AMC Oscar Nominees Night Part II

The second day of the Oscar movies seemed to be the slow day. Sure, it started and ended with a bang, but the three in the middle were pretty damn slow.

I actually even skipped the first movie. I’ve seen Up at least twice, maybe more. It was absolutely one of my favorites of the year and, possibly, even the one that I think should win Best Picture. It won’t, but I think it should.

You can read my review here.

Let’s get right into the first one I saw today.

A SERIOUS MAN

Directed by: Joel Coen/Ethan Coen
Written by: Joel Coen/Ethan Coen

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) tries to be a serious man. He takes his marriage seriously. He takes his kids seriously. He takes his job as a physics professor seriously. And he takes his Jewish faith seriously.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that things won’t fall apart on him. In the same week that he’s up for tenure at his school a student tries to bribe him for a passing grade, his wife tells him that she’s leaving him and seeing Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), his brother (Richard Kind) is having some sort of crisis and his son is having his bar mitzvah. How could things possibly get any worse?

When the Coens are in charge of a retelling of the story of Job, you know that things will get worse. This is and isn’t a typical Coen Brothers film. First off, it’s a very personal film. It’s about Jews in suburbia in the late 60s…just as they were. It deals very closely with their religion and the way they grew up. It’s also the story of a man who loves his faith, but he’s about to lose it because so much is falling apart around him.

As always, the Coens manage to make someone else’s pain very funny. It’s not as laugh-out-loud as something like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski, but it’s still a comedy. Larry is a schmuck. He’s a loser. He’s a schlemiel. No doubt about that. But there’s something so pathetic about the guy that it’s hard not to really push for him and want things to work out. Stuhlbarg is amazing in this role and absolutely deserves all of the accolades that he’s gotten from this performance. Also better than expected was Richard Kind. He can be a pretty funny guy, but I’ve never seen him try anything else. He was very good here in what could have been a one-note role.

Also watch for Micheal Lerner and Adam Arkin in small roles.

I’m not a Jew, so it’s hard for me to really relate to a lot of this film, but I think I might understand my Jewish friends a little bit better after seeing it.

A lot of my friends who saw this movie with me hated it. Mainly it seemed to be because of the ultra-ambiguous ending. The thing is that they pretty much tell you that the story will have an ambiguous ending about mid-way through the film. And, really, there is no other way for the film to end. I loved it. It may actually rank up with some of the Coens’ best work. Just know that you’ll have to work some stuff out for yourselves.

THE HURT LOCKER

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal

“War is a drug.” This film starts with those words. Then it takes the next two and a half hours to prove it to us.

William James (Jeremy Renner) is the new guy on the EOD team. Unfortunately for the other two guys, he’s also the leader. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are actually scared when he takes over for their former leader (Guy Pearce). Is this guy going to get them killed?

In the RL, the answer to that question would be yes. Actually, no. It wouldn’t This guy would have been fired before he finished his first day on the job. He’s a complete dumbass. He puts on his suit and walks out to disarm a bomb, even after his team tells him that they have robots to do just that. Then he goes out, disarms the bomb and starts yanking on other cables that he finds with no real regard as to whether they might be attached to other bombs. Seriously? I would fire this guy and I wouldn’t know the first thing about disarming a bomb.

Barring that, though, this is a movie and, even though my friend who actually did this kind of work in Iraq called the movie pure fantasy, I’m here to grade it on its merits as a film, not its accuracy…of which there really isn’t much at all.

James is a down to earth guy for a guy who yanks on bombs all day for a living. He does his best to get to know his team and the people around them. He even befriends one of the kids who sells DVDs to the troops. (Right here, I thought, “Dammit. I’m seen MASH. I know what’s going to happen here.”)

The movie doesn’t necessarily have much of a through-line story. There’s no single villain except for the faceless Iraqis who are placing the bombs and shooting at our heroes. It starts 39 days before they’re done with their tour and ends basically at the end of those 39 days. It’s just a string of bomb disarmings put together to form a character study of the guys who do this incredibly important job. Luckily, the characters are interesting enough to hang this film on.

Is it a great film? Meh. I don’t really think so. I think it’s very good, but it’s not great. Maybe what ruined it for me is that even I am smarter about disarming bombs than these guys were. Or maybe it was the fact that I’ve seen a lot of war films, so I knew a lot of the tricks that Bigelow and Boal were pulling on us. (Although, they did kind of pull one new one with the kid. Kind of.) They do know how to build suspense, though. Those disarming scenes were pretty fucking tense. Definitely the best moments of the film.

Definitely worth seeing, possibly even buying. I wouldn’t say it’s Oscar worthy, though. I think everyone loves it so much because it gets into the heads of these guys…unfortunately, they don’t have anything new to say about their plights.

It’s still better than Bigelow’s ex-husband’s movie.

AN EDUCATION

Directed by: Lone Scherfig
Written by: Nick Hornby
Based on memoir by: Lynn Barber

England in the early 60s was a MUCH more permissive place than America in the early 10s, apparently. I spent this entire movie thinking about how strange it was that a couple were perfectly ok with their 16 year old daughter dating a nearly 40 year old man.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is just such a 16 year old. She meets David (Peter Sarsgaard) outside of her orchestra rehearsal when he offers her cello a ride when it’s raining. The two hit it off and, eventually, start dating. Meanwhile, her parents (Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina) don’t seem to have too many problems with this older man taking her all over town.

Times were different then, though. They were looking to get Jenny married partly because it would save them the money of sending her to college at Oxford. (They’re not quite that cold, but that is a big factor.)

David’s friends, Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), seem to have some secrets. Come to think of it, so does David. He’s really good at coming up with reasons for Jenny to come with him on weekend trips. And how does he make his money?

Basically, this is a really good (and more complex) version of Mona Lisa Smile. Jenny fights for her right to have a real education without having to be married off. I mean, why even bother if you have to give it all up when you get married, right? Even her headmaster (Emma Thompson) doesn’t seem to understand that Jenny wants to do something besides get married OR teach. (At the time you couldn’t really do both.) Although, she wants an English degree and, unfortunately, there’s not much else that you can do with that besides teach. Sad, but true.

An Education is a very good movie but, again, not so Oscar worthy. There just isn’t anything new here…except for the creep factor with the major age difference.

DISTRICT 9

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Written by: Neill Blomkamp/Terri Tatchell
Based on short film by: Neill Blomkamp

I’ve seen District 9 before, but I really wanted to see it again on a big screen. The main thing I wanted to make sure of was my original assessment of the special effects. Luckily, I was right. They are better than Avatar’s.

Wikus (Sharlto Copley who should have been nominated for an Oscar) is a weasel of a man. He works for the MNU, a munitions company in South Africa who pretty much rule the nation now that the aliens are here.

The aliens (“Prawns” to the racist humans) came 20 years ago and seem to be stuck on Earth. South Africa did what they always do: they put the folks who look different into a slum and made them separate and unequal. The aliens live in squalor that they aren’t allowed to get out of and now the MNU wants to move them to a concentration camp.

Wikus is sent in to serve the Prawns eviction notices. He has fun with it at first. He’s just as bad as the rest of the humans. He thinks the Prawns are slime, worse than animals.

Then something happens. Something horrible and amazing. He starts to turn into one of them. As he’s treated worse and worse by his own kind, one of the Prawns, Christopher Johnson as he’s called by the humans, starts to treat him better. Christopher is  a father and just wants to get his people home.

What’s so amazing about this movie is that the CGI creatures are actually more human than the humans. Christophe and his son are much more appealing than Wikus is. As Wikus turns more and more Prawn, he starts to become more human.

I love this movie. It’s not just a morality play about racism and human nature to hate what it doesn’t understand, but it’s a great gore-flick, too. The effects and gru are pretty amazing. The Prawns mix in with the human world far better than the giant blue smurfs of Avatar and the story makes more sense.

So, that’s all of ‘em. All TEN of the Oscar nominated films. What do I think of the choices?

Well, I absolutely think that it could have been whittled down to five. In fact, these ten could be whittled down to even less to let in some more worthy films. Of the ten here, I think that Up, A Serious Man, District 9 and Up In The Air are the best. I love Inglourious Basterds, but I’m not sure that it’s better than those four. In its place, I would put either The Fantastic Mr. Fox or Where The Wild Things Are. There. I said it. That was a great film.

What should win? Up. Hands down, Up was the best of these ten (or twelve) films. It won’t win, but it should. What will win? Most likely we’re down to either Avatar or The Hurt Locker, two of the films that I don’t think belong. It will probably be The Hurt Locker, because it’s more of an issue film. It’s also MUCH better, so I guess I won’t be TOO terribly upset if it wins over Avatar. I just wish that they would give the award to the movie that actually deserves it. Up will win Best Animated Feature and that will probably be it.

That’s too bad, but unsurprising. We’ll see tomorrow night, though!