Divine Intervention (2002)

DIVINE INTERVENTION  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Elia Suleiman
    Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader, Nayef Fahoum Daher
A man driving down a highway throws an apricot pit out the window and a tank explodes. A balloon bearing the likeness of Yasser Arafat floats over a military checkpoint whose on-duty guards radio headquarters for instructions on whether or not to shoot it down. An attractive woman strolls through the same checkpoint, distracting the guards, and a lookout tower collapses in her wake. A man systematically gets rid of his garbage by throwing it in a neighbor's garden, and complains loudly when she finally starts throwing it back. A firing-range target in the shape of a Palestinian woman magically comes to life and retaliates against the synchronized gunmen taking aim at her.  A wry, deadpan comedy about the absurdity of life in Israel/Palestine. It opens with Santa Claus being mugged on the outskirts of Nazareth, and ends with two people sitting on a couch watching a pressure cooker hissing on a stove. One of them suggests that the other get up and turn the kettle off, but neither of them makes a move. The kettle hisses on, the final metaphor in a movie full of metaphors reflecting both the universal human condition and the particular ongoing tragic farce that's called the Middle East.

Stagecoach (1986)

STAGECOACH  (1986)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ted Post
    Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings,
    Johnny Cash, John Schneider, Elizabeth Ashley,
    Anthony Newley, Tony Franciosa, Mary Crosby,
    June Carter Cash, Jessi Colter, Lash LaRue
Back in 1985, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash recorded an album together, forming an outlaw country supergroup called the Highwaymen. A year later, they teamed up for a TV movie, a remake of the 1939 John Ford film "Stagecoach". Willie plays Doc Holliday, fighting consumption and trying to get to Tombstone and a rendezvous with Wyatt Earp. Kristofferson plays the Ringo Kid, the role that in the earlier version made John Wayne an A-list star. Jennings plays a gambler with a shady past. Cash plays a no-nonsense lawman riding shotgun on the stage. Kristofferson's the only real actor in the group, and his scenes with Elizabeth Ashley (in the old Claire Trevor role) aren't bad. Jennings gets by, more or less. Cash could stand to lighten up a bit. Willie's just Willie, the old prairie hipster who goes his own way no matter what. The picture's a mashup of western movie clichés, but as a vehicle for its four stars to hang their Stetsons on, it's all right. When they walk elbow-to-elbow toward the saloon and the climactic confrontation with the bad guys, it doesn't really matter that you've watched the same thing happen in better films a dozen times before. It might not be the myth-making they were hoping for, and which they found in some of their music, but there's something about it that feels exactly right.

The New Women (2001)

THE NEW WOMEN  (2001)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Todd Hughes
    Mary Woronov, Jamie Tolbert, Sandra Kinder,
    Jane Ray, Roma Maffia, Jenny Shimizu,
    Amy Hill, Tracy Reiner, Michael White
I was in the middle of watching this movie when Ms. Applebaum came in. It was the part where the four women in the big camper are at the feminist commune. See, there was this rainstorm, and after it was over, everybody slept for two days, but the men never woke up. So the women had to take over everything, but eventually a lot of them started starving and wandering around like zombies looking for food, and that's when the four women got out of town in the camper. They're trying to get to a place called Elysium that they've heard about on the radio, and one of the women is pregnant, and they end up at the commune because the women there say they've got a doctor, but it turns out the doctor's just a Ph.D., not a medical type, and after some freeform dancing and a lot of painfully blissed-out rhetoric, the camper women get out of there, except for one of them who decides to stay at the commune. After about a minute of this, Ms. Applebaum said, "This is real bad." Then the three women who are left meet these two psycho chicks who terrorize them, and one of the campers has to dance for the psycho chicks, and she even takes her blouse off, and this is where Ms. Applebaum said (again), "This is real bad." So then the camper women escape from the psycho chicks and they get to Elysium, which is like this woman-run clinic and medical facility and it seems real nice at first, but it's not, and the pregnant woman has her baby and then she escapes in the camper with a little girl, but the other women are left behind, and then it's like 15 years later, and I'm pretty sure that somewhere in there, Ms. Applebaum said (yet again), "This is real bad."

One, Two, Three (1961)

ONE, TWO, THREE  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Billy Wilder
    James Cagney, Arlene Francis, Horst Buchholz,
    Pamela Tiffin, Lilo Pulver, Howard St. John
A maniacally paced Cold War comedy with Cagney as a dictatorial Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin. A topical time capsule from the early 1960s, dated now but still very funny, with lots of references to old movies, some of them Cagney's. (There's even a grapefruit scene.) Cagney's so energized, you wonder whether he really did put benzedrine in his coffee. He's practically bouncing off the walls.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

CLOUD ATLAS  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer
    Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent,
    Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Hugo Weaving,
    Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon,
    Keith David, James D'Arcy, David Gyasi
It might sound crazy, but the movie "Cloud Atlas" probably comes the closest to for scope, ambition and multitrack storytelling is D.W. Griffith's 1916 silent epic "Intolerance". Griffith's film told four parallel stories in four different time frames simultaneously, cutting between them. "Cloud Atlas" tops that, telling six stories in six different time frames, with some familiar actors turning up in multiple roles. (Sometimes you'll recognize them, and sometimes - believe me - you won't.) A recurring theme is how everything's connected, and how the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer found the financing to do something so high-risk and offbeat is anybody's guess. It's like this intricate puzzle where the pieces are pieces of time, some just a few seconds long and some a few minutes, and every time you turn a piece over, new pieces appear. It'll take time and multiple viewings to try to unravel it all. Good luck with that. And have fun.

Previous Scobie Award Winners: Career Achievement

          1988: John Carradine
          1989: Don Siegel
          1990: Burgess Meredith
          1991: Richard Fleischer
          1992: Woody Strode
          1993: Richard Widmark
          1994: Dennis Hopper
          1995: John Frankenheimer
          1996: Stella Stevens
          1997: James Coburn
          1998: Max von Sydow
          1999: Geraldine Chaplin
          2000: Christopher Lee
          2001: Henry Silva
          2002: Donald Sutherland
          2003: Bruce Dern
          2004: Charlotte Rampling
          2005: Jeff Bridges
          2006: L.Q. Jones
          2007: Genevieve Bujold
          2008: Nick Nolte
          2009: Walter Hill
          2010: Scott Glenn
          2011: Lily Tomlin
          2012: Alan Rudolph
          2013: Harry Dean Stanton
          2014: Tom Courtenay
          2015: Kevin Brownlow
          2016: Werner Herzog
          2017: Leslie Caron
          2018: Ed Harris

          2019: Judy Davis

          2020: Tom Skerritt

          2021: Terence Stamp

          2022: Bill Murray

          2023: Peter Coyote

The 2012 Scobie Awards

Picture: "Cloud Atlas"
Actor: John Hawkes, "The Sessions"
Actress: AnnaLynne McCord, "Excision"
Supporting Actor: Christopher Walken, "Seven
                                 Psychopaths" and "A Late Quartet"
Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, "Les Miserables"
Cameo: Bruce Dern, "Django Unchained"
Ensemble: "Carnage"
Director: Colin Tevorrow, "Safety Not Guaranteed"
Cinematography: Roger Deakins, "Skyfall"
Editing: Alexander Berner, "Cloud Atlas"
Musical Score: Raymond Enoksen and 
                           Geirmund Simonsen, "Thale"
Foreign Language Film: "Barbara"
B Movie: "Haywire"
Documentary: "The Dust Bowl"
Revival: "The Sting"
Title Sequence: "Searching For Sugar Man"
Trailer: "Les Miserables"
Print Ad: "Nobody Else But You"
Career Achievement Award: Alan Rudolph