Up the Academy

I am sure you have have been eagerly awaiting my thoughts on the upcoming Academy Awards.

I waited for the invitation to appear on the radio to opine over the airwaves about this stuff, but it never arrived. So you lucky readers have the full benefit of my perspicacious predictions.

Best Actor

Richard Jenkins in The Visitor: a good movie few people saw and even fewer remember. Jenkins is a fine character actor, but not even he believes he has a chance at this one.

Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon: I found Langella’s performance mannered and unconvincing. Anthony Hopkins did a much more memorable RN in Oliver Stone’s Nixon. Unlikely.

Will win: Sean Penn in Milk. The probable winner, given the current political climate and the acclaim surrounding his portrayal of slain San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk. I didn’t think Gus Van Sant’s movie captured the essence of Milk, a far more volatile and interesting man than Penn’s nebbishy portrayal suggested, but nevertheless I think he’ll get the Oscar.

Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. My dislike of this overblown Forrest-Gumpification of a fine F. Scott Fitzgerald story is detailed in earlier posts. The movie might have actually worked better with an actor more interesting than Brad Pitt. Pitt is best suited to absurdist comic roles (Fight Club and Burn After Reading), but he’s a bit hollow as the centerpiece of an emotional saga.

Should win: Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. I think everything about Darren Arnofsky’s portrait of a has-been ‘80s wrestling star is just about perfect, but it rests entirely on the naturalistic, bravura performance of Rourke, whose pumped-up comeback mirrors that of the washed-up performer Randy. A triumph of Method acting.


Best Supporting Actor

Should win: Josh Brolin in Milk. Brolin immerses himself in every role, whether it’s the ne’er-do-well George W. Bush, the hunted drifter in No Country for Old Men or the straitlaced San Francisco city supervisor-turned-murderer Dan White in Milk. He probably won’t win, but of the nominees, his performance seems to me the most award-worthy.

Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder. I loved this movie, and thought Downey was a scream as the Australian actor who darkens his skin to play a black soldier and then can’t drop the character. I love the political incorrectness of this movie and the ire it raised, and Downey always does impeccable work. Given the competition, though, he won’t win.

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt. This nomination might be a consolation prize for the lack of nominations for the much more complicated Synechdoche, New York. It’s a pretty workmanlike performance, though, in an adaptation of a workmanlike play. Not this time for Hoffman.

Will win: Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Unfortunately, being famously and recently dead is a surefire win for Ledger, whose performance as the Joker in this lugubrious Batman sequel –- a movie hailed for unexplainable reasons as a “masterpiece” –- was all about dry mouth and drag makeup. The performance was humorless and repellent and made me long for Nicholson’s flamboyance. And therefore, being so very dead, he will win.

Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road I’m sorry, but everything about this misguided adaptation of an unadaptable Richard Yates novel was laughably awful, from Leo DiCaprio’s attempt to portray an adult man of the 1950s wearing his granddad’s fedora, to the fresh-from-the-showroom fifties furniture and overwrought period music. So I can barely remember Michael Shannon, though he played the only interesting character in the movie, a psychotic man who is for some reason a frequent guest — and the Voice of Truth — at the Kate and Leo characters’ smart dinner parties. Ho hum, I say. Go away, terrible movie.

Best Actress

Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married

Angelina Jolie, Changeling

Melissa Leo, Frozen River

Meryl Streep, Doubt

Kate Winslet, The Reader

A very good lineup, in which all are worthy except Meryl Streep, the most overrated actress in the history of acting.

It’s heartening to see the small, low-budget Frozen River nominated in several categories; Melissa Leo was great as the desperate mother who becomes a reluctant smuggler of illegal immigrants, but she will not win.

Winslet was very good as the former Nazi guard and boy-lover in the flawed Reader, and Hathaway was surprisingly effective in Jonathan Demme’s supremely grating Rachel. I think it’s between Jolie, who was snubbed two years ago for her tour de force in A Mighty Heart, and Winslet, whose nomination compensates for the lack of Oscar mojo for the godawful Revolutionary Road. I favor Jolie, who was very good (if disturbingly skinny) as the mom whose son goes missing in 1920s L.A., but her celebrity may work against her. I’ll go out on a limb and give the prediction to Winslet.

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams, Doubt Adams’ squeaky-voiced, goody two-shoes nun, who is cowed by Meryl Streep’s big scary nun, wasn’t anything to write home about.

Penélope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona Cruz was on fire in Woody Allen’s likeable but largely forgettable Spanish romp. I don’t see it as Oscar bait, but it was a lot better than her role as the overage college student who beds bald Ben Kingsley in the embarrassing Elegy.

Viola Davis, Doubt This nomination is remarkable for the fact that Davis has only one teary scene in the movie, in which she is upstaged by the snot running down her face. It was a fine performance, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen for her.

Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Henson was lovely and lovable as Benjamin’s unlikely adoptive mom. I think she will get it.

Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler She was great, and supremely sexy as the aging stripper and quasi-girlfriend of Mickey Rourke’s wrestler. But Tomei already won that improbable Oscar for the 1992 My Cousin Vinny, and the Academy hasn’t lived down the ridicule. I'd pick Tomei, but she probably won’t win.

Best Animated Feature

It’s WALL-E’s world, everything else just lives in it.


Let’s skip the rest and get to the main event:

Best Picture

Nominees: Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire.

First, what is The Reader doing in there? It was pretty bad, dramaturgically and historically specious, as was the marginally better Frost/Nixon. Some people liked Button a lot more than I did, and I’m sure it will collect a slew of awards in other categories. I think it’s a slugfest between Milk and Slumdog, in which Slumdog, which has received the Golden Globe and all the global buzz, will be the winner. Will its director, Danny Boyle, also win in the directing category, edging out Gus Van Sant? I think so, but you never know about these things.

All This and Norm Coleman, Too

The spotty “fish out of water” romantic comedy New in Town, directed by the Danish director Jonas Elmer, is amiable and endearing, but doesn't have the zest it needs to make it a success.

The early scenes, in which Lucy Hill (Renée Zellweger), an ambitious food-company executive in Miami, agrees to relocate to frigid New Ulm, Minnesota to oversee a factory conversion, have a nice indie-film quirkiness as Lucy experiences some icy culture shock. “Holy Mother of….!” Lucy exclaims when a frigid wind blast greets her outside the airport, an experience those of us spending winter in the frozen north can relate to.

Minnesota native Ken Rance, who wrote the screenplay with C. Jay Cox, affectionately mocks his fellow Gopher Staters, who talk in exaggerated “Fargo” accents (anyhoo, you betcha!) and enjoy ice fishing, snickerdoodles, scrapbooking and talkin’ ‘bout Jesus. Lucy’s guide to New Ulm (the movie was actually filmed in Canada) is her secretary, Blanche Gunderson (nicely played by Siobhan Fallon Hogan), who introduces her to the local union rep, Ted (Harry Connick, Jr., a better singer than actor), a widowed would-be Woody Guthrie who rails wearisomely against corporate “robber barons.”

Naturally, it’s hate at first sight between Lucy and Ted, which inevitably turns to love as the movie succumbs to the hoariest of Hollywood clichés, including an utterly improbable scheme to save the factory when the corporation decides to shut it down.

The movie has a strong beginning and a triumphant ending, but the stuff in the middle is lacking. There’s no logical reason, for example, why the New Ulmers, so boorish when Lucy meets them — swilling beer, watching football in Viking helmets and spouting small-town ignorance — would be transformed by movie’s end into wise, lovely people. Still, the movie offers a smattering of laughs, especially at such familiar things as getting a car stuck in a snowdrift, and a talented cast that includes fine character actor J.K. Simmons as the shop foreman. Zellweger, less scrunch-faced than usual but still awfully pale for a Floridian, is effective as the exec in the sky-blue power suits who gradually lets her hair down.

Now, if they could just seat Senator Al Franken....

Will Criticize for Food

Regular readers of this blog -- wait, there are no regular readers! -- have probably noticed that there haven't been many updates lately. There are several reasons for this, not least of which is that your blogmistress has noticed that people seldom visit, unless it's because they googled "pepperoni nipples american teen" or linked onto an ancient article about the New York Times "Ethicist" Randy Cohen.

Another reason is that blogging about movies is something other people -- the ones who can write about celebrity culture without gagging -- can do much better than I. My brand of film criticism seems kind of outmoded these days, and your blogmistress is getting far fewer calls for her thoughts, paid or unpaid, on all things filmic. Still, the Oscar nominations need to be discussed in snarky ways, so there will be some more posts to come.

Dirty Old Harry

Eastwood dares gangs to make his day in Gran Torino

When asked if he would make a Dirty Harry 6, Clint Eastwood used to joke that he could imagine Harry Callahan, long retired, fly fishing with his .44 Magnum.

It turns out he wasn't exactly joking. In Gran Torino, the 78-year-old Eastwood plays a cranky old codger who yells at the neighbor kids to get off his lawn, guzzles Pabst beer and keeps his trusty firearms close at hand. The movie, Eastwood’s second release this year after the fine Changeling, is like Dirty Harry-meets-Grumpy Old Men. With Asian cuisine. He reminds us of why we didn't vote for John McCain.

Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired Detroit autoworker mourning his recently deceased wife. Walt’s hatreds are many: he grumbles at his teenage granddaughter’s belly ring, the doting attention of his son and daughter-in-law (Brian Haley and Geraldine Hughes), the Asian family next door (“Damn barbarians!”), and at Father Janovich (Christopher Calrey), the round-faced young priest who urges Walt to come to confession. Walt is an unapologetic racist, trading ethnic jokes and scurrilous insults with his barber. He is also, for the sake of drama, hiding some unspecified, coughing-up-blood illness.

The movie takes us into the home of the Asian neighbors, Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia. The youngest son, a quiet teen named Tao (Bee Vang) is being harassed by his cousin Fong (Doua Moua), who wants to recruit Tao into his gang. The gang pressures Tao into stealing Walt’s prized 1972 Gran Torino, a lovingly preserved heirloom that sparks envy in all who behold its gleaming beauty.

Like Walt, the last white man in a shifting neighborhood, the car is an eight-cylinder symbol of the way things used to be, when “Buy American” meant something, before the Big Three automakers had to crawl to Congress and beg for a bailout. Grrr, wusses!

Walt catches Tao in medias theft and nearly blows his head off with a shotgun. Walt grumbles a lot, but eventually lets Tao’s penitent family talk him into letting the boy do odd jobs for him. Walt becomes the foul-mouthed father Tao never had, schooling him on home repairs and the manly art of insult banter.

We are in Dirty Harry territory as we tour Walt’s neighborhood, a scuzzy war zone terrorized by Asian, black and Mexican gangs. Walt becomes a hero by intimidating some African American thugs who are harassing Tao’s very cool sister, Sue (Ahney Her). He aims his finger at them like a cocked gun and delivers a parody of Dirty Harry’s famous “Do I feel lucky?” speech.

Sue (Ahney Her), unperturbed by Walt’s gruff personality, invites the old man for dinner at the house, where he is enveloped in the warmth of the family gathering. The ladies ply him with delicacies, and a diminutive shaman reads his fortune, accurately sensing that Walt, who is haunted by his Korean War experiences, is “not at peace.”

The colorful, respectful dramatization of the Hmong family rituals, with Walt as bemused outsider, is the most rewarding part of the movie. The portrayal recalls the quiet immersion in Japanese culture of Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. Disappointingly, Gran Torino tarries only briefly in cross-cultural territory before heading down the well-traveled path of villains-and-vigilantes. Violence escalates when Fong’s gang targets Tao and his family, prompting Walt to take action in a way that allows him redemption for his past sins.

Nick Schenk’s screenplay is woefully prosaic and at times painfully clichéd. Here’s Walt’s “concerned” son and daughter-in-law wanting to put him in a retirement home! Here’s Walt debating the “padre” over the value of religion! Here’s Walt saying, “You ‘slopes’ are supposed to be good at math!”

Yet there is considerable interest in the way the movie incorporates Eastwood’s pet themes: the hero with the dark past he is trying to forget, the gulf between mythologized heroics and ugly reality. With its unholy mix of cultural tolerance, racial stereotypes and gun violence, Gran Torino mirrors the contradictions of its director/star, a vegan, pro-gun pacifist who likes George Bush, hates the Iraq War and once said he would kill Michael Moore if he stalked him with a camera the way he did Charlton Heston.

It’s a bit hokey, like its eponymous muscle car, but in its oddness and ambiguity is a fitting vehicle for what Eastwood has said will be his last screen performance.

A version of this appeared in the Cleveland Scene.

F. Gump Fitzgerald

David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will be released on Christmas Day, a fitting premiere for a sentimental, multi-generational saga that plucks shamelessly at the heartstrings.

A family picture is not what viewers expect from Fincher, best known for Fight Club, but Benjamin Button is a magical-realist movie about death. Benjamin Button is more eschatological than even the doomy Synechdoche, New York, another recent contender in the “way too long” winter glumstakes (this one clocks in just shy of three hours.) The narrative, as written by prolific Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth, is a litany of loss, a meditation on mortality.

The movie is impressive in its technical proficiency and massive scope, but it saddens me that it takes its inspiration and title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegant, laconic short story about a boy born as an old man who, to the surprise of everyone including himself, ages in reverse. It is my favorite short story in the world.

I couldn’t imagine that this jewel of a story, which occupies less than 20 pages, could be swollen into a two-hour-and-forty-seven-minute epic. Fincher does it by using Fitzgerald’s story as a mere kernel for an elaborate fantasia, which is disappointing if you care, as I do, about Fitzgerald. It’s like a rich, multi-course holiday dinner that leaves you wanting something lighter and more nutritious.

Fitzgerald’s story may not be easily adaptable to the screen, but I can imagine a short film that follows its perfect arc. Fincher doesn’t trust the material, so he makes the movie into F. Gump Fitzgerald. In the hands of Fincher, Fitzgerald’s gossamer magical conceit becomes a heavy, ornate fruitcake of a melodrama.

The movie transplants the story from antebellum Baltimore to New Orleans, so that star Brad Pitt can trot out his “Nawlins” accent and the story can be bookended between deathbed scenes at a hospital where the staff is preparing for Hurricane Katrina. The dying woman is Daisy (Cate Blanchett), attended to by her grown daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond). Caroline reads a lengthy and revelatory “last will and testament” by someone named Benjamin. And so the narrative is launched.

Fincher’s Benjamin is born to a mother who dies in childbirth (a tragedy not in the original story) and a father who is horrified by the infant’s grotesque appearance. Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Benjamin’s arrival is brilliantly comic: Benjamin is born a white-haired, bearded old man. His father, Mr. Button, is alarmed to find him in the nursery, sitting and smoking a cigar.

This kind of humor is lost on Ficher, in whose hands Benjamin Button becomes a tragic story about a deformed infant. Mr. Button takes one look at the monstrously wrinkled, prematurely aged newborn, bundles him up and deposits him on the back stairs of a rooming house, where he is scooped up by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a loving, God-fearing African-American old-age home caretaker who longs for a child. Queenie raises the funny-looking, wizened baby, who grows a funny-looking, wizened little old man who gradually, thanks to artful CGI effects, gains youthful vitality, muscle tone and hair, and becomes Brad Pitt.

In the short story, Benjamin falls for and marries the lovely Hildegarde Moncrief, whose parents are horrified that she is marrying an old man. He is in reality much younger than Hildegarde, though as the marriage wears on, she ages and he grows younger. She ceases to attract him, and he becomes enamored of “the gay life” of dancing and parties. The movie calls Benjamin’s inamorata Daisy, thinking perhaps of Gatsby's girlfriend. She is introduced as the precocious little granddaughter of one of the rooming house’s tenants. She is the same age as the elderly-looking Benjamin, but the odd pair are drawn to each other. Benjamin watches from afar as Daisy grows into a swan-necked ballet dancer played by Cate Blanchett.

Benjamin becomes a merchant seaman and battles enemy fire on a tugboat during World War II. He reunites with his father, who, in an example of the movie’s hyper-literalness, owns a button factory, Button’s Buttons. Fitzgerald, never so boringly obvious, made Mr. Button proprietor of a dry-goods store.

There are more pointless adventures as Benjamin grows up and grows younger. He visits a brothel. He has a passionate affair with a married Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton) who wants to swim the English Channel. He pursues Daisy, who turns him down in favor of her exciting bohemian life as a New York dancer. A taxi accident — which is, for no good reason, delineated as a metaphysical event — ends Daisy’s dancing career. She and Benjamin get together, become a swinging ‘60s couple and have a daughter. The window of time when their ages are compatible begins to close, and the increasingly sprightly Benjamin heads off on his motorcycle for regions unknown.

The movie meanders obsessively into meaningless digression – for example, an old man compulsively recounts the many times he was struck by lightning, and Fincher obliges by dramatizing each comical incident in sepia tones. It gets a laugh every time, but it has more to do with Fincher showing off than with telling of Benjamin’s story. The collection of "events" elicits little more than a bored sigh.

The movie’s not very profound theme isn’t “Life is like a box of chocolates,” but “Everybody dies.” The story recounts death after death, funeral after funeral, and it’s peculiarly unmoving. The movie is so stuffed with irrelevant characters, it’s hard to invest any feeling in them. It's reminiscent more of the the Dickens-manque novels of John Irving than the lean, economical writing of Fitzgerald.

At the screening I attended, some audience members were audibly choked up by the mournful denouement, in which Benjamin experiences childhood in reverse. I was struck by the silliness of Benjamin being equated to an Alzheimer’s patient “forgetting how to walk," since he is clearly becoming a baby. In the hands of the hyper-literal Fincher and scenarist Roth, Fitzgerald's magic becomes tragic

Over the years, Fitzgerald has been treated rather poorly by Hollywood. Francis Ford Coppola’s embarrassing 1974 The Great Gatsby, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, may be the nadir of attempted Fitzgerald adaptations. But Fincher and Roth are the only filmmakers I can think of who had the arrogance to completely rewrite him.

Writing about the Gatsby movie, John Simon mused on the problems of adapting great novels for the screen: “Partly out of exploitativeness, but partly also out of stupidity, producers ignore a fact that the very schoolchildren of today have mastered: the form is the content. The shape of the novel on the page, its paragraph and sentence structure, the imagery and cadences of the prose, and all the things that are left to the imagination, these, as much as plot and character, are what the novel is about, and these, in good and great novels, cannot be transposed on screen.”

Nothing in this massive movie, for example, compares to the final paragraph of Fitzgerald’s story, which is as perfect an ending as can be imagined:

“Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.”

Swollen Beyond Recognition

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was a story F. Scott Fitzgerald had a hard time selling to magazines like Collier’s, which wanted him to write more Jazz Age flapper stories. A delicate supernatural tale about a man who is born old and ages in reverse, “Benjamin Button” is a masterpiece of short-story writing.

In a letter to his agent, Fitzgerald explained the origin of the idea:

“The story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying to experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given the idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s ‘Note-books.’”

The story occupies about 20 pages. Director David Fincher (Fight Club, Panic Room) has made a movie based on this story that runs 167 minutes. This seems to me like taking a small, perfect jewel and pasting it on a huge, garish costume-jewelry brooch.

The movie opens December 25. I’ll write a fuller review in an upcoming post.

Emetic Opera

There are some jobs best left to professionals, and opera writing is certainly one of them. Repo! The Genetic Opera, a gothic-rock musical and midnight-movie hopeful, shows what can happen when a person with no musical talent locks himself in a room with the soundtracks to Phantom of the Opera, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Moulin Rouge, and decides, “Hey, I can do that!”

A memo to Repo! “composers” Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich: No, you can’t. And you shouldn’t, forever until the end of time.

No words yet exist to describe how wretched this movie is. It originated as a play by Smith and Zdunich about a graverobber in debt to an organ-repossession man. For some reason, the play was successful enough to be made into this unwatchable movie, an all-singing gore-fest replete with vivisections, oozing intestines and music that, if used to compel terrorist confessions, would violate the Geneva Conventions. Smith and Zdunich seem to have been attempting a theater piece in the manner of Brecht and Weill, but lack any talent for it. Their idea of “opera” is to provide a chugging heavy-metal guitar track, over which the actors perform a tuneless singspiel of breathtaking banality. “I’m infected/by your genetics/that’s what’s expected/when you’re infected.” “Dad I hate you/Go and die.” “Surgery!/Surgery!” After you leave the theater, the effect is hard to shake. You begin to hear every thought sung in this way. “Time to get my laundry done/laundry done!” “Do you think the mail is here/mail is here?”

Brought to you by the producers of Saw and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, the movie is about an evil biotech firm, GeneCo, headed by Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino — what is he doing here?), which has capitalized on a worldwide epidemic of organ failure by selling transplants on credit. When payments are missed, GeneCo dispatches its killer “organ repo men.” Zdunich plays The Graverobber, a whitefaced Brechtian narrator who comments on the action while harvesting organs and selling intravenous painkillers.

A 17-year-old girl, Shilo (Spy Kids’ Alexa Vega), lives in isolation because she has a rare disease acquired when her doctor father, Nathan (Anthony Head), tried to save her pregnant mom’s life. The man actually responsible for the mother’s death was Rotti, whom the mother jilted. Nathan is secretly a GeneCo repo man whose next target is GeneCo spokeswoman Blind Mag (ex-Lloyd Webber chanteuse Sarah Brightman).

Rotti, who is dying, must contend with his disappointing sons Luigi and Pavi (Bill Mosely and Nivek Ogre) and daughter Amber (Paris Hilton), who’s addicted to plastic surgery and painkillers. Rotti lures Shilo, who is desperate to experience the outside world, to The Genetic Opera, a stage show in which all secrets are supposed to be revealed.

This putrescent soap opera is illustrated by scenes of intestines being yanked out of abdomens and musical numbers in musty styles retrieved from the MTV vaults. The Genetic Opera, which should be a fantastically entertaining climax, is dull and dreary, enlivened only by the spectacle of a woman gouging out her eyeballs and getting impaled on a fencepost. There is also a dying-daddy-daughter duet that vaguely mimics real opera. By this point, though, anyone with eyes and ears has already fled the theater.

Visually, the movie is a muddy mess, badly lit and unbearably ugly. The backstory is told with comic-book panels that suggest the movie would have made more sense as a graphic novel, or even as a film using comic-book illustrations, like Persepolis. But then we wouldn’t have the treat of seeing Paris Hilton trying to act and sing.

The film targets young viewers, who may find something entertaining about it, and who don’t insist that songs have such things as melodies. But the movie has no discernible point. Is it a satire about the modern mania for easy credit and plastic surgery? A warning about a future corporate-controlled dystopia? Both, or nothing at all? I suspect the latter.

The main failure of Repo! is that it isn’t the least bit funny. No movie becomes a cult classic without humor, even if it’s unintentional (Plan 9 from Outer Space). Generations wouldn’t have slavishly followed Rocky Horror if it weren’t a fun, silly farce. Repo! hasn’t a whit of wit — and worse, it seems to take itself completely seriously.


Originally published in the Cleveland Scene.