Today’s filmmakers can conjure up any creature they can imagine courtesy of computer technology. But for much of the 20th century directors had two stark choices – dress up an actor in a garish costume or pick up the phone and call Harryhausen for help.

The FX maestro perfected the art of stop-motion animation, the kind that brought early movie monsters like King Kong to life. Harryhausen’s work is front and center in “Mysterious Island,” the 1961 thriller just released on Blu-ray. The story of Civil War soldiers deposited on an island filled with danger roars to life whenever Harryhausen’s handiwork shuffles onto the screen.

“Mysterious Island” opens with a group of Union soldiers plotting their escape from a Virginia Confederate prison. They overpower their guards and make a bee line to a hot-air balloon stationed nearby.

They’re up, up and away to freedom, but a series of storms sends the balloon far off course, and they end up crashing near an island that looks untouched by man. They quickly hunker down in a mountain side excavation and use some “Gilligan’s Island” like ingenuity to recreate the creature comforts of home.

They even have their own version of Mrs. Howell courtesy of actress Joan Greenwood’s husky-voiced matriarch.

But they aren’t alone on the island. They soon run into a gargantuan crab, a bird the size of an elephant and other amazing creatures which turn their island paradise into a nightmare.

The film’s generic cast isn’t as hokey as one would expect given the era in question, although Michael Callan’s wan performance as the youngest and hunkiest soldier feels like a focus-tested cast addition.

The opening action sequence is surprisingly crisp, and it’s grand fun to watch the soldiers put aside their grievances and get down to the business of survival. No navel gazing, no long epiphanies about their lot on life. Modern audiences may blanch at how the work is divvied up on the island, with the women folk sewing and the men saving the day with their brute weapons. But given the setting the gender divide seems more than appropriate.

“Mysterious Island” takes on dramatic water with the arrival of Captain Nemo (“Pink Panther” foil Herbert Lom). Nemo’s inventions give the film a jolt, but his arguments against war and man’s inhumanity to one another are so crudely delineated they spoil the B-movie fun underway.

The creatures who threaten our heroes are an odd lot, indeed. Some of Harryhausen’s best work involves fantasy monsters like Medusa in “The Clash of the Titans,” but here he’s working with ordinary animals magnified to monstrous sizes. The crab and bees in particular have aged well, and even when the actors interact with the beasties the illusion of terror remains more or less intact. Credit the shrewd editing and Harryhausen’s ability to mimic how real creatures behave.

The new Blu-ray edition lacks extras of consequence. We’re left with only an isolated score track, the original theatrical trailer and a TV advertisement for the film. It’s a shame the minds behind the release couldn’t have corralled some of today’s FX gurus to share how Harryhausen’s work still influences their art.

An incurably snarky acquaintance of mine has recently introduced me to the word “suckage.” Apparently this magic word can qualify as a noun, verb, adjective, and with a little creative thought, a personal pronoun as well. While I am not sure I agree with the idea that this is the Swiss army knife of words, I think that this is the perfect word to express how I feel about whatever process is used to figure out who gets honored with an Oscar statue.

While there is always a healthy debate over who won the industry’s most aesthetically unpleasing award, there is not often a lot of discussion about the folks who were completely snubbed by an academy dedicated to the principals and values of “suckage.”

Here are 10 people, films, or entities that should be displaying Oscar on their mantles but aren’t.

Ray Harryhausen
Anybody watching Ray Harryhausen work would think he was just a middle aged man playing with dolls. While this is probably not uncommon in Hollywood, especially in any residence owned by somebody from the Sheen family, what was really going on was a master craftsman at work. Ray may not have invented the stop motion technique, but he certainly perfected it. During his prime he was a one man “Industrial Light and Magic” who inserted world class special effects into mediocre (at best) films. His long shadow fell over, and influenced an entire generation of special effects enthusiasts and without his groundbreaking work the world would probably not have films like Jurassic Park and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is a crime against nature that, other than a special technical Oscar, this man was never honored for his magical work in a specific film. 

Wes Craven
During a horror era marked by machete wielding maniacs in masks, Wes Craven took the genre out of the physical and into another dimension; literally. He created a horror masterpiece with The Nightmare on Elm Street and probably, single handedly, provided the makers of Ambien with an extremely tired, and afraid to sleep, client base. While this film was ground breaking and breathed new life into a tired and predictable horror genre, the Academy decided that Flashdance and Wargames were more worthy of nominations than Mr. Kruger and Mr. Kraven in 1984.

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“The Passion of the Christ”
It’s hell being Mel. At least it was back in 2004 when we all still thought he was charming and didn’t know he was actually a restraining order looking for someplace to happen. Back then he was the director who brought the film The Passion of the Christ to life. This powerful and moving film depicted what many believe was the most important moment in the history of the world. Had the Roman historian, Tacitus, seen the film, he probably would have said, “Yup, that’s exactly what we did to him.” Seeing as Hollywood rejects Christianity in much the same way that the human body would reject a heart transplant from a water buffalo, the Academy chose to pretend this film, the near billion dollars in revenue it generated, and the millions of people who loved it, simply didn’t exist.

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“300″
In real life, were it not for Leonidas and his Spartans giving their lives in a crucial delaying action, it is very possible that all of Greece would have fallen to the Persian Empire. The map of the western world would be a very different place if that had happened. This is an inconvenient, politically incorrect fact for the people in Hollywood who now refer to terrorism as “man made disasters”. Most of the categories that 300 should have been nominated for instead featured a musical about a murderous English barber (Sweeny Todd) and his cannibalistic girlfriend. This was a disservice to the visually stunning and well acted 300.

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Christina Hendricks
People may ask why Christina Hendricks is on this list. She doesn’t have a film out this year, and currently stars on a cable television program. Here is the answer; because she is Christina f’n Hendricks. They should have a special Oscar just for the category of women who most resemble Jessica Rabbit.

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Kevin Smith
We are never going to hear the words “And the Oscar for best supporting actor goes to Silent Bob”; nor should we ever. Even so, Kevin Smith defined a generation with his films and deserves some recognition. Both Clerks and Dogma should have been at least nominated by the Academy for the Best Writing Oscar.

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“American History X”
Any world where the film Shakespeare in Love beats American History X in anything is not a world I want to live in. Shakespeare in love is just another thinly veiled screen adaption of Romeo and Juliet. They may as well have just rolled one of those disclaimers that states “The names have been changed to protect the innocent” during the opening credits. American History X was a substantive narrative on racial tensions and how they can poison the minds of the youth, regardless of color. While it didn’t win an Oscar, I think American History X won in the court of public opinion.

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Haley Joel Osment
In the film The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment made us believe he saw dead people. He was such a good actor at that age he could have said that he saw Bigfoot getting a coffee at Burger Chef and most of us would have believed him. Despite a performance that should have made him a shoe in for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, he lost to Michael Caine. Who cares what movie Mr. Caine won his Oscar for, he once starred in Jaws 4 (Jaws: The Revenge “This Time its Personal”). That fact alone should put him in an Oscar “time out” that bars him from getting nominated for anything until the middle of this century. The Fact that Haley walked away as part of the “it’s an honor to be nominated” crowd, is living proof that there is a Tom Cruise sized statue somewhere on the Academy red carpet with a sign that states “You must be this tall to win an Oscar.”

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Pixar
Pixar has produced a number of extremely high quality films. For their efforts they have collected enough Oscars to fill a stadium with. Of course they always get their awards in the “animated” category. It is time to realize that these animated films are often the best movie of the year…period. This year Toy Story 3 is up for the Best Picture Oscar. It was an almost perfect film and certainly the best thing to hit the screen in 2010. Its time Pixar got recognized for the quality of their work instead of just stuck in the same pigeon hole that Daffy Duck and Mickey Mouse call home.

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Tim Curry
I was recently re-watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show when I had an epiphany. The last epiphany I had involved spreading peanut butter between two fudge pop-tarts. That was a religious experience. The one I had while watching Rocky Horror was a cinematic realization. It’s simply this. When you step outside the silly context of the movie and objectively look at the job that Tim Curry did as the lead, the only conclusion one can come to is that this was a world class piece of acting. He is a fairly normal man from a middle class background who credibly played a bizarre, borderline sinister, mildly psychopathic, bi-sexual/trans-sexual character. If the Oscars are about the best performances, and not politics, industry lobbying, cleavage, and coffee house claptrap, than Mr. Curry should have gotten some serious consideration for the Best Actor award. Mr. Curry so immersed himself in the part that his own sense of self-consciousness (and quite possibly his sense of self as a whole) became non-existent. In short, he became (for all intents and purposes) the character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. This gave the viewer the rare gift of an effortless suspension of disbelief. Let’s watch Liam Neeson play Oscar Schindler while wearing nothing but a teddy and see if he can still pull that trick off.

And all the while TCM played in the background, like an old friend.

I’ve since reflected on how Turner Classic Movies has grown over the years into one of the most universally admired cultural forums in America. It’s a familiar presence in households of all political persuasions. If you like old movies, you like TCM, period.

That’s why the mini-uproar here at Big Hollywood last week was so disheartening. For those of you who missed it: during an on-air introduction to the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz gave legions of conservative viewers a collective poke in the eye, by way of a not-so-veiled sneer at talk-show host Glenn Beck. You can see the sad spectacle for yourself by clicking over to the TCM website, but here are the money quotes:

My top pick this January, A Face in the Crowd, is admittedly a little cheap. . . But, in an era where the political commentators who shout the loudest — or (dramatic pause and sly smile) cry the most — generate the biggest ratings, the prophetic nature of this 1957 classic enhances its remarkable timeliness today. . . Fifty years later, there’s a new generation of men armed with the phony authenticity of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes.

Beck, of course, has long been mocked on liberal websites for shedding tears in the midst of emotional monologues. And comparing him to Crowd character “Lonesome” Rhodes is a favorite gag of MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann.

This is hardly the first time that Mankiewicz has overstepped the bounds of good taste to take a swipe at conservatives. Big Hollywood readers have called him onto the carpet before for inserting needless political commentary into his TCM introductions for films like The Fighting Seabees (1944) and Capricorn One (1977).

As a former co-host of the liberal radio talk show The Young Turks, he frequently unloaded on ideological enemies with stunning vitriol. In one episode, he scoffed at a video of conservative journalist Michelle Malkin pointing out that most terrorists are “young Muslim males” with a rejoinder about “dumb Asian bitches.” (his radio partner, Cenk Uygur, promptly dipped even further into rank misogyny, dismissing Malkin as a “racist whore.”) In another public appearance, the same duo graced their audience with the following banter:

Cenk Uygur: “This is non-partisan, so when I say that Republicans suck c***, I just mean that literally.”

Ben Mankiewicz (laughing): “Name a Republican who’s not gay. Can that be done?”

All of this is par for the course among Lexus liberals, who ever luxuriate in their reputation for tolerance in between rants filled with the worst sorts of racism, sexism, and class warfare. I still remember laughing out loud earlier this year when, in a Los Angeles Times article bemoaning the hardships of well-heeled, fashion-conscious women, Mankiewicz’s wife spoke of feeling

guilty about flashing her finds in front of the housekeeper who cleans the Westside town house she shares with her husband. “I have racks for shoes and boxes. I will turn around the boxes that are particularly expensive when she comes,” she said, explaining that she turns the side marked with the price toward the wall of the closet so it doesn’t show. “I know she’s having a tough time — she told me. You can’t have an $800 box of shoes showing.”

That is what passes for good manners, charitable action, and noble sacrifice in today’s Hollywood.

Mankiewicz was recently fired from a disastrous year-long stint co-helming the former Siskel & Ebert show At the Movies, and has since taken up blogging at The Huffington Post in addition to his TCM duties. “Growing up in Washington, D.C.,” he says, “politics and sports were always a lot more important than movies. They still are, for that matter.” When pressed to name a film that has changed his life, he answers, “Hey, I love movies, but let’s not get carried away! I don’t think one has changed my life.” These comments alone should have disqualified him from ever being hired as a featured host at TCM.

With every snide put-down and sneaky swipe against movie-loving conservatives, a universally admired television treasure becomes a little less so. Ben Mankiewicz seems destined to continue to alienate a full half of the channel’s audience, one needless insult at a time, until they quit the whole business in disgust and retreat to their Netflix queues. The TCM brass, presumably a bit more concerned with gauche ratings than the hired help, would be wise to heed the warning of the literary critic Francis Jeffrey, who wrote almost two centuries ago that, “Goodwill, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one.”

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history.

His first triumph, made on a shoestring budget and a scant few weeks of shooting time, was a little picture called Rocky (1976). He had no money, no stars, no amazing effects, and yet Avildsen used camera, music, and editing to craft scenes of immense power and impact. Has there ever been a film, before or since, that ends on a more rousing wave of uplift? That takes such pains to create identification and empathy with its wide array of characters? That more patiently or expertly builds up to its cataclysmic swell of emotion? That has the guts and sense of timing to fade to black at the exact peak, frustrating our desire to know what happens next even as it leaves us too blissful to care?

Rocky did all of that and much more, and despite its fight scenes now looking like slow-mo hokum compared to the MMA-style mayhem that now rules on TV, it remains the most memorable and effective boxing film ever made. That’s really saying something, given the immense amount of solid competition the genre boasts.

But as other directors began ineptly looting and mimicking Avildsen’s style and innovations, it looked as if everything that made Rocky great would quickly become so cliché as to make a repeat impossible. We all know that sinking feeling when we begin perceiving the clunky wheels of the typical “Hollywood sports plot” turning — that excruciatingly slow crawl towards the utterly predictable final showdown, where the very last seconds of a contest are shamelessly milked until the hero finally hits the last shot/punch/goal/basket. Even the Rocky sequels couldn’t escape these pitfalls, and it would be hard to blame an audience for glumly concluding that Avildsen’s 1976 artistic triumph had spoiled the sports movie for all time.

So who would have guessed that, eight years later, Avildsen would essentially pull off the same trick again? How on earth did he once again make a Rocky-style plot arc work, without the end result becoming a pale pastiche?

He achieved this feat in large part by turning everything we remember from Rocky on its head. Ralph Macchio’s Daniel Larusso is played not as a thickheaded lummox, but as a fast-thinking, bone-skinny teen whose nasal Jersey whine sounds more like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer than Sylvester Stallone. He’s neither a down-and-out fighter with his best years behind him, nor is he looking to “go the limit” to prove something profound to himself. He’s just a kid at the very beginning of his adult life, who for most of the film limits his ambition to simply not getting beat up. Similarly, Elizabeth Shue’s Ali Mills is light years away from Talia Shire’s Adrian Pennino: rich instead of poor, charming rather than an ugly duckling, sociable not shy. And Pat Morita’s unforgettable Mr. Miyagi isn’t washed up or pathetically ambitious like Burgess Meredith’s Mickey Goldmill — he’s the very epitome of contentment and balance and wisdom.

Rocky achieved its verisimilitude with generous dollops of grime, rust, blood and profanity, whereas The Karate Kid is notable for its relative wholesomeness (note how Elizabeth Shue even wears a one-piece swimsuit to the beach instead of the obligatory teen-movie bikini). The music marks yet another telling departure. Rocky’s iconic score, by Bill Conti, was a mix of 1970s funk, heroic brass, and a choir acting as a Greek chorus, all combined into a sonic brew that still ranks as one of the most recognizable and rousing in film history. For The Karate Kid, Conti was once again brought in as the composer. But this time, in between pop songs like Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” he chose a light mix of delicate strings, only occasionally allowing them to burst forth into full orchestral splendor. For the training montage, Conti completely eschews Rocky’s reliance on trumpeting brass and instead opts for the lonely skirling of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute, creating a more spiritual and intimate vibe.

Avildsen’s camera, for its part, is probing and observant, often making excellent use of telephoto lenses to highlight what would otherwise be a missed reaction or expression. He achieves true poetry in the training scenes: on the beach among the circling cranes, on the lake amidst glittering golden waters, and even in the fights and strategies that pulse through the climactic tournament. He also warred with the studio when necessary to protect certain crucial scenes, such as the one where a drunken Miyagi reveals his service in WWII to Daniel. That one adds a whole new layer of depth to what was already a touching and authentic relationship, and yet the studio wanted it cut, deeming it superfluous.

On top of all that, the excellent screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen (who distinguished himself more recently by penning the immensely satisfying kidnap flick Taken) consistently leads Avildsen down novel paths. The teen villains of the story (portrayed by, among others, Steve McQueen’s son Chad and Elizabeth Shue’s brother Andrew) are refreshingly human, at times even gaining our sympathy. Unlike the usual faceless, gormless teens in Hollywood fare, this group is delineated exceedingly well, and remain recognizable as individuals even when hiding behind Ray Harryhausen-esque skeleton makeup in a genuinely chilling night scene. Kamen fleshed out his bad guys so well that the Cobra Kais, led outside the dojo by actor William Zabka’s smirking blond-haired bad boy Johnny Lawrence, now have a sizable fan following among Karate Kid aficionados. One admirer even made a clever YouTube re-edit of the final fight so that Johnny wins:

Meanwhile, a band called No More Kings has made a song about the redemption of Johnny called “Sweep the Leg,” with a fun “Karate Kid continuation” music video written and directed by Zabka himself:

In interviews, Zabka has expressed pleasant surprise that The Karate Kid remains so alive in the popular culture, calling it a “sacred film” and noting that there are even Cobra Kai bowling teams out there. It’s enough to convince me that The Karate Kid II should have been all about Miyagi reforming the Cobra Kais, slowly rehabilitating them into good guys.

In so many ways, Avildsen’s 1984 film is courageous in the way it deviates from the instantly recognizable Rocky formula. How strong must the pressure have been on Avildsen to make the easy, safe choices, mimicking his earlier masterpiece in every detail? His resistance to those impulses does him credit, and hence to dismiss The Karate Kid as a mere Rocky clone is to do it an injustice.

But if there is one overriding secret to the success of The Karate Kid, it is the transcendent performance of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi. In 1984, most Americans still conceived of the East, at least in cinematic terms, as a mystical wonderland of Kung-Fu magic and swordplay. Hong Kong directors like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam were only beginning to create the explosion of masterful, modernized pictures that would eventually change the entire way the world looked at Asians on film. It’s hard to remember how utterly fresh a character like Mr. Miyagi was to 1984 audiences, completely unexposed as they were to the renaissance happening in Hong Kong. Fully fleshed out, with a compelling backstory and potent motivations, he was written as charmingly colloquial and disheveled, a character who could consistently shatter the stereotype of the “magic Asian” to raucously humorous effect.

Almost always in American cinema — to this day — Asian protagonists are depicted as cardboard caricatures at best and laughingstocks at worst. Avildsen rejected the initial front-runner for the part of Miyagi — the great Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune — and instead bet his entire film on the talents of a thoroughly Americanized stand-up comedian, one who in his salad days used to bill himself in comedy clubs as “the Hip Nip.” Comedians have a strangely robust record of shining in good dramatic roles — think Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, et al. — and they often manage to strike a solid balance between laughs and drama. Morita did exactly that in The Karate Kid: affecting just the right Japanese accent, leavening his character’s power and seriousness with just enough comedy, and always figuring out ways to make you laugh with Miyagi instead of at him.

If you haven’t seen The Karate Kid in awhile, you’re in for a treat — Mr. Miyagi was no fluke, he remains one of the most winning characters in the history of cinema. It was the role of a lifetime for Morita, who garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination (as it happened, he lost that year to Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields, who himself became the first Asian to win an acting Oscar). Any number of others would have played Miyagi as either an embarrassing joke or an irremediably grim Samurai grandmaster. But in his every glare, mannerism, and pose, Morita elevates the character into a veritable Gandalf. Look closely at the scene when he bows gravely to a shocked Daniel (who has just discovered that his hated chores were actually important lessons), or when towards the end he smacks his hands together with such orchestra-enhanced thunder that the audience jumps. In those moments The Karate Kid — so often seen as an also-ran and afterthought to Rocky — breaks away from that film’s orbit and soars free all on its own.

So Avildsen pulled it off not once, but twice — I still can’t believe it. And if he never makes another great movie, he can still sit back and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that two of the very best fight pictures ever made have his name on them. That he did both of them on such low budgets should give hope to conservative filmmakers who assume liberal Hollywood will never give them a chance. There is nothing in The Karate Kid that couldn’t be accomplished on a micro-budget — all you would need is the gumption to dream up the script.

But will anyone take on the challenge, as Avildsen did those many years ago? Only time will tell. Until then: wax on, wax off. . . wax on, wax off. . . .