Author Archives: Jay

Golden Globes – Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama

Selma

Ooof. I confess, I don’t really know how to review this movie. Why does it feel different from any other movie? Because it’s a piece of art? A piece of history? No, it’s because this is a piece of heart, of our collective hearts. This story is an act of remembrance, an act of grace.

Matt, Sean and I attended the screening of this film at Silver City last night and I’ve been sitting with it ever since, wondering how I can add my voice to what’s being said about this movie. This is not just a history lesson. The images of protest, of indignation, of police brutality, of black people being gunned down for no reason, these could just as easily be ripped from today’s headlines as from 50 years ago. That’s the part that will scrape raw at your conscience, as it did mine.

Annie Lee Cooper is an older black woman registering to vote, as is her right as a supposed American citizen living in Selma, Alabama. The registrar is white, and resorts to dirty tricks in order to deny her once again. She leaves, slump-shouldered and dejected. Annie Cooper is played by Oprah Winfrey in the movie. I’m not normally a fan of stunt-casting, but in this case, using America’s sweetheart, a respected, powerful and highly successful personality who is also a black woman, to remind us just how far we’ve come in just 50 years, is pretty much the most perfect casting in the history of the world. Winfrey plays it winningly, with all the dignity the role deserves.

Insert Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr (David Oyelowo). He and his crew arrive in Selma to unite the people, to stir up activism, to attract the attention of the president (LBJ, played ably by Tom Wilkinson) and force him to do something about this supposed right to vote. Of course the president is reluctant, has his own agenda, and so King and company use their non-violent protest to force action in a genius and tragically necessary way.

The cinematography is a subtle tip of the hat toward realism. The costuming, particularly the suits worn by LBJ (those shoulders!), is pitch-perfect. The casting is strong. On paper it seems a bit weird to employ so much British talent to portray American icons, but it works. Oyelowo does a great job of shouldering the man and the spirit, the hero and the human being, without impersonating him.

It is hard to sit and watch this film. Director Ava DuVernay knows this and even uses it, with a stirring montage of Americans of all kinds watching horrified as the events unfold across their evening news, mirroring our own choking dismay.

DuVernay succeeds in stringing together a lot of different plot points in the course of the Selma events – the internal struggles of the organization, King’s problems at home, his grief and self-doubt, and government apathy or outright hostility on all levels. The film works so brilliantly because, while it stays humble in its scope, it becomes a representation for the movement as a whole, and for all the smaller victories along the way that led to real change. This flexibility in her story-telling is skillful and impressive and I can’t wait to hear her name announced as an Oscar nominee (I won’t even say if), the first black female director ever to make the list.

Please see this movie. I can’t say that enough.

Big Eyes

3 Replies

This movie failed me on many levels. I want to tell you that it’s still a movie worth watching, it’s not horrendous, and it’s a fascinating story. I want to tell you that, and I suppose I have, but I also can’t help but tell you the rest.

First: Christoph Waltz. So miscast. He runs through the movie like a bull in a china shop. It’s like he decided to approach this role as a Jim-Carrey-in-The-Mask impersonation, with a peekaboo German accent, and maybe whiffs of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, just for kicks. When he was on screen, and he almost always was, I could barely suppress my urge to yell “Cut!” Where was director Tim Burton in all of this? Has Burton spent too long in kooky, make believe worlds that he can’t even tell what’s real anymore? It certainly felt to me like he was out of his depth. Waltz’s portrayal of Walter Keane was artless and unrestrained. Yes, he plays a schmoozy con man who takes credit for his wife’s art for years, but this was also a real man and Waltz does not convey for one second that he has a single genuine, authentic bone in his entire body.

Amy Adams as the quashed artist Margaret Keane didn’t quite satisfy either. I kept hearing in the script Margaret fighting back a little with bitterness and sarcasm, but Adams couldn’t carry them off. She’s too mousey and breathy.

My biggest problem, though, is this. The movie is about a woman who is passively (and then maybe not so passively) abused for years. Her husband steals from her, takes away the thing of which she is most proud, and intimidates her into silence, forcing her to live in secret, isolation, and near-sweatshop conditions. And the era in which she lives doesn’t provide a whole lot of viable alternatives. But the movie itself is another act of subjugation. She’s not really the star of her own story. It’s Christoph Waltz who dominates the screen. He’s allowed to steal the scenes. Amy Adams can never inject her character with enough backbone to compete. He walks all over her. This turns out to not be the story of her stolen art, but about his swindle. You need only look at the movie poster for proof.

So that’s how you ruin a mediocre movie. You take a powerful story and you tell it from the entirely wrong perspective. It’s as if the movie itself hasn’t learned its own lesson, and in 2015, that’s a heartbreak.

The Hundred Foot Journey

1 Reply

I only watched this movie because Helen Mirren was nominated as Best Actress in a motion picture, musical or comedy by the Golden Globes for this very role. She’s a twelve-time nominee with four wins under her fabulous belt. I think she’s great, and not just in a girl-crush kinda way (though definitely in that way as well), but in that I find her elegant to watch on screen. She usually make good choices, and as the film is backed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Steven Speilberg, I was a little let down to find this one was more hamburger than filet mignon.

It’s about Madame Mallory (Mirren), a restaurateur of a fine French establishment who is horrified when foreigners open up a curry shop not 100 feet from her front door. She tries to harass them out of business but eventually must admit that their young cook (Manish Dayal) is superior to her own.

The food porn is fabulous, and of course I watched it on an empty stomach (confidential to Matt: butter chicken tonight?) but it’s not enough to hurdle over the holes in the plot, which is dashed sparingly throughout the movie like so much spice, along with pounds of clichés and a good measure of cultural stereotype to boot. Not to mention the slow burn (but maybe you’re looking for a movie to nap to?) and the schmaltziness that Mirren and co-star Om Puri should be above.

It’s predictable and pompously-titled, and at one point I found myself really bothered by the score, which was overdramatic (sounds like Schindler’s List, is actually over melting ice in a bucket of fish). The cast is solid (Dayal is a serious cutie) but in Lasse Hallstrom’s cinematic food fight, baguette vs naan, all you end up with is a bit of sliced Wonderbread with the crusts cut off.

Golden Globes – Best Screenplay

Golden Globes – Best Original Score

NightCrawler

8 Replies

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom shows that you don’t have to be a journalist or a photographer to make it in the news business, you just have to have a nose for blood and a really strong stomach. In fact, tracking down the goriest, most gruesome deaths and crimes (especially those committed in rich neighbourhoods and against white people) seems a perfect fit for an enterprising but morally vacant soul such as Bloom, and thanks to a partnership with ratings-whore Nina (Rene Russo), he’s encouraged not only to continue, but to blur the line between finding and creating mayhem to “report.”

Gyllenhaal is gaunt, like a hungry animal prowling the night, his unblinking stare reminding me of Donnie Darko’s. He gives an increasingly chilling performance, cold but needy. You can never quite get a handle on just how intelligent this guy is. He studies the internet voraciously and comes off sounding like a wikipedia page, but the one thing you can’t learn online is feelings, and those are in short supply. Watching footage of a brutally murdered family, Lou has a self-satisfied smirk on his face, and Nina is practically salivating. These are not good people. There isn’t even a question of privacy, or of going too far. There is no too far.

Lou is pretty much irredeemable, as far as I can tell, unlike any other character I’ve seen on screen this year. It will give you the willies. First-time director Dan Gilroy will have you watching this movie with dread; with no ethics or scruples, anything can and may happen. Lou’s a dirty scavenger at best, and an unapologetic predator at what he would consider his best. Morality doesn’t factor in, which makes for a fascinating if disturbing character study of a man, who as near as I can tell, is void of any character to study.

Golden Globes – Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

3 Replies

Matt and I are still cramming to bring the best Globes coverage we can, and I’m putting up thoughts and predictions as I complete the categories. Please chime in with your own vote, we always love the feedback!

The nominees:

St Vincent

Pride

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Birdman

Into the Woods

I watched Pride this morning and The Grand Budapest Hotel probably 10 months ago, so this category is a little uneven for that reason. I’ve enjoy ed all of these movies to some extent, but of course there are some stand-outs.

St Vincent is a fun movie if you love Bill Murray but probably a little flat if you don’t. It’s a star vehicle but not much more. Pride is a feel-good movie that everyone should watch and anyone would have some good take-away feelings. It’s just not that deep. The Grand Budapest Hotel is my baby. I’m a Wes Anderson nut and I love everything he does. He probably poops glitter. And this movie is great even among Wes Anderson films, with an all-star cast that blows you away (and a little Bill Murray to make me swoon), and a thousand little details that will have you licking your lips in delight. Don’t miss it. You may, however, give Into the Woods a miss. The cast is great but the story’s inconsistent and the musical numbers just aren’t that memorable. Plus there’s the whole pedophilia angle. Birdman has a great cast AND a great, fresh story. It somehow blends a gritty realism with a gothic surrealism quite seamlessly, leaving the audience to guess and to fill in the blanks. It’s the most daring of the nominees, and the most exciting to watch.

Apologies to Wes Anderson (and with confidence that you have many more great movies to come), I’m giving it to Birdman. It just makes you excited about what is possible in filmmaking. I’m gushing, but Birdman deserves it, just as it’ll deserve the golden Globe on Sunday.

Score one Birdman. But do I think the Globes will agree? I hope so. I wouldn’t be disappointed to see it go to The Grand Budapest Hotel, another deserving movie from a director who’s been criminally snubbed in the past. What I’m worried about is the celebrity power of Into The Woods, a movie undeserving but perhaps irresistible to the people doing the voting. Fingers crossed that they do the right thing.

More Golden Globes awards coverage: Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.

Golden Globes – Best Animated Feature Film

2 Replies

The Nominees are

The Lego Movie

How To Train Your Dragon 2

The Boxtrolls

Big Hero 6

The Book of Life

I have nothing bad to say about any of these movies, they’re all watchable and enjoyable. It’s not easy to compare inflatable robots with Mexican representations of death, or sentient toys with mute dragons, but the Golden Globes (and soon the Oscars) forces us do so, and this year, there’s no contest.

This category holds one of my favourite movies of 2014, period. The Lego Movie is a triumph in detail. Every piece of the movie is virtually built with bricks, bricks that are blemished and scratched, bricks that appear to be played with. The nostalgia factor runs deep in this movie, with several familiar faces popping up in cameos throughout the film. Emmett, the hero of the movie, voiced by Chris Pratt, is a likable doofus that appeals to all audience members. Liam Neeson voices good cop\bad cop brilliantly and steals every scene he’s in. The movie shows a pig explode into sausages – I mean, there’s just no beating that. And any kid movie that can sneak in themes of Orwell’s 1984 AND The Matrix has got to be awarded. We’ll start with the Globes, but we’re not stopping until the Oscars.

Score one The Lego Movie. But do I think the Globes will agree? Yes, I do.

See our other Golden Globes coverage.

The Book of Life

4 Replies

Matt really disliked this movie but I couldn’t disagree more. The Book of Life is dazzling and vibrant and steeped in beautiful Mexican culture, even if it does fudge the facts a bit. Yes the accents are a bit wonky and the movie embraces stereotype – but that’s just it. They own it. There’s a real sense of pride but it’s never alienating. It may occasionally poke fun at itself but I thought it was sensitive and illuminative.

And finally an animated feature that, when most people would rather show another talking dog or a cuddly dragon rather than a person of colour, brings us a whole host of Mexican heroes that teach a lesson in love and diversity to a group of white schoolchildren. I thought it was refreshing. I thought it was electrifying to look at, Day of the Dead has inspired so much art and this movie is a real testament to all that came before it, and sorry Matt, but I even loved the mariachi-inspired covers of Radiohead’s Creep and Mumford & Sons I Will Wait. I thought it was a brilliant way to incorporate Mexico’s modernity into a film mostly set in the 19th century.

The story had lofty ambitions but didn’t quite live up to its own goals. The female character balks at her hand in marriage being given away for her. She seems an independent sort, strong, dare I say a feminist, but is sadly animated in the disgusting tradition of cartoons – her eyes are bigger than her hands, her ponytail is wider than her waist, and she’s about half the size of her male counterparts (who are glamorously styled after traditional marionettes). A real disappointment, not to mention the fact that the plot relies on a wager placed between gods as to which of two childhood friends will marry her, because offering a girl as a prize to be won is apparently necessary even when we’ve already established that this girl can think for herself.

The pacing is quick, maybe too quick. Adults, at least, will want to soak in the artistry and the legends but the momentum is unrelenting. The voice work is pretty great, although some of the casting did give me pause. Why are Channing Tatum and Ice Cube voicing Mexican characters? Did they get lost on their way to a 23 Jump Street rehearsal? I mean, I’m relieved that Channing Tatum at the very least isn’t affecting a disingenuous Mexican accent, but I feel that with so much Latino talent, they could have easily found someone better and I can’t think of any reason why they chose to go with a whiteboy. I realize we’re already stretching our imaginations to include a Mexico where the people speak English (some accented, some not). And I also realize that I probably don’t even have the right to comment on this. And while this movie isn’t a perfect representation of Mexican tradition, it’s a friendly start. It’s familiar enough that American audiences, even American kids, won’t be put off, while bridging a cultural gap that I hope will lead to more family movies doing the same.