Tag Archives: Oscar winner

Rain Man

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Sean and I watched Rain Man, me for the nine hundredth time, Sean for the first. The first!Can you believe that?rain

I’m not going to review it because I believe and I certainly hope that he’s the only idiot to have not appreciated this film until now. And he did appreciate it. This film holds up beautifully, except maybe for the synth over the opening credits. This movie could have gone wrong in a lot of ways, so I have to give credit to the brilliant director (Barry Levinson) who treated the subject so tenderly. He doesn’t go directly for the heart strings, he doesn’t’ cloud the relationship with a lot of outside help. He creates a bond and lets his two actors shine. And they do. The movie may be a little off-kilter in some places but Dustin Hoffman never is. His performance I think is the best of his career (the Academy agreed). Tom Cruise could easily have faded into the background of such a performance but instead he also delivers one of his best, a raw and unsentimental portrayal of a man deeply layered in pain, confusion, and selfishness. Despite the inherent heaviness, this movie manages to pull us in not with easy tears, but with well-earned laughs.

And so Sean’s education continues.

The Theory of Everything

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Finally a movie that answers the age-old question: Does Stephen Hawking watch Dancing with the Stars?

Okay, no, it doesn’t answer that. But go ahead and assume yes.

More like, is Stephen Hawking kind of a dick?

You go into this movie knowing that, whatever else, there will be a sure thing on your ballet for this year’s Oscar pool: Eddie Redmayne has already won. You may be less prepared for the fact that at times this movie feels like a companion piece to Interstellar (and I mean that in a good way) and that when the lights come on during the end credits, you’ll be caught in a packed theatre with tears still wet on your face.

This movie is strikingly well-lit. I loved the lighting, the glow, it felt romantic, and helped you remember that in fact this is not so much a biopic as a love story between Dr Hawking and his first wife, Jane. Eddie Redmayne was fairly forgettable in Les Miserables but absolutely claims the screen in this role, capturing expressiveness even in stillness, and showcasing joy and wit not easily conveyed. Felicity Jones, as Jane, may take a back seat on paper, but her performance stands up every bit to his. It’s a subtle portrayal, but strong and sure. Stephen Hawking, the concept, the icon, belongs to us all, but Felicity Jones reminds us that he is a man, and once, he belonged just to her. And there’s so much vulnerability and heartbreak, as a couple once deeply in love are forced into the caretaker and reluctant patient role that chafes for both of them.

I haven’t read Jane Hawking’s book upon which this movie is based. She wrote an earlier one that was much less forgiving, painting Hawking as controlling and almost dictatorish, and you can kind of pick up hints of that even in this second, gentler version, his manipulation of events, his reluctance to express gratitude.

When Stephen and Jane are still a very young couple, Hawking’s father tries to warn her away, saying that this will not be a battle but rather a defeat. He’s wrong and he’s right. Because there is a battle. Stephen outlives the projection by 50 years (and counting). But love is simply not enough. We see love grow, and then wither. And so this movie works much better as a study of love’s ability to withstand challenges than as a traditional biopic. Because I have read A Brief History of Time, and though there are touches, this movie is really “science lite”. It glosses over some pretty major milestones if the measure is the man, and not his marriage. But this is not a story about the failure of marriage because even as it crumbles, it seems a triumph that it lasted at all, and certainly as long as it did.

I wondered what Marsh would make of this movie – he won an Oscar some time ago for his documentary, Man On Wire – but would his work translate? If this was anything other than a story of real, living people, of a living legend in fact, it would be less dazzling. Certainly we’ve got a couple of knock-out performances and some very pretty things to look at, period wise, and even a few well-timed chuckles and some gorgeous gothic backdrops, but pulled together, does it make a Best Picture? It’s hard to say, because of course this isn’t just another period romance, this is the Stephen Hawking story, or at least a piece of it, and it feels incomplete for having just skirted around the outside of his genius. The thing that makes him most remarkable is remarked upon the least, and that feels a bit hollow. I still liked this movie tremendously, and was moved by it, but I suppose I also mourn for the many missing pieces.

The Hurt Locker

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Like everyone else, I watched The Hurt Locker the year it came out. It was dutiful, really. The subject matter didn’t interest me but its female direction was like a monkey with a typewriter. That sounds awful, I know, but honestly, it was a bit of a sideshow. Just 10 years ago, you rarely if ever heard about a female director, period, let alone one who was taking on a project so classically masculine. A war movie, for christsakes. But Kathryn Bigelow didn’t just ‘take it on’, she was so fucking good at it, even boys had to admit it was great. “A near perfect movie,” one had to admit. “A full tilt action picture” said another. Gosh. It was so undeniably good that the biggest consortium of white men ever, the Acamedy, could do nothing but award in 6 Oscars (of 9 nominations), including Best Picture AND Best Director for Ms. Bigelow. Fuck yeah!

But I didn’t like it.

MV5BNzkzZDFhZTUtMWQwYi00MzNhLThiODItNmRlMDhlODZjZDMzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTIzOTk5ODM@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,674,1000_AL_Rewatching it, I get why. Jeremy Renner plays hot shit Staff Sergeant William James, a…bomb guy. Pretty sure that’s the technical term. He gets all dressed up in a quasi-astronaut outfit and defuses bombs (ideally). His unit has only about 30 days left in their Iraq rotation when he’s assigned to them (their last guy got blown up) and they immediately want to throw him right back. He rushes into combat like he’s got a death wish, and worse, he puts his fellow soldiers at risk too. Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), his subordinate, is particularly disturbed to be working so closely with what appears to be a straight-up crazy, reckless person.

This movie is rife with unapologetic toxic masculinity, and it was fucking hard as hell for me to make it through. In the army you don’t get to choose not to follow a whackerdoodledoo into combat, but from the comfort of my bed (it’s on Netflix atm), you betcha I was yelling obscenities at my TV.

Grudgingly, I can appreciate some of the craft in this movie that I was probably willfully blind to a decade ago. Bigelow uses hand-held cameras and an incredible 100:1 shooting ratio to make this film feel real – almost like a documentary. It’s also relentless. One scene barely ends before the next bout of trouble is upon us, usually already in motion.

I like the ending, what it reveals of James’ character – namely, that he’s happiest when he’s staring a ticking bomb in the face. But that’s essentially also my problem with the film. That his disregard for his own life is going to get everyone else in his company killed along with him. That their only move toward self-preservation is to kill him. Imagine being in Baghdad and contemplating that. That his risk taking and complete indifference to the rules somehow make him this bomb cowboy action hero when in fact, in real life, it makes him a moron and a liability. Personally I rooted against this guy, this “hero” because as much as I don’t really love watching people get turned into jam, at least it would give the rest of this unit a fighting chance. War is tough enough as it is. We don’t need to “up the ante” on a bomb squad in an active war zone. That should have been enough. Crazed war junkies intent on obliterating themselves likely would have been weeded out back in basic. The Hurt Locker is just punishing, and I get that the Academy didn’t want to give Best Picture to Avatar (I haven’t seen that one at all), but, ahem, I do believe Up was also in the running that year.

 

Monster

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This movie came out in 2003. I bought the DVD and watched it once and never again – until now. Fifteen years later, it’s as rough as I remembered.

Aileen “Lee” Wuornos is a hooker past her prime. She meets Selby at a bar one night and it’s the oddest case of love at first sight. Lee (Charlize Theron) is smitten, and self-centered Selby (Christina Ricci) loves the attention she lavishes upon her.

Anyway, girlfriends are expensive. Pretty soon Aileen has to start working the highways again. One night, a trick goes wrong. Not that they’re ever right, but more wrong than usual. A john drives her int the woods and beats her unconscious before waking her back up with sodomy. Oh god. I can’t believe I just described that scene so flippantly! It’s HORRIFYING and I’m traumatized and I’m coping by being weirdly light hearted about it. Anyway, Aileen is in a bad way, but what he doesn’t know and she does is that she’s armed. She manages to to break away just long enough to shoot (and kill) him.

Is it weird to describe murder as empowering? Aileen is unsuitable for any other kind of work and though she’d like to quit prostitution, she and Selby can’t quite partying, so it’s back to working truck stops, only this time she only uses sex as the bait, and then murders them for cash and cars. This becomes another one of her addictions.

Aileen Wuornos is a real-life serial murderer. A lot has already been said about Charlize Theron’s physical transformation to play her, so I’m going to concentrate instead on what an interesting character she is. I mean, there’s no denying that Aileen herself is a victim. She even convinces herself it’s a justification for her increasing blood lust. What she does is undeniably wrong but society had already left her in the dust. Where, exactly, was Aileen’s place? That’s what earned Charlize her Oscar. She didn’t try to excuse away her crimes, but she did find empathy for her. Theron is intense as hell in this movie. Her eyes shoot laser beams with such focus you’d think her life depended on it – and in fact, for Aileen, it did. A moment’s inattention could have cost her her life. But otherwise she’s not at home in her body. Theron prowls as Aileen, her shoulders curling, discomfort in her very posture. Her performance is one for the ages.

Director Patty Jenkins treats Aileen with compassion, and she might be the first to do so. Monster doesn’t feel exploitative. Aileen might have had the morals beaten out of her, but we haven’t, and Jenkins’ framing of her always keeps this in mind. The first time Aileen kills, it’s in self defense. Subsequently though, she kills for every time a man has done her dirty, and that’s a very long list. When a tiny sliver of redemption offers itself, Aileen is unequipped to take it. But Jenkins refuses to objectify her; she treats her humanely, which is possibly more than Wuernos ever got in life.

Ordinary People

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20140201_040737Calvin (Donald Sutherland) and Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) are two ordinary people who meet with extraordinary circumstances when their oldest son dies in a tragic accident and leaves them grief-stricken and unable to cop with their suicidal surviving son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton).

They seem like an ordinary family, but grief has a way of throwing things off-balance, of demanding things of people they are perhaps unable to give. And this family is one of those stiff upper-lip types, with no foundation for talking about feelings, unused to having things go wrong.

Conrad is drowning in survivor’s guilt. His parents are reeling. They are coping alone, poorly, Ordinary-People-23-11-09-kcicily, until director Robert Redford skillfully peels back the layers and exposes their beating hearts.

It’s a bit uncomfortable to watch, a bit grim. This is the dirty laundry that everyone’s trying hard to conceal. Judd Hirsch plays a therapist who helps to ruthlessly dissect the great WASP psyche. Even when pointing fingers, the film still strives for sensitivity. For just a little while, the mask of self-control slips, and we’re the recipients of raw pain between searing walls of silence.

Ordinary_People_2750391cThis was Robert Redford’s first directorial effort and it won him the Oscar for best director. It was also the screen debut of Timothy Hutton, and he walked away with an Academy Award for best supporting actor (Mary Tyler Moore was nominated for best actress despite having less screen time than Hutton; she lost to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter).

Oscar controversy: Ordinary People won the Best Picture Oscar in 1981, some people say “stealing it” from Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ordinary People is by no means a bad movie, but Raging Bull is a pretty seminal film, maybe the greatest sports movie of all time, De Niro’s a tour de force, and the Academy has a history of snubbing Scorsese. In hindsight, Raging Bull is the one that’s held up the best, and appears on lots of 50 best ever lists, but you can watch and decide for yourself.

 

Good Will Hunting

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Good-Will-Hunting-01-4This movie is worth watching if just for Ben Affleck’s matching windbreaker and tear away pant outfits alone. He has the EXACT wardrobe of my Catholic school gym teacher\music teacher\ librarian, who accessorized hers with orange lipstick, a popped collar before they were cool, and faux-black curls that reached at LEAST three inches in height.

Matt & Ben, god love em. I love how these two high school drop-outs laboured to make the college classroom scenes authentic, but couldn’t be bothered to learn how to use a mop. I love Hollywood for that. Actors can learn to box and DJ and make a béarnaise sauce, but they can ben-affleck-and-matt-damon-owe-everything-to-good-will-hunting-co-star-robin-williamsnever convincingly fold laundry or pump gas. Why is that?

Anyway. The interesting thing about this movie is that it fools you with its quirkiness and quick wit into not seeing the incredibly predictable story arc. Sad, abused, troubled kid is actually a genius and he just needs someone to provide the Armour-Piercing Statement: “It’s not your fault” enough times to crack through his tough-guy veneer and get some healing on. Despite the basic cliché upon this film is predicated, the film succeeds in its smaller bubbles of truth. The defense mechanisms feel true. The relationships are charismatic. And blessed be, it avoids the gift-wrapped perfect ending. I like the ending of this movie so much, I’ve written about it before:

Like every other morning, Ben Affleck pulls up to Matt’s house with a product-placement cup of coffee, and jobs up the front stoop in his latest sport-douche look. This time, though, the last time, he knocks on the door, and no one answers. We already know that Ben has always secretly hoped for this very thing: he has said that his favourite part of the day is between his knock and Matt’s answering, that length of time where he can imagine that his brilliant friend has left his desultory life behind to chase the starsbenny. So we know that Ben is happy, but we also know that he will inevitably also be sad, having just lost his best friend, and having no such escape route himself. It’s a very bittersweet moment where not a single word is spoken, but so much is said. All of this is communicated with just a slight grin, but the script and the director have set this moment up so perfectly that it plays on the audience’s emotions for all it’s worth. Love it.

 

As Good As It Gets

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tumblr_m1ehh5O2Z81rra86mo1_1280It’s impossible to tell if it’s this movie that’s not aging well, or if it’s me. Maybe I’m just getting more curmudgeonly with every passing year, but this movie seemed better in my memory than it did in the re-watching.

Jack Nicholson, who is superb, plays Melvin, an obsessive-compulsive gentleman who lives an extremely regimented life until two things stop him in his tracks: a diner waitress, and a mangy dog.

The first: Helen Hunt is, playing a martyr named Carol, or you know, just doing the Helen Hunt thing. I’m immediately annoyed with her character. Being a single mom is so hard, guys! And article-1350653-000B108A00000258-682_634x481asthma: the worst! She got an Oscar for this, so I guess I’m just being hard on her. She plays the only waitress that will serve Melvin at the only restaurant he’ll eat in. When she doesn’t show up to serve him his usual three eggs, over easy because her son is sick, he shows up at her house hungry with a doctor in tow.

The second: Greg Kinnear plays Simon, Melvin’s arty neighbour. Melvin is not what you would call a sociable man anas-good-as-it-getsd has no love for any of his neighbours, or their acquaintances, or their pets. In fact, Simon’s pup Verdell takes a trip down the trash chute early on because Melvin can’t stand the sight of him. But once Cuba Gooding Jr. brow-beats Melvin into caring for the dog while Simon recovers from a vicious attack, certain aspects of pet ownership start to feel enticing – particularly when little Verdell starts to imitate some of Melvin’s idiosyncracies.

Always worth a mention: Jack Nicholson was also awarded an Oscar for his work on this film, and this one I can get behind. Melvin’s only communication with the world is a series of as-good-as-it-gets-41-4degrading insults – racist, sexist, homophobic, you name it, he spits it out. And yet we love him for it, almost. We certainly forgive him. Just a lift of his bushy eyebrows and we’re his. The fact is, there’s great dialogue between these players, full of irony and thoughtful observation. It really makes you wish the plot didn’t follow such a conventional path. If only the film makers were brave enough to follow the characters down their authentic, quirky paths instead of playing it safe.

The dog, by the way (played saucily by “Jill the dog”), never received an Oscar for her stellar work on the film, but did pick up a UK Shadows Award, presented to the best dog actor, and I think a imagescase can be made for hers being the most charming role of them all. Technically Verdell was played by 6 dogs (Timer, Sprout, Debbie, Billy, and Parfait) but Jill was undoubtedly the star – Greg Kinnear (who was nominated for an Oscar but lost to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting) describes being “upstaged by Jill”: “She’s got these lashes and big eyes… and when she walks onto the set everybody just says ‘oooh’.” Jill and company are Brussels Griffons and terribly cute. I’m sure she could melt the heart of any obsessive-compulsive, and I don’t know that there’s a higher compliment I can pay than that.