The War Wagon (1967)

THE WAR WAGON  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Burt Kennedy

    John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Howard Keel,

    Robert Walker, Bruce Cabot, Joanna Barnes,

    Keenan Wynn, Gene Evans, Bruce Dern

John Wayne made two kinds of westerns through much of his career: the classics, usually directed by Hawks or Ford, and lighter, more formula work handled by journeymen like Henry Hathaway, Andrew McLaglen, or (in this case) Burt Kennedy. "The War Wagon" is one of his more jovial entertainment pieces, full of broad humor and two-fisted action, with Wayne, just out of prison, teaming up with Kirk Douglas to rob a horse-drawn armored car used to transport large shipments of gold. Douglas does a giddy self-parody, all snake-oil charm and swaggering vanity. There's even a joke about the dimple in his chin. About all Wayne has to do playing against that is stand there and be John Wayne, the ultimate force to be reckoned with, the guy who can cut down lesser men with guns, fists, a word, or a look. He seems to be having a good time, too.

Carnage (2011)

CARNAGE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Roman Polanski

    Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet,

    John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz

Dr. Sporgersi,

I saw "Carnage" not long ago, the new Roman Polanski movie, and liked it more than I thought I would. Four people in one apartment (essentially one room) for 80 minutes, in something like real time, talking, drinking, and (in the case of Kate Winslet) spectacularly throwing up. It's quite vicious, and surprisingly, real funny. And Jodie Foster's amazing. By the end of the film, even the veins in her face have declared total war. Of course, just because I liked it doesn't mean anybody else will, but at least it's a movie for grownups. If it's still around somewhere and you're looking for an alternative to whatever dreck is playing at the multiplex, check it out.

Nick

A Plantation Act (1926)

A PLANTATION ACT  (1926)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Philip Roscoe

    Al Jolson

Al Jolson in blackface sings "Red, Red Robin", "April Showers" and "Rockabye Your Baby" in front of a painted backdrop of a cotton field. Creepy, sure, but a useful reminder that once upon a time in our cultural past, something like this could actually pass for mainstream entertainment. A Vitaphone short, filmed a year before "The Jazz Singer".

Melancholia (2011)

MELANCHOLIA  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Lars von Trier

    Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland,

    Alexander Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt,

    Stellan Skarsgård, Udo Kier, Jesper Christensen

Lars von Trier brings about the end of the world and makes sure it goes out with a bang. He divides the story into two parts. The first, called "Justine", centers around a horribly posh wedding, at which the bride cracks up and the guests behave badly. The second, called "Claire", has the unbalanced bride (Kirsten Dunst) coming to stay with her responsible sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) on the same golf-course estate where her botched wedding took place. And all the time, a planet called Melancholia is hurtling toward earth, for what's supposed to be a "fly-by," but could be something more serious than that. Once again, von Trier's primary subject is hysteria. Specifically, how much can he make his female characters suffer, and how crazy will they get? Both Dunst and Gainsbourg throw themselves into that, but under von Trier's detached direction the characters seem less like people than the subjects in some cosmic psych-lab experiment, where the scientist (von Trier) sets up a problem and plunks them down in it, to see how they respond. It doesn't all add up, but since Kubrick's no longer around to take on stuff like this, why not von Trier? It's an awfully good-looking psych-lab experiment.

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

ANATOMY OF A MURDER  (1959)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Otto Preminger

    James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara,

    Arthur O'Connell, George C. Scott, Eve Arden,

    Murray Hamilton, Orson Bean, Kathryn Grant

Adult courtroom drama with Stewart as a small-town lawyer defending an Army lieutenant (Ben Gazzara) accused of killing the man who allegedly raped his wife. The focus is more on how justice works than on whether the accused is guilty or not. Throughout the movie, the defendant and his wife (Lee Remick) arouse more suspicion than sympathy, and the objections the prosecutors raise to Stewart's grandstanding tactics are mostly justified. Scott stands out in an early role as a high-powered attorney who shows up to assist the prosecution. The folksy, bullshit-resistant judge is Joseph N. Welch, who made his real-life mark a few years earlier by famously standing up to Senator Joe McCarthy. Duke Ellington composed the music and appears briefly in a nightclub scene playing a piano duet with Stewart.

Ben Gazzara

(1930-2012)

Black Field (2010)

BLACK FIELD  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Vardis Marinakis

    Sofia Georgovassili, Christos Passalis, Despoina Kourti

An unusual period drama about a wounded soldier who comes under the care of some nuns in an isolated convent in 17th-century Greece. The setup's a lot like Don Siegel's "The Beguiled", but if you think that's what's going on here, guess again. Moody and mysterious, with one of the best (and longest) down-in-the-dirt lovemaking scenes ever, done with no real nudity but a lot of grunting and moaning and yowling, a primal act of longing, brutality, terror, discovery, resistance, acceptance and pure animal passion. The ending's ambiguous, but there's a lot of ambiguity in this movie. It's kind of what the whole thing's about. See for yourself.

Sextette (1978)

SEXTETTE  (1978)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Ken Hughes

    Mae West, Timothy Dalton, Tony Curtis,

    Dom DeLouise, Ringo Starr, George Hamilton,

    Walter Pidgeon, George Raft, Regis Philbin,
    Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, Rona Barrett

A famous actress with an anachronistic wardrobe and a familiar purr in her voice checks into a London hotel for her honeymoon, but the demands of stardom and the attentions of numerous men conspire to keep her away from the bridal suite. Like some other legendarily godawful films, Mae West's last movie isn't necessarily as bad as its reputation. But it's still pretty bad. West was 83 when she made it, and multiple takes and some artful editing were required to cover for her inability to hit her marks and remember her lines. For all that, she pretty much pulls it off. She might look like some drag queen's grandmother, but she's still Mae West, the grand dame of sexual innuendo, inviting the boys to come up and see her sometime. It's an act nobody else could get away with. Beyond that, the picture's a mess, a jumble of campy cameos, ghastly musical numbers and gags that just don't fly. A geriatric curtain call for a cultural icon who maybe stayed in the game too long, but couldn't do or be anything else.

Hugo (2011)

HUGO  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Martin Scorsese

    Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz,

    Sacha Baron Cohen, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer,

    Helen McCrory, Ray Winstone, Jude Law,

    Richard Griffiths, Michal Stuhlberg, Frances de la Tour

An inventive kid living in the clockworks of a railroad station in 1930s Paris tries to repair a treasured museum piece - a mechanical man - which leads him to an old shopkeeper, the all-but-forgotten filmmaker Georges Méliès. This is Martin Scorsese's valentine to silent film, and he goes way back, to the Lumière brothers and that late-19th-century shot of the train pulling into the station. There's the Edison Kinetoscope shot of two men dancing, and the shot from "The Great Train Robbery" of the outlaw firing his revolver into the camera, and, of course, there's Méliès. The kids' adventure story line is a departure for Scorsese, but it's unmistakably his work, a movie lover's movie for the ages. Its action-crammed opening reel might be a little too busy, and some of the side characters and subplots barely get a chance to register, but if Scorsese's ambition sometimes exceeds what the script can grasp, who cares? His passion for the medium and its history is infectious, and the movie looks great, an amber-and-sepia journey back in time, and a tribute to the spirit of invention and magic that made cinema possible in the first place. The line connecting Méliès and Scorsese isn't such a long one, after all.

Previous Scobie Award Winners: Best Picture

               1988: "The Moderns"

               1989: "Sidewalk Stories"

               1990: "The Civil War"

               1991: "Thelma & Louise"

               1992: "Unforgiven"

               1993: "Schindler's List"

               1994: "Natural Born Killers"

               1995: "The Usual Suspects"

               1996: "Lone Star"

               1997: "Brassed Off"

               1998: "Pleasantville"

               1999: "Run Lola Run"

               2000: "Ghost Dog"

               2001: "Amelie"

               2002: "Gangs of New York"

               2003: "Mystic River"

               2004: "Control Room"

               2005: "Good Night, And Good Luck"

               2006: "Linda Linda Linda"

               2007: "Atonement"

               2008: "Milk"

               2009: "In the Loop"

               2010: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
               2011: "Hugo"
               2012: "Cloud Atlas"
               2013: "Nebraska"
               2014: "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
               2015: "Suffragette"
               2016: "A Perfect Day"
               2017: "Wonderstruck"
               2018: "The Old Man & the Gun"

               2019: "They Shall Not Grow Old"

               2020:  no award

               2021:   no award

               2022: "The Banshees of Inisherin" (Covie Award)

               2023: "The Quiet Girl" (Covie Award)

The 2011 Scobie Awards

Picture: "Hugo"

Actress: Eva Green, "Cracks"

Actor: André Wilms, "Le Havre"

Supporting Actress: Maibritt Saerens, "Happy, Happy"

Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill, "Moneyball"

Ensemble: "The Way Back"

Cameo: Martin Scorsese, "Hugo"

Director: Woody Allen, "Midnight In Paris"

Cinematography: Marcus Waterloo, "Black Field"

Musical Score: Sylvain Chomet, "The Illusionist"

Foreign Language Film: "Baarìa"

B Movie: "The Woman"

Documentary: "Page One: Inside the New York Times"

Revival: "Playtime"

Title Sequence: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

Trailer: "Red Cliff"

Print Ad: "Griff the Invisible"

Career Achievement Award: Lily Tomlin