Oscar Predictions

What was supposed to be the Oscar year in which Richard Linklater and "Boyhood" took home the big prizes, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and "Birdman" might just pull it off instead. The past several weeks have proved that the momentum has almost decisively shifted to the latter's favor, even if its lead actor's chances have gone done. Who will win?

The real horse-race this year is the Best Actor category. While it initially seemed like it was Michael Keaton for his comeback role in "Birdman," with wins at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, as the man to beat, Eddie Redmayne seems to have taken the lead with his best performance yet in "The Theory of Everything." Redmayne also won at the Globes and then took home trophies at the Screen Actors Guild ceremony and recently at the BAFTAs. Had Keaton and Redmayne not been nominated, this easily would have been Benedict Cumberbatch's win for his exceptional work in "The Imitation Game," but with such fierce competition from Keaton and Redmayne, this isn't his year. Incidentally, Steve Carell has also given us his best work in "Foxcatcher," but in a role that essentially is a supporting one, and with all due respect to Bradley Cooper and his third consecutive nomination for "American Sniper," David Oyelowo's performance in "Selma" was more deserved. Carell and Cooper are the least likely to win.

So who will win Best Actor? My head tells me it's going to be Redmayne. While the Academy has traditionally picked a veteran over a newbie (e.g. Humphrey Bogart over Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck over Peter O'Toole, and John Wayne over Dustin Hoffman), these days, they're not too interested in a comeback (e.g. Sean Penn over Mickey Rourke), and definitely are in love with biographical portrayals (for films like "Ray," "The Iron Lady," "The King's Speech," "Capote," etc.). There is an understandable controversy about Redmayne's performance, centering on the Academy's constant rewarding of actors without disabilities portraying characters with disabilities. However, with Redmayne's case, because he was playing Stephen Hawking in his earlier years as well as Hawking as the figure we now recognize, I wouldn't be surprised if Academy voters ignore the controversy. Still, while Redmayne's is a really great performance, Keaton, in my mind, slightly surpasses him. For one, it's true that comedy is harder than drama. It is also, it could be argued, equally or more difficult to create a new character, especially one that seems to, in some respect, tease Michael Keaton and his status as former superhero star staging a comeback. My prediction is still that Keaton will win, but I'd say it's only slightly higher than 50 percent; it is, essentially, the toughest Best Actor race in a long time.

Regarding the final major nail-biter, the Best Picture race, this is also the hardest race to predict in years. "Boyhood" seems to be the choice of critics, as it won at the New York and L.A. film critics awards as well as the Critics Choice Awards; "Birdman," however, stole its thunder with wins at the Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, and Producers Guild awards. The latter three in particular are usual good indicators of who will win. This is another head-versus-heart match. I think "Birdman," Inarritu's fifth film, could very well likely win, but my gut still tells me that the Best Picture (and Director) Award will go to "Boyhood." "Boyhood" is an epic of the 21st century, and I think the Oscars will reward that.

Regarding the rest of the races, they should be fairly predictable:

Best Actress: Julianne Moore ("Still Alice")
Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette ("Boyhood")
Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons ("Whiplash")
Best Adapted Screenplay: "The Imitation Game"
Best Original Screenplay: "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
Best Song: "Selma"
Best Visual Effects: "Interstellar"
Best Makeup: "Guardians of the Galaxy"

Read More →

2014: The Year of Shitty Movies

Hey there, cats and kittens,

While this time of year typically brings great joy to release my list of the best films of the year (as I did in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013), I regret to inform you that there will be no top ten list this year. This past year has given us, by far, the worst slate of motion pictures in more than a decade. Whereas the previous year gave us such noteworthy greats as "Wadjda," "12 Years a Slave," and "Nebraska," this year gave us a disappointing mess, for lack of a better word.

There were a variety of different duds, from blockbusters ("Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier") to independent artsy movies ("Only Lovers Left Alive"), and movies so boring the best solution was probably to turn them off ("Particle Fever" and "Le-Weekend"). Some big names gave us crap, too -- there was Darren Aronofsky's worst film ("Noah"), and Tim Burton's most boring ("Big Eyes"). And of course, how can I not forget Mr. Clint Eastwood? Eastwood, though still a universally-loved legend, this year not only gave us the awful "Jersey Boys" (which actually was ridiculed by the critics), but he also directed the most divisive, controversial (and arguably the worst) movie of his career: "American Sniper." Aside from the fact that this movie dumbs down and rewrites history while painting the Iraq War in black-and-white moral terms, this movie was simply boring--dreadfully boring (and you would think that a guy with four Oscars would notice a fake baby). Aside from its opening moments, there wasn't a single scene that really engaged me, and people might be able to legitimately claim it's "powerful" if they've never seen a plethora of other superior war movies. "American Sniper" is one of the worst movies of the year.

Then there's "Birdman," a movie I really, really wanted to like. What a cast -- Michael Keaton, in his comeback role, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis. Coupled with a clever screenplay, as well as a respected director and great cinematography, this should have been a movie I really liked. And yet, like so many other 2014 movies, I felt letdown and bored out of my mind. That being said, I hope Keaton wins the Oscar. His performance is excellent, and is one of the few good things about "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)." Perhaps one day, I will re-watch it and enjoy it, but I doubt that will happen.

There were movies that had great performances, like the always perfect Marion Cotillard (deservedly nominated this year for "Two Days, One Night") in "The Immigrant," Joaquin Phoenix in "Inherent Vice," Tom Cruise in "Edge of Tomorrow," Melissa McCarthy in "St. Vincent," Oscar Isaac in "A Most Violent Year," and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman in "A Most Wanted Man"; great performances in crap movies that could cure insomnia. There were other movies that were just utterly ridiculous, like "Fury," a movie in which five Americans in a tank defeat practically the entire Nazi army, or pretentious junk like "Begin Again," or dull documentaries like "Citizenfour," or puffed-up animation such as "Big Hero 6," Disney's movie where they turn a likable healthcare-providing robot into a weapon of mass destruction. And it wasn't simply Hollywood that released such garbage. Films from a variety of different nations also bored me to tears: "Ida" from Poland; "The Tale of Princess Kaguya" and "The Wind Rises" from Japan; "Stranger by the Lake" and "Ernest and Celestine" (two radically different movies) from France; "What If" from Canada; "The Missing Piece" from Cambodia; "Calvary" from Ireland; "Mr. Turner," "Starred Up," and "Under the Skin" from the U.K.; and "Force Majeure" and "We Are the Best" from Sweden and Denmark.

Maybe I should just quit.

Here's hoping for better movies in 2015.

Read More →

Into the Woods

Once the familiar becomes strange, as Michael Sandel has said, things are never quite the same. So it is in Disney's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's "Into the Woods." Here, the familiar becomes quite strange. I recall complaining to my theatre professor when my university put on a production of "Into the Woods" my freshman year that I didn't care for the sudden change in mood during the second act of the musical. But he and others convinced me of this necessity; strange is often quite good, and Disney, of all studios, has done a mostly good job of avoiding the "Disneyfication" of these famous stories like it did for practically a century.

"Into the Woods" is a musical featuring a variety of different fairy tales so juxtaposed with each other that one might be advised to take a copious amount of notes. There's the usual suspects: a little hungry girl with a red cape; Cinderella, slaving away at home for her terrible step-family; Jack, unable to help his mother because their cow will not produce any milk. But then there's something about a curse being placed on a house of a baker and his wife, or something like that. The plot is not too interesting. But the couple are forced to collect a series of items for a witch (Meryl Streep), who placed the curse, and so on their journey they come across all these characters.

Many of the musical numbers fall fairly flat in terms of interest, but there is something certainly peculiar about it all. Here, as our characters sing, the woods are just trees, and the trees are just woods; stay on the path, they may try, but something wicked surely will come. Little by little, we see these characters' stories becoming intertwined. Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) embarks on her journey into the woods to bring some bread to Granny (who is sick in bed), and, as we all expect, she comes across a hungry wolf (Johnny Depp). Depp appears only in one sequence as the Wolf, ears pointed and tie undone, with long black claws. It's a pretty good scene, and despite the (mostly) unfair wave of recent criticism he has recently received, like when the Washington Post's Stephanie Merry called him a "51-year-old ham," it shows that Depp still has it. Is the sequence disturbing? Yes, but by now everyone knows the dark history of these old fairy tales and their didactic nature -- take a read to find out what really happens to Cinderella's stepsisters in the original Grimm stories.

The other actors are also quite good. I knew Meryl Streep and Anna Kendrick (Cinderella) could sing, but I had no idea Tracy Ullman (Jack's mother) and James Corden, who plays the baker, could as well. But the one who really is impressive is Captain Kirk himself -- Chris Pine, as Prince Charming, belts out "Agony" with co-star Billy Magnussen in one of the best scenes in the movie. Also giving good performances are Crawford and Daniel Huttlestone as Jack (of the "Beanstalk" story). (Huttlestone appeared in "Les Miserables" two years ago and Crawford makes her film debut here; she also played the title character in "Annie" in the Broadway revival.)

Job certainly well done to director Rob Marshall. We all knew he could get great singing from his actors from his previous movies, but beyond that he deserves credit for this incredible production design, especially its design by Dennis Gassner and Anna Pinnock, and visual effects team lead by Christian Irles, Matt Johnson, and Stefano Pepin. In addition to a nomination for Streep and the production design team, Colleen Atwood is deservedly nominated for her costumer design. This is truly one of the most visually impressive movies of the year, especially the sequences featuring the angry lady-giant, imaginably one of the more difficult moments to visualize. Beyond that, there might be some disappointment. There isn't quite as much thought as I think many people would want, and I don't think there's any way of being able to decipher if this is or isn't a parable about AIDS, as some have theorized the original musical is. Still, compared to many of the disappointing duds of December, "Into the Woods" is quite the treat.

Read More →

Selma

"Our feet are tired, but are souls are rested."
-Martin Luther King

In the opening scene of "Selma," directed by Ava DuVernay, Martin Luther King stares into a mirror and mentions a "disdain for hopelessness." He's simultaneously putting on his tie. It is 1965. It's an incredible way to open the movie, with a haunting score by Jason Moran (in his debut). But then we immediately go from Oslo, Norway to Birmingham, Alabama, where four young girls are descending stairs in what appears to be a church, and it doesn't require a PhD in History to at least suspect what is coming. The church explodes, killing the four girls inside.

King, played exceptionally by David Oyelowo, is not going to tire from his success in helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and becoming a Nobel laureate -- he's instead going to Washington, D.C. to try and stress to President Lyndon Johnson that more urgent work is desperately needed, and they need LBJ's help. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, blacks are still being systematically persecuted, and this is made possible by segregationist white governors, police chiefs, juries, etc. If a perpetrator actually sees his day in court (a rarity), then the white jury always finds the white criminal not guilty. Why? Because, MLK tells LBJ, to serve on a jury, a person needs to be registered to vote. And while, technically, blacks did have the right to vote in 1965, as the next scene demonstrates, this was often not actually the case. In the scene, Annie Lee Cooper (played by Oprah Winfrey, a producer of the film), attempts to register (again) to vote. She is rudely asked to recite the preamble to the Constitution. Upon beginning, she is then rudely demanded to identify how many county judges there are in Alabama. She answers correctly. "Name them," is the next order. Her request is denied.

The film accurately portrays Cooper's bravery and her punching a police officer, and Winfrey has stated that she wished to portray the character because of her courage. The depiction of President Johnson, however, has become a bit more controversial. A group of historians and Johnson advisers have pushed back against the notion that King and Johnson had a tense relationship, or that they disagreed about the procedure for solving the problems. Johnson historian Julian E. Zelizer recently wrote at Vox that Johnson and the civil rights leaders were partners, not adversaries. And as Bill Moyers, himself a former Johnson adviser, has pointed out, it was not Johnson who was behind the wiretapping of King's phones. The culprit? Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, two years earlier. And it should not be doubted that the FBI was ruthless toward King. In addition to the wiretapping, an FBI agent, using terms like "filthy" and "abnormal," sent King a letter suggesting the civil rights leader kill himself.

While the scenes with Johnson might be seen as dumbing-down the history of everything, I don't think they hurt the film too much. While it's truly bizarre that Oyelowo didn't receive a Best Act nomination, his fellow Brits give disappointing performances. Tom Wilkinson isn't particularly good as LBJ, and neither is Tim Roth, whose accent sounds more like an exaggerated version of Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards" than it does than the venomous governor of Alabama, George Wallace (whose daughter, incidentally, claimed Wallace saw the errors of his ways and regretted his years of proclaiming that in Alabama there would be "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"). The rest of the cast, however, is sufficient and plentiful: Common, Wendell Pierce, Lorraine Toussaint, and Cuba Gooding, Jr. all appear as civil rights activists, as does Martin Sheen as a judge hearing the case of the legality of the banning of marching in Selma, and Carmen Ejogo (another Brit) is excellent as Coretta Scott King. In her scenes, Ejogo (who also played the character in "Boycott" from 2001 and who had met her) portrays Coretta not only as a concerned wife but one understandingly angry about her husband's infidelity in scenes demonstrating that DuVernay and her team aren't afraid of de-mythologizing MLK a bit.

"Selma it is." King and his advisers agree to go to Selma to march to Montgomery in a demonstration to demand their right to vote. They concentrate on a "defined battleground," and predictably are met with violence; it's "open season," as Johnson warns. One young man is shot and killed in front of his family. In scenes that provoke demonstrators to ask how it can be that troops were being sent to Vietnam but not Selma, skulls are cracked and scores of people chased. These are not, in any stretch of the imagination, easy moments to watch. As the judge Sheen plays notes, "the wrongs are enormous." So it was then, and so it is, frankly, now.

Is "Selma" a great film? No, and at times it doesn't aspire to be more than a mediocre movie about history, much like "The Imitation Game" before it. I hope that this continues the success of Oyelowo, who also appeared in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and "Lee Daniels' The Butler," and I hope that the Academy (which is 93 percent white and 76 percent male, and has been stung by a Twitter campaign called #OscarsSoWhite with tweets like "they didn't see 'Selma' but their housekeeper said it was really good") continues to not only diversify but also has enough sense to nominate DuVarney when she earns it. That being said, "Selma" is a movie you should see, but that does not make it one of the year's best.

Read More →

The Interview

This is what all the fuss was about? A film showcasing James Franco trying way, way too hard? A film light on satire and heavy on bathroom jokes? Yes, indeed, this is, we have all found out, at the center of a geopolitical scandal like none before it. What was meant to be the third part of the Rogen/Franco trilogy (the first being the overrated "The Pineapple Express" and the second being the underrated "This Is the End") has become one of the most controversial motion pictures of our time, and all for nothing.

Here, Franco is Dave Skylark, a celebrity news journalist who shares a concern with his producer, Aaron Ropoport (Seth Rogen), that they and their show are not taken seriously by their fellow journalists and the public. Anxious to show the world their true talent, they discover that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (his name has not been altered for the movie; perhaps his personality hasn't, either) is a huge fan of the show, and so they have an epiphany: interview Kim himself. The CIA, however, isn't opposed to the idea of the two of them going to the most isolated nation in the world, but they would certainly appreciate it if the two of them could "take him out." Dave and Aaron are understandably a bit stunned. "You mean for drinks?" Aaron asks.

In "The Interview," Franco gives the least funny performance of his entire career, a performance so devoid of humor it makes his job as Oscar host look like a gem. He creates a character that is perhaps the most annoying in cinematic history, a rich celebration of desperate gibberish and cruel obnoxiousness. Just when it can't become any more over the top, he goes full-Smeagol, twitching and squirming about -- and we're barely ten minutes into the movie. Franco is an actor who is known for his immoderate hyperactivity in movies, but may this movie be a warning to all actors to avoid such an approach.

The movie continues, but the laughs do not. There are practically a dozen cameos, and none of them funny. Eminem comes out as gay ("the greatest moment in gay history"), Rob Lowe has no hair, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays with dogs, or something -- the stuff of comedic genius. Hollywood (and late-night comedians) need to learn that celebrity cameos aren't automatically funny, and they certainly aren't here. Rogen himself, though, usually offering the only chuckles sprinkled throughout the movie, doesn't really provide anything unique compared to his previous material. True, Rogen and Franco do have a couple of funny moments. As the North Korean guards bang on their door, the two, with material to assassinate Kim, must surely hide it, so they expectedly perform a false conversation: "Uh, I'm gonna take a shower." To which the reply is, "Okay...I'm gonna take one with you." Skylark and Kim develop a bit of a friendship; the latter shows off his tank that was a gift to his grandfather from Stalin. "In my country," Skylark assures him, "it's pronounced 'Stallone.'" The two relate to one another, and there are obvious allegories to the Kim-Dennis Rodman "friendship."

At least some props must be given: There are a few genuinely good moments of satire, not only poking fun at America's enemies, but America itself. The actor who plays Kim (Randall Park) is pretty good, and I couldn't help but think that the movie does, in fact, get better as it goes. I, for one, will never not be a joyful witness to a mocking of such a disgusting pig like Kim. (My sincere apologies to pigs everywhere for the comparison, for it is truly unjust.) 

But my ultimate conclusion is that this is certainly a missed opportunity. I know this is pretentious of me, but I think most folks would not understand that the portrayals of Kim, North Korea, and how North Koreans view their leader are not quite exaggerations in the movie. The film accurately portrays the fake crying, the charades of propaganda throughout every aspect of the country, and the deification of the Kim supreme leaders. Kang Chol-hwan, a defector from North Korea who survived ten years in a North Korean concentration camp, wrote in his memories that to his childish eyes, "Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of gods?" "The Interview" puts it in a bit more sophomoric way by stating that Kim "has no need for a butthole."  Perhaps a movie like "The Interview" will help people everywhere realize not only the numerous absurdities of North Korea, but also the atrocities, the ultimate and complete oppression that is totally unprecedented, unlike anything ever seen in recent humor history. (Imagine if Hitler and Stalin dominated every aspect of their respective citizens' lives and if their families ruled for three generations.)

One could wonder if it's a good idea to laugh about this sort of thing when such things are actually occurring. Beyond that, while there now appears to be some doubt about who actually hacked Sony, some have argued that putting on your Uncle Sam hat and chanting U-S-A! as you watch Kim being mocked is what Kim actually wants you to do. But memories of this scandal behind the release of "The Interview" will far outlive the movie itself. And beyond that, as mentioned, this is a dismal attempt at satirizing a terrible despot. The Greatest Generation had "The Great Dictator." We have "The Interview."

Read More →

The Polar Express

"The Polar Express" certainly starts out with a great deal of ambition while trying to make sure it presses all the right notes required of a Christmas movie. There's a calm, mystical score by Alan Silvesti, the usual composer of director Robert Zemeckis, and quite impressive visual effects. There's a poem (as all stories about Christmas must have) of a young boy who is starting to lose faith in Santa. He picks up an encyclopedia to discover that the North Pole is, contrary to all the stories he's been told, "devoid of all life." (Oh, knowledge -- how cruel you are.) The epiphany of this boy's awareness of Santa is where things start to spoil. The score becomes overly repetitive, and the "is-it-real-or-is-it-not" animation begins to make some of the characters looks like aliens. Fairly soon, it becomes evident that the only thing devoid of life in this film is the film itself.

Trains in the movies are usually magical things. One would think that would be the case here, in a movie that features some sort of ghost-hobo and flying reindeer. It's true that things certainly look quite magical in "The Polar Express." After all, an actual train shows up in front of the house of young "Hero Boy." (Yes, that's what he's credited as.) Our young boy is performed by...Tom Hanks? Yes, not only does Hanks, who has shown us that he can play a man dying of AIDS and a man with a mental disability and everything else, play the train conductor (the central adult character) and practically every adult male role in the film, but also "Hero Boy." Why Zemeckis and crew didn't simply have Daryl Sabara (who voiced the character) provide the motion-capture is something I just don't understand. Anyway, Hero Boy gets on the train to the North Pole because why wouldn't he? If we are to believe that a train can show up (and go to) such a place, then we must believe that Hero Boy would get on that train. (Seriously, what a terrible name for a character.) Hero Boy (argh, it sounds so stupid) meets a group of children, one of whom, Hero Girl (who wrote this?), seems to have a crush on him. Another one, a know-it-all (I suppose I should mention that that's the character's name, as well) is not only performed but also voiced by an adult, which just adds to the misery of hearing a child say the words "wise guy." Then we are witness to two not-so-competent (or safe) train engineers whose annoying attributes make Jingle and Jangle, the humorless elf duo of "The Year Without a Santa Claus," look like amateurs in the realm of humor and efficiency. These are several of the attempts at humor that I can't imagine even children laughing at.

This movie isn't all bad. Hanks does do a mostly sufficient job as most of these characters, even though he hams it up so often. "The Polar Express" looks and feels quite wondrous and even frightening, like the graveyard of forgotten toys. One of them even appears to come to life and wants to attack the young boy. "The Polar Express" turns ten years old this year, and the scenes like that have aged well. So no one would deny that Zemeckis, who started his computer animation trilogy with "The Polar Express," is a master of visual storytelling. But his best movies, like "Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and "Forrest Gump," focus more on character than visuals. Here, the opposite is true. Its only focus is on visuals, with every sequence trying to top itself, to the point where a giant star on a giant Christmas tree nearly crashes through the skull of one of Santa's elves. And for some reason, 45 minutes into the movie, it embraces its chaotic train ride energy and suddenly becomes a musical. You know how they say you know you've seen a good musical when you leave the theater and the songs are stuck in your head? I can't even imagine the ones who worked on the productions of these dismal songs to have them stuck in theirs upon leaving the studio.

The song that Haley Joel Osment-lookalike sings fortunately finishes, and our characters finally make it to the North Pole, which oddly enough does seem devoid of life (in the figurative, sarcastic sense) but (of course) is inhabited by an army of elves all dressed in red, crawling over each other to shower their adoration on their fascist of a master. The characters (who might just be representing the most annoying portrayal of children in any movie) finally meet Santa Claus (who is also played by Tom Hanks), and then the movie still goes on for another 15 minutes. No exciting train scene can save this film. Ten years later, "The Polar Express" is, for some reason, considered a holiday classic. Call me Ebeneezer, but this movie is crap.

Read More →

The Theory of Everything

"O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer time."

-W.H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"

In the beginning, the camera immediately shifts from Hawking in a wheelchair to Hawking on a bike. He is a "strange" and "clever" fellow, with crooked glasses and in an intense quest to solve equations and get the girl. These early scenes feature Eddie Reddmayne being calmly lectured and encouraged by his professor, played by David Thewlis, who issues homework assignments that might send students to the hospital. And yet this professor is quite impressed with Hawking, despite the latter's submitting assignments on scraps of wrinkled papers. It is remarkable that such a character falls for a girl whose interest in Medieval poetry of the Iberian peninsula might seem antithetical to his obsession with physics; surely, her belief in God is in opposition to his purely logical mind. But fall in love they do. This is a love story, and while not the best of the year, it works best when seen through that prism. When seen through the prism of the standard biographical film, as the filmmakers and distributors wish us to do, "The Theory of Everything" doesn't shine so much.

As mentioned, it's quite remarkable that these two fall in love. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr reminded us, religion uses the language of poetry far more than science does. Hawking, upon bringing her home to his family for a Sunday meal, describes to her his requirement to refrain from religious thought when conducting science, but is met with a firm reply: "Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists." He has met his match. Beyond that, the girl, Jane Wilde (played by Felicity Jones), is rather attractive, while Hawking (with all due respect not only to him but also Reddmayne, who used to model) has a nice smile but a very awkward (yet witty and obviously brilliant) persona. They go to the ball, and there's a majestic dance scene (with no dancing from our two characters), lit perfectly by cinematographer Benoit Delhomme. In the first third of the film, though, despite its pretty figurative and literal fireworks, "The Theory of Everything" seems to be a somewhat bland biographical motion picture, providing not much else. It's like "A Beautiful Mind" but slightly more boring. But of course it will be nominated for Best Picture -- it's the type of movie that makes the Academy salivate.

Hawking trips, just as he develops an idea for the beginning of the universe, and is taken to the hospital. He is diagnosed with motor neuron disease (a.k.a Lou Gehrig's disease) and is expected to live only two more years. His thoughts won't change, but no one will know what they are. He begins to limp, quite noticeably, and in no time he has a cane. Soon after that, he has to crawl up and down the stairs. He is continually told that he has only two years left. This is where the acting gets quite challenging for Reddmayne. Not only does he have to portray a real-life figure, one who is known around much of the world, but also one who starts shy yet articulate but is forced to have his physical abilities stripped from him. He has to convey a lot of emotions -- jealousy, ambition, lust, love -- with few words. Reddmayne gave us some pretty good acting in "My Weekend with Marilyn" and "Les Miserables," but here he is exceptional. You will remember his performance, but forget virtually everything else about the movie.

Why? For one, it tries to compensate by having innovative visual effects -- the fire sequence sparking his epiphany that "black holes are not, in fact, black at all" looks nice, but then the film doesn't give us much more. This is an intriguing story, no doubt, and I think human beings, for the most part, will forever be drawn to these types of fighter stories. "The little one has done it!" as one character exclaims. Hawking isn't simply a brilliant scientist, but a devoted father and husband, even able to chase around his young children in his electronic wheelchair. In spite of all his troubles, he perseveres, continuing to write and even retain his boyish grin, if only to annoy his wife, who is growing frustrated with worrying about him, as he refuses to see specialists regarding his choking spells. His father (Simon McBurney) joins in the prodding. Stephen eventually concedes. 

There's a powerful moment where Jayne orders Hawking's doctor to do an emergency operation because "Stephen must live." She is warned that Stephen might not survive the journey. "He will," she insists. Indeed, he barely does. He has to talk with a computerized voice (an American one, to the surprise of his wife), but he actually seems to be trying to make the best of it, quoting Clark Gable's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and shouting "exterminate" while playing with his children. And he still likes reading copies of "Penthouse."  

I liked "The Theory of Everything," and yet I was underwhelmed by it. I wanted something a bit more audacious and creative, not a check-the-box style safe movie from Hollywood to try and gain some awards. As I mentioned, Reddmayne is incredible; the movie itself is forgettable.        

Read More →

Gone Girl

An Irish prince leaves his perfect wife at their perfect home. How perfect is his life? So much that on the night he fell in love with his wife, there was a storm of sugar surrounding them. There aren't many cinematographers better than Jeff Bronenweth, and his camera makes that scene, in particular, hauntingly beautiful. His excellent cinematography lights a dark, dark world, as is often the case in the movies of David Fincher, the Prince of Darkness. When the man comes home, his wife is gone. His perfect world is turned upside down.

The man in our movie is Nick Dunne, played by Ben Affleck. He goes to a bar to drink with the bartender, who incidentally is his sister (Carrie Coon). Why is he drinking? Why not--it's his fifth year wedding anniversary. The bar is under the name of his wife, played by Rosamund Pike in her best performance. Pike's debut was as a Bond girl in "Die Another Day" a little more than a decade ago, but she hasn't really been given a chance to prove herself since. Here, however, she really shines, in a performance that will (or at least should) get her an Oscar nomination. Her character, Amy, is, in the first half of the movie a "complicated" woman, a "nagging shrew" whom no one particularly likes. But that would be too simple. In the second half, it's an entirely different story for her. I cannot elaborate, but I am permitted to say my opinion of the twist, which is this: While it did provide Pike with an opportunity to demonstrate her talent, it also produced some eyeball-rolling. In the history of dumb movie twists, this might be one of the dumbest.

But back to our couple. Nick is remarkably calm considering his wife has just disappeared. While it can only be natural to side with him as an audience member, the evidence is clearly piling up against him in the movie, and an objective detective (Kim Dickens) continually grills him. Our story bounces back and forth so that we see just how bad Nick and Amy were at marriage; it's as if it could have been titled "Scenes from a Marriage About to Turn Mysterious and Violent." The wife is increasingly frightened by her husband, and perhaps vice versa.

There are a lot of compelling moments here about cable media's obsession with scandal, dangerous "Fatal Attraction"-style marriages, and other human flaws. But one cannot help but feel that these would all be so much more interesting to think about while reading the novel. It seems almost inevitable to think unfavorably about a film adaption if one has seen the original material beforehand, but I haven't read "Gone Girl," and yet I know I would have had a better experience reading it than watching the movie. Yet probably the most interesting ideas (in the novel or the movie) are the gender issues. Despite the fact that improvements for women have been one of the most impressive gains in the rights revolutions we've seen over the past century, we still live in an unfortunate era where women are not only underrepresented but shockingly mistreated (to say the very least). Here, we have a story where women are not only capable of such disturbing violence, but they are also the most interesting characters. Well done, Fincher and company.

Fincher's directing is commendable as always, but his storytelling is a bit weak. Frankly, I often have this reaction when watching many of his films. Other than "Se7en," I can't think of an instance where I was totally amazed at his filmmaking. But he has, at least, gotten quality performances from his players, especially Pike and Affleck. Affleck, who won Oscars for writing "Good Will Hunting" and producing "Argo," has shown us arguably his best performance, and Pike, as mentioned, has never been better. The actors in smaller roles--Dickens, Tyler Perry as Affleck's attorney and Neil Patrick Harris as a rich man who has been obsessing over Amy for years--likewise are quite enjoyable to watch. But while the actors are sufficient and mostly have been given satisfying words from screenwriter Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the novel), this is ultimately a mediocre film. After an incredible climax, it goes on for another unwelcomed twenty minutes. It's certainly intriguing but, like most Fincher movies, forgettable.

Read More →

Frances Ha

Upon first glance, it would seem that these two young ladies are happily in love. They are Frances (Greta Gerwig) and Sophie (Mickey Sumner), running around and playing in the New York jungle featured so beautifully in black and white, in Noah Baumbach's "Frances Ha." It might take a while, but it becomes more evident that they are not a couple, but instead two young women in love with each other only in the platonic sense. This is a story about friendship, and it's off to a nice start--the black and white, the energy, Bowie's "Modern Love" sprinkled about. But it quickly realizes that it doesn't have much else to offer.

Maybe it's in black and white because it knows there's not much else there. Frances asks Sophie early in the film to tell her "the story of us." That's essentially what this movie is--the story of two friends and "the story of them." Think of all the fine films there have been on such a profound topic--"Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Stand by Me," "Au revoir les enfants," "Bridesmaids"--and compare them to this. How disappointing.

Frances is a character who always "feels bad," constantly apologizing for the most minuscule things. With Sophie, she has an intimate soul mate, one who shares her enormous aspirations--they even want honorary degrees. Frances is a dancer, but she struggles to find work even within the company she dances with. She's an old-fashioned individual, one who watches French movies, reads on the subway, and shuns modern obsessions with phones. This movie is so Woody Allen-esque but misuses the inspiration. At one point, she arbitrarily goes to France to...show us how quirky she is? To really show us that she makes poor choices? I don't know. All she does there is go to the cinema to watch "Puss in Boots," probably because the writers thought we would laugh if we heard the word "puss." It's a bit dangerous to make a movie about New York and Paris in black and white; whereas Woody Allen gave us a hopeless romantic roaming the streets in a pleasant time-travelling adventure through Paris, Baumbach has given us a woman watching a "Shrek" spin-off.

Frances' lack of success and unique personality continue. She finds herself in debt from her trip to France and doesn't find much opportunity in her dance company. She awkwardly makes her way through dinner conversations, in ulcer-inducing moments in this movie that dreadfully fall flat. What exactly is this movie trying to show us through this character? My only conclusion is how annoyed I was, and particularly at the words "I'm sorry." I don't think I've ever heard it so many times in one movie.

There aren't many other things to make up for it. Adam Driver might be a hit on HBO's "Girls," but his film performances have been mediocre or forgettable at best, and he was particularly annoying in the recent "What If." (Let's hope he'll be better in Martin Scorsese's "Silence" and J.J. Abram's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens.") Here, he's not much better. He does offer a humorous line at one point, teasing Frances that he was "pretending to be a liberated woman" in refusing to sleep with her. He plays Levi, one of the artists she moves in with. Another is Dan, played by Michael Esper, who continually says "un-dateable," thereby offering more examples of the awkwardness of the film's screenplay, written by both Gerwig and Baumbach. Such repetition and bad dialogue is the stuff of weak plays. The dialogue is pretty atrocious, particularly that given to Esper. His character claims to be writing a screenplay for "Gremlins 3." Why? Who cares. The so-called dialogue was probably improvised, as if, the filmmakers thought, to give it more legitimacy. So hip. At one point, we are told that "the only people who can afford to be artists are rich." That's deep.

So this "quirky" comedy is actually rather painful, the kind that folks will tell you you're supposed to like, and you must have inferior taste if you don't. It tries too hard to be clever and humorous and fails at both. Greta Gerwig is a remarkably talented actress who simply has chosen a bad role and given a sub-par performance. As the co-writer of this film, she deserves extra criticism. But I'm confident she'll be better next time.

   

Read More →

The Blair Witch Project

It's not quite reality. In one of the weaker scenes of “The Blair Witch Project,” the somewhat groundbreaking mockumentary horror film of 1999, a character teases his fellow documentarian about her never-ending use of the camera. He now understands why she's in love with it, why she continues to film even though some very strange and eerie things have been happening to them on their trek into haunted woods. This movie is not quite reality, but it sure as hell feels like it. We're told in the beginning that in October of 1994, “three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” And thus, a genre changed.

I agree with them that the woods during Halloween are haunting enough. Burkittsville (a real-life town of about 150 people) according to our student filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard), used to be known as Blair. A small cemetery contains an unusually high number of dead children. Some of them, we are told, were murdered by an insane man who kidnapped them and killed them two-by-two with an ax, with one looking away in the corner. He eventually entered the town and declared, “I'm finally finished.” His reason? A witch was torturing him and told him she would stop if he killed the children. There are several other scary stories like this sprinkled throughout the exposition. One of them is the story of the Blair Witch, a local legend grandparents used to tell their children to scare them to bed early. Mary Brown, an older woman the town has written off as crazy, tells our three protagonists a story of how when she was a young girl fishing with her father, a woman who appeared to be completely covered with hair approached her. Because the three filmmakers note that Mary Brown also claims to be a scientist doing research for the government, they ignore her ominous story and drive off for the woods. There, they meet two fisherman, one of whom describes the story of Robin Weaver, an unfortunate soul who vanished, apparently caused by an old woman--or witch--whose feet never touched the ground.

These stories are eerie enough and would make a fine film of their own, but they're not particularly scary. “The Blair Witch Project,” however, is truly scary. Influenced by other horror films (its utilization of both color and black-and-white is reminiscent of “Night of the Living Dead” and the more obvious similarity is to "Cannibal Holocaust") and obviously influential (with the most obvious influence being on “Paranormal Activity” and a host of other horror films), it might be considered one of the best of all time. While not as scary as "Paranormal Activity," it certainly is more real-looking. Perhaps the reason is that, like "Jaws" before it, our witch is never seen (or is it?). Instead, we are witness to our characters being woken at night to the sound of silent cackles. There are piles of rocks mysteriously placed outside their tent. Their map goes missing. One morning, there appears to be slime surrounding the tent. The camera can barely pick it up, but who cares? It's much scarier to simply take their word for it. In fact, hardly anything can often be seen, and this works mostly to the directors' (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez) favor. The movie is so simple yet brilliant because it rests on our shared phenomenon of being scared in the woods at night. Add a witch and I can't even imagine. 

    

While the three actors are not necessarily bad, the constant improvisation leads to overacting. There's an incessant amount of shouting at each other as they argue their way into madness, constantly being hunted by a witch seen, not heard. Josh teases Heather about the camera, telling her it's not quite reality. Well, for one, it's hardly realistic that a group of characters in such dire situations would continue filming, or that they would have moments of levity and laughter in their breaks from being hunted. The reality of things like witches I'm sure will be debated for centuries, but if such creatures do exist, it can be concluded that they probably lack any sense of compassion or mercy. If there are witches, they are probably more like the Blair Witch than Harry Potter. 

Hungry, cold and hunted, the three continue to do their best to crawl out of the vast woods, but to no avail. There is an absolutely terrifying climax in a house deep, deep in the woods. It's impossible to see what exactly is going on, but it's hauntingly eerie. Handprints everywhere and a silent scream somewhere in the foods. How I would hate to be alone in the woods, hunted by a witch. Terrifying. 

Read More →