“Recapping” Sam Juliano’s Predictions and The Oscar@ Categories…Below is the full list of the 82nd Annual Oscar@ Nominations…

Below is the full list of the 82nd Annual Oscar Nominations and “recaps” of Sam Juliano’s Oscar Predictions.

Oscar@ Statues
Best Picture
“Avatar”
“The Blind Side”
“District 9″
“An Education”
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
“A Serious Man”
“Up”
“Up in the Air”
[Editor Note;Sam Juliano’s Prediction For This Year Best Film To Be Announced Tomorrow Morning]

Best Direction
“Avatar” — James Cameron
“The Hurt Locker” — Kathryn Bigelow
“Inglourious Basterds” — Quentin Tarantino
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” — Lee Daniels
“Up in the Air” — Jason Reitman
[Editor Note;Sam Juliano’s Prediction For Best Director To Be Announced Tomorrow Morning.]

Actor in a Leading Role…
Sam Juliano’s Choice To Win…
Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart”…
George Clooney in “Up in the Air”
Sam Juliano’s Personal Favorite…
Colin Firth in “A Single Man”
Morgan Freeman in “Invictus”
Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker”

Actress in a Leading Role…
Sam Juliano’s Choice To Win…
Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side”
Sam Juliano’s Personal Favorite…
Helen Mirren in “The Last Station”
Carey Mulligan in “An Education”
Gabourey Sidibe in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
Meryl Streep in “Julie & Julia”

Actor in a Supporting Role…
Matt Damon in “Invictus”
Woody Harrelson in “The Messenger”
Christopher Plummer in “The Last Station”
Stanley Tucci in “The Lovely Bones”
Sam Juliano’s Choice To Win…
Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds”

Actress in a Supporting Role
Penélope Cruz in “Nine”
Vera Farmiga in “Up in the Air”
Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Crazy Heart”
Anna Kendrick in “Up in the Air”
Sam Juliano’s Choice To Win…
Mo’Nique in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”

Read Full Post »

The Kid Brother (no 23)

by Allan Fish

(USA 1927 83m) DVD1/2

A Hickory from Hicksville

p  Harold Lloyd  d  Ted Wilde, J.A.Howe, Lewis Milestone  w  John Grey, Tom Crizer, Ted Wilde  ph  Walter Lundin, Henry H.Kohler  ed  Allen McNeil  m  Carl Davis  art  Liell K.Vedder 

Harold Lloyd (Harold Hickory), Jobyna Ralston (Mary Powers), Walter James (Sheriff Jim Hickory), Leo Willis (Leo Hickory), Olin Francis (Olin Hickory), Constantine Romanoff (Sandoni, the thief), Eddie Boland (Flash Farrell), Frank Lanning (Sam Hooper), Ralph Yearsley (Hank Hooper),

It may not be the most famous of Lloyd’s vehicles, an honour probably held by Safety Last, but The Kid Brother is the best film of the comedian generally rated behind Chaplin and Keaton in the lists of the mighty.  Why is this?  Partly because Lloyd’s persona has dated slightly, partly because his influence was not as strong as the others, partly because he didn’t really have too much creative influence, not writing or directing his films.  Yet one glance through this work and you’ll find The Freshman, Never Weaken, Movie Crazy, Safety Last and For Heaven’s Sake, The Kid Brother is my nomination as his best film.  And though set in a rural country setting more associated with Keaton rather than in the urban town he seemed so much a part of, and not really containing any death-defying stunts or seriously violent humour, as characterises the building climb in Last and the use as the tackle bag in Freshman, The Kid Brother is a little gem of a film that deserves more recognition than it currently gets. 

            Harold Hickory is the youngest of three sons to a roughneck sheriff in a small rural town (Hickorysville, what else?) who falls for Mary, a travelling show girl.  When the show is burned down he invites Mary to come and live with his family, but when the town’s money is stolen by thugs from the show, Harold’s father is blamed, so Harold sets out to prove his innocence and win his father’s respect (as well as his girl’s hand).

Read Full Post »

Huckleberry Friends: Bob’s belated take on James Cameron’s “Avatar”

*** ½

 

By Bob Clark

Late in Richard Linklater’s 1990 indie masterpiece Slacker, a couple of laid-back stoners are overheard sharing a conversation concerning the socio-political ramifications of five-decades strong Smurf franchise, with one theory bandied about being that the iconic five-apples high characters, sprung from the mind of Belgian cartoonist Peyo, were intended to help children all over the world prepare for the coming of Krishna, by growing accustomed to the sight of blue-people. Since then, we’ve had plenty of opportunities for people of all ages to wrap their head around the concept of sapphire-skinned creatures— the pious Nightcrawler and nudist Mystique from X-Men, the equally au naturel Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, the archeological-artifact mule Diva from The Fifth Element, the soft-spoken Abe Sapien from the Hellboy series, and even the live-theater troupe Blue Man Group for good measure. Throw in the range of azure-skinned characters in pop-culture, from the inflated figure of Violet Beauregard in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to the only-take-no-for-an-answer Blue Meanies of Yellow Submarine, and one imagines that particular Austinite must’ve grown rather impatient for Krishna’s impending manifestation onto our particular corner of reality (perhaps he thought better of it after all, and simply decided to stay at the bus-station).

Read Full Post »

Marc Bauer on Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’

by Marc Bauer

Sometimes, when watching a movie, it inspires you with questions. In the best scenarios, these questions are a good thing, you are thinking about the plot, the characters, and where this is going next. In Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, these questions are there, but they are of a different nature. ‘Why did I pay nearly $15 for this?’ is one. ‘The original material was so good, why would they change it?’ is another. Tim Burton has taken a great story, one of the most recognized fantasies, and turned it into something completely different. Imagine, if you will, a 5-year old being given free reign in a kitchen; I’d venture the jellybean sandwich they created to be the culinary equivalent of this movie.

The movie is capped with two scenes in the real world, filmed in flat pastels. These scenes rely very lightly on tinkering and special effects other than some color balancing to wash away anything that resembling human flesh and expanding a few extras into a field full of followers.  Imagine if you will a “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette” inhabited by the undead and you will be able to mentally approximate the ‘warmth’ of this scene. What comes between those capping scenes is brash, colorful, and completely saccharine. These scenes are the ‘white bread’ in the aforementioned sandwich, and the entire time in Underland (more on this in a bit) are the jellybeans betwixt.

Read Full Post »

The Academy Awards on Wonders in the Dark

by Joel Bocko

Every year we grumble, and then we turn our attention back to the TV screen to discover, curse, and hopefully sometimes cheer the choices of the Academy. The recent controversy over some exposed Hurt Locker e-mail should remind one to take the proceedings with a grain of salt (as if “negative campaigning” has anything to do with the merits of the film in question…). Nonetheless, the awards have real-world consequences, boosting business, dominating discussion, controlling the short term of a film’s legacy – though a roll-call of past winners should refute the notion that this hold lasts for long.

I’ve watched the Oscars every year, either live or on VHS tapes the next day, since 1991, when I was seven. I had resolved to abstain this year, the straw that broke the camel’s back being the Academy’s decision not to air the Honorary Awards. To my way of thinking, an institution which ignores its own history is worthless; besides which, this was the one category where the awards got it right! Yet again, I’ll probably submit – my excuse this time being that I’ll be hanging out with others who want to watch it. Oh, alright then…

Griping aside, as I’ve said the Oscars have some positive corollary benefits. One of them being that they often produce interesting discussions – this year is no exception, what with the groundbreaking Avatar, the widely-acclaimed Hurt Locker, and the political connotations of both. Without further ado then, let me present a round-up of the “Oscar” pieces from the Wonders in the Dark writers (both for this site and elsewhere). This will, of course, include my own recent reviews but also pieces by Bob Clark, Jamie Uhler, and Dee Dee (Allan Fish’s favorites from the year will not be revealed until he initiates his final, eagerly awaited countdown; Tony d’Ambra has focused on his noir reviews as of late). And, of course, Sam Juliano, proprieter of Wonders in the Dark, author of numerous Oscar pieces, and reviewer of many nominated films.

And of course, all of you are invited to post links to your own reviews of nominated films below.

Avatar
*Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction, Original Score, Sound Editing, Mixing, Visual Effects.
Sam Juliano
Bob Clark

The Hurt Locker
*Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Jeremy Renner), Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Original Score, Sound Editing, Mixing.
Bob Clark

Inglourious Basterds
*Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz), Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Sound Editing, Mixing.
Sam Juliano
Bob Clark
Jamie Uhler

(continued after the jump)

Read Full Post »

Diary of a Lost Girl (no 24)

by Allan Fish

(Germany 1929 111m) DVD1/2

Aka. Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen

Deform school

p  Georg W.Pabst  d  Georg W.Pabst  w  Rudolph Leonhardt  novel  Margaret Böhme  ph  Sepp Allgeier, Fritz Arno Wagner  ed  uncredited  art  Ernö Metzner, Emil Hasler

Louise Brooks (Thymian Henning), Josef Ravensky (Robert Henning), Fritz Rasp (Meinert), Edith Meinhard (Erika), Franziska Kinz (Meta), Vera Pawlova (Aunt Frieda), André Roanne (Count Nicholas Osdorff), Sybille Schmitz (Elisabeth),  

The second and final collaboration between director G.W.Pabst and star Louise Brooks was for a time regarded as very much the inferior of the two.  Rumours persisted for decades that it wasn’t so much unfinished as deliberately finished early.  Writer Rudolf Leonhardt maintained his script was left half finished and the film does indeed end rather abruptly, but Diary remains a film so full of fascination, visual beauty and seedy subtexts as to beggar belief for its day.

            Thymian is the virginal daughter of pharmacist Robert Henning who is being prepared for confirmation, to celebrate which she is given a present; namely a diary.  On the self same day, her beloved housekeeper Elisabeth leaves in mysterious circumstances and she is replaced by the insidious Meta, who becomes the mistress to Thymian’s father.  Desperate to find out what happened to Elisabeth, she agrees to meet her father’s assistant Meinert, only to pass out and be carried to her room by him and raped.  Cut forward nine months and Thymian has given birth and Meta gets Thymian’s diary opened to find out the identity of the father.  Refusing to marry Meinert, after seeing her child taken to a sinister midwife, Thymian is sent to a terrible correctional institute for girls, run like a prison by a distinctly lesbian mistress and her creepy male assistant.  Soon she becomes desperate to escape.

Read Full Post »

Docks of New York (no 25)

 

by Allan Fish

(USA 1928 77m) not on DVD

The end of many journeys, the beginning of many adventures

p  J.G.Bachman  d  Josef Von Sternberg  w  Jules Furthman  story  “The Dock Walloper” by John Monk Saunders  ph  Harold Rosson  ed  Helen Lewis  m  Gaylord Carter  art  Hans Dreier

George Bancroft (Bill Roberts), Betty Compson (Sadie), Olga Baclanova (Lou), Clyde Cook (Steve), Gustav Von Seyffertitz (Hymn Book Harry), Mitchell Lewis (engineer), Lilian Worth, Guy Oliver,

How might Wilkins Micawber have summed up the works of Josef Von Sternberg?  Maybe like this – “in short, sex with the right young girl; end result?  Happiness.  Obsessing after sex with the wrong young girl; end result?  Misery.”  Throughout his career, the ersatz Von Sternberg carried that mantra as his good companion and, though it received its greatest flowering in a series of memorable studies with Marlene Dietrich, the first great example came with this visually extraordinary dockside drama of the late silent era.  Compare it to Clarence Brown’s Garbo starrer Anna Christie two years later and one begins to wonder whether talkies really were an advance on the silent masterworks, for no film truly evoked that era and location quite like Von Sternberg’s film did.  It’s a film that preserves the world of Eugene O’Neill far better than any film of his works. 

            Bill Roberts is a ship’s stoker who is given shore leave of one night to have some fun on the New York dockside.  While walking along the waterfront, he notices a young prostitute jump in and he jumps in after her to save her.  Bringing her back to his lonely room, he becomes instantly enamoured with her, and even offers to marry her.  However, the morning after, he realises he must leave his young bride to return to sea. 

Read Full Post »

“Go With Me Somewhere”: David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive

The world boils down to those who want safety and those who want to live. Safety is easy to understand. Life isn’t. The impenetrability of Mulholland Drive stems from a remarkable acknowledgment of just how dark and lovely is the drive we’re on. Mulholland Drive does tell a coherent story.   But it is a story hollowed out and scrambled on behalf of a display of almost universal self-betrayal. In succumbing to that gravity one retraces horrors going on forever. Thus the movie comes at us like a lava-storm from a volcanic explosiveness – a Pandora’s Box – whereby straightforward personal and public action defers to a more complex sequential power.

Copyright © 2010 by James Clark

Within a scenario crowned by countless dazzling moments, the performance of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” (“Llorando”), at Club Silencio, by Rebekah Del Rio, to an audience including the protagonist detectives, Betty and Rita, musters a level of detonation setting it apart and constituting the key to what could be an impenetrable evening out. An M.C. goes to bemusing lengths of histrionics insisting that at the Hôtel de la Silence there is no band and all the singing is taped. “Everything is illusion!” Then a plump, rather dowdy figure emerges from the curtains, her suddenly riveting face fills the screen and she lip-syncs a tidal wave of despair. The two investigators, who earlier that night had consummated their love for each other in a culmination brimming with beauty and forward momentum, begin to tremble and cry, tears streaming down their cheeks. For Rita it was tears alone; for Betty it was tears following from convulsive shaking. The performer collapses. The tape blazes on. She is carried from the stage, and Betty reaches into her glowing purse for a closed blue box (a Pandora’s Box), the blue key to which figures as ever more specifically crucial for their resolve to overcome the car-crash induced dilemma of Rita (and that of Betty, with no car-crash to blame), namely, “I don’t know who I am.”

Though a wide swathe of French New Wave cinema enacted again and again (none of the components of which more ardently, wittily, gracefully and pervasively than Jacques Demy)—as did Michelangelo Antonioni in Blow-Up (1966) and Wong Kar-Wai in In the Mood for Love (2000)—a secret tribute to the American film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and its serious business with Pandora’s Box, no American filmmaker would see the point in sustaining such a puzzling congress until David Lynch, a born exponent of horror and noir, manufactured his astounding vehicle, Mulholland Drive (2001). Among myriad instances of sureness of touch for such an endeavour about Pandora’s Box, was his assimilation of Demy’s epigraph to his first feature, Lola (1961), namely, “Cry who can/Laugh who will” (“Pleure qui peut/Rit qui veut”), attaining to the stature of an axiom of dynamical integrity. To maintain sufficient buoyancy (and its glee) upon the strike (kiss) of eventuation, calls for courageous and loving maintenance of that deadly opening. To settle into personal leadenness is to become lost in a zone of self-dramatizing and self-tormenting despair, notwithstanding adept compensatory manoeuvres (like the sensual coherence bursting through the performance of lostness by Rebekah Del Rio). Therefore, the giving in to tears and its implication in resentment undermines all the promise of their concerted dedication to casting light on Rita’s history—her past, of course, but also on powers more immediately pertaining to the present and future. With the onset of the tempting show of decadence in the club, a precipitous shift occurs. They return to Betty’s aunt’s townhouse, Rita recovers the blue key to the blue box having strangely materialized in Betty’s purse in face of the plunge that was the delivery of “Crying,” confronts an abyss, and finds that Betty is no longer there. Where she has gone is into the matrix of “Diane,” Rita’s homicidally possessive, betrayed and resentfully blue (crying) former lover. Demy had no interest in his players’ actually fitting into the personae of A.I. Bezzerides’ noir about Pandora’s Box, choosing instead to flick out echoes of the high risk action in such a way as to diminish those players in their historically honorable positions. Lynch, on the other hand, was attentive to the twists of quantum energies deposited by Bezzerides in the configuration of the credits to Kiss Me Deadly, coming about from the top of the screen but reading backwards from bottom to top. On making a move, one has been already visited by an electrodynamic double, moving downward at speeds superior to those of the straightforward output. In this way one’s unfurling of intent includes an outset of challenge to proceed aright. This structure of action encourages Lynch to oversee shifts from one incarnation (Betty’s wholeheartedness) to another (Diane’s half-heartedness). The pre-credit vignette of swing dancers of the era of Kiss Me Deadly, i.e., 1955, shows some of the jivers occasionally losing themselves in delving into large silhouettes of dancers (black holes). That motif constitutes the grounds for a panoply of startling and puzzling narrative twists. (A second vignette of heavy breathing under a bed sheet—redolent of Christina on the highway about to encounter Mike’s car—would be Betty, now Diane, having plunged from Club Silencio and the blue box suddenly palpable in her purse.)

Read Full Post »

Cops (no 26)

by Allan Fish

(USA 1922 20m) DVD1/2

Secret Policeman’s First Ball

p  Joseph M.Schenck  d/w  Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline  ph  Elgin Lessley

Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Eddie Cline,

How many people today have really seen any Buster Keaton films?  Of course many have seen the house gag from Steamboat Bill Jnr and the train sequence in The General, but who has actually seen the films in question?  Hopefully, since the advent of DVD and the superb Keaton box-sets in the States, France and eventually the UK, that will be rectified, but his shorts are another matter.  As with Chaplin, though the shorts are available, they are unjustly overlooked.  Critics may rave about them, but rave about them to each other, rarely actually converting anyone to them.  So how can I hope to convert anyone to Keaton’s shorts?  The first thing is to make sure I pick the right one and, in this reviewer’s opinion, there are three all-time great Keaton shorts, all of them from the annus mirabilis that was 1922; The Electric House, The Paleface and, my favourite, Cops.  It certainly isn’t that I like Cops any the more, but that it rather has a truly Keatonian narrative style.  The Electric House is a joyously hilarious piece of pratfall farce exquisitely rehearsed and The Paleface a wonderful tale of Buster’s running into some Indians.  Yet Cops is definitive Buster in that, like his greatest feature The General, it’s an escalation of gags.  Keaton’s most typical works are like cinematic Rossini overtures, building to crescendo upon crescendo with each gag topping the previous one and the pace quickening by the minute.  That much is certainly true of Cops. 

Read Full Post »

The Hurt Locker (Best of the 21st Century?)

by Joel Bocko

This is the first entry in my renewed Best of the 21st Century series, which will continue exclusively on Wonders in the Dark.

Two pictures to sum up a decade. One, a man encased in defensive armour, surrounded by explosive cannisters. He’s a stranger in a foreign land, an embattled American, homemade bombs weaving a spiderweb in the desert sands beneath his feet. The devices are all aimed in his direction like gigantic bullets, together forming a silent threat simmering just underneath the surface. Two, a man in a cavernous, overwhelming, colorful yet utterly sterile supermarket, faced down by hundreds upon hundreds of cardboard boxes, each containing processed and mass-produced snacks. More significant than the contents is the packaging – this is nutrition second, consumption first, and an empty, dissatisfying consumption at that. The bombs are existential threats; the boxes are not, and yet somehow their spiritual threat seems deeper. As Jason Bellamy astutely notes (in an observation which inspired the pictures and paragraph which open this piece), “In staring at all the cereal boxes on the shelf, he is presented with a multitude of choices, just as when he’s disarming a bomb, but his choices don’t mean anything. There’s no ‘wrong’ choice. It’s a reminder of how he misses the rush of duty, when every decision has a potentially life-altering consequence.”

Pick your poison. Sgt. William James has certainly picked his.

Read Full Post »