One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Quoth the Tammy:

When have you ever been drawn to somebody solely because of intellect?

Always. Is there any other reason to be drawn to someone? That is, once we’re past the single-minded mammal-in-heat stage of life? (Well, maybe I speak only for males.) If all my relationships have a theme it’s this: I’m the dumber one. It’s devious and self-serving but my system compensates for my general slow-wittedness.

Those are elective relationships. Not so in Rachel Getting Married, where the pain is there to stay whether Kym remains in the fold or is turned away. Or perishes. When fate deals that lousy a hand, it doesn’t take brains but rather some sublime spiritual gift to find a modicum of sweetness and light. In the immortal words of Yossarian: “There, there.”

It’s late, can’t sleep, blood to be drawn first thing in the morning. One could dwell on why brains never seem to overcome the blues. Instead I’ll step back an admire the painting.

• Bill Irwin, as a father who, dammit, is going to get everyone through all this, is simply heartbreaking here. You sure made me want to see Fool Moon; I checked, no disc of it seems to exist, another stage production lost to the ether. 

• Rosemary DeWitt — in the title role! — swings us around the room but good. We first meet her as the older, wiser sister. At about the time she needs to buck up as poor Kym falters, suddenly we hear decades-old habits of haranguing and button-pushing. Rachel should know better. She doesn’t. She can’t hear herself. Sister-schmister, she’s had her fill of Kym.

• I’m still loving Anne Hathaway here; ye shalt not tax my faith. Let’s cut to her dinnertime toast. She rambled on, flicking words of gratitude and reassurance and therapy-speak at the assembled. Sheesh, the tension. Did she end in a tantrum? Breakdown? The dinnertable being over turned? (I’m looking at you, Ed Harris-as-Jackson Pollock.) No. It was a much better scene than that. Did you see About Schmidt? Jack Nicholson also had a wedding toast in a similar tense situation with a strangely touching– and non-movie-ish — outcome.

• I’m in awe of Jonathan Demme overall. There’s scarcely a false note in an entire movie built mostly on small gestures, heated comebacks and occasional non-sequiturs concerning a bunch of wedding guests who aren’t wrapped up in (or are purposefully obliviously to) the family fireworks. It’s an amazing — and not-that-fun — movie to watch yet oddly delightful to remember.

Tammy, after watching Rachel Getting Married last night, I revisited our flare-up over the WASP angst of Smart People. So I’m looking forward to another squabble.

Or not. My gripe with Smart People was in its caricatures and its distrust of intelligence. Rachel Getting Married traverses the same territory – smart people have their woes too — but its characters are alive and vital. These are unhappy people — or rather typically functioning people who, under the stress of a wedding weekend, start unpacking the ol’ baggage and dumping the contents on one another’s head. I was surprised K liked it. She tends to not like talky, dramatic onscreen theraputic sessions.

But K loves Anne Hathaway and so do I. This is an ensemble movie, and a great ensemble at that, but Hathaway’s astonishing performance gives this movie a genuine soul. Her Kym is a mess, an addict since an early teen, and her coping skills remain on edge. As written, Kym is a bundle of guilt, loathing, and self-destruction who, at every moment, is desperate for reassurance. Hathaway reveals Kym with countless little strokes: darts of her eyes, sudden stricken looks as she forgets we’re watching her, rushes of verbal assaults when you can see her brain trying, and failing, to shut down her mouth.

I’m trying to get Oscar out of my system but they missed the boat. Hathaway here is not “good for such a young actress.” This is great acting because you can’t see it being done.

There’s lots of little surprises in Rachel Getting Married, a chance for Jonathan Demme to get back to his mini-Altman mode. It’s a quirky, seriocomic study but it’s also a short course on how design a modern wedding for a big-hearted world.

Tam, some quick thoughts about The Wrestler:

1. I enjoyed its sense of originality and warmth; only later did it occur to me that the dilemmas were familiar ground. It’s a fresh movie, thanks to the unaffected writing and direction.

2. Did not expect a simple, straightforward effort (deceptively so) from Darren Aronofsky. He made the bewildering Pi (a student film gone amok), the truly outstanding Requiem for a Dream although he slam-styled it within an inch of its life, and the The Fountain, which proved that if you really want to wreck an ambitious movie, be earnest. For The Wrestler, Aronofsky never upstages the actors. It’s almost a documentary.

2 ½. The film’s look, a slushy, late-fall tour of Ickville, New Jersey, is lovely. Its grain and color palette reminded me of Fuji 800, one of my favorite color negative films. For you kids out there: film.

3. It’s a lead pipe cinch to make professional wrestlers and their fans look dumb, gross, pathetic. Aronofsky goes the other way. There’s genuine affection for the showmanship and brotherhood of pro wrestling — it’s fake but the blood and sweat is real.

4. I love the fact that the writer, Robert Siegel, was a major player in The Onion’s rise to greatness. The Onion is hilarious because it’s incisive and observant. This piece, and this — I urge you to read all the copy — represent Pulitzer-level reporting. Sure, they’re made up but they are a pure truth. The scenes where Randy the Ram, struggling with being a has-been, starts finding his groove behind a goddam deli counter is keen fiction but it’s told as if by brilliant journalism.

5. Remember that scene where Randy befriends the stripper because he saves her from a vicious physical attack in the alley? Of course you don’t. This movie is devoid of that scene. Like I said, fresh.

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Tam, K and I enjoyed Frozen River, a relatively light-hearted romp after watching you and the rest of the cast perform A Memory, A Monologue, a Rant and A Prayer. (Very strong and effective stuff. I just wish this and The Vagina Monologues were seen by the crowd that is least likely to see them, teenage boys.)

Frozen River is simple and unaffected, and we liked its naturalism. Because movies routinely show one enormous event per act, a smart filmmaker can use our expectations to create suspense. That’s what Courtney Hunt does here. A young boy with a propane torch, a car crossing a iced-over river, a desperate woman with a gun — we know what’s going to happen. Don’t we?

I also like the way winter is another authentic character — a cold, slushy, bitter, changing winter the way we know it in Jackson Hole. There are quibbles — is it 20 below or isn’t it? — but on the whole the snow is real snow, none of those digitized wafting snowflakes of recent fashion that I’m already tired of seeing. (I’m looking at you, The Reader and Benjy Button.)

That said, Melissa Leo’s on-the-money performance won’t win the Oscar. In fact, I’m changing my Meryl prediction to Kate. The Reader is yet another case where the Holocaust is used like steroids in the Oscar game. A so-so movie yet Kate Winslet’s subtle performance deserves praise — I gave her short shrift in my review. Winslet puts a haunting face on Hannah Arendt’s remarkable phrase that came out of her Nuremberg reporting: “the banality of evil.”

Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz was a guard for the SS, one of the millions of regular folk who went along with Hitler because that was the easy, “patriotic” thing to do. During her trial, Schmitz explains why she let nearly 200 Jews burn to death. They were prisoners, she said, and if she had tried to save them they would have escaped. Her job was to prevent their escape. Period. No redemption, no feeling, a monster because she’s just doing her job. Banal, evil. Winslet carries her character every inch of the way with a trace of deadness in her eyes and you have to wonder if she was born that way.

.Dav-

Yep, most of us are in the same rowboat this year. Flying blind.  Glad you scored Frozen River, and I know you’ll let me know what you think.

I know you won’t have the WASPs-being-boring-and-insipid problem!

Ok.  I’m picking my picks I feel particularly partial about picking:

*Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire

Best Actor: Mickey Rourke

Best Actress: It may be Streep, but I hope it’s Melissa Leo

( It’s the new austerity, as you once noted.  I think too many portrayals of famous men and women have won Best awards in recent years.  These two acting turns reverse that. )

*Best Directing: Danny Boyle/Slumdog

*Best Supporting Actor:  Heath Ledger. And this is tough, because I’ve enjoyed three other performances very much.  But I’m not deserting Heath now.  And he should have won for Brokeback.  -

Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis.

Best Original Screenplay:  I’ll pick Frozen River.

Best Screenplay Adaptation: Frost/Nixon

Best Visual Effects:  Iron Man

*Best Editing: Slumdog

Best Art Direction: I’ve never been sure what this means.  I’ll pick Dark Knight.

*Best Costume Design: The Duchess

Best Original Song: WAll-E

*Best Cinematography: Slumdog

1/2 *Best Original Score: Button  ( Doh!  I was right the first time! Slumdog!)

*Best Animated Film: WAll-E

Best Sound Editing: Dark Knight

1/2 *Best Makeup: Hellboy II: The Golden Army. ( Because Heath’s makeup was the only real stand out in Dark Knight, and Benjamin Button was just weird…maybe they’ll toss B.B. the bone, though.)

Tam

Okay, Tammy, with the Londy List by my side from the  Jackson Hole Daily — whoo-eey, Ella’s Room! — here’s how it’ll all go down.

Picture: Slumdog Millionaire. The other four look crotchety and asthmatic by comparison.

Actor: I’m going to go out on a limb: Frank Langella. Maybe the Penn-Rourke contest will split that vote, and you can never go wrong with the deserving old pro who hasn’t gotten his gold yet.

Actress: Meryl. Although when I turn in my official ballot I might change that to Melissa Leo, depending on how she plays to mine eyes tonight. Update: I changed this to Kate Winslet. See “Freezing” post above.

Director: Dannyboy. Only Boyle and Ron Howard belong in this category anyway. Milk and The Reader are unexceptional efforts as directors go, and David Fincher’s The Prune Who Grew Down is remarkable only for converting massive amounts of money and technical expertise in a hollow gourd of a movie. (If only Fiincher would have made more of the scenes when Brad Pitt looked like Dick Cheney.)

Supporting Actor: It should be Robert Downey Jr. He turned a dicey concept into a sharp and hilarious performance. But Oscar seldom likes comedies unless it’s a heartwarming Holocaust romp. My second choice is Josh Brolin. Still, I rented Darkened Is the Knight a couple of weeks ago hoping to revise my initial dim view of it. Nope. The movie is still a mess while Heath Ledger is stunning in his every frame. So it’s Heath Ledger, which is fine by me.

Supporting Actress: Viola Davis. Davis upped the ante for what gets an Oscar. It used to be, you’d better turn on the waterworks. Now, you’d better add some snot to your tears. Seriously, although she has one scene we saw her entire life. 

Original Screenplay: They’ll give it to Milk — Prop 8 backlash — even though it’s the least accomplished of this bunch — and I have yet to see two of them. I just know Happy-Go-Liucky is awesome because Mike Leigh is awesome.

Adapted Screenplay: A toughie. Doubt and Frost/Nixon are buffed and smart, both by accomplished playwrights. But won’t Slumdog Millionaire need extra swag to bolster its Best Pic gold? I say Slumdog. Ya gotta love the concept of gaining trivial knowledge through a series of traumas.

Visual FX: Benjy Button. All those nominations. It’s got to win something.

Editing: The Dark Knight. All those tickets sold. It’s got to win something. 

Art Direction: Button again. Lots of decades to artify.

Costume: The Duchess. When it doubt, go with the most enormous dresses.

Song: “Jai Ho,” which I think is Slumdog’s big dance number. An obsolete category, by the way. 

Cinematography: Slumdog. 

Original Score: Slumdog.

Animated Film. Wall-E. It’s absurd that Wall-E is not a Best Picture nom. However, I wonder if they’ll decide that Pixar pwns this category for too long and that can no longer be? A group of professional animators gave their blessing to Kung-Fu Panda last month.

Sound Mixing: The Dark Knight. Somehow I think explosions count for a lot in this category.

Sound Editing: Button. A lot of sound in a lot of movie.

Makeup: Button. The academy can never get enough of that young-beauties-all-wrinkled stuff.

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Beautiful day. Skated. Saturday was winter’s first springtime tease, that “if you make it another six weeks, this is what awaits you, big boy” flash.

Am I beating you to posting Slumdog Millionaire? Sorry. Tammy, I’ll leave the real work to you. I don’t feel like organizing my thoughts.

1. Slumdog Millionaire is both a classic (and very good) Hollywood rags-to-riches fantasy, and wonderfully alien. Another small step toward the 21st century. Call it New Old Hollywood.

2. Makes me want to see again Danny Boyle’s first big film, Trainspotting. What a debut.

3. Danny Boyle obeyed Dav’s First Law of Making a Good Movie: he took serious the photography. He throws a delirious number of potent images on the screen. A popular style, to say least, but most other directors who attempt it are annoying.  Boyle has a keen sense of rhythm.

4. A lot of overkill. Does not matter. When a song or movie is this entertaining, overkill is just another term for rock and roll.

5. Slumdog has another trait of New Old Hollywood: it’s a great 90-minute movie done in two hours.

6. Never has so much squalor looked so warm and colorful. To some this is a bug, to others it’s a feature. 

7. Best Picture Oscar, easily. 

8. Bollywood dance numbers are awesome. 

9. Danny Boyle reinvents subtitles. Someone had to. Finally we can read dialogue without taking our eyes off the action.

10. The brand name isn’t shown but the bottle shape is unmistakable. Poor Coca-Cola: the worst product placement ever.

Z. Also took in Taken. (No late showing of The Reader.) Ready for fun. No fun. It’s incoherent right wing pro-torture macho style.  I laughed once, when Liam Neeson tortured his dinner hostess. Taken is a bad French imitation of Tony Scott in that it’s indistinguishable from any movie by Tony Scott.

. . . and the question is how, without explicit evidence, do we deal with what appears to be malfeasance of the worst kind?

Holy smoke, Tammy, to answer that question would take up all the Internets there are. I’ll compress my answer into a 2×4x6-inch brick: Doubt is also about the abuse of authority. Ever notice how self-proclaimed God-fearing people are the first to also demand obeisance as if they were God? History is lousy with methods of dealing with “what appears to be” wrongdoing “without explicit evidence.” Witch trials. Inquisitions. Most recently, the Orwellian “extraordinary rendition.”

You think Flynn is an unrepentent boy-toucher, guilty as sin. (Sorry.) I concluded differently, that Flynn had had his greedy gropes in the past but in this case he was putting the needs of the boy first. His past caught up with him anyway.  (Shanley, the writer, is both clever and wise to keep the extent of Flynn’s guilt unrevealed.)

The dynamics of Doubt are stupefying. We have a bitter nun perhaps doing the right thing — yet who finally shows emotion when she ponders that she may have done the wrong thing. We have the age-old wackiness of celibacy, an institutionalized and untouchable guarantee that the priesthood is heavily populated by those haunted with sexual demons. And the especially nagging problem of the age of consent. In the wonderful moment I’ll just call the Viola Davis Scene, when she desperately begs for any scrap of deference so her son might have a better chance in life, did you catch her suggestion that her son might be the one who is instigating physical affection? 

Anyway, I was taken by your powerful review. Well done. Yep, Meryl does own this role through an apparent secret indulgence in who-knows-what pains from the past. Hoffman . . . well, he’s a cat. Dude can play anything with always fresh riffs. Amy Adams got an Oscar nom, as did Viola Davis — no contest, it’s Davis’s — but unlike Hoffman and Streep, Adams did not strike me as contemporary to the mid-60s. A minor quibble.

Yes, there was plenty of heavy-handedness but I’ll groove on heavy-handedness that works, like Crash. (Shanley’s original title was Doubt: A Parable.) Shanley certainly puts in italics the fact that Catholic church is a man’s world save their work garb  – the priests get to drink, smoke and carry on while the nuns are expected to remain grim. He also dedicated his story to the nun who would be played by Amy Adams. I once had a crush on a nun too.

[Note to readers: Tammy has been on the modern equivalent of a vision quest, traveling far from home without the guidance and succor of her computer. She sent me some copy to append to her Best of 2008 draft, which languishes as it ripens in a forbidden zone on our server. However, my time belongs to things like learning Guitar Hero and a secret home improvement, to be revealed shortly. We'll have to wait a couple more days for Tammy's return. ]

Tammy, last night we happened to watch Ghost Town (which you mention in your latent Best of 2008 post) and I agree: it’s fresh and funny. The story is not new — ghosts roam the earth, or at least New York, looking for a little closure — but the ensemble acting is topnotch.

Both leads are revolutionary for a Hollywood comedy. Téa Leoni is, as Hollywood beauties go, rangy, angular and unprepossessing. She’s confident enough to play a busy archaeologist as harried and distracted, like a real scientist.  None of that “I am a celebrity, you can tell by my perfect hair and makeup” stuff.

Ricky Gervais’ “The Office” persona remains, a pudgy fussbudget who over-explains everything. Maybe he’d better think of something else soon but . . . maybe not. In Ghost Town he keeps coming up with new variations on that theme. A lot of the scenes in Ghost Town have a breezy, improvised feel. When Téa Leoni uncorks joyous laughter, you don’t know if it’s her character or the moment. It scarcely matters.

Kristen Wiig and Aasif Mandvi, two sharp TV comedians, get to stretch out a bit. Wiig is on Saturday Night Live so here, for a change, she gets to work with funny material. Mandvi is on “The Daily Show”  where he gets nothing but hilarious material. Here he’s asked to get a tad serious. Win-win.