Nick's Flick Picks: The Blog
Oscar Nomination Reactions
I didn't even set my alarm clock, woke up only five minutes before the announcements, dashed off the predictions that I abandoned last night, and proceeded to see how terribly I had mind-read the Academy. But this, in large part, was a good thing.HAPPILY:
* The New World for Best Cinematography! Mark those ballots now, people.
* I love years where they spread the wealth. Brokeback leads with eight, the fewest nods for a front-runner since American Beauty in '99. Also, the categories do not just slavishly mirror one another (even where they usually do, like between Art Direction and Costumes, or Picture and Film Editing).
* Terrence Howard gives me someone to root for solidly in Best Actor, but AMPAS didn't go overboard with a double-nod, as I thought they might (for his Supporting work in Crash)
* Only three nominees for Best Song! AMPAS knows a bum year when it happens, and they didn't even fall for the Mel Brooks stunt of scribbling off a new song... a cheat that worked for Chicago and, much worse, for Phantom.
* A big deal: no Editing nomination for the Best Picture front-runner, Brokeback Mountain, which I think is just as it should be. Way too little connecting material holding the film together as it continues, and in my mind, a Zulema-style smackdown to Ang Lee for switching editors. (The late, brilliant Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor are hard to argue with, but where's the loyalty? Was Tim Squyres just busy?)
* No Walk the Line for Best Picture! I didn't think this would happen anyway, but I'm still jazzed that it didn't.
* I had predicted the Capote and Munich Best Picture slots for Cinderella Man and The Constant Gardener, and not only do I think the Academy chose much the better films, they're actually my two faves in the lineup. (I'm surprised how pleased I'm feeling for the Munich crowd; that strange film has really lingered well with me.)
* No Shopgirl sneak attacks. (I was worried about Adapted Screenplay.)
* No Cheadle or Hoskins emptily taking up space in Supporting Actor.
* No overestimation of Narnia in the tech categories.
* Howl's Moving Castle over Chicken Little and Madagascar for Animated Film.
* Amy Adams keeps Junebug alive in popular film memory.
* Woody Allen can have his Screenplay nod for Match Point, but the Academy didn't fall for the myth of his resurgent abilities any more than that.
* Tech-group excitement over Geisha did not translate into any above-the-fold nominations. By contrast, Pride & Prejudice worked a little of its magic all over the place, from Actress to Art Direction to Original Score (though, sadly, no Screenplay nod).
TRAVESTIES:
* I'm still not over the exclusion of Grizzly Man, even though it dropped from competition over a month ago.
* Canonization of unremarkable acting: Giamatti, Phoenix, Dench, Gyllenhaal, Hurt
* The North Country gals are better than people who haven't seen the movie are likely to assume, but this still feels like excessive praise
* No New World for Art Direction, Costume Design, or Makeup? Um, okay.
* Indeed, the Makeup derby is absurd. Hayden was looking ragged in Star Wars, Episode III (more than necessary, I mean), Narnia wasn't all that accomplished... and Cinderella Man???
* Crash, a film I respected quite a lot when I saw it, has been souring lately in my memory, and all the nods, even though I predicted them, are for some reason damning it further in my mind. Gonna hafta rent that one again.
Labels: Awards 2005, Oscars
posted by NicksFlickPicks at 8:20 AM
16 comments
Zhang Ziyi is nominated for an NAACP 
I recently signed off as a 
The case of Best in Show is even odder to me, because it doesn't, like Burton's film, require any stylistic acclimation, and its comedy emerges much more through conventional means like one-liners and parodic personalities than, as in the Burton, through camp reenactment and sustained eccentricity. I read my original review of Best in Show now and, though I still wonder about the film's allegiance to mockumentary and am well aware of the jokes that don't score, I can't figure out what the hell I was being so stingy about. I probably quote Best in Show more often than any other movie I've seen, save three or four, but you wouldn't know it from my frugal little write-up. But I don't think I was just being a stick-in-the-mud. I am not a flip-flopper, though I might occasionally be blind and deaf. I can't believe how many of my favorite moments I didn't fully appreciate or even notice until the third or fourth go-round, like when John Michael Higgins' Scott looks at Jane Lynch's desperately primped dog handler Christy Cummings and expertly sizes her up as looking "like a cocktail waitress on an oil rig," or Higgins and Michael McKean having the world's most politely submerged argument about over-packing a suitcase, or Catherine O'Hara's perplexed look at husband Eugene Levy when he tries to avert a credit-card disaster by paying with traveler's checks, even though they don't have any.
Hurl a stone in a contemporary movieplex and you're bound to hit some screen where a passel or fleet of Los Angelenos fumble their way toward self-consciousness, corraled by the freeways into smaller and smaller circles until we realize that they all already know each other. But Magnolia, in contrast to most of these movies, barely bothers to fix its locale as a worldly place, a place of real, waking lives. Magnolia, as wide and colorful as someone's bursting imagination, knocks its fluorescent scenes of kilowatted personal crises against one another, lighting faces so brightly that they pool with black shadows even bigger than personality, listing and tracking through hallways and suites and offices and conference rooms until the movie feels like a series of aftershocks. But they aren't tectonic aftershocks. They are psychic reverberations, prodigious ones, even in a movie whose off-kilter score, outsized characters, and rudimentary plot conflicts abolish any sense of realism. Is it too much to say the film derealizes psychology, even as it spelunks straight downward into its grottiest crevices—fathers who menace their daughters, sons who abjure their fathers, women trying to scale some terrible epiphanies just as they are dawning? Somehow, Anderson's baton-twirling virtuosity with his camera evaporates even more irony than it introduces, since the characters are, almost universally, experiencing their lives just as floridly as the film portrays them. Jason Robards' canker of angry loneliness, Julianne Moore's centrifugal self-dispersal, April Grace's surgical defrocking of Tom Cruise's panther pride (where is she now, when we most need her?), Jeremy Blackman's suffocation within his absorbent genius, Melinda Dillon's bitter medicine—these are all delectably reckless acting turns, a fine vintage of supporting performances packed into one robust buffet. But there's an idea inside all of this rococo reaching, because at least as I experience the movie, its tragic aspirations only work because of how, in the film's relentlessly forward and sideways velocity, all of the most extreme emotional states get windshield-wipered by all the other ones. No one's breakdown stands in much relief from anyone else's, and California, America, the now, they all become a pop-art collage of interchangeable secrets and miseries—the source, too, of all the vividness and life in the movie, so we're never less than thankful for them. Anderson doesn't add these figures into any polemical sum, just one film's picture of the way things are, possessed of rather less variety than the sprawling cast and shifting style imply. Amidst all of this, the song (you know) and the frogs (you know) feel much less incongruous than the movie's two hints of connection: a stammering policeman's date with an addict and, even more miraculously, a relay of awkward telephone calls that succeeds against all odds at locating the person it seeks. Amazingly, John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman, two congenital over-actors, have finally found this least likely of movies in which to rein it all in and offer compelling, affecting snapshots of the normal. Threshold of revelation!
'Tis the winter of my discontent, as I look out on yon cinematic horizon and see... nothing. My life has taken a turn for the science-fictional. How can it be that I am so utterly un-compelled to see anything that's out, or coming out? Of course, then I remember that this happens every year around this time.
But let's not bury the lead: Bullets Over Broadway lives, sparkles, even jubilates because of its dialogue and its performances. Why does it feel a little embarrassing to say so? Perhaps mainstream film criticism places such exclusive emphasis on words, story, acting, and character that it feels almost regressive to praise a movie so roundly in those terms. But there it is, and happily so. The narrative conceit of David Shayne's turgidly sub-O'Neill script, God of Our Fathers, is brilliantly borne out by such believably lumpen lines as "The days blend together like melted celluloid, like a film whose images become distorted and meaningless"—a line, in fact, that wouldn't feel at all out of place amid the strenuous solipsisms of 
More likely than not, if you read this blog, you know this woman, which—when you consider the 6 billion people in the world you could have met in her stead—is a major stroke of good luck. Some of you do not know this woman, and that is something you should really get working on. Either way, I want to see the Comments section get burned up today. Consider it your own private donation to Nick's Flick Picks (again, that stands for Not For Profit), a tiny tithe that I extract every few months in exchange for any scrap of pleasure you find or have ever found on this website.
She gives herself no credit for being beautiful, but she is, as is so manifestly clear in photos like this one (my favorite). I don't remember ever seeing her dressed this way, but something about the frontways Hurston-tilt of the hat, the radiant grin, the mischievous twinkle, the lovely indigo color of the blouse, the fact that you wonder what's in the locket, the fact that she is so obviously happy to be sitting on someone's floor (because none of us own enough furniture to sit on, and we're used to this, and who are we kidding, it's fun)... all of this captures how terrifically vivacious she is, how unexpected and memorable her humor is. The longer you look at the picture, you realize with a start that apparently, some graduate student in the tundra of Ithaca actually succeeded in keeping a plant alive in their apartment, and you can't but credit Her with some of this achievement. She is photosynthetic.
Why am I up so late? Because, mere days before the semester starts, I am in the classic mudhole of making last-minute but drastic revisions to syllabi that I thought I had finished weeks and in one case months ago. I think all the changes will help—I'm mostly pruning, to keep viewing and reading loads more manageable—but I'm also driving myself crazy, and there's gotta be a better balance.
The first shot of the film finds Claudine and her bumptious brood crossing a street, an image that will repeat at the film's conclusion with only one major change, which is either momentous or negligible depending on whether you favor a personal or a structural view of the film—an impossible choice, everywhere precluded. Claudine and Roop meet at work, though he works for the city and she for a family, and so nothing happening between them is happening on their own turf. Work keeps her from arriving on time to their first date, which begins in her own home, where she has to hide appliances and amenities from the surveilling eye of the Welfare Office case worker, who hears about Roop from Claudine's neighbors, whom we never meet because she never has any time to interact with them, because she's off working the job that the case worker also mustn't discover, in order to feed the kids who phone her incessantly on her first night in Roop's bedroom, which is no less permeable to espionage and intrusion than Claudine's bustling pad. Claudine doesn't keep this all in balance so much as she bends and flexes impressively to hit back as many of the balls as she can, and just as impressively throws her racket and stomps her foot when she knows she's losing a set. Meanwhile, she can't get away from her kids when she wants to but also can't find them when she wants to. Her eldest son Charles is absorbing himself in militant youth politics that the film ribs without dismissing. He swears that if Claudine really loved him, she would have killed him, in the manner of murderously protective slave mothers about whom he has heard, and yet his garbled, comically judgmental anger stems from evident and ubiquitous sources. Her eldest daughter Charlene all but draws knives on Roop when he comes a'courting, but later finds herself tearfully defending the achievements and battered honor of black men, when her unplanned pregnancy riles Claudine to majestic, literally violent fury ("I guess it's a shame you didn't get knocked up by Frederick Douglass!"). The film switches tones and registers on a dime, over and over and over again. Its candor in matters social, sexual, and political, just like its expressively bright color palette, is like an icy splash of river water, even though the film is as inveterately urban as a Spike Lee joint, and defiantly proud of its own dirt.
Dream of Light is a Spanish film. Its original title, El Sol del Membrillo, translates more directly as "The Sun of the Quince Tree," and several prints name the film as The Quince Tree Sun. Only in America, as far as I know, was the film released as Dream of Light, and this confusion over titles both augments and reflects how elusive and ephemeral the movie is. Tracking it down, looking it up, even invoking it in conversation is a serpentine process, a series of choices that circle the film instead of leading right to it. The subject of the film, also deceptively simple, is the languid, patient process by which the painter Antonio López Garcia commits the image of a quince tree to his canvas. The process of painting, the interplay it requires between eye and mind, its status as a dynamic rather than a static art, was never really clear to me before I saw this movie. That López Garcia labors over a still-life of a tree, not a Pollock eruption or a Bacon abjection or a series of Van Gogh swirls, only enhances the revelation. His eye measures the tree and its bounty of leaves and fruit each hour of each day, so attentively that the viewer gradually shares in this observant acuity, if only for 135 minutes, and with greater and greater admiration for how López Garcia, aided by mundane tools and scrupulous geometrics, translates such seeing into a new, existing object. At least cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, who achieved international fame a decade later with The Others and Talk to Her, has got the jump on us here, judging and rendering López Garcia's world with a comparable grace and luminescence.
So almost every other blog I know and love makes some effort to clue you in to some good tunes, or at least to what's most recently been hooking the blogger. I really am trying to branch out a little in my music-listening, though none of that is really reflected in my first sidebar batch of iTunes links. Mary J. Blige's 
I'm about two weeks late, but while I was in Virginia, I did in fact revise my other 
Nothing about Mask is ostentatious, which is particularly remarkable given that it draws on so many tropes that typically embroil Hollywood productions in a tar-pit of tonal trouble: a socially ostracized protagonist, a lower-working-class milieu, a female lead who is "brassy" and "no-nonsense," explorations of teen romance and adult alcoholism, necessarily conspicuous prosthetic make-up, and a foretold trajectory into early death. Somehow, despite the boneyard of palpably phony movies that ventured into these same territories—several of them major Oscar winners—Mask feels true and naturalistic, give or take the bathetic accents of a mute acquaintance who achieves language at a climactic moment. Eric Stoltz and Cher, as the cranially disfigured Rocky Dennis and the mother who both champions him and cuts him zero slack, are such confident and open performers that they forbid the film from drifting into histrionics. Their house is believable. Their quarrels are believable. One of Mask's quiet but marvelous scenes follows Stoltz's Rocky as he follows his mom around the house, reciting to her a poem he has written in school, and for which he has been praised. It sure doesn't hurt that the poem, written by the real Rocky Dennis, is, like much of the movie, a marvelously minimalist piece of work—unforgettable, I suspect, to anyone who's seen the movie. What's most memorable about the scene, though, is how Cher seems so casually indifferent to the poem and to her son, and how Stoltz keeps reciting as though her evident preoccupation doesn't bother him. A simple scenario, played out in daily lives all the time, but seldom realized on-screen, particularly given the usual Hollywood stranglehold that characters must at all times be either 100% appealing or, temporarily, 100% unappealing, at which point the film's job is to strenuously redeem them. Here, too, Mask is modestly exceptional: when Rusty and Rocky fight, their reconciliations are not perfect; Cher's embodiment of brave, protective motherhood stays in the same general temperature range as her scenes of negligent and cruel motherhood; and as the film progresses and martyrdom approaches, Rocky actually becomes less easily "likable," his disappointments and frustrations souring his personality in a wholly plausible way.
...on the occasion of the 
It is symptomatic of my dyspepsia about this year's awards season that all of my favorite Globes moments came from the TV actors. Two of them came from Geena Davis alone: reminding us what a knockout she often managed to be at these kinds of affairs, especially in bright red, and hooking the whole audience with that hilarious bit of apocrypha in her acceptance speech. It suddenly didn't matter that the two episodes of Commander in Chief I have seen have been so tepid and milky, not least because the writers seem so scared of fully realizing Davis' character and because she hasn't done much to raise the game of her own accord. I loved when Sandra Oh, looking like a million bucks for the second year running, described the nervous rush of the winning instant—"I feel like someone just set me on fire!"—and I loved that S. Epatha Merkerson, virtually alone among repeat Globe- and Emmy-winners (or Globe- and Oscar-winners) managed to give two distinct speeches that were both funny, warm, and sincere: "I am 53 years old, and this was my first lead in a film," she semi-tearfully confessed, before adding, "and if I weren't in the middle of a major hot flash, I would have something to say about that." Merkerson also had, in Jesse L. Martin, the dreamiest date of the evening.
Okay, so I'm officially back in Hartford after a month away. There is nothing in my fridge or pantry, there is next-to-nothing in my checking account, and there are only five days before the next semester gallops apace. How is any of this possible?
In other news, I found Duncan Tucker's Transamerica to be a rather winning experience, without too much of the mushy sentiment that adheres to adjectives like "winning." The actors are good, even when creaky story-motivations require some surmounting, and the pressure to affirm the heroism of the protagonist or to simplify the perspectives of the people who surround her is much less than this kind of movie often demands. Moving down the ladder of value, Merchant-Ivory's The White Countess boasts a very strong performance by Ralph Fiennes, a bewitching sound mix, a typically good score by Richard Robbins, and a preposterous screenplay that keeps threatening to sink the whole thing. If Ivory had directed the verbal repetitions, stock figures, and clunky social collage so that they felt more purposefully irreal—as in some of screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro's more dreamlike novels, like The Unconsoled—then things might have hung together. Unhappily, The White Countess starts as a polished film with quaintly banal notions of history, before lowering itself into the truly unpardonable dialogues and contrivances of its finish.
With apologies to Raymond Carver, and to any of you reading, my wee but loyal party of chums. I am neither a) dead, b) near-dead, c) undead, nor d) 
Finally, I'm a little over 100 pages into Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and on balance, I'm really enjoying it. I am not much buying the dialogue that issues forth from any of the younger characters, and the Howards End parallels often feel too forced; the transliteration of Leonard Bast's unintentionally nicked umbrella into a brief wrangle over swapped Discmans creaks like a poor transmission. But there's wonderful and quite funny narration throughout, the unfolding of extra- and intra-marital intrigue is succulently paced, and as much as it irks me that novels about academia are almost inevitably satires (does no one really believe in it anymore?), Smith's comic observations are trenchant and specific instead of just twee. She's particularly good at the absurd frictions between intellectual solipsism and the worlds outside that tower: "The flight from the rational, which was everywhere in evidence in the new century, none of it had surprised Howard as it had surprised others, but each new example he came across—on the television, in the street, and now in this young man—weakened him somehow. His desire to be involved in the argument, in the culture, fell off. The energy to fight the philistines, this is what fades."
