Obligatory Oscars Post

Sometimes the Academy Awards (now officially re-branded as "The Oscars") honor artistic excellence in cinema, but mostly the whole shebang is about Hollywood promoting product and selling a positive image of itself to the public ("Look! We make prestige films, not just Gigli and Transformers movies!") while simultaneously patting itself on the back.  As William Friedkin said, it's the "greatest promotional scheme that any industry ever devised for itself."

It wasn't shocking that the Academy honored Argo, an entertaining film about Hollywood's role in the rescue of American hostages.  It wasn't shocking that they honored actress Jennifer Lawrence, a breakout movie star whose performance in Silver Linings Playbook wasn't even in the same league as fellow nominee Emmanuelle Riva (Amour).  It wasn't shocking that Amour won only in the Best Foreign Film category, the same fate that befell the superb A Separation last year.  It wasn't even shocking that Michelle Obama announced the Best Picture winner, which just happened to be a film about the relationship between the US Government and Hollywood.  I'd say that was rather convenient, but the Obama Administration wasn't taking a big risk since the other contenders included a film about President Lincoln and a film about killing Osama bin Laden. 

Of course, there were oversights in the nominations. The Academy has a long history of overlooking good films.  For example, The Night of the Hunter, City Lights, The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West and Out of the Past didn't receive any nominations at all.  However, I do think it is surprising that the In Memoriam tribute didn't include Andy Griffith, who was previously overlooked by the Academy for his excellent performance in A Face in the Crowd.  After all, that's the one part of the program that's supposed to be inclusive.  At least the tribute included some less famous people such as screenwriter Tonino Guerra (L'Avventura).

I find it difficult to take the Oscars seriously enough to continue mocking them, so I'll just close by saying that if Jennifer Lawrence can win an Oscar, then I demand an honorary award for the late John Reynolds who played Torgo in Manos: The Hands of Fate.  It's time he had his due. 

Lessons Learned from Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

WARNING: SPOILERS 

 
1. Romance can overcome mental illness.  Sure, taking meds and setting goals can help, but love is the magic potion.  Falling in love is particularly effective if you're so obsessive and violent that your wife took out a restraining order against you.  Because nothing says "dating is the answer to your problems" like a restraining order (or still being married to someone else, for that matter).

2. A history of violence (note the aforementioned restraining order) will not be an impediment to true love if you're both attractive and have used some of the same medications.

3. A mother who truly cares about her son will remove him from his treatment program before he's ready and (apparently) help set him up with a woman while he still has violent outbursts.

4. A father will be punished for the irresponsibility of risking his nest egg on gambling unless his gambling furthers his son's romantic storyline, in which case he will be considered a great dad and be rewarded with a big victory.

5. Lying and manipulating is romantic and a sure sign that two people deserve are destined for each other.

6. It may be the 21st century, but your token wacky African-American friend is still the best person to provide advice on how to put more soul into your dancing.

7. Ridiculous plots are more fun when they are meant to be ridiculous (see Preston Sturges, for example) than when they're meant to be taken seriously, as in this film.  It also helps if your female lead is Barbara Stanwyck or Claudette Colbert instead of Jennifer Lawrence.

Holy Motors (2012)

Holy Motors is a surrealist film about nostalgia, or possibly a nostalgic film about surrealism.  Actually, I'm not sure what it's really about.  I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to know what it's really about.  It's that type of movie.

The plot of Leo Carax's movie involves a day in the life of actor Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant).  Céline (Edith Scob) drives him around Paris in a white limousine for various "appointments."  Each appointment requires M. Oscar to apply makeup and become a different character in a scene.  Most of the scenes appear to take place in the "real world" of Paris.  They resemble performance art in which M. Oscar interacts with "real" people who are not actors, although the film raises the possibility that even the "real" people are actors on their own "appointments." Some of the scenes appear to involve actual violence and death, but the rules of reality are as fluid as the rules of identity in this film. Everything is ambiguous.

This voyage into the heart of surrealism has several intentionally funny moments, mostly based on the juxtaposition between the different levels of reality.  However, this is also a melancholy film that is permeated by a sense of aging and loss.  M. Oscar seems exhausted by the role playing that constitutes his life and the fleeting nature of his interactions with other people.  His day is filled with memorable moments, but there's no foundation to give greater meaning to it.  Perhaps this is a commentary on how we've become a society of surrealists that consumes media and even life itself in fragmentary moments that conceal an underlying emptiness.

I'm not certain if there is a grand unifying artistic vision behind Holy Motors.  It's possible that Carax had a bunch of cool ideas for individual scenes and came up with a loose concept to justify putting them all in the same movie. In any case, there's a lot of imagination here and the scenes are generally quite impressive.  Lavant deserves particular praise for his outstanding work in this film.  He's the glue that holds this crazy mishmash of a movie together.

What Price Hollywood? (1932)

The film's title is rhetorical, because obviously the price is high.  To succeed in Hollywood, you have to pay in blood, sweat, tears, heartbreak, and montages that look like you're being attacked by The Hypnotic Eye.

George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib) directed this black-and-white showbiz drama about waitress and aspiring actress Mary Evans (Constance Bennett).  She meets alcoholic director Max Carey (Lowell Sherman), who invites her to a movie premiere.  Mary does a screen test, signs a contract, and finds herself caught in a plot that resembles (and presumably inspired) A Star Is Born.  Meanwhile, she meets polo player Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton), who gets her to "agree" to a dinner date by breaking into her house, physically assaulting and kidnapping her, and force feeding her the meal.  However, he is rich and handsome, so apparently the audience is supposed to consider this romantic and root for the couple to succeed.  

Bennett gives a good performance -  for example, she does an impressive job of showing how Evans fails her first screen test and then improves her acting for her second test - and the other performances are also good.  The rest of the cast includes Gregory Ratoff as producer Julius Saxe, whose Russian accent is so thick it's hard to believe that Ratoff really was born in Russia, and Louise Beavers, who does her best with the small role of a maid who'd like to appear in the movies. The dialogue is sharp, although the banter doesn't have the rapid-fire pace of a screwball comedy; this was still the early stage of talkies when it sometimes seemed like actors were pausing for a laugh track after their one-liners. The movie also features several montages that seem a bit offbeat (in a good way) for the time; there's a short one at a dramatic point near the end of the film that's particularly effective.  Overall I liked the movie except for Borden, who seemed like a creepy control freak to me.

Red Salute (1935)

The election is finally over and people are tired of politics.  So, of course, I've decided to post about a political film.

It's not just any political film, however. Red Salute is a Golden Age Hollywood Red Baiting Romantic Screwball Comedy Road Film.  This black-and-white film was directed by Sidney Lanfield (Ritz Brothers, Bob Hope, The Hound of the Baskervilles) and stars Barbara Stanwyck as Drue Van Allen, a rich, spoiled and rebellious general's daughter in love with Communist agitator Leonard Arner (Hardie Albright).  It also stars Robert Young as Jeff, a  rowdy, chauvinistic right-wing soldier who's such a red-blooded American that he doesn't even need a last name.

Drue's father General Van Allen (Purnell Pratt) sends her on a Mexican vacation against her will.  She meets Jeff, sparks fly and wacky hijinks ensue. Jeff goes AWOL, steals a military vehicle, and crosses the border illegally with Drue. They bicker with romantic tension as they travel cross-country in a  homemade trailer after kidnapping the owner Rooney (Cliff Edwards), an affable fellow who spends most of his screen time either singing or complaining about his wife. Meanwhile, Drue wants to return to Washington, DC to attend a lecture that Arner is delivering at a college. However, Arner is a Commie so Jeff is the hero and Leonard is the villain. I won't reveal which one Drue chooses, just in case you've never seen a screwball comedy before.

The movie is essentially a second-rate It Happened One Night with a silly plot and jingoistic politics.  Drue is portrayed sympathetically but the film dismisses her opinions as flighty rebelliousness (in stark contrast to the portrayal of Barbara Streisand's leftist activist in The Way We Were, for example).  Despite the movie's superficial patriotism, it doesn't show much respect for important American values like freedom of speech.  However, the film is not completely devoid of interest.  Some of the humor is intentionally amusing and the cast is generally good. Stanwyck brings her sexy, sarcastic charm and big time movie star charisma, even though this movie was actually an independent production by Edward Small's Reliance Pictures that was released by United Artists. Also, the movie is only 78 minutes, which automatically makes it twice as good as Biutiful (no, I'm never going to stop ragging on that film).

By the way, there were protests against Red Salute because of its political message and several protesters were jailed for unlawful assembly.  Many of the protesters were students who were members of the Communist Party-led National Student League and the Student League for Industrial Democracy. I'm not sure if this proves that the film's jingoism was considered heavy handed even for its time, that real-life student activists were treated as disrespectfully as their film counterparts, or that Communists were as humorless as portrayed in the movie.

Somewhere (2010)

 
Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a famous Hollywood actor who parties a lot and is kind of an asshole.   But then he has a chance to bond with his 11-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), and show that he has a good side.

Didn't we just cover this trope in my previous post?

Anyway, Sofia Coppola wrote and directed this film about being a Hollywood celebrity and, also, about being the daughter of a Hollywood celebrity.  She places a fair number of scenes in an overseas hotel and includes both a celebrity-translation scene and a moody-female-at-mealtime scene, just like in her film Last in Translation.  In other words, she isn't exactly stretching by exploring new territory here. Nonetheless, I think this movie has some merit, despite my indifference to the plight of Hollywood movie stars and an ending that seems overly calculated for a "cool" final image.

Coppola has a real flair for minimalist scenes that extend to just before the breaking point: long enough to properly establish the emptiness of Marco's life but stopping a moment before I want to jump onscreen (like Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr.) to make something happen. The movie's main drawback is that even though Dorff is well cast as Marco, the character isn't sufficiently engaging for me to care if his pampered life is empty. However, I did learn a valuable lesson from this film.  Not only do Hollywood celebrities live better lives than the characters in Biutiful, but I live a better life by watching films like this instead of Biutiful.

Biutiful (2010)

I'm not going to bother to review Biutiful, I'm just going to post this photo as therapy for people who've seen the film.

All right, I'll say a few things about this depressing movie.  Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is involved in illegal activities such as selling drugs and sweatshop labor, but he's a morally ambiguous character because he cares about his children (I think that's a standard movie trope for showing that a criminal has a good side) and has other positive traits.  His life sucks, and then it sucks harder, and then it sucks even harder.  That's essentially the plot of the movie.

Javier Bardem deserves the accolades he's received for his performance.  Also, the film's visual imagery is stunning; indeed, I think someone should deconstruct this movie by cherry-picking the most striking images and showing them in random order, thus freeing them from the oppressive burden of the screenplay.  I'll concede that some thought went into the screenplay; for example, I liked how a bit of dialogue that seemed like a throwaway line could prove to be important later in the film.  It's even possible that the filmmakers were trying to make a statement about the plight of illegal immigrants, although that statement would probably have been more effective if the immigrants were more fully developed as individual characters (and seemed less like a plot device created specifically to make the protagonist's life more tormented) and the film didn't make it seem like everybody else's life also sucked.

This film is slow paced, ponderous, humorless, two-and-a-half hours long, and so unrelentingly miserable that I have to wonder if it was secretly funded by a pharmaceutical company to promote antidepressants.  It seems to be based on the assumption that wallowing in suffering while constantly unveiling negative plot developments is the same as crafting a story with real depth. That thinking is like the mentality of an adolescent who believes that his poorly written, angst-ridden poetry is profound simply because it is dark and depressing.  Except that the adolescent is sincerely expressing himself as best as he can, whereas the filmmakers squandered real talent with this project.