Okay, the ceremony is over, the theatre formerly known as the Kodak is empty and, with the exception of The Weinstein Company who are more than likely adding about a thousand screens to The Artist’s theatre count while gleefully paying off some old debts, most have stopped caring . And honestly I can understand why, this years Oscars felt like a whole lot o’ nothin.

But…the evening wasn’t a total loss (and it certainly wasn’t the unmitigated disaster that was last year). I wouldn’t even call it bad by any stretch.  It just felt… off. Perhaps a lot of the blame for this goes to the whole Brett Ratner/Eddie Murphy fiasco but I was really hoping that out of that mess might come something really special. Instead all that we got was the most paint by numbers awards show in recent memory.

Let’s break it down.

THE CEREMONY

Okay, so why didn’t the ceremony work? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that there wasn’t a cohesive theme. I’ve said this a thousand times and I’ll say it again here, the best Academy Awards in recent memory was the 09 ceremony hosted by Hugh Jackman. Why? Well, partly because Hugh Jackman is an incredibly gifted performer but mostly because  it was a show with a controlling idea. That idea being “let’s take the audience through the process of movie making”. The entire ceremony incorporated this with both a strategically designed awards order (awards that have the most to do with pre production started early, those more related to post production came later) and with the host guiding us through it. Hugh took his job seriously, explaining all of the hurdles a film goes through to get made and using each award as an example. That night felt like it had a clear direction.

Now think fast, what was the theme of last Sunday’s ceremony? Anyone?

Well, there was about eighteen montages about how movies are magic. So was it about the magic of the movies? Maybe. Isn’t that what every Oscar ceremony is about though? What was the controlling idea? The experience of watching a movie? That movies are good for the soul? Just pick one! Please!!!

What made this worse was that even things that were kind of cool made no sense in the context of a night that lacked, well, context. Cirque Du Soleil  put on an amazing physical spectical that was supposed to recreate the experience of sitting in a theatre and watching a movie…I think. I suppose all of those people were floating around because they were carried away by the magic of the cinema but I never really felt the connection. Plus it had absolutely nothing to do with this years crop of films. For this we didn’t get to watch the Muppets singing Am I a muppet or a man.

Was there anything cool? Well, a couple of the presenters knocked it out of the park. Emma Stone and Ben Stiller’s routine (in which Emma was so amazed that she was presenting for the first time that she attempted to stretch out the banter) was probably my favourite. I also loved Chris Rock’s riff on why voice acting is so easy, a bit that proved A: Chris Rock is one of the funniest guys on the planet and B: given how harsh he is he will NEVER host the Oscars again. And speaking of hosting…

THE HOST 

Okay, first off, I did a quick internet search before writing this up and it looks like the reaction to Billy Crystal’s hosting gig has been less than enthusiastic. People have used words like “Safe” and “forgettable” and, while I understand to a certain extent I think people aren’t giving Billy enough credit. Was  the opening flat? Yes. As it turns out doing a song and dance number about nine nominees doesn’t leave as much room for gags.  But he kept the impossibly slow evening moving with some decent jokes (the audience wasn’t always receptive, but bits about the new name for the Kodak theatre or how difficult it is to hug a black person in Beverly Hills had me laughing) and a good energy. Was it among his best performances? Nope. Did it make me want him to come back next year? Probably not. Was it the worst part of the evening? Not by a long shot.

Okay, next element to look at…

THE AWARDS

And absolutely nothing interesting here either. Why? Because thanks to the eight thousand other awards shows that have gone on in the past three months we all kind of knew who all the winners were going to be. Were there a couple of surprises? Yup. Midnight In Paris took the original screenplay award (my favourite award of the night) and Meryl Streep upset in the best actress category (not one I agreed with but she’s Meryl, I’ll give her a pass). But there was never that sense of a build. I enjoyed The Artist but it’s not like the realization that it was going to win best picture (which became evident about half way through the night) made me want to root for it. We all knew it was going to win best picture so it didn’t really feel like a massive accomplishment for such a small film. It just  felt like the last award that Michel and crew had to pick up before they could go back to Paris and drink wine with breakfast. I wanted to root for it but I just didn’t care. I was tired and I wanted to go home.

Which brings me to the most important section of this post…

WHAT THEY CAN DO TO IMPROVE THE OSCARS

I know a lot of people are posting things like this but there’s a reason for it. Something’s wrong. This is three Oscars in a row now (including the Steve Martin Alec Baldwin yawnfest) that have felt like wastes of time. Remember when people said that Jon Stewart and Ellen Degeneres weren’t funny enough? Remember when they said that Chris Rock was too offensive? Those ceremonies seem like a golden age compared to what we’ve had to deal with in recent years. So what’s wrong and how do we fix it?

First: move the Ceremony. One of the reasons that the awards feel so tired is that it’s the last leg of a long run of awards shows. And every year it feels like another show gets added, just to dilute the majesty of winning an Oscar. There was a movement some time back to combat this  by moving  the Oscars back a month, from late February to late January. This idea was quickly dismissed.

bring it the fuck back.

You see, if the Oscars came before the other awards shows two things would happen. One, favourites wouldn’t be as established which would make the race for best picture that much more of a dog fight and two, other awards shows would die quick deaths as they would no longer serve a purpose. Think about it. Would you bother watching the SAG awards after the Oscars have already happened? Or the Golden Globes? There’s be no reason to tune in. I’m not saying that these ceremonies shouldn’t exist (Okay, I’m not saying that the SAG awards shouldn’t exist) I’m saying they don’t need to be televised. The Oscars is the one we should watch, all the other awards shows should be industry events and industry events alone. Moving the Oscars early could make that happen.

Second: Find a Host that can build a legacy like Billy did. Okay, this is a tough one. I say this because, while I’m not privy to a lot of inside Hollywood information I have heard that a lot more people turn down the hosting gig than you’d think. But it still feels like there’s a lot of untapped talent out there just waiting to get on stage. Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Conan O’brien, Steven Colbert, any one of them could not only host a good show but host a string of good shows that, like with Billy Crystal, got progressively better. Have they all been offered the job and said no due to pressure? I have no clue. All I know is someone cool better say yes soon or the Oscars are in serious trouble.

And finally….

I said that the lack of a theme is a big part of why the ceremony has lost its umph. There’s also a lot of people who feel that the Oscars are increasingly about films no one actually watches. So, taking both of these points in to account I think there is only one real solution…

The 85th Annual Academy Awards. A salute to Fantasy. 

Think about it. A theatre done up like some sort of Hobbit space ship.  A different montage for every fantasy sub genre ( Horror, Science fiction, Super Hero etc) and they give the lifetime achievement award to John Carpenter.

Yeah, I know they’ll never do it. I also know it would fucking rock.

Okay, that’s it for now. Tune in in the next couple days when I chip away at the massive back log of reviews I need to clear up which includes A Separation, This Means War, The Vow, Safe House, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Act of Valour and many more.

Cheers.

Sef. 

Hey all.

It’s been quite the interesting week for film. Not a lot of great stuff, yet, but as far as starts for the year go, it’s been nothing if not eclectic. Let’s get started shall we?

Contraband 

Mark Wahlberg plays a former smuggler who must do “one last job” in order to dig his troubled brother out of debt with some local gangsters. And, like all smugglers, Wahlberg is also apparently a Ninja with unparalleled driving skills and a complete knowledge of how to commit every crime in the history of mankind…ever.

Contraband is a very, very tired feeling action film.  It reminded me a great deal of Jason Statham’s last couple entries into the “I’m so badass I don’t need depth of character” genre with The Mechanic and The Killer Elite. All the parts are there, but none of them feel particularly important. There are some nice twists in the film and some decent performances (Ben Foster manages to coax some genuine feeling out of his incredibly predictable storyline) but instead of the good bits elevating the material, all the elements that don’t work drag the good parts down and make them feel wasted on this totally forgettable experience.

Haywire

This, on the other hand, is eighty seven thousand kinds of awesome.

Haywire is a first for two people involved. For director Steven Soderbergh it’s his first action film and for it’s lead, woman’s MMA pioneer Gena Carano, it’s her first acting gig…ever. And while Carano has a ways to go as an actress her action chops are a sight to behold, especially when mixed with Soderbergh’s ultra realistic directing style.

The story revolves around Mallory (Carano) a former soldier turned super spy working for a privately run company that contracts out to different governments. On her last job (a theme in action movies, I know) Mallory is betrayed and finds herself on the run from her former employers who have also put her at the top of the list of the America’s most wanted list, resulting in her having to avoid both elite killers and joe average police officers.

The plot is a fairly stock  ”she’s gone rogue. May god help us all” type deal. But the fight scenes in this film are top notch, the dialogue is surprisingly clever, and the decision to surround the rookie Carano with savvy acting vets (Michael Douglas, Antonio Bandaras, and Ewan McGregor to name a few) pays off a thousand times over. This is an action movie for film lovers, and one that true fans of old school martial arts/cloak and dagger movies should seek out as soon as possible.

Coriolanus 

Ralph Fiennes picks this Shakespeare classic for his film directorial debut and he succeeds, somewhat, but not nearly as much as I’d been hoping.

The story of Coriolanus is that of a military leader in Rome for whom the fighting is almost done. He’s reluctantly pushed into politics and, while at first it looks like he will have success, his rivals play rough and manage to get him exiled, leading him to join forces with a former enemy and take the city-state by force. Fiennes has made the decision to put Coriolanus in a modern-day setting, with Rome involved in foreign battles not unlike Afghanistan or Iraq. During the battle scenes, this choice works quite well. Unfortunately, when Coriolanus returns home everything starts to feel very staged. The scene where Coriolanus is exiled takes place on a talk show and, honestly, it just felt like the film was trying to be clever (“See? In the modern day it’s television that decides who’s ostracised and who’s not. Get it?”). The movie alternates between feeling honest and feeling staged quite a bit, leaving it’s audience with more than a little whiplash.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare then I’d say this ones worth it, if for no other reason than the volume of great actors involved. Otherwise don’t feel rushed to see this just okay adaptation of one of the Bards least produced masterpieces.

Underworld: Awakenings

So…this is my first Underworld movie and it is EXACTLY what I thought it would be.

That’s not a good thing.

Underworld: Awakening   takes place about a decade after the last Underworld movie and it revolves around its  hard done by protagonist, a cool and sexy Vampire named Selene (played by Kate Beckinsale) who is one of the most important soldiers in the vampire war against werewolves.  At the start of the film Selene is woken up after a decade long hibernation in a top secret science lab. The world she’s in is now virtually vampire and werewolf free, thanks to a large scale purge by humans, but that’s not a big worry for Selene who’s fighting skills are only matched by her ability to strike a pose in impossibly cool lighting. Once she’s escaped the evil humans it isn’t long before she discovers that, shock of shocks, a lot of Vampires have survived, as have a lot of Werewolves. Meaning that nothing has actually changed.

If this movie is an example of its predecessors then the Underworld series tends to use the first draft of a screenplay as it’s shooting script. I’m quite serious. Plot lines come and go like stream of consciousness writing as opposed to a thought out story structure. Maybe there was a deadline involved but, considering how much money was sunk into this thing that’s no excuse.  As far as the action sequences I.E. the Vampire on Werewolf fights, they’re pretty impressive, I guess, but I didn’t feel invested in them for a second. I know that the stakes are low for an Underworld movie in the same way they are for the Resident Evil franchise but at least with Resident Evil you get the feeling that the film-makers kind of know the whole thing is a guilty pleasure. With this, there doesn’t seem to be any pleasure involved at all.  Just a lot of people in leather overcoats engaging in fancy CGI fighting sequences in between never smiling.

Red Tails 

Oh…my…god.

This movie is so awful it HAS to be seen.

The last time I saw a movie this entertainingly bad it was the big screen version of Dungeons and Dragons starring Jeremy Irons and Thora Birch. I never thought I’d see a movie so gruesomely horribly awesome. Where literally every single thing that could go wrong did, and every misfire had some sort of sad…sad entertainment value. But with Red Tails it’s even better. With Red Tails there’s that added bonus. That tragic x-factor known as lucasfilm. That’s right, The Lucas is responsible for this one. That means that during every horrible, racially insensitive scene we get to think to ourselves “this is the guy behind the best science fiction trilogy in the history of film… and the worst.” We can poke out heads out of the doors of the theatre and scream, at the top of our lungs “hey everyone. A billionaire just made a really crappy movie for a lot of money and  I think he thinks it’s really good. Everyone come see!”

So…what’s the plot?

Well, it’s a true story about the Tuskegee airmen which was the first all black fighter pilot squadron in history. It’s rare to see such a sensitive subject handled with such a comical lack of care. I cannot begin to describe how bad the dialogue is, or the acting (and there are some really good actors in this sucker) or, well, everything. It’s just so horrible.

So…am I recomending it? Well, kind of. I’m recommending it to people of my generation. People who took years to get over The Phantom Menace and, eventually, managed to find humour in that colossal failure (thanks in no small part to satirists like Mr. Plinkett). Well, we can now officially see what that unique brand of failure would be like if it was brought to another genre. What would Attack of the Clones be like if it had taken place in WWII? Now we know. And please don’t take it too seriously, it’s only a story about some of the bravest souls in America’s history.

Man on a Ledge

Wow, it is so January right now it’s not even funny.

What does that mean? Well I’ll tell you. January is the graveyard for films that no one knew where to put. The kind of half assed action movies that barely make it into theatres (cough Contraband cough) well, enter Man on a Ledge.  

The premise is that a former police officer, now convict, escapes from prison while on a day pass to go to his father’s funeral. He goes to a Hotel and, after a last meal, goes out onto the window-ledge, presumably to commit suicide. Only WAIT;  he’s actually involved in some masterful robbery that only works if…um…if he’s out on a ledge…pretending…okay um…because as long as someone’s on a ledge no one will notice that across the street there’s a robbery…but the robbery is done by absolute experts…okay it isn’t…it’s actually a couple of his relatives…but still it all makes sense because…

Okay so it makes no sense. But the thing is, for every laughable moments. For every “are you fucking kidding me?” scene where every single character does exactly what they need to do to keep the plot going. There’s another scene that’s actually kind of entertaining. It doesn’t hurt that, though the script is totally implausible, it’s filled with characters that are surprisingly three dimensional. From Elizabeth Banks as a grizzled hostage negotiator to Ed Harris’s nasty assed real estate guy this film is loaded with people that feel like they were passing through this piece of fluff on their way to a better movie.

Am I recommending this? Well, I’d feel kind of dirty if I did that. But for the record let’s just say that Man on a Ledge is better than Contraband (wow, Contraband is casting a much longer shadow on this series of reviews than I was expecting)  and if you’re stuck in an airport and it’s playing on one of the screens in the bar, you could do worse.

And finally…

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 

This movie is one massive piece of manipulative horseshit and it shouldn’t be viewed by anyone. At all.

It’s also just been nominated for an Academy Award for best picture.

Seriously.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tells the story of a possibly autistic child who loses his father in the collapse of the twin towers. He then finds a random key in a vase in his father’s closet and decides that the key must mean something so he begins a search to figure out which lock it fits into. It’s a journey of self discovery, set against the backdrop of post 9/11 New York, and it is a prime example of handling delicate material horribly.

You need to understand, this film isn’t horrible in the way Red Tails is horrible. Red Tails is like a bad TV movie with a hundred million dollar budget. No, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is horrible because it’s obviously the work of good filmmakers who have chosen to be this manipulative. Who think they are doing something positive when they insert a shot of the Towers on fire as people are crying, or a shot of Tom Hanks (the father who dies) as one of the people who jumped out of the towers before they collapsed (yeah, you read that right). There’s nothing like watching an open wound of a subject handled horribly by someone who seems like they should so obviously know better, and that’s what you get with this film.

As for the Oscar Nom, well, I stand by my claim that having more than five nominees is a positive for the best picture race, especially when you consider that virtually every major critic does a top ten list and not a top five, but it’s shite like this that’s going to get the nominee list knocked back down again and completely negate the point of having more nominees to begin with. The point was to give a chance to the kinds of movies that get weaseled out of a nomination. Like big budget films (The Dark Knight) or independent features (this years We need to talk about Kevin which I haven’t seen yet but which was at the top of nearly every major critics list). But if the Academy uses those extra slots to nominate the kind of films that only seem like they should be nominated based on the people involved in them (Besides Hanks, you’ve got producer Scott Rudin who was behind No Country for Old Men and The Social Network, and Stephen Daldry, who directed Billy Elliot as well as the last worst nominee for best picture The Reader) then the experiment can officially be called a failure and we might as well go back to nominating a couple great films and three boring biopics no one saw. Nuff said.

Okay, now that that’s off my chest, it’s time to move on.  Next up should be my Oscar nominee round up (which, as you can tell by my reaction to Extremely loud and incredibly close, will be lots of fun) as well as a review of The Grey, which I’m going to say right now, despite the month, will more than likely be on my list of best films of 2012.

Cheers.

Sef.