02 February 2008

Skandies: #14



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:

Matt Noller said...

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.

md'a said...

I believe for some people the brief reprieve from the pain it provided made it one of the year's best scenes.

Anonymous said...

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.

Anonymous said...

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.)

Jeremy Heilman said...

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.

Anonymous said...

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.