Free Solo.

Free Solo was the only Oscar-nominated documentary I hadn’t seen at the time of the Academy Awards ceremony, and of course it was the winner for Best Documentary Feature, but it’s free to stream on Hulu now and certainly worth a watch … although I wonder if I got a very different message from it than many other people did. I don’t think this guy is a hero at all, nor is it really a portrait of a great achievement. Free Solo presents us with a sort of modern Don Quixote whose quest is inexplicable and maybe pointless, and who pursues the goal in this film with disregard for his own life and for the wishes of the person who is, or should be, the most important to him.

Alex Honnold is a free solo climber, which means he climbs giant, sheer rock faces without ropes or other safety gear. This is, as you might imagine, really fucking dangerous; at one point in this documentary we see brief video or photo montages of other famous free soloists who fell to their deaths. In Free Solo, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin follow Honnold as he prepares to scale El Capitan, known as El Cap, a 3000-foot wall in Yosemite National Park in California, which nobody had free-soloed before. We know that he survived – had he died, the film might not exist, and his death would have made the news – although the way the documentarians filmed the ascent is itself noteworthy, and many of the drone shots, near and far, of El Cap are utterly breathtaking. There’s a scene at the end that gives you a sense of how small a human is in comparison to the rock itself, and I think it challenges our ability to understand the scale of the world around us.

Free Solo aims to be about much more than strictly the ascent, and it partially succeeds. Honnold is a different cat, to put it gently. He reveals things about his childhood that may explain his strange affect, and undergoes an fMRI at one point that tells him and us that his amygdala is not very sensitive to excitement, which likely contributes to his thrill-seeking behavior as well. He and his mother have extremely different stories of what his father, who died when Honnold was 19, was like. Honnold has lived in a van for years and keeps a rather ascetic existence, with bizarre habits that would seem to go along with just a peculiar choice of living arrangements. There’s a scene where he cooks some strange assemblage of vegetables and beans and then eats it with a giant, flat cooking spatula, as if no one ever showed him how to use utensils.

Early in the film, a new character appears, Sanni, who attended a book-signing of Honnold’s, slipped him her number, and has since become his girlfriend. (Nobody has ever slipped me a number at a book signing, so clearly climbing giant rocks > baseball stats.) She clearly loves him, although there’s never the sense that this is some sort of hero-worship, and she is actively working both to get him to participate in a normal, adult, romantic relationship, and to consider that chasing death with these free solo climbs now affects her life too. He’s strangely detached in most of his interactions with her – there’s one exception at the end of the movie when we see him react to her in new ways, like the egg cracked and he’s coming out of his shell – and comes off as unaware of her emotions much of the time. It does not help matters that Sanni is both very upbeat and very pretty, which I think had to bias me in her favor and likely will have the same effect on many viewers. She’s just – here’s that word – likeable, which makes Honnold look like Lukas Haas playing a character with Asperger’s by comparison.

Sanni’s arrival in the film was a necessary bit of luck, as she gives us the best window on to Honnold’s personality and pushes him at least a little to explain his motivation for continuing to climb increasingly dangerous cliffs. (It’s not mentioned in the film, but Honnold described himself in a 2011 interview as a “militant atheist,” and I can not imagine having the strong belief that there is nothing after death and then pursuing a career that is likely to lead to an early decease.) I don’t think Free Solo explains enough why Honnold does what he does; he comes off like a modern George Mallory, who answered the question of why he wanted to climb Mount Everest with the possibly apocryphal answer “Because it’s there.” We get something from that fMRI result, and more from his interactions with Sanni, but he’s still something of an enigma even at the end of it all, especially since there’s no good reason he has to climb without some sort of protection. When you watch him ascend, it is absolutely impressive and Vasarhelyi and Chin do a superb job of capturing his climb, but how he could do this when there’s someone on the ground who’s waiting to hear he survived and would be devastated if he didn’t, is completely beyond me.

Oscars preview and picks, 2018 edition.

If you haven’t heard it yet, Chris Crawford and I recorded a podcast previewing tonight’s Academy Awards, but I also wanted to be able to put my predictions here for everyone to see, as well as links to all of the nominees I’ve reviewed so far. As always, bear in mind I am not a professional film critic in any way, and I have no inside knowledge at all of who or what is likely to win any of these awards. I just have opinions.

I’ll do a full ranking of all of the 2017 films I’ve seen once I get Loveless.

Best Picture

Who should win: Of the nine nominees, I would probably vote for The Shape of Water over Dunkirk but would be fine with either winning.

Who will win: I think The Shape of Water is going to edge out Three Billboards given the blowback against the latter’s mishandling of a police brutality subplot that’s treated as a joke. I still think there’s maybe a 5% chance Get Out shocks the world, though.

I haven’t seen: Got ‘em all this year.

Who was snubbed: The Florida Project was my #1 movie of 2017, with only a few films left for me to see to put a bow on last year. I don’t assign letter grades to movies a la Grierson & Leitch, but that would be my only A, I think.

Best Director

  • Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan
  • Get Out, Jordan Peele
  • Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
  • Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson
  • The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro

Who should win: Nolan.

Who will win: I said in the podcast with Chris that I could see Gerwig (first woman) winning, but I think I’d probably still bet on del Toro.

Who was snubbed: Sean Baker for The Florida Project, making a masterpiece with a cast of largely non-professional actors.

Best Actor

  • Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
  • Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
  • Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
  • Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
  • Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Who should win: Day-Lewis gave the best performance. I think I’d prefer to see Kaluuya win, and it was a real breakout role for him, but DDL is just a master.

Who will win: Oldman, who should win for Best Impersonation, but that’s not really the same thing, is it?

I haven’t seen: Roman J. Israel, Esq..

Who was snubbed: John Cho for Columbus, a wonderful movie almost nobody has seen.

Best Actress

  • Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
  • Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  • Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
  • Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
  • Meryl Streep, The Post

Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, I’d give it to Hawkins.

Who will win: Everyone seems to think McDormand has this locked up. She’s good, but I think her role was much less demanding than Hawkins’ or one of the actresses I think was snubbed.

I haven’t seen: I, Tonya.

Who was snubbed: Daniela Vega for A Fantastic Woman, and perhaps Alexandra Barbely for On Body and Soul or Vicky Krieps for Phantom Thread. This was the strongest category of all this year.

Best Supporting Actor

  • Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
  • Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards
  • Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
  • Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
  • Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards

Who should win: Dafoe.

Who will win: Rockwell.

I haven’t seen: All the Money in the World. This seems like an acknowledgement of the effort rather than the performance.

Who was snubbed: Michael Stuhlbarg (who appeared in three Best Picture nominees this year) for Call Me By Your Name.

Best Supporting Actress

  • Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
  • Allison Janney, I, Tonya
  • Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
  • Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
  • Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, Metcalf.

Who will win: Janney.

I haven’t seen: I, Tonya or Mudbound.

Who was snubbed: Holly Hunter for The Big Sick.

Best Original Screenplay

  • The Big Sick
  • Get Out
  • Lady Bird
  • The Shape of Water
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    • Who should win: I’m torn on this one, but I think I’d vote Get Out here.

      Who will win: I have no idea. I’ll guess Lady Bird.

      I haven’t seen: None.

      Who was snubbed: The Florida Project and Columbus.

      Best Adapted Screenplay

      • Call Me By Your Name
      • The Disaster Artist
      • Logan
      • Molly’s Game
      • Mudbound

      Who will win: Call Me By Your Name.

      I haven’t seen: Call Me is the only one I’ve seen.

      Who was snubbed: The Sense of an Ending, another very good, quiet film that almost nobody saw last year. It’s adapted from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes.

      Best Animated Feature

      Who should win: Coco.

      Who will win: Coco.

      I haven’t seen: Ferdinand.

      Who was snubbed: This category has become a disaster thanks to the change in voting rules I mentioned yesterday, favoring big studio releases over indie films. But there were a ton of eligible films that were #BetterThanBossBaby, including The LEGO Batman Movie and The Girl Without Hands.

      Best Short Film – Animated

      • ”Dear Basketball”
      • ”Garden Party”
      • ”Lou”
      • ”Negative Space”
      • ”Revolting Rhymes

      Who should win: Three of these are great; I’d probably vote “Revolting Rhymes,” which is on Netflix. I reviewed them all in one post.

      Who will win: I assume “Lou” because it’s Pixar. It’s also great, as is “Negative Space.” I am really hoping “Dear Basketball,” easily the worst of the five, doesn’t win on the basis of Kobe Bryant’s involvement.

      I haven’t seen: None.

      Best Documentary Feature

      Who should win: This really depends on what you want from your documentaries – should the film really expose or explain something, or can it just show you a slice of life? I liked four of the five nominees and would probably vote Faces Places by a nose over Icarus.

      Who will win: I think Faces Places so they can put Agnes Varda – or a cardboard cutout of her – on the stage.

      I haven’t seen: None.

      Who was snubbed: I did not see Jane, but given the wide critical acclaim of that film (about Jane Goodall), I was shocked it didn’t get a nod. I also thought City of Ghosts would get a nomination over Last Men in Aleppo.

      Best Short Film – Documentary

      • ”Ethel & Eddie”
      • ”Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405”
      • ”Heroin(e)”
      • ”Knife Skills”
      • ”Traffic Stop”

      Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, “Knife Skills” is a wonderful watch but “Traffic Stop” (on HBO) and “Heroin(e)” (on Netflix) are both so incredibly important.

      Who will win: I really don’t have a guess on this one.

      I haven’t seen: “Ethel & Eddie” and “Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405”. The latter is on YouTube but I couldn’t get through a few minutes of it because it was so upsetting right at the outset.

      Best Foreign Language Film

      Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, A Fantastic Woman, which also would have been worthy of a Best Picture nomination.

      Who will win: I think A Fantastic Woman gets this.

      I haven’t seen: I’m going to see Loveless this week, weather permitting, and it has earned critical plaudits on par with the best movies of the year. I also missed The Insult.

      Who was snubbed: I haven’t seen either of these, but thought In the Fade (which won the Golden Globe in this category) or Foxtrot (that trailer looks amazing) would sneak in here.

      Best Short Film – Live Action

      • ”DeKalb Elementary”
      • ”The Eleven O’Clock”
      • ”My Nephew Emmett”
      • ”The Silent Child”
      • ”Watu Wote/All Of Us”

      I’ve only seen “DeKalb Elementary,” which is superb, well-acted, and unfortunately very, very timely. I haven’t been able to find any of the other four online in any format.

The Salesman.

The Salesman won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this past February, although the film’s victory was obscured by director Asghar Farhadi’s refusal to travel to the ceremony after the current Administration attempted to enact a de facto travel ban on people from his native Iran, among other countries. The ban and the director’s previous, eloquent statements criticizing it may have secured the win for the film, especially given the overall tone of the proceedings this year. Separating the movie from the atmosphere around it (as best as I can), however, the story and the two lead performances are more than deserving, and, as with his Oscar-winning A Separation, Farhadi has shown how much a strong screenwriter can do without resorting to the usual pandering of sex and violence. (The film is available on Amazon Prime, or for rent on iTunes.)

The movie’s title comes from the play within the film: A married couple, Rana and Emad, are also starring in a stage production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with Emad as the protagonist Willy Loman and Rana as his wife, both wearing prosthetics and using makeup to appear much older than they are. The movie opens as the couple’s apartment building is evacuated as the structure begins to crack due to construction in the neighboring empty lot, putting the edifice at risk of collapse. One of their co-stars in the play has a vacant apartment in his building and offers it to the couple rent-free, but doesn’t fully explain why the previous resident left or why all of her stuff is still sitting in one locked room. Someone visits the apartment, apparently thinking the previous tenant is still there, and ends up assaulting Rana, putting her in the hospital with a skull injury and possible concussion. The aftermath of the assault drives a wedge between her and her husband, as she suffers obvious PTSD and doesn’t want to pursue a case against her unknown assailant while Emad struggles to understand why she can’t just ‘get over it’ yet simultaneously becomes fixated on finding the culprit and enacting vengeance.

Farhadi thrives on delicate pacing and dialogue that leaves much unsaid, which can be more powerful in the right hands but puts a great burden on the actors. Taraneh Alidoosti delivers one of the best performances of the year as Rana, going from the confident, matter-of-fact woman from before the attack to a woman showing all the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, looking for emotional support her husband can’t give her, still trying to act in the play as it’s the one ‘normal’ thing she might be able to do. Shahab Hosseini is a bit maddening as Emad because he’s so perfectly aloof, unable to see past his own anger to help his wife, obsessing over finding the perpetrator – only to stumble on an answer he didn’t expect. And when that character is revealed in a tragicomic parallel to the play, Emad and Rana end up opposing each other over what to do about him: whether to grant him forgiveness or ruin his life by telling his family what he’s done.

The Salesman establishes its velocity early and never wavers from it; Farhadi doesn’t speed things up as we approach the resolution, and there’s no fake action to give the film a burst of energy. It’s a slow build, such that the tension near the end and the sense that something awful is going to happen is close to unbearable, after which Farhadi leaves the audience with an ambiguous closing scene (like that of A Separation) that leaves many aspects of the story open to interpretation. The story seems like it would demand an easy answer or a big finish, but even its most basic questions, like whether or how to forgive someone who committed a crime like the one depicted here, remain unresolved. His depiction of the attacker introduces an element of uncertainty that, at the very least, raises the possibility of empathy rather than justifying the initial reaction of one of the neighbors that he’d like to skin the culprit alive.

I’ve seen all five of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film from last year – the others are Land of Mine, Tanna, Toni Erdmann, and A Man Called Ove – and would have voted for The Salesman too, giving it the edge over Tanna on story and the two lead performances. South Korea’s film board chose not to submit The Handmaiden, which I think would have at least given The Salesman a run for its money in the voting given the former’s high production values and strong LGBT storyline, although in the end the best film was the winner anyway.
 

La La Land.

My top 100 prospects ranking is rolling out this week, with prospects #40 to #21 in today’s post. Over at Paste, I reviewed the new edition of Citadels, a classic game from 2000 that plays 2-8, and comfortably plays five-plus – I’d say it’s best with at least four.

Imagine if Once were set in L.A., opened with a classic musical-film song and dance number, and starred two ridiculously beautiful people wearing nice clothes and singing happier songs?

Once didn’t get the love it deserved from the Oscars, although it later became a cult hit and a Tony Award-winning musical. La La Land is a lot more ambitious and bigger-budget than Once was, and it’s going to win a lot more Academy Awards, but at their hearts are quite similar stories about love affairs that just can’t last, set to music.

Of course, that’s a bit glib – La La Land is more than just that. It’s part homage to the bygone era of the big Hollywood musical. It’s a feast for the eyes, with vivid colors in the background and on Emma Stone. It’s a little bit parody, and then it folds a little back in on itself and plays along with its own gag. It’s also a really good time, which makes it a rarity among the Best Picture nominees this year. La La Land is an outright pleasure to watch, even with the half-and-half ending, and with so many movies draped in grief, regret, sorrow, and isolation this year, it stands out even more.

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling play Mia and Seb, two beautiful people struggling in their careers in LA – she an aspiring actress working in a coffee shop, he a jazz pianist playing Christmas music in a nightclub and then, in a sight gag that Stone turns into something much more, in a bad ’80s cover band. They meet more than once and don’t hit it off right away, but eventually the movie keeps pushing them together until there’s a spark, along with a song about how there’s no spark between them. Eventually, he gets a medium break, playing in a jazz-pop band led by his old frenemy Keith (played by John Legend), which forms the first wedge between the star-crossed lovers, although they manage to careen back and forth until the movie’s epilogue, five years later, where we see that, even in the movies, sometimes you just can’t have everything after all.

This is a musical, but not an old-time musical. If you just saw the opening scene, a huge ensemble dance number set in a traffic jam on a highway on-ramp, you’d expect something like the classics, where people just spontaneously start dancing while singing their dialogue. Instead, this is a regular movie with a handful of songs, and it isn’t until the end, when Emma Stone sings for her Oscar with “The Audition Song” (earning the movie one of its two Best Song nominations) near the very end, that we get another flashback to the halcyon days of Hollywood. Did critics who’ve said of La La Land that “they don’t make movies like this any more!” realize that Hollywood never made movies like this in the past?

Stone really owns this film in just about every way. Her character is better-developed, more three-dimensional, and shows real growth over the film. When Mia and Seb have their first quarrel as lovers, Mia holds her own in the argument, and Stone manages to portray inner turmoil on a face that’s outwardly composed until Seb finally insults her enough for her to leave. That’s Stone’s greatest achievement in the movie – her character is often put in situations where she’s turning from one emotion to another in a flash, and she can do this without making you aware that this is just someone acting.

The movie also uses her as a blank canvas of sorts, running her through an array of dresses in solid, vibrant colors that seemed to underscore the fact that, hey, we’re in California, where everything is sunny and bright and colorful all the time. It doesn’t hurt that she can get away with wearing all of those colors, or that her eyes seemed to be green in one scene and blue in another, but it ensures that your eyes are on her in nearly every scene.

Gosling, meanwhile, can turn on the charm when his character permits, but Seb is prone to this sort of insular, sulking behavior that I thought was as offputting as his strange amalgam of New York and Philly accents. And neither of these two is winning any awards for dancing, although, as always, we must give more credit to the woman for dancing backward and in heels.

Some of the L.A. jokes were a little too on the nose – the Prius gag, the gluten-free line – and the movie is funnier when it draws humor from situations rather than punchlines. When Seb is trying to explain jazz to Mia, and she answers with, “What about Kenny G?” it’s his reaction that drives the entire scene. He is totally beyond exasperated, like he wants to claw the skin off his face, yet is so passionate about the subject and obviously smitten with her that he tries to talk her down off the smooth-jazz ledge. It’s probably my favorite Gosling scene in the movie, especially since Seb’s ego returns to the center of his character towards the end of the film.

The movie ends with a dream sequence that shows an alternate reality five years on, what might have happened if things went … well, the other way, and I think here director and writer Damien Chazelle did two things: paid homage to classic musicals in more explicit fashion, and reminded the Academy just one more time to vote for him. I caught direct allusions to An American in Paris and Royal Wedding, and Funny Face, but I’m no expert on the genre and assume I missed many more. In that sense, it was the most engrossing part of the movie – you’re looking at the flip side of the movie’s internal reality, and also watching the two of them move through a rolling reference to Hollywood history.

I’ve seen four of the Best Picture nominees and hope to see as many as eight – I have zero interest in a Mel Gibson movie, and even less in that particular one – although I might only get Lion after the awards ceremony. Of the four I’ve seen, I think La La Land would get my vote. It just does more, and does more well, than Moonlight or Manchester by the Sea, both great movies but less ambitious than this one. I think any would be a worthy winner, but I rank things, and I currently have La La Land at #1.

Moonlight.

Moonlight is already one of the best-reviewed movies of the year, and it feels like a lock for a Best Picture nomination, especially in light of recent criticism that the Oscars are too white. It’s an unusually quiet, understated movie, often painfully silent, mimicking the internal suffering of its main character, a gay black man we follow from elementary school to young adulthood as he struggles to find any way or place he can feel comfortable in his own skin.

The story unfurls in three parts, with a different actor playing the lead character in each stage, with probably six to eight years separating each third. Chiron, variously known as Little or Black, first appears on screen as he’s chased by a bunch of classmates shouting about beating “his gay ass” as they run through a project in Miami, eventually cornering him in a boarded-up motel or apartment complex where he’s found by the local dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali). Juan ends up serving as a sort of father figure to Chiron, but the relationship unravels as Chiron’s mother, Paula, becomes a crack addict. The film follows Chiron through a miserable experience in high school as a bullied, silent kid whose one experience with sexuality is followed by betrayal and disaster, to his transformation as an adult into a jacked-up enforcer in Atlanta who comes back to Miami to reunite with his estranged friend.

If you want to summarize Moonlight as the gay black movie, you wouldn’t exactly be wrong, but you’d be doing the screenplay by director Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney a huge disservice. Chiron is a target because he’s gay, something even his own mother can’t accept, but the theme of ostracism and isolation is broader than just that brought on by homophobia – and if Chiron were comfortable with his sexuality, or had a support system at home, or were just willing to defend himself physically (as Kevin tells him in part one), his story arc would be completely different. Chiron’s problem is not that he’s gay, but that he is who he is, with no one around to tell him that he’s okay, or to help him become a more assertive, confident person before it’s too late. You could just as easily say Moonlight is about a life ruined by the scourge of crack in poor black communities. I don’t think it’s any of those things, not individually, but draws on so many different themes that it manages to create a complex story with a bare minimum of dialogue.

And when I say a bare minimum, I mean it; you could probably write this entire script on the head of a pin using a Sharpie and an old English font. Chiron rarely says more than two or three words at a time, and often just doesn’t answer questions addressed directly to him. No one talks at length except for Kevin, and by the third act, it seems like it’s out of nervousness rather than him having something to say. The silences throughout the film are there to make you uncomfortable, to make you feel the characters’ discomfort, but as someone with the attention span of a goldfish I felt a little like I was watching Steve Trachsel’s directorial debut. The silences are undoubtedly effective, both for that purpose and for making the film’s bursts of activity that much more incisive, but oh my God Chiron just answer the question!

It seems like Moonlight is already generating Oscar buzz, and it’s on par with some of the best movies I’ve seen the last few years as a work of art, but I wonder if any actors in the film will earn nominations given how little time most of them get on screen. Of the three actors to play Chiron, only Trevante Rhodes really has enough to do to merit a Supporting Actor nod, and Ali could get consideration for the same. As much as I’d like to see Janelle Monáe, who plays Juan’s girlfriend Teresa and appears in two of the three parts, get a nomination, the character is too one-note for that, and Naomie Harris, who plays Chiron’s mother, has much more weight to her role as well as the bonus points from playing a drug addict. (The hair and makeup department did their best to make Monáe look plain, but failed.) I could see Moonlight getting Picture, Director, and Screenplay nods but whiffing on the four Actor categories, depending of course on what the rest of the field looks like; the Screen Actors Guild has a Best Ensemble category, however, and that seems tailor-made for a film like Moonlight that is the sum of many great, small performances.

I’m hoping to catch a few more of the leading contenders in the next few weeks – La La Land, Loving, and Manchester by the Sea among them – as my writing schedule permits.

Spotlight.

I’m not a big movie guy in general, and the Academy’s leanings the last few years in Best Picture nods haven’t done a lot to bring me back to the fold – not that they’re choosing bad movies, but that they’ve favored a lot of movies I wouldn’t even want to watch. (I’m sure 12 Years a Slave was amazing. I just can’t watch that kind of cruelty.) I did watch Birdman, last year’s winner, and thought it was clever but lacked any sort of resolution to the main story, as if the screenwriter had a great idea for a movie script but couldn’t figure out how to finish it.

Spotlight (amazoniTunes), which of course won Best Picture earlier this week, appealed to me more than any recent winner I can think of. The story shows how a small group of reporters at the Boston Globe known as the Spotlight team conducted a months-long investigative effort that uncovered the scope of the abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, including the fact that the Archbishop of the Boston diocese, Cardinal Bernard Law (no relation), knew about it and did nothing beyond moving the pedophile priests around to new parishes. It’s a film that’s going to be talky – big on dialogue, light on action, highly dependent on everything from acting to directing to editing to make it a compelling film. The whole concept of a dramatic film that has no action, no sex, no romance, not even a proper antagonist (in the conventional sense of a ‘villain’), feels very British to me, just because their TV programs and films tend to be more story-driven in my entirely anecdotal experience.

Spotlight is an incredible film in the most old-fashioned sense: It tells a great story and never lets up until the end. The pacing was perfect, the performances were very strong, and no nonsensical subplots interfered with the unfolding of the main story. Only one scene rang a little false, one that felt like it was inserted so that there was a Big Dramatic Conflict to use on awards shows, but otherwise the screenplay was taut and efficient, wasting few words and even less time on irrelevant details.

I thought the performances were almost all excellent, yet none seemed likely to win an award – I was surprised to see the nominations the cast received, because these performances were all so understated. Liev Schreiber plays the new editor of the Globe, perceived as an interloper because he’s not from Boston and because he’s Jewish, with such restraint that it was hard to remember who was behind the glasses and facial hair. Mark Ruffalo, playing reporter Mike Rezendes, was just as unrecognizable with a little change to his hairstyle, a slight accent, and, aside from the one scene where he blows up at Keaton’s character, delivers a similarly spartan portrayal. A mediocre writer could have had him explode at the imperious file clerk who won’t give him access to public records that would prove damning to the Church, and a mediocre actor would have hammed it up, but instead, we get a scene that works because it’s so mundane.

The lesson of Spotlight the movie – as distinct from the scandal, which certainly gets its air time in the film but doesn’t need me to thinkpiece it any further – is that the drama in a good dramatic film doesn’t have to come from the screenplay. This story was inherently compelling: A small team of reporters, given unusual autonomy, discovers and reveals a massive, decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse by one of the world’s most powerful and most implicitly trusted authorities through hard work and ingenuity. I could give you a dozen places where someone could have Hollywoodized the script – a screaming confrontation between reporters and church officials would be the most obvious – but instead we get a simple, linear story, where the narrative greed comes from the piecemeal uncovering of the scandal. Even my short attention span was riveted for two solid hours, and when the story was over, the film is over, and if that last scene wasn’t real, well, I am going to pretend that that’s what actually happened the day the story finally ran.

The defunct Phoenix also did some great work on the story and does get a brief mention in the film, although there’s a debate over how much credit they deserve. The Globe certainly pushed the story much farther.

I’m going to watch a few of last year’s highly-rated films now that many of them are available digitally (legally – I won’t Torrent), so if you’ve got a favorite or two, nominated or otherwise, throw them in the comments. I will watch movies in any language, but I draw the line at Room, which I think I will find far too upsetting because I have a young daughter.

Academy Award thoughts.

I’ve seen eight of the nine Best Picture nominees but ended up light on the acting categories, so take all of this with a huge grain of salt. I’m just throwing my opinions out there for discussion, and because it’s fun to talk about this stuff before we get all serious by talking baseball. All links go to my reviews of the films.

Best Picture

My choice: Zero Dark Thirty
Prediction: Argo

Everyone’s assuming Argo will win after it has won most of the major predictor awards, defying the previous conventional wisdom that a film can’t win Best Picture if its director isn’t even nominated for Best Director. It’s a solid movie, not a terrible choice in the abstract, but not the best movie I saw from 2012. Zero Dark Thirty was better across the board for me – better written, better acted, better staged, and tackled a more serious subject.

Best Director

My choice: Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Prediction: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

I’m not even sure how to consider these five directors; Kathryn Bigelow would have been my choice, but she, Quentin Tarantino, and Ben Affleck were all snubbed despite outstanding efforts on their respective films. Tarantino may have been omitted for that awful Australian accent, though.

Best Actor

My choice: Hugh Jackman, Les Misérables
Prediction: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

DDL has had this in the bag since the movie came out, but I thought Jackman’s role was more demanding while it was just as central to his movie as DDL’s was to his. I’m still irritated that Richard Parker didn’t even get an nomination, however. Note that I’ve only seen three of the five nominated performances.

Best Actress

My choice: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Prediction: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

She just edges out Jessica Chastain for me, but I think the actual voting won’t be that close. Lawrence’s performance lacked the gravitas of Chastain’s but it was no less convincing or essential to her film’s success. Again, I’ve only seen three of the five performances here.

Best Supporting Actor

My choice: Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Prediction: Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook

I think De Niro gets the “hey, thanks for finally making another decent movie” award, and I can’t argue that much with the choice. Waltz had far more screen time in a role that recalled the meticulously malevolent character he played in Inglorious Basterds, but this time with more emotional depth. I have not seen The Master among the five films involved here.

Best Supporting Actress

My choice: Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
Prediction: Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables

Of the three performances I’ve seen here – Hathaway’s, Weaver’s, and Field’s – this is a no-brainer. I will see The Sessions at some point soon, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Hunt deserved this one more.

Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay

My choice: Tony Kushner, Lincoln
Prediction: Tony Kushner, Lincoln

I could see Argo pulling this off, but I think the more erudite language of Lincoln will resonate more with older voters. That said, if Silver Linings Playbook hadn’t ended with that silly parlay, it would have been my pick here.

Best Writing, Original Screenplay

My choice: Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
Prediction: Pass

I’ve only seen two of the five nominees here, so I’m just including this category for the sake of completeness.

Include your own picks and predictions below. Anyone who nails every winner gets a free one-year subscription to the dish.

Argo.

Ben Affleck’s Argo earned substantial praise right out of the chute when Roger Ebert tabbed it as the likely Best Picture winner based on, I presume, a strong story, well-acted, with Hollywood at its heart. (You just have to look at last year’s Best Picture winner to see how much that last point matters.) That aside, I knew the true story behind Argo was in itself interesting enough to make me want to see the film, as did the trailer that strongly evoked the look and feel of an era that exists largely at the periphery of my memories – I remember the hostage crisis and clearly remember seeing the bulk of the American hostages deplaining when they were finally released in 1981 – even if the film played a little loose with history. As it turns out, Affleck and company did a masterful job of infusing drama into a story where the conclusion is known to all at the film’s beginning, and the work they did in recreating 1979 provides a massive injection to your suspension of disbelief, to the point where even the bits that seem obviously false, like coincidental timing of two events, don’t break the spell the movie has over the viewer. The result is a heist movie without the pervasive unreality of most heist movies, yet one that retains the dry humor that sets the best heist movies apart from the rest.

The story, well-known by now but classified until 1997, involves the escape of six employees at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the day that demonstrators breached the gates and stormed the building, taking another 60-odd employees hostage for what turned out to be 444 days. The six employees who escaped spent a night at the British embassy but had to leave and eventually found sanctuary at the Canadian embassy thanks to the courage of the Canadian ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor, and his wife, Pat, who could have faced execution had they been caught by the Revolutionary Guard. (Taylor discussed the story with BBC Witness earlier this week, stating that the biggest problem for his six houseguests wasn’t fear of discovery but boredom.) The U.S. government was aware early on that these six employees had escaped, but couldn’t come up with a viable plan to rescue them until extraction expert Tony Mendez (played by Affleck) came up with the idea to create a fake movie, with Mendes himself playing the film’s Canadian producer and the six escapees playing members of the film crew. The film in question was called Argo, and was a fairly blatant Star Wars ripoff that happened to be set in a place that made Iran a plausible location for the crew to be scouting. The group of seven ended up leaving Iran without as much trouble as Affleck’s film would indicate, although the truth would have been fairly dull on the screen, and Affleck also boosts the tension with a substantial amount of gallows humor from all angles, including John Goodman and Alan Arkin hamming it up beautifully as the fake film’s makeup guy and executive producer. (Goodman also appeared in last year’s Best Picture winner, The Artist, and if there were a way to quantify the most underrated actors in Hollywood, he’d have to be on it.)

Argo, the real movie, shifts around the timing of certain events to heighten the drama, making the group’s escape from Tehran more thrilling by keeping them a half-step ahead of the Iranians at every point, including a race on the tarmac in the film’s climax that apparently never happened. If you knew none of the real story, however, every bit of this movie would seem plausible except for the coincidences of timing – Arkin and Goodman returning to their sham office in Hollywood just as the Iranian authorities are calling to confirm Mendez’ phony credentials, or the CIA finally authorizing the group’s tickets on SwissAir as the seven are waiting at the ticket counter at Tehran’s airport. The pacing, however, is so crisp that most viewers won’t have enough time to think about these improbabilities; the script never dwells too long on any one character, scene, or plot point, taking a story that, in reality, probably played out quite slowly and instead turning it up to fourth gear almost from the moment Affleck first appears on screen.

His appearance, and those of the six refugees, also help cement Argo‘s power to suck you into its story even with the occasional artistic license. Images during the final credits show how carefully the actors were chosen and made up to resemble the largely-unknown people they’re portraying, with hairstyles and fashions that are instantly recognizable for their era. The film is shot with the slightly muted tones you see when watching movies filmed in that era, while the settings, mostly in Tehran but also in D.C. and in Hollywood, are just as carefully constructed to take you back to that time period. The shots of Tehran are especially stunning, including reenactments of violent street demonstrations that will certainly evoke memories in any viewer my age or older.

Affleck will likely get a Best Director nod for Argo and perhaps one for Best Actor as well, but beyond his central role, it’s an ensemble effort, with the actors playing the refugees working with limited material to carve out unique identities for their characters, and only Bryan Cranston, playing Mendez’ supervisor at Langley, getting enough screen time to earn award consideration. I haven’t seen enough contenders to consider whether Argo deserves to win Best Picture, or even be nominated, but it would be ironic and perhaps a bit awkward if a film that paints the Iranians as dimwits were to earn that honor when the unbelievable Iranian film A Separation was consigned to the foreign-language category just a year earlier.

If you want more of the true story behind the film: the Wired story from 2007 that Affleck optioned for the film version; The Houseguests: A Memoir of Canadian Courage and CIA Sorcery, a self-published memoir from Mark Lijek, one of the six embassy employees rescued by the CIA; and Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, co-authored by Tony Mendez himself.

The Artist.

Here’s my basic problem with The Artist, which I saw two weeks ago: The more I try to think about it, the more I end up thinking about something else.

Don’t mistake my tone there – it’s a very good movie, at different points entertaining, funny, and poignant; beautifully shot and staged; and simply written with little that doesn’t belong. But it didn’t stick with me at all; a great movie will come back to me often, days or even weeks after I see it, with the best scenes replaying in my head regardless of whether I called them to mind. I end up considering and reconsidering themes or questions or ambiguities, often until I see a different film. But The Artist brought none of that. It was a fun way to spend two hours, but I couldn’t call it more than that.

The Artist is, at heart, a tragic romance, the story of a man, George Valentin, who is madly in love with himself – so much so that he can’t seem to recognize it when someone else actually cares about him. The title might even be ironic, and given how he treats most of the people in his life, especially after his career begins to unravel, it might have more accurately been called The Asshole.

Valentin (Best Actor winner Jean Dujardin) is a silent-film star whose life is altered by two major events near the start of the film. One is the advent of talkies, which he dismisses as might anyone who finds his livelihood threatened by new technology or innovation. (I imagine buggy drivers had some choice words for the first automobile as well.) The other is a chance encounter with an adoring fan, the fresh-faced and aptly-named Peppy Miller (Best Supporting Actress nominee Berenice Bejo), to whom George gives a role as an extra in his next film. Her star rises with the rise of sound in pictures while he is cast aside, eventually blowing his fortune to produce a silent film that, for a variety of reasons, tanks at the box office, after which his wife leaves him and his life spirals down to the bottom of a series of bottles. He hits bottom twice, and Peppy ends up in position to repay him for his part in starting her career – if only he wasn’t too buried in self-pity to notice.

The strongest aspects of the movie lie in its subtleties, as the plot itself is pretty straightforward and there aren’t any real subplots. Peppy criticizes silent movies once she’s a star by referring to actors “mugging” for the camera, but Bejo and Dujardin mug a lot less than I expected without sacrificing the expression a silent film requires from its stars. I was far more impressed by the mass of activity underneath the film’s surface, some of which holds clues to the small twist at the end of the film that casts Valentin in a better light (but only slightly), some of which just made the film a greater pleasure to watch – such as the scene in the studio’s offices where the camera shows three floors simultaneously, with a flurry of activity around Peppy and George as she tries to reconnect with him, unaware that he’s just been sacked by the studio.

But the production values and strong performances couldn’t quite get me past how sparse the actual story was. Valentin starts at the top, falls to the bottom, nearly dies, considers suicide, but never seems to learn a damn thing – not the need to change, not the value of treating people well, not how to live within his means, nothing. Only at the very end do we see a small sign that he may have learned some humility, but even that is tainted by its circumstances. He waited around for life to come back around and save him. We spend more time laughing at misfortunes of his own making than we do empathizing with him because we never seen the insecurity that lurks behind the pride.

The dog is awesome, though.

I was familiar enough with the film going in to try to guard against the reflex reaction that the film only won the Academy Award for Best Picture because it seemed designed to win the award – a black-and-white love letter to nascent Hollywood shot in 4:3 with only two lines of spoken dialogue, coming at the very end of the film. And, to the film’s credit, it wasn’t hard to get lost in the story, even with the twists I kind of knew were coming. But it seemed rather insubstantial for a Best Picture winner, according to the arbitrary standard in my head for that award. I expect more depth from a film deemed the best of the year by that body.

I’ve only seen one other Best Picture nominee from last year, and The Artist was better, but I’m not sure what made this film, stripped of gimmickry, better than, say, Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s prettier, and more mainstream, and not half as disturbing, but none of those things really makes it better. I’ll work my way through the nominees as I did last year, as well as a few movies that film-critic friends of mine have pushed me to see (coughA Separationcough), but I’ll predict now that I’ll find something else I thought was more deserving. Next up is Drive.

Inglourious Basterds.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds won widespread accolades, including eight Oscar nominations, for its portrayal of an alternate ending to World War II that involves Jews killing Nazis while working in enough allusions to other movies to fill a film studies major’s thesis. As someone insufficiently schooled in the genres Tarantino reveres, however, I didn’t get the full value of the work and found the movie, judged mainly on plot and character, a little less than fulfilling.

The movie interlaces two plots to assassinate members of the Nazi high command in a Paris theater during the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film called Nation’s Pride. The Basterds of the film’s title are a ragtag group of soldiers, mostly American Jews, led by Appalachian-born Lieutenant Aldo Raine, who informs the crew that their mission is to kill “Natsies” (rhymes with “patsies”) and scalp them. The second plot involves the sole survivor of the massacre of a French Jewish family in the opening scene, a young girl named Shoshana who ends up (improbably) as the owner of a small theater in Paris that is chosen for said premiere. Seeing her opportunity for revenge, she hatches a plot to burn down the theater full of Nazi officers and soldiers, unaware that the Basterds are planning to blow the place up during the same event.

By far the star of the movie is Christoph Waltz, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa, an effete Nazi “detective” who prides himself on a particular talent for finding Jews and, as it turns out, traitors. Humanizing the inhuman has become something of a cliché, but Tarantino/Waltz don’t humanize this central Nazi character so much as smear him with a veener of normality, beneath which lies a venal, selfish soldier who takes orders without question until it is in his own personal interests to do otherwise. He bears a superficial charm with his upper-class manners, speaks several languages fluently (always with a proper, urbane accent), and moves seamlessly from one to the next, and engages in small talk even though he knows he is about to commit or order a murder. It takes multiple scenes to reveal the depths of his personality and how that surface layer is merely a cover for a man who will make good for himself any way he can. His pleasure in identifying a situation where he holds all the cards (the “Bingo!” scene) shows how willingly he will change his strategy to suit his own needs while also revealing how much he revels in something as trivial as correctly utilizing an English-American colloquialism. One small flaw in Landa’s design, however, is that we are given only the slightest glimpse of what makes him a good detective, and that comes from his own soliloquy about how he thinks as the fugitive might think – nothing terribly clever or enlightening.

The film’s best scene doesn’t involve Waltz, however, and only resorts to Tarantino’s cartoonish violence at its very end, once the story within the scene has played out. Three of the Basterds are meeting with a German actress/double agent in the basement* of a tavern in a small town outside of Paris, but their rendezvous is compromised by a group of low-ranked German soldiers getting plastered because one just became a father, which leads to the intrusion of a much higher-ranking officer who eavesdropped on the conversation and believes, based on one of the Basterds’ accents when speaking German, that they are frauds. We know it’s not likely to end well, and that any chance of the Basterds’ escape would mean extermination of everyone else in the room, but instead of racing to the obvious conclusion, Tarantino draws it out with natural dialogue, long pauses, and shots of the most volatile of the three Basterds slowly coming to a boil as the conversation with the German officer drags on. It’s tightly shot with no wasted words or unnecessary delays, leaving you as the frog in the pot of cold water as someone gradually turns up the heat.

*Which leads to Brad Pitt’s character warning about fighting in basements. Pretty clever, Q.

Unfortunately, a few minutes later, Tarantino draws out the worst scene in the film to excruciating result, trying to extract comedy from the blindingly obvious as Lt. Raine and two of his Basterds attempt to infiltrate the theater in the guise of Eye-talians, with comically bad accents to match. You know they have no shot to pass any inspection, but where drawing out the scene in the tavern created tension, drawing out the scene in the theater lobby made me want to reach for the fast-forward button.

I’ve also read some criticism of the film for turning its Jewish heroes into sadistic killers along the lines of the Nazis they’re fighting. It’s an interesting point, one I raise here (even though it is not my own – it didn’t really occur to me as I watched the film) for discussion purposes. My immediate reaction to the argument is that the film is so obviously fantasy that the heroes’ bloodlust is merely a physical manifestation of the deep desire for revenge that would be difficult, if not impossible, to display without having the characters channel it into outright violence.

Overall, however, there’s a restraint here I don’t associate with Tarantino, and in this case I think it detracted from the movie as a whole. Of course, there’s no restraint from violence – we see scalpings, stabbings, shootings, and even a strangulation up close – but the story itself is small despite the seemingly grand ambitions of the plot. The commercials for the film indicated a grossly comic romp of daring American misfit soldiers wreaking havoc behind enemy lines, killing Nazis in a glossy revenge fantasy that mixes highbrow dialogue with lowbrow humor and graphic violence. Inglourious Basterds is nothing of the sort, which made it much less funny than I expected while leaving most of the revenge for a single extended scene at the end of the film. It’s an homage to spaghetti westerns and World War II films with references to art films and even fine arts, nearly all of which went right over my head. If you follow the allusions, it is probably a far more enjoyable film. As a devourer of plot and a philistine in all of the fields to which Tarantino alludes, however, I was disappointed and even a little confused.