2019 Best Picture Nominees: Place Your Bets

For the first time in a long time, I actually saw all nine of the Best Picture nominees this year. Here’s what I found notable about them, and a stab at prognostication

FORD V FERRARI – It’s been called a “Dad Movie” and it is: A Boomer story about the one thing Boomers really care about: cars. In this film you can see the humble origins of all the obnoxious high-performance supercars currently being driven around by midlife-crisis millionaires and decadent oil-money royal nephews: Ferrari, Shelby, McLaren, etc. Feels like a fill-in nominee, but Christian Bale has a slim chance to score a win.

THE IRISHMAN – A Netflix offering from Martin Scorsese. I’d argue that, like JOKER, it's an imitation of a Scorsese core cinematic offering, despite the fact he directed it. Really more of a Robert De Niro film: he was instrumental in packaging the deal and bugging Joe Pesci 20+ times until he came out of retirement to participate. It’s overly long, which has a lot to do with the production oversight methods of Netflix (more below) then actually having three hours of story to tell. Look at a few acting nods, but not a Best.

JOJO RABBIT – This is the one film that I consistently forget is in the running. Not that it’s forgettable: it’s such a singular, unique film that it doesn’t fit into the mental framework of Oscar movies. It’s a comedy / drama about 10-year-old Hitler Youth member during the last months of World War II. His imaginary friend is Adolph Hitler, and his core beliefs are challenged when he discovers a Jewish girl hiding in the attic of his house. So it’s a strange setting for a comedy, but a very worthy film-- one that I’m afraid will get passed over because stories like this make some people queasy.

JOKER – Perhaps the first superhero movie (or rather a supervillain movie) from either major imprint to get a Best Picture nod. It may well take the big prize: JOKER has a polished look with solid art direction. It’s also a nihilistic story that is centered on explaining away the creation of a murderer as a product of hard times. It does not quite justify him, though, which is where Joaquin Phoenix’s remarkable performance comes in, pushing against the amoral narrative. It may well take the big prize.

LITTLE WOMEN – This is a fine film, filled with great performances and meticulous art direction (it will get Best Costume because, as we all know by now, Best Costume always goes to the movie where actors wear clothes that look like costumes). The story was given the Tarantino script-blender treatment, transformed from a time-linear narrative to a flashback / flash forward style that breathes a considerable amount of surprise and energy into the familiar tale. Great Gerwig did not get a Best Director nod, which usually means it won’t take the big prize.

ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD – QT really mended some fences with me with this film, which luxuriated in the sunny universe of Hollywood in 1969. It will appeal to Academy voters ‘cos it is a very flattering look at their own industry, giving it the standard glossy take as a creative, glamorous place where dreams come true. However the gory, historically inaccurate, needless ending will sink this film.

MARRIAGE STORY – Another Netflix joint. The performances by Scarlett Johansen and Adam Driver are electric, riveting and devastating. I get the feeling one or both will be rewarded. The film itself was… fairly good? It felt like a TV movie, and it suffered from the same problem most Netflix features have: it’s sloppy, underbaked, feeling a lot more like a first edit than a final cut. This has a lot to do with how these films are financed: Netflix is not trying to sell movie tickets. These films are made to generate buzz for a streaming service, which is trying to increase subscriptions. Absent the need to compete one-on-one, Netflix does not insist on one more script polish, one more effects pass, one more edit. Look at the downstream offerings on Netflix and you can really see this oversight philosophy in action.

PARASITE – This is, hands down, the best film of 2019. Enormous creative energy in the direction, photography and design, the acting is superb, and the story is both timely and utterly unique. It tells the story of a poor family which figures out a way of gaining the employment of a rich family through deception and clever thinking. Unfortunately it a Korean film in Korean: there are a certain percentage of film viewers who simply do not like reading subtitles. I HOPE it gets best picture, so I’ll just make it my personal pick.

1917 – a visually and technically superior gimmick film that is staged as one long continuous take. It tells the story of two young soldiers on a perilous mission to deliver a message behind enemy lines. The problem with gimmick movies is the gimmick overwhelms everything else, like story or acting performances. So even though it is a visual spectacle, 1917 is an emotionally static affair. I spent most of my time looking for the parts where they hid the cuts— when a tree is in the foreground or when the scene enters darkness. This film already took some significant pre-Oscar industry awards, and Hollywood may well reward it: they do love their bright, shiny objects.

In a few weeks, we’ll see how I did!

Tarantino the Nostalgic Unreliable Narrator

I went into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood expecting not to like it that much: he burned me very badly with his cute switcheroo act with The Hateful Eight, a film he touted as an epic widescreen roadshow movie but turned out to be a blood-drenched, claustrophobic indie film that had no earthly reason to be in Ultra Panavision 70.

But after thinking about it for a while afterward, I have a grudging respect for this film. Once Upon a Time is built around an original story, unusual for him: its not a pastiche or an homage or a dully executed re-make of some cheap exploitation film. It’s really him, talking directly to us and not through some faux-junk, schlocky exploitation genre— and God damn it if that isn’t refreshing. Quentin succeeds at his primary goal here: creating an alternate universe version of Los Angeles in 1969. He did a splendid job of it. The dialog is crisp, mostly lacking the big gobs of “Tarantino-speak” that bogged down earlier efforts, and the acting snaps as well. It’s a longish film, and his obsession with the trappings of the past often overwhelms his story, but more worth your time than any of his films since Jackie Brown.

On to the notes!

Nostalgia: Once Upon a Time drowns in nostalgia, aching and wistful and angry at the passage of time that erased the treasures lovingly displayed onscreen. Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker driven by desires— obscure action cinema, violence, glib dialogue, women’s bare feet. But this time his desire is the past. His past, a past he has said was the favorite time of his childhood.

Once Upon a Time is Quentin the video-store clerk and kid who grew up in LA in the 1960s and 1970s, finally brought to his fullest. It’s a wishlist of everything he ever wanted to do in a movie as a kid, pattered out in his characteristic staccato: he wants to be a TV western star (Quentin Tarantino was named after Burt Reynold’s character in “Gunsmoke”). He wants to beat up Bruce Lee. He wants to change Hollywood history (more later). He wants to set an LP needle down right on the gap before his favorite song (this happens several times) and hear the KHJ and KFWB jingles ring out over an AM car radio again. He wants to make a movie with Steve McQueen and Michelle Phillips and Sharon Tate. He wants all he knew and saw and loved as a child returned to him.*

But most of all, he wants to go home to the past. You can feel it: his longing reaches right out of the frame. It’s all there in broad strokes: late 60s Hollywood Boulevard lovingly recreated; classic, unchanged locales like Musso and Frank and El Coyote visited. There’s a montage near the end of the film that gave one of the biggest thrills of the movie: night falls and long-gone business facades light up. There’s an old Der Weinerschnitzel, a Mission-style Taco Bell, The Cinerama Dome restored to its Pacific Theaters glory.

Tarantino is one year younger than I am, and I spent some time in LA around this time as well— down in sleepy suburban Lynwood rather than Hollywood, but I know these sights, the look and feel of the era. I’ll admit one of the strongest reactions I had to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a strong desire to move into this film. I didn’t want to leave. I’m not sure if 1969 was a better world than 2017, but the version he showed us was simpler, shinier, and undeniably beautiful.

Two-person, one-character protagonist: washed-up star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt-double/dogsbody Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) are the inseparable pair at the center of the film. They make a very big deal out of the fact that Rick can’t function without Cliff, and vice versa. This makes it easy to pin this relationship as a Tarantino staple, tough guy male bonding. But it goes far deeper than that. Rick and Cliff are the same character. They cannot exist outside of the definition they have for each other. The two characters span one complete male personality. Rick is insecure, weak, vain and sensitive (he cries like three times in the film), but also talented and ambitious. Cliff is taciturn, strong, highly capable and practical, but also lacks ambition to the point he is content to live in a wreck of a trailer in North Hollywood. A lesser effort would have these traits embodied in one overly complex, somewhat unbelievable character: in Once Upon a Time this one character is smeared over two individuals, yin and yang, completing each other in all ways, functioning as one complete person. This sort of split character has been done in other films, but usually the other way: in biopics they make they take handfuls of real historical figures and smoosh them into one character.

History and the Unreliable Narrator (mild spoilers): Once Upon a time in Hollywood follows three intertwining storylines, much like Pulp Fiction but without time-shifting tricks: Rick and his buddy Cliff, trying to re-start a failed Hollywood career; Sharon Tate’s arrival in Hollywood, and— lurking like an evil portent— the Manson Family, biding their time in an abandoned movie ranch in Chatsworth, waiting for their call to the stage.

Anybody familiar with recent history knows what happened the night of August 8, 1969: Four members of the Manson Family entered the house on 10050 Cielo Drive in the LA hills and murdered everyone inside, including actor Sharon Tate. Not to give away anything specific, but this is not what happens at the end of Once Upon a Time. Something completely made-up happens.

Quentin Tarantino has done this sort of “alternative historical fiction” thing before: he killed the living hell out of Hitler in a French movie theater in Inglourious Basterds. And by all means he has every right to do so: he’s the storyteller here and he has a right to re-tell historical events any way he wants to. When you get right down to it, every filmmaker who ever shot a narrative film is a total and complete liar. You can plot a line straight through the relative level of reality in any filmmaker’s work, from hyper-real (Zero Dark Thirty, The Grapes of Wrath, HBO’s Chernobyl) to utter fantasy (Toy Story 4, Lord of the Rings, Top Gun) with lots of shading in-between. And the hyper-real ones are still mostly made-up hooey.

But the tall tale Tarantino is spinning at the conclusion of Once Upon a Time does something very strange. If the terrible thing that is supposed to happen on the night of August 8, 1969 doesn’t happen, what was the point of two-thirds of the film? In other words, if you showed this film to somebody with NO IDEA of the history Quentin Tarantino is re-writing, what would she make of it? She would sit through long sequences of Sharon Tate wandering around Los Angeles, shopping, seeing herself in a movie theater in Westwood. She would see long sequences of Manson Girls wandering around Los Angeles barefoot, hitchhiking and hanging around Spahn ranch. But they never really connect: all the long minutes of foreboding and build-up are dissipated in a standard Tarantino gory ending. Our historically ignorant movie viewer would leave the screening wondering why those other sequences even exist.

Does a filmmaker owe fidelity to historical facts? I don’t know. What I do know is this film will be seen by people 50, maybe 100 years from now. The Tate-LaBianca murders will no longer be a part of living history: to these future viewers, they’ll be as familiar with the actual events as we are of the details of the murder of Stanford White in 1906. Which is to say they may very well accept Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s ending as actual history. This is how history gets distorted: it does not seem important now, but we owe some debt to the future to tell the truth.

*Quentin Tarantino put himself in this film twice, even though he had no cameo. In one segment Rick Dalton is resting between set-ups in a western backlot set next to a precocious child actor (Julia Butters). She is roughly the same age QT would have been in 1969, and you can hear him talking through her as she engages Rick in some positive affirmation. Later in the film one of the characters announces a move to “a condo in Toluca Lake,” likely the same one occupied by Jimmie and Bonnie 25 years later in Pulp Fiction (1994).

QT's Roadshow Gimmick: or, The Heuristic Eight

This still is the actual proportion of Ultra Panavision 70mm.

Went to a late screening of The Hateful Eight at the Century San Francisco Center, where a friend (Chris) has successfully seen the thing. Very nice place with leather seats where you can buy a beer. At 11:00 on the dot the projected cranked up and the overture screen appeared on that wide, wide screen.

The rest of this is going to a Hegelian dialectical analysis of The Hateful Eight in Roadshow format. It's important to quantify the entire experience this way because when you get right down to it, the synthesis of technology and subject here is super goddamned peculiar.

THESIS: The Ultra Panavision 70mm Roadshow Release.
The extra wide format Tarantino used here -- 65mm source with an extra anamorphic squeeze bringing the frame to a stunning 2.76:1 aspect ratio-- is quite rare and was used exclusively for prestige Hollywood productions. Ben Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Fall of the Roman Empire were previous films lensed in this format.

The technical presentation at the Century San Francisco Center was simply excellent. The image suffered a little bit from the screen masking, which was open at the bottom, showing a soft edge. I believe the auditorium was equipped for either 'scope (2.35:1) or spherical/HD (1.8:1) and simply could not mask the screen down to the right aspect ratio.

70mm film. This is a faded clip from
Hello Dolly! (1970) which was shot in 65mm.

For the sheer visual experience, it's worth the effort seeing the film this way (and you can until January 11th, when they will dismount all the 70mm projection gear). I have been fortunate to have seen several films in Ultra Panavision before (Ben Hur and It's a Mad x4 World, in the Cinerama Dome no less) and the sheer visual aspect of the film-- incredible 70mm detail, rich color and natural tone of photochemical film makes for a memorable experience. (it would have been even better to have seen a screening on a deeply curved Cinerama screen but those are no longer available in the Bay Area.)

No less pleasurable is the entire Roadshow experience: an overture, intermission and a quality program handed to every patron. More films should do this. When I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in Cinerama Roadshow when I was a little kid there were programs, but you had to buy them.

ANTITHESIS: The Hateful Eight
The movie itself was vile. Set in the Old West, it's a tale about a collection of mostly unpleasant Western movie types holed up in a mountain trading post during a blizzard. Having a full complement of characters, Quentin advances his story by having his characters give little speeches and then kill each other. His idea of a "plot twist" is killing off a character and letting the story dynamics fall into a reductio ad absurdum pattern until the next killing. If anything (and H/T to Chris for pointing this out) it's a lot like John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) complete with Kurt Russell.

They're hateful and there are eight of them.
Walton Goggins (#6 here) turned in a great,
unusual stand-out performance.

There are no overarching themes aside from vengeance and pointless violence and super-casual 19th century racism. Like Django Unchained, one could look at this film as a addressing slavery and institutional racism, but it's clear that ol' QT is only vaguely aware of this: he merely loves having his characters say "nigger" over and over and over until the shock value hardens into dull acceptance.

Some critics have argued that Quentin Tarantino is expertly deconstructing archetypes of classic cinema in his movies. That may well be, but I do not think I have ever seen a Hollywood or spaghetti western quite as nihilistic and meaningless as The Hateful Eight. If anything it gave some glimpses into QT's thought processes-- and man, it's ugly in there. Maybe he's trying to meld the classic low-budget Western with the Austrian horror genre (i.e. Funny Games) in terms of sheer lack of human empathy, but I doubt it. It's all just those ugly thoughts. In fact he's so in love with his own tough-guy, everyone-is-a-killer narrative that he reads the left-hand narration out loud right after the intermission-- apparently because he believes we're a bunch of goldfish who forgot everything in the first half of the movie.

The Hateful Eight also claustrophobic. Most of the movie is set in one room. Wide film notwithstanding, this film has the lowest and simplest production values of any Quentin Tarantino film-- and this includes Reservoir Dogs, another one-set film but with a lot of interesting scenes set in other interesting places.

SYNTHESIS: Tarantino's Roadshow Gimmick
Roadshow implies prestige: Every other film released in Ultra Panavision 70mm had incredibly large budgets, stellar casts and sweeping vistas and locations. Even the ones shot in spherical 65mm, from Oklahoma! (1955) to Samsara (2011) have a certain cachet, a promise of an enhanced experience. Add to that the roadshow format, with an overture, intermission and a program-- all elements of legitimate theater transplanted into cinema to impart a sense of occasion and importance--  it adds up to the anticipation of a special, full-sensory, even transcendent cinematic experience.

We don't get any of that here.

The Hateful Eight is an anti-prestige movie. It's a grindhouse Western full of grungy, glib characters who spend the majority of the film in a rustic shack pointing revolvers at each other. There are some gorgeous sweeping vistas in the beginning of the film, when the first four of the eight meet up in a stagecoach, set in the snowy wilds of Wyoming. But aside from some clever use of cross-frame staging and mise-en-scene, the super-wide frame and rich film look is wasted. It's the least spectacular large-format movie I've ever seen.

The synthetic effect is, as I said, super goddamned peculiar. It's like putting on evening wear and paying a premium to watch a bunch of YouTube cat videos. I overheard a few conversations during the intermission: Most other audience members were trying to define what the big deal was about 70mm and why the screen was so squished. This represents a misuse of the format. Tarantino should have made Inglorious Basterds in Ultra Panavision 65: it had sweep, spectacle, a huge cast and amazing settings. Hell, he should have made Kill Bill into a single, 200-minute-long-with-intermission roadshow production. In terms of matching content to format The Hateful Eight deserved to be filmed in 16mm and blown up to plain HD.

If you want to see a bit of cinematic history, a real live roadshow 70mm release with the full bells and whistles, The Hateful Eight technically qualifies, I suppose. If you're all hype to see Jennifer Jason Leigh (who was great, BTW) get punched in the face, covered with her own and various people's blood, and called a bitch about a million times, see the Digital Cinema version: it's shorter and cheaper.

Quentin would have been PISSED

With nothing compelling on TV and a movie pass burning in my wallet, I decided to attend a roadshow screening of The Hateful Eight.

I've sort of fallen out with Tarantino lately, what with his ardent passion for turning junk movies from the past into faux-junk cinema and utter devotion to pointless nihilistic gore and over-the-top vengeance stories. It's all part of his huge movie-geek thing-- but something of substance DID come out of it. The man cares about old-school widescreen cinema: so do I. That's where our Venn diagrams intersect.

He went through an extraordinary amount of trouble to create a roadshow release of The Hateful Eight. The last film I remember seeing in a proper roadshow release was Apocalyse Now, a credits-free 70mm screening with a program provided. The Hateful Eight goes a few steps better, with a musical overture, intermission and a three-hour program length.

At least, that's what I understand is supposed to happen.

The fun part: going out with a big ol' 65mm
camera and shooting cool lens flares.

December 28th's  last screening was supposed to start at eleven at the Daly City 20. I got there early, paid the $3 up-charge and staked out a seat near the screen, pleased they had curtained it for crazy wide 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision. Two young women-- practically the only female-only party in a half-full show-- stopped on the way in and noted the smell. Sure enough-- this was the fourth screening of the day and Quentin's core audience demographic had filled the auditorium with a heavy, funky, manly fragrance.

11:00 became 11:10, then 11:20. No movie. The floor manager appeared, handed out rain checks and promised we'd be up and running in about ten minutes. At 11:40, he came back and cancelled the show. So, in the end I did NOT see The Hateful Eight-- but I got two movie passes and three roadshow programs out of the experience, so not a total loss.

The floor manager and I chatted just before he called the screening off. Apparently the theater got all the hardware for a 70mm screening just before it was supposed to start. The projector was refurbished, and at the end of the roadshow screening they will haul it away and 2K digital shows would take it's place. The problem was the projector was just plain broken: it simply would not pass the wide film, some sort of mechanical failure. This cancelled screening was not the first one they had to axe either. Roadshow screenings have gone dark all across the US and Canada in regular intervals.

Hey: Quentin Tarantino and The Weinstein Company are trying very hard to give the audience a taste of the widescreen glories of the past, and more power to them for it.  The thing is: they're giving audience a taste of not just that, but the entirety of photomechanical projection technology.

For each of The Hateful Eight roadshow venues they had to ship in a 70mm projector, set it up and align it, and station a projectionist exclusively to handle the thing. (I'm sure they had to bring in flatbed film platters in some places as well, but not Daly City: they still had one Christie system left). These projectors are likely vintage Century or Todd-AO machines they bought used and had mechanically refurbished. But without the infrastructure and expertise to maintain these machines, they break. They didn't break as much in the past because they were so common.

DP70 35/70mm projector.

Back in my movie theater management days a surprising number of theaters I managed had 70mm capability. In the 80s United Artists had the presence of mind to buy up and install a lot of DP-70 Todd-AO projectors made by Phillips/Norelco in the Netherlands in 1955 or so. The reasons for buying up these machines was twofold: they were very solidly made and reliable for regular 35mm screenings, and even the dopiest non-union assistant manager could switch them over to 70mm. Even with dopey non-union assistant managers running the shows, there were technicians available for overhaul and spare parts were in abundance in every projection booth (sometimes even spare projectors). This all made the average screening in the film era a reliable thing.

Nonetheless, there were a lot of moving parts and flying film and things went off the rails all the time. I am personally responsible for destroying a $3000 reel of 70mm: I started a screening of Bonfire of the Vanities in 70mm blow-up (why? WHY?) forgetting to engage the feed platter motor. Reel One wrapped around the hub and was torn to shreds. Fortunately we could switch to 35mm until a replacement reel arrived (and Larry Levin finished yelling at me).

Digital projection has as we all know, transformed the moviegoing experience. For the audience the changes have been subtle: the picture is more steady, screenings more reliable, and unfortunately trailers nearly endless. the films still "break," though, but they do it digitally: It was reported that an opening night screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens glitched a few minutes in and skipped to the very end of the film. Digital Cinema's most profound change happened in the booth: no moving parts. Films are loaded via hard drive. The roar of the average film projector (which was terrifyingly loud when running 70mm) has been replaced by the hum of cooling fans.

Like I said, big praise for Tarantino for bringing back Ultra Panavision, but it's a kind of stunt, like wiring theater seats to shock people. My cancelled show was part of this whole retro-technical stunt rather than the continuum of modern Digital Cinema technology, and as such none of the backups were available. There was no 35mm print backup or a spare digital projector. He's giving people a taste of the old film days, but it's so late after the passing of this technology it's definitely a double-edged sword. Part of this is sheer hubris: it's easy and cool on the front end to go out and shoot a film with 65mm Panavision cameras and hand-restored 1.25X anamorphic lenses. On the back end it's not so easy: conforming 100 theaters to a nearly dead film format is a tall order indeed, a stunt not as easily pulled off.

So I'm gonna try again soon to see another roadshow screening, but this time I'm going to a theater that isn't in the sticks (Daly City: I'll bet they installed the less reliable refurbished projectors in the outliers). Sheer law of averages means next time the projector will light up.

Inherent Vice: Pynchon 101

This poster, aside from tweaking Leonardo DaVinci, gives an idea
of the many wonderful cameos in Inherent Vice. Martin Short
(far right) is particularly funny and strange.

After dinner last Friday, the wife and I stopped by the Redwood City 20 to see what was playing. We spontaneously decided to see Inherent Vice. I love that sort of thing-- we went in unprepared for Paul Thomas Anderson's newest film-- and it ended up being a total delight.

It's the story of "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) a hippie P.I. who is hired to find a missing girl who also happens to be his ex. thus begins Doc's strange journey through 1970 Los Angeles-- both helped and hindered by Detective "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a flat-topped, hippie-hating, brutal/delusional LA cop who also carries a SAG card (we see him as an extra in "Adam-12," in fact). On the long, winding path of investigation Doc encounters all sorts of odd and historically appropriate types: Nazi bikers, cultists, a Laurel Canyon mansion full of hippies, a hidden cabal of dentists and drugs. Lots and lots and lots of drugs. River Phoenix does an amazing job, in fact, of conveying an amazing range of stoned: mellow high, totally baked, buzzed, flying' and everything in-between.

"Doc" Sportello (River Phoenix), doing what he does
dozens of times in the film.

Compared to any other sort of film, I'd say it was not unlike The Big Lebowski- but it's a LOT more like Kiss Me Deadly, a film noir saturated in the light of Los Angeles and the darkness cast by the greedy and evil.

This is the first Thomas Pynchon book ever committed to film, and the script was apparently personally approved by Pynchon as well. Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson were made for each other-- their mutual approach to storytelling is spacey and convoluted yet brimming with insight. Inherent Vice perfectly embodies a lot of Pynchon's favorite motifs: Los Angeles, complex whodunits, subtle mysticism and conspiracies by shadowy, powerful organizations. The 2009 book was considered considered "Pynchon Lite," one of his most accessible novels. If this is so, than the movie version is an even better introduction to his distinctive literary style. Pynchon 101.

Thomas Pynchon, as seen on "The Simpsons." According
to Josh Brolin, the reclusive author has a cameo in
Inherent Vice. Forget it: we'll never figure it out.

Paul Thomas Anderson has developed an elliptical and indirect narrative style, especially in his later films: Inherent Vice could be described as being comprised of a series of close-ups and medium shots of Joaquin Phoenix interacting and reacting. He is an example of a filmmaker whose core relationship with cinematic storytelling has clearly evolved: his beginnings as a teller of Tarantino-like multiple-storyline widescreen films like Boogie Nights and Magnolia to a focus on nuance and dialog, as in The Master and Inherent Vice. This refocusing gives these later films a rambling feel as the plot slowly snakes from one scene to another. It take a little getting used to, but when it all clicks together it's exhilarating.

Inherent Vice is also very funny-- which is sort of unusual. P.T. Anderson doesn't really do funny: There was some situational comedy in Boogie Nights, and Punch Drunk Love was supposed to be funny (it wasn't), but this is the first time he stretches out for some Coen Brothers-style sardonic humor.

Check it out, you'll enjoy it. See it high, and you might enjoy it even more.

2013 Best Picture Nominees: Nine Movies You May Have Actually Seen

Just realized two things: 1) I haven't handicapped the Best Picture candidates for the 2013 Oscars yet, and 2) I handicapped the Worst Picture candidates for the 2013 Razzie Awards first. That's backwards. I was probably preoccupied or something, but it's kinda telling. Also, I've only seen three of the nine nominated films-- but the three I saw were quite amazing, so I can tell picking a Best is going to be tough sledding this year. I'll venture a guess that this is going to be the first year in a long time where Best Picture and Best Director are going to be split.

Anyhoo, here are the noteworthy nine:

Amour - Didn't see it. Hardly anybody saw it. However, Michael Haneke got a Best Director nod, so if you believe in the conventional wisdom it has a better chance of netting the big tamale than Argo, Django and Zero Dark Thirty.

Argo - Very enjoyable, hyper-tense and pitch-perfect storytelling. Not sure why Ben Affleck didn't get the director nom. Maybe because he's the star as well, and the Academy voters found it too… I don't know, Afflecky. (A measure of quantity, not quality: he was fine in both roles.)

Beasts of the Southern Wild - Didn't see it. The members of AMPAS have gone for low-budget, little-seen films before (as in last year's The Artist), and they could do it again.

Django Unchained - I get to walk away from objectivity here and say, once again, I hope Tarantino's hitless streak continues. He's still purveying his uniquely unoriginal brand of warmed-over 70s exploitation-film faux junk.

Russell Crowe in Les Misérables, singin' his ass off,
live and mere inches from both Hugh Jackman and the
protective anti-spittle filter on the camera lens.

Les Misérables - There was fascinating article in the New York Times about this film, and why so many critics have savaged it AND the audiences who loved it. It has something to do with Tom Hooper's technique of having the actors singing live and in super-close up. It's so intimate that the audience cannot pull away, to get some emotional distance from the subject. this approach makes it absolutely sincere, emotionally raw and true, which makes viewing and evaluating Les Misérables in way-too-typical ironic detachment mode difficult, if not impossible. Irony is the inch-deep sea most critics swim in these days. Hence the brickbats.

Life of Pi - Didn't see it. But Ang Lee got the nod, and I have a strange feeling this one may just take it.

Lincoln - Saw it and loved it. makes you proud to be an American-- in a good way, not a somewhat guilty Zero Dark Thirty way.

Silver Linings Playbook - Did not see it. Close second in best picture race, I think. David O' Russell has been a player for a while, and he may well get his due.

Zero Dark Thirty - Just saw this, and it is amazing, mature and complex. Far from taking sides on things like torture or detainee interrogation it showed the moral complexities involved in it, issues that go deep into the psyche of the intelligence community and post-9/11 America in general. Unfortunately, Kathryn Bigelow took home statues two years ago for The Hurt Locker.

Interesting note: the three Oscar-nominated films I saw - Lincoln, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty-- are of the exact same genre: historical fiction. They're dramatized enactments of important but either obscure or classified moments of American history. In fact, anyone with a reasonable good knowledge of history knows how each film ends. But each of the three was compelling and surprising, telling their stories with such skill that I didn't care that I knew how the curtain falls on each one.

Which is why movies are, even in this big effects tentpole and comic book obsessed era of cinematic history,  still so damned great.

More fun Oscar observations after the Stewie Griffin-hosted awards ceremony!

Butch, Barbarella and the Pain Threshhold

Music is so prevalent in motion pictures (and television, video games, public spaces, smartphones, etc.) that for the most part we don't even notice it unless it's trying to flay us (like the stings in Inception-- Yes, I'm sure we have all pushed the button on that link by now. I never get tired of it). For the most part, good movie music seamlessly underscores the tone and rhythm of the film and reinforces it's genre-- the double-beat percussion of a Michael Bay film, the whimsical strings of RomComs, the oldies abuse of Tarantino or Wes Anderson.

But there was a time, quite a while ago, when Hollywood could not figure out what sort of music to put in films-- and I ain't talking about the eighties, when the studios apparently fired all their musicians and hired a keyboard guy. Things have improved as far as major motion pictures go, but television still uses just that one keyboard guy: synthetic music technology has gotten so good that you really can't tell it's just that one guy anymore.

No, I'm talking about the late 1960s, and I have two examples of films, quite good films, that were very nearly sunk by their music. The youth-culture explosion of the era must have left some studio executives completely clueless as to how films should be scored: They may have thought symphonic music would be considered "square." And there were few actually young producers genuinely connected to the times, such as Peter Fonda and the remarkable soundtrack of Easy Rider (1969). So some producers tried to bring in the kids with a "hip" score-- and they didn't always succeed. And nothing, in the historical long view, dates a film as badly as poorly chosen music.

Barbarella (1968) is a big-budget European sci-fi psychedelic freakout of a film, directed by Roger Vadim. It stars Vadim's wife Jane Fonda wearing costumes with transparent sci-fi bits in a role I think was calculated to give Henry Fonda a stroke. It's over-the top, tongue-in-cheek, breezy fare, sure, and it didn't exactly set any box-office records when it came out, but it has an undeniably unique visual style. It's also the very first film adapted from a comic book (Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were serials).

For reasons I can only imagine were tied to a sincere effort to be groovy, Bob Crewe, a former member of The Four Seasons, was hired to composed the soundtrack. The result is painful. His idea of creating a sci-fi mood is to run a guitar through a super-wet coil (you can hear this on Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," which Bob Crewe co-wrote). It's such a overwrought, high-pitched, silly sound that it begins to hammer at you, turning from merely annoying to mild torture by the end. Which is a shame, because what's onscreen is quite lovely to behold.*

On the more Hollywood side of cinema, the producers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) must have thought they had a pretty hip property (two guys, one gal, not married!) so they hired a musician who must have seemed pretty far out by studio heads at the time: Burt Bacharach. (I just saw this in sublime HD, which is why I wrote this piece.)

(And I'd like to point out that I am not just making fun of old movies here. I'm sure audiences at the time were as bewildered as I am now that someone would hire a Doo-Wop artist to score a sci-fi love-in, or Dionne Warwick's songwriter to compose a western.)

I'm quite amazed by how, in several sequences, the music sucks you completely out of the film. There's a scene where Butch and his maybe-girl Etta goof around with a bicycle (which was a new invention in the film's setting in the 1890s). "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" plays. This gets you half-way out of the film. Then, for some reason, the soundtrack starts blaring what can only be described as three minutes of obnoxious circus music. You are then pushed completely out of the film, left watching Paul Newman and Katherine Ross aimlessly improvising bits with a bicycle on a ranch set. This out-of-film experience happens again later in a sequence where Butch and Sundance elude a determined posse to a peppy, mixed-chorus New Christie Minstels sort of scat deal.

But bad music, in this instance, does not kill the movie. It's still a remarkably good watch, much of that credit going to George Roy Hill's interpretation of William Goldman's amazing script. Never a dull moment-- though there are some hard-on-the-ears ones. Katherine Ross was sexy and great, Paul Newman gives an amazing performance and Redford, well… The producers lucked out by getting Robert Redford at the exact moment when he was in full bloom, at his absolute maximum amount of handsome. I'm not generally attracted to men, but in many scenes I found myself unable… to... stop… staring at him.

Jane Fonda, Robert Redford: I guess you can turn the sound off.

*And yeah, they're remaking Barbarella, and the talk is Rose McGowan will be playing her. Maybe they can get Sha-Na-Na to do the soundtrack.

Some Holiday Kindness for the Coppola Kids

Alright, I've had my sights set on Sofia Coppola for a while now.

I think it was Daniel who quoted me as saying, some four years ago, that he admired my simple adage: Films by Francis Coppola's kids all suck. This was not long before the release of Marie Antoinette which, though the film has it's defenders, was mostly met with towering brickbats. So I'd like to go on record to say that I hated it first, sight unseen.

Hey: It's me, not them. I'll admit to the core of my hostility towards Sofia and to a lesser extent his brother Roman is rooted in a deep sense of societal fairness. Meritocracy is what makes America great. It's also what draws people from all over the world to work in Hollywood-- the idea that if you have the right ideas or talent, you can go far regardless of how humble your origins are and far outside the TMZ you came from. This meritocracy ironically exists side-by-side with the most outrageous bias there is: if you're good-looking you can easily get in the door and you're guaranteed at least a walk-on or two.

The idea of aristocracies should be abhorrent to every American who has even the slightest idea of why this country was founded in the first place. But aristocracies are here, and apparently thanks to some recent bipartisan legislation they're here to stay, and on their way to being tax-free-- coincidentally, just like the nobles were in Marie Antoinette's time.

So in Hollywood we have the kids and grandkids of talented artists, their careers paths pre-paved and pre-lit, all tolls paid. Sometimes it works out well-- I'll never fault Ben Stiller for riding coattails, nor is George Clooney guilty of leveraging anything more than his aunt's last name.

But the Coppola kids are another breed entirely. Sofia in particular has no problem using the medium of film to interpret the world exclusively thorough the extremely narrow definition of being Francis Coppola's privileged kid. Lost In Translation draws deeply from her personal experiences of aimlessly hanging around in a five-star hotel in Tokyo. Marie Antoinette is a gleefully shared observation about how great it is to wear pretty clothes and cool shoes and have unlimited amounts of money.

Sofia's latest, out soon, is Somewhere, which breaks from her monologue films to something closer to a biography. It's about Johnny, a jaded movie star (Stephen Dorff-- has nobody heard of the Stephen Dorff Curse?) who spends his time doing drugs and hanging out with strippers in the Chateau Marmont (hey-- another hotel flick!). He continues his downward-- albiet well-financed-- spiral, until... according the the LA Times:

Until, that is, his 11-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), is thrust into Johnny's care. The precocious preteen awakens his parental instinct and punctures his abiding self-absorption. Hmm. Kind of like the movie's director — who as a kid regularly took up lengthy hotel residencies while Dad shot movies such as "Apocalypse Now" and "The Cotton Club" and was exposed to her father's freewheeling Hollywood hubris — might have done?

So what we have here, protests in the press to the contrary, is Sofia tangentially making a film about... her dad. Roman did the exact same thing with his film CQ (2001), which is tangentially about his father's early career in the late 1960s.

Did I say I hated the films these guys make? Maybe I do, but I beginning to lose much of my animus toward the Coppola kids themselves. After reading the synopsis for Somewhere, I actually started to feel a little sorry for them. Imagine trying to make your mark in an industry where your father has produced undisputed masterpieces. Even worse: your father was able to create great art in a period in history when an auteur was given artistic freedom and studio funding-- a level of autonomy and unquestioned financial support on a scale the current generation of young filmmakers can only envy.

Through their self-reflexive films, it's becoming apparent Francis Ford Coppola really left his bootprint on his kids. They're a little like trauma victims, reliving overwhelming experiences by doodling them out on the walls of their rooms, never able to truly get out of their own heads.

But time and success heals all wounds, right? Roman Coppola has carved out a decent career as a Second Unit Director-- of course, it's usually for films helmed by Wes Anderson or his sister or his dad, but it's good, honest, stress-free work. And Somewhere won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival-- Of course, the glaring fact that Sofia's ex-boyfriend Quentin Tarantino was the presiding judge should probably be ignored as a wild coincidence.

Oscars: Hooray for Conventional Wisdom

The fabulous 82nd annual Academy Awards handout is now in the history books. It was a triumph of Hollywood Conventional Wisdom, a perfect sort of ceremony that featured no real surprises. Okay, there were a few:

• Somebody made the strange decision this year was to start the Best Actor and Best Actress nominees with encomiums from peers and co-workers: we were treated to Tim Robbins talking about Morgan Freeman (funny), Colin Farrell toasting Jeremy Renner (embarrassing, but also funny), Stanley Tucci gassing on about Meryl Streep, etc. This process ate up over ten broadcast minutes, and it was deadly. Time stopped.

But there was a sound reason they decided to structure these categories that way: the undeniable force of Conventional Wisdom. Everyone in the Kodak Theater knew who the winners were. Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock were just plain due for Oscars, period. No Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls snubs tonight! So the surprise in the end was how well the ceremony was engineered to make two solid locks seem downright magnanimous.

It wasn't exactly a fix, but Conventional Wisdom was too strong this year (as were the "for your consideration" campaigns) to allow any other outcome. When the Best Actor segment was over, I turned around to the people watching the broadcast with me and asked: "Think fast: what film did Jeff Bridges just win for?" "Uhhhh... Country Heart?" Giving everyone a moment to be personally celebrated, to have a moment of unshared spotlight, probably seemed like the least the Academy could do. Gotta keep Oprah happy...

• Conventional Wisdom made it's shadowy presence known again a few moments later, for the Best Director award. Okay, can you tell me what presenter Barbra Stresand would have done if a white male had won that Oscar? Tarantino as Taylor Swift and Babs as Kanye West, that's what.

And they played Katherine Bigelow off to "I Am Woman." What the hell? Jon Stewart calls the Oscars "The Gay Super Bowl:" Maybe there was a need to bury the needle on the kitsch-o-meter at least once during what was otherwise a rather restrained evening. I mean, the dancers were wearing-- quelle horreur-- street clothes!

• Speaking of what the hell, during the "rollcall of the dead" or whatever they call it, the Academy acknowledged Michael Jackson-- but not Farah Fawcett, who passed away on the same day. She was in nine theatrical releases: He was in two, and he was dead for one of them.

• Since Barbra was appeased by the selection of a female director, The air was let out of the Best Picture category as quickly as possible. Tom Hanks practically trotted out to the podium, tore open the envelope, barked out the winner (The nominees were not listed!) and quickly moonwalked back to allow Bigelow to retake the stage. (I really liked seeing Hurt Locker stars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty take the upper stage, howling, laughing and doing The Bump. Spontaneous and fun-- and, with all due respect, I doubt they'll ever be up there again.)

• A few surprises were to be had, my favorites being two blatant displays of bitchery. Roger Ross Williams, winner of Best Documentary Short Subject, came up on stage and started gushing in the emotionally overwhelmed way most lower-level Oscar winners gush. Then an apparition wearing a sparkly shower curtain-- Elinor Burkett, the category's other winner-- came in stage right, pushed him aside and said, "Ain't that just like a man?" She then started in with her grand, swinging-for-the-fences speech-- and the mike was abruptly cut off. 45 seconds, people! The long shot afterward showed the presenters trying to shoo her off the stage.

Sandy Powell won her third Oscar for Costume design. She slowly slinked to the stage, fairly broadcasting the fact she made her own gown. Her speech went something like this: "This my third Oscar, so it's not quite as surprising to get it. I would dedicate this to all the new talent and designers just getting into the business, but I'm keeping this."

• In some of the podium presentations, there was a strange, rather prominent noise going in the background, a roaring, clunky commotion. It was in the parts where the nominees were speaking into the podium mikes, which were pointed upwards and were likely catching machinery noise in the massive flyspace above the Kodak Theater stage. Or it was, for the first time ever heard by the public, the great gears of The Industry meshing. The great gears grind slowly, but they do grind everyone.

• My wife summed it up best: "Everyone got what they deserved: the nominees, the audience, everyone."

ADDENDA: Dana Stevens of Slate had an interesting interpretation of Sandy Powell's speech: she may have been signaling that the Academy can stop giving her awards, thank you. And from what I have read on the Washington Post, the Elinor Burkett stage shove was the end result of some amazing offstage action.

Man, That's a Lot of Nominations

For the first time since 1943, The Academy has seen fit to nominate 10 films for the Best Picture top prize. I think this is fun.

They should expand the Best Picture category to 25 nominations next year. Why not? They could briefly describe each nominated film at the beginning and end of each segment-- or they could throw out all the rules and go live for five solid hours. (And wouldn't it would be a hoot to see what all those amazing dresses and expensive tuxes will look like after being sat on for five hours?) And with a field of 25, the tipping point for a winning film goes to a hair over four percent of the votes, which would guarantee a certain amount of amusing chaos.

I am very curious as to how they are going to divvy up the screen in that moment before the envelope is torn open. Ten little boxes-- it's going to look like a security camera suite at a very expensive, very exclusive mall.

Anyway, here are the nominees, in alphabetical order. I actually saw quite a few of these: Last year, I was 0 for 5, pathetic. Because I have I'll just go ahead an annotate my take on each film's chance of actually winning:

Avatar - It's a "Hollywood Votes For Itself" sort of shoe-in. Best odds in the bunch. I am very happy to see Avatar didn't get a nom for screenplay-- it almost restores my faith.

The Blind Side - Didn't catch this one. John Lee Hancock didn't get a director nom, so I wouldn't bet on it.

District 9 - An excellent movie, and a gratifying choice. I think it has the best chance of the ones on this list-- one that did not get a director nom, that is. Which means, unfortunately, there's no way it'll win.

An Education - Didn't catch this one either. By the look of it, this film will clean up with the academy members with schoolgirl fetishes and those who are fans of "Mad Men." Director Lone Scherfig didn't get a nom, so it'll do nothing.

The Hurt Locker - An amazing movie. It's the front-runner for the "Hollywood Votes for Quality" academy crowd. It absolutely confirmed the fact that a very good film could be made about the Iraq war-- All they had to do was put away the crying towel and embrace an action-film ethos. Go get 'em, James Cameron's Ex! (And a big nod to Modesto's own Jeremy Renner, the nominated star of The Hurt Locker. I seriously thought this guy was doomed to play weasel-faced bastards, as he did in Dahmer and S.W.A.T.)

Inglourious Basterds - I saw it. It has a chance, because Quentin was nominated too. But why? For every good scene with Christoph Waltz, there is one of Brad Pitt masticating scenery. There were so many references to Pabst, Pola Negri and UFA I thought I was back in Film School and I was being graded on it. I read on several news sites that Tarantino was "due" for a major nod. If his recent output was, in terms of box-office and relevance, in any way indicative of this, I'd agree.

Precious - My Austin Film Festival Precious story: I was sitting down to a screening of Calvin Marshall and a woman-- by the look of her accessories, a very well-off woman-- sat down next to me. She had just seen Precious and gushed about how powerful and devastating it was. I had read the extensive article on it in the festival program, so I kind of knew what she was talking about. But there was something about a rich white woman telling me about her cinematic peek at soul-crushing black inner-city poverty that made me kind of ill. Precious has the best chance of any of the Indie underdogs to score an upset victory, mostly because I suspect half the Academy voters are like that woman in Austin.

A Serious Man - The Coens got their Oscar hardware two years ago, so never mind.

Up - Hey-- Isn't there another category for this film already? I quite enjoyed it, and it's so well-written and paced it deserves to duke it out in the Best Picture category.

Up in the Air - Saw it, liked it quite a bit. Strong second or third place, if the Academy had such things... Wait...

Hey, I just got a whole NEW idea! Instead of adding more nominations, how about additional Silver and Bronze Oscars in all categories? Anything to get to that magical 5-hour broadcast length...

Weekend Box Office

See chart here.

It's a little surprising to see Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS opening at $38 million. Yes it's one of only two new movies in the top ten, but after DEATH PROOF you'd think people are through with the big QT. The other new movie? SHORTS, from Tarantino's partner in Grind House crime Robert Rodriguez. Which only made $6 million. It's family entertainment! What the hell is wrong with the world?

(Note to self - THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE is out already? I'm getting out to see this. Ever since I read the novel I've been wondering how much they'd have to cut out to simplify it to movie size).

-daniel k