Alan Pakula is starting to pull away, which is something I certainly never predicted, so congrats to all his boosters. It does, however, put me in a bit of a spot: since I never assumed that he’d win – assumed, indeed, that he’d come up dead last – I didn’t vet his films for availability quite as hard as the other four, and while there shouldn’t be any problem getting to 15 of his 16 features, his third movie, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, is being a bit slippery. It’s never been released in any home video format, and all my voodoo isn’t enough to find it.
The good news, then, is that it’s coming out on DVD for the first time ever on September 8. The bad news is that this is an August project I had in mind. No matter, a month is just 31 days, so I am herewith announcing that if Pakula wins, I’ll be postponing his retrospective just until the DVD is ready to drop. To fill the August gap, I have selected another director to give a retrospective (again, in the event that Pakula wins): Jane Campion, of whose work I have seen, shamefully, not one single thing.
So there it is, Pakula voters: two directors for the price of one. Or will Miyazaki sweep back into first? I’m keeping voting open for just one more week, until 12:01 AM on Saturday, 1 August.
Incidentally, here’s how the 54 write-in votes look at the moment:
George Lucas is doing very well with 47 votes, thanks to an enthusiastic and wholly sincere supporter. The only other man with multiple nods is Honda Ishiro with 2, and while the director of Godzilla is surely worthy of more attention than he gets, there’s just too much to his filmography to make a month – or even two! – sufficient to do him justice. At one vote each, we have Ridley Scott, Michael Haneke (both of them were on the long list for this poll, incidentally), James Cameron (somebody didn’t notice that I specifically eliminated him as a choice; December is coming soon), Michael Bay (har-dee-har), and in a very sweet but woefully misguided bit of fandom, a Chicago-based filmmaker with one feature, two shorts and a short documentary to his credit, named Tim Brayton