2006 Flak Film Also-Ran Awards: The Steak Knives
Second-Best Director
by Flak Staff

The fourth installment in a five-part Oscars feature

 Photo Slideshow

To be eligible for the Steak Knives, candidates must not have been recognized by the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards or in the top tier of the Village Voice Take Seven Critics' Poll. To see the ineligible nominees, click here.

Ingmar Bergman
Saraband

No more appropriate reaction could have been hoped for with Saraband than the one it got: almost total disinterest if not outright obliviousness to its very existence. That universal shrug of the shoulders was appropriate for what is said to be Ingmar Bergman's final film, a bitterly angry portrait of a very old man contemplating the irrelevance and failure of his meager life. Bergman has been working in theater since his last movie more than 20 years ago, and Saraband's staginess — not to mention that it was shot in digital — at first gives the proceedings an even more out-of-time, worn-out quality. But, like an athlete returning from retirement to shake off the rust for one more run at glory, Bergman slowly starts getting his hooks into you, ratcheting up the drama as we watch that angry old man, his recently returned ex-wife, a son from another failed marriage, and that son's daughter go through a painful sizing-up of one another, and by and large the participants are found lacking. Saraband spits in the face of those autumnal valedictions older artists allow themselves when they decide to coast on collective goodwill — Bergman, like his fondest admirer Woody Allen, realizes he has learned nothing from life, and his final film mourns that recognition. No wonder it made so little money — this is the bad news about the terrors of old age most of us do not want to know. But in Bergman's hands, it is paralyzing and hypnotic and soul-shattering and, oddly enough, life-affirming in its honesty. — Tim Grierson

David LaChapelle
Rize

In an era where cinematography seems to be a dirty word, movies have become scripts on stilts. These big-ass movies are propped up by big-ass directors who are so conservative in their use of the medium of film that when other directors make "filmic" gestures like presenting a handheld, documentary style or depicting any sort of visual whimsy, critics and viewers alike cream all over themselves. This belies the public's desire, conscious or not, for visual storytelling as well as narrative storytelling. And yet Hollywood still continues to squeeze out one plot-dissemination vessel after another, and we still give many of them awards.

To save us from a literally lackluster awards season, It isn't surprising that it took a photographer to do a director's job. David LaChapelle made a name for himself as an art-cum-fashion photographer in the era where the lines between the two began to blur. He is famous for surreal, saturated, highly posed and highly narrative photographs, and it's no different in Rize, a documentary about clown-dancing and krumping in South Los Angeles. LaChapelle interlaces amazing dance footage with sometimes strange and inarticulate interviews — after a strech of traditional documentary footage, just when you've forgotten that you're watching a DV image, he cuts to a 35mm film sequence of dancers undulating wildly against the LA landscape that is so rich and juicy you feel as if you've just taken a few hits of acid, and it is just like Timothy Leary told you it would be.

While Rize isn't going to change the world with its script, it weds its aesthetic to its story and creates a visual world all its own. The Oscars could use a few more shameless visual gestures and a few less narrative ones. A good script never hurt anyone, but film is made out of pictures, not words. This is something that directors should love, but more often fight. It would be a joy to see 2006 full of films like Rize — films that expand our visual horizon so much, they could never be described in words. — Aemilia Scott

Nick Park
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

In the past ten years, there's been an unprecedented number of fantastic animated movies — meaning about 20. This year, Nick Park's beloved short-film claymation stars Wallace and Gromit joined the relative crowd with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The duo is the last of the dying breed of stop-motion animated clay characters, and Park is inarguably the king of the medium. He has, until recently, eschewed the new standard of computer animation, preferring instead to master the traditional technique of using — gasp! — actual film, although that era is ending at his production company, Aardman Animation, which is computer-animating its next feature, Flushed Away.

Park isn't directing Flushed Away, but he's top dog at Aardman, and they've earned the right to try something new. Park has worked hard for decades, and The Curse of the Were Rabbit, his ultimate effort, is virtually perfect. Not one frame of film is wasted — every second has been measured for pace, tone, weight, emotion. The story is silly, funny, sad and exciting. Each word and detail has been pored over, every character plotted and weighed. It's a perfect movie, really, so well crafted that it's hard to think of Wallace and Gromit as anything but a living, breathing man and his faithful dog. Which, really, is exactly what they are. — Chris Shadoian

Steven Spielberg
War of the Worlds

Steven Spielberg's two-movie years are always interesting, mixing historical recreation with sci-fi flight: Schindler's List and Jurassic Park, Amistad and The Lost World, Catch Me If You Can and Minority Report. The easy response is to say that he makes one to justify the other, artistically and monetarily, but even a half-awake look at the popcorn movies shows that they're more than mere cash-ins, and War of the Worlds goes so far as to turn the popcorn to ash in your mouth. About halfway through, I was squirming out of my seat, one thought flashing in my head: I can't believe this is less fun than Saving Private Ryan. That movie's realism and misery seemed to set a bar for the unfliching, emotionally brutal depiction of man's inhumanity to man, at least as far as studio filmmaking is concerned, but at least it had the classic pleasure of a squadron of men acting nobly and ingeniously as they trekked through hell.

In War of the Worlds, it's all hell, all the time, compounding man's inhumanity to man with Martians' inhumanity to man. A lot has been said, even by Spielberg, about how it's a metaphor for this or that specific permutation of the post-Sept. 11 world, but that obscures the fact that the movie is so nightmarish because it's so nonspecific: The world where you live is under attack, and it is a war you cannot win, so what do you do? Every scene is a fresh heartbreak, and taken together it's a bone-chilling disquisition on 21st century terror. Spielberg's sustained dread is sublime, and the questions he poses with screenwriters John Friedman and David Koepp — so what do you do? — stick in the mind and the gut. Munich tells the story of what a nation does when it considers itself capable of responding to terrorism, and the consequences of those actions. War of the Worlds tells the story of what happens when there is no capacity for proportional or disproportional response.

The bad guys are irrigating the fields with our blood — villainy so pure that it doesn't even register as metaphor. And yet it's the human-on-human scenes — when our protagonists lose their car, or when they take up residence with the survivalist — that get your heart stuck in your throat; who knows what incomprehensible technology the genocidal aliens might have, but it's the neighbors with the recognizable motives who, when their world collapses, are capable of anything. If there was going to be a "five years later" time capsule to be sealed on Sept. 11, 2006, War of the Worlds would be my head-and-shoulders pick for the cultural artifact that described who and where we were, and only a consummate popular artist like Spielberg could communicate it with such terrible vivacity. — Sean Weitner

Joe Wright
Pride and Prejudice

In Jane Austen's day, novels were regarded as such low art, like how we see pop music and dime-store paperbacks today, that she wrote "Defense of the the Novel" defending her craft. Now, critics' modern exaltation of the novel represses cinema to the basement of art. But as the medium evolves, we see it creeping up the stairs — not into the intellegencia penthouse, mind you, but into the discussion of high art.

Thus we come to one of the best cinematic adaptation of a canonic novel in some time: Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice. Wright's accomplishment is a realization of a cinematic form: He films Jane Austen like a Robert Altman movie, creating a new type of poetic voice for the old stories. The bubbly confusion of Pride's parties are filmed like Altman high society events: Conversations overlap, and as at a party, you only pick up bits and pieces. In one remarkable 10-minute sequence, the camera follows the characters from dance floor to staircase, in and out of doors, picking up one girl and veering to another after a bump on the dance floor or a relay of gossip. The camera's fluidity mirrors the elegance of the chandeliers and candlelabras; the scenes are blocked so that the actors perform without knowing the camera is there, as if we overhear illicit gossip when the girls go into a giggle session. A remarkable melding of form and function.

Where Altman would have amped up the class war, Wright takes a more measured approach. Remember Gosford Park, in which you could barely see Michael Gambon's jowls through all the crystal stemware? Wright uses wide exterior shots of homes to capture details: geese in the yard, a well downhill from the Bennett house. He takes us inside and finds spinning rooms and cluttered offices, lit by candles and open windows. The detail creates a cinematic painting of Austen's prose.

The third act seems rushed, but think of what might happen if Altman were directing Pride and Prejudice. Lady Catherine would have ordered her servants to shoot the Bennett geese, and he would have had Knightley do a full-frontal while Darcy tickled her rear with a feather (how Altman hasn't cast Dame Judi as a high society ball-busting shrew, I have no idea). But Wright's choices capture a more subtle class struggle, voiced as elegantly and fluidly as a champagne flute of Austen prose. — Stephen Himes

Second-best Actor
Second-best Actress
Second-best Screenplay Second-best Picture

Produced by Andy Adams.