Oscar time again, where (some of) the best (if you ignore
almost everything outside America) films get a fantastically expensive celebration, whilst we admire some
frocks, hope that Seth MacFarlane is
vaguely funny and that there is at least a 15 minute break between each time
that I Dream a Dream gets belted out.
Hmmm, this might need a drinking game.
So, I have this year seen all 9 Best Picture
nominees (it helps when they don’t pick anything so scathingly reviewed
that I can’t bring myself to go see it –
see The Blind Side and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for previous years!)
and here are my thoughts – I’ve tried to avoid spoilers but may not have
succeeded.
And it has to be said, I haven’t hated any either. Les Mis didn’t really speak to me , even as
it bellowed earnestly in my face, but I still enjoyed the spectacle. Beasts of the Southern Wild and Lincoln
couldn’t be much more different but are my definite favourites. As for the other 6, I’ve tried putting them in
order as to my preferences, and I can’t.
It does have to be said that Amour and Zero Dark Thirty are clearly
superior films to Silver Linings Playbook or Argo but I came out of the cinema
considerably happier from the latter two! Django also has the enjoyment factor
but needed a bit of an edit (well the removal of Tarantino acting) and Life of
Pi was just remarkable – weirdly I can’t think of a good reason why it isn’t
third in my preferences, maybe otherwise it didn’t quite grab me as much as the
book did, maybe my memory is being mean and not giving it the credit it
deserves.
So to rescue my dad from having another half hour phone
lecture on what film should win and why here is my quick reviews of each the
films – for many of these from memory of films I saw a few weeks or more ago,
so might be different from my immediate reaction – and also my views on some of
the other major categories.
In alphabetical order….
Amour:
I know I was going to leave the other categories to later,
but please, please can Emmanuelle Riva win Best Actress. Something which takes place almost entirely
in one flat and for the vast majority of the film features only 2 actors,
should probably belong on stage, and should probably not be so engrossing on
film. It is the performances by Riva
and by Jean-Louis Trintignant which involve you so deeply in the story, they
are perfectly judged and utterly believable.
It’s a shame that Trintignant didn’t get a nomination too, for best
actor, perhaps instead of BRADLEY COOPER.
The fact that it feels cinematic and more than something that should be
done on stage, is down to Michael Haneke’s direction, which makes the flat feel
like a full-on landscape. The film is
beautifully done, but my one slight qualm about it is that it builds up to one
big event which then suddenly happens out of the blue, which given the subtlety
and perfect pitch of the rest of the film, it jarred too much for me and
slightly took me out of the film. I
don’t know whether Haneke is trying to provoke, or that it was just the timing
didn’t work for me. But otherwise the
film is an impressive and haunting achievement.
But for a film that wasn’t so haunting….
Argo:
I remember enjoying Argo immensely. I remember being completely gripped,
particularly through the last section of the film (although I was laughing at
the cars chasing the plane down the runway).
There were lots of fun performances, and the story was sharply, slickly
and well told. But I’m not sure how much
it stuck with me. I guess the films I
rate the highest are the ones I’m turning over in my mind over the next few
days. Argo was one of those films that I
was happily recommending to friends and colleagues as an enjoyable night out,
but maybe wasn’t thinking that much about afterwards. So it’s a well-made, well-scripted and
well-edited and exciting film but maybe
not one of that much substance. It looks
like it will be walking off with the Best Picture Oscar – I’m not annoyed at
this, but it’s not the film I’ll be cheering on either.
Which brings me nicely to….
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Now here is a film that stayed with me immediately and for
long after. It’s a film that feels
poetic, is full of intimate moments of sadness and masses of defiance. The central two performances are excellent –
and I’m not sure how to quite articulate but what most impressed me about
Quvenzhané Wallis’ performance was that this didn’t feel like a brilliant child
acting performance, it felt like a brilliant performance by an actress. This may be film about a marginalised
community going through a disaster, but one of things that impressed me most
was the film was devoid of any pity or self-pity. It celebrated survival and getting through on
your own terms. It wasn’t po-faced, it
dealt with serious issues without being too earnest, instead it had real visual
flair and the ability to pick up and completely transport its audience. It was a really special debut, and I can
even forgive Behn Zeitlin for being younger than me and getting nominated for
Best Director (I don’t approve of high achievement by those younger than me!!!) because of his
imagination and vision.
Of course for directors with a single-minded, bloody-minded
vision, you can’t go much further than….
Django Unchained
Well probably only Tarantino would do this – make a bloody
revenge western set in slavery, just like he did it with the Second World
War. And this was somewhat less
a-historical than Inglourious Basterds.
Furiously entertaining, bloody,
bloody, bloody, and just about balancing between visceral horror and being much
more entertaining than revenge violence has any right to be. I think one of the bigger achievements was the
clear tonal difference between the violence perpetuated against slaves, which
is harrowing and all to convincing, and the cartoon violence inflicted by
Django and Schultz, in the style you’d normally associate with Tarantino. That’s how he just about gets away with
making this a western set against something which cannot be taken lightly. Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo di
Caprio and Samuel L Jackson are all excellent – and it’s a shame someone as
brilliant as Kerry Washington wasn’t given a little more to work with. The only thing that I’d really fault the film
for was its excessive length, which meant it wasn’t quite as tight as it could
have been. Not necessarily even cutting
a section but shortening bits here and there, to stop the occasional
meander. And also a ban on Tarantino
acting, especially with that awful attempt at an Aussie accent.
Meanwhile without their Aussie accents….
Les Miserables
I’m going to try not get too negative on Les Miserables as I
did appreciate the spectacle, but with so many positive things to say the other
films here, this is one of those films I enjoyed while I watched it and then started
to pick apart after I left. I think the
problem is the source musical – and where you can get away with a lack of
characterisation in a stage musical, to me it fundamentally let down the film.
Hugh Jackman does his best, but I would have loved to know more about the early
Jean Valjean, to have a more interesting and explored character transformation,
so that I could really care about the character at the end. I was more moved than I expected at the end
(despite Amanda Seyfried trying to put me off) but still just didn’t care that
much. I suspect Tom Hooper and his
colleagues were hamstrung by not really being able to deviate from the original
as it has too many fans. This is a shame, as I think cutting back on the
utterly unconvincing love story between Marius and Cosette and perhaps focusing on the ongoing battle of wills between Valjean and Jalvert, it could
have been a much more engaging film. The
revolutionary bits are done well (me, a sucker for anything related to French
revolutions?!! Yeah, ok….) and are well and truly epic and as an on screen
achievement, I can’t fault them for effort, it’s just I need characters to care
about, and apart from rooting for the success of the obviously doomed
revolutionaries, there just wasn't much there for me.
Speaking of an achievement in bringing something to the
screen…
Life of Pi
I saw a critic say
somewhere that perhaps the most impressive achievement by Ang Lee in his
realisation of Life of Pi was that instead of thinking of the source material
as a book that is impossible to bring to the screen, it seems like the most
naturally filmic story in the world, perfectly made for cinema. And to a large extent I agree with this – it
is a phenomenal achievement, and despite my love for Lincoln, I really hope
that Ang Lee gets his second Best Director award. The film is absolutely stunning, and although
I can accept that the tiger wasn’t real, I refuse to believe they did not
actually film the whole thing at sea. If
there was a better visual achievement last year, I don’t remember it. If it doesn’t win the relevant technical
awards, I might just march on Hollywood. How far is it again? Also, the actors
deserve a nod, Suraj Sharma deserves an endurance award – the fact he was able
to still act convincingly at the same time is impressive, and I think Irrfan
Khan judged is part perfectly – even being slightly off could have spoiled the
film. So I’m still trying to work out
why I’m not quite as passionate about this film as I would expect me to – I
loved the book and thought this was as good as an adaptation that you could
hope for. I think it might have been the
foreknowledge of the revelation at the end and perhaps that the more
fantastical elements (such as the island with the mongeese) whilst we are
hearing someone tell us a story that is supposed to be real, perhaps work
better on the page than the screen. But
it’s a minor quibble, and if Life of Pi was to win Best Picture, I would not
begrudge the makers that one bit.
Of course I would slightly prefer it if the Best Picture
went to….
Lincoln
Now to be honest, particularly given the class of Tony
Kushner’s script, I was probably guaranteed to love Lincoln. Something that plays out like The West Wing
1860s-style? Yeah, I am totally there.
It really does all begin with Kushner’s magnificent script (it better
win Adapted Screenplay, or most of Edinburgh will be woken up by a lot of angry
yelling), which does a great job of mixing the political and the personal, of
capturing the clash of ideas and the complexity of the great task ahead, whilst
still (for me at least) pushing the story forward. I was probably as tense through the vote near
the end of the film as I was during the final acts of Argo or Zero Dark
Thirty. And at the same time, it manages
a brilliant character study of Lincoln himself, a complex man and a study that
never drifts towards hagiography. Of
course, that element of the script is given a huge helping hand by Daniel
Day-Lewis’ stunning performance. Enough
has been said about how you forget you’re not watching Lincoln himself (I
totally agree), what I think is also particularly magnificent about his
performance is that you have to believe such a person exists - a man who is
both charismatic enough to drive these events through and brilliant enough to
pick his way through the political maze – that someone so incredible could
still be a real person. And Day-Lewis
really, truly does this. There is also a
terrific supporting cast, even if it was occasionally a tiny bit jarring to
spot random actors in there – oh look, it’s Gale Boetticher from Breaking Bad,
is that Hannah’s creepy boyfriend Adam from Girls? But a big shout out should also go to James
Spader who is clearly having a whale of a time and was massively
entertaining. As for Steven Spielberg,
his direction is assured and unobtrusive, leaving the actors and script to
shine, probably exactly what was called for.
My biggest fear was, after the schmaltzy disappointment of War Horse,
that he would have the cheesometer turned up to 11, but in fact there is very
little of that as he recognises that the emotion is in the importance of what
is happening, and is in fact nicely underplayed.
Enjoyable as it is, underplayed is maybe not the first word
you would use to describe…
Silver Linings Playbook
I really did enjoy Silver Linings immensely. It got to the
end and I had a nice warm, fuzzy feeling, it really hit the spot. But best picture of the year? Hmmmmm. The way I managed to enjoy it was to pretend
that BRADLEY COOPER’s character was in fact suffering from some sort of
personality quirk rather than a mental illness as potentially serious as
bipolar disorder. Because there is a
line where he mentions that he is now better because he is taking his
medication but you could easily miss it and assume that the improvement is
purely down to dancing with Jennifer Lawrence.
I also just wasn’t 100% sold by BRADLEY COOPER’s performance – he’s not
bad, but he’s not exactly convincing either, there’s just not enough depth to
the performance, it’s too much bells and whistles (which is why I’m insisting
on putting his name in shouty caps, in case you hadn’t worked that out!). So I can’t tell if he’s been nominated for
Best Actor because people were so surprised to discover BRADLEY COOPER can do
dramatic reasonably well, or if the Academy didn’t realise Tropic Thunder’s
take on Oscar-picking roles as comedy.
But hey, there is still a hell of a lot to enjoy in this film, and like
I said, taken as a nice film to see one evening, it’s a proper engaging,
feel-good movie. Both Jennifer Lawrence
and Robert de Niro are terrific, and their characters feel fully realised and
much more convincing. Jacki Weaver is
good too, if a little underused. It zips
along nicely, you sort of know where it’s going but it is also entertaining,
and quite touching too. One final thing,
that has really confused me. David O
Russell’s last two have been his most conventional and probably his most
uninterestingly directed. Yet both have
earned him Best Director nominations? Of the man things I will never understand
when it comes to Academy choices, this is one of the biggest. Especially when they didn’t nominate Paul
Thomas Anderson.
And for my final dodgy link between pieces, speaking of this
year’s not-nominated directors….
Zero Dark Thirty
It’s a week or two since I saw Zero Dark Thirty and I’m
still not quite sure what I thought of it.
Much of it was impressively shot, Jessica Chastain is of course
excellent, the final act is far more tense, edge-of-the-seat than it has any
right to be. But. I think my issue with the film is that in trying to stay
neutral and just present and report, it feels a bit disconnected and
dispassionate. I don’t need a film to
tell me how or what to think or feel, but I think I engage with it a bit more
if I feel it is thinking or feeling something.
There is something cold and clinical about ZDT, which means while it is
a tremendous, often unnerving, piece of film making, it can also be a bit
clinical. I like moral ambiguity in a film but this just didn’t quite spark
off. It is not pro-torture, in that it shows
just how horrific even so-called enhanced interrogation is and yet it didn’t
feel angry enough about the time wasted on these dead ends. It doesn’t lionize the CIA agents, make them
heroes or villains, just sits there in the corner watching them. In many ways, this is a brave choice, and
quite probably the right one, I just wanted to be grabbed a bit more. Maybe the length, and the splitting of the
film into chapters is what accentuates this.
It felt like watching half a series of Homeland in one go. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, but with
that, you know you can stop any time. ZDT just felt like a bit of a marathon
until we got to that final, brilliantly realised final act. This might be a film I have to watch again
until I finally make up my mind. Until
then, I will put it as a technically excellent, if detached, piece of film
making.
So, if you can’t tell from above, I would prefer Beasts of the
Southern Wild (it won’t) or Lincoln to win (it might sneak it), and would have
no problem with Life of Pi, Amour or Django Unchained winning. I am resigned to the fact that Argo will win,
this doesn’t annoy me, but it is a little bit disappointing that something more
original or substantial isn’t the favourite.
And if Les Miserables or Silver Linings walk away with it…. Well Academy,
you and I are having words.
On a final note, if you’re wondering why I care so much
about the Oscars when I doubt many people truly believe they are rewarding the
best film of the year, it’s more because of their impact on what it means for
film production – the types of films that succeed are the types of films that
are more likely to get made, either because of the boost to their financial
success or to the studios’ prestige. Awards shouldn’t matter, but they do. It’s important to me that big, proper films
are being made by studios as well as the blockbusters and cheap horror
franchises, because the reality of the film industry is that I’m never going to
get to see most smaller movies because they won’t make it to screens. Yes, I can see a few at the Film Festival,
but it’s only a fraction of what’s out there.
So the other chance I get to see films with something of an original
vision, with a director in command of his art, with proper characters realised
by talented actors is through the ‘Oscar’ film. It’s not an ideal system, but
what we’ve got. So c’mon Academy, be bold, give the awards to the real
accomplishments so that these films keep getting made.
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