Tuesday, November 29, 2005

A little less Spirit-ed

The Independent Spirit Award nominations are out today, the first key announcement of the film awards season. Not that reading this list will give you a good indication of the eventual Oscar nominees. The Spirit Awards are fun because their focus is more narrow than most award groups and their selections are often offbeat, occasionally recognizing films that have only played film festivals and have no distribution deals.

That said, this year's crop feels a little more conventional than usual. Compare this year's Best Feature nominees (Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night and Good Luck, The Squid and the Whale, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) to last year's (Baadasssss!, Kinsey, Maria Full of Grace, Primer, Sideways).

Choices like Baadasssss! and Primer were only-at-the-Spirits outside the box selections. The same can't be said of Capote, Good Night and Squid, which are all heavyweights on the art film circuit in terms of box office, critical and media attention. Brokeback has yet to open but it's already a significant critical success and a (deserved) Oscar frontrunner. Only Three Burials feels remotely like a maverick pick (the yet-to-be-released movie could still become a Big Deal, although that seems unlikely). The nominating committee didn't even have to go back very far to come up with this group: the "oldest" movie on the list is Capote which opened in September, Good Night and Squid debuted a week later and the two westerns bow next month. (However, if you're going by festivals, Squid is the oldest since it premiered at Sundance. It's the only Sundance movie nominated for best feature.)

The five movies nominated for best feature also dominated the overall list. Squid and the Whale earned the most noms (6) and its feature competitors all landed four. No other movie was nominated in more than three categories.

The spring and summer indie sensations were relegated to the "Best First Feature" category (like Crash and Me and You and Everyone We Know) or less (like Junebug's noms for supporting actress, yay for Amy!, and first screenplay, Mysterious Skin's nom for director, Broken Flowers' nom for supporting actor, Hustle & Flow's nom for actor).

Maybe it means the "bigger" indie movies released at the end of the year are simply better. Frankly I haven't seen enough of them yet to say (someday soon I will see Capote and Good Night and Good Luck, I truly will), but if the Spirit Awards really are getting more predictable, and/or more reflective of the Oscars and critics groups, they risk losing their unique charm.

Take a look at this category:

BEST MALE LEAD
Jeff Daniels, The Squid and the Whale
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Terrence Howard, Hustle & Flow
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck.

All great performances, no doubt, but last year the committee found room for Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman and Jeff Bridges in The Door in the Floor (not to mention Jamie Foxx for his festival-screened TV movie Redemption). This year's lower profile contenders, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Mysterious Skin and Bill Murray in Broken Flowers, weren't so lucky.

Then again...

BEST FEMALE LEAD
Felicity Huffman, Transamerica
Dina Korzun, Forty Shades of Blue
Laura Linney, The Squid and the Whale
S. Epatha Merkerson, Lackawanna Blues
Cyndi Williams, Room

This probably speaks to the larger issue of a lack of great, highly visible, roles for lead actresses but the category includes actresses from a feature nominee (Linney), a festival-screened TV movie (Merkerson), an ultra-low profile Sundance winner (Korzun), a film with no distribution deal (Williams) and a bona fide Oscar contender (Huffman). Sadly Huffman, as the Oscar contender, will probably win (even though her movie is awful it also earned nominations for first feature and first screenplay). I would've liked to have seen Miranda July in here for Me and You and Everyone We Know but it's a great mix anyway.

Next up in the frenzy is the National Board of Review's top ten list and winners on December 7, followed by LA and New York critics group announcements and the Golden Globe noms (on Dec. 13).

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Good Girls

I don't know how tonight's episode will be but it's worth noting that last week's episode of Gilmore Girls, written and directed by series mastermind Amy Sherman-Palladino, was the best of the season so far. Like several other of my TV favorites *cough*Lost&DesperateHousewives*cough*, Gilmore has been having a rather erratic season. But episodes like last week's prove the show is still far from overused jump-the-shark territory.

The great divide that opened up between Rory and Lorelai was always more interesting in theory than execution so it was a relief to finally see them reconcile, but the bonus was that this was an almost perfect episode start to finish. There were actually several scenes, most notably Luke and Lorelai's dinner table argument and Emily and Lorelai's jet-set discussion, that rank with the series' best. And the episode was even entirely free of loathsome Logan!

I have a few quibbles (I'm not sure what to make of the idea of Luke's daughter, but I immediately disliked the actress playing her, and Rory's sudden determination after an editor gives her a compliment only made her look even more foolish than she did by dropping out of Yale—is she really that influenced by what other people think?) but overall I thought it was one of the best hours of broadcast TV so far this season.

Given the state of the current season you could read that as faint praise, but in this case it isn't.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Potterheads

By this point you're either with Harry Potter or you're against him (dirty muggles!), so whether or not you see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (or even read the rest of this post) should be an easy call.

There's nothing in director Mike Newell's film version of the fourth Potter tale to convert new fans but nothing to turn off old ones either. It's a solid 2 1/2 hour action epic that hits all the major points of a long and complex book, includes a staggering amount of characters, brings a magical world to dazzling life with astonishing special effects and top notch craft contributions and will likely be near-incomprehensible for anyone not well schooled in the world of Hogwarts, Voldemort and Quidditch.

The movie doesn't match the artistic heights of Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but it has enough energy and imagination (and makes enough alterations to the source material) that it won't draw the ire of those upset with Chris Columbus' slavishly faithful first two films in the series.

The cast is as solid as ever with reliable supporting players like Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman in typically fine form and perfectly cast newcomers Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes adding to the fun. Unfortunately Miranda Richardson, another newbie, doesn't make much of an impact as ethics-challenged journalist Rita Skeeter, but her role has been drastically cut down from the novel and rendered nearly superfluous.

The kids are still the kids. After four movies they pretty much are the characters and they do what's required, though I think it will take other roles in other films to accurately judge their skills. In this movie they have the most fun with the story's enjoyable excursion into romance courtesy of a holiday dance that stirs up awkwardness, confusion, jealousy and everything else that goes with young love.

I was impressed with how much of the book's plot made it to the screen and can't find much fault in any of the significant changes. Even the long-winded ending survives (and packs a strong emotional punch). In one of the film's best ideas there's an increased role for a minor young character which allows the movie to completely jettison the book's house elves subplot without missing a narrative step.

The Potter movies may not be for everyone, but I can't think of any other Hollywood franchise that has remained this vibrant and interesting for four films (the continually evolving Bond series doesn't really count). Bring on number five!

Friday, November 18, 2005

The Man in Black (and a Man in Drag)

Walk the Line, which opens today, just might be the year's first bona fide contender for a Best Picture Oscar nomination. But that says more about the Academy's often antiquated selections than the quality of the film itself.

This film version of Johnny Cash's life, as directed by James Mangold (who peaked with Copland and has since given us Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold and Identity), so strongly echoes a certain Best Picture nominee from last season that it might as well be called "Ray 2: This Time It's Country!" It's all here: the drugs, the infidelity, the haunting childhood memories, the music that changed the world.

It's tempting to write the movie off as a broken record, but there are pleasures to be had anyway. Cash's music is strong (duh) but the surprise is that every actor in the film does their own singing. Joaquin Phoenix isn't Cash (duh) but he does a pretty good vocal impersonation (and his performance is so deeply felt that it's silly to nitpick about areas in which he's not just like Johnny). Actors playing minor roles of Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis do their part also. The music, produced by T-Bone Burnett, sounds simply fantastic; the movie is most alive whenever it's onstage.

But as great as the music is the movie has one more tremendous thing going for it: the performance of Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. This may be Cash's movie but it's his slow-burning relationship with Carter that drives the narrative and allows Witherspoon to steal the film away from its leading man. She brings so much heart, humor, charm and honesty to the role that she single-handedly makes the whole thing worth seeing. Witherspoon embodies the role so well that it becomes the dramatic equivalent to her brilliant comedic turn in Election (high praise indeed) and will quite possibly get her the Oscar she deserved back in 2000.

Opening in more limited release (and unlikely to ever get very far beyond the biggest markets) is Breakfast On Pluto, the latest film from Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan but probably better described as the movie where Cillian Murphy—most recently seen in villianous roles in Batman Begins and Red Eye—plays a transvestite, Patrick "Kitten" Braden, in 1960s Ireland.

If there's much reason to see the movie at all, which is silly and unsubstantial and episodic in a generally unfufilling way, it would be for Murphy's entirely committed performance. Slightly androgynous to begin with Murphy is ideally cast but it's the performance and not the character that resonates. Bad news for a movie that's basically a character study.

The film unfolds in a series of "chapters" that are loosely built around Kitten's search for his birth parents but there's not much to the story, which was adapted from a book by Patrick McCabe (just like Jordan's previous film, The Butcher Boy). The soundtrack, however, is packed with lively and smart song selections and there are fun supporting turns by several of Jordan's former leading men: Liam Neeson and Brendon Gleeson are the most enjoyable but Stephen Rea isn't bad either (Crying Game fans will be amused at his reaction when Murphy's character confesses his natural born gender).

Monday, November 14, 2005

Further Developments

I'll move on soon, I promise, but for now check out Tim Goodman's San Francisco Chronicle column on Fox treating Arrested Development like an ugly stepchild even though they still have Stacked, Reunion and War at Home on their schedule.

He explains the (modest) reasons to be optimistic that it's not over yet (even though it is, it just is).

Sunday, November 13, 2005

It was inevitable but...

still frustrating and disappointing and annoying and, yes, downright tragic.

But I'm dealing.

Thursday was an awful day in TV land: the morning after that hideous episode of Lost, the day Freddie was picked up for a full season and the day that Fox slammed the final nail into the coffin of Arrested Development. The show has been pulled from Fox's schedule for the rest of November, will return briefly in December and will be pulled again in January. At which point it will likely never return. And the number of episodes ordered for this season has been reduced from 22 to 13.

After three, oops, two and a half seasons, the funniest show on television is destined to become a part of TV history. Yes, some high quality shows have faded faster (even some on Fox: Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Profit, Undeclared, etc.), but no, none of them were better.

From a network perspective it had to be done: since moving to Mondays this season the show has delivered miserable ratings and its hour long airing last week was especially poor — more people watched Seventh Heaven (which, oddly, was cancelled on Thursday, but the announcement was only made to hype this season as its final one), a 9 p.m. airing of Girlfriends on UPN rated higher for the evening in viewers age 18-49, and, probably worst of all, lead-out Prison Break (one of Fox's only current "hits") saw its ratings drop.

But it hurts that this show is off of Fox's schedule while Stacked, Reunion, Killer Instinct and The War at Home remain. (At least for the moment... the only one of those shows likely to survive until January is The War at Home, already picked up for a full season, just like Freddie.)

It also hurts that this comes during a supposed renaissance in TV comedy. With the loss of Arrested the network comedy landscape is pretty barren. Since combining incessant voiceover with a parade of white trash cliches is NOT actually funny, the best half hour on network TV is now about Chris Rock's childhood. Which is cute but overly familiar. But I guess this is why the TV gods created cable and shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Weeds.

And as for Arrested Development, we'll always have DVD.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Don't Read if You Haven't Seen Lost

Hmm, who should we kill? The annoying fat guy? The annoying new mother? The annoying redneck asshole? The annoying girl who can't act? The annoying hobbit?

Hey guys, I have an idea! Let's kill off the character we've explored the least! The actress whose talent we've only hinted at! The one who has a romance that's actually working! The only one with a personal connection to the character we killed off last season, so we never have to actually deal with the emotional repercussions of that!

We'll finally give her her own episode, make it clear how sad and pathetic and tragic she is and then WE'LL KILL HER! We'll have our most promising new cast member pull the trigger! That way we can stir up some nonsense with one of our Emmy nominees, instead of exploring his character in a new, less obvious direction! SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN!

Oh and next week, we'll do an episode exploring in full what we just told the entire audience happened. That way they'll be less surprised when we show how it happened and we can delay dealing with the stupid thing we just did. And put off dealing with everything else a little bit longer.

I mean people will keep watching, no matter what we do.

(sigh)

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Battling boredom

In a generally disappointing year for movies the biggest disappointment for me so far was Sam Mendes' Jarhead. Unlike, say, Elizabethtown, which had bad festival buzz and a mediocre trailer as harbingers of an underwhelming final product, I saw Jarhead before the middling reviews and had only the well produced trailer, credentials of the cast and crew and Oscar-friendly release date to feed my expectations.

Sure Road to Perdition had its significant flaws but American Beauty is one of my all-time favorites, so I was eager to see what Mendes would deliver for his third film. And the cast is excellent: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and, before he was cut out of the final film, Sam Rockwell.

The good news is that Jarhead is hardly a crap film. It's well made, it's thoughtful, the performances are solid. There's nothing sloppy or stupid about it. No one involved has anything to be ashamed of (the one possible exception being a very embarrassing epilogue).

The bad news is that there's nothing very interesting, entertaining or enjoyable about it either.

It's more of an exercise than a movie, an existential riff on what it's like to be a soldier who undergoes dehumanizing basic training, gets shipped off to a desert in a very foreign land and is forced to wait and wait and wait for "something" to happen. The basic action of Jarhead goes something like this: you worry if your girlfriend back home is cheating, you question your sanity, you question the sanity of those around you, you wonder why you agreed to this in the first place and you wait some more. Jarhead revels in the tedium of the soldier's daily lives so much that it simply becomes tedious.

Possibly more shocking than how dull the movie is is its complete failure at getting inside these soldiers' heads. You might think by devoting so much screen time to hanging out, goofing off and getting into trouble we'd actually learn something about them. But every character remains at a distance from beginning to end.

I haven't read Anthony Swofford's memoir on which the film is based but I can't imagine that a first-person account of time spent as a sniper in desert storm would lack a personal touch that transforms the Marines from pure grunts into real people. I imagine by removing any such personal detail Mendes was aiming to turn one man's story into something more universal, but the end result is a lead character who is such a cipher that it's impossible to connect, or even care.

There's one preciously meta scene where the soldiers watch Apocalypse Now, which feeds their expectations - and possibly our own. While watching Jarhead I couldn't help but think of many other (better) war movies, not limited to Apocalypse Now: there are also scenes that recall Three Kings, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July, etc. Eventually I even found myself longing for the simple-minded approach of Black Hawk Down (at least in Black Hawk Down's character-deficient story things happened).

Anything to squash the boredom.