2007 Flak Film Also-Ran Awards: The Steak Knives
Second-Best Director
by Flak Staff

The fourth installment in a five-part Oscars feature

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.

Alejandro Aja
The Hills Have Eyes

Perhaps irony reverberates a little louder across the Atlantic, and so a Frenchman naturally gets a better sense of America's schizophrenia; for instance, the way the world's first user and biggest builder of atomic weapons now goes to war against "weapons of mass destruction." Probably the French above all others wonder why a "wardrobe malfunction" triggers hysteria here, while violence is a network staple and righteous high, and payback's passion play is an orgiastic sacrament. Surely this informs the French director Alejandro Aja's remake of the B-classic The Hills Have Eyes.

In Hills, three generations of suburbanite family embark on a common American Dream, a camper odyssey on the scenic highways of the American West. The clan gets detoured into the wasteland left by atmospheric nuke tests, and there they are set upon by feral mutants created by the tests' radiation. The RV is crippled miles from the highway and the mutants besiege it like cinematic Apaches. Full-strength gore-nography ensues (with a smattering of deviant sex) as the tourists get picked off one by one, and the survivors ratchet their own savagery up to the level of their tormentors. One sortie takes a reluctant warrior into the mutant stronghold, a target-town suburb complete with smiling test-dummies. There a mutant renders judgment in the glow of a television, "You made us what we are," speaking perhaps for everyone warped by the Pax Americana.

The O'Reilly fans in the twentyplexes found it all delightfully formulaic and savagely climactic, so a sequel now slouches toward theaters. They didn't seem to get what those who can see irony in the dark were laughing at. — David Essex

Matthew Barney
Drawing Restraint 9

Film is a visual medium. The best films are not merely scripts on stilts, but rather visual worlds with their own logic and beauty. So often directors are given praise for simply bringing a beautiful script to life, but more satisfying is the director who creates something that is greater than the sum of its textual parts. Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew Barney's first major-release motion picture, does just this. Having made a huge name for himself in the art world as a video artist with the Cremaster film series, his gallery manager decided to have DR9 released wide.

DR9 is patient and grand enough to be called an epic, but Barney manages to evaporate all sense of the epic in this film. He doesn't give the viewer the luxury of a hero, a single journey, or a conclusive-enough ending to call the movie an epic. Rather, the film is centered around the tiniest and most intimate of rituals in Japanese culture — the preparation of a present, tea ceremony and courtship. These images are juxtaposed with other ritualized actions, including the synchronized movement of naval officers, the cleaning of the deck of the ship, and the construction of a wooden frame on the shore.

Somehow, describing a large, sweeping film like this makes it sound like little more than a sotto voce trailer for Mystic River. But DR9 is the anti-Mystic River. It has about 10 lines of dialogue total. It is full of disturbing and surreal imagery. And most importantly, it doesn't desperately pull on your heartstrings or cry for attention. Rather, it takes you on waves of visual experience, some lovely, some weird, some horrifying, and at no time asks you to judge. This is what makes the film the more disturbing: there is a sort of atheism in his romanticism, in that all images are shown at their most significant, whether they be the movements of a broom or the slicing of flesh off of the body — and the film does not leave room for the viewer's moral position. In a world of uplifting biopics and tragic morality plays, nothing could be more refreshing to see. — Aemilia Scott

Gil Kenan
Monster House

Outside of the work of Ralph Bakshi, Gil Kenan's Monster House is the scariest feature-length animated movie of all time. Moments of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and perhaps The Rescuers might offer more intense scares, but it's been decades since a genuinely, consistently scary animated movie came along.

That Monster House was made at all is surprising. One look at the preparatory artwork would dissuade 9.9 of every 9.99 producers. It's bizarre, off-kilter. The character designs are twisted and creepy, each an archetype existing halfway between 1980s pop icon and MySpace emo-punk. The sets look hyper-real, like they might be sculpted from chewed gum.

Most disturbing of all is the monster house itself. What it looks like, how it moves and lures its prey, is somewhat indescribable, actually, but it's every child's feared neighbor's house. It's the Linda Blair of haunted houses. Seriously, the possessed house in Poltergeist would run away from the monster house, screaming in terror, if only it had legs — which, of course, the monster house does.

To truly appreciate Kenan's vision, though, watch the DVD bonus features, particularly those about the motion-capture process used to animate the movie. Actors Steve Buscemi, Jason Lee, Maggie Gyllenhall and Jon Heder didn't just lend their voices, they dressed in bizarre, ball-covered suits and paraded around an empty room filled with 200 ball-specific cameras. They had to act out the entire movie without any realistic-looking sets or props — everything was constructed in wireframe form and their co-stars were covered in balls. But it somehow worked, and magnificently. The animation is something else. In one scene an enthusiastic but not-very-good-at-basketball kid dribbles a ball, and instead of looking like a dumbed-down version of a kid who's good at dribbling, he looks like a kid who wouldn't be able to dribble a ball to the end of his own driveway without bouncing the ball off his own foot. Several times.

Monster House is an astounding directorial debut. Good story, fun, silly characters, not dumb or dumbed-down at all, and just plain ol' too scary for little kids — who you'll want to show it to anyway. — Chris Shadoian

Christopher Nolan
The Prestige

In my review of Batman Begins, I wrote: "In what may be Nolan's signature as a director, everything adds up to be exactly the sum of its parts — no synergy, no transcendence." Through the filter of being impressed, but not that impressed, by Insomnia and Batman Begins, I was content to look back at Nolan's breakthrough film, Memento, as a devilishly good idea executed par excellence but with little real weight — something akin to The Usual Suspects. With The Prestige, however — which, like Memento, was co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan — I realized I had underestimated their previous collaboration, writing off as indie cynicism their genuine inquiry into how we choose to shape our lives. When working together, the Brothers Nolan take what looks for all the world like a strictly formal exercise and explode it, finding the philosophical resonance thrumming inside.

The Prestige chronicles (albeit not in chronological order) the unmitigated enmity that passes between two 19th century stage magicians. Nolan casts Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in the roles — perfect choices to both attract and repel our affections, because the story strips our sympathies away as these two go for one another's throats. This culminates in Angier (Jackman) trying to determine how Borden (Bale) executes his signature illusion, a seemingly impossible trick, and then striking on a seemingly impossible approach.

This is the film's glory: It reveals the simple mechanical secrets of many of the magicians' illusions, earning our confidence, and then legimately makes us question whether Angier has successfully harnessed the supernatural in order to get his ultimate revenge. This is explicitly structured the same way that the movie tells us a stage illusion must be structured, but the victory isn't simply that it's clever-clever — by pushing suspension of disbelief past its breaking point, he makes the emotional toll devastating to the point where it transcends the narrative. As in Memento, Nolan's hyperextended reach proves to be within his grasp, and we see in the dire fates of Algier and Borden a real grappling with our capacity and desire for wonder and higher meaning in an age when we know how all the tricks are done. — Sean Weitner

Sylvester Stallone
Rocky Balboa

People should reasonably expect that when they go to see a Rocky movie, Sylvester Stallone is going to beat the hell out of a side of beef, and everything else is just gravy. Sure enough, Stallone delivers — but not before an hour and 15 minutes of what can only be described as "filmmaking."

The movie opens with Rocky visiting Rocky Jr. at his job in a glass-cased skyscraper, the legend shrouded in a dark overcoat. Stallone then moves the film from downtown to Fishtown, filming Philly so dark and moldy you can almost see the brick rot. He labors to make these first two acts of this movie not nostalgic, but tragic: The old pond where Rocky and Adrian went ice skating, like most of Rocky's Philadelphia, is now a dumping ground. Buildings are crumbling because people don't have jobs good enough to pay for upkeep, the streets are mucked with grime, and factories sit empty to rust and rot. Potholes are cesspools; dive bars cloud the old neighborhoods. Houses are hollowed out from fire, and nobody's even bothered to knock them down. The film feels like Stallone used the production team from Mystic River.

If this were Clint Eastwood's Rocky Balboa, film critics would be praising it as an elegy to the American industrial empire or a deconstruction of the American myth. In fact, Rocky Balboa is Stallone's Unforgiven. Here's an essential pop culture figure not only reflecting on his legacy, but participating in a self-criticism of his persona — he treats Rocky like Eastwood's William Munny put out to an urban pasture. The testosterized icon we remember landing haymakers on Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago is now baggy-eyed, his body broken down, spending so much time at Adrian's gravesite that he keeps a folding chair in a tree nearby.

Rocky Balboa lived a dream for all of us, and this is where it got him. Like Fishtown Philly, he's not going to age gracefully; he's going to go down swinging in an attempt to infuse life into himself — and by extension, the city. In the end, Stallone might romanticize a tough urban America, but he throws and lands a startling punch: Maybe America is getting soft, maybe something in the essential American character is changing. — Stephen Himes

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