Academy Awards - The Oscars

Once again it is time to celebrate a year of film watching. Here are my choices for the following awards along with a few thoughts about some of the selections and non-selections The Academy made.

• Actor in a Leading Role – The nominees are: Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Timothee Chalamet (Call me by Your Name), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread), and Denzel Washington (Roman J. Isreal, Esq.). Who else could be on this list? Tom Hanks (The Post), James Franco (The Disaster Artist), and Richard Gere (Norman). However, regardless of who wasn’t on the list, the runaway best performance is Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour. His Winston Churchill was simply sublime.
• Actress in a Leading Role – The nominees are: Meryl Streep (The Post), Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water), Margot Robbie (I, Tonya), Francis McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, and Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird). Who didn’t get nominated? Rachel Weisz (My Cousin Rachel), Emma Stone (Battle of the Sexes) and Jessica Chastain (The Zookeepers Wife). If it were up to me, I’d select Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird because of the variety and excellent delivery of teenage emotions she effectively brings to the screen. Margot Robbie was utterly fantastic as Tonya Harding. Francis McDormand was filled with angst and fire as the woman who lost her daughter to rape and murder. Sally Hawkins was ethereal as Elisa Esposito a deaf woman who communicates with the captured creature. Meryl Streep showed the subtle development of strength as her character Katharine Graham.
• Supporting Actress – The nominees are: Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread), Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird), Allison Janney (I, Tonya), Mary J. Blige (Mudbound). Octavia Spencer (The Shape of Water). Who is missing from this list? Melissa Leo (Novitiate), who gave one of most outstanding performances of the year. The film wasn’t seen and that is a shame. This is a strong field but choosing from the nominees, I’d select Allison Janney. Her depiction of Tonya Harding’s mother was vividly cold.
• Supporting Actor – The nominees are: Christopher Plummer (All the Money in the World), Woody Harrelson (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Willem Defoe (The Florida Project), and Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water). A great set of actors. Missing? Steve Carell (Battle of the Sexes) gave us an incredibly life like Bobby Riggs. I’d have to say that Sam Rockwell would get my vote although each of the above deserve the recognition.
• Best Cinematography – The nominees are: Bruno Delbonnel (Darkest Hour), Hoyte van Hoytema (Dunkirk), Rachel Morrison (Mudbound), Dan Laustsen (The Shape of Water), and Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049). Great list of people creating and delivering great pictures. My vote would go for Hoyte van Hoytema in Dunkirk. I admired the multitude and type of scenes that were shot and how they were made into a cohesive feeling of awe.
• Writing (Adapted Screenplay) – The nominees are: Dee Rees and Virgil Williams (Mudbound), Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter (The Disaster Artist), James Ivory (Call Me by Your Name), James Mangold, Michael Green and Scott Frank (Logan), and Aaron Sorkin (Molly’s Game). My vote would go to  Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter for The Disaster Artist.
• Writing (Original Screenplay) – The nominees are: Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water), Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick), Jordan Peele (Get Out) and Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird). This is probably the tightest category to be contested. Each of these stories is amazingly original. Therefore, I don’t have a single selection, they all are deserving.
• Film Editing – The nominees are: Lee Smith (Dunkirk), Tatiana S. Riegel (I, Tonya), Jonathan Amos and Paul MacHliss (Baby Driver), Sidney Wolinsky (The Shape of Water), and Jon Gregory (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). All very good, however the standout in editing goes to Lee Smith for Dunkirk. This is a story based film and not a character based film and because of this the editing makes this film engaging.
• Directing – The nominees are: Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), and Jordan Peele (Get Out). What is missing. To me there are huge gaps here. Margaret Betts (Novitiate), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit), Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya), and Joe Wright (Darkest Hour) all had a great firm hand on their story's and told them with excellence. Out of the nominees, I’d vote for Christopher Nolan and Dunkirk because he made this event come alive. However, Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) got amazing performances from her cast.
• Picture – The nominees are: Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Phantom Thread, Get Out, The Post, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water, and Lady Bird. All these pictures, except Phantom Thread (review in process) are films I loved to watch for different reasons. What is missing? I think Novitiate, Detroit, and Battle of the Sexes were deserving as well. However, Novitiate would be my candidate for replacing Phantom Thread which I didn’t really find likable or engaging. Who will win? My wish would be Dunkirk, Lady Bird, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in that order. If Novitiate was in the mix, it would be a tie between it and Dunkirk.

Thank you for visiting my site. May you all Be Well...

Dunkirk

First Hit: An amazing film that focuses on the event not the actors or their characters.

Easily the best overall film of this year mainly because the vision is true and clear. Not many films make the story the highlight and focus. Mostly films have a character or two that engage the audience into the story. Here the characters are a subset of the story. This doesn’t take away from the actors or acting, but it lays the responsibility of how good this film is on the writer, editor, sound team, music, cinematography, and director.

Christopher Nolen did an amazing job of creating and giving his vision life on the big screen. This is the true story of how 800 boats, most of them small personal pleasure and fishing boats from England, crossed the English Channel to save over 338,000 allied soldiers consisting of British, French, Canadian and Belgium men who were trapped by German soldiers.

Nearly 400,000 soldiers were backed-up to the English Channel, trapped into a corner at Dunkirk, France. German planes bombed the English ships, including hospital ships taking the wounded away from the shoreline. Boats were also torpedoed and sunk. The British Government determined that sending in more large ships and planes to assist these trapped troops would only result in more losses of people and hardware.

The call went out to boat owners in England to sail to Dunkirk and save as many men as possible. Their low water draft meant they could also get closer to shore.

The film follows a couple of the English pilots in their Spitfires as they sacrificed themselves to knock German plains from the sky. It follows a couple of soldiers as they try to find their way to a boat to take them to freedom, alive. It gives the viewer glimpses of British command thinking through Commander Bolton. And it follows a man and his sons in their small boat attempting to save as many as possible. The line shown in the previews and used in the film, “there’s no turning away from this…” was poignantly perfect.

Everyone who played a character in this film is to be lauded. Fionn Whitehead, Damien Bonnard, Aneurin Barnard, Lee Armstrong, James Bloor, Barry Keoghan, Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Tom Hardy, and Kenneth Branagh, just to name a few, were fantastic in each of their respective roles. The music by Hans Zimmer was astounding. The sound effects and its use was spot on perfect. Hoyte Van Hoytema created a sublime view as director of photography. As I previously noted Christopher Nolen’s script and direction was clearly top-notch. This film is his crowning achievement thus far.

Overall:  As of July 2017, clearly best film of the year.

Interstellar

First Hit:  Beautiful pictures, very long and, at times, a confusing film.

I walked out of the theater unsatisfied by the film. It meanders between philosophical, spiritual, pragmatic, and scientific. Example:  The earth is dying and is being encumbered by dust storms but we only see Midwest of the United States. Where is the rest of the world?

The focus of society is on growing food, but corn is the only surviving food. Is that what they are growing in Asia? Another hole  was that NASA is a secret unit of the government because no one would authorize spending money on rockets to find a place for earthlings to re-populate. Why would we want to repopulate a new planet when we screwed up our own?

The holes in the initial setup of this story are huge and gaping. Because there were so many questions from the beginning the story was confusing. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former NASA pilot, turned farmer who has two kids Murph (10 Yrs – Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain as mid-aged, and Ellen Burstyn as the older Murph) and Tom (15 Yrs - Timothee Chalamet and older Casey Affleck).

Because his wife is deceased, also living with him is his father-in-law Donald (Jon Lithgow). He improbably (gravity helps him discover where it is) finds NASA’s working headquarters and because he’s there, Professor Brand (Michael Caine) decides to ask him to fly a space vehicle into a wormhole near Saturn.

The film wants us to believe that some super being placed the wormhole there for our use to figure out how to save the planet. Professor Brand’s daughter Brand (Anne Hathaway) is part of the scientific crew as well. The story spins off into different planets (worlds) for the crew to explore as a way to “save earth”.

McConaughey was good (and no better than that) as the cowboy-ish pilot of the space vehicle and father of two children he misses. Although he is fun to watch, I don’t think his character was believable and really a tad too self-righteous. Hathaway was good, but again believability in her character was questionable. Foy was one to the highlights of the film as was Chastain in the role of Murph. Lithgow is effective in the brief role as father-in-law. Caine was mediocre as the professor who is neither brilliant nor conniving. Matt Damon as Dr. Mann a pilot who had previously gone through the wormhole stuck on a planet was very good in his role. Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan wrote a script that was too large to film well without it being a 4 hour film. There were too many holes (black or worm) in the story to be believable. Overall, the story was disappointing. Christopher did a very credible job of filming space and creating various worlds, but the ambitiousness of the story left me lost in space.

Overall:  Although there were great pictures this film was too ambitious for its own good.

The Dark Knight Rises

First Hit:  A real waste of 164 minutes.

The beginning of an action thriller film needs to draw the audience in with intrigue.

This film starts off with lost mediocrity and because the beginning is not set well, the rest of the film fails. Not that there aren’t fun, interesting, and exciting moments, but the slowness and overly complex development of a unexceptional plot was wasteful of my time.

Christian Bale (as Bruce Wayne/Batman) looked bored and grateful that this will be the last time he has to pretend he’s the king of Gotham’s crime fighters. That the film hinted that Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Blake) will become “Robin” in some future encounter was unfortunate. What worked? Anne Hathaway worked.

She played the petty thief Selina and every time she was on the screen, you watched her. She brought humor, intrigue, and something different than the dull overly scripted film that continued to unfold. Michael Cain as Wayne’s manservant Alfred, made an attempt to bring drama and passion to this film, but it was seen as just that; attempting to bring drama to a dying film.

One of the worst ideas in characters was having the evil enemy Bane (played by Tom Hardy), talk through a device covering his mouth which made him sound silly, not menacing. I could go on and on about how unengaged this film was with telling a good story but I won't. 

Frankly, the film was a poor semi-showcase of visual effects and overly dramatic storylines which meant little because the set-up was so piss poor.

Bale, looked and acted bored with the role and film. Gordon-Levitt was reasonably good and brought energy to a dying film. Hathaway was engaging and delightful and the only reason to sit through the bloated story. Cain was wasted in this role although he did try to bring emotion to a heartless film. Hardy’s character was minimalized by the voicing device. There are a whole host of others who were part of this film that didn’t make it any better despite their wholehearted attempts. Jonathan and Christopher Nolan wrote a wasteful overly complex lifeless script. Christopher Nolan directed this and I’ve no idea of what he was trying to give the audience but it felt as though he didn’t care a whole lot.

Overall: Bloated, overly developed and stupidly complex – don’t bother.

Inception

First Hit: Beautifully and visually arresting but overly complicated, long and too many gun fights to make it really work.

I don’t think films need to be seen multiple times to understand them better. Films need to create the story in a way which allows one to move (pulled) into the story with thoughtfulness.

I don’t want a lot of rethinking of what I just saw, wondering how it conjoins with the part I’m seeing now and if it makes sense with the beginning or where it might be going. Good films can be complicated. A good complicated film allows the complicatedness to unfold in such a way that the audience trusts the story and director to make sense of it all which they invariably do.

There are films I will see more than once (Memento and Sixth Sense to name two) looking to see if I missed story line clues along the way which revealed an earlier ending or a plot twist which I misunderstood, but after seeing it again, I realize it was just a well-made film.

I don't see films more than once just so I can understand the film. If after seeing a film I have this thought that I have to see the film again to understand it, then in my book, the director has failed. Inception is such a film.

Christopher Nolan over complicated this story and film to make it seem intelligent. He didn’t have to. The story is already intelligent. I understood the story, but it's the execution which is flawed. I knew early on why Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) felt guilty about his wife’s death. It was obvious, the early hints at tokens and them being personal along with the longing angst.

One knew early on it wasn’t his token which he was carrying. Nolan tried to make this a pivotal part of the film but it didn't work that way. It became a weight. At 148 minutes it was laboriously long and could have used about 30 – 40 minutes of trimming. Cut out the multitude of gun battles (why were they there and what did they add?) in which only one person on the “good team” gets shot. How can people miss their target at 2 feet distance, (Think about this: I’m at the window of your van with a really big gun, you’ve got 6 people in your van and pull off 15 shots and I don’t hit anyone – not likely) especially if they are hired killers?

Much of the gun battle stuff doesn’t make sense nor does it add to the intrigue of the film's concept. Just because a person is in a dream doesn’t mean they cannot get shot; if one guy gets shot (and he did), then all can get shot (and they don't).

On the plus side, the exploration of dreams at multiple levels is interesting. The concept of inception or implanting an idea and having it take hold and grow is in someone's mind is interesting. Another really good segment in the film was the part in which Cobb hires Ariadne (played by Ellen Page) as the dream architect.

The initial scenes where she is learning how to be a dream architect are extraordinary. Page (as Ariadne) is just the right kind of person to push dream boundaries with a particular amount of intelligence and risky youthful exuberance.

DiCaprio is alright here but from an acting standpoint he hasn’t grown and his standard character is getting worn out. Page is wonderful especially at the beginning of the film. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as DiCaprio’s side kick is great as the solid piece of the team. He brought great energy and clarity to the film. Nolan did direct some great scenes with interesting pictures, but the story (by Nolan) was overwrought with needless gun fights (real or imaginative) and took away from what might have been a real psychological thriller.

Overall: Not an impressive film and certainly doesn’t live up to the hype of the previews or press.