Oscars 2016

Midnight:  Spotlight.

11:57  I like Leonardo DiCaprio a lot, liked him from when I first saw him in Gilbert Grape a very very long time ago.  In Wolf of Wall St., in Titanic, in lots of movies.  I just wish he wasn't getting an Oscar for The Revenant.

11:53 PM I would happily see Michael Fassbender or Malcom's dad or Matt winning for Best Actor.  But this is not likely to end happily.  Steve Jobs was a great movie, and Fassbender's performance is a huge part of that. Matt Damon was too good, made it seem too easy!  Trumbo better for me than for most critics.

11:45 PM Best Actress is a depressing category for me.  Saw 45 Years, and not a fan.  And not a fan of Brooklyn, or of Carol.  Didn't see Joy.  So I guess I'll hope for Brie Larson to win, as she is touted to do.

11:38 PM Not a surprise, but I so wish something or someone else would have won for Best Director.  What can he do next year in his quest for Best Award Bait?  Maybe we'll find out he's secretly been filming a movie for a few days every year that takes some character from his bar mitzvah through his 30th birthday.  Yes, he is "very lucky."

11:35 PM  For all the people complaining how long the Oscars are... well, it's actually not much longer than seeing a bloated 2:20+ superhero movie with the accompanying previews of coming attractions.  And here, you got to tweet and eat and do the whole social media thing and complain at the TV set, and just now you got to learn about an exciting drug to ask your doctor about.  Which beats needing ear plugs during the overblown SFX CGI spectacular half hour battle at the end of the bloated superhero movie.

11:34 PM  If they could do a revote after seeing the performances tonight, would the same song have won?

11:33 PM Curious to see what movies won Best Score when Ennio Morricone could have won for The Mission, The Untouchables, or Casualties of War.  His collaboration with Brian de Palma was, for me, a particularly rewarding period for Morricone's work.

11:26 PM  Look at Ennio Morricone's filmography, it's stunning he's never won an Oscar before, and wonderful for him to get one for something that's good on its own terms, rather than Leonardo DiCaprio potentially winning for something like The Revenant that is far from his best role, movie, or performance.  Much as I like John Williams, and hope he'll get one more Oscar for his career, thks deserved to be Morricone's year.

11:17 PM  Happily Lady Gaga's great moment is followed shortly thereafter by another one of those great Kohls ads.

11:15 PM Lady Gaga is kind of special.  Very powerful moment that crept up in the middle of a song.

11:08 PM No rooting interest in Foreign Language category.  The more reviews I read of Son of Saul, the less interested I was in seeing it.  So the only one of the five nominees I ended up seeing was the Danish film A War, which opened in NYC just this month.  Which was good, though I'd say the director's earlier A Hijacking was somewhat better.

11:05 PM  So they found a way to get Jacob Tremblay on to the stage in the year of his amazing performance in Room. A way that worked kind of nicely.  This is a really, really sweet moment.  Kudos.

11:02 PM  It was not a good year for the art of cinematography, with Slocombe, Zsigmond and Miroslav Ondricek all passing away.

11:01 PM Douglas Slocombe passed away just recently.  He did additional filming on Close Encounters, leading to work as Director of Photography on the Indiana Jones movies.  Only in the Oscar memorial crawl am I noticing that he passed in the same "Oscar year" as the primary cinematographer for Close Encounters, Vilmos Zsigmond.

10:51 PM  So I guess I am celebrating an anniversary of seeing Whoopi Goldberg's Oscar-winning performance in Ghost.  I saw Ghost at the Loews Elmwood.  Where did you see Ghost?

10:48 PM  The award for Best Tweet from @isaacbilmes: Patricia Arquette seems bored and confused
I wish I'd come up with that one.

10:46 PM  I don't even get the joke about the kids and Price Waterhouse.  But I feel like Chris Rock is very very in command of the festivities this evening.

10:43 PM  Per my comment a little while ago, Amy was great.  The Best Documentary award might have gone to the actual best documentary of last year.

10:39 PM  If you want to understand the regard for the caliber of Mark Rylance's performance in Bridge of Spies, just look at his filmography.  It's full of, frankly, not very much.  The award isn't being given for career achievement.  But he's done enough that it isn't being given for being someone we've never heard from and won't hear much from again, which is another tradition in the supporting categories.  I first heard Rylance's name associated with Angels and Insects, an overrated UK artsy film that came out some twenty years ago.  And it isn't like I've heard it in association with much else since.  Lots of Shakespearean and UK theatre credits.  But this is an award that's given for a great performance that commanded recognition.

10:37 PM  And the clip for Sylvester Stallone showed why the Oscar didn't go to him, shouldn't have.  It's said that acting is about listening, and the quickest glimpse of Michael B. Jordan listening to Sylvester Stallone's Rocky shows so much in just a few seconds of quiet listening.  So much feeling, so much thought, so much thinking about what's being said.  I mention in my #OscarsSoWhite post that it's tough to judge negatively on categories Creed could have been nominated in and wasn't; which Best Actor nominee do you boot in favor of Michael B. Jordan.  But Jordan delivered a better performance in Creed than Sylvester Stallone did, and let's hope Michael B. Jordan's time will come...

10:32 PM  Glad to hear Mark Rylance singling out Tom Hanks for praise.  Tom Hanks should be the Men-yl Streep, picking up nomination after nomination in the Best Actor category, and he isn't.  He's so effortless and so likable that it's hard to appreciate just how good he is, continues to be, in many different roles.

10:31 PM  The win for Mark Rylance is something of an upset, but he gives a great performance in Bridge of Spies.  Which I really liked.  And which now has an Oscar win.

10:30 PM  Everyone thinks Stallone wins for Creed, but the Supporting Actor category is full of great performances from Stallone, Bale, Ruffalo and Rylance.  Anyone but Tom Hardy for The Revenant.

10:20 PM  These Android ads.  This was better than the first, but still has so little to do with the product that I don't think it works.  And did I suggest that Kohls start the search for a new ad agency?

10:15 PM  Will take advantage of song to finish my cole slaw from my take-out last night from the excellent John Brown Smokehouse.  Better BBQ than any place in NC or TX or KC or wherever, just a ten-minute walk from my apartment.  For good BBQ, come to NYC and join me at John Brown Smokehouse.  I got there too late yesterday, though, and they were out of turkey.  Sigh.

10:14 PM  I also like Kevin Hart's tux.  If I ever have to go the National Book Awards or something, I hope I can find a tuxedo with pizzazz.  Not that this is a problem I am very likely to have to worry about.  But yes, "a suit with shiny stuff on it," as Kevin Hart just said.  That's the way to go.

10:13 PM I didn't like Inside Out at all, but I guess as a 51-year-old I can't muster the energy to hate what happens in the Animation category.  Don't go to many of the movies.  I liked Peanuts Movie, which wasn't even nominated.

10:11 PM Is there any chance that people voted for Bear Story in the Animated Short category because they thought they were voting for the Bear Mauling in The Revenant, thus heightening the chances that some other, better movie will take the Best Picture award?

10:10 PM I'm going to talk a little about documentaries while the Minions are speaking.  2015 was a great year for documentary films, and most of the best to me aren't even on the Oscar ballot.  From those we can choose from, Amy is my hands-down favorite.  It's informative, enlightening, happy, sad, opinionated but even-handed.  Takes a musical figure I'd known only from a great distance and humanizes her.  Finds the tragedy without dwelling in sadness.  Don't know if it will win tonight.  Do know I would strongly suggest checking it out.

10:07 PM  They don't have near enough boxes for 3000 people.

10:05 PM  Is Wednesday's episode of The Goldbergs finally the excuse I need to give it a try?  Have an hour of TV to replace The Flash with.  Try that? Try Black-ish?

10:02 PM One of my professional frustrations is the ghettoization and lack of appreciation of serious science fiction.  Ex Machina should have gotten even better reviews, been seen by even more people.  But there are a lot of people who don't even have the tools to understand and evaluate Ex Machina, to appreciate the suppleness of its writing, the elegance with which the performances conveyed those words, and the idea that Alex Garland put into them.  So it is incredibly, incredibly sweet to have it take something home on Oscar night.  It takes some unexpected yet obvious turns, in the tradition of but more serious than something like Sixth Sense.  I would see this again if it popped up at a New York movie house.

9:57 PM  And I am kind of stunned and kind of super happy that Ex Machina has taken an actual Oscar to go with its honorary win for Alicia Vikander in the supporting arts category.

9:57 PM  Quick glimpse of bear mauling sequence that would have cut The Revenant short.  Too bad it didn't.

9:55 PM  Very nice gesture to single out Andy Serkis for some special recognition, since his contributions to movies like the Planet of the Apes and Lord of the Rings sagas have been hard to acknowledge within traditional acting categories.

9:53 PM  Quite a year for achievement in unexpected sequels, with both Mad Max Fury Road and Creed setting a standard that I can pretty much guarantee won't be exceeded by the next Avengers or Superman movie.

9:52 PM  We're now at six wins for Mad Max: Fury Road; we can safely say it will be taking home the most Oscars on the evening.  Maybe not the biggest Oscar, but definitely the most of them.

9:50 PM  One of those Mad Max dudes is wearing a great tux.  The Mad Max tech crew is setting the bar high for wardrobe tonight, which is probably not what they were covering on the red carpet.  Like, I want that tux.

9:49 PM Maybe Star Wars can get a token win in one of the sound categories?

9:45 PM  Two dud ads from Kohls.  I vote they start the search for a new ad agency first thing Monday morning.

9:43 PM  Hasn't Liev Schreiber come a long way from lighting up the screen in the Scream movies?  Lots of  critics have him on their "Should have" lists for Spotlight.

9:41 PM  Four wins now for Mad Max Fury Road, and against tough competition.  Spotlight and The Big Short also had serious cred for winning in this category.

9:40 PM Editing is a category with a snub.  I think Bridge of Spies should have gotten a nod in this category.

9:38 PM  Not a surprise to see The Revenant win for photography.  It looked beautiful in the 30 minutes I saw of it.  But this was a category with a lot of achievement from all of the nominees.

9:34 PM:  McDonalds ad just used the word "montage," hopefully to better results than Sam Morgan rolling it out when we played Codenames in the office on Wednesday.

9:33 PM:  Steve  Jobs hasn't been in the discussion much this awards season, and I just want to interrupt to say how good a movie it was.

9:30 PM:  I saw Mad Max Fury Road with noted YA author and JABberwocky client E C Myers!

9:30 PM:  The bear -- nice touch!

9:27 PM  Are these three straight tech wins for Mad Max Fury Road three leaves at the bottom of a tea cup?

9:25 PM  Can we acknowledge that the "thank you" crawl at the bottom isn't working, and do away with it before the end of the evening?

9:23 PM  And I kind of am surprised.  But not going to complain.  Anything but The Revenant is my motto for the night, and Mad Max Fury Road was a very well-crafted film.

9:23 PM  Will be surprised if The Revenant doesn't win Production Design.

9:21 PM  Costume Design for Mad Max!  I didn't have an opinion until they started announcing the awards, and they got to Mad Max, and I said "you know, these costumes had to be created actually from whole cloth to form a full world that couldn't be based on pictures from a book or a newspaper."  I'm happier about this than I would have thought.  And the winner is wearing quite a costume, herself.

9:17 PM  Followed by an ad for Mr. Holland's Opus.  Wait.  No.  An ad for Android.  How couldn't I have figured that out?

9:16 PM  Cadillac ad is a glorified version of the Kohl's ad.  So well done, so intriguing, all the art and artistry.  And it's an ad for a car nameplate.

9:13 PM:  Yeah.  I don't like it when someone wins for a movie I didn't see, but since she was in another movie this year that I saw, and that movie was really good, and she was really good.  Congrats to Alicia Vikander.

9:12 PM:  Even Alicia Vikander from the movie I didn't see.  I can pretend it's for Ex Machina, instead.

9:10 PM:  Anyone but Rooney Mara in this category.  Please.  Anyone.

9:10 PM:  So each Best Picture gets about as much time as the bits during the screenplay award presentations?

9:06 PM:  Over 35 minutes in.  2 awards presented.

9:04 PM  One of the worst ever James Bond movies has as many Oscar nominations as Straight Outta Compton.

8:57 PM:  I feel like the Kohl's ad is a fail.  It doesn't have any association with the product it's advertising.  Would have fit in with all the bad ads during the Super Bowl telecast.

8:56 PM:  The Samsung Galaxy 7 ad was better filmmaking than some of the Best Picture nominees. So was the Diet Coke ad.

8:52 PM And the three-way Best Picture race lives on, with The Big Short staking its claim.

8:50 PM Another tough category in Adopted Screenplay.  Martian, Big Short, Room -- all three, I could make a case for.

8:48 PM:  It's now official.  One of the year's best pictures will not win an Oscar.  And one of the year's best pictures is guaranteed at least one.  Keeps Best Picture race alive; if Compton had pulled an upset here, highly unlikely Spotlight would have still been in running for the top prize.

8:46 PM:  Tough category.  I want Straight Outta Compton to win an Oscar.  And of course, I loved Ex Machina.  And Spotlight.

8:40 PM  "Sorority Racist" -- I detect a hash tag.

8:35 PM I worry about wearing white clothes because they'll get stained so easily.  I hope no one plans on giving Chris Rock a newspaper to read during the commercial breaks, and that he ate beforehand.  Newspaper ink is deadly.

8:33 PM  I don't understand this montage.

8:31 PM And we're off!

8:26 PM  I'd be happy to see either Spotlight or The Big Short win for Best Picture, of the three movies considered to be in a three-picture race.  Last year I was totally bummed when Boyhood lost to the overrated Oscar Bait that was Birdman, and if Alejandro Inarritu, the director of that film can do it again this year with The Revenant, I will not be happy.  You can reference my "#OscarsSoTrite" post for further details on my reaction to The Revenant.  In fairness, a reaction that is based on only the first 30 minutes, because I couldn't tolerate longer.  Also this year, #OscarsSoWhite, best exemplified by the failure of Straight Outta Compton to be nominated for Best Picture.

8:25 PM In a year full of over two dozen nominations for movies I didn't see or didn't like very much, I have lots of opinions this year.

7:58 PM Coming soon, my annual live blog!

The Joshcars for 2013

So having completed the live blogging for the Oscars, this is my Baker's Dozen best of 2013, in no particular order:

World War Z:
This is grading on a curve.  But basically, there are so many really shitty special effects spectaculars around these days that I feel an urge to give some recognition to a movie that's just a little bit different.  Also, since I keep asking authors to revise their manuscripts, it's nice to see something in the popular culture where revision works.  In particular, the ending of this major CGI-ridden summer spectacular release is quiet.  One setting, one main character, a place where small little things count, where the tension is real.  A place where the violence is earned, justified by the movie being what the movie is, and now entirely thrown in just because someone thinks it's fun to plow a starship into a building, or to destroy Manhattan for the 18th time and pretend like it isn't, like Superman didn't save Manhattan in Superman 2 over 30 years ago.  This was a pleasant surprise, an over-achiever in a genre that keeps under-achieving.  So I want to give it some credit.

The Spectacular Now:
Rumor has it that Miles Teller, the star of this spectacularly good adaptation of a YA novel, is going to be in a new Fantastic Four movie.  What a shame.  An actor as talented as Miles Teller shouldn't be wasting time in shitty SFX/CGI/superhero movies, please see my comments above on World War Z.  See my comments on my live Oscar blog, and this is an example of where Roger Ebert can do something I can't, which is explain why a movie is good.  This was one of the very last movies Ebert reviewed, and maybe I should just let his review speak for me. But I don't really want to.  So let me try.

I always feel like one of the best achievements in the arts is to get me to like the kind of thing I don't ordinarily like.  The New Yorker story that I can read must be a truly great story, or the generic slasher movie that I love can't be just a generic slasher movie, or the literary science fiction novel that grabs the Joshua Bilmes whose roots are in the Analog end of sf/f.  And The Spectacular Now is a movie about a character I despise, a high school student really big into alcohol who is supposed to be lovable.  And alcoholics aren't lovable.  Behavior fueled by alcohol isn't lovable.  There's nothing redeeming about a movie like Don's Party.  Nothing pleasant about Leaving Las Vegas.  Yet this movie walks the tightrope.

It has to be a team effort, here.  Novel by Tim Tharp.  Adapted by screenwriter Michael H. Weber, whose previous credits include the similarly successful (500) Days of Summer.  Directed by James Ponsoldt, whose prior movie was Smashed, the kind of movie about alcoholism that I really don't need in my life, thank you.

But most importantly, a pitch-perfect performance by Miles Teller.

He's a likable alcoholic but never a lovable one.  When he's given the chance to have more hours at work if only he would show up on time, he's self-aware enough to tell the boss that he knows it just won't work, he won't put the job before alcohol, and he won't be showing up on time.  Capable of being the perfect boyfriend, except for all the times he's drunk and he isn't capable of being anyone's boyfriend.

You can understand a bit of why he likes his booze.  He's from a broken home.  Older sister he isn't on great terms.  Struggling mother, who won't tell him where his father is.  And when we finally meet the father, you know the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and you also see this glimmer of awareness that our lead character knows his father's a screw-up, that he's a screw-up, that one doesn't justify the other and he doesn't admire his father for being what he too often is, even though he can't stop himself from being it.

It's awfully damned good.

Short Term 12:
Another quiet little film that has probably gone under the radar for most of you.  Brie Larson, who also has a supporting role in Spectacular Now, plays a counselor at a group home for troubled children.  Jonathan Gallagher is another "veteran" at the home, which isn't saying much.  It's a hard place to stay, the kind of place you burn out on real quick.  But the two of them have somehow managed to keep at it for at least a little bit, and the film starts with a quiet scene of Gallagher giving some background on the place to a new employee.  These characters have a lot more going on than we see at first, and the film peels back their layers slowly, carefully, way more so than any of us will ever be with an actual onion in our kitchen.  While it's doing that, the film also slowly peels back some of the closely held secrets for the characters in the home, many of whom might want to be someplace else, all of whom are free to be someplace else if they can escape past the doors and the guards and get on to the street outside.  It's a strange kind of thing, how the employees at the home can do just about anything to keep the kids from leaving but have no power to order them back should they leave.

So I'm not describing this like any film anyone is going to rush out to see.  But the writing is really good.  The acting is really good.  The surprises along the way are never total surprises, yet we never quite see them coming way far ahead of time.   Powerful stuff.

Rush:
Great performances.  Great soundtrack.  Great photography. Great racing sequences.

It's not like this film, one of Ron Howard's best, didn't get some good reviews.  It's not like it didn't get some recognition on the awards scene, with some acting awards especially.  But certainly, in the US, the film didn't do as well as hoped.  It's a shame, that.

12 Years a Slave:
It's a hard film to love, and I want to keep pushing it away, but it doesn't deserve that.

I first caught up with director Steve McQueen with Shame, an impressive feature about an IRA prisoner who went on hunger strike.  Searing visual images, excellent acting, powerful story.  Often hard to sit through.

I got to see McQueen in person when the Museum of the Moving Image screened his Shame.  Didn't impress me so much there.  The movie had the same stunning visuals, I can still see some scenes of the main character racing down deserted Manhattan streets that shimmer and gleam.  Like Shame, hard to sit through.  We don't really need visually stunning movies about sex addicts.  And to have to listen to the director talk about all of the wonderful artistic decisions in making a film that nobody should have bothered with.  It's the risk of these Q&A things.  This wasn't as bad as listening to Alan Parker spout on about his genius in making The Life of David Gale, but it was close.

Then we arrive at 12 Years a Slave.  And we're starting to see some patterns here.  There are stunning visuals, and the movie is hard to sit through.

But it's a worthy movie in better ways than a lot of other worthy movies.  It isn't a movie that uses white people to tell the story of the black struggle.  It isn't Richard Attenborough or Bernardo Bertolluci who choke on their own artifice half the time.  See Gandhi for worthy and dull, or The Last Emperor.  See Cry Freedom.  No, this is told with passion, with emotion, with an abundance of good acting.  

Captain Phillips:
Tom Hanks gives a great performance, and the film shows director Paul Greengrass at this best, with great photography and great editing in the service of some real-life drama.

Room 237:
A documentary about The Shining, kind of.

If you like The Shining -- and I like it very much -- it's hard to see it just once.  You want to keep seeing it, over and over and over again.  And when you see a movie over and over again, you notice things about it that you may not notice on the first viewing or the thirtieth.  And it's a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, whom some consider to be technocratic and cold, so in control of every frame that he suffocates human emotion.  So when you see one of his movies over and over again, and you notice things, you know that everything has to be there for a reason.

So this movie introduces us to people, whom we hear in voiceover over clips from the film but don't actually see on-screen, who have very clear ideas of what The Shining is all about.  Notice how the carpet has things that look like little rockets, and this is a movie about the faking of the Apollo rocket launches.  Or notice the food in the pantry and realize it's a movie about the treatment of the American Indian.  Or realize that the window in the hotel GM's office couldn't really be there and go someplace else from there.  All of these theories can't be right, and likely none of them are.  According to Kubrick's right hand man on the film, even the control freak director sometimes has a particular thing appear on the screen because they happened to need something and that was at hand on the particular day they shot a particular scene where they needed this particular thing.

I have a confession to make.  I never realized the window in the office couldn't have been a window.  I have stared at the screen a gazillion times trying to figure out if the bathroom window that Danny has to climb out of can really be a window in that particular place. I've yearned to look at blueprints because I never quite believe the architecture of the hotel, and now I find out that I might be able to go on the internet and find the blueprints I'm looking for.  But do I want to?  I like my mysteries.  I like my The Shining.

It's funny, sometimes funny-scary, it's insightful about the creative process, about our interaction with creativity, about obsession. .

Philomena:
The funny version of the not so funny story of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.  Excellently acted by Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.

Before Midnight:
I saw Before Sunrise when it came out 18 years ago, at the UA Lynbrook on a day when I rode out there to visit the accountants for the Scott Meredith Agency, whom I used for a couple years when I struck out on my own.  If memory serves, I've not seen the movie again, though the idea of it sticks around.  And then Before Sunset came around, 9 years after, and it sticks around.  You can't quite believe how much tension you can get out of wondering if a guy's going to leave to catch his flight or not, and this movie left me as rapt about that small little decision as if there were a red timer counting down for the bomb that might go off and destroy the world.  And now, Before Midnight.  Once again, Ethan Hawke, Juliet Delpy and director Richard Linklater collaborate on a little movie with a long aftertaste.  Ethan Hawke didn't make his flight.  Now, he's got a son from his prior marriage, the one that broke up in part because he didn't make that flight.  And he's spending some tense time in Greece with his girlfriend, Delpy.  And they ride around in a car after dropping their son off at the airport, and they talk while the beautiful Greek scenery glides by.  And they talk over lunch with friends, while chopping the vegetables and eating the result.  And they talk some more while they walk back to their hotel, an extended take tracking them through relics.  And it all comes to a head when they get to the hotel, 18 years of history and resentment and love and bitterness and shared experiences and things they should've done together but didn't.  Nominated for an Oscar in the screenplay categories.  The movies seem like they're being made up on the spot, but as I read in one interview, you can't go filming across the Greek countryside, closing roads, doing multiple takes, and make it all up as you go along.

Her:
One of the best sf films in a long time.  Winner of an Academy Award for Original Screenplay.

The Wolf of Wall Street:
Not quite up to the level of Goodfellas, but an amazingly good film by Martin Scorcese, with an exceptional lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio and good supporting work by Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler and others.  Leisurely, finding its own rhythms, and certain to be talked about for a very long time.

The Conjuring:
I realized as I was typing that I needed to add this to my list for reasons mentioned in what I say above about The Spectacular Now.  I'm nearing 50.  I don't do horror movies the way I used to.  I hardly do them at all.  But I went to see this one, I was on the edge of my seat the whole way, I was using my arms or my knees or my anything to keep myself from seeing what was happening on the screen because I was scared.  The movie's of a type, but it's among the very best of it's type that you'll find.

Gravity:
New-fangled technology and old-fashioned great acting from Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.  Visually stunning to look at, suspenseful to sit through, one of the few films I wish I'd paid more to see.

There are several hundred films released each year, and I see only a small percentage of them, somewhere between 90-110 in a typical year.  So ya know, my list isn't as valid as some critic who is paid to see movies and sees 400 of them, but it also isn't full of too many obscure films that only a critic would have or could have seen.  Room 237, Short Term 12, Spectacular Now are the more "obscure" of the movies on my list, but hey, I just round a Room 237 DVD lurking in Costco, so how obscure can it be!

Rushing Captain Phillips

In case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to catch up on a year of movie reviews in the week of/after the Golden Globes and before the announcement of Oscar nominations.

Lots of people have seen the excellent Captain Phillips.  As well they should!

Tom Hanks is fantastic in this movie.  Unlike in Saving Mr. Banks, you never forget that he is Tom Hanks.  But the much talked about last scene of the movie which is harrowing and amazing (and all the more so for being partially improvised, with Hanks playing against a non-actor) is all the more so for us knowing that if it's Tom Hanks in this situation, it really could be any of us.  It's directed by Paul Greengrass who is a quite perfect choice.  He started out as a documentarian, moved to doing documentaries like the quite excellent Bloody Sunday and United 93, jas done action-oriented feature films like Green Zone and two Bourne movies.  So here, he gets to take a real story which is full of ways to show off his action-shooting acumen.  Screenplay by Billy Ray, whose credits include hte fact-based Shattered Glass.

Alas, far fewer people have seen the excellent film Rush.  It was a pleasant surprise that Daniel Brühl picked up a Golden Globe nomination for Supporting Actor in the film, for a movie that came and went disappointingly at the US box office, and has also gotten nods from the Screen Actors Guild, the Broadcast Film Critics, and the BAFTAs (British film awards).

More to the point, Rush has a lot of people and things in it that I have long admired, doing very good work, in a well-crafted entertainment.  You need to see Rush!  You should stop reading this blog post and go find Rush to stream or rent or whatever!!

The director of Rush is Ron Howard.  As I mention here I think Ron Howard is underrated.  He has a career full of solid films, very few really bad ones, and deserves more of a reputation for doing consistent work for so very very long.

The screenwriter of Rush is Peter Morgan.  The Queen and Frost/Nixon are among his best-known credits, but his The Damned United is an excellent sports film about British football that understandably didn't take the US by storm but is really really good.  So this is another sports movie from him.

Daniel Brühl.  He first came to my eye in 2003 in a film called Good Bye Lenin! about a son trying to hide the fall of the East German regime from his mother.  A German actor, he hasn't done a lot of English-language film acting, but he's been in a Bourne movie and in Inglorious Basterds and I've never been sad to see him in something.

I really liked Thor, the first one, directed by Kenneth Branagh, which spent lots of time showing me Chris Hemsworth in a tight tee-shirt.  I did not like the new Thor movie, which had Chris Hemsworth covered up in a silly Thor uniform the whole time.  Hemsworth is under-rated by critics because he looks fantastic.  He really looks fantastic.  So it's easy to overlook that you don't just watch him on the screen because he looks fantastic but rather because he radiates charm and charisma, and the charm and charisma kind of hide the fact that he can act.  I think I'm saying that because he can act, and not just because I enjoy looking at him enough that I wish it was because he was acting, and not because he's posing.

So with all these things going for it, Rush can't be bad, and it isn't.  It's a darned fine movie.  Like The Damned United, it goes beyond beyond just a sports movie.  There are a lot of moral issues involved about the collision of safety and money in sports that pop their head up through the action.  There's enough going on with the characters and with universality of theme that I enjoyed this Formula One racing movie even though I don't have any interest to speak of in Formula One.

The making of the movie is smooth and unobtrusive.  The thing with Ron Howard is that he gets out of the way, and usually lets his story speak for itself.  So he gets some good actors, he finds a good DP in Anthony Dod Mantle (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, 28 Days Later, all for Danny Boyle), and the film is attractive to look at.  Hans Zimmer does an amazing score, one of the best I've heard in a long long long long long time, and hopefully to become a masterwork in Zimmer's discography alongside Rain Man.  The overall sound editing and sound design of the film is excellent, so the music co-exists with the dialogue and the sounds of the race cars careening around the turns.

And of course the acting is really good.  You can't tell Chris Hemsworth is acting because he's just radiating charisma as a bad boy race car driver as famous for his sexual rondelays off the circuit as for how he drives the ovals on.  Brühl is one of those drivers who's full of respect for the game and his competitors and by-the-books, and he talks in a weird foreign accent while the driver Hemsworth plays talks nicely accented English.  The two are both very talented, fierce competitors.  And on a rainy day when Brühl is saying it's too dangerous to race, Hemsworth is using his charisma to say the show must go on.  The two pair off one another nicely.

What not to see?  The film is great to listen to, great to look at in every way, an interesting story that gripped me in spite of being set in a milieu I don't default to being interested in.

It would make me very happy to see nominations for sound, score, and in an acting category.  It will make me very sad if the film is overlooked entirely.

Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mister Banks started out kind of slowly at the box office in its initial limited release.  I went to see it opening weekend on the primary screen at the Village East, a landmarked beautifully ornamented former Yiddush play house surrounded by much smaller screens in the basement and stacked in the one-time stage area. The movie was playing on four screens,and there were maybe a few dozen people watching in this very large one.

Happily, to me, the film picked up some steam with families over the holidays.  It is quite entertaining, boasts some fine acting, and for my clients and people in my trade it poses some interesting questions about the boundaries between art and commerce. It is the story of an artist, the author of the Mary Poppins novels, and her money-driven flirtation with Disney over the making of the film based on her books, which the author wouldn't have enjoyed with a five-pound bag if sugar, let alone a spoonful.

The acting first.  Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney.  I didn't realize this when I watched the coming attraction until Hanks' name appeared, and I didn't realize it during the movie.  He submerges himself thoroughly in the role.  Even in his excellent performance in Captain Phillips -- in most of his excellent performances -- you always know you are watching Tom Hanks.  In burying himself here so thoroughly in the role of Disney, he gives one of his very best performances of quite a number of exceptionally good ones.

Emma Thompson is highly buzzed for Oscar contention for her performance as P.L. Travers and is also impeccable.  The author is not likeable in the movie or in life (I read that a grandchild said she died liking or being liked by no one), and Thompson doesn't shy away from this.  But she shows just enough admirable sternness or authorial pride/possessiveness, both virtues we generally cherish, that we never grow distant.

Myke Cole pointed me in the direction of a review from the LA Weekly that is one of the most extreme examples of one of the strongest critiques of the film.  It whitewashes, it sugarcoats, it hides inconvenient faces, it makes a mockery or just plain dismisses the importance of Travers' creative integrity.

Yes, the movie sugar coats.  It is a movie about the making of one of the most beloved family films of all time, and it is intended to be seen by families.  But for all the sugar coating there isn't a major point about Travers' dislike for the movie that isn't addressed in the film.

It is very clear early in that this was all about money, that she needed Walt's. One of the very first scenes is her agent/adviser saying "no one is buying your books, you have no money coming in, do you want to keep your house."

The movie has her say at one point "you are the only American I like" to Paul Giamatti's chauffeur, so it doesn't make a big huge announcement of how much she hated Americans, and why should it? Does this critic wish for American children to reciprocate her hatred, not read the books because of it?  No one seeing the movie would be surprised to know that Travers forbade American involvement in the stage adaptation of Mary Poppins, but the movie actually being made isn't the place to dwell on it.

It is very clear in the movie that she was not invited to the premiere.  In the movie, we see her deciding to go absent an invitation, Walt is seen saying something like "I should invite her to dump on it?" She shows up in Walt's office and we have a "gee, that invitation must have been lost, will have a fresh one delivered right to your hotel" moment where we know there was no sent invitation to resend.

Another review of this nature criticized the film for not showing Walt Disney's chain smoking, but the movie isn't about the evils of tobacco, and in one scene Travers barges into Disney's office and he hastily puts out a cigarette and says "have an image to behold, can't see me smoking" so we know that he smokes. Hanks also depicts his smokers' hack.  Here the filmmakers lose either way, because anti-smoking advocates would rather we see no smoking ever in movies, that people who did smoke shouldn't in cinematic reality because it encourages a bad habit.

Who would want to see the movie this critic would prefer?  Isn't it better to have a palatable movie where Disney says "bad to let people see me smoking" and Travers says "you are the only American I like" -- a movie that people will see that says these things? Few people will see the movie this critic is upset not to have seen.

I never read the books.  I know of them only because of the movie.

Which brings us to the teachable lesson for authors.  Don't quit the day job!  For almost 28 years I have watched bad decision making -- let me qualify that, necessary decisions that I shouldn't call bad, but which are detrimental to the quality of the work or to the long-term financial benefits which should accrue to the author -- by authors who need to do something for immediate financial reasons or feel the pressure of those needs.

Travers was aware enough to loathe her decision while she was making it, and I have to give her credit for that.  Too many authors remind of the adage about people never acknowledging a fact that their employment requires they ignore.

It is hard to tell from the movie the extent to which she did or did not later take ownership of her decision.

Which one should.

But sometimes the ownership is acknowledging that some decisions are forced upon us by circumstance.  I think it might have been Cory Doctorow who pointed out that the advance is in part a compensation for having to go along for the ride with the publisher when other options are foreclosed.  I can think of two books early in JABberwocky history with one publisher willing to buy, so what can you do but sell?  And when the publisher wants the bad cover, what do you do?  You can't pick up your toys and go elsewhere.

The last point I will make on this -- authors way more often than not are along for the ride, for better or worse or richer or poorer the publishers make decisions and after a point you just have to go along.  And perhaps because it is so often thus, the authors shy away when I point out that they can pick up their toys and go elsewhere that the decisions are in fact theirs.

The tragedy of Saving Mister Banks, that you hear a bit of on some excerpts from archival recordings made at Travers' request of her hectoring sessions with the film creators, of her fighting where she really can't.

As an agent, I hate those tragedies but know they are unavoidable. But what tears at me more are the rarer tragedies where we had the leverage to have things done some other way and failed to do it.

Quick Cuts

I haven't done a lot of blogging recently.  To make up for it, I'm going to try and do quick capsule reviews of some movies that are in theatres now and/or not in so many theatres but in the buzz for awards season.

Thor: The Dark World
I didn't care for this at all.  The first movie with a very odd superhero movie choice in Kenneth Branagh directing was a little off the superhero movie tracks, as interested in showing Chris Hemsworth in a tight tee-shirt as in endless superhero battles.  Not this movie,  As is so often the case, I tuned out and went to sleep when we got to the last half hour, because I knew it was just going to be another long, dull, over-CGIs, boring, been-there done-that fight scene.  That said, I saw it with a client who enjoyed it quite a bit, as have most of the other people I know who saw it.  Really?

Last Vegas
If you think you might like this, you probably will like it.  It's not good by many objective critical standards, but it has amiability to excess and delivers perfectly on its promise and premise.  I rarely laughed out loud, but I certainly had a smile on my face.

Dallas Buyers Club
This movie, which is getting great reviews, was the second half of a self-made double-feature for me with Last Vegas.  I enjoyed the "worse" movie a lot more, and didn't care so much for this critical darling.  Yes, Matthew McConaughey gives an amazingly great performance in the movie, and in that sense and maybe in that sense alone, the movie is worth seeing.  He acts up a storm, captivates the screen.  But there's no dramatic structure to the movie.  If I can make a comparison that not too many people are making, this is kind of like Catch Me If You can.  It's a lovable bad guy being chased after by the feds.  But in Catch Me If You Can, the stakes heighten as the movie goes along.  Leonardo DiCaprio's character goes from doing small things to doing bigger and bigger and more outlandish things.  There's also all the studio veneer in the casting, with Tom Hanks and Christopher Walken providing star level support, and Hanks in particular investing us in the movie's Javert character.  But here, it's the same scene over and over again.  The movie doesn't heighten as it goes along.  In spite of the madcap energy of the lead performance, the movie itself sags.  So maybe I was dozing during the portion of the movie where Jared Leto is engaged in some amazing sure-to-be-an-Oscar-finalist supporting turn.  Honest!  This guy's in all the awards buzz, and I can't remember a thing about him in this movie.  The Javert character is incredibly dull and uninteresting, but Michael O'Neill made more of an impression on me for his "oh God, not this same FDA guy again" role than the guy who's going to get a Supporting Actor nomination.

Ender's Game
Saw this with two clients and two other people from the office.  Reactions were motley, from entirely satisfied (not more than that) to outright dislike.  I was entirely satisfied.  Nothing new.  It's a bootcamp/biopic movie and you get a lot of the same notes.  Training camp sequences and conflicts you can predict.  But it was well-acted, never sagged.  For some perspective, I read the original 1977 "Ender's Game" novella in 1981's Analog Anthology #2: Reader's Choice at the dawn of my sf-nal experience.  I'm not sure if I ever read the novel-length version of the story, and no I never read any of the sequels.  I don't know if my feelings about the movie would be different if I had more recent or adult memories of the underlying story.  Insofar as the novella goes, I do think the movie does, at the end, get across the knife-twisting truth of Ender's final test, as I remember if from 32 years ago.  And just to say -- I wasn't in favor of the boycott calls for the movie.  That's a double-edged sword, for how many gay advocacy organizations would be super-duper thrilled if we decided to boycott gays?  They could say correctly from our current perspective that the difference here is that Card was on the losing side of the historical trend, but nonetheless I think it's a very dangerous thing to start boycotting or ignoring artists -- and for the past 40 years Card has been an important and significant one -- on account of their political beliefs.

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.

I Have a Buzz Up My Woody

Toy Story 3 may be the best movie I've seen so far in 2010.

It demonstrates that if Hollywood were to try, if it were to care, that it could make movies that were actually good. The people at Pixar care. They don't always succeed, and I haven't been as big a fan of Up or Wall-E as others. Not that either of them was bad, but I just didn't think they were as good as some of the fuss and bother had them to be. And when I see Toy Story 3, I'm seeing the difference between true greatness and some nice tries.

Why do I love this movie so much?

Well, the most important thing might be the characters. They're toys, but we really and truly and deeply care about them. There's something about the performances of the voice actors that goes a little bit deeper than the usual. Way back when the first Toy Story came out not every actor was lined up for these animation voicing jobs like it is now. That's a long time ago, it is, and we were just getting to Robin Williams in Aladdin or to Tom Hanks and Tim Allen in the Toy Story movies. These are real performances with heart and soul, and even so many years after the second Toy Story movie, we fit right in with these people -- yes, people -- kind of like we find the way to our favorite seat in the living room when we go back to the old family homestead.

And Pixar cares about the script, so the characters we care about aren't let down by writing that goes through the motions. The script fot this movie has the same qualities as some of the best scripts for The Simpsons. If you get the cinematic allusions that are thrown around to things like Cool Hand Luke, then you have something added, but you don't have to get the allusions in order to enjoy the script at the basic plot level. If you understand what it means when we're told those might not have been Lincoln Logs in the box, well that's a very nice joke, But the line works at another level even if you're not sure entirely what's meant by it.

With a real story to tell about real people, the film can include a lot of pop culture riffs without just being about them, which is a fault that I think Dreamworks Animation can fall prey to a lot of the time.

Most of you probably know the story from other reviews, but in brief Andy the human owner of our toys is about to go off to college. His toys end up donated to a daycare center, and there is disagreement amongst the toys over whether they were supposed to end up in the trash as Andy's discards or in the attic for some possible next generation of Andys. But they all know that Woody was going into the college box as one of those childhood memories Andy would keep with him in the next stage of his life. The daycare center turns out to have some issues; the new toys are left to the devices of the youngest toddlers who can play a little rough. So can they escape before Andy goes off to college?

It's not a complex story, but the emotions cut a lot deeper than the description of the plot. I was crying at the end. Yes, me, fortysomething and crying at Toy Story 3.

And because there are real characters, real emotions, a good script... When we get to the overloud overlong climax of a lot of Hollywood extravaganzas these days, let's think Transformers of the 2nd Narnia movie, we don't care. It has all the emotional impact of watching somebody else play a videogame. Here, there's never any doubt that our toys are going to survive but it's still gut-wrenching when it looks like they're going to go to that great trash-to-energy plant in the sky.

As good as that brief bio section at the beginning of Up is -- and is there anyone who doesn't love those opening ten minutes -- Toy Story 3 is that level all the way through.

I saw this at Clearview's Ziegfeld on Saturday June 19, 2010. The Ziegfeld is the last big single screen movie theatre left in New York, and I wish they were showing Toy Story 3 in 2-D. The glasses give an extra dimension on the screen but at the cost of shrinking the dimensions of the screen itself. I'm not sure I'd have lost as much seeing this on some smaller screen for $4 less as I would have on a 2D movie. That being said, for my $20 for the opening weekend at the Ziegfeld, we did get to see Buzz and Woody live in person between the coming attractions and the movie. I could have gotten my picutre taken. I did get a pat on the back from Buzz as he headed down the aisle. And there's that $20 thing. I don't want to pay $20 for a movie on a regular basis, and I think this may come back to bite Hollywood. There are some movies where I might be very happy to save some money, not have the 3-D, and not be paying so much. Hollywood and the theatre owners want us to be able to see movies in 3-D all the time with every screen digitally equipped to do it. But at least for me, there are going to be some movies I might skip if my only choices are the premium-priced 3-D because I'm just not going to think the movie's worth the extra bucks. I'm not sure 3-D should be seen as Hollywood's salvation, because I think they might lose a few admissions here and there that won't be noticed -- it's always hard to miss what you don't know you could have had -- even if they gain a little extra lucre on some of the admissions they do have.

angels UP demons

Up.  Seen Tuesday evening May 19, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen 17.  2.5 Slithy Toads

Angels & Demons.  Seen Tuesday evening May 19, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen 6.  3.5 Slithy Toads

So I'm sitting at home on a Sunday night with The Firm on as background noise; it's a TNT Free Movie On Demand, and hearing that Dave Grusin score...

It inspires me to write about movies.

Up is Wall-E redux.  It starts out with some wonderful stuff that nobody but Pixar does in an animated film, a music-and-pictures sequence that tells the life story of the lead character from youth to old age, for richer and poorer and sickness and health with the woman he meets at a young age, marries, and eventually survives.  There's another very nice scene not long thereafter when he snaps at the pressure of a development going up around the house he's holding on to, providing an opportunity for evil developer to get his way.  

[where is Gene Hackman.  I just hear his voice in The Firm and wish he were ageless.]

So if you've read anything about Up, you kind of know what happens.  The house floats away on a sea of balloons, there's a boy-scout-like boy stowed away, and they go to South American and have an adventure.

Sadly, all of the inspiration in the movie must have been left behind when the house lifted off, because there ain't a darned thing in the South Africa section that really makes any sense.  You've got a valuable bird, but why?  Dogs that talk, but why?  The old explorer the lead-as-boy once idolized is still alive even though he's got to be fifteen or twenty years older, and he's the dog master and bird hunter, but why?  So to me, Up ends up having the same second act troubles that seriously deflated Wall-E for me.  All that effort to start up the concept for a story, all the creativity and genius, but I don't think anyone knew what to do leading off from the idea. 

At their best, these movies show Pixar doing animation for adults that's serious and refreshing and at the same time accessible, and I'd rather see Pixar trying to do something than see the Dreamworks Animation formula being trotted out once more.  But to be honest, Pixar's starting to get credit like French films, just for being French or being Pixar.

The quality of the animation is often excellent.

The best part of the movie is the music by Michael Giacchino.  Jerry Goldsmith is gone.  John Barry and John Williams aren't gone but also aren't working much any more.  I've been wondering if there's anyone who might lay the claim to being a real go-to guy for film music.  There's this temptation for me to say its James Newton Howard who has some excellent work in Defiance and The Village, but I can't to that far in his favor.  Well, after listing to his work on both Star Trek and Up, I think we've found it, that his name is Michael Giacchino, and that it's a good thing maybe Lost is ending because perhaps if his work on that show is over he'll find time to do more movie music.  The score in Up is wonderful.  Yes, Giacchino is channeling Randy Newman something big, but there are worse things to do.  His music helps make the wordless sequences sing.  Great job.

Angels and Demons is this summer's Wanted, or perhaps the closest thing I've seen to the movie equivalent of Simon R. Green.  Like Wanted, it's not "great" movie-making, but it's just a helluva lot of fun.  I was rapt from beginning to end, never checking my watch for a 2+ hour movie (not even tempted until very near the end, and I said "no, it's close to the end, let it ride..."), enjoying myself thoroughly for the duration.  I'd mention Simon R. Green because Simon is a writer I've represented for 20 years whose work is often wonderful (and to give a plug, I think the book Daemons Are Forever which comes out in paperback this week may be the best book he's ever written with the prior Man With The Golden Torc very close behind) but whom I can't use as a good how to example.  Simon's sheer energy and verve and voice and all allow him to get away with being very "tell-y" sometimes when writers are supposed to show, not tell.  It's kind of like that with Angels and Demons.  You really shouldn't have Tom Hanks running around Rome stopping constantly to give little lessons in art history, geography, theology, and more.  You totally shouldn't.  But yet he does, and the movie's all the more endearing for enthusiastically charging ahead to do things you're not supposed to do.

This is better than DaVinci Code.  The formula might be the same, but the geography and time scale of Angels and Demons are much more compressed, so there's a ticking clock vibrancy that was lacking in the earlier move.   A lot of fun, Angels and Demons is, and the summer's off to a blessed good start to have it and Star Trek bringing joy and life and fun to the multiplex.

And I want to give some special mention to Ron Howard.  I haven't seen all of his movies, and some like Night Shift I really should have.  But The Grinch is the only Ron Howard movie in a long career that I wouldn't want to see.  Ron Howard hasn't made a great all-time classic movie like Martin Scorcese with Goodfellas, but neither has Howard made a turd like The Last Temptation of Christ.  Apollo 13 might be his best movie, and it was fun in Angels and Demons for me to see Howard channeling his inner Apollo 13 in the CERN sequences.  In Backdraft he almost pulled off the feat of making a good movie from a decidedly bad script.  He's made many different types of movies in many different genres and usually made them entertainingly.  

Rachel Getting Married

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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