Caution, Misdirection
While we’re on the topic of alternate editions, I ask you to please avoid the recently released Lust, Caution DVD that promises the “R-Rated Version of the Film Not Seen in Theatres”. That phrasing implies that scintillating footage has been added, when it is actually the opposite. The R-rated Lust, Caution wasn’t seen in theatres because producer James Schamus and director Ang Lee had the stones to tell the MPAA where they could go with their R-rating and took the NC-17 instead, releasing Lust, Caution with all footage intact. The R-rated version (in fairness, I haven’t seen this cut) most likely abbreviates very intense sex scenes that magnify the story considerably. See the film, it’s a very good one, but see the naughty version that was available in theatres.
If Bowen’s Cinematic picked the Oscars (we don’t)
First a taste of the clichéd and self-righteous: I boycotted the Oscars last year, the prior year’s awarding of Best Picture to Crash being enough, and I didn’t even get on the All the Cool Kids Hate Crash bandwagon. Crash is what it always was, a better than average bit of rich guilt porn. People blowing it all out of proportion and then hating it because THEY overrated it is their issue not the movie’s, just as a certain movie this year that rhymes with Uno (hint: Juno) is a perfectly ok bit of irresponsible teen babe wishful thinking malarkey when taken on its own terms, it’s just not a Best Picture.
Oscar and I are still broken up though, even though they rectified the fascinatingly absurd omission of Martin Scorsese last year. Every year the Oscars leave me feeling a little guilty and woozy, as if I just eaten a box of very heavy candy. I would rather have the candy, or at least the self-congratulation of skipping a ceremony that will do just fine without me.
Because I’m a whore though, and because I’ll do anything for attention, here, out of the nominees, are my picks:
Best Picture: There Will Be Blood.
Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson-There Will Be Blood.
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood.
Best Actress: Julie Christie, Away from Her.
Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men.
Best Supporting Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone.
Best Original Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins, The Savages.
Best Adapted Screenplay: Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men.
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Readers of my site will know that I have a major jones for There Will Be Blood, as well as its star and director, so I will elaborate no further on those. I will say, however, that the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nominees largely leave me cold. They all feel so obligatory, so created simply to be honored on this special night that it doesn’t give me much pleasure to really root or talk about them, with one exception: Julie Christie. She’s a legend, she’s beautiful, and neither of those matter. Her performance in Away from Her is not the work of a famed personality resting on their laurels: it’s subtle and vulnerable, deserving of recognition. Gordon Pinsent, the proper star of Away from Her, was even more devastating and understated, but I guess he isn’t famous enough.
Ruby Dee’s work in American Gangster is the equivalent of giving the good actress a gold watch, she’s fine, but there just isn’t much of a part there, Scott’s film is a boy’s club all the way. Tilda Swinton is good, but again, it feels pitched to win awards, as is Cate Blanchett’s Jude in I’m Not There. Blanchett gives good freak show method impersonation, but it’s actually the least interesting Dylan to choose to reward. People accusing Amy Ryan of over-acting don’t know what they are talking about; a prior day job occasionally afforded me a close look at Amy Ryan’s mother in Gone Baby Gone, and let me tell you: they ARE that obviously odious and unpleasant. Ryan’s work is more ambitious than initially appears, beyond the up-front ready made for the Academy white-trash histrionics is an authentic portrait of bitchy entitlement as mask for cancerous self-loathing.
But the Academy overlooked many of my favorite Actresses this year, the most obvious being Wei Tang of Lust, Caution and Carice Van Houten in Black Book. Just because they’re sexy doesn’t mean they’re just sexy, these women give star-making performances in wonderful erotic thrillers of quick-silver deceit and pain. Or if we wanted to honor I’m Not There, what about Charlotte Gainsbourg? She gave the film a yearning that helped save it from tipping too far into the Glory of the Artist abyss. People continually mourn the lack of roles for women in the movies, but the best female performances are frequently ignored anyway.
Best Supporting Actor is an unusually strong category this year, and it seems a pity that Philip Seymour Hoffman shouldn’t win anything despite giving not one or two, but three of the best performances of his career in 2007. That’s how the cookie crumbles though, because Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem are iconic and un-missable: avenging dust clouds of our collective apathy and despair.
Original Screenplay goes to Tamara Jenkins because she managed, with The Savages, to write an “it was daddy’s fault” pity party that’s quick, funny and plays fair. Michael Clayton would be next, but The Savages gets the edge for giving me either my first or second favorite to date Philip Seymour Hoffman performance, no mean feat. Laura Linney is fine too, but Jenkins’ imagination isn’t quite as generous with her, I never believed I was watching anything other than Laura Linney prestige performance #12.
Adapted Script goes to No Country, primarily because There Will Be Blood appears to be an original script masquerading as an adaptation. The Coens should be recognized anyway, for their graceful distillation of the overly ponderous novel, and for creating a film that’s just about as rich and powerful as Blood.
Cinematography is barely debatable. Roger Deakins shot The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men this year. If that’s not enough to convince you, I don’t know the words that will be.
Happy hunting.
Oscar Reviews
Hey guys, this is Ben. Here is a little meta-post round-up of reviews Chuck has done this year for films either nominated for an Oscar or featuring Oscar nominated performances.
There Will be Blood
Eastern Promises
Juno
Michael Clayton
The Savages
Away From Her
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Ratatouille
Sweeney Todd
Something to Watch: Valentine’s Day
Apologies for the loss of comments, something kept eating the end of this post and it seems that deletion was the only solution.
It may be a desperate grab for cash, along the lines of a Father’s Day II or National Golf Acknowledgement Day, but anything that could possibly remind you to kiss your girlfriend’s toes one extra day of the year can’t be all THAT bad. After dinner and drinks, you may find yourself searching for that perfect flick to begin (or end) that dance that starts as the public portion of the evening reaches its end. With that, I offer five double features:
The Samuel L. Jackson as Ironic Instigator of Unexpected Romance Double Feature: Jackie Brown (1997) and Black Snake Moan (2007).
The very best romances are the romances that feel spontaneous, unreal, scary and vulnerable. The relationships shouldn’t feel like they’ve been worked out two months ahead of time by their star’s agents. Nothing, nothing, nothing is less romantic than numbing obligation. You will be able to sneak up on your young lady with either Jackie Brown or Black Snake Moan, because both, in the beginning, will feel like she’s doing you a favor. Both are riddled with profanity, both are steeped in sweaty, sleazy movie references that she (or you) probably haven’t heard of, and both feature Samuel L. Jackson at his crazy best as a very unexpected cupid.
Quentin Tarantino had written True Romance a few years before tackling Jackie Brown, but that earlier film is the fantasy of a very under-laid white guy who just wants “someone that understands him”. He actually understanding her is un-explored and, at best, optional. Jackie Brown was Tarantino’s follow-up to the monumentally successful Pulp Fiction, and one imagines that he was able to gorge himself on a variety of carnal delights while picking a follow-up picture.
As a result, Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, is mature and confident: Tarantino doesn’t feel the need to remind you that he’s cinema’s reigning bad boy in every frame. At about the forty-five, fifty minute mark, Robert Forster, in the best performance to ever grace a Tarantino film, spots the titular Jackie (Pam Grier) coming out of jail. She looks like shit (for the movies) but that doesn’t stop Forster from hearing a beautiful R&B song in his head as she approaches him. He’s instantly hers, but life, age and other things keep romance at a side-line. Instead, they decide to rip-off Samuel L. Jackson in his career best work.
If Jackie Brown features Jackson as the object of the couple’s wrath, then Black Snake Moan has a frazzled, vaguely Uncle Remusy Jackson inflicting his wrath on a mixed up couple that needs it more than they ever imagined: Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake. I never thought I would call a Ricci and Timberlake teaming romantic, but such is the charm and potential surprise of the movies. The film, a little like Punch-drunk Love, dives head first into the notion of people as mutual saviors from one another’s crippling rage and insecurity. Moan begins foul and self-conscious and ends in tender embrace. Few films can make a transition so believable, or heartbreaking.
The Paul Giamatti as Unlikely Romantic Hero Double Feature: American Splendor (2003) and Sideways (2004).
Again your young lady is going to initially feel as if she’s doing you a favor: men seem to get the appeal of Paul Giamatti much more than women. And I get it. Giamatti, at his best, is the spokesperson for everything a man can find about himself to dislike: he’s paunchy, short, stooped, bitter, making little money, and way too self-conscious to ever dream of landing a woman. But he does, and by the end, the women just may believe it too.
American Splendor isn’t exactly a romance, but the relationship between Giamatti and Hope Davis eventually comes to signify something very romantic: two flawed people who unite in mutual desperation discovering via their bitching that they’re perfect for one another. Watch how Davis handles Giamatti’s (playing Harvey Pekar) announcement that he has cancer. Watch how she holds him up, and forces him to face his art and his life.
Sideways, one of the most perfect American comedies to come down the line in some time, is more idealized. Giamatti offers a portrait of the self-loathing failure that’s, if possible, even less compromising (certainly less showy) than his Harvey Pekar, but the savior female embodied by Virginia Madsen here is a bit more on the fantasy side of things. She’s beautiful. She’s articulate. She’s undemanding, and, most importantly, she “sees something in him.” When the writing is this sharp, this lived-in, this poignant, this literate, you won’t much give a damn what’s real and what’s false. The final image is one of the most hopeful, satisfying, and earned in recent movies.
The Probably More Appropriate for Halloween but, Screw It, It’s My Web-Site Double Feature: The Fly (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001).
The Fly and Mulholland Dr. have more in common than you may initially realize. Both are my favorite of their acclaimed directors’ (David Lynch and David Cronenberg) work and both are, at their core, intensely moving stories of broken romance. The Fly is actually the more optimistic of the two, at least the lover in that one (Geena Davis) has reason to break the affair, her boyfriend (Jeff Goldblum) gets drunk and turns himself into a bug. Her devotion (again that word) is admirable though, as she’s the only one who has the stuff to do what must finally be done. Mulholland Dr., on the other hand, represents the other side of that coin: the lover splits as soon as things become somewhat inconvenient. Below a sometimes challenging narrative (though it’s not as bad as you’ve heard) lurks Lynch’s most naked, moving story of rejection and self-delusion.
The Unrequited, Self-Pitying Artist Love That Most Directly Taps Into Our Memories of Being Stood Up at the Junior High Dance Double Feature: Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Being John Malkovich (1999).
Edward Scissorhands ages poorly: the not really that funny John Waters satire slows the thing to a crawl, but there’s no denying the power of the opening and closing minutes, where an older Winona Ryder recalls to her grand-daughter the strange would-be lover that got away. That lover, an S&M cover of the creature that lived in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, remains in the tower Winona left him in so many years ago, creating snow storms just for her. We all like to think that we’ve inspired that kind of regret in someone who never saw anything in us (though we probably haven’t), so watch this movie and see what it could look like.
As trapped as Edward may feel at the end of his film, it’s nothing on what John Cusack (effectively playing against type) has to contend with at the end of the still fabulous Being John Malkovich. Cusack doesn’t just not get the girl. He doesn’t just lose his wife. He doesn’t even just lose his wife to the girl he also didn’t get. No, Cusack, in addition to those tropical storms of disappointment, is fated to witness their happiness for eternity in the mind of their love child. Total abject failure with someone you inappropriately love has rarely been rendered so vividly, or beautifully.
The This Behavior Would Strike Most As Sociopathic if This Wasn’t A Movie Double Feature: Say Anything (1989), Frankie and Johnny (1991).
Most women that I’ve spoken to love Say Anything, which represents the more popular incarnation of John Cusack, back before he started to play around with his “nice guy with just a bit of quirk so he’s not super boring” image. Guys like the movie too, and they tend to admire Cusack because he’s more approachably flakey than the leads in many romances, but can we acknowledge that the behavior that women applaud so in Say Anything is just a teensy-weensy deranged? Imagine, ladies, what you’d do if the man you lost your virginity to showed up one morning with the soundtrack to your lovemaking blaring over a boombox. Yet, in the movies, this is the height of selfless expression.
Actually it isn’t. The appeal of Say Anything lies in the notion of a total absence of mind games: Lloyd Dobbler is exactly who he claims to be and feels for Diane exactly how he claims to feel. Lloyd’s feelings are constant, un-changeable, reassuring, and totally absent in real life. Writer-director Cameron Crowe used to have a flair for selling this sort of thing, which has since, evidently, abandoned him. Crowe’s most recent picture, Elizabethtown, features a would-be lover (Kirsten Dunst) who’s one pretend camera click away from appearing opposite Bette Davis AS THE CRAZY ONE OF THE TWO.
Al Pacino’s short order cook Johnny is a little more relaxed by comparison, he waits about two hours into his first shift with waitress Frankie (Michelle Pfeiffer) before deciding to follow her around and declare their destiny to be united. The film seems to regard Frankie as a broken, up-tight shrew because she’s slow to warm to Johnny, but I found her behavior surprisingly relaxed and tolerant in that she manages to resist calling the cops. The film is an ode to stalking, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s directed by Garry Marshall, who’s managed to also transform kidnapping (Overboard), prostitution (Pretty Woman) and abandonment (Runaway Bride) into frothy romantic byplay. Common sense gets the better of those other pictures, but Pfeiffer and Pacino’s work in Frankie and Johnny trumps the cynic in me, and if it trumps the cynic in me, it will trump the cynic in you.
This last double feature, by the way, could also be called The Double Feature She’ll Most Actually Watch on Valentine’s Day and That Doesn’t Require A Bunch of Pretentious Cinephilic Justification.
Have fun kids.
Kon Ichikawa Dies.
Kon Ichikawa, director of The Burmese Harp, died yesterday of pneumonia at the age of 92. Ichikawa is recognized, along with Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, as one of the leading Post-World War II Japanese directors. I would love to voice more appreciation but I’m afraid that Ichikawa represents a chink in my movie going armor: I only know him by reputation, and have not seen any of his films.
For a better appreciation and a characteristically rewarding discussion, I implore you to check out Craig Kennedy’s Living in Cinema. The whole disguising a link in the middle of a passage of writing technique eludes me at the moment, but you can find Craig under my blog roll.
Roy Scheider Dies.
Apologies, this would have been up yesterday, if it wasn’t for the internet gremlins.
Roy Scheider, one of the definitive bad ass laureates of American cinema, passed away yesterday after a two year battle with cancer. Scheider was most obviously known for his Chief Brody in Jaws, but he was a reliable (usually supporting) player in several other notably great movies: The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, Marathon Man, Sorcerer, Klute, Naked Lunch, as well as the much better than they’re known to be All That Jazz, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Scheider had something that many stars, or even great actors, would kill for: your intent, insatiable curiosity. You always, in any given movie, wanted more Roy Scheider. Marathon Man boasts Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, but it’s Scheider you wonder about. The French Connection has one of the definitive Gene Hackman performances, but you can’t help but wonder why the Scheider dosage hasn’t been upped just a little more. Some supporting, mysterious bad asses whither when promoted to the center ring: Scheider only further justified the intrigue. Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s initially maligned, but now rightly revered remake of Wages of Fear, is definitive Scheider: hard, mysterious, unsentimental, fascinating and charismatic. Scheider, like many of the 1970s icons, is a MAN first and foremost. You don’t watch him and wonder where he studied technique, you watch him and wonder when he’s gonna call the bullshit he knows everyone is feeding him.
Scheider, and this is the mark of a real star, is never caught trying to be cool, and like Bogart (to which a few blogs compared him), he projects a restless intelligence. Scheider’s cynicism isn’t brought on by ego, but by a deep reservoir of sadness and understanding. Scheider, again like all the truly great tough guys, isn’t terrified of sentiment or vulnerability though. Watch the scene between Chief Brody and son at the dinner table in Jaws, where the son mimics Brody’s hand movements. Try not rooting for this man to kill the shark after a scene like that.
Scheider was also a wonderful dickhead. Have you seen Francis Ford Coppola’s much better than you think The Rainmaker? The film is a refreshingly leisurely handling of the usual Grisham hugger-mugger, and Scheider shows up late inning as one of the faceless executives who’s trying to shirk responsibility. I don’t remember what he’s trying to shirk responsibility for, but I remember the act of shirking, if only because it signaled a brief, welcome return for a man who deserved to be treated better in the last few decades. Also check out The Rainmaker for a nice little Mickey Rourke performance, ten years before it was hip to re-hire Mickey Rourke.
I haven’t seen the film in a long time, but you should also watch All That Jazz, in which the legendary Bob Fosse recruited Scheider as method of self-examination, in another of his too few lead roles. Scheider and Fosse create what has to be one of the most macho theatre directors in movies: but they manage that without compromising the more outlandishly temperamental aspects of what we think of when we think “acclaimed theatre director.” The performance and the film are superb examples of mutual glorification and deconstruction, or glory deconstruction, which what is most supposed deconstruction is anyway (see also: Allen, Woody).
But Scheider would’ve told me to shut up by now, if only with a fleeting look.
Hiccup.
My Wolfman bit disappeared into the realms of internet afterlife as I was trying to update it to include the recently announced decision that Joe Johnston, of October Sky and Jurassic Park III, has been hired to take over after Mark Romanek decided to vacate. At the risk of unoriginality, I think Johnston’s better than Ratner, and I have no major problem with anything he’s done, but the decision strikes me as boring. I’m still interested in Del Toro’s Talbot and Baker’s Wolfie, but that’s about it.
Why Most Movies Are So Bad.
Because studios make shit like
Meet the Spartans and audiences reward them with 18 million dollar #1 movie of the week box office. We don’t normally do numbers here at BC but this is just too much, particularly when one considers the wealth of pictures that are currently playing in the theatres. Hell, even
Rambo, which I’ll get into tomorrow, is preferrable to this. Who watches that
Spartans trailer and says “Hmm, that looks good”?
Heath Ledger Dead.
We normally go out of our way not to report the news here at BC, the play is the thing, but I feel it would be in bad taste not to at least acknowledge this. Heath Ledger was found dead yesterday. The details are uncertain and beside the point. Ledger, an actor destined to age well, to get better, wilder, more interesting, is no longer. He leaves behind a child, an ex-wife, and one performance of major note: Ennis Del Mar of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
Ledger was the force of Brokeback Mountain, and the primary reason I saw the picture three times in the theatre. I was expecting a high toned Oscar wank, instead I saw a good movie with a lead performance of startling gravity, particularly for such a young man. The smart alecks had to mock the mumble he invented for the role. Did these folks take a moment to peak behind the mumble? The voice, the gestures, the body language, Ennis Del Mar looked like a piece of notebook paper folded in half: shrunken, creased, trying to disappear from the world. The heartbreaker of the film is that, at the end, he essentially succeeds in that aim, with only a daughter to notice. Most actors his age are chasing starlets around in forgettable junk; Ledger, at twenty-five-ish, was chasing the ghost of Marlon Brando.
It wasn’t as large a role, but Ledger also made an impression in the brilliant hall-of-mirrors Dylan film, I’m Not There. He had one of my favorite moments in the picture: a bit of self-absorption (even for Dylan) at an outside meal with friends that signals the beginning of the end for him and the continually suffering Charlotte Gainsbourg. Ledger was also the highlight in an acclaimed film that I didn’t particularly care for, Monster’s Ball. Everyone was writing about Halle Berry but it was Thornton and his broken relationship with Ledger, his son, that makes the film worth seeing once. Ledger also had that film’s one truly shocking moment of humanity: a cry for help that takes a lightening turn towards violence.
Extremely pleased….
…with Viggo Mortensen’s Oscar nomination for his iconic work in Eastern Promises. Everything else was relatively in sync* with the various pointy head predictions.
*Turns out there were more surprises, oh well.
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