Over the weekend I saw Lone Survivor with Myke Cole, my favorite Coast Guard Reserve officer.
Wow!
The only real question is this: In ten years, when it is movie night at FOB Somewhere, are the troops going to be downing their popcorn with this, or Black Hawk Down. Lt. Cole votes for Black Hawk Down. I vote Lone Survivor.
An odd choice for me. Black Hawk Down tried hard to let us get to know its characters, and Lone Survivor tries hardly at all. The context comes from a montage of SEAL training under the opening credits, to give you some sense of what these men endure to get where they are. And other than that, an email or two with the gal at home, some discussion of whether to get the gal an Arabian (or is it Arabic?) horse, a race around the base channeling either the yard race in Chariots of Fire or the volleyball in Top Gun. Hazing the new guy. But not much. And all the guys are buried in facial hair so you can't see their features or tell them apart all that easy. They have to act thru their hair thickets.
But when you get to the fighting it doesn't matter.
And I think this might be where I prefer Lone Survivor over Black Hawk Down.
I have seen plenty of urban war in my cinematic history.
Peter Berg, the director of Lone Survivor, did urban war in The Kingdom. Kubrick did it in Full Metal Jacket. Black Hawk Down wasn't the first or the last, and even if it is the best it doesn't lack for other films with similar scenes. They abound. And jungle warfare abounds in any number of Viet Nam movies and elsewhere.
But I can't remember a film that gave me the gut-wrenching chill of watching these guys tumble down a mountain like real life versions of a Road Runner cartoon, each bump against the rocks rendered in very verisimilitudinous Dolby Atmos. I felt like I was on the mountain with this band of brothers. I liked Black Hawk Down but have no memory of it, no scene that sticks in my mind. I can still feel those jolts from Lone Survivor a few days after.
I am assured that most of the details in the movie are spot on. Myke Cole showed me his Maverick gloves, vouched for the use of Under Armour.
I can vouch for the A+ rating from Cinemascore, the company that polls Friday might audiences. The movie is that good.
The movie isn't a political statement. Read it how you want, a study in the futility of waging war in Afghanistan with radios that don't work, or a testament to the strength of character of the American military, or anywhere in between.
The movie will not be shown at the next Raytheon annual meeting.
The Oscar nominations it has in sound categories are well deserved. Those jolts I feel four days later -- sound, baby, sound. That Lone Survivor has about as many nominations as Lone Ranger is feeble. The movie doesn't lend itself to acting awards; hard to act past those 'staches. But no Best Picture nod?
As a historical note, I have now seen a Ben Foster movie at the UA Court Street with both Myke Cole and Peter Brett.
Showing posts with label Mark Wahlberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Wahlberg. Show all posts
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Broken Effects
A few weeks ago I finally caught up with Broken City, this year's MLK Weekend film from Mark Wahlberg, and was a little quicker to see Side Effects, the new movie from director Steven Soderbergh.
There's a lot I can say about Broken City, not much of it good. Wahlberg is a cop who's on trial for killing a teen in a housing project without just cause, he's found not guilty but there's some evidence we don't see that comes into the possession of the mayor played by Russell Crowe. Several years later, Wahlberg isn't making ends meet as the head of a private detective agency, he's happy to get a call from the Mayor offering a lot of money to find out whom his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is sleeping with. This is happening in the midst of the Mayor's re-election campaign, and we find out that the chief aide to the Mayor's opponent seems to be Catherine Zeta-Jones's paramour. All of this ends up tying in to some possible scandal with the sale of a public housing project to a private developer. And all of it's a mess. Let's start with the script, which is too convoluted to follow without the script in hand and not really worth following. It's a script that has the candidate running against Crowe doing debate prep right in front of the windows of a storefront campaign headquarters instead of in an actual private place. It's a script that has the mayor's wife and his opponent's chief of staff heading off to Montauk in the days immediately ahead of the election for a rendezvous, as if neither of them would have other engagements or better things to do or not be missed or have their absences questioned at this crucial point in the campaign when they disappear for what would pretty much be a full day to get out to Montauk and back. It's a script where the climax depends on Mark Wahlberg making a decision about whether it's worth his going to jail for the murder he was acquitted of if it will mean the bad guy will go to jail as well, ignoring common sense (I don't think I'd go to jail in order to send somebody else to jail) and the legal principle known as double jeopardy under which Wahlberg's character could maybe face a civil suit but probably not be re-tried for a crime he was acquitted of. It's a movie filled with people who are either wrong for their parts or not directed well enough to fit into them. The mayoral candidate played by Barry Pepper just seems off, Crowe seems off as the Mayor, I don't often see a movie where so many parts seem filled by people who just aren't quite right. It's a movie where the main revelation involves finding somebody's name on papers that aren't secret and which almost certainly would have been uncovered well before they are in the real world no matter how few newspapers are around to look at old papers like these. It's a movie where people buy tickets in Grand Central Terminal then go to an above-ground platform to board the LIRR to Montauk when the LIRR doesn't stop at Grand Central, which doesn't have any above-ground platforms. This will take a place next to Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 as how not to do a New York movie. The director of this mess is Allen Hughes.
Side Effects was better, but weird. Rooney Mara (Dragon Tattoo) is depressed even though her hubby (Channing Tatum) is just out of jail after an insider trading conviction. She's given a drug by psychologist Jude Law to help her deal with her depression. It doesn't help much, there are side effects, she sleepwalks. During one such incident she stabs Channing Tatum quite nicely in the gut and ignores him as he bleeds to death in their apartment. Jude Law is castigated for prescribing the drug, he is convinced he's the last person to blame, and he sets out to find the real story, going all kinds of Moby Dick and Captain Ahab in the process. I was entertained by the movie, this is a good cast with people who work well, Steven Soderbergh always directs with panache and vision and style. It's hard to talk too much about this movie without spilling things that shouldn't be spilled, at the same time I'm uncomfortable putting the movie in a spoiler free zone because I was certainly offput by some of the kinkier directions the script took. There are all sorts of things worth seeing in the film, and yet I hesitate to give it a recommendation.
And to comment briefly on one other movie, because I want to try and blog on as many reviews as I can this year... Molly's Theory of Relativity is an indie movie that opens in New York this week, and I walked out of a preview screening. The script doesn't sound like real dialogue people will say, it's acted by people who are not good actors or just not able to act out the words in this script, it's not visually interesting. Odds are it won't come to a theatre near you. If it does, feel free to skip it.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Oscars 2013
My reviews of some of the Oscar-nominated movies:
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.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Fighter
Quick Note #1: With I Love You Phillip Morris now opening in the US and playing in select cities, you can find my earlier review from the spring when I saw during its UK release here.
Quick Note #2: Have reviewed around 50 movies on Brillig this year, 45 or so current releases. That leaves at least a couple dozen I didn't get to, and if I can I'm going to try and mention all even if briefly by the end of the year.
Quick Note #3: I saw The Social Network for a second time a few weeks ago. Just the fact that I decided to see again makes it one of my lead choice favorites for a Best Picture nomination, and perhaps even for the win. That said, while I enjoyed it the second time, I don't see it becoming one of those movies like The Shining or The Muppet Movie, Stepmom or Jerry Maguire, The Empire Strikes Back or Goodfellas, that I might happily see again and again and again. A very good movie, just not going to enter my pantheon.
So on Friday I was a somewhat bad boy. I had meetings in Manhattan at 10AM and 11AM and at 5PM. The 11 didn't break until 12:35, I hadn't even visited the Barnes & Noble the meeting was scheduled to be near to, and I decided to just stay in Manhattan instead of making a 2.5 hour token appearance in the office. Quite happily, when I realized I could just dash down to the AMC Loews Lincoln Center and see the 1:25 of The Fighter if it was on a decent size screen, it proved to be on their biggest, the balconied Loews auditorium.
This is a passion film for Mark Wahlberg, an actor whom I have long been a fan of, and I'm going to review a few other big passion movies for people in the days to come. It's not a passion we share, however. Not a big boxing fan, and I went into the movie with no idea of who this Micky Ward person is. I'm reading reviews that discuss how his big fights with Arturo Gatti, my reaction is "huh, what big fights, never heard of the guy." But it's Wahlberg, which is good. His director is David O. Russell, whose Flirting With Disaster from many years ago I recall as being quite hilarious, whose Three Kings (also with Wahlberg) was OK, and who's done only one other film, I Heart Huckabees, in the eleven years since Three Kings arrived. There's decent pedigree in the rest of the cast, with Christian Bale (an entire episode of Sneak Previews could be devoted to his weird-ass career), Amy Adams (very good) and Melissa Leo (caught everyone's' eye deservedly with Frozen River).
And ultimately, the movie ends up being pretty good, but nowhere near great. I'd hate to see it copping a Best Picture nomination, I certainly think it can get an acting award or two, it's a mix of good creative decisions and bad creative decisions.
There's quite a contrast in acting styles. Wahlberg works for me by always being very quietly good in his work. Part of it with Wahlberg is that he's nice to look at, but it's not that he just coasts along on his good looks like maybe you could say of an Ashton Kutcher. And that's exactly what Wahlberg is here. So quiet you hardly notice he's in the movie at all, even though he's the center of it, and especially because he's playing against two other actors who are totally acting. In the case of Christian Bale, it works for me. I've read a few reviews of the movie that criticize his performance for essentially being over-acting Academy Award bait, and maybe they're right but I say give it to him. He's done the "lose weight" thing before, he's done the character immersion stuff to a hilt, it's kind of like his schtick almost so I don't hold it against him the way I might somebody else that his crack addict character here of Micky Ward's brother is gaunt in a totally gaunt way and strung out in a totally strung out way. And there's something about how he manages to turn on a dime in a strung out kind of way to not be entirely strung out when he realizes he's three hours late for an appointment that works for me. Some of the best scenes emotionally at the end of the movie when Micky is insisting on having his crack addict brother work for him again after a stay at jail work because of the contrast with the more strung out version of Christian Bale earlier in the film.
What doesn't work for me is Melissa Leo as the mother of the two. She's clearly been instructed by the director to be a harridan on an incredibly grand scale, leading this group of harpies that are Micky Ward's sisters. All with big hair that should probably be outlawed outside of Texas, all of it so incredibly godawful blonde that I could hardly look at the screen for fear it would be like staring directly at the sun, all overly made up, all indistinguishable from one another. Maybe that's what they were like in real life, but hear you've got this nice quiet Mark Wahlberg guy the film is supposed to be about and there you've got this thing, this blob, this scourge of sisterhood that you can't bare to watch. When I'm talking about bad creative decisions in the movie, this first and foremost among them. The strange thing is that you read the articles and reviews on the movie and find out how hard they worked to do justice to the fights in the fight scenes, using the actual commentary from the HBO coverage of the matches and seeking out old matching cameras so that they would match the exact look of what an HBO boxing match would have looked like back then with all the same graphics. Which has some cost to the movie dramatically, you can't emphasize the drama of the fights the way a Rocky movie might by going slo-mo or showing nice extra digital droplets of blood that were left over from 300, because you're purposely trying to work off the same canvas here as then. So you ratchet up the spectacle of Ward's family in such a garish and over the top kind of way? There's one person I've come across in life who kind of sounds like the mother sometimes, so we can't say there are no people like this.
Amy Adams I do like, from first stumbling across her in Junebug a few years ago through Ella Enchanted and on to here. She has range, she has skill, and her quietly forceful romantic interest (later wife) for Micky Ward plays perfectly to what Wahlberg is doing. Her style isn't exactly like Wahlberg's. Wahlberg always seems to be Wahlberg no matter who he's playing, while Amy Adams is doing one of those "oh, that's Amy Adams" performances because she's deep enough in you don't recognize her at first. But the two just play really really well off of one another.
In the film, Micky Ward breaks his hand when he tries to save his brother from being arrested, and a bad guy cop goes after Ward's hand with a nightstick. According to Wikipedia, Ward had been having trouble with his right hand during some of the fights during his first go-round, and then had surgery during his retirement years before getting back into the sport where bones from the pelvis were fused into the bones on the hand to strengthen them. Here, I prefer the real life version to what the script presents. The script has to show the brother's complete dark descent to this awful moment when bad brother leads to hand being broken, so that there's then this nice complete rise up to to triumph. I was dozing off during the slow mid-section of the movie that's devoted to showing us that the brother whom we already know full well is a crack addict is going downward downward downward, and if this 114 minute movie had been a 105 minute movie without or a 114 minute movie dealing with the actual events, I think I'd have liked more. In real life, the brother didn't break his crack addiction, either. Whether it was at a lesser point during those big fights with Gatti that aren't covered in this film or whether it was working in spite of, that we don't know.
Because of the decision to keep the boxing real and the brother Bale, the movie ended up working for me most powerfully as a family saga, and it works well enough as both. I'm not going to push people to the theatre to see, but I'm reasonably certain you'll more than like if you end up going. And this might be the best work from Christian Bale that I've seen, which is no small thing in and of itself.
Quick Note #4: I might have been a little unfair to Anne Hathaway in my review of Love & Other Drugs. Thinking on her work in Rachel Getting Married, she does have the same range as Amy Adams, she may be choosing not to go in that direction.
Quick Note #2: Have reviewed around 50 movies on Brillig this year, 45 or so current releases. That leaves at least a couple dozen I didn't get to, and if I can I'm going to try and mention all even if briefly by the end of the year.
Quick Note #3: I saw The Social Network for a second time a few weeks ago. Just the fact that I decided to see again makes it one of my lead choice favorites for a Best Picture nomination, and perhaps even for the win. That said, while I enjoyed it the second time, I don't see it becoming one of those movies like The Shining or The Muppet Movie, Stepmom or Jerry Maguire, The Empire Strikes Back or Goodfellas, that I might happily see again and again and again. A very good movie, just not going to enter my pantheon.
So on Friday I was a somewhat bad boy. I had meetings in Manhattan at 10AM and 11AM and at 5PM. The 11 didn't break until 12:35, I hadn't even visited the Barnes & Noble the meeting was scheduled to be near to, and I decided to just stay in Manhattan instead of making a 2.5 hour token appearance in the office. Quite happily, when I realized I could just dash down to the AMC Loews Lincoln Center and see the 1:25 of The Fighter if it was on a decent size screen, it proved to be on their biggest, the balconied Loews auditorium.
This is a passion film for Mark Wahlberg, an actor whom I have long been a fan of, and I'm going to review a few other big passion movies for people in the days to come. It's not a passion we share, however. Not a big boxing fan, and I went into the movie with no idea of who this Micky Ward person is. I'm reading reviews that discuss how his big fights with Arturo Gatti, my reaction is "huh, what big fights, never heard of the guy." But it's Wahlberg, which is good. His director is David O. Russell, whose Flirting With Disaster from many years ago I recall as being quite hilarious, whose Three Kings (also with Wahlberg) was OK, and who's done only one other film, I Heart Huckabees, in the eleven years since Three Kings arrived. There's decent pedigree in the rest of the cast, with Christian Bale (an entire episode of Sneak Previews could be devoted to his weird-ass career), Amy Adams (very good) and Melissa Leo (caught everyone's' eye deservedly with Frozen River).
And ultimately, the movie ends up being pretty good, but nowhere near great. I'd hate to see it copping a Best Picture nomination, I certainly think it can get an acting award or two, it's a mix of good creative decisions and bad creative decisions.
There's quite a contrast in acting styles. Wahlberg works for me by always being very quietly good in his work. Part of it with Wahlberg is that he's nice to look at, but it's not that he just coasts along on his good looks like maybe you could say of an Ashton Kutcher. And that's exactly what Wahlberg is here. So quiet you hardly notice he's in the movie at all, even though he's the center of it, and especially because he's playing against two other actors who are totally acting. In the case of Christian Bale, it works for me. I've read a few reviews of the movie that criticize his performance for essentially being over-acting Academy Award bait, and maybe they're right but I say give it to him. He's done the "lose weight" thing before, he's done the character immersion stuff to a hilt, it's kind of like his schtick almost so I don't hold it against him the way I might somebody else that his crack addict character here of Micky Ward's brother is gaunt in a totally gaunt way and strung out in a totally strung out way. And there's something about how he manages to turn on a dime in a strung out kind of way to not be entirely strung out when he realizes he's three hours late for an appointment that works for me. Some of the best scenes emotionally at the end of the movie when Micky is insisting on having his crack addict brother work for him again after a stay at jail work because of the contrast with the more strung out version of Christian Bale earlier in the film.
What doesn't work for me is Melissa Leo as the mother of the two. She's clearly been instructed by the director to be a harridan on an incredibly grand scale, leading this group of harpies that are Micky Ward's sisters. All with big hair that should probably be outlawed outside of Texas, all of it so incredibly godawful blonde that I could hardly look at the screen for fear it would be like staring directly at the sun, all overly made up, all indistinguishable from one another. Maybe that's what they were like in real life, but hear you've got this nice quiet Mark Wahlberg guy the film is supposed to be about and there you've got this thing, this blob, this scourge of sisterhood that you can't bare to watch. When I'm talking about bad creative decisions in the movie, this first and foremost among them. The strange thing is that you read the articles and reviews on the movie and find out how hard they worked to do justice to the fights in the fight scenes, using the actual commentary from the HBO coverage of the matches and seeking out old matching cameras so that they would match the exact look of what an HBO boxing match would have looked like back then with all the same graphics. Which has some cost to the movie dramatically, you can't emphasize the drama of the fights the way a Rocky movie might by going slo-mo or showing nice extra digital droplets of blood that were left over from 300, because you're purposely trying to work off the same canvas here as then. So you ratchet up the spectacle of Ward's family in such a garish and over the top kind of way? There's one person I've come across in life who kind of sounds like the mother sometimes, so we can't say there are no people like this.
Amy Adams I do like, from first stumbling across her in Junebug a few years ago through Ella Enchanted and on to here. She has range, she has skill, and her quietly forceful romantic interest (later wife) for Micky Ward plays perfectly to what Wahlberg is doing. Her style isn't exactly like Wahlberg's. Wahlberg always seems to be Wahlberg no matter who he's playing, while Amy Adams is doing one of those "oh, that's Amy Adams" performances because she's deep enough in you don't recognize her at first. But the two just play really really well off of one another.
In the film, Micky Ward breaks his hand when he tries to save his brother from being arrested, and a bad guy cop goes after Ward's hand with a nightstick. According to Wikipedia, Ward had been having trouble with his right hand during some of the fights during his first go-round, and then had surgery during his retirement years before getting back into the sport where bones from the pelvis were fused into the bones on the hand to strengthen them. Here, I prefer the real life version to what the script presents. The script has to show the brother's complete dark descent to this awful moment when bad brother leads to hand being broken, so that there's then this nice complete rise up to to triumph. I was dozing off during the slow mid-section of the movie that's devoted to showing us that the brother whom we already know full well is a crack addict is going downward downward downward, and if this 114 minute movie had been a 105 minute movie without or a 114 minute movie dealing with the actual events, I think I'd have liked more. In real life, the brother didn't break his crack addiction, either. Whether it was at a lesser point during those big fights with Gatti that aren't covered in this film or whether it was working in spite of, that we don't know.
Because of the decision to keep the boxing real and the brother Bale, the movie ended up working for me most powerfully as a family saga, and it works well enough as both. I'm not going to push people to the theatre to see, but I'm reasonably certain you'll more than like if you end up going. And this might be the best work from Christian Bale that I've seen, which is no small thing in and of itself.
Quick Note #4: I might have been a little unfair to Anne Hathaway in my review of Love & Other Drugs. Thinking on her work in Rachel Getting Married, she does have the same range as Amy Adams, she may be choosing not to go in that direction.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Happening
Seen Saturday evening June 28 at the Regal Kaufman Astoria 14, auditorium #13. 2 slithy toads? Or 0? Or 4?
So getting back to what I said about French films in my last post, here we have a movie from a genuine American auteur that's been totally dumped on and disrespected.
Is it a good film? Not sure that it is, or why anyone should see it. Is it a bad film? In an ocean of movies without craft or ambition this has plenty of both. Like A.I., it's a failed movie which no true student of American cinema should miss. It makes it very hard to know how many toads to give it.
So let's try and give this some of the serious (& spoiler-filled) analysis that too few of the reviews have had.
A. This is a clear departure for the auteur, M. Knight Shyamalan, whose Lady in the Water I have missed but whose work I've otherwise seen from Sixth Sense forward. There are no secrets at the end, no sudden reveals. The plants are doing it. It's a thing of nature. It can't entirely be explained. We're no more than a third of the way through and maybe even much less because all of this is made abundantly clear.
B. It isn't a horror movie, or is at least as much a horror movie as Kubrick's The Shining is a horror movie, only with even less blood. Kubrick bathes his masterpiece in the red stuff, while Shyamalan might even be too sparing with his. One reviewer I read commented on a line in the first few minutes "I think those people are clawing themselves," and hopped on the show v tell thing. Um, does this reviewer not notice that Shyamalan spends the entire movie showing less blood than he could? People kill themselves off the top of the frame or off-screen entirely. When it's established in one scene that the suiciders will pick up any gun at hand, all we get in the next scene similar is the sound of the gunshots. We can fill in the rest.
C. So as much as anything, it's a mood piece or a tone poem.
D. There's an entire other level of subtext beyond what everyone is noticing. On the main level, it's the plants. Humanity is getting to be too much for the plants, and they decide to do something about it, emitting something into the air that interferes with our self-destruction taboos. But... In the schoolroom scene in Mark Wahlberg's class, he harps on some matinee idol in the class. He's told to pay more attention in class because the nose will keep growing, the ears will keep growing, he might look perfect at 15, but what's he going to look like at 20? Is he sure he wants to just rely on his good lucks. This line is delivered by a totally deglamorized Mark Wahlberg. You know, Mark Wahlberg, aka Marky Mark, aka the guy in the Calvin Klein ads. Those were a long time ago, and he ain't gonna be that guy again, but does he have to look quite as common as he does here? The hair, the clothes, the hint of Rain Man. Wahlberg immediately hooks up with another teacher played by John Leguizamo, who was not too long ago a hot young Latino. Not here. It's like in Rocky, if Rocky had told Adrian to bun up her hair and put her glasses back on and reverse Pygmalioned her. Awful looking glasses, kind of like the ones Myke Cole told me I should stop wearing. And he spends pretty much the entire movie with his face all scrunched up as if he's trying to age himself even more than the attire. And then completing the triumvurate, Zooey Deschanel is a hot young actress who is totally not hot, who's also wearing less than flattering clothes with an expression that does indeed suggest "stilted." As do many of the line readings and actions of all of these people. This can't all be an accident. This 90 minute movie doesn't spend several minutes on the appearance issue for the heck of it. It doesn't take glamor men like Wahlberg and Leguizamo and totally deglamorize and have them sounding stilted and false like this was a high school play and the first five choices for the lead all got suspended for smoking pot in the principal's office. But for goodness sake, what? What! What is the connection between this appeance thing and the Plants Attack! centerpiece? I could probably think of lots of interesting suggestions, but I consider Shyamalan's failure to find a good tie between Thing 1 and Thing 2 to be the movie's biggest failing. Anyone have any ideas?
E. The Betty Buckley character is another something that I don't think is working quite the way it's supposed to. There are some connections I can see between her and the rest of the movie. When she slaps at Jess' hand for taking what isn't hers and then offers here a cookie a minute later, can the Mother Nature parallel be any more obvious? Mother Nature gives us all kinds of things, but we get a little greedy and the whole movie is in macrocosm what that slap on Jess' hand is in microcosm. But where do we go from there? Is Mother Nature as crazy as the Betty Buckley character? Was there a rewrite at the end, because I'd swear when Buckley goes out and talks to the plants in her garden that we were around eight seconds away from being told that this crazy bat had spoken to the plants and ordered them to attack, and then somebody said "no no no no NO, you can't do another one of those silly twist endings" and so the movie went off in some other different direction that really doesn't make sense.
F. And the movie doesn't make sense. We need to find out more about the attack. How many people are immune? There's the CNN lady who's doing news from NYC after the attack has started, so is she immune or just not infected yet? There are lots of hints that not everyone would be taken under by this. And does the attack really go down so far as to be on groups of only one? If not, the Buckley ending makes no sense. If, then the "off to school" ending makes no sense. Because who is going to live in any of these cities in the Northeast after everything that's happened, where every park bench and every street and every swath of sidewalk is a killing ground.
G. So it's a failure, but one that deserves a lot more serious attention than it is getting. It's a movie I expect to be thinking about for rather a long time to come, and most of the movies I see you can't say that.
H. & 3 Cheers to Shyamalan and James Newton Howard. As with Indiana Jones, this is a movie that relies on instrumental scoring entirely. It's not as good as the score for The Village with its haunting violin solos by Hilary Hahn, but it's a companion piece to it with some wonderful solo work on cello by Maya Beiser.
I. & seeing this movie on the last Saturday in June 2008 can't help but turn me back a little teary-eyed to that last Friday in July when I saw The Village on the final opening night at my beloved Loews Astor Plaza. A lot of people didn't like The Village; I liked it quite a bit and not just (I don't think) because of the circumstances of my seeing it. But that being said, I don't think there was ever a movie I saw at the Astor Plaza that didn't become a little bit better for being seen there. Shyamalan's Unbreakable was also the last movie to play the UA Syosset; I made a special trip out to Long Island to see the movie there because I liked to do that every once in a while, and didn't know at the time that it was the Last Picture Show for that modern movie palace. I only wish that The Happening were the last movie I'd see at the godawful miserably designed execrescence of a movie theatre called the Kaufman Astoria 14. But we're four weeks and a few days shy of four years that the Loews Astor Plaza left my life, and I still miss it terribly. James Newton Howard and Hilary Hahn let its tweeters and woofers go out with style.
So getting back to what I said about French films in my last post, here we have a movie from a genuine American auteur that's been totally dumped on and disrespected.
Is it a good film? Not sure that it is, or why anyone should see it. Is it a bad film? In an ocean of movies without craft or ambition this has plenty of both. Like A.I., it's a failed movie which no true student of American cinema should miss. It makes it very hard to know how many toads to give it.
So let's try and give this some of the serious (& spoiler-filled) analysis that too few of the reviews have had.
A. This is a clear departure for the auteur, M. Knight Shyamalan, whose Lady in the Water I have missed but whose work I've otherwise seen from Sixth Sense forward. There are no secrets at the end, no sudden reveals. The plants are doing it. It's a thing of nature. It can't entirely be explained. We're no more than a third of the way through and maybe even much less because all of this is made abundantly clear.
B. It isn't a horror movie, or is at least as much a horror movie as Kubrick's The Shining is a horror movie, only with even less blood. Kubrick bathes his masterpiece in the red stuff, while Shyamalan might even be too sparing with his. One reviewer I read commented on a line in the first few minutes "I think those people are clawing themselves," and hopped on the show v tell thing. Um, does this reviewer not notice that Shyamalan spends the entire movie showing less blood than he could? People kill themselves off the top of the frame or off-screen entirely. When it's established in one scene that the suiciders will pick up any gun at hand, all we get in the next scene similar is the sound of the gunshots. We can fill in the rest.
C. So as much as anything, it's a mood piece or a tone poem.
D. There's an entire other level of subtext beyond what everyone is noticing. On the main level, it's the plants. Humanity is getting to be too much for the plants, and they decide to do something about it, emitting something into the air that interferes with our self-destruction taboos. But... In the schoolroom scene in Mark Wahlberg's class, he harps on some matinee idol in the class. He's told to pay more attention in class because the nose will keep growing, the ears will keep growing, he might look perfect at 15, but what's he going to look like at 20? Is he sure he wants to just rely on his good lucks. This line is delivered by a totally deglamorized Mark Wahlberg. You know, Mark Wahlberg, aka Marky Mark, aka the guy in the Calvin Klein ads. Those were a long time ago, and he ain't gonna be that guy again, but does he have to look quite as common as he does here? The hair, the clothes, the hint of Rain Man. Wahlberg immediately hooks up with another teacher played by John Leguizamo, who was not too long ago a hot young Latino. Not here. It's like in Rocky, if Rocky had told Adrian to bun up her hair and put her glasses back on and reverse Pygmalioned her. Awful looking glasses, kind of like the ones Myke Cole told me I should stop wearing. And he spends pretty much the entire movie with his face all scrunched up as if he's trying to age himself even more than the attire. And then completing the triumvurate, Zooey Deschanel is a hot young actress who is totally not hot, who's also wearing less than flattering clothes with an expression that does indeed suggest "stilted." As do many of the line readings and actions of all of these people. This can't all be an accident. This 90 minute movie doesn't spend several minutes on the appearance issue for the heck of it. It doesn't take glamor men like Wahlberg and Leguizamo and totally deglamorize and have them sounding stilted and false like this was a high school play and the first five choices for the lead all got suspended for smoking pot in the principal's office. But for goodness sake, what? What! What is the connection between this appeance thing and the Plants Attack! centerpiece? I could probably think of lots of interesting suggestions, but I consider Shyamalan's failure to find a good tie between Thing 1 and Thing 2 to be the movie's biggest failing. Anyone have any ideas?
E. The Betty Buckley character is another something that I don't think is working quite the way it's supposed to. There are some connections I can see between her and the rest of the movie. When she slaps at Jess' hand for taking what isn't hers and then offers here a cookie a minute later, can the Mother Nature parallel be any more obvious? Mother Nature gives us all kinds of things, but we get a little greedy and the whole movie is in macrocosm what that slap on Jess' hand is in microcosm. But where do we go from there? Is Mother Nature as crazy as the Betty Buckley character? Was there a rewrite at the end, because I'd swear when Buckley goes out and talks to the plants in her garden that we were around eight seconds away from being told that this crazy bat had spoken to the plants and ordered them to attack, and then somebody said "no no no no NO, you can't do another one of those silly twist endings" and so the movie went off in some other different direction that really doesn't make sense.
F. And the movie doesn't make sense. We need to find out more about the attack. How many people are immune? There's the CNN lady who's doing news from NYC after the attack has started, so is she immune or just not infected yet? There are lots of hints that not everyone would be taken under by this. And does the attack really go down so far as to be on groups of only one? If not, the Buckley ending makes no sense. If, then the "off to school" ending makes no sense. Because who is going to live in any of these cities in the Northeast after everything that's happened, where every park bench and every street and every swath of sidewalk is a killing ground.
G. So it's a failure, but one that deserves a lot more serious attention than it is getting. It's a movie I expect to be thinking about for rather a long time to come, and most of the movies I see you can't say that.
H. & 3 Cheers to Shyamalan and James Newton Howard. As with Indiana Jones, this is a movie that relies on instrumental scoring entirely. It's not as good as the score for The Village with its haunting violin solos by Hilary Hahn, but it's a companion piece to it with some wonderful solo work on cello by Maya Beiser.
I. & seeing this movie on the last Saturday in June 2008 can't help but turn me back a little teary-eyed to that last Friday in July when I saw The Village on the final opening night at my beloved Loews Astor Plaza. A lot of people didn't like The Village; I liked it quite a bit and not just (I don't think) because of the circumstances of my seeing it. But that being said, I don't think there was ever a movie I saw at the Astor Plaza that didn't become a little bit better for being seen there. Shyamalan's Unbreakable was also the last movie to play the UA Syosset; I made a special trip out to Long Island to see the movie there because I liked to do that every once in a while, and didn't know at the time that it was the Last Picture Show for that modern movie palace. I only wish that The Happening were the last movie I'd see at the godawful miserably designed execrescence of a movie theatre called the Kaufman Astoria 14. But we're four weeks and a few days shy of four years that the Loews Astor Plaza left my life, and I still miss it terribly. James Newton Howard and Hilary Hahn let its tweeters and woofers go out with style.
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