Sounds Delicious

As I stated in a recent post, I’ve decided to tackle this year’s top oscar nominees head-on.  That means I have to get off my couch, go somewheres else, sit back down, and watch 16 movies in 29 days.

 First up: “Doubt“ 

5 nominations:

Philip Seymour Hoffman - Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Meryl Streep - Performance by an actress in a leading role 

Amy Adams - Performance by an actress in a supporting role 

Viola Davis - Performance by an actress in a supporting role

“Doubt” is a screen adaptation of a play that still feels like a play.  The setting is limited to a small area;  the story unfolds through conversations.  Unlike your conventional film stories, which typically try to resolve some broad and generic existential question (Matthew McConaughey’s gotta be true to Matthew McConaughey . . .), good stage drama usually just raises a bunch of difficult questions.  Here the questions relate to tolerance, ‘moral certainty’, and - of course - spiritual and philosophical doubt.

Did he do it?  Don’t know.  He kinda acted guilty.  But he could have felt guilty about thoughts, motivations, not actions.  What if he didn’t do it?  Is she wrong for acting on her own certainty instead of solid proof?  Does it matter if a child’s well-being is at stake?  Is the child better off either way?  Is anybody around here better on the inside than the world will allow them to be? 

So yeah, it’s a really good play.  As a movie it cannot help but come up short on action, a little too microscopic in its events.  There were some attempts to make the thing more visually interesting: an opening tracking shot, lots of cocked camera angles; but all that felt fairly uninspired and often inappropriate.

Aside from that, “Doubt” is a miniature perfection.  Despite its emphasis on conversation the film moves quickly and deliberately, never showing you too much or dwelling too long.  It offers humor when you least expect it, and its bursts of intensity feel startling and uncontrollable.  The casting is absolutely unbelievable; it is uncanny how snugly this work fits over the specific talents of its main cast.  Streep in particular - who I’ve always felt was a bit overrated, or to be fair, often miscast (she just seems too heavy, too intentional for some roles)  - is perfect for this forceful and deliberate woman, herself constantly acting, manipulating, and concealing deep apprehension.  If there was an Academy Award  for casting, “Doubt”  would be a shoe-in, though I suppose nominating the entire cast for awards is sort of saying the same thing.

“The Reader”

5 nominations: 

“The Reader” stars Kate Winslet as an illiterate Nazi war criminal/pederast who destroys the life of a fifteen-year-old boy before being put on trial for mass murder.  Or it’s a tragic love story in which the saddest woman in the world forms a lifelong relationship with a young, sickly German stamp collector.  Or you could just say it’s about guilt, reconciliation, and the destructive power of emotional isolation. 

It’s a decent movie.  It starts off feeling like some female soft-core sex fantasy (”You read to me first, then we make love.”) and eventually shifts into your average novel-into-film adaptation in which everything seems abbreviated yet everything takes too long.  The only really great thing about this movie is Kate Winslet: she’s portraying a woman who hardly says anything - kind of an issue with her - yet her performance is devastating.  I’ve never felt so bad for a mass murderer.  In fact, if this film were part of some broader conspiracy to make people feel sympathy for nazis, it would be a pretty sharp first move.

Ralph Fiennes is pretty good, the teenager is pretty good, nothing else here really stands out.  In fact, the performances sometimes feel like they succeed despite the overall production. The movie is only two hours long, but it feels real long.  The structure of the story is weird, long stretches are ambiguous in where they’re going, the flashbacks and flashforwards and multiple time-lines seem too distant from each other.  I did tear up at two points, once because of a powerful and sudden turn in the story, and once because of Winslet’s little sad face.  

She can have have an oscar; everything else is a stretch.

Oh, and I guess this was marketed at least partially as a suspense film (Tagline: “Unlock the Mystery”), which is just retarded. 

“The Wrestler”  

2 nominations:

I need to say right of the bat that my impression of “The Wrestler” was affected by the overwhelmingly positive critical response to the film.  Not that I wanted to dislike it; I went to the theater expecting to be impressed. But, come on, this is not a good movie.

Mickey Rourke is spot-on perfect at playing a has-been professional wrestler.  His performance is not just worth seeing, it’s heartbreaking and intensely real.  I’d like to hook him up with Winslet’s character in “The Reader”, but the world would probably implode from impending dramatic tragedy.  Tomei is solid and convincing too; these are both fantastic performances.  But this is a one-line story, obsessed with contriving the most simplistic and sensationalistic way to destroy a man.

I have heard a lot of talk about this film’s ‘gritty realism’, but I don’t see it.  Though shot like a documentary, every scene feels set-up and all the peripheral characters seem one-dimensional.  The manager of the grocery that Rourke works for, for instance, is so insensitive that he yells at the wrestler even when he cuts his thumb in the deli slicer.  Tomei’s clients at the strip club don’t just turn down her lap dances, they remind her that she’s ‘kinda old’.  If you took away Rourke’s performance you’d be left with a bad after-school special about the dangers of doing, well, anything that Rourke does in this movie.  At least that would attempt to serve some purpose.  This film has no philosophy, it asks none of the deep questions; it simply is.

Porn movies offer people what they’re looking for without the intrusion of boner-busting reality.  I’ve often referred to films like “Roadhouse” and most Van Damme movies as ‘fight porn’ because the drama takes its cues from the fighting, not the other way around.  In both cases, the substance - the sex or the fighting - is real, if not hyper-real, while everything else has to be modified, abbreviated, or simplified to make room.  This happens (usually to a lesser degree) in all movies.  In the case of “The Wrestler” the substance - the porn - is hopelessness.  Sad-porn.  Like “Dancer in the Dark” and Aronofsky’s earlier “Requiem for a Dream”.  Not that there isn’t room to make a decent movie in such a genre (I like much of “Dancer in the Dark” just fine), but “The Wrestler” feels empty to me, like a long, bad joke with an obvious punchline.  I am curious, actually, to know if the original script was meant to be a dark comedy.  If so they missed some beats.

I should stop ranting now and say that I really had no difficulty watching this.  Mickey Rourke, again, is worth the price of admission.  There is some really good dialogue, especially between our two hopeless oscar nominees, and Rourke’s final speech to the crowd is touching.  The wrestling sequences are shot pretty well.  Marisa Tomei gets, like, almost totally naked a bunch.  

 Writing a review for this type of comedy is pretty silly.  People either like the jokes and love the movie or they don’t.  Arguing about whether it is well-made or not is missing the point.  So I’ll just say that I thought the first 15 minutes or so were hilarious, and everything else was pretty funny but forgettable. The fake previews and the opening parody bit have some of the quickest and silliest moments in the film.  But once the story starts Stiller focuses a little too much on the mechanics of the story and not enough on maintaining the frequency of good gags.  I feel similarly about the movie “Hot Fuzz” (another sort of ‘tribute-parody’ or ‘love-parody’, to make up a superfluous genre) but there is so much to love about that movie that it doesn’t matter.

So for me, much of this movie falls flat.  Tom Cruise isn’t that funny - I actually like him a lot as a dramatic actor, so watching him do bad comedy isn’t that rewarding - except for a few obscene screams and his big hands.  Jack Black isn’t that funny to me to begin with, and he is totally wasted here (with the exception of his mock trailer, which is amazing).

Standing out in the midst of all this is Robert Downey, Jr.  While it doesn’t immediately register as a typical ‘oscar-worthy’ performance, I have to give the Academy some credit for recognizing such craftsmanship despite its being obscured by such an obvious and superficial joke.  Downey could have easily resorted to pure stereotype and mockery, but he put something else into it, something internal, something dark but absurd, something different.  Unfortunately the film as a whole doesn’t even approach the same depth, so he doesn’t quite manage a complete character arc.  It’s weird, actually, at the end, when you think he’s going to have some ridiculously huge breakthrough, and the movie just doesn’t care.  Maybe that’s funny though.  I don’t know.  Watch it, it’s fine.    

Feb 17th: Hey - So the Oscars are this coming weekend, and I still have a bunch of them to watch.  I blame poverty and a huge ice storm that knocked out the power at several theaters.  And now “Revolutionary Road” and “Ben Button” are out of theaters.  And also I can say, with some sincere arrogance, that I’m too fucking busy to watch all these stupid movies.  I did check out “In Bruges” and “Man on Wire”, I’ll throw in some reviews for those (they’re both pretty good.  actually “Man on Wire” is kind of amazing).  Other than that, I might continue this exercise after the Oscars, or I may not.  You are probably not reading this right now anyway.  - Alexander Delicious.