1. Although it did deplete from my woeful prediction score , I’m glad Martin Scorsese was vindicated by the Academy , winning four Oscars including Best Picture and Director, unlike Robert Altman who had to content himself with the Lifetime Achievment award and a posthumous round of applause. Nonetheless, the most poignant moment in the show for me was  Scorsese looking on from the wings as producer Graham King accepted the Best Picture award for the passable "The Departed." The great director had an “is that all there is?” expression on his face, or maybe his thought was, why couldn’t they have given this to me thirty years ago when I made really good movies? (Naturally, he claims otherwise).

2. So what organization was the first to recognize “The Departed” with its awards? Way back on December 10, 2006 The Boston Society of Film Critics  gave Best Film, Director and Screenplay to “The Departed.” Just like the Oscars! Who says critics are irrelevant? Who says we suffer from delusions of significance?

3. The BSFC also presented its Best Supporting Actor Award to Mark Wahlberg in “The Departed,” something the Academy failed to do. I think they missed a great opportunity. Gratifying though it was to defeat Eddie Murphy (who was definitely not happy about losing), the nominee that we all love to hate, but why give it to a performance (admittedly the best part of the film) from “Little Miss Sunshine,” which, next to “Babel,” is the most overrated film of the year? Why not to Wahlberg, whose street punk to movie star story has it all over the canned melodrama of Jennifer (Here come the tears! Here comes God’s blessing!) Hudson? And for that matter, why did a film whose greatest strength is the acting get only one nomination and no wins?

4. Speaking of “Babel,” I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, its loss means that yet again my score for predictions is a mediocre four for six. On the other hand, its loss means that the most pretentious piece of phony crap saince “Crash” has, well, lost. In fact, of the seven categories "Babel" was nominated in, it won only one: Best Score! Worse even than, “Dreamgirls,” which won in only two of its eight nominated categories, Best Supporting Actress and Best Sound Mixing.

5. Here's the classic arc of Hollywood corruption: Lifetime Achievement award winner Ennio Morricone goes from the eternally haunting themes from “A Fistful of Dollars,” (1964) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966) to eternally emetic Celine Dion singing his “I Knew I Loved You” on Oscar night.

6. Every year Hollywood tries in the Oscar broadcast to present the idealized image of itself that  it wants everyone to accept. What is it this year? A bunch of Birkenstocked tree-huggers saving the world with their hybrid cars and their embrace (sometimes literally) of fashionable liberal Democratic candidates and softcore issues (anyone hear the word “Iraq” mentioned?). Doze off for a minute while Leonardo DiCaprio butters up Al Gore as they announce how Green was my Oscar (okay, the “big announcment schtick was kind of funny) and you wake up to see an impassioned Hillary Clinton singing the Oscar-winning song for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Whoops -- that’s not Hillary, it’s Melissa Etheridge, who, despite the lousy song, did contribute one of the evening’s few subversive moments -- kissing her spouse Tammy Lynne Michaels on the lips before walking up to the stage. And has any woman recipient in Oscar history ever said the words, “I’d like to thank my wife…?” A short nap later, there’s Gore again, being held down by “Truth’”s  nearly convulsed director Davis Guggenheim as if the former Vice President were a huge, wind-whipped dirigible about to break free and never be seen again, while they accepted the award for Best Documentary.

7. Long, dull, dreary, tasteless, demoralizing. I can’t wait for next year. Of course I’m talking about the presidential race.

2/27/2007 2:09:15 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

Last night I was watching the film “The Situation”  (it opens March 2 at the Kendall) on DVD, a love triangle set in the Sunni Triangle directed by Philip Haas and starring Connie Nielsen, and by the time it got to the third IED explosion and the fifth sectarian assassination I thought, this is entertainment? I might as well be watching the news. So after the movie was over I did turn  on the news (it was around 10:15 p.m.), flipped through MSNBC, CNN and NECN, and saw that all three were broadcasting the latest on the Anna Nicole Smith story. Not a single scene of carnage! What a relief!

In one regard, though, “The Situation” does resemble the cable news stations: the presence of commercials. At one point the movie openly plugs Johnny Walker Black whiskey. As product placement goes, this is pretty mild. For a glimpse at hardcore studio pandering, check out this year’s Brandcameo Awards for Product Placement (the “Brandies”). Forget the Oscars; as I noted in a posting on the same event last year, these trophies recognize Hollywood’s true achievments.

Or, rather, those of the Ford Motor Company, winner for the second year in a row of “Overall Product Placement.” Of all the the top ten box office films of 2006 — 41 in all — you’ll find a Ford of some sort in 17.

That doesn’t even include, the Brandcameo people point out, “Casino Royale ,” which is loaded with Fords, but didn’t make it to number one in the box office. Maybe because the film suffered a bad rap from critics for being overloaded with product placements. In fact, with only 25 plugs, “Royale” paled even before the Oscar favorite “The Departed,” which had twice as many, not to mention “Big Mama’s House” with a big 58, or the champion “Talladega Nights,” with 89.

Which brings us to the “Brandies” post-modernist favorite. “The ‘Wayne’s World’ Award for Product Placement Placement,” granted to the film that’s hip and jokes about product placement, and thereby manages to get in more than its share of plugs. Is it irony or hypocrisy? Either way, the award didn’t go, as expected, to “Talladega,” but to the infinitely more smarmy “Thank You For  Smoking.” As the Brandcameo people explain, “Will Ferrell was no match for Thank You for Smoking, in which an entire subplot consists of our intrepid hero working out a detailed and absurd (yet not quite absurd enough) scheme to put cigarettes into the hands of today's hottest celebrities.”

2/23/2007 1:55:13 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

The prestigious 57th Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival, came to a close a couple of days ago and its jury, headed by American writer/director (and former film critic) Paul Schrader, awarded its top prize, The Golden Bear, to Chinese director Wang Quan’an’s “Tuya’s Wedding.”

 Set in Mongolia, it’s the story of a woman who pursues a suitor to take care of herself and her handicapped spouse. I think it sounds kind of interesting, and so apparently did Paul Schrader and maybe a couple of dozen other film critics and cinephiles in this country. But I don’t see it bumping “Ghost Rider” ($52 million its opening weekend)

or “Norbit” (grossing to date $62 million), currently number one and three in the box office, out of the cineplexes.

Frankly, looking back a past choices by the Berlin juries, I don’t think they really have their finger on the pulse of what American audiences want. Rather, they seem to opt for the film with the title that folks hereabouts will have the most trouble pronouncing. Last year the winner was Bosnian director Jasmila Zbanic’s “Grbavica,” the story of a mother and daughter struggling through the ruins of their post-war country. It won’t even open here until March 9. Maybe by that time “Ghost Rider” will start to fade.

Come to think of it, looking at the remaining films in this week’s top ten, I don’t think there’s a single Berlin Film Festival winner in the lot.

Meanwhile, for those of us who can’t make it to Berlin, a little bit of Berlin, or at least Germany, has come to Boston. “Phoenix” film critic Brett Michel is among the many lauding Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s  Oscar-nominated “The Lives of Others.” Michael Atkinson this week recommends the films of Helmut Käutner, who somehow made great films in the midst of the Third Reich, now showing at the Harvard Film Archive (I can personally attest to his exquisite and heartbreaking postwar film, “Sky Without Stars.”)   And the Museum of Fine Arts will screen a retrospective of the three films of Michael Hofmann, which I’ll be writing about in the new issue of
the “Phoenix.”

Oh, and I’ll be introducing Hofmann for his “film talk” this evening at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe Institute (176 Beacon St, Boston), where he will show clips of his films and discuss them. And this self-promotional plug, of course, was the reason this whole item was posted in the first place.

 

2/21/2007 12:02:22 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

Kudoes to Globe film critic Ty Burr for his entertaining and illuminating new book, The Best Old Movies for Families.  It fills a yawning gap in film criticism. No, not what films to show your kids and how to introduce them to the pleasures of cinema, though it accomplishes that much needed task charmingly. I’m talking about the ugly secret of how traumatic early movie experience contributes to the formation of a critical sensibility.

Let’s face it, film critics in general (James Agee and the French New Wave maybe excepted) suffered deprived childhoods. Deprived of trauma, that it is, and in most cases real-life experience of any kind (Burr himself admits to seeing nearly 11,000 films in his lifetime. That’s about 800 days that could have spent shopping at Target or catching up on the latest on Anna Nicole Smith). So? Well, for one thing, that explains the merciful lack of confessional memoirs by members of our profession.

To compensate, at an early age we get our share of pain from the movie screen. Burr indirectly suggests this phenomenon in his chapter titled “The Kong Island Theory, Or Old Movies Not to Watch With Your Children.” He screened the 1933 horror classic for his two daughters, aged four and six at the time. Trouble started when the characters arrived at Skull Island and a giant Brachiosaur (which since my own first viewing I have learned is a placid herbivore, not that it helps now) plucked assorted crew members off of a raft and munched them like they were offerings on a canape tray. This was when Burr’s younger daughter called it a day. And this is when the older daughter apparently became fixated on the horror, almost against her will, as was I many years ago when I saw the film for the first time on TV on Fantasmic Features.

For me, the worst was yet to come. Burr doesn’t even mention the scene in which the guys are trapped on a log crossing an abyss and Kong picks it up and shakes them off, their pathetic shrieks as they fall to their deaths minutely audible. Or later, in Manhattan, when Kong’s giant and obviously fake hand thrusts through a window of a hotel and pulls out his beloved, screaming Fay Ray.  Horrible, and yet strangelysexy. Definitely not for kids.

But I knew that movies were a window into something terrible, remorseless, inexorable and wildly attractive about life even before seeing this. Forget Bambi, what about that old Disney mainstay Old Yeller? The truth about life it teaches [SPOILER WARNING] is that in the end, we all shoot our beloved dog. (Burr notes that had the movie been made today, the dog would have lived. I suggest maybe it could be reincarnated as a CGI super hero).

But none of these films compare in terms of nightmarish trauma to The Wizard of Oz. There was a period in the 60s when they would show this 1939  ur-text on TV around the holidays as some kind of family celebration. Did the adults responsible for this programming even see the the movie? No wonder I’m a basket case.  The flying monkeys soaring in formation like Soviet bombers, the dismembered scarecrow eviscerated on the ground, its severed head still somehow talking. Then the tornado. “It’s a twister!” It was more than that, it was every dread of doom descending from the sky like the hand of God. It scared the hell out of me. To this date I have nightmares of phallic tornadoes chasing me under my bed.

Speaking of dreams, maybe the ultimate horror of The Wizard of Oz is the whole premise. To realize that all one’s experience was merely a dream. To wake up in black and white telling Ray Bolger, “and you were there...”

In his book Burr blithely recommends the movie without much comment, saying, “Do I really need to add another 500 words to the million already written on The Wizard of Oz?” Probably not. Maybe it’s just me. All I can say is be careful what you show your kids, or they’ll end up a film critic, too.

 

2/19/2007 1:28:24 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

Aside from the prospect of Al Gore annoucing his presidential candidacy after winning the Best Documentary Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth," the only thing I’m looking forward to in next week’s Academy Awards is finding out whether Martin Scorsese will be the only director to go 0 in 6 in nominations. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if he lost out — if only to grant him that distinction. At 1 in 6 who’s he in a league with? Woody Allen? That hardly compares with the company he keeps with the other 0 in 5 guys: Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman (okay, and Clarence Brown, too), both of whom died before the Academy could undo their disgrace by honoring them.

 

So who in their exalted wisdom did this jury of his peers deem superior to one of the half dozen greatest American directors of the last three decades? We won’t even count 1976, when "Taxi Driver," nominated for Best Picture, lost out to that quintessential hokum "Rocky." Scorsese wasn’t even nominated. “Rocky”’s John G. Avildsen was, and won. John G. who? So as you can see, a Best Directing Oscar is about as significant, as, well, a Best Picture Oscar. One has to wonder, however, had Scorsese’s film won, whether we would have been subjected eventually to a “Taxi Driver V: Travis Bickle” starring an over-the-hill armed-to-the teeth Robert De Niro, still working the streets,  gruesomely defending the honor of his and Iris’s frisky love-child, played by Dakota Fanning.

Dream on. Meanwhile, Scorsese, perhaps taking a cue from Stallone, decided to make his own boxing movie, the brutal and breathtaking “Raging Bull,” in 1980. It did earn him his first nomination. But it was also the year Robert Redford got his first nomination also, for the tear-jerker “Ordinary People,” and established a pattern that must be considered Scorsese’s Oscar curse. With the exception of 1988, when his  direction of “Last Temptation of Christ” lost to Barry Levinson and  overrated mawkish hoo-ha “Rain Man” (had he won, the Catholic League would have burned down the building), and  2002, when his “Gangs of New York” deservedly lost to Roman Polanski and “The Pianist,” he has always lost the award to an actor-turned-director.

In 1990 when he directed “GoodFellas,” maybe his best movie, he lost to Kevin Costner and “Dances With Wolves.” In 2004 with “The Aviator,” which some consider one of his worst movies but which I kind of liked, he lost out to one of Clint Eastwood’s worst, “Million Dollar Baby.”

 

So given that history, Scorsese’s prospects don’t look good. He’s up against Eastwood again and Clint’s movie, “Letters From Iwo Jima,”  is one of his best, better than the bloodsoaked, operatic, technically brilliant, splendidly acted but ultimately frivolous “The Departed.” On the other hand, Eastwood himself might have given Scorsese a leg up, magnanimously and perhaps a bit  condescendingly telling the Academy voters, give the guy a break. “He probably has a good chance,” Clint said recently. “There is a lot of sympathy for him, but I have no control over any of that. I always feel sorry... for the others, because there are other nominees and they've worked very hard on their projects, too. I don't think any two people should be singled out.”

As for the others: Stephen Frears for “The Queen” and Paul Greengrass for “United 93” probably don’t have a chance, but don’t be surprised if in the shoot-out between “The Departed” and “Iwo Jima,” “Babel’”s Alejandro Gonzalez Iñaríttu is the last man standing.

 

2/12/2007 6:49:25 PM by Peter | Comments [1] |  

(Listeners of WFNX might recognize the following as derived in part from my film review broadcast on the station this week. Keep it to yourselves.)

 

A couple of postings ago, I suggested that the Academy had snubbed Dreamgirls, which was shortlisted by some for Best Picture Oscar even before it was released, because it was unconsciously racist or, given the film’s enthusiastic response from the gay community, perhaps latently homophobic. It occurred to me that maybe it didn’t get the Best Picture, Best Director or Best Screenplay nominations because it just plain sucked. So I decided I’d have to see the damn thing myself.

Why did it take me so long? Call me old-fashioned, but when it comes to movie musicals I prefer the classics of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to the convulsion-inducing razzle dazzle of “Chicago.” So when it came to “Dreamgirls,” another hit Broadway stage production directed and written by Bill Condon, who also wrote “Chicago,” I thought maybe I could just wait until it all went away. Alas.

So I saw it and I wasn’t disappointed. I hated “Dreamgirls” even more than I hated “Chicago.” Oh, I can handle the stroboscopic editing and the cornball montages that serve to disguise how lame the production numbers and the songs are. I can overlook the moth-eaten clichés, the racial sterotypes, the hackneyed plot devices, the phony platitudes. I can even laugh ruefully at ridiculous moments such as when Jennifer Hudson storms out of a recording studio after an argument with Jamie Foxx and walks smack into the Detroit Race Riot of 1967. Whoops! Won’t make that mistake again.

No, what really bugged me about “Dreamgirls” was the hypocrisy. Here’s a movie that supposedly celebrates Black empowerment but which has its two strongest male characters collapse into self-destruction or self-betrayal. It’s a film that supposedly demonstrates the integrity of soul music that has the whitest soundtrack since “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” And it’s a film about not selling out to “the man” that has the man whistling “Family” all the way to the bank.

I hate to accuse the Academy of good taste or integrity, but in this case they made the right call.

2/1/2007 3:21:36 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |