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.
Listmania ‘09! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Two
I technically started writing these lists months ago, when I began compiling a list of all of the movies we had seen in 2009 that had been released that year. In my head I was trying to assess where everything was going to go before the year ended, so I could save myself the problem I had in 2008 when writing these posts took forever despite their lack of actual content. And yet here I am, over a week into 2010, and I’m still going. At least this miscellaneous bunch of observations represents the last of it. And most of it is pictures, so it will only take about three minutes to read. Go crazy, dear reader…
Scene of the Year: Lt. Archie Hicox makes the mistake of holding a meeting in a basement bar (Inglourious Basterds)
Honorable Mentions:
Carl and Ellie Frederickson share a wonderful life (Up)
Det. Terrence McDonagh is visited by a couple of Iguanas (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans)
Jake Sully tames an Ikran and flies it around the Hallelujah Mountains (Avatar)
Mark Bellison reveals his “Ten Commandments” (The Invention of Lying)
The Demon haunting Katie finally gets a little handsy (Paranormal Activity)
Action Scene of the Year: Space Dragons + Space Tigers + Space Rhinos + Blue Giants vs. Rapacious Capitalism (Avatar)
Honorable Mentions:
Clive Owen vs. assassins in the Guggenheim (The International)
Sniper vs. sniper in the desert (The Hurt Locker)
Optimus Prime vs. three Decepticons in a forest (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Christian Bale raids Johnny Depp’s forest hiding place (Public Enemies)
Wikus Van Der Merwe dons a “Prawn” Battlesuit (District 9)
Most Satisfying Ending: Inglourious Basterds
Honourable Mentions:
A Prophet
District 9
Public Enemies
Enter The Void
G-Force
Least Satisfying Ending: Terminator Salvation
Dishonorable Mentions:
All About Steve
The Boat That Rocked
The Brothers Bloom
The Box
Twilight: New Moon
Best Hero of the Year: Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner - Up)
Honorable Mentions:
Neytiri (Zoe Saldana - Avatar)
Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine – Star Trek)
Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington – Terminator Salvation)
Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson – Zombieland)
Sam Sparks (Anna Faris – Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs)
Best Villain of the Year: Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds)
Honorable Mentions:
César Luciani (Niels Arestrup – A Prophet)
Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang – Avatar)
Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer – Up)
Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim - Thirst)
Linton Barwick (David Rasche – In The Loop)
Worst Hero of the Year: Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk – Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)
Dishonorable Mentions:
Goku (Justin Chatwin – Dragonball Evolution)
Duke (Channing Tatum – G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra)
Jimmy (Mathew Horne – Lesbian Vampire Killers)
Wolverine (Hugh Jackman – X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Roger (Vincent Gallo – Metropia)
Worst Villain of the Year: Bison (Neal McDonough – Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)
Dishonorable Mentions:
Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh - The Boat That Rocked)
Sabertooth (Liev Shreiber – X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Piccolo (James Marsters – Dragonball Evolution)
Ryder (John Travolta – The Taking of Pelham 123)
Nero (Eric Bana – Star Trek)
Best Ambiguous Hero/Villain of the Year: Mia (Katie Jarvis – Fish Tank)
Most Passive Character of the Year: Bella Swan (Kristin Stewart – Twilight: New Moon)
Gupta of the Year: Fletch (James Corden – Lesbian Vampire Killers)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Sean (“S.J.”) Tuohy, Jr. (Jae Head – The Blind Side)
Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper – The Hangover)
Mary (Beth Grant – Extract)
Eric Powell (Chris Messina – Julie and Julia)
Micah (Micah Sloat – Paranormal Activity)
Highest Concentration of Guptas of the Year: Away We Go
Only Maya Rudolph’s Verona de Tessant survives the film as a likable protagonist, coming to terms with her familial strife without histrionics, just noble acceptance. Everyone else in the film is a dreadful caricature, and that’s on Sam Mendes, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida more than on the talented actors, who are forced to do some terrible things. I still wake up in the middle of the night after terrifying nightmares about how Allison “Wonderful” Janney was made to play a squawking redneck shrew. Horrible.
Badass of the Year: Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White – Black Dynamite)
Honorable Mention: One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen – Valhalla Rising)
Honorary Happy-Go-Lucky Award For Services To Unbearable Characters Whose Optimism Is Actually A Kind Of Mental Illness: Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock – All About Steve)
“What Was Your Name Again? Oh Well, Doesn’t Matter. He’s Only Along As A Chauffeur And Potential Husband” Character of the Year: Gordon Silberman (Thomas McCarthy – 2012)
Best Talking Animal of the Year: Dug the Dog (Bob Peterson – Up)
Honorable Mention: Steve the Monkey (Neil Patrick Harris – Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)
Worst Talking Animal of the Year: Mr. Fox (George Clooney – Fantastic Mr. Fox) (He’s a really selfish dick, if we’re being honest here.)
Dishonorable Mention: The Chaos Reigns Fox (Antichrist)
Best Non-Talking Animal of the Year: Kevin the bird (Up)
Honorable Mention: The various ratbirds plaguing Swallowfalls (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)
Worst Non-Talking Animal of the Year: The yappy dog in 2012 that gets saved in a moment robbed from all of Roland Emmerich’s other movies.
Best Lizard Cameo: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Best Alligator Cameo: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Best Crack Pipe: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Best Couple of the Year: Julia and Paul Child (Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci – Julie and Julia)
Honorable Mention: Brian Clough and Peter Taylor (Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall – The Damned United)
Worst Couple of the Year: Julie and Eric Powell (Amy Adams and Chris Messina – Julie and Julia)
Dishonorable Mention: Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric – My Sister’s Keeper)
Most Doomed Couple of the Year: He and She (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist)
Honorable Mention: Micah and Katie (Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston – Paranormal Activity)
Least Convincing Couple of the Year: Leonard Kraditor and Michelle Rausch (Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow – Two Lovers)
Dishonorable Mention: Leonard Kraditor and Sandra Cohen (Joaquin Phoenix and Vinessa Shaw – Two Lovers)
“I Hope These Guys Make It” Couple of the Year: James Brennan and Emily Lewin (Jesse Eisenberg and Kristin Stewart – Adventureland)
Honorable Mention: Columbus and Wichita (Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone – Zombieland)
“God, Just Split Up, Will You?” Couple of the Year: Derek and Sharon Charles (Idris Elba and Beyonce Knowles – Obsessed)
Dishonorable Mention: Mathieu Liévin and Maya (Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – Les regrets)
Most Tedious Love Triangle of the Year: Bella Swan, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black (Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner - Twilight: New Moon)
Dishonorable Mention: Kate Curtis, Jackson Curtis, and thingy. You know, the guy. The one who flew all those planes. With the glasses. (Amanda Peet, John Cusack and Thomas McCarthy – 2012)
Best Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the Year of All Time: Ellie Frederiksen (Elie Docter – Up)
Worst Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the Year: Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel – (500) Days of Summer) (ETA: With caveats. See comments for further discussion.)
Funniest Apparition of the Year: Wayne Mead (Michael Douglas – Ghosts of Girlfriends Past)
Least Funny Apparition of the Year: Whatever the hell was haunting Katie (Door-Opening Grip #3 - Paranormal Activity)
Sort of Funny, Sort of Horrifying Apparition of the Year: The Chaos Reigns Fox (Antichrist)
Most Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank)
Honorable Mention: Anna Friel (Land of the Lost)
Least Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Megan Fox (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Runner-Up: Gerard Butler (The Ugly Truth)
Most Pallid Lust Object of the Year: Robert Pattinson - Twilight: New Moon
Worst Wig of the Year: Taylor Lautner - Twilight: New Moon
Most Improved Hair of the Year: Amy Adams’ pixie-cut – Julie and Julia
Scourge Of Cinema in 2009 – Sandra Bullock
Best Insult of the Year: In The Loop (comes at 0:36)
Running Joke of the Year: Det. Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) mentioning the name “G” (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans)
Honorable Mention: “Steve!” (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)
And that, my friends, is that. Thank you for all the comments and discussions. The blog will be taking a bit of a break, becoming more sporadic in 2010 while I deal with other things, though I’m sure once the Oscar nominations are announced I’ll be back to complain about the inevitable nods for Precious and Up In The Air. So at least there’s that to look forward to, eh?
Listmania ‘09! Performances Of The Year
As ever I got carried away. This post was going to cover my picks for cast and crew in 2009, but I ended up going on about performers at such length that I figured it’s best to save the rest for later.
Best Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist)
Honorable Mentions:
Rachel Weisz (The Brothers Bloom)
Isabelle Huppert (White Material)
Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek)
Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds)
Alison Lohman (Drag Me To Hell)
Best Actor: Hott Sam Rockwell (Moon, G-Force)
Honorable Mentions:
Nicolas Cage (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, G-Force)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
Peter Capaldi (In The Loop)
Willem Dafoe (Antichrist, Fantastic Mr. Fox)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt ((500) Days of Summer)
Best Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air)
Honorable Mentions:
Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds)
Gina McKee (In The Loop)
Mimi Kennedy (In The Loop)
Lauren Ambrose (Where The Wild Things Are)
CCH Pounder (Avatar)
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Honorable Mentions:
Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds)
Billy Crudup (Watchmen)
Tom Hollander (In The Loop)
Zach Galafianakis (The Hangover, G-Force)
Ben Affleck (Extract)
Breakthrough Actress: Katie Jarvis (Fish Tank)
Breakthrough Actor: Tahar Rahim (A Prophet)
Best Voice Cast For An Animated Movie: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
Anna Faris, Bill Hader, James Caan, Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Samberg, Mr. T, Bruce Campbell, Bobb’e J. Thompson, Benjamin Bratt, Lauren Graham and Will Forte, all perfectly cast and all funny. Even Al Roker is good in it. It’s a kind of miracle.
Most Surprising Dramatic Performance From An Actress Better Known For Her Comedic Work: Maya Rudolph (Away We Go)
Most Surprising Dramatic Performance From An Actor Better Known For His Comedic Work: Ricky Gervais (The Invention of Lying) (It’s not a drama, but he sells the dramatic beats better than I could ever have imagined.)
Best Performance From An Actress In A Really-Not-That-Great Movie: Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia)
Best Performance From An Actor In A Really-Not-That-Great Movie: Vincent Cassel (Mesrine)
“Surely This Will Be The Year This Actor Becomes A Superstar” Performance Of The Year: Chiwetel Ejiofor (2012)
Most Committed Performance That Transformed A Diverting Movie Into An Totally Absorbing Experience: Ben Foster (Pandorum)
Best Performance From An Actor I Was Never Keen On Before But Now Think Is Capable Of Miracles: Karl Urban (Star Trek)
Funniest Performance From An Actor Who Has Been Sorely Underused For Years: Eric Bana (Funny People)
Worst Actress: Cameron Diaz (The Box, My Sister’s Keeper)
Dishonorable Mentions:
Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side, All About Steve, The Proposal)
Katherine Heigl (The Ugly Truth)
Beyonce Knowles (Obsessed)
Kristin Kreuk (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)
Rose Byrne (Knowing)
Worst Actor: Chris Klein (Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li)
Dishonorable Mentions:
James Corden (Lesbian Vampire Killers)
John Travolta (The Taking of Pelham 123)
Tim McGraw (The Blind Side)
Peter Sarsgaard (Orphan)
John Krasinski (Away We Go)
Worst Supporting Actress: Betty White (The Proposal)
Dishonorable Mentions:
Melanie Lynskey (The Informant!, Up In The Air)
Fionulla Flanagan (The Invention of Lying)
Ali Larter (Obsessed)
Malin Akerman (Watchmen, The Proposal)
Rosamund Pike (Surrogates)
Worst Supporting Actor: Eli Roth (Inglourious Basterds)
Dishonorable Mentions:
Tom Sturridge (The Boat The Rocked)
Sam Riley (Franklyn)
Neal McDonough (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li)
Bobby Canavale (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)
Geoffrey Arend ((500) Days of Summer)
Most Thankless Role: Jayma Mays as Paul Blart’s love interest in Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
All she is allowed to do is frown or open her eyes wide. She barely gets any dialogue, and certainly no jokes. It’s deeply frustrating as she can do so much when given the chance.
Runner-Up: Amy Smart as Chev Chelios’ girlfriend Eve Lydon in Crank: High Voltage. Last time she was forced into having sex with Chelios in public against her will. This time forced to wear stripper’s clothes for the entire movie, as well as be licked and molested by a crazed prostitute and then athletically shagged on a racecourse in front of a large crowd of baying men. Is she a glutton for punishment? She really needs to fire her agent.
Scenestealing Actor Of The Year: Woody Harrelson (Zombieland)
Scenestealing Actress Of The Year: Carrie Preston (Duplicity) (Couldn’t find a picture of her in Tony Gilroy’s delightful con-trick movie. Here she is at an awards ceremony with her husband, World’s Greatest Actor Michael Emerson.)
Scenestealing Duo Of The Year: Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig (Adventureland)
Most Glorious Ham: Michael Sheen (Twilight: New Moon)
Most Wasted Actress: Naomi Watts (The International)
Honorary Manuela Velasco Award for Services to Scream-Queen Culture: Katie Featherston (Paranormal Activity)
Best Cameo: You know who (Zombieland)
Runner-Up: Ralph Fiennes (The Hurt Locker)
Worst Cameo: Every celebrity that showed up in Funny People and bogged down the first thirteen hours of the movie
Runner-Up: Mike Tyson (The Hangover) / Lou Ferrigno (I Love You, Man)
Weirdest Cameo: Geri Halliwell as Chev Chelios’ mother in Crank: High Voltage
Where The Hell Have You Been? Actor of the Year: Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill (Inglourious Basterds)
Biggest Disparity In Quality of Performance By An Actress From One Film To The Next: Kristin Stewart – charming in Adventureland, deeply irritating and boring in Twilight: New Moon.
Biggest Disparity In Quality of Performance By An Actor From One Film To The Next: Ryan Reynolds – extremely charming in Adventureland, obnoxious in The Proposal.
And he shouldn’t have been cast as Hal Jordan. I say this as a fan of Ryan Reynolds: he really was fantastic in Adventureland, and was very funny at the start of X-Men Origins: Wolverine before his character got dumped over by the mindless buffoons who wrote it. But he’s not Hal Jordan! [/GL fanboy] Okay, I’m rambling now. More to come, amazingly enough. Got to give props to the crew on this year’s films.
Announcing The Return of the Full-On Cage Experience
Recently I defended Michael Bay (while simultaneously expressing how odious his movies can be), and now I rush to the defense of another man used as a lazy punchline to a billion deeply unfunny jokes about bad cinema: the acting colossus called Nicolas Cage. As with Bay, Cage is treated like a cautionary tale about how that vile, Chthonic monolith called Hollywood can drive people insane with greed, how talented individuals can lose their way and begin a descent from making art to making dross. He is accused of sleepwalking through films, cashing checks, appearing in unworthy crowd-pleasing dreck, and working with anti-cinematic infidels. His personal life is raked over (he keeps impulsively marrying women! He calls his kid a silly name! He buys too much crap!), his eccentricities treated as signs of mental illness, and his success used as example number two in the case against modern culture (example one being the success of Bay). Only Ben Affleck is treated with less respect, a fact that I intend to address in a future post where I defend him too. (I’m serious about that. Affleck is awesome.)
There are millions who seem to love to take a short-cut in thinking and just refer to Cage as a has-been with no understanding of what a joke he has become, though Cage’s most famous critic has been Sean Penn, the former friend who once told the New York Times, “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he’s more like a…performer”. This was said around the time that Cage appeared in two Bruckheimer productions — The Rock and Con Air — which seems to be the one thing an artist can do that will sink his credibility. Why did Penn single out Cage for that and not Cage’s co-stars Ed Harris, or Sean Connery, or John Cusack, or John Malkovich? They’re respected actors who have won awards and are considered to be fine actors, but Cage falls into the line of fire for moving from carefully considered character pieces like Leaving Las Vegas to action movies, three of which he did in a row (the third being the classic John Woo SF actioner Face/Off). His wildly broad performances in those movies were almost certainly a factor, but then he has always given broad performances, within which lie subtle moments (see also Wild At Heart, Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc.). They’re entertaining displays of eye-rolling crowd-pleasing acting pyrotechnics, but there’s a soul there too. This is what I think of as getting The Full-On Cage Experience, with madness and soulfulness tied together. Penn could never pull off anything like that. When he mugs, he ends up wrecking the movie.
By all that’s holy and unholy, how much better was Penn in Milk, or Dead Man Walking (incidentally, that’s one of my favourite screen performances of all time)? It’s not even a fair competition. Besides, this accusation, insinuating that Cage is no longer an actor, is rich coming from someone who appeared in I Am Sam. I’ll take an entertaining and unpretentious actor having fun playing a demonic avenger with a flaming skull than some humourless chide wasting his talent on Oscar-baiting bullshit like that any day of the week. Sadly, Penn’s not the only one who thinks Cage has pissed his talent away. In this little essay, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman compares Cage to Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, which is prescient considering Cage’s current tax woes, but while Snipes has descended into Direct-To-DVD hell, Cage is still working on big-budget movies and smaller curios, still attracting the viewing public, and still cranking out performances that are — at best — thrilling, and — at worst — merely entertaining.
The one argument that genuinely annoys me is the one where Cage is cranking out piss-poor, lazy performances since his last truly astonishing performance in Jonze and Kaufman’s Adaptation. I’ve often said that I think his work in that (along with his work in Leaving Las Vegas and Raising Arizona) deserves a coveted Shades of Caruso Free Pass…
…but of all the movies he has made since, only three performances really disappointed me: his work as Benjamin Gates in the first National Treasure movie, where he seemed awfully tired; his creepy performance in Next, the empty action thriller adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s clever short story; and his catatonic turn as a greasy-haired loser assassin in the disastrous remake of Bangkok Dangerous, which I suspect he took so he could get a holiday in Thailand. That last one really did give me cause for concern, but Gleiberman likes to make out that Cage is regularly signing on for “grade-Z genre schlockers”, which apparently include Ghost Rider and The Wicker Man. Neither of them are good movies, but they were not developed as low-budget cash-ins. Ghost Rider was obviously meant to be a big comic book adaptation, with a pretty good cast and a $110m budget, and even if it was absolutely dire, it was made with love by fans of the character, of which Cage is one.
The Wicker Man is a dumb-ass movie by any standards, but it’s made by Neil LaBute, who was once a promising director. He could have turned in a thoughtless remake of the excellent original (which would fit under Gleiberman’s umbrella of “genre schlocker”) but instead made something personal, for better or worse. For all its faults it’s obviously of a part with his other movies, dealing with his favourite themes of misanthropy, deceit, misogyny, fear of opening up to others, and gynophobia. I’ve occasionally argued that The Wicker Man is a satire on male fear of impotence and castration, a paranoid comical fantasy about a scheming cabal of exaggerated feminist ballbreakers who are out to destroy the penis, turning all men into drones and semen-donors whose sexuality is merely a sacrifice of power to the almighty womb in order to replenish the earth with children.
Sadly, even if this was LaBute’s intention — and even if Cage was in on this project for that reason alone — it’s still ridiculous and poorly made and filled with wonderfully camp moments. Cage maintains that the comedic aspects of the movie were not lost on him. In an interview with Spike Jonze, Drew McWeeny discusses meeting Cage, and Jonze is full of praise:
Jonze: I love [Cage]. We had the best time working together. He really works and focuses.
McWeeny: His publicist was a little wary of me being there, I guess, because he doesn’t do a lot of press and he doesn’t allow press around a lot, but he really was very accessible once I’d been there for a few days, and he kind of warmed up to me. And he was really just fascinating. I loved chatting with him about stuff.
Jonze: Totally chill.
McWeeny: Yeah. And I think far more self-aware than most people think. Like I think some people think Nic is in this vacuum and doesn’t realize how crazy some of his performances are. I got the feeling he was totally aware of how people perceive things. We were talking about THE WICKER MAN, and he was like, “How do people call that an unintentional comedy? I’m in a bear suit kicking Lelee Sobieski in the throat. I know it’s funny.”
Jonze: He just takes it so seriously that nobody knows how to take him. Like PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, I was like, “What is that?” Like I was 15 so I didn’t really know.
McWeeny: I just love how you can always count on him to push things further, like VAMPIRE’S KISS. He ate a roach, man.
Jonze: And also just the insanity of that performance, just the balls-out fearlessness.
Is it enough that Cage is aware of the ridiculousness of the movies he is appearing in? For me it is. I strongly suspect Cage is the most easily bored person in the world, and unfortunately that is paired with the ability to get work in movies that pay millions of dollars for him to spend on cars and comics and castles. Some of the films he has been in lately are truly awful, and I would never argue that they weren’t. Neverthless, I watch them for those flashes of manic commitment from Cage — The Partial Cage Experience — that delight me so. Are they valid acting choices, or is he merely trying to entertain himself while he trudges through formulaic populist bilge? As far as I’m concerned, even if he’s merely trying to entertain himself, he succeeding in entertaining me, and surely that’s what counts.
The only other popular actors that delight me as much are Clooney (who can do pathos and comedy equally well), Streep (who is always the best thing about everything she has ever been in), and maybe Jeff Bridges. Even those fine actors have not given me as much pleasure as Cage does, even when you forget about his early, golden years and concentrate on this bizarre stretch of poor movies. Since Adaptation we’ve had the insanity of Not The Bees…
…a literally hysterical fiery transformation…
…a Shout-Off with Rose Byrne (who is utterly overmatched, despite her invention of the word “chuldren”)…
…a run in with an obnoxious know-it-all child (the best part of which is how he treats the kid like an adult for most of the scene)…
…and a frustrating teaser of what could be his finest hour, if ever Rob Zombie got the money to make it…
His willingness to make fun of himself is the thing that keeps his crazy public and professional persona viable, and though many of his actions seem completely deranged, I honestly believe he’s playing a trick on us. Can someone who makes a series of adverts like these really be unintentionally weird?
(N.B. Anyone who has a sense of humour about themselves gets a break from me. Even the reportedly tyrannical and insensitive director Michael Bay gets points for playing up to his image with this commercial for Verizon:)
I’m a fully paid up Cage fan. For entertainment value, he can’t be beat. To see a person with such intelligence, quirkiness, restlessness, fearlessness, and energy do his thing in such big-screen movies is a rare thrill. If I squint I can see why Cage is now considered a hack by critics and film-watchers, because it’s easy to confuse being in a terrible movie and actually being terrible, but I worry that maybe people are also turned off by his intensity and his allegiance to the weird. The odd soporific performance aside, perhaps what baffles people the most is seeing him devote so much energy to projects that they feel don’t deserve it. Personally, I think that’s admirable. He’s getting paid enough, after all. Dance, you fucking monkey! Dance for your millions!
And yet even though I revel in his passionate and unpredictable work in crud, I’ve become concerned that we would never get another performance out of Cage that is as electrifying as his best work (disclaimer: I’ve not seen Lord of War or The Weather Man, and some have said he gives solid, rounded performances in both). Once upon a time he would work with Lynch and Scorsese, and the performances he gave were over-the-top yet grounded in some kind of emotional profundity, but lately those performances — while entertaining, memorable, and stronger than popular wisdom would have you believe — are lacking that extra fire. Well, I’m happy to report the return of The Full-On Cage Experience, as he takes on the task of being the 21st Century Klaus Kinski. More on that tomorrow, when I review Werner Herzog’s excellent Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
Summer Movie Poll Madness
England just got substantially less green and pleasant. Temperatures have plummeted, and I’m having to wander around the house in a pair of warm slackerpants (and yes, in case you were wondering, I am a nerd). There’s no use denying it. Even though the local cinemas are clogged with top-of-the-line blockbusting audience-pleasers — such as The Soloist, Surrogates, and the Fame remake which made critics pine for the Alan Parker original in defiance of all that is holy — it’s fair to say the Summer Movie Season (aka My Christmas) is now over. And what an exciting time it was! Four million romantic comedies came out and actually did well, everything seemed to be 3D all of a sudden, and Michael Bay became the most hated film director on Earth, an event which apparently annoyed previous title holder Roman Polanski so much he gave himself up to the rozzers just to remind everyone what an asshole he is.
Compared to last summer, it was a pretty underwhelming few months, with the odd high spot and pleasant surprise tucked away. Nevertheless, there was at least one stone-cold masterpiece, and even flat and kinda pointless movies often had something to recommend them (I’m looking at you, Meryl). There was also the occasional spectacular failure, the sort of disastrous and ill-thought-out fuck-up that gives the Summer Movie Season its bad reputation. So, in the interest of collating an overview of what people loved and hated this summer, I have begun two polls, asking for your favourite and least favourite movies of the 2009 summer season. The list is the same in both:
- Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy
- Zooey Hall
- Pixar’s The Bucket List
- Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece
- Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs
- Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold
- Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure
- Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence
- Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse
- Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell
- The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming
- Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience)
- Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband
- X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine
- G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES!
- Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision)
- That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent!
- When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican
- Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan
- STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband
- Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing
- Futile and Fatuous
- Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan!
- The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123
- Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI
As I’ve never used PollDaddy before, I don’t really know what I’m doing. There’s a good chance I’ve got this wrong and it will all implode, taking all the votes with it, but then Blogger once started to randomly excise votes from polls I had going over there, so I’m sort of prepared for crappy functionality. Anyway, please vote in this poll. I’ll close it and collate the data later this year. Apologies if I’ve missed out a movie you feel passionately about. Feel free to leave a comment if I have.
ETA: I just checked out PollDaddy. Once you’ve voted on the poll you can leave comments. Click on the comment link and it takes you to a dedicated page for each poll. Oh, the future. Next you’ll be telling me you can embed videos in blogposts.
Listmania! The Films of 2008, Part 2
The second part of my long-gestating List trilogy is ready to go. Man, finding pictures can take up an entire day.
Best Actor: Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man, Tropic Thunder)
Honourable Mentions:
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)
Chiwetel Ejiofor (Redbelt)
Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon)
Colin Farrell (In Bruges)
Michael Fassbender (Hunger, Eden Lake)
Best Actress: Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)
Honourable Mentions:
Gwyneth Paltrow (Iron Man)
Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler)
Julianne Moore (Blindness)
Frances McDormand (Burn After Reading)
Lina Leandersson (Let The Right One In)
Best Supporting Actor: Aaron Eckhart / Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Honourable Mentions:
James Franco (Pineapple Express)
Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges)
Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Adam Scott (Step Brothers)
Matthew Fox (Speed Racer)
Best Supporting Actress: Emily Mortimer (Redbelt)
Honourable Mentions:
Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona)
Dame Judi Dench (Quantum of Solace)
Laura Ramsay (The Ruins)
Amy Poehler (Baby Mama)
Wei Zhao (Red Cliff)
Best Performance by Hott Sam Rockwell: Snow Angels
Honourable Mention: Choke
Worst Actor: Mark Wahlberg (The Happening)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Al Pacino (88 Minutes, Righteous Kill)
Hayden Christensen (Jumper)
Jim Sturgess (21)
Steven Strait (10000 B.C.)
Vin Diesel (Babylon A.D.)
Worst Supporting Actor: Burt Reynolds (In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Tom Wilkinson (Cassandra’s Dream)
John Hannah (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor)
Ray Liotta (In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale)
Jamie Bell (Jumper)
Tyrese Gibson (Death Race)
Worst Actress: Liv Tyler (The Incredible Hulk, The Strangers)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Kate Bosworth (21)
Camilla Belle (10000 B.C.)
Zooey Deschanel (The Happening)
Renee Zellweger (Leatherheads, Appaloosa)
Alicia Witt (88 Minutes)
Worst Supporting Actress: Charlotte Rampling (Babylon A.D.)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Leelee Sobieski (88 Minutes, In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale)
Saffron Burrows (The Bank Job)
Claire Forlani (In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale)
Betty Buckley (The Happening)
Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Best Performance Hiding Behind An Uncanny Impersonation of a British Icon: Michael Sheen as Sir David Frost in Frost/Nixon
Most Unexpectedly Demented and Entertaining Performance in an Unexpectedly Demented and Entertaining Movie: Matthew Fox (Vantage Point)
Most Glorious Ham: Matthew Lillard (In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale)
Best Uncredited Performance: Steve Martin (Baby Mama)
Worst Uncredited Performance: Gerard Depardieu (Babylon A.D.)
Most Entertaining Actor in an Appalling Movie: Al Pacino (88 Minutes)
Most Entertaining Actress in an Appalling Movie: Meryl Streep (Mamma Mia!)
Most Depressing Performance From a Talented Actor Trapped in a Schlocky Movie: Morgan Freeman, seen here posing in front of a destroyed Loom of Fate (Wanted)
Some Loom of Fate. It didn’t even see a bunch of exploding rats coming. Pathetic.
Dishonourable Mention: Kevin Spacey (21)
Most Depressing Performance From a Talented Actress Trapped in a Schlocky Movie: Joan Allen (Death Race)
Dishonourable Mention: Maria Bello (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor)
Most Egregiously Wasted Cast: Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh and Anthony Wong Chau Sang (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor)
“Where The Hell Have You Been?” Actor of the Year: Lance Henriksen (Appaloosa)
Honourable Mention: Brian Dennehy (Righteous Kill)
Best Director: Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Honourable Mentions:
Matteo Girrone (Gomorra)
David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Snow Angels)
Gus Van Sant (Milk, Paranoid Park)
John Stevenson, Mark Osborne and Jennifer Yuh Nelson – (Kung Fu Panda)
Darren Aronofsky – (The Wrestler)
Best Directorial Debut: Steve McQueen (Hunger)
Honourable Mentions:
Martin McDonagh (In Bruges)
James Watkin (Eden Lake)
Worst Director: Jon Avnet (88 Minutes, Righteous Kill)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Robert Luketic (21)
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
Woody Allen (Cassandra’s Dream)
Roland Emmerich (10000 B.C.)
Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!)
“Where The Hell Have You Been?” Director of the Year: John Woo (Red Cliff: Part One)
Honourable Mention: Marc Caro (Dante 01)
Best Screenplay: Martin McDonagh (In Bruges)
Honourable Mentions:
Christopher Nolan / Jonathan Nolan / David Goyer (The Dark Knight)
Seth Rogen / Evan Goldberg (Pineapple Express)
David Mamet (Redbelt)
John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let The Right One In)
Matteo Garrone / Roberto Saviano / Maurizio Braucci / Ugo Chiti / Gianni Di Gregorio / Massimo Gaudioso – (Gomorra)
Worst Screenplay of the Year: Gary Scott Thompson (88 Minutes)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb (21)
Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire)
Woody Allen (Cassandra’s Dream)
Russell Gewirtz (Righteous Kill)
Jason Richman (Bangkok Dangerous)
Best Sound Design: Ben Burtt (Wall*E)
Honourable Mention: Leslie Shatz (Paranoid Park)
Best Score: Hans Zimmer/John Powell (Kung Fu Panda)
Honourable Mentions:
Alexandre Desplat (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard (The Dark Knight)
Michael Giacchino (Speed Racer)
Tarô Iwashiro (Red Cliff)
Jeff McIlwain/David Wingo (Snow Angels)
Best Original Song: Another Way To Die – Jack White and Alicia Keys (Quantum of Solace)
Honourable Mentions:
What Happens After – Explosions in the Sky (Snow Angels)
The Wrestler – Bruce Springsteen (The Wrestler)
Most Unexpected Vocal Performance: Clint Eastwood dueting with Jamie Cullum on the title song to Gran Torino.
Honourable Mention: Ed Harris singing You’ll Never Leave My Heart over the end credits of Appaloosa.
Best Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel (The Spiderwick Chronicles)
Honourable Mentions:
Christopher Doyle/Rain Li (Paranoid Park)
Colin Watkinson (The Fall)
Sean Bobbitt (Hunger)
Claudio Miranda (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight)
Worst Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire)
Dishonourable Mentions:
Haris Zambarloukos (Mamma Mia!)
Simon Duggan (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor)
Decha Srimantra (Bangkok Dangerous)
Most Disappointing Photography: Roger Deakins (Revolutionary Road)
After his stellar work last year on No Country For Old Men and especially The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it pains me to say his work on Sam Mendes’ adaptation of the Richard Yates novel left me cold. It’s very nice work, and he doesn’t do anything wrong, per se. It’s just kinda limited. Was this Sam Mendes’ fault? Or was I expecting too much after he excelled himself last year? Only one shot stuck in my mind; the bravura overlighting while Kate Winslet looks out of a window at the end of the movie. That was awesome. Other than that, I was frustrated. Perhaps it’s my fault for expecting fireworks every time out, but I kept thinking about how gorgeous Antonio Calvache made suburbia look in Todd Field’s Little Children, and it irked me greatly. I’m sure King Deakins will thrill me again in the future, but for now, ::pouts::
Best Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Honourable Mentions: Speed Racer, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Seriously, those effects in Benjamin Button were insane. Digital Domain and the other FX teams have the effects Oscar sewn up for sure. Anyway, one more installment to go, best filed under the heading “Miscellaneous”. I’ll be stuck looking for more pictures again tomorrow. Oy…
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (Some Kind Of Memory Erasing Drug)
As I said in this enormous apologia, we watched Mamma Mia! a couple of days ago and though we both sat in astonished horror as the cinematic disaster unfolded, it felt like unwarranted cruelty to think ill of it. What kind of curmudgeonly bastard could hate such a fun movie? Look! Pierce Brosnan trying to sing! Isn’t that the sweetest thing ever? And Meryl! She really believes in this project, and can touch her toes in mid-air! OMG it’s Stellan Skarsgård’s butt! He’s showing off his butt! They’re all irrepressible!
And who doesn’t love Abba? Everyone loves Abba. Yes, even I, who has been deemed a music snob by many, many people (including my lovely wife), cannot say a bad word about Abba. Except that Winner Takes It All depresses the shit out of me. It’s a great song, arguably Abba’s best, but since I was a kid it has bummed me out, in much the same way as Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks, and Captain Sensible’s version of Happy Talk (I don’t get that one either).
Since seeing it, however, I’ve come to realise how big a lemon we were sold. From what I can gather the general consensus is that the flaws of the movie are ignored by fans, who feel that its air of amateurish enthusiasm is the centre of its appeal. It’s not some slick, cynical enterprise, say the fans as they dance in the aisles to yet another poorly-integrated and ineptly arranged bastardisation of a once great song. It’s a rarity; a movie aimed at middle-aged women and made by middle-aged women. It’s an antidote to all of the usual macho horseshit pumped out by Hollywood, and celebrates middle-aged femininity in a way that just never happens. I can go along with that appraisal. It’s obvious that a large demographic is being stupidly ignored by studios, and the occasional romance starring Keanu Reeves or Diane Lane is not enough.
That said, the simplistic criticism, that men just don’t get it because it’s made specifically for women, is verifiably false. Melanie Reid, who I linked to before (yes, this piece really pissed me off), says:
The result is an uninhibited, fun, cheesy, hugely tongue-in-cheek women’s film that has, as few others have done, parted the critics like the Red Sea. The highest-browed men, poor things, entirely missing the irony, have struggled to cope with Streep in a popular role, or to find words hate-filled enough to describe the result: “absolute cack”; “silliness unredeemed by wit or polish”; “super pooper… soulless panto”; “hideous… a crock of hooey”; “Streep meets her Waterloo”. My colleague James Christopher, the Times film critic referred to “Hollywood blancmange” and said that the “sight of a Greek conga of local scrubbers vamping to Dancing Queen on a wobbly wooden pier is a truly terrifying spectacle”.
And there was me thinking what fun it would be if I was part of it.
Never have the posh male critics been marooned higher or drier. They have missed the joke, you see. Almost everyone else in the world, it seems – especially women – got it. People love this movie despite its flaws. They love that it celebrates middle-aged women; that it laughs at itself continuously; that it is shamelessly silly and heart-warming.
I’ll grant that the UK critics were, on a whole, much harsher with the film than the US critics, with the male critics making up the majority of the negative opinion, but then that’s more than likely as the number of female film critics in the UK is depressingly small. The Sunday Telegraph has Anne Billson, Jenny McCartney, and Catherine Shoard, and a long Google search doesn’t find any Mamma Mia! reviews by them. The Times has Wendy Ide, and she didn’t review it either. There are others scattered around (not Xan Brooks from The Guardian, who, I just found to my surprise, is a man, baby), but they are very rarely the lead critic for the paper, which means, as it was the biggest release of the week, only men reviewed it. And they hated it.
Does that mean male critics are pre-disposed to hate it? Perhaps if, with a larger and more diverse sample of critics, there is a distinct gender split, but a look through all nine pages of capsule reviews on Rotten Tomatoes shows there are plenty of male critics who loved it and many female critics who hated it, which suggests there was really little more than just personal opinion at play here. Even a tiny sample, i.e. me and Canyon, shows a 100% “rotten” score, as we both hated it (and hey, Canyon is all woman, Melanie Reid). Still, this is nitpicking with one argument. If people are made happy by this film, and the consensus seems to be that it’s better at generating euphoria in its fans than pure heroin, why carp about it?
Partially because the standard of filmmaking on display is so heinously bad. The baffling chaos was apparently directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who has been responsible for many highly regarded opera productions, as well as directing a version of Mamet’s Boston Marriage at the Donmar Warehouse, the excellence of which I can happily attest to. She’s obviously no dummy, and having overseen the original stage production of Mamma Mia! she should know her way around the story, such as it is. However, her obvious expertise is not on show in this film, which is badly lit, poorly blocked, indifferently choreographed, and plotted with startling indifference. While watching it we both commented on the school play feel of it, which is a bad sign.
But who cares when there’s this much fun to be had, right? You can be certain the cast and crew were having a blast on set. Anyone would. Can you imagine what it would be like hanging out in Greece (or, at worst, the studios at Pinewood), with no real work to be done in learning how to dance or sing properly, meaning the frivolity continues all day long with only the odd shot to break up the holiday. There’s no effort made to choreograph the movie beyond some jumping up and down or going around in circles, and a lot of the blocking is messy, which suggests the stage version was transplanted straight over instead of coming up with new moves (though I’ve not seen the stage version so I could well be wrong).
Even more startling, the production design is so shoddy that one scene, featuring cross-cutting between two bedrooms in an effort to suggest a connection between mother and daughter’s plights, is transparently set in the same room, with different beds and a cupboard to make it look different.
Kudos for cutting production costs down, but did anyone on set understand that suspension of disbelief isn’t granted automatically by the audience? That there has to be some effort made by the filmmakers as well? The juxtaposition of the two characters is clearly expressed, but it’s distracting too.
The shakiness of the hotel sets are not best served by the bizarre decision by Lloyd to make no effort to disguise them as unreal facsimiles of a Greek mountaintop. This wouldn’t be so jarring if the whole movie was filmed in the same way, a la One From The Heart, where Coppola constructed an entire world on a soundstage, or if it was all done naturalistically, but instead we get terrible transitions from the bright and expansive Greek locations to gaudy, unconvincing sets, with shots either over-lit…
…under-lit…
…or just lit with no understanding of how a frame should be composed…
…with actors sometimes obscured by shadows or, at worst, filmed in normal light and then altered in post-production to look like the scene was shot after dark, which is another cost-saving measure gone horribly wrong thanks to inept usage.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad. Amanda Seyfried ends up getting most of the emotional work, and she does a good job of selling the film’s central dramatic arc. Upon first seeing this it was an hour in before I realised that the only thing it seemed to be about was the identity of her father, a minimalist plot that had been obscured by much faffing about. That said, late attention to the lightly sketched thread about Seyfried’s worries about her impending marriage fleshes the film out a little. Nevertheless, this thread barely registers except as pretence for having her and Dominic Cooper sing Lay All Your Love on Me, much as Meryl’s financial strain is a weak excuse for shoehorning Money, Money, Money into the soundtrack.
Seyfried’s insecurity also drives the final act twist where she decides against marrying so that she can see the world, though she does this with her fella, which garbles the free young woman message. I get why they did it; can’t have a break-up at the end of the film to bring everyone down, after all. It’s a shame to dilute her aspirations, though, as the film (and musical) commendably focuses on Meryl’s free love past with only minor “comical” reproach, instead celebrating her free spirit and life choices, which is a rarity in these prudish and censorious times. As a peon to women’s rights, it might not be The Female Eunuch, but it’s a huge and gratifying success in this respect, even if it fails elsewhere, partially with the despicable objectification of poor Pierce Brosnan, his clothes torn from his back and his chest hair displayed for all the world to see. What kind of depraved Amazon nation are we preparing ourselves for here??!?!?
Best of all, through it all there’s Meryl, who does a good job dragging some of the emotional weight from Seyfried’s shoulders (their duet during Slipping Through My Fingers is one of the few moments in the film that really works), and an even better one selling the ridiculousness of the whole enterprise. While Julie Walters and Christine Baranski are panto dames squawking about men in a lamentably unfunny stylee, Meryl tries her damnedest to make the movie work with total commitment to her character’s woes, which makes it all the more annoying that her efforts are rendered pointless by the lackadaisical production.
Especially galling is that her committed performance of Winner Takes It All means nothing, bearing only a tangential relationship to some emotional plot thread jammed in at the last second to justify the inclusion of the song, not to mention the uncomfortable sight of Fierce Pierce standing around trying to emote some vague and undefined emotion that might be sadness but looks more like uncomfortable boredom, in a bit of blocking that resembles the vexed shrugging from the undercover cops in this momentous scene from Cop Rock.
The production smacks of “Let’s do the show right here” impulsiveness, with a weird visual mixture of glossiness and incompetence. The shockingly poor photography, when not getting the lighting horribly wrong, features some of the nastiest zooms I’ve seen in years. One aimed at a shell-shocked Stellan Skarsgård wouldn’t look out of place in a low-budget 70s blaxploitation movie. The slapdash visuals, shaky choreography (if it can be called that), and hectic air suggest this rough-and-ready photography is part of a consciously made stylistic choice, but that decision scuppers the film, as it’s hellishly ugly to look at, made worse by some appalling post-production work and editing flubs that make the movie impossible to follow at times (the three potential fathers entering the goat house confused us both).
I can live with all that. Lackadaisical filmmaking is not that big a deal as long as the package is likable enough, but the piss-poor filmmaking is compounded by the desperation pouring off the screen like a brown-green cloud, with no line unbellowed, no emotion half-expressed, no subtlety left uncrushed by the pounding of dancers jumping up and down on the spot to denote artificial joy. I can just about tolerate the shrieking in America’s Next Top Model because it’s expected of the models to act like everything that happens to them is OMG amazing, but watching the same level of hysteria maintained throughout the seemingly endless Mamma Mia! was unbearable. Enthusiasm is one thing, but relentless howling and jumping around palls very quickly. Just ask anyone who has ever watched Spielberg’s 1941.
I’ll happily admit that watching Pierce struggle to honk out his songs did make me smile, but I refuse to give the film a free pass just because it’s openly saying, “We just want to show you what a good time we’re having and you should join in too!” That was the guiding ethos behind Ocean’s Twelve, an empty abomination that attempted to coast on audience good-will towards its cast and failed. If some people are fine with that, good on them. This viewer was appalled by the laziness of the whole affair.
Most importantly at all, even if the fans’ argument – that the poor filmmaking and slipshod plotting don’t matter because of all the larks onscreen – holds true, it falls apart for anyone outside that forgiving subset of humanity that adored it without question. I’m sure Canyon and I are not the only people who watched the film with one hand over their eyes for fear of cringing themselves to death. It’s one thing to see the high-larious shot of Fierce Pierce dressed like a hippy…
…or Meryl headbanging and doing air guitar during Dancing Queen (which contains zero opportunity for shredding), but the risible dream-sequence to Money, Money, Money (included in the film because Meryl is momentarily, and conveniently, worried about money), was the last straw, and it comes early in the film.
Many scenes were almost unwatchably embarrassing, and any immersion in the film was repeatedly thwarted by us being unable to deal with what we were seeing. That Money, Money, Money scene was possibly the most ham-fisted and calamitous scene I’ve endured all year, looking like a YouTube replication of a French and Saunders sketch, except cheaper, but there were several moments that rivalled it later on.
Case in point: Julie Walters chases Stellan Skarsgård around the hotel in the final scenes, a turn of events that comes after the big emotional reworking of When All Is Said and Done, partially to pep the film back into life before the final dance scene, and also to shoe-horn Take A Chance On Me into the film. That they have wrecked another of my favourite tracks is only part of the crime, but having Skarsgård crawling around while Walters chases him is depressing as well as illogical, as he seems to vacillate between terror and lust depending on which line is being sung at that time.
It’s a mystifying hodge-podge of confusing emotional beats, betraying the true philosophy of the filmmakers; batter the audience with unearned uplift and nostalgia and they’ll have no choice but to respond/surrender. It’s like a Michael Bay action scene, but nearly two hours long and without the gleaming photography and split-second editing (or giant robots. Or explosions. Or rippling American flags). “LOVE US!” it screams, pointing at Colin Firth as he ineptly dances. “We’re totally letting our hair down and we can’t help but go crazy!” And, despite our better judgement, we find it hard to keep our brains switched on in an attempt to resist the onslaught. Pavlov would have found it fascinating, I’m sure.
Just to make things even more dispiriting, I failed to fanwank away the involvement of the two creative architects of the Abba leviathan. Upon seeing Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson listed as executive producers I had hoped that they were included merely as a contractual obligation, and that they hadn’t had anything to do with the production, but right at the end of the film, as Dancing Queen gets a second runthrough prior to the egregious and unnecessary destruction of Waterloo, we see what I assume are Greek gods, and right in the middle…
…is Björn, which strikes me as a direct endorsement, in much the same way as John Waters’ cameo in the Hairspray musical is a tip of the hat. It destroyed my will to live.
Does that mean I think people are fools for loving it? Of course not. As I said earlier, there are millions of people out there who were in desperate need of a movie that appealed directly to them, and if this film makes producers realise the potential of this untapped market, all of its filmmaking sins will be absolved. However, I’m depressed by the fact that the demographic that this film appeals to is so starved of filmic attention that this poorly-made, patronising mess is considered an event. If we’re going to get more films of this nature, I hope they will be made with more care and intelligence and respect for the audience, even though that audience would think I was being patronising for suggesting this film is unworthy of their affection. That I think they’re probably right even though I was rendered insensible by the monumental dreadfulness of it all says something for the pull of the film. Even now that I’ve voiced my displeasure with it I can still understand the appeal of it, and predict I will end up seeing it many more times, first against my will and later with full acknowledgement that I’m compelled to revisit it.
That doesn’t make it a good film, though, and I’m miserable knowing that it has achieved notoriety and popular acceptance by default. I’m even more annoyed by it as I was desperately in need of cheering up the day we watched it, after finally seeing American Movie and being plunged into a pit of depression by it. I had hoped that watching Mamma Mia! with my critical faculties switched off would cure my blues, but in a way it made it worse, by being so thoroughly bad it broke through my initial good will and kicked my calmer senses into a bin. And yet, even though I was unmoved by the exhortation to just enjoy myself dammit, I could never be mad at Meryl. Because Meryl is a Goddess, and we’re lucky to be seeing her in anything at all.
Recognize.
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
