Posts
 |
| As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico’s annual awards for best achievements in all kinds of cool movie stuff. |
Best Line Reading of the Year: “A few small beers.” — Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another
Best Monologue: Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. It is in fact, two monologues in one, the former arguing skepticism for religion, the latter reaffirming his belief, split right down the middle and letting the mystery be.
Best Sequence: Sinners. Mid-movie there is something like Black music hootenanny that opens a portal to the past, present, and future, an exhilarating sequence that does something only the movies can do. (Runner-up: the last scene in “The Phoenician Scheme.”)
Best Title Card: Sirât. It takes a good half-hour to drop, the title card for this Spanish phantasm, and when it does, you feel the full effect of it being laid over the image of three vehicles racing across a vast desert that brings the title to life: “the metaphorical bridge in Islamic belief connecting Heaven and Hell, one thinner than a strand of hair.”
The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expression in a movie): Sean Penn, One Battle After Another. When his Col. Steven J. Lockjaw is recruited into a cabal of white supremacists and reminded of their superior race, Penn does this thing with his face unmasking his character as someone craving an honor that he knows he does not deserve.
The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Chris Evans, Materialists. I cannot really describe the styling of Evans’s hair, I’m afraid, all I can say is that in a movie where his character and Pedro Pascal’s character are alternately vying for the affection of Dakota Johnson’s character, when I saw Evans in close-up smoking a cigarette with his caterer bowtie loosened and this haircut, I knew immediately that Pedro was toast.
The Annual Then He Kissed Me Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): American Girl by Tom Petty in One Battle After Another. It is hard to think of a more ubiquitous classic rock song than Petty’s, deemed as being practically part of the literary canon at this point by The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. Yet, if Paul Thomas Anderson tagging his, shall we say, new American epic with it might sound obvious or easy, what’s remarkable is that given everything preceding it, the needle drop is wholly, movingly earned. In fact, after this, it should be retired, and no movie should ever get to use “American Girl” again.
The Annual Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)? Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): Kill the Jockey. The name of our annual award is a little ironic in this case because it was Fred Astaire who demanded full body shots for dancing and the dance sequence near the beginning of this Spanish neo-noir is a full body dance sequence reimagined for people who cannot dance or are maybe just high on horse tranquilizers and whiskey.
The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best costume in a movie): One Battle After Another, Bathrobe. If Colleen Atwood does not win an Oscar for this movie, I’m gonna be pissed, people. From the navy sport coat and khakis that Sean Penn’s Colonel wears for his big meet and greet with The Christmas Adventurers, like he’s rushing Omega Theta Pi, to the cowboy boots that Benicio del Toro’s sensei slips on when the heat rises, it’s all on point. And though the Christmas Adventurer assassin (John Hoogenakker) conspicuously sporting Lacoste is, like, Best Costume in a Movie 1A, I cannot help reveling in Leo’s bathrobe, which is, like, Ali la Pointe rechristened as The Dude.
The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Buddy Guy, Sinners. His appearance ties the whole movie together.
The Annual The Godfather is the I Ching Award (presented to the best reference to another movie in a movie): Jaws in The Secret Agent. It is really something how writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho uses “Jaws” as a unifying force for all his themes and in doing so, squares the circle between arthouse and the Hollywood blockbuster.
The Annual I Like My Brandy in a Glass Award (presented to the best drink in a movie): A House of Dynamite, Coffee with Eight Sugars. This is what General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) asks for which, I suppose, is what the head of U.S. Strategic Command might require when nuclear war is imminent.
The Annual Now We Can Eat Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): The Naked Gun, Chili Dog. If you have not seen it, you do not deserve to have me spoil it.
The Annual French Connection Award (presented to the best car chase in a movie): One Battle After Another. A rollercoaster not just in the loop-de-loop sensation, though it does involve vehicles traversing rolling hills in rural California, but in how it makes your stomach drop from what is at stake.
Best Shot: The Ice Tower. A runaway orphan, Jeanne (Clara Pacini), has snuck on to a movie set where a cinematic version of Hans Christen Anderson’s The Snow Queen starring Marion Cotillard’s capricious Cristine in the eponymous role is being filmed. And when Jeanne first sees Cristine, she is hidden, peering through a crack in the wall in the middle of a scene being shot, and looking up as she does so, as if at a movie screen. Cristine, though, senses this hidden interloper, pauses for a split-second, and then looks down, catching Jeanne in the act of peeping, like the fourth wall has been broken, an almost reverse “Purple Rose of Cairo,” not just dissolving the barrier between movie and viewer but shattering that attendant voyeuristic sensation into a thousand pieces. When Cotillard looked down, reader, I gasped, terrified as much as I was entranced; it was a movie shot embodying every movie fan’s greatest dream, and greatest fear, as if Jean Harlow had noticed me watching “China Seas” and remarked, “Say, whatcha doin’ there, fella?” It will haunt me forever.
