Best of 2006: The Directors

Many, but not all, of these five artists will have their praises sung again when I post my Best Picture lineup in the next few days. But first, there will be stops along the way for Best Actor and my three favorite categories every year, Best Actress, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.

Meanwhile, though it may be immodest of me, I can't resist the temptation to link to this article at the Reverse Shot Blog. Some portion of the web-writing I do feeds back into my professional life, but mostly, I do all of this for the fun, the conversation, and the challenge of practicing my writing and my thinking, especially about movies. It's enormously gratifying when people notice, and even better when they appreciate what they find here. Thanks to all of you who read and comment, and a particularly huge thanks today to the writers at Reverse Shot!

Nick Comes Knocking on 'Broken Flowers'

It's a bird... it's a plane... no! It's an actual full-length movie review on Nick's Flick Picks! Will wonders never cease?

Too bad the film in question is Jim Jarmusch's promising but dismayingly fallow Broken Flowers. During the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Broken Flowers won the Grand Prix (i.e., the runner-up prize for Best Picture), all the hubbub was that this film was poignant and layered, and much better than Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking, which also centers around a father seeking out a son he didn't know he had (and, not to be discounted, the mother of the son, too.) Based on how much I disliked Broken Flowers, I'm perversely expecting that Don't Come Knocking might be more my cup of tea. Since I can't seem to get with the critical or popular consensus at all this year—I didn't like Mysterious Skin but enjoyed 9 Songs, I much prefered The Interpreter to Walk on Water, I found Hitch utterly charmless, and I'm positive that Johnny Depp was the worst thing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—it'll just go to show if I wind up championing all the movies that everyone else hates. Wouldn't be the first time.

Now, I just need to dig up those notes I took during The Beat That My Heart Skipped, since that's a winner everyone seems to agree on...

Meanwhile, in attending to my Cinemarati duties, I've also posted a capsule review of George Stevens' Giant, which I just screened for the first time in the gorgeous Cinestudio theater on the campus of my new stomping grounds, Trinity College. The movie theaters of Hartford—I visited four of them in my first eight days of living here—deserve a blog entry of their own, but for now, it's all about Giant, one of those mid-century Oscar darlings that you expect will be awful until you give the thing a chance and come to find that, dang it, that's one thoroughbred of a mainstream American movie. It's the kind of film you expect will go to shit once Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor have got their hair painted silver so they can act more than twice their age, but even against the formidable odds of old-age makeup, they, and the movie, hold their own.