Rolling Stone named There Will Be Blood as its number-one movie of the first decade of the millennium, which I think disqualifies the rest of the list (which, in addition, ends with the mind-numbingly endless Lord of the Rings trilogy, or, as I like to refer to it, “That Fucking Day I’ll Never Get Back”). It’s filled with the usual suspects, No Country for Old Men and A History of Violence and Mulholland Drive; lots of, you know, arty sort of movies people always mistake the boringness of for things like subtlety and craft.

Gag me with a spork.

This past decade was pretty awesome for movies, though you wouldn’t know it from most top ten lists. There was a lot of stuff blowing up in ways we’d never seen shit blown up before. There was a whole lot of being really, really ridiculously good looking (spoiler spot!). We didn’t just believe a man could fly; we believed a man could build a suit that would enable him to fly.

Which was totally rad.

So I started to think about a top-ten list. I started to make up a top-ten list, in fact. And then it got long, when I realized how many absolutely awesome movies had been made in the last decade, and how many were going to go ignored. So I’m going with two top-ten movies of the past decade list: the absolute top ten, and then the top ten movies that didn’t make the top-ten list itself. I figured I’d start with the latter, all of which you can call number eleven.

In no particular order:

–Adaptation–

Nicolas Cage plays both screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s fictional twin brother Donald in this utterly surreal send-up of adapting a book (The Orchid Thief) into a movie, the entertainment industry, and meta-fictional takes on screenwriting and story structure. And if that sentence didn’t just blow your mind, the movie, which is hysterical in places and just totally odd in others but mostly (mostly!) works, totally will. If you’re into that sort of thing, which is why it’s number elven.

–Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet start to court each other after meeting just a little while after having their memories of breaking up with each other erased from their minds. Another Charlie Kaufman flick (this one directed stunningly by Michel Gondry), and another that warps and wraps around itself. Totally brilliant, and one of the best and most poignant portrayals of a fucked-up relationship in cinematic memory. Woody Allen spent his entire career trying to be this smart (and never actually managed it. What? Yeah, I’ll say it).

–Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix–

Let’s be honest, here: the first two were perfectly adequate, but Columbus never quite fully captured the actual spirit of the books (which is a shame, because the series is bookended by two spectacular installments). Cuaron’s Azkaban was the first that went balls-out, but it might have gone quite too hard, and it also left out a good deal of book material that really might have brought it together. Goblet is mostly famous for being an early apperance of Edward Cullen, and it’s quite good, with some real emotion there, but the Tri-Wizard tournament bogs it down, for the most part.

But finally, finally we have Phoenix. Which starts with Dementors draining Dudley and just continues to get better. Yates, who’d previous only done television work, for the most part, brought to it not just a new spirit, which allowed a better, more mundane sense of the wizarding world, but also a new vision; even the transitions, with the shouting newspapers, are among the best in the entire series. Add to that that the young actors are maturing and getting better at their craft (Radcliffe, in particular, continues to improve as an actor. Which is rather a relief; one problem with Goblet was that he wasn’t quite up to the role, yet. That changed in Phoenix). Excellent performances, excellent execution, excellent all around: the scene of the young wizards expectoing their patronae is among the greatest I’ve seen, perfectly capturing both the glee and the wonder inherent in such a moment. Brilliant.

–The Bourne Identity

Like here, in The Bourne Identity. Was there a better start to a spectacular franchise all decade (there were several, in fact, but they make the top ten). Damon delivers a paradox of a restrained action performance; his Bourne can kill anything that moves and knows it, and his entire performance, beginning to end, is a study in concision, precision, and kinetic energy. Flat-out phenomenal.

–The Incredibles–

Pixar. All that needs to be said, really; as a brand, they are quite simply unstoppable, and may well be the single name that most guarantees a quality movie. Even their missteps (I’m looking at you, Wall-E. I don’t care what everyone else said) are cinematic gold. But The Incredibles was SuperPixar; “Pixar does superheroes” is the sort of conceptual, developmental pitch you know made some studio head somewhere ruin his pants. Or hers. The entire movie is worth it for the “100-yard Dash” sequence alone, but more than anything, it is about being extraordinary in a mediocre world. About not holding back. And about being incredible. Awesome.

–Thank You For Smoking–

I may be biased here; I use Thank You for Smoking to teach my composition courses when I can. It’s smart and funny and deliriously, spectacularly well written. It’s a great movie on crack, and Aaron Eckhardt delivers quite possibly the best movie of his career (if you don’t count The Core ftw! [That's totally a joke]). Satire hasn’t been this good in a while.

–Good Night, and Good Luck.–

Speaking of smoking (there are so many cigarettes in this movie it’s like a two-hour commercial for Pall Mall. Well. Kent, anyway). In 2006, George Clooney got the wrong Oscar when he won for Supporting Actor in the Syriana in a year when the MPAAS knew that, for some ungodly reason, Brokeback Mountain and Crash were getting all the critical attention. Shame, too, because Good Night, and Good Luck. is far superior to either (which admittedly isn’t saying much, but most of all is a terrifically crafted movie about integrity, journalism, and the Constitution disguised as an Edward R. Murrow biopic. Perhaps the MPAAS knew it was too overtly political, as well as too timely and appropriate, and so it busied itself patting its own collective back for “racial awareness” everyone says Crash is about (it’s not. It’s just a bad movie disguised as a message). I don’t know, but what I do know is that Good Night, and Good Luck. is flat out terrific, subtle and superbly acted and insanely well written.

–Batman Begins–

Finally, someone (Christopher Nolan and David Goyer) understood the Batman story well enough to actually tell the damned thing. This wasn’t a comic-book movie; it was a movie based on a famous hero whose most effective stories, up until then, had been told in the pages of comic books, and there’s a huge difference there. Batman is rooted in social injustice, guilt, and the sort of deep-seeded misery that used to carry the great film noirs, but Batman Begins told that story, about those things, and made it fun and exciting, rooting it in a character we cared about, sympathized with, and, most importantly, liked. West was too corny, Keaton too detached, Kilmer too odd, Clooney too playboy; in Christian Bale, the story found a hero we could hope to be. Bale’s performance is a master-class in acting, too, with notes of both humor and deep anger; Bale’s Wayne is a guy you want to have drinks with (because you know he’ll pay, or maybe even buy you the bar) but you know never to fuck with (as we see proven in the terrifically overrated The Dark Knight). When you make a movie in which Michael Caine and Liam Neeson are not the actors who deliver the best performances in it, you know you’ve got gold, and here you do. It’s seems paradoxical to call a movie with so much blowing up (not to mention a man in a bat suit) subtle, but Nolan is a master of direction; it’s rather amazing that, as strong as Nolan’s other movies were (Memento and The Prestige were both excellent), this here is the one that demonstrated him as a great director. That he wasn’t at least nominated for this movie demonstrates just how out of touch with quality the MPAAS actually is.

–Snatch or Sherlock Holmes–

or

Because if Sherlock Holmes doesn’t demonstrate itself as one terrific flick, Snatch certainly was, from Statham’s smirking Turkish right on down to Brad Pitt (wtf? ftw!) performance as a completely incomprehensible gypsy (wtf again!) who specializes in bare-knuckle boxing, and if your head didn’t spin at that idea, well, this movie will spin it for you. Benico Del Toro plays a four-fingered courier with a gambling problem who loses a diamond that serves as the Macguffin pretty much every character in the movie is after whether they realize it or not (and the genius is that only a couple of them do). Utterly quotable–

“Protection from what? Ze Germans?”

and

“It was at a funny angle.”
“It was behind you!”–

this flick is hyperkinetic as a kid with A.D.D. on a sugar high.

“All. Bets. Are. Off.”

Unless, of course, Sherlock Holmes is better. And I kind of hope it is. Because if this decade was nothing else whatsoever, it was Robert Downey, Jr.’s, comeback as probably the best actor of this generation. Marlon who? Laurence British whosajammer?

–Zodiac–

As is evidenced here; that Zodiac (not to mention: Fincher!) was ignored by the Oscars demonstrates . . . oh, you get the picture about the Oscars. Here’s a movie mainly starring Jake Gyllenhaal who makes you completely forget Donnie Darko and Brokeback Mountain as he investigates the San Francisco serial murder known as the Zodiac killer. Here’s the thing, though: the Zodiac case was never, ever solved. We have no idea whodunit. And neither does Jake. Nor Mark Ruffalo, who’s also in it, nor even Robert Downey, Jr. (who probably should know simply on account of how awesome he obviously is). I think that’s why this movie works so well, structure-wise; it’s a bit messy, for lack of a better word, and it seems to lack real plot points, or the beats that turn a story/screenplay/movie so it can be easily divided into acts. Not so much here, but I think it works because the case is messy; nobody knows who killed all those people, and the killer, so far as anyone actually knows, could, in fact, actually be out there somewhere. Which makes this extraordinarily creepy, and is Fincher’s version of The Departed; finally he stopped trying to direct a damn vision and managed to put a great story on film without a bunch of special effects and crazy imagery (I mean, I liked Fight Club as much as the next guy, don’t get me wrong, but subtle it was not).

***

So those are my number eleven. I’ve got the top-ten list filled out for the most part (in fact, I had to bump The Departed completely off the list to get room for Harry Potter, which got bumped off the top ten).

Post that bit after I format it. Any guesses? I think you already know two of them.

Over the course of (several) fine Belgian beers (Rochefort 10 ftw!), we started talking about Heath Ledger and The Dark Knight. Now, what you have to know, straight off, is that while we’re good buddies, he and I rarely agree on anything related to either music or movies. We both like music in general and good music in particular, but we have very different definitions as to what that exactly means.

So, Heath Ledger. The Dark Knight.

I didn’t love the movie. I’ve read many people claim that the reason it’s so great is because Christopher Nolan, moreso than directing a good superhero movie, managed to make a good movie, overall, but I’m not sure. See, I think that what really happened is that Nolan managed to make a good crime movie out of superhero material, because I can’t agree it was overall a good movie; it’s at least twenty minutes to half an hour too long, the final twenty minutes to half an hour of which seem composed of a philosophical treatise on the nature of good and evil telegraphed through dialog to the audience because Nolan suddenly got scared his audience hadn’t picked up what he was saying. Still, I will admit I originally thought it was badly structured, but I’ve since realized it’s not, that the plot turns when it’s supposed to for the most part (given 3-act structure and 140 minutes, the first plot point should come about 35 minutes in, with another midpoint beat and then a second plot point, each coming 35 minutes after the previous).

Also: when did Two-Face debut? In the comics, I mean. He’s been around at least long enough that Tommy Lee Jones played him nearly a decade ago, but yet he lasts, like, fifteen minutes in this flick? Wtf? I suppose it’s possible Nolan was lolzing us and will bring Two-Face back for The Dark Knight Returns or The Dark Knight Again or The Dark Knight Lightens Up a Bit, Because, Seriously, Why So Serious?, but either way, I think Nolan blows his villain load by using two who merely serve as thematic foils to Batman/Bruce Wayne, rather than any story use.

Because I think that’s the problem I have with the Joker (and with Ledger’s portrayal of him). While he claims to both want chaos and have no plan (and I realize that his claim of the latter probably serves the former), I think that the two villains clash in a way that the Scarecrow and Liam Neeson didn’t in Batman Begins. The first movie was about Batman and how he foiled the plans of Neeson, whose subsidiary was the Scarecrow; this movie is not just about Batman anymore. It’s about Gotham City and heroes and good and evil (as Nolan seems to want so dearly for us to see). It’s almost like Nolan had the exact opposite problem as the brothers Wachowski: while the second two Matrix movies probably should have been combined into a single flick, Nolan probably should have taken his time with this story and let the second installment become two.

(which, too, would have solved the problem Warner Bros. now faces, because, sorry to be callous about it, but who’s going to play the Joker now?)

Can the Joker desire chaos but have no plan? I’m not sure it works both ways, but given a little more fleshing out, Nolan might have proven it can and does. As it stands, though, the problem with the Joker is that he’s merely the foil or the anti-self or the whatever-opposite of Batman. He’s reactionary, really, and I’m trying to come up with great characters who have been solely reactionary but not really succeeding. He wants chaos, but only seems to want chaos because other people have plans he doesn’t like.

(of course, the major argument there is there’s no such thing as order, anyway, given that the natural tendency of all things is toward disorder/entropy. Had the Joker taken any science courses, he might realize that life exists despite chaos, in which case he might file for unemployment by reason of redundance)

Given all that, Ledger arguably did the best job he could with a somewhat otherwise limited role; I’m not sure he’s the only reason The Dark Knight wasn’t a typical superhero movie, but he might have been. That and his premature death are, I think, a large part of the reason his performance has gotten the acclaim it has. Which might seem cynical or even callous, I fear, but the thing is, I keep thinking of his performance in Brokeback Mountain. Now, I didn’t like Brokeback; in fact, I shut it off after fifteen or twenty minutes, because I was bored out of my skull. And I think that The Dark Knight, despite its flaws, is a movie far superior to Brokeback if only because the latter commits the cardinal sin of movies, which is that it’s not at all entertaining, but still, I watch Ledger as Joker and I just don’t think his performance there is nearly as good as he was in Brokeback Mountain. In Brokeback, he wanted something (namely: Gyllenhaal) but yet restrained himself, and in that restraint is all the subtlety and craft that I thought the Joker lacked. The Joker seemed wall-to-wall Id. Creepy thrift-store drugged-out rockstar more likely to front an emo band, sure, and entertaining to at least the degree you expect him to be onstage lamenting about how nothing actually has meaning, but just being crazy-villain guy seems to require little effort. I mean, in some ways, it strikes me that his role was of the just-add-alcohol variety; skip all the inhibitions and the performance executes itself.

Do I think he’ll win (not that you asked)? I don’t know if it’s important, at this point, if only because I think there’s too great a disconnect between good movies and critically acclaimed, award-winning movies. And why do I think that?

Because the one thing my buddy and I could agree on, over those fine Belgian beers, was that Ironman might well have been the best movie all year, and Robert Downey, Jr. has always knocked every performance he’s ever given straight out of the park. I mean, the fact that he doesn’t have an Oscar yet is nearly as big a travesty as that Zodiac went completely ignored last year, and if he got one this year for being “the dude playin’ the dude disguised as another dude,” I wouldn’t argue. I’d say he could then dedicate it to Ledger, but didn’t Daniel Day-Lewis already do that last year?

All that said, I might also just be bitter. I still wish Nolan had cast Christian Bale as the Joker, too, because I think that would have been awesome.

(crossposted to Mightygodking.com)

Lott makes a few good points, opening with:

Here is a selection of groups that have been consistently under-represented among the winners of the UK’s two major book prizes, the Booker and the Costa/Whitbread: the white working class (0); West Indians (1); black Africans (0); disabled writers (0).

No one has funded a prize for these groups. However the Orange Prize was set up in 1996 to give women their own prize – because of perceived under-representation in the Booker. Despite 12 years of consciousness-raising by the Orange, the Booker still doesn’t give women their just mathematical due – a 3:10 ratio remains. But given that women have won five out of the last six Whitbread/Costas, does the level of injustice remain enough to justify the Orange?

Although the idea of applying ‘mathematical dues’ and ‘ratios’ to anything concerning writing hurts my head.

It’s a post both The Girl Detective and We are in debt took umbrage with and argued with, to various degrees of efficacy. My students would be quick to point out that calling anyone “Neanderthals” outside of an anthropoligical/taxonomical context is immediately ad hominem (a phrase meaning “against the man,” which may be particularly appropriate in this context).

Which also probably describes my own thoughts on this, as well as the probable argument that I am not entitled to them. I should not think about such issues because, as an average white male, I have no right. That Debt blog notes that “there’s no such thing as a reverse -ism,” but I’d disagree with that, especially in consideration of a phrase later used: “Leave it to a man.” Right. Because all we white males believe precisely the same thing and act precisely the same way, and we’ve all subjugated and oppressed every woman we’ve ever met because to do otherwise threatens our alpha-supremacy in the world.

The author later notes “The author of this silly piece seems to think that women are a “dominant” group, like “whites” (wrong)” but I wonder if that’s truly the case. First, a quibble: technically, women are more numerous, as a gender, than men–isn’t the population split still, like, 52% to 55% (versus, wait, I can do this–48% and 45%, respectively) in favor of women? I get that the trouble spot is in the definition of “dominant,” and that to be more populous does not necessarily equate to dominance, but still it isn’t technically wrong to state that women are a dominant group, for most definitions of the term. Not to mention that simply calling an argument ‘silly,’ or ‘wrong-headed’ or whatever doesn’t actually forward any real argument, and, indeed, if nothing else, brings the debate down.

The argument seems to be whether the Orange prize is necessary, but I have to admit I have trouble believing any literary prize is actually necessary. I don’t really get them, any more than I really get the whole Oscars thing; what, exactly, is a best picture, and on what level was No Country for Old Men better than Zodiac (I can think of many ways it was worse, but few better)? Given a real ballot with nominees (of any medium or genre) of any actual merit, terms like “better” actually cease to exist, I think. And does it really denote anything? Looking over Wikipedia’s list of nominees and winners, the only book on it I’ve ever read is Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which I thought was overrated. I’ve picked up books by the usual suspects (Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, etc.), but have felt the same way toward theirs; nothing to inspire me to read beyond the first ten pages.

Maybe bad writers need awards to get recognition in a marketplace of books by people who know how to tell stories? Who’s Booker, and why does their list matter so much? There was a recent blogbate over Zadie’s Smith’s decision, as judge and jury for the Willesden (sp?) Herald’s award, to not award anything because it wasn’t good enough; who, besides WH, decided Zadie Smith is some arbiter of quality? More important, one of the members of the Orange jury is Lily Allen. Of MySpace fame.

Has Lily Allen ever even read a book? Her comments on Radiohead’s ‘devaluation of art’ seem to demonstrate she is perfectly content to argue based on superficial preconception with neither basis nor experience to bear them up.

One of Girl Detective’s arguments is:

I’d love to see a society in which women’s needs are catered to in the marketplace – where, say, every billboard has a picture of a naked man on it – and products for men just don’t exist. I wouldn’t want to live there – I’d just like to poke around a bit.

Does this mean that products for women, in the current marketplace, “just don’t exist,” whereas men’s every need is catered to? Also, I wonder where GD lives; I live in Hollywood, and there are plenty of naked men on billboards. Plenty of giant images of sharply chiseled jaws like none of us really have, washboard abs like none of us will ever really manage to get… etc. What female needs aren’t catered to, exactly?

No, really, I’d love to know, because as I’ve learned in my marketing class, built-in need-based target markets are a fucking gold mine, and I’d love to not be a broke-ass grad student anymore.

Speaking of mines, I’m sure this is probably one, and I expect debate/discussion (though not all together much, because who really reads this blog yet?), but if we can refrain from calling me a whiny Neanderthal, that’d be awesome.

Because, I mean, come on, it’s kind of the obvious strategy, isn’t it?

I just watched the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. It was ostensibly a Western based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones, about a man who happens across a drug-running deal gone awry and finds a satchel full of money. How much, you ask? Not sure, but it was a small satchel full of hundreds, so probably a million, tops. Not much more, certainly.

I’m very proud of myself for having written the above paragraph without saying anything actually negative about the film. My mother always said if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything, but I managed to say something without its being not-so-nice.

Though I could. Oh, boy how I could.

I’ve not seen A Simple Plan, with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton, but I’d wager the movies (and their books) had similar themes; you happen across money procured via ill-gotten ways, and you try to keep it, and Bad Stuff Happens. ™

Javier Bardem seems to have gotten a lot of press and respect for a bad haircut, but John Cusack played a much better, more layered hitman in Grosse Point Blank. I realize the movies are pretty much on opposite ends, but the only thing Bardem’s character lacked was a mustache he could twirl as the sociopathic villain sans sense of humor. Monomaniacal in his single-minded pursuit of the money. Hired by someone? I never caught that. He just shoots a lot of people, sometimes with a little attachment dohickey on the end of an oxygen tank. Which Tommy Lee Jones mentions completely non sequitur in a completely unrelated scene, because, as you know, Bob, this is how cattle ranches work.

Tommy Lee Jones was certainly the best part of the movie. There really weren’t any characters to care about. Josh Brolin, while certainly not unlikable, wasn’t all together sympathetic, either, and he wanted only one thing clearly; to survive with money. As motivations go, certainly, it’s what we all hope, but he does some fairly stupid things several times along the way (like chucking the briefcase over a border fence it’s not clear why he’s crossing, anyway).

I think what most disappoints me is the movies ignored. I mentioned both Zodiac and Gone Baby Gone in a post the the other day; as crime movies go (and No Country was, pretty much, a crime movie set in the Southwest), both were far superior in their own ways. Casey Affleck’s troubled detective fought hard to save the life of a young girl despite that her mother was not the most responsible person in the world; a definite motivational dilemma that sought but never found an easy answer. Even the den–denou–climax/resolution was layered and nuanced.

Zodiac was even better, and was the sort of movie Fincher should have been recognized for. Fincher is an easily recognized director, stylistically; watch Fight Club and Panic Room and there are telltale signs it was the same guy. In a good way. Even his lesser appreciated fare (Sean Penn: better in The Game than in anything since he was Spicoli? Discuss) has his fingerprints all over it.

Until Zodiac. He was completely invisible, like Scorsese was finally invisible in The Departed. Fincher finally gave his utmost attention to simply telling the story well, without tricks or gimmicks, and man did it ever work. Even Gyllenhaal gave the sort of performance that makes you forget your watching Gyllenhaal.

Zodiac was not my favorite movie, but it was certainly one of the most perfectly conceived and executed films I’ve ever had the distinct pleasure of watching.

And it should whooped No Country all over the place last night.

Which ultimately means that the only thing the Academy actually got right last night was the award it gave Once.

I won’t be watching them because I have no real desire to see any of the nominations. I think Juno is really only this year’s version of Little Miss Sunshine, and the only reason I saw that one was because I went with my best buddy. I enjoyed the latter, certainly, and it was certainly well crafted, well written, and well structured, and it certainly had a lot of heart

–but.

(you knew there would be a ‘but’, of course). I don’t know; it was technically good, and enjoyable, but mostly– well, let’s just come right out and let me admit I like blowing shit up. My favorite movie is Shakespeare in Love, but my top ten is filled with the likes of V for Vendetta, Casino Royale, and Mission: Impossible III (also: The Sixth Sense). I’ve never been a huge fan of smaller indie movies (that last I mentioned because it comes about as close as I get). Grosse Point Blank is, I think, the closest I come to indie, and while it doesn’t blow anything up, there are silencers around.

So the full disclosure is that I’m not sure I’ve seen anything nominated, but when has lack of knowledge ever prevented anyone from writing about something, especially on the Internet? Tha Interwebs were invented for unfounded opinions from people who don’t know what they’re talking about, weren’t they?

In keeping with blowing shit up, how about some bullets?

-I’m tired of hearing about Diablo Cody, although I’ve begun to consider renaming myself The Jesus Casidy. With one ‘s’, because it’s cooler.

-The Coen brothers are interesting enough that I want to see No Country despite everything good I’ve read about it, but that’s because I like they’re stuff. I’ve always liked their stuff (though I think it’s a little too quirky just for the sake of being so). Intolerable Cruelty might be George Clooney’s best movie, and this from a guy who loves the entire Ocean’sfranchise (dear Mr. Soderbergh: you’re going backward. What we want is Ocean’s Five, with Damon, Pitt, Clooney, Cheadle, and Izzard, pulling off a low-tech heist of a low-tech casino, shot like Full Frontal. Get right on it, please).

-I’m more impressed that Daniel Day Lewis has cobbled shoes by any of his performances I’ve ever seen. Not that they were bad, mind, but he seems a poster child for the whole “Life’s too serious to be taken seriously,” as are work and craft. Dear Mr. Day Lewis: you’re an actor. Lighten up. Unless you want to do more cobbling of shoes, in which case, I wear an 8. Thank you.

***

I think one of the reasons I’m so disappointed is that two movies I loved were completely ignored. Zodiac is very nearly as close to perfect a movie as I’ve ever seen; it’s a lot like The Shawshank Redemption in that it manages to tell precisely the story it set out to in precisely the way it needed to, without gimmick or spectacle. A perfect example of a director really letting the story do the work. It’s the sort of movie someone who knows about how movies are made watches and thinks, wow, that’s well done, because the craft of it is just about invisible. It’s so subtle.

Also: Gone Baby Gone was robbed in just about every category. Best picture, best director, best actor, best supporting actor, best adapted screenplay . . . in a truly awesome world, Affleck would have won his second, third, and fourth Oscars for this movie, though it would have been a damned close race with Fincher.

But congratulations, Oscar, for nominating Casey. Just a shame you got the wrong movie.