2007 Flak Film Also-Ran Awards: The Steak Knives
Second-Best Screenplay
by Flak Staff
The third 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.
Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden
Half Nelson
Much has been written about Ryan Gosling's revelatory performance as a junkie teacher who spirals into self-destruction. It's a great performance, but overlooked is the fact that it underpins some very potent criticisms of the American Left.
Gosling's Dan Dunne wears short-sleeve dress shirts as if they're draped from a wire hanger. In fact, his life has whittled away to nothing: The kids like him because he's charismatic enough to control a classroom, but he doesn't teach as much as riff on undergrad standards like the Communist Manifesto and the writings of Martin Luther King. He coaches an awful middle-school girls basketball team — this is how he's "doing something" as an upper middle class suburban kid moved to the big city.
The political argument emerges later in the film, after we've subtly consumed the details of Dunne's life: The shelves of books, his lack of lesson planning, his stoned exhortations that "the kids keep me grounded," the ex-girlfriend who couldn't get him to grow up. On the brink of losing his grip, Dunne has dinner at his parents' house. These former '60s activists have traded their passion for civil rights for a passion for a good pinot noir; they wax nostalgic about the Beatles and protest placards under the glow of the chandelier, vaguely bemoaning gay marriage amendments and the erosion of affirmative action.
They "care" about civil rights and the conditions of black Americans, but after white flight, what did this turn into? What contribution have these limousine liberals made from the comfort of their suburban McMansion? The answer is down in the wine cellar, sneaking a line of blow: They've sent a sheltered son with a vague sense of responsibility to try to emerge from these creatures of comfort to "make a difference." He's incapable of taking care of himself (one morning, Dunne finds his cat dead, stiffened from lack of food), nonetheless handling the problems of his students. Rather than be part of the solution, rather than helping them lift up out of the lives of drug dealers, he literally becomes the problem. His drug habit, wrought from the excess of his upbringing, becomes the way wealth is redistributed to the working class. The entire movie is encapsulated in Gosling's Oscar clip, in which he visits the drug dealing uncle of one of his students: "I don't know! I'm supposed to do something, right? But what am I supposed to do?" It's this literary quality that makes Half Nelson one of the best movies of the year. — Stephen Himes
Russell Gewirtz
Inside Man
Writers debate how far behind the curtain to invite the viewer; Russell Gewirtz brought us all the way into the world of Inside Man. In fact, he brought us so very extremely far in that he revealed the MacGuffin that viewers demand to know. We'll never know what was in Marcellus Wallace's briefcase or on Phillip Vandamm's microfilm, but Inside Man answers its big mystery: What is in Arthur Case's safety deposit box?
The answer is an interesting twist on Zionism: proof that Case profited from the Nazis in World War II, the proceeds with which he founded the bank besieged by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his troupe. With the screenplay, Gewirtz pieces together a back-and-forth, flashed-forward quilt that dissects a cunning heist through the lens of Dalton's cat-and-mousing with cop Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington).
At the bank, Frazier toils to understand all angles and plot his next move. The übergame being played, the one regarding Case's secret, is "a little bit above [Frazier's] pay grade," as Madeliene White (Jodie Foster) informs us. The viewer gets the thrill of the heist, and thanks to being let in on the movie's biggest secret, also sees peripheral action of more global concerns. Frazier is the viewer, being introduced to the larger picture while fighting with Dalton's interference with the hostage situation at hand.
On this larger scene — Nazis, betrayal, deaths of millions, that sort of thing — Gewirtz pulls loose one yarn that teases the viewer: Who the hell is Dalton Russell, and why does he want to unmask Case (Christopher Plummer) so badly? He's the catalyst for the action on the bank level, but in this larger game, where the real chess is being played, his role is utterly ambiguous. (This viewer, with fists clenched, so badly wanted him to reference Case as "Dad" just once, so as to close the loop.) Who is Dalton Russell? Hopefully, that MacGuffin is why Inside Man 2 is in the works. — Andy Stilp
Mike Judge
Idiocracy
Both comedies and satires are usually underrepresented in the
category of Best Screenplay. For some reason sincerity reads as great,
and comedy reads as not-so-great. But as any screenwriter knows,
unflinching sincerity is easy. Melodrama is easy. Satire, on the other
hand, is hard. It requires the impossible position of being close
enough to the subject matter and the characters that we care about
them, and also far enough from them so they can all be ritualistically
thrown into the gaping maw of social criticism. Mike Judge, creator of
two of the greatest satirical characters of Generation X — Beavis and
Butthead — has created a totally human and yet totally brutal satire
in Idiocracy.
The satirical angle of
Idiocracy is that the dystopia of the future is not created by
an evil government or a huge corporation, but by our own tendencies
toward laziness and stupidity. Therefore Luke Wilson's character Joe,
who is the epitome of average in the year 2002, upon waking up from
cryogenic stasis in 2502 discovers that he is the smartest man in the
world. Because of the bunnylike breeding tendencies of the stupidest
of us and the prophylactic behavior of the greatest of us, the mean
intelligence of the world has dropped to the point where the human
race is in jeopardy. Without spoiling the brilliant reveal, suffice it
to say that behind the danger there is no mastermind and no
orchestrated plot for America's destruction, but rather a "banality of
stupidity" that drags the whole system down.
In addition to
a brilliant satirical framework, every moment in Idiocracy
movie is chock full of tiny, awesome bits. Every frame is filled with
images of future logos, future slogans, future clothing, each one a
jewel in the crown. This is a film that you need to watch once for the
plot, and once to process dialogue like:
JOE:
"Gosh, I could really use a Starbucks."
FRITO: ""Starbucks?
Dude, we don't have time for hand job!"
That bit is only
paid off when the two men pass by a Starbucks, which in 2505 only
offers Lattes with full release, and an H&R Block, which features
the "Adult Tax Return: Home of the Gentleman's Rebate."
Idiocracy has its share of harsh critics. It is alternately hit
for being too stupid and too overthought. And like any good satire, it
is both. It is also the most powerful, wholesale indictment of the
entertainment-industrial complex that has been made to date, so it is
no wonder that the film offends those who make a living buzzing around
it. And no wonder the film was disappeared. — Aemilia Scott
Garrison Keillor
A Prairie Home Companion
There are many ways to measure the power and effectiveness of a
screenplay. The authors of Waiting for Guffman, Men in
Black and Annie Hall all deserve kudos for their writing
chops, even if the first was largely improvised around a skeletal
storyboard, the second was a fast-paced popcorn crunching action film
and the third was the outgrowth of a wisecracking intellectual who
could just as easily have spent his time deconstructing Tolstoy.
A Prairie Home Companion doesn't always sparkle and crackle the
way the best screenplays should, although it boasts what is probably
the funniest singing cowboy sketch ever written. The loveliness of
this work of fiction is its overall conceit, both grand enough to
intoxicate and subtle enough to entirely elude many of its viewers.
A Prairie Home Companion seems like a film about a radio show,
but it's not; it's a film about the creative artist as God. And like
most of the stories that play with this particular idea, it examines
the power for creation and destruction that the artist holds within
his hands. But ultimately, and much more interestingly, the film
delves into the laughable weakness of those powers to hold off the
fierce winds of the real world when they come a-blowin'. The film may
look like a junker at times, with seemingly stereotypical plot elements
and characters whose bearing on the overall film seem tangential at
best, but there's a lot under the hood. Garrison Keillor may not churn
out perfect pearls of polished dialogue, but in the big-picture scheme
of things, he's a hell of a great writer. — James Norton
Richard Linklater and Eric Schlosser
Fast Food Nation
In 2001, Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation, a wide-ranging Upton Sinclair-style expose of the industry McDonald's has wrought. Now he and Richard Linklater have adapted it into a surprising fiction feature Among the foremost surprises is that it's not all that preachy or didactic. It may well put you off hamburgers, but it doesn't do so by demonizing the Golden Arches — or Mickey's as it's rechristened by the studio's lawyers. The film tells a half-dozen stories as they track towards and through a huge meat-packing plant in Colorado. Almost everybody who works in this fast-food chain is given a sympathetic side, shown to be as much victim as victimizer. Still, it's a grisly, dirty business and, as one of the characters tries to track down the cause of contaminated meat, we get a visceral sense of this over his shoulder. Ultimately one understands (perhaps better than we want to) why global competition, relaxed regulation and enforcement and just-in-time delivery models will be soon bringing an outbreak to a drive-in near you.
Along the way we follow Mexican illegals, lured north by work in the slaughterhouse, traditional ranchers being pushed out by industrialization, environmental activists with more passion than clues and disgruntled minimum-wagers spitting on patties as they grill and daydreaming about Columbine. One never quite knows where it the film is going. It seems, for a time like, we might get any of four textbook Hollywood tragic or pyrotechnic climaxes. But here again we're surprised. The tragedy is muted by the way even the most sympathetic characters choose foolishly from among their shitty options, and the very real violence occurs where it cannot be prosecuted.
Fast Food Nation is the antithesis of today's studio film, which is just as formulaic, focus-grouped and artificially flavored as the latest drive-thru delicacy. Indeed, it would be mighty hard to conceive of a McDonalds marketing tie-in, so among the surprises Fast Food Nation packs is the fact that it got made in the first place. — David Essex
Second-best Actor
Second-best Actress
Second-best Director
Second-best Picture
