The Oscars

I watched the Academy Awards from a Miami hotel room without internet access. These things happen. I am ready, however, to make my predictions. I know it’s unexpected, but I’m really thinking that Marion Cotillard can pull off an upset. And probably Tilda Swinton, too. You heard it here first.

Actually, the Academy did a good job this year. No Country actually was the best picture. When was the last time that the movie which deserved to be nominated and to win actually did? The Godfather Part II? One could make the case for The Departed last year, but that was essentially a make-up call for denying Scorsese repeatedly in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It’s hard, too, to dispute the acting choices. Daniel Day-Lewis is, well, Daniel Day-Lewis (or as my coworker watching with me called him: “Who?”), and Javier Bardem deserved to win the Best Supporting Actor Presented by SuperCuts Award.

As for the actress awards, I can’t really say if they are deserved as I do not believe women should be allowed to work. I am, after all, a freedom-hating Communist (as are Jon and Steve). If I was forced to comment, though, I would say that Tilda Swinton has been among the most underrated actresses around. From Thumbsucker to The Chronicles of Narnia she has had a knack for picking great characters. Her work in Michael Clayton was a highly original take on a character that most actresses would have played as a two-dimensional stereotypical “bitchy boss”.

Jon, any comments on the art direction and/or sound editing awards?

Oscars Live

Stay tuned for minute-by-minute blog entries for the Academy Awards, starting at 8:00 EST Sunday night.

The Top 10 of 29

Every year I make an effort to see 1-2 movies per week in the theater. Most years I fail. 2005-2006 in Scotland was the exception. On rainy afternoons, we chose from the slates of one multiplex and two art houses, all within walking distance, washing down our haggis and chips with buttery popcorn. After all the student discounts, it cost us on average about $4.00 per show. While there is no shortage of good theaters in DC, I also have a job and adult prices to pay. Thus, of the 306 Oscar-eligible films for the 2007 year, I managed to see only 29. A few I did not realize were Oscar-eligible, as they came out in Europe the prior year. These boosted my overall total. However, I did not realize that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s double-feature, Grindhouse, was meant to be seen in its entirety as Netflix divvies them out separately. Thus, I’ve only seen the Rodriguez portion, Planet Terror. Jon–I think it’s still pretty fun even on a 16-inch Mac screen, but I don’t think it was going to make my top-ten. Here, in alphabetic order is the list of films I actually caught in their entirety:

Mind the Gap: 2007 in review

2007, while one of the world-beating years of all time for music, was very divided between the excellent and the egregious, film-wise. On one hand, 2006 produced only one truly great film, Children of Men, but this year we received a few instant classics, the kinds of films that leave a legacy (There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men). On the other hand, we also accumulated a bunch of trash (The Nanny Diaries, Beowulf). On one hand, it was a literary banner year in cinema: three of my top five films were adaptations; two from great novels, one from the Good Book. On the other, 2007 continued pummeling us with lowest common denominator remakes and sequels, which remains the greatest threat to America that Homeland Security has yet to focus on.

My perception could be colored by the fact that I watched more movies on airplanes and in hotel rooms than I ever had before. When some of your most recent film-going experiences deal with wondering “Should I watch Stardust for the 3rd time, or stop at 2?” you know that the ability to actually choose the movies you’re most interested in seeing has been taken away from you.

In my eyes, there’s a very clear dividing line between my Top 5 favorite films and films 6-10 (and then all the rest of the 32 movies that I saw from January to December). Actually, I’m including 10 of them just because it seems important to get to 10 in a Top 10 list.

No, screw it. Here’s my Top 8.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

My friend has a theory about the career trajectories of auteur directors–a pattern to their outright successes and brilliant failures; a line of best fit for wunderkinds if you will. Their first film shows their promise, but is ultimately messy or too close to a rote genre exercise. They follow that with a bold expression of their talent onto celluloid–oftentimes their early masterpiece. Emboldened by this success, they overextend themselves in their third film and create something of a monster, from which they learn some important lessons before continuing on with their careers. Map Soderbergh, Aronofsky, or any Anderson to this and you certainly wind up with some interesting points/fodder for arguments; hey, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday night. I’m not saying I completely agree, but this does come from the only person I know with an Academy vote, so maybe it’s worth more than I give it credit.

I’d like to extend this theory into the later years of a director’s career, at the point when the director corrals all of his hobby horses into one pen, trying to tame them for one more ride. This results in their “late masterpiece” even if its more a distillation than a leap forward. Looking at the critical reactions toward this year’s eventual Best Picture, No Country For Old Men (and earlier, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive), I feel like I’m on to something here. Maybe that makes me like the scientists who discovered Neptune–not by actually seeing it, but by seeing the reactions of things around it–but if so, I’m in good company.

No Country For Old Men takes its themes, tone, and sometimes even its scenes from the Coen Brothers’ back catalog, to the extent that it sometimes feels like a K-Tel Greatest Hits compilation. Even so, the elements are compiled with such a deft touch and soldered together with such delicious tension that the film stands head and shoulders above anything the Coens have released since the 90s.

The Birth of a…Blog

Back in college I was fortunate enough to have a good friend, Jon McNeill, serve as a film columnist for the powerful The Collegian, Willamette University’s finest–and only–newspaper. This meant that not only did I have the pleasure of reading Jon’s commentary on the state of 21st-century cinema, but I also occasionally could disagree with him on the merits of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Crossroads. My friendship with Jon proved particularly fruitful when his cowriter in crime, the inimitable Steve Duman, suffered the authorial equivalent of pulling a hamstring and remained sidelined in Europe for the Spring 2003 semester. I was called up from the minor leagues for a cup of coffee. January through May is not exactly a haven for Oscar-fare, but Jon and I had fun traipsing to such delights as Cradle 2 the Grave, Willard and Identity. The Collegian’s mailboxes were filled with angry mail when we panned The Pianist after catching it on its second run through art houses. Actually, there was just one piece of angry mail, but the editors had the kindness to run it so as to prove that we had a reader. It probably came from Steve. 

Steve, Jon and I love film because we are creators ourselves. Jon and Steve wrote and directed a mind-bending double-feature their senior year, while I got hooked into a friend’s project, which I think was a documentary about cursing. We shot the bull on Truffaut and Godard in film class before retreating to our rooms to write essays arguing that Jules et Jim, not Breathless, marked the beginning of “The French New Wave” (which is, of course, the kind of mad thing a college-level cinephile would argue).

I miss those times and–because my film education has continued since college–I don’t see any reason why we can’t have them again. Thus, Jon, Steve and I decided to start a blog (which may at some point become a website and then a network pilot before finding its way to the silver screen entitled Three Men and a Film Blog) to discuss films both past and present. The premise was simple: we would decide on a movie to see, go see it, and discuss it. However, Steve’s old hamstring injury flared up again, and he e-mailed us from Europe in between sips of tea while doing his taxes to inform us that, Hey, the movies here are different. We will push on anyway, altering the format to fit the constraints. A good place to start, as this is award season, is with each of our top-ten lists.

Since this blog is not entitled “Film Autocracy” or “Cinema Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, it’s worth noting that your opinion counts for something but that not all opinions are equal. If you liked Glitter, please move along. Comment, discuss, disagree with us. We’re trying to learn something from Film School.

-jb