Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 5 of 13

The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey

3 Nominations

• Production Design: Simon Bright (King Kong) & Dan Hennah (King Kong, The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring) & Ra Vincent
• Visual Effects
• Hair and Makeup

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Aidan Turner, Dean O'Gorman, Sylvester McCoy, Andy Serkis, Ken Stott, Graham McTavish, William Kircher, James Nesbitt, Stephen Hunter, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee

Apparently no one liked The Hobbit's first installment. Well, that's sort of a lie. It has made over $600 million worldwide so far. And counting. But the Academy, it seems, was not having it. In categories where the Lord of the Rings franchise cleaned up – score, editing, both sound categories, cinematography – this movie got left out, despite its technical brilliance. My sympathy, as you can probably imagine, runs low. But I have to say that it deserves to win a few things, and I think it will win Hair & Makeup (I mean just look at the hair in that poster!). And... if I am being honest, I would probably watch this movie again. Just to give it another chance. In a guilty-pleasure sort of way, you understand.

Will Win: Hair & Makeup

Could Win: Visual Effects

My Rating: #51 out of 61

Flight

2 Nominations

• Best Actor: Denzel Washington (Training Day, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Glory, Cry Freedom)
• Original Screenplay: John Gatins

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Washington, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle, Tamara Tunie, Tommy Kane, Brian Geraghty, Melissa Leo

Um, Best Original Screenplay? It's a little odd because the time-travel picture Looper looked like it was going to get this nomination, but who knows what the writers branch was thinking. Instead they went with this highly moralistic screenplay that is, in many ways, a retread of The Lost Weekend. Being an alcoholic is bad, guys. Not that I disagree, but this film gets across its message... inelegantly. There are good things about the movie – I actually rather liked it – Denzel Washington is great and Zemeckis' direction is tight and exciting, but Gatins' screenplay is heavy handed and unnecessarily sentimental. All that to say: this movie is not taking home any Oscars.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #29 out of 61

Snow White and the Huntsman

2 Nominations

• Costume Design: Colleen Atwood (Alice in Wonderland, Nine, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Memoirs of a Geisha, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chicago, Sleepy Hollow, Beloved, Little Women)
• Visual Effects

Director: Rupert Sanders

Cast: Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Sam Spruell, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Brian Gleeson

This film is not winning any Oscars. But I think I probably screamed out loud when I saw that it was nominated. See: I thought it was going to be terrible, and so my friend Julie and I got drunk and watched it together. In fact, it isn't the least bit terrible. The visual effects are delightful, the narrative is interesting, the costumes are completely fabulous, and Charlize Theron goes for absolute broke in the role of the evil queen. It really is a very fun film marred just slightly by a fairly uninteresting heroine. I want to say, too, that two Oscar nominations is kind of a lot! It's more than, say, Cloud Atlas or, say, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen got. Colleen Atwood has enough Oscars, however – three, actually; can you believe she has three? – and she does not need another one for Snow White and the Huntsman. But if her nomination gets you to rent the camp-fest that is this movie, I say more power to the Academy for honoring good design and visual effects work, no matter what kind of movie they appear in.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #35 out of 61

Cloud Atlas

The new film from the Wachowskis (The Matrix and its sequels, Speed Racer)  is also the new film from Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior – I somehow skipped his films Perfume and The International).

Cloud Atlas is split up into six separate storylines that do not so much as converge as repeat in odd kind of ways. They reverberate. So, for example, in the 1930s a young composer writes letters to his lover at Cambridge while he attempts to write a symphony before he commits suicide (we find this out in the film's first 5 minutes, so it isn't a spoiler). Those letters are found by a young reporter in the 1970s, who is attempting to write an exposé of a certain nuclear power plant. The mystery novel that the woman writes is read in 2012 by a publisher who goes through a very humorous ordeal as he is locked into a nursing home, and he later makes a movie of his travails. That movie is seen in the 22nd century by a young clone who is being used as slave labor, etc. etc. You get my drift. Cloud Atlas is grand in scale like the Wachowskis' previous movies, and the Wachowskis directed the futuristic sequences of the film; Tykwer's sections were the 1930s, the 1970s and the one in the present day.

Each of the threads is fairly interesting on its own, and each also manages to be a basically different genre of story. Some are more interesting than others; I was not at all, for example, interested in the story that takes place in the distant future on a random island. But here's the thing: all the stories take place at the same time in the movie. Like a hyper-realized version of The Hours where there are six stories instead of three, and where the viewer is asked to connect the stories as best she can.

But they're not connected, or at least they don't work together. In book form, I think they might, and this movie made me really want to read a novel that I suspect works really well, but as for the film, we switch back and forth from time to time and the links between the storylines (that I was waiting for) just never appear.

Worse yet, nearly all of the main actors appear in each of the storylines. I found this head-spinning. Not because I couldn't make sense of it, but because it actually does not make sense. Tom Hanks plays a kind of mountebank quack doctor in the storyline in the 19th century, a blackmailing hotelier in 1930, a nuclear physicist in the 1970s, a gangster/autobiographer in the present day, an actor in the 22nd century, and a kind of Celtic family man in the distant future. All of the actors have these kinds of repeats, and they create additional resonances. Or rather: they are intended to create additional resonances, as though looking into the eyes of a young woman you just met you might see the lover who left you forty years earlier come back into your life serendipitously. I appreciate this sentiment. I think often, in fact, about the ways people come back to us and the ways in which the people remind us of others in our lives. But the actor-doubling doesn't actually have these resonances. It only simulates them. It makes no sense, in fact, that Halle Berry should play the doctor in the 22nd century who helps Bae Doona get free as well as a Jewish woman in 1930 married to a doddering old composer. I mean why? I found myself spending much of the film thinking about why the actors were playing certain characters instead of actually watching the movie. In other words, Cloud Atlas presents its audience with a puzzle that has no solution, and one is invited to solve the puzzle over the duration of the film. Do I think the film would have worked better without all of this doubling? I am pretty sure I still would've disliked it, but I would have disliked it less.

And then there's the movie's politics. The "message" of Cloud Atlas – and make no mistake, this is a "message" film (like The Matrix Revolutions was) – is that our actions have reverberations. The small ethical choices we make in our day-to-day lives have effects that we cannot know until a long time into the future. We must behave ethically now and refuse to make decisions which harm other people, because we are all connected and because we do not know yet what the results of the good we do will be. I am wholly on board with this sentiment. We are all connected. We must work toward being better at who we are.

But the scope of the film as made presents these ethical choices as general: pro-human, anti-slavery, pro-freedom, pro-art, anti-big-business. All of those choices are obvious choices. Should we oppose slavery? Should we fight the plan that a big oil company has to blow up a nuclear power plant? Should we try to stop people from killing our families? Ya think? And yet, Cloud Atlas does not present any instances when such decisions are actually difficult. The world, even centuries from now, is only ever seen Manichaeistically. It's easy to choose when the choices are "good" and "bad."

There are two gorgeous moments in the movie – both from Tykwer – one in which an elderly Jim Broadbent remembers being young and the film swirls around him and he is kissing his girlfriend on a train platform, and another where Ben Whishaw in the 1930s is standing in the bedroom of his beloved in the 1970s, a continent away, and then the vision fades. I would have loved more chiasmatic plays with time like these, but they are, sadly, few. I want also to say that I thought Ben Whishaw was perfect in this: charming, beautiful, and charismatic, and because I liked his storyline best, it might have made me the most angry of all of them. What looks as though it is something that will be lovely ends up being just one more cinematic love affair between men where one of them kills himself. I have seen that enough times, thanks.

I am sorry for being so frustrated with this film. I really did want to like it. But Cloud Atlas is preoccupied with form so much that it can't manage to tell even one straightforward story.

Some More Spring Break Movies

I liked Marc Forster's The Kite Runner better than his last film Finding Neverland, but like that film, The Kite Runner is also rather a sentimental mess. Mind you, I cried about six times. It's a sad story, but it isn't moving, if you know what I mean. It's a kind of surface sadness based on situations. I haven't read the book, but I bet it's really good. Not to stray too far from my thesis topic, too, The Kite Runner contains a scene of male rape and the film's villain, in addition to the Taliban, is a kind of homosexual pervert who looks like an Afghan John Lennon. I should mention that I loved two things about the film: the credit sequence, which is beautiful, and the score (which was Oscar-nominated) by Alberto Iglesias, which is complicated and intelligent as well as very pretty.

Pascale Ferran's French film Lady Chatterley of D.H. Lawrence's novel John Thomas and Lady Jane is a long one (2 hours 40 minutes) and a rather boring one. The most interesting thing about the film is the way that it subvert's the male gaze. This is a film made by a woman about a woman and I'm not sure I can explain exactly why but it feels like it. Everything is from Lady Chatterley's point of view. This is not a film where the central female is still an object. Lady Chatterley is a sexual subject. Still, the filmmaker makes a lot of bad decisions: title cards to show passage of time and to tell us things she can't figure out how to show us. She also yadda-yaddas what could have been a beautiful sequence in the film, Lady Chatterley's trip to Paris and Italy. The director uses a kind of hand-held home video camera to relate this period in the book and it makes her journey abroad seem unimportant in her transformation. It's a very bad decision. The performances are good in Lady Chatterley, but this is not a very exciting movie.

I really, really liked Paris, Je T'aime, though. This film consists of 21 short films by world-renown directors (the Coen Brothers, Olivier Assayas, Gérard Depardieu, Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne, Tom Tykwer, Richard LaGravanese, Gurinder Chadha, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Christopher Doyle, you get the drift) all about Paris, and the film stars about a million people you know and love: Gena Rowlands, Juliette Binoche, Willem Defoe, Nick Nolte, Gaspard Ulliel, Miranda Richardson, Steve Buscemi, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Natalie Portman, Javier Cámara, Hippolyte Girardot, Bob Hoskins, Fanny Ardant, Ludivine Sagnier, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elijah Wood, Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell, Alexander Payne (as Oscar Wilde), Ben Gazzara. I pretty much loved almost every sequence, and none of them lasts very long. The best short film among the troupe is Oliver Schmitz's sequence Place des Fêtes about a would-be romance and tragedy. It's a perfectly contained little story and it's excellent. Anyway, this one is definitely a renter: romantic, lovely, filled with good miniature movies.