Those Left Behind IV: The Ignored Actors and Actresses (pt. 2)

Mark Harris already said everything I could've said about the insanity happening in the Best Animation category (though he has the gall to refer to Wallace and Gromit as an inferior award winner, a position I cannot support), and a simple Google search will lead you to hundreds of articles deriding the Academy's bizarre decision to ignore yet another Steve James documentary, as well as Senna, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Buck, Into The Abyss, Being Elmo, Page One: Inside The New York Times, Project Nim, and Joan Rivers: Piece of Work - or, every documentary that garnered any praise or attention this year. I'm beginning to feel like the voters for this category are some breed of hipster documentary snobs: they only like movie's that aren't too mainstream (because Werner Herzog's 3-D study of caves was totally inescapable this year). 

Every other category evokes little to no anger - somewhere out there, someone's horrified by Super 8's snub in sound editing, but that person is not me. So I'm gonna finish my review of the Oscar nominations with one last look at the acting categories.

Best Supporting Actor and Actress
I've already talked about Best Supporting Actress once, and I simply can’t summon any anger for the rejected potential nominees. Frankly, I can’t even really think of any. I should have done this piece sooner. Sandra Bullock, I guess? Oh, Shailene Woodley.

Woodley’s an intriguing subject. She’s so very good in The Descendants, yet until now she’s been best known for the ABC Family show she’s on, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” a show she’s supposedly not very good on.

What, you expected me to watch the show in order to write this review? That’s ridiculous. I don’t get paid for this. Who would put themselves through such an affair for no reason?

Oh, that’s right, me. Challenge accepted!

…alright, hunting for it on OnDemand… pulling it up… and… here we go.

(fourteen minutes later) …and I’m back. That’s all I can take, guys. This show is awful. 

It’s everything I don’t like about scripted television – bad, flat lighting, hastily delivered lines, several unconnected storylines running along from episode to episode without resolution, all the action happening in a series of close-ups to hide the shoddiness of the sets (unsuccessfully). There are ways to sell a show on a tiny budget so it doesn’t look cheap. This show doesn’t do any of them.

All the acting is bad, but there’s varying levels of badness to it – there are bad actors who can’t do any better, and there’s good actors who aren’t being the opportunity to do better work. And of those, Woodley looks like the best of the lot. I mean, Molly Ringwald’s in this show too, and while it’s been a long time since Sixteen Candles, she’s doing pretty lousy work here.

Woodley’s taken some offhand shots at the show during her interviews for The Descendants, mostly in a “no offense, but working on ABC Family is not like working with Alexander Payne and George Clooney” sort of way. The show’s creator, Brenda Hampton, pretended not to notice and insisted that “doing that film was a very good thing for her and for us. She brought what she learned back.” Early prediction: Woodley lands a bigger role in a big film sooner rather than later, her star starts to rise, and she departs the show in a year or two. No one stays on ABC Family if they can’t help it, with the possible exception of Melissa Joan Hart.

For Best Supporting Actor, the obvious complaint would be Albert Brooks for Drive, since he’d managed to win about 40% of the supporting actor trophies that were handed out before getting ignored by the Academy. There’s no way he would have beaten Christopher Plummer next Sunday (a respected elderly actor playing a dying gay father? Who could top that?), and Brooks seems to be taking it pretty well, so it’s just one less tuxedo rental for him, I guess.

As to those people who kept harping on Andy Serkis’ being ignored for playing the digital version of Caesar, the ape in Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Let it go. Sure, playing a role like that looks awfully tough, but when has the Academy ever nominated an acting performance from a prequel to a reboot? Annoyed the Academy doesn’t respect motion capture? Of course they don’t! Who wants to give an Oscar to a guy for playing a chimp?

Mostly, these snubs are just indicative of the Academy’s stances on the movies these actors came from. Woodley not being nominated means The Descendants has no chance of winning Best Picture, if it ever did. Brooks being ignored was just one of the various ways the Academy ignored Drive (no nominations in Best Actor, Picture, or Director, either). And Serkis being ignored just means that the Academy still hates monkeys.

When you get down to it, there’s really not a whole lot that’s shocking here.

The 16th Best Movie I Saw This Year: The Lion King (In 3-D)

Whenever movie sites discuss the re-release of a movie to theaters, there’s always an audible sniff and a scathing put-down that this new release is “nothing more than a cash grab.”

Well, of course it’s a cash grab. They’re a movie studio. What else would it be? And furthermore, who cares?

Most movies walk a fine line with insolvency. They gamble on a lot of movies, most of them don’t hit, and then they’re saved by the occasional film that sells like gangbusters and makes them hordes of money. A studio like Summit Entertainment acquires the ‘Twilight’ books, makes a two and a half billion dollars off of them, and gets purchased by Lionsgate this month. A studio like MGM has a century of success, then makes a couple bad calls in a row, finds itself two and a half billion in debt, and is forced to file for bankruptcy. It’s a high-stakes game they’re playing out there.

The 3-D craze has played itself out, but there’s a new concept emerging where studios take movies that have already made hoards of money, convert them to 3-D, and release them to the public again. The Lion King was the first of the bunch, but this spring we’ve already had Beauty and the Beast, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and soon Titanic will be back in theaters. I’m assuming the pattern will continue until we get to Norbit or something.

A lot of people hate 3-D, and are diametrically opposed to this practice. I have no problem with it, for two reasons:

1. Movie studios need to make a lot of money, and this isn’t a bad way to do it. Another way they do it is by grabbing old things that I loved, like ‘Battleship’, or Alvin and The Chipmunks, and turning them into horrifying film franchises. Then those franchises advertise their terrible films with their terrible puns and terrible catchphrases and terrible poop jokes (I’m talking about the Chipmunks movies here. Battleship doesn’t have any poop jokes. I don’t think) everywhere I go, until I’m tempted to tear out my eardrums and retinas.
   
   This way is easier. They convert the film, re-release it to theaters, there’s a small, noninvasive promotional push for it showing scenes from a movie I liked, and then it’s gone again. I didn’t see Beauty and the Beast in theaters, but I’ve always liked the movie and didn’t mind watching clips of Gaston and Cogsworth pop up on my television every now and then.
2. These movies are a way to connect to my childhood. I was ten when my grandparents took me to see The Lion King. I loved it then, and seeing it again on a big screen, munching popcorn in the dark, reminded me of what I loved about it. It’s a great movie, epic and grand, and the animation is beautiful.* I imagine that if I had kids, I’d enjoy the ability to take my child out to a film of that quality and have us experience it together. When you consider how low the standards are of parents taking their children to the theater, that’s a real win.

So calm down, everyone. It’s not a desecration of your childhood to have people watch a movie you liked while wearing 3-D glasses. And anyone who thinks it is should be forced to watch both Battleship and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked, just to teach them a lesson.

*If you’re wondering why I chose to rank The Lion King, a movie I love, 16^th overall in a weak year for film: While The Lion King is a tremendous film, I enjoyed the experience of re-watching­ the film about the same as I enjoyed watching the films that surrounded it for the first time. But then, I’m not a movie re-watcher in general.

Those Left Behind III: The Ignored Actors and Actresses (pt. 1)

Well, the Oscars are a week and a half away, and still no one feels any better about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close being nominated. Last weekend, sixteen times as many people went to go see a movie that came out thirteen years ago. Hugo, The Descendants, and The Artist – all of whom were released in November – all did better. Whatever vague chances that movie had at any Oscars have now faded entirely. Sorry, Max Von Sydow.

I don’t know why I keep picking on this movie. I haven’t even seen it.

Since I spent a whole post talking about the movies passed over for Best Picture, and another whole post talking about those snubbed for Best Song, I guess I’ll have to move a little faster, since the Oscars are almost here and I still have to get through all the other categories.

Let’s start with the only other categories people care about: the acting categories.

Best Actor and Best Actress

The eventual winners of these categories will be George Clooney, Christopher Plummer, Octavia Spencer, and either Meryl Streep or Viola Davis (probably Davis). Could The Artist dominate all categories on their way to a clean sweep? They could. But everyone else in these categories is an also-ran and knows it. There’s no real reason to get bent out of shape at a lack of recognition in a nomination slot. The Academy Awards is just one more award show to go to where you’re not making a trip to the podium (and there are – this is no exaggeration – several dozen you’re supposed to attend. There’ve already been more than sixty this year, including the BAFTAs last night, where most of the nominees were expected to show). I imagine one gets bored awfully quickly.

As for the rejects: the Academy only handed out one award for “strong and silent” this year, and it went to Gary Oldman (I’ll discuss his performance whenever I review Tinker Tailor), so Ryan Gosling’s out of luck for Drive. Michael Fassbender got well and truly naked for Shame, and while most Oscar watchers have suggested he was shut out because he has a sizable penis, I think we can all agree that this is a pretty stupid idea. In reality, it just seemed like Shame was a pretty divisive movie, and a lot of people just didn’t like it that much. Not to mention, Fassbender had a few different performances for voters to chose from this year, and at least some of them must have preferred him in A Dangerous Method. Or even X-Men: First Class, maybe (don’t laugh. If you’ve seen it, you know he’s great in that).

I think most were surprised that Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t land a spot for J. Edgar, a movie that will always be remembered for having makeup so bad even the movie poster looked unconvincing. Because people hate celebrities, there’s been some snickering that his “desperate” bid for an Oscar nomination came up short; which shows a total lack of understanding of who DiCaprio is as an actor.

Look, DiCaprio doesn’t care about Oscars. He just doesn’t. He likes working on interesting projects, and he likes working with top-notch directors, and that’s the sum total of Leo’s movie-selection process. In the past ten years, he’s worked with Martin Scorsese (multiple times), Stephen Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Baz Luhrmann, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Sam Mendes, Ridley Scott, Ed Zwick, Todd Field, and Danny Boyle.

That’s a hell of a list, and the amazing thing about it is that I didn’t leave anyone off. He didn’t do a single paycheck role anywhere in there. Even his big, crowd-pleasing hits are risky movies (Inception springs to mind). Even Titanic was a fairly interesting historical study that finished with everyone drowning in icy water, so he's never had a nose for standard Hollywood fare. As much as I love Clooney’s commitment to small films, he’s still willing to take a paycheck role every now and again (this is unfair of me. I love the Ocean’s movies and would be thrilled if Clooney did nothing else). 

Tilda Swinton lost her Best Actress slot to Glenn Close* for playing the mother of We Need To Talk About Kevin, and while I feel for her, it’s not like this hasn’t happened to her before (remember all the buzz when she wasn’t nominated for I Am Love? Anyone? Just me? Okay, never mind). It’s tough to be centerpiece of a movie that divides critics that much, and I think she got shuttled to the side the same as Fassbender did. It’s just no one’s made the penis excuse for her (yet!).

* If you’re a woman playing a man, you get nominated. It’s a rule. With the exception of She’s The Man, of course. If you’re a man playing a woman, you get gutted and possibly tarred and feathered by the press. With the exception of Dustin Hoffman, of course.

The 17th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Like Crazy

I wanted to love this movie more than I did.

I’d been entranced by the trailer, which (aside from a brief bit of awkward plot summarization in the middle) is an entrancing bit of earnest indie sadness, propelled by the two leads’ mostly improvised dialogue.

I got my hopes too high. Seeing the movie was an adventure in mild disappointment. Because, for the most part, the movie works. The photography is naturalistic and simple,

the story refreshingly small. It’s a relationship split by the chasm of an ocean, but the divide never feels that wide, it lacks the sweeping scope of the bigger-than-life love stories Hollywood’s trying to sell us on. It’s no Cold Mountain, nor An Affair To Remember. It’s not even Sleepless In Seattle. It’s just two young college graduates, ignoring their own good sense and the data fees for international texting to try to make a relationship work. Their bullheaded certainty that their love can bear the strain of distance and the U.S. immigration system (as if anything could) could melt a moderately cold heart. And when the reality of their lives slowly crumples the foundation of that love, it’s hard not feel the pain of it almost as deeply as they do, even if you saw the knife coming in well before they did.

I’ve always liked Anton Yelchin, and he’s well cast here – he’s so open and likable and easy to bruise. But Felicity Jones, the then-unknown cast in the lead opposite him, is a revelation. She’s garnered festival acting awards right and left since the movie’s release, and all of them deserved. From the opening frame, she is so blindly, wholeheartedly in love, a shaking doll of porcelain emotions. She chips and falls apart, then pulls herself together, only to collapse again. This movie was too small to garner any Oscar love, but I’ll guarantee that we’ll be seeing her name bandied about in that conversation in years to come.

But how small a movie is too small? Our leads fall in love, are separated by distance, develop other relationships that don’t work out, and struggle to decide whether they should be together or not. And while I’m invested enough to follow along, I’d prefer that they maybe did something else interesting with their time while I was watching. But instead they sit and mope, have dull conversations with their parents, build hipster chairs and write unseen blurbs for fashion magazines. I was bored silly by Cold Mountain, and at least in that movie, Jude Law spends a lot of his time getting shot at.

The problem with realism, of course, is the banality of it. The second ends up feeling a bit like watching an artfully shot version of my own life, though I (unfortunately) don’t have Jennifer Lawrence as my live-in girlfriend. I feel for these two, but I’ve got my own problems. If I want to spend two hours watching young people stare glumly at their phones, I’ll just go to the mall.

The 18th Best Movie I Saw This Year: The Help

This will be less a review of The Help and more a statement on why Viola Davis should win Best Actress in a couple weeks. Seeing as The Help came out six months ago and you’ve had plenty of time to form your own opinion of it, I can’t imagine you’ll mind.

We’re entering an Oscar season where very few of the films nominated are hits of any kind. This happens a fair bit these days, now that indie films have come to dominate the awards landscape. But there amidst Tree of Life ($13 million) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ($27 million) is The Help, a film about racism that is a certified box office success at $169 million. To have a film that is both an Important Movie as well as a Successful Movie? Bound for Oscar Gold.

Or not. The problem with The Help is that for a movie that deals with such a dark and difficult subject matter – exploring historical racism in the deep South at the dawn of the Civil Rights era – it is an astonishingly shallow movie.

From the very outset, the story exudes falsehood. Our hero, a young girl (Emma Stone) named Skeeter (a chestnut from the treasure trove of Endearing Protagonist Names), returns from college and is shocked – shocked! – to find that all of her friends and family are deeply racist. She gazes wide-eyed at their backwards attitudes, as if this behavior had sprung out of nowhere, unbidden, while she was eating lunch at the school cafeteria. She decides to write a book telling stories from the point of view of the help: a story no one has ever dared write. A story no one has ever imagined.

I’ll skip to the end. The book is finished, gets published, and cures the South of racism. I’m pretty sure it’s a true story, too, so we’ve all got to feel pretty good that Skeeter managed to solve that problem for us.

Oddly, innocent Skeeter is the least cartoonish of the character. There’s a trampy Jessica Chastain and a bug-eyed Octavia Spencer, doing all they can to sell you on their poorly realized characters. Bryce Dallas Howard is handed a villainess role so two-dimensional that she’s probably doomed herself to become some sort of ginger Glenn Close for the next ten years. Remember when she played dear, sweet Gwen Stacy in that Spider-man movie? By the end of the movie, Emma Stone has managed to take even that from her. The resolution is so ham-handed that four (four!) different characters, on four separate occasions, have to inform Howard they know her deep, dark secret to keep her from continuing to wage her bizarre, angry war against them. Her character is so unappealing that the movie spends most of the last act watching her get her comeuppance. It’s like a snuff film for people who hate prejudice.

And yet this film is nominated for an Academy Award, and I have no issue with that, because Viola Davis singlehandedly makes this movie into Oscar material. Every movie critic who’s reviewed The Help has said the same thing, but I’ll say it again because it’s impossible to come away from the movie with any other conclusion: Davis appears to be acting in her own movie. And it’s a movie much darker and more layered than The Help, and yet whenever she’s on screen, she makes the movie around her rise to her level.

I’ve seen actors out-act movies that they’re in, and I’ve seen them fail to match up to the depth of the film on which they’re working, but I’ve never seen an actor who changed the movie around her like Davis has. And that should win her the Oscar.

Her main competition is the always-otherworldly Meryl Streep, and while everyone is unanimous that she’s excellent as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (and when is she not?), everyone is equally unanimous that the movie doesn’t do nearly enough to meet the standard she’s set.

This is no slight on Streep, but maybe we should honor someone who refused to let that happen.