Best Documentary: I watched three featuring animals that were all really good--Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, The Natural History of the Chicken, and Animals Are Beautiful People. Cory recommended the great Errol Morris movie featuring Robert S. McNamara, Fog of War, disappointing because it didn’t have a single toad-on-toad sex scene, any yodeling or chicken impressions, or drunk animals like those other three. Room 237 dazzled me with its collection of strange ideas about The Shining, and Beauty Is Embarrassing was a great look at an artistic oddball, my favorite kind of artist. But I’m a chess guy, so the incredible Bobby Fischer vs. the World wins it. But seriously, those cane toads were pretty awesome.
Best Musical: Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles has perverse puppetry, and in any other year might be hard to beat. And the homoerotic Can’t Stop the Music could get the prize except it’s more of a biopic with some interrupting Village People music videos. The big Bollywood production Enthiran is maybe the best sci-fi musical I’ll ever see and makes me giddy just thinking about it, but it’s also more in that music-video-interrupting-mayhem category. The best musical is Troma’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. A warning though: If you’re looking for a musical to watch because you liked West Side Story or The Music Man, this might not be for you.
Best Song: “Friends Forever” from Miami Connection. There can be no second place.
Most Memorable Montage: There’s an Eddie Money song used behind some random nonsense in Stallone’s arm-wrestling epic Over the Top. There’s only one thing I can think of that’s worse than that montage--one used later in that movie with a terrible song by Frank Stallone, a guy who I’m going to assume is related to Sylvester Stallone. Speaking of Stallone, Cobra has a nifty montage of images with Sly and his partner interrogating street thugs, a cult slapping axes together, and Brigitte Nelson posing for pictures with robots. That’s something. There’s only one montage that can win this though--”YMCA” in Can’t Stop the Music which managed to make me want to invent a time machine so I could travel to the late-70s and wear really short shorts, exercise more, and have sexual intercourse with a man.
Biggest Movie Badass: So easy! In a year where I watched Arnold Schwarzenneger, Sylvester Stallone, and Joe Piscopo movies, there’s still only one badass who can be the biggest badass and that badass is Jon Mikl Thor for his badassery in the fantastic Rock and Roll Nightmare. I mean, let’s see Sylvester Stallone battle Satan and come out of it alive.
Something I Claimed I Was Going to Start Doing but Forgot All About: Say “Come on, God damn it!” every time I step in an elevator and push the buttons like Weaver does in Aliens.
Best Stunt: 2’9” Weng Weng’s leap over a chasm on a pocket rocket in The Incredible Kid of Kung Fu! You can’t end that sentence fragment without an exclamation mark.
Sexiest Moment Not Involving Actual Sex: That 20-foot-tall Sophia Loren in Chicken with Plums was a sight to behold, but when Anna Karina looked straight at me and winked in A Woman Is a Woman, that was the best--and I mean the absolute best--moment of my entire life.
Best Comments I Received All Year:
“I find this review pretentious and sad.” (anonymous, for my write-up of A Nightmare on Elm Street)
“A female telephone repairman? That’s not a thing.” (my brother)
“You were going to cry? What?” (my wife, making me feel bad for my feelings while watching Life of Pi)
“Maybe Bin Laden watches this for laughs in a cave under the grassy knoll.” (Cory, describing Zero Dark Thirty)
“Lew Zealand should not be above Swedish Chef.” (Cory again, showing that we all have a little too much time on our hands)
“You’ve officially surpassed Roger Ebert in my estimation of film critics.” (Matt, and all I had to do was write about Cane Toads: An Unnatural History)
“When the hell did you start identifying with guys who are older than our parents?” (Barry, in a question to Cory about The Bucket List)
Best Animated Movie: Not a strong year with animated movies for me. I didn’t watch very many, and ParaNorman and Wreck-It Ralph were only as good as Starchaser: The Legend of Orin which we watched for Bad Movie Club. The aforementioned Dead Leaves had a penis drill but wasn’t even really long enough to be considered a full-length movie. Monsters University was really good but not great. So I’m going with Jan Svankmajer’s Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) which is a mix of animation and live action. It’s kind of cheating, but Jan Svankmajer deserves to win an award.
Best Svankmajer Moment Not in a Svankmajer Movie: Animated meat in John Dies at the End, the best part of that movie.
Best Silent Movie: I didn’t watch a lot of those either! The best was the stunner Sunset although I did enjoy Harry Langdon’s The Chaser, a slightly-surreal 1920’s comedy about impotence. I also showed my students Modern Times on our team party day right before break, and they all seemed to love it. They’re not going to admit to it though.
The Shammallammadingdong: Another new award! This one goes to the best (or maybe the dumbest) twist in any movie that I saw all year or, if not the best, then the most Shammallammadingdong-esque. Shriek of the Mutilated is one bad movie, but the twist--which I suspect was just a way to explain why the Yeti looked a lot like a guy in a costume--was pretty terrific. But I’m giving this to a racist’s realization at the end of Abar: The First Black Superman, another bad movie. An absolutely amazing way to end a movie! And no, I’m not going to spoil it. But it was really stupid.
Best Nudity: A photograph of Bobby Fischer’s posterior in the documentary I mentioned earlier.
Speaking of That, Here’s a List of Things That Would Probably Irritate My Wife If She Read My Blog More Closely:
A confession: That I was aroused while watching Yogi Bear
“How hot would it be to date a lizard woman?”
“I find metronomes sexy.”
“Leggy blonds in skimpy denim cut-offs being groped by zombies--that’s a movie I’d want to watch.”
Upon realizing that dwarf actor Arturo Gil was in an Olson Twins movie: “the hottest menage-a-trois I’ve ever imagined”
The words “the perfect amount of skank”
“I’d take the risk for a chance to have Eva Marie Saint fondle the back of my head.”
My claim that I’m allowed to lust after movie nuns
The fact that I still give movies Winona Ryder bonus points and frequently make Freudian typos and call them “boner” points
Calling a shot of Kim Flowers the best shot in the entire Alien franchise
“I’d like to invite Anna Karina to every one of my dreams.”
My admittance that Gordon Liu is my celebrity crush.
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