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2011 Best Actress: Davis or Streep?

20 Monday Feb 2012

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“THERE IS NO such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously remarked.  There is, however, such thing as the Oscar and soon, five leading ladies – Glenn Close, Rooney Mara, Michelle Williams, Viola Davis and Meryl Streep – will get their chance to pick up the golden calf of the film-acting world.  Having just caught Streep as British Prime Minister in “Irony Lady,” I have good reason to predict that her competition, Viola Davis (“The Help”), will pick up her first gold-guy next Sunday night.  There are five reasons why, in fact, Davis will triumph one week from tonight:

  1. It’s the Movie, Stupid:  By now you’ve likely heard or read that “Iron Lady” (directed by Phyllida Lloyd, from a script by Abi Morgan) is less than a perfect film.  Actually, it’s a scrambled egg of a story and one that talks out of both sides of its mouth: heroizing its steely subject while also humiliating her.  Ruling for eleven years, Mrs. Thatcher was a polarizing leader who became the first prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812-27 to win three successive elections.  What “Irony Lady” does, cruelly so, is reduce her to a lady who irons (laundry) and talks to the spectre of her beloved husband.  As Dennis Thatcher, Jim Broadbent keeps popping up like a cross between Marley’s Ghost and a jack-in-the-box.  Even more confounding is that a biopic which features Maggie protesting, “I cannot die washing up a teacup,” actually ends with Maggie washing a teacup.  The GOP would practically combust if a film ostensibly about Ronald Reagan condensed his achievements to sound-bites and portrayed him as the Madman of Simi Valley, wandering the hallways in his pajamas and crying out for Nancy.
  2. Been a While, But Streep’s Got Two Already:  Streep is the Madonna of cinema.  Yes, she’s nearly a decade older than the Material Girl but she’s a ruthless impersonator and proof that indeed women can command the stage and screen over the age of fifty.  Yes, it’s been a while since she sealed the deal – her first Oscar Nomination, for “Deer Hunter” in 1978, is as old as I am, and her two wins followed in quick succession (for “Kramer vs. Kramer” in 1979 and “Sophie’s Choice” in 1982) – but she’s the most-nominated living movie actress and may remain so, at least until the performance and the film are better matched.
  3.   Aibileen as the Heart of “The Help”:  Coincidentally, Davis earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for just eight minutes’ worth of screen time with Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (2008).   Davis has a fascinating face – deep, protuberant eyes always on the verge of crying – and she’s the emotional core of “The Help” who provides our white heroine Skeeter with first-person accounts of her race-based humiliations.  One of Skeeter’s questions, which we hear twice, is even sadder the second time: “How does it feel to raise white children while your own children are being raised by someone else?”  Unsure, or perhaps afraid, to answer, Aibileen can only stare at the portrait of her dead son (the victim of a racial hate crime) on her kitchen wall.  A movie is only as good as the memories it leaves you, and that singular scene stings the day after.
  4. Is Davis Drama’s Version of Melissa McCarthy?:  The other estrogen-driven ensemble film of 2012 is “Bridesmaids” and the unforgettable supporting member of that cast, Melissa McCarthy (as the frisky Megan), has been repeatedly singled out, even for a Best Supporting Actress, as the stand-out of the ensemble.   The Academy may want to honor the baby, though not the bathwater, by elevating Viola Davis above all others, honoring a perfect performance in a less than perfect film.
  5. Always Bet on Black (Unless You’re Oscar): It’s jaw-dropping to think that only one black woman has won movie-acting’s highest achievement: that’s Halle Berry in 2001’s “Monster Ball.”  Yes, 2001, in a film in which the late Heath Ledger co-starred.  Been a while, indeed.  Last year’s “The Help” is only the third film in movie history to feature black nominees for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress and made Davis, alongside Whoopi Goldberg, the most nominated black actress with just two nominations (Streep has an astounding 17 nominations, not to mention 26 Golden Globe nominations).

Note to Oscar: help yourself and give the gold to Viola (“The Help”) Davis!

Postscript: The 2011 Oscar for Best Actress went to Streep.

 

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “50/50”

03 Monday Oct 2011

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“Spinal Trap”

REVIEW: “50/50”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

CANCER AND COMEDY aren’t as incompatible as one might think.  For centuries doctors worked from the assumption that the human body was comprised of four humors: phlegm, yellow and black bile, and blood. What’s called the humoural model (from fluid, or humon, in Greek and humor in Latin) dominated from the fifth century BC, with the work of Hippocrates, to the early twentieth century, the vestiges of which are now understood in terms of moods and temperament.  “English-speakers still have to humor the whims of a temperamental colleague,” writes Noga Arikha, author of Passions and Tempers: A History of The Humours, or “face a Monday with ill-humor, and remain good-humored throughout the week.”

But what about facing a stage-four spinal tumor with a sense of humor?  That’s the challenge facing Adam and indeed the larger dramedy based on his existential ordeal called “50/50.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt [“(500) Days of Summer,” “Inception”] plays Adam, a radio producer in Seattle, in a script by Will Reiser who himself battled and beat spinal cancer.  Adam gets by, and high, with a little help from his friends, chiefly Kyle (a sly and slimmer Seth Rogan), his hospital-appointed therapist (Anna Kendrick of “Up in the Air”) and smothery mother (an underused Angelica Huston).  When Adam informs her of his diagnosis over dinner, Huston shoots back: “I’m moving in.”

The film’s first frames feature Adam following all the rules: at 27, he exercises and patiently jogs in place at crosswalks while waiting for the light to change.  He’s smitten with girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) who, as an abstract artist, fills his apartment with ugly canvases and worse, arrives an hour late at the hospital to pick him up.  Reprising her turn as Cruella de Vil in “The Help,” Howard tries her darndest to breathe life into a flat character in a film really about the bonds between men.

The emotional core of “50/50,” after all, lies in that fine bromance between Adam and Kyle.  Friends don’t let friends drive themselves to chemo.  And friends certainly don’t let friends shave their own heads, nor miss the opportunity to corral girls into sympathy sex.  “50/50!” exclaims Kyle, “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds.  And lots of people beat cancer.  That guy from ‘Dexter’ and Patrick Swayze.”  “Swayze?” Adam retorts, “That guy is dead.”  “Really?” Kyle backtracks, “Well, don’t think about him.”

Rogan’s casualness as a comic actor makes him instantly likable, and citing “night-blindness” as a reason to share Adam’s cancer-pot, he also reprises a role already seen on screen: 2009’s “Funny People” in which there, too, he nurses a terminal Adam Sandler back to life and laughter.   Directed by Jonathan Levine, “50/50” has none of that inferior film’s acerbic nihilism.  Instead, and in large part because of Levitt’s tenderness – listen for his larynx-shattering howl on the eve of a crucial surgery – “50/50” keeps its head high in the face of despair.  There’s a term for that tactic, by the way; it’s called “gallows humor.”

Cancer Sucks so Blog for a Cure:

http://www.blogforacure.com/

My “Bromance” review (“Funny People,” “The Hangover,” and “I Love You, Man”) from the _GLR_:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/’Bromance’+Flix+and+the+State+of+Dudedom.-a0216644249

Review: “The Debt”

05 Monday Sep 2011

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“Schindler’s Fist”

Film Review: “The Debt” (2011)

Grade: B (RENT IT)

“Terribly and terrifyingly normal.”  That was Hannah Arendt’s memorable description, from 1963, after seeing Adolf Eichmann, one of the evil architects of the Holocaust and only Nazi to be executed on Israeli ground after the war, stand trial for crimes against humanity.  It was exactly Eichmann’s bourgeois normalness that terrified Arendt the most.  Even the most destructive of men, she realized, can look like, well, Joe the Plumber.

Every bit the Nazi monster, Eichmann was also a pencil-pusher and a bureaucrat, and as Arendt would argue, in her controversial “Report on the Banality of Evil” from Eichmann in Jerusalem, all the more dangerous because he himself could be pushed around.  In the end, he was a mere “organization man” whose unthinking compliance made the deportation and deaths of millions as easy as the flip of a switch.  “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him,” Arendt observed, “and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

That banality of evil, as Arendt would famously phrase it, is what gives the many face-to-face confrontations between Mossad special agent, Rachel Singer, and Nazi monster, Dieter Vogel, their thrilling charge in John Madden’s “The Debt” (a reboot of a 2007 Israeli thriller adapted by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Godlman and Peter Straughan).  Their tense scenes together involve straight razors, needles, even speculums and they’ll make you want to look away.   The wicked Dr. Vogel (played by Jesper Christensen) is best (or worst) known as the sadistic Surgeon of Birkenau, and he’s been hiding in plain sight in an East Berlin gynecology practice since the fall of the Third Reich.  He has a pleasant looking wife, also his nurse, and he appears, on the surface, well, normal.   Incognito as Dr. Vogel’s timid patient, Rachel exchanges pleasant chitchat with the good doctor as she prepares, with the help of her two fellow agents, to forcibly apprehend the fugitive and bring him to justice.

The young Rachel is played by Jessica Chastain, surely 2011’s greatest revelation on screen.  She was ethereal as the virtually mute mother in Terrence Malick’s superb “The Tree of Life,” effervescent in “The Help,” and here, in “The Debt,” she’s every bit as forceful and effective as the third corner in a triangle of operatives consisting of Stephan (Marton Csokas) and David (Sam Worthington of “Avatar” and “Terminator Salvation”).  The film occupies several points on the same timeline all at once.   Juxtaposed with the kidnapping of Vogel in 1965 Berlin is modern-day Tel Aviv where Rachel, thirty years later, is now famous for shooting Vogel dead and making her people proud.

But did she?  Is her version of Vogel’s killing truthful, or could the Nazi doctor have fled and Rachel, and Stephan, and David’s account of events be a fabrication?   A terrific trio of actors plays the agents at middle-age (Helen Mirren as Rachel, Tom Wilkinson as Stephan and Ciaran Hinds as David).  They’re still busy trying to rewrite history, and since this reviewer is no spoiler, all I will say is that this triangle, young and old, has more than a few lies to protect.  What powers “The Debt” is the same Hitler-directed revenge fantasy that powered two modern-day classics: 1976’s “The Marathon Man” and Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” of 2009.

Hanah Arendt and the banality of evil is surely a useful lens through which “The Debt” should be viewed.  More accessible perhaps is someone a bit closer to (cinematic) home, that is, Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones, Jr., PhD who, in his “Last Crusade” of 1989, has the last word when he says with a sigh: “Nazis.  I hate these guys.”

Review: “The Help”

25 Thursday Aug 2011

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“Separate but Sequel?”

Movie Review: “The Help” (2011)

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

IN THE SPRING of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was imprisoned for eight days in an Alabama jailhouse.  The crime?  Leading a peaceful protest against the institutionalized racism of the age otherwise known as segregation.  The result?  M.L.K’s masterwork “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” perhaps the second most important work of antiauthoritarian argumentation after that little-known piece of paper called “The Declaration of Independence.”  In a blend of aphorism and oratory, King writes of what he calls the “interrelatedness of all communities and states,” adding: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  The part, in other words, infects the whole.

The part in Tate Taylor’s “The Help” is the kitchen or the nursery in any ordinary Southern house and the whole is the deeply racist and paranoid world outside.  The uniformed maids working long hours in those humid, white-owned spaces have grown bitter and resentful after generations of hardship.  Known euphemistically as “the help,” they’ve got a few stories to tell about the white women they’re forced to “Yes Ma’am” all damn day long.  All they need is a person in power to get the word out, to publicize their notes from the underground.  They get more than they bargain for when a brash white woman comes home, proclaiming: “I’d like to write something from the view of the help.”

Based on the much-anticipated film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best-selling novel, “The Help,” director Tate Taylor preserves Stockett’s sense that even the domestic sphere has something instructive to say about the world outside.  Set not in Birmingham but in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, the narrative unfolds inside a hermetically-sealed world of upper-class white privilege, one in which dessert forks and serving from the left still matter.  There’s Hilly (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), a veritable slave-master in a beehive who believes wholeheartedly that black maids should use separate bathrooms from whites, and Allison Janney as the cowardly mother of the film’s white heroine, Skeeter (the starlet du jour Emma Stone of “Easy A” and “Crazy Stupid Love”).  It’s not just Skeeter’s name that sets her apart from the vapid dilettanti of Jackson high society but Skeeter’s freckles, corkscrew hair, her literary aspirations, and her little interest in marriage and men.  When Skeeter returns home as an Ole Miss alumnus with a new writing job, her mother corners her about her unconventionality, worried that she’s having “unnatural thoughts” about the same sex.  “I read there’s a cure,” blurts a worried Janney, even a “brew tea” to make her more like Hilly and herself.

But Skeeter sticks to her guns and to the marginalized black help of Jackson, namely Aibileen (the indomitable Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer).  Davis earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for just eight minutes’ worth of screen time with Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (2008).   She has a fascinating face – deep and protuberant eyes always on the verge of crying – and alongside Spencer’s Minny, she’s the emotional core of “The Help.”  The two provide Skeeter with first-person accounts of their humiliations.  One of Skeeter’s questions, which we hear twice, is even sadder the second time: “How does it feel to raise white children while your own children are being raised by someone else?”  Unsure, or perhaps afraid, to answer, Aibileen can only stare at the portrait of her dead son (the victim of a racial hate crime) on her kitchen wall.   When the testimonials of Aibileen and Minny grow into Skeeter’s book-length exposé of white establishment, the joke is mainly on Hilly.

The film’s pace and performances are equally fine.  It’s refreshing to see Bryce Dallas Howard drop the usual blankness of her expression and relish in the bitchy malevolence of her role.  Her senile mother, played by a cat-eyed Sissy Spacek, garners laughs since even she finds her daughter’s racist airs repugnant.  On the narrative sidelines, perhaps, is the character of Celia (played by Jessica Chastain, the ethereal mother-figure in “The Tree of Life”) who, like Skeeter, sees no value in separate bathrooms and dining areas and relies on Minny (who is fired by Hilly for insubordination) to teach her how to cook and play the perfect wife.  The fact that she can’t get pregnant and that she’s viewed as a harlot by the in-crowd has driven her slightly batty.

By empathizing with Celia’s predicament as well as Minny’s, “The Help” smartly rounds out the various levels of subjugation at work in 1960s culture.  What’s worrisome about America’s nostalgic return to that era – thanks to “Mad Men” and its various offspring – is that the age of the skinny tie was, in reality, an age of wide disparity.  For every Don Draper in a skyscraper there were a million more Aibileens and Minnies.  The ditsy Celia is as much a victim as they are since all these women, white or black, are relegated to social roles that simply don’t fit.  The main deficiency of “The Help” is that it doesn’t do enough with this parallel form of oppression.  Too eager to please, the film loves to watch Hilly fall flat on her face over and over again, but in this respect, it can’t see the forest for the trees.  “The Help” misses the fact that racism and patriarchy are overlapping forces, which means that even the most villainous women are sometimes victims.