Archive for January, 2009
BASTARRRRDDDDD!
For the Overacting Hall of Fame, we get this little gem:
She may not know the import of her words, but damned if she won’t give it all she’s got anyway. This girl’s got moxie, I tells you.
432 – The X Files: I Want to Believe
Posted by frothy in X Files: I Want to Believe on January 31, 2009
In this clunker, Mulder and Scully are reunited to help track down a missing FBI agent. As you might expect, they argue about being logical and following hunches, but familiar tropes of movie cops abound, producing a cliched, unlikeable mess.
Both agents have left the FBI. Mulder (David Duchovny) has become an obsessive recluse – he even has the mountain-man beard going – and Scully (Gillian Anderson) has resumed her medical career, working in a church-run hospital. But when an agent is feared abducted, the FBI (in the person of Dakota Whitney, played by Amanda Peet) asks Scully to ask Mulder to help them. Why Mulder? Because a certain Father Joe (Billy Connolly), who claims to be a psychic with visions of the missing agent. The FBI wants to make use of Father Joe if it can, but it thinks Mulder’s paranormal experience would help them figure out whether Father Joe is on the level.
Complicating matters considerably – especially in Scully’s mind – is the fact that Father Joe is a confessed pedophile, jailed for having had intimate relations with 37 altar boys. Father Joe believes that God is sending him these visions of the imprisoned agent (and other victims), and although Mulder is inclined to believe him, Scully is blinded by anger at his past crimes. And since the agency is no closer to finding its lost agent, there’s plenty of tension afoot.
Concurrent to all of this, Scully is treating a young patient who has a nearly untreatable brain disease, wrestling with church authorities who want to move the boy to hospice care; Scully herself wishes to keep trying more and more treatments, no matter how painful they may be, hoping that one of them saves the boy’s life. This is supposed to be a parallelism to the missing-agent case, not to mention symbolic of the Scully-Mulder relationship itself.
It’s a movie with obsession as its major theme. Mulder is obsessed with finding the killer/kidnapper. Scully is obsessed with saving the little boy’s life. The difference is that Mulder seems to suffer no consequences – sacrifices nothing – in pursuit of his obsession, whereas Scully risks losing her job and her reputation if she pursues her avenue of treatments. And although there is still significant chemistry between the two actors, it takes a little while for each to look really into the role. Anderson, who still looks breathtakingly beautiful, comes off a little shrill and one dimensional at the outset, slipping into the Scully persona like trying on a raincoat and thinking it’s a negligee. Duchovny, though, looks comfortable as an old, slightly torn pair of jeans.
The problem with all of this, though, is that it all feels like it was spit out of a machine. Duchovny and Anderson are being made to mouth dumb dialog against a backdrop of tried-and-true cop-drama standards. It’s a good thing the two stars have plenty of charisma, particularly with each other, because this by-the-numbers thriller isn’t terribly thrilling or provacative, choosing unwisely to use the history of the long-cancelled TV series as a prop for a mundane drama.
**
Nothing Sacred: classic screwball with a hint of cheese
Posted by frothy in Nothing Sacred (1937) on January 31, 2009
A small-town woman thinks she’s dying of radium poisoning. A reporter, trying desperately to salvage his reputation after being snookered by con men, is dispatched to interview the woman as a sentimental puff piece designed to increase readership. Only she’s not actually dying, see. But when the reporter (Fredric March) offers to take her to New York on an all-expenses-paid trip (that was a big deal back in the day) on which she’d be the toast of the town, Hazel (Carole Lombard) readily agrees. But then she falls for the reporter!
Nothing Sacred (1937) is a wonderful screwball comedy that makes good uses of Lombard’s prodiguous comedic talents. Director William Wellman juxtaposes the reticent, protective nature of the small town with the boisterous, welcoming – but ultimately discarding – attitude of the city citizens. Why, we’re all not so dissimilar after all, are we? And of course, this being a screwball comedy, you know that Hazel and Wally the Reporter will wind up together, but it’s fun to see March and Lombard interact. March, in fact, looks a heck of a lot like Gene Kelly here, with the Everyman idiosyncracies of, say, Jimmy Stewart. Okay, a poor man’s Jimmy Stewart. Maybe a pauper’s Jimmy Stewart.
Anyway, it’s a lot of fun. I particularly liked the drunk boxing scenes between March and Lombard, which exemplify how physical comedy should be (not stagy, just funny). Oh, and look for Margaret Hamilton as a harridan (I know, prescient typecasting) and Billy Barty as a literal ankle-biting little kid. Well, little even for Billy Barty.
***1/2
The Dark Knight and WALL-E aren’t all that.
Some jaws dropped when the Oscar nominations were announced this year and these two films were shut out of the Best Picture category. ”It’s an outrage!” people cried. “There’s an obvious bias against comic-book movies and animation!”
The Academy has been around for a long time, and its choices are not always the best ones (see: Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction). And it’s true that most of its nominees come from the Drama genre; specifically, the Melodrama or Biography minigenre. The Academy loves true stories about real people, especially if the person is an underdog. Comedies and sci-fi films, horror movies and cartoons don’t get much respect overall.
I suspect that over time that’ll change, but I don’t think that’s why these two wildly popular films were not granted Best Picture nominations for 2008.
WALL-E was, in my mind, a decent cartoon. Yes, it was pretty, and yes, WALL-E himself was cute. He was especially cute twenty years ago when he was Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, and he had a deeper vocabulary back then. The thing that struck me the most about the movie is that the subject matter was not necessarily conducive to being animated. Think of the past animation classics, from Pinocchio to Fantasia to Beauty and the Beast. What looks best being animated? Inanimate objects of course, and cute little animals.
So what did WALL-E show us? An animated robot. The animation was very good, of course, but because an object that is by definition animated (i.e., moves and interacts on its own), the effect is less intriguing than if a completely inanimate object had been animated. Look at earlier Pixar films, like Toy Story. What made that film work wasn’t just how well it was animated – and all by computer – but the fact that it was toys talking and walking and such. It’s that level of whimsy that sets Toy Story apart from WALL-E.
Then there’s the whole nothing-happens-for-an-hour thing. Scene after scene of WALL-E gathering garbage, saving some, dancing to showtunes, and so on, interspersed with life aboard the spaceships. The actual plot of WALL-E pursuing EVE doesn’t take place until the film’s well underway.
In short, WALL-E is pretty, but ultimately it’s unmemorable. We won’t care about it in five years.
Which brings me to The Dark Knight, an exciting, dark followup to a dull, dark original (Batman Begins). It’s a good movie overall, but if it weren’t for Heath Ledger’s singular performance as The Joker, there’d be no movie. Strip away his fantastic work, and you’re left with a standard-issue superhero movie – nothing more. The Joker is the only well-developed character.
Christian Bale is a terrible Batman; he has the emotional range of a toaster, and he looks like a giant light bulb. And he intentionally modified his voice for some reason. I never could figure out why he sounded so hoarse all the time. It sounded just ridiculous.
He’s got a very talented cast around him, though, especially old pros Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. Gary Oldman is decent as Gordon, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is excellent as the new and improved Rachel Dawes, but Aaron Eckhart lacks the panache and savvy required to play the duplicitous Harvey Dent.
So this is why both of these movies are good, just not good enough to win a Best Picture Oscar. The Academy got this one right.
A naked attempt to get the vote out
Voting is ongoing in our annual Oscars polls. There are polls for each of the six main Oscar categories – Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, and Director. If you wish, you can imagine past winners reading the names before you vote. Or imagine them naked, it’s all the same to me, just please do vote. You can vote once a day per IP address.
As of now, here’s how it all stacks up, like film canisters:
Best Picture: It’s extremely close. Benjamin Button trails Slumdog by one vote, 10-9.
Best Actor: Also close. Sean Penn leads with 10, followed by Mickey Rourke with seven.
Best Actress: Kate Winslet is dominating with 14 of 23 votes.
Best Supporting Actress: Marisa Tomei is likewise hoarding votes, with 11.
Best Supporting Actor: To no one’s surprise, the late Heath Ledger is winning this in a walk, with 19 of 25 votes cast.
Best Director: Close – Danny Boyle and Ron Howard have six votes each, David Fincher has five, and Gus van Sant has four.
Chained for Life: tepid exploitation
Posted by frothy in Chained for Life (1951) on January 26, 2009
In this lowest-budget psuedo-courtroom-drama, half of a set of conjoined twins is put on trial for the murder of an ex-lover. Chained for Life is campy, but not so campy as to be entertaining and has a ludicrous plot and terrible, jaw-droppingly bad acting. On the other hand, a certain parallel can be drawn between one of its aspects – the right of a conjoined twin to get married – and current events in America.
First, a brief look at the plot. The Hamilton sisters, played by real-life Siamese twins the Hilton sisters, are a singing vaudeville act. Their manager’s come up with a brilliant plan – one of the other stars in the act, a suave sharpshooter, will marry one of the sisters to boost ticket sales. The gambit works, except that the guy’s ex (his assistant) gets jealous, and the guy’s shot. Hence the trial. Fear not, dear reader! I haven’t given anything away. Even if I do, it’s not as if you couldn’t figure it out twenty minutes ahead of time yourself.
Certainly, one wouldn’t expect the Hilton sisters to be good actresses; the producuers obviously couldn’t cast someone who wasn’t conjoined. (This is in 1951, when the technology that would later make Stuck on You possible was not yet feasible.) So I can cut them plenty of slack here, nonactors trying their best. But everyone around them was pretty lousy, too.
Doesn’t matter. This is one of those many cheapos that leave no impression at all, no memory, other than the hook that there are conjoined twins. Incidentally, the Hamilton sisters appeared in one other film, Tod Browning’s 1932 classic Freaks, playing – can you guess? – conjoined twins in a circus.
So here’s the parallel. In this movie, Dorothy Hamilton wants to marry Andre Pariseau (Mario Laval), but no state will grant them a marriage license, on the grounds that the marriage would make Andre a bigamist. There’s the briefest of discussions about how that’s discriminatory, and then it’s all resolved when some super-duper priest makes it happen, probably after palms have been greased.
That’s about it for appeal here. Chained for Life isn’t interesting, ends a bit too early (taking a cop-out at the end to “leave it up to the audience” – which makes sense if the movie’s otherwise richly plotted, but not here), and is dull as dishwater left in an old jar of mayonnaise.
*1/2
431 – Gran Torino
Posted by frothy in Gran Torino on January 24, 2009
In his latest Oscarrific film, Clint Eastwood plays a cranky Korean War vet who seemingly hates everyone, including his dopey grown sons and his new neighbors, an Asian family. Walt Kowalski, having recently buried his wife, now lives alone in an immaculate house with his yellow Lab, alone to carry the sins of his past and to meticulously tend to his two loves, his yard and his mint-condition 1972 Ford Gran Torino.
Eastwood takes great care in showing us how irascible Walt is. He constantly spits tobacco juice. He shuns the church and its eager-beaver pastor. He wants merely to be left alone, albeit with a half-grimace, half-sneer on his face at all times, as if he’s just eaten something disagreeable. Yes, hardly a more cuddly, welcoming figure you’ll never see.
Shortly after the Lor family moves in next door, raising Walt’s hackles, trouble begins; an Asian gang harasses the only man in the family, teenaged Thao, and his older sister, Su, trying to recruit the former. As an initiation rite, the gang forces Thao to steal Walt’s prized car, but he fails in the process, thus angering both the gang and Walt, who catches him. But later, when the gang tries to grab Thao forcibly in front of his home, Walt chases them off with a shotgun, earning the gratitude of the neighborhood and the undying wrath of the gang. (This is the scene in the trailer where Eastwood famously tells the gangbangers to get off his lawn.)
Such a display of rebellion would never sit well for a die-hard gang member, so certainly the situation escalates. I won’t ruin the plot for you any further than to tell you that things do get out of hand. Armed with big guns, little guns, and a perpetual sneer, Kowalski isn’t a mere carbon copy of Charles Bronson in Death Wish; he realizes his limitations (not to mention his mortality), that he’s not some kind of hero in any sense – even though the rest of the neighborhood believes him to be and showers him with gifts.
Eastwood is at his crunchiest and most crotchety here; it’s as if he had a severe case of heartburn for two hours and didn’t want to tell anyone directly. Kowalski never smiles; he grimaces and grits his teeth, but he’s never happy, sort of emblematic of the character’s entire life. As the local priest notes, Walt knows a lot about death (having killed men in Korea) but almost nothing about life. No, this isn’t a movie about a bad man’s eternal salvation, it’s more about a man doing what a man’s gotta do. And that includes not only saving the family from the thugs on occasion but taking Thao under his wing and teaching him how to be a man.
Gran Torino is overtly racist, but it skirts the line of offensiveness through the use of hyperbole. Walt Kowalski uses every ethnic slur in the book (except, notably, the n word), sometimes to great comic effect. Even when he’s insulting everyone, we don’t feel he’s insulting us, so we’re not as aggrieved by his vocabulary choices. Eastwood is convincing as the seething rage machine, and he has a fine supporting cast. The movie is a little longer than one would hope (that is, it ended a bit longer than I thought it should), but it’s an effective and highly evocative story of a man’s quest for inner peace.
***
430 – The Reader
The Reader, starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes and set against the backdrop of the Holocaust, is at times tiresome and plodding, offering a unique plot (boy has affair with older woman, finding out later she was a Nazi guard) and a strong performance by Winslet and very little else. Its main problem seems to be that it simply doesn’t know what it wants to tell the viewer, what lessons it wishes to impart. As a result, its identity shatters into the proverbial million little pieces, each less interesting than the last.
Michael Berg (David Kross) is 15 and on the verge of falling under two spells: first, scarlet fever, from which he recovers in a few months, and then Hanna (Winslet), the older woman who helps him when he becomes ill. It is from this latter spell, though, that Michael never recovers; he feels the impact of their short, summer affair until the end of the movie (forty years later).
As romances go, it’s pretty sweet for the teen: he gets to sleep with a sexy older woman who desires only one thing (other than his sinewy body, of course): for him to read to her whatever trips his fancy. It’s a symbiotic relationship; he’s happy to have found a kindred spirit and ecstatic – pardon the term – to find an outlet for his hormones. She, on the other hand, is happy for his company and to hear him recite works of classic literature.
But as all affairs do, theirs ends abruptly, with nary an explanation, and that’s the last young Michael sees of Hanna, until he’s in law school years later, and as a field trip he’s in the very courtroom where a group of female, ex-Nazi guards is being charged with war crimes. Lo and behold, one of the guards is Hanna!
The story is related in flashback through the memories of the adult Michael, played by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes is a fine (ha) actor, of course, but it seems he’s always stuck with these repressed, completely controlled roles. Distant, Michael’s called in the movie, an emotional cipher. Michael attempts, for decades, to come to grips with two dilemmas: why did Hanna leave him, and is her alleged Nazi past true?
For me, I didn’t much care about his first dilemma; of course she left him, because she’s like twice his age and he was the clingy, controlling type. I was more concerned with the latter dilemma, because the trailer leads you to believe there’s some dispute about that. But this isn’t a courtroom drama. It’s more of a romance melodrama with serious undertones about the choices we make and the responsibility we marshal. The suggestion is made in the movie that the German people are looking for someone on whom to pin the blame of the Holocaust, and who better than guards following orders?
Really, the film has just one thing going for it, although it’s a doozy: Kate Winslet, who electrifies the screen even when she’s not on it. Her vulnerable, conflicted Hanna is nurturing and distant, just as Michael would turn out; we can only guess at her true feelings, but Winslet is so talented that with a mere glance she can turn our perceptions on edge. She is this film, inside and out, and the fact that she also gets naked doesn’t hurt matters.
The Reader perhaps overreached its goals, whatever they may be. It admirably tries to give us a main character who is not noble and good of heart in all things, but it fails to give us a solid reason to care about the proceedings other than as if we were being read a tale set in a faraway land in a distant time.
**1/2
Your 2009 Oscar polls – vote early, vote often, vote ’till you drop
Now, I know there are plenty of you out there saying to yourselves, “I haven’t seen these!” and then you don’t vote. That is the dumb! Don’t do that! Guess randomly, if nothing else.
2009 Oscars Predictions
Well, finally the nominations have been set. As is tradition, I’ll look at the five main categories (Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, and Director) and give my predictions as to who will win.
Best Picture
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire
Winner: Button. It got a lot of buzz late last year anyway, and the presence of Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt didn’t hurt; the movie has made nearly $100 million at the box office. Still, this is a tight race, and you can expect Slumdog Millionaire to be a dark horse here, but I’ll stick with Button.
Best Actor
Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn, Milk
Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Winner: Mickey Rourke. Very tough call. I’m going to go with Rourke, who delivers the performance of a lifetime. If he wins, it’d be an acknowledgment that his wasted years are far behind him, a validation of his career going forward. That said, I won’t be disappointed if either Pitt or Penn wins. Jenkins is a dark horse, certainly (most people haven’t seen The Visitor).
Best Actress
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie, The Changeling
Melissa Leo, Frozen River
Meryl Streep, Doubt
Kate Winslet, The Reader
Winner: Kate Winslet. I think this is a two-mare race between zillion-time-winner Streep and zillion-time-bridesmaid Winslet. I’ll predict Kate Winslet taking home her first Oscar, after being nominated five times previously. Since these two turned in such powerful performances, I don’t think the other three have much of a chance; Leo and Hathaway have never been nominated, so naturally they’re just happy to be there (slight sarcasm). Jolie’s already won, and here she’s nominated for a movie many didn’t care to see – despite the Clint Eastwood name attached to it.
Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, Doubt
Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis, Doubt
Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Winner: Marisa Tomei. I don’t think anyone else in this category is remotely worthwhile. Amy Adams’ character was completely out of place in the serious Doubt, and her “costar” Davis has all of ONE scene in the entire movie. Cruz was the best part of a crappy, crappy film, but it’s not enough, and Henson, although also good, isn’t nearly good enough to overcome the impressive, dead-on, knockout performance by Tomei, who’s one of the greatest actresses of her time.
Best Supporting Actor
Josh Brolin, Milk
Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road
Winner: Heath Ledger. Could it be anyone but Ledger? Imagine, even a few years ago, someone getting nominated for being in a superhero movie. Ledger’s performance was outstanding in and of itself, and it easily lifted the entire picture. TDK without Heath Ledger would have been a terrible film. That said, Brolin, Downey Jr., and Hoffman are all worthy, in that order. I haven’t yet seen Revolutionary Road, although I thought DiCaprio would have gotten a nomination, rather than the no-buzz Shannon.
Best Director
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Stephen Daldrey, The Reader
David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
Gus van Sant, Milk
Winner: David Fincher. It’s unusual that a the Best Director doesn’t direct the Best Picture, though it’s been known to happen. If Fincher doesn’t win, it’ll be Boyle. (And if Slumdog wins, it’ll be Boyle here as well.)
So that’s that. The awards will be announced on February 22. Later, I’ll put up polls for each of these five categories, and we’ll see if any of the three or four of you reading this deign to vote. Vote early and often!
Also, you can go http://www.oscars.com/play/ and fill out a ballot (as well as play other Oscary games).
I’m begging ya!
… to post comments, i.e., comment. To type your thoughts into the alloted space on this website. They can be mean comments, they can be supportive ones. They can disagree with me in principle or just for the hell of it. They can agree, too. Anything germane to the post is hunky dory.
So why am I begging you for posts? Well, because posts are the prevailing way to see how popular a site is. Now, this one isn’t terribly popular, partly because I don’t update it nearly enough. But still.
So whaddya say? Hm? Are you not entertained? (It’s rhetorical; don’t answer it.) Tell you what: Comment, or the dog gets it! I mean it! (But not the kid.) 
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