Oscar Noms 2017: 13 of 13

Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films
Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna
Part 11 - Allied, The Jungle Book, Doctor Strange, 13 Hours
Part 12 - Sully, Zootopia, The Red Turtle, My Life as a Zucchini

Trolls

1 Nomination

• Original Song: "Can't Stop the Feeling!"

Director: Mike Mitchell

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Zooey Deschanel, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Christine Baranski, Russell Brand, Gwen Stefani, John Cleese, James Corden, Jeffrey Tambor, Ron Funches, Aino Jawo, Kunal Nayyar, Quvenzhané Wallis, Caroline Hjelt

I have already written about this very stupid movie. But let's just say that although this movie was very dumb, in fact, we might consider it to be the year's most insistently asinine film, it was not without its pleasures, and I actually rather enjoyed myself. By the way, the reason why Justin Timberlake's troll in the picture above is fifty shades of gray instead of brightly colored like the pink thing to his right and the glitter bomb directly behind him and that llama-muppet at the far right is because Justin's troll is a sad troll who doesn't like to sing or snuggle. He will be, by the end of the film, cured of this unfortunate malady, as you might have been able to predict. The real question of Trolls is: what color will Justin's troll turn when he becomes colorful? If you never watch this film you will never know.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #62 out of 96

Jim: the James Foley Story

1 Nomination

• Original Song: "The Empty Chair"

Director: Brian Oakes

This is an interesting story about a guy named Jim who was a freelance journalist in Benghazi and then later in Aleppo. I really didn't know anything about James Foley before, but he apparently gained national attention as a hostage of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This is a film about a filmmaker, and it is made with great attention to detail, but it is mostly a film that is designed as a way to mourn a man who did a lot of good during his life. Much of the film consists of interviews with family members – these are touching but sort of confuse the film itself. Foley's family members don't really understand why Jim did what he did, and they mostly use their interviews to sort of collectively puzzle out who this man that they loved was. The most interesting portions of the film to me were the interviews with men who were imprisoned with Foley in Syria. Foley was imprisoned and tortured by ISIL for nearly two years before they executed him publicly. So what happened to Foley while he was in prison had the potential to be the most exciting part of the film. This act of the film is told so strangely, though, that while it should have been the most intriguing section of the movie, it was the least filmic. Most of these sequences are very dark, and the movie includes hazy re-enactments that make this most violent section of the movie seem less real than the other stuff. If you know my work, you know I study torture and violence, and so this movie's refusal really to deal with this frustrated me a lot. As for the song... I checked it as one of the most interesting of the 91 eligible tunes, but there were a lot of better songs up for this award. If you want to listen without seeing the movie, go here.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Unranked (Documentary)

Star Trek Beyond

1 Nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Justin Lin

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Sofia Boutella, Idris Elba

I had a great time at this movie. I wouldn't really say that I love Star Trek as such, but I freaking love James Tiberius Kirk. So as long as Captain Kirk is running things, I am here for it. This movie is so much better than all of the other superhero/fantasy movies I saw this year (except Rogue One – I really liked Rogue One). It does crib a couple of things from Guardians of the Galaxy, to be fair, but I was on board even for that. And, finally, Star Trek Beyond turns its focus toward the crew of the Enterprise as a team. The movie is really about how a group of seven people who are devoted to one another can work together to solve a problem. I was buying whatever this movie was selling. I even really liked the Rihanna song that played over the credits. Will it win? I hope so, becaause the other option is Suicide Squad, more on which below.

Will Win: Makeup & Hairstyling

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #28 out of 96

Suicide Squad

1 Nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: David Ayer

Cast: Margot Robbie, Will Smith, Viola Davis, Joel Kinneman, Jay Hernandez, Jai Courtney, Jared Leto, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Cara Delevingne, Ben Affleck, Ike Barinholtz

This is beneath contempt. It has no script whatsoever. In fact, I kind of can't believe this was made. The makeup is kind of great, I will have to admit, and the Joker and Harley looks really have become iconic. But this thing is terrible and completely fucking incoherent. And I can't believe David Ayer, who made my beloved Fury made this piece of trash. Honestly what is Warner Brothers doing?
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Makeup & Hairstyling

My Rating: #93 out of 96

Back to:
Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films
Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna
Part 11 - Allied, The Jungle Book, Doctor Strange, 13 Hours
Part 12 - Sully, Zootopia, The Red Turtle, My Life as a Zucchini

Fury

Fury. It's awesome. I absolutely loved it. First of all, I love Brad Pitt, so watching him be in charge of a WWII tank was already a sell for me. He is great in this, his lined, pained face showing years of struggle. In fact, I think this is the main thing that I liked about this movie. Fury is about a tank crew that has seen a lot of terrible things. This crew has been in the war since the beginning of U.S. involvement, and they have done and seen terrible, awful things. Fury doesn't try to upsell the war, to tell us that wars are won by men building computers in England or by spies stealing secrets from wealthy ammunition salesmen. And Fury doesn't pretend that wars are about ideals or freedom or democracy or even revenge (as our government would have us believe). War, in Fury, is about what Elaine Scarry says it is about in The Body in Pain, viz. people in a contest of killing. The winner is the person who kills the most people or has convinced the other person, by virtue of having killed a lot of people, to stop trying to kill him. A contest of murder. That's the set-up here.

Fury is not a rah-rah-America movie or even a rabid anti-Nazi movie, both of which would have been much easier for David Ayer to make; this is a muddy, bloody, usually drunken mess.

The plot, such as it is, follows a young typist who is ordered to join a tank squadron made up of four men who have been together since the beginning of American involvement in the war and have just lost one member of their crew. Logan Lerman plays the young recruit and the other actors in the tank are Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal. Jason Isaacs, Anamaria Marinca, and Xavier Samuel are also in the cast.

Mr. LaBeouf

Fury is an action movie, but in a lot of ways it feels like an old-fashioned WWII picture. This is probably due to the tank in which the crew spends the entire film. This was not a tech-savvy, exciting war for the men in Fury. It was a difficult, disgusting, awkward dogfight in a bulky, stultifying metal box on wheels. Critics have said that the movie is too brutal, too graphic, but all of it seemed quite responsible to me.

The revelation to my mind is the acting. Shia LaBeouf is absolutely fantastic. Let me just say that again: the guy from Transformers and its absurd, ridiculous sequels is great in this film. Logan Lerman, who I have only seen in nonsensical roles, was also great in this. In fact, the film is filled with excellent performances, including a near-silent turn by Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca (from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). The men look exhausted throughout, and the camera spends a great deal of time looking at them, examining their faces. One sees in their eyes a kind of tired, resigned horror. It's incredibly powerful.

(As for Oscar chances, I don't think Fury can do very well. It's too anti-war, too violent, too conflicted about the violence it portrays. Sound categories, perhaps? And maybe also one other below-the-line category. This is just not the kind of thing Oscar voters want to see. Not uplifting enough.)

**

I actually recently saw a 1936 film called Fury with Sylvia Sidney and Spencer Tracy. He's a nice man who becomes the victim of a lynch-mob somewhere in the North. He is burned alive by the mob or at least almost burned alive. But he lives and then he seeks revenge against the men who unjustly tried to murder him. The film is notable for a few strange reasons. It uses video footage as evidence in the trial – the murderers are actually caught on video lynching him. It also was Fritz Lang's first U.S. film, and a big departure for Metro, which got into the gritty crime-film business with Fury. (The wikipedia page has lots of other trivia, too.) The other thing that is curious is that the film is about lynching, but of course there are only white people in the film. Fritz Lang made a movie about lynching in the United States, but he didn't set that film in the South and he didn't make it about the lynchings of black men. It's a pretty interesting picture.