Monthly Archives: February 2015

Oscars 2015: Best Director and Best Picture

Amelie

Sean and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary in Paris; today we’re actually renewing our wedding vows at the Eiffel Tower so I’m posting about a wonderfully romantic French film about love and life in Paris through the eyes of an idealistic and imaginative young woman.

Gloriously known as Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (translation: The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain), this film introduced the rest of the world to Audrey Tautou, seemingly born to play the role though it was actually written specifically for Emily Watson, who turned it down because she doesn’t speak French. A passion project for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, he’s been collecting the various memories and curiosities that make up the story of Amélie since 1974. Who knew that the guy who brought us Alien: Resurrection had such magic and whimsy in him?

Amélie was brought up in a rather protected fashion, her father being very concerned about her supposed heart condition. To make up for her isolation, a young Amélie lives in her imagination, and her grown-up self is still very much a dreamer, a wondrous observer and devoutly introverted. She devotes her life to making others happy, and lucky for us, she’s surrounded by a very quirky bunch.

For her father, she fulfills his lifelong dream of travel (tough for a recluse) by stealing his treasured lawn gnome and sending it all over the world. This was inspired by true events – in fact, a rash of pranks perpetrated in the 1990s in England and France.

The traveling gnome was inspired by a rash of similar pranks played in England and France in the 1990s. In fact, the theft of garden gnomes is so pervasive it even has a name – “gnoming.” A gnome is taken from someone’s garden and released back “into the wild” (wherever that is for an inanimate object – the shelves of Walmart?). In 1997, a the leader of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front was convicted of stealing over 150 gnomes – his prison sentence was suspended, but he did pay a hefty fine. (A couple of years later, there was a “mass suicide” of garden gnomes in a small town in France – residents woke up to find 11 gnomes hanging from a bridge, swinging from the nooses around their necks). At any rate, Amélie was responsible for bringing the whole garden gnome kidnapping thing to our attention, and the idea was later used by Travelocity in an ad campaign.

Although the movie is shot in a dreamy sort of way, with Paris polished, glowing, and blemish-free, some of the locations can actually be found in Montmartre. The cafe where Amélie works, for example, can be found on Rue Lepic (and is conveniently also named “Les Deux Moulins”). The fruit store run by M. Collignon is at 56 rue des Trois Frères. And of course the church where Amélie’s mother is crushed to death by a suicidal jumper is none other than the uber-famous Notre Dame cathedral.

Amélie’s watchful neighbour paints the same painting yearly – he’s up to 40 copies of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, and he still hasn’t got the girl-drinking-water’s expression quite right. Pierre-Auguste Renoir is a French artist of the impressionist variety and I’m looking forward to ogling his stuff at the Museé de l’Orangerie, but that particular painting can actually be found in The Phillipps Collection in Washington, DC.

If you haven’t seen this, you should, and if you have, no time like the present for a re-watch!

Gideon’s Army

Gender Inequality in Film

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Yes, there are movies made with a female in the lead. But has Oscar ever heard of them?

This year’s Best Picture nominees are as follows: a story about a man who goes to war and loves it; a man on Broadway as actor\director\schizophrenic; a little boy growing up to be a man; a man running a crazy hotel; a brilliant gay man; a brilliant black man; a brilliant man with a degenerative disease; a devoted male student and his sadistic male teacher.

So, a big time sausage fest. These are the stories of men. Felicity Jones, Emma Stone, and Keira Knightly are all nominated for their roles as pretty accessories. None are real players in their films; they are passive actors in someone else’s story. Julianne Moore in Still Alice, Reese Witherspoon in Wild, and Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night are all the driving forces in movies told from their (female) points of view, and none of those movies earned best picture nods.

2014’s highest grossing movies include:

1. Transfomers: Age of Extinction

2. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five ARmies

3. Guardians of the Galaxy

4. Maleficent

5. X-Men: Days of Future Past

6. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, part 1

7. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

8. The Amazing Spider-Man 2

9. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

10. Interstellar

Women fare a little better here – females take the lead in 2 of the 10, which, in case your math is weak, is exactly 20% of the top-earners and 0% of the most lauded. And women, in case you haven’t looked around in a while, make up a good 50% of the population. Does that make any sense to you? Only 12% of protagonists were female in 2014 movies, which is down 3% from the previous year. THAT’S THE WRONG WAY, PEOPLE!

Yes – you’re reading that right. Only 9% of directors are female. Only 4 women have ever been nominated as Best Director, and of them only Kathryn Bigelow has won (for The Hurt Locker – a movie with basically no women in it). It would seem that to be taken seriously, a woman has to direct a masculine film; Angelina Jolie made war movie Unbroken this year, and Ava DuVernay tackled the most iconic man in American history with Selma. Both were locked out of the Best Director category but Selma scored 2 men nominations for Best Song while Unbroken garnered 3 nominations spread among 5 men and 1 lone woman (Becky Sullivan, for sound editing – we salute you!).

In 73 years of Academy history, only 8 women have won best adapted screenplay, and only 8 have won best original screenplay. In 85 years, only 7 women have taken home Best Picture Oscars as producers, and all of them were co-producers with men.

77% of Academy voters are male. Another big surprise: the average winner in a female acting category is 36 years old compared to 44 for men.

The top 10 highest-paid actresses made $181 million in 2013 while the men made more than twice that – $465M!

The worst part is that the stats are worse when it comes to movies made for kids – in top-grossing G-rated family films, there is almost a 3:1 ratio of male characters to female characters. And how many of those are industrious go-getters? What are we telling our daughters, or for that matter, our sons? And what does it say about us as a society that animated female characters tend to show more skin than male ones – even the little girls – and are portrayed with tiny little waists and sexy features. Even the non-human females are sexualized in children’s cartoons!

In G-rated family films, speaking parts are 70% male. Characters with jobs are 80% male.

In 2012, Pixar released Brave, its first movie (out of 13) with a female protagonist. While Merida provides a positive female role model to its young audience, behind the scenes things were a little less progressive. Brenda Chapman, who spent 6 years working on the film, was stripped of her directorial duties and for the 13th time in a row, a Pixar movie was helmed by a man.

Check out the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media to find out more.

A comment on the Best Documentary Oscar race

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I have only been able to find two of the Best Documentary nominees. I regret that I couldn’t see more but I’m not sure I’d be in a much better position to predict a winner if I had. After last year, where the undisputedly entertaining and interesting 20 Feet from Stardom won over the thought-provoking, troubling, and almost universally acclaimed The Act of Killing, I wondered what criteria voters were using to decide what the Best Documentary was.

The best thing about awards season is it gives us the chance to look back on our favourites of the year and talk about them, argue about them, and think about what makes a movie better than another. In this case, what makes a good documentary?

All four of us here at Assholes Watching Movies have predicted a win this year for Citizenfour, one of the only two nominated docs that I’ve been able to see. My thinking was that, not only is it the subject matter important- which is a tough thing to measure against the other nominees- but one that the Acadamey is sure to endorse. We’re all feeling a little sensitive about our cyber security right now. Even Hollywood, with a major studio being hacked just a few months ago. Just as director Laura Poitras was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, this might be the right movie at the right time.

A great documentary, like any great movie, is about more than the topic. A great documentary has to be great, not just important. Poitras was fortunate enough to get footage of history as it happens, instead of just interviewing people about it later. Unfortunately, as I said when I reviewed Citizenfour last month, she didn’t get enough of this footage to fill a whole movie and seems to spend the rest of the movie struggling to fill it, without asking some of the tough questions that I would have liked to have seen asked.

Virunga, the other nominated doc that I watched, also got great footage and important subject matter; civil war in the Congo. Like in Citizenfour, the subjects and filmmakers take serious risks and in some cases make great personal sacrifices in their quest for justice. The difference is that director Orlando von Einsiedel knows how to use his great footage to tell a great story and edits it together to form a finished film with a genuine emotional impact. “I cried,” wrote fellow Asshole Jay. This is why am hoping that Virunga wins the Oscar, even if I predict that Citizenfour will.

Note: This started out as a review of a fantastic 2013 documentary called Gideon’s Army but I seemed to have gotten sidetracked. I’ll have to write that tomorrow.

What was your favourite documentary of 2014? Have you seen any of the other three nominees? What do you think makes a great documentary? We’d love to hear from you.

Audrey Hepburn In Paris

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Audrey Hepburn’s iconic look, by Givenchy

This week will be the tale of two Assholes in Paris – Sean and Jay are there on vacation. They’re posting about various movies set in Paris (On Valentine’s day they were at Le Moulin Rouge – guess which movie the reviewed? Check it out below). Today we’re covering several movies, each of them revolving around a quintessential French star (who was actually American) – Audrey Hebpurn.

: Hepburn in Sabrina – a classic French look

Sabrina is one of my favourite Audrey movies. It’s not really set in Paris, but it does open there, with Sabrina at a French cooking school. Today Sean and I are also at a French cooking school, learning to make delicious macarons (Earl Grey and milk chocolate, and white chocolate and raspberry, if the syllabus is to be believed).

Sabrina is the chauffeur’s daughter who attracts the attention of the family’s playboy son (William Holden). He’s interested because she’s fresh and beautiful, but despite his ardour, she’s really be a better match for the older son, a serious business type (Humphrey Bogart). Fuck the plot though, this film is significant because it marks the beginning of

Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina – dress by Givenchy

a great collaboration between Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy. He’d never heard of her when she first showed up in his French salon, assumed it must be Katharine Hepburn, in fact. But it was the start of a beautiful relationship. He supplied designs and dresses for her to wear in the film, and continued to do so for most of her career. The awkward thing is that the Academy gave the Oscar for costume design to Edith Head when in fact the outfits were created by Givenchy and personally selected by Hepburn.

Givenchy of course created her iconic look in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and started being credited

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

for providing her wardrobe in the credits. Audrey has said “His are the only clothes in which I am myself. He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality.”

At the Louvre – Audrey in Funny Face

Funny Face saw Audrey back in Paris again, this time because she’d been discovered as a frumpy bookshop clerk and turned into a high fashion model and whisked away to Paris to wear sumptuous dresses in elegant locations – running down the steps of the Louvre waving a scarf of red chiffon;

fishing on a barge on the Seine in cropped suit and straw hat; dashing through the Jardin des Tuileries in a cap-sleeved black dress.

Funny Face

Audrey in Charade

Charade saw Audrey dressed in a lot of coats, smart suits, and trenches – perfect for drizzly Paris weather. It’s both a romance and a mystery set in the

Givenchy’s aesthetic for ‘Charade’

city of light as poor Audrey is chased through Paris by men wanting the fortune that her murdered husband stole. Things are complicated but she always looks chic and put together. Givenchy focused on classic but straight lines, ushering a new aesthetic into the 60s.

Paris When It Sizzles is not Hepburn’s best movie. She stars as a secretary sent to type up a writer’s manuscript for his new movie, but she arrives: no script! She helps him get over his writer’s block by reenacting (I guess it’s more like fantasy sequences) different plot possibilities. The movie may not have worked, but Hepburn’s wardrobe sure did (although let’s not question how a she could

Paris When It Sizzles

afford couture on a secretary’s salary). Givenchy was inspired by Paris in the spring to use a sorbet-coloured palette. He was also the first to receive a screen credit for a scent – Ms. Hepburn’s wardrobe AND perfume, it said, though I don’t think audiences could tell the difference. Still, how positively Parisian.

Givenchy has her all in white

How To Steal A Million is also set in Paris. It’s a comedy-caper with stereotypical French art forgeries and museum heists. Audrey is a smart and sexy woman of the 60s, and above all, well-dressed. Her many stylish outfits led to co-star Peter O’Toole to quip, in character, during a scene

Givenchy frames her face

when Audrey is disguised as a cleaning lady,”it gives Givenchy the night off”.

Oscars 2015: Best Actor and Actress

Ratatouille

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This post will publish the moment Sean and I, in Paris and thus “6 hours into the future” will set foot into Guy Savoy, a beautiful 3-star Michelin restaurant, the second most-expensive in the world, where we hope to eat caviar, drink champagne, and delight over brioches slathered in truffle butter. There will be 35 chefs in the kitchen preparing dinner for 60 hungry people and we will hope, hope hope hope, that none are rats. That none so much as have a rat in their hat.

Ratatouille is one of Sean’s favourite Pixar movies, probably because Sean loves food, but possibly also because Sean doesn’t have the classic aversion to rats that the rest of us do – his family idiotically kept them as pets (RIP Robbie and Bambam). So did the animators of Ratatouille. Rats lined the hallways of the Pixar studios so that animators could get their whiskers and tails and paws just right.

The film’s protagonist, a rat named Remy, is rendered with over a million individual hairs (his human counterparts have a tenth that – still impressive!). Little Remy dreams of becoming a great French chef despite the fact that his family’s against it, and you know, he’s also a rat. And restaurants hate rats. But he encounters a laconic chef named Linguine who benefits from Remy’s passion and skill.

The bad guy is the Head Chef, Skinner. This character is named after behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was known for the Skinner Box, where he made rats push a button for food over and over again.

This is the first Disney movie to feature a bastard. You know, as in, a kid born out of wedlock. Shocking! However, plenty of Disney movies have featured orphaned or partially-orphaned children – disproportionately so, one would hope.

To get the feel of the city just right, Brad Bird took a team up to Paris for a week where they buzzed around on motorcycles and ate at its top five restaurants (certainly Guy Savoy would have been on their list – it’s actually in the top 20 of the world). I feel sort of silly for not figuring out how to get my bosses to pay for my trip. And then I remember I’m self-employed. So I guess she kind of is! Meanwhile, the animators back home got to study and photograph rotting vegetables in order to render a realistic compost pile. No jealousy in that office, I’m sure.

Anyway, while the lucky ones were in Paris, they came across quite a sight, which made its way into the movie: a window shop displaying dead rats! Sounds weird but it’s a real shop that you can find (and we just might) in the first arrondissement called Destruction des Animaux Nuisibles. It’s an exterminator, established 1872, and quite a curiosity, but I don’t think I’ll be shopping for souvenirs there.

I may, however, be staking out their fine wines to bring home to our wine cellar if only we have the weight to spare in our suitcase. There’s a surprising amount of wine to be seen in this children’s movie – the restaurant critic Anto Ego orders a Chateau Cheval Blanc 1947, a Grand Cru, and obviously quite a vintage. This baby would set you back at least two grand, so for the second time in this film review, I’m left commenting: damn. How can I possibly bill that one to my boss? I’m clearly in the wrong profession! John Lasseter, Pixar head honcho, has a winery in Sonoma Valley and a bottle of his Lasseter Cabernet Sauvignon can be seen in the background.

This is a delicious little movie and I hope you’ll give it a watch if you haven’t already!

Oscars 2015: Sound Mixing and Editing, Film Editing, and Original Score

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Best Sound Editing

What is sound editing and how is it different from sound mixing? I myself didn’t know until today and understanding the difference is sure to give us some advantage in our Oscar pools. Sound Editing, which used to be called sound effects editing, is basically just the recording or creation of a sound. For example, in American Sniper, the sound editor would either have to find or make a recording of a gunshot or something that sounds like it. Speaking of sound effects, if you haven’t seen Berberian Sound Studio, you definitely should.

The nominees are…

American Sniper

Birdman

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Interstellar

Unbroken

Ihaven’t seen Unbroken or The Hobbit so I can’t comment on thosee. Luc, Jay, and I have all predicted a win for American Sniper while Sean went his own way by putting his money on Interstellar. Now that I know what sound editing is, I think he may have made the right choice. When I first reviewed Interstellar last year, I complained that I could barely hear the dialogue over the score and sound effects. Now that I’ve done my research and know that I should be taking this up with the sound mixer, I’m thinking about what it was like to see Interstellar in IMAX. The sound was as impressive as the picture. I was as blown away as I was when I first saw The Dark Knight or Inception on the big screen, both of which won the Oscar.

Sound Mixing

Sound mixing is exactly what it sounds like. All the sounds that have been collected by the sound editor must now come together in a way that makes sense. The gunshot in American Sniper has to ring out over the sounds of the city and, I’m talking to you now Interstellar sound mixer, never drown out the dialogue.

The nominees are…

American Sniper

Birdman

Interstellar (seriously?)

Unbroken

Whiplash

Sean, always marching to the beat of his own drum, has strayed again and predicted a win for Whiplash. The rest of us are sticking with American Sniper. Sean has a point. There’s a lot going on around the sounds of live music in the movie but war movies have a lot of sounds and must be complicated to mix so I’m sticking with my guns.

Film Editing

This is always an exciting category, Even if we don’t comment on it, we aall appreciate good editing and know it when we see it. The hnominees are…

American Sniper

Boyhood

Thel Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Whiplash

These five film’s are so well made that I’m amazed that three of us were able to agree. Luc, Jay, and I all picked Boyhood and Sean is going with Whiplash. Boyhood edited together 12 years of footage so that’s tough to beat. I’m hoping for a tie between Boyhood and Grand Budapest though.

Original Score

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Interstellar

Mr Turner

The Theory of Everything

I thought the music in Interstellar was too manipulative and- as I’ve said before- loud. The score for The Imitation Game was too conventional and the one in Mr Turner seemed to belong in another movie. That leaves Budapest and Theory of Everything, both of which are very nicely done. Sean, Luc, and I have picked Grand Budapest Hotel while Jay is banking on a win for Theory of Everything. TOE won the Golden Globe which is something. Not to mention that it’s beautiful music that fits the tone of the movie. I still like Budapest though which may make an even better marriage between images in music. I’ll be interested to see what happens on Sunday.

Marie Antoinette

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Sean and I are still in France and in fact should be touring around the beautiful grounds and palace at Versailles right now, so what movie is more fitting that Marie Antoinette?

She was a bright and beautiful girl, married at the age of 14 to a political ally she’d never seen before. She is traded from one kingdom to another. She is surrounded by servants and comforts of every kind; she has jewelry and clothes and feasts like no other. She also has no grip on reality. And this movie doesn’t criticize her for it. Sofia Coppola may have strayed from historical accuracy in the writing and directing of this film, but she does give us a more human character to relate to. Marie-Antoinette is above all just a teenage girl, used to a lavish lifestyle, uncomprehending of any other.

The production had special permission from the government of France to film on location at Versailles. Even more impressive (to my mind), Coppola even induced famed designer Manolo Blahnik to create hundreds of shoes for this film. Fittingly, there is a shoe montage, which will make you squeal with delight, and if you watch carefully, you might catch a 1.5 second shot of a pair of Chuck Taylor Converse, not exactly time-period correct, but a staple of any teenage girl’s closet.

Did you know Jason Schwartzman is Sofia Coppola’s cousin? I didn’t. I get my Hollywood royalty mixed up just as assuredly as I get my regular royalty confused I guess. At any rate, he plays the king to Kirsten Dunst’s queen, and I have to admire the casting. Who but him could play such a socially inept little weirdo, and who is more inherently hated than Dunst?

I saw this originally back in 2006 when it came out (I’m kind of surprised it’s not older than that) but in the 8 or 9 years since, I’ve become more familiar with some of the other names of the cast: Rose Byrne (broke out in Bridesmaids), Tom Hardy (aka, Bane, and almost Mad Max), and Jamie Dornan (soon to be the pervy guy in Fifty Shades of Grey). Coppola otherwise cast a lot of progeny of movie stars, most of whom I don’t know (although I did see a Nighy and wondered, and was correct in wondering). Plus she threw a bone to her boyfriend, Thomas Mars, from the band Phoenix – he and a bandmate play guitars in one scene, although they can’t have been happy about the tights.