Oscar

DVD of the Week: The Artist

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If you still haven’t seen the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist, you don’t have any excuse because it’s now available on DVD.  It’s a magical romance that writer-director Michel Hazanavicius gives us through the highly original choice of an almost silent film.  Set in Hollywood from 1927 through 1929, it is the story of a silent film star who is left behind by the startlingly immediate transition to talking pictures.

The French actor Jean Dujardin won the Best Actor Oscar as the silent star, a charismatic and ever-playful guy whose career is trapped by the shackles of his own vanity.  While on top, he treats an ambitious movie extra (Berenice Bejo) with kindness; she remembers when she becomes a star of the talkies.

Dujardin’s star, whose films resemble those of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.,  is a joker with a knack for the grand gesture.  He also has an adorable Jack Russell terrier that serves as his companion and co-star.

Hazanavicius is so skillful that audiences that have never seen a silent film soon become enraptured by the story and invested in the fates of the characters.  It’s a visually and emotionally satisfying film.

John Goodman and James Cromwell are excellent in supporting roles. 

(BTW, in real life, Berenice Bejo has two children with Michel Hazanavicius.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvifS2QOun4]

And, courtesy of photographica in the Movie Gourmet’s LA bureau, here is co-star Uggie the Jack Russell terrier celebrating Uggie Day in Los Angeles.

A Separation: brilliant film, tough to watch

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A contemporary Iranian couple had planned to leave Iran for a better life in the West, but, by the time they have wrangled a visa from the bureaucracy, the husband’s father has developed Alzheimer’s. The husband refuses to leave his father and the wife leaves the home in protest. They are well-educated and secular. The husband hires a poor and religious woman to care for his father (and she does not tell her husband about her job). Then there is an incident which unravels the lives of both families.

This is a brilliant film. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi has constructed a story in which the audience sees and hears everything that happens, but our understanding of the events and characters evolve.  We think we know what has happened, but then other narratives are revealed.  Likewise, the moral high ground is passed from one character to another and to another.  It’s like Rashomon, but with the audience keeping a single point of view.

Much of that point of view is shared by the ever watchful teenage daughter of the educated couple.  She desperately wants her parents back together, views everything through this prism and is powerless to make it happen.  She is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.

Religion towers above the action – and not in a good way.  It guides the actions of the religious couple into choices against their interest.  The Iranian theocracy restricts the choices of the secular couple and of the judges trying to sort everything out.  Almost every character is a good person who is forced to lie to avoid some horrific result otherwise required by the culture.

One final note:  it will be a lot harder to make an easy joke at the expense of American lawyers after watching the Iranian justice system in A Separation.

The realistic angst of the chapters makes this a difficult film to watch – not a light date movie for sure. But the payoff is worth it, and it’s a must see.

This film is on the top ten list of over 30 critics and is Roger Ebert’s top-rated film of 2011. It is a lead pipe cinch for the Foreign Language Picture Oscar.

DVD of the Week: Incendies

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This searing drama is the year’s best film so far.  Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets.  As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks.  We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.

Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play.  Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.

It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and  children.  But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.

Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life.

Coming up on TV: Midnight Express

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On July 23, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting 1978’s  Midnight Express. This film is so gripping that, thirty-plus years after its release, you can’t hear “Turkish prison” without immediately thinking of Midnight Express.  It’s probably done more to keep American kids from bringing drugs into Turkey than any other factor.  Midnight Express is based on a true story, and is amped up considerably by Oliver Stone’s screenplay.  Nominated for six Oscars, it won two.

TCM is also showing Cool Hand Luke on July 23.  Both are on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies

Incendies: best movie of the year so far

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This searing drama is the year’s best film so far.  Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets.  As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks.  We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.

Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play.  Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.

It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and  children.  But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.

Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life.

 

Movies: Best Bets for May

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You can see trailers and descriptions of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, Incendies, releases widely May 6.  Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets.

Meek’s Cutoff is especially promising because it is directed by the excellent Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy).  The route of the Oregon Trail was not yet well established in 1845, so a covered wagon train hires a mountain man who claims that he has found a shortcut through the Cascades.  However, it becomes clear that the mountain man (Bruce Greenwood) is unreliable, and there is a new option of following an Indian of unknown motives.  The men (Will Patton, Paul Dano) must figure out what to do while their wives (Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson) eavesdrop and guess their fate. Releasing widely on May 6.

And now for a lowbrow guilty pleasure on May 27:  The Hangover Part II.  The buddies return – this time losing a little brother on a wild night in Bangkok.

Here’s the trailer for Incendies:

In a Better World: an ambitious contemplation on violence

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How do we respond to violence without perpetuating a cycle of violence?  What and how do we tell our kids?  Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers/Brodre, After the Wedding, Things We Lost in the Fire) takes on these questions through the stories of two 12-year-old boys and their well-meaning but troubled parents.

A schoolboy bully is handled through shock and awe, but the responses to other incidents of violence are far messier.  A parent’s teachable moment about pacifism doesn’t seem effective, and the boys fashion their own disproportionate solution.  One of the fathers, a do-gooder doctor who puts in time at a hell hole of an African refugee camp, must face pure evil in the form of a local warlord.  It’s an often tense drama.

In a Better World benefits from outstanding performances, especially by the boy actors, William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen and Markus Rygaard.

In a Better World won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture.  I didn’t like In a Better World as much as Brothers and After the Wedding, but it’s still an ambitious and successful film.