When the holiday season comes around, new movies end up divided into two general categories. There are the explicitly Christmas films, such as Deck the Halls and the whatever latest Santa Clause there is, and there are the Oscar whoring films, crammed into the last few days of December to qualify for Academy consideration.
I’ve had a chance to see most of the Oscar whoring films, and the challenge is to determine which if any of these movies will be of lasting importance. Some of them have already even come and gone, if by “gone” we mean failed to make enough money to qualify for continued residence in the main auditoria of first run theaters. And while the financial hell of the sub run and second run theaters is filling up, the new movies crowd the starting gate like Boston Marathon aspirants.
Take Turistas and Deja Vu. It’s always struck me as odd that slasher films are frequently released at Xmas, and several good ones have been, such as Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (which I saw on Xmas Day way back when it first came out), so they must appeal to some particularly suicidal mood in loner Americans. Turistas was a short-lived new release, a general addition to the genre about Ugly Americans and other tourists in Latin America cunningly routed to a house of horror in which their internal organs are slated for distribution among the poor. Summer fun specialist John Stockwell’s film is beautifully photographed and has a strong cast, including Las Vegas‘s Josh Duhamel and the wonderful Melissa George, but it appears to have struck reviewers and subsequently the audience wrong, and quickly faded. I liked it, though, but in the way you like a TV show that isn’t top flight, or the way you like minor poetry, which is often better than high art.
Deja Vu also carried with it some baggage, being another Tony Scott – Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration, with all which that entails in our minds from their past associations, and in addition sparking the revilement of Manohla Dargis in the New York Times for the casualness with which it played with terrorist themes. It’s the most “normal” of Scott’s recent films (no ad-agency style subtitles, and a less frazzled editing style), and concludes two different ongoing trilogies, one on American policy and paranoia and the other being films extolling the virtues of Denzel Washington. Again, I enjoyed watching it, but it did feel light, and turned out to be much more romantic than the usual Tony Scott film, while also inspiring the usual mind wrinkles time travel films generally do.
Those two films are unlikely to garner any Academy consideration, as are the two big romantic comedies of the season, The Holiday and Stranger Than Fiction. Director Marc Forster and writer Zach Helm’s comedy, about an IRS tax investigator (Will Ferrell) whose life is inexplicably controlled by a reclusive novelist (Emma Thompson) has a very interesting thought at its center, i.e., that characters in books are more than “galley slaves” and that authors have a certain responsibility toward them, but this being a Hollywood movie and not completely a Charlie Kaufman enterprise, the thought gets lost. Still, it worked as a movie, and its second half is very touching.
Nancy Meyer’s The Holiday is her attempt to replicate the tone and spirit of recent British romances such as Love, Actually and Notting Hill, and though I am far from a fan of Meyers’s previous films, including the Father of the Bride remakes and the Oscar voguing Something’s Gotta Give, this one won me over. I was teary eyed all through it. This is partially because The Holiday is as movie mad as I am, with one of the film’s temporary house-trading characters (Cameron Diaz) being a movie trailer editor, and the other (Kate Winslet) befriends a ancient Hollywood screenwriter (Eli Wallach). In fact, Wallach may end up nominated for best supporting actor, if the Academy’s tendency to acknowledge very small almost non-roles remains consistent, and Meyers’s Oscar cred remains high.
For Your Consideration, which mocks Oscar buzz, has generated Oscar buzz, and that’s a pity because it is a very unfunny comedy about movies made by people who don’t seem to understand movies. It is ludicrous to suggest that someone would make an indie film called Home for Purim set in the post-war South, even in the cockeyed world they are imagining. In fact, the film’s TV satire is more spot on than its movie satires. Where’s Billy Wilder when you need him? His movie quips would have been achingly accurate. And I’m getting rather fed up with Christopher Guest and Company’s absolute and unremitting cruelty towards their characters. They could take a lesson from Thompson’s Kay Eiffel.
I was under-whelmed by Almodovar’s Volver. This entirely female-centric tale of a mother comes back as a “ghost” (there is a surprise twist) to help her two daughters and granddaughter is being praised by critics and award dispensers far and wide as the director’s crowning achievement, but to me it was Almodovar Lite, a conventional movie that shows how far he has strayed from his surrealistic roots.
Another title that can’t be mentioned without the breath of Oscar on the lips is Babel, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s latest foray into that genre that the Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy calls the “web of life” film. Since Amores Perros, his films have grown colder and more oblique and despite the sunny climbs of this film’s three main locations where distant, loosely connected cross-cultural family dramas are enacted, it is actually quite soft at its center.
Babel‘s Cate Blanchett is clearly the star of the season, appearing in no less than three of its films. She is excellent in all of them but outstanding in Notes on a Scandal. In a time period that insists on sharing with us unintentionally paired films, this one goes with The History Boys, a cinematic adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play about the conflict between an old style view of learning as a civilizing end in itself, and a cynical view of education as a tool for advancement in a money mad society. Richard Griffiths is excellent as the old codger whose values and sexuality conflict with the new world order. There is an exquisite scene, in which Griffiths’s character, just forced into early retirement, attends a conference with the student most like him and discusses the Hardy poem “Drummer Hodge,” which becomes a vehicle through which he discusses his most sacred feelings. It’s one of the best moments in recent cinema.
Call Judy Dench in Notes on a Scandal the “History Girl.” She is a severe dinosaur in a modern school whose new headmaster wants modern teaching techniques. She is also prone to rather obsessive fixations on younger female colleagues. Told from her viewpoint, via voiceover readings from her acerbic, hilarious diary, Notes on a Scandal recounts how various passions in her circle of friends and colleagues flail out of control. Dench, Blanchett, and Bill Nighy (as Blanchett’s husband) are all superb in this film based on a novel by Zoe Heller. It, too, is awards bound, and the only blank spot is the kid who plays the object of Blanchett’s affections. Either as acted or as written, he fails to embody the sort of predatory Beatty-in-Embryo he is supposed to be. Nevertheless, Notes on a Scandal is surely one of the best, if not the best film of the season.
Dench will no doubt be up against Helen Mirren, titular character of The Queen, about the few days the monarchy endured after the death of Diana. Though directed by the otherwise dependable Stephen Frears, The Queen ends up being just a very, very good TV movie, in all ways, as it ends up slobbering over the royals in the most craven and arse-licking manner. Furthermore, Mirren is OK in the role, but really, come on, 12 other stars could do just as well. I’m also getting rather weary of actresses and actors being over-praised for just doing their jobs, and for at-best competent performances being hailed as Oscar worthy because of sentimentality over the performer. Awards, if they must be given, should be reserved for the truly most outstanding, risky, and successful performances of the year.
Speaking of TV movies, that’s what Rocky Balboa turns out to be. This sixth Rocky entry is a slow paced, lumbering, impoverished film that comes across like an ’80s inspirational TV movie you might see on a Lifetime channel, as Rocky pauses periodically to espouse his “philosophy” of life. The only innovation, as the film virtually repeats the structure and climax of the first Rocky, is that the final fight itself is presented as if it were an HBO broadcast, which should make for a good DVD transfer.
Who would have thought that two holiday films would feature, at some point, Spanish conquistadors? Both Mel Gibson’s derivative Apocalypto and Darren Aronofsky’s turgid The Fountain reference such throwbacks. But that is not the only thing ancient about both films. Each one harks back to the roots of American cinema. Apocalypto, which draws upon about 30 film clichés, from the choppers at the start of Apocalypse Now to the blood dripping from a wound that betrays someone hiding, from Rio Bravo and countless other films, is ultimately derived from silent films such as F. W Murnau’s Tabu and the some of Robert Flaherty’s docs, and alternately also from Terrence Malick’s near-silent modern epics of love and war. Apocalypto, from its “beheading cam” to its stacks of Maya holocausts bodies, is as excessive as we might expect, but ultimately a minor film that replays scenes from Gibson’s earlier films.
Aronofsky’s muddled, well-meaning movie is a variation on D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which also told several stories simultaneously, inter-cutting among them. What it comes down to is that each of the three Fountain stories features one of a trio of Hugh Jackmans (conquistador, contemporary scientist, bald spaceman) is trying to save his dying wife by finding the secret of eternal life. The wife is played, mostly in closeup, by Rachel Weisz, a current critical darling, but who here is treated, boringly, like a delicate, virginal spirit of life itself.
I’d like to add a footnote to this brief discussion of Apocalypto, however. Back in 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman, the moral equivalent of carnies, produced a small horror film, shooting it in a Miami motel room. It went on to be one of the most controversial films ever made, one that unleashed a radical change in what and how we watch movies. I refer, of course, to Blood Feast, aka Feast of Flesh. One of the most striking images, much reproduced, shows the murderous and deranged Egyptian caterer Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) just after he has torn out the heart of a female victim, holding it up for the geeks in the audience to see. Forty-three years later, Mel Gibson virtually recreates that moment, on a grander scale, toward the middle of Apocalypto. The implications of this stagger me. Speaking only visually, few other paired images show how far we have come, or how much the old psychotronic films have been taken over by mainstream media.
Also in the realm of confusables are The Good Shepherd and The Good German. George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s German, which also stars Blanchett, is an adaptation of a pop novel that they turn into an academic exercise in mimicking 1940s Hollywood styles. This film is quite simply boring, confusing, and repetitious (Clooney is beat up about three times in the first 20 minutes). It’s possible that Soderbergh has some high-minded goal of mocking the MPAA’s standards or something like that with his blend of old fashion camera techniques and modern era humping, but for this Soderbergh supporter, the experiment failed.
Though often a part of Clooney’s posse, here Matt Damon strikes out on his own as a withdrawn, laconic CIA administrator modeled loosely on James Jesus Angleton, who, like Damon’s Edward Wilson, was befuddled by a Soviet mole and betrayed by British double agent Kim Philby (here played by Billy Crudup). This is one of those dream projects, the apple of director and co-star De Niro’s eye as well as of writer Eric Roth. It also makes for an interesting variation on, a sober corrective to, Damon’s Bourne films, with Wilson being an inward operative whose whole career is a failure. In a brilliant, all-star cast that includes Alec Baldwin and William Hurt, the only false note is the freckle-faced guy who plays Wilson’s son, who is dreadful and too often shot in eyeball peeling close-up.
The other big confusables are Todd Field’s second film, Little Children, and Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of the P. D. James novel, Children of Men. They couldn’t be more different, although the ironically titled Little Children bears the influence of American Beauty in its examination of adultery and spiritual corruption in suburbia. I didn’t like this film as much the second time I saw it, when it came across much more mechanical and schematic. Still, Kate Winslet is, once again, very good in a tough part, and Field does capture well the wind blown suburban environment well.
Children of Men is a movie I wanted to like but for all its visual pyrotechnics has very little affect. The mono-expressive Clive Owen has something to do with this. Although clearly the people of this film’s future, where childbearing has ceased due to some vague environmental factors, is populated with depressed unexpressive people, it seems like Owen could be a little happier later as he tries to escort the last birthing mother to safety. As a director Cuarón appears to like journeys, at least in the few movies of this prolific filmmaker that have received wide distribution, but in this one the journey is the least interesting part of the film. Only the very beginning and very end really seem to matter, like in a basketball game. Nevertheless there are at least two stunning long takes that are utterly surprising.
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