BY DENNIS KING

Like lemmings, we movie critics line up every late December to release our lists of the year’s 10 best movies.

It’s a necessary chore, but try as we might to be independent minded there’s a numbing sameness to most critics’ lists. Dictating the year’s “best” films is so often a rote ritual, driven by urgencies of the upcoming awards season and marked by a certain inevitability as studios march out their prestige pictures and promotional blitzes to generate maximum holiday fanfare. Thus, most top 10 lists are necessarily top-heavy with these inescapable Oscar contenders.

The fated suspects show up on every list – “The Artist,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Descendents” and so on. And rightfully so. These are indeed among the year’s indisputable best. (* Below, see the 10 best voted by members of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. A worthy roster indeed.)

In a mild act of contrariness, we hereby issue our highly subjective list – not of “bests” but of spiffy double features comprised of some of the year’s coolest flicks. Not all of these movies will show up on others’ lists and they might not all figure into the manufactured hype of the pre-Oscar run-up. But they’re popcorn pairings we found to be neat and natural fits.

So, here are our top five double features for 2011:

“The Artist”/”Hugo” – A film buff’s dream double: French director Michel Hazanavicius’ silent valentine to silent cinema and Hollywood’s rocky transition to the era of “talkies,” and American master Martin Scorsese’s 3D epic of a mechanically gifted Parisian boy and his encounter with visionary French film pioneer Georges Melies. (Add in “My Week With Marilyn” and the knockout performance of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe and you have a cinephile’s eureka trifecta.)

“The Tree of Life”/”Melancholia”- Two brainy, abstract movies that address philosophically wonky, cosmic questions: Oklahoman Terrence Malick’s visual poem couches in its dead-on evocation of a 1950s boyhood in America’s heartland multiple big questions about creation, the afterlife and God; Danish trickster Lars von Trier’s dreamy duel examination of clinical depression and the end of the world is both beautiful and terrible to behold.

“War Horse”/”Buck” – Equine magnificence in all its earthy glory: Steven Spielberg’s painterly adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s classic young adult tale and the Tony-winning stage play is a gloriously old-fashioned horse opera; documentarian Cindy Meehl’s aw-shucks film portrait of original “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman is a life lesson in the intricate relationships between horses and people, one that brings out the best in both.

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”/”Project Nim” – Monkey business, low and high: The chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that populate director Rupert Wyatt’s surprisingly smart and emotionally resonant reboot of the fallow franchise based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 sci-fi novel are indeed a gnarly, frighteningly feral and hyper-realistic bunch; Oscar-winning documentary director James Marsh takes an unflinching and unsentimental look at Nim, the chimpanzee who was the focus of a landmark experiment aimed at showing that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. A sad, funny and unsettling biography of an animal we tried to make human.

“Moneyball”/”Seven Days in Utopia” – The Zen of baseball and golf: Director Bennett Miller’s portrait of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) shows that nerds, with the obsession over stats and box scores, can indeed win baseball games; director Matt Russell marshals the gnarled, wizened countenance of Robert Duvall to tell the spiritual tale of a troubled young pro golfer (Lucas Black) who recaptures his mojo by hanging out in the rustic, sagebrush environs of Utopia, Texas.

* Here’s the OFCC Top 10 films of 2011

1. “The Artist”
2. “Drive”
3. “The Descendants”
4. “Hugo”
5. “Shame”
6. “Moneyball”
7. “Midnight in Paris”
8. “Melancholia”
9. “The Tree of Life”
10.“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

Director Nicholas Ray’s movies were noted for their darkly roiling emotional undercurrents, their compassion for wounded loners and outcasts and their gritty commitment to realism.

In works such as “They Live By Night,” his auspicious 1948 debut, to his 1955 masterwork “Rebel Without a Cause” and notable films such as “In a Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar” and “Bigger Than Life,” Ray cemented his reputation as a passionate champion of social misfits and as a consummate Hollywood outsider himself.

If the stories he told onscreen were rigorously troubling and haunting, Ray’s life off screen was even more so. The drama he lived outside his work is related in gripping, sometimes sordid, detail in “Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director” (Harper Collins/It Books, $29.99), by veteran Hollywood biographer Patrick McGilligan.

Long on carefully researched incident, anecdote and detail, if a bit short on critical analysis, McGilligan’s 560-page examination of Ray’s raucous life sets the stage with the colorful adventures of the man’s rambling youth.

As a restless young bohemian, Ray flirted with the worlds of protest music (he recorded and caroused with Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly), New York theater (he worked with Thornton Wilder and Elia Kazan), architecture (he befriended Frank Lloyd Wright) and leftist politics (he flirted with Communism and became entangled with the House Committee on Un-American Activities).

By the time he came to Hollywood in his thirties as a protégé of producer John Houseman, Ray was carrying along some hefty psychological baggage. And in typical show-biz fashion, his self-destructive urges were exacerbated by drink, drugs and women.

Over the years, Ray romanced a bevy of starlets, including Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Joan Crawford and a teenaged Natalie Wood. But his second marriage, to blond bombshell Gloria Grahame (who played opposite Humphrey Bogart in Ray’s noir thriller “In a Lonely Place”), left a lifelong scar, according to the author. The marriage was shattered when Ray found Grahame in bed with his teenage son from his first marriage.

Ray’s stillborn working partnership with young James Dean was also a source of tragedy in the director’s life. After forming a close bond with the gifted young actor on “Rebel Without a Cause,” Ray’s masterpiece of youthful angst, the two planned future projects together. But Dean’s untimely death in a car crash left Ray devastated and drove him deep into a netherworld of drink and drugs.

True to the subtitle of the book, McGilligan duly follows Ray’s precipitous fall from grace and the final sad years of his career, until his death from cancer in 1979. In his later years, Ray enjoyed a small renaissance as his work was revived and celebrated by influential European critics.

Still, by most measures his great potential was never fully realized, and Ray himself admitted he was “the best damn filmmaker in the world who has never made one entirely good, entirely satisfactory film.” The convincing evidence offered in “Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director” seems to bear that out.

- Dennis King

Constructing a comprehensive documentary history of Hollywood – from the larger-than-life moguls who molded the movie industry into a culture-changing force to the film stars who became its glamorous, extravagant public personification – is a daunting, if not impossible, task.

But if any organizations are best equipped to try it, they’re probably Warner Brothers and Turner Classic Movies, which have massive archival film libraries to draw upon and in the case of TCM a long-established history for earnest consideration of motion pictures as a serious as well as commercial art form.

WB and TCM mustered considerable resources in 2010 to produce and broadcast “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood.” It’s an informative and entertaining seven-part, seven-hour documentary series that doesn’t really come close to being comprehensive but nevertheless offers an engaging ground-up primer on how movies have come to be such a potent force in shaping popular culture.

First, a couple of caveats: This is indeed a “Hollywood history” and doesn’t take into account developments in worldwide cinema, except to briefly acknowledge early breakthroughs by such European pioneers as Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers. And while it certainly offers up a rich cavalcade of familiar movie stars, the primary focus throughout seems to fall more on the moguls, mainly men, who built the studios and wielded iron-fisted power in determining how and what movies got made and how they were presented to an eager public.

“Moguls & Movie Stars” has been released on three discs, featuring seven episodes that cover highlights in film evolution between 1889 and 1969.

And “highlights” is indeed the operative term. A mere seven hours is barely enough time to skim the surface of Hollywood’s colorful history, with occasional pauses to delve a bit more deeply into certain notable, notorious, high-profile or game-changing developments.

Here’s a capsule look at each chapter:

“Peepshow Pioneers” (1889-1907) – Looks at the technological innovations of Thomas Edison, Auguste and Louis Lumiere and others; at the rough-and-tumble Nickelodeons and the early efforts of founders such as Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner brothers; at early movie making in New York and Fort Lee, N.J. and
the silent-era stars such as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. Narrated by Christopher Plummer, this section is necessarily more talky and short on illustrative film clips (with the exception of “A Trip to the Moon” and “The Great Train Robbery” as examples of early “story” movies).

“The Birth of Hollywood” (1907-1920) – Examines the migration West and the shaping of Hollywood as the primary film production center; the first feature-length movie, “The Squaw Man,” and the rise of westerns stars such as Tom Mix and William S. Hart; the comedy of the Mack Sennett studios and the work of comic stars such as Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand.

“The Dream Merchants” (1920-1928) – The formation of various studios – Warner Bros., MGM, Universal, Fox and Paramount – as moviemaking powers; the silent era; the development of grand, studio-owned movie palaces that made watching films a special event, and the formation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (as the moguls’ means of fighting the newly formed film unions).

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dream?” (1929-1941) – Looks at the effects of the Great Depression on the film industry; at the game-changing introduction of “talkies” and the rise of stars such as Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Shirley Temple, Mae West and the Marx Brothers; at the promising addition of Walt Disney to the ranks of inventive, pioneering movie moguls.

“Warriors and Peacemakers” (1941-1950) – Examines the dramatic effects of World War II and the movies that war inspired; looks at anti-trust efforts to prohibit studios from controlling both production and exhibition of films in their own theaters.

“The Attack of the Small Screen” (1950-1960) – Covers the advent of television and its impact on the film business; the coming sexual revolution and the ascension of big-screen sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Marlon Brando; the dire effects of government “red baiting” and the terrible toll that blacklisting took on many Hollywood careers.

“Fade Out, Fade In” (1960-1969) – Concludes by looking at the demise of the old studio system and examining new systems of so-called “indie” film production; the rise of foreign film influence in Hollywood and the effect it had on a new generation of young, counterculture American filmmakers.

As the series progresses through these chapters, it becomes increasingly superficial and increasingly obvious that the subject is simply too big to cover in one-hour episodes. The territory covered and the information provided is largely textbook stuff that seems fitting for college-level introductory film course. Those hoping for startling revelations or deeper insight into cinema history will feel shortchanged.

Nevertheless, “Moguls & Movie Stars: A Hollywood History” is never less than entertaining and enjoyable. It’s merely that it’s popcorn-light and bites off far more subject matter than it can realistically chew.

- Dennis King

With all the hype, glamour, opulent wealth and sunny self-congratulations surrounding each year’s Academy Awards presentations, it’s strange to think back to a time when the movie business was a loose assortment of slightly disreputable hustlers scrambling to give their fledgling industry a gloss of respectability and prestige.

That’s just the colorful and deliciously seedy backstory that emerges from “Bringing Up Oscar: The Story of the Men & Women Who Founded the Academy” (Pegasus, $27.95), author Debra Ann Pawlak’s rambling and anecdote-filled history of the motley pioneers, hucksters and dreamers who built the movie industry into a pop-culture dynamo and gave birth to the little golden statuette called Oscar.

Essentially, Pawlak’s book is a 384-page, copiously detailed historical survey
cataloging the lives and careers of the 34 men and two women who in January 1927 were summoned by MGM founder Louis B. Mayer to an industry gathering that led to the establishment of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.

At a pivotal moment in Hollywood history – when Prohibition and the Depression were creating great uncertainty and when movie-star extravagance, murders and drug scandals threatened to forever taint the infant industry’s reputation – Mayer and others agreed on the need for an organization to promote and uphold film as a high art, as well as a profitable business. Hence, the gathering of founders.

A colorful gathering it was, indeed, including a retinue of one-time cowboys, vaudevillians, prospectors and even junk dealers who were in on the ground floor of the prospering motion picture business. Some of the movers were already household names (Cecil B. DeMille, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks) and some were cantankerous usurpers with shaky histories (Harry M. Warner, who ran a bicycle shop before producing the breakthrough “talkie” titled “The Jazz Singer,” and Joseph M. Schenck, who did jail time before going on to discover Marilyn Monroe).

Others were stolid, behind-the-scenes functionaries, little known to the movie-going public – Hollywood lawyer Edwin Loeb, special-effects artist Roy Pomeroy, director Fred Niblo and actor Milton Sills.

In the book’s exhaustive first section, Pawlak draws detailed profiles of each Academy player, including minute biographical information on parents, siblings, marital status and employment history. Much of the data is mind-numbing and relevant mainly to film researchers of the pickiest kind. Certainly, Pawlak, a freelance writer from Michigan, has done ample digging to bring all this information together.

And, certainly, “Bringing Up Oscar” offers some fascinating details and florid anecdotes about the mythology of old Hollywood, the early history of moviemaking and the eventful lives of filmdom’s founders.

However, Pawlak’s book is mainly an earnest compilation of facts, details and stories that can be found elsewhere (especially those concerning the big-name moguls). She’s most successful in providing a broad overview and details on the Academy’s lesser-known players.

With its scattered structure and head-long rush through film history, “Bringing Up Oscar” never seems to find the narrative momentum to make it a good read. It’s best for dipping into here and there for bits of colorful history and biography. For Oscar fans, it’s a useful though not essential addition to a movie-lover’s library.

- Dennis King

It was a film that forever altered the nation’s collective sense of fashion, film and sexual mores – not to mention the brittle, squeaky clean image of actress Audrey Hepburn. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” drawn from Truman Capote’s translucent novella that most Hollywood producers deemed “unadaptable,” became a film that defined a profound sea change in Hollywood and in America at the dawning of the 1960s.

Just how this wispy tale of a spirited Manhattan good-time girl came to be such a potent cinematic emblem of glamour, sexual politics and the new morality is told in Sam Wasson’s delightful book, “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” (HarperStudio, $19.99), a pithy behind-the-scenes look at the messy making of an era-defining classic.

Wasson, who previously surveyed the works of Tulsa-born director Blake Edwards in the witty, wide-ranging “A Splurch on the Kisser,” sharply pulls his focus here to chronicle Edwards’ trials and tribulations in bringing Capote’s light-as-a-bubble story to the screen. The challenge was considerable: the book lacked a second act and forceful dramatic motivations, it featured a nameless gay protagonist and an unhappy ending. Not exactly the stuff of feel-good Hollywood fantasy.

One early producer’s coverage report cited by Wasson predicted dim prospects for the book’s adaptation to the screen. “In any event this is more of a character sketch than a story,” the reader noted. “NOT RECOMMENDED.”

Wasson lays out the disagreements, stumbling blocks, misjudgments, on-set feuds and near disasters in the making of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with a novelist’s eye for telling detail and narrative tension and a refreshing irreverence. In fact, the story reads like gripping fiction yet falls neatly into the factual confines of the “nonfiction novel” that Capote so brazenly claimed to invent with “In Cold Blood.”

“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” is packed with juicy tidbits that will surprise even avid film buffs. For instance:

- Capote was against casting Hepburn – who was defined in the American mind by wholesome roles in “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina” – as Holly Golightly and instead lobbied vigorously for Marilyn Monroe.

- Hepburn herself was reluctant to take a role that played so starkly against her lily-white screen image. Yet, as Wasson lays out the story, Hepburn emerges as a smart, thoroughly modern woman, more cunning and complex than her ingénue image would imply.

- Producers resisted having Henry Mancini contribute a song for the film, and Johnny Mercer’s original lyric for the eventual signature tune was “Blue River.” One unimpressed Paramount exec famously remarked on “Moon River” that “the song should go.”

- Two endings for the film were shot – one romantic, the other melancholy.

- George Peppard, as Holly’s heterosexual soulmate Paul Varjak, was widely disliked on the set and almost got into a fistfight with Edwards.

- The guest list for the post-premiere party was a hodge-podge of who’s whos and has-beens, including Dennis Hopper, Jane Mansfield, Buster Keaton and Charles Laughton.

- Capote himself was dismissive of the finished film, archly characterizing it as “a mawkish valentine to New York City.”

All this and more is fit into Wasson’s slim volume, as trim and neatly tailored as Givenchy’s little black dress. “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” is sparkling storytelling, as bubbly and bracing as the film it chronicles and also as filled with deep and timeless cultural resonance.

- Dennis King

Silly names have been a staple of comedy since the early days of vaudeville, and when old burlesque performers eventually moved in front of Hollywood’s rolling cameras their outlandish sobriquets, garish noms de plume, goofy monikers and loopy pseudonyms came along with them

And so pioneers of comedy traipsed across Nickelodeon screens in the guise of characters such as Egbert Souse, Cuthbert J. Twillie, Larson E. Whipsnide, T. Frothingill Bellows, Rollo La Rue, Elmer Prettywillie and Professor Eustace McGargle (all W.C. Fields inventions), or as Wolf J. Flywheel, Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Otis B. Driftwood and Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (a.k.a. Groucho Marx).

That va-va-voom vamp Mae West gave us the suggestive Marlo Manners, Flower Belle Lee and Peaches O’Day.

And while the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy mostly appeared onscreen in their heyday as Stan and Ollie, their earlier screen incarnations, both together and individually, were rich with purple appellations. Stan boasted performances as Ferdinand Finkleberry, Romaine Ricketts, Winchell McSweeney, Rhubarb Vaselino, Gabriel Goober, Dippy Donawho and Magnum Dippytack, while Ollie donned such character names as J. Piedmont Mumblethunder, Sharkey Nye, Oswald Schwartzkopple and Solomon Soopmeat.

Preston Sturges, that master of screwball comedy from the 1930s and ‘40s, wrote into his scripts such distinctively nutty character names as Dr. Zodiac Z. Zippe (“Hotel Haywire”), Charles Poncefort Pike (“The Lady Eve”), Constable Edmund Kockenlocker (“The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”), Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith and Sgt. Heppelfinger (“Hail the Conquering Hero”), Harold Diddlebock and E.J. Waggleberry (“The Sin of Harold Diddlebock”) and Judge Alfalfa J. O’Toole (“The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend”).

Comic Bob Hope kept close to his vaudeville roots with such movie names as Milford Farnsworth (“Alias Jesse James”), Pippo Popolino (“Casanova’s Big Night”), Hot Lips Barton (“Road to Rio”), Painless Peter Potter (“The Paleface”) and Humphrey “Sorrowful” Jones (“Sorrowful Jones”).

Even sexpot Marilyn Monroe wasn’t immune to a little suggestively silly nicknaming, appearing on screen as such characters as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (“Some Like It Hot”), Pola Debevoise (“How to Marry a Millionaire”) and Dusky Ledoux (“Right Cross”).

Hollywood he-men generally veered toward macho character names in their movies, but every so often they also got saddled with slightly silly monikers. John Wayne turned in one of his best performances ever as Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit,” and as an early matinee cowpoke the Duke labored under such trumped-up sagebrush pseudonyms as Stony Brooke, Duke Slade, Biff Smith, Dare Rudd and Singin’ Sandy Saunders.

Even big star James Stewart suspended his leading man image to play such whimsically named characters as Mattie Appleyard (“Fools’ Parade”), Elwood P. Dowd (“Harvey”) and Rowdy Dow (“The Gorgeous Hussy”).

Some modern comic actors still hold to that old tradition of silly names, notably Ben Stiller, who has created such amusing screen roles as Gaylord Focker (“Meet the Parents”), Tugg Speedman (“Tropic Thunder”), Derek Zoolander (“Zoolander”), Bwick Elias (“If Lucy Fell”), Garth Motherloving (TV’s “The Simpsons”) and Reuben Feffer (“Along Came Polly”). And Woody Allen has contributed two of the best with nebbishy Fielding Mellish (“Bananas”) and the pseudo-murderous Virgil Starkwell (“Take the Money and Run”).

Of course, the silly name phenomenon isn’t limited to film comedies. Occasionally, goofy character names even show up in heavyweight dramas – note Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt (“Interview With the Vampire”) or Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle (“Taxi Driver”). The list is endless.

If there were a Silly Name Hall of Fame we’d nominate all of the above, plus the following, for a place of honor:

Tom Cruise again as Cole Trickle (“Days of Thunder”), Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore (“Goldfinger”), Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe (“Every Which Way But Loose”), Uma Thurman as Beatrix Kiddo (“Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2”), Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler (“Boogie Nights”), Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo (“Midnight Cowboy”), Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko (“Wall Street”), Scott B. Morgan (uncredited) as Keyser Soze (“The Usual Suspects”), Harvey Korman as Hedley Lamarr (“Blazing Saddles”), Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink (“Reservoir Dogs”), Yano Anaya and Zack Ward as Grover Dill and Scut Farkus (“A Christmas Story”), Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips O’Houlihan (“MASH”), Jon Heder as Napoleon Dynamite (“Napoleon Dynamite”), Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley (“Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”).

And naturally there’s George Lucas, who stands in a category of his own for silly and sillier names via “Star Wars” – from the mainstays Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader to supporting players such as Boba Fett, Mace Windu, Jar Jar Binks, Hermi Odle, Jek Porkins, Kit Fisto, Lak Sivrak, Momaw Nadon, Mon Mothma, Nute Gunray, Ponda Baba, Salacious B. Crumb, Sy Snootles, Sio Bibble, Plo Koon, Dexter Jettster and on and on.

Did we leave any out? Have your own favorites? Send them in to dking@wimgo.com and we’ll include them soon in an updated version of this post.

- Dennis King

Movies are all about moving images, but advertising graphics in the form of posters and glossy stills offer an artful subset to the glamour side of films that is well worth celebrating.

And that’s just what takes place in a lovely new coffee-table book titled “Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters From Classic Hollywood” (Abbeville Press), a celebration of graphic arts by noted film historian and collector Ira M. Resnick. The glossy tome hits bookstore shelves on Feb. 9.

Boasting vivid color reproductions of 250 posters and 40 stills from Hollywood’s Golden Age (1912-1962), the book offers not just stunning artwork but also a valuable insider’s perspective on cinema history beginning in the silent era and running up to the release of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Resnick, founder of the Motion Picture Arts Gallery in Rutherford, N.J., the first gallery devoted exclusively to the art of the movies, holds a rare personal collection of 2,000 posters and more than 1,500 stills, many rarely seen outside pricy collectors’ circles.            He’s a professional photographer and serves as a trustee of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the International Center for Photography.

Along with the artwork, Resnick offers insights and anecdotes about his collecting history and his encounters with Hollywood elite. Arranging the posters to highlight the careers of such stars as Lillian Gish, the Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe, John Barrymore and Audrey Hepburn, Resnick neatly manages to chart evolutionary courses in several stars’ careers. The book also provides an insightful forward by director Martin Scorsese.

Bonus materials in the book include a glossary of terms and poster sizes, helpful tips for collectors and a list of Resnick’s 50 favorites one-sheets.

The oversized book in hardcover is set to retail for $65.

– Dennis King