• Steve Pond goes blue in the face trying to explain, again, the preferential ballot to people who just don’t get it. [The Odds]
• Nathaniel Rogers chats with “The King’s Speech” production designer Eve Stewart. [The Film Experience]
• Jamie Bell: Oscar prognosticator. [Movieline]
“He no longer challenges our ideas about film,” actor Leonardo DiCaprio said of Christopher Nolan tonight, before presenting him with the Modern Master Award. “He has helped define them.”
It was a great bow on a fine evening meant to celebrate the director’s work over the last decade. The Modern Master designation is Santa Barbara’s highest honor and, despite an unexpected Oscar snub for Best Director from the Academy last Tuesday afternoon, this is certainly the year to single him out in such a light.
Pete Hammond served as moderator for the evening as he queried Nolan on his brief if dense career to date. It was shrewd to note that “Following” in 1998, a $6,000 movie that grossed $40,000 and “Inception” in 2010, a $160 million movie that grossed $800 million worldwide, only have 11 years separating them. The director’s latest “has been successful on its own terms, not on Hollywood’s,” Hammond said by way of introduction. It’s a good way to put it.
The word of the day Friday will most certainly be “Inception,” as casually interested movie-goers and anxious fanboys alike line up to take in Christopher Nolan’s latest effort.
Now, I have suggested in this space that the film’s ensemble is an organic one, alive and driven. And that the performances are separately less than their sum impact. It nevertheless seemed a good time to look back over Nolan’s septet of offerings thus far and cherry pick the best portrayals for a return to this semi-regular feature at In Contention.
Nolan always puts together a great cast. His carefully selected leads tend to ably balance themes of identity, control and psychosis, while highlighted supporting parts always prove to be charming outside-the-box considerations.
With the latter in mind, I’d have loved to make room for the Steven Tobolowskys, Rutger Hauers, David Bowies, Ritchie Costers and Tom Berengers, but I naturally kept settling on the larger roles when push came to shove.
So, without further ado…
This column has been the elephant in my living room for months.
Putting together a list of the year’s best films is easy. It’s fresh. It’s in your mind. It’s, in many ways, the expected culmination.
Putting together a list of the decade’s best films is a different chore altogether. Yearly rankings fly out the window as a proper gauge, because tastes shift and impacts either dwindle or deepen. Revisiting films is called for, but fitting in the works you missed along the way is also imperative. It can be maddening.
And the truth is, you can’t see everything. All you can do is try to be as honest about how you feel as you can. And even then, no list can be definitive on a personal level, let alone authoritative.
And so the whittling begins, and in many ways, the process is the reward. The ultimate collective is a mere reminder of the journey through 10 years of film product. But some things stuck out along the way.
Over at IMDb there is a new feature called “The Power of Film” (lofty title, that), which has listed out the top 15 films of the millennium as voted on by IMDB users, i.e., fans, the public, regular folks.
The IMDb top 250 is an ever-changing mish-mash of high-,middle- and low-brow entertainment that always makes for an amusing cross section of what the public thinks of cinema from one moment to the next. “The Godfather” and “The Shawshank Redemption” trade off the #1 spot consistently, save for the spike of interest in this major new release or that, films that insinuate themselves high early on but inevitably fall down the list as more viewers get a look.
The new feature, unsurprisingly, features Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” at the top, but strewn throughout is a diverse mixture including the “Lord of the Rings” triology, German Oscar-winner “The Lives of Others” and Pixar entries “WALL-E” and “Up.” And speaking of Oscar, MTV’s Terri Schwartz has spun her wheels on the idea that, with a larger slate of Best Picture possibilities, the IMDb list could prove an omen for the potential blend of eclectic and entertainment cinema so many expect the Academy’s line-up to resemble from this year forward.
(Schwartz’s thoughts and IMDb’s list after the jump.)
I was working on this piece yesterday (nothing major — just pulling together the YouTube clips), but I wasn’t aware how the list was going to pan out. “Carrie” at the top? Not so sure about that.
But The Times critics like to be contrarian. Just take a look at their Top 100 Films of All Time list, which places Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” rather brazenly at #2.
Anyway, debating and sussing out the best of movie endings ever could have us chatting into the night. Most of my favorites are recent examples, but that’s probably due to what the 1990s did to the screenwriting form.
Scribes began giving a lot more thought to how the audience would feel when leaving the theater. Twists and emotional-punches became a currency of sorts, which is probably why there are more films from the decade than any other on The Times’ list.
I will say I’m glad there was room for “Seven,” “Memento” (which I re-watched recently and absolutely adore) and “E.T.,” three (perhaps) out-of-the-box choices that don’t leap to mind when the subject comes up. And it’s impossible to argue against “The Usual Suspects,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Planet of the Apes.”
If I were to suggest a some additions, I might begin with “Heat,” “Citizen Kane,” “A History of Violence,” “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Boogie Nights,” to name a few.
The Times’ list of the best movie endings of all time:
1. “Carrie”
2. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”
3. “Casablanca”
4. “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial”
5. “Chinatown”
6. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
7. “Some Like It Hot”
8. “The Italian Job” (1969)
9. “The Usual Suspects”
10. “The Sixth Sense”
11. “Thelma & Louise”
12. “The Wizard of Oz”
13. “Les Diaboliques”
14. “Dr. Stranglelove”
15. “Gone With the Wind”
16. “The Shawshank Redemption”
17. “Planet of the Apes”
18. “Memento”
19. “The Blair Witch Project”
20. “Seven”
I might pull together my own top ten soon enough.
What are your favorite movie endings?