The 2008 Oscars and some not so boring bits and pieces
Movies seen summer 2008.
Originally written: April 2008
2008 Oscars
3:10 to Yuma
27 Dresses
Definitely, Maybe
Vantage Point
Hey Hey It's Esther Blueberger
Martian Child
Into the Wild
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
There was a definite lack of oomph at the 2008 Oscars ceremony. In fact I would rate it as the most boring in memory. There were too few jokes, too few surprises, too many montages and too little in the way of really bad dresses. This is borne out by the abysmal ratings for the broadcast in the US and in Australia, just about the lowest on record in each case. The major surprise was that Marion Cotillard won a best actor nod, ahead of the favorite, Julie Christie. It is highly unusual for the academy to award an actor who delivers lines in a foreign language; even more so for a biopic of an entertainer with whom American audiences would not be that familiar. The award to Tilda Swinton, ahead of our Cate, was also seen as surprising, but it was such a great performance (in Michael Clayton), from such an accomplished actor, that it did not shock me at all. I was happy to see Diablo Cody rewarded for her Juno script and the Coen brothers finally won the awards they had deserved for years, although not for a film that reflects their idiosyncratic humor and off-beat casting. Jon Stewart remains a good choice for host but, in the wake of the writers' strike, and the short lead-time available to the writers, the script let him down. So did an uninteresting year of films. The people who have been doing the Oscars for too long need to be ousted and something new tried. Producer Gilbert Cates has lost any originality or touch he might have had; Bill Conti has played out too many interesting award recipients in the middle of their speech. This year he repeatedly frustrated attempts by winners to deliver their speeches. Get rid of them both and try someone else. And hope for some more interesting movies, with genuine appeal.
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Last train to moralville
The western is a genre that has largely fallen into disuse. The simple dichotomies between good and evil, which were at the heart of the moral lessons of the western, are not so simple anymore. The moral ambiguity that has impacted on society generally has had a major impact on the western as a movie genre. Formerly it didn't matter whether Wyatt Earp was in reality a peacemaker or a gunslinger, the movies had made him a moral exemplar and that was that. The occasional resurgence of the classic western, such as Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado, or the Lonesome Dove miniseries, has been matched by the rise of the revisionist western, like Dances with Wolves, which casts the noble savage as truly noble and the white soldiers as the savages, or Deadwood, which seeks to give a 'realistic' post-modern look to the traditional western story. In the light of that the choice by James Mangold, fresh from the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, to remake 3:10 to Yuma is interesting. The original, based on an Elmore Leonard short story, was as I recall a very simple storyline in which the valiant farmer tries to escort the cold-blooded killer to the eponymous train, while the killer's gang sets up all sorts of barriers. The remake, which stars much more high-powered actors, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale taking on the roles formerly played by Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, respectively, also has much greater moral ambiguity. In particular the greater role played by the rancher's son, who hero-worships the outlaw and harbors doubts about his dad, adds texture to the interaction between the antagonists. Both the leads radiate a sense of intelligence and awareness of their situation, and the confrontational scene in the hotel room, as they await the arrival of the train, reinforces that. In particular, Crowe is able to create a character that is believable as both a cold-blooded killer and as a man worthy of respect. The two leads are assisted by a couple of supporting actors who provide more substance to the story: Peter Fonda as the cynical bounty hunter, who just wants to get the job done; and Ben Foster as the outlaw's chief offsider, a sociopath whose attachment to his leader is given a more modern overtone. There is nothing startling or original about remade 3:10 to Yuma, just a good workman-like modern western, with strong acting and, like the crunchy westerns we used to get before the modern era, a moral lesson at the end.
Dressed to three nines
As my reviews occasionally demonstrate I'm a bit of a softy when it comes to romantic comedies, but even I have had difficulties with some of the latest entries in the rom-com stakes, but not with Knocked Up. After its success, Katherine Heigl was ideally placed to carry her next vehicle to box office success. A shame then that the film in question, 27 Dresses, is not as good as its leading lady. Once again she is very good, but the film is weighed down by its predictability: she is a thirty-something who has 27 times acted as bridesmaid, and who cannot bring herself to let her boss know that she loves him. Edward Burns plays the schmuck in question, a successful entrepreneur with an outdoor-equipment business. The other parts of the love quadrangle are filled by James Marsden's wedding correspondent, who sees story gold in the perennial bridesmaid, and Malin Akerman as Heigl's younger, self-centred sister. You can see the plot developments a mile off: bossman and sister fall in love and the bridesmaid has to line up #28. Meanwhile bridesmaid and reporter start to see the good in each other, until the inevitable newspaper article comes between them. Equally predictably, you can posit the denouement, because this is pretty much plotting-by-numbers. While all of that sounds a little negative, there are a number of positives. Heigl is very good indeed - much better than the material she is dished up. She is supported well by Marsden, and by Judy Greer, as the modern-day Eve Arden (the acerbic best friend). There are a couple of nice scenes, particularly the drunken sing-along in a roadside pub; and the eponymous dresses are a costume designer's dream, with their variation of styles and tastes. Good but not good enough.
Three strikes for love
I enjoyed Definitely, Maybe more, and a lot more than some of the local critics (conversely it garnered 72% on the Rotten Tomatoes critic-meter, with a good majority of reviews worldwide being 'fresh'). The main trouble was that it borrowed from a whole lot of sources. That is, I suppose, in post-modern parlance, it paid homage to a number of influences. The framing device, as a divorcing father tells his daughter about how he and her mother met and married, is reminiscent of a current TV sit-com as well as of The Princess Bride; there is an inscribed particular edition of a particular book, just like in Serendipity; there are elements of the political campaign from Taxi Driver; and one or two speeches that have an eerie familiarity to them. Nonetheless, the movie, which goes through a decade or so of Will (Ryan Reynolds) and the three women with whom he is serially in love, one of whom is Abigail Breslin's mom - please try to guess which - is entertaining and amusing in parts. The three women are his comparatively dreary college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks); the free-spirit April (our Isla Fisher) whom he meets in New York when he is a volunteer on the 1992 Clinton campaign; and a cynical journalist Summer (Rachel Weisz) who was a high school buddy of Emily, and who is the subject of the major meet-cute in the movie. The framing device doesn't always work, and our Isla has by far the best-written part among the women, and comes out of the piece best, but over all it is quite a good movie. Reynolds is surprisingly effective in the lead role, given that he has graduated from a plethora of drink, fart and road-trip college movies. Breslin shows that her success in Little Miss Sunshine was not a one-off: she is likely to be around a long time in juvenile roles. For a romantic comedy, however, it has a bracing dose of cynicism about the likelihood of a successful long-term romantic liaison, which is strange, given the fact that it opened on Valentine's Day. I felt that the ending partly betrayed this tone established in the relationship between Will and his daughter, but it was an ending in keeping with the best traditions of the genre.
Time fractured fairy tale
Because it is told from an array of viewpoints, some critics have compared Vantage Point to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. It is a false and lazy comparison. The Japanese movie told the same story from several different perspectives. What former British TV director Pete Travis is doing is telling the one story but creating layers of narrative by re-capitulating the same events from a different perspective, and extending the length of the narrative further towards the climax with each story. Based around an anti-terror summit, with a public rally in the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca, the film starts with a US television news crew's view of the events leading up to an assassination and its immediate after-effects in the plaza. Then we return to the start (around noon) and have the view of secret service agent Dennis Quaid, freshly returned to action after recuperating from a previous attempt in President William Hurt's life; then of a local cop; of an American tourist (Forest Whitaker) who had been videotaping the scene; of a young Spanish girl; and of the President himself; before we finally get to the overall story as seen by the putative assassins. The idea is slick: that any such plot will be labyrinthine in nature and the best way to reveal it is by peeling back the layers until all is revealed and that no one person will have all the details. Unfortunately there are some credibility problems with the plot, including questions about who is involved and how this group came together, let alone had the opportunity to work out and perform a series of intricate steps in the execution of a design that would have done Daniel Briggs' team proud. The credibility problems grow through the movie and the cliched method by which the plan unravels at the end is unworthy of the early parts of the movie. With a little tighter scripting and some deeper examination of elements of the plot, Vantage Point could have been so much better. As it is, it is a passable thriller, that devolves into a gory shoot-'em-up and a series of car chases. Its international cast is largely underutilised, with only Whitaker and Quaid having anything like the time needed to establish anything of their character. Like the plot within it in it, this movie is a near miss.
Come of age already
Australian teen comedies have not been very successful of late. In fact Australian movies have not made much of an impact in recent times. The fact that, despite reasonably wide release, Hey Hey It's Esther Blueberger finished in eleventh place in its first weekend's box office results, indicates that it too has failed to find its audience. The movie is a coming-of-age fish-out-of-water quirky teen comedy drama. In fact it tries to tick too many boxes and ends up not quite knowing what it really is. The title character is the female half of a brace of twins in an Adelaide Jewish family. They are preparing for their respective Bar and Bat Mitzvah and each are portrayed as slightly strange. She is definitely an outsider at her private school and, when she falls into the company of would-be drummer Sunni (Keisha Castle-Hughes), she is soon pretending to be an exchange student at the local public and hanging out with the bad girls. Sunni's mother (Toni Collette, adding some class) is a free spirit who pretty much lets her daughter and her mates do what they like. Esther starts exploring some of the less salubrious reaches of the city and of her male classmates. Esther would like to fit in and, when her behavior earns her unwarranted credit with her private school peers, she shows that she is just as happy being part of the conforming set. The movie never really settles on a tone. It seems to want to be a satire, but is sidetracked into the melodramatic and the maudlin. Writer-director Cathy Randall cannot find a way of resolving her story without resort to manipulation - both of the plot and of our emotions. It's a bit sad because there is, within the film, the germs of several good ideas, none of which are quite realised. Newcomer Danielle Catanzariti (strange, she doesn't sound Jewish) does well enough in the lead role as do Essie Davis as her mother and Castle-Hughes as the idiosyncratic Sunni, but, in the final analysis, the film confuses its audience. Based on the shorts, I was expecting a lightweight comedy; I got something much different and less definable.
Seen on DVD
The two movies I saw on video thish were seen on plane flights to and from New Zealand. There are necessarily downsides to watching films on airplanes, particularly in respect of the sound quality, so I prefer movies that are not dialog-based. Martian Child, based on a David Gerrold story, is very much a dialog-based movie. Its protagonists are a recently widowed SF writer (John Cusack) and an orphaned child (Bobby Coleman) who believes, apparently sincerely, that he is from Mars. David, the writer, has been considering adoption but is getting cold feet. His visit to the orphanage beings him in contact with the child, who hides from the sun inside a cardboard box, and he is intrigued. Intrigued enough to try communicating with the child, who responds to his less oblique approaches. The bulk of the movie deals with David's attempts to win over the child; convince the adoption authorities that he knows what he is doing and should be allowed to keep the child; and their interactions with David's sister (played inevitably by Cusack's own sister Joan), his mates (including Oliver Platt) and his putative good female buddy (the increasingly great Amanda Peet). The writer is prepared to let the kid keep his illusions, which naturally upsets the bureaucrats, personified by Richard Schiff, who tries very hard to appear uncaring enough to take the child away from an obviously loving parent. The end result is that the movie, despite the quality of its cast, cannot overcome an overly soppy script, nor quite make the quirkiness of the set-up quite work. John Cusack cannot help but be appealing and Joan Cusack provides some sass as his acerbic sister, but the rest struggle and the resolution is all too predictable.
The disappointment then of the trip east to NZ was compensated by a surprise on the way back. Given that we were right at the front of economy class, and without good sight lines to the communal screen, we were gifted with personal DVD players from Business, and a selection of DVDs. This gave me a chance to watch Into the Wild, one of the fringe candidates during the recent awards season. Written and directed by Sean Penn, from a non-fiction book written by John Krakauer, the film seeks to understand the reasons why Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate, would seek the isolation of the Alaskan wilderness, and the events that led to his untimely death. In the book, the narrative is in the author's hands, and develops as he discovers more of Chris' fate and talks to those he met on his journey. In the movie the narration is carried by Chris' younger sister, so it has a more personal perspective but lacks reasons for being an all-knowing auctorial voice. The movie is never transparent about why McCandless might choose the life he does, but suggests that he was seeking to cleanse himself somewhat and to both find himself and find the purity of the wild. It also suggests that, towards the end of his quest, he was ready to return to civilisation, only to be frustrated by the very forces of nature that he had sought to know better. The narrative is told in fractured chronology, jumping from his days on an abandoned bus in Alaska, back to the events that had led him there. Along his journey, he meets a series of people who impact on his life, particularly Jan and Rainey, a brace of superannuated hippies, and Wayne, who gives him some work in the Dakotas. Perhaps the most significant encounter is with the old and conservative "Ron" (Hal Holbrook), who represents to Chris the results of a choice of a life without daring. In Chris, Ron sees the road not taken. It's an interesting confrontation and Holbrook's performance is certainly worthy of the award nominations he received. Emile Hirsch (who had been good in a totally different sort of role in Girl Next Door) plays Chris, and his transformation through the movie, internally, as well as externally, is impressive. Sean Penn draws from him a studied performance of quiet dignity, and surrounds him with complementary actors, including Catherine Keener as Jan, Vince Vaughn (Wayne) and William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, who portray his concerned and confused parents. This appears to be a very good movie that may take itself just a touch too seriously. Nonetheless, it provides much food for thought about the thinking that leads people to make the lifestyle choices they do, and how those choices can impact on others.
From our DVD collection - reviews of good and great movies not previously reviewed
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe is another movie that moves between the present and the past. In the present Ninny Threadegoode (Jessica Tandy) is in a retirement home where she meets the put-upon Evelyn Couch (the great Kathy Bates). Evelyn is overweight and has low self-esteem, a situation not helped by her neglectful husband. She sits with old Ms Threadegoode, who starts spinning a yarn about the pre-war South, involving the Threadegoode family, including the rebellious Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterton), who never recovers from the death of her elder brother Buddy. Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker), who may have married Buddy, remains a friend of the family and her plight when she marries an unsuitable husband stirs Idgie into action. Mixed into the tale are the other inhabitants of Whistlestop, GA, including the Negro employees of the family, the indigent sheriff and other colorful identities. As Ninny tells her story over several episodes, it starts to inspire Evelyn to be more like Idgie and Ruth, and to change her own life, starting to do more exercise, lose weight and be more assertive. The tale continues with Ruth and Idgie living together and running the eponymous cafe, leading to the death of Ruth's spouse, and a sensational murder trial. Like Scheherazade, Ninny has a captive audience who keeps returning for more. Some critics have bemoaned the fact that, like some other contemporary movies, the film downplays the central gay relationship within it. The same criticism was made of Philadelphia and of The Color Purple, because there was some subtlety in the way the same sex relationship was portrayed. The love between Ruth and Idgie is obvious and it doesn't need a bedroom scene nor to rub the audience's nose in what is going on. Ironically, it was largely fans of the novel who made this whinge, and the screenplay was co-written by the writer of the novel, Fannie Flagg. The strength of the movie is in the success of the two complementary two-woman relationships and of the actresses who play them. Idgie and Ruth are played by two (then) young actresses, one of whom (Parker) has gone on to greater success, particularly in television (Angels in America, The West Wing, Weeds). Masterson had a number of good roles in the late 1980s and was the better known of the two youngsters at the time. She was excellent in this movie, especially in getting across Idgie idiosyncratic personality. Evelyn and Ninny are of successively older generations and played by Oscar winners and two excellent actors. Tandy never really had the roles her talent deserved, but between this and Driving Miss Daisy she had two of her better roles. Evelyn is another of Kathy Bates' excellent performances and her character is the one who undergoes growth as the tale unfolds. This is a movie about non-conformity in a very structured society and about how the lessons of the past can be applied to the present. It is a seriously interesting and also good fun.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]