Issue 02: Thoughts on Oscar Nominations, A New Japanese Film Has Me Jazzed, and More
Another year, another Oscars. The lead-up to the grand unveiling of the year's anointed “best” is always more exciting than the interstitial month before the awards are handed out and the night of the ceremony itself. Everyone has their own unique idea of what constitutes the best movie of a given year (I'm no different), yet everyone seems to agree that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences never gets it quite right.
My own journey to cinema began, as it does for many of my type, with the Oscars. Or rather, Oscar prognostication: growing up I never really cared for movies that much (I could be coaxed to see the latest Pixar or Harry Potter franchise installment, though that was usually it), but I loved reading film criticism. The Boston Globe is not normally vaunted in this regard, but circa 2006 Ty Burr and Wesley Morris ran a pretty great shop. Every February, a week before the Academy had its big night, the Arts section of the Sunday Globe would run (and continues to run) a column where Burr and Morris nitpicked their way through every Oscar category, choosing the nominees—and snubees—they thought would win, should win, shouldn't be here, and were robbed.
Thus despite never having seen any of the films up for the big prize, the Oscars were a perennial source of excitement and fascination—not because I thought they would ever recognize the performances and filmmaking that actually deserved that tiny gold trophy, but because I wanted to see my film critic homeboys stick it to the man with their superior taste. Occasionally the Oscars do get it right; we're living in a world where Marion Cotillard, Tilda Swinton, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert Richardson, and the Coen brothers won competitive Oscars in the same year. Most of the rest of the time, the consensus turns out wrong, laughably wrong.
So this year, rather than get your knickers in a twist over the Academy's tendency to shaft diversity and all the nominees that could have been, let's celebrate the things they got right: those unimpeachably awesome cinematography and animated feature nominees, Joshua Oppenheimer's second shot at losing Best Documentary to a populist music doc, Charlotte Rampling's first nod after a career of strong work, Emma Donoghue and Phyllis Nagy bringing down the house in the screenplay field with thoughtful portrayals of women in emotional and physical captivity, “Mad Max: Fury Road” E V E R Y W H E R E. There are plenty of other worthy names left out of this year's list of nominees, but no one should need a voting body of some 6,000 mostly old, white guys to validate the greatness of what a year of movies has to offer.
What new film am I excited about this week? It's a Japanese drama called “Happy Hour”. The premise is something you'd expect from Ozu. Via Film Comment: “four almost middle-aged women whose close friendship and respective world views are profoundly challenged by the divorce and disappearance of their group's seemingly most stable member.” So far so good; sounds like the kind of personal drama that's becoming harder and harder to get made in the American indie scene. But it gets better—the director only provided that basic narrative framework for his actresses and let the women write their characters’ personalities and stories themselves. That kind of innovative approach to moviemaking is so simple and obvious that you're struck by how unique the concept is—why isn't this done more often? Why can't we make all our movies this way, giving the actors and actresses (but especially the actresses) a greater degree of creative control over what's rightfully their art too, not just the director's? The kicker, as I learned at the very end of writing this paragraph, is that the movie clocks in at an epic 317 minutes. Whelp, guess I'll be going to see this one by myself.
Articles, News, and Interviews
“Whether in a cave with sticks or against a massive green screen in Pinewood Studios, the story of Star Wars has always been much less important than the act of telling it.” http://rol.st/1PNZNJo
Orson Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight”, recently restored and soon playing in theaters nationwide, holds a mirror up to the director’s unpredictable career. http://bit.ly/1Rx9Iqt
Future Academy Award Winner Brie Larson on playing a mother onscreen (without having the experience of being one herself): http://bit.ly/1mZbggd
Three cheers for Ryan Coogler: the director of “Creed” and “Fruitvale Station” has officially been tapped for Marvel's “Black Panther” after months of rumors. http://bit.ly/1ZipxA8
This month in “Reasons you're relieved not to be Meryl Streep”: as president of the 2016 Berlin Film Festival, she'll have to watch the new 8 hour-long film by Filipino director Lav Diaz. (and you thought “Happy Hour” sounded grueling!) http://bit.ly/1SOXvwq
Don't let the drab newsroom interiors of “Spotlight” deceive you: the movie’s more cleverly directed than you’d think. http://bit.ly/1Zn2Vyv
Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks about “Mustang”, her Oscar-nominated feminist fairytale. http://bit.ly/1SXd2ue
What are film critics seeing in “Carol” that most audiences seem to be missing? http://theatln.tc/1P9MsOL
Poster of the Day
If Wes Anderson movies had been made in other periods of Hollywood history: http://bit.ly/1Pkdm0j