The Number of Nominees for Best Picture is Too Damn High

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As the title implies, I don’t like this new thing where they nominate a slew of movies for Best Picture.  It makes it harder to watch them all, and a few undeserving movies always sneak in.  I think this is a conspiracy by Hollywood to put more “Nominated for Best Picture!” stickers on DVDs that no one is buying anymore anyway.

Because I am a passionate movie fan, I did see all nine of the films that are nominated for Best Picture this year.  Hear are my thoughts on each:

Gwyneth Paltrow is crying because I have so many goddamn movies to write about.

The Artist - This film was a lot more entertaining than I thought it would be.  That it’s a silent black and white movie is a novelty, and the charm doesn’t wear off, probably because it’s not too long.  The two leads do a lovely job of overacting, and I’m glad they aren’t well-known actors.  Every time John Goodman was on the screen it reminded me that I was watching a movie made in 2011 and not one made in the 1920s.  While it was a good movie and deserves inclusion on the list, I don’t think it should be Best Picture.  It’s too gimmicky.

The Descendants - I did not enjoy this movie at all.  I like George Clooney, but he can’t carry a film for me.  I love him in Up in the Air, but he had the lovely Anna Kendrick by his side.  Ides of March was amazing, but you can’t lose with Gosling standing next to you.  This movie tried really hard to make me care about the characters, but all I could think was, “this is just a bunch of rich white people problems.”  Also the daughter’s boyfriend, who I guess was supposed to be comic relief, was annoying and a pointless addition to the cast.  I don’t think this should have been nominated for Best Picture at all.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - This film got me.  I will admit that it totally swept me away.  I don’t understand the mixed reviews for it–I think that Thomas Horn did an amazing job and Sandra Bullock made me cry twice.  The story was completely compelling and I didn’t even notice that it was over two hours long.  The film is a love letter to New York and its residents.  It would absolutely be in my top five for Best Picture.

The Help - I don’t even know why this movie is on the list.  It’s a feel-good chick flick based on a feel-good chick lit novel.  I loved the book.  I enjoyed the movie.  I think Viola Davis deserves her nomination for Best Actress and I am in love with Emma Stone.  But this is not a Best Picture caliber movie.  It doesn’t really confront the race issues that were at the core of the book.  This movie feels like pink lemonade and bubble gum, designed to give you a warm fuzzy feeling when you leave the theater, but with no real weight behind it.  When I think about a movie that tackles racial issues that would deserve to be nominated for Best Picture, I think about American History X or Mississippi Burning.  This isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a serious movie.

Hugo - Based on a Caldecott medal-winning children’s book, Hugo is a beautiful film about a boy who lives in a train station in Paris.  I saw it in 3-D, although I don’t think that added even a little to the experience.  In fact, I think it detracted some as all of Hugo’s running and jumping and sliding caused me to feel motion sick at a couple of points.  It’s a sweet movie with a lot of heart, stunning visuals, and excellent performances by the entire cast.  While it’s definitely worth a watch, with or without your kids, I would not include it on a Best Picture short list.

Midnight in Paris - I’m a latecomer to the Woody Allen party, and I’m pretty happy about that.  I haven’t seen Annie Hall (although I know I should have) and I tried to watch Sleeper and did not enjoy it at all.  However, I very much enjoyed both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris.  While I don’t like Rachel McAdams at all, she’s hardly in the film, which is carried by the lovable Owen Wilson and sexy Marion Cotillard.  I’m probably biased as both an English major and a lover of French (and particularly Parisian) history, but I think this is a wonderful film.  It’s funny and smart and deserves to be nominated for Best Picture.

Moneyball - Any movie that can make me care about baseball without making me feel blatantly emotionally manipulated deserves to be nominated for Best Picture.  I know that, at the core, sports movies are about people and about rooting for the underdog, but Moneyball managed to draw me in intellectually as well as emotionally.  This movie made me want to read a book about baseball, made me like Jonah Hill again, and gave me some Brad Pitt eye candy.  That’s pretty much the definition of a successful film for me.

Now Halle Berry is crying. Great job, Academy.

The Tree of Life - Tree of Life is over-artsy and pretentious, and if it wasn’t for Moneyball, I would think that it had only been nominated to ensure that Brad and Angelina were at the award show for the cameras.  I think that Tree of Life could have been a good movie if it was at least half an hour shorter and they cut out all of the Discovery channel-style beauty shots.  As it was, I found it to be a jumbled mess.  If the Academy wanted to nominate something avant-garde, I think that Melancholia would have been a better choice.

War Horse - This is a stunning, epic movie and I cried four times.  I didn’t expect much going into it–I actually only went as a favor to a friend.  I thought that it was going to be a movie about war (which I don’t usually enjoy) and probably a horse that takes a whole lot of abuse (which I can hardly watch).  And while both of those statements turned out to be true, the movie was beautiful and compelling and unapologetically sentimental.  It’s a movie about war, but also about love and family and being human and making mistakes.  It’s about what brings us together as people.  If I had to pick, I would choose War Horse  for Best Picture.

If you’re mad that this was so long you can blame the stupid Academy for nominating nine films.  I still can’t believe that some of the best movies of last year (most notably 50/50, Drive, and Beginners) were not included on this list while The Help and The Descendants made the cut.  Don’t even get me started on how I don’t like Billy Crystal and Gosling got left off of every list.  I’d write three more paragraphs and have to find another picture of an actress crying.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular inspector gets a 21st century remake.

Spoilers ho!

What does Sherlock Holmes mean to Guy Ritchie?  Meditations in bullet-time, lens filters, gratuitous violence, frenetic pacing.  He injects into Victorian England a street hoodlum sensibility that suits the fog-veiled grimy London of old, but his writers work with a tin ear for Arthur Conan Doyle.  Signature Doyle quotes are trotted out to remind us that we are indeed watching a film about Sherlock Holmes, but beyond that the plot is a muddle and the dialogue—written by relative newcomers Kieran and Michele Mulroney—seems a lackluster approximation of what Yanks think clever Brits sound like.  A compositional equivalent to Dick Van Dyke’s infamous butchering of the Cockney dialect in “Mary Poppins.”

Robert Downey, Jr., ever-amusing and charismatic, delivers another droll performance as Holmes, yet there is little else to him than a collection of quirks and pithy phrases.  The first installment of the franchise focused on the developing bro-mance of Holmes and Jude Law’s Dr. Watson and this sequel extends their rocky relationship, but only after ridding them of the poor females in their lives.  In a wild diversion from Holmes canon, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is done off fairly early in the film—this should be no small feat given that Adler is the only adversary to best Holmes, but the scene is dull and the method is predictable.  Adler’s death is meant to signal that Holmes’ new adversary, the nefarious Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris), means business.

Soon Holmes and Watson are entangled in Moriarty’s plans and must escape or thwart numerous murder attempts.  We, the audience, are assured of Moriarty’s genius but not shown his vaunted intellectual prowess in action; he can play chess, he’s a professor, he has a British accent and speaks with proper grammar but beyond that his plans for dominion amount to little else than his attempt to become an arms merchant and war profiteer.  How is this genius?

I would have rather been watching a film with Fry as Mycroft. Written by Steve Moffat and directed by David Yates.

Stephen Fry is a welcome distraction as the shrewd and proud Mycroft Holmes, older (and smarter) brother of Sherlock.  There are a few weak attempts by the writers to amp up the quirk factor by reinterpreting Mycroft as a gay nudist who is attended by a doddering servant; it initially makes for an amusing scene but my mirth soured at its idiosyncrasy.  It seemed a flimsy ploy for cheap laughs.  Yet I found myself more appealed by the idea of a film with Fry as Mycroft than with the celluloid Sturm und Drang unravelling before me.

It’s a fair action film and is otherwise a suitable distraction.  Though I’ve come to dislike the theater experience, I didn’t regret seeing it on the big screen.  I say rent the thing on DVD.

Grade: C+

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked

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Sometimes you just get stuck with things. You can bob and weave all you like, but every so often you just have to gonad-up and take what’s coming to you. This happened to me last weekend. My eight year old son took his first Taekwando test, and instead of accepting a celebratory milkshake afterwards he informed me that he’d rather go see “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked.” Later that evening, his gerbil died. Under those circumstances I think even Hitler would have said, “Ok, fine. Let’s go see the goddamned Chipmunk movie.”

So it started pretty much like I’d expected, except there are six Chipmunks (the original three and three chick-munks). All six of the vermin and Jason Lee get on a cruise ship, where they meet David Cross (who spends the entire movie in some kind of duck costume). Then I nodded off for a while. When I awoke, everybody was on some kind of desert island. I don’t know what happened exactly, but the gist of it was that Alvin pulled some shit and everybody else suffered as a result. (Wait- was that a spoiler? That’s probably something that was in the trailer, right? Besides – the fucking movie is subtitled “Chipwrecked”, so you do the math.) On the island they meet Jenny Slate, who is actually pretty funny IRL but in this movie plays a surprisingly hygienic castaway who keeps making references to Tom Hanks’ “Castaway.” (I’m sure none of the kids in the theater had seen the previous movie, so I guess that was a little Easter egg for the parents in the audience. Thanks for the hilarity, Chipmunk Movie People.) Jenny Slate has been on the island for a while so she’s developed an impressive infrastructure which includes the installation of a pretty advanced zipline through the jungle. (This part I actually enjoyed – see, there are ziplines in the new Assassin’s Creed and every time I use them I like to shout, “Zipline, motherfucker!!” as I sail through the air. As Alvin zipped along, I imagined him yelling, “Zipline, motherfucker!” in his crazy high-pitched chipmunk voice and for a moment I didn’t mind being there.)

Not long after that I dozed off again. I woke up as the group was escaping the island (Oh, is that a spoiler? The fact that there was not a grotesque death scene in a fucking Chipmunk movie?) and somehow they paddled a raft to a destination that allowed the rodents to perform at an award show.
This movie taught me the following things:

  1. David Cross, Jason Lee, and Jenny Slate are all talented, funny people, but even talented, funny people gotta pay the bills
  2. I’m getting super good at napping as I get older
  3. I can probably make an Assassin’s Creed reference in ANY movie review.

Five quick reviews because it’s December and everybody’s busy

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I was out of town for a while, but now I’m back and ready to see some goddamn movies.  I’ve managed to see three movies in the past four days, so it’s time to do some quick reviews of films I’ve seen recently.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - I saw this one about a month ago and just didn’t have enough to say about it for a longer blog.  It was good and I enjoyed it.  There was an underlying thread of tension running throughout the movie that kept me engaged–just a constant sense that something terrible was about to happen.  It is extremely well acted.  If you saw Winter’s Bone, then you know that John Hawkes is amazing at portraying a character with violence simmering just below the surface, and he brings that same intensity and feeling of menace to this film.  It’s not a comfortable movie to watch, but it is excellent.

Immortals (3-D) - I will admit that I wasn’t particularly excited about this one because it’s just not my kind of movie.  I’m not a big fan of crazy stylized violence.  I can say that it was pretty.  It was very, very pretty.  But other than that I didn’t find much to enjoy.  Oh, except for Freida Pinto, who is also very, very pretty.  And if you’re going to see it, see it in 3-D.

The Muppets - I wanted to like this movie.  I have some Muppets nostalgia and I really enjoy both Jason Segel and Amy Adams.  Parts of it were wonderful and felt like the old muppet magic.  Sadly, I found it to be really uneven and some moments were yawn-worthy or just plain cringe-inducing.  They pulled it back around for me when Kermit started singing “The Rainbow Connection,” but I’m afraid that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this one.  Maybe wait and see it on DVD.

The Descendants - Perhaps I just wasn’t in the right head space to watch this one because I think it’s going to get some Oscar love and at least one person that I saw it with cried quite a bit, but I wasn’t feeling it.  George Clooney is an amazing actor, but I couldn’t connect with his character, or with either of the daughters.  I can’t put my finger on anything that was wrong with this movie exactly.  The pacing was good, the story was compelling, and the setting was beautiful.  Still, it left me feeling empty when I could tell that its intention was to move me to emotion.

Melancholia - This is a beautiful artsy movie.  Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg both do a great job and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of them get an Oscar nod.  The opening sequence is gorgeous, if a little long.  In fact, that would be my only complaint about this film–I felt like it was about twenty or thirty minutes too long.  Part of that is that it tells two distinct stories, and it tells them both well, but it’s a lot of material for one movie.  The character development is deep and rich, and the portrait of a woman who is deeply disturbed feels so realistic.  I enjoyed this one and it’s definitely a film that should be seen in the theater.  I just don’t think it would have the same sweeping, epic beauty on the small screen.

I’ll probably see at least one more movie in the next week (Young Adult is the most likely, although I’d like to see Into the Abyss as well), so keep an eye out for more reviews!

Twilight: The Nightmare is Almost Over

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I saw The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1.  Clearly I will go to extreme lengths for this blog.  (Actually I saw it for a friend.  Thanks a lot, Libby!)  I have seen every one of these movies so far, although I only read the first book.

First, a few trailer mentions.  Snow White and the Huntsman actually looks pretty good–or, at least, pretty.  And I am trying not to watch the trailer for The Hunger Games because I want to go into that movie and see everything for the first time.  Tonight was the first time I had to cover my eyes to avoid it–let’s see how many more times I have to do that before March!

I have several points to cover, so let’s just jump right in.  The short version, if you’re just waiting with bated breath, is that it was terrible.

Look! She can be kinda moody. How come she's not Bella Swan?

I always forget that Anna Kendrick is involved in this mess until she appears on screen.  Needless to say, the five minutes in which she appeared were the highlight of the film.  She managed to be cuter, funnier, and have more personality in that five minutes than Kristen Stewart displayed in the rest of this film.  Please put Anna Kendrick in more movies, Hollywood.

The music in this movie was awful.  Not the songs, necessarily–there were a few songs that seemed like they could stand okay on their own.  But the music was extra super dramatic pretty much constantly.  I rarely even notice the music in a movie, but this score was so bad that it drew my attention.  Or it could just be that I was so bored with what I was seeing that I was listening extra hard.

The only kind thing I can say about Kristen Stewart is that she provided a nice body on which to drape a gorgeous wedding dress.  Look, I actually liked Kristen Stewart in Adventureland.  I think there are roles in which her acting thing can work okay.  I just don’t think Bella Swan is one of them.  As blank of a character as she is, K-Stew somehow manages to make her blander.  Less interesting.  I’m not sure how that’s even possible.  Robert Pattinson is the same way.  It truly might be the material that they’re given.  But I have a hard time picturing Stewart and Pattinson dating in real life, because they have no chemistry.  Once in a while I catch a spark when he looks at her, but it’s like it’s bouncing off of a piece of wood.  Lautner, although he kind of looks like a llama, actually does get a good smolder going when he looks at her, but again, she’s giving back less than nothing.  Not a single caught breath, secret smile, or flirty eyelashes.  Nothing.  Mostly just the jutting chin and awkward eye-averting that she does the rest of the time.  For a teenager whose hormones are supposed to be raging, she’s doing a good job of keeping that shit under wraps.

There is a point in this movie in which Kristen Stewart looks super anorexic.  I know that there’s a plot-driven reason, blah blah, but K-Stew is already skinny.  She almost looks anorexic at the beginning of the movie, and then she loses like twenty pounds.  They don’t do it in a way that glorifies it, exactly, but I just don’t think that you should project a picture of a girl looking that skinny in a movie that a grip of America’s teenage girls are going to see.

I believe anorexics call this "thinspiration."

Also the woman who plays Rosalie is super gorgeous from pictures that I’ve seen, but she always looks like a drag queen in these movies.  I think they’re doing something wrong with her makeup.

In summary, this movie was a hot mess.  I won’t even get into the CGI and bad dialogue (“I’ll see you at the altar.”  ”I’ll be the one in white.”) and things.  I can’t speculate as to whether or not the teenage girls that Todd was flirting with before Three Musketeers would think that they “ruined it.”  I have very little respect for the source material–it could be an improvement.

Heh. This Movie Totally Says “Puss” All The Time.

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How those of you without children will most likely experience Puss in Boots

I like my kids, all things considered. They’re getting old enough where they’re starting to become interesting people – people I like to hang around with, and people I look forward to seeing. Sure, there are times when parenting is tough and I’d rather go to a restaurant that has actual silverware or do something grown-up instead of whatever kid bullshit they’ve picked out, but that comes with the territory. The best you can do is to try to find activities that all of you can enjoy together in hopes that you’ll be brought closer and, when the time comes, they’ll stick you in a high-dollar nursing home that overmedicates instead of a crappy Medicare tenement.

Watching “Puss in Boots” turns out to be one of those enjoyable activities. It’s a no-shit “Fun for the Whole Family” movie, unlike some of the total turds I’ve had to sit through in my day. Of course, this is a kids’ movie, so don’t expect to have your notions of “what character can accomplish in film” challenged. Still, I enjoyed watching it, and I never once thought, “Oh well – maybe I can take a quick nap while I’m here.”

Puss in Boots is a prequel/origin story for the PiB character from the Shrek movies, and like the early Shrek movies they do a good job of actually creating characters with motivations and personalities. The main characters (voiced by Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, and Zach Galifianakis) were all good choices – they’re recognizable, but not conspicuously so and they do a good job of making sure the dialog doesn’t get lost behind the animation. I saw the 3D version, and fine – go ahead and hate on 3D and hate on the glasses and hate on how it isn’t “necessary,” but then go fuck yourself. I enjoyed it. There were a number of really inventive action scenes that were made much more immersive by the 3D.

She's in this movie, so posting a photo of her isn't at all gratuitous.

It’s not a perfect movie. There are some points where the story stumbles a bit and commits the sin of twisting the plot so that previous events no longer make sense, but they weren’t too jarring. There were a couple of nice throw-away jokes for the grown-ups (like Puss explaining that his bottle of catnip is “for my glaucoma”) and whenever Kitty Softpaws speaks you can always spend some time reflecting on how ridicuhawt Salma Hayek is. I’d say that this movie is definitely worth seeing in the theaters if you have kids, and probably worth renting at home if you’re into that sort of thing.

I was hoping they’d play “Time After Time” over the credits

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Before I saw In Time yesterday, I’d seen enough previews to be tired of it.  The ads were everywhere I looked for months.  If you told me a year ago that I’d be tired of looking at Justin Timberlake’s face at any point in time, I’d have laughed at you, but the incessant previews almost took me to a dark place.  Fortunately the movie is out, the trailers have subsided somewhat, and Timberlake is back in my good graces, because I enjoyed this movie quite a bit.

They're not exactly sneakers is all I'm saying.

After reading reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I had lowered expectations.  But Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried are both good, as are almost all of the minor characters, and the actors carry this movie.  It’s also a lot of fun, if you have a large capacity for suspending disbelief.  I did have to stop myself from trying to keep up with every addition and subtraction of time.  And a lot of this movie is just plain impossible.  There is no way that she is doing all that running in those heels.  Stuff like that.  But if you’re willing to look past those small (and sometimes huge) things, it’s an entertaining popcorn ball of a movie.

There are definitely places where In Time is too heavy-handed and predictable.  Also it feels like there is a whole lot of back story that they never get around to explaining and loose ends that aren’t resolved.  I left the movie feeling like I wanted to read the book to more fully understand what was going on, but, of course, there is no book.  However, bonus trivia: noted sci-fi author Harlan Ellison sued the production because he thought the movie was too similar to his short story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.”  So if you enjoy this film, you may want to give that a read.

What does Timberlake have in that box? Probably time.

I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this film.  I liked it and I’m glad I saw it, but it’s mostly a fun, fluffy action movie without quite as much heart as it aspires to.  I like the actors, it moved at a good pace, and it had a few surprises for me.  If you like futuristic thrillers starring pretty boys who managed to successfully transition from boy band to silver screen, go see it.

50/50 Chance That I Will Cry During This Movie

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The title of this post is a lie.  I have seen 50/50 twice now, and I cried both times.  So there is a 100% chance that I will cry during this movie.  That’s just math.

I was a little skeptical about this movie–it’s about cancer?  And Seth Rogan is in it?  And you’re telling me that it’s going to be funny?  Look, I saw Funny People.  All signs pointed to me hating this movie.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt provided a ray of hope, but I knew from the poster that he was going to shave his beautiful hair.  Really, I had very low expectations going into this movie.

And it’s wonderful.  The first time I saw it was the same day I saw Ides of March–that film was excellent and it had Ryan Gosling in it.  And I still came to the conclusion that 50/50 is the better film.  Only slightly, but it truly is very good.  See it.  (But see Ides of March, too.)

Here is my only complaint about this movie, and it happens in the opening scene.  JGL and Bryce Dallas Howard are talking and she is brushing her teeth.  Only there is no toothpaste in her mouth.  This makes me irrationally angry because it’s small things like this that can distract you and pull you out of a movie.  In real life you can certainly talk while brushing your teeth, but you need to spit or toothpaste suds are going to come out of your mouth.

One of these mouths contains toothpaste. See if you can spot which one!

At one point she even refers to the toothpaste in her mouth. Which is obviously not present.  It’s such an easy thing to fix!

This is, of course, a tiny, stupid complaint.  And it is my only one about this movie, which I found to otherwise be pretty much perfect.  Seth Rogan was funny.  JGL was adorable with his shaved head.  It was like a Christmas miracle.  I cannot recommend it enough.

It Kinda Needed More Muskets

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I’m always a little bit worried when I see the preview for a shitty movie. Movie studios do all sorts of research and they figure if you’re already in the theater to see Movie X, you’re probably the kind of person who would like Movie Y. When Movie Y is an obvious turd, though, that tells me that I may have made a serious error when I decided to see Movie X.

Movie Y, in this case, was the next fucking Twilight movie. I’ll cut you some slack for watching the Henry Potter movies, because at least those seem to be creative, but if you’re a grown-ass adult and you’re into Twilight I’m judging you. This latest movie is called “Twilight: Late Mid-Morning Before Brunch” or something and it features that insufferable girl getting married to that vampire guy, after which they bone down and she gets knocked up. What to hate first? The trailer made it look like she got preggers on her wedding night, so I guess it’s laudable that she saved herself for marriage BEFORE SHE FUCKED A CORPSE. Then it turns out that corpse-fucking is bad for you because your vampire babby drinks the blood or something, but also because that kid from Shark Boy and Lava Girl shows up and then some cgi wolves roll in and everything goes to slo-mo, which means that the movie goes even longer than it otherwise would. I almost snapped when I heard the teenaged girl behind me say, “I almost don’t want to see it because I’m afraid they’ll ruin it!”

But I wasn’t there for Shitty Movie Y, I was there for Shitty Movie X: The Three Musketeers. I didn’t expect the movie to be especially good, but the trailer showed a bunch of sweet steampunky stuff going down in Venice and it featured Leeloo Dallas and Titus Pullo to boot. What’s not to like? As Kim Kardashian has shown us, just because something’s stupid doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to look at. I wasn’t disappointed, either.

No, this isn't a sweet Venice-based action sequence from "The Three Musketeers," but wouldn't it be awesome if it was??

Sure, you have to have a few suspensions of disbelief. There are no legal ramifications for murdering 50 of the Cardinal’s guards in a sprawling street battle in the middle of Paris. Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions would all *totally* have worked if only somebody would have built them. Practicing swordfighting with your aged dad in the country totally prepares you for swordfights with seasoned veterans. Fortunately, I’m a huge fan of Assassin’s Creed so all of these things seemed completely plausible. I just smiled and nodded through all of the implausible, anachronistic action and enjoyed a fair amount of it. That turned out to be the right way to approach this movie, because the script – well, the script was one of those things that left you asking, “Really, Hollywood? A hundred million dollars and this was the best you could slap together?” For example, Milla Jovovich’s character was named “Milady.” I’m not talking about how she was addressed – I’m talking about her actual name. Also, the movie really felt like a sequel. Character development was limited to introducing the main characters during an opening montage. It was clear who the good guys were (hint: they’re Musketeers) but we were never really shown why we should care about them. They were just presented like they were characters we should all already know and love, and they just kind of went from there.

So if you want a true “Three Musketeers” experience, you may have to crack a book. If you just want to see some cool effects and swordfights on the roof of Notre Dame, then rent this movie.