Notes from the Trenches

With the end of the year about three weeks away, time is tighter than my top pants button and I’ve been getting a few emails from studio reps wanting to know when the drop-dead date would be for me to screen a film for end-of-the-year list consideration. Which tells me, if nothing else, that folks are paying attention and so let’s spend the next couple of weeks here on the worldwide blogosphere, working our way to the New Year’s Eve unveiling of FFC’s annual top ten list. Haven’t seen Spielberg’s Munich yet, the last film that I’m genuinely curious about – and I also haven’t seen Transamerica which represents the last, best hope for a solid Best Actress prospect not only because I really like Felicity Huffman, but because she plays a man. Should be a shoo-in. This time of year, there almost aren’t any small movies that screen for us anymore: screens are suddenly in short supply, see, so a lot of the arthouse hopefuls might as well be mud in the middle of the country for all the attention they’ll be getting. Squeezed out, as they say. Still, managed to watch screeners of the excellent Touch the Sound and the, let’s say not so excellent Loggerheads - the latter a film I’ll probably write with The Family Stone which I also have not seen but get a little gastric just thinking about.

Thanks to Alex for mentioning Ebert’s “thumbs down” for Memoirs of a Geisha on his show. Didn’t stop it from doing gangbusters in limited release this weekend, however – and the article in this week’s Entertainment Weekly interviewing all three of the main actresses, successfully glosses over any hint of a controversy with one, dismissive, sentence. Chronicles of Narnia also did excellent business (close to 70 million, I think). Anyone see it? Save your money for King Kong.

Let’s start with the top ten moments of the year which occur irrespective of whether or not the films that they belong in make the Top Films cut – also without me having seen everything of course and with me having the habit of forgetting shit. Brain like a sieve, swear to god. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time now – thinking, in particular, of a scene of Samantha Morton dancing in Code 46 that has stood out in my head as something I wish I’d had a place to go on about independent from the review. Wish there was room for Stephen Chow dipping the little mute candy girl in front of a Top Hat poster in Kung Fu Hustle.

10. The Steamer crash and T-Rex and Bronto and Snake Pit and Kong capture and Empire State sequences from King Kong
9. A walk through a picnic ground by Dina Korzun in Forty Shades of Blue
8. The train on fire from War of the Worlds
7. The montage detailing the hero’s life of humiliation in Save the Green Planet!
6. When Choi Min-Suk eats a live octopus in Oldboy
5. Wes Studi touching a piece of topiary in The New World
4. Amy Adams masturbating and about 9 months pregnant in Junebug
3. When our heroes finally make love in 3-Iron
2. Steve Coogan putting a hot chestnut in his pants in Tristram Shandy
1. When Damian Lewis takes Abigail Breslin to the bus station in Keane

While we’re at it, let’s do the bottom ten, too:

10. When Obi-Wan Kenobi turns his back on his “best friend” Anakin as Anakin lies, dismembered, burning, and very much alive in Episode III. So much for the grace and forgiveness of the light side – the weak sisters earned everything they got – and Lucas finishes shitting all over his legacy.
9. When Terence Howard’s lovable pimp soul-kisses one of his bitches in Hustle & Flow
8. When the kid lives and when the cop sees the wife in the car in Crash
7. When Heath Ledger closes a closet door containing the fetish object of his secret love in Brokeback Mountain
6. When Bambis attack. Ring Two.
5. When Susan Sarandon launches into her soft shoe, post-boner joke, at her husband’s wake in Elizabethtown
4. Mimi’s resurrection from Rent
3. When Anton Yelchin pulls Tea Leoni’s plug in House of D in the easiest, most suspect and consequence-less euthanasia since Million Dollar Baby’s
2. The can’t rape the willing scene from Derailed.
1. When gramps and granny and, honey and sonny boy show up on the steps of that goddamned Boston brownstone. War of the Worlds.

Not much time to read this week, but been listening to a lot of John Lennon to commemorate the old boy’s passing. Lots of Leonard Cohen, too – especially the song “A Thousand Kisses Deep”.

Here’s capture six of seven – we got a tie here between Jack S. (2), Chad E. (2), and Tim R. (1). Not too late, but it’s getting there.

On the muthasite, check out Bill’s DVD addendum of Joss Whedon’s Serenity while Travis assaults the soon-to-be-remade Fun with Dick and Jane and, in case you missed it, finds something to like in Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man.

Hot off the Presses (12.12.05)

Alex struggles with Shirley Temple - marking him as human - and her Curly Top, Bill adds a DVD addendum to Valiant (to what? precisely) and here's the review for Peter Jackson's awesome King Kong.