Year: 2017

The Hell Plaza Oktober-Minifest 2017: House

~ electrictheatre

When the average moviegoer thinks of Japanese horror movies, the first (and possibly only) thing that pops to mind is likely the Godzilla series. If you ask the more Criterion Collection-obsessed fan about the subject, they might bring up the sublimely creepy supernatural thrills of Kwaidan or Ringu. All of these movies have their merits and deserve their places in the horror pantheon. But if you continue to explore the country’s genre efforts, eventually you’ll get to Nobuhiko Obayashi’s delirious 1977 film House. And once you do, you’re never gonna forget it. There are plenty of horror movies but there aren’t a whole lot from any country that are quite like House.

The plot itself is relatively straightforward. A teenage girl (named Gorgeous, your first indication of the broad strokes this movie is painted in) is disappointed to learn that her summer vacation with her film composer dad is going to be crashed by his new fiancée. Still mourning the death of her mother, Gorgeous contacts her estranged aunt, who lives alone in a remote country house. The aunt responds that she’d love a visit, so Gorgeous and her six friends (Sweet, Prof, Mac, Melody, Fantasy and Kung Fu) head off alone for the country, their school-teacher chaperone promising to follow right behind.

It takes a little while for things to get spooky once the girls arrive at the house. At first, the wheelchair-bound aunt is a gracious host, overjoyed to have company after all these years. The girls take turns cleaning up, cooking, and giggling over inside jokes and crushes. But eventually, they start disappearing one by one and as they do, the aunt grows steadily more youthful and invigorated. No points for guessing the source of her new vitality.

Even though it takes a little while to get to the horror parts of House, the movie is pretty unhinged right from the get-go. The cinematography is bathed in lurid colors and composed of wildly disorienting camera angles, disassociating even the most ordinary scene from any sense of realism. There’s already a sense that anything can happen even before the girls’ heads start turning up in wells and pianos start to devour them. And just as you’re thinking, “This movie is bananas,” a character literally transforms into a pile of bananas, as if Obayashi was reading your mind and decided to see your bet and raise it.

This was Obayashi’s feature directing debut and he threw everything up to and including the kitchen sink into it. The result is absolutely exhilarating, a haunted house ride like none other. The only other thing I can compare it to is Takashi Miike’s equally insane The Happiness Of The Katakuris. I could easily see House being an influence on Miike’s most free-wheeling projects. This is the perfect Halloween movie for the jaded horror fan who thinks they’ve seen everything. House is proof that there is always something new under the sun just waiting to be discovered.

The Hell Plaza Oktober-Minifest 2017: Jacob’s Ladder

~ electrictheatre

(SPOILER ALERT: This article will discuss plot points, including the ending, of a film that was released in the previous century. If for some reason you have not yet seen Jacob’s Ladder, adjust your reading plans accordingly.)

When you think horror movies, a murderer’s row of iconic directors immediately pops to mind: Argento, Carpenter, Cronenberg, Hooper, Craven. They’re so familiar to horror fans that first names aren’t necessary. But it can be equally fascinating when a filmmaker not typically associated with scary movies decides to tackle the genre. John Landis and William Friedkin, for example, have only made a couple of horror movies apiece. But those films were strong enough to forever link them to horror. You could make the same case for Stanley Kubrick. He only made one but I think most people (besides Stephen King, of course) think it was a pretty solid effort.

Then you have the real outliers, folks who are just visiting the dark side. Think Rob Reiner (Misery), Robert Zemeckis (What Lies Beneath and the horror-adjacent Death Becomes Her), and pretty much everybody who ever directed an episode of Tales From The Crypt. But surprisingly enough, one of the darkest visions from these horror dabblers came from the guy who directed Flashdance.

In 1990, Adrian Lyne was riding high on the blockbuster success of Fatal Attraction (a movie that’s usually classified with the higher-class “suspense thrillers”…but come on, it’s basically a horror movie). He had enough clout to get Jacob’s Ladder out of development hell and into production. Bruce Joel Rubin’s script for Jacob’s Ladder had been kicking around for years, with such names as Ridley Scott and Sidney Lumet taking a crack at it. Lyne made some significant changes to Rubin’s script, lending the finished film a much more disturbing atmosphere than it likely would have had otherwise. (Rubin, of course, had another big paranormal hit of a much different kind in 1990 with Ghost.)

Lyne cast Tim Robbins (then best known for his comedic work in such films as Bull Durham and…um, Howard The Duck) as Jacob Singer. During the Vietnam War, Singer is badly wounded in a brutal firefight that wipes out much of his platoon. Back in the States, he’s a postman struggling to return to civilian life. He’s separated from his wife following the traumatic death of their son, Gabe (played, somewhat distractingly, by an uncredited Macaulay Culkin). Even worse, he’s begun to suffer from severe hallucinations, high fevers and other ailments. When one of his old Army buddies (Pruitt Taylor Vince) is mysteriously killed, he compares notes with the other survivors of his platoon (including Ving Rhames and Eriq La Salle). They come to the conclusion that something must have happened to them back in Vietnam and whatever it was, it’s coming back to haunt them.

So far, so good. Lyne films all of this with a palpable sense of dread and menace, his signature carefully placed shafts of light and banks of rolling fog getting put to great use. The hallucinations Jacob endures are genuinely disturbing, from a near miss on a subway track to the bravura sequence with Jacob strapped down on a gurney in one of the creepiest abandoned hospitals in film history, being tended to by eyeless doctors with hypodermic needles the size of trombones. But here’s the thing (and here comes that spoiler I warned you about at the top): Jacob’s dead. He was mortally wounded in that firefight and died in a mobile hospital tent while still in ‘Nam.

When I first saw Jacob’s Ladder back in 1990, this reveal soured the entire movie for me. For one thing, it’s not exactly a twist. We’re explicitly told several times that this is exactly what’s going on. Jacob even has a palm reader tell him point blank that he’s dead pretty early on. It’s a little like if Citizen Kane had opened with the words, “My sled!” instead of “Rosebud”.

Also, it essentially turns the entire film into a protracted version of the great short subject An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge (which also aired as an episode of The Twilight Zone). There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that (although I admit to being biased against movies that take longer to do the same exact thing as a much shorter predecessor). But Jacob’s hallucinatory life is filled with details and characters that are extremely specific. These certainly help sell the reality of the situation but don’t quite fit comfortably once they’re revealed for what they are.

Danny Aiello’s role as an angelic chiropractor (I assume either Ruben or Lyne have had some serious back problems) is easy enough to explain away. But Elizabeth Peña has a thankless role as Jacob’s “current” girlfriend who presumably never actually existed. We get no sense that this is some other figure from his past who he has recast into this role. She’s presumably a demon (her name is Jezebel, after all) but for the most part, she seems like an overwhelmed young woman who’s genuinely trying to help her partner. Almost all of the other hallucinatory characters have a mysterious aloofness to them that sets them apart. But Peña seems like a real person and it’s a shame that she and the audience aren’t given more to work with.

All this being said, there are plenty of people who admire Jacob’s Ladder in its entirety and find it to be a disturbing and even profound horror movie. For me, it remains a movie full of brilliant individual moments that unfortunately don’t ever add up to anything more than that. The allegorical elements don’t seem entirely thought out, which may be a result of Lyne’s tinkering with Ruben’s script. As long as the movie focuses on Jacob Singer’s brilliantly art-directed hallucinations and paranoia, it works like gangbusters. It’s only when it tries to spin the horror into something more meaningful that it goes awry. I find Jacob’s Ladder to be a frustrating near-miss. As always, your mileage may vary.

The Hell Plaza Oktober-Minifest 2017: Phantasm Ravager

~ electrictheatre

For eight years, from 2007 to 2014, I ran an annual October review-a-thon for The Digital Bits called the Hell Plaza Oktoberfest. As you probably already know (or can figure out if you have any idea what holiday is most closely associated with October), the premise was that I would review a horror (or horror-adjacent) DVD every day for the entire month. This doesn’t sound like it should be too hard. Social media is chock-a-block with posts about horror-movie-a-day challenges. Plenty of people even write up their reviews on blogs, Facebook, Letterboxd and anywhere else words can be posted online. It’s really not that big a deal.

The thing is, I wasn’t exactly doing that. I wasn’t reviewing a movie a day. I was reviewing a DVD or Blu-ray release a day and that frequently meant multiple movies, plus hours of bonus content. For every bare-bones movie-only DVD I reviewed, there’d be something like Scream Factory’s 6-movie Vincent Price Collection or the Masters Of Horror television series. What I’m trying to say is these things took time.

Anyway, I began to get a little burned out after 8 years and decided it was time to pull the plug on Oktoberfest. I thought eight installments was a respectable run for a horror franchise. Most don’t make it that far and if they do, they’ve usually started to truly suck. That’s right around the time where the word “reboot” starts getting tossed around.

This year, I’ve been doing my own personal Oktoberfest at home, trying to watch a horror movie a day. I haven’t been as religious about it as I would if I was still writing for the Bits, missing a day here and there. But that’s just helped remind me why I enjoyed doing it in the first place. So I figured, why not reboot Oktoberfest? Now that I’m not in the DVD review business anymore, all I’d have to worry about is the movie itself, which was always the most fun part about those reviews anyway. I felt that I did a halfway decent job reviewing bonus content and other technical aspects of the discs I covered but I always tried to make it clear that if you were just reading my reviews for analysis of bit-rates and 7.1 remixes, you were in the wrong place. Here at the Electric Theatre, I don’t even have to pretend to care about that stuff.

There were only two problems with Oktoberfest 2.0. One, I wasn’t sure if anyone would really care. Two, I didn’t even think about doing it until October was already halfway over. Fortunately, the outstanding community over at the J.E.T. Facebook page assured me that they did care and helped me pick out a few movies for a Mini-Fest. So let’s give it a shot. If this goes well, you can expect a complete Oktoberfest next year. Until then, what better way to kick off a new installment of a long-running franchise than with a look at another new installment of a long-running franchise?

And say what you will about the Phantasm series, nobody involved with these films can be accused of rushing things to capitalize on their popularity. The first movie came out back in 1979. Since then, Don Coscarelli and friends have gone one to make four more, including last year’s Phantasm: Ravager (or RaVager, depending on how clever you’re feeling with Roman numerals).

First things first: it is nothing short of miraculous that these movies are still being made by essentially the same group of people who made the first one almost 40 years ago. Despite getting briefly sucked into the studio system with Phantasm II, Don Coscarelli has somehow managed to retain control of his cult classic creation. Sure, he handed the directorial reins of Part 5 over to David Hartman but he still co-wrote the script and produced. Offhand, I can’t think of another series whose creators have maintained that kind of focus and autonomy. Even Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell have broadened the Evil Dead tent well beyond the scope of their original effort. Coscarelli and crew just seem to keep plugging along in their own little corner of the universe, away from anyone who might try to interfere with or dilute their vision.

That’s pretty cool but Phantasm: Ravager is the first movie in the series where that sense of isolationism starts to work against it. There’s no question that this movie was made exclusively for Phantasm Phans. And that’s fine. I consider myself a fan. But this is a movie made for people who have seen all four Phantasms multiple times and rewatch them on a regular basis. I like ‘em myself but it’s been almost 20 years since the last one came out. Ravager picks up as if it’s been six months. I have never seen a movie sequel make so little effort toward attracting new fans as this one.

For better or worse, Phantasm: Ravager is essentially The Reggie Show, throwing the spotlight on the guitar-playing ice cream man turned sphere-hunter played by Reggie Bannister. Reggie returns from the events of Phantasm IV alone, wandering the desert and looking for Mike (A. Michael Baldwin). Reunited with his iconic ’71 ‘Cuda, Reggie gets back on the road, still pursued by the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) and his silver spheres. Or maybe not. In another timeline, Reggie is wheelchair-bound and suffering from early onset dementia, reciting his insane-sounding stories to Mike, who is alive and well and has no memory of any of this. Again, or maybe not because Reggie soon finds himself in yet another alternate timeline, this one a post-apocalyptic hellscape ruled by the Tall Man where Mike leads a ragtag group of Mad Max-inspired rebels like Chunk (Stephen Jutras) and Jane (Dawn Cody, who also turns up as…aw, forget it…it doesn’t really matter).

Believe it or not, this is both more and less confusing on screen than it is on paper. Narrative clarity has never been the strong suit of the Phantasm franchise. It tracks in dream logic that sorta kinda makes sense while you’re watching it. It’s never unclear what timeline you’re in or what’s happening within each one. But what it all’s supposed to mean is another thing. I give Coscarelli and Hartman a lot of credit both for getting the band back together (there are plenty of other surprising callbacks and pop-up cameos here) and for trying to do something kind of ambitious that doesn’t ignore the cast’s advancing age. There’s certainly no reason for the Tall Man to be calling Mike “boy” anymore. But let’s be honest. None of these guys are really strong enough actors to pull off something truly meaningful or emotional. The degree to which this material moves you depends entirely on your own emotional connection to these movies.

Ravager ends up being a tribute to Reggie Bannister, which is fine. He’s certainly earned his day in the sun. But it probably should have been a swan song for Angus Scrimm, who passed away shortly before the movie premiered. You might say, “Sure, it’s easy to say that in retrospect,” considering this movie’s lengthy production time but come on. Scrimm was 89 when he died, so you can’t say it was a shock. I have no doubt they used him as much as they could given his age and that rumble of a voice still carries menace. But it seems to me that if you’re going to make another Phantasm movie and you’re pretty sure it’ll be the last one, at least with Angus Scrimm’s involvement, wouldn’t you do everything you can to highlight his presence? Reggie’s timelines are so scrambled that the Tall Man barely figures in to much of it and eventually, he goes out with a whimper. It’s not what you want from an iconic movie villain’s final appearance.

For all the obvious care and enthusiasm that went into the making of Ravager, the movie is a step backward for the Phantasm series. With its low-grade digital video look and often chintzy effects, it’s clear that they simply did not have the resources to pull off some of the more ambitious sequences. The reveal of Earth as remade in the Tall Man’s image particularly falls flat. The movie feels more like a Kickstarter-backed piece of fan fiction than a professionally produced film. If this is indeed the end of the road for the Tall Man (and with Scrimm’s death, it certainly should be), it’s a well-intentioned but rather ignoble conclusion to the series. For all its faults and quirks, the Phantasm series had more ups than downs. Ravager, unfortunately, lands squarely on the negative side of the balance sheet.

Not That You Asked…Some Thoughts On Twin Peaks: The Return

~ electrictheatre

And now come the think-pieces.

(Note for those of you new to the internet. This piece will be discussing David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return {or Season 3 or whatever you want to call it} in its entirety. This will include what are popularly referred to as “spoilers”. If you are invested in this show but have not yet watched all eighteen episodes, you may not want to read this.)

From the very beginning, to be a fan of Twin Peaks has involved a certain degree of frustration. Not merely tolerating it but actively thriving upon it. To truly appreciate the show, you had to love mysteries more than solutions. When a show’s co-creator admits in interviews that he has little to no interest in solving the murder mystery at the root of the proceedings, you should realize that frustration will be woven deeply into the fabric of the program.

Over the years, Twin Peaks has frustrated its viewers and fans (two groups that shouldn’t necessarily be mutually exclusive but kind of are) in a variety of ways. A lot of viewers got frustrated and jumped ship when the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer was still unrevealed at the end of the first season. Others became frustrated over the course of the second as the show became more esoteric and eventually rambled its way through a bevy of subplots (Ben Horne’s Civil War obsession, the DEA’s investigation into Cooper and, most notoriously, James Hurley’s dalliance with wealthy abused femme fatale Evelyn Marsh) that mostly went nowhere. And everyone who stuck around for the season two finale was frustrated by a series of escalating cliffhangers that were unlikely to ever be resolved.

All this frustration arguably reached its apotheosis in 1992 when the few remaining die-hards went to see Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Never forget that despite its recent re-appraisal by fans and critics, FWWM was a major disaster when it first came out, despised by virtually everybody who saw it. People were frustrated that it was a prequel focusing on the murder of Teresa Banks and the last days of Laura Palmer instead of a continuation that would provide some resolution to the series. They were frustrated that beloved Special Agent Dale Cooper was relegated to a relatively minor (and somewhat baffling) supporting role. And they were frustrated to learn that over an hour of footage, including both material featuring some fan favorite characters as well as stuff that actually helps you make some degree of sense of the damn thing, had been cut from the film.

So it came as no surprise when the recently concluded Showtime revival introduced an entire summer’s worth of frustration to Peaks viewers old and new. But a lot has changed in the years since we were last in Twin Peaks, not least of which is the way we engage with television. These days, the water cooler has moved online. Each and every television show worth discussing (and quite a few that aren’t) is given an online post-mortem, recapping the events of the week and giving fans a place to congregate, theorize and speculate. I followed a few of these for Twin Peaks: The Return and I was amazed to see that the level of discourse and criticism rarely rose above that of Homer Simpson: “Brilliant! I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.”

The Return seemed to defeat the week-by-week analysis method of television criticism. Even something as simple as recapping the events of each episode ultimately proved futile as entire weeks would go by where seemingly very little happened. But without knowing where any of this was headed, the vigilant recapper would gloss over a scene at their peril (“Meanwhile, Andy and Lucy have a heated discussion over what color chair to order…”), resulting in some absurdly detailed articles that somehow still managed to miss the forest for the trees.

But despite all the virtual ink spilled over The Return, very few people attempted to analyze it at its most basic level: as a piece of motion picture storytelling (whether you consider it to be cinema or television is up to you). In other words, what about this thing actually works and what doesn’t? Everyone seems to have collectively decided that David Lynch is above such things. Whatever he’s doing can’t be discussed in terms of traditional filmmaking. Frankly, that’s a crock of shit. Regardless of whatever other artistic pursuits he chases down, Lynch is still a filmmaker, working with a script, actors, a crew and all the other stuff everybody else works with. Whether you’re a fan of his work or not, your initial response to his work, whether it’s positive or negative, is based on how it works as a movie, not as some esoteric puzzle that requires 60 minutes of transcendental meditation a day to decipher.

Now don’t get me wrong. For the most part, I felt that Twin Peaks: The Return worked beautifully. I certainly wouldn’t call it a disappointment. If anything, it was much better than we had any right to expect from such a belated follow-up. But it’s worth taking a look at what worked and what didn’t work here because I feel far too many people are reacting as though every minute of these 18 hours was an unassailable masterpiece. Twin Peaks has never been perfect and it does the show, David Lynch, Mark Frost and all involved a disservice to pretend like it is.

But before we look at what we got, I’d like to express my disappointment at a few of the things we didn’t. You can’t really criticize a show for not giving you what you want, especially this one, and this really isn’t criticism. This part is just the whining of a longtime Twin Peaks fanboy.

Sheriff Harry S. Truman/The Man from Another Place – I don’t know what happened that Michael Ontkean and Michael J. Anderson couldn’t be persuaded to return to Twin Peaks, whether it was something personal, health reasons, money or something else entirely (probably money…it’s usually money). Whatever it was, their absence reverberated throughout. Ontkean’s Truman was the heart of the original series, an audience surrogate who guided us into the strange world of the Black Lodge. Likewise, he was able to ease Cooper (and us) into the every day weirdness of Twin Peaks that was simply business as usual for him. The relationship he and Cooper forged over those two series was a key element in Twin Peaks’ success. As much as I love Robert Forster (more about him later), he was no substitute for Ontkean. But at least he was replaced with another human actor. Anderson’s Man from Another Place, a.k.a. The Arm, evolved into a tree skeleton with a blob of flesh on it. Of course in the Twin Peaks world, this evolution actually makes more sense than Harry’s job being taken by a previously unheard-of brother but still. Anderson was one of the first iconic, indelible actors who helped define the look and feel of Twin Peaks. Without him, The Return didn’t feel quite the same.

Chet Desmond and Sam Stanley – I may be the only person who was hoping for a return visit from Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland’s characters from Fire Walk With Me. Sutherland’s Stanley was a long-shot. The forensic specialist was newly paired up with Desmond to investigate the murder of Teresa Banks, maybe a test run arranged by Director Gordon Cole (Lynch) to see if he could handle a Blue Rose Case. It’s safe to assume he didn’t pass the audition. But Isaak’s Desmond disappeared without a trace, just like Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) and Coop. If Jeffries could come back despite Bowie’s death AND we could make time to catch up with former DEA Agent Denise Bryson (David Duchovny), an amusing but peripheral character, surely we could have spared a thought for poor Agent Desmond.

How’s Annie? – This one really irked me. Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham) provided the whole reason Cooper went into the Black Lodge at the end of the second season in the first place. And as we glimpsed in Fire Walk With Me, she’s still in there. The fact that neither she nor her captor, Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh), were even mentioned in The Return felt like a disconnect to me.

(EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that Annie did indeed get out of the Black Lodge at the end of season two. I forgot about that. It’s also confirmed in a deleted scene from Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces showing her in the hospital. Mea culpa on that one, although I stand by the larger point about how nobody even refers to her or Windom Earle.)

As much as I would have liked to see all of the above turn up in The Return, I knew full well that none of them would be appearing before the first episode even aired. Considering the intense veil of secrecy surrounding the show’s production, it’s a bit surprising that Lynch released a complete cast list well in advance of the premiere. That information turned out to be 100% accurate, with no surprise omissions or red herring inclusions. It was the only scrap of information we had in the months leading up to the premiere and it was a far more effective teaser than any trailer or clip could be. It told us everything and nothing at the same time.

Even armed with this knowledge, one of the biggest question marks hanging over The Return was how Lynch and Frost would deal with the large number of prominent cast members who had died over the past 25 years. Apart from Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and the constant presence (felt if not always seen) of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), no one member of the cast seemed to have any more or less importance than another. It would have been fairly simple to acknowledge these passings with a nod and a line, or even ignore them entirely, and move on.

Instead, The Return’s resurrection of its late actors and treatment of death in general became one of its greatest strengths. Who could have predicted that Phillip Jeffries (originally Bowie, now an enormous steampunk kettle voiced by Nathan Frizzell) or Major Briggs (Don S. Davis, who died all the way back in 2008) would be key players in The Return? And yet, these revivals never came across as cheap, exploitative or crass. They were all deeply reverent, a tacit indication that no one other than these men and women could embody these characters. The touching dedications at the end of each episode served as a fitting, final goodbye.

In many respects, saying goodbye seemed to be the entire point behind The Return. Part of the reason the second season cliffhanger proved so frustrating was that we didn’t know at the time that it was the end of the road. Sure, the writing was on the wall as ratings continued to drop but that episode was never meant to be a series finale. It just became one by default after ABC pulled the plug.

In the years since, Lynch may have realized how much he underestimated our need for closure. That isn’t the same as resolution, something The Return steadfastly refused to provide. But watching The Return, steeled with the knowledge that whatever happened, this was probably the end, was a much different experience than watching that second season finale all those years ago. This was particularly true in the series’ second half. Our last glimpse of Big Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) and Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton), together and happy at last, or Margaret Lanterman’s (Catherine E. Coulson) heartbreaking final call to Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) felt like the end of a long road. And when Cooper says, “See you at the curtain call” to Cole and Diane (Laura Dern) in Episode 17, it felt like an acknowledgment that the folks who brought us Twin Peaks would finally be getting a chance to take a long-overdue bow.

What then are we to make of the fact that the curtain call never quite materializes in Episode 18? In the end, we’re left with Dale Cooper (or really, I guess, “Richard”) and Laura Palmer/Carrie Page, MacLachlan and Lee, the two constant presences, standing alone on the street in front of what used to be (or maybe will someday become) the Palmer house, asking “What year is it?” The episode works as a powerful visualization of the nostalgic impulses that drove this series, as a thematic epilogue to Twin Peaks in its entirety, and even as simply a tone poem exploring the quixotic urges inside Cooper’s quest to avenge and retroactively “save” Laura. But it’s a far cry from the traditional victory lap we usually envision as a curtain call. And how does it function within the overall narrative of Twin Peaks? Is there meaning here or is it completely inscrutable?

There’s certainly enough to unpack in this episode that I’m confident that it’s scrutable, given enough time, analysis and careful reviewing. But I’m less sure that’s the case with the series as a whole. Many of The Return’s best moments came in its second half, following the astonishing high point of Episode 8, 60 minutes of nonstop I-can’t-believe-I’m-seeing-this-on-American-television mind-fuckery that only David Lynch could have delivered. Prior to that episode and even in several that followed, there were several blind alleys and detours that simply didn’t work. What’s astonishing is that The Return’s strengths overshadowed its weaknesses to such a degree that we all just kind of forgot about them.

The problem here, I think, is that David Lynch hasn’t been all that interested in narrative storytelling for a long, long time. All of his films have grace notes and superfluous sequences that don’t necessarily add anything to the forward momentum of the story being told. And that’s great in a single two-to-three-hour movie (although three hours is pushing it…overlength being one of several problems that sunk Lynch’s Inland Empire). But that kind of meandering becomes maddening over the course of 18 hours.

Did The Return need to be 18 episodes long? Absolutely not. As far as I’m concerned, if this had been a trilogy of movie-length episodes it would have been one of the towering television achievements of all time. First on my chopping block would have been, I’m sorry to say, Robert Forster and Candy Clark as Sheriff Frank Truman and his wife, Doris. I love both actors but Forster’s presence was too close to the heart of the series. He was never going to fit in entirely, despite his best efforts. The addition of Doris should have distinguished him more from his brother. But her few scenes, harping at Frank about minor offenses, felt like rehashes of stuff we’ve seen played out before between Ed and Nadine (Wendy Robie) or, for that matter, Pete and Catherine Martell (Jack Nance and Piper Laurie). If you’re going to go back to the well, at least come back with some fresh water.

There were plenty of other subplots that seemed to portend much but added very little, including Dr. Jacoby’s (Russ Tamblyn) new gig as podcaster Dr. Amp, most if not all of the goings-on at the relocated-for-some-reason Fat Trout Trailer Park run by Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton), and the various relationships between Shelly the waitress (Mädchen Amick), her daughter Becky (Amanda Seyfried), Becky’s cheating, drug-addicted husband Steven (Caleb Landry Jones) and drug dealer Red (Balthazar Getty). If you were paying attention to the credits on Episode 11, you were probably shocked to discover that the woman Steven was having an affair with was Gersten Hayward (Alicia Witt), youngest sister of Laura’s best friend, Donna. This seemed like it should be important. Turned out, it wasn’t.

Perhaps the worst offender in the Things That Went Nowhere Department was virtually everything that happened at the Roadhouse. Almost every week, in addition to some admittedly excellent but somewhat intrusive musical performances, we met a variety of locals, most of whom we’d never seen before and would never see again. Their conversations were intense, elliptical and full of references to people and events we didn’t know anything about. I found it easier to care about and become invested in the now-notorious floor-sweeping sequence in Episode 7. At least I knew what they were doing and why they were doing it.

Having said that, the best sequence in the Roadhouse makes me want to revisit the entire series and watch all of the scenes there more carefully. That’d be the arrival of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) and husband Charlie (Clark Middleton) in Episode 16, culminating in the reveal of Audrey waking up in that white room. I’d suspected something was off about Audrey’s situation from the first time we saw her. The dialogue, the situation, everything seemed stilted, even by Twin Peaks standards. So when it turned out that her trip to the Roadhouse was possibly not real, it made sense. Now I wonder if everything in that location was unreal. There’s also the question of Audrey’s missing lover, Billy. His name comes up throughout the series in a few different contexts. I’d be willing to bet that if you could piece together a plausible theory about Billy, you’d get a lot closer to figuring out what’s up with Audrey.

What’s frustrating (there’s that word again) is that even if you did all that, it’d still just be a theory. I really don’t believe Lynch and Frost have given us enough information here to know what’s happened to Audrey. She’s only the most egregious example. You could say the same about many of the other minor characters. But considering what a popular character Audrey was/is…she was even a favorite of Lynch’s…her treatment in The Return stings more than a little. She deserved better.

But we, the audience, got exactly what we deserved. Maybe even a little bit more. After all this time, we now have 18 more hours of imperfect television to add to the 30 or so imperfect originals and one very imperfect feature film. Happily, the best moments of The Return can stand toe to toe with the very best work Lynch has ever done. That’s a remarkable achievement for a guy who seemed to walk away from filmmaking completely over a decade ago. If The Return isn’t as cohesive or consistent as one might like, that’s OK. Consistency was never Twin Peaks’ strong suit anyway.

This kind of years-later creative reboot is rare, perhaps because it’s so risky even with the original creative team at the helm. The X-Files wasn’t able to pull it off and they only had half a dozen episodes. Lynch and Frost came much closer to recapturing the magic of their original creation than most. They knew they had lightning in a bottle back in 1990. And if there’s one thing we know about lightning, it never strikes in the same place or in the same way twice. They had the bottle but they were smart to go chasing after a different storm.

An Honor To Be Nominated: Shampoo

~ electrictheatre

THE CONTENDER: Shampoo (1975)

Number of Nominations: 4 – Supporting Actor (Jack Warden); Supporting Actress (Lee Grant); Original Screenplay (Robert Towne and Warren Beatty); Art Direction (Richard Sylbert, W. Stewart Campbell and George Gaines)

Number of Wins: 1 (Supporting Actress)

Several months ago, around the time Rules Don’t Apply was released to thunderous waves of indifference, I was surprised to find myself having to explain who exactly Warren Beatty is to a few younger people. This wasn’t an isolated incident and, while I don’t think any of the people I spoke to would necessarily describe themselves as hardcore movie buffs, they certainly aren’t entirely ignorant of film history. They were very aware of Beatty’s contemporaries, including Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. But Beatty and his work had made little to no impact. By the time the Oscars rolled around, social media reactions to this year’s Best Picture snafu confirmed what I already suspected: an entire generation has grown up without a single clue who Warren Beatty is.

As I rattled off titles of Beatty’s most famous films to these twenty-somethings, it gradually occurred to me that it was no wonder they’d never heard of him. He’s only made half a dozen pictures since around the time they’d been born in the early 1990s and none of them really lit the world on fire. His biggest hit, 1990’s Dick Tracy, didn’t leave much of a footprint after it left cinemas. Today, it’s warmly regarded by certain fans as sort of a cultish curiosity but nobody has clamored for Dick Tracy Returns in the years since (except, perhaps, for Beatty himself and he’s in no hurry). Both Bulworth and Bugsy have their admirers and supporters but that isn’t the same as having fans. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to speak up for Love Affair or Town & Country, the latter of which is the nadir of multiple careers.

But even the movies that made Warren Beatty an icon have had surprisingly little staying power. Odds are the first movie that jumps to mind with Beatty is Bonnie And Clyde. But Beatty was already a huge star by the time it came out in 1967. He struck it big in his debut, 1961’s Splendor In The Grass, a soapy potboiler that really has not aged well. None of his other movies of the decade made much of a mark (although some are worth checking out) until Bonnie And Clyde. That film’s impact should not be underestimated but, for whatever reason, it’s no longer a movie many people check out just for the hell of it. I first saw it myself in a film history class. It wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to see. It was something I was required to see.

As both a movie star and a filmmaker, Warren Beatty is inextricably linked to the late 60s and 1970s. Many of his movies were very popular at the time of their release but they remain trapped there in amber, occasionally revisited by those who experienced them first but rarely discovered by new audiences. There is no better example of this than Shampoo, Beatty’s first venture as hands-on star-as-auteur following the success of Bonnie And Clyde. It was one of the biggest hits of 1975, was nominated for Oscars and Golden Globes, and is even ranked at #47 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Laughs list of the best American comedies. But while I was certainly aware of it, I’d never actually seen it until recently and, judging by its relatively low popularity ranking on such sites as Letterboxd and IMDb, I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Beatty (who also produced and co-wrote the screenplay with Robert Towne) stars as George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser whose talent as a stylist is equaled by his proficiency as a lover. He’s eager to open his own salon but when the bank won’t take his request for a loan seriously, he agrees to meet with Lester (Jack Warden), the conservative business tycoon husband of his client/lover Felicia (Lee Grant). Lester, who assumes George is gay, agrees to consider the partnership. He asks George to escort his mistress Jackie (Julie Christie) to an election night dinner party he’s hosting, unaware that she used to be George’s girlfriend. Meanwhile, Jackie has become something of a mentor to George’s current girlfriend, Jill (Goldie Hawn), and invites her to come along as well.

Shampoo is an unusual film in many respects. Beatty and Towne took William Wycherley’s Restoration-era comedy The Country Wife as their inspiration and it’s easy to see how Shampoo could be translated back to the stage. The action takes place in a tight 24-hour time span and the characters and their histories are woven together in the style of a classic sex farce.

The film takes place during the 1968 election and televised results feature prominently throughout. The deliberate foregrounding of the first Nixon/Agnew victory, coming just a year after Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, calls attention to the fact that Shampoo is a period piece, albeit one where the “period” was less than a decade earlier. But America had changed substantially in those seven years in both mood and style. Beatty, Hawn and Christie don’t even look the way they do in the movie on the poster. There, they’re given a contemporary makeover that looks more like the cover of a 1975 issue of Esquire than a bit of movie marketing. But this is very much a movie about the end of the 60s and the counterculture, the rise of conservatism, and the ultimate failure of both of these value systems. I can almost imagine a remake of Shampoo set during the Trump/Pence election coming out in 2023, although who knows what the world will look like then.

But while Shampoo is explicitly political and the sympathies of noted lefties like Beatty and director Hal Ashby aren’t exactly difficult to crack, its sexual politics are a bit harder to pinpoint. I do think it’s a mistake to view art of the past through the prism of today’s societal attitudes. So while Beatty’s casual dalliance with Grant and Warden’s sexually aggressive teenage daughter (played by Carrie Fisher, no less, in her film debut) probably wouldn’t pass without comment in today’s world, the fact that it does here shouldn’t necessarily ruffle too many feathers.

Also, while the movie isn’t exactly progressive in its views of homosexuality, it’d be a stretch to call it homophobic. George certainly isn’t bothered by the fact that Lester and other men think he’s gay. Indeed, it’s in his best interest that they do. And only once does Beatty start to edge toward the clichéd, limp-wristed flamboyantly gay caricature that most movies would use as their default mode and even in that moment, he stays a safe distance away from it. But actual gay people are pretty much invisible in this movie. This is homosexuality as a plot contrivance, not as a way of life, which may be offensive in its own way to some but it isn’t really what the movie’s about.

On the other hand, the movie is very much about women and that’s where its perspective gets a bit muddled. You’d be on thin ice if you called Shampoo a feminist movie. Sure, the women here are all sexually liberated and sleep with whomever they please, whenever they please. But for the most part, they all want to sleep with Warren Beatty and define themselves based on how much Warren Beatty wants to sleep with them. Goldie Hawn’s Jill is a model (or an actress…even her job is vague) weighing a job offer that’ll take her to Egypt for a few months. It’s annoying that she even has to think about it. There’s no indication that George loves her even half as much as she seems to love him and Jackie tells her as much.

George eventually realizes that Jackie’s the one woman he’s ever truly loved but that epiphany comes too late for him. Unfortunately, it isn’t because Jackie realized she doesn’t love him. It’s because Lester has decided to divorce his wife and run away with her. Jackie defines herself entirely by the men in her life, ultimately aligning herself with the one most likely to take the best care of her.

The film’s only Oscar win went to Lee Grant for her supporting turn as Lester’s wife, Felicia. Grant had been nominated twice before in this category, for her debut in 1951’s Detective Story and in Ashby’s The Landlord in 1970, and would be once again the following year for Voyage Of The Damned, so it’s fair to say that the Academy had been wanting to give her one for awhile. A victim of the blacklist after she refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, there was likely an element of Hollywood Survivor Reward to her victory. Her competition included Ronee Blakley and Lily Tomlin, both for Nashville which may have split their votes, and Sylvia Miles and Brenda Vaccaro for Farewell, My Lovely and Once Is Not Enough, neither of which were recognized in any other categories. Not that Grant wasn’t a deserving winner. She gives a strong, funny performance in an unfortunately underwritten role. Towne and Beatty’s script simply isn’t all that interested in developing the women in George’s life. That’s the weakness that prevents Shampoo from being truly memorable.

In many ways, Warren Beatty’s insistence on controlling nearly every aspect of the films he agrees to do is what has prevented his legacy from reaching new audiences. For one thing, he is not a fast worker and in Hollywood, out of sight does often translate to out of mind. But more importantly, other filmmakers haven’t had the opportunity to collaborate with him and use his persona and talent in new and interesting ways. One of Beatty’s best roles is in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller but it’s hard to imagine him agreeing to be in that picture if it had been made even five years later because he wasn’t the one calling the shots.

I’m sure even Hal Ashby would concede that Warren Beatty was the driving creative force behind Shampoo. And in the end, the film isn’t much more than a very interesting, intermittently entertaining time capsule, simply because the star at the center of the action fails to recognize that he is the least interesting thing about his own story.

Shampoo is available on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

An Honor To Be Nominated: X-Men: Days Of Future Past

~ electrictheatre

THE CONTENDER: X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014)

Number of Nominations: 1 – Visual Effects (Richard Stammers, Lou Pecora, Tim Crosbie and Cameron Waldbauer)

Number of Wins: Zero

By now, it’s widely accepted that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a blind spot when it comes to superhero movies. Even though the decision to increase the number of Best Picture nominees was largely seen as a corrective to the specific omission of The Dark Knight back in 2009, there still haven’t been any superheroes in the category since then. (Unless you count Birdman and you shouldn’t.)

Granted, there hasn’t been an overabundance of superhero movies recently that have really deserved a Best Picture nod. Deadpool’s surprise nomination for a PGA Award only raised its Oscar chances from impossible to unlikely. But perhaps more surprising is how poorly superheroes have done across the board, even in categories they might be expected to dominate. It barely requires two hands to count the number of superhero movies that have won any kind of Academy Award: Tim Burton’s Batman, Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles (which wasn’t based on a comic book but I’ll allow it), The Dark Knight, Big Hero 6, and now (sigh) Suicide Squad. If you want to stretch it, we could include Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, which received a comparatively warm reception from the Academy, and Men In Black, a movie most people either don’t realize or don’t remember was based on a comic book. That’s almost as bad a showing as movies based on toys, games and theme park attractions.

Today, superheroes are an inescapable part of the pop culture landscape, generating billions of dollars and dominating both movie theatres and television. But when 20th Century Fox gambled on X-Men back in 2000, superhero movies were still risky. These days, we seem to get a new superhero movie every few weeks. But that first X-Men movie was the only one of its kind that year and the first real superhero movie we’d seen since Spawn and Batman & Robin fizzled out back in ’97.

(Note: Marvel did have its first taste of success with Blade in 1998 but the marketing downplayed its comic book DNA to focus more on bad-ass vampire action. And yeah, M. Night Shyamalan’s deconstructionist take on superheroes Unbreakable also came out in 2000 but I think we can agree that it’s a different type of beast than the movies we’re discussing here.)

Perhaps because it was a little early to the party, the X-Men franchise has never quite received the respect some of its contemporaries have enjoyed. At first, it lived in the shadow of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. The fact that Bryan Singer’s X2 outperformed the original both with critics and at the box office was soon overshadowed by how much Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 improved on its predecessor’s reputation. Both franchises were damaged by their third installments. But while Raimi decided to cut and run and Sony chose to start over after Spider-Man 3, Fox kept on truckin’ after Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand stumbled with critics. After all, the money coming in was still good.

Shortly after the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in 2008, the X-Movies entered the spinoff/prequel stage with the misbegotten X-Men Origins: Wolverine. While Marvel was being lauded for their ambition and scope, Fox was beginning to look like they didn’t know what they were doing with the X-Men. At this point, it would have been easy for Fox to follow in Sony’s footsteps and do a hard reset on the franchise. Instead, they doubled down on their previous work with X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days Of Future Past, two movies that allowed them to keep all of the elements that were working and get rid of those that didn’t.

The culmination of all these years’ worth of world-building, Days Of Future Past is, if anything, a little too ambitious for its own good. By its very nature, it was always going to be a little complicated in its attempt to reconcile multiple timelines. But while the X-Men movies have always featured sprawling ensemble casts, DOFP seems to go out of its way to introduce even more characters, some of whom are barely given more than a minute or two to establish themselves. At times, it feels like the movie should come with a cheat sheet just so you can keep track of who’s who.

Still, whenever a franchise can still surprise and impress audiences and critics with its seventh installment after over a decade, it must be doing something right. After Marvel and Sony worked out an arrangement to incorporate Spider-Man into the MCU, fans began to hope Marvel might work out a similar deal with Fox. Besides the X-Men, of course, the studio also has the rights to the Fantastic Four. Since that property has been thoroughly botched, fans would love Marvel to just take control of the FF lock, stock and barrel. But even fans who want the X-Men to fight alongside the Avengers don’t want to see these movies wiped clean. Ideally, they’d like the timelines to somehow merge or blend together so that they can be incorporated into the MCU. It isn’t likely to happen but it does prove that Fox has made more right decisions than wrong ones when it comes to the X-Men.

Despite fan loyalty, critical acclaim (most of the time) and box office grosses of over 4 billion dollars, no X-Men movie received a single Oscar nomination until Days Of Future Past was recognized for Visual Effects. Why this one? Not that the effects work isn’t impressive but is it truly that much better than what had come before?

Well, it is and it isn’t, which is probably a big reason why it didn’t win (it lost to Interstellar). Visual Effects is actually a tough, somewhat strange category. It’s one of those categories where, if the voters aren’t all that impressed by the year’s eligible films, there can be only three or two nominees or they’ll just give it to somebody outright. Some years, it’s not unheard of for the Academy to turn this car around and nobody gets an award. Lately there’s been no shortage of effects-heavy movies for their consideration but if you want a shot at this prize, be prepared to show audiences at least one thing that is impossible.

The effects in the X-Men movies have always been a bit workmanlike. They’re fine. There’s nothing really wrong with them, for the most part. But there also isn’t anything like the opening sequence in Gravity or that tidal wave in Interstellar that lingers in your memory and has audiences asking how they did that. Claws coming out of hands, girls walking through walls and folks massaging their temples or waving their hands in the air while they manipulate ice or fire or whatever? That’s all very nice but we’ve seen it plenty of times before.

The post-apocalyptic hellscape of DOFP’s future scenes and the shape-shifting Sentinels certainly didn’t hurt the movie’s chances at a nomination. But if one thing put the movie over the top, it was the “Time In A Bottle” sequence featuring Evan Peters’ Quicksilver making short work of an attack in a cramped, sprinkler-soaked kitchen. As entertaining as previous entries had been, none of them really had this kind of conversation starter setpiece before. Nightcrawler’s infiltration of the White House in X2 came close but it wasn’t scored to a Jim Croce tune. Never underestimate the power of a pop song to help land a scene in the film history books.

Even though the X-Men’s first time at bat didn’t bring home a trophy, there’s no reason to suspect Days Of Future Past will be the franchise’s last nomination. Even though Hugh Jackman (and apparently Patrick Stewart) are saying goodbye to the series with Logan (out this weekend), the series itself will continue. Considering the rapturous reviews Logan has been receiving, it isn’t too far out of the realm of possibility that it may find itself in contention next year. Jackman’s 17-year stewardship of the character is unprecedented and an impressive achievement in its own right but arguably the biggest hurdle standing between him and a Best Actor nomination is the calendar. Oscar voters are not known for their long memories and nomination time is a long way away. And while actors aren’t often recognized for this type of role, it would be kind of nice to see Jackman’s work given the validation of a nomination.

The X-Men movies have been taken for granted for too long. They’ve been doing this longer and more successfully than most of their contemporaries. And they haven’t been content to simply rehash the same formula over and over again. Movies like Deadpool and Logan (not to mention TV shows like Legion) show a willingness to innovate and expand the genre’s parameters. After all these years, you’d think they’d have more than a single Oscar nomination to show for it.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past is available on Blu-ray, DVD and 4K Ultra HD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

An Honor To Be Nominated Redux

~ electrictheatre

Well, another Oscar season has come and gone, along with the usual surprises, upsets and disappointments. Boy, who could have predicted Deadpool would become the very first write-in candidate to win Best Picture? Pretty crazy!

Actually, I started writing this on the Friday before the Oscars, at which time I had no idea what won or even if this year would bring the usual surprises, upsets and disappointments. As it turned out, this was a particularly unusual year. But in the days leading up to the event, a remarkably boring year would have meant that La La Land won every single award it was up for. But even the fact that nobody really thought that was likely…and that nobody could have predicted what actually happened…means that very few Oscar scenarios can truly be described as boring.

For those of us who aren’t likely to be receiving one any time soon, it can often seem like the only thing the Academy Awards are good for is complaining. No matter how many “substandard” movies take home the big prize, we still cling to the belief that the Best Picture winner should in fact represent the very pinnacle of cinematic achievement. Our own personal tastes coincidentally match the Academy’s just enough to make us believe in the inherent fairness of the system, despite the fact that a case for a superior alternative can be made for virtually every year the Oscars have been given. The argument is the same every year. Only the titles change.

This recurring theme was part of the impetus behind the creation of An Honor To Be Nominated. I introduced the column several years ago over at The Morton Report and it’s floated around the interwebs since, cropping up at The Digital Bits, One Perfect Shot and, of course, right here. The original concept was pretty simple: taking a look back at the movies that did not win Best Picture and seeing how they withstood the test of time.

Regardless of what site was publishing it, Honor never really set the world on fire. Obviously, some columns were more popular than others. Pretty much anything about Star Wars is gonna attract some eyeballs. But by its very nature, the column was going to have to look at some movies whose cultural moment had passed. I wasn’t exactly shocked that my analysis of The Blind Side didn’t prove to be click-bait. But considering how hugely popular the movie was at the time, I thought it was interesting to see how little lasting impact it had.

While I truly loved the original concept for Honor, I found myself running into a hurdle greater than public indifference that sapped a little of my enthusiasm for the project. Namely, most of the movies that have vied for Best Picture are pretty good. I realize this doesn’t sound like it should be a problem. But what I mean by this is that while only some of these movies are true masterpieces, and just a handful are outright terrible, the majority are simply above average. Their ratings on Rotten Tomatoes tend to land in the high-80-to-low-90 percentiles. That commitment to competence and professionalism doesn’t exactly inspire passion.

But if I cast the net wider to include ALL the nominated films in every category, an interesting thing happens. The pool now includes cult movies, blockbusters, bloated would-be epics that Oscar didn’t quite take the bait for, and odd outliers that had no business being there but crashed the party anyway. For all the pomp, circumstance and importance placed upon them, you’d think that an Academy Award nomination would at the very least guarantee a measure of immortality. It really doesn’t.

When you think of the films of 1977, you probably think Star Wars, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Annie Hall, all of which were nominated for and indeed won Oscars. But when’s the last time you spared a moment for I Never Promised You A Rose Garden? Or The Other Side Of Midnight? Or The Slipper And The Rose? All of them were up for trophies too, believe it or not, and Oscar history is littered with countless such forgotten also-rans. Hell, in the early years of the awards, some categories had so many contenders you’d think an Academy Award nomination was the equivalent of a participation ribbon.

Taking a broader look at the other categories reveals all kinds of interesting quirks and trends. For instance, people always seem surprised when a foreign language film is nominated in any category other than Best Foreign Language Film. But they’ve actually done reasonably well at the Oscars over the years, especially if your name happened to be Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa. It’s interesting to note that some but not all of the Harry Potter, James Bond and Star Trek movies have competed for Oscars. And while the Academy is unquestionably lax in diversity across the board, representation of women at least becomes a lot more interesting when you take the focus off of the Best Director category and look at writers, designers and editors. In some cases, better. But in others, a lot worse. For example, did you know that Best Cinematography is the only category (apart from Actor and Supporting Actor, obviously) that has never had a female nominee? Now you do.

From now on, An Honor To Be Nominated will be reconsidering all the movies nominated in any category. The title is remaining the same. Sure, a handful of movies have been nominated for just one or two awards and won everything they could. But most movies come up as a bridesmaid in at least one category. Even Ben-Hur and Titanic lost a couple of awards. (Trivia note: the biggest sweep so far was enjoyed by The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, which went 11 for 11.)

In rethinking the parameters of this column, I’ve settled on a few ground rules. One, I’ll be ignoring short films, except for those very rare instances where shorts managed to compete alongside features. Those are few and far between, however. Second, the movies had to be nominated and compete for their awards, so no special recognition and honorary awards like those given to Fantasia or early makeup winners like Planet Of The Apes. While most of these honorary appointees ended up competing in other categories anyway, a few slip through the cracks.

Finally, I’ll be making a best effort at tracking down some of these movies but, as anybody who has been following the JET’s Most Wanted project knows, even Oscar nominees aren’t guaranteed an afterlife. So there are some nominees and winners (particularly documentaries, foreign films and early contenders) that simply aren’t available. Rest assured that I’ll continue to spotlight these orphans as Most Wanted picks.

The new (and hopefully improved) An Honor To Be Nominated debuts on Thursday, March 3, and will appear biweekly every Thursday. The Academy doesn’t really have a special day of the week that they announce their nominations on but they’ve most often fallen on a Thursday lately, so I’m going with that. I know this announcement doesn’t rate as high as Red Vines and Junior Mints parachuting down from the sky but I hope you’ll enjoy this new direction and that we can rediscover some interesting movies together.