Oscar Noms 2017: 5 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

2 Nominations

• Visual Effects
• Sound Effects Editing

Director: Peter Berg

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Gina Rodriguez, Kate Hudson, Dylan O'Brien, Ethan Suplee, John Malkovich, Brad Leland, Dave Maldonado

This movie is so good. I honestly was expecting a bunch of nonsense, but I completely enjoyed it. It's plotted beautifully, it's exciting from start to finish, the effects are awesome, and even the script is pretty great (there's this awesome sequence in act two when Malkovich thinks he's calling a bluff and tells Wahlberg that if there's so much wrong with the rig, then he just *name one* thing wrong. Wahlberg rattles off a list of at least twenty things at breakneck speed. It's just great). Deepwater Horizon is a disaster movie in the tradition of The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and The Hindenburg. So it is structurally generic – first we meet all the players, then things all go to hell, and then people try save lives – and we also know what is going hsppen from the very beginning, but it handles all this perfectly. This is also a Peter Berg movie (one of three collaborations with Wahlberg) so it is, like all of his movies, invested in a kind of American patriotism/nationalism that I don't really understand, but Deepwater Horizon is made palatable by its investment in a critique of the corporate greed that caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the first place. It would have been easy, too, to make the villains a bunch of big bad cyncical foreigners (they do, after all, work for British Petroleum), but they're all American assholes in Berg's film, corporate suits who discard safety, the lives of the laborers working on the rig, and the health of the planet so that they can line their already well-lined pockets. This  movie is very high on my list for 2016 (higher than a lot of awards bait like La La Land, Hidden Figures, Lion, and Jackie). It's a great watch. I wish I had seen it in theatres so I could have experienced the effects on a big screen. 

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #22 out of 90

Kubo and the Two Strings

2 Nominations

• Visual Effects
• Animated Feature

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Art Parkinson, Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes, Rooney Mara, Brenda Vaccaro, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, George Takei, Meyrick Murphy

A delightful animated film and pretty much a total surprise. Like The Book of Life from 2014, Kubo and the Two Strings takes the look of its characters from its subject matter, in this case origami. Kubo is a film about storytelling, but it is also a story of dealing with death. This is an odd topic, perhaps, for a stop-motion animated children's film, but Kubo manages to treat its topic beautifully, and little Kubo, at the film's center is himself a kid who must learn how to cope with the death of his mother and father. That this movie got a Visual Effects nomination is really special. This has never happened for an animated movie before, as far as I know, and is indicative of just how much the Academy loved this movie. You will like it too.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #34 out of 90

Moana

2 Nominations

• Animated Feature
• Song: "How Far I'll Go"

Director: Ron Clements, John Musker

Cast: Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Rachel House, Jermaine Clement, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Temuera Morrison, Chris Jackson, Alan Tudyk, Nicole Scherzinger

So cute! The central song to Moana, "How Far I'll Go" recurs about fifteen times in the movie, so its nomination here was mostly inevitable. In addition, the songwriter is Lin-Manuel Miranda, current darling of Broadway and most everywhere else. Miranda's charms are lost on me (also, he can't sing), but I really liked Moana, and Miranda's songs are catchy and fun (my favorite in the movie is Dwayne Johnson's song "You're Welcome", which I actually can't stop singing in my head). Moana, too, is a story about a girl's bravery and a kind of interior belief in what she knows even though it contravenes everything her parents tell her to do. In other words, the film is about marching (rafting?) to the beat of your own drum rather than doing what you're supposed to do. This is an enjoyable message to be sure, but the film also looks gorgeous. Its rippling water effects, its  Polynesian islandscapes and flora, its villainous volcano god, are all beautifully imagined.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Animated Feature, Song
My Rating: #31 out of 90

En Man Som Heter Ove (A Man Called Ove)

2 Nominations

• Foreign Language Film
• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Hannes Holm

Cast: Rolf Lassgård, Bahar Pars, Filip Berg, Ida Engvoll, Tobias Almborg, Börje Lundberg, Chatarina Larsson, Klas Wiljergård, Poyan Karimi, Simon Edenroth, Anna-Lena Bergelin, Johan Widerberg

To be fair to this movie, it isn't quite terrible, but I'll just tell you that in the first twenty minutes the main character tries to commit suicide about 4 times and each time I wished he would succeed. I legitimately have no idea why this is nominated for Makeup and Hairstyling. Every year there is at least one old-age makeup nominee in this category, but the old version of the protagonist and his younger counterpart are played by two different actors, so I don't really get it. I suppose the actress playing his wife does play both the elderly version and the young one, but the makeup is barely even notable, much less Oscar-worthy. And as for the film? This is a little fairytale about an awful, old, rule-obsessed curmudgeon who learns, after being a jerk for a really long time, not to be such an asshole to the people in his life. This is mostly due to his friendship with a new neighbor that he meets, a pregnant immigrant from Iran who is, as far as I can tell, the most generous woman in the world. I suppose A Man Called Ove is better than a movie like the Walter Matthau vehicle Kotch, where the old curmudgeon doesn't learn how to be a better person, and where the film just decides that he was right all along, but I was not really that interested in this old man's conversion to friendliness. Why should I take any interest in this jerk? The fact that this was nominated in the Foreign Language category is also a puzzle. You're telling me the Academy thought this was better than Almodóvar's new movie Julieta or Paul Verhoeven's Elle or Jonás Cuarón's Desierto or Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World? I don't get it.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Makeup & Hairstyling

My Rating: #70 out of 90

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

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 6 of 14

Despicable Me 2

2 Nominations

• Animated Feature
• Original Song: Pharrell Williams

Director: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud

Cast: Steve Carrell, Kristin Wiig, Russell Brand, Benjamin Bratt, Steve Coogan, Miranda Cosgrove, Elsie Fisher, Dana Gaier, Ken Jeong


I did not care for the first Despicable Me, and much of the charm of this second one is lost on me as well. The film's main gags involve beating its characters to a pulp without them getting injured – this bit of humor is at its most egregious when Gru goes on a date with a rude young woman who is then tranquilized and tied to the top of a car and thrown around like a giant sack of potatoes. Still, #2 does feature a few laugh-out-loud moments, and Steve Carrell is very charming. Even more importantly, Benjamin Bratt is absolutely excellent in this. He plays two characters and both are a blast (and there is a nice shout-out to Stanley Kubrick in one of his sequences). The music in Despicable Me 2 is its best feature, though, and the film is filled with great original songs by Pharrell Williams – who is A.) everywhere these days and B.) kind of genius. His song "Happy" is so catchy, and so much fun, that I am starting to think it is the only contender that might be able to beat Frozen's song "Let It Go". The awesome music videos out right now for "Happy" (there is an official one here and then there is the 24-hour version) definitely up its chances. But in the end I don't really expect it to win.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Original Song

My Rating: #60 out of 79

The Great Gatsby

2 Nominations

• Production Design: Beverley Dunn & Catherine Martin (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet)
  
• Costume Design: Catherine Martin (Australia, Moulin Rouge!)

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Cast: Tobey Maguire, Leonard DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Elizabeth Debicki, Jason Clarke, Isla Fisher, Amitabh Bachchan

If only this film had been a film only about parties. Alas, it purports to be a film with a storyline, and worse! It purports to be a film version of one of the great USAmerican novels. It is neither of these things. Instead it is an enormous, opulent, cartoon version of a real story. And it has some awesome party sequences. But this film is not without merit: Catherine Martin will deserve her second Costume Design Oscar when she wins on March 2. It will be, in fact, well deserved. The entire film feels like it was simply an excuse for Martin to design the gorgeous frocks and suits she made for this movie. I was less sold on the production design - it often looks as cartoony as the acting, personally, but I see why it has shown up here, as well. There was a film version of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby made this year, but it is called The Great Beauty not The Great Gatsby. My advice, if you're thinking of seeing Baz Luhrmann's mess of a film? Go see Paolo Sorrentino's version.
Will Win: Costume Design

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #71 out of 79

Lone Survivor

2 Nominations

• Sound Mixing
• Sound Effects Editing

Director: Peter Berg

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch, Alexander Ludwig, Eric Bana, Yousef Azami, Ali Suliman, Dan Bilzerian

The National Board of Review named Lone Survivor one of the ten best films of the year. No one else seemed to notice. I've posted about my problems with the movie already, so I won't go into that. I just want to say that while these nominations might've seemed to come out of nowhere, they really didn't. All of the critics groups saw this and many respected it, as the National Board of Review mention indicates. And the film really is technically awesome, especially in the sound department. These guys end up falling down some difficult cliffs at one point, and it is actively wince-inducing, as the audience can hear the crunching of bones. It is pretty great stuff. As film theorist Stephen Prince has argued in his book on violence in classical film, the sound information we receive as we watch a film is directly related to our empathy for the person suffering violence. Sounds of anguish or pain have been directly censored (silenced) by the MPAA, because they make violence more difficult for an audience to watch. The sounds in Lone Survivor, then, do their job, asking for the audience to empathize with the four men who get surrounded by men who wish to kill them. These sounds of agony go away, of course, as the helicopters swoop in and the full might of the U.S. military is felt, but the sound work is very, very good. (Not that this film can beat Gravity for either of its awards, because it cannot.)

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #67 out of 79

Lone Survivor

I've been told by Dayne that this is "a very drunk post", and I did write it after drinking half a bottle of rosé, so be forewarned.

Here's the thing: when you title your film Lone Survivor and you show the audience who that survivor is in the film's first five minutes, it becomes difficult to maintain the tension a survival film needs.

As far as I am concerned, Peter Berg was in trouble as soon as we started. If I was invested in the four men who go on this mission to kill a random dude (and I was invested in them), I also knew – again, from the film's first few minutes – that they were all going to die except for the, ahem, lone survivor, played by Mark Wahlberg.

I'm actually sort of baffled by the way this film was made, because it really is a high-quality thing for much of its running time. The sound is awesome. The makeup is awesome. The photography is top-notch. The acting is great (I love me some Mark Wahlberg, as you probably know I see everything he does, and I absolutely fucking adore Ben Foster – who is as fantastic in this as he is in everything else). Better yet, this could've been a pretty great survival movie. And who doesn't love a survival movie? Deliverance is very good, but 2012's totally fantastic The Grey by Joe Carnahan is totally worth your time.

Lone Survivor just isn't that, though. Instead it is a picture about four guys who go out to kill some random Arabs about whom we know absolutely nothing. So they go off to do this and then people start shooting at them and stuff. And, well, I sort of understood why people were shooting at them. And I still don't know what we're doing in Afghanistan. And the word Taliban is used a lot, but I am not really sure what that means anymore, and in the context of Lone Survivor it only means "bad".

Mr. Foster, Mr. Hirsch, and  Mr. Wahlberg: not doing so hot.

This isn't to say that I didn't like these guys. They were great guys – funny, charming, interesting. I'd probably have a great time having a beer with any of them. But their deaths were inevitable from the film's first frame, and the deaths of the dozens and dozens of Afghanis also seemed inevitable.

I find all of this killing troubling, as you might imagine, but I also find it troubling that the film is fundamentally not interested in interrogating questions about who deserves to live and who deserves to die. There is a long-ish Deliverance-inspired conversation at the beginning of act two about precisely this question, but the arguments never even reach the level of intelligence of Burt Reynolds' monologue in Boorman's film. We remain well entrenched in clichés. And the possibility of being on CNN as the next Lynndie England is more important to these men than moral obligations or ethical decisions.

I was not unmoved by Lone Survivor. Ben Foster, when he dies, talks about his wife and brotherhood and the Navy, and I really responded to that. But Lone Survivor wears out its welcome. It's twenty minutes too long, and it never manages to justify all of the killing it puts on display. As for the lone survivor himself, he's intense and never boring to watch as a performer. The film he's in, however, had me checking my watch. When do we get to the end – which, I may remind you, we've already seen at the film's opening?  

Are we there yet?

(Sober) Addendum

I forgot to say, too, that I was just stunned by the amount of U.S. military firepower that is mobilized at the end of the film. This is something that Lone Survivor has in common with Captain Phillips. In both films, it is as if the U.S. military is a kind of sleeping giant that doesn't enact its full power unless truly angered. In other words, instead of U.S. military tactics subtending the entire action of these films, both Lone Survivor and Captain Phillips behave as though USAmerican agents act on their own (in Phillips, an unarmed naval crew, in Survivor a heavily armed but isolated foursome) and are not actually supported, trained, funded, protected, and armed by the U.S. military. But once the men get into trouble in both films, the (apparently) full might of the United States descends onto the small number of men who have dared to test this sleeping giant. In both films, the military acts as a kind of exercitus ex machina, triumphantly, impossibly, and with unimaginable power, sweeping in and saving the day.

But this is all a trick – a trick of narrative that serves a specific ideological function. The U.S. military has caused everything in Lone Survivor. The men get sent onto this mountain as a military directive. They get abandoned on the mountain because the military is stretched too thin in Afghanistan. They are there, in fact, to kill the man who then fights back and attempts to kill them. And then when the Navy's four foot-soldiers do not succeed in killing the two men that it has all-along planned to kill, the Navy sends in a large number of helicopters and guns down everyone in sight. Why it didn't do this in the first place and why it allowed all of the soldiers who died to die is the Navy's business, of course, but the film pretends as though it isn't. Lone Survivor pretends that all along the four SEALs are fighting against an army much bigger than them. With its army-from-the-machine narrative device, however, Lone Survivor exposes the lie at its center: all of these deaths – the three SEALs, the rescue troupe, the Afghan fighters – have been, if not carefully, at least deliberately, orchestrated by U.S. military policy in Afghanistan.