MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > OT: Awards Contenders and Awards Thread ...

OT: Awards Contenders and Awards Thread (First Up - La La Land)

posted 7 years ago by swanstep
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Yikes, La La Land opened here in NZ on Boxing day, so I saw it at an evening session on its second day of release (with Tuesday being cheapie day here), yet the smallish auditorium was only about 10% full, i.e., about 20 people. I had the sense that there were only musical buffs and drama kids in attendance. In other words, Gosling and Stone (let alone director Chazelle after Whiplash) do *not* appear to be pulling in a general, hit-making, young-ish crowd.

As for the film itself. I liked it - it's the sort of thing I'm very much primed to like - but I wasn't really swept away by it. It has only one memorable melody in my view, the 'City of Stars' number sung by Gosling in one of the trailers. Gosling isn't much of a singer, and while that doesn't matter too much in context where the off-handness of the song and melody plays well, it does mean that the only thing you can really remember isn't any great singing.

The best piece of music, however, the film's only chance for a new standard is Emma Stone's big 'Audition (The Fools Who Dream)' number. It wowed me, but I can't for the life of me recall its melody now. So that highlight has problems too I think.

[Update: There's a podcast with the composers about 'Audition (The Fools Who Dream)' on the iTunes store that's pretty great. Search for the podcast Song Exploder, and it's the Dec 21, 2016 ep. with Justin Hurwitz. I think I've got the melody properly stored in memory now. Maybe it *is* going to be a new standard after all!]

The choreography is a complete waste of space. I don't know what Chazelle was thinking with that. He hired Mandy Moore who's principally known for designing dances for the TV reality show So You Think You Can Dance. Jesus, when you think of the brilliant modern dance choreographers out there he could have hired....

Another area of even more technicality that I had a problem with is the focus-pulling. The camera's very mobile throughout (something I'm generally in favor of), but important objects of our attention were constantly not quite in focus or slipping in and out of focus (and not in any artful way believe me). It looked like the focus puller was always late and then overshooting and having to pull back (the other possibility: they did all the moving camera stuff with an auto-focus setting, like shooting with an iPhone, and so did without a focus-puller. That's unforgivable on a big Hollywood production if so.) That's bad and it's going to cost LLL at awards time; old Hollywood hands will not vote for something with this level of technical flaw. [I also didn't like the lighting of the dancers in a couple of scenes - Cazelle seemed to go for mainly natural light and this meant that Dancers faces were often in shadow - a mistake in my view that could and should have been avoided with the appropriate artificial lights.]

Setting aside the tunes, the dancing, and the focus, however, La La Land was pretty good. Strong on story (arguably lifted from Umbrellas of Cherbourg but I'm OK with that) and structure, and Gosling and Stone are charming, have chemistry, etc..

So, I'm torn over this film. I like it because it's the sort of thing I like that's pretty rare these days, but it's not an especially good example of the sort of thing I like. I hate to say it but things like Enchanted and Frozen, maybe even Moulin Rouge and Chicago (all of which have many problems) are better than La La Land at least on first viewing.

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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

A great if slightly hyperbolic New York magazine article on Children of Men (2006):
http://tinyurl.com/johlt2n
It was such a huge film for me at the time I didn't realize that it actually lost tons of money! ($70 million world wide gross on $70 million production budget = ~70 million loss for the studio.)

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[–] Iron_Giant 7 years ago

Why is this in the Psycho section? Just wondering. Seems like the La La Land section would be the logical place for a La La Land review.

Please don't call someone a _____tard.

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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

Why is this in the Psycho section? Just wondering. Seems like the La La Land section would be the logical place for a La La Land review.
I did post a version of the note on The La La Land-board.

I posted it here too because it's quite traditional on this board both to have OT (Off Topic) threads generally and especially to have an OT thread this time each year about the main Oscar contenders and the Awards Season generally. (I've changed the heading of this thread to make its meaning clearer.)

Note that one of the many things that is fascinating about Psycho is that although it's one of the few genuinely revolutionary films to become a massive popular hit, it did not receive much Oscar love (a few noms, no wins; no Best Picture nom., no actor nom. for Perkins, no editing nom. for Tomasini, no writing nom. for Stefano, no score nom. for Herrmann). Hence there *is* always a semi-connection between Psycho and the Oscars each year. Psycho gives you all of us here an angle on both the artsy side of film and the commercial side of film and also on the 'How Hollywood likes to Think of Itself' side of film that the Oscars represents.

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[–] ecarle 7 years ago

I did post a version of the note on The La La Land-board.

I posted it here too because it's quite traditional on this board both to have OT (Off Topic) threads generally

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Yes.

One comment I would like to make about the "Psycho" board OT threads on movies is that if we take up current films, I think we are a bit "hidden" over here away from their main boards and the hundreds of posts -- often quite angry and combative -- that are the true heart of internet discourse.

We can slip in a few remarks in a different context over here. And many of us here are older than the usually imdb message commenters.

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and especially to have an OT thread this time each year about the main Oscar contenders and the Awards Season generally. (I've changed the heading of this thread to make its meaning clearer.)

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I noticed that you did that, swanstep, and I think its great to have this thread for another year.

That said, though I will read every post with great interest, I'm not sure I'll be able to personally join in too much. I'm not terribly into what seems to be out there for Oscar bait this year. Perhaps once a full list of nominees is announced and I have the "menu before me," I'll get in to it more. But not now.

I recall a few years ago working pretty hard to catch 'em -- Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Argo -- but honestly, this year's crop seems pretty esoteric. I just don't think I can get myself out to see much of this stuff. La La Land -- maybe -- it doesn't sound like a REAL musical. I mean, if Ryan Gosling can't really sing...

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I have some interest in seeing "Fences" and I'm intrigued to see Denzel as an Oscar frontrunner -- again. This because Denzel has certainly been willing to shall we say "sell himself out" as an aging action hero - in movies like "Two Guns," "The Equalizer" and "The Magnificent Seven." Good entertainments, all but...he was devaluing his Oscar brand(two so far he's won.)

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Note that one of the many things that is fascinating about Psycho is that although it's one of the few genuinely revolutionary films to become a massive popular hit, it did not receive much Oscar love (a few noms, no wins; no Best Picture nom., no actor nom. for Perkins, no editing nom. for Tomasini, no writing nom. for Stefano, no score nom. for Herrmann).

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Let's linger on the "badness" of three in particular: no nomination for Perkins iconic charaacter in movie history; no nomination for Herrmann's revolutionary makes-the-movie score, no nomination for editing in the movie with the damn shower scene!

Oh, and no nomination for Balsam as Best Supporting Actor.

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Hence there *is* always a semi-connection between Psycho and the Oscars each year. Psycho gives you all of us here an angle on both the artsy side of film and the commercial side of film and also on the 'How Hollywood likes to Think of Itself' side of film that the Oscars represents

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Yes, I've seen a few documentaries on Oscar where Psycho is held up as THE key movie that was snubbed overall in place of movies which -- even back in 1960 -- were "good for you" (Inherit the Wind, The Sundowners, Sons and Lovers, The Alamo) that haven't lasted nearly as well (Well, Inherit the Wind will always be a classic drama, I guess. But nobody went to see it at the movies in '60.)

The poignant Oscar tragedy(well, maybe that's too strong a word) for Psycho is that, had it come out 13 years later or more, it would have gotten more respect at least with nominations and probably wins. The Exorcist and Jaws got big nominations(Best Picture), the Jaws score won(for the reasons the Psycho score should have won.) And eventually movies like "Misery" and the Jackpot Thriller of "Silence of the Lambs" started WINNING Oscars.

Psycho just came out when there were too many "old fogie" voters.

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I was looking to put this somewhere, and I guess I'll put it here:

David Thomson has a new book out called "Television." I want to give it its own post, and he talks about Psycho in it(even as the book is about television; Psycho and The Godfather are the two movies Thomson can NEVER stop talking about, even as he doesn't like the second half of Psycho.)

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Anyway, Thomson reaches awards shows and uses as his centerpiece Ricky Gervais' devastating takedown remarks at the Golden Globes as a host. Thomson moves to his topics:

"For what (Gervais) had done in a matter of moments was to say that all awards shows were a sham and a shambles, dead meat waiting for vultures...in truth, the community that once bound together the Oscars and the people is forever shattered and beyond repair...The Academy Awards show is suffering a long , slow death. All Gervais had said was 'Look, heres a knife . Do it, put yourself out of our misery."

Thomson goes on: "Today, the well being of the Academy's money-raising night on television is threatened by the fact that seldom the winners are pictures enough people have seen."

Thomson is here coming to a place we've been before on this particular thread in previous years. I think we've found the rebuttals to that argument -- plenty of folks saw "The Revenant" last year, for instance. But for the most part, Thomson is correct(who saw the movies that won about Idi Amin, or Julianne Moore with Alzheimer's?) and, in declaring the Oscar broadcast as dying a slow death -- saying something I've been wondering about.

I figure the Oscar broadcast will go on practically forever. The ratings are always pretty high; people tune in to see the stars who ARE in movies people see; the musical numbers are fun. (Sometimes I think the Academy buried all the tributes to great stars and directors of years past because they show up the decrepit state of the art today.)

But there could come a time when the Oscar broadcast will go the way of the AFI Lifetime Acheivement Award...to a lesser cable network, buried with everything else.

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None of that is to discount that this is an admirable, interesting thread every year, and that I for one will read swanstep's comments with an eye towards steering myself to see at least some of these pictures.

"Good movies" need to be sought out and shared.

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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

Hell or High Water continues the great tradition of the South-Western (Charley Varrick, Blood Simple, No Country) and is as comfortable and rewatchable as anything else in 2016 that's for sure. I'd certainly give HoHW a (losing) Best Picture nom and maybe a supporting nom for one of the four main actors who are all excellent. Bridges probably doesn't need another nod, so I'd probably vote for Chris Pine who's an unrecognizable revelation as the brains of the bank-robber team that drives HoHW's story.

HoHW is a will/must-see for anyone on Psycho's board I'd say. A simple story well-told with good characters and dialogue and all the resonances in place that you get from working mindfully in the Southwest. I imagine that in years to come HoHW's going to play *very* well on cable.

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[–] ecarle 7 years ago

Hell or High Water continues the great tradition of the South-Western (Charley Varrick, Blood Simple, No Country) and is as comfortable and rewatchable as anything else in 2016 that's for sure.

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OK. I finally saw me a 2016 Oscar movie! Watched in on pay per view.

Liked it a lot. It's clearly "my type of movie" (crime action "with character") and the Charley Varrick/No Country/Blood Simple vibe is strong.

Funny: Charley Varrick was largely set in New Mexico, but filmed in Nevada(making it easy to budget and film when the story moves to Reno.) Hell or High Water is set in Texas...but was filmed in New Mexico.

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I'd certainly give HoHW a (losing) Best Picture nom and maybe a supporting nom for one of the four main actors who are all excellent. Bridges probably doesn't need another nod, so I'd probably vote for Chris Pine who's an unrecognizable revelation as the brains of the bank-robber team that drives HoHW's story.

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It has ended up with four noms:

Picture
Original Screenplay
Editing
Bridges (Supporting).

Since I think the screenplay is great as screenplays should be (great dialogue, great characterization, great structure, surprises along the way) that's the film's best shot for a win. And there is always less competition in the Original Screenplay category because most films are written from other sources(novels, plays, short stories.)

Jeff Bridges has a 2009 Best Actor Oscar win(for playing a country singer from Texas, I believe) and a the-next-year 2010 nomination for HIS take on John Wayne's Oscar-winning Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Bridges is great in "High Water" but I fear his work is a bit too much like those two above. Still, were Jeff to add a Best Supporting Actor win to his Best Actor win...it would put him in Jack Nicholson/Jack Lemmon range..."one of the greats." But I expect one of the other Best Supporting nominees "does something more."

Best Picture? I doubt it. Best Film editing? Maybe. This movie MOVES. And it has some great camera work alongside the characters cars as they drive.

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HoHW is a will/must-see for anyone on Psycho's board I'd say.

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Yes...I suppose we can add Psycho itself -- kinda/sorta -- to the Charley Varrick/No Country for Old Men template. Psycho begins strongly in the Southwest (Phoenix, Arizona) and sports characters in Cassidy and California Charlie who would easily fit in Hell or High Water. Marion's embezzlement is a "stolen cash MacGuffin" that repeats in Varrick and No Country, and Arbogast and Sheriff Chambers rather repeat, too. (In No Country...Arbogast is Woody Harrelson's ill-fated private eye and Tommy Lee Jones is John McIntire..."kinda/sorta.") Though Psycho ends up in dusty backwater Northern California, it DOES have a Southwestern vibe and a robbery crime/cops undertow.

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A simple story well-told with good characters and dialogue and all the resonances in place that you get from working mindfully in the Southwest.

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As I say, I think the strongest chance for a win here is Best Original Screenplay. There is less competition in that category and this IS a good screenplay that gives its actors great roles to play and great lines to say. I can't remember most of the lines now, but I will(repeated viewings.)

And there's a bit in the middle of the film where an old, ornery waitress pretty much orders Texas Ranger Bridges and his Native American/Mexican American partner to order ONLY the steak on the menu, ONLY medium-rare. ("Everybody else does -- except one time we had a New Yorker in 1987 who tried to order TROUT. This isn't a trout kind of place!") A funny scene -- it does little or nothing to advance the story, its just there, and great. (And when the old broad snapped on the idea of "trout" -- I flashed back to Eve Kendall ordering trout on the train in NXNW: "A little trouty, but good.") And to Michael Moore wearing one of his ubiquitous caps in "Roger and Me." The cap said "I'm out for trout."

And so concludes my trout digression. I guess I find trout an interesting movie additive.

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Its funny. One keeps waiting for Tommy Lee Jones to show up in High Water. And then one realizes: no, he's Jeff Bridges in this one.

Jeff Bridges was 61 when he made True Grit for 2010 release. So I figure he's 67 or 68 now. Bridges was an affable young man with an Adonis physique in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot(1974) and Cutter and Bone(1981)...but he's aged over the years, and in High Water I was sad to see that he's aged beyond his True Grit grizzliness. He's still in good shape, but he's playing an old man in "High Water" and the performance takes that in as "a new twist to the old Jeff Bridges."

Two examples: though Bridges argues and racially insults his Texas Ranger partner amiably throughout the film(and vice versa), there comes a scene where Bridges is trying to explain his thoughts to his partner about where some bank robbers will strike next(using a map), and the partner keeps interrupting and Bridges -- surprisingly FOR Jeff Bridges -- gets "old man mad" (Grandpa style): "Will you shut up and listen to what I'm tryin' to tell you!" Its a real moment of elderly exasperation and cussedness. How a man changes in old age.

The other example: eventually Bridges is called upon to take action with a scope rifle, on the open desert and in the very hot sun. The "old man" was probably a helluva shot in his prime and his concentration to shoot well this one more time is well acted. After he takes the shot, Bridges wheezes and gasps and has to "calm down" as an old man would. Firing a rifle turns out to be like running a mile for this old codger. It IS a great performance...different from Bridges other work and yet redolent of his fun True Grit role(except this time, HE's the Texas Ranger.)

Bridges is the old Texas Ranger on the verge of retirement, and lonely from widowerhood. Its more a familiar figure than a cliché(and wasn't that Jones' state in No Country?) and there is the built-in suspense ALL such stories have: will Bridges make it to retirement or get killed right near the finish line? Not to mention, trouble on the other side of survival. If he lives, CAN he retire as a "lonely old man" without losing his will to live?

Its the guys on the other side of the equation who are a bit more "new hat." Chris Pine(more handsome than usual given a more rugged, unshaven look) and Ben Foster(always a dangerous character) as two brothers who are out to rob a series of branches of the same bank(Texas Midland) for specific reasons which reveal themselves along the way. High Water asks us to understand these brothers, if not quite sympathize with them. When robbing banks, they terrorize women and beat up men. But they've got their reasons. Foster's brother is the ex-con who is dangerous; Pine's brother is the "good one" who never had a day in court other than his divorce. They make for a gripping pair: loving and good to one another while being dangerous to everyone else. And we sort of want them to get away with their crimes just as much as we want Bridges to catch them. (See: Norman Bates/Arbogast.)

Two good scenes for the brothers. One in which "the good brother" in protecting "the bad brother" from harm, proves just as savage as the bad one. And one in which, sharing the same Indian Casino hotel room, the "good brother" looks away and covers his ears while the naked bad brother enjoys a naked hooker in the very next bed! (That's brotherhood.)

Like Bonnie and Clyde years ago, High Water uses the economic difficulties and job loss of America's working class (in Texas yet, where Bonnie and Clyde plied their trade) as its backdrop. "The bank is the bad guy." I couldn't help feel that while Hollywood never sought this outcome, this is a tale about the "forgotten working class men" upon whom our current President built his win. Its a conundrum: these are terrible things visited upon our working class citizens -- but was this President really the solution? Never mind -- politics. Mine field. Sudden death. Why the imdb message boards are going kaput.


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I imagine that in years to come HoHW's going to play *very* well on cable.

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That's where I saw it. And BEFORE the Oscar ceremonies. Its like everyone in America can act like an Academy members now and screen the Oscar noms in our own homes. But we don't get the movies free.

It sure wasn't that way when Ben-Hur 1959 was in competition!

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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

I wasn't going to include Elle in this thread, but since it just won two Golden Globes (Best Actress in a Drama for Huppert; Best Foreign Film) I should say something after all.

Elle is twisty and twisted, a purposefully outrageous psychological study of a very sick woman whose whole life is shaped by violence and whose sexuality is enfused with rape fantasy and reality. Elle is impressively committed to its own shockingness - this is Verhoeven we're talking about after all and his lead is the fearless Isabelle Huppert who's the master of this kind of role - but I ultimately found it rather pointless (or maybe I'm just too square for this sort of film?). We can't *really* embrace Huppert's completely mad character (and those who are effectively revealed as her accomplices) as any sort of valuable alternative lifestyle and the movie's own fast-exit from that implausibly radical thesis near the end (which I won't spoil) to me kind showed the game was up and that Verhoeven didn't know what he was doing beyond being a pure shock/perversity-merchant

Elle isn't a million miles removed from Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001) also with Huppert or from Almodovar when he's at his most outrageous, e.g., Talk To Her (2003), both of which I loved. But, I dunno, maybe they're all the smae thing at bottom and it's just that Haneke's austere precision and Almodovar's playfulness and sensualness are just more to my taste than (at least this instance of) Verhoeven's sick jokiness. At any rate, I imagine that other people's mileage will vary on these films!

One big line from Elle has stuck with me though. Near the end of the film Huppert hears a confession from a friend (who somewhat implausibly has no idea of the depths of Huppert's character's depravity) who's snooped on her husband and is ashamed of what she's done. Huppert replies very generally (but we the audience know it most definitely applies to her much more clearly than to her friend), 'Shame isn't a strong enough emotion to stop us from doing anything at all.' This line has resonated with me I think because of the current political situation... a lot of anti-Trump activity has been shame-based. In effect people tried to shame others out of voting for Trump by pointing to his various disgusting views and attitudes and inviting them to be ashamed of him and of themselves to the extent that they either share those views and attitudes or are prepared to overlook them. But 'Shame isn't a strong enough emotion to stop us from doing anything at all.' I'm not sure why political disagreement and persuasion has ended up in this impotent key of shame (maybe Trump's vulgarity has triggered this modulation).... but Elle at least helped me identify the problem!

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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

A mostly great-looking, great-sounding, well-acted film that despite being set in (an almost wholly black enclave of) South Florida *feels* like a foreign film. For one thing the Southern Black patois and slang was frequently impenetrable to me. There's a crucial dialogue when we find out what a main character has been doing something bad with his life but I really wasn't sure what that was: is he a drug-dealer? a sex-worker? There was in fact a later piece of dislogue that seemed to rule out sex-worker but really you know that something's become an obstacle when major plot points are having to be guessed at 10 minutes later. I could have used subtitles. For another thing the basic approach to visual and sonic story-telling is one that we're much more used to seeing from film-makers such as Lynne Ramsay (What Need To talk About Kevin, Morvern Callar, Ratcatcher), Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Red Road), and there's some outright quoting from Wong Kar-Wai near the end. Character's drift in and out in ways that purposefully offend Hollywood story-telling conventions... well two cheers at least for those conventions. I was irritated by the fact we never encounter the two best characters from the first half of the movie, played by Janelle Monae and (Oscar Nom'd and SAG supporting actor-winning) Mahershala Ali, are never heard of again. This felt like pure Euro-drift-affectation to me since it's almost inconceivable that the very lonely main character would have completely lost touch with these two supportive figures.

I suspect that the experience of being immersed in a what feels almost like foreign country inside the US *is* what some Americans in particular are finding affecting about Moonlight, but I'm not especially impressed. I've been a big fan of recent what we might call 'enclaves within the US' films from Beasts of the Southern Wild to Winter's Bone to (iPhone-shot) Tangerine, and Moonlight is the least interesting and affecting to me of these films (albeit it's possibly the best-looking and -sounding - it's amazing how great that technical side can be on a small budget these days). I wouldn't give Moonlight a Best Picture nod over much more satisfying things like Love and Friendship and Julieta (not first-rate Almodovar but as with Hitchcock, second-rate Almodovar is still better than most other peoples' A-games) or even Zootopia or The Nice Guys.

And there's no way that Moonlight is a threat to La La Land's front-runner status. The late charge of Hidden Figures (which I haven't seen yet) into the Awards frame now makes sense to me: people who want to stop La La Land need a film to coalesce around and something more polished and generally satisfying story-wise than Moonlight is definitely needed if that's to happen. HF is evidently it!

One flaw for me with Moonlight's mostly amazing score-work and sound-design is that at a crucial juncture it reuses *the central* musical cue from Almodovars's masterpiece Talk to Her (2003). As with The Artist re-using cues from Vertigo, this score-snatching is a disaster - The Artist wasn't nearly as good as Vertigo and Moonlight isn't nearly as good as Talk to Her. Don't remind us! And the emotions of the original are actually completely inappropriate to the new contexts so gears grind and you're instantly out of the movie. Bad mistake.

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[–] ecarle 7 years ago

It is educational and giving me pleasure to read these posts, swanstep.

I'm also distraught to say..I have not seen any of these movies.

Some of it has been schedule; the rest of it finding people to see them with. I may catch a few on my own.

Is it looking like La-La-Land as the BP winner to you?

I will try to see at least one of these and say SOMETHING here. I figure "Hell or High Water" is the natch given "my type of movie." And my love of Jeff Bridges, the Biggest Movie Star Who Was Never a Big Movie Star. I loved his Oscar speech(for a movie nobody saw): "They may have to knock off with all this underrated talk."

PS. To give just one indication of my slowness on catching up with Oscar bait, I only JUST THE OTHER NIGHT watched "Dallas Buyers Club" on cable. Its the 2013 film that won Oscars for McConaghey and Leto. Impressive in some ways, distressing in others...the "affliction" Oscar syndrome strikes again. And weight loss as ticket to Oscar gold. But a good movie, certainly.

I liked the part where an AIDS-stricken (and hetero) MM learns that a sole AIDS-stricken woman has come into his clinic filled with AIDS-stricken men. MM and the woman -- a total stranger -- both end up within moments having sex in the bathroom: two people who have had to swear off sex, hungrily getting it from their "infected twins."



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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

MBTS is a stately, mournful picture that for me is too simple and never really takes off. It doesn't help that the big mid-picture reveal of 'the secret' behind all the mournfulness (which the film has rather contrivedly hidden from us up till that point) is (a) filmed with no visual verve whatsoever, and (b) is soundtracked by the too on-the-nose Albinoni Adagio that's such an overused signifier of grief at this point that it's now a complete joke fit only to be been used in Larry David/Louis CK-style lampoons of seriousness.

All the acting's great but the actors are not given a single line of memorable dialogue to work with. Put that weakness together with 'not containing a single memorable image or strong visual idea' and I think it's fair to say that MBTS is at best only a very partial success. For me, it's indubitable that MBTS is Lonergan's weakest film, and that it's probably only about 50% as valuable as You Can Count On Me (2000) in particular.

Part of the problem is that there are regularly spectacular films in world cinema about family disasters of one sort or another, but that means we know very well what a *great* lugubrious film looks and feels like: like most Bergman movies or Room or A Separation or Once Upon A Time In Anatolia or The War Zone or Force Majeure or Amour or Red Road or Son of Saul or certain seasons of Mad Men, *not* like MBTS (unless for some reason I'm just not getting it).

I thought Moonlight had its problems, but I still prefer it to MBTS. There's not a chance in hell that Manchester By The Sea stops La La Land picking up Best Picture or probably any of the other awards it's due to win. For me the clear order of the big three Oscar contenders is LLL > M > MBTS. Non-contenders like Hell or High Water, The Handmaiden, Elle, Sing Street, The Witch, Zootopia are also way ahead of MBTS in my view.

I still haven't seen The Lobster or The Wailing or Toni Erdmann or American Honey or 20C Women, but I'd be amazed if a bunch of those don't slot in well above MBTS too. In the final analysis, MBTS probably won't make my top-20 films of 2016. Someone (the NY film critics circle?) *loved* MBTS. What were they thinking?

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[–] ecarle 7 years ago

There's not a chance in hell that Manchester By The Sea stops La La Land picking up Best Picture or probably any of the other awards it's due to win. For me the clear order of the big three Oscar contenders is LLL > M > MBTS. Non-contenders like Hell or High Water, The Handmaiden, Elle, Sing Street, The Witch, Zootopia are also way ahead of MBTS in my view

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Man, I've only seen one of those -- Hell or High Water, which, were it to win(hah), would be like Charley Varrick winning. Sort of. Idea being: a well-written, tight little Southwest thriller with something to think about -- but nobody's idea of what a "Best Picture" should be. The SOMEWHAT similar Southwest thriller, "No Country for Old Men," on the other hand, had the power of the source novel and the profundity of many scenes and dialogue stretches -- like the villain chatting up the store clerk about his life depending on the flip of a coin. Plus, "No Country" played like an art film, with climaxes not happening and everything up in the air at the end.

This seems to be shaping up to be a weird Oscar season. We've seen this before, but the gap between these movies and what even PART of the general public knows or sees, is wide.

"Moonlight" is there to negate last year's "Oscar so white" issue(along with Fences), and we can figure the anti-Trump, pro-immigration spirit will be strong. This looks to be an Oscar show more about our American times than about American movies.

The other weird thing: with all its nominations, "La La Land" looks to win big almost by default -- nothing else there. But I notice that SNL has gone on the offensive -- kinda/sorta -- AGAINST La La Land. A couple of weeks ago they did a sketch where cops heavy-footed some poor soul in the interrogation room for NOT liking La La Land. This week's joke on the Update segment was that" only white people" like La La Land which...is kind of sad. Where things are today.



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[–] movieghoul 7 years ago

The minority boost doesn't stop with Moonlight and Fences, there's also Hidden Figures, which is actually neck and neck with La La Land at the BO, and Lion.

Of these four, I've only seen Lion which was pretty good but I would have liked more if it wasn't a Weinstein production, because that reminded me that I was watching the same film as their 2013 Oscar bait Philomena.

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[–] ecarle 7 years ago

The minority boost doesn't stop with Moonlight and Fences, there's also Hidden Figures, which is actually neck and neck with La La Land at the BO, and Lion.

Of these four, I've only seen Lion which was pretty good but I would have liked more if it wasn't a Weinstein production, because that reminded me that I was watching the same film as their 2013 Oscar bait Philomena.
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Good to realize that the minority boost is extensive. I suppose that makes a statement either about the "oddity" of last year's all white nominees, or perhaps some studios worked extra hard to greenlight more "minority films."

Well, I've READ about all of these, but I'm feeling a certain embarrassment not to be able to really discuss them.

Its as if I'm having a discussion about "the Oscar movies" with an understanding that they really aren't FOR me any more...like certain art in certain galleries.

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I mean, hey , how about the five Best Picture nominees of 1967:

Bonnie and Clyde
Doctor Doolittle
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
In the Heat of the Night
The Graduate

I saw ALL of those, and pretty much within months of release, tops.

But who knows, maybe today I wouldn't. John Wick, instead. Hah.

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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

The other weird thing: with all its nominations, "La La Land" looks to win big almost by default -- nothing else there. But I notice that SNL has gone on the offensive -- kinda/sorta -- AGAINST La La Land. A couple of weeks ago they did a sketch where cops heavy-footed some poor soul in the interrogation room for NOT liking La La Land. This week's joke on the Update segment was that" only white people" like La La Land which...is kind of sad. Where things are today.
I know what SNL is getting at: It probably is social suicide to not like LLL if you're in certain sorts of crowds (I remember feeling that pressure when I lived in Seattle around 2000 about, of all things, Sofia Coppola's debut The Virgin Suicides: every gal I was trying to date loved it and it was ruining my social life hence I nicknamed it 'The Virgin Social Suicides') and LLL does feel like a paradigmatic entry on a 'Stuff white people like' list from about a decade ago. But these jokes are old and reductive and a bit depressing.

And yes the 'nothing else there' phenomenon is real I'm afraid - Moonlight and Manchester were picked out early as the only serious contenders (i.e., with LLL as the default) and they're just not good enough. I *really* understand now why there's clearly been some sort of push to find something else, e.g., 'Hidden Figures' but it sounds like that's just an OK-ish 'true story' picture. (but that was enough for Argo to sneak up on the outside and win a few years back!).

This seems to be shaping up to be a weird Oscar season. We've seen this before, but the gap between these movies and what even PART of the general public knows or sees, is wide.
I think it's just one of those years where most of the the real contenders weren't really ready for their close-up. Two years ago Birdman *had* to win Best Picture because Boyhood/Imitation Game/Theory Of Everything/Selma simply weren't good enough, vigorously written or directed enough to win the biggest awards, so Birdman more or less won by default. This pattern certainly makes for sulky Oscars! The tone is 'Everyone feels free to snark because everyone's pretty sure that no one really deserves it.'




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[–] movieghoul 7 years ago

Seinfeld had a couple of great episodes on the theme of having to like prestige Oscar winners (even if you really think they suck). Schindler's List and The English Patient.

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[–] ecarle 7 years ago

Seinfeld had a couple of great episodes on the theme of having to like prestige Oscar winners (even if you really think they suck). Schindler's List and The English Patient.

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I recall Elaine screaming with boredom through The English Patient which...you may recall...beat out the cult favorite(and much more entertaining) "Fargo" in 1996.

I don't recall the Schindler's List references.

Ironically enough, I saw both of those pictures. I saw a lot more movies like that back then, mainly because of a relationship. I thought List was great(with emotion in the Spielberg tradition) and I was fine with The English Patient.

But I much preferred Fargo -- MY favorite movie of 1996.

The die is cast on Oscar. "It is what it is."

To me, the bigger issue is the Oscar telecast. People still tune in by the multi-millions. It as if the event -- and the draw of viewers not wanting to MISS the event -- has become much bigger that the movies it salutes. Also, I have read the Oscar Ceremony described, TV-audience-wise as "the gay SuperBowl."

And, there are movie stars there.

Including, one year, Will Smith, who introduced the Best Special Effects Oscar by saying "I'm here to introduce the nominees for Best Special Effects...which is an award given to movies that PEOPLE ACTUALLY GO TO SEE." Smith said that with disgust -- and it felt like real disgust to me. Maybe he asked for that category to make that statement.



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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

Including, one year, Will Smith, who introduced the Best Special Effects Oscar by saying "I'm here to introduce the nominees for Best Special Effects...which is an award given to movies that PEOPLE ACTUALLY GO TO SEE." Smith said that with disgust -- and it felt like real disgust to me. Maybe he asked for that category to make that statement.
This reminded me of a point I heard urged on a podcast a while back: if we think of 'movies that PEOPLE ACTUALLY GO TO SEE' as equivalent to 'sfx-driven far-fetched spectacle and fantasy' then ultra-glamorous movie stars are not only surplus to requirements, they're actual liabilities. That is, since the high-concept content of these films is very far-fetched and way out it's better for the actors to be relatively normal looking to sell these crazy worlds to us to, to be Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider and Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn and Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray and Veronica Cartwright and Harry Dean Stanton and Michael J. Fox and Shia LeBoeuff and Mark Wahlberg and Melissa McCarthy. The converse case is the film that's set in essentially the real world where movie-star glamor is useful to heighten and make interesting something that everyone does (fall in love, lose love, fall ill, get old, have issues with ones family, have life/work balance problems, and so on).

Of course there are plenty of movie-star-laden vehicles that lots of people go to see and there are also plenty of sfx-driven fantasies that have glamorous movie-stars in key roles (including some with Will Smitf in them), but Will Smith was putting his finger on something real: that sfx extravaganzas *are* in tension with movie-stars and the glamor they represent.

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[–] ecarle 7 years ago

This reminded me of a point I heard urged on a podcast a while back: if we think of 'movies that PEOPLE ACTUALLY GO TO SEE' as equivalent to 'sfx-driven far-fetched spectacle and fantasy'

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Which -- though you are about to make a different point -- is sort of the problem with where we are now.

If movies that PEOPLE ACTUALLY GO TO SEE are mega-effects comic epics with no real differentiation among them...our movie business is indeed a shadow of its 20th Century, vibrant, story-driven self. We know that people went to see -- mindlessly, all over the world(and, snorted one critic, the "mouth breathers" of the world), bad movies like Batman vs Superman last year. (Suicide Squad -- with Will Smith! -- I give a bit more of a pass; it was pretty good for the first two acts and then fell apart.)

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then ultra-glamorous movie stars are not only surplus to requirements, they're actual liabilities.

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I was quizzical for a moment,....

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That is, since the high-concept content of these films is very far-fetched and way out it's better for the actors to be relatively normal looking to sell these crazy worlds to us to, to be Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider and Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn and Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray and Veronica Cartwright and Harry Dean Stanton and Michael J. Fox and Shia LeBoeuff and Mark Wahlberg and Melissa McCarthy.

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And then I got it...good point. I expect so often here, the producers knew so much of their budget was necessary for effects, and/or to serve a "story bigger than any star"(Jaws)...that hiring a top marquee name was unnecessary.

That said, I always found it funny that "Jaws" novel writer Peter Benchley said the movie should star "Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and Robert Redford." Too much star power, too expensive, too fantastic of a hope to land all three(two of them could be gotten, maybe, but not three)...and then I saw it: Paul Newman as the steady but anxiety-ridden Chief Brody, Steve McQueen as the rugged Quint, Robert Redford(perhaps with eyeglasses) as the brainy Hooper. I'll bet that Benchley knew the star casting would work for the characters...even as it would be impossible to pull off in "real Hollywood life."

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The converse case is the film that's set in essentially the real world where movie-star glamor is useful to heighten and make interesting something that everyone does (fall in love, lose love, fall ill, get old, have issues with ones family, have life/work balance problems, and so on).

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True, but I expect the problem here is that stars are so expensive, its hard to get them cast into these stories. Indie film ALSO uses "lesser stars."

THAT said, what stars often do nowadays is "set up shop" in a blockbuster franchise(Depp in Pirates)...and do smaller pictures on the side("The Rum Diaries.")

But this brings up one of my other points: the role of the star is simply different now. Folks used to go see a Bogart picture to see BOGART. Hopefully in a good drama or crime picture, but driven not by action or effects, but by the star AS a star.

That happens a bit now, but not a lot.

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Of course there are plenty of movie-star-laden vehicles that lots of people go to see and there are also plenty of sfx-driven fantasies that have glamorous movie-stars in key roles (including some with Will Smitf in them), but Will Smith was putting his finger on something real: that sfx extravaganzas *are* in tension with movie-stars and the glamor they represent.

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Yes, but he was also pointing out -- I guess even back when he appeared -- that too often the Oscar movies are NOT seen by many people. The films that won Marcia Gay Harden, Julianne Moore, and Forrest Whitaker their Oscars (to name but a few)...nobody saw.

And Hollywood has rather trapped itself into this situation. Its hard to make major budget, major star Oscar bait.

Though it happens. Denzel in Fences this year, for instance (even as he made the Mag 7 to have a popular hit on his resume the same year.)

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[–] movieghoul 7 years ago

As I recall, the premise of the SL episode of Seinfeld was that Jerry is goaded by his parents into seeing it, but has difficulty discussing it with them later, understandably since he spent the whole film making out with his girlfriend.

Yes, there are movie stars at the Oscars, but unlike the good old days, there a re movie stars EVERYWHERE so it's no longer the treat it was. Remember when millions tuned in to What's My Line? every Sunday wondering if they would have a rare chance to see one of their favorite stars?

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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

TE isn't nom'd for Best Picture but is close to a sure thing for Best Foreign Language Film, is one of the year's best films, and is destined for a (probably Oscar-laden) Hollywood remake that brings Jack Nicholson out of retirement....so let's talk about it here!

TE is a 2 hour 40 min worldwide comedy hit from Germany - a rare beast! The story of a retired father trying to (re)connect with his business executive daughter who's consulting in Romania mostly... TE feels somewhat specific and gritty and real (it's mostly (totally?) shot hand-held and with very loose, catch-as-catch-can framing) but the story is also pretty universal. It could be remade very successfully I think. TE's tone is not a million miles removed from that of Alexander Payne's films, esp. About Schmidt and Sideways and Nebraska. There's also a bit of James L. Brooks in there somewhere albeit filtered through the more verite stylings and with a bit of the cringe factor comedy that one associates mostly things like Louis CK and The Office on TV. TE has two great roles - the father and the daughter and both will be automatic Oscars noms and probably wins if the remake turns out well. There are 3 or 4 instant classic scenes and some good monologues here - meaty stuff. And there are at least a couple of scenes that, while very good, don't quite fulfil their potential in my view - I can just see a Payne or PTA or David O. Russell rubbing their hands at the thought of having a crack at this material.

TE doesn't strike me as a perfect film by any means - other takes on this underlying strong material *could* improve it possibly making both funnier and more poignant. And I'm bemused by Sight and Sound choosing it as the best film of 2016 (one suspects that if essentially the same film had come out of Hollywood then it would have been condescended to by that publication as very middle brow, white people's problems).

But TE is a classic script/scenario and good fun and poignant throughout with two peach roles for an older man and a middle-aged woman. People are going to crawl over broken glass to get these roles in the US remake. It sounds as though Jack Nicholson is going to come out of retirement to play the father, and it appears that he'd be perfect for that role. The same reports suggested Kristen Wiig had been offered the daughter-role. She could work but the German actress playing the daughter is exactly half-way between Cate Blanchett and Jessica Chastain. Both will undoubtedly be pressing their cases and sending 'Please explain' notes to the relevant studios if they aren't closely considered. But every other actress of note with a line in uptight and skinny is also going to compete like crazy for this role - all your Watts's, Paltrows, Therons, etc are going to demand a shot. We know Jack likes JLaw - that might make the difference (although she's a little young as she often is!). All power to Wiig if she can hold off all of the competition that's coming.


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[–] swanstep 7 years ago

Ha, Passengers is not a contender at all but I just got around to seeing it and there's something interesting I believe to say about its reception, so here goes...

I read four or 5 tepid reviews and antagonistic semi-think-pieces about Passengers on its release and they were enough to convince me to wait to watch it at home. The striking thing now I've seen the film is that while the reviews and think-pieces were right that Passengers is a dud, the reasons that I recall being offered for that judgement are *way* off the mark.

The big complaint I remember people having, especially in the think-pieces, was that they thought the film didn't grapple sufficiently with the ghastliness of Chris Pratt's character, Jim's decision to wake up JLaw's character Aurora (ha! sleeping beauty, screenwriter Spaihts just can't stop himself can he? - more on him later) from hibernation (and then not 'fess up that that's what he did), the stalkerishness of how Jim selects Aurora to be woken, and so on. The ending of the film (in which Aurora has the chance to go back to sleep but decides instead to stick it out with Jim)in particular was singled out for being an instance of 'Stockholm Syndrome' disgustingly posing as a happy ending.

Having seen the film, I think that none of this basic feministy, 'right on' criticism has any merit whatsoever. Indeed that people so reflexively advanced a kind of snarky supposedly pro-woman agenda at the expense not even trying to understand the film they were watching is almost enough to have me think things like 'Hey, maybe those Trump-voters have a point about "political correctness gone mad"? (Ditto for when I recently heard a young woman on a podcast talking about The Terminator (1984) and suggesting that Kyle Reese was such a jerk for 'mansplaining' to Sarah Connor about robots, etc.)

The film dwells at *length* on the unique terribleness and understandableness of Jim's decision to wake up Aurora. She literally almost kills him when she finds out what he did, and does not even begin to reconcile with him until they have to work together to save the whole ship from destruction.

Without going into spoilerish detail the movie does offer redemption to Jim both in our eyes and in Aurora's because it turns out that the collisions that led to Jim waking up did also cause slowly spreading damage to the rest of the ship. Without him and also Aurora awake to do something about that the ship's destroyed. It just does change the moral calculus if it turns out that Jim's waking of Aurora allowed them to save their own lives and those of 5000 others. The film is perhaps guilty of not hitting this basic point hard enough, but you have to be a bit thick or politically blinded to not get it.

Why according to me is Passengers a dud if the principal criticisms of the film are so weak? The big problem is Spaihts's script at the nuts and bolts level. Two thing that judging now from his scripts for Prometheus and Passengers that Spaihts just can't do:

1. Write causal dialogue that feels alive. Some people from Shakespeare to Mamet and QT have this talent and some do not. Spaihts does not - he needs to bring in a dialogue specialist to fix his damn scripts on this front. (Truly this script is a reminder that QT could have made a very good living even if he's never made anything after Reservoir Dogs *just* doing dialogue polishes on other people's scripts. Pratt and Jlaw both when they're chipper and when they're stressed out and screaming come across as flat and finally unbelievable. Their dialogue is so bland in fact that we don't like either of them and have no interest in their relationship. Both their voices, and especially Lawrence's end up very exposed and grate on us (this film is a disaster for JLaw - cut-price J-Law in Mag 7 is much better, has much better dialogue to work with).

2. Write good philosophical exposition. Good films and especially good sci-fi often has a few big ideas floating around and there's an art to writing them up in expository dialogue or VO so that they capture our imaginations and don't sound trivial. Spaihts on the evidence of these two films doesn't know how to do this.

I think the basic story outline/treatment-level for Passengers is actually quite good - this film could have been a minor classic if someone else, Duncan Jones say, had written the actual script from the treatment.

There's a lot more that one could say about this film but it's not clear that it's worth it.* Passengers is sort of fascinating: it's an unjustly lambasted but nonetheless deserved big flop that really needn't have been.


* The Physics seemed a little undeveloped. The seemed to be uncertain about how they were generating gravity (it's supposed to be through spinning, which is the sort of thing that can't be turned on and off instantaenously - it'll alsways take enormous amounts of energy to stop or start spinning in a relatively gravoty-free vacuum - but at some points a 'gravity drive' that can be turned on and off instantaneously seems to be involved). And the 'views' from the travelling-at-.5C spacecraft aren't relativistically impacted - they should be red-shifted behind and blu-shifted ahead and there should some kind of rainbow effect between those two extremes. I would have been cool for the sfx people to do the sums and see what that'd look like but they didn't bother, harrumph. I originally thought they'd mucked up the gravitational slingshot around supergiant star Arcturus (its radius is about 25x our suns) and that a .5C spaceship would ping by far too fast for what we see, but when I did some quick rough calculations they turned out to have it broadly correct a .5C ship would take a couple a minute or two to swing around something the size of Arcturus which is what we see.

I suspect however there'd be some horrendous forces from cornering at that speed that the film doesn't grapple with. Note too that a spaceship with the size and mass of an aircraft carrier coming screaming into a solar system at .5C is an extinction-level event for any planet it collides with (we'd crap our pants if anything like that came by our Sun) so doing what they do would likely be regarded as an aggressive action by any local sentient being. A better script would have made some jokes about this (how they're actually praying that there's no intelligent life around Arcturus).

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago


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Yikes, La La Land opened here in NZ on Boxing day, so I saw it at an evening session on its second day of release (with Tuesday being cheapie day here), yet the smallish auditorium was only about 10% full, i.e., about 20 people. I had the sense that there were only musical buffs and drama kids in attendance. In other words, Gosling and Stone (let alone director Chazelle after Whiplash) do *not* appear to be pulling in a general, hit-making, young-ish crowd.

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I have finally seen La La Land...a few months after its initial release and a few weeks after it so famously did NOT win Best Picture, after all.

One thing I've checked: it puts to shame my statement that Oscar movies are movies "nobody goes to see." I'd say MANY Oscar movies are movies nobody goes to see, but LLL is up to almost $150 million domestic. That's a hit (albeit big comix hero movies make that on OPENING WEEKEND nowadays so...well...)
I was in a bar the other day and I actually heard some guyish looking guys talking about it: "You see La La Land? Yeah, I saw it. Thought it was pretty good, actually."

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As for the film itself. I liked it - it's the sort of thing I'm very much primed to like - but I wasn't really swept away by it.

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Probably my take as well. I''m a sucker for musicals, but my favorites are a "wild bunch" indeed. Sure I like the MGM stuff, and I like Rodgers and Hammerstein(I gave a class report on them one year as a kid; it wasn't ALL Hitchocck with me), and Lerner and Loewe.
I LOVE "Damn Yankees"(1958) which is sorta low budget but very brash and funny, with Stanley Donen co-directing and Fosse on dance.
And I will go to my grave as the guy who loved what I call "The 1968-69 Mastodon Trilogy": Finian's Rainbow, Paint Your Wagon, Hello, Dolly. Now I'll remove the more upscale Oliver and Funny Girl from that pack; THESE three all got rather poorly reviewd and yet I love them for who's in them(Walter Matthau! Lee Marvin! Clint Eastwood!) as well as their attempted hipness and big budget sumptuouness. They're FUN -- Oliver is too grim and Funny Girl is too much the soap opera.
And La La Land ain't like any of the above at all.

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It has only one memorable melody in my view, the 'City of Stars' number sung by Gosling in one of the trailers. Gosling isn't much of a singer, and while that doesn't matter too much in context where the off-handness of the song and melody plays well, it does mean that the only thing you can really remember isn't any great singing.
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It seems to me -- and the Oscar ceremony pointed this up -- that there are three main musical motifs in the film, some of which repeat to begin different songs entirely: the OPENING NOTES of the opening number on the freeway(which are the opening notes over the end credits), rather martial and exciting; City of Stars; and the one for Emma Stone. That's it, though "Another Day of Sun" and the song for the girls going out to a movie town party had their own tune BUILT on the other motifs.

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The best piece of music, however, the film's only chance for a new standard is Emma Stone's big 'Audition (The Fools Who Dream)' number. It wowed me, but I can't for the life of me recall its melody now. So that highlight has problems too I think.
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Its really an aria for an actress -- its where Emma Stone wins her Oscar. You know, like one of Marisa Tomei's long speeches in My Cousin Vinny but with music and more emotion.
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[Update: There's a podcast with the composers about 'Audition (The Fools Who Dream)' on the iTunes store that's pretty great. Search for the podcast Song Exploder, and it's the Dec 21, 2016 ep. with Justin Hurwitz. I think I've got the melody properly stored in memory now. Maybe it *is* going to be a new standard after all!]
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These things take time!

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The choreography is a complete waste of space. I don't know what Chazelle was thinking with that.

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You take who you can get?

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Another area of even more technicality that I had a problem with is the focus-pulling. The camera's very mobile throughout (something I'm generally in favor of), but important objects of our attention were constantly not quite in focus or slipping in and out of focus (and not in any artful way believe me).

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You know, even I noticed that -- once when the two leads were approaching a parked car on the street in the evening.
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[I also didn't like the lighting of the dancers in a couple of scenes - Cazelle seemed to go for mainly natural light and this meant that Dancers faces were often in shadow - a mistake in my view that could and should have been avoided with the appropriate artificial lights.]

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Was any of this done to disguise doubles for Ryan and Emma? They were clearly doubled in silohouette for the dance around the LA Observatory interior.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

(MORE)

Setting aside the tunes, the dancing, and the focus, however, La La Land was pretty good. Strong on story (arguably lifted from Umbrellas of Cherbourg but I'm OK with that)

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I've been looking for the thread where you discuss this with doghouse -- the whole Demy thing. I'm aware of his musicals, but I have not seen them. (SPOILER): This movie is big on "career over love...success and consequences." Is that basically what Cherbourg is about?
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and structure,

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I found the dramatic scenes as compelling as the musical ones. Especially the long scene over a "surprise dinner" in which Ryan and Emma discuss his busy career and how "she goaded him into it." Uh oh.

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and Gosling and Stone are charming, have chemistry, etc..

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You know, they did two other movies before this one, and I saw them both:

The one with Steve Carell where he's divorced, Ryan advises him on picking up women and Ryan dates Carell's daugther -- Emma Stone!

And "Gangster Squad," in which Ryan and Emma are the lovers interspersed with Josh Brolin as a tough macho cop(think Russell Crowe) to Ryan's cool cat cop(think Kevin Spacey) and Sean "Box Office Poison" Penn trying to make a commercial hit and dying trying. (He's playing LA crime boss Mickey Cohen.)

In short, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are almost our Spencer and Kate, and by now, I've certainly learned their faces. Ryan is one handsome devil -- I used to think he was a more handsome David Arquette but he's carved out his own personality. Emma has a "Keane big eyes face" but uses it for great emotional range. Skinny as a rail though -- it was tough seeing her as a sexual being in La La Land, landing all those hunky men, when she had the body of a little boy. Oh, well...she's a star. She ACTS sexy.

Funny thought: La La Land is rather a companion piece to The Nice Guys, yes? LA by night and by day. The Hollywood hills. Ryan Gosling paired with....Russell Crowe/Emma Stone.

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So, I'm torn over this film. I like it because it's the sort of thing I like that's pretty rare these days, but it's not an especially good example of the sort of thing I like. I hate to say it but things like Enchanted and Frozen, maybe even Moulin Rouge and Chicago (all of which have many problems) are better than La La Land at least on first viewing.
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Moulin Rouge is my favorite film of 2001; Chicago is my favorite film of 2002. So I MUST like musicals. (And I gave Chicago the nod even as the characters are so distressingly venal and selfish; hard to take.) Both of them were mounted more handsomely than La La Land, which gives away traces of lean budgeting to me. The Disney stuff is in a class by itself, almost monolithic in its domination of the musical scene.

But La La Land is its own special thing. I find myself thinking about it a lot.
(BIG SPOILER BELOW)

And that ending. Casablanca? You bet. The Way We Were? I saw that, too. Even Cast Away(a man sees, by chance, the woman who got away, got ANOTHER man, and a baby by that other man.) But that sad, sad ending was buttressed by wild "alternative fantasies" that took La La Land somewhere those other endings didn't go.

I haven't seen Moonlight yet, but La La Land(and its 150 million gross) strikes me as a fine candidate for a legitmate Best Picture winner.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

This movie is big on "career over love...success and consequences." Is that basically what Cherbourg is about?

In Umbrellas of Cherbourg the young lovers (Guy and Genevieve) are separated by the Algerian war (France's Vietnam/Iraq). They have 'one night of love' before he leaves. In the centerpiece of the movie, Genevieve fairwells Guy at the train station and they sing 'I Will Wait For You'.

Unfortunately, Guy barely stays in contact with Genevieve after he ships out. The details aren't filled in for us but when he comes back he's limping and a bit broken. Algeria was a nasty, street-fighting, guerilla way with tit-for-tat shameful atrocities committed on both sides so it made sense at the time that Guy might not want or be able to correspond home that much.

While Guy is away, Genevieve discovers she's pregnant by him. Single mom-hood being not really an option in France in the '50s, and with Guy not really in the picture, Genevieve's mom urges her to forget about Guy and kind of sets her up with a genuinely nice, slightly older, wealthy man, Roland, who agrees to marry Gen. notwithstanding that she's carrying another man's child. (The mores of the time dictate that this was a near heroic thing for Roland to do - save Gen. from disgrace and all that. Modern mores don't see things quite this way, and Deneuve is such a stunner as Gen. that most modern viewers kind of think that Roland is just being smart to get Gen. while he can! Still, it's clear that he is in fact a very nice guy.) Gen. is ambivalent but does goes along with the plan and movies to Paris with her new husband.

Guy comes back from the war and discovers that Genevieve is long gone and that various other personal tragedies have befallen him. Madeleine, a girl who'd looked after Guy's aunt and who'd long had feelings for Guy, now comforts him and generally helps him pull his life back together. Time passes and Guy and Madeleine marry (although she worries he's still hung up on Genevieve).

It's a musical so we know that Guy and Genevieve will meet again, and that eventually Guy'll find out about the daughter he has with her..... and, without going into details, 4 year or so later there's a very realistic, bitter-sweet ending where Guy and Genevieve run into each other, exchange a few pleasantries, but that's all. They don't get back together, indeed nothing like that is ever in the cards. They've both moved on, they're different people now.

So... Umbrellas of Cherbourg doesn't feature conflicts between career and love but between events/timing and love. A lot has to go right for a young couple to make it, and people's playing-it-safe choices under difficult conditions can be good notwithstanding their tragic dimensions. Obviously these sorts of heartbreaking complexities of real lives were all over non-musical dramas of 1950s. UOC broke ground, I suppose, by showing how a very extreme, sung-through musical with incredibly beautiful leads could be on the same page as, e.g., The Apartment and Some Came Running.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

So... Umbrellas of Cherbourg doesn't feature conflicts between career and love but between events/timing and love.

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Thanks for the great summary of Cherbourg. I may see it someday, but I don't know when, so I feel like I've "seen it" now.

I would like to note here that it was in the 70's, I think, that I determined I HAD to see many of the great movies I'ed either only read about(in books on film) or found "in the air" in the great TV Guide full page advertisements for their TV showings, which invariably listed a whole lotta stars on the page:

John Wayne
Dean Martin
Ricky Nelson
Walter Brennan
Angie Dickinson
in Rio Bravo

Burt Lancaster
Montgomery Clift
Deborah Kerr
Donna Reed
Frank Sinatra
in From Here to Eternity

Marlon Brando
Eva Marie Saint
Lee J. Cobb
Rod Steiger
Karl Malden
in On the Waterfront

Honestly...the ads in TV Guide were like that(with a photo from the movie) and I jus KNEW to be a true film buff, I would have to see those pictures. So I spent most of the 70's catching up with them, on TV and at revival theaters.

One channel had, every summer, the "Classic Movie Summer" with one of those movies PER NIGHT. If you could invest the time, you could check off a lot of classics, one right after another, one night after another: Casablanca, Citizen Cane, It Happened One Night...Psycho, North by Northwest. That channel abandoned that "Summer of Classics" promotion after VHS and cable came in. But it was a great decade. I recall enticing a few dates to spend the date at home watching one of those greats...

Anyway, I'm weak on the foreign side, and I KNOW I should see Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and now...I feel like I have. (Growing up in LA in 60's, I would like to add that foreign films were promoted on LA TV as much as American studio classics; Cherbourg got ITS full page ad not too long after Psycho got its ad in 1967, as I recall. LA was a movie town, all the movies got shown locally if not on the big three networks.)

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A lot has to go right for a young couple to make it,

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Though I've known a few high school sweeethearts in my time who have 'gone the distance" -- 50 year marriages and kids, no other lovers --- the fact of the matter is that young love is almost doomed from the start. Money must be earned, careers must be started, separate cities may have to be moved to, separate lives start to develop. But here's the catch. People usually dutifully break up and move on to the second, third, fourth and fifth loves of their lives before marriage finally arrives and...you still miss that first one. Seems to me. And any number of film romances have taken this topic up -- Casablanca, The Way We Were, and I can't remember: isn't Gable really Leigh's real love even as she marries Howard? Hell DID she marry Howard? I've only seen GWTW once.

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safe choices under difficult conditions can be good notwithstanding their tragic dimensions.

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Fighting with feelings of love are the need for "security," or safe harbor, or "the right type of person, the one who can provide." Very hurtful where things can end up.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

(MORE)

Obviously these sorts of heartbreaking complexities of real lives were all over non-musical dramas of 1950s. UOC broke ground, I suppose, by showing how a very extreme, sung-through musical with incredibly beautiful leads could be on the same page as, e.g., The Apartment and Some Came Running.

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Well put. You know, one of the interesting elements of Some Came Running is how Sinatra, almost on a whim, elects to marry the low-class(but nice) Shirley MacLaine even though his true love is higher-class Martha Hyer(and despite how mean Dean Martin calls MacLaine "a pig!" in his efforts to dissuage Sinatra from his rash decision.) Some Came Running is sort of a big, lightly tawdry soap opera, but it has some painful truths within it.

As does The Apartment, which has both Shirley MacLaine(romantically) and Jack Lemmon(professionally) kowtowing to the awful but powerful Fred MacMurray because "its the right thing to do." They both reject Fred in the end (which is why some call The Apartment "a dirty fairy tale"), but in real life, sometimes...not. People marry the MacMurrys, people work for the MacMurray's. And surrender.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

You know, they did two other movies before this one, and I saw them both[/quote]
Thanks for the background on these. They look good together on-screen - good enough so that you do kind of fear for Gosling's marriage to Eva Mendes... At any rate, Gosling+Stone is a genuine team now that's like an additional star.
[quote]Emma has a "Keane big eyes face" but uses it for great emotional range. Skinny as a rail though[/quote]
Yep. Her ultra-skinniness didn't bug me in LLL. It did when she was on SNL and standing next to Kate McKinnon and Cecilie Strong, Emma S. was half their size. Emma S. had a much more normal body when she was younger, e.g., in things like Superbad and Easy A. In other words Stone has been getting more and more bird-like through her 20s. I suspect that social pressures in Hollywood are to blame together with new dietary and exercise technologies that make it relatively easy to starve and exercise your way down to pure sinew.
[quote]I haven't seen Moonlight yet, but La La Land(and its 150 million gross) strikes me as a fine candidate for a legitimate Best Picture winner.

I agree with your basic sentiment here - that LLL put a lot up on the screen, that it felt ambitious and busy in a way that we hope Best Pictures will be. Moonlight has a lot going for it too, especially in its first hour, but it's a very *small* movie with 3rd Act problems galore in my view, so I'm surprised that it managed to pull out the Best Picture win. I think that LLL got kind of cemented in people's minds as the presumptive winner way back in January, and then this gave people a lot of time to kind of take it for granted and to invent reasons to not vote for it. Moonlight never went though months of people campaigning against it!

Anyhow, neither LLL nor Moonlight struck me as truly top-tier (they're top 20 not top 10 movies for me). Here are the movies of 2016 I really loved:
1. The Lobster (the only perfect 2016 film in my view)
2. Toni Erdmann (close to perfect with some explosively comedic scenes; being remade with Jack Nicholson)
3. The Handmaiden (twisty S Korean madness for which I have a weakness)
4. I Daniel Blake
5. Julieta
6. The Witch
7. Love and Friendship
8. Spring Street
9. Zootopia

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

You know, they did two other movies before this one, and I saw them both[/quote]
Thanks for the background on these.

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I can't remember the name of the one with Steve Carrell, but they made a GREAT couple, with Emma aghast and laughing at Ryan's shirtless six-pack physique: "What, are you PHOTOSHOPPED?"

I liked "Gangster Squad," which was an overt attempt to go 50's(a good look for Stone; I think she played a nightclub singer) and mix "The Untouchables" and "LA Confidential" together(my favorite movies of the 80's and 90's respectfully, let alone 1987 and 1997.) Perhaps it was all too derivative, and "Gangster Squad" simply didn't have the script or production value. I remember liking the contrast between burly Josh Brolin and suave Ryan Gosling as buddy cops. Sean Penn was good as Mickey C(and he doesn't die at the end, when I wrote "dying by trying," I meant his mainstream career. Its over.) But the hidden key to the whole thing was the Gosling/Stone romantic chemistry and I guess the makers of La La Land knew it. Hell, all they had to do was look at the two earlier movies!

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They look good together on-screen - good enough so that you do kind of fear for Gosling's marriage to Eva Mendes...

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Yikes. Well, that happened sometimes. How about Brad and Angie at one time? Of course, there's always the Tracy/Hepurn route. Tracy died in Hepburn's house; Hepburn picked up the phone and called Tracy's wife to drive over and take over the morgue business and mourning. Tracy's wife arrived and told Hepburn," YOu know, I always thought you were just a rumor."

On the other hand, Eva's got more meat on the bones...and she's not a Best Actress winner; they can be hard to live with for the male ego(Burt Reynolds dropped Sally Field over HERS. He was jealous).

---

---

--- At any rate, Gosling+Stone is a genuine team now that's like an additional star.

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Like Tracy and Hepburn. Bogie and Bacall. Grant and Bergman....Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaghey?

I'll bet Ryan and Emma do one more together, at least.

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Emma has a "Keane big eyes face" but uses it for great emotional range. Skinny as a rail though

Yep. Her ultra-skinniness didn't bug me in LLL. It did when she was on SNL and standing next to Kate McKinnon and Cecilie Strong, Emma S. was half their size. Emma S. had a much more normal body when she was younger, e.g., in things like Superbad and Easy A. In other words Stone has been getting more and more bird-like through her 20s. I suspect that social pressures in Hollywood are to blame together with new dietary and exercise technologies that make it relatively easy to starve and exercise your way down to pure sinew.

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I've read of the pressures and I certainly salute weight loss(a lot harder for ME) and fitness. Whatever edge of sexism may arise from this comment, it is based on a real-life inability to ever have Emma Stone, but still: she's too skinny for me to even fantasize about.

Back in the day, Audrey Hepburn was the same way. Beautiful face, emotional voice but...skinny to the point of boniness(in Wait Until Dark in sweater and jeans, especially.) I guess you could say that Audrey and Emma sell a different kind of sex appeal. They aren't the voluptuous types(MM, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, Raquel Welch, Stella Stevens) one could picture a good bed wrestle with -- that's a whole nuther kind of beauty. Plus -- Audrey in Charade with Grant, and Emma in La La Land with Ryan -- know how to charge a kiss up with emotion and sex, right there, that's enough.

And hell, its all fantasy, anyway. Those are movie goddesses, I know my limitations.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago



I agree with your basic sentiment here - that LLL put a lot up on the screen, that it felt ambitious and busy in a way that we hope Best Pictures will be.

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Yes, I think that's it. It seemed very creative, visually(CAMERA MOVEMENT, Thank God) and musically and dramatically. I keep thinking about it, and I want to see it again. I want to memorize the songs. I'll probably buy it.

Side-bar: Its set in LA. I used to live there, a few times in my life. The nostalgia is always there. And a funny irony: I entered the theater from an "outside" which was dark, gray, pouring so much rain down on me that my hair was soaked. I settled in for the movie and what's the first number? "Another Day of Sun." Even an LA traffic jam in all that sunshine was nostalgic! And the "City of Stars" song scene on the pier at sunset? Swooning memories of how it feels by the SoCal ocean at sunset(I LOVE how the older black man feistily pushes Ryan away when he tries to dance with the man's lady.)

Second sidebar: whereas I viewed Manchester by the Sea and Hell or High Water on Pay Per View at home, I was lucky enough to see La La Land on the big screen, in "Cinemascope" and boy am I glad I got the experience.
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Moonlight has a lot going for it too, especially in its first hour, but it's a very *small* movie with 3rd Act problems galore in my view, so I'm surprised that it managed to pull out the Best Picture win. I think that LLL got kind of cemented in people's minds as the presumptive winner way back in January, and then this gave people a lot of time to kind of take it for granted and to invent reasons to not vote for it. Moonlight never went though months of people campaigning against it!

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Probably so. The circumstances were different, but Crash pulling it out against Brokeback Mountain had a similar feeling. I recall that Roger Ebert seemed apologetic that his "Crash" rave review came out close to Oscar voting, he felt it may have tipped voters as his "masterpiece" rave for Million Dollar Baby the year before pushed THAT movie past the competish(Sideways.)

In short, Oscar races today are a matter of timing and advertising and pressures. Political campaign firms are hired to "diss" certain frontrunners (telling us that a real-life character portrayed in a film had Nazi leanings, or beat his wife, or something)

And , in the year after OscarSoWhite, well -- statements evidently needed to be made.

Still, from what Ive read, I'm sure that Moonlight is a fine movie and its like any other Oscar years. The nominated films are all great in some way, one just gets picked.

Anyhow, neither LLL nor Moonlight struck me as truly top-tier (they're top 20 not top 10 movies for me).

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Fair enough. You are a true cineaste, swanstep. Except I'm not sure if I REALLY know what that term means. Reading your comments has taken over for my reading of Pauline Kael and others who knew the depth and breadh of international film. I may not SEE these movies, but I will come to appreciate them, and to know of them.

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Here are the movies of 2016 I really loved:
1. The Lobster (the only perfect 2016 film in my view)
2. Toni Erdmann (close to perfect with some explosively comedic scenes; being remade with Jack Nicholson)


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Wow. I've been looking them up, maybe I'll see some.

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My problem nowadays is I don't see enough current movies, or enough GOOD current movies, to even make up a list.

Mine for 2016?

Hah.

The Magnificent Seven
The Nice Guys
Suicide Squad(first 2/3 only , and I know you hated it.)
and yes...La La Land.

All solely and only for entertainment value "a few steps up from programmers." With good movie stars, too. Think about it: the movies above landed Denzel, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Russell Crowe, Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Emma Stone, JK Simmons....if THEY were willing to be in those things, I guess its easier for me to profess liking them.

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I still can't reach a ten best even for my favorite years, but its easier to get a list going:

1959:

North by Northwest
Rio Bravo
Some Like It Hot
Anatomy of a Murder

1960:

Psycho
The Apartment
The Magnificent Seven
Spartacus
Ocean's Eleven

1962:

The Manchurian Candidate
The Music Man
Lonely are the Brave
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
How the West Was Won
To Kill a Mockingbird
Cape Fear
Hatari

1973

American Graffiti
The Sting
The Way We Were
Charley Varrick
The Paper Chase
Westworld
The Exorcist(grudgingly, for the way it took over my city, my friends, and the world)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

...see, its funny, even in "my favorite years" I can't quite cough up ten.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

A stray thought for La La Land with SPOILERS:

Some of the backlash against La La Land in the press as the Oscars got closer was driven by, I think, a New York Times article that indicated the film was about "white people problems" and suggesting that the characters weren't struggling all THAT much. (I think the article even said this about Manchester by the Sea!) Not to mention, the "ending" for one of them (Emma Stone) was wealth and fame and the worship of others which, let's face it, has always been a dark side of the Hollywood experience.

One "circular scene" brought this prominence for me:

Early in the film, Emma is a Starbucks-clone barista right there on the Warner Brothers lot. A "major female star "comes in and we get, in rapid sucession:

ONE: The store manager telling the star, "its on the house."
TWO: The star saying, "Oh no, I want to pay for it," and doing so.
THREE: Emma Stone, the lowly barista, both in awe of the major star and...one can figure...dreaming about becoming a major star herself.

By film's end, Emma Stone IS the star coming in to the coffee place, being offered the on the house, being worshipped by the barista...

And I felt: "Is this REALLY a happy ending?" It sort of felt "All About Eve-ish" to me, you know? That barista is possible young competition....

Its the conundrum of show business. We see how Emma suffers through a succession of heartless and humiliating auditions(for SIX YEARS, we are told) and finally...the breakthrough. And she IS talented. So doesn't she deserve all the wealth and fame and worship?

I suppose...but "La La Land" seems a bit rueful on the subject. To get that fame, she probably lost her true love(even as he wanted the fame for her) and once she becomes a Star, day to day human struggle is over for her.

I find my own feelings TOWARDS Hollywood creating a kind of envy/disgust, about these things actually, and I don't feel good about it, but there it is. Yes, they work hard to get there, and if they are talented, they deserve what they get and hey -- we DO worship them. But something seems a little unfair and painful about how they succeed and become Gods.

I don't necessarily think this is a "white people's problem" either, frankly. Many "stars of color"(African-American, Latino, Asian) have the same sudden ascent, and get the same worship. Think of the megamillionaires in the rap world, for instance(and I know that THEY get their movies and TV shows about their travails.)

---

Anyway, I have to say that the repeating "major star worshipped by minor barista" scenes in La La Land provided me with food for thought. From a nobody(but not really) to a God(but not really.) Is it fair? Is it good?

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I'm reminded of an anecdote about Hitchcock finding Eva Marie Saint pouring her own coffee into a Styrofoam cup on the set of North by Northwest. Hitchcock grabbed the cup from Saint and admonished her:

"Miss Saint, you are one of the stars of this picture. You do NOT pour your own coffee. You ask to have it brought to you. And you do NOT drink from a Styrofoam cup. You have it brought in a china cup as I have provided."

Thus are "normal people" transformed into Egotistical Demanders (though I think Eva Marie kept on being as normal as possible.) As William Goldman wrote, "They're all crazy, but given how they are treated, its a wonder they aren't MORE crazy".)

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[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

Some of the backlash against La La Land in the press as the Oscars got closer was driven by, I think, a New York Times article that indicated the film was about "white people problems" and suggesting that the characters weren't struggling all THAT much. (I think the article even said this about Manchester by the Sea!) Not to mention, the "ending" for one of them (Emma Stone) was wealth and fame and the worship of others which, let's face it, has always been a dark side of the Hollywood experience.[/quote]

Yeah, these kinds of lines of objection (and relatedly scorn at Gosling's ideas about Jazz together with SNL-scorn at the pressure some people felt that they *had* to love LLL) probably did play a role in Moonlight's overtaking LLL at the end.

Something similar probably *almost* happened in the animation category: Zootopia came out early in 2016 and was the presumptive winner forever. During Oscar-season, however, I started to see various think-pieces attacking its central clever conceits and analogies. Most of these honestly read to me as the meanderings of people with too-much-time-on-their-hands/pages-to-fill. The more-anti-racist-than-thou tone of some of these critiques (like that of some of the critiques of LLL) is one of the few things that reliably triggers in me "maybe those Trump-voters had a point?" thoughts.

[quote]Thus are "normal people" transformed into Egotistical Demanders (though I think Eva Marie kept on being as normal as possible.) As William Goldman wrote, "They're all crazy, but given how they are treated, its a wonder they aren't MORE crazy".)[/quote]

Indeed. Similarly with sports stars who often grow up poor but know nothing but adulation in HS and College, *then* they suddenly get millions and millions of dollars overnight and truly national and world-wide (no escape) adulation in their early '20s. It's simply astonishing to me how *few* of them misbehave especially badly or get into real trouble.

[quote]Anyway, I have to say that the repeating "major star worshipped by minor barista" scenes in La La Land provided me with food for thought. From a nobody(but not really) to a God(but not really.) Is it fair? Is it good?


I think you are right that we're meant to feel the presence of All About Eve's ending with the barista repeat scene. Funny isn't it how those two great Best Picture contenders from 1950, Eve and Sunset Blvd, act like dark, Ecclesiastes-like truth-tellers for any subsequent show-biz tales? LLL didn't reference Sunset AFAIK, but on some level a dusty old mansion off Sunset has Emma's Mia character's name on it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago


Yeah, these kinds of lines of objection (and relatedly scorn at Gosling's ideas about Jazz together with SNL-scorn at the pressure some people felt that they *had* to love LLL) probably did play a role in Moonlight's overtaking LLL at the end.

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Gosling's side of the story -- the jazz side -- brought John Legend into the storyline and certainly dispelled the idea that this was a "white" movie, but it seems that the nature OF the storyline became controversial -- the white guy is clashing with the black guy over the purity of jazz?

I suppose it will be a sign of the times in film criticism that racial topics will become a filter.

Having just seen the new Kong movie, I was re-checking some reviews and found one from the NYT again bashing the film for casting Samuel L. Jackson as the mad military villain out to kill Kong, and two white people as Kong's saviors. Yeah, I guess so-- but a couple of years ago Jackson was the mad villain vs the white Brits in Kingsmen -- Samuel L. Jackson(like John Travolta and Robert DeNiro) is willing to take paychecks to play good guys and bad guys alike. Moreover, Jackson's villainy in Kong is as much affixed to being a military man as to being a black man. Oh, well.

--

Something similar probably *almost* happened in the animation category: Zootopia came out early in 2016 and was the presumptive winner forever. During Oscar-season, however, I started to see various think-pieces attacking its central clever conceits and analogies. Most of these honestly read to me as the meanderings of people with too-much-time-on-their-hands/pages-to-fill. The more-anti-racist-than-thou tone of some of these critiques (like that of some of the critiques of LLL) is one of the few things that reliably triggers in me "maybe those Trump-voters had a point?" thoughts.

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Well, sadly lines of demarcation have been drawn, moreso than in the last 20 years though certainly the 70's had an explosive rise of racially themed tales.

For me, the problem is with lazy critical thinking that automatically defaults to the same complaint. Roger Ebert used to drive me nuts by citing the same idealized "WWII movie with squad composed of a rich guy, an Italian, a country bumpkin, etc" -- when really, he'd only READ of such movies, and couldn't name them. It was a lazy critical trope used to quickly shoot down some modern movie he didn't like for its diversity casting.

We are in an era in which Denzel, Samuel L. Jackson, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx and others are major stars, with some lesser names making themselves known in films like 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight. I'd hardly say everything's fine,but in Hollywood, everyone's trying. (And if I missed some of the ladies in town, that probably reflects a bigger problem for Hollywood. )

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[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

Here are the movies of 2016 I really loved:
1. The Lobster (the only perfect 2016 film in my view)
2. Toni Erdmann (close to perfect with some explosively comedic scenes; being remade with Jack Nicholson)
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Wow. I've been looking them up, maybe I'll see some.[/quote]

I'm pretty sure you'll love both The Lobster and Toni Erdmann, ecarle. Points of reference for the former include Being John Malkovich (and other Charlie Kaufman films) and for the latter include About Schmidt (and other Alexander Payne films). These are *very* pleasurable films!

[quote]The Magnificent Seven
The Nice Guys
Suicide Squad[/quote]

Yeah, The Nice Guys is pretty great. Relaxed star-driven action-humor is very hard to pull of, and TNG does so. Having only recently got around to seeing most of Shane Black's previous action-comedies I think I appreciate TNG more now.

[quote]1973
American Graffiti
The Sting
The Way We Were
Charley Varrick
The Paper Chase
Westworld
The Exorcist(grudgingly, for the way it took over my city, my friends, and the world)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid


What a year 1973 is?! My picks for the years are:
Mean Streets
Badlands
Exorcist
O Lucky Man
Don't Look Now
The Sting
The Last Detail
Amarcord
Long Goodbye
Scarecrow
The Spirit Of The Beehive

which doesn't overlap with your list that much.... The point is, however, that like other years in that 1971-1975 corridor, 1973 is overflowing with riches, with films that are not only great but that would set other filmmakers agendas for years to come.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

1. The Lobster (the only perfect 2016 film in my view)
2. Toni Erdmann (close to perfect with some explosively comedic scenes; being remade with Jack Nicholson)
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Wow. I've been looking them up, maybe I'll see some.[/quote]

I'm pretty sure you'll love both The Lobster and Toni Erdmann, ecarle. Points of reference for the former include Being John Malkovich (and other Charlie Kaufman films) and for the latter include About Schmidt (and other Alexander Payne films). These are *very* pleasurable films!

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I read reviews of both The Lobster and Toni Erdmann, and both seemed "up my alley." As I've noted recently, my ability to get out to the art houses as I used to(honestly, particularly in the 70s and the 90's) has diminished. I will likely rent both of those.

Toni Erdmann in particular has become such a big deal, critic's wise. And that it has brought Mr. Nicholson out of retirement after a ten-year hiatus is pretty impressive to me. He's definitely one of my favorite stars of all time, and I'd pretty much figured he'd joined Gene Hackman and Sean Connery in simply disappearing on us.

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The Magnificent Seven
The Nice Guys
Suicide Squad[/quote]

Yeah, The Nice Guys is pretty great. Relaxed star-driven action-humor is very hard to pull of, and TNG does so.

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My little bitty favorites of 2016 list reflects perhaps one thing only: being entertained "above the usual." It was good to see the young new star Ryan Gosling(who seems to be in every other movie released now -- I just saw him in a trailer for Blade Runner 2 with Aged Harrison Ford) paired with a somewhat tarnished older star (Russell Crowe) with both men relaxed as a pair and individually.

As for The Mag 7, they WERE a Mag 7, the seasoned older star(Denzel) matched with the hot new star(Chris Pratt) and some other good actors along, in a script with just enough of the original in it for nostalgia's sake and two great gunfight sequences.

--

Having only recently got around to seeing most of Shane Black's previous action-comedies I think I appreciate TNG more now.

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I can't recall: You like 'em, or not? Lethal Weapon(the original only for Black) is the famous hit; Last Boy Scout the famous flop; Kiss Kiss Bang Bang the offbeat comeback. Buddy movies, all, and Lethal Weapon is very much of the 80's. (Trivia: Black's script for "Lethal Weapon" was original called "The Nice Guys." I guess its like The First Frenzy, except it got made.)

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[quote]1973
American Graffiti
The Sting
The Way We Were
Charley Varrick
The Paper Chase
Westworld
The Exorcist(grudgingly, for the way it took over my city, my friends, and the world)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid


What a year 1973 is?!

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It was incredible to live through(and to read about, with the movies I DIDN'T see), and it looks even more incredible now.

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My picks for the years are:
Mean Streets
Badlands
Exorcist
O Lucky Man
Don't Look Now
The Sting
The Last Detail
Amarcord
Long Goodbye
Scarecrow
The Spirit Of The Beehive
----
which doesn't overlap with your list that much....
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There's a few on your list I forgot about and loved: The Long Goodbye, The Last Detail, and Scarecrow.

Mean Streets was a big deal in the critical columns, but it took me years to see it, and now it looks a bit too "rough sketch seminal" versus Scorsese's later work. Still -- 1973 was Scorsese's launch year. He's still here.

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Also Don't Look Now, for a true Psycho shocker finale and That Scene(the sex scene; remember I'm in favor of more of same.) And I recall the narration for the trailer: "Paramount has brought you the classics of horror Psycho in the 50's and Rosemary's Baby in the 60's. Now comes Don't Look Now for the 70s!" Sneaky how they slipped in Psycho as a fifties film. Yes, it kind of is("The sixties" don't start til JFK dies and the Beatles hit Sullivan) , but on the other hand, Psycho was definitely INTENDED to start the sixties. However, it was written and partially filmed in 1959.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The point is, however, that like other years in that 1971-1975 corridor,

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Interesting focus, there, swanstep. Makes sense, though. 1970 was a bit of a wobbly year, with the 60's movies sort of dying out and movies like Patton and Airport not quite feeling new enough or good enough as classics. 1971 had all that sex and violence(Clockwork, Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, French Connection) which flowed into 1972(Deliverance, Frenzy, The Godfather.)

1973 was a bit more electic and less "sick." 1974 was "The Downer Deluxe Year(Everybody Loses, Unhappy Endings Galore -- Chinatown, The Parallax View, Godfather II, The Gambler, even I would say, the partial loser endings of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Longest Yard, in which death and/or life in prison await key characters) and 1975 had a megahit(Jaws) that wasn't quite the feelgood movie that blockbusters to come would be(The Town Establishment is corrupt and good people die horrible deaths), and that rather anchored the summer whilst Cuckoo's Nest came along in the Oscar winter to cover THAT base.



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1973 is overflowing with riches, with films that are not only great but that would set other filmmakers agendas for years to come.

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Yep. And here's two more:

Sleeper. Woody Allen nears the end of his "early funny period" with some Keaton/Chaplin slapstick set 200 years in the future, with a Dixieland jazz score. I wasn't crazy about this, but it seemed everybody else was. (Love and Death in 1975 would be much funnier to me.)

Day for Night. In Hitchcock/Truffaut, Truffaut tells Hitch he wanted to make a movie about the comic travails of making a movie. Here it is. (Hitch told Truffaut he wanted to make a film about food, from fresh vegatables to sewage; that sorta became Frenzy.)

I DEFINITELY wasn't seeing foreign films in the early seventies, but I made a point to go out and find Day for Night. I remember loving it.

Though I count American Graffiti as my favorite of 1973(for personal reasons I once outlined, but won't again), I think it was the one-two nostalgia punch of The Way We Were and The Sting that I will remember most from 1973. Robert Redford became, conclusively, a superstar. He was truly great opposite Streisand in The Way We Were(a movie that really moved me) and then had fun opposite Newman(again) in The Sting. Those two star vehicles suffused the fall into Xmas of 1973 with great emotion and joy for me that year, and I think they will be what I remember most "at the movies" of that year.

And "Frenzy" got a re-release in 1973, too(in the fall, with Eastwood's "Breezy"; I called them the "-zy' double bill.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Thus are "normal people" transformed into Egotistical Demanders (though I think Eva Marie kept on being as normal as possible.) As William Goldman wrote, "They're all crazy, but given how they are treated, its a wonder they aren't MORE crazy".)[/quote]

Indeed. Similarly with sports stars who often grow up poor but know nothing but adulation in HS and College, *then* they suddenly get millions and millions of dollars overnight and truly national and world-wide (no escape) adulation in their early '20s. It's simply astonishing to me how *few* of them misbehave especially badly or get into real trouble.

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Maybe sports stars have a greater sense of their own worth, and a greater knowledge of how hard they work(even the "natural talents") at doing what they do. A lot of them had great, "hands on " parents, too. They are also aware how quickly a lapse in their physical prowess(from drugs or over-eating or sexual fatigue) can ruin their careers.

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[quote]Anyway, I have to say that the repeating "major star worshipped by minor barista" scenes in La La Land provided me with food for thought. From a nobody(but not really) to a God(but not really.) Is it fair? Is it good?


I think you are right that we're meant to feel the presence of All About Eve's ending with the barista repeat scene. Funny isn't it how those two great Best Picture contenders from 1950, Eve and Sunset Blvd, act like dark, Ecclesiastes-like truth-tellers for any subsequent show-biz tales?

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That's a great point. "The Movie Gods" seemed to take pleasure in pairing those movies up in 1950, with one telling the Hollywood version and one telling the Broadway version, but BOTH telling the same cautionary tale about the rise to Godlike status, the people stepped on to get there, and the (inevitable?) fall.

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LLL didn't reference Sunset AFAIK, but on some level a dusty old mansion off Sunset has Emma's Mia character's name on it

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A cogent point. I suppose ANY movie star can run that risk, but its tougher for female stars, boththen(think Feud) and somewhat, now(Sharon Stone and Halle Berry come to mind as gorgeous women who hit certain heights of stardom and then came back to earth with a crash.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

MORE

The business of Stone's character becoming such a major star(as she now is in real life) DID trouble me in La La Land.

I'll raise a sensitive point that the South Park guys raised about their resentment for famous people in Hollywood taking certain political stands. One of these guys (who hit their own multimillion dollar paydirt and hence knew the town) contended that since he knew a lot of Hollywood people as "addicted to drugs and hookers," they had no business advising anybody on anything.

But then he took the additional nasty step of saying "its worst with actors. Unlike musicians who have to learn an instrument or can sing, actors just recite lines and look good; they do something that half of America could do in their sleep."

Oh,maybe yes, maybe no. Take a look at all the "regular people" re-enacting scenes from Psycho and other famous movies on YouTube and you will see: movie stardom, whatever it is, IS special. And good acting is always something more rare than it looks.

Certainly not everyone looks like Warren Beatty and Robert Redford(in their prime) or Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds today. And to go with the facial genetics, the men and women of Hollywood have to stay thin and fit and well-muscled. That's HARD.

Moreover, for those actors whose looks DIDN'T get them their careers(Spencer Tracy, Walter Matthau, Gene Hackman...arguably Samuel L. Jackson) they had other special qualities(voice, timing, presence, etc.) Women seemed to need beauty to make it more than men, but eventually Glenda Jackson, Ellen Burstyn and, yes, Meryl Streep sold their talent aside from gorgeous looks.

So, anyway, I think stars SOMEWHAT earn their huge salaries, and that's just the way life works. I recall LA Times critic Charles Champlin writing of Steve McQueen's commanding and charismatic work in (of all things) "The Towering Inferno": "McQueen proves why he deserves every penny of the multi-million salary he commands, the whole movie comes to life with him." (Hey, Chuck, what about Newman?)

What's funny is, I think I'm most partial to writers and directors as deserving whatever spectacular wealth they got: Hitchcock deserved it in exchange for the lifetime memories he gave us of Psycho and North by Northwest and 50 more(plus that TV show); Larry David deserves it for the ace cynical comedy of "Seinfeld" and his smaller-scale "Curb Your Enthusiasm." QT deserves it for revolutionizing great talk and bloody violence with "Pulp Fiction" (the classic that Reservoir Dogs was not) and creating a cult in follow-up. Etc.

Some would say that Spielberg deserves it, but I'd say only for the movies from Duel to ET. Thereafter, he became a bit of a conglomerate and attached his name to too much movie and TV junk as a producer(though he certainly made a few fine movies after ET, but alternating with mediocre ones.)

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Anyway, I don't know. Rambling here. But those two barista scenes did "get to me." I just wasn't sure that Emma Stone truly deserved what she got at the end of that movie, or for that price.

At least Ryan Gosling could play the piano....

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[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

And think of all the 1973 movies neither of us have mentioned so far:

Friends of Eddie Coyle
Day For Night (Truffaut at his slickest, probably made Godard physically ill)
Serpico (Nobody's fave Lumet+Pacino combo but still v. good)
The Wicker Man (brilliant Shaffer script still gets picked over every year or two these days)
The Mother and The Whore (Cannes-winner - 3.5 hours of French political & sex chat - not for everyone, but a real landmark about the burning out of a whole generation's dreams of revolution in France)
Turkish Delight (an early Paul Verhoeven w/ Rutger Hauer as some kind of feral force of nature - has to be seen to be believed)
The Last of Sheila (kind of brilliant! a high point of my Edgar Wright list project)
High Plains Drifter (slender but awesome art-western)
Emperor of the North (superb macho Aldrich)
Jesus Christ Superstar (has its moments)
Sisters (De Palma arrives!)
Electra Glide in Blue
Scenes from a Marriage (Nobody's favorite Bergman but still very good)
Sleeper (pretty damn funny)
Papillon (Nobody's fave McQueen or Hoffman movie but the sort of grounded, gritty, on location movie we'd kill for these days!)
The Three Musketeers (Spritely crowdpleaser)
La Grande bouffe (at the limits of taste, 'people eat themselves' to death shocker that has to be seen to be believed)

In other words there are *well* over 30 films from 1973 that are worth anyone's time watching and that have been important in some way or other to how film has developed since. People have built whole careers around what they learned from Badlands, or what they learned from American Graffiti, or what they learned from The Exorcist, or what they learned from The Wicker Man, and so on. Guillermo Del Toro, for example, has made relatively minor variations of Spirit of The Beehive several times (and these are his best films!).

Put Innervisions, Dark Side, Houses of the Holy, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Let's Get It On on the stereo, and all hail 1973!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Holy tomoly...what a year!

Honestly, it puts modern movie times to shame. Sorry but it does.

About Papillon: Here was a best-selling novel I saw all on coffee tables all over the place, made into an "adventure" film with McQueen and Hoffman -- two VERY big stars. And...its really not much of an adventure film at all -- its pretty grim and dull and relentlessly true to its tale of a prisoner subjected to a lot of solitary confinement and torture. McQueen proved his acting chops here but...he just LOOKS great in the early scenes in the movie. You wanna see a movie star, people? Here he is! With Hoffman doing his damndest as a character star in full mousy-mode, to keep up.

Friends of Eddie Coyle is a good, gritty, East Coast crime story -- a good precursor to things like QT's work on the West Coast...and...The Sopranos.

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The music was a lot of fun, too.

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I recall a local, small-city critic(lacking in big city sophistication, but loaded with regular-guy heart) writing a rave review of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" in which he wrote something touching: "I feel myself blessed and lucky to be alive at the time when Steven Spielberg is making his movies."

Well, I think sometimes I feel myself blessed and lucky to have been alive to experience 1973. I was VERY lucky -- the draft and Vietnam didn't touch me, I'm sure it was a horrible year for others. But to have been there young and free and able to enjoy what that year had to give me in entertainment....very lucky indeed. It was exciting at the time, and it is a warm memory now.

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