We Need To Talk (And Talk And Talk) About Oscar
Why am I doing this? There was once a time I would dazzle all those around me as I applied an almost precognitive talent for award prediction to numerous hastily organized Oscar ballots. Oh how I was feted, carried high on the shoulders of friends and enemies alike, given ambrosial liquor to sup on from jewel-encrusted golden goblets. They were glorious times, my friends, and those efforts were the stuff of legend. But since making my predictions via this blog, my hit rate has dropped into the low fuckalls. Once Shades of Caruso was described as “usually fairly reliable“. Well, not in terms of Oscar predictions. So why put myself through this ordeal again? Why humiliate myself when my former predictive talents as a modern-day Cassandra have suddenly and inexplicably morphed into those of just some random lass called Sandra?
To be honest it’s only to justify having sat through the combined clusterfuck-a-thon of War Horse, The Iron Lady and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; three movies so wretched they should be investigated as hate crimes against my very soul. And yet here they are, given baffling nominational attention from the various elders who constitute the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The anguish caused by this triumvirate of terribleness, and their baffling inclusion on the Oscar shortlist, is the fuel that powered this epic post, so if you get bored to extinction by the time you get halfway down the page, blame Stephen Daldry, Eric Roth, Abi Morgan, Phyllida Lloyd, Lee Hall and Richard Curtis (Spielberg gets a free pass for Tintin, which was aceballs).
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: George Clooney – The Descendants
Jean Dujardin may have been winning awards by smiling a smile that honestly looks like it could melt through steel like Superman’s heat vision, but I think the Academy members are ready to give Gorgeous George the big prize at last, mostly just to get it out of the way. There are worse things that could happen; though I’d be more than happy to see the thoroughly handsome Dujardin win and do a little tap-dance or something, Clooney was the best thing about The Descendants (other than Shailene Woodley, who was also very good). It’s odd to look at the mostly quiet work he does here, the way he balances light comedy and heavy tragedy, and think back to the way his performances were merely an amalgamation of irksome tics when he was on E.R. and not-massively-popular action extravaganza The Peacemaker. Now look at him. He’s really very good. And still handsome. An Oscar win here is no bad thing.
Who Should Win: Gary Oldman – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
But of these five candidates, surely it’s Oldman’s prize. He’s survived the fallow years caused — I’m sure — by appearances in two Luc Besson movies with only Airforce One and Lost in Space to separate them, and has proved cynics (such as myself) wrong time and again. By now even his shaky appearances in crap like Red Riding Hood are usually worth watching. It’s enough to make me think he will take over from Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Endlessly-Entertaining-Actor-Shaped extra chamber in my heart once the great Welshman has sadly entered the Odinsleep. Tinker Tailor was an impeccably performed movie; picking out individual acting highlights is hard, but pretty much every moment Oldman is onscreen, like a shade sucking all of the light from the room, it’s as if everyone else has faded into the awful period-appropriate wallpaper. His voicework in Kung Fu Panda 2 was good too. We take Oldman for granted; time we stopped doing that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Fassbender – Shame
Maybe it’s a good thing Fassbender didn’t get nominated. The outrage generated by that stupid-but-expected decision will power his career for a while longer as he comes to work on projects to be filed under the heading True Quality, as opposed to the gilded, establishment-approved version of art represented by the Academy’s often-mystifying choices. It also means that the inevitable dirty tricks campaign could dig up some pretty unpleasant stuff about Fassbender, and at this point in his career (or at any point, really) that’s not a good thing. Best he sits this one out until a year when a very driven producer doesn’t have a dog in this fight.
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Beginners was a good enough movie, one that made it okay to like Ewan McGregor again, but without the storming performance from Plummer I think it would be forgotten fairly quickly. His energy levels here are remarkable, and make an average movie unmissable. Hopefully people won’t go on about how he’s bound to win because he plays a terminally ill gay man who finds a new lease of life in his final years, thus completing some kind of Oscar-Worthiness Bingo card. He deserves to win because he deserves to win. It’s that simple.
Who Should Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Though a spanner was thrown into the works when Max Von Sydow got nominated as “The Renter” in Stephen Daldry and Eric Roth’s monumentally awful Extremely Insensitive and Incredibly Corny. The great man has been acting for nearly 700 years now and has never won an Oscar, so surely he’s due one. Hell, make it a retroactive award for The Virgin Spring. Despite this, and despite the fact that he’s the only good thing to come of Daldry and Roth’s wretched miasma of relentless sentiment, it has to be Plummer who wins this. He’s been cranking out great performances for the past few years (he should’ve won for The Insider, to be honest), and if he gets this, he’ll have a BEGOT (not just your Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony quadfecta, but also a Bafta as well). If you don’t want to root for such an achievement, please fill out the order form below to request a new, fully-functional soul.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sir Ben Kingsley – Hugo
Lots of folks complained about the numerous snubs in this nomination list, with much of the justifiable frustration directed at the miserable lack of Albert Brooks, but I’ve only seen a couple of people point out that leaving Sir Ben off the list for his superb work in Hugo was an egregious omission. Maybe Best Supporting Actor is the wrong category, as Uncle Georges is arguably the protagonist of this movie, but there’s more room for him here than in the crowded Best Actor slot (ahem Jonah Hill ahem). Sir Ben is in the same category as Sir Anthony Hopkins; he’s usually the most interesting thing in whatever movie he appears in, and Hugo is no exception. If it works at all, it’s because of his skill in bringing to life the sweet-and-sour mystery at the heart of the film.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady
A horrible inevitability has descended upon this category. Many are talking up the relative lack of Oscars Meryl has received despite being in the list of top twenty most awesome people in the history of the world, and I’m sure many people are aggrieved that she didn’t win anything for her impersonation of Dan Aykroyd in Julie and Julia, but even so, the thought of her playing a real live actual person is just too much. The Academy must have written this winner on their scorecards without even seeing the movie. She truly embodied the pluck and lovability of Margaret Thatcher completely (i.e. it was correctly completely absent from the movie). Plus there was a lot of make-up on her face. The assorted critics of the Daily Telegraph plumped for Viola Davis en masse, but I still think this is Meryl’s to win.
Who Should Win: Michelle Williams – My Week With Marilyn
And it would be the worst crime of the night. Don’t get me wrong; I genuinely adore Meryl Streep. She might even be my favourite actor, if not vying for joint fave with Jeff Bridges. Nevertheless, the obnoxious fractured editing by Phyllida Lloyd — which is obviously meant to mirror Mrs. Thatcher’s current unfortunate medical situation — means the movie never settles down long enough for us to have any idea what Meryl’s performance is like. As I tweeted after the godawful mess finally came to a close, it feels like a 100 minute trailer for a 17-hour-long movie, mostly made up of stock footage. It makes W.E. look like a coherent film, which I thought would be impossible. The glimpses we get of Meryl in excelsis suggest she did good work but I honestly can’t attest to that. So I say it should have gone to Michelle Williams. Cheeky of me, as I haven’t seen My Week With Marilyn; I’m burned out on such things thanks to The King’s Speech. But MW was unfortunate to have given a performance of such brilliance in Blue Valentine in the same year that Natalie Portman brought her A-game in Black Swan. Williams deserves to unlock the Reversal of Fortune Achievement for that. (1000 Gamerpoints)
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin
What else do I need to say? Excise the horrible cartoonish display by the otherwise excellent Jessica Chastain in The Help, and put Tilda in where she belongs. She’s said she’s happy to avoid going to the ceremony, but what about her fans, who look forward too seeing her appear in white dresses before being described as “androgynous” by every fashion expert? An essential part of the award season is now sadly missing. Plus she was phenomenal in WNTTAK. That too.
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Octavia Spencer – The Help
This was a movie that made me very uncomfortable, much as The Blind Side did a couple of years ago, but at least The Help had great performances (and not-so-great, Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard) on its side. Octavia Spencer managed to out-act Viola Davis without having to do that snotty nose thing Davis does in so many movies; Davis even managed it again in Extremely Long and Incredibly Offensive, probably because she knew that disappointing us by not featuring it would have ruined hundreds of Extremely Twee and Incredibly Pretentious drinking games. This is another of the most predictable wins of the ceremony, and one I back almost 100%.
Who Should Win: Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids
Except that it would be so nice for a comedic performance to get an Oscar nod, and Melissa McCarthy’s much-loved work is the most likely possibility for many a year. Admittedly if she won over the other candidates there’s a possibility that in time she would be given the same treatment Marisa Tomei got when she won for My Cousin Vinny, but as someone who likes Marisa Tomei and My Cousin Vinny, and who has done a complete 180° on McCarthy now that I know she has more about her than was shown in Gilmore Girls (shudder), I’d back this win also. Not gonna happen, though.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Melancholia
Fair to say that Uncle Lars’ Bedtime For Hitler storytelling at the Cannes Film Festival sank any chance that either Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg would get a nomination. I suspect the screeners for this sat unwatched on many an Academy member’s coffee table. A pity, as it was one of the highlights of the year. Gainsbourg was just as good in Antichrist, but maybe this kind of soul-baring work isn’t ever going to find favour with the assorted old white men who vote for these things. “Why, she’s just got the vapours,” they would say into their mug of restorative potions made from the tears of discarded Hollywood dreamers. “Just buy her an ironing board and be done with it.” And that, my friends, is why the Oscars mean jack shit.
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
What Will Win: Rango
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Cars 2 didn’t get nominated ha ha ha ha ha. Reap the merchandising whirlwind, Pixar, and thanks for pissing on your legacy (until your next incredible film comes along and makes me forgive you for temporarily misplacing your soul). Anyway, Rango was the frontrunner over a year ago and nothing has changed since.
What Should Win: Rango
Seriously, why are we even talking about this? Rango‘s a masterpiece. End of.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Of course, there was the amusing upset during the Golden Globes when Spielberg’s much-maligned performance-capture movie won the animation award, but then it didn’t get in here. There are lots of theories why, from “is it animation?” to “it’s not animation“, to “it wasn’t good enough”. Whatever the reason, its omission here is pretty bizarre, made all the worse by the nominations dropped into War Horse‘s trough. This vibrant, manic blast of imagination gets nothing while that risible failure gets a bunch of nods? Shocking. But it still wouldn’t deserve to win. Why? Because Rango. Like I just said a paragraph ago.
Achievement in Cinematography
Who Will Win: Robert Richardson – Hugo
I have a theory, for which I have absolutely no proof, that if the movie with the most nominations doesn’t win Best Picture, it will be given Best Cinematography as a consolation prize. The Artist might or might not not win many awards this year but I believe it’ll win Best Picture at the very least, which would leave Hugo wanting. As a result, I think Robert Richardson’s 3D cinematography will win out. Or Ludovic Bource will win for The Artist because he isn’t using that new-fangled technology? No, it’ll definitely be Richardson. Unless that lovely, clear, monochrome photography persuades the oldsters. ::is utterly undecided::
Who Should Win: Emmanuel Lubezki – The Tree of Life
If there is one word I could use to describe Malick’s meditation on cosmic gubbins and personal strife — other than pretentious, or powerful, or intricate, or unsubtle, or preposterous, or profound, or overlong, or ambitious, or breathtaking, etc. etc. — it would be luminous. Thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki’s work, this film glowed. It throbbed with the very life its titular tree is full of. Maybe it was just that we saw this on a good screen, brightly lit and digitally projected (a rarity nowadays), but it was so gloriously shot that I felt I was looking straight through a window into another world, or at least into the mind of Malick, and it was as beautiful a place as I had hoped.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sean Bobbitt – Shame
In the past Bobbitt filmed a lot of Ye Olde Worlde settings for some of the seemingly infinite number of period adaptations made by the BBC, so it must have been a nice change for him to capture the most memorable images of New York in recent memory. Not that that mattered to the Academy, who don’t care about his ability to paint the city with terrifying reds, soft golds, and rainy greys. All they think is, “But he pointed the camera at a dong”, and that’s your lot. Sorry Sean. Maybe some day you’ll make a movie set during the first quarter of the 20th Century and the Academy members will be falling out of their bath chairs to give you a nod. Fingers crossed, eh?
Achievement in Art Direction
Who Will Win: Laurence Bennett and Robert Gould - The Artist
It’s in these technical categories that the two love letters to silent cinema will fight their most fraught battles, where the majority winner will be decided. As a result it’s hard to deduct who will win using my usual scientific rigour. Instead I have to rely on guesswork, and the thought that last year the Weinsteins managed to strongarm the Academy into giving Tom Hooper — TOM HOOPER — the award for Best Director. I’m sure Harvey has been going door-to-door this year, telling more anecdotes about how clever he was to acquire the rights to this, buying bunches of grapes for the voters and promising to give them back-rubs and what-not. Even though half of my brain is convinced the voters will be more charmed by the charming charming super super charming charm of Hugo (an excellent read, that), I think Harvey’s carpet-bombing techniques will win again. Plus the art direction on The Artist was very nice.
Who Should Win: Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo - Hugo
That said, the art direction on Hugo was even better. Dante Ferretti’s collaborations with Scorsese are always a feast for the eyes and his interpretation of what a semi-fantastical Parisian railway station would look like — with toy shops, overstocked bookshops and clockwork labyrinths included — is some of the best work he’s done. Plus he’s on a roll, having won his last two nominations for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and The Aviator. So I could well be wrong here.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Maria Djurkovic, Tom Brown and Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Friend-of-the-blog Beggar So’s Hat wisely noted that the shockingly grim production design of this was horribly snubbed. I hadn’t even noticed that. I think I tried to blot the miserable look of the film from my brain rather than be reminded once more of the horrors within. It made me think of my childhood, which now feels like it happened in the 50s and not the 70s like it actually was. It’s as if England was frozen in time for fifty years, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was just a snapshot of that. Which is to say, Mr. Hat was right. The production design on TTSS was worthy of many awards, especially this one, but also Grimmest Evocation of the Cigarette-Smoke-Stained Dilapidation of 20th Century Britain.
Achievement in Costume Design
Who Will Win: Mark Bridges – The Artist
Again, it’s all down to who will be the overall winner. If it’s going to be The Artist I have to go all in and give it to Mr. Bridges…
Who Should Win: Sandy Powell – Hugo
…while thinking that Sandy Powell’s work is more deserving. By now I must seem like a guy who hated The Artist, but I didn’t. I adored it. Hugo was the movie that left me cold, even though it’s obviously a thing of great precision, as intricate and lovely as the clockwork contraptions that litter it. But all that effort from Scorsese was futilely expended trying to shift the enormous rock that is my heart, and it wasn’t going to work. ::hands in film buff card::
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Eiko Ishioka – Immortals
Nevertheless, that’s not as big a crime as neglecting Eiko Ishioka’s brain-maddening work which so dominated Tarsem’s latest empty trinket. It’s especially frustrating as the world is now bereft of her singular genius. Creating works of art for ill-received genre movies directed by someone with… shall we say, a questionable grasp of narrative… means her work wasn’t really seen enough. When we see Mirror, Mirror later this year, it’ll be a bittersweet experience. And not just because it’ll almost certainly be desperately boring crap. #Uncharitable
Best Documentary Feature
What Will Win: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
As usual I haven’t seen any documentaries this year, not even depressing ones about how the economy is about to explode with the force of a million megaprolapses, so I can’t really talk with any authority here, but I’d wager Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky will get the nod for campaigning successfully for the West Memphis Three. Unless the Academy is still mad at Berlinger for Blair Witch 2, which is understandable.
What Should Win: IDK SMDH
As I can’t say anything authoritative here, I’ll keep my fat mouth shut.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Tabloid
Yep, I didn’t even see Senna, the most critically acclaimed documentary of the year, but everyone I know who has seen it adores it. Nevertheless, I would’ve loved to have seen Errol Morris’ crazily entertaining Tabloid get some recognition. Perhaps because it’s so much fun it never stood a chance of getting any Oscar love; that old “comedy is too frivolous to be worthy of recognition” thing again. Which is a shame, because I’d say Tabloid has some pretty hefty points to make about news cycles, journalistic arrogance and human venality. It just also happens to be very amusing while it makes those points.
Best Documentary Short Subject
What Will Win: God Is The Bigger Elvis
Best Animated Short Film
What Will Win: La Luna
Best Live Action Short Film
What Will Win: The Shore
Okay, I’ll come clean. I haven’t got a clue about any of the nominees in any of the three categories clustered here, as was the case last year, so I’m just going to pick for the stupidest reasons. I just read about God Is The Bigger Elvis a few hours ago, La Luna because I like the name of the director (Enrico Casarosa), and The Shore because it’s made by Terry and Oorlagh George, and I always get annoyed that I confuse Terry George and Terry Southern even though their surnames and careers are completely different so I guess that’s an omen or something. Sorry to all of the nominees in these categories; I should give you respect, and instead I give you this excrement-soaked corsage. You deserve so much better.
Achievement in Film Editing
Who Will Win: Thelma Schoonmaker – Hugo
It’s arguable that Hugo was a bit slack, to be honest, and could have done with a bit of tidying up, but you’re a fool if you bet against Schoonmaker, who has won three of the six Academy Awards she has previously been nominated for (can you believe she didn’t win for Goodfellas? WT actual F?).
Who Should Win: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
As I said last year, David Fincher’s editing team on The Social Network did a fantastic job of wrestling a ton of footage and talking to the ground and making it work as a narrative. they’re here again with a movie that’s less talky but just as complex (if not more so) than that. Dragon Tattoo may not have blown my socks off the way Fincher’s best work does, but it’s a great thriller, perfectly paced and seemingly effortlessly compelling. Baxter and Wall deserve this win twice over now.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Paul Hirsch – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol / Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber and Mark Yoshikawa – The Tree of Life / Joe Bini – We Need To Talk About Kevin
Quick run through of my reasons here. 1) The best action movie of the year deserves a nod, especially when the action scenes are so clearly drawn and beautifully constructed. It was a joy to watch, and much of that was down to veteran Hirsch’s command of the AVID. 2) A team of five head editors wrestling with what was probably 65,000,000 miles of footage featuring kids running down alleys or Brad Pitt standing on a lawn, and in the end we get an impressionistic collage of mood and image as powerful as this? I may complain that Hugo was slack but any flabbiness here was probably intentional. The longueurs are as important as the moments of emotion, and the superb judgement of this team — and Malick — will probably become more apparent with each rewatch. 3) It’s as if Nicolas Roeg is making major motion pictures again, and Bini is as important as Lynne Ramsay in creating a fractured but exhaustingly scary like Kevin. Again, a major omission for this exceptional artistic accomplishment.
Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
What Will Win: A Separation
Of course the Academy has a talent for arsing this category up, which could be good news for Agnieszka Holland — I’d think of it as an award given in honour of her stunning Treme pilot; one of the best episodes of TV ever made – but honestly, how on earth could anything beat Asghar Farhadi’s magnificent family drama? I would’ve like to have seen it do a Crouching Tiger and get a Best Picture nomination as well, it’s that good (yes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, a fact that seems to elude many professional Oscar prognosticators each year).
What Should Win: A Separation
Time spent thinking about this masterpiece since seeing it right at the end of last year has made it seem even more profound, even more exciting. I may not have seen any of the other films nominated here but still it seems only right that this wins.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Skin I Live In
To be honest, though I enjoyed Pedro Almodovar’s macabre thriller, it still left me a little cold. I’m sure there’s some arcane reason why this wasn’t included (that’s usually the case; did Spain even offer it as a nominee?), but if that’s not the case then I guess its omission here is pretty surprising. Other than that, the majority of the foreign language movies I saw last year just weren’t good enough to warrant inclusion here. Even Peter Chan’s Wu Xia — a film which made it onto my best-of-2011 list — would seem out of place. The closest thing I can think of for inclusion would be Andrea Molaioli’s Il Gioiellino, the fictionalised dramatisation of the Parmalat fraud scandal, but even that’s too dry to really pass muster. ::shrug::
Achievement in Makeup
Who Will Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
I almost feel like I’m saying this because it had the most make-up, mostly on Meryl’s chin for Thatcher’s later years…
Who Should Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
…but as Daisyhellcakes said when we tried to stay awake during this possibly endless collision of stock footage and poorly shot comedic shenanigans, “That’s a really convincing wattle”. And she’s right. It’s a really convincing wattle.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Contagion
The most startling physical transformation of the year was a digital effect; the enfeeblenising of Chris Evans in the first third of Captain America: The First Avenger is a baffling, seamless effect that convinces so completely that post-super-serum Evans looks somehow more wrong than the wimp. I’m tempted to say this should have been nominated just for the wicked Red Skull make-up on Hugo Weaving, but I think Contagion may be a more worthy nominee, for the nasty sweaty death pallor on the victims of MEV-1, Jude Law’s pasty face and rotten tooth, and one very fun autopsy scene.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
Who Will Win: Howard Shore – Hugo
I can’t actually remember a single note of it, even though I’m a big fan of Mr. Shore (his score for A Dangerous Method was particularly lovely; he does his best work for Maestro Cronenberg), but I doubt either of Williams’ scores will win (vote splitting), and there’s the possibility that Kim Novak really does have some insider information about how the soundtrack to The Artist did something unspeakable and illegal to Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score. That leaves Shore’s score.
Who Should Win: Alberto Iglesias - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Of course, this wonderful score by Alberto Iglesias should be the frontrunner here for anyone who has ears. It’s an absolute corker, sinister and peppered with smokey-jazz moments; perfect for the film and powerful in its own right. And yes, I know this won’t be a consideration for the Academy, but the inclusion of this great, nerd-funky version of La Mer just shows how much care was put into the music. It’s such a great choice for the scene it accompanies that I did a joy-pirouette without leaving my super-comfy Odeon-Swiss-Cottage seat.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Giacchino – Super 8
My favourite soundtrack of last year was Cecile Corbel’s delicate score for Arrietty, but as the movie wasn’t released in the US until this year, it wasn’t eligible. I’d like to say Hans Zimmer’s score for Rango should’ve got in, but considering the fuss over Ludovic Bource’s The Artist soundtrack, Zimmer’s re-appropriation of The Blue Danube and Ride of the Valkyries — not to mention similarities with Carter Burwell’s Raising Arizona score — mean it’s better off out of it. Giacchino’s Super 8 score managed to conjure up memories of some of John Williams’ work with Spielberg while remaining recognisably his own work. It might not be the best thing he’s done, but it played an important part in conjuring up the air of nostalgia that made J.J. Abrams’ homage work.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
What Will Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
I’ve not heard the Rio song, but is there any doubt?
What Should Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
It’s just what a musical number should be. It’s thematically relevant, perfectly judged on a tonal level, it signals a big plot moment, it’s full of clever lyrical tricks, and it’s a proper showstopping earworm. It brought the house down at the BFI a month ago and I reckon this happens everywhere this movie plays. Is this the most assured winner of the night?
What Should Have Been Nominated: Star Spangled Man (Alan Menken / David Zippel) – Captain America: The First Avenger
Still, the feeble number of nominees here means there’s no real reason why Menken and Zippel’s entertaining pastiche of WWII propaganda songs didn’t get a nod. It’s not as good as Bret McKenzie’s song, but it’s still a witty and catchy tune. I guess the Academy members didn’t want to be reminded of the war that took place during their middle age. Yeah, I went there!
Achievement in Sound Editing
Who Will Win: Richard Hymns and Gary Rydstrom – War Horse
It might be a load of old chuff but I think War Horse will get at least one Oscar just because Spielberg and the rest strained so damn hard to make something timeless and noble that I bet someone will feel sorry for him. That’s not to say the work of Hymns and Rydstrom isn’t worthy of an award. The movie has a wide array of excellent whinnies, clip-clops, and gunfire.
Who Should Win: Ren Klyce – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Normally I’d pick Transformers: Dark of the Moon for two reasons: 1) to annoy everyone by continuing to not crap all over Bay’s carnage-laden doomfuck, and 2) because there were about one zillion sound effects in this movie, and I’m sure there was a small army of sound recorders trying to find the material for this movie’s sonic tapestry of boom. Nevertheless, I’ll pick Ren Klyce’s work on Fincher’s bleak midwinter tale for two different reasons: 1) I always tend to pick Ren Klyce because Ren Klyce is ace, and 2) the sound of Lisbeth Salander’s steel-toed boot clanging noisily against a very large metallic anus-seeking dildo has haunted me for two months. That counts for something.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Oliver Tarney and Mark Taylor – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
My two picks here (Nicholas Becker for Andrea Arnold’s glorious Wuthering Heights and Koji Kasamatsu for Arrietty) are again not eligible because of US release dates. Instead I’ll pick the team behind the sound effects in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. There’s some lovely work done during the action scenes, but also the thrum of Victorian London is captured as well as in the first movie, which was also deserving of a nomination.
Achievement in Sound Mixing
Who Will Win: Tom Fleischman and John Midgley – Hugo
Big noisy setpieces in a train station where every individual, important noise is clearly picked out? It’s a lock.
Who Should Win: Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Peter J. Devlin – Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The soundscapes of Michael Bay’s noisiest movies are widely loathed as merely a wash of explosions and screaming, but when blasted at with a good THX sound-system, it’s likely that the volume will deafen you to the amount of intricate work done here. It’s not just queueing up a bunch of banging and sticking it all in a blender; there’s more layering of sound than you’d think. Then again, I’ve always been a fan of percussion, so I’m more likely to enjoy an extended drum solo than the finely-picked notes of a symphony. Make of that what you will.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Peter Miller, Adam Kopald, J.R. Grubbs and Addison Teague - Rango
Among the many joys of this astounding triumph of animation is the lovely audio track, evoking the eerie silences of Sergio Leone’s classics while changing gears for some huge, complicated action scenes. Truly a feast for the ears as well as the eyes.
Achievement in Visual Effects
Who Will Win: Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White and Daniel Barrett - Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I’m tempted to say Hugo will win this too, but the furore over Andy Serkis’ performance and the technology used to capture it means this might have a shot, as a sop to the campaigners.
Who Should Win: Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Matthew Butler and John Frazier - Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Once more I’m picking complexity and logistical madness over subtlety or beauty, but the scale of the FX work in this movie is simply breathtaking. It’s also seamlessly integrated with reality; you’ll really believe Chicago had its arse kicked by robotic dickwads. The only caveat here is that they’re not really breaking new ground; we’ve seen this kind of thing before, just not on this scale. Nevertheless, my eyes boggled at the monumental mechanical madness, and I really appreciate that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Douglas Trumbull, Dan Glass, Peter and Chris Parks – The Tree of Life
What a lovely welcome back for the legendary Doug Trumbull; a snub by his peers that probably would have stung if he had even noticed them, bearing in mind he is a colossus who bestrides the discipline of visual effects and probably thinks Digital Domain is little more than an interesting ant-farm. Bear in mind, this is a man who, while everyone else in the FX business was learning how to use a mouse, was either working on IMAX and Showscan technologies or trying to fix the BP oil-spill. Does he need an Oscar? If the FX industry members of the Academy can’t find it in their hearts to give this visionary the award he deserves, he can get over the insignificant pain by inventing another world-changing doohickey. Trumbull does not need your baubles.
Adapted Screenplay
Who Will Win: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash – The Descendants
Hugo should win this considering the overwhelming critical praise for it in the US, but I have a feeling the sentimental Academy members will be more drawn to The Descendants, which is a very writerly movie with big dramatic beats, terminally ill people, confrontations that play out in unexpected ways, and speeches that run on for perhaps a bit too long. It also has a terrible voiceover in the first half of the movie that should make invalidate it, but I doubt that that’s a dealbreaker. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking because I want to see Dean Pelton win an Oscar? If so, can Magnitude come on stage for a celebratory “Pop pop!“?
Who Should Win: Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Much as I enjoyed Moneyball, mostly because Sorkin’s worst excesses were curtailed by the low-key performances and direction, I don’t think it’s the best script here. I also don’t think that honour belongs to The Ides of March; yet another Clooney / Heslov disappointment that feels four drafts away from completion. Surely Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the only logical choice here. It’s a labyrinth of words and actions and information but there’s emotion here, real aching pain. It’s a magnificent achievement.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Christopher Hampton – A Dangerous Method
As is Christopher Hampton’s expansion of his play The Talking Cure. Its absorption and translation of the ideas and theories of Freud, Jung and Spielrein into dramatic forms is breathtaking, made all the more memorable for its puckish wit and satisfying emotional charge. Though I’d resigned myself to seeing this underrated movie get little Oscar love I held out hope for this screenplay as the sole nominee, but no. What a pity.
Original Screenplay
Who Will Win: Woody Allen – Midnight in Paris
Remember all those days ago when The Artist won the Bafta for best screenplay and amateur comedians and film critics said, “How can it win best screenplay when there’s no words in it duhhhhh duuuuuuh a-duuuuuhhhhhhh?” Well I guess that won’t happen here, but only because the truly sentimental choice is to give Woody another Oscar for his latest self-indulgent wallow in nostalgia. Usually that yearning for simpler times is a subtext to his usual light middle-class semi-intellectual drama, but here it’s right at the fore-front. Who was the Twitter wag who said that this movie was like Woody’s “Things I like” list made celluloid flesh? Because well done, that person, you got it in one.
Who Should Win: Asghar Farhadi – A Separation
That victory for a second-rate script would be a crime when Asghar Farhadi’s brilliantly constructed, humane, intelligent, complex, multi-faceted screenplay has also been given a nod. In a perfect world this would’ve been the only nominee. If ever anyone asks me what screenplay I would pick as an example of brilliant screenwriting, I’ll pick George Gallo’s script for Midnight Run. If they couldn’t find that, I’ll pick this.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Kenneth Lonergan – Margaret / Scott Z. Burns – Contagion
That said, I would’ve liked it if Kenneth Lonergan had received any kind of recognition for his notorious movie, but I guess there was no chance of that happening with the lawsuits flying back and forth like flaming buzzards of doom. Also, we’ve not even seen the full movie; I long for the director’s cut of this challenging and audacious movie. I also would’ve liked it if Scott Z. Burns got nominated for Contagion, but that’s because I’m a big Scott Z. Burns fan and I think he’s great so there.
Achievement in Directing
Who Will Win: Martin Scorsese – Hugo
Okay, hear me out. Yes, I think The Artist will win Best Picture. Yes, I know that Michel Hazanavicius won the Director’s Guild Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film Award, and that’s usually a pretty reliable marker of who will win the Academy Award, but I think Scorsese has played a blinder here; making a homage to the birth of cinema, eoo-goog-alising one of the earliest pioneers of the medium, and passionately campaigning for the virtues of film preservation within the film itself. A pretty ballsy move, to turn a children’s movie into a two-hour lecture about archiving and storage technology. The Artist might be a love letter to silent cinema, but Hugo is a billet-doux attached to a heart-shaped box of chocolate cherries with a bit of sexy lingerie hidden under the crepe-paper tray. There’s no way the assorted dodecagenarians of the Academy will be able to resist giving Scorsese his second director’s gong for this.
Who Should Win: Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life
Even though I really loved The Artist (I did! Honest!), and thought Scorsese did a good job of methodically stripped the magic from his children’s film by the time the final reel arrived just so he could prove a point, this category belongs to Malick. Alexander Payne served up a curiously listless dramedy, and Woody Allen woke up for a little while; not really work worth lauding. But Malick’s bold vision was even more daring than his usual work, happily comparing the travails of a family to the beginning and end of life. What brass balls. It’s the best thing he’s done since Days of Heaven, and more than deserving of some Oscar love. If they don’t do it now, they’ll only regret it in future when he suddenly starts making action movies starring Channing Tatum (mark my words, this will happen).
Who Should Have Been Nominated: David Cronenberg – A Dangerous Method
The great man can’t win. When he makes a genre movie — albeit a genre movie with an intellectual ambition that dwarfs almost everything else around — clueless critics proclaim that he’s little more than a provocateur debasing his better instincts. When he makes a movie that’s sober and thought-provoking, everyone whines that there’s not enough parasites or inappropriate vaginal images in it. So when he makes something as crystalline as this, so perfectly hewn and formally precise, critics say it’s too dry. “It’s too dry,” they say, drawing attention to what they think is an excessive dryness. Seriously, that’s all anyone could say. Well bollocks to that. It’s exactly what it needs to be, and Cronenberg is the only filmmaker in the world smart enough to get that right. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; one day critical opinion will swing back Cronenberg’s way. Sadly, not before voting ended.
Best Motion Picture of the Year
What Will Win: The Artist
Critical mass has been reached for The Artist. I don’t think anyone on the planet expects another movie to win, except Stephen Daldry, probably; a conclusion I’ve reached after enduring Extremely Bad And Just Generally Incredibly Incredibly Dire And Awful Jesus What A Stinker, which seems to have been directed by someone who has absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. I was tempted to predict a Hugo surprise here, but I think we all know that’s not happening. Harvey Weinstein has been prowling the streets of Hollywood like a cross between Batman, Wilson Fisk and P.T. Barnum, pimping out that movie for all he’s worth. It’s a foregone conclusion.
What Should Win: The Artist
And I’m absolutely fine with that. Not just because it’s the best movie of the nine nominees, but because I still think so fondly of it a victory in this category would make my night. I’m sure in time the numerous haters will multiply like mogwai under a waterfall, but for now a big win would almost feel like an extension of the movie’s deliriously happy vibe. Like a 4D experience for its fans. Plus it’s a last chance to see Jean Dujardin charm us with another impromptu dance. Vous dansez comme un nuage enthousiaste, vous bel homme!
What Should Have Been Nominated: Take Shelter / A Dangerous Method
If that vile… vile… thing with the obnoxiously precious title can get nominated, then surely anything can. Two of my favourites of last year are more than good enough to get in here, usurping Daldry’s slimy ode to sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-McSweeney’s-style precocity and Spielberg’s admittedly hilarious and Dadaesque World War One comedy The Adventures of War Horse: The Siren-Centaur Hybrid of Death, not to mention The (Wonderful Way White People) Help(ed Those Relatively Unimportant Black Folks). Put these two brilliant movies in there, dammit, and why not add Fast Five while you’re at it. That movie was better than at least seven, arguably eight of the movies in that list, even if only for the moment when The Rock and Vin Diesel crash through a wall during a fight. Better than Malick’s dinosaurs, I reckon.
That”s enough making a fool of myself in front of the entire internet. See you on the other side of the award ceremony, and what will likely be a really cozy opening monologue from Billy Crystal featuring at least one — maybe five — jokes about the lacklustre box office takings of Mr. Saturday Night. Mazel tov!
Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Three
Oh blogging. You are the occasional pastime that makes me absurdly unhappy, for the most part. That’s because I don’t do it as often as I would like, and so when I do I over do it and write posts large enough to choke Cthulhu. And this last post in Listmania metastasised as soon as I started complaining about something; griping posts tend to run out of control. Friend of the blog @Beggarsoshat said to me after my Listmania! Crew Contributions post that he looked forward to me listing my favourite dolly grip of 2011, and after I had stopped crying because of how much he had cut me to the core, I wondered if there was maybe something in that. Why not keep spinning this out? I’m scratching my blogging itch even though all I’m doing is lazily transcribing the thoughts I’ve had lying around in my “mind palace” for months anyway.
But how could I? How could I keep talking about last year’s movies when I’d only seen 120 of them? Simple; why not talk about movies released in 2010? People love reading reviews of movies released 14 months ago. I traditionally do this during Listmania! season as an aside in the last post, but as this post had already gone all top heavy, why not post this section on its own without all of the other photo-heavy stuff I had planned on posting (and which will turn up in Listmania ’11: Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Four, and probably Five, Six and Seven too)? And so here we are, with a couple of thousand words on three movies that I’m sure only a handful of people have already talked about. After all, the first movie here was a pretty obscure little number.
Best Film(s) From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: True Grit / Tangled
Both of these movies were released in the UK just after SoC finished its last Listmania (which was done a lot quicker and with less baloney than this one, I can tell you), but would have radically changed the state of my Best Movies of ’10 completely. Both would have breached the top ten, with True Grit possibly making it into the hallowed and legendary top five of that year. The Coens were coming off the back of one of their least accessible — but most highly regarded — films with A Serious Man, and True Grit represents one of their “crowdpleasers”, if that’s the right word, as they did with No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading. This is a slightly different beast, too dramatic to qualify as one of their comedies, but too funny to be a tragedy. It’s the most successful blending of their two different “flavours” to date.
The pleasures of this magnificent Western are numerous, but the best thing about it is the precise dialogue, which evokes the Wild West in a way only David Milch has ever come close to achieving. This poetry — so often evident in their writing but at its most striking here — is matched by the photography by Roger “King” Deakins, who does career best work with shadows and darkness; the night-time ride to save Mattie is one of the most haunting scenes in recent cinema, a dream painted almost solely with black. Hailee Steinfeld shines in her first role, perfectly riding the line between charmingly forward and obnoxiously precocious. I can picture her playing The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen far more readily than Jennifer Lawrence — an actress I admire but who is too old for the character, as are co-stars Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson.
She’s matched by Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, who both have their own balancing acts to do, between humour and drama. While Bridges has the flashier character to work with, Damon has a harder job, playing a dandified and ridiculous ranger LaBeouf who wins over Mattie and the audience despite being an awful blow-hard. Obviously, he succeeds; with each performance SoC realises how lucky we all are to have such a thoughtful, charming actor working today. This is not to take away from Bridges, though, who is as good here as he is in The Big Lebowski. This was already a late-career classic from the Coens, but his vastly entertaining turn pushes True Grit up there with Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing, and A Serious Man.
But I’ve had trouble figuring out whether I love it more than Disney’s Tangled, which so completely fried my brain at IMAX that I became a fervent and boring proselytist for it for months after. If you’re a 3D sceptic, this is the movie to change your mind. Seeing this in 3D, on that vast screen, was a memorable, tear-inducing experience I shall cherish forever. The whole film is great fun and filled with lovable characters (none more so than defiant horse Maximus), but the most memorable scene is also the single greatest use of 3D I’ve ever seen. Being in that room, dwarfed by the vast IMAX screen, was the most immersive cinema experience I’ve ever had. The illusion of being surrounded by floating lanterns was utterly convincing; when I wasn’t distracted by wiping tears from my eyes, that is.
The songs by Alan Menken feature lyrics from his sometime collaborator Glenn Slater; a happier fit than Stephen Schwartz, at least on this small sampling. They’re rich and funny and charming, reminiscent of his best work with the late, much-missed Howard Ashman. They’re the cherry on top of a superbly well-designed movie, that matches its symbolism (the light motif is present throughout) with its story so deftly that I wanted to applaud throughout. I’ll even go so far as to say… ::deep breath:: …I think I like it more than Beauty and the Beast, and I really loved Beauty and the Beast. It’s a triumph for Disney; a thrilling modernisation of their animation technique that pays humble tribute to the studio’s history, and possibly a portent of great things to come. SoC can’t wait to see what comes next.
Worst Film From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: Morning Glory
Until last year it looked like the movie output of Bad Robot Productions was going to be less diverse than their TV division, which has tried (and failed) to tap non-nerd audiences with Six Degrees and What about Brian? It’s worth praising them for adding Morning Glory to a roster that so far contains only sci-fi and spy movies (not counting Joy Ride), but the addition of something this unchallenging makes you wonder if Bad Robot’s other movies are as cynically produced as this. Even with a terrific cast (including Harrison Ford, in his liveliest performance since The Fugitive) and an interesting director, it has an enormous handicap: a rote script by dreaded screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna.
If Michael Bay is a cinematic villain for aiming all of his movies at the same Mountain-Dew-drinking, FHM-absorbing, Call-Of-Duty-playing fratboy demographic, then can we add Brosh McKenna to Hollywood’s rogues gallery for making numerous movies from the same template in which a doofy woman — with work skills so brilliant and yet so poorly depicted that she almost appears to have mystical powers — has trouble finding a man due to a habit of occasionally bursting with an emotion-geyser like all the normal people don’t. So far ABM has churned out 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and now Morning Glory; it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between them as they come tumbling down the conveyor belt like malformed Barbie dolls.
Among its crimes: trying to make us believe that Rachel McAdams’ awkwardness is representative of some large cross-section of the female audience, and that bagging Patrick “Saintly and Uncomplicated Love Interest” Wilson is some kind of victory for these mythical klutzy women; making Diane Keaton rap with 50 Cent in a display of cinematic desperation unmatched by anything else released in the past four years; punishing McAdams by making her run in high heels in almost every scene, which just makes her look like a lunatic with superhumanly strong ankles; inadvertently making Anchorman — a Dada-esque comedy — the superior comment on the treatment of women in the TV industry; setting up Harrison Ford as a villain with the AWFUL crime of criticising McAdams’ fringe/bangs; making me pine for another Bridget Jones sequel just to stop Brosh McKenna from going back to that dried-up well.
Worst of all, it attempts to make a case for breakfast news as something worthwhile, something as necessary as serious investigative journalism. Ford’s Mark Pomeroy is portrayed as a conceited horse’s ass who has a snooty attitude to the fripperies of breakfast TV, objecting to the clowning of Daybreak’s jokiest segments. We’re meant to be excited when he abandons his serious self in order to make a frittata in an effort to magically summon McAdams from her job interview with NBC (because all job interviews are done in the morning while you’re supposed to be at work).
This character moment, which shows what he is willing to sacrifice in order to placate his producer McAdams, softens him — a nice twist on the romcom trope where a romantic interest humbles himself in order to win the girl. And yet no matter what side-effects this final act has, we can’t escape the fact that this is a betrayal of a good point personified by the grizzled old news hound pining for his old career. All the way through the movie he’s right about the importance of investigative journalism, and McAdams is so averse to his philosophy that he has to lie to her to get her to cover the scandal story he’s been trying to tell her about for weeks, and only seems to recognise its value for the sake of plot convenience. And to stop her looking like a complete idiot.
This is similar to the scene in Devil Wears Prada in which Meryl Streep defends fashion from criticisms that it isn’t important. It’s a very well-acted speech by a great actress, but her claims that high fashion is what eventually trickles down to the lowest forms of clothing — that the Cerulean blue she celebrates in haute couture one month becomes the blue that everyone wears later — isn’t really the answer to the question “why should we care about fashion”, because if we weren’t wearing that shade of blue we’d just wear another. What she’s arguing for is the influence of fashion journalism, which is fine, but it’s a bit disingenuous to assume that without Vogue we wouldn’t know how to dress ourselves. Though I will say InStyle is a fine publication (one for @Ms_RH there).
So here we’re meant to swallow the line that breakfast TV is an essential component of the news cycle, that it acts as the “sugar” that sweetens the “fibre” that constitutes news. As if the world isn’t awash with sugar, while fibre is rarely present in our news diet. Anyone who watches, say, BBC Breakfast (which SoC has railed against before), will note that what little serious news is shown inbetween puff pieces and appearances by the magnificently oleaginous Chris DeBurgh is poorly researched, biased, and revealing of the presenters’ poor preparation. Any time the show covers matters of popular culture more racy than Midsomer Murders, or youth issues, will know that this is less fibre, more asbestos.
So to see a movie attempt to make excuses for something inconsequential, when in actual fact it’s salty and challenging investigative journalism that needs to be celebrated, is like hearing the self-defensive and unconvincing justifications of someone caught watching something frowned upon by others — say for example, a cliche-ridden Aline Brosh McKenna movie that sets back gender politics about 20 years. If you want to watch a breakfast show that spends more time covering Al Roker being a clown than it does serious issues, that’s your prerogative. If you want to argue that this is important, do it by making your case, not by belittling serious journalism. And Bad Robot? Stick to what you know best (i.e. lens flares).
Will this ever end? Can I keep this going forever? If not, I’m taking a break from it as soon as Listmania! is finally brought to heel, which will either be by mass reader apathy or a typing coma.
The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (45-31)
On with the many many movies I stupidly missed off the Top 106 Movies list (which could well be a Top 165 by the time I get through with it). I’ve gone on about Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf before, and so won’t waste time doing the same here, but I will confirm — much to my delight — that it still works well even when not seen in IMAX Digital 3D. Most of that is down to the thoughtful script by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, which cleverly addresses myth and religion. The visuals still work well in 2D, much better than in Zemeckis’ The Polar Express but not as well as in A Christmas Carol, which veers further away from the not-quite-there realism of Beowulf. This is a good thing: Christmas Carol looks more like a living painting than a flawed rendition of reality, and it’s good to see that the technology has come along enough to add this kind of texture to the imagery. The quality of Zemeckis’ adaptation is one of the most pleasant surprises of this year, as was Beowulf in 2007. Perhaps I should stop assuming he’s going to make bad movies and just learn to look forward to them.
Speaking of Christmas movies, I’ve also missed off Jon Favreau’s Elf. To be honest I’m not sure it belongs on this list: the third act is really underwhelming, and some of the casting is a bit suspect. Nevertheless, it’s become a real favourite here, with our annual rewatch a Christmas tradition (we do the same with Robert Benton’s lovely Nobody’s Fool on Christmas Day). Though Elf falls flat a couple of times, Will Ferrell’s insanely committed performance is essential viewing. For those who avoid him because of his reliance on arrested development characters — and I know there are a lot who feel that way — I’d say that Elf is a lovable enough variation on that stock character to win anyone over. There are countless perfectly timed moments in it, as Ferrell races around New York in a whirl of manic energy. Maybe it doesn’t deserve to crack the Top 106, but it warrants a mention, especially at this time of year.
Actually, I’ll be honest. It should’ve got on the list just for this moment:
And now, fifteen movies that don’t feature Will Ferrell or performance-captured monstah-huntah Ray Winstone.
45. Capturing The Friedmans
Andrew Jarecki’s documentary about a family accused of involvement in child pornography would already be fascinating, but it is Jarecki’s examination of the effect of time on memory and perspective that sets this movie apart. How far are we willing to deceive ourselves and others in order to prevent awful truths from coming to light, and can we ever trust our subjective interpretations?
44. Infernal Affairs
Scorsese’s remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s imaginative crime thriller was terrific, and filled with entertaining performances, but the original version is the truly exciting one. Within minutes the tension is ratcheted up, and never flags. Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai have never been better.
43. Lady Vengeance
The final part of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy is less flashy than Oldboy, but it may say more about human behavior than its hyper-stylised predecessor. After two relatively low-key acts, Chan-wook unveils the perfect capper — not just for this movie, but for the trilogy as a whole — as vengeance is visited upon a truly terrible person in a tense and intelligent denouement. Praise is also due Lee Young-ae, who is stunning as the haunted Lee Geum-ja.
42. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
In the hands of Julian Schnabel what could have been grueling and bland becomes an immersive visual masterpiece, just by applying intellectual rigour to the problem of how to make a movie from a story so resolutely uncinematic. Devoid of cynicism and dismissive of despair, Diving Bell has the power to recharge even the most empty heart. Essential viewing.
41. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Released in the same year as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, Andrew Dominick’s re-telling of the Western myth was initially praised then forgotten by year’s end. For giving us such a breathtakingly luminous vision of desperate man trapped by their infamy — and for showing us that Casey Affleck was capable of actual greatness — we hope time will be kind to it.
40. In Bruges
Martin McDonagh’s wonderful debut feature is profane, scatalogical, and surprisingly moving. A superb cast — including a shockingly funny and lovable Colin Farrell — attacks his superbly constructed screenplay with palpable relish, and McDonagh handles the gradual tonal shift like a seasoned pro. The first two acts may have made me laugh, but the final one made my pulse race.
39. Morvern Callar
Lynne Ramsay’s gorgeous adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel showed youthful disaffection and alienation against a backdrop of blistering, unforgettable images, with a never-better Samantha Morton creating a mysterious protagonist whose motives defy easy explanation. Ramsay’s next project (an adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin starring Tilda Swinton) cannot come soon enough.
38. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring
Kim Ki-duk tells a deceptively simple tale of a man whose journey through life takes him from Buddhist training to tragedy to atonement and peace, but every frame vibrates with emotion. The reflective pace and cinematography are hypnotic, the ambitious scope and depiction of spiritual awakening are profoundly moving.
37. Princess Mononoke
Spirited Away might be Hayao Miyazaki’s most celebrated movie, but this was my introduction into the world of Studio Ghibli. Its unfamiliar structure, dismissal of Manichean conflict, and air of infinite possibility were even more appealing at first sight, even considering the terrifying, discordant atmosphere of imminent disaster.
36. Team America: World Police
Trey Parker and Matt Stone may not have hit every target they aimed at (such as celebrity culture, repulsive jingoism, and clueless liberalism), but they hit many of them hard enough to justify a declaration of victory. They also included yet more great songs (“America, Fuck Yeah” might have been obnoxious if it wasn’t so much fun to sing), and filmed the funniest third act character turnaround ever:
35. Black Book
Only Paul Verhoeven could have made a movie as trashy — and classy — as this. Leaving behind the dimishing returns of his Hollywood period, the master of provocation conjured up a morally complicated tale of Nazism, collaboration, and resistance that thrilled and appalled in equal measure. He also introduced us to the magnificent Carice Van Houten, who should be a superstar by now. I’m waiting, Hollywood.
34. Brokeback Mountain
A cultural touchstone, a political statement, a punchline to a million bad jokes. Ang Lee’s love story is also, quite simply, a heartbreaking tale of a man who realises too late that he has wasted his life because of crippling fear. Heath Ledger’s final, devastating scene is burned into my heart, his last promise the best final line of the decade.
33. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The romcom Philip K. Dick would have written were he still alive. Charlie Kaufman supplies the delirious concept, Michel Gondry brings the lo-fi visual wizardry, and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet bring the soul. A thrilling combination of narrative trickery, philosophical curiosity, and flighty romanticism, and another fascinating exploration of the connection between memory and identity.
32. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Tim Burton’s best film since Ed Wood is also the best screen musical of the decade. His thoughtful tweaks to orchestration and plot transform Stephen Sondheim’s original into a Gothic masterpiece. It helps that his cast — not known for their singing voices — give such committed performances and belt out those beautiful songs with such gusto. This might be Johnny Depp’s best performance to date, playing Todd as a force of nature, almost completely irredeemable but still a tragic figure in the devastating final scene.
31. The Descent
The best British movie of the decade was not a period drama or kitchen-sink wallow from lauded, overrated establishment-approved fakes. It was a balls-to-the-wall, technically perfect rollercoaster. It was also the scariest horror movie since Blatty’s Exorcist III, and that’s even before the monsters appear. Director Neil Marshall remembered that for the horror to work, we had to see humanity at its worst, and it is the final act of protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) that pushes this movie into classic status.
By now, with the end of the list approaching, I’m beginning to second-guess my choices even more. Should Eternal Sunshine have been higher? I’ve only seen it once and loved it, but from this point on I’ve seen most of the movies numerous times, and so they have had a bigger impact on me. Of course, second-guessing means I’ll never get this done. Best to just finish it as soon as I can. Tomorrow, hopefully. Until then…
Speed Racer Vs. Total Critical And Popular Apathy
Perhaps it was always going to be a hard sell. With the fanboys turning their noses up at what looked like a candy-coloured movie for babies, critics followed their cue, leaving a handful of cinema-goers excited about the film and feeling like pariahs (yes, poor me). Genre movies (by which I mean sci fi, fantasy, or horror) always get a hard time from critics, and while I’m not crazy enough to suggest that any film that fits the category is automatically worthy of praise (there’s a lot of genuine shit out there), I would hope critics realise they are all worthy of serious attention. I get that it’s hard for a critic to really give all of their attention to every movie released each week, but even so, any movie that fits the bill described above (and often any movie that can easily be sneeringly dismissed as “typically Hollywood”) will be the one to fall by the wayside.
That I expected. The UK reviews of Speed Racer have been horrible, a litany of horrified complaint about the subject matter, the performances, the plot, the running time, and most often, the visual style. “A movie of such garishness and impenetrability as to test the stoicism of any audience member older than 14,” says The Independent’s Anthony Quinn! “I can’t begin to describe how creepy this futuristic movie is,” says James Christopher of The Times! “You have to be 12 to like it, and I have to say there is little or nothing here to remind us why we were all quite so excited about The Matrix,” says Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, who also describes Lost as “interminable,” and as a result is removed from my Love List and placed on my Shit List (he was already on probation for that appalling Iron Man review last week).
In fact, the only mainstream critic who liked it was Sukhdev Sandhu of the Telegraph, who still had reservations but seemed to get that it was for kids and not think this was a terrible strike against it. James Christopher seemed to think that it was a kids’ film by accident. I won’t even begin to point out the laziness of Anthony Quinn’s review, which led me to believe he had lost his press pack and couldn’t be bothered to even Wikipedia the source material; he also missed vital plot points that were not that hard to spot and then bitched about subsequent “illogicalities” (his comments about Speed’s race up a cliff-face are the ones that made me mad, if you’re curious).
I would have liked to have seen Nigel Andrew’s review, as he usually responds positively to films that are a bit out there, but he appears to be missing in action at the moment. The most positive review I’ve read so far is from Moriarty from Ain’t It Cool News, and he did what the “respectable” critics couldn’t be bothered to do: forget his prejudices and watch the movie on its own terms. You could say he only gave it a chance because he’s a nerd critic, but even now, with the film about to be released, nerd opinion is massively critical of it. “It’s too garish, it’s too childish, it looks stupid, I hated the cartoon, it’s got a chimp in it, it’s too colourful, it’s too fast, it’s too weird, it’s not violent enough, it’s not The Matrix.” The Wachowskis seem to have made a movie that no one wanted to see. And they say Hollywood only panders to its audience.
From all of that it should be apparent that I have a huge chip on my shoulder about this, and not just because I regularly get annoyed when critics dismiss genre movies, an annoyance that has been exacerbated by my current reading material, Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures. It’s a hugely entertaining read, and Biskind is a terrific writer, but it is laced with snobbery about Hollywood product, even — at one point in the introduction — claiming that its subject matter, independent film, appeals to “real people” in contrast to mainstream populist fare. So is the usual mass audience not made up of people? What are they then, figments of his imagination? Pod people? Androids?
Ridiculous. And insulting. There are millions of people out there (REAL people, even), that will happily watch a movie as transcendently beautiful and moving as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring one day, and then watch Pirates of the Caribbean the next day and have a different experience but one that is no more or less real than the previous one. One isn’t better than the other because it does certain things that the other doesn’t even attempt. If one has to be judged better than the other, let it be by internal criteria. Which one of them succeeds best at doing what it was made to do? Otherwise we’re just going to be bitching at every movie that isn’t Citizen Kane for not doing the things Citizen Kane does. That way lies misery and madness.
Sorry, I digressed. As I was saying, I do have an inherent bias towards Speed Racer that makes me touchy about it, and that’s down to my love of The Matrix. It’s my favourite film, one I can watch over and over again and never get bored of. I still remember the first time I saw it, and the shellshock I felt. I’ve heard the criticisms of it, and the carping about the sequels (one of which I liked), and I’m not interested. If a movie or book or song is meant to touch the viewer and move them, that’s exactly what The Matrix did to me. It was as if the film I had been waiting all my life to see had finally arrived, and it was better than I had hoped for.
So I’m defensive about the Wachowski siblings, and get tetchy when their work is criticised, especially because experience has taught me that film critics will happily dismiss genre work rather than engage with it, as if by dint of its mere existence it is not worthy of the effort. The reviews have focused on two things that are cardinal sins of that enemy of quality that is glossy Hollywood product: how little the story matters, and how emotionally empty the movie is because of the technology used to create the film.
I’ll grant that these can be valid criticisms, but only if they are used against films that fail in those respects (and many do; I’m not crazy!), and not just as a kneejerk response against that nasty Hollywood product. Well, I risked breaking my own brain with fatigue and sensory-overload by seeing Speed Racer yesterday, and I can give you my opinion on these most pressing of questions. Does Speed Racer fail in telling a story? No. Is it emotionally empty? No. Here are some other questions that are less important than those, but need answering nonetheless. Is it perfect? No. Does it matter? No. Is it impossible to follow what is going on during the races? As long as you’re not sitting in row H of the London Waterloo IMAX or lower, no. Will it make any money at the box office? Probably not, no. Should it? Unequivocally, yes.
Here’s a litmus test for anyone watching the movie, and that includes critics. The film starts pretty much in the middle of a race, during which we flash back and forth between the race and Speed Racer’s childhood, where he bonds with his brother and idol, Rex, played by Scott “Whiny Jason on FNL” Porter.
The race continues for a little while past that clip, with Speed attempting to break the record set by his brother, who we learn died in disgrace many years later, an event that shaped the lives of the entire Racer family, who are gathered together in the stands watching Speed racing. It’s a busy few minutes, setting up the bizarre palette (which you will grow accustomed to much quicker than you might expect), the otherworldly future physics of the race cars (all impossible spins, leaps, and crazy drifting), the family dynamic, the history of the Racer family, their triumphs and failures, and the sadness that haunts them.
If you’ve gone in expecting a garish, empty movie for kids, the sophistication of the criss-cross narrative format might throw you (there’s a particularly bold time-shifting moment in the middle of the film I liked), but there’s nothing there to convince you of any emotional depth, until the very end of the race. What Speed does as he’s about to cross the finish line is a marker for whether the film is for you. If you don’t notice or care about his decision, you’re not going to care enough about the characters to give the film a fair shot, and you might as well walk out of the room. If Speed’s decision makes you grin, and you understand exactly what his motivation is and admire the character for making that choice, then you might end up liking the movie a lot more than you would have expected.
And I did. A lot. For the majority of the movie I was very happy, if not overjoyed, by what I was experiencing. After a few minutes of discombobulation, the visuals made a lot more sense to me once I had figured out what the Wachowskis were trying to do with them — i.e., they weren’t building a multitude of 3D environments to place the green-screened actors in, and they chose instead to create a number of photographic backgrounds and use them the same way backdrops in animation are used, to slide past each other in a parallax effect.
The only time the environments look fully rendered is during the race scenes, with the tracks featuring a more conventional perspective. The other trick used throughout is the scrolling of talky-heads across the screen, just as in anime. I made my peace with that a lot faster, as it’s a technique used so often in Japanese animation that I’ve become inured to it, though I had a moment of WTF, simply because I’d not seen it used in live-action before. It’s a terrific effect, carrying us through expositional dialogue (of which there is quite a bit) without sacrificing pace.
In fact, the dialogue delivered during races, often as a form of flashback, barely alters the pace of the action, so completely does it add energy to what would normally be dreary. A lot of people have said the races are confusing, but I thought they were pretty clean and edited with plenty of clarity, though perhaps if you’re not used to the floaty heads it might cause problems (plus, if you’re invested in the narrative, they carry plenty of dramatic kick, contrary to the opinion of the critics, at least IMHO).
Those races would mean nothing if they were not surrounded by solid performances and a carefully crafted narrative, and the one we get, concerning the struggle of the little man to succeed in a world where the monolithic nature of The Market stands in the way of artistic expression or freedom of the spirit, as well as the value of teamwork and learning from your mistakes, is immensely satisfying, so much so that the final race, which is already overwhelmingly filmed, achieves a kind of emotional warp factor as dialogue from the previous two hours slides past the camera, and you see just how important it is that Speed wins that race.
The hapless Christopher Tookey of the Daily HateMail stated that the film is meaningless and soulless, but if you’ve been sucked in by the carefully constructed narrative, the committed, irony-free performances, and the emotionally resonant conflicts and tribulations of our heroes (all of which he missed, instead carping about not knowing what was going on and hating the commercialism of it), the final ten minutes are filled with significance. As I said earlier, for the majority of the film I thought it was very very good. However, my final verdict was boosted by the brilliant, resonant, and totally satisfying finale, where my “overall grade” leapt up about three notches. All of this is code for “I cried at the end.” Laugh, you doubters! I don’t care.
And yes, it is resolutely a kids’ movie. The majority of the humour lies in the actions of Spritle, played by Paulie Litt, who has annoyed some critics but cracked me up consistently, and his simian buddy Chim Chim. They pretty much spend the whole film eating candy, getting into trouble, and throwing Chim Chim cookies around (and I’ll let you see the movie and discover what they are). Maybe it’s not as “sophisticated” as Jacques Tati and his pipe-smoking japery, but it works and fits the tone of the movie perfectly. However, the plot itself, though featuring a manichean battle between a big corporate scumbag (played to perfection by Roger Allam) and the innocent small guy Speed, is filled with corporate intrigue, reflections on achieving an almost artistic perfection through sport, and what it is to be free to do what you want. That it touches on some of the themes of The Matrix (purpose, free will, self-belief) came as a surprise even to a fan like me. There’s even a shot of stock-market notations scrolling across the screen that echoed Matrix Code, a nice little touch that made me smile.
One of the criticisms I saw thrown around (particularly in Bradshaw’s review and the AV Club’s withering dismissal) is that the film is anti-corporate and yet, hypocritically, is a heavily marketed and expensive big-budget money-making machine unleashed by the Warner Brothers monolith. I’ll be honest, I was very worried about that, and reckoned I might have trouble reconciling it with any possible enthusiasm I might have for all the whiz-bang. Again, the Wachowskis surprised me. Roger Allam’s Royalton is obviously an unscrupulous bounder and cad, uninterested in racing as sport (or art) and only concerned about how he can gain a monopoly over the production of a revolutionary engine by manipulating the outcomes of races. However, his enthusiasm for the machinations of The Market (revealed in a brilliantly demented monologue about share values) is just as complete and almost childlike as Speed’s obsession with racing, even if it does involve ruining the tiny, independent Racer family. Other CEOs featured in the movie do unscrupulous things too, but end up siding with Speed at the end, realising that he is blessed with true talent and artistry in a way that moves them.
Glenn Kenny of Premiere says in his review that, “the narrative of Speed Racer, such as it is, is one of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci’s 1900,” which is not what I took from it at all. It’s made clear that the Racer family is a business, one that thrives on making cars that will be used by Speed to win races, mostly for the love of the game. But as long as they are allowed to participate on a small level within the financial framework of their world, keeping their aims low, and not worrying about being swallowed up by big business, then they’re fine. They don’t opt out of the capitalist system at all. They just want to play the game on their own terms, using their talent and ingenuity to make a living. Surely that’s at the heart of the capitalist message, something Anthony Lane should keep in mind as he delivers paranoid and inaccurate comments about the film being nothing more than “Pop fascism” (because it features crowds cheering at a sport, for crying out loud). Why doesn’t he rail against actual crowds cheering actual sport? Why is it only bad in the context of a movie? Gah!!!
If anything, the film is merely anti-monopoly, anti-greed and anti-corruption, showing how a single spanner in the works of The Market can crush those who abuse their position of power, thus turning the pursuit of prosperity into a game on a level playing field, with room for monoliths and minnows, both aiding each other and prospering from that cooperation and mutual respect. Isn’t that what Thomas Friedman naively thinks The Market already is? Of course, we’re meant to side with the Racer family exclusively, but it’s clear that, just as The Matrix Revolutions ended with a detente between the machines and the humans, Speed Racer finishes with a respectful distance left between his family’s independent company and the almost benign Togokhan Racing. At least, that’s how I saw it. I will admit I was more interested in the story as parable about one man chasing his dream, doing what he is built to do, and not letting anyone talk him down, but that’s just where my head is at right now.
But enough of this. I want to lavish more praise on it. I’ve never really been a huge fan of John Goodman unless he’s in a Coen Brothers film, but this is my favourite non-Lebowski performance by him. His sincerity won me over totally, as he screws up with one son and is given a chance to get it right with Speed. It’s a testament to the skill of the Wachowskis that the scene where he attempts to bond with Speed at his lowest ebb is one of the best in the whole film, a finger in the eye of the doubters who insist the film is hollow.
Even better than Goodman (and I know Canyon will be pissed at me for saying it again [You are right. Foxy must be destroyed! -- Canyon]), Foxy is terrific as Racer X, playing it cool and mysterious for the most part, before opening up in two scenes towards the end that rank as my favourites in the whole film. He’s come on in leaps and bounds over the past couple of years, and here he’s in top form. Plus, he gets to beat up ninjas! Seeing him do some Neo moves on a bad guy made my nerd chip overheat. Also, much love to Owen Paterson, whose production design is a delight from start to finish, and Michael Giacchino, who delivers yet another wonderful soundtrack.
So yes, since seeing it, I’ve had images from the film popping up in my field of vision like a fever dream; the undulating desert landscape rolling behind Speed, the Eadweard Muybridge homage in the final race, cars exploding into flame and glitter, camera flashbulbs changing into love hearts, highways seen from a distance as glowing ribbons of light, oversaturated colours glowing during the single shootout, and, best of all, a Chim Chim cookie in a bad man’s face. Even though I’ve been happy to rail against what I see as a dismissive critical attitude to it, at least some writers have been eager to point out how gorgeous the whole thing, and it is. It’s new. It’s something you’ve seen before done in a completely new way, and as such is a triumph of design, vision, and uncompromising chutzpah. I’d hesitate to recommend it wholeheartedly, because it’s obvious it’s not going to be for everyone (and I have a terrible feeling it will lose out at the box office to both Iron Man and What Happens In Vegas, which would hurt my feelings as I cannot stand Kutcher or Diaz), but try it out, and maybe apply that litmus test. It might surprise you. Bravo, Wachowskis! Bravo!
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
