Cinematical

I'm just dying to complain a bit about the Golden Globes, so please indulge me for just a moment. Let's take a look at the winner for Best Dramatic Film, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (currently playing on 173 screens). Now, let's compare it with two other films directed by Iñárritu's pals, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (194 screens). Being totally honest, hardly anyone would say that Babel is the best film of the three. It's long and vague and reeks of self-importance, and even some of our most overenthusiastic critics shrugged their shoulders at it. But of the three, it's the most awards-like. It has a message about guns, and one character has a medical condition (she's deaf), which almost always results in awards. Plus, it carefully straddles the line between confusing and complex, so that even viewers who didn't quite get the point were reluctant to say so for fear of looking dumb. (Last year's Syriana pulled off the same stunt.)

On the other hand, Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men employ genre elements in their story construction, namely horror and sci-fi, and nothing turns off awards-givers faster. Not that either film was dumb, not by a long shot. But their messages were cleverly woven into the story's fabric, instead of waved around like a flag. Such subtleties are often lost on the folks that hand out awards. This leads one to conclude, though many find the idea ludicrous or depressing, that filmmakers deliberately make films with certain elements in place to win awards. But what's really depressing is not so much that they do this, but that it works.

Another gripe: as much as I admired it, I don't think it's right that Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (35 screens) won Best Foreign Language Film, and that Mel Gibson's Apocalypto was nominated. Yes, they technically qualify, since they were filmed in foreign languages, but it's a question of fairness: shouldn't this category be reserved for those films and filmmakers without big Hollywood backing? Or for filmmakers whose first language is not English? (Not to mention that the horrible Apocalypto shouldn't have been nominated at all, for anything.)

Still, the Globes did finally award Martin Scorsese a long-deserved award, Best Director for The Departed (117 screens). It's become a national joke that arguably our greatest filmmaker has never won the industry's highest award, so perhaps this will send a clue to the Oscars. And the composer Alexandre Desplat won for his superb score for The Painted Veil (202 screens). It's a score that stood out from the movie a bit, but it's also a score that I would actually like to listen to on its own. Desplat likewise composed my favorite score of 2004, for the criminally underrated Birth, as well as for Girl with the Pearl Earring (2003).

Anyway, moving on to a bit of good news this week: The Thai filmmaker Wisit Sasanatieng's 2000 film Tears of the Black Tiger (1 screen) was recently freed from Miramax purgatory. The film is something of a Western melodrama, with elements of Sergio Leone combined with Douglas Sirk; it has a relentlessly artificial surface with supercharged pastel coloring, operatic overacting and tearjerking moments so sappy that Hallmark would blush. It's beautifully filmed, but a little slow, given that all this emotional weight hinges on these two-dimensional characters.

As they did with so many other films, Miramax enthusiastically snapped up the rights, changed the film's ending, and then shelved it indefinitely. Now that Disney is in charge of Miramax's back catalog, some house cleaning has begun. Magnolia Pictures picked up Tears of the Black Tiger, restored the original ending, and released it in American theaters, seven years after the fact. (It's currently playing in New York and will be moving around to other cities through March.)

Slowly, other films smothered or butchered by Miramax have been making their way out into the real world. Terry Zwigoff recently completed his director's cut of Bad Santa, without the additions the studio requested of him (no, it's not the cut known as "Badder Santa"; this is a brand new one. Look for the green DVD box.) And I tracked down a Region 0 DVD of the original cut of Giuseppe Tornatore's 2000 film Malèna, which has quite a bit more nudity and subsequently makes Monica Bellucci's title character darker and less passive. I also found an American-friendly DVD of Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece Through the Olive Trees (1994), which Miramax briefly and tentatively released before shelving. And even Miramax itself got into the act when it released Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer on DVD in its superior original cut as well as the Miramax-edited and dubbed version.

Of course, the real extent of the damage is unclear. It's possible that disappointments like Billy Bob Thornton's All the Pretty Horses (2000), Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) and Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm (2005) went under their knife. We know that Jim Jarmusch demanded and received final cut on Dead Man (1996) and subsequently suffered a dismal, underfunded and unpublicized distribution. But one wonders if a great film like Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) opened here with her final approval, or how Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) might have been changed? Perhaps these new baby steps will result in more widespread reform, some new re-cuts and re-releases, and the cinema can breathe easy again.