Tag: The Artist

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

Like “The Artist,” the spy spoof “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” is as wonderfully made as the movies it is spoofing.

OSS 117 Cairo Nest of Spies

After “The Artist” won five Oscars, it looked almost ridiculous that the goofy looking spy spoof “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” now had so much award bait pedigree. But you watch this charming and silly film and begin to realize what Michel Hazanivicius must have had in mind all along before making a silent film.

Most movies that parody just about anything riff on names, plot points, characters and once interesting ideas that have become clichéd. But “Nest of Spies” is an image-based spoof. It’s very attentive to what these films look like first and runs from there.

“The Pink Panther,” “Charade, “Austin Powers;” these are all movies that know their target well, but none of them are as well made or visually dynamic as their counterparts.

“Nest of Spies” is. The wacky plot and debonair hero are almost secondary to making the film look right first. Continue reading “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies”

2012 Oscars Recap

Image courtesy of guardian.co.uk and Getty Images

We love the movies. That’s why we watch the Oscars.

Did I mention that we love the movies? And did I mention that Billy Crystal loves the movies? Oh yeah, we love the movies, the old classic ones that aren’t all really classics, but some new ones too that definitely aren’t classics but people might actually recognize.

But rather than show you how much we love the movies with actual funny jokes or parodies, we’ll just tell you how much we love the movies and play it real safe all night. That way you’ll watch next year so long as you didn’t completely hate us, right? And how could you hate us when we all love the movies so much?

Sunday night’s Oscars were eye-rollingly mediocre, and part of the reason for that was an adamant position on not doing anything that might be too risky, too offensive or even too gaudily awful of a joke or skit that might alienate people from changing the channel. Continue reading “2012 Oscars Recap”

The Importance of Being Oscar

What will we say about 2011 as a year for movies when the potential Best Picture winner quite literally doesn’t say anything at all?

“The Artist” was once the controversial contender for Best Picture. Not since the first Oscars in 1927 had a silent film won, and it was doubtful this French crowd-pleaser would be the one to change that.

The narrative even fit the tumultuous Academy landscape with the lop-sided number of nominees and changing rules in other major categories.

Now however, ‘The Artist” seems like the safe bet, and in just a few weeks since the nominations, the race has lost its energy as obvious frontrunners make their way ever closer to the podium.

The Oscars remain the last important awards ceremony, but the movies nominated need to reflect their significance.

Consider for a moment that of all the films nominated for Best Picture, not one is a dark, feel-bad movie like “Drive,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” or “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

There is also only one film, “The Help,” which grossed over $100 million at the box office.

And of those, only “The Descendants” or “Moneyball” can be called 21st Century films.

There is still something to be said about a silent film winning Best Picture, namely that a movie, in this case a foreign film that would typically be Best Picture poison, can be universal.

But the problem is that “The Artist” will not inspire a wave of silent films from young, aspiring filmmakers. It may temporarily generate some fascination in the silent era, but the nostalgia of Michel Hazanivicius’s film, as well as the many other backwards-looking films in 2011, is fleeting.

If something like “The Tree of Life” could win, heads would really turn. Films like “No Country for Old Men,” “The Hurt Locker” and “The Lord of the Rings” are all masterpieces in their own ways, but Terrence Malick’s film carries with it the aura that still belongs to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Rarely is such an important film this close to being recognized as such by a populist voting body.

Short of ensuring that the best films always win, I’m struggling to think what the Oscars still need to do to remain relevant.

Many have criticized that the Oscars can seem like an old man’s club, and this year is no exception. The average age of the nominees in the Best Supporting Actor category is 62.6, and even the Best Director field is stacked with aging masters.

The Oscars could very easily slate younger if only they nominated Shailene Woodley, “Bridesmaids” or included performances by “The Muppets,” but part of what makes the Oscars special is that they are distinguished and made to be taken seriously. If the Oscars are anything, they are not the Grammys or the MTV Movie Awards.

There’s the thought to go back to five nominees, but even if nominating “Inception” and “Toy Story 3” meant little in terms of ratings, a changing, broader field of films has kept movies like “The Tree of Life,” “Bridesmaids,” “Tinker Tailor,” “Drive,” “Dragon Tattoo” and even “Harry Potter” or “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” in the conversation for long enough for them to actually be recognized.

Even if the nomination for “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” was infuriating, it at the very least created some buzz and actually got people out to see the damn thing.

Fixing the Oscars may not come easy, but it’s clear that something must be done to address the Oscars’ problems. They’re too important to just ignore.

Oscars 2012: Will Win (Part 2)

See my picks for the remaining categories along with analysis, here.

Movies are an art, not a science. And yet The Academy, save for a few eye rolling hiccups each year, operates like clockwork. Predicting the winners at the Oscars is as simple as playing the horses at the track, so here’s your betting form for the big race on Sunday night.

Best Picture

The Artist: 80%

I was once in the camp that a silent film, no matter how good, could never win Best Picture in 2012. But now my odds hardly reflect how one-sided this race has become. Even though it’s a French film, “The Artist” is universal. It’s a crowd-pleaser, a star-maker, and the only Best Picture nominee filmed in Los Angeles. From the Golden Globe to the Director’s Guild to the surprising BAFTA win, the question is not if “The Artist” will win but how many Oscars it will win.

Hugo: 8%

Actually trumping “The Artist” in nominations and taking its cinematic nostalgia trip one step further, “Hugo” and a sweep of technical awards may propel this film to a Best Picture win.

The Descendants: 7%

Be it “The Social Network” or “Up in the Air,” critics and Academy voters respond to the 21st Century darling of the year, and Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” is that film.

Midnight in Paris: 1.5%

The Help: 1%

The Tree of Life: 1%

Moneyball: .75%

War Horse: .5%

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: .25%

To address the remaining nominees, I don’t want to say they don’t stand a chance, but who am I kidding? If you had five nominees this year, your contenders outside of the top three would be “Midnight in Paris” and “The Help,” maybe “Moneyball.” So that says something for their chances. The other completely outside chance would be “The Tree of Life,” an important film that a number of critics have made a case for to win the Oscar based on how significant such a victory would seem in terms of cinema history. I don’t want to make any sort of case for “Extremely Loud,” but being here was its first big surprise, and winning could be its second. Continue reading “Oscars 2012: Will Win (Part 2)”

Oscars 2012: Will Win (Part 1)

See my remaining picks in the major categories here.

Movies are an art, not a science. And yet The Academy, save for a few eye rolling hiccups each year, operates like clockwork. Predicting the winners at the Oscars is as simple as playing the horses at the track, so here’s your betting form for the big race on Sunday night.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants: 40%

“The Descendants” is bound to win something, and because it’s a screenplay that greatly differs from the source material and comes from a director and screenwriter who hasn’t put out a movie in six years, it’s looking more and more certain.

Moneyball: 30%

“Moneyball” is a serious contender in this category for the way in which it adapts a fact based, nonfiction book into a story with likeable and pathos filled characters. It also comes from last year’s winner, Aaron Sorkin and other Oscar fave Steven Zallian.

Hugo: 20%

“Hugo” isn’t exactly a writer’s movie, but Brian Selznick’s children’s book is surprisingly rich and colorful, and somehow John Logan tops it.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: 5%

The Ides of March: 5% Continue reading “Oscars 2012: Will Win (Part 1)”

2012 Oscar Nominations Announced

“Hugo” and “The Artist” lead a field of nine films for the Best Picture Oscar after being announced by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Tuesday morning.

New rules for Best Picture voting indicated that anywhere from five to 10 films could be nominated, leaving the exact number uncertain until this morning when Academy President Tom Sherak and former nominee Jennifer Lawrence announced the full list of nominees.

The other Best Picture nominees included “The Descendants,” “Midnight in Paris,” “The Help,” “Moneyball,” “War Horse,” “The Tree of Life” and the long thought dead in the water “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”

The current Oscar frontrunner, the silent, black and white movie “The Artist,” took home 10 nominations, including for Best Director Michel Hazanivicius, Best Actor Jean Dujardin and Best Supporting Actress Berenice Bejo. Martin Scorsese’s children’s fantasy “Hugo” however made the race interesting by leading the pack with 11 nominations.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt found their long presumed spots in the Best Actor category, but fellow A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio was left out altogether in favor of Jean Dujardin, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s” Gary Oldman and “A Better Life’s” Demian Bichir. DiCaprio’s film “J. Edgar” was forgotten as well.

Also performing strongly was the comedy “Bridesmaids,” scoring a nomination for Melissa McCarthy for Best Supporting Actress and for Best Original Screenplay, despite not receiving a Best Picture nomination.

Meryl Streep received her record 17th Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” and she’ll be up against Michelle Williams, Viola Davis, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s” Rooney Mara and “Albert Nobbs’” Glenn Close.

The Academy surprised in many of the smaller categories as well, only nominating two songs from “The Muppets” and “Rio” for Best Original Song. What’s more, the Academy removed the Oscar powerhouse Pixar from contention by not nominating the poorly reviewed “Cars 2” for Best Animated Feature.

Iran’s “A Separation,” which is not only the front runner in the Best Foreign Language film category, is now also a serious contender in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.

The Academy Awards Ceremony will be held on Sunday February 26.

A full list of nominees is below: Continue reading “2012 Oscar Nominations Announced”

2012 Golden Globes Recap

“Ricky Gervais’s monologue is over, and we’ve heard all we need to about Jodie Foster’s Beaver. Can I stop watching the #goldenglobes now?”

So I tweeted roughly five minutes into the ceremony. I did watch the entire evening, and because they kept Gervais locked in a cupboard (or occupied at the bar) all night, it never reached that same level of amusement, but it at least did not sink to absolute wretchedness and languish the way last year’s Oscars did.

But what the evening lacked was a clear winner or any convincing surprises that would give us a deeper insight into the Oscars. Continue reading “2012 Golden Globes Recap”

The Artist

“The Artist” is a whimsical, crowd pleasing film that succeeds on its style and love of the movies, not its story, but for a modern silent film, that’s wonderful.

I should be thrilled “The Artist” is such a winning, fun crowd pleaser of a movie, despite being a silent, foreign film. This movie should be box office poison, and yet it’s whimsical and well made, despite an ultimately flimsy and familiar plot that makes it overrated as a Best Picture frontrunner. Continue reading “The Artist”

2012 Oscar Analysis Post Golden Globes Nominations

Here’s the state of the 2012 Oscar race following some surprises with the Golden Globe nominations.

So I kind of forgot the Golden Globes were a thing this year.

Each year the Globes and a few bloggers at Entertainment Weekly pretend it’s the only other awards ceremony after the Oscars that means something, and yet every year the nominations come out and thoroughly embarrass themselves with their shameless glorification of A-list driven pictures (I’m looking at you “The Tourist”) and moneymakers.

Instead, I’ve been greatly invested in the 2012 Oscar race but have not yet gotten an opportunity to write about them. Simply put, in a year that has been mediocre to weak to plain bad for movies, it has surprisingly led to the most interesting Oscar race in years in which no front runners, or even clear nominees for each category have truly presented themselves. And with the rule change in the Best Picture category from 10 nominees to God-knows-how-many, anything can happen.

And in looking at this year’s Golden Globes nominations that were announced Thursday morning, a few unexpected wrenches have been thrown into the race that have made everything that much more intriguing.

The real reason for this is that the Globes did not completely vomit in their own faces with their nominations this year. They awarded “The Artist,” a modern silent movie, with six nominations, the most of any film in the race. People assumed that even the Oscars might not get behind such a movie, and this says a lot.

In fact, “The Artist’s” nomination, amongst other nods, illustrates what sort of indicator the Golden Globes are for the Oscar nominees. Movies expected to be nominated for GGs that do doesn’t mean a thing in the Oscar race, and it only sometimes matters when movies expected to be nominated for GGs don’t. But Golden Globe surprises revitalize an Oscar campaign. It says, if this group of geniuses in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association look like they know what they’re talking about, what’s the Academy missing?

Best Picture Continue reading “2012 Oscar Analysis Post Golden Globes Nominations”

Debunking Silent Film Myths

Many silent films are considered old and dated despite a number of misconceptions and a lack of viewing options to watch all these classics.

The last and biggest hurdle to overcome to becoming a real lover of cinema is learning to appreciate silent films.

Stick enough violence or action in a movie and you can get anyone reading subtitles. Show them “Singin’ in the Rain” and they’ll be able to watch any musical ever made. Watch a movie timeless enough and you’ll forget that it’s in black and white.

But silent films are different. They’re a hard sell for a number of reasons, and there are a few myths and cultural problems to address before we notice a change.

Debunking silent film myths

Myth #1: Sound Movies are Better

The biggest misconception about film is that it was once seen as nothing more than a novelty, and only later did it become art.

Anyone who believes that transition happened between silents to talkies is wrong.

Of course sound and dialogue is a good thing. Movies would not be the same if we had been denied the clever dialogue of modern wordsmiths like the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin and more.

Rather, silent films hardly told stories the same way as talkies, even to the point that storytelling had to be reinvented with the introduction of sound.

But this form of silent storytelling was not primitive or inferior.

The best directors of the silent screen were gifted at telling a story through purely visual means, minimizing intertitles and composing moods through facial cues and striking shot placement.

Consider the chilling images of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” the cinematic ballet of any of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick, the mesmerizing first-ever montage of “The Battleship Potemkin” or the simple love story behind “Sunrise.”

I can’t think of more elegant, poetic or even easier ways of telling any of those stories, and I certainly can’t imagine how words would help. Continue reading “Debunking Silent Film Myths”