumps. Even as a child, it wasn't my desire to believe in Peter Pan that was having a physical reaction on my arms and the back of my neck. It was the filmmaking. This is just a marvelously executed moment that figures out how to sell the viewer on a world of magic without actually showing or mentioning any. 

Hook has a handful of moments like this. Dustin Hoffman, for however bad the bulk of his performance is (and to be fair to him, it's a terribly written part that he had no way to save) still manages to give one of the film's best moments. When Hook is first confronted with an adult Peter Pan that doesn't remember who he is, Hoffman gets very close to him, slowly pulls down his glasses, and in an exaggerated voice that sounds like half-southern drawl and half-British aristocracy, calmly says "Can it really be you, my great and worthy opponent?" Spielberg's camera is so close to the faces in this moment that we're basically analyzing the rings on their cheeks to determine age, and Hoffman draws out the word "opponent" as though he's trying to fill up the time quota in high school speech class. And it works. It's another mini-moment of magic. 

In Roger Ebert's list of the best movies of 2005, he wrote of King Kong, "If movies like this didn't delight us with the magic of cinema, we'd never start going in the first place." That quote has stuck with me because I'm fascinated by the origins of ideas. Loving certain disciplines and fields might be something that we're biologically predisposed to do (maybe), but even if that's the case, the predisposition still has to get fertilized. Maybe the genetic raw matter swirling about my head suggests that I was likely to fall in love with film as an art form, but something still had to trigger it into action. I've always told people that my two film Eureka! moments were seeing Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption in theaters when I was thirteen, and that those two movies awakened in me my love and appreciation for cinema. But I realize now that's only a partial truth. After all, if something in me hadn't already been awakened, then I wouldn't have been seeking out movies like that as a thirteen-year old. The more and more the idea marinates in my head, I think Hook might have been my Eureka! movie. Even if I now see it as a movie whose flaws heavily outweigh its attributes, its still those attributes that speak loudest to me. Amidst everything Spielberg did wrong in Hook, his natural talent for selling the magic of cinema found ways to shine through. 

About two thirds of the way through, there's a truly awful extended sequence of Captain Hook teaching the other pirates how to play baseball, to try and win sway over Pan's son. Every time I watch the movie, I just want the scene to end. Nothing about it works. But the ending of that scene directly leads to Peter's own Eureka! moment, when he remembers who he is. This is where Robin Williams is at his best. I re-watched Hook most recently the day after Williams died, and it was this scene that most struck me. Hook is both the best and worst role of Williams' career. On the one hand, it's perfect for him, because he plays a character that's supposed to be an eternal child. On the other hand, this specific movie saddles him with being a boring adult for the vast majority of the run time. It's sort of meta, because the viewer is trapped with Williams' fake/bad adulthood as much as the character of Peter Pan is. But it's also a waste of his strengths as an entertainer. When Peter finally seizes back his youthful identity, we see all over Williams' face how much he seems to have found his true self. It's another transcendent moment, and Spielberg nails it. Just as Williams is lost in his newfound childhood, Spielberg is visually drunk on his ability to create it. 

Of course this high can't last. Just minutes later we see the Lost Boys "armor up" for the big war, and it's easily the worst sequence of the movie. It's so bad that watching it as an adult makes you want to reach back through time and slap yourself in the face for not realizing how bad it was when you were a kid. But whatever. By that point, the movie has already won. You're still watching because the isolated moments of true greatness have permeated so deep into your desire to see high seas adventure that you can no longer be discerning about the form in which it manifests. It doesn't matter that the rest of the movie is bad, because you're still high on the moment where it briefly became everything you wanted it to be. I remember watching that scene with my mom once back when I was a kid, and I told her I didn't understand how Peter was suddenly wearing his green tights just because he remembered how to fly. My mom laughed and basically told me not to worry about it, and that characters can just do things like that in movies. I still think about that plot hole every time I watch it, and then I still heed my mom's advice and stop worrying about it. Even though they're everywhere in Hook, the flaws aren't the point. They just make the few great parts even better.