The Steak Knives

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 IndieWire Critics' Poll. To see the ineligible nominees, click here.

Stephen Zaillian
American Gangster

The rise of The Sopranos resurrected, unfortunately, the old velour-and-gold-chains Italian stereotypes that marked pop culture after the success of The Godfather films of the '70s. If The Sopranos' genius is turning the mobster stereotype into a family drama, then Steve Zaillian's script is remarkable because it turns the stereotype into a capitalist critique for the post-industrial United States. With Frank Lucas, Zaillian created a gangster in the clothes of a straight businessman — a post-gangster character that transcends the Superfly image of blaxploitation. Zaillian's source material is a 2000 New York magazine article in which the real life Frank Lucas laments the rise of big box stores because guys like him can't extort them for protection. From this, Zaillain fashions a narrative in which Lucas' success doesn't come from the fact that he was more deadly than other heroin dealers (though he certainly was), but that Lucas' business practices (cutting out the middle man to deliver a purer product to a developing market) made him the king of Harlem.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)

Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
1408

Lots of the criticism of the creepy-hotel-room frightfest 1408 is to the tune of "so what?" That kind of response to unabashed Hollywood product that succeeds on the strength of its understated craftsmanship and crowd-pleasingness seems small-minded. These are the movies — the romantic comedies, the déclassé action flicks, the murder mysteries — that have always been the bread and butter of American moviemaking, and indeed the auteur thoery arose as a way to evaluate just such programmers, looking across a director's body of work to see how he makes such conventions his own. In the fine art world, no one ever seems to say, "Oh great, another nude."

1408 is a shade less accomplished than the best studio horror movies of recent years — The Ring, say — but it is an absolutely sturdy edge-of-your-seat chiller, the kind of thing that's easy to hold up as a rebuke of the torture-oriented horror trend. No clever-clever serial killers, no flayings, no inbred mutant ax murderers — just a haunted house in miniature whose backstory goes no deeper than "it's an evil fucking room." It presents itself as a one-actor, one-set wonder; imagine if Repulsion was produced by the Weinstein brothers and instead of Roman Polanski they got the director of Derailed and instead of Catherine Deneuve's sexual paranoia, you get John Cusack's obsessive quest to debunk the paranormal because he'd like nothing better than to learn that in fact his dead daughter was in a better place. "Um, I'll take Repulsion," you say — me, too — but that doesn't change the fact that the Weinsteins would like to have a John Cusack horror movie on their docket. Lo, these are the depredations of the times we live in — but we live in them nonetheless, and so I'll extend my gratitude to Greenberg, Alexander and Karaszewski for taking a short story by the surprisingly adaptation-proof Stephen King and turning it into an honestly frightening movie with emotionally coherent characters, succeeding both in its macro movements and each one of its micro moments of spookiness. Is it just The Shining writ small, both in scale and ambition? Fine — I'm sure when David Fincher or Paul Thomas Anderson makes his Grand Guignol horror film it'll be a real corker worthy of Kubrick. But the smartly constructed 1408 is worthy of you, the discerning viewer, and that's accomplishment enough.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
Hot Fuzz

No matter how you finish the sentence "It wouldn't be a buddy cop movie without…," Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright have it covered in Hot Fuzz. Emotionally guarded frontman? Check. Injury from the line of fire haunting you to this day? Yep. Straight-line officer clashing with laissez faire comrades? Yeah. Never had to pull the trigger? Yes!

Pegg and Wright apply the Shaun of the Dead treatment, except in a much more challenging arena. Shaun of the Dead, a fish-out-of-water story, benefitted from many "It's weird for us too, audience!" laughs — numerous outs that Hot Fuzz doesn't provide. In Hot Fuzz, the laughs come from a quilt of good comedy writing and gentle jabs at cop flicks.

While playing in this crossover area between farce, spoof, homage and straight comedy, if anything rings hollow, it becomes amateur hour, and you may as well have cast Vince Vaughn and the Star Wars kid. The straight cop can't be too straight, even when making fun of straight cops, and the silly cop can't be too silly. (What do you get when you put a straight cop with a straight cop? The Wire?) The Hot Fuzz script that survived this challenge is a tighter, more rewarding comedy than higher-earning fartfests like Knocked Up and Superbad.

Hot Fuzz takes its leading man through a more rewarding journey, too. While the eponymous Shaun eventually accepted the task of taking more ownership over his family, his girl and his best friend (the latter in a wholly different sense), Nick Angel has to relax his vigilance and allow some slack in the rope. Stepping away from the strict letter of the law may seem to snarl the investigation further, but as can be expected from the genre, a little bit of rough justice gets the job done.

Plus, consider the equation here. This film is a roast of Lethal Weapon's stomping ground. We're due for an insane, cliché-driven shootout climax, riddled with ridiculous monologuing and one-liners. (I mean, just look at the movie poster.) Someone needs to chew gum and kick ass, and find themselves fresh out of gum. If this were an Apatow flick, we would get blue-speaking lovable but emotionally stunted losers — starring, say, Paul Rudd — who face a long path to maturity, and all of the crude, brute introspection would crowd out the genre conventions that make available comedic gold. From Pegg and Wright, we get a comedy that oddly smacks of grace, and we wait with excitement for what genre comes next.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)

Judd Apatow
Knocked Up

Apatow's script for Knocked Up contains many of the little-noted but painfully important truths that make for great comedy: Parents shouldn't step out like hipsters; a man will always protect his bong above all else; and married fathers will go through far more trouble to free themselves for a night of fantasy baseball with the guys than they would to cheat on their wives.

But the most little-noted but painfully important truth, the one that makes Knocked Up a modern classic, is that the least interesting person to watch during a pregnancy is the pregnant woman herself. (Exceptions: if you are the pregnant woman, or the one who got her pregnant.) There is something about a pregnancy, even one everyone knows is coming ("We're trying!"), that brings out the weird side of people.

By focusing his script on everyone but Katherine Heigl's pregnant self, Apatow elicits the true humor of pregnancy, not that Heigl got it with her later remarks about the movie being "a little bit sexist." (Note to Heigl: the movie was a lot sexist. That was the point!) Had he focused on Heigl, Apatow would have written a cinematic shmish-mortion.*

— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)

* Divided on whether the correct term from the film was "smushmortion" or "shmashmortion," we decided, given that this is the Second-Best Screenplay award, to settle the debate by using the spelling in the script.

The Simpsons writers
The Simpsons Movie

Of course the The Simpsons is famously assembled by a committee of fierce wits in a writers' room, so the movie of the same name could never properly qualify for a screenplay award (The Writers' Guild will only credit three writers on a film) — even if the nominating bodies could overcome their prejudice against comedy. And there's some justice in this. Probably no one, two or three comic geniuses could grind out the jokes-per-second rate required in Springfield. Still, The Simpsons Movie should get some kind of lifetime achievement recognition for the many writers who have sustained the franchise's high, low and middling contributions to our culture. The cheesy animation has liberated the entire spectrum of satire, cerebral to puerile, unleashing its kaleidoscope on everything from politics to pop culture and all pieties in between. Consider, for instance, that The Simpsons has since the very beginning, been taking the piss out of Christianity in ways that would get any non-animated series canceled. (Thus the Flanders kids can gleefully announce, "We're going to Bible camp to learn to be more intolerant!") And what other show could depict a child tripping as hard as Lisa "I am the Lizard Queen!" Simpson, to no ill effect, without raising all manner of censorious ire?

Bringing Springfield to the big screen must have presented challenges in pacing and daring, and pricing. The team wisely foregrounds a crucial issue in the first minutes by having Homer mock its audience, "Stupid people — paying for what they could see for free on TV." The writers also take Itchy and Scratchy brutality to thermonuclear levels, and famously present Bart's full frontal nudity, because otherwise we might feel gypped. But apart from such touches, the movie seems pretty much like 3.5 television episodes without commercial interruptions. It flies by, but also sets up and delivers A, B and C story-line climaxes (just like a real movie!), along the way puncturing everything from Homeland Security to Disney animation to Homer's American dream — a homestead in Alaska, "where you can never be too drunk or too fat."

Somewhere various very serious people counted, measured and dissected the laughs in the test audiences for The Simpsons Movie. I'm sure it blew the top off by industry standards, getting several multiples the yuks provided by say, Knocked Up, or Juno (both of which had other satisfactions to offer). If it hadn't, it would have been denounced as an utter failure. We have come to take for granted the stratospheric (and yet somehow gutter) standards the writers have set for themselves, and the national treasure represented by the show's syndication. Bearing in mind Kierkegaard's observation that "Laughter is a form of prayer," we should now observe The Simpsons achievement on large and small screens, and prepare to tithe our ten bucks for the sequel.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)