gene simmons video

There’s a scene in the postmodern chase movie No Country For Old Men where Javier Bardem — playing the assassin Anton Chigurh — goes into the office of a trailer park looking for a man he wants to kill. The man isn’t there, and the manager of the park, a large woman, refuses to give Chigurh his work address because it’s against trailer park policy.
It’s a funny scene because Chigurh, an unstoppable killer, actually looks a little intimidated. At the Cannes film festival, where the movie had its premiere, Bardem recalled that the scene had to be shot several times because he kept breaking up over the deadpan performance of the woman playing the manager.
Her name is Kathy Lamkin, and although she appears to be just an ordinary person recruited to be in a Hollywood film, she’s a veteran actress who had small roles in three movies last year — including In The Valley of Elah and The Heartbreak Kid — and is probably most famous as “the Tea Lady” in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films.
Lamkin is not up for an Oscar. She probably never will be. But she was one of the performers who added texture to No Country For Old Men, who grounded it in authenticity so that its flightier notions — of a mythical Evil stalking the land — could take hold. (Another such actor was Gene Jones, who played the gas station manager who flips a coin for his life.)
Lamkin is one of those actors who prove that not every memorable movie moment or performer gets an Academy Award nomination. Sometimes great artists are snubbed, and sometimes what they do isn’t really Oscar-worthy. It’s just wonderful.
Sometimes they seem to have been forgotten. Take the non-nominated song Pop! Goes My Heart, as sung by Hugh Grant in the romantic comedy Music & Lyrics. The movie was a pleasant diversion that probably benefited from low expectations, but the musical video, a straight-faced parody of Wham!, is one of those catchy and inspired movie moments that was pure pleasure.
We all understand that only five performers can be nominated in each category, but it is still too bad that there was no room for what Nicole Kidman accomplished in Margot At The Wedding, a mostly ignored family drama in which she played an angry and unhappy woman who, in one scene that sticks with you, climbs a tree just to prove that she can do it and gets stuck up there. Kidman was up a tree of one sort or another for most of Margot At The Wedding: She created a woman who was selfish, insensitive and bravely unlikable.
And two cheers for Catherine Keener, whose hippie mother figure lent such warmth to the chilly adventure story Into The Wild. It was a movie brimming with snubs — notably for director Sean Penn — but it would have been nice to acknowledge Keener, who has been bringing a sexy humanity to movies for 20 years (and has earned two Oscar nominations in the process).
We also loved J.K. Simmons, a character actor who has been delighting us for years both as the dyspeptic newspaper editor in the Spider-Man films (”If we get a picture of Julia Roberts in a thong, we can certainly get a picture of this weirdo!”) and now as the unexpectedly understanding father in Juno, another movie that relied on its supporting cast (Allison Janney as the mom, Olivia Thirlby as the best friend, Michael Cera as the boyfriend) to make a realistic landscape in which its unlikelihoods could unfold.
A movie forgotten in the rush for the statuette was Zodiac, a complex true-life crime mystery that is never solved, just another of the unresolved stories of 2007. It was a tough movie to connect with, but there was real, unnominated pleasure in watching Robert Downey, Jr., play a fidgety newspaper reporter: His line of fast-spoken, irreverent patter would be a healthy addition to any newsroom.
Another movie that came and went and didn’t seem to accomplish much but gave me pleasure was The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson’s somewhat disconnected but always rollicking train trip through India. Owen Wilson is hilarious as the eldest of three brothers — the others are played by Adrian Brody and Jason Schwartzman, each of whom has his moments — and an Indian actor named Waris Ahluwalia was a small-scale delight as the steward who tries to keep order. None of them was acknowledged, but that doesn’t diminish their achievements.
Nor will there be an Oscar for another unlikely character, Steve Zahn, who played one of the desperate escapers in Rescue Dawn and almost made you forgive the fiasco that was Strange Wilderness, or for Christian Bale, who imbued his role in the film — the true story of a hair-raising escape from a POW camp during the Vietnam war — with such desperate hunger. Laura Linney’s nomination as best actress for The Savages was deserved, but that left out Philip Seymour Hoffman as her brother and Philip Bosco in a wonderfully realized performance as her ailing father. And it didn’t take everyone long to forget Ben Foster, who was the best thing about 3:10 to Yuma as Russell Crowe’s sidekick, or Peter Fonda, almost unrecognizable as the doomed bounty hunter. No Oscar? No problem.

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