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Under discussion:

Star Wars  (1977)

An Unmarried Woman  (1978)

Superman: The Movie  (1978)

Titanic  (1997)

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring  (2001)

Ratatouille  (2007)

The Dark Knight  (2008)

Wall-E  (2008)

Last week, Entertainment Weekly confirmed with Warner Bros. that the studio would be campaigning for a nomination for Heath Ledger specifically in the supporting actor category, putting to rest all the speculation and suggestions that he could contend for the Best Actor Oscar. Now all the awards pundits seem to agree that Ledger is a definite lock for a posthumous nomination. As for The Dark Knight’s hopes for other categories, though, it’s still up in the air as to how many nominations the comic book movie might garner.

While its predecessor, Batman Begins, only received one Oscar nomination, for Wally Pfister’s cinematography, there’s at least some likelihood that The Dark Knight could be recognized in as many as a dozen categories. That’s about as many as it’s legitimately eligible for, anyway, and in a year that keeps looking slimmer and slimmer in terms of Oscar-worthy pictures, there’s no reason to completely deny The Dark Knight’s full capability. Unfortunately, it’s a popular genre picture, so regardless of how critically acclaimed it is, and regardless of how the Academy has historically lauded similar titles, there will be a lot of doubt and debate concerning this movie’s prospects all the way up until January 22, when the nominations are announced.

Yesterday, John Foote of In Contention, commented on the increasing chances of The Dark Knight in such a lackluster Oscar season. In some ways, though, it’s not just about onetime Oscar hopefuls turning out to be hopeless; it’s also the constant problem of so much Oscar bait being held away from viewers and voters until the last possible second. Even those films that end up being fairly good can be disappointments after so much premature awards season hype. Sure, audiences have short attention spans and typically a film released midyear is easily forgotten by voting time, but a movie as memorable, as successful and as well-made as The Dark Knight can come out in the summer and easily be in the forefront of voters’ minds as an easy and deserving fallback. Therefore so many Oscar bloggers shouldn’t suddenly be surprised to see that The Dark Knight’s hopes for multiple Oscar nominations is “brightening” or “shaping up.” It’s always been a contender. Let’s break down its chances, category by category, after the jump:

Best Picture

The greatest difference in opinion among the experts so far is with the movie’s chances in the Best Picture race. The majority consensus seems to be that The Dark Knight has little to no shot at the top award (apparently only The Hollywood Reporter’s T.L. Stanley and Rolling Stones‘ Peter Travers are seriously considering it), primarily because it’s a superhero movie. However, deserving or not, there’s really no viable argument against the plausibility of a Best Picture nom. Rather, the movie’s chances for inclusion in the category already outweigh its chances for exclusion. And as more Best Picture hopefuls are either released to underwhelming response or pushed back to 2009, the balance in The Dark Knight’s favor only increases.

So what if there’s never before been a superhero comic book movie up for Best Picture (despite Superman being far more deserving than An Unmarried Woman)? The Dark Knight still could fall in with that ever-increasing list of genre flicks, including Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings movies, which have shown us that quality fanboy fodder is also capable of appealing to the Academy. And while it’s true that box office success doesn’t necessarily translate to Oscar contention, The Dark Knight has the right combo of being the biggest moneymaker and one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2008, which was hardly the case with another high-grossing blockbuster Best Picture, Titanic.

It’s believed that if the Academy does nominate a box office winner with critical acclaim, they’ll go with Wall-E, because they’ve nominated an animated feature for Best Picture in the past. But that thinking goes against the whole present logic of the Oscars. There will never again be an animated feature up for the top award as long as the Best Animated Feature category exists. That award was pretty much conceived for the purpose of sidelining films like Wall-E in order to give them separate recognition. If the Academy isn’t going to nominate something as brilliant as Ratatouille for Best Picture, they’re not going to nominate Wall-E either.

On the other side of the argument, there’s just as much of a mistaken defense for why the movie will be nominated. Contrary to some early conjecture, though,The Dark Knight’s chances aren’t improved at all by the fact that the Oscar ceremony needs a ratings boost. Sure, a Best Picture nom for the film would be great for the Academy in terms of telecast viewership, but it’s probably not permitted or likely for the show’s producers to encourage Academy members to vote for more popular fare.

Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay:

If The Dark Knight does receive a Best Picture nomination, it will be one of those occasional cases where the director is not nominated. Due to a sometimes-problematic issue of having different people voting for different categories, The Dark Knight’s flaws will be clearer to the filmmakers who pick the nominees for Best Director, and so Christopher Nolan will be excluded there (although Awards Daily still has him as a front runner anyway). However, Nolan and his writing partners, Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer should have a decent shot at the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for their success at turning a superhero comic into a realistic film with a smart, topical, complex and fairly original story.

Acting Categories:

As for the acting awards, The Dark Knight can really only count on Ledger’s nomination. The film lacks any substantial female performances, and despite the fact that Christian Bale seriously deserves an Oscar nomination and despite the belief that he puts more into the Bruce Wayne/Batman character than is necessary, it’s simply not his time. If there is any other actor besides Ledger worthy and at all probable to receive a nomination, it’s Gary Oldman, for Best Supporting Actor, but there’s not much likelihood that Academy voters would water down Ledger’s lauds like that.

Technical and Craft Categories:

Finally, with the tech and craft categories, Pfister should very easily pick up another nomination for his cinematography work, while The Dark Knight is expected to better Batman Begins‘ Oscar glory by turning up in both the sound categories. Score and Editing are total longshots, despite their respective talent’s past Oscar success. And as much as makeup and costumes are significant to the film, The Dark Knight may only be a dark horse in those categories. Still, it’s probably about time the Academy ignored its period piece tradition with the latter category and took notice of Lindy Hemming’s accomplishment of making superhero movie costumes that are more realistic and believable than the typically flashy, costumey costumes of the genre. The film even reflexively addresses the issue of plausible and practical superhero wear in the real world.

Then, of course, there’s the other craft categories that could suffer from the film’s efforts to be more natural than most comic book adaptations. Best Art Direction? Not enough obvious design there. Best visual effects? The Dark Knight could be one of the rare genre movies nominated for Best Picture that doesn’t place in the effects category, due to its lack of showy CG work. Like In Contention’s Gerard Kennedy, I won’t be shocked if the film manages an effects nomination simply because it’s so respected, but the odds are mostly against its modestly functional effects spectacle.

Before the Hamptons Film Festival this weekend, I wrote a post about The End of America, a documentary based on Naomi Wolf’s book of the same name, which I was interested in not least because of its unusual distribution strategy: it will premiere on SnagFilms tomorrow, before debuting theatrically in New York in December before becoming available on DVD in January. I’ll have a more review-y take on the film tomorrow. In the meantime, an anonymous (but angry!) SpoutBlog reader commented on his/her experience at the film’s first screening in the Hamptons:

First, the film was late to arrive and so we sat for an hour listening to live commentary from Alec Baldwin and Naomi “Preach to You” Watts [sic]. Then the film played and we had to hear it all over again. Naomi is out for one thing… to sell books.

I can’t speak to the motives of Naomi Wolf *or* Naomi Watts, but I can confirm that some aspect of this comment is accurate: the screening did start late, because there was an accident on the highway between Manhattan and East Hampton, and the master tape was stuck in traffic with co-director Annie Sundberg. But most of those in attendance seemed to get some value out the improvised program which preceded the movie, in which Alec Baldwin moderated a conversation about The End of America’s themes with Wolf, co-director Ricki Stern, and ACLU rep Jameel Jaffer. I was there, and I recorded the bulk of the conversation and had it transcribed. That transcript, edited for clarity, can be found after the jump.

Jameel Jaffer, ACLU: The country has really changed in fundamental ways. As the film, I think, really makes quite compelling. The country increasingly is shifting from an open society into one that’s closed and is based on fear. I’m not sure that I would go as far as to say that it is a closed society. One thing that American’s have that is denied to most people in closed societies is the right to vote. Obviously that’s of special importance right now. And if I could say a brief plug for an ACLU campaign, you’ll all get gift bags after the film. And in the gift bag - it’s not an ordinary gift bag. There’s no aftershave or things like that. There’s a Constitution in there. It’s a pocket constitution. And there’s some information about the ACLU’s Constitution Voter Campaign.

Alec Baldwin: There is cologne in the gift bag. “Habeas Corpus.” For men. [As if saying, "But seriously, folks..."] No.

Now we have a situation where [with] domestic eavesdropping, you’ve got the government listening to hundreds of thousands of phone calls a month, and breaking into hundreds of thousands of computers and emails a month. I’d like your opinion about what is that going to do for people’s legal rights in this country in terms of illegally obtained evidence.

Someone was telling me - this is completely speculation, I don’t know if this is true. Eliot Spitzer — and I’m not trying to take the heat of Spitzer and his behavior — but Spitzer, oddly enough, was someone who was drafting memos - this I do know as a fact - that Spitzer really was on the mortgage crisis scenario two weeks prior to him going down. Two weeks prior to them busting Spitzer, he was drafting all these memos and he was going to hold a press conference. He was totally onto the mortgage crisis and what needed to be done about it. But as a result of the Patriot Act, and act of legislation, they were reading his bank records.

I believe, people ever so slightly become more politically sophisticated, but more politically inactive as they get older. So it’s your kids on a college campus that’ll wind up being booked as terrorists for their activity if you’re not careful. Your kid’s going to end up going to prison for something like attending a meeting. So I want you to make a comment about what you think are the imminent dangers now.

Naomi Wolf, Author, The End of America: First, I want to respectfully challenge you [Jamaal] before I answer your [Baldwin's] question. It’s very tempting for us to delay. This, I have to say respectfully, maybe from the point of law you can have that sense of certainty, but from my perspective as a cultural critic, this is delusional. I’m not singling you out. I’m just cautioning you all against this state of mind.

I’ve read many memoirs of sophisticated, educated Germans in 1930, 1931, 1932. And they were writing to each other, “We’re a humane society. We’re the home of Goethe. We are the home of opera and the classical novel. We are the most civilized nation. These thugs are going to come and go. This is going to be a flash in the pan. It can’t get worse. These people are ridiculous. Let’s just laugh at them.”

Again and again and again: “It cannot happen here,” they said in Germany in the early 1930s. And let me just tell you something about how quickly ideals can be extinguished. The founders knew this. They wrote the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in a state of fear. They didn’t have our sense of certainty that we’re different. They categorically wrote that Constitution and set up the system of checks and balances certain that a day like this would arrive in America. They categorically knew that a would-be dictator would arise in America to oppress Americans.

And I just want to say about America, I too believed at the beginning of my journey, well, surely the American people won’t stand for the state legalizing torture. Surely, the American people won’t tolerate the state listening in on their intimate phone conversations this way, describing personal conversations between soldiers in Iraq and their loved ones at home. Surely Americans won’t tolerate a situation where Congress is saying, “We’re subpoenaing Josh Bolton and Harriet Miers for wrongdoing,” and the White House says, “Whatever.”

I’m sorry to tell you, the American people stood for it. And this is how fragile democracy is. There is nothing sacred. We’re going to have to get over this American exceptionalism, that somehow “God just likes us better.” And we’re just special and we’re never going to go the way of Germany or any of those Latin American countries, or Pakistan.

And I can also tell you that historically when there are boots on the ground - and there are now with the deployment of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division - you can have the most sophisticated, civilized society and the minute people start getting hurt, everyone goes quiet.

Jameel: I actually agree with everything you just said. I didn’t mean to suggest that we weren’t in a situation akin to the situation that those countries found themselves in at some point. I just meant to say that we weren’t Germany in 1938-39, and I don’t think you were saying that either.

The other thing, this issue of torture. I think, Alec, your question about what the most urgent issues are right now. The administration right now is arguing that people held at Guantanamo Bay can be tried on the basis of evidence that was obtained through waterboarding, which the administration argues is not torture. There are trials going on in Guantanamo in the name of Americans in which people are going to be in some cases imprisoned for the rest of their lives, and in some cases even put to death on the basis of information that was literally beat out of other people. So I think that that’s a fairly urgent issue.

Alec: It makes you look at that idea: do we care what the government is doing that’s stripping away the rights of people that aren’t Americans. That’s been a big, big part of this administration, is they believe you don’t care because it’s not Americans.

And that’s a really, really profound idea. I’ve always had one motto or one perspective that was leant to me, which is that America is special and America is different, but only in direct proportion to us doing great things and us doing good things. We live in an age now where you have a very tired, wheezing group of people who keep wanting to tell you, “America’s great. America’s great,” regardless of what we do. We just have to keep telling ourselves we’re great and we can go out there and torture people and do these horrible things.

Do you think this is the new reality? Or do you think that a new administration, an administration that ends with a vowel [pause for laughter], would be able to turn this stuff back and change things?

Naomi: Just before I answer that, the most important issue is these boots on the ground. And I should explain what that is, because the next president will have to deal with that.

The 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division has been deployed by George Bush to somewhere in the United States of America. So, that’s 3, 000 or 4, 000 warriors. And they aren’t answerable to Congress, they’re not answerable to the American people, they’re answerable to President Bush. Again from my study, this is never a good sign.

Alec: Where are they now?

Naomi: Nobody knows. I had the surreal experience of being on the “Today Show” this morning and having the “Today Show” give me a great big sound bite from their commander saying, “They’re here to save lives.” And they challenged me as if I was a fear-monger and a dangerous radical for raising the questions about them. And no one, including NBC, knows where they are.

Alec: They’re on 27 Highway, that’s why the tape isn’t here.

Naomi: Who are they and what are they doing? They are battle-hardened soldiers. They’ve spent two tours in Iraq. They were responsible for crowd control in Fallujah. And their original mandate according to the Army Times was crowd control here. They’ve got tasers, they’ve got rubber bullets. They’ve got tanks capable of killing 300 people. They’re armed. And I guess looking at what’s happening around the world in closed-in societies or in weak democracies, soldiers are often sent to monitor elections. Especially contested elections.

So, I don’t like them being here. And by the way, it violates 200 years of the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus, which kept us safe. And why did people around the world envy us? Because we’re safe from soldiers policing our streets. We have civilian police.

Audience member calling out: Why have we not read about it?

Naomi: That is really a very good question. I was just on the phone with a friend from the New York Times saying, “When are you guys going to run the story about where the 1st Brigade is and what they’re doing?” [He said] “It’s classified.”

Jameel: We just filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, I guess this morning, asking for more information about this. But, they’ve only had a few hours to respond and they haven’t come up with a response yet. They may yet come back and say that the information is classified.

Naomi: And if is classified, none of us will ever be able to know, and if you know and tell us, they can prosecute you for a 10-year jail sentence. So this sucks.

[Audience laughs]

Alec: [Motioning to side of the room] Where are you? Ricki, come out for a second. Come and sit with me on my luxury bench here

[Baldwin moves over to the side of the piano bench on which he's sitting. Ricki Stern, the co-director of the film, comes and sits next to him]

Alec: We’re just going to take another quick minute. I think one of the greatest things about when I come to these events, not just this film festival, but any great film festival, and see great narrative and documentary films, is this idea that this is the democracy in action that, I think, is really withering in the country that we live in right now. The corporate media assumes that people don’t want their day to be ruined. I’m somebody that used to read the New York Times every day, and basically watch morning news shows every day. I haven’t watched a morning news show in five years. And I might read the New York Times if I pick it up in somebody’s office while I’m waiting for them to finish on the phone. I get my news online, from other sources that I have more faith in.

This war is, in terms of how it was prosecuted, the worst thing this country has ever done. Vietnam fell and it did not make a bit of difference in anybody’s life here at all. All those [American] men who died were brave soldiers, and they should have not have been treated the way that they were treated when they came home, but in terms of Vietnam falling, in terms of our political stability and our economic stability, that meant nothing. It meant nothing. Now we go ahead and have this war that we have now, where is the protest against this war? Something tells me that there have been a lot of protests, but you just don’t see it on TV. It’s not covered by the media, because the media assumes that the lion’s share of Americans would rather watch Deal or No Deal.

So what was it that led you to make this film?

Ricki: Honestly we were asked. We met with Naomi and Avram Ludwig, the producer of this film, and some of the other people who were involved. They asked us if we would be interested in making it. I think probably from our other films that we had made. And when we met with Naomi early on she thought that it would translate well into a film because the images and the visual comparisons that you see in the film are ones that you don’t need words. They just resonate alone, just by seeing the comparisons. We tried to take her lecture of the book and put it into pictures.

Naomi: What got you interested in this, Alec?

Alec: I’ve said this before and it may seem modest to everybody here, but Bloomberg and the Republican convention really burned my ass. I mean, I was so upset that that happened in the city of New York that they weren’t going to have any protests allowed, it just really kind of drove me almost crazy.

I think both people running for president today - I think presidential candidates are like luggage in some old movie, with all those big stickers on them. Paris. Lisbon. Kyoto. Venice. Presidential candidates are owned by someone. But you still have to ask yourself, in this election, who’s the person who is going to turn back this assault? Who do we have the best chance of turning back this assault of our freedoms in this country? I still believe that the bulk of Americans are hard-working people. They work too hard, as a matter of fact. They pay a lot of money in taxes, and they want to be left alone and they want to live their lives in peace. They don’t need to be monitored by the National Security Agency on an ongoing basis.

Naomi: Alec, there is a question of who’s going to fix it. And I’m trying to tell you that if Barack Obama is elected by a miracle in a transparent, accountable election, we are not out of the woods.

It’s a better outcome because at least we are avoiding the wholesale dismantling of out checks and balances, the further of establishment of police state basics that I’ve argued you’re going to see in a Palin presidency. I’m not too concerned about John McCain, but I’m very, very concerned about Palin being surrounded by Rove advisors and Rove speech writers. And in a closed-in society, you often see a telegenic, not-very-bright figurehead selected by the same group of criminals who intend to be the powers behind the throne in the next regime. They love elections. They hold elections all the time. They just make sure their elections are corrupted and that the figurehead that’s on their team gets in. So if we elect Obama, it’ll stabilize things long enough for what’s necessary for a real citizen’s revolution, a grassroots American democracy movement.

We’ve started one, and you can sign up for it with that piece of paper, that you’ll be able to. And you can go to MyAmericanProject.org. It’s going to be millions and millions of Americans. We have almost five million in the American People Campaign’s partner organizations.

But, here’s what I mean. Barack Obama may want to do all the right things to restore the Constitution. I believe he does sincerely. But many corporations are making trillions of dollars in shredding the Constitution. It’s not cost-effective to stand up for the Constitution. It’s true. Here’s what I mean, you’ll see this in the movie. At the end of the Cold War, the third of the economy making Cold War weapon systems needed to find another global enemy. And so they found the “War on Terror.” And now they’ve switched to surveillance and security technologies.

So, why did [Obama] cave on FISA? Because AT&T is going to make a bundle turning us into the enemy. They’re trading shares on Wall Street for technologies to spy on the Chinese. We are not out of the woods. Barack Obama cannot restore the Constitution without us holding our feet to the fire.

Alec: I have a friend of mine who’s a reservist, and he says we don’t have protests because we don’t have a draft, and people don’t have as much at stake.

Audience member calling out: Is there any evidence of that?

Alec: I don’t know. I’m not a sociologist and I don’t study that problem. [But] a friend of mine who’s a reservist, a guy I know from another field in my business, in the film and television business, who is a pretty right-wing guy. He’s a GI Joe, this guy, all the way. And he said the military, the last thing they want is a draft. He said the military doesn’t want a draft. They love a professional army. They love an army where everybody’s getting paid, you’ve got o bribe everybody to come and pay them more. With a draft, the fees go down, the prices go down, that the politics goes out. The Pentagon, the draft is anathema to them because then the public becomes engaged when their kids may die.

Naomi: I’ve got a chapter on protests in the new book, and what I discovered really surprised me. Basically over the last 30 years, there’s been a process of over-permitization that I believe is deliberate to make sure that our protest in America is pointless and puerile.

I studied what kind of protests bring down tyrannical regimes, and they’re the kind of protests that brought down the Berlin Wall and restored the people’s power in the Philippines, and liberated Estonia. They’re illegal in the United States now. I tried to stage a rally in Union Square for the Constitution. There I was with my bullhorn and two people and I was told 10 minutes in that it was illegal, because it’s illegal to use a bullhorn in Union Square without a permit. And I found out the permit process is set up to frustrate you and make you impotent, essentially, as citizens. You go to these marches and you go from here to there and you feel like that didn’t change anything. Well, guess what? It didn’t.

The kinds of the protests that change the outcome of history stop traffic. They bring everything to a halt. That’s what you had in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. That kind of protest is illegal now. The other reason people are staying home has to do with the militarization of the police forces. I was in my stroller - I was a hippie baby, I grew up in Haight-Ashbury. I was in my stroller with my mom or dad, against the bomb and against this and against that. When I take my kids to protests now, Homeland Security is sending millions of dollars to police departments, training them, giving them new lethal technologies, and paying in advance for the lawsuits that the ACLU is going to represent citizens for when they’ve been beaten or assaulted. So those are two reasons.

Jameel: I think that the question goes back to something that Alec was saying earlier, which is that people don’t care about these things because they’re not happening to them. They’re happening to non-citizens. And it’s true that when these policies were first instituted that they were being applied to non-citizens. The people held at Guantanamo are non-citizens. The people who were being wire-tapped around 9/11 were noncitizens.

But it’s increasingly true that all of these policies are being applied to Americans. Some of the people who are being held as enemy combatants are Americans. We now represent somebody who is a US resident, he was studying at Peoria, Illinois when he was picked up.

He’s held still as an enemy combatant. And also the NSA stuff is happening to people who are citizens too.

Naomi: The movie’s here, so I’m supposed to wrap it up. But I just want to say thank you so much for your patience. And before you go into this dark journey, I just want to say, history categorically shows that when we all work together we can reverse this and come out stronger. Thank you all so much.

Under discussion:

Fanboys  (2009)

Those who have spent the last three or four years following the parallel production nightmares of Fanboys and 5-25-77 would be excused for assuming that all films involving teenagers and early cuts of Star Wars films are cursed. The former, which Kevin reviewed at Comic-Con, should have been the nerd toast of summer 2007, but reshoots, reedits and a scuffle with the Weinsteins over the film’s pesky downer undercurrent mandated a number of shuffles down the calendar; it’s now tentatively scheduled to hit theaters at the end of next month. Geek excitement for 5-25-77 hit fever pitch when the film’s first trailer hit the web way back in January 2006 (and subsequently the won Golden Trailer for the best promo for a film that wasn’t actually released — yes, such an award exists). A rough cut screening (apparently, very rough) followed a year and a half later, and a year and a half after that, Patrick Read Johnson’s long MIA autobiographical epic, now simply called ‘77, had its official World Premiere this weekend at the Hamptons Film Festival, where it won a Heineken-sponsored indie auteur award. But don’t get too excited yet — it’s still not finished.

In his introduction to ‘77’s Saturday afternoon screening in the Hamptons, Johnson thanked programmer David Nugent for requesting to show the film, despite the fact that it is “still in post-production.” Johnson and crew reportedly got an influx of polishing cash earlier this year, and let’s just say we hope that polish is still in the process of being applied. In its current state, ‘77 is a good 35 minutes too long, its special effects alternate between inspired and straight dodgy, the performances are brutally uneven, it ends three or four times and it’s so drowned in source cue music that a fair deal of the dialogue is simply unintelligible. It’s a mess. But it’s kind of a fascinating mess.

Based on the filmmaker’s actual coming-of-age (which he discusses at length in this 2001 interview, when ‘77 was in the planning stages), John Francis Daley (the kid from Freaks and Geeks who kind of looks like Jon Heder, except attractive) stars as Pat, a sci-fi nerd in a teeny tiny Illinois town who, after having his world fundamentally changed by the appearance of the Star Baby at the end of 2001, goads his friends and siblings into starring in gonzo backyard sequels to that film, and Jaws (in a fake blood-filled swimming pool) and Planet of the Apes. Pat is deeply in love with cinema and maybe even talented, but without money for film school or access to a local film industry, he’s at an impasse. He tells his girlfriend Linda that he’s waiting for “alien relatives” to rescue him from rural Illinois and take him “back to a distant star system [called] Hollywood.” He gets his close encounter when his mother (Colleen Camp, in a part that Carrie Fisher reportedly turned down) arranges for him to fly out to Hollywood to meet with Herb Lightman, a failed filmmaker-turned-editor of American Cinematographer magazine. In LA for what seems like a day, under the wing of the cynical but still movie-obsessed Lightman (Austin Pendleton, in the film’s one truly solid performance), Pat stumbles into the prop shop for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, meets Steven Spielberg and special effects wizard Douglas Trumbell, and ends up seeing an early cut of the yet-to-be released Star Wars. It’s this last experience that really marks our young hero, and though the actor who plays George Lucas is mostly heard and not seen, Pat seems to find a kinship with the older filmmaker based on making fantasies real via the scrappiest means necessary (”Don’t tell anyone,” Lucas says. “We’re making this whole movie out of stuff you could find in your garage.”) Pat then goes back to his hometown and evangelizes on behalf of the upcoming space epic, via non-stop chatter and a t-shirt emblazoned with the film’s release date, 5-25-77.

Until the film’s final half-hour, where it almost feels like Johnson is so exhausted that he gives up on trying to be inventive (or maybe he just ran out of editing time) ‘77 is refreshingly free of exposition, and sometimes startlingly structurally complex. Pat’s “real” life, the movies he makes, the movies he sees, his daydreams and his nightmares are woven together almost seamlessly, with the confidence that the ideal viewer will have the cinema vocabulary to get it. And though the films referenced are by now mostly classics, there’s a strain of cinephilic discourse running throughout that can actually be fairly high-minded, and yet it’s self-reflexive enough that nothing is ever purely pretentious. It was obvious, in the cut we were shown, where the effects are finished and where they aren’t; the finished stuff looks great, the unfinished stuff looks REALLY unfinished. But on the whole. the level of ambition — and the fact that Johnson is more often than not actually able to pull off what he’s trying to do — is enough to cover for the fact that most of the performances are amateurish.

What it can’t cover for is the narrative’s spraw. There’s enough plot here for several episodes of CW-quality drama, and aside from the actual trip to Los Angeles, none of it feels like it’s operating at stakes higher than your average episode of teen-friendly TV. It seems smart to reserve further judgement until the film is finished, but one hopes that Johnson finds the distance he needs to whittle his passion project down to its core. Under the miasma of autobiography (which covers everything from young Pat’s car troubles to the loss of his virginity), it seems like within ‘77 there’s an earnest love letter, somehow both audience-friendly and totally formally experimental, to the birth of mass cinemania, the moment when sci-fi nerds in small towns around the world found the franchises that would make their obsessions seem more normal, that would make all these alien(ated) teenagers feel connected to one another through film. Johnson just needs to find it.