Oscar Nominations 2022: 3 of 9

This year's nominees:

Avatar: the Way of Water

4 Nominations

• Picture
• Production Design: Dylan Cole, Vanessa Cole & Ben Procter
• Sound
• Visual Effects

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Britain Dalton, Jack Champion, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Brendan Cowell, Jemaine Clement, Bailey Bass, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Joel David Moore, Edie Falco, CCH Pounder

I expected to love this, and... I loved it. It's visually stunning, and it's a superb action movie that frequently feels just like you're on an enormous ride. I had a great time. The double fight sequence at the film's end is completely excellent. I think the movie thinks it is getting to important questions of meaning and deep themes, but actually Avatar just needs to be enjoyed on the level of pleasurable visual spectacle. I don't think any movie this year can top Avatar for that. It's just extraordinary. I'm also currently obsessed with Polynesia, and when I watched this I had just finished the book Sea People; I loved the way the film made the new Na'vi we met into a riff on Polynesian societies, with tattooing and a different relationship with the water. And then they cast one of my favorite actors, Cliff Curtis, as the Polynesian Na'vi chief? Great move. Oh one other thing I loved. I was super into the way the movie treated the whale-adjacent creatures as persons, referring to the Kate Winslet character's friend as a composer and talking about how much she wanted a child. I do not understand how Britain Dalton's character began understanding the whale-language instantly, but hey, not all of it has to make sense.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Production Design, Sound, Visual Effects

My Rating: #9 out of 63

Triangle of Sadness

3 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Ruben Östlund
• Original Screenplay: Ruben Östlund

Director: Östlund

Cast: Charlbi Dean, Harris Dickinson, Dolly De Leon, Woody Harrelson, Vicky Berlin, Zlatko Burić, Arvin Kananian, Sunnyi Melles, Amanda Walker, Oliver Ford Davies

I know lots of people loved Triangle of Sadness, and I wanted to love it. I love Ruben Östlund's other movies, and his brand of satire and sincerity makes great sense to me. This movie is divided into three parts. Part one is great, and part two is better than great. It's absolutely hilarious, and it's so intensely outrageous that I was laughing out loud, nearly in tears in the theatre and completely enjoying myself. But then act three happens. In this part of the film, a bunch of rich folks are stranded on a deserted island and they expect a cleaning woman from their yacht to work for them by catching food for them and helping them survive even though they are themselves useless/helpless. This is a funny conceit, and it's made all the more enjoyable because of brilliant acting by Dolly De Leon and Harris Dickinson. This even has the added element of sexual politics with Dickinson trading sexual favors for other favors. But the trouble with this act is that it's the plot of Lina Wertmüller's 1974 film Travolti da un Insolito Destino nell'Azzurro Mare d'Agosto (Swept Away), which starred Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. Original screenplay? I've literally seen the whole thing before. Indeed, Wertmüller's movie was remade in 2002 by Guy Ritchie with Madonna and Adriano Giannini (Giancarlo's son). I know that if I hadn't already seen this movie I would have liked it more, but I have seen it, so Triangle of Sadness fell flat for me.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #44 out of 63

The Whale

3 Nominations

• Actor: Brendan Fraser
• Supporting Actress: Hong Chau
• Make-up & Hairstyling

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton, Sathya Sridharan

I have already written out most of my feelings about Darren Aronofsky's film. I won't repeat much of that here, but I will say that I hated this movie; it's the worst movie I saw in 2022 (so far). However, I am delighted for Brendan Fraser, and I won't be at all mad to see him win this Oscar. He's great, and he's had a lot of gaps in his wonderful career, so I'm very glad to see him back in the spotlight and hopefully getting more work. It's weird that it has to be in this enormous fat suit and for this stupid movie, but what can you do? I also think this movie will win for best make-up: the fat suit actually was the most realistic thing in this intensely unrealistic film, to my mind, so giving it an Oscar makes sense to me.
Will Win: Actor, Make-up & Hairstyling

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #63 out of 63

Babylon

3 Nominations

• Production Design: Anthony Carlino & Florencia Martin
• Score: Justin Hurwitz (La La Land)
• Costume Design: Mary Zophres (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, La La Land, True Grit)

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Diego Calva, Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Jovan Adepo, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li, Lukas Haas, Max Minghella, Olivia Hamilton, Eric Roberts, Katherine Waterston, Olivia Wilde, Ethan Suplee

This is a very good movie, at least for most of its running time. For its first two acts I was having a great time. I say first two acts, but one does wonder how many acts this movie had. It really was far too long of a film, and I think it might have done a lot better with the Academy if it had been shorter – even by forty minutes or so. This movie begins with a party, and the entire thing is wild and fast-moving, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Having Brad Pitt at the film's center during this part of the movie makes things so much easier. Watching him, I just sort of relax. Like, I know he's going to be great and he's going to keep this movie working perfectly. Then we're making movies on two different sets simultaneously before sound pictures, and the whole thing is pleasurable, like really just fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants fun. Somewhere in act two we descend into the bowels of hell, though, and the film really takes a perverse turn. I rather liked this part too, actually, but it did bring things down quite a bit, perhaps too far for Chazelle ever to be able to bring us back up from it. For the film's final section, we jump ahead to 1952 and sit in a theatre and watch Singin' in the Rain with Diego Calva. This is where the film really lost me. The character cries because he remembers the people he made movies with, but the film we're watching has proved what Jean Smart's character said to Brad Pitt's. The town doesn't care about you. They remember you by transforming your pain into something else, writing songs for other actors to sing, and forgetting everything you went through so that instead of remembering they can think about the new stars, the new costumes, the new audiences, the new dollars they can rake in. For me, the ending of this film is coldly cynical, and yet Chazelle asks us to feel very different, satisfied, exultant emotions. This section didn't sit right with me, but Babylon is still a really good movie.

Will Win: Score

Could Win: Production Design
My Rating: #15 out of 63

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Elvis

2. The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

More posts coming soon:

4. The Batman, Women Talking, Living, and Aftersun
5. Blonde, To Leslie, Glass Onion, and Causeway
6. Argentina, 1985, Close, Eo, and The Quiet Girl
7. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Pinocchio, Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, Turning Red, and The Sea Beast
8. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Empire of Light, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, RRR, and Tell It like a Woman

Check out my new book Love Is Love Is Love – out March 24!

The Whale

I don't understand The Whale. I didn't understand it as a play, and I didn't understand it any better as a Darren Aronofsky film. This is, by the way, a very Darren Aronofsky film. It hates people and hates the god just as much as Mother! and Noah. The Whale is, in many ways, a perfect companion to these two very religious films, because this film is also about religion and horrible, horrible human beings.

The part that makes no sense to me, though, is the point of all of these portraits of horrible people. And I don't understand the purpose of the portrait of the delusional person at the film's center. (Aronofsky films are always about delusion.) This person is delusional about how wonderful people are. He somehow simultaneously believes that people are "amazing" (he uses this word more times than I could count) and wonderful while also willfully deciding to commit suicide. What does it mean to want to die but also to believe that the world is filled with people who are incapable of being unkind?

And of course one could say "I am large, I contain multitudes", as a poet the film cites once said, and one would be right. The film's protagonist can want to die while also believing in the inherent goodness of even the worst people in the world. But surely this is stretching things a bit.

For me, this film felt phony from start to finish. It doesn't strike a single true note. The situation that poses as a plot feels totally manufactured, and the backstories of the characters as they are revealed to us feel like theoretical feelings that people might have had rather than actual ideas thought by any real people.

As with the other two recent Aronofsky films, The Whale, although it's actually not a film about Jonah, is very, very angry at the god. But it also believes that the god is real. These two ideas can go together, and I understand their coexistence. Neither one, however, is at all interesting to me.

Skip! This! Movie!

I am sure Aronofsky thinks that Mother! is some sort of meaningful, fascinating allegory. But it isn't. Jennifer Lawrence's range is, as usual, limited, to say the least. She unsurprisingly scowls through the picture, and thus is, I suppose, the perfect star for the outrageous cynicism, awkwardness, and displeasure that characterize Mother! itself.

And if the plot itself is incoherent – which it is – this incoherence is made uncomfortable, unbearable, unwatchable by the fact that one has no character with whom one can identify and no one for whom one might wish to root. Aronofsky actively dislikes his own main character, and quite possibly dislikes his antagonist even more. This is a sadistic, painful movie that is actually invested in punishing its audience and violating its protagonist.

The structure of Mother! (what is that exclamation point about?) is such that we are angry and have hit a breaking point a full sixty minutes before our protagonist hits her own breaking point. This leaves us an entire hour in which we as an audience are frustrated enough to scream, but our heroine is not. We actively wait for her to lose her shit and let everyone have it – or for her to do anything at all! (Exclamation point.) But we wait the entire movie for this to happen. It will take the full two hours.

Michelle Pfeiffer is good in this, though, in her Hebraic Eve drag. I will say that. And I am certain this is because she is really the only actor who is having any fun here. Bardem plays a sadistic asshole but doesn't seem to relish this part at all, opting instead for a baseline of sincerity with small bursts of uncontrollable rage (an odd thing for an actor who has played fiendish, pleasurable villains.) Pfeiffer, on the other hand, opts for taking pleasure in sadism, annoying our protagonist and trying to get a rise out of her in whatever way she can. It's a pleasure to watch, and one of the only pleasures Mother! can actually boast.

La Pfeiffer

Domnhall Gleeson, on the other hand, is wasted in this movie. He is great, as always, but woefully underused.

And as for Kristen Wiig, there's a problem here. She represents, in fact, a real casting error. Wiig is hilarious. And we can't take her seriously in a part – we are trained to laugh at the things she says. So when she shows up in act three and is supposed to be terrifying? All I could do was giggle.

It might not be her fault completely. To be fair to Wiig, I had already started laughing at this movie by the time we got to act two. It's too silly not to laugh at it. This is an absurdist exercise in sadism and allegory. Be smart and skip it. This is the same guy (with an utter contempt for humanity) who directed Noah, and we all skipped that one (or wish we did). Do yourself a favor and skip this one too.

Addendum: If you want to read my sincere critique of the politics of Mother!, please follow the link to my Noah discussion. As it turns out, Mother! is just Noah in a new CGI outfit. What my friend Rick and I discuss about Noah is that Aronofsky really believes that a) human beings deserve to be punished for their total depravity, that b) there is a god, and that c) that (apparently male) god is actually a terrible force of mostly petty evil. Now, I have nothing per se against a film without hope or a film with a cynical view of human beings. But Aronofsky's two most recent films posit that human beings ought to be destroyed, that human culture is without redeeming qualities, and that the god ought just to scrap the whole experiment.

I find this frustrating for numerous reasons. In the first place, there is not actually a god. In the second place, what does Aronofsky want us to do with his allegory? Ask mom how we can help? In his film, the one character (Jovan Adepo) who actually tries to help JLaw, is treated like just as much of an interloper as Aronofsky's ciphers for Cain and Abel. As far as I can see, Aronofsky has no empathy whatever for any member of humanity, so aside from finding his film boring, I find his politics bankrupt.

Noah

This post is about Darren Aronofsky's bizarre religious film Noah. I decided to have a conversation about the movie with my buddy Rick. Our own religious backgrounds are slightly different (Rick was raised Catholic and I was raised Baptist), so we have different takes on the way the movie uses religion, but unsurprisingly the same take on the quality Aronofsky's film.

Aaron: First off, when you think of the Noah story, you think: rain, giant boat, animals, dove, rainbow. Those are the standard images, right? There is also this story in the bible where (after the flood) Noah gets drunk and his sons see him naked and cover him. (As a child I thought this part with the naked man was very important.)

Rick: The most fun part of the Noah story is obviously the animals! But Aronofsky makes the bizarre choice of not showing us one single moment with a real animal. Noah and his family don't even collect the animals; the animals, CGI all of them, come to Noah, quickly running into the ark where they're put to sleep by some kind of incense.

Aaron: Right. All CGI and all oddly napping.

Rick: This could have been hugely entertaining cinema, right here. You could have comic relief, obviously ("This one's definitely male"), but also a chance for real spiritual reflection. Maybe Japheth has a moment where he realizes, Hey, this aurochs is another living being, we're all part of God's creation, etc.

Aaron: But the film's version of the god's power is really one of violence and power, no? I mean, the god of the Old Testament is essentially vengeful and terrifying. The film gets that part right – although it is unmoored from any spiritual arrangement. The god in Noah is more like a king or a government.

Rick: In fact, Noah and his family have no agency at all, because not only do they not collect the animals, they don't actually build the ark! The ark is built by what I can only assume are the beings of Genesis 6:4: King James calls them "giants"; my Catholic bible calls them the Nephilim. Darren Aronofsky apparently thinks they're like the rock monster from The Neverending Story. In the movie, they tell Noah that they're fallen angels, but the bible says that they're the result of sexual intercourse between angels and humans, which aside from being biblically faithful, would have been a hell of a lot more interesting from a storytelling standpoint.

Aaron: The nephilim? Giants who are not fallen angels, as the film would have it, but (according to Genesis), the men of old, who were the children of (apparently male) angels and the "daughters of men". The way they worked in Noah made me think of a kind of Hebraic tradition of golems. That's how Aronofsky apparently saw them, but the way they are described in the film is a generic blending of the myth of the fall of Lucifer (who does not really appear in this film) and the Greek story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans. Aronofsky is Jewish anyway, right? He is not a Christian, so his relationship to the bible is going to be much different from ours (not that I'm a Christian either.)

Rick: But the film's relationship to morality and spirituality is what I'm interested in. Why does God bring the Flood? Because of the wickedness of man. But the movie never shows you in a concrete way just how wicked man has become. You see some men acting like douchebags, and the narrative text in the opening sequence tells you that the descendants of Cain created an "industrial" society. In this same vein, you never see why God loves Noah so much. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord, says Genesis 6:8. According to Aronofsky, he found this favor because he told his kid once, Hey, don't pick that flower if you don't need it. The thing is, the story in the bible is pretty short, and presented rather journalistically. But given the opportunity to flesh the whole story out, Aronofsky presents the events in the same way. The God of the Old Testament is a bastard. And a fascinating, complicated character! He's capricious, vengeful, loving; Moses even argues with him. But He's barely present in this movie.

Aaron: My favorite characters, for exactly this reason, were the Ray Winstone (descendant of Cain) and Logan Lerman (Ham) figures. Winstone's character understands that he is made in the god's image, right? And so this means that everything he does is justified. His decisions are reflections of the god's own decisions. He mirrors the god. He knows this. But still the god refuses to talk to the descendant of Cain. And he begs him: talk to me. Why won't you speak to me? The arbitrariness of the entirety of the god's decisions is so clear in these moments that we spend with Ray Winstone. The god doesn't like that guy, but - as you say - we never really are told why he should choose this guy over the other.

Rick: Probably the deepest problem with the whole movie is that at its heart is a contempt for humanity. There's never a moment where Noah displays uncommon kindness towards another person or even acts in a way that makes him particularly likeable. All he does is stoically look after his family, which is, as Chris Rock once said, what you're supposed to do, motherfucker! And aside from Ham's barely-sketched love interest in the latter half of the film, not one human being who is not a member of Noah's family is portrayed sympathetically. The movie never once encourages us to ask, Hey, maybe God's making a poor choice here, and Noah himself never questions humanity's fate. At the end of the film, Hermione tells Noah that he's a good person because he "chose love." This is a sort of vaguely Catholic-ish value, but the theological idea of love (based on my layman's understanding) is first of all, a New Testament concept, and secondly, not love for your family, but caritas, or love for humanity. Which this movie clearly does not have.

Aronofsky's The Fountain

Aaron:  I found the way that the film portrayed Noah's (not the film's) contempt for humanity strange. Noah totally goes off the deep end, right? I mean, he sincerely believes that humanity needs to end, and I am intrigued by this because there are these radical left-wing sects that believe that the planet would be better off without humanity. Anti-humanists and then other people who refuse to reproduce, who plan only to die out. The film rejects this as completely psychotic, of course, which is why it interests me – as a kind of rupture in a narrative that assumes we all are on the side of heterosexual reproductive futurity. (Which you might style as the vaguely Catholic-ish value "love"). As for Hermione's argument about "love" at the end of the film, the argument is identical to the one that the Descendant of Cain uses. I was made in the god's image, therefore everything that I do is a reflection of the god and, therefore, the right thing to do. This is, to my mind, identical to what she says at the end of the movie: The god chose you because it knew that you would do what is right, therefore, everything you've done is right. I am, I suppose, agreeing with you that the arguments for what is morally correct here are tortured beyond all sense and end up being just vaguely liberal.

Malick's The Tree of Life

Rick: It just seemed utterly drained of any theology or spirituality. I spent the entirety of the film wishing it had been directed by Terrence Malick, because he has a knack for making a scene seem suffused with spiritual meaning (Noah even has an "evolution" sequence somewhat like the one in Tree of Life).

Aaron: An odd thing, really, since Aronofsky's π as well as his later effort The Fountain (both of which I loved), both interrogate spirituality in rich, fascinating ways. But I for one am glad Malick isn't wasting his time on nonsense like this. I was initially interested in this movie because I am interested in revisioning Biblical mythology from modern points of view. I am interested in stories about old gods and our relationships with them. But, as you say, the god doesn't ever show up in Noah. He just flexes his muscles. For me the god was most present in the film when Ray Winstone was begging him to speak to him and he was answered only with silence. This, to me, is a much more modern understanding of how a person's relationship with god might work. Noah has it both ways – three ways, really. The god is an old man with white hair in the mountains, and the god is in the sky sending the rain, and the god is in your dreams at night. The whole thing was a big ol' mess.

Rick: A total mess, with too much CGI, crappy, ponderous writing, one-dimensional characters, and no moral message beyond Be a good person, and maybe don't eat so much meat. Oh, and every human being alive on Earth today is descended from white people.

As Regards The Master

I have been delaying a post about The Master for a while.

Often, when I feel like a film is a little smarter than I am, or when a film overwhelms me, I just avoid posting altogether. Sometimes, I feel like a film is just too good, and I don't have anything to say except the (rather boring) oh-my-god-I-loved-it. Films like Biutiful and The Reader and The Wrestler left me without words at the time, though, for the record, I could now probably regale anyone with numerous reasons why I love those films.

But I haven't been avoiding discussion of The Master because it's too good. It is, rather, that The Master left me feeling very conflicted. I didn't love The Master, and this isn't because it is not excellent. It is excellent. But I found The Master also to be deeply flawed.

In many ways, The Master is a kind of continuation of Anderson's previous masterpiece There Will Be Blood. If you remember, Blood was a kind of giant metaphoric battle of wills that pitted (evil) capitalism against (evil) religion. There Will Be Blood is a morality tale dressed up as a personal drama. It uses dual character studies as a cover for an exploration of what Anderson (via Upton Sinclair, who wrote the source material) sees as competing sets of lies that trap human beings and blind them to their own lives and the lives of others. I found it difficult not to see Anderson's big-picture metaphors in There Will Be Blood, but they didn't bother me even a little bit, so taken in was I by the story, the character studies, and the sheer audacity of Anderson's filmmaking.

(Further, There Will Be Blood was an enormous departure for the director, whose previous films had been stories of late-twentieth-century life, saturated with color, filled with urban ennui, but possessing an underlying faith in the good intentions of his characters.)

The Master is also a battle of wills between two characters, each of whom symbolizes a way of life or a system of lies that traps human beings. Joaquin Phoenix (who is just absolutely genius in this movie) is a wayward alcoholic, who can't keep a job down, who has no direction in his life, who is impulsively and dangerously violent, and who mixes his own unique brands of hooch using shall we say unconventional ingredients (in the first few minutes of the film he uses – in different brews – jet fuel, paint thinner, and what looked to me like acetic acid).

His foil is the eponymous Master himself, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (with his usual obstreperousness), an L. Ron Hubbard-type figure who believes in past lives and who performs something called "processing" on people willing to undergo his pseudo-psychoanalytic treatments.

Both characters are very, very interesting, and it is a testament to how convincing both characters are that my companion and I both considered the self-destructive alcoholic to be the one to have gotten in with the dangerous crowd and not the other way around. There are also some absolutely phenomenal sequences. Joaquin Phoenix's first processing session is easily some of the bravest, best acting he's ever done. It's incredible, actually. Anderson's direction of actors is flawless. His eye for detail is extraordinary. The Master is breathtakingly shot (by Francis Ford Coppola's cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr.), and Johnny Greenwood's score is haunting, intelligent, and engaging.

But... The Master outstays its welcome. Anderson is not satisfied with the film's first ending, and tacks on two or three more (depending on how you count). And the larger evils for which his (admittedly fascinating) characters stand in – alcoholism and religion – come to seem simple, trite, obviously flawed. Too soon I sensed my own feelings of superiority for these characters – one an aimless, disaffected alcoholic, the other an unapologetic, destructive charlatan. It felt easy to say Well why can't he simply get his life together? and How dare this man behave with such shameless arrogance?

If The Master is complicated, rich filmmaking – and it undoubtedly is – it also settles for answers that seemed to me too easy, and its moral compass is less complex than the intricate, humane storytelling that Anderson is able to achieve.

2011's Nominees: Part 3 of 12

BLACK SWAN

5 Nominations:

  · Best Picture

  · Best Director: Darren Aronofsky

  · Best Actress: Natalie Portman (Closer)

  · Best Cinematography: Matthew Libatique

  · Best Editing: Andrew Weisblum

Director: Aronofsky
Cast: Portman, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder, Benjamin Millepied

 
This is my favorite film of the year, and I can't help but think that it should have done better here. But you know what? I have to be thankful for what I get. Black Swan is a very well made B-film and while I completely loved it, no one should be expecting the Academy to be as much in love with it as they are. Small victories. Still, most people were expecting a nomination for Mila Kunis here, as well as Visual effects and Sound nods (the Costume designers were deemed ineligible). Most people expect Portman to win Best Actress on the 27th.
Will Win: Actress
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #1 out of 42

TOY STORY 3

5 Nominations:

  · Best Picture

  · Best Adapted Screenplay: Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine), John Lasseter (Toy Story), Andrew Stanton (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, WALL·E), Lee Unkrich

  · Best Animated Feature

  · Best Sound Editing

  · Best Song: Randy Newman (Ragtime, Parenthood, The Paper, Toy Story, Babe: Pig in the City, Toy Story 2, Meet the Parents, Monsters Inc., Cars, The Princess and the Frog)

Director: Unkrich
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Wallace Shawn, Don Rickles, Michael Keaton, Estelle Harris, John Ratzenberger, Laurie Metcalf

 
This movie is great and everyone knows it. If you have seen it you know. If you haven't seen it, the last fifteen minutes are so moving that I defy you not to cry. I mean, I know I cry at everything, but I saw it with eight other people and we all cried. Even the most cold-hearted of us.

Will Win: Animated Feature, Song
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: #16 out of 42

WINTER'S BONE

4 Nominations:

  · Best Picture

  · Best Adapted Screenplay: Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini

  · Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence

  · Best Supporting Actor: John Hawkes

Director: Granik
Cast: Lawrence, Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Shelley Waggener

 
I was so bored by this film I don't know how to talk about it without getting cranky. None of my friends in California liked this either. At any rate, to my complete and utter bafflement everyone seems to love it, the critics and the Academy.
Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: #32 out of 42

The Four Big Ones

A couple of quick thoughts about the big four mid-December releases. You may be thinking that you might want to see The Fighter or The King's Speech, but I'm here to try to convince you that your first two choices ought to be Black Swan and 127 Hours.

Black Swan is so far my favorite movie of the year. It's creepy and exciting and basically a thrill a minute. I also found it incredibly sexy and often very, very fun. The best thing about this picture—and I put a high premium on this as a movie-goer so you can take my excitement about Black Swan with a grain of salt if you like—is that I pretty much never knew what the hell was going to happen. I was never ahead of this movie. The acting is great, as well – I was particularly fond of Ms. Portman and Ms. Hershey – both of whom are basically batshit crazy in this film. Darren Aronofsky is the star here, though. Has this man ever made a bad movie? Seriously. He's awesome.

The next movie on your list should be Danny Boyle's 127 Hours. While not quite the Hitchcockian drama that Aronofsky's movie is, 127 Hours is a riveting character study of a truly fascinating guy. It's a Danny Boyle movie, so it's a film about flash and color and, well, general coolness. To be honest, though, Boyle himself is outshined in 127 by the film's actual star James Franco, who gives one of the great performances of the year. The camera is on him nonstop and his desperation, fear, and even his ingenuity, are displayed through tiny nuances, minimal action. A ham in real life (obviously) Franco focuses his energy in this brilliant star turn and only gives away a little at a time. The result is, frankly, devastating. Boyle's filmmaking takes over again as the film's focus by the end, but this is no Slumdog Millionaire. 127 Hours feels deep under all of that flashy exterior in a way that Boyle's big Best Picture-winning extravaganza never did.

The King's Speech is a good movie. And the thing of it is, I just kept thinking that thought while I was watching this picture. In other words, I never really emotionally dropped in to Tom Hooper's movie. This has to do with direction, of course, and with, I think, the subject matter. The King's Speech is, after all, about a king, and, well, I am not sure that a king's problems are really that momentous just because he's the king. Maybe it's just me. The King's Speech feels very invested in the notion of patriotism and national togetherness and big stuff like that. (This is also a rather sex-negative film, to my mind.) It was good, but, well... I had the feeling that Tom Hooper was trying too hard the whole time. The acting is good in this movie except for the bizarre caricature of Winston Churchill, which I found baffling, even in a comedy.

 The Fighter also has really, really good acting. Particularly from star Christian Bale and supporting-actress-of-the-decade Melissa Leo, both of whom give extraordinarily fierce performances, tearing into these roles and never criticizing the people they're playing. The film itself is a little uneven, however. First off, it's like no David O. Russell film I've ever seen. And, then, the center of the movie isn't really the center of the movie. The scenes that need to be in the film in order to make the main character the main character never materialize, and the emotional center of the film doesn't ever quite jell. Because of this, the end of the movie threw me for a bit of a loop. In a way, all of this is because The Fighter, as it turns out, is a boxing movie. It's not an unconventional boxing movie or a new twist on the boxing movie. It's a boxing movie: you know, like Cinderella Man or Rocky or Somebody up There Likes Me or The Champ. I was expecting something... else. So, perhaps if you go in with different expectations than I did, you will come out feeling a bit warmer toward Russell's new flick.

Film Update

I am a shitty film blogger.

The Fountain, new from Darren Aronofsky (his last film was 2000's Requiem for a Dream) is amazing. Aronofsky ought to never wait do long to make a movie again. I loved this movie. It's a visual stunner and the imagination of Aronofsky is front and center with the movie. I know some will have trouble with the movie, but I absolutely loved it. It's not terribly intelligent or new or anything, but the techniques he uses are so wonderful and it is easily the most beautiful film of the year. Hugh Jackman is absolutely wonderful in the lead role(s). And there is a totally hot, wonderfully filmed sex scene in a bathtub. Did I mention the movie is breathtakingly gorgeous?

Ask the Dust is a competent, slow-paced movie from legendary screenwriter-turned-director Robert Towne (you know who he is. He wrote Chinatown.) It's okay. No great shakes. An Italian immigrant and a Mexican woman fall in love in 1933 Los Angeles. Some of the movie is done really, really well. Colin Farrell is very good (if far too good looking for the part) and so is Salma Hayek. The plot is rather conventional, though, and it doesn't really have much new to say. Shrug. It was good.

Half Nelson is one of myn ew favorite films from this year. I loved it. It's about a drug addicted high school teacher in an inner city neighborhood. It's a movie with very few answers and a lot of really intriguing, honest questions. The two main performances, from Ryan Gosling as the teacher and Shareeka Epps as his young student are absolutely extraordinary. Epps is a total puzzle. She is the toughest little girl you've ever seen and yet she has a smile that can make you feel like you've never seen anyone smile before. Gosling is superb, haunted. The movie is about so many things: mostly addiction, race relations and teacher-student relations. I cannot recommend it enough. I think it's the smartest movie I've seen this year. Go see it!

Blood Diamond is retarded. Skip this bullshit. It's an Edward Zwick party and it's idiotic as all Hell. I think I disliked it more than last year's Munich. Spielberg's movie was at least well-made.

Happy Feet is a total mess too, but also totally fucking fun. Penguins that dance like Savion Glover. You can't really screw that up. It's also a movie about religious fanaticism and environmental protection in the Antarctic and growing up different (gay?--I think so). I liked it quite a bit. It's very silly but totally ridiculous and therefore fun. There are even these little tiny Adélie penguins that all speak Spanish. It's hilarious.