Black Bike and Mother of Pearl, or How I keep my obsessive compulsive Oscarquest going

Some people may wonder why it is that back in the winter of 2001 I decided to set about my extremely anal project of seeing all the award nominated films I could, and what might continue to drive this eccentricity after five years. My original intent was to reduce the number of outright bad films I saw (often multiple times) by having a checklist to guilt-trip me into seeing something other than the Curly Whip of Zorro or whatever was playing close by, and I could annoy people on Oscar night by explaining why their favorite actor lost. I still see ridiculously bad movies (Ghost Rider, 300, The Da Vinci Code, 16 Blocks, and I could go on and on) so that didn't work, and let me tell you, there are some serious dogs that get to go to the Oscars as well (Poseidon, The Black Dahlia, Babel, and many more), and nobody would invite me to an Oscar viewing party to hear me explain why their favorite film's anachronistic, jejune mish-mash of Carmina Burana and Mozart's Requiem doesn't qualify for an award for best original score. (Or at least they've never invited me back.) So sometimes even I wonder why I've taken the last remaining tranquil repose in my life and made such work out of it, tracking down every excruciatingly tragic Chinese wuxia, English comedy about limping coughing towards death, desperate American musical revival, dreary Hollywood biopic centered entirely on the subject's drug use, or all-singing, all-dancing falafel drenched Israeli homage to the aforementioned American musicals, all drenched in our Western culture's horrid fascination with its own decline as we each stare into the darkening eyes and torn stomach of our own Dying Gaul... at least Spider-Man 3 would be a known quantity.

But this week Carice van Houten and Orla Fitzgerald gave me an answer: sexy girls on bikes. Once I saw those two chicks wheeling it through WWII Den Haag and 1920's Cork, I knew I was, like... I was home, man. Amidst all the prestige pictures and arthouse dreck that failed to catch the wind in their sails, there are those moments when all the threads of a good film come twisting together into this tense knot that will snap in all directions in the next gust of wind, that violent, cathartic burst of the heart and surge of blood through veins and the mind, that all those Greek playwrights were sounding out through their giant wooden masks and pounding across the echoing stone a thousand years before Rome, London, and New York, until across a thousand flickering screens Aeschylus, Yeats, Bertolucci, O'Toole and Williams and Mirren cry "I am!" Okay, I just threw in that last part to be pretentious, but there is such beauty in some of these films as to shake you to tears and put you back together, if you can find it. But really, I just like that occasionally you get some cuties on bicycles. The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Palme d'Or at Cannes is how it got my attention) is a moving story about the combined power of and the tension between idealism, optimism, pragmatism, faith, hope, love, and resolve, about two brothers who join the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1920 Cork with a heartbreaking performance by a captivating Irish girl on a bicycle (above, right), and Black Book (Best Film not in the English Language nominee at the BAFTAs, just missed an Oscar nod) is a fantastic thriller in which a devastatingly sexy Jewish woman tries to survive the Holocaust, the Nazi occupation of Den Haag, and the Dutch resistance, with the aid of a black bike. I really had Oscar fatigue after the last of the awards were given out, but two cuties on bicycles in one week... somehow that's got the wind at my back again.

(By the way, I never actually got disinvited from an Oscar party for being a pedantic annoyance, I don't even know what jejune means, and I only refer to the cinema as "tranquil repose" to get a laugh out of anybody who's seen the Doctor Who episode "Revelation of the Daleks", where Davros is running a cryogenic freezing facility for the terminally ill next to a meat-packing plant and nobody finds this suspicious.)

The 2007 Oscar Shorts... most of them, anyways

The 2007 Oscar nominated shorts turned out to be a fantastic way to spend an evening, and I really wish they could get these distributed a little more widely, so more people would be exposed to them. Some of the animated shorts from major studios find their way onto DVDs, at least.

The live action shorts were all pretty humorous, a nice change of pace from last year's musings on death and tragedy, and the supermarket. Most of them can't be done justice without spoilers, and their individual quirks lose something in description, but here's my shot at convincing anybody else they're worth checking out. “Eramos Pocos” is an amusing piece about a man whose wife leaves him, leading him to collect her mother from a nursing home and trick her into cooking and cleaning up after him and his son, while claiming his wife is just “er, away on a trip,” perhaps making him appreciate the true meaning of family for the first time through what turns out to be a fairly odd set of circumstances. “Helmer & Son” is a cute story about a man called to a nursing home where his father has locked himself in the closet and won't come out. Trying to coax their father out of the closet brings out a lot of the undercurrents in the family relationships, and draws out a long-awaited confrontation. I thought “Helmer & Son” was hilarious, watching this man try to deal with a surreal situation, while everybody acts like he's the one with the problem. “The Saviour” has to be the most controversial, and the one I'd least like to spoil, dealing with religion, adultery, and gullibility in the suburbs, and what people need to believe to make sense of it all, and definitely well worth seeing. If not for “West Bank Story”, I would think it was an easy favorite for the Oscar.

“Binta y la Gran Idea” is a film set in Senegal that's really about two ideas, one big and one little, that Binta and her father have to make the world a little better. Binta and her schoolmates put on a play to put pressure on her very traditional uncle to let his daughter go to school, like her cousin Binta, and maybe change one life for the better. Her father sees how sometimes people miss the point of progress and comes up with his own big idea, and with Binta's help, tries to take it to the government. The scene where Binta's father has a friend show off his new watch that sounds an alarm every day at noon is classic, because his friend so taken with the technology (“It's Swiss!”), but Binta's father can only wonder, what happens at noon? His big idea about how to handle the influx of progress and take what's good from old and new is pretty funny, and “Binta y la Gran Idea” is a pretty neat film.

For me though, the best film out of all of them was “West Bank Story”, about two competing falafel stands in the West Bank, the Jewish-run Kosher King and the Arab-run Hummus Hut. The bitter competition between the two restaurants mirrors the larger conflict in generally ridiculous ways, and I burst out laughing at the first shot of the film, which is several Arab men doing a tough guy strut down the street snapping their fingers in an obvious homage to the Sharks and Jets. The whole film continues as a parody of West Side Story, with some pretty hilarious musical numbers. My favorite line was when this film's Juliet goes out chasing after a customer shouting that he forgot his package of hummus, only to be detained by Israeli soldiers who think she said she's got a package from Hamas. Standing in front of the soldiers in a hideous restaurant uniform with a kabob skewer through the hat, she asks “Do I look like a suicide bomber? You think I'd be caught dead in this?” More than any of the other films, I hope “West Bank Story” gets exhibited to a wider audience, because it's about the best straight comedy I've seen in ages, and maybe its Oscar win will do that.

Several of the animated shorts had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe, and while it's true I have been told I'm easily amused, I still think the films deserve the credit. I always thought the Scrat did more in five minutes to promote the Ice Age franchise than the rest of the movies combined, and “No Time For Nuts” is some of his best work. The Scrat stumbles on a strangely acorn-shaped time machine buried in the snow, and after darting about it in circles sniffing it over, he pushes a button and zaps his nut away, and what follows is the Scrat's chase through time after his nut. “Maestro” shows a singer warming in front of his dressing room mirror with the assistance of a robot arm in a pretty odd style, where the viewer's perspective rotates around the scene. The animation is tremendous in its three dimensional detail, down to showing the reflections in the singer's eyes, and the film is amusing, but it was the kicker at the end that made me laugh out loud.

I could have done without “The Little Matchgirl”, which is a competent but uninspiring retelling of the grim fairy tale done in a traditional two dimensional style, and I suspect it owes its Oscar nomination to nostalgia over the old Disney cartoons, but who knows. One of the shorts not nominated for an Oscar, “The Wraith of Cobble Hill”, is another inclusion that shows off a different style of animation, which I found interesting but ultimately uninspiring. “Lifted” is an almost purely visual short about an alien abduction with training wheels, as a gelatinous teenage alien takes his equivalent of a driver's test. It's Pixar's inclusion, to be released in conjunction with Ratatouille next year, and I'm sure that helped it get to Oscar night, even though it is quite funny.

Of the other shorts not nominated for Oscars, I was blown away by the technical detail of “One Rat Short”, the star-crossed romance of a street rat and a lab rat. An alley rat out on a rainy rooftop catches a whiff of a bag of cheetos blowing around in the wind, and chases it into an exhaust vent, only to accidentally stumble into a lab full of bar-coded rats in cages being experimented on by an automated system with a sinister glowing red eye. He finds a dainty white lab rat with big, watery blue eyes he sinks into, smitten immediately, and tries to take her away from it all. Like “Maestro”, it's a great visual use of what animation can do, moving in three dimensions in incredible detail, since there's no limitations of sets or crew and equipment.

Definitely at the other end of the spectrum in both tone and style, “Guide Dog” is a brief cartoon with a colored-pencil drawing sort of look about a dog applying for a position as a guide dog for the blind. Just watching the dog run through his whole repertoire in the job interview, showing vigilance, ferocious defense of his charge, enthusiasm, etc. all the while spraying saliva as he bounces up and down on his chair is hilarious. When he actually starts his assignments, he has the most ridiculous set of awful circumstances befall his charges, no matter how hard he tries to protect them. I couldn't believe how funny “Guide Dog” is, and I only wish I could find Plympton's other film with the same protagonist, “Guard Dog” (which apparently did get an Oscar nomination). Also absolutely laugh out loud hilarious in a much more low-key manner is “The Passenger”, this film about a kid out on an eerie, stormy day, walking home with his nose buried in a scary book also titled “The Passenger”. He gets on a bus, and engrossed in his book doesn't notice he's the only one on the bus other than this strange looking fish in a plastic bag on the seat next to him. The mood is somewhat creepy, so the kid puts on some headphones and puts on some groovy tunes to take the edge off, to disastrous results. It's also incredibly funny, with such a cool sense of its own style that I really wonder how it didn't make the cut for an Oscar.

The capper to the exhibition was “Gentleman's Duel”, which featured competing 18^th century French and English aristocrats each seeking to charm the same woman, and gradually completely losing sight of her in their attempts to one-up each other. Finally, a challenge is made, and they agree to a duel... with giant steampunk robots. France vs. Britain is always an amusing clash of cultures to watch, and this is a cute little film crammed with sex and poodles, so of course I loved it. And I definitely could see myself being clumsy enough to follow in the footsteps of the Englishman who begins his seduction with “My darling, your grace is matched only by your boobies. I m-mean your beauty!”

Unfortunately “The Danish Poet”, this year's Oscar winner, wasn't included in the Magnolia Pictures' collection that I saw, so I can't comment on it. I also never got around to hitting the documentary shorts, which were showing once a day at an obscure theater, not really getting the star treatment. But I do hope more people see some of the great shorts that get nominated for Oscars and occasionally released on DVD, because there's some great stuff in there... every single one of the live action shorts was a much better film than Babel.

Four Hours of Oscar

Another Oscar night is over, and this year they managed to keep things clicking and give out an award every 11 minutes. (Although that is just an average, early on it went much longer between awards.) The problem is that while some of the usual Oscar filler was interesting, at least the first couple times, after the first couple hours I just wanted to know if Martin Scorsese was going to get robbed a fourth time. Like the dancers who formed silhouettes were pretty impressive, and at least one of the many montages was good (Michael Mann's America), but once you hit that fourth hour they're like hold music: it doesn't matter how much you like the song, it's just an automated voice telling you "Your call is important to us". On the positive side, there was nothing so terrible as the interpretive tap-dance homages to Saving Private Ryan and La Vita E Bella that were practically offensive.

Some of the big favorites got their well deserved rewards, like Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, and Martin Scorsese, and The Depahted for Best Picture and for William Monahan's screenplay. About the only upset I cared about was Pan's Labyrinth taking home awards but losing the foreign film award to The Lives of Others, although that is the only award where you're required to see all the nominees before submitting a ballot, so it tends to hold up a bit better... I couldn't believe Amelie lost to a Bosnian movie about opposing soldiers stuck in a trench with a third guy stuck on a land mine, it turned out No Man's Land was just a truly fantastic black comedy in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove, so there's something to be said for actually seeing the movies before voting.

The idea that the big cash-grab Norbit may have cost Eddie Murphy an Oscar was fairly amusing, especially in light of his comments at the Golden Globes, where he raved about how he had basically done the movie for free only because Bill Condon told him he'd get an award for it. Maybe he already blew through all his Axel Foley money, but I can't help a certain smug schadenfreude when a successful person chases even more commercial success and gets it, but still falls flat on their face when their greed makes them miss more meaningful opportunities. It's like Meg Ryan, she had to do just a few more romantic comedies to put a few more bucks in the bank before the big 4-0. Just to be fair, while writing this I took a look back at her filmography, and I was surprised to be reminded that there are a fair number of dramatic films over the course of her career, but she kept following the Ben Affleck model of doing a safe movie to counterbalance every risk she took, and consequently any credit she gets for Proof of Life is undermined by making sure it was closely followed by Kate & Leopold. Cut out a couple of her less successful romantic comedies and the third time around with Tom Hanks, maybe occasionally take a small part in a good movie, and I wonder if she'd have gotten scripts better than In the Cut for her last gasp "I'll get plastic surgery and drop my pants" attempt at keeping her career alive. And so it is with Eddie Murphy, if he'd held off on fucking Norbit for a few months, doors might have opened for a guy who hasn't done anything but bathroom humor family entertainment in a decade (I blocked out Pluto Nash), but I guess he wanted the cash.

I did enjoy the gags with Al Gore about the possibility of launching his presidential run at the Oscars, almost as much as I enjoyed seeing that POS Babel go home with a consolation prize, and as many Oscars as Pirates of the Caribbean. How that got a best picture nomination over Little Children or The Last King of Scotland, to give a couple alternatives, I'll never know. Rinko Kikuchi can pick a movie up on her shoulders, but she can only carry it so far. There were no outstanding original songs, or animated films, and of course the only animated short I didn't see was "The Danish Poet", which won. And a lot of winners of course had to make passive-aggressive protests against the request not to read lists of names on an international TV broadcast, setting down their Oscars on the floor so they could pull out their little folded pieces of paper to start reading... the reason there's no podium is so you can't settle in and start rummaging around in your pockets and purses for wadded up pieces of paper, dummies. But the best moment was when the announcers cemented how stupid and intrusive their little factoids were by bringing up the Japanese film Infernal Affairs William Monahan used as the basis for his Depahted screenplay, because despite their best attempts, Japan does not in fact include Hong Kong.

Little Children, cocks and bulls, and Venus with a Pot Noodle

I truly think Little Children may be the most underrated film of the year. It's a story about the world of stay-at-home parents who meet at a suburban playground, and the extra-marital affairs and social intrigue that take place over the course of the summer, under the specter of child molester who has returned to the neighborhood. Kate Winslet is one of the five women nominated for seemingly every best actress award this year, for her performance as Sarah, a young mother feeling trapped in her house with her daughter, desperate for any brief escape. Patrick Wilson is Brad, a father whose emasculating wife sends him to the library to study for the bar exam every night, while instead he sits on a bench watches kids doing skateboard tricks. Jackie Earle Haley also got an Oscar nomination for playing Ronnie the child molester, whose sinister presence looms over the neighborhood from the fliers with his picture posted on every available surface.


I had no idea what to expect going in, but Little Children completely grabbed me with the frustrations of Sarah and Brad in the tiny, petty universe in which they find themselves trapped, and Jackie Earle Haley's presence as the simultaneously creepy and pathetic Ronnie and his persecution by a deranged local cop was surprisingly engrossing. It's a fascinating story about adults trying to live out juvenile fantasy, particularly in the case of Brad, dubbed “The Prom King” by the local mothers, joins a football team to moonlight as the star quarterback with Sarah as his adoring groupie. Eventually it all has to end, and this makes for a great drama. The film also makes use of an omniscient narrator, which I usually despise, but in this case it provides another perspective on the dramatic events of the film: the narrator's dramatic voice-over commentary, while completely serious in its insights into the characters, is absolutely hilarious. This over the top dramatic device ironically allows the misadventures of Brad and Sarah to be as much comedy as they are drama. And I loved every frame of it. Although I do think it's weird that every time I see Patrick Wilson in a film there's castration and child molestation involved...


Peter O'Toole apparently was a bit disgruntled at receiving a lifetime achievement Oscar, because he said he considers himself very much still in the game, and while Venus may not be his most inspiring work to date, it does prove his point. I really the idea explored in Venus that all the great iconic images of the female form in art all began with a live model who belched and drooled in her sleep like the rest of us. Jodie Whittaker's first appearance as inspiration slurping up a pot noodle captures this perfectly. Peter O'Toole plays Maurice, an aged actor who becomes obsessed with his friend's great-niece Jessie, a pretty low-class young woman whose exasperated family tried to shuffle her off to her ancient great-uncle Ian. The vapid Jessie wolfs down chips while proclaiming her aims at a modeling career, but Maurice's slightly creepy obsession makes him the first person to see something truly transcendently wonderful in her, including her own mother. Leslie Phillips, and Richard Griffiths round out Maurice's circle of friends of fussy and crude old men, and Vanessa Redgrave is great as his ex-wife. Venus really does get into my favorite thing about the world, the moments of shocking beauty that emerge when you find the right angle to view them from, and the way even a complete chav like Jessie is no less a woman for it, with all that implies.

Finally, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, was Michael Winterbottom's attempt at filming the supposedly unfilmable post-modern novel, so necessarily it stars Steve Coogan as the director and star of another attempt to film the novel. It moves smoothly from actual scenes from the novel, moving past the cameras of the film within a film to follow the actors into the chaos surrounding the film production, concluding in the screening room where a disappointed cast and crew are underwhelmed by Steve Coogan's film. Completely bizarre, obviously, but very funny in a literary nerd sort of way. And it's nice to see Gillian Anderson again and know she survived the X-Files. I just caught it because of its BAFTA nomination, but I was certainly glad I did.

Children of Men

I really felt overwhelmed by Children of Men, I really did, and I was amazed on reflection to realize it's really down to one technical factor that raises a good dystopian thriller into something transcendent. Much of the film is shot in incredibly long, fluid takes following Theo Faron (Clive Owen), often as he moves through a variety of locations. Because Theo's world is so large and fluid and I was never shown the seams, it felt incredibly real. At several points Theo passes by or eavesdrops on the rest of the cast as he walks into earshot of conversations, so there is a definite sense that the world around him continues without him, like the of the reverse Truman Show(1). The cumulative effect is to make Theo and his world, and everyone in it, seem so real that I was completely absorbed into the story, to the point of feeling the crawling grief of Theo's world, and feel the warm spark when he glimpses something brighter. The exploding coffeeshop clip from the opening used to promote the film packs this surprising punch because the long, intimate shot of Theo captures so well his feeling of “I was just there.”

The themes of the film when presented in that manner take on a greater significance, and they take on a range of issues, from the obvious authoritarianism and xenophobia, to a more general malaise of despair in a culture that sees no future for itself, to the fleeting nature of the transcendent, unifying moments we experience as a culture. The general premise of the film is that no children have been born in the world in 18 years, without any explanation, and the looming extinction of the human race has created a climate of overwhelming depression. When the first pregnancy is introduced into this world in almost two decades, the effect is briefly overwhelming on those around the mother, before politics set in and protecting her becomes secondary to exploiting her. In particular there's an image in this film of soldiers kneeling penitently before the child before resuming fighting in an Iraq-like wrecked urban landscape, which evoked the fleeting effects of both Christ and 9/11 of turning our focus to something higher than our usual squabbles ourselves, before both were exploited.

I can be biased by the fact that I love a few of the actors in this film, and Clive Owen and Julianne Moore both do well, as does Chiwetel Ejiofor in a supporting role that needed the depth of feeling he brings to it. Michael Caine, however, who is having a very good year, steals a lot of his scenes playing an John Lennon-inspired aged hippie. So my response may have been exceptional, but the only other film I've seen this year that moved me as much as Children of Men was The Depahted.

1 - Technically that would be the real world, but I suppose I was referring to the way that The Truman Show was about constructing an obviously fake, idealized world that let people escape their own lives and carefully protected its audience through panning away from Truman's sex life, letting imagination substitute where our romantic ideals get... sticky. Truman being a real person makes him an anchor to ease the suspension of disbelief even though the parameters of Truman's world are laid out as fake, and Children of Men does the opposite. Alfonso Cuaron makes the world around his actors seem real, and ties it into our own through careful references to media imagery from Abu Ghraib, The Green Zone, and Guantanamo, to give a few, and to some of our most profound real and fictional nightmares through references to Orwell, Auschwitz, and others. So Cuaron has Clive Owen's stomping around in the world I brought into the theater but lured me in with a premise that keeps the story at a safe distance (global infertility, decades into the future).

The Devil Wears Prada

I was really excited about The Devil Wears Prada, because when award nominations started coming out I basically hadn't seen any of the top rated female performances of last year. Overall I have to admit to being a little disappointed. It's well made, and it's great to see a well-made, enjoyable film of a female experience, which being grumpy and critical I rarely do.

So The Devil Wears Prada was certainly stylish and funny enough to charm me. Meryl Streep is excellent, and I positively adored Anne Hathaway's character. Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci put in delightful supporting performances, and the four of them do make it a film well worth seeing, and earn the film all its props.
My complaint is that the story of Andy Sachs' rude introduction to, seduction by, and rejection of the fashion world is such a well-worn story, it's hard not to know where it's all going within the first fifteen minutes, and when this started to sink in, I found it hard to maintain interest in the second half.

I suppose my real problem is it doesn't feel like it has a lot to say about this meme, about fashion or powerful women, or even Andy Sachs, outside of a few tantalizing moments, like when Sachs first dares to snort a bit at how far up their own asses the fashionistas she works with are. Miranda Priestly (Streep) breaks down everything she wears in terms of its relation to high fashion and how Sachs is using her fashion choices to present an image of herself, and completely punctures the air of superiority surrounding Sachs' view of herself, by reminding her that we cannot live outside our culture, and that culture includes Runway Magazine. I wish it had gone further along this line, and had showed a real transformation for Sachs, since her wardrobe throughout the film is a barometer for changes in her character. Instead she goes from dressing in the dark to runway model and back to dressing in the dark... by the end, she's back to where she started and her wardrobe more than anything tells us that.

There were other threads that could have been the basis for this to be a great movie, but ultimately The Devil Wears Prada is only a good movie, albeit full of great actors in smashing outfits.

African Doubleheader

Last Wednesday I caught Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland, and in retrospect I should have gone down to the West Bank for an African meal in between, instead of sushi, had I realized I was going for that much African tragedy in one night. The most engrossing, intense theatre experience I ever had was a performance of Macbeth set in West Africa, complete with fright wigs and machetes, and these films certainly tied into the same violent spectacle.

Blood Diamond is a pretty straightforward, some say cliche, story of a father (Djimon Honsou) kidnapped and sent to Sierra Leone's diamond mines, who finds an enormous pink diamond and uses it as leverage to find his family, with the help of a cute but manipulative smuggler (Leonardo Di Caprio) and the earnest reporter in an open necked shirt (Jennifer Connelly) who falls for him. The problems of the film that numerous reviews will comment on come from trying to set a high moral tone and make an important film about the exploitation of Africa's minerals, and the feeling that such a traditional story told in a high-minded way has a certain inevitability to its plot, as everyone must either get their just rewards or punishment, or if they're a crooked smuggler with a heart of gold, achieve salvation. However, even if it's not told in an innovative way, that story is at least told well.

So while some rolled their eyes a little bit, for me what's good about Blood Diamond far overshadows its limitations. And it does achieve its moral objective (using Jennifer Connelly as a Mary Sue), which is to put a real sense of the horror of conflict diamonds to a wider audience of diamond consumers in wealthier countries. I suspect that if this movie, which is set in 1998, had come out a few years ago in support of the Kimberley Process and not after it, or while Sierra Leone and the antics of certain mercenary groups were still fresh topics, its message would have been received as more relevant than preachy. It doesn't help that last year's Oscars featured Hollywood patting itself on the back for championing yesterday's social issues, and Blood Diamond sadly gets caught in that, making me wonder if this screenplay wasn't buried in some exec's drawer for a few years. On the other hand, diamonds aren't the only mineral supporting armed conflict in Africa so maybe the failure is the film's inabilty to suggest that it's about more than Sierra Leone.

It is also a great look at Africa (I should qualify that by admitting I've got no particular knowledge of West Africa, so I can't speak to how accurate a depiction it is). It's still a step closer than we usually get, since early on the film spends a fair bit of time following Danny Archer (Di Caprio) through Freetown. This may be just my own perception, but Western filmmakers don't spend a lot of time in Urban Africa, or looking at industries like mining and energy. Given the probable importance of the Niger delta to an energy-hungry world, it's odd that pastoral peoples like the Samburu and Masai get more screen time, and it's why a film like Tsotsi seemed so startling for depicting side by side shanty town gangsters and a modern train station and gated homes.

One of the criticisms of Blood Diamond has been that it's told from a white person's perspective, but given its political ambitions, that's where it needed to be. The two perspectives on Africa are the cynical native-born mercenary smuggler and the ignorant in her idealism American journalist, but there is some awareness of this within the film. In a film about exploitation, these two are particularly suited as guides. Archer is all about exploitation with only some sense of fair trade to act as a moral compass, but the idealistic journalist is not actually the moral barometer of the film, since she has to acknowledge her own role in shaping what Africa is to the world: a victim, passively exploited without any consciousness of its own agency. The stories of victimized Africans make thiem into such a flat image of tragedy, with faceless tormentors rather than actual people who live in the same world as her readers; they are separated more by the level of reality they reside, than by geography. The moral barometer is Djimon Honsou as Soloman Vandy, who has an actual purposeful life populated by real people and not images, and both white people nevertheless reduce him to a couple of photograph captions and his only possession, the diamond.

There's a subplot ignored in all of the reviews I've read as well, and that is the graphic, brainwashing violence of the RUF. From chopping off hands in a symbolic act to protest democracy to their mining operations, they are clearly the primary antagonist. The element that's interesting about them is the subplot with Vandy's son Dia being recruited as a child soldier, and the transformation required to survive that ordeal, the rites of forced violence and drugs, and creation of a violent new persona, in Dia's case renaming himself "See Me No More". This effect of creating armies of violent children, remaining very much emotionally children but with the capability for violence of the most hardened men, is a truly frightening phenomenon that exists far beyond Africa. The only mention of it, or the violence and intimidation in failed states, in any review I read was to suggest that the film was too violent, as if the solution was to ignore the message about Western consumption supporting violence and instead continue to turn our heads. Democracy and violence, making sure children pick up a gun rather than go to school, sounds like issues we find ourselves embroiled in outside of Africa.

Now that I've written god knows how much about it, what I really enjoyed most about this movie had nothing to do with message or politics, or all the analysis I can muster up. I just really loved watching these actors prance through a lush African setting. I've been a big Leonardo Di Caprio admirer since before he did Titanic, and just listening to him talk in this movie was a treat. His Zimbabwe accent and the Krio he uses in Sierra Leone along with the melodic charm of his character made it a captivating performance, and I found myself thinking of some of his casual expressions after the film. Archer's conversations with pretty much anyone in the film were shiny in Leo's Zimbabwe banter. Djimon Honsou as always brings such a dominant presence to the screen his every movement held my attention. And for the first time in a long time, Jennifer Connelly looked like she'd been enjoying good food and fresh air, because she looked quite good.

The characters may seem a little thin, a little cliche, but I do think the film redeems some of that by presenting over the course of the film by grounding enough of Danny Archer's cynicism in the details of his past that he becomes something other than a stock character, and Archer's amusement at the earnestness of Djimon Honsou's Solomon Vandy reminds us that Vandy is an unusual man. The sharpness of his insights into Connelly's Maddy Bowen tear the veneer of the earnest do-good reporter she is playing enough to suggest a deeper human character underneath,. This is perhaps the whole point of the film, that these images, these characters from this tale of Sierra Leone were not fully formed into their roles, something made them this way just as the real conflict didn't spring out of the red earth fully formed and impenetrable to outside forces. It isn't enough to throw up our hands and say there will always be Danny Archers and Colonel Coetzees and Captain Poisons, because as the film shows briefly with Dia's indoctrination and Danny's history as a soldier, these people and their country were formed, and perhaps can be reformed.

The other Africa film I saw was The Last King of Scotland, the story of the rise and fall of Idi Amin in Uganda from the perspective of his personal physician, a very different experience. Nicholas Garrigan travels from Scotland to Uganda on a lark, and by a chance meeting becomes the president's doctor and by the murderous whims of the mercurial Amin becomes the dictator's closest advisor.

What's so fascinating about this is that we only see Amin through Garrigan's eyes, although the benefit of history gives us a certain cynical insight that Garrigan lacks, allowing to see more of what Garrigan's enthusiasm and Amin's charm glosses over. The youthful Garrigan basks almost entirely in the charm of Amin, and in the promise of an independent African state led by a man of Amin's stature. Garrigan is further pushed towards Amin by his Brittish peers' distrust of Amin, which he assumes is the racist cynicism of the former empire that can't stand to see a black nation rise. It takes Garrigan far too long to see the stituation he has gotten himself into, and he does not see the dangers in his carefree Ugandan odyssey until long after the point of no return. In the end each notes about the other that there is something childlike in the way they view the world, believing it cannot hurt them no matter how far they push.

The reason to see this film is Forest Whitaker. He plays Amin with the perfect mix of charm and terror, and I couldn't help but grin and (and sometimes shudder) watching every scene he was in. I've always had a soft spot for Forest Whitaker since Good Morning, Vietnam but now I want to rewatch that movie because I can't believe it was the same guy. Apparently he also had some trouble abandoning the persona of the Ugandan dictator after spending months immersing himself in all things Idi Amin preparing for the role, and couldn't shake the accent for a long time, so if he doesn't get an Oscar for this, he may hang Leonardo Di Caprio by his skin backstage.

James McAvoy puts in a great performance as Nicholas Garrigan, bubbling with this infectious enthusiasm that enticed me to see Amin through his eyes. Some of Garrigan's story is a little thin, but McAvoy helps a lot with the energy he brings to it. And it's nice to know Gillian Anderson is alive and well and still has an agent (I also liked her contribution to last year's A Cock and Bull Story).

Seriously a great evening, two great films and some great octopus in between. And don't get excited, PJ, I said a cock and BULL story, and it's an adaptation of an 18th century postmodern novel, not Peter North's latest oeuvre.

2007 Oscar Nominations

I haven't seen many Oscar contenders this year, but I was pleasantly surprised to find I'd seen seven Oscar nominees and only six Razzie nominees. Usually those numbers are reversed, given the number of awful movies I see. I did find a couple things amiss in this year's nominees, such as Marky Mark getting the only acting nomination for The Depahted, and the total lack of Razzie nominations for the steaming pile of... well, for 16 Blocks. I also see that once again the technical awards form the Oscar-Razzie overlap: Poseidon is up for an award from both organizations. This is why the technical awards get no respect on Oscar night, because they bring in the riff-raff. Seriously, when Click is up for an Oscar, and Steven Seagal as a losing nominee came back to present the next year, that just brings down the level of the whole event.

Holy #$*& is Superman Returns boring

There's just not even anything to say about it. After an hour and 15 minutes, there's been abo15 minutes of plot and character introduction... that's not hyperbole, I seriously think somebody could edit the first hour and a half down to 15-20 minutes, ditching the endless flying through space opening credits, and trimming the endless fawning over a bubbling model train set.

Actually there are some things to say. For one thing, when the model train set-up is being destroyed by the bubbling crystal from Krypton, I wondered who has a model train set where the miniature model people emit human screams if they get knocked over? I think that was supposed to be a bit more subliminal, but it's still stupid. Richard Branson makes yet another aviation cameo as the shuttle flight engineer, when he really would have been more useful as a flight attendant telling Lois Lane to put her seat belt on so she wouldn't have been thrown around the cabin during the crash. She survives that with no bruises or broken bones, but then faints from the sight of Superman, which really makes me wonder, when did fainting come back in style for ladies? Are corsets a fashion necessity for Metropolis women?

Really, what kills Superman though is the floating. The old Superman used to land and walk around in an authoritative way, where the current boyish Superman gives off a different vibe. Christopher Reeves played the character as Superman, and had the man of steel play at being Clark Kent, showing some amusement at how people perceived him because underneath he was all strength and confidence. Brandon Routh is playing Clark Kent all the time, and he's resentful of how nobody can see his Superman persona. When he plays at being Superman, he's trying so hard he seems that much more like a little boy in a Superman costume, imagining himself as something important, and powerful. And then he cements it by floating around everywhere. Superman flying with the fist out in front of him: strong and majestic, and he makes the flying seem like a forceful, challenging mode of transport only Superman could do by taking the running start, and by landing, which respects the power of flight in the imagination of the audience. Clark Kent in tights daintily floating down from the ledge is just channeling Peter Pan.

With two and a half hours and a plot that I can summarize in... well, Superman goes to Krypton so Lex Luthor steals a crystal from the Fortress of Solitude and a Kryptonite shard, and uses them to make a new Kryptonite continent, so Superman flies in and throws it into space. In all the time allotted for that, you'd think there could be one character driven story to tell, but at the end of Superman Returns, nobody has changed in any way due to their experiences, other than Superman now knows he has a Super-rugrat (with asthma). All it really accomplishes is to show why children outgrow Superman: there's nothing for him to do that's beyond a five year old's attention span.

"God will forgive them. He'll forgive them, and allow them into heaven. I can't live with that."

That's the opening narration of Dead Man's Shoes, and I have no idea why this movie is so amazing, but it is. Paddy Considine, who wrote the screenplay, stars as this soldier named Richard whose retarded brother Anthony is tormented by thugs in their hometown. It's not clear what he's been doing in the army, but it's clear Richard has become an extremely dangerous man since leaving town... describing him, one of these thugs says "The man who left isn't the one who came back," and alludes to his having been a commando. He's right, because Richard has come back to town only to hunt down his brother's tormentors one by one. It's like Get Carter with Grizzly Adams, and it's brilliant.

What's so gripping is the realness of this film, especially Paddy Considine as Richard, who seems like such a genuine, real person but gets this murderous look flashing over his eyes, sliding mercurially from warmth to rage in an instant. He's a sympathetic hero, very likable, and it's hard not to root for him, but he's also a genuinely frightening character. This film manages to be both so stark and horrifying in its depiction of what amounts to a series of violent crimes, but also strangely funny. This is what the realistic feel of the grainy film, shaky cam without autofocus style of film-making was intended for, filming Paddy Considine right up close where every drop of rain on his coat and his hair is in perfect, sharp focus. The victimization of his brother is all shot in black and white, super-8 film like some awful home movie, the vivid image everyone touched by it has keeps replaying in their head.

When Richard first makes contact with one of his targets, while it's still unclear what he has in mind, he appears at the doorway to an apartment building in a gas mask, pounding on the glass and gesturing for his target to come out. I don't know what's so scary about that, but there is something terrifying in this inhuman face Richard chooses to put on. His drugged out mark goes running back up the stairs screaming about an elephant with great, staring eyes outside the door, not really sure what he saw in the shocked moment before he ran. When asked about his first round of psychological warfare, he makes it clear in about two sentences that this will not end until people are dead.

There's some brilliant lines in the drug-addled tough guy rambling of the local gangsters Richard is stalking, and in the absolutely chilling things he says to them. When one of them waking from a drugged stupor gets off the couch he passed out on, and sees a blurry Richard standing in the room with him, he asks, "Are you the Devil?" Richard's response, with a shy grin and no bravado, is "You wish I fucking was, mate."

There is more to this than a grimly executed revenge story, because there's more to it than Richard initially tells us. He's a fascinating character, in a film that's so perfectly executed it really mysteriously rises way above the genre flick I thought it would be. I still don't really have a grasp on how this is so good, but my first thought when the credits rolled was just wow.

I never would have heard of it either, had it not been nominated for Best British Film at the '05 British Academy Awards. Paddy Considine seems to be showing up in more and more quality stuff, like the excon who's found Jesus in My Summer of Love, devoted to being a man of peace, building a cross to overlook the valley and starting his own church, but still capable of snapping and choking the life out of a teenage girl without warning. Seriously, if you were at a dinner with this guy, based on the characters he plays I'd love to sit next to him but also give him plastic utensils: fascinating but scary as hell.

"I told him not to mention the elephant."

Joyeux Noel, and the dangerous subversiveness of Christmas

It's quite a thing, this film about small acts of kindness, and that fraternal spirit in all human beings that lets us recognize each other despite differences in language or skin color... well some of us anyways. It's about the Christmas spirit, and the way all that for one night and one day, we can all stop caring about the problems of this world and care more about each other. For a little while. Maybe because of that, there was an overwhelming feeling of sadness for me watching this film, knowing what had to happen when Christmas was over.

Joyeux Noel is a story inspired by the events in Europe on December 24th, 1914, when all up and down the western front, soldiers of all nationalities came up out of their trenches to share Christmas together. The story some of the survivors told was of singing Silent Night and hearing across no man's land other soldiers singing Silent Night, or Douce Nuit, or Stille Nacht, and realizing they had far more in common than what separated them. They were all young men far from their loved ones, likely to die in the mud without seeing home again, whose individual lives didn't amount to much beyond moving a border a few yards back and forth. So they took a break from killing each other and played football in the snow between the trenches, until it was time to go back. Soldiers exchanged letters for family in occupied territory, showed each other pictures of their children, made plans to see each other again after the war, and wished each other well.

The film focuses on the subversive effect of that kind of contact between people, when all these soldiers gathered together singing Christian songs, in need of both physical and spiritual. German, French, and Scottish, they all gather together for a mass said by a Scottish minister. The mass is said in Latin, appealing to one of the connections between these men, a spiritual authority that operates independent of the authority of governments, that no longer belongs to any single language, or culture, or people. The subversive effect of Christians acting like Christians, forgiving and loving their neighbors, is not lost on the powers that be, that have to present their own version of doctrine and reframe genocide as holy work against an inhuman horde. As one commander says in the aftermath, you can't execute 200 men, recognizing that if the entire mass of soldiers dying on the front lines were to stop hating the enemy, there would instantly be no war for the generals to direct and with which to inspire the public.

This is what's so sad about Joyeux Noel, is knowing that the truce didn't continue, that those who weren't on the front line on Christmas Eve did restore order, and that most of the men who took a risk and climbed out of their trench were buried somewhere on that same field. The final image of the film is heartbreaking, German soldiers shut up in a box car being sent off to the Russian Front where they will have a fresh set of strangers to kill, far from the friends they made on Christmas Eve. As the train leaves, they hum the song the Scottish soldiers taught them, "I'm Dreaming of Home". There is a powerful image, Germans in a box car (with their Jewish lieutenant), being sent off to die in a bloodbath that killed an entire generation of men, making the point that this genocide was no more noble than any other.

I was also struck by the opening, with children in three countries reciting wartime rhetoric in a classroom like a book report. There's something very curious about how we sometimes only recognize the grotesqueness in our public discourse from our children, when it's wrong for them to repeat what the views of their elders. Jon Stewart has exploited this to great effect with the children reading transcripts of political pundits arguing on TV, undressing everything the way only children can, where there is no excuse of hyperbole or point of view, and we must decide if we believe these things to be true, before passing them on as fact.

It is an uplifting film, even in its sadness, for reminding us of what kind of people we should like to be at Christmas, if we can't do it the rest of the year. It was made by French filmmakers last year, and it's nice to see despite the animosity towards the French over the war in Iraq some of them found it in their hearts to tell a story about soldiers far from home, when so many American and British soldiers are spending Christmas in hellish conditions. God bless them all and keep them safe.

2006 Oscar Shorts, or The Chill Breath of the Reaper

I've caught almost all of last year's Oscar nominated short films, and there's this recurring theme through three animated films and five live action films where they're all about death. Okay, one of the cartoons was about a hibernating badger, and one of the live action films was about working the late shift at the supermarket, but my god did that feel like death. There's certainly some quality stuff, and a couple deserving award winners, but yikes, it's like Hollywood thinks America's going down in flames and like the Greeks in the last hours of their civilization, our artwork is going to be non-stop death until the very end.

The 2003 Oscar shorts were also released in a collection, and it's a pretty stark contrast in tone. That collection had some lighter fare like "Mike's New Car", the Pixar short with the characters from Monsters, Inc.; "The Chubbchubbs!", a hilarious film about a janitor at a cantina packed with science fiction movie characters and carnivorous fuzzballs; and "Das Rad", a German film about rocks watching the temporary distraction of the rise and fall of civilization around them. The live action films included quite a bit of humor as well, like the Belgian film "Fait d'hiver", which is an urban legend about a man calling his house and having his five year old daughter (who was curiously reminiscent of Bryan's niece) tell him Mommy's playing in the bedroom with "Uncle Wim". The best film in that collection was "This Charming Man", a comedy about a Danish man whose unemployment paperwork gets screwed up, so he has to pose as a muslim asylum-seeker to get a job and takes Danish classes to hit on the instructor, and sees how differently Danish society is views Lars Hansen than they do his alter ego El Hassan. Either the Iraq war or rampant movie piracy must have the Academy a little depressed.

Some things are worth commenting on, like "The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello", which in title and in a brief description sounds like a much lighter film than it really is. It tells the story of Jasper Morello, living in a very vertical and airborne industrialized society, navigating an airship into the unknown reaches of the sky with an old biologist on a mission to seek new medicines in the wild places of the world. However, Morello's mission is seeking a cure for a wasting, coughing disease afflicting his whole society, which he and the doctor find in a carnivorous jungle plant, which is kept alive for the journey home by feeding it the entire crew and all of Morello's blood. All the characters appear as black silhouettes against the white walls and grey clouds around the airship, turning a fantastic craft and landscape and a noble adventure into this blighted, diseased, black tale. The use of silhouettes, only shifting to detail to show the diseased, and the hungry, carnivorous plant, things that are impure and not whole, is visually interesting, as is the world of open-decked airships Jasper Morello comes from.

The Oscar went to "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation", which is an imagined attempt by a son to speak to his recently deceased father about his father's life and criminal past, and the bitter, violent anger that poisoned that life. I felt it was a well made film, and I found its style of animation reminiscent of children's drawings, all in bright primary colors, to tell the story of a son who still feels small facing the memory of his father, even after his death.

The live-action films include some wonderfully filmed stories like "The Last Farm" and "The Runaway" which are perhaps better left unspoiled, ironically about the end of one life, as an Icelandic farmer concludes his last day on the farm, and the beginning of another when a man is forced to spend his first day as a father by a small child who shows up at his door insisting to be his son who needs a ride to school. But still, the impact of our fragile mortality lingers over these films like a dying gaul bleeding to death in the seat next to you at the theatre.

I've always liked Kevin Pollack, so the first short I actually watched was "Our Time Is Up", which introduces the recurring theme of death the most directly. Pollack plays a disinterested, ineffective therapist who is diagnosed with terminal disease, who starts brusquely just speaking his mind with his stable of hopeless clients. His unprofessional outbursts and enjoying tweaking their phobias actually challenges them for the first time in their therapy. Being able to ignore the risk that his clients will quit therapy actually allows him to do something to help them. "Our Time Is Up" is an amusing comment on the way death is sometimes the only thing that can force us to live our lives.

The Oscar went to the Irish film "Six Shooter", which is about the weirdest, darkest, most violent, and unmistakably funniest of the whole lot. This was an absolutely bizarre yet absolutely captivating film about a man who has just lost his wife and a couple who've lost a baby to crib death, who end up in a train car with a young man who seems to have no sense of propriety. It's the best movie about suicidal and lapicidal train passengers being entertained by stories about an exploding cow with a climactic police shoot-out I've ever seen, that's for sure. Just a great, bizarre film, well deserving of an Oscar, that touches on death, religion, pain, companionship, courtesy, and police procedure. Seriously, my reaction was what the fuck, and wow.

Besides that I have to add a kind word for "Cashback", a film about working all night in a supermarket, and how to pass the time. It really goes through the expected bits about surrounding oneself with the dregs of the working world for mind-numbing tasks under a fluorescent glare, and the dreary horror of it all. Every worker has their own technique for managing the gray ocean of time. What made it interesting was the narrator's artistic bent and interest in still life leading him to embrace the timelessness void of the supermarket, fascinated by a near-infinite beauty he finds in passing moments. His main obsession is the striking beauty of the female form, that every woman unconsciously shines with in every gesture, and his inner life consists of converting tired, bored female shoppers doing the least sexy thing in the world into beautiful nude sketches. It's all about fascination, when something sublime appears out of the mundane, like plunging through a crack in a frozen lake but falling into warm blue water. This film struck a real familiar chord on the lute strings that I'm told are the strange, strange inner workings of my mind.

And while finishing this up, I did finally catch Pixar's contribution "One Man Band", and it is a cute little film at the end, and it charmed me once the scowling girl picked up the violin and played it herself. Now I can't decide whether to actually watch Cars or just return the DVD now that I've seen the short.

Casino Royale, or Europe's New Toy vol. 2

I really enjoyed Casino Royale in a way I haven't enjoyed a Bond movie in twenty years. Judi Dench as M particularly hits just the right note in terms of mixing humor with ruthless gravitas, and the verbal fencing between Bond and Vesper is perfect, seductive and funny. Casino Royale refers to the franchise's hallowed traditions with a sense of humor as well, such as mocking James Bond's tremendously mannered drink order, while simultaneously giving it a special place in the new Bond mythos by giving it an origin and significance. The reference to the unusual names of Bond girls (Pussy Galore, Holly Goodhead) is nicely woven into the interplay between Bond and Vesper. In another simultaneous break with and nod to the past, the opening credits dispense with the usual naked ladies, silhouettes, which had progressed from silhouettes to models with oil pouring over their breasts, another example of how style had given way to excess in the franchise. Actually I really missed the barely-disguised nude women, because I first discovered Bond films in the awakening sexuality of my youth, and I find I still really like boobies. To me though, the new opening credits were very reminiscent of Dr. No, reinventing the franchise by returning to its roots, using Ian Fleming's only un-filmed Bond novel as inspiration. The two opening action sequences were wonderfully done, the first serving as an introduction for Bond and the whole franchise reboot by doing something unusual, opening the film in black and white, alternating between a callous assassination in a dark office and a flashback to a brutally violent knock-down drag-out fight to the death in a bathroom, all concluding with its own take on the signature Bond gun barrel opening shot. After the credits, there's a fantastic chase sequence of Daniel Craig pursuing Sebastien Foucan through a Madagascar construction site, in which Foucan's ability to evade Bond through a whole monkey-like style of movement, and Daniel Craig's attempts to follow resembling the proverbial bull in a china shop made for an amusing but still tense chase. The film can really be split into three acts, and the first act plot really seems to be about affirming an English commitment to Europe and European industry, as amid speculation about the future of EADS and Airbus, Eon has James Bond foiling LeChiffre's plot to manipulating the market by shorting EADS stock and then blowing up the A380 at its launch. It's not actually the A380, but I thought the message was clear to those speculators considering abandoning Airbus and forcing a bail-out by the French government, when LeChiffre loses $102m overnight. The A380 apparently takes over from the Chunnel (featured in Mission Impossible) as Europe's new toy. The second act, where Bond meets the absolutely scrumptious Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) and engages with LeChiffre in the Casino Royale, all went very well, with just the right balance of high class gambling, brutal violence, and shower finger-sucking. My only gripe was I wondered why they played No Limit Texas Hold'em, when the dominant game in Europe is supposedly the very similar Omaha, but then it would be somewhat harder for Giancarlo Giannini to give a play-by-play to the audience. And to those who criticize the ridiculously rare hands played, I'd just have to point out that no matter how gritty it gets, this remains a Bond film, and Bond doesn't win on a pair of threes facing a broken straight, and I would wager Bond and LeChiffre are guys who like to rake in huge pots when everybody's looking at a monster hand, not professionals who grind out wins. It's really the third act that hurts the film, and has caused the most criticism. The beginning of this third section is easily the poorest part of the film. It asks us to skip ahead quite a bit by introducing a romance with very little real groundwork, and explore the softer side of Bond, and then compounds its clumsiness by dragging quite a bit, and by offering somewhat clumsy foreshadowing. At that point we all know where the film needs to get itself to, and losing its way two hours in is not good. The overall length wouldn't be as much of a problem if it didn't head into the third hour with a declaration of "I've loved you ever since... actually just since 5 minutes ago" and a very long, long series of romantic scenes in romantic locations. First the lake, then the beach, then St. Mark's Square, it just crashes the whole film, when what needs to actually be explained in the third act is very rushed and unclear. It all concludes with one of the signature action set pieces of the film which the trailers had to tease us with, the collapsing Venetian building, which is quite well done, and concludes the story of how Bond came to be the strange lover and killer he's been for decades, so it's by no means a complete derailment, but it is the clear flaw of what is otherwise a really fun film. All in all, Casino Royale is really just a hell of a lot of fun, and immensely exceeded my expectations, especially in its sense of humor. And was that really Richard Branson in the airport? Rufus will return in "Sotongfinger"

King Kong

I've just finished watching the original King Kong from 1933, and now it's official. I hate this movie. I hated both remakes, the endless Peter Jackson homage to nostalgia and CGI, and the 70s version with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges with an evil oil company plundering skull island. Three attempts at the same iconic story by three directors in three different eras, and I've been sitting here trying to figure out why I find it all so tedious.

First off, I hate monkeys. I just think they're annoying, misshapen little creatures who glorify playing with your own feces and screeching, neither of which is something I approve of. I can't help but think this hindered my enjoyment of a series of films whose entire raison d'etre seems to be making people squeal "OMG look at the giant monkey!" A movie based on showcasing some grand, cutting edge special effects spectacle always ages incredibly badly, with the classic example being ID4 where "OMG look at the exploding White House!" wore thin before the movie was even out of theaters. And all of these movies feature long, long sequences of the giant monkey doing stuff for us to marvel at. In the case of the original, I kept thinking this must have looked really cool back in the 30's, but the thing looks so much like the Bumble from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer it's completely comical now.

Maybe it's the whole story about a powerful savage being civilized by the sight of a blonde woman, only to have Our Aryan Hero keep stealing her back, capturing Kong and transporting him back to America on a boat in chains, taking a magnificent force of nature and turning it into an immobile sideshow attraction in a theater. There's so much material there ripe for exploration, so many themes to build a story on, and instead they give us "OMG look at the giant monkey!" I'm not asking for a deep exploration of colonialism or the vanishing wild, but seriously, the human story of King Kong, how Ann Darrow is changed by her experience with Kong, is nonexistent in the original, and since abruptly ends at Kong's death, there's a really abrupt, dour conclusion to that poorly explored subplot, implying Ann Darrow finally makes a meaningful connection to another living thing and but then it dies so she lives out her meaningless life in a loveless marriage making babies for the guy who kept coming to drag her away. This is the problem with it being a giant monkey movie, any real theme, like the obvious metaphor of the heartless oil company raping the earth in the 70's remake, gets a real halfhearted treatment.

Peter Jackson's version goes the way of all nostalgia fests, in that proudly magnifies all the fondly remembered flaws, and is too afraid to really commit to any of its innovations. It's disappointing, because he wasn't afraid to make Lord of the Rings into a story that would work on film and add and subtract material and characters, and add as many endings as necessary, but there's a timidity towards finishing anything he starts exploring here besides the endless restored spider-pit sequence (aka OMG look at the giant slugs!). The preciosity of trying to nostalgically recreate the film style of the period, which really boils down to Jack Black running around belting lines out to the back row and doing jazz hands, is also something I find unbelievably irritating. And after two and a half hours, the "I am Peter Jackson and you will marvel at my terrifying CGI dinosaurs!" sequences get as uninspiring as they did in the Jurassic Park sequels. King Kong... it doesn't matter what version you see, unless you have some sort of unnatural interest in giant monkeys, they all suck.

I'm shipping off... to find my wooden leg

What a fantastic movie, that delivers on all of its promises. Everybody in a great cast delivers, Martin Sheen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marky Mark, Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga, and even Anthony Anderson were all absolutely captivating. After this and The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio may finally be done being the guy from Titanic. This is one of those films where for me all the twists and turns of the story and any meaning to be derived from it all faded to the background, and all that was left was being hauled through a wild ride, just mesmerized by the actors going through each individual scene. I could completely forget who all these people were and every other acting job they've ever done watching them in this film.

Based on those performances, if this is the movie that finally gets Martin Scorsese an Oscar, it won't be politics and pity (like Randy Newman's Oscar for Monsters, Inc). The use of music was also particularly cool, both in some of the selection and in the choice to blast it and then cut it off abruptly when dialogue took its place. The Dropkick Murphys cover of "I'm Shipping Up to Boston", half Irish-half punk, really set the tone for the whole film.

I don't remember the last time I saw such a violent film, not because it was wall-to-wall violence or graphic, but because of the frankness of it. The whole thing is a bloody tale about an Irish gang in south Boston, and the only works I've ever seen with this much senseless, violent tragedy were all Irish plays, so of course this screenplay was adapted by a guy named Monahan. To be fair, I've never seen Infernal Affairs, so I don't know how much of this is straight from the Hong Kong film, and how much is from the same wellspring of violence and loss that fueled W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge. It also makes me wonder how William Monahan's script for Kingdom of Heaven would have come out with better casting (David Thewlis and Siddig El Fadil excepted) and was aimed in a smarter, less commercial direction.

Some people in the audience were definitely not up to it though, so don't bring your dumb friends. The people who audibly yawned during any tense scene because they didn't understand what was going on, or giggled during any display of emotion, and laughed whenever anyone got shot, basically the people with no capacity to appreciate anything but broad physical comedy and melodrama and just came to see Jack Nicholson be all crazy, were notably disappointed. Several people filed out early, and this is a long film without a lot of roadsigns, so if a brutal Irish-american crime thriller doesn't sound like something you can immerse yourself in, skip it.