Picture: Ratatouille (80/6)
Director: Paul Verhoeven, Black Book (79/9)
Actress: Rose McGowan, Grindhouse (77/10)
Actor: Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild (54/6)
S. Actor: Michael Cera, Juno (61/8)
S. Actress: Marley Shelton, Grindhouse (65/6)
Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins, The Savages (80/9)
Scene: "All These Things That I've Done," Southland Tales (53/3)
[Quality is terrible, but I couldn't do any better; the only torrents I could find are this exact same camcorder job.]
Everybody is new across all categories save for McGowan, who placed 17th in Supporting for Scream way back in 1996 (which I guess means she now holds the record for longest time between top 20 appearances).
6 comments:
Maybe it works better in context, but if that's the consensus best scene in Southland Tales, I can't even imagine what a shitstorm the rest of it must be.
I believe for some people the brief reprieve from the pain it provided made it one of the year's best scenes.
Does craft count for nothing anymore? This would be a substandard music video... but it's even more depressing in terms of cinema. As Clara Peller would say, "Where's the mise en scene?"
Plus, this scene is basically a dilution of the "Just Dropped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In" scene from THE DUDE ABIDES.
I thought there were a couple of other scenes in SOUTHLAND TALES that were tolerable in exactly the same way -- as a decontextualized music video (e.g. the all-strings performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner").
I short-listed the Justin Timberlake scene for Best Scene, a beneficiary of my annual ritual of going through my "con/CON" films and try my darndest to include as many elements as possible from films I didn't like overall. There certainly wasn't a scene this year that was so much better than the rest of the film surrounding it. (It eventually dropped off at about #16 or #18 ... I shuck back my short lists until they're down to 10.)
I gave Southland points in Picture/Director/Actor/Screenplay, but giving this particular scene points seemed completely absurd to me. It's not even the best musical sequence in the film (that would be either Rebekah Del Rio's Star-Spangled Banner rendition or that Moby-scored roundelay between Mandy Moore and Sarah Michelle Gellar).
I will chalk its success up to exterior affection for either Timberlake or The Killers' song.
Nobody should ever ask Del Rio to sing a song in a movie ever again. She topped out the first time.
I gave Timberlake some points, since he was the only actor in the film who maintained the outward appearance of an actual human being instead of some inbred pseudo-futuristic assclown. Plus, his character's exhaustion struck me as both intra- and extra-diegetic, like he was the only one who understood the futility he was up against.
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