Culture Snob

Regardless of which film takes home Best Picture on Sunday night, the Academy Awards finally got it right.

I don’t mean that the best movie of 2009 will have won, even if one only considers the 10 nominees. Rather, the Oscars have chosen a sound voting system — an instant-runoff election — that nearly guarantees that every ballot will help determine whether Avatar or The Hurt Locker nabs the prize.

Writer/director David Spaltro’s debut feature ...Around concerns a film-school student who lives out of train stations in New York City, and the movie has such a distinctive, Pollyanna view of homelessness that it’s either completely divorced from reality or born of some charmed experience.

In an interview last month, Spaltro called ...Around “a very personal story to me. I never use the term ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography,’ because I think even if you’re being extremely honest, when you start writing or creating anything, it’s always fiction in some way, because you can only tell your perspective or your memories.”

That’s a roundabout way of saying that Spaltro lived out of a train station while going to film school. He put his tuition on credit cards, aiming to pay the minimum each month, but “then I realized I’d have no money for living.” He read an article about a student calling a public library home, and ... there you go.

Maynard James Keenan — the frontman for prog-metal gods Tool, the co-leader of A Perfect Circle, and the founder of Puscifer — isn’t the type of person you’d expect to see as the subject of a thorough documentary. He has a reputation for being reclusive, and for jealously guarding his privacy. As he says in the movie Blood Into Wine, “I’m not much of a people person.”

Yet Keenan, along with his wine-making partner Eric Glomski, is at the center of that documentary, a freewheeling but thoughtful mix of wine primer, underdog story, buddy picture, and sketch comedy. The movie is fun and gently didactic, and thankfully it engages in little idolatry. (Those hoping for a Tool movie will be disappointed; although Blood Into Wine doesn’t ignore Keenan’s music career, it’s at best a tangent.)

Keenan often looks uncomfortable in the movie, but that could be a function of once being filmed on the toilet, and of being hectored by a pair of wine-hating talk-show hosts. (More on those things later.) But he is apparently committed enough to his cause — fostering an Arizona wine country, and combating the idea that the state’s climate and terrain can’t produce good grapes and wine — that he’s willing to subject himself to all these indignities, and the public spotlight.

As Keenan told me in an interview last week: “This is an important thing we’re doing up here. If we’re successful with what we’re doing, it’s going to set up a future for more families than we can number. ... If you plant vines in this valley, they’re going to taste a certain way; they’re going to be very specific to where they’re from. It’s not a business that you can move to Mexico or China. It’s from here. This is the definition of sustainable and local.”

In his “Great Movies” article on Caché, Roger Ebert teases that he found a key to understanding this ever-mysterious movie:

“How is it possible to watch a thriller intently two times and completely miss a smoking gun that’s in full view? Yet I did. Only on my third trip through Michael Haneke’s Caché did I consciously observe a shot which forced me to redefine the film.”

Great! In my single viewing, I was frustrated by the film; I enjoyed its coy, cryptic nature but still don’t get its critical reputation.

Ebert provides the following hint:

“Now I call your attention to the shot I missed the first time through. You will find it on the DVD, centering around 20:39. You tell me what it means. It’s the smoking gun, but did it shoot anybody?”

The trouble is that with different DVD versions in different countries, and with different DVD players, the 20:39 mark might fall on a different shot. I’m guessing that the “smoking gun” in question comes before the dinner party, but beyond that ... .

The Top 10

1. Memento
2. Pan’s Labyrinth
3. Requiem for a Dream
4. Oldboy
5. The Royal Tenenbaums
6. No Country for Old Men
7. The Mothman Prophecies
8. Mulholland Drive
9. Donnie Darko (original theatrical version)
10. The Descent (international version)

Christopher Nolan directed five movies released this decade; two of them are nearly perfect, one of them has unparalleled rigor for a superhero movie, and the other one has Heath Ledger’s Joker casting an enormous shadow over (and therefore obscuring) its many flaws. The unnecessary remake of Insomnia was the necessary bridge between Memento and Batman Begins — from independent to studio work — but beyond it Nolan has made nothing but winners.

To be clear, I don’t believe Nolan is a great filmmaker, and I’m skeptical he’ll ever equal any of these four movies, even though he hasn’t yet turned 40.

The goal: Make an album from favorite songs released in 2009, with special attention paid to the arc and to the relationships between songs.

The rules: one song per performer; artists featured in the previous three years of this project are excluded.

The caveats: I listen to a lot of music, and I estimate this list is culled from roughly a thousand songs from the past year. But I don’t hear everything, and my listening is constrained by both taste and work. These are merely favorites.

The results: I had a much easier time selecting and sequencing in past years; the order here is more random than I would like, and it feels like it’s missing some connective tissue. But these 16 tracks (totaling just more than an hour) do follow a path. This album puts up a defiant front before revealing its heart, and then it falls into a dark and cold place for much of its second half before recovering a little at the end. A line in the final song is “I believe in growing old with grace,” and I think that can be seen as a loose theme running through this collection.

A throw-away bit of connective tissue struck me in Jim Emerson’s announcement of his and MSN’s movies of the decade:

“That’s a pretty mainstream list (hey, it’s for MSN) — and so is mine.”

“Not really,” I thought. Unsurprising? Yes. Dominated by English-language films? Yes. But mainstream?

This is, of course, a matter of definition.

The Box Office Power Rankings do not like the Twilight movies. We are not fooled by the excitement or ticket-buying power of teenage girls. We are on Team No One. (Did I do that right?)

Neither movie has ever finished better than third place in the Box Office Power Rankings. We are confident that this validates our methods.

The first movie in the series was hammered by stiff competition. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 44, it was 10th in the top 10 its opening weekend. To put that in context, New Moon’s 28 netted it a seventh-place finish in the Rotten Tomatoes criterion its first weekend. (Thank you, Couples Retreat, The Fourth Kind, and Planet 51.)

But the reality is that neither of these movies, given Thanksgiving release, is ever really in the Box Office Power Rankings conversation, even though they’re mostly avoiding the end-of-year Oscar bait. They might be ATMs for the studio, but without even better-than-mediocre reviews, they’re DOA in this neighborhood.

And that means there’s lots of room for movies that are more ... colorful. These five weeks of rankings feature wins by Precious (twice), The Blind Side (twice), and The Princess and the Frog, and a second-place debut by Invictus.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.

The One-Line Review’s Iain Stott has followed up his The 50 Greatest Films project with Beyond the Canon, meant to address complaints that the first survey was too canonical.

The top five:

1. Eyes Wide Shut;
2. Mulholland Dr.;
3. The Killing;
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;
5. Shadow of a Doubt.

The list is here. A different list, weighted for obscurity, is here.

The introduction and methodology are here. The list of 155 participants is here. My ballot is here.

It’s great fun to see which movies I was alone on (Clockers, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Incident at Loch Ness, and Trees Lounge, among others), and those on which I had unexpected company. Iain has done a tremendous job coordinating the project, compiling the results, and building the site so that everything is cross-referenced.

As people tell us time and time again, box-office performance is in the eye of the beholder.

Box Office Mojo wrote that Michael Jackson’s This Is It, in its debut weekend, did “exceptionally well for a concert picture or music documentary.” On the other hand, Disney’s A Christmas Carol “stumbled a bit out of the gate.”

Guess which one made $30 million and which one pulled in $23 million in its opening weekend.

Yep. The stumbler made more.

The two movies are within a couple hundred theaters of each other. Michael Jackson had literally no new-wide-release competition, and as you might have heard, Michael Jackson died suddenly in June. Charles Dickens had to fight off Goats, aliens, and whatever Richard Kelly is selling in The Box. And again: A Christmas Carol made $7 million more than This Is It, even though it had significantly weaker reviews.

It also earned $7 million more in its opening weekend than The Polar Express, made by the same director with the same technique for the same holiday. But as Mojo helpfully adds: “Polar Express ... was muted by opening a few days after The Incredibles whereas Carol had no such direct competitor.”

The unstated premise here — and it is truly unstated in these weekend roundups — is the size of the gamble. A Christmas Carol cost $200 million to make ($35 million more than Polar Express, by the way), while the production costs of This Is It had been spent before the decision was made to turn those rehearsals into into a movie. So any revenue generated by This Is It is gravy, while A Christmas Carol has far to go before it’s in the black.

I’m no defender of Robert Zemeckis or these motion-capture animated things, but I refuse to consider a $30-million, non-Thanksgiving November opening a disappointment, either in absolute terms or compared to a postmortem cash-in. (Yeah, I know it was assembled with affection and skill, but it’s still a postmortem cash-in.)

Others might be harsh in their assessments, but cheer up, Robert! You did win the Box Office Power Rankings, and Michael didn’t.

Continue reading for the full rankings and methodology.