Oscar Nominations 2019: Part 4 of 11

Part 1: Roma, The Favourite, Vice, A Star Is Born.
Part 2: Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Part 3: Mary Poppins Returns, First Man, Cold War.
Part 4:

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

3 Nominations

• Actress: Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids)
• Adapted Screenplay: Nicole Holofcener & Jeff Whitty
• Supporting Actor: Richard E. Grant

Director: Marielle Heller

Cast: McCarthy, Grant, Dolly Wells, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Ben Falcone, Christian Navarro, Gregory Korostishevsky, Anna Deavere Smith, Erik LaRay Harvey, Pun Bandhu, Brandon Scott Jones, Marc Evan Jackson

This movie is so good! I thought from the trailer that this movie had no idea what it wanted to be – is it a comedy? A serious drama? A true story? What's kind of amazing is that it is all of these things and that it is still so balanced, so lovely. Marielle Heller has done superb work here, and she probably ought to have been nominated in the director category this year. It's rather a shame she wasn't. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is just such a good movie. I hope more people see this movie now that it has three Oscar nominations. I have to say, also, that I have long been skeptical of Melissa McCarthy. I thought she was hilarious in Funny People, but I think that's because Funny People is so unfunny, so she was a bright spot. But in this movie she is both hilarious and also really, really beautifully moving. She's excellent, and she was one of my top 5 performances of the year. This nomination is completely deserved. Shout out, too, to Nicole Holofcener, who, for some reason has never been nominated for best original screenplay but got her first writing nomination for a) a movie she didn't direct and b) an adapted screenplay! So strange. Oh! last note: this is a film about two queer people in New York in the 1980s. Queerness is not a problematic in the film, but the film's perspective is very queer. It's delightful.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #17 out of 67

If Beale Street Could Talk

3 Nominations

• Adapted Screenplay: Barry Jenkins (Moonlight)
  
• Supporting Actress: Regina King
• Score: Nicholas Britell (Moonlight)

Director: Jenkins

Cast: KiKi Layne, King, Stephan James, Colman Domingo, Michael Beach, Teyonah Parris, Finn Wittrock, Bryan Tyree Henry, Aunjanue Ellis, Ebony Obsidian, Dominique Thorne, Dave Franco, Diego Luna, Ed Skrein, Emily Rios, Pietro Pascal, Marcia Jean Kurtz

This is the best ensemble work of the year. Every actor is fabulous in it. Every single one. Stephan James is incredible in this movie, and Regina King will deserve her Oscar when she wins it. I loved this movie. It isn't quite the book (a book I love), but it's doing its own rather magical thing instead of trying to do the book. I felt near tears through most of it. Now... I have heard talk that some people think this movie got robbed when the nominations came out. I can't say I agree. It was released way too late, and the studio really didn't do the work it needed to do to get the nominations happening. Regina King's omission from the SAG awards is a good example of this. The SAGs skew heavily toward stuff that's been released in theatres – thus the popularity of movies like A Quiet Place and even Mary Queen of Scots. If a poetic movie like Beale Street is going to land with the Screen Actors Guild, it simply needs to be released earlier. In any case, three nominations is nothing to sneeze at. And this is pretty much exactly what happened with Call Me by Your Name last year. It was a movie popular with critics that everyone thought would get more nominations than it did, and it ended up with only three. Still, I think Beale Street could win two Oscars on Feb. 24th. It will definitely win supporting actress, but it may also win Jenkins his second writing Oscar, as well. (It is worth saying that Beale Street also is not perfect. Because Jenkins' style is so insistently poetic, the film's treatment of the appalling incarceration rates for black men in the U.S. don't quite work. Jenkins' film doesn't really take place in the real world, so if you're whole film is going to be a kind of poetic meditation, you can't also attempt to address real world consequences and issues, well maybe you can do this, but Jenkins' film doesn't quite manage it.)

Will Win: Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress
Could Win: Score
My Rating: #11 out of 67

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

3 Nominations

• Adapted Screenplay: Ethan Coen (Bridge of Spies, True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo) & Joel Coen (Bridge of Spies, True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo)
  
• Costume Design: Mary Zophres (La La Land, True Grit)
• Song - "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings": David Rawlings & Gillian Welch

Director: Coen Brothers

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, James Franco, Harry Melling, Jonjo O'Neill, Saul Rubinek, Sam Dillon, Stephen Root, Chelcie Ross, Jefferson Mays, Paul Rae, Prudence Wright Holmes, David Krumholtz, Willie Watson,

This feels like a sort of minor Coen Brothers movie, but it's so funny, and it's such a pleasure to watch all of these little stories. Each one is excellent. Each works very well on its own terms, but as a group, these stories are pretty wonderful. And they're so well made that this film is completely enjoyable. Also it's on Netflix, so that just makes everything easier. For me, Bill Heck, who played the intended husband in the "girl who got rattled" segment, was truly the best in the film, His portrayal is so sensitive and vulnerable. I found him quite moving. I also loved Tyne Daly in the final segment. She's perfect. And the score. It's nice that the cute Gillian Welch song got nominated; that's really fun. But Carter Burwell's score is memorable and haunting, and I love it so much. I am very sad that it didn't get nominated.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #29 out of 67

Oscar Nominations 2018: Part 5 of 12

Back to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4.

My Best of 2017.

Coco

2 Nominations

• Animated Feature
• Song – "Remember Me": Kristen Anderson-Lopez (Frozen) & Robert Lopez (Frozen)

Director: Lee Unkrich

Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renee Victor, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau, Herbert Sigüenza

This is easily the best animated feature of the year (I'll talk more about the scraping of the bottom of the barrel that this year's nominations are in another post). But, don't let the lack of competition fool you. Coco is actually brilliant. It may look like a retread of The Book of Life; it's not. This movie is breathtakingly gorgeous, vividly imagined, and the story is told beautifully. The songs are lovely, the acting is wonderful, and I cried several times. There was a moment in the middle of the movie when Miguel, the young protagonist, has his guitar taken from him by his abuela, and I reacted so strongly and violently that I realized I was completely in love with Coco, and that was before little Miguel reached the land of the dead and I realized that this was going to be the most finely realized Pixar movie yet. The animation is stunning. This is in my top ten films of the year. It's better than The Shape of Water; it's better than Three Billboards; it's better than Lady Bird; it's better than Get Out. And it deserves to win both of the Oscars for which it is nominated.

Will Win: Animated Feature, Song

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #9 out of 80

Roman J. Israel, Esq.

1 Nomination

• Actor: Denzel Washington (Fences, Flight, Training Day, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Glory, Cry Freedom)

Director: Dan Gilroy

Cast: Washington, Carmen Ejogo, Colin Farrell, Lynda Gravátt, Amanda Warren, Tony Plana, Hugo Armstrong, Amari Cheatom, DeRon Horton, Sam Gilroy, Ludwig Manukian

This isn't terrible, honestly. Denzel is quite excellent, and I'm glad he got nominated (especially since I pregamed this movie), but this movie has serious script problems. I rather liked it for much of its running time, and watching Washington make the acting moves he makes is very interesting. As I said in my longer review, he is constantly surprising, and the part is really different from parts he usually plays these days, but I think that is really the only selling point this movie might have. It is a clunkily told story about ethics in Los Angeles that can't quite ever seem to focus on its themes because it is too obsessed with its plot – a plot which is not as well thought-out as it might have been in the first place. Washington can't win this year, even though most people agree he was a close runner-up to last year's award. He'll need to be part of a movie more widely loved in order to win this trophy again, but this nomination is well-deserved.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #45 out of 80

Molly's Game

1 Nomination

• Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network)

Director: Sorkin

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong, Chris O'Dowd, Bill Camp, Angela Gots, Brian d'Arcy James, J.C. MacKenzie

I thought this worked really well and I liked it a lot. It moves quickly and with purpose, and it only gets slowed down twice. (There's a stupid sequence in which we learn about Molly using drugs and another slow sequence in which she heals from a violent attack. Both of these sequences break the contract the narrator and filmmaker have made with the audience.) But actually – and this surprised me – I thought Sorkin's direction was mostly great. This is perhaps not too surprising, and it is also true that this film might have been better with a more experienced director reining him in at certain times, but I confess that I like this snappy Sorkin dialogue, and if I wasn't completely on board with the film's ethical arguments (which quote Arthur Miller directly), I had fun at this movie. It felt like a window into something I know nothing about, and the lightness of the whole thing was amusing throughout.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #31 out of 80

The Disaster Artist

1 Nomination

• Adapted Screenplay: Michael H. Weber & Scott Neustadter

Director: James Franco

Cast: Franco, Dave Franco, Zac Efron, Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, Ari Graynor, Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Megan Mullally

I've written about this film and its drawbacks already, so I won't rehearse all that again. What I didn't say is that this film does feel like a kind of extension of Franco's work. I think Franco is building a kind of film directing oeuvre that makes sense, or at least he is making films that hang together in some way. The Disaster Artist is, in many ways, very similar to Interior. Leather Bar., for example. Mostly, though, I think The Disaster Artist falls short of what it could have been. It doesn't explore Tommy Wiseau deeply enough to be really interesting, and it is too busy laughing at him to get under his skin. Is Wiseau gay? Is Wiseau an obsessive? Is he clueless? In love? Terrified? Desperate? Who is this dude? It isn't enough to say "no one knows", but that is what this film chooses to do.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #55 out of 80

Queen of Cannes as Queen of the Desert

Queen of the Desert is, perhaps, an interesting true story, if indeed it is true.

Gertrude Bell travels to the near East where she befriends and learns about the Bedouins and becomes a British agent who eventually divides up Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

Nicole Kidman is in full period-piece diva mode here. And she is fine in this tepid film. Robert Pattinson works very well as T.E. Lawrence. Oh and James Franco is in this. As Kidman's first love. I actually had forgotten he was in this – the film sort of forgets about him as we move along – and I saw this movie two months ago.

The problem is that if the true story of Gertrude Bell is interesting, and it very well might be, Werner Herzog's film isn't very interesting (Werner Herzog made this film??). It's more like a rather dull historical pageant flavored with two love stories to spice it up a bit.

Darkest Hour, Roman J. Israel, Disaster Artist, and the Best Actor Oscar

Last night I saw Joe Wright's Darkest Hour, the Winston Churchill-leading-up-to-Dunkirk movie, and I am here to tell you it is really, really strong.

Gary Oldman plays the cantankerous old Prime Minister, beginning his fight against fascism, and his performance is just pitch perfect the entire time. He's under a large amount of makeup, of course, but this doesn't seem to get in the way of the work he is doing at all. Churchill emerges as a rich, nuanced, fascinating figure filled with doubts and attempting to balance two warring political factions at home while making the right decisions about the soldiers fighting the Nazis in France and Belgium.

Oldman is superb, and he is definitely the best part of the film, but this is only because he is so good. Wright's filmmaking is also just excellent, the script is smart if it occasionally veers off into the overly sentimental, and the camerawork and editing are wonderful. Oh, Dario Marianelli's score is great, too, keeping the mood intense even when what we're watching doesn't seem to be about the stakes of human lives in peril.

Darkest Hour is also total Oscar bait. It's a WWII movie with a great performance at its center. It's (obviously) way better than The King's Speech (in fact, Darkest Hour has it's own King George VI – Ben Mendelsohn – who is great), and it maintains a sort of regal, important tone throughout.

It earns all of this, though, and the movie works very, very well. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope Oldman does win his Oscar.

* * *

While I'm talking about this year's Best Actor Oscar, let me just go all the way in. The SAG nominees are out, and the Golden Globe nominees are out, so that means the field is pretty well established.
Here is how it looks to me.

The Screen Actors Guild nominated:
Timothée Chalamet for Call Me By Your Name,
Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour,
James Franco for The Disaster Artist,
Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out, and
Denzel Washington for Roman J. Israel, Esq.

The Golden Globes doubles up its nominees. To the list above they added the following five names:
Tom Hanks for The Post,
Daniel Day-Lewis for Phantom Thread,
Steve Carell for Battle of the Sexes,
Ansel Elgort for Baby Driver, and
Hugh Jackman for The Greatest Showman (haha).

I think the Golden Globes Drama list – Chalamet, Day-Lewis, Oldman, Hanks, Washington – is the top five. I would say there only really two alternates for those top five spots and those are Daniel Kaluuya and James Franco. But the SAG skews young, and it is also going to skew toward films that have come out earlier. It makes sense that movies like The Post and Phantom Thread, which are only now just being seen by everyone, are not on that SAG list. I don't see either Kaluuya or Franco breaking into that top five. It could happen, but I don't see it.

* * *

As for Roman J. Israel, Esq., it's surprisingly good! I was sort of expecting it to be just a star vehicle, but Dan Gilroy (who also made Nightcrawler a couple of years ago) is trying to deal with ethics in Los Angeles, and he has crafted a script that explores social justice and law in the U.S. in interesting ways. The movie is too long, and it has an oddly uplifting, hopeful ending, but perhaps this just reflects the fact that Gilroy believes in the possibilities of change a bit more than I do.

And Denzel Washington is great in this part. It is a really beautiful performance that often feels new and intriguing, and Roman J. Israel, Esq. is very different from other parts that he has played recently. It's a de-glammed, non-powerhouse part that (paradoxically) packs an interesting punch. I really enjoyed the film, and after seeing the performance really feel confident that he will get nominated.

Oh! And Colin Farrell is also in this movie, doing his usual excellent supporting work. He is just a fantastic actor. I am glad he works so much. At some point, I am sure people will wise up to just how good he is, but for now I guess he can just keep churning out great performances.

* * *

I have also seen Franco's The Disaster Artist, and I can tell you that I also think Franco is great in the movie. The movie itself is... well, I think it is for people who really like The Room. I'm not one of those people, so I didn't think the film was nearly as funny as it thought it was. Also, and this is the part that doesn't really sit well with me, The Disaster Artist's treatment of Tommy Wiseau strikes me as mean-spirited, even ugly. For all of the brilliance of Franco's mimicry – and it is brilliant – The Disaster Artist thinks Wiseau is a total fucking joke. So the entire film, which is about the making of a terrible film, is busy making fun of Wiseau. The film thinks he's a sexual deviant; it is baffled by how rich he is but also happy to cash his checks; and it is laughing at him to his face.

What is fucked up about The Disaster Artist is that this is all done under the pretense of really loving Wiseau. The movie even begins with various actors speaking to the camera in documentary style about how brilliant the film is. We love Tommy Wiseau, everyone in the movie seems to be saying.

The Disaster Artist, in other words, wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of Wiseau while pretending that it is paying tribute to him or some such business. It all feels disingenuous to me. The Disaster Artist isn't really interested in getting to know Wiseau, in exploring what's going on with him or how he works or what he thinks. It's content, instead, simply to look at him as a curiosity, a bizarre, wealthy clown. It reminded me a bit of the way last year's Stephen Frears's film looked at Florence Foster Jenkins: this person is a freak and nothing more. We might feel a little bit sorry for these people, but we certainly can't identify with them. Both of those films allow us to believe that we normal people are nothing like those weirdos.

I didn't dislike the film, really, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

* * *

My own preferences for Best Actor this year lean toward Robert Pattinson, Claes Bang, Harris Dickinson, and Jeremy Renner – but that's another story, and I haven't seen Call Me By Your Name, The Post, or Phantom Thread yet, so the jury's still out.

Vibrating Homosexuality and the Pacino Popper Freakouts

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Spring Break Forever, Y'all

I am not quite sure what I figured I'd get from Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, but it was recommended to me by two sources that I don't really trust (ahem: Carlos and Jonathan), and so my expectations were fairly low. More than anything else, I figured Spring Breakers would be like 1998's Wild Things for a new generation.

In fact, as I write this, the comparison makes perfect sense. Wild Things (if you grew up in the '90s like I did) was the sexiest mainstream film I had ever seen: Neve Campbell and Denise Richards have sex with Matt Dillon in a swimming pool and it's all very exciting. Wild Things was all about trafficking in this kind of eroticism: Kevin Bacon even appears fully naked (he did that a lot in the late '90s). But Wild Things is a plot-driven film that has about twenty-five twists: this person double-crossing the other and then being double-crossed in return to the point of total absurdity. The tittilation in Wild Things is the point of the movie, of course, but the film pretends for all the world that it is a crime caper, almost as if it is in denial of its own purpose. 

Spring Breakers does things differently. It's set in Florida, too (Florida is apparently the favored setting for both real-life criminal behavior and its cinematic equivalent these days) but Korine's film is not about plot any more than it is about eroticism or faux-lesbianism. Spring Breakers is, for one thing, about time.

Spring Break forever, y'all. The film's characters chant this mantra as a plea for living in the now and as a demand made upon those participating in spring break to celebrate this time during spring break to the fullest. It's a way of saying YOLO or (as we used to say) carpe diem. And essentially this time during spring break is assumed to be "free" time, or time that is outside of time. The young ladies at the film's center speak about getting away from their lives, leaving their humdrum existences. They need to get out of their lives: out of the regular time of their lives in order that they can have "the time of their lives". They repeat hackneyed expressions such as these are the moments we'll always remember, but aside from being so intoxicated that memory of anything would seem impossible, the moments that are intended to be remembered are themselves outside of time, approached as outside of time. It is central to the film's premise that the moments in these young ladies' lives are not at all memorable and the moments lived outside of "real life" are worth remembering, indeed are the only ones worth cinematic retelling.

And if Spring Break is considered a break from time, Korine's film explores the ways that time itself is disrupted through the activities attached to the popular notion of spring break: the film is often unclear about when we are and where we are. Sometimes we watch things that haven't happened yet, flashes-forward that we then see in real time, giving the entirety of the film the feeling of having happened already. I found myself saying wait, has this already happened? or hasn't this happened before?. Lines repeat, sometimes ad nauseum, and Spring Breakers plays with the totally intoxicated way of living this life out of time. The young women re-enact a scene of violence from the first act of the film in the second act. Only this time they're in a parking lot and everything is different. It's just play-acting. And the film flashes quickly between the memory and what is happening in the present. But even what is happening in the present feels like it has already happened. And one begins to feel a bit nauseous. I began to feel as though I had had as much to drink as they had. But you said that already. Didn't you say that already?

James Franco as Alien

Spring Breakers, too, is essentially about our time. It feels very much about the current moment: the total banality of collegiate sexual activity, of naked men and women, of alcoholic intoxication, of beach parties and public, sexualized play. The police appear in the film at a key moment and they (as you can imagine) do nothing but cause much more trouble. They are present for none of the violent criminal activity in the film, but appear only to slap a hand or two, only to facilitate further criminal behavior. And this no longer feels like a total failure on the part of our legal system, but par for the course. This is the way the law works. When, late in the movie, Alien refers to Britney Spears as one of the greatest voices of our time, it doesn't land as a joke. I nodded my head. He's right. That is the version of greatness we are willing to accept.

The plot of the movie is essentially that three young ladies violently rob a restaurant and set fire to a car so that they can go on vacation with their friend. The four girls then have a wild time in Florida (St. Pete, to be exact) and spend their time getting trashed and flirting with guys. Then they are hauled in by the cops for drug use. They spend a night in county lock-up and then when they come before a judge they are sentenced to two days in jail unless they can pay a fine. The fine is paid by a musician/gangster with a mouthful of gold teeth and a head of cornrows. This guy, whose name is Alien, sells drugs and collects weaponry, and spends most of his time barging into the hotel rooms of spring breakers and robbing them. The young women take up with this guy and form a kind of gun-toting, bikini-clad gang. Eventually two of the women go home, but the two main girls form a ménage à trois with Alien (there is a Wild Things homage where the three have sex in a swimming pool).

The film is filled with bright lights and saturated colors, and these are used to fabulous effect both by the film's cinematographer and its editor. The film is violent and shocking and spends most of its time attacking the famous urban/rural axis that Carol Clover analyzed so well in her study of 1970s horror films. Class conflict is central to Spring Breakers, and that conflict is literalized as the film becomes increasingly violent. Spring Breakers is about money. And to return to time, the film questions who is able to afford time and what people might do to pay in order to buy some time out of time.

By the point at which Spring Breakers is over, it has begun to seem less and less real. Paradoxically, however, the way that Korine has told his story recommends the narrative to us as a real one. I was convinced, by the movie's finale, that such things happen and probably with frequency. And further, I found Korine's approach to be an empathetic one. The young women in Spring Breakers make foolish decision after foolish decision, but they are, after all, more trapped than anything else: trapped in boring lives, trapped by their age, trapped by their relative lack of intelligence, and trapped in a time when the best idea anyone can come up with for escaping a life of boredom is robbing a restaurant in order to get wasted and flash your tits at a video camera.

Best Actor 2010

My top choices in the order I would place them on my Academy ballot if I were allowed to vote:

TAHAR RAHIM, Une Prophète (A Prophet)


ROBERT DUVALL, Get Low


JESSE EISENBERG, The Social Network


JAMES FRANCO, 127 Hours


COLIN FIRTH, The King's Speech

Runners-up, alphabetically:
BEN AFFLECK, The Town
CHRISTIAN BALE, The Fighter
RYAN GOSLING, Blue Valentine
CRISTIAN MERCADO, Contracorriente (Undertow)

Related:
My Best Actor picks for 2009
My Best Actor picks for 2008
My Best Actor picks for 2007

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.