Kinematoscope

The Tree of Life

2011-06-27T17:08:00.003-05:00

The Tree of Life is a song to the human, to the world, to time. It is a sweeping, swooning roller-coaster through the moments that make us alive, the blades of grass that whisper to our fingertips, the ancient stairway that we stumble blindly upward upon.

Terrence Malick, who had been building to these heights of fractured, sweeping gusts of emotion with eddies and swirls evident in his previous four films (spanning four decades), has acheived a magnum opus that defines, in many ways, the feeling of being human.

It's not a film for everyone- in nearly every conventional sense it's not even a film to begin with. The 'narrative' begins by focusing on a family dealing with loss, and as they find themselves unraveled by their own mortality, The Tree of Life blinks and recollects the dawn of time and the universe itself.

But it's a natural shift- the poetry of every frame of Emmanuel Lubezki's artful cinematography, Alexandre Desplat's operatic tone-poem of a score, the affecting, naturalistic performances, and Malick's trademark sparse, rapturous dialogue perform a remarkable feat of parralax.

Suddenly the lines on our palms and the cooling stretches of magma in our planet's infancy seem to have patterns in common. A moment of forgiveness between brothers echoes a passing moment of tenderness between dinosaurs.

When the film returns to our era, it's ready to embrace the conflicts that make us both tortured and beautiful.

A special mention should also be made for VFX GUY's astonishing, largely hand-made visual effects, as well as all five (!) editors that pieced together the scraps and movements and breezes that comprise every moment of this film.

But it's Terrence Malick's unmistakable vision, the movie he's been making all along. A joyous ode that manages to be spiritual without being religious, to be deeply personal and yet as universal as it gets.

Go see it.

Unranked: Dogtooth

2011-03-29T12:00:00.000-05:00

Leading questions about the many movies not in the top 250

Dogtooth

What is it?

It is a Greek film, and one of five 2010 Oscar nominees available on Netflix Instant, which is neat (the others are I Am Love (costume), Alice In Wonderland (art direction, costume, VFX) and documentaries Restrepo and Exit Through The Gift Shop).

Dogtooth made a surprising showing in the Foreign Language category despite being COMPLETELY INSANE.

What do you mean by that?

Let's list some things prominently featured in Dogtooth- incest, self-battery of the Fight Club variety, prostitution, fake pregnancy, cat murder, alternate vocabularies, fake translations of Sinatra songs, and a bizarrely sticker-based acheivement system.

Wait, what?

Okay- it's about two parents that have raised their three children, now younng adults, in complete isolation for reasons that are never explained. They don't let them watch television or go outside of their walled-in property, and they tell them that if they do, stray cats will tear them apart with their claws.

Also they tell them they have a brother that went outside the fence and met a super-violent death. And they give certain words false definitions, seemingly just ones that would imply the existence of a world outside: "telephone," for example, is what they call saltshakers.

For real?

For real. The whole movie is pretty much just about this family's insane home life.

But what happens?

Well, the dad works at some sort of office, and he pays a female security guard there to come home with him and sleep with his lone son, I guess to satisfy the son's natural urges? This has been arranged before the film starts.

Naturally bringing in an outsider causes some minor ripples in the weird stasis they've set up, but the film is not structured in a very linear way.

Is the film's look as insane as the story?

Nope, it's a beautiful, aethestically pleasant film. The family's compound has a rather large yard, and a pool, which makes for some great compositions during what appears to be summertime.

The parents aren't made to be villains, at least not by music cues and camera angles. They clearly have their reasons for everything they do, even if these reasons are never made clear to the audience in the slightest.

The director, Giorgos Lanthimos, has solidly positioned himself as a master of artful, bizarre simplicity much like Lars Von Trier or Michael Haneke. But don't ask me exactly what he was trying to say.

Should it be on the countdown?

Not quite, but it's definitely a intriguing debut feature. You spend the entire film sort of waiting for it to unravel into a nightmare, when the real frightening part might be how normal it seems to everyone involved.

Dave's Top Ten of 2010

2011-03-25T12:00:00.004-05:00

Honorable Mention

127 Hours (because of Franco’s performance), Blue Valentine (because of Gosling and Williams’ searing work), How to Train Your Dragon (because it completely surprised me), The Human Centipede (because it delivered on what it promised and the care with which the film was made showed), The Other Guys (because Ferrell and McKay always make me laugh), Piranha 3-D (because it was what it promised it would be and, yet, it still made me laugh), Predators (because it was mindless fun and a decent throwback), and Toy Story 3 (because it nearly made me cry).

10. Paranormal Activity 2

The first Paranormal Activity was an effective, documentary-esqe film that was good because of its minimalism and realism. However, the film was only good – and not more – because there was an air of “been here, seen this” and prolonged periods of watching time-lapse photography where nothing happens. The second film is better because of its ramped up production and better pacing. The film still gives you the chills, while expanding upon the initial storyline. My only complaint: There is going to be a third entry and I feel that the drop-off is going to be severe.

9. The Fighter

Great performances flood the screen in David O. Russell’s boxing drama. I should perhaps call it Mark Wahlberg’s boxing drama, as he stars, produces, and advocated for this film to be made for four years. Wahlberg’s subtle performance is the eye of the acting hurricane as more substantial performances surround him.

Amy Adams and Melissa Leo are constantly vying for a stake in Wahlberg’s psyche. Adams, as Wahlberg’s girlfriend, gives an outstanding performance that is as explosive as it is heartfelt. Leo, playing Wahlberg’s mother/manager, reeks of 1990’s Boston.

However, the real acting triumph belongs to Christian Bale. Bill Simmons wrote a piece about how Justin Timberlake felt like Justin Timberlake playing a famous dude in The Social Network. Ultimately, Simmons argues, you cannot get past the fact that it is Justin Timberlake on screen. While I may not entirely agree with Simmons, I understand the point that he is attempting to make. Bale’s performance easily could have fallen prey to a similar situation, but he takes control of it and makes it feel lived in. Inevitably, Bale should (and will) walk away with an Oscar for his work.

8. A Prophet

Technically, this film came out in 2009, but it did not reach my front door until 2010. Besides, if Entertainment Weekly can put it on their top ten list, then so can I. Anyway, this French-Arabic-Italian crime-drama is outstanding. It is gritty, thoughtful, and contains one of the better shoot outs over the last few years.

7. The Ghost Writer

Was this film a thinly veiled Tony Blair analogy? Does the Sun rise in the East? There is a lot of social commentary and analogies occurring in Polanski’s thriller. Not only is there the Blair analogy, there is also Polanski’s analogy of being subject to living in a foreign nation in order to avoid legal ramifications.

Tied together with some outstanding work by McGregor, Brosnan, and Williams, you get a thriller that may seem conventional, but exceeds my expectations.

6. True Grit

The Coen Brothers cannot do any wrong. Not only did they remake/revision a western that many hold in high regard, they made it better. A truer adaptation of Portis’ novel was pitch-perfect for the Coens, similarly to No Country for Old Men.

Entertaining, straightforward, and wonderfully anchored by Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld makes True Grit really enjoyable. Also, this had to be the year for Roger F. Deakins to win an Oscar for Cinematography (but it wasn’t).

5. The Town

Ben Affleck’s career renaissance continues. The Town is not only a great bank robbery movie; it is also a great drama. Affleck makes the most of his cast and crew to deliver one of the most exciting and brutal films of the year.

4. The Social Network

I tussled with this decision. The Social Network and Inception kept flip-flopping with one another (I will discuss later why Inception got the slight nudge). Fincher’s Facebook creation drama unfolds beautifully through fantastic editing. The young cast show great poise and maturity to deliver one of the finest written scripts ever.

The technical merits of the film, including the overlooked Special Effects, are flawless. These elements are to the highest standard because of Fincher’s drive to create as close to perfection as he can. Paired with a hypnotic score by Ross and Reznor, this film sets itself up perfectly and delivers.

3. Inception

So, how did Inception get the slight edge of The Social Network? For me, both films are technically flawless, both have outstanding scores, both have outstanding direction, and The Social Network has an advantage in acting. The scripts are excellent, but very different in their excellence. The written dialogue for The Social Network is superior to Inception, but the overall story of Inception is more intriguing.

It all came down to rewatchability. While both merit multiple viewings, I know that I will watch Inception over and over for years to come because it was more exciting to me than The Social Network.

2. Mother

Again, a film that is technically from 2009. However, this Hitchcockian story about a mother trying to prove her son’s innocence is taut and moving. Much of the acclaim can reside with Hye-ja Kim’s incredible performance.

1. Black Swan

A lot of articles have pointed out that Darren Aronofsky makes films that focus on the physical extremes for his lead characters. What separates Black Swan from his previous works is the psychological extreme. It reminded me of Repulsion, but was ten times more coherent.

The entire cast is great. Whether it be Kunis’ seductive understudy, Hershey’s overbearing and controlling mother, or Cassel’s sexual and manipulative director. Even Winona Ryder’s five minutes of screen time is unsettling. However, the majority of the praise belongs with Natalie Portman. Her role is innocent, frightening, sexy, and timid all at the same time.

Mansell’s score is pretty terrifying, and all the technical work creates an atmosphere that is compelling and scary as hell. This was one of the few films this year that stuck with me long after I left the theater. I eagerly anticipate its impending release onto Blu-Ray.

Try as I might to find the most humorous part of the film on YouTube (“Would you fuck dis gurl?”), I cannot. So, I leave you with this instead:

IMDB #156 Ben-Hur

2011-03-24T10:00:00.000-05:00

Man, I've been trying to work up the energy to write about 1959's epic Ben-Hur for the countdown project, but it hasn't been coming.

What's to say about a film that won 11 Oscars and is somehow all about Jesus while barely featuring Jesus? Stay tuned to find out how I muddle through it!

The Key Players:

Director William Wyler returns for the hat trick, star Charlton Heston makes appearance number two. His jaw remains squarely set.

In support are Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Haya Harareet, and Jack Hawkins.

Click for More...

The Story:

It's been a couple months since I watched it, so it'll be more fun to see what I can remember without leaning on wikipedia:

Heston plays Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of the Jews (?), who returns home to Jerusalem. He's reunited with his sister, mother, and one faithful servant (who has a hot daughter named Esther).

He's also reunited with childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), who is a Roman primed to take over governorship of the area. Messala wants Ben-Hur to spy for the romans and turn in Jews who don't like being ruled over and opressed and suchlike- Ben-Hur respects his friend but refuses to turn on his own people. He promises to counsel the Jews to avoid violent revolt, but Messala is not pleased.

The entire plot of the film is then set in motion by a falling roof tile- yeah, a teeny little roof tile. As Ben-Hur and his sister watch some Roman bigwig parade by, she accidentally knocks a tile right onto the guy, and the police come storming in to arrest everybody. Clearly this is all part of some devious, under-handed Jewish roof-tile-based revolution!

Messala, as chief of the guard or what have you, is in position to put a stop to all this, but dramatically refuses. Ben-Hur (after a brief escape attempt) is sent to work row on a slave ship, his family's fate unknown to him.

What follows is an improbable run from shirtless rower to adoptive Roman citizen to charioteer, involving a benevolent Roman luminary, and a hilarious shiek played by a scene-stealing Hugh Griffith. All the while Ben-Hur struggles with his desire for revenge, ignoring the pacifist teachings of some offscreen fellow named "Jebus" or something.

The Artistry:

Man, I can't even begin to imagine the scope of Ben-Hur. The extras! Imagine getting that many people together before the AI CGI extras that were developed for Lord Of The Rings. Or even the matte painting stormtroopers in Star Wars.

The chariot race, of course, stands out as an unrivaled piece of action film-making. Actual horses, actual chariots, an actual crowd- it's very authentic, to say the least.

I can't say I maintain any impression of Miklós Rózsa's score, other than that it was loud when the film was loud and quiet when the film was quiet. But I hear it's one of the greatest?

Charlton Heston does an admirable job- he's great at selling Ben-Hur's genuine struggle to reconcile his friendship with Messala with his people's pride at the beginning, and he remains compelling in the fall and rise of the character as the film goes on (and on).

The ending, which we'll get to, is a little more troublesome as he has to be entirely converted into a believer by a Christ figure played by an extra whose face is never seen.

But in many ways that's the best aspect of Ben-Hur (I would assume this is true of Lew Wallace's novel as well). The focus allows the movie to deal with the large theme of vengeance and peace without getting too heavy-handed, because the story of Ben-Hur is personal instead of allegorical.

Which isn't to say it's subtle, at all. Or short. Here's my question- what was the last film to have an actual intermission? One where, like in Ben-Hur, the word "INTERMISSION" actually appears on the screen and people get up to stretch their legs?

It seems like sacriledge to say Ben-Hur could be shorter, but some of the interpersonal drama once Ben-Hur returns and sees what's become of everybody is pretty slow...

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

So once he finally returns to face down Messala in said badass chariot race, Ben-Hur discovers his former servant and his foxy daughter destitue but still devoted to him, and his mother and sister have supposedly died in prison.

In fact, they've both become lepers, which is apparently so shameful that they demand that Esther lie to him and say they've died.

In the race, Messala drives a chariot with spikes on the wheels and tries to destroy's Ben-Hur's chariot (he also has black horses to Ben-Hur's white horses). But he ends up crashing himself and is mortally trampled.

In a final act of douchery, he reveals to Ben-Hur that his mother and sister are lepers. Dun dun Dunnn! Enraged, he plans violent revolt at last, since Romans are as much responsible for their fate as Messala himself was.

Esther, however, tells him about the sermon on the mount, and convinces Ben-Hur that Jesus could heal his family. They're too late, however, and only arrive in time to see him carrying his own cross.

At this point, Ben-Hur recognizes Jesus as a stranger that once offered him water in his slave days, saving his life. He poignantly returns the favor before guards pull him away.

The crucifixtion brings the film to its climax as Ben-Hur hears Jesus ask for the people's forgiveness even as they kill him and realizes he's been a little revenge-obessed, and then a miracle occurs in which the blood of Christ, seemingly washed down into their cave in the rainwater, heals Ben-Hur's mother and sister completely. Bonus!

So all's well that ends well. Presumably all of the Jews would recognize Jesus as their savior and king on this earth and in the next realm, and these new, so-called "Christians" would never persecute anyone themselves.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

We'll say it should stay right here, even though for all the production value I can't say I need to sit through it again.

The Legacy:

It won a record 11 Oscars, since tied by Titanic and The Return of the King- though it is the only one of the three to have any acting awards included, as Heston won Best Actor and the hilarious Hugh Griffith won Supporting Actor.

As such, it's on lists and in vaults and everything else required of a cultural touchstone- although the only homage to it I can think of is the car race from Grease with the spiked hubcaps.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Chariot time!

Leftover Thoughts:

-The nativity story is briefly acted out as a prologue. Forgot to mention this.

-I feel like this film really gets to have its cake and eat it, because it preaches pacifism but also has Messala get trampled and all. The other Roman villains are mainly offscreen, though I think Pontus Pilate is around for the washing of the hands bit.

Coming Up...

155. The Manchurian Candidate

154. Avatar

153. Scarface

Unranked: Mary and Max

2011-03-23T12:00:00.001-05:00

Leading questions about the many movies not in the top 250.

Mary and Max

What is it?

It's claymation, that's what! One of my favorite things ever since Gumby.

If I have a heart, is Gumby a pal for me?

He totally is!

Anyway, what's 'Mary and Max' about?

It's about a lonely little girl from Australia and a man from New York City with Asperger's syndrome that become unlikely pen pals. It claims it's 'based on a true story' at the beginning.

Does it have that song from those pentium commercials in it?

Indeed, the beginning credits and key moments of emotion are set to Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Perpetuum Mobile, which you will recognize as soon as the piano kicks in.

Is it a kids' movie?

Not at all- it wasn't rated by the MPAA for some reason, but I would guess at least PG, if not PG-13. There is some frank discussion of sexuality (which gives Max panic attacks), death, alcoholism, and one near-suicide.

Is it affecting?

It is, kinda. It makes a pretty broad point about the importance of human connection in a life filled with loneliness, and uses a hugely contrived ending to put an exclamation point on it.

But you can't blame it for that, right, because it's a true story?

Here's the thing- it's not. Not even in the slightest. The director, Adam Elliott, has said in interviews that he wishes they had gone with "Inspired by a true story," instead of 'based on,' because only the barest facts are true: as an Australian youth (17), he himself began a two-decades long pen pal correspondence with a Jewish man with Asperger's from NYC. That is it.

It bothered me, probably too much. It's one thing for something like Unstoppable to throw that line out there, because 'there was a runaway train that some people had to stop' is a pretty generic premise. But for a story that was seemingly intensely personal, it was a huge misdirect that probably should have been removed altogether.

But you enjoyed it, right?

I guess I did? I felt for them, I cared at the time. But now, especially now that I know it was it was 95% made up, it strikes me that it was just an unending parade of miserable things happening to miserable people, capped by a bittersweet ending. And that's one of my least favorite types of film. It also relies heavily on a narrator to tell us obvious things about how Mary and Max are affecting one another.

It's not holding up well, let's put it that way.

Should it be on the countdown?

It actually is, it just wasn't when I did the 200's before. But it wouldn't make my top 250, personally. I do admire the craftsmanship, though, and especially enjoyed the opening credits, which focused on the small details around Mary's neighborhood.

For the record, the fact that Fargo is mostly not true (but explicitly claims to be up front) was spoiled for me before I saw it, and it's great anyway. But I wonder now how I would have felt if I was duped.

The Top 20 Movies of 2010, part 2

2011-03-22T12:00:00.002-05:00

This took forever to order correctly, just so you're aware. Let's get to it!

10. TRON: Legacy

I will fully admit I have too much of a soft-spot for TRON. I saw it when I was in grade school, and then I wrote a story for English class that was more or less a bald-faced ripoff.

So there's that, plus Jeff Bridges basically playing The Dude in TRON-land, the incredibly kickass Daft Punk score, and Olivia Wilde in skintight leather (see the blog header). It just had to be in the top ten.

Every criticism you may level at it is completely valid, but it's just not enough to countermeasure those other things for me. The 3D was even decently handled, too.

9. The Ghost Writer

Another great ending on this one. You think Tony Blair and his wife have seen it yet?

8. The Way Back

Another movie that might be right up my alley, because I love epic, Lord of the Rings style journeys on foot. But the look and feel and general Peter-Weirness of it more than made up for the hammy ending and the lack of character development. It helps that other than shuffling a few characters around, the extreme nature of the journey is close to the memoir on which it's based.

7. Please Give

If Woody Allen's not going to make Woody Allen movies anymore, then I vote for Nicole Holocefner to take up the mantle.

Credit Please Give for dodging complaints of stuffy New York intellectualism by moving swiftly, being funny, and not taking itself too seriously. Also this movie gets extra credit for passing the Bechdel test so hard you guys.

6. Inception

Once you see Inception enough times, the (admittedly necessary) exposition starts to drag quite a bit. But the most memorable, exciting action of the year makes it one of the best heist films ever- not, as it's frequently misunderstood to be, one of the best films about dreams ever.

It would be higher, though, if there were chemistry between any two of the actors beyond Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's awesome bickering. The central DiCaprio-Cotillard relationship fell flat for me, and Ellen Page's character may as well have been literally named "Audience Surrogate" instead of "Arachne" (which was this year's "Unobtainium" in terms of making me groan out loud).

But if I were to rank my top 40 minute stretches of the year, there's no way the last 40 of Inception doesn't top that list.

5. True Grit

Fitting that the Coens would make a stark, chilling neo-Western (No Country For Old Men) before they make a traditional one. But the genre is a perfect fit for them, with arcane, memorable language and a literally wandering storyline.

Matt Damon and Jeff Brigdes make up a powerfully dynamin triumvirate with young Hailee Steinfeld- every scene between them is a study in shifting authority and social perception in an unusual situation. With Roger F-ing Deakins and Carter Burwell bringing their standard greatness to the look and score, True Grit is right up there with Gangs of New York in the "I Can't Believe it went 0 for 10 at the Oscars" Club.

4. Winter's Bone

The perfect bleak winter movie, chilling and desolate. Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes deliver great performances in a movie that's engrossingly propulsive and quietly artful at the same time.

3. The Social Network

Previously reviewed here. I think noteworthy Best Picture snubs are just as good as wins in the larger scheme of things, as Stephen Spielberg helpfully pointed out right before giving it to The King's Speech.

2. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

How did I not do several posts about how great Scott Pilgrim was? As seen in my preferred Oscar nominations, it was a winner in every department for me.

Edgar Wright was clearly a fan of the graphic novels, and set about dutifully brining them to the screen with the spastic, nostalgic spirit intact- working closely with Bryan Lee O'Malley even as he was finishing the sixth and final volume.

As unique as the video-game style fight sequences are, the rest of the film is more enjoyable to me: wright's trademark whip-cuts are perfect for the pace of the film, and I enjoyed the way the dialogue was countered with odd bits of sound effects.

Plus, it featured the first film soundtrack (not score) that I had to have in a long time, with original songs by Beck and Metric.

1. How To Train Your Dragon

Pretty sure I covered this one already.

I would only add that if this list was titled- "The Best 20 Films of 2010 to watch on DVD," then Dragon might not be #1, but the 3D, in-theater experience (which I experienced an embarassing number of times) makes it the clear winner for the year.

(Coming as soon as he sends it to me: Dave's top ten!)

The Top 20 Movies of 2010, part 1

2011-03-21T12:00:00.000-05:00

It bugs me when people say things like "this was a pretty weak year for movies."

First of all, that's not something we can judge until AT LEAST five years afterward. Secondly, you just have to know where to look.

Despite the internet seemingly concurring that this was a down year, I found myself wanting to do a top 20 instead of a top 10. So here's the first half of the best 2010 had to offer.

20. Solitary Man

Thoroughly overshadowed by the misguided Wall Street sequel, Brian Koppelman and David Levien's quiet, thoughtful rumination on the Michael Douglas archetype came and went quickly at the end of the summer.

Playing a literal used-car-salesman, Douglas explores the fallout that the womanizing and swindling Gordon-Gekko-types would eventually face in real life.

The early plot hinges on the character's extreme reaction to not-that-extreme medical news, but stays low-key and believable the rest of the way. Douglas does some fine work, and supporting turns from Jesse Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Jenna Fischer, and even Danny DeVito make it a memorable film.

19. The American

Beautiful, beautiful film from photographer and music-video-director Anton Corbijn. Very sparse and very quiet, so I can see why it didn't catch on in a big way. George Clooney is also pretty good, even if the script is too spare to make the ending as heartbreaking as it wanted to be.

18. 127 Hours

My initial response to the film was just north of ambivalent, but it's grown on me since. By the time I ended up writing about it at length for the movie-blog association, I found myself arguing for its relative subtlety, as loud and Danny-Boyle-y as it is.

17. The Town

(reviewed already here)

Question: film-setting-wise, is Boston the new New York? Discuss.

16. I Am Love

A little soapy, to be sure, but worth it for the cinematography and Tilda Swinton- who can switch from unsettlingly androgynous mode to fabulous just like that, it turns out.

15. Shutter Island

Shutter Island was top ten for me until the end. A full five minutes of Ben Kinglsey explaining every little damn thing, straight down to a full-on, facepalm-inducing anagram.

I've said this before, but can we most past names that are anagrams in movies as a society? That's something that the lame twin in Adaptation would think was awesome.

So as well-made as Shutter Island is in every other respect, the hand-holding makes it vastly inferior to something like Spider. But no Oscar nominations?

14. Tangled

Tangled, too, was in the running for the top half until the big finale sidelined the heroine and turned on a deus ex machina. But it was witty, well-CGIed, and swiftly paced.

13. Mother

On the other hand, Mother has an ending that just amplifies everything that's come before, even if you were to guess it beforehand- which I didn't, I was too enthralled by Hye-ja Kim's performance.

12. Never Let Me Go

Still not sure how much of my goodwill comes from just having read Ishiguro's beautiful novel just beforehand, but credit to the movie that I could do so and not immediately find flaws in the adaptation of it. Mulligan, Knightley and Garfield all acquit themselves well.

My only complaint would be that the casting for the younger version of Mulligan was so spot-on that it made the other two younger characters less believable.

11. Toy Story 3

You cried too. Admit it.

Tomorrow, the top ten!

Unranked: My Man Godfrey

2011-03-18T12:00:00.000-05:00

Welcome to a new feature, featuring quick, much breezier reviews of movies that either are not on imdb's top 250 (and a few from 160-250 that weren't on it before).

In short, just random stuff. A chief motivation for this is that I recently signed up for Netflix instant, which is probably the reason the internet was invented in the first place. And it's only eight bucks a month, which is less than the cost of one movie ticket.

Now, I know that the top 250 entries can get kind of silly, but these will be even sillier, mostly because the majority of what I find to watch is screwball comedies. Let's get started!

My Man Godfrey

What is it?

A classic screwball, one that falls squarely into the 'Rich People Be Crazy' sub-genre. I would guess that people liked to mock the wealthy during the Great Depression, and this was right in the middle of it (1936).

Who's Godfrey, then?

He's a forgotten man, played by the super-suave William Powell, that two daffy rich sisters try to recruit as part of a scavenger hunt. He pushes the arrogant sister into an ash pile, and accompanies the nicer (but considerably wackier) one to help her win the hunt. She hires him as the new family butler, which leads to both sisters and the family maid falling in love with him.

How creepy is the age difference?

As we'll soon see, this is an essential question of pretty much every old movie that features romance of any kind, even silly romance like My Man Godfrey. In this case we have Powell, 44, eventually ending up with Carole Lombard, 28. So... just a little creepy.

Though for a good portion of the movie I thought Godfrey was headed toward the other sister, played by the 25-year-old Gail Patrick. The actress playing the maid (Jean Dixon) was 40, incidentally.

Is there a wacky foreign dude?

Of course there is! Seemingly a staple of lampooning high society, here we get Carlo, a piano 'prodigy' that the mother of the family is 'mentoring,' who only seems to know one song (and is constantly stuffing his face with food, or acting like a monkey to amuse his benefactor).

Should it be on the countdown?

I say yes, but just barely. Here's the thing: it's wonderfully funny, with plenty of great quips from Powell (and Eugene Pallette, who played a lot of rich fathers back in the day), but Carole Lombard rubbed me the wrong way. She just seemed shrill and nuts and stalkery.

This could be just me- after all, Katherine Hepburn does mostly the same thing in Bringing Up Baby and it worked for me then. But Powell seems to have a lot more chemistry with the other, haughtier daughter, Gail Patrick. There's even a movement to their relationship during the story, wherein she tries to frame him for theivery and eventually realizes how shallow she's been.

Lombard just doggedly clings to Powell until, dazed, she arranges to marry him at the film's end. What?

Also in favor of the film is the inventive title sequence, which is a long pan over marquee lights (as in the still above).

IMDB #157 The Big Sleep

2011-03-17T10:00:00.001-05:00

It's easy to think of classic films as unimpeachable works of art- chiseled from stone, woven in tapestry. The vision, perhaps, of a black and white auteur, or the product of the finely-tuned studio system of yore. But the greatest films often have the most slipshod, haphazard tales of development: take 1946's The Big Sleep, for example.

After the best-picture triumph of Casablanca, it probably seemed like a no-brainer to cast Humphrey Bogart as another ambivalent wiseguy trying to live under Vichy rules with a piano-playing sidekick. So Howard Hawks enlisted a broke William Faulkner to transpose Hemingway's To Have and Have Not to WWII France. Despite the extensive pedigrees of those four men, the show was stolen by a nineteen-year-old Harper's Bazaar cover model named Lauren Bacall- her rapport with the middle-aged Bogart resulted in her part enlarging considerably.

And so it would be for Hawks/Bogart/Bacall volume two: give the people what they want. It turns out they want star power, sexual chemistry, long horse-racing double entendres, and classic noir.

The Key Players

Howard Hawks comes back to the countdown after two screwball comedies, Bogart we saw once, later in his all-too-brief careeer.

It was actually Hawks' wife Nancy that spotted Betty Joan Peske, soon to be rechristened Lauren Bacall, on a magazine and urged Howard to give her a screen test. The legend has it that both Hawks and Bogart (also married) fell in love with the young starlet during filming of To Have and Have Not, with bitterness resulting when she chose Bogart. Nevertheless, after imitating life in art with four successful thrillers together (Dark Passage and Key Largo being the other two), Bacall would also prove adept at comedy (How To Marry A Millionaire, Designing Woman) drama (Written on the Wind), and stage-work, winning two Tonys before an obligatory "It's Lauren Bacall!" Oscar nomination in 1996 (The Mirror Has Two Faces) and honorary statuette in 2009.

Martha Vickers takes the only other substantial role, in her biggest career success- though that might not be the case if she hadn't died in early middle age from esophogeal cancer, just like Bogart. Elisha Cook from The Killing also pops up- I think he was mostly cast to make the 5'8" Bogart look taller.

More...

The Story:

Raymond Chandler's classic gumshoe novel is rightly famous, not just for having a whole lot of twists and turns, but just the right amount of them: not so many as to be ludicrous, not so few as to be easy to guess the end.

We start with Bogart, aka most famous shamus ever Phillip Marlowe, arriving at the house of his latest client, Old Rich Father (General Sternwood). First he meets Carmen Sternwood (Vickers), whom we'll refer to as Crazed Sexpot Daughter. This is established in a wonderful scene featuring a metajoke about Bogart's height and possibly the shortest shorts available in 1946- also she tries to sit in his lap while he's standing.

Anyway, Crazed Sexpot Daughter has some gambling debts with a Fake Book Dealer, and Old Rich Father wants Marlowe to get her off the hook. Simple enough.

But wait- Vivian Rutledge (Bacall), the other daughter (and presumably a widow? This is never explained) thinks Marlowe's really been called in to look into the dissapearance of her father's Ex-Right Hand Man, who ran off with the wife of a Scary Casino Owner some months before.

Got all that? Marlowe does some simple recon, following the Fake Book Dealer from his Fake Bookshop to his house, only to hear a gunshot and a scream. He storms in to find a drug-addled Crazed Sexpot Daughter, a dead Fake Book Dealer, and a hidden camera with missing film.

Marlowe takes the girl home, but soon Vivian is blackmailed with the compromising picture of Crazed Sexpot Daughter from the camera (the contents of the photo are never explained), and goes to our man for help. But is Vivian in cahoots with the Scary Casino Owner, who was coincidentally the Fake Book Dealer's landlord, and incidentally doesn't seem to care at all about his wife running off with the Ex-Right-Hand-Man?

I'm pretty sure the suspense is gripping!

The Artistry

It's not proper film-nerd behavior to watch The Big Lebowski two dozen times before ever seeing actual noir staples like The Big Sleep, but that's what I ended up doing. I actually even saw The Maltese Falcon last month in the theater!

I even saw the random Smallville episode where Jimmy Olsen gets knocked out and has an elaborate noir fantasy after watching The Big Sleep before I saw The Big Sleep! But better late than never.

And even with too many shady thugs, offscreen murders and double crosses to really keep track of the first time through, there's a familiar rhythm and atmosphere that makes it a pleasure to watch. Marlowe falls in love with Vivian Rutledge because he always does, because she's a woman with a troubled past who needs his help. He gets roughed up by some thugs because he's ignored multiple warnings to stop looking, even after his client says to stop (technically his actual case ends when the Fake Book Dealer is shot).

My favorite character is not Marlowe, however, it's a character never seen onscreen named Owen Taylor. The Sternwood family driver, he is at one point in possession of the scandalous photo- a dumb thug named Joe Brody admits later that he knocked Taylor out and took them, to blackmail Vivian with.

But Owen Taylor still ends up dead, his car twelve feet under the ocean. But who killed him? Brody had no reason to (and no reason to hide it, if he had). The legend is that when Hawks and co. found this plothole, production halted for two days while the screenwriters combed over the book to figure it out. When they couldn't, they telegrammed Chandler himself... who admitted that he didn't know, either.

How awesome is that? Owen Taylor, killed by the plot itself! The very mood of The Big Sleep killed him, because it needed a second body to raise the stakes, and there he was: alone, unconcious, on the side of the road. Absorbed by the shadowy fog and washed out to sea. Owen Taylor is my new go-to reference for plot holes in great films- films great enough that the plot holes hardly matter.

It makes The Big Sleep even better, because there's no way a plot that messy could tie up entirely neatly, is there?

Anyway, the cast is of course excellent, even if the Bogie/Bacall phenomenon threatens to hijack the entire film (more on this later). Vickers shines in her few scenes (according to Chandler, her role was diminished because she was acting circles around Bacall), and all the character-actors as minor stooges acquit themselves just as well. Elisha Cook plays a doomed go-between with such frank earnestness that even Marlowe takes a shine to the guy.

The score I found a pretty typical "OH NO! SOMETHING BAD OR DRAMATIC IS HAPPENING" big band warble, and the noir shadows were familiarly non-descript. The crackling dialogue was filled with some wonderful lines- all my favorites I'll throw in Leftover Thoughts.

The only knock against The Big Sleep is really against the goddamned Hayes Code, anyway- racy and lewd things are left in the film but just obliquely hinted at, like the photo, or a key homosexual relationship. And the ending is softened a bit, as we'll see.

So studio pressure, a mystery killing, and the Hayes Code all mucked The Big Sleep about, and the result was still great. Just goes to show.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS THAT ARE PROBABLY IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP TRACK OF ANYWAY!

Let me preface this by saying this is uneccesarily long and largely so I can keep it all straight for myself:

So...Marlowe tracks down the blackmailers and, despite interference from both sisters, reclaims the photo from Joe Brody, who got it from Owen Taylor (who killed the Fake Book Dealer and took the film because he's in love with Crazed Sexpot Daughter, or was) and a woman named Agnes, who was the Fake Book Dealer's assistant.

Then some random dude (that the film never bothers to mention was the dead guy's gay lover) mistakenly kills Brody in revenge.

Vivian, assuming the case is now over since her sister's debts are gone, and the murder of the Fake Book Dealer is solved (WHAT ABOUT YOUR DRIVER, OWEN TAYLOR, HUH!?), flirts with Marlowe until she realizes that he's not done with the case.

Even though she and the Scary Casino owner stage an elaborate show to throw him off the trail, Marlowe doggedly follows the right people at the right moments until Agnes tips him off to the location of the Casino Owner's wife (after a poor stooge in love with her gets killed delivering the message, which means Marlowe is really Not Letting It Go).

He goes to a secluded cabin to find said Wife, but also Vivian and some henchman that knocks him over the head and ties him up. But Vivian sets him free, long enough to shoot the henchman and drive her back to the house that the Scary Casino Owner owns.

And here's the finale, ready? Marlowe calls the Casino Owner, tells he'll meet him at the house in 40 minutes (even though he's already there- ha! landlines.). Casino Owner arrives, leaves his henchman outside, so Marlowe gets the drop on him.

And here's the rub: turns out Scary Casino Owner convinced Vivian that her sister killed the missing Right Hand Man, and has been blackmailing her ever since. In the book this is ACTUALLY WHAT HAPPENED, but in the film Marlowe sees that he has no proof, and is just taking advantage of Crazed Sexpot Daughter's frequent blackouts to be a jerk. In both versions, he just fires his gun into the ceiling and scares the Casino Owner out of the door, where he's shot by his own men (who heard the shots and figured out Marlowe was in there, and naturally got jumpy).

He calls the cops to get them out safely, and Bogie and Bacall manage to own this cheesy ending exchange:

Vivian: "You've forgotten one thing - me."
Marlowe: "What's wrong with you?"
Vivian: "Nothing you can't fix."

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Higher, for sure. It's definitely my favorite in the genre so far (take that, Out Of The Past). They actually made another version of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe, but it was in 1978 and he was sixty! Come on, now.

The Legacy:

As popular as it was, no awards or nominations. It is in the NFR, and I did see a "Who was the best Phillip Marlowe?" poll somewhere where Bogart was absoluely crushing everyone else (Elliott Gould? Be serious.).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

The Big Sleep was actually finished and shown to servicemen before the studio decided the sexual tension between the two leads needed to be amped up. So they shot the night club scene where they talk for a super long time about horse racing and made countless double entendres (many of which I only got the naughty-side of, knowing squat about horses). Embedding is sadly disabled, so follow this link. The clip is from a colorized version, so brace yourself for that.

BONUS: My favorite part was when they prank call the police!

Leftover Thoughts:

-FYI, by "Fake Book Dealer" I mean a lowlife pornographer that masqerades as a book dealer, not a dealer of false books (or "fake books" like jazz musicians use).

-I kind of want to write my own version of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," called Who Killed Owen Taylor? Too bad he never actually appears in The Big Sleep.

-Theorists argue that either Brody killed Owen Taylor and didn't admit it for no real reason, or that Taylor, waking up alone, now a murderer, and without the damning photo of his beloved Carmen, then killed himself- but I don't buy it.

-And now, all quotes all the time:

Carmen: "You're not very tall, are you?"
Marlowe: "Well, I try to be."

after Vivian has trouble opening his office door to get out
Marlowe: "Well it wasn't intentional."
Vivian: "Try it sometime."

Mars: "That any of your business?"
Marlowe: "I could make it my business."
Mars: "I could make your business mine."
Marlowe: "Oh, you wouldn't like it, the pay's too small."

Vivian: "The only trouble is we could've had a lot of fun if you weren't a detective."

Marlowe: "You came in by the keyhole like Peter Pan."
Carmen: "Who's he?"
Marlowe: "Guy I used to know ran a pool room."

Carmen: "Is he as cute as you are?"
Marlowe: "Nobody is." (it's impossible to describe the perfect deadpan with which Bogart delivers this reply. It destroyed me.).

Coming Up...

156. Ben-Hur

155. The Manchurian Candidate

154. Avatar

The Oscar Hangover

2011-03-02T09:50:00.003-06:00

An unfocused, lazy wrap-up of the show to follow- for in depth coverage, see the entirety of the rest of the internet/entertainment media.

How did I do?

For the third straight year, I got 16 out of 24 categories correct. So.... at least I'm consistent? I missed two out of the three shorts (which is a win, for me), documentary (picked with my heart on the Banksy thing, not my brain), Art Direction and Costumes (Alice in Wonderland? Seriously?), Score, Song, and Cinematography.

I did beat Dave, though! After beating me 18-16 for the last two years, he finished either at 13 (on the posted predictions from Sunday) or 15 due to some off-the-cuff changes to his paper ballot. Either way, boo yah. This puts us even at 2-2 in four years of blog-prognosticating, including my not-super-impressive 13-11 victory during the No Country For Old Men year.

I get to hold on to the bragging rights for a year, or I would if we were the type of dudes that brag about stuff.

How was the telecast?

I don't care. I really don't. I watch to see the Oscars. The actual statues, handed to people, people that made films. I might have off-hand, armchair opinions about stuff, but I will watch the Oscars no matter what. Next Year they could have Justin Bieber host and use a T-Pain app to auto-tune everyone's acceptance speech.

So from my perspective, they were a success. 24 Oscars were presented. Nobody accidentally choked on one of them. I can intellectually appreciate all of the things people are saying about how Franco and Hathaway did, but I just don't care. Since The Oscars are my superbowl, in my mind they are a thing that happens, that I enjoy even when aesthetically they may be pereceived as unpleasant- I don't complain about when the Superbowl is a blowout, similarly.

How do I feel about the awards themselves?

I'm okay with them. Like anyone pulling for The Social Network and Inception, I had steeled myself emotionally for The King's Speech to win nearly everything, but it lost every single tech award it was up for.

Yes, it lost costumes and art direction to Alice in Wonderland, which seems like it was co-directed by Tim Burton and Spencer's gifts, but score went very deservedly to The Social Network, and Cinematography to Inception.

I'm sure David Fincher will have another day in the sun, possibly with his Dragon Tattoo movie. Nolan I'm less sure will ever jibe with the Academy, but a longstanding, Scorsese-like streak of snubbing is just as fun, really.

The King's Speech is better than Slumdog Millionaire and Crash, anyway, so it isn't a burning injustice.

Now it's time for the post-Oscar doldrums. Sigh.

Official Oscar Predictions- Duncan

2011-02-27T15:00:00.000-06:00

Here we go again! Note to self- stop picking with your heart. You specifically ran a feature on Friday to get all that out of your system. Be cold and logical.

I know I picked a handful already, but some have waffled- this is the master list.

Best Short Film – Live Action

The Confession
The Crush
God of Love
Na Wewe
Wish 143

Did not end up seeing the shorts this year, nor purchasing them on itunes. God of Love seems to be the one that stands out from the pack (three of the other four are mega-depressing, The Crush sounds too slight). If I've learned anything, it's that comedies tend to stand out in the crowd in the short films (see The Other Tenants and West Bank Story the last couple of years).

Will Win: God of Love

Best Short Film – Animated

Day and Night
The Gruffalo
Let’s Pollute
The Lost Thing
Madagascar, a Journey Diary

I think the rule is to make up imaginary criteria to judge this one, because there's no pattern to follow and no easy way to win (not even a Pixar short or a Wallace and Gromit installment is safe anymore). So I say The Gruffalo wins because it is A) The Longest (like last year's Peter and The Wolf) and B) Stuffed with more celebrity voices. Done!

Will Win: The Gruffalo

More...

Best Documentary – Short Subjects

Killing in the Name
Poster Girl
Strangers No More
Sun Comes Up
The Warriors of Qiugang

What's hot right now among these five serious-minded short docs? The Middle East is a big deal, right?

Will Win: Killing in the Name

Best Documentary

Exit through the Gift Shop
Gasland
Inside Job
Restrepo
Waste Land

I've only seen Restrepo, so I'm uninformed here as well- I'm going with the late game switch from Inside Job to Exit Through The Gift Shop, though. It's getting all the buzz/graffiti these days.

Will Win: Exit Through The Gift Shop

Best Visual Effects
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing

I stand by my pick of Inception for all three of these. Winning only these three is known as "Pulling a Bourne Ultimatum," FYI.

Best Original Song

127 Hours – “If I Rise”
Country Strong – “Coming Home”
Tangled – “I See the Light”
Toy Story 3 – “We Belong Together”

It seems to me that every time there's no Seabiscuit-like frontrunner, then you should stay away from the one that everyone's just kinda settled on. That would be the Randy Newman song from Toy Story 3. And I think it would be just like the Academy to spurn him another time for Alan Mencken, the Oscar Winningest person alive.

Will Win/My Vote: Tangled – “I See The Light”

Best Original Score

127 Hours
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
The King’s Speech
The Social Network

It hurts my heart to predict Desplat's score for The King's Speech, which mails in the films climax and sub in Beethoven and is otherwise not memorable (especially for such a gifted composer). This is because beyond 127 Hours' score (which was... loud), the remaining three are nearly tied for my favorite score of the year, and I'd be thrilled to see them win.

Will Win: The King's Speech
My Vote: The Social Network

Best Make Up

Barney’s Vision
The Way Back
The Wolfman

See here.

Will Win: The Wolfman
My Vote: The Way Back

Best Costume Design

Alice in Wonderland
I Am Love
The King’s Speech
The Tempest
True Grit

Continue seeing here.

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Vote: True Grit

Best Art Direction

Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and Deathly Hollows: Part One
Inception
The King’s Speech
True Grit

Art Direction, my yearly pick to go rogue. I think that The King's Speech has lost a little bit of steam- not much, but enough to lose this category. Logic would dictate that a Tim Burton film would be a likely upset pick, but Alice In Wonderland was apparently terrible. So I say Inception gets a well-deserved fourth win here. This isn't emotional, I swear.

Will Win/My Vote: Inception

Best Editing

127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
The King’s Speech
The Social Network

The only guild award that The Social Network picked up will hold true tonight. Call it a consolation prize.

Will Win/My Vote: The Social Network

Best Cinematography

Black Swan
Inception
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
True Grit

ROGER F*CKING DEAKINS for the win!

Will Win/My Vote: True Grit

Best Foreign Language Film

Biutiful
Dogtooth
In a Better World
Incendies
Outside the Law

Dogtooth is enjoyable effed up, but I imagine (without having seen anything else) that there were better foreign films out there last year. In another abrupt reversal, I'm going with Bier's In A Better World. I have an unresearched theory that second nominations in this category (she had After The Wedding a few years back) give you a leg up.

Will Win: In A Better World

Best Animated Film

How to Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
Toy Story 3

Cars 2? Seriously Pixar?

Will Win: Toy Story 3
My Vote: How to Train Your Dragon

Best Adapted Screenplay

127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

This is a bigger lock than some sort of giant padlock or something.

Will Win/My Vote: The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay

Another Year
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech

INT. BUCKINGHAM PALACE: The King looks aggrieved.

KING: Er.. Ah... (stammers, is handsome)

HARVEY WEINSTEIN: Ka-Ching!

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Vote: Inception

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams – The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter – The King’s Speech
Melissa Leo – The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld – True Grit
Jacki Weaver – Animal Kingdom

Like I said, I don't feel good enough about The King's Speech's momentum to call Carter for the upset here. And even though Melissa Leo has lost a lot a buzz, I can't make a case for anyone else winning. Boring, I know...

Will Win: Melissa Leo – The Fighter
My Vote: Hailee Steinfeld- True Grit

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale – The Fighter
John Hawkes – Winter’s Bone
Jeremy Renner – The Town
Mark Ruffalo – The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush – The King’s Speech

Bale sealed the deal with a solid speech at the Golden Globes. But I'd have voted for John Hawkes, Ozark badass.

Will Win: Christian Bale – The Fighter
My Vote: John Hawkes- Winter's Bone

Best Actress

Annette Benning – The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman – Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence – Winter’s Bone
Natalie Portman – Black Swan
Michelle Williams – Blue Valentine

Natalie Portman picks up an easy win for extending that scene in every movie where she freaks the hell out to feature length. Of the choices available to me, I'd give Lawrence a slight edge over Williams.

Will Win: Natalie Portman – Black Swan
My Vote: Jennifer Lawrence- Winter's Bone

Best Actor

Javier Bardem - Biutiful
Jeff Bridges – True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network
Colin Firth – The King’s Speech
James Franco – 127 Hours

Colin Firth again, just had to be his Colin Firthiest. Eisenberg had to be unlikeable but compelling, in a very subtle way.

Will Win: Colin Firth – The King’s Speech
My Vote: Jesse Eisenberg- The Social Network

Best Director

Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan
Ethan and Joel Coen – True Grit
David Fincher – The Social Network
Tom Hopper – The King’s Speech
David O. Russell – The Fighter

It's been a long while since I've seen such a major award with such an even split among prognosticators. Hooper and Fincher are in a dead heat, mostly due to Fincher's surprising BAFTA win (after Hooper's even more surprising DGA award). I'm officially siding on the depressingly undeserved choice of Hooper, if only because the DGA is nearly never wrong.

In terms of precedent, this battle feels more like Million Dollar Baby vs. The Aviator (where Eastwood and the character-based movie beat the more technically impressive foe in both) than Traffic vs. Gladiator (where period piece Gladiator nabbed Best Picture despite losing Editing and Director to Traffic).

Will Win: Tom Hooper- The King's Speech
My Vote: David Fincher – The Social Network

Best Picture

127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

I will say that there's no The Blind Side this year, and that I enjoyed all ten movies when I saw them. The Kids Are All Right is by far the most over-hyped to me (just as much as The King's Speech, but to a lesser degree). The ten nominee format still amounts to an empty gesture for the bottom nominees, but this year it was noticeably harder to say which five would've composed the small field (Though clearly True Grit had the edge over Inception, in the final analysis).

With time, The King's Speech over The Social Network isn't going to seem as bad as it does right now, or as bad as the other famous disputed Best Pictures. But that doesn't mean there's not a part of my brain screaming at me to make this pick differently (it won editing! it could win Director! Screenplay is in the bag! How could a film win those three and not Best Picture?) Quiet, brain! The King's Speech it is.

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Best Picture Ballot…

10. The Kids Are All Right
9. The King's Speech
8. The Fighter
7. 127 Hours
6. Black Swan
5. Toy Story 3
4. Inception
3. True Grit
2. Winter's Bone
1. The Social Network

Official Oscar Predictions- Dave

2011-02-27T12:00:00.000-06:00

Dave was much more timely about getting this done than I, so look for mine to post in another few hours, and also shamelessly rip off his Will Win/ My Vote format!- Duncan

Best Short Film – Live Action

The Confession
The Crush
God of Love
Na Wewe
Wish 143

I don’t have a horse in this race. I have not seen or heard anything about any of these films. Random guessing to ensue!

Will Win: Wish 143

Best Short Film – Animated

Day and Night
The Gruffalo
Let’s Pollute
The Lost Thing
Madagascar, a Journey Diary

I saw Day and Night because it was in front of Toy Story 3. Otherwise, I have not seen any of these. So…

Will Win/My Vote: Day and Night

More...

Best Documentary – Short Subjects

Killing in the Name
Poster Girl
Strangers No More
Sun Comes Up
The Warriors of Qiugang

I am drawing nothing on this category either. I hear films whose titles are similar to Rage Against the Machine lyrics have great Academy success.

Will Win: Killing in the Name

Best Documentary

Exit through the Gift Shop
Gasland
Inside Job
Restrepo
Waste Land

Finally, I have some vested interest in a category. I saw Gasland, Restrepo, and Waste Land. However, many prognosticators have Inside Job and Exit through the Gift Shop are the frontrunners. There seems to be something engaging about Exit through the Gift Shop, but I do not feel the Academy will feel the same way.

Will Win: Inside Job
My Vote: Gasland

Best Visual Effects

Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One
Hereafter
Inception
Iron Man 2

This category seems pretty straight forward, except for the lack of recognition for The Social Network’s Winkelvii.

Will Win/My Vote: Inception

Best Sound Editing

Inception
Toy Story 3
Tron: Legacy
True Grit
Unstoppable

After years of confusion, I now get the difference between Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. I will include it in my book: Academy Awards for Dummies.

Will Win/My Vote: Tron: Legacy

Best Sound Mixing

Inception
The King’s Speech
Salt
The Social Network
True Grit

I think this category is the start of The King’s Speech’s run…

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Vote: Inception (with The Social Network a close second)

Best Original Song

127 Hours – “If I Rise”
Country Strong – “Coming Home”
Tangled – “I See the Light”
Toy Story 3 – “We Belong Together”

I feel that I am tempting fate if I go against Toy Story 3. It would be nice to see Dido with an Oscar though.

Will Win: Toy Story 3 – “We Belong Together”
My Vote: 127 Hours – “If I Rise”

Best Original Score

127 Hours
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
The King’s Speech
The Social Network

This was a tough category to choose a winner. For me, the two frontrunners are Zimmer’s electronic-based score from Inception, and Ross and Reznor’s whirlwind from The Social Network. Ultimately, Ross and Reznor will take the top prize.

Will Win: The Social Network
My Vote: Inception

Best Make Up

Barney’s Vision
The Way Back
The Wolfman

I saw The Wolfman… On Cinemax… I did not enjoy it.

Will Win/My Vote: The Way Back

Best Costume Design

Alice in Wonderland
I Am Love
The King’s Speech
The Tempest
True Grit

I am immediately drawn to Alice in Wonderland (Colleen Atwood) and The Tempest (Sandy Powell). However, I feel that The King’s Speech (Jenny Beavan) will take the prize.

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Vote: Alice in Wonderland

Best Art Direction

Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and Deathly Hollows: Part One
Inception
The King’s Speech
True Grit

All worthy entries, but my choice and what will win are two different choices. The King’s Speech historical re-creation will take the prize. However, my personal choice is for Inception because after watching it on Blu-Ray I saw a lot of little set details that I previously missed.

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Vote: Inception

Best Editing

127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
The King’s Speech
The Social Network

It has often been said that the winner of this award will be a predictor of who wins Best Picture. I think it will not hold true this year, as The Social Network picks up the win here.

Will Win/My Vote: The Social Network

Best Cinematography

Black Swan
Inception
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
True Grit

After nine nominations, it’s Roger F. Deakins’ time.

Will Win/My Vote: True Grit

Best Foreign Language Film

Biutiful
Dogtooth
In a Better World
Incendies
Outside the Law

I have not seen any of these. I hear Dogtooth is supposed to be nutty, while Biutiful is supposed to be gritty. I like my films a bit nutty. I cannot throw any weight behind Outside the Law because I would blindly say it stars Steven Seagal.

Will Win: Incendies (because Ebert said so)
My Vote: Dogtooth

Best Animated Film

How to Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
Toy Story 3

If gambling on the Academy Awards happened with a higher frequency, Toy Story 3’s odds would be 1-20 at this point.

Will Win: Toy Story 3
My Vote: How to Train Your Dragon

Best Adapted Screenplay

127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

Duh.

Will Win/My Vote: The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay

Another Year
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Vote: Inception

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams – The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter – The King’s Speech
Melissa Leo – The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld – True Grit
Jacki Weaver – Animal Kingdom

Even with a weird and controversial (to some) campaign, Leo Will Win this award for a very good performance in a very good movie. I feel that Adams did more with her particular role and I found it more enjoyable.

Will Win: Melissa Leo – The Fighter
My Vote: Amy Adams – The Fighter (with Steinfeld getting a lot of consideration)

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale – The Fighter
John Hawkes – Winter’s Bone
Jeremy Renner – The Town
Mark Ruffalo – The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush – The King’s Speech

Since Rush won the BAFTA, there is an awful a lot of speculation that he could win the prize over Bale. The lesson to be had is: Talk is cheap. Bale wins the category, as he should. Even though I would like to see Hawkes win and deliver a speech in character from Eastbound and Down.

Will Win/My Vote: Christian Bale – The Fighter

Best Actress

Annette Benning – The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman – Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence – Winter’s Bone
Natalie Portman – Black Swan
Michelle Williams – Blue Valentine

This category, along with Adapted Screenplay, is the easiest pick of the night. Bet the farm.

Will Win/My Vote: Natalie Portman – Black Swan

Best Actor

Javier Bardem - Biutiful
Jeff Bridges – True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network
Colin Firth – The King’s Speech
James Franco – 127 Hours

I have not even seen The King’s Speech, but how can I go against the awesome Firth?

Will Win/My Vote: Colin Firth – The King’s Speech

Best Director

Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan
Ethan and Joel Coen – True Grit
David Fincher – The Social Network
Tom Hopper – The King’s Speech
David O. Russell – The Fighter

Personally, this was the toughest voting category for me. I have always admitted and greatly enjoyed the work of Aronofsky, Fincher, and the Coen Brothers. Aronofsky has always presented a fresh approach on matters, while making films that are as moving as they are disturbing. Fincher is the consummate professional who steadies and ship he controls. The Coen Brothers always have their uniquely brilliant spin. David O. Russell did a great job on The Fighter, but there was a lot of talent in front of the camera, so was he merely regulated to a game manager? Tom Hopper, while John Adams was great television, is too new to the arena to get consideration from me. Besides, he suffers from the similar plight that Russell does with all the talent in The King’s Speech being in front of the camera.

Will Win: David Fincher – The Social Network
My Vote: Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan

Best Picture

127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

While this year’s field is pretty good, I do feel that The Town should have made the cut over 127 Hours or The Kids Are All Right. I believe Black Swan was the Best Picture of the year, but it has no shot in winning this award. This category is a two horse race between The Social Network and The King’s Speech. Ultimately, The King’s Speech will win the year’s biggest accolade, even though I disagree with that.

Will Win: The King’s Speech
My Best Picture Ballot…

10. The Kids Are All Right
9. Winter’s Bone
8. The King’s Speech
7. 127 Hours
6. Toy Story 3
5. The Fighter
4. True Grit
3. Inception
2. The Social Network
1. Black Swan

Preferred Oscar Nominations- Dave

2011-02-25T22:00:00.000-06:00

Dave fills out his imaginary Oscar Ballot.

Best Sound Mixing

Black Swan
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
The Social Network
Tron: Legacy

I stick to films that I have seen...

Best Sound Editing

Black Swan
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
Toy Story 3
Tron: Legacy

Best Special Effects

Hereafter
Inception
Iron Man 2
The Social Network
Tron: Legacy

More...

Best Costume Design

Black Swan
Shutter Island
The Fighter
Tron: Legacy
True Grit

Best Art Direction

Black Swan
Inception
Shutter Island
Tron: Legacy
True Grit

Best Make Up

Black Swan
Piranha 3-d
Shutter Island

How did Black Swan not secure a nomination when the black and white make up on Portman has become part of the film’s identity? Shutter Island gets in mostly for Jackie Earle Haley’s make up, while Piranha’s gore is accurate and over the top.

Best Animated Feature Film

How to Train Your Dragon
Tangled
Toy Story 3

Best Song

“If I Rise” – Dido and A. R. Rahman – 127 Hours
“Sticks and Stones” – Jonsi – How to Train Your Dragon
“Black Sheep” – Metric – Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

While I did not see 127 Hours, I have heard the song and it is pretty good.

Best Score

Black Swan
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
The Social Network
Tron: Legacy

Dear Academy – Change your eligibility rules.

Best Cinematography

Black Swan
Inception
A Prophet
The Social Network
True Grit

Black Swan, Inception, The Social Network, and True Grit are obvious choices. I like the difficulty of lighting (or not lighting) the prison, the Rivera work, and the shoot-out at the end of A Prophet enough to merit a nomination.

Best Editing

Black Swan
The Ghost Writer
Inception
The Social Network
The Town

All of these films are tautly edited, even though not all of them are in the “suspense” genre.

Best Original Screenplay

Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
Mother
A Prophet

I am always slightly befuddled as to how the true story of someone’s life (see Milk) can be deemed “original.” It just seems a little odd because the writer, unless they knew the person/situation firsthand, would have to adapt it. This is why I am confounded about The Fighter this year.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Ghost Writer
How to Train Your Dragon
The Social Network
The Town
True Grit

Solid grouping right here.

Supporting Actress

Amy Adams – The Fighter
Barbara Hershey – Black Swan
Mila Kunis – Black Swan
Melissa Leo – The Fighter
Olivia Williams – The Ghost Writer
Last Actress Out: Winona Ryder – Black Swan

While there were not many memorable lead female performances, there were boatloads of great supporting roles. The Fighter and Black Swan were so stocked; it was absurd amount of talent.

I would have given Winona Ryder a nomination, but her role was not nearly as meaty as the other contenders here.

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale – The Fighter
Pierce Brosnan – The Ghost Writer
Vincent Cassel – Black Swan
Matt Damon – True Grit
Jeremy Renner – The Town
Last Actor Out: Dieter Laser – The Human Centipede

Bale’s mesmerizing performance will earn him this year’s award. Brosnan’s Tony Blair-impression was spot-on. Matt Damon was amusing, while Renner was crazy. Vincent Cassel asked the most quintessential question in cinema this year: (Looking for a Link Where Cassel Asks, “Would You Fuck Dis Gurl?”)

As for Laser, yeah, I went there.

Best Actress

Hye-ja Kim – Mother
Jennifer Lawrence – Winter's Bone
Natalie Portman – Black Swan
Hailee Steinfeld – True Grit
Michelle Williams – Blue Valentine
Last Actress Out: Elisabeth Shue – Piranha 3-d.

When I first made this list I had three nominees (Kim, Portman, and Steinfeld receiving the Winslet Jump®). Unfortunately, I did not see many memorable lead female performances this year.

Best Actor

Jeff Bridges – True Grit
Leonardo Di Caprio – Shutter Island
Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network
Tahar Rahim – A Prophet
Mark Wahlberg – The Fighter
Last Actor Out: Ewan McGregor – The Ghost Writer

Eisenberg and Bridges are obvious choices. I feel that had I seen The King’s Speech, Firth would be here as well. Tahar Rahim’s wide-eyed criminal who blurs boundaries is an engaging view. Di Caprio’s performance in Shutter Island stands out more to me than Inception because he has more depth to work with. Lastly, Wahlberg’s subdued performance maybe did not earn him as much attention as it should have, but his silent struggles speak volumes.

Best Director

Ben Affleck – The Town
Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan
David Fincher – The Social Network
Christopher Nolan – Inception
Roman Polanski – The Ghost Writer
Last Director Out: Joon-ho Bong – Mother

You have the new kid on the block (Affleck), the auteur (Aronofsky), the greatest of the hour (Fincher), the visionary (Nolan), and the wily veteran (Polanski). I feel that Affleck got the most out of his cast (after all, Blake Lively appeared to be acting), while Aronofsky was able to push his stars. Fincher, the consummate professional, honed a story to meet up, and ultimately exceed, any and all expectations. Nolan is probably the most original filmmaker we have going right now. Polanski’s thriller already earned him the Berlin Film Festival Award.

Best Picture

Black Swan
The Fighter
The Ghost Writer
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
Mother
A Prophet
The Social Network
The Town
True Grit
Last Movie Out: A Tale of Two Escobars

Before I hear cries of “But Mother and A Prophet are from 2009, not 2010!” … Hold on… Take a big breath… A Prophet did not show up in Milwaukee until the end of January, and Mother came in March. Plus, Mother is actually still getting awards from various critics groups this year, so I am not entirely wacky.

These nominees would probably constitute most (if not all) of my top ten list of the year too. While the Academy acknowledged many of these films in this category, I feel that the omission of The Ghost Writer and The Town bother me, but only slightly.

As for A Tale of Two Escobars, I cannot remember the last time a documentary was so compelling and suspenseful. Sure, it played in one theatre in Los Angeles, and was seen by most on ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. However, it hooks you and enlightens you, which is what you demand from a documentary.

Nomination Totals:
Black Swan – 15 nominations
Inception – 10 nominations
The Social Network – 9 nominations
True Grit – 8 nominations
The Fighter – 7 nominations
How to Train Your Dragon – 7 nominations
The Ghost Writer – 6 nominations
Tron: Legacy – 6 nominations
The Town – 5 nominations
A Prophet – 4 nominations
Shutter Island – 4 nominations
Mother – 3 nominations
Toy Story 3 – 2 nominations
Blue Valentine – 1 nomination
Piranha 3-d: 1 nomination
Tangled – 1 nomination
Winter's Bone – 1 nomination
Hereafter- 1 nomination
Iron Man 2- 1 nomination
127 Hours- 1 nomination
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World- 1 nomination

Preferred Oscar Nominations- Duncan

2011-02-25T19:30:00.000-06:00

What happened to Oscar Week? I warned you my enthusiasm was low this year. We'll get to the rest of the predictions over the weekend. For now, enjoy my favorite part of Oscar coverage, Preferred Oscar balloting- the things I would vote for if I had a vote. Posting later tonight, Dave's ballot!

Best Animated Feature:

The Illusionist
Tangled
How To Train Your Dragon
Toy Story 3

Just now saw The Illusionist, a sleepy but beautiful film that has one of the most bittersweet endings for any animated film, ever. Tangled I might have enjoyed because it relied on the slapstick energy of early Disney cartoons more than the familiar Alan Mencken songs, but it was thoroughly entertaining either way.

Toy Story 3 managed to be moving, beautiful, and memorable despite not needing to exist in the first place, so I don't begrudge it winning this category. But I've got a huge soft spot for How To Train Your Dragon, which shouldn't have worked for so many reasons, but did. It's from Dreamworks Animation, known primarily for the unsubtle, diminishing returns of the Shrek series. It has historically innacurrate Vikings with inconsistent accents. But a good story, well-told, an adorable dragon, and the first 3D effects to actually sell me on the medium made me want to see it again the very next day (and later on that week).

More...

Best Art Direction:

The Ghost Writer
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
I Am Love
Inception
Tron: Legacy

Had a lot of trouble narrowing this one down, but I ended up with five of the most visually striking or memorable films. TRON may have been mostly digital, but if Avatar can win this category I don't feel bad about including it- I'm going to the gym mostly so I can pull of a light-suit when they become available. Scott Pilgrim matched everything to Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel, down to some crazy minute details.

The Ghost Writer practically made another character out of an austere, modernist beach retreat location. Inception took a similar cue for its dreamworld, with just a dash of Escher. I Am Love, meanwhile, was as pristine as a Criterion Collection cover.

Best Cinematography:

Wally Pfister, Inception
Russell Boyd, The Way Back
Martin Ruhe, The American
Jeff Cronenweth, The Social Network
Roger F*CKING Deakins, True Grit

Nearly gave Deakins a second nomination for consulting on the look of How To Train Your Dragon, but his work in True Grit is of course beautiful, especially during a sequence at the end. I like Wally Pfister's clean, stately work every time he works with Nolan, but I get the feeling he's destined to be the Randy Newman of this category over the years- always there, never winning. Cronenweth's did fun things with windows and glass doors in The Social Network, plus he had to work digital and make it look like film, and put up with David Fincher.

In non-actual-nominee territory, epic natural vistas in The Way Back and Criterion-level austerity in The American were the most memorable films for me, visually.

Best Costume Design:

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Tron: Legacy
I Am Love
True Grit
Shutter Island

I know, Scott Pilgrim mostly just matched t-shirts to the graphic novel. But also there were crazy stage outfits, and stuff... Kudos to the academy for recognizing the chic character on display in I Am Love, but shame on them for ignoring the classic 50s duds in Shutter Island. Let that be a lesson, Marty- February is not your month.

Best Makeup:

The Way Back
Black Swan
Tron: Legacy

Can't say I ever notice makeup work that much, so I'm glad this is a three-movie kind of deal. TRON had a bunch of people with white faces, right? Hats off to the makeup at the end of Black Swan which does most of the "bad girl" phase of Portman's role for her. But hands down the most impressive work to me was the blistering heatstroke in The Way Back, which had part of me fearing that Saoirse Ronan was actually about to die of thirst.

Best Original Score:

John Powell, How To Train Your Dragon
Hans Zimmer, Inception
Carter Burwell, True Grit
Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross, The Social Network
Daft Punk, Tron: Legacy

I've totally become a film score nerd over the last couple of years- I blame mostly Dave. So that makes this category hard to narrow down: near misses include Desplat's The Ghost Writer and Harry Potter 7.1, Nigel Godrich's bleep-blooping Scott Pilgrim score, Rachel Portman's Never Let Me Go, and James "LCD Soundsystem" Murphy's Greenberg.

But the best of the best include three actual nominees in Powell, Zimmer, and Reznor/Ross, whose work ran the gamut from traditional orchestral bombast (Dragon) to avant garde noise making (Network) to a potent mixture of the two (Inception).

I really enjoyed Carter Burwell's score for True Grit as well, with a small selection of traditional hymns broken apart and repeated as character themes over and over. Too bad the Academy doesn't like borrowing Public Domain material, disqualifying it just like There Will Be Blood a few years back. Finally, I don't think there was any Oscar snub that was easier to predict than Daft Punk, but the awesomeness of that score makes it still hard to take.

Best Original Song:

"Sticks and Stones," Jonsi, How To Train Your Dragon
"We Are Sex Bob-Omb," Beck, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
"Garbage Truck," Beck, SPVTW
"Threshold," Beck, SPVTW
"Black Sheep," Metric, SPVTW

Beyond the wonderful (albeit hard to decipher) song at the end of Dragon from Sigur Ros' frontman, the only songs I can even think of are all from Scott Pilgrim. But I feel pretty confident that I'd like them more than the rest, anyway.

Best Sound Editing/Sound Mixing/Visual Effects:

Inception
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Tron: Legacy
The Social Network
How To Train Your Dragon

I just realized I nominated the same five films for all three of these categories, so this saves space. Four of them are filled with enough action and innovative imagery to justify inclusion (as for Dragon in VFX, insert joke about Avatar here), and I might be biased in favor of The Social Network because I watched all of the special features. But the Winklevoss effect was better than anything in Hereafter, come on. My mom thought they were real twins!

Best Film Editing:

Inception
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
The Social Network
True Grit
Please Give

Inception and Scott Pilgrim earn a place on technical mastery- The Social Network team also had to navigate through hundreds of different takes, which must have been fun. But that movie was expertly paced as well, taking essentially a courtroom drama and making it a propusively narrative with an intricate structure.

True Grit is more of a study in langorous pauses, and catching your breath after instense showdowns. And the way-better-than-The-Kids-Are-All-Right Please Give is a perfect 90 minute film, intellectual comedy done right.

Best Writing - Adapted Screenplay:

Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Coen bros, True Grit
Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini, Winter's Bone
Edgar Wright, Michael Bacall, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
4 people, How To Train Your Dragon

Dragon was mostly written by directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, though the concept and structure existed before they were brought in. But it's a great, heartfelt script that survived the Dreamworks studio's normal "How many McDonald's toys can we get out of this?" mentality.

Wright and Bacall wisely decided to stick with Bryan Lee O'Malley's original words for nearly all of Scott Pilgrim, which worked out nicely when only fans of the graphic novels went to see it, anyway. The three Oscar nominees are pretty obvious choices.

Best Writing - Original Screenplay:

Nicole Holocefner, Please Give
Dan Fogelman, Tangled
Joon-ho Bong, Eun-kyo Park, Mother
Christopher Nolan, Inception
Brian Koppelman, Solitary Man

Before you ask, Disney themselves were pushing Tangled for original, and I'm gonna roll with it since this category had far less that appealed to me than adapted. Besides, do we have the credit the Grimm brothers with every story that has a girl with super-long hair trapped in a tower? Rapunzel itself was adapted anyway. The script itself is clever, fast, and winning.

In one of those Capote/Infamous parralells, there were two films this year that self-referentially commented on Michael Douglas and the characters he usually plays. I didn't see Wall Street 2, but I hear it was a giant mess- Solitary Man I found to be a smart, biting look at the used car salesman persona aura Douglas carries, even if I wasn't over the moon about his performance in it.

Inception in inconceivably going to lose to The King's Speech in this category on Sunday, because apparently juggling five different levels of reality at once is less impressive than "there was a handsome king who had a problem and then it got slightly better." Boo.

Mother was an interesting, involving modern noir, that manages to get you so invested that you don't think about any obvious twists that might be right around the corner.

Best Actor in a Leading Role:

Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island
George Clooney, The American
Mark Wahlberg, The Fighter
Colin Firth, The King's Speech

Okay fine, Colin Firth is pretty great in The King's Speech. That's one out of 12 that makes sense to me. I'm usually not that into DiCaprio's usual stick, which boils down to "THIS IS SERIOUS. LOOK HOW SERIOUS MY FACE IS RIGHT NOW," but it worked in the very dramatic Shutter Island (and made Inception a little less fun than it could've been).

Eisenberg is a revelation in a very non-traditonal leading role, and Mark Wahlberg has been unjustly forgotten as the straight man to Bale and Leo's scenery chewing. And I wish I had seen the artful The American in theaters, for the cinematography yes, but also Clooney's angsty, more vulnerable than normal work.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role:

Matt Damon, True Grit
Andrew Garfield, Never Let Me Go
Andrew Garfield, The Social Network
Ed Harris, The Way Back
John Hawkes, Winter's Bone

That's right, two for upcoming Spider-Man Garfield, for being quiet at the right moments in Network and one profound howl of rage near the end of Never Let Me Go. Harris and Hawkes play badasses just getting by in harsh conditions of various kinds, and Matt Damon is the MVP of True Grit for me since he has to keep a delicate balance between buffoonish antagonist and hero.

Best Actress in a Leading Role:

Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
Catherine Keener, Please Give
Rebecca Hall, Please Give
Tilda Swinton, I Am Love
Hallee Steinfeld, True Grit

Lawrence and Steinfeld have been everywhere this awards season- it's all richly deserved. I don't know how many people saw I Am Love, exactly, but it clearly wasn't enough- can anyone tell me if Swinton's Italian is as good as her performance, though?

And can you tell I really loved Please Give? What does Catherine Keener have to do to get an Oscar people? Be in something other than a comedy? Rebecca Hall, my Frost/Nixon era marriage proposal still stands. Think about it.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role:

Olivia Williams, The Ghost Writer
Amanda Peet, Please Give
Ellen Wong, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Blake Lively, The Town
Keira Knightley, Never Let Me Go

I'm not sure if Blake Lively was that good in The Town or if she just wowwed me nby being so much more dynamic than in her affectless "Gossip Girl" role- but either way, impressive (though she's clearly mailing it in during The Green Lantern trailer).

Peet is aces in Please Give, a caustic, brutally honest character that defys any artificially loud performance tropes. Knightley makes a late run in Never Let Me Go for sympathy after playing a self-involved poser for the entire film that nearly works. Wong is a bundle of energy that stands out in an already hyper film, and Williams makes The Ghost Writer warrant an immediately re-watch to see just how quietly masterful she was.

Best Director:

David Fincher, The Social Network
Christopher Nolan, Inception
Edgar Wright, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit
Debra Granik, Winter's Bone

I think these are all pretty clear cut, from the nominations above. Winter's Bone impressed me in mood and atmosphere, breaking a tie with Holocefner and Please Give for the last spot.

Best Picture:

The Ghost Writer
How To Train Your Dragon
Inception
Please Give
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
The Social Network
TRON: Legacy
True Grit
The Way Back
Winter's Bone

Sorry, The Town. Too bad, Shutter Island. If only you had laser-disc battles too, Never Let Me Go. Seriously, it was tough to get down to ten, despite everyone else on the internet claiming this was a week year. They can't all be 2007, folks, don't get greedy.

In a vaccuum, would I have been nicer to The King's Speech? Ehh, maybe. If I wasn't an Oscar fanatic, I probably wouldn't have bothered with it in the first place. I also just sort of enjoyed The Fighter and Black Swan, which ended up with one nomination apiece. I've got a big treatise on Best Picture in the works to explain all this.

Totals-

Scott Pilgrim- 14 (in 11 categories)
The Social Network- 11
Inception- 10
True Grit- 9
How To Train Your Dragon- 8
TRON: Legacy- 8
Please Give- 6 (in 5 categories)
Winter's Bone- 5
The Way Back- 4
Ghost Writer- 3
I Am Love- 3
Never Let Me Go- 2
Shutter Island- 2
Tangled- 2
The American- 2
Black Swan- 1
The Fighter- 1
Toy Story 3- 1
The Town- 1
The King's Speech- 1
The Town- 1
Solitary Man- 1
Mother- 1
The Illusionist- 1

Oscar Week, Day 2: More Techs

2011-02-21T12:00:00.000-06:00

Today, we'll look at some of the artier tech awards, and of course we'll also form some definite opinions that will turn out to be way off!

Best Makeup

Barney's Version- Adrien Morot (0/0)
The Way Back- Edouard F. Henriques (0/2), Greg Funk (0/0), Yolanda Toussieng (2/3)
The Wolfman- Rick Baker(6/11), Dave Elsey (0/1)

Research for this category revealed a fun fact: there is an Oscar-winning makeup artist (Braveheart) named 'Peter Frampton'! I think that must have an effect on that guy's life that is the exact opposite of the fictional 'Michael Bolton' in Office Space.

Anyhow- we meet again, Rick Baker. Will your flashy, more-is-more approach to hair and claws beat out two films that no one has seen? Of course it will.

Though the blistering heat-stroke of The Way Back (which I saw) and aging effects in Barney's Version (which I didn't) may be fine enough, Baker is this category's only superstar- and he took the inaugural win in it for An American Werewolf in London, besides.

Best Art Direction

Alice in Wonderland- Robert Stromberg (1/2), Karen O'Hara (0/1)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1- Stuart Craig (3/8), Stephenie McMillan (1/3)
Inception Guy Hendrix Dyas, Larry Dias, Douglas A. Mowat (all 0/0)
The King's Speech- Eve Stewart (0/1), Judy Farr (0/0)
True Grit- Jess Gonchor (0/0), Nancy Haigh (1/5)

It would seem that the heavyweights in this category are the Harry Potter team, but Oscar logic dictates that they will have to wait for the last film in the series to add another win (so mark that in for next year).

Look for The King's Speech to pick this up on its way to a near-sweep. True Grit feels like the only possible spoiler to me, if voters are feeling nostalgic for America instead of Britain.

Best Costume Design

Alice in Wonderland- Colleen Atwood (2/8)
I Am Love- Antonella Cannarozzi (0/0)
The King's Speech- Jenny Beavan (1/8)
The Tempest- Sandy Powell (3/8)
True Grit- Mary Zophres (0/0)

Three heavyweights in this category, but do we even need to think about it? If there's a category that loves British royalty movies even more than the Academy at large, it's this one, so put another in The King's Speech column. True Grit seems like the potential spoiler here as well, mostly because recent winners Atwood and Powell both worked on critically frowned-upon films.

Best Animated Feature

How To Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
Toy Story 3

Included here with little fanfare because there's nothing left to say about Pixar and its dominance. Hopefully the upcoming Cars 2 will be terrible and we can all take glee in how they've sold out.

Coming up later today: Score and Song, which I always have a lot to say about.

Oscar Week Begins!

2011-02-20T12:00:00.001-06:00

Oscar prognosticating is the bread and butter here at Kinematoscope, but the late-game reversal of fortune in the race has sapped my enthusiasm for it this year.

So instead of the month-long Oscarthon, we'll have an abbreviated Oscar week, with some longer posts leading up to the ceremony. Today, some technical awards!

Best Sound Editing

Inception- Richard King (2/3)
Toy Story 3- Tom Myers (0/2), Michael Silvers (1/5)
TRON: Legacy- Gwendolyn Yates Whittle (0/1), Addison Teague (0/0)
True Grit- Skip Lievsay (0/3), Craig Berkey (0/2)
Unstoppable- Mark Stoeckinger (0/2)

Since it bears repeating every year, this category pertains to the creation of sound effects, mostly. So it's the guys making footsteps on foley stages and recording elephants to stand in for aliens, and so on. The consensus seems to be that any time there's an actiony blockbuster with critical respect, it takes it- last year The Hurt Locker broke this rule, but since Inception fits the bill and is still a huge underdog for other awards, it seems like an easy walk for their soundpeople this year.

I can't argue- they did have to decide what Paris folding in on itself would sound like, after all. Repeat viewings make the scene where everything explodes for no reason seem like shameless Tech-baiting, as well.

Best Sound Mixing

Inception- Lora Hirschberg (0/1), Gary Rizzo (0/2), Ed Novick (0/2)
The King's Speech- Paul Hamblin (0/0), Martin Jensen (0/0), John Midgley (0/1)
Salt- Jeffrey J. Haboush (0/1), William Sarokin (0/0), Scott Millan (4/7), Greg P. Russell (0/13)
The Social Network- Ren Klyce (0/2), David Parker (2/5), Michael Semanick (2/7), Mark Weingarten (0/1)
True Grit- Skip Lievsay (0/3), Craig Berkey (0/2), Greg Orloff (1/2), Peter Kurland (0/2)

The Susan Lucci of the season is Salt's Greg P. Russell, now on his fourteenth nomination without a trophy to show for it- he was partners for a long time with current record holder Kevin O'Connell (0/20). But no one's giving Salt an Oscar, get real- it's one of the few nominees for anything that I haven't seen, because it sounds ridiculous (if competently made).

Inception looks primed to win here as well- bear in mind I've gotten both of the sound categories wrong for three straight years, though. Mixing, in particular, seems harder to predict, because the two front runners for Best Picture have elbowed their way into the field. I can think of no compelling argument for The King's Speech, sonically, but The Social Network has the much heralded scene in which Eisenberg and Timberlake have to shout a long, complex conversation over the din of a nightclub (see above). That could draw some votes.

Best Visual Effects

Alice In Wonderland- Ken Ralston (4/6), David Schaub (0/0), Carey Villegas (0/0), Sean Phillips (0/0)
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows: Pt 1- Tim Burke (1/2), John Richardson (1/4), Christian Manz (0/0), Nicolas Aithadi (0/0)
Hereafter- Michael Owens (0/0), Bryan Grill (0/0), Stephan Trojansky (0/0), Joe Farrell (0/0)
Inception- Chris Corbould (0/1), Andrew Lockley (0/0), Pete Bebb (0/0), Paul J. Franklin (0/1)
Iron Man 2- Janek Sirrs (1/1), Ben Snow (0/3), Ged Wright (0/0), Daniel Sudick (0/3)

I'm not sure if the expansion to five nominees will make this category easier or harder to predict. In any case, recent history has provided us with one slam-dunk nominee to choose every year, except for the year they reminded us that quantity does not equal quality by dismissing Transformers. This year the showiest, largest effects picture is also the lone BP nominee, so Inception will take this one easily- my favorite part is that the most memorable effect, in this age of CGI trickery, was the old-school spinning hallway fight, achieved by simply rotating the entire set.

So mark this one down in pen, not pencil. Inception is on pace for a sweep! Also, I highly recommend the VFX featurette embedded above for the criminally-snubbed TRON: Legacy, because not only is it neat, but it eschews the usual talking heads and the "Let's Explain What The Film's About, Even Though Anyone Who Cares Enough To Watch This Already Knows" nonsense common to featurettes.

Best Documentary Feature

Exit Through the Gift Shop
GasLand
Inside Job
Restrepo
Waste Land

Best Foreign Film

Biutiful
Dogtooth
In a Better World
Incendies
Outside the Law

These will be the only two categories in which I haven't seen all or most of the nominees, because I just don't watch enough documentaries and the foreign films take forever to get here. As notable as Banksy's street-art campaign in LA for Gift Shop has been, I'm betting on the timelier and indisputably not staged Inside Job to take it. Maybe the director will also wear a gorilla mask, just 'cause?

And Foreign? Who knows? In years of going on the record, I've only gotten this category right once, and that was on an easy, Holocaust-based call (The Counterfeiters). I feel pretty confident that the only one I have seen, Dogtooth, is too crazy to win, and also that Biutiful will lose simply for being the recognizable one that we all expect. Susanne Bier's In a Better World will also be a popular choice, given her name recognition, so nay on that. I'm going with Outside The Law- it's a period piece, which breaks the tie with Incendies.

Thus concludes part one. Stay tuned for more predictions. I promise not to pick with my heart this year.

IMDB #158 The Bourne Ultimatum

2011-02-14T10:00:00.000-06:00

A while ago I tried to read Robert Ludlum classic The Bourne Identity, but compared to the film of the same name I found it dryer than dry. I needed a glass of water after three pages.

Instead, let's talk about the second followup to the film adaptation, 2008's The Bourne Ultimatum.

The Key Players:

Director Paul Greengrass took some time out from dramatizing important historical events like the Bogside Masssacre (Bloody Sunday) and 9/11 (United 93) to make the second and third Bourne movies, taking over from Doug Liman.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Matt Damon makes his second appearance on the countdown, limiting himself to acting this time.

Triple oscar nominee Joan Allen (Nixon, The Crucible, The Contender) and teen Shakespearian Julia Stiles (10 Things I Hate About You, O, the Ethan Hawke Hamlet that wasn't as bad as you think) both return from Supremacy to show us the CIA has a conscience.

Meanwhile, character actor David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck, also he was totally Kim Basinger's pimp in L.A. Confidential you guys) and familiar southern gentleman Albert Finney play the ruthless CIA bad guys.

Click for More...

The Story:

One suspects a "PREVIOUSLY, ON THE BOURNE SAGA" style highlight reel might be necessary, but it isn't. We start en media res as Bourne (Damon) runs from Russian police (I believe right after finally killing the dude that killed Marie in Supremacy). Even though he's limping, he ducks most of them, and gets the drop on two that follow him into a janitor's closet. "Don't kill me." One of them pleads.

"My argument is not with you," Bourne responds- he's begun to have flashbacks to his initial indoctrination into the supersoldier program (just in time for a third film!).

Sometime later he goes to London to track down a journalist for The Guardian that's mentioned 'Jason Bourne' in an article or two. Of course this journalist has also caught the attention of the CIA (chiefly David Strathairn's ruthless Deputy Director Noah Vosen). Despite Jason Bourne, smartest man in the world, and his clever dodging tactics, the journo ends up dead at the hands of a CIA sniper- though Bourne takes his notes before getting away.

Bourne tracks the CIA leak that was speaking to the dead guy to Madrid (Vosen and co. right behind him), and makes an unlikely ally in Nicky Parsons (Stiles). They follow the leak to Tangiers, Morrocco, and a crazy chase ensues to stop another CIA "asset" from killing the guy.

But then he blows up. Sensing a pattern here? After being forced to yet again kill another supersoldier just like himself in order to survive, Bourne sends Nicky on the run and takes the fight home to America.

The Artistry:

I was interested to turn a critical eye on the third Bourne movie- even though it's by far the most critically revered of the series, it's still a pretty straightforward action movie. What did it do any better than the first two?

The first half of Ultimatum in particular, in which Big Bad CIA dude Strathairn has the upper hand and Bourne spends a lot of time and energy trying to talk to two dudes who promptly get killed, might be a labor to watch.

But the first big sequence, involving a sniper, security cameras, and a cleverly placed pre-paid cellphone, is still riveting cinema- excellently staged and paced, plus the cellphone bit is just clever (and if I had a lot of money to waste on phones I would do it to strangers all the time). The chase through Madrid, however, is kind of a bore, since it consists mainly of people staring at maps on computer screens and a bafflingly naieve guy that we know is about ot explode.

But it doesn't take that long, and the Bourne brand has always been about delaying answers with well-made action setpieces. Plus, instead of regrouping after Bourne is foiled again, Ultimatum moves headlong into a stunning pursuit of the Evil Agent guy through the streets to keep him from killing Nicki.

His eventual takedown of the rival assassin, Desh, is punctuated by my favorite close-quarters weapon of the series (a book!) and that famous shot where the camera follows Bourne as he jumps from a rooftop, through a window across the alley.

The Bourne Ultimatum reaches real heights with that sequence, taking the raw energy and realism of the prior films and ratcheting everying up a few notches. The entire film contains several intentional homages to the previous two (I didn't realize we were so sentimental about them)- wikipedia has the full list.

You almost don't ever need to see those two again- but just almost. Supremacy of course began with the shocking death of Bourne's girlfriend Marie, and Greengrass and Gilroy make the wise choice to have that death still reverberate strongly- Damon plays the pain and remorse well, and it's a welcome additional motivation for the character, since 'who am I?' is getting a little old at this point.

Joan Allen throws a welcome wrench in the formula as well, since Bourne finally has an ally on the inside. This leads to a brilliant endgame...

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

In a brilliant retconning of the closing scene of Supremacy, Bourne calls the only CIA stooge with a conscience, Pam Landy (Allen), who covertly passes him the address of the supersecret training facility. He tells her to meet him in the park, then strolls into Vosen's office while the entire teams goes there to intercept him.

He finally gets to the final showdown with Finney, the brains of the whole operation, who reveals the somewhat-shocking truth: Bourne volunteered for the program by shooting an anonymous man in the head, just because they told him to.

Although it's clear that he does so after a fair amount of psyche-breaking-down type conditioning, it's just as clear that he does it willingly. The lesson here, just like in Total Recall, is that sometimes wiping your memory can make you a better person.

Bourne decides not to kill Finney, and escapes to the roof. There he is confronted by another CIA assassin that he spared earlier, who spares him in turn. Vosen gets a cheap shot in as Bourne jumps into the East River. I bet you can guess if he dies or not.

Also Landy faxes some documents somewhere and the bad dudes go on trial for being jerks, or something. Hooray!

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Slightly higher. It serves nicely as a summation of the whole series which saves us all a lot of time in the long run.

The Legacy:

Well it won three Oscars, and I guess there's going to be a Jason Bourne-less fourth movie (directed by Tony Gilroy). So that's something.

The Bourne series on the whole had an effect on the overall grittiness of the action genre in the last decade, exemplified best by James Bond's transformation from a cufflink-adjusting eyebrow raiser (Die Another Day) to a badass that strangled people to death in men's restrooms (Casino Royale).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Because it's fun, a side by side of the recreated scene from Supremacy.

Leftover Thoughts:

-Also it's strongly implied that Nicki knew Bourne (nee Jason Webb) intimately before he became a super soldier and lost his memory, but it's quickly moved past and never revisted, which I liked.

-Julia Stiles' wordless reaction after Bourne kills Desh is some great acting. It boggles me that she's spent so much of her career choosing terrible scripts.

-Rumor has it that Tom Stoppard did an uncredited polish on the script, further proof that he is awesome.

Coming Up...

157. The Big Sleep

156. Ben-Hur

155. The Manchurian Candidate

Nomination Reaction! Finding the right amount of RAGE!

2011-01-25T23:37:00.005-06:00

I had a revelation today- following the Oscar race like I do means the only possible reaction I can have to the annual nominee announcements is anger.

For example, I long expected that Daft Punk's score for TRON wouldn't come anywhere near a nomination, so when it didn't, in fact, get one I felt nothing. Even though that score is hands down my favorite score of the year, and made its film infinitely better.

I didn't expect, as nearly everyone didn't, Christopher Nolan to get the shaft AGAIN, and Inception to get further dissed in the Editing category. This is because he's been included by the guild, the BAFTAs, virtually every awards-type-thing that has space for five directors has had the same five, but the Academy up and decided the Coen brothers were better.

Now, I didn't expect Inception to win for Director, or Editing, so it really is pretty meaningless news, but I didn't see it coming, so I was mad.

But just because AMPAS is trying to goad Nolan into breaking down and making a Holocaust movie, we shouldn't take their capricious decisions to heart- they don't mean anything, not when films mean something to us.

It's all what we make of it. In that spirit, things that were great about the announcements:

-Winter's Bone gets four nominations! John Hawkes as well, officially moving him past 'Hey It's That Guy!' status, which is long overdue.

-I did enjoy True Grit quite a whole lot, so its somewhat surprising 10 nominations is pretty cool, even coming at Inception's expense. I'm starting to think that this is finally cinematographer Roger F*cking Deakins' year.

-THERE IS AN ANIMATED SHORT NOMINATED CALLED 'THE LOST THING' BY SHAUN TAN! THIS IS THE REASON CAPSLOCK WAS INVENTED!

-Even without Daft Punk, the score category has three of my faves: John Powell's stirring How To Train Your Dragon work, Hans Zimmer frantic Inception strings, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' progessive, amazing soundscapes for The Social Network.

-Even though it's been cleaning up to this point, the love for The Social Network is still gratifying, with eight nominations total. Except for the two supporting categories, it'll be going toe-to-toe with The King's Speech come Oscar day (contemporary dramas never get considered for Costumes or Art Direction, so those don't count as an advantage).

Finally, how did I do? Middling to well, I reckon. 79% overall (75/95), 85% in the Big Eight categories (38/45). The only categories in which I predicted every nominee were Best Supporting Actress (which everyone got) and Animated Film (which also wasn't that hard).

Early predictions for Oscar Sunday- it looks bleak now, but I just can't see The Social Network losing, not after the run it's had. It pulls in 5 trophies (Picture, Director, Ad. Screenplay, Editing, and Score) to The King's Speech's 3 or 4 (Actor, Or. Screen, and Art Direction for sure, maybe Costume). The Social Network could even take home Sound Mixing, too, since the Oscars are hating on Inception so much. True Grit for Cinematography, I feel good about it in costume for some reason, and Hailee Steinfeld is the only acting nominee with a shot at upsetting the frontrunner (Leo). Firth, Portman, and Bale are locked in. Toy Story 3 already got the Animated Oscar in the mail, and Randy Newman wins another Original song Oscar.

Is that everything? Oh, Inside Job for documentary and Inception consoles itself with Sound Editing and Visual Effects.

Also Foreign Film will go to something I don't pick. You heard it here first!

Oscar Nominee Predictions 2011!

2011-01-24T10:00:00.003-06:00

Nominations are out tomorrow? Totally snuck up on me this year. Categories not appearing in this list: All three short films, doc feature, foreign film. Didn't see any of 'em.

Sound Mixing:

127 Hours
Black Swan
Inception
The Social Network
Tron: Legacy

Sound Editing:

127 Hours
Black Swan
Inception
Toy Story 3
Tron: Legacy

I used to think I was good at these categories, then I just realized I was overly proud of myself for being able to tell between them.

Makeup:

Alice In Wonderland
The Way Back
The Wolfman

It seems like it would be easy to pick three out of seven finalists, but I can never call makeup correctly. I looked at the last ten years, and creature-features are pretty consistently nominated, hence The Wolfman. Alice's primary marketing strategy early on was to go "Hey! Look at all the makeup Johnny Depp's wearing! IT IS A LOT OF MAKEUP DON'T YOU THINK?" And there has to be a respectable choice to actually give the award to, which my gut is telling me is The Way Back remarkable sun-bleached and dehydrated faces.

Original Song:

“You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” from Burlesque
“If I Rise” from 127 Hours
“I See the Light” from Tangled
“We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3
“Shine” from Waiting for Superman

Is it lazy to pick the most obvious one? Probably. But everytime I put a lot of research, trying to listen to as many of the 60ish songs that I can, I get burned by an unpredictable, random slate of nominees. So I feel safe that at least three of these end up vying for the prize: Alan Mencken (Tangled) and Randy Newman (TS3) are returning Disney-winners, A. R. Rahman (127 Hours) of course won with a Slumdog Millionaire song, Cher is Cher I figure (no matter how bad the film is), and the last Davis Guggenheim documentary (An Inconvenient Truth) made Melissa Etheridge an Oscar winner, so why not his new one?

Original Score:

Alexandre Desplat, The King's Speech
Danny Elfman, Alice In Wonderland
John Powell, How To Train Your Dragon
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network
Hans Zimmer, Inception

Whither Daft Punk, huh? Whither?!

Visual Effects:

Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
Inception
Iron Man 2
TRON Legacy

They already narrowed this field down to seven, despite expanding the field to five. So you just have to pick the two that'll miss, in this case Hereafter (one good tsunami, not musch else) and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World- because the Academy is a noted enemy of fun.

Art Direction:

Alice in Wonderland
Black Swan
Inception
The King’s Speech
True Grit

Why did the guilds love Alice in Wonderland so much if it was so terrible? True Grit finally gets some respect here at least.

Costumes:

Alice In Wonderland
Black Swan
The King's Speech
The Tempest
True Grit

When Julie Taymour does Shakespeare it always shows up somewhere, even if it's a trainwreck. The other four are foregone conclusions.

Cinematography:

Russell Boyd, The Way Back
Danny Cohen, The King's Speech
Roger F*CKING Deakins, True Grit
Matthew Libitique, Black Swan
Wally Pfister, Inception

Gut feeling on Boyd sneaking in, though it might just be because I saw it three days ago. Pretty sure that's Deakins' legal middle name, by the way.

Editing, Director:

Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The King's Speech
The Social Network

Why waste space if the five 'real' Best Picture nominees are going to clean house in these two as well? Those directors would be mssrs. Aronofsky, Russell, Nolan, Hooper, and Fincher.

Animated Film:

How To Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
Toy Story 3

The need for 16 entries to get five nominees seems dumb- why not just go with whatever gets enough votes? Then we'd have room for the fourth deserving entry, Tangled.

Supporting Actress:

Amy Adams, The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech
Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom

I think I read that the powers that be have decided Steinfeld is too young to be a lead actress, history notwithstanding. Otherwise, Adams might drop out.

Supporting Actor:

Christian Bale, The Fighter
Andrew Garfield, The Social Network
Jeremy Renner, The Town
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech

Sorry, La Boeuf (Matt Damon), but Garfield deserves it.

Lead Actress:

Annette Benning, The Kids Are All Right
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
Julianna Moore, The Kids Are All Right
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

Nicole Kidman may have pushed out Williams with a late run in Rabbit Hole, but I just can't take her off the list.

Lead Actor:

Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
James Franco, 127 Hours
Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine

Again, lots of people are predicting that Gosling will lose out to Robert Duvall in Get Low playing an Old Guy Who Is Old And Stuff, but I just don't see it.

Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay:

The Social Network
The Town
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

Best Picture, Original Screenplay:

Black Swan
Inception
The Fighter
The King's Speech
The Kids Are All Right

Again, why wast column space when our ten BP nominees are evenly split into screenplay groups? 127 Hours has just been fading too far too quickly for me to feel better about it than The Town or Winter's Bone. The Ghost Writer is probably better than three or four of these movies, but will be shut out (unless is sneaks into score or something). Shutter Island's February-release strategy worked out better for the box offic than the awards chances. And I really believe that with a real fall release pattern instead of a last minute "Oh yeah, did that come out?" dumpoff, The Way Back could have won enough voters over.

Totals:

The King's Speech- 11
Black Swan, Inception- 10
The Social Network- 8
The Fighter- 7
True Grit, The Kids Are All Right, Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3- 5
127 Hours- 4
The Town, Winter's Bone, Tron: Legacy- 3
Blue Valentine, The Way Back, How To Train Your Dragon- 2
A Bunch Of Other Stuff- 1

This Week In Actual Movie Taglines

2011-01-21T10:00:00.001-06:00

No Strings Attached

Actual tagline: Friendship has its benefits.

This year we get not one, but two entries in the burgeoning subgenre of Former 'That 70s Show' Stars Having Casual Sex. Who knew there was such a market for such a thing.

Anyway, we get the Natalie Portman-Ashton Kutcher version in January, and the Mila Kunis-Justin Timberlake one in July.

Just to add to the confusion we'll all surely have years from now remembering which is which, No Strings Attached went with a tagline that brings the competing film's title, Friends With Benefits to mind.

Which one will be better? Who can say? No Strings Attached does boast Ivan Reitman as director, although he hasn't made a good film since... Dave, in 1993? I would watch Dave if it came up on cable. Friends With Benefits has Will Gluck, of the surprisingly winning Easy A, behind the lens.

The Way Back

Actual tagline: Their escape was just the beginning

New Peter Weir movie! And it comes out on Friday? In over 600 theaters? Amazing.

Why has Weir gone all Terrence Malick on us? He worked pretty regularly until the 90s- in 1972 he has five credits to his name. Now it'll be five-plus years until we hear from him again.

Oh, the tagline: eh. Thanks for hammering home the plot, but it is called 'The Way Back,' after all. I wonder more about the change from the title of the book, The Long Walk- I suppose that didn't sound terribly exciting.

But hey, something I wanna see. In January!

IMDB #159 Groundhog Day

2011-01-20T12:00:00.000-06:00

"Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today."

"That's right woodchuck-chuckers, it's GROUNDHOG DAY!"

The hilarious, seminal, mind-bending (gently, but still) 1993 classic comedy is today's subject on the countdown- it's funny: every time I approach a classic movie hesitantly, because what could I possibly have to say about a movie so ubiquitous and beloved, I find myself pondering deeper questions and writing even more than usual.

It bodes well for the future of the countdown, I would say. In any case, let's do this.

The Key Players:

Ivan Reitman's fame as a director (Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation, Analyze This) is arguably equal to his fame as Egon from Ghostbusters one and two.

Bill Murray (whom we saw briefly once already) rose to national prominence as a wild man on "Saturday Night Live" and in Meatballs, Stripes, and Caddyshack. And he's had a resurgent decade on the strength of his world weary performances in Lost In Translation, Rushmore, and The Life Aquatic. But really, didn't that essential "Bill Murray" persona already exist in an earlier form in his 90s hits like Scrooged and Groundhog Day anyway? Arguably even his unprofessional parapsychologist in Ghostbusters used nihilistic humor to mark an inner sadness. There's a case to be made here, but we don't have the time or space.

Remember Andie McDowell? She used Steven Soderbergh's breakout hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape as a springboard to co-headlining a bunch of romantic comedies like Green Card and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Just as Murray can be seen embracing his age in an ironic way, she's a spokeperson for L'Oreal these days that would like you to know you can postpone it.

Chris Elliott and character actor Stephen Tobolowsky appear in support.

Click for More...

The Story:

A sci-fi premise with none of the expository trappings you'd expect, Groundhog Day stars Murray as a vain, cranky Pittsburgh tv weatherman assigned to cover the Groundhog Day ceremonies in Puxatawney, PA for the fourth year in a row.

He drives out the night before with a wise-cracking cameraman (Elliott) and his new producer (McDowell), and wakes up a miserable day of well-beneath-his-taste small town pleasantries- he's even trapped in town for an extra night by a blizzard just out of town, the same blizzard he predicted would miss the area altogether.

He goes to bed, he wakes up to the same song ("I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher), same radio dj patter as above. He soon finds he's repeating Groundhog Day, all over again, but nobody else seems to remember doing it all before. Every time he goes to bed, he wakes up to the same clock, the same song, the same town, the same day.

The Artistry:

Groundhog Day started out as a very different kind of movie. In the first week of shooting, some of the most expensive scenes were produced- Murray's character, realizing that there were no consequences to any of his actions, gets his hair cut into a mohawk, and destroys his room at a bed and breakfast with a chainsaw, only to wake up and have everything restored.

Harold Ramis, after the production spent thousands on mohawk hairpieces, duplicates of destroyed props, and scenery restoration, took a look at the footage, decided 'nope', and tossed it out.

Instead, after the second time through the fateful day, a visibly shaken and confused Murray goes to bed, but breaks a pencil and puts it on the nightstand before falling asleep. 6:00 AM, and the pencil's whole again, and this quiet moment (in place of an over-the-top mohawk/chainsaw test) sets the character down a more existential path.

How do we tell the difference between things we want and things we need? If everything in our day to day routines was taken out of the equation, how would we choose to pass the time? What would give us purpose?

This is what Groundhog Day asks, or at least specifically asks Murray's Phil Connors. He first moves from confusion to a sort of glee at living without repurcussions (seducing a local woman, robbing a bank) to a single-minded pursuit of Rita, his kind-hearted producer.

The reasons for this are unclear, other than Rita being one of the constant presences in his "day" (no matter what he chooses to do, she'll at least seek him out to see why he blew off reporting the groundhog ceremony) and being totally early-90s-hot. A masterpiece of editing follows in which, bit by bit, he learns little things about her and treats her eventually to a "perfect" evening, but no matter how many times he orders her favorite drink, recites French poetry, and says cliche things about wanting children, he's usually met with a slap in the face.

Even with an eternity to smooth it out, trying too hard isn't the answer. A depression sets in, where Phil attempts many times to commit suicide (highlighted by the film's comic apex, the car chase with Phil the groundhog)- given the timing, it seems brought on by his inability to score Rita, but it's really the last vestige of a man with everything stripped away- even when it's funny, Murray's trademark hangdog expression is perfect for this sort of despair.

The real beauty of Groudhog Day is in the final third, when Phil finds purpose by helping the townsfolk and learning various skills (ice-sculpting, classical and jazz piano) since he has the time. Even as he acknowledges his limits when he's unable to save the old homeless man, Phil learns that our lives are defined by the idle hours we pass with ourselves as well as our impact on the community around us, even one that doesn't remember you.

What makes the film a classic is that this Frank Capra-like life lesson is more or less a backdrop to hilarious scene after hilarious scene. The comic timing of the most depressing and uplifting elements of Groundhog Day prevent it from even approaching maudlin. One of my favorite examples is Phil's eloquent, expressive speech that capitvates the entire crowd by the last "day": the cut right into the middle of the scene elicits the biggest laugh from me, every time.

Murray's performance is of course integral to the film and well realized but McDowell has an important torch to carry as well. She has to be tolerant enough of Murray's crass persona in the beginning to sell falling for him later, and naive enough not to doubt his sudden (to her) transformation for too long. It helps that her character has just met Phil. Chris Elliott meanwhile plays a pretty good Chris Elliott, just like he does in guest appearance on every other sitcom in the last decade.

It's hard to really judge the cast- I know their parts so well and saw this movie first so long ago that they're nearly actual people in my mind. They exist in a Punxatawney that grows more familiar with each repetition, populated by the sort of regular, midwestern folk that I know well (at least cinematically).

Groundhog Day is an allegory for the filmmaking process as well. Take after take after take, all to find which one has the spirit, the feel that the picture needs. The editing determines the resulting product just as our decisions determine the outcomes of our days.

As mentioned up top, with the wrong choices, Groundhog Day could have become a much different film: a funny one, sure ("Oh that crazy Bill Murray!"), but more run-of-the-mill funny than deep-thinking funny.

If I have one, minor critique of the film it would be the too-obvious soundtrack choices, like Ray Charles' "You Don't Know Me" to the montage of Phil's failed attempts at Rita (because he, like, totally doesn't really know her, get it?), or "Weatherman" by Delbert McClinton.

Finally, I can't say enough about the decision not to explain the basic premise: apparently an early version of the screenplay had a gypsy curse or some such thing. Explaining it in any fashion would make the movie something else entirely- trying to ground it in any real-world or other-worldly phenomenon would make it cheaper somehow, and less universal.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

After an indeterminate amount of Groundhog Days (Ramis estimates as much as 40 years' worth), Phil appreciates life, wows the entire town and Rita on one especially fine day that culminates in Rita winning his company in a bachelor auction.

The next morning, the alarm goes off, and "I Got You Babe" plays...but it's a fakeout, as Rita shuts off the alarm and Phil freaks out.

It's a new day, and they run off in the snow to the tunes of "Almost Like Being In Love." Aw.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

"If you gotta shoot, aim high. I don't wanna hit the groundhog."

The real question here is where the F%&%^ is Ghostbusters, countdown voters? For all my meaningful bluster you just read, sometimes funny is just funny, too.

The Legacy:

This would win the BAFTA for best original screenplay, but go largely unrecognized otherwise. Today it's revered as one of the most spiritual films of our time by Buddhists and Catholics alike, already preserved in the NFR, and the title is instant shorthand for the time-loop concept, or any unpleasant, recurring situation (especially in the military, for some reason).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

"There is no way that this winter is ever going to end, as long as this groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any other way out. He's gotta be stopped....And I have to stop him."

Leftover Thoughts:

-Stephen Tobolowsky, AKA annoying insurance salesman Ned Ryerson, has an excellent podcast at Slashfilm- the episode where he reminsces about Groundhog Day was an immense help in writing this article.

-Question: didn't he ever try and stay up until six the next morning? I might not be yet in my middle age, but how hard is it to stay awake 24 hours if the very nature of TIME AND THE UNIVERSE is at stake? Just a thought. He probably would just instantly be back in bed at 6 on Groundhog Day again at that instant, anyway, since not even his death breaks the cycle.

-"I don't know, you're a producer: think of something!"

-"What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?"

-A good metaphor for how this film affects me is the look on the face of the dude on the stairs when Murray recites some Coleridge, kisses him on both cheeks, and departs with a pleasant "Ciao!"

-The day this is posting we're expecting -25 degree sind chills here in Milwaukee, which seems appropriate.

Coming Up...

158. The Bourne Ultimatum

157. The Big Sleep

156. Ben-Hur

This Week In Actual Movie Taglines

2011-01-14T10:00:00.001-06:00

Remember this? No? Well, it's back anyway.

Season Of The Witch

Actual tagline: Not all souls can be saved.

It's hard not to think that we're referring to Nicolas Cage's soul, instead of witches. You should go listen to the second episode of Paul Scheer's new podcast, How Did This Get Made?, which takes on this movie and finds it to be unsurprisingly terrible.

Mostly I wonder if the title is a reference to the Donovan song from 1966. Is that a phrase ever used before that point? Are witches more prevalent during a particular season of the year (autumn, I would assume)?

Country Strong

Actual tagline: It doesn't matter where you've been as long as you come back strong.

Meh. The placement above the title makes the rhythm weird- "...come back strong. (pause) Country Strong." If you don't care about spoilers, go here and prepare to be flabbergasted. I would never have guessed that this seemingly fluffy Lifetime version of Crazy Heart would draw legit Black Swan comparisons.

I heard one of the songs from this movie playing over the PA in a Borders books and it was stuck in my head the rest of the night.

The Dilemma

Actual tagline: The Truth Hurts.

OR: A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing.

OR: Two best friends. Nothing could come between them... or could it?

Look, I'm not a fool. I understand that Kevin James/Vince Vaughan movies where people fall down a lot and call things 'gay' (but not in a homophobic way, at all, totally) exist because there's a market for That Sort Of Thing.

But why are we dragging Ron Howard into this. Why is a Ron Howard movie of any sort coming out in January? I know he's not Terrance Mallick or anything, but still.

Anyway, the tags seem to all think that one man seeing his best friend's wife having an affair is hilarious, when in reality it would just be a miserable situation for all involved. The movie, or at least the trailers for it, seem to acknowledge this and go for laughs based entirely on pratfalls, Queen Latifah busy Latifah-ing it up, and Vince Vaughan's character having painful urination. Stay classy, Ron Howard! This should make a good triple feature with Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon!

The Green Hornet

Actual tagline: Breaking the law to protect it.

Yes, I guess that's what all viglantes do? Thanks for reminding us of the concept.

Speaking of beloved directors whoring themselves out, this is directed by Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the movie I would blurt out if you had a gun to my head and for some reason demanded I name my favorite film of all time. With Rogen co-writing and co-producing, it might actually be okay, but I still wouldn't have predicted Gondry to helm a film that should properly be referred to with "in 3D" at the end of its title.

IMDB #160 The Graduate

2011-01-13T10:00:00.001-06:00

Are there any movies that make going to college seem like a good idea? So much is made of the post-undergrad malaise there's nearly an entire subgenre, from last year's Tiny Furniture to Noah Baumbach's classic Kicking and Screaming. It even has it's own flops, like Post-Grad.

But 1967's The Graduate might have been the original film to imply that higher education doesn't necessarily elevate your life.

The Key Players:

Our second visit with Mike Nichols, directing his second film. How ridiculous is it that he opened with Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, back to back?

Dustin Hoffman would launch an iconic career playing oddballs and eccentrics. To this day he remains arguably cinema's most memorable cross-dresser (Tootsie), autistic (Rain Man), male divorcée (Kramer vs. Kramer), and of course Wonder Emporium proprietor.

Anne Bancroft's role as Mrs. Robinson would overshadow her otherwise lauded career, consisting of multiple other nominations and a breakthrough Oscar for The Miracle Worker, in a role she originated on Broadway. Katherine Ross (The Stepford Wives) may look vaguely familiar to my generation since she had a wonderful small part as Donnie Darko's therapist.

Click for More...

The Story:

Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman), a dead-eyed, mystified recent college grad arrives home. His well-to-do parents throw him a party, attended by his parents' uppity bourgeois friends, all of them full of congratulations and vague advice for the future.

Benjamin is beset by worry about said future, but before he can think about it he's seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Bancroft), the wife of his father's business partner- she bullies him into driving her home from the party, strips down and traps him briefly in her bedroom. Though it doesn't take- Benjamin flees downstairs, and makes a hasty, flopsweat-filled exit after sharing an awkward drink with the just returned Mr. Robinson- he soon calls her up to start a wordless, summer long affair at a hotel.

Even the most basic attempts at small talk with Mrs. Robinson fail, though she does talk at length about one thing: she forbids him from seeing her daughter, Elaine (Ross). So naturally Benjamin falls in love with her.

Even after it's all out in the open, Benjamin feels himself drawn to the younger Robinson woman, so he announces his intention to marry Elaine to his parents, and follows her on a fool's quest to Berkeley.

The Artistry:

Much like Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate spoke to a large audience on the cusp of a revolution. And while I couldn't really fathom why so many disillusioned youth would latch on to Beatty and Dunaway's stylish but empty posturing as a cultural moment, I can see why Hoffman's blank cipher, unmoored and aimless holds a wide appeal.

It might help that I'm pretty much stuck in the exact same period of post-college self-evaluation- thanks, English degree!

The Graduate is about life happening around you- Hoffman is moved through the opening credits on an airport walkway, standing stone-still himself. He stumbles through the party of faceless corporate well-wishers (the on-the-nose pro-tip of "plastics" is probably the movie's most famous quote), is jostled into position by Mrs. Robinson, and hides from his family in a deep-sea diver suit.

Anything he actually does, later in the film, is met with resistance and unexplained hostility by the older generation, especially Mrs. Robinson. Her downright animosity at the idea of Benjamin and Elaine together is never explained (other than that it would just be, you know, messed up).

Even after gamely trying to put Elaine off entirely (driving like a maniac, taking her to a strip club), Benjamin finds it easy to open up to Elaine, to be himself, perhaps. But it's hard to tell if that's something he found worth pursuing so stridently on his own, or because it was forbidden.

Adding to the hip factor, in an era before so-called "music televison," is the function of The Graduate as an extended music video for a handful of Simon & Garfunkel songs. The thematically relevant "Sounds of Silence" bookends the film, "April Come She Will" is wonderfully edited with the beginning of Benjamin's laconic summer, "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" plays for what seems like ten minutes when he goes to Berkeley, and the original(ish) song "Mrs. Robinson" briefly scores the big finish- Simon would write a full version for a later album, which became the ubiquitous radio staple we all know.

The wistful, melancholy folksiness of said tunes adds much more emotional weight than the screenplay seems to have in mind, filling in the spaces that Calder Willingham and Buck Henry's screenplay leaves empty. The performances, especially Hoffman's mumbling blankness and Bancroft's arch hostility, seem like caricatures in memory but are very restrained on the whole. No one in The Graduate seems to know what they're doing, or why they're doing it, but Hoffman and Ross are the heroes of the story because they're willing to admit it.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Their seeming rebellion manifests itself in a somewhat shocking showdown at a church- Elaine's family spirits her off to marry a patented Some Douchebag, and Benjamin's manic drive to stop the wedding and pounding on the chapel window are the stuff of cinema legend.

What I always think of though, is the rapidly cut faces of Mr. and Mrs. Robinson (and Some Douchebag), whose faces are absolutely convulsing with rage when they realize what's happening, and the way Benjamin has to hold them all off by swinging a cross ripped from the wall.

As they sit on a bus, riding off into the proverbial sunset, Benjamin's trademark neutral expression creeps back onto his face, and quickly spreads to Elaine's as well. What do they do now?

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I guess I'm going with an obligatory higher- The Graduate makes me mildly uncomfortable every time I see it, but I seem to watch it every few years one way or another. It might be this time the post-collegiate malaise hits a little close to home, but it's one of those films that feels like a classic, even when you're watching it.

The Legacy:

Aesthetically, The Graduate is bright and arresting, and surely that's inspired the Wes Andersons of the world (as has the interwoven pop music, much like the use of Cat Stevens in Harold and Maude).

The cinematographer, producer, screenwriters, and all three principal stars would be Oscar-nominated for their work, but the sole statue went to Nichols as director (still his only one out of five trips). And while sure, I'd agree to throw in the NFR archives, I don't know if it needs to be AFI's seventh greatest film of ALL TIME.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Kind of tough. The ending? The initial seduction? Plastics? I'm going with the run-up to Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson's awkwardly hilarious first meeting at the Taft Hotel bar- "Are you here for an affair sir?"

Leftover Thoughts:

-Simon & Garfunkel, too busy to write any original songs in earnest for the film, just contributed a bunch of old stuff and and re purposed a vague, nostalgic song about Americana and "Mrs. Roosevelt." Lazy jerks.

-I saw the parody of the ending in Wayne's World 2 waay before I saw The Graduate itself.

Coming Up...

159. Groundhog Day

158. The Bourne Ultimatum

157. The Big Sleep

IMDB #161 Amores Perros

2010-12-17T10:00:00.002-06:00

There are composite films like previously covered Crash and Magnolia, that weave many storylines together, and there are anthology films like Paris, Je T'aime and Coffe & Cigarettes which present separate short films, one after another.

Somewhere in between you have what I like to call "Tarantino films," which are organized into distinct chapters that may overlap significantly. Today's entry is structured in such a way.

The pertinent question, though- is it ever necessary? Let's see how we feel after Amores Perros, part one of Alejandro González Iñárritu's mission to DEPRESS THE ENTIRE WORLD.

The Key Players:

Our director, whom I'll simply refer to as AGI frow now on for accent/tilde related reasons, has since completed his "Death trilogy" with the similar in tone 21 Grams and Babel, about miserable things happening to miserable people. Word is that this year's Javier Bardem starring Biutiful will be an awards contender as well.

Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga spent three years writing Amores Perros, and went on to collaborate with AGI until a bitter falling out about writing credits drove them apart. He made his directorial debut with The Burning Plain, yet another morose composite film that was received with a shrug.

A large ensemble cast boasts on Gael García Bernal (Y tu mamá también, Blindness) as the only future luminary amoung many other recurring AGI players like Adriana Barraza.

Click for More...

The Story:

The film is divided into three chapters, though the other two plotlines are briefly touched upon in each one.

1. Octavio and Susana- García Bernal plays Octavio, a man smitten with his hoodlum older brother's young wife, and takes to dogfighting to make the money to run away with her. His family dog Cofi, turns out to have a knack for it, and goes undefeated as Octavio and his friend Jorge make plenty of cash- naturally this angers a local thug whose dogs keep losing, leading to a violent confrontation that ends in a car crash. Plus Susana takes the money Octavio was keeping to run away and takes off with the asshole brother instead, after Octavio has him beaten up. Aw.

2. Daniel and Valeria- Valeria, a preeminent supermodel, is gravely injured by said car crash, which leads to tension in her budding relationship with Daniel, a magazine executive who's just left his wife to be with her. When her dog (do you sense a theme?) disappears under the floorboards of their new apartment, tension escalates between them violently the longer they can't get him out.

3. El Chivo and Maru- An ex-revolutionary turned hobo hitman has taken in an injured Cofi after witnessing the car crash, and nurses the poor dog back to health- this only to come home one day to find that the newly-minted fighting champion has killed all of the other mutts that he lovingly takes care of. This seems to cause a shift in his perception of senseless killing, and how he handles his latest job to kill a man's business partner.

The Artistry:

Wikipedia informs me that Amores Perros is sometimes referred to as the "Mexican Pulp Fiction," and structurally I can see why. There's even plenty of crime, but there's virtually no humor, and no one to root for.

García Bernal carries a little bit of magnetism in the first chapter, but it's not enough to get past the abhorrent nature of dogfighting in the first place- certainly by the time he has his brother violently beaten (instead of just sleeping with his wife and then running away with her) we don't really care that he's about to get in a terrible car accident (which is actually the first scene of the film).

I'm not sure what's added to the film by making it almost a straight chapter-by-chapter anthology but teasing us with scenes of Daniel and El Chivo during the first third. The paths of the characters do intersect, but we also see El Chivo kill a man in a restaurant very early, and then we have to wait until the final chapter to find out why. It's kind of maddening, especially during the second chapter.

"Daniel y Valeria" itself feels like the beginning of a horror movie or psychological thriller edited into a different film- the blissful new freedom of the couple (as she had been a secret mistress for quite some time) is immediately marred by the car crash, and then a creeping dread sets in the moment the little dog goes under the floor. Valeria is too suddenly introduced to care for, and the earlier glimpses of Daniel being awkward around his wife (but no scene of him leaving her?) add nothing. By the time she re-injures her leg trying to get the dog out, requiring it to be amputated, the whole plot just seems terribly mean-spirited.

The final third is the best, largely due to Emilio Echevarría's performance as El Chivo, quietly dealing with the most important, or at least cinematic life events. Cofi killing all of his dogs is the best moment wrought from the screenplay myriad crossed-paths, and the scene where he can't kill Cofi in turn is the most moving.

But his attempt to reconnect with daughter, while well-played, is just another of the film's thin parables without the time to have an impact.

Amores Perros has a lot to say, and two and a half hours to say it, but I didn't really end up with anything to speak of by the end, especially not watching it for the second time for this review. There's a big difference between illuminating class differences and simply having characters from different classes, and an even bigger one between a philosophical edge and superficial grittiness.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Let's see. Octavio's brother gets killed, but Susana can't even stomach the thought of being with him (also his friend Jorge was killed in the car crash while Octavio was banged up pretty badly). Valeria as mentioned loses her leg, her billboards taken down and her career over. El Chivo ties up his target and the target's half-brother that wanted him killed, and puts a gun on the floor between them and tells them to sort it out themselves. He takes the money, leaves it for his daughter with a tearful message on her answering machine, cuts his hair and walks off into the sunset with his new dog.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Lower. And since they're not on the countdown, I wasn't into 21 Grams or Babel very much either, though I found the former focused enough to be more meaningful.

These films that focus on misery, cutting from various tales of woe as if that illustrated some sort of connection, what are they trying to say? If the message is just "life's a bitch" (or Love, as the case may be), you can spare me the time and the ticket price.

The Legacy:

It did launch AGI as a Hollywood talent, culminating with Babel nearly stealing Best Picture from The Departed in 2004 (this was my fear, anyway). Amores Perros would lose the Oscar but win the BAFTA for Foreign Language.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Ugh. Do I have to? Here, watch an hilarious fan-made version of the trailer instead:

Leftover Thoughts:

-The title doesn't literally translate to "Love's a Bitch," nor does AGI find that to be adequate. See here for various possibilities.

-Again, did Amores Perros have something to say about police corruption, or did it merely just include one corrupt cop?

-As pointless miseryfests go, it's still way, way better than Crash

Coming Up...

160. The Graduate

159. Groundhog Day

158. The Bourne Ultimatum

IMDB #162 The Terminator

2010-12-16T10:00:00.001-06:00

PREVIOUSLY ON THE IMDB COUNTDOWN: I had to review the sequel to Kill Bill LONG before Kill Bill itself- it was awkward.

But the countdown smiles benevolently on us today, as The Terminator is ranked lower than T2, so we can process everything in the right order. Phew.

What about T3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation, you ask? Good news! We don't even have to think about them, because they're both pretty terrible!

The Key Players:

James Cameron once was a self-taught special effects supervisor from Canada. But then on one magical day in the early 80s he did ten gallons of coke and wrote 873 screenplays at once (Aliens, The Terminator, and Rambo II: First Blood wer among them), hopped on a unicorn and stormed to the top of the film industry.

Subsequently he only made films as excuses for various obsessions, like his desire to see the wreckage of the Titanic, to invent a new 3D camera (Avatar), or to see Jamie Lee Curtis partially nude (True Lies). Does he seem like an insufferable jerk every time he speaks publicly? Of course! But that's the cross he has to bear, consoling himself with his mansion of frozen orphan tears and his diet of liquified Euros died to look like food.

Beginning with The Terminator, Cameron magnanimously took several actors along for the ride with him. Lance Henriksen and Micheal Biehn would both also appear in Aliens- Biehn in The Abyss, too.

Linda Hamilton will always be known primarily for her role as Sarah Connor, though Cameron did cast her as his fourth wife in the late nineties.

Finally, I have a theory. We all know James Cameron to be a man of science- he even had a plan to fix the BP spill. I propose that nearly thirty years ago he invented a time machine. High on the thrill of discovery, he went to the future, only to discover that he'd traveled too far, and found the human race just beginning to divide in twin races of pure intellect and brute physical strength. He befriended one of the latter, a huge but affable giant, and took him back to our time. But due to the future proto-man's slightly devolved intellect, he could only get work as Hollywood movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It makes a lot of sense, I'm sure you'll agree.

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The Story:

We've all seen it, so I'll be brief- AHH-nold plays a killer robot that looks like an Austrian dude sent back in time to kill Linda Hamilton, who will one day be the mother of the resistance leader in the war with machines we all know is coming. Biehn also shows up from the future, sent by her future son to protect her. Cool?

The Artistry:

Somehow I ended up seeing The Terminator at a very young age, maybe eight or nine. My memory is hazy- was it on video? At a friends house? In any case it was the first rated R movie I'd seen, and it scared the bejeezus out of me.

So I never really gave it another watch for a long time, and can't honestly say I've watched the whole thing through until doing so for this project.

Turns out it's no so scary, but still fun. I don't need to tell you how iconic the lines and images of the franchise are- though in the first installment, only Biehn's "Come with me if you want to live" and "I'll be back" made it everywhere.

And Cameron is of course a master at building suspense, even working with a terribly dated score and familiar cliches like the roomate who doesn't hear impending doom because of her headphones.

Unsurprisingly the effects, while impressive in scope, are a little dated- notably the lasers in the future war bits and the Terminator's obviously fake head when he was removing his left eye.

The script is a little leaden, especially on a human level- I never really found myself invested in the inevitable romance (really? You 'loved a lifetime's worth'?). But the performances carry it as well as they can, Biehn especially. I liked his PTSD flashbacks to the future, and the way he spoke in jargon from his own time, naming the model number (101) of the Terminator as if it would mean something.

The real basis of the appeal, and the reason so much of The Terminator has become cultural shorthand (it's probably the most popular of any "robot war" speculation), is that it taps into the innate foreboding that the future seems to hold. This will get a lot more explicit in T2, but it's easy for someone born in 1984 himself to forget that The Terminator came out during the last years of the Cold War, and even mentions the rise of the machines coming in the wake of a nuclear holocaust.

In the face of the bleak stormclouds comes the idea that we can be meant for greater things, like unassuming diner waitress Sarah Connor. What were her ambitions before this all went down? Other than being stood up on a date, her personal life is hardly mentioned. But she becomes the key to the entire future out of nowhere, perhaps simply because she exists is a world of recurzive paradoxes- she's plucked from the everyday into a harrowing trial of fire until she wins the first battle against an apocalypse rapidly approaching, and it happens seemingly for no reason at all.

SPECIAL SECTION ON PARADOXES! SPOILERS!

Speaking of causality: The Terminator franchise is nothing but chicken-egg paradoxes- John Connor send Kyle Reese back in time to become his father, so he can be born and live to send him back. What? We'll see later that the presence of the Terminator the machines send back leads to their eventual creation as well in T2.

I found myself pondering these loops as the movie went along. There were three Sarah Connors in the phone book, so the Terminator (with less information than Reese) killed the first two before he gets to our Sarah. But what if he had started from the bottom of the list? Maybe Sarah Conner becomes the Sarah Connor precisely because the other two got killed?

The other big irony is that the machines create John Connor instead of preventing his existence, because now his mother knows to prepare him to lead a war against machines in the future.

Also, I have many technical questions about time-travel itself (which the film skirts around by having Reese be a soldier unconcerned with the physics of it all). Why does Reese show up a little after the Terminator? Why can only the two of them come through (he implies no one else can come when interrogated)? Why not find some way to transport future weaponry in organic material, like the machines did? You could wrap some guns in a pig carcass or something.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Oh, I like it where it is, really. We'll see in a bit how T2 found a way to preserve the spirit while raising the stakes, gravitas, and action to higher levels.

The Legacy:

Careers launched, a franchise spawned, NFR inclusion already, and so on. And did you know "I'll be back" has its own wikipedia page?

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Literally nothing. But this unembeddable featurette includes the following pearl of wisdom:

"I think the love story is really what made it work." - Linda Hamilton

Leftover Thoughts:

-Would a polaroid photo really last 40 years in that condition?

-A quick inflation calculation informs me that this was made for the equivalent of $13 million, which makes the FX all the more impressive.

-the internet would have me believe that Cameron initially met with Scharwzenegger to discuss playing Reese, which would have been a ludicrous idea.

-One of those punks was Bill Paxton? Huh.

Coming Up...

161. Amores Perros

160. The Graduate

159. Groundhog Day

IMDB #163 Stand By Me

2010-12-15T10:00:00.000-06:00

Today's countdown entry, 1986's Stand By Me, is yet another of the many classic 80s films that I missed while I was watching Flight Of The Navigator over and over and over.

From the pop consciousness at large I've gathered that's it's some sort of coming of age tale involving a corpse, a train, and the 50s. And presumably standing near one another, literally or figuratively. Let's see what I missed!

The Key Players:

Rob Reiner makes his second appearance on the countdown as director, working from a short story by the much-adapted Stephen King.

Our story follows a quartet of child stars, each of whom would go on to varying degrees of adult sucess: Wil Wheaton went from the most annoying character on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" to one of the more beloved people on the internet, somehow. Corey Feldman was ubiqitous during the 80s and early 90s, then laid low until nostalgia kicked in. Jerry O'Connell has been in over sixty episodes apiece of three different television series- can you name the two that aren't "Sliders"? And River Phoenix was poised for not only success but respectability (My Own Private Idaho) before OD-ing in 1993.

~~Jack Bauer~~ Kiefer Sutherland has a supporting role, while Richard Dreyfuss acts as narrator.

Click for More...

The Story:

Four twelve year old best buds go on a quest to find a dead body in 1959. That's pretty much it. There's our narrator Gordie (Wheaton) who wants to be a writer and is definitely not just Stephen King when he was twelve at all, tough kid Chris (Phoenix), budding psychopath Teddy (Feldman), and butt-of-every-joke Vern (O'Connell). The former three deal with various father-issues throughout the story, while Vern is mostly just a goofball.

Racing the kids to the body is stereotypical older bully Kiefer Sutherland and his posse- everyone seems to imagine that finding the corpse of a kid who got hit by a train will bring them untold glory.

The Artistry:

I dunno. There isn't much I took away from Stand By Me- nothing about it was visually arresting, the child-acting was competent at best, and the story generally ham-fisted in a very Stepehn Kingish, telling-not-showing (with extra telling viz voiceover) kind of way.

40 years from now, will our era be signified solely by top 40 radio hits? The use of Buddy Holly's "Everyday" and The Chordettes' "Lollipop" felt kind of cliche to me, but that's probably not fair- there were fewer radio stations back then, I suppose. But the constant soundtrack selections seemed to do nothing more than yell "IT'S THE FIFTIES! 1959 IN YOUR FACE!" to me. Though the boys singing the theme to "Have Gun Will Travel" was a subtler touch, and I liked the low-key rendering of the titular Ben E. King song as a score motif.

The pie-eating contest (a story of Gordie's we see visualized) is a colorful, if disgusting, digression, but the only scene that stood out to me was the ambling campfire discussion- it seemed like things twleve-year-olds would actually say, and was funny to boot ("Wagon Train's a really cool show, but did you notice they never get anywhere? They just keep wagon training.")

And finally we come to one of my least favorite things: the Unecessary Framing Device. Let's discuss this behind the spoiler wall.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

So three of the kids cry about their respective fathers (Vern remains a goofball), then they find the body (deciding wisely to make an anonymous tip instead of glory-hounding), face down the bully, and part ways back in town.

How nice. But through voice-over, Future Gordie (Dreyfus) tells us what became of Vern, Teddy, and Chris- the chief fact being that Chris overcame the odds, became a lawyer, then got stabbed trying to break up a fight at a restaurant.

Gordie has become a successful novelist, after he was lucky enough to have his first book made into a film (which was probably Carrie but with a totally different spelling).

I don't know- it feels manipulative to me. Remember this character you cared about? He died senselessly! You're all a bunch of saps! I know this is basically Stephen King's memoir (and in fact all three of the friends in the novella "The Body" die in young adulthood), but the mechanics of the revelation bug me. What do we gain by seeing Dreyfus looking somber at the beginning and end?

Other than, of course, the eye-rolling last lines of his memoir: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Maybe I'm supposed to be twelve when I see it? Lower. To be clear, that just means that I don't find it countdown-worthy, not that it's terrible. Rob Reiner was still some years away from showing us what 'terrible' means.

The Legacy:

The cloying screenplay got an Oscar nomination despite being clearly the weakest part of the film, and there's the career-launching covered above. It also led to the founding of Castle Rock Entertainment, named for the fictional Oregon setting.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

"The kind of talk that seemed important until you discover girls."

Leftover Thoughts:

-Now I can finally check this off of the "Popular Corey Feldman Movies I Never Saw For One Reason Or Another" List, along with Goonies, which I finally saw last year (meh). Next up, The Lost Boys.

-"Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman is a real guy. There's no way a cartoon can beat up a real guy."

-My favorite part about Stand By Me in general might be the Pez line as the poster tag. That's pretty great.

Coming Up...

162. The Terminator

161. Amores Perros

160. Finding Nemo

IMDB #164 The Thing

2010-12-14T10:00:00.000-06:00

Antarctica: is it ever any fun? It seems like with a few, penguin-related exceptions, every film that visits our forgotten seventh continent only does so to discover something horrifying buried in the ice. 1982's The Thing might just be the progenitor of this trend.

The Key Players:

Thriller maestro John Carpenter makes his only countdown appearance with arugably his least successful film- The Thing would gain cult status only upon the advent of home video. Still, not even Halloween?
Star Kurt Russell is another face we'll likely never see again (not even Stargate?), since his most notable roles are in Carpenter classics like Escape From New York and Big Trouble In Little China.

Among a small ensemble are grizzled voice for hire Keith David (Pitch Black, Platoon, They Live)and Wilford Brimley (Cocoon, spokesperson for the ADA, and of course mentor to Stephen Colbert via regular 3AM phone calls).

Click for More...

The Story:

Pretty standard- a collection of scientists (like Brimley) and badass types (like Russell's helicopter pilot and David's...badass black dude?) are stationed at a research base in Antarctica, minding their own business doing science and all, when a krazy Norwegian from nearby crashes his helicopter, blows it up, and starts shooting at a sled dog that was running from him.

He wings one of the scientists during his crazy Norwegian rampage, so the base commander is forced to shoot him. Russell and another guy go to his base, but find only more dead Norwegians, evidence that they had dug something out of the ice, and a horrible, half-human looking burnt corpse.

Naturally, they haul the corpse-thing back to the lab, where Brimley discovers it has familiar organs but is clearly not all human. They put the sled dog in with their own pack, but it quickly turns into a horrifying nightmare monster and sends out tendrils to assimilate the other dogs- Russell breaks out the flamethrower just in time.

Brimley takes some samples or what have you, and discovers that it's some sort of organizism that can consume and imitate any host, on even a cellular level- and very rapidly at that. Realizing that he can no longer trust anyone, he promptly goes nuts and destroys the helicopters and radio equipment before the rest can tie him up in a shack.

After some more chaos and untimely demises (the half-human corpse thing? Totally not dead.), a harrowed half-dozen or so remain. Suspicion falls on Russell, but he holds the rest at bay with a stick of live dynamite and a blowtorch in his hands, and devises a blood test to see who's human and who's not once and for all.

The Artistry:

Alien parasite, isolated base- I settled in for an atmospheric, Alien style horror film. And The Thing is certainly that, in part. But it's also a full-on, gross out creature feature, and it boldly announces so 25 minutes in when that stray dog suddenly isn't a dog any more.

That creation, by Stan Winston and all of the subsequent partially-human monsters created by Rob Bottin, spend the film veering wildly across the line between Evil Dead II excessive hilatiry and genuine, Cronenberg-style horror. It makes The Thing a little dicey in tone- especially because none of the cast really has the time to create a character we might care for, with perhaps a couple exceptions.

Those would be of course Keith David's reactionary badassness and Kurt Russell's gritted teeth: Russell gets the lone character beat before the chaos begins as he loses to a computer at chess.

The Thing has a fun visual look, mostly full of flares illuminating the base at night in bright colors, and the score (by Ennio Morricone!) is a neat balance of 80's synth and histronic strings.

But what I liked most was the pod-person nature of the plot- much more the focus of the John W. Campbell, Jr. novella "Who Goes There?" upon which the movie was based. That's where Russell's improvised test comes from- taking a blood sample from each man and testing it with a hot wire- comes from. Since each part of "the thing" is a separate organizism that defends itself, provoking it should get a tell-tale reaction.

In the movie, Russell figures this out when he sees my favorite of the many disgusting images- a severed head sprouting insect-like legs to crawl away.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

The test reveals one man to be an impostor, who then monsters out and kills another one before they can flamethrower him. This leaves four standing, though they realize they've forgotten about poor Brimley, locked out in a shack. David stands guard as Russell and the two others go to give him the test- instead they find an empty shack, and a secret tunnel under the floor leading to what looks like and alien craft made from spare helicopter parts.

They see David leave the base, just before the power gives out- the Brimley-monster has destroyed the generator. Accepting that they're never getting out alive, all three take some dynamite to burn the whole place down and prevent the Thing from reaching civilization. This is pretty much what happens, and you'll never guess which of the three survives and makes it out before the explosion!

David returns (he thought he saw Brimley out there, and got lost, allegedly), and he and Russell share a laugh about how they can't possibly trust one another as they wait to freeze to death. The end.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Definitely a solid effort, but not something that would make my top 250. It might be the overdone FX, or the lack of any sort of arc to the story, but I can't see revisiting The Thing in the future.

The Legacy:

Coming out two weeks after E.T. and on the same day as Blade Runner, The Thing fared pretty poorly at the box office, and was an afterthought in Carpenter's otherwise winning 80s career. But it found new, cult-status life after coming out on video and DVD. It's even been made into a comic book series and a video game.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Warning: severed-head-related discretion is advised.

Leftover Thoughts:

-Favorite part: Brimley's hilariously prophetic computer, which takes one look at a cellular animation of the Thing and types out things like "PROJECTION: IF INTRUDER ORGANISM REACHES CIVILIZED AREAS... ENTIRED WORLD POPULATION INFECTED 27,000 HOURS FROM FIRST CONTACT," while Wilford sits there with his face at its Brimliest.

Coming Up...

163. Stand By Me

162. The Terminator

161. Amores Perros

IMDB #165 The Secret In Their Eyes

2010-12-13T10:00:00.001-06:00

Talk about a familiar story: 2009's Oscars had a clear frontrunner for Best Foreign Film in The White Ribbon, and even a potential spoiler in Un Prophete- but in keeping with the wild nature of the category, the voters went with Plan C and gave it to El Secreto De Sus Ojos (The Secret In Their Eyes) instead, the submission from Argentina.

After some initial wavering, it looks like it's made the countdown for a long stay. Let's hop to it!

The Key Players:

Director Juan José Campanella was first nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar for 2001's El Hijo de la Novia, but spent much of the last decade earning his living directing episodes of "House" and "Law & Order: SVU" before returning to make Ojos in his native Argentina.

And I have it on Wikipedian authority that leading man Ricardo Darín is one of the biggest film stars in Argentina- I've only seen him in Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens), a fun con-men caper remade in the states as Criminal.

Click for More...

The Story:

In 1999, a retired justice agent name Benjamín Espósito finds himself obsessed with a case from 1974 in which a 23-year-old woman was raped and killed in her home. He decides to write a novel about it, after discussing it with his former department chief, Irene Hastings, between awkward, lost-love-tension-filled pauses.

Flashback to the seventies, when Irene first came in to be his boss, and his biggest problems were ridiculously large piles of paperwork and an alcoholic partner named Pablo Sandoval. He trades barbs with rival detective Romano, and sets off on the fateful Morales case.

The widower, young Morales himself, is what makes the case so memorable to Benjamín: devastated by his young wife's death, he has several conversations with Benjamín about living an empty life.

Romano beats two lowlifes into false confessions, which an enraged Benjamín quickly exposes, causing Romano to transfer away. The detectives find a real suspect in Isidoro Gomez, a childhood acquaintance of the victim's that Benjamín noticed staring at her real creepy-like in every old photo, but can't locate him for a year: all they can find are some letters to his mother that mention random names and taking the train to the city.

Morales, dedicated to his wife's vengeance, takes to waiting in the train station after work every day, for an entire year. Then finally, Pablo discovers the names in the letters are players from the local soccer team's history- they decide to look for Gomez at upcoming matches, and find him at the fifth one.

Benjamín and Irene manage to cajole Gomez into a confession. He's sentenced to life in prison, and alls well that ends well.

Or not: just a year after that, Gomez is seen clearly unjailed on national tv- he's been released by Romano, now a member of an important government agency employing Gomez as a clandestine enforcer and hitman. What?

The Artistry:

El Secreto De Sus Ojos manages to be several different types of film at once, without getting too caught up in any of them.

A Parable Of Lost Love: Darín and Soledad Villamil, popular Argentian stars that have played romantic interests before, bring such a lived-in, subtle chemistry to both time periods that it's easy to take this angle for granted until the very end of the film. The opening, dreamlike sequence is a haunting image of Villamil running after Darín's train as they're parted, perhaps forever, but the actual scene sneaks up on you. The two leads make the romance compelling in its honest frankness, instead of overdoing it like soap stars.

A Straightforward Procedural: The murder itself ends up being more like a typical "Law & Order" plot than I expected- for some reason I expected a larger, behind-the-scenes machination to be behind it, but it never came. It's the soulful obsession of Morales, and the eventual impact of the case on each character's life that propels the film along- the Morales case is almost a feint to get us to look at the wrong hand.

A Historical Drama: As we'll see in the ending, some important political factors in Argentina's history end up playing a part in how it all adds up- another element that slowly encroaches on the plot, lost in news snippets and casual remarks.

A Rumination On Writing: Darín's struggle with the theme of his novel, and what the case means in the present day is a rare framing device that I appreciate- in a memorable element, he takes to writing snippets of phrases on paper by his nightstand, half-awake. One reads "TEMO" ('I fear'), which he thinks he wrote in a fit of paranoia , before he realizes that he meant to write "TE AMO" ('I love you') all along, spelling out the real reason that time of his life was haunting him.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Pablo is accidentally killed, mistaken for Benjamín when sleeping off a bender at his apartment. When Benjamín finds his partner's body, the only two pictures that he had of himself had been turned facedown: Pablo had intentionally confirmed the gunmen's mistake to save Benjamín's life.

Presumably the vindictive Romano is behind the killing, but since the government at the time was rampant with gestapo killings (as the Peronist right escalted its tactics against rebel leftists), he's virtually untouchable. So Benjamín flees to a remote job in the country, as Irene stays behind (her rich family makes her an unlikely target), tearfully running after his train in a goodbye.

Back in the present, Benjamín (who moved back to the city in 1985 after the Dirty War died down to find Irene married with children) visits Morales in a remote town to show him the finished novel. After a tense discussion, the widower admits that he tracked Gomez down, and shot him dead in the trunk of a car.

Benjamín leaves, but remembers Morales' singular dedication to his wife, and his conviction that life imprisonment, not the death penalty, would be the fitting punishment for Gomez. Benjamín sneaks back to discover that Morales has kept Gomez in a home-made prison cell for 24 years (hence the move to the country), feeding and clothing him, but never once speaking to him.

Aghast, Benjamín leaves, and finally goes to Irene to admit his feelings for her- though they both agree it won't be easy (since she's still married and all), they're finally ready to move on with their lives, together.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I imagine, as this gains exposure on DVD and so on, that it will go presently higher on its own, without me having to say so.

The Legacy:

One Oscar, One Goya Award (like the Oscars of Spain!) and thirteen Argintine AMPAS Awards. Otherwise, too soon to tell, go rent it or something.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Hey you know what YouTube isn't big on? Subtitles! But check out this insane shot (I assume trickery of some sort is involved) that goes all the way from a blimp's-eye-view of the futbal stadium to our heroes as they search the stands. The shot actually goes way longer as they chase their man through the stairwells.

Coming Up...

164. The Thing

163. Stand By Me

162. The Terminator

The Tourist

2010-12-12T19:00:00.001-06:00

So I'm a little too into Oscar predicting. In the last five years, the Pittsburgh Steelers (who I root for because I grew up there), have played in and won two Super Bowls that I watched with only mild enthusiasm.

But during the Academy Awards I groan or fist-pump with every hit or missed call for some reason. So I savor any category with a sure winner.

If only there were such a thing. At the 2007 ceremony, nothing looked safer than Pan's Labyrinth in the Best Foreign Film spot- it even had five 'domestic' nominations, so to speak. It's at number 74 in the top 250, even.

But stealing its thunder (and presently number 56, incidentally) came a German thriller called The Lives Of Others, which walked off with the statue and reviews ranging from "poignant, unsettling thriller" to ""one of the greatest movies ever made!" It was a stunning, awesome debut feature from the awesomely-named Florian Henckel Von Donnersmark.

Hollywood soon came calling, and we all rubbed our hands for his next step.

On paper, The Tourist sounded like a great idea- a thriller based on a little-seen French movie where an unsuspecting average joe is chosen by a Woman of Mystery to be a patsy for her boyfriend, a fugitive millionaire thief.

After a carousel of directors and stars, The Tourist ended up with our man Von Donnersmark and a studio's dream for a leading couple: Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. Surely we could end up with a tense, throwback thriller right in the same ballpark of The Lives Of Others, which mined the former Soviet Union for endless dramatic silences and tense eavesdropping sessions.

The trailer for The Tourist made it clear this wasn't the case, but it just seemed like it was in a different gear- an action-packed romp with two stars that should have breezy chemistry even on an off day.

The problem is, Von Donnersmark tried to make the latter, but only has the skill set for the former. What results is a languid, under-plotted, barely there sketch of a film that's downright boring.

What went so wrong? I'm not sure what passes for glamorous these days, but the decision to have Depp sport a haircut that resembled a dead animal on his head and Jolie to constantly wear so much dark eye makeup that she could be an anime character (she even wore it to bed!) didn't help matters.

Surely two talented, award-winning thespians could manufacture some chemistry even while appearing to be space aliens, but it's not meant to be: every conversation the leads have is hampered by constant awkward pausing, meaningless silence, and pacing straight out of some other film.

It's the same action-packed trailer/dripping-faucet film switcheroo that The American pulled in September, but instead of overwrought somberness The Tourist just has pointless boredom.

Maybe it's the language barrier, but in this film Von Donnersmark displays a Shamylanian talent for getting wooden performances out of talented actors: Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, and (briefly) Rufus Sewell all go to waste explaining the ridiculous plot to us.

Oh yeah, the plot: it's not worth getting into, really. It's contived, muddy, and culminates in the London Financial Crimes Division straight up murdering some people. There's one big reveal halfway through the film that's wholly uneccesary, and one at the very end that, even though it's wholly predictable, is still ridiculously insulting.

But the plot shouldn't matter! Duplicity had a similarly ludicrous structure, but Clive Owen and Julia Roberts relegated it to window dressing. It was fun. The Tourist is what I'll use from now on to defend Ocean's Twelve when people dismiss it as a pointless Euro-trifle: at least it was fun to watch.

Ah, well. In an interview, Von Donnersmark said: "I had just finished writing a screenplay for a dark, dramatic thriller, and when I heard about The Tourist, I thought, 'Maybe I'll do this one first.'" So perhaps his next film will be appropriately Lives Of Others-ian and we can leave all this behind.

Meanwhile, maybe whoever edited that trailer can recut The Tourist into a solid, thrilling half hour.

Leftover Thoughts:

-To be clear, I don't think FHVD should make the same film every time, I just get the impression that his skill set is still developing.

-There was some rumor that Sam Worthington and Charlize Theron were up for these parts, and in hindsight that seems like a much better fit- Worthington seems a lot more like a hapless American (Depp is always the villain himself), Theron has a better balance of vulnerability AND allure (Jolie here is all allure with a hint of lizard-eyes).

-You want to know the TWO MAJOR SPOILERS so you never have to see it? Okay: First, Jolie is a London Financial Crimes Unit agent in deep cover! But actually she's gone dark and fallen in love with her target (the rich thief) anyway, so it's really not a twist at all until she decides she's falling for Depp and wants to catch the rich thief after all. Finally, Depp turns out to have BEEN THE RICH THIEF ALL ALONG OMG! Even though he sent her a note telling her to choose a random guy and pretend it was him! And we even saw a dream sequence of Depp's where he kissed her- wouldn't he have his original face in a dream? And he acted all nebbishy and awkward while being chased by random thugs, even though he was actually the dude they thought he was! ugh. It's a good thing I had nothing invested by the end of this film.

IMDB #166 Dog Day Afternoon

2010-12-12T07:30:00.001-06:00

Ah, Sidney Lumet: we meet again. Will we get along this time? (Network being perhaps a slight runner-up to Crash for the 'Least Favorite Of The Countdown So Far" title)

I think so, based on what I know of 1975's Dog Day Afternoon- I haven't seen the whole thing before, and even though it fits into the subgenre of Bad Things Happening To Miserable People that I usually don't enjoy, I do enjoy bank-hostage dramas.

The Key Players:

Lumet just turned 86, yet remains Oscarless. I smell a Thalberg coming on.

Al Pacino, not too long after the first two Godfathers and a winning collaboration with Lumet in Serpico, gets his name before the title and everything.

Chris Sarandon's career has included his memorable villain in The Princess Bride, the speaking voice of Jack Skellington in A Nightmare Before Christmas, and a whole lot of tv guest-work as a doctor/judge type.

Among many in support are Charles Durning (Tootsie, "Evening Shade") and John Cazale (who would appear exclusively in Best Picture nominees in a brief career, cut short by cancer in 1978).

Click for More...

The Story:

Two Vietnam veterans, the loquacious Sonny Wortzik (Pacino) and the mute, intense Sal (Cazale), hold up a bank right as it closes. After a a third robber, Stevie, leaves due to nerve, they get the manager to open the vault, only to find scarcely $1,100 left after the daily pickup.

Sonny instead takes the money from the drawers (using his experience as a former teller to avoid the alarm-rigged bills and such) and the travelers checks- but his attempt to burn the check register alerts a nearby businessman to trouble- soon the police have the place surrounded.

What follows is a long standoff, in which a Detective Moretti (Durning) attempts to negotiate the hostages' release with Sonny, who's increasingly bolstered by the crowd gathering around the police barricade. A camraderie develops between Sonny and the female tellers, and we learn he was motivated by his partner Leon (Sarandon)'s need for sexual-reassignment surgery (this is in addition to Sonny's female wife and two children).

They demand transportation to the airport and a jet, amid a media frenzy- but you know how these things usually end.

The Artistry:

A September 22, 1972 ariticle in LIFE, which you can read here formed the basis for Dog Day Afternoon, and the end result seems remarkably true to life- John Wojtowicz, the real life Sonny, is even described as "a dark, thin fellow with the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino or a Dustin Hoffman."

The movie, seeking to place itself thoroughly in early 70s Brooklyn, opens with a montage of shots of the city set to Elton John's "Amoreena." The rest of the movie has no score, and the documentary feel is only heightened by the opening moments of the heist unfolding in real time.

That tension is brilliantly brought to a head when the phone rings, and the bank manager turns to Pacino with a heart-freezing "It's for you."

The police arriving in excessively huge force is edited brilliantly thereafter by the late Dede Allen, a rush of activity before the film and the hostages settle in for an ordeal.

The undercurrent of anti-establishment sentiment in Dog Day Afternoon works well because it's precisely that- there's no speeches, no heavy-handed allegory, just some offhand and rambling remarks by Pacino about police brutality, and the famous "Attica!" chant to the crowd. That scene, and the crowd's interaction with Sonny and the police have become the most influential part of the film, but Lumet seems just as interested in the media's co-option of any developing story. The awkward, live on camera interview Sonny gives to a local tv station is kind of hilarious ("Couldn't you get a job?") until Sonny cuts it short by cursing on air.

The performances help the film get away with just skimming the thematic surface. Pacino at his wild best, Cazale with an aura of idle sadness as the heist continues, and Durning with an urgent, angry turn as the local cop trying to resolve things before the FBI takes it out of his hands.

And in a showcase for both actors, Pacino and Sarandon share a long phone call that hints at the character's long, complex history- and the long zoom in on Sarandon is flawless, as is the timing of the revelation that the FBI and Durning are listening in.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

The FBI gives in and sends a limo for Sonny, Sal, and the hostages to get to Kennedy airport, where a jet is standing by. But even though he inspected it beforehand, a gun was hidden in the driver's side armrest, and the FBI agent driving shoots Sal in the head while Sonny is quietly disarmed.

The hostages flee to safety, and Sonny looks more passive than anything as the credits roll.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I liked it! You win, Lumet, and you get a 'higher' this time. May it comfort you in your waning years. Wait (checking the news)- yep, still alive.

The Legacy:

It would win an Oscar for Original Screenplay out of six total noms (including Picture, Lumet, Pacino, Sarandon, and Allen), and has a place in the NFR along with its cultural legacy in Pacino's quote.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Funny how yelling "Attica!" has become cultural shorthand for "I Am A Moron Who Saw A Movie One Time And Also Enjoys Yelling!" instead of for police brutality.

Leftover Thoughts:

-With Carol Kane as a mousy teller, this actually has two people from The Princess Bride in it.

-Shouldn't it be an adapted screenplay? Based on that article? I wonder about these things.

Coming Up...

165. The Secret In Their Eyes

164. The Thing

163. Stand By Me

IMDB #167 Ratatouille

2010-11-26T12:00:00.000-06:00

Look, I'm as big of a Pixar fan as the next guy, but are you aware that there are 9 out of 11 Pixar releases in the top 250 right now (all of them except Cars and A Bug's Life, and rightly so), but just one single animated Disney film (The Lion King)? Whatup with that?

I know, the list skews more recent, that's part of the fun. But by and large, the classics are covered, and if the mid-20th-century hand-drawn Disney features aren't classic cinema I don't know what is. Get voting, people!

Anyway, back to the modern CGI renaissance with 2007's Ratatouille.

The Key Players:

Remeber Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles? It's him again! Composer Michael Giacchino also returns for duty. Jan Pinkava originated the concept, basic plot, and many elements of the art design before Bird was brought in to replace him.

Multiple celebrity voices abound, but our lead is that of perhaps Greatest Living Standup Comedian Patton Oswalt (R.I.P. Mitch Hedberg). How cool is that?

Click for More...

The Story:

The premise is a simple one that takes longer than you'd expect to explain. There's just two things you're going to need to accept and move on:

1. Rats (or at least our furry little hero, Remy) can read and understand spoken English, though they cannot themselves speak.

2. A rat, sitting on your head (or at least that of our misfit human hero, Linguini) can control your arm movements by tugging patches of your hair.

Thus provide the mechanics for Remy, a gourment and natural chef, to team up with Linguini, a garbage boy in a gourmet kitchen- one can cook, the other can "appear human," and the rise to fame is inevitable.

Obstacles soon present themselves, however: a suspicious head chef, a feisty love interest, a toweringly intimidating food critic, and even the health inspector. Remy's family doesn't think much of his new, unratlike career, and Linguini doesn't know he's actually the son and heir of the deceased restaurant owner! Mystery, excitement!

Will Remy and Linguini be able to overcome our society's (or at least that of Paris, where this is all set) inherent prejucides against rats and misfits?

The Artistry:

Let's breeze past the obligatory remarks about how far CGI animation has come, shall we? Suffice it to say that Pixar still puts other studios to shame in this regard, and the little details like rat-hairs and water bubbles are nearly flawlessly rendered in Ratatouille.

The art design of the human characters I enjoyed more than any other CGI to date, nicely balancing the need for anatomical plausibility with expressive caricature (a line that Up would later fall just on the wrong side of- it seems like a movie about a talking box (Carl) and egg (Russell)).

The plot itself is a compelling double-underdog story, with the more complex themes of self-actualization that we're starting to take for granted with each Pixar realease. It might be a little overstuffed, at nearly two hours, but it has to make time for stories in both worlds, as well as multiple madcap action sequences.

You can tell the research and commitment to cooking that Bird and his team must've had- Ratatouille is a love letter to fine food as much as anything else. We get a lesson in the staff requirements and hierarchy of a gourmet kitchen, tips on efficiency as Collette teaches Linguini the ropes, a philosophical debate on the merits of improvisation, and most tellingly a subplot about how disdainful and crass microwavable, pre-cooked meals are.

That "foodie"-ness finds its way into another lesson, rife with Bird's seemingly trademark amiable elitism: that of Gusteau's proposition that "Anyone can cook." As the film clearly demonstrates, Linguini can't, while Remy can, and the lesson, as the critic Ego clarifies, is that a world-class chef can come from anywhere.

What does this mean? Much like The Incredibles, in the end we're taught to embrace those with special talents while admitting our own limitations. Misplaced pride (like Linguini's brief power tripping or Syndrome's fake robot attack) leads to disaster, sure, but what if you've got nothing to be proud of in the first place?

There's a joke in epsiode five of "Party Down"'s second season which I feel applies:

-"Who's Ayn Rand?"
-"She wrote about how awesome awesome people are."

Anyway, the voice cast is excellent as always, if a little more stuffed with superflous celebrities than you'd hope- Will Arnett? James Remar? Mostly they're well chosen, like Ian Holmes maniacal villain, Brad Garrett's jovial Gusteau, and especially Oswalt's expressive, energetic rat.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Linguini finds out the truth, and all goes well until Anton Ego arrives for his fateful review, just as Remy and Linguini fight about misplaced credit. When Linguini admits the bizarre truth to his staff, they leave in disgust (Collette returns after a bit), leaving no one to help Linguini prepare the meal that might save the restaurant.

Remy rides to the rescue with his entire clan of rats, lead by his apologetic father. They make, of course, ratatouille, wowing Anton Ego, who writes a stirring review even after they explain that a rat cooked it. A health inspector shuts down the restaurant, of course (there were rats in the kitchen), Linguini, Collette, and Remy start a new one with Ego as an investor.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Higher, by a rat nose. Way more fun than reading The Fountainhead, anyway.

The Legacy:

Winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and a nominee for score, screenlplay, and sound (as well as 9 Annie Awards).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

A more interesting case is this super-early teaser trailer for the film, which sets up the whole "rat in a kitchen" conflict but doesn't mention that Remy wants to be a chef (just that he's tired of eating garbage). And it seems to have an overblown, more looney-tunes like sensibility than the end result (though the knives visual made the first posters, as well).

Leftover Thoughts:

-Not sure if the shorts paired with the Pixar features count, but "Lifted" is one of the least impressive ones I've seen.

-The food critic's final review at the film's end is a nearly completely shameless pat on the head for film critics as well: " But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

-Did you know you can see the Eiffel Tower from every single window in Paris? This is a proven fact.

Coming Up...

166. Dog Day Afternoon

165. The Secret in Their Eyes

164. The Thing

Hereafter

2010-11-02T00:46:00.007-05:00

In Clint Eastwood's storied career of playing no-nonsense toughguys, and directing no-nonsense, serious films, not once has he touched upon the supernatural. It's been all western gunfights and gritty crime thrillers, alternating with Very Serious Oscar Type Movies.

Which is why Hereafter, three interwoven narratives about death and the afterlife, seemed like such a promising idea. Who wouldn't want to see Eastwood's steady hand (and Peter Morgan's lauded pen) brought to the quote unquote fantasy genre? Sure, the reviews are mixed, but watch the trailer below- it certainly seems like they're swinging for the fences with the premise.

The problem is, it's really more of a sac bunt than anything. Eastwood treats the profound questions involved with his usual straightforward frankness, but Hereafter doesn't offer any answers. It doesn't even speculate about them for too long, really.

Instead, it seems to find itself profound for raising them in the first place, even though pretty much everyone alive has asked them for pretty much all of history. It's as if Eastwood and Morgan (who's mostly written historical dramas about real things and people) had actually never seen anything involving psychics who can talk to the dead, near-death experiences, or ghosts, and thought they had truly original concepts that could do all the heavy lifting for them.

More...

Let's break it down. Matt Damon is a John Edward-type psychic who can speak to the dead, after briefly touching a bereaved loved one. Cécile de France is a French news anchor that has a near-death experience during a tsunami in Thailand and is moved to write a book about it. And Marcus is a young boy who's just lost his twin brother, Jason, and is all sad and stuff about it (amateurs Frankie and George McLaren play the twins, but we'll refer to them by character names since I don't know which plays which).

Eastwood apparently chose to cast amateur twin actors, and it pretty much shows, all the time, whenever they say anything. But Damon and de France are superb, and flourish as most good actors do under Eastwoods fast, hands-off direction. Bryce Dallas Howard shines in a supporting role despite some awful bangs as well.

And this film looks great- the opening, which follows de France through the tsunami, is breathtaking filmmaking, even if it was all CGI (no clue). Even the brief glimpses of the afterlife, which appears to be a bright white endlesses where everyone stands four feet apart in all directions for no reason, are tasteful and hazy.

It's just that Hereafter has nothing to say. The three plots converge in the end for brief moments of predictable frustration, and then the credits come up all at once. It's not really possible to get into this without spoilers, so...

SPOILERS! A FRICKIN' TSUNAMI OF THEM!

Here's Hereafter in a nutshell: during the film, Damon writes two letters. The first is a letter explaining to his brother (Jay Mohr) that he won't be helping him relaunch his profitable medium business because he can't take the bad juju (dreams, making people cry, etc) associated with his ability. The second is a letter he writes to de France after he touches her hand at a book signing, and sees not a dead loved one but a brief glimpse of her near-death tsunami. It's like three pages long and causes her to meet him in a cafe at the end of the film.

Got that? Now which letter do you suppose the film helpfully has Damon read to us via voiceover? You would hope its the second one, full of information about seeing the afterlife, the connection he feels to another important character, and the relief that he's found someone he can touch without being bugged by her dead loved ones, right?

Nope. It's the brief note to his brother, which we can easily guess says "sorry, can't do this anymore," because that's what he's been saying the WHOLE FILM. It even paraphrases the film's worst line, which is about how it's not a gift, it's a CURSE, to have this ability, boo hoo, etc.

De France reads the second letter and this real emotional music plays, like there must be some really profound stuff there, but not one clue do we get on that front.

The other main plot intersection, when little Marcus runs into Damon as well and pesters him until he does a reading, is done well enough, but offers nothing unexpected. Marcus feels sad, Damon tells him his brother says to be strong, and so on. Then Damon says Jason, the dead brother, has left. Where did he go? Marcus asks. Damon doesn't know. Even after all those readings, he doesn't know.

So that's it, then. Huh.

Eastwood's dramas sometimes have a procedural, obligatory feel, but it's easy to forgive in things like Changeling and Mystic River (a literal procedural) because they build to some intense, cathartic scenes. Hereafter builds to one scene (Damon and Marcus) that's shrug-worthy and one unread letter/brief cafe meeting- there is one weird vision (Damon's... I guess?) of the two of them kissing, but then the film literally ends on them shaking hands.

It takes away nearly all of the weight any earlier events seemed to hold. I enjoyed the subplot where Damon's gift ruins a budding relationship with Bryce Dallas Howard, his partner in a cooking class, and maybe if the film had been framed as some-sort of death-tinged romantic comedy or something the ending with de France would have been satisfying ("Who can find love with all these CRAZY GHOSTS flying around!? This fall catch Matt Damon in Paranormal Connectivity!").

PRETTY MUCH THE END OF ANY SPOILERS

There's a scene halfway through Hereafter wherein Marcus runs away from his foster parents (his mom's a junkie, much time is spent on this for no reason at all) and goes to a series of crackpots and wannabes to communicate with his dead brother. Even with another subplot (via de France's book) about how legitimate afterlife research is shunned and scoffed at, the film wants to smirk and roll its eyes at these poseurs and charlatans, too.

Too bad Hereafter is right there among them, distracting us with tsunamis and subway explosions to hide the fact that it's got nothing real to offer us.

Leftover Thoughts:

-Gotta say the marketing really failed on this one. Look at that poster up there- it's all blue with the freaky scifi lines and all. And the shadowy figure in the distance- definitely thought we'd spend more than a few seconds in the afterlife. The trailer, meanwhile, puts the tsunami two thirds of the way through, making it seem like an escalation of events rather than the trigger of one of the plot threads. It seems more like "Hey some people were curious about the afterlife AND THEN EVERYTHING BLEW UP AAAAH."

-Fun to see Bobby Baccala from The Sopranos stretching his range to play an Italian chef. Jay Mohr, meanwhile, is always a slick douchebag who wants to exploit people, in everything.

-Just so we're clear, I might have enjoyed Hereafter in spite of its lack of answers if it had not answered them in a more interesting way. It's just that it seemed to be purposefully building to de France and Damon and the little kid meeting, and then backed off when they all got in the same place and had no idea what to do. Once Damon decides to go meet de France there's a scene where he asks for her in the lobby of her hotel and she isn't there. What purpose is served by him having to leave the MacGuffin note and meet her two scenes later?

-I realized I haven't seen very many but my favorite film about the afterlife is still Wristcutters: A Love Story

IMDB #168 The Wages of Fear

2010-10-05T15:00:00.000-05:00

Today we check back in with Henri-Georges Clouzot, with 1953's The Wages Of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur).

Having no exposure, all I can tell you is that it's French, it's black and white, and his wife is probably in it again. And it'll probably be tense. Really, really tense.

The Key Players:

Clouzout we know, as well as his beautiful wife Véra (who plays a supporting role here).

But the whole film is sort of a family affair, as star Yves Montand, veteran French singer and actor, was married to Les diaboliques star Simone Signoret at the time- Charles Vanel played the inspector in that film as well, the same year he put in a supporting turn in To Catch A Thief.

Folco Lulli (The Organizer) and Peter Van Eyck (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) round out the main cast.

Click for More...

The Story:

In a South American town isolated by the desert, the local economy and law enforcement is all run by the American 'Southern Oil Company,' which is there to drill. After an oil well catches fire, the only way to extinguish the blaze is to blow it out with a whole lot of nitroglycerin. The only way to get it there is to drive a truckful of the unstable, highly sensitive explosive over rough terrain.

SOC, already adept at exploiting the locals for cheap labor, decides to hire the job out to the masses stranded in town with no way to pay the fare home, and they offer high wages for the job to attract lots of vounteers. After many trials and selection processes, they pick four men who coincidentally are our four main characters:

Mario (Montand): a French drifter, playboy, and douchebag (at least to his girlfriend, Linda (Mrs. Clouzot)).

Jo (Vanel): an aging, prideful gangster new to town that strikes up a friendship with Mario- this causes a falling out between Mario and...

Luigi (Lulli): (Mario and Luigi! I JUST REALIZED THIS!) a hard-working, penny-pinching Italian who needs to get out of his job mixing cement before inhaling the dust kills him.

Bimba (Van Eyck): an intense Dutchman that survived the Nazi regime after being forced to work in a salt mine.

Actually Jo is a last minute replacement for a man named Smerloff that doesn't show- did Jo murder him? It's left unclear. Mario and Jo set out in one truck, Luigi and Bimba in the other.

For the next hour and a half, they try and navigate cracks in the road, detonate a boulder blocking the way, a rickety bridge, and psychological breakdowns (namely Jo, whose nerve is nowhere near what it used to be) to their destination despite the possibility of exploding at any moment.

The Artistry:

Is there a stronger word for 'harrowing'? Chilling? Agonizing? Nerve-racking? The extended second half of The Wages Of Fear is all of these things.

Split the credit for the tension between the nitroglycerin itself and the steady time the film takes to buildup these characters before they set out- Luigi, a man of the people, and Jo, a wannabe bigshot, nearly brawling at the bar, the riotus townsfolk when the accident in question kills 13 local sons (but no SOC employees).

That idea of the town itself as a powder keg never really pays off, but it lays a solid thematic foundation of oppression. In fact, I admired how stark the film turned out to be- the cartoonish villainy of the SOC brass is never met with any retribution, Mario is at times a slimeball, other times a brute, and never really redeemed.

The cinematography is wonderfully claustrophobic, particularly for what's basically a road movie. The closeups in the trucks (labeled EXPLOSIVE in big letters, the oil fire framed by a doorway- even the cramped porch as the vagrants sit out the heat at the cantina. It helps that two thirds of the trucks sequences take place at night, with lights illuminating only the determined faces of our heroes.

If heroes you can call them: certainly Luigi and Bimba are easy to root for- Van Eyck is the most memorable performance of the four, slowing revealing a jovial personality under a battle-hardened exterior. He shoulders one of the most intense moments, when he slowly, carefully pours a little of the nitro into a hole carved in the boulder in order to blow it up.

One character who takes his name out of contention for the job right away makes a comparison: " I used to see men go off on this kind of jobs... and not come back. When they did, they were wrecks. Their hair had turned white and their hands were shaking like palsy!" This journey is like growing old, all at once. But in the promise of something better, we see four men choose it willfully to leave the hellish township behind, beaten down by heat and watchful tormentors in the SOC. But if life is the journey, through obstacle, tension, and especially fear, the only reward is untimely death or deliverance to hell: a flaming, chaotic oil field, greed wrought upon the landscape.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

After making it successfully past the bumpy road (where they have to maintain 40 mph, Speed style to keep level over the bumps and not jostle the payload), the rickety bridge, and the boulder, Luigi and Bimba's truck explodes for no reason at all. Aw.

Jo finally snaps and flees, but Mario catches up to him and beats him into submission in an uncomfortable confrontation. They encounter a sinkhole filling with leaking oil, and Jo gets out to steer the truck through- he trips, and Mario (unwilling to stop and have the truck be stuck with no momentum to carry it out) runs over his leg. On the final trip to the oil derrick, Jo dies while reminscing about his time in Paris.

Mario is greeted as a hero by the frantic workers, but collapses in exhaustion and despair. The next day, seemingly jovial, he starts back to town in the now empty truck- we see Linda and the townsfolk jubilantly start to waltz to "The Blue Danube" on the radio as Mario, smiling, dangerously swerves the truck side to side on the road for no reason, immune to the risk.

He of course careens off a mountain road, and dies as the trucks broken warning siren wails a distorted finale tone. The end.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Wow, it was a bummer, but I'd put it up there- I certainly enjoyed it more than Les Diaboliques.

The Legacy:

It was remade twice for Americans, as Violent Road and Sorcerer (directed by our pal William Friedkin). It would win the Golden Bear in Berlin, the Palm d'Or in Cannes, and the BAFTA for Best film despite being ignored by the Academy.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Not a single damn one. But here's Yves Montand singing "Les Feuilles Mortes." Culture!

Leftover Thoughts:

-Remeber that one episode of LOST where Arzt blew up? That was hilarious, and nitroglycerin will always remind me of it now.

-Truly a multilingual film, with Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and English all flying around in there.

Coming Up...

167. Ratatouille

166. Dog Day Afternoon

165. The Secret In Their Eyes

The Social Network

2010-10-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

There's a moment halfway through The Social Network, wherein Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), Napster co-founder and proverbial devil on the should of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), relates to the budding billoinaire the story of Roy Raymond- a man embarassed to buy lingerie for his wife in a department store, who had the idea to open a chain of lingerie specialty shops and an accompanying mail-order business called Victoria's Secret.

After five successful years, Raymond sold the business for $4 million, and ended up jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1993, while the company grew exponentially without him.

Zuckerberg, stone-faced and inscrutable as ever, wonders "Is that a parable?"

Of course it is. And The Social Network, David Fincher's even more salient take on dissaffection than the Generation X rant Fight Club, is an uber-parable for a new generation, a wired-in, fast-talking, flashing banner ad in the corner of the screen, loudly telling us that we've opened a door to a new world, we've won billions of dollars, we're hip and now, and all we have to do is ignore the phone buzzing and the knocking on the door and Click Here.

More...

It's a study of many things at once- as much as it comments on the unique type of isolation that's bred by being connected in too many ways to too many people, it tells an age-old tale of greed and betrayal. How else could a film that almost everyone scoffed at upon its announcement ("A facebook movie? Really?") end up drawing somewhat-legitimate comparisons to Citizen Kane?

Those comparisons stem mostly from structure- a flashback laden narrative of billionaire tycoons that alienated everyone they cared about to get to where they are. But we can't all be Orson Welles- Fincher's eye is as refined as ever, and Aaron Sorkin's script runs hyper-verbose laps around Citizen Kane's episodic chapters, tied together by a dying man's last word.

Instead of a reporter pondering the MacGuffin of "Rosebud," The Social Network uses lawyers in twin depositions to relive the story of Facebook's disputed origins. As Zuckerberg faces lawsuits from former best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and a trio of undergrad elites that hired him to program a Harvard-exclusive dating website, both lawyers try to get at the underpinnings of Zuckerberg's motivations.

Any such motivations are where the film departs the most drastically from the real-life evidence. In real life, there's nothing to suggest that he was motivated to get into exclusive "Final Clubs," or was jealous of Saverin for doing so. There's little to support the idea that he created precursor site facemash.com (a 'Hot or Not' style site using the pictures of other undergrads) because he was just broken up with- in fact, facemash actually included both male and female photos for peer-ranking (not just female ones, as in the film).

But would a normal, even-keel Mark Zuckerberg that just happened to get into legitimate legal disputes make for an interesting anti-hero? Of course not.

If Web 2.0 has created an ovearbearing disconnect with the interpersonal relationships we're supposed to cultivate when we become adults, then why shouldn't a film about one of the key founders of this portray that founder as overcompensating for an inability to connect to anyone? For as bad as it makes him look, the Zuckerberg of the film comes off remarkably sympathetic, flailing slightly as he mourns the twin deaths of privacy and intimacy- we can all relate, not because we're all antisocial billionaires, but because we live in new spheres of connection that Zuckerberg inadvertently created.

Maybe you have to have been in college during facebook's founding to consider this film as dramatic as I do (Mark Zuckerberg is, after all, two months younger than I am). But given the 48-year-old director and 49-year-old screenwriter, I doubt it. I can't wait for the film adaptation of Sorkin's stage play "The Farnsworth Invention," as I hear it tells a similar tale of innovation followed by litigation.

Every role seems expertly cast. Eisenberg, the twitchy, somewhat abrasvie "thinking man's Michael Cera," anchors the whole thing together with a shy brilliance. Andrew Garfield provides an entry point for the audience -not only is he the most sympathetic and likeable, but at one point his character even sheepishly admits he doesn't know how to update his own facebook relationship status despite being the company's CFO- a relief of sorts for anyone who doesn't consider social networking a second language.

Justin Timberlake is perfectly suited for the role of a flashy, seductive epitome of 'cool,' which the narrow-focused Zuckerberg is obsessed with maintaining in regard to his website. Rooney Mara and Rashida Jones bookend the film well with honest reductions of Zuckerberg's character. Max Minghella and Armie Hammer (twice) liven up the lawsuit scenes, though the subtext of the Saverin suit carries more weight. Hammer especially is great, as both Winkelvoss twins- though I suspect Fincher cast him instead of real twins just because he likes doing tricks in post-production.

Of course he's as technically flawless as ever- the lighting is muted but crisp, the editing propulsive and seamless (even told in double-flashback), and the rapid-fire dialogue woven with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's wonderful score to great effect. The Nine Inch Nails frontman and producer create a rhythmic, digitally-tinged landscape that seems to make the events onscreen grow in importance.

Is it perfect? Is it the best film ever? Is it, you may ask, really the next Citizen Kane. No. Sorkin's characters sometimes sound a little too much like Sorkin characters (my favorite over-the-top line is when one of the Winklevi threatens to beat Zuckerberg up: "I'm 6'5", 220, and there's two of me!"). The film's strong adherence to real-life events leaves the ending abrupt and somewhat resolution-less, emotionally.

The larger-world effects of facebook aren't really addressed beyond making the creators very rich- this isn't too much of a drawback, but the film's brilliant trailer seemed to promise more context with that opening montage.

But even as a personal parable of the breakdown of trust, The Social Network has plenty of meaning. By all means go see it. If you like it, I bet there's some way you could recommend it to all of your friends at once.

Leftover thoughts:

-In a hat-tip to the current economic crisis, the Winklevi take their troubles to Larry Summers, once and future Treasury Secretary of these United States and then-president of Harvard. In a hilarious scene in which I expected him to say "Did I nicturate on your rug?", Summers blithely dismisses any potential value that "thefacebook.com" might have.

-Would highly recommend splurging $5 on the score at Amazon. Minimal piano like Andrew Newman's work on Donnie Darko, at least one track that incorporates clicking keyboards a la Dario Marinelli's typewriter-laden Atonement score.

-I don't see what the real Mark Zuckerberg's problem with The Social Network might be- it somehow manages to portray his alleged betrayals of multiple parties while maintaining sympathy for him, even while Eisenberg is sort of rock-star arrogant in the deposition scenes. With all the well-publicized innacuracies out there, I don't think the general reaction is going to be "What an asshole!"

-Speaking of, I have no problem with the movie taking liberties, but I have no interest whatsoever in Ben Mezrich (who wrote the book the movie was based on) and his "I made a bunch of this up" brand of non-fiction writing. I feel like there's some sort of unspoken contract with general veracity in non-fiction, but maybe that's just me.

-I especially liked the juxtaposition of Zuckerberg's creation of facemash with the party bus of women that the Phoenix club rounds up. Just taking an analogue convention of superficiality and making digital.

The Town

2010-09-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, was an unexpected delight- assured, authentic, and relatively taut. The plot, from Dennis "Boston is the new Purgatory" Lehane, got a little murky in the end; Ben's brother Casey and Amy Ryan had to work overtime to cover for weak performances elsewhere, but such flaws were easy to overlook after going in with one eyebrow raised skeptically.

Expectations for his sophomore effort, The Town then, were considerably higher- tempering them once again is his decision to take the lead in front of the camera as well. Despite quiet, solid work in Hollywoodland, State Of Play, and Extract his last leading role was in Jersey Girl, at the height of Bennifer-related inanity.

But he's more than up to the task- The Town trades some of Gone Baby Gone's atmospheric intensity for straightforward heist action, and Affleck himself plays a solid leading man, but is an even better casting agent- every supporting role is superbly cast and superbly inhabited.

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The film starts with perhaps fancifully enhanced claims about Boston's Charlestown neighborhood producing more bank robbers per captia than anywhere else. That may not be true (at least since the Irish mob was gentrified out in the 90s), but The Town does an excellent job at drawing from the real-life close knit feel of the place to create a fictional, moody haven for thugs and hard-living wiseguys.

It's a different flavor than the Boston of Scorsese's The Departed (almost clinically austere in comparison) or the hidden malice lurking in Gone Baby Gone (which turns out to be a smokescreen). The cops in The Town's Charlestown turn their heads when the odds aren't in their favor, everyone (except Affleck's character) drinks and does oxy or coke. The cloudy sky rushes over the Bunker Hill Monument in time-lapse in two different shots- life goes on in twilight.

Piercing the clouds, and literally mentioning sunny days in key dialogue, is Rebecca Hall's love interest. She gives it her best, but the role isn't really there. Affleck's foursome of masked bank robbers takes her briefly hostage to begin the film, and the ensuing romance, unknowingly with one of her captors, never feels real enough to be worth the reveal we all know is coming. Hall's gift might be for wry understatement (like in Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Please Give), but I felt like she might have sold the melodrama of this part if it had more depth to it.

The time spent on the love interest, then, seems like the main culprit that deprives us of more time spent with Affleck's livewire best friend, an ex-convict brought to life beyond the cliche by Jeremy Renner.

Or perhaps we could have gotten more time with Jon Hamm's squinting, bluntly smug FBI-agent as he rapidly closes in. The "Mad Men" breakout star absolutely nails the one face-off he and Affleck have, and gains steam as the film goes on and we see he's just as unconcerned with the people that get in his way as any bank robber.

But if those characters seem underutilized, Chris Cooper's single scene as Affleck's incarcerated father and Blake Lively's handful of key moments as Affleck's former flame are perfectly paced and timed. Cooper's scene is almost a brief intermission, halfway through the film, that underplays a key plot element and leaves a realistic amount unspoken- Lively is perhaps the most memorable of the entire casy, if only because her raw performance is the least expected.

There's something unyieldingly linear about The Town that I admire the more I think about it. It ends with a minor flourish, but the majority of the screenplay establishes clear stakes, sets us dramatic revelations for the last third of the film (all of which are thankfully not overdone in the slightest), and then leaves the heavy lifting for the more-than-capable cast.

As perhaps unexpectedly autuer-like Affleck has been as a director so far, it helps that he started out as an internationally famous movie star- The Town boasts the same cinematographer (Robert Elswit) and editor (Dylan Tichenor) of P. T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Oscar nominees (with Elswit winning) for their work. (This after double winner John Toll lensed Gone Baby Gone). The result is a film seamless in aesthetic and pace, making the possibility of a Best Picture nomination seem less and less like a longshot.

In a slow September, it's easy to recommend an artful, gripping thriller like The Town.

IMDB #169 Star Trek

2010-09-20T22:34:00.007-05:00

I would've sworn I'd covered last year's Star Trek reboot pretty thoroughly, but then I remembered it wasn't one of the Best Picture nominees for some unfathomable reason.

So strap in, hold on, for a thrill ride that takes the framework of a beloved cultural icon and makes it even better.

That's right, I boldly went there.

The Key Players:

J.J. Abrams is the superproducer and director who masterminded or co-masterminded awesome things like "LOST," "Alias," "Fringe," Cloverfield, Mission Impossible III and also "Felicity." Breaking his teeth as a screenwriter (Forever Young? Really?) and maturing as a tv producer, he's been on a course as a blockbuster visionary ever since writing and directing the "LOST" pilot (the most expensive pilot ever at the time) in 2004.

Leading men Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are probably most-associated with Star Trek this early in their careers- which is a relief for Pine (The Princess Diaries 2, Just My Luck), but a slap in the face to fans of Quinto's work on "Heroes."

So many, many other roles support these two: surely we could get to them all, but my favorites are Karl Urban's about-face into scene-stealing comedy from Lord Of The Rings seriousness and our old friend Simon Pegg from the third countdown entry.

Click for More...

The Story:

A massive Romulan ship, captained by a crazy Romulan named Nero (Bana), comes seemingly out of nowhere and attacks the USS Kelvin- in the fracas, the Kelvin's captain is killed, and George Kirk briefly takes command before evacuating the ship, setting a collision course to buy the escape shuttles time, and tearfully saying goodbye over the ship's comm to his wife and newborn son.

Some years later, we see that son, young James Tiberius Kirk, steal his stepfather's car and drive it off a cliff as he jumps out- we also see a young Spock on planet Vulcan, struggling with his half-human, half Vulcan heritage. Some years even later than that they both join Starfleet as young adults, Kirk (Pine) because he was tired of back-country bar brawling and Spock (Quinto) out of a seemingly knee-jerk response to the prejudice of the Vulcan Science Academy.

Eventually, Spock graduates with honors and serves as an instructor or TA or something and accuses Cadet Kirk of cheating on a test simulation. The hearing is interrupted by news of an attack on Vulcan, and everyone rushes off to man the new fleet of ships (the rest of the Federation is busy in the Laurentian system, which must be super far away because it only takes three minutes to get to Vulcan at warp).

Adventures and peril follow, during which each of the characters we semi-recognize rise (Uhura, McCoy, Sulu, Checkov, Scott) take over their destined posts and save the day in various ways. Also there's another Spock floating around (Nimoy, of course) for some reason, and a giant ball of something called "red matter."

The Artistry:

A disclaimer: I would describe my appreciation for "Star Trek" the original series as 'casually enthusiastic' at best- I mean, I love the premise, the characters, and so forth, but I can't say I have the whole thing memorized, and I wouldn't defend the stodgy pacing and Shatner's scenery-chewing to someone without the patience for them.

To me, it's always been a relic of another time- I was more into the "Star Trek"s that were on tv during my youth, the later years of "The Next Generation" and the heyday of "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager." But for all that the loss of a sense of philosophical trappings and parlimentary debate to the film reboot doesn't pain me in the slightest.

I wrote here about how great I thought the film was (and here and there about its technical merits during the 2010 Oscarthon), but to sum up: great script, great performances, excellently made (lens flares aside), shoddy science but all-around fun.

Here's the paradox: I would have like it probably less if I cared a whole bunch about the original series, but I also would have liked it less if I knew nothing about it at all.

Why? Because nostalgia is a tricky thing- an ideal of the past, not the thing itself- and considering it went off the air before I was born, "nostalgia" might even be too strong a word. All Star Trek had to do for me then, was remind of the parts I enjoyed of TOS without replicating it exactly. That would be the camraderie between Kirk, McCoy and Spock (check), the basic concept and design of the Federation (check), spaceships that fire space torpedoes at one another (check), and Leonard Nimoy (super-check!).

In a way I think it's partly an issue of ownership, of primacy. There are these big, pop-culture institutions that exist before we all come along and participate in the culture, and even now that we can watch them all on DVD it's hard to feel included- "Star Trek" is great, but it was never meant for me to see in the first place.

And then these remakes come along, and as disheartening as the paucity of originality in Hollywood can be, it helps these institutions belong to entire new generations. This could be why I'll argue for Batman Begins over Batman every time, or the new "Battlestar Galactica" over the old one.

You still have to make a good film- the Transformers and G. I. Joes of the world can testify to that. But J.J. Abrams, with his madcap camera shaking, lens flaring, witty sensibility fully intact, has managed to create something new and old all at once, and I can't wait for the sequel.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Does it matter how we get there? Kirk and Spock end up as Captain and First Officer of the Enterprise after saving Earth (but not Vulcan, which implodes on itself), Nero explodes, the stage is set for the vague, open-ended mission "To explore strange new worlds" and so on.

Hopefully Abrams and co. will take this as a cue to make new stuff up for the sequels instead of rehashing old villains like Khan and so forth.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Well, I did see it three times in the theater. Let's nudge it up a bit. I just realized that when I'm finally done I should re-rank the 250 films I cover, a project that will be nearly as impossible as watching them all (except that Crash will be last).

The Legacy:

It was the first Star Trek film to win an Oscar (for makeup), the highest grossing ever, and the launch of a new franchise. Not too shabby so far.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

This clip (where Kirk goads Spock into attacking him) wins solely because the poster titled in "Erotic Asphyxiation IN SPACE."

Leftover Thoughts:

-Michael Giacchino's score here is so great I'm thinking about tagging his name in all of the countdown entries in which he appears.

-Can you do the "live long and prosper" hand thing? If not I feel for you, because it's awesome.

-I'm working on a screenplay for a kids' movie called Ouroboros about a snake that comically always mistakes its own tail for food.

Coming Up...

168. The Wages Of Fear

167. Ratatouilee

166. Dog Day Afternoon

IMDB #170 V For Vendetta

2010-09-14T12:00:00.003-05:00

A vague idea: when viewing violent, voluminous vestiges of visual vehicles of verbalization (as V for Vendetta, a virulent volume of vastly vivacious verse, verily), the vein of vindictive votaries may veer to volatile vandilizations void of valid and virtuous veneration of the value therein vaunted.

Ahem. What I mean is, fans of Alan Moore (and David Lloyd)'s landmark graphic novel may be unfairly prone to dislike its 2006 film adaptation before even seeing it. And it's perfectly understandable, given Moore's long history of getting butchered by Hollywood, which reached a nadir with The Leage Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

But we're here to review the film, on its own, with a gracious acknowledgment that Alan Moore deserves nearly all of the credit for the great parts of the film and none of the blame for the not-as-great parts. Okay? Let's dive in, then.

The Key Players:

Director James McTeigue has gone on to direct Ninja Assasin, and could have a long, fruitful career in his own right. But I'd bet when you search him on imdb his pull credit will always be "Second Unit Director, The Matrix," as it is right now. Because V for Vendetta is really a product of co-writers and co-producers Andy and Larry Wachowski, masterminds of The Matrix trilogy and the bonkers Speed Racer live adaptation.

Our cast, it is super-loaded: Natalie Portman had by last decade parlayed her dramatic indie chops and Star Wars prequel overexposure into A-list star status. Hugo Weaving (The Matrix, the Lord of the Rings series) was brought in to replace James Purefoy as the title character.

In support are Stephen Rea (The Crying Game, The End of the Affair), John Hurt (1984, Alien), and Stephen Fry (Gosford Park, Jeeves!).

Click for More...

The Story:

SO much going on here: it's the near future, totalitarian England (that seems to happen a lot, huh?)- a despot named Adam Sutler (Hurt) has come to power, riding a wave of paranoia and fear after a terrorist biological attack.

Evey Hammond (Portman) heads out after curfew, only to be accosted by sleazy, corrupt "Fingermen" (like the gestapo)- she's saved by a cloaked, Guy Fawkes-masked, seemingly super-strong man who introduces himself as only 'V' (Weaving), who invites her to see a concert with him.

That concert turns out to be the 1812 Overture, hacked into the police loudspeakers, as a backdrop to his detonation of the Old Bailey (part of the Crown Court buildings), right at the stroke of midnight, turning the calendar to November 5th (Guy Fawkes' day).

The next day, an irate Sutler berates his underlings (ironically via huge, 1984-style tv screen), including his right hand man Creedy and Chief Police Inspector Finch (Rea), and promises are made to capture the terrorist immediately, and the girl who was with him.

Finch follows a lead on said girl to Evey's place of employment, the British Television Network where she's a PA. Just as the news crews are busy proclaiming last night's explosion a "planned demolition," V shows up with a bomb strapped to his chest, hijacks the signal, and sends out a message eloquently decrying the government, the apathy and fear that led to their power, and exhorting one and all to show up at Paliament one year hence, when he'll blow that up too.

Evey sees V nearly caught during his escape (as they were already coincidentally there, looking for her), and maces a policeman to help him, getting knocked on the head for her trouble. V takes her to his lair, to spare her the secret prison route of Creedy's secret police.

Then we see V sneak in to the home of "The Voice of London," Bill O'Reilly-like pundit Lewis Prothero, and kill him- Evey, revealing her parents' abduction and deaths at the regime's hands, promises to help him kill another important party member, a pedophile priest, but she tries to warn the man and runs away, frightened of V's murder-spree.

V also kills (more humanely) a Dr. Surridge, and at this point we realize V is killing not just important regime members, but people who held him captive many years before at Larkhill Detention Center, where the party performed awful genetic experiments on "undesirables" killing all but the man in the cell with Roman Numeral V on the door, who was transformed as a result.

Evey meanwhile, goes to the home of Gordon (Fry), a tv comedian (what a stretch) and her friend. He's recently been emboldened by V's actions, and stages a skit mocking Chancellor Sutler on his latest show- for which he is hooded and taken away, of course. Evey tries to sneak out a window, but is snatched as well.

She's tossed in a cell, her head is shaved, she's tortured and questioned- but will she cooperate and give them V's location? The shadowy interrogator promises her that's all they want, and she'll be free. And why do all of Finch's superior's want him to stop looking into Larkhill and V's past, once he realizes the pattern of those getting murdered?

The Artistry:

V For Vendetta had a couple different crosses to bear, so to speak- both in their way impossible ones. There's the Alan Moore contingent, a bitter, frothing, reclusive mass that had been burned a few times and were pessimists by nature, as well as The Matrix fans, the die-hards that shook their heads and got into the sequels, and the die-softers that could still get pumped about a Wachowski project that they didn't write themselves.

Would their new project, rife with many of the same dystopian themes, reclaim that Matrix magic without turning Moore's beloved think-piece into a prolonged music video?

Turns out more yes than no, even if Moore and many of his fans disagree. Certain subplots were logically removed, and the focus shifted slightly, but the result is a rollicking fable on its own merits.

There's an action scene very, very late that lusicrous slow-mo nonsense, as jarringly out of place as the "bullet time" scene in The Matrix was breathtaking and innovative, but otherwise the filmmakers show some restraint and focus on the performances.

Weaving's jovial, theatrical turn (perhaps mostly in the ADR booth) creates a memorable character without a face to remember. Hurt's few scenes are all memorable bombastic scenery-chewing. Portman's early innocence is a little forced to me (though her accent was fine to my American ears), but I warmed to her sincerity as the film went on- and the role of audience cipher is always a little thankless.

The MVP is really Stephen Rea, though, at his weary, doleful, Stephen-Rea-iest best. He mopes from point to point, and underplays the reactions to the conspiracy he uncovers quite well.

In fact, the biggest thing I miss from the graphic novel is a scene where his character, equally reserved, goes to the ruins of Larkhill and trips on acid until he has a revelation- Rea takes the same trip and has a much milder revelation, but apparently sober.

Otherwise mostly everything went right- V For Vendetta clocks in at a snappy 2:10, especially for all of the exposition it has to dole out the entire time. The colors are muted, the nostalgic fancies of V are all there.

The film's commitment to general theatricality is perhaps what make it worth reviewing. Witness the insane, not-Alan-Moore's-at-all monologue by which V introduces himself (as parodied above). Or the glossy, dreamlike reading of the prison-cell note.

Yes, the film changes from a morally ambigous study of anarchism vs. facism to a liberal freedom fighter's quest to topple ultra-conserativism (still sorta facist, though), and its even brief couching of the origins of the conflict in terms of American wars makes it more of an American fable. Well...I'm an American liberal, so tough.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Evey finds a note, from a fellow prisoner named Valerie who had been rounded up as a homosexual, and the story of her life gives Evey the courage to defy her inquisitor and accept that she'll be killed. At which point he tells her she's free to go. So she walks out of her cell... into V's home. Turns out he's been torturing her, to teach her to live without fear.

She's enraged, but also emboldened by the ordeal, and decides to leave. V is sad, and asks that she come back before Nov. 5th, once more.

Finch eventually discovers that the government itself engineered the bioattack that led to their takeover (gasp!), but also that his informant was V. So who knows? (except that we know). V strikes a deal with Creevey to hand himself over in exchange for the life of Sutler (this is a suprisingly easy deal to broker.

The day arrives, and Creedy delivers- Sutler gets one in the head. Then a whole group of soldiers take a whole bunch of shots at V, but he's still standing, and kills them with knives in that nut-bonkers, indulgent sequence, and Creedy as well. That's why you don't make deals with people in masks, Creedy.

V stumbles back to his train full of explosives, says goodbye to Evey, who earlier came to see him off as promised, and dies. Finch arrives (he had a hunch about it, or something), but Evey stares him down and flips the train on to head it toward Parliament.

Which then explodes, and the people all takes off their Guy Fawkes masks (V sent them to everyone in the mail) and watch the fireworks, unsure of what awaits them tomorrow.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Maybe a little lower? It's super-fun, but I don't know if it's top 200 material.

The Legacy:

A decent-enough box office return and positive reviews will suffice for now. The real legacy- it's the best Alan Moore adaptation to date, and for all the things different from the source, it's more than made up for it in the extra sales thereby generated. The flashy, worse-every-time-I-watch-it Watchmen can't even come close, you ask me.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

The so-cheesy-it's-fun alliterative speech, kinetic-typography-style!

Leftover Thoughts:

-Neil Gaiman has a pretty good theory about how the excreable LoXG adaptation is really the best thing to happen to comic book movies, since all the reviews (and the consensus) was "ruins a great comic," and helped us take it for granted that comics can be great literature that films can then ruin.

-The Wikipedia article on the Wachowski brothers REFERENCES ITSELF WHAT? Also both imdb and Wikipedia are rife with the seemingly unconfirmed theory that Larry Wachowski has undergone a sex change operation and is now known as Lana, to the point that both names are changed in the user-edited databases.

-Hey it's Patrick from "Coupling"! Neat. I heard that Jeff is in Prince of Persia and just the thought of taking him seriously in an action movie cracked me up.

-If I ever have a mansion (or a lair), The Shadow Gallery would be a pretty good name.

Coming Up...

169. Star Trek

168. The Wages of Fear

167. Ratatouille

Too Good Not To Share

2010-09-13T23:44:00.003-05:00

At the library where I work, a lady was checking out The Transporter. She asked if we had the sequels, but we just at The Transporter 3, not 2. She thought about it and asked me, earnestly:

"Do you think I'll be able to understand what's going on?"

To which I replied: "You mean... transporting? I think you'll be okay."

I left a voicemail for Dave, proud owner of all three Transporters, and got this email the next day:

"Dunc-

Here's what I would have told that woman...

Well, "The Transporter 2" is a bit sleeker than its predecesor. Louis Leterrier assumes full control of the film, as opposed to sharing the helm with Cory Yuen on the first film. The second film picks up in a new, unexpected locale: Miami, Florida. Frank Martin has now taken a position as a transporter... Of children. He serves as the personal chaffeur and Dr. Ruth for the Billings Family. Jefferson Billings, as portrayed by the Golden Globe-nominated, Chute defeating, and WNBA fan Matthew Modine, is the family patriarch who serves as the director the National Drug Control Policy and is hell-bent on cleaning up the country's drug lords. How one becomes a director of a policy remains to be seen. Gianni Chellini happens to be Miami's most nefarious drug lord. Chellini is played by Italy's own Allessandro Gassman, who's film credits include "Windsurf" and "Big Deal After 20 Years," dispatches his henchwoman, the sultry Lola. Lola, not Russian in the slightest attempts to kidnap the Billings' son at a doctor's appointment Martin has taken him to. A wild shoot-out ensues, with Martin blowing up the office with an oxygen tank. Lola then intercepts Martin, and young Jack Billings, at the entrance to the Billings' estate. Lola forces her way into the vehicle and a wild chase ensues. To sum the chase best, Martin drives his Audi A8 W12 off of a parking garage rooftop into another building that is under construction. Obviously, the special effects make this sequence completely believable. Martin is then taken for a face-to-face meeting with Gianni. While meeting at Gianni's warehouse, Gianni kidnaps Jack and Martin's car is booby-trapped with bomb under the carriage. Martin notices the bomb via a puddle and proceeds to flip the car over, and catch the bomb on a crane hook. However, the Audi A8 W12 is ruined from the impact on the ground. Lola and Gianni have announced their demands and receive payment for the safe return of fair Jack. Unknown to the Billings family and the local authorities, Jack has been infected with a lethal virus that will kill anyone who comes into contact with it within 48 hours. Martin is not happy or amused by this. Martin takes matters into his own hands. Many Russians die because they have a deal with Italian drug lords that work in cooperation with Colombian suppliers. Martin fights a very large man for mild comic relief. Martin winds up with some of the all important antidote and delivers a vial to cure ailing Jack. Martin goes to Gianni's home and fights off numerous henchmen. Finally, preparing to battle Gianni, Lola steps in. A struggle ensues and Lola ends up as a part of an art piece in the living room. Martin then steals Gianni's Ferrari and chases down an airplane. Once aboard, Martin does two things: Displays his British hospitality and KILLS! The plane crashes and an underwater battle ensues. Martin incapacitates Gianni by crushing his spine with his elbow. The antidote is then synthesized from Gianni's blood to cure all the world's problems. I am leaving out the intricate subplot surrounding Gianni's sexuality, the arrival and importance of Tarconi's dinner, and the influence of French New Wave Cinema upon Leterrier's vision. I would say that it is utterly pivotal that you watch this movie to fully understand the multiple storylines that make up what is often described as the greatest action movie trilogy that stars Jason Statham of all-time."

August In Actual Movie Taglines

2010-09-02T20:30:00.013-05:00

The Other Guys

Actual tagline: When the top cops are busy...our only hope is... The Other Guys.

As far as Using The Title In A Sentence goes, it could be a lot worse. Though after seeing it I can tell you that the 'top cops' are hardly in the film any longer than they're in the trailer.

Step Up 3-D

Actual tagline: Two Worlds. One Dream.

OR: Take the biggest step of all in 3D

I would have extrapolated that first one much more, but in ascending order: "one Dream. Two Worlds. Three Dimensions. Eight Dollars Extra."

Click for More...

Eat, Pray, Love

Actual tagline: Let Yourself Go This August

I'm sure they mean it spiritually and all, but aren't they really just saying "let yourself go TO THE THEATER AND PAY FOR THIS"? Look how the 'GO' is in a bigger font and all.

Also can't agree more with Nathan Heller of Slate regarding the lack of commas on the poster: "Eat Pray Love is not a title. It's a random and nonsensical jumble of words. It is a score card in the most boring game of Scrabble imaginable."

The Expendables

Actual tagline: Choose your weapon.

OR: Heroes today. Legends forever.

OR: Semper Fight.

Could these vary any more in quality? From the decently intriguing "Choose your weapon," which underscores both that it's an action movie and that it has many, many stars, to the cheeseball second, to the awful pun on "semper fi(delis)." Which means "always faithful" and is about loyalty, not fighting.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Actual tagline: An epic of epic epicness.

OR: Get the hot girl. Defeat her evil exes. Hit love where it hurts.

Blah on the second one, hooray for the very internet-friendly first one. And what a great film! It doesn't even matter that it tanked at the box office, because it didn't need to do well enough for a sequel (unlike, say, Serenity or something). Plus now it won't be overexposed and annoying. It's a win for everyone but Universal!

Vampires Suck

Actual tagline: Some sagas just won't die.

OR: From the guys who couldn't sit through another vampire movie!

As many problems as there are with the 'Twilight Saga,' I would much, much, much rather that the more informal saga of Friedberg and Seltzer's "_____ Movie" parodies (though lately they've moved on to actual titles, perhaps to avoid brand recognition) would die.

I realized that I wouldn't feel sad at all if Friedberg and Seltzer themselves died in a tragic auto accident (or, in fitting with their oeuvre, a tragic movie-prop-feces-related accident or something). Not one iota. Even if Uwe Boll died, I'd be kind of like "Aw, he really believed in what he was doing." Not these dudes.

The second tag even makes them the ones seemingly victimized by bad films. Oh you just couldn't sit through another one, could you? Boo hoo.

Nanny McPhee Returns

Actual tagline: You'll Believe That Pigs Can Fly!

OR: Who's Your Nanny?

Never saw the first one, no interest in this one. But if you told me there was a movie written by and starring Emma Thompson (who has an Oscar in each regard), directed by someone (Susanna White) that directed six episodes of "Bleak House" and four of "Generation Kill," I would probably sign up without knowing anything else and be pretty surprised.

Piranha 3D

Actual tagline: There's Something in the Water

OR: This Summer 3D Shows Its Teeth

The internets tell me that the French poster had the much more apt "Sea, Sex and Blood" tagline, much better than the bland American examples (Water, Teeth, we get it). I actually saw Piranha 3-D and I would say it was kinda dissapointing, but there were piranhas, and they were in 3-D. So it pretty much delivers.

The Switch

Actual tagline: The most unexpected comedy ever conceived.

If you're referring to a Jeffrey Eugenides short story somehow becoming an obviously bland and toothless romantic comedy, then that is pretty unexpected, yeah.

Lottery Ticket

Actual tagline: Winning is just the beginning. Surviving is another story.

So... surviving is 'another story' in that it.... isn't the beginning? I guess that makes sense?

Normally the phrase goes "[SOMETHING] is easy, [SOME OTHER THING] is another story." They kind of tried to fir a square peg in a round hole here.

The Last Exorcism

Actual tagline: Believe In Him.

Him who? Based on the poster it's a tossup between Jesus and Eli Roth. I dislike horror in general, and I especially dislike this recent spate of horror films that take skeptics who have lost their faith and then punish them with real supernatural religious voodoo (The Reaping, The Excorcism of Emily Rose, this thing).

Takers

Actual tagline: Who's Taking Who?

OR: Everyone's after something.

I believe it's "Who's Taking Whom?"

Fun Fact: I saw a trailer for Takers this spring when I randomly saw The Losers- as that film also starred Idris Elba, Zoe Saldana, and a generic prettyboy (Chris Evans and Paul Walker may in fact be the same person) I was briefly under the impression that either they ran the trailer for the movie I was about to see, or that I was in the wrong theater entirely.

Wasn't that fun? Coming soon: September! Maybe all at once I dunno!

IMDB #171 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

2010-08-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

Remember when Guy Ritchie was cool? What happened? Oh yeah, he married Madonna, cast her in a remake of Swept Away, and renamed her character after his mother. I wonder why that didn't work out?

But today, we take a look at his triumphant emergence on the scene with 1999's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

The Key Players:

Ritchie recently proved he could direct something other than comic gangster fables with the winning Sherlock Holmes, though that in its way was sort of like Snatch or Lock, Stock without the kickin' soundtrack. But his shtick had been getting a little old, as witnessed by the serviceable but indifferently-recieved RocknRolla, even after his departures had gone even worse (like the ridiculously misguided Revolver and the aforementioned Swept Away). Holmes has brought the newly Madonna-free Ritchie back into standing as a bankable talent- I guess we'll see how he cashes it in.

He directs a large ensemble, the only notables of which include future action-superstar Jason Statham (The Transporters, Cranks, The Italian Job) and a cameo by some banjo player named Gordon Sumner (though Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher have pretty solid careers as "Hey It's That Guy!"s).

Click for More...

The Story:

Our ostensible main characters are four friends: a card sharp, a cook, a grifter, and a...dude played by Jason Statham (I guess he's also a grifter, as it were) pool £100,000 to back the card sharp in a high stakes game- a game that turns out to be rigged, and they end up with a £500,000 debt to a local "porn king."

The porn king, meanwhile, hires two incompetent thugs to steal the titular pair of priceless antique rifles, a group of criminals robs a trio of middle-class marijuana-growers, drawing the ire of their afro-headed supplier and his own thugs.

Our four heroes decide to rob the first group of criminals after they've cleaned out the weed-farm, keep the cash, and sell the weed to the local kingpin- who is of course the same afro-ed psycho they've indirectly stolen it from. They purchase some guns along the way, but all they can scrounge are two anicent rifles they're not sure will even fire. Hmmm.

The Artistry:

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels clearly demonstrates Ritchie's propensity for fun montages, acid-washed visuals, and a frenetic pacing right away (though one can argue that producer Matthew Vaughn might deserve just as much credit).

But the screenplay's balance of wit, sarcasm, casual profanity, and fully-formed characters (or cariacatures) are what makes it worth multiple viewings.

Nearly every character, no matter the limited amount of time, makes an impression- be it's Sting's glowering father figure, Vinnie Jones as an acerbic muscleman (not that he plays anything else, really), the bumbling comic duo that steals the rifles, or Vas Blackwood silently watching the tv after lighting a tosser on fire.

The cockney rhyming slang helps, especially since it's just presented as is instead of explained (like in the weakest single scene from Ocean's 11).

I suppose the frank portrayal of gangland violence was sort of extreme, even just 11 years ago, but it's a yawn these days. Oh, he shot off a dude's foot? Meh.

But the lived-in underworld that Lock, Stock creates is memorable enough to be worth visiting again (which Ritchie himself would do with Snatch), and the breezy chemistry of the cast (the celebratory montage of drinking between our heroes late in the film seems pretty real) makes it a minor modern classic.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

The muscleman (and his moppet son) ends up with the money, the two bands of criminals take each other out, and our four compatriots have only two musty rifles to show for their troubles (but no debt, after the duo of thugs takes out the porn king in a hilarious crossed-wire act of desperation). They send loudmouth Tom to throw them off a bridge, just as they realize they're worth a quarter mil each! A hilarious ambiguous freeze-frame ensues.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I like it right here: a unique vision, a fun time had by all. My only quibble would be that Snatch is even higher, while Matthew Vaughn's superior Layer Cake is nowhere to be found. But you can't have everything.

The Legacy:

Surely the whole "Guy Ritchie movie" Type has lead to the greenlighting of lesse fare, your Smokin' Aceses of the world and all. There was also brief tv series adapted from the film.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

I'm pretty partial to the very opening scene, with Statham's rapid patter giving way to a kickass Ocean Colour Scene set flight from the 'cozzers.'

Leftover Thoughts:

-The lack of an Oxford comma in this film's title bothers me. I will defend the Oxford comma with my life.

-My favorite running joke is the way everyone makes fun of Flemyng's character as if he's fat. "Tom what have you been eating?"

-Most of the quotes are funnier in context, really. It's the banter, not the lines themselves.

Coming Up...

170. V For Vendetta

169. Star Trek

168. The Wages Of Fear