One of the Oscar nominees for International Film, and quite wonderful. Like, even if I hadn't known Parasite was going to win the actual Best Picture prize, I'd have been rooting for Corpus Christi three weeks ago had I caught up with it before the Oscar ceremony.
If you're going to do a melodrama, why not go all in!
Start with a lead character who's getting parole from a violet juvie prison to work at a saw mill out in the countryside. Only, the parole thing -- they haven't made any arrangements for room & board, so have the lead character to to a church to hang out after work.
Having left the prison swearing to arrive sober at the saw mill, have him go a wild night before bender and take a priest's collared shirt from one of the other partiers. Have him joke with an attractive teenage girl at the church, end up taking out the shirt to back up his joking boast about being a priest, and then Dear Evan Hansen style the deception just keeps going and going.
Not only is there no arrangement for room & board, there's no attendance check that he's actually at the saw mill.
Oh, also, a local priest who needs to head out of town on the down low for some medical tests/treatment and doesn't want any of his loyal parishioners to know.
The town bulletin board has tacked onto it the faces of six local kids who died in a car accident several months ago. All in one car, and crashed into (or did they crash into) by the car of a man whose wife is on the outskirts of town in more ways than one.
You've got love, religion, power struggles, town secrets -- all sorts of stuff, and I'm kind of making fun of it because the movie piles it on, piles it on some more, and then manages to pile even more on when you think the movie should already be falling over from the weight of all that melodrama.
But the movie plays all of this for real pathos, asks real questions about mercy, power, justice, the day-to-day uncertainties of human existence, about compassion and rehabilitation and faith. Or is it the other way around? Is the film ultimately mocking all of the important stuff by surrounding it with volcanic preposterousness?
In the lead role, Bartosz Bielenia is absolutely brilliant, and very much a name and face to watch. And what a face. I don't know what his English is like, but on looks and charisma and expressiveness Bielenia's ready to step into stardom. He manages to pull this off, up until an ending that would have worked just as well in a slightly more Grand Guignol version of First Reformed, and an epilogue that takes the movie -- well, I've absolutely no idea where the lead character's gong at the end, and strangely, I don't care.
Highly recommended.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Oscar Nominations!
Most of the films I liked most didn't get anywhere near a nomination for Best Picture. There is 0% overlap between the Academy and my Ten Best list, and if I get around to posting a "worth mentioning" there might be three from that list. But there are lots of things to be praised in the selections.
And just to note, I signed up around Thanksgiving for this social media site called Letterboxd where I am listing every movie I see, and expect to review a good chunk of them.
Black Panther was one of the best superhero movies in years, but that's a deeply degraded standard since most of them aren't very good at all. But Black Panther is the work of a major filmmaker, who made a superhero movie steeped in influences from major works in the cinematic cannon rather than other superhero movies. Sure!
BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee's best movies, it boasts great performances, it's timely. Sure!
Bohemian Rhapsody isn't a good movie, but the last twenty minutes are about as transcendent an experience as I've ever had in a movie theatre, helped by seeing it on a big RPX screen with great sound. And since you can't get directly to the transcendent experience, I've got no problem with the Academy bestowing a Best Picture nomination on the film. Sure!
The Favourite. WTF. There's a thirty point gap on Rotten Tomatoes between the critic and audience rating. I'm with the audience rating. WTF. WTF. WTF. And with Roma, I can understand and appreciate why the critics are fawning over the film even though I didn't like it all that much. My dislike of Roma veers into the kind of passionate dislike which at least suggests it's gotten under my skin. The Favourite? WTF WTF WTF.
Green Book: This would be kind of like having a really great slightly modernized version of a 1980s military sf novel come out in 2019, and be nominated for a Hugo Award. It's not a bad movie. I laughed out loud in parts, as did the audience I was with. Again, lots of good performances to go around. The movie's safe and comfortable, but I think not entirely so because there's some squirminess and discomfort in the mens store scene or the country club scene that bring it a little more into today than the same movie might have been thirty years ago. But at the same time, you can't shake from the movie that there are parts of it that seem so thirty years ago. Meh.
Roma: So I didn't like this movie very much. It's so full of all the things those deep within the critical establishment like. Deep meaning. Rich and wonderful black-and-white cinematography. Very auteur. It was pretty much foreordained from its earliest screenings to be an Oscar nominee, but I would have liked a character to care about, a tiny bit of a sense of humor, something that wasn't so fully and self-consciously auteur. Meh.
A Star is Born: I'll apply the same guidance as I did for Bohemian Rhapsody, only in reverse. The first third of the movie is danged good. It goes steadily downhill, the middle third somewhat worse and the final third I'm thinking really really hard about the Bumblebee puzzle in that weekend's NY Times Magazine. But the good parts are dang good. Sure!
Vice: No. Not Best Picture material. Nominate it for make-up, nominate it for Christian Bale, but this is not Best Picture material.
& Moving down the list...
Actor: Willem Dafoe got a nomination for a movie nobody has seen. I don't need to look at the "Snubs and Surprises" list to know what one of the leading Surprises will be. I would give this to Rami Malek, because how you give a great performance in a bad movie with those teeth leading into one of the most transcendent sequences on film...
Actress: Glenn Close is impeccably good in The Wife, and it's a movie about an author winning a Nobel Prize for Literature. How can I not root for that? But all the competition is strong.
Supporting Actor: Hard to choose, We'll toss Mahershala Ali for being in the wrong category. We'll toss Sam Elliott for doing a great job with cliches in a cliche ridden movie. Sam Rockwell is good, but I'm sure there are five other performances as or more deserving. And I still wouldn't be able to choose easily between Adam Driver and Richard E. Grant. But I'll go with Richard E. Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me, because it's closer to my profession.
Supporting Actress: Amy Adams. Because The Favourite isn't very good, I didn't like Roma, I won't go see If Beale Street Could Talk. And Amy Adams was great. But whether or not I go and see Beale Street I think Regina King has this. (Why am I not going to see Beale Street: Me no like the overly arty Moonlight full of weird shots of people coming onto the frame out of focus. Unless there's a chance to do this as part of a double feature...)
Director: Spike Lee.
Animated: Spider-Verse. More because of how much love it's inspired from people I love, more than because I loved it myself.
Screenplay: First Reformed in Original. BlacKkKlansman or Can You Ever Forgive Me for Adapted.
And let's talk about First Reformed. Ethan Hawke is great in it, and the movie has some indelible aspects and images that I won't soon forget. The ending! The ending! But really, the movie is just too damned weird, and the unique and special qualities of the weirdness don't entirely compensate for the fact that the movie is trying to do way too many things at once, with too many important moments happening way too quietly to the point that you wonder if they're motivated at all. The weirdness of the movie, its offputting-ness, is nicely demonstrated by the fact that Willem Dafoe has an Oscar nomination for a movie nobody say, and Ethan Hawke does not. Since a lot of my problems with the movie have to do with its screenplay I hesitate to award it an Oscar in that category, but I feel like the movie deserves an award someplace.
Cinematography: Cold War and Roma are both fabulous.
Documentary: We are living in such a great era for documentaries, and Free Solo and Minding the Gap are both wonderful. And even though I liked RBG, I think it would be a disappointment, awarding a perfectly fine documentary for being in the moment when there are other movies which are just plain better.
Editing: Bohemian Rhapsody. You don't get twenty minutes of transcendent filmmaking at the end without editing the heck out of it.
Tech categories: A brief moment of silence for First Man, which has a couple nominations down ballot. I wanted to love this movie, with a director and actor I both love both doing some solid work, but at the end of the day the movie never makes a persuasive case for existing when we already have The Right Stuff, already have Apollo 13, etc.
Good News: No need to see Mary Poppins Returns on account of its Oscar nominations count, which is slim.
And just to note, I signed up around Thanksgiving for this social media site called Letterboxd where I am listing every movie I see, and expect to review a good chunk of them.
Black Panther was one of the best superhero movies in years, but that's a deeply degraded standard since most of them aren't very good at all. But Black Panther is the work of a major filmmaker, who made a superhero movie steeped in influences from major works in the cinematic cannon rather than other superhero movies. Sure!
BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee's best movies, it boasts great performances, it's timely. Sure!
Bohemian Rhapsody isn't a good movie, but the last twenty minutes are about as transcendent an experience as I've ever had in a movie theatre, helped by seeing it on a big RPX screen with great sound. And since you can't get directly to the transcendent experience, I've got no problem with the Academy bestowing a Best Picture nomination on the film. Sure!
The Favourite. WTF. There's a thirty point gap on Rotten Tomatoes between the critic and audience rating. I'm with the audience rating. WTF. WTF. WTF. And with Roma, I can understand and appreciate why the critics are fawning over the film even though I didn't like it all that much. My dislike of Roma veers into the kind of passionate dislike which at least suggests it's gotten under my skin. The Favourite? WTF WTF WTF.
Green Book: This would be kind of like having a really great slightly modernized version of a 1980s military sf novel come out in 2019, and be nominated for a Hugo Award. It's not a bad movie. I laughed out loud in parts, as did the audience I was with. Again, lots of good performances to go around. The movie's safe and comfortable, but I think not entirely so because there's some squirminess and discomfort in the mens store scene or the country club scene that bring it a little more into today than the same movie might have been thirty years ago. But at the same time, you can't shake from the movie that there are parts of it that seem so thirty years ago. Meh.
Roma: So I didn't like this movie very much. It's so full of all the things those deep within the critical establishment like. Deep meaning. Rich and wonderful black-and-white cinematography. Very auteur. It was pretty much foreordained from its earliest screenings to be an Oscar nominee, but I would have liked a character to care about, a tiny bit of a sense of humor, something that wasn't so fully and self-consciously auteur. Meh.
A Star is Born: I'll apply the same guidance as I did for Bohemian Rhapsody, only in reverse. The first third of the movie is danged good. It goes steadily downhill, the middle third somewhat worse and the final third I'm thinking really really hard about the Bumblebee puzzle in that weekend's NY Times Magazine. But the good parts are dang good. Sure!
Vice: No. Not Best Picture material. Nominate it for make-up, nominate it for Christian Bale, but this is not Best Picture material.
& Moving down the list...
Actor: Willem Dafoe got a nomination for a movie nobody has seen. I don't need to look at the "Snubs and Surprises" list to know what one of the leading Surprises will be. I would give this to Rami Malek, because how you give a great performance in a bad movie with those teeth leading into one of the most transcendent sequences on film...
Actress: Glenn Close is impeccably good in The Wife, and it's a movie about an author winning a Nobel Prize for Literature. How can I not root for that? But all the competition is strong.
Supporting Actor: Hard to choose, We'll toss Mahershala Ali for being in the wrong category. We'll toss Sam Elliott for doing a great job with cliches in a cliche ridden movie. Sam Rockwell is good, but I'm sure there are five other performances as or more deserving. And I still wouldn't be able to choose easily between Adam Driver and Richard E. Grant. But I'll go with Richard E. Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me, because it's closer to my profession.
Supporting Actress: Amy Adams. Because The Favourite isn't very good, I didn't like Roma, I won't go see If Beale Street Could Talk. And Amy Adams was great. But whether or not I go and see Beale Street I think Regina King has this. (Why am I not going to see Beale Street: Me no like the overly arty Moonlight full of weird shots of people coming onto the frame out of focus. Unless there's a chance to do this as part of a double feature...)
Director: Spike Lee.
Animated: Spider-Verse. More because of how much love it's inspired from people I love, more than because I loved it myself.
Screenplay: First Reformed in Original. BlacKkKlansman or Can You Ever Forgive Me for Adapted.
And let's talk about First Reformed. Ethan Hawke is great in it, and the movie has some indelible aspects and images that I won't soon forget. The ending! The ending! But really, the movie is just too damned weird, and the unique and special qualities of the weirdness don't entirely compensate for the fact that the movie is trying to do way too many things at once, with too many important moments happening way too quietly to the point that you wonder if they're motivated at all. The weirdness of the movie, its offputting-ness, is nicely demonstrated by the fact that Willem Dafoe has an Oscar nomination for a movie nobody say, and Ethan Hawke does not. Since a lot of my problems with the movie have to do with its screenplay I hesitate to award it an Oscar in that category, but I feel like the movie deserves an award someplace.
Cinematography: Cold War and Roma are both fabulous.
Documentary: We are living in such a great era for documentaries, and Free Solo and Minding the Gap are both wonderful. And even though I liked RBG, I think it would be a disappointment, awarding a perfectly fine documentary for being in the moment when there are other movies which are just plain better.
Editing: Bohemian Rhapsody. You don't get twenty minutes of transcendent filmmaking at the end without editing the heck out of it.
Tech categories: A brief moment of silence for First Man, which has a couple nominations down ballot. I wanted to love this movie, with a director and actor I both love both doing some solid work, but at the end of the day the movie never makes a persuasive case for existing when we already have The Right Stuff, already have Apollo 13, etc.
Good News: No need to see Mary Poppins Returns on account of its Oscar nominations count, which is slim.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
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.
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!
#OscarsSoTrite
When it comes to plot-driven media like books and movies, I'm an opinionated SOB.
As such, Oscar season will never be my across-the-board favorite time of year. There will be critical darlings that aren't actually very good. Worthy movies that are just that. Frenzies, tulip bubbles, and more. Usually there will be a few things, but only a few, that I haven't seen; after all these years I can do a good job smelling out the movies that will leave an aftertaste.
I can't remember a year with as many of those movies. And after making a dutiful effort to catch up, only one of them was considerably better than I feared or suspected.
It sure isn't The Revenant. 12 nominations for a movie I never wished to pay for, and which I could stomach for just 30 minutes when I was finally able to plan it as part of a "double feature." The plot skeleton I studied thirty years ago this week when I was handed a copy of WRITING TO SELL by Scott Meredith on my first day at his literary agency starts with an identifiable lead character, and The Revenant has none. There is a lead role played by a movie star, and thus we are expected by default to root for the character. But nothing -- nothing!! -- is done atop of that. Is the novel like that? I would reject any such novel. Furthermore, the movie should have ended before I could walk out. The lead character shouldn't have survived the bear attack. In a Hollywood action movie I am willing to let pass that the lead character rarely misses and the bad guys can rarely aim, so maybe I should have more tolerance for the bear missing Leo. Yes, the photography in the movie was crisp and beautiful, but the movie is a turd.
Then we come to Carol. Director Todd Haynes has spent his entire career as a critics darling, but the critics don't seem to notice that Haynes isn't actually a very good director of actors. I wasn't a fan of Haynes' Far From Heaven, and if not for the chance to see late in the season at the Museum of the Moving Image. And to an extent, Carol was a pleasant surprise because it is better than Far From Heaven. Haynes is better at craft than at performance, and Carol is better at its craft. Far From Heaven had a certain mise en scene but never felt like Hartford. Carol does make Cincinnati into a solid enough approximation of New York City. But oh dear, what a mess to behold if you actually look at the script and acting. Rooney Mara and Kyle Chandler have both shown acting chops elsewhere, but they flail here. Chandler plays a cuckolded husband with no back story, no internal or external life, basically just a human embodiment of the male ethos of the day, and has no idea what to do, other than to do it like he's playing to the last row of the balcony. Rooney Mara received awards for this movie? In this movie, her look for all seasons is that of a mousy deer caught in the headlights. Happy, sad, lonely, fresh off sex, whatever she's doing she has this one expression. The best I can say for Carol is that it's better than The Revenant, and better than my worst fears.
Brooklyn is another movie that sent out "skip me" pheromones during the coming attractions, and also ended up screening at Museum of the Moving Image. This had more moments than either Carol or The Revenant. Efforts were made to provide an identifiable lead character, including the establishment of nemeses in Ireland. Maybe I could teach a senior seminar or get a PhD comparing and contrasting the department store scenes in Brooklyn with those of Carol. But the longer Brooklyn goes, the more it digs holes for itself. I rested my eyes for a few minutes in the middle, and when I woke up there were toe people deeply and madly (or is it almost kind of?) in love. I don't think I was resting my eyes long enough for the relationship to be suitably established. When the lead character returns to Ireland she is very quick to both forgive her enemies and forget her marriage. She doesn't make an internal decision to return to her husband. The decision is forced upon her. I am better able to see merits in Brooklyn, but I have long been picky about plot structure and can't myself forgive the shortcomings in that area.
Much as Amy Adams staked her claim as an actress of note in the little seen Junebug, Brie Larson made her mark in Short Term 12, simply brilliant as a counselor in a home/halfway house for deeply troubled kids. When Room played at the festivals last year, garnering acclaim for Larson's performance I was intrigued, and yet when the movie finally opened last fall, the more reviews I read the more my interest in actually seeing the movie diminished. I finally went a couple of weeks ago. I was both right and wrong. In terms of the Oscar race, Brie Larson has a strong claim to the award everyone is certain she will win, but yet her performance is the second best in the film, and her very young costar Jacob Tremblay could easily have been nominated. And these excellent performances aren't islands in a sea of problems; the movie around them is solid. My one big problem was with the musical score. It does nothing, and becomes actually bad at the very end of the movie, to the point that I noticed it in a negative way as the notes started to flourish at the end of the movie. And yet I also feel like my life would have gone on without Room. There's something missing in the movie. It's too good to be written off as Award Bait, but nothing about it inspires any passion in me.
Some 25 Oscar nominations given to movies that, at best, I could go either way on.
And then. we come to another handful of nominations for The Danish Girl, which I never even toyed with seeing after nominations were announced. I did Eddie Redmayne, Master Thespian, last year, with the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything.
So when it gets to be 11:30 EST, anything but The Revenant.
As such, Oscar season will never be my across-the-board favorite time of year. There will be critical darlings that aren't actually very good. Worthy movies that are just that. Frenzies, tulip bubbles, and more. Usually there will be a few things, but only a few, that I haven't seen; after all these years I can do a good job smelling out the movies that will leave an aftertaste.
I can't remember a year with as many of those movies. And after making a dutiful effort to catch up, only one of them was considerably better than I feared or suspected.
It sure isn't The Revenant. 12 nominations for a movie I never wished to pay for, and which I could stomach for just 30 minutes when I was finally able to plan it as part of a "double feature." The plot skeleton I studied thirty years ago this week when I was handed a copy of WRITING TO SELL by Scott Meredith on my first day at his literary agency starts with an identifiable lead character, and The Revenant has none. There is a lead role played by a movie star, and thus we are expected by default to root for the character. But nothing -- nothing!! -- is done atop of that. Is the novel like that? I would reject any such novel. Furthermore, the movie should have ended before I could walk out. The lead character shouldn't have survived the bear attack. In a Hollywood action movie I am willing to let pass that the lead character rarely misses and the bad guys can rarely aim, so maybe I should have more tolerance for the bear missing Leo. Yes, the photography in the movie was crisp and beautiful, but the movie is a turd.
Then we come to Carol. Director Todd Haynes has spent his entire career as a critics darling, but the critics don't seem to notice that Haynes isn't actually a very good director of actors. I wasn't a fan of Haynes' Far From Heaven, and if not for the chance to see late in the season at the Museum of the Moving Image. And to an extent, Carol was a pleasant surprise because it is better than Far From Heaven. Haynes is better at craft than at performance, and Carol is better at its craft. Far From Heaven had a certain mise en scene but never felt like Hartford. Carol does make Cincinnati into a solid enough approximation of New York City. But oh dear, what a mess to behold if you actually look at the script and acting. Rooney Mara and Kyle Chandler have both shown acting chops elsewhere, but they flail here. Chandler plays a cuckolded husband with no back story, no internal or external life, basically just a human embodiment of the male ethos of the day, and has no idea what to do, other than to do it like he's playing to the last row of the balcony. Rooney Mara received awards for this movie? In this movie, her look for all seasons is that of a mousy deer caught in the headlights. Happy, sad, lonely, fresh off sex, whatever she's doing she has this one expression. The best I can say for Carol is that it's better than The Revenant, and better than my worst fears.
Brooklyn is another movie that sent out "skip me" pheromones during the coming attractions, and also ended up screening at Museum of the Moving Image. This had more moments than either Carol or The Revenant. Efforts were made to provide an identifiable lead character, including the establishment of nemeses in Ireland. Maybe I could teach a senior seminar or get a PhD comparing and contrasting the department store scenes in Brooklyn with those of Carol. But the longer Brooklyn goes, the more it digs holes for itself. I rested my eyes for a few minutes in the middle, and when I woke up there were toe people deeply and madly (or is it almost kind of?) in love. I don't think I was resting my eyes long enough for the relationship to be suitably established. When the lead character returns to Ireland she is very quick to both forgive her enemies and forget her marriage. She doesn't make an internal decision to return to her husband. The decision is forced upon her. I am better able to see merits in Brooklyn, but I have long been picky about plot structure and can't myself forgive the shortcomings in that area.
Much as Amy Adams staked her claim as an actress of note in the little seen Junebug, Brie Larson made her mark in Short Term 12, simply brilliant as a counselor in a home/halfway house for deeply troubled kids. When Room played at the festivals last year, garnering acclaim for Larson's performance I was intrigued, and yet when the movie finally opened last fall, the more reviews I read the more my interest in actually seeing the movie diminished. I finally went a couple of weeks ago. I was both right and wrong. In terms of the Oscar race, Brie Larson has a strong claim to the award everyone is certain she will win, but yet her performance is the second best in the film, and her very young costar Jacob Tremblay could easily have been nominated. And these excellent performances aren't islands in a sea of problems; the movie around them is solid. My one big problem was with the musical score. It does nothing, and becomes actually bad at the very end of the movie, to the point that I noticed it in a negative way as the notes started to flourish at the end of the movie. And yet I also feel like my life would have gone on without Room. There's something missing in the movie. It's too good to be written off as Award Bait, but nothing about it inspires any passion in me.
Some 25 Oscar nominations given to movies that, at best, I could go either way on.
And then. we come to another handful of nominations for The Danish Girl, which I never even toyed with seeing after nominations were announced. I did Eddie Redmayne, Master Thespian, last year, with the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything.
So when it gets to be 11:30 EST, anything but The Revenant.
#OscarsSoWhite
Movies are the one, or at least the longest, constant in my life.
I can easily recall movie moments from my teenage years, even early in. I was twelve when I saw Star Wars, and know that I saw it in Monticello.
So Oscar night is always special to me, the High Holidays of my secular religion.
But this year has an off taste for me, part #OscarsSoWhite, discussed below, and part #OscarsSoTrite, which will be discussed in another post and/or within my live blog of this year's Oscar ceremony.
A year ago, I thought Selma was a worthy movie, kind of like how I felt about Gandhi when I saw that 33 years ago, and how I've felt about quite a few biopics over the years. With Selma nominated in the Best Picture category, with its elastic number of potential nominees, #OscarsSoWhite felt abstract to me.
But in 2015, two movies, Love and Mercy and Straight Outta Compton raised the bar for the genre of the musical biopic. Considering how many appreciably triter biopics have garnered award nominations, I'd like for both to be more prevalent on the Oscar ballot. But Love and Mercy didn't do great box office, got mixed critical reactions, has too many problems staking its claim on the ballot. I can't feel sorry for Love and Mercy.
But
1. What's the excuse for Straight Outta Compton?
2. Why am I making the argument for Straight Outta Compton, rather than for Creed instead of or in addition to?
The second question is the easier one, so I'll tackle that first.
Yes, Creed was another highlight of the 2015 Year in Cinema. It was a creatively driven resurrection of a series that was widely thought to have crucified itself. The resurrector was a black writer/director, Ryan Coogler. He oversaw top-notch creative efforts from a female director of photographer, a Swedish composer, and a brilliant young black actor, Michael B. Jordan. And with Creed, as with Straight Outta Compton, the nominations are #OscarsSoWhite.
And yet, in the history of the Academy Awards, how many seventh movies in a series have ever been nominated for Best Picture? To ask the question is to answer it, and it's an easy way to divert self-introspection.
The other categories where Creed could have been nominated have a cap on the number of nominees. Maryse Alberti did an exceptional job photographing Creed, but there are five strong nominees in that category. Even Carol, wildly overrated as it is, shines most in the technical categories like photography. If I really really had to choose I could find a nominee to boot out of the Director and Original Screenplay categories, but it would be a hard choice. I would prefer to see Creed in the Original Score category over Carol or Bridge of Spies. But whatever my own choices would be, there are choices like this which can be made, rationalized, justified. Any Oscars voter could too easily say "if only I had room for one more on the ballot, Creed would have been it." Again, self-introspection can be avoided.
But what''s the excuse for Straight Outta Compton in the Best Picture category, with two open slots?
1. It was #19 on the box office chart for 2015. If you look at the movies above it and provide basic screening tests like "no 7th movies in series" "no comic book movies" "no animated movies" "no 50 Shades" and feel that it would be really really nice if box office successes had some correlation with the Oscars, then Straight Outta Compton has to be your second or third choice, in a category with ten nominees.
2. It's a biopic. A genre that mints Oscar nominees. See Coal Miner's Daughter in the musical biopic category.
3. Is it good enough? It has an 88% critic's rating and a 93% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Revenant, a contender to win Best Picture, is worse in both categories.
4. Is it part of the National Conversation? Well, duh! The scene of the N.W.A. members being harassed by the police outside of the recording studio couldn't be more timely if it came with a carillon chiming the hour.
I loved the movie. Like Boyhood in 2014, it demonstrated that it's possible to have a film flirt with three hours and justify each and every minute. That's great directing by F. Gary Gray. Not that it should matter if I liked it or not. Every year I have to resign myself to the fact that some movie I don't like will be nominated for Academy Awards because it is so totally part of the National Conversation or so clearly a Critics Darling or the kind of movie that attracts award nominations like fruit flies to apple cider vinegar. Straight Outta Compton is, for all reasons noted above, the exact kind of movie that forces acquiescence to its presence on the ballot, regardless of one's personal opinions. And white as Hollywood might be, enough of Hollywood is capable of acknowledging that. Its omission from the elastic Best Picture category is ultimately much harder to justify than its presence would have been.
In a few instances, those questioning the omission can find a scapegoat. The Oscars take cues from the studios themselves. I have a subscription to the Los Angeles Times, which is a prime venue, especially in its "The Envelope" special sections that run frequently during the Oscar and Emmy award seasons, for award campaign advertisements. In spite of the excellent reviews it received and the strong box office reception it garnered, I feel that Straight Outta Compton could have received a stronger, more persistent, from the word "go" awards campaign than it did. But if the Oscar campaign for Straight Outta Compton was underwhelming, it reflects decisions made by the studio, which are likely influenced by the lack of diversity in the studio and/or by an acknowledgment of the realpolitik of putting money behind this movie in advertising to the older, whiter, "maler" constituency of Oscar voters. The scapegoat goes off with the sins, but ends up wandering right back to those wishing absolution.
So there are no good excuses. I'm a 51-year-old white dude, and I can see this. And so can many, many other people.
The creators of and the driving forces behind Straight Outta Compton might not have a chance at Best Picture, but there's reason to think (or at least hope) that their failure there might win a bigger prize in forcing change upon the film industry.
I can easily recall movie moments from my teenage years, even early in. I was twelve when I saw Star Wars, and know that I saw it in Monticello.
So Oscar night is always special to me, the High Holidays of my secular religion.
But this year has an off taste for me, part #OscarsSoWhite, discussed below, and part #OscarsSoTrite, which will be discussed in another post and/or within my live blog of this year's Oscar ceremony.
A year ago, I thought Selma was a worthy movie, kind of like how I felt about Gandhi when I saw that 33 years ago, and how I've felt about quite a few biopics over the years. With Selma nominated in the Best Picture category, with its elastic number of potential nominees, #OscarsSoWhite felt abstract to me.
But in 2015, two movies, Love and Mercy and Straight Outta Compton raised the bar for the genre of the musical biopic. Considering how many appreciably triter biopics have garnered award nominations, I'd like for both to be more prevalent on the Oscar ballot. But Love and Mercy didn't do great box office, got mixed critical reactions, has too many problems staking its claim on the ballot. I can't feel sorry for Love and Mercy.
But
1. What's the excuse for Straight Outta Compton?
2. Why am I making the argument for Straight Outta Compton, rather than for Creed instead of or in addition to?
The second question is the easier one, so I'll tackle that first.
Yes, Creed was another highlight of the 2015 Year in Cinema. It was a creatively driven resurrection of a series that was widely thought to have crucified itself. The resurrector was a black writer/director, Ryan Coogler. He oversaw top-notch creative efforts from a female director of photographer, a Swedish composer, and a brilliant young black actor, Michael B. Jordan. And with Creed, as with Straight Outta Compton, the nominations are #OscarsSoWhite.
And yet, in the history of the Academy Awards, how many seventh movies in a series have ever been nominated for Best Picture? To ask the question is to answer it, and it's an easy way to divert self-introspection.
The other categories where Creed could have been nominated have a cap on the number of nominees. Maryse Alberti did an exceptional job photographing Creed, but there are five strong nominees in that category. Even Carol, wildly overrated as it is, shines most in the technical categories like photography. If I really really had to choose I could find a nominee to boot out of the Director and Original Screenplay categories, but it would be a hard choice. I would prefer to see Creed in the Original Score category over Carol or Bridge of Spies. But whatever my own choices would be, there are choices like this which can be made, rationalized, justified. Any Oscars voter could too easily say "if only I had room for one more on the ballot, Creed would have been it." Again, self-introspection can be avoided.
But what''s the excuse for Straight Outta Compton in the Best Picture category, with two open slots?
1. It was #19 on the box office chart for 2015. If you look at the movies above it and provide basic screening tests like "no 7th movies in series" "no comic book movies" "no animated movies" "no 50 Shades" and feel that it would be really really nice if box office successes had some correlation with the Oscars, then Straight Outta Compton has to be your second or third choice, in a category with ten nominees.
2. It's a biopic. A genre that mints Oscar nominees. See Coal Miner's Daughter in the musical biopic category.
3. Is it good enough? It has an 88% critic's rating and a 93% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Revenant, a contender to win Best Picture, is worse in both categories.
4. Is it part of the National Conversation? Well, duh! The scene of the N.W.A. members being harassed by the police outside of the recording studio couldn't be more timely if it came with a carillon chiming the hour.
I loved the movie. Like Boyhood in 2014, it demonstrated that it's possible to have a film flirt with three hours and justify each and every minute. That's great directing by F. Gary Gray. Not that it should matter if I liked it or not. Every year I have to resign myself to the fact that some movie I don't like will be nominated for Academy Awards because it is so totally part of the National Conversation or so clearly a Critics Darling or the kind of movie that attracts award nominations like fruit flies to apple cider vinegar. Straight Outta Compton is, for all reasons noted above, the exact kind of movie that forces acquiescence to its presence on the ballot, regardless of one's personal opinions. And white as Hollywood might be, enough of Hollywood is capable of acknowledging that. Its omission from the elastic Best Picture category is ultimately much harder to justify than its presence would have been.
In a few instances, those questioning the omission can find a scapegoat. The Oscars take cues from the studios themselves. I have a subscription to the Los Angeles Times, which is a prime venue, especially in its "The Envelope" special sections that run frequently during the Oscar and Emmy award seasons, for award campaign advertisements. In spite of the excellent reviews it received and the strong box office reception it garnered, I feel that Straight Outta Compton could have received a stronger, more persistent, from the word "go" awards campaign than it did. But if the Oscar campaign for Straight Outta Compton was underwhelming, it reflects decisions made by the studio, which are likely influenced by the lack of diversity in the studio and/or by an acknowledgment of the realpolitik of putting money behind this movie in advertising to the older, whiter, "maler" constituency of Oscar voters. The scapegoat goes off with the sins, but ends up wandering right back to those wishing absolution.
So there are no good excuses. I'm a 51-year-old white dude, and I can see this. And so can many, many other people.
The creators of and the driving forces behind Straight Outta Compton might not have a chance at Best Picture, but there's reason to think (or at least hope) that their failure there might win a bigger prize in forcing change upon the film industry.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Walter Reade's Ziegfeld Theatre, 1969-2016
The first movie I ever saw at Walter Reade's Ziegfeld Theatre was Gandhi.
It was Christmas break between my first and second semesters in college. It was a sold-out show. There were a lot of those at the Ziegfeld in the 1980s and 1990s. I was not one of the first to arrive, and I found my way to a seat on the far right side of the theatre, fairly near to the front. The theatre smelled of food; Gandhi was a very long movie, and people were prepared with more than popcorn.
The Ziegfeld and Gandhi turned out to be very similar to one another. They were worthy. You couldn't not like Gandhi, could you? I mean, it was a long epic biopic about an incredibly important historical figure, You could learn so much of such importance about such an important personage. Of course, it wasn't actually a good movie. It was a quintessential biopic. The actual filmmaking by Richard Attenborough was kind of plodding.
So it was with the Ziegfeld. It was a single screen movie theatre with over 1000 seats, and a reasonably large screen. But the rake was practically non-existent, making it difficult to see over the head of anyone sitting in front of you. Long and narrow isn't the best dimension for a movie theatre, but that was the Ziegfeld. A whole city block long. From the raised mezzanine at the back, a very long way to the screen, which didn't dominate the field of vision from such a distance. Four urinals, three stalls, two sinks for the men's restroom; imagine the lines after a full house. Small lobby and concession area. No accessibility for the handicapped. There were lots of chandeliers, and some exhibits on the original Ziegfeld Follies theatre.
The Loews Astor Plaza, built just a few years later, was much better. Great rake. Better dimensions. Bigger screen. Bigger lobby. Nicer everything, just not as fancy. I came to be very frustrated that many more people knew about the Ziegfeld, which got better press and was more often booked for Hollywood premieres and exclusive general releases.
As it turns out, I've likely seen more movies at the Ziegfeld than on any other screen (emphasis on "screen," because some multiplexes I've gone to more often, but spread out over many screens). But going to the Astor Plaza always exhilarated me, and I never felt that way about the Ziegfeld. I was often as happy to see a movie on the big screens at the multiplexes than at the Ziegfeld, and I never felt that way about the Astor Plaza. Looking at the long list of movies I saw at the Ziegfeld, and at full lists of movies that played the Ziegfeld that are on Cinema Treasures, I'm as impressed with the list if movies I could have seen there and didn't.
When I read in 2004 that the Astor Plaza was closing, I cried. When I read in 2016 that the Ziegfeld was closing, it was more "sigh, I guess I'll have to go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet again."
Nonetheless, an era passes with the closing of the Ziegfeld. It was the next-to-last single screen movie palace to open in Manhattan, with the Astor Plaza the only that came after, and it was the very last large single screen movie theatre to close. I decided to treat the entire office to the final 2D show at the theatre so that they'd all have a chance to experience it before it closed for good.
The last show at the Astor Plaza, opening weekend for The Village, had a few dozen people on a Sunday night. The Friday night show had hundreds and hundreds of people, but the quick falloff showed how difficult it was to make money running a really large movie theatre. Of those few dozen people, no more than a dozen were there to bid farewell to the Astor Plaza itself. And even as the opening credits were rolling, a few workmen came in to begin disassembling.
The last 2D show at the Ziegfeld, with three more 3D to go, had 200, maybe 250 (anyone on the internet saying 500 is lying). Half of them were still in line to buy tickets. Three ticket windows, but only one had an actual computer to sell tickets, because they rarely needed even that many. People stayed. They took pictures. It was a scene. And Star Wars: The Force Awakens, gets worse and worse with each viewing.
At some point maybe I'll append a reasonably accurate list of the movies I saw at the Ziegfeld to this post. But the bottom line is that I won't miss the Ziegfeld, while I miss the Loews Astor Plaza often.
The Paris Theatre is the last of the holdouts. The link takes you to the Cinema Treasures website, which makes the Paris seem much nicer than it actually is. Almost 600 seats, and it does have a balcony. But the leg room isn't good. The rake isn't good. The screen isn't very big. The lobby area is practically non-existent. Some commenters on Cinema Treasures are trying to say the Paris isn't the last single screen theatre in Manhattan, but they are as wrong as the ones saying I saw Force Awakens with 500 other people. The other single screen theatres like the Walter Reade aren't commercial theatres showing first run movies. And if the Paris closes. I won't miss it very much, either.
It was Christmas break between my first and second semesters in college. It was a sold-out show. There were a lot of those at the Ziegfeld in the 1980s and 1990s. I was not one of the first to arrive, and I found my way to a seat on the far right side of the theatre, fairly near to the front. The theatre smelled of food; Gandhi was a very long movie, and people were prepared with more than popcorn.
The Ziegfeld and Gandhi turned out to be very similar to one another. They were worthy. You couldn't not like Gandhi, could you? I mean, it was a long epic biopic about an incredibly important historical figure, You could learn so much of such importance about such an important personage. Of course, it wasn't actually a good movie. It was a quintessential biopic. The actual filmmaking by Richard Attenborough was kind of plodding.
So it was with the Ziegfeld. It was a single screen movie theatre with over 1000 seats, and a reasonably large screen. But the rake was practically non-existent, making it difficult to see over the head of anyone sitting in front of you. Long and narrow isn't the best dimension for a movie theatre, but that was the Ziegfeld. A whole city block long. From the raised mezzanine at the back, a very long way to the screen, which didn't dominate the field of vision from such a distance. Four urinals, three stalls, two sinks for the men's restroom; imagine the lines after a full house. Small lobby and concession area. No accessibility for the handicapped. There were lots of chandeliers, and some exhibits on the original Ziegfeld Follies theatre.
The Loews Astor Plaza, built just a few years later, was much better. Great rake. Better dimensions. Bigger screen. Bigger lobby. Nicer everything, just not as fancy. I came to be very frustrated that many more people knew about the Ziegfeld, which got better press and was more often booked for Hollywood premieres and exclusive general releases.
As it turns out, I've likely seen more movies at the Ziegfeld than on any other screen (emphasis on "screen," because some multiplexes I've gone to more often, but spread out over many screens). But going to the Astor Plaza always exhilarated me, and I never felt that way about the Ziegfeld. I was often as happy to see a movie on the big screens at the multiplexes than at the Ziegfeld, and I never felt that way about the Astor Plaza. Looking at the long list of movies I saw at the Ziegfeld, and at full lists of movies that played the Ziegfeld that are on Cinema Treasures, I'm as impressed with the list if movies I could have seen there and didn't.
When I read in 2004 that the Astor Plaza was closing, I cried. When I read in 2016 that the Ziegfeld was closing, it was more "sigh, I guess I'll have to go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet again."
Nonetheless, an era passes with the closing of the Ziegfeld. It was the next-to-last single screen movie palace to open in Manhattan, with the Astor Plaza the only that came after, and it was the very last large single screen movie theatre to close. I decided to treat the entire office to the final 2D show at the theatre so that they'd all have a chance to experience it before it closed for good.
The last show at the Astor Plaza, opening weekend for The Village, had a few dozen people on a Sunday night. The Friday night show had hundreds and hundreds of people, but the quick falloff showed how difficult it was to make money running a really large movie theatre. Of those few dozen people, no more than a dozen were there to bid farewell to the Astor Plaza itself. And even as the opening credits were rolling, a few workmen came in to begin disassembling.
The last 2D show at the Ziegfeld, with three more 3D to go, had 200, maybe 250 (anyone on the internet saying 500 is lying). Half of them were still in line to buy tickets. Three ticket windows, but only one had an actual computer to sell tickets, because they rarely needed even that many. People stayed. They took pictures. It was a scene. And Star Wars: The Force Awakens, gets worse and worse with each viewing.
At some point maybe I'll append a reasonably accurate list of the movies I saw at the Ziegfeld to this post. But the bottom line is that I won't miss the Ziegfeld, while I miss the Loews Astor Plaza often.
The Paris Theatre is the last of the holdouts. The link takes you to the Cinema Treasures website, which makes the Paris seem much nicer than it actually is. Almost 600 seats, and it does have a balcony. But the leg room isn't good. The rake isn't good. The screen isn't very big. The lobby area is practically non-existent. Some commenters on Cinema Treasures are trying to say the Paris isn't the last single screen theatre in Manhattan, but they are as wrong as the ones saying I saw Force Awakens with 500 other people. The other single screen theatres like the Walter Reade aren't commercial theatres showing first run movies. And if the Paris closes. I won't miss it very much, either.
Monday, February 23, 2015
The Next Best Films of 2014
I saw around 100 movies that opened in 2014, which is a pretty typical year for me. Rarely less than 90, hard to see more than 120.
Of those 100 movies. Boyhood is the best.
Here are the next dozen or so movies that I consider to be my 90th percentile for the year:
2. Whiplash
This is the one other film from 2014 that I've seen twice, though it's possible there are one or two others I'd try to see again.
JK Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film also won Oscars for editing and for sound mixing.
Simmons is the leader of the top ensemble at a Juilliard-like performing arts school, and Miles Teller is a student who yearns to be playing drums in this ensemble. And the two are both crazy. Simmons might be an actual psychopath, or he might just take a little bit too seriously the idea that you've got to tear down in order to build up. Which, just to say, is the entire premise behind boot camp for the US armed forces. But what would drive Miles Teller's student to put up with this? He's obsessed in his own way, firm in his belief in a youthful romanticism where it's clearly better to be famous and dead than a living nobody. Which belief he'll happily advertise to his girlfriend, to family at a holiday dinner, to anyone -- though there are so few people who want to be around someone so obsessed that his world is defined entirely by the JK Simmons character.
Simmons is a long-time character actor who's done great work in films like Juno and who hits it out of the park here. Teller is one of the best young actors around, who amazed in The Spectacular Now and amazes again here.
The film's technical excellence is key to its success. We have to hear the music, the drums, the subtle change in tempo from one playing of the riff to the next. And its edited to within an inch of its life, especially in the closing ten or fifteen minutes.
It's in those final minutes that we finally come to understand why these two characters are together. JK Simmons' entire life relies on Miles Teller for validation. If Teller isn't a great drummer, then there's no mark left on this world for all of Simmons' teaching career. And Teller can only survive if there's someone to appreciate the greatness he yearns to have. They might hate one another forever and always, but they need one another as deeply as life itself.
3 & 4
American Sniper & Interstellar
Like Boyhood, Interstellar kept me going for some three hours without much looking at the watch. The story may or may not make sense. Belay that; like most time travel the story is a mess when you sit down and think about it. But it's imaginative and different. The acting might be better than the movie deserves. The effects are well-done without ever feeling like video games. Hans Zimmer provides good musical accompaniment. I'd be interested to see how it holds up on a second viewing.
And American Sniper hasn't quite left my mind in the month since I've seen it. If anything, its call seems to be getting louder as the days go by. Bradley Cooper's performance as the Chris Kyle is sensational. He submerges himself in the role. There's no trace of the Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook. There's just this man in this role. The direction by Clint Eastwood does good service to a script that manages to glorify the lead character's actions in Iraq while being unflinching in its depiction of the damage to the character and his marriage on the home front. As such, it's pro-war and anti-war and can be read as one wishes. It's quiet, powerful film-making, another demonstration of Clint Eastwood's stature as one of the leading directors of the past three decades.
And in no particular order:
The documentaries Citizen Four, Remote Area Medical, Elaine Stritch Shoot Me and Life Itself.
Citizen Four won the Oscar. Set mostly in a single hotel in Hong Kong during the days when Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's spying programs were beginning to be reported. It works on multiple levels. Snowden is someone who understands in abstract and theory the risks of what he's doing who in a matter of days comes to understand the reality of it.
Remote Area Medical is a little-seen movie which depicts one weekend of free medicine at a NASCAR track by the Virginia/Tennessee border. Who are the people who'll line up in the dead of night for the opportunity to have someone look at their teeth or their eyes? Who are the people who'll give up a weekend to provide the necessary services? The documentary never stops to score political points. It lets the footage speak for itself. I'm the kid who grew up fixated on the behind-the-scenes aspect of things, the secret corridors at Disneyworld or the secrets of putting up skyscrapers or bridges, or the secrets of making Kermit ride a bike. The film appealed to the kid by spending lots of time on the logistics of the clinic while simultaneously appealing to the adult who's thinking about the policy issues of our health care system.
The Elaine Stritch movie is very narrowly tailored for people who like showtunes, and isn't quite on a league with the other two. But the film is such a perfect embodiment of its subject that I feel it deserves mention.
Life Itself is the documentary about Roger Ebert that was overlooked entirely by the Oscars. It's from the director of Hoop Dreams, another documentary that the Oscars overlooked which was fiercely advocated by Ebert. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the level of trust between the subject and the filmmaker, it stays just shy of hagiography, taking pains to ask if not to fully tackle questions raised by Ebert's career (prime example, how close to the filmmakers he critiqued should Ebert be?). Which is fine in the end, because there are people who are better than the rest of us, and Ebert was clearly one of them.
Fault in Our Stars and Edge of Tomorrow
If only every movie for teens could be as good as Fault in Our Stars, and every sf adventure as good as Edge of Tomorrow.
Fault in Our Stars has an excellent cast, in both the primary and supporting roles, holds some surprises to those who haven't read the book, and elicits tears without ever being too (or at least not too too) blatantly manipulative. Edge of Tomorrow falters a bit in its final scene which is poorly set up, poorly blocked, and thus incoherent, but before then... Tom Cruise gives a performance with surprisingly little ego, well-matched by Emily Blunt and by a script that is unusually intelligent for the sf action movie.
Locke.
So it's basically a guy talking in a car for 90 minutes. And I don't think you'll ever find the concept done better than this. Tom Hardy shows he's much more than Bane.
Nightcrawler
Fierce acting by Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo helps cover any ethical uncertainties in the script. And from a co-writer of Freejack!
Gone Girl
Good performances, a surprisingly puckish sense of humor, Hollywood gloss at its best and most powerful.
Pride
Surprisingly good, based on a true story of gay & lesbian Londoners coming to the aid of striking miners during the Thatcher era. Paint-by-numbers as based-on-true-story movies often are, but the quality of the performances and of the script put it well above average in the genre.
Of those 100 movies. Boyhood is the best.
Here are the next dozen or so movies that I consider to be my 90th percentile for the year:
2. Whiplash
This is the one other film from 2014 that I've seen twice, though it's possible there are one or two others I'd try to see again.
JK Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film also won Oscars for editing and for sound mixing.
Simmons is the leader of the top ensemble at a Juilliard-like performing arts school, and Miles Teller is a student who yearns to be playing drums in this ensemble. And the two are both crazy. Simmons might be an actual psychopath, or he might just take a little bit too seriously the idea that you've got to tear down in order to build up. Which, just to say, is the entire premise behind boot camp for the US armed forces. But what would drive Miles Teller's student to put up with this? He's obsessed in his own way, firm in his belief in a youthful romanticism where it's clearly better to be famous and dead than a living nobody. Which belief he'll happily advertise to his girlfriend, to family at a holiday dinner, to anyone -- though there are so few people who want to be around someone so obsessed that his world is defined entirely by the JK Simmons character.
Simmons is a long-time character actor who's done great work in films like Juno and who hits it out of the park here. Teller is one of the best young actors around, who amazed in The Spectacular Now and amazes again here.
The film's technical excellence is key to its success. We have to hear the music, the drums, the subtle change in tempo from one playing of the riff to the next. And its edited to within an inch of its life, especially in the closing ten or fifteen minutes.
It's in those final minutes that we finally come to understand why these two characters are together. JK Simmons' entire life relies on Miles Teller for validation. If Teller isn't a great drummer, then there's no mark left on this world for all of Simmons' teaching career. And Teller can only survive if there's someone to appreciate the greatness he yearns to have. They might hate one another forever and always, but they need one another as deeply as life itself.
3 & 4
American Sniper & Interstellar
Like Boyhood, Interstellar kept me going for some three hours without much looking at the watch. The story may or may not make sense. Belay that; like most time travel the story is a mess when you sit down and think about it. But it's imaginative and different. The acting might be better than the movie deserves. The effects are well-done without ever feeling like video games. Hans Zimmer provides good musical accompaniment. I'd be interested to see how it holds up on a second viewing.
And American Sniper hasn't quite left my mind in the month since I've seen it. If anything, its call seems to be getting louder as the days go by. Bradley Cooper's performance as the Chris Kyle is sensational. He submerges himself in the role. There's no trace of the Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook. There's just this man in this role. The direction by Clint Eastwood does good service to a script that manages to glorify the lead character's actions in Iraq while being unflinching in its depiction of the damage to the character and his marriage on the home front. As such, it's pro-war and anti-war and can be read as one wishes. It's quiet, powerful film-making, another demonstration of Clint Eastwood's stature as one of the leading directors of the past three decades.
And in no particular order:
The documentaries Citizen Four, Remote Area Medical, Elaine Stritch Shoot Me and Life Itself.
Citizen Four won the Oscar. Set mostly in a single hotel in Hong Kong during the days when Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's spying programs were beginning to be reported. It works on multiple levels. Snowden is someone who understands in abstract and theory the risks of what he's doing who in a matter of days comes to understand the reality of it.
Remote Area Medical is a little-seen movie which depicts one weekend of free medicine at a NASCAR track by the Virginia/Tennessee border. Who are the people who'll line up in the dead of night for the opportunity to have someone look at their teeth or their eyes? Who are the people who'll give up a weekend to provide the necessary services? The documentary never stops to score political points. It lets the footage speak for itself. I'm the kid who grew up fixated on the behind-the-scenes aspect of things, the secret corridors at Disneyworld or the secrets of putting up skyscrapers or bridges, or the secrets of making Kermit ride a bike. The film appealed to the kid by spending lots of time on the logistics of the clinic while simultaneously appealing to the adult who's thinking about the policy issues of our health care system.
The Elaine Stritch movie is very narrowly tailored for people who like showtunes, and isn't quite on a league with the other two. But the film is such a perfect embodiment of its subject that I feel it deserves mention.
Life Itself is the documentary about Roger Ebert that was overlooked entirely by the Oscars. It's from the director of Hoop Dreams, another documentary that the Oscars overlooked which was fiercely advocated by Ebert. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the level of trust between the subject and the filmmaker, it stays just shy of hagiography, taking pains to ask if not to fully tackle questions raised by Ebert's career (prime example, how close to the filmmakers he critiqued should Ebert be?). Which is fine in the end, because there are people who are better than the rest of us, and Ebert was clearly one of them.
Fault in Our Stars and Edge of Tomorrow
If only every movie for teens could be as good as Fault in Our Stars, and every sf adventure as good as Edge of Tomorrow.
Fault in Our Stars has an excellent cast, in both the primary and supporting roles, holds some surprises to those who haven't read the book, and elicits tears without ever being too (or at least not too too) blatantly manipulative. Edge of Tomorrow falters a bit in its final scene which is poorly set up, poorly blocked, and thus incoherent, but before then... Tom Cruise gives a performance with surprisingly little ego, well-matched by Emily Blunt and by a script that is unusually intelligent for the sf action movie.
Locke.
So it's basically a guy talking in a car for 90 minutes. And I don't think you'll ever find the concept done better than this. Tom Hardy shows he's much more than Bane.
Nightcrawler
Fierce acting by Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo helps cover any ethical uncertainties in the script. And from a co-writer of Freejack!
Gone Girl
Good performances, a surprisingly puckish sense of humor, Hollywood gloss at its best and most powerful.
Pride
Surprisingly good, based on a true story of gay & lesbian Londoners coming to the aid of striking miners during the Thatcher era. Paint-by-numbers as based-on-true-story movies often are, but the quality of the performances and of the script put it well above average in the genre.
The Best Film of 2014
The Oscars forced me to sit down with my print-out of the movies I'd seen that opened in 2014, and without further ado...
1. Boyhood
The very notion of the movie is crazy. The challenges in making a film with a 12-year shooting schedule go far beyond anything. You can't even compare it to the 7/14/21/etcUp documentary series by Michael Apted that has followed a group of kids from 7 until very close to today with films every 7 years. It's one thing to just get together every seven years and see what's happened. You don't have to worry about what happened in the intervening, you just have to report on it. And in any event, Boyhood director Richard Linklater has already replicated that with his Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series of films with Ethan Hawke and Juliette Delpy.
Let's look at this:
You can't sign a contract for longer than 7 years for an actor/actress, so for your primary cast members, there's the chance that you could be left adrift if someone becomes rich and famous. Or they could go Full Robert Downey Jr. for a year. Or they could die. And then there's the child you start filming at age 6 who could be lots of different things by age 18, and almost certainly it's bucking the odds to expect the kid to grow up to be Miles Teller. Or something could go wrong with the director or an important crew member.
Aside from the pragmatic considerations, the script has to evolve because the world changes in twelve years. You can start the movie with an outline, but it's like the military setting about no plan surviving contact with the enemy. There are so many opportunities to fall on your face. As it is, the scenes set amidst the 2008 Presidential campaign work, but there's no guarantee of it.
And then you've got the money considerations. Empires in Hollywood rise and fall in a dozen years. IFC Films, which backed this, is a part of a big entertainment conglomerate, but these companies change management, or they get parceled out in different mergers and business arrangements.
To set out to make Boyhood is insanity.
And yet it was made, and it is a stunningly good movie, and it is always much harder to talk about the bad in something than about the good.
As a matter of effect, I've now seen Boyhood three times. It's three hours. I didn't look at my watch once. To be sure, the structure of the movie helps because the movie goes into a different year every so often so I don't need to look at my watch to know the movie is progressing, but there are versions of this movie where there would be looking. Lots and lots of looking. The "I can't believe it's been an hour and I'm only in year five and I have seven more agonizing years and two more painful hours" looking. And I would go see the movie again. Not tomorrow, but it's like a Kubrick movie, 2001 or The Shining, which I'm just thinking I need to see every two to five years, just because.
The editing is seamless, which doesn't help with the Academy Awards. Showy is nice, seamless is bad. But the movie cuts from year to year with ease, and any three hour movie that moves as fast as this is a well-edited movie. Not just between years, but in each scene, especially because some of the scenes go on for a bit. The conversation between the boy and his photography teacher that goes on at pretty much the exact length it would go on in real time. My favorite shot is a minute or two of a tracking shot of two people talking as they walk down the street in San Marcos, which uses the same toolkit for these two minutes that the "Before/Beyond" series uses for fifteen minute conversations.
But what good would it do to cut or not cut in some of these long set pieces if the words being said didn't feel right. And every word in this movie feels right. Which, when you think about it, is an amazing thing to say about a movie that was scripted and shot over twelve years with no do-overs for the early scenes. Every once in a while there's something that skates just to the line of feeling a little bit off. The scene in the restaurant with the manager who was set on his path by Patricia Arquette a few years earlier is one of those. It's just a little too perfect. But the thing of it is that this stuff happens in real life. I'll go to a convention and some writer will come up and thank me for some piece of advice in a rejection letter or something like that. Since the script always feels right when it's talking about something I can relate to, I can trust it when it's lingering on a scene I can't relate to, like the birthday party where Mason gets his first gun.
The soundtrack is well-curated.
Even on the third go-round, the film was affecting in the final scenes.
I feel like I'm underselling the movie, that it's rife with virtues I can't articulate. But there's no denying it, Boyhood is the best movie of 2014.
Monday, October 13, 2014
Me And My Movie
This fall season marks both my 50th birthday and the 20th anniversary of establishing JABberwocky Literary Agency. To celebrate, I screened a film at the Museum of the Moving Image for a select group from virtually all phases of my life. I didn't name the film in the invitation, though the invitations included references to enough of the catch phrases immortalized by the film that it wasn't exactly a state secret.
Here, slightly edited, are the program notes I prepared:
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When Jerry Maguire opened on Dec. 13, 1996, I sat down to see it projected (in 35mm, on part of the screen) on the Imax at the Loews Lincoln Square.
I was expecting to like it.
I didn’t realize that I was about as close to my autobiography as Hollywood is likely to get.
The “expecting to like” is easy; it was Tom Cruise in a Cameron Crowe movie, with a decent coming attraction.
Tom Cruise and I have very special relationship. Top Gun is extra special to me. That movie wasn't the first film I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, which was the best movie theatre in Manhattan. But it was the first movie I saw at the Astor Plaza after starting at JABberwocky. Before, I was visiting the Astor Plaza. After, I was living there. And over the thirteen years that separated Top Gun from Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise had a misfire or two (Days of Thunder, Interview with the Vampire), but for the most part, he was hitting it out of the park every time up to the plate. Rain Man, The Color of Money, Born of the Fourth of July, The Firm, A Few Good Men, Mission: Impossible. Even Cocktail and Far and Away -- if you think they worked (and I did, at least at the time I first saw), they worked because of Tom. The films were generally hugely successful at the box office. They were also more often than not hugely successful artistically. The directors or screenwriters included the likes of Barry Levinson, Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Ron Howard, Oliver Stone, Tony Scott and Sydney Pollack. All have made significant contributions to cinema. And the co-stars? Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Brad Pitt. These movies garnered a lot of Oscar nominations for people besides Tom Cruise, whose artistic contributions to cinema over a long career are, I think, under-appreciated.
And then Cameron Crowe. 25 years later we still reference the classic scene in Say Anything of John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box to woo his girlfriend. And in 1996 when Jerry Maguire was open, that classic scene was much nearer in the past. There was a frisson to a new Cameron Crowe film. But Say Anything was good on many levels, including the overall quality of the performances. Not just John Cusack's defining performance, but the best performance from John Mahoney. Forget Frasier. Has Mahoney ever been better than Lloyd Dobler’s nemesis, the father who doesn’t want Lloyd dating his daughter.
For both Cruise and Crowe, their movies were often my soundtrack. Working with music supervisor Danny Bramson, Say Anything and Singles were full of great tunes. Bramson's one of the best at this. He also helped pick the music for the very lyrical Bull Durham soundtrack. Rain Man had one of Hans Zimmer’s best scores. The Color of Money was full of great tunes. There were the soaring trumpet solos in John Williams’ Fourth of July score, and the jazzy piano of Dave Grusin’s music for The Firm.
So Tom Cruise was going to be in a Cameron Crowe movie.
Which was not just my soundtrack, but my life.
Jerry Maguire and I -- it turned out we were both agents who’d come to have issues with our bosses.
I’d been working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. Scott Meredith died. The people with the clients and the money walked out the door to start their own agency. A rich guy purchased Scott Meredith and had lots and lots of bad ideas, and I made a very conscious decision that I wasn’t going to just agree with them all. Working for Scott hadn’t been fun; I didn’t need to bend over backwards to work for another bad boss. A year-and-some after the agency was sold, did I know the day I was fired, twenty years ago this month, that I was going to be fired? No. But when the office was being renovated in the summer of 1994, I wasn’t entirely joking when I told people I got a fax to have at home just in case the boss had other plans for me.
After Jerry wrote his mission statement, he knew there might be repercussions. He knew just about the moment he hit “save.” He didn’t know Sugar was taking him to lunch to fire him, but deep down, he wasn’t shocked by the news.
The phone jockeying that followed? That was me, twenty years ago this month. My boss, he didn’t care about my clients. If he wanted my clients, he wouldn’t have fired me. But boy, did I spend a lot of time on the phone in October 1994. I had a $300+ phone bill that month. Because even if I wasn’t competing with my boss, I was competing with the Scott Meredith guys that had broken off 18 months earlier, and any and every other option besides me that any of my clients might have had. Jerry Maguire’s a movie. In real life, I doubt there’d be the crying gymnast picking up the wrong line. But in its essence, every moment Jerry spends on the phone that afternoon is entirely real.
I’m not sure if it’s me or Jerry who headed off to our own businesses with a bigger stock of naiveté. I talked to an accountant enough to understand I’d have self-employment tax weighing down on me whether I was actually making any money or not, but my “business plan” was a sheet of my Scott Meredith memo paper where I roughed out that I needed $24-25K in commission my first year, that I knew where half of it would come from, and that I would come up with the other half. But honestly, I never thought much about doing anything else. And while Jerry Maguire and I both settled into home offices, for me the home office was all I needed. Jerry Maguire needed more. He had a much bigger income potential because he was representing big-time athletes, not a bunch of sf/fantasy authors that were little known outside their fields. But he had champagne tastes. He needed the fancy suits and the fancy cars and the ability to look rich and act rich and compete with Bob Sugar. I was fine settling into my one bedroom and moving furniture around to make room for a desk (cheap do-it-yourself from Staples), a filing cabinet, and a hand-me-down copier from my parents.
So Jerry Maguire might have been nominated for five Academy Awards: Picture, Actor (Cruise), Supporting Actor (Gooding Jr. who won), Screenplay (Crowe) and Editing. It might have spawned a sea of catch phrases that are as or more enduring as Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box in Say Anything. That’s not why we’re here watching Jerry Maguire today. There are other favorite films of mine that have probably aged better which are even more iconic.
Here is why we’re here:
When I sat in the Lincoln Square on that Friday night in 1994, having paid full tariff for a Manhattan ticket at a time when my first choice was always the Saturday bargain matineee in Queens, my story was unfolding in real time with Jerry’s. I laughed a lot. Too much; I earned some weird looks from people in the row behind me who couldn’t fully appreciate the jokes, because who else but me really could? But I squirmed a little bit. I wasn’t sure how the health insurance bills were going to be paid, or when or if I’d ever get a big offer coming across my fax machine. I was two years into starting a business that spent five years working its way out of neutral. I was still hoping to have Jerry Maguire’s happy ending. And today, there’s no better way to say I had that happy ending than to be able to share Jerry Maguire with you.
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And what would I say after seeing Jerry Maguire again this weekend?
I own DVDs and BluRays, but I don't do them. They're there for decoration. I live in New York City, there are lots of movies to see, and I don't sit in my apartment to do them.
Which means there are films I love that I see over and over again because they're easy to see. As an example, if I wanted to see The Shining, I could do that lots between Kubrick retrospectives or midnight showings or whatever. Jerry Maguire isn't one of those films. I haven't actually watched it in a while.
And in my notes above, I underestimated it. The movie has aged pretty well, and is even more iconic than I remembered. The number of little bits of dialogue in this film that have taken on a life of their own goes so far beyond just "show me the money" or "you complete me." I don't know how many of them Crowe made up and how many he'd heard and used, but so much of the movie is in popular culture 18 years ago because it's in this movie.
In 1996, I could most appreciate the movie's tonal accuracy for the stuff at the beginning. I was two years off from my own phone jockeying. Which still feels accurate from a twenty-year remove. But now I can appreciate it for so much more, especially at the end of the movie. Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s Rod Tidwell has his big game and gets his big contract. It's very Hollywood, with Tidwell taking a big hit and being knocked out and doing this whole dance and the terms of his contract are revealed as a surprise on an ESPN interview show. But if you cut away all the Hollywood trappings, every emotional beat is right. Jerry Maguire, walking around the stadium after Tidwell's big game, is pretty much feeling the exact same beats that I felt a year ago, watching Brandon Sanderson win the Hugo Award for "The Emperor's Soul," and then hanging out with Brandon that night going for a celebratory late night nosh. It was so dead-on right that I found myself tearing up at the ending. I hadn't expected that.
So Cameron Crowe's screenplay is a masterpiece.
It doesn't get the emotional beats of being an agent right just by chance. It doesn't fill itself up with cultural references just by chance. These perfect words don't write themselves.
The acting. This I knew. Strangely enough, both Jay Mohr and John Mahoney have the same initials. Both are better known for stuff on TV. Both give their best performances in a movie directed by Cameron Crowe. Ione Skye? Renée Zellwegger? Again, both probably have their iconic roles in a Cameron Crowe movie. Cuba Gooding, Jr. Same thing. Lili Taylor is hiding out in Say Anything. Donal Logue (Harvey Dent on Gotham) is hiding out in Jerry Maguire. Cast long enough, any movie you do can have someone important doing an early role, but Crowe -- he seems to keep doing it.
What a darned good movie.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
The Maze Runner
It isn't often that I get to see a movie based on a huge bestselling novel that I had the good taste to turn down, but I got to do it tonight, when I headed off to the Ziegfeld after work for the 7:15 of The Maze Runner, based on James Dashner's novel of the same name.
Which is worth your time.
Spoilers follow:
I think I might've liked the movie less if I'd read the book. One of the things I enjoyed about the movie was that it held surprises. I was able to make some educated guesses about what would happen in certain instances based on my experiences as a reader of fiction and a viewer of films. When a group of 15 people heads off somewhere, and half of two-thirds of them are characters who haven't had a line of dialogue, it is safe to say that a good number of those characters aren't going to be around for the end of the movie. Cannon fodder, they've got cannon fodder. And if the arch nemesis is left behind someplace, the suspense is in wondering whether the arch nemesis will return in the sequel or before the end of the film at hand. Also, when characters walk in front of something that looks like the door to a loading dock, it might be a door.
But if I had a general idea of what was going to happen at points throughout, the movie held my attention, interest and curiosity. I was never entirely sure what was behind the door, or who might be coming up on the elevator, or the exact point in time when the climax was going to be set in motion.
Casting was a definite plus. Not a single complaint about any of the kids in the Glade, and their roles weren't all easy ones to play. As an example, the role of the Doubting Thomas (and this movie does have not just a Thomas but a Doubting Thomas) is kind of cliche and very functional and full of pronouncement, but all those lines are delivered with fervor and self-belief by Will Poulter, in a very different role than his equally excellent performance as the son in We're The Millers. And Dylan O'Brien as Thomas makes his character's actions seem perfectly natural even when, really, they're not, when it takes a lot of gumption or a job with McKinsey to arrive in a situation and start shaking things up like you've been doing it all along.
Well, maybe one false note in the cast. Blake Cooper has the task of playing the analog to Piggy in Lord of the Flies, and he doesn't manage to surmount that burden.
One false note in the physical production, which is generally impressive, and which false note occurred to me in real time as I was watching, and not with thought afterward. There isn't some giant dome over the Glade, like there is in the arena in Catching Fire. Yet the weather in the Glade seems entirely and completely different than the weather beyond the Glade and its immediate environs. I don't think it can work that way.
But on the whole, it's a movie that kept me interested all the way through, that didn't have me looking at my watch, that kept me awake and alert.
And as the Washington Post critic said, if I could've stayed around to see the sequel right afterwards, I would have. It's a great ending. A couple other reviews made it seem like this movie was a giant set-up for the next one. And it is. But it's also a quite entertaining movie in its own right.
Which is worth your time.
Spoilers follow:
I think I might've liked the movie less if I'd read the book. One of the things I enjoyed about the movie was that it held surprises. I was able to make some educated guesses about what would happen in certain instances based on my experiences as a reader of fiction and a viewer of films. When a group of 15 people heads off somewhere, and half of two-thirds of them are characters who haven't had a line of dialogue, it is safe to say that a good number of those characters aren't going to be around for the end of the movie. Cannon fodder, they've got cannon fodder. And if the arch nemesis is left behind someplace, the suspense is in wondering whether the arch nemesis will return in the sequel or before the end of the film at hand. Also, when characters walk in front of something that looks like the door to a loading dock, it might be a door.
But if I had a general idea of what was going to happen at points throughout, the movie held my attention, interest and curiosity. I was never entirely sure what was behind the door, or who might be coming up on the elevator, or the exact point in time when the climax was going to be set in motion.
Casting was a definite plus. Not a single complaint about any of the kids in the Glade, and their roles weren't all easy ones to play. As an example, the role of the Doubting Thomas (and this movie does have not just a Thomas but a Doubting Thomas) is kind of cliche and very functional and full of pronouncement, but all those lines are delivered with fervor and self-belief by Will Poulter, in a very different role than his equally excellent performance as the son in We're The Millers. And Dylan O'Brien as Thomas makes his character's actions seem perfectly natural even when, really, they're not, when it takes a lot of gumption or a job with McKinsey to arrive in a situation and start shaking things up like you've been doing it all along.
Well, maybe one false note in the cast. Blake Cooper has the task of playing the analog to Piggy in Lord of the Flies, and he doesn't manage to surmount that burden.
One false note in the physical production, which is generally impressive, and which false note occurred to me in real time as I was watching, and not with thought afterward. There isn't some giant dome over the Glade, like there is in the arena in Catching Fire. Yet the weather in the Glade seems entirely and completely different than the weather beyond the Glade and its immediate environs. I don't think it can work that way.
But on the whole, it's a movie that kept me interested all the way through, that didn't have me looking at my watch, that kept me awake and alert.
And as the Washington Post critic said, if I could've stayed around to see the sequel right afterwards, I would have. It's a great ending. A couple other reviews made it seem like this movie was a giant set-up for the next one. And it is. But it's also a quite entertaining movie in its own right.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
The Devane and I
Watching the premiere of 24: Live Another Day earlier in the week gets me to thinking where it is that I have heard the name of William Devane before...
Once Upon a Time, 24 years ago strangely enough, in September 1990, a client of mine named Barbara Paul called to say that there was a TV movie on NBC by the name of Murder COD being previewed in TV Guide that sounded a lot like her book Kill Fee.
The TV movie and a perfectly respectable cast. Patrick Duffy, still on Dallas, starred as a police detective, and one William Devane was the bad guy. Devane was on Knots Landing.
And if it sounded a lot like Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee -- well, that's because it was.
The book had been under option for a while. The option had, if memory serves, expired on September 10, which was now a few days in the past. The producers of the TV movie had not quite forgotten to pay the purchase price for the TV movie, which they should have done months before when the started filming the movie. And now, the check really was in the mail.
I don't know how it would have played out if they had sent their late check even a coupe of weeks or a month sooner, when the check would have been late but at least within the option period. Had it come in before we knew the movie and actually been shot and delivered we almost certainly would have cashed it and then been a little perturbed to find put two weeks later that they had screwed us a bit.
But here, the option had expired, the producers had no rights to the movie, and they were planning to show it on NBC in a few days. So of course the check was returned.
We ended up getting a few dollars more. Not a lot, I wonder if we could have held out longer and gotten more, but as little as it was it represented a 60% increase in what they needed to have paid had they done so just that wee bit sooner.
So this is my William Devane story that had absolutely nothing to do with William Devane.
You can give a listen to the Audible audio edition of Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee.
Once Upon a Time, 24 years ago strangely enough, in September 1990, a client of mine named Barbara Paul called to say that there was a TV movie on NBC by the name of Murder COD being previewed in TV Guide that sounded a lot like her book Kill Fee.
The TV movie and a perfectly respectable cast. Patrick Duffy, still on Dallas, starred as a police detective, and one William Devane was the bad guy. Devane was on Knots Landing.
And if it sounded a lot like Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee -- well, that's because it was.
The book had been under option for a while. The option had, if memory serves, expired on September 10, which was now a few days in the past. The producers of the TV movie had not quite forgotten to pay the purchase price for the TV movie, which they should have done months before when the started filming the movie. And now, the check really was in the mail.
I don't know how it would have played out if they had sent their late check even a coupe of weeks or a month sooner, when the check would have been late but at least within the option period. Had it come in before we knew the movie and actually been shot and delivered we almost certainly would have cashed it and then been a little perturbed to find put two weeks later that they had screwed us a bit.
But here, the option had expired, the producers had no rights to the movie, and they were planning to show it on NBC in a few days. So of course the check was returned.
We ended up getting a few dollars more. Not a lot, I wonder if we could have held out longer and gotten more, but as little as it was it represented a 60% increase in what they needed to have paid had they done so just that wee bit sooner.
So this is my William Devane story that had absolutely nothing to do with William Devane.
You can give a listen to the Audible audio edition of Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Noah
Not sure I would have seen Noah otherwise, but there was a preview screening at the Museum of the Moving Image.
It's an interesting movie, in a better way than when your spouse is saying your banana bread is interesting, but I'm still not sure it's actually a good movie.
But interesting.
The first interesting thing is the complete lack of sugar coating. We can spend so much time with bible stories growing up, the idealized kinds of stories suitable for children of all ages, that we can forget that most of the people in those stories are kind of crazy. Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Noah certainly. And the director Darren Aronofsky doesn't let us forget that about Noah. Nor does the portrayal by Russell Crowe. There isn't a thing about the movie that lets us forget that you have to be a certain kind of crazy to build an ark because God tells you to, and to do most of the things that Noah goes around doing in the classic bible story of Noah. It's an interesting choice, and I respect it. I'm so tired of heroes in cinema that I was kind of delighted here when Noah forces his son Ham to abandon his girlfriend, who doesn't fare well in the immediate aftermath. Not what we're supposed to do, not what we're used to seeing, not what we like to think of when we think of God and doing God's work and being Godly. But it's actually true to the nature of the Old Testament, where bad things happen to people.
It's interesting to see the use of classic elements of sf/fantasy to provide the presence of God in the movie. You need the hand of God to make the story of Noah work. To make it rain for those 40 days. To get Noah to build the ark. To keep the ark from being attacked and destroyed by the saner people in Noah's universe. So if you've got to have a supernatural entity casting its gaze and spirit over the movie, why not have it be a cross between Tolkien/Peter Jackson's ents and Brandon Sanderson's koloss.
The movie has a bad guy, and the bad guy isn't the strength of the movie in cinematic story terms. But in the bibliical sense, the character makes for some itneresting parallels with the story of Adam and Eve, providing temptation which mankind has to either embrace or resist. The decision on what to do in Noah is much more interesting than asking what card you have in your wallet.
I dozed off only briefly, and I could easily have gotten sleepy-eyed for a lot more of the movie than this. It's an interesting movie. I'm hesitant to give it a recommendation, but I wouldn't warn anyone against.
It's an interesting movie, in a better way than when your spouse is saying your banana bread is interesting, but I'm still not sure it's actually a good movie.
But interesting.
The first interesting thing is the complete lack of sugar coating. We can spend so much time with bible stories growing up, the idealized kinds of stories suitable for children of all ages, that we can forget that most of the people in those stories are kind of crazy. Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Noah certainly. And the director Darren Aronofsky doesn't let us forget that about Noah. Nor does the portrayal by Russell Crowe. There isn't a thing about the movie that lets us forget that you have to be a certain kind of crazy to build an ark because God tells you to, and to do most of the things that Noah goes around doing in the classic bible story of Noah. It's an interesting choice, and I respect it. I'm so tired of heroes in cinema that I was kind of delighted here when Noah forces his son Ham to abandon his girlfriend, who doesn't fare well in the immediate aftermath. Not what we're supposed to do, not what we're used to seeing, not what we like to think of when we think of God and doing God's work and being Godly. But it's actually true to the nature of the Old Testament, where bad things happen to people.
It's interesting to see the use of classic elements of sf/fantasy to provide the presence of God in the movie. You need the hand of God to make the story of Noah work. To make it rain for those 40 days. To get Noah to build the ark. To keep the ark from being attacked and destroyed by the saner people in Noah's universe. So if you've got to have a supernatural entity casting its gaze and spirit over the movie, why not have it be a cross between Tolkien/Peter Jackson's ents and Brandon Sanderson's koloss.
The movie has a bad guy, and the bad guy isn't the strength of the movie in cinematic story terms. But in the bibliical sense, the character makes for some itneresting parallels with the story of Adam and Eve, providing temptation which mankind has to either embrace or resist. The decision on what to do in Noah is much more interesting than asking what card you have in your wallet.
I dozed off only briefly, and I could easily have gotten sleepy-eyed for a lot more of the movie than this. It's an interesting movie. I'm hesitant to give it a recommendation, but I wouldn't warn anyone against.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Die Muppets en Die Raid
It's been an eclectic and unusually fertile week of preview screenings at The Museum of the Moving Image. After showing Bad Words earlier in the week, there was an unusual double feature today of Muppet Most Wanted and The Raid 2, both quite enjoyable in their own different ways.
The best thing, and perhaps the only thing, that one needs to say about Muppet Most Wanted is that it's undoubtedly and undeniably a film Jim Henson could have made.
I'm not sure any Muppet movie will ever equal the consistent delight of the memorable tunes from the original Muppet movie, but there's no denying the quality of work that Bret McKenzie is doing for the current Muppet films. This movie starts with a production number where the Muppets celebrate the fact that they are getting to do a sequel (yes, Bunsen Honeydew does quite scientifically interrupt the song to point out that this is in fact the 7th Muppet movie), which features lots and lots of Muppets, happily breaks the third wall, goes big in the style of The Magic Store from the original Muppet movie or even big in the style of a big number from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life or Mel Brooks' History of the World Part One. There are other solid original numbers sprinkled throughout. And the movie's plot lends itself to paying tribute to the use of music in the original Muppet Show, so we get little gems like Miss Piggy doing her best Celine Dion with a number from The Muppet Movie. Of course, we later get Celine Dion herself. And the movie ends with a rendition of the song "Together Again" that seems like an homage to the Monty Python film Life of Brian. Yes, Jim Henson would have gotten this.
The movie is sprinkled with celebrity co-stars and celebrity cameos. I don't like Ricky Gervais, but I liked him here. He has a twinkle in his eye throughout and seems to clearly be enjoying playing second fiddle to The Muppets. And then there's Ray Liotta, and Tina Fey, and Usher, and Frank Langella, and many many more. I didn't recognize everyone; I'm getting to be an old man. But the cameos here should resonate with a mix of thirteen year olds and 53-year-olds, because the sheer abundance of them allows the film to cover all bases.
And the jokes cover all age bases. There's a lot of just plain silly for kids to enjoy. Then there's a quick reference to David Lean. Or to David Niven, while we're at it. Jim Henson would understand where the creators are coming from.
So three cheers to director James Bobin, who co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller. Almost 35 years after the release of the original Muppet Movie, they have the Muppets feeling fresh and new again.
The strange thing to me: Jason Segel, who did so much to help spearhead the return of the Muppets to movie theatres isn't here in any way, shape, or form, not even in the form of a no-show producer credit hiding somewhere.
A few years back there was a martial arts movie called The Raid which I didn't get around to seeing. It got some nice reviews, kind of wanted to, but it just never happened, I think in part because I have an informal quota on the number of martial arts movies I want to see and that might have been released in proximity to another one. But suffice to say when I saw that Moving Image was hosting a screening of The Raid 2, I wasn't going to miss out twice.
Glad I didn't. The Raid 2 is excellent.
Martial arts movies don't need a plot, necessarily, but this one has one Shakespeare would recognize, which centers around a father/son struggle over the future of an Indonesian crime family. The son thinks his dad has gone soft, and doesn't buy into the idea expressed to him at one point in the movie that the father now has enough respect that he doesn't still need to have fear going for him. Into the midst of this father/son struggle is thrown an undercover cop, the actual lead of the movie, played by Iko Uwais. He appeared at a Q&A afterwards along with writer/director/editor Gareth Evans, and Julie Estelle who is by default the female lead, because there aren't any females hanging around in this movie.
While it's nice to have a powerful primal central plot in the film, people don't go to martial arts movies for the plots. They go for the martial arts. And there are a number of incredible sequences using a variety or weapons and fighting styles. What's your favorite? The prison yard? The subway car? The hotel ballroom? The guy with the baseball bat? Kinetic fighting inside a four-seater?
Nothing's predictable. At the halfway point, after some great sequences in large rooms, I was thinking the director liked doing action on a big canvas. But that was until he started doing great fights in halls and alleys. By the time he gets to doing vibrant martial arts inside of a not-that-big moving car, you realize he'll do his action anywhere he can.
If I were one of those reviewers or critics who reviews multiple things and feels that requires finding some way to link them all together in the hook to that week's review colum, I guess I'd be talking about the shared love of film history that one sees in both this and Muppet Most Wanted. I saw lots of Kubrick in The Raid 2. The classical tune "Sarabande," which plays for an entire reel in Barry Lyndon gets a decent workout here. There's a hotel ballroom that could be considered the heir to the Gold Room at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, complete with a bathroom attendant, a decent facsimile of the bar itself, and a resplendent color scheme that goes well with the color of the blood that will be nicely spilled before the movie's 2.5 hours are over. Attached to the hotel ballroom is a nicely sized hotel kitchen that Dick Halloran would probably have enjoyed cooking in. At one point a car stops in the middle of a group of burnt-out buildings that would have done nicely for the major urban battle set piece in Full Metal Jacket. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get a full-on martial arts sequence in the space.
The movie's long at 2.5 hours, but it moves. If you see one martial arts movie in 2014, there's an excellent chance you'll wish it to be this one.
The best thing, and perhaps the only thing, that one needs to say about Muppet Most Wanted is that it's undoubtedly and undeniably a film Jim Henson could have made.
I'm not sure any Muppet movie will ever equal the consistent delight of the memorable tunes from the original Muppet movie, but there's no denying the quality of work that Bret McKenzie is doing for the current Muppet films. This movie starts with a production number where the Muppets celebrate the fact that they are getting to do a sequel (yes, Bunsen Honeydew does quite scientifically interrupt the song to point out that this is in fact the 7th Muppet movie), which features lots and lots of Muppets, happily breaks the third wall, goes big in the style of The Magic Store from the original Muppet movie or even big in the style of a big number from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life or Mel Brooks' History of the World Part One. There are other solid original numbers sprinkled throughout. And the movie's plot lends itself to paying tribute to the use of music in the original Muppet Show, so we get little gems like Miss Piggy doing her best Celine Dion with a number from The Muppet Movie. Of course, we later get Celine Dion herself. And the movie ends with a rendition of the song "Together Again" that seems like an homage to the Monty Python film Life of Brian. Yes, Jim Henson would have gotten this.
The movie is sprinkled with celebrity co-stars and celebrity cameos. I don't like Ricky Gervais, but I liked him here. He has a twinkle in his eye throughout and seems to clearly be enjoying playing second fiddle to The Muppets. And then there's Ray Liotta, and Tina Fey, and Usher, and Frank Langella, and many many more. I didn't recognize everyone; I'm getting to be an old man. But the cameos here should resonate with a mix of thirteen year olds and 53-year-olds, because the sheer abundance of them allows the film to cover all bases.
And the jokes cover all age bases. There's a lot of just plain silly for kids to enjoy. Then there's a quick reference to David Lean. Or to David Niven, while we're at it. Jim Henson would understand where the creators are coming from.
So three cheers to director James Bobin, who co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller. Almost 35 years after the release of the original Muppet Movie, they have the Muppets feeling fresh and new again.
The strange thing to me: Jason Segel, who did so much to help spearhead the return of the Muppets to movie theatres isn't here in any way, shape, or form, not even in the form of a no-show producer credit hiding somewhere.
A few years back there was a martial arts movie called The Raid which I didn't get around to seeing. It got some nice reviews, kind of wanted to, but it just never happened, I think in part because I have an informal quota on the number of martial arts movies I want to see and that might have been released in proximity to another one. But suffice to say when I saw that Moving Image was hosting a screening of The Raid 2, I wasn't going to miss out twice.
Glad I didn't. The Raid 2 is excellent.
Martial arts movies don't need a plot, necessarily, but this one has one Shakespeare would recognize, which centers around a father/son struggle over the future of an Indonesian crime family. The son thinks his dad has gone soft, and doesn't buy into the idea expressed to him at one point in the movie that the father now has enough respect that he doesn't still need to have fear going for him. Into the midst of this father/son struggle is thrown an undercover cop, the actual lead of the movie, played by Iko Uwais. He appeared at a Q&A afterwards along with writer/director/editor Gareth Evans, and Julie Estelle who is by default the female lead, because there aren't any females hanging around in this movie.
While it's nice to have a powerful primal central plot in the film, people don't go to martial arts movies for the plots. They go for the martial arts. And there are a number of incredible sequences using a variety or weapons and fighting styles. What's your favorite? The prison yard? The subway car? The hotel ballroom? The guy with the baseball bat? Kinetic fighting inside a four-seater?
Nothing's predictable. At the halfway point, after some great sequences in large rooms, I was thinking the director liked doing action on a big canvas. But that was until he started doing great fights in halls and alleys. By the time he gets to doing vibrant martial arts inside of a not-that-big moving car, you realize he'll do his action anywhere he can.
If I were one of those reviewers or critics who reviews multiple things and feels that requires finding some way to link them all together in the hook to that week's review colum, I guess I'd be talking about the shared love of film history that one sees in both this and Muppet Most Wanted. I saw lots of Kubrick in The Raid 2. The classical tune "Sarabande," which plays for an entire reel in Barry Lyndon gets a decent workout here. There's a hotel ballroom that could be considered the heir to the Gold Room at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, complete with a bathroom attendant, a decent facsimile of the bar itself, and a resplendent color scheme that goes well with the color of the blood that will be nicely spilled before the movie's 2.5 hours are over. Attached to the hotel ballroom is a nicely sized hotel kitchen that Dick Halloran would probably have enjoyed cooking in. At one point a car stops in the middle of a group of burnt-out buildings that would have done nicely for the major urban battle set piece in Full Metal Jacket. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get a full-on martial arts sequence in the space.
The movie's long at 2.5 hours, but it moves. If you see one martial arts movie in 2014, there's an excellent chance you'll wish it to be this one.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Bad Words
The Museum of the Moving Image hosted a preview screening of Bad Words, a film soon to open directed by and starring Jason Bateman, of Arrested Development and other such things. Regrettably, the bad isn't good.
Bateman plays a 40-something man who decides to participate in a spelling bee for children. He never finished 8th grade, so under the rules (can't have finished 8th grade before a certain date) he gets to play.
We're supposed to guess, I suppose, how a man who never finished 8th grade can spell so many obscure words so precisely. According to the Q&A afterwards, cue cards were very important. But that helps the actor, not the character.
Just like we're supposed to guess why a reporter for a magazine is following the guy around for a story. Really?
No guessing on this: Bateman's character isn't content to leave things to change. While on stage, he'll talk to his fellow contestants and persuade one that he just slept with the kid's mother, or a young girl that she's just had her flowering with the evidence quite visible for all to see while she walks down a few steps to the microphone for her next word
Does this sound funny? It is, as played out, but it's also kind of creepy.
We don't want a creepy character, so there is plentiful voiceover narration to explain the character's regret and remorse at allowing himself to be so childish in his actions.
But that's about the only internal life that the character shows. All the voiceover narration in the world doesn't compensate for a script that gives its characters either no motivations or stock motivations. A script that trots out old tropes like the "at first, I was just pretending to be your friend, but then it became real." A script that has Philip Baker Hall as the head of the spelling bee announcing, a role that used to belong to Fred Willard in the other movies that had this character. It's hard to believe a script like this was on the "Black List" of best unproduced screenplays.
And I don't go to the movies to look at people who look ugly. Bateman has a haircut that reminded me of bad '70s haircuts in the small town New York I grew up in, like my little league coach the one year I "played," or every adult man who seemed to be around for a mid-'70s 4th of July fireworks on a summer camp outing to Dover Plains. The reporter played by Kathryn Hahn looks ugly. Allison Janney looks like she's wearing a wig she plucked from a dumpster.
The saving grace of the movie was Rohan Chand as one of the children in the spelling bee who brightens every scene he's in, plays off Bateman beautifully, acts with assurance, has a captivating smile. If we're lucky, maybe this young man of real talent can be the Mathew McConaughey of the 2020s and 2030s, but may end up in a few years embarking on a life of spandex playing some new mutant in the 7th thru 12th X-Men movies because that's what Hollywood wants all the good young actors to do.
Bateman plays a 40-something man who decides to participate in a spelling bee for children. He never finished 8th grade, so under the rules (can't have finished 8th grade before a certain date) he gets to play.
We're supposed to guess, I suppose, how a man who never finished 8th grade can spell so many obscure words so precisely. According to the Q&A afterwards, cue cards were very important. But that helps the actor, not the character.
Just like we're supposed to guess why a reporter for a magazine is following the guy around for a story. Really?
No guessing on this: Bateman's character isn't content to leave things to change. While on stage, he'll talk to his fellow contestants and persuade one that he just slept with the kid's mother, or a young girl that she's just had her flowering with the evidence quite visible for all to see while she walks down a few steps to the microphone for her next word
Does this sound funny? It is, as played out, but it's also kind of creepy.
We don't want a creepy character, so there is plentiful voiceover narration to explain the character's regret and remorse at allowing himself to be so childish in his actions.
But that's about the only internal life that the character shows. All the voiceover narration in the world doesn't compensate for a script that gives its characters either no motivations or stock motivations. A script that trots out old tropes like the "at first, I was just pretending to be your friend, but then it became real." A script that has Philip Baker Hall as the head of the spelling bee announcing, a role that used to belong to Fred Willard in the other movies that had this character. It's hard to believe a script like this was on the "Black List" of best unproduced screenplays.
And I don't go to the movies to look at people who look ugly. Bateman has a haircut that reminded me of bad '70s haircuts in the small town New York I grew up in, like my little league coach the one year I "played," or every adult man who seemed to be around for a mid-'70s 4th of July fireworks on a summer camp outing to Dover Plains. The reporter played by Kathryn Hahn looks ugly. Allison Janney looks like she's wearing a wig she plucked from a dumpster.
The saving grace of the movie was Rohan Chand as one of the children in the spelling bee who brightens every scene he's in, plays off Bateman beautifully, acts with assurance, has a captivating smile. If we're lucky, maybe this young man of real talent can be the Mathew McConaughey of the 2020s and 2030s, but may end up in a few years embarking on a life of spandex playing some new mutant in the 7th thru 12th X-Men movies because that's what Hollywood wants all the good young actors to do.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Omar and The Lunchbox go to Bethlehem
I did indeed manage to get to Omar in the week following the Oscars, if just barely, catching a 10:45 show on the Sunday morning a week following.
This was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language movie. It's a Palestinian film about the business relationship between a young man named Omar (would you believe! in a movie called Omar!!) played quite fetchingly by Adam Bakri, and his Israeli handler, equally fetchingly played by Waleed F. Zuaiter. It's tempting to look at every film that comes out of the Israeli conflict as a political statement of some or another sort, but this well made film by writer/director Hany Abu-Assad manages to make its points without every becoming polemical. If we see the routine humiliations that Omar endures as a young Palestinian man, it's only what we do or don't bring from our other experiences that allows us to understand or not his involvement in a shooting of an Israeli soldier at a garrison, and the film can be enjoyed for how the story plays out thereafter or the quality of its performances no matter what justification you're willing to ascribe (or not) to the primary incident. Taken in by Israeli security forces afterwards, Omar is forced to become collaborator. It helps that saying "I will never confess" is, according to the film, considered a confession in and of itself by the Israeli military courts that govern. Torn between his Israeli handler, his love interest, his friend and competitor for his girlfriend's hand in marriage, and some of the internal politics in the occupied territories, Omar has some soul-searching and growing up to do. It's quite a good film, and worth seeking out.
Interestingly, an Israeli film called Bethlehem opens almost simultaneously, and is playing along with Omar at the Angelika in New York, and takes a different but parallel path that reaches virtually the same place at the end. Bethlehem starts a little slowly. Adam Bakri's performance as Omar hits its target with the audience from pretty much the first close-up shot of the film, and carries us from there. Bethlehem is a little broader in its approach. The politics between different Palestinian factions that lurk in the background of Omar are in the foreground, which presents a broader canvas, and more jumping around from place to place and person to person, before ultimately settling on a similar relationship between a Palestinian and a handler in the Israeli intelligence forces. Here, the Palestinian is the brother of a much-wanted terrorist who may be taking money and/or orders from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Omar has a lot of little chase scenes, Bethlehem one extended set piece. I liked both differently, and similarly.
These movies I'd heard some buzz on for some months ahead of their release. Between the two of them on a kind of triple feature, I saw an Indian movie called The Lunchbox that came to my attention on the basis of some good reviews in the NY papers when it opened this weekend. Really? This is the story of an Indian woman who uses the famed lunch delivery system in Mumbai to send her husband a hot meal every day, but somehow or other her meals end up getting cross-shipped. She and the "other man" start exchanging notes back-and-forth in the lunches. There are an awful lot of shots of him, sitting at his desk, reading her notes. Her, opening up the lunch-box at the end of the day to see if there is a return note hiding in an empty container. Lots of shots of people riding the trains to work. Subplots. She yells upstairs to her auntie to share confidences, and auntie yells back with advice and gives recipe ideas. He is asked to train his replacement, a particularly annoying person. One dissenting review I read from Richard Brody in the New Yorker, sadly after I saw the movie, called it twenty minutes of story in a much longer film, and that's about the long -- and short! -- of it. During Omar, when I was feeling bleary-eyed after losing the hour to the Daylight Savings switch the night before, I resisted sleep. During The Lunchbox, there was plenty of time to sleep off the meal.
This was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language movie. It's a Palestinian film about the business relationship between a young man named Omar (would you believe! in a movie called Omar!!) played quite fetchingly by Adam Bakri, and his Israeli handler, equally fetchingly played by Waleed F. Zuaiter. It's tempting to look at every film that comes out of the Israeli conflict as a political statement of some or another sort, but this well made film by writer/director Hany Abu-Assad manages to make its points without every becoming polemical. If we see the routine humiliations that Omar endures as a young Palestinian man, it's only what we do or don't bring from our other experiences that allows us to understand or not his involvement in a shooting of an Israeli soldier at a garrison, and the film can be enjoyed for how the story plays out thereafter or the quality of its performances no matter what justification you're willing to ascribe (or not) to the primary incident. Taken in by Israeli security forces afterwards, Omar is forced to become collaborator. It helps that saying "I will never confess" is, according to the film, considered a confession in and of itself by the Israeli military courts that govern. Torn between his Israeli handler, his love interest, his friend and competitor for his girlfriend's hand in marriage, and some of the internal politics in the occupied territories, Omar has some soul-searching and growing up to do. It's quite a good film, and worth seeking out.
Interestingly, an Israeli film called Bethlehem opens almost simultaneously, and is playing along with Omar at the Angelika in New York, and takes a different but parallel path that reaches virtually the same place at the end. Bethlehem starts a little slowly. Adam Bakri's performance as Omar hits its target with the audience from pretty much the first close-up shot of the film, and carries us from there. Bethlehem is a little broader in its approach. The politics between different Palestinian factions that lurk in the background of Omar are in the foreground, which presents a broader canvas, and more jumping around from place to place and person to person, before ultimately settling on a similar relationship between a Palestinian and a handler in the Israeli intelligence forces. Here, the Palestinian is the brother of a much-wanted terrorist who may be taking money and/or orders from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Omar has a lot of little chase scenes, Bethlehem one extended set piece. I liked both differently, and similarly.
These movies I'd heard some buzz on for some months ahead of their release. Between the two of them on a kind of triple feature, I saw an Indian movie called The Lunchbox that came to my attention on the basis of some good reviews in the NY papers when it opened this weekend. Really? This is the story of an Indian woman who uses the famed lunch delivery system in Mumbai to send her husband a hot meal every day, but somehow or other her meals end up getting cross-shipped. She and the "other man" start exchanging notes back-and-forth in the lunches. There are an awful lot of shots of him, sitting at his desk, reading her notes. Her, opening up the lunch-box at the end of the day to see if there is a return note hiding in an empty container. Lots of shots of people riding the trains to work. Subplots. She yells upstairs to her auntie to share confidences, and auntie yells back with advice and gives recipe ideas. He is asked to train his replacement, a particularly annoying person. One dissenting review I read from Richard Brody in the New Yorker, sadly after I saw the movie, called it twenty minutes of story in a much longer film, and that's about the long -- and short! -- of it. During Omar, when I was feeling bleary-eyed after losing the hour to the Daylight Savings switch the night before, I resisted sleep. During The Lunchbox, there was plenty of time to sleep off the meal.
Monday, March 3, 2014
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!
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!
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