Oscar Roundup: The Artist

The Artist.  So...that happened.  I'm going to say flat out that I don't understand why so many people are so excited about this movie.  I thought it was kind of interesting, and sort of a fun experiment, but overall?  I was honestly pretty bored.  It was saved a bit for me by the absolutely charming acting jobs by Berenice Bejo and Jean Dujardin, but when I left the theater I wasn't impressed.

This is short because I don't have a lot to say (SEE WHAT I DID THERE), but I'm pretty mystified by everyone going nuts over this movie.  (To say nothing of how baffled I am that this experiment in silent film earned a Best Original Screenplay nomination.)  I guess my big issue is that yes, it was kind of interesting to watch a silent film in this day and age, but I didn't get why it was done this way?  I don't feel that having The Artist be silent and in black and white added anything to my experience watching it.  Hugo, the other love letter to film that's collecting accolades this year, is also about the history of film - but it's dynamic, exciting, and beautiful.  Which are not adjectives I would have used to describe The Artist.

Oscar Roundup: The Help

It's that time of year that falls between the Oscar nominations being announced, and the telecast airing - that time of year when I frantically scramble to try and see the nominees I haven't had the chance to yet.  This year I have a lot of ground to cover, partially due to my own delinquency in seeing movies and partially due to the seemingly randomness of the nominations.  Of the nine best picture noms, I've already seen Moneyball and Hugo; yesterday, I watched The Help.

I read the book last month because I wanted to be part of the discussion.  I've heard a lot of the controversy and strong feelings surrounding this book (and subsequent movie), and I always like being included.  Having read it, I can say that I both enjoyed it and understand why people are complaining about it.  It's a very self-serving story, and sags a little under the weight of the author's guilt - but it's also a strong story about racial relationships (obviously) and the relationships women form between themselves...and how those get warped and break down when the women involved have very little power to affect their own lives. 

The movie is similar, but gets an extraordinary boost from the actresses.  Every performance is wonderful, from Emma Stone's squeaky wheel Skeeter straining against the claustrophobic confines of her home to Viola Davis' worn down, worn out, compassionate housemaid who continues to give even after she's got nothing left to offer.  The surprising note here was Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays the villain; her Hilly Holbrook is a contemptible character who schemes and back-stabs and plays with the tiny amount of power that society has given her...and ultimately makes you feel for even her, when she gets force-fed some badly needed truth for, you realize, probably the first time in her life.  Davis gives the best performance, but she's the star of the media at the moment so I won't repeat what everyone else is doing - suffice to say, she's as brilliant as people are saying. 

The strength of the performances means that even the bits of the story you want to side-eye (and while I enjoyed the movie, there are a lot of them) are full of emotional honesty and weight.  Getting the story in visual form also helps alleviate the problems the book has with voice.  That is, while I was reading it I was always aware that no matter which character was speaking, I was reading narration that had been written by a white person and thus was subject to white privilege and experience.  Watching it play out on screen means that I don't have that white person narrator between me and Aibileen or me and Minny - it's just their experience.  Clearly there's still the problem of the story's origins, I'm just saying that this mediates that a bit.

Oscar predictions: I haven't seen The Iron Lady, so I can't weigh in on Meryl Streep's performance, but if Viola Davis gets Best Actress she'll definitely have earned it.  And despite having two noms in the Best Supporting Actress category, I hope Jessica Chastain doesn't split the vote enough to take the award away from Octavia Spencer.  Her impeccable comedic timing and sass made for some of the best moments in the film.

I don't think this one has a real shot at Best Picture, and honestly, having seen Hugo I would pick the Scorsese love-letter to film over this one.  But I'm glad it was recognized.

2011 In Review

I don't really have a top ten list of films for 2011 because I don't feel like I saw a complete sample of things that came out - I missed A LOT of movies that I wanted to see.  But several things did come out that, if I had a top ten list, would most likely have made the cut:

X-Men: First Class and Captain America, both two of the finest super hero movies the genre has turned out since, well, ever.

Drive, which won't get nearly as much awards press as I want it to.

Hugo, which I liked a whole lot more than I expected to, due to an unfortunately misleading trailer.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a movie which manages to be more exciting than both the original source material and the first adaptation.

Margin Call, which I tried to write about but had difficulties I can't really articulate; it's a wonderfully sharp piece of writing and acting that I maybe didn't really understand completely?  There's a lot of financial business that I didn't get, but it's a testament to the power of the actors that it didn't matter.  Check it out if you get the chance - I don't understand how it didn't get a wider release, with the surplus of powerhouse names in it (Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Bradley Cooper, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany).

Maybe Moneyball?  I didn't write about this one, either, because I have a problematic relationship with it.  I want to recognize the wonderful writing and excellent performances (especially by Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman), but...it didn't resonate with me the same way it seems to have with the rest of the world.  I just didn't feel like there was enough of a story to fill the whole time slot - all the bits about Pitt's family life felt like padding to me, and didn't really add anything in terms of emotional development.  I wish it had been a really tightly-focused 60 minute film, concentrating on the baseball aspects of Pitt's character's life rather than a weakly-written relationship with a daughter I didn't care about.  The fascinating moments of this movie are the negotiations and the game itself, not the private lives of the characters.

If I get the chance to see more 2011 films before the end of January, I'll do a list for you guys.  Otherwise, what's above is pretty much my greatest hits of things I actually saw.

My biggest hope for 2012 in terms of film is simple: MORE.  ANIMATED.  MOVIES.  Is it just me, or was 2011 COMPLETELY LACKING in good animation?  I'm not sure I realized it until I watched the Golden Globes on Sunday, but to follow 2010, a year which gave us Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, and Tangled with a spat of sequels and poorly reviewed items that disappeared almost as soon as they hit theaters seems...sad.  I hope Pixar delivers with BRAVE, is all I'm saying.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

At this point you've probably at least heard about David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, if not seen or read it for yourself.  I don't honestly have anything new to say about the film itself in a reviewer's capacity - it's really good, and has been adequately covered by the professionals.  But I do want to weigh in on the film's cornerstone, Rooney Mara's portrayal of the enigmatic Lisbeth Salander.

In an article titled "Girls on Film: Softening and Sexualizing Lisbeth Salander," the author, Monika Batyzel, claims that Fincher has essentially removed the teeth from Salander; that because of American film tropes, she is a softer, less effective character than in either Larsson's original text or than Noomi Rapace's portrayal in the Swedish adaptation.  I disagree - I think that Mara's Salander is more true to the text than Rapace's, and I found it to be a much more interesting and powerful performance.  I also disagreed when everyone was claiming that the poster with Mara naked on it devalued Salander; read my opinion on that (which informs this one) here.


(Mild spoilers follow.)


Batyzel observes that "Fincher removes the suffocating, repetitive sense that Lisbeth is prey. Bjurman starts off warm and seemingly logical. In comparison, Lisbeth appears like a rude, antisocial child spurning honest help. Mara’s version snarls before he gives her reason to."  Here Batyzel and I disagree because we read the first scene between Salander and Bjurman very differently.  Maybe it was because I knew what was coming, but I found Yorick van Wageningen quietly menacing; his soft, slow way of speaking is patronizing and controlling.  And Salander is a character who has learned from an early age that the unfamiliar is nearly always dangerous, and unfamiliar men especially so.  It is appropriate that she reacts this way from the start because Bjurman is an unknown.  She has no reason to be nice to him.  (She reacts similarly when Blomkvist pays his first visit to her, hiding a tazer in the waistband of her pants.)  The "suffocating, repetitive sense that Lisbeth is prey" is saturated in every aspect of Mara's being: unlike Rapace, she shrinks and skulks around, makes hardly any eye contact, and only accedes to being touched when she initiates it (at which point she becomes ferociously dominant, keeping control over the situation).

I happen to think that Fincher and Mara's Salander is a closer match to the original literary character than Rapace's portrayal.  In the books, she is described as childlike rather than boyish, genderless more than anything else.  Her hardness comes from that deceptive delicacy - Rapace is literally all ropy muscle and menacing stares, but I find Mara's fragility and her frustrating refusal to meet the eye of the camera more emblematic of Salander.

Lisbeth Salander is already a sexualized character.  Larsson is never shy about showing that - she has a lot of sex with various partners, and treats it in a very matter-of-fact manner; she's just as brusque about it in the book as she is in Fincher's film when she comes in Blomkvist's room and strips off her pants.  Perhaps the biggest indication that she is not as alienated from her body as Batyzel wants to think comes in the second book, when she decides she likes the fake boobs she's been wearing so much that she gets implants.  Her relationship to her body may be occasionally problematic, but she's certainly not afraid of it, and is aware of her appearance and appeal to others.

The last thing in Batyzel's article I want to address is this: "In a pivotal moment in the book, Lisbeth says: “I’m going to take him” and runs off as Blomkvist tries “to shout to her to wait.” In Fincher’s film, she asks him for permission, and only acts with his blessing. Perhaps we can accept the changes in how Mara presents Salander. But it’s unacceptable to take a woman made into a phenomenon because of her solitary strength and particular moral compass and drive, and turn her into a romantic girl saved and guided by a man."  Mara delivers this line (a simple "May I?" with a jab of her chin towards Stellan Skarsgard's retreating figure) in such a wry fashion that it's almost comical; she's deferring to the fact that technically Blomkvist hired her and thus defines the parameters of what her job entails, but there's no submission in her tone.  And let's not forget that this comes immediately after she herself saves Blomkvist with an incredibly satisfying golf club to Skargard's jaw.  She's no waif that needs saving; if anything, she's checking that Blomkvist is going to be alright left by himself after she goes after the villain.

A Reaffirmation on why I love movies

I love movies.

I love them because they're transportive, because they're sentimental, because they're exciting.  I love them because they tell you so much about the people who make them.  I love them because I can watch the same one, over and over, and continue to get something back from it.  I love how they move me.  I love everything about them.

And apparently so does Martin Scorsese.

Hugo is a giant love letter to cinema.  Affection saturates every frame.  Set against the lush backdrop of Paris in winter, there is not a moment of this film that fails to remind you how powerful movies are and how deeply they resonate with people.  It starts as a mystery: Hugo, an achingly young boy who lives orphaned in the walls of a train station taking care of the clocks, is trying to fix a small automaton, a project originally started by his father.  Fixing the automaton is how Hugo stays connected to his father; he is convinced that, once functional, the writing machine will reveal a hidden message from the deceased Monsieur Cabret.

To fix the machine Hugo steals bits of clockwork from George (Ben Kingsley), who owns a toy shop in the train station; his god-daughter is Isabelle, enchanted with the idea of the great adventure and loquacious from devouring every book she can get her hands on.  She meets Hugo when he's caught by George and has his notebook (full of mechanical sketches done by his father) taken from him by the older man.  Working together, Hugo and Isabelle begin to discover that the automaton is more than it seems and may help George re-discover his purpose in life.  (I won't tell you who George is, if you're trying to preserve the surprise, although IMDB has his full name listed.  If you're interested in the real person Kingsley is portraying, click here.)

I'm not the first person to use the phrase "love letter to film" in description of Hugo, and I use it now because it's the only phrase I can think of that encompasses the beauty and poetry of this film.  Scorsese gives us a symphony of light and clockwork, punctuated by gusts of steam from passing trains and the snowy streets of Paris.  Visually this movie is stunning: the train station is all warm, golden light, framed by the faces of clocks and ornate iron grates.  Paris is blue and white winter, with the lights of the city (and especially the Eiffel Tower) picked out like stars in the sweeping shots of the city.

Asa Butterfield as our titular hero has huge blue eyes that break your heart in nearly every shot.  He and Chloe Moretz (as Isabelle) are the focus of the film, and they do an excellent job of the heavy lifting.  I'm always ready to simply accept the job that child actors do in films, and when a young person comes along who can actually carry his scenes next to a veteran like Kingsley I'm properly impressed; both Butterfield and Moretz pull their roles off beautifully.  Moretz should start winning awards any day now, if she continues doing this well.

It was interesting to me that Scorsese chose to do a movie that's essentially an ode to silent film and the history of film in 3D; I understand now, I think.  We get scenes from some of the earliest films made, and to think about how far the film industry has progressed since those first efforts is really breathtaking.  About 98% of the time I think 3D is poorly done and completely unnecessary; here, it's beautiful and thought-provoking.  The early filmmakers were inventing the wheel that Hollywood keeps trying to re-imagine, and every once in a while a film comes along that shows you not only a new way to build that whee, but a whole new purpose for it you could never have imagined.  Hugo is this kind of movie.

Go see it.  You won't be disappointed, I promise.

Horror Movies I Secretly Kind Of Like

In the spirit of the impending holiday, I thought I might do another top ten list.  Everyone likes lists, right?

Despite my almost pathological aversion to horror movies, I have managed to see a handful in my movie-loving life.  I present to you: The Top Ten Horror Movies I Could Bring Myself To Watch, And Also Kind Of Really Liked (But Don't Tell Anyone).  These are in alphabetical order, rather than ranked in any sort of fashion.

American Psycho

I've heard mixed reviews about the book, but this film is phenomenal.  Christian Bale is just so GOOD in this role: you feel like you're being personally invited by Patrick Bateman to watch his mental unraveling, and as the things he does escalate up the horror scale Bale manages to preserve that smooth, shiny edge which makes the whole film surreal in addition to terrifying.  Bateman's shark-toothed grin will haunt you while you ponder the movie's messages of social emptiness (preferably while listening to Huey Lewis and the News).

Cthulhu (2007)

NIGHTMARES, you guys. Legitimate nightmares, made all the more insidious by the fact that while I was watching this one I wasn't all that scared.  In this little indie jewel, a history professor returns to his birthplace in a little seaside town in Oregon for a funeral, and discovers that his family (and the whole town) is deeply involved in an Elder Gods cult.  The movie is filmed in a very amateur, hand-held camera style, but it adds to the creepy atmosphere.  Dan Gildark, the director, is sparing with his jumpy moments and horror images, which makes them all the more effective - the film's stark style will give you chills during the last beach scene.

The Dark Crystal

More frightening than Labyrinth and Willow rolled into one, if you ask me (that scene were the witch turns everyone into pigs?  Scared the HELL out of me as a child).  The lack of human faces makes the dark fantasy setting even more eerie, playing up the alien nature of the gelflings and skeksis and of the environment itself.  The scene where Kira, one of our gelfling heroes, is being drained of life by the vicious, vulture-like skeksis, has pretty much haunted me since I first saw this as a child.

In The Mouth Of Madness

If Stephen King had written Cthulhu, the result would have been In The Mouth Of Madness.  The story of Sutter Cane, a horror writer who molds reality with his macabre stories, is like a batshit Neil Gaiman; one fabulous sequence has him banging on a typewriter in a church while a thick wooden door pulsates malevolently behind him.  A wonderfully nihilistic horror film that blithely plays with your sense of reality, and laughs the whole time: some of the things in this film are so completely absurd that, like Sam Neill's John Trent, you can't help but laugh helplessly.

Jennifer's Body

At this point, you might have guessed that I appreciate my horror balanced with a nice dose of sarcasm or tongue-in-cheek, and this particular film has a heaping share of both. Megan Fox is COMPLETELY believable as a man-eating demon (gee, I wonder why...?), but she also clearly is not taking the movie too seriously, and neither is anyone else.  They're having fun with it, which is good, because shit is ridiculous and the movie totally owns it; the indie punk Satanic band members are just icing on the demonic cake.  It's kind of like Buffy, if the script had been more self-conscious and less tasteful.

Let Me In

What I didn't know about this before I saw it is that it's actually a love story.  The relationship between Abby the vampire and Owen the outcast kid is sweet and awkward, even after you see Abby flip out like a ninja to snack on some hobo.  Low lighting and fantastic sound editing are used to great effect, and Chloe Moretz-as-monster brings some much needed excitement to a movie that could have ended up over-wrought and moodily dull.  The tender moments and the scary bits add to the tension, and the ending is both touching and depressingly inevitable.

The Ruins

The Ruins should have been a dumb creature feature, but it actually has a lot going for it that makes it quite effective.  A group of co-eds goes hiking in Mexico and ends up on a Mayan pyramid covered in a parasitic, man-eating plant; native people surround them to keep them on the pyramid or kill them so as not to spread the growth of the plant.  The plant itself is a surprisingly fantastic villain; it creeps under the skin like an alien parasite, mimics human voices to separate the co-eds, and eats away at them, driving them insane. It almost feels like a medical horror, featuring sequences where the plant gets under the skin like some kind of bug, threads its way into injuries, and one particularly imaginative amputation scene that ends with cauterization by frying pan (these kids are nothing if not resourceful).  Not for the faint of heart.

Saw

They go way downhill after number two, but before they descend into tasteless torture porn the Saw franchise was more about psychological horror than spilling blood.  Asking that all important question, "how far would you go to save your own life?" Saw the first is all yellow lighting, fast-paced editing, and clever film shots that don't quite show you all the gore it hints at.  Where the subsequent films lose their restraint in favor of cheap shock value, this first film reaches in and grabs your brain right in its survival center. Plus, that ENDING.  Whatever criticisms you have about the sequels, you have to acknowledge that, at least for the first outing, someone on the scriptwriting staff was really being clever.

Silence of the Lambs

Will we ever have another villain as charismatic as Hannibal Lecter?  I rather hope not.  Anthony Hopkins is a complete scene stealer in this classy slasher flick, dominating the background with his panoramas of intestines while Buffalo Bill skins his victims in the main plotline.  A film that's become iconic for a reason; the scene where Jodie Foster bumbles around in pitch black while being stalked by the night vision goggles-wearing Bill still gives me chills.

A Tale of Two Sisters

Unlike the other films on this list, I never re-watched this Korean horror film and have no desire to - but that doesn't mean that, while I was watching it, I didn't appreciate its construction and effect.  Equal parts mental exercise and ghost story, the family elements and the relationship between the young sisters are surprising spots of warmth in an otherwise chilling movie.  It's also a kind of fairytale, a play on the Cinderella story, and rather beautiful - the camera work finds beauty in an imposing wardrobe as well as a shot of a dead bird.  Even when it's being poetic, though, the tension still pulls you thin, and waiting to find out what's inside that wardrobe made my knuckles go white.

The Avengers

I wanted to write about my reaction to The Avengers trailer about a week ago, but I had trouble because there aren't all that many interesting ways for me to say I AM EXCITE, MAY SHOULD GET HERE FASTER.  So, there you go: it's a fabulous trailer, and I have high expectations for the films.

I think it's both interesting and worth mentioning that Marvel has basically taken a backwards approach to The Avengers franchise; usually, you get the ensemble film and THEN the spin-offs.  Do to necessity, perhaps, Marvel gave us the spin-offs first, and now has the herculean task of bringing together half a dozen disparate, egotistical, arrogant and powerful characters.  Some things we should note that Marvel did particularly well in preparing for this task, which are also all reasons why The Avengers has more potential to be wonderful than to fall on its face:

- Giving the characters worth caring about their own films.  Let's be honest: Black Widow, Hawkeye, Agent Coulson and Nick Fury are pretty awesome characters, but none of them are strong enough to carry their own films.  And Marvel wisely didn't try; instead, they built them up through other, more interesting movies.  The Thor movie is sort of the exception, and I think it suffered because Thor himself isn't a very interesting character, but the argument can be made that that film was more about Loki than Thor anyway. 

- Hiring fabulous writers that (most importantly) have experience with ensemble casts.  Joss Whedon writes really good dialogue, and he has shown in multiple venues that he writes distinctive voices for multiple characters really well.  Zak Penn, the other credited script writer, worked on one of the best comic book movies of the last ten years (X2), and fabricated two sequels that, compared to their originals, were veritable works of genius (Norton's Hulk and Elektra, the latter of which I will defend until I die because I actually thought it was fun).  He also wrote X-Men: The Last Stand, and regardless of what you thought of that particular film (I liked it), the dialogue was as solid as its predecessors.  These guys know what they're doing.

- The casting is perfection.  I've already written about how impressed I am with Chris Evans' Captain America (read my review here), and at this point it pretty much goes without saying that Robert Downey Jr. = Tony Stark (similarly to how Patrick Stewart = Professor X).  Chris Hemsworth as Thor was one of the only interesting things about that movie, and Mark Ruffalo certainly can't do worse at being Bruce Banner than anyone already has.  And if I need to mention Sam Jackson's Nick Fury here, you really haven't been paying attention.

- Not introducing a new villain.  I've just convinced myself that the purpose of Thor was actually to introduce Loki, rather than Thor himself, and all of his daddy issues, which means that The Avengers won't have to dedicate valuable time to introducing a brand new villain.  What I hope this means is that we'll get to spend more time seeing how all these egos learn to play nice together, which is honestly more interesting to me than villain backstory.  Which leads me to my last point:

- We're essentially done with backstory.  All of the establishing is done.  We know everything about these people that we need to, so we can get right into the meat of the story.  It really, really bugs me when filmmakers waste time, or spin out a movie longer than it should be; hopefully, with The Avengers we'll get no wasted space.