We Need To Talk (And Talk And Talk) About Oscar

Posted on February 25, 2012 by admiralneck

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!

BFI LFF 2011: Bernie / The Monk

Posted on December 6, 2011 by admiralneck

Whenever I try to come up with a list of perfect movies — movies that get everything right, that never fail to lighten my mood, that have moved me so profoundly that I see the world and our culture in a new and better light — there are some that leap straight to mind. Midnight Run is the main one, with Galaxy Quest right behind; Carroll Ballard’s beautiful Fly Away Home is on TV as I write this, and I’m instantly in love with it all over again. To that list I’d add School of Rock, Richard Linklater and Mike White’s lovable comedy which remains one of those films that, if it shows up on TV at any point, will make me put down whatever else I’m doing. Along with Kung Fu Panda, it’s one of the examples I use to justify my longstanding affection for Jack Black. The role of Dewey Finn allows him to channel his rock-slacker shtick into the ideal personification of his muddled anti-authoritarianism and bone-headed enthusiasm.

I couldn’t love the movie more, and if you don’t adore it too, we can never be friends. (#Dealbreaker) Good news for us; the LFF was generous enough to nab Linkater and Black’s newest collaboration; pretty fortunate as it seems to have had some trouble finding distributors, even in the US. Bernie is based on a Texas Monthly article – Midnight in the Garden of East Texas — by Skip Hollandsworth, who co-wrote the movie with Linklater. (Warning: it’s impossible to synopsise this movie without giving away a huge plot point.)

It starts innocently enough; gregarious assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede (Black, of course) arrives in the town of Carthage and immediately charms everyone with his upbeat personality, generosity, and enormous singing voice (fans of Mr. Black’s vocal stylings will be very pleased with his unctuous phrasings and epic bellowing here). In hardly any time he becomes a beloved member of the community, helping with school productions, contributing to church ceremonies, and coming to the aid of even the town’s worst occupant, the mean-spirited Marjorie Nugent, played with sour relish by Shirley MacLaine.

Nevertheless, no man, no matter how kind or loving he is, can remain unchanged following prolonged exposure to poisonous individuals like Marjorie, and their odd friendship goes horribly awry. She begins to wreck his life, demanding more and more from him, estranging him from the townsfolk he has grown to love. Her onslaught of hostility begins to wear the good-natured Bernie down; even his shield of good-natured positivity is not impervious to one demented, irrational outburst, and in a moment of madness he shoots Marjorie. The events that this triggers strain credulity, but it’s apparently all true.

A curmudgeon could complain that Black’s performance is pitched a little bit too weird, but that layer of cheeriness covering a tortured soul is perfectly judged considering just how bizarre the rest of the cast is. Other than MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey as District Attorney Danny “Buck” Davidson — the man who seems so uncomfortable with Bernie’s camp mannerisms that he directs his energy into bringing him down — the majority of the cast are citizens of Carthage who were present at the time of the movie’s events, and who both talk directly to the camera in a documentary style or act in scenes that they seem to have lived through already. Their “performances” are the key to the movie’s success; they’re almost eccentric, but instantly recognisable and human, no matter how odd their beliefs might seem to outsiders.

This mixture of reality and artifice, which includes interviews with both real people and actors as if they were both there at the time, is a dizzying conceit I don’t recall seeing anywhere else, but if someone knows of an instance, please let me know. The most unusual thing is that both reality and unreality mix and support each so well that there’s no mental argument about the veracity of the story. It feels real, no matter how unbelievable it gets. Something like Capturing The Friedmans – one of the best documentaries of the past few years – will offset conflicting viewpoints from the subjects that creates a pleasing and discombobulating friction between possible interpretations. Which narrator can be trusted? There’s no such conflict with Bernie. It’s pretty much straight down the line.

Linklater depicts Bernie’s appalling crime and we’re never meant to question it, even though the townsfolk who defend Bernie against the accusations by DA ‘Buck’ Davidson are convinced their opinion is correct. The joy of Bernie is not trying to get to the heart of a mystery; it’s watching the subjects’ willing leap into delusion because they want to believe something so badly. Linklater has created a picture of a fascinating and bizarre phenomenon, a mass delusion that should be sinister but is actually charming, thanks to his comedic touch. It resembles Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, except that Linklater aces the tone in a way that eluded Clint Eastwood, most probably because, as a Texan, he understands the way in which a small town like this would rally around someone they had taken into their hearts.

This is a far superior snapshot of the effect of a shocking crime on a tight-knit community, reminiscent of Errol Morris’ superb Tabloid – another crowdpleaser that touched on serious subjects. Bernie is broad and spritely while still managing to paint a sophisticated picture of small-town politics, Southern justice, and the way celebrity (either local or national) can warp the perception of criminality. Naturally it has drawn criticism for portraying Bernie’s crimes in such a light-hearted way; Linklater was never going to completely get away with making a black comedy about such things, though his use of real Carthage residents and his command of tone makes this a lot easier to swallow than it should be.

But I’ll be honest, concerns about the rights and wrongs of portraying these real events in this way never occurred to me while watching. Everything about this is pleasurable, especially yet another stand-out performance from Matthew McConaughey. Thanks to his funny turn in this and his strong work in the very entertaining Lincoln Lawyer, he’s having a fantastic year. Shades of Caruso has defended him in the past, but sadly failed to sway even a single hater. However, after these two movies, and (hopefully) his appearance in Jeff Nichols’ Mud, it might be time for more people to cut the big guy some slack. Yes, I’m talking to you, Bim of Yoruba Girl Dancing, you big sceptic you.

Black is great too, though an unfortunate side-effect of the movie’s format is that while everyone else gets to be “interviewed”, Bernie himself comes across as a blank slate with no chance to speak to us about his motivations. Black is required to be the one mysterious individual in the movie, but this is not to denigrate his strangely touching performance; he does more than enough to convince us that Tiede’s crime was a consequence of that red rage I’m sure most of us would recognise. Shades of Caruso remains committed to Jack Black fandom, and this is worth seeing for him alone.

(Sidenote: Much as you would hope for perfect or near-perfect film projection during an international film festival, Bernie was sadly projected in a baffling ratio that clipped off the top and bottom of the image. I mean, I could happily blame that on Linklater and claim that the guy suddenly forgot how to place his camera correctly, but seeing as how I was recently told by @AntCrossfield that the screening of Meek’s Cutoff I attended last year was also projected in the wrong ratio, it’s fair to say that West End Vue needs to hire a few more projectionists for the next festival. It’s especially galling that Meek’s Cutoff was projected incorrectly. Kelly Reichardt specifically chose a 1.37:1 ratio to create an almost square image, but the Vue projected it far wider than that. I think I even commented on the “panoramic vistas” in my review last year. So they made me look like a complete know-nothing asswit like my biggest non-fans already believe. Thanks for robbing me of my dignity, West End Vue.)

Bernie’s fall from grace is played for laughs, while Dominick Moll’s The Monk depicts a grave tale of hubris and corruption. Based on a novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk tells of Father Ambrosio (Vincent Cassel, as compelling as ever), a mysterious and adored Monk with a mysterious past whose unwavering belief in his own righteousness brings about his doom. After doing what he sees is right in reporting the “sinful” behaviour of a nun, who is then punished to death by her Abbess, Ambrosio finds himself falling under the spell of a new presence in his abbey. Valerio, an eerie deformed man hiding behind a mask, is the only person who can quell the pain of the terrible headaches Ambrosio experiences, and the bond they forge becomes deeper and more threatening to the monk’s eternal soul.

As with Bernie, The Monk is a movie that is more rewarding for being seen with as little foreknowledge as possible (difficult considering it’s based on a 1796 novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, but it’s safe to relate that Ambrosio’s arrogance and almost militant, humility-free piety are not going to be things that save him from damnation). His situation is complicated by the introduction of Antonia, a young woman being courted by Lorenzo, a nobleman’s son. As questions about their suitability for each other arise, Ambrosio soon becomes involved in the lives of Antonia and her mother Elvira. It’s not long before Ambrosio’s sense of honour and restraint begins to collapse, and an obsession with the virtuous young woman begins to affect him.

The original novel appears to have many sideplots and diversions, but Moll’s adaptation strips out much of that in order to focus primarily on Ambrosio’s downward spiral, thus accentuating the morality tale at the heart of the novel. The key is the treatment of Agnes, the young nun whose indiscretion leads to her demise. She survives Lewis’ novel after being rescued from her imprisonment by the Prioress, and settles down with Don Raymond, the father of her child. In Moll’s movie, all we see is Agnes foolishly dropping a love letter in front of Ambrosio, who rats her out to the Abbess (a short role for Geraldine Chaplin). There’s no happy ending for Agnes in Moll’s movie. By linking her protracted and miserable death to Ambrosio’s rigid piety, his comeuppance is assured.

And what a comeuppance. There are hints of what is to come laid throughout the movie, including one casting decision that struck me as odd early on but made sense eventually. Synopses of the novel talk about Ambrosio’s descent into pure evil, but while the movie version of the monk certainly commits terrible acts, Cassel plays Ambrosio as a terrified man dwarfed by the dark powers arrayed against him. He’s not sympathetic at all, but he appears haunted by what he is doing, aware of the depravity of his acts but almost powerless to stop himself. Visions of the future plague him; when he finally succumbs to his urges, it almost seems as if he feels he has no choice.

Cassel’s riveting performance is as well-modulated as Moll’s direction, neither descending into overt melodramatics. The few concessions to directorial bombast from Moll are a few surrealist touches, such as the unnerving mask and sinister, whispery voice of Valerio, and a particularly unpleasant demonic millipede that Ambrosio encounters in his beloved rose garden (a visual echoed later in the movie by the procession that takes place outside the building in which Ambrosio commits his final, terrible crime). Patrick Blossier’s dramatic lighting sculpts numerous memorable moments from the medieval darkness; several shots of Cassel’s anguished face surrounded by black shadow are particularly effective, forming a nice contrast with the garish washes of primary colour near the end, a startling choice which wouldn’t look amiss in Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder. The very final scene, where the full scale of Ambrosio’s failure is made apparent, is rendered without bombast, but is all the more powerful for that.

But it’s Linklater’s movie that says more about humanity, even though The Monk is very solidly made and atmospheric. Moll’s macabre and oppressive semi-horror is impressive, but it’s so far removed from modern experience that it exists more as a curio — albeit a very entertaining curio — than Bernie’s delightful humanist tale. Cassel deserves praise for doing everything he can to make Ambrosio relatable, and it’s arguable that he does a better job than Black, whose work as Bernie is lots of fun but more than a little alienating due to the number of peculiar tics on display, but even with such an impressive display of acting fireworks at its core, The Monk is still a movie about a near-saint who falls victim to his pride and suffers an operatic fate involving vastly powerful supernatural forces. Bernie is about that horribly recognisable moment when every good thing you do as a human is undone by one weak moment when pent-up fury bursts out. That’s something that most audiences — for better or worse – would find more believable.

The Rock and The Diesel: Titan Clash

Posted on April 28, 2011 by admiralneck

Until about ten days ago I did not give a single damn about the Fast & Furious franchise, having endured the first one several years ago and finding it wanting. It was easy to dismiss yet another ropey Rob Cohen movie, especially one starring Paul Walker and which was so obviously based on Point Break (or Donnie Brasco, I guess someone could argue). Its success just seemed like one of those things that happen in the unpredictable summer season, and at the time – and I stress, at the time – could have been attributed to Vin Diesel’s apparent rise to superstardom. I watched the movie, it fed my brain with vroom for a couple of hours, and then it vanished and I didn’t really think of it again, except as That Movie With Vin That Wasn’t Riddick Or xXx.

The second movie came and went without even disturbing my poorly-styled hair, other than to note that Vin didn’t return – surely a bad sign. Nevertheless his stalled career had caught my attention, and thus the success of the first movie suddenly seemed a little more mysterious. It wasn’t Diesel that audiences flocked to see, so what was it? Paul Walker? That seemed unlikely, especially as the third movie came along, this time without Walker, and still made money. At that point I just figured, well, boys like fast cars and women in short-shorts wiggling away from the camera, so that’s that. They struck me as straight-to-DVD actioners that had just managed to catch a wave of enthusiasm, perhaps from gamers who liked that the movies so often resembled a Burnout sequel with added booty.

Suddenly a fourth movie was upon us, and I briefly considered watching the others and then watching that latest sequel, but time was so tight, what with trying to pack in every other movie going, that I decided against it. Besides, surely this was a last roll of the dice, an attempt to keep the franchise going just a little longer by bringing the full team back from the first movie. It wasn’t worthy of my time, and would merely be the end of a franchise that had commendably defied its critics by lasting longer than expected (though I did recently notice this very astute and accurate article praising the series for its commitment to racial diversity, something that has been sadly ignored until recently but has now been picked up as an interesting critical take on the franchise).

But I was massively wrong, and apparently so were the many others who have mocked the franchise and its fans. Though I will admit I only recently took an interest once my beloved Dwayne Johnson signed on, the appearance of a fifth movie made me strongly question my dismissive attitude. You don’t get to five films in a series these days by barely squeaking into profitability. This series continues because it makes fat cash and is genuinely loved by millions of people, and just treating them like idiots who must have risibly low standards because they like car movies is unacceptable. It’s like the movie equivalent of Top Gear; hated by the monocle-wearing Snootingtons of the critterati but adored by many.

So last week I took advantage of Sky Anytime’s generous streaming of Fast/Furious 1, 2 and 4 (no Tokyo Drift, which I figured was because it wasn’t part of the main plot, though please let me know if I’m wrong) and caught up. The first movie was still nothing special, from what I could tell, but I enjoyed it a bit more this time around, taking time to enjoy Diesel’s performance and the pretty cars. The end still seemed problematic; at the seventy minute mark it suddenly goes, “Heist! Accident! Shooting! Bike chase! Drag race! Accident! End!” for no reason other than those elements were always meant to be in the movie but all of the reaction shots between Brian O’Connor and Dominic Toretto ate up the second act.

It doesn’t surprise me that this mulch of action beats was cobbled together by Gary Scott Thompson, the man who eventually gave us the horrendous Knight Rider reboot that died on its wheels last year, and the amazing 88 Minutes, surely the most entertainingly bad mainstream movie of the past few years. Still, I liked it more than the second, which seemed to lack even the momentum of the first movie, with Diesel’s diverting anti-hero missing and replaced by smartarse Tyrese Gibson. No chemistry between him and Walker plus a very silly final act (featuring a weak and poorly staged resolution that reminded me of Black Dynamite, for some reason) meant I strongly considered not bothering with the fourth.

Thankfully I ignored my better judgement and dived in, and was rewarded with easily the best in the series to that point. Chris Morgan’s plot had numerous inconsistencies, as pointed out here, but it was still noticeably sharper than previous scripts, and was willing to take the main characters seriously, meaning Brian and Dominic’s adventures finally had the heft they had needed in the first movie. Even better was Justin Lin’s muscular direction. He was already in my good books for directing the truly magnificent Modern Warfare episode of Community, where his knowledge of action cinema was apparent.

Fast and Furious showed he could bring the love to the big screen, with numerous superb setpieces worthy of mwahs of affection (especially the opening petrol truck heist-gone-wrong and the mid-movie street race with Brian constantly driven off course while his satnav nags him). If previous instalments had felt a little light on dramatic oomph – often by being primarily about racing/sexy male bonding but with a crime element dolloped on top like some cheap vanilla ice cream – Fast and Furious felt like a consistent film. The fractured relationship between Brian and Dominic breathed for once; even more so than the first movie, I became invested in their reconciliation, and was rewarded with a terrific final scene where Brian finally turns his back in the law in order to help his buddy. Ace stuff.

But Holy Fanbelts, nothing – NOTHING IN THE WORLD – could have prepared me for the absolute bug-shit-nuts insanity and balls-to-the-wall brilliance of Fast Five. It’s surely a contender for action movie of the year, and is so far and away the best movie of the series that everything to this point has felt like a mere pre-amble. I’m as surprised as anyone as my snotty dismissiveness has been transformed into rapturous adoration, and I would actually recommend everyone watch the other movies – even if they don’t really like them – just to get to the point where they can watch and fully appreciate the twists and turns of this berserk epic of melodrama, action, and bromance.

Writer Chris Morgan may have been memorably lampooned by The Onion this week, and again there are a number of times during Fast Five where the only response is befuddlement (one scene shows Dominic escaping some chains by just escaping don’t overthink it OMG look a pretty car!), but credit where credit is due; the decision to make the fifth movie a hybrid of Fast/Furious, Ocean’s Eleven and The Fugitive (or more accurately, US Marshals) was a stroke of genius. The mid-section of the movie – depicting our heroes planning a robbery – is enormous fun, with Diesel and Walker the B-list Clooney and Pitt, Sung Kang as Damon, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges as Cheadle, and Tyrese Gibson as Bernie Mac. This refocusing is a far cry from trying to find new ways to make Paul Walker fall out with his co-stars before winning them over with that… that… “smile” of his.

It struck me as I goggled in disbelief at this indecently entertaining slice of summer madness that there is no other movie series ever made where the fifth movie was better than the previous instalments, at least as far as I can recall. Even the fifth Bond movie - You Only Live Twice – is not as good as Goldfinger or From Russia With Love, though it’s still a blast. The Bond series had several high notes later on, but there was a definite sense of fatigue after a while, necessitating a total revamp. The Fast/Furious movies have just hit their fifth instalment and now finally make sense as a whole, using the same cast and plot elements as before, taking the initial concept to its natural conclusion, and basically saying, “Fuck it, it’s kitchen sink time” and ramping the franchise up to heights that are almost epic in scale without abandoning any elements.

For a long time I’ve been increasingly annoyed by the complaints from critics and pop culture pundits when they talk about the lack of new ideas out there. “Too many sequels, too many remakes, too many spin-offs; can no one come up with anything new?”, etc. Yes, I will concede that tired sequels or remakes made with no imagination or no understanding of what worked with the originals – or what didn’t work and needs to be rethought – make me despair as much as anyone. I’m not crazy. When you’re sitting in front of the third Twilight movie and the plot is resolutely stuck in a rut and you can feel your soul turning grey with boredom, it’s easy to think we’ve built a cultural Pompeii on the side of a mountain that will erupt, spewing cliches everywhere and permanently submerging the things that make storytelling matter.

But this ignores the fact – two facts if you count “there are no new ideas, only new variations” – that sometimes, if done right, stories can get better the longer they run. Look at comics; Captain America has been good in the past, but its finest hour is arguably Ed Brubaker’s run, and he’s come in really late in the day. Look at TV shows; Lost had a couple of terrific seasons, admittedly with highs and lows, but the fourth and fifth seasons were incredibly surprising. Look at The Shield or Seinfeld or The Sopranos or The Wire or Friday Night Lights; they didn’t just wow us initially and then burn away because “all the ideas ran out”. They built worlds, filled with characters we knew and understood and loved. We connected with them more the longer we lived with them, and so our interest grew along with the new possibilities being spotted by the creators and then used as narrative fuel.

When lazy critics bemoan this rampant sequelitis, they often judge before they experience. There is always a chance that a creative team will come up with some new twist or idea, or some new possibility based on the seeds sown in previous episodes/editions/movies, that will excite the audience and break new and interesting ground. This should be obvious, but it seems to pass people by, mostly because it’s easy to just get stuck repeating complaints until they eventually become “self-evident”. Fair enough; we’ve all been burned a million times before, and so it’s easy and inevitable that cynicism increases. Some stories work best when told quickly. Not everything needs a million chapters. Some in recent years have been horribly overdone and stretched too thinly (numerous horror franchises or sci-fi epics could be trimmed quite easily). I get that, and in many cases, I totally agree.

However, Fast Five is a perfect example of something that takes a step back, surveys all of the franchise’s elements, and weaves them back together in a new and thrilling way. Perhaps it works better than most because at its heart the series is about artificially created and sustained families, both in terms of the people in Brian’s life and also around the world, as this community nurtures and sustains itself on the fringe of society and protects its members from the disapproving mainstream with mutual respect and codes of honour. This in itself is a fertile ground for stories and continuity, especially as Lin and Morgan have so far proven to be versatile enough to not just make the series about racing.

It also helps that the series has been to so many different locales, with Lin making great use of Rio de Janeiro in this instalment; he stages a rip-roaring chase sequence through a favela that resembles a scene in Louis Leterrier’s Incredible Hulk, except even more exciting. So we see a this template expand in scale, and because we have now arrived at a point where our numerous heroes have become familiar to us over time, Lin and Morgan can get on with setting these characters off against each other in various combinations of friendship, love, antipathy and distrust without the audience having to be led by the hand. The variations would not be possible without this familiarity.

Another beneficial side-effect of adding new chapters onto a story is this removal of set-up; we have about three film’s worth of story in Fast Five because most of the exposition is stripped out, having been dealt with in the previous films. This movie is lean while packed with incident, but – unlike some over-reaching summer entertainments – is not devoid of emotive impact or dramatic weight (provided you buy into it, of course). The big muscular showdown between Diesel and Johnson is not only a crisply-edited and exciting brawl, it has considerable power due to the deftly-handled in-film build-up, and finishes on a memorable and cathartic moment that has great resonance to fans who have watched the whole series. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

As for the other participants, while Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster still have difficulty generating onscreen sparks, their characters at least matter to Dominic, and therefore to me. I’ve long held that Diesel is a more interesting performer than he’s given credit, especially as he seems drawn to morally diverse characters like Dominic and Riddick, and he does some strong and surprisingly quiet work here. Tyrese Gibson is now designated comic relief and seems to relish it; what had seemed to me to be a casting misjudgement in the second movie really pays off here. Chris “Ludacris” Bridges is slowly becoming a much more confident actor the longer he stays in the game, and this movie makes me look forward to more from him.

What about my hero Dwayne Johnson? He is BUILT TO KILL in this movie, having bulked up to terrifying size. His head is bald, his chin is whiskery, and his face is coated in a sheen of freshly-spritzed sweat throughout. It’s fantastic to see him finally play something a little meatier than his recent ill-advised child-placating roles; it’s not like he’s playing anything really shocking, but his character Hobbs is a bit of a sexist, kinda mean-spirited, a cross between Sam Gerard in The Fugitive and Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona. He’s not in the movie enough (an unfortunate consequence of that kitchen-sink spirit), but its obvious he’ll be back, and hopefully he’ll have more to do. As previously mentioned before, the fight between him and Diesel – a fight I didn’t realise I needed in my life until just last week – is as good as you would hope, but the best thing is the grudging rapprochement between hunter and hunted.

Allow me to explain. If there is any single relationship arc I love more than any other in all of written or filmed storytelling in the history of our world or any other, it’s the eventual thawing of hostilities between two diametrically opposed characters who hate each other or who cannot possibly ever be friends and yet somehow do because that’s how strong their love is. Midnight Run, Heat, the many buddy-comedy-dramas of Shane Black; these movies have moments that absolutely shake me to my core. Nothing makes me happier than seeing enemies become allies, and let’s just say, without spoilers, there is a moment in Fast Five that made me want to take off all my clothes and run around the cinema screaming “YEEEEEESSSSSS!” while sobbing and jumping and generally getting way too excited.

So yes, Fast Five is the business. For my previous ignorance on the Fast/Furious front, I humbly apologise (to no one in particular, as before today no one knew what I thought and will likely never care). The setpieces are amped up a thousand-fold, the bromance is intensified, the cars are still lovely, and what do you know, the final act throws out some major surprises that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling – I strongly advise fans of the series to stay in their seats until the traditional ropey CGI racing credits finish to see a terrific set-up for the next movie. I’d say it’s a guilty pleasure, if I believed in the concept. Screw that; everyone involved can be proud of themselves for making an action classic that gives the audience more bang for its buck than anything else in cinemas right now.

I might – I should stress might – even go so far as to say I enjoyed this more than I enjoyed Thor, and I really really really enjoyed Thor, though that might be because I’m still basking in the post-viewing glow, or perhaps the shock that something I had been so sniffy about could be so good. Who knew I would have this good a time just by dropping my sense of superiority and giving myself over to the love of two burly men rolling around on the floor and sweating over each other? Five more movies, please! Ten!

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (106-91)

Posted on December 9, 2009 by admiralneck

Longtime readers will know that I’m a fiend for lists the way Sonny Crockett is a fiend for mojitos. Don’t believe me? Check out this blurry video:

My Best of 2009 movie list has been percolating for a while now, with only a few contenders for best or worst film to come before I shut things down at the end of December (oh yes, I won’t stop watching until I’m sure I have it right). Meanwhile, even though I’m uncomfortable with the idea of this decade being 1999-2009, I’ve been pondering my own best of the decade list. This should be something to be excited about, and yet until last week I just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. When I search my soul I come to the uncomfortable but inescapable conclusion that it’s because any list I would come up with would both be horribly incomplete and would betray my populist taste. What makes me more uncomfortable than that is realising that such an admission makes me uncomfortable at all.

Any list I could make for this decade is already off to a bad start when I admit that I’ve yet to see many of the best reviewed and most beloved movies of recent times. The gaps in my viewing history include Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, and anything by Wong Kar Wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or the Dardennes. I’ve also only seen a couple of (terrific) movies by Claire Denis and a single, memorable one by Michael Haneke. Some film buff I am. This short list is merely the tip of the iceberg. According to this list, I might as well not consider myself a film lover at all, as I’m not looking for movie excellence in the right places (though the entire list is invalidated by the praise for Woody Allen’s technically disastrous and intellectually vapid Cassandra’s Dream: surely one of the ten worst films of the decade).

All of that shame over my taste is wrapped up in feelings of mortification over class and intellectualism and authenticity and so many other things. I know that none of it is important but the expression of some kind of discernment in my opinion helps to legitimise my amateur film criticism, something I take very seriously even when I talk about things that readers might consider beneath contempt (my defence of Michael Bay, for instance, or my enthusiasm for The Dark Knight). Therefore it scares me to openly admit that I’m a sucker for a well-choreographed action scene with some pretty explosions included. No one wants to admit to enjoying those movies without losing their credibility, so why should I be the one to stick my neck out?

Maybe it’s time to get over those silly fears and say it loud: I’m a fan of populist cinema. Yes, I can appreciate works of cinematic art on many levels, though perhaps I might have greater difficulty expressing that appreciation or placing those works in context with works by other artists. However, when I talk about how much I love Joel Silver movies of the 80s and 90s, or Bruckheimer’s output in the late 90s to the current day, I’m on firmer ground. Perhaps this is why Shades of Caruso concentrates on those movies: it’s safer to talk about the joy I get from seeing a movie by the Wachowski Siblings than it is to attempt to unpick the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Any list I would make for the past decade would skew heavily towards populist movies, partially because most of the movies I’ve seen were major releases by Western writers and directors, but also because these are the movies that speak directly to me.

It was upon staring at that shame, and the shame I feel for having that shame, that I said bollocks to it and compiled this list. I hereby reject that shame, expel it from my soul, and embrace the movies that filled my soul with joy or heart-ache. The construction of this list is helped by the clear cut-off point in my past: 1999 was the year I moved out of my hometown for the second time and headed to London, where I found enough time and opportunity to attend more movies. As a result my enthusiasm increased, until I had no choice but to start a blog to use as a pressure valve for this energy. I’ve seen hundreds of movies in that time, and so I expect this list to be incomplete and filled with egregious misses, plus some movies have been missed off (Pan’s Labyrinth) or put low on the list (No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood) because I’ve only seen them once. I’ll need to revisit them with a clear head, free of hype, to do them justice.

One more caveat: I’ve not included films from this year. I know, this seems to make the whole process pointless, but I like to have at least a little gap between seeing a movie and putting it in a list this big. The End-Of-Year lists are made with the proviso that I understand how my opinion will change over time, and watching films right up until Dec 31st means I will be cramming in movies even though my opinion of them has yet to settle. Who knows whether time will be kind to these movies or not. I’ve certainly been surprised with how some movies I initially loved have dropped out of my favour, and others that I enjoyed well enough on first viewing are not breaking into the top fifty. For the record, at least three from my forthcoming 2009 list would definitely qualify for inclusion here, but I don’t want to add them now as the year has yet to finish, and I’m hoping two or three more will qualify. Perhaps when I’ve finished compiling my 2009 lists, I will write an addendum explaining where they would go in this list.

And so, here is the first part of my list of the best 106 movies of the period 1999-2008. Why 106? Because I just couldn’t leave the last six movies off without writing a little bit about them, as I enjoyed them greatly and felt they would never in a million years get any list love otherwise. As this post has already run on, I’ll only list the first 16 here, and the next 90 films will be revealed as the week progresses. Yes yes, there are simpler ways of doing this, but anyone who knows me will understand that when there is an easy way and a hard way to do anything, I will ignore both and then do something completely self-indulgent that makes a mockery of my original goal. Just play along. I’ve kept my explanations for why I love these movies as short as I can. I hope I’ve lauded a secret favourite of yours, dear reader, one that has been snubbed by every critic in the land.

Honorary Bad Movie Inclusion — The Room

It is quite simply the worst movie ever made, but its rewatch value, its quotability, and the fearless depiction of the dreadful inner life of its emotionally immature writer and director make it almost infinitely fascinating. Its inclusion here is no reflection of its quality, but of the hold it has over anyone who watches it. It’s a true curio.

106. Avalon

After leaving a screening of Avalon, my viewing companion commented that there is good boring and bad boring, and this was a perfect example of the former. Starkly beautiful and glacially paced, Mamoru Oshii’s ode to the power of gaming predicts a future where our desire to transcend our mundane world will drive us to abandon it.

105. Kung Fu Hustle

What made me love Stephen Chow’s madcap martial arts comedy wasn’t the expertly choreographed actions scenes, great though they were. Neither was it the broad humour, though I enjoyed that too. The best thing about it was how the wacky tone morphed into effective dramatic energy. At first you laugh at the caricatures, but by the final act you fear for their safety.

104. The Mothman Prophecies

Poorly marketed as a bog-standard X-Files-esque alien abduction flick, this dread-soaked thriller is more interested in dramatising our insignificance in the face of supernatural forces that move us around like game pieces. Strong performances and meticulous direction from Mark Pellington help to ground the potentially silly project.

103. Moulin Rouge

At his worst, Baz Luhrmann is a vulgar artiste who has zero impulse control, but when his approach works, it can wrench your heart open. This fearlessly sincere musical is the most successful example of the Luhrman effect. Though many have resisted its garish onslaught, my cynicism melted twenty minutes in and stayed that way.

102. The Rundown (aka Welcome To The Jungle)

What should have been the gateway drug to the paradise that is Loving The Rock instead faltered at the box office, but who cares? For its sheer exuberance and demented asides — not to mention a totally hatstand performance by Christopher Walken — this Midnight Sprint shall be remembered and adored.

101. Solaris

Though Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Stanislav Lem’s SF classic fails to capture the essence of that novel (as does the previous version by Andrei Tarkovsky), the result explores equally interesting philosophical questions. Clooney excels as a bereaved astronaut forced to confront living memories of his dead wife, a celestial manifestation distorted by his yearning and twisted perceptions of reality.

100. Mushishi

Katsuhiro Otomo’s live-action adaptation of Yuki Urushibara’s manga is a curious beast. Though overlong, the tale of Mushi master Ginko’s journey through a polluted and hostile pastoral land is a feast for the eyes. The gloomy atmospherics and cascade of ideas more than make up for any flaws.

99. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Kevin Smith’s low-budget comedies often fail to fly thanks to their self-imposed parochial restrictions. His ambitious and controversial religious satire Dogma was an improvement upon those early movies but this self-lacerating road-movie was the one that really worked, and well enough to finally make me appreciate his scatological shtick.

98. I Heart Huckabees

It achieved an awful notoriety as the movie where director David O. Russell lost his mind on set and bollocked Lily Tomlin, but I Heart Huckabees was also a disorienting blend of philosophy and Dada-esque nonsense, often incomprehensible but almost always entertaining. However, unlike many chaotic cult movies (ahem, Richard Kelly), this actually made sense if you unfocused your brain while watching.

97. Shanghai Knights

Shanghai Noon was fun, and the pairing of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson was more successful than the tiresome team-up of Chan and Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour movies. The London-set sequel was a massive improvement, mostly because helmer David Dobkin was the only US director who seemed willing to spend time with Chan to create fights almost as complex and funny as his classic Hong Kong work.

96. Michael Clayton

Clooney again in full force, this time as a corporate fixer who gets messed around once too often. What could have been a rote corporate thriller instead becomes a fascinating character study, one where terrible decisions are made in good faith, and good decisions happen for the wrong reasons. It also propelled Tilda Swinton into stardom: for this I am eternally grateful.

95. Mulholland Drive

Is it poor form to admit that upon first viewing I didn’t understand anything about David Lynch’s tinsel-town nightmare? All that I knew was that the final scene was almost unwatchably terrifying. Days later, the mood of dread still lingered. That residual horror — and Naomi Watts’ excellent star-making performance — is enough to justify inclusion on this list.

94. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Easy to forget how big an impact this movie had on first release. Even though the final installment of the trilogy ripped all of the fun from the franchise, the first is still a near-perfect swashbuckler. The first appearance of Captain Jack Sparrow is a contender for Best Entrance of the Decade.

93. The Prestige

Initially the blatantly obvious “twist” at the end of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation soured an experience that had been extremely pleasurable. Upon repeated viewings, it becomes apparent that the Transported Man trick is not the point of the movie. Instead, Nolan is more interested in painting a picture of a man driven to unthinkable acts because of his thirst for revenge. Compared to dreadful fallout of that psychological damage, magic is nothing.

92. The Chronicles of Riddick

Many choose to focus on the flaws and hubris of David Twohy’s Space-Conan-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings hybrid, but that occasionally inspired vision – and that amazing twist ending — are enough to justify the entire ambitious, galaxy-hopping project. Another film where the cult grows every year, with the prospect of a continuation of the saga now tantalisingly close.

91. eXistenZ

Arriving between the reality-warping brain food of Alex Proyas’ Dark City and The Wachowski’s Matrix, Cronenberg’s only self-scripted film of the decade was greeted with an initial burst of excitement and then seemed to be forgotten. A shame. It’s his most playful movie since Naked Lunch, skipping gleefully between levels of reality and throwing in traditionally unpleasant body horror with abandon.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Keep checking back to see more updates as the week progresses.

Battlestar Galactica Puts $57 In The Futureswears Box

Posted on April 22, 2008 by admiralneck

Battlestar Galactica has returned with a mixture of very good drama, dreary character soliloquies, and appalling dialogue, most of which is delivered by Dean Stockwell’s Cylon character Cavil, not to mention introducing the most interesting sub-plot yet (a Cylon civil war involving mass robo-genocide), and practically ignoring it in favour of lots of scenes of Cally shouting at Tyrol and Starbuck being super-grumpy. Not the most appealing of televisual prospects (though thank God she’s separated from Apollo so we don’t get week after week of them bickering).

Still, so far it’s been better than season three, though not as good as the earlier seasons. Canyon has pretty much given up on it, and I don’t blame her really, though I find myself in the odd position of giving a lot of its weaknesses a break now that I know there is an end in sight, hoping that what seems to be boring time-wasting is actually pertinent, in much the same way that a lot of Lost doubters have started to give the show a chance to prove itself. More on all of that later (again, if I can find the time and energy), but first, this week’s episode (which ended very strongly and ruthlessly) featured a very dull moment between boring Starbuck and her boring husband/ex-husband, Lee Anders the Cylon, which involved The Hott Angry Sexx. We didn’t see that, of course, but we got some futuristic potty-mouth from Starbuck that totally wrecked the scene.

I’m not fan of space-swears in sci-fi, though I totally understand why it is there. I don’t expect BSG (or any other show) to turn into Deadwood-On-Mars, but inventing new swearwords often falls flat. I was fond of the authorised profanity in Judge Dredd (the comics), but hearing Sylvester Stallone say “Drokk!” in the movie brought home how stupid the idea is. Red Dwarf may fit on my list of Least Favourite Shows for lots of different reasons, but high up is the attempt to make, “Smeg” work as an obscenity. The only thing obscene about Smeg is that their pretty fridges are way too expensive for me to buy. Other than that, it sounds stupid. Perhaps not as bad as that, BSG famously features the fake swear, “Frak!”, standing in for fuck.

To be honest the only show I can think of that got around the problem was Firefly with its Cantonese exclamations, though they often translated into words and phrases as innocuous as, “bullcrap,” “You fink,” and “The explosive diarrhea of an elephant.” The difference is that in Cantonese it sounded cool. Frak does not sound anything like as cool. It’s more like the fake swears you used to get on TV in profanity-thons like Midnight Run or Goodfellas, all “Melonfarmer” and “Freaking”. In fact it makes me cringe just thinking about frak, except when Dwight Schrute says it on The Office. Then it’s perfect.

Until now the word has only appeared sporadically; the odd “frakking” or “frak me” popping up here or there, but this week Starbuck popped out a rare (and regrettable) “You dumb motherfrakker”, which wrecked the scene, before grabbing Anders, pressing him against a wall, and then giving into her urges (as many characters appeared to this week). Very sexxy. And how did she seduce her secretly-Cylon hubbie? By breathlessly saying:

I don’t wanna fight, Sam. I wanna frak. You don’t get it, do you? I’m not the same girl you married. All I wanna do right now is frak, really frak like it’s the end of the world and nothing else matters. So come on, Sam. Make me feel something. I dare you.

Cue vigorous offscreen frakking. I already had trouble handling that stupid fake word, and this sent me over the edge. Instead of making BSG seem edgy by slipping semi-profanities past the censors, it makes this sophisticated and intelligent show sound like a comedy. It doesn’t even have any consistency. Is this the only profanity of the future? Apparently not. They say crap pretty often. So why haven’t they gone all out and futurised all of the swears? As the dialogue in that scene got more and more ridiculous, I imagined Starbuck demanding buttsecks with the order, “Frak me in my promper with your big hott shmazzmer.” It would have been no more ridiculous than what we actually got.

Don’t believe me? Consider this memorable scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, written by former liberal David Mamet, directed for the screen by James Foley, and performed by Al Pacino (with an assist from Canyon’s acting hero, Jude Ciccolella).

Now here’s the BSG version.

You stupid frakking cump. Williamson! I’m talking to you snathead! You just cost me 6,000 cubits. 6,000 cubits, and one Viper. That’s right. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it…promperhole? You frakking snat! Where did you learn your trade, you stupid frakking cump?! You idiot! Whoever told you that you could work with men?! Oh, I’m gonna have your job, snathead. I’m going to Admiral Adama. I’m going to Roslin! I don’t care whose nephew you are…who you know…whose shmazzmer you’re sucking on, you’re going out! I’ll tell you something else, I hope it was you who ripped off the joint, maybe I can tell our friends something that will help them to prove you’re a skinjob. Any man who works here lives by his wits… What you are hired to do, is to help us. Does that seem clear to you? To HELP us. Not to FRAK US UP! To help men who are going out there to earn a living, you fairy. You company man. You want to know the first rule you’d learn if you’d ever spent a day in your life? You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is. You frakking child.

I don’t know. Perhaps in the final episode the use of the made-up word will be justified. Upon finding Earth, the final Cylon (who will obviously be Zach Adama, we have decided), might say “fuck”, and the humans will immediately adopt it. After he’s shown off his signed copy of John Wesley Harding, of course.

Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (Results)

Posted on January 8, 2008 by admiralneck

If you’re wondering why the slight delay in this, it’s not that I’m really crappy with numbers, but that I’ve spent the past two days playing Guitar Hero III (until I got as far as Cherub Rock on Hard and gave up, weeping), Super Mario Galaxy (a masterpiece), and John Woo’s Stranglehold, which is not the best game ever made, but is the best gaming sequel to a legendary action movie masterpiece featuring Chow Yun Fat and cameo appearances by John Woo ever made, and as such is fully deserving of my time. As for the two movies, the scoring is as arbitrary as before, but with them I hope to give a sense of what watching both movies was like. Both movies are glossy and dumb, but only one will end up in my collection of bad movies.

I Know Who Killed Me

Cast: Lindsay Lohan: -7
Neal McDonough: -2
Julia Ormond: 1
Brian Geraghty: -4
Donovan Scott: -9
Paula Marshall: 4
Total: -17

A justifiably crappy score, with the professionals doing their best to keep things afloat while the director fiddles, and the amateurs running around putting even bigger holes in the boat. The filmboat. ::sigh:: Darn metaphors! All that said, bonus points for casting the likeable Paula Marshall in a smaller role. She’s been notoriously bad at getting a job on shows that don’t get cancelled mid-season or earlier, and I’m hoping that turning up in crud like this is the bottom of a curve and now her prospects will improve. Donovan Scott plays the sheriff of Bluetown, and though he’s only in a couple of scenes, he’s appalling, like a benevolent, Santa-like version of the sheriff in The Blair Witch Project 2: Post-Modernism Go Boom. Thank Crom Sivertson and Hammond had no idea what to do with the police, otherwise he would have been in it more.

Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: -4
Coherence: -1
Economical use of flashbacks: -1
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: -6
Subtle use of motifs: -8
Avoidance of deus ex machina: 4

Total: -16

If you see this film, or have seen this film, then you know that that -8 for motifs is more than justified. There’s no need to go on about the colour scheme any more, or the fact that I found it hard to laugh at due to the sleaziness (though the robot bits of Lohan certainly kept us entertained, but I will add that for all the incompetence on show, at least the film had an interesting internal logic (when it eschewed the nonsensical flashbacks). It was a definitely interesting idea, and had been worked out fairly well, at least at the script stage. Can you tell I’m trying to find something good to say about it? Erm, the strip club seemed like it was run fairly efficiently?

Miscellaneous:
Originality: 2
Liveliness: -3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -7
Unique Selling Points: 3
Production values: 3
Total: 3

Finally, some positive numbers! A particularly good one for enthusiasm, because I believe Sivertson thought this was the big ticket, the stepping stone into the big time, and tried very hard to make an impression, throwing in semi-nudity and torture and colour and sex and look at me look at me I’m making a big movie bigger than anything Lucky McKee ever did! Unfortunately, it’s crap. Still, again I have to take my hat off for the surprising payoff to the mystery.

I Know Who Killed Me overall total = -30

While Sivertson has managed to create a slasher thriller that has some kind of ambition, the sheer cynicism of it wrecks the project entirely. Who knows if Hammond’s script could have been salvaged if given to someone who knows how to hold back on the symbolism, not to mention thinking twice about casting someone whose real life does not bear up well to comparisons with the main character’s life. I just couldn’t get past the sleaziness of the project; casting Lohan might have seemed like a great idea at the time, but in retrospect it’s as if Sivertson and his cohorts were picking the last bits of dignity from the corpse of Lohan’s career. As I said before, I really do hope this is not the case, and she can make a comeback. And not wear blue. With her pale skin, it really isn’t her colour.

D-War

Cast: Jason Behr: -7
Amanda Brooks: -8
Robert Forster: 2
Chris Mulkey: -4
Craig Robinson: 1
Michael Shamus Wiles: -5
Total: -21

Dear God, where to begin? Only Craig Robinson and Robert Forster stand out at all here, and even then it’s a close call. Forster in particular is asked to do some pretty silly things (meditating in mid-air, comedically faking a heart attack, pretending to be a martial-arts wizard), and phones it in pretty badly. Behr and Brooks, however, don’t even manage that. Behr has zero charisma, and Brooks looks somnabulent, angry, frustrated, and disgusted with herself for getting the part. It’s a monumentally feeble performance. I guess she has very little to work with, and might have been directed to act like someone who had just woken up whenever Shim said action, but I don’t see why. As for Michael Shamus Wiles as Evil General, he was passably evil, in a pantomimey way. He was also okay at pretending to be in charge of a bunch of people. However, if the antagonist of your film is a big serpent, you really need to have a interesting human character to boo and hiss at, but he had no chemistry. You know, this film is so false and so empty it seems weird to judge it in this way. Did the actors hit their marks? I guess so. Did they fluff their lines? Not on the takes they used. That’s as much as you could hope for.

Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: 8
Coherence: -7
Economical use of flashbacks: -5
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: 6
Subtle use of motifs: 0
Avoidance of deus ex machina: -9

Total = -7

I think it was fairly obvious from the fact that I wrote twice as much about this film that I enjoyed it much more than I Know Who Killed Me. I laughed from beginning to end, mostly because I couldn’t believe how inept it was. In a normal studio situation surely someone would have realised that the script was unusable, and have other writers come in. Here Shim was fully in charge with no oversight, and the result has to be seen to be believed. Robert McKee’s theories of storytelling annoy as many people as they delight, but this is proof that he’s onto something. Shim breaks almost all of McKee’s rules, not because he has mastered them, but because he has no idea what they are, and has merely cobbled together bits from other films and stuck them together in some kind of order that resembles the movies he’s stolen them from. As much as any writer should watch Chinatown or Casablanca (and my personal choice, Midnight Run), they should also see something like this, because it’s a total failure, primarily because of the non-plot. Still, the big action scenes, the wow moments he built everything around, are wonderful. I may have hated most of the plotting and acting, but when a pilot pulled out a gun and started shooting at the dragon hanging off the side of his helicopter, I went a little crazy with excitement. Only some poor effects and filming ruin it, but still, for a dragon fan, it’s the nuts.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: 0
Liveliness: 3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -6
Unique Selling Points: 4
Production values: 6
Total = 12

For all of his ineptitude, Shim (seen here impersonating Ricky Gervais) knows how to cover his back with some actual talent. He hired Bruckheimer/Bay regular Steve Jablonsky to handle the soundtrack, and Mark Mangini to work on sound design (he did some great work on The Mist this year, in a monster movie two-fer). They do good work here, and it definitely helps Shim create the illusion that he knows what he’s doing, but even a little attention to what’s going on shows him up as a chancer. His previous movie, Yonggary, was such a catastrophic flop and disaster (after he promised to turn the Korean film industry into a powerhouse to rival Hollywood) that he had to get it right this time. Seems he figured he could do that by filming in L.A. with an American crew, which is a hell of a screw-you to Korean filmmakers. Anyone who has seen recent Korean movies knows there are some incredibly talented people there, and Shim should have been alerted to the fact that even when you take a holiday, you can’t take a holiday from yourself. Or something. What I’m trying to say is, Hyung-Rae Shim, your movies are always going to be shit until you fire yourself. Don’t blame the caterers. We can tell who messed up.

D-War overall total = -16

So there you go. I Know Who Killed Me gets the lowest score, so can be safely filed in the Awful Bad Movie file. It’s silly, it’s pretentious, it’s dreary, and it features some horrible performances from people who have a horrible aura of desperation around them that would sour you on the movie even if it wasn’t so nasty. D-War, on the other hand, is a big silly disaster, with film-student errors, egregious plotholes, Saturday-morning-serial acting, and a huge FX blowout featuring monsters fighting the military. If you watch it in the wrong frame of mind you might think I’m mad for recommending it, but watch it with a bunch of friends knowing full well you’re going to be watching a big turd of a movie, and it’s up there with Dreamcatcher and Albert Pyun’s Ticker. I hated it so much I loved it. And now, I’m going to see if I can find an Evil General action figure online. Wish me luck!

CSI: Miami Watch – "Backstabbers"

Posted on October 27, 2007 by admiralneck

Remember the awesome episode where H blew up a truck bound for the nuclear power plant at Turkey Point? We sure do. Canyon recapped that one, with the silly kidnapping plot that turned into a really really bad episode of 24. Seems we’re not done with that story yet. You may recall that H apprehended the glamorous Sonya, evil terrorist mastermind with a smirk and a flirty gleam in her eye. Obviously that outrageous sexual tension between her and the Orange Pimpernel worked so well she got dragged back to continue her nefarious schemes. Of course, we have to get her trial out of the way first. It’s held in a cathedral-like courtroom, and it was this outrageous monument to justice that started me thinking; is H the modern day Judge Dredd, except he’s not just Judge, Jury and Executioner, but Forensics Expert and Bomb Disposal Hot Shot as well?

As soon as H gets onto the stand, we get a flashback of him blowing up the truck, cutting back and forth to H and Sonya giving each other sexy stares. The prosecutor asks H to explain what Sonya said to him at the end of that episode, and hilariously H sits mute while her voice is looped in. Yet another disastrous directorial decision in this most inept of shows. At this point we find out that she’s not working for al-Qaeda. Instead she’s allied with al-Qadir, who I assume is al-Qaeda’s Floridian cousin.

All of that is great, but sadly she’s in the dock on the far more interesting charge of kidnapping the Kinkella family and extorting them. Screw all that blowing up a nuclear reactor and irradiating Florida nonsense, we want justice for the Kinkellas! Sonya’s weasel lawyer brings this up after H has gone to the trouble of damning her by associating her with the sabotage plot, but he still manages to get at her reputation by continually pointing out that she only gave out information in order to reduce her sentence, even when the weasel lawyer goes all, “Objection!” on his ass. It’s very Phoenix Wright. He metaphorically dances with the lawyer for a while, but against H, the lawyer has no chance. Instead of dropping charges, the judge sets her bail at $1m. Naturally, this is paid instantly. At this point I figured that the terrorists really do make a lot of money from sales of illegal DVDs and ciggies, but there will be a shocking twist later on. No, seriously. It is shocking. Shockingly stupid.

Seriously, H and Sonya can’t stop staring at each other throughout this entire scene. She looks only at him, and wears this sexxy expression through the whole thing.

H, she’s either horny or hungry, and who knows how al-Qadir rolls. Anyway, outside the cathedracourt, Peter Kinkella is super-pissed about her bail release, and angrily confronts H, who promises they will deal with Sonya eventually. Not good enough! Kinkella storms off, leaving H free to follow Sonya and her lawyer to his car, where they simmer at each other a little more. Suddenly, before they can go from staring to pouting and blowing kisses, OMG! Another car comes out of nowhere and shoots the lawyer! H is shocked to the core, and even goes so far as to make the effort to change his expression from self-satisfied to horrified, which is always a big moment in CSI: Miami history.

Sonya takes to opportunity to leap into the lawyer’s car and speed away, and H comes out shooting, as usual. He gets off a few shots at both the assassin car and Sonya’s car, but the latter time he uses incendiary bullets or something. Like Judge Dredd! See? He’d make a great Judge Dredd. Plus, the helmet covers his face and offers some protection against that evil sun.

As a result there is no payoff line prior to credits, just a shot of him looking piiiiiiissed. We were more pissed than him, actually. We live for this quipping shit, if you can call it that. Still, once the credits have finished yelling at us, we do get an awesome shot of H reflected in a bullet casing. It’s rare to see H deign to do any actual detective work, so it’s a big deal, but then in the next scene he’s running the plates of the shooter’s car! This must mean he’s taking the case personally! Excellent. It’s always great when he gets all moody. Moodier. Whatever.

H traces the car to a kid called Craig Edwards, and he is brought in. During the intense interrogation scene, he tries to come up with some lame excuse that his friends took his car, but after a single tough line from H, he starts ranting about how corrupt the legal system and the US are. Doesn’t he know who he is talking to? He’s talking to Justice Incarnate! This is the literal red rag to the literal bull. Not literally, though. A little bit of gunshot residue is found on him, and immediately he starts ranting about how happy he is the lawyer is dead. Lawyers and US law suck! Then, two seconds later, his own lawyer appears and he’s all over him. I love that the show thinks that this shows up the hypocrisy of the terrorists. They hate our freedoms until they need them. Bastards! Where’s Gitmo when you need it?

Anyway, the lawyer is a sleazebag in a pink shirt and cheap leather jacket, so he must be one of those liberals who love abortion and Castro! On this show? SHOOT HIM, H! Don’t let that bastard live! H is amused by Craig’s hypocrisy. As are we. And probably Bill O’Reilly and that weasel Hannity and some other right-wing douchebags, if they’re watching this and not listening to the ever-more deranged shrieks of the famous Lesser-Brained Coulter Vulture. I guess after all of these comments I don’t need to reiterate how right-wing this show is. Or how clumsily written.

Meanwhile, Calleigh and Wolfe are en route to Sonya’s car, which has been found somewhere with a guy in it. He’s called Hector Ramirez, and is played by Rick Gonzalez, currently to be seen as bird-hating Ben on Reaper! Awesome! He’s great, and is actually the first guest actor on this show to exhibit some inner life. Also at the crime scene is the documentarian, Doyle, who has been assigned to follow Wolfe around in episodes passim, thus setting up the most memorable moment of the episode later on. Wolfe uses super-detectivity to find a corpse in the boot of the car. Things are looking bad for Ben. Sorry. Hector. He’s immediately arrested, and slowly the scene is resolved under the oppressive orange sky. Yes, this scene features the most out of control orange filter yet seen in this show, and that’s saying a lot. It’s as if someone spilled Lucozade on the lens and didn’t clean it off before it dried.

Back at the lab, Boa Vista pays a visit to Alexx, performing an autopsy on the dead lawyer. They realise the bullet (or, as Boa Vista calls it in a rare moment of professionalism, the “projectile”) is not there. As usual, no one noticed the guy has two enormous holes in his neck, which would suggest one of them is an exit wound. What else could it be, gills? Couldn’t they have figured that out at the crime scene and sent someone to look for it then instead of doing it hours later? God! Anyway, H and Natalia return to the crime scene and while he stands around looking as cool as an orange cucumber, Natalia finds the bullet handily stuck in a tree just a few feet away from where the lawyer was standing, thus saving the show time and money setting up a big scene with them scouring the area. Brilliant. They also realise that the shot was not aimed at the lawyer, but was meant for Sonya. The assassin in the killer car missed, and the “projectile” ricocheted off a metal pole. These al-Qadir assassins suck, man. At least at drive-bys.

Back at the morgue, Calleigh and Alexx confer about the body in the trunk. Seems he is called Gabriel Cervantes, and was “28 years young”, as Alexx intones, pompously. This guy’s daughter is sitting nearby, and in a weird change of pace, Calleigh goes over to patronise her and make her a promise she cannot keep. For at least 75% of the first three seasons, H would have a scene where he creepily talks down to some orphaned kid and promises to bring the killer of his/her father/mother to justice, but for some reason this week the responsibility falls to Calleigh. She is slowly starting to replace H, as her horrid season 5 transformation into a snotty judgemental scumbag has shown.

Of course, the kid saw the killer stab her father to death, and is terrified that they will get at her if she testifies. Naturally Calleigh promises her that will not happen, which is really ill-advised. While she makes that terrible mistake, H deduces that Sonya’s lawyer has no phone on his body, which means Sonya must have picked it up. Also, Delko reveals that Craig didn’t shoot Sonya, even though he’s covered in gunshot residue (I can’t remember why this is. Something to do with cutting-edge science, I’ll wager), and is taking the fall to lead the team away from the real killer, who is still out there looking for Sonya. That duplicitous America-hating bastard! H calls Sonya on the lawyer’s phone, and desperately begs her to give herself up so he can save her from herself. Of course, because she is a criminal mastermind, she reckons her chances of survival are good, and so she hangs up. Rude! Oh, and I loved this shot. This is how H dials a phone. He even has a trademarkable method of making a call. That is acting genius.

Wolfe and Documentary Doyle interrogate Hector, and he confesses to carjacking Sonya and being a sleazy dick who keeps winking into the camera, but denies the murder of Gabriel. He’s obviously lying, and Wolfe reckons there will be evidence on his clothes (this is the standard bit of detective work done on this show. If it’s not looking for rock dust, it’s spraying clothes for blood stains).

Before we get to that memorable scene, H and Delko go to the scene of the carjacking, and find a car rental place from which Sonya probably got another vehicle after losing the lawyer’s car. She bought an Escalade with tinted windows and no GPS, which doesn’t seem suspicious at all. H takes a security tape from camera on the lot to look at later. Meanwhile, Wolfe is showing off to Doyle, doing a Luminol test on Hector’s jacket, but his usual amount of spraying doesn’t show up on camera, so upon Doyle’s prompting he has to go nuts and practically empty a bottle on it. This, of course, destroys all the DNA, so the evidence is now useless. As usual, this is a purely mechanical way to stretch the episode out in length and to create some silly drama for Calleigh, as the kid will now have to testify, thank to the loss of their conclusive evidence. The only thing I like about this plot development is that Valera gets to chide Wolfe in front of the camera, and the arrogant little jerk gets to look stupid. Yay Valera!

Calleigh gives him a little grief, but really not nearly enough. How unprofessional does a Miami CSI have to be before they get in trouble? The only person in the show who ever got properly punished for not being professional was poor Speedle, who was punished by God by being killed in a gun fight. That showed him. Turns out Gabriel’s corpse has tattoos over his chest, and Tripp gets to do more than just spout exposition to H by spouting exposition to Alexx and Calleigh. He reveals that one of the tattoos represents his retirement from gang life. Great! Except in gang culture that’s a suicide statement, and therefore another gang member would then have to kill him. Harsh.

This leads Calleigh to gang boss Rulon Domingo, a hard ass currently in jail. In possibly the most preposterous scene of the week (or even season), Calleigh goes to see if he ordered a hit. Of course he tells her there is no way he’s going to cooperate, because, you know, he’s a hardass. Calleigh reasons that because he has 3 life sentences and nothing to lose, he should reveal it. So without any further prompting or bargaining he does. WHAT? This is beyond ridiculous. Calleigh’s argument is that he’s already in for life, what’s another count of murder? WHAT? He then arrogantly says she should tell Hector he made his bones by killing Gabriel, and she says, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you tell him yourself.” Stupid line, but the best thing is Rulon’s response, which is like, “Oh man, I never thought of that!” Dumbest. Gang boss. Ever. No wonder he’s in jail. What did he think was going to happen? GAH! This could very well be the stupidest moment in CSI: Miami history. I don’t think I need to tell you there is a lot of competition.

Tech hero Cooper has been hard at work tracking Sonya’s phone, and they find the signal coming from a warehouse. Unhappily for our heroes, so has a cadre of evil al-Qadir hitmen! H and Tripp and a bunch of cops rush to the scene, but the swarthy Middle Eastern bad guys are already there. Cue vaguely exotic music with wailing and sitars or something. Pretty offensive stuff, but then the only contact the showrunners have with Muslims is casting them as terrorists, so it’s not surprising. Turns out, Sonya is a smart cookie. She left the phone as a trap, so the law and the terrorists would get into a shootout. And they do! Bullets whizz, but of course it’s H who gets first blood, shooting a terrorist to shit while destroying a handy sheet of glass. Super-dramatic!

Then Tripp blows someone away too. Good week for Tripp. the other cops just run around a bit. How will this terrifying bloodbath get resolved? H wings another guy and they all surrender. Seriously. It’s awesome. Then we get a cool shot of H looking fearsome, standing over the wounded terrorist with the enormous warehouse behind him. The perp is reaching for his gun, and upon seeing that he simply growls, “Wrong.” See what I mean about Judge Dredd? That movie needs to be remade, stat.

H interrogates the guy while he’s on the floor and threatens to kill him. He’s so bad ass this week. Turns out the terrorists now think Sonya is a narc, but no, you silly bad guy, she really is an evil terrorist. Is he pissed because she broke some terrorist code? You’re bad guys! All of this “honour amongst thieves” stuff is just so much bunkum. Or are you just pissed because she outsmarted you, you misogynist asshole? Tripp’s response to this accusation of her being in cahoots with his fellow cops is great. “Fat chance!” Yes, because she seems to be pretty smart. She’d never gonna get a job in Miami Dade law enforcement. They only employ righteous idiots.

Such as Wolfe, who tells Calleigh that due to his ridiculous mistake the kid has to testify, and she’s understandably horrified. Wolfe really times his screw-ups to maximise the drama in the B-plot, doesn’t he. Video expert Cooper has managed to get the car rental security tape running (tough job, eh Cooper?), and OMG Hector isn’t just a carjacker with a body to hide; he’s in on it with the evil and brainy Sonya! The gang is in league with al-Qadir! Turns out that a bit of scientific deductive work reveals that his shirt may not have DNA on it any more, but it does have plastic explosive residue on it. He worked on the truck that was going to blow up the power plant in the previous episode! Ridiculous. I mean, exciting!

H interrogates Hector, and his excuse is that it was good money, ignoring the fact that if the plan had gone ahead he would only have been able to spend the money on irradiated churros. Sadly he doesn’t know where Sonya is. H threatens him with the line, “Under the PATRIOT Act this is your last hour of freedom. What do you want to do?” Only on CSI: Miami (and 24) is the Patriot Act seen as a good thing. Still, it works. It scares Hector into considering confessing, and so he asks for a deal. Great! Except H says no. Probably because he doesn’t deal with terrorists. Good work sticking to your ideals, H, but now what are you going to do?

Time to get the B-plot out of the way. Calleigh tells the orphaned little girl that the man who killed her father is going away, though she doesn’t tell her it’s on a charge of sedition, not murder. Would the kid care? Doesn’t matter. Time to wrap this shit up. H does something unusual; lab work! Usually he just orders the others around and then materialises behind them when they’re finished, but either this week he’s taking it personally, or he doesn’t trust his team to get it right. After Wolfe’s mistake, he probably has a point. Of course, it’s also possible he just can’t wait to see her sexxy smouldering sex face again. He tests some of the guns found during the warehouse shootout, and one of them has blood on the slide. Someone who has never fired a gun before got his hand caught in the slide. It has a technical name; a slide bite. This is not the first time they’ve done this. Who was the drive-by assassin? The lawyer! He’s in so deep with al-Qadir that now he’s shooting people for them. I know tuition fees can leave you in debt for a long time, but jeez, there’s a line you don’t cross, dude.

H is so pissed about this he snarls, “Book these two animals!”, and the lawyer and the al-Qadir guy he winged get dragged off. With that resolved, our heroes resume the search for Sonya, and finally think to see who posted bail for her. Who did they think it was, Moscone Bail Bonds? Actually, that would be awesome.

That digression doesn’t disguise my annoyance with this revelation. Sure, it’s another stupid artificial way to stretch out the plot, but this really does make the team look like a bunch of chumps. Why didn’t they think to check this earlier? It’s a pretty big deal, right? Perhaps there’s a law against it, but seeing as how H is throwing the PATRIOT Act around like a really cool Top Trumps card, you’d think they’d just go for it. But I, again, digress. Turns out the bail was provided by Peter Kinkella, the guy whose family was kidnapped on her say so in the previous episode. He’s used his yacht as collateral, so H goes to the marina.

Kinkella has a brilliant and devious plan to kill Sonya for being so evil, and he’s trapped her by promising her a trip in his boat. Which is surely under the control of the Miami Dade justice system, right? Man, this is making my head hurt with its relentless stupidity. What’s worse is she has gone along with this, which means she’s either less smart than we thought, or way more cunning. I hope it’s the latter. H needs a new arch-enemy. He’s killed all of the others.

H confronts Kinkella and tries to talk him out of murdering Sonya, who is standing nearby, listening with a smug and sexxy look on her face. If she’s there listening, I have a feeling this plan is pretty much doomed. Kinkella says, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose your family?” which give H the chance to look pained. He talks Kinkella out of killing Sonya (which is dumb for the reasons listed above), and he walks away, leaving the yacht for Sonya to use. I’m not even going to point out how stupid that is. After a bit of sexxy banter with H she just gets in the boat and sails off, though promising to honour the terms of her bail by not leaving Miami waters. She’s all gloaty, but H is half-pissed, half-concerned for her safety, what with al-Qadir determined to kill her. This is why I love H; he’s a real chivalrous hero, something that Judge Dredd isn’t. Maybe I was wrong all along. The episode ends with her sails off into the really orange distance. H puts his glasses on, and walks away. Until the next time, Sonya. Until the next time.

“Backstabbers” Stats:

Horatio’s Send-Off Into Credits: None. A shocking anomaly in the history of the show. It left the entire episode spinning in chaos without it. Let’s hope it never happens again.

Ripped-Off Plot of the Week: This week they just ripped the story out of today’s headlines. PATRIOT Act, terrorism, shootouts, Cuban gangs doing grunt work for the notorious al-Qadir; this is life in the 21st century people, except life isn’t predominantly orange.

Natalia’s Awful Blouse of the Week: Natalia surprised us greatly with a tasteful cardigan, albeit a low-cut one. No bad blouse for us?

Wrong! Hector stole one from her wardrobe, somehow. What the hell is this monstrosity?

Perhaps the rule of the show isn’t that Natalia must wear a horrible blouse, but that at least one person has to wear a horrible blouse and her name kept getting picked out of the hat. This week, he lost.

Number of Caruso Two-Steps: About seven. By the end of the episode he was really packing them in.

Best splitscreen of the week: There was more complicated stuff, but this was gratifyingly symmetrical.

It is as if they are two sides of something that has two sides. Bread? It’s as if they are two sides of the same slice of bread. H’s side is buttered. No wait, that doesn’t make sense.

Most Patronising Dialogue From Horatio:
Craig: You think someone’s going to get a fair shake in the court system you’re kidding yourself. Your whole legal system’s corrupt, just like your country.
H: Son, aren’t you from Pensacola?

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Midnight Run