DIRECTOR
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PRODUCTIO
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Welcome
The phrase “American Heartland” conjures up the image of acres upon acres of
plains, wild and tamed, domed by a cathedral sky. It's a heroic but static vision; people
in it tend to be no more than figures in a landscape, picturesque but posed and silenced.
Hollywood, too, has been something of a flatland recently. Movies have too often
smothered emotions rather than unearthing them. The people in its movies, like those
figures in the landscape, look like mannequins and, sadly, sound like them, too.
Luckily, this year we can celebrate movies that aren't taken in by the easy temptation
to slouch through stereotypes. Rather, they have poked into crevices, mounted hills,
knocked on doors, meandered through neighborhoods, and peered under the comfortable façades of what we reassuringly – or maybe fearfully? – call “normal.”
Brokeback Mountain broke the back of one of the most generalized and marketed
American types, the rugged, but emotionally non-committal cowboy. The landscape of
the northern plains shrugs off its immutability and transforms into the pure physical
embodiment of tragic loneliness. Jack and Ennis, two men in love, have to invent a
language to express themselves, words that both pierce and expend themselves in
fugitive echoes.
Capote also featured a gay character, but sexuality was less at issue than the
contrasting variety of American experience. A patron saint of the haute literati voluntarily engages the submerged, quotidian evil of middle-class respectability, only to
discover the chasms of his own divided self.
Filmmakers also took magnifying glasses in hand to ponder addiction in a small
town in upstate New York (Down to the Bone) and the imponderable, but viciously
violent movement of fate in an Indiana hamlet (A History of Violence).
Can you fit this burgeoning cinematic self-examination into some larger national or
international pattern? Perhaps given the U.S.'s position in the world, we are given to
questioning our secret motives and camouflaged appetites. But maybe that's too easy,
splicing together journalism with art only to produce a fragile hybrid.
After all, there's a current – a narrow one, perhaps, but also strong – in American
filmmaking that puts the ambiguities of national life in direct focus. John Ford comes
immediately to mind as an iconic filmmaker whose supposed validations of American
heroism were actually dramatizations of fractures and hypocrisies. Our career achievement award-winner, Richard Widmark, teamed with James Stewart in Two Rode
Together to wrestle dramatically over the nature of duty and responsibility in a racially
segregated world. A starker contrast erupted between Widmark's character and one
played by his friend – and his stand-in for tonight – Karl Malden in Ford's Cheyenne
Autumn, an unjustly neglected feature whose very title encompasses loss, war, and
hoped-for reconciliation.
As we learned from Ford, as we learn from tonight's filmmakers, this country's
images only seem stilled in photographic aspic. With a twist of a lens or a nudge from a
pan, these natural and human vistas awaken with victory and loss, the mire of humanity.
– Henry Sheehan
President, LAFCA
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
Henry Sheehan, president
Lael Loewenstein, vice-president
Leonard Klady, secretary
Alonso Duralde, treasurer
Robert Abele
David Ansen
Jorge Camara
Charles Champlin
David Ehrenstein
Harold Fairbanks
Stephen Farber
F.X. Feeney
Juan Rodriguez Flores
Scott Foundas
Todd Gilchrist
Mike Goodridge
James Greenberg
Ray Greene
Ernest Hardy
Kirk Honeycutt
Andy Klein
Robert Koehler
Emanuel Levy
Sheri Linden
Wade Major
Leonard Maltin
Willard Manus
Todd McCarthy
Myron Meisel
Joe Morgenstern
Jean Oppenheimer
H.J. Park
John Powers
Claudia Puig
Peter Rainer
Michael Rechtshaffen
Harriet Robbins
Robert Rosen
Dean Sander
Richard Schickel
Brent Simon
Charles Solomon
Bob Strauss
Ella Taylor
Kevin Thomas
Kenneth Turan
Glenn Whipp
Best Music/Score
Joe Hisaishi
Howl's Moving Castle
It's not every film composer who's as comfortable scoring the travels of a giant
cat-bus as he is a gritty gangster shootout. But then it's not every film composer who
would be the go-to guy for acclaimed filmmakers as different as Hayao Miyazaki
and Takeshi Kitano. Joe Hisaishi's collaborations with Miyazaki have included
such contemporary classics as My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Kiki's
Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, and LAFCA's 2002 Best
Animation winner, Spirited Away. For Howl's Moving Castle, Hisaishi captures the
pomp and grandeur of an unnamed, Ruritanian nation in the midst of war as well as
the delicate romance of a young girl's coming of age and falling in love. Whether
he's implementing a small ensemble or a full orchestra, Hisaishi's exquisitely
crafted score perfectly shapes and guides Miyazaki's sweeping tale of battling
wizards, enchanted scarecrows, and, of course, moving castles. In the same way
that Miyazaki's masterpieces are anything but kids-only movies, Hisaishi's deft
compositions are robust, complex, and mature pieces of music. He's a rare musician
whose moments of sotto feel as integral as his violento. Long may he provide
perfect sounds to the work of great visionaries.
– Alonso Duralde
Best Production Design
William Chang Suk Ping
2046
There are two kinds of great production designers: those who dazzle when
they have millions to spend and those who dazzle us because they don't. William
Chang Suk Ping is one of the latter. Working with budgets one-tenth or onetwentieth the size of a big Hollywood film’s, this longtime collaborator of Wong
Kar Wai (they've worked together since Wong's first film in 1988) has established
himself as one of the most brilliantly versatile, innovative – and influential –
designers in all of world cinema. His work is a mother lode of visual ideas,
stripmined by movies and commercials from Seoul to Stockholm. And why not?
Chang is a dazzling manufacturer of imaginary worlds, from the martial arts
fantasia of Ashes of Time to the dreamy Buenos Aires of Happy Together to the
unforgettable double reality of 2046, with its seductive 1967 Hong Kong and its
train hurtling through the glittering dystopia of the loveless year 2046. Whether
he's conjuring up an imaginary Oriental Hotel (don't you wish you could check in?),
designing costumes for Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, or editing the work of footagehappy Wong Kar Wai – he performed all three tasks in 2046 – here is an artist
whose rare talent puts us in the mood for movies.
- John Powers
Best Cinematography
Robert Elswit
Good Night, and Good Luck
Good Night, and Good Luck opens in a gracefully appointed banquet hall
where sophisticated, elegantly attired men and women mingle at an awards dinner.
The black-and-white imagery is so dazzling it's like looking at a photograph by
Cecil Beaton. When these same men and women, now wearing business suits and
sensible heels, gather the next day in the bustling CBS newsroom, they are bathed
in a soft but high-contrast light that lends a feeling of almost tangible intimacy and
immediacy. Much of the credit for creating these two different but connected
worlds goes to director of photography Robert Elswit, whose exquisite black-andwhite cinematography is not only stunning to look at but helps to capture the air of
authenticity that infuses this masterful film. (So powerful is the sense that we are
actually inside with the characters that the film might just as easily have been called
You Are There.)
While Elswit designed his lighting plan with black-and-white in mind, the film
was actually shot on color stock. The color was removed by way of a digital
intermediate, after which the film was printed out onto a color intermediate stock
and, then, a black-and-white final print stock. This combination resulted in the
silvery luster that gives Good Night, and Good Luck such a memorable look.
– Jean Oppenheimer
Best Documentary/
Nonfiction Film
Grizzly Man
Directed by Werner Herzog
When cinematic giant Werner Herzog was handed an article by documentary
producer Eric Nelson on the strange life and tragic death of an amateur naturalist
named Timothy Treadwell, Herzog had no idea he'd found the subject for a new
work. Twenty-nine days later, Herzog's Grizzly Man had been filmed and edited,
combining new footage and an extraordinarily revealing and candid narration from
Herzog with excerpts from over 100 hours of alternately confessional and selfaggrandizing videotape shot by Treadwell himself during the last five of his 13
summers among the bears of NorthernAlaska.
Treadwell believed his status as a self-appointed steward of the land gave him
a special connection with the wilderness, and with the animals who populate it.
Herzog's approach is dialectical: He respects Treadwell's need for self-mythology
and the grandiose poetry of Treadwell's footage, while remaining skeptical and
even appalled by the reckless and delusional actions Treadwell took in his efforts to
find communion with the massive grizzlies.
Like many Herzog protagonists, Treadwell is a man in the grip of a
compulsion. In Timothy Treadwell, Herzog has found a real-world successor to
Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, with the fascinating additional complication that
Treadwell shares with Herzog the filmmaker's vocation. From these human and
structural complexities, Herzog has shaped the most exhilarating and terrifying
film of 2005 – a documentary that is also an essay, and a character study that is
equally a personal memoir. Grizzly Man can stand next to the best work of Herzog's
career, which puts it beside the best films – narrative or documentary – anyone has
ever made.
– Ray Greene
Best Supporting Actress
Catherine Keener
The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Ballad of Jack and Rose,
Capote, The Interpreter
It's a perennial lament that the movies rarely know how to use great female
actors in an age where alpha dog males dominate and women are relegated to main
squeeze/second banana/best friend/wife/mother scraps that hardly qualify as supporting parts and usually feel like wasted opportunities. This year, however, in four
different films, Catherine Keener proved that when given the chance – playing the
lead's tragically optimistic, single-mom girlfriend (in The Ballad of Jack and
Rose), or his bitingly funny, mannish colleague (in The Interpreter), or his
sensually-spirited and emotionally volatile deflowerer (in The 40-Year-Old Virgin)
or his calm voice of moral reason (in Capote) – then a movie doesn't have to feel
like a star-centered vacuum.
When someone with the gift for timing and character nuance like Keener is
along for the ride, the possibility of a movie expands: Suddenly the boundaries of
feeling are being prodded and explored, revealing how a laugh can be heartbreaking, how something sad can be funny, and how a beautifully open face with a
screen-stretching smile can make labels like “star” or “character actor” or “indie
queen” seem pointless. If size matters at all in Keener's career, it's how her
performance can make any movie exponentially better.
– Robert Abele
Best Supporting Actor
William Hurt
A History Of Violence
He comes into the picture late in the game, being the haunted hero's demonic,
long lost brother. Yet William Hurt brings such a luminous jolt of hell-bent comedic
energy with him that we fully believe it when, in the space of a single sequence, the
once-doomed hero turns his fortunes around. Whether leading or supporting, Hurt
is so deeply truthful that whoever is in the room is energized to the highest pitches
of spontaneity and authenticity. High praise to director David Cronenberg for
having the wit and insight to cast him. For as Richie the mobster, Hurt must not only
project a menace more subtle and terrifying than any we've met thus far. (Coming in
after Ed Harris's vulture-eyed Fogarty, that's a tall order.) He must also, by the
sparks of giddy, greedy, even self-destructive fury in his eyes, make visible the very
“history” of violence his brother Tom has been from running from in himself.
Viggo Mortensen has already communicated the depth of Tom’s pain and
bewilderment. Hurt gives his fellow actor the shot of pure oxygen that allows us to
see, at last, not just the killer inside Tom -- but the escaped slave.
- F.X. Feeney
Best Foreign-Language Film
Caché
Directed by Michael Haneke
Caché is a compelling and disturbing psychological thriller. Michael Haneke's
story, which unfolds with long, almost painful takes, is unsettling, tense and even
shocking. The pacing is both fluid and methodical, as befits the plot. Superficially,
this is a tale of a well-off family terrorized by a series of videotapes showing them
under surveillance by an unknown voyeur. But there are several layers to this
complex and superbly-made film. Embedded at its heart is a mystery, but equally
critical are its exploration of class issues and the repercussions of casual cruelty as
well as the tenuous façade of bourgeois intellectualism.
The personal story is entwined in a larger political commentary. The manner in
which this conflict is approached is both clear-eyed and emotional and particularly
timely in its personalizing of the tension between Algerian immigrants and native
French citizens. The blending of the intimate story of a family feeling besieged and
the victimization of a troubled Algerian immigrant reminds us of the inequity that
French of Algerian descent have endured. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche give
powerful, understated performances. Their transformation from comfortable and
privileged to panic-stricken reveals the flimsiness of the foundations upon which
we build our lives.
- Claudia Puig
The Douglas Edwards
Independent Experimental
Film/Video Award
Peter Watkins
La Commune (Paris 1871)
For over half a century Peter Watkins has cinematically defined what it means
to be independent, experimental, and above all political. With La Commune (Paris
1871), he has made what one might very well be tempted to call his masterpiece,
save for the fact that the creator of The War Game, Privilege, Punishment Park and
Edward Munch might well reject such a classification, much as he's rejected every
aspect of what he calls the “monoform” of audio-visual representation that
dominates the media worldwide.
Like its predecessors, La Commune mixes documentary and fictional
techniques recreating the events that took place in Paris in the waning days of the
Franco-Prussian war when socialist self-governments briefly reigned before being
destroyed in a massacre in which 20,000 to 30,000 men, women and children died
(an event barely taught by historians to this day). Wakins utilizes techniques fully
open to viewer evaluation at all times.
Shot in an abandoned factory that once was the site of Georges Méliès's film
studios with a cast of more than 220 (approximately 60% of whom had no prior
acting experience), Watkins has made a film of over five hours in length that wastes
not a nanosecond. La Commune is arguably the greatest political film ever made,
and we are privileged to honor it with this award.
- David Ehrenstein
Best Animation
Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box
In Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, directors Nick Park and
Steve Box succeed in moving the stars of the Oscar-winning shorts The Wrong
Trousers and A Close Shave to a feature. Chaplin, Keaton and the other great silent
comics made that transition, keeping their personas intact. But the shift to longer
forms has proved more difficult in animation.Attempts to adapt Mickey Mouse and
the Warner Bros. characters to features have proved unsatisfying.
Comparisons to the silent comedians seem particularly appropriate, as the
most articulate character in Were-Rabbit is mute. In the shorts, Park and his fellow
Aardman artists proved that stop-motion animation of clay characters could be as
subtle as the best drawn animation. When Gromit looked up from his knitting at the
ridiculous yet sinister Penguin in Wrong Trousers, audiences believed a little clay
dog was thinking.
That subtlety of performance continues in Were-Rabbit. While Wallace
dithers, Gromit solves the mystery. His wordless eloquence continues a comic
tradition that stretches back to silent movies, pantomime and the commedia
dell'arte. Gromit takes his place among the great silent clowns, and his
performance helps to make Curse of the Were-Rabbit a wonderfully funny film.
– Charles Solomon
Career Achievement
Richard Widmark
On his first day on the set of his first movie, Richard Widmark plowed his way
right into movie history: As the baby-faced gangster Tommy Udo in Henry
Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947), he pushed Mildred Dunnock's wheelchair-bound
Ma Rizzo down a steep flight of stairs, giggling all the way. Of the role, which
would earn Widmark his first (and only) Oscar nomination, James Agee wrote, “It
is clear that murder is one of the kindest things he is capable of,” and indeed,
Widmark was so very good at being bad that he was immediately typecast as a
heavy – as the germophobic, wife-beating gangleader of The Street with No Name
(1948) and as the insanely jealous owner of the titular establishment in Road House
(1948).
The kid from Princeton, Illinois would soon prove as adept at heroism as
homicide (notably as the dogged public health official of Panic in the Streets
[1950]), but Widmark was at his greatest playing characters capable of both
extremes – men of circumstance with one foot planted in each of two opposing
worlds. So he was perfect for the literal and figurative shadows of film noir, where
he became the doomed hustler Harry Fabian, trying (and failing) to get a break in
Night and the City (1950), and the considerably more resourceful Skip McCoy,
who reaches into a lady's handbag and pulls out a whole tangle of Red tape in
Pickup on South Street (1953). Widmark did westerns too, war pictures and even a
Doris Day comedy – then, in 1991, he hung up his hat and retired, never to come
back. Perhaps he realized that Tommy Udo, Harry Fabian and Skip McCoy had
already made him immortal. Of Udo, it is even said that real-life gangsters modeled
themselves on the role. But then again, who among us didn't once gaze at the screen
and imagine what it might be like to be Richard Widmark?
– Scott Foundas
New Generation
Terrence Howard
Although actors expose their inner selves every time they step in front of a
camera, they are arguably at their most vulnerable as they try to navigate a career.
Terrence Howard has been at it for nearly twenty years. As recently as 2001, an
article in The New York Times called him “the best actor you never heard of.” It must
be frustrating to see less talented people move ahead or grab the spotlight when one
does consistently good work, but Howard has finally been rewarded for his
patience and persistence.
Howard's performances in 2005 commanded the screen, and demanded our
attention. His extraordinary opening monologue as a silver-tongued Memphis
pimp in Hustle & Flow may be a gift from filmmaker Craig Brewer, but Howard
hits every note just right. The compromised TV director in Crash has complexities
one rarely finds in any screenplay, but it is the actor's interpretation that brings this
all-too-human character to life on film. Why it took this long for such a gifted
performer to gain widespread recognition, we'll never know. All that really matters
is that Terrence Howard has arrived, and it isn't likely we'll ever take our eyes off of
him again.
- Leonard Maltin
Special Citation
Unseen Cinema
Bruce Posner and David Shepard
It isn't often that a film, let alone a DVD release, can be said to rewrite history,
but that's exactly the case with the new seven-disc box set, “Unseen Cinema: Early
American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941.” The sheer mass alone–155 films,
eighteen-plus hours – plus the curatorial collaboration between 60 film archive
collections coordinated by the Anthology Film Archives, curator Bruce Posner and
producer/preservationist David Shepard, places this project in extremely rarified
air. But what makes Unseen Cinema essential for any serious film lover is the
argument it makes: That long before the post-war period of Maya Deren, Stan
Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, Americans were experimenting with film form and
subject matter.
This runs against received wisdom, which insists that a true American avantgarde in film, as in painting, didn't exist before World War II. Posner and company
have compiled enough contrary evidence to shatter this notion. Consider this set's
collection of wild dance films shot in Thomas A. Edison's studio in the 1890s;
Jerome Hill's mindblowing La Cartomancienne; Orson Welles's first actual film,
Hearts of Age, that foreshadows all of his subsequent work; abstract films such as
Ralph Steiner's H20, and the visually rhythmic projects by Mary Ellen Bute,
Douglas Crockwell and Dwinell Grant; or radical narrative experiments like Boris
Deutsch's Lullaby and David Bradley's Sredni Vashtar.
There's no more transparently false idea in film criticism than the notion that
everything is cinema has been seen and written about–that there are no new
discoveries. Unseen Cinema deliciously, deliriously puts a firm stop to this
falsehood.
– Robert Koehler
Special Citation
Kevin Thomas
Filmmakers in the indie, experimental, foreign, avant-garde or, until very
recently, documentary fields desperately need critics. Lacking money for a
promotional campaign and forced to rely on word-of-mouth, these filmmakers
have found no better friend over the past 40-plus years than Kevin Thomas of the
Los Angeles Times.
Hard to believe there once was a time in antediluvian Los Angeles when major
critics shunned anything with subtitles. And drive-in movies were certainly beyond
the pale. So it fell to Kevin to alert Angelenos to the French New Wave and to such
giants as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti
and Andrei Tarkovsky. He also discovered talented newcomers doing interesting
work in films from Roger Corman and American International Pictures. Indeed, he
was the first journalist to interview a young actor named Jack Nicholson.
His love of avant-garde and experimental films led him to be the only Times
critic to review films by Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Since 1984 his Special
Screenings column in the Times has been the lifeblood for venues that exhibit films
for brief runs or even one night. In short, no one in the Los Angeles critical
establishment has done more to create an awareness and appreciation of film
culture than Kevin Thomas.
– Kirk Honeycutt
Best Actress
Vera Farmiga
Down to the Bone
In Down to the Bone, a quietly devastating first feature by Debra Granik about
a working class drug addict in upstate New York, Vera Farmiga plays Irene, a loving
mother of two boys who, after humiliating herself by trying to buy cocaine with her
children's birthday money, checks herself into a drug rehab clinic. Based on a reallife family saga, the movie is shot verité-style, and as the hand-held camera follows
Irene through her snow-bound, downscale neighborhood, from her dreary home to
her dreary job as a supermarket checkout clerk to the dreary (but helpful) clinic, we
tag along with her struggle to get and stay clean. She says very little, but her
hunched demeanor – now slumped and defeated, now gathering resolve – speaks
volumes.
Farmiga, whom you may have seen as Liev Schreiber's long-lost love in The
Manchurian Candidate or as Detective Susan Branca in television's Touching Evil,
sinks her stunning Slavic beauty into this woman's quiet desperation with such
understated conviction that when at last she smiles, it's as though the sun came out
from behind a lowering cloud. In a performance as ego-less as it is sensitive to
nuance, Farmiga makes you see why it is that this intelligent young woman does her
tedious job so much better when she's high than when she's clean.
– Ella Taylor
Best Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Capote
Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of our finest and most versatile actors, and
after seeing him as Truman Capote, I'm prepared to say he may be our greatest.
What he does is so astonishing and so far beyond mere mimicry that you just sit
there awestruck at the alchemy that allows for such a gift. Part pasha, part genius,
his Capote is an outsider on the inside. With his raised pinkies, baby-blue bathrobes
and Bergdorf scarves, it's easy to spot him as an intruder in the Kansas countryside.
But Hoffman makes us aware of how spiritually isolated Capote was even in his
beloved New York jet set. Wherever he found himself, he was a man immolating in
his own slow flame. Hoffman delves into the psychology, the duplicity of what it
means to be an artist. It's a fully fleshed-out portrait that captures the dainty whine
and lizardly savoir faire of the man. He lays bare the creepiest recesses of the
author's psyche. Capote could just as easily have been called In Cold Blood, except
that title was already taken.
– Peter Rainer
Best Screenplay
Dan Futterman
Capote
Dozens of films have been made showing tortured writers at work. And, as we
know, the process can be deadly dull. The mystery of creation is abstract, and typing
is not wildly cinematic. All the more credit to Dan Futterman, whose script for
Capote makes the inner workings of an artist's mind come to life. Futterman, an
actor by trade, had never written a screenplay. But after reading Gerald Clarke's
biography he became obsessed with the story of how Truman Capote mined the raw
material of a family's brutal murder in Kansas and turned it into the genre-bending
masterpiece In Cold Blood. Futterman wrestled with the screenplay for six years. In
the final product, we can almost see the wheels turning in Capote's head as he
recognizes the literary mother lode he has stumbled on and figures out how to
exploit it.
Futterman's accomplishment, with an invaluable assist from his childhood
friends Bennett Miller and Philip Seymour Hoffman, is capturing a man whose
essence is neither black nor white but all shades of gray. Yes, Capote is
tremendously ambitious and duplicitous, using his subjects ruthlessly, but at the
same time he is a kindred soul who understands their suffering. Futterman manages
the rare feat of both extolling and exposing Capote, and he does it with an economy
of language and deft touch for revealing character. The turmoil of creating and the
price the artist pays for the privilege has never seemed more real.
- James Greenberg
Best Screenplay
NoahFutterman
Dan
Baumbach
The Squid and the Whale
Anyone who has had the awkward misfortune to overhear a parental argument
or come of age during the 1980s will find an uncanny reflection in Noah
Baumbach's keenly observed tragicomedy The Squid and the Whale.
Shot in 23 days on a $1.5 million budget, Baumbach's portrait of a family in
transition is a timely reminder that you don't need dazzling effects or elaborate set
pieces to make a good movie. You need a savvy director, a willing cast, and above
all a solid script.
Baumbach's script is unassailable; it's literate, painfully funny and
unflinchingly honest. As the Berkmans' marriage unravels, their Brooklyn Park
Slope neighborhood becomes a landscape for questionable behavior and shifting
alliances. No one is spared Baumbach's comically critical eye -- not the adolescent
boys Walt and Frank, and certainly not their bickering parents Joan and Bernard.All
are complicit in the chaos around them. Baumbach nails precisely the way that
seemingly benign remarks can cut deeply, lies can be immediately transparent and
statements made in sincerity can be inadvertently absurd. It's impossible not to
laugh at The Squid and the Whale, even as you can't help but cringe at the painful
memories it evokes.
- Lael Loewenstein
Best Director
Ang Lee
Brokeback Mountain
What is the essence of good direction?
Ah, there's the rub. There is no empiric value system to gauge Ang Lee's
achievement in Brokeback Mountain. Yet, its presence is felt. The camera is ideally
situated; the juxtaposition of shots enhances the drama (or comedy); the
performances are seamless.
There is no formula that addresses what makes someone ideally suited to
interpret a script. We can only applaud when it occurs as it has again and again in the
films ofAng Lee.
He has a singular stamp. His work is informed by a literal and cinematic
appreciation of the past and the good sense not to replicate it. He is a master of genre
and not its slave, and Brokeback Mountain exemplifies that trait. He takes the
bedrock simplicity of the western and, without trampling on it, turns the cowboy's
life, work, sexuality and environment into a complex landscape. It is as apt a
contemporary reflection as Stagecoach, High Noon and The Wild Bunch are of past
eras.
We've come to expect fearlessness and precision from Ang Lee and the ability
to elicit the same qualities from his collaborators. Whether that's best or great
direction is argumentative. It should be bottled and savored.
-Leonard Klady
Best Picture
Brokeback Mountain
Produced by Diana Ossana and James Schamus
Many people have felt, watching Brokeback Mountain, that they were
witnessing not only a movie but a historic breakthrough in the American
conversation about sexuality, love and masculine stereotypes. This is certainly one
reason to honor Ang Lee's achievement, but Brokeback wasn't made to be a
landmark. It was made because Lee, like Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana before
him, recognized in Annie Proulx's tale of two young Wyoming ranch hands a great
and enduring love story. And that's what this painfully beautiful film gives us, and
why it will be remembered long after any culture shock subsides. Made with a
patient, compassionate, closely observant eye, acted with subtle, bone-deep
conviction, Brokeback Mountain takes us deep inside a passion that transforms and
wounds at once, a bond that can't transcend a world of fear and disapproval. Few
films have captured so piercingly the desolation of repressed desire. Few films
have rendered so acutely the paradoxical bleakness and grandeur of the West,
where the myth of rugged individualism works only for those who play by the rules,
and where love can suffocate in the wide open spaces.
– David Ansen
LAFCA Best Picture Awards
2005 Brokeback Mountain
2004 Sideways
2003 American Splendor
2002 About Schmidt
2001 In the Bedroom
2000 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
1999 The Insider
1998 Saving Private Ryan
1997 L.A. Confidential
1996 Secrets & Lies
1995 Leaving Las Vegas
1994 Pulp Fiction
1993 Schindler's List
1992 Unforgiven
1991 Bugsy
1990 GoodFellas
1989 Do the Right Thing
1988 Little Dorrit
1987 Hope and Glory
1986 Hannah and Her Sisters
1985 Brazil
1984 Amadeus
1983 Terms of Endearment
1982 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
1981 Atlantic City
1980 Raging Bull
1979 Kramer vs. Kramer
1978 Coming Home
1977 Star Wars
1976 Network and Rocky (tie)
1975 Dog Day Afternoon and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (tie)
SALUTES
LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION
AND
OUR HONOREES
WINNER OF 5 AWARDS
Best Foreign Language Film
CACHÉ
Best Actor • Philip Seymour Hoffman
CAPOTE
Best Supporting Actress • Catherine Keener
CAPOTE
Best Screenplay (Tie) • Dan Futterman
CAPOTE
Best Production Design • William Chang Suk Ping
2046
RUNNER UP
Best Supporting Actress • Amy Adams
JUNEBUG
Best Cinematography
Christopher Doyle • Kwan Pun Leung • Lai Yiu Fai
2046
Best Foreign-Language Film
2046
DreamWorks
would like to thank the
Los Angeles Film
Critics Association
for naming
Best Animated Film
and congratulate all the other award winners.
Warner Independent Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures
Thank the Los Angeles Film Critics
And Proudly Congratulate Robert Elswit
www.warnerindependent.com/awards
NEW LINE CINEMA
Thanks
THE
LOS ANGELES
FILM CRITICS
ASSOCIATION
AND CONGRATULATES
OUR WINNER
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
WILLIAM HURT
thank the Los Angeles Film Critics Association
and Congratulate werner herzog
©2006 DCI
A WERNER HERZOG FILM
WINNER
BEST DOCUMENTARY
LA Film Critics Association
C REATIVE A RTISTS A GENCY
congratulates our 2005 LAFCA Award Winners
Best Picture of the Year
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
James Schamus
Producer
Best Director
Ang Lee
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Best Actress
Vera Farmiga
DOWN TO THE BONE
Best Supporting Actor
William Hurt
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
©2005 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.
mPRm Public Relations
Thanks the
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
and Congratulates
All the Winners
Acknowledgments
This event has required an extraordinary effort from a
number of individuals and organizations.
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association is greatly
appreciative of all those who have worked to make
tonight’s event possible, and wish to extend
special thanks to the following:
Dianne Greenberg-Dilena
and the staff of the Park Hyatt
Michael Lawson, James Lewis
and the staff of mPRm
Nicole Campos
Sasha Carrera and Holley Hankinson
James Honoré
Steve Elzer
Craig O’Connor
Jerry Day Productions
Phil Alley
Laura Kim of Warner Independent Pictures
Sony Pictures Entertainment Media Services
Melody Korenbrot
Harlan Gulko of Focus Features
Lisa Edley of New Line Cinema
David Geisen, Debbie Silverman
and the staff of Burbank Printing
Program Designed and Printed by
P R I NT I N G
818.840-8013