POST-POSCAR PARTY: MEET THE BATTIES! As mentioned previously, my friend Susan Thea Posnock's latest Poscars have finally been announced! Which means that it's time once again for me to gainsay the Poscars via the Battie Awards, drawing on my spotty film viewing habits. So here goes....


FAVORITE PICTURE I've had trouble with this one this year, so I think the main point is that 2007 was a year of many very accomplished motion pictures. Poscar-winner No Country for Old Men and Sweeney Todd are perfect or pretty close to perfect; Juno is less airtight and more provocative. The Savages is very strong, too. And Hannah Takes the Stairs should not be underestimated. (More on that later.) But just to use this high-profile platform to shine a spotlight on a much less appreciated movie, I think I'll go with the neglected romantic comedy Ira & Abby because it blew me away and it's the movie I most want people to see and appreciate, with its excellent cast and well-sculpted script. If that's not a favorite, I don't know what is.

FAVORITE REVIVAL This is also a case where I'm reluctant to pick just one. So I'll pick just three: Charles Burnett's artful Killer of Sheep, the wonderful French noir Le Doulos, and the astounding home video Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.

OVERLOOKED ACTORS The Poscar favorites were Amy Adams, Cate Blanchett, Thomas Haden Church, Tommy Lee Jones, Viggo Mortensen, and Saoirse Ronan. But let us not forget the contributions Parker Posey and Drea de Matteo in Broken English, and the casts of Ira & Abby, The Savages (including Philip Bosco), No Country for Old Men (especially Kelly McDonald) and Hannah Takes the Stairs.

MOST PROMISING USE OF DIALOGUE Kudos to Diablo Cody for the transition from heavy slang to (relatively) clear admissions in Juno. The kind of thing I associate with much classic literature, it's a very pleasant surprise in Juno.

STEALTH SUBPLOT I loved how Jennifer Garner's story gradually came to the fore in Juno, but here I've got to take note of the incredibly sad story of Kelly McDonald's Carla Jean Moss in No Country for Old Men. That poor sweetie!



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THANKLESS ROLE Jennifer Garner came close as the wannabe mom in Juno, but for the second year in a row, this Battie goes to Emily Blunt, this time for her obnoxious, hard-to-like character in The Jane Austen Book Club. Just look at how the group reacts to her Prudie!



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FAVORITE PERFORMANCE BY A PROP I won't argue with the Poscar that went to the McLovin ID, but I would like to take a moment to salute Chigurh's unforgettable hairstyle in No Country for Old Men as Most Memorable Hairdo. I imagine it was modeled after some police sketch. Know what I mean?

BEST ACCESSORIZED The accessories (and makeup) speak volumes about Drea de Matteo's character in Broken English.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING I totally agree with the Poscar for the chef's hat in Ratatouille, explained in DVD Extras More Stimulating than the Movie Itself.

LEAST APPEALING LEADING MAN What can I say? I found Ratatouille's Linguini hard to digest.

HALFSIES Half of the Battie for the Movie that Falls Apart Midway goes to Broken English; the other half goes to Hairspray.

DUMBEST BEHAVIOR BY A CHARACTER WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER The Poscar in this category went to Josh Brolin's character Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men, but I think I can top that by giving the Battie to all the Transformers in Transformers. Here's the deal: The main character in the movie is desperate to raise some money, so he offers his grandpa's glasses for sale on eBay. The glasses, it turns out, are the Holy Grail for the computer-savvy Transformers, who wreak all kinds of Oscar-nominated havoc to get the specs. But all they needed to do is put up a buck or two on eBay, saving everyone a lot of cataclysmic trouble.

NEVER MIND THE HYPE Hannah Takes the Stairs risked being subsumed by the buzz over mumblecore, but it's worth being considered in its own right as a canny look at the twentysomethings of today, akin to such arthouse staples as Baby Face and the early films of Godard and Truffaut. Plus it's got the Best Use of Brass.

BEST ORGAN Normally this would go to a porn star, but this year it goes to Sweeney Todd for the mood-setting music during the opening credits.

MOST CONFUSING ACCENT The central figure in an extremely clichéd scene in Gone Baby Gone (it's like something out of Hollywood Shuffle), the character Cheese is described as "Haitian" but I swear he sounds Jamaican to me. Possible explanation: In Southie, "Haitian" is another word for "Jamaican." Or maybe I'm totally wrong about this.

MOST INEXPLICABLE LACK OF EFFECT Why doesn't Patrick get his ass kicked in the Southie bar in Gone Baby Gone? Just because he's carrying that little 'ol gun? Maybe Southie isn't so tough after all....

BEST IMAGINED PLOTLINE In Gone Baby Gone, co-PI Angie Gennaro could've been in on the plot, as a relation of Francine Doyle.

DON'T GET ME WRONG I liked Gone Baby Gone. It's A Good B Noir Dressed in A Clothing.

MOST BITTERSWEET PIE Waitress, of course. I miss you, Adrienne Shelly!

SPIRIT OF INGMAR BERGMAN Sarah Polley for Away from Her.

SPIRIT OF DIVINE This posthumous Battie goes to Divine, whose wonderful kinetic performance in the original Hairspray completely overshadows John Travolta's fat suit-embedded turn in the musical remake.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT Were you really impressed by Romance and Cigarettes? Watch just about anything by Dennis Potter, the genius behind The Singing Detective. However, Romance and Cigarettes also includes the Funniest Gag, which has to do with Susan Sarandon's character.

BEST REALIZATION OF ONE OF MY IDEAS Paprika, of course!

BEST DEPICTION OF A MEDICAL CONDITION Philip Bosco and Julie Christie were good as people with dementia, but Jack Carpenter and Crystal Hunt broke new ground as people on gluten-free diets in Sydney White. (I'm presuming that at least one of them was formally diagnosed as having celiac disease.)

MEET CUTE The encounter between those two gluten-free characters in Sydney White. It's like Papageno and Papagena!

MOST DECONSTRUCTIONIST Todd Haynes indulged his interest in semiotics in I'm Not There, which (hype aside) is/isn't about Bob Dylan. It's difficult, like being/not being there/not there in college when deconstruction was/wasn't king.

GENRE Doomed (mis)adventure (for both documentaries and non-documentaries).

MOVIE I WISH I'D SEEN How did I fail to see Fay Grim?

CHEESIEST FUN The movie Prey is a kind of throwback to the post-Jaws killer animal films of the Seventies. Part of the fun is seeing through the transparent contrivances that provide the lions with fresh meat.

MOST DIVISIVE FILM GEEK FLICK You see, Grindhouse pays tribute to the fun side of certain junky movies, and it doesn't just pair up two types of those movies. "Death Proof" in itself is two movies in one, with one set of women being victims in the first part and the other set of women refusing to be victims in the second part. So it's a kind of dialect within a dialectic...ah, what's the use? Either you liked it or you didn't! But it does deserve Best Trailers and Best Pee Joke.

MOST DIVISIVE EDITING Some people—some people I admire—think the world of The Bourne Ultimatum. And that's one place where we part ways. The chase and fight in the Casbah exemplifies weaknesses of many modern Hollywood action movies. The idea of the chase is a good one, but it's too hard (perhaps impossible) to figure out where the parties are in relation to one another, how they're keeping track of each other, etc. It's just a lot of technical devices, such as cutting and suspenseful music, at the service of a clever concept that just isn't well realized. So you lose out on drama, on theater. And the fight scene is also a lot of cutting without a strong sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the fighters. Again, you lose out.

For an example of a good chase...I dunno. I was thinking of The Third Man...or better yet Blade Runner...or perhaps lots of No Country for Old Men. For a really good dramatic fight, take a look at Drunken Master 2, in which Jackie Chan uses a crazy drunken style of fighting.



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WORST TREND Besides (see above) substituting quick edits and noise for dramatic action? How about opera-length features...without intermissions? Grindhouse excepted.

WORST USE OF 3D This time it goes to Whatever Harry Potter Movie Came Out in 2007. The movie also offered more examples of incoherent fight scenes (see above).

MOST GRATIFYING VIDEO RELEASE Just over four years ago in Entertainment Weekly, I called for the DVD release of the Busby Berkeley extravaganza The Gang's All Here, in all of its Technicolor ludicrosity. Here's "The Polka Dot Polka."



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THE POSCARS HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED!

Who won? Who lost?? Find out here!

THE SECOND ANNUAL POSCARS: NOMINEES

Once again the movie industry crosses its fingers and holds its breath (though no one knows exactly why) while awaiting the announcment of the Poscars, determined solely by BAT friend Susan Thea Posnock.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

POSCARS AND BATTIES: THE RESULTS ARE IN! As I'm sure all of you already know, the Poscar nominations came out during prime time on February 9.

Now that Susan Thea Posnock's final choices are in, I want to stress that I totally respect them. Nevertheless, it's gainsaying time at Blog About Town!

Herewith, a bevy of Battie Awards (drawn from my very spotty viewing of films in 2006).

FAVORITE PICTURE The Poscar winner for Best Picture is the very respectable Volver, yet I'm sorry to see that another movie with a Spanish connection--Pan's Labyrinth--was not even a nominee! For its powerful parallel plotlines and imagery, Pan's Labyrinth earns a Battie for Favorite Picture along with Batties for Unfortunate Title Translation and Justifiable Ickiness.

MOST OVERLOOKED ACTORS The Poscar nods for the Best Actors went to Forest Whitaker and Steve Carell, but Battie wants Michael Caine (Children of Men), Stanley Tucci (The Devil Wears Prada), and that Tony Blair guy (okay: Michael Sheen in The Queen) to know their efforts were noticed and admired. In fact, a very democratic MIKE LEIGH BATTIE FOR ENSEMBLE ACTING goes to the cast of The Queen, largely overlooked in the hype over Helen Mirren.

HALFSIES Half of the Battie for the Movie That Falls Apart Midway goes to Little Children; the other half goes to The Last King of Scotland.

NOTEWORTHY SOUND Ah, but the Batties would be remiss in not acknowledging how Forest Whitaker dominated The Last King of Scotland--largely through sound. So here's a Battie for the 14-member Sound Department of The Last King of Scotland for recording and mixing the sound so that Whitaker's voice--justly honored at the Poscars--resonated throughout the movie.

WORST USE OF 3D The intermittent 3D in the IMAX version of Superman Returns was almost perversely used in many scenes when it was negligible anyway.

DUMBEST BEHAVIOR BY A CHARACTER WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER The Poscar nominees in this area were on-target--eating forbidden fruit in Pan's Labyrinth and shtupping the wrong people in The Last King of Scotland and Thank You For Not Smoking were stupid, stupid, stupid--but what about skateboarding in Little Children? For that matter, how about a Special Group Battie for Dumb Behavior in Little Children? (Sorry, Eddie Murphy-- Norbit came out in 2007.)

THROWAWAY CUTAWAY Tobey Maguire's character having "sex" in The Good German. He's supposed to be into violent kink, but the one cutaway that could have illustrated that character point merely shows him bonking away unimaginatively. If it had been omitted (in the censored "style" of movies from the period evoked in The Good German), our own wild imaginations could have done a much better job at filling in the, uh, gap.

GLARING OMISSION Judging by the rules of chick lit, I understood that the original romantic relationship of Anne Hathaway's character in The Devil Wears Prada would wind up on the rocks. Still, I might have liked seeing one or two scenes actually depicting the problem. Instead, the director relied too much on the audience taking the cliché for granted.

MOST SHAMELESS CREDITS Anyone who saw the entirety of Dreamgirls knows that the credits were styled like Oscar ads. Still there's something to be said for paying so much attention to behind-the-scenes people (such as costume, hair, and makeup staff) who labored on the movie.

COSTUME AND MAKEUP Normally, the Oscars favor historical fashion, while the Batties try to recognize the creativity that goes into science fiction and fantasy films. But this year the nod goes to Dreamgirls for using its outfits, wigs, and makeup to communicate loads about the characters as they move from rhythm-and-blues to disco.

SUSPENDED ANIMATION The Battie goes to For Your Consideration for relying heavily on Internet jokes that must have been in comedy's cryogenic deep-freeze for about a decade. (I still liked the movie, by the way.)

REVIVAL All together now: El Topo. Perhaps I'm too ignorant to fully appreciate Army of Shadows.

GENRES Westerns and Mafia Movies, hands down. (Or should it be hands up?)

PROMOTIONAL OVERBOOKING A long line showed up with passes for Woody Allen's Scoop in Chelsea--but virtually no one got in! Not even the consolation prize of a Scoop notebook could take away the hurt. At least the weather was good.

THANKLESS ROLE I'm open to other suggestions, but Emily Blunt comes to mind for her workaholic, ambitious, snotty, pissy, and ultimately frustrated underling in The Devil Wears Prada.

PREDICTABLE PHRASE The reference to Anne Hathaway's character "drinking the Kool-Aid" in The Devil Wears Prada.

MISCAST FOOD ITEM Jarlsberg, presented as a gourmet cheese in The Devil Wears Prada.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING Once again, a startling omission from the Poscars. Susan considered coats tossed by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada and the push-up bras worn by Penelope Cruz in Volver before assigning top honors to stretchy pants worn by Jack Black in something called Nacho Libre. I would give the BEST SUPPORTING UNDERGARMENTS to the ones worn by Cruz in Volver...but what about Stanley Tucci's oversized ring in The Devil Wears Prada? Oversized ring, Blog About Town wants you to know you were noticed and admired!

Wait for it!



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Photo: David Marc Fischer