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.

Wanted

The Angelina Jolie vehicle Wanted, which stars James McAvoy as well as Morgan Freeman (who, I'm increasingly inclined to believe, does not turn down any role he is offered) is a derivative, inane, piece of junk of a movie.

When I say that Wanted is derivative, I mean, specifically, that Michael Brandt & Derek Haas's script is a complete and total rip-off of the Wachowski Brothers' 1999 feature The Matrix. Nearly all of Wanted's plot points faintly echo the exploits of Neo and Morpheus and Trinity. And it should not surprise you at all that Wanted totally pales in comparison to the film it copies. Its accusatory politics, its moral high ground, and its smug message of carpe diem all seem lifted from 1999. If any of this were interesting I'd tell you, but none of it is. Wanted is totally absurd and laughably bad. And Angelina Jolie is not even in it enough for it to be a vehicle worthy of her abilities.

Two Movies I Disliked (Sorry, Darren)

The new Christopher Guest (A Mighty Wind, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show) movie, entitled For Your Consideration is a satire of the whole Oscar-buzz awards-show-machine idea, and it is, unfortunately, rather boring. The laughs are few and far between and the send-ups and subtle are so steeped in Hollywood culture that they fall totally flat (at least here in Tallahassee). I went to the movie with a non-Californian and he was totally lost. I wasn't lost at all, but the movie is so badly edited, so poorly scripted, and so totally unfocused that I got very frustrated after the first twenty or thirty minutes. The film has no central plot device like the other three films, with a clear end in sight. Instead, it flounders, without purpose, making fun of... wait a minute! Who exactly is For Your Consideration making fun of? It seems to me that who they're making fun of are actors. But not stars, not ego-driven Hollywood movie assholes, but rather working stiffs, people who scrape together money to pay rent and wind up doing shitty weiner commercials to make ends meet, people who have been around for twenty-thirty-forty years trying to make a go of it in Hollywood and never achieving any kind of fame. That's who Guest & co. are lampooning. And to me, well, that doesn't really seem fair. I mean, those people don't really deserve to be mocked.

And the Wachowski Brothers' latest script V for Vendetta has been directed by James McTeigue and is beautifully shot, edited and decorated--the score, too, is beautiful. It also boasts a bevy of talented British actors--Stephen Rea, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Fry, John Hurt, Rupert Graves, Sinéad Cusack--and a wonderful performance by Natalie Portman. But the script is awful. It's like something out of Ayn Rand. And I mean stylistically not politically. V for Vendetta is about as subtle as a mack truck, with screechingly one-dimensional characters. And some of the plot points left me furious at the script. Terrorism as a form of rebellion is lionized--fine. But the makers of V and V himself (the lead character I mean) propose fear as a tool to be used against their own people in the same way that fear has been used as a tactic by the oppressive, totalitarian regime they wish to overthrow. It's a totally confused sort of logic that makes sense in the minds of the Wachowskis (and, I presume, McTeigue) but didn't make sense in mine. The fight sequences, too, have all been choreographed into precise, mathematical, mind-numbing boredom. There isn't an interesting action sequence among them, leaving only the political chatter of which the movie consists. Talk is interesting, but in a movie purporting to be about action, talk is beside the point. And when the talk is logically unsound, as it is in V, it comes across only as absurd.