February 24, 2009

A Final Word on Ledger’s Oscar

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I was too tired and too busy the other night to really comment on this more extensively the other night, but I am absolutely thrilled that Heath Ledger got his Oscar. In only just realized that, because of the Academy’s new “we asked another actor to talk about the performance, rather than show you any of the performance” policy, we didn’t get to see Ledger’s Joker on the Oscar telecast. So go watch this (embedding sadly disabled by request) and remind yourself why he deserved it.

If anything, I am more irritated than ever that The Dark Knight didn’t get a Best Picture or Best Director nomination. Truly, you have to ask yourself: if Nolan can’t get nominated for this, then does any film from this genre have any chance?

Going back and watching this Michael Phillips and Richard Roper review only renewed my sense of indignation on Nolan’s behalf:

I certainly hope that Christopher Nolan makes some other movie, and then comes back with a killer end to the trilogy, with more actors at the top of their games, and gets Return of the King-like Oscar recognition for all three movies. That movie broke through for fantasy; maybe the Ledger win is just the beginning of the end of anti-comic book bias for the Academy.

 

February 22, 2009

Oscars Tonight

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UPDATE 6: No Mickey Rourke, sadly. Haven’t seen either Milk or The Reader, so I can’t comment on the Penn and Winslet wins, but I’m very happy that Slumdog Millionaire did as well as it did, from top to bottom. I wouldn’t put it up against No Country for Old Men, but it was a beautiful film.

UPDATE 5: Seriously, though. The parade of old actors/actresses introducing the nominees is just awkward.

UPDATE 4: Heath Ledger wins. Here’s hoping people remember that this was an Oscar-worthy performance completely independent of his death.

UPDATE 3: Can we just have less time for the people doing the nominations and more time for the winners for their speeches?

UPDATE 2: The presentation of nominees for original screenplay is even weirder than the five-woman crew we saw a minute ago.

UPDATE 1: Well, you can’t be pissed off too much, given Penelope Cruz’s speech. But it’s still bullshit. You get the feeling every one of the other nominees will be back at some point for another chance, with the possible exception of Marisa Tomei, who already has hers. I sure hope they’re not going to do the five-person speech for every acting nomination. I gotta get to bed before 3 AM.

Apparently we’re the only people bothering to watch the Oscars, as I’ve seen more of the films and performances this year than any in memory. Hopefully Huge Ackman (thanks, Dana Stevens!) is much smarter and funnier in a hosting role than any of his performances to date suggest he’s capable of.

Don’t know how to make predictions about this, when I haven’t seen all the movies and “everyone knows” Slumdog will win Best Picture, etc. Here’s what I will say:

1. Heath Ledger needs to win Best Supporting Actor. It is the last opportunity to recognize a young actor who might well have gone on to be the best of his generation.

2. If Penelope Cruz wins Best Supporting Actress, I will be pissed. She’s being nominated because she’s attractive, has a beautiful accent, and was fun to watch opposite Javier Bardem while they were both talking in Spanish. Amy Adams absolutely deserves the award, unless that woman from Benjamin Button was awesome; I wouldn’t be tooooo upset if Marisa Tomei wins. That’s the only performance from the category I didn’t see.

Best of all, after tonight, we can have a brief respite from Ross Douthat’s whining.

 

February 19, 2009

The Wrestler

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Looks like the last film we’re going to get to see on our pre-Oscar tour is The Wrestler, which we saw last Saturday night. I know, not the most obvious Valentine’s fare. Actually, we’d started the evening by watching Aranofsky’s previous film, The Fountain, which is a far more appropriate for Cupid Day. The Fountain just happened to be the next film up in the Netflix queue, and then we decided to make it an Aranofsky double-feature. (Which is not to say The Fountain was good. Hugh Jackman has never met a scene in which he did not overact.)

Anyhow, I’d seen all of Aranofsky’s other widely distributed work. Pi and The Fountain were both interesting experiments, but I found the former confusing and the latter tedious. I’ve seen Requiem for a Dream a few times, and would probably put it in my all-time top ten films if it weren’t so heartbreaking to watch, almost to the point of physical pain. It’s beautiful, but offers precious little relief from the soul-sucking downward spirals into which the characters descend.

In most ways, The Wrestler is like none of these films, which is clear from the opening shots, and which should be garnering Aranofsky a lot more praise than he seems to be getting. It’s shot in a grainy style that represents a true departure from the slick, stylized Requiem and Fountain, and where his previous films incessantly called the viewers’ attention to the directors’ techniques, his strategy here is to disappear as much as possible.

(more…)

 

February 8, 2009

Additional Oscar Thoughts…

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We’ve seen a few more nominated films/actors since I posted my initial reaction to the Academy Award nominations, and we’re going to try to see at least one more before the Oscars themselves are on.

Slumdog Millionaire

[Well, I had an entire review of Slumdog Millionaire on here, but something went wrong in the uploading of the post, so it replaced my post with an earlier draft. All gone now. So until I can bring myself to re-write something that I'd already written, I'll leave it at this: it's very good, you should see it, and it will probably win Best Picture.]

Tropic Thunder

[Same story here. Long post, carefully written, supposedly AutoSaved, now gone into the memory hole. Thanks, WordPress! On Thunder: Netflix it. Robert Downey Jr. is very good.]

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

If anyone tells you to see this film, politely smile, and, at the next opportunity, erase any evidence of him or her from your life. Delete the contact from your cell phone, de-friend on Facebook, change your e-mail address if necessary. The next time you are tempted to see Woody Allen’s latest work, send Annie Hall to the top of your Netflix queue instead. This is truly a horrible film with a wretched script and exactly one interesting character (Penelope Cruz, nominated for Best Supporting Actress), who gets about fifteen minutes of screen time. Scarlett Johannson is vapid, Javier Bardem is fine but unremarkable (except for his rapid-fire arguments with Cruz, in Spanish, which are amusing), and Rebecca Hall is completely forgettable. The whole thing is so cliche-ridden and self-conscious that halfway through I wondered if this was not actually a terrible romantic comedy-drama, but a very subtle parody of that form. Alas, I can find no evidence of that from this interview with Allen, or these reviews of the film. Which is a shame, because it is a parody, whether or not Allen knows it. This is a movie where the voiceover tells the viewer three kinds of things: (1) things the viewer can see for him/herself; (2) things that are of no imaginable use for the viewer to know; and (3) things the characters will themselves say seconds later. This is a movie where we are supposed to be surprised when the suave Bardem propositions not Johanssen or Hall, but (gasp!) both. When Cruz’ Maria-Elena finally comes into the movie almost an hour in, I found myself wondering why it couldn’t have happened forty minutes before. This spineless thing meanders from beginning to end, and when Cruz entered one late scene firing a gun, I momentarily hoped that somehow, through the magic of film, she would somehow ignore the other actors in the room, point at the camera, and shoot me.

If you want a second opinion, I strongly urge you trust Kenneth Turan’s.

 

January 26, 2009

Oscar Noms

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As is, I suspect, the experience of many people when the Academy Award nominations come out (as they did late last week), I am saddened by certain non-nominations. But I think the reason for this, and the reason I suspect I have a lot of company, is that I just haven’t seen a whole lot of the movies that were nominated. I won’t call them “snubs,” because I’m therefore in no position to judge whether they should or shouldn’t have been nominated. I thought Doubt was great, as I mentioned recently in this space, and expected it would be nominated for Best Picture, but I’ve no idea how it stacks up against, say, Slumdog Millionaire (which I hope to see this upcoming weekend), or Frost/Nixon, which I kind of wanted to see, or The Reader, which I had no particular intention of seeing at all.

So, I thought Doubt would be rewarded with a Best Picture and Best Director, and it wasn’t (though it did get an Adapted Screenplay nod, which was deserved). I thought, probably naively, that maybe Dark Knight could squeeze into a Best Director nomination, and it didn’t (though it was nominated for Cinematography).

Glad to see Heath Ledger get his nomination, hope he wins. Unsurprised that he’s joined by Philip Seymour Hoffman; very surprised that Robert Downey Jr. was nominated for Tropic Thunder, which I will now Netflix. I was pleasantly surprised to see not only Amy Adams nominated for Doubt, but also Viola Davis, who was fantastic. I’ll be rooting hard for Adams, but again, I haven’t seen any of the other movies nominated in the category. So who knows if it’s justified.

Hell, maybe I’ll even see Benjamin Button now. But I don’t really wanna.

 

January 18, 2009

Catch-Up Blogging: Doubt

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If you haven’t seen Doubt, go check your local theater times. It’s a brilliantly acted film with a relatively small cast. For those who don’t know it, it’s set in late 1964. Meryl Streep plays Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a nun in a New England parish, and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Father Brendan Flynn, a priest and relative newcomer to the same parish. Hoffman’s Flynn is friendly, popular with his both adults and children among his flock, and politically progressive: he believes the Church has to figure out how to change for new times. Streep’s Beauvier is the quintessential nun from the nightmares of previous generations of Catholic children: strict, unwavering, seemingly omnipresent and omniscient. She finds Flynn distasteful. When she becomes certain that Flynn might have had some kind of untoward relationship with an altar boy, and Flynn vehemently denies it, we have the central plot of the film. John Patrick Shanley, who wrote and directed the film, as well as the stage play from which it is adapted, explores a number of rifts within the Catholic Church. The abuse of children that went on for so long is obviously part of it, and Shanley takes a particular position on who knew that abuse was systemic. But he’s also interested in addressing faith, the unknowable, and the challenges of connecting Medievalism with Modernism.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance is all subtlety, and he poses a serious threat to Heath Ledger’s posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar; Meryl Streep is surely (I initially wrote “surly,” and she’s that too) deserving of a nomination for Best Actress. I haven’t seen enough films in the past year to know whether she deserves the Oscar, but she is extraordinary. Also wonderful is Amy Adams, who plays Sister James, a young nun caught between Beauvier and Flynn, trying to find her way as a new teacher and member of the sisterhood. Jen and I struggled throughout the movie to remember what we’d seen her in, and afterward figured out that it was the surprisingly watchable Enchanted, in which she plays a Disney Princess who questions the traditional storyline. Adams is funny and charming in Enchanted, but shows in Doubt that she is a very capable dramatic actress as well.

 

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