Posts Tagged ‘Bedtime Stories’

Wilmington on DVDs: Doubt, Alexandra, The Last Metro, Fallen Angels, No Country for Old Men and more …

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: NEW

Doubt (Four Stars)
U.S.; John Patrick Shanley, 2008 (Miramax)

In Doubt, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman play a gorgon, dictatorial nun and a chubby-faced, affable progressive priest, battling in a Bronx parochial school in 1964. And they stage a classic actor‘s duel for director-writer John Patrick Shanley’s tense, humane adaptation of his Tony-winning play.

Streep plays, to a holy fare-thee-well, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the old-fashioned and relentless principal of St. Nicholas grade school and Hoffman matches her scene for scene as Father Brendan Flynn the parish priest — a young liberal with a jokey and benevolent manner, a flair for coaching and a teasing smile that Sister Aloysius finds suspicious.

She finds it even more damning when young and earnest Sister James (Amy Adams) reports an incident involving a young black student/altar boy, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), who drank some altar wine and had an encounter of some kind with Father Flynn. Abuse, thinks Sister Aloysius, who’s so old school, she doesn’t even like ballpoint pens, much less the church‘s new path under John XXIII. A woman with a low prosecutorial voice and a basilisk eye, she has probably rooted out many a randy priest before. Flynn, for all his biblical-slanted blarney, is guilty in her eyes of molestation in the house of the Lord. Of that, she has no doubt.

But Sister Aloysius has a worthy, and wordy, foe/debater in Father Flynn, who will not go quietly into the sexual/sacred hell she‘s prepared for him. And he has surprising aid, and support, from the boy’s mother, the long-suffering and worldly-wise Mrs. Miller (Viola Davis, in a scorching scene with Streep) and eventually from Sister James herself. That’s the drama, and it is a drama. You may think you have Doubt all figured out, but you’re probably wrong. Even after the climax, doubts will linger. And they should. That’s the conflict — and Doubt has genuine moral and spiritual clash to show us, with formidable performances by great actors.

It also has the feeling of a real story taken from a real place and time. I attended a Chicago parochial school for one year as a non-Catholic student — at St. Thomas Aquinas in Hyde Park, Chicago — and many scenes and images here brought back a rush of remembrance. And I liked my second grade teacher nun, Sister Roberta Theresa. I also liked this movie. All the acting is excellent and, under Shanley’s compassionate, precise hand, it makes for a provocative and prize-worthy film. No doubt about it.

Alexandra (Four Stars)
Russia; Alexander Sokurov, 2007 (New Yorker)

A lovely, sad film from the great Alexander Sokurov, a director all too often neglected by American moviegoers. (The exception: Sokurov’s incredible one-tracking-shot-in-the-Hermitage masterpiece, Russian Ark. Alexandra is a seemingly small drama, but a powerful one, in the stream of Sokurov’s Mother and Son and Father, about the visit to her soldier son (Vasily Shevtsov) on the Chechnyan front by an elderly, determined woman who has seen him rarely in recent years and will probably never see him again, no matter what the fortunes of war.

She arrives by train. They meet several times. The soldiers are kind to her; she’s a little testy. Her son goes off on a patrol. She visits (without permission) a Chechnyan village, makes friends with a woman (Raisa Gichaeva) there. Though she hasn’t been there long, she must finally leave. The train departs. That is the Chekhovian stuff from which Sokurov weaves his deeply touching story. The soldier‘s mother Alexandra, sturdy, plump and heartbroken, is played by famed opera singer Galina Vishneskaya, the widow of Sokurov’s previous film subject, the supreme cellist Mistislav Rostropovich. We hear opera in the background, part of the world of art and the soul of life that war so often subverts or even destroys. This is a fine movie, currently somewhat ignored. Don’t.

I select Alexandrapartly in remembrance of its distributor, New Yorker Films and Video, Dan Talbot’s magnificent Manhattan conduit for foreign and art films, which died last February after 44 years of opening up the world and bringing us movies like Godard’s Breathless, Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Bresson’s Pickpocket, Vigo’s L’Atalante, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Kusturica’s Underground and Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist. Talbot’s superb catalogue of 400 or more titles, which he assembled over four decades, was put up as collateral for a loan by New Yorker’s owner, and like many another dubious financial deal of the era, it went bust.

Alexandra, a New Yorker title, would have been my co-pick this week anyway — it‘s another lyrical antiwar piece by the masterful director of Russian Ark — and it’s still listed this week on Amazon.com. I name it as a last fond nod to Talbot and his wondrous legacy — and a last angry shake of the fist toward George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the Wall Street whiz-bang’s, Blimp Rushbomb, Sean “The Sham” Hammity, and the rest of the trickle-down idiots and greed-crazed media morons who helped make such a hash of our economy and such a bad joke of our culture. Up yours, you worthless assholes. Bravo, Dan Talbot. And please Mr. T., buy some more films, and start playing it again. (In Russian, with English subtitles.)

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CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: CLASSICS

The Last Metro (Two discs) (Four Stars)
France; Francois Truffaut, 1980 (Criterion Collection)

Francois Truffaut’s highly popular and seductively expert star vehicle for Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu is set during the war years in Nazi-occupied France. As always, Truffaut finds something to be nostalgic about, something to celebrate, something to deplore — and something to remind him of the movies of his youth. Deneuve, maddeningly beautiful as ever, plays Marion Steiner, the star and boss of a beleaguered theater troupe beset by political intrigues, war turmoil, and fascist critics (Jean-Louis Richard, who resembles a few editors I’ve had).

Depardieu is her amorously persistent, magnetic costar; and Heinz Bennett plays Lucas Steiner, her husband and renowned playwright/director, whom she‘s trying to smuggle out of the country. A big hit and major French prize-winner, this is Truffaut’s theatrical variant on his love poem to the cinema Day for Night — and it’s also hisCasablanca. (Play it again, Catherine and Gerard.) It reveals again what a warm-hearted guy — and what a great filmmaker — he was. (In French with English subtitles.)

Extras: Commentaries by Depardieu, Annette Insdorf, Serge Toubiana and others; deleted scene; TV and video interviews with Truffaut, Deneuve, Depardieu and Jean Poiret; Nestor Almendros; the 1958 short Une Histoire d’Eau, by Truffaut and his youthful movie-loving buddy Jean-Luc Godard; trailer; a booklet with an excellent essay by Armond White.

Fallen Angels (Four Stars)
Hong Kong; Wong Kar-Wai, 1995 (Kino)

My favorite Wong Kar-Wai: an absolutely incredible movie that’s kind of a continuation of Chungking Express. (It was originally intended as the third interlocking episode of that film.) In Angels, Wong gives us not only a wildly romantic neo-noir about an alienated hit man (Leon Lai Ming) and his sexy, dangerous manager (Michele Reis), but a second rapturous pop romance involving a poetic mute (Takeshi Kaneshiro) on a motorcycle. Done at the feverish height of Wong’s sardonic, unashamedly emotional, go- for-broke style, I loved this to pieces. And I also loved the credits song, which I’d never heard before but which I played seven times in a row afterwards (like I once did “I Feel Fine“ and “Run Around Sue”): Flying Pickets’ bubbly, Bach-and-Phil Spector a cappella cover of Clarke Vincent’s sweetly infectious “Only You.” Wow! I don’t care if it was Margaret Thatcher’s favorite record; it‘s still a honey of a pop love ballad. So is Fallen Angels. (In Cantonese, with English subtitles.)

Extras: Featurettes; interview with cinematographer Chris Doyle; trailers; stills gallery.

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CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: Blu-ray

No Country for Old Men (Four Stars) (A)
U.S.; Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007 (Miramax/ Paramount Vantage)

The Coen Brothers have made a great film of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel about a busted drug deal in the West Texas desert and the relentless three-cornered chase that follows. This brutal, spare, acidly compassionate crime thriller — a primo noir in the style of Hemingway, Mailer (The Executioner‘s Song), Jim Thompson and James M. Cain — receives about as faithful and powerful a film translation as any first class American book could get these days, courtesy of those modern masters of neo-noir, Joel and Ethan Coen.

The Coens make this material their own, while preserving much of McCarthy’s dark, bleak, hard-case vision. They deserved their 2007 Oscars; the cast is dead on the mark all the way. Josh Brolin is a perfect Llewellyn Moss, a seemingly lucky welder who stumbles on the death and wreckage left behind a big drug deal, finds the heroin cache and two million in a suitcase, steals the loot, gets spotted and suddenly has on his trail, the baddest of all hired-killer, clean-up man bad-asses, Anton Chigurh (played by the great Javier Bardem, the king of bad hair and no mercy).

” Sugar“ is a sullen, murderously efficient hit man whose only flicker of compassion comes when he occasionally flips a quarter to see if he’ll kill or cut free a fresh potential victim. Bringing up the good-guy tail-end of the pursuit is that magnificent Texan Tommy Lee Jones — born and raised in the San Saba oil field region where the movie is set — who plays a kindly, solid-pro sheriff named Bell, a war vet and model citizen who just can’t understand how the world got so kill-crazy and mean, and who speaks his disillusionment in brooding melancholy monologues. (Less of them in the movie than the book, which is one reason to buy it.)

The rest of the cast, which includes Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald (great on accents) as Moss’ sweet, tough Texan wife and Woody Harrelson, a wily marvel as a gabby colleague of Chigurh’s, and Barry Corbin as the old man with the cats, are all so damned good they tear your heart and freeze your blood at will. This is a tough, ruthlessly sad movie that unwinds its Peckinpah-style story slowly and calmly, knocking on Heaven’s door with barely a note of background music. (This has to have been the easiest assignment composer Carter Burwell will ever have.) It’s also the kind of movie The Getaway should have been, both times — as well as the peak of Coen, one of the all-time best film noirs or neo-noirs, and, by God, one hell of a show.

Extras: Documentaries.

Winged Migration (Four Stars)
France/Germany/Italy/Spain/Switzerland; Jacques Perrin & Jacques Cluzaud, 2001 (Sony)

One of the most beautiful and stunningly photographed of all wild life documentaries, this fascinating film follows flocks on the wing of migrating birds all over the world, not from the earth below, where we always see them, but at eye-level, wing-level, flying alongside them as they traverse countries and continents through the air on their regular seasonal migratory flights. Special cameras and devices were devised for the flight shoots; what they record is so amazing that, even without a conventional narrative thread, the experience of the film becomes hypnotic, exalting. Co-directed by Jacques Perrin, the producer of Microcosmos, and the young actor who played the intrepid reporter in Z; if you haven’t seen his Winged Migration, your life is poorer and more earthbound.

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OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVDS.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Two stars)
U.S.; Scott Derrickson

Remaking a movie classic can be like destroying a planet. Sometimes you should think twice about it. The new movie version of The Day the Earth Stood Still — based on director Robert Wise‘s 1951 science fiction classic about an extraterrestrial named Klaatu, who is sent to warn the Earth’s inhabitants of impending nuclear disaster, and who hangs out with an earthling family to see if we’re worth saving — is a good-hearted but pretty shallow special effects extravaganza. It‘s a movie that keeps throwing in scraps of the old movie to try to make up for the fact that its new ideas are mostly lousy.

“Klaatu barada nikto” is the 1951 movie’s famous alien catchphrase, the activating message for Gort the robot. But this show couldn’t klaatu a barada if its nikto depended on it. Part sci-fi chase thriller, part disaster epic, part family trauma drama, and part global warming cautionary tale, the new Earth sends Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, Jennifer Connelly as astrophysicist Helen Benson and Jaden Smith as her ill-behaved tyke Jacob (counterparts to the roles played in the original by Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal and Billy Gray) on a race with catastrophe, in which we’re often just as worried about Jacob’s incredibly bad manners as whether the world will end.

The ‘51 original (see below) was a great messagey sci-fi genre movie, a sci-fi sermon against the nuclear arms race that still packs a punch — and that was just ‘50s-hokey enough in its visual effects (a flying saucer, a robot named Gort) to become a charming period piece. The new movie — directed by Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) and written by David Scarpa — may become a period piece. But its charm is mostly invisible, even though its effects summon up everything from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Good Earth.

Even its premise now seems faulty. Why will the planet be saved by unleashing hordes of rampaging metal insects who look as if they might, locust-like, devour everything? And can the good example of the Bensons really change Klaatu’s mind when such a bad example is being set by the president, his know-it-all Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates) and the military?

One thing the new Earth does have is a lead actor who really looks and acts like a man from outer space. The original had Rennie, an Englishman educated at Cambridge, whose advantage was that he seemed more sophisticated and civilized than that film‘s earthlings, especially gee-whiz little Billy Gray (Father Knows Best). Reeves, with his opaque dark eyes, chiseled features and strange humorless delivery (something like an anchorman from the Twilight Zone) often sounds as if he came from several worlds away. Connelly does look as if she could redeem humanity. But poor Kathy Bates, always great in the right roles, has been saddled with one of the worst parts of her career: Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson, who looks and acts like a cross between Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Nurse Ratched. Holy klaatu barada nikto! (The three disc special edition also contains Robert Wise’s four star 1951 original version.)

Bedtime Stories (Two Stars)
U.S.; Adam Shankman

Adam Sandler plays Skeeter Bronson, a put-upon but infallibly good-natured hotel handyman whose dad (Jonathan Pryce) once ran the place and who keeps telling bedtime stories to his niece and nephew, stories derived from movies, which later (sort of) come true, or suggest something true. Richard Griffiths blurps around as the new owner, who has grandiose plans. The usually reliable Guy Pearce makes an ass of himself trying to be a mean boyfriend/rival. Courteney Cox is Skeeter‘s sister and Keri Russell (Waitress) is his socially progressive heartthrob. Anyway, this is a truly bad idea for a movie and the fancy-schmancy production doesn’t help it a bit.

Yes Man (Two Stars)
U.S.; Peyton Reed

Jim Carrey is the best physical comedian around right now. Has been for a while. So why did he say “Yes” to for a high concept would-be verbal comedy like this — especially since it’s a malfunctioning concept that doesn’t work right? Was he conned?

Say “Yes.“ Carrey plays Carl Allen, a lonely withdrawn guy avoiding life and living in video stores, whose pattern changes when a buddy drags him to guru Terrence Bundley’s psycho-babble cult, a self-help con in which you start saying “Yes” to everything. Neat idea. Unfortunately, Carrey is a banker, a loan guy, which means that he‘s saying “yes” to propositions that would have terrified Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and that definitely give this movie a weird topicality now. So, is this movie less funny than the current administration?

I can think of lots of “No”-proof questions which would have been great setups for Carrey gags and humor. “Why don’t you insult everybody in the room, and set fire to the drapes?” “Why don’t you challenge Sacha Baron Cohen to a nude wrestling match?“ “Why don’t you strike a match on a cake of soap?“ “Why don’t you stick your head up your ass?“ But nobody asked. And the movie lost me when Carrey’s Carl rode with Zooey Deschanel’s Allison on her bike and she asks him if she’s going too fast — and they didn’t make a routine out of it. (Nor did he say “Yes.”) An ideal setup for an Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First?“ cross-talk routine, but the writers pass it up. I guess they said “Yes” to too many guys. So did Carrey. But are most of you going to watch this movie anyway? Say…

I.O.U.S.A. (Three stars)
U.S.; Patrick Creadon (PBS Direct)

I.O.U.S.A. is another intellectual/historical disaster movie in the”Inconvenient Truth” mold — one that substitutes charts and talking heads for natural or man-made catastrophes. But it’s no less a portrayal of a cataclysm: the descent of the United States into mind-boggling national debt and looming financial meltdown. (It’s also become five times as topical since its release last year.)

Among the witnesses here: Comptroller General David Walker, Concord Coalition exec Bob Bixby, moneyman Warren Buffet, ex-treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and others. The revelation: another fine mess that Bush and his G. O. P. macho-creepo cronies have gotten us into — partly though their obsession with tax cuts and trickle-down, partly through Iraq spending sprees and partly through sheer economic imbecility. They’re not the only culprits, however. And it seems obvious here that, as with climate change, something has to be done about it soon. Not as entertaining a film as director Creadon‘s crossword doc Wordplay, but a crucial one. We should have paid attention to these ideas and warning signs years ago.

Tales of Ordinary Madness (Three Stars)
U.S./Italy; Marco Ferreri, 1981 (Koch Lorber)

Ben Gazzara, Ornella Muti and Susan Tyrell in one of the first (and best) films adapted from the pungent lowlife works of American novelist Charles Bukowski. Gazzara, as the Bukowski surrogate, has one of his most pungent and memorable roles outside of Cassavetes. In English.

La Grande Bouffe (Four Stars)
Italy/France; Marco Ferreri, 1973 (Koch Lorber)

One of the holy terrors of ‘60s and ‘70s Italian cinema, the ferocious satirist and unbuttoned comic cineaste Marco Ferreri, hit his peak with this outrageous classic: a robust dark comedy in which four hedonistic pals played by four great actors — Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi — carry bourgeois excess to a deadly extreme. They eat, swill and fornicate themselves to death. Salo, with laughs. In French, with English subtitles.

A Song is Born (Three Stars)
U.S.; Howard Hawks, 1948 (MGM)

A remake of Howard Hawks’s and Brackett and Wilder’s Ball of Fire — the one about the shy professor-encyclopedists and their run-in with gangsters and a great moll — starring frantic patter-meister Danny Kaye in Gary Cooper‘s old part, and noir mainstays Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran (a year before White Heat), subbing for Barbara Stanwyck and Dana Andrews. Usually regarded as one of Howard Hawks’ worst movies, but I like it. (I also likeRed Line 7000.) The professors are now musicologists, an excuse for lots of great ’40s pop music and musicians — including Benny Goodman (who also has a major supporting prof part), Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and Buck and Bubbles.

– Michael Wilmington
April 7, 2009

‘Tis the Oscar Season

Friday, December 26th, 2008

December, once cherished for its singular place on the religious calendar, now serves primarily as a month-long orgy of conspicuous consumption and glorification of dubious cultural achievements. A tiding of comfort and joy has been drowned out by gifting concerns, and, in in the western precincts of Los Angeles, at least, anxiety over box-office tallies, awards nominations and top-10 lists.

Anyone at a loss for something at a loss for something to between Christmas and New Year’s Day can drop by the local megaplex to catch Opening Weekend presentations of The Spirit, Bedtime Stories, Valkyrie, Marley & Me, Last Chance Harvey, Waltz With Bashir and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Holdovers include Nothing But the Truth, The Wrestler, Yes Man, The Wrestler, Seven Pounds and The Tale of Despereaux.Those who live somewhere other than New York, Los Angeles and other “select” locations will have to content themselves with such leftovers as Australia, Four Christmases, Bolt, Quantum of Solace and Twilight.

Now, some folks would consider this to be an embarrassment of riches … others, holiday gridlock.

Hollywood doesn’t mind offending movie lovers in flyover markets. No matter how often the theory has been disproven, the guiding principle remains, “If we show it they will come.”

With rare exceptions, though, pictures that flop in limited release in December rarely catch a second breath in January. By the time the high-profile pictures go wide, there’s hardly any money left for advertising and marketing; the critics’ favorable opinions, if any, have grown stale; and the talk-show circuit has been repopulated by the teenage stars of movies destined for release over the Martin Luther King weekend.

Ten years removed from the slow-to-develop Titanic juggernaut, word-of-mouth tends to favor movies more humbly scaled. This year, The Wrestler and Slumdog Millionaire likely will benefit most from buzz and megaplex fatigue. It takes a lot of persuasion to convince Americans to sample arthouse fare, but, once the negative inertia is reversed, low-budget films stand to win friends and make big killings.

It’s no longer unusual to see big holiday turkeys – no matter how well they do on the critics’ lists – disappear completely from view after the Golden Globes and announcement of Academy Award finalists. The fewer the nominations, the sooner an under-performer will show up in DVD and Blu-ray. In some cases, that window has been reduced from 4-6 months, to 8-10 weeks.

For their part, exhibitors have long clamored for a more balanced distribution schedule, one that would accommodate grown-ups, teens and kiddies simultaneously. Typically, they’ve been ignored. Instead, by moving up Academy Awards a month, the studios gave the theater owners less time to exploit nominated pictures and make room for the populist fare that arrives in January and February. Gridlock isn’t limited to Christmas in limited markets. Then, too, by the time the Oscar and Independent Spirit awards unspool, television viewers will already have had their fill of awards shows, a trend reflected in plummeting ratings for all such telecasts.

Still, hope springs eternal, and the first 90 minutes of the Oscar-cast garner huge numbers. The audience worldwide is nowhere close to the one billion viewers AMPAS once would have us believe, but, nonetheless, impressive.

That’s because, as much as Americans say their sympathies lie with the little guy, they enjoy the pomp and circumstance associated with pageants and championships. If nothing else, we relish the opportunity to take potshots at the hosts, nominees, their spouses, production numbers and acceptance speeches. Winners are envied more than respected, unless, of course, they speak in foreign tongues and subtitles … in which case, they’re despised.

Only a few sporting events each year engender such passion, but not without reservations. Everything shuts down for the Super Bowl, but that’s because everyone has money on it; ditto the NCAA Final Four, thanks to office pools; the Stanley Cup belongs to Canada, no matter who wins it; the NBA playoffs are fun to watch, but, absent Michael Jordan, eminently forgettable; and the World Series hasn’t been the same since free-agency. No one likes the BCS’ method of determining a national college-football championship, if only because it’s cumbersome and inconclusive.

Likewise, only three entertainment award shows resonate beyond the night of the ceremony itself — the Grammys, Emmys and Oscars – and, increasingly, for reasons related less to rewarding achievement than to such peripherals as fashion, star sightings, the opening monologues and the possibility someone will mess up and say something unscripted. The Golden Globes only really matter to Hollywood publicists, 80-plus HFPA freeloaders, NBC and the Beverly Hilton’s catering staff. None of the awards shows engineered by Dick Clark Productions can be trusted; the People’s Choice Awards, which benefit from by coming before the Globes, feel even less genuine; and the MTV Movie Awards are pure theater.

It’s also possible Americans are suffering from reality fatigue, and even the major awards shows suffer by comparison to American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, The Amazing Race and Survivor, which combine drama, suspense and other cheap thrills every night of the week. The contestants in these and such niche competitions as Iron Chef and America‘s Top Modelassume the roles of hero and villain, underdog and prohibitive favorite, amateur and professional, upstart and veteran. (Cloris Leachman … dance? Top that, AMPAS.) As scripted, staged, unrealistic and manipulative as the reality shows have become, the participants resemble real human beings in ways today’s generation of superstars don’t.

In the run-up to the Academy Award nominations, those of us who comment on popular culture for a living, however meager, have begun pondering various aspects of the impending awards season. It’s what comes after the filing of top-10 lists. Newspaper reporters have begun profiling awards consultants – the cinematic counterparts to Rahm Emanuel andDavid Axelrod – profiling likely nominees and making suggestions as to how they would fix the ceremony. By “fix,” they really mean, “make the show more entertaining for me and my friends.”

Before that could happen, though, AMPAS executives first would have to acknowledge there was problem to fix and ABC would have to demand the reforms necessary to plug the ratings drain, neither of which are likely to happen. Typically, their concerns are manifest in the annual quandary over who should host the show. By choosing the handsome Aussie leading man, Hugh Jackman, it’s clear that TV-based celebrities no longer can be expected to reverse the negative tides. It also helps that he’s popular with the theater community and readers of People magazine.

At ABC, though, I suspect executives are lighting candles at this very moment, summoning divine intervention. Their best-case scenario would find both Wall-E and The Dark Knightamong the Best Picture finalists. It could happen. Both pictures were terrific entertainments, box-office smashes and critically acclaimed. The only thing not in their favor is tradition.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say Wall-E and The Dark Knight are nominated for Best Picture, and Heath Ledger is among the Best Actor nominees. What, then, if ratings still don’t spike upward. Well, first of all, Jackman would likely take the fall for such a disaster, even if, under similar circumstances, Billy Crystal would have trouble drawing eyes. The call also will go out to eliminate such allegedly show-stopping categories as short-form documentary and short-form animation. The enthusiastic response to the short-subject finalists at public screenings – and via iPod — has demonstrated, however, that they also deserve a seat at the grown-ups’ table.

The more viable solution might come from the world of sports, which has a better hold on crowd control.

If one were inclined to compare the annual Academy Awards ceremony to a single sporting event, it wouldn’t be the Super Bowl or World Cup, as the folks at 8949 Wilshire Boulevard would have it. The last time the Oscar-cast bore even a passing resemblance to those monumental championships was the year Titanic captured the hearts and minds of audiences, critics and academy voters.

Such a consensus of opinion is rare these days, on or off the fields of play. When it comes to movies, though, it’s a near impossibility, especially when comedies, musicals, documentaries and animated features aren’t welcome at the big dance. If the voting wasn’t so slanted toward drama and period biopics, the people who actually pay for their tickets – something no one in the academy or media does – would develop a rooting interest in the ceremony. If this disconnect doesn’t bother Academy officials, it’s likely a sports-driven operation like ABC/ESPN/Disney does.

America isn’t alone in loving winners: in sports, business, game shows and politics (although not so much in politics). The NCAA has so blundered the choosing of a national collegiate football championship, it’s rendered all but one of the traditional bowls meaningless and the BCS showdown anticlimactic. The Oscars have reached a similar crossroads.

If the Academy Awards pageant resembles any highly prestigious competition, it would be the Masters Golf Tournament.

Unlike most other tournaments the Masters limits participants to the elite of the game, and only those lucky few civilians on a “patron list” are allowed on the hallowed grounds of Augusta National to watch. (The list has only been opened to new applicants twice in the last 30 years). The hoi-polloi is invited to apply for practice-round tickets, but the procedure is complicated and weighted against anyone not privy to the magic passwords. Like ABC, the CBS network serves mostly as a shill for the good ol’ boys in charge of the tournament, and its commentators are discouraged from asking tough questions about club policies or cracking wise about course conditions.

Likewise, on the Industry’s biggest night of the year, tickets are limited to nominees, past winners and Hollywood royalty. Fans fortunate enough to gain access to the bleachers are screened as if the Red Carpet led not to the Kodak Theater, but to Baghdad’s Green Zone. Even the reporters, who never get closer to the TV cameras than the press ghetto, are required to wear tuxedos and gowns. Commentators who work the red carpet risk permanent expulsion if they ask questions any tougher than, “How does it feel?” and “Who made your gown?”

The difference between the two events is that the talent and grit of a Masters champion will never be open to question. Only a few Best Picture winners have been held in such high regard.

Otherwise, the people in charge of both contests consider themselves to be above the fray. They control everything from the dress code to the number of commercials (the Masters) and type of advertisers (the academy) allowed in their broadcasts. Learning what individual competitors earned after 72 holes practically requires a court order, while potential Oscar candidates are encouraged to memorize the One Great Lie, “It would be an honor just to be nominated.” Winners and their heirs are forbidden from selling the statuettes.

Unlike promoters of the Super Bowl and World Cup, however, AMPAS executives can’t take audience loyalty for granted. (If the point-spread and office pool hadn’t been invented, the Super Bowl would be a hit-and-miss affair, as well.)

Just as ABC benefited hugely from the Titanic juggernaut in 1997, CBS simultaneously found its savior in Tiger Woods. In the 10 years that Tiger’s prowled Augusta, weekend broadcasts have annually benefitted to the tune of roughly 2.2 ratings points, or more than 2 million households. In 1997 and 2001, the numbers spiked 6 ratings points. It can be argued that Tiger’s acceptance by the predominantly white, wealthy and Republican golf community paved the way for Barak Obama, who also was a product of mixed-race parentage.

Tiger couldn’t have arrived at a better time for sponsors and tournament organizers around the world. Such international stars as Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Seve Ballesteros, Craig Stadler, Bernard Langer, Ben Crenshaw and Nick Faldo were losing ground to a mostly anonymous collection of technically sound, but virtually colorless frat boys. Although the current generation of actors can hardly be described as colorless, or lacking in talent, only a very few carry themselves with the same gravitas as yesterday’s matinee idols. If they aren’t overexposed, like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, they’re hiding away in places like Montana and Paris.

The more money the studios pour into publicity campaigns for movie openings and awards recognition, it seems, the less certain they’ve become of box-office success and nominations for prestigious prizes. This also coincides with declines in TV ratings and the growing media obsession with the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and anything to do with celebrity. One can argue that Miramax raised the stakes, by, in effect, buying nominations for low-profile, if highly deserving indie and foreign titles. It’s also possible that by opening the eyes of the voters and nominating committees, Miramax simply was reminding them of a time when the works of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Cacoyannis, Dassin, Teshigahara, Lelouch, Pontecorvo, Forman, Bertolucci, Cassavetes, Wertmuller and Truffaut were viewed in the same light as those by Ford, Minnelli, Cukor, Huston, Reed, Kazan, DeMille, Wyler, Stevens and Mankiewicz.

Today, the theory goes, the more times a title or name is mentioned in print or on a website, the more likely it is that voters will actually watch the screeners sent to them … or go with what they’ve been led to believe is the flow, sight unseen. No news or gossip item is too trivial for analysis by entertainment writers in MSM and trades, bloggers and their blogettes.

God bless, Meryl Streep, for admitting, on The View, “I hate the whole campaigning thing now for awards. I find it just unseemly. These campaigns are launched, like a political campaign. You run for this award. It should be that you’re honored with an award, not that your campaign was that much better or well-financed.”

Streep, no novice in the awards game, said this while plugging Doubt, and, ostensibly, its chances for being nominated. And, it came on a show that wouldn’t exist if celebrities and movie stars weren’t contractually obligated to plug their titles.

When pundits ask, “Can the Oscars be saved?,” they’re really focusing on are ratings, common wisdom and their own impatience with the academy.

As a marketing tool, the brand is in no danger of losing any luster, no matter how boring is the show. Because the public’s awareness of the logo is right up there with Mickey Mouse, Playboy and Nike, AMPAS protects it with the same fervor as the army guards the gold in Ft. Knox. A nomination can enhance the marketability of a DVD, even if it’s in a tech category, and the obituary of any winner will include “Oscar-winning …” before his or her name. Photos taken on the Red Carpet fill the pages of fashion and gossip magazines – at virtually no cost to the publications – for months, sometimes years to come.

Judged solely on the ceremony’s entertainment value to viewers, though, once the opening monologue and fashion parade are finished, the thrill is mostly gone … unless they have a dog in the fight. In the Glory Years of Hollywood, the co-hosts and presenters seemed larger than life and the Best Picture candidates either were epic in scale or wildly popular. Today, those duties are performed by actors most people over 40 would have a difficult time recognizing. The bigger the star, the more important the category and less likely the presenter has a movie in the pipeline.

With all due respect to gag-meister Bruce Vilanch, what spontaneity is left in the evening generally is reserved for the ritual walk down the Red Carpet, where the ladies risk having their boobs fall out of their gowns and the guys show up with their 19-year-old girlfriends. When the winners began thanking their agents and managers, before acknowledging co-stars, directors, spouses and God, all hope was lost.

So, what keeps us coming back for more? Mostly, the possibility that the opening monologue will contain something so outrageous it will be discussed at water coolers for weeks to come. Then, too, there are the rare moments, when something truly heart-jerking or weird is built into the show, or a winner goes completely off-script: Rob Lowe and Snow White’s production number, which will forever live in infamy (and the Internet); Sally Field‘s unforgettable “You really love me” acceptance speech; fake Indian Sacheen Littlefeather standing in for Marlon Brando; David Niven‘s ad-lib, after being upstaged by a streaker; Roberto Benigni‘s impromptu decision to take the overland route to the podium; Jack Palance‘s one-arm push-ups; host David Letterman‘s riff on Oprah and “Uma”; Three 6 Mafia performing, “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp”; Cher’s gowns and hair-dos; the outpouring of love for Charlie Chaplin, whose political views forced him into exile; and the arrival on stage of a wheelchair-bound Christopher Reeve.

These moments are rare enough now to be treated as anomalies by pundits, but they’re always the chance someone’s innocent faux pas or entrance will wind up in next year’s lists of 50 most-memorable (or embarrassing) moments in Oscar history. This year, for example, I can hardly wait for Jerry Lewis to pick up the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. If he walks to the podium on his ankles, sporting black-frame glasses, buck teeth and high-water pants, it could zoom right into the top-10.

Other than that, the Academy Awards aren’t all that different than the honors handed out at any trade show, convention or reunion. The audience is larger and the stakes are greater, but the quirks and likelihood of running late are pretty much the same.

One can certainly argue that the academy’s nominating procedures are out of date, that its long-tenured members are out of touch with audiences and minorities are under-represented. The same is true of the Masters. If viewers are bored or unhappy, they can vote with their remote controls, just have audiences have voted with their feet by not playing along with seasonal gridlock.

By moving the ceremony from Monday night to Sunday and extending the length of its own Red Carpet telecast by a half-hour — effectively denying niche cable networks timely access to the Beautiful People — the academy revealed a strategy designed to make the Academy Awards a daylong celebration, not unlike the Super Bowl. So far, so not so good. ABC’s pre-show is as fawning as it is inconsequential: every gown is sensational, all of the actors are mahvalous and the show-to-follow will be the best ever. And, yet, ratings haven’t improved.

Any radical change would require that the Best Picture category be expanded to include a few more finalists, or, as with the Globes, be completely restructured. By acknowledging that its members have unfairly weighted their votes toward drama and period biopics, it can return comedies and musicals to the status they enjoyed for the first 50-years of the show’s existence. Adding a Best Ensemble prize also would add something bright and peppy to the proceedings. If that’s too great a leap, allow the nominating committees to nominate fewer than five finalists, as is done in other categories, or, God forbid, more than five. Rating-wise, it’s win-win.

As it is, too many academy members relieve their indecisiveness by relegating excellent, if less grand indie fare to the province of the Indie Spirit crowd. If any movies suffer from an inability to mount an awards campaign, it’s movies the size of Ballast and Let the Right One In, their stars and directors.

In PGA events, “sponsor’s exemptions” cure a multitude of ills. It permits a tournament’s sponsor to give a golfer on its pro staff or their product spokesman a free pass, when they’re otherwise ineligible for entry. By extension, ABC could reserve its right to choose a suitable candidate from a short list formulated by a select committee of voters. (It might be difficult to avoid the conflict of interest implicit in ABC being owned by Disney.) A sixth slot would be added to each of the major categories, but the ringer wouldn’t be identified, as such.

Of course, there’s always the worst-case option, which would require succumbing to the commercial imperative. The Academy Awards could rip a page from the Grammy playbook, by stage the ceremony at the Staples Center or Dodgers Stadium. Tickets to the upper tiers could be sold to rabid fans, who would scream on cue. Judd Apatow could produce the show and populate the production numbers with members of his slacker ensemble. Jim Carrey might be persuaded to host, and, as he once threatened, fart the monologue out of his butt.

It wouldn’t be pretty, that’s for sure. But it might be fun for a while. It should be noted, however, that ratings for this year’s 2008 Grammy Awards followed the same downward trend as the Oscars. So, maybe that’s not the answer, either.

For professional movie critics, 2008 was a watershed year, albeit a calamitous one. Newspapers shed reviewers like pack animals in springtime, in some cases eliminating the position, entirely. No one outside the film community has raised much of a fuss, if only because the Internet is alive with the sound of chattering pundits.

It’s in December, though, when the continuing role played by critics is most obvious. After 11 months of being treated like punching bags by editors and publicists, who insist they’re out of touch with their readers, the reviewers’ top-10 lists are scavenged for anything positive that could be used in ads and awards campaigns.

Teenagers may not require guidance in their choice of summer popcorn movies, but such adult-themed movies as Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married and Frost/Nixon certainly need help getting the buzz going. Conversely, for movies like Wall-E and The Dark Knight to be considered for Best Picture consideration, a critic’s approval validates popular taste.

The elimination and consolidation of critics from influential publications would mark a significantly more tragic reality, if it weren’t for the fact that almost every one of them has found an Internet outlet for their opinions. At this juncture, studio publicists can’t help but pay attention to the blogosphere. It’s been a long time coming.


– Gary Dretzka

December 26, 2008

Wilmington on Movies: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button plus reviews of Valkyrie, Bedtime Stories, and The Spirit

Friday, December 26th, 2008

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; David Fincher

What a refreshingly “uncommercial” big-budget project! And what a surprisingly enjoyable movie. (more…)