Hans got a compliment from his training teacher; he was commended on his ability to read. High five!
From a two woman race in the Best Actress category, we move on to a two man race for Best Actor. From a career resurrection, to another fine performance in his resume, the other nominees need not come Sunday night. The nominees include Richard Jenkins (The Visitor), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), Sean Penn (Milk), Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler). (Full disclosure: I still need to see The Visitor, don’t judge me!)
Who Will Win
Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler
Hollywood loves a redemption story, and there is none hotter right now than Mickey Rourke’s. Poised to be the biggest Hollywood star of the 80s and 90s, Rourke took a well documented detour and became Hollywood poison. Slowly working his way back into everyone’s good graces, Rourke completed his comeback with perhaps his finest and most authentic performance to date as a broken down, aging wrestler out for one last hurrah, a role that critics point out was not hard for him to pull off as it is his story. Nonetheless, it was the best performance of the year by anyone, and one that will studied for years.
Who Should Win
Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler
Mickey has this on lock. I hope. If it is not going to be Mickey Rourke though, it will be this guy…
Sean Penn in Milk
Sean Penn gives another amazing performance as Harvey Milk, and is just as deserving as Mickey Rourke for the grand prize. As awful as it may sound to say it, I feel that there may be some sort of homophobic backlash against Penn’s performance, and it may have rubbed some of the voters the wrong way, similar to how Brokeback Mountain and Heath Ledger were seemingly locks a few years back but came away empty handed, save for Ang Lee’s win. Penn is deserving of it, and becomes Harvey Milk, and it is another iconic performance.
Who Was Snubbed
Colin Farrell in In Bruges
Anybody who has followed this blog knows my love and admiration for In Bruges, and at the core of this great picture is a performance from Colin Farrell that will change his career. He earned a Golden Globe for it, and he was an outside shot at getting the nomination, but fans of the film will be rooting for Martin McDonagh in the Original Screenplay category. If you still have not seen this gem, definitely make the effort to see it, and treasure the performance by not only Colin Farrell, but also Bredan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes.
As we have recently finished up our top 10 lists of 2008, and the end of the award season coming up in just over one week, The Feature Preachers embark on prognosticating the major Academy Awards categories. We will make sure to belittle each other’s poor selections and life choices in true FP tradition. In our quest to bring something new to critiquing the films, we will not only be predicting who we feel will go home with those little golden naked men on February 22, but who we feel should win, and who was snubbed from receiving a nomination. To kick it off, we start with perhaps the most fiercely debated acting category, Best Supporting Actress. The nominations are Amy Adams (Doubt), Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Viola Davis (Doubt), Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler).
Who Will Win
Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona
While I disagreed with Hans on the greatness of Woody Allen’s latest, I will give credit where credit is due: Penelope Cruz chews up the screen and brings a saving energy to the film. As soon as she enters the film in the second act of the film in her dramatic and fiery welcome, the entire film becomes better. She has perhaps the biggest supporting role compared to her competitions, and far and away the most flashy and loud, and will probably be why she wins. The frontrunner since its summer release, Cruz has rode the crest of momentum and should be soon able to append Academy Award winner to her name.
Who Should Win
Taraji P. Henson in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Forrest Gump comparisons aside, and the fact that critics were split on the film just as Hans and I were, I hope that we can at least agree that Taraji P. Henson gives a career defining performance as Benjamin Button’s adoptive mother. While Brad Pitt’s performance may have been cold, distant, and hard to relate to for some, we all could feel for Queenie and her desire to be a mother and subsequent unconditional love for her son born under unusual circumstances. She was the human core of the film, and was a touch of reality in an unbelievable story.
Who Was Snubbed
Rosemarie DeWitt in Rachel Getting Married
Rachel Getting Married is a wonderful movie…but there is about 30 minutes of extraneous material that should have been cut, and the handheld camera photography was about 0% necessary, and about 100% unwelcome. There are some incredibly raw and human performances from Anne Hathaway (more on her in a future post) and the relatively unknown Rosemarie DeWitt. Playing the one getting married, DeWitt embodies the role of a seemingly forgotten about because of her normalcy sister and daughter to perfection, and personifies the roller coaster of emotions of a bride masterfully. Though this may be the first time you have heard of Rosemarie DeWitt, I am sure it will not be the last.
Even though I enjoyed Pineapple Express, I’d be remiss if I didn’t scold Sulmoney for ranking a stoner comedy higher than modern classics on his list like Wall-E, The Wrestler, and RocknRolla. BAM! See what I did there? No? Maybe cookie monster can explain it for you:
I’m actually glad that at least one big summer comedy made it onto Sulmoney’s list, though, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had a chance to discuss them. I’m a notoriously harsh critic of movie comedies, and trips to the cinema have often started with my (so-called) friends arguing over who has to sit next to me because I hardly ever laugh out loud. That said, we got some pretty decent stuff this summer with Pineapple Express (good), Tropic Thunder (better), and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (best). Unlike Sulmoney, I don’t think Pineapple Express succeeded as much as a genre-bending action-comedy, especially because a lot of the action in the last act fell flat for me, but James Franco, Danny McBride and, my personal favorite, Craig Robinson did some hilarious work that at least held up the comedy end. Even though I enjoyed Tropic Thunder more in the theater, I think Pineapple Express will age better.
Shout out also to Role Models, which I still haven’t seen, but expect I’ll really dig. Here’s big #2:
The Dark Knight
This list of my top 10 films of 2008 doesn’t necessarily include the best movies, in order, of last year. It’s simply a list of those films that for whatever reason appealed to my personal tastes more than the rest. The Dark Knight is a flawed film in many ways. It’s too long, it’s a bit too ambitious, it rushes the Two Face storyline, and some of the story elements (particularly the cell-phone mapping at the end) are just a bit too preposterous for the universe it establishes. For all of those reasons, I’m not too upset that The Dark Knight failed to snag a nomination for Best Picture at the 81st Academy Awards, but it’s a complete and utter travesty that director and co-writer Christopher Nolan was not even nominated for the Best Director trophy. If you want a review of The Dark Knight, you have thousands to choose from. Instead, here’s my case for Christopher Nolan as one of the best directors of 2008.
There’s so much to talk about that I won’t be able to really do the man justice without taking up the entire page. The stellar performances across the board, the moody music, the breathtaking scope, the unbearable tension, the bold choice to shoot in Chicago over New York, the emphasis on practical effects vs. CGI and the groundbreaking use of IMAX cameras all deserve to be mentioned, so there, I just mentioned them. What I find most impressive, though, is the uncompromising vision of the man behind the camera.
I wonder how awesome my hair looks right now...
I attribute every last dollar of The Dark Knight’s nearly $1 billion box office gross to the directorial vision of Christopher Nolan in translating the epic story of Gotham City to the big screen. The film’s title may refer to Batman himself, but it may as well have been titled “Gotham City,” since the first thing that struck me when the credits started to roll was just how much of the film was not even about Batman. Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan had a monumental task before them in trying to adapt the story of one of pop culture’s most recognizable heroes with 70 years and thousands of stories of history. And just to make it a little bit harder, they had to somehow capture the essence of not one, but two of the character’s most iconic villains in a way that both honored the source material and communicated ideas that strike a chord even with today’s audiences.
Didn't I have a really cool tower with a train through it last time? And before that everything glowed-in-the-dark?
But to get back to the point, it’s not the writing that’s important, because it’s a mistake to think that The Dark Knight is an original story. Like the classic Homeric poems, the story of Gotham City, its heroes and its villains has been retold for decades through many generations. The genius of the director, then, is not that he saw something in these characters that no one else had seen before, it’s in the way he was able to sift through the excess and boil down so many of these unfathomably dense and disparate elements in a way that made sense for his own medium. You think the Joker was scary? So did Alan Moore (writer of the upcoming mega-blockbuster Watchmen) when he wrote The Killing Joke back in 1988, which Christopher Nolan hand-delivered to Heath Ledger in preparation for his role. Felt for the plight of Commissioner Gordon, who had to choose between working with Batman (implicitly condoning vigilante justice) or risk letting the city fall into the hands of the mob? What about the tragic story of Harvey Dent, the man who believed so strongly in the goodness of the system that seeing it ultimately fail drove him to complete madness? Then check out Batman: Year One, Gotham Central, or The Long Halloween. Chris Nolan did.
In Japan, the Joker says, "Hai! Cheeeezu," and somehow it's still scary.
These are ideas that say an enormous amount about so many universal themes: the greyness of right and wrong, the limits of the human psyche, our capacity to find hope in a sea of despair, and, of course, the true nature of villainy and heroism. Now try telling your friends that you learned about these things in a comic book. “Ha! You mean those kids’ books with the silly pictures and the big words that say SMASH and POW?” But tell them that you saw all of those same things in The Dark Knight, and I suspect you’ll be met with a little more respect.
Christopher Nolan has made it socially acceptable for people to argue in public over the motivations of the guy with green hair and white face-paint, the justifications of the man with a melted face and a split-personality, and the iconography of the dude in the cape and rubber suit. That deserves a trophy in my book.
BWAHAHA! Once again, Sulmoney old friend, you embarrass yourself by populating your top 10 list with overly pompous, formulaic dreck like– wait, Wall-E? Damn, that one was actually pretty good. But now that leaves me with two paragraphs of the snarkiest, wittiest and most obscenely malicious insults I’ve ever crafted, and no helpless victim to unleash them on. Wait, who am I kidding? I’ll just save it for the big reveal of something ridiculous like Meet the Spartans in your #1 slot.
Iron Man
In a summer packed with an unprecedented number of hundred-million dollar blockbusters, only one of them stood out to me as the classic summer popcorn-flick. Wall-E was touching, Indiana Jones was disappointing, Hancock had “cock” in the title, The Incredible Hulk was a big, stupid CGI green man in purple pants who liked to shout while he smashed things, and The Dark Knight was, well, we’ll get to that. Each of those films made millions, some of them were even pretty darn good, but none of them embraced the true spirit of the summer blockbuster like Iron Man. This is a movie that knows its audience, and, like that high-school prom date who puts out to gain acceptance, it gives the audience what they want: a dude in a bad-ass metal suit who flies around and blows shit up. Oh, and he bangs a really hot chick somewhere in there, too.
Hot Chick: Mass murderer! | Tony Stark: I fly around in a metal suit and blow shit up. | Hot Chick: TAKE ME NOW!
In previous picks we’ve discussed the fantastic work of JCVD and Mickey Rourke in roles that mirrored their own lifestyles. Well, here’s a third. Robert Downey Jr. completely owns the role of the dry, wise-cracking, alcoholic womanizer. He is Iron Man, and I can honestly think of no other actor who could’ve embodied this role so fully.
With Iron Man, director Jon Favreau took a character with very little name recognition outside of comic book geek circles and turned him into the baddest dude on the block. Is it really one of the “best” movies of 2008? No, probably not. But good luck finding me one dude who didn’t walk out of that theater, peek side-to-side to make sure no-one was looking (they were) and then declare, “I am Iron Man.”
A bold pick with Tell No One, a film I have yet to see, but I must say it smacks of a desperate effort to establish some kind of film cred. “I looove foreign films. Hold still while I drop the names of a couple features from the burgeoning Kyrgyzstani film industry that I just happened to catch at the local art house theater between visits to Pinkberry and my weekly sake tasting class. Oh, never heard of them? Didn’t think so.”
So, um… my #7 also comes from France:
JCVD
Words alone can’t properly communicate just how cool this movie is, so if you haven’t yet seen it, watch the trailer above (preferably in HD).
In JCVD, Jean Claude Van Damme plays himself as a washed-up Hollywood has-been who finds himself stuck in the middle of a bank heist back home in Belgium, and what follows is a story of heroism and redemption that ends just a little differently than you might expect. This film oozes style from every orifice, whether it’s the genius premise, the phenomenal acting (Mickey Rourke needs to donate at least some of that excess praise to the Jean Claude Van Damme foundation), the lively score or the inspired direction by French-Algerian newcomer Mabrouk El Mechri. I can only imagine it must take a remarkable amount of skill from everyone involved to pull together a complex, one-take action setpiece or an intense character moment that lasts 5 minutes without shot-by-shot coaching. This movie does it so many times you lose count, but you never lose focus.
JCVD doesn't blink, he makes Chuck Norris blink for him.
When Sulmoney picked The Wrestler as his #9, I commented that it was a fantastically-made movie to which I simply felt no personal attachment. Well, JCVD is my Wrestler, and Jean Claude Van Damme is my Mickey Rourke. In concept, JCVD and the Wrestler are almost identical, but in execution they’re perfect opposites. Both stories examine the lives of tragically-fallen superstars of days past, but while The Wrestler tackles the parallel stories of Randy “The Ram” and Mickey Rourke with subtlety and subtext, JCVD doesn’t even know the meanings of those words. At one point Jean Claude looks straight into the camera and delivers a 6-minute soliloquy about his feelings on his struggling career. It’s not the movie’s strongest point, but thankfully, subtlety isn’t everything.
JCVD as Guile
In 1994’s Street Fighter: The Movie, Jean Claude Van Damme as Guile told M. Bison he was gonna kick his ass so hard, “the next Bison wannabe is gonna feel it.” If he had said that in JCVD, I would’ve believed him. Respect.
So, Sulmoney, I’ve stumped you on 2 picks already, and we’re only getting started. Obviously my level of professionalism and knowledge vastly outshines your own, but that’s to be expected when dealing with a self-proclaimed “long time fan” of professional wrestling. Here’s a spoiler for you: It’s all fake. And the Easter Bunny isn’t real, either.
To be honest, I thought The Wrestler was a fantastic piece of filmmaking that just didn’t connect with me on any personal level. Rourke’s performance was certainly impressive, but let’s be real, how much of a stretch is it for him to play a washed up star of the 1980s struggling to jumpstart his career again? Expect me to out Wrestler his Wrestler in an upcoming pick. For now, though, I present:
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
It’s with great shame that I admit this is the first and only Woody Allen movie I’ve ever seen, but honestly I think that’s for the best, because as far back as a year ago I don’t think I would’ve gotten as much out of this kind of relationship story as I did a few weeks ago. Putting together this list, I was really torn between this film and Sam Mendes‘s (of American Beauty fame) Revolutionary Road for the #8 spot. As a young, virile, incredibly manly twenty-something, there’s only so much room in my top 10 list for relationship dramas without seriously jeopardizing my street cred, but here we go anyway.
I'll do whatever you want, just don't kill me afterwards.
Thematically, the two are somewhat similar. At their cores, both films are cynical of our ability to temper our perceptions and expectations of the perfect relationship or the ideal lifestyle. Objectively, Revolutionary Road is probably the better film on most levels: direction, acting, and especially cinematography (thanks mostly to the phenomenal work of Roger Deakins). The first 40 or so minutes of Vicky Cristina Barcelona are bogged down by some clumsy voice-over narration and cliched character set-ups with Vicky and Cristina, but once Penelope Cruz hits the screen, everything else disappeared for me. Her performance is funny, sexy, crazy, and above all, fierce, and it leads into one of the most interesting and alluring relationships captured on film all year (it’s a 3-way! And not the devil’s kind). Thanks largely to the Oscar-deserving work of Penelope (as only her most intimate acquaintances know her), in addition to the absolute pimpness of Javier Bardem (following up last year’s total badassery in No Country for Old Men) and the charming Spanish backdrop, this film has an energy and a distinctly exotic taste that gave it that slight edge in my book over Kate and Leo’s latest.
The Incredible Hulk destroys The Hulk 24/7. Don’t make me hungry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry.
Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a doc that I would love to watch when I get a chance to. So far, you have got me on two of your top 10; I blame it on living in the Caymans and their third world theatres where the multiplex has 6 screens. Also, I blame my school’s slow internet connection, though I am not sure what that would have to do with watching films, hmmm. However, your #9, a documentary about steroid abuse, segues perfectly into my #9, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.
The Wrestler
As a long time on and off fan of professional wrestling, and being very much disturbed by the national headlines that many wrestlers have gotten themselves into, The Wrestler might as well be a documentary of the lives of many wrestlers. Tragedies involving the premature deaths of Eddie Guerrero, Curt Hennig, and countless others have tarnished many childhood memories. Watching recent WWE presentations where “Legends” are trotted out and are often made fools of do not help in maintaining these precious moments of youth, and often leads me to wonder what would cause these old men to don a pair of tights 20-30 years past their primes so that some up and coming star can smash them over the head with a steel chair. Then, while watching The Wrestler, I understood; these men have nothing else. This is a tragic tale of one man’s attempt at recovery and normalcy with the constant lure of his poison being omnipresent.
The Wrestler can not be mentioned without singling out Mickey Rourke’s performance. The Wrestler might as well be Rourke’s career: a huge star and draw in the 80’s, resulting in a well documented life of partying and wild times flushing it all away, making him nearly black listed in Hollywood, and then getting a chance many years later to prove his worth. And prove his worth is what he does. We have been blessed to have watched two of the most engrossing acting performances of all time in the past two years, with Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson joining Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood in the pantheon of great screen characters. The return of Mickey Rourke has been recognized with his recent Golden Globe win, and should be capped off with an Academy Award win as well.
The Feature Preachers 