And The Oscar Goes To...

One week ago today I got to hold an Academy Award.

It was amazing.

Let me explain.

Have you heard of Jim Cameron's Titanic? Yeah, well, it's being re-released for the 100th anniversary of the event that inspired it, and in 3D no less. Because, you know, nothing says respecting the lives of the dead like watching them die in the third dimension! I joke, but I not-so-secretly love this film. It was one of the very best films of 1997 and it's 3D rerelease will make it one of the very best films of 2012. I don't begrudge it any of its success, whether that be grossing over one billion dollars or taking home a mammoth haul of Academy Awards.

Speaking of the Academy Awards... Titanic's producer, Jon Landau, visited our fair shores to do a bit of promotion and while the full 3+ hour screening of Titanic in 3D isn't until next week, they did screen 40 minutes of the final product for us (mostly innocuous stuff like Gloria Stewart seeing herself on the TV, Kate Winslet's big hat, the staircase meeting, followed by a hefty chunk of the stunning sinking sequence) before getting into a Q&A with Landau. Towards the end he produced the golden statue and, hilariously, the Titanic fan who he allowed to hold it was also just kinda allowed to exit the cinema with her hands clasped around it with nobody here nor anywhere looking out for it. They quickly cottoned on that Landau's Oscar had gone walkabouts, but by that time I had already gotten my grubby lil mits on it and it was a glorious feeling.

Then we lined up to have our picture taken with Mr Landau and the Oscar, and boy... it was something. As somebody who actively follows the entire award season circus and who makes no apologies about loving the Academy Awards, getting a chance to actually hold one was incredible. I kinda felt, for those few brief seconds, what the fuss was all about. I'd seen them before - Oscars won by Adam Elliot and Cate Blanchett have a home on show at ACMI in Melbourne - but to actually hold one was something entirely different. It's like the statue has a gravity pull that just drew me in, even if the base was a bit wobbly. Landau needs to send that baby to the Academy's repair shop! It's a wonderful piece of work and I imagine many people who year-after-year bemoan the movie industry's slavish devotion to the Oscar tradition and who spout the same tired "who cares?" arguments would find the experience quite something.

And I love how Leonardo DiCaprio is peeking behind my shoulder there looking all intense and grumbling "I want one of those!"

Review: J. Edgar

J. Edgar

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Country: USA

Aus Rating: M15+

Running Time: 137mins

Hounded at every turn by a smothering mother, unable to freely express his love for a male co-worker in a conservative political landscape, disrespected by colleagues, and prone to bouts of cowardice at moments that called for heroics; it’s easy to assume that J Edgar Hoover lived a very sad life. None of that compares, however, to how drearily sad the film of his life, J. Edgar, is. Clint Eastwood directs his expansive tale with a wash of drab colours – the brown colour palate of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy looks positively lively compared to the metallic near monochrome colour scheme of Eastwood and cinematographer Tom Stern – and a never-ending heavy-handedness. It’s Eastwood’s second film in a year that has been suffocated at the hands of grand ambitions that failed to materialise when a more intimate approach probably would have worked better.

Coming hot on the heals of the improbable box office success of Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady, J. Edgar takes a near identical flashback heavy approach to the life of Hoover, rather lazily played here by Leonardo DiCaprio, as an older, frail man looks back over his life. While it thankfully doesn’t use that terrible Margaret Thatcher biopic’s absurd ghost motif to get from one Wikipedia entry heading to the next, it does haphazardly jump around through time and space as if at whim with little thought as to how one memory leads to another. Why do the people in these sorts of films always have such perfectly linear, chronological memory?

As if the dour cinematography, lit seemingly only by low watt lamps and natural light filtered through grey skies, Eastwood’s twinkly jingle jangle score would certainly put a sour mood over the proceedings. Perhaps he is to be commended for eschewing the traditional overwrought John Williams type of music, but those same incessant piano keys getting stroked over and over again like some villainous cat is nigh on nauseating.

Of course, as tends to happen with films of this type, really interesting stuff is either glossed over or chucked out altogether. The screenplay by Dustin Lance Black (re-using his Milk structure to diminishing returns) appears to be trying to have it both ways, dotting the script with big grand moments of historical significance alongside small scenes between Edgar and his mother, played by Judi Dench on Autopilot, and his alleged lover and Associate FBI director, a wide-eyed Armie Hammer as Clyde Tolson. Rarely complimenting each other in any way, I couldn’t help but suspect there was more interesting stuff to be said, especially since the private sequences are quite clearly just pulled out of thin air. Where was the public’s reaction to his private life? Where was the motivation behind the loyalty of Naomi Watts’ Helen Gandy? The list could go on and on. Meanwhile, a sequence addresses rumours of a fondness for cross-dressing is doesn’t feel like an organic part of the story at all, just merely tacked on for effect.

Too long, for sure, Eastwood and his editors, Joel Cox and Gary Roach, could have made the near two and a half hour length much less unwieldy by cutting out the unnecessarily repetitive scenes of Hoover recounting his memoirs to an eager fellow FBI agent (who puts new meaning to the term “paper pusher”). As DiCaprio’s heavily made-up elderly Hoover extols blank cheque platitudes about democracy, freedom and the fine line between right and wrong, it’s hard not to find the eyes rolling (or, even worse, drooping). Featuring some downright frightening make-up work on Armie Hammer – looking like some scary pod person from whence an alien entity is soon to burst free – and some truly ridiculous political impersonation – Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon is just off the chart bad – gives J. Edgar an at times comical edge. Although I probably would have preferred some good ol’ fashioned hoots, Eastwood’s film is too much of a sad sack to let us even have that. The life of what the posters tell us is “the most powerful man in the world” has been filtered through so many sieves that it’s rendered dull. D-

Black & White Friday: Shutter Island

Perhaps an obvious choice, but even though I didn't like the movie I still thought there would be enough within it to sustain a Black & White Friday entry. I was surprised by how modern the film felt and, perhaps, I might have liked it more if it had surrendered to the classicism of it all (not that I would expect Martin Scorsese to go there, but this tale was begging for a big ol' noir-tinged camp telling, don't you think?) I just could not buy Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as characters from the 1950s and with so many modern filmmaking flourished from Scorsese mixed with the obvious gothicism of it all and Shutter Island felt confused and really quite boring.


Interesting, I found the art direction of Shutter Island quite bothersome. The exterior scenes were great, but the interior ones were just too over the top in 1950s insane asylum decor. And yet when the colour is gone I feel that the interior scenes looked better. Strange, that. Whoever scouted this location, however, deserves a special cheque from Marty.


I quite liked Ben Kingsley here. Not in any particular "wow, his acting is superb" kind of way, but I thought he totally fit into the vibe of the movie. I can see him slotting right into the same role had this movie been made in 1954 (er, if he'd been alive and all that jazz of course) with his propensity to overact and be a bit larger than life. It's just a shame that Martin didn't really frame him in any particularly interesting ways.


The skies of this movie always looked so manufactured (and not in a matte kinda way like they would've been in the past), just so much CGI! gah! In black and white they look excellent, though.


See what I mean? Lovely shot by any means.


This is what I was talking about before. In the movie, this scene is just quite putrid and unappealing, but in black and white it feels so much more classical and less like I'm gonna get tetanus.





The women of Shutter Island. Scorsese can work miracles with actresses so it is always a shame when he doesn't just knuckle down and make a movie with a female lead role. He went there with The Age of Innocence and it's one of Marty's very best and just thinking of the performances from the likes of Sandra Bernhard, Lorraine Bracco, Cate Blanchett, Sharon Stone and the women of After Hours makes me shudder in delight. My favourite of the women in Shutter Island was Patricia Clarkson (and I love the shot I captured of her, actually looking quite old fashioned) because she was just so "on" and focused. Her role is thankless, really, but she does good stuff with it. Same goes for underrated actress Robin Bartlett (at the top). Emily Mortimer is good in her prison cell scene, too, although I admit I was very wrong about predicting her Oscar win.

And that leaves Michelle Williams, the weakest of the four. She doesn't really get much to do, does she? Despite having the most screen time of them all she basically just has to stand around and look a little bit sick, a little big ethereal and a little bit like there's not much going on upstairs. I chose this shot, however, because it reminded me of a similar moment in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive which, let's face it, Scorsese was clearly inspired by in some respects.


I really liked this scene. It had compelling actors actually doing good acting, advancing the story (and not just needless plodding like so much of the rest of the movie) and it was one of the very few moments that fully embraced the concept of this kinda noir, kinda camp, kinda artificial world (notice how it actually does look like an old kinda movie that it's halfheartedly trying to be).


This moment very much looks like a shot from an old movie, I reckon. Perhaps that's because we can't see the faces of any of the very modern actors? Perhaps.