NYT. Top 10 x 3. And more.

Million Dollar Baby tops Scott and Dargis's list, and it's in the accompanying "audio slide show," in which each critic boils the lists down to their gists, that we hear that, for Scott anyway, Baby didn't just edge out the others, it was "by far" the best picture of the year. When Dargis speaks (the cinetrix likes to hop all over her case for not showing herself, but: she speaks!), she chooses to emphasize Richard Schickel's approximate restoration of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, the #2 on both her and Scott's lists.

That makes Holden, once again, the odd man out. His #1 film of year, Bad Education, doesn't even appear on the other two lists. But in the audio show, Holden notes that, in his mind, with his last three films, Pedro Almodóvar has established himself as the greatest filmmaker currently working anywhere.

What else: Besides Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the only film to make a showing on all three lists (Sideways doesn't make Scott's list, Dargis doesn't include Kinsey and Holden doesn't list The Big Red One); both Scott and Dargis include one anime feature, albeit different ones. Scott goes for Tokyo Godfathers, Dargis for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.

In a sort of quieter, digested version of Slate's "Movie Club," an email free-for-all appearing each January and one of the highlights of each year when it comes to reading about movies, Dargis and Scott discuss what's made the most lasting impressions on their minds in the past 12 months, an exchange divided into four topics: actors, directors (primarily contrasting what's become of Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese), politics and the impact of digital technology. And of course, it should be noted that all this movie talk and listing are only part of the paper's overall package, "Culture: The Best of 2004."

Also in the NYT:

An unusual piece, and a brave move for Oliver Stone: "On a warm Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, just back from showing Alexander, much of which was filmed in Morocco, at the Marrakesh film festival, the director sat down at his office in Santa Monica to reflect, in the presence of a critic, on his film's fate and its future. His tone was sometimes wounded, sometimes defensive." The critic is Scott and the conversation's engaging: "I mean why didn't Shakespeare touch the guy, or Marlowe or Goethe? He was famous. Nobody touched him. Why? Because there's too much success. He's too much - too much for people."

Nick Madigan profiles Gerard Thomas Straub, the sort of Christian one wishes were ascendant in America rather than the belligerent neocons running things now. Straub's mission is to "'put the power of film at the service of the poor' by photographing and filming what he sees as the suffocating, deeply unjust conditions of countless millions.... In 1999, when he ventured overseas to document what he called 'global poverty and the Christian response to it,' he was horrified. On his first night in Calcutta, staying in a church in the heart of a slum, he said he was so overwhelmed by the pervasive squalor - the thousands living in the streets, the filth, the wailing - that he could not close his eyes."

Meanwhile. Sharon Waxman reports on the drastic scaling down of operations at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley and the closure of Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope Productions, both "consequence[s] of technological shifts and economic hardship in the California film industry." Zoetrope, which you'll see featured in any history of the "New Hollywood," that often-celebrated 70s-era shift away from the old studio system, is, of course, a multi-armed entity - it's good to see, for example, even one of its relatively smaller ventures, Zoetrope: All-Story still going strong, featuring most recently a cover design by Gus Van Sant and work by, among others, Ryu Murakami. But this particular arm is expected to reopen as ZAP Productions in LA. Even so, argues Waxman in a separate piece, Hollywood itself is being led by "a veritable flock of lame ducks."

If it's been a while since you've seen Mary Poppins and you think you remember it well, think again, writes Virginia Heffernan: "The movie is set in 1910, in part among chimney sweeps and the bankers in high, hard collars, but the 60s come through in just about every scene. If those who most exemplified that decade were the activists and the sybarites, this movie is clearly on the side of the sybarites - the hippies."

Richard Schickel's review of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: Volume II, 1945 - 1957 is accompanied by one of the site's excellent "Featured Author" pages.

Posted by dwhudson at December 25, 2004 6:33 AM