Oscars 2019

12:05 AM - And we'll call this a wrap for the Live Blog.  I may have more to say about some of my favorite movies of 2018, but for the Oscars, it's a night.  I know I've done better jobs on the live blog than this year, but since they eliminated around a half hour of Stuff, they eliminated a lot of the down time when I could pay less attention to what was on the screen, and more to my typing.  I'll take that trade-off any day.

12:03 AM -- Best Actress.  Prior to going for a repeat viewing of The Wife a couple of weeks ago, I don't believe I've ever gone back twice to a movie just to see a brilliant performance by an actress.  I am deeply disappointed for Glenn Close.  I might have a hard time separating out Olivia Colman's performance from my overall dislike for the movie she was in.  But even allowing for that, I can't see Colman's performance as better than the third or fourth best in the category, because Melissa McCarthy is a knockout in Can You Ever Forgive Me, and as up and down as A Star Is Born is, it would almost certainly be down-er with anyone else in the lead role.

11:58 PM - Talking more about the Adapted Screenplay category.  I didn't see Beale Street, but there are arguments to be made for all four of the nominees that I did see, while the Original category is full of weak links in stronger movies.  Can You Ever Forgive Me takes an assortment of unlikeable characters -- even Jane Curtin as the literary agent isn't the most likable literary agent, which is scandalous, and makes us love their faults and imperfections.  A Star is Born gets progressively weaker as it goes along, but at its best it takes a story that's decades old and makes it feel utterly contemporary, and it tackles issues of class differences that aren't required from the original movies. But the Screenplay category, both for awards and nominations, is often where the consolation prize is given, and it's a great place to give Spike Lee his first competitive Oscar.  I'd put Spike Lee's career against that of Martin Scorsese.  Neither has many Oscar statuettes.  Both have done films that are highly variable in quality.  I'm glad to see him with an Oscar to put on his shelf.

11:45 PM - I'm more upset with Green Book winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay than I am about its winning Best Picture.  The Oscars will be the Oscars, and if anything they've gotten better and less Oscar-y over the course of my lifetime.  Last night I saw Goodfellas at the Loews Jersey, with around 300 people in attendance to see a film that's some thirty years old.  It lost Best Picture to Dances With Wolves.  I doubt the Loews Jersey would program Dances With Wolves.  If it did, I doubt 300 people would show up to see it.  But the most notable thing about that year's Oscars isn't that Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture.  The more enduring film loses often, and if you take a look at the Amazon rankings, it ain't like there aren't people still interested to buy a copy of the movie.  What's noticeable is how Dances With Wolves swept so many of the smaller award, and once upon a time the Best Picture always racked up Oscar after Oscar.  Now, it's much more common to see the spreading around of the statuettes as we saw this year with Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book and Black Panther all taking home multiples.  But for Screenplay?  The remake of Driving Miss Daisy wins for Screenplay?  And yet, even there, my disappointment is tempered.  This year's Adopted Screenplay category was full of contenders.  The Original Screenplay category?  Well, The Favourite wasn't winning.  Vice?  First Reformed and Roma are both better movies than they are screenplays.  Roma's strengths weren't in its underwritten screenplay; I don't know that even the movie's fans would say the screenplay was its strength.  And First Reformed is similarly flawed to Roma.  There's just too much in both screenplays that we don't see on the screen.  Without Ethan Hawke and the passion that the screenwriter also brought to his direction, First Reformed is a clumsy mess that flips its lid as it goes over the top in the ending, and Roma is full of contrivances and the under-explained in its screenplay.  But. Still.  Green Book, for Screenplay?

11:32 PM - Returning to earlier items...  So I joked about Ludwig Goransson's ago, but quite well-meaningly.  He's 34 years old.  And winning an Oscar for Best Score at the age of 34 -- well, that takes some work.  You don't get to score very many motion pictures fresh out of college.  You've got to become known, apprentice, gain trust, have reputation enough that the music branch of the Academy will think of you as a possible Oscar winner.  If we looked back over 90 years of Academy Awards, how many winners will we find who were younger?  It's also a tribute to Ryan Coogler, to spot the talent in someone he meets at college, and have the confidence to give that person work.  It's easy enough in to do in his debut movie Fruitvale Station, but then you have to be willing to stick with your man when the studio starts to say "Superhero movie, we need to have the score by the guy who does the loud obnoxious Superhero Movie music."  Also worth noticing is the delicacy with which Goransson's scored the quite different Creed and Creed II, where the score requires a different touch, including playing the obligatory homage to Bill Conti's original and enduring themes from the first Rocky movie, which Goransson always does with skill and grace.  Now, if Goransson would be willing to study just a little bit more at the knee of a John Williams and get even better, because Williams is getting on, Michael Giacchino isn't doing as much as he could be doing to assume the mantle, and we need people for that role.

11:15 PM - Green Book. Well!

11:03: We don’t always get what we want in life. Green Book won an Oscar for its screenplay, and Glenn Close did not win for The Wife.  I shall have more to say on these things.

10:50 PM - Rami!  I believe Bohemian Rhapsody is currently in the lead with four Oscars.  Very good Nike ad.  Roma is the only movie with a shot at overtaking Rhapsody.

10:45 PM - Already at Best Actor?!?!?

10:36 PM - after a few minutes of music from E.T., the bulk came from Superman: The Movie, the music over the funeral of Jonathan Kent, which brings tears to my eyes as an adult when I am lucky enough to see the film on the big screen. Fitting selection in a year when Margot Kidder is amongst thise whose lives were commemorated.

10:25 PM - Ludwig Goransson said “twelve years ago” in his acceptance speech. He doesn’t look old enough! Since I didn’t like any of the score nominees, I opted to root for Black Panther in this category, and am glad to have another win for the movie.

10:20: The Good. The Bad. And The Ugly. And having Green Book win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay is definitely in the Bad column.

10:09 PM - I quite liked how they non-introduced Shallow, just had Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper come on up and sing. Would have been better if theybalso used the occasion to reenact that famous piano number from The Fabulous Baker Boys, but, OK. And how have so many people been doing the “Star Was Robbed” thing. It’s a great first third of a movie that gets worse with each trimester.  Really!  It isn’t a great whole movie.

10:05 PM - quoting @kylebuchanan “Only 3 black women have won Oscars for anything other than acting. 2 of them just happened tonight.”

9:57 PM - First Man. Won an Oscar.

9:53 PM - American Idol ad is the first standout in a while. The cell service providers are dragging the whole thing down.

9:50 PM - Whatever happens with Roma as Best Picture, Netflix has three Oscars in hand tonight.

9:48 PM -  “I can’t believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar.”

9:47PM -first time presenters have done two awards?

9:38 PM - Not so happy about Supporting Actor category.  The winning performance could have been in the Best Actor category, and I just have a lot harder a time seeing Richard Grant or Adam Driver being swapped out for actors as good or better, while with Mahershala Ali, I can easily plug in three or five. Richard E. Grant first came to attention in the late 1980s with Withnail and I, which I didn’t see, and How To Get Ahead in Advertising, which sadly I did, an overpraised art film but Grant made an impression.  He resonated more positively in Steve Martin’s LA Story, and over the past thirty years he’s been in everything and anything, genre-wise, that you could be in, a lesser known actor from the Mchael Caine school choice philosophy. But there’s nothing in that thirty years to hint at the offbeat power and brilliance of his performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me,, which is a tone perfect tone poem about a deeply imperfect man playing off an ewually imperfect character played by Melissa McCarthy. I reckon being nominated and getting to play the award circuit is for a Richard E. Grant somewhat its own reward, but an Oscar would be a bigger one. And Adam Driver is an actor of deep subtlety as seen also in movies like Paterson.  So, here, two performances I much preferred to the one that won.

9:26 PM - from David Itzkoff in the New York Times — Trevor Noah reflects on his own life as “a young boy growing up in Wakanda,” and recounts the many people in his life who approach him by saying “Wakanda Forever.” “Even backstage, Mel Gibson came up to me like, ‘Wakanda forever.’ He said another word after that but the Wakanda part was nice.”

9:16 PM - I could’ve filled out half of a Ten Best list just with documentaries. Bathtubs Over Broadway, Three Identical Strangers. Science Fair. Filmworker. In addition to the the two I placed on.

9:12 PM - When Justin Chang says it for you, quote Justin:  Foreign-language film winner Alfonso Cuarón, making the second of likely three appearances on stage tonight, has a lot of cinephilia to go around: This time he tips his hat to CITIZEN KANE, JAWS, THE GODFATHER and BREATHLESS and quotes Claude Chabrol. 

9:09 PM - Black Panther didn’t make my Ten Best, but I find myself pulling for it because the films I liked more  are often not contending. And it is the work of an actual filmmaker in Ryan Coogler who tried jard to bend the superhero movie to his vision, and crafted a film that wears the influence of other great films on jts sleeve, rather than other superhero movies.  I am pretty much dead to the world of superhero movies at this point in time, but this has more staying power with me.

9:05 PM - Geek note, Ruth Carter was the Costume Designer for Joss Whedon’s Serenity.

8:53. Serena!

8:44 PM - Moving along so briskly, not a lot of dead time for blogging!

8:37 PM - Walmart ain’t my favorite place. McDonalds neither. But they step up to the plate with their Oscar ads.

8:27 PM - the guys are killing it with the tuxes this year😀👍😊😁👍😊

8:26 PM - Vice is not a good movie.

8:25 PM - and a great Rolex ad.  Google did someg soecialir the Oscars, but seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey abused that way.  Yikes!  Ugggh!!

8:21 PM. That was a great Cadillac ad, and then gets followed by a very prosaic Verizon ad.

8:18 PM - But Free Solo also made my Top Ten, and I wish I had gotten back to see it in IMAX.  Missing from the category is Three Identical Strangers.

8:16PM - What a great category. Minding The Gap, Free Solo, RBG all good.  Me go for Minding the Gap.

8:10 PM - Regina King is favored to win, and Beale Street is the one film all over the awards season that I took a pass on. No dog in this hunt.  I couldn’t have done worse seeing Beale Street over The Favourite, which I loathed.

8:08 PM Sparkly! Love the tux Chadwick Boseman is wearing.

8:04 PM An Oscar buffet fit fir a Queen

https://twitter.com/justincchang/status/1099835759186477056?s=21

7:48PM - Getting ready!  Post from when nominations were announced here and my Top Ten for last year.

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!

Hustlers and Wolves

A year ago this time I was leading the cheers for David Russell's Silver Linings Playbook.

This year, I want to say clear as day that David Russell's American Hustle is a giant snow job of a good movie, and I cannot believe critics are falling for the hustle,

I cared about the characters in Silver Linings Playbook.  It was old-fashioned at its heart and sweet at its core, and very well acted.

I didn't care about a thing in American Hustle,  Christian Bale plays a two bit hustler whom I don't care about.  He runs a con with an FBI agent played by Bradley Cooper, whom I don't care about.  All the movie does is remind me constantly. of films like The Sting or Catch Me If You Can that do it better.

There is the occasional pleasure.  De Niro is good and has a great moment.  Amy Adams is brilliant but too little seen.  But mostly, I was bored early and often.

If you're looking for a cinematic snow job this winter, The Wolf of Wall Street would be your better bet.

From the coming attraction there were hopes this would be another Goodfellas, an earlier Scorcese film that us one of the best American films of recent decades. And by that standard, Wolf of Wall Street disappoints.  By most other standards It is a darn fine piece of work.

It is the mostly true story of Jordan Belfort, who founded the serious sounding brokerage firm of Stratton Oakmont that specialized in "selling garbage to garbage men," persuading the middle class -- very very persuasively -- to invest in penny stocks, two bit companies with much better chances of becoming half pint runts. This was a very lucrative if not entirely legal business that made Belfort very wealthy, and the Wolf of Wall Street delights in the bacchanalia that resulted, at least until Belfort was imprisoned on a variety of fraud charges.

The movie is long, around three hours long.  When so many movies today are special effects spectaculars full of fast cut action or fast cut just about anything, this is unusually rare.  The last movie I can consciously remember being so leisurely scene by scene was a Romanian art movie that seemed almost a parody of leisurely art movies.  Before that, Jonathan Demme's remake of Manchurian Candidate was a movie where every scene dragged on a beat too long, an extra boring beat too long.  And here, these long scenes can be seen as a celebration of decadence and excess and tawdriness and sexism and so much else we aren't supposed to celebrate.

Yet I found the scenes in Wolf of Wall Street to be tightly edited, taut, and compelling.  For all their length, Scorcese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker were finding the pulse of the scene, letting it play out in its own time and rhythm.  Matthew McConaughey's slightly more veteran broker teaching Leonardo DiCaprio's newbie broker the ropes at a 30 martini lunch.  Jordan Belfort trying to romance the stone of a cold FBI agent on a luxurious yacht. Most memorably a scene at a pay phone in a country club that turns into sardonic slapstick that in term becomes almost Grand Guignol.  Yeah, some of the scenes could have been a little tighter.  A going away speech given at Stratton Oakmont is one. But on balance I was enjoying the slow building skill of the film.

That said, it could still have lost a half hour in its final hour.  We aren't watching this because we care about Jordan Belfort's wife and kids, and the resolution of that plot arc could have been left on the cutting room floor.

I can't criticize the movie for its excess.  It is what is is; these are things that pretty much happened.  I can't fault the film for not showing the victims. It isn't about them, and a movie about selling "garbage to garbage men," you can't fill in just a little where the money for the bacchanalia is coming from?

Scorcese can be up and down,  Goodfellas great, Hugo I walked out of and other of his movies I should have.  But this is a major canon addition for a major figure in American cinema and should be seen. iPad

Three by Three

My big sit two weeks ago really can't compare to seeing Django Unchained, Les Miz and Zero Dark Thirty back-to-back-to-back.  The good news, I guess, is that I saw all three in different theatres so I got some fresh air in-between.

Django Unchained was kind of frustrating to me.  The writer/director Quentin Tarantino is an auteur, a student of cinema, a craftsman.  He does films that won't be confused with anyone else's.  This one is, as many of his often are, a bit wacko in the descriptions.  A German bounty hunter in the pre-Civil War south decides to buy a slave, teach him to assist in his job, the slave proves to be a natural with a gun, and then agrees to go to buy the slave's wife.  The slave is played by Jamie Foxx, the German by Christoph Waltz who was a deserving Oscar winner for Supporting Actor in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, the plantation owner who has Foxx's wife by Leonardo DiCaprio.  Quite a cast.  Kerry Washington is the wife, and a house slave on the plantation is played by Samuel L. Jackson.  There are also a gazillion cameos from Jonah Hill, Don Johnson, Tarantino himself, and more.  It's not only a good cast, but it's well taken care of by the director.  Everyone is good or very good, except maybe Tarantino himself, but to me the stand-out is Samuel L.  Jackson.  There's no Samuel L. Jackson in him this time around, he's been doing films for ten or twenty years now by being Samuel L. Jackson, and here he's completely his character and not himself at all.

Technically, the film is brilliant, rich with allusion to cinematic history and yet entirely its own.  Music couldn't be used more perfectly, Django has his own theme song that hearkens back to classic Western cinema, the kind of theme song parodies by the F Troop song but here done most subtly.  There are spectacular individual shots, one of the family gathered under a large tree for a funeral leaps off the screen.  There is rich choreographed pageantry, especially as Waltz and Foxx enter on to a plantation, the parade of their horses or the looks of the slaves.  One moment you can be reminded of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the next of Kubrick, maybe some John Ford or some Scorcese mixed in.

If you're going to see the film, do yourself a favor and see it now in theatres, it's the kind of movie that deserves that.  And when you're at the theatre, if you have a choice of screens why not be sure to go to the auditorium with the biggest screen.  This is a movie that fills the screen, it wants to grow and expand to fill every square meter the way sea monkeys want to grow when you've poured hot water on them.  You could probably teach a film class using just this film and it's direct ancestors as the text.

But alas, all that is good about the film is ultimately being used toward one goal, which is to get us to another Quentin Tarantino gore-fest, it's like a tasting menu with lots of little violent morsels along the way as the odd-numbered courses and bits of cinematic brilliance for the even-numbered courses, and then the dessert is some massive thing, a molten chocolate cake that bleeds blood covered by blood-colored ice cream with bullet sprinkles and hot blood topping and pistol barrels taking the place of the bananas.  I haven't even seen every movie written or directed by Tarantino, and I've already seen this in True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse, here, Inglourious Basterds, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk till Dawn.

Other great directors like Kubrick and Scorcese have applied their skills to lots of different kinds of movies, some more successful than others, but they've gotten around.  I could forgive Tarantino his complete disinterest in moving beyond the bloodbath if he had some niche he was amazingly good at, kind of like the way a James Burrows or a Jay Sandrich could direct a sitcom like nobody's business, but Tarantino is every bit as inconsistent as Scorcese without any compensating ambition.

It's possible to interpret this as Tarantino using his violent ends as a way of sugaring thematic medicine. Django Unchained is a great romance, or it's the first film in decades to look at slavery from the black point of view.  Please.  In Django Unchained, there's this question DiCaprio asks of why slaves haven't killed their masters, it's a good question wondering about the motivations of the Samuel L. Jackson character to care more for the plantation master than the slave.  The film answers this question by having DiCaprio bring a skull out to the dinner table and launch into a discussion of phrenology that would fit right at home in DePalma's Untouchables.  But it doesn't give a serious answer to the question, it doesn't for a moment think seriously about that question or any other question related to slavery.

And it is indulgent.  Much as I admired the film, beats and scenes could often have been shortened, I didn't need to be sitting in a theatre for three hours (inclusive of coming attractions) for this movie.

Les Miz has gotten a lot of attention for stylistic reasons as well.  Most musicals pre-record the songs then have the cast lip sync to their recordings while doing their actual performances.  Here, director Tom Hooper (King's Speech, Oscar winner) uses small mikes to record performances actually being filmed, the mics then removed digitally in post-production.  He also films most of the numbers in tight close-up.  Charles Isherwood, a theatre critic for the NY Times, isn't kidding when he says he had the map of Eddie Redmayne's freckles memorized by the end of the move.  Also, he isn't kidding when he says he had to go to the movie twice because he dozed off the first time.  I'm just not that big into Les Miz, I saw the musical near the end of its can and can hardly remember a thing about it.  The movie, in turn, isn't bad, it's probably a very good adaptation of the musical, but it doesn't elevate it from what it is/was on the stage.  The drama's a bit of a mess, there are songs that are memorable for the duration of the show but that disappear very quickly once removed.  I didn't care as much for Anne Hathaway's performance as the rest of the world does, in fact it was toward the end of her Dreamed a Dream big solo number that I started my brief slumber during the film.  I was most taken in the case with Eddie Redmayne's performance, I was taken with him in Marilyn as well.  And Broadway veteran Aaron Tveit is very good as a fellow revolutionary with Redmayne, overall I felt that the cast of young schoolboy revolutionaries was the highlight of the film, but I'm biased.  Still and all, Russell Crowe can't sing that well, Hugh Jackman doesn't seem as engaging here as when hosting an award show or even in some of the X-Men movies.  The stylistic choices by Tom Hooper work sometimes and not in others.  Certainly better choices than the ones in Anna Karenina.  The close-ups aren't vertiginous, which some reviews have suggested, they are held for a long time and the film is so consistently in close-up that I never felt like I was zooming in and out, in and out.  In the last fifteen or twenty minutes the choice actually pays off quite nicely, and I ended the film much more effected by the closing moments than I would have expected.  The main problem I have is that even the best stylistic choice sometimes needs to be used selectively.  There are things that you can do on stage that you can't as easily do on film, as an example have multiple characters on stage singing a duet in tandem on different sets.  The close-ups work really well when they need to, but in a climactic section when you've got everyone singing right before the barricades are going up and the final battle close to hand you don't get a real sense of that at all.  There isn't a lot in the big production number category, which Les Miz should have more of.  At least as long movies go, this one needed to be, you can't really take a three hour Broadway musical and make a two hour movie out of it.

Finally, Zero Dark Thirty.  This is a film about the killing of Osama bin Laden, with threads that the film might date from early "enhanced interrogation" soon after 9/11 to the actual killing in 2011.  I'm not going to use this as an entry point into the torture debate.  I'll state quite flatly that I am opposed to torture, that we shouldn't have done it, and I would feel that way whether or not some piece of intel gained from a torture session was helpful to catching bin Laden.  Simply put, turn the tables, ask how we would feel if our soldiers were being tortured.  But my personal opinion about torture shouldn't cover the appropriateness of its inclusion in this film.  It happened.  It has to be part of this story, especially since we can't tease out whether or not we needed it to get bin Laden.  Even if every last videotape of every last interrogation sentence, enhanced or not, were in the public record, I doubt we'd have crystal clarity.  And aside from whether or not torture should be part of it, this just isn't a great film.  It's a decent one, but not close to great.  As virtues, you get a solid sense of some of the tradecraft, the bits and pieces of taking information and analyzing and inferring, the difficulty of finding bin Laden's courier.  The musical score by Alexandre Deplat is one of the years best. But the acting is haphazard.  The CIA execs don't have the personality that Bryan Cranston gives in his role in Argo, the only one who comes close is James Gandolfini and even he seems very constrained.  A very good actor like Kyle Chandler seems neutered here.  Jessica Chastaine as the CIA analyst whose eyes we look through for most of the movie is so single-handedly focused on this one thing that she's ultimately boring, she has that vacant-eyed look of the marine recruits getting haircuts in the early montage in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.  The only person with any personality that comes thru in the script or direction (by the Hurt Locker team of Mark Boals and Kathryn Bigelow, Hurt Locker was a much better film than this) is the male CIA interrogator who reveals some sense of an internal life within a role that doesn't always allow it.

You don't want to have an Obama impersonator, but if someone wants to tell me that the film does play politics with torture by only choosing to show Obama in a clip decrying and ending the use of torture by the US, which the film strongly implies is a stupid decision, I can't argue.  Obama had a role here.  The role of invigorating the search for Al Qaeda activists to kill is handed off to some CIA guy who does a fly-by dress-down at the US embassy in Pakistan and Obama doesn't have a role there.  The implication of the movie is clearly that the only proper and right decision was to go in and get Osama the way we went in to get him, but that isn't a decision that everyone would have made, and so the film again subtly denies Obama any credit for something that happened on his watch.  So, OK, I'm avoiding the torture debate, but I'm arguing with the film's politics anyway.

Finally, this film is too long, and is too indulgent.  The movie skips a lot of interesting stuff about the search for bin Laden, it doesn't delve much at all into the planning for the mission to get him, the decisions on what kind of mission to wage, on the training for the mission, we don't even really know that there was a training mock-up.  Rather, it detours from its main mission to give us a Forrest Gump kind of history lesson.  We see the attacks on the London transit system and other major attacks subsequent to 9-11, though in a bit of historical bias we don't get anything on the Madrid rail bombings.  Our lead character is inserted into the bombing of the Pakistan Marriott, the bombing itself has a better argument to be referenced than some to the extent that some of the intelligence gathering might be HQed in the US embassy in Islamabad, but having our lead character in the hotel at the time is a dramatic invention since our lead is a composite, a Hollywood invention.  And we spend several long minutes getting to know another character in the embassy just to add emotional resonance to a reenactment of the suicide bombing that took out several CIA agents, including some experts, who were so excited to have a powerful defector that they dropped security procedures at the meeting.  This, again, has an argument for inclusion, it shows the foolhardiness of desperation.  But coming at the end of a long string of unnecessary diversions into the terrorist timeline, I didn't have any patience for it.

Just as an idle note, I saw Les Miz at the Ziegfeld almost 30 years to the date after going there for the first time, to see Gandhi.  A good crowd, half full or more, 30 years ago the place could routinely sell out for an epic movie, these days half full is impressive.