The Chris Moeller Archives

The 9th Annual Chris Moeller Film Awards

Bring up the houselights. It's once again time to reflect upon the year in film now past. Half of the next year has now gone since even the most recent releases, but the studios and press agents sent the tapes to the old address again this year so it's taken me this long to cobble together the succeeding tripe.

2005 was a year of great performances on camera, but of precious little to praise behind it. Having to single out the wonderful performances caused me enough nervous pacing that a four-inch trench now winds its way through my living room's stylish shag carpeting, yet I nearly had to replace the annual Top 5 Film & Directors' list with awards for gold, silver, and bronze. Is it just me or are directors making features for DVD and video now rather than for that "old-timey" theater magic? Movies today are, by and large, too cluttered. It seems they're increasingly made to require multiple viewings, or even a DVD audio commentary, to fully appreciate, and story conclusions are becoming so ambiguous and utterly in-conclusive that a movie like "Syriana" makes "Apocalypse Now" look like "Rudy."

My movies? I like 'em spare and I like 'em tight-- imaginative stories, simply told. I finally settled on five flicks that I believe will satisfy the test of time. Excepting one, they average 92 minutes in length, and all five bring freshness to the screen. Two were nominated for Best Picture by the Motion Picture Academy-- an overlap somewhat typical, and they each have the proverbial balls, by either their subject matter, their narrative originality, or both.

They include: a clean and dramatic, if not overlong, western of shocking courage; a most cunning and bizarre character study of a man alternately hero and baffoon; a pleasureful and one-of-a-kind living comedy with performance artist as writer/director/star; and a portrait of a broken family so polished and expert that it avoids nearly every trait the modern Academy voter is looking for. Finally, the CM Film of the Year is brisk, topical, convincing, and beautifully photographed. May it be viewed often and by many.

CMFA Top 5 2005

Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee, dir

Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog, dir

Me and You and Everyone We Know
Miranda July, dir

The Squid and the Whale
Noah Baumbach, dir

And the 2005 Best Picture/Director
Good Night and Good Luck
George Clooney, dir

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Best Actress
Laura Linney, The Squid and the Whale

Best Actor
Jeff Daniels, The Squid and the Whale

Best Supporting Actress
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Happy Endings

Best Supporting Actor
Ben McKenzie, Junebug

Best Adapted Screenplay
Dan Futterman, Capote

Best Original Screenplay
Miranda July, Me and You and Everyone We Know


Explanations (i.e. the aftermath): There continues to be a dearth of great parts for women in films. I feel lucky to have had two worthy options in Linney and Gyllenhaal. Reese Witherspoon in "Walk the Line" and the jilted women of "Brokeback Mountain" were also strong contenders in films whose stories threatened to keep them restrained to the background. Amy Adams and Embeth Davidtz were noteworthy in "Junebug." Linney is now a 2-time CMFA winner as actor (a first), and the real accomplishment, it now dawns on me, is that both times she won alongside her co-star.

The choice for Best Actor may have been the toughest I've had to make in any category since passing over Naomi Watts ("Mulholland Drive") in favor of Halle Berry ("Monsters Ball") in 2001. How do you shun David Strathairn in "Good Night and Good Luck," Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote," Anthony Hopkins in "The World's Fastest Indian," Joaquin Phoenix in "Walk the Line," Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain," or Eric Bana's hair in "Munich"? The answer is Jeff Daniels in "The Squid and the Whale." His characterization is authentic to the word-- I loved how his literature professor eludes to F. Scott Fitzgerald, not as "an influence," but as "a predecessor." Cheers to Noah Baumbach's script, I guess, as well. Great character.

I picked "Junebug's" McKenzie as the top male supporter for his spot-on reveal of Red State melancholy and resentment. I'm still trying to figure out why Jake Gyllenhaal's performance in "Brokeback Mountain" wound up classified as a supporting one while Ledger's was a lead. The only reason I can come up with was that he was the catcher, and Ledger, the pitcher.


Other 2005 thoughts:
I've told you already that I didn't care for War of the Worlds, Munich, or Batman Begins, and that Elizabethtown blew chunks. You know that I was slightly charmed by the second coming of The Bad News Bears and completely charmed by The Producers.

I thought Wedding Crashers had two great performances at its center, but was suffocated by a script and director that didn't know what it had, not the least of which else was Christopher Walken. The Aristocrats was filthy fun, but Sarah Silverman's Jesus is Magic could have done with a little more pep and fewer musical numbers. And looking back on it now, it's hard to believe I ever saw Four Brothers.

Walk the Line avoided most of the pitfalls of the "Great Man" bio-epic, mostly thanks to Reese Witherspoon keeping the focus on the June-and-Johnny Cash relationship. Shopgirl was the sort of tedious self-indulgence I fear we'll be stuck with from Steve Martin for the rest of his career. I regret that it will forever be the first movie I ever saw in the theater with the love of my life, but at least the distinction won't belong to Elizabethtown.

I was drawn deeply into Capote, and it competed for a spot on the Top 5 list, along with Happy Endings. (I would watch an entire series of films featuring the unlikely pair of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tom Arnold.) Syriana left me scratching my head-- not because of its convoluted story, though it indeed had that to spare, but because of my lingering anger that it let too many of its principals off the hook.

Not many will wind up seeing The World's Fastest Indian, but Sir Anthony H as the real-life 70-something codger who travels from New Zealand to the Utah salt flats to race his motorcycle in the 1960s has three terrific elements-- a great central performance, old-fashioned road-picture cred, and a love for sports through racing that I had previously found quite foreign. It's the best family movie of the year.

On the documentary front, there was much to chew on in Why We Fight, though it has a rather disingenuous title seeing as how a small percentage of Americans actually do the fighting. I caught Bukowski- Born Into This, a profile of eccentric and oft-drunk poet Charles Bukowski, on a notably bad day and fell asleep half way through. What I saw, though, I liked.

The three most inexplicably popular films of the year were The 40 Year Old Virgin, which I didn't get around to seeing until last week, and about which I will probably be able to remember nothing by October; A History of Violence, which I thoughtlessly expected to be about something other than film studio marketing and audience pandering; and finally, Oscar's favorite, Crash, the worst kind of movie, one that pretends to be serious while, in fact, is nothing more than manipulation and melodrama, in love with its own high-mindedness. We're all guilty, it preaches. So sorry I made the mistake of driving my car or getting out of bed this morning. It lacked all of the intelligence of the year's top movie. Half of the film's cast is still trying to get paid, but I want my money back first.

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2004's CM Film Awards were posted last July, and here you have the list of all the previous winners.

posted by CM @ 10:31 PM