Here is my follow-up to last month’s question of what mainstream movie will feature on the most top ten movie lists. And the winner is … Ratatouille. Oh wait, didn’t I disqualify that one for being too obvious? No? Well, I should have. Yes, according to Movie City News’ Big Ass Chart (aka Scorecard) of critics’ top tens, the Pixar movie made it on to 51 best-of lists, making it the best-grossing best movie of the year. But maybe it wasn’t the most mainstream, if you define mainstream as studio-produced fare. Under that qualification Zodiac was the best mainstream movie of 2007, having been made jointly by Warner Bros. and Paramount and showing up on 70 best-of lists. Other Warner successes include Michael Clayton, which featured on 54 lists, Sweeney Todd, which received 44 mentions, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which showed up on one list, and Letters From Iwo Jima, which showed up a little late on one list.

As far as those mainstream movies I predicted would feature heavily, Knocked Up (34 lists) ended up defeating Superbad (25 lists) — meanwhile, the third Judd Apatow movie of the year, Walk Hard, managed to get on one critic’s list — though both were actually behind The Bourne Ultimatum (28 lists), when it came to “average vote” (average numerical placement on the list). If we’re going by mainstream appeal (and if Karina is correct in her view of the film), then Juno was the best mainstream comedy of the year with 63 lists. Hairspray (13 lists) beat out its crappy musical siblings Across the Universe (7 lists) and Enchanted (8 lists). In addition to showing up on Richard Corliss’ list, Beowulf managed 3 other mentions. And Transformers not only showed up on a top ten list, it featured on 3! Of course, it’s more surprising that Spider-Man 3 made it on 4 lists. The greatest thing to happen, of course, was Manohla Dargis listing The Kingdom as one of her favorites. Joining her is Don Payne. If I had made a top ten list (instead of this thing), the film could very well have beaten Transformers. Oh well, at least nobody put the shocking blockbuster Alvin and the Chipmunks on their list … yet.

While trying unsuccessfully to get over the whole Amy Adams kudos debacle (did you see she’s just been nominated for best actress by the Broadcast Film Critics Association?), I began wondering about year end lists and how many of them feature at least one obligatory mainstream movie. Typically its a funny but highly overrated comedy, like Borat, The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Little Miss Sunshine, sometimes its an action movie, rarely it’s a thriller or well-made horror flick.

So, I’m wondering what will be the most mainstream best movie of 2007, the one that features on the most year-end top ten lists. I’m so far discounting Juno, because it’s still in its little indie darling stage, and not yet a wide-release hit. Instead, I’m counting on either Knocked Up or even Superbad to take the honor. Already I’ve seen, thanks to Movie City News, both movies featured on a list made by a publication called the Georgetown Voice. But while I figured the former had more cred with critics, it’s the latter that has shown up on more lists by itself, including those of Victoria Times‘ Michael D. Reid and Artforum’s T.J. Wilcox.

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While I should have been a good cineaste and watched some Oscar-worthy documentaries or some Sundance-originating indies, I saw two mainstream movies this week. One was this past weekend’s box office winner, Beowulf; the other was Enchanted, which will surely be the Thanksgiving weekend champion. I found neither of them to be very remarkable in terms of storytelling, but each does have some significance to cinema, and each is noteworthy for its respective blurring of animation and live-action.

Obviously, Beowulf is animated. It is so far considered eligible for the Animated Feature Oscar, and aside from its few bits of photorealism, it looks like a cartoon (or a video game). But because the movie was made with real-life actors, who were “performance-captured”, there is still that link to live-action filmmaking. And there was hardly much reason, in my opinion, why it necessarily had to be made as an animated film. Meanwhile, Enchanted is primarily live-action, but it does have some bookending animated sequences, which figure into the gimmicky plot of a 2-D Disney Princess who magically finds herself in the 3-dimensional world of New York City. But it probably could have been fine as a completely animated film — maybe it could have been the Wizard of Oz of computer animation (as in 2-D to 3-D animation rather than black and white to color film). As it is, the “real-life” parts of Enchanted seem too artificial anyway.

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Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:

• Redacted: Bill O’Reilly can finally get a look at the film he’s sight-unseen been threatening to boycott, while Magnolia finally gets to put that whole all-press-is-good-press maxim to the test. Here’s my review from Telluride; for a recap on the possibly-contrived battle between director Brian DePalma and producer/distributor Mark Cuban, see here, here and here.
• Beowulf: Is director Robert Zemeckis not doing press for this film because he knows it’s a bad idea to compete with the post-Comic-Con gushage over Angelina Jolie’s nakedness?
• Smiley Face: Kevin and Paul are big fans of Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy, which came off a successful festival run to be all but abandoned by its distributor. The film opens on one screen in L.A. today before going straight to DVD. Listen to Paul’s interview with Araki here.
• Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is disappointing, despite Nicole Kidman’s strong performance as a wicked sister. Read the review here.
• Southland Tales: What can I say? I thought it was funny.

I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I’m actually very excited about Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture drool-fest, Beowulf, coming out tomorrow. I should probably know better. When dialog scenes are replaced with slick CG versions it’s a pretty safe indication that the movie will be little more than eye candy. Nevertheless, I’m dying to see an impossibly ripped Beowulf kick some Grendel ass.

My excitement about the movie has made me feel like a eleven year-old again, which has me thinking about two other passions from my younger years: stop-motion animation and Legos. I haven’t done much to nurture either of those loves in the last decade and a half, so I was unaware that there are a handful of hilarious videos on YouTube featuring stop-motion animated Lego mini-figs playing out scenes from movies. The best one I found was a the well-crafted short above, depicting the opening act of Beowulf, apparently “made for a school project.”

While Zemeckis pours millions into pushing CG animation to the next level, I’m glad there are still kids out there making movie magic in their basements, one frame at a time.

Anne Thompson’s respecting the Beowulf review embargo for the time being, but she can’t resist poking a bit at the flick’s major bait: gold-painted naked Angelina Jolie:

…in one scene when Angelina Jolie rises up out of her cave pool to seduce the mighty Beowulf, who has just killed her only son, Grendel, she walks on water, revealing that she is not only painted in gold, a la Goldfinger, but sports a tail and stacked high heels. Please. Barbie Doll stilettos in 5th century Denmark?

Two of the men I asked about this, intelligent film critics both, said it didn’t bother them. I guess Jolie worked her magic.

With Comic-con running through the weekend and finally wrapping yesterday, you probably opened your RSS reader this morning to find a seemingly endless backlogue of live blogs, Flickr streams and breathless “exclusives”. Me too — and after three hours of skimming, I’ve gleaned the following five takeaways:

1. There’s gonna be a lot of Black Sabbath in Iron Man

2. Rob Zombie might his Halloween remake a “re-imagining”, but he apparently had no interest in re-imagining the dumb-as-rails horror heroine.

3. Sorry, Robert DeNiro: you might have been forgiven for Rocky and Bullwinkle, but we will never, ever forget.

4. Beowulf could be the most Razzie-worth pile of crap since I Know Who Killed Me (more on that later today), but 100 percent of the world’s male film writers (and about 50 percent of the gals) will still give it a pass, and all because of the naked Angelina Jolie.

5. Jenna Jameson knows her way around a pun (scroll down to the part about Scarlett Johansson and “ins and outs”).

• Is Reese Witherspoon the great untapped comedic talent that David Denby thinks Vince Vaughn has been waiting for? The two stars will face off in a comedy called Four Christmases, which New Line is trying to hustle into production so as to be able to release it in tie for the 2008 holiday season.
• Anchor Bay has acquired some kind of distribution rights (home video? theatrical? The Variety story is vague) to Sex and Death 101. The film marks the long-awaited re-teaming of Heathers director Daniel Waters with the star of that 1989 film, Winona Ryder.
• With footage from Beowulf blowing Comic-con crowds away, the effects firm behind that film’s motion-capture technology has landed deals to develop effects for three additional projects, including an animated film about cavemen to be developed by Jon Favreau.

Co-writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman introduced a reel of fully-rendered footage from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf last night at Comic-con, and the reviews are rolling in.

David Poland thinks it’s an Oscar contender:

It is very easy to imagine, based on this small amount of footage, that Beowulf could be a huge smash that critics can actually get behind and that it could be a serious Academy player in the way Lord of the Rings was. Though this is not a trilogy, it seems ready to break even more ground in a real way. (The issue of acting nominations was something Avery & Gaiman considered out loud in the room tonight. With big names like Hopkins, Jolie, and Malkovich, one thinks they might actually turn that trick if all the pieces come together. The great Ray Winstone, who doesn’t look like himself, might have trouble on that basis alone.)

IGN’s Todd Gilchrist says that although Beowulf relies on the same motion-capture process Zemeckis used for The Polar Express, the director seems to have avoided the major failing of that film:

The main problem director Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express faced was its (literal) absence of life behind the CGI characters’ eyes, and Beowulf appears to have conquered this technical challenge: all of the characters act and react with a palpable sense of reality, not to mention a febrile kind of unpredictability, creating a much more authentic and evocative emotional backdrop for the larger-than-life story. Meanwhile, the general proficiency with which computer-generated imagery is rendered has evolved by leaps and bounds since those earlier films, creating an increasingly believable but nonetheless spectacularly melodramatic universe in which Beowulf’s adventures are concrete and also fantastic.

The Post Chronicle’s naked-Angelina Jolie-centric write-up is just creepy:

Brad Pitt’s lover Angie shows her sexy side once again as her naked body emerges from a dark pool of water, with little droplets of water dripping down her every curve.

The film’s trailer is now on Apple, so skip over there if these reports have made you salivate.