Oscar Nominations 2019: Part 2 of 11

Part 1: Roma, The Favourite, Vice, A Star Is Born.
Part 2:

Black Panther

7 Nominations

• Picture
• Production Design: Hannah Beachler & Jay Hart (Pleasantville, L.A. Confidential)
• Costume Design: Ruth Carter
• Score: Ludwig Goransson
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing
• Song – "All the Stars": Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, Solana Rowe, Mark Spears & Anthony Tiffith

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Daniel Kaluuya, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Sterling K. Brown, Winston Duke, Martin Freeman, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis, John Kani.

This movie was cool. I was really into it. Mostly, of course, this was due to Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan and the great energy they bring to working together. Coogler is just so good at what he does. He takes a silly genre picture like this and makes it meaningful and resonant. For me, Black Panther really used this tired old Marvel formula to address important issues of blackness in the United States as well as larger class questions within Black America. This is a very interesting film, and if it is predictable because of its largely formulaic comic-book plot, it does everything that it does in interesting, exciting ways. This movie just won the SAG ensemble award, and it's hard to argue with an award like that. Half the movie, I found myself exclaiming John Kani is in this?! Forest Whitaker?! Angela Bassett?! This is awesome.

Will Win: Sound Editing

Could Win: Sound Mixing

My Rating: #18 out of 66

BlacKkKlansman

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Spike Lee
  
• Adapted Screenplay: Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel & Kevin Willmott
  
• Supporting Actor: Adam Driver
• Film Editing: Barry Alexander Brown
• Score: Terence Blanchard

Director: Lee

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Ryan Eggold, Topher Grace, Michael Joseph Busemi, Jasper Pääkkönen, Ashlie Atkinson, Robert John Burke, Harry Belafonte, Corey Hawkins

I thought this movie was great. It is worth saying, first of all, that Spike Lee has never been nominated for best director and that this is only his second screenplay nomination. That is actually crazy. But this is also Lee's best movie in years. It's a brilliant analysis of contemporary policing and the connections between the KKK in the 1970s and the resurgence of white supremacist politics in the 2010s. And it's funny. Lee's frequent Brechtian techniques work beautifully here. This is an excellent film and it's one of my favorite of the year. I will say that BlacKkKlansman's popularity with Academy voters is a little surprising to me. This is a film that spends time with racism and takes a hard look at it. The Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, the National Board of Review and plenty of other awards bodies looked more favorably on the milquetoast, candy-coated 1960s of Peter Farrelly's Green Book and mostly ignored the more racist and volatile 1970s in Lee's film. But here the Academy is, handing out more nominations to Lee's movie than to Farrelly's. This is good for everyone.

Will Win: Film Editing

Could Win: Director, Adapted Screenplay
My Rating: #13 out of 66

Green Book

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Actor: Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic, Eastern Promises)
  
• Original Screenplay: Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly & Nick Vallelonga
• Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali (Moonlight)
• Film Editing: Patrick J. Don Vito

Director: Farrelly

Cast: Mortensen, Ali, Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Dimiter D. Marinov, Mike Hatton, Jon Michael Davis

I had a lot of problems with this. But I wasn't surprised that this movie got as much love with other awards bodies as it did here. Note that this film got a best film editing nomination. Usually those are linked with Best Picture, but Green Book, as you can see, is film #7 on the list this year. It probably wouldn't have gotten a best picture nomination if there were only five nominees. It looks as though most of the love that was shown to this film ahead of the Oscar nominations has begun to fade. Farrelly, who got a best director nomination in lots of places before January 22, did not (and rightly so) get a nomination here. Still, Nick Vallelonga, despite his recent racist comments on Twitter, got a screenplay nomination, and that editing nomination means that some people still really like Green Book. One thing everyone can agree on is that we love Mahershala Ali. It looks like he's going to win in the supporting actor category come February 24th. All good and well, but I do wish the Academy could think out of the box just a little more. Ali won the Oscar only a couple of years ago for Moonlight. He doesn't need another one. I don't see how giving him another one helps the industry or Ali's career.
Will Win: Supporting Actor

Could Win: Picture, Original Screenplay, Film Editing

My Rating: #44 out of 66

Bohemian Rhapsody

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Actor: Rami Malek
• Film Editing: John Ottman
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, Aiden Gillen, Tom Hollander, Mike Myers, Aaron McCusker, Meneka Das, Ace Bhatti, Priya Blackburn

Sigh. I get why this is as popular as it is, but it really is not a good movie. I've written about how homophobic I think this film is here, but also, I feel like Awards bodies are giving awards to this movie just to thumb their noses at the critical consensus around the movie, which had been very harsh. And that's not a good reason to give a movie awards. Most people I know who liked this movie have told me they liked it with an apologetic tone, as though they felt guilt for liking the movie as much as they did. I don't blame them, and I don't know why they're blaming themselves except that they know the movie isn't good, even if they did enjoy it. Will Rami Malek win best actor? I think that is insane – his performance cannot compare in any way with Bradley Cooper's brilliant work in A Star Is Born, but Malek has won the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award now, so he is definitely the front runner. This is so crazy. So maybe I'm just ignoring the writing on the wall, but... I think the Screen Actors Guild skews toward television, and so what we're seeing is residual love for Mr. Robot, the show that Malek felt he got too big for. TV viewers love Malek. My thought is that the Academy, which watches a lot less TV, will vote for Bale instead.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Actor, Film Editing
My Rating: #53 out of 66

BoRhap Horseman

I saw Bohemian Rhapsody tonight. I had been avoiding it. The problems with both the script and the set were widely reported. Sacha Baron Cohen was supposed to play Mercury but quit the production. Then Rami Malek had director Bryan Singer fired during production. (Dexter Fletcher finished the shoot. Also, how is Bryan Singer still even working? Spacey fell hard but Singer is still around? Really?) Then BoRhap got terrible reviews. I thought the whole thing was sort of a train wreck. I don't usually like train wrecks. I don't even get pleasure out of watching things that people say are so bad they're good. So I was prepared to look away.

But then BoRhap became the most popular musical biopic of all time and made a ton of money and it became clear that Rami Malek is almost definitely getting a Best Actor nomination. Since I usually gamble on these sorts of things and try to pre-game these movies, I figured after the SAG nominations that I had to see BoRhap. It's almost certainly getting a best actor nomination, and it may also get nominations in sound mixing and costume design. It might even deserve those last two nominations.

It's worth saying, too, that I loved Ben Hardy in this movie. He plays Queen's drummer, Roger Taylor, and he's excellent.

The thing about BoRhap is that there's just not much to it. That's sort of odd to say for a movie that is 2 hours and 14 minutes, but there simply is not much of a plot: Queen gets famous and then... Queen stays famous. To be fair, most of the film is actually about Freddie Mercury and his weird relationship with his girlfriend–fiancée Mary. There are two very long scenes where Queen fights with a record producer about whether or not "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a good song. These pass for plot as well as for conflict in Anthony McCarten's screenplay, and I have to say that even though these scenes don't work, they do give the movie a kind of structure on which to hang a story.

Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor

The screenplay itself is pretty terrible. Just as one example, there's this really clunky sequence where Mercury's dad explains that their family is of Parsi heritage and, like, basically reads a little Wikipedia summary of Parsi ethnicity. The rest of it is your typical rock-star drama. Lead singer becomes too big for the band, turns to drugs and sex and easy living (more on this in a moment), and deserts his faithful brothers in the band who have been nothing but loyal. But then! He learns his lesson and comes crawling back. Humbled, he asks for forgiveness and his band forgives him. Then they give a reunion performance and everyone cries. You've seen this before. We all have. And here's a drinking game: take a shot every time a member of Queen says "we're a family".

But... and here is where we really run into trouble – at least for this viewer – BoRhap has a great deal of trouble dealing with Mercury's sexuality. BoRhap is rated PG-13. It's about 1970s rock stars and it is rated PG-13. This creates a very serious problem. The band doesn't do any hard drugs in this movie. Instead they drink a lot, pop a pill every once in a while, Roger Taylor has sex with multiple women, and Freddie Mercury... fucks guys on the sly. Well, he looks at them, anyway, and attends a lot of parties where other guys make out.

The villain swoops in

Homosexuality, however, is central to this movie. Since drugs or sex can't really be the obstacle that draws Mercury away from his band and his girlfriend, what the screenwriter instead has done is move homosexuality tout court into that role. So, there is this underlying force that threatens Queen at all points throughout the movie, and that threat is homosexuality – first in an inchoate form and then in the form of BoRhap's antagonist, Paul, who is, as far as this film is concerned, evil incarnate. Paul is the descendant of those old school gay vampires in Hollywood movies made in the 1940s and '50s, feeding off of Freddie and destroying him; he's a figure of two-dimensional homosexual predation. Queer desire is presented as illicit, troubling, seedy, and dangerous from its first introduction in the film. And BoRhap maintains this association throughout. Homosexuality is what disrupts Freddie and Mary's relationship; homosexuality breaks up Freddie and Queen; Freddie's homosexuality is the way the film indicates his lassitude and depression; and homosexuality is what finally kills Freddie. Homosexuality is structurally the film's villain: it is a haunting force that Freddie can't quit and that eventually destroys him. BoRhap goes so far as to present homosexuality as something separate from Freddie, like a terrible addiction. It's as though Freddie isn't gay, it's just that he struggles with being gay and is troubled by his sexuality, which torments him and won't let him alone.

Rami is as curious as I am

Now, this very well may be the way Mercury experienced his own sexuality – how should I know how he experienced it? – but the thing that bothers me is that this becomes the structure of the film, which uses homosexuality as the film's central obstacle and makes homosexuality itself into BoRhap's villainous force. I found this outrageously homophobic.

Still, Queen's music is great. And Malek has Mercury's physicality down perfectly. As boring (and offensive) as I thought the screenplay was, all the concert stuff is pure pleasure. It's impossible for me to be annoyed with great concert footage or shots of audiences singing along and loving their lives. (The middle-aged woman next to me in the theatre who alternated between checking her phone and singing along, seemed to me to feel the same way. She was there for the karaoke. The dialogue? Not so much.)

And it's hard not to think of "We Are the Champions" as a gay anthem, and despite the film's homophobia, the song still feels like that in act three when it appears in BoRhap. The direction even helps with that feeling a little.

Weirdly, in other words, even though the film is, on the one hand, homophobic, it also can't help but celebrate queerness as a lifestyle or as a performance. Mercury is flamboyant, outrageous, and, well... queeny, and if BoRhap tries to say that gay sex is bad, it still maintains a love for gay style. Bohemian Rhapsody celebrates that, at least, and there is definitely something to love in that celebration.

X-men: Apocalypse

I'm officially done watching these X-men: Origins movies. I totally want to see the new Logan movie that comes out in March, so I am not swearing off of the franchise altogether, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna sit through another narrative where a group of young mutants whom I barely know decide between the good mutant (James McAvoy) who wants to protect all of the humans from the random evil besetting the world and the the bad mutant (Michael Fassbender) who also wants to protect all of the humans from the random evil besetting the world.

The thing that really sucks about these stupid Origins movies, though, are the performances. They're just embarrassing. Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy have spent the majority of each one of these movies just weeping. Now, I know J-Law only knows how to look sullen in movies, but I am used to McAvoy being a bit more engaging. I don't know what happened to him with this franchise, but he seems only able to cry and tell Michael Fassbender that he loves him. (Not that I blame him for the latter.)

As for what this movie was about. I don't think I can even remember. Ancient Egypt. Apocalypse. End of the world. Tye Sheridan (love him even though this movie is dumb). Something something the secret to it all is actually Jean Grey something something. Wolverine cameo. Lachrymose actors. Crisis averted. World returns to normal. McAvoy and Fassbender say goodbye with some difficulty, while McAvoy looks smugly condescending and Fassbender looks bored.

Days of X-men past:
The Last Stand
Days of Future Past
The Wolverine

I'm not doing it again, I tell you.

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 7 of 12

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7 of 12:

Captain America: the Winter Soldier

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Cast: Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Robert Redford, Sebastian Stan, Frank Grillo, Cobie Smulders, Maximiliano Hernández

This was really fun. It is so much better than the first Captain America movie, mostly because this movie has a lot of action. In the visual effects department there is just so much. Gigantic set pieces and flying buildings, and Anthony Mackie is something called Falcon and he flies around Washington DC like a badass. It's all very cool. I am sort of surprised this movie wasn't nominated for more things, but I take it that the Academy is not really into the whole Marvel-as-studio thing. This is perhaps not surprising, since they are sort of snobby, but Marvel is making tons and tons of money and giving a lot of people work. The Academy should get hip, especially if the movies are as good as this one was.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #43 out of 80

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Andy Serkis, Toby Kebbell, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Keri Russell, Nick Thurston, Kirk Acevedo, Judy Greer, Terry Notary, Doc Shaw

Yeah, this is very good. This is a good series with lots of big ideas. And this movie, like the last one, also dealt with real and interesting issues about humanity, racism, and animal rights. I wrote a little mini-essay on it when I first saw this movie back in July. I liked Dawn of the Planet of the Apes a good deal more than I liked more "important" movies this year – it's higher on my list than six of the Best Picture nominees, for example. This movie is excellent, and everyone should see it. It's exciting and powerful and imaginative and will ask you to use your brain. As for visual effects, this movie really works because of the humans who are digitally captured performing as apes. The effects people on these movies are doing insanely good work. This is great stuff.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #30 out of 80

X-men: Days of Future Past

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Patrick Stewart, Peter Dinklag, Ian McKellen, Nicholas Hoult, Halle Berry, Evan Peters.

This was awful. I don't want to complain about it anymore, though. My review is here. And the visual effects, particularly in the Quicksilver sequence that is pictured above, are really great. So this nomination is deserved. I want these movies to be better. I think that's the real issue with everything X-men. I love the X-men; have since I was a kid. And I just want these movies to sort of rock instead of being sentimental and schmaltzy. Use your powers and be a badass and stop moping around.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #69 out of 80

The Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies

1 Nomination

• Sound Effects Editing

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Lee Pace, Richard Armitage, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom, Aidan Turner, Dean O'Gorman, Evangeline Lilly, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving, Christopher Lee, Sylvester McCoy, Stephen Fry

How the mighty have fallen! Like this dragon in the image above, who dies within the film's first twenty minutes, this final episode of The Hobbit series simply peters out, rather than being anything interesting. It's sad because The Lord of the Rings series is so delightful, but The Hobbit series is painful. They look like they are the same but they are manifestly not the same. I have gone over my feelings about this movie in detail here, so I won't go through any of that again, but the absurdity of this film is almost incomprehensible. Who knew that an excellent little piece of literature like Tolkien's original novel could be this dumbed down?
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #76 out of 80

Days of Future Past

Well, I am still seeing these X-men movies.  
Days of Future Past, though, really has to be the low point so far. The script was apparently cobbled together by fans of Star Trek, since the plot is really a kind of mash-up of Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home and Star Trek (VII): Generations. There's even a moment in the film when we go into Beast's office and an episode from the original Star Trek series is playing on the television set (and of course the captain from Generations is playing Professor X).

And everyone is in this X-men movie. Not content with the origin stories of the X-men that we saw in 2011's X-men: First Class, this X-men movie places us in the past and the present. We have all of the casts – the old and the new. Double the pleasure!

Well, double the confounding plots anyway. I honestly had no trouble following all of the absurd plot twists, but I can't say that I cared much about what was happening. Wolverine goes back in time into his own body in 1973, and he has to convince Professor Xavier and Magneto to work together to stop Mystique from killing Peter Dinklage. And if they do that, the world will be less afraid of mutants in the future.

Um... ok. Will he be successful? We all know the answer is yes, but if only the doing of all of this had any fun attached to it! It doesn't, or at least it has very little. Even Wolverine (who is plenty of fun and has lots of delightful quips even in the bad movies that feature only him) is boring in this movie. Worse yet are James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence, who cry and cry and have a lot of feelings throughout the film.

There is one really fun sequence in the film, when Quicksilver breaks into the Pentagon and rescues Magneto from his metal-less prison cell. This part is fun fun fun. But the rest of the movie just doesn't have the same joie de vivre; it drags and drags some more, and it's filled with ponderous philosophizing about "doing the right thing" and "noble sacrifices" and "believing in people's true path".

Let's not lie, I'll probably see the next X-men movie, all the same. (I explain my fascination with the X-men here.) But Days of Future Past was a real misstep.

Superman II

Man of Steel's trailer was awesome. I loved it. But the movie itself is actually absurd.

(My friend Walter reminded me that the trailer for Pearl Harbor was good, too.)

And it isn't just that Superman is rather a boring character (he is) or that the plot doesn't actually get started until at least halfway into the movie. I think it may be that Zack Snyder doesn't really know what he's doing. (Obviously a Michael Bay fan, Snyder one-ups Bay's falling skyscrapers in Transformers 3 by including at least three falling skyscrapers in Man of Steel.) Snyder alternates between explosion-filled setpieces and sententious scenes about "doing the right thing", and this is, basically, all he's got for us. In fact, somehow the movie manages to be about 90% exposition.

The sententiousness is provided by Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner – and more often than not only the sonorous tones of their voices (both fine in the movie, even though their characters are absurdly crafted). The content of this sententiousness is Snyder's usual generic mix of USAmerican patriotism, love of violence, Christian imagery, and pro-militarism. Yay America! Fun game: try to count the number of American flags in Man of Steel. Yay Jesus! Kal-El tells the militarized U.S. government that he is thirty-three years old. Since Henry Cavill was only twenty-nine during filming, it seems a rather blatant reference to the age of Jesus Christ when he was crucified. Yay military power! There are no democratically elected leaders in the movie; only fascist dictators and military leaders. But adolescent Clark, while getting picked on but refusing to punch the bully in the face, is reading (for pleasure, apparently) Plato's Republic. Some people, Man of Steel says, ought to have more power than most. It's okay if someone has a great amount of power as long as it's the right man who has the power. It's okay to break laws made by the majority, as long as you know you are doing the right thing. This is, of course – like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan was a co-writer on Man of Steel) – an apologia for dictatorship, increased government authority, and (not to be alarmist but) the police state.

It sounds like what I really object to in Man of Steel is its politics, but it's the movie that is bad: the politics are only incidental. Still, there are lots of cool things in the movie. Because it is setpiece after setpiece, I really didn't get bored until the last half hour of the movie (and I prefer a movie with this much action to a snorer like The Avengers, where I just kept waiting for a setpiece.) The art direction is Alien-inspired and looks really, really cool. If Amy Adams is miscast as Lois Lane (someone with less "pluck" and more gravitas would have been my choice), it was nice to see Clark and Lois as grown-ups as opposed to the teenagers who played the pair in Bryan Singer's Superman reboot from 2006. And Henry Cavill is just... so... pretty. Even more than he was when he was in his early twenties. I mean, his face is perfect. He's not so much sexy as he is adonic.

Still, the movie is almost not worth watching. And that's Zack Snyder's fault. Because while Snyder knows how to blow things up and create a visually enticing setpiece, he simply has no idea how to have any fun.

The Nominees: Part VIII of VIII / Summary

SUPERMAN RETURNS

1 Nomination:

Best Visual Effects

Director: Bryan Singer (X2, X-men, Apt Pupil, The Usual Suspects)
Cast: Brandon Routh, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Frank Langella, Parker Posey, Kal Penn, Eva Marie Saint, James Marsden

High flying effects. This movie is big on effects and probably deserves to win this award. The effects really are top-notch. The movie, on the other hand, is laugh-out-loud bad, with all of the main characters being played by people far too young (and untalented) to fill their shoes. Sometimes the movie looks like a really expensive community theatre production of Superman III. And Kevin Spacey hams it up like you've never seen. Don't expect it to win anything on Sunday.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: Best Visual Effects
My Rating: #70 out of 74

POSEIDON

1 Nomination:

Best Visual Effects

Director: Wolfgang Petersen (Troy, The Perfect Storm, Air Force One, Outbreak, In the Line of Fire, The NeverEnding Story, Das Boot)
Cast: Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Jacinda Barrett, Mia Maestro, Emmy Rossum, Mike Vogel, Jimmy Bennett, Freddy Rodriguez, Andre Braugher, Kevin Dillon

I liked this movie, and there are a lot of special visual effects in the film, but—here's the thing—they all look fake. I mean, they don't look really fake, but they don't exactly look real, either. I'm assuming that the exterior of the ship is all special effects, which is great, except the boat looks like a CGI creation. I liked the effects better in Casino Royale, though I liked that movie less than this one.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #39 out of 74

CLICK

1 Nomination:

Best Makeup

Director: Frank Coraci (Around the World in 80 Days, The Waterboy, The Wedding Singer)
Cast: Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Henry Winkler, Julie Kavner, Sean Astin, Christopher Walken, David Hasselhoff, Jennifer Coolidge

The makeup in this film is really, really good. The film is the most peurile, asinine waste of time you could ever sit through. It's the worst movie I saw in 2006, and I didn't think anything could get worse than De Niro's The Good Shepherd. Boy was I wrong. This movie is unspeakably bad. It has no intended audience, and it recycles a plot we've all seen about three hundred times. Spend less time at work. Spend more time with your family. You'll miss your family when you're older. Then the movie is racist and homophobic on top of all that. Awful. The makeup, as I said, is really, really good. They make Adam Sandler look around 50, and he really looks 50. Like, for real, you believe it. It's damn good makeup.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #74 out of 74

HAPPY FEET

1 Nomination:

Best Animated Feature

Director: George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City, Lorenzo's Oil, The Witches of Eastwick, Mad Max and its two sequels)
Cast: Elijah Wood, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Robin Williams, Hugo Weaving, Brittany Murphy, Johnny A. Sanchez, Carlos Alazraqui, Lombardo Boyar, Savion Glover (for the dancing)

This film is insane, but it's a fun, ridiculous animated feature. Not my favorite of the year, but in a year without Miyazaki, this film deserves its nomination. The plot begins with a cliché, but quickly leaves any semblance of reality behind. It's an out of control plot with totally unbelievable plot elements, and I was fine with all of it.
Will Win: Best Animated Feature
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #45 out of 74

MONSTER HOUSE

1 Nomination:

Best Animated Feature

Director: Gil Kenan
Cast: Michael Musso, Sam Lerner, Spencer Locke, Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Kathleen Turner, Jason Lee, Jon Heder

So fun. This is a truly imaginative feature with all kinds of cool things going for it. My friend Elizabeth even told me that all of the characters' movement is done through a motion-capture process like the one they used for Andy Serkis when he played Gollum. For all the characters! That is so cool. Anyway, it can't really win the award, but it's a cool picture.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #42 out of 74

Wrap-up:

Best Picture - The Departed
Best Director - The Departed
Best Actor - The Last King of Scotland
Best Actress - The Queen
Best Supporting Actor - Dreamgirls
Best Supporting Actress - Dreamgirls
Best Original Screenplay - Little Miss Sunshine
Best Adapted Screenplay - The Departed
Best Foreign Language Film - Pan’s Labyrinth
Best Cinematography - Children of Men
Best Film Editing - The Departed
Best Costume Design - Marie Antoinette
Best Art Direction - Pan’s Labyrinth
Best Original Score - The Queen
Best Sound Mixing - Dreamgirls
Best Sound Editing - Letters from Iwo Jima
Best Original Song - An Inconvenient Truth
Best Visual Effects - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Best Makeup - Pan’s Labyrinth
Best Animated Feature - Happy Feet

Gay Movies

Superman Returns is loooong and very silly. Brandon Routh is very cute as Superman and I quite liked Parker Posey as Lex Luthor's moll. Ditto James Marsden as Lois Lane's fiancée and Kal Penn as Lex's henchman. And of course I loved Frank Langella as Perry White. But that small child who plays Lois Lane (I always forget her name and I never like her in anything) is so horribly miscast I can't even talk about it. James Marsden is—what—almost thirty-five? and she looks like she just turned sixteen and is playing dress-up as Lois Lane. It's positively ludicrous that she could have a five-year-old child.
And Kevin Spacey! He is as campy in Superman Returns as I've ever seen him in anything (including K-Pax and Pay It Forward). He dances around and changes clothes in the middle of the day like he's hosting the American Music Awards. There is this one scene where Lex stabs Superman from behind that looks like something out of a Bruce La Bruce movie. So gay.
This film is also hampered by an almost total lack of plot. I swear to you the plot doesn't start until at least an hour into the movie. There is an interesting father-son narrative in Superman Returns but I was so bored by Act Three I didn't care if Superman lived or died. Did anyone think he might actually die? I mean where was the conflict? The effects are cool most of the time, but the dialogue is terrible and just like Bryan Singer's Spider-man 2, characters spend eons gazing at one another from afar bemoaning the fact that they can't be together when there is absolutely no reason they can't be together. As a matter of fact, Superman Returns is nearly a complete retread of Spider-man 2.
A word or two about the poster before I abandon this film: could it be any more of a ripoff of last years Batman Begins? I don't think it could. With a plot taken from a movie nearly thirty years old, a performance (Marlon Brando's) hijacked from the original film (1978), a mood set by Spider-man and a poster stolen from Batman, this Superman doesn't have much that it can call its own at all: except maybe the money it made.

Summer Storm (Sommersturm) is a gay coming-of-age story. It's a retread of nearly every other gay coming-of-age story I've ever seen, but it's cute and palatable and at times very well shot. The music is excellent and the conceit (contact with an all-gay Berlin rowing team called the Queerstrokes causes a closeted rowing captain from somewhere in Bavaria to come out) is sweet. Not much to say about the movie. I quite liked it but it's mostly fluff.

X-Men 3

So has everyone already seen X-men: the Last Stand? I know that shit came out May 26th and I know it's September 7th, but I saw it tonight for the first time. It was free, though, so I guess that's good.

Did everyone like the movie? I liked it. I mean, I know it's not Bryan Singer and all and the intelligence quotient of the film plummeted from the second to the third, but I still really liked it. I did groan a couple of times (at the cheap sentimentality), but I still hope they make a fourth one. I love X-men. It's my favorite of the comic book series (not that I'm well-educated in such matters.)

Also: any excuse to see Shohreh Aghdashloo is a good one, in my opinion. And I'd also like to say that Ian McKellan's Magneto is, like, my new gay hero. He's all about taking no prisoners. It reminded me a little of Rufus Wainwright's "Gay Messiah." I think Magneto is the Gay Messiah. Pray for your sins: the gay messiah's coming. It's Magneto in a fabulous outfit, oh yeah, and he can kill you.

A Thought on Big-studio Comic Book Movies and a Review of Last Days

I'm not sure if I dig the idea of our good American directors making big-studio comic book movies, though: it makes the comic book movies smarter and cooler, that is undeniable, but are we not also missing out on stories of actual merit these directors could be telling? Batman Begins and for that matter The X-Men movies are certainly good, but wouldn't Christopher Nolan and Bryan Singer's talents be better used elsewhere? And did I just read that David O. Russell will now be hired to do a comic book movie? Really? I don't blame these guys for selling their considerable talents to the big studio machines, I just regret the studios use of these talents.

As for Last Days which I saw last night, it has a lot in common with Gus Van Sant's most recent two movies: Elephant and Gerry, both of which are superb films. Last Days has a lot of really similar elements: a love of silence, a roving eye, several points of view, and a slow, meditative pace. This film, like the other two, also goes back in time over ground we have crossed already to see things in a different light or from someone else's point of view. I think this style is very effective and interesting.
Last Days is difficult, though, because it has a main character, Blake, to which it is very tough to relate, at least from my point of view. He is a sort of doddering, mumbling crazy-man who rarely does anything we expect him to do. He is obviously a talented musician, but he doesn't seem to have much else going for him (certainly, his choice of friends is misguided), and I found this frustrating. I wanted to like the Cobain-esque Blake, but everything he did seemed drug-induced and I found it difficult to empathize. Van Sant uses sound in a lot of cool new ways in this film, though, and it might be worth seeing just for that. One of the oddest sequences of the movie is when Boyz II Men's "Down on Bended Knee" music video is played almost in its entirety. It is hilarious. Most of the audience at my screening got the joke, but I know some people were just baffled. The theatre was full at the 10:00p screening I attended, but at least 10 people left during the movie, maybe more. I guess they came for Kurt Cobain and didn't know about Gus Van Sant, but hadn't they seen the trailer?
I don't really recommend Last Days. I liked it more than I disliked it, but it isn't for the easily bored and if you haven't seen Gerry or Elephant, rent those first.