Kinematoscope

I would first like to send my sincerest and deepest apologies to Avatar, The Cove, An Education, A Single Man, and Up in the Air. I did not see these five films, which have all been lauded. I am relatively certain that if I had seen one or all of them, it would have affected this list.

However, I make due with what I have. Away we go!


10.) The House of the Devil: A tense, low budget, horror film that evokes the nostalgia of quality the 1980s. Ti West’s film works because it is minimal in all approaches and never tries to be anything more than it really is. Also, how can you not love its tagline: Talk on the phone. Finish your homework. Watch T. V. DIE!

9.) In the Loop: The satirical take on the United States’ invasion of Iraq is hilarious. Utterly foul mouthed, this movie is blisteringly funny with a top notch cast. Most notably, Peter Capaldi delivers one of the most underrated (and probably under-seen) performances of the year as an offensive British Intelligence leader.


8.) District 9: I did not see this film until last weekend. Neil Blomkamp’s first true outing did not disappoint. What makes this movie action science fiction movie special is that it has a heart and its thought provoking. I also like to imagine that Peter Jackson prank calls Universal Studios periodically and reminds them that they could have had Blomkamp direct Halo.


7.) Sin Nombre: It’s poetic, touching, and beautifully shot. It’s also in a different language, which makes it even more artsy.

6.) Up: The much hyped opening 10 minutes of the film do not disappoint. It sets the tone for a movie that will make you smile and cry, sometimes at the same time. While Up is not the best entry in the Pixar canon, it ranks near the top.

5.) The Hurt Locker: Kathryn Bigelow’s mediation on the tensions that surround war is outstanding. Jeremy Renner breaks out in the most suspenseful film since The Bourne Ultimatum (I feel like Rex Reed when I say something like that). The tension created by Bigelow is mesmerizing and Mark Boal’s script hits all the right notes.


4.) A Serious Man: I enjoy every Coen Brothers’ film (even The Ladykillers). However, what made A Serious Man special was how personal it was. The Coen Brothers tend to focus on subversive people, while this film was about a college professor and his life’s troubles. I may be trivializing the film’s plot with that summation because it also deals with faith, family, adultery, and Jefferson Airplane.


3.) Drag Me to Hell: 2009 will be remembered – at least for me – as a fun year. 2007 had many films that could be called masterpieces, but this year was about being fun. Drag Me to Hell was easily the most fun I had at the movies this year. Raimi’s return to his roots was vintage form and Alison Lohman served admirably as the new Bruce Campbell.

2.) The Reader: I saw it in theatres five times in 2009, but it qualified for last year’s list.

2.) Fantastic Mr. Fox: On any given day, Drag Me to Hell and Wes Andersen’s first animated effort could swap places. However, this was the film I was most excited for this year and it delivered even more than I imagined. The meticulous attention to detail by Andersen proved to be rewarding because it was nice to have a film that was completely done by hand, as opposed to computer wizardry.


1.) Inglourious Basterds: This film has Quentin Tarantino’s pulp fetish fingerprints all over it. From the opening frame, to the screaming conclusion, the film is a masterpiece. The terrific performances supplied by all players, especially Christoph Waltz, rival the enthusiasm with which Tarantino directs. The film, while heavy on the dialogue, may disappoint the purest action fan, but it compares well to another World War II picture – The Dirty Dozen. This is a film that I can easily re-watch over and over again and still find it entertaining every time.

Of the Big Eight categories, Original Screenplay is the only one that's a true tossup. Will it go to the now beleaguered Hurt Locker script, or Tarantino's wordy Nazi parable?


1. The Hurt Locker- Mark Boal (0 for 0)

SGT. JAMES: [to his son] "You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yeah. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."

The winner of the WGA and the BAFTA, Mark Boal's taught script looks like the current frontrunner, by just a nose. It's swift, frank, and as laudable for the things it leaves unsaid as the things it emphasizes.


2. Inglourious Basterds- Quentin Tarantino (1 for 2)

COL. LANDA: "Consequently, a German soldier conducts a search of a house suspected of hiding Jews. Where does the hawk look? He looks in the barn, he looks in the attic, he looks in the cellar, he looks everywhere *he* would hide, but there's so many places it would never occur to a hawk to hide. However, the reason the Führer's brought me off my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today is because it does occur to me. Because I'm aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity."

Tarantino, I suppose is a heavyweight having won this category for Pulp Fiction, but it's hard not to think of him as an outsider still. Yet it's possible AMPAS will award his wordy, episodic, and mannered script for Basterds, if only for navigating several languages at once.


3. The Messenger- Alessandro Camon, Oren Moverman (both 0 for 0)

CAPT. STONE: "You do not speak with anybody other than the next of kin - no friend, no neighbor, no co-worker or mistress. Hours of operation are 0600 to 2200 hours and we dont want to wake anybody up in the middle of the night. If you ask me, hitting them with the news at the crack of dawn is not exactly a great way to start their day -breakfast-wise."

Moverman and Camon's screenplay seems more like something for a stage production- apparently there was little to no blocking or direction, or even rehearsal for any of the death notification scenes, so the reaction when someone slaps Woody Harrelson's character in grief-stricken panic was geniune. But there was some great work near the end when people finally start opening up.


4. A Serious Man- Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (both 4 for 8)

LARRY: "It's, it's more about myself, I've... I've had quite a bit of tsuris lately. Marital problems, professional, you name it. This is not a frivolous request. This is a ser- I'm a ser- I'm, uh, I've tried to be a serious man, you know? Tried to do right, be a member of the community, raise the- Danny, Sarah, they both go to school, Hebrew school, a good breakfast... Well, Danny goes to Hebrew school, Sarah doesn't have time, she mostly... washes her hair. Apparently there are several steps involved, but you don't have to tell Marshak that. Just tell him I need help. Please? I need help."

The Coens return with another dour, dark, farce layered with stuttering and awkward silence. It seemed to me designed to frustrate, but maybe that was the point. Moving on...


5. Up- Bob Peterson (0 for 1), Pete Docter (0 for 4), Thomas McCarthy (0 for 0)

CARL: "This is crazy. I finally meet my childhood hero and he's trying to kill us. What a joke."
DUG: "Hey, I know a joke! A squirrel walks up to a tree and says, 'I forgot to store acorns for the winter and now I am dead.' Ha! It is funny because the squirrel gets dead."

Not sure if I agree- Ratatouille, Wall-E, and The Incredibles seemed a little more complex to me- the appeal of Up is almost entirely visual and immediate.


I'm going with The Hurt Locker in a close vote, even with all the late-breaking hubbub last week. Sometimes there's just no stopping a movie on a roll.

What a great, great category this year. Apparently it takes 16 animated films in a year to expand the nominations to five, and we just barely squeaked by in '09.

There's your obligatory Pixar, an old-school hand-drawn Disney film, two great claymation entires (one based on a book by my favorite author), and just when you thought the last spot would go to a generic crowd-pleaser like Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, along comes an unheralded but awesome-looking Irish sleeper.

1. Coraline

Neil Gaiman would be the aforementioned favorite author of mine (better luck next time, Roald Dahl), and while Stardust was passable entertainment, Henry Selick's Coraline is by far superior in both overall quality and in capturing the spirit of Gaiman's work, seamlessly blending fright with wonder.

Dakota Fanning manages not to annoy the stuffing out of me in pure voice form, and beyond Teri Hatcher every other choice is a ringer: John Hodgman, Ian McShane, Dawn and French, and even a brief cameo by a They Might Be Giant.

2. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Not only would I have included this in the Best Picture race over Up, I would also venture that it was grieviously overlooked for both Adapted Screenplay and Art Direction- isn't set decoration harder when it's really, really small?

3. The Princess and the Frog

Didn't see it, sure it's fun, and so on. Not sure if I ever will, even though frogs are my favorite animals.

4. The Secret Of Kells

This hasn't been released in the U.S. as of yet, but my "friend" who lives in "Ireland" and has no idea what a torrent is whatsoever saw it and told me it was amazing.

A visually mesmerizing, hand-crafted style and Bruno Callais' painfully-snubbed score support a story set in the 9th century about monks, vikings, forest spirits, and an adorable cat. It's snappy, but has the straightforward, unexplained mysticism of a Miyazaki film.

...or so I hear.

5. Up

See the previous post on how this film was fine enough, but not a home run- more Cars than Wall-E, at least for me. But there's pretty much no way it's losing, unless enough people fall in love with The Secret of Kells- and hey, they're technically required to see all five before voting.

A ten part series on the Best Picture nominees, structured around four basic questions.

Was It Any Good?

We're well past the point that we should just amend the dictionery to contain:

Pixarian- adj.- of consistently superior quality.
The ballplayer put up winningly Pixarian numbers from season to season.

Up continues the 10 film winning streak, this time all the way to the Best Picture race. The story is whimsically simple, something of a regression from recent concepts like Wall-E and Ratatouille: widower grows cranky, leaves society by tying balloons to his house.

My verdict was good, not great.

Would I See It Again?

Sure, I guess- I actually put it on my Christmas list before seeing it on blnd faith, and I can't say I'm dissapointed.

It's just a bit of a letdown after Wall-E, a film that deserved a Best Picture nomination last year even before the expansion, given the field (cough). And although the image of the house is unique and the animation splendid as always, it's by far the most pedestrian Pixar concept so far: the list goes toys come to life, bugs run a circus, toys come to life again, monsters harvest screams for power, clown fish loses son, superheroes faced with lawsuit, talking car gets lost, rat wants to cook, last robot on earth falls in love, and then... old man is cranky?

And the characters aren't terribly rich, either. As wonderful as the opening montage of Carl's lifetime with his wife was, he's a pretty generic cranky-old-dude archetype for the rest of the film. His little sidekick Russel is a pretty run of the mill annoying kid, until some revelations about his parents' divorce halfway through.



What Did It Acheive?

Second highest grossing Pixar film, and of course along with Avatar the first animated Best Picture nominee since Beauty And The Beast. And we all know that it's bringing in the fifth Animated Feature Oscar on March 7th.

Will I Remember It Years From Now?

I did see, at some point, Pete Docter's other Pixar collaboration, Monsters, Inc., but I find my memories of it very sketchy. So I'll have to get back to you. Though only a few moments in Up made me roll my eyes as much as Billy Crystal's tired Vaudevillian schtick (namely when the dogs played poker and obvious gags like the GPS falling).

Maybe it doesn't help that it's the first Pixar movie with human protagonists, as I found myself wondering a lot of pragmatic questions, about how long it would take to float to South America and so forth. Pixar's great at animals and robots, but it might still be south of the uncanny valley for humanfolk.

Although it had its usual share of hiccups yet again (like disqualifying Where The Wild Things Are), the Score category surprised me with two of my favorites that I thought would be overlooked, and another great inclusion that didn't even occur to me.

1. Avatar- James Horner (2 for 8)

For your consideration: "War"


Funny how the future as depicted in cinema looks better and fancier all the time, but the soundtrack is the same old bombastic thing. Witness the above selection, a pretty standard Greek-chorus type of thing- seems like it could be from a chariot race or gladiator fight, not a huge battle between twin-blade space helicopters, robot-exoskeletons and big alien dinosaurs. If you want to see the future done right, see Clint Mansell's great work on the indie Moon.

Horner is a frequent nominee, but has wins only for Titanic's score and song. If he takes the trophy, it will probably be good news for the film's Best Picture chances.

2. Fantastic Mr. Fox- Alexandre Desplat (0 for 2)

For your consideration: "Kristofferson's Theme"


Desplat had a busy year in 2009- so much that I was sure that he'd get nominated for his work in Coco Before Chanel, A Prophet, Julie and Julia, or even New Moon before his wonderfully vibrant Fox score.

He matches frequent Wes Anderson composer Mark Mothersbaugh's plucky string work with some richer, more emotional compositions which helped make Fantastic Mr. Fox arguably Anderson's most affecting film.

3. The Hurt Locker- Marco Beltrami (0 for 1) and Buck Sanders (0 for 0)

For your consideration: "The Way I Am"


Hey did you know there's super-loud death metal band called "Hurtlocker"? Just a tip if you're looking for score clips on YouTube and have headphones in. I learned the hard away.

Anyway, a wonderful inclusion of a score I forgot about. It seems a lot like the branch trying to make up for certain past omissions, since the score has a lot of similarities to Zimmer and Howard's dark, atonal Dark Knight score- plus one track (from the six IED scene) is even entitled "There Will Be Bombs," an homage to Johnny Greenwood's tragically disqualified score from '07.

4. Sherlock Holmes- Hans Zimmer (1 for 7)

For your consideration: "Not In Blood, But In Bond"


Loved Zimmer's work here, especially the plaintive tack above when it looks like Watson died in an explosion (spoiler- he was fine. I'm sure you're shocked). The whole score had a very broken-piano, ranshackle, steampunk feel to it that was superb.

5. Up- Michael Giacchino (0 for 1)

For your consideration: "Married Life"


Your likely winner, thanks to the unforgettable early montage in Up that made everyone all teary-eyed. Giacchino's score does most of the heavy lifting in that sequence, and the score weaves in and out of the rest of the film nicely.