127 Hours

127 Hours opens and closes with montages of people in mass. People on the street, people in stadiums, at worship, people interacting and living amidst each other. It is a great contrast to the life of the central character in the film, Aron Ralston. He is a man that is mainly concerned with one thing, himself. Ralston is played brilliantly by James Franco in an Oscar nominated performance. Out of the performances I have seen so far this year, it should have won in my book. The progression his character goes through in this film is brought ot life perfectly. For a movie mainly concerned with a man stuck in a crevice it is amazingly fast paced and engaging.

 

Going into the movie I was excited to see how well the it would work because I was a big fan of James Franco and Director Danny Boyle. This was Boyles follow up to his Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire. I had been intrigued by Ralstan's story back in 2003 when it first happened. I was impressed by this man's ability to do the unthinkable to survive, but also always thought he was just kind of an idiot for having gone out there by himself without telling anyone where he was. Franco's portrayal of him really makes the audience connect with Ralstan. As the days go by, Ralstan's struggle to survive becomes more precarious, his hallucinations become more severe, his memories flood into the film and his confessions to his video camera become more and more candid. These devices allow a window into Ralstan's mental and physical life.

 

Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy do a wonderful job of showing the importance of community and connections with each other by showing a man completely alone. It comments on the effect that selfishness and carelessness with the way we relate to each other can have on our lives. The film does build to the climax that everyone is expecting and possibly dreading. It is shocking and uncomfortable but done in a way that is not sensationalist or just for shock. Most of it is only heard and done just off screen.

 

I highly recommend seeing this film for Boyle's direction, Franco's tour de force performance and a story that is surprisingly emotional and inspiring.

How Long Were The Speeches at the Oscars?

Steve Murray at the National Post put together this infographic regarding the speeches at the Oscars this year. I thought it was interesting, especially the sections in red where the speakers were talking while the band was trying to usher them off of the stage.



Here is a link to the full article:
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/02/28/graphic-oscar-speeches-dissected/

Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone is a dark fascinating look at a crime ridden rural landscape. The movie follows a 17 year old girl (played perfectly by Jennifer Lawrence) trying to track down her father who may be dead in the hopes of saving the family home and being able to take care of her two younger siblings.  It is very similar in style to mystery/detective films of the past. Instead of an adult male detective you have a teenage girl and in place of the mean streets of a rainy city you have the mountain environment of an underprivileged drug addicts.

The setting is bleak and the characters are desperate. The stakes are very high as the young protagonist struggles to do everything she can to find her father and save her brother and sister. This is one of the best independent films I have seen in a very long time. The plot is simple and straightforward and told in an incredibly tight form. The people are the focus and even the smallest roles seem so layered and real. I was blown away by all the performances. At one point Lawrence’s character Ree visits an army recruiter in hopes of getting money for her family by enlisting and the recruiter is played outstandingly. This actor has only moments of screen time and is able to produce a fully formed character that seems pulled from a documentary rather than a narrative film. He is just but one example of the many outstanding performances in the film.

John Hawkes who is an always solid character actor turns in a great performance as Ree’s uncle Teardrop. He is a frightening and complex man torn by his loyalty to his life, his family and his addiction. The two’s journey together is a unique thing to watch and very well scripted.

The movie has been nominated for several Academy Awards (including Best Picture and nods for Lawrence and Hawkes) and worthy of all the praise it can get. It is a dark and rewarding film that should have been released to a much larger audience than it was offered to. For almost the entire running time there is a sense of dread that is strong to the point of draining. You know that this story will not likely turn out well. But thanks to the incredible performance of Jennifer Lawrence you never want to turn away. You want to follow her as far as she is willing to go to find justice or at least survival for her family.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is an entertaining interesting movie. Interesting mostly because it is way better than a documentary about Joan Rivers should be. Like most people of my generation, Joan Rivers was just that crazy old lady that made fun of celebrities (mostly on E!) at Hollywood events. The movie revealed her to be a much more interesting character than that. Her story was surprising, I had no idea about her history as a standup comedian. I had no idea that at one point she was somewhat of a groundbreaking female comedian who spoke about things that women in polite society were not supposed to discuss.

It is obvious in the film that she is the type of person who feels very comfortable playing the victim role. While you do feel sad for her in many moments you can also see that she somewhat relishes being “oppressed” or “mistreated”.

I suggest watching for a few reasons. You get a glimpse of her as a person rather than just a caricature. You see her as a vulnerable, insecure, working comedian. You get to see her actually being funny which was mostly foreign to me up to this point. It works as a portrait of a woman in entertainment and how difficult that world can be for an older female.

5 Movies that Should Have Won Best Picture

Since we are a day away from the Oscars I decided to post a little about some past awards. Sometimes the Oscars get it wrong. Actually it’s more often than not. But, some of the big mistakes in my opinion are as follows. I am not going to include any movies I feel were the best of the year and not even nominated. These are all movies that were nominated but lost.

1)In 1990 Dances with Wolves won Best Picture. Dances With Wolves is fine, I don’t mean to knock it, however the film it beat is not just the best mafia movie ever but one of the best movies of all time.

Goodfellas

Goodfellas is an amazingly fast paced hard edged look at three decades of life in the mafia. It was based on the true story of wiseguy turned informant Henry Hill. It followed his rise and fall during the 60s 70s and 80s. The cast was perfect, the soundtrack amazing, and it served as a pretty good blueprint for The Sopranos. I love The Sopranos but it is very reminiscent of Scorsese's masterpiece of the mafia genre. Speaking of cast, this is hands down Joe Pesci's best performance ever. "Am I a clown, am I here to amuse you?"






2) Four years later the Academy dropped the ball on another crime drama. One very influenced by Goodfellas but very different. In 1994 the award went to Forrest Gump. Gump is a cute film and entertaining, but it was nowhere near as visionary, challenging and original as Quentin Tarentino's

Pulp Fiction.

Fiction was unlike anything that had come before it. It borrowed from many influences of course (as a lot of Tarentino bashers like to point out) but it assembled them a completely original way. Like Goodfellas, the pacing, editing, soundtrack and cast are outstanding. Scorsese and Tarentino are both geniuses when it comes to assembling a soundtrack. John Travolta, Sam Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken and more fill out the cast of criminals and low lifes whose lives intersect over a few days in California. This movie is incredibly re watchable and just as fresh as it was when originally released. It's only fault is the countless copycat movies that came out afterwards that were almost all terrible. A side note, another better film that lost to Gump that same year, The Shawshank Redemption.

3) The Academy loves romantic epics and often gives them the award over much more deserving films. 1996 was no exception. The long, boring and completely forgettable The English Patient beat out the wonderful Coen Brother's classic

Fargo

Fargo is a dark black hilarious comedy thriller. It's a movie I can watch over and over and always find new things to love. Francis McDormand is hilarious and believable in her Oscar winning role as Marge Gunderson, the very pregnant Midwestern cop trying to catch a couple of killers who have come through her town on a kidnapping job gone wrong. The cast of Coen brothers regulars are hilarious dark and shocking. It is very similar to the film that won the brothers their Best Picture statue years later, No Country For Old Men. Although this film was a lot funnier than the even darker No Country.




4) In1998 Shakespeare In Love won. It's an ok romantic comedy that is also pretty forgotten. Yet somehow it beat out the Spielberg WWII epic,

Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is mostly remembered for the intense, extremely graphic and realistic recreation of D Day. While that sequence is sobering and engaging and kicks off the film strongly, the rest of the movie in my opinion is just as strong. It raises a lot of great questions about war, the value of a life and the destruction of men in battle. It also contains a good performance from Tom Sizemore right before he kind of fell off the map and landed in a jail and rehab over and over.





5)The final movie on my list that should have won, lost in 2000. That year the Ridley Scott throwback to sand and sword epics of the past Gladiator nabbed the award. Gladiator is an entertaining movie. The battles are fast paced and violent, Russel Crowe is at his best as Maximus, the soldier turned slave. However, it is also pretty cheesy and by the numbers. The movie that should have won was

Traffic

Traffic directed by Steven Soderbegh was an American adaptation of the British miniseries Traffik. The original covered the opium, heroin trade. The new version was focused on the drug world in America and Mexico. It had multiple plots all shot in a different colored filters to guide the audience through the huge world of police, politicians, drug dealers, socialites, drug users and their families. It was huge in scope yet very focused on it's characters. Traffic won the Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Editor and Best Screenplay. So while they thought it was the best written, directed and edited film, they somehow came to the conclusion it was not the best film.

Waiting For Superman

Davis Guggenheim’s follow up to his excellent Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth is another very well made, very strong film perfect for raising discussion. Like his previous film this documentary is about an important issue. This topic, however, is one that is not as politically dividing as his movie on climate change. (A side note, it is called climate change now, because global warming causes a lot of people to misunderstand the issue.)

Waiting For Superman takes a look at the education system in America. It takes aim at many of the flaws that are prevalent in our system. It is told in a very savvy and entertaining way. It looks at the bureaucracy of the system, the teachers unions and the rise of Charter schools. The biggest fault of the film comes towards the end. The movie spends its running time describing the issues but by the end you realize it has not done enough, in terms of suggesting a solution.

The strongest portion of the film is also its emotional core. It follows a selection of children across the country entering lotteries in the hopes of gaining a spot for their children in the overcrowded Charter schools. All of the children are worthy of the best education possible and watching the hope and despair that comes along with their situation is heart wrenching.

This is an important film no matter what you believe about the state of our schools or the reason we have gotten to this point. The movie raises discussion about one of the most important issues in life, the well being and future of our children and nation.

Movies I Love: Little Children

I remember back in late 1999 hearing so much buzz about this new movie coming out called American Beauty. All of the critics were raving about it and it had a very intriguing poster. If I remember correctly the poster was a a picture of a stomach and a rose. Around this image were paragraphs of rave reviews from pretty much every major film critic and a lengthy list of critic circle awards it had won. For a film geek, this was exciting, they were selling this as the greatest movie of all time. It even went on to win a bunch of Academy Awards.

 

I am not knocking that movie, but when I saw it I was a little let down. It was good, had amazing performances from all the main cast and was cleverly scripted. But it didn't move me, it didn't blow me away like I had expected. I bring this up, because a movie came out a few years later that dealt with a lot of the same themes. It was a look at suburbia, family, infidelity, criminals, redemption, secrets, hopes. Like other films had done (namely American Beauty and Blue Velvet) it was a look at the underbelly of suburban life.

 

Little Children did exactly for me what I wanted American Beauty to do those years earlier. It blew me away. Megan and I watched it one night on DVD, I had picked it up at a used book store because I had heard good things about it and remembered it had garnered some Oscar Buzz. We started the film and were sucked into this world within the first few minutes. A lot of times people will accuse movies with narration of being lazy. This is not one of those movies. The narration actually adds another great layer to the film. It is a God voice, not of any of the characters. It gives the movie an almost surreal documentary feel. As if we are with a crew secretly filming these people. When the film ended I called a friend of mine and instead of suggesting that he watch this movie, I demanded that he come over the next evening and watch it with us again. He was unsure at first that it sounded interesting but like Megan and I the night before, within minutes new he was watching something exceptional.

 

Director Todd Field guides us through this suburban landscape expertly. The leads, Kate Winslet (perfect as always) and Patrick Wilson play two unhappy married people struggling with the fact that their dreams have not come true. They find each other at the playground and neighborhood pool where they routinely take their children and immediately respond to each other. They see in each other what they want in their spouses. Meanwhile, Jackie Earle Hailey; in a powerful, sad and creepy performance, is a recently released sex offender who is constantly tormented by an ex cop obsessed with running him out of their safe ideal world. Hailey is joined by Phyllis Somerville, in a heartbreaking performance as his mother, who just wants her son to be normal and in her words, "Be a good boy".

 

As these peoples lives intersect and slowly unravel the film builds to an emotional climax that without spoiling it will leave you haunted and conflicted and definitely discussing. This was the movie American Beauty could have been, it is a very funny, very disturbing (like Beauty) but also emotionally engaging and affecting.