2006 Flak Film Also-Ran Awards: The Steak Knives
Second-Best Picture
by Flak Staff

The fifth installment in a five-part Oscars feature

 Photo Slideshow

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 Village Voice Take Seven Critics' Poll. To see the ineligible nominees, click here.

The Aristocrats
ThinkFilm

If a dramatic feature film manages to engage your attention for 90 minutes, periodically break you up with laughter, occasionally provoke deep-seated outrage and then keeps you talking about its themes and details for weeks to come, here's what it becomes: a best picture Oscar contender.

If a documentary picture manages all the same things, however, it's quickly boxed up into its own little non-fiction ghetto of Oscar marginalia.

The Aristocrats — an often offensive, sometimes subtle and continually hilarious tour through the history and psychology of (non-black) American stand-up comedy — does a great thing. It starts with a little noun — an inside joke told, retold, and wildly elaborated upon by comedians — and uses it as a vehicle to explore norms of race, class, gender and religion … typically by brutally violating them, often to great comic effect.

Michael Moore made a quixotic bid to have Fahrenheit 9/11 nominated for best picture, rather than going for the easy Oscar in the best documentary category. It was a noble impulse, and one that The Aristocrats should have emulated. — James Norton

Junebug
Sony Pictures Classics

Chastising the sort of self-important epic films that usually win the Oscar, a friend once commented that, to be more accurate, the Academy should just go ahead and change the award from "Best Picture" to "Most Picture." Junebug would never win Most Picture — it's too quiet, too deceptively simple — but it was the best film of last year by having more eloquent things to say about more subjects. The logline is a cliché nightmare: Sophisticated Chicago newlyweds go to visit his conservative North Carolina hometown so that he can introduce her to his small-minded family. But Junebug seems to be not just an empathetic study of our country's cultural differences but also a critique of Hollywood's inability to make competent films about small towns or families anymore. The secret to the film's emotional and geographic fidelity is simple observation and patience, grasping a community of individuals well enough that every detail feels accurate and yet somehow still mysterious and elusive. Junebug is such a sprawling, layered, balanced work that it's unfair to call it just director Phil Morrison's film or screenwriter Angus MacLachlan's film. It's also Amy Adams's and Embeth Davidtz's and Frank Hoyt Taylor's and Alessandro Nivola's. And if you've ever loved someone and wondered who that person really is and where he came from, it might be your movie too. — Tim Grierson

King Kong
Universal Pictures

If you got bored with King Kong's fighting dinosaurs and feasting worms and vicious vampire bats, well, I have to wonder what you were doing in the theater in the first place, as those were all fulfillments of director Peter Jackson's stated desire to recreate the original Kong as it exists in his fevered remembrances. While you can legitimately gripe that a lot of the hellzapoppin Skull Island stuff doesn't really serve the story, the movie's adventure angle is exactly equal to the sum of its sturdy, ass-kicking parts, and I would be a less starry-eyed moviegoer if I hadn't seen that apatosaur pile-up.

But even if you did find all that totally uninteresting, it would be worth sitting through just to be there when Jackson's Kong becomes transcendent, which is exactly where it should: when Kong and Ann share the screen alone. It's some of the best acting of the year. (While there are legitimate complications preventing a Best Actor nomination, for Naomi Watts to have been snubbed at the Oscars yet again can only mean that she is just too good for the Academy; she must frighten other actresses.) Kong is brilliantly coded as every facet of maleness: his preverbal neediness and temper suggests a child, his unflagging devotion to Ann's well-being suggests a mate, and his silverbacked austerity suggests a widower happy to simply be in the presence of a young, vital woman — and in a miracle of performance-capture technology, Andy Serkis and the team at WETA do all that and make it human as well as simian. Ann, in turn, is mother, wife and child to this ür-male, and the brilliance of Watts' performance is how she's able to express the world while looking at a green screen (or, sometimes, Serkis wrappen in a green screen). The movie invokes classic Hollywood left and right, but it feels like a true child of that era in Jackson's close-ups of Watts in Kong's presence. Each one is endlessly communicative — a soliloquy per eye, a monologue in the set of her mouth. All the other technical wizardy is fun, but this is movie magic. — Sean Weitner

Millions
Fox Searchlight Pictures

As several have observed, American narratives, and especially movies, tend to be infantile because they trivialize death. They deny it altogether, positing angels, ghosts, reincarnations and happily-ever-afters; they make it lugubrious melodrama with Beautiful Movie Star Disease; they make it sexy fun, as in action/slashers. The best movie in a long, long time, the British-made Millions, does none of the above. The main characters are little boys coping with the recent death of their mother. With the life-insurance money, their father moves them into one of those instant suburbs and fills their new house with all new stuff in order to make a fresh start. Just like a real 6-year-old, the younger brother takes the boxes that all the crap came in and, down by the train tracks, makes a fort against reality. In it he has hilarious conversations with ancient Catholic saints ("Now I'm the Patron saint of Television. Keeps me busy — I can tell you."), among whom he envisions his mother. One day a Nike bag stuffed with money comes crashing into the fort, the older brother declares it "a miracle," and complications ensue. It's the newest version of the old morality play wherein the devil leaves gold at a crossroads to set men murdering and thereby snare their souls. Other versions include "The Pardoner's Tale," and more recently, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Simple Plan and Shallow Grave. This last was also directed by Millions' Danny Boyle, whose credits include Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, A Life Less Ordinary and, as producer, the neglected wonder Twin Town. Clearly Boyle can spot material.

Millions, like most of Boyle's oeuvre, is sardonically funny without being facetious. The boys here are not themselves saints; they play the death card, telling people "Our mother's dead" to get their way. The younger boy has misgivings: "It's not completely right." With the kind of casual conviction Tom Hanks would kill for, his brother says simply, "She's completely dead, isn't she?" and then changes the subject. Just so, every character in the piece — even the pompous cop and the clueless Mormon missionary — is given both a comic turn and a moment of redemptive dignity.

If there were a God, American preachers would have sent their flocks to see Millions and it would have made as much money as Mel Gibson's sado-porn epic. And then He would have had a divinely ironic laugh about Millions' sermon on cupidity. — David Essex

The Weather Man
Paramount Pictures

It's easy and deceptive to just cast this movie off as a weird piece of Hollywood, directed by the newly rich director of Pirates of the Carribbean and starring a Jerry Bruckheimer stalwart.

But Gore Verbinski's film has a certain literary quality: It captures a specific man in a specific place, fleshed out by intimate details, and in the final product becomes something larger. Dave Spritz is a divorced weather man slogging through snow-sludge in Chicago, but he's also a symbol of the general malaise of modern America. Spritz gets paid an extraordinary amount of money to do nothing but hang out by the water cooler, and then go wave his arms in front of a green screen for a few minutes (like how Cage performs in Bruckheimer movies). As Spritz himself says, "What I do is fast food," a sentiment literalized by the shakes and fries with which he's pelted when his forecasts don't satisfy his viewers — what he does isn't real, doesn't have any meaning, so he can't really satisfy himself or others on any serious level. And that's his life. His ex-wife "wasn't enthusiastic about the blowjobs," they screwed up their marriage, and now their son is being seduced by a NAMBLA-esque counselor and his 12-year-old daughter has already started smoking.

The tone is the trick: We laugh at Spritz' ineptitude, even while sensing his profound patheticness. In other words, Verbinski creates a depression comedy. The details make sense on levels small and large: Close-ups of teenage cameltoe become symbols of the relationship between American excess and its depression. Spritz tries to flirt with his ex-wife, but nails her with a snowball and says, "You turned into it," casting the blame out of reflex. As Spritz ambles down the big streets of Chicago, buildings casting long shadows, snow-sludge covering everything, we recognize that his problem is focus. He's bogged down in the giant sprawl of American life — with its demands of family, work, social engagements and all the rest — and it doesn't help that his only possible contribution to society is the pseudo-science of guessing the most miserable weather of each week (aka the Spritz Nipper). Worse, Spritz' father is a successful novelist, so successful and self-assured that he's played by Michael Caine.

So Spritz takes up archery, among other things, to get his life back on track. The irony here is that the pinnacle of his career wouldn't be the admiration and deep respect his father earned as a writer, but as a completely innocuous replacement for Al Roker in New York. In the movie's final image, Spritz parades through Times Square to confetti and streamers — an oft-used American literary image of the delusion that fame and fortune will cure all ills. It's a midwestern movie, like About Schmidt, in which a man loses himself in the expanse. This is, Spritz tells us, an American accomplishment. And so is the movie.
— Stephen Himes

Second-best Actor
Second-best Actress
Second-best Screenplay
Second-best Director

Produced by Andy Adams.