Now I Want One More Than Ever!

It's that time of year, people. No matter how hard one tries, it's virtually impossible to avoid discussion of the Oscars - love 'em or hate 'em, they're the movies' equivalent of the Olympics, World Series, or Super Bowl, a cinematic decathlon. Some love them, some hate them, some are indifferent, but I think just about every movie lover goes through the five stages of Oscar, and it ends with acceptance - for better or worse (mostly worse), the inclusive, pretentious, self congratulatory circle jerk is what it is. Truthfully, depending on the host, I enjoy the show more often than not. I accepted long ago that it's not about art and it never will be, so I try to focus on the positive in that, if a good movie is at least nominated, then I'm a happy person.

And the Academy has implemented a major face lift this year that I think makes the awards more interesting than usual (not saying much): in something of an homage to the Oscar's past, they opened up the Best Picture nominees to ten films. Some have objected to this, saying that this and the new weighted voting process (where the films are ranked 1-10 and every movie gets something from every ballot) will open the door to film's not worthy, to which I can only reply: "So the eff what?" Undeserving films winning the biggest prize in Hollywood isn't exactly a new development. The major plus side of the 10 nominees is that it opens the door to more populist films being nominated, and to dark horse candidates winning; especially after the stiflingly self important garbage that was nominated last year, this is especially refreshing. If the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences is going to validate crap, they should at least validate popular taste as well.

Anyway, not to make too much of a production out of this post, I just want to share my thoughts on the 10 nominees, toss down some (probably way off) predictions, and call it a day.

James Cameron's long awaited and highly-touted Avatar has almost everything the Oscars could want: large-scale spectacle, melodramatic romance, and heavy handed social import (bonus points for anti-American social import), plus everyone out in Hollywood seems to like James Cameron and his wavy, silver hair. Reviewed here.

Though it occupies a Hallmark card universe, there is an earnestness and depth of feeling in The Blind Side that I find it a difficult film to dismiss. Sandra Bullock does just fine with her role, but almost anyone would be nominated for this performance, full of snappy one-liners and sassy attitude. Most remarkable, to my eyes, is the performance Quinton Aaron as first round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens (23rd overall) Michael Oher; he does not have too much to work with in the dialogue sense, and has to be expressive with his eyes and face. Because of this, he naturally was not nominated.

Still, it is not a bad film at all, certainly not a racist one as some have suggested. The Blind Side strikes me as more accentuating the class differences between Oher and the Tuohy family than the racial ones.

Though it feigns a socially driven subtext, District 9 is a big screen video game that doesn't have much to say about anything. Unlike The Hurt Locker, which used fast editing and hand held camera work to make a statement on the existential nature of the rush of combat, District 9 wants you to feel that rush instead of ponder it.

An Education mercifully avoids typical coming-of-age cliches for the most part, with the exception of a few speeches designed to sum up any point that you were supposed to take away from it. But Nick Hornsby's screenplay is well written and the leading performances by Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard are excellent, and Alfred Molina is memorable in a supporting role as Mulligan's father.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is a visceral, gripping war film - one that grabs a hold from the opening frames and doesn't let go for its entire 2 hour duration. Using handheld 16mm cameras, The Hurt Locker brings us directly into the action unfolding onscreen, without trying to approximate a documentary style (the film is above such gimmicks). Rather, the movie's quick cutting and hand-held camera work allows us to enter the subjective mind frame of the characters, who work as part of an E.O.D. (explosive ordinance disposal) squad and could easily be killed at any moment. However, this technique is never used gratuitously; The Hurt Locker is exciting without being exploitative and political without being partisan. While this is among the most exciting films to come out in 2009, it's also among the most contemplative, and this is because the film is more interested in portraying the way men relate to one another than it is in polemics. The result is among the first movies to approach the Iraqi Occupation in the manner it needs to be approached, which would be on the same level it's waged: with the men who fight it. The Hurt Locker shows that Kathryn Bigelow has unique insight and understanding into the kind of mentality that would travel half-way across the globe to fight in this conflict, which actually makes it more politically relevant than the cheap partisan movies on the subject.

Tarantino's gleeful, anarchic take on World War II and its cinematic representations has just enough pristine polish to be accepted by the Academy. I'm thrilled it was even nominated. Review here.

A grotesque freak show that masquerades itself as a valuable social commentary, Precious is an exercise in sheer cinematic torture. The critics throwing claims of racism are only doing themselves a major disservice; the film does not trivialize racial relations, but rather it misrepresents the plight of the lower class in the most cliched, obvious of ways, confusing dark subject matter and gritty filming from depth and meaning. Surely if Precious were about white people (which it could have been), no critic would claim that it was racist or supposed to be representative of all white people everywhere. It's a fairly typical white liberal trap to fall into: any artistic representation of a black person must represent an entire race. And what makes it especially dubious in the case of Precious is that there are many black characters from various backgrounds depicted.

Oh boy. This movie. This fucking movie. I remember the day that I saw A Serious Man at Manhattan's Sunshine quite vividly, though the film hangs over that day like a storm cloud. Not to say that I think it's a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but the worldview that it seems to be endorsing is not one that I empathize with, let alone understand. What bothers me most about A Serious Man is that the Coens not only suggest that existence is meaningless, but that they mock the very idea of the search for meaning (a Rabbi's condescending and patronizing speech about the beauty and wonder of a parking lot being the most offensive). I don't wish to take anything away from the Coens, film makers I have felt a strong personal connection with in the past, but A Serious Man helped kick start a season's long depression that I am only recently starting to pull myself out of.

Pixar, under the watchful eye of The Walt Disney Company, continues with the same old formula instead of expanding perceptions of our world. Reviewed here.

What I find most repulsive about Up in the Air is the way it capitalizes on the economic hardships our country currently faces yet doesn't say anything meaningful about them. It simply patronizes the people who are currently suffering and calls it a day. Did the film makers honestly think this would make anyone feel better?

And, as promised, my annual way off predictions:

Best Picture: Avatar (potential Hurt Locker upset, probably not)
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges
Best Actress: Sandra Bullock
Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Waltz
Best Supporting Actress: Mo'Nique
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino
Best Adapted Screenplay: Nick Hornsby, An Education
Best Animated Feature: Up
Best Art Direction: Avatar
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds
Best Documentary: Food, Inc.
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker
Best Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon
Best Makeup: Star Trek
Best Original Score: James Horner, Avatar
Best Visual Effects: Avatar
Best Sound Editing: Avatar
Best Sound Mixing: Avatar

Damn, writing Avatar over and over got really boring. It's just one of those years.

Oh, and some live blogging to follow during the ceremony from great writers will make the proceeds that much more enjoyable, be sure to check out Roger Ebert, Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running, and Ali Arikan at Cerebral Mastication. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Let's Take a Moment to Congratulate Ourselves

The grandest of all clusterfucks in the world of film, the Oscars are like a hurricane that sucks up every film lover in its path--- from the most casual of fans to the most hardcore of cinemaniacs, there's really no avoiding them. Whether you love or hate them, there isn’t a movie fan alive who can avoid some discussion of the Oscars; it’s what the feverish, seemingly never-ending awards season culminates in. Oscar parties don't celebrate the awards themselves--- rather, it celebrates the end of award season circle jerk.

In spite of the Oscars’ innate lack of importance, the last two years’ ceremonies have been noteworthy. In 2006 Martin Scorsese received his long overdue award, and in 2007 the Coen Brothers were awarded their long overdue honor. For the first time in over a decade, the Academy was willing to give the big prize to films with violent undercurrents instead of self-important nonsense pictures (The Departed is at least silly nonsense). Last year's ceremony, rather than being a much needed sign of change in the Academy's taste (There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men being front runners has to be a unique bridging of quality and popular tastes, an anomaly in the Awards' history), seems like it was just a fluke. Now that the actors' strike is over, we're back to self-congratulatory red carpet trash--- stifling, self important garbage that suffocates world view as opposed to enlightening it. Because I hate being behind on popular movie taste, I forced myself to sit through all the nominated films. It wasn't a pretty experience.


With that being said, on to the pictures themselves.


David Fincher’s technical virtuosity does nothing to expand the themes of this vacant tale, which has all the schmaltz of Forrest Gump (a film I do not admire) but none of the energy. Fincher deliberately bores and stifles in the name of an intellectual pursuit; it’s turgid, lifeless formalism at its most portentous. I admire aspects of Fincher’s technique, but it is absolutely meaningless in the context of the narrative. The casting of Cate Blanchett’s is most revealing of Fincher’s methods--- like Fincher, Blanchett is all sanctimonious, distracting technique and no genuine emotion. Seriously, I walked out of the movie theater starving because I’d just watched scenery getting chewed for three endless hours.


If liberals in H'wood really wanted to look ahead to the future instead of doubling back on the past, Frost/Nixon never would have made it past the green lighting phase. Instead of contributing to our understanding of the nation’s 37th President, Richie Cunningham’s film is really only about invalidating genuine political discourse and re-inflating the left’s favorite punching bag, Richard Nixon. By treating the Watergate break in like it was the Reichstag's fire, Cunningham fundamentally misunderstands the dramaturgical power of Richard Nixon's story. Instead of analyzing the corrupting influence of politics in the United States (‘the beast’, as Oliver Stone so flawlessly phrased it in his masterpiece Nixon), Frost/Nixon is two-hours of pseudo-grandstanding and partisan hackery; in terms of political dialogue, it’s about as enlightening as your average cable news program, and it even comes complete with its own set of pseudo-babbling talking heads. In spite of being just plain stupid, Frost/Nixon has to count as Cunningham's first legitimately watchable film since Apollo 13, maybe Night Shift, at least in the sense that it's not offensively pedestrian and trivializing. It's just insipid.


The first of the discussed nominees to have an actual sense of life, Milk at least has the common sense to be amicable self-importance. Coasting by on energy and Sean Penn's weightless, graceful performance, Milk succeeds in embodying the three part biopic structure without dragging it out with pretension. Gus Van Sant manages to transpose his indie aesthetic to a populist form, and the result may count as one of the finer genre efforts of the year. The supporting players are all wonderful to, with Josh Brolin managing to touch a humanistic note in spite of the fact that his character is woefully underwritten. Van Sant more or less transposes his 'reasoning' for the school shootings in Elephant, that repressed homosexual rage leads to murder, and it's especially tacked on in this film.


This movie seriously fucking sucks. In all honesty, I turned off this piece of shit about a half hour in, so I can’t really comment at length on it. The Weinstein’s are another in a long line of cultural derelicts to prove that there really is no business like Shoah business, like no business I know.


Yes, I know, it’s pornography. It’s television. It’s gimmicky. It’s so sappy that you’re blowing your nose in pancakes by the end. It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. It’s bombastic. I think there is a certain sect of contrarian critics simply hating the idea of a film so digitized, and they throw out a set of meaningless buzzwords to jump on a bandwagon of hate. Maybe I’m just worn out of hating every critical and award darling this season, but I really do struggle to see what is so contemptible about Slumdog Millionaire. Benjamin Button, Frost Nixon, The Reader, and even Milk deliberately suffocate the audience with self-importance; in contrast to this, Slumdog Millionaire is practically a liberating experience. Without a doubt, this is the film that's going to win; and it is the best of the nominated films, I think (which is a bit of back-handed praise, to be sure). The film's game-show framing device is an easy target for people who want to talk about the 'death of cinema', but it's so ingrained into how the story unfolds that I think it rises above mere gimmickry. The Darjeeling Limited it 'aint, but it also doesn't deserve to be thought of as hateful or racially ignorant, especially considering the film goes to such, shall we say, extreme lengths to get you to sympathize with the protagonist (he gets beaten, waterboarded, electrocuted, spit on, and doused in shit...and that's the first ten minutes). I enjoyed it while I was watching it; indeed, it's an experience that comes at you from side to side, but if I never see it again, it will be too soon.

Just for fun, some old fashioned predictions:

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Director: Danny Boyle
Best Actor: Sean Penn
Best Actress: Melissa Leo (maybe I just can't fathom the idea of Winslet winning for a role so...embarrassing)
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger
Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz
Best Original Screenplay: In Bruges
Best Adapted Screenplay: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Cinematography: The Dark Knight
Best Editing: Slumdog Millionaire
Art Direction: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Costume Design: The Dutchess
Best Original Score: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Achievement in Sound: The Dark Knight
Sound Editing: The Dark Knight
Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Animated Feature: Wall-E
Foreign Language Film: Waltz with Bashir
Best Documentary: Man on Wire

Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th- That's all folks.

31 Days of Boredom

Like hurricane season, the flu, or even the Oscars themselves; every year TCM commences with its annual 31 Days of Oscar. I'd imagine this is the time of year when their ratings are highest, playing a slew of canonized classics with hugely iconic stars. It's just about the only time of year I notice people that I wouldn't normally classify as classic film watchers seem to tune in to TCM with relative consistency.

It's also uniformly their least interesting month, schedule wise. Especially after the brilliantly inventive schedules TCM has had the last few months which included everything from Hitchcock to Abel Gance and Ford to Tourneur, as well as a slew of films unavailable on Region 1 DVD:

Nick Ray's first collaboration with Humphrey Bogart, Knock on Any Door, undoubtedly inferior to their second collaboration In a Lonely Place, but still worth a look for any fan of Ray. It's a two-fold narrative: one, a rehash of They Live By Night (a better film, I think), and the other being Bogart's relationship with the 'hood' character. Bogart plays his lawyer, which allows for lots of moralistic preaching in courtroom scenes about how his failings are really society's failings.

There was King Vidor's Show People, released the same year as the seminal The Crowd, and nearly as great a film. It has a serio-comic tour-de-force performance from Marion Davies, who will always tragically seem to live under the shadow of William Randolph Hearst. While he was undoubtedly driving for her success, what stands the test of the time is her incredible screen presence and ability to flawlessly weave comedy and drama into a rich tapestry of emotion. Plus, it has a cameo by Vidor, playing himself. A real travesty that both his masterpieces from that banner year 1928 are currently unavailable, and I know of no plans for them to be released any time soon.


There was also Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, the first time he's ever disappointed me. Somewhat simplistic and turgid Americana that reminded me of Hawks' Sergeant York; pictorially effective but subtextually vacant. Still, the director of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and especially Out of the Past deserves better, and any fan of those films should check this out for many of Tourneur's usual breathtaking compositions. This film is interesting for its unusual turn for Western star Joel McCrea, as this strikes me as one of the beginning of the 50s answer to the Westerns of the past, not films that focused on action so much as evoking a feeling of Americana and deriding the violence in the films that many of the Westerns of the 30s and 40s purported. High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma, and even The Searchers could be seen as examples of this different spin on a classic American construct.

Joseph Cotten gives a somewhat phoned in performance in Budd Boetticher's The Killer is Loose, an incredibly economic noir-thriller, which borrows the psycho-sexuality of Hitchcock and gives it a rough, exploitation edge (Hitchcock would of course give himself a rough, exploitation edge in Psycho a few years later). Still, it benefits from Cotten's Star power and Boetticher's brilliant staging, which always underlines the drama and establishes a lot about the mental state of the character.

I'm not saying all the aforementioned films are great, but they are noteworthy for film fans because they are hard to find elsewhe re. Someday, someone really should write a long diatribe about TCM's invaluable, jaw-dropping contribution to film history and film preservation.....

As The Criterion Collection must put out the occasional Michael Bay film, so must TCM do its 31 Days of Oscar. I'm not knocking any of these films in any way, I'm just saying the schedule by its very nature is going to be more confined to a certain pool of films; many of which your average cinephiles saw a great majority of the March schedule by the time they were twelve. TCM is great for its variety; not everything they play is a highly regarded, prestige classic, and that makes their treasure chest of an archive all the more alluring. They're so all-encompassing that, like the Criterion Collection, you get spoiled and demand that they stick to the same consistency of quality and variety. Still, there are plenty of things to look out for this month:

King Vidor's Comrade X and The Citadel
Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka
Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933
Vincente Minnelli's Designing Woman and Madame Bovary
Paul Musurzky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Zoltan Korda's The Four Feathers, The Jungle Book and Sahara (the last of which with the always agreeable Humphrey Bogart)
Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce
Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life
Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory and The Last Detail
George Cukor's David Copperfield and Pat & Mike
Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol
John Huston's Moulin Rouge
Louis Malle's Pretty Baby
Istvan Szabo's Mephisto
Jean Renoir's The Southerner
Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan
Frank Borzage's Three Comrades

Do these films make up for selections like Moonstruck, Sophie's Choice, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Awakenings? Almost. Still, I'll be looking forward to March, which looks like it's going to hit the ground running.

My memory doesn't recall if they've had themes in the past; I always thought that TCM arranged them by the categories the Academy Awards did. This year they've decided to a simultaneously lame and hilarious College-theme, with films organized by 'Department'. Film-square extraordinaire Robert Osborne is the so called "Dean of Ceremonies". Somehow, I think TCM may have found the perfect shoe to fit Osborne's tweed personality.


Like college itself, I'll attend enthusiastically, but perhaps finding myself day-dreaming during some of the 'required' courses.

TCM's full schedule can be found here .