WE WANT YOUR VOTE AND ARE THEY SERIOUS? - Sam, Eric and I are in the midst of whittling down our list of the top ten films of the past 25 years (see my post from last Tuesday, Dec. 3rd below). We would like your help in constructing this list. Use whatever criteria you would like. Send your picks to: CinemaScoped@attbi.com.

I have to admit I was a bit shocked (and disappointed) to see Ebert's three-star review of the new J. Lo-Cinderella tale, 'Maid In Manhattan'. But not half as shocked as I was to read Jonathan Rosenbaum's take in the Chicago Reader. You think you know someone...

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SPEAKING OF MOVIES NOBODY WILL SEE - Has anyone seen this new movie 'Russian Ark', which is shot in one long, unbroken take? Here's the NY Times' blurb about it:

Russian Ark" is a magnificent conjuring act, an eerie historical mirage evoked in a single sweeping wave of the hand by Alexander Sokurov. The 96-minute film, shot in high-definition video in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, consists of one continuous, uninterrupted take. Thanks to recent technological innovation, it is the longest unbroken shot in the history of film. As the Steadicam operated by Tilman Büttner (the German cinematographer of "Run Lola Run") floats through the museum's galleries, a cast of 2,000 actors and extras act out random, whimsical moments of Russian imperial history that dissolve into one other like chapters of a dream.

And here I thought Welles' long take at the beginning of 'Touch of Evil' -- and Altman's spoof at the beginning of 'The Player', and Scorsese's tracking shot into the Copacabana in 'GoodFellas' -- were the most amazing uses of the long take in cinema. Sadly, like 'Adaptation', it's not playing in Chicago. How did the Windy City suddenly become Star City, Arkansas? And if you can name what movie is set in Star City, Arkansas, you get...well, I'm not sure what you'll get other than my respect and admiration.


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RABBIT-PROOF FENCE - I've been promising comments about Philip Noyce's 'Rabbit-Proof Fence' (opened limited, 11/29) for so long that whatever I have to say about it now will probably be a disappointment -- especially considering I saw the movie back in October at the Chicago International Film Festival and have no notes to reflect on. But then this is a movie playing on like five screens in the whole world so this post will be relevant to almost noone. Set in Australia in 1931, the movie is based on the true story of an Aboriginie girl named Molly Craig who was taken from her home along with two friends to a British training facility. According to British policy at the time, "half-caste" children (whose mothers were Aboriginal and whose fathers were white) were required to be removed and trained to work as servants. The end goal was that through marriage the half-caste children would eventually reproduce and somewhere down the genetic line the Aboriginal half would be washed away. It's basically an aristrocratic brand of ethnic cleansing -- the same horror but with tea and crumpets instead of guns and bombs, which is what makes it seem all the more horrific. If your interest isn't sparked yet, I haven't even gotten to the heart of the story, which follows Molly and her friends as they escape from the facility and embark on a 1500-mile journey back home using the titular fence as their guide. That's three kids. 1500 miles. Walking. The movie is a remarkable one, primarily because the story itself is so remarkable. Using non-professional actors and a cinema verite style, Noyce's only misstep is that he marks the line between good (the kind-hearted, happy natives) and evil (the British regulators) a little too neatly, at least in the scenes with Kenneth Branagh who plays A.O. Neville, the man in charge of overseeing the half-castes. The scenes of the Australian landscape are bathed in a warm, yellow glow against a clear-blue sky and shot with simple, fluid camera movements. There are also not as many close-ups, which would cinematically accomplish what the British were doing to the Aboriginies, which is to remove them from their surroundings. In contrast, all of Neville's scenes are a crisp, cold blue with harsh whites and sharp cuts that immediately make you uneasy. It's just a little too obvious for my taste, especially when Branagh is consistently shot at a low angle to signifiy his power. Noyce doesn't want us to think even for a second that their is any kind of nobility in Neville's endeavor -- and there definitely isn't -- but the fact is that evil people very rarely view themselves as being evil. They're just doing what they believe is right, no matter how misguided it might appear to others, or to us 70 years later. Neville is positively sure he is helping the Aboriginies, an irony that Noyce could have toyed with a bit more rather than color-coding who the bad guy is. Switching gears for a second, Sam piqued my interest with something he mentioned in his musings on Wednesday. With regard to 'Monsoon Wedding', he wrote: "Are actors in foreign films inherently more believable than actors (particularly well-known actors) in English-language films." I'll raise you one: Are non-professional actors, especially foreign ones, inherently more believable than professional actors (particularly well-known ones)? I automatically attributed a certain naturality to the behavior of these girls -- actual Aboriginie girls playing Aboriginie girls -- that I'm not sure I would have granted to regular actors. And I find that I always have this reaction with foreign non-actors. Is it because they are speaking in a foreign tongue and our ears are not able to pick up the kind of inflections that sometimes make a performance seem fake? Take Ed Burns' 'The Brothers' McMullen, for example. Burns cast is actual girlfriend at the time, Maxine Bahns, who had never acted before, to play his love interest in the movie. And really all she is doing is playing herself -- a 20-something living in New York, probably a student, which she was at the time. But her performance is textbook bad acting, horrible even by low-budget indie standards. Why couldn't I buy her performance, but every time I see a non-actor in a foreign movie -- any of Rossellini's and Fellini's neorealist efforts, the recent 'Himalaya', and so on -- I am inevitably convinced buy it? I'm not sure, but Noyce's semi-neorealist aesthetic worked for me and I was moved by the story and the performances of the girls, particularly the lead.

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MY RANDOM MUSINGS- You've heard the rumors, and, alas, they appear to be true. A deal is apparently in place that would have Sly Stallone lacing up the gloves one more time to play the Italian Stallion in 'Rocky VI' -- something about running a youth center and being roped back in for one more fight. I think what I'm looking forward to most is the inevitable scene where Talia Shires yells, "You're gonna get killed!" Stallone, who did write the screenplay to the best-picture winning original -- 'Rocky' beat 'All The President's Men', 'Network', and 'Taxi Driver' in 1976; think about that for a sec -- is reportedly developing the script. We can only hope the dialogue is as good as his last effort, 'Driven', which produced this gem: "Faith is like a good disease...it's contagious." As a blogger I know I'm supposed to come up with fountains of snarky remarks here -- and I picked this story to comment on just for that reason -- but I can't bring myself to do it. The story is it's own punchline. * I was flipping channels this past weekend and came across 'As Good As It Gets', a film that was nominated for best picture and earned an Oscar for its star, Jack Nicholson, back in 1997. I've caught parts of this movie on TV a few times since seeing it in the theater and I'm always struck by an awful feeling of self-loathing for having actually enjoyed it the first time I saw it. As some CS readers will recall, I ranted about this same subject on my old Iowa City radio show, "Burn Hollywood Burn," earlier in the year, but I just can't seem to let it go. This time I had the pleasure of tuning in to see Nicholson deliver his "Don't knock on my door ever again you little queer speech" to Greg Kinnear. How did I fall for this? How did I find this amusing? And how did Nicholson win an Oscar for such a tedious, ham-fisted performance? His delivery is so protracted as he basks in his "Jack-ness" that the scene becomes interminable. He just seems to be working sooo hard. "Mugging" is probably the best word to describe it, which is exactly what Slate's David Edelstein does when mentioning the performance in his tepid review of Nicholson's latest, 'About Schmidt', which was written and directed by Alexander Payne of 'Election' fame and opens Friday. (See, this post is topical after all.) Sadly, it only opens in NY and LA, which leaves the rest of us with: 'Maid In Manhattan', 'Star Trek: Nemesis', 'The Hot Chick', and 'Drumline'. Ouch. Guess the DVD player will see some action this weekend. 'Rabbit-Proof Fence' comments coming Friday...no really.

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SAM'S RANDOM MUSINGS - In my effort to catch up on this year's best-reviewed films, I saw "Monsoon Wedding" over the weekend. As I watched it, it was impossible for me not to compare it to this year's biggest box office surprise (and recent Oscar-talk bait) "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." A comparison may be unfair, because they are very different films; but watching the two films in fairly close succession has given me some clarity in articulating what I didn't like about "Fat Greek Wedding" (which itself might be redundant and unnecessary). Using a camera that remains in almost constant motion, "Monsoon Wedding" succeeds in submerging you into the frenzy of the few days preceding an upper middle class "dot com" wedding in New Delhi, India. The script, which has characters speaking interchangeably in English and Hindi, offers only scant help in sorting out the various and sundry family members; but what you get is a wonderfully chaotic portrait of a family in transition. Despite reports that the characters that make up Nia Vardalos' Fat Greek Family are based on actual family members, the film is still a canvas painted with a large, cartoonish brush, and the script is little more than a series of hit-and-miss punch lines. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” still works on the strength of the actors, but no better than an above-average sit-com. The extended family in Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding" looks, feels, and sounds like a real family. When the film strays from character into plot, the film loses momentum and occasionally comes off as contrived, but I found these mild distractions. The sheer volume of ideas and characters and sights and sounds that the film introduces is intoxicating. Nair doesn’t condescend to any of her characters; instead, she mines humor out of a community of (very un-cartoonish) individuals who are provoked to sometimes outrageous fits of passion due to extraordinary circumstances. The extraordinary circumstances in this case being a wedding that brings together a bride and groom who have only met days before their wedding (it’s an arranged wedding); family members who have used the springboard of the global economy to leave New Delhi and India; and members of opposing classes and castes who struggle to shed the burden of history, while still embracing tradition. Not everything works in Nair’s film, and end is more cathartic than it is dramatically sound; but there is a contagious spirit of well-earned fun to the film. Definitely one of the better movies I’ve seen this year.

Something on a related topic that my girlfriend raised after we watched “Monsoon Wedding” that Adam and Eric might have an opinion on: Are actors in foreign films inherently more believable than actors (particularly well-known actors) in English-language films? I don’t watch a lot of foreign films, but I don’t go out of my way to avoid them either; and I think there’s some truth to this. I know with “Monsoon Wedding” I shut off the part of my brain that, with American films, is used to identify examples of illogic or inconsistency. I don’t know anything about traditional Indian customs, so I paid more attention to the story and the relationships. Ignorance is bliss. The same could be said for the power of unknown actors. Joaquin Phoenix is great in “To Die For” (for example), but the impact of his performance was all the greater because we had no expectations of him. There are a thousand examples of this; I just can’t think of any. Guy Pearce and (the relatively unknown) Russell Crowe in “LA Confidential;” Matthew McConaughey in “Dazed and Confused” (it’s impossible to watch that film now and not see “Matthew McConaughey;” whereas, when I first saw it, I thought to myself: “where did they find THAT guy?”). There are some films out there that I’m convinced I would have loved if they had been re-cast with unknown actors (“The Thin Red Line” comes immediately to mind; or basically any war movie where you know the guy played by Bruce Willis or whoever probably isn’t going to die). Thoughts on this, guys?

Final thought on the best sports movie of all time. I insist that anyone who claims that “The Natural” is their favorite sports movie should go and watch it again (as I did less than a month ago). It is atrocious. Terribly cast and boringly acted, it has almost nothing to do with baseball. It is moralistic, misogynistic and trite. I can’t believe I sat through it as a child. What a boring movie. A single caveat: the scene at the end still gives me chills. But that’s because it’s a baseball fantasy, and I love baseball. The music, the cinematography. You don’t need the rest of the film to appreciate that. “Hoosiers,” which I also saw again recently, is hands-down the best sports movie of all time. No question. Three things allow it to trump the entertainment value of “Bull Durham”: it’s based on a true story; it makes you feel like shooting hoops; and it’s got Gene Hackman’s laugh (which, in the event of his passing, should be put in the Smithsonian).

SPORTS MOVIES - I'm going to have a review of 'Rabbit-Proof Fence' tomorrow along with some other random musings. But until then, Rico has provoked a bit of a debate in the Feedback Forum on the subject of sports movies...why I'm not entirely sure, but it's worth commenting on nevertheless. Everyone seems to agree that 'Field of Dreams' belongs at the top of the list or at least near it, and as a baseball fan first and foremost, and as someone who (rightly or wrongly) doesn't consider 'Raging Bull' to be a "sports movie", I'm inclined to agree. Sure Ray Liotta plays Shoeless Joe Jackson as a righty -- how did the casting agent/filmmakers overlook this? -- and they mispronounce White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte as 'Che-cotty' when it should be 'See-cot', as anyone who has seen Sayles' great 'Eight Men Out' is well aware, but it's truly an American classic. It's a movie that's as much about fathers and sons as it is baseball. 'Bull Durham' is a close second because, as LawDog admits, I can watch it three times a week and not get tired of it. Joeycotton stands out from the group by putting 'Slap Shot' at the top of his list and then slamming 'The Natural' as "the worst sports movie ever." Shamefully, I have never seen 'Slap Shot' despite the fact that I work for a professional hockey team! I come to work each day scared to death that I'll be found out, outed for all of my co-workers to humiliate and ridicule. As for 'The Natural', Joeyc and the Movie Club's own Sam Hallgren are on crack if they hate this movie. Much like 'Field of Dreams' and it's source material -- the book 'Shoeless Joe' -- 'The Natural' is actually a better movie than a book, even if Barry Levinson makes Roy Hobbs into the embodiment of perfection and Hollywood-izes the ending. Manipulative? Maybe, but if you don't get a chill down your spine when the ball hits the lights at the end and the sparks fly onto the field, then I say there's something wrong with you. I am absolutely unashamed about the fact that this moment provokes the same response from me today as it did when I was 12. For what it's worth, ESPN Page 2 produced this list awhile back of their top 20 sports movies of all-time. You can also read Bob Halloran's missive about how 'Bull Durham' is over-rated, self-indulgent crap. He argues his points well even if there is only one criticism that really holds up, which is the fact that Nuke (Tim Robbins) somehow gets called up straight from "A" ball to "The Show," skipping the usual "AA" and "AAA." My college roommates and I, who watched this movie about 100 times senior year, have always had a problem with this bit of fantasy too. And who knows, maybe Halloran is right about 'Durham.' After all, Ron Shelton did direct the dreadful 'Cobb' and the even more dreadful -- I mean despicably bad -- 'Play It To The Bone.' I also dislike Shelton's 'Tin Cup' about as much as Halloran does 'Durham' -- probably for the same primary reason, too, which is that everyone else seems to love it way too much. But don't you ever say an unkind word about 'White Men Can't Jump'. Forget Newman and Redford, Astaire and Rogers, has there ever been a better on-screen duo than Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes?

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