Academy Awards 2012 Nom-Noms, Movies about Movies about Acting in Movies

You might have noticed I haven't been posting much here, mostly because my reviews of terrible movies have been picked up by JustPressPlay. But it's that time of year again to talk about the movies that are supposed to be not-terrible, but usually are. That's right, it's The Oscars: Not Accounting for Taste since 1929.



Last year's awards were a potpourri with the gentle scent of Mediocre Medley. This year seems to be no different.

Best Picture
The Descendants might be the only movie for adults on this list, in that it's concerned with taking apart illusions rather than building them up. Midnight in Paris was a cute ball of childish fluff, and I'm just not sure how it's any different from the last ten years of (roughly equivalent) Woody Allen films that it suddenly deserves an Oscar nod. (Match Point was the best thing he's done since the 90s, and that only got a writing nod.)

Speaking of pervy old men, look at Speilberg with War Horse and Scorsese with Hugo. Neither of them have made a truly great movie in forever. Is the Academy so desperate for role models that it needs to trot out a gray-haired American auteur or two for every ceremony? True, the red carpet wouldn't quite be the same without Scorsese's eyebrows bobbing somewhere along it, wafting up and down lazily and independently, like drinky birds.

Also note the absence of an Eastwood this year, both he and DiCaprio have been snubbed for J. Edgar. This might be the first awards in a while where we're spared having to watch Leo fail to win anything.



Best Actor
Gary Oldman is a bit of a surprise here, since Tinker, Tailor skated by theaters without too much notice like a cold war spy. On skates. But Oldman's nomination is curious since in Tinker, Tailor he basically plays Alec Guinness. Now look at Brad Pit playing Robert Redford in Moneyball, Dujardin playing any number of silent actors in The Artist, and George Clooney playing, well, George Clooney. All of these characters are throwbacks. Are movies becoming increasingly about movies? I predict that in a decade the only award-winning acting will be Marlon Brando impersonations.

A notable snub this year is Michael Fassbender, for his poignant and full-frontal portrayal of guilt and sex addiction in X-Men: First Class.

Of course, Pitt deserves an Oscar nod for trying his hardest not to be sexy (a great, ultimately futile effort). And Clooney deserves an Oscar nod for his salt-and-pepper hair. Or, rather, his hair deserves its own category. Best George Clooney hair in a George Clooney movie (Comedy or Musical).



Best Actress
Most of the buzz here is going to Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn for the much-covetted "Playing Someone Who Couldn't Act" award. Viola Davis needs a separate "Putting Up with White Folk" award. The statuette will be of Nichelle Nichols.



Supporting Actor/Actress
And the Oscar goes to: Jonah Hill! Did you just die a little inside right there?

Writing
Usually my favorite category, this year is basically a mess. "Original Screenplay" has two foreign films, two comedies, and one Sorkin-esque docudramady ("Best Fast Talking about Important Matters in a Non-Sorkin Film, Or, the In The Loop Award"). Adapted writing has one novel (The Descendants, one sort-of-novel (The Invention of Hugo Cabret), one play (The Ides of March), one non-fiction (Moneyball), and one movie/novel (Tinker, Tailor).

My Predictions:
are that it will be a five-hour waste of time but I'm going to watch it anyway. Also Billy Crystal will make one dirty joke too many and end up with more than he bargained for when Viola Davis takes him home.

As usual I'll be watching as many of these films again or for the first time over the next month. I'll be writing quick reviews here on the fly about how terrible they all are and how the apocalypse must surely be coming. Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.

Rome, Danger Mouse, and the Soundtrack to an Italian Daydream

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi — Rome

Clearly, Danger Mouse can do no wrong. He can, however, attempt too much, which somewhat mars Rome, an otherwise fine and low-key musical trip. The hype cloud surrounding this album is intense, that it took five years to make, that it reunited most of the people who worked with Ennio Moriccone on his seminal movie scores, that it used only period instruments and production tools. This creates certain expectations, and let me get this out right now: Rome lives up to none of them. But that doesn't mean it's not worth a listen on its own.

Very little in Rome sounds Morricone. Maybe it's the choice of rocker Jack White and crooner Norah Jones to front the album, who give a very modern, very Danger Mouse feel to the vocals. But there is also the songs themselves. There is none of the wild, barren patience of Morricone, or of other Italian soundtracks of the '70s. The changes feel like rock changes, the bass feels restrained and over-produced and many tracks seem like they could be on a Broken Bells album (another Danger Mouse collaboration.)

But if you take the album on its own merits, it's very good. "The Rose with a Broken Neck" has a Nick Cave-esque darkness, with White and Jones' voices playing over each other like hunter and hunted. Or "Two Against One," a Jack White solo that could play over a very sexy fight scene. In "Problem Queen," Norah Jones is so good you almost forget about "Come Away with Me." Almost. Rome is halfway between a collaboration album (the usual Danger Mouse or Dan the Automator fare) and a soundtrack album. So the usual inconsistencies of a collab are smoothed over, and the usual boringness of a soundtrack is perked up. This also means the stand-out tracks which usually dot a collab are also toned down.

Rome is low-key and unspectacular and mostly one-note, but it works. It's an experience, a small, same-colored musical journey. And it manage to capture the danger and drive of a '70s soundtrack, with moments of quietness and moments of action, crescendos and small climaxes. And if you play it through while driving, you're almost guaranteed an adventure.

Midnight in Paris, Nostalgia, Didn't Owen Wilson Try to Kill Himself?

Midnight In Paris

You know when stepping into a basic Woody Allen film that you're entering a particular sort of universe. It'll be charming and whimsical, there will be a slew of colorful supporting characters played by the best actors in the business. The bad guys will be pretentious blowhards, the good guys will be confused overthinkers speed-talking their way through a crisis. And a few minutes before the credits, there will be a small epiphany. Not a world-shattering realization. Just a little one, merely there to assure you that the movie you just sat through wasn't just silly fun.

It's a solid formula for many of his movies (Match Point only slightly excepted), and Midnight In Paris seems the perfect vehicle. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a frustrated writer trying to turn from hack screen writing to real literature. He has an overbearing fiancée who is probably having an affair with the pretentious blowhard du jour (a very funny Michael Sheen, who gets all the pedantic cadences just right). They are on vacation in Paris, which leads Gil on a wave of Lost Generation nostalgia, which doesn't interest his girlfriend in the slightest. Oh, and if he sits on a particular corner at midnight, a taxi pulls up and takes him to 1924.

This is where Woody gets to be Woody: having his sad-sack protagonist wander through the streets and parties of 1920s Paris, rubbing elbows with many of the great artistic and literary figures of the time, listening first-hand to Cole Porter, giving advice to Louis Buñuel, doing the Charleston with Djuna Barnes. The fact that all of these fabulous figures are played by equally fabulous actors turns the movie into a sort of guessing game: "Who will show up next? T. S. Eliot? Adrien Brody... as... Dali?" And this is where the strength of the movie lies, in this nostalgic wish-fulfillment. If you went back to 1924, what would you say to F. Scott when he complains about Zelda? What would you say to Gertrude Stein's critique of your novel? 

The nostalgia scenes are the strength, certainly not the predictable and uninspired scenes in the present, which proceed like clockwork, every snag and relationship argument telegraphed from the beginning. And certainly not Owen Wilson's character, who, try as he might, is never much more than the shoulder we have to look over to see what we want to see. The Paris of the roaring '20s is too interesting to have the Paris of today be so boring, and so the movie sags whenever we are not in the presence of Hemingway et al.

So Midnight In Paris is a slight pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless (Adrien Brody as the bombastic Dali is almost worth the price of admission itself.) The epiphany moment, which concerns nostalgia, is particularly underwhelming, since it's not only obvious, but also in a way contrary to the spirit of the movie. We all know nostalgia is unproductive and illusory, but then again so are movies. And movies can fun and useful too. This one is more fun than useful, but fun nonetheless.

Oscar Predictions, 2011

Just because you care, here is my list of Oscar 2011 predictions in the main categories. The rest of them I'm certain are decided by trained monkeys.

Supporting Actor
Christian Bale, The Fighter

Purely to see what accent he'll use in his acceptance speech.

Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, The Fighter

Playing a bitchy girlfriend isn't hard. Male voters will pick Amy Adams because they think their bitchy girlfriends will bitch at them if they don't. Female voters will pick Melissa Leo. Smart voters will pick Hailee Steinfeld. The weak of mind will pick Helena Bonham Carter, and blame it on the imperious curse.

*EDIT: Clearly I underestimated the number of female voters. Also the effect of plastering your f***** face on every magazine in Hollywood

Best Actress
Natalie Portman, Black Swan

It takes talent to make a lesbian sex scene unsexy, congratulations Natalie.

Best Actor
Colin Firth, The King's Speech

For the best English stuttering since Hugh Grant.

Best Picture
The King's Speech

Not a terribly good movie but by this time it will be 11:30 and people will be itching to get out and go to sleep and someone will shout "Just pick the pretentious one!"

The Actual Best Picture
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Not Really! But the only movie I didn't feel like walking out of!

Award Season Round-Up 2011!, Speed Reviews, High Expectations and Surliness

Right, it's Oscar time again, and as you may know I usually try to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies as I can in the days before the ceremonies. So these reviews are speedy and harsh and above all biased, since there's a certain expectation that comes from being an Oscar nom. Many of these movies might be fine on their own, I'm only interested in how they stand as Oscar movies.

It's only a few hours to the ceremonies and there are still three of the ten Best Picture nods that I haven't seen, 127 Hours, The Kids are All Right and Winter's Bone. Toy Story 3 I have no desire to write about, since you can tell pretty accurately what it is from the title and the Pixar logo (it was a tad darker than most wholesome movies within limits, but I've been all bawled out since Up). Inception I saw when it came out and have written about it a bit in other places. It's been over-examined to death already so I'll sum up my thoughts with this: thpppbbbt.

Inception was, sadly, the movie with the most substance of these noms, though it drowned that substance in action movie tropes and obviousness. So, here are the rest:



Black Swan

There's one movie Darren Aronofsky has been trying to get right for the last two decades, in Pi, in The Wrestler, even in Requiem For A Dream to a lesser extent, a movie about how an person (mathematician, pro-wrestler, whatever) manages to, just once, do something right. In typical cinematic pessimism the way to get to that rightness is through movie-lengths bouts of self-destruction, paranoia, egotism, evisceration and various power tools. But what makes these movies different from your typical Hollywood tortured-artist story (and Hollywood hates artists more than anything except maybe single females) is that in the end the Aronofsky folks do get things right in the end, somehow. There's a mad triumph at the end, and you say, aha, at least it's possible (even in Requiem, for one character). So it’s e a big thumbs up to hard work and perseverance, and a big fuck you to life in general, which, if not particularly healthy, is at least fun to watch.

Black Swan manages to do this well, and at the same time fails in the way his other movies also fail. There is a lack of subtlety here (obvious just from the casting of Mila Kunis alone). Natalie Portman's overworked ingénue is hardly likeable (and also, at pushing 30, a bit older than we're supposed to believe she is). It's still a solid performance, she's wrung out like a wet towel in varying degrees of wrungingness for two hours, and it's impressive that she could maintain that intensity without getting the giggles.

But above all there is a tendency toward the overdramatic. It's this more than anything else that has caused Aronofsky to shoot himself in the foot over and over again (let's not even mention The Fountain). I had hoped that The Wrestler, which was low-key in all the right ways, marked a turned toward the more honest and understated. But with Black Swan we're back to all the old bad habits. If the movie had slightly less drama it could have been a fable about the trials that any performer has to go through to get that great performance. But instead we're left with a cinematic ending, which, after an exhaustingly satisfying third act, smacks more of spectacle than truth. The Wrestler had more heart, even if there wasn't much else in it, and because of that I'd rather have watched that movie twice than one this once.



The Fighter

The first, and main, failing of this movie is the title. Boxing movies have a long history of singular men and singular titles, beefy man-children punching away at fame until it gets old or they do, Rocky, Raging Bull, Ali, The Great White Hope, The Hurricane, Million Dollar Baby – note how all these titles are singular, with just one dude (or ladydude) at the forefront, everything else being about or against them. So with The Fighter, we expect, mainly, a fighter. One. What we get is two, the washed-up crackhead Dickey Eklund and his sullen, boring half-brother Mickey Ward. Which one is this movie about?

The writers tend to think it's Mickey, since he gets (sadly) the most screen time. But all the buzz is about Christian Bale's nod as best supporting actor, not about Mark Wahlberg's as producer. And for good reason, Wahlberg's Mickey is about as interesting as a can of Boston baked beans with boxing gloves on. One suspects that if Wahlberg weren't also in that producer's chair, a savvy director would have seen the obvious and either a) fired Wahlberg and got someone more lively in the role, or b) restructured the movie around Dickey. Because it's almost all about Dickey anyway, he has charisma, humor, an effortless manic energy. Because of that Mickey has to be played relatively straight, so the brothers can bounce off each other. But Wahlberg loses us in the process. His Mickey is a big child, constantly pushed around by his mother and sisters and even his girlfriend (a feisty Amy Adams, who will probably win best supporting actress for her fake Boston accent even though True Grit's Hailee Steinfeild did more work). Even when Mickey does stand up for himself it's more like a child stamping his foot in petulance than a grown man taking rightful charge of his destiny.

Thoug if the movie had been rewritten with Dickey as lead, Colin Firth would have a tough time getting his Oscar this year.



The King's Speech

The trouble with trying to write a light-hearted buddy movie about a historical person in the midst of a historical crisis, is that when faced with a historical person in a historical crisis the last thing people want is a light-hearted buddy movie. The biopic lights start flashing, we see Churchill and Hitler go by and suddenly we are expecting one of those Serious Movies about Serious Things. You know, the sort where the movie poster has the lead, dramatically lit, looking off into the middle-distance with a half-weary, half-resigned look. The sort of movie that usually makes it to the Oscars every year (though not this year). That is the movie The King's Speech exasperatingly dangles in front of us, and I know I don't need to see another serious movie about Britain in World War II, and yet, and yet…

So The King's Speech is at best half a movie, taking the bromance that usually occurs on the sideline of your usual biopic and putting it center stage, with all the predictable tiffs and spats and reconciliations of the bromantic drama. The fact that Firth is so good in the role, that Helena Bonham Carter is so regal, that the sets are so lush and comfy and make you really want some tea, makes it that much sadder that these things have ended up in a plotline more suited for Will Ferrell and the cast of SNL than the best of Britain.

The rest of the cast drops off in quality, and I shan't say anything about Geoffery Rush but to ask why he is playing an Australian while Guy Pierce is the one with an accent. And Churchill, who let Scabbers into parliament?

The half a movie that we get do in The King's Speech is still good, and quite watchable, but still disappointingly incomplete.



The Social Network

Has anyone ever noticed that Aaron Sorkin doesn't make good movies anymore? Yes, a brilliant screenwriter, yes The West Wing was the best thing on television since Alf, yes A Few Good Men and American President. But The Social Network and Charlie Wilson's War were both structured like tv pilots: bring in some good characters, have them verbally abuse each other, end abruptly. Of course Fincher did for The Social Network what was wholly lacking in Charlie Wilson, that of breathing life and realism into the characters and set pieces. Everything is lush and dark and velvety, clearly in the 90s Harvard was only lit by streetlights and laptop screens.

Mark Zuckerberg is played with that confidence-bordering-on-arrogance you tend to see in people raised by computers (try to deny it). It's hard to say anything more about the movie, since it comes and goes with such nonchalance. Is it a movie about a kid who can't connect to other people who nevertheless designs a site which is connecting the world? Not really, Zuckerberg isn't played as particularly lonely. His loneliness is more a function of wounded pride, he expects to not be alone and is disappointed when he is. So what is this movie about?

There is a certain glee to see programmers being treated with the same rapt enthusiasm given to rock stars or people who throw or kick round things at or into round or square net-things, which sustained my interest for the first half. But I think the whole concept might have worked much better as a miniseries than a movie, because while Sorkin is great at making dialogue go by with breezy ease, the movie felt full of air. The main conceit, playing the action as being retold through two simultaneous lawsuits against Zuckerberg, loses traction in the second half. Zuckerberg so eloquently dismisses these lawsuits as unimportant (settling out of court), and in the end, we have to agree. There's not enough matter for a full trial, and not enough substance for a full movie.



True Grit

The main question left by this movie is what, precisely, did the Coen brothers see in the material here. Because there's not much in it that seems very Coen, the plot is a basic revisionist western, which might have carried weight in the late 60s (when the previous version was made) but seems a bit uninteresting now. The only things of heft are the characters, right down to Josh Brolin, who can breathe life into the smallest role. Jeff Bridges is heavy, old, cantankerous, and above all rambly, which is refreshing. There's some tacit rule in Hollywood that heroes and anti-heroes alike all have to be laconic, the only people allowed to babble are mothers-in-law and foreigners. But really it was Hailee Steeinfield's sassy and tallish 14 y/o that sustained the movie.

But besides some gorgeous landscape and some minor characters there just isn't much here. There's no Coen weirdness, what we get instead is some irony and wry humor, as if the characters are equally disappointed to be in an uninteresting movie. While this may seem harsh, just remember how good No Country For Old Men was.

Electric Literature, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Boozing for Charity

Just when I've resigned myself to having no reason to leave the futon for at least two weeks, I get an email from Electric Literature about the issue 05 release party at Housing Works. I've been paying attention to Electric Literature for some time now, mostly for their progressive approach to publishing: their issues are released in print, online, through email and on mobile apps. And on cosmic rays. And quantum carrier pigeons.

This in an age when print media is being about as forward-thinking as a backwards man named Backy Backwards from backwardston, backwardshire.

Print media is the dude still flying a confederate flag after relocating to Portland. Or something.



Of course the event gets a Time Out NY top pick, so everyone and their hipster grandma is there.

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe is both dark and complicated, but you can forgive the hit-or-miss selection because the proceeds go to the homeless and those suffering from AIDS. Though most of these books would be more useful as insulation. Or coat liners.

It is a good place to find random anthologies and lit mags for fiddy cent though.



The upside to all the bustle, though, is that Harpoon was giving away drinks for donations. So not only could you get trashed on fine irish red at $3 a pop, but you could do it all for charity.

Let me tell you, I did my best to help out those homeless. Almost makes up for years of ignoring panhandlers by pretending to listen to an invisible iPod.



After a short movie about eating alien crustaceans, magic crystals and masturbation, there were readings by Ben Greenman, Lynne Tillman and J. Robert Lennon.



Ben Greenman read "What 100 People, Real and Fake, Believe about Dolores."



In general the fiction was hip and full of ironic tics and casual references to pop culture. Which I suppose is what the kids are into these days.

The crowd was your usual SoHo mix, young urban professionals followed by old urban professionals and occasionally a middle-aged urban professional.


Photo by Liz, who doesn't know what animal this is either

By then end I was pretty sodden with charity, and headed down to Tom & Jerry's where I randomly met an architect, a girl from Doncaster and an asian from Alaska. Then I followed someone who was trying to bum cigarettes through the cold for several blocks and randomly punched my best friend in the face for fun. Woo!

Parenthetical Girls, Privilege Pt I, The Saddest Girl to Ever Crush a Taxi

Let us remind us of the fey and amazing Parenthetical Girls, who are slowly releasing a set of five EPs that will combine to form their next album like a big gender-ambiguous Voltron. You might remember how their last album, Entanglements, single-handedly restored my faith in music. And poetry -- if you printed the lyrics to this small set of dramatic monologues, with their puns and tiny rhymes and sexy, sexy sibilance, and released it as a tiny chapbook telling their single, morally ambiguous story, not only would it be better than 99% of the poetry books out there, I might actually pay for it.

The first song off Privilege Pt I is the pleasingly grating "Evelyn McHale" which made no sense until I googled Evelyn McHale to find beautiful and desperately lonely picture above. Gone are the lush arrangements of Entanglements, this is a return to basics, with the happy morbidity right on display in the first lines:

When you were crippled by that car
when we were martyred monthly and scarred
by the way that we are

(Note how the pronoun changes. With the Girls the question is always 'Who is speaking?')

The Girls have always portrayed suicide as a glorious mess, almost like a famed death-in-battle for the ancients (in that gone are always better off than the surviving). And what could be a more beautiful suicide than Evelyn McHale, who went up the world's most famous landmark and came down on a limo.


Parenthetical Girls - Evelyn McHale

I'd like to note that earlier this year the Girls made very nearly the best/strangest/creepiest Smiths cover ever, which I liked so much I made it my ringtone. Thankfully nobody calls me, or I'd be continuously freaked out.


Parenthetical Girls - Handsome Devil

Anne Carson, Poet's House, If Not... Brother

Minication. New york and back, less leisurely than my usual trips since I'm on a bit of a schedule. Last night was Anne Carson reading from Nox at Poet's House, the small conference room downstairs filled with interesting and uncomfortable people, and Anne, and her collaborator Currie, and someone from their publisher, with mics that weren't loud enough and a needless overhead display. The people upstairs watched the feed from monitors (live monitors in such a small venue?) and had overall a much better time seeing and hearing everything. We ditched our spots on the windowsill during the Q&A and went upstairs to get a head start on the free wine.

She read quite a bit of Nox, I have no idea how much of the text of it was read but it seemed like most of it. And still it was incomplete: the photos and drawings and clips and cut-outs provide the bulk of the impact of this book-in-a-box. The text itself, Anne's sad, lost, analytical voice laying down the facts and experiences of her relationship with her brother, absent from much of her life until his death, is a small voice, like someone trying to categorize pieces of a thing they can't hope to understand. She describes herself here as an intellectual, an analyzer, a "pinhead" as her brother called her living mostly in her mind. Then we have the figure of her brother, who seems (though how can we know?) to have spent his life at living, passionately, unhappily. And this living tore a hole in the life of her family and her life, so Anne is left, as usual, with pieces. Which is where she always tends to end up. This is a world irreconcilable, being always late to the party, walking into the middle of conversations, wandering in ruins that when they weren't ruins were built on some other ruin. A translation of a translation of which the original is lost. Even the playfulness, which is one of her strongest responses to this feeling, was more subdued in what she read on Thursday, or at least more painfully ironic.

Currie is a strange little man and I wonder what precisely she sees in him. They teach a class on collaboration (they said), and the line they give the attendants is "Now that you've completed it, what are you going to do with it?" Meaning she's started treating her own work like a text, ready for exegesis and adaptation, or maybe more like a scrap of cloth that can only be admired so much for the garment it was once part of. If I had a question to ask her it would be if she has a concept of the original anymore, or has everything in life become like catching hold of a wave you can't know the origins of, can't know what shores it might wash up on.

I wouldn't ask her this question because it is not a question but an answer, and not her answer but my answer, and not a complete answer but an unfair one.

The meaning of the wave of course is loss. The wave is not where it once was. All the mind can really know of the world is loss if it looks hard enough, and I start to wonder if this is a property of the world or a property of the mind. Is loss mind-colored?



Spend the rest of the night in bars, some full of drunks and some not, the bartenders all evenly unsmiling. Headed back to jersey around dawn, got to see the sun rise there on the road. Dawns are so strange and fragile, they have their own color. White instead of red.

I can't remember actually seeing city lit up with dawn before. My knowledge of the city is all evenings and midnights.

It's a different beast in the morning. It's almost kind.



Snapped this photo on the walk from the bus stop, trying to catch the sun as it pushed this dark and hazy avalanche ahead of itself. Didn't capture it. Some photos are to remind you of things, some photos are to remind you of things you didn't see the first time, some photos are to isolate a thing which out there in the world is too lost in the world to be seen. This one's a failure of the first type. I put it here so I can write: this is a failure of myself to remind myself of anything.

82nd Annual Academy Awards, Oh My God What Have I Been Doing for Three and a Half Hours

Well, the only thing surprising about this year's Oscars was how unfunny the hosts were. Hollywood pays enough money for this fiasco, you'd think they could afford some not-awkward.

Also it contained the most inappropriate interpretive dance number in the history of inappropriate dance numbers.

Also wtf sandra bullock.

Positive Female Role Models in Science Fiction, Part II

A while back I started a series of Positive Female Role Models in Science Fiction, a series which peaked at one because do you know how hard it is to find positive female role models in science fiction? Whether they're warrior women or sexy scientists or space-damsels in space-distress, women routinely get shafted in this male-fantasy dominated genre.



This next one has been so obvious to me (and everyone else) that I thought it not even worth mentioning. Of course Donna Noble is a positive female role model. Anyone who's watched the Doctor pine after the chavtastic Billie Piper while Catherine Tate gets stuff done knows that of all Doctor Who companions ever, Donna Noble is the only one who managed to be an equal.

And I do mean ever. It's been nigh fifty years of transparent kidnap fodder or two-dimensional window characters or feisty cave girls. Sarah Jane Smith might've sassed Tom Baker's Doctor more than he sassed back but she was still mostly along for the ride. And Leela and Ace were both warrior-woman phenotypes and more protégés than companions.



But along comes Donna Noble with her hang-ups and insecurities and above all that attitude. Is she bovvered? She ain't bovvered. In a show where the main function of the companion is to stand there listening while the Doctor explains stuff, Donna will more than likely walk away mid-speech because that's not what she's here for.



Of course, Donna's story arc is about as sad as television can get. Which means the writers are either complete chauvanists or sad, sad realists.

Award Season Ramp-up Round-up: Down to the Wire!

There is a particular joy in the art direction of Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the scenery and all the action is flattened into two dimensional planes, the background sttretched up and out like a renaissance landscape. Unlike in a traditional animation (or god forbid cgi) the subjects on screen are real, tangible, three-dimensional objects: puppets, lovingly matted and choppy, walking about in colorful, detailed sets so meticulous you can almost smell the rubber cement. Yet these detailed, 3d objects are smooshed into two-dimensional planes and the effect is like having your head stuck in a diorama, or a toybox, where everything's it's own little fascinating anthill. Like in some of the fantastic 2D platformer games that have come out in the last few years you get the sense that although this is a stylized reality nothing has been lost in the stylization. A reduction that enhances. At no point does it feel like a cartoon and at no point does it feel like a movie. It's its own world, which is what an animation should be.

Which isn't to say Mr. Fox is all that great. It's near-impossible to judge Wes Anderson movies as movies, mostly because they refuse to be taken as such. They're kind of like a disaffected Gen X'er on the other side of the room at a party. Interesting, talkative, defensive, flawed but he'd never call them flaws, petulant but (he says) always justifiably so. And above all he never approaches you — you're either interested or you aren't.

Sometimes it works. I was taken in by The Life Aquatic for its unabashed childishness, it was so loudly and uncompromisingly a labor of love, a big, expensive non-commercial romp in the toybox of aging adolescants. (The 2d-flattening effect was also used to great effect here — suddenly the submarine becomes a great big toy, of Bill Murray's yes but mostly Wes Anderson's, and we get to play around in it with him.) Other times he's less convincing. I thought The Darjeeling Limited, for example, failed to gel around anything other than its leading men's self-fascination.

So we know We Anderson movies have certain plot points and certain characters, and there's only one lesson anyone ever learns (the only lesson one really can learn by himself alone in a sandbox, "I'm a little crazy, yes, but I can't help it.") Mr. Fox hits these points no better than any other Anderson movie, so in terms of that it's pretty mediocre. But there's still some fun to be had watching a creator plays with his creations, especially when those creations get away from him as they often do, here probably more than in any other of his films.

The dialogue of course is sparkling and the cast a screenwriter's wet dream. But if you were expecting Anderson to grow up anytime soon, well, no cussing way.

Giant Beavers, Giant Moose, Giant Mounties, Giant French-Canadian Hookers

in re: Vancouver Olympics Closing Ceremonies: I may not be high but, dude, I am so high right now.

Apolo Ohno, Charles Hamelin, 500m, blame Canada

in re: Apolo Ohno's 500m disqualification: Clearly all you have to do is touch a Canadian on the butt and they'll go down.

Vancouver Snowlympics, First Nations, "Y'all may win the golds but remember who you stole the gold from in the first place"

Vancouver Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony: A Recap

1)

The water tribe hangs around a glacier.

Look, an aurora. Good thing it's not real or it might mess up Shaun White's iPhone reception.

2)

Giant bear shows up. Maybe the one that ate Bjork in Human Behavior.

HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS!

3)

Water Tribe gets eff'd up by global warming. Then they get eaten by a gang of Free Willys.

Poor water tribe.

4)

It's alright, blood makes the trees grow.

5)

Some Martha Graham crackers show up and stupid-dance around the trees. Stop Fern Gullying our trees, hippies.

6)

Now this is the canada I know. Like France, but dirtier.

7)

Some kid runs around a My Pictures screensaver, but all the pictures are of grass. Someone switch it to something more interesting. Like Flying Toasters.

8)

Out of storm and lightning, Extreme Sports are born.

Oh no, the evil black team is going to beat the good red team! Quick, everyone rollerskate in a circle.

9)



Slam poetry? Seriously? Ok, let me break it down for you, son. First, that ain't beard, that's all chin. You ain't fooling nobody. Second, all slam poetry sounds the same, so the fact that they got a mediocre slam poet to wax canucktastic on our uncultured asses doesn't mean you ain't going back to flipping fish fillets at McD's tomorrow.

10)

Everyone's favorite middle-aged lesbian K. D. Lang has finally morphed into a man who looks like a middle-aged lesbian. In this case, a mix of Ricky Gervais and Clay Aiken.

She sings a Leonard Cohen song, who must be in his hermitage somewhere right now vainly striving to write a song no one can cover.



I've already started getting into fights about this, but for all its flaws I felt moved and a wee bit educated by this ceremony. And while China's summer ceremony might have been one of the most spectacular spectacles ever performed by humans, if you ask me what I'd like to see more of in the future I'm certainly not putting a check mark next to the "Massive Populist Hegemonic Spectacle" box.

Award Season Ramp-up '09 pt2

Wherein the author continues to watch as many award-season movies as possible, jotting thoughts down as soon after viewing as he can.



An Education is sweet and full of texture, it brought to life both the drab and the excitement of 60s Britain without really choosing sides: The drab is also comfortable and cozy. The exciting is also shady, strange. It's somehow wrong, wrong in ways you can't quite explain other than that it's not comfortable or cozy. That David is also somehow wrong we know right from the start, and as we and Jenny learn more about him the wrongness gets clearer and clearer until it's blatant, inarguable. But he was always wrong, and the movie handles this well, he never becomes any less or more than he is right there at the beginning. Only Jenny is changing.

The movie loses ground only when Jenny starts to become the voice of authorial arguments, delivering speeches to blank-faced adults who could very well offer a counter-argument but never do. Maybe that's the point though, she has to learn on her own, the adults in her life are of no help, not unless she wants their help. These other roles really make the movie though. Her father is played brilliantly by Alfred Molina, he exudes care and love and worry even while yelling, you just want to give him a hug every time he talks. Emma Thompson as the school headmistress is exactly the opposite, she never needs to show that she cares. She's only in a few short scenes and mostly on the quiet end of a Jenny-speech, but just in not arguing with Jenny she makes probably the strongest argument in the movie. These two performances balance the story, a cartoonish portrayal of either would have ruined it from the start.

Also excellent was Rosamund Pike as the trophy-girlfriend Helen, who manages to be dumb yet sweet without being too dumb or too sweet. Again, a cartoonish portrayal would have killed it.




Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Herzog movies generally take place in a world somewhere between the realities and the delusions of his main characters, and in this movie even the obvious fantasies: iguanas, break-dancing souls, etc, don't mark a clear line between reality and unreality. They're real to Nicholas Cage, and that's all that really matters. As the plot gets increasingly convoluted and nonsensical you might start to wonder if we're all tipping into fantasy-land with him. But no, turns out it's no more or less real than it ever was.

And Cage's performance is so strange, mostly because he's clearly wrong for the part. He walks around hunched over in suits too big for him, moving like he's fifty pounds heavier than he is, yelling like he has a voice for yelling. (He doesn't have a voice for yelling. He sounds more like a frustrated English professor than a professional, no matter what movie he's in.)

But Cage is fabulous at being miscast, I can't think of any other actor who so deliberately seeks out roles he is completely wrong for. If this movie were another Harvey Keitel vehicle you could imagine the Lieutenant as being actually frightening, actually loathesome, actually at times courageous and at times charming. With Cage, we have a character who is none of those things. He's nothing at all really, just confused and in pain, and the movie is better off for it.

The point of the movie seems to be that there's things out there (reptiles, water) that disaster lets in and once they're in they take hold and get stronger and stronger until at the end you're drowning in them.

Cage's question at the end is "Do fish dream?" Herzog's answer seems to be "Yes, they dream this movie."



Bright Star is a well-needed reminder that poetry, as it is in the first line we hear of Keats, is a joy, cut of the same cloth as a walk in flowered fields or throwing pebbles in a lake or sitting in front of an open window on a windy day — though more than a hundred years have almost convinced us that these things aren't enough, as if there were something that was more of life than these simple, fleeting moments. In the movie, Mr. Brown is an annoying, heavy-handed reminder of what poetry shouldn't be: vain, self-serving, cynical, serious, witty in the service of pettiness, "modern" in the service of fear. Though he's a reminder of what a poet has to deal with you often he's far too despicable to have as much screen time as he does. Keats however is portrayed as playful first and melancholy second, a welcome departure from the brooding Byronic figure you come to expect from movies about poets. Movies in general aren't keen on geniuses, they'd much rather focus on common people in uncommon circumstances, public figures — genius is too private a thing to translate well to a medium that is public at every stage of production and consumption. Intimacy in a film is a difficult and necessary illusion, which is why the love story is practically the definition of film: A love between two people is both private, between each other, and public, seen by each other. It is the smallest unit of intimacy that can be put to film.

The production is very lush and surprisingly intimate, and manages the difficult task of making a period piece not look like a set piece. Some shots have the heaviness of a painting, and though this takes you out of the story a little it also reminds you of what you're in. The movie is brimming with poetry, in the dialogue as well as the visuals.

It all turns to misery of course, and Campion is a Romantic enough to embrace the misery as much as the joy. Everything may turn to misery in time, and everyone may die, but in those bright moments of not-misery there is a promise and a hope that misery might never return. The young sister Toots is a heartbreaking reminder of this as she banishes autumn from her garden. In some world, she succeeds.

As for the love story, it's strange. The courtship is short and full of jousts and lots of silences, and you get the sense that the most they know of each other are those silences, that they are filling those silences with dreams of each other. Like love was a dream they were wishing each other into, and in so faling in love themselves. You never once suspect in the end that they actually know each other, or even themselves (they're so young!). And in that sense it's a very honest love story, and a very true one. And very powerful.

Also, that cat should win best cat acting by a cat in a non-cat movie.




What was surprising about Inglourious Basterds is not that it's bad — and it is bad, very bad, "What were you thinking?" type bad &mdsash; but that it's poorly made. We don't expect a Tarantino movie to be drab, his characters lifeless and their motivations a mystery. We expect explosive wit and familiar throwbacks. We expect larger-than-life characters pitted against each other in a ridiculous and ultimately satisfying orgy of genre tropes. But the only larger-than-life characters in this unsatisfying movie are The Nazis and The Jews, the individuals are almost nondescript. His Nazis are luxuriously evil, slippery and smarmy and nasty, sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly. If only he cared nearly as much for his so-called-protagonists, but to call them cookie-cutter would be an insult to creative bakers. The only one of any interest is Brad Pitt's Aldo, who is clearly not Jewish. The rest are so well summed up by their nicknames ("The Bear Jew," etc) they don't even need to have lines (and many don't).

But the names Nazi and Jew are red herrings, this movie would more honestly (and far less offensively) be set on Mars, with some evil Martian Socialist Party hunting down ethnic barsoomians or something. But the fact that the movie makes no sense (and the movie makes absolutely no sense) is secondary, we could forgive even that if it were in the least bit interesting. The script is set up as a series of verbal confrontations, some of them twenty or thirty minutes long, and an ordinary director would play these heated conversations as a buildup of tension, putting off the release until the last possible moment until it explodes, generally in gunfire. Instead, Terantino has these scenes play out normally, as if nothing were happening at all. The audience knows something is at stake, the characters know something is at stake, yet no one acts as if something is at stake — giving an overall impression of watching boring people talk about boring things which something interesting just might be happening somewhere else. Like having to sit through a discussion of hog futures on the deck of the Titanic. And because there's no tension when the release comes it feels less like a climax and more like a "What just happened?"

The problem here is clearly that Tarantino has developed a sort of auteur's arrogance, he expects us to believe whatever he tells us. He says this crack commando team has killed so many Nazis behind enemy lines that even Hitler is afraid, we're supposed to believe him (even though all this Nazi-killing supposedly happens in the jump cut between the "Let's kill Nazis" scene and the "Hitler is afraid" scene). He says Eli Roth is somehow fearsome, we're supposed to believe him. He says that movies can end the war, we're supposed to believe them. Sure none of it makes any sense, but he doesn't seem to even lift a finger to try to convince us, which is both lazy and unforgivable.

The joy of Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs was in things we've seen already, familiar themes and tropes and body movements and dialogue, for what is "genre" but something the audience already believes without you having to tell them? Inglourious Basterds is a departure from that. Things are still familiar, god knows he doesn't have an original bone in his body. But they don't feel familiar. They feel rather shoddy.

Award Season Ramp-up Round-Up '09, part1

Every year around this time I try to see as many best-of-year films as possible, that way when Oscar night finally comes around I have that much more to be aggravated about. Generally I don't document it as best as I could, but this year I've decided to make the effort to get it all down, generally as soon after I see the movie as possible.

I've already seen Public Enemies and Avatar. So here we go!




THE HURT LOCKER
Fantastically realistic (or realistic-seeming, who knows if it's even remotely actually-realistic). So much so that little bits that didn't seem realistic stood out more, even a single canned sound effect was enough to jar me out of it for a second. Also unconvincing, that tendency for any squad in any action movie to be immediately qualified for any operation, no matter if more experienced troops are probably waiting by (Miami Vice-itis). The glimmerings of a plot thankfully they petered out, as if to say: here's the sort of movie you're expecting to see, but this isn't that movie.

There are no superior officers to be found, there are no consequences beyond the physical damage to the squad (almost entirely from themselves and each other), and there is no enemy -- everyone is treated equally as an enemy, allies, friendlies, squadmates. And it's an interesting consequence of a bomb squad that there really is no enemy: there's only it, and you, and what you do or do not do to it. It has no will or plan or purpose.

So war is a bomb, and the bomb is a drug, and the soldiers are addicts and they either see it and quit or they keep at it. The only way to view James is as an addict, and as an addict he serves a necessary purpose in the war, a purpse that the movie clearly admires. But this purpose is not a moral one, he doesn't save lives or make things safe for his countryment -- the more he cares the worse he is at his job. He can't actually make a difference. His purpose is as inexplicable as the bomb's.

Avatar is the triumph of a gamer, an ultimate gamer's fantasy where the gameworld becomes more important than real life. Hurt Locker is nearly identical in that regard, they're about addicts who give into their addiction. And for all its brutality, Hurt Locker still glorifies the addiction. But that's the question, isn't it? Is James really being "All he can be"? Or has war made him less than he could have been? All we really know is that when he's in the suit he's all that he is.

Interesting that we've been talking about how '00s movies are specifically amoral, their exemplary heroes aren't anti-heroes (who do wrong things for the right reasons), they're the opposite: they have the wrong reasons and whether their actions are good or not is entirely up to chance or circumstance.

We'll see if it continues with Bad Lieutenant.

Blue Men Group, Ripley-is-not-Amused, and The Subjugation of the Natives: The Game: The Movie

Ended up seeing Avatar (due to familial obligations, I swear!).

I can see why some people liked it, though I was far too annoyed by the middle to be able to stomach the guns-and-dragons-for-forty-five-minutes climax. This is what white people do, they eradicate populations then overidealize them afterwards in order to make themselves feel better. This movie, like some reviewer said, is entirely Ferngully meets Dances With Wolves — and Dances With Wolves is probably the most demeaning two-and-a-half hours ever set to cinema. District 9, though not a great movie (it couldn't decide where allegory ended and action movie began) at least treated culture clash more realistically than Avatar, which ends up being your basic white male fantasy.

In terms of biology the movie was fascinating and detailed, though they don't even make an effort to make Pandora seem like an actual alien world. The template is an oversized, primordial earth. Notice how the dragon-things all have four wings — just like the first flying lizards on earth.

Anthropologically it was less than interesting. The Na'vi both facially and phonetically resemble indigenous post-slave-trade Caribbean Indians, so Pandora is basically Hispanola with flying mountains. Like in all white-man-goes-native movies, the male tribesmen are stubborn, strong and ugly (though easily bested by the hero in combat) and the women are fierce, oversexualized and all for a little miscegenation.

Movies like this tend to forget that native americans didn't have horses until Europeans brought them over, and the supposed natural connection between man and beast that Native Americans exemplify depended entirely on beasts being previously domesticated. People forget that a successfully culture must reshape the landscape around it, must subjugate the beasts of the field and the plants of the earth, this is how a species escapes extinction. It's the whole reason we have things like language and culture and bad movies. Humans are the dominant species in their ecosystem, the fantasy would be a humanoid society that is not the dominant species, in a society that exists symbiotically with other large creatures. Which sounds almost romantic if it weren't so unrealistic. In nature, you're on the top or you're food. And if you're food you're not going to be concerned with luxuries like love or morality. But human society, or at least the human society that makes movies like this, has been on the top so long I bet it just longs to be submissive to something. This is part of the reason why man is never the master of his own fate, we long to be controlled by something, be it god or nature or in this case some weird tree-based melding of the two.

Sigourney Weaver seemed like she was having a good time but became less and less interesting as the story got more and more predictable (though she was still given the best lines). The temple scenes were laughable reminders of the hilarious Zion rave party. And the climactic fight, for all its ecological ballyhoo, was all machismo and patriotism, designed to inspire way more recruitments for the marines corps than for Green Peace.

The 3d was fantastic though.

Depp, Mann, and Boys



Public Enemies. I will say, Mann is becoming a master of shooting in near-total darkness, you really felt the muzzle flare in all the night shots and it was deafeningly loud at times, which is all good. But it's true, his Dillinger is a complete blank. And I wonder about this, most of Mann's early movies were all fronted by big personalities: James Caan, deNiro, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, which sort of hid or ameliorated the fact that those characters were essentially the same blank. But the last few movies have been almost a deconstruction of that hero (the hero boiled down to mere competence, as grashupfer had been talking about). Has Colin Farrel ever been less interesting than in Miami Vice? His hair did most of his acting. And Johnny Depp, a master of mannerisms, here plays someone with no discernible personality. But Depp's been deconstructing himself as well, look at how deeply he inhabited the character of Ed Wood versus what he's been playing the last few years: he's consistently creating characters who are hollow shells. Shells of mannerisms.

I hope they come together to make Action Movie: where our hero Troubled Hero faces Cool Bad Guy to save Idealized Woman and succeeds or doesn't.

(or did I just describe Sin City and all its future iterations)

(actually the movie should be titled Adolescent Confusions About Masculinity)

Train Robbers, Brad Pitt, and Reticence in the American West



Finally saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Not a great movie but parts are worth it. I especially like the portrayal of James himself, a man alternately coarse and troubled -- the coarse parts being more convincing than the troubled parts since Brad Pitt's default expression seems to be one of troubled blankness. But when he's coarse and rude and jovial we get a real glimpse of the anger and sadness there, more deeply than when Pitt goes all puppy-eyes on us. I also liked how very little was spoken that meant what was said, speaking one's mind being a faux pas in this sort of manly universe. But almost nothing was said in the whole movie that was not an outright lie, an elision, a change of the subject, chit-chatty bullshit, etc. (An almost sole exception being Jesse's line about how when the soul peeks over the mountain it will be as loath to reenter the body as you would be to suck up your own puke.) I enjoy when movies show how little meaning corresponds to text, maybe because it seems so difficult from a screenwriter's perspective (I can only imagine how many notes the script must have contained.) Our culture is built on words, always has been, even our visual art needs to have paragraphs of explanation attached to it. It's nice to be reminded how small a part words play in the dance of meaning.

The character of James gradually morphed into your basic american movie tragic-hero: paranoid, moody, self-destructive. But there was something in the character (and in the story itself) that didn't quite lend itself to this pigeonholing, which made that section a little difficult to stomach. And once he's offscreen the movie sort of peters out. But it makes its point, which is the same question of imaginary fathers that McCarthy deals with. (Also notice how Jesse only starts to go south when his older brother, his authority figure, takes off.)

The narration was sub-par and seemed tacked on but what it was trying to do was frame the movie into the right genre: this is a historical essay, told in retrospect, with all the phrases and cadences of a documentary. A short story of a movie.

The visuals are more surreal than documentary though, and I kept noticing how in the framing of the outdoor shots the land seems to dominate the sky, grain and weeds and browns and dull greens pushing out the blue and clouds. It made me realize how much the camera cuts a hole out of reality, a hole where we are. I wouldn't be noticing these things in a movie that demanded I believe in it (cf: Kubrick's "not shooting reality but the photograph of reality"), another reason why this is more of an essay.

Covers Mash-Up vol4

The Desperate Ones