Oscar Nominees 2016: Part 2 of 11

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11.

Bridge of Spies

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Original Screenplay: Ethan Coen (True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo), Joel Coen (True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo) & Matt Charman
• Supporting Actor: Mark Rylance
• Original Score: Thomas Newman (Saving Mr. Banks, Skyfall, WALL·E, The Good German, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Finding Nemo, Road to Perdition, American Beauty, Unstrung Heroes, Little Women, The Shawshank Redemption)
• Production Design: Adam Stockhausen (The Grand Budapest Hotel, 12 Years a Slave), Rena DeAngelo & Bernard Henrich
• Sound Mixing

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks, Rylance, Amy Ryan, Sebastian Koch, Austin Sowell, Will Rogers, Scott Shepherd, Mikhail Gorevoy, Alan Alda

First of all, this was an original screenplay? Bridge of Spies is incoherently stuffed full of so much stuff that I would have bet $100 it was an adaptation of some absurd novel. Huh. Oh well. I thought this movie was pretty boring and unsuspenseful, and had a long conversation about it here. But I am a Spielberg hater and everyone knows it, so I guess this shouldn't deter you if you usually like him. Still, the Best Picture nomination is a kind of strange stand-out here. The Academy obviously liked the movie (a screenplay nomination is a big deal), but they ignored Bridge of Spies' director, its lead actor, and its photographer Janusz Kaminski, so it didn't like the movie that much. Thomas Newman deserves his nomination here (his twelfth). He has never won an Oscar and, once again, will not win this year. It's starting to be a very notable situation. I keep hoping he'll write the score for a movie that people can really get behind. I expect almost all of the Academy's love for this film to have evaporated by February 28th. No Oscars for this movie.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #56 out of 61

Carol

6 Nominations

• Actress: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, I'm Not There., Notes on a Scandal, The Aviator, Elizabeth)
• Adapted Screenplay: Phyllis Nagy
• Supporting Actress: Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)
• Cinematography: Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven)
• Original Score: Carter Burwell
• Costume Design: Sandy Powell (Cinderella, Hugo, The Tempest, The Young Victoria, Mrs Henderson Presents, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Shakespeare in Love, Velvet Goldmine, The Wings of the Dove, Orlando)

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Blanchett, Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy, John Magaro, Cory Michael Smith

I didn't write my own review of this because everyone seemed to like it so much and I was sort of soft on it. Besides, Carol is gorgeous – beautifully designed, beautifully acted, exquisitely costumed – and the script is really tight and lovely. For me, though, something was off. I wanted something else from Carol, and the more I think about it the more I just felt sort of weirded out by the idea of "true love" or the idea of these two women being in love. I just didn't buy this relationship as fully as I wanted to buy it. As I puzzle this out, what I've come to believe is that the character of Carol is really much more like the main character in Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley than Todd Haynes (and Cate Blanchett) would like us to believe. If this is so, then Carol herself is not really to be trusted – her actions should be more mysterious. We should be spending much of our time puzzling her out from the perspective of the Therese character. Instead, the film doesn't see Carol as a problematic; Haynes presents her straightforwardly as a woman who knows herself well and is beaten down (but unbroken) by a constraining, difficult society. I wanted more complexity here.

Will Win: Costume Design

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #31 out of 61

The Big Short

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Adam McKay
• Adapted Screenplay: Charles Randolph
• Supporting Actor: Christian Bale (American Hustle, The Fighter)
• Film Editing: Hank Corwin

Director: McKay

Cast: Bale, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Finn Wittrock, Hamish Linklater, Marisa Tomei, Adepero Oduye, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, John Magaro, Melissa Leo, Billy Magnussen, Max Greenfield

I started off thinking this movie was smug and more flash than substance. In a lot of ways the movie stayed smug, flashy, and insubstantial, but I came around to the way it was working as the movie progressed and really began to enjoy myself. The direction and screenplay are the most fascinating thing about this movie. They both really are excellent: the film takes a Brechtian tack toward its subject matter, addressing its audience directly, historicizing its narrative, teaching us about its difficult subject matter, and then asking us to get emotional not about characters so much as information. It's an extraordinary choice, and McKay commits to this fully. His commitment pays off and The Big Short works marvelously. It's funny and hard hitting and analytical. As I said, it maintains its rather smug tone for most of its running time (Brad Pitt's character is the lone voice of earnestness), but this doesn't seem to have bothered most audiences, and The Big Short surprised everyone by winning the big prize at the Producers Guild Awards on January 23rd. I expect it to win Adapted Screenplay for sure, but support for this movie may swell even more by the time we get to late February, and it may take home Picture and Director, too.
Will Win: Adapted Screenplay

Could Win: Director

My Rating: #13 out of 61

Star Wars: Episode VII - the Force Awakens

5 Nominations

• Film Editing: Maryann Brandon & Mary Jo Markey
• Original Score: John Williams (The Book Thief, Lincoln, War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Catch Me If You Can, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Patriot, Angela's Ashes, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Sleepers, Nixon, Sabrina, Schindler's List, JFK, Home Alone, Born on the Fourth of July, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Accidental Tourist, Empire of the Sun, The Witches of Eastwick, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The River, Return of the Jedi, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, The Towering Inferno, Tom Sawyer, Cinderella Liberty, Images, The Poseidon Adventure, Fiddler on the Roof, The Reivers, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Valley of the Dolls)
• Visual Effects
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Harrison Ford, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong'o, Peter Mayhew, Max von Sydow, Andy Serkis, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels

This was cool, if completely predictable. But the thing is is that The Force Awakens is predictable in all the right ways, in ways that work to tell us that the world makes a kind of sense, that things are getting better, that our memories matter, that dad is looking out for us, that each of us has a heroine hiding inside us waiting to come out and kick the ass of the evil corporation/religion that doesn't care about people's lives and is seeking to destroy everyone in the world. So if The Force Awakens delivers exactly what it is meant to deliver and nothing more, it is hard to fault anyone for that. Anything more ambitious wouldn't have worked to please crowds as much as this film has. And for the record, five nominations is a ton for a Star Wars movie these days and even a Star Trek movie. The prequels to the original trilogy only ever got five nominations total, but then, they sucked, so that makes sense. John Williams has received his umpteenth Oscar nomination for this score, and I have to admit that the score is serviceable and interesting, though it doesn't really manage to transcend the original Star Wars material in too many ways – and not nearly as much as Ludwig Göransson's Creed score does with the original Rocky material.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Film Editing, Original Score, Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #27 out of 61

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 9 of 14

All Is Lost

1 Nomination

• Sound Editing

Director: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Robert Redford

The talk about All Is Lost really centered on Robert Redford's acting. And I have to say that I assumed he was a shoo-in for a nomination. Older actor who never won outright (he was nominated once in 1974 for The Sting but he was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2002), and good reviews! But I think there is a bit of a curse on the person who is named Best Actor by the National Board of Review. I always think of Campbell Scott and how we all thought he was going to be a nominee for Roger Dodger all those years ago, but then it didn't happen either. They don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to such things – it is because they are so early, of course. As for the film, I found All Is Lost difficult, and I am not sure I understand what acting is in cases like these. Acting is certainly doing – I am not confused about that – but how is this doing any more impressive than the things that other actors did in their respective films? So the nomination for Sound Editing is rather a surprise, and I suspect that the love for older actors all ended up in Bruce Dern's camp this year and that explains Robert Redford's omission.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #52 out of 81

Star Trek: into Darkness

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoë Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Bruce Greenwood

I really enjoyed myself at most of the action films this summer – Star Trek, Elysium, Pacific Rim, World War Z. I even liked the Thor sequel. Star Trek was not the best of these, but I am really sold on this entire franchise. I think they are really fun. I like Chris Pine, and I think he is great in the part. But more importantly, I have been watching the old Star Trek movies. In fact, I have watched the first seven of them. They are so good. Well, as anyone who has seen these movies will tell you, the even ones are good; the odd ones mostly don't work very well. My big realization with these old movies (they begin in 1979 and the last one with the old cast is in 1991) is what a great team they are: they all have each other's numbers and have the ability to trade barbs with ease. These films are delightful for precisely this reason. And then there's William Shatner. The original Kirk is just phenomenal. This is the case of a man who knows his role perfectly and always looks as though he is having a whale of a time performing it. I am getting distracted talking about the old franchise when I should be talking about the reboot. In fact, I don't really remember this movie, and since I didn't review it, I suppose I probably won't remember it. It is a vague remake of Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan if I remember correctly, and there are lots of fun and interesting nods in the direction of the original. But Chris Pine is making the role his own, and I am excited to see the next film in the series.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #33 out of 81

Iron Man 3

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Shane Black

Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, Rebecca Hall, Jon Favreau, Stephanie Szostak, Paul Bettany, Ty Simpkins, Dale Dickey, Miguel Ferrer

I was kind of drunk when I saw this. And I don't feel the least bit bad about it. This is allegedly the best series in the Avengers group of films – Hulk, Thor, Captain America – but I guess it just doesn't do it for me, or hasn't for a while. The first one was good, but these most recent two (and The Avengers movie) have struck me as incredibly, overwhelmingly smug, insincere, and cynical. I really like Gwyneth Paltrow, and I am happy to see her in these films, but Downey feels like he is phoning it in – everyone loves him and so he simply does not need to try – almost in a Johnny Depp kind of way. My impatience with Downey will probably never reach Depp levels, but these movies are simply not doing anything that interesting. Someone else is planning to destroy the world again. The villain has a dastardly new plan, but the plan simply isn't that great. And I am never worried about whether or not the superhero can save us all. It is just that there aren't any stakes in these films, and if (you might argue) these films are not about things like stakes or plot, but are about enjoying the pleasure of beating bad guys into the ground or laughing at smug jokes or watching explosions, then I will accept your proposal. But if this is so, then we need more beating of bad guys into the ground, and we need more explosions. More more more. Because when these movies are about plot or personal connection or (heaven help us) politics, they just can't carry their weight. Among the other Summer blockbusters this year, Iron Man 3 was out of their league, never quite managing to be special. All of the other big summer movies were better than this tired old thing.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #63 out of 81

Force Fields and Fields of the Dead

Elysium is the action-movie of the summer, in case you hadn't figured that out yet.

Neill Blomkamp certainly knows how to do a bleak dystopian future. Elysium is a totally action-packed adventure film, filled with lots of great set pieces, tons of explosions, firepower, and insanely advanced and fascinating weaponry.

Not only is the film totally fascinating from a "look what these badass weapons can do" perspective, Elysium – because this dystopian future contains machines that can achieve all sorts of medical miracles – also contains some really exciting images of the impact of those weapons on the human body.

In fact, Elysium's entire focus is the human body. This is a movie about healthcare: who has access to it and who does not (and why). But the film also makes a point of detailing and examining what happens to bodies that have been shot, that suffer explosions, that are poisoned by radiation, that are malnourished, that are given steroids or other medication. This and more make the movie a fascinating must-see.

My favorite part of the movie (amid several things I loved) was the way that the movie is paced. Elysium feels short – it is paced so that fast-moving action sequences are followed by slower-paced but still tension-filled sequences that allow for the intensity of Blomkamp's movie to build over time, heading toward a totally awesome finish that feels completely earned.

I'm not gonna say too much more about it, but I thought Elysium was better than World War Z, Pacific Rim, and Star Trek: into Darkness, and I liked all of those films a lot. Amid a great summer for action movies, Elysium is a stellar finish.

Zombies!

I never watch zombie movies, really, so I am a totally uninformed and uneducated person when it comes to approaching World War Z. But I really enjoyed it.

World War Z is a bit of a strange amalgam of a film, really – each act feels very different from the others – but the whole was exciting and, while I would not quite call it suspenseful, the action was fun, the zombies were cool, and the movie was shot beautifully. Frankly, I would go so far as to say that for me the star of the film was Ben Seresin's photography.

In truth, the first thing that must be said about World War Z is that it is basically unrelated to Max Brooks's novel of the same name, a novel which reinvented the zombie genre through its innovative storytelling, and the audiobook of which won an Audie in 2007. The friend of mine who is the most expert in zombie lore called the book "one of the seminal pieces of zombie lit [...]. The book is incredibly harrowing. When you're reading it in a public place and someone sneezes you want to die." So, let's be clear and say that this film is not that.

But... it's exciting. And shot well, and the zombies move both very quickly and rather like a swarm of ants (as you can see in the poster), scrambling on top of one another as though they are basically of one mind, moving at the behest of some kind of interior collective pulse. All of that is fun.
 
The movie is strangely assembled, though, and we go from save-my-family action sequences in close quarters to James-Bond-style action sequences set in the public streets and airport of a city in Israel to a (really awesome) plane crash sequence to what becomes, finally, a rather standard zombie picture in a medical facility. Oddly enough, this works. World War Z has several very exciting set pieces, excellent special effects, and never has the over-saturated look of a standard Hollywood picture by (say) Jon Favreau, J.J. Abrams, or Joss Whedon. I was into it.

Ten Facts about Magic Mike

1. This film is directed by Steven Soderbergh not Bruce La Bruce. It is in no way pornographic. It is, in fact, hardly even prurient. With all of the lens flares, however, it does occasionally look like a film directed by J.J. Abrams.

2. Magic Mike is an unremarkably conventional narrative that involves an older "expert" teaching "the ropes" to a noob (this one is conventionally named "the kid"), whom he has "discovered". This narrative progresses precisely how you think it progresses. The expert begins to see himself in the noob. It's fun at first, of course, and then he sees how the young man is falling prey to this fast-and-loose lifestyle. He sees how this lifestyle will eat this boy alive and (what's more!) that it has already consumed the expert himself. But it's not too late! He will turn his life around. Make a change. You know the drill. Magic Mike, however, because of how well it is made, often feels like something other than the narrative I just described.

3. Is Magic Mike better than, say, a film like Savages? No, it isn't. Is it better than The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? It is.

4. Channing Tatum is fantastic. He is so good. In a review of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints once many years ago, I described a scene in which Channing Tatum made me gasp with a bit of acting he did. He did something similar in Magic Mike in two separate scenes. I think he is great in this.

5. Matthew McConaughey's singing in Magic Mike is, in all probability, better than Russell Crowe's in Les Misérables. You be the judge.

6. This film is kind of homophobic. I mean, there's a lot of bro stuff happening here. A lot of half-naked men around each other at all times. A lot of "I love you man"s being thrown around. None of them ever has sex with one another, of course, and none of them is into dudes or anything. The whole thing is queerly inflected, but none of it is ever actually queer. Not that I was hoping for some kind of "There's nowt as queer as folk" moment like the one in The Full Monty, but I was kind of expecting a little more queerness from the movie and a lot less "no homo" bullshit, which is there in spades.

7. I totally cried. Not till the end when Channing is crying, but still.

8. If I had to choose one of the guys, I'd go for Alex Pettyfer.

9. McConaughey is pretty good in this. He's always interesting, totally wild, and a bit unhinged, actually, when it comes down to it. Truth be told, the acting is fairly good across the board – particular kudos to Olivia Munn, whom I loved.

10. Hidden somewhere inside this film is a very interesting film about class, about the sex-service industry (which includes male strippers), about the shortage of livable wages in Florida, about the ways in which middle-class people pay working-class people to sell them their bodies in various ways, and about the ways in which the middle class then later excludes people who work in such industries from its own ranks. We don't want your cash, thank you so much; unfortunately it's all one dollar bills and we know where that money came from. Magic Mike is neither this conscientious nor this intelligent, but it is passable stuff.

Nostalgia

I have been posting so frequently about history and nostalgia, you probably think, dear reader, that I am becoming obsessed with the past. But au contraire; that is only partly true. What I am becoming interested in more and more is the way that we see the past. Why we need it. Let me offer a question:

Of what is the past productive for us? What does it give us?

These days I am reading Raymond Williams's wonderful book Marxism and Literature and
A) wishing I had read it when I was a first-year graduate student,
B) remembering how one needs to write the history of things before one begins to speak about them, and
C) feeling better about my own hesitation to actually write. There is so much to know before the writing starts.

But back to nostalgia.

One of the awesome things Williams says is that we think that tradition is some kind of fixed entity, a real thing. But to be more accurate, "tradition is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits. ... What we have to see is not just 'a tradition' but a selective tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification." The past, in other words, is always being put to work in order to influence the present.

And that for which we are nostalgic is also a kind of produced feeling that another era or period was better than our own.

This is all preface to the two movies I've seen so far in 2011, both of which are actively about nostalgia: J.J. Abrams' Super 8 and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

I liked Super 8, and I really appreciated its brand of nostalgia - more a nostalgia for childhood than for a specific time period (like, say, American Graffiti or Avalon). The movie is cool, too - like the last Abrams movie - a great cast and lots of fun ideas.

People are saying the movie is derivative, and it is, but that's sort of okay for this sort of thing, I think. Super 8 has a lot of generic themes about being a kid, and it's hard not to be derivative in that department. I think this is mostly because we tend to re-imagine our childhoods so that they actively fit these images and tropes that movies give us. Many white people probably have re-imagined their childhoods so that they match the childhoods of the children in E.T.: the Extra-terrestrial and, oh, I don't know, American Beauty, if that makes sense.

My favorite part of Super 8 was seeing a lot of good actors - the film just kept surprising the audience with new ones: David Gallagher was a total trip and I loved seeing Dale Dickey, and especially Glynn Turman. Also: loved Michael Giacchino's score.

And I loved Woody Allen's new movie. LOVED. It's a total delight with even more wonderful cameos. The plot is totally nonsensical, of course, but the movie is just really really smart about nostalgia and the ways in which we pretend other time periods are better time periods. In Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson is obsessed with Paris in the 1920s, and then, somehow, finds himself there, visiting with Picasso and Cole Porter and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (and even Djuna Barnes!). It is hilarious from start to finish and also filled with wisdom and wit.

In Allen's film, the performances of these famous people don't match what we know from history about these people; instead, Allen has his actors play the characters like the fantasies they are. Zelda and Scott are exactly how you'd expect them to be: constantly drunk, attending parties every night, dancing until dawn. And Hemingway is as intense and self-important as you imagine. Salvador Dalí is an absolute lunatic. The actors in these parts are absolutely great; Adrien Brody as Dalí is giving a particularly inspired performance that might actually border on genius. I could not stop laughing.

In typical Allen philosophy, too, one must learn to live in the world one inhabits. (Think Purple Rose of Cairo.) Nostalgia is only good if it helps us to make the present better - not by going back, never by going back - by going forward. Allen, as usual, I think, encourages us to live with the world we have and stop trying to make it into something it used to be - especially because it was never really "what it used to be" in the first place.