Oscars and Alice
Movies seen early 2010.
Originally written: April 2010
Oscars 2010
2009 - year in review
Valentines Day
Alice in Wonderland
The Blind Side
Call it the "year of the critics' revenge" but don't call it sensible. This year's Academy Awards casts into relief some of the real problems with the limited franchise and older age demographic of the Oscar voters. The major prize-winner, for film, direction, writing and some technical awards was a traditional war film that failed to resonate with the public. (Caveat: The film in question, The Hurt Locker, had not been released theatrically in Australia and appeared to be going straight to DVD. It has been released in the wake of the Oscar nomination and favoritism but I haven't as yet seen it, so any comments I make have to be read in the light of my having seen only relatively small sections of the movie, and read some critiques.) The press, particularly the trade press, established a narrative early: the fight was between was The Hurt Locker, the critics' darling, and Avatar, the box office champ. That the respective directors were ex-partners only made the contest motif more attractive. What needs to be understood is that, in the lead up to the Oscar nominations, there are a number of other awards, particularly now a series of awards from groups of professional film critics. The critics almost unanimously awarded The Hurt Locker, which they had reviewed overwhelmingly favorably. The trouble was that the film flopped with the public and completed its US run with only $12 millions in box office takings. Even though it was ideal Oscar fodder, a critically acclaimed and promoted "serious" movie, directed by a Hollywood insider, normally the failure to attract an audience would rule it out, as it did with, for example, the musical Nine. I don't know whether it deserved to beat Avatar, but it is another example of the Academy's determination to do the "right" thing by selecting a sercon exercise in traditional format (this one the war story concentrating on a small company - in the Battleground tradition) rather than go for the sort of movie that is innovative and adventurous or, heaven forfend, a genre movie, no matter how technically creative they are. The 2009 exclusion of The Dark Knight was a worse sin than the omission of Avatar, because I still have great problems with the derivative and simplistic storyline of Cameron's film.
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I also had problems with Kathryn Bigelow's acceptance speeches. Particularly her Best Director victory was trumpeted as a win for women directors (she is the first such winner in 82 tries and her exit music was "I Am Woman"), but her speech was all about "our boys in uniform". That was pukeworthy enough but she upped the ante when The Hurt Locker won Best Production. This time she offered her support "to men and women in uniform everywhere". Did that include North Korea? Burma? Fiji?
But my real concern was with the acceptance of the Bigelow-v-Cameron narrative. There were eight other nominated films, many of which were likely deserving of the Best Picture award. The sports contest narrative suggested that it was a two-horse race and thus discounted, amongst others, Up in the Air, one of the more creative, thoughtful and entertaining movies of recent times, and Up, which despite being an animation (as was Avatar to a large extent) was deserving of the award for its cinematic, as well as its narrative, qualities. The omission of these excellent movies from victories, except for Up's music and animation, was the worst part of the 2010 Oscars.
The upside was in the acting awards, which seem to have gone to four deserving actors. Jeff Bridges rates as one of the greats, whose work includes Starman, The Great Lebowski, The Contender and The Fabulous Baker Boys. That he ended up sounding like the Dude, as he gave his acceptance speech, only added to the joy of the occasion. Sandra Bullock seems to have been rewarded for showing a more serious side to her acting in The Blind Side - in the same year that she won the Razzie for her unfunny turn in the pathetic All About Steve. Her speeches on both occasions (she actually turned up at the Razzies and gave a very funny acceptance speech) demonstrated the smart woman behind the actor. Whether her performance was better than Streep's Julia Child, or the young woman in Precious, is a more difficult question, but Bullock has paid her dues well and truly. The two supporting actors appear to have been won by the best performances, although they were, again, also the critics' choices.
The downside was the show itself. The pairing of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin just didn't work and their opening dialog contained far too few funny moments. There were also real sound problems on the broadcast, particularly of the opening number, featuring Neil Patrick Harris, who should have been the host and would have worked better. Apart from the tribute to John Hughes, the show was uninteresting, and moving the special awards to a separate ceremony robbed us of the chance to see Roger Corman and Gordon Willis truly honored.
As for the frocks, and the red carpet, the conservative outfits this year continued the recent tradition of not upsetting the punters, with two dishonorable exceptions: Vera Farminga's ruffles and Scary Jessica Parker's abomination were the fashion disasters de jour.
The year in review
Some reflections on a year in movies and where we are headed. The five leading US money-makers in 2009 were: Avatar, Transformers 2 (which won the Worst Picture Razzie), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Twilight: New Moon and Up. Three were sequels and all relied on animation and/or cgi.
Did you happen to notice there isn't a big name amongst the actors? People have become familiar with Daniel Radcliff, maybe, and Robert Pattison and Kristen Stewart are gossip mag fodder, and Ed Asner has a certain renown from his TV past. Apart from James Cameron, and Pixar, there is really a name above the title either. Up was the only one with reasonably unanimous critical support. Most of 2009's biggest hits were their own best promotion, and had ready target audiences. They indicate that movies are changing and the multi-million dollar big-name [male] star is no longer a guarantee of box office success (except perhaps for Johnny Depp, who made Public Enemies a quasi-hit and has pushed Alice in Wonderland into 2010's first big earner, and Robert Downey Jr, whose Sherlock Holmes has now grossed over $200 millions in the US and $500 million worldwide).
Ironically, while the men haven't justified their inflated money demands, there is a small number of actresses who defy the trend, Katherine Heigl took the ordinary The Ugly Truth to $200 millions worldwide; Meryl Streep led both Julie & Julia and It's Complicated to grossing over $110 millions in the US each; and, especially, Sandra Bullock, with The Proposal taking $160 millions (the most ever taken in the US by a romcom) and The Blind Side - close to $250 millions in the US (now the highest grossing sports film of all time). Even the abysmal All About Steve took $33 millions.
Typical Hollywood excess actually
It's probably unfair to blame the Hollywood studio system for the sins of Garry Marshall, but that won't stop me. Marshall, with writer Katherine Fugate, has made what is essentially the American version of Love Actually, with the scene switched from Xmas to Valentine's Day. The same series of disparate love stories, the same attempt to link the characters together through various concatenations and connections, the same feel-good flavor. The only things it misses are the humor that saved Richard Curtis' movie and the vibrancy afforded by the bookend airport scenes that gave it some kind of thematic unity. There is no kind of unity in Marshall's mish-mash and no overarching outre story like Billy Mack's in the British film. The central plot line, which brings florist Ashton Kutcher from his current love interest to his destined love interest, is far too obvious. The Bradley Cooper-Julia Roberts scenes far too arch. In between there are some effective bits from Hector Elizondo and Shirley McLaine and from Topher Grace and Anne Hathaway, as different ends of the pairing spectrum. The youngsters, including Taylor Swift, Taylor Lutner and Emma Roberts add little. And overall there are far too few jokes. There is a certain sweetness about some of the scenes but none of the daring that is apparent in the British original. Given my earlier comments about the box office appeal of star names, this movie, with its all-star cast, may be the exception that proves the rule: despite largely negative reviews, the film has made a motza at the box office in the States. It will likely lead to a series of all-star Holiday-themed movies. I trust that, if there is to be such a series, that the films are written more tightly and with more control that this entry. And that the all-star cast is better employed.
When logic and proportion ...
There are always been a certain undercurrent to the adventures of young Alice Liddell in Wonderland. Even leaving aside the puzzles and maths that Lewis Carroll incorporated, there is a frisson of adult danger that may have been missed by younglings fascinated by the overt fantastical elements of Carroll's tales. Tim Burton's re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland, by making it a sort of sequel to the original stories and having a more mature Alice undertake the adventures, revels in the more questionable elements of the original tale, at the expense of the story's innocence. In Burton's take on Wonderland, an adult Alice (now surnamed Kingsleigh) is on the verge of engagement to an upper-class twit. Her earlier adventures have been sublimated as but a dream, which she barely recalls - even if she continues to experience the adventures nocturnally. At her engagement party she espies a white rabbit and before you can say, "Isn't that Tony Blair's Michael Sheen's voice?" she's down the hole and the movie gets going. This is Wonderland, but not quite. The Hatter is genuinely mad but, as impersonated by Johnny Depp, becomes the ring-leader for an insurgent cabal aiming to rid the kingdom of the baneful (and literally big-headed) Red Queen. In this he is abetted by a series of characters originally from the book, but with a twist or two for flavor. And the plot and cast of characters is supplemented by some non-canonical figures and some imports from other Carollian works. So Alice's quest is revealed early on to be to slay the Jabberwocky (sic) on the Frabjous Day. She is menaced by a Bandersnatch and taunted by the Hatter's crazily rewritten version of the original nonsense poem. The film itself is a mixture of live action, motion capture and cgi techniques, shown in the latest Disney 3D technology (the same one as used in Up). This gives the whole thing a fantastic look and feel. There are a plethora of lovies taking the voice roles, including Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Christopher Lee. The American cast tends to do the live-action bits, including Depp, Crispin Glover as the Jack (Knave) of Hearts and Anne Hathaway as a mincing White Queen (if she was one of the better things in Valentine's Day, she is just about the worst here). Helena Bonham-Carter gets to do the resident evil for her squeeze Tim and our Mia Wasikowska is a useful Alice. The film carried me along for the first two-thirds but, like so many films about which I have written recently, devolved into a set-piece fight scene in the denouement, although I did appreciate the climactic fluttenwacken dance - as well as the even more meaningful anti-climactic one. Tim Burton is blessed with a fertile imagination and Alice needed some sort of upgrade to make it relevant for the modern era. This movie is enjoyable enough - especially on the big screen. It again proves what a good actor Johnny Depp is, and how there is really no challenge he cannot face. Together with the phalanx of good English voice actors, he is the best thing about this movie, and a good reason to see it.
Thank you Lawrence Taylor
The Blind Side is not a bad movie; it is a reasonably entertaining and inspiring story, based on actual events, about a Memphis family that takes in a homeless high schooler and helps turn him into an All-American offensive tackle and NFL multi-millionaire. It features an outstanding acting performance, but it's not from the actress who won the Oscar. It is from Quinton Aaron who plays Michael Oher, the young, if big and tall, black kid who is taken in by the Tuohy family, especially by the mater familias, Leigh Anne (Sandra Bullock). Bullock certainly understands the character and conveys with some subtlety the various emotions through which she goes in her journey - and Michael's. What she doesn't do is provide anything uniquely interesting in her portrayal. In The Rookie, an earlier movie, from the same director, John Lee Hooker, also based on real events in the life of an unlikely sports star, Rachel Griffiths showed how you can find the depth in character drawn from real-life. While Bullock does a good job, adding another strong performance to her resume, which has very few failures on it (and they are usually sequels - and All About Steve), she is overshadowed by the young man who plays the reluctant footballer. With little acting experience he shows the kind of emotional growth required in this slice of life, exemplifying the learning and maturation through which he goes. The rest of the cast is serviceable: Tuohy's fast-food magnate husband is handled sympathetically by an actor about half his girth and the kids are OK. The script and direction don't take too many liberties and there is some fun in the cameo appearances of many of the college football coaches who tried to lure Oher to their programs. Michael Oher graduated Ole Mizz and is now a starting tackle for the Baltimore Ravens. He's completed a successful first year in the NFL and is on his way to wealth and success. The film demonstrates that this success is built on the support and efforts of his adopted family and his teachers. That's a pretty good lesson.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]