Best of 2007: Ensemble

Ever feel like you're stuck in a year that you can't get out of? I realize that it's March, for crying out loud, but I'm afraid that I am still not done celebrating the movie year we have now said goodbye to, over and over again. Perhaps early-childhood imprinting has shaped my awards-season metabolism around the late March calendar, even though the Oscars have been on their accelerated schedule for five years now. Or maybe I just have an incredibly demanding job. Either way, and perhaps because I am sitting in a faraway city attending an academic conference with two blogging buddies, and because I find conferences to be helpful reminders that we academics (especially in our home disciplines) really are In This Thing Together, I present you with the long-delayed Nick's Flick Picks Honorees for Best Ensemble. Apologies about length, but with this many delectable performances to cover, one tends to overween.

Another Category, Another Buddy

I couldn't help it: having shouted out Tim and Nathaniel in the categories I drafted last night, I couldn't have the world thinking that I had forgotten ModFab, who'd also have a Willy Wonka golden ticket to the stay-up-all-night sleepover I wish I could throw on the night before the nominations. ModFab's theater productions are always such arresting sights to behold, and he's always so attuned to production design in his film reviews, that the Art Direction category always makes me think of him. So, there went my lunch hour, but here you go. Tough choices this year, and a lot of swapping in and out right until the end, but I think I'm at peace with these as my final five.

By the way, as we've now hit the one-third mark of these Honorees, with 7 out of 21 categories announced, the multiple nominees thus far are Lust, Caution and There Will Be Blood with three apiece (and at least one honorable mention in each case), and The Aerial, Grindhouse (a four-time honorable mention, which means it's been in striking distance for every category except Costume Design), and Lady Chatterley. Since I'd argue that none of these movies, save There Will Be Blood, got anywhere close to their due while they were in theaters, I hope that somehow, somewhere, somebody's Netflix queue is newly a-churning.

The Great Work Continues...

Here are two more categories in my Best of 2007 feature that I here deliver as targeted treats to two of my favorite Oscar buddies: Tim, who actually remembers extended melodies and motifs from a film's score on the way out of the theater (which I have managed to do about five times in my life), and Nathaniel, who loves costume designers so much that they get their own shrine on The Film Experience, and their own page in his Oscar nomination predictions. Enjoy these picks, guys—I think you'll be sympathetic to both groups of choices, based on your own picks—and enjoy them, too, everyone else! (I really enjoy hearing from some of you lurkers in response to these announcements...) (And yes, "enjoy" is apparently the word of the day...)

Send a Happy Thought to Mainly Movies

Everybody knows that January is the hardest month to be an academic, right? If I weren't jump-starting my new classes and filing requests for courses to teach next year and attending job talks and reading admissions files and helping to organize a conference and writing a paper, I would be voicing my Oscar predictions and getting my Best-Of lists going. Please show up, even when the party inevitably starts late! (Those Oscar predix will up soon — necessarily, since the cat's out of the bag as of Tuesday morning.)

But for now: be thankful for Mainly Movies, an erratic blogger just like yours truly, but incomparably quick and incisive, and still my favorite mass-market print reviewer. (If you aren't keeping up with his real-job reviews every Friday at the Daily Telegraph, I can't understand why not.) In addition to posting his Best & Worst picks in the acting and Original Score categories for this year (and they're wonderful picks, especially the runts), today is Mainly Movies' birthday. So what better time to reiterate how we love him? Or to get caught up on his back catalogue of blog entries and lists, if you haven't been following along already?

Many happy returns, MM!

Bests of the Bests Keep Getting Better

After telling you yesterday about all the great year-end features happening around the Web, two Near'n'Dears of Nick's Flick Picks came through yesterday with really delicious treats. StinkyLulu hosted the second edition of his grand annual party on behalf of supporting actresses. How I longed (and intended!) to attend. Had I found the time, I was going to ask, why is everyone so mad at Knocked Up for selling out the smart, classy dame to the barely redeemable schlump when Marge Simpson has been consigned to the same fate for more than a decade? In case we didn't notice, Marge is still the best thing going in The Simpsons Movie, and Julie Kavner makes something heroically poignant out of Marge's video-recorded goodbye to Homer, which made me only a little less tempted to scream, "YESSS!! She's finally getting away from him!"

I know we're supposed to love Homer, and yeah, I sorta do, but does he have to be that idiotic and congenitally self-absorbed? Does he have to steamroll his whole town and pull every rug out from under his entire family three or four times in the space of 90 minutes, and still get to star in the heroic finale? Oh, well: at least he keeps setting up Marge/Kavner for her sad, beautiful, bizarrely affecting variations on patience and marital resilience. And yes, the movie is hilarious, if a little standard-issue for the big screen. Lots of the jokes are zesty, but Kavner's voicing of that farewell made for one of the few moments truly worthy of the big screen. Then again, speaking of Supporting Actresses: why is Lisa in so little of this movie? She catalyzes the whole environmental-crisis angle and then gets all but buried? The whole movie's about fathers and sons. It's the There Will Be Blood of Simpsons narratives. No country for female Simpsons. The Emancipation of Bart Simpson from the Imbecile Homer Simpson. Harrumph. Women couldn't get a break in '07. Then again... not a new story.

But try telling that to Marisa Tomei, who this year continues a bright and eclectic career on film in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and on stage in Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations. If two estimable artists like Sidney Lumet and Will Eno don't already constitute an amazing year for an actress, Marisa keeps her game high high high in '08 with Darren Aronofsky and Nick's Flick Picks idol Caryl Churchill. Wanna hear about it? And way, way, way more about from the enchanting and talented Ms. Tomei? Well, fire up the positraction, and speed over to Nathaniel's site for his first-ever podcast, which starts with a generous, revealing, and vivacious interview with Marisa Tomei and ends with Nathaniel, Joe Reid, and I coffee-klatsching over the Screen Actors Guild nominations (well, the film categories). Now, why Nathaniel had to cast a wee pall over this delightful 45 minutes with even a short clip of Helena Bonham Carter "singing" is a little beyond me... but he won those points back a dozen times over by asking Marisa my pre-submitted question about pet indie films from her back catalogue that she wishes had gotten more attention. If you want to know which ones, you gotta listen! And why aren't you already listening, anyway? (Seriously: way to go, Nathaniel!)

Bests of the Bests

With about a week to go before I can start posting my own awards—y'all know I'm out here working without critics' previews or screener DVDs to help me out—I thought I'd direct your attention to some of my favorite year-end stuff happening around the web. If you've got an hour or two, Radio Allegro out of British Columbia hosted a year-end wrap-up radio show with me, Modern Fabulousity, Queering the Apparatus, and the Allegrist himself, Ashley Foot. Tune in to hear about flops that should have been hits; left-field For Your Consideration ads; our thoughts on movie trends related to aging, pregnancy, gender, the Western, and the musical; and for QTA's imperious, uproarious riff on the sexual politics of Knocked Up (which we all laughed at before admitting that we liked the movie). Yours truly is a bit horrified to realize how loooooong I go on when someone asks me a question, especially compared to my gorgeously succinct conversation partners, but I think it's a great conversation.

I also urge you to read QTA's own Year in Review; ModFab has a great one, too, but he also whipped up a parallel list of the year's best films and performances by soliciting opinions from six of his pals (including filmmaker Q. Allan Brocka and GreenCine impresario David Hudson) and tallying them up. Look who won the acting derby! The heart melts.

Our discerning and beautifully incisive pal Mainly Movies also puts an unexpected twist on the year-end format: he is counting down the 10 best and 10 worst movies at the same time, so that (for starters) the observational sensitivity of Funny Ha Ha arrives in a package deal with the lurid grotesquerie of Hannibal Rising. Continuing the theme of the articulate and the unexpected, Nic Rapold's Top Ten List in the New York Sun is a great read, topped by the sensational and ridiculously underseen Day Night Day Night.

Doug Cummings and Rob Christopher both fill us in on their favorite new releases of 2007 as well as their favorite back-catalogue titles that they saw for the first time in the last twelve months. I still don't see what Rob does in Stuck, but I appreciate the eclecticism of his list.

Lastly, as you are all no doubt aware, the 8th annual Film Bitch Awards will be in full swing any moment now, but the preview attractions—a list of the year's most overrated darlings and an indictment of the year's worst movies and performances—already constitute a full-course meal. No sacred cows here; you know it hurt Nathaniel to say some of these things, but it probably hurt him more to watch them. Stay tuned for more, there as well as here.

And now, I take my leave to keep pondering that milkshake with the long, long straw.

Supporting Actress Smackdown: 1955

As always, StinkyLulu is the Anna Magnani of this month's Supporting Actress Smackdown, dedicated to the tier-two ladies of 1955. He is the centerpiece, the star, the grande diva, and he make-a the prom dresses for-a all of us-a. If Stinky could actress at his own edge, I'm sure he would, but you can only be so many places at once, so he invites his own supporting cast. Nathaniel is the Natalie Wood: colorful, wicked, impassioned with his clipreel of the nominated performances. Goatdog is the Jo Van Fleet: marvelous, versatile, and brilliantly concise. His one-line captions for all five performances had me rolling on the ground. I am not accusing anyone of being the Marisa Pavan, or by all that is holy the Peggy Lee (Actress Edition), though Canadian Ken, Criticlasm, and Adam Waldowski could proudly count as the Peggy Lee (Singer Edition), beautifully carrying the tune and shaking up the rhythms of the Smackdown.

I am nominating myself as the Betsy Blair, and not just because I (alone) think she should have won. Van Fleet, as Ken sums it up especially well, is "a submerged mountain of radioactivity" in East of Eden, and Oscar should be proud of counting her among his anointed. And, as you'll see, Natalie Wood has her vehement champions. Still, to me, Blair gives her whole movie a raison d'être—Marty is just loafing along, pleasantly but unimpressively, until she arrives both to comfort and unsettle him with a persuasively wallflowery romance, a girlfriend who is both appealingly bright and almost spookily recessive, but without overdoing the "appealing," the "bright," or the "spooky" part. There's a bookish loneliness as well as an ingratiating decency to Blair's high-school chemistry teacher that I haven't often, or maybe ever, seen evoked quite this lucidly on screen. She eventually becomes a character who, like Van Fleet, is discussed more often than she is seen, and she manages to give a performance that allows everyone's competing opinions to be correct: she is wonderful, she is a threat to an uneducated mother-in-law, she is a surprising and somewhat abrupt choice to be Miss Right. The one thing she isn't, despite frequent allegations, is a "dog," but I also love that Betsy Blair lets Clara be so average in looks and demeanor, and not one of those Hollywood "wallflowers" who's really just a beauty behind big spectacles.

But why else am I the Betsy Blair? Well, again, she is the bookish nerd in the group, and I am bookish and nerdy enough to make webpages like this one, expanding my website's year-by-year archive of past viewings. (None of those other pages from the 50s are live links yet, but just you wait.) From my 1955 Oscar ballot, you'll note that Blair is the only one of Oscar's actual nominees who qualifies. Jo Van Fleet still wins, but for her gruesome stage mother in the Susan Hayward corker I'll Cry Tomorrow, not for East of Eden, though she's a close 6th for that performance. In truth, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from Oscar's list, 1955 was a great year for supporting actresses: there's Shelley Winters' obedient, sex-starved, and vulnerable widow in The Night of the Hunter and Lillian Gish's steely protector in the same film, Agnes Moorehead's acerbic and unsettled friend in All That Heaven Allows (where her slamming of a door on a vacuuming maid is the single funniest thing in Sirk), Jean Simmons' righteous reformer in Guys and Dolls, Ann Doran's angry, inhospitable, and sensationally layered wife-mother in Rebel without a Cause, and Harriet Andersson's lusty servant in Smiles of a Summer Night. Smiles didn't open in the U.S. until 1957, so in more ways than one, my ballot is impossible, but it's all about fantasy anyway.

Lastly, about Blair: she was married for many years to Gene Kelly, which is reason enough to want to be the Betsy Blair. She was later married for even longer to Karel Reisz, an important actressexual in his own right. (Screw Pete Kelly's blues; try Patsy Cline's. No, really: try 'em.) Blair was one of the first to propose and organize a non-discrimination committee within SAG and later was blacklisted for her liberal-radical convictions, which would be awful to live through but easy to admire, on principle. She apparently wrote a hell of a memoir; the reviews were mostly raves a few years ago when it came out. And speaking of books, Betsy came this.close. to being in The Hours; she filmed all of old Laura Brown's scenes opposite Meryl Streep when Julianne had to go leave to make Far from Heaven, though Stephen Daldry & Co. eventually decided that, for emotional continuity, Laura needed to be played by the same actress we'd been watching for the rest of the movie. Even if she was the world's oldest hugely pregnant woman. Which I'm fine with. Still: poor Betsy. Never could get a career break, that one. Wouldn't you love to see that footage somewhere?

And can't you see in Betsy Blair's Clara, in Marty, the possibility that she might marry Marty, but she also might leave him and cut all ties with her children to be a librarian in Canada, alone with her books and her memories? Can't you draw a pretty straight line from Ernest Borgnine's Marty to John C. Reilly's Dan, and even though Betsy isn't playing hesitation or misery in Marty—quite the opposite, in many senses—doesn't this train of thought sort of call into relief that strain of sadness and of craving for solitude that's still there, glinting and upsetting, at the heart of her warm, generous, but frightened Clara? It all comes back to how much I like her in this movie. I am not the Betsy Blair because I wish I could leave everyone I know and go seek solace among my books as a librarian in Canada; as I've just finished explaining, it's Australia that I want to flee to. But I would love to give a performance this candid and quiet and articulate and be remembered for it decades later, despite a truncated career. And if my career is ever truncated, I hope it's for the reason of firm and unimpeachable principles.

Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: The Joy of Life

The Joy of Life is not just the title of the movie I am reviewing for QTA's Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: it also names the sensation I feel whenever I'm watching a queer film (even, in most cases, a bad one) or writing about queer films or reading about them or just thinking about them and appreciating that they exist.

Queer movies are the most important things in my life that aren't people. They are better than food, way better than drink. For me, they rank right up there with shelter and oxygen. I applied to graduate school so that I could write about them, and I devoted my entire Ph.D. dissertation to queer cinema: an ecstatic pleasure in itself, at least insofar far as "ecstatic pleasure" is the right framing concept for dissertation writing, but also a rare case of actually realizing a clear goal without wavering, after seven years of work. That's how much devotion and renewable wonderment they inspire in me.

I teach courses in queer cinema, around seminar tables and more recently in lecture halls, and many of my most delirious moments of professional joy come from the fresh discoveries of revisiting these movies, and from the ardent and sometimes unexpected enthusiasm—and even, just as much, the frustration and bewilderment and intellectual calisthenics—that these movies inspire in my students. I love that queer movies, truly queer movies, invite the viewer to delectate in style and aesthetics while simultaneously demanding intellectual engagement and exercise. Just like my favorite people, my favorite queer movies are smart and fun, and they never stop surprising.

Anyone in academia has surely had his or her moments of worrying about the potential gulf between scholarly theorizing and everyday life, and another reason I treasure queer cinema is not only that they bridge this gulf, but that they do so by insisting on the overlaps and contradictions and seductive connections between the scholarly and the everyday, instead of diluting them so much that they can neutrally get along. Queer filmmakers were and are often the same people as queer activists, and queer theory and filmmaking have influenced and challenged each other more consistently and more explicitly than one finds in almost any other vein of contemporary cinema, especially the commercial cinema. You don't get Velvet Goldmine or Boys Don't Cry or Brother to Brother or Swoon without Michel Foucault or David Halperin or Kobena Mercer or Judith Butler, but you also don't get, say, Judith Butler without Paris Is Burning—a film that almost single-handedly clarified her field-defining arguments between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter but also highlighted the continued controversy and ideological aporia within her own thinking.

And I love that there are always more queer movies around than we think. Well beyond the greatest hits that we all think of quickly, "queer" cuts so deep and wide as a concept, in such brilliantly category-shifting fashion, that seemingly "straight" movies, "classic" movies, even "weird" movies can turn out to be queer. Also, sexual daring and erotic insight and intellectual vitality are really inexpensive as far as filmmaking assets go, so queer cinema drives as much energy from local, university, amateur, and do-it-yourself filmmaking as it does from big crews with (comparably) big budgets. To celebrate that legacy of new talents and exciting discoveries, I wrote my review for this Blog-a-Thon about Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life, a movie that's still working out the kinks and limits of a distinctive and promising approach to form, but well worth a rental and a rah-rah for future work by this director.

Enjoy the rest of the Blog-a-Thon (I confess that ModFab's piece is already a favorite for me), thank Queering the Apparatus for hosting it, and thank all the queer films and filmmakers in this universe for giving us so much to love and reconsider and be inspired or angry or gleeful or mournful or informed or enlightened or troubled by.

Preview of Queer Attractions

Continuing yesterday's thread about inspiration, it's worth remembering that inspiration sometimes comes from looming prospects instead of past or present moments. Which is my way of hyping up the Queer Film Blog-a-thon that Queering the Apparatus, that Wilde of the Web, that passionate scholar and perfect wit, will be hosting this coming Monday. My whole Ph.D. dissertation and much of my teaching are devoted to queer cinema, so QTA knows that this blog-a-thon couldn't possibly be closer to my heart, and I love him for dreaming up this particular shindig. Since a "queer" film to me is politically invested and, even more than that, formally adventurous in a way that a "gay/lesbian" film isn't necessarily, I offer this quick review of the 1982 groundbreaker Making Love, a very earnest "gay" film that hasn't got a "queer" bone in its tastefully conventional body. I just saw Making Love for the first time and am trying to get into the habit of dashing something off after I catch things on DVD, though you know I've promised before...

Anyway: when next week rolls around, start your Manic Monday at QTA's house, and appreciate all over again one of the richest, most challenging, most politically ambitious, and most stylistically varied traditions in contemporary film!

It's Halloween, and I'm Not Dead...

...I'm just haunting a different house than I usually do. The typically tireless Nathaniel is taking one of his seasonal siestas from his own blog, so I'm helping to pitch in during his absence. My particular task is to maintain his daily 20:07 feature, for which I have so far pulled images from The Descent, Children of Men, United 93, INLAND EMPIRE, and – in commemoration of StinkyLulu's recent 1940 Supporting Actress Smackdown, which you've hopefully already visited – Rebecca, The Uninvited, and The Grapes of Wrath.

More to come chez Nathaniel, and here at home, too. I can vouchsafe for now that late October has been something of a zombie brigade: movies that are mostly dead but not entirely so. Dan in Real Life hangs itself on an infantile story arc that somehow manages to feel abrupt even though there's nothing else going on for most of the other 98 minutes. At least the movie emanates a rare and engaging vibe of family bustle that nicely pulls against and whistles around the false beats of the story. Reservation Road kills off a child in its first ten minutes but has no better idea of how to recuperate from this crisis than do the parents of the kid in the story. A lot of middle-class agony and New England art direction ensue, and the ending is jaw-droppingly truncated, but that knotted-stomach feeling of committing a titanic error and knowing you won't (and shouldn't) get away with it is convincingly evoked—often enough to count for something, even if the movie's still not very good. Rendition can't decide who or what to be about, finally, and the large cast cycles listlessly in and out of a script that would feel dry and programmatic if it weren't so bizarrely oblique. The movie is not without interest, primarily due to its subject matter, but for some reason, director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) has cast most of his actors and even some of his crew to play directly against their biggest strengths. This leaves Jake Gyllenhaal cramped and inexpressive, Meryl Streep embarrassingly vague and gormless, and redoubtable cinematographer Dion Beebe (Collateral, In the Cut) culpable for one of the year's most badly underlit movies. Sleuth is as bad as its box-office numbers, which are very, very bad. Director Kenneth Branagh treats the tacit banalities of Anthony Shaffer's play and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's sawdust-and-tinsel original film as though they were sleek subtexts just waiting to be jackhammered home. And I choose my metaphors deliberately. Determinedly diagonal in look without ever once achieving an "edge," the film marks the very definition of "pointless," except insofar as it confirms the overratedness of the play itself.

By far the nicest things I have to say are about Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, a sprawling but evocative documentary about abortion in the United States that eschews deep historical contexts but still approaches the issue from a gratifying diversity of angles and positions; its strongest sequences, including the macabre aftermath of a second-trimester abortion and on-camera interviews with the future assassin of a doctor who performed abortions, rank among the year's most indelible moments. Speaking of indelible, Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire may not qualify on the whole, and if she doesn't stop shooting eyelashes and cheekbones in extreme close-up as arbitrary inserts, I'm going to perform a citizen's arrest. However, for all its basically conservative impulses, the movie bravely occupies some mysterious and illuminating emotional terrains of passive aggression, well-intended exploitation, and the appropriation of nearly defenseless people as prosthetic substitutes for dead lovers and friends. Holding this tricky emotional ecosystem together is Benicio Del Toro, in what looked to me like one of the year's very best performances. I've read that some critics think he's showboaty and unpersuasive, but I loved watching him hover away from rage, away from despair, away from sexual ardor, and away from loutishness—all of which the character as written seems to court. The actor locates himself instead within quieter, gentler, more paralyzed, and dare I say more subtle states of being. He's funny, tetchy, warm, uneasy, charismatic, non-judgmental, and nonetheless unreliable in some way that feels impolite to acknowledge. Male leads in "women's pictures" are a sadly neglected bunch, but Del Toro will make my year-end shortlist without breaking a sweat.

(Photos © 2006 StudioCanal/Asymmetrical Productions; © 2007 New Line Cinema/Anonymous Content; and © 2006 Anonymous Content/2007 ThinkFilm)

Montgomery Clift Blog-a-Thon: The Search

I'm a few hours late, but Montgomery Clift has waited 87 years for this blog-a-thon, 41 of them posthumously, so I'm guessing three hours in Central Standard Time aren't going to make him roll over in his grave. Plus, Nathaniel's parties tend to run late into the evening. Trust me, I know. And, I have an excellent excuse for being otherwise occupied, but more on that tomorrow. Best of all, I only have nice things to say about Monty in his first released movie, The Search, which I finally screened this morning after many years of anticipation. I think it's a high point for Monty and even more so for its director, Fred Zinnemann, and if you surf through the comments on her own phenomenal post, you'll find that Self-Styled Siren agrees with me, and who could want better validation than that?

Here, then, is my full review of The Search, and here is the rest of the blog-a-thon. Read them, love them, and rent more Monty! (I have seen 8 of his 17 movies, and these write-ups make me want to see more, especially The Misfits, which I own on DVD but have never watched, Indiscretion of an American Wife and Wild River, which I have on tape from TCM somewhere around here, and Freud, which is apparently harder to find than a good therapist whom your HMO will actually cover.)

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1990

It's That Time of the Month again, when all of the acolytes of actressing collect at StinkyLulu's house to stump for and swipe at the best and the worst of a given year's Best Supporting Actress Oscar roster. Up to bat this month are the contenders from 1990. Together, they constitute a redoubtable and dissimilar field of actresses but, perhaps, a middle-of-the-road group of performances. You can, and should, read all about that over at the Smackdown. Dip into the warm, perfumed waters of the Comments section, and you'll also see that my own dream list of nominees for that year is probably:

GLENN CLOSE in Reversal of Fortune, who somehow missed a mention despite the film's multiple noms in leading categories, and despite being an 0-for-5 bridesmaid that everyone seems to like;
WHOOPI GOLDBERG in Ghost, who actually won the thing and, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't owe anybody an apology for that;
DIANE LADD in Wild at Heart, a performance championed by several Smackdowners despite the fact that most of us, myself included, have little love for the film;
JENNIFER JASON LEIGH in Miami Blues, who Tim and I agree does an affecting, funny, and atypically unhistrionic job of underplaying her dim Florida call-girl (and has the cinema's all-time best scene concerning vinegar pie); and
SHIRLEY MACLAINE in Postcards from the Edge, a film which you should already know is a favorite, in which MacLaine is an almost Whoopi-level hoot and a holler, and also a game belter and a surprisingly tough cookie, doing a terrific acting duet with Meryl Streep

Mary Alice in To Sleep with Anger might belong here, but she's construable as a lead, and I haven't seen the film in a long while. Helen Mirren also deserves a consolation prize, or maybe an actual nod, for making such brilliant, suggestive use of her screen time in The Comfort of Strangers, acing that Pinter dialogue and adopting a demure voice and delicate demeanor that still puts everyone on edge.

Of the three actress vehicles from 1990 that I screened in the last 24 hours, as a build-up exercise to this morning's Smackdown, the jewel is Paul Brickman's Men Don't Leave, in which fans of You Can Count on Me or Truly, Madly, Deeply will recognize another tart, carefully measured, wonderfully acted tale of bereavement, quiet comedy, and persuasively wrought ties to family, neighbors, lovers, and friends. Joan Cusack gives one of her best Kooky Joan performances as the downstairs eccentric who's putting the moves on Jessica Lange's 17-year-old son, very well played by Chris O'Donnell; Arliss Howard and Kathy Bates are also incredibly deft and funny in their roles as Lange's pseudo boyfriend and insensitive boss. Lange comes closer to Tootsie-style melancholy comedy than she has before or since, and it's nice to see her at comparative ease for once. The writing, especially in the first two-thirds of the film, is clever and economical, and the editing achieves poignancy not by dawdling but through carefully timed pruning and expertly showcased moments. B

Bates pops up in a single scene of Luis Mandoki's White Palace, which also features a generation-gap relationship where the woman is again the senior partner. Susan Sarandon has several effective scenes as a working-class waitress at a "White Palace" restaurant that primarily slings bite-sized hamburgers (uh....), and James Spader gives his eerie, clammy eroticism another go as the upwardly mobile yuppie whom Sarandon takes home for a hot roll in the sack. Spader has a Sadness in His Past that he won't snap out of; Sarandon also has a Sadness in Her Past that she pretends to have snapped out of, which is a good thing, because the screenplay barely makes it playable. All in all, White Palace is one of those movies that rails against embarrassment and deceit while constantly lying and emanating embarrassment about the grief, the religious disparity, and the class divide between its characters, though Sarandon does sell a great fuck-you speech as she storms out of a well-appointed Thanksgiving dinner. C

The movie could have been worse but also could have been much better, which also describes Philip Kaufman's gorgeously photographed Henry & June. Sadly, the director's follow-up to The Unbearable Lightness of Being is nowhere near as confident or as mysterious. The effortful recreation of 1930s Paris looks fussy and tacky despite Philippe Rousselot's diligent attempts to sublimate it, the script is full of faux-serious and ersatz-literary howlers, and the cast simply isn't up to the complexities or the charismas of their characters. Fred Ward and Maria de Medeiros give things an honest go, but either they don't have a knack for stylized performance, or else their maladroit versions of realist acting come across as failed stylization. Kevin Spacey and Richard E. Grant are cloying in second-tier parts, and Uma Thurman is, as so often, a disaster. The period seemingly means nothing to her except a reason to assume awkwardly "sultry" poses and stares in a series of exotic outfits, and she hasn't got the head for the writerly themes nor the physical grace required for the slinky character and mise-en-scène. Some welcome touches of wit are scattered through the film, and you can see the smarter, tighter movie lurking beneath the existing version, but it's still a bit of an ordeal. C

As for the nominated Supporting Actress movies, I'd give The Grifters a B– for nastily diverting but annoyingly hollow showmanship; Goodfellas an A– for prodigious, engaging technique and daringly comic overtones, whatever its lapses into autopilot machismo and style for style's sake; Ghost a B+ (and y'all can complain if you want to) for playing its sentimental plotline affectingly straight and also for laughs, and working the machinery of Pop Cinema quite deftly; Wild at Heart a C+ for finding 20 minutes' worth of truly startling images within 124 minutes' worth of drafty self-indulgence; and Dances with Wolves a B for telling an embarrassingly Uncle Tom's Cabin-level tale of white male sentiment, and orbiting around a terrible Costner performance, but nonetheless achieving real majesty in its score, its cinematography, and its editing.

William Wyler Blog-a-Thon: The Good Fairy

Goatdog, of whom I was a huge fan for years before I was a neighbor and a friend, is hosting a William Wyler Blog-a-Thon this weekend. Whether it was the announcement itself that inspired me or the completely hysterical and brilliant graphics, what began as a blog post about Wyler's The Good Fairy—a 1935 film I'd never even heard of that predates and completely differs from all of his big Hollywood hits, including Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur—turned into my first full review since God (or at least William Wyler) was a boy. Maybe one day I'll manage to churn out one of these that isn't about a movie that's already 72 years old... but I hope you enjoy this one, and though I didn't love the film, I did find it enormously interesting and well worth the rental. (It also goes without saying that the whole blog-a-thon is a real feast.)

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1971

Nothing like a Tuesday post to tell you what happened on Sunday, but is anyone else having that sensation of end-of-summer time delay? If you read this blog, you probably also read StinkyLulu's religiously enough that you already know that the 1971 Supporting Actress Smackdown played out this weekend, distinguished from past Smackdowns by the large flock of participants (nine!) and by the huge divergences of opinion about almost every performance. It's a pretty fascinating roster, partly because, in an increasingly rare Oscar move, all of the turns are legitimately supporting ones; partly because the films are such a gaggle of oddities, blending very strong elements with very weak ones (except for Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me?, which is almost entirely terrible); and partly because the turns themselves often blend strong and weak elements in unusual and difficult combinations. Just like last month, when my preferred candidate (and, in that case, Oscar's) got a pretty bad drubbing from the rest of the group, I once again backed the losing horse in the Smackdown derby: Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge, a film so lacerating in its anatomy of misogyny (and occasionally over-proud of its immersion in such misogyny) that it badly needs and greatly benefits from Ann-Margret's soft, discomfiting sincerity as one of the women that Jack Nicholson all but annihilates over the course of the film.

My pals Stinky and Queering the Apparatus both raised articulate objections to Ann-Margret's work, but because the visual and tonal atmosphere of Carnal Knowledge verges so heavily on the sterile and abstract, I admired the inertia of Ann-Margret's performance, its unironic woundedness, her simultaneously dim and pointed pauses, and the sad way in which her voice and face and body hover away from the script instead of getting drawn into its angular shapes and severe rhythms. In a strange paradox, I think she's the least talented and resourceful of the nominated actresses (also to include Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, double Tony-winner Margaret Leighton, and the indomitable Barbara Harris), but, save for Harris, she does the ablest job of fighting for her character and shifting the ground of the movie, quite against the efforts of her director. Most of the directors of these films were greater hindrances than helps to their actors, but whereas Peter Bogdanovich turns the credible, interesting women in The Last Picture Show's script into glassy, symptomatic figures of Womanhood, and Burstyn and Leachman find no way out of his oppressive and reductive aesthetic, Ann-Margret inherits a glassy and symptomatic script and creates a real woman inside it—palpably real in her anomie and neglect, and her barely adolescent despair inside a ripely adult body—and she complicates rather than adhering to or betraying the style or flow of the piece. (And to Stinky's objections that Ann-Margret forgets that Bobbie is supposed to be fun, I'd counter that it's Nicholson and Garfunkel who keep insisting that she's "fun," but surely their myopic and cruel perspectives are not to be trusted, at least not necessarily.)

I'd seen Carnal Knowledge once before and found its atmosphere so noxious and its aesthetic so highfalutin in relation to its subject that I forgot how impressed I was with Ann-Margret, and I probably underestimated the film a little bit, too. I still wouldn't recommend it, exactly, although Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, and a late-arriving Rita Moreno are all quite good, and I wouldn't recommend any of the other films, either, except insofar as Oscar found five performances that are truly worth arguing over in this field, and all of them relate to their films (often redeeming whole chapters of their films) in curious and memorable ways, even when they don't always work out. Go read the post and the long necklace of Comments that have since been added, and keep chiming in... and come back for 1990 next month, when I suspect I will once again fall into a critical minority on at least two counts. But we'll cross that crazy grifter and that happy medium when we get to them.

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1988

I've been gone from this blog for so long that I feel like I should have some magnificent soap-operatic excuse, like having been garrisoned in an Eastern prison or trapped in an Andean rockslide. Or maybe I've just been possessed, like Marlene on Days of Our Lives, surely the best/worst soap subplot ever. In truth, I probably have been possessed, but only by mundane forces like my job and a move and some writing obligations elsewhere, none of them interesting to address here. Let's just get down to business and pretend it hasn't been an entire three months since I've showed up for duty, okay?

That flaming creature StinkyLulu has invited me back for another Supporting Actress Smackdown, this time for 1988, a pretty atrocious year for Oscar. For the first time in anyone's memory, all five Best Picture nominees were late December releases, intensifying for years to come a dolorous trend of backloading prestige releases into the final weeks of the year. Worse, none of them really deserved the slots. The Accidental Tourist (my full review is here) is probably my favorite of the five, because its blend of the quirky and the genuinely melancholy is distinctive in American movies of that era, and its unremarkable surface is threaded with some poignant moments. Dangerous Liaisons is its close rival in my esteem, but the tone of that movie seems more smug and the direction and performances more scattershot whenever I revisit it—a real disappointment, because I used to love that film. Speaking of real disappointments, though, I have very little to say on behalf of the other Best Picture nominees, Mississippi Burning, Working Girl, and the winner, Rain Man. If you want proof that even the Academy membership wasn't so excited about this field, check this out: Rain Man was the only BP nominee to get nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay.

The Academy was apparently even less excited about the year's Supporting Actresses, since all of the nominees derived from those same collectively humdrum films: Joan Cusack and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, Geena Davis in The Accidental Tourist, Frances McDormand in Mississippi Burning, and Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons. It's a hugely impressive roster from the standpoint of star power. Cusack, Davis, and McDormand were virtual newbies, especially to general audiences, and even Pfeiffer had only that year established herself as a pformidable star pfor more than her pretty pface. Weaver had been double-nominated that year, with a Best Actress nod for Gorillas in the Mist, and she was also the only nominee who'd been nominated at the Golden Globes (where she won, twice) so precedent held that she'd sail to victory, but two stronger forces carried Geena Davis to an upset: the actual votes, for one, and the clairvoyance of fashionistas, who knew how f*cking fabulous she was going to look.

Davis gets my vote, too, in a squeaker over Weaver, but as with most of the 1988 races, I would have started over from scratch. I've only seen 34 movies from 1988, but I'd have swapped out Davis for Amy Wright in The Accidental Tourist, who summons up the pearly weirdness of this muffled romance even more than Davis does, in the truly supporting part of William Hurt's love-starved adult sister; I'm gaga over Sandy Dennis' acid turn in Woody Allen's Another Woman, where she reams Gena Rowlands for taking their friendship for granted in just two or three bristling scenes; Geneviève Bujold, who scooped the Los Angeles Film Critics prize, frumped down in a completely un-Oscary way in the extremely un-Oscary movie Dead Ringers, playing a barren, pill-popping actress who is psychologically abused by Jeremy Irons' twin gynecologists but reveals herself to be the sturdiest character in the film; and two Globe nominees, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ and Lena Olin as the worldly Sabine in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (My pick? - probably Olin, with an outside shot for Bujold.)

Anyway, what you really want to know is what the other Smackdowners have to say, right? Go read, and go comment: your Stinky host loves it when you do that. And let me just add in closing that during one of the three Smackdowns I've missed since last spring, one of my favorite supporting performances in Oscar history (or any history) got a pretty raw deal back in May, so if you want to say a nice thing or two about the glorious Celeste Holm in All About Eve, here's where to do it. Chin up, Karen!

The Revisions Continue...

Before... After!, with updates to the new style and color palette, illustrated and reformatted full reviews (though I only wrote seven of these last year!), easy links for sorting by title or by letter grade, quick navigation to previous and subsequent years, and, as always, a no-frames version. My beloved also tells me that he likes being able to resize the frame borders, so he can maximize his reading window, and what am I if not accommodating?

Also, though this is something of an afterthought: Before... After!, notable for prettier pictures and a new e-mail destination. The NicksFlickPicks account has been screwy for months, devouring who knows how many e-mails I never saw, so I'm steering people away from it.

Finally, if on an unrelated note, happy birthday to Dr. S, a clever, sexy, talented, and incandescent MemoryChick who never, ever needs a redesign.

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

This post is a strange non-sequitur after nearly a month of silence, especially with so many threads dangling and so many novelties (like a redesigned website!) looming on the horizon... but this is the weekend of Goatdog's 1927 Blog-a-Thon, and I hate to miss out. Once you see the beautifully illustrated and deliciously detailed showcase of Chicago cinemas in 1927 that Goatdog has prepared as the centerpiece to his feature, you'll want to participate, too.

All the Oscar enthusiasts out there probably know that during the first year of the Academy Awards, honoring films exhibited in 1927 and 1928, the "Best Picture" category was complemented by a second race called "Artistic Quality of Production," designed to honor films that made extraordinary achievements in their overall formal techniques and poetic modes of expression. F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was the winner, and anyone who has beheld that pearly, rapturous masterpiece would hardly dispute the outcome. Still, rumor has it that the path to victory was cleared for Sunrise by some ideological misgivings about an equally esteemed and durable masterpiece, King Vidor's The Crowd; indeed, the Academy Board had originally anointed The Crowd as the winner until Louis B. Mayer spent all night filibustering against it.

The implication behind this widely accepted Academy lore is that the third entrant in this race, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, was a bridesmaid from the beginning. Given the legendary status of its fellow nominees, Chang may well have deserved its bronze-medal finish, but the movie, an enormous commercial hit at the time of its release, deserves a much bigger audience and more vocal critical support than it has tended to elicit. When Andrew Sarris published The American Cinema in 1968 and basically rewrote popular American film studies as a hierarchical constellation of auteurs, he didn't even afford Cooper and Schoedsack their own paragraph or chapter (this despite the critical and commercial colossus of King Kong), and Chang doesn't appear anywhere in his catalogue of 1927's major releases. Image Entertainment, through its Milestone Collection imprimatur, released a splendid and feature-packed DVD of the film back in 2000, but it's hard to find stores that stock it or places to rent it, apart from online behemoths like Amazon and Netflix.

What I love about Chang, a film as exciting and entertaining to teach as it is to watch, is that even a casual viewer can see how Cooper and Schoedsack are simultaneously feeding into the nascent genre of the feature documentary even as they are telegraphing the various short-cuts, contrivances, and white lies (in more sense than one) on which their sentimentally exciting and affectionate ethnographic adventure-yarn depends. Like its obvious model, Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Chang introduces us to a genial but hardworking nuclear family who come to stand in for the entire region they inhabit (northern Thailand, in this case) and a vast imaginary field of "custom" and "tradition" that ostensibly permeates the area. Kru, our protagonist, his wife Chantui, and their children live in an elevated cottage with their pet monkey Bimbo (about whom more later). The family mostly live on the food they grow and the animals they hunt, though we also enjoy brief glimpses of a wider village life in which they participate, on the occasions when they leave their isolated home. Chang already makes for beautiful, engaging viewing just on the bases of the radiant location photography, the textures of the foliage, the ground, and the manmade structures, the spontaneous movements of the children and their pets.

As with Nanook, most of the humble "life" and domestic rituals we observe in Chang are recreations of already-outmoded or fanciful practices, enacted by a locally selected cast who were very conscious of performing for the camera. Kru really was married to Chantui, and their onscreen children really were their children, which is more than you can say for Nanook, and as the senior location scout and interpreter for the film crew, Kru himself enjoyed more of the creative process and was perhaps more creatively involved in the staging of his own (mis)representation than was Allakariallak, the Itinivuit man who played Flaherty's "Nanook."* In these ways, Chang captures a family group and a setting that are slightly more "real" than Nanook's, and yet the film flaunts its artificiality much more obviously. Some well-shot and extremely exciting sequences of "spontaneous" leopard attacks are nonetheless blocked suspiciously well toward the sightlines and placements of the cameras; the interior shots of the treehouse, in at least some instances, don't match the exterior perspectives of what is supposed to be the same structure.

Then there is Bimbo, the monkey, who pulls a peculiar triple-duty within Chang's terms as comic relief, as a primary site of audience identification (doting on the cute children, fleeing various predators), and as an uncomfortably anthropomorphized character, blurring the human/animal divide in ways that refract poorly on the film's representations of Kru and his family. If you count the title cards, I believe that Bimbo has the most "dialogue" in the movie, interacting with the family in a fully integrated way. He has some close shaves escaping a leopard and an elephant that make obvious use of rear-projection and other photographic tricks. Cooper and Schoedsack dote on Bimbo in a way that they don't on the human characters, and every viewer has to decide whether this choice relieves the humans of the obligation to be "adorable" or if Chang implies a mental, emotional, and linguistic continuity among the people of Siam and the gibbons in their midst.

Whatever its political implications, Chang (the Thai word for "elephant") is a remarkably efficient entertainment, packing more visual punch and pulse-quickening spectacle into 69 minutes than Trader Horn did, and with less jarring cuts between the personal scenes and the animal footage. Indeed, Chang's cameras get daringly close to several beasts, and though you notice and even relish the clear fictional contrivance of the climactic elephant stampede—it would be horrible if this razing of an entire village, portrayed to us as entertainment, were real—the pure, thundering spectacle of this sequence is quite something to behold. Watching one pissed-off elephant maul Kru's hut when she thinks he's kidnapped her baby is impressive enough, but a sprinting fleet of elephants is something altogether different, without so much as a pixel of special effects.

Chang scored with the public and with the industry. As you'll notice from the copious clippings and press notes included on the DVD, the exotic stories about the filming of Chang—frequently turning on the directors' reckless pursuit of the best, closest footage of their dangerous, unpredictable animals—were almost as crowd-pleasing as the film itself. If Chang's box office earned the duo the opportunity to direct King Kong, Cooper and Schoedsack's reputations as bold explorers and thrill-seeking image-makers certainly played into the Kong screenplay's decision to center the action around Carl Denham, a reckless filmmaker who'll do anything and venture anywhere for the right shot, and who promotes himself just as hungrily as Cooper and Schoedsack did. One tidbit on the Chang DVD includes this injunction from the directors and their studio to the theater-owners across the country exhibiting Chang: "If you are not in the habit of personally endorsing your programs, digress from the straight and narrow path just this once. Chang will live up to anything you say!" The filmmakers also declaim the virtues of projecting Chang inside pet-stores or zoo compounds, so that audiences could ostensibly watch the excited reactions of animals to their own on-screen images.

I haven't tried watching Chang in a zoo, but I have screened it for an auditorium full of restless, pent-up college undergraduates, and their reactions—excited, skeptical, nostalgic, ironic, but universally intrigued—were thrilling to gauge, and Chang's aspirations to "reality," even as it serially undercut its own pretenses in that direction, make it a fascinating time capsule of popular cinema at a moment where talkies were just arriving and the drift toward theatrical, narrative- and human-centered comedies and dramas was not yet graven in stone. Sunrise, in its more delicate and elegiac way, is just as commemorative of cinema's moment of reckoning, after thirty years of evolving traditions and on the cusp of seismic revolutions, ascendant studios, and much more standardized production. Cinema, up to that point, subsisted on a recipe of short "actualities" (acrobats flexing, boats docking, fires, kisses, rescues), nature photography, slapstick humor, formal experiments with light and continuity, and literary narratives. Chang gives you a little of all of this at once, and it's built, shot, and scripted to entertain literally anyone, from a 4-year-old to a nonagenarian member of its own original audience. Give it a whirl, tell your friends, and if you're drafting a film-studies syllabus pretty soon, consider giving the admittedly wondrous Nanook a rest.

* Turns out this family's a fraud, too! (Note the comment below.) Let's at least hope that Cooper and Schoedsack didn't keep filming while Kru and his compatriots cried for help and relief on their seal-hunting mission, as Flaherty allegedly did, and that Kru didn't die of starvation on an ice floe right after Chang came out, as Allakariallak/"Nanook" apparently did. Most of all, let's hope that reviewers like me will stop dropping tidbits of knowledge that turn out to be false, and stick to the center-ring task of reviewing and extolling what's on screen! Mea culpa. —the Management

Images © 1927 Paramount Pictures, 2000 Image Entertainment

A Brief Interruption in Service

Don't the people at my job know that I have a countdown to finish? Pardon the hideous interruption in my Ten Best list, which I'll resume as soon as possible. Blame some looming deadlines and academic over-extension, necessitating my first all-nighter inside my own office as a professional-type person. When I've had any time to write at all, I've devoted it to Nathaniel's 2nd annual Oscar Symposium, which I invite you all to read!

Very Brief Notes on Many Scandals

Little Miss Sunshine here, dashing off some first impressions on the way to work:

YAY! for Gosling. The Dreamgirls camp must be reeeeeeeally glum. Surely it's never happened that the movie with the most nominations isn't even nominated for Best Picture? By my count, the five movies that did squeeze into the top race only racked up 26 nominations among them—an incredibly low number, even lower than last year's 29. In 1998, for example, the Best Picture nominees combined for 45 nominations, with Shakespeare in Love getting 13 by its damn self. This downward trend is bad for Best Picture producers, but good for the Academy, and for audiences, because the categories don't repeat each other so endlessly.

By the way, speaking of Best Picture producers, how come everyone's still figuring out who gets credit for The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine? Is Brad Pitt, co-producer of The Departed, about to get two smackdowns this morning?

Nice showings for Children of Men (Lubezki!) and Pan's Labyrinth...with 6 noms, I can't have been far off with all those Pan's predictions, even though I'd counted on higher-category mentions.

Only five nominations for The Departed? And Wahlberg's the only acting nominee? That's a little bit Rod Serling, isn't it?

Here's what it looks like when Oscar truly doesn't care about your movie, though: I came thisclose to predicting against Volver (I was right when I said the Academy "might be a little Pedro'd out"); the movie missed in Original Screenplay and even in Best Foreign-Language Film. More surprising to me is the flat-out rejection of Casino Royale; even though I didn't hate Blood Diamond the way some of my colleagues did, it's a much less inspiring film to rack up all those technical nods—to say nothing of the weird Leo problem. (I didn't even hear "Blood Diamond" when they read that nom.)

I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me what Borat is "adapting" (wasn't Nia Vardalos an "original" for doing the same thing, even with a one-woman playscript in her hand?), or how Iris Yamashita didn't adapt the published letters of Gen. Kuribayashi, as the on-screen credits attest. Why aren't those nods flipped?

I don't have a single memory of the Good German score; the composers sure jacked The Painted Veil, but at least Desplat got in for The Queen.

An Oscar nomination for Click is sort of a hurtful thing, at least in the abstract, but I guess I'll take a look at the movie in an attempt to understand. Conversely, I am quite pleased for the unfairly maligned Poseidon, though I don't think its visual effects were even at the level of its cinematography, production design, and sound work.

I have to admit I'm kind of bored by the magician movies in Cinematography. The Prestige looked good but not incredible, and The Illusionist looked inexpensively fussed-over but sort of blah. I know all the reviews said it was brilliantly in keeping with Victorian palettes and lighting effects, etc., but I actually thought it looked tacky. Still, I hate to kick a movie when it's down and all, but I'm really gratified that Dreamgirls missed out in this particular category: that was one fugly movie, from a lighting or framing perspective. (I'm thrilled, though, for costume designer Sharen Davis, who hopefully has a decent shot against Devil Wears Prada's Pat Field. I think they're each other's competition.)

Am I right to have called for a three-wide category for Best Song? "Our Town" from Cars? Seriously? Did the Academy understand, or did I misunderstand, that within the logic of Dreamgirls, "Patience" represents a blandified selling out to a conservative, quietistic 80s aesthetic?

I bet Modern Fabulousity is pissed about Dreamgirls, but happy for Paul Greengrass; Nathaniel is trying to deal with the Clint Eastwood steamroll through Picture, Director, and Screenplay; StinkyLulu is having his worst fears confirmed about an uninteresting roster in Best Supporting Actress, even though I saw Little Miss Sunshine with him, and I remember how much he liked Abigail Breslin; and Tim R, like me, is ready to congratulate Ryan Gosling and go back to sleep. Even though a lot of us Oscar queens will find plenty to be miffed about, I loved that Salma Hayek, at least, was so emotional and excited.

Meanwhile, "I Need to Wake Up," but it's time that I Departed. That's All.

Supporting Actress Blog-a-Thon, Served Up with a Smile

One especially frustrating confluence of being away from the internet and having my blog infested by a code-devouring succubus was that I missed out on celebrating the 1975 Supporting Actress Smackdown alongside my comrades in arms. This Smackdown was exceptional for all sorts of reasons: a clipreel from Nathaniel that was even sassier and more illustrative of the nommed performances than usual; a new and very welcome participant in all the smacking; two exquisite nominees from the same legendary film; better-than-expected work from the two nominees I hadn't seen before, even though their films were horrendous; and the announcement of a hiatus in Supporting Actress Sundays for a few months while our fearless leader StinkyLulu recharges his batteries and considers some tweaks to the format.

But Stinky's just a little tired, y'all; he's not neurasthenic. Besides, the committed actressexual doesn't just plunge into celibacy at a moment's notice, so today's Supporting Actress Blog-a-Thon is more than adequate recompense for the January Smackdown that isn't to be. It's a glorious smorgasbord in and of itself, with movie bloggers all over the web stumping for one supporting actress performance from 2006 that they'd like to include in our collective, glittering time capsule. I haven't had time to read the other entries yet, but I'm already excited to hear praise for some overlooked gems, such as ModFab's ode to the very fine Kerry Washington in The Last King of Scotland, Nathaniel's gorgeous enthusiasm for the delicious Meryl Streep in A Prairie Home Companion (her best perf in 2006!), or Radio Allegro's praise for the superb Mia Kirshner in The Black Dahlia. I'm also ready to be convinced by some arguments for performances that I didn't quite love: for example, here's our resplendent host's commentary on Lindsay Beamish, the dyspeptic dominatrix in Shortbus.

For my own part, not just to avoid more consensus choices but because I think she's every bit their equal, I'd like to sing the praises of Ashley Johnson, a 23-year-old actress previously unknown to me, who contributed such an exemplary, unfussy, and wondrously humane performance as Amber in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. I am still recovering from my astonishment at the public and even the critical indifference to Fast Food Nation, which has yet to eke out even $1 million after seven weeks of release, a sharp and witty trailer, an interesting and generally favorable reception at Cannes, and two years of hype about the resurgence of liberal politics in Hollywood cinema, often in films much inferior to this one—an admittedly flawed and occasionally clumsy but smart, eloquent, detailed, and vividly acted panorama. Yes, in some passages, Eric Schlosser's nonfiction investigation has not translated sublimely into mellifluous dialogue or satisfying dramatic structures, but increasingly, the film manages the clever and principled trick of eliciting deep emotion and educated ire without compromising on its subdued, almost creepily mundane tone, sound, and look.

Johnson's performance is fundamental to the film's grand success in this regard. Cast as a fetching, agreeable, and breathtakingly self-assured teenager—a type we rarely see in movies, who makes even Rory Gilmore seem mush-mouthed and unappealing—Johnson already achieves quite a bit by communicating decency, intelligence, and lively affection for her single mom (Patricia Arquette), her gadabout uncle (Ethan Hawke), her friends, her dreams of college, her co-workers, even her alienating job at Mickey's, where she's surrounded by plastic furniture, felonious uniforms, chemical smells, and dead air, to say nothing of the shit-stained burgers and carbonated sugar-water. Amber persists, because Johnson does, in being game without being a dupe, responsible without being officious, jovial without being silly, equally at ease with adults and peers, and quite obviously liked even by her disaffected, criminally tempted cohorts at Mickey's, especially the character played by Paul Dano. Essential goodness, as the Smackdowners agreed in the comparable case of Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies, is a deceptively difficult thing to conjure on screen, especially within the mandates of narrative film to complicate or "dramatize" that goodness through unexpected actions, accelerated evolutions, or contrived scenarios.

Kudos, then, to Linklater's direction and to his and Schlosser's script for clearing some space and defying some clichés so that Johnson can assemble the credible, layered, and intriguingly optimistic person that she does. Which isn't to say that Amber doesn't evolve over the course of the film. After involving herself with a student-activist group at a nearby college, Amber carries herself to the brink of a massive and dismaying realization, not just about her job at Mickey's but about the enormous social and political structures in which it participates. Amber soon finds herself engaging in anti-corporate guerrilla efforts that seriously jeopardize the ubiquitous approval and promised upward mobility that have surrounded her through the film. It's a tribute to Johnson that she has evoked Amber's potential and her soundness of character so strongly and uncloyingly that we shudder for Amber in these moments, even if we are politically sympathetic to her new intents; it's a further tribute that she doesn't jettison Amber's earlier personality in the throes of this epiphany, but expresses Amber's reluctance, panic, and mystification even as she sticks to her cadre's dangerous plan of action after several of her older, more experienced comrades have already fled the scene. The connecting thread is Amber's solid but complicated idealism: the very trait that once may have conditioned her blindness now forces her toward precarious action.

Amber teeters on a precipice between innocence and experience, helplessness and enlightenment, optimism and agitation at the end of Fast Food Nation, in a way that makes her both an audience surrogate and a gleaming projection of how we may wish to see ourselves. Few people in Fast Food Nation's audience are as legitimately green as Amber, even if we, like her, are allowing ourselves our very first frank look at the social and political enormities innate to corporatized food and abattoir economics. Johnson's performance poses germane and important questions: will political awareness require the tarnishing of Amber's happiness, even her goodness? By the same token, are her confidence and maturity fundamentally premised on naïveté and unknowing complicity? Where is the balance between communal responsibility and shallow self-interest within Amber's political enlightenment? We can see that her activism rewards, at least in part, her high-school dreams of sharper, more enriching friends, better invitations, more promising crushes on more interesting boys. She even suggests a nervous but powerful attraction for her uncle, or at least for his life of travel and thought and tale-spinning, so the connections between domestic influences and public conduct remain lucid and compelling in Johnson's delineation of Amber.

To ask more acting-specific questions, who besides Johnson could draw out the warmth and spontaneity in Patricia Arquette, who hasn't looked this comfortable or relaxed on screen since Flirting with Disaster? Who, short of Julie Delpy, has not only indulged Ethan Hawke in his freewheeling, coffee-shop improvisations but has actually sustained and improved them with her own bright-eyed, attentive, exquisitely pitched responses? How many actresses this young, and this new to cinema, can hold the screen so compellingly in shots of active listening, fond onlooking, genial small-talk, and the nearer and nearer tremors of a shifting inner life? Johnson is a terrific, fresh screen partner and a shrewd, disciplined actress, and she manages all of this with the ease of prime Kirsten Dunst, but without the aloofness or the heavy lids. She acts terrifically without ever seeming like she's auditioning for other roles, or straining to demonstrate her gravitas. In other words, she proves her superiority to most actors her age (at least when she's cast in the right part) without signalling that this, in fact, is her primary objective—a lesson from which the talented but sternly self-conscious Natalie Portman might take some notes.

Johnson's is the smile with which Fast Food Nation serves up its terrible news. The movie wouldn't work if the smile weren't so sparkling, and so real, or if the gathering storm of fear and knowledge weren't palpable beneath that smile.

(Images © 2006 Participant Productions/20th Century Fox)