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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

OSCARS ROUND-UP '08

Wherein I try to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies in as short a time as possible.



#1 is The Wrestler, which is hard to like or dislike, though thankfully Aronofsky has (at least temporarily) shed most of the the annoying tendencies of his last two movies. You could take the movie as the failure of the american dream (not the rags-to-riches one, the find-what-you-love-and-do-it-and-everyone-will-love-you-and-youll-make-oodles-of-cash one), but really it's more about its success -- this is what you actually want when wanting stuff. For ambition to be more important than family, health, etc. In characteristic movie fashion, professional ambition is put against family and love and stuff: movie-success, since movies all want to tell us that family and love and stuff are more important than anything. The scenes with his daughter feel phoned-in, the scenes with the stripper would have felt it too if not for the natural vivacity of the characters, old but still frisky. What is hard to stomach is his speech at the end, about the audience being his family -- we know it's a lie, he knows it's a lie, and yet there's supposed to be something triumphant about the ensuing battle. Up to that point he'd been at least trying, but then he gives up — and giving-up is essential to the American Dream, the stubborn, stupid, self-destructive American Dream. Aronofsky understands this, re: Requiem, but here it seems that he has to sell the dream back to us.

#2 was Frost/Nixon which does a lot to be obviously about what most plays are about anyway. Language as competition. As such it's the most thrilling movie about a conversation I can remember to have seen. Where it fails for me is in the character of Frost, who is portrayed far more weak/lucky than you think he should be -- I didn't feel at all the scenes where we're supposed to feel the mirrored connection between the two combatants, in fact Frost seemed to be everything that Nixon railed sympathetically against, which tips the scales way too far toward Nixon in the identification department. This seems to be more a failing of the directing than the portrayal, since Howard seems to be trying to squeeze every bit of capital-e Entertainment out of this script as possible. Hence Frost is weaker and less charming than we know he should be so it becomes more of a struggle for him to succeed. Which leaves you feeling at the end that Frost is simply lucky.

#3: In Bruges — very entertaining while not extremely good. The writing was fresh and jumpy (another playwright) but most of the scenes had pacing problems, abnormal pauses, the signs of a young/shaky director. And yet, very much worth watching, if only for the Colin Farel's character. You can't keep your eyes of him, he's so twitchy and excitable and juvenile and fun, one of those characters bigger than the story he's in. Also, best eyebrow acting since David Tennant. He picked up a Golden Globe for it too, but no Oscar nods. And as good as Heath Ledger's performance was, his Joker was still very much contained in his story. Curiously though, if the Best Supporting goes to Ledger this will be two years in a row of villains. But Chigurh will always be much more frightening.

#4: Milk, the best of the lot so far. It's a biopic, doesn't pretend to be more than a biopic, but hits everything evenly and well. Very balanced — entertaining without being sensational. And it avoids the big pitfalls of biopic: First it skips right over the rise/fall that makes most of them get weighty and predictable in the third act, since its main character dies right at the top (nothing to be thankful for but hey, makes for good cinema). Second, it skips the backstory, the inner life, the secret woes etc. Milk is portrayed as a public figure, there's nothing to him that isn't right there up front, which is part if not all of his charm. And the performances were all pitch-perfect, down to the smallest roles, each with his/her own fascination about them. Another benefit of biopics, even the bit parts are real people.

#5: Happy Go Lucky plays like a love letter to the social, so strange in a medium full of rugged individualists and tortured loners. I got bored by the middle of the movie while it started to be About Things; thankfully it didn't end up being about much. Poppy is unconcerned with the things the neurotic people around her are: ambition, career, procreation, pensions, adulthood, etc, which the movie portrays as things we use to stave off loneliness. Poppy staves off loneliness by being social, and so tries to help people. And thankfully the movie doesn't gloss over the fact that this is the result of number of neuroses of her own, but at the same time doesn't dwell on them. Some people like to help people. And we all can't be social (if we were we wouldn't be on the internet) but it's nice finally give a bit of thanks to those who are, 'cause where would we be without them really. This doesn't mean that we're gonna make eye contact on the street or anything.


#6: doubt was. alright? It was too long for its content and too short for its subject. Meryl Streep was better than I expected but worse and worse as it went on. Hoffman was capable. Viola Davis was the standout of course. Her scene kinda reminded me of the scene with William Holden's wife in Network — both small, almost throwaway scenes that do little to further the plot but add so much, taking you outside the little squabbles we're concerned with on screen and reminding us that maybe there are real people out there being affected.