The BFI sent out a survey yesterday to those who bought tickets online, asking for feedback on this year’s festival. Obviously I filled it out. A chance to win £150? Are you kidding me? That’ll pay for copies of XCOM Enemy Unknown, Dishonored and Borderlands 2 and might even leave me with enough for Halo 4, after which I’ll give up this timewasting blog nonsense and just dedicate my free time to gaming like I always dreamed when I was a boy. The survey wanted to know what attendees thought of the festival’s spread across London (I’m mixed on that), the line-up (better than I first thought) and the new groupings for the films, which were arranged in categories such as Love, Debate, Laugh, etc. (this didn’t even register at the time).
One part of the survey struck me as particularly interesting: “To what extent do you agree with the following statement: The LFF increases my understanding of other cultures”. I chose “strongly agree” because the festival, and cinema in general, is my main window into the rest of the world; I don’t travel and even though I live in London my time is split between working and recovering from working, so I’m not out there meeting new people as often as I would like. But it made me wonder about how the movies I saw represented their country of origin, and how they will colour my impression of them.
Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is a silent, black-and-white retelling of the Snow White fable, as well as Spain’s entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category of next year’s Academy Awards; a move that has been interpreted as a reaction to the success of last year’s The Artist. This version of the tale, set in 1920s Andalusia, focuses on Carmencita, the daughter of a paralysed bullfighter trapped by his malevolent new wife (the enthusiastic Maribel Verdu), who becomes Snowhite (Blancanieves, natch), an amnesiac torero who falls in with six bullfighting little people. The plot follows the legendary tale surprisingly closely, despite the change in period and locale and the removal of the fantastical elements, though it cuts off at a point you wouldn’t expect.
By setting the movie in the past, Berger paints a romantic portrait of the era, complete with flamenco dancing, flamboyant toreadors beloved by the Spanish people, and crazed but dominant women with nefarious motives; more a play on cultural stereotypes than a look into the Spanish soul. As a result there are a number of references throughout that would likely fall flat outside that country, and I will admit to some discomfort as my narrow view of the country, its people and the products of its culture showed up here in such an open fashion. Is this satire? Self-abasement? Should I know more about the country to appreciate these elements?
The bullfighting especially seemed odd to a 21st Century viewer, bringing about not only concern about its glamorisation but also my immense presumption in deciding what aspects of the culture Berger is allowed to depict; the typical infinite regress of judgement and paranoia that is the mindset of an evolving liberal. This excellent blogpost by Mar Diestro-Dópido displays a greater understanding of the cultural significance of these plotpoints, and eases my concerns a little. That question about learning more about other cultures returns; these movies are lessons in culture but nuance once more confuses the student.
Berger’s film is apparently intended to be a homage to the silent European melodramas of the 1920s, which suggests that the elements I found problematic are more likely mere nostalgic references. None of this made the movie particularly interesting to me, unfortunately. After two miserable versions of the Grimm Brothers tale from Hollywood this year the tale is pretty much burnt out, even when reconfigured in this manner, though I enjoyed the entertaining pantomime performance from Maribel Verdu and winning work from Macarena García as Blancanieves and Sergio Dorado as lovestruck Rafita (Snow White’s Prince Charming is now one of the “dwarves” who protects her).
The choice to make this a silent film is where my patience faltered. While, as that blogpost points out, the silent storytelling on show here is commendably clear and efficient, it’s hard to say why Berger chose to make the film in this manner. His previous movie, Torremolinos 73 — a Spanish / Dutch Boogie Nights, maybe? — includes scenes that mimic both softcore porn and famous movies, capturing the look and feel of those artifacts with skill. Perhaps Berger just likes old movies, and is eager to pay homage to them. Or maybe he likes “cheeky” porn references; the Dominatrix jokes in the middle of Blancanieves were a shock to me and to the parents who had brought their kids along for what they thought would be viewpoint-expanding U-cert culchah.
Or perhaps this is a way to portray Spanish culture at arm’s length, the form as distancing technique. Whatever his reasons, Berger confuses the issue by adding obnoxious fast-cutting and hand-held camerawork during some sequences; two modern developments in film language that clash with the otherwise rigorously followed silent cinema techniques. The spell is broken, the present rushes in, and this viewer at least became impatient with Berger’s choices. It’s certainly a cut-above Tarsem’s light but inconsequential Mirror, Mirror and Rupert Sanders’ woeful Snow White and the Huntsman, but that’s not exactly difficult. They were absolutely appalling; this is merely a disappointment, one saved from censure by a very bold final scene that I won’t spoil.
No spoilers either for Juan Carlos Medina’s superb Painless (Insensibles), a macabre horror tale set in Catalonia both in the present day and during the Spanish civil war. Macabre is the key word there; after seeing it that was the term that kept running through my mind whenever I tried to describe it to anyone. Without getting too deep into film-ruining details, Medina’s debut movie, which he co-wrote with Luiso Berdejo, tells of a doctor dying of leukaemia who discovers that his parents have kept a secret from him, one which links him to a group of children born in the 1920s, all of whom suffer from Congenital analgesia and are kept in a mountaintop asylum to prevent them from harming themselves or others.
Evoking memories of Spirit of the Beehive and Pan’s Labyrinth, as well as Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Bernard Rose’s Candyman, Painless draws allegorical links between modern Spain and the country’s painful past. As the movie’s modern protagonist David (strong work from Àlex Brendemühl as the tortured doctor) begins to learn about his family’s history, we see the worst parts of Spain’s history as the 1930s Civil War reaches the asylum, bringing with it clumsy Republicans and vicious Fascists whose actions jeopardise the vulnerable children, before the cruelty of the Fascists passes over to one of the children in particular, warping him into something awful, an evil weapon who terrifies even those who use him.
To an outsider the deliberate points made here by Medina about the war’s corruptive influence on Spain’s soul can only be guessed at, but even so Painless‘ allegorical power is still obvious thanks to Medina’s powerful direction. This is a horror film as a confession of crimes committed through ignorance and fear, and a message of hope; without giving anything away, the grandiose finale hints at the possibility that a rebirth can be achieved in which the country’s dark history doesn’t have to affect the future. Victor Erice and Guillermo Del Toro have used horror and fantasy to explore the war and Franco’s cruel dictatorship before, but Medina links this to the Spain of the 21st Century, saying that the atrocities and cruelty of that time must not be forgotten.
On top of all that richness, Medina has created a creepy and distinctly unpleasant horror movie with greater atmosphere, tension, and even romantic breadth than any horror movie of the past few years; only Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage rivals it. The discovery of the children’s condition is the stuff of nightmares, and that’s before we embark on a series of unnerving experiments and lessons from kindly Jewish refugee Dr. Holtzmann — a welcome appearance by Dutch actor Derek De Lint, formerly of Poltergeist: The Legacy and Paul Verhoeven’s Zwartboek. I’ll say nothing more about the outcome of this sequence, other than to proclaim Tómas Lemarquis’ Berkano a horror icon fit to stand alongside Doug Bradley’s Pinhead and Tony Todd’s Candyman.
Who knows when Painless will get a release internationally; it’s been released in France already and will appear in Spain in February 2013 (it’s a Spanish-French co-production). When it does get picked up (and it most certainly will), please try to catch it on the big screen. It’s exquisitely shot by Alejandro Martinez, and the squirmiest and most unpleasant parts will get great audience reactions. More than that it’s a valuable insight into the way a country riven by a terrible history attempts to come to terms with it, using metaphor to address the most upsetting aspects of it, and perhaps heal itself by keeping an honest and soul-searching dialogue going. Cinema as remedy for societal ills.
While Medina looks at the Spanish soul through Gothic horror and ambitious explorations across a terrible century, Ben Wheatley captures a snapshot of what it is to be English in his rain-sodden black comedy Sightseers. Written by the film’s stars, Alice Lowe (formerly Liz Asher of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace fame) and Steve Oram, the film depicts a love story between hapless Tina and ominously ill-tempered Chris as they take a trip from the Midlands north through the most risible tourist attractions the North of England has to offer, passing through the Lake District (via lovely, lovely Keswick and the famed Pencil Museum) and into North Yorkshire. They leave behind a trail of bodies, as their socially stunted personalities clash with those of uncaring countrymen that won’t let them have the idyllic holiday they imagined.
This is, again, a film that should be seen unspoiled; please avoid the trailer currently doing the rounds, which wrecks many of the funniest jokes and pitches the tone as being far more manic than the actual film. What we get instead is a leisurely road trip through England, but with the occasional murder; Badlands with caravans. Black comedies are hard to get right but England has a great track record, the best of which are subversive Ealing classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers. Sightseers lacks the elegance of those, but its bleak visual style and damp air brings to mind memories of Carry On Camping‘s “saucy” goings-on, the brown colour-schemes of Only Fools and Horses, the crushed-dreams and social grasping of Steptoe and Son.
There hasn’t been a film as quintessentially English as this in years. The celebratory hurrah that was Danny Boyle’s lovely Olympics opening ceremony seemed perfectly matched to the sunny fortnight of the actual Games, but now we’re in the middle of a particularly unpleasant autumn and the miserable weather outside felt like it had seeped through the walls of the cinema, into our bones, to soak the things we English hold inside; resentment of others, distrust of modernity, repressed fury at perceived injustices, frustration at dreams dashed, a yearning for connection and freedom and space that an island cannot provide. If the festival allowed me to experience other cultures, Sightseers is the perfect peek into my own culture; a dark mirror image of Boyle’s joyous vision.
Perhaps I’m taking this film too personally, but it’s hard not to when I myself have felt like I’ve wasted years of my life not chasing my dreams due to familial obligation and fear of the unknown. Sightseers starts in the West Midlands, place of my birth, and the accents and shots of the M6 and the Aston Expressway sank blades of cold dread right into my heart. That grudging, belligerent worldview, that disappointment in life felt by both Chris and Tina, is all too familiar. I’d hope I’m the only person who recognised this sourness, but I come from the country of The League of Gentlemen, Fawlty Towers, Reginald Perrin, Nighty Night, Tony Hancock, Nuts in May, Eden Lake, Straw Dogs, Alan Partridge, The Trip, Rising Damp, etc. ad infinitum. Maybe not.
If you cut me, do I not bleed the frothing bile of impotent grievance? Am I not the child of a former superpower, forced to watch helplessly as the rest of the world passes by? I cringed at this portrait of the disaffected and socially inept of England, wincing as I recognised the baffled disgust of the two lovers, but as counterpoint Wheatley and his stars perform miracles in creating a relationship that feels real and touching even as their reactions to the world are heightened into the realms of murderous fantasy. Chris and Tina struggle to find ways to compromise with each other as they embark on their romantic adventure, and despite the violence surrounding them, these tiny battles to establish and understand their coupledom will be familiar to most viewers.
Wheatley blends the absurdity of the couple’s violence with the mundanity of their lives expertly, and Lowe and Oram’s perfectly judged comic performances are so endearing that concerns about “mocking the idiot” are dispelled. It helps that Chris and Tina are not necessarily stupid people, merely lonely and confused; universal and unfortunate disadvantages that most of us experience at one time or another. They are unable to deal with their frustration, leading to a slowly growing malevolence that they, Adam and Eve in the North of England, have no way of understanding as being evil. Perhaps this is a commentary on the slow acceptance of vile deeds we see in war time, as we try to ignore the crimes we commit against our perceived aggressors.
There’s so much to unpack here, touching on class tension, stymied imperial ambition, the image of England as an idyll or Bedlamite nightmare, a shadow of its former self — the inclusion of Sir Hubert Parry and William Blake’s Jerusalem during one particularly violent scene is just perfect. These are things that an Englishman/woman will feel intuitively; Wheatley, Lowe, Oram (and co-writer Amy Jump) have tapped into the soul of the country. Who knows how outsiders will react. Perhaps the key is the believable love story, forged from real emotions heightened to absurdity; friend-of-the-blog @Jamieandaston compared the film to Before Sunrise/Sunset, and despite the addition of violence she has a point. Time will tell if this universal aspect appeals to others.
Or maybe I’m being too cautious. After all, the movie that came most to mind while enjoying this was Withnail and I. Not only is that a drizzly exploration of rural England, it’s massively quotable, and Sightseers is packed with dialogue that will become as well-known as anything from Bruce Robinson’s movie. The popularity of that outside the UK bodes well for Sightseers, but I have no doubt that, if handled right, this uncompromising vision of our gloomy country will become an enormous domestic hit, something that will attract a devoted following and become part of the cultural lexicon in the same way as all the sitcoms and films listed above. It’s out at the end of November, it’s great from quiet start to stunning finish, and I couldn’t recommend it more.
Traditionally this is one of those periods in the year when I get obnoxiously, nerdily excited about something many discerning film buffs dismiss as irrelevant: the Academy Awards, where overpaid buffoons receive the acceptance of their similarly overpaid buffoonish peers in the form of a gilded trinket. My enjoyment of this ceremony and all of the nonsense surrounding it flies in the face of serious film criticism, but then so does my love of garish and noisy explodofilms, and I guess that means I’ll never get that job at Sight & Sound, WOEZ.
This year is a bit different. Aside from a blip caused by this excellent and informative Tom Shone piece about the Academy voters, RL problems have taken some of the steam out of my usual preparation for the ceremony, and we won’t even be having our traditional Oscar party this year, where a bunch of lovely folks come around to eat Pringles, set off party poppers at 4 in the morning (::panics::), and shout insults at the thoroughly dreadful Sky Movies Oscar show presenters Claudia “I haven’t seen it yet” Winkleman and Mark “I haven’t seen it either but I bet it’s crap” Dolan. Sorry guys, it would have been fun, even with those endless Moet-sponsored inserts from England. Besides, would there be anything quite as thrilling as this in this year’s ceremony? I think not.)
Maybe it’s a lucky escape for all of us. Watching the ceremony is seriously damaged by enduring these ninnies wonk on about things they do not understand. Watching the Golden Globes earlier this year was a truly disheartening experience, the only entertaining aspect of it being Jessica Stevenson-Hynes cashing a paycheck for turning up at the studio and then crocheting for four hours (seriously, she just got her crocheting equipment out and got on with it) while Sky’s fashion correspondent and that stand-up comedian who looks like he’s taking a break from getting rejected by hot girls at fresher’s week blithered on about how The King’s Speech has to win everything just because it’s British and if it fails we’ll all die because our self-worth has somehow become inextricably linked with its baffling worldwide success.
Maybe that’s another reason why I’m not looking forward to the ceremony as much as usual. For the illumination of readers who live outside the UK, it’s fair to point out that all you hear about right now is King’s Speech King’s Speech King’s Speech 24/fucking/7, and it’s ruining my enjoyment of everything. It’s not a terrible movie, per se. It’s just unsurprising and overdirected. British movies revel in these “loser overcomes adversity” plots, applying them to every subject imaginable, though at least we can be glad Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush didn’t have to end up naked like the cast of The Full Monty or Calendar Girls. King’s Speech is no exception to this reliance on the rote and cliched plot template, though much of my irkety feelings about the damnable box office colossus is aimed at the final scene.
Audiences across the country might be weeping openly at King Thingy’s triumphant pronunciation of “thet scahhndrel Mestah Hetlah”, but the scene is so badly edited it really does seem like Tom “Off-Kilter Composition” Hooper is saying the final speech was delivered with such adversity-conquering power that Britain went insane with joy at their monarch getting it finished in a reasonable amount of time, instead of thinking “Oh shit, we’re going to war and we’re going to be bombed to blood-drenched ribbons and our sons are either going to die or be traumatised for the rest of their lives, oh God, oh God, oh God.” No no, our lips were too stiff for all that: huzzah for our imperial leader’s newfound confidence! That’ll make digging an Anderson shelter in the back yard and living on birdseed and gravel for ten years all the more fun.
Which is not to say I hated it entirely. It’s pretty difficult not to enjoy the seemingly now-legendary performance from Colin Firth, who is commendably spiky and unlovable as the spiky and unlovable monarch. The cast is generally very good, though Guy Pierce’s accent is hilariously distracting and Timothy Spall’s genial take on Churchill is a poor choice. It would have been much better had it been directed by someone who wasn’t so eager to draw attention to his work. Mr. Hooper, please stop with the maddening camera-frippery please please please. Your first movie – the far superior Damned United – was similarly marred by showy compositions, and it just makes you look a bit silly. You’re never going to have to go back to directing episodes of EastEnders now, so you don’t have to prove you’re the next Orson Welles. And look! Mark Lawson thinks that your time in the TV trenches makes you and your partner-in-overcompensating-visual-splurge Danny Boyle more capable than David Fincher and Darren Aronofsky! So congrats, one temporarily senile media pundit says that you’ve made it. Now please use the centre of the frame like a grown-up, okay?
So yeah, the worrying possibility of a King’s Sweep has soured me on the awards this year. I’m not crazy enough to assume that my favourites of the year – Black Swan and Inception – would win much, but I’d be perfectly happy with The Social Network winning a bunch of stuff. The topicality of it has made many see it as a movie that will date badly, but I think it says enough about our approach to relationships and interactions that it will fare better than previous tech-movies (who can watch, say, War Games and not laugh at the LP-sized floppy discs). I’m also hoping for some love to be thrown at The Kids Are All Right: it can be dismissed as light indie fare but I think it’s a better crafted movie than that, and earns all of its emotional payoffs with enough invisibly deployed effort that many US indie movies of the past few years couldn’t even begin to imagine. I’d also be very happy to see a surprise deluge of naked gold men all over the Coen Brothers’ triumphant True Grit, a film that ranks up there with their very best.
My sourer impulses hope for a shut-out of ADHD Boyle’s predictably empty 127 Hours, which is little more than a grisly advert for Humanity that relies almost exclusively on Sigur Ros’ Festival to generate any emotion amid the frenetic and mostly random frame-shuffle: classic Boyle, then. Despite my adoration of James Franco (so, so good here, and very amusing in his Green Hornet cameo), there’s little else to praise in 127 Hours. Oh, the photography is very nice. But still, Boyle has even less to say here than usual: the message of the movie seems to be “don’t die if you can help it, and be a little nicer to your mom”. Okay, thanks for the advice, go away now. It would also be nice to see Alice in Wonderland receive none of the technical awards it was nominated for just because I hate it so much (and yes, I’m using hate in the non-hyperbolic sense that I actually do hate it: properly hate it and get red-mist-angry whenever I think about it), but the technical categories were the only ones where I thought it was worthy of praise. That’s a tough one that won’t matter at all as I doubt it will win anything even though the Academy likes to pat successful movies on the head for being profitable, no matter how inexplicable or undeserving that success is.
So anyway, who do I think will win, and who do I think should win, and who do I think was unfairly shut out? See below for further details.
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: Colin Firth – The King’s Speech
Fairly obvious. His ascendance to Oscar glory wasn’t even damaged by the weird attempt by some unscrupulous scoundrel to stymie him by pointing out that King Whats-His-Name was a huge fan of Hitler (he had all of his albums, even his ill-advised dubstep experiment Das Reichbeat). The only thing that could stop Mr. Firth from winning this year would be for him to reveal he used a stunt double in THAT SCENE in Pride and Prejudice as he didn’t want to get his britches wet.
Who Should Win: Colin Firth – The King’s Speech
I used to be a Colin Firth agnostic, but this performance – and his adorable humility in the face of overwhelming praise – has made a believer of me. I’ll be just as pleased at his inevitable win as all of the journalists who will be able to print “GOD SAVE THE KING!” on the front page on Monday morning.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Ben Stiller – Greenberg
I don’t think anyone nominated this year should be excluded. Even the fact that Biutiful is an appalling movie can take anything away from Javier Bardem’s impressive work. Nevertheless, I think Stiller’s bold and detailed performance deserves more praise than it got. Ah well.
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Geoffrey Rush – The King’s Speech
I think the initial rush of enthusiasm for Christian Bale’s bold work in David O. Russell’s annoyingly conventional The Fighter has passed, though not because of anything Bale did or didn’t do (though not taking out ads of himself with his current Jesus ‘do with the word “Consider…” above it was a good move, ahem ahem). The Weinsteins are going all out with the promotion for The King’s Speech, as they always do, and I think it will swing it for Rush. Which is no crime. He’s very entertaining in that movie, though he sadly does not top his most towering and haunting performance as Casanova Frankenstein in Mystery Men.
Who Should Win: Christian Bale – The Fighter
But seriously, Bale’s performance is more than worthy of the nod. After a couple of years of harassing cinematographers and being overshadowed by his co-stars, this amazing transformation into a haunted and hyperactive loser on a redemptive path is initially showy enough to attract attention but allows for the development of quiet notes later in the movie that knocked my socks off. It reminded me of why I was thrilled when I heard he was going to be Christopher Nolan’s Batman many years ago: because he’s a really, really talented actor and has incredible screen presence when given some room to breathe. That is the main reason I’m not shouting from the rooftops about John Hawkes, who will surely now get the work he deserves after wowing us as the amoral scumbag Teardrop Dolly in Winter’s Bone.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Zach Galafianakis – It’s Kind of a Funny Story
As feeble as this movie is, Galafianakis’ unshowy stillness in the centre is the only thing that stays in the memory after the credits roll. I would have been miffed to see Fleck and Boden’s twee failure be recognised, but it would have been worth it to see Galafianakis receive his due (and not Due Date, which is what the poor bastard ended up with).
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: Natalie Portman – Black Swan
This is possibly the strongest category this year, and yet there is still a frontrunner. While everyone else is preparing bunting for King Colin, I’m expending all of my energy rooting for Natalie. Let’s hope No Strings Attached isn’t her Norbit.
Who Should Win: Natalie Portman – Black Swan
I was impressed by all of the performances in this category (and was especially glad to see Nicole Kidman remind us of why she is such a fascinating actress with some very strong work in the heartbreaking Rabbit Hole), but even so, there is only one that can win. I think the only people who would be more upset if she lost would be all of the Marvel marketing folks who will have prepared countless Thor posters bragging that it stars two Academy-Award-winning actors (and Kat Dennings) in its line-up.
Who Should Have Been Nominated:
Let’s see: Catherine Keener for Please Give, Kristin Scott Thomas for Partir, Rachel Weisz for Agora, Greta Gerwig for Greenberg, Carey Mulligan for Never Let Me Go, Emma Stone for Easy A (I’m 100% serious), Julianne Moore for The Kids Are All Right (it would split the vote against Annette Bening, but it would have been nice anyway), Marion Cotillard for Inception, Angelika Papoulia in Dogtooth… The list goes on and on. What a year for incredible performances from actresses.
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Helena Bonham Carter – The King’s Speech
You’ll note a trend developing here. I’m really convinced there’s going to be a landslide for The King’s Speech, certainly in the top tiers, and this – or a win for Geoffrey Rush – would be the first sign that Hollywood has gone Monarchy-Mad. Melissa Leo screwed the pooch with her ill-considered campaign (though if she felt the Paramount marketing department were letting her down she’s perfectly entitled to do something about it, I guess), and it’s going to cost her. Plus her performance was really cartoony: even more so than Bonham Carter’s silly Queen Mom with her clipped tones and humourlessness and no mention of all that Nazi sympathising, of course.
Who Should Win: Hailee Steinfeld – True Grit
I guess? I don’t know, this is a tough category. I don’t think I loved any of the performances here (whereas the best actress category is overloaded with greatness), though I haven’t seen Jacki Weaver’s work in Animal Kingdom (released in the UK two days ago FFS). I did enjoy Steinfeld’s funny turn in True Grit, and if Bridges isn’t going to win (and Matt Damon isn’t even going to be nominated, which is bullshit), then this is where the acting praise should fall. Amy Adams was okay in The Fighter, but I’m never very keen on seeing her play working class folks (don’t get me started on Junebug). So yeah, Steinfeld gets my vote and a shrug.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Olivia Williams – The Ghost (Writer)
Ms. Williams was almost obscenely entertaining as the sour and unpredictable wife of Fierce Pierce’s puppet PM, but perhaps appearing in a thriller was enough to make the voters ignore her. Or maybe there was no effort to lobby for her nomination. Whatever the reason was, it’s a crime. See also a lack of nominations for Dale Dickey in Winter’s Bone (so terrifying) and Rebecca Hall in Please Give.
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
What Will Win: Toy Story 3
Is there any question? I haven’t seen The Illusionist, even though I liked Chomet’s Belleville Rendezvous quite a bit when I first saw it, and so can’t attest to its quality, but even so, Toy Story 3 is one of the richest, smartest, and cleverest films of the year, as well as being the cruellest. In a good way, obviously. Cheerleaders for The Illusionist still hope for a surprise, but it’s not going to happen. This is Pixar’s year. Again.
What Should Win: Toy Story 3
See above. I’m still getting over it. Lee Unkrich and Michael Arndt owe me some new tear ducts.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Tangled / Megamind / Summer Wars
It’s a shame they didn’t expand the list to five nominees this year, because while 2010 might not have been as impressive as the previous year for animation, it was still pretty great, even if only for Walt Disney Animation’s phenomenal Tangled. It was deemed worthy of a Best Original Song nod but nothing else? Even with only three nominations I’d place this above How To Train Your Dragon which, I should stress, I liked a great deal. That said, I preferred Dreamworks Animation’s other big release of the year, the irreverent but surprisingly affecting superhero comedy Megamind. It would also have been nice to see Mamoru Hosodo’s paean to family life and the power of technology get on the list, but I realise that I’m now asking for the moon on a stick.
Achievement in Art Direction
Who Will Win: Eve Stewart and Judy Farr – The King’s Speech
In years past I’ve grown frustrated with the habit of awarding this Oscar to the movie with the stateliest stately home, mostly because I prefer the flash of a fully designed set to the stultifying idea of sitting in an antiques shop trying to find the right vase for a specific period. I suspect I’m not alone in this: everyone who loves film remembers the name Ken Adams, but does anyone remember the names of the (very talented, I’m sure) production designers and set decorators on any randomly chosen period drama from the Great British Period Drama Machine? Still, King’s Speech is bound to win this, with the grungy basement studio of Lionel Logue providing the only interesting set in the whole worthy film. Only Jess Gonchor’s designs for True Grit stand a chance of beating it, which would be nice, as I’ve enjoyed her work before now.
Who Should Win: Guy Hendrix Dyas, Larry Dias and Doug Mowat – Inception
I suspect I’m only saying this because I love the idea of a rotating set so much, but I did think Inception had some lovely sets, including the team’s ramshackle workspace, the grimy first level of the dream and the demolished hotel room in Cobb’s subconscious. Or maybe I think True Grit should win it. I’ll have to ponder that one. (No I won’t. This is bloody exhausting. There are, like, a million categories!)
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Dante Ferretti – Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese’s energetic movie may have been muddled and unfortunately stuck with the most glaringly obvious “twist” ending imaginable, but it as a technical exercise in ramping up suspense it was well worth the effort. On top of that it looked the BUSINESS. Part of that was Dante Ferretti’s brilliant production design, a highlight being the asylum on the eponymous island with its intricate nightmarish dungeons, plucked straight from the recesses of Hitchcock’s subconscious. Shutter Island may not have been a total success, partly because the movie serves the twist and not the other way around (for an hour nothing makes sense in order to hide the ending from the audience: a lethal narrative choice), but hell, it got no nominations, even in the technical categories? I guess the Academy figured that after Scorsese won for The Departed they could just forget about him.
Achievement in Cinematography
Who Will Win: Roger Deakins – True Grit
King Deakins amazes again! They should just have an award ready for him every year, and then another one for best runner-up. Truly lovely and textured work, a joy to behold. LOVE!
Who Should Win: Roger Deakins – True Grit
It’s a strong category, but even though I liked almost all of the work here (with the exception of The King’s Speech, though I blame Tom Hooper for that, not Danny Cohen), it has to go to Deakins.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Shelly Johnson – The Wolfman
As weak as that film was, it was so beautiful it was almost possible to completely ignore the phoned-in performances and creaky shock-jumps. Johnson took the black-and-white photography of the original Universal monster movies as a starting point and created a beautiful modern update with flickering shadows, delicate bounced light and an almost monochrome palette that allowed the blood to stand out in all its grisly glory. It reminded me of Emmanuel Lubezki’s terrific work on Sleepy Hollow (a film released in one of the strongest ever years for cinematography, with Conrad Hall and Dante Spinotti excelling on American Beauty and The Insider respectively).
Achievement in Costume Design
Who Will Win: Jenny Beaven – The King’s Speech
I’m actually just saying King’s Speech now as a form of temper tantrum. I’m actually not sure it will win (True Grit is a likely winner too), but I dread its dominance so much everywhere I look I see some obnoxious fish-eye close up of King Colin swallowing noisily. Ugh, I’m beginning to hate the fucking thing.
Who Should Win: Sandy Powell – The Tempest
I haven’t seen it, but I’d imagine Julie Taymor would ask her collaborator to come up with something a little more interesting than something based on a design hanging in a museum somewhere. [/bitter]
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Penny Rose – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
This misfiring Bruckheimer game adaptation managed too look great despite Mike Newell’s seeming indifference (I expected more from him: maybe the focus groups ruined it, or perhaps the scale of it was too overwhelming to allow space to breathe). Part of that was Ms. Rose’s lovely designs. As I know nothing about clothes I won’t embarrass myself by trying to explain why I liked them so much. I just thought everyone looked really cool. Maybe I should rename this blog I Can’t Believe It’s Not Film Criticism.
Achievement in Directing
Who Will Win: David Fincher – The Social Network
At last I suspect the grim claws of the Weinsteins will loosen a little, and sanity will prevail, though part of me (the miserable pessimistic part) fears Hooper will win and then deliver his speech just to the side of the podium, facing the wrong side of the stage. But no, surely Fincher will finally get his trophy. Surely! The alternative is too depressing to comprehend: a Hooper win and Fincher following up The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo with a Driving Miss Daisy remake starring Brad Pitt as Miss Daisy and Jodie Foster taking on the role of kindly chauffeur/slave Hoke in order to appeal to the addle-brained sentimental twits who are ruining movies for everyone. Because come on, what the hell does one of the most impressive and intelligent directors to come out of America in the last twenty years have to do to get a goddamn Oscar? ::looks at Best Director snubs in the past:: Never mind.
Who Should Win: Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan
After all that I may seem like I’m being contrary, but while I thought Fincher did astounding work wrestling with Aaron Sorkin’s verbal splurge, my heart belongs to Aronofsky this year. Regular readers will be praying for me not to lose my head over Black Swan again, after writing an absurdly hyperbolic review last year, so I’ll leave it there.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Christopher Nolan – Inception
A no-brainer, surely. His ambitious screenplay has been attacked for being exposition-heavy, though there are those of us who think the exposition was actually pretty elegant considering he had to front-load the movie with about a million pages-worth of universe-explaining rules in order to make that amazing final half flow so smoothly. Whatever side of that divide you come down on, I would’ve thought only the movie’s most vocal detractors would think Nolan doesn’t deserve something for creating something so singular and odd and appealing despite being a total left-brain project without all of that lovely heart that apparently all movies require nowadays.
Hence the inclusion of Tom Hooper and David O. Russell on the list. Yes, though I love Russell’s previous work his direction of The Fighter was disappointingly straight-forward here. It would be crazy to expect his usual quirkiness considering the formulaic nature of the sports movie, but Aronofsky found a way to make The Wrestler seem uniquely his. Conspiracy theories about Russell attempting to store some mainstream capital after the Nailed debacle seem more and more justified. (For the record, I liked The Fighter well enough — I’m a sucker for boxing movies, it seems — and it was well-performed. It was just kinda flat, is all.)
Best Documentary Feature
What Will Win: Waste Land
Apparently it”s emotional and universally well-liked, so why not? As with many of the categories to come, this is a bit outside my wheel-house, so I’m guessing here. I’ve only seen Restrepo, which is a solidly made and very depressing movie, but I don’t think it will win: war is so last decade. Same with Inside Job, which I think may alienate a lot of the voters. But what do I know? I don’t even know what Gasland is about, and haven’t bothered with Banksy’s movie even though everyone loves it.
What Should Win:
Okay, I promise I’ll make more of an effort next year, because this is always a bit embarrassing. Why don’t I watch more documentaries? I really like them, so there’s not even an excuse.
What Should Have Been Nominated:
::depressed silence::
Best Documentary Short Subject
What Will Win: The Warriors of Qiugang
Is it bad that I’m only picking this because it sounds like it could be an action movie starring Donnie Yen? (Answer: yes, you twat.)
Who Should Win:
As I haven’t seen any of the nominees in this category, it’s best I just walk away before I embarrass myself further.
Achievement in Film Editing
Who Will Win: Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter – The Social Network
Some great work here, taking the excellently paced performances and making them shine, keeping the pace up. The barrage of information should be overwhelming, but Wall and Baxter control it perfectly. Not since Oliver Stone’s JFK have I been so impressed by the way the audience is guided through choppy waters by an editing team.
Who Should Win: Andrew Weisblum – Black Swan
However I think this just pips it just because Black Swan is so immersive and exhausting. It’s a technically perfect movie, and I would love to see everyone involved on the tech side of the movie get their reward.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Inception
I would have thought this was a certainty, as well-liked action movies often get a cursory editing nomination as a sop to the filmmakers who won’t see any other award love during the night, but apparently this doesn’t warrant a mention, even considering there is so much information to impart that if it hadn’t been edited as clearly and cleverly as it did the whole thing would have fallen apart. This might be the most inexplicable snub of the night, other than the sound awards, which I will get to in good time. (Note: I don’t just think editing a movie well is a matter of getting all of the footage in the right order, but it’s worth noting that two of this year’s best films were very info-heavy and relied on steady hands and smart decisions in the editing room to keep the audience onboard.)
Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
What Will Win: In a Better World
I know nothing about this as it hasn’t even been released in the UK yet, but I’ve heard chatter about it from better critics than I who have caught it at festivals. Choosing this feels right: how often does the foreign language award go to the best known movie nominated? It’s always something I’ve never heard of. It’s science.
What Should Win: Dogtooth
Yes, I’m picking this as I’ve seen it, but also because it is amazing. Will it win? Will it bollocks. Too upsetting and daring to gather votes, but it’s okay, I won’t cry. Just as long as the execrable Biutiful loses, I’ll be happy.
What Should Have Been Nominated: A Serbian Film
Kidding! Except not, because it is good. Unwatchably horrific, but good. Even more depressing than Biutiful, in fact. Isn’t that why people like that artfully-presented chunk of sentimental crap? (Okay okay, I’ll drop it now.)
Achievement in Makeup
Who Will Win: Rick Baker and Dave Elsey – The Wolfman
It’s Rick Baker, bitches! I have no idea how good the work is on the other movies nominated, but I do know the effects here are just fab. Almost as good as Baker’s ground-breaking work on American Werewolf in London.
Who Should Win: Rick Baker and Dave Elsey – The Wolfman
See above. Yes, I would like Peter Weir’s first movie since the mighty Master and Commander to win something, but come on! A werewolf movie! It’s the make-up genre. Surely werewolf movies should win every year. They have to put a ton of hair and teeth on people’s faces! That shit is hard, you know.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Black Swan
It’s the only film I can think of that had any notable make-up in it, so I plump for that one. Red contact lenses and shoulder feathers are this year’s hottest new look.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
Who Will Win: Alexandre Desplat – The King’s Speech
One of the few things I really liked about King’s Speech was the traditional terrific soundtrack from Mr. Desplat, who is surely the most talented man in the world whose name almost decribes the sound made when a tomato falls on the floor. It might not be as good as his wonderful work on Fantastic Mr. Fox or Birth (surely his masterpiece), but it’s still worthy of admiration. (Caveat, there’s a good chance Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross will win if Speech is starting to rack up the wins and Social Network is suddenly found wanting. I’m tempted to suggest that this award will be crucial in determining who will win the most big awards on the night, but I suspect I’m overthinking it.)
Who Should Win: Hans Zimmer – Inception
Though my choice will anger at least one Facebook friend who maintains the music doesn’t work as a movie score at all (back off, Johnny May), I still maintain Zimmer’s conceptually bold and pulse-quickening score is one of the all-time greats. The fact that it references the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service score by the much-missed John Barry cements it for me. There could well be an upset on the night.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Clint Mansell – Black Swan
Dear Academy voters, yes, Britain is sorry about the whole Pop Will Eat Itself thing, they were not great, but Clint Mansell has apparently turned out to be a massive music genius and we’d really appreciate it if you throw him some love. Fourteen thousand trailers using his music can’t be wrong. Cheers, Admiral Neck. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t eligible because it referenced Tchaikovsky’s ballet so directly, but even so, it looms over almost everything else recorded this year like a bulging ballet-dancer’s groin filled with violins and such.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
What Will Win: We Belong Together (Randy Newman) – Toy Story 3
Surely the only way the Academy can honour the majesty of Toy Story 3 is to hand another award out for this terrific, heart-flensing ditty from the maestro. All three films have featured a wonderful song: the benefit of this one is that it’s actually possible to listen to it, unlike When She Loved Me, which is still the most lethal piece of music ever recorded.
What Should Win: I See the Light (Alan Menken and Glenn Slater) – Tangled
The highlight of Walt Disney Animation’s lovely fairy tale Tangled is this soaring love song fit to rival Aladdin‘s A Whole New World for combining emotion, theme and imagery with such satifying skill. It’s the centerpiece of the movie, and seriously folks, if you hear people dismissing 3D or IMAX, this is the scene to quell the doubts. The combination of visuals and thematically resonant storytelling is one of Shades of Caruso’s favourite cinema moments in years. Sorry Randy, I want that moment GILDED by the Academy.
What Should Have Been Nominated: I’ve Got A Dream (Alan Menken and Glenn Slater) – Tangled
As the rules for this category state that a movie can have up to two songs nominated, I would have loved to see a nomination for the other showstopper from the truly magical Tangled (seriously I LOVED IT). It’s silly and broad, but it’s a proper crowdpleaser, sending audiences full of kids into all sorts of gurgling paroxysms: the sort of behaviour that usually annoys a grouchy bastard like myself but merely added to the fun in this case, because Tangled is such a joyous movie. I’m going to keep banging on about this one, so get used to it!
Best Motion Picture of the Year
What Will Win: The King’s Speech
What Should Win: Black Swan
In no world would this get the requisite amount of votes, unless there is a Fringe-style alternated universe where Paul Verhoeven, Dario Argento and David Cronenberg are treated with the fawning respect they deserve. As I’ve said before, I won’t go on about it as I’ve already exhausted reader goodwill, and I will add the caveat that a win for Social Network would please me almost as much, but I just don’t think we’re going to get either. It’s especially frustrating as The Social Network has been “in the lead” for so long, but something tells me the bubble has burst thanks to Harvey “Wilson Fisk” Weinstein’s usual obnoxious efforts. Or maybe it was that Screen Actors Guild win. It’s Crash all over again!!!
What Should Have Been Nominated: Please Give
Yes, only a few people watched it, but my other suggestion for this spot – Agora – was watched by even fewer. I seem to recall a burble of positive notices when this came out but by the end of the year no one remembered. I blame The King’s Speech. [/irrational]
Best Animated Short Film
What Will Win: Day and Night – Teddy Newton for Pixar
Yes, it’s the only one I’ve seen, but I’d be surprised if anything else won. It’s a memorable and imaginative piece of genius.
What Should Win:
It’s not fair to speculate, having not seen anything else (I really want to see The Lost Thing, having loved Shaun Tan’s work in the past), and I can’t think of any other short that should have been animated, so let’s move on.
Best Live Action Short Film
What Will Win: Wish 143
I have no idea if any of these are any good, and am only selecting this one as I’ve heard a lot about it this week (from the predictably patriotic papers that are thrilled to bitsies every time a Brit gets nominated for anything that isn’t a technical award, which is a bugbear of mine), plus the making of it has a story that will appeal to voters. I’m sure it’s very good on top of all this strategic thinking.
What Should Win:
Again I haven’t seen any of the other movies, so I won’t predict. Usually I rely on friend-of-the-blog Mim for help on these matters as she is connected, but I haven’t had a chance to talk to her about it lately. She has better things to do than give me tips about short movies.
Achievement in sound editing
Who Will Win: Skip Lievsay and Craig Berkey – True Grit
Part of the reason I’m adding this is the old standby of “Well, they have to honour it somewhere”, but also because the Coens always go the extra mile to make their movies completely distinct from everything else out there, and hiring Lievsay and Berkey to provide a new Western soundscape to distinguish this from every other Western in recent years was a shrewd choice.
Who Should Win: Richard King – Inception
Inception’s freshness was partly down to the imaginative choices made by King: the distorted music cues, the swish of the dream machine, the crisp gun battles and explosions. This is probably just as likely to win as True Grit, but I suspect the voters will want to hand the award to someone shoring up a genre seen to be in decline as it is to praise the new. Not to disparage anyone’s work here: it’s another strong category, though with one egregious omission…
What Should Have Been Nominated: Black Swan
Seriously, what the FUCK happened here? How could Craig Henigan’s amazing sound design and mix get missed off the roster? There were a lot of misses this year that caused some headscratching, but this is possibly the most baffling. The sound work on Black Swan was absolutely exemplary, and there is just no excuse for this snub. Okay, yes, the other nominees deserved their nods, but surely something could have been moved for this. I guess it’s a good job I’ll never be asked to join the Academy, because omissions like this make me wonder if I would fit in.
Achievement in sound mixing
Who Will Win: Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten – The Social Network
It’s easy to miss a lovely piece of sound mixing, but one of my favourite moments in 2010 came as the fictional construct referred to as “Mark Zuckerberg” walked across campus after being dumped by his girlfriend. The melange of chatter from the students around him reflects the imminent chatter on the internet as he unleashes The Facebook – one of many clever touches by the always brilliant Klyce and his ace team.
Who Should Win: Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten – The Social Network
Either that or the work on Inception, which goes from introspective silences in the first half to increasingly chaotic clatter in the hour-long setpiece. Perversely I would also like Salt‘s sound team to win as well, just so that Salt could win an Oscar. That would entertain me almost as much as that crazy movie did.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Black Swan / Shutter Island
Again, all of the sound work on Black Swan should have been given some praise, but Shutter Island‘s snub is similarly peculiar. The experience of watching both movies was immeasurably enhanced by the feeling that the room was alive with noise, sharp clicks and cracks peeping out from the expertly mixed ambient noises not for shock value, but merely as stabs at the amygdala. Your nerves jangled more and more as the movies progressed: a wonderfully unpleasant thing to endure.
Achievement in Visual Effects
Who Will Win: Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb – Inception
The incredibly clever and imaginative in-camera effects of Inception would probably be a sure thing most years, but as it will likely win bugger all other than a sound award, it’s guaranteed to win here. I’m tempted to think the last Harry Potter movie will win big in technical stuff next year: kind of like a Return-of-the-King sop to the incredibly profitable series, which is why it won’t win here.
Who Should Win: Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb – Inception
From the moment we saw Paris fold over on itself, it was obvious we were going to see something special in Nolan’s action masterpiece. It doesn’t matter that the Limbo effects were a bit murky and smudged: these are the visuals that caught our imagination this year. They deserve all the plaudits they’re getting.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Tron: Legacy / Black Swan
The first is a crazy FX blowout, the second has many effects that are almost invisible. As usual, I’m surprised and more than a little disgusted with the FX voters (industry folk who tend to judge on standards that we don’t necessarily understand). I figured both movies were destined to be nominated (I especially loved the FX in Tron: Legacy), but as usual we get this weird curveball, the same kind of thing that saw Speed Racer and the Matrix sequels snubbed (did John Gaeta spill red wine on some voter’s white carpet?), and E.T. winning in the same year Blade Runner was released. Always a weird category, this.
Adapted Screenplay
Who Will Win: Aaron Sorkin – The Social Network
The surest sure thing imaginable, no offence to all of the other fine screenplays nominated here (not counting 127 Hours, which manages to stretch nothing out – an achievement I’ll grant it though it doesn’t really fill the understandably threadbare story out with anything interesting). This is a tougher victory for Sorkin than you’d expect, as I’m sure there are many who think the Coens should win again. This is why I think True Grit won’t win much, even though it’s terrific. The competition this year (not counting King’s Speech and 127 Hours) is just too strong.
Who Should Win: Aaron Sorkin – The Social Network
I have many, many problems with Sorkin’s work, but I also think he’s amazing. I go back and forth on this all the time. When he’s good he’s really really good, and when he’s bad he’s fucking dreadful. The Social Network is him at his best, even with all of the tics, recycling and showing-off. Sorry Coens! I thought you did a great job too.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughan – Kick-Ass
Stop laughing at the back! I genuinely loved what Vaughan and Goldman did here, keeping enough of Millar’s voice to make it pleasantly anarchic while tightening up his most pointless excesses and adding powerful emotional cores. The motivations of all characters were grounded amid all of the other madness, enough that I’ve been moved to the brink of tears each time I’ve watched it. Their work hasn’t yet received enough praise. Or any praise, really. Except from me and a couple of other people. I’m sure this will make up for all the difficulties I’m sure they’re experiencing while trying to make X-Men: First Class their own while Fox attempt to fuck it all up like they always do.
Original Screenplay
Who Will Win: David Seidler – The King’s Speech
Cliched, inaccurate, sentimental, really really inaccurate, and ultimately kind of lazy, but it’s a sure thing. Fuckety piss. At least it will shut out Mike “Sourdoughballs” Leigh. That’s something.
Who Should Win: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg - The Kids Are All Right
Cholodenko and Blumberg’s light-yet-deeply structured screenplay is an almost pure joy, some last act clumsiness aside. This is the film’s only chance to be given some Oscar love this year, but it’s not about to happen. No triumph over adversity: just truth. Who wants that? ::kicks picture of Buckingham Palace into a furnace::
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Nicole Holofcener – Please Give
Holofcener’s delightful screenplay is one of the many wonders of her underrated rumination on white middle-class guilt and the ways in which we try to profit off each other to get ahead. It looks like a fluffy indie comedy but it’s filled with insight about modern life, all while being thrillingly well-observed and funny. Come on planet Earth! You complain about all the crappy movies being released and we’ve got an incredible artist and reliable entertainer standing RIGHT OVER THERE! ::points in what one assumes is the direction that leads to Ms. Holofcener:: What the hell is wrong with everyone? ::kicks picture of Windsor Castle into furnace::
Well what do you know. I start this post all agnostic and shit about The King’s Speech and end up thinking it is the deformed bastard spawned by the unholy union of Crash and Slumdog Millionaire. ::sigh:: It’s going to be a long night.
Last Friday, while attempting to write yet another lengthy post about the London Film Festival, I was repeatedly distracted by Twitter. This is nothing new. However, one of the people I follow whose name escapes me now (sorry) linked to an article posted on the film discussion site The Auteurs. I’d heard of it before but stayed away as I thought it had something to do with the dreary Luke Haines band, but in fact it’s a nice way to completely waste hours of your time, rating and “favouriting” movies to create a Profile for yourself, complete with representative movie still selection so you can have an iconic image next to your name (I went with Gene Hackman in The Conversation). It was pleasantly pointless, though I did take enormous pleasure in giving Slumdog Millionaire and Happy-Go-Lucky one star each, and Kung Fu Panda the five stars it so richly deserves. Take that, Sight and Sound subscribers.
The article that directed me to this site via Twitter was this lovely little prose poem half-heartedly giving Michael Bay some credit while referring to “fascism” and suchlike. This is possibly the only even vaguely positive critique of Bay’s work I’ve seen on the Internet that hasn’t been written by a teenager with an apostrophe allergy, and as such deserves to be preserved in amber. It might never happen again. As I said earlier this year, my opinion of Bay is torn between fascination and revulsion, the latter becoming more pronounced after the casual (but no less odious) racial insensitivity of Transformers — with the breakdancing jive-talking African-American parody known as Jazz getting killed in the final act, as is sadly the norm in movies — “transformed” into the full-on indefensible racial stereotyping of Skids and Mudflap. Shades of Caruso reader and former Transformers fan Lindywasp (one of her noms de Net) once sent me a very passionate disavowal of the sequel after an upsetting experience at a screening where the audience went from excited to silence once the extent of the caricature settled in. I was concerned by Bay’s decision before, but after reading her heartfelt condemnation, I became furious.
Though I’ll not be able to think of Bay without thinking about that incredible cloth-eared arrogance, I have still long been fascinated — as Daisyhellcakes can attest, having listened to me go on about it at length — by his public persona as the Fratboy DeMille, a man who stomps around like an over-excited teenager while making canny backroom deals for profit points, keeping the cost of his (sill expensive) movies down with obnoxious product placement, and buying effects houses such as Digital Domain. This bravado is ripe for parody, most brilliantly by the faux-Twitterer Fake Michael Bay (sample tweet: “Dammit, if I had a dollar for every time I dropped my iphone out of a helicopter doing a barrel roll…”), though I suspect he’s in on the joke.
Even more fascinating to me than Bay the Man/Douchebag is that signature style of his. Like haphazardly edited two-hour-long trailers, his films are plot-light endurance tests; a relentless swarm of images that he hurls at the audience, seemingly not caring why image B must follow image A. As long as the barrage of glowing, flashing, swirling pictures and the cacophony of multi-tracked sound effects keeps audiences pinned to their seats, Bay seems to think “Job done!” and then returns to his swanky Bay-Cave to drink Crystal and watch Total Wipeout. Is this good filmmaking? Hell no, and as I’ve attempted to explain before, I would never be able to argue that it was (though Danny Boyle’s similar everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach wins critical approval and Oscars). However, he does create an experience that no one else has the studio backing, the technical know-how, and the obnoxious confidence to be able to pull off.
Examples: Transformers ends with a city being pulverised, complete with epic firefights on a main street that totals buildings and blows up cars. The destruction-gasm setpiece in Pearl Harbor — a wretched film of enormous ethical dubiousness — contains the single most expensive shot caught on film, which is ghoulish, wasteful, and logistically impressive all at the same time. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is capped off with a huge scene where an Egyptian village gets mashed into the ground, pretty much (I’m sure it was not a real village, but if it’s fake he still managed to get it built before blowing bits of it up). He shows aircraft carriers getting split in half as if it ain’t no thing. These are stereotypically big and dumb crowd-pleasing moments that I’m sure Eric Rohmer’s fanbase would consider utterly vulgar, but they look impressive in slices. It’s not in Bay’s interest to coral these images into a coherent narrative other than “Man go from point A to point B while the world explodes.” It’s enough for him to hint that there is a goal that his heroes are trying to achieve, and as long as it seems there is some kind of forward momentum while he stages bravura visual orgasms containing complicated visual and physical effects, that’s enough for him.
Again, I’m aware that this is not technically artistically valid on a large-scale level, but on a micro-level, I cannot look away. Every dumb populist miscalculation like his nasty treatment of women, or his blindness to the wrongness of using racial stereotypes for stupid lowest-common denominator jokes, or his infantile reliance on slapstick and screaming instead of nuance and character growth, or any number of other admittedly dreadful habits, run parallel to his facility with composition. There are so many shots he has created that make my eyes wobble with pleasure that I cannot forget them. His reliance on patriotic button-pushing aside, he can create stirring moments just through imagery in a way that would probably make propagandists salivate. That ability to capture an emotion through manipulative visuals, aided by the pounding music of Hans Zimmer or Steve Jablonsky, is unparalleled. He truly is Leni Riefenstahl with a baseball cap and a collection of sports-cars in his Beverly Hills mansion.
And yet, despite this facility with imagery — perhaps the one thing I think even his detractors should accept, even if really really really grudgingly — he is treated like the Boogeyman. Numerous people accuse Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen of being the worst film of the year. Granted, it’s not very good, but I’ve seen far far far worse movies released this year. Just a cursory flick through the Auteurs site sees a number of forum threads based around hating him, including Why is Michael Bay on Criterion?, Is Michael Bay the worst director of all time?, and Reasons to *HATE* Michael Bay. The thread NAME THE FILM MAKERS YOU THINK SHOULD RETIRED OR SHOULD NOT BELONG TO THIS INDUSTRY AT ALL is filled with calls for Bay’s immediate withdrawal from the film industry. I get the feeling that this is a running joke, though it is borne of genuine frustration at his movies and his success.
They’re not the only ones who dislike him, of course. Mainstream critics are revolted by his movies, and even on a site oft-visited by the people you would think comprise his most ardent fanbase (Ain’t It Cool News), Bay is treated like a pariah. “Damn You Michael Bay” is a long-running Internet joke that has become a mantra. Bay hatred appears to be reflexive, the last word in an argument. Why accuse any other filmmakers of crimes against decency? Isn’t it obvious that Bay is the worst of the worst, representing everything that is debased and evil about modern cinema? He’s an unpleasant man with poor taste who appeals to the slack-jawed yokels and the hoodies and the youths with their popcorn and their knives and their mobile phones and suchlike and so on and so on etc. ad infinitum.
He’s the Hitler of films. Mike Godwin postulated that the overuse of mentioning Hitler in online arguments was sadly inevitable (“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”) Well, I reckon that there is another law we can accept as fact by now. “As an online discussion about film or culture grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Michael Bay approaches 1.” I don’t think this law should be associated with my real life name, which doesn’t have the Ooomph that “Godwin” has (that’s the kind of name that belongs in front of the word “law”). Therefore I propose we refer to this as Burke’s Law, named after the TV series from the 60s that was revived in the 90s. Why Burke’s Law? Because I always hear that phrase said in the same way as in the 90s title sequence, i.e. with this voice…
…and there is nothing more awesome than that. Sex up that show title, Sexy-Voiced Lady. (Here’s the first part of a full episode, just to show it in amazing context.)
So yeah, whenever a discussion about sucky film directors inevitably begins to focus almost exclusively on the vapidity of Bay’s destructo-porn epics, feel free to mention Burke’s Law. If Bay is what people think represents the true nadir of modern filmmaking, that’s up to them, but if they’re not willing to expand their search to other far less talented individuals out there, then I just can’t take them seriously. I see Dr. Uwe Boll get mentioned a lot, and he’s certainly a candidate. He’s made a shit-ton of laughably awful movies in the past — many more than Bay — and he has now tried to make himself seem classier by making a film about Darfur. However, he’s filming real rape victims re-enacting their own rape for his camera. Making fun of his shitty output suddenly doesn’t seem so funny.
If we’re going to talk about directors who create deafening, poorly storyboarded and edited action scenes that substitute crashing, clashing cacophony for flow and plot momentum, how about Stephen Sommers? He combines Bay’s inability to understand the clear, unambiguous narrative progression of a movie or an action scene with a flat eye for visuals, as evidenced by the busy but tedious G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra? Or Rob Cohen, a man who has yet to make even a half-way decent action movie? Though I’ve not seen his most recent movie — Fast and Furious — I did endure Stealth (where some of the best visual effects ever committed to film were wasted on a farrago of galactic proportions) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which actually managed to be the worst film in the Mummy franchise. It takes a special kind of witless hack to out-Stephen-Sommers Stephen Sommers. I’d rather watch a Bay action scene than something by either of these guys any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I’d also like to make the case for Robert Luketic, who keeps pumping out the most artless dreck, seemingly with no understanding of what cinema can do. His last three films were lifeless committee-borne crowd-pleasers that couldn’t even be bothered to do anything pleasurable, rendered even more unbearable by being presented in a lifeless cavalcade of wretchedly awful compositions. As a bonus they also featured either reductive, retrograde gender-politics (Monster-In-Law and The Ugly Truth) or ethnic white-washing (the utterly worthless 21). Or what about Jon Avnet, aka the modern day Ed Wood? His last two movies — Righteous Kill and the incredible 88 Minutes — were among the most catastrophically misjudged movies I have ever seen, made by someone without a single artistic bone in his body. It’s so bad that I suspect he doesn’t even understand the scripts he adapts. No matter how hard he tries, he will never be able to come up with a single memorable or inspiring image in his entire career. Not counting this one with Leelee Sobieski taking aim, that is.
If you’ve thought long and hard about it and have come to the conclusion that Bay is less talented than these directors, or that he represents something far greater than just bad filmmaking (i.e. he’s a mascot for the debasement of the culture at large), or that his Platinum Dunes production company is committing a terrible crime by making bland remakes of great horror movies, or that the compositions I love are just ugly but shiny commercialised parodies of actual art, or that he’s the worst kind of patriotism-spouting pro-military arrested adolescent, or even that he’s just an obnoxious douchebag (James Cameron without the brains or the talent), that’s perfectly understandable. I’m cool with that, if you show me your calculations. But don’t just say, “Michael Bay is the worst director ever” because that’s the accepted wisdom. That’s not film criticism. That’s letting someone else do your thinking for you.
Wow, the dashboard is so pretty. It’s like Functionality Porn in here…
First, an explanation of what the hell is going on for anyone showing up here for the first time. Shades of Caruso has been going for a couple of years now, during which time we have criticised Slumdog Millionaire and Mike Leigh, praised Michael Emerson and Kung Fu Panda, obsessed about Rock Band, and listened to Seth Lakeman, Jens Lekman, and Animal Collective. As the over-used phrase would have it, good times. Nevertheless, in its previous incarnation Shades of Caruso was in a rigid — and ugly — Blogger template. So, as of today, we (we being contributors Canyon and Masticator as well as me, Admiral Neck) are going to be trying out a WordPress format for a while. I’ve transferred our previous blogposts over, but some of them didn’t seem to work properly. Consider the old blog an archive, which we shall refer to from time to time, and consider this blog to be in a state of constructiony-flux.
And yes, even though we’ve not said it on this new blog, we still support James “Sawyer” Ford.
Now, time to go on and on about The Shield, Lost, and the woeful Torchwood. Business as usual, it seems.
Tonight is the night when we feeble schlubs get to dip our toes in the lake of glamour that is the Academy Awards, staring in disbelief at the staggering beauty of our betters. I say this without sarcasm, as I am powerless to resist it. The award period is like my Christmas (with the summer season of robots, monsters, superheroes and explosions being my extended birthday). This year, though, has been particularly frustrating, as the likely winners seem more predictable than ever. It’s obvious that, by now, Slumdog Millionaire is going to win most awards. That frustrates me enough as I’m on record as hating the damnable thing, but also because it has robbed us of some speculation fun. Last year I might have had a terrible timepicking winners, but it was a lot more fun guessing.
Before revealing my picks (can you bear the suspense?), first the results of our poll to find out the most popular longshot Oscar winner from this year’s nominations. It was pretty clear who was the favourite.
Kung Fu Panda (Animated Feature Film) – 6 (50%)
Martin McDonagh (Original Screenplay – In Bruges) – 3 (25%)
Richard Jenkins (Actor- The Visitor) – 2 (16%)
Melissa Leo (Actress – Frozen River) – 1 (8%)
Michael Shannon (Supporting Actor – Revolutionary Road) – 0 (0%)
Viola Davis (Supporting Actress – Doubt) – 0 (0%)
Gus Van Sant (Director – Milk) – 0 (0%)
Thomas Newman (Soundtrack – Wall*E) – 0 (0%)
Peter Morgan (Adapted Screenplay – Frost/Nixon) – 0 (0%)
Wally Pfister (Cinematography – The Dark Knight) – 0 (0%)
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Foreign Language Film) – 0 (0%)
Milk (Picture) – 0 (0%)
Iron Man (Visual Effects) – 0 (0%)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Makeup) – 0 (0%)
The Dark Knight (Sound Editing) – 0 (0%)
Wanted (Sound Mixing) – 0 (0%)
Kung Fu Panda‘s win in this most insignificant of polls warms my heart. KFP has been damned with faint praise since its release (“It’s surprisingly good for a Dreamworks movie!” “It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not profound like the Pixar film!” etc.), though that didn’t stop it sweeping the board at the Annies, recently. Recently I rewatched Wall*E, hoping I would like it more second time around, but sadly no. As usual, I offer the usual caveats. It’s beautiful, it’s got a lot of incredible ideas and imagery, and the sound design is stunning, but the second half is flat, and Wall*E spends far too much of the movie falling over or having things land on him. In Kung Fu Panda the slapstick has a purpose (Po’s clumsiness is the source of his kung fu strengths, as his unpredictability makes him unstoppable), whereas in Wall*E it’s more like punctuation at the end of scenes, something I have a real problem with. The analogy I ended up with was that Kung Fu Panda was a Buster Keaton movie (it’s all about the story and the spectacle), and Wall*E was a Charlie Chaplin movie (convinced of its own importance, and deeply unfunny). Keaton beats Chaplin any day of the week. Sorry, Pixar.
The votes for Martin McDonagh, Richard Jenkins (who had a really good year with great work in Burn After Reading and Step Brothers as well), and Melissa Leo were cool too, but the latter two are in categories that seem decided already. Martin McDonagh has a better chance, as his category of Best Original Screenplay is kinda weak, but even so, In Bruges was too filthy and odd to win votes from the staid Academy members. Shame. No one else got a single vote. Maybe I chose badly, or maybe readers of this blog haven’t seen the movies I picked. No matter. Thanks to everyone who participated.
And now, my picks for this year. Except for a couple of categories, it was a no-brainer. Even if the Weinsteins have been trying to turn people against Slumdog, it’s just not going to happen. To be honest, I may have hated Slumdog, but I might hate The Reader more. Not only is it of questionable value as a comment on post-Nazi German guilt (I think thesecommentsandthesereviews sum up my feelings far better than I could express), it’s also a really stupid and pompous movie, filled with wall-to-wall cliches and laughable dialogue. David Hare and Stephen Daldry should hang their heads in shame. The list of nominees seems even worse now that I’ve seen that fucking appalling exercise in static worthiness. And so, I think the Oscars will, should, and can’t (due to stupidity) go to the following…
Best Picture:
Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire Should Win: Milk Should’ve Been Nominated: The Dark Knight / Rachel Getting Married / The Wrestler
I may have had some reservations about Milk, but it’s far and away the best movie of a really poor bunch, and by an order of magnitude in the case of Slumdog and The Reader. The snubs for the three films I have listed truly grate on me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; this is the worst nominations list I can remember, which is another thing that has robbed me of my enthusiasm.
Best Director:
Will Win: Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire Should Win: David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Should’ve Been Nominated: Christopher Nolan – The Dark Knight / Jonathan Demme – Rachel Getting Married
An easy pick, though I chose Fincher as the Should Win as there was so much work done on Benjamin Button that I thought he edged it over Van Sant, who also did excellent work on Milk (though, as I’ve said before I would have liked a bit more unconventionality in it). None of this matters, though. Boyle will win it for the worst film of his career. Yuk.
Best Actor:
Will Win: Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler Should Win: Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler Should’ve Been Nominated: Robert Downey Jr. – Iron Man
This has to happen. If someone else won it would be the biggest upset of the night. And by upset, I mean, I would turn off the TV and not bother watching to the end. Come on, Mickey!
Best Actress:
Will Win: Kate Winslet – The Reader Should Win: Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married Should’ve Been Nominated: Kate Winslet – Revolutionary Road / Julianne Moore – Blindness
I love Winslet and think she’s one of the great actors of our time (seriously), but for The Reader? Nuh-uh. She’s good in it, but that movie deserves no reward. Having her nominated for that and not the far superior (and not despicable) Revolutionary Road is testament to the efficacy of the Weinstein’s strong-arming tactics, but that’s little consolation to us. I’d love for Anne Hathaway to win instead, just to rob the Weinstein’s of their little victory, but that would also rob Winslet, who has deserved Academy recognition for about ten years at least.
Best Supporting Actor:
Will Win: Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight Should Win: Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight Should’ve Been Nominated: Aaron Eckhart – The Dark Knight / Bill Irwin – Rachel Getting Married
Another no-brainer. And deservedly so.
Best Supporting Actress:
Will Win: Penélope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona Should Win: Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler Should’ve Been Nominated: Rosemarie DeWitt – Rachel Getting Married
I would have plumped for someone else in this category, but Tomei isn’t winning (even though the Academy might like to legitimise her Vinny award), and Cruz will get it for losing out on a justified award for Volver.
Best Original Screenplay:
Will Win: Milk – Dustin Lance Black Should Win: In Bruges – Martin McDonagh Should’ve Been Nominated: The Wrestler – Robert D. Seigel
See above for my feelings on this. Milk wasn’t a bad screenplay, but it was pretty unimaginative, and filled with clunky exposition. Seigel’s work on The Wrestler, on the other hand, was feather-light. It would have been nice for a former Onion employee to get a nod.
Best Adapted Screenplay:
Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire – Simon Beaufoy Should Win: Frost/Nixon – Peter Morgan Should’ve Been Nominated: The Dark Knight – Christopher Nolan / Jonathan Nolan / David Goyer
A particularly weak field. Beaufoy’s script is shockingly poor, a stream of one-dimensional characters, contrivance, phony uplift, and childish humour. That said, David Hare’s adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s novel is equally vapid. I would love for them both to lose to Peter Morgan, even if his screenplay was also loaded with some silly Cliff Notes-style exposition to help the viewer along (though the amount of contextual information in that film has to go somewhere if it’s going to be less than fifteen hours long).
Best Animated Feature:
Will Win: WALL-E – Andrew Stanton Should Win: Kung Fu Panda – Mark Osborne and John Stevenson Should’ve Been Nominated: Fear(s) of the Dark – Various
I’ve not even seen Fear(s) of the Dark, but it sounds great, and it would be fun to see Charles Burns getting a nomination (read Black Hole; it’s awesome). That would have meant Bolt misses out, which is a shame, as it’s a lot of fun, and the nomination is a nice present to Disney Animation, which has had a difficult couple of years.
Best Foreign Language Film:
Will Win: The Class (France) in French – Laurent Cantet Should Win: Waltz with Bashir (Israel) in Hebrew – Ari Folman Should’ve Been Nominated: Gomorrah (Italy) – Matteo Girrone
I suspect The Class will win as much for its quality as for not being the far more controversial Waltz With Bashir. I’ve not yet seen The Class, and it might be amazing, but I can vouch for the incredible Bashir, a film that moved me to horrible tears. I just can’t see something that bleak winning an Oscar. Though it would ruin my spread, I’m hoping for a Bashir win here.
Best Animated Short:
Will Win: This Way Up – Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes
As I’ve not seen anything in this category, I don’t feel right commenting on what should or shouldn’t have been nominated, but I will make this prediction, based on my super-scientific method of picking the one I’ve heard of (this short was profiled in the Times this week). Besides, it looks pretty cool.
Best Art Direction:
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo Should’ve Been Nominated: Hellboy II: The Golden Army – Stephen Scott
The wide-range of time periods for this movie, and the amount of work in replicating them, ensures this win. Either that or The Duchess will win for Removal of Contemporary Items From Stately Homes. Yawn.
Best Cinematography:
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Claudio Miranda Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Claudio Miranda Should’ve Been Nominated: The Spiderwick Chronicles – Caleb Deschanel / The Fall – Colin Watkinson
It was ravishing! How can it lose? It won’t win anything not in the non-technical categories, so this is a sure thing (he said with obnoxious over-confidence).
Best Costume Design:
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Jacqueline West Should Win: Milk – Danny Glicker Should’ve Been Nominated: The Fall – Eiko Ishioka
As in the previous category, an egregious snub for The Fall. I know the movie wasn’t seen by many people, but even just looking at the trailer should be enough of a showreel to get some attention. It was one of the most beautiful movies ever made, and no one noticed. I’d feel sorry for the director, for which this was a work of great personal significance, but I imagine worldly things do not matter to the mighty… TARSEM!
Best Documentary Feature:
Will Win: Trouble the Water Should Win: Man on Wire Should’ve Been Nominated: Standard Operating Procedure
Boy, I was looking forward to watching Trouble The Water on More4 this week, but our Sky+ record function has gone kerflooey, so that’s not happening any time soon. I would think that will win over Man On Wire due to the subject matter, no matter how good it is (I hear it’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t know). Maybe I’m being too cynical. I’ll happily eat my words later, if necessary.
Best Documentary Short:
Will Win: The Conscience of Nhem En – Steven Okazaki
As with the animation short, I’ve not seen any of the nominees in this category, so I won’t insult everyone here, and will plump for this nominee as I have heard of it as well.
Best Film Editing:
Will Win: The Dark Knight – Lee Smith Should Win: The Dark Knight – Lee Smith Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – Roger Barton, Zach Staenberg
There is an awful error in The Dark Knight, during the Batpod sequence, where Batman shoots a glass door, drives through a building, shoots another glass door, and then is back in the building even though it should have driven out. GAH! It drives me crazy every time I watch it. Even so, the editors do an amazing job of cutting a big complex movie down to a manageable size (it should have been a lot longer).
Best Live Action Short:
Will Win: On the Line (Auf der Strecke)
Here is where my foolproof method for selecting the hard-to-find nominees fails. I’ve not heard anything about any of these movies. ::sigh:: Sorry, short film filmmakers. I’m going for On The Line as it’s the top of the list. Oy, that’s some crappy motivation.
Best Makeup:
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Greg Cannom Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Greg Cannom
I didn’t select a film that should have been nominated, as I think they picked the best three films of the year, though I will say I suspect Tropic Thunder didn’t get picked for Robert Downey Jr.’s blackface makeup as the Kodak theatre would explode from the white liberal confusion over it. I think Ben Stiller et al have a good defense when they say that the character of Kirk Lazarus is a lampoon of actorly pretension, and it’s a hilarious turn, but I really don’t think we’re ready to be handing out awards for that kind of divisive and explosive makeup just yet.
Best Original Score:
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Alexandre Desplat Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Alexandre Desplat Should’ve Been Nominated: The Dark Knight – Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard
Doesn’t it seem ironic now that The Dark Knight‘s ineligibility caused so much fuss, and all for nothing? Repeated viewings have shown how complex, unorthodox, and stirring that soundtrack is. The eventual snub is deeply frustrating. And why did I choose Desplat’s soundtrack over A.R. Rahman? Because Desplat is super-awesome and I just don’t want Slumdog to keep winning things. Please?!
Best Original Song:
Will Win: “Down to Earth” from WALL-E – Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman (music), Peter Gabriel (lyrics) Should Win: “Down to Earth” from WALL-E – Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman (music), Peter Gabriel (lyrics) Should’ve Been Nominated: “The Wrestler” from The Wrestler – Bruce Springsteen
This category is utter bullshit this year. I can understand Slumdog and Wall*E getting a nomination each, but leaving out Springsteen makes absolutely no sense. It’s good news for Peter Gabriel, though. Slumdog should, again, win, but I suspect (as does Richard Corliss in his picks) that the Slumdog vote will be split, leaving Gabriel free and clear to win.
Best Sound Editing:
Will Win: WALL-E – Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood Should Win: WALL-E – Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – Dane A. Davis, Mike Chock, Drew Yerys
Big no-brainer. Burtt’s work is the main reason Wall*E works at all.
Best Sound Mixing:
Will Win: The Dark Knight – Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo, Ed Novick Should Win: The Dark Knight – Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo, Ed Novick Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – Felix Andriessens, Christian Wegner
The Dark Knight is the big action film of the year. This is the way this kind of voting goes.
Best Visual Effects:
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, Craig Barron Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, Craig Barron Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – John Gaeta
The last no-brainer, though I’m still upset with the FX voters for yet again snubbing John Gaeta’s work. The same thing happened with the two Matrix sequels. No matter what you think of those films, the effects were ground-breaking and beautiful. Who has this guy pissed off in the FX community to keep getting snubbed like this? I’d put Speed Racer above the competent Iron Man work any day of the week.
And that’s that. Sorry for going on at such great length. After tonight I hope to stop thinking about this for at least eight months. Getting annoyed by something so trivial is exhausting.
One last poll before the big day (Feb 22nd), when some really mediocre movies get handed awards, and hopefully, just to make the whole thing not a total disaster, Mickey Rourke and the FX teams on Benjamin Button get their gold-plated just desserts too. By now it’s probable that even though Slumdog has mysteriously been hit with all sorts of unsavoury accusations of child exploitation and dismissal by India, it’s going to romp home. Though I am on record as not being best pleased about that, I’ll just be happy if people stop referring to it as the longshot. It really isn’t. By now people desperately want it to succeed, and it will. Benjamin Button will go home with some technical stuff, and Slumdog will get the biggies, a decision that will be the sanity-twisting equivalent of this…
…and, eventually, just as regrettable and embarrassing for the Academy members and the folks at home as this.
That inevitability aside, there are some actual longshots in that list. The ones no one thinks to bet on. In some awards the longshot occasionally wins (no one expected Bryan Cranston to get an Emmy for his Breaking Bad work as there were other, better known nominees there), but with the Oscars it pretty much never does. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored though. Hence this new poll. Which longshot nominee would you most like to see score an upset and win?
Richard Jenkins (Best Actor for The Visitor)
Melissa Leo (Best Actress for Frozen River)
Michael Shannon (Best Supporting Actor for Revolutionary Road)
Viola Davis (Best Supporting Actress for Doubt)
Gus Van Sant (Best Director for Milk)
Thomas Newman (Best Soundtrack for Wall*E)
Martin McDonagh (Best Original Screenplay for In Bruges)
Peter Morgan (Best Adapted Screenplay for Frost/Nixon)
Wally Pfister (Best Cinematography for The Dark Knight)
Kung Fu Panda (Best Animated Feature Film)
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Best Foreign Language Film)
Milk (Best Picture)
Iron Man (Best Visual Effects)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Best Makeup)
The Dark Knight (Best Sound Editing)
Wanted (Best Sound Mixing)
I will admit, I have no idea if Wanted really had amazingly well mixed sound. I just want to know if anyone out there is eager for a movie featuring a Loom of Fate, bullet-curving, and bomb-rats to win an Oscar. If anyone votes for it, I’ll assume Mark Millar popped by. Anyway, have at it, my pretties.
When I posted my Best Movies of 2008 lists, I had a little rant about release schedules, and how making a list before seeing some potentially great movies got released made a mockery of the whole thing. Daisyhellcakes argued very persuasively that we wait for a little while longer, but the thought of posting a Best Of list at the end of March (the earliest we could see Synecdoche, New York, which is released on Region 1 DVD two months before it gets a UK release) was anathema to me. I love lists like Picard loves Earl Grey, so there was no way I could put off blurting out my picks.
To be honest, I thought that the final few big contenders might not get on the list. Synecdoche was the big hope, praised by some whose opinion means a lot to me but dissed by some hardcore Kaufman fans, so I couldn’t be sure. Doubt looks promising, especially if you’re a fan of Viola Davis, guilt, ACK-TING, and/or Joe Vs. The Volcano. The Reader could appeal to the Winslet enthusiast in me, even if it sounds like a potentially mind-shredding mixture of worthy ingredients and themes baked into Seriousness Souffle.
Other than that, there was Rachel Getting Married, which Daisyhellcakes had been excited about since The AV Club went a bit mental about it. Even though it was great to hear that Jonathan Demme — a director I had once been crazy about — was back on form after some dodgy efforts, I was less enthused than Daisyhellcakes, thinking I would like it well enough, but surely not more than I had liked the perfect crowd-pleasingness of Iron Man, or the complex power struggles and martial arts mastery of Red Cliff: Part One, or Colin Farrell’s eloquent profanity and existential misery in In Bruges.
And yet I did like it. More than Iron Man. More than The Wrestler. More than In Bruges. More, even, than Kung Fu Panda, a film that makes me cry when watching just because I love it so much. We went to see it last night (finally released in the UK months after its initial US release), and I was floored by it. The only film of 2008 that I liked more was The Dark Knight, though Rachel Getting Married gives it a run for its money. Sadly for Demme and his amazing cast and crew, their excellent film still lacks Ledger and Eckhart, the Batpod, and the boat dilemma, so it could never be top of my list.
I cannot overstate how happy I am that Demme has made a movie that feels so much like his earlier work, even if the shooting style (handheld cameras and a home movie feel) is so different from anything he has ever done before. Demme was renowned for making movies that feel like they’re full to the brim with life and unpredictability even though, formally, his movies were often very stylised and structured. Even something as potentially uncinematic as a Spalding Gray monologue was rendered visually lively in his movie Swimming to Cambodia, and yet all he was doing was filming Gray at a desk.
His post-Corman movies all felt like parties with plotlines, bristling with energy and quirkiness, and even if they weren’t all perfect, they were still a lot of fun. Something Wild is possibly the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie, generating so much goodwill in the audience that even the much-discussed third-act detour into thriller territory doesn’t derail the good times. Married To The Mob is possibly the oddest and most lovable gangster movie yet made, with Dean Stockwell doing a great job of being funny and threatening at the same time. Stop Making Sense is the classic concert movie, a playful celebration of not only the music of Talking Heads but the idea of live music as theatre. Melvin and Howard, coming across like a lost Hal Ashby movie or the brother of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, is in dire need of reappraisal. Even something as compromised as Swing Shift had the spark of something made outside the restrictive studio system despite the interference of people who just didn’t understand what he was aiming for.
The only other filmmakers from that period who managed to fill their films with such energy (at least that I can think of) were Jim McBride and Martin Scorsese. McBride regrettably disappeared after the failure of Great Balls of Fire (one of the most infectiously anarchic mainstream movies ever to fail miserably at the box office), and Scorsese has been chasing Oscars with some uninspiring prestige movies for a while now, cranking out shadows of his former great work. That said, I totally don’t begrudge him winning, and even shed a tear when it happened. Look at him! I want to give that man a hug.
(An aside: There is also former Demme collaborator George Armitage, responsible for the gleefully unorthodox Miami Blues and Grosse Pointe Blank, but sadly he too came unstuck with The Big Bounce, a deeply frustrating project that hinted at, if not greatness, then at least some light-hearted and good-natured fun.)
That ossification of their exuberant style is similar to what happened to Demme. In a complete left-turn that still baffles me to this day, he made Silence of the Lambs, his biggest hit and an award magnet even though it is wilfully peculiar, bleak, and filled with idiosyncracies. It was a strange triumph for his brand of unorthodox and imaginative storytelling. However, for the longest time it was his last great hurrah. Philadelphia did a great job of raising awareness about HIV and AIDS, but it’s not a particularly good movie. It’s the first Big Theme movie of his career, and signalled that awful time in an Oscar-winning director’s career when they lose whatever it was that made them interesting in the first place. It doesn’t happen all of the time. Spielberg made Minority Report and Munich after winning two Oscars, and Bob Zemeckis followed his Forrest Gump win with performance-capture experiments of varying quality that were, however, still bold and fascinating on a technical level. However, how many interesting films has Barry Levinson made since Rain Man? Or Bernardo Bertolucci?
In the case of Demme, while I would be eager to see his early movies, I have little interest in seeing The Truth About Charlie (despite having Joong-Hoon Park, aka the Korean Marlon Brando, in the cast), and zero interest in Beloved, which looks like a deeply flawed interpretation of Toni Morrison’s book. Plus, who wanted to see a remake of The Manchurian Candidate? It has all the elements of a potentially good movie, except that it serves no purpose. The updating of the story to satirise the nefarious motives of Big Business was potentially interesting, but garbled by horrible plotholes and inconsistencies. Flashes of Demme’s quirky eye for detail or image broke through from time to time, and the performances were a joy to watch, but it was a dispiriting experience, seeing Demme making movies that were a world away from his earlier films, all of which looked and felt like they were made on Planet Demme. His earthbound projects just didn’t inspire me at all. (N.B. I wrote this paragraph a couple of days ago, but a quick look at The AV Club’s New Cult Canon feature on Married To The Mob features the phrase Demmeworld. He really does make movies unlike anyone else.)
In recent years his documentary work, such as Jimmy Carter Man From Plains, The Agronomist, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, were critically praised, but their releases were so badly organised that, with my new apathy towards Demme, I couldn’t muster the energy to chase them down. I never thought it would come to that. And now, that period has passed. Rachel Getting Married did many things to my brain and heart and soul, but first and foremost it’s made me excited to watch his movies again. Those documentaries are definitely getting tracked down as soon as possible.
Rachel Getting Married has been described as being Altmanesque simply because it features a large ensemble cast that talks a lot, and the subject matters echoes that of Altman’s A Wedding. Other than that the connection between Demme’s work here and that of the great man is not as definitive as has been noted. The use of naturalistic speech patterns have more to do with the way the movie is filmed, with hand-held cameras and natural sound, than with some stylistic tic appropriated from elsewhere. Cleverly the movie is filmed in the same style as a wedding video, as if an invisible visitor to the ceremony was recording everything. At times the film cuts to the PoV of a guest who is recording everything, and other than the film stock you can barely tell the difference in style. Altman’s overlapping dialogue was intentional and often overdone to the point of parody. In Rachel Getting Married, it’s a natural consequence of Demme letting his actors loose without rehearsals, hence lines are stepped on and come at the wrong moments, much as with real conversations. Check out this press kit for more information about Demme’s shooting style.
Saying the movie is realistically filmed is one thing, but it would still ring false if the performances and script were not up to scratch, but they are all nigh-on perfect. Jenny Lumet’s debut script is an absolute marvel, superbly managing the tricky task of juggling tone and revelation and pace without giving away her structure. Love McKee though I do, it’s hard to watch a lot of movies as learner writers show their act breaks too obviously, using McKee’s work as a strict manual filled with compulsory rules instead of a guidebook of advice, which is how it should be treated. Lumet’s script flows like real life flows, with unpredictability and awkwardness and accidents, but is structured perfectly. You just never notice until you pick it apart later. Of course, I shouldn’t have to praise her for doing something that any writer worth their salt would do, but she does such an amazing job in a world where even this basic competence seems rare that I feel obligated to mention it.
That said, even an amazing script would suffer without a great cast to add life and natural flow to it, and Rachel Getting Married has a superb range of performers who seem to have been in rehearsal forever, so seamlessly is everything played. One memorable scene — which could easily have turned into a stagy shoutfest — is conducted almost entirely through calm, acidic asides and vicious accusations delivered in quiet but furious voices, the protagonists moving from room to room while Anna Deavere Smith hands out plates of melon. Seeing the incomparable Bill Irwin desperately trying to hold his family together as the tragedy in their past threatens to bring everything crashing down is one of the most affecting things I’ve seen in film for years, and would not have worked if we were watching big meltdown moments.
The only scene containing sustained histrionics — the climactic showdown between Kym and her feckless mother (played with odious brilliance by a perfectly cast Debra Winger) — earns those screams. The fight we see has been in the offing for years, and when it comes it starts with almost no warning. I can’t remember the last time a scene alarmed me more. Well, a scene that didn’t involve a Batpod, exploding bodies, or some kind of monster on a rampage.
Music has always been important to Demme, and plays a huge part. He’s done more to champion African music than any other US filmmaker, and without it his narrative work of the past few years has felt incomplete. As the movie’s form demands no non-diegetic music be used for fear of breaking the semi-realist spell, Demme fills the wedding with musicians, used diegetically, throughout. Demme has said he was eager to present a wedding that reflects his life experiences and circle of friends, which is why Sister Carol East and Robyn Hitchcock turn up to perform (this is explained away by having Bill Irwin’s patriarch conveniently working in the music industry). There is much African soul and funk in later scenes, and classical-ambient noodling throughout earlier scenes. We even get to hear Tunde Adebimpe, in the role of groom Sidney, sing to Rachel (an excellent performance by Rosemarie DeWitt), which was a lovely touch.
Sadly, that amazing soundtrack by Donald Harrison Jr. and Zafer Tawil’s gets no Oscar nomination. Neither does Bill Irwin, or Jonathan Demme, or even (and this really disgusts me) Jenny Lumet. This despite it being widely admired, though I guess that means little when you have the moneyed likes of Harvey Weinstein running around strong-arming voters into praising illiterate Nazi movies. Much of our post-movie debate (conducted over amazing food at the West End branch of super-restaurant Tsunami, food fans!) was spent bemoaning Slumdog‘s recent SAG Awards win for Best Ensemble Cast. I can think of a number of movies more deserving of that award than the indifferently performed Slumdog, and none more so than Rachel Getting Married, which features a large and talented cast at the peak of their powers.
That cast is Demme’s secret weapon. By casting friends and family, filming them constantly, and ensuring that a party atmosphere prevails, Rachel Getting Married feels fresh and new and exciting, just like Demme’s work from decades ago. No other film of recent years is as vibrant and life-affirming as this, even while it deals with tragedy and pain and some of the worst behavioural impulses imaginable. The sense of real celebration, real love and emotion bursting from the screen, is palpable, even though Lumet’s script goes to extremely dark places and stares down pain and loss and grief without blinking, and even though Demme is not afraid to have scenes play out to uncomfortable or tedious length.
And yet it is almost totally ignored by the Academy, with numerous nominations given to less worthy movies instead. Of course, that includes my current bête noire, Slumdog Millionaire. Apologies for banging on about this yet again, but after seeing Rachel Getting Married, we were furious about the nominationariational state of play. Danny Boyle’s movie purports to be an upbeat celebration of life and love, but at heart it’s a hollow, ugly, fake trinket, a cubic zirconium blob of contrived uplift and phony sentimentalism. Rachel Getting Married is often painful to watch, but it feels real, and earns all of the emotions it generates in the audience. It serenades humanity in all its forms, whereas Slumdog is an inconsequential hymn to Hallmark-card simplicity. Despite all of its distracting flash it’s little more than escapist Mogadon. As many fans have pointed out, it’s not trying to be anything more than escapism, and that wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so ugly and boring and aggressively stupid. Rachel Getting Married is a thousand-times the movie Slumdog is, and seeing Boyle and his cohorts pulling in awards and rapturous praise while Demme’s movie is treated as little more than a competent amuse-bouche is driving me into paroxysms of rage.
Of course, Rachel Getting Married did get one nomination. A Best Actress nod went to Anne Hathaway, whose phenomenal career-best performance earns her a prestigious Shades of Caruso Free Pass.
I don’t care if she goes on to make The Devil Still Wears Prada, or a series of Bride Wars sequels that rival the Bond films for longevity. In Rachel Getting Married she is incredible, playing Kym — a messy neurotic bag of hostility and guilt — to perfection. I’ve heard some people say her tics annoyed them (including at least one loyal reader of this here blog), but I didn’t notice that. Perhaps it’s because I know Kym, or at least someone who went through some similar life experiences and, sadly, came out of it just as angry and unhappy as her. Hathaway reminded me of that period so much that it freaked me out for long stretches of the movie. But in a good way. For a start, it gave me an insight into why people try to help family or friends who are going through horrible internal strife. Obviously, it’s because you love them no matter what. A no-brainer answer, really.
So yes, my lists (allfourofthem) are now all skewiff. The number two spot on my best films list goes to Rachel Getting Married. Anne Hathaway does the incredible and knocks the Unstoppable Winslet Machine out of the Best Actress spot. Rosemarie DeWitt and Bill Irwin get on my supporting lists. Jenny Lumet gives Martin McDonagh a run for his money for the Best Screenplay spot (I watched In Bruges again this week and I think it remains number one, but only just). Christopher Nolan remains my favourite director of the year, but Jonathan Demme is right behind him.
Oh, Demme. Film buffs are still patiently waiting for the second coming of Woody Allen (or third, or fourth; I’ve lost count), and two weak-to-average movies have been treated like the equals of Crimes and Misdemeanours and Husbands and Wives, even though Match Point was a silly mess and Vicky Cristina Barcelona is kinda dull and obvious. We’re not getting another Manhattan, or Hannah and her Sisters, or even Broadway Danny Rose ever again, and we should just accept that and treat his late career projects as mildly diverting exercises in mannerism and waffling. Demme, however, hasn’t just made something better than The Manchurian Candidate. He’s not just made his best film since Silence of the Lambs. He’s made his best film since Melvin and Howard. Maybe even better than that. It’s not a return to form, or the late-blooming of a failed but interesting director (his early movies are too good for that insulting appelation). It’s vindication for his fans, proof that the man was an important and fiercely intelligent artist all along, and was just having a bad run that would end one day when the right project came along. In 2008, it finally did. I simply cannot praise it enough.
