Oscar Nominations The Practical Best Picture

Oscar Nominations: A Practical Look at Best Picture

Best Picture

• “The Artist” Thomas Langmann, Producer
• “The Descendants” Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Producers
• “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” Scott Rudin, Producer
• “The Help” Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, Producers
• “Hugo” Graham King and Martin Scorsese, Producers
• “Midnight in Paris” Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, Producers
• “Moneyball” Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, Producers
• “The Tree of Life” Nominees to be determined
• “War Horse“ Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers

When I sat down to cover this event of events I suddenly found myself transported back in time to 1970.  I am me as I am now, today, not the me I was then because I wasn’t born until March 9^th and since the awards took place on February 27^th, well you get the picture.  Frank Sinatra is on stage being Frank, old Blue Eyes as he is known, and he’s just announced Carry Grant.  The audience has been waiting in that anticipatory low tone humming a bunch of strangers make sitting elbow to elbow in the dark, and they immediately come to life in unanimous applause as Carry appears stage right (house left from our vantage point).  The camera cuts back to the theater as one by one people pop to their feet, the collective sound so much like the ocean or maybe a thousand thousand shards of confetti raining down on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.  Then I’m here, now, but it’s the future, February 26^th, at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California and Ryan Gosling is where Carry had been only a moment ago, crossing the stage in a smart tuxedo; traditional cut, bow tie, impeccable.  He stops with that boyish grin, charmer, then composure where you stand at these shows, and serious now, eyes tracking to the teleprompter for the speech I have written.

I observe.

The Help

Some films are required viewing for their technical brilliance and cinematic accomplishments, others capture the light just right and the beautiful imagery creates a world for our imagination where captivating characters embark on journeys of adventure, love, and triumph.  Some films take us to far away places; serve primary and secondary escape shuttles coming away from the failing mother ships of our lives.  Every now and again films give us pause, reward our daring, and enliven otherwise ordinary to bolster the human spirit against shared tragedy and personal understanding.  Sometimes those films are the same thing, or in place of grand landscapes they turn inward where they speak to the heart and all films truly live.  The Help is a challenging film that relies on the strength of commanding performances to elevate dramatic explorations of our dark, not-to-distant past.  Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard and Octavia Spencer are magnetic and clearly show great fortitude and poise.  Director Tate Taylor knows some of the cast from his earlier film (Pretty Ugly People) and was wise to enlist their talents here.  This is a return to fundamental filmmaking, to the power and grandeur of true character work that can be traced to the best films of any era, and with such striking honesty and heroic portrayals of everyday people we can’t help but embrace them, grow a little in our hearts and minds when the fine line between art and life is blurred for a little while.  You might not escape the troubles of your here and now in this film, your everyday, but through this film you have an opportunity for inward journeys where greater things happen all the time and we hope one day to have taken similar steps on our own.

War Horse

An incredible accomplishment that is everything it appears to be and quite honestly has as much to do with what we see on the screen as it does with what made it all possible.  The advertising campaign for War Horse was staggering and for all intent and purposes dwarfed the entire production budget for other films that were nominated.  But after all the commercials and ads have faded from view, all the critics have been silenced and you sit down where ever that might be to experience this film, you feel as though you’re invited into a world where all things are possible and a film about the life a horse named Joey is not only possible but necessary.  Once you embrace the fact that the protagonist is a four-legged war-horse the adventure of a lifetime ensues and before long you can’t help but root for him to make it home again.  The fact that Spielberg is able to accomplish so much through a myriad of technical, computer, puppetry and live action scene work with horses, people and more horses is reason enough to praise this movie even against your concerns it might not work.  Some have pointed out familiar problems found in the grand sense of the Spielberg universe – the heavy melodrama even though melodrama is not the heinous thing many critics slap it about with, the grand OK’ness that Spielberg requires perhaps to offset the abject atrocity he is so versed and well commands – yet all in all War Horse is the perfect metaphor of where we are in the world today.  A collective pessimism weighs heavy on films that set out to lift our spirits and we are so ready to resist the very idea of triumph that we get in the way of our own happiness of it.  War Horse is every bit the Spielberg film you would expect and perhaps much much more – the sort of big screen larger than life experience you’ve grown up with and truly need more than you know.  Read my full review of War Horse here.

The Descendants

There is little doubt this film will resonant with a broad spectrum of movie goers – from star George Clooney to the lush and fertile landscape beauty of Hawaii.  Filmmaker du jour Alexander Payne hopes to capitalize on his universally appealing brand of verisimilitude as much as Judd Apatow sells toilet bowl humor or Adam Sandler gives falling down stupid a sort of brand name marketability.  Payne is already a master storyteller with bankable Americana contributions and a sort of name-clout-recognition that has taken his peers much longer to achieve.  Payne returns to the family centered plot as in his Oscar-winning film Sideways, with the machinations of the dysfunctional ensemble and their struggles to, but never quite achieving, normal.  The Descendants contains the same dark undercurrent here, a husband facing his crumbling family after his wife suffers an accident.  We all want Clooney in this role as much as he makes the broken father endearing, attractive in that flawed boy-man personae he has built a Hollywood career on.  Sometimes we feel compelled to dislike films like this for their honesty, the mirror held too long so that we’ve seen too much of ourselves and our problems.  In this case Clooney invites us beyond what repels us and this gives his bumbling father figure Ralph more depth and complexity, more genuineness than Jack the spy (my review of The American  2010) or Ryan Bingham the perpetual traveler (my review of Up In The Air 2009) – here it feels as though Clooney and Payne had a conversation beforehand to talk about all the things he’s done before this, the successes and the failures, and they agreed to leave all that out.

The Artist  

It takes moments to understand why this film was chosen and perhaps less to appreciate it from the outset.  Though we think we have this one figured out, director Michel Hazanavicius embarks on a challenging undertaking in capturing the simple beauty of an era in transition – that is the chasm that threatened an entire industry when silent pictures gave way to what came to be known as “the talkies”.  The Artist is a striking portrait lovingly photographed and well constructed with such austere beauty and conviction that it is impossible to know whether you will enjoy it without screening it.  Some will discount the film as obvious “Oscar Bait” though to be honest, who doesn’t want the film they’ve nurtured for years to win, to make it the best it can be with the hope it will reach us so very far removed from the golden dreams and platinum halos of Hollywood?  Anyone who has ever held a camera or hit their mark, waited for the light to fall just right to capture a moment in all the moments of a movie – we can tell you that even as we dream of success we’re still fighting for every frame that it happens, that tiny spark, the magic that happens along the way.  If only people knew how hard a thing it is to reach this stage – even the hint of glory seems impossible.  The Artist will not be a film everyone will like but it will nevertheless be a film everyone should see.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

They tell you in film school to keep it simple and make it make sense – and at no better place is that rule most important than in the title.  If you think you know what this film is about you’re probably wrong, just like if you think you haven’t got a clue you might surprise yourself.  We will most likely return to the events of 9/11 much the way we do our wars, every so many years after the wounds have scabbed over, after our anger allows us to explore the hurtful things of our collective experiences through the cinema where all things can be made to bear some semblance of ourselves.  Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock are the stars fueling this tale of modern loss and the existential quandary of personal hurt contrasting our collective sorrows and how we get from the beginning and end of our lives.  Like The Help this too is a challenging film that touches a very open wound known around the world, a place that might not ever heal as we search for who we are and where we are like the answers found in movies.  This is a powerful story and one that feels awfully convenient come awards time but nonetheless a film that demands our attention even if for only two hours.

Hugo  

Scorsese and 3D.  It was inevitable, destined, and perhaps this film is not about an aging filmmaker desperately searching for relevancy in a medium that’s speeding a thousand miles faster than when he started.  Hugo has all the ingredients for blockbuster accomplishments, the story of children who take action because adults have lost their way, a magical place where our youth steal away to save their world and ours because they can’t wait any longer for us to do it.  It is difficult for a filmmaker like Scorsese to depart from the darker recesses of broken characters and damaged worlds, to put edges he’s honed for decades on children’s stories from the man who carved an imperfect De Niro from granite rock into a Raging Bull, made Harvey Keitel once and proud friend who would betray the King of the Jews for Last Temptation of Christ, then dug down deep in the mire of human obsession for Bickel the Taxi Driver, Goodfellas the princes of cool and calculated murders.  In an era of the half-blood prince, the lion, the witch and wardrobe, in grand the spectacle of children embarking on no children’s journey you or I have ever known, Scorsese knows that in order to raise the bar back to the place where he set it for all the right moves in character studies and story driven adventures, he’d have to bring technology front and center.  Grand for the sake of grand and now for the test of time.

Midnight in Paris  

A film that thinks too much to be entirely forthright, makes clever for the sake of gimmickry then talks too much to have something to say.  By the time you’ve committed yourself you realize you’ve gone beyond the point of no return – the point in a journey where it is further to turn around then continue on – and in the end you realize you’ve been told how to feel about most Woody Allen movies until now when you have every reason to disbelieve.  I still believe Allen’s best films are those he is not in – there, I said it – oh the cad!  As far as romantic comedies are concerned, the stuffy aristocrats of pompous wind and heady opinions, you’ll find plenty.  As far as humorous situational absurdity coupled with the improbable, there is all that.  I suppose the best advice is to dig right in but then again, you have to pay for what you eat and by the time you realize you don’t have enough money to pay for what’s missing, you begin manufacturing all sorts of things to cover it up so you might at least have a fond memory later.

Moneyball

If you live in the Bay Area it is like having the kid from down the street playing in the Super Bowl or driving the #1 car at the Indianapolis Speedway.  If you live anywhere else it might feel like a hometown movie or just another baseball movie, but Brad Pitt delivers a distinctly other performance here that will resonant for some and seem dialed well below necessary.  Jonah Hill was singled out for his performance in this film and it will really be up to you if it’s deserving.  Personally a film about baseball has only two possible outcomes – the team wins or the team loses.  In this case it’s obvious going in for anyone who watches the sport, being this is a historical snapshot of a moment in time, and for those who can read sports movies from the cheap seats.  The performances are effective, compelling at times, but selecting this film against all the other films that should have been picked is mostly just showing us the power and the effect of big names to make little movies matter.

Tree of Life

Terrence Malick is an enigma and much like the man his films rely entirely on the beauty of the universe and the sanguine moviegoer who wishes for more but is settled by less.  To suggest it would make sense to analyze a film that purports to defy structure, to scratch the screen for meaning in the meaningless would offer than the sum of the results.  If you like Malick or want to like him you’ll find enough in this film to carry you a decade until he makes another.  If you’re looking for a reason to like him or his films or want to like him, this film might not have the desired effect.  Maybe Sean Penn was right.

By the end of all the speechifying I realize I’m at the end of a very long Word document.  The cursor is popping on off and it dawns on me that I don’t ever really think about it blinking.  On|off, on|off.

Go ahead I think between blinks.  You have all the other nominations to write a speech for.  Who did you have in mind to deliver?

To be continued.

Sources:

http://oscar.go.com/

Check out Rodney’s coverage over at Fernby Films: http://www.fernbyfilms.com/2012/01/25/the-84th-academy-awards-nominations/

http://hamptonroads.com/2012/01/oscar-nominations-2012-hugo-artist-lead-oscars-list

http://popwatch.ew.com/2012/01/25/oscars-2012-factoids/

http://mubi.com/oscars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0Zijgn-c9w

Above The Line 2011 Year In Review

A mighty snappy glimpse back over Above The Line in 2011: The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared this report. Yeah it’s canned but still a good look-see:

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Hollywood’s Blockbuster Makes Victims of Us All

Hollywood’s Blockbuster: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In The Theater.

Over the last couple of years there’s been a steady upsurge in the number of big budget, high concept films fueled almost entirely on catchy, gimmick-ridden premises.  They flood the market with outrageous budgets and ridiculous scenarios that simply cannot hold the weight of their own water.  OK.  Enough water metaphors but clearly we’ve been submerged beneath the tide of expensive, bad movies far too long.  Too much is too much even though they continue to make money and we can’t seem to get enough comic book adaptations, video game ride franchises, remakes and prequels.  While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with spectacle, escapism for the sake of 90 minutes of non-stop devastation followed immediately with a rapid-fire wrap up so all the unknowns become known in four minutes so fifteen minutes of credits can scroll to an empty room.  Let’s face it, we all need our escape ships from the sinking mother ships of our lives, but now more than ever we’re seeing the same blueprint for movies that cost too much and don’t go anywhere, movies that are quite obviously thrown together for the sake of ‘product’ and we’re left paying too much for popcorn and nachos.  All  this Hollywood genuflecting and no one is complaining.  Why?  For some reason we’ve lowered our standards or maybe mediocre is enough or perhaps we just don’t care.  It’s not enough to say a movie was “OK” or “pretty good” or “entertaining”.  We shouldn’t have to resolve the fact that a franchise was just getting started so all the exposition and drawn out history lessons were important for the sake of the original comic book or just because Disney did it on a stone tablet we should keep on doing it the same for the sake of tradition.  We need to make a stand and start demanding more from the movie makers or scrap the whole lot of them and start over.

It used to be that blockbusters were smart, character driven and well thought out.  We embraced these behemoths because for all the grandeur and landscape epics there remained a solid foundation of story, and for all the archetypes and generalizations that fueled the characters they were also unique, charismatic and cavalier.  Indiana Jones with his hat and bullwhip, Princess Leia had Luke Skywalker and those spiral hair bob things and she could handle a weapon just as good or better than the boys.  Story was a starting place with a plot that developed over time, rewarded us with exciting stunts and amazing locations, explored familiar themes and projected curious scenarios about space, afterlife, greed, avarice and the hereafter.  It wasn’t that long ago that these big films commanded our attention and we gladly became audiences all over the world based entirely on the quality of the experience not because of how many zeros were in the budget or box office receipts.  These films became part of the world lexicon and remain widely recognizable, celebrated, quoted, imitated and revered.  There’s a reason why Spielberg gets to make OK movies these days or Scorsese can make a movie as bad as Shutter Island and people still go see it.  There is a legacy of smart, sophisticated films like E.T., Close Encounters, Blade Runner, early Indiana Jones and the first couple of Matrix films.  At some point though, we started lowering our expectations and instead of every other film paying us for the price of admission it was every fourth or fifth film and we were paying for the occasional Iron Man or Sherlock Holmes scattered among really bad Adam Sandler films and everyday ordinary films based on painfully boring jobs like zookeepers and mall cops.  Then we were enticed with gross budgets, IMAX, 3D, and if we’re lucky we get an action toy with our hamburger and processed cheese theme meal.  Lethargic plots and thrown together stories are now the norm with films like Armageddon, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Source Code.  All of sudden the blockbusters of an entire generation are forgettable, laughable yet bankable.  In the end it is up to us to make the water safe again.  If Hollywood is the giant metal shark of our generation, of the now generation then one of us needs to pick up the badge, put on the hat and pick up a pair of those stylish 70s shades and become the Chief Martin Brody of today and put the bomb in the shark’s mouth.

No matter what you’re told or sold, convinced brilliance lives in convoluted interpretations of the reinvention of tired superheroes and comic book characters that were vastly better written and realized on paper, we can and must demand more than we’re getting from Hollywood.  OK isn’t OK when you’re paying for good.  A movie simply cannot be labeled a thriller or suspense if the sum of the plot is replaying the same 8 minute scene a dozen times as tiny, nearly imperceptible changes occur.  Making the climax of a film our realization that the whole film took place in the protagonist’s last minutes, that he was stuck somewhere in a vacuum chamber the whole time, that a secret shadow agency figured out how to keep him alive long enough to save the planet from exploding (Source Code) is not only ridiculous but insulting to the senses.  A film should not require the totality of dialog to serve the plot so as the audience can follow along (Inception) and when we are told that a beloved children’s book is the source material for a film that is an interpretation of that material rather than in the spirit of the original (Where The Wild Things Are) we must complain either in voice or by action and demand more from those we’ve elected with our ticket stubs to make our movies.  Plot is not akin to body count or devastated space stations or giant talking robotic cars and Tonka trucks throwing each other around along with some of the worst dialog ever written.  Sorry, it’s not.  We have to demand more from Hollywood or they’re going to keep shoveling us manure and laughing when we step in it and track it all over the carpets of our lives and spare them the stink.

War Horse (2011)

War Horse makes painterly use of nostalgia, elevates ordinary with pizzazz, saccharine and optimism.

War Horse (2011) is effective, entertaining and at times exceedingly sentimental, yet audiences and critics seem mostly upbeat and genuinely receptive since it opened on Christmas day.  In usual fashion the onslaught of award nods have choked early reviews, stifled objectivity in cases, and continue to blot newsprint and clutter social media margins in a flurry to capitalize on the hurried, the easily impressed, the glitz and romance of holiday-ness.  It’s true, Steven Spielberg is right at home in this coming of age story, champion of innocence and cartographer of home spun Americana – it’s difficult to miss-market innocence by way of a cocky colt dragging a plow to save the family farm or the stubborn boy fighting his way to manhood and war.  Spielberg is more than well versed on extravagant, big budget epics with expansive sets sprawling into the history books but this time he hasn’t enlisted star power to help him make the delivery.  Instead he’s fashioned an unusual combination of character narrators to connect a series of vignettes based on a children’s book and the subsequent adaptation for the theater.  War Horse chronicles the life and adventures of Albert and his horse Joey as they grow up together, face the pains of poverty then find themselves thrust apart into World War I where they face unspeakable atrocity with the hope of finding home and themselves again.  Being a Christmas release, PG-13 movie it’s clear you should put aside critical, embrace predictable and try to enjoy feel good twists, turns and trials along the way.

Spielberg handles the material with clear and purposeful choices, instilling the four-legged protagonist with wit and humor, character and charm – he is a master painter in coloring sunsets and farmhouses against a backdrop of war, in fueling the triumph of the underdog to best the horrors people wage against one another with war and politics.  Joey is at once our hero and needs little by way of trickery to connect with the audience.  Picturesque, painterly paced, a landscape of themes with as much attention to detail as any of his proceeding films, War Horse makes a point of slowing way down, taking Joey’s perspective early so that our connection with him sustains transitions from one vignette to the next.  For some the change in little stories might be a little distracting and for some the fact that Spielberg has dedicated most of the first act to character work might be too slow before the first explosion.  For others the character work will radiate, the story assembled nuances and calculated vignettes connected so that everyone is moving in the same direction.  The heavy lifting required to give us something to come home to his entrusted to seasoned character actors Emily Watson (mum Narracott) and David Thewlis (da Narracott).  While young Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvin) wears doe-eyed adolescence a bit thin he’s no less convincing and very confidently takes his charge to carry the first act and establish the cornerstone to the story.  This might be Albert’s story but it is Joey who makes it so and Spielberg wages everything on our willingness to go along for the ride.

Rich in detail, lovingly brought to life with specificity, it’s impossible to criticize Spielberg’s war time melodrama as anything less than entertaining.  Sure, you’re advised to remind yourself from time to time that you’re watching a PG13 story before the movie does, but there’s quite a lot to like about a Spielberg war and the special way he brings gutsy performances together.  Picking up with long time collaborator, veteran lens smith and multi-award winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report, Schindler’s List) the duo ensure elaborate set pieces and lengthy battle sequences fill the theater with devastation an awe, commanding the big screen and pushing sound and picture to full effect.  The war scenes are riveting, meticulous and sometimes too close for their own good – Spielberg emerges the viewer in the war to underscore the gritty realism with trademark zeal.  The scenes with Joey are thoughtful and emotive, touching a level of expression that would be hard not to connect with.  Spielberg goes to great lengths to ensure that a horse as the central character does not feel gimmicky, though it should be said you better embrace this aspect early.  Joey is much more than a tether line though, and provides a foundation upon which the entire film rests.  Joey transforms along with the characters who come in and out of his life, each affecting one another and passing on a little of their story in the process.  A glimpse behind the scenes reveals the extent to which live action, CGI, animatronics and a host of other technical achievements were employed to make all of this work.  Deep into the war there is a particularly powerful scene where a frightened Joey charges blindly through the battle field and ends up imprisoned in a web of barbed wire and the ensuing scenes where soldiers from either side unite to help him is not only a highlight in the film but incredibly poignant and moving.  If Spielberg stumbles at all here it is that he constantly tries to spin closure into optimism, wrapping loose ends together for the sake of well-being, for justification.  It’s easy to spot his sense need to punish bad people and help the underdog, to go too far to tidy things up instead of allowing them a certain amount of ambiguity and uncertainty.  Admittedly it’s a difficult balancing act, especially when working within the constraints of the MPAA’s PG13 rating system, to factor in life lessons and the intersection of morality and justice – just when you think escapism means you can leave all that stuff behind there it is.

If Spielberg fails at all it is that he often relies on rough cut archetypes with singular purposes and obvious contributions to flesh out his supporting characters.  These are the guys who arrive with the message from the front just in time on the horse that dies at the doorstep – or the soldier who helps the other soldier who will be sticking around cut barbed wire, exchange a smoke, leave some sentiment behind then disappear into the inky night, presumably the victim of war and circumstances.  The result is too much like the last time and they come across as uninspired, flat, plot devices alone.  It’s not always possible to give these characters enough time and space to do more, especially in a movie with a horse and horses to contend with, but leaving without a way into the center stage is unnecessary.  Here Spielberg moves Albert’s mother and father around like pawns, a place to land and take off from then nothing until it’s time to see the sun set one last time.  Then, rushing to complete one stage of the journey he brushes over bad guy soldiers and moments with individual soldiers that you can’t help but feel have a specific charge in the story and then they aren’t needed anymore.  Spielberg knows how it’s done and he’s done it all before – a good example can be found in Ralph Feinns as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List – on one side a monster capable of killing indiscriminately from the balcony of his house and on the other a man fighting deep-seated hatred and the Jewish woman prisoner he can’t help falling in love with.  This is powerful stuff for a relatively minor character – perhaps not exactly a supporting role but the effect is the same.  The more attention given the character rather than just the role they play, the plot device, the easier it is to accomplish a great deal more.  There I go wanting more from PG13 again.

If Spielberg makes any mistakes at all they are inherent first in his methodology.  His films function according to a set of rules based on romantic idealism.  Think of this as the universal truths that require bad guys to get their due, good times to ultimately triumph, the sun the rise the moon to glow bright white in the dark, dark night and from time and time things are simply wrapped up in a blanket that you can carry better out of the theater.  Lets think of it as a prescribed order of what must happen in order for the circle of life to be affirmed, not necessary bad or good but there, in capacity.  Spielberg makes the most of resolution, he resolves things to instill in the audience a feeling of optimism and well-being.  His films often pit good and evil against one another with the triumph of the underdog as center stage, part of the natural order of the universe insofar as happy endings are less about accomplishment as it is affirmation.  His films almost always take the form of the journey of the individual and the journey of the universe, clear paths forward with definable beginnings, middles and an end.  The end is fundamental.  But with all the absolutes popping off like fireworks and star bursts Spielberg succumbs to forced, to inevitable, to the dreaded ‘happy ever after’ ending.  But closure doesn’t have to mean a perfect circle and I get that he wants to elevate an overall sense of greatness in the world, warm hearted, elevated spirits, etc., etc.  Maybe he can’t help himself but wipe the tear streaked cheeks of the mother’s in his films as the sun is setting and her son returns unscathed from war (War Horse), or reunite a family scattered by an alien invasion (War of the Worlds) against all possibility that they would have survived.  In the end the corrupt official who has assumed Godhead must fall (Minority Report) so that a semblance of order is maintained.  Yet it is this very ‘semblance’ that is suspect when it posits unknowable destiny when in fact Spielberg’s defined order dictates good triumphs over evil, wrong is righted, no bad deed goes unpunished.  Maybe it is most important that optimism win out, that hope is the most valuable currency he shares with us because there are plenty of other films to leave you saddened, forlorn and uncertain about tomorrow.  The thing is, Spielberg starts to make heavy-handed choices in the name of achieving this romantic ideal with tidy solutions for otherwise untidy situations regardless of the necessity in wrapping the story up.   Granted none of these short comings detract any more than any of his films, but reveal a way in which Spielberg arrives at some of the same conclusions and problems with a mixed bag of successful and not so successful outcomes.  If War Horse happens to end well it is not for lack of the troubling ways in which we get there.

The best advice to anyone considering War Horse this time of year or any, is to check your heavy criticism at the door and embrace folly, allow silly to replace stern and no matter how much you want War Horse to be more or less it cannot be.  In a way, War Horse – an adapted work based on two other works, one a children’s book by Michael Morpurgo and the other the adapated play by Nick Stafford – is a product of today.  In a rush to meet the sort of carnage that fills a Michael Bay film (my review of Transformers here) or touch on the unthinkable psychological gore of a Saw film, perhaps Spielberg meanders a bit too much in the horror, makes room for repeat plays of the same sort of senseless violence and depravity for the sake of commentary; obviously he’s had an illustrative career with which to pose questions for decades, and maybe it’s OK that in the end he gets caught up in it all.  The war scenes are devastatingly beautiful and grotesque, the perfect blend of mud and blood, barbed wire and trenches hacked into deep dark earth like mazes stuffed with the living and the dead with little distinction between the two.  Some sentimentality weighs early, subsides, resurfaces again later perhaps when we least want it but secretly need it.  Hope is a funny thing, you end up looking for it even after you’ve told yourself you’ll feel better without it.  Then it appears for a second on the horizon as the sun is going down orange, quiet, mystifying and you need it more than anything in the world and it just feels right.  You have to remind yourself that this is every bit a packaged affair for Christmas day and Spielberg has a story to tell, stuff happens, big landscapes and emotional quiet, tears and gentle rewards expected, needed, delivered right next to the same kind of optimism that will carry you all the way home.

On a side note:

I found this in transit.  It’s a list of movies that were supposed to required viewing before Spielberg would let anyone work with him.  It turned out to be false but nevertheless interesting reading.

Red State (2011)

Red State is Kevin Smith’s first horror film and by the go of things probably his last.  Yes, a horror film, no big deal, not worth mentioning except that it’s from the same guy who made the Clerks franchise and Jay & Silent Bob and The Smodcast Network.  You’d think a guy who seems to have the whole packaging thing going on would have done another package but instead he’s gone astray, made a horror flick.  I suppose it would be as surprising as Michael Moore making an action movie or a romantic comedy with a happy ending. We’d watch the thing because you’d have to.  We all want to see our heroes crash and burn every so often just to remind us it’s not all cake and corn flakes but we’re right back there rooting and hollering when they get back up, make a million dollars, spend two weeks in all the press then screw up all over again.  It’s a circle.  It’s inevitable.  It’s why we care so damn much.

Red State is as much a gamble as it is anything else, a departure that stands a good chance of going too far from Kevin Smith land and alienating fans and followers or not far enough and audiences figure they’ve had enough Clerks reboots and choose the remake of Footloose instead.  Red State is curious enough though, simply because it’s Kevin Smith. Even when he’s doing something OK his films are entertaining, always local color variations on characters and scenarios that are both familiar – comforting in the way mom’s pancakes make you feel like everything is OK in the universe – and askew like you should care because it’s flawed, imperfect, just like us.  Smith has a knack for putting us in the middle of his films through dialogue – quick-wit and prickly, multi-purposed and well suited in the way Tarantino makes ordinary important but only for seconds at a time so as not to make it boring.  Smith is celebrated for his mundane sense of order, perfectly astute in adolescent rage against the machine wearing black t-shirts and face jewelry with skateboards at the mall (Mallrats) and discombobulated angels circumventing biblical laws for personal gain at the cost of the universe (Dogma).  Up until now Smith has mastered adventure-absurdity meets comedy-fantasy, but his decision to navigate a socially aware, critically conscious film about nefarious religion and institutionalized extremism without the requisite funny feels like the filmmaker drawing a line in the sand and daring us to cross it.

You cannot fully appreciate or properly ridicule Red State without screening it.  You could probably say that about most films, but in the case of Kevin Smith there is usually something, somewhere nestled in with all the crap that ends up with five minutes of rewarding; kinda like digging to the bottom of the Cracker Jack box to find that one half-burnt, caramelized kernel that’s not quite popped and not quite not-popped that’s equal amounts of salty and sweet and when you crack it between your teeth it feels like you can make it through one more bad movie.  In a Kevin Smith film it’s not about the Cracker Jack prize so much as everything else that is happening all around it and informing that tiny plastic prize, mass-produced-meaningless in China or Pakistan dreaming of the American dream.  But in order to fully appreciate Red State you must have a rudimentary experience with Kevin Smith.  If this is your first film, start with his third film, Mallrats (1995) and Jersey Girl (2004) if you haven’t seen anything else. Mallrats illustrates Smith’s ear for the natural rhythms and melodies of dialogue and the surgical precision by which he fashions minute detail and idiosyncrasies in his characters.  While Jersey Girl is a lesser film, heavily flawed and poorly received at the box office (boxofficemojo shows it maybe made a million dollars, rottentomatoes shows a %41 rating and metacritic waivers at 43 out of 100) it proves his ability to tell stories and create worlds with complicated characters; admittedly Jersey Girl is not a good film but it gives you a look at the filmmaker’s successes and failures and this can be more telling than by just watching the films that everyone else likes.  The only way to truly know a filmmaker without watching everything they have ever made (which is always preferred) is to employ this technique.  Trust me, it works.  In addition, if you haven’t been following his widely colorful side-life from his movies, there’s more than enough reason to google the man or just stumble over to the universe he created ‘View Askewniverse’ which is featured in several of his films, comics and spawned a television series; it’s also the name of his production company.

Red State begins with a couple of middle of the bottom, aimless adolescents staggering through everyday American squalor.  In order to pass time and quell their raging hormones, they connect up with a lonely older woman on an internet site that turns out to be a ruse for a fundamentalist religious group that plans to use them as sacrifices for their cause.  Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, the group attracts the attention of the local police and eventually the ATF which sets everything in motion for the rest of the story.  If you think you see things coming and can speculate as to the outcome of police and crazy religious compounds where people with issues live with an arsenal of weapons, you’re right. Kevin Smith doesn’t pretend to be original any more than he tries to hide the blatant similarities to just about every movie ever made on the subject.  John Goodman portrays the ATF agent in charge of the assault on the compound and while Goodman does what he can with the part it’s painfully obvious there simply isn’t enough for him to do. Michael Parks is clearly the standout actor involved, his performance of the David Koresh/Jim Jones/Joseph Smith inspired fanatical leader of the armed encampment is razor-sharp and he delivers his lines with convincing detail.  I can’t help but draw similarities to Chris Cooper’s performance in American Beauty as the confused but determined neighbor next door and the way he maximizes every expression and innuendo. Melissa Leo seems lost in her role, one-dimensional and ordinary.  Red State frequently under utilizes the amassed talent as many ensemble films do, for example Nolan’s The Dark Knight got the balance of the relationships wrong between the protagonist (Batman) and the antagonist (Joker). There are some cinematic conventions that are at the core of every film, structural elements related to the role of certain characters, such as the protagonist/antagonist, the three act structure and so on.  Some things can be tinkered with and by all rights there are others that cannot without jeopardizing the entire film.  Smith understands this but it appears that he got caught up in the message behind the film and this got in the way of him working out the particulars of character, story and consequences in the most effective way.

Image from Vanity Fair Article

Where Red State fails most spectacularly is with Smith’s reliance on the pulpit, literally and figuratively to make a statement about morality and extremism.  The issues are part of the story but for some reason Smith is compelled to make more out of them.  The entire film comes to an abrupt halt as the characters carry out lengthy conversations and debates about the issues that are not only awkward but unnecessary. Good stories engage us, they compel us to connect through emotionally endearing sentiments that we all belong to a shared past, present and future.  Good stories entertain us because they contain reflections of laughter, sadness and sentiments we understand or find truthful. Smith loses grasp of these fundamental principles and as a result we cannot commit to his story or care about his characters in a completely meaningful way because it all becomes so exaggerated and stylized.  If this was his intention I must say it was a bad choice.  The exposition is clunky and after all is said and done the film doesn’t really end, it’s as though the story is left out in the open as a way of suggesting the issues themselves are out in the open too.  If that is the case it might make sense but it ends up feeling like lazy writing or an inability to connect visual storytelling with dialogue, characters and themes.  I’m immediately reminded of Inception from Christopher Nolan and how his solution to convoluted visual storytelling was to chime in every five minutes with exposition to tell us what we’re watching, how we should feel, and what we should make of it never mind how annoying or distracting this is for audiences paying attention. There’s nothing wrong with complexity and breaking conventions, in side stepping traditional narrative storytelling but treating your audience as though they are automatically incapable of following along is as insulting as it is distracting.

The idea of putting all this stuff in your movie and forcing two controversial issues together to see what happens makes for the best kind of films, powerful stuff.  Alexander Payne’s 1996 movie Citizen Ruth with Laura Dern, about a drug addled malcontent who winds up pregnant and thrust into the maelstrom of the warring factions on either side of the abortion debate is good example of complex story telling with a message.  Citizen Ruth is vastly superior in the way it tells us something about the subject without resorting to exposition and blasé blasé monologues.  Red State eventually loses sight of story and the characters end up like pawns on either side of a chessboard that have a place in the game but little individual value.  On this basis there are strong performances here and there, the trademark Kevin Smith banter and chatty-Kathy conversations, characters with something to say and curious ways to say it.  Red State needs us to set aside our expectations and for some that’s easier than for others.

It’s unclear what’s up next for Kevin Smith.  He’s no stranger to lackluster films and disappointment at the box office.  He’s seen his share of negative reviews, critical opinions about his professional and personal life, yet he remains a filmmaker of interest and continues to expand his viewaskew universe. Red State is not his worst film but it clearly dims in comparison to previous accomplishments.  I’ve written here and elsewhere that it is hard to relegate films to a simple rating, to justly, accurately and effectively convey the overall ‘watchability’ of a movie with thumbs and stars, clapping hands and popcorn containers, numbers, signs and symbols or even movie stubs that read ‘miss it’ and ‘see it’ but we have to start someplace.