Philip Burke

Virtually everybody agrees that 2007 was a terrific year for movies. No matter. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will still hand over its statuettes to hearty feel-good blather and life-affirming gimps, while too many worthy films get doughnuted (or worse, a sound-mixing nod). As a preemptive strike to this wrongheadedness, we offer our ninth annual Alternative Oscars, celebrating last year's most relevant, astonishing, and overlooked achievements. Or whatever struck us as funny.

Best Failed Experiment: Grindhouse

Nobody, it seems, wanted to sit through two fake exploitation movies in a row, which is a shame, because they're both fantastic. Robert Rodriguez's zombie epic Planet Terror amounts to the best John Carpenter flick since 1982's The Thing, while Quentin Tarantino's neatly bifurcated Death Proof, with Kurt Russell as a homicidal stuntman, mows down audience identification like nothing since Hitchcock's Psycho. Both films are available separately on video (in needlessly extended versions), but they work much better in tandem -- Death Proof, in particular, needs to be the grimy second half of a double bill for full effect. And the phony trailers created by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Eli Roth (Hostel) are more hilarious than anything on Funny or Die.

Best Proof That Cult Movies Are an Accident: Southland Tales



After seeing his first film, Donnie Darko, turn into a sensation on the midnight circuit following a stillborn initial release, Richard Kelly must have decided to skip the respectable phase and go straight for unhinged infamy. The result: a crass, overblown, painfully sophomoric exercise in apocalyptic sci-fi "comedy," populated largely by former SNL cast members (plus the Rock) mugging and twitching up a storm. Chockablock with empty, self-conscious literary and topical references, it unfolds as if Jeff Goldblum had attempted to transport a Pynchon novel across his lab but failed to notice that a battered VHS copy of Hudson Hawk had somehow gotten inside the telepod.

Best Gratuitous Nudity: Marisa Tomei, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead



Actresses tend to be more willing to get naked onscreen when they're young, unknown, and hungry. Lately, though, there's been an influx of long-established celebs who suddenly become allergic to clothes as they hit middle age and the ingenue roles start drying up: Meg Ryan (In the Cut), Jennifer Aniston (as close as she's ever come in The Break-Up), and now Tomei, who spends much of Sidney Lumet's heist-gone-wrong picture parading around topless for no particular reason. Not only does she look delectable at 43, but her casual exposure gives this contrived and glibly cynical film a disarming frankness that it desperately needs.

Best Film with a Pseudo-Philosophical Bullshit Ending: No Country for Old Men



Great movie, no question -- but while the deliberately unresolved and abruptly thoughtful denouement is bold and utterly faithful to Cormac McCarthy's novel, it simply doesn't work onscreen. That's not because we're all pathetic little children who need an explosive action climax and can't stomach ambiguity. It's because McCarthy interweaves Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's weary ruminations about the changing American landscape throughout the book, whereas the Coen brothers, who are clearly more interested in the niceties of retrieving a briefcase full of drug money from an adjoining hotel room's air duct than they are in grumpy interior monologues, have fashioned a brutally streamlined thriller that sets pulses racing for nearly two hours before finally making a Hail Mary bid for profundity: "P.S. Everything sucks now."

Best Documentary: My Kid Could Paint That



Any halfway sentient American is well aware that we've completely bungled Iraq and that our health-care system is a global embarrassment, so did we really need Charles Ferguson and Michael Moore to lay out those no-duh theses in excruciating detail? Meanwhile, the year's finest documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, about a four-year-old girl whose abstract art became a minor sensation, raises genuinely tough questions about the exploitation of children and the distinction between creativity and commodity. It was roundly ignored.

Most Missed Hollywood Practice: Dubbing movie stars in musicals

Back in the good old days, when studios were churning out musicals practically every other week, they'd simply hire whichever actor was best for the speaking part (and the box office) and then get somebody else -- usually Marni Nixon -- to do the singing, uncredited. Nowadays, however, no star wants to look like Milli Vanilli, and so we get Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter making Tim Burton's otherwise exceptional adaptation of Sweeney Todd play like community theater every time the orchestra kicks in. And it's not as if lip-synching can't be effective, either: Look at George Clooney belting out "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (actual voice: Dan Tyminski) and tell me he doesn't convince.

Best Insane Opening Sequence: Tie -- Michael Clayton and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters



It takes serious cojones to kick off a complex legal thriller with a lengthy monologue of paranoid gibberish spoken by a character (Tom Wilkinson's bipolar whistle-blower) who has yet to be introduced. As audacious as that move was, though, it was trumped by the Aqua Teen crew. Even if the TV show does nothing for you, rent the movie for its hilarious parody of "turn off your cell phone" theater ads, performed as a death-metal song by a band of pissed-off animated condiments. ("If I see you videotaping this movie, Satan will rain down your throat with hot acid and dissolve your testicles and turn your guts into snakes!")

Best Action Sequence in Which Almost Nothing Actually Happens: The Bourne Ultimatum



The third and best Bourne adventure includes a close-quarters fistfight and a car deliberately driven backward off the roof of a high building. But it's the high-tech CIA stakeout of London's Waterloo Station -- a sequence that mostly consists of Matt Damon's hyperalert Jason Bourne guiding a bewildered Guardian journalist (Paddy Considine), via cell phone, through a maze of covert-ops assassins and hidden surveillance cameras -- that truly jangles the nerves. Emphasizing the threat of danger from every direction and the need for not just eternal but downright obsessive vigilance, it's a sign of the way that even Hollywood blockbusters are gradually shifting to reflect America's increasingly paranoid landscape.

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