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

The fifth installment in a five-part Oscars feature

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.

Children of Men
Universal Pictures

Half an hour before the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry and his wizard-school pal Hermione find themselves at a loss as to how to prevent Harry's godfather from being put to death within the hour. Dumbledore, the school's headmaster, knows the man is innocent and so makes a cryptic suggestion Harry doesn't understand. Hermione, however, understands perfectly that she and Harry are to use a secret time-travel device she swore not to abuse — until Dumbledore gave her sly permission to do so. With no time to explain, Hermione draws Harry close and loops a long, golden chain around their shoulders. As she starts to fidget with a small hourglass attached to the chain, Harry reaches out, not realizing that touching the hourglass could have a disasterous effect. Again, Hermione does know this, and could respond any number of ways, but rather than move the hourglass out of Harry's reach, or take precious time to explain or say "no," she chooses the most efficient method, slaps his hand away, and off they go.

Prisoner of Azkaban could have been what the other three Harry Potter movies are — pretty entertaining, pretty rushed, pretty good — but instead it's something else entirely. The story is more shrewdly edited than the other three Potters, but that's only part of director Alfonso Cuaron's secret, and not even the biggest. Cuarnon understands moments. Moments that exist in real life; moments that beg for an off-the-cuff, unthought-of reaction from their participants. It's precisely the unthinking nature of these moments that makes them such rare cinematic sights. It's a job hazard, probably: Directors have to spend too much time thinking, plotting, constructing and storyboarding to understand, let alone practice, spontaneity. Cuaron's movies are too well constructed to suggest that he is anything but thorough, but he has nevertheless found some way to retain that spark of life.

Cuaron's Children of Men is bursting with Hermione hand-slaps. It's a story set in a not-distant, horrible future; the horror is caused by humanity, of course, but humanity has a somewhat better than usual excuse: the inexplicable 18-year-long gap since the last baby was born. There's no expectation for a cure, and people have begun to accept that the human race will likely vanish from the planet in less than 100 years. Virtually every single human being has begun a rapid descent into despair, chaos or both — even the richest, most privileged, most protected people carry visible scars from the dystopia — but there are still moments amongst the wreckage, of pain and joy and love.

Theo (Clive Owen) sees or lives each of Children of Men's moments. They aren't all happy, but they're all human, unknowable and unpredictable. Theo walks away from his estranged wife's body; he's covered in her blood, but still confident in his tough facade of self-control. He stops to light a cigarette, and it's this dip into his own humanity that undoes him. We'll never know why; he and his wife spent 10 years apart and two days together before her death, and she mentions his smoking only in passing. Perhaps she had wanted him to quit; maybe he never smoked when they were together. Cuaron undertands the power of moments so well that he refuses to even attempt an explanation — because they're inexplicable by nature. We're not telepathic. Every human is inherently unknowable by any other. We're allowed precious glimpses, and then, generally, only of the people we're closest to. They're wonderful, even the painful ones, because they're so terribly human. Whatever it may be, lighting his cigarette triggers just the right memory in Theo's head, and the moment that drop of weakness gets into the clear he collapses to his knees, sobbing. The person he was closest to, the only person who could possibly have explained why, is dead. So Cuaron doesn't explain. He simply lets the moment exist, and he lets us see it.

In Children of Men, life is painful, but it's the moments of sheer happiness that make it such an amazing film. The shocked look on Theo's face when his ex Julian (Julianne Moore) kisses him for the first time in ten years; the irresistible joy they feel when playing a silly game during a car ride; the paralysis of amazement that overcomes Theo when Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), the first pregnant woman he or anyone else has seen in 18 years — and the reason hs ex came to find him — reveals her swollen belly and pleads for his help. The world is literally falling down around humanity's ears, but Theo, Julian, Kee … none of them can stop themselves from having fun, kissing, laughing. Even when facing death, the love these beaten-down people feel for one another leaks out and stretches their grubby faces into unconscious smiles — and given the movie's mortality rate, we're often priviliged to see their last smile. Cuaron doesn't tell us to cry. He doesn't tell us to smile. He doesn't tell us to fall in love. He merely lets his moments stand on their own, and lets us fall in love with his characters and with life, because the two are inseparable. — Chris Shadoian

District B13
Magnolia Pictures

It's hard to say which film is worse: the prolix social commentary, or the learning-disabled action film. Films with a message are becoming more and more dogmatic, while films meant to titillate are becoming more and more lobotomized. In that last category is included films like X-Men: The Last Stand, which throw the audience a theoretical bone by dropping themes about mutants and discrimination, but then resort to the usual string of boring shootouts.

Come on grandma, you got a problem with violence in films? Absolutely the opposite. The problem with action movies is that they are excused from needing a real aesthetic because they are simply action-packed. This is why writer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel deserve an award for District B13. Besson gave us The Fifth Element, an action movie with its own gorgeous aesthetic. Pierre Morel carries that torch beautifully with an image of Paris' future ghettos that is both tragic and very beautiful. Morel also cast and incorporated two of the most amazing athletes in the world, and a ready Western response to the beautiful athleticism of modern martial arts stars. The two protagonists practice a form of urban evasion called parkour. While not specifically referred to in the film, this technique of moving through urban landscapes is in every shot. It is gorgeous, and totally apropos: In Paris 2010, the true athletes are those who can escape the police and organized crime, not the best boxers or football players.

The plot? Oh, only a story about the Parisian ghetto of the future that has been physically walled off by the government of Paris, and whose inhabitants are denied basic civil rights such as education and representation, and thus out of desperation are driven to violence and lawlessness, perpetuated by corrupt government fat cats who can neither totally control nor totally condemn the ghettos. In other words, today's news. That is what makes District B13 such a brilliant movie. It's one part social commentary, one part martial arts film, and one part sexy music video.

It's condescending to say that a sexy film can't be too smart, and it's condescending to say that a smart film can't be too sexy. MTV's impact can't be ignored, and The New York Times' impact shouldn't be ignored. But very often in America, filmmakers are ghettoized into genres and audience groups and judged as such. Besson and Morel deserve great praise for making a political film that is also kick-ass.

Idiocracy
20th Century Fox

At first glance, Mike Judge's long-awaited follow-up to Office Space might seem like an innocent slapstick, sitting innocuously on the shelves of Blockbuster alongside Employee of the Month and Little Man. Luke Wilson looks so non-threatening on the DVD cover, shoulders shrugged and palms up, befuddled by something wacky. The first clue to the movie's seriousness is the simple fact that Fox systematically buried it — odds are, you probably never heard of it until spotting a half-section of it on the New Release shelf. In fact, the target audience Blockbuster is selling it to is the exact object of Judge's scorn in the most harrowing satire since The Stepford Wives.

At a time when the existence of evolution is a charged political issue, Judge proposes that devolution is already in full swing. The film opens with a family tree of two different couples, one a DINK and the other ready to step onstage at "The Jerry Springer Show." The Yuppie tree stops at the stump, while the white trash pollinates his seed far and wide, filling the screen with babies, overwhelming us with horror at the notion of a Springer Nation.

On the surface, Judge's attention to detail and barrage of small jokes (try to explain the difference between mega-hit "America's Funniest Home Videos" and 2505's mega-hit "Ow! My Balls!") might seem like an attempt at the rapid-fire, scattershot method of the Zuckers. Look closer: The best horror films make the familiar frightening; the best apocalypse films make the frightening seem just a beat beyond the familiar. Now, the movie isn't perfect — it feels edited into oblivion, the Prostitute with a Heart of Gold subplot goes nowhere, and maybe there are too many holes for the plot to hold entirely together. Still, Judge's victory is his vision: A future that feels like you're trapped inside the barbed wire of a trash-strewn trailer park, where reason doesn't apply not because of the primal instincts of survival, but because reason and instinct have become prisoners of comfort. In most apocalypse movies, the fright comes from the ease of ultraviolence, but here the fright is in the fact that people don't even care enough to kill each other or to bust out of prison — except to cheer on the cops as they swoop in to firebomb the car of a fugitive.

Constitution, schmonstitution — when Joe is put in front of judge, the proceedings are a cross between the Flesh Fair scene in A.I. and a Wrestlemania promo. Indeed, when former pro wrestler and current leader of America President Camacho brings Joe to the White House, we see a yard full of rusty autos and a satellite dish hanging from the pillars. Judge takes us to the State of the Union, delivered from the House of Representin', to underscore the point that totalitarianism may not sprout only from the imposition of the police state, but from the lack of vigilance in protecting our democratic institutions. In this regard, Judge's anti-corporate message hits the hardest: Crops starve when a megacorp buys the Department of the Interior and convinces the masses that you have to irrigate with Gatorade (because it has electrolytes); a Costco spreads for square miles, imposing as a Siberian death camp; Fox News is delivered by bodybuilders and supermodels.

Of course, it's the Fox corporation itself that suppressed Judge's film. Judge would have you believe that this is more dangerous than government takeover. People can summon the energy to cast of a brutal dictator, but when the enemy is apathy, there's no revolution or evolution. As Joe tells us in his own State of the Union: "There was a time when reading wasn't just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories, that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!" If only Mike Judge had that optimism. — Stephen Himes

The Last King of Scotland
Fox Searchlight

If one of the primary goals of art is to transport the observer, The Last King of Scotland is a roaring success. In every respect — time (the 1970s), place (Uganda, both rural and urban) and mindset (the intoxication of power and the fear of one's enemies), the film moves its viewers. It skillfully deploys its soundtrack, costume, accent, scenery and acting to paint a picture vivid enough to be lifelike. And unlike many other films that seek to bring Westerners into a foreign land, there isn't the dumbed-down oversimplification (see Lumumba) or hammy and complete disconnect with the audience (see Kandahar) that turn many otherwise interesting and high-minded movies into dumbass Third World action-adventures or boring social studies slideshows.

Much of the film's power emanates from Forest Whitaker's intense dedication to nailing the persona of dictator Idi Amin. Can an American viewer accurately appraise the quality of his Ugandan accent and Swahili? Absolutely not. Can we feel utterly convinced that the man on the screen is not an actor, but a poor African soldier who clawed his way to the top of his own society only to disintegrate into a maelstrom of paranoia and violence? Absolutely. And that's a tribute to Whitaker as an actor, not the film as a whole.

But consider this: If you removed Whittaker's incandescent performance and substituted an unknown, workmanlike character actor, you'd still have a movie worth watching. The plot is nail-bitingly paced (moving from blissfully languid to panic-inducing in a series of almost unnoticeably gentle increments) and its world is painted with thousands of thoughtful brushstrokes. It may not connect with audiences the way The Departed or The Queen can, but it spans a much larger gulf than either of those pictures, with an elegance that belies its emotional impact. A "best picture" award should be about films exceeding a simple summation of their parts; The Last King of Scotland positively transcends its individual components to become something truly wonderful. — James Norton

A Scanner Darkly
Warner Independent Pictures

It's really easy to see why Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly didn't go over all that well with the Academy. They're humor-impaired, as Jon Stewart's reception at last year's awards proved, and Scanner is often diabolically funny, but lacks tots, clowns or laugh track to clue the beautiful people. Also it looks "funny" (but not ha-ha funny) thanks to the traced-animation treatment of its photography — but without this, any rendering of Philip K. Dick's hallucinatory sci-fi novel would have been nearly unthinkable. (If only they'd done Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in this mode.) Finally, Scanner is rife with moral ambiguities. There are no diseases being endured bravely, no racism, homophobia, fascism, etc., being heroically resisted. The main characters are mostly undoing themselves, quite self consciously, with the deranging drug "D" that they're all addicted to — including the undercover cop who's supposed to be rooting out the kingpins of the trade. Here even the best intentions are enacted through dubious means.

The tale is a bit bleak, paranoid and claustrophobic, but it is leavened so well by the people who play the parts that it calls for an Oscar just for casting. Linklater's waste-cases are brilliantly played by Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Keanu Reeves — all of whom bring street cred to their strung-out roles. Linklater gives them some truly inspired (albeit addled) dialogue, and some truly disturbing hallucinations, which we experience on the same level of reality as everything in the rotoscoped world.

This is not a film to warm anyone's heart, but it dazzles as much as anything in a long time. — David Essex

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