Tag Archives: Oscar contender

Wild

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I read this book way back when it was first published and didn’t overly love it. I’m wondering right now whether I hold books to an even higher standard than I do movies and believe that this is probably so. The book was written by Cheryl Strayed herself – an account of her time spent solo-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in order to slam the brakes on her self-destruction. I don’t think I liked the voice of Strayed, didn’t like her haughtiness, didn’t connect with her unapologetic ways. Luckily, this movie has undergone the Nick Hornby treatment and as a result, Strayed is a little more tolerable and the story a little more cohesive.

Reese Witherspoon plays the title character. She’s good. She’s good but she’s not great. It doesn’t feel like an overly-challenging role. As she hikes along, some loose association will jar her memory and we’ll receive another piece of the puzzle via flashback. She’s entirely believable in every scene, it’s just that no scene is particularly gripping. I enjoyed seeing her bare face exposed to us (did anyone else feel she looks like an Olsen twin without makeup?) but I didn’t really feel like it translated enough to an emotional vulnerability that seemed necessary in telling such a story. In fact, the “Nick Hornby treatment” that I started out being grateful for began to seem just a little too trite. The puzzle pieces fit together just a little too snugly. No one’s life path is that linear, and I felt that Witherspoon struggled with the script’s limitations.

Perhaps so did the director, because neither did I feel a connection with the vast and probably very beautiful landscapes. We never dwelled on them. They only existed as backdrop. The terrain was rough, certainly, but we never get a sense of it because the camera is always maddeningly smooth. None of the 1000 miles she treks through seem to be all that “Wild” but the thing about this movie is that the land should be Reese’s costar. Richard Brody, reviewer for The New Yorker, put it about as well as anyone could: “they don’t give Oscars for Best Mountains.” True. And after last year’s success with Dallas Buyer’s Club, it certainly feels like Jean-Marc Vallée is gunning for the Oscar by any means necessary.

I criticized the book for being too smug and the movie for being too glib. And maybe I’m just hard to please but there was a lot of story here, a lot of layers and potential depth but for some reason we stayed safely near the surface, and while I’d still place this film in the top 20% of 2014, I think it failed itself because it had all the ingredients to be much much better and wasn’t.

The Imitation Game

11 Replies

Mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) meets a girl at a bar while taking a break from trying to build a machine that can break a Nazi code. She may not be the genius that Turing is but she makes an off-hand remark that helps him see a problem that he’s been struggling with in a new way. He gets this crazy look in his eye and runs off without warning, leaving her wondering what she just said. She has just given Turing his Eureka moment.

I hate Eureka moments in movies and The Imitation Game has a few of them. Actually, there were a handful of scenes here and there that felt lazy and occasionally a little pandering. Worst of all though, they distract from what is overall a fantastic script.

Winner of the People’s Choice Award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, some have suggested The Imitation Game as the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar. They may be on to something. Like The King’s Speech and Argo, there isn’t much special about it except that it’s a good story told very well with healthy doses of dramatic license taken to keep the truth from getting in the way of a good story.

The best reason to see The Imitation Game is Benedict Cumberbatch. Turing is a tough guy to get to know. At first, the film establishes only that he is brilliant at all things math and ignorant of most things social. He’s portrayed almost as a British Sheldon Cooper, hilariously misunderstanding statements that he takes too literally. He uses logic, not emotion, to guide him and at first it seems like he doesn’t feel much of anything. With time, and the more time he spends with new friend Joan Clarke (well played by Keira Knightley), Cumberbatch slowly lets us see a little compassion and lots of pain. By the end, we’re left with one of the year’s best performances and a genuinely heart-breaking ending.

Read another Asshole’s opinion of The Imitation Game.

Foxcatcher

5 Replies

In the sprawling Du Pont family home, there is a room referred to as the trophy room. Its walls are lined with ribbons and medals and a bounty of trophies featuring gleaming silver horses. “Horses are stupid” says John Du Pont (Steve Carrell), who prefers wrestling, though his dear, ultra-wealthy mother considers it a “low sport.” It’s funny he has such a disdain for horses since he seems to treat his own pet wrestler no better than a dog.

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is an Olympic gold medal winner but has lived his life in the shadow of his older brother, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), also an Olympian, and arguably the better wrestler. Mark’s living the unglamorous life of an amateur athlete, surviving on one $20 cheque at a time when Du Pont swoops in to offer him not just sponsorship, but mentorship. Desperate, Mark accepts.

Steve Carrell is nearly unrecognizable as Du Pont, and I don’t mean the prosthetic nose. I mean he walks Du Pont and talks Du Pont and hunches his shoulders and has this stillness and almost emptiness about him that’s kind of chilling and really restrained and very well done. Matt played the Oscar card in his review and I can’t help but agree. Every time he’s on screen, he’s giving out a vibe that makes you uncomfortable but prohibits you from looking away. Du Pont is basically soulless and he attempts to buy himself a biography with cash. He’s got an interest in sports but no qualifications – luckily, as long as you embroider ‘coach’ on your jacket, no one second guesses you when you’ve got millions in the bank. Carrell and Tatum both spend much of the movie in silence, so much so that a coked-up scene on a helicopter where the two repeat polysyllabic words is one of the “funnest” scenes in the movie. For the most part, it’s slow and mumbly and dark, dark, dark.

I actually think Tatum was the perfect choice to play the physically strong but emotionally stunted athlete. He comes alive in the gym, on the mat, but seems subdued and uncomfortable in almost any other setting. We see him as vulnerable and feel that somehow Du Pont has taken advantage of him, even though it’s clear he’s an adult. The movie relies on what’s not said between these two, because Du Pont is socially inept and Schultz is a dull bulb. But wordy or not, I needed something more from this movie. We never know the true nature of the relationship between Du Pont and his protégé. There’s a lot of tension and creepiness and stuff we don’t feel good about, even some erratic behaviour from Du Pont, but nothing that can really explain the drastic event at the end. I mean, what the hell? It’s not fair to spring that on us, you need to earn it, even if we knew all along we were in for some violent end.

The movie works best as a commentary on America and on social inequity than as a true-crime caper. Director Bennett Miller makes his movie as if he’s a journalist, not a story-teller. We are presented with facts; emotions are observed but not delved into. The whole thing is cold. And when shit hits the fan, we knew it was coming, but we still don’t know why.

The Book of Life

1 Reply

The Book of Life is the fourth Golden Globe nominee for Best Animated Feature Film that I have gotten around to reviewing and, unfortunately, the worst in every way I can think of.

The movie was produced by Gullermo del Toro so I know that I’m supposed to love it. And I’ve read several reviews that praised it for its focus on Mexican culture and characters. Fair point but I couldn’t help wondering on what side of the thin line between celebrating diversity and reinforcing stereotypes this film was falling as I nervously glanced around the theater once or twice to see if anyone else found this offenseive. Maybe I was the only one. I’m curious to hear what the internet has to say. What I could not forigive though were the bad song covers from which no one is safe- even Radiohead.

The book of Life may earn some points for its Just Be Yourself message. I’d be more impressed though if every other nominated animated film (although I haven’t seen the Boxtrolls yet) didn’t also have a Just Be Yourself message . In fact, if it turns out the Boxtrolls has a Don’t Stray From the Pack message, I would probably vote for it just for,ironically straying from the pack.

I may not be the target audience for this movie. Some movies are just for the kids and maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. But in the theater where I saw The Book of Life, the kids were as restless as I was, making me wonder who the target audience is supposed to be.

The Imitation Game

10 Replies

Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Avengers for math nerds. As Alan Turing, he assembles a crack team called Hut 8 who will secretly try to break the unbreakable German code machine, Enigma, to win the war, while pretending to be regular schmos putting in time at a radio factory.

Turns out, pretending to be regular is probably the bigger of the challenges for Turing. He’s a genius, but he’s also probably autistic. He’s horrid with people, often laughably so in the film (Cumberbatch portrays him lovingly, with sensitivity, grace in his gracelessness, and touches of clueless humour). Turing is also gay, and closeted, necessarily. Churchill credited him with the single largest contribution by an individual to the war effort; his work probably shortened the second world war by at least two years. He was an expert in his field, the father of computer science, and a war hero and yet he struggled just to make a friend.

The film flips between different time periods: his boyhood at school where he had his first love, a post-war break-in of his home that leads to him being interrogated by police, and the time he spent at Bletchley Park deciphering Nazi codes. Both book-ending periods paint us, the audience, a picture of the things he’s keeping secret. The film does an excellent job of presenting his world as a series of codes: as a boy he confesses that for him, conversation is a code. People are an enigma. The wallpaper in his home looks like morse code, dashes and dots. The production design is upscale period all the way.

For a movie about math and cryptology, it’s surprisingly gripping. Reels of news footage help give us a sense of their urgency. They aren’t battling Germans, they’re fighting a clock. Their countrymen are dying in tunnels during air raids (as Keira Knightley already did, in Atonement), or simply wasting away of starvation. The movie isn’t 100% historically accurate, but I think it’s faithful to the time and place and people, and if the computer itself is given the Hollywood treatment, looking much more impressive than it ever did in real life, where’s the harm? Perhaps it will inspire people to go home and look it up.

I think the film’s strength is its moral question. Once the code is cracked, how and when can that information be used? How many civilialns and soldiers would you sacrifice to keep a secret that could win the war? The movie does a great job of personalizing the question and we start to feel that as awful and tense as it was in the not knowing, it was a lot more bearable than the responsibility we’re faced with when we do know. The weakness is in having painted Turing as the unblemished hero. The truth is , he was probably unknowable, and without ever having known him, I’m betting that no one could be as spotless as he’s implied to be in the film. Turing, the actual man, was mistreated by his ungrateful government, who kept his war records sealed while he was prosecuted for simply being a gay man at a time when it was illegal to be so (or at least to act on it – “gross indecency” they called it, hypocritically), and then sentenced him to chemical castration, robbing a nation, and the world, of a great mind.

Into the Woods

12 Replies

Based on the Stephen Sondheim musical, Into the Woods tells the story of a childless baker and his wife, cursed by a wicked witch to be barren forever but granted the chance to reverse the spell, if only they go into the woods to retrieve some special items for her. Their story intersects with the familiar Grimm Brothers’ tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel.

Meryl Streep plays the witch and plays her beautifully. Director Rob Marshall knows she’s the linchpin and grants her the most spectacular entrances and exits. But it’s Emily Blunt in the role of the baker’s wife who feels like the heart of the movie and Blunt really shines. She can make any line sound so natural, and her voice can only surprise you in the best way possible. She was nominated for a Golden Globe and deserves to be, possibly even more so that Streep (!). Anna Kendrick as Cinderella is comparatively disappointing. It’s always difficult for this reviewer to see past her donkey dentures, but her voice is up to the challenge, even I can admit that. But Cinderella just isn’t that exciting to watch (this problem was likely compounded by the inclusion of a preview for the new live-action Cinderella movie to be released in 2015 – my sister and I wrongly imagined some of those scenes as scenes from Into the Woods).

“I was raised to be charming, not sincere.”

There is a lot to recommend in this movie. The ensemble cast is spectacular. After their opening number, “Into the Woods” I felt like I should applaud. And if you had doubts that Chris Pine could sing, let me assure you that he’s learned more than just a thing or two from Shatner along the way. Actually, our group quite enjoyed the scene between Pine’s Prince Charming (recycling his smug asshole look from Horrible Bosses 2) and Rapunzel’s Prince (Billy Magnussen, leatherclad) – the two men are singing about their respective woman-induced “Agony”, splashing about homoerotically in a waterfall, trying to out-macho each other, crotch-thursting, popping buttons to reveal increasingly deep vees of smooth, tanned chests, reminding us more of a duet between George Michael and Freddie Mercury than your typical fairy-tale princes. Delightfully tongue-in-cheek, you almost wished more of the movie could feel this way.

“Scrumptious carnality”

The sets are gorgeous, and no matter how many times our characters go into the woods, it never feels like they’re passing the same 5 trees, it’s a truly enchanted forest that creates a storybook look that’s fun to get lost in. And the fabulous Colleen Atwood heightens the visual gorging with a stunning array of costumes, including a suit that transforms a man into a mister wolf. Johnny Depp, playing the wolf, is lurking inside those woods, looking lupine and oily, putting out vibes that should warn us away. Although top-billed, Depp’s in the movie for maybe 5 minutes, but that’s more than enough to turn things pretty sour. How do I say this…I felt like I picked up on certain nuances in his song that I was uncomfortable with. As in: sexual innuendo. As in: the wolf would like to “eat” Little Red Riding Hood in more than one way. He’s an absolute creepster with a real pedophile’s mustache and his singing “Hello, Little Girl” will send shivers up your spine. He tells us there’s a “scrumptious carnality” about to be had, and maybe that works in the Broadway production, but it feels grossly inappropriate in this toned-down Disney version where the actress playing Red is indeed a little girl, much too young to be on the receiving end of this lascivious song. And when she starts responding that what they’re doing is new and scary but also kind of exciting, well…I wanted to slam on the brakes.

The characters wrap up their traditional story lines around the 80 minute mark – but wait! These poor schmucks don’t get their happily-ever-afters. The story continues. And I’m glad that the movie doesn’t end on Cinderella’s wedding day because I would have felt cheated. But 80 minutes of singing and skipping through the woods was about as much as I wanted. So the remaining third of the movie, which gets a hell of a lot darker, felt entirely too much. Streep delivers another great song but I was fed up with the inundation of special effects, my patience was waning, and it just felt like filler. My sister felt that since all the characters start (or continue) making selfish, morally ambiguous choices, she didn’t have anyone to pull for. She’s not wrong. My husband felt that the songs were not particularly catchy or memorable, and he’s not wrong either. I enjoyed the movie, enjoyed it quite a bit, it would be impossible not to given the sheer amount of talent (although I am wondering why all of that talent had to be white), but I’m not feeling it for Best Picture this year. Of course, I’m sure I said the same about Rob Marshall’s Chicago and we all know how that went.

American Graffiti

6 Replies

In 1973. After sitting on the finished film for six months, Universal finally got around to releasing this relatively low-budget surprise hit that was directed and co-written by a young George Lucas. Different in almost every way from the films that Lucas would later become known for, American Graffiti is inspired by memories of his youth cruising around Modesto, California while trying to pick up girls. Set in 1962 during the last night before two high school grads head off to college, four friends spend one last hilariously wild night driving around the strip trying to get laid, find someone to buy beer for them, and give a clingy 12 year-old the slip.

What it’s lost with age. Even what’s dated kind of works. Even at the time, the clothes and expressions were from what Lucas thought of as a more innocent time. How can you not love a movie with lines like “Don’t you think the Beach Boys are boss?” and “Go kiss a duck, marblehead!”? I do have to admit though that it was bizarre watching Harrison Ford as the cocky cowboy looking to race the fastest kid in town.

What still holds up. Pretty much everything. Lucas apparently wrote the script around the rock and roll music of the 50s and early 60s and the classics play throughout the entire movie through car radios and at the sock hop. The film follows several characters throughout this one night on the strip and the stories are constantly interesecting as our heroes run into each other often yelling through car windows. Everywhere they go, they seem to run into someone they know and before long the strip starts to feel like home for us too. This style keep s the pace as fast as an Indiana Jones film.

Nice surprise for modern audiences. George Lucas did make one classic film that he didn’t eventually ruin with prequels and sequels.

Bottom line. You can feel Lucas’ love for this time and place in almost every scene. But you don’t have to be nostalgic for the music, cars, and styles of the 50s and 60s to love this movie. It’s like Superbad with less dick drawings. I can’t think of many teen party movies that were made by such a celebrated and talented filmmaker. Rent it.

St. Vincent

4 Replies

Reviewed by Jay

The plot here has the potential to be revolting – sweet lonely kid next door befriends curmudgeon; the world becomes a slightly better place. Luckily, in the hands of Bill Murray, the script mostly escapes cliche and is often sublime. This is Bill Murray at his Bill Murrayest. Nominate him for an Oscar right now. He won’t win, but it’s honour, blah blah blah.

Murray has great chemistry with the kid. But then again, if you stayed through the credits, you know he’s got great chemistry with a house plant. His character’s a mess, often literally (“Where’s all my dirt?), often bleeding and badly bandaged. Naomi Watts was a bit of a head-scratcher, playing a pregnant Russian hooker (with a heart of silver? bronze? aluminum?) with an accent verging on cartoonish. Melissa McCarthy is great in her role of newly-single mother. She feels a bit wasted on the role, playing it very straight, although it does bring welcome relief from her recent flood of obnoxious characters. Chris O’Dowd, playing man of cloth\teacher, is criminally underused. The audience eats him up every time he’s on screen. The kid is a delight, and not too obviously acting, so I’d like to shake his hand for that.

Bill Murray makes this movie. Kudos to the director for knowing he’s got a star vehicle and for finding the exact right star – the only star – for the role. Bill Murray does eccentric grumpy old man quite well. It’s a hoot to watch, every time. But it’s the tiny moments of gruff tenderness that blow you away.

It’s a little long for a comedy, but if a little long means Bill Murray bumbling his way through Bob Dylan, then so be it.