Oscars 2013

My reviews of some of the Oscar-nominated movies:

Argo, Flight

The Master

Life of Pi, Anna Karenina, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Skyfall

Wreck-It Ralph

Silver Linings Playbook

Lincoln, The Impossible

Django Unchained, Les Miz, Zero Dark Thirty

Amour and No

And my Live Blog of the Oscar Telecast:

12:20 am -- the telecast

In recent years I've felt as if the Oscars were often a little bit perfunctory, checking boxes and doing what you do without any thought or passion.  There will never likely be the perfect Oscar telecast.  It can't redeem itself like the Grammys or the Tonys can with live performances.  I'm fairly certain the Academy will be respectful enough of the art of film that the awards nobody cares about will continue to be on the show.  There's only so much you can do and still do the show.  Within those limitations, I thought this year's broadcast was quite well done.  Like Argo, there were things the people making the show wanted to do, and for the most part they did them well.  They wanted to focus on music, they did that, they did it well. The transition to Barbra's number from the In Memoriam.  Doing the music with taste and respect.  Seth McFarlane wasn't fantastically great, but he was fairly solid all the way through, and for a first time doing a a gig like this I thought quite a respectable job of it.  There were weak moments with some of the presenter patter, aren't there always, but also nice touches like having the college kids helping out on stage and seeming really happy to be there when we got those little glimpses of them along the way.  Simply put, I felt something coming back from the show, I felt some love and appreciation and happiness for people to be doing what they were doing, and I haven't felt anything like that from the telecast itself in years.

12:10 am -- and so to close...

If you want to think on the art of acting, look at the people who won this year.  I did not warm up to Daniel Day-Lewis early in his career, My Left Foot wasn't that good in my opinion and was so much one of those "play disability, win award" movies.  But can you look at two performances in two movies like There Will Be Blood and Lincoln and think that you're seeing the same person?  Can you watch Lincoln and not feel like you're watching Abraham Lincoln? His acceptance speech was brilliant. And oh, he completely submerges himself in his roles, and leaves only the role behind.  Or Jennifer Lawrence, in The Hunger Games and in Silver Linings Playbook or in Winter's Bone ??  These people know what they are doing, they do it beautifully.

For Best Picture.  I don't know if Argo is exactly the best picture of the year, sometime over the next week maybe I'll blog on that subject.  But it was certainly the best for what it was of the films it was competing against.  A studio product as that used to be meant in the best sense of the word.  Suspenseful, not a movie to have you looking at your watch, filled with good actors (Victor Garber was also in the previous Best Picture winner Titanic, just to say), reflective of its vision.  Every other movie that was nominated, I can think of something not to like.  Amour, lost of things.  Beasts, lots of things.  Zero Dark Thirty was over-long, Silver Linings too dependent on its cast, Lincoln a bit long and sometimes dull, Pi had a bit of a weak spot in Rafe Spall and less to say than it thought, Les Miz was imperfect and Django as well.  But I can't think of anything about Argo that I'd wish to have been different than it was, not at the time I saw it and not in hindsight or retrospect  Best is such an objective thing, but I think Argo was certainly the best and fullest realization of what it was intended to be.  The acceptance speech was very well handled, with George Clooney content not to say anything and the omission of Ben Affleck from the Director nominations handled well

11:39 pm -- I like Bailey's, their ad makes me never want to drink it again, it so isn't anything about the drink that makes me interested in it.

11:37 pm -- Why is Seth McFarlane making so many jokes about how late it is or how ong the evening is going on?  This is no longer or shorter than pretty much any Oscar show, in fact shorter than many.  And for the most part, going down pretty smoothly.  This isn't the time for self-denigration.

11:35 pm -- Life of Pi and Argo were both director's movies, and Argo wasn't an option in this category, so it's nice to see Ang Lee winning.  This was a movie about finding the right writer and approach to the adaptation, about the craft of the movie in every way, about the integration of technology and old-fashioned story-telling, about the sense of wonder that great movies can provide.  I wouldn't have minded if Spielberg won, Lincoln wasn't as good as Pi but was a director's movie.  Silver Linings Playbook, you need a good director to put actors in all four of the acting categories.  But Life of Pi feels right for this.

11:34 pm -- Jane and Michael walk out to a few bars from Nobody Does it Better !!

11:30 pm -- OK, as a fantasy fan I should appreciate all the mentions of unicorns in this Samsung Galaxy ad, except that I'm not sure what the connection is between unicorns and cell phones.  Unless unicorns are regular creatures that used cell phones too much and got horn cancer as a result of having all that cell phone radiation too close to their horns?

11:26 pm -- Django and Argo each take 2nd Oscars in the Screenplay categories.  It is so nice to see the happiness and excitement on the face of a Chris Terrio as he accepts for Argo.  Django was nothing if not original, so that's a deserved win, and I'm glad to see Tarantino recognize the importance of the actors who bring his roles to life.  Looking over the nominees in both categories, I'd say best man wins, certainly in the Original Screenplay category where I don't think any of the scripts other than Django were that powerful.

11:19 pm -- As we head into the final categories, the love is being very well sporead.  3 each for Life of Pi and Les Miz, 2 for Skyfall, Argo and Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty and Django all have one award.

11:18 pm -- Samsung has spent so much money on such awful ads during the Oscars.

11:12 pm -- I can't complain to have Michael Danna win for Score.  He's done a lot of nice music with not a lot of recognition, especially for director Atom Egoyan and more and more in recent years for other directors.  I still wish Wreck-It Ralph were in the mix, but I am genuinely pleased that this composer is going to have a little gold guy on his shelf.

11:10 pm -- Original Score is one category where I feel a strong snub, that the score for Wreck-It Ralph wasn't nominated.

11:06 pm --  My last screen memory of Ernest Borgnine is watching him sit bemusedly on the couch of "What's Up With That" on Saturday Night Live.  Three people who helped bring SFX along to a new era in the 1970s and early 1980s, Ralph McQuarrie from the Lucasfilm empire, Carlos Rambaldi who made ET live, Matthew Yuririch of Close Encounters.  Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head is one of the first film songs and film montages to imprint itself in my mind, the bicycle ride on the screen while the words came from the speakers, that was just one of many Hal David songs.  Tony Scott who directed Top Gun.  Herbert Lom, who did many other things than just the Pink Panther movies.  Charles Durning, from Tootsie and so many other movies.  And Marvin Hamlisch.  My song with Marvin isn't The Way We Were and Barbra, for me it's Carly Simon singing "Nobody Does it Better" from the Spy Who Loved Me, one of the great James Bond songs.  And for all those in memoriam, indeed, Nobody Does it Better.

10:53 pm -- While we watch a broadcast from the Dolby Theatre, I want to give a nod to the new Dolby Atmos sound system.  The movies I've seen using this new iteration at Auditorium #6, the ETX screen at the AMC Empire 25 in Manhattan, sound fantastic.  This is the best I can ever recall movies sounding.  If you live near any of the theatres in this list of Atmos-equipped, check it out, call and see if the movie you wamt to see is on an Atmos-equipped screen.  I remember how impressed I was the first time I saw movies in 70-mm 6-track sound, and then after that the first time watching the Dolby Digital train rumble thru theatres in the early days, or when the sound at the Loews Astor Plaza got upgraded.  We've grown to expect very good sound now with Dolby Digital or DataSat/DTS sound now standard just about everywhere.  Dolby Atmos is the next major advance in making the theatre experience better than your living room.

10:48 pm -- Production Design? Either Pi or Anna Karenina in my playbook, but it goes to Lincoln.

10:45 pm -- I know three groups of people, the ones who haven't seen Silver Linings Playbook, the ones who love it, and the ones who hate it.  I don't know anyone who's seen it who has a neutral or "enh" or "meh" relationship with it.  Very polarizing.

10:44 pm -- But we just saw the musicians in the Capitol Records building.  Where did the Skyfall string section come from?  Did they walk or take a shuttle bus over from the Capitol Records building?  Were they not good enough?  Or are the ones in the Capitol Records not good enough?  How many more musicians are hiding in the Dolby Theatre?

10:43 pm -- The Skyfall number was very good.  In general, I think the production team this year has been doing a very good job with the musical numbers, doing them with class and elegance when the tendency is too often toward the bombastic and overblown and overproduced.

10:41 pm -- I liked this Joe Fresh/Penney ad more, it is probably the same ad I didn't like an hour ago.

10:33 pm -- And it does go to William Goldenberg for the very well-cut Argo.  The same William Goldenberg whom I was not rooting for in Zero Dark Thirty.  Michael Kahn, who was nominated for Lincoln, has been working with Spielberg since Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

10:32 pm -- In the editing category, first and foremost not Zero Dark Thirty, which is long and feels it in spite of the good final sequence.  Argo was very well edited.  This is also a good category to think Life of Pi.

10:30 pm -- the new Academy museum will be going into a beautiful old department store building on Wilshire Blvd.

10:27 pm -- The Coke ad is interesting.  Should I be watching Nashville?

10:24 pm -- Happy as I am to see Anne Hathaway get her first and most likely not last Oscar, her acceptance speech is kind of blah, I wish some of her time over 30 seconds had gone to the winners for the Documentary Short.

10:21 pm -- My own favorite in this category is Jacki Weaver.  There's just something about her performance in Silver Linings Playbook that I can't take my eyes off of her even when someone else is speaking.  But Anne Hathaway is expected to win.  And does.  And I can't complain.  She's a great actress, and has done a lot of great work in the early years of what should almost certainly be a much longer career.  Rachel Getting Married, have you seen that, you really really should if you haven't.

10:20 pm -- Christopher Plummer presents the Supporting Actress award with class and dignity.

10:19 pm -- The nod toward Sound of Music is a wonderful non sequitur.

10:18 pm -- And even though I liked Skyfall less than some other people, the movie holds up in my mind better than a lot of other movies, and I'm very happy to see it taking an Oscar in a deserved cateogry.

10:17 pm -- I like the speech from Paul N. J. Ottosson for Zero Dark Thirty.

10:15 pm -- A tie!  How exciting!!!

10:12 pm -- Not a surprise to see the Sound Mixing award go to Les Miz, which is a musical with music and voices and stuff.  I might have inclined to Skyfall or to Life of Pi if I were voting in the category myself.

10:08 pm -- Not a car ad fan, but the Hyundai battery ad was pretty good.  Did Chris Pine spend some time in a tanning salon, or on the beach in Santa Monica this afternoon?  Or is it my TV?

10:06 pm -- The American Express ad for Small Business Saturday is very good.  I will not rush to see the Oz movie.  Just read an article which suggests that on-line learning isn't as effective as the in-person variety, which if true wouldn't be a shock, so I'm not beguiled by the University of Phoenix ad.

10:04 pm -- Rather to my surprise, the Les Miz number is fantastic and totally deserves the standing "O" from the audience.  Danged good.

9:57 pm -- Using this musical medley to start in on a blondie with chocolate chunks from the Magnolia Bakery branch at Grand Central Terminal.

9:53 pm -- I like the sheen of John Travolta's tie, but the outfit is way too monochromatic.  Even his hair is the same color as the jacket and shirt and tie.

9:51 pm -- Two straight winners thinking Tom and Michael, the masterminds at Sony Pictures Classics, who've been at the specialty film business for decades and know their stuff.

9:50 pm -- Another good iPad ad.  Foreign film goes to Amour as expected, I walked out of the movie.  Just cracked open the orange flavor of Zevia, and am not liking it.

9:44 pm -- The Documentary Oscar goes to a film I mostly slept thru, and don't think I missed all that much in doing so.

9:41 pm -- So it was aruond 50 seconds for each of the Best Picture montages in this trio of Argo, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty.

9:36 pm -- I know I'd like to hear more than 30 seconds from the people up there to accept the award for Inocente for Documentary Short.

9:35 pm -- Very nice acceptance speech from the Live Action Short winner.

9:32 pm -- If I ever have to wear a tux, I so want to wear the one Jamie Foxx is wearing.

9:31 pm -- I hated the Penney ad, but I liked the ones that nobody else seemed to that introduced their new pricing plans a year or two ago, so what do I know.

9:24 pm -- The Bond montage was awful.  My eyes are full of circules.  No context.  No flow.  Just an awful mess.  But it is awfully nice to have Shirley Bassey reprising one of the most classic of classic Bond songs.  It's a paid distraction for an hour or two.

9:21 pm -- One of the winners in the hair design category had very interesting hair.  What was it holding up, exactly, in the back ??

9:20 pm -- I only saw Les Miz of the nominees in the Hair/Makeup category.

9:18 pm -- I didn't like Anna Karenina very much, other than as a nap vehicle, but looking over the full list of nominees in the category I'd say this is the right movie for this Oscar Award.  Weren't there other better designed movies to have been nominated in this category?

9:16 pm -- I think Jennifer Aniston would look better with a wrinkle or to.  Preternaturally smooth isn't a great look to me.

9:14 pm -- The Diet Coke ad was not new but is a very god ad, especially in this setting.  The iPad ad was fantastic, Apple's always done some excellent advertising during the Oscars.  Brad Pitt won't make me try a perfume!  Maybe a cologne.  I watch some ads when I'm watching things on DVR because people pay good money for my eyeballs, but I generally fast forward past car ads and cell phone ads because I just don't give a hoot about either product line.

9:11 pm -- And Pi does win, deservedly here for all the same reasons as in the Cinematography Award.  Beating what are likely more over-CGI'd effects from Peter Jackson in The Hobbit, which I didn't see, and don't want to see.  I wasn't such a big fan of The Avengers, and didn't see the other noineees, and I wish they gave more time for the multitude of winners in this category to speak instead of enforcing the 30-second rule to tightly.  Humbug on that.

9:10 pm -- After more painful presenter dialogue we get to the Visual Effects category.  I'll pull for Life of Pi here, as well.

9:06 pm -- Lots of good nominees in the Cinematography category.  When I think of Skyfall I think of the wonderfully filmed scenes at Skyfall, Lincoln looked fabulous, Django Unchained was a cinematic feast. And Life of Pi?  This was a triumph of filmmaking that required a lot of effort to film on the water and make it look beautiful, to film in a way that blended the humans and the CGI. to film in a way that made some of the best use of 3D you're going to find.  So it wins, and it deserves to.

9:04 pm -- Just in general having these little puff pieces in groups of three doesn't exactly give lots and lots of prominence to the nominees.  But really, they're just Best Picture nominees, it's not like theyshuld have their little individual moments in the sun.

9:02 pm -- In this batch of Best Picture nominees, Life of Pi was a pleasant surprise, I didn't like Beasts of the Southern Wild at all, you will know why as you hear the blaring music playing in this little snippet.  Les Miz was Les Miz.

9:00 pm -- Wreck-It Ralph was the only nominee I saw, so I don't know if  Brave should or shouldn't have won.  I do somewhat regret not seeing Brave, which puts it above the other nominees that I didn't see, don't regret not seeing, will die happy never to have seen them.  I am no longer the target audience for most animated movies.

8:58 pm -- Paperman was shown before Wreck-It Ralph, is very good, and was touted to win in part because of its melding of computer and hand animation techniques.

8:57 pm -- this thing with Paul Rudd is truly painful to watch.

8:50 pm -- I'm not going to complain about Waltz winning.  He gave a great (lead) performance.  He was also very good in last week's Saturday Night Live, which was the first episode of 2013 that was any variety of good.  A salute to Quentin Tarantino is not out of place, because this is an actor that really became someone because Tarantino has that knack for finding actors kind of like I find fantasy authors.

8:47 pm -- Supporting Actor has three deserving nominees, Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained, Robert DeNiro in Silver Linings Playbook, and Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln.  The consensus is that it will go to Tommy Lee Jones.  Which would be hard to complain about.  I disliked The Master intensely.  I'm not sure how Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Christoph Waltz have been nominated in this category instead of in the Best Actor category. And the consensus is wrong.

8:46 pm -- the orchestra this year is off premises.

8:40 pm --  Channing Tarum can do anything.  He can even dance with his clothes on!

8:38 pm -- OK I love the production number that CaptainKirk has provided us with.

8:34 pm --  Seth McFarlane isn't laying an egg, but he isn't scaling the heights.

8:26 pm -- I will attempt to live blog the Oscars.  This is my first time trying to do it since Google updated its Blogger web interface, and it sucks.  I tried to post some of my reviews, but because I was pasting in from the Notes program on the iPad, the fomating was off.  And there is no way to get it to fix itself.  Not even walking into the other room.  Select all, change the font, change the style, change it back, try whatever you want to do the format won't come out correct.  The act of coming back here to update the blog as I go along is near impossible, because it's very difficult to click in the box where you are supposed to update text.  It's no fun doing a live blog if it takes 30 seconds of intense effort just to try and get the cursor to where it needs to be.  I downloaded Google's Chrome App to see if maybe the blogger interface will work better in a Google browser than in the iPad-native Safari.  But no, it's as sucky there as it is in Safari.  I looked at the Blogger app, by the reviews for that look pretty bad, so I'm not in the mood for experimenting there.  So we'll try, we'll see how it goes.  But it's typical, and when Google does things that don't work there's nobody who's ever there to complain to, they hide, they don't care, Google is as evil as everyone else on the internet.

7:55 pm -- Settling in for the annual live blog, a half hour to showtime.  Going to post some reviews of recently soon movies between now and then.

The True Social King or the Grit Network's Speech

11:37 having the presenter do all the encomia for the acting nominees instead of the array of past winners, well OK, not lime the thing they did the past few years is unalterable. But the Best Picture nominees are all lumped into one montage. The producers don't have their names read aloud and have to settle for just type on the screen. And even the Best Picture winers have to deal with music telling them time is too shirt. C'mon, broadcast somewhere around 3:15 you can let the winners for Best Picture have their say.

11:32 why Jurassic Park music of all the films Spielberg has directed

11:31 not in love with his acceptance speech. trying too hard.

11:25 Colin Firth was also great in A Single Man last year.

11:20 unless Jeff Bridges wins in a category that is almost certainly and deservedly going to Colin Firth, safe to say that True Grit is the evening's big loser. Lots of nominations, lots of bos office, no love from Oscar. I didn't like the movie all that muspch save the painterly and stunning cinematography by roger Deakins, certainly not the performance by Bridges. I did love Jesse Eisenberg in Social Network, but as a stutterer myself I can tell you there are bits of the teenage me on the screen in Firth's King's Speech performance.

11:19 she will thank Mr Oster for inventing the blender she blends her protein shakes with in the press room afterward.

11:18 and giving such a boring cliche ridden speech that I would rather be listening to Jar Jar.

11:16 the buzz is right, what would Jar Jar Binks say to have his next door neighbor winning an Oscar?

11:13 Warren Beatty, being the loving husband to Annette Bening. He coulda been a contender, and not just on the football gridiron in Heaven Can Wait. Buzz is Portman, I want Bening.

11:08 Fancy Feast ad it's not, but M&M ad cute

11:02 supposed to be David Fincher's category and is not. Tom Hooper takes it for King's Speech..Well, it's a good movie too, but I am disappointed. But I will plug Hooper's earlier film The Damned United. One of the best sports movies I have ever seen, to where it is hardly a sports movie at all. Bottom line, much as I wanted Fincher and The Social Network to win in this category, I cannot begrudge Hooper the win.

10:52 John Barry, Tom Mankiewicz, Gloria Stuart, William Fraker, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Culp, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Yates, Arthur Penn, Susannah York, Ronald Neame, David Wolper, Jill Clayburgh,, Irwin Kerschner, Blake Edwards, Theoni Aldredge.

10:49 the Lulu German chocolate cake is really good, sorry Jim C Hines but this is the one place where coconut s a good thing. I am a big fan of the Juniors version of this cake but have to make special trip to Brooklyn to buy it. Only problem with liking Lulu version is that they do not always have the same cake lineup so it's not like I can count on having when I am in the mood for it.

10:48 and he is giving such a delightful speech

10:46 found myself rooting for the song from 127 Hours after hearing all four, but I cannot complain to have Randy Newman winning. Hard to believe 20 nominations for him have resulted in so few wins.

10:41 I walked out of Hereafter. I couldn't quite believe I was walking out of a Clint Eastwood movie, but after the wonderful opening scene of the tsunami, the movie gets boring and dull and even worse pretentious. Lots of good talent, Matt Damon whom I always like and Jay Mohr and Eastwood is Eastwood. But my only regret is that I didn't Orleans before the Tube bombing which just sickened me. You have to earn the right to get emotional points out of terrorism, and otherwise you're the worst kind of exploiter. And I sat watching that scene, kind of figured where it was going before I got there, and said to myself that it is Eastwood and he can't be going there. But go there he did. A bitter aftertaste, that's the main takeaway for me from that movie.

10:33 is this four for Inception? And now another well-deserved win for Social Network for editing. I do not often think of editing when I think of a film, but just thinking back to the opening fifteen minutes of this movie, it is hard not to. The crackling conversation between Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend won't crackle without good editing. Te tension that simmers as the opening credits roll over the walk back to the dorm room, that's a lot due to the editing. I didn't love Social Network the second time I saw it, and yet each new win, each playing of the movie's theme, makes we want to see again.

10:31 bad repartee, nothing new, and white ties that you can hardly tell are there since they fade into the shirts.

10:19 but this musical montage that just finished?

10:16 what a wonderful excited enthusiastic speech from the documentary winner, and yes this of us in NYC are happy to hear NYU mentioned, not sure if I have ever heard NYU in an acceptance speech before. What a great speech.

10:09 the Randy Newman song is nice but sounds like 16 other Randy Newman songs for animated movies. I like Newman, scores for The Natural and Ragtime are bookends at the earlier end of his career but not this. The second nominated song is also nice but sounds vaguely familiar. I gets me humming some other song, something la da da, I can go the distance or something like that, instead of the song itself.

9:59 two wins for Alice in Wonderland? Wow, if Tim Burton entered an Oscar pool he may be the only person with any chance of winning.

9:54 the red velvet "twinkie" at Lulu was quite good but must try and pace myself for the other two treats...

9:51 in fact I think Inception now has the most Oscars on the night. Which will not win Best Picture. Better to have the Fancy Feast ad win than Inception. Which if put into pill form would put Ambien out of business.

9:46 but one of the major changes in Oscar voting in my 30 years paying serious attention to such things is that the awards in smaller categories have become more likely to go to deserving winners instead of the evening's sweeping Best Picture.

9:44 and a pleasant surprise that it won. most of the buzz for this category was that it would go to Alexandre Desplat as part of a King's Speech evening.

9:43 my favorite original score is that for Social Network

9:39 I cannot believe they just took two minutes to talk about the renewal of the ABC license to televise.

9:32 but this is an amazingly competitive category with Geoffrey Rush, Mark Ruffalo in particular both giving worthy performances. I have been watching Christian Bale for close to 25 years since Empire of the Sun, and there as so often he has been overpraised in so-so movies lie that or gone unnoticed in things like Newsies or Swing Kids, which might be the prior movie where I most warmed to him, which I haven't done very often indeed. I am almost surprised at how much I liked him in The Fighter. And listening to his acceptance speech -- Ewan McGregor one hardly sees doing other than a British accent and Christian Bale only seems to be in movies where he does American dialect.

9:31 and he does

9:30 Supporting Actor has to go to Christian Bale

9:19 David Seidler's speech was very nice. I do not think this was the best script in the category, but no complaints. Oh -- the Fancy Feast ad in the last commercial break was better than some movies I have seen over the past hear. The Diet Coke commercial just ended, are they maybe getting a little too full on themselves in Atlanta?

9:15 the adapted screenplay win for Aaron Sorkin for Social Network is expected and well deserved. Sorkin's speech isn't as tightly edited as the movie was.

9:14 Blinded by the white! These two white tuxes together on stage are screechingly awful to look at.

9:06 Toy Story 3 was one of the best films of the year, deserves this, everyone expected it to win. And the winner clearly had his speech prepared, unlike Melissa Leo. Who let me say was really good in Frozen River. Just not, not, not that good in The Fighter.

9:03 More vapid dialogue in presenting the Animated Short. Justin Timberlake deserves better.

9:01 I thought Melissa Leo was one of the least pleasant things in the somewhat overrated (good, just overrated) The Fighter. Jacki Weaver was one of the best things in Animal Kingdom, which you must rent. And Helena Bonham Carter whom I never like was wonderful in King's Speech.

8:58 but credit Melissa with a good adlib.

8:55 pleased that Jacki Weaver was nominated for Animal Kingdom

8:55 please not Melissa Leo.

8:52 making lecherous small talk about Anne Hathaway? Who is writing this thing?

8:51. serendipity, here comes Kirk Douglas.

8:49. I think my biggest regret in the nominations is that Michael Douglas wasn't nominated for Best Actor for Solitary Man. But nobody saw it, and Wall Street Money Never Sleeps some people did see but it wasn't as good a performance and wasn't a fantastic movie.

8:47 I did not like True Grit, but Roger Deakins deserved to win this for True Grit. No sweeps tonight, that's for sure.

8:45 Alice in Wonderland for Art Direction? One film will not win all three awards this year. How many people have this in the Oscar pool.

8:41 first year I cab live blog with an iPad

8:40. Flatter than the dictator's nose after the steamroller in Sleeper.

8:38 The dreidel joke was borrowed from my review of Inception.

8:35 I though the pre-opening opening was a commercial. The opening montage I think is falling flat.

8:25 Once again doing live blog for Oscar night. I am rooting for The Social Network, but it will probably be Best Picture for Rocky done as Masterpiece Theatre. Main course for dinner some brisket from Righteous Urban Barbecue, about to take some mashed potatoes and veggies off the stove to tap off the meal. Desserts tonight come from Lola in Chelsea.

Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole is based on the 2007 play of the same name by David Lindsay-Abaire which I managed to miss both in NYC and in DC. It's a very well-acted but not entirely convincing domestic drama about a couple trying to deal with the death of their 4-year old son eight months before, the couple played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart and her mother played by Dianne Wiest.

It's hard in some ways to judge a movie with subject matter like this. Both my parents are in their '80s and aren't going to be around forever. Their five children all got virtually identical upbringings and especially insofar as religion is concerned have managed to end up at all different kinds of places as adults. I am looking forward with a certain dread fascination to seeing how this all plays out when we have to deal with a loss in the family, as someday we are certainly going to have to do. For one, I don't currently anticipate that I'll want to do everything the handbook of Jewish mourning says you're supposed to do, and there are other people in the family who almost certainly will. Will this cause tension in the family? Will that tension play out in quiet or subtle ways, or will we argue it out? If there is tension, will it linger for years or decades, or will we be able to move on? It's something I would enjoy watching with clinical detachment, and will get to live it instead. And I can think back to cousin Jane's wedding, there are things you think only happen in movies and soap operas and sometimes they happen for real.

All that being said, my big problem with Rabbit Hole is that too many of the awkward moments that are so brilliantly acted by this fine cast seemed to me to be made-up awkward moments that exist for purposes of the script in ways they wouldn't exist in real life. One example: the couple decides to sell their house, the wife goes off to read in a park for a few hours, the husband insists on staying around during the showing and when he's showing off their son's room to a couple that's looking at the house there are those awkward moments. The script handles it wonderfully, and Aaron Eckhart doesn't have a false note in his performance. But I just kept thinking how in real life the real estate agent would probably hire a team of horses and have them drag the husband away from the house for the showing, instead of saying "sure, stay." And the husband would never even say he wants to stay, because there's no guidebook on this process in the history of ownership of real property that advises the owners to stay on site during a house showing. No, no, no, no, no. Another example is a scene that's in the coming attraction, which is set at a bereavement group where the Nicole Kidman character challenges somebody giving their story, how God must have needed another angel and took their daughter. Kidman says "couldn't God have just made an angel. He's God after all. Can't he just make another angel." In the real world, I think eight months later that Kidman would probably have enough tact in her body not to say that aloud, during the group meeting. She might think it, she might say it to her husband in the car on the way home, but she wouldn't blurt it out like that. And if she did, somebody would try a lot harder and quicker to tell her to stifle, while here for dramatic purposes she's allowed to say her piece uninterrupted. Again, it's a wonderful scene to look at the face of the other mother, and the faces of the other people in the bereavement group. All wonderfully acted and directed by John Cameron Mitchell with great grace and tact and beauty. But I don't buy it.

It's hard to know where to draw the line on moments like these. The son was killed when he ran out into the street after the family dog, and was hit by a teen-age driver who swerved to avoid the dog without noticing the son fast on the dog's tail. The mother is having clandestine rendezvouses with the teenager. That may or may not be convincing, but it's the kind of thing that happens often enough in drama (the kids in Party of Five need to meet the drunk who killed their parents) that I'm willing to buy it here. And buying that, the scene where Nicole Kidman drives by the kid's house not realizing its prom afternoon and is overcome to realize there will never be a prom for her son is real and powerful and one of the best scenes in the movie. That she falls asleep in the car and doesn't wake up until the kid pounds on her door on his way home at 6AM the next morning is then a good way to ruin the reality of the moment.

Do I recommend it? Do I not? I don't know. It isn't an easy movie to sit through, but it's got enough human heart and ultimate optimism that it isn't one of those depressing downer sorts of things that can only be enjoyed on an intellectual level. Yet I've seen darker more depressing movies like The Sweet Hereafter that I might recommend more quickly simply because there darkness rings true. And there are awkward moments on film like Anne Hathaway's toast in Rachel Getting Married that are more believable to me than the awkward moments here.

Nicole Kidman was a very pleasant surprise. She can be a little icy sometimes, but in this role she somehow finds an openness and warmth and heart to her performance that is engaging and open even when the character is flirting with the edges of acceptable behavior. You never know what you're getting with her, she can be wonderful in genre fare like Dead Calm or in Cold Mountain, she can be awful in a Far and Away. She's amazing here, perhaps her finest piece of work, though thinking on great performances by actresses in 2010 I may still give the nod to Annette Bening in The Kids Are Alright. But this is great work.

I was disappointed with Diane Wiest, who is less wonderful than usual. Which may have more to do with her part than her performance.

Love & Other Drugs

Love and Other Drugs is a definite cut above most of the other dreary formulaic romantic comedies that have graced our screens in recent years. This one is striving to attain Jerry Maguire territory instead of Wedding Planner territory. If it doesn't ultimately achieve Jerry Maguire, it still has considerable virtues on display.

Let us start in the virtue department with the acting. I have always liked Jake Gyllenhal, but the opening scene here is revelatory because he looks for the first time like an actual adult in an adult role. This transition isn't an inevitable one; McCauley Culkin anyone? And there is energy and brio to the performance as well, vs the hangdog Donnie Darko thing he often defaults to. He is actually a leading man, and if he can hold on to that moving forward Incan anticipate some nice nights at the movies. His love interest is played by Anne Hathaway, and she too is making a nice transition which we have steadily seen in the years since Princess Diaries. However she may be topping out as this decade's Andie McDowell. Amy Adams may be higher ceiling.

However... the film started out as an adaptation of a memoir, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Riedy. And then they took that story and pretty much grafted on the entire romance angle. And the two stories don't have much to do with one another. The film Jamie Riedy could be in any occupation and still have the romance with the Anne Hathaway character. In Jerry Maguire, Jerry is an imperfect vessel for his ideas about sports representation, but at the heart of the movie he ends up almost by default living the "fewer clients" mantra that gets him fired. His relationship with Dorothy is driven by what's happening in his business life. He grows in multiple ways. In Love & Other Drugs, Jamie ends up in a different place at the end than at the beginning, but not in any integral way, or at least in an integral way that goes beyond the amount of change necessary to get the girl and have a happy ending. And I believed he wanted the girl, but didn't believe the career choice that he makes.

But ya know, all that being said if I held every movie up to the standard of whether or not it was another Jerry Maguire, there wouldn't be many movies worth liking.

So that aside, let's focus on the fact that we have two really good lead performances. We have some nice supporting work by Oliver Platt as Jamie's mentor on the Pfizer job (I wasn't thrilled with the quality of the casting up and down the list, though). We have a reasonably truthful look at what the drug sales business is about. We have a reasonably truthful look at what it's like to deal with Parkinson's. Anne Hathaway's dealing with it is a little more cutting to the core than let's say Susan Sarandon coughing and glowing in Stepmom, and there's a very good scene and some very harsh real-world advice given Jamie during set at an alternate convention for Parkinson's sufferers across the street from a drug sales megablast convention.

No, Love & Other Drugs doesn't live up to the depths of its aspirations. However, if every romantic comedy was as good as this one, I'd certainly go see a lot more of them, and two-thirds of the other movies playing at the multiplex this holiday weekend will likely be worse.

Rachel Getting Married

Seen Monday evening September 29, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Auditorium #1, 3 Slithy Toads

I was so quick to post negatively about the first film I saw in this year's Variety Screening Series that I should have been much quicker to enthuse about Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married."  But better late than never.

Jonathan Demme's had a very uneven career as a director, from the excellent and energetic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and film adaptation of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, on to Married to the Mob and Something Wild (not bad, though others love more than I), continuing to The Silence of the Lambs and the excellent Philadelphia to The Truth About Charlie remake (which I love more than others) to a remake of The Manchurian Candidate (which needed better tighter editing; even scene seemed to last a beat too long making it rather a chore) and now to Rachel Getting Married, which I think might be up there with Philadelphia as his best narrative motion picture.

Much like Philadelphia is and will always be known for the excellent central performance of Tom Hanks, Rachel Getting Married will be known for the excellent central performance of Anne Hathaway.  Sadly so, almost, because just as Philadelphia boasts a slew of excellent supporting performances, like Mary Steenburgen's delicious performance as the evil attorney, Hathaway's star turn will likely overshadow the excellence of the cast up and down the line here.

But goodness is Anne Hathaway good!  She plays Kym, the sister of the eponymous Rachel, whose wedding weekend it is.  We know from the conversation in the car ride up to the wedding in ritzy Stamford CT with her father that there's something a little awry with Kim, which we'll soon enough find out is her drug dependency.  All of the other reviews I've read mention that she's on a weekend furlough for the wedding, but this seems to be the kind of thing you pick up from the press kit that isn't so well described in the film itself.  There's another secret about Kym that's a little more important and a little better hidden that's revealed slowly and gently, a line of dialogue here and a photo there and a plate in yonder kitchen cabinet.  And is it Kym's fault that her mother and father have split up, the mother ephereally and ephemerally played by Debra Winger in a nice supporting turn that (to continue with my comparison) isn't unlike the late-career glimpse of Joanne Woodward as Tom Hanks' mother in Philadelphia.  The father's played by Bill Irwin, who is perhaps better known to we  New Yorkers for some of his Broadway clowning.  He uses every bit of his expressiveness to convey the uncertainties of his own balancing act on the wedding weekend, and Rosemarie DeWitt's Rachel is similarly expert showing sometimes with raised voice but often with her face just what's it like to have to deal with Kym on a weekend that ought to be about her.  Both also have to ac with a lot of delicacy, because we're going to look at things they do before we find out Kym's other little secret and ask just how well they fit.

Films like this can sometimes be difficult for me, because I'm not fond of addictive personalities, and I don't enjoy seeing what people can do when they're drugged up or drunk.  I'm a little more tolerant of varieties of drugged up because I've seen less of that in my own life, so thank heavens it's drugs here and not drunks which in high school and elsewhere I've had my fill of.  Furthermore, there's nothing very glorious about Anne  Hathaway, other than that she's absolutely and totally magnetic to watch even as she does and says the darnedest and damnedest things on occasion.  And it's just a magnificent performance, definitely an Oscar contender.  She's hurt and hurtful, cuddly and hateful and hateable all at the same time.

The centerpiece of the movie might be a rehearsal dinner capped by a toast by Kym. We were told in the post-film Q&A that all of the script (by Jenny Lumet, the daughter of the noted director Sydney Lumet) is in the movie and that 90% of the movie is in the script but a good chunk of the 10% that's improvisation is contained in this long section.  Kym's toast is a cringe-worthy moment in the best possible way, because we're not sure where Kym is going or what she's going to say, and it's early enough with enough left unsaid about Kym to this point that what she does say can be looked at a lot of different ways and then maybe in six more when you talk about the movie afterward.  It's selfishly gracious, or is it graciously selfish?  Later on, with all cards on the table, there's a scene between Debra Winger and Anne Hathaway that's also devastatingly well done. 

This isn't a perfect film.  The stuff about Kym that's better found in the press notes than the movie is one small reason for that.  A bigger one that results in the deduction of half a toad is the very self-indulgent wedding reception.  Demme likes his music, so the film is filled with music and musicians (in fact, all the music in the film is sourced, on a radio or there live or such instead of scored), and they're all at the wedding reception.  And since they're all there, they must be shown.  Even though the dramatic climax of the film has already been reached, and we've had our wedding, and we're hungry for the epilogue.  And this just drags on.  And on.  And on.  And on.  And on some more.  

Perfect, no.  But very very good.  Often in ways that American films simply aren't good at being good at any more, and at the same time mostly without falling prey to some of the cliches of Amerindie cinema.