Every year, a certain inevitable inevitability creeps up come Oscar time. We more or less know precisely who and what is going to win, and not merely because the ceremony arrives at the tail end of a string of lesser and mostly homogeneous awards shows: the Golden Globes, the various guild awards, the critics awards, etc. It also has much to do with how the movies themselves are brought into the public eye. The first time I ever heard of The Artist, it was in print next to the words "future Best Picture winner." Ditto for The King's Speech. It's like these movies are set up from the beginning to win awards, presented to the Academy like some sort of matchmaking service.
So it's hard to muster much enthusiasm anymore. And yet, somehow, I do. I still love the Oscars. There's something official about them, backed by 84 years of history, almost as long as movies themselves have been around. The Oscars matter, even after we've accepted the fact that they're decided by a group of people who are just marking ballots after coming home late from a 16-hour shoot, who haven't seen half the films and have no real clue whether Moneyball had better sound mixing than Transformers: Dark of the Moon or not. We still have the illusion that these are the year's definitive bests in their respective categories, and what are movies if not illusions?
So, yeah, I didn't much care for The Artist. But its Oscar for Best Picture still means something, still gives it its place in history alongside such beloved classics as The Greatest Show on Earth and The Life of Emile Zola. You can't un-award an Oscar, or even a nomination. Jonah Hill will always be Academy Award Nominee Jonah Hill. Coming soon: 21 Jump Street, starring Channing Tatum and Academy Award Nominee Jonah Hill. There's something comforting in that.
I have no real problem with most of the winners, either. They gave Woody Allen an Oscar for his script for Midnight in Paris, which I predicted (the Best Screenplay award almost always goes to a Best Picture nominee, so it was either that or The Artist, and I figured a lot of Academy members would be prejudiced against voting for a silent film for a screenplay award), but which nonetheless came as something of a pleasant surprise. Having personally only seen nine of the 20 nominated acting performances (including zero for Best Actress), I had no real stake in the outcome of any of them (though I do think Jean Dujardin is a tad overrated). True, a win for Melissa McCarthy would have been awesome, but did anyone really think that would happen?
I'd also like to thank the Academy for giving Best Adapted Screenplay to Alexander Payne, who has already won, and not to John Logan, who has never won, and yet keeps getting nominated even though he's awful (his script for Hugo would have made a great Public Service Announcement for film preservation, but it's not really a screenplay, is it?). This even makes me forgive them for giving the Best Animated Feature Oscar to Rango, a movie I loathed (and anyway, I haven't seen the other nominees, or have any wish to do so), or Best Song to "Man or Muppet," a song that makes me want to machine wash a Muppet on high, with bleach and no fabric softener, from a movie I also loathed. And for giving War Horse absolutely nothing.
It was actually the most enjoyable Oscar ceremony in years. Billy Crystal was back, so they had a host who was funny and knew what he was doing; they had Cirque du Soleil doing a pretty cool performance; they skipped the performances of the Best Song nominees; and, best of all, they moved the lifetime achievement awards and the Jearn Hersholt Humanitarian Award to a different ceremony entirely, so we were spared half an hour of somnolent platitudes. Thank you, producer Brian Grazer... you may be the first person in history to shut Oprah up.
Now if someone could just explain to me why, in a room full of sound mixers, they couldn't find someone to fix the sound.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
10 Best Movies of 2011
Contrary to popular opinion, I have to say this was an awfully weak year for movies. As so often occurs, with what seems to be increasing frequency, I found myself underwhelmed by most of the critics' favorites. Indeed, this year had more than its fair share of critical responses that simply seemed bizarre to me. Like, for instance, A Separation. Nice movie, kinda forgettable, pretty typical Iranian film, really, the kind I've seen many times before... and yet it had the critics declaring it a masterpiece to be placed alongside the canonical greats of all time (of course, neither am I a big fan of Kieslowksi's Decalogue, A Separation's spiritual antecedent... ethical dilemmas seldom hold much interest for me as plot material, which is why the Dardenne brothers generally leave me cold, as well). Or The Artist, this year's The King's Speech, a cute crowd-pleaser that was mysteriously exalted as something brilliant and momentous. Or The Tree of Life, which was just laughably bad, like a pretentious student film with a Hollywood budget and a top-notch D.P. And there were others, mostly with one-word titles: Hugo, Drive, Shame, Melancholia et al.
All right, now that I've most likely alienated half of those reading this, I can move on to my top 10 list, which will no doubt alienate the other half. In ascending order (well, numerically descending, but you know what I mean):
10. The Arbor
One of my favorite films of 2002 was The Laramie Project, a docudrama based on a play in which actual interviews with people connected to the Matthew Shepard murder case were transcribed and then performed by actors as dialogue, which proved to be a surprisingly effective experiment in cognitive dissonance between drama and reality. With The Arbor, filmmaker Clio Barnard took that concept a step further, by having her actors actually lip sync to the recorded interviews of real-life people (in this case, the friends and family members of English playwright Andrea Dunbar). I know what you're thinking, probably the same thing I was thinking when the concept was explained by on-screen text at the start of the film, which was something along the lines of: "Wait, what?" But it only took one sentence to convince me of its efficacy as a weirdly poetic device. Barnard intercuts these docu-dramatized scenes with sequences of Dunbar's autobiographical play (called The Arbor, natch) being performed (outdoors in the very neighborhood in which it is set), and real television footage of Dunbar herself. It's like layers of reality upon layers of reality, making for an eerily fascinating examination of the meaning of truth versus art.
9. How I Ended This Summer
I've never seen a movie quite like How I Ended This Summer. Even the title betrays an unusual sense of whimsy that you have to actually see the movie to understand. The film is a two-hander about a pair of meteorologists living in an isolated weather station on a remote island off the Arctic coast of Russia, and the plot concerns what happens when a lack of communication between these two men creates a misunderstanding that ultimately spirals out of control. It takes roughly the form of a thriller, but, really, it's an anti-thriller, in which the plot is moved forward by inaction rather than action. More contemplative than kinetic, but infused with humor so dry and deadpan that it's easy to miss it entirely.
8. The Future
Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know was my favorite movie of 2005, and, really one of my favorites of all time. Finally, after six years, she made her second feature film, and while it doesn't reach nearly the heights of brilliance of her first film, it still outstrips most films that came out last year. July once again directs herself, this time as half of a self-involved bohemian couple whose uncharacteristically magnanimous adoption of a stray cat sends them spiraling into some sort of existential, premature mid-life crisis (their reasoning goes something like this: "This cat will live another five years. In five years we'll be 40, and 40 is basically 50, and everything after that is just loose change.") It's a hilarious look at thirtysomething neurosis, but also, ultimately, kind of a sad one.
7. The Descendants
It says a lot about Alexander Payne that his latest movie is my second least favorite film that he's made, and yet it still makes my Top 10 list of the year. The thing that strikes me most about his style, evident in this film more than in any other, is his sense of place. He's so specific in his treatment of scenes and social milieus that it's almost impossible to come away from one of his films without feeling like you've just spent a year of your life living in whatever locale it's set in, whether it's the wine country of Santa Barbara County (Sideways), or, in this case, the Hawaiian islands. And, just like with all of his other movies, the performances are terrific across the board (Shailene Woodley, a young television actress, is particularly impressive, if only because she's young and from television), and the script is equal parts sensitive and acerbic. I love this guy.
6. Moneyball
Herein lies the value of film critics. Without them, I never would have seen this generic-looking baseball movie, never would have known I was missing out on maybe (probably... almost definitely) the best baseball movie ever made. And it's a great baseball movie made from such unlikely material. The drama isn't based on homers or strike outs, but on board meetings and conference calls, as it follows Oakland A's manager Billy Beane's quest to build a winning team based on statistics and computer analyses rather than talent. It's surprisingly riveting stuff, and, even with the focus on the business of baseball over the actual sport, there's still room for those stirring crowd-pleasing moments that are the benchmark of any sports movie. What a nice surprise.
5. Tucker and Dale vs Evil
In an era of dumb horror movies and dumber comedies, Tucker and Dale vs Evil feels like a miracle. It's a smart, hilarious horror-comedy that, even more surprisingly, actually has something to say. The premise is truly inspired: a group of college kids go camping in the woods, and run across a pair of redneck hillbillies who, um... just want to go fishing. But since the college kids have seen... well, take your pick of horror movies... they assume that the two hillbillies are inbred psychotic killers, particularly after the kids keep meeting with grisly accidents one by one. In reality, the hillbillies are just regular, nice guys minding their own business, utterly perplexed that college kids keep dying around them. So what we get is both a spoof on slasher movies and a commentary on prejudice, as well as a sweet character study and some of the most pitch-perfect moments of gruesome dark comedy I've ever seen. First-time(!) writer-director Eli Craig is definitely one to watch.
4. Putty Hill
If The Arbor is a documentary posing as a drama, Putty Hill is a drama posing as a documentary. Not that it can really be classified as a mockumentary, but the film occasionally takes time out from the action to hold interviews with the characters, conducted by the (unseen) filmmaker himself. The film itself plays a bit like something Richard Linklater and Gus Van Sant would come up with if they ever decided to work together. It follows the friends and family members of a young man who recently died from a drug overdose, and how his death affected (or didn't affect) the community in which he lived. Absolutely mesmerizing from one shot to the next, filled with uncannily naturalistic performances and a formal mastery not commonly found in low-budget American indies, it's the year's most overlooked film by a mile.
3. The Guard
My first response upon seeing The Guard was that it was this year's In Bruges: a witty, darkly comic British (well, Irish, in this case) thriller with a first-rate Brendan Gleeson perfomance. So it wasn't much of a surprise to learn that the writer-director, John Michael McDonagh, is the brother of Martin McDonagh, the writer-director of In Bruges. Clearly, this family is awesome. In Bruges is the better film, I think, but The Guard is a more than worthy companion, with the same breezy wit, the same loving attention to character development, the same visual aplomb. The trailer makes it look like a lame cross between a buddy cop movie and a fish-out-of-water comedy (the "fish" being Don Cheadle's FBI agent, paired with Gleeson's drunken Irish cop to catch a gang of drug smugglers), but the actual film delights in subverting these cliches, and others like them. Far more interested in character than comedy or action, it ultimately becomes Gleeson's movie as it gradually stakes its claim as, really, little more than a detailed character study. And what a wonderful character it is.
2. Midnight in Paris
Woody Allen is very hit or miss, especially lately, but when he hits, it's magical. This is one of his best films, and easily his funniest. It's the kind of movie he was making back in the '80s, when he would have a new masterpiece practically every year, and particularly recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo, its most obvious thematic sibling. In one of the most canny marketing campaigns since The Crying Game, the trailers avoided revealing what the movie is actually about, and I wouldn't dream of spoiling it here; but it's a story so enchantingly told, so fraught with pleasures both small and large, that it's no wonder it became Allen's highest grossing film to date, and his first in quite some time to get serious Oscar buzz. It's his most assured film in years, with gorgeous camerawork, absolutely brilliant casting in all of the key roles, and a screenplay that, while it might belabor the central thesis a bit much, is decidedly pointed and utterly charming.
1. War Horse
Somehow, Steven Spielberg made one of the great masterpieces of the 1940s and nobody noticed. Maybe because he made it in 2011. But whatever... War Horse is the closest thing we have to the days of John Ford and Victor Fleming, King Vidor and Powell and Pressburger. It's a glorious, old-fashioned epic about a great love being torn asunder by war. The fact that it's a love story between a boy and a horse does nothing to dilute its emotional potency. Even I, who groaned at the thought of seeing a horse movie, was captivated by this story. I can't imagine it working as well on stage (it's also a Tony-winning play), without Spielberg's knack for anthropomorphizing these animals... not in a silly kids movie kind of way, but in subtler ways that simply serve to remind us we're watching living, feeling creatures. For it's the horse who is the film's protagonist, not the boy, and without such an uncannily expressive treatment of our hero, it would be an entirely different movie... Au Hasard Balthazar with a horse, or something. The whole film is magnificent, with the expected stunning war scenes and unexpected moments of humor, but the ending is what I'll remember most. The ending is quite simply one of the most insanely beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. To say that it moved me to tears is a severe understatement. It freakin' destroyed me.
Worst Movie of the Year:
Trust
I watched this only because Ebert put it on his Top 20 list for the year. Every so often I forget why I don't read Ebert anymore, and I need a movie like this to remind me. Think of the absolute worst '80s Afterschool Special you ever saw. Then imagine that it was about internet sexual predators, maybe involving Chris Hansen from Dateline somehow. Now, imagine that Afterschool Special remade as a feature film in 2011. That movie you're imagining is way better than Trust. This movie is hilariously awful, a two-hour piece of propaganda against something we already know is bad. It's a movie in which every scene seems to be calculated solely to teach teenage girls the dangers of online messaging, complete with a creepy sexual predator who, like most movie sexual predators, couldn't be simply creepy by being a sexual predator, but has to have an extra layer of creepiness even above that, like creepiness squared. But the funniest moment is when the teenage victim, who up until now has been defending the sexual predator and insisting the sex was consensual, suddenly has a breakthrough and realizes, "Oh my god, I was raped!" Rape, incidentally, is the film's key word. The dialogue in any given scene invariably goes like this: "blah blah rape blah rape something something rape, yadda yadda rape... rape rape rapity rape." PSAs have more subtlety.
All right, now that I've most likely alienated half of those reading this, I can move on to my top 10 list, which will no doubt alienate the other half. In ascending order (well, numerically descending, but you know what I mean):
10. The Arbor
One of my favorite films of 2002 was The Laramie Project, a docudrama based on a play in which actual interviews with people connected to the Matthew Shepard murder case were transcribed and then performed by actors as dialogue, which proved to be a surprisingly effective experiment in cognitive dissonance between drama and reality. With The Arbor, filmmaker Clio Barnard took that concept a step further, by having her actors actually lip sync to the recorded interviews of real-life people (in this case, the friends and family members of English playwright Andrea Dunbar). I know what you're thinking, probably the same thing I was thinking when the concept was explained by on-screen text at the start of the film, which was something along the lines of: "Wait, what?" But it only took one sentence to convince me of its efficacy as a weirdly poetic device. Barnard intercuts these docu-dramatized scenes with sequences of Dunbar's autobiographical play (called The Arbor, natch) being performed (outdoors in the very neighborhood in which it is set), and real television footage of Dunbar herself. It's like layers of reality upon layers of reality, making for an eerily fascinating examination of the meaning of truth versus art.
9. How I Ended This Summer
I've never seen a movie quite like How I Ended This Summer. Even the title betrays an unusual sense of whimsy that you have to actually see the movie to understand. The film is a two-hander about a pair of meteorologists living in an isolated weather station on a remote island off the Arctic coast of Russia, and the plot concerns what happens when a lack of communication between these two men creates a misunderstanding that ultimately spirals out of control. It takes roughly the form of a thriller, but, really, it's an anti-thriller, in which the plot is moved forward by inaction rather than action. More contemplative than kinetic, but infused with humor so dry and deadpan that it's easy to miss it entirely.
8. The Future
Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know was my favorite movie of 2005, and, really one of my favorites of all time. Finally, after six years, she made her second feature film, and while it doesn't reach nearly the heights of brilliance of her first film, it still outstrips most films that came out last year. July once again directs herself, this time as half of a self-involved bohemian couple whose uncharacteristically magnanimous adoption of a stray cat sends them spiraling into some sort of existential, premature mid-life crisis (their reasoning goes something like this: "This cat will live another five years. In five years we'll be 40, and 40 is basically 50, and everything after that is just loose change.") It's a hilarious look at thirtysomething neurosis, but also, ultimately, kind of a sad one.
7. The Descendants
It says a lot about Alexander Payne that his latest movie is my second least favorite film that he's made, and yet it still makes my Top 10 list of the year. The thing that strikes me most about his style, evident in this film more than in any other, is his sense of place. He's so specific in his treatment of scenes and social milieus that it's almost impossible to come away from one of his films without feeling like you've just spent a year of your life living in whatever locale it's set in, whether it's the wine country of Santa Barbara County (Sideways), or, in this case, the Hawaiian islands. And, just like with all of his other movies, the performances are terrific across the board (Shailene Woodley, a young television actress, is particularly impressive, if only because she's young and from television), and the script is equal parts sensitive and acerbic. I love this guy.
6. Moneyball
Herein lies the value of film critics. Without them, I never would have seen this generic-looking baseball movie, never would have known I was missing out on maybe (probably... almost definitely) the best baseball movie ever made. And it's a great baseball movie made from such unlikely material. The drama isn't based on homers or strike outs, but on board meetings and conference calls, as it follows Oakland A's manager Billy Beane's quest to build a winning team based on statistics and computer analyses rather than talent. It's surprisingly riveting stuff, and, even with the focus on the business of baseball over the actual sport, there's still room for those stirring crowd-pleasing moments that are the benchmark of any sports movie. What a nice surprise.
5. Tucker and Dale vs Evil
In an era of dumb horror movies and dumber comedies, Tucker and Dale vs Evil feels like a miracle. It's a smart, hilarious horror-comedy that, even more surprisingly, actually has something to say. The premise is truly inspired: a group of college kids go camping in the woods, and run across a pair of redneck hillbillies who, um... just want to go fishing. But since the college kids have seen... well, take your pick of horror movies... they assume that the two hillbillies are inbred psychotic killers, particularly after the kids keep meeting with grisly accidents one by one. In reality, the hillbillies are just regular, nice guys minding their own business, utterly perplexed that college kids keep dying around them. So what we get is both a spoof on slasher movies and a commentary on prejudice, as well as a sweet character study and some of the most pitch-perfect moments of gruesome dark comedy I've ever seen. First-time(!) writer-director Eli Craig is definitely one to watch.
4. Putty Hill
If The Arbor is a documentary posing as a drama, Putty Hill is a drama posing as a documentary. Not that it can really be classified as a mockumentary, but the film occasionally takes time out from the action to hold interviews with the characters, conducted by the (unseen) filmmaker himself. The film itself plays a bit like something Richard Linklater and Gus Van Sant would come up with if they ever decided to work together. It follows the friends and family members of a young man who recently died from a drug overdose, and how his death affected (or didn't affect) the community in which he lived. Absolutely mesmerizing from one shot to the next, filled with uncannily naturalistic performances and a formal mastery not commonly found in low-budget American indies, it's the year's most overlooked film by a mile.
3. The Guard
My first response upon seeing The Guard was that it was this year's In Bruges: a witty, darkly comic British (well, Irish, in this case) thriller with a first-rate Brendan Gleeson perfomance. So it wasn't much of a surprise to learn that the writer-director, John Michael McDonagh, is the brother of Martin McDonagh, the writer-director of In Bruges. Clearly, this family is awesome. In Bruges is the better film, I think, but The Guard is a more than worthy companion, with the same breezy wit, the same loving attention to character development, the same visual aplomb. The trailer makes it look like a lame cross between a buddy cop movie and a fish-out-of-water comedy (the "fish" being Don Cheadle's FBI agent, paired with Gleeson's drunken Irish cop to catch a gang of drug smugglers), but the actual film delights in subverting these cliches, and others like them. Far more interested in character than comedy or action, it ultimately becomes Gleeson's movie as it gradually stakes its claim as, really, little more than a detailed character study. And what a wonderful character it is.
2. Midnight in Paris
Woody Allen is very hit or miss, especially lately, but when he hits, it's magical. This is one of his best films, and easily his funniest. It's the kind of movie he was making back in the '80s, when he would have a new masterpiece practically every year, and particularly recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo, its most obvious thematic sibling. In one of the most canny marketing campaigns since The Crying Game, the trailers avoided revealing what the movie is actually about, and I wouldn't dream of spoiling it here; but it's a story so enchantingly told, so fraught with pleasures both small and large, that it's no wonder it became Allen's highest grossing film to date, and his first in quite some time to get serious Oscar buzz. It's his most assured film in years, with gorgeous camerawork, absolutely brilliant casting in all of the key roles, and a screenplay that, while it might belabor the central thesis a bit much, is decidedly pointed and utterly charming.
1. War Horse
Somehow, Steven Spielberg made one of the great masterpieces of the 1940s and nobody noticed. Maybe because he made it in 2011. But whatever... War Horse is the closest thing we have to the days of John Ford and Victor Fleming, King Vidor and Powell and Pressburger. It's a glorious, old-fashioned epic about a great love being torn asunder by war. The fact that it's a love story between a boy and a horse does nothing to dilute its emotional potency. Even I, who groaned at the thought of seeing a horse movie, was captivated by this story. I can't imagine it working as well on stage (it's also a Tony-winning play), without Spielberg's knack for anthropomorphizing these animals... not in a silly kids movie kind of way, but in subtler ways that simply serve to remind us we're watching living, feeling creatures. For it's the horse who is the film's protagonist, not the boy, and without such an uncannily expressive treatment of our hero, it would be an entirely different movie... Au Hasard Balthazar with a horse, or something. The whole film is magnificent, with the expected stunning war scenes and unexpected moments of humor, but the ending is what I'll remember most. The ending is quite simply one of the most insanely beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. To say that it moved me to tears is a severe understatement. It freakin' destroyed me.
Worst Movie of the Year:
Trust
I watched this only because Ebert put it on his Top 20 list for the year. Every so often I forget why I don't read Ebert anymore, and I need a movie like this to remind me. Think of the absolute worst '80s Afterschool Special you ever saw. Then imagine that it was about internet sexual predators, maybe involving Chris Hansen from Dateline somehow. Now, imagine that Afterschool Special remade as a feature film in 2011. That movie you're imagining is way better than Trust. This movie is hilariously awful, a two-hour piece of propaganda against something we already know is bad. It's a movie in which every scene seems to be calculated solely to teach teenage girls the dangers of online messaging, complete with a creepy sexual predator who, like most movie sexual predators, couldn't be simply creepy by being a sexual predator, but has to have an extra layer of creepiness even above that, like creepiness squared. But the funniest moment is when the teenage victim, who up until now has been defending the sexual predator and insisting the sex was consensual, suddenly has a breakthrough and realizes, "Oh my god, I was raped!" Rape, incidentally, is the film's key word. The dialogue in any given scene invariably goes like this: "blah blah rape blah rape something something rape, yadda yadda rape... rape rape rapity rape." PSAs have more subtlety.
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