Waste Land (2010)

We really liked this Oscar-nominated feature-length documentary about Vik Muniz, a Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist, who returns to his homeland to make art and interact with the workers in the world's biggest landfill outside Rio de Janeiro. So glad it it's not in Smell-o-Vision! Muniz chose marvellously photogenic subjects who pick through the trash, sometimes from right under the dump truck, and pull out the recyclables to sell to make their livings. They have complex, interesting lives and great fortitude and resilience. I got a little misty just now, watching the trailer. Muniz is completely at ease in front of the camera and, brimming with self-confidence and warmth, he gives strength to his new friends as he changes their lives forever. He does not, however, answer the question sometimes attributed to George W. Bush: how many is a Brazilian?

The fabulous music, by the artist known as Moby, doesn't seem to be available as a soundtrack or on any links, but here's a song from his new free EP. It's too bad we haven't seen three of the five nominated docs, but this one and Exit Through the Gift Shop are extraordinary. Now I have to get out of my chair and do some cardio before sitting down again to watch five hours of red carpet and awards tonight!

Jack Speaks v.2011

This is the 6th time I've been on the panel that comments on the Oscars for our local newspaper, and the 4th time for Jack. We pick our favorites, not our predictions, and sometimes something we write gets printed. Today's the day, and you get to read everything we wrote--what was printed is in quotation marks. Links are to my posts on each movie (yes, of course we've seen them all).

Jack gets to go first.

Best Picture: The King's Speech
The King’s Speech made us sympathetic to people of wealth and privilege, not an easy feat these days. Elegant and authentic sets, perfectly framed interior shots, and a story line that transcends the historical implications combine for a compelling flashback to Britain’s impending darkest hours.

Directing: True Grit, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Joel and Ethan Coen coax layered performances from newcomer Hailee Steinfeld and grizzled vet Jeff Bridges while evoking an unromanticized American West. They resisted character stereotypes and kept the audience from expecting Bridges to break into a Bad Blake song around the camp fire.

Actor: Colin Firth (The King's Speech)
Colin Firth somehow manages to portray temperamental, protected, privileged-beyond-belief, weak-willed, reluctant heir Bertie as the underdog and makes us buy it. Beside the difficulty in playing a seemingly incurable stutterer, he shows humility and humor in his verbal jousting with speech coach Lionel Logue.

Supporting Actor: Christian Bale (The Fighter)
Most of the tension in The Fighter emanates from Christian Bale’s portrayal of Dicky Eklund. He shows us that the title character wasn’t the eventual champion brother, but the crackhead ex-pug who was the real Pride of Lowell.

Actress: Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
Portman’s well-publicized commitment to her role included striking weight loss and intensive ballet training. She compels us to watch the train-wreck of Nina’s life as she dwells on the dark side of big-time ballet, buffeted by a predatory director, cunning competitors, and a mother scarier than Mrs. Bates, Norman’s mom.

Supporting actress: Amy Adams (The Fighter)
"While standing up to formidable foes is standard fare in boxing movies, Amy Adams extends the concept. She is completely believable in taking on the dominating mother and seven hyena-like sisters" of the guy she loves. She demonstrates all the characteristics of a championship fighter— determination, dexterity, agility, and stamina.

And my ballot.

Best Picture: The Kids Are All Right
The family story with humor, conflict, sex, luscious lesbians (the straight guy and his girlfriend aren't bad, either), gorgeous southern California locations, and no gore gets my vote.

Director: Ethan and Joel Coen for True Grit
Less bloody than their usual fare, this sweeping western with old-fashioned grammar is a masterpiece for the brothers Coen.

Best Actress: Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole
From her nervous laughter to her inappropriate outbursts, she had me convinced she was torn up inside from the greatest tragedy any mother can endure.

Best Actor: Colin Firth (The King's Speech) hands down
"Only one guy could be regal while struggling to speak, and that would be Mister Darcy, er, Firth."

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo in The Fighter
Don’t cross Leo the mother lion who is capable of eating her young.

Best Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech
Rush is thoroughly entertaining every minute he’s on the screen.

Here are our ballots for last year.

Barney's Version (2010)

Jack and I loved this story of flawed man (Paul Giamatti) and his three wives, his best friends, his ups, and his downs. It took 12 years for seasoned producer Robert Lantos to bring his friend Mordecai Richler's 1997 novel to the screen, finally using a writer and director with little experience, Michael Konyves and Richard J. Lewis (not the comedian), respectively. Giamatti (after I wrote about him in Cold Souls he was in The Last Station) is at the top of his always-high-level game here (he won the Golden Globe for this role), aging 40 years over the course of the movie (kudos to the Oscar-nominated makeup chief Adrien Morot), as the curmudgeonly TV producer. Somehow we don't wonder why insulting, heavy-drinking (his favorite bar is called Grumpy's), cigar-smoking Barney Panofsky can attract such beauties (the wives are played by Rachelle Lefevre, Minnie Driver, and Rosamund Pike), because he can be funny and smart and loving, just like his dad Izzy (short for Israel) played by Dustin Hoffman (won Oscars for Rain Man (1988) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), nominated for Lenny (1974), Tootsie (1982), and Wag the Dog (1997); I also loved The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Dick Tracy (1990), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), and Last Chance Harvey, and I didn't hate Ishtar (1987), even though it's frequently a punch line). 

In a bit of ironic casting Hoffman's son Jake Hoffman, plays Barney's son, Izzy's grandson. Although some of the movie is shot in Rome and New York, it's Canadian through and through. Lantos, Lewis, Konyves, Lefevre, Saul Rubinek (who plays her father), Scott Speedman (who plays Barney's best friend Boogie), and Bruce Greenwood (who appears later, and for a minute I thought he was an older version of Boogie) all live in Canada. Richler was Canadian (he also wrote The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). The characters are mostly Canadian and live in Montreal. Iconic Canadian directors David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Denys Arcand have cameos (as two TV directors and the maître-d at the Ritz). My only quibble is a small one: Pike, a radiant blonde in Die Another Day (2002), Pride and Prejudice (2005), An Education, and the upcoming Made in Dagenhem (she was also good, and not blonde, in The Libertine (2004) with Johnny Depp), has varying shades of brown hair in this movie, even though her character Miriam is, you should forgive the expression, a shiksa goddess (they are usually blonde). Perhaps the filmmakers wanted not to have Barney's three wives be a redhead (Lefevre), a brunette, and a blonde. Pike's dark hair makes the Englishwoman look faintly Asian, but she isn't and I must also mention that her American accent is flawless.

The music, by Pasquale Catalano, is lovely, but there are only 17 minutes of it on the soundtrack CD, which doesn't have the Nina Simone song on it and now I've forgotten which one it was. There's a mystery from the middle of the movie that is "explained" at the end. It's not really possible that it could have happened that way, but, I believe, it's taken from the book. Definitely see the movie and ONLY AFTER YOU'VE SEEN IT, read this spoiler.

The Company Men (2010)

This drama about corporate downsizing lives up to its trailer, that is to say, mildly diverting, but a bit disappointing. We're supposed to feel sorry for Ben Affleck's Bobby, fired after an outstanding early golf game, but he is clearly in over his head, with his club membership, Porsche, big house, and no savings. John Wells (best known for producing and writing on The West Wing and ER, among many, now a writer on the outstanding Showtime series Shameless) makes his feature directing debut with his own script, about the conglomerate run by Tommy Lee Jones' (Oscar nominated for JFK (1991) and In the Valley of Elah (2007) and won for The Fugitive (1993) ("What I want ... is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse..."); I also liked and liked him in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), both Men in Black (1997, 2002), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and No Country for Old Men (2007)) Gene and Craig T. Nelson's (I know he's had a long a fruitful career, but my favorite is his ongoing role as patriarch Zeek Braverman in the TV series Parenthood) Jim, with Maria Bello (I wrote about her in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) as Sally doing the dirty work of firing Bobby, Chris Cooper (my faves: This Boy's Life (1993), American Beauty (1999), Adaptation (2002) which won him an Oscar, Seabiscuit (2003), Married Life (2007), and more), and many others. We're supposed to think that Gene is a good guy, since he feels bad for the others, but his actions don't really set him that far apart from Jim, who is unapologetic about doing what's best for the company, its stockholders, and himself. Kevin Costner (favorites: The Untouchables (1987), Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), Tin Cup (1996), The Upside of Anger (2005)), Rosemarie DeWitt (terrific in United States of Tara, Rachel Getting Married, and more), and Eamonn Walker (Cadillac Records, The Messenger) are all good in their roles.

Despite the best efforts of Affleck (I wrote about him in The Town) and the rest of the cast and lovely location shots in the metro Boston area, from Marblehead and Wellesley to Milton and Quincy, this didn't grab us. Not everyone is in agreement. The New York Film Critics gave Wells the Best Debut Director award and Roger Ebert gave it a thumb up with an interesting commentary. However, the imdb message board, filled with spoilers, has quite a discussion going on a negative lead ("Did anyone else hate this movie...") and rottentomatoes averages only 64% for critics and 60% for audiences.

The Illusionist (L'illusionniste - 2010)

Nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, this sweet tail, er, tale of a French magician who travels to Scotland with his bunny (who bites!) is good fun, though not quite as wonderful as director/writer/composer Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (Belleville Rendezvous - 2003). Not to be confused with the thriller The Illusionist (2006), which starred Edward Norton and Jessica Biel, this one, like Triplets, has no subtitles and few words, in French, English, and Gaelic. Really, the only word you need to know is lapin (la-PANH) which is French for rabbit.

Jacques Tati (1907-1982) is everywhere in this movie. He wrote the script (Chomet adapted it) in 1956, the magician is named Jacques Tatischeff (which was Tati's real name) and is drawn to look like Tati, and, at one point, the characters walk into a screening of Mon Oncle (1958), Tati's award-winning comedy. Chomet lived in Edinburgh while making this and as much as it's a love letter to Tati, it also honors that city in the 1950s. There are some hilarious British pop stars called the Britoons. Read this to learn more.

The drawings are lovely (people, animals, shops, Paris, northern Scotland (the trip between!), Edinburgh), the music (by Chomet with a few added songs--listen to it song by song here) is divine, and Jack commented that the Foley artist should get an award: all the sounds, from each footstep to the scrape of the pot on the stove and the clunk when it lands on the table, are right there. It was released this week on DVD. Make a night of it, watching this and Triplets of Belleville in two hours and 40 minutes total.

Another Year (2010)

I said, "Delightful!" Jack winced and said, "Good, but not delightful." I was captivated by the blissfulness of the long-married, still happy couple, and Jack was distracted by the neurotic people surrounding them. English director/writer Mike Leigh is Oscar-nominated for Best Original Screenplay, as he was for Secrets & Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999), Vera Drake (2004), and Happy-Go-Lucky (hasn't won yet--I also liked High Hopes (1988) and All or Nothing (2002), among others). Leigh regulars Jim Broadbent (I picked my favorites when I wrote about The Damned United) and Ruth Sheen (wonderful in High Hopes, the Reese Witherspoon-starring Vanity Fair (2004), and more) are 60-something Tom and Gerri--here are their cartoon counterparts--and during the course of a year they tend to their garden and patiently care for their relatives and friends, including the mercurial Mary (Lesley Manville, who was in every Leigh project above and more, and is quite powerful here--the American Academy should have nominated her instead of Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom--the British Academy did!). Imelda Stanton (she was Oscar-nominated for playing Vera Drake, and was wonderful in Sense and Sensibility (1995), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Freedom Writers (2007), and Taking Woodstock, among many others) has a fabulous scene at the beginning as a depressed insomniac. A face I recognized was that of Phil Davis (he was the "mark" in Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream (2007), just one of his 103 acting credits, which also include High Hopes and Vera Drake), who plays the golfer buddy. I did not recognize Karina Fernandez, who plays Katie, but she was the flamenco teacher in Happy-Go-Lucky. Special note must be made of their wonderful house with the attached greenhouse and grand eat-in kitchen (production design by Simon Beresford).

This time we agree with rottentomatoes' 92% from critics, not with their 77% from audiences, nor imdb's 79%. Lovely music by Gary Yershon (he composed for Happy-Go-Lucky and was music director for Topsy-Turvy), but I can't find any clips for us (you could watch the trailer, but there are spoilers, in my opinion), nor is there a soundtrack available to buy at any price. You'll just have to see what many are calling Leigh's best movie ever.

Animal Kingdom (2010)

Jack and I would have missed this had it not had an Oscar-nominated performance by supporting actress Jacki Weaver as the matriarch of a Melbourne crime family. And that would've been okay. Mean-spirited with no laughs, it does have a compelling opening scene. Black-out, noise of dogs barking and a game show on TV, fade in to two people on a couch, motionless. We were beginning to think something was wrong with the picture (we were watching a netflix DVD), until the paramedics arrive and tend to the woman on the left as the young man on the right moves out of their way, but he can't stop watching the show. They take away the woman, and the pimply young man, Josh (Eric Frecheville, in his second feature film), calls his grandmother (Weaver, many credits that I haven't seen) on the phone and tells her his mom has just died of a heroin overdose. He doesn't seem upset. His grandma isn't at all upset. He moves in with grandma and two uncles, and they talk about a third uncle who's on the lam. Senseless murders, check (one of which Jack predicted just before). Lies and double-crosses, check check. And we kept waiting for the big scene that got Weaver the nomination, like Viola Davis with snot on her face, crying, in Doubt. Can't say that we found it. Despite pretty good music by Antony Partos (and a clip of All Out of Love from 1980 by Air Supply--sorry about the commercial first), and scenes with the very talented Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential (1997), Memento (2000), Factory Girl (2006) as Andy Warhol, The Hurt Locker as Staff Sergeant Thompson, and The King's Speech as King Edward VIII, the one who abdicates) and Joel Edgerton (excellent in Kinky Boots (2005) and more), we didn't agree with rottentomatoes' falling all over it with 97% from critics and 80% from audiences (imdb gives it 75%) nor the other awards and nominations it has garnered so far. We weren't in bad moods or tired. We just didn't like it very much.

Somewhere (2010)

We enjoyed this languid story of a bored movie star connecting with his 11 year old daughter over a few weeks. No accident that the Police song So Lonely is featured--this guy has no one, despite his hangers-on, until his daughter arrives. Director/writer Sofia Coppola's three features (Lost in Translation (2003) which won her the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Virgin Suicides (1999)) are all about loneliness in crowds--she's been down this road before. Stephen Dorff (my faves of his career from ages 12-37: Backbeat (1994) in which he played Stu Sutcliffe, who was briefly in the Beatles, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), Blood and Wine (1996), and Cecil B. Demented (2000)) is Johnny Marco, living at the Chateau Marmont above the Sunset Strip (where John Belushi died), too listless to stay awake for twin strippers he has hired to pass some time between shoots. When his ex-wife drops off their daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning, who will be 13 in April--her sister Dakota will be 17 this month, is quite the accomplished actress: Ruth in The Door in the Floor (2004), the little blonde girl in Babel (2006), the "niece" in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, the young redhead in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) Johnny begins to come to life. His one friend Sammy, played by Chris Pontius (I haven't seen Jackass, so had not heard of him until researching this later), shows up when there's fun to be had, but isn't around for the lonely times. Jack commented that he could see why many movie stars turn to addictive substances because their lives can be so boring when they're not exciting.

The title is somewhat misleading because the locations are distinct. Most of the movie takes place at the iconic hotel, and was really shot there, in room 59, which is often a hangout for Hollywood "bad boy" types, and they take side trips to Milan and Las Vegas, as well as driving around L.A. in Johnny's Ferrari (potential for carsickness, but I wasn't affected). Coppola has insisted that this is not based on her life as the daughter of famed director Francis Coppola (by the way, it's COPE-a-la), but that she wanted to make a movie in and about Los Angeles. On the official website you can read more about her inspiration, as well as some behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, including a comment about shooting in cars. She seems to be the ideal director, open to suggestions, and kind, even loving, to her cast and crew. We liked how she wrote Johnny as a nice guy, friendly to the staff. The soundtrack, by the French band Phoenix, and more, is hip, as Sofia's soundtracks always are (Marie Antoinette was accompanied by many catchy tunes from the 1980s and not the 1780s).

This is not really for kids of Cleo's age, due to some nudity, sex, and plenty of profanity (here's the parents' guide). Out of 115 reviews on rottentomatoes 72% of critics liked it, but only 49% of nearly 18,000 audience members. Well, Jack and I like the little indies and this one, one of the National Board of Review's Top Ten Independent Films (see its other achievements here), gets our vote.

Biutiful (2010)

Sad and seedy, this tale of a sick man with two lovely children, a bipolar ex-wife, and a profession simultaneously exploiting and protecting immigrants in Barcelona is pretty hard to take. I liked it a lot, better than Jack did, but then I am a huge fan of director/co-writer Alexandro González Iñárritu (directed Babel (2007), 21 Grams (2003), and Amores Perros (2000), all of which were equally grim, and, in my opinion, brilliant). The movie is nominated for Oscars for Best Foreign Film and for Javier Bardem (I wrote about him in Eat Pray Love) as Best Actor, the first time anyone has been nominated for a non-English-speaking role. Bardem's Uxbal has a hard life, but not nearly as hard as the African and Chinese illegal aliens by whose work he profits. The child actors, Hanaa Bouchaib as Ana and Guillermo Estrella as Mateo, are transcendent, and the title is taken from a misspelling by Ana. Maricel Alvarez is also quite good as the mother/ex-wife Marambra.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (I wrote about him in Broken Embraces) has strayed from his usual colorful work to shoot this in tones of rust and filth. This is not the lovely Barcelona of Las Ramblas, La Pedrera, and Parc Guell, though La Sagrada Familia can be seen through the smog in one shot. Iñárritu's regular composer Gustavo Santaolalla (Oscar winner for Babel and Brokeback Mountain (2005), also scored The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and more) has given us a gorgeous soundtrack, which I bought without even previewing it and am listening to right now.

This is not for everyone, but recommended for serious film buffs and anyone who wants or needs to see the major Oscar nominees before the show on February 27. Rottentomatoes' rating is barely fresh with 64% from critics and 76% from audiences. We saw this Sunday on a cloudy day while vacationing in Tampa, in a very cool mall theatre called Muvico, with seats that Jack pronounced the most comfortable ever: fully padded, reclining, with wide armrests, and seats low enough that my feet rested on the floor. We sat about halfway back, which was a good thing, because I suspect the handheld camera work may have caused Motion-Picture-Motion-Sickness.