Last year’s programming was such a success that we had to prep a 2010 edition. Sorry for the wait, superfans.
April 1-15: Lifetime Batting Average .167: The Complete Filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
April 16-25: Is My Childlike Awe at the World Reflection of Some Inner Perversion?: The Films of Steven Spielberg
April 26-30: Great Dude, Shitty Movies: Let’s Watch Some John Waters
May 1-13: Mikhail Kalatozov: In Soviet Russia, Movie Watches You
May 14-15: I’ll Underwrite Your Drug Habit and I Fuck Teenagers: Larry Clark, Still Not in Prison
May 16-30: A Life In Pictures, Or: How I Inspired the Scream Mask, Won a Pity Oscar, Fathered a Hottie, and Got Brian Grazer Into an American Express Ad. The Achievement of Ron Howard
June 1-30: Till It Hurts: The Films of Tom Shadyac
July 1-8: We’d All Secretly Prefer It Was a Michael Ritchie Retro: But Here’s Some Dreyer!
July 12-21: Maximum Effort, Minimal Impact: Stan Brakhage and the Dawn of the Screensaver
July 22-August 5: The Director’s Best Work Is the Unavailable One That I Have Seen and You Haven’t: A Tour of Cinema with Jonathan Rosenbaum
August 7-29: Art-house George Burns: Manoel de Oliveira Likes Soft Foods
September 1-10: Fair-Trade, All Things Considered, 8.7 on Pitchfork, Obama Tote Bag, Ramin Bahrani, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
September 11-22: Audience Members Pointing Out Hitchcock Allusions Will Be Shot on Sight: The Brian De Palma Film Festival
September 24-30: Politics as Usual: Costa-Gavras’s “Wait, the Sixties aren’t over?” Cinema
October 1-3: Some Stephen King Adaptations and Little Else: The World of Frank Darabont
October 4-31: Y’all Know My Motherfuckin Name: Michelangelo Antonioni, Make That Money, Nigga, Str8 Mobbed Out
Special thanks to programmers filmenthusiast2000, seanmcavoy, eshman, mjr, robbiefreeling, bugs meaney, and clarencecarter.
In honor of this weekend’s Oscar ceremony, we’ve rounded up all of Reverse Shot’s predictions, think pieces, and insider trivia about the awards that we’ve posted this season. Hold on, actually we don’t have any. We’re not saying that makes us special, or somehow above it all . . . wait a second . . . actually, yes, that does make us pretty special.
So rather than run down yet another list of “fearless” predictions about who will win the big prizes (Bigelow or her ex-husband?! Streep or a frosted-tipped gorgon?! Waltz or Waltz?! Mo’Nique or a flying pig just arrived from a frozen hell?!), we thought this year we’d pay tribute to our favorite past Oscar winners: you know, those movies that really make one appreciate the joy and magic of the Oscar season, when all is right with the world and everyone appreciates film as an art form. So, breaking with our own Oscar tradition, here are the five “greatest” Academy Award winners, one that perhaps The Blind Side, Precious, and Up in the Air can soon join, should they emerge victorious:
1. “I will sell this house today!”: American Beauty for Best Picture, 1999
Annette Bening doing her best Faye Dunaway impression stands out in our minds as the most blatantly horrendous thing about American Beauty, but there’s SO much to hate about the debut film from Sam Mendes, who has gone on to terrorize moviegoers with a succession of misogynistic, idiotic treatises on that fallow place called America. A real Alexis de Tocqueville, that one: Mendes’s crassness never fails to astonish, but never more so than in the glib Beauty, which was so “subversive” about contemporary American values and mores that it ends up making a savior of . . . a wealthy, straight, white American male. One whose regression into pot-smoking, responsibility-shirking infantilism is honored as transgressive. One whose real estate-hawking materialist demon wife (who slaps herself in the face over and over when she doesn’t excel at work) and sullen daughter hamper his happiness from every side. One who gets to die in a perfect moment of shotgun-assisted bliss, spiritually cleansed after deciding not to fuck the nubile, willing teenage girl on his couch (because she’s a virgin), and while staring at a framed photo of his baby girl. One whose death is manipulated into a distasteful faux murder mystery in which everyone who’s not him (a nonsensically gun-wielding shrew wife, a self-loathing gay neighbor, his black-cloaked outsider son) just might be a killer. To the unending blood-boiling of the smart few who at the time saw through this vacuous, perhaps unintentional upstander of traditional values, American Beauty is perhaps the single most hateful Best Picture winner, outdoing even the insipid Crash due to its Hollywood polish and sheen, which only make its transparencies all the clearer.
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It’s a tradition, whether we like it or not. Reverse Shot’s annual year-end awards, including Most Needless Backlash, Most Successful Failure, Most Overrated, Worst Date Movie, Best 3-D, The Alfred Molina Award for Overacting, Worst Character Name, Best and Worst Soundtrack, Best Nic Cage, Actress Most in Need of a Sabbatical, and much more!
Click here to get going, and let’s call 2009 done, shall we?
It seems these blockbuster sequels never stop coming! Especially with box-office queen Delphine Seyrig.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Part 2: Whores in Prison
The Kindle of Madame De…
Mandingo 2: the Reconstruction
Irma La Douce Douce
Wind 2: Gale
Theodore Rex Goes to Japan
Tank Girl, You’ll Be a Woman, Soon
Werckmeister Harmonies 2: And the Band (of Drunken, Hirsute, Hungarian Accordionists) Played On, or, So Long and Thanks for All the Giant Dead Sea Mammals
Hard Candy: Chew Harder
Always 2: Always and Forever
One Hour Photo 2: Overexposed
My Dog Skip 2: Life Is Shit
Diarrhea of a Country Priest
Curly Sue 20 Years Later: Curlier and Thicker
Cop 8 and a Half
The 401 Blows
Amarcord Again: Bigger Farts and Tits
They Shot Horses, Didn’t They?
Le regle de jeu 2: Scanner Cops
Hamlet 2 2
Cinderella Man: The 4th Anniversary Re-Release
Inland Empire Strikes Back
Been There
Wavelength II: Breaking the Waves
Last Year at Marienbad 2: Last Year at Marienbad
Programmed by filmenthusiast2000, seanmcavoy, eshman, mjr, robbiefreeling, bugs meaney, and clarencecarter
May 1-15: Theater Full of Part-Time Film Critics: The Reverent Kino-Eye of Hou Hsiao-hsien
May 16-25: Ugly Buildings, Whores, and Shamelessly Posturing Downtown Trash: The Cinema of Jim Jarmusch
May 26-30: Jean-Pierre Melville: Crime Dramas So “Precise” and “Immaculate” You’ll Be Wishing for Midnight Run
June 2-17: Ooh Look At That Shiny Thing Over There, Wait There’s Another One: The Worlds of Danny Boyle
June 18-July 10: Try to Remember Which Movie Was Which in a Month: An Ozu Chrestomathy
July 12-14: Reefer Madness: A Weekend with Terrence Malick
July 15, special event: There Will Be Blood: Haskell Wexler and David Carradine Discuss Bound for Glory
July 20-29: From Kinky to Stinky: The Career Trajectory of Jonathan Demme
August 4-29: Theater Full of Disgusting People: A Bunch of Old Crime Movies at Film Forum
August 30- September 2: Everybody’s Stupid and I Hate Them, Hate Them, Hate Them: The Mature Visions of Todd Solondz
September 3-4: But I Don’t Want To :’( —You’ll Watch These Jason Statham Movies and LIKE THEM!
September 5-14: Hop In and I’ll Get You Some New Air Jordans and We’ll Grab Pizza!: Victor Salva, Filmmaker
September 16-20: Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart: The Apocalyptic Phantasms of McG
September 21-30: I Don’t Know What the Hell I’m Talking About: The First Draft cinema of Woody Allen
October 1-11: Not Nearly as Funny as You Remember: Mel Brooks’s Stuff
October 15-31: Oshima and Imamura: Wow, Postwar Japan Sure Looked Like a Degraded Fucked-Up Shithole, eh?
November 1-15: What’s this Pile of Rusty, Vinegar-y Canisters in the Archive Basement?: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg Rides Again
November 16-20: But She Was Kinda Cute: The Documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl
November 22-30: The CD-ROMS of Chris Marker
December 1-10: Expensive Naps: The Weerasethakul Oeuvre
December 11-14: Meh: Half a Decade of Mumblecore
December 15-22: Still an Asshole: Godard at 80
December 24-31: Eye-Searingly Unwatchable: A Festival of Student Works by Reverse Shot Contributors
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