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By now it seems like a ritualized shafting: last night Martin Scorsese once again failed to collect an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The question each year seems to be not whether Scorsese will lose for his nominated picture, but to what degree said loss will qualify as a miscarriage of justice. His loss to Robert Redford in 1980 (when Marty directed Raging Bull) was tragic; his loss to Kevin Costner in 1991 (when Marty directed GoodFellas) comic. I couldn’t work up my usual righteous indignation when he missed last night, since I thought Million Dollar Baby was far superior to Scorsese’s mediocre The Aviator. Scorsese’s film won in the categories of art direction, film editing and cinematography, well-deserved awards that serve not just as recognition of the expert craftspeople involved but as testimony to Scorsese’s immense good taste. (Cate Blanchett’s supporting actress win proves only that Oscar loves a stunt.)
Otherwise, it was an unusually flat show, even for the Oscars. With Jamie Foxx’s big win — and the substance of his acceptance speech — a generally foregone conclusion and Chris Rock apparently shackled by the middlebrow reality of the gig (even Robin Williams was told that his big planned anti-censorship number was a no-fly zone) what was there to get excited about? The Academy hitched its hopes to Black America so transparently that the move came across as not so much misguided as outright cynical, with Rock’s taped bit at the Magic Johnson multiplex illustrating the gap between the Oscars and everyday moviegoers so eloquently that it functioned as autocriticism.
So how can the Academy square itself with the rest of the populace and reconnect with ticket-buyers? And if those ticket-buyers feel the closest kinship with White Chicks, does the Academy even want to? If the new middlebrow prefers to watch its movies at home, and I think it does, maybe the rest of Hollywood needs to take its cues from Ray this year and Lost In Translation last year — two Oscar-winners that were rushed onto DVD in time for the ceremony, enabling at least some degree of water-cooler chatter from folks who just don’t head out to the theaters anymore, and who seem to represent the movie-watching demographic that Oscar may still appeal to.
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
The entire text (and many of the pictures!) from Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art, a fairly exhaustive history of avant-garde and "alternative" cinema with an anti-establishmentarian agenda, has been posted by Subterranean Cinema. This is good news for anyone who's been trying to find a reading copy of the book, which doesn't exactly litter the shelves of used bookstores, but I'm unclear on its copyright status. So while I hope this has been posted with the approval of Vogel and/or his publisher, Random House, it's entirely possible that it's a bootleg copy. Still pretty fascinating stuff. (I've long thought somebody could compile an interesting and commercially viable DVD of films drawn from the entries in this book; many of them are surely mouldering away in somebody's garage and are unlikely to find wide distribution outside of this context, or film-studies classrooms.)
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 03:30 PM | Comments (2)
ONG BAK
Grade: B
Jackie Chan ain't getting any younger. So it's understandable that he's toned down his bone-breaking stunts in favor of bank-building Hollywood fare. If you missed the experience of seeing his elegant, inventive stuntwork on a big screen with an appreciative audience, or just want another dose of solid martial-arts action, you could do a lot worse than getting out to a theater and catching a screening of the furiously choreographed Ong Bak: Thai Warrior.
As a story, it's strictly generic fare — the young Ting (Tony Jaa) sets out to the big city after a sacred Buddha is stolen from his village. He quickly finds himself dealing with thugs. Fortunately, he's a skilled kickboxer. The elaborate, violent and often acrobatic action sequences that anchor Ong-Bak echo Bruce Lee a little more strongly than Jackie Chan; where Chan would go for physical comedy, Jaa opts to lay the motherfuckers out. That's not to say there's no humor here — one witty set piece represents the most elaborately choreographed stunt sequence I can think of that involves a hero who's trying to avoid a fight. But the general mood aspired to is fairly hard-boiled, with director Prachya Pinkaew nodding perfunctorily in the direction of the sordid with, for example, a disconcerting scene involving a forced drug overdose. So it's not as much fun as a great Jackie Chan movie, but at its best it’s similarly jaw-dropping. Finally, I would have sworn that wire work was involved in at least a couple of shots, but U.S. distributor Magnolia Pictures is swearing that it's all real, and I have no reason to doubt them. Which makes the achievement even more impressive. (Cue theoretical discussion about making critical judgments based on extra-textual information.)
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
Grade: C-
The critical rap on Sundance hit Napoleon Dynamite is that first-timer Jared Hess has directed himself some amalgamation of Welcome to the Dollhouse and Rushmore — extra points given to the Nowhere, Idaho, environs — to varying degrees of success. I don’t really buy that. As nerd movies go, Welcome to the Dollhouse gets value from its honesty about the emotional brutality of high-school peers and empathy for the geeky and needy Dawn Weiner, and while some reviewers have compared ND’s dry cinematic style to Wes Anderson’s stately widescreen tableaux, let’s just note that I could accurately describe some of Kevin Smith’s work as “deadpan” and it wouldn’t turn him into Jim fucking Jarmusch. Despite a few effective stabs at physical comedy that actually benefit from Hess’s directorial detachment, the excruciating Napoleon Dynamite has not much going for it in the realms of honesty and style. What it offers instead is a barely-there episodic narrative hitched to an unsubtle, goonish lead performance by Jon Heder, playing the kind of cartoonish mouth-breather you’d expect to be featured in a too-long sketch on Saturday Night Live, flanked by a supporting cast of camera-facing kids designated as weird by unfortunate clothing and/or hairstyle choices. (Everyone dresses like it’s 1982, which is apparently humorous.) None of them have any spark or passion, and Hess holds them in depressingly simplistic regard. So forget Solondz and Anderson; this is more like an R. Crumb comic with a PG rating — that is, all the grotesquerie and awkwardness with none of the bawdy joie de vivre, and what’s the point of that? Apparently, this really turns some people’s cranks, and Hess himself claims that it’s all semi-autobiographical. Fine. But as long as this kind of derivative and lazy comedy is considered some kind of hallmark of American independent filmmaking, well, God help us.
HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE
Grade: B
OK, this is more like it — an outsider comedy featuring ethnic types with actual personalities. Harold is a reserved, well-groomed Asian with a thankless job and a strong work ethic. Freewheeling Indian roommate Kumar is concerned mainly with putting off anything resembling his career (he has daddy issues). The narrative is a series of episodes involving a nighttime trip across the New Jersey landscape featuring the promise of sex, the threat of incarceration, car theft, casual racism, and really bad skin. Sure, it's hit-and-miss. But the laughs that roll in owe to the film's general rated-R fearlessness — it’s impossible to tell which loony direction it might veer in next. If you don't dig the scatological humor, maybe you'll go for the nudity (and vice versa). At one moment, the boys are riding a galloping, stoned cheetah through the Jersey woods. At another, they're picking up a hitchhiker who turns out to be Neil Patrick Harris (playing himself in a tour de force cameo). Their ultimate goal is nothing less all-American than a bag of tiny cheeseburgers. Underneath the stoner-comedy trappings, you feel a genuine sense of what it means to live in the melting pot and yet be pigeonholed on a maddening, near-random basis.
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 07:41 PM | Comments (7)
First Sin City, now this. Amazon.com is premiering the trailer for The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and, frankly, it's scary how completely the filmmakers (renowned music-video collective Hammer & Tongs) seem to have wrapped their heads 'round this notoriously crazy Brit-lit artifact from the late 1970s/early 1980s. Again, who knows how the movie will actually turn out -- but this footage had me giggling happily at my desk, which will stand as its own achievement. And it got me jazzed to see the film itself, which is the point of the whole exercise.
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)
If the New York Film Festival ever fails to turn your crank -- too many established prestige pictures on the schedule, too few small fries waiting to be discovered -- you probably get excited by the many secondary mini-festivals that run during the year, to a fraction of the press attention garnered by the big event. The annual Film Comment Selects series has become crucial over the years, showcasing a genuinely intriguing range of international cinema, including films too obscure or extreme to get U.S. distribution alongside previews of films the rest of the country won't get a good look at until later in the year. What's more, you get to see them at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, a venue that's showing its age but still ranks as one of the very best places in New York City to see this type of film.
Selects kicks off this year with February 9 screenings of Old Boy and Clean. The latter is the new Olivier Assayas/Maggie Cheung flick that's being distributed by Palm Pictures later in 2005 and thus gets only a single, sold-out screening at the fest. The former is the Cannes-award-winning revenge melodrama that's being released by Tartan USA next month (that's according to the IMDb; I couldn't successfully Google an official Web site for Tartan's USA distribution arm). Other potential highlights look to be Vital, the new film from Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto starring Tadanobu Asano, Downfall, with Bruno Ganz playing Adolf Hitler (!), Izo, a Takashi Miike film starring Takeshi Kitano (!!), Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, the debut film from Old Boy director Park Chan-wook, Sam Fuller's rarely seen Fixed Bayonet and Steel Helmet, the Korean Memories of Murder and Lisando Alonso's Los Muertos. So far only Clean is sold out, but tickets do tend to get scarce. Why not bust out your credit card and check out the full schedule?
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 12:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack