2009 Alternate Oscars

Every fan of Quentin Tarantino has their own personal ranking of his movies. Here's mine. If you're not a Tarantino fan, skip straight to the voting. Otherwise, settle in. You're encouraged to post your own rankings in the comments section below.

10. Grindhouse (2007) — The only Tarantino movie that gives me no pleasure, Grindhouse is a loving homage to drive-ins and double features directed in two halves by Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror) and Tarantino (Death Proof). Tarantino's half is about a stuntman (Kurt Russell) who slums as a serial killer while driving a "death proof" car. The film is a faithful rendering of what you might have seen in a 1970s "grindhouse" movie — according to Wikipedia, "low-budget horror, splatter and exploitation films for adults" — but the nostalgia is lost on me. Double features weren't really a thing in my part of the country and the closest drive-in was in a swamp next to Mansker Creek — it was literally underwater most of the time.

9. The Hateful Eight (2015) — See my original full-length review here. Eight seemingly unrelated strangers wind up stuck in a cabin during a blizzard in the days after the American Civil War. True to all Tarantino movies, baroque chat and cartoonish levels of violence ensue. I mean that as a compliment. Ennio Morricone won an Oscar for his score, Jennifer Jason Leigh earned an Oscar nomination (and an alternate Oscar win). Also stars Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern and Demián Bichir. Katherine and I saw the 70 mm road show edition at the AFI-Silver. Great fun.

8 and 7. Kill Bill: Volumes 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004) — A martial arts movie released in two parts, Kill Bill stars Uma Thurman as "the Bride" who seeks revenge against a team of assassins who tried to kill her on her wedding day. She hops and chops, slices and dices her way across the globe, dispatching hundreds of trained killers along the way, until she confronts the leader of the assassins, "Bill" (David Carradine). If you're a fan of the martial arts exploitation films of the 1970s, this two-parter is for you.

6. Jackie Brown (1997) — Some people have this first, which is a reminder of how consistently great Tarantino really is. An adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, this is a story of a stewardess (Pam Grier) who gets caught smuggling laundered cash for a lowlife drug dealer (Samuel L. Jackson) and risks everything to get out from under. Along with Get Shorty and Out of Sight, this was one of the few adaptations of the great Elmore Leonard that understood what the man was up to. The most restrained of Tarantino's movies (and maybe a tad reverential for my tastes), Jackie Brown revived the careers of Grier (Golden Globe nomination, alternate Oscar winner) and Robert Forster (Oscar nomination).

5. Django Unchained (2012) — A pre-Civil War spaghetti Western starring Jamie Foxx as a runaway slave named Django and Christoph Waltz as the bounty hunter who helps him rescue Django's wife from a cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). Stuff gets blowed up real good! Waltz won his second Oscar for his performance, Tarantino his second Oscar for writing, but more importantly, Foxx took home the alternate Oscar.

4. Reservoir Dogs (1992) — Tarantino's first directorial effort, this one put the video rental store clerk turned auteur on the map. The story of a heist gone terribly wrong, Tarantino took fifty years of noir tropes, drenched them in blood, added dialogue worthy of William Shakespeare and changed crime movies forever. Stars Tim Roth as a gut-shot undercover cop, Harvey Keitel as the gang member he duped, and Michael Madsen as the psychopathic killer who doesn't trust either one of them. The infamous Lawrence Tierney (read about Eddie Muller's hilarious encounter with the noir legend here) is great in support as the gang's leader.

3. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019) — If you've never seen a Tarantino movie and you're feeling a bit reluctant to dive in, this is the one I would start with. An insider's look at Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, Once Upon a Time is the story of a washed-up television actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), his stunt double (Brad Pitt in an Oscar-winning role) and the real life Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Stars hang out, deals are made, work is done. And then Pitt gives a hitchhiker a lift and drops her off at her home with (uh oh!) the Manson Family. But if you think you know where this is going, well, clearly you've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie. Features Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Timothy Olyphant, Damian Lewis (as Steve McQueen) and Mike Moh (as Bruce Lee).

2. Inglourious Basterds (2009) — This is every great World War II commando movie ever made, only better. The story follows three broad narratives — "the Jew Hunter" Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-winning turn), and his favorite prey, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent); a British officer (Michael Fassbender) and his double-agent contact (Diane Kruger); and finally the Basterds of the title, a group of commandos (led by Brad Pitt) wreaking havoc behind the German lines. These three narrative threads converge on a small cinema in Paris where the Reich's leaders, including Hitler himself, are attending a movie premiere. It's my pick for the best picture of 2009. As someone says at the end, "I think this just might be my masterpiece!"

1. Pulp Fiction (1994) — If Tarantino had stopped making movies after this one, he'd still be one of the greatest directors of all time. This black comedy crime classic weaves together multiple unrelated storylines featuring a heroin-addicted hitman (John Travolta), his Bible-quoting partner (Samuel L. Jackson), a bloodthirsty crime boss (Ving Rhames), his dance-crazy wife (Uma Thurman), a washed-up boxer (Bruce Willis), and the glowing MacGuffin in a shiny black briefcase. Told in a thematic rather than linear fashion, it should be utterly confusing but somehow isn't, and it's still one of the most wildly entertaining movies ever made. Also features Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Harvey Keitel, Eric Stoltz and Christopher Walken. Tarantino and Roger Avery won a well-deserved Oscar for the screenplay. I have it down as the best picture of 1994 which is saying something — 1994 was one of the best years for movies in history.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2008 Alternate Oscars

Fifteen years ago (!) when I started this blog, I roughed out a number of posts I intended to get to ... some day. Here's one for a movie no one saw, then or since, that I really enjoyed in the moment.

When back in the day my mother would complain, "They don't make movies like they used to," I think she meant they don't make witty, light-on-their-feet screwball comedies anymore, those dizzy fast-paced farces they cranked out in the '30s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, or Cary Grant and a music-loving leopard.

Except every once in a while, they do — a film like Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, for example, a clever Cinderella comedy directed by Bharat Nalluri and starring three-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand and six-time nominee Amy Adams. Released in 2008, it was fun, frothy and funny, exactly what you want when you're in the mood for laughs, a little romance and a glass of ice-cold champagne.

Too bad nobody saw it.

The title character, Miss Pettigrew (McDormand) is the world's worst nanny who, thanks to a mix up at an employment agency, finds herself working as a social secretary to a high society flibbertigibbet, Delysia LeFosse (the always enchanting Adams).

It's not that Miss Pettigrew is incompetent, exactly — she's just a tad too opinionated for the rest of the world. But she can wrangle a boy who doesn't want to get out of bed, even if the boy ia much bigger than the ones she's used to.

"You noticed," giggles Delysia.

As the story opens, Delysia and Miss Pettigrew meet on the thin margin between having and having not — one wrong move and they're both on the street — and what plays out is not so much a story about living it up as about discovering what living is for.

Frances McDormand as Miss Pettigrew is neither glam'ed up nor glamorously made plain in the fashion of Hollywood — she's simply allowed to inhabit that long face and those impossible cheekbones, looking at times like the saddest bloodhound who ever lived, at others like that stern third grade teacher who didn't approve of your youthful shenanigans.

Amy Adams, meanwhile, plays Delysia like an Egyptian embalmer has sucked her brain out with a straw — and I mean that as a compliment. It's the sort of role Carole Lombard made her bread and butter.

On the face of it, Delysia is what was known in the parlance of the times as a gold digger, sleeping with three different men, sometimes within minutes of each other, mostly for what they can give her. But don't judge her too harshly — there are very few career opportunities for a woman in 1939 — and anyway, her scheming is so transparent, it has a sort of integrity all its own.

That she also readily accepts the odd, gawky Miss Pettigrew into her inner circle, seeing her not as an inferior but as a soul mate, well, you can't help but like her.

This is a performance that could have easily gone wrong and just the sort that when done right, escapes everyone's notice.

The movie is set in London the day before World War II begins, and both Miss Pettigrew and her low-key love interest, perfectly underplayed by Ciarán Hinds, are old enough to have lost someone to the horror of the last war. With the trivial pursuits of youth in their rearview mirror and with another war coming, they know that everything from now on will be played for keeps.

Their ever-present past adds an undercurrent of wise melancholy to the daffy proceedings.

Miss Pettigrew is a rarity now, a romantic comedy for adults about adults — and more to the point — about adults behaving like adults. It's the sort of thing that studios turned out by the basketful once upon a time but which Hollywood has largely forgotten how to make.

Worse still, audiences have forgotten how to watch them.

Based on a novel published in 1938, I get the impression the book's author, Winifred Watson, spent a lot of time at the movies — shake two parts Lady For A Day with one part My Man Godfrey, add a dash of Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler, garnish with a twist of Frank Capra, and viola! you have a delightful comedy in the style of the old masters.

Serve in a Nick and Nora glass. Cheers!

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2007 Alternate Oscars

I wrote this review of There Will Be Blood (along with reviews of Inglourious Basterds and The Grand Budapest Hotel, here) five days after the August 2017 white supremacist / terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Spoilers.

I had actively avoided There Will Be Blood for a decade — perhaps because the famous line "I drink your milkshake!" led me to believe it was a comedy about dairy products.

It is, in point of fact, a tragedy featuring petroleum byproducts. Based on Sinclair Lewis's novel Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson gives us the story of Daniel Plainview (the great Daniel Day-Lewis winning his second of three Oscars), a would-be oilman who gets everything he ever wanted and loses himself in the process.

But this isn't a morality play about greed, it's a cautionary tale about that most American of virtues and vices, rugged individualism. Plainview's dream isn't to pile up money — he turns down an easy million, for example, opting instead for the hard, risky work of building a pipeline to the sea. No, what Plainview longs for is to cut the middleman out of his business affairs. And not just the railroads and the big oil producers who take a large cut of the profits, but all middlemen everywhere: friends, family, God, and finally dignity and sanity — anyone or anything upon which he might have to rely.

By the end he's living like a feral cat in a giant mansion, free at last.

Many reviews concluded that Plainview is a monster and maybe he is, but there's a certain majesty in his labors. At least he's making something of tangible value as opposed to the worthless paper products Wall Street's fraudsters and slicky-boys fobbed off on a gullible public.

But crazy Plainview most definitely is, the end for all of us who think we can live without regard for our fellow human beings.

Is There Will Be Blood a great film? Yes, absolutely. Unless it's terrible. The movie is two and a half hours long, is virtually silent for long stretches as it contemplates the West like no one since John Ford, and when people do finally speak, they say nothing of value, which is fine because no one is listening anyway. Like Dunkirk which I reviewed here, the characters in There Will Be Blood reveal themselves strictly by their actions.

Do they reveal enough? That is the question. I'd have to see the movie again to decide for sure whether there's as much moving under its surface as I think there is.

Check back here in 2027 for my final verdict.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2006 Alternate Oscars

The most underrated movie of 2006 is Spike Lee's Inside Man, a terrific little caper flick that quickly turns into something a lot more interesting.

My name is Dalton Russell. Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself. I told you my name, that's the who. The where could most readily be described as a prison cell. But there's a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being in prison. The what is easy. Recently, I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery. That's also the when. As for the why, beyond the obvious financial motivation, it's exceedingly simple: Because I can. Which leaves us only with the how. And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.

As promised in his opening monologue delivered straight into the camera, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen, who also starred that same year in Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian sci-fi classic, Children of Men) has masterminded a meticulously planned bank heist — or has he? His intricate caper immediately turns into a hostage situation as half the New York police force descends on his location.

Enter veteran hostage negotiator Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington, great as always — I'd pay to watch him read the phonebook). So far, it all sounds a bit like a remake of Dog Day Afternoon or maybe even Die Hard.

It isn't.

This is the strangest bank robbery in history. Nobody seems to be in a hurry to steal anything, or negotiate demands, or make a getaway when they're done. Instead, Russell and his crew sit and wait. And wait. And wait.

It's a game of cat and mouse, and Detective Frazier strongly suspects he's the one holding the cheese.

Superb supporting work from Jodie Foster as a sleazy fixer, Christopher Plummer as the bank owner in need of her services, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Frazier's bemused partner, and Willem Dafoe as a trope-busting SWAT commander who is neither a bloodthirsty psychopath or a bumbling buffoon.

Director Spike Lee also treats us to an up close look at how a post-9/11, multicultural New York has changed since the gritty days of classic 1970s crime pictures (The French Connection, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three). Indeed, this might be the best use of the city in a movie since Woody Allen's Manhattan. The most insightful, anyway.

Supporting work and demographic insights aside, though, it's the high-stakes sparring between Denzel Washington and Clive Owen, two of my generation's coolest actors, that makes this movie so much fun to watch.

This is to date the highest grossing movie of Spike Lee's career.

A great Saturday night picture. Highly recommended.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2005 Alternate Oscars

I have a friend — I'll call him "Domenic" because his name is Domenic — who is as big a fan of the Star Wars prequel trilogy as I am ... not.

He's of the opinion that Revenge of the Sith is the best of the Star Wars movies while I rank it somewhere ahead of The Phantom Menace and just behind every other movie ever made not starring Hayden Christensen, up to and including a student film I took part in when I was in college called Das Volkswagen.

But it's not like his perspective is out of the ordinary. A lot of people share his opinion (see, e.g., here, here and here).

So I'm thinking, what's the deal? How could one of us be so fundamentally wrong about something so unimportant, while I, as usual, am so right? And I puzzled and puzzed 'til my puzzler was sore, then I thought of something I hadn't thought of before — maybe Christmas, I thought, doesn't come from a store Domenic is half my age. And that actually makes a difference.

When I saw my first Star Wars movie, I was sixteen, it was the summer of 1977, and there was and only ever had been the one Star Wars movie, a standalone sci-fi action adventure flick playing in theaters for the first time that year. Han shot first, there was no Jabba the Hut sequence, the attack on the death star was half as long ...

And you also have to remember, there were no science fiction movies in those days. We had 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, some B-pictures from the '50s, Star Trek and Lost in Space reruns on television — and that was it! No Aliens franchise, no Indiana Jones, no Terminator, no Blade Runner, no Predator, no Lord of the Rings, no Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not even a Superman movie!

No nothing, just Star Wars ... and it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before.

It was three years before the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back came out, and three more after that before the rather disappointing Muppets in Space, a.k.a. Return of the Jedi, finished off the trilogy.

And then there was nothing for seventeen years.

In the meantime, if you cared about such things, you had to work out Darth Vader's backstory in your own head. Me, I pictured him as a hero of the Clone Wars, a hot shot pilot who, in a moment of extreme peril for his family or friends or the Republic, turned to the dark side and in the process, lost his soul.

Basically, Michael Corleone in space.

Not that it mattered. The original trilogy was the story of Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader was not much more than the evil MacGuffin that kept the plot moving. How he turned out to be Luke's father, well, space pilots are a typically randy bunch, I figured, prone to picking up green hookers in space bars ... you know, it didn't really matter!

And then the prequel trilogy came along and, what the holy hell!, Darth Vader turned out to be a little boy who grew up to be a whiny, cockblocked teenager who took his revenge on the galaxy because he couldn't spend all his time mooning over Natalie Portman.

Talk about your letdowns!

But look at that story from Domenic's perspective. A child of the 1990s, he saw the first six Star Wars movies in the order George Lucas now intends them to be seen, starting with The Phantom Menace and ending with Return of the Jedi. And that series was never about Luke Skywalker, it was about Anakin Skywalker (the future Mr. Darth Vader to you, pal).

For Domenic, Star Wars only ever unfolded in one way. No opportunity to be disappointed, no reason to be.

The point being, no work of art is ever a pristine, unchanging monument to objective truth. You bring a lifetime of experiences and expectations and prejudices with you every time you walk into a theater or a museum and that colors your interpretation of what you see. There's not one Mona Lisa, there are seven billion, and yours is probably just as valid as mine.

Something to think about before you go yelling at the kids to get off your lawn.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.