Birthday Invite to Matthew Eng

First, to Matthew Eng, a longtime reader of this website whose birthday is today, June 12. I have never actually met Matthew, but a little birdy (initials V.S.) told me that he has spent enough time on this site that he'd get a kick out of an e-mail or a tweet or a blogpost saying "Hello!" and "Happy Birthday!" and "Long Live All Those Actresses You and I Both Love!"

But I've decided to go Matthew and his birthday benefactor one better, because with the Northwestern school year finally wrapping up, and with my long year of waiting for tenure and for my book to come out (expect more soon about that!), it's clearly past time to get serious about reviving this website and blog.  I loved hearing that there are readers out there who still enjoy this site and its initial centerpiece of long-form reviews, because I haven't written one in quite a while.  Getting other, bigger, higher-stakes writing projects off my plate means getting to re-embrace lots of smaller and/or more personal ones, and I can't tell you how delighted I am to throw off the dust covers and get Nick's Flick Picks properly going again.  Hopefully all the plumbing still works and the electricity's still on.

So Matthew, for being such a devoted patron of NFP, and for having such a good friend who's such a fantastic person and wonderful student (which only assures me of how fantastic and wonderful you surely are, too), what would you like to hear about first?  You, like me, live with the indignity of having no Best Actress nominee who shares a birthday with you, or else I was going to profile one of her performances.  My research shows me that your birthday-mates include famous diarist Anne Frank, and I've never seen the Oscar-winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered or the classic Diary of Anne Frank, which netted so many Academy nods and a win for Shelley Winters, one of the very few Supporting Actress victors I have left to screen. Should I write one of those up for you?  Are those too depressing for a birthday celebration?

Would you prefer a review of a movie starring gorgeous Aussie stalwart Frances O'Connor, perhaps Patricia Rozema's oddball adaptation of Jane Austen's magnificent Mansfield Park? Something starring saucy, multi-talented African-American pioneer Nina Mae McKinney, such as her dazzling musical debut in Hallelujah! or the amazing pre-Code potboiler Safe in Hell? Maybe you'd prefer a review of one of last year's most terrific movies, Magic Mike, starring another Matthew, as well as June 12 birthday girl Cody Horn? That would also be a prompt to post my long-delayed Top Ten of 2012.  Maybe you'd enjoy a review of one of the only three movies that ever featured the legendary stage actress Uta Hagen, who originated the role of Martha in Broadway's original Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If you're in the market for Uta, the movies I know I can get my hands on are the dark thriller The Boys from Brazil or the celebrated Jeremy Irons-Glenn Close potboiler Reversal of Fortune.

Or maybe you'd be more excited for a movie that shares your birthday, rather than an actor or actress who did so? A bit more digging reveals that The Witches of Eastwick, which I've never seen, and Predator, which I have, both opened on June 12, 1987. Six years earlier, Raiders of the Lost Ark bowed on June 12, 1981, as did the O.G. original Clash of the Titans. I've already reviewed the modern lesbian classic High Art (twice, in fact, because I love it), but not the other actressy arthouse venture that opened on June 12, 1998: the eccentric Balzac adaptation Cousin Bette, where Jessica Lange tries out period comedy, and everything ends with Elisabeth Shue and Bob Hoskins smearing each other's naked bodies with chocolate sauce. For real.

Or maybe the most obviously birthday-related linkage———and I'm not sure how you feel about this—is that you came into the world on the same day that Rosemary's Baby did. Don't worry, I'm sure that doesn't mean anything.

So, Matthew: pick one of the movies listed above, and I'll be delighted to review it: not just in honor of you, but as a gesture of solidarity with all my patient readers that I really am baaaack. Choose wisely (use the Force!), leave your answer in the Comments field, and have a fantastic day today!

P.S. One extra gift: June 12 is also the birthday of the hostess of the obviously best infomercial there ever was.  I give you Jennilee Harrison and the Infinite Dress. You're welcome. (Go easy on her, because as she may have mentioned, she doesn't have a mirror.)

Making a List, Checking It Obsessively

When last we checked in, more or less, I still had the whole Fall and Holiday season ahead of me on a viewing itinerary. And this after a crazy year in which almost all of my moviegoing was backloaded into the last five months, and in pretty concentrated binges at that. Now my lists of prioritized titles—before I call in the limos and publish year-end favorites—can almost fit on an index card or two.

A Dozen in Theaters: ✓The Hobbit (already landed in Chicago), ✓The Impossible, ✓Rust and Bone, and ✓This Is 40 (all arriving Friday), ✓Django Unchained and ✓Les Misérables (Christmas gifts, or "gifts"), ✗Searching for Sugar Man (back by popular demand on the 28th), Promised Land, ✓Sister, and ✓Zero Dark Thirty (all hitting the first weekend in January), and ✓Amour and ✓On the Road (no publicly announced Chicago dates, at least as far as I know). I'm sure I'll chase other stuff, to include the gay-themed drama Any Day Now and the gayish-frattish-grannyish gene-splice ✓The Guilt Trip, but these twelve feel like the big stories to me.

A Decalogue on DVD: the Joe Reid-endorsed January sci-fi ✓Chronicle, the Frederick Wiseman documentary Crazy Horse, the Binoche vehicle ✓Elles, the prize-collecting Israeli hit ✓Footnote, the Criterion-stamped Forgiveness of Blood, Mia Hansen-Løve's well-received Goodbye, First Love, the Dardennes' widely loved ✓Kid with a Bike, Maïwenn's Cannes trophy collector Polisse, Pablo Larraín's two-year-old Venice entry ✓Post Mortem, and Michael Winterbottom's flop spin on Hardy, Trishna.

Those are my scheduled pit-stops. Anything I didn't list poses a problem either of availability or enthusiasm.  If the former, you're welcome to hook me up with some fabulous screener.  If the latter, make your pitch in the comments!  What's the best movie released in the U.S. in 2012 that you liked more than most people did, and which you're pretty sure I didn't see but should have?

Everybody Goes to Mike's, and Nathaniel's

Slow going on this blog lately; ironically, I've been quite active on other people's. Last week, Mike's site served as the headquarters for our latest entry of the Best Pictures from the Outside In series, where he, Nathaniel, and I chatted up Gentleman's Agreement, 1947's earnest exposé of anti-Semitism, and Rain Man, 1988's innovative fusion of mushy drama, luxury car ad, autism-themed PSA, leaked actor's-rehearsal footage, odd comedy, incipient Reagan-era self-critique, and inexplicably didgeridoo'd kitsch object. Please read the transcript and leave your comments at Mike's place, but come back here to vote in our Reader's Poll of your favorite Oscar champs from 1943-47 and from 1988-92.

As you already know, I tend to exploit the typically long hiatuses between Best Pictures... installments as a reason to investigate other titles from the same years as our current headliners. I made a huge dent in 1947 when all was said and done, though I still have some luscious-sounding reader recommendations like Nora Prentiss, Daisy Kenyon, and The Unsuspected to hunt down. I opted to fill out a year where I hadn't seen much, rather than round out my bulkier albeit U.S.-centric viewing history in 1988, so that remains a bit of a loose end, with the Angelopoulos, Eastwood, Kusturica, Kieślowski, and Menges titles remaining especially enticing. Also, now that Pete Postlethwaite has passed, I'm all the more eager to at least take another trip to the sad but incandescent Distant Voices, Still Lives.

Meanwhile, over at Nathaniel's recently spiffed-up site, I added my voice to the semi-regular Oscar podcasts that he convenes with Joe Reid and Katey Rich. As is true of his apartment, Nathaniel's blog remains a host-space par excellence, and it's sweet of him to keep inviting me over. In the latest conversation, divided into a Part One and a Part Two, we pore over the tea leaves of what films and performers do and don't seem bound toward Oscar nominations on January 25th. We also gloss a few favorite semi-candidates (or, in my case, a non-candidate) who ought to have been walking in the front-runners' shoes.

The onetime front-runner that Nathaniel, Katey, Joe, and I all wonder (and maybe hope?) will find itself locked out of the Best Picture race is Danny Boyle's 127 Hours—which, in a fortuitous coincidence, will also be the title of my next Best Pictures... chat with Nathaniel and Mike, given how long it will take to re-screen Laurence Olivier's Hamlet and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, a Top Ten of 2010 should follow in the next week or so, and maybe another special feature to keep things going at a steady hum in the new year....

Further into 1947

I loved having the Chicago Film Festival to break up my days of book writing and revising, and now that it's concluded, I've been running an unofficial festival of my own of the movies of 1947. I tend to do this when I've finished re-screening the Best Picture victors that Nathaniel, Mike, and I will be discussing in our approaching installment of the ...Outside In series, and I'm curious to flesh out my sense of the annual crops from which Oscar anointed his favorite. I've changed my ideas about Gentleman's Agreement in certain ways since the last time I saw it, so I'm not spoiling the conversation we three musketeers will eventually have when I say that, all the same, it's an uninspiring winner. And already I've made thrilling dates with much-loved or at least widely admired classics that I'd never seen (Out of the Past, Kiss of Death, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Best Picture nominee Crossfire), exciting short films from the comically animated to the darkly lyric (Tweetie Pie, Le tempestaire), and less familiar outings from renowned directors (Hitchcock's The Paradine Case, Kazan's Boomerang!). I've also revisited some movies I saw so far back in my TCM-watching and VHS-renting days that they were in many ways new to me, and almost always delightful larks: The Bishop's Wife, The Farmer's Daughter, and especially the delicious if stylistically rudimentary The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, the year's second-biggest commercial blockbuster, starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple on lustrous comic form and derived from an Oscar-winning script by Sidney Sheldon.

What I have not done is revisit the two huge auteurist touchstones from 1947, Orson Welles's deeply disorienting Lady from Shanghai and Charlie Chaplin's rather broad and scabrously off-putting Monsieur Verdoux, which sprang from an idea by Welles and many, many people regard as a masterwork. I've screened them both in big-screen restored prints, recently enough to at least trust my basic distaste for both, and though I probably owe it to the geniuses behind each of them to take another stab at some point, I am so not up for it right now.

But what should I be up for? I love reader recommendations in cases like these, either because you've already seen some of the films I'm still anticipating or because something jumps off my pre-selected docket that sounds as tantalizing to you, sight unseen, as it does to me. Major actorly showcases with durable fan bases, like Carol Reed's Odd Man Out with James Mason, or Robert Rossen's Body and Soul with John Garfield? Anthony Mann double-feature Railroaded! and T-Men? Relative obscurities by Ozu (Record of a Tenement Gentleman) and Kurosawa (One Wonderful Sunday), and better-known but seemingly minor work by Sirk (Lured), Leisen (Golden Earrings), and Renoir (The Woman on the Beach - check!)? Black-cast musicals Juke Joint, New Orleans, with its much-touted Billie Holliday cameo, and the enticingly named Boy! What a Girl!? The brooding darkness of Brute Force, Nightmare Alley, or Quai des Orfèvres? Actressy vehicles for Joan Crawford (Daisy Kenyon) and, in a rare leading role, Teresa Wright (Pursued)? Actor-director Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, a longtime pet of film theorists? (His Mexican noir Ride the Pink Horse is an under-heralded gem of the same year.) British cult favorite Brighton Rock, apparently ruined by the Rowan Joffe remake now completing its global festival tour? Box-office bonanzas Forever Amber, Welcome Stranger, Unconquered, Life with Father, and The Egg and I, the latter two with Oscar nods for acting? Notorious MGM boondoggle Desire Me, the Greer Garson vehicle from which George Cukor fought to efface his name? The movie Cukor made that year that he actually liked, as did AMPAS, was the Othello-obsessed thriller A Double Life, probably due for a rewatch. And speaking one last time of the Academy, what about inaugural Academy anointee for Best Foreign Language Film Monsieur Vincent? The Katharine Hepburn twofer of Sea of Grass (another Elia Kazan project) and Song of Love (a dread composer biopic), which even I, as a lifelong devotée, have thus far stayed away from? What other titles am I not clocking at all, though I should?

I probably have room between now and November to absorb three or four more of the above. If you were setting my agenda, what would you pick? Fire away in the comments, and we'll see if we can reach a gentle(wo)man's agreement, or whether we get stuck in a crossfire.