The first week of voting for the director to be given a month-long retrospective this week is behind us (vote now! poll in the sidebar), and the results are a little surprising. Miyazaki Hayao has been running away with it pretty much since voting opened, but Alan Pakula has managed to scrape by with a one-point lead. Meanwhile, Spike Lee has overcome a very shocking slow start to come within swiping distance of first, as Ang Lee has begun to stall out. And I'm still at a loss to explain how the crazy stylistic genius Pedro Almodóvar is staying trapped in a very firm and very distant fifth place.
But there are still weeks to go! So go out there and vote for your favorite - find a bunch of unused computers if you want, cheat the poll as much as possible; it's America, dammit.
11 July 2009
6 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
Spike Lee has such sharp contrasts in quality throughout his career. In fact, Spike Lee's body of work lends itself perfectly to a retrospective. It would be like an emotional rollercoaster, and I imagine that the different films would compliment each other very strangely.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I'll work up the nerve to go to the library and vote for Spike several times.
ReplyDeleteI think it'd also be good, personally, as I'd finally get the motivation to watch Girl 6, Summer of Sam and ("maybe") even She Hate Me to finish his feature catalogue.
On your advice, I think I just killed the poll, overflowing it with ironic votes for George Lucas.
ReplyDeleteRight after it died I thought of a more hilarious person to vote for. Damn it.
Ooh, never mind. It came back! It just shut itself down temporarily because it detected a flood, I guess.
ReplyDeleteNow, to decide whether or not I want to give Kenny Ortega 100 votes...
Damn, looks like I've got to hit every computer in Nottingham to get Miyazaki back in the lead.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I could stay alive through a retrospective of Alan J Pakula. To start off with the highs of 'Klute', 'The Parallax View' and 'All the President's Men', only to take the kamikaze-like nosedive in quality and end up with the last decade of his career and the rancid expanses of celluloid that comprise 'The Pelican Brief' and 'Consenting Adults'.
And does a man who made three films distinguished by an authorial signature only to devolve into a film-making-by-numbers studio hack count as an auteur?
Bring on Pakula! He gets my vote, despite the drop-off in quality during the twilight years of his career.
ReplyDelete