Phoenix critics name The Artist best film

Oh dear, another list.

These things are getting out of hand. We as a people have too many lists. I came to this realization after trudging through Time's list of everything last night; I think I officially gave up on the one called "Best Murders" or something like that. There's just something about organizing things into neat tidy little lists that makes us all go bonkers. But as another writer once wrote before me: people read lists not to see what's on it, but to see what's not on it. It's a lose-lose situation for movie critics: readers go, "Oh he forgot Transformers 3 ... he's an idiot and this list is stupid." The people who we want to read our lists — the folks who will clip it and Netflix all the items on the list — are in the dwindling minority of list readers. 

But hold on, here's another list. And this one is great because I contributed to it (in the words of Chris Cooper: "maniacal laugh"). The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I'm a member, announced their annual list of movie awards this week. It's a nice selection of movies. I campaigned heavily for several winners, including Elizabeth Olsen from Martha Marcy May Marlene and Thomas Horn from Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I also campaigned for The Artist for best picture, though I was kinda hoping it would share some of the winnings — it won nine awards, the hoarder.

Below is the full list of winners with clickable photos for each one. And full warning: I will be posting my own 2011 top ten list by week's end, so save room.

Phoenix Film Critics Society 2011 Awards

BEST PICTURE

The Artist

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TOP TEN FILMS OF 2011

(in alphabetical order)

The Artist

The Descendants

Drive

The Help

Hugo

Midnight in Paris

Moneyball

My Week With Marilyn

Super 8

The Tree of Life

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BEST DIRECTOR

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

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BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

Jean Dujardin, The Artist

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BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene

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BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Albert Brooks, Drive

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BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Berenice Bejo, The Artist

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BEST ENSEMBLE ACTING

Super 8

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BEST SCREENPLAY - ORIGINAL

The Artist

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BEST SCREENPLAY - ADAPTATION

The Help

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BEST LIVE ACTION FAMILY FILM

The Muppets

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THE OVERLOOKED FILM OF THE YEAR

A Better Life

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BEST ANIMATED FILM

Rango

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BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

The Skin I Live In

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BEST DOCUMENTARY

Page One: Inside the New York Times

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BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“Life's a Happy Song,” The Muppets

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BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

The Artist

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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Tree of Life

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BEST FILM EDITING

The Artist

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BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Hugo

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BEST COSTUME DESIGN

The Artist

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BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Hugo

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BEST STUNTS

Drive

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BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE ON CAMERA

Thomas Horn, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE BEHIND THE CAMERA

Michael Hazanavicius, The Artist

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BEST PERFORMANCE BY A YOUTH IN A LEAD OR SUPPORTING ROLE – MALE

Thomas Horn, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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BEST PERFORMANCE BY A YOUTH IN A LEAD OR SUPPORTING ROLE – FEMALE

Saoirse Ronan, Hanna

Mini train scenes full of life, humanity

This week my wife and I had an assignment at the PebbleCreek Model Railroad Club. She was doing a real basic feature on the group and their model trains. I was doing the pictures. Their little headquarters had several big train tables that were interlocked together, on which they had something like 400 train cars crisscrossing around their various scenes, from coal mines and steam plants to small-town Americana and Main Street, USA. I had seen similar model railroads like this before, but I really started looking at the small details. What you see here are unedited and unposed pictures of some of their scenes. What's remarkable is how much life are in these shots of plastic figures. They really went the extra mile in making their scenes feel human and real. In many cases, if it weren't for the little plastic bases on their feet, these might look like actual shots of people ...if you squint a little, that is.

That ring around the lens ... yeah, it's the focus

Some brief randomness:

First, check out this horrible-terrible-awful publicity still for The Muppets. You might have to click on it to enlarge the beast but you'll notice right quick that it's entirely out of focus. Not just soft, but blurry. This is the oddest of several odd photo choices on Disney's press site for the rather terrific Muppet movie. And another strange thing is that there's no consistency on the file sizes. There are 20 MB files and then there are 4 MB files. Then the Disney hacks upload print versions and online versions as well, which makes browsing the site feel rather redundant. It's one of the more confusing publicity sites.

Secondly, please check out my favorite new photo site, The Kingston Lounge. This guy wander around Brooklyn and thereabouts to document decaying buildings and forgotten structures. I can't help but think of movies like The Road when looking through the eerie photos of crumbling spiral staircases, molding hospital rooms and theaters with sagging plaster molding and broken wood framing. Oh, and the photography is amazing.

And lastly, check out my second favorite new site, If We Don't, Remember Me, or just IWDRM. This site features a variety of movie GIFs and they're perfect little windows into the souls of the movies from which they came. Animated stills from Fargo, M, American Pyscho, The Royal Tenenbaums, Full Metal Jacket and Once Upon A Time in the West (pictured, click to animate) are just a small collection of the many wonderful GIFs. I think I watched the Tron one for like 20 cycles — mesmerizing.

Congrats, dad, it's a bloodsucker

My punching bag returns.

Oh, it’s fun to hate on Twilight. The atrocious acting. Those pouting, insignificant teens and their boring lives. The dialogue, as wooden as a termite’s lunch. There’s just so much material to thrash apart, and yet here even I’m bored with the thrashing.

Maybe it helps that The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1, with its horribly long title, is a slight improvement over previous Twilight films, though still far from anything that might be considered classic moviemaking. If you’re a Twilight fan, you might argue that the film was never made for people like me. It was made for people like you, fans who read the books.

So be it. I’ll never win that argument, and don’t really care to because film and books are independent mediums and thus don’t require each other even though one might derive from the other. If they wanted you to read the book, they wouldn’t have made the movie.

This new film has some improvements if only because the plot now has a purpose. See, human Bella and vampire Edward get married. Then they take a honeymoon and she gets pregnant, but with what? Edward's mighty vampire sperm, that's what. Humans and vampires can’t interbreed; neither can humans and devils, but that didn’t stop Rosemary from carrying the Antichrist to 36 weeks. Certainly what’s in Bella’s belly must be some kind of evil. Therein reclines the film’s plot, though don’t wait around for the conclusion of this story because that only comes after you’ve waited until November 2012 and deposited more money into the Perpetual Movie Machine.

Previous Twilight films were gaping abysses filled shallowly with brooding teens. These teens were universally dull as they stared into the forest, ocean or their bedroom walls. They seemed to rejoice in their angst, like they were all in emo scream-core bands when they weren’t crying into their Nightmare Before Christmas pillows. Women swooned at this, but my only thought was removing all the sharp objects from the houses in the film. The plots ultimately always became about Bella choosing dreamy Edward or hunky Jacob. “I love you for eternity,” Edward would say. “No, I love you for eternity … plus one,” Jacob would negotiate. I exaggerate only a little, but I’m not far off on this characterization — the subtext of every piece of dialogue was “I love Bella.”

All that is over. Bella has picked Edward. Close that book. Now comes the sex. Yes, Breaking Dawn deals with sex, which apparently is very, very taboo in author Stephanie Meyer’s vampire world. Nevermind that vampires drink blood and live forever as an animated corpse, now they are apparently abstinent and morally responsible. I’m much fonder of the hedonistic free-wheeling vampires in HBO’s True Blood — they’re fun at parties. In any case, Bella and Edward have sex and everyone feels awkward and dirty afterward, including the audience, who must endure strategic nudity, pale corpse skin and Edward’s orgasm, which demolishes the bedroom. Oh dear. Thank goodness it’s a rental.

Even after their first time, it’s all kind of weird. He worries he’ll hurt her, but she craves it. They settle this dilemma with games of chess. He wins, they go hiking; she wins, they have sex. Edward is good at chess, which means Bella spends the middle section of the movie very desperate. Remember when Max von Sydow played chess to save his eternal life? Neither does this audience.

The subtext of these scenes is profane, but it must be mentioned: throbbing vampire cocks cause pain, and devil babies. There I said it. The movie skirts around this issue so delicately it comes off humorously pathetic. Consider that they never even mention the word "sex." He just does that dead-eye thing, and she asks if he's ready, and bam! — vampire-on-human sex. But the camera cuts away before anything titillating can be seen. The whole movie rotates around this theme, but the fact that it's never explicitly stated does a disservice to its audience, who, judging by the way the film treats them, must be like 10 years old. I would have preferred the subject not be so taboo so the film could address the central theme of the story, which is this: for Edward to love Bella he will inevitably have to cause her pain, be it from sex or her transformation into a vampire. 

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the movie’s Bella and Edward, are given slightly more to do in this film (besides PG-13 sex), and it helps tell a more cohesive story. Both seem to be better actors than the dialogue would suggest. Some of their lines are painful, especially when you consider they’re all variations on the sentence, “I’ll love you forever.” And they’re always framed in alternating close-ups, which the film uses so much that I started counting eyelashes (Bella has some sort of eyelash deficiency). There’s a silver lining in these roles, though: the Twilight movies have landed these actors bigger jobs — Pattinson in Water For Elephants, and Stewart in Welcome to the Rileys — that have allowed them to showcase their true talents.

Then there’s Taylor Lautner, who plays werewolf Jacob. There’s no helping that one. I’ve seen better performances at the high school level. He’s the weakest link in the series, especially here as he plays the terminal third wheel skulking and moping around the vampires’ IKEA lair tucked up in the hills and trees like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Occasionally he’s a CGI wolf, which actually helps add some humanism to the forlorn character of Jacob, who spends much of the movie on vampire fetus guard duty as he stares into space doing his “troubled teen” look like his life depended on it.

Women adore this stuff. I’m not faulting them. Men typically love action films. No harm there. But what I can’t seem to figure out is why women refuse to view Twilight as the trashy soap opera it is. No, they say, it’s high art of the most profound order. Men can willfully acknowledge that Rambo 4 was ridiculously over-the-top and horrible in all the ways a movie can be. But they loved it, so there. They don’t need validation. Can a Twilight fan, man or woman, do that? My guess is no, but remember I didn’t read the books.

The movie’s violence is also noteworthy. It’s fairly gruesome. At one point Bella has an O-negative Slurpee that coats her teeth and drips down her chin, a ringing endorsement for vampirism. When Bella goes into labor, I half expected that little infant to explode out of her belly Alien-style. Instead a bouncy vampire baby comes out drenched in gore and chunks of meat. Yikes! I'm just glad she didn't have twins — they would have murdered each other in utero.

Should you see Breaking Dawn? You should know the answer already at this point and blood smoothies and vampire babies are unlikely to sway you. 

The Tenenbaums in Pictures

A movie's worth can be gauged in several ways, but here's one: Are we still talking about it 10 years later?


In the case of The Royal Tenenbaums, the answer is a most enthusiastic yes. But rather than spew the exact same praise as everyone else as we mark 10 years of Wes Anderson's hit second film, I'd rather just look at still of the film. Each frame is terrific. Here are some of my favorites.