The Golden Nude Oscar - annually awarded to the Best Performance By An Arse - goes to Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence. What particularly distinguishes Mortensen's rump is its ability to climb stairs in pursuit of Maria Bello's arse, and to stay in view for far longer than a telescopic inspection of the lunar surface would take to reveal all those acne-like pockets and rills.
If you are broke and old, and have chosen to see the film with the pensioners to obtain a discount, the interminable wobblings of Mortensen's rear should help you hear the shrill commentary of the lady with purple hair and a gallon of waxy popcorn: "I much preferred him in Lord of the Rings!"
Yes - in Rings Viggo debuted as Aragorn (or Arathorn, one forgets) in a doublet, bravely prancing over the landscape in search of the vertically challenged hobbits. About whom: though their furry feet are convincing (you can almost smell them), the camera is unable to make the creatures consistently uniform in height, so that they spring up and down like Harry Potter learning to shave his legs. To the wardrobe tech on J R R Tolkien's hairy-footed saga, then, a pair of Imelda Marcos-style pink booties.
This year, not one but two movies showed us paranoid women racing about airliners in search of the loo - or wherever else some plot explanation might be lurking. Both Red Eye and Flightplan (Rachel McAdams in the first, Jodie Foster next) show tormented figures probing every nook and cranny of airliners with a peculiar propensity for being tossed around the sky by storms. Both rely on the cinematic insight that if you wrap up the ending quickly enough, no-one will notice that none of it makes sense.
For the respective directors, therefore, a rare (and only) first edition print of Saving Ryan's Privates, by Steffie Speëlvoël (1 897 minutes), a Hitchcockian exercise in filmic space that deconstructs in black and black the gender paradigm of a Nazi who keeps body parts in his freezer. Shown first at the 1924 Krijkikistan Film Festival, its merits are traditionally settled after a brisk sperm count.
After decades of the implausible thesis that extraterrestrials travel trillions of light years to remove the ova of trailer trashettes, ET staged a comeback as an octopus in Spielberg's War of the Worlds, transforming the surface of the earth into a large kitchen after a riotous night of red wine and prawns. Stuff cuddly aliens, we say. Of course, like many another film, War could be interpreted as a take on 9/11 - in which case, an exotic night in the sauna with Michael Moore and a Big Mac for Spielberg.
Anyone who enjoyed the Peter Sellers film - Life & Death Of - deserves a reiterated download of the Pink Panther series on his or her twinkly cellphone, when it isn't in use babbling to the person on the other side of the table in the food mall.
George Lucas wound up his Star Wars sextet with the revelation that Darth Vader is Hayden Christiansen in polystyrene. The same effect was to be seen in Troy, where as Achilles rippling his pecs, Brad Pitt is never once heard to roar, "Bring on the Trojans!" since that would constitute a form of product placement.
Brad also played some spanking games with Angelina Jolie in Mr & Mrs Smith, where it would have indeed been responsible and adult if someone had presented them, as married hitpersons, with a bouquet of Trojans.
Zen-like, all films become one in the mind of the addict. Is it possible that as a special Christmas 2004 treat, the arbiters of our television fare decided to show the stay-at-home boerewors-stuffers the special-effects doomsday movie, The Day After Tomorrow? Some might have thought: At last! Something different from What a Wonderful Life or Scrooge! or The Grinch That Stole the Aviator.
Alas, on the very day of mass screening, an actual tsunami struck Asia, killing hundreds of thousands; and since a highlight of the designated film was a tsunami striking New York, killing hundreds of thousands, good taste forbore that it be shown that night. So it was pulled - and replaced with something more tasteful: Saving Ryan's Privates. For he who took this decision, a free slot on Idols 8 - next year's home rap bonanza.
