2011 Year in Review and Awards Post!

First, the boring statistics. For the second year in a row, I watched the most movies in December (a whopping 50) as I was trying to reach the yearly goal. I watched the least movies in August (only 16) as school was starting up. Most of the latter were watched on a urine-stained couch. The year started strong with a January average rating of 14.6. The lowest-rated month was November at 10.9. The overall average this year rounds up to 13. That's .7 less than last year, but it's higher than the year  before. For the 4th straight year, the rating I gave out the most was a 16/20. Last year, I didn't have a single 1/20. In 2011, I watched two. There were also only two 19/20's.

Readership: I think it's the same--4 1/2 readers. Anybody got any ideas? Maybe I'll start promoting more because the more I read myself the past couple of days in preparation for this post, the more I realized how delightfully entertaining I am.

But enough about me. You 4 1/2 readers come here for the awards.

The Billy Curtis Award (Best performance by a little person): Not a particularly strong field this year. I like Danny Devito's work in Cuckoos Nest, and Jesus Juarez is great as Aladin in Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre. I liked that little caramel-covered Indian in The Manitou, but that little bugger was actually played by a pair of little fellows--Joe Gieb and Felix Silla, both who will probably find in this blog after Googling themselves and be thrilled to come so close to winning the Billy Curtis Award. This one was really no contest though as Weng Weng jump-kicked and scooted into my heart as Agent Double-O in For Your Height Only. Whether as a fighter or a lover, a kung-fu or weapons master or a guy floating from a top floor of an apartment building with an umbrella, Weng Weng delivered the goods. Way to go, little buddy!

Most Embarrassing Thing That Happened While Shane Was Blogging in 2011 That He Probably Shouldn't Even Admit to His Readers: How much I giggled after imagining little people Googling themselves.

Best Blog Comments: Because it's really you 4 1/2 readers that make this blog the success that it is! Here are my favorite comments from the year:

"Starting off the movie club with accusations of brutality? Couldn't ask for more." (L@rstonovich)
"Ohhh snap. That plan of posting like a billion reviews almost worked. Bitch!" (my brother, after my plan to post a billion reviews to hide a movie that I was supposed to watch with him didn't work)
"I will never see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It beat Jaws for Best Picture. (Barry, bewilderingly)
"[Gump's] voice is like a cheese grater to the balls." (my brother again)
"Haven't seen it." (Barry, numerous times)
"I thought, 'Ringo doesn't cry!'" (Cory, possibly still crying himself after his failed efforts to get Ringo's autograph)
"If I didn't know any better, I would suspect you of subtly pointing out that I misspelled caricature...and you did it twice!" (a paranoid Cory...or is he?)
"If you had seen [Inception] in a theater, you would have given it a 36." (Cory)

Readers don't get to see all the comments. Anonymous comments, spam. Here are the three best ones:

"Dreadfully fine document. I just stumbled upon your weblog moreover required to reveal that I've truly enjoyed browsing your web publication posts. After all I'll be subscribing to your rss feed as a consequence I wish you compose over again before long! As a final point, permit me to thank you for your understanding with my English as (I'm convinced you have become aware this at this moment,), English is not my main tongue consequently I am utilizing Google Translate to figure out how to write down what I sincerely mean to say." (for Cars)

"You have a very good blog that the main thing a lot of interesting and useful!" (left by "Order Anti-Depressants")

"You are truly correct with this piece." (left, of course, on the Up post)

Movie That Caused Me to Suffer the Most Abuse from People Who Are Supposed to Love Me: Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas. I need a new family.

Scene That Causes Spontaneous Bits of Giddiness When I Think about It: When the guy in 127 Hours starts hallucinating and imagines that Scooby Doo is with him. That laugh!

Number of Movie Posts in Which I Confused or Asked about Alligators and Crocodiles: 6. 7 if you count this one.

Best Nipples: Leslie Nelson in Day of the Animals! The worst scene with a nipple is probably in Ichi the Killer when a nipple gets sliced off.


Best Fight Scene: So many good ones. Anything with Weng Weng could have won. The fight between a boy with a stick and an alligator (or would that be a crocodile) in Louisiana Story is really a thrilling action sequence. In Night of the Demon, you get a scene where a guy fights a stuffed animal. Leslie Nelson could take this and the nipple category with his fight against a bear in one of the most erotic movie moments I saw this year. Arnold Schwarzenegger also fights a bear in Hercules in New York, although it's really a guy in a bear suit because Arnold doesn't have Nieson's nipple power. Rat Pfink and Boo-Boo also fight a guy in a bear suit. Lots of good kung-fu action--Bruce Lee, Donnie Yen vs. a whole bunch of dudes in Ip Man, the showcase of weaponry at the end of The Legendary Weapons of Kung-fu, several fights in Master of the Flying Guillotine but especially the ones involving the guy who can extend his arms to ten feet, Super Inframan against all those guys in rubber suits. The award, however goes to Lionel and his lawnmower against all those zombies in Dead Alive. Bloodbath-o-rama!

Best Special Effect: A three-way tie because I couldn't decide between the flying horse scene in Ashik Kerib (accomplished with a spinning globe), the woman falling in Day of the Animals (accomplished with a blue screen), and the baby octopus in Octaman. I don't know how that last effect was accomplished.

Movie That Needed Mel Tillis the Most: The King's Speech. Tillis would have brought the laughs.

Number of Movies That I Think Andy Dick Might Have Been In: 17, a new shane-movies record!

Best Giant: John Aasen in Harold Lloyd's Why Worry? despite Richard Kiel's attempts to win the award by popping up in every other movie I watched in December

Best Documentary: Marwencol! Although I also loved Exit through the Gift Shop, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Why We Fight, Brother's Keeper, Vernon Florida, and I Like Killing Flies.

The Question I Asked My Readers That I'm Disappointed None of Them Answered: Are there any movies with a Whoopi Goldberg nude scene?

The Movie That Should Have Killed Me but Didn't: Teen Wolf, which also started the Urine Couch A.M. Movie Club. All those recurring dreams of dying while van surfing? Watching this at the most dangerous motel in Indianapolis? I risked my life to see shaggy Michael J. Fox dunk basketballs in this one.
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My Favorite Thing I Wrote All Year: "I liked Jafar as a villain. . .but when he turns into a genie and starts making puns that would make C3PO groan, it was clear that the script could use some editing."

Another Time When My Readers Let Me Down: After I asked if anybody wanted to do a "Human Centipede" thing with me for Halloween, I got no responses. None! The offer's still on the table, people.

Best Puppet: I've already mentioned how much I enjoy Emmet Otter's legs, but that little furball had too much competition this year. We had creepy Hugo in Devil Doll, the skeletal creatures and sock caterpillar in Svankmajer's Alice, the wonderful Bilial in Basket Case. Heck, if I can count Mitzi Mozzarella as a puppet, there's even a sort of strip tease in that documentary about Showbiz Pizza's band! But I have to give the award for best puppet to Gordon in Follow That Bird.

Worst Puppet Omission: How could they not put Roosevelt Franklin in Follow That Bird? Is it because they already had Gordon?

Best Shane-Movies Transvestite Experience: Easy. I only had one, the interruption of American Splendor by a transvestite who first wanted stale doughnuts and later wanted to sell me a shrink-wrapped pornographic DVD for five dollars. My biggest regret of the year? Not buying that DVD.

Most Controversial Thing I Typed: "Why was Kevin Costner's wife wearing a beanie at one point?" It was the question that almost destroyed the Oprah Movie Club!

Other Favorite Things That I Wrote This Year (If you can guess the movies correctly in the comments, you can win a prize!):

1. "Next time I'm on an elevator, I'm just going to go ahead and kill everybody just to be on the safe side."
2. "I'm going to try to start my career as a battle rapper."
3. "Halitosis bonerificus!"
4. "I want breasts on my Disney princesses."
5. "I have the hots for Mary-Louise Parker. Don't tell my wife. I can type that because she only skims this crap."
6. "[A titular character] reminds me of my penis."
7. "All I want is a two-hour film in which Renee Zellweger gets beaten with a shovel."
8. "Black people are really dangerous."
9. "[This movie] was the only source Al Gore used for An Inconvenient Truth."
10. [The spanking scene in this movie] reminds me--a baseball coach at my school was telling me today that one of his players couldn't make it to practice because he injured himself by "diving onto his bed with a hard-on," hurting the member."

Amount of Tarkovsky's Movies I Watched After Announcing That I Was Going to Watch All of His Movies Back in January: None.

Number of Movies That Used "Beyond the Sea": 27. This is a real statistic!

Best Sex Scene: Another tough one! Nicolas Cage and Satan (you have to turn your head sideways and squint a little) in the otherwise dreadful Season of the Witch. The wind and door sequence in Out of the Past. The drill/robots sex in Tetsuo. Action hero Tom Griffith's bare-bottomed work in Nightbeast. The great line that ends the scene in Taoism Drunkard: "How is it? Is it comfortable?" Silvano Venturelli and everybody else in The Lickerish Quartet movie. Nic Cage again in Deadfall, a scene with just him and a bed. The scene in Taxidermia that includes a hole in the wall of a barn, lubricant, and a rooster. Bilial in Basket Case or the Fleshapoids with their finger lightning in that Kuchar movie. Those were all good and very very erotic, but the scene that takes the prize? Ashik Kerib's sex scene in which a clown covers a couple with a sheet before a couple guys blow horns and a couple more guys release a bunch of doves. That one wins because it was in a children's movie.

Most Erotic Movie Moment That Isn't Really a Sex Scene: Catherine Keener's delivery of the line "We'll see" in Being John Malkovich. Oh, there's also that scene in The Cat in the Hat where Kelly Preston vacuums somebody. That's hot. And of course, Tippi and those birds.

Best Masturbation Scene in a Motion Picture: C'mon. I still have this award? Somebody needs to take this blog away from me! I would have thought that Natalie Portman, in what would undoubtedly be her proudest moment as an actress, would win this one easily with her masturbation work in The Black Swan. It definitely beats the Randy Quaid/dildo opener of Another Teen Movie and John C. Reilly's work in Cyrus. Crispin Glover doesn't masturbate on screen, but his line about how he doesn't masturbate in Fast Sofa is close enough: "I've never done that. . .thing. That thing with the dolphins and the ponies." There's implied masturbation of a tire in Rubber which is great, and it's fun watching John Waters watching Chucky masturbate in Seed of Chucky ("A masturbating midget!"). But this is all Taxidermia's award for its opening scene (that's right--it opens with this) where a guy ejaculates fire. Sorry, Natalie Portman. Maybe you can try again and win next year!

Movies That Made Me Cry: Make Way for Tomorrow, Edward Scissorhands, Toy Story, Cars, Yellow Brick Road, The Illusionist, Waste Land, Anvil: The Story of Anvil

Best Stunt: The bike stunt from Bad Ronald

 Worst Child Actor: Mike "Boys have penises; girls have a vagina" Hughes would take this easily for his work in Kindergarten Cop but had the disadvantage of acting next to Arnold Schwarzenegger which made him look not as bad. Milton Davis Jr. is terrible in Angels in the Outfield, but at least I was convinced he was really a black kid. He pulled off "black kid" pretty well. The kid who played Bodo in Watch on the Rhine though? Eric Roberts couldn't even convince this viewer that he was a kid! A truly awful and irritating performance.

Best Sound Effect: It's got to be the hiccup from Hukkle, my second favorite movie from this year. Although I did like the final sounds in Mongolian Ping Pong and some grunting the The Saragossa Manuscript as well.

Best Monster: This category is tough every year. I'm going with the Watermelon Monster from Taoism Drunkard, but look at these other contenders: the Demon in Night of the Demon, the titular creatures in Attack of the Eye Creatures, Larry Buchanan's other monsters in Zontar--The Thing from Venus and Curse of the Swamp Monster (the monster in the latter is mostly recycled from It's Alive! though), the little uvula-stealing demon in that Miike movie, the Umbrella Monster in that Yokai Monsters movie, rubbery-blubbery Yongary, all those rubber-suited guys in Super Inframan, Ortega from Mixed-Up Zombies, the fearful Manitou, the bunny-exploding tire from Rubber, Octaman, Gooby. That's a nightmarish collection of monsters!

Best Musical Movie Moment: You've got Joe Pesci singing Chuck Berry, a wicked dancing scene in the Greek Dogtooth, another great dance number in Godard's Band of Outsiders, the guy singing "If I Only Had a Brain" in Yellow Brick Road, the piano mayhem near the end of Hausu, Bad Boy Bubby's punk antics? They're all good, but this is the actor known as Lucky Ron's award for his work in Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. His scene as Blind Jimmy Leper is a short one. He enters, scats, and is gone, never (as of right now) making another movie appearance. I'm guessing it's because he knew that he had climaxed, that nothing he ever did again would come close to touching this scene.

Best Animated Movie: Out of the ones I had not previously seen, The Illusionist takes it easily. Beautiful, beautiful movie. I also liked A Town Called Panic, Idiots and Angels, Rango, and Blood and Red String.

Weirdest Thing in Any Movie I Saw This Year: The face groping thing that John Travolta does in Face/Off. What the hell is that?

Best Movie Quote of the Year (not said by Nicolas Cage or Crispin Glover): See if you can guess the movie! No prizes though.

"God called us here to shoot this movie, and we're going to shoot this movie--camera or no camera!"
"You want a taste of my sewage pipe?"
"I am using abdominal language to joke with you."
"And the omelet stinks!"
"Hi, doggy!"
"Have you seen a five-year-old boy, blond hair, and he's wearing a t-shirt that says "bullshit" on it?"
"Remember, Boo-Boo, we only have one weakness--guns!"
"You shouldn't have been from Minneapolis."
"I haven't seen any goats!"
"You're quite a good chicken strangler."
"I'll be like, what time is it? Five o'clock? Damn. Time to rape me some fine bitches." (This one is really special and the one I'll most likely quote at dinner parties.)
"I've seen amputees with better hands than this."
"He had a lot of ukuleles in his trunk."
"Our Father, who art in heaven, you made a jackass out of me for years!" (Leslie Nelson again!)
"Let's shag ass."

Best Nicolas Cage Moment: In a year that included the ongoing Summer of Nicolas Cage, this isn't going to be an easy choice. Watch Vampire's Kiss or Deadfall in their entirety, and you will see Cage at his very best. The reciting of the ABC's and the "I'm a vampire!" scenes in the former and the "What am I--a fucking retard? Huh?" delivery or the awesome karate kick in the latter? Movie magic. Stuff like that is why we watch movies! Other great Nic Cage moments:

"Banana nut--that's a good muffin." (His real best performance in Adaptation. Heck, there are two of him!)
"You know, I can eat a peach for hours." (from Face/Off, and I'd like to meet the woman who isn't turned on by those words)
"Have you ever been taken to the sidewalk and beaten until you pissed blood?" (magical moment from Matchstick Men)
Dozens of Nic Cages on screen at the same time in Next (actually, that's not as euphoric as you'd think)
His sex scene in Drive Angry where he smokes a cigar, drinks whiskey, kills garden-utensil-wielding Satan worshippers, and screws a woman simultaneously
Cage and Tom Waits on the screen at the same time in Rumblefish

Best Scene Featuring an Animal: A cow is eviscerated in Viva La Muerte, rats jump on Roger Barnes' face in Day of the Animals, a guy calls a turtle a gopher in Vernon Florida, Crispin Glover flips out over a bird in Fast Sofa, a turtle is torn to pieces is Cannibal Holocaust, Paris Hilton's face falls off in Repo Man: The Musical, and Gooby wafts his fart. The best animal scene is the elephant funeral in Santa Sangre though. It's one of those can't-believe-this-exists things.

Best Actress: Anna Karina is just so pretty in Band of Outsiders. I just want to squeeze her. Again, I can type things like that because there's no way my wife (or anybody for that matter) will read it. Jennifer Tilly's work in both Seed of Chucky and especially Fast Sofa can't be ignored. Crispin Glover's mom in Willard (Jackie Burroughs) is really awesome, too. But the Best Actress award goes to Helen Lloyd Breed for her one line in Vampire's Kiss. To stand out in a movie where Nicolas Cage is that Nicolas Cagey is award worthy.

Best Actor (Nicolas Cage and Crispin Glover Aren't Allowed in This Category): I saw a lot of my favorites this year--Matti Pellonpaa, Paul Benedict, Klaus Kinski, Peter Stormare. I think David Thewlis in Naked is about as great as it gets, and Richard Beckwith's work as a medium in Night of the Demon really has to be seen to be believed. I really wanted to give this award to Fred Kaz for his work as Noah in ...And God Spoke: The Making of. But Tom Hardy in Bronson was just too mesmerizing and powerful to not win this one.

The Torgo Award (Best Worst Acting Performance): I really would like a woman to win this award some day. Same with the Billy Curtis! And Linda Watkins almost did it as the neighbor in Bad Ronald, most impressive because she doesn't even have a single line! Jake Busey came on strong at the end of the year with the crap he threw on the screen in Fast Sofa. The guys who played "Jim" and "Uncle Dave" in The Attack of the the Eye Creatures (my favorite on-screen error of the year) and Nightbeast were just awful, and believe it or not, Tom Waits could have won this award for his wackiness in Cold Feet ("I'd like some cowpoke stuff."). Arnold delivers a bad performance in Hercules in New York and an even worse one in Kindergarten Cop. But there's just no way anybody is beating Tommy Wiseau in this category. I have trouble imagining anybody being worse than he was in The Room.

The Manos (Best Worst Movie): Tommy Wiseau again with The Room. Not that there wasn't stiff competition. Buchanan's Eye Creatures, Zontar, and Swamp Monster could all three have given him a chance to win his second Manos in a year where I didn't watch The Room. Ray Dennis Steckler's Rat Pfink and Incredibly Strange Creatures are both solid pieces of inept filmmaking. Nightbeast, The Manitou, Hercules in New York, Bad Ronald, Octaman, Day of the Animals. I loved all of those. But they all have one problem--they're not Tommy Wiseau's The Room and therefore can't win the Manos for 2011.

Worst Movie (Bad Worst Movie): Well, I saw The Cat in the Hat on the Urine Couch. No need to count any ballots this year.

Best Movies of the Year (in no particular order): Note--this excludes Naked, Do the Right Thing, Alice, Goodfellas, Rope, Psycho, The Birds, The Royal Tenenbaums, Enter the Dragon (a 20/20 if I ever saw one!), Being John Malkovich, Edward Scissorhands, Double Indemnity, Punch-Drunk Love, Adaptation, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Santa Sangre, Out of the Past, Toy Story, and any other movie I'd previously seen. This is a list of Best Movies New to Shane:

Hukkle
Taxidermia
Make Way for Tomorrow
Ip Man
Ace in the Hole
Ivan's Childhood
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
The Cremator
Lenny
Irreversible
The Saragossa Manuscript
Tree of Life
Witness for the Prosecution
The Social Network
Vampire's Kiss

Very Best Movie I Saw This Year: Werckmeister Harmonies

Favorite Crispin Glover Moment: His answer to his mother's "What are you doing in there?" question in Willard: "I'm going potty!"