The Oscars: Thoughts, not Predictions

A few thoughts:

1. Nick Nolte?

2. There is still one Best Picture nominee I haven't seen, but the fact that the Academy produced 9 out of a possible 10 nominees in the first year when a minimum percentage of votes was required indicates there's no clear-cut choice. The winner will have a small percentage of votes and that means an upset is possible. Assuming The Artist and The Descendants are the favorites then my upset choices are Hugo and The Help.

3. I'm pleased to see Gary Oldman nominated for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but the race is between Clooney and Pitt. My bet is that the idea The Descendants is more "serious" and that Clooney is stretching will prove the difference, never mind that Moneyball is the better movie.

4. The indifferent reaction to The Iron Lady will spell trouble for Meryl Streep, and I think the obvious favorite at the moment is Viola Davis. I'd love to see Michelle Williams win but I don't know if she has been burned enough times to create a Kate Winslet-like idea that "this is her year." Rooney Mara's nomination also hurts Williams the most. Much respect to Glenn Close.

5. One of the races in which a "campaign" might make the difference is Best Supporting Actor; the Best Picture nomination of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close means the studio will throw money behind the movie. That helps Max Von Sydow against Christopher Plummer, who's on his own with Beginners. Both roles seem ideal for Oscar's attention; Plummer is wise, angry, and backward-looking while the novelty of Von Sydow's wordless performance will pull some votes. I can't see any of the the other nominees winning.

6. Jessica Chastain received an Oscar nomination for the wrong movie. I suppose Octavia Spencer is the favorite for Supporting Actress, but there's a movement for Melissa McCarthy that I'm thinking will may put her over the top. McCarthy will be the evening's "surprise".

7. Finally, the Tree of Life has an excellent chance in cinematography and a slight chance in directing. We can hope.

No Blue French Horns

I saw Josh Radnor's Happythankyoumoreplease just in time, since Radnor's new Liberal Arts (which co-stars Elizabeth Olsen of Martha Marcy May Marlene ) is getting strong reviews at the Sundance Film Festival. (Film School Rejects)

Radnor stars as perhaps an older, mid-thirties cousin of happythankyoumoreplease‘s Sam Wexler. His Jesse Fisher is consumed with books, and his affection for printed reading material perhaps eclipses his affection for anything (and anyone) else. That’s probably why Jesse is (both unoriginally and still quite believably) unsatisfied with his current life state. His job as a college admissions counselor means that Jesse comes equipped with a few conversational ticks that he might not even be fully aware of possessing (though Radnor the writer certainly is). He’s interested in people, but most of his questions seem rehearsed and leading, meant to disarm those he is asking while not revealing much about himself. And that’s certainly no way to go through life.

Sunday Music: Foo Fighters - "This Is A Call"

According to a new biography written with his cooperation, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters and Nirvana may be the happiest guy in rock. (NYT)

That happy kid still seems to be part of Grohl’s persona. When he gushes about the tour van being like “a traveling treehouse,” he sounds like Huck Finn setting out down the Mississippi on his raft. And when Grohl gets his first big check for his work with Nirvana, he buys himself a BB gun because he didn’t have one as a child. Nirvana’s overnight rise from obscurity to international stardom, and its violent end with the suicide of the ­singer-­guitarist Kurt Cobain in 1994, tested Grohl’s sanguine outlook during what he later called “a tornado of insanity.” Lost for a while after Cobain’s death, he distracted himself by making a 15-song tape, playing all the instruments and doing the vocals himself. When record companies heard the tape and started calling, Grohl recruited three other musicians and formed the Foo Fighters; last year their seventh studio album, “Wasting Light,” entered the Billboard chart at No. 1.

Dept. of Fired Critics

Former Village Voice critic J. Hoberman on whether movies matter as much as they did in the great old days of Sarris v. Kael, and on what a critic's job should be. (NYT)

J. HOBERMAN Jonas was no longer at The Voice when I started reviewing in late 1977, but he’d been important to me both as a reader and a filmgoer. I saw myself following his example, and also creating a beat. In addition to the avant-garde there were many things that the paper’s two established critics, Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen, were just not that interested in covering — documentaries, independent cinema, museum shows and most foreign films. To the degree I thought about my role, I saw myself as a journalist (reporting on movies people might not otherwise know about) and as someone contributing to something I’d call, after Jonas’s magazine, “film culture.” On succeeding Sarris as lead critic in 1988 I continued what I saw as a Voice tradition — emphasizing work I felt significant, regardless of its commercial clout or mass appeal.

Haywire

The DVD commentary for Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, is famously combative, with Soderbergh and writer Lem Dobbs going back and forth over Soderbergh's decision to strip almost every ounce of motivation and backstory from the tale of an ex-con (Terence Stamp) seeking vengeance for his daughter's death from an L.A. music mogul (Peter Fonda). I highly recommend the commentary (and the film) to those who don't know it; imagine what commentary tracks would be like if everyone involved were totally honest about the finished product they were viewing. Soderbergh and Dobbs are back together again on the new Haywire, the tale of an agent for hire named Mallory (MMA fighter Gina Carano) trying to discover who sold her out and why. Haywire plays like some kind of weird experiment, as if Soderbergh had tried to make a minimalist action film that an audience wouldn't have to invest in (or even pay full attention to) in order to enjoy.  I don't know what Lem Dobbs had in mind, but if the two reteam for a commentary here the results could be worth hearing. The movie is lean and underpopulated; after an old colleague (Channing Tatum, trying hard to play a world-weary mercenary) attempts to take Mallory down we flash back to a rescue job in Barcelona and Mallory's discovery that her boss and ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) wants her dead. The centerpiece of Haywire occurs in Ireland when Mallory and Paul (Michael Fassbender, whose talents don't exactly get a chance to air themselves), at Kenneth's behest, get close to a man MI6 wants targeted. This sequence is the one point in Haywire where Carano appears to be having fun (an inexperienced actor, she was probably afraid of lighness), and she and Fassbender would make a dandy pair of spies in a yet-to-be-written movie franchise. But there are layers within layers, and the fight between Mallory and Paul (heavily teased in Haywire ads) is Carano's best chance to show off her physicality. Carano is not an expressive actor yet, but there's a sense of danger in her movements and the feeling that she could physically take over any scene. The rest of Haywire is sauced with betrayals and reversals and includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Bill Paxton, all of whom must have signed on in part seeking a dash of credibility from attachment to Soderbergh's name. If Soderbergh were a new director Haywire might have enough anti-style to get noticed, but for a filmmaker ending what's at least Phase 2 of his career it's missing too much to be regarded as more than an entertaining trifle.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The way you feel about Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (based upon the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer) will likely have much to do with how you feel about its main character. Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) is a hyperarticulate nine-year-old with a fondness for maps, logic, and systems thanks to his father Thomas (Tom Hanks), a Manhattan jeweler who had ambitions to be a scientist. Thomas is glimpsed in flashbacks (much more so than in the novel to my recollection), but the bulk of Extremely Loud takes place after Thomas dies in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The chance discovery of a key in his father's closet sends Oskar on a journey across the city in search of a last message or unexpected connection with his Dad.


Before one criticizes Extremely Loud on the grounds that Oskar is too precious, a literary creation who never becomes fully human on screen, it's worth thinking about the fact that 9/11 aside New York is the only place that could have held this story. Where else could a 9-year old move unnoticed, crossing the five boroughs in an attempt to meet everyone in New York whose name matches the one Oskar finds on the envelope containing the key? If Oskar can travel the city, often by foot, on Saturdays then why couldn't he grow up smart, curious, and shy in the believably sized apartment he shares with his father and mother Linda (Sandra Bullock)? Yes, Oskar's collection of his father's things looks like a little like a Joseph Cornell box or something from a Wes Anderson film, but it also contains the answering machine Oskar has hidden from his mother in an effort to keep her from hearing his father's last desperate messages. Many things about Oskar may be exceptional, but Daldry and Thomas Horn find something deeper working in Oskar than just a layer of personal idiosyncrasy. But yet it's here that the movie runs aground on the source material’s density. The grieving Oskar’s journey through New York is a journey from the particular to the universal; the cross-section of New Yorkers that Oskar meets regale him with blessings, shared stories of grief, and insights into their own lives. The ever-curious curious Oskar is conducting a “reconnaissance expedition” without his father for the first time and bringing back stories of the way people live, but the two hours plus of Extremely Loud don’t allow time for these stories. We see the obsessive method of Oskar’s search, but too little of the result. A few characters break through; there’s Viola Davis as an unhappy Brooklynite and best of all Max Von Sydow as “The Renter”, a mute man renting a room from Oskar’s grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) who becomes an unlikely ally in Oskar’s search.. Von Sydow fills up his scenes in a way I’ve never quite seen before, with an economy of gesture and expression that works as a perfect foil for Horn’s verbal pyrotechnics. It’s a small, perfectly etched performance.


Thomas Horn is a former winner on the children’s edition of Jeopardy, and that’s almost too perfect a place for him to have been discovered. Horn carries the movie, projecting great intelligence and a need for connection. Daldry and writer Eric Roth use Oskar’s voice-over to carry the film, and though a few more scenes could have been allowed to breathe the narration explains just how far Oskar has to go both emotionally and physically. Finally Daldry’s movie isn’t Foer’s Extremely Loud, it strains a bit too hard for profundity for that. (Hanks' scenes are all on-the-nose, by design perhaps.) It is an honest try that works thanks to the performances of Horn, Von Sydow, and Bullock, whose best scenes come late and who suggests enormous reserves of love and anger in equal measure . Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a movie about a child’s mind, one that is just beginning to understand itself as the final credits roll.

Video store: Happythankyoumoreplease

Josh Radnor's Happythankyoumoreplease is the kind of low-budget film I thought they didn't make anymore, one where loosely connected friends bounce around New York and by the end a couple of lives are changed. Radnor's theme seems to be that it's too easy for us to overlook small moments of genuine happiness, and while the movie doesn't go anywhere terribly new the ride isn't too bad thanks to a couple of sharp performances. Sam (Radnor) is a writer on the verge of a real career in fiction whose chance encounter with a boy named Rasheen (Michael Algieri) causes him to reflect on the state of his life. What seems like an indie version of the Bagger Vance situation winds up being a sly parody of Hollywood cliche. Rasheen doesn't have a great sense of humor or magical powers; he's just there, and Sam's having to deal with him causes him to get out of his own head. While Sam is only a slightly less self-absorbed version of Radnor's How I Met Your Mother Character, Radnor gives him enough grit so that the movie's other precious touches (Sam falls for a woman named Mississippi, played by Kate Mara.) don't grate as much as they might otherwise. Malin Akerman must have been overjoyed to get the role of Annie, a woman with alopecia slowly opening up to love thanks to the attentions of a persistent colleague (Tony Hale). If you only know Akerman from Watchmen, be aware that she's quite capable of creating a fleshed-out, fully realized character. As Mary Catherine, a woman not sure how to deal with a pending move to Los Angeles, Zoe Kazan is the best thing in Happythankyoumoreplease. Mary Catherine's concerns are so immediate and Kazan's emotions to urgent that the rest of the movie might as well be something she's watching.


I'd like to see Josh Radnor open up his world in his next film, but he has a way with actors (Kazan and Akerman are as good as I've ever seen them.) and an ear for the concerns of the 30ish. Happythankyoumoreplease is a promising debut, and so much more than a TV star's vanity project.

Dark and Bloody Ground

Beth Henley is of course best known for Crimes of the Heart, though I'd love to hear about her work with David Byrne on the True Stories film. Henley's recent plays (including the new The Jacksonian) draw on her childhood and a violent family history. (NYT)

For her part Ms. Henley is grateful to her advocates (“Glenne should get a medal,” she said) and seems relieved at last to be getting a premiere production at a major resident theater in her adopted hometown. (She’s had three previous premieres at 99-seat theaters here.) She also seems visibly wary. The trouble she had with her last play, “Family Week,” may offer a clue as to why. The show’s 2010 production at MCC Theater in New York, overseen by film director Jonathan Demme, got terrible reviews, but that’s not what bothered Ms. Henley most about the experience. “That play is very, very difficult for me to bear,” she confessed. Partly inspired by the unsolved 1996 murder of her nephew, “Family Week” only served to churn up her own unresolved grief. Watching the play “really made me loopy,” she said. “It’s like, you exorcise your demons when you’re writing, but when the actors are good, your demons are reflected back to you in a sometimes crucifying way.”

Sunday Music: Matt Haimovitz & Christopher O'Riley - "Empty Room"

An Arcade Fire cover from a cellist (Haimovitz) and a pianist (O'Riley); their new CD is Shuffle Play Listen. Review here. (All Things Strings)

Haimovitz’s musical zeal, plus O’Riley’s amazing finesse, equals a powerhouse sound that vacillates wildly between whispery plaintiveness (Arcade Fire’s “In the Backseat”), emotive intensity (Herrmann “Carlotta’s Portrait”), and enviable improvisational prowess (John McLaughlin’s “A Lotus on Irish Streams”). The latter piece closes this unconventional recording, appropriately rounding out a wonderfully diverse musical experience performed by two incredibly complex artists.