Featurette: Lincoln

Tweet

A wonderful featurette on the making of Lincoln, one of this year's best films:

Nominees: The SpyGlasses Full (2012)

Tweet

Click to show full list

Best Live-Action Film (Feature-Length)

Holy Motors

Lincoln

The Master

Silver Linings Playbook

Zero Dark Thirty

Best Director

Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty

Ang Lee, Life of Pi

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Best Actor

Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook

Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors

Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty

Ann Dowd, Compliance

Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

Meryl Streep, Hope Springs

Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea

Best Supporting Actor

Jason Clarke, Zero Dark Thirty

Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook

Phillip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained

Eddie Redmayne, Les Misérables

Best Supporting Actress

Isabelle Allen, Les Misérables

Sally Field, Lincoln

Anne Hathaway, The Dark Knight Rises

Helen Hunt, The Sessions

Maggie Smith, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Best Art Direction

Rick Carter & Jim Erickson, Lincoln

David Crank & Jack Fisk, The Master

Sarah Greenwood & Katie Spencer, Anna Karenina

David Gropman & Anna Pinnock, Life of Pi

Arthur Max, Prometheus

Best Cinematography

Greig Fraser, Zero Dark Thirty

Eric Gautier, On the Road

Janusz Kaminski, Lincoln

Mihai Malaimare, Jr.; The Master

Robert D. Yeoman, Moonrise Kingdom

Best Costuming

Bob Buck, Ann Maskrey, & Richard Taylor; The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Sharen Davis, Django Unchained

Paco Delgado, Les Misérables

Jacqueline Durran, Anna Karenina

Joanna Johnston, Lincoln

Best Make-Up

Tina Earnshaw & Nina Fischer, Prometheus

Bernard Floch, Holy Motors

Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater, & Tami Lane; The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Lincoln

Lisa Westcott & Julie Dartnell, Les Misérables

Best Visual Effects

Cloud Atlas

Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton, & R. Christopher White; The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams, & Dan Sudick; Marvel's The Avengers

Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley, & Martin Hill; Prometheus

Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer, & Donald R. Elliott; Life of Pi

Best Original Score

Mychael Danna, Life of Pi

Jonny Greenwood, The Master

Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina

Ennio Morricone, Django Unchained

John Williams, Lincoln

Best Original Song

"100 Black Coffins" by Rick Ross, Django Unchained

"Pi's Lullaby" by Mychael Danna & Bombay Jayashri, Life of Pi

"Song of the Lonely Mountain" by Neil Finn, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

"Touch the Sky" by Julie Fowlis, Brave

"Who Were We?" by Kylie Minogue, Holy Motors

Best Sound Editing

Karen Baker & Per Hallberg, Skyfall

Christopher Boyes, Marvel's The Avengers

Paul N. J. Ottosson, Zero Dark Thirty

Ann Scibelli, Prometheus

Wylie Stateman, Django Unchained

Best Sound Mixing

Ron Bartlett & Doug Hemphill, Prometheus

Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill, & Drew Kunin; Life of Pi

Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom, & Ronald Judkins; Lincoln

Paul N. J. Ottosson, Zero Dark Thirty

Best Editing

François Gédigier, On the Road

William Goldenberg & Dylan Tichenor, Zero Dark Thirty

Leslie Jones & Peter McNulty, The Master

Michael Kahn, Lincoln

Tim Squyres, Life of Pi

Best Screenplay (Original)

Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty

Leos Carax, Holy Motors

John Gatins, Flight

Jonathan Lisecki, Gayby

Best Screenplay (Adapted)

Michael Bacall & Jonah Hill, 21 Jump Street

Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Tony Kushner, Lincoln

David Magee, Life of Pi

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Animated Film (Feature-Length)

Brave

The Lorax

Paranorman

Best Animated Film (Short)

Best Documentary Film (Feature-Length or Short)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The Queen of Versailles

Best Foreign-Language Film (Live Action or Animated, Feature-Length or Short)

Amour (Love)

Holy Motors

L'Intouchables (The Untouchables)

A Royal Affair

Article: "Pain and Nourishment: Kirin Kiki in Still Walking"

Tweet

Michael Koresky of the Criterion Current presents a complimentary piece on the performance of Kiki Kirin, a 2009 Best Supporting Actress nominee from the Best Live-Action Film (Feature-Length) and Best Foreign-Language Film (Live Action or Animated, Feature-Length or Short) that year, 歩いても 歩いても (Still Walking).

Review: Django Unchained

Tweet

Genre: Comedy

Mr. Tarantino's Django Unchained is not, as many people would have it, a racially charged epithet against the progress made by proponents of abolition and equality among men but is rather, as it was written to be and as Inglourious Basterds (2009) was, a clever send-up of those who would speak up to protect the so-called sacrosanctity of the relevant topics in social and cultural discourse both polite and casual. As it is, the result is brilliant. Under Mr. Tarantino's glowing hand, the characters spring to life in a charming, mostly well-paced and even jaunty, literally and figuratively explosive, and cacklingly comical adventure into, cleverly, what is again the new old frontier. Mr. Waltz delivers a popping performance, in key locked tight with Mr. Tarantino's audiovision - audio vision, indeed, for music unsurprisingly figures as importantly and proudly as image in his cinematic work. To this end, Mr. Morricone's work is perfect. Not in any way neglecting to mention Mr. Jackson's tremendous [and though the expression be cliché] scene stealing performance or Mr. DiCaprio's own able acting, I must conclude by mentioning how the curious sound mixing and the slightly lumpy pacing in places defected the figure of the film. The bursts and shudders of the soundtrack veered unwittingly into erraticism, betraying the zany but ultimately controlled plan spiriting forward the action of the film, and the bowing out of the plot midstream - particularly when the protagonists are busy socially entangling themselves with Calvin Candie, Mr. DiCaprio's character - weighs down an otherwise lithe and quippy body. Yet, the film eventually rights itself and finishes with aplomb in a bang - for real.

Grade: A-.

Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Tweet

Genre: Drama

Ms. Bigelow bulwarks against cinema's ever effacing superfice with her own quasi-documentary brand of drama narrative filmmaking - a brand now manifest in a captivating Zero Dark Thirty. A purposefully naturalistic film, the piece is smartly edited and even better written, a vision of not simply the plan executed for apprehending and eliminating the terrorist Osama bin Laden but generally the effort expended in cultivating and asserting a political face over one's personal one. In this craft, the film mirrors truly Ms. Bigelow's own filmmaker's story and thus becomes itself a political face to a personal toil rich and sweaty and gritty and male (in the most loaded social sense of the word).
As her Galatea (of sorts), Ms. Chastain exuberates her dampened passions, frustrations and joys, in the thoroughness of her body. She affronts her surroundings across the spectrum in concert with the growth of her character in the film, until as a perfect last note the façade breaks and she cries to close the film. Her tears moisten the desert landscape that she inhabits, hoping for greenery where there is hardly cause to expect one. Like Galatea, she transforms.

The only serious critique I can lob at the film is, surprisingly, at its score's composer, Mr. Desplat, whose work for other films (see here for example) notably has been among my favorite musical compositions in memory. Here, however, there is none of his keen observation of rhythm and depth as there has been in the past; his notes and, indeed, his chosen motif miss the nature of the film and sound classical where they should sound spite and severe. I wanted a kind of Messrs. Reznor and Ross' bubbling spirit from The Social Network (2010) but I continually found a kind of Mr. Desplat's terpsichorean cues from Birth (2004). Would that the score had been as en pointe as was Mr. Morricone's for this year's Django Unchained, this work would approximate ultimate excellence.

Grade: A.

Review: Les Misérables

Tweet

Genre: Drama (Musical)

It saddens me to have to write that summarily Mr. Hooper's new film may - far more than its predecessor, a technically apt portrait - be best characterized by the simplistic adjective "weak". Weak acting cum singing, weak writing, weak editing, and - above all - weak cinematography undermine what could have been an even more compelling film than The King's Speech (2010).
Now, perhaps the weak writing could be excused by weakness in the source material; perhaps, for example, Javert as a character could be proven by the original text to be a spare, unidimensional automaton by nature. (Whether he be truly I cannot say, for I have not read that original text. I can say:) Still, the rest of the listed weaknesses cannot be similarly excused. In fact, by contrast, all the other weaknesses hinge on the final one; the abominable cinematography of this film makes for such difficult story-telling that the spectating audience is almost entirely reliant on the snippets of the background behind the singing actors' faces for gaining any sense of the action's location and is entirely reliant on those faces for gaining all sense of the action's emotion and direction. As I've mentioned on this blog before [though at present I can't find the post for citation], it's just too hard for actors to carry thus, via such tight bust shots alone, a whole film successfully. Success in such acting is akin to success in neurosurgery; delicate, fine-grained articulations make all the difference. With such a heaping swath of tight framing, the likelihood that each needed articulation is executed smoothly is terribly low; the story is visually too closely told to have a realistic chance at being quite good. Therefore, expectedly, it falters. It trips over its own breaks in pacing, in tone, in coherence.... Even Ms. Hathaway, whose performance in this year's The Dark Knight Rises I lauded and whose performance in this film I had eagerly anticipated, only shoddily delivered.
But two actors really stood apart from the rest and made their soliloquys' scenes entrancing and powerful: Mr. Redmayne and Ms. Allen. Mr. Redmayne, playing the young buck Marius, infuses into his role the ripe honesty and fraternity that personify Marius' embodiment of the spirit of the Revolution. It is forward thinking, forward thrusting, and forthright, and it weeps as he does well for the fellow champions of the cause who have fallen for it at his side. Singing his unique song "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," Mr. Redmayne is in full command of his character and evidences why he already has a Tony award. Ms. Allen, a much younger member of the cast, hums with the same accuracy and cohesion of person with place. Though only a girl, she is the frontispiece of not only the Revolution in spirit but also of the show in explicit visage. Thus, she must too carry in her bearing the resilience beneath weight that speaks to the hearts of the crowd, around both the French red, white, and blue and the English silver (screen). That she sweeps and trips with anything less is as a judgement unfair. These actors, plus only Mr. Delgado's costumes and Ms. Wetcott's make-up and somehow the magical coincidence of comedy within the "Master of the House" sequence, redeem in part this cinematic effort. Would that redemption held more.

Grade: C.

Reviews: Hitchcock and Anna Karenina

Tweet

Since I had the pleasure of seeing these two films in a double feature this past week, I thought both for the sake of consistency with my viewing and for the fun of linkage that I'd review them here together, in a single post.

Hitchock

Genre: Comedy

Mr. Elfman's score says it all really: a jaunty, at times charming little piece that, despite heavily using the metaphor of a pool, fails to dive deep into the interpersonal dynamics of action on screen. Note that I categorized this film as a "Comedy" above, but also that I don't believe by reflecting on its screenplay that it was meant to be a comedy outright. In this note is really the whole of my review; the tone of the piece is so often wrong, playing on the side of the light rather than on the side of the dark and filtering intimate hard interactions through a winking lens of late '50s' Hollywood-style perfection. By diving despite this strange tide white-washing everything, Dame Mirren is the soul right in this film (though, it must be said, Mr. D'Arcy gives a spot-on supporting performance of Anthony Perkins). Her performance is graceful and complex, while her on-screen husband played by Mr. Hopkins is surprisingly unidimensional. Part of this discredit is certainly due to the errors of the screenwriter, Mr. McLaughlin, but the major part I think lies in Mr. Hopkins' hands. One cannot rely on the brightness of a young actress like Scarlet Johansson to paint by chiaroscuro the lines and hues of one's own role for oneself. There should have been more to Hitchcock than this....

Grade: B-.


Anna Karenina

Genre: Drama

It must be so disappointing for Ms. Knightley, to no longer blush like the first flower on the vine for one of Mr. Wright's films. Though not quite old enough to play this film's eponym, she is also not quite as young as she used to be; the vibrant youth that characterized her wonderful portrait of Elizabeth Bennet (Pride & Prejudice, directed by Wright in 2005) is all too absent from this latest role as the now classic Russian dramatic protagoniste. Rather, she flops, limpid and labile, feigning stunted versions of the true amplitudes of emotion and determination that the role is meant to embody. Mr. Law at her side, too unfortunately, is commensurately disappointing, flabby and staid. Indeed, only really Ms. Williams as the Countess Vronsky ever snapped my attentiveness to the screen - "snapped" indeed, for it was clear that thus Mr. Stoppard's lines were meant to be read, punctuating staccato the elegant choreography of the actors and sets preset by Mr. Wright. Truly, he stumbled upon some efficient machineries for delicately, appropriately shifting through the many scenes of the tale from which this film is adapted. So, unlike in Pride & Prejudice, here his best work is rather not in channeling the talents of his actors than in assembling those talents and their environs into lyrically contiguous tableaux vivants especially within the physically constrained domains of a single theatre. This achievement, however, was not perfect; he and his editrix missed some few (to my count) easy improvements in cutting together the series. For example, in an relatively early scene, a gunshot is fired after we as the audience are shown an establishment shot of a misty lake. This shot countermands the abruptness of the shift from the previous scene, by installing serenity after volatility and thereby making a rather underwhelming or even inconsummate climax to the preceding emotion. By having reördered the events here, so that the gunshot caps the emotion of the previous scene and the establishment shot reorients the audience after the brief scene into which it's been already transitioned, the ebb and flow of the piece would have been made more consistent within itself (as other instances of such punctuation were common throughout the rest of the film) and more impactful as an audio-visual narrative than it was. This type of improvement could have vastly elevated the grade of this film from interesting and beautiful - plaudits to costumer Ms. Durran - to captivating and elegiac.

Grade: B+.

Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Tweet

Genre: Drama (Epic)

There is little that I have to say about this first chapter of the prequel before The Lord of the Rings series (2001-3). While entertaining, its being filled with purposefully active excerpts from other sources, like The Simarillion (Tolkien, 1977), punctuated the beauty of the dramatic sweep run by the earlier series and slotted the heart spoon of the directed machinery to let pass through the true roots of fraternitas, gravitas, and caritas that make the soup-stew of a legatic tale powerful, zesty, and ultimately digestible. Technology is pleasing but shifting and unstable. Narrative is the only sure thread. Weaving without it is missing; weaving without it is the verisimilitude of this branch of filmmaking. Action minus intention is impotence - handsome impotence but impotence still. Impressive fashion is pheasantry. Search the woodlands. Radagast was there.

Grade: C+

Review: Silver Linings Playbook

Tweet

Genre: Comedy/Drama

Mr. Cooper's work here is nothing short of astounding. Complemented by Messrs. Cassidy and Struthers' excellent pacing, the acting picks up momentum in fits and starts as well as possesses this uncanny evenness that is redolent of the ideal realization of the character as adapted by Mr. Russell. Truly, Mr. Cooper here is at his finest as ever and now retroactively may be worthy of having already appeared on Bravo's Inside the Actor's Studio. Perhaps it was working with the experienced Mr. DeNiro, here also surprisingly delivering a compellingly whole character after a series of fragmented caricatures like the oft cited Jack Byrnes from the execrable Meet the [x] series, in not only this film but also their previous Limitless (2011), that helped refine Mr. Cooper's craft to the extent that it achieved the nuanced complexity of a truly leading man. Perhaps otherwise it was simply the fullness of time. Whatever the reason, I applaud Mr. Cooper and, though I find it hard still to hold him against the apparently indomitable Mr. Day-Lewis this year, I have now serious hopes for his future roles.
Ms. Lawrence too does well. However, her acting style is markedly different from Mr. Cooper's here. Whereas he clearly digs into the piece and works his character from its natural core, Ms. Lawrence has blueprinted her schema and works her character from a control room - technically en pointe but still once removed. I wanted to believe her more strongly than I did, as strongly as I believed him in the subtleties of his gestures and furrows and frowns, but I could not do so. Truly she was fine, acting at a level well above the standard set this year by the average leading lady. However, in comparison with Mr. Cooper and Mr. DeNiro - not to mention Ms. Streep already in her category - she had only technical finesse where she should have had original emotion. Though not in her category, Ms. Field in Lincoln too possessed this shyness from acuity in her own performance; yet there, for the tenor of the piece, the shyness worked. With Mr. Russell's patently far less staid film, the shyness doesn't cohere.
As for Mr. Russell himself, this work is far and away an improvement on narrating through a particular subculture akin to that of his last film, The Fighter (2010). Here he successfully found the thread of this story and stripped away all the extraneous fibers that otherwise could have bound and confused it within a thicker pattern of ideas, as there did occur in The Fighter. Here he thus has a focus and a chemistry that together matched direction and dynamics to crackle, waver, and flare with hypnotic passion like the first good fire in a new hearth. Making so many solid choices, he nourished the potential of his own adapted screenplay and enabled it to be a simple but not simplistic, readable but not risible, engaging but not contentious meditation of how people make sense of the sequences of events that they observe in their lives while they are still participating in continuing those sequences (hopefully) to desired ends. As Mr. Spielberg did well in Lincoln, Mr. Russell does well here; the little everyday affections complement the aspired notion with thorough personality, entrenched deeply and intricately in others.

Grade: A-, charming.

Review: Life of Pi

Tweet

Genre: Drama

It's difficult to construe a film at sea about abandonment of self, of ties, and of possession without also reconstruïng among others Cast Away (2000), Lifeboat (1944), and - here especially - the still to be made to-film adaptation of The Queen vs. Dudley and Stephens (1884) (to which Life of Pi does, admittedly, give a solid nod in "Richard Parker"). What more can be said about existence adrift amidst barrenness than what these films have already said? How can self discovery be, if not newly investigated, then at least more richly communicated to an audience?
Though as a director Mr. Lee for his brilliant past work has my complete confidence, I cannot be sure of his knowledge of the right answers to the perfection of a trodden path. His Life of Pi as a result is a thoughtful, lush, engaging retelling of the same old responses to the same old questions; a fable of the most faithful sort; a delivery through hardship by the story-within-the-story structure, flopping a stepping stone reality between audience and fantasy; and an adaptation (in a positive sense) to history, to visual narrativity, and to the contemporary points of the medium (see the 3D theatrical release). The choices that Mr. Lee thus made, to arrive at this final product, were clearly careful, majorly intended on vaulting the emotion and the passion of the story to the audience with the greatest spring and complementarily intended on executing artistry in pictographic or layered still lives with the smartest appeal. Yet, the same choices were also to a certain extent safe, comfortable with sitting amongst those of films past without trying new poses or settings or reärranging the chairs - save perhaps one neat transition style, courtesy of his collaborating with his long-time editor Tim Squyres. So, nothing resounded, nothing shimmered, nothing broke out as stellar, though everything in compilation was smooth and textured and colorful.
Still a step well above his previous feature, the fun but easy Taking Woodstock (2009), this film hits the mark: solid execution, stability and precision, elemental goodness: a gymnastic 8.5/10.0. Mr. Danna's score especially noted, I enjoyed it (but cannot believe that there will be nothing to stand above it this year in film).

Grade: B+.