Beautiful Frauds

NPR Review: What Maisie Knew

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:49:00 -0400

By the end of What Maisie Knew, what 6-year-old Maisie knows is the thing everyone in the theater has figured out in the first five minutes: This poor little girl has two of the most horrible movie parents since Faye Dunaway got her hands on a wire hanger.

They fight or are distracted so much that Maisie is often left to her own devices, making herself meals or scrounging for cash to pay for the pizza her parents ordered.

Her father, Beale (Steve Coogan), runs off with the nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham), and that’s just the first in an endless string of abandonments and other outrages. Susanna (Julianne Moore), Maisie’s rock-star mother, invites one of Maisie’s classmates over to stay the night, just to try to get the kid’s mom to say a few nice things about her in the impending divorce proceedings. Problem is, she schedules the sleepover for the same night as a booze-and-cigarette-filled hangout with her band and assorted hangers-on. The friend goes home sobbing in the middle of the night. This couple is poison to anyone with the misfortune to wander into their decaying orbit.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

NPR Review: Kon-Tiki

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:13:00 -0400

Early in Kon-Tiki, a dramatization of Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 1947 trans-Pacific raft expedition, the Norwegian ethnographer arrives at the New York Explorers Club trying to drum up support for his crazy adventure.

Though the host initially tells him he’s not welcome — Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) has already been soundly rejected by every publisher, magazine editor and potential financier in the city — the Danish explorer Peter Freuchen (Soren Pilmark) recognizes him and lets him in.

Freuchen’s appearance in Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg’s film is limited to just this one scene, but the character introduces two key concepts — one that will be central to Heyerdahl’s philosophy, and another that will prove key to that of the filmmakers. When trying to live as native peoples do, Freuchen explains, it’s best to trust in the native ways of doing things. Heyerdahl takes this advice to heart in the building of his titular raft, a craft built of balsa wood, held together without a single nail or rivet.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

WCP Arts Desk Blog: Avalon Going Digital

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:05:00 -0400

You’ve already kicked in to help Veronica Mars hit the big screen and Zach Braff plumb the plights of existentially challenged thirtysomething white dudes. Now you’re wondering where to throw those philanthropic film dollars next.

For those inclined to give locally, D.C.’s Avalon Theatre is throwing an anniversary bash and fundraiser this weekend, the proceeds from which will help the nonprofit theater transition to digital projection.

As Washington City Paper reported last year, the District’s cinema screens, just like those all over the nation, have been rapidly transitioning to pixel-based projection as celluloid film prints become increasingly scarce. It’s an expensive process, and one that’s hitting independent nonprofit theaters like the Avalon particularly hard, as they aren’t in a position to take advantage of the strings-attached financial aid packages offered by distributors to help defray the costs.

Continue reading the rest of my post over at Washington City Paper.

WCP Theatre Review: The Lady Becomes Him

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:56:00 -0400

Another in my occasional forays outside a cinema to that other brand of theater:

The great rock ‘n’ roll philosophers of Spinal Tap once said there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. That might seem like nonsense to anyone with, well, a firm grasp of the concept of opposites. But after seeing Faction of Fools’ production of The Lady Becomes Him, one might come around to David St. Hubbins’ unconventional wisdom.

Faction is a company devoted to preserving and evolving commedia dell’arte, merging the tropes and stock characters of that old Italian tradition with more modern sensibilities. The core of The Lady Becomes Him is a 17th century scenario called “Donna Zanni”—the broad sketches of a romantic comedy of errors involving adultery, mistaken identities, unrequited love, and magic rings. Oh, and a love pentagon between the play’s upstairs nobility, plus an entirely separate love triangle among the downstairs help.

Given all that geometry, a diagram would be helpful to describe the plot, which involves Celia (Lindsey D. Snyder), who is married to the nobleman Il Dottore (Matthew Pauli) and having an affair with the gallant Orazio (Stephen Hock), who is loved from afar by the rich foreigner Isabella (Amelia Hensley), who is being pursued by Luzio (James McGowan). Meanwhile, Isabella’s servant Rosetta (Rachel Spicknall Mulford) is shacking up with both Dottore and Orazio’s servants. And matters become confused even further by a sorcerer-aided body swap subplot that juggles both class and gender.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at the Washington City Paper.

Atlantic Essay: Lords of Salem & Rob Zombie as One-Hit Wonder

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:46:00 -0400

Ever since he first made the jump from musician to moviemaker, horror fans like me have wanted to root for Rob Zombie. It has little to do with whether one is a fan of his music or not. It’s that there was a consistent aesthetic at work in everything he did that made it seem like he was going to make the kind of movies that genre buffs were going to love.

After all, here was a guy who named his band (White Zombie) after a great 1932 Bela Lugosi horror flick, sampled exploitation and horror classics like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Night of the Living Dead in his songs, and embedded cult culture and film references throughout his records. In short, beneath the shaggy hair, scraggly beard, and heavy metal gloom, he was basically just a sci-fi/horror nerd. Add to that his background in graphic arts, filmmaking experience making music videos, and it was easy for any person who shared his tastes to figure some good could come from having Zombie behind the camera.

But with today’s release of his fifth movie, Lords of Salem, it’s time to come to terms with the sad truth: Rob Zombie as a filmmaker is at best a one-hit wonder, and a case study in the dangers of putting a fanboy in the director’s chair.

Continue reading the rest of my piece over at The Atlantic.

NPR Review: Unmade in China

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:39:00 -0400

The best documentaries about filmmaking are the ones that show it at its worst.

Movie sets are fundamentally boring places, where there’s mostly a lot of waiting around going on. But when disaster strikes with millions of dollars on the line, the tension and drama are suddenly amped up to levels that often equal those in the movie being filmed.

Watching Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski nearly come to blows in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, for instance, is just as gripping as Fitzcarraldo, the movie they’re making. Perhaps the best of this genre is Lost in La Mancha, which doesn’t need to search for a metaphor to describe Terry Gilliam’s doomed production: The movie he’s failing spectacularly to make is, of course, about literature’s most famous conquistador of futility, Don Quixote.

Throughout the new documentary Unmade in China, director Gil Kofman is dedicated to a seemingly quixotic task of his own. He’s been given a green light to direct his second feature, but with a hefty catch: He has to make the movie in China, with a Chinese cast and crew, in Mandarin — a language he doesn’t speak. Oh, and he has to do all this under the watchful eye of the Chinese film production system, a nonsensical and labyrinthine maze of graft, misogyny, bizarre rules and Communist Party politics that still manages to operate with an almost admirable lockstep efficiency. Unless you challenge any part of it.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR

Atlantic Essay: Cinematic Experimenters, Shane Carruth, and Upstream Color

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:53:00 -0400

The wall between experimental and commercial film is as easy to see and difficult to penetrate as the marble walls of a museum. Experimental filmmakers generally work alone, eschewing narrative in favor of exploring the raw visual and sonic possibilities of the medium, and their work is nearly as confined to those museums as the Picassos and Pollacks in the next room. Yet every now and then, a commercial director manages to play populist art thief, sneaking the theoretical ideas of the avant-garde out of the gallery and into the cinema.

David Lynch is the best example: a filmmaker who has long made highly experimental shorts that then inform his (relatively) more accessible narrative work—and occasionally, as in the “Rabbits” sequence from his 2006 Inland Empire, uses those shorts within the long-form work. Terrence Malick is another, a director whose drift into more and more abstracted territory found him licensing the work of experimentalists like Thomas Wilfred and Scott Nyerges to use in the meditative birth-of-the universe sequence from Tree of Life in 2011. But the most recent addition to the collection, Shane Carruth, director of the mesmerizing new Upstream Color, is perhaps even more radical.

Nine years after successfully debuting the micro-budgeted time travel mindbender Primer at Sundance, Carruth has returned with a work of ambitious, difficult, and unapologetic experimentation. It’s difficult, heady stuff, using a fractured structure that mirrors the messy-but-ordered way of nature to tell a love story using the interlocking life cycles of plants, pigs, nematodes, and humans.

Continue reading the rest of my piece over at The Atlantic.

NPR Review: Evil Dead

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 07:52:00 -0400

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Fede Alvarez’s remake of Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead can’t hold a candle, shotgun or revving chainsaw to the original.

Raimi’s 1981 debut is a masterpiece of punk filmmaking, a bunch of young enthusiasts who barely knew what they were doing, going out into the woods and stumbling blindly into the creation of a ragged landmark — largely because they didn’t know, didn’t care or didn’t have the money to do it the way it was supposed to be done.

Luckily Alvarez, for whom Evil Dead is also a debut feature, doesn’t try to replicate the practically accidental glory of that film. With studio money, and Raimi and original star Bruce Campbell on board as producers, this Evil Dead is polished and meticulously planned, and it benefits from the attention to detail as well as from Alvarez’s obvious love for the spirit of the source material.

The basic, archetypal framework is the same: Five 20-somethings head to a remote forest location, accidentally unleash unspeakable evil via a flesh-bound book of rituals and incantations, and fall prey to malevolent, soul-devouring demons. But the first major shift that Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues introduce is giving these characters a little more depth and purpose.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

Criticwire Survey: The Dud You Love

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:40:00 -0400

This week’s survey asked: “What movie widely regarded as a cinematic dud do you like (or maybe even love)?” Here’s what I had to say:

While I think maybe it’s gained a small cult following over the past decade, the critics’ scores and box office numbers for Antonia Bird’s Western-cannibal-horror flick, ‘Ravenous,’ are pretty anemic: 37% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 45 on Metacritic for a movie that didn’t even manage to make back 20% of its $12 million budget. That response has always surprised me, as it’s a movie that I immediately became attached to when I first saw it, and go back to regularly. Yes, it’s a film of wild mood swings, starting out on the bloody battlefields of the Mexican-American war, moving to a bleak and isolated military outpost in a Sierra Nevada mountain pass in what looks to be a turn towards frontier survivalism, and then out of nowhere it becomes a supernaturally-inflected, gory cannibal horror piece. But the genre mashup works, thanks to really fantastic performances from Guy Pearce as a cowardly army captain and the scene-chewing Robert Carlyle, tapping the same reservoir of villainous likability that fueled his turn as Begbie in ‘Trainspotting.’ Jeremy Davies, Jeffrey Jones, Neal McDonough, and yes, even David Arquette round things out nicely with a lot of really well balanced black comic relief. On top of all that, ‘Ravenous’ boasts one of the most striking scores from any film of the 90s, featuring off-kilter riffs on 19th-century Americana from Blur’s Damon Albarn along with Michael Nyman.

You can have a look at the other critics’ responses over at Criticwire.

Washington City Paper review: Starbuck

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 08:41:00 -0400

David Wozniak is no garden-variety screwup. The protagonist of writer/director Ken Scott’s endearing but ingratiating Québécois comedy, Starbuck, is a walking cautionary tale on life and how not to live it. He’s terrible at his career, and only keeps his job as a perpetually tardy delivery driver because it’s the family business. His romantic life is no better: His longtime girlfriend is ready to leave him because she’s pretty sure he’s keeping things from her. She’s not wrong. He’s secretly trying to grow hydroponic weed in his apartment to raise $80,000 for his bookie. None of that is likely to go over well with her—given that she’s a cop.

But that might not be the worst of this guy’s offenses. As a broke student, he also donated copious amounts of sperm. After the sperm bank enthusiastically doled out his DNA, he’s the biological father to more than 500 children, 142 of whom have banded together in a class action. Their goal: to force the clinic to turn over the real name of “Starbuck,” his nom de donateur back when he was regularly providing top-grade genetic material.

This scenario could only be considered a screw-up in the weird logic of Scott’s movie. Starbuck hinges on the assumption that there’s something weird about a sperm donor having sired a lot of children. Granted, there are a lot in this case, and more than sperm banks are supposed to allow, but that’s not David’s fault. Yet in the movie’s fantasy world, the anonymous Starbuck is talked about like a pervert in the media, with outrage directed at him from around the world as the trial reaches its improbable fever pitch.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at the City Paper.

NPR Review: Olympus Has Fallen

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:51:00 -0400

It’s probably best not to think of Olympus Has Fallen as a movie released in 2013. Antoine Fuqua’s film — about a band of North Koreans who invade the White House — feels from start to finish like a throwback to the action cinema and military thrillers of decades past.

It’s like an ersatz reproduction of an archaeological relic, if the archaeologists in question had just thrown together a bunch of random artifacts from different eras, taken a blurry photograph and then asked someone to make an accurate model based only on their memory of that photograph.

The obvious reference point here is Die Hard, with Gerard Butler stepping awkwardly into Bruce Willis’ shoes as Mike Banning, the man trying to single-handedly thwart a hostage situation from the inside. He’s a disgraced Secret Service agent, formerly part of the president’s detail, now languishing in the apparent purgatory of the Treasury Department. But when a massive coordinated attack on the White House from the air and the ground leaves the president (Aaron Eckhart) held hostage in the basement of the building, with most of his protection lying dead in the smoking ruins above, Banning is the country’s last hope.

Continue reading my review over at NPR.

NPR Review: The Call

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 07:06:00 -0400

In the buildup to the climax of Brad Anderson’s The Call, a character discovers what the film’s villain has been doing with all the teenage girls he’s been kidnapping and killing. It’s a grisly revelation, and it’s played for shock value — both for the audience and for the character making the discovery.

There’s only one problem: Early in the film, the body of one of these girls is recovered. So the details of the killer’s M.O. shouldn’t come as any shock whatsoever to the character that discovers his lair.

It’s careless storytelling — and unfortunately, it’s typical of the bizarre choices and the lazy, sloppy structure that inform the last 20 minutes of the film.

Those oddities include the moment when the film’s protagonist — a 911 operator named Jordan (Halle Berry) — undergoes a sudden personality shift. There’s also a hilariously ham-handed attempt at what I can only assume is meant to be a metaphor for American attitudes toward crime, punishment and vengeance, signaled by the conspicuous framing of an American flag behind Jordan in a key moment before the proceedings start going completely bonkers.

Even the props department drops the ball, providing canisters marked “nitric oxide” (rather than nitrous) to be used as anesthetic for an impromptu medical procedure.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

NPR Review: The ABCs of Death

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 08:25:00 -0500

Despite a reputation for unevenness, anthology films still hold a certain appeal. There’s the opportunity to see a few shorts — a form that tends to get bulldozed by feature films due to the economic realities of the industry. There’s also the chance to see a number of directors all in once place, trying out something different; it’s the cinematic equivalent of a rock ‘n’ roll supergroup.

If one film in an anthology is weak, it doesn’t have to ruin the whole thing; a really good short or two can help to elevate the whole even with a few lackluster efforts in the mix. And so The ABCs of Death, a new collection of horror shorts assembled by producers Ant Timpson and Tim League, would seem to have a good chance at success: With 26 films, one for each letter of the alphabet, one might expect enough gems in the mix to make up for any stinkers. That’s sadly not the case.

Timpson and League assembled an international crew of directors, assigned each a letter, instructed each to choose a word starting with that initial, and asked them to make a film about death associated with that word. In concept, it’s Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies for the big screen, with each director receiving a $5,000 budget and no other restrictions on how to carry out the task.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

NPR Review: Jack the Giant Slayer

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0500

Great deeds start out as current events, move on to history, and eventually, with some craft and embellishment, become folklore and legend. This process is central to the structure of Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which merges elements of the familiar folktale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” with the less ubiquitous “Jack the Giant Killer.” It sets the story as a kind of midpoint between one “true” story that has become a legend for Jack, just as the events of Jack’s “true” story have supposedly passed into the realm of a simple folk story.

In the modern world, there’s one more step that isn’t discussed within the film’s depiction of that cycle: the eventual film adaptation, which adds more characters, more adventures and the inevitable romantic subplot. Those are rules that Singer and his frequent writing collaborator Christopher McQuarrie follow to the letter.

That predictability prevents Jack the Giant Slayer from being anything out of the ordinary, but the pair are smart enough storytellers — and have an immensely talented cast — to make the film an entertaining diversion.

Contine reading the rest of my review over at NPR.

2013 Oscar Picks and Predictions

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:28:49 -0500

For the first time since 2010, I managed to complete the full Oscar Death Race this year, managing to watch all 38 features and all 15 shorts that were nominated. I can’t pretend that makes me any better qualified to predict what’s going to win, but hey, it can’t hurt. Here’s my complete rundown on who I think will win, as well as who I think ought to.

Visual Effects:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Life of Pi
Marvel’s The Avengers
Prometheus
Snow White and the Huntsman

Who’s going to win: Life of Pi
Who should win: Life of Pi

3D that fulfills the promise of the technology, plus digitally rendered animals that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Plus, voters are going to enjoy being able to give an effects award to a smart, adult drama.

Makeup and Hairstyling:
Hitchcock
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Les Miserables

Who’s going to win: The Hobbit
Who should win: Les Mis

Hitchcock loses because, well, Hopkins’ fatsuit and facial prosthetics look like Anthony Hopkins in a fatsuit and facial prosthetics. I think the naturalistic makeup work in Les Mis is the more impressive achievement, but voters are, at this point, just used to giving makeup awards to Jackson-directed Tolkein movies; even if HDR ends up making too much of the makeup look like, well, makeup.

Production Design:
Anna Karenina
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln

Who’s going to win: Lincoln
Who should win: Anna Karenina

I think Life of Pi, impressive as it looks, looks too “natural” to feel like the obvious choice here. The digital backgrounds of Les Mis work against it, and HDR really does the production design of The Hobbit no favors. Lincoln takes this for being a lushly designed period piece that everyone saw, vs Anna Karenina, a lushly designed period piece that far fewer saw. But for me, Karenina walks away with this one.

Costume:
Anna Karenina
Les Miserables
Lincoln
Mirror Mirror
Snow White and the Huntsman

Who’s going to win: Anna Karenina
Who should win: Anna Karenina

The beauty of Anna Karenina’s production design extends to the costuming as well (they often interact with one another). The meticulous work put in on the costuming is, I think, even more apparent in Anna Karenina, so this one I think it’ll take.

Sound Mixing:
Argo
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Skyfall

Who’s going to win: Argo
Who should win: Skyfall

I don’t really have the ear for this sort of thing, so just going with my gut on this one.

Sound Editing:
Argo
Django Unchained
Life of Pi
Skyfall
Zero Dark Thirty

Who’s going to win: Zero Dark Thirty
Who should win: Zero Dark Thirty

Skyfall or Argo could probably also take this, but I’m going to bet that voters impressed with the visceral punch of ZD30’s final sequence may be swayed in its direction.

Original Score:
Anna Karenina — Dario Marianelli
Argo — Alexandre Desplat;
Life of Pi — Mychael Danna;
Lincoln — John Williams;
Skyfall — Thomas Newman

Who’s going to win: Argo
Who should win: Skyfall

Desplat is the go-to score guy this year, and that plus general Argo goodwill will, I think, carry the day. But his Moonrise Kingdom score is his best of this year, and I’d rate his ZD30 and Rust and Bone scores ahead of Argo as well. Of this group, I’ve got to go with Newman’s excellent Skyfall work. But the two best scores of the year don’t even appear here, those being Romer & Zeitlyn’s incredible Beasts of the Southern Wild score, and then the one that should have won everything, Jonny Greenwood’s music for The Master.

Original Song:
“Before My Time” from Chasing Ice — J Ralph
“Everybody Needs a Best Friend” from Ted — Walter Murphy and Seth MacFarlane
“Pi’s Lullaby from Life of Pi Mychael Danna and Bombay Jayashri;
“Skyfall” from Skyfall — Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth
“Suddenly” from Les Miserables — Claude-Michel Schonberg Herbert Kretzmer and Alain Boublil

Who’s going to win: Skyfall
Who should win: Skyfall

The potential upset here is Les Mis, and never underestimate the power of Les Mis fandom. But there are so many aspects of Skyfall that rank as best of Bond, and this song is probably one of them.

Live Action Short Film:
Asad
Buzkashi Boys
Curfew
Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw)
Henry

Who’s going to win: Curfew
Who should win: Curfew

I’m basing this on last year’s winner, which was the most American of the entries, with the most definitive style. Curfew certainly qualifies on both of those counts, my only complaint being that I could see exactly where the director was already thinking of it as the basis for an eventual feature. That said, I also really liked Death of a Shadow, which shows an entirely different side (and impressive range) of Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts. Asad is also fantastic, a little clumsy at times, but completely upends the usual expectations of African civil war movies in some really delightful ways.

Documentary (short subject):
Inocente
Kings Point
Mondays at Racine
Open Heart
Redemption

Who’s going to win: Inocente
Who should win: King’s Point

I’m working on the theory that the most uplifting and inspirational story generally wins this award, and Inocente, the story of a homeless teen with a gift for painting and her journey to rise above her difficult background, definitely fits that bill. Still, I couldn’t help enjoying the wry humor mixed with recognition of the inevitability of death in King’s Point, which looked at the social lives of the elderly in a Florida retirement community.

Documentary Feature:
5 Broken Cameras
The Gatekeepers
How to Survive a Plague
The Invisible War
Searching for Sugar Man

Who’s going to win: Searching for Sugar Man
Who should win: The Gatekeepers

My gut tells me that The Gatekeepers goes in the “going to win” section here, just because it’s expertly constructed and about a larger subject, but I keep reading that Sugar Man (also an incredibly well-done doc) is the front runner, so I’ll go with that. Also, Gatekeepers’ criticism of Israeli counter-terrorism tactics could read as too pro-Palestinian for Academy voters wishing to avoid controversy.

Animated Short Film:
Adam and Dog
Fresh Guacamole
Head over Heels
Maggie Simpson in `The Longest Daycare’
Paperman

Who’s going to win: Paperman
Who should win: Adam and Dog

Paperman is the most high-profile, screening before Wreck-It Ralph, and just as so often has happened in the past with Pixar’s pre-feature short winning alongside the feature, so it will go with Disney this year. I liked Paperman a lot, but the traditional animation and delivery of Adam and Dog really won me over.

Animated Feature Film:
Brave
Frankenweenie
ParaNorman
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Wreck-It Ralph

Who’s going to win: Wreck-It Ralph
Who should win: Wreck-It Ralph

What an odd year when Pixar’s entry is more like a traditional Disney film, while Disney’s entry has both the imagination, heart, and smarts of a Pixar film. I liked all of these choices though, and have a particularly soft spot for ParaNorman.

Film Editing:
Argo
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty

Who’s going to win: Argo
Who should win: Zero Dark Thirty

ZD30 is probably the most complex editing of this bunch, and the construction of the attack on Bin Laden’s complex alone should win the award, but I think the safer choice will prevail with Argo. It may even win for it’s own tense final sequence, which, ironically is the very thing that killed my enjoyment of that movie and took me out of it.

Cinematography:
Anna Karenina
Django Unchained
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Skyfall

Who’s going to win: Life of Pi
Who should win: Django Unchained

Voters will reward a 3D film that finally delivers as more than a gimmick (ok, so Hugo managed that too). I want to go back again and again to the big western vistas of Django, though. The snowy scenes are the equal of any great western ever, for my money. I’d probably rate Skyfall ahead of Life of Pi, too. The film dares to question how beautifully shot an action film can be.

Foreign Language Film:
Amour (Austria)
Kon-Tiki (Norway)
No (Chile)
A Royal Affair (Denmark)
War Witch (Canada)

Who’s going to win: Amour
Who should win: Amour

I mean, who are we kidding here, anyway? (That said, No is a fantastic film, and might be a shoe-in for me in any year without such a masterpiece as Amour.)

Adapted Screenplay:
Chris Terrio — Argo
Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin — Beasts of the Southern Wild
David Magee — Life of Pi
Tony Kushner — Lincoln
David O. Russell — Silver Linings Playbook

Who’s going to win: Lincoln
Who should win: Lincoln

If Argo does win Best Picture, I think Lincoln still beats it here just for the pure gorgeousness of Kushner’s language, not to mention the fact that it’s Kushner to begin with, who’s been nominated before but hasn’t won. If anyone plays upset, it’s Russell for SLP’s snappy dialogue.

Original Screenplay:
Michael Haneke — Amour
Quentin Tarantino — Django Unchained
John Gatins — Flight
Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola — Moonrise Kingdom
Mark Boal — Zero Dark Thirty

Who’s going to win: Tarantino
Who should win: Anderson/Coppola

Apart from Flight, I’d honestly be happy seeing any of these win. I think Boal’s excellent ZD30 screenplay is too hot to touch, and voters will only give Amour the Best Foreign award. Moonrise Kingdom may be too quirk-filled, and at the end of the day, Tarantino’s writing is the most distinctive part of any Tarantino film. I just adore Moonrise, though.

Supporting Actor:
Alan Arkin — Argo
Robert De Niro — Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman — The Master
Tommy Lee Jones — Lincoln
Christoph Waltz — Django Unchained

Who’s going to win: Jones
Who should win: De Niro

This is the toughest acting award to predict, and I could really see this going to anyone. But I think Waltz loses since he already won for a similar performance in Inglourious Basterds. De Niro’s turn is one of his best, most subtle performances in years, but I think the subtlety works against him in this case. Hoffman gets dinged because The Master is so opaque, so I think Jones gets it, since he’s nearly as important to Lincoln as Day-Lewis. n

Supporting Actress:
Amy Adams — The Master
Sally Field — Lincoln
Anne Hathaway — Les Miserables
Helen Hunt — The Sessions
Jacki Weaver — Silver Linings Playbook

Who’s going to win: Hathaway
Who should win: Hathaway

The only thing I can see upsetting this is if voters felt it was TOO much of a foregone conclusion. But even people who didn’t care for Les Mis, or who thought it was merely OK (like me) had trouble not being taken with Hathaway’s delivery of “I Dreamed a Dream.” When I reviewed it for NPR, I said it, ” ought to become one of the great moments in musical cinema history,” and I still feel the same way.

Actor:
Bradley Cooper — Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis — Lincoln
Hugh Jackman — Les Miserables
Joaquin Phoenix — The Master
Denzel Washington — Flight

Who’s going to win: Day-Lewis
Who should win: Day-Lewis

Any other year, I’d go with Phoenix’s unforgettable performance in The Master, but there’s just no denying Day-Lewis’s transformation into Lincoln. Decades from now, this portrayal will be as definitive in people’s minds as the marble statue in the Lincoln Memorial.

Actress:
Jessica Chastain — Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence — Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva — Amour
Quvenzhane Wallis — Beasts of the Southern Wild
Naomi Watts — The Impossible

Who’s going to win: Chastain
Who should win: Chastain

Lawrence or Riva could certainly upset this one, but I think Chastain’s performance is the one thing from Zero Dark Thirty that will manage to overcome controversy and pick up an award.

Directing:
Michael Haneke — Amour
Benh Zeitlin — Beasts of the Southern Wild
Ang Lee — Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg — Lincoln
David O. Russell — Silver Linings Playbook

Who’s going to win: Spielberg
Who should win: Haneke

Actually, the should win here is really the snubbed Kathryn Bigelow. My pick of Haneke should indicate no lack of respect for Spielberg, who turned in one of his best efforts in years with Lincoln, but of these five, the job Haneke did controlling the subtleties of tone and story in Amour is, as is usually the case with him, amazing to behold.

Best Picture:
Amour
Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty

Who’s going to win: Argo
Who should win: Zero Dark Thirty

I honestly can’t decide whether the winds are blowing more favorably for Lincoln or Argo at this point, but I’d rather Lincoln took it. Working on the theory that fate isn’t in favor of my Oscar pool, I’m picking Argo just to increase Lincoln’s chances. All that said, this ought to be a moot point; the best film in this crop is Zero Dark Thirty, and without the silly controversy, maybe we’d be talking about it instead. I liked Argo, but in this group of nine, I’d rate it 8th, with only Les Mis behind it. As usual, overhype for a perfectly fine and entertaining film that’s far from a masterpiece is unfortunately causing me some resentment for a film I otherwise like.

NPR Review: Red Flag & Rubberneck

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 08:07:00 -0500

You might know him best as Ray, the self-centered, arrogant coffeehouse manager from Lena Dunham’s Girls. Or as Jed, the self-centered, arrogant date from Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture.

But in two features out this week, Alex Karpovsky is much more than that: He’s the psychotic obsessive Paul in the psychological thriller Rubberneck, and an anxious filmmaker named … well, Alex Karpovsky, in the road comedy Red Flag.

And yes, there’s may be some self-centered arrogance to those characters as well.

Karpovsky not only stars in these two films but also writes and directs; they’re his fourth and fifth features in that capacity. On the surface, the pair couldn’t look more different. Rubberneck, a deadly serious story about a scientist’s obsession with a co-worker after an ill-advised one-night stand, is a thriller so tightly restrained that it borders on inertia. Paul, who seems a gifted scientist but an emotional child, carries with him a decades-old trauma from his youth. If he were any more inwardly directed, he’d become a black hole.

Red Flag, on the other hand, is a hilarious meta-comedy in which Karpovsky, playing a version of himself, goes on a roadshow tour for a movie he’s directed (Woodpecker, which is also the real Karpovsky’s 2008 sophomore feature) immediately after getting dumped by his girlfriend.

Washington City Paper Arts: The Legend of Cool "Disco" Dan

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:44:24 -0500

Through its streetcar days, its riots, its crack epidemic, and its many-flavored scandals, Washington has remained a town of hoary legends. Men’s names, etched into marble; dead generals astride horses, gazing stonily into rush-hour traffic—for generations, these cold and glory-drunk statues have passed as public art in the District. Ask a passerby to connect a name to a chiseled face, and you’ll get a sheepish shrug.

There’s one Washington figure whose name was all anyone knew of him, though, at least for a while, and few could traverse D.C.’s neighborhoods without learning it. Feds riding downtown on the Red Line. Tourists, the minute they unglued their eyes from their crumpled maps. Hustlers. Go-go stars. Schoolchildren. Cops, definitely. Shop owners. There was hardly a soul in town who didn’t know the name of Cool “Disco” Dan.

For a long stretch during the 1980s and 1990s, Dan earned a reputation as the city’s most prolific tagger. Through D.C.’s worst violence-scarred years, when official Washington seemed ever segregated from city residents, his marks let you know you were still in the nation’s capital. He had rivals, but no other tagger sprayed his name as relentlessly or as adventurously as Cool “Disco” Dan; for that, the troubled kid originally from Boston became an anti-legend amid founding fathers whose legacy, to many District residents, seemed to impart only statues. Now, Dan is getting his own kind of immortalization: He’s the subject of a new documentary, The Legend of Cool “Disco” Dan, and he’s a part of a soon-to-open exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, “Pump Me Up: D.C. Subculture of the 1980s.”

Continue reading the rest of my piece over at the City Paper.

Atlantic Essay: Steven Soderbergh's Astonishing Last Rebellion

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:57:00 -0500

Great filmmakers rarely retire. Death put an early end to the careers of the likes of Kubrick, Truffaut, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, while studio disinterest sidelined Billy Wilder and Orson Welles even as they wanted to continue their work. Those who have managed to avoid similar fates often just keep working as long as they’re able. The list of directors who have continued to laboring well into their 70s or 80s is long and distinguished: Allen, Altman, and Antonioni, just off the top of the alphabet. The Brazilian director Manoel de Oliveira is currently in pre-production on his 32nd feature; he just turned 104.

Directors simply don’t voluntarily switch careers at the age of 50 or end their runs with films that neatly summarize what their careers have been about. Apparently no one told Steven Soderbergh. Or if they did, he just didn’t listen to conventional wisdom. It would hardly be the first time.

In 2009 the director first floated the idea of retiring in a few years, and in 2011 confirmed it more concretely. Since that 2011 pronouncement, he’s released four features, capped off with this month’s pharma-psycho-sexual-thriller, Side Effects. That’s four movies in under a year and a half, a punishing schedule practically unheard of for modern filmmakers. The aforementioned Fassbinder managed that sort of pace, but had to alternate cocaine and sleeping pills (which eventually killed him) to manage it. Soderbergh seems fueled by a pure joy of making movies.

Or maybe that blistering pace is just the heavy foot of a racecar driver enjoying a carefree victory lap following a grueling race. The director’s recent candor in an excellent interview over at Vulture paints a picture of an industry where even being a filmmaker as well-regarded as Soderbergh can be a thankless task, making movies for a culture that no longer values the kinds of films he wants to make. While some of his quotes in that interview might sound grouchy, it’s hard to argue with his point that “ambiguity is not on the table anymore,” given the simplistic and tone-deaf pieces that came out of so many political writers in the wake of Zero Dark Thirty.

Continue reading the rest of my piece over at The Atlantic.

Atlantic Essay: How Immortality Killed 'Die Hard'

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 07:57:00 -0500

“Schieß dem Fenster,” says Hans Gruber to his subordinate, Karl, as they try to catch the “monkey in the wrench” to their heist plan in 1988’s action masterpiece Die Hard. Gruber is trying to tell Karl to shoot the glass, a fact that the audience discovers when Hans repeats himself—in English, oddly, given that they’re both native German speakers—in response to Karl’s quizzical look. (Viewers have noted over the years that the German words Alan Rickman utters here make no grammatical sense, which could explain Karl’s confusion.)

Hans knows that our hero, New York cop John McClane, is out there barefoot, and a floor covered in glass should sideline him at least temporarily. He’s right. As they create the shower of shards for McClane to run through to make his escape, they also set up the scene that demonstrates exactly what made Die Hard such a foundation-shaker for action cinema, setting it apart from the films that came before. Sadly, the same elements have set it apart from most of the sequels that have come after.

After that sequence, we next see McClane at the end of an alarmingly thick trail of blood, picking pieces of glass out of his foot. But he’s not doing it with steely resolve, gritting his teeth and planning his revenge. He’s in clearly debilitating pain. Choking back tears on the radio to his pal Sgt. Powell on the outside, he basically says he’s probably not getting out of the Nakatomi building alive.

We latched onto Die Hard’s version of John McClane because he’s a relatable hero, an everyman with a quick wit and real vulnerability. Up to that point, audiences knew Willis primarily as the sarcastic, flirty private eye on TV’s Moonlighting, and from lead roles in a couple of Blake Edwards comedies. At that time, Willis as an action hero was as out of left field as if Paul Rudd had been cast as Jason Bourne—and it’s even weirder when you consider that Die Hard came out in an era when Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Van Damme were the template for the successful action star.

Continue reading the rest of my piece over at The Atlantic.

NPR Review: A Good Day to Die Hard

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0500

In a dark, dusty vault beneath a studio back lot, are there stacks and stacks of unproduced Cold War-era screenplays? A pile of untapped bad movie potential, like a hidden stockpile of enriched uranium, just waiting for a film crew that’s looking to make a quick buck with a dirty bomb of a movie?

A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth entry in the annals of hard-to-kill New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis), is not that explosively bad movie. It’s the decaying radioactive wreckage left behind after that bomb goes off.

It doesn’t even feel like it was ever intended to be a Die Hard movie: It’s like someone went into that Cold War boilerplate pile, found a buddy-cop script about two mismatched heroes out to thwart the nefarious plans of some generic Russian bad guys, and substituted McClane and his son for the leads.

Continue reading the rest of my review over at NPR.