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Best and Worst Oscar Actors

Jim Emerson

View image Ernest Borgnine (“Marty”), Oscar-winner for Best Actor, 1955.

Edward Copeland announces the results of his third annual Oscar survey, this year devoted to the best and worst choices for Best Actor, 1927 – 2006. Survey participants chose Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hanks and Jeremy Irons among the best best actors, but guess for which films? Worst best actors included Dustin Hoffman, Russell Crowe, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington.

My own choices are below, after the jump…

Go Inland, young woman!

Jim Emerson

Laura Dern in “Inland Empire”: A Woman in Trouble is a Temporal Thing.

My review of David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com today:

Put on the watch. Light the cigarette, fold back the silk, and use the cigarette to burn a hole in the silk. Then put your eye up to the hole and look through, all the way through, until you find yourself falling through the hole and into the shifting patterns you see on the other side.

That’s a metaphor for watching and making movies, and it’s one way to watch “Inland Empire” — a way that is, in fact, specifically recommended in the movie itself. This is David Lynch’s film — the one he’s been making since “Eraserhead” — and it offers you multiple ways to view it as it uncoils over nearly three hours, encouraging you to see it from all of them at once. It is, after all, overtly about the relationship between the movie and the observer, the actor and the performance, the watcher and the watched (and the watch).

In this sense, you might say, “Inland Empire” is a digital film, through and through. Not because Lynch shot it with the relatively small Sony PD-150 digicam and fell in love with the smeary, malleable and unstable texture of digital video (where the brightest Los Angeles sunlight can be as void and terrifying as the darkest shadow), or because the first pieces of the movie were digital shorts he made for his Web site before they grew and crystallized into a narrative idea. “Inland Empire” unfolds in a digital world (a replication of consciousness itself — hence the title), where events really do transpire in multiple locations at the same time (or multiple times at the same place), observers are anywhere and everywhere at once, and realities are endlessly duplicable, repeatable and tweakable. This is a digital dimension where, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, there’s no difference between ketchup and paint and light and blood: On the screen, it’s red.

“Inland Empire” presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie. When people say “Inland Empire” is Lynch’s “Sunset Boulevard,” Lynch’s “Persona,” or Lynch’s “8½,” they’re quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou,” Bunuel and Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou,” Maya Deren’s LA-experimental “Meshes of the Afternoon” (a Lynch favorite), and others.

Of course, it’s also a tour-de-Lynch, in which we virtually revisit spaces and images and faces (Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie, Harry Dean Stanton … ) that resonate with memories of “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Inland Empire” itself — and some perpetually unfinished Lynch movie of the future. Because, in the Inland Empire, nobody can quite remember if it’s today or two days from now, because yesterday and the day after tomorrow are all transpiring in the present tense. Or, as one character puts it so memorably, “I suppose if it was 9:45, I would think it is after midnight.”

Rest of review at RogerEbert.com

Shirley MacLaine’s review of that Joaquin Phoenix documentary

Jim Emerson

It’s all here, courtesy of Stephen Sondheim, Mike Nichols and MacLaine:

Then you career from career to career…

I got through all of last year

And I’m here.

Rogen. Franco. Pineapple. Tarantino. Ninjas.

Jim Emerson

This ad in The New York Times makes me unreasonably, but not unaccountably, happy. Who would have thought, only a year or so ago, that a major studio summer picture could be promoted with those (half-) faces and last names?

Rogen. Franco.

Like: Pacino. De Niro. Or: DiCaprio. Crowe.

What more do you really need to say? The title will be a mystery to most people until they see the movie, but it should already be clear to everyone by now that “Pineapple Express” is the greatest movie ever made.

Web > Friends, sex?

Jim Emerson

View image It’s called a laptop for more than one reason…

Weren’t there stories just like this about the invention of the telephone? These kinds of reports mystify me, as if they’re coming from someplace in the distant past and have only just now reached our present:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web. […]

“People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line,” said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people’s behavior.

“They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family,” she told Reuters.

The poll, released on Wednesday, found the use of cell phones and the Internet were becoming more and more an essential part of life with 48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.

More than a quarter of respondents — or 28 percent — admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online.

It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.

Cell phones won out over television in a question asking which device people couldn’t go without but the Internet trumped all, regarded as the most necessary.

“It is taking away from offline activities, among them having sex, socializing face-to-face, watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines. It cuts into that share,” said Mack. […]

“We are calling them ‘digitivity denizens,’ those who see their cell phones as an extension of themselves, whose online and offline lives are co-mingled and who would chose a Wi-Fi connection over TV any day,” said Mack.

“This is how they communicate, entertain and live.”

To which I want to say: “Duh.” Talk to David Cronenberg about the use of technology as an extension of the human body and mind. He’s been making movies about it for 30-something years. (Oh, and I don’t think the term “digitivity denizens” is going to catch on. I’ll be mortified if it does.)

Wouldn’t the planet as a whole be a lot healthier if we used the web more and our cars less? Is the web allowing us to remain more in touch (and with more people) and do a better job of filtering out the people we don’t want to have much contact with? Don’t e-mail, chat and text technologies allow us more opportunities for instantaneous and regular contact with our real friends, regardless of geographical distance? Is there anything worse than being physically present in a room with people you don’t want to be around? Is that not a terrible waste of the very essence of life — your enjoyment of how you spend it? Is e-mail not more reliable and efficient than exchanging phone calls involving logistical or practical details? Do web services (bill-paying, prescription ordering, online scheduling, shopping, etc.) not reduce the time and drudgery expended on routine household maintenance tasks and errands (not to mention the cost parking and gasoline and the inconvenience of waiting on hold or in line)? On the other hand, isn’t Scanners better than sex, anyway? (Don’t answer that.)

‘Swing Vote’ remake: My bad

Jim Emerson

Make your own here.

Maybe Bill Maher was right…

Jim Emerson

… when he wrote that too many Americans are just plain stupid. How can we expect to have meaningful discussions, applying critical thinking skills to verifiable facts, when (as Barney Frank says above) we may as well be talking to pieces of furniture? Seriously: How many Americans are as dumb as this woman? I’ll give Maher some credit for compiling these stats (though I’ll elide some of the hacky jokes):

… a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators and more than half can’t name their congressman. […]

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It’s actually less than 1%….

The stupidity and ignorance of the woman (a LaRouchie) in the clip above is demonstrated not only by her flagrant violation of the Rule of Nazi (basically that anyone who invokes a comparison to Nazis — almost always an invalid one — is not interested in reality), or her inability to acknowledge facts. Her question isn’t even a legitimate question, being of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” variety: “Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy?” (Would that there were some sort of time machine that could transport this woman back to, say, Germany in 1940 — briefly, just long enough so that she could learn something about what “Nazi policies” actually were…) But Frank offers the only logical response, answering a non-question with a non-question: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

From the NPR Health Blog:

When Nazi references surface in online comments, it’s a sign that any hope for civil conversation is lost. Seems like the same rule of thumb applies to town hall meetings.

What was YOUR favorite comedy of 2006?

Jim Emerson

Don’t ask me how I came up with these dozen options — that’s all the software allows, and these were the ones I thought of — either because they were popular, conspicuous, or got some year-end recognition. (So sorry to all you fans of “Benchwarmers,” “Failure to Launch,” “John Tucker Must Die,” “Little Man,” “Madea’s Family Reunion” and “You, Me & Dupree.”) Choices are limited to predominantly English-language, live-action pictures, which is why “Babel” isn’t listed. The box is a bit long. Just select the square next to the title of your choice, then scroll down and press the vote button at the bottom. The results will display automatically.

Final results (02/25/07):

Welcome Back, Edelstein

Jim Emerson

View image The inaugural edition of The Projectionist.

David Edelstein, one of my favorite early “movie bloggers” (when he was at Slate he hosted the annual Slate Movie Club, an e-mail conversation between critics) has returned to the, uh, “interactive” world. David Edelstein, now at New York Magazine, has launched a blog under its auspices (or, at least, root URL) called “The Projectionist.”

Oh, sure, I “disagree” with him plenty (and sometimes just his tone), but as anyone who visits Scanners knows, I read critics for their writing styles and insights, not for their opinions, and Edelstein’s is a valuable voice. I’m especially glad to see him returning to writing specifically for the web, and not just within the provincial confines of NYM (although the mag has a web site too, of course). But today, the World Wide Internets is the only forum that really matters, and if you’re not participating on that level you may as well be doing cave paintings — even if they’re in midtown Manhattan.

Edelstein outlines his reasons for blogging in one of his initial posts:

And so I welcome you to my occasional blog, the Projectionist, a place for second thoughts, third thoughts, musings both important and self-indulgent, and — I hope — a fluid exchange with readers.

I’ve missed that here at New York. In my nine and a half years at the online magazine Slate, I got thousands of e-mails from readers. That last one I got here was two months ago. It’s not, I’m convinced, that I’m that much less read. It’s that the distance, literal and existential, between a glossy weekly print mag and cyberspace is vast. I send e-mails to bloggers and online writers often but can’t remember the last time I mailed someone at a glossy, even when I’ve read an article online. My fingers aren’t poised over the keyboard in the same way.

Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

Here’s to digressions, the spice of life! Follow more of Edelstein’s here — regarding the use of color in “The Valley of Elah” (or maybe one particular print of it), a cinematic sadism contest, and a look back at “Sideways.”

P.S. Please note my inability to use words such as “disagree” and “interactive” without some hesitation, above. Both have been overused beyond the point of meaninglessness — and the former so grossly that simply stating disagreement is now considered a logical counter-argument. “Oh, I disagree,” is no longer the beginning of a discussion but, for many, the substitute for a discussion.

Old White Guy Lists

Jim Emerson

“Madame de…”

Movies are just a little more than 100 years old. Many of them (some say maybe even most of them) are lost or gone — discarded, intentionally junked or rotted away. Original nitrate stock is extremely volatile, and “safety film,” which wouldn’t decompose quite so easily, wasn’t widely adopted until the mid-1950s. Just look at the filmographies in any movie encyclopedia and you’ll be overwhelmed by how many movies, even by famous directors, that you’ve never seen, whether they still exist or not. (John Ford directed somewhere around 150 of ’em.)

So, I got a kick out of some of the comments about Andrew Sarris’s Greatest Movies of All Time (below). Yes, no question, it’s an Old White Guy List. Mainly because Sarris is an old white guy, and does not pretend to be anything else (except, maybe, an old white Greek-American New Yorker auteurist guy and champion list-maker). Remember, Sarris built the original “American film pantheon” with what’s probably the most influential English-language book of film criticism, “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968.” So, is it a coincidence that “Belle de Jour” (1967) is the most recent film on his all-time greatest list? Maybe he just has a longer perspective. (He didn’t start writing for the Village Voice until about 1960.) Think of the thousands upon thousands of movies he’s seen in order to make up that list. We should all have such a broad film background to draw upon.

I think of it like this: When people decry the Western canon as being about dead white males, they’re (partially) right. But there are other canons that are even more exclusive, and most of the greats are… well, still great. We live in an age where we know there’s a lot more to art, and art history, than the Western canon, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value it as much as ever.

At the risk of betraying my Old White Guy roots (I’m sure I’ve been one since I was about 12), what cracks me up is the assertion, by some people whose idea of film history extends as far back as, say, “Fargo” or “Star Wars” or “The Godfather” or “The Wild Bunch” or “Psycho,” that Sarris must be misguided because nothing made in the last 40 years tops his list. (I’m not talking about any specific Scanners commenters here; this is just something I’ve heard from people for years — like the ones who accuse me of disingenuousness when I say “Citizen Kane” is about as much fun as I’ve ever had at the movies — and is demonstrably rich and profound, besides.)

Bad Waitress (Or, the Wit and Wisdom of Mr. Pink)

Jim Emerson

View image Mr. Pink, about to break out the world’s smallest violin.

“I don’t tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip. When somebody really puts forth an effort, they deserve a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, that shit’s for the birds. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just doin’ their job…. The words ‘too busy’ shouldn’t be in a waitress’s vocabulary.”

— Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), from the opening scene of “Reservoir Dogs” (1992)

Sunday night I had dinner with some friends at an Italian joint called Mi Piace in Pasadena, where we encountered Bad Waitress. (Yes, you may use that as the name of your next band or movie if you like.) You’ve probably met her yourself: She knows nothing about the food — what’s in it, how it’s prepared — or the drinks (like what the bar scotch is), or what constitutes a martini (olives are the default; a lemon twist makes the drink into something else that is not a “martini,” and should be a special request). OK, that last one is really the bartender’s fault, but she was so clueless I didn’t even bother to say anything. I just drank the thing, and it was fine.

But, you see, that’s what passive-aggressive workers do to customers: They attempt to make us feel guilty for expecting the minimally acceptable service we’re supposedly paying for when we spend money in a public establishment. As is the habit these days, Bad Waitress made herself scarce for most of the evening, and was nowhere to be found when it was time — and long past time — to pay the bill. Perhaps because we were a party of eight (we’d made reservations), she figured she didn’t have to do anything because, as the fine print on the menu explained, her tip was automatically added to the check. But Bad Waitress didn’t deserve a gratuity — even though one was required. I guess we just have to chalk that up to the cost of eating in this mildly upscale joint. (I have an idea: How about if they put taxes and tip amounts alongside the prices of each dish on the menu, so you can see your total price for that particular item? Kind of like the tax and shipping calculators used on shopping sites like Pricegrabber.com?)

Anyway, that’s what got me to thinking about Mr. Pink…

Movies too personal to share with an audience

Jim Emerson

View image Imprinted on/in your head…

In Steve Erickson’s novel “Zeroville,” a young man with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in “A Place in the Sun” imprinted on his shaved head arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1969. Raised a strict Calvinist (not coincidentally like Paul Schrader, writer of “Taxi Driver”), his hunger for, and obsession with, movies has a religious fervor to it.

He develops protective feelings for a young girl in the Hollywood fast-lane (echoes of Travis Bickle and Iris). He takes her to the Fine Arts for a revival of “A Place in the Sun.” The audience laughs at some of the “dated” moments, and the girl (Isadora, who goes by Zazi — as in “… dans le métro” by Louis Malle, 1960?) thinks it’s silly. He is devastated. But one night she watches the movie, alone, on TV. It is a revelation to her.

“The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the point of movies — you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be that different when you don’t watch it with anyone else. And that movie… […]

“That’s a movie you see alone and it gets into you. I’ve been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There’s nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply f—ked up, yeah… but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know?

“I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater — what are they going to do with a movie like that? There’s too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it’s just you alone. It just seems… radical, any movie that, like demands your privacy, because it’s, you know… a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you’re one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can’t be naked like that with strangers, you can’t even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you’re finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs… so I just couldn’t sleep. That movie’s like a ghost. Watch it and you become the thing or person that it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else’s.”

OK, maybe ‘102 Movies…’

Jim Emerson

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove. True, he’s no Jim Carrey, but…

My list of “101 Movies You Must See Before You Die” has generated some provocative e-mail. As I mentioned in my original posting, this was a list I came up with in 1999, providing what I’d consider to be the most important common cultural touchstones in films from the 20th century. It’s not a list of the best films (some I don’t even like much), or the most important films, or even my favorite films. (The latter list, circa 1998, is here — and it needs some updating.) I could easily have listed 202 titles (or, perhaps, even 1001, as a certain book with a similar title does), but I limited myself to a short list. That wasn’t enough for everybody, though…

Paul Newman x 3

Jim Emerson

Clips from the on-screen life of the late Paul Newman, actor and movie star:

Richard T. Jameson at MSN Movies:

Paul Newman’s entrance in “Hud” (1963) is actually an exit, emerging just past dawn from a nondescript house on the side street of a no-name Texas town that barely has one street to begin with. He’s the title character, of course, mid-30s, the lone surviving son of a local rancher, and he’s been spending the wee hours with a married woman whose husband is about two minutes away from arriving home. Hud’s nephew Lon (Brandon de Wilde) has been looking for him, found his big pink Cadillac brazenly parked in front of the house, and called him out.

So here comes Hud, snarling, tearing himself away from business left unfinished offscreen and lunging onto the small front porch. The shot is pretty straightforward but Hud’s an insouciant angle: his body canted so that one side of him is advancing before the other, his spine still in the reluctant process of drawing itself erect, his left arm lifted in anticipation of leaning on the porch post between him and the camera. “This had better be good,” he growls, into the lean now and letting his torso sag a little — signaling that he’s in charge here, but also allowing for the possibility, indeed the expectation, that maybe he can get out of whatever this is without raising a hand.

Rally ’round the Cruise, boys!

Jim Emerson

The Attitude in action. (photo: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

At first I wasn’t going to write anything about last weekend’s “disappointing” domestic grosses for “M:I:III” (or, as Stephen Colbert pronounces it, “Miiii”), because, well, who really cares about the box-office numbers of movies like “Miiii” (or Celebs Who Act Out)? Especially when “24” gives you trickier plotting, more believable stunts, top-flight production values, first-class actors (Kiefer Sutherland, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Stephen Spinella, William Devane, Ray Wise, Jean Smart…) and characters for whom you can actually feel something besides an indefinable creepy revulsion (though some have that quality, too), week after week (and in digital surround and HDTV, no less) — making pre-packaged, pre-fab disposable summer action products like “Miiii” seem as dinosaurish and unnecessary as they truly are. (Note to self: How do I really feel?)

But then I saw this headline above a Reuters story Thursday: “Hollywood friends rally around Tom Cruise.” Yes, dear readers, Tom needs some friends just now (if only, evidently, to buy batches of opening-weekend tickets to “M:I:III” at the Scientology Celebrity-Center-adjacent ArcLight Theater in Hollywood). It was too absurd to pass up.

So (he said wearily), let’s recap:

His Cruiseness’s public “approval ratings” (says a USA Today opinion survey) are way down there with the likes of… George W. Bush:

National Society of Film Critics: Waltzing and Happy

Jim Emerson

This just in:

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

*1. Hanna Schygulla (The Edge of Heaven) – 29 (Strand Releasing)

2. Viola Davis (Doubt) – 29 (on fewer ballots)

3. Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) – 24

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

*1. Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky) 41 (Miramax)

2. Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) – 35

3. Josh Brolin (Milk) – 29

With love, from Bay, to you…

Jim Emerson

Baywatch: A down-to-earth, nice guy.

A letter published in the Northwest Herald, Crystal Lake, Illinois:

To the Editor:

The Northwest Herald’s movie critic, Jeffrey Westhoff, seems to be woefully out of touch with pop culture.

The “Transformers” movie’s $155 million seven-day haul is the biggest non-sequel opening in box office history. Numbers like that usually mean positive word of mouth on the film is huge, and people are going back.

A friend of mine, Steven Spielberg – he’s pretty smart about film – said Westhoff’s review was idiotic. Westhoff’s a critic who actually reviewed his dislike for the director, rather then reviewing the movie, like his job description prescribes. Westhoff talks about the director being an “egomaniacal hack.” [“Michael Bay turns ‘Transformers’ into pile of scrap metal.”] Well I don’t believe I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting Westhoff, though it sounds like he knows me. If Westhoff actually did know me, he would find me to be a pretty down-to-earth, nice guy.

I implore the editor to give Westhoff a little relaxation and sunshine, clear his head, let him rediscover that movie-going is supposed to be a fun experience.

Maybe even help him get rid of his hatred.

Michael Bay

Director of “Transformers”

Los Angeles, Ca.