Oscar ennui and a few new movies
Movies seen autumn 2007.
Originally written: April 2007
2007 Oscars
Stranger than Fiction
Notes on a Scandal
The Illusionist
Music and Lyrics
Lucky Number Slevin
Talladega Nights
Excalibur
I was re-watching The West Wing the other day and was reminded of Aaron Sorkin's view of awards' shows. When President Jed Bartlett is confronted with the two Thanksgiving turkeys that were sent to the White House, CJ, the press secretary, explains the deal: "The more photo-friendly of the two gets a Presidential pardon and a full life at a children's petting zoo; the other one gets eaten." Jed: "If the Oscars were like that, I'd watch." Fortunately, the 2007 Oscars were cannibalism-free; unfortunately they were also by and large entertainment-free. It ended up being one of the more anodyne awards shows in the history of generally boring television. I cannot really blame Ellen DeGeneres, who tried hard, but her schtick, which replicated some of the moves she'd made as host of the Emmies a few years ago, was more suited to an audience of television performers, than one of movie stars. The main Oscars were fairly predictable, although the best movie award to The Departed shocked a bit - not because it was unworthy but because violent, R-rated, genre movies rarely win over the middle-of-the-road, serious and important message movies and Babel was a prime candidate. (Personally, I though Children of Men was the best film of 2006 and that wasn't even nominated. It was visually and narratively interesting, with arresting characters and a degree of originality and verve that was missing from all the nominated films, except for Little Miss Sunshine, which was after all a comedy and they never win.) I would have liked Peter O'Toole to win the best actor (or even for Michael Sheen to have been nominated for his Tony Blair) but Forest Whittaker was apparently very good. I was happy with Helen Mirren and a little surprised that Alan Arkin, who truly deserved to win, beat Eddie Murphy, who didn't but was tipped. I'm not happy with Jennifer Hudson's win, for two reasons: there was very little acting involved (even if there was a lot of singing) and it was not a supporting role - hers was the lead and central role in Dreamgirls. Mind you, Cate Blanchett would not have been a better choice: hers was also a leading role, equal to Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal. I'm not sure there was a worthy winner amongst the nominees but, if they were going to class Blanchett and Hudson as supporting actors, our Cate acted her off the screen. Scorsese finally won an Oscar - in the same year that he finally won a Directors' Guild award. The technical Oscars were shared amongst a whole heap of technically worthy films, including Pan's Labyrinth, and Happy Feet deservedly won the local animators their first feature length Oscar.
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In fashion observations, there were few real shockers, unfortunately. I noted that beards were worn properly on directors, including Steven, George and Francis, who collectively gave Martin his statue, and on del Toro, Cuaron, Lee, Zwick and Hackford. Those actors with facial hair generally had anaemic ziffs, like Leo and Forest, Robert Downey Jr, Djimon Hounson, Jackie Earle Haley and Will Smith had embarrassing hair growth. In terms of couples probably the award went to John Travolta and Kelly Preston, he having encountered a horrible bloating accident and she in questionable leopard prints. Other quasi-disasters included Beyonce's turquoise shell accessories, J Lo's bad hair, Penelope Cruz' feathers, Eva Green's eyes, Gwynneth Paltrow's apricot dress and Anne Hathaway's latest infantalised costume. On the other hand, there were some fashion icons, including Helen Mirren, Emily Blunt, Jessica Biel, Reese Witherspoon, and our Naomi, our Cate and our Nic.
My final impression though was that it was a long and interminable ceremony with too many badly edited montage sequences. The ceremony needs a zippier host than Ellen D.
Dying for a masterpiece
Zach Helm's script for Stranger than Fiction is a speccie picked up by a very good director and turned into a very interesting movie. The McGuffin is that the protagonist, tax officer Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), starts hearing a narrator, describing his life. When psychiatry fails him, he consults a professor of literature (Dustin Hoffman) to find out what's happening. His interactions with Professor Hibbert and with Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an unconventional baker he is auditing, profoundly change his life and have the effect of making him less compliant with authority. Meanwhile, in the subplot, novelist Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is having difficulty deciding how to kill her fictional protagonist, Harold Crick, and is being assisted through her 'block' by Penny Escher (Queen Latifah). I love the way in which the English professor takes Harold's delusion seriously and seeks to find out whether the narrator is writing a comedy or a tragedy. Based on that analysis, he seeks to narrow down the list of possible authors. Eiffel isn't on his list because he concludes that it is a comedy and all Eiffel's novels end in the pre-ordained death of the protagonist. The chance discovery of Eiffel by Harold Crick leads to their meeting, as plot and sub-plot meld, and another twist in the recursive story arc of the film, a recursiveness that is unnecessarily emphasised by the name of Latifah's character. Director Marc Foster (Finding Neverland, Monster's Ball) finds the right notes for this symphony, piloting his vessel through the humor and the pathos of Harold's dilemma: he discovers love, and another possibility for life, only to be confronted by his obligation to art: does he need to die to ensure the successful conclusion of a masterpiece? The resolution of these various strands is, at best, a compromise, but Helm's script (his first) is marvellously constructed and the resolution is logical within the framework of the film. Will Ferrell is very good in a role that gives him a chance to demonstrate some dramatic chops. Like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, before him, he shows that there is more to the clown's art than only crude comedy. In fact, these sort of semi-serious, slightly flip, films may be his metier. Hoffman and Gyllenhaal are strongly supportive in their roles. Maggie Gyllenhaal's natural tendency is to underplay and her style suits the part here. Hoffman eschews the dramatics to good effect. Stranger than Fiction deserves more attention than it has received. It certainly deserved a nomination for best original screenplay. This is a fun film and a good one. Recommended.
Two Lessons in Acting
Notes on a Scandal is not all that much fun ... unless you really get off on the pyrotechnics of very good acting. This is largely a two-hander: Judi Dench is Barbara Covett (another unnecessarily suggestive surname), an older teacher at a London comprehensive into which floats Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a 30-something artist aiming to be an art teacher. The story is told from Covett's perspective and we get from her a bitter and biting observation of those around her. She seeks to act as a mentor to Sheba and insinuates herself into the younger woman's family life - an older husband (Bill Nighy), a teenage daughter and a Downs Syndrome son. When Covett catches Sheba in a compromising situation, she seeks to exploit it to her own advantage by placing emotional pressure on the younger woman to become more intimate with her. Increasingly as Sheba shows reluctance to involve herself more with Barbara there are threats and other pressure applied. The scandal, of course, eventually comes to light and leads to the climactic confrontation between the two women. This exposes both the naivety of the younger woman and a much darker side of the older one, whose personality is gradually revealed through information about her previous proteges. While Patrick Marber's adaptation of Zoe Heller's novel is generally good - extending the narrative from an observation of the scandal to a more interesting examination of the observer's involvement in it - and Richard Eyre's direction serviceable, the outstanding feature here is the acting of the two leads. As you would expect for great practitioners of their art, Dench and Blanchett are brilliant and more than a match for each other. Her role calls for Dench to display a quieter and more enigmatic menace and Blanchett's Sheba is more demonstrative and changeable creature. The climactic confrontation is one of the more explosive scenes in modern filming and fulfils the classic Greek view of the need for drama to provide a catharsis for the audience through the emotions of pity and fear. Nighy has a much less demonstrative role as the husband but, as usual, he performs it flawlessly. A good enough film with a couple of great performances, Notes of a Scandal is one for either the cinema or the DVD.
Not such a trick
If you've only time for one movie this year about magicians, see The Prestige. If, however, you want to see another movie that isn't quite as good but shares some of the same thematic elements, then The Illusionist is available to you. Based in part on the Mayerling scandal in the later days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the film posits a stage magician coming between the heir to the Empire's throne (Rufus Sewell) and his Hungarian fiancee (Countess Sophie, played by Jessica Biel). Interestingly, Eisenheim (Edward Norton), the illusionist, is by implication Jewish, as well as lower middle class, two strikes against him in the end-of-the-century empire. The love triangle is but a background to the more interesting story arc, a labyrinthine tale of murder and magic in which the chief inspector of police Uhl (Paul Giamatti) seeks to solve the puzzle. Unfortunately this aspect of the movie, which should be the strongest, and which has had many critics praising the revelation of the mystery, is the least satisfactory element: in my view, the solution is obvious from far too early in the piece. The back-story tells us of Eisenheim's friendship with the young aristocrat, Sophie, and of their separation. We cut to fifteen years later, when he has returned to Austria as a headliner. Prince Leopold and Sophie attend a performance and the former friends are re-united, and become lovers. Leo is less than chuffed and, when the mage embarrasses him at a private party, he sets Uhl on the case: to run the illusionist out of town. Instead, tragedy ensues and Uhl turns from persecuting Eisenheim to solving a crime. Meanwhile Eisenheim changes his act from illusions to something new: he appears to conjure and animate ghosts who speak when asked questions. The resolution of this - with the ghosts of lovers past making an appearance and with its echoes of Mayerling - is foreseeable and, for me, too predictable. The other major structural flaw in the piece is the casting of Edward Norton in the eponymous role. Unlike Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, in The Prestige, his Eisenheim is a singularly unsympathetic character, too withdrawn and remote. On the other hand, Giamatti is again a delight: Uhl starts as an enthusiastic amateur magician seeking Eisenheim's secrets, transmutes into a Javert and ends up as Auguste Dupin. Both Sewell and Biel have to do little more than be beautiful - well within the range of each. The Illusionist has some good elements but is, in the end, a disappointment.
Two for the money
Imagine Andrew Ridgeley trying to make a living on the fringes of the music business twenty years after Wham! That's the starting point for the latest Hugh Grant rom-com, Music and Lyrics. He's the less successful half of Pop!, an eighties boy-band duo, and now he's playing amusement parks and high school reunions. He gets the offer of a gig writing a new tune for a popette clearly based on Britney, Cora (played by newcomer Haley Bennett), only he's got a limited timetable and is competing against a number of other pop has-beens. Alex (Huge's character) is a melodist but not a lyricist so he needs help. Enter the meet-cute: with Sophie (Drew Barrymore), the plant lady with a turn of poetical phrase. The rest is inevitable - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets to do a duet with Cora, boy gets girl. Along the way there are some interesting and entertaining turns. Kristen Johnston (so good in Third Rock from the Sun) turns up as Sophie's older sister, and a Pop! fan from the eighties; and Sophie turns out to have a little more depth than most rom-com characters. She is recovering from damage inflicted by a former professor who has used her as the model for a character in his latest best-seller, in a not particularly complementary way. So there are some darker undercurrents and some broader comedy to complement the main story arc, which revolves around whether Cora will devalue their song by inflicting all sorts of Indian musical overtones and flash dancing sequences onto it - and whether Alex will stand up for his artistic creation. Writer-director Marc Lawrence, having survived several Sandra Bullock projects, mainly as a writer, although he also directed Two Weeks Notice, doesn't add much to the visual mix but there are enough twists to keep it interesting. My main whinge was that the song they write, "Way Back into Love" (actually written by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne), is just not that good. Certainly not for the popette's pre-teen fan base.
Seen on video
I love a convoluted caper story and The Wrong Man (Lucky Number Slevin is its US title) is as convoluted as all get out. The back-story lets us know that there was a race fix that went wrong, because the information got out prematurely, and a mob had a man, his wife and their son murdered to demonstrate that this should not happen again. When we get to the present day, Bruce Willis is taking out a mark in a transit lounge and telling us that the Kansas City Shuffle requires a body. Meanwhile Slevin (Josh Harnett) is using a mate's apartment, meeting-cute the neighbor from down the hall (Lucy Liu) and being mistaken by The Boss' goons for his mate Nick. Soon he is involved in a complex plot involving the rivalry of the Boss (Morgan Freeman) and the Rabbi (Ben Kingsley), opposing gang leaders, and a rogue cop (Stanley Tucci). Written by Jason Smilovic in a semi-Tarantino way - smart dialog and reasonably strong violence - the plot in the end resolves exactly as you would suspect from the start. There's some fun along the way because, Harnett aside, these are top-class actors with enough material to make it interesting but it's sound and fury signifying nothing.
If Stranger than Fiction demonstrates that Will Ferrell has a future as a dramatic actor, Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby shows that his self-written material doesn't do him much justice. This 'comedy' set around the NASCAR race circuit is by-the-numbers stuff, with a couple of exceptions. Ferrell is the eponymous character, a mechanic who gets behind the wheel and is soon dominating stock car racing. He develops into a self-centred oaf, with a brassy wife and two monstrous kids, in need of comeuppance. His nemesis is the best part of the film: a gay French "Formula Un" driver, who prefers jazz and Camus, played by Sasha Baron Cohen with an accent so thick that it must be the runaway winner of last year's Streepstakes. Ricky Bobby suffers defeat and enters into a down cycle from which he is of course rescued for the ridiculous ending. So much for the plot; now for the whinges. The movie is largely composed of a succession of naive cliches, right up to and including the assistant with the glasses and the ponytail, who eventually lets her hair down and gets her man. In fact most of the plot deficiencies are too easy, so let's move to my pet peeve. One strike against Frenchie is that he plays Charlie Parker on the local joint's jukebox. Since when did appreciation of jazz - a far more American form of music than even country and western - become a sign of a character on the wrong side of the values debate? This is one-dimensional tack saved from utter ruin by a fine turn by a British comedian playing a French race car driver. Ironic.
From our DVD collection - reviews of good and great movies not previously reviewed
Excalibur bears no relation to the Dark Ages as we know them, or to any real concept of the era in which an Arthur might have been war leader of the Britons, but as a twentieth century imagining of the way in which a high medieval romantic might have envisaged the era of chivalrous knights, magicians and evil sorceresses, it is without parallel. John Boorman has put together not exactly an Arthurian story but literally the story of the sword Excalibur, from its start with Uther through its return to the Lady in the Lake. And it is the fate of the sword that determines the fate of the kingdom. The story sticks reasonably closely to the Arthurian/Camelot legend but, because of the actors playing them, Merlin and Morgana are more prominent than the putative love triangle of king, queen and champion. Nicol Williamson's eccentric Merlin is perhaps the best thing about this movie, although he is matched by a very young Helen Mirren as the scheming Morgana, who seeks his secrets and revenge for the offences against her mother and father. Against that sub-plot is played the story of Arthur's rise to kingship and his decline. Nigel Terry (John in A Lion in Winter) makes a good younger Arthur and Cherie Lunghi is a radiant Guenevere. There are a couple of actors who'd make their names later on, as well: Gabriel Byrne is Uther; Liam Neeson as Gawain; and Jean-Luc Picard appears as Leondegrance. The main departures from the general flow of the myth include the use of Perceval (Paul Geoffrey), the Grail Knight, as first peasant-squire and then as surviving quester, and the more metaphorical meaning given to the Grail. But the thing that people remember, and which is worth remarking on, is the look and feel of the film: the knights in their polished armor, the very image of chivalry that Mallory and his contemporaries might have had of the Round Table knights; the stirring classical themes from Wagner operas and Carl Orff that accompany the tableaux and battle scenes; and those battle scenes themselves. Boorman has given life to an idea that is normally treated with ponderous solemnity (think First Knight) and brought the knights to life.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]