Maria (2024)

Pablo Larraín is doing his usual Pablo Larraín thing here. For my money, Maria is not nearly as good as Spencer, but it's a good deal better than Jackie (not that that would be difficult). 

On the one hand Maria is overwrought and melodramatic and excessive. It frequently feels theatrical and false, calling attention to itself as a performance or dramatization. But on the other hand, all of the masks in Maria feel true and deep and desperate. 

In many ways, although this is a film about a diva who was never not on stage, never not faking it, Larraín gets to something honest and sensitive. Just because the tears had to be manufactured doesn’t mean they don’t come from real grief.

The art direction is gorgeous in this, and the makeup is exquisite. Jolie is luminous and every bit the movie star. I was also in love with Pierfrancesco Favino (he’s always good, but he is the real heart of Maria, and he teaches us how to love her).

Eternals

I quite liked Eternals. I think there are a couple reasons for that.

1. The fighting is way more interesting than punching, and the energy sources with which the eternals fight are visually very cool.

2. The monsters – especially the main monster – are very cool. They look cool and they do cool things.

3. The movie is epically long, but that didn't really annoy me until the dénouement, when we had to wrap up what happened to Sprite (who cares) and every other one of the eternals. That made for a thousand irritating little cliffhanger scenes so typical of Marvel films.

4. This movie had good jokes. Kumail Nanjani, Don Lee, Harish Patel, and Brian Tyree Henry are all very funny in this.

There is plenty of clunky exposition, of course, and there is soooo much that still is not explained in this world, but the world-building is kind of cool, and I think I like how humans are not really the center of things in many ways. Thinking about the universe the way helps us remember how small humans are. This is good.

Angelina Jolie. It was so good to see her and get to spend so much time with her. I legitimately missed her.

I. Love. Richard Madden. He can do no wrong. He's not even great in this or anything, but goddammit I love him. 

Haaz Sleiman!? This movie gave me the beautiful gay actor in a key supporting part – and he played a gay man. My heart soared every moment he was onscreen.

Look Eternals has plenty of problems. I thought it was mostly a big old unwieldy mess, but I had a good time. The fight scenes, especially, were really awesome, the visual effects were very cool, and the eternals' superpowers were interesting and used in ways that were constantly intriguing.

Another CGI Gorilla

The One and Only Ivan is relentlessly saccharine, but honestly the effects were great.

I have to say something about Bryan Cranston. I don't understand it. I know everyone watched him on television in this Breaking Bad show, and I know everyone loves him, but he's awful in movies. I can't think of a single movie I thought he was good in. I honestly just don't get what you all see in him.

The Oscars, the Golden Globes, and the Best Foreign Language Film

There are five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes. They are:

• Angelina Jolie's First They Killed My Father (មុនដំបូងខ្មែរក្រហមសម្លាប់ប៉ារបស់ខ្ញុំ), 
• Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless (Нелюбовь), 
• Sebastián Lelio's A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantastica), 
• Fatih Akın's In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts), and 
• Ruben Östlund's The Square. 

All of these films have been released for at least a week in the U.S. so far, and I have managed to see them all. More on each in a bit.

Nominees for the Foreign Language category at the Globes work differently than nominees for that category at the Oscars. At the Globes, any foreign language film can be nominated as long as it qualifies (i.e. as long as it meets the U.S. release criteria). What's interesting here is that these are foreign (non-American) journalists choosing a "best foreign language film", that is, a best foreign-to-the-U.S. film. This strikes me as odd, but maybe that just looks weird to me today.

Nominees for the Foreign Language category at the Oscars need to be released not in the U.S. but in the country of origin. In this way, the Oscars are usually several months ahead of films released in the U.S. Many of the films nominated in this category at the Oscars will not yet have had U.S. release dates. Some will, of course, but many will not. Because the films are selected by the countries themselves, and because only one film can be selected by each country, films get left out. France selected Robin Campillo's 120 Beats per Minute this year instead of a number of other options, including one of my favorite films of the year, François Ozon's Frantz. A film like last year's Aquarius, which the Brazilian government felt was critical of its policies, will not get chosen. And a horror film, like Julia Doucournau's Raw (Grave) (another favorite of mine from this year), almost never has a chance to be chosen by a nation to represent it at the Oscars.

In fact, we already know that when the Oscar nominations come out on January 23rd they aren't going to match the Golden Globe list. AMPAS has released a shortlist of nine films from which they will choose their final five nominees. Those films are:

• A Fantastic Woman,
• Alain Gomis's Félicité,
• Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot (פוֹקְסטְרוֹט),
• In the Fade,
• Ziad Doueiri's The Insult (ضية رقم ٢٣),
• Loveless,
• Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul (Testről és Lélekről),
• The Square, and
• John Trengove's The Wound (Inxeba).

These are films from Chile, Senegal, Israel, Germany, Lebanon, Russia, Hungary, Sweden, and South Africa. A fairly nice range, although the Academy has historically ignored films from East Asia, and this list certainly replicates that history of snubbing.

Snubbed Cantonese film Mad World

This also means that the Academy has already decided not to choose films that have been popular with critics, such as France's 120 Beats per Minute, Spain's Summer 1993, Cambodia's First They Killed My Father, Argentina's Zama, or a film I'm really excited about from Belgium, Racer and the Jailbird.

Lots of people complain about the way AMPAS runs this category. I am not one of those people. To my mind, the idiosyncratic way that the Academy deals with foreign language films just puts more films on my radar. See, I'm already planning to see the critically acclaimed films the Academy is ignoring. Zama, Racer and the Jailbird, 120 Beats, Thelma, Tom of Finland, A Ciambra, Happy End – these films are already on my list of movies to see. But On Body and Soul, Félicité, and The Wound certainly were not. ... And now they are. As I see it, the Academy's odd choices just give me more films to see, they direct me toward stuff I wasn't already paying attention to. I see this as just more of a good thing.

In any case, here is what I thought of the five Foreign Language nominees for the Golden Globes:

* * *

I thought First They Killed My Father was a giant leap forward for Angelina Jolie, and is definitely her best film to date. This movie was way, way better than I thought it was going to be. The film represents a marked, significant improvement from Unbroken. Jolie is still interested in characters who are unconquerable – survivors who make it through awful things – but this one is told with real intrigue and nuance. The plot centers around a young woman in Cambodia who is imprisoned in a child labor camp by the Khmer Rouge. We follow her and her troubles very closely, and the camera is intimately connected to our protagonist. Perhaps because it is about a child, Jolie's work diffuses from its normal insistent storytelling and focuses more on experience and fear rather than reportage. It's strong work.

Another thing that this film avoids because it is about a child are those formative "childhood years" sections of Unbroken, where we see some kind of insistent will to survive even as a child that then is later manifest in the adult who manages to deal with such terrible things. First They Killed My Father needs to find that courage in the child herself, and so it looks to the sequence of events that create courage or survival rather than attempting to locate some internal essence of unconquerability. In any case, this is a good film and well worth seeing.

Also, Netflix loves a film about child soldiers. (This is no Beasts of No Nation, to be sure, but it is good.)

* * *

Loveless, Andrey Zvyagintsev's even chillier follow-up to the already very chilly films Leviathan and Elena, is gorgeous. I absolutely loved this film. This is, I think, saying a lot because Loveless is, as you might imagine from its title, not exactly a lovable film. This film is an unflinching and even merciless exploration of one couple's lack of care for their twelve-year-old son. This movie is bleak, y'all.

But what is the point of it? my mother asked me, when I explained this movie to her.  

Loveless is a portrait of modern Russia, of course, but it is much more than that, and I found plenty with which to identify that looks familiar to this North American. Loveless is about the ways that the state has stopped caring about actual people and the issues they face; it's about the bureaucracies designed to assist people that end up getting in the way of helping them. It's also about human selfishness, about our contemporary cult of making ourselves happy – about finding ourselves, about being the best versions of ourselves – and about how those seemingly benign or even healthy ideas often conflict with taking care of the people in our lives, loving those in our orbit, making space for others.

In many ways, too, this is a movie about the horrors of modern progress – what it might look like to focus only on ourselves and our own desires and needs. As I said, this is a cold film. It's a tough portrait of modern life. I found it hard hitting and uncompromising, and I loved it.

* * *

Sebastián Lelio's most recent film, A Fantastic Woman, is a movie about a trans woman named Marina in Chile whose boyfriend dies. She then must grieve, while also dealing with police bureaucracy and the man's hostile family. I had high hopes for A Fantastic Woman, mostly because Lelio made the delightful film Gloria a couple of years ago, and I was so taken by the brilliant performance at the center of Gloria, by the superb actress Paulina García.

A Fantastic Woman is not even remotely comparable to Gloria. Of course, Gloria is a comedy and Fantastic Woman is a rather serious drama, but Lelio's gifts do not translate well to this tragedy. In fact (and paradoxically) the film is best when it is playing for laughs. There are, for example, some delightful sequences in which Marina and her sister banter, and the best sequence in A Fantastic Woman is a fantasy dance sequence, in which the queer club is portrayed as a place of freedom and fabulousness, a space of infinite possibility.

But the real trouble with A Fantastic Woman is that it doesn't have Paulina García in it. Marina is played by singer Daniela Vega, and the actress comes alive when she is singing, but for the entirety of the rest of the film, her performance felt wooden and uncomfortable. She seems to have absolutely no connection with her boyfriend in the movie, and the affectlessness that marked her performance left me bored for most of the movie's running time.

* * *

Honestly, I don't think there is much to say about Fatih Akın's movie In the Fade. It struck me as a fairly generic legal-crime thriller. Diane Krüger won Best Actress at Cannes for the movie, but the best performance in the movie is by Denis Moschitto, who plays her lawyer friend.

The truth is, I've never really loved a Fatih Akın movie. I keep watching them since he first broke through with Head-On, but I thought The Edge of Heaven and The Cut were both good but not great. And In the Fade doesn't break any new ground from the standard revenge drama. In fact, Akın's work is occasionally frustratingly over-the-top. When Krüger first loses her husband she weeps and thrashes at a level ten. When this first happens I thought, where are we supposed to go from here? Indeed, there isn't really anywhere to go, and Krüger weeps through the entirety of the movie.

It isn't that I don't sympathize. The woman is supposed to have lost her husband and son to neo-Nazi terrorist murderers. Fine. But with Krüger having all of the feelings, I didn't really feel invited to have any of my own.

In the Fade is, of course, not completely without merit. As I said, Moschitto's performance is excellent, and there are some great moments interrogating the terrorists' father and German complicity with anti-foreign sentiment and terrorism. But this film doesn't really have much going for it.

* * *

And then there is The Square, which is easily one of my favorite movies of the year. Ruben Östlund, who directed this film, has made an absolutely hilarious satire of art and modernity and decadence. This is a superb, outrageous, jaw-dropping film, and I can't wait to see it again. It stars Claes Bang as a director of a museum, and it so. damn. funny. I can't recommend this movie enough.

The Square follows the dramaturgical structure that I have come to think of as an Asghar Farhadi structure, where some event that seems singular – or, perhaps remarkable but rather simple – begins to grow more and more complicated as more and different people respond to that event. In this way the movie is able to take up numerous perspectives not just on a single event, but also to show its audience where all kinds of different people are coming from, and in this way explore not only this event from numerous angles, but also explore numerous different life-worlds.

You might remember that Östlund's last movie was Force Majeure, which was in incisive exploration of masculinity using this same Farhadi structure. Östlund's new film is equally wise and equally clever, and it's brilliantly well made. The Square also stars Elizabeth Moss (hilarious) and Dominic West (equally hilarious). Watch the trailer and then go see this movie.

Jeremy Irvine and Jack O'Connell Are Not the Same Person

Jeremy Irvine and Jack O'Connell are apparently not the same person.
 

This one is Jeremy Irvine

This one is Jack O'Connell

I kept thinking they were. And throughout the whole time I was watching Yann Demange's Northern Ireland military thriller '71. I thought I was watching Jeremy Irvine. But I was not. That was Jack O'Connell.

Jeremy Irvine was the guy from Steven Spielberg's (pretty awful) War Horse, and he was the main character in Roland Emmerich's much maligned film Stonewall from earlier this summer that no one saw. (This probably wasn't Jeremy Irvine's fault, per se, but he became a kind of symbol for "young white gay man" taking center stage and therefore pushing to the side the people who did the real work at Stonewall.) In any case, poor Jeremy Irvine really can't catch a break, even though as far as I can tell he is a pretty fine actor. In fact, it's a little hard to feel sorry for someone who is that good looking. I expect he'll make something soon that will redeem his career. Surely he can't make only stinkers.

Shirtless Irvine

Shirtless O'Connell

You can see why I might be confused.

Both men were, in fact, born less than two months apart in the summer of 1990, and both have played leads in big Hollywood films, but neither has really made a name for himself as an actor. And both are also English: O'Connell was born in Derbyshire and Irvine in Cambridgeshire.

But the guy in '71 is Jack O'Connell. He was also the guy in Angelina Jolie's Oscar-bait/Oscar-fail Unbroken. But don't let Unbroken fool you; Jack O'Connell is a very good actor. He got great reviews for a prison drama called Starred Up, and he is great in '71.

'71, in general, is pretty damn great. I was expecting something a bit more sentimental, a bit less hard hitting, but Yann Demange keeps his film so that it is always saying what he means it to say, and he outlines the army's lack of care for its footsoldiers. It's a tough little movie, despite what might seem to be a sentimental idea behind it. What's even better is that the film has enough reversals – it's full of them, in fact – that it kept me on my toes for most of its runtime. It's also unsparingly violent and politically smart.

I've had this movie on top of my DVD player for a month and a half, easily, and I've just now gotten round to watching it. I wasn't expecting much, but it constantly surprised me, and I was absolutely sold by the time we got to act three. Jack O'Connell, too, really ought to be an actor we're all watching. He is a really fascinating performer.

One gripe: Demange adds two extra endings onto the first ending of his film – not sure why he did this, unless he was trying to convince me that I actually was watching War Horse again – but I think we can expect his work only to get better and tougher.

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 6 of 12

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
Part 6 of 12:

Nightcrawler

1 Nomination

• Original Screenplay: Dan Gilroy

Director: Gilroy

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rene Russo, Michael Hyatt, Price Carson, Bill Paxton, Sharon Tay, Pat Harvey

Smart, vicious satire, a Network for 2015, although this film is not intended to be funny – it feels all too real, not distant and absurd the way that Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's film did in 1976. Gyllenhaal is great in this, and he was close to getting a Best Actor nomination, but it was a very crowded category this year, and the Academy didn't nominate David Oyelowo for Selma, so Gyllenhaal's chances always seemed slim to me. Nightcrawler is too small a picture for the Academy, it seems to me, although it is a very "Los Angeles" film, and I'm sure that gained it some points with viewers. Better yet, the acting is stellar. Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed are just excellent. This Oscar nomination for writer-director Gilroy means that lots more people are going to see his movie, and that is good news for everyone. It's a picture that deserves the notice it's getting. It's creepy and disturbing and seat-of-your-pants tense.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #32 out of 80

The Judge

1 Nomination

• Supporting Actor: Robert Duvall (A Civil Action, The Apostle, Tender Mercies, The Great Santini, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather)

Director: David Dobkin

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Duvall, Vincent D'Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, Vera Farmiga, Billy Bob Thornton, Dax Shepard, Emma Tremblay, Leighton Meester, David Krumholtz, Lonnie Farmer

I'm going to state here and now that The Judge is the worst movie of the year. This movie thinks its audience is so stupid. I found this unbearable. It's stupid sequence after stupid sequence. We're supposed to love this judge who (as far as I can tell) is an actual murderer, a terrible father, and an awful person. Worse yet, we're supposed to believe that this adorable town that is functioning as a movie set here is actually a small town in Indiana. Every bit of it looks like New England, except for the CGI cornfields, of course. I can't even remember why I hated this as much as I did. But I will try: for some reason a hotshot lawyer who hates his father feels guilted into taking care of this father of his (who literally never stops being an asshole). I am not sure why Hollywood feels intent on trying to convince us that it would be really awesome to live in a small town in the midwest, but I see this all the time in the movies and can't understand it. In The Judge, they want to convince me that the midwest is so great that they've shot the whole thing in New England. Anyway, whatever. Hardened, crusty, curmudgeon of a father finally tells his kid he's proud of him after years of being a total asshole. Wow. Zzzz. And the son is supposed to have learned... what? I'm not sure. I couldn't have cared less. Every bit of this movie is preposterous.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #80 out of 80

Maleficent

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Jane Clive & Anna B. Sheppard (The Pianist, Schindler's List)

Director: Robert Stromberg

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley, Sharlto Copley, Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, Juno Temple, Brenton Thwaites, Isobelle Molloy, Michael Higgins, Ella Purnell, Jackson Bews

This wasn't terrible or anything, but it wasn't great, either, and it turned the fabulously evil Maleficent into a copy of Elphaba the Green Wicked Witch of the West in the musical Wicked. "Wicked" could only be used ironically to describe the Maleficent in this movie, who is apparently a goody-two-shoes and not evil at all. Angelina Jolie is perfectly cast, but the script is terrible and the movie never manages to compete with the awesome 1959 film. I've already complained about this film at length, so I won't retread all of that, but this movie ends up being a kind of amalgam of Wicked and Frozen. The costumes really are pretty fabulous, so I'm glad they got some love her. (Incidentally, the Costume Designers branch really has been choosing great films these days; I'm delighted that they've taken to honoring fantasy films in this category. It shows a delightful lack of snobbery and an appreciation for real invention.)
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #65 out of 80

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 3 of 12

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3 of 12:

Interstellar

5 Nominations

• Original Score: Hans Zimmer (Inception, Sherlock Holmes, Gladiator, The Thin Red Line, The Prince of Egypt, As Good as It Gets, The Preacher's Wife, The Lion King, Rain Man)
• Production Design: Nathan Crowley (The Dark Knight, The Prestige) & Gary Fettis (Changeling, The Godfather: Part III)
• Visual Effects
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, John Lithgow, Mackenzie Foy, Michael Caine, David Gyasi, Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, Matt Damon, Ellen Burstyn

Ok, so I wasn't the biggest fan of this when I first saw it. (It's a time-travel movie, but it swears it's all about love.) But it's grown on me since then, and I keep ranking other things below it, because Interstellar was pretty to look at, even if so much of it was silly and half baked. Hans Zimmer's score, it should also be noted, is my favorite of this year's nominees. It won't win, but I find myself listening to it at work. It's very, very good; one of my favorite Zimmer scores in recent years, and one of this year's best. The effects, too, are top notch, and I expect them to go home with the Oscar.

Will Win: Visual Effects

Could Win: Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #47 out of 74

Mr. Turner

4 Nominations

• Cinematography: Dick Pope (The Illusionist)
• Original Score: Gary Yershon
• Production Design: Suzie Davies & Charlotte Watts
• Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran (Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice)

Director: Mike Leigh

Cast: Timothy Spall, Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, Dorothy Atkinson, Joshua McGuire, Karl Johnson, Lesley Manville, Martin Savage, Jamie Thomas King, Karina Fernandez

#dickpoop started trending on Twitter after Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs mispronounced his name on nomination morning. Oops. Honestly, I loved Mr. Turner and it's in my top ten, but four nominations is a lot for a film that is as difficult to love as this one is. I am surprised it did so well with the Academy. I find Gary Yershon's nomination to be especially surprising, given his score's simplicity and the relative lack of publicity that this film got. But unlike films that were latecomers to the game this year (Selma, Cake, A Most Violent Year), Mike Leigh's movie played at Telluride and had lots and lots of time to sink in with voters, steadily gaining positive buzz from critics throughout the fall. Mr. Turner probably won't take home any statues, but I am delighted that a movie I loved this much got so many nominations.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Costume Design

My Rating: #10 out of 74

Into the Woods

3 Nominations

• Supporting Actress: Meryl Streep (August: Osage County, The Iron Lady, Julie & Julia, Doubt, The Devil Wears Prada, Adaptation., Music of the Heart, One True Thing, The Bridges of Madison County, Postcards from the Edge, A Cry in the Dark, Ironweed, Out of Africa, Silkwood, Sophie's Choice, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter)
• Production Design: Dennis Gassner (The Golden Compass, Road to Perdition, Bugsy, Barton Fink) & Anna Pinnock (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Life of Pi, The Golden Compass, Gosford Park)
• Costume Design: Colleen Atwood (Snow White and the Huntsman, Alice in Wonderland, Nine, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Memoirs of a Geisha, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chicago, Sleepy Hollow, Beloved, Little Women)

Director: Rob Marshall

Cast: Emily Blunt, James Corden, Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Huttlestone, Chris Pine, Lilla Crawford, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Johnny Depp, Billy Magnussen

When you look above at this list of nominations, you'll see that each of Into the Woods's four nominees has already been nominated multiple times. This is a big studio picture, and the studio paid a lot of money to hire all the best people. They did, and four of those people wound up with Oscar nominations because they are all excellent, well-known artists. But Into the Woods is a phone-in job for all four of them, as well as for most of the rest of the team on this movie. It's a lazy, boring, joyless adaptation of the stage show that is, in fact, never more than a filmed stage version of the show itself. In writing this post, I kept trying to find an image from the film that wasn't the same tired sound stage that served as the backdrop for most of this movie's scenes; they just aren't out there, though. Most of this film took place in what is, for all intents and purposes, the exact same location. As for Meryl Streep, she basically acts as though she is in a completely different movie than the rest of the cast of Into the Woods; the whole performance feels a little off kilter. I know the Academy loves her, but she doesn't need to get nominated every single year, does she?
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #68 out of 74

Unbroken

3 Nominations

• Cinematography: Roger Deakins (Prisoners, Skyfall, True Grit, The Reader, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Kundun, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption)
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Angelina Jolie

Cast: Jack O'Connell, Ishihara Takamasa, Garrett Hedlund, Domhnall Gleeson, Finn Wittrock, Jai Courtney, C.J. Valleroy, Alex Russell, Maddalena Ischiale, Vincenzo Amato

Honestly, it is time for Roger Deakins finally to win an Oscar. Look at that list up there! He has shot some gorgeous, gorgeous films and never won. He ain't gonna win this year, either. Jolie's film was not widely loved by the Academy, and it is a little bit of a mystery to me as to why this was so. Was it too obviously Oscar-bait for them? Did it not make them feel good enough about themselves? Was it too ethnic (Italian)? Was it that it was a WWII movie about the Pacific theatre instead of the European theatre? Who knows. In any case, the Academy just didn't go for it, and they aren't going to go for it on the big night either. I should also note my own frustration, here, that this year's very, very good war movie – Fury, which boasted excellent performances, great art direction, awesome sound mixing and editing, a great script, and realistic violence – is nowhere to be found among the nominees despite its being far superior to any of the other war movies this year.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #54 out of 74

Inspiration, Overcoming, and Oscar Bait

Somewhere near the end of act two of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the evil Japanese man who runs the P.O.W. camp where U.S. Olympian slash soldier Louie Zamperini is imprisoned forces the other Allied soldiers in the camp to punch Louie in the face. All of them. Louie takes their punches like a champ, screaming at his fellows who don't want to slug him Just hit me!

Jolie's film is a little bit like Louie at this moment in the movie.

It isn't that there aren't problems with the movie. There are plenty of them. But, like its hero, Unbroken seems to me a sort of resilient little guy. It tries and tries, and it wants to be something amazing. And as much as you might want to punch it in the face, it's just going to get up and stand there staring at you in defiance.

Unbroken, for the record, is based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, and if you didn't know this before you started the movie, you will once you start watching. Anything that could happen to Louie Zamerpini happens to him. Hillebrand stuffs new events into Zamperni's life as though accretion will make him interesting, much like she did in the narrative she created that spawned Seabiscuit back in 2003. He is a first-generation immigrant; he takes control of his life as a small child by focusing on running; he runs in the Olympics; he is a bombardier in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War; his plane crashes not once but twice, and the second time the plane goes down in the Pacific and he survives. Then he survives in the middle of the ocean with only a tiger for company for like 45 days by literally catching sharks with his bare hands; he is finally rescued... by the Japanese; he is beaten; he is transferred to a POW camp in Tokyo where he is tormented by this crazy sadist named "the Bird", who has some kind of bizarre (erotic?) fascination with him; he appears on Japanese radio for some reason; he is then transferred to a new prison camp where he hauls coal; he lifts things above his head. (The poster, incidentally, really is iconic. I love it. Even if this movie never addresses anything approximating "redemption", whatever that is supposed to mean in this context.)

But all of that really happened to him, you might protest. Fine. But I am sure lots of other things happened to him, too. Like, I dunno, dancing with a girl for the first time, or learning to make gnocchi, or training to be a bombardier, or carrying his husband's blood around his neck in a vial. My point is that the film (of course it does) gets to choose what it shows us, and it chooses to show us all of the things that beggar belief. Even if they are all true, this compilation of events is not the same as a character study. Hillebrand and Jolie seem to believe that the fact that he made it through all of these events is a study of who the man is.

Garrett Hedlund: an unassuming bright spot in this movie

What it does to me, instead, is make him into a kind of superhuman figure, who represents resilience, unbrokenness (that old masculine preoccupation), triumph, even military victory, rather than being an actual human. We learn very little about Louie Zamperini himself, except that he is strong enough to take a punch.

There is plenty of sentiment here, too, and Unbroken is intended as a weeper: a deeply tearful story that makes us all hug our six children just a little tighter.

And now I imagine Louie getting back to his feet and looking at me with his clear, shallow eyes. See, in truth, this film is not really that much worse than the other big sentimental Oscar-bait movies of the year (The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, Rosewater). In fact, I think it's a bit better than them. It's beautifully shot, and much less boring than those movies, and it doesn't have nearly as many cliché phrases as those three films, and if Unbroken focuses, like Theory, Imitation, and Rosewater, on a young man who is assailed by things he simply doesn't deserve and a world in which he feels lost and misunderstood, Unbroken at least does not ask us to pity our protagonist from some position of audience superiority; the other films do that in spades.

Why did the Academy like Theory of Everything and Imitation Game so much more than it liked Rosewater and Unbroken? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. It all feels so arbitrary to me. But it might be this feeling of superiority that we are allowed as we look at Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking in this year's movies about their lives. Imitation Game and Theory of Everything are completely invested in the idea that their protagonists "really" want to be "just like us"; they're designed to make us feel better about ourselves. Unbroken wants us to try to be better, to work harder, to lift that motherfucking piece of wood over our heads. It's a ridiculous film, but in this way, at least, it asks so much more of its audience than its fellow Oscar-bait films this year. Somehow I bet that it will eventually make more money than those other two movies, too. Because when you punch Louie Zamperini, he just gets back up.

Your Drag Mother's True Love Kiss

When I was a kid, I loved Disney's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. To begin with, it is beautifully animated. I loved the straight lines of the castle and the characters (even Prince Phillip's horse), the gorgeous colors, and pageantry of royal christening. I loved the Tchaikovsky-inspired score and the main song's catchy lyrics – And I know it's true / That vision's are seldom all they seem / But if I know you / I know what you'll do / You'll love me at once / The way you did once / Upon a Dream. But mostly I loved Maleficent.

She was fabulous. All dark and brooding and incredibly powerful. She was also cruel and greedy and rather ugly. But unlike the silly, bumbling, good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather (what in the hell is something called merryweather doing with flora and fauna anyway?), Maleficent was regal. She walked with poise. She wielded an awesome staff. And she could turn into a fucking dragon. This was clearly everything I wanted to be in life. And Eleanor Audley's voice was just too good. Deep and rich and calm: it was everything my little soprano voice was not. I used to mimic her tone, her way of speaking, her clipped diction. And I used to practice issuing stern commands to my minions (clearly I was an ENTJ when I was a child and not the solitary, introspective INFJ I am now).

Clearly this is all some kind of drag fantasy that the little genderqueer boy that I was performed and enjoyed. But since I've gotten older I've noticed that lots of people that I know identify with the villains of the classic Disney movies rather than those movies' heroes or heroines. It is a kind of disidentification practiced by queer people, people of color, or otherwise misunderstood people, who don't see themselves in the inamorati of the Disney cartoon. I never wanted to be a princess. No thanks. And I never wanted to be Prince Phillip, either, or even (at least I don't think so) have Prince Phillip or Prince Eric or Prince Charming or any of those dudes come save me. Such a thought never would've occurred to me. But the evil, uncontained, dark female character, who tries to rule the world and ruin the lives of the pale protagonists of the story? Sign me up!

For the record, I loved Jafar, too, and used to quote him extensively, and I obviously loved me some Ursula the Sea Witch.

On first glance, Angelina Jolie's casting as Maleficent is perfect as a fulfillment of my childhood villain-identified fantasies. She is by all accounts a lovely person and obviously an incredible humanitarian, but on the screen she has often played bad girls and misunderstood women. She is obviously gorgeous, but she has something dark about her. Anyway, this is excellent casting.

But the film is just not great. It has an awesome dragon, to be sure, and it also contains one really good sequence (right before Aurora pricks her finger), but less than a year after Frozen, Maleficent hinges on a trick identical to that film. And the plot – greedy power-seeker destroys the land of the fairies – is an old, boring one. Worse yet (and this is where the movie falls absolutely flat), Maleficent isn't evil at all. In fact, she's good. She's actually a saint, as it turns out. And what's worse: she learns a lesson. Gross.

I didn't identify with this character at all. Maleficent, the powerful, fabulous creature of my childhood fantasies, turns out to be a sentimental, jilted lover, who never does anything really bad or anything she might actually regret. She gets revenge for what is done to her, but she is always in the right. She never takes things too far. Only the cheekbones of this Maleficent could ever be described as excessive. Everything else is reasonable. All of this is toothless and boring, but I also see it – and this is actually rather awful – as a kind of foreclosure of the disidentification I experienced as a child when I wanted to be Maleficent. Transforming the villain into someone who is a good person deep down enacts some kind of ridiculous twenty-first century fantasy where we seem to believe that "bad" people are actually just "misunderstood", and you can always get through to someone who is doing something you don't like simply by talking to him or her and appealing to his or her reason.

But this isn't true, first of all, and second of all it still assumes a version of good and evil to which I have no desire to subscribe. In this fantasy, the bad girl's heart can be changed by motherhood, and by the beautiful smile of a happy blonde child. Well, no thanks. Happy blond children do not make me want to smile, and I don't wish to think of my own badness/queerness as actually good. See, for me, the villain of the 1959 film was someone with whom I could identify. In 2014, Disney hasn't given me anyone who I would want to be.

Best Actress 2008

My top choices in the order I would place them on my Academy ballot if I were allowed to vote (I have only four this year):

KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS, Il y a Longtemps Que Je T'aime
(I've Loved You So Long)

KATE WINSLET, The Reader

ANGELINA JOLIE, Changeling

CATE BLANCHETT, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Related:
My Best Actress picks for 2007
My Best Actress picks for 2006
My Best Actress picks for 2005
My Best Actress picks for 2004

Clint Eastwood 2008 Film #1

I finally scrounged up enough time to go see Clint Eastwood's Changeling last week. I figured it will be out of theaters soon and I would miss it if I didn't go soon.

I liked this picture. It is not going to be for everyone and it isn't a great movie by any means, but it is a very respectable picture; well shot, nicely staged. In discussion, I keep calling Changeling a "quality" film. It is a good script (by J. Michael Straczynski) and it is very well acted by a company of talented folks (helmed by the luminous Angelina Jolie, but including Michael Kelly, John Malkovich, and Jeffrey Donovan). A young man named Eddie Alderson gives a great performance—one of the best in the film—as a young murderer who is roped into killing Angelina Jolie's little boy (maybe).

Changeling is not without its problems. The lead character lacks a strong narrative arc and the plot occasionally follows various subplots that feel out of place and ill-motivated. Still, the subplots converge well enough, and each has an emotional payoff. The movie is never boring and it's filled with a bevy of intriguing villains and seedy elements as well as a noble heroine.

As far as Oscar, I think the film is not really going to catch hold. I love Angelina Jolie, but I don't think the Academy is really on the bandwagon. She was fantastic in last year's A Mighty Heart, had tons of early buzz, and still didn't get a nomination. And, as the title of this post hints, Eastwood has another movie coming out this season (Gran Torino) that is also getting very good reviews. Changeling, therefore, may only end up getting some below-the-line buzz (costumes, cinematography, art direction, screenplay) and may not even get those.

Still, this is quality filmmaking, and I found the film emotionally satisfying, well directed and intelligent.

Wanted

The Angelina Jolie vehicle Wanted, which stars James McAvoy as well as Morgan Freeman (who, I'm increasingly inclined to believe, does not turn down any role he is offered) is a derivative, inane, piece of junk of a movie.

When I say that Wanted is derivative, I mean, specifically, that Michael Brandt & Derek Haas's script is a complete and total rip-off of the Wachowski Brothers' 1999 feature The Matrix. Nearly all of Wanted's plot points faintly echo the exploits of Neo and Morpheus and Trinity. And it should not surprise you at all that Wanted totally pales in comparison to the film it copies. Its accusatory politics, its moral high ground, and its smug message of carpe diem all seem lifted from 1999. If any of this were interesting I'd tell you, but none of it is. Wanted is totally absurd and laughably bad. And Angelina Jolie is not even in it enough for it to be a vehicle worthy of her abilities.

Jolie's Snub

Angelina Jolie, though she was thought a veritable lock for an Oscar nomination this morning, was snubbed by the Academy. It's a snub that I predicted back in June when her movie, A Mighty Heart was released. I didn't see the movie and expected that Jolie would be overlooked come Oscar nomination morning. I was right.

The thing is, I had been avoiding the movie since June, but then I watched Mira Nair's The Namesake last week (it's really good, but I wish it were more intelligent than it is) and a slot opened up in my Netflix queue. By this time, everyone was naming Jolie as a lock for a nomination, so I thought I should relent and send away for it, even though the nominations didn't come out until this morning.

Fastforward to today, when, realizing she was snubbed, I now have wasted my Netflix slot. I mean, I still haven't seen Transformers or Norbit or Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, yet, right? And I need to send away for those movies. And now, since it didn't wind up getting any nominations, I don't need to see A Mighty Heart, which the trailer made look so sentimental and silly.

But I popped the DVD in tonight, figuring I would send it back to Netflix in the morning and clear some space for the movies I need to see now that they've been nominated (Surf's Up, In the Valley of Elah). Boy was I wrong. Angelina Jolie was seriously fucking robbed this morning. And the film is excellent.

As a matter of fact, the only thing wrong with A Mighty Heart is its cloying title. Michael Winterbottom's film, which is the story of Mariane Pearl, the wife of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002, is never dull, moves along at a rapid pace, and is edited like a memoir, interweaving tiny splices of the Pearl's lives together with the kidnapping crisis. It's also a kind of cubist retelling of the situation, taking snapshots of Pearl's parents, the police departments, CIA, and other journalists working the story in addition to Mariane Pearl herself. I found the film incredibly moving, and also searingly intelligent about U.S.-Middle East relations. Pearl is an amazing, heroic character and Jolie plays her with tenacity and an incredible inner power. It's a truly superb performance, and Winterbottom's film is one of my favorites for the year. I was a fool to wait this long.

Some Words on the Golden Globes

As you probably know, the Golden Globes ceremony/party has been canceled this year, in what has got to be the weirdest Oscar season in a really long time. And we all know that tonight's awards press conference will have no bearing on the Oscar nominations (which will be announced on Tuesday January 22nd) since the ballots are already being counted. The Globes really aren't that good of a predictor for the Oscars anyway. Nevertheless, I thought I'd do a rundown of who's nominated and I've included who I think will win in bold...

Best Picture (Drama)
American Gangster
Atonement
Eastern Promises
The Great Debaters
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood




Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
Across the Universe
Charlie Wilson's War
Hairspray
Juno
Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
(Hot Fuzz, Enchanted and Dan in Real Life were obviously too funny to be nominated by the HFPA)






Thoughts on this?

Best Actress (Drama)
Keira Knightley, Atonement
Julie Christie, Away from Her
Jodie Foster, The Brave One
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: the Golden Age
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
*I am predicting Keira but honestly it could be anyone of them (except Jodie)

Best Actor (Drama)
Denzel Washington, American Gangster
James McAvoy, Atonement
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
*How can anyone resist the Clooney?

Best Actress (Musical/Comedy)
Amy Adams, Enchanted
Nikki Blonsky, Hairspray
Ellen Page, Juno
Helena Bonham Carter, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose

Best Actor (Musical/Comedy)
Tom Hanks, Charlie Wilson's War
Ryan Gosling, Lars and the Real Girl
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
John C. Reilly, Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story

Best Supporting Actress
Saoirse Ronan, Atonement
Julia Roberts, Charlie Wilson's War
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There.

Best Supporting Actor
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
John Travolta, Hairspray
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men

Animated feature will go to Ratatouille, best foreign language film will go to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the Coens will take best director and screenplay too, and original score will go to Dario Marianelli for Atonement. Have you heard it? It's gorgeous. Song goes to Enchanted.

[Edit] My predictions mostly sucked. I went 7 for 14.

Best Actress 2007

My top choices in the order I would place them on my Academy ballot if I were allowed to vote:

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, Atonement

NICOLE KIDMAN, Margot at the Wedding

ANGELINA JOLIE, A Mighty Heart

ELLEN PAGE, Juno

JULIE CHRISTIE, Away from Her

Runners-up (in alphabetical order):
Cate Blanchett (I'm Not There.)
Parker Posey (Broken English)

Related:
My Best Actress picks for 2006
My Best Actress picks for 2005
My Best Actress picks for 2004

The Oscar Race

So now that I have a little time, I thought it might be interesting to discuss some of the critics awards that have been released over the last couple of days. Everything will change very visibly with the Golden Globe nominations on Thursday, but here is what everyone's talking about right now.

BEST PICTURE
American Gangster
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Atonement
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Bucket List
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Juno
The Kite Runner
Lars and the Real Girl
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
Sweeney Todd
There Will Be Blood

It seems very likely that no other film will emerge as a frontrunner for awards, and that the five Best Picture nominees will come from this list. It's a huge list, so that shouldn't be too shocking. Most frequently mentioned here are No Country for Old Men, of course, and The Diving Bell and Butterfly, which is getting mentioned as most critics' Best Foreign Language selection. It is ineligible for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but it could emerge with a Best Picture nomination. If it's lucky. This seems unlikely.

BEST DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson (L.A.)
Tim Burton (Nat'l Board of Review)
The Coen Brothers (N.Y., San Francisco)
Julian Schnabel (Boston, L.A.)

The additional directors mentioned by the BFCA are: Sidney Lumet (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), Sean Penn (Into the Wild) and Joe Wright (Atonement). The top four here are Anderson, the Coens and Schnabel. I expect Lumet to get an Oscar nomination too. Not sure about slot five.

BEST ACTOR
George Clooney (NBR, San Fran)
Daniel Day-Lewis (L.A., N.Y.)
Emile Hirsch (NBR)
Frank Langella (Boston, L.A.)

The BFCA also includes Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd), Ryan Gosling (Lars and the Real Girl) and Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises). Viggo Mortensen's performance is one of the best of year--no question. Not sure if he can score a nomination, though. I think Hirsch's chances are iffy, too. He is very young for a Best Actor nomination. Could James McAvoy (Atonement) place?

BEST ACTRESS
Julie Christie (NBR, L.A., N.Y., San Fran)
Marion Cotillard (Boston)
Anamaria Marinca (L.A.)
Ellen Page (NBR)

THE BFCA adds to this Amy Adams (Enchanted), Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: the Golden Age) and Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart). They aren't included here, but I think Laura Linney (The Savages) and Keira Knightley (Atonement) could also place.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck (NBR, San Fran)
Javier Bardem (Boston, N.Y.)
Hal Holbrook (L.A.)
Vlad Ivanov (L.A.)

The BFCA adds Philip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Wilson's War) and Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton). The field is not completely wide open here, but only Bardem is really set in stone here. And everyone was talking about Max Von Sydow (The Diving Bell and Butterfly) last week...

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Ryan (NBR, Boston, L.A., N.Y., San Fran)
Cate Blanchett (L.A.)

The only name anyone is mentioning is Amy Ryan and this is stupid. Not because she's bad in the movie (although I wasn't particularly over the moon about her performance), but because the critics have a chance to influence the discourse. The only actress anyone wants to talk about is Amy Ryan, and they could be choosing instead to promote some other cool performances. The BFCA adds Catherine Keener (Into the Wild), Vanessa Redgrave (Atonement) and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton). But what about Kelly Macdonald (No Country for Old Men), Charlotte Gainsbourg (I'm Not There.) or Leslie Mann (Knocked Up). I can think of another three or four actresses whose supporting work impressed me. It is a little ridiculous that no critics organizations can think of any.

The Nominees: Part VII of VIII (Aren't We Done Yet?)

THE ILLUSIONIST

1 Nomination:

Best Cinematography: Dick Pope

Director: Neil Burger (Interview with the Assassin)
Cast: Edward Norton, Jessica Biel, Paul Giamatti, Rufus Sewell

Zzzzz. This is a bad movie, and don't see it for the cinematography either. I mean, yay, Dick Pope's first nomination and all, but from what I recall of this movie (and I spent a lot of it wishing I would fall asleep), I remember that there aren't very many wide shots because it's kind of a low budget affair with very few sets. This is mostly an interior picture. And I could tell that as I was watching it. I am skeptical of this nomination. There are much more deserving pictures that might've appeared here. Including Best Picture nominee The Departed, which is brilliantly shot.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #65 out of 71

MARIE ANTOINETTE

1 Nomination:

Best Costume Design: Milena Canonero (The Affair of the Necklace, Titus, Dick Tracy, Tucker: the Man and His Dream, Out of Africa, and two trophies: Chariots of Fire and Barry Lyndon)

Director: Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, The Virgin Suicides)
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, Rip Torn, Molly Shannon, Asia Argento

Very good movie. Awful reviews. But the costumes in this film are really a vision. And Canonero hasn't won since 1982. I want her to win again. This category seems sort of tough to predict, but I think I will predict it for the win... mostly because Canonero is who I'm rooting for.
Will Win: Best Costume Design
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #23 out of 71

CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER

1 Nomination:

Best Costume Design: Yee Chung Man

Director: Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers, Hero, Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, To Live, Shanghai Triad)
Cast: Chow Yun Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Ye Liu, Man Li, Jin Chen

This movie is fun stuff. Of course, almost nobody saw it. It's not a big martial arts/swordfighting bonanza like Flying Daggers and Hero were. And is it just me or was it not marketed as much as those two flicks were? It has all of the eye candy of those films and more if you ask me. Anyway, congrats to the designer on this nomination. And let's hope for more stuff of substance from Yimou. He is a master filmmaker with a lot more good stuff in him. And any excuse to see Gong Li is a good one in my opinion.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #33 out of 71

THE GOOD SHEPHERD

1 Nomination:

Best Art Direction: Jeannine Oppewall (Seabiscuit, Pleasantville, L.A. Confidential), Gretchen Rau (The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha—she died last year) & Leslie E. Rollins

Director: Robert De Niro
Cast: Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Robert De Niro, William Hurt, Gabriel Macht, Timothy Hutton, Lee Pace, Joe Pesci, Billy Crudup, John Turturro, Michael Gambon

Just look at that cast! And then look at my rating down below. I have no explanation for this film or this film's appearance among the nominees for an Academy Award. The only thing I can think of is that everyone who saw this movie just stared at the sets because the plot was so sleep-inducing. Actually, in all fairness, the film does cover a huge span of time and involves lots of beautiful set work. It starts at the beginning of the cold war, so the look of the film really is exquisite, particularly when the film moves across the pond to England and the USSR. In addition, there is a whole plotline that involves the contents of a single specific room. The plot is, in a way about the set. But goddamn, this film is awful.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #71 out of 71

THE GOOD GERMAN

1 Nomination:

Best Original Score: Thomas Newman (Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Finding Nemo, Road to Perdition, American Beauty, Unstrung Heroes, Little Women, The Shawshank Redemption)

Director: Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven and Twelve, Erin Brockovich, Full Frontal, Traffic, Out of Sight, The Limey)
Cast: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire

Does anyone have an explanation for how this film missed out on a cinematography nomination? I mean, look at that picture! It's gorgeous. But let's talk about Thomas Newman. My favorite of his scores is the underappreciated Nemo, but this guy has obviously been doing a lot of good work in a very short time. Shawshank was 1995 and it's 2007. That's thirteen years and Newman now has eight nominations. But no wins yet. I don't think he's going to win with this one either, but he needs to get one soon. I also want to talk a little about the score that's actually nominated here. Newman's music has a distinctive sound. We all know the way it works from the "Six Feet Under" soundtrack. Kind of minimalist. High on precussions and low on big orchestrations. But not the score for The Good German. Newman has composed a huge, 1940's movie score. It's grand and opulent and very beautiful. So this is a well-deserved nomination. Hand this man an Oscar soon!
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: Unranked: This film has not appeared in Tallahassee just yet.

One more to go...

At All Costs, Avoid Alexander

And all of us said, "It's gotta be better than the trailer, right?" Wrong.
If you haven't seen Alexander yet, be wise, take my advice and stay away. Far away. As far away as you can. This movie is terrible.

I wanted so badly to like it. I knew Manohla Dargis had hated it. I thought, "Perhaps Manohla merely holds Oliver Stone to higher standards." No. Manohla was so, so right.

What an unholy, ungodly, awful, ridiculous mess of a film! I sat there wanting to cry or throw up or scream. It was so frustrating to watch. It had such promise. It looks so beautiful. The production is lavish and rich. The battle scenes are expertly filmed. The film stays true to the hero's homosexual affairs. But goddamit if there is not one scene with merit. No, I am unkind. There is a single, five or six minute battle sequence with Darius, the emperor of Persia about forty minutes into the film that is good. The rest is not just "okay," it is terrible. The inane dialogue and incomprehensible political discussions are not the film's main problems, either. The problems are the scenes: almost every one of them. Not one of them (save aforementioned six-minute battle sequence) serves any purpose at all. I kept wondering why I was watching what I was watching. I mean, why did he keep showing me such nonsense? If he was going to pick and choose which of the scenes of Alexander's life he was going to show us, why did he pick the ones he did? I don't think this will ever make sense to me.

The only character in this film who was nicely crafted was Angelina Jolie's Olympias, and I would say she was the best part of the film were it not that she had the most ridiculous Russian/Transylvanian accent. Jared Leto's Hephaistion is terribly written, though Leto seems to pull off something with the role. I did believe he loved Alexander, though I couldn't figure why. Poor Colin Farrell needs some voice work like nobody's business. I just don't know what he's doing in this movie. He tries yelling and crying and other things but nothing seems to come across the screen and hit me. Maybe he needs to do a play or something: play a supporting character in some low budget flick. I don't know.

Oh, and if you think you're going to see any nudity, think again. There is a very nice view of Rosario Dawson's breasts (and they are magnificent, I promise you), but that is it. Colin Farrell barely takes his shirt off that I can remember, and other skin is noticeably absent. There is a very dark shot of his ass, but let me tell you, three hours of suffering is not worth it.

Wahima said it best as we left the theater: Troy was more interesting. No shit.