Young Ahmed

Le Jeune Ahmed is a Dardenne Brothers movie, so it's a beautifully realized bit of social analysis with excellent acting. It is, of course, a tragedy, as most of their films are. This one is about a fundamentalist young man, and the jeune in their title is really important. Ahmed is a young teenager who keeps making terrible decisions because he is too young to understand the world in which he lives. This movie made me hate religion more than I already hate it, but Le Jeune Ahmed is a fundamentally hopeful film, mostly because it wants us to believe – and to continue to believe – that Ahmed can change.

Young Ahmed is available to stream on Criterion.

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 5 of 12

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

Guardians of the Galaxy

2 Nominations

• Visual Effects
• Makeup

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoë Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, John C. Reilly, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, Glenn Close, Karen Gillan, Benicio Del Toro

This was an awesome movie and I loved it. I loved all of its jokes; I loved the way it sent up the seriousness (unintentional campiness) of the Marvel universe; I loved Zoë Saldana; but most of all I loved Chris Pratt. Now, I know everyone loves Chris Pratt these days so this is not any big news or anything, but he is just so lovable! As for Guardians of the Galaxy itself, its use of '80s music, and its interest in anti-heroism make it fun and action-oriented without any of the deadly sentimentalism and nobility we have come to expect from Marvel Studios movies. I can't recommend this enough. It's one of the best action movies of the year.

Will Win: Makeup

Could Win: Visual Effects

My Rating: #33 out of 78

Still Alice

1 Nomination

• Actress: Julianne Moore (The Hours, Far from Heaven, The End of the Affair, Boogie Nights)

Director: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland

Cast: Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, Stephen Kunken, Shane McRae, Erin Drake

Julianne Moore is finally going to win an Oscar. And it is about time. She has been nominated four times before (and got close to winning in 2003 for Far from Heaven), but this time it is for real. And one of the things that's great about this is that Still Alice is such a good movie. This isn't a picture that was especially tricked out so that Moore could win awards, this is a sensitive, well-made picture directed by the independent-film directing team who made The Fluffer and Quinceañera. In any case, I loved this movie, and I loved Julianne Moore in it, and I even loved K-Stew.
Will Win: Actress

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #21 out of 78

Gone Girl

1 Nomination

• Actress: Rosamund Pike

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Ben Affleck, Pike, Carrie Coon, Neil Patrick Harris, Kim Dickens, Missi Pyle, Patrick Fugit, Tyler Perry, Lola Kirke, Boyd Holbrook, Sela Ward, Emily Ratajkowski, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Casey Wilson

A badass thriller that I found totally shocking at times. This is also a really interesting feminist film about the ways that women are forced to behave in certain ways and become objects that men can love ("cool girls", the film calls them). But the best part of Gone Girl is watching the nooses tighten around people's necks, watching the plots thicken, and the pleasure of squirming in your seat while someone does something you know is going to turn out really, really poorly. This is a well-shot, well-acted, exquisitely scripted tough-as-nails picture that got totally fucking ignored by the Academy for reasons I don't really understand. Was it too sexy for them? Too much about their television-addled lives? Too hard on its male characters? In any case, Rosamund Pike got a deserved nomination here, even though the film's director, screenwriter, composers, cinematographer, and editor all also deserved nominations. This is one of the great fuckups of this year by the Academy, if you ask me. This movie isn't in my top ten (there are too many good movies this year – not that Oscar is paying attention to many of those) but I know quality when I see it, and this deserved better. It's excellent.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #14 out of 78

Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Two Days, One Night)

1 Nomination

• Actress: Marion Cotillard (La Môme)

Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Cast: Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Catherine Salée, Baptiste Sornin, Timur Magomedgadzhiev, Christelle Cornil, Myriem Akheddiou, Olivier Gourmet, Serge Koto, 

One of the year's absolute best. Cotillard plays a woman who is trying to go back to her job. To do this she needs the people who work on the floor of the plant with her to vote that she can have her job back. But if they vote yes, their boss has decreed that they will not get their bonus; the bonus will be used for her salary. It's a capitalist nightmare (i.e. real life) staged in human terms. Cotillard is superb and she just barely squeaked out a nomination here over Jennifer Aniston in Cake (whose movie could have gained steam if it had come out earlier). The film itself was submitted by Belgium in the Foreign Language category, but didn't make the January shortlist. The Dardennes, although they make near-perfect films every time they make one, have never been the Academy's particular cup of tea. They've never been nominated before. But, hey, Haneke finally got nominated for Amour two years ago, so maybe it's just a matter of time before the Dardennes are honored. Go see this movie, though. It is another one in my top ten for the year.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #3 out of 78

The Dardennes Do It Again

The final film that I was able to see from the Dartmouth version of Telluride was the Dardenne Brothers' Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit). The film is the kind of tense, emotional ride typical of the Dardennes' work, and I loved it.

The film is about a woman who works in a manufacturing plant. She has been on sick leave, but is recovered and has returned to work. At the plant (which has 16 workers plus her), the boss has decided that he can't afford to rehire her. He gives the other 16 employees the option to vote. Her coworkers must choose between getting a bonus or hiring the woman back.

She spends the titular two days and one night visiting each of her coworkers in turn to try to keep her job. The bonus is rather a lot of money, so this is an uphill battle and a very emotional one. The Dardennes always have the ability to raise the stakes on any plot. Their work is similar to the work of Asghar Farhadi in this way, except that the intensity of Farhadi's stories revolves around unfolding plot events. The Dardennes's stories just seem to unspool, to follow naturally from the initial event they've scripted.

Two Days, One Night is also very, very smart. It is an intelligent analysis and emotional representation of how capitalism works to divide people up, to teach us to see ourselves as individuals and understand the world as one where the choice is between our benefit and someone else's benefit. Two Days, One Night makes this crystal clear, and the journey of it is almost agonizing.

More than anything, though, this is a movie about very high stakes, about asking for assistance from the people in our lives and hoping that they will be willing to help us. In other words, it's about community, about nation, about working together at something in order to make the world better. Each time the film's main character has to ask for help, though, this prospect is absolutely terrifying. Two Days, One Night makes clear just how difficult community actually is.

***

Two Days, One Night is Belgium's official selection for the Foreign Language Picture Oscar. But the Dardennes have not been appreciated by the Academy, and Belgium has done better with Felix Van Groeningen and (surprisingly) Michaël R. Roskam. The last time Belgium submitted a Dardennes movie was in 2005 with L'Enfant. In the same year, Argentina submitted the last Fabián Belinsky film, El Aura, Canada submitted current Oscar darling Jean-Marc Vallée's excellent C.R.A.Z.Y., Hungary went with Lajos Koltai's gorgeous Fateless, and Romania selected Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. The Academy's nominations weren't all terrible: Sophie Scholl: the Final Days and Gavin Hood's Tsotsi made the cut. But the category was filled with mostly bad films: Paradise Now, Don't Tell, and the truly terrible Joyeux Noël. I'm crossing my fingers for the Dardennes this year.

Why I Still Care about the Oscars

This was the most exciting Oscar year in recent memory. So many of us had no idea who was going to win what, and as it turned out there was even a tie. I was all about it. My friends and I drank heavily, ate brownies and cheesecake, and spent a lot of time criticizing Anne Hathaway's dress (which, in case you hadn't noticed got worse as the night went on because of all of the creasing that fabric did around her midriff.) When I woke up after the Oscar ceremony on February 25th, however, everyone was trashing the Oscars.

• Andy Griffith wasn't in the "In Memoriam" tribute (with all of the people who passed away last year).
• Lupe Ontiveros wasn't in the "In Memoriam" tribute.
• Michelle Obama shouldn't have handed out Best Picture.
• Ang Lee shouldn't have won for Best Director while places that do visual effects go bankrupt.
• Seth MacFarlane was racist and sexist and not very funny.

So much griping! It almost ruined the good time I had while watching the Oscars. I don't want to say too much about all of this, but what I find most irritating about all of the criticisms of the Oscars is that people are mad that the Academy of Motion Pictures didn't do what they wanted the Academy to do. I love Lupe Ontiveros and I love Andy Griffith (I watched Matlock every day for five years, actually), but who cares if they are included in the Academy's tribute to the recently deceased? As Howard Beal says in Network, what's that got to do with the price of rice? There are more interesting things to complain about if you're gonna complain about the Academy than that Whitney Houston (she was left off last year) or Lupe Ontiveros or Farrah Fawcett (she was left off in 2010) didn't make the In Memoriam slideshow.

People are also complaining about Seth MacFarlane. He was racist and sexist and irritating. Um... I know these people saw Ted because it got an Oscar nomination, so I also know that they expected MacFarlane to be all of those things. I find him annoying at all times, but I was there for the awards and the stars, not Mr. MacFarlane. (The truth is, everyone trashes the Oscar host. Every single year. And so there was no way MacFarlane could win with this one. Though I prefer my entertainment to be less racist and sexist as a rule.)

Charlize is pissed!

As for the awards, I am always hearing, well so-and-so should have won that award. We want our favorites to do well. Understandably. Imagine, though, that there are 10 of us together in a room and we all attempt, together, to come up with the best movie of the year. It's true, perhaps, that Argo would not be at the top of our lists – maybe a few of us. But, then, our choices would probably be really contentious. My favorite movie of the year was Beasts of the Southern Wild. My friend Matthew's was Compliance. Julie's was Zero Dark Thirty. Michael's was The Master. Now, I pretty much hated Compliance, though I really liked the other two. But my friends are equally negative about my favorites and each other's favorites. Of course they are.

Turns out, people don't all like the same things.

So, Best Picture is always going to be a film that people can agree on. A likeable, fairly good film, that a majority of people can get behind. Your typical winner is The King's Speech or Chicago or Slumdog Millionaire or Braveheart. None of these films is particularly brilliant. None is particularly heinous. My point is that The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men and Silence of the Lambs are outliers. They are the exception not the rule. The rule is Titanic and Forrest Gump and Gladiator.

But I love the Academy Awards. I love them because they make a list of some of the important films that captured the popular year in film. I love them even more because they work like a kind of baseline against which to make our own lists. They draw attention to specific aspects of film. During the Oscars, some friends and I were griping about the film scores that we were nominated. Dayne didn't like any of them except Dario Marianelli's Anna Karenina score, a score I thought was sort of boring. My response was: The best scores of the year are The Master, Skyfall, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Lincoln, and Cloud Atlas. These are facts.

I think my point is that what the Oscars do is give us a frame for choosing our own favorites – for sharing these favorites with each other (sometimes heatedly, I will admit), and more importantly, for seeing other movies.

But I don't care if my favorites win the Oscar or not. I am happy when they do, of course; it means all sorts of pay raises and awareness, etc. But a good film is still a good film.

The bad part about this year's Oscars was that there weren't as many films in total nominated as usual. More films and more actors need more attention, and the Academy focuses that attention every year, so they need to spread that love around!

A little perspective. I live in a small city in New Hampshire at the moment, so I don't have much access to films as they come out. I'm catching up on 2012 right now: last night I saw Ann Hui's quiet, beautiful film A Simple Life and a day or two ago I saw a cute Flemish romantic film with two teenage boys called North Sea, Texas and last week I finally got to see Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Kid with a Bike. These films are all pretty excellent, and all got great reviews, but they're not in our multiplexes (they don't come to Hanover NH) and so fewer people see them than see the big bad behemoths like Les Misérables. If we want to talk about the Academy ignoring films or actors or directors, we ought to start with the excellent cinema coming from places around the world that are not the United States. There are some awesome films out there that aren't even on the Academy's radar.

I've started to ramble, but what I want to make sure I say is that the Academy is going to get it wrong. Of course six thousand odd people aren't all going to agree with you. This is a surprise?

I try not to spend time hoping they'll agree with me. I prefer to compare my own tastes to the Academy's. Like I would with any old friend.

Three More Foreign Films

Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film this year, is a film made in the Palestinian Territories and is about (surprise, surprise) the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not that it's not an important topic or anything; I certainly think it is a topic worth exploring, but it wasn't explored well with Munich and it wasn't explored well with Paradise Now. The Palestinian film is a better film in a lot of ways because it takes a single idea (i.e. suicide terrorism) and attacks the issue from as many sides as it can. (Munich tries to attack myriad more issues but fails to deal with any of them.) Paradise Now bit off only a little bit and is able to chew on it well. This is also the problem with the movie: it has nothing to add to what we know about either suicide terrorism or the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. The main characters also become unrecognizable halfway through the film and the disconnect that this provided me with was insurmountable. The Palestinian men I met at the beginning of the film were totally different people from the suicide bombers who end the film; for me this makes the film incapable of emotional resonance. And with nothing new to add to the discussion and very little emotional weight, Paradise Now just didn't work for me.

Mikael Håfström's Evil was released in Sweden in 2003. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004 (a shock, really), and though most films with a nomination like that are basically guaranteed a U.S. release (art-house-type movie-goers will spend money to see the movie if it has a Foreign Language nomination), Evil wasn't released in the U.S. until four weeks ago. Last Friday it was finally released in Los Angeles. The movie is about violence and the evil (and good, but mostly evil) that violence can bring. It's a very interesting film if you just think about the violence in the picture. The characters are interesting, the hero is extremely easy to root for and very likable, but the plot is downright ludicrous. A very violent young teenager is sent away to a prep school where the students (not the teachers) keep order and discipline throughout the school. They do this through disproportionately violent means (i.e. making a student's head bleed for saying "ass" at the dinner table.) Our hero (the violent young man, whom we've come to like and trust) is thrust into this environment but simply refuses to be bullied. His life is then made a living Hell by the upperclassmen. Håfström's film would have been a lot better if it didn't ask us to believe in this school as a real place: I mean, if he created a mythical school where this violence could occur. His focus is, after all, the violence inherent in youth interaction, and so why spend so much time displaying the injustice of the adults in the situation—when the situation is clearly fictional? Ludicrous plot aside, I quite liked Evil. I loved the main character (and the actor, Andreas Wilson) and I'm a sucker for coming-of-age stories... and violence. I find explorations of violence in cinema endlessly fascinating (Oldboy, A History of Violence, you get the idea.)

After watching Paradise Now, last night, I headed to the Laemmle's Playhouse to see the Dardenne Brothers' most recent, Palme-d'Or-winning film, L'Enfant, which is so damn good. It's not quite as good as The Son, in my opinion, but I think that mainly owes to my preferred interest in the subject matter of The Son over L'Enfant. L'Enfant follows the story of Bruno, a young petty thief and new father. His girlfriend Sonia has just given birth (mere days earlier) to their son Jimmy. After spending very little time with the boy, Bruno decides (without the mother's consent, naturally) to sell his child on the black market. This is easily done (Bruno knows the right kind of people), but Bruno hasn't considered the consequences of his actions at all. The title, The Child, we come to realize, refers not only to the little baby in Sonia's arms, but to his father as well. Bruno is an impetuous, unthinking, selfish young man, for whom the word "irresponsible" would be a gross understatement. The Dardennes (who are obviously master filmmakers) leave their camera focused unflinchingly on Bruno and explore his world with sensitivity and amazing emotional power. I highly recommend this film.

Le Fils

I don't want to say too much about Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne's Le Fils (The Son), because I wouldn't want to spoil any of it for those who haven't seen it, but I will say that this film is brilliant. It centers around a man (Olivier Gourmet) who teaches carpentry at a center for—what we call in this country—"at risk youth." A teenage boy comes to the center and wishes to be taken on as an apprentice to the carpenter, and though the carpenter refuses (he has too many pupils as it is) he immediately becomes obsessed with the boy and begins to follow him. The Son is a fascinating character study about a complex, confusing man and I found the movie to be absolutely riveting from start to finish. The Dardenne brothers wind the tension up exquisitely and when it breaks (as it must) the audience has no idea what will happen next.

I saw this film in preparation for the Dardenne Brothers' L'Enfant (The Child), which is playing at a theatre near my house, and if L'Enfant is anything like Le Fils, I know I'm going to love it.