Nicholas Thurkettle

Here is every song I can remember performing at karaoke nights.

Big & Rich – Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy
Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run
David Lee Roth – Just a Gigolo
Dion – Runaround Sue
Cheap Trick – Surrender
Don McLean – American Pie
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – American Girl
The Righteous Brothers – You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (duet)
Bobby Darin – Mac the Knife
Bobby Darin – Beyond the Sea
Bobby Darin – Artificial Flowers
Bobby Darin – A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
The Vogues – You’re the One
Nick Lowe – Cruel to be Kind
Frank Sinatra – Fly Me to the Moon
Frankie Valli – Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You
Jay and the Americans – Come a Little Bit Closer
Tom Jones – Delilah
Tom Jones – She’s a Lady
U2 – Where the Streets Have No Name
U2 – Beautiful Day
Johnny Rivers – Secret Agent Man
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy – You and Me and the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight (Baby)
4 Non-Blondes – What’s Up
The Who – You Better You Bet
Elvis Presley – Viva Las Vegas
Matchbox Twenty – Real World
Santana feat. Rob Thomas – Smooth
Dave Matthews Band – Crush
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – December 1963 (Oh, What a Night!)
B.J. Thomas – Hooked on a Feeling
A-Ha – Take on Me
Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch – Good Vibrations
Huey Lewis and the News – Stuck With You
Everclear – AM Radio
Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up
Barry White – Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Baby
Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire
The Cure – (Friday) I’m in Love
B-52’s – Love Shack (group)
Survivor – Eye of the Tiger
War – Why Can’t We Be Friends? (duet)
Wild Cherry – Play That Funky Music
The Beatles – Twist and Shout
Coldplay – Viva la Vida
Bobby “Boris” Pickett – Monster Mash
Little Shop of Horrors – Dentist
The Grass Roots – Midnight Confessions
Stray Cats – Rock This Town
Stray Cats – Stray Cat Strut
Neil Diamond – Sweet Caroline
Bob Dylan – Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35
R.E.M. – Man on the Moon
Aerosmith – I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing
My Chemical Romance – Welcome to the Black Parade (duet)

Of the type that I cannot tell you about. It’s a Hollywood development, it is one of the most exciting things to happen in my career in awhile, and I must remain mum, because:

1) It involves a name I am not officially permitted to drop in public.
2) It does not pass my test of real in Hollywood, which we remember involves a signature on a piece of paper and a check that clears.

It must sound awfully joyless of me that I am so resistant when these things happen for which a lot of would-be screenwriters would trade three toes. But I’m not denying it, just saving it and letting it accrue interest. If this development behaves the way it potentially can – as a hard-to-resist chunk of movie bait that movie-making elements will be drawn out to sniff at – then trust me; you will see joy. Snoopy dancing with his little black nose in the air-type joy.

Until then, keep the faith, brothers and sisters.

I have a few traditions around this time of year:

-I publish a 10 Best/10 Worst list from the movies I saw that were released in the previous year; thus closing the book on them so I can exclusively review releases from this year.
-I publish my predictions of who will win this year’s Academy Awards.
-I have seen all the Best Picture nominees.

None of those traditions hold this year. The reasons are many and interrelated. You may have noticed that I am months behind on the movie reviews I publish, and I still have about 10 I intend to write. Organizing my writing time and goals is an ongoing struggle, with the way my life is structured right now.

I could give myself the excuse that, with 10 Best Picture nominees for the first time in my life, it’s understandable that I missed one (An Education) in the run-up. I know I will catch it soon, but I always had a certain OCD pride in seeing all the nominees in advance, so I could feel extra opinionated.

But now I will see that habits can be broken and the world does not come to an end. And I’ll get to do the important thing, which is to enjoy the ceremony with friends, and appreciate the passing of another excellent year of cinema.

And by the way? This isn’t a full round of predictions, but all that talk of this being the year of Avatar versus The Hurt Locker? In the last two weeks, I have come around to thinking there is a different possibility for one of the two top prizes – Inglourious Basterds.

My reasons why?:

-Harvey Weinstein distributed Inglourious Basterds; and no one knows how to run a better single-minded, no-bullet-un-fired campaign of ratfuckery for Oscars than Harvey. The well-timed news articles complaining about Hurt Locker’s originality and accuracy in the final hours before the ballot deadline, the leak of that producer’s e-mail breaking Academy rules by bad-mouthing Avatar; someone has done a very good job provoking a hot war between those two pictures. With the new vote-counting procedure for Best Picture, the movie with the most first-place votes won’t necessarily win, if everyone outside its camp ranks it much lower. In religion, business, and politics, always ask: “Who benefits?”

-James Cameron got his big sweep with Titanic, and Oscar has a resistance to repeating history this exactly. Titanic may have been criticized as hokey, but it was providing romantic sweep and melodrama that gave a patina of classicism to its scope. Avatar doesn’t score as high for its all-ages dramatic appeal, and is probably a little too weirdly-spectacular for the older voters (and boy are there a LOT of them).

-The Hurt Locker’s box office was small. REALLY small. Look at the most recent Best Picture winners – Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby. The lowest grossing of them, No Country, had over five times Hurt Locker’s box office when it won. Locker finished its run in theatres many months ago, and while it ran an amazing awards campaign, it doesn’t change the fact that just not a lot of people have seen it. And being on DVD doesn’t provide the same cultural currency payoff. That said, because of the strength of its campaign, and the historic possibilities for director Kathryn Bigelow, I still think it is well-positioned to win Best Picture or Best Director, or possibly both. But I now think that, if it splits, the movie it splits with will be Inglourious.

-The Academy’s favorite prize to give is the make-up prize. Quentin Tarantino had to be satisfied with the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction, one of the greatest and most influential films of its generation. He’s a slow-burning savant who doesn’t put out movies as often as other filmmakers, and eccentric enough that he doesn’t always put out movies that can attract the approval of the respectables. Inglourious is roundly admired, financially successful, and shows him working at the peak of his craft. The Academy has a chance to give him one of its top prizes, and can’t be assured it will have another any time soon.

-Did I mention Harvey Weinstein?

The Princess and the Frog
Directors: Ron Clements & John Musker
Writers: Story by Ron Clements & John Musker and Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, Screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the story The Frog Princess by Ed Baker; music and lyrics by Randy Newman
Producer: Peter Del Vecho
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Keith David, Michael-Leon Wooley, Jennifer Cody, Jim Cummings, Peter Bartlett, Jenifer Lewis, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard, John Goodman

I recognize what they’re doing – the broad humor and the good heart, the way colorful ink is made to imitate life, the fairy tale story that proudly wins its happy ending. It is familiar but shocking, because it makes you realize just how long it has been since you saw it. It’s Disney Animation.

This is not to say that the Walt Disney Transglobal Entertainment Conglompire has failed to put out cartoons in recent years. But it felt so distressingly like they hated their own legacy and character, like they had no confidence that children still worked the way they did even 15 years ago when The Lion King was enrapturing them. When the budgets and staffs were slashed, when spreadsheet-inspired sequels to classics were outsourced to quickie TV animators, and finally, when they announced that they were through with 2D hand-drawn animation, and would be switching entirely to digital like their competitors at Pixar and Dreamworks, I wondered why all these suited bigwigs could have such poor taste as to grin at a funeral.

But with Pixar heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull brought in to take the reins of the animation studio that inspired them and so many other artists in its heydays, we have the privilege of watching this one corner of Disney re-discover, and re-embrace, its true nature. The Princess and the Frog might not rank in the masterpiece class of Disney’s long roll call of animated features – the format they essentially invented with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – but it brings with it a palpable breath of joy. You get to see them remembering what they do, and that it feels good.
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Originally published 11/17/04

Ray
Director: Taylor Hackford
Writers: Screen story by Taylor Hackford and James L. White, screenplay by James L. White
Producers: Taylor Hackford, Stuart Benjamin, Howard Baldwin, Karen Elise Baldwin
Stars: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Sharon Warren, Clifton Powell, Bokeem Woodbine, Harry J. Lennix, Aunjanue Ellis, Curtis Armstrong, Richard Schiff, Larenz Tate

A movie and a life always make strange bedfellows; my gut call would be that there’s a lower ratio of excellent biopics than nearly any other genre in filmmaking. Sure, you have the attraction of a famous name, and the opportunity for award-friendly acting. But it’s hard finding defining emotional and dramatic shape in messy real lives. It’s even harder when the life in question is one so many people are invested in that there’s immense pressure to fit in all those highlights.

Ask yourself what a challenge it would be making one mix album to summarize Ray Charles, whose genius crossed so many genres and embraced so many stories and moods. The cumbersome weight of expectations throws Ray seriously off-balance. You are left learning a great deal about the life of the artist – in fact, most of what a good timeline would tell you. But after trying to jam in so much data, we leave strangely unenthralled despite the extraordinary efforts of Jamie Foxx in the title role.
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Originally published 11/2/04

Sideways
Director: Alexander Payne
Writers: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickett
Producer: Michael London
Stars: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh

Screenwriting gurus use a term called “petting the dog”, which is meant to remind writers to give their characters some action that humanizes them, so we in the audience will like them.

Sideways shows us a different application of this principle, we might call it “chugging the spit bucket.” Which means there’s got to be a lot to this warm, rambling charmer of a movie for us to like these characters. After all, how hard is it to like a guy who pets a dog?
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