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.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 13 of 14

The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Hideaki Anno, Miori Takimoto, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masahiko Nishimura, Stephen Alpert, Keiko Takeshita, Mirai Shida, Jun Kunimura, Shinobu Otake, Nomura Mansai (except that they all spoke English when I saw it, so: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Martin Short, Stanley Tucci, Werner Herzog, William H. Macy, Jennifer Grey)

This is apparently not going to be (as has been reported) Miyazaki's final film. We should all breathe a sigh of relief at this. The subject matter of The Wind Rises is not Miyazaki's usual fanciful content, so I was sort of worried that The Wind Rises wouldn't be as magical as his previous films. I oughtn't to have worried one bit. This is a film about an artist, and his visions of what he can create are told through beautiful, fanciful dreams that feel like nothing but magic. It is gorgeous. The score is beautiful (and really should've taken Philomena's spot – who remembers that score?), but what's really on show here are Miyazaki's beautiful vistas, intriguing ways of looking at things, memorable quirky characters, and fanciful storytelling. This is a director who tells us that a couple is falling in love by having them fly paper airplanes to one another from the ground to a third-story window. The planes in flight are breathtaking, and the film itself becomes about what it is like to love something, to dedicate your life to something only to have it destroyed by something else (the military, illness). This is beautiful stuff and is easily my favorite in the Animated Feature category, not that that means it's going to win; it hasn't a prayer.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win:N/A

My Rating: #21 out of 82

Ernest et Célestine (Ernest & Celestine)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

Cast: Lambert Wilson, Pauline Brunner, Dominique Maurin, Anne-Marie Loop

I don't get to see this before the Academy Awards, and my bet is that most people won't have seen it. It, frankly, looks adorable, and captures the look of the children's books on which it is based (the books are by Gabrielle Vincent and you can see them – some are even translated into English – here). French animation has soared in this category recently, and it has become a safe bet for a nomination almost every single year, though (it would appear) not for the win. Films like Une Vie de Chat, Persepolis, and Sylvain Chomet's superb L'Illusionniste and Les Triplettes de Belleville have all gotten nominations, but none has gone on to the win (despite L'Illusionniste's superiority to almost all of the films – animated or not – that were released in 2010). Ernest et Célestine is released in the U.S. today, so if you live in a city bigger than mine you may have better luck than I catching this picture. 
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked

The Croods

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Kirk DeMicco, Chris Sanders

Cast:Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Cloris Leachman

I liked this film more than most of my friends did, and I liked it mostly for the kinds of lovely visuals you can see in the image above. The Croods is a silly little story, with characters who are, for the most part, unattractive (they are cro-magnons, after all). The plot covers a family who are running away from the splitting of the supercontinent Pangaea. It is, more importantly a story of learning new things – adapting to new technologies and new ideas. It is about parents learning to listen to their kids and kids learning to listen to their parents. In the ideology of this film, the parents don't know the best way to do things, but they have much bigger hearts than the children. All of this is sort of sweet, and the tone is tongue-in-cheek enough that it didn't make me groan too heavily at any point. And then there is the art design! It is gorgeous. There are millions of bizarre little creatures and plants that look like something out of a prettified Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel painting. The Croods is worth watching for these inventive visuals alone.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #60 out of 82

Day of the Lord

I have a plan to do some cleaning today. But mostly I am following my new mandate to be not so hard on myself for the next two weeks or so. The plan is to finish more movies than books for the next two weeks and to not worry about doing a lot of research and work. We'll see how that goes. I did start Howard Barker's The Castle (which is a really awesome play so far) but I also watched two movies in the last twelve hours.

First: Werner Herzog's new film Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale is pretty good. I enjoyed the film, too, for the most part. I am being hesitant and I don't know why. I think I hesitate because Rescue Dawn isn't exactly Aguirre: the Wrath of God. Few films, of course, are Aguirre: the Wrath of God, so I guess I should just let that go and evaluate Rescue Dawn on its own merits. It's a harrowing, at times very difficult to watch story about a man in a P.O.W. camp in Laos during the lead up to the Vietnam war. It's excellently made, very well acted, beautifully shot and cleverly scripted. Definitely worth seeing if you like P.O.W. movies. Christian Bale is awesome, as usual, slimming down to a dangerous weight again. And Jeremy Davies, who costars, is as thin as I've ever seen him in anything (he looks disgusting, in fact.) Steve Zahn is excellent as well.

Lindsay Anderson's 1968 movie If.... with Malcolm McDowell was finally released on DVD recently (god bless Criterion) so I finally got to see this amazing film from Britain's angry sixties. This film deserves its cult status. It's a movie about a school with strict discipline and lots of corruption and McDowell plays a rebel who goes on a rampage at the school. It's a fabulous movie and a biting satire. Totally sexy, too, in a kind of queer, underage-boy, British way. I absolutely loved it.

Mizoguchi Kenji's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) is a social justice movie from the Japanese filmmaker. It's mostly an anti-slavery movie, detailing the evils of servitude and slavery on the Japanese islands. Our hero gets captured and sold into slavery as a young boy, and we watch as tragedy befalls him and his family. It's a fairly bleak cinematic adventure, truth be told. I think I've decided, too, that I like Mizoguchi the least of the Japanese masters I've seen so far. Both of the films of his that I've seen have been more didactic than anything else and my tastes run more toward the poetic.
(Oh yeah, and Sansho the Bailiff is not the main character. The title kind of makes no sense. Weird, too, because the title is the same in Japanese.)

Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman / Kinski, Aguirre, Herzog

I think I'm getting soft in my old age. I finished The Pillowman today. A play that is mostly about unforgiveable child murders (but is also about totalitarianism and childhood and moral quandaries where brutal art is concerned). said he loved The Pillowman and it is definitely poetic and lovely at times, as well as incredibly--almost impossibly--sad in places. But...

I guess I just don't deal too well with the brutality involved in the show. I am not having a reaction similar to my reaction to Sarah Kane's Cleansed, but a quieter, more ambivalent one. I think The Pillowman is, in some ways, necessary. It is certainly well-crafted and often moving. I think parts are hasty or strangely-phrased, but I mostly think it's a good play. I'm just not sure I'm glad that I've read. I'm not sure who would benefit from reading it. And my intestines squirm a little when I think about the images The Pillowman provided me.

Like I said: getting soft. I never used to have such difficult reactions to brutality and horror.

*

All that talk about Werner Herzog's 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God being one of the best movies ever made is on the money. I finally watched it this morning. It's fascinating, totally crazy and beautiful to watch. Klaus Kinski looks absolutely insane and the shots of the Amazonian jungle are fabulous.