MOB: The Artist — Best Picture Frontrunner

I got the opportunity to watch The Artist at the New York Film Festival, but never got the opportunity to write about it. It's a film of some lightness but it's incredibly lovely; the film draws you into its concept soon enough and, in spite of occasionally dipping into the more melodramatic and maudlin near the climax of the film, the very end goes off on a booming and spirit lifting note that has a full theater cheering at the end. I saw it among cinephiles and average moviegoers alike and the opinions were pretty much the same, and judging from the critical reaction it looks like it ticks off boxes for all relevant camps.

As far as the Oscar race goes, there appear to be three films that can conceivably win the top prize at this point — Alexander Payne's Clooney led The Descendants, Spielberg's War Horse and this. Sure, Michel Hazanavicius doesn't quite have the starpower of Spielberg's name nor does lead actor Jean Dujardin carry the crowd recognition of George Clooney. That said, anytime Dujardin's glowing smile isn't on screen, you wish it was. And we see last year with Tom Hooper beating someone at career peak like David Fincher last year that directorial star power doesn't quite go all the way every time. At this point, War Horse is more of a wildcard than anything. Spielberg this year has gotten off to a fine note getting a decent reaction for The Adventures of Tin Tin which was seen as being a lot riskier in reception than the film based upon the most recent Tony winner for Best Play.

The problem with Payne is that his films don't really hold up. Sideways positively swept the critics awards in 2004 and he may find similar passion among them this year, but in the general populace his films don't exactly hold up. Sideways loses impact upon repeated viewings while something like About Schmidt or Election are praised for little else than their respective central performances. Payne also had won an Oscar for the screenplay for Sideways and does seem to be perceived as more of a writer than a director, and George Clooney had been given his own Oscar not even that long ago while going up against Oscarless actors of similar star status like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Most damning for the film is the fact that, as far as the distinction vis à vis The Artist goes is that people like The Descendants...people love The Artist.

This much was evidenced by its audience win at the Hamptons Film Festival, among a few other places, since Hamptons is where many Academy members can be found trying to catch up on this year's crop of films. You might remember last year, another Harvey Weinstein vehicle, The King's Speech took that prize. The Artist missed out on the Toronto audience award that jumpstarted The King's Speech's campaign, but it has more going for it than The King's Speech, that being that it simply fits better within the framework of the more recent winners. Whether its win was balked or not by the majority of cinephilic communities, The King's Speech still may well have been the third best reviewed film nominated last year behind The Social Network and Toy Story 3, and Colin Firth had still managed to take 2 out of 3 of the central critics groups' awards; The Artist will likely inspire even more critical adulation. It has that distinguishable feature that almost certainly makes it stand out, being silent and black and white, that reminds me of Slumdog Millionaire's ascent into Best Picturedom. And while the more dramatic elements of the story remind older voters of the most traditionally pleasurable of Hollywood themes and entertainment, the story of a Hollywood star transitioning to major changes in the film industry could not be better timed with the onset of actors' fears of motion capture performance and 3D sales dominating the new industry business model. Read more!

My Week With Marilyn

First of all, the film itself is a lot better than I expected. Perhaps thin and a bit disposable like Me and Orson Welles a few years ago but I found this much more watchable overall and generally more convincing. It is definitely stagey and very old fashioned Hollywood in its construction but as appropriately as the film they're making in this film is very much the same.

Eddie Redmayne and Emma Watson are perfectly serviceable while Judi Dench plays the same lovable and sweet but still honest and wise old broad that she generally plays in her sleep. Julia Ormond was stunning as Vivien Leigh in her insecurities about her relationship with Olivier on the set of the film and in her starpower as she reaches 40, and I wish there were more of her since, frankly, she's barely in it.

The two stars are who you'd pretty much imagine. Now, let's get this out of the way. There were times in the film where Michelle's resemblance to Marilyn was straight up uncanny, but no, overall, she does not look all that much like her. But she didn't look more unlike her than Branagh did as Laurence Olivier in the same film. It didn't matter because at some point in the film I easily bought her as Marilyn, really capturing the full spectrum of enigma that exists in our image of her. Williams has that gift where one glance of her eyes could be of pain, disappointment, shock, overwhelming joy, flattering, etc. at different times. Your eyes go to her every moment she's onscreen, and really, I don't know any other actress who could have pulled off the performance with the same intelligence and emotional pull in spite of there being some who might just be considered more "conventionally" sexier than her (though remember, we're using our present day perception of such a thing which Monroe herself likely would not have fit).

She was excellent playing against Branagh, and it's interesting to note that Williams herself seems more of a method actress (and a very good one at that in addition to her natural beauty and allure that I think is part of the formula for the success of her performances) while Branagh is obviously more of Olivier's school. I don't know about the test screening reactions that suggest that Branagh totally outshines Williams in this; yes, he's given quite easily the very best lines of the entire movie that had me burst out cracking up in a way that I can't quite remember doing in a film in a very long time. Hits those RIGHT out of the park. But in the end it's true that Olivier's character is the actor who wants to be a star while Monroe was the star who wanted to be an actress, and her effortless starpower is what shone in this film. Read more!

We Need To Talk About Tilda's Oscar

When we first see Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin, we see her swimming through a symbolic sea of red during a tomato festival where everyone's red drenched fleshes are pressing in on one another in mass chaos and her haunting body above and floating through the crowd in a sort of sacrificial ecstasy, not unlike familiar portrayals of Jesus himself or Maria Falconetti's iconic performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

From that point forward the film jumps back and forth through bold editing between her life in the present and her life before leading up to this point. We see her in the beginning as a young woman with soulful passion and a joyful yearning to live and experience a hopeful life. Cut to the present day and you see a haunting shell of a woman completely beat down and ground to a pulp; rock bottom, left for dead, nothing left to look forward to, in an absolute pit of despair. She seems quite pleased to imagine that if there is a God she will go straight down to hell, because, really, how much could the physical inflictions of hell effect her to the profound point where she already is in her life right now?

We follow her journey leading up to what led her to this point with a performance as bold and daring and courageous and provocative as the material lent to her. Tilda, a proud mother herself in her personal life, went forth with a brute honesty in her character's disgust for pregnancies, the violence of childbirth, and a failure to ever connect with her own child from the start before commencing a sequence of maddening and thought provoking events raising the challenging notion of the nightmare scenario of parenting — what if everything (that possibly could go wrong) goes wrong? What if you really truly just happen to bear a monster? In this psychological horror the natural questions then arise of how much that child is a reflection of her, and how much of her she sees in this monster.

Year after year goes by whence Tilda slowly destroys and dismantles and collapses her character of Eva once brimming with hopes and passions and livelihood into the woman we see in the second half until the pivotal moment of the plot finally arrives where anything she's ever known more or less wipes out. Without giving too much away, this doesn't happen until the end, but it makes us seeing her in that barren state of unimaginably lonely and painful and guilt-ridden existence in her specially subtle and layered performance in particular all the more powerful upon retrospect and demanding of repeated viewing. Read more!

A Separation

I'm fully aware that when someone like myself has been really hyping up a certain picture for a while...and they finally see it...and it turns out, surprise!, they're in love with it, it almost seems forced if not bordering on self-fulfilling prophecy. But when Asghar Farhadi (whom I met before the screening and is a totally nice guy) introduced the film, he told us to forget anything we've heard about it and ordered us not to think about any awards it had won or what reviews we'd read of it or any preconceptions we'd held and to pretend that we have an appointment at 4:00 and were just looking for a way to kill time until then by watching that movie. And by the end of it, for the first time I've ever seen a 1 pm non-gala showing at a film festival, Farhadi rightfully received a standing ovation from the crowd.

And boy howdy did he deserve it. It was honestly one of the most emotional, invigorating, aggravating, tense and visceral viewing experiences and reaction I've had to watching a film in a very long time. Perhaps it's a bit one-sided in favor of Nader to a fault, but his character still gets enough of a vague morality that comprises part of the film's beauty. Never before, I'll say, have I seen a film that so perfectly captures the ambiguity of human "truth." Let's just say that Meryl Streep's final line in Doubt had nowhere near the impact or stakes that a similar line delivered in this film had by any means. But you see temperatures flailing as two sides held black and white and defined sides when deep inside, both sides know they each have more nuances and complications to their stories that they will refuse to confront either out of their own shame or guilt or rationality's sake to win in the system of a legal court.

There were points in the film where I easily felt as hot-tempered as the characters themselves and by the end of it was basically shaking, and I think many in the audience felt the same way. I think I read somewhere that some felt that the sort-of-twist in the final act completely ruined it for them but I don't really think it was anything that I paid much attention or mind to while watching it because it all still fit with the rest of the film and the story, and if anything added a necessary complication to a certain character's side to the story that made me sympathize a little more with her actions despite how deep the implications of it ran, whereas otherwise I think that would have seemed weak. And to me it just speaks more to how intricately and beautifully constructed every word and character and action in Farhadi's script is, and each and every performance more or less seemed as intricate and beautiful as Farhadi had seemingly written them, and I totally understand why basically every actor won Best Actor or Best Actress at Berlin and why Isabella Rosselini's jury's decision was pretty unanimous. It's truly a marvel to behold. Read more!