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.

Holiday Films

Some quick reviews of other films recently seen:

Lincoln.  This is good, I'm not sure it's that good.  Daniel Day Lewis is amazing as Lincoln, and there are other good performances to be had.  But the second half of the movie was way more interesting.  The first half, there's a lot of political arm-twisting taking place but it's a very prosaic kind of arm-twisting, partronage jobs for votes.  Boring, nod off.  In the second half, the deadlines are approaching, the stakes are clearer, things are more fraught and more taut, the arm-twisting is more subtle and much more strong-armed, the morality of everything is more clearly heightened.  John Williams isn't just for superhero movies, he delivers a score here that is good in an almost invisible kind of way.

The Impossible:  Kind of like Lincoln, parts of it that are very good and parts of it that are much more prosaic.  Not yet in wide release but being touted for Academy Award attention, Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor are the parents of three children who are caught up in a devastating tsunami in Thailand.  The film is kind of true, the events mostly happened but the actual family was from Spain.  The tsunami and its aftermath are some of the best pure filmmaking and acting you are likely to see on the screen this year.  Naomi Watts and her eldest son, played by Tom Holland, are washed inland.  She's injured.  The two of them have to make their way to safety, detouring to save a toddler they hear crying, climbing a tree in case there's another after-wave.  It's excruciating to watch in a good way, you feel every grimace as Naomi Watts tries to walk and climb in spite of her injuries.  There's thespian acting in a not-Master-Thespian way between Watts and Holland.  The photography, the production design, the special effects of the wave, the acting, it's all there.  It keeps at that level as the three or them are rescued by a Thai family and taken to a hospital which is like a dreary scene out of The English Patient or Atonement only more engaging because the characters are so involving and the filmmaking more passionate.  Eventually, the film has to cut back to the father.  He and the two younger children also survived the wave, but managed to hold on to things at the hotel.  Neither group has any way of knowing the other is alive.  He leaves his two children to look for his wife and his other child.  Ewan McGregor isn't bad, there's one especially powerful scene when he borrows someone's cell phone to call the family in England to let them know he's alive and his wife's fate unknown.  But on balance, this story is a weak second to hers.  In the same way that the true story in Argo is done up with Hollywood business at the end, close calls and narrow escapes, the reunion is delayed with all sorts of scenes where Tom Holland and Ewan McGregor are this close to seeing one another but don't.  This bothered me more in The Impossible than in Argo.  Tom Holland deserves special praise.  He's 16.  His acting career was launched when he was found in a dance school and recruited to the initial cast as a Billy Elliot in the UK musical.  He gives an excellent performance here, matching or bettering the rest of the cast.  There are some criticisms of the movie for political reasons, for changing the nationality of the family or for focusing on a tourist family when most of those devastated by the tsunami were the locals.  The bigger problem, the main reason to see the movie is for brilliant scenes that do a brilliant job of making you squirm in your seat, the good kind of squirm to be sure of watching unpleasantness pleasantly depicted.

Not Fade Away:  David Chase, the mastermind of The Sopranos, about one of the '60s bands that didn't make it.  Other than for James Gandolfini's performance as the family patriarch, I'm not sure there's enough to carry this as a movie.  The teenager who becomes lead of the band gives a good performance as well, the music is good, there's nothing really wrong with the movie.   But it needs something more.

There are a few Christmas releases I need to see, Les Miz, Django, Zero Dark Thirty.  Then we can start to think about our year's best...

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.

Harry Potter and the Perfect Getaway and other such things

As I mentioned a few posts ago, doing the blog thing is one of the things that takes a back seat when work gets really busy and work has been really busy.  But I'll try and do some quick takes on my recent film-going...

Harry Potter and the Whatever's Whatever.  Seen Wednesday July 29 at Clearview's Ziegfeld.    1.5 slithy toads.  This was nice because it was a guy's night out with Peter V. Brett, who was eager to see the movie again, and I don't often have company for my movies, and we had a nice dinner after, and I saw it at the remaining big single screen movie theatre in NYC.  But I just didn't like it very much.  One of the problems early on in this series of movies was that the films had no screen life independent of the books themselves.  I felt this slowly improved over the first three or four films, but now the series has regressed.  This movie introduces you to characters of absolutely no importance to anyone who hasn't read the books, involved in events and situations that make no sense to anyone who hasn't read the books, and as a result it felt dramatically inert sitting in a theatre watching it.  Peter pointed out the plus sides of the film.  It is a fine reenactment of the book, with excellent special effects on which no expense was spared.  And in that sense, not only great effects but effects that are real world enough to keep you in the world of the movie instead of giving the sense as the most expensive bad effects can that you're watching a computer game.  But for me, just too too flat.

Fahrenheit 451, seen Sunday August 2, 2009 at the AFI Silver Theater (Silver Spring MD), Auditorium #1.  2 slithy toads.  This was also a nice day at the movies with the newest JABberwocky client Myke Cole, in the old restored main auditorium at the AFI Silver, and a nice meal after at Ray's The Classics.  This is the 1964 adaptation by Francois Truffaut (the only English language film by this great French director) of the classic novel by Ray Bradbury.  I've never read the book, and hadn't seen the movie before, and it was interesting, but at the same time not something I'd hugely and heartily recommend.  The performances are a bit icky and flat, and the difficulty Truffaut had coaxing a performance out of his actors in English may be part of why he stuck to doing films in French after.  I'd had this notion that the story was about burning books for censorship reasons, so I was surprised to discover that it's the notion of books itself instead of any particular book that's annoying the authorities in this future world.  The vision of the future includes weird urban design connected by weird monorail to standard suburbs.  The monorail was the most interesting thing to me, with the cars hanging down from the rail instead of being supported by it.  And then access was by stairway which comes down from the floor of the monorail and leads very steeply to ground level.  So this means that the cars lose a lot of usable space because people can't stand on the spot that's the staircase, and then the dwell time in the stations as people climb up or down a steep set of stairs to the ground must be horrible.  Who'd think of such a thing?  It must come from the same mindset that would think that reading a book can only be a dark and depressing experience.  But the solution the film posits (is it the same in the book?) of oral history as the next generation of book is odd as well.  On many accounts an odd and interesting film.

A Perfect Getaway.  Seen Tuesday August 11 at Pacific's Culver City Theatre (LA), Auditorium #9.  3 slithy toads.  For somebody who usually goes to the movies alone, I saw four straight films with company, in this case horror anthology editor and long-time client Jeff Gelb.  Following dinner at the kosher dairy restaurant on Pico run by Steven Spielberg's mom.  This was a very nice B movie.  It's written and directed by David Twohy, who wrote the screenplay for The Fugitive and has done some other nifty genre turns as writer and/or director like Pitch Black and The Arrival.  This looked like above average B movie fun from its coming attraction, and happily the film delivered.  With a good cast including Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich. Some smart scripting.  Some good Puerto Rican locations doubling as exotic  Hawaiian vacation destination.  Suspenseful without overdosing on cheap tricks.  I enjoyed it at least as much as I'd expected from the decent reviews and the trailer, and Jeff maybe even more so.  Not a great movie, but a very good one that I hope will last some on video.  Because it's an exemplary example of the kind of thing it is.

And speaking of Steven Spielberg...  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, seen Monday August 17 at the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival.  4 slithy toads.  My friend Mark from my Scott Meredith days joined me in the park for this, and it's always nice to sit, talk, eat al fresco, people watch, and make a full evening of it.  The final showing of this year's Bryant Park Film Festival was packed but happily not quite as much as last year's showing of Superman.  Mark was just back from Atlantic City and got me a box of James Salt Water Taffy as a two-month early 15th anniversary gift for the founding of JABberwocky, and lovingly changed every number on the Nutrition Facts box to a "15."  I love James Taffy and it still tastes yummy anad really best in classs/best in show for taffy, though sadly it agrees less with my fortysomething teeth than it did my twentysomething teeth.  Oh, and the movie...  it's a masterpiece still 32 years and multiple viewings on.  It's tautly constructed, well-edited, well-acted, I still get goose bumps when we get to the dark side and the music-and-light show begins and the aliens swoop down for their visit.

A lot of the summer it's been a struggle to find good movies to see but recent weeks when I've had a distinct lack of movie time have seen a lot of interesting open.  I did see 3 more movies yesterday and am going to try and make time for a few more during midweek, but I'll save those.  Four movies in this post is a real post, and that's all the blog time I can give tonight.

Mongol Raiders

Mongol. Seen Tuesday evening June 3, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Aud. #9 (the Majestic). 1 Slithy Toad.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Seen Tuesday evening June 3, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Aud., #2 (The Kings). 2.5 Slithy Toads.

So to do the obscure movie first... Mongol is a Russian movie depicting the Adventures of Genghis Khan as a Young (and Not so Young) Boy, ending after he has united the Mongol empire but before he has conquered the world. It blames everything on the fact that Genghis lost his sled Rosebud (excuse me, his father) when he was a young boy. I hate not to like it because I got to see a preview screening via the Museum of the Moving Image, and the direct Sergei Bodrov was there and did a Q&A afterward, but I don't think it's very good. That being said, give the movie an extra toad if you liked Lawrence of Arabia. This movie is a real wonder to look at, filmed on exotic locations all over the world and picturesque in virtually every frame If you like watching camels ride across the dessert, how can you not like watching horses roam across the steppe? And give the movie another extra toad if you liked the abysmal 300. This movie too has the nicest digital specks of blood flowing during the many battle scenes. If you liked both Lawrence of Arabia and 300, you'd probably love this movie with every fiber of your being.

Why didn't I? Well, it has that generic historical movie music with male chorus. All Mongols look alike (at least a lot of the ones n the movie), so it was hard to tell who was who, and this was exacerbated by the jumps in time which meant you were just getting used to one look of the young Genghis when all of a sudden it was six years later and he looked six years older. It really does seem facile to try and explain away Khan on account of youthful trauma, and having him lose his sled probably would have made just as much sense. And you still can't root for the guy so much. There's also a farcicial romance which we are supposed to find deeply moving even though it mostly consists of very brief visits between captures or campaigns full of sweet words that don't mean much and one silhoutted sex scene that maybe we're supposed to find funny.

This is one of the last releases from Picturehouse, an indie-ish imprint of Time Warner that's just been killed. I will try and remember Picturehouse for the wonderful King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and not for this.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a good example of one difference between making a movie and writing a book. Books, you want to grab the reader quickly. Sample chapters are read on line, opening pages read in the bookstore, agents like me may read only a few lines or paragraphs before rejecting something. Movies, if you want to have one half of a good movie why not make it the second half so people will leave the theatre with fond memories. Once someone has gone to a theatre, paid to see a movie, sat in a comfy rocking chair, there's a reluctance to walk out, so if you're willing to take your chances that the audience will still be awake, have 'em leave happy.

Crystal Skull is OK in its first half, but comes to life in its second when Karen Allen makes her return to the series. More wit, more fun, more to the relationship between Mutt and Jones. There's a wonderful scene with cars racing along the edge of a cliff that manages, much to my surprise, to work. It's artificial but done just well enough to avoid the sfx overkill that marred the Narnia movie or Peter Jackson's King Kong. In fact, any critic who bemoaned the artificiality of this Indy movie while praising the Jackson Kong should be excluded from the critics circle. It was only in the closing scenes that I felt this movie went a little bit too far in showing off the technology. I'm not quite sure what little Ewoks were doing in this movie, or why they the extended capuchin relatives of the monkey from the first movie? Did Indy get in trouble for passing thru Cuba on his way to Peru? Or was this taking place before the embargo?

I'd like to give special praise to John Williams, and I would urge anyone who sees this movie to stay thru to the last notes at the end of the credits. We're nearing the end of a special time and era of film music that was best practiced by Jerry Goldsmith, who has departed, and John Williams, who is in his 70s and not working so much any more, and occasionally a Randy Newman or other composer. Movies that had instrumental music with powerful themes, hummable melodies, recurring motifs. In the best of these movies, the end credit score was a work of art unto itself, and Williams may be the best practitioner of all times. Yeah, the Williams end credit was and is somewhat of a formula in its place. Usually leading out of some kind of triumphant moment, reprising all the main themes and motifs, a bit of a quiet stretch in the middle with the softer stuff, and then building exuberantly near the end. One of the things I might like most about the Superman score is that it has more of a fade-out in the closing moments, the gorgeous music drifting away in the ear just as the Warner logo appears at the end. It's been almost four years to the day since I last heard a great John Williams finale, over the excellent final credit sequence of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azbakan, which was one of the final movies to play my beloved Loews Astor Plaza. Just long enough to have forgotten how good John Williams can be. Overall, I don't think this is one of his better scores, but those final five minutes are up there in any and every way. I guess you can experience it on DVD, but you can't experience it on TV any more with the end credits of a movie rushed and crunched and hidden behind ads, and music like this might do well on good home theatre but does way more than that in the large experience digital sound of your local theatre. I don't see anyone coming along who can do what Williams does.

I'd also seen Temple of Doom and Last Crusade at the Astor Plaza. My first experience with Raiders was at the Sack Cinema 57 in Boston. Bottom line on Crystal Skull ils that it's no more or less forgettable than Doom and Crusade were, and thanks to Karen Allen maybe a tad better. Seeing the original Raiders for the first time, which any of us can only do once, will always be the best Indy experience.