2010 Recap (aka I've Done This for Three Years Now?)

Billy Curtis Award: Traditionally, we honor our little-person-of-the-year first, and that isn't changing this year. What is changing is the name of the award. I've decided to name it after the late great Billy Curtis, the first recipient of the Little Person of the Year Award.

This year, we had Tony Cox as the criminal elf in Bad Santa, a significant role that nevertheless didn't get his name on the poster. Harry Earles was fantastic as the little guy in The Unholy Three, and R2-D2 himself Kenny Baker had a short (ha ha) appearance in The Elephant Man. Billy Curtis himself had a very small (ha ha) part in The Incredible Shrinking Man, but there was really only one little guy who could win the award this year. Herve Villechaize wins for his work in both Forbidden Zone as King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension and Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun.

Most Incredible Achievement in the History of Movies: Me, mo-fos! I watched 137 movies in a row with the word "man" in the title. How this isn't newsworthy is beyond me.

Biggest "No!" Moment: Harvey Kietel's little Harvey in Bad Lieutenant.

Best Animated Movie: Lots of good ones! I loved Ponyo and The Princess and the Frog. I loved The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Toy Story 3 even more. My Neighbor Totoro is great despite what some of my readers think, but I'd already seen that. The award goes to the frequently funny and frequently touching Mary and Max.

Worst Caveman Movie: For whatever reason, I saw an above-average amount of cave people movies this year. Themroc wasn't bad, and One Million Years B.C., although not very entertaining, wasn't the most terrible. In a normal year, Teenage Caveman (5/20) would probably win, but I saw The Wild Women of Wongo (3/20) this year. But not even that captures the Worst Caveman Movie of the Year Award! Nope, that has to be the dreadful Eegah (2/20) with Richard Kiel (Jaws in the Bond movie) as the 7'2" titular character. If I had an opposite of a Billy Curtis Award, he'd likely get it.

Shane-Movies Blog Buzzword of the Year: Reader Cory's favorite--Delightful? My most overused word--Titular? I couldn't pass up dickfart, introduced by reader Larst when he posed as an Anonymous to leave a comment for the Orphan entry. Dickfart didn't linger, but it still left a mark.

Favorite Comments of the Year: Speaking of my four-and-a-half readers (Man, I really wanted to get that up to five-and-a-half this year!), they leave me lots of delightful comments.

My favorites:
Anonymous: "Your must be jealous of orphan because its popular and you only got like two people reading of your blog! lmao!"
Kairow: "If 250 movies were southbound on a train going 25.4 mph, while the cast of Harry Potter and Tea Leoni are traveling northbound at 25.4 kilometers per hour, in a semi driven by Kris Kristofferson's nipples, which train would arrive at the end of this topic of discussion first? (P.S. Nipples are unshaven. You must show your work to get credit.)"
Barry: "Karen Allen looked like she had eaten Short Round right before filming."
Kairow (again): "I will be honest, child rape never crossed my mind during Totoro."
Cory: "Your theory and take are wrong." Or "What the hell is thmilsde?"
Larst: "I need to wash your lack of taste out of my brain."

Documentary of the Year: The fascinating Big River Man beats out a lot of good ones. Watching Martin Strel lose his mind in the 4th Dimension is as fun as it gets. Even Dylan gave that movie a 20/20. Other contenders: My Winnipeg by shane-movies favorite Guy Maddin, Marjoe about that child preacher, and Touching the Void, recommended by Cory. Oh, and I liked seeing those bugs in Besieged Fortress.

Favorite Word from a Musical: "Shipoopi!" R.I.P. Buddy Hackett.

Most Depressing Movie: The Devil, Probably. And Dear Zachary. Thanks for those, Cory and Larst. Most Depressing Movie Experience (an entirely different thing) was Meet Me in St. Louis. See below for the reason why.

Best Sound Effect: The blippity blurping sounds from Alec Guinness's series of beakers in The Man in the White Suit, a sound effect cleverly pinched by Wes Anderson for The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Most Offensive Child Actor of the Year: Good God! I still can't, to borrow Larst's lingo, wash the taste of Margaret O'Brien from Meet Me in St. Louis out of my brain! Also offensive: Bonita Granville from These Three, Tommy Bupp from It's a Gift, Hallie Kate Eisenberg (Uggh! I hate that family!) from Bicentennial Man, and Julie Herrod from Wait Until Dark. Three of those were recommended by Cory. I don't know what that means.

Recommender of the Year: Cory, despite those movies with the offensive child actors! Six 18/20's and ten 17/20's? Holy cow! That's some terrific recommending!

Best Movie with At Least One Scene Featuring Sharon Tate in a Bathtub: The Fearless Vampire Hunters

My Most Outrageous Claim of the Year: "I could have written [the screenplay for Home Alone 2] with nothing more than the screenplay for Home Alone 1, ten bottles of white-out, a pencil, and forty-five minutes."

Best Puppet: Ventriloquist dummy in Dead of Night.

Most Santo Moment: 1) Santo rips off his opponent's mask in Santo vs. the Vampire Women. 2) Almost every scene in Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters. Trying to pick a favorite Santo moment would likely cause the world to implode.

Best Appearance by a Wrestler Not Named Santo: Plan Nine "actor" Tor Johnson was in The Man on the Flying Trapeze.

Best Movie Moment Featuring at Least One Nipple (New Category): Richard Harris suspended by his in A Man Called Horse or the faux-nipples in The Man with the Golden Gun?

Best Groucho Line: "There's something Corrupt going on around my pants" from Go West.

Best Bird: The penguins from The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Most Inspiring Movie Quote of the Year: "There is an endless supply of white men, but there have always been a limited number of human beings." I've always loved that quote from Little Big Man. "Funny is a person trying to smile without teeth" is great. So is "Where are you taking me, Homo?" on a title card, not spoken. Mystery Train's "At the time of his death, if he were on Jupiter, Elvis would have weighed six hundred and forty-eight pounds" is great. But I have to give this award to The Pistol: The Birth of a Legend for the words "Pete, watching you makes me want to dream." Listening to the dialogue in that movie made me want to bleed from the ears.

Best Monster: Oh, boy. The Incredible Melting Man from the movie of the same title was nice and gooey. The seductive Wasp Woman was easily the sexiest monster of the year. That little guy who just stood around in that Santo movie or the Cyclops or Dracula, a vampire not afraid to strike a pose, in the same movie? The Goatman, another monster I got to see with Kairow. Does the cymbal monkey in Toy Story 3 count? The Mighty Peking Man? I'm still just happy a movie called Manster exists, and that scene where the guy's starting to turn into a monster and an eyeball appears on his shoulder is one of the best things I've seen all year! That creature in Corman's The Creature from the Haunted Sea sure was goofy, and I liked those giant stars with an eye in the Japanese sci-fi weirdness that was Warning from Space. No, I've got to give the Best Monster award to Teenagers from Space for the terrifying shadows of lobsters. Can't figure out how to make a big scary lobster thing? Don't have a budget? Nothing to worry about, makers of Teenagers from Space! Just use a lobster shadow!

Favorite Moment that Made Me Want Wish My Grandfather Was Still Alive So I Could Share It with Him: Watching the jungle girl climb up and down the tree in The Mighty Peking Man. That old dickfart would have loved that scene!

Best Musical Moment: That part near the end of Honkeytonk Man with Marty Robbins almost made me cry. The beatboxers in Forbidden Zone (and a hell of a lot more) were great. There's a scene I'm mentioning later from Bad Lieutenant that could fit here. I loved a version of "The Moonlight Sonata" from Walker, and the line that follows a song sung by Jarvis Cocker's character in The Fantastic Mr. Fox--"You wrote a bad song, Petey." David Byrne bouncing around and sweating profusely inside that big suit? The musical number in Man of the Century about how the guy is a "Diga Diga Do" man is wonderfully wacky. And delightful! My Best Musical Number for 2010 goes to Scott Walker: 30th Century Man for the scene where Walker instructs a percussionist in the studio on the proper way to slap a big chunk of meat.

Best John Malkovich Line: "Hold this watch because if it breaks, I will kill everyone on this train."

Best Nic Cage Moment Not in a Werner Herzog Movie: Watching Cage chase after a car with a McDonald's apple pie in The Weather Man.

Best Use of the Wilhelm Scream: Them! wins this one easily, not necessarily for the clever use of the scream but for the balls to include three of them in the movie. Three Wilhelms?

Best Scene Featuring the Delightful Practice Known by the Kids as "Teabagging": Laurel teabagging Hardy in Block Heads. This just beat out what is likely the first teabagging in cinema history in The Gold Rush.

Most Ridiculous (Good Ridiculous) Movie Moment: The parking garage scene in Drag Me to Hell. I'm not joking when I type that that scene made me pee myself.

Favorite Moment Involving a Frenchman in a Movie about Russia: For no reason I can figure out, a French guy in Russian Ark peeks in a doorway, blows a raspberry, and then leaves.

Most Touching Movie Moment: Watching Karen at the end of Idioterne.

Best Devil: Pitch in Santa Claus? Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster? Danny Elfman made a pretty good song-and-dance devil in Forbidden Zone. With apologies to those fine thespians, I just have to give the award to Tom Waits as Mr. Nick in The Imaginarium. When Tom Waits acts, I listen.

Best Moment Featuring a Salad: A scene in otherwise dreadful The Man with the Screaming Brain where Bruce Cambell eats a salad.

Best Death Scene: Nothing can beat a scene where a guy, with his own intestines, strangles another guy, and that's exactly what happens in Guy Maddin's Archangel.

Best Mime Scene: There was a midget mime (again, I apologize to any little people reading, but I can't pass up the alliteration) in Shakes the Clown, but the scene with a mime in Mary and Max is easily the best.

Best Masturbation Scene: Why the hell do I have this award? What's wrong with me? Is anybody even reading this still? Runner-up for this award doesn't matter when you've got a scene where a guy masturbates on tomatoes like in Leolo.

Movie That I Wish Was More Well Known: Fred Tuttle: Man with a Plan. Dinky!

Best Nic Cage Moment and Best Moment in Any Movie Ever: "Shoot him again. His soul's still dancing." I can't believe this scene exists! Thank God for Werner Herzog.

Best Performance by an Actor: It almost seems unfair to include Crispin Glover or Vincent Price or Nicolas Cage in this category. Price showed amazing versatility in Theatre of Blood. I also really liked Christoph Waltz in Basterds, Eamonn Owens (the anti-Margaret O'Brien?) in The Butcher Boy, Marcel Marceau in the delightfully strange Shanks, Michel Simon in Boudo, Per Oscarsson in Hunger, the great Buddy Hackett in Music Man, Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner, Maximillian Schell as Arthur Goldman in The Man in the Glass Booth, Chief Dan George in Little Big Man, Richard Dawson as the villain in The Running Man, and Paul Muni in I'm a Fugitive from the Chain Gang. I have to give the Actor of the Year award to Nicolas Cage for Bad Lieutenant though. I have to give it to him "to the break of dawn!"

Best Performance by an Actress: Lots of good ones here, too. Sarah Douglas as Ursa in Superman II. Non-actress Flo Jacobs, the director's mom, in the oddly-named Momma's Man. The lovely Angela Jones in the macabre comedy Curdled. Susan Cabot, the Wasp Woman herself! Sally Kellerman in Brewster McCloud, Judith Anderson as Buffalo Cow Head in A Man Called Horse, or Lillian Gish as the titular girl in The Yellow Man and the Girl (Broken Blossoms)? I certainly enjoyed watching Britt Ekland in The Wicker Man and The Man with the Golden Gun. Edith Evans almost should earn this award for her delivery of "A handbag?" in The Importance of Being Earnest. This award was an easy one for me though. Congratulations, Emmanuelle Beart for your work in Manon of the Spring! That harmonica solo could have also been included in the Best Musical Moment category, by the way.

Worst Movie of the Year: These are unpleasant bad movies, not good-bad movies. Those are for another category. I wanted to give this award to Orphan because some fool who likes this movie too much left those stupid comments. But the truth is, there were worse movies I watched this year. Bicentennial Man (4/20) was particularly brutal, possibly the longest movie I've ever seen. Little Man (4/20) ended the "man" streak. Batman and Robin (4/20) could almost be considered a good-bad movie, so I don't want to pick it. He Was a Quiet Man (3/20) was abysmal, but the winner of the Worst Movie of the Year award goes to the Michael Jackson biopic, Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story. That 2/20 has to be seen to be believed.
The Manos Award (Best Good-Bad Movie): The contenders--Creature from the Haunted Sea, Eegah, The Amazing Transparent Man, Tentacles, Breaker! Breaker!, Pumaman, The Incredible Melting Man, The Wild Women of Wongo, The Horrors of Spider Island, The Wasp Woman, Santa Claus, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The winner--Teenagers from Outer Space.

The Torgo (The Best Bad Acting of the Year): George Murdock, you classed up Breaker! Breaker! Linda Hayden, you made things sizzle in Blood on Satan's Claw. Douglas Kennedy, you made The Incredible Transparent Man come to life. Alan Oppenheomer, you almost had it as Dr. Contrare in that Gamera movie I watched this year! Fess Parker, you sure did your best to bring Them! down a few notches. And Ronald Halicki, your performance as the pig farmer in The Junkman was about the worst thing I've ever seen. And you can call me biased, fine thespians, but I've going with Crispin Glover's dad Bruce Glover for his portrayal as "The ex-husband" in his son's It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine! It's a truly Torgo-esque performance!

Nipples I Almost Forgot About!: Rubber Duck's nipples! Not reader Rubber Duck. Convoy's Rubber Duck.

Best 11 Movies New to Shane (No particular order. . .well, actually they're in the order I watched them. That's a particular order, I guess.):

Inglourious Basterds
Idioterne
The Earrings of Madame de. . .
Odd Man Out
Broken Blossoms
The Man Who Would Be King
Ugetsu
The Lavender Hill Mob
Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring
The Sweet Smell of Success

My Pick for Movie of the Year: You, the Living

But My Actual Favorite Movie Experience of the Year: Forbidden Zone

My Wish for 2011: To find a movie where John Wayne beats the crap out of Tootie from Meet Me in St. Louis. Or that with CGI technology, somebody can still make that movie.

Statistics:

I watched 47 movies in December. I watched only 10 in April. April had the highest average rating with a 16.1, but that's based on only those ten movies. The next high was November with a 14.9 average. The worst average for a month was September with a 9.8, but that was only based on 11 movies as school was starting up again. The next low was actually December with a 12.4.

The rating I gave the most was a 16/20. That's three years in a row. That has to mean something, but I don't know what. I gave only five 20/20 (two Santo movies), and zero movies got a 1/20 this year. There were four 2/20's though.

Average rating: 13.7. Last year it was a 12.6 and the year before it rounded up to a 13.

Naked States

2000 documentary

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Spencer Tunick, artiste, travels America with the goal of photographing nudes in all fifty states. Art!

Part of the reason why I didn't like this was because of Spencer Tunick. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the guy's demeanor rubbed me the wrong way. His "art" was a little too random, and I didn't like his photography anyway. As he asked a variety of people--men and women, conventionally attractive and less-conventionally attractive--to pose nude, he had this looky-at-me-giggle-giggle-I'm-an-artist attitude that I thought was intolerable. My favorite footage in the documentary was when Tunick went to a nude beach and figured he could boss everybody around while they were trying to enjoy themselves with naked beach bowling and other activities that ugly naked people do and then started whining when he wasn't getting his way. There was irony in his claims that he was somehow a savior for these people, that he was in some way liberating them from their fabric bondage while he was whining about them not doing exactly what he told them to do. I'm starting to believe that the less we know about and see or hear our artists, the better. I definitely saw far more of Spencer Tunick than I ever needed to see. Aside from all that, this isn't a good documentary anyway. It has the look and feel of your typical reality television show. I'm also annoyed that they left out Indiana because naked Hoosiers would definitely have bumped this up a couple points.

The Aristocrats

2005 dirty joke

Rating: 12/20

Plot: An enormous collection of some of the world's funniest people and Bob Saget ruminate a filthy vaudevillian joke.

This would have been a lot better if it was about half as long. If nothing else, it helps me discover that I don't think I like comedians very much. The interviews with the comedians are edited to make this into a pissing contest. There's also this vertigo-inducing thing going on where you get rapid quick-cuts of the comedians telling the joke from multiple angles, I guess so the producers can show off the fact that they had more than one camera. I never figured out why that was necessary. There's nothing especially clever about any of this, but it does have a lot of very funny moments and gives a glimpse of the inner workings of how funny people make the funny. Overall, it's not as outrageous as it wants to be and in no way succeeds in being as funny as it thinks it is for ninety minutes. It's definitely not for everybody although there is one scene that I doubt anybody could watch without uttering, "My God! This is the greatest thing ever filmed!" That's right--I'm referring to the scene where the mime delivers his version of the joke. That was comedy gold.

Jackass Number Two

2006 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Morons pull pranks and perform stunts, mostly to entertain themselves, it seems.

You know you're in good shape when somebody says, "We have rectal bleeding," within the first ten minutes of the movie. Several chapters involving horse semen, malfunctioning rockets, launched shopping carts, fecal matter, the exposed testicles of the elderly, beer enemas, puking, bull attacks, flying wee men, pubic beards, and death-defying moments later, I had laughed quite a few times and even laughed until tears came once. I should probably feel a little guilty for liking this as much as I did, but I refuse. The mayhem is faster, funnier, and more dangerous than the stuff they did in the first movie (or on the television show, of course), and the beginning scene and ending musical number that bookend the body of this are really well executed. That closing musical number even pays tribute to Hollywood musicals and even Buster Keaton. I was reminded of Keaton quite a bit while watching Jackass Number Two actually. No, I've not yet found the movie in which Keaton's ass or testicles are displayed. With a lot of the stunts, you get exactly what you think you'll get (bike with a rocket being shot into a lake) but there are a lot of set-ups that take the stunt one unexpected step further, giving the audience a second unanticipated punchline. Does all of it work? No. Some of this is hard to watch and not really all that entertaining. But when this hits, it's home run after home run. Brilliant stuff! My favorite scene? Likely the extended terrorist bit near the end.

By the way, watching this made me realize what Tillie's Punctured Romance from 1914 was missing. If the kicking in Tillie's Puncture Romance would have been in the groin instead of directed at the backside, I think it would be considered one of the most influential and uproariously funny comedies of the early 20th century.

Les Enfants Terribles

1950 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Paul and his older sister Elisabeth are close. Really close. Following a snowball fight accident and the death of their mother, they become recluses, shutting themselves off from society so that they can play bizarre games and argue in the privacy of their own room. When Paul falls in love with the boy who injured him with a snowball and later a girl who looks a lot like that boy, Elisabeth starts to get a little jealous.

I really expected to like this one a lot more than I did. I think it suffers from being seen so close to Troll 2. But with the talent involved (I love both Melville and Cocteau), I had enormously high expectations despite the stylistic differences in their films. In a way, this combines those styles fairly well with Melville's stark and simple narratives and character studies balancing Cocteau's dreamy free-floating surrealism, but I have to admit that I just wasn't all that interested in these siblings while watching this. I was a little bored. Parts of whatever narrative this has float like poetry, but the movie seemed too long and didn't have a single goblin or double-decker bologna sandwich. Sacre bleu!

A Clockwork Orange

1971 satirical dystopian black comedy

Rating: 20/20

Plot: A hilarious musical in which Alex DeLarge and his thuggish pals don codpieces and spend their nights sipping milk and engaging in various ultraviolent acts--beating up inebriated bums, throwing down against rival gangs, stealing cars, rape. After his three droogs attempt a rather half-assed and unsuccessful coup, the lads make their way to what they believe is an easy target, a health camp operator who is alone and apparently rich. Alex is caught and found guilty of the lady's murder. While in jail, he feigns interest in religion and hears of a new "method" that supposedly heals the criminal mind. He undergoes the harsh treatment and is once again released into society.

A "turning point" movie for me when I saw this in high school. Watching A Clockwork Orange made me realize that film not only existed to entertain the (m)asses, but that it could also be artistic. For better or worse, this one turned me to a fan of the sort of adventurous, dangerous, audacious, and chaotic cinema that I love today. This is a wildy creative adventure, and the world Kubrick created could probably not have been created by anybody else. There's really not another movie that matches Kubrick's artistic vision. Is there? And Malcolm McDowell deserved at least a best actor nomination. I can't imagine anybody else playing Alex, and there's a demanding physicality to the role (in fact, he was injured twice and nearly drowned during one scene) that was apparently underappreciated. The actors with smaller roles, from the bum in the opening scene to the the parole officer to the writer, are also terrifically hammy. A Clockwork Orange is also great because of the way the visuals and music compliment each other so perfectly. I guess Wendy Carlos (actually he/she was Walter Carlos when the music was composed) and his mooginess was also overlooked by the Academy. There's a unique perspective/point of view in this one, too, one that forces the viewer to side with a sadistic murderer/rapist. You've got to love a movie that does that! But a lot of Kubrick's trickery let's you see the story alternately as disturbing, humorous, terrifying, and ludicrous. It's also got phallic symbols galore! If you asked me seventeen years ago about my favorite movie, I would have picked this one for sure. That might not be true now, but it'll always be up there near the top. So many memorable moments!

My favorite scene changes every time I see this movie; this time, it was when Alex notices the phallic sculpture, latter his weapon, in a victim's house. His expression, around a comical rubber nose (another phallic symbol), is great! What's your favorite scene?

The People vs. Larry Flynt

1996 biopic

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Larry Flynt, a true American hero, struggles for his right to free speech (i.e. naked people, the slander of religious leaders) while the conservatives, those enemies of freedom and democracy, fight him every step of the way, practically setting fire to your Constitution and your flag and stomping all over them. The story also details the struggles of Flynt's wife, Ginavah McDruguser, and her downward spiral.

With friends like Crispin "Hellion" Glover and Courtney Love, who needs enemas? First off, this is an entertaining and sprawling glimpse at the life of Flynt and brings up some important issues about what constitutes free speech. It's a dialogue starter. It's not without problems and the overt propaganda might be one of them. The loose structure and sketchy details might be other problems. The acting is very good straight up and down the cast list. Woody's great, and Courtney Love shows a lot of flexibility in her role as a strung-out skank. She's so good that you can practically smell her through the screen. What a stretch that must have been for her! Crispin Glover, as always, is fantastic, and Ed Norton, playing really the only character who is likable, is solid. The entire movie is fairly effective despite its density and extraneous wanderings. Very similar to Forman's later Man on the Moon, another biopic that I liked even though I had almost no interest or opinion on the subject matter.

Faust

1994 Svankmajer flick

Rating: 17/20

Plot: See Marlow, Christopher.

This version of the Faust story is a lot funnier than 1920-something silent Murnau version. It's even, arguably, more visually imaginative and fantastically stylized. Arguably. Svankmajer's mix of live action, marionettes (sometimes sans strings), and stop animation creates an off-kilter universe of twitching cobwebs, junk-drawer chicken bones, and closet ash and shadows. And a dude has sex with a seven-foot tall wooden puppet. I know what folks'll say. Folks'll complain that this is too much of an onslaught of the random, too much of that weird-for-the-sake-of-weird type stuff. But I disagree completely and think that this grows with multiple viewings. Surrealist funk that hits you right in the loins! This isn't my favorite Svankmajer movie, but it is my brother's and is probably one of the easier ones to locate.

Year Recap--the awards post

Important things first--2008's Midget of the Year was a tight race. After all, out of 365 movies, 52 of them had a midget. The candidates:

Don't Look Now had one creepy midget. So did The Brood, but that movie was absolutely terrible.

The Holy Mountain and Simon of the Desert both had crippled midgets, and both movies were a whole lot better than It's a Wonderful Life which had no midgets.

The Terror in Tiny Town had all midgets, and early on, I figured Billy Curtis was a shoe-in for Midget of the Year. He was terrific as the diminutive cowboy hero.

But the prize goes to Peter Dinklage from Death at a Funeral. I still can't think of that scene without laughing hard enough to fall down and hold my stomach. I did just that last night at a grocery store, right next to the pickles, and an elderly woman asked me if I was ok. I said, "Yeah, just laughing at the exploits of a midget." She looked up and down the aisle and, seeing no midget, scooted away, likely figuring that I was a drug addict. It's a scene that has to be seen to be believed. And set your vcr's, for Dinklage is going to be on the upcoming episode of 30 Rock which is a show everybody should be watching anyway. He also played the bad guy in Underdog which was a movie I had forgotten that I watched this year. So he's sure been busy. I'm sure winning my midget-of-the-year award is a highlight of his career though.

Other stuff:

I saw 22 Japanese movies which seems really low. I saw 27 French movies, 11 Italian movies, and 10 movies from Hong Kong.

I saw 36 documentaries on a wide variety of subjects. 32 movies I watched were animated or had animation. I saw 48 comedies, another 37 movies that were supposed to be comedies but weren't funny, and 14 movies that were funny but weren't supposed to be. I saw 22 horror movies and another 15 that were supposed to be horror movies but turned out to not be scary at all. There were 33 science fiction movies and a large bulk of "romantic" movies, 88 to be exact. According to the labels, I only saw 21 silent movies, but it sure seems like a lot more than that. 32 movies I labeled as "surreal" and I really tried to use that term correctly. I saw 7 movies with Vincent Price, 1 movie with Shirley Temple in black face, and 1 Sylvester Stallone movie that he actually wasn't in (Ran). I also saw 23 kung-fu movies and 11 samurai movies.

Looking at the other labels--I saw 17 movies with handlebar mustaches, 84 movies with ill-fitting pants/underpants, 15 movies with eyepatches, and 17 movies with cannibalism. The 79 movies I watched with nudity lends credence to my wife's claim that I seek out movies with nudity. The fact that I saw 27 movies with male frontal nudity (if I gave an award, Ewan McGregor's junk in that dull Peter Greenaway movie) and only 23 kung-fu movies likely means that I'm a homosexual. Suprisingly, I only saw 8 movies with puppets. I saw a whopping 224 movies with violence but only 154 movies with blood.

Jen only picked out 10 movies, including the huge surprise that was The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. My children picked out 12 more.

I paid for only two movies this year--the new Indiana Jones movie cost whatever two tickets costs, and I got the poker comedy The Grand from the dollar rental machine at the grocery store. Wall-E, by the way, is only the second Pixar movie I haven't seen in a theater.

I gave out three 20's, but two of those were for El Santo movies. The rating I gave out the most was a 16. I gave 57 movies a rating of 16. I only gave two 1 ratings. My average rating, assuming my math is correct, was a 12.978.

One of those was the worst movie I saw all year, the dreadfully offensive Facing the Giants. A runner-up, even though it had a rating better than Manos: The Hands of Fate, would be the terrible remake of The Wicker Man.

My best personal discovery of the year--The Lone Wolf and Cub series. Also worth mentioning would be the movies of Guy Maddin, Mario Bava, and Preston Sturges.

Here are the best movie experiences of the year. I'm including only movies that I had either previously not seen or have not seen bunches of times. That elimates favorites like Rear Window, The Gold Rush, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Duck Soup, The Triplets of Belleville, The General, and The Big Lebowski. And The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly which I didn't want to include in the above sentence because it would have forced me to use semicolons.

The best bad, all highly entertaining and highly recommended:

Manos: The Hands of Fate
Night of the Ghouls, which I watched on my birthday because I couldn't find The Big Lebowski and continue my tradition.
The Beast of Yucca Flats
The Happening

The best good:

The Passion of Joan of Arc
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
The Falls
The Holy Mountain
Viridiana
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Woman in the Dunes
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Days of Heaven

Finally, one last statistic. Amount of shane-movies readers? Four! I hope to double that in 2009!

The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer

1965-1992 animated shorts

Rating: 18/20

Plot: A collection of Czech stop-motion surrealist Jan Svankmajer with images yanked from twisted dreams and perverse memories. "A Game of Stones" is about rocks. "A Quiet Week in the House" is about an intruder drilling holes. "Meat Love" is about meat engaged in coitus. "Food" is about breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are two Edgar Allan Poe stories. "A Trip to the Cellar" is about a little girl trying to get a basket of potatoes. "The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia" details the autopsy of a statue of Stalin. Etc.

Surrealism doesn't get more fun than this. Unforgettable imagery ranging from the hilarious to the grotesque and occasionally managing to be hilariously grotesque or grotesquely hilarious. Lots of "What the hell?" moments countered by amazing "How'd he do that?" moments. I love how in the later shorts, Svankmajer begins using people, stop-animating them just like he would his puppets or clay sculptures although I probably like the earlier shorts best. Likely unlike anything you've seen unless strange late-night dietary habits somehow fuel funky nightmares. Or you've got some wires crossed in your head. Recommended if you do have wires crossed in your head or if you've ever wanted to watch furniture have sex or enjoy voyeuristically watching vegetables rot.

Age of Gold

1930 surrealist dickery

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Scorpions defend themselves, deteriorating bishops are located, Rome is founded, men fall in love and then leer lustfully at the toes of statues, a son is shot, and they must get the cow out of bed as soon as possible. And what's Jesus doing in there of all places?

I'm not really positive there was a midget in this. The violinist was awfully short. Awfully short! However, even if there's not a midget in this, it's got the right spirit. Midget spirit! Follow-up to An Andalusian Dog is a bit more linear (there's a love story sort of weaving itself in and out of the nonsense) and probably more provocative. Bunuel's obsessions are here--attacks on the bourgeoisie, religion, and government. Alternately funny and disturbing, Age of Gold still works today and I can't imagine how revolutionary it would have seemed at the end of the 1920's. There's enough here to offend the whole family!

Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom

1975 garbage

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Eighteen kids are kidnapped by fascists in Nazi-controlled Italy and treated meanly. There's lots of what can only be described as grotesque sex.

Unless the point is as simple as "People are mean," I'm missing some context here. This is not a good movie. It's not really even an interesting movie. Director Pasolini was murdered after the release of Salo, and although it's not likely that this movie was the reason why he was murdered, it really couldn't have helped. I just had a tough time trying to figure out exactly what this film is--smut, blacker-than-black comedy, dark allegory, perverse crap? Painstaking and dismal and seemingly empty.

Fando and Lis

1968 psychedelic love travelogue

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Fando and Lis, troubled lovers, attempt to travel to a mythical and magical town called Tar. Along the way, Fando faces temptation and doubts his love and Lis, dependent on her boyfriend to push her wheel-table for her, whines a lot. Mud people, transvestites, dolls, vampires, wasteland jazz bands, hide-and-seek fiends, a brutally unforgiving landscape, burning pianos, and bowling dominatrices get in the way.

This is very first-filmish and not as good as Jodorowsky's later El Topo or The Holy Mountain, but it's still a very entertaining hip thrust of surrealism with bizarre imagery galore with a story that is easy enough but not necessary to follow. Infantilely visionary, but there's a lot about this that reminded me of the whimsical and chaotic parts of Godard or the gloomier bits of Bunuel. Unhinged and nutsy, Fando and Lis sometimes crosses that line into territory that would disturb the average person. Money was definitely a factor, but Jodorowsky did a lot with what he had, creating a disturbingly desolate and rugged world and a texture that is unique. He certainly uses the landscape well here, using jagged rocks or tombstones to frame certain shots. One long shot in particular, where Fando is circling Lis while ascending from a little valley, is really cool.

The script for this was apparently only one page long.

The Films of Kenneth Anger Volume Two

Shorts from 1964 to 1981

Rating: 12/20

Plots:

Scorpio Rising is about a gay motorcycle gang who go to a party because they've got great juice. "Juice me!" they keep saying.

Kustom Kar Kommandos is a low-budget commercial.

Invocation of My Demon Brother is about how Mick Jagger should never be allowed anywhere near a Moog synthesizer. It's also about how the 60's were turbulent times.

Rabbit Moon is about how wearing nothing but the color white will transform even the manliest of men into the gayest of bunnies.

Lucifer Rising is about how when the devil rubs his hands together, pyramids are built and volcanoes explode. Satan!

I watched these a couple weeks ago and forgot to post about them. This stuff is interesting, especially if you are a fan of the penis, but none of it seems all that revolutionary and most of it is pretty boring. It frequently hints at genius but genius not ever able to reach full potential. So all in all, this is more frustrating than anything else. Most interesting is Invocation of My Demon Brother although that Jagger music is abysmal. Powerful imagery though. The rest of this underwhelms.

Lent to me by my brother. Satan!

The Pillow Book

1996 drama

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Nagiko's the daughter of an aspiring Japanese writer. As a child, she derives pleasure from having her father write on her face. She adores her father and also has aspirations of becoming a writer. One day, however, she walks in on her (heterosexual?) father and his homosexual publisher completing a book deal that somehow involves the publisher putting his pants back on. Oh, snap! The body-writing thing develops into a sexual fetish as she reaches adulthood, and luckily for her, she can find lots of guys who want to write on her and then have intercourse with her. Later, she meets her father's publisher's lover and finds a way to get revenge.

Parts of this are undeniably beautiful as expected for any Peter Greenaway movie. And if you've always had the urge to see extended scenes involving a naked Obi Wan Kenobi (not Alec Guinness at 82...although that would have been great!), this is the movie for you. The score (specifically the Japanese stuff and the French pop song used repeatedly) works well with the imagery, the exception being this really tacky trip hop stuff. There's some interesting things going on here, most notably a picture-within-a-picture (also, unfortunately, twenty-five pictures-within-a-picture) thing (sort of like how people can watch multiple channels at the same time), the layered visuals, and the use of text (unfortunately, in multiple languages). Watching this, it's impossible not to see that it's coming from an auteur and virtuoso. That doesn't mean it's a good movie though. In fact, it's so pretentious and dull, I didn't even want to finish watching it. If not for all the penis, I'm not sure I would have. It's difficult when it doesn't have to be and insipid and vacuous when it shouldn't be. It's a lot closer to Greenaway's The Cook, The Monkey Trainer, His Lover, and the Archbishop (which I remember only as being boring) than Drowning by Numbers or A Zed and Two Noughts (which I loved despite the pretensions). Peter Greenaway's got huge ideas and ambitions, and although there's definitely nothing at all wrong with that, it's exactly what's wrong with The Pillow Book. It's artsy at its most fartsy with the tricks and style suffocating the substance. Frustratingly fartsy!

Lars and the Real Girl

2007 drama (romantic comedy?)

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Lars is a guy who lives in a garage and is sick and tired of his older brother being the sibling everybody talks about. So he devises a plan to trick people into thinking he's delusional so that he can get all the attention in the small town they live in. He purchases a sex doll and pretends to think that she's his new girlfriend, a shy busty nurse in a wheelchair. Everybody takes the bait, and Lars finds new popularity and happiness. After the townspeople realize they've been duped, they tear apart Bianca (the doll) and use her plastic arms and legs to bludgeon him and leave him for dead.

Ryan Gosling's performance was fine, I suppose, but I really never bought that he had a mental disorder and really thought the doll was real. I also was never sure what I was watching. Dramatic comedy, I guess, but there was very little drama and nothing at all was funny once you've seen the guy sitting at a dinner table with a sex doll. You can put a crazy guy in different places (hospital waiting room, forest, car, church) with a sex doll, but it's eventually not going to stop being funny. I did laugh twice, but one of those times was because of bad acting during a scene that was supposed to be sad and the other time was because I thought my toe looked really funny. To me, it seemed like an hour and fifty minute trailer for a fake movie instead of a real movie. Not especially well written, but at least the writer never went for cheap laughs. In different hands, this could have easily gone from not very good to horrifyingly stupid.

Unlike the "real girl," I am anatomically incorrect:

Lust in the Dust

1985 western comedy

Rating: 5/20

Plot: A wanderer who at first has no name and then later does have a name (I've forgotten it.) meets up with one of the filthiest women alive somewhere in the desert. They travel to Chili Verde where they meet the busty proprietor of a brothel/tavern, an elderly whore, a younger whore, a piano player named Red Dick, a priest, and some Mexicans. Later, the Hard Case Gang shows up. They all have one interest in mind--hidden gold! Using a limerick and two halves of a map tatooed on the behinds of the female characters (no, I'm not kidding), they figure out where the treasure is hidden and race to grab the prize.

I picked this up for three reasons. 1) The review on the cover: "It would've made John Wayne lose his lunch!" 2) It stars Divine in a movie that isn't a John Waters' movie. She accidentally breaks a midget's neck while being orally pleasured by him. That's something. 3) I noticed last week that I hadn't given a movie a 5/20 yet and thought this looked like a good candidate. Silliness abounds, but it's unfortunately not very entertaining silliness. It doesn't seem like the director (Paul Bartel of Eating Raoul and Death Race 2000 infamy) knows whether he wants to make something completely campy or something a little more subtle, and as a result, it doesn't work on any level. The action sucks, the comedy sucks, the sex scenes suck, the plot sucks, and the writing sucks. Oh, and the acting. It sucks. There's some entertainment value here, but probably not enough to ever watch it again.

Here I am enjoying Lust in the Dust, probably wishing there was a little more dust:

Oldboy

2003 drama

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Dae-su Oh, a married father of one, is minding his own drunken business one night when he is kidnapped and imprisoned. After fifteen excruciating years, he's freed. He meets a girl in a sushi restaurant, and together, they try to solve the mystery of who imprisoned him and why. Things are uncovered shockingly, and the protagonist shows off his carpentry skills.

Stupid and almost mind-numbingly dull, Oldboy ends up being one of those style-but-no-substance movies. I couldn't buy anything that was going on, didn't even care about the mystery, and found it nearly impossible to become emotionally invested. There's a twist of Crying Game proportions, but I was able to see the twist coming from 1/4 of a mile away and by then didn't care anyway. This nearly nudges against innovative at times, but then it takes its silly flashbacks, cardboard character types, the thumping techno soundtrack, and lame attempts at art-house surrealism and retreats back into cliche. It's all too bad. I was intrigued up until the point when he stuck a live octopus in his mouth. After that, the stupid grabbed hold.

Here I am wondering if I should see any more movies from Korea:

Note: I knew Roger Ebert had given this a four-star review because I saw it on the front of the dvd box. Seeing now that the imdb rating of 8.3 ranks this as the 114th best movie ever made, that it finished second behind that Fahrenheit 9/11 for the top prize at Cannes, and that it has an 82% at rottentomatoes makes me scratch my head. What the hell did I miss?

Crumb

1994 documentary


Rating: 17/20


Plot: A brutal look at the life of 60's counterculture comic artist icon Robert Crumb and his dysfunctional (word is too mild here) family. Bizarre sexual proclivities (piggyback rides and thick legs), mental disorders, and misanthropy abound.


"When I was young, I was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny."



Possibly the most honest documentary look at an individual ever made with subtexts about sexuality, family, genius, the worlds of art and pornography, individual expectations. Crumb's an interesting and quirky enigma, a guy who is almost unbelievably portrayed as the most normal of the three brothers in his family with the older an Autistic recluse who rarely leaves his room and spends all of his time writing illegibly in notebooks or reading and the younger a pseudo-monastic painter who rarely paints and spends the majority of his time sitting on nails or begging on the streets with a wooden bowl. Director Zwigoff, who apparently spent over ten suicidal years creating this labor of love, lets the audience just watch the subject without embellishment, and it's fascinating to see an artistic genius surviving in a world he hates by retreating into his sketchbooks. Uncomfortably entertaining and sometimes difficult to watch and sad. Pretty brilliant work.



I just might be better looking than Robert Crumb:

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

1928 romantic melodrama


Rating: 16/20


Plot: It's another tale of unrequited circus love! Tito is a clown who finds a crying infant who has apparently been stranded. He "adopts" her and she travels with the troupe. As she matures, she learns to art of the tightrope and becomes part of the act. While looking for a rose to put in her hair, she meets the womanizing Count Ravioli who immediately falls in love with her and kisses her bare foot while she's nursing a barbed-wire-fence wound. It's ok. She's of age (14) and he's got a monocle. Tito also rather inappropriately falls in love with his little Simonetta but knows he can not pursue. Tito and Count Ravioli meet through a psychologist they're both seeing, the former because he can't stop crying and the latter because he can't stop bursting into spontaneous laughter. They become friends and the circus love triangle is complete.


"Laugh, clown. . . laugh even though your heart is breaking." Lon Chaney was much better in this than he was in The Unknown, and this also had much better pacing, more elaborate style, and a more emotionally involving story. I had to take a point off my rating because the movie made me feel uncomfortable. I'd commented to Jen that the love interest of Chaney was "pretty hot" and then discovered that Loretta Young was only fourteen when she acted in this. Of course, it didn't seem to be a problem for the male characters in the movie. The denouement is sort of clumsy here, and I'm not sure about the character's motivation at the end, but this still had a lot of moments that silently hit you in the gut. Melodramatic but smooth. One other note: there's barely a wasted title card in this silent film. The dialogue used is poetic, but so much of the story takes place successfully with pantomime and the camera work.


I'm all blubbery eyed: