Month: February 2008

Oscar

We talk movies a lot in our office. One person was wondering whether a non-American was likely to win Oscars. As we pursued the question further, it became clear that “non-American” has really come to mean having English as their native language. People from the UK, Australia, New Zealand and especially Canada (unless they are French-Canadians) are considered “Americans” by the movie-going public, we suggested. This year’s nominees:

Performance by an actor in a leading role
George Clooney in “Michael Clayton” – US
Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood” – England
Johnny Depp in “Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” – US
Tommy Lee Jones in “In the Valley of Elah” – US
Viggo Mortensen in “Eastern Promises” – US
The English guy will win.

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Casey Affleck in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” – US
Javier Bardem in “No Country for Old Men” – Spain
Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Charlie Wilson’s War” – US
Hal Holbrook in “Into the Wild” – US
Tom Wilkinson in “Michael Clayton” – England
This is even more interesting; the guy who was born in the Canary Islands will win.

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Cate Blanchett in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” – Australia
Julie Christie in “Away from Her” – England (born in India)
Marion Cotillard in “La Vie en Rose” – France
Laura Linney in “The Savages” – US
Ellen Page in “Juno” – Canada
Only one American in the field, and she’s unlikely to win; the Englishwoman or the Frenchwoman.

Cate Blanchett in “I’m Not There” – Australia
Ruby Dee in “American Gangster” – US
Saoirse Ronan in “Atonement” – US
Amy Ryan in “Gone Baby Gone” – US
Tilda Swinton in “Michael Clayton” – England
Could be the only American to win an acting Oscar tonight, unless the Australian takes it and shuts out the US completely. (Entertainment Weekly suggests it’ll be the Englishwoman.)

Let’s look at the awards for the previous 7 years, just the winners:

2001 (74th)
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE* Denzel Washington — Training Day – US
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Jim Broadbent — Iris – England
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE* Halle Berry — Monster’s Ball – US
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Jennifer Connelly — A Beautiful Mind – US

2002 (75th)
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE* Adrien Brody — The Pianist – US
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Chris Cooper — Adaptation – US
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE* Nicole Kidman — The Hours – Australia (born in Hawaii)
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Catherine Zeta-Jones — Chicago – Wales

2003 (76th)
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE* Sean Penn — Mystic River – US
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Tim Robbins — Mystic River – US
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE* Charlize Theron — Monster – South Africa
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Renée Zellweger — Cold Mountain – US

2004 (77th)
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE* Jamie Foxx — Ray – US
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Morgan Freeman — Million Dollar Baby – US
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE* Hilary Swank — Million Dollar Baby – US
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Cate Blanchett — The Aviator – Australia

2005 (78th)
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE* Philip Seymour Hoffman — Capote – US
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* George Clooney — Syriana – US
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE* Reese Witherspoon — Walk the Line – US
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Rachel Weisz — The Constant Gardener – England

2006 (79th)
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE* Forest Whitaker — The Last King of Scotland – US
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Alan Arkin — Little Miss Sunshine – US
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE* Helen Mirren — The Queen – England
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE* Jennifer Hudson — Dreamgirls – US

Every year, a non-American has won, albeit one whose native language was likely English.
***
I’m not going to change my picks from three weeks ago, though, in fact, I picked Julie Christie rather than Marion Cotillard in a contest. I would not be shocked, though, if the heavyweight vote splits between No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, movies filmed so close to each other that I read in Entertainment Weekly that an oil rig fire filmed for Blood interfered with a shot for No Country. This would allow Juno, the movie that, at midweek, had twice the box office of No Country, its nearest Oscar competitor, to win. Not saying it’ll happen; I’m just saying that it wouldn’t be the upset that Atonement or Michael Clayton winning would be.

And since the Academy will have all the glitz, in honor of my friend Uthaclena’s 55th birthday, I’ll be watching. Probably not tonight, though; that’s what timeshifting’s all about. I don’t watch the Oscars to see who wins; I watch them to see HOW they win.

ROG

ROG

Movie Quote Meme

In as much as it’s Oscar weekend, I thought I’d cop this from Gordon. However, I didn’t looked at his responses before writing this because I didn’t want to be influenced by my near-twin’s choices:

1. Pick 10 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Fill in the film title once it’s guessed.
5. NO Googling/using IMDb search functions.
(Feel free to stick your guesses in the comments section)
I THINK half of them may be easy, the other half not so much, but none of these films are obscure.

1. There’s an old joke – um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”
“Annie Hall” = Tom the Dog

2. It’s got a long rock wall with a big oak tree at the north end. It’s like something out of a Robert Frost poem. It’s where I asked my wife to marry me. We went there for a picnic and made love under that oak and I asked and she said yes.
“Shawshank Redemption” – Scott

3. You’re a sucker for French poetry and rhinestones. You’re very generous. You’re kind to strangers and children, and when you stand in the snow you look like an angel.
“Groundhog Day” – Tom the Dog

4. If I don’t get a little law and order around here, I get busted down to a traffic corner. And your friend don’t like traffic corners.
“West Side Story” – Gordon

5. We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects.
The Truman Show

6. They have to paint me red before they chop me. It’s a different religion from ours. I think.
“Help!” – Gordon!

7. Uh, well, if anyone from the, uh, from the IRS is watching, I… forgot to file my, my, my 1040 return. Um, I meant to do it today, but, uh…
“Apollo 13” –Jaquandor

8. My story begins in London, not so very long ago. And yet so much has happened since then, that it seems more like an eternity.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians

9. I want them to stop looking to me for answers, begging me to speak again, write again, be a leader. I want them to start thinking for themselves. I want my privacy.
“Field of Dreams” – Scott

10. Do you have a special grudge against me? Do you feel a particularly strong resentment? Is there something I’ve said that’s caused this contempt, or is it just things I stand for that you despise?
The Graduate
***
For Gordon and Lefty, other Doctor Who fans, and linguists: Darleks vs Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre

ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: La Vie En Rose


Sunday evening, after I had finished watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I started watching this film. On the surface, they have some comparables. Both in French with subtitles, both with Oscar nominations, this one, deservedly, for actress Marion Cotillard, who I last saw in the previews for – but the actual film – A Good Year with Russell Crowe. Both also touch on going to a physical location of great spiritual significance, though while Diving Bell’s Bauby tends to dismiss it, it’s a more recurring theme here.

This is a more conventional biopic about chaunteuse Edith Piaf, starting off with her terrible childhood of illness and abandonment until she is literally pushed by her father to perform. Then we see the grown-up Edith move from street corner busker to the highest levels of stardom, only to be brought down by her addictions to alcohol and drugs, so that when (hardly a SPOILER ALERT) she dies at age 47, she looks about 20 years older.

The film is good, but it’s long. I started it Sunday night (saw 90 minutes) and finished it Monday morning (another 45 minutes), which is not a fair way to see it. The other problem I had is that Piaf, at times, reminded me of Judy Garland in the early 1960s, another child singer who had reached great fame but also great tragedy because of her addictions. In fact, Cotillard looks and acts at times remarkably like Judy Davis in the 2001 TV movie Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. I know this is MY hangup, but there it is.

See it for yourself and let me know what you think.

One last thing. The DVD EXTRAS involved all of less than eight minutes of Cotillard and writer/director Olivier Dahan talking about the process of getting the Piaf character; trés disappointing.

ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.


Dizzyingly claustrophobic. We’ll get back to that in a bit.

Every year for the past several, our real estate agent has sent out a card to allow his patrons to watch a free movie at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany on a weekend near Valentine’s Day. That opportunity came up this past Sunday, and we took advantage, inviting a couple from church to the movies; he allows for up to six free passes to be used, plus $3 off per person at the concession stand on a $5 purchase. Unfortunately, one of our church friends, who we’d seen only an hour earlier, fell ill, so I called one of my work friends, and she called one of our former workmates, Maureen, and we all rendezvoused at the cinema. We had a babysitter for Lydia.

I was looking forward to seeing director Julian Schnabel’s Le scaphandre et le papillon, a French film with English subtitles, for a couple reasons. One was that many said that Jean-Dominique Bauby’s novel based on his real-life experience of living in an almost totally paralyzed body, save for his left eye, was unfilmable, so I was curious what kind of screenplay Ronald Harwood could come up with. Mostly I was wondering how Schnabel, whose previous films Before Night Falls (2000) and Basquiat (1996) I had enjoyed, would tackle the story.

The first 10 minutes (15? 20? I wasn’t looking at a watch) was from inside Bauby’s left eye. It was blurry and narrow in scope, dizzyingly claustrophobic, as I said. If people got vertigo from seeing Cloverfield (which I have not seen), I can imagine they might also get the feeling here. Yet, as the perspective changes, as Bauby’s sense about his captivity changes, one starts feeling for the people around him, including his family, and even for Bauby himself, the Elle magazine editor who was a bit of of a lothario. I laughed out loud when he realized how beautiful his therapists were and how he was totally incapable of hitting on them, for instance.

As Bauby decides to write his book, using only that left eye, I was reminded of a comment in Salon magazine that said, in essence, that the movie has turned writer’s block into a very lousy excuse. One suggestion, however; don’t use your rudimentary high school French to try to figure out the words Bauby is trying to say, since the performers are spelling out the words in French, while the screen is spelling them out in English. Just go with the flow of the film.

Schnabel’s directing Oscar nomination is well deserved. Recommended.
ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: No End In Sight


I believe I’ve been quite clear in my long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq. Yet, I also believed that if we were to go to war, we ought not have gone understaffed, based on everything I had read at the time. This documentary written and directed by Charles Ferguson, and narrated by Campbell Scott, lays out the case that the failure of the United States military policy after the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, far from being unforeseen, was utterly predictable. And there were high-ranking officials, many with military experience, telling the Bush administration that they were doing the occupation all wrong. These people included former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador to Iraq Barbara Bodine, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and, most notably, General Jay Garner, who was in charge of occupation of Iraq through May 2003.

No End In Sight, which I watched on DVD last week, lays out in painful detail the three main problems that took place. One was the failure by the US to provide security because they were understaffed when the looting of museums and other national treasures took place. The de-Ba’athification of Iraq showed serious loss of of the professional class, most of whom joined the Ba’ath party pretty much for the same reason managers joined the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, because that’s how to get and keep a job, not out of any ideological affinity. But perhaps the greatest blunder was to dismiss the Iraqi army; when the invading US Armed Forces told the army to go home, it did, but the entity, which predates the creation of the country of Iraq, was waiting for requests from the Americans to help rebuild Iraq, a call that failed to come. Thus, one created a situation with bunch of unemployed, angry people with guns that helped fuel the insurgency.

You may seethe to hear Donald Rumsfeld’s various pronouncements, one of which, early on, was that there WAS no insurgency. Many of these inept decisions were carried out by Paul Bremer, but it is not clear whether they were his initiatives, or that he was merely carrying out the wishes of chickenhawks such as Rummy, Dick Cheney, Paul Wofowitz and Doug Feith.

Ferguson filmed over 200 hours, and many of the extended interviews show up in the DVD extras, probably longer than the actual film.

However you feel about the Iraq war, its justification, or how it needs to be handled now, there’s little doubt that when you see this film, you’ll wonder how such early blunders were made, leading to many unnecessary Iraqi civilian and US military deaths.

ROG

ROG
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