Category: Winners – 2000s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Hurt Locker – 2009

Well, here we are again with another war film.  This one has the distinction of being the first Best Picture winner about the Iraqi War.  Everyone with whom I had spoken about The Hurt Locker told me that it was such a good film, so my expectations were high.  I enjoyed the movie on a number of levels, though when I was done watching it, I had to take it in stride.  Some aspects of the movie were so obviously manufactured, unrealistic, and not based in reality that I could not take them too seriously.

That being said, there was also a lot of realism about other aspects of the movie, and the drama was good.  It seemed to me that there were 3 leading cast members and 3 supporting members.  The leads were all relatively unknown actors at the time: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty.  The supporting cast was made up of Guy Pierce, David Morse and Ralph Fiennes, each of whom had already made names for themselves in Hollywood.

The plot was an interesting one in that there was no real villain.  But despite that fact, the film was full of heart-pounding tension.  Our 3 leads are members of a U. S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, or EOD unit.  Live explosives make for innately tense situations.  The men who volunteer to be on the teams that diffuse them have to have nerves of steel to work under enormous pressures that I can only attempt to imagine.

The film follows Sergeant First Class William James, played by Renner, Sergeant J. T. Sanborn, played by Mackie, and Specialist Owen Eldridge, played by Geraghty, during the final month of their 1 year tour of duty in Baghdad.  These 3 men did a fantastic job, especially Renner, the leader of the team.  Not only did they act their parts well, as I did my research, I found that they did their filming in Jordan, in the Middle East.  They had to deal with all the harsh conditions typical of the remote location, not the least of which was the heat, which averaged 120 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the shoot.

The film was directed by Kathryn Bigleow, and she was the first woman to be awarded the Best Director Oscar from the Academy.  It was her goal to infuse the movie with as much realism as she could.  She wanted the audience to experience the realities of Iraq War as did the soldiers by whom the war was fought.  The sweat on the faces of the actors was real.

Interesting note:  Renner recounts his experiences during filming, saying, “I got food bugs, then I got food poisoning: lost 15 lbs in 3 days.”  Add to that the 80-100 lb bomb suit made of padded material, and it is a wonder that he didn’t suffer heat stroke on a daily basis.

But the film starts out with a different leader:  Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson, played by Guy Pierce.  He seems like a very competent man who really knows his job backwards and forwards.  A bomb threat is called in and it is his job to put on the bomb suit and actually approach the explosives to diffuse them.  Sanborn and Eldridge have the task of making sure the locals stay away from him and to watch for any suspicious individuals who might have remote detonation devices.

Too late, a man with a cell phone is spotted.  Thompson tries to run, but the bomb explodes and Thompson is killed.  His replacement arrives in the form of Sgt. James.  The problem with Sgt. James is that he is a loose cannon.  He is a successful bomb diffuser with an incredible track record, but he has a complete disregard for proper procedure, and has a habit of endangering his own life as well as the lives of his teammates.

Here is where my main complaint about the plot comes in.  I happen to be from a military family, and though I’ll admit that I don’t know much about military procedure and the like, I do know that soldiers that don’t follow rules and safety protocols are not tolerated.  They are quickly taken off assignments and sent elsewhere.  I imagine that they are probably harshly disciplined as well.

Even as I was watching the movie, I was just rolling my eyes as I saw Sgt. James doing stupid things that put his crew at risk.  He put them into situations that they had no business being in.  He gave them orders which could have easily gotten them all killed.  And yet, there was a scene in which Colonel Reed, played by David Morse, approached him simply to praise him for his work and marvel at how cool everyone seemed to think he was.

No!  He is not cool!  He was a menace to himself and everyone around him!  He needed to be taken off the EOD unit and demoted, if not discharged!  It all started on the first mission in which Sgt. James participated.  An explosive device is reported in a residential area of Baghdad.  The locals clear the street as they see the bomb squad approaching.  Sanborn starts to get out the remote unit, a small robot with a swivel arm and a camera that can safely assess the threat.  It can give the EOD unit an idea of what kind of explosives are being used and possibly what detonation device is being employed without putting any human lives at risk.

However, the gung-ho Sgt. James refuses to send the robot.  He immediately demands the bomb suit and approaches the bomb on foot.  Sanborn objects and protests, but James pulls rank, ignores the rules, and does things his own way.  OK, end of story.  Remove him from duty… now.  But no.  He successfully diffuses the bomb and nobody is hurt.

This kind of behavior causes tension in the group, and here is where a lot of the drama of the film comes from.  How do Sanborn and Eldridge put their lives in the hands of a man who seems to have little regard for their lives?  There were just so many stupid things that the character of Sgt. James did I had to start looking at the movie as a complete work of fiction.

Interesting note:  The film was independently written and made without the help of the U. S. Army.  Here is a quote I found on Wikipedia, in regards to the character of Sgt. James: (He is) “more of a run and gun cowboy type… exactly the kind of person that we’re not looking for.”  Another bomb disposal team member says that the lead character’s “swagger would put a whole team at risk.  Our team leaders don’t have that kind of invincibility complex, and if they do, they aren’t allowed to operate. A team leader’s first priority is getting his team home in one piece.”

I was right.

But at least his reckless behavior was acknowledged.  At one point, he orders his EOD team to chase after some terrorists that were fleeing the site of a successful bombing.  During the chase, Eldridge is nearly captured.  In order to save him, James and Sanborn have to shoot the men dragging him away.  In the process, they shoot Eldridge in the leg, shattering his femur in 7 places.

As Eldridge is being airlifted to surgery, he bids a fond goodbye to Sanborn, but curses James for his stupid and unprofessional behavior.  James tries to apologize for shooting him, but adds that he had to do it in order to save his life.  Eldridge says that he would never have had to do it if he hadn’t forced them all to be where they should have never have been in the first place.  And he was absolutely right.  But even after that, James was still not relieved from duty.  Pure fiction.

But I was able to enjoy the tension and drama of the movie.  The unpredictability of the bombs and mysterious behavior and attitudes of the locals really put me on edge, which was the point.  Bigelow did her job well.  I was at the edge of my seat when James was searching a burned-out car for a detonation device or trying to use a pair of bolt cutters to remove a bomb vest from a civilian being used as an unwilling suicide bomber.

Now, there is one thing that I had to question.  It seemed that at times, the team was diffusing a different bomb every day, which seems like a lot.  Is that really how it was?  Were there that many unexploded bombs all over the city of Baghdad and the surrounding area?  How often were real EOD units called to do their dangerous work in the Iraq War?  Was this an accurate depiction?

Apparently, the answer is yes.  In fact, in my research, I found that the movie may have actually softened reality a bit.  The film’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, had spent time with an EOD unit as a journalist in 2004.  He apparently accompanied the team 10 – 15 times a day to watch their tasks.  That would lead me to believe that the brave soldiers who have this horrible job are put in danger far more often than the movie shows.

As I mentioned earlier, I thought that Renner did a particularly good job in his role.  The fact that his character did some pretty unprofessional and moronic things like throwing away his communications head-set when he was irritated because Sanborn was screaming at him, telling him that he was putting all their lives in danger, was not the actor’s fault.  That was Boal’s fault.  Renner played the part well as it was written.

The film not only tried to put the audience in the middle of the action, it tried to put it inside Sgt. Jame’s head, as well.  What we saw was a little disturbing and yet all too believable.  It takes a certain kind of mind to function under those harrowing conditions for any length of time.  I would guess that nobody walks away from one life threatening situation after another without being damaged somehow.

And here, finally we have somewhat of an explanation for the problems with the character.  The first thing said at the very beginning of the film is a quote from a best selling book written by Chris Hedges, a New York Times war correspondent and journalist.  “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

That chilling quote is explained in the final scenes of the film.  When Sgt. James’ tour of duty is over, he returns home to his wife and infant son, only to realize that he feels disconnected from everything.  The banality of his home existence is too much for him.  He is bored and uninterested in the safe and sedate day to day tasks he must perform.  So, what does he do?  He re-enlists and is sent back to Iraq to begin another 365 day tour of duty.  A potent and often lethal addiction, indeed.  It made for a very profound ending.

The Hurt Locker was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, winning 6 of them.  In addition to Best Picture, the film took home Oscars for Best Director (Bigelow), Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Film Editing.  I would agree with all of them, except maybe for the Best Original Screenplay.  The whole basis for the film is a man who would never be allowed to serve in such a capacity.

So, I have to ask, what was The Hurt Locker up against in the Original Screenplay category?  Inglorious Bastards, The Messenger, A Serious Man and Up.  The only one of those films I have actually seen is Inglorious Bastards.  Personally, I liked that screenplay better than The Hurt Locker.  But that’s just me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slumdog Millionaire – 2008

Let me just say right off the bat, I was completely surprised by this movie.  I have to admit that though I went into watching it with an open mind, my expectations were a little low.  I was not expecting much out of a film from a foreign country, half of which was in another language, using subtitles.  But not only did Slumdog Millionaire surprise me, it surprised the Academy, if not the world.  And I think it is important to mention that though the story takes place in India, this is not a Bollywood film.  It is actually a British movie, a fact I did not know.  Still, the original novel, called Q & A, was written by the Indian Author, Vikas Swarup.

The plot is three-fold: the far past, the recent past, and the present.  Each story is held tightly together to paint a large and colorful picture.  We start out by being asked a question, as if on a game show.  I can only give an approximation based on memory of the opening question of the film, but something like the following question came onto the screen: How did Jamal Malik know the answers to all the questions?  A. He guessed.  B. He cheated.  C. He studied hard.   D. It is written. (Meaning: it was fate.)

The whole thing takes place in Mumbai, India.  Jamal, played by Dev Patel, is being tortured by the police in a prison.  He is asked how a common slumdog could possibly answer all the questions right.  When they accuse him of cheating, the only answer he can give is that he knew the answers.  As he is being tortured, he has flashbacks of being on a game show.  He is on the set of the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  The show’s host, Prem Kumar, played by Anil Kapoor, is asking him questions from a card.  The studio audience is waiting in silence for his answers.  Then he snaps back to the present and the torture continues.

The Police Inspector, played by Irrfan Khan, stops the torture and has him cleaned up.  He sits Jamal down and tries talking to him.  Again he is asked how he cheated.  Jamal insists that he is innocent.  He really knew the answers.  The Inspector tries a different approach.  He turns on a video of Jamal on the game show and goes through each question, asking how he knew the answers.

That is where the real magic of the story begins.  Jamal tells his story and the far past sequences begin.  He tells of how he grew up in the Juhu slums.  Dozens of children are shown running and playing on trash heaps.  The first question asks the name of an actor in a popular Indian movie.  Jamal recounts the tail of when the very actor in that film came down in a helicopter and signed autographs for the kids in the slum.  We are introduced to his brother Salim, who is self-serving and habitually mistreats Jamal.

The Police Inspector goes over more questions that Jamal answered correctly on the game show.  The questions get harder and harder.  The answers for each one can be found in a key story in Jamal’s life.  The questions are not always chronological in conjunction with his life, so the flashback sequences bounce back and forth between different periods in his childhood.  But through his interrogation, it soon becomes apparent that Jamal doesn’t care about the money he is winning or the game show.  His motivations, then, become unclear.  But all is eventually revealed when he tells of the most important event in his young life.

He tells of the day his mother was attacked and murdered during the Bombay Riots. He and Salim, now orphans, meet a young girl who has also lost her parents.  Her name is Latika.  Salim tries to reject her but Jamal defies his brother and welcomes her.  The three of them live in the garbage dump until they are picked up by Maman, played by Ankur Vikal, a cruel man who takes in orphans and teaches them to be street beggars.  He even goes so far as to mutilate the children, saying that a blind or deformed beggar can earn more money.

Without going too much farther into the plot, I will attempt to be brief.  Salim and Jamal escape Maman, but Salim betrays Latika and she is recaptured.  The brothers become petty thieves and con-artists.  Years pass and Jamal continues to search for Latika.  When they find her, Maman shows up and tries to take them all back into his custody.  But Salim pulls out a gun and kills him.  He then takes a job working for a crime boss.  He throws Jamal out onto the street, and rapes Latika.  Jamal grows up and continues to search for his beloved Latika, who has become the wife of Salim’s crime-boss employer.

All of this is relevant because the climax of the plot involves the far past, the recent past and the present as they come together.  The film turned into a romantic love story by the end.  It turns out that even though his varied life experiences allowed him to win millions of rupees, it is revealed that the only reason he was on the game show was because he once saw Latika watching the program.  He got on the show in the hopes that she would see him and find him.  That was why he never opted to take the money at each stage of the game, why he did whatever he could to stay on the program for as long as he could.  That was why he made it to the end and won the grand prize of $20 million rupees.

Interesting note:  The current exchange rate for $20 million rupees in USD is $411,600.00.

The film was so well constructed and so well acted that I quickly forgot that nearly a third of the dialogue was in the Hindu language with cleverly placed subtitle boxes appearing and disappearing on the screen.  Just like the country of India itself, they were colorful and pretty, not your common subtitles in yellow at the bottom of the screen.  Instead, they showed up all over the screen, always next to the character who was speaking.

When the time came for Jamal to answer the final question I didn’t know how the movie would end so I was completely caught up in Jamal’s story.  I wanted him to win and I wanted him to find his true love.  I wanted the happy ending.

And as for the game show aspect of the plot, all of India became caught up in the excitement as well.  He had become an overnight celebrity.  The fact that he was from the slums and that he was on the verge of becoming an instant millionaire caught the attention of the nation.  All of India tuned in to watch, the entire country hoping the same thing I was hoping for Jamal.

He is driven back to the studio to answer his final question.

Dev Patel, by far, was the best actor in the film.  He really did a fine job.  His portrayal of Jamal was honest and insightful.  He was so believable, both in the custody of the authorities, and as the nervous contestant on the game show.  He also handled the few brief love scenes with an earnest innocence that was an important quality of the character.

Freida Pinto played opposite Patel as Latika.  She was beautiful and had a smile that could light up a room, though the only scene in which she was able to show it was the tiny scene at the train station.  She sees Jamal and smiles at him and you instantly understand the passionate and yet unspoken relationship between the two characters.

Salim was played by Madhur Mittal.  He did alright, but his character had so few redeeming qualities, that I must admit, I tend to discount the actor along with the character.  Of course, I should not do that.  Mittal did just fine and played his part well.

Now, when I mention this trio of characters, I have referred only to the adult portrayals.  There were actually 6 child actors that played them at different ages.  They all did a good job.  The youngest Jamal, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, and the middle Salim, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, actually did a very good job.  As child actors go, they turned in some impressive performances.

Interesting note:  This little fact is taken directly from the IMDB website:  Director Danny Boyle placed the money to be paid to the three lead child actors in a trust that is to be released to them upon their completion of grade school at 16 years of age.  The production company has set up for an auto-rikshaw driver to take the kids to school every day until they are 16 years old.

However, another character who caught my attention was the host of the game show, Prem Kumar, played by Anil Kapoor.  He was very handsome and his role encompassed a bit more than his on-stage persona.  There were short scenes of him threatening Jamal, trying to unnerve him, trying to make him lose all the money.  He was shown to be visibly furious at Jamal’s success, an emotion which had to be suppressed when the studio cameras were rolling.  He had to pretend to encourage him to win.

In fact there was a wonderful scene when the filming of the game show was on a break.  Jamal and Prem were in the restroom together.  As Prem washes his hands he lets the hot water cover the mirror with steam.  He tries to tell Jamal that he wants to help him on the current question.  In the fogged-up mirror he writes the letter B, apparently giving him the answer to the question.  When they are both back on the stage, Jamal, knowing that Prem has already encouraged him to drop out, gets the question right by not choosing B.  It was a well done sequence.

Interesting note:  Danny Boyle originally wanted the actor who was the host of the final season of the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire to play the game show host in the movie.  Anil Kapoor, the actor who ended up playing the role, had actually been a contestant on the show.  He had taken home $5 million rupees.

The movie was an impressive bit of film-making.  The story was almost like a sweet fairy tale, but more than anything else, it was a love story that was very well crafted.  It retained a sense of innocence and love all the way to the very end.  It was a feel-good movie that left me with a smile.  I was pleasantly surprised by how much I really enjoyed this film.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Country for Old Men – 2007

Wow!  This was a very violent movie, mostly because of the creepy, creepy character played by Javier Bardem.  No Country for Old Men was an action/thriller that kept you on the edge of your seat.  It was a back and forth game of cat and mouse that was unpredictable and unstable.

First of all, as I sat down to watch the movie, I had high expectations.  Everybody I talked to about it said that it was such a great movie.  I was told of its violent nature, but was not told of the psychotic aspects that made my skin crawl just a little bit.  I have heard it described as a modern western, but I don’t think that is an apt description.  The story takes place in Texas, but for me, a western has to have cowboys or a story that can only be told in the Wild West.  But this story could have taken place almost anywhere.

To explain what I mean by that, we need to go into the plot a bit.  Bardem plays the bad guy, Anton Chigurh (pronounced like Sugar), a psychotic killer who is the most dangerous kind of criminal.  He has no conscious and kills randomly with no thought of consequences, honor or morality.  He murders if he happens to feel like it at the time.  But he is also incredibly smart and knows how to survive just about anything.

Chigurh starts off the film by being picked up by a police officer, then strangling him with the chain between the handcuffs that are still about his wrists.  He steals the police car, only to ditch it by pulling over a motorist, and murdering him with his strange weapon/tool.  It is a captive bolt pistol.  It is a strange weapon, to be sure, but it just adds to the creepy nature of the character.  It is a device used to stun cattle before they are slaughtered.  Basically it is a high-powered air compression device that forces a metal bolt through the skull.

So after his character is introduced in this way, the real story begins, and therein lies one of the biggest differences from the source material.  The original book had the same name and was written by Cormac McCarthy.  The directors, the infamous Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, went out of their way to keep close to the book.  In an interview, Joel said that adapting the book into a screenplay was just like compressing the novel instead of re-writing it.  As is understandable, a few things were taken out, but nothing new was added.  But the big difference between the book and the movie was the focus.  The book focuses on the character of Sheriff Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, as he tries to figure out what is going on.  The movie focuses more on the cat and mouse relationship between Chigurh and Llewellyn Moss.

Moss is a regular guy living in West Texas, wonderfully played by Josh Brolin.  He is hunting out in the desert when he comes across a drug deal gone bad.  Dead bodies are scattered over the ground.  Even the dog has been shot and killed.  Automatic weapons are still gripped in dead hands.  But moss is a smart enough man to know that where there is a drug deal, there is money.  He follows a trail of blood and eventually finds a satchel containing $2 million next to a man who has bled to death.

Of course, he takes it in the belief that he can elude whoever the money belongs to.  After that, the movie follows Moss as he runs from Chigurh, the Mexican drug dealers, and Sheriff Bell.  But he finds himself constantly on the run and never able to relax.  He receives injury after injury, making one narrow escape after another.  At one point, he finds a tracking device hidden in the money.  He leaves it behind and believes that he is safe, but the chase continues.

The back and forth scenes between Brolin and Bardem were very well done.  The two of them are rarely on the screen at the same time, but each of them did a great job in their respective roles.  I mentioned the creepiness of Bardem’s performance, but for me, it stood out as a defining element of the whole film.  That is what you remember when it is over.  That is what sticks with you.

So, what made him so scary?  It was his look, his voice, and his behavior.  First, and many critics go out of their way to mention it, was his hair.  It was a strange kind of page-boy haircut that looked like a perversion of Little Lord Fauntleroy on an adult.  The haircut made him look like he was automatically out of place wherever he went.  It made him look like a man who had no regard for social norms or the opinions of other human beings.

Interesting note:  The strange hair left Bardem’s “psyche… affected in a very delicate way.”  He was convinced that he would not get laid for two months and was too depressed to leave his house.

Bardem is a Spanish actor who had to brush-up on his English to play the part.   He did his best to hide his accent, making his character hard to place.  He has a very deep voice and all his lines were delivered very dispassionately, though with a deadly seriousness at the same time.  It reminded me a little of the voice of the psychotic character of Buffalo Bill from the 1991 Best Picture winner, Silence of the Lambs.

And the random acts of violence and murder made for some very tense scenes.  One in particular that stands out is a scene in which he stops at a gas station to fill up the tank of his stolen car.  He goes in to pay for the gas, but is offended because the old man behind the counter casually comments on the car’s license plate.  You can see the look in his eyes and hear it in his voice.  He now wants to murder the man.  But what he does just made for a wonderfully tense scene.  He pulls out a quarter and asks “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” before flipping the coin.  The poor guy behind the counter is already unnerved by the man’s look and behavior.  But now, he suddenly feels that his life is somehow in danger.  He is frightened enough to attempt to get rid of him by saying that he is closing the store early, but Chigurh is insistent that he make the call.  It is never plainly stated, but I think that the man knew that the wrong choice would somehow cost him his life.  It was a very well written and chilling scene.

Josh Brolin also did a fantastic job.  At first, I didn’t even recognize him.  He had a big moustache and long greasy-looking hair covering half his face.  He looked so red-neck and scuzzy that he fit the part perfectly.  And the character was also very well written.  He is portrayed as a generally good man who felt like fate had dropped an opportunity in his lap that was too good to pass up.  He is trying to make a big score to give to his wife, played by Scottish actress, Kelly Macdonald.  The problem is that he is smart enough to have a few tricks up his sleeve, allowing him to think he can get away with his life and the money, but dumb enough to not realize he is way outmatched by just about everybody.

Interesting note:  Brolin was in a motorcycle accident a few days before filming was to begin.  He broke his collarbone, but he was so excited about being in a Coen Brothers’ film, he and his doctor lied about the extent of his injuries.  They allowed him to perform the role.

Another Interesting note:  Kelly Macdonald has a very strong Scottish accent and had to have a vocal coach teach her how to speak with the proper West Texas drawl.  Macdonald did a great job and was very believable in her part.

But going back to my earlier statement.  The plot of this movie could have taken place in any place, any time, and against any backdrop, and it would have been just as good.  The story was good enough to transcend a single location and setting.  It just happened to have been set in Western Texas.  So, would I call it a modern western?  I wouldn’t, but I guess other people would.

The only real disappointment of the film, in my opinion, was Tommy Lee Jones.  He just wasn’t a very good actor.  He was cast in the role for several obvious reasons, the first and foremost being that he didn’t really have to act.  Jones grew up in San Saba, Texas, not far from where the film takes place.  That took care of the accent.  Second, he looked the part well enough.  And third, he was a well-established name in Hollywood.  The problem is that he brought no passion to the performance.  I always felt like he was on the verge of falling asleep.  He made me want to fall asleep, as well.

Maybe I was missing the point of the character.  It is conceivable, especially considering the end of the film.  It was very cryptic.  The newly retired Sheriff Bell is sitting at the breakfast table with his wife explaining two dreams to her.  They both seem to be about getting old and dwelling on the death of his father.  Maybe that was part of the point.  He was just getting too old and sleepy to deal with the dangers and horrors that are part of being a law enforcement officer.  Unfortunately, if that was the case, it just translated on the screen as a one-note actor with no energy.  Someone like Clint Eastwood could have done the part better justice.

Now, as I sometimes do, I have to give a special honorable mention to actress Kathy Lamkin, who had a very small, but very memorable part.  She only had a minute or so of screen-time.  When Chigurh is searching for Moss, he checks in with Moss’s trailer-park office and tries to intimidate the manager to tell him where his intended victim works.  She politely refuses.  He calmly asks again, “Where does he work?”  She refuses again.  The tension in the scene is clearly rising.  He asks a third time.  “Where does he work?”  Her response is final, showing that she is not intimidated by the scary man.  “Did you not hear me?  We can’t give out no information.”  Priceless!  Even Chigurh is impressed and leaves without incident.

And finally, I have to mention the Coen Brothers, themselves.  As a team of directors, the actors and the critics alike have nothing but good things to say about them.  They consistently put out quality films like The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?  Bardem revealed in an interview that it had always been his biggest dream to work with the Coen Brothers, so when he got the call to talk to them, he could not believe that his dream was actually going to come true.  And after filming was done, he had nothing but positive things to say about them and their style of directing.

This was a good film.  It was very violent, but I didn’t feel that any of it was gratuitous.  It was all actually very tastefully done, if that makes any sense.  It was all pretty integral to both character development and plot development.  The Coen Brothers really put together a well-made film with one of the creepiest bad guys I’ve seen in a long time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Departed – 2006

The Departed was so named in reference to the dead, or the dearly departed.  Knowing this, I can easily say that it lived up to its name.  By the end of the movie, nearly all the main characters had departed this world, most of them with gunshot wounds to the head.  Martin Scorsese was hired to direct this remake of three Chinese films, originally called Internal Affairs.

Interesting note:  When asked about Scorsese’s film, the co-director of the Internal Affairs series, Andrew Lau, said that his own movies were better, though it was appropriate that Scorsese would change the story to be more suitable for an American audience.  Also, Scorsese did not realize the movie was a re-make until after he had agreed to direct it.

The movie stars Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg.  But there were several other big names that were in supporting roles like Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone and Vera Farmiga.  I had no problems with the acting.  Everybody did a good job.  The movie itself was good.  Scorsese did his job as well.  And it was a thriller so I’ll give another nod to the Academy for stepping away from the dramas that normally win the Best Picture award.

But all that being said, I feel a little less than enthusiastic about it.  The problem is that I’m having difficulty pinpointing why.  I think that the movie’s hype had something to do with it.  Everybody I talked to kept telling me how incredible the movie was, so I had some pretty high expectations.  And while I would certainly call the movie good, I don’t think I would call it great.

The departed was an over-the –top thriller.  Jack Nicholson plays Frankie Costello, a crime-boss in the Irish mafia in Boston.  He is hard and ruthless, no stranger to murder, and manipulative.  He chooses a young boy named Colin Sullivan and takes him under his wing, grooming him so that one day he can become a mole in the Massachusetts State Troopers.   Sullivan, played by Matt Damon, grows up and is accepted into the Special Investigations Unit which focuses on organized crime.

DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, a boy who also hails from a neighborhood under Frankie’s control.  Before he graduates from the police academy, he is recruited by Captain Queenan, played by Martin Sheen, and Staff Sergeant Dignam, played by Mark Wahlberg.  They ask him to voluntarily go to jail for a number of years and become a small time criminal in order to build a plausible back-story, all for the purpose of becoming a mole in Frankie’s crime family.

And there is the set up for the entire film.  The rest of the movie follows the two men as they dance around each other, each trying to find the rats in their own organizations before they are found out, themselves.  It is a back-and-forth plot that twists and turns.  How can each mole help their own side while buried deep in their opponent’s?  Who knows their true identities?  How can they be compromised?  It is really a clever script and it kept me very engaged.

But then we bring in the character of Madolyn Madden, played by Vera Farmiga.  She is the sexy psychiatrist who councils both men and starts a relationship with each of them.  She is supposed to be a professional, but she does a number of very unprofessional things that I’m guessing could make her lose her license to practice psychiatry.  While counseling Costigan, she sees him become obviously upset.  He is mad that he can’t get any medication to help him through his stress which is brought on by his assignment.  First, she grabs some pills from her desk and tosses them across the desk at him.  She has already stated that it is far too early to be prescribing him any kind of medication, let alone throwing what looked like an over-the-counter medication for who knows what at him.

Then after he leaves her office in anger, she writes him a quick prescription for Oxycodone.  Then she tracks him down outside the building as he is leaving to give him the prescription and tells him that she no longer see him as a patient.  Not long after that, she jumps into the sack with him.  Never-mind the fact that she is also sleeping with Sullivan.

Interesting note:  The character of Madolyn Madden was actually a combination of two different characters in the original Internal Affairs movies.

Something else about the movie was the overly gratuitous use of foul language.  There were scenes in which every other word was the “F” word.  Every character did it, but Wahlberg was the worst.  He couldn’t open his mouth without dropping the F-bomb.  I’m not opposed to the use of such language, but really, it was way too much.  Of course, this was not the actor’s fault.  It was either the screenwriter or the director.

Of all the actors in the film, I actually would like to single out DiCaprio.  He actually did a particularly good job.  His character was in a situation where his life was in constant danger, and while he handled his fear in front of Frankie flawlessly, when he was away from him, his fear and paranoia were very well portrayed.  At several points he is begging Queenan to get him out.  He almost looked like he was ready to have a nervous break-down.  Well done DiCaprio!

And lest I forget, I have to give another honorable mention to actor Ray Winstone, playing the part of hit man, Mr. French.  He also stood out to me as a particularly god actor.  When he first appeared on the screen, I immediately saw him as a big, cuddly teddy-bear of a man.  But he quickly made me re-evaluate that assessment.  He shows himself to be a tough and almost mean-spirited muscle man for a notorious criminal.  He has a gentle look, but was just as violent as the man he worked for.  Well done Ray!

As I mentioned before, by the end of the movie, nearly everyone gets killed off.  Actually, it would be easier to list off the surviving characters.  Staff Sergeant Dignam and Madolyn Madden.  That’s about it.  And the strange thing about it is that most of them died within the last 5 minutes of the film.  One after another, someone would kill a man, and then within seconds, he would be killed by another character, who would then be killed by another… and so on.  But it all just seemed a bit gratuitous and it all happened so quickly that it left me just a little dumbfounded.

The movie took home 4 Academy Awards.  In addition to Best Picture, The Departed won for Best Director (Scorsese), Best Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay.  Wahlberg was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor, though honestly, I can’t see how his performance was any better than any of his co-stars.  They all did a fine job.

Now, here’s something else about the movie caught my attention.  The whole thing took place in Boston with characters that grew up in Boston.  The two main leads, Damon and DiCaprio had noticeable Boston accents which they both kept up very well.  This was easy for Damon who had actually grown up in Boston, but DiCaprio had to have a dialect coach teach him to have the proper accent.  This just goes one step further why I think he did an exceptional job on the film.

But then I have to ask, why wasn’t DiCaprio nominated for an Oscar?  His acting was excellent, he kept up the difficult task of maintaining a plausible accent, and he had already made a name for himself as a good actor.  He was actually one of those rare cases of a child actor that successfully transitioned into a competent adult actor, a true star of Hollywood.  Well, there were a couple of reasons why he wasn’t nominated.  First, Warner Bros. Studios didn’t want to favor him above any of his co-stars in the Best Actor category.  It is noteworthy to mention that DiCaprio supported this decision, believing The Departed to be an ensemble cast with no leads.  Second, DiCaprio was also in another film in 2006 called Blood Diamond for which he was nominated for the Best Actor category.

And finally, there is one more aspect of the movie that I have to mention in regards to Jack Nicholson’s character of Frankie Costello.  There were two little scenes he was in that didn’t really make much sense.  First, there was a scene that lasted for about 15 or 20 seconds in which Frankie grabs a handful of cocaine and throws it at two whores on a bed.  Then he says “You want some coke?  There it is.  Don’t move until you’re numb.”  In another scene, Sullivan is covertly meeting him in a porn theatre.  Frankie is wearing a trench coat and a quite visible strap on phallus.  Huh?

In my research, I learned that Scorsese told Nicholson to improvise as much as he could to display the wild and unpredictable nature of the character.  I’m OK with that as a concept, but the cocaine scene and the dildo didn’t seem to fit the film somehow.  They seemed to be too non-sequitur.  But those things were actually fairly small and forgivable.  There were probably more similar improvisations that I never noticed because they fin into the film without drawing attention to themselves.

All in all, I’d say The Departed was a good movie and I enjoyed it well enough.  But I guess I’m still having trouble figuring out my ambivalence towards it.  Well, let’s take a quick look at what it was up against.  Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen.  Hmmm… no help there, though Little Miss Sunshine was a very funny comedy.  I think there was just too many gratuitous things about the film:  the violence, the killing and the foul language.  I think the movie might have been just as good with just a little less of each.  But hey, what do I know?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crash – 2005

RACISM!! RACISM!! RACISM!! In case you haven’t gotten my point yet, this movie is about RACISM!! I was clobbered with the concept. I came away from it feeling like I had, by virtue of being White, been accused of being a racist. It was so strongly shoved into my face that I was almost offended.

The stance that Crash seemed to take is that everybody, without fail, is a racist… especially white people. I haven’t felt like this since watching the Best Picture winner of 1947, Gentleman’s Agreement, which was about Anti-Semitism. But to the film’s credit, even the victims of racism were shown to be racist as well.
Now, if you can get past being preached at and being force-fed the differences between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese and Persians, There were actually some fairly interesting stories going on. Director Paul Haggis, who you might remember as the winner of the Best Adapted Screenplay Award the previous year for his work on Million Dollar Baby, made some very interesting choices. He seemed to go out of his way to mislead the viewers at every opportunity. He seemed to look at the popular 1994 film, Pulp Fiction and emulated its eclectic style.

Like Pulp Fiction, Crash didn’t have a strong central plot. Instead the film was made up of a number of individual stories that were thinly connected by tiny threads. Each of those threads touched the wavering line that was the main story, though very little time was given to that story. The result was a tapestry made up of characters that floated in, out and around each other, sometimes touching each other, and sometimes crashing into each other.

The opening scene is that of a Persian man, Farhad, and his daughter, Dorri, played by Shaun Toub and Bahar Soomekh, as they are buying a gun. The owner of the gun store is a racist. When Farhad becomes confused and thinks the owner is cheating him, he becomes angry and the racial insults begin. The owner kicks him out of the store. Dorri completes the purchase and buys a box of ammunition, seemingly at random.

But then the main story kicks in and it is a murder mystery. Don Cheadle plays Detective Graham Waters, a Los Angeles homicide policeman who is called to the scene of a body found on the side of the highway. At this point, we do not know who the victim is.

Then the scene changes to the previous day where two Black men, Anthony and Peter, played by Chris “Ludacris” Bridges and Larenz Tate, are walking down the street in a predominantly White neighborhood. They are passed by a couple, and as they walk by, the woman unconsciously shies away and grabs her husband‘s arm. Anthony comments that the woman is racist and doesn’t even realize it. He says he is offended because she sees a Black man and automatically assumes that he is a criminal. Of course, two seconds later Anthony and Peter pull out guns and car-jack the couple.

The couple are District Attorney Rick Cabot and his wife Jean, played by Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock. The story then follows them as they go home and are having the locks in their house changed. A Hispanic man named Daniel Ruiz, played by Michael Pena, is the locksmith. Jean freaks out and gets into a fight with her husband, saying that the locksmith is going to give their keys to his “homies” and she wants the locks to be changed again.

Then the story follows Ruiz as he returns home to tuck his daughter into bed. She is afraid because she has heard a gunshot. Once he gets her into bed, he gets an emergency call to fix a lock in someone’s store. It happens to be Farhad’s store.

Anyway, I could keep going, describing the various plots and stories. Suffice to say that more and more characters are introduced in this fashion. Mat Dillion plays a White racist police officer John Ryan, partnered with Tom Hansen, played by Ryan Phillippe. Terrance Howard and Thandie Newton are the Thayers, a Black couple who are pulled over by Ryan. Loretta Divine is Shaniqua Johnson, the Black insurance representative that denies Ryan’s father’s insurance request.

Then there is… wait… what was the main plot again? Oh, right. The murder mystery. But by this time, I didn’t even care about that any more. I was still trying to figure out what all these separate stories had to do with each other. But the answer was simple, really. You guessed it: racism.

Crash went out of its way to show just how nearly every one of its characters were racist in one way or another. But after a while, I began to realize that it was the whites that were portrayed as the most racist of all. They were afraid of just about everybody, believing them all to be criminals, gang members, and rapists.
The movie seemed to take itself too seriously. There was nothing light-hearted about it. There was no sense of fun or joy. I’m not saying there has to be in order for the film to be good or enjoyable, but when the ending credits started to roll, I was left with a general feeling of anger and futility. It systematically showed me the serious problem of racism and yet offered no solution, no hope of a better tomorrow.

But don’t worry. In the end, at least you are brought back to that main plot. You learn who was murdered and who murdered him. But once again, Haggis takes every opportunity to mislead you. Neither the murderer nor the victim are who you expect.

And as for those misleading aspects of the film, I suppose they are one of the things that made the movie interesting, if not enjoyable. For example, when Dorri buys the bullets in the red box, we naturally assume that they are regular ammunition. But when Farhad eventually shoots the weapon, we think he has accidentally killed Ruiz’s young daughter. It isn’t until later that we learn that the bullets Dorri bought were blanks. We are never told whether she knew they were blanks when she bought them or if it was just a fortunate mistake. The point is that the tragedy was averted, but not through any human virtue. It was just blind luck.

With such a large cast telling so many different stories, nobody really got very much screen-time, especially when compared to a normal linear film. So it is difficult to judge individual performances. Sandra Bullock got the second billing spot behind Don Cheadle, but they were by no means the leading actors. They were probably just the biggest names the film had at the time and they were hoping that they would draw more people to the box-office.

So, the only thing I can do is to pick out the actors whose performances stood out to me. And I’ll also mention one who I felt fell a little flat.

For my money, the actor that stood out the most was Matt Dillon. He played a despicable character whose blatant sexual violation of Mrs. Thayer was disturbing and unforgivable. But in a later scene, when he saves her from a horrible death, he becomes that perfect blend of level-headed thinking and reckless heroics that make him the quintessential police officer. He puts his own life at risk to save hers, despite the fact that she recognizes him as the man who molested her in front of her husband. She initially refuses to let him touch her, but accepts his help when she sees the danger she is in. Again, more misdirection. We are all set up to write Ryan off as a racist pig, but then he turns around and is shown to be a true hero in a life or death situation.

Terrance Howard also turned in a good performance as Mr. Thayer. They set him up as a weak man who often allows people to shower him with racist comments and abuse. But we are misled again. When Anthony and Peter try to car-jack him, he fights back and nearly gets himself killed, not by the two criminals, but by the police officers who show up on the scene. Howard was actually very good in that scene, playing a man who has finally taken too much abuse.

Cheadle is a very good actor and he always does a good job, so I liked the few scenes he was in. He always has a wonderful seriousness about him, yet also an undeniable depth of emotion that lies beneath the surface.

However, Brendan Fraser, I’m sorry to say, fell a little short of his co-stars. He just wasn’t a very good actor. His performance was virtually emotionless. He was paired up with Sandra Bullock, who is a pretty good actress, and she quite easily upstaged him. Part of that might have been the writing, but I think that Fraser’s poor performance had something to do with it as well.

Interesting note: Fraser’s role of Rick Cabot was originally supposed to have been played by John Cusack, who I think would have been a much better choice.

All in all, I’m not sure if I would call this movie Best Picture material. It was a well constructed film, deserving the other two Oscars it took home for Best Editing and Best Original Screenplay, and the acting was fine. It just had too little cohesiveness in the plot and too much anger behind the action. It accused me of being a racist but didn’t offer me any forgiveness or apology, or any hope of redemption. The world is full of bad and horrible people, and it always will be. The end.

Interesting note: The Best Picture win for Crash was actually a fairly controversial issue. It won over the movie Brokeback Mountain, which many people say should have taken home the coveted award. Unfortunately, anti-homosexual discomfort among the Academy members made Crash the “safe” choice. However, some critics stood by Crash as the better movie.

Another interesting note: This really has nothing to do with my critical analysis of the movie, but it was an interesting bit of trivia I found in my research. Crash was the last Best Picture winner to be released in VHS format, and the first to be released in Blu-ray Disc in the United States.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Million Dollar Baby – 2004

It is time to scale things back again.  Million Dollar Baby is a film that comes back down to reality.  No big special effects spectacle.  No huge cast of characters.  Just a good story told in a very down-to-earth way.  On the surface this movie might look like a movie about boxing, and while that is certainly an important and integral part of the plot, it is about much, much more.

Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman are together again.  The previous Best Picture winner that they both happened to be in was Unforgiven, 12 years before in 1992.  Hillary Swank was a newcomer to Hollywood, and she did a fine job.  There were really no other big names in the movie.

Eastwood played the character of Frankie Dunn, a boxing trainer that is a great coach, but is only marginally successful with his boxers.  He is too cautious.  He has a habit of keeping his fighters away from matches in which they might get hurt.  He never takes any risks, and so his boxers never achieve great success.  Freeman plays Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris, an ex-boxer who has lost the use of one of his eyes and is now a janitor of the boxing gym that Dunn owns.  Frankie becomes depressed after his prize contender leaves him for a manager who will be more aggressive in getting him a shot at a title bout.

In comes Maggie Fitzgerald, played by Hillary Swank.  She is a poor girl from a white-trash home who wants a chance to make something of herself.  She wants to have her moment in the sun, doing something that she loves to do.  She wants to become a professional boxer in the WBA.  After some hard coaxing from Scrap, Frankie grudgingly takes Maggie on and becomes her trainer and manager.

It turns out that Maggie is a natural, and with Frankie’s expert training, she starts working her way toward a title fight.  Now, here is where the real emotional content of the film becomes apparent.  Frankie has a skeleton in his closet.  He has a daughter from whom he is estranged.  He writes her letters every week, and every single one of them is returned.  The movie never explains what happened between him and his daughter, but it is made clear that he harbors very deep regrets.  During the training process, Frankie develops a paternal bond with Maggie, seeing in her the spirit of the daughter with whom he desperately desires to reconcile.

On the flip side, Maggie’s father died when she was young, and her white-trash mother never developed the parental connection needed to help her in any way.  So, Maggie becomes fiercely loyal to Frankie as well.  But true to form, Frankie begins to turn down opportunities for Maggie’s boxing career to advance, fearing for her safety.

Interesting note:  At one point in the film, Frankie gives Maggie a nickname in Gaelic, playing up her Irish Heritage, which the fans chant.  He called her Mo Cuishle.  However, in reality, the phrase is spelled wrong.  It should be Mo Chuisle.

Both Eastwood and Swank did a good job in their roles.  Eastwood really surprised me by showing a softer side than I ever remember seeing him display.  His character even broke down into tears at one point, something I have never seen the actor do in any of his films.  Swank was a relative unknown at the time and even today, I am not familiar with any of her work.  She did a great job and it was obvious that she and Eastwood had a good on-screen chemistry.

One complaint I have about Eastwood, and I must admit that this seems to be a characteristic of his acting style, in general, is the way he speaks.  The sound is a soft, raspy sound that is almost like a trademark for him, but as he gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to understand him at times.  And I know that he doesn’t have to sound that way.  It is a choice.  I know this because on the DVD, he included a four-way interview between himself, Swank, Freeman, and the interviewer, James Lipton, known for his television program Inside the Actor’s Studio.  In this interview, Eastwood spoke clearly and without his typical rasp.  That was his normal speaking voice.  But for some reason he chose to make himself sound old and rough.  But now that I consider it, maybe that was the point.  Hmmm…

Another interesting choice Eastwood made, this as the film’s director, though the screenwriter, Paul Haggis, had to have been the first person behind it, was to have the character of Scrap doing narration throughout the film.  And as we all know, Freeman has that natural gift of making nearly everything he says sound deep and meaningful.  It is an uncanny thing with him and it has the effect of making everything sound incredibly interesting.  In the end, it is revealed that all of Scrap’s narration is a letter to Frankie’s estranged daughter.

One of the major themes of the film, a phrase that Frankie keeps repeating to Maggie over and over again is ‘protect yourself at all times.’  This seemed to be Frankie’s mantra, but as I watched the film, I realized that he didn’t just mean in the ring.  He meant it for life in general, which only served to emphasize his overly caution attitude as a boxing manager.

Eastwood set the viewers up to expect the movie to be about Maggie’s boxing career, like a female Rocky, being the underdog and triumphing over her personal demons to touch greatness.  But it was the twist in the tragic ending of the movie that caused most viewers to say that it was one of the most depressing movies ever made.  And it really was.  However, I was a little cheated.  Even though I had never seen the movie, I already know what the plot twist was.  I knew the tragedy and saw it coming, though not the whole tragedy.  I was not as emotionally slammed as I should have been.

Lucia Rijker played the part of the Welterweight Champion Billie ‘The Blue Bear’.  She was defending her title, but she was a dirty fighter.  She blatantly broke as many rules as she could get away with.  One would think that any boxer who was given warning after warning for rule-breaking would be banned from the sport.  But one of the cheap tricks she pulled was to attack Maggie after the stopping bell had rung and Maggie’s guard was down.  She punched her so hard that she fell down.

Now here is the real spoiler alert.  She fell and broke her neck on an overturned wooden stool.  She became permanently paralyzed from the neck down, ending her career, her hopes, her dreams and her life outside of a hospital bed.  She could no longer even breath on her own.  Frankie cared for her and stayed with her at the hospital, all the while feeling that he was responsible for her injury.  As the audience, we all know that he was not to blame.  But it is also so easy to see how he could fall into that trap of blaming himself.

I wanted to know what happened to the other boxer as her rule breaking almost turned into murder. Now would she be banned from boxing?  But the movie never said what happened to her.  It was the final ending that took me by surprise.

The plot made it clear that Frankie was a very religious man.  As many people do, he struggled with his faith, earnestly praying for reconciliation with his daughter and for Maggie’s safety.  He got neither of those things.  Who would not have their doubts?  So when Maggie asks him to euthanize her, he initially refuses.  But after her suicide attempts, (she tried biting her own tongue and chocking herself on the blood…) he realized that that she was suffering intolerably and wanted to die.  She explained that she had no regrets and was grateful that she’d had her moment in the spotlight.

At this point I sympathized with her.  I’m not sure if I believe in euthanization.  But on some level, I do believe in a person’s right to choose their own path, even if that path leads to death.  But that is a whole different discussion.  Anyway, that is enough plot analysis for now.

Another thing about the movie that caught my attention was the music.  Much like the movie Unforgiven, the music was this kind of soft and gently played guitar music that had a very melancholy edge to it, despite the violent nature of the story being told.  According to the credits, Clint Eastwood, himself, wrote the music.  Who knew that he was a musician as well?  It was beautiful and slightly haunting music that fit the end of the film, but not necessarily the beginning and middle.

I don’t really have any big complaints about the movie at all, though there is one thing I don’t understand.  The film was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, and took home 4 of them.  In addition to best Picture, it won for Best Director (Eastwood), Best Actress (Swank), and Best Supporting Actor (Freeman).  I have to ask the question: Why did Morgan Freeman win?  I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it.  He is a very good actor and he did a fine job in his performance.  But the role itself just wasn’t worthy of the award.  He didn’t do much, didn’t really affect the course of the plot much, and didn’t have much opportunity to show off any above-the-bar acting skills.  So, why did he win?

The Character of Scrap was like an outside observer to the story taking place.  He commented on it and narrated it, but honestly, he could have been easily written out of the movie and it would have had just as great an emotional impact.  He only had one memorable scene in which he sees a somewhat mentally handicapped boy being abused and used as a punching-bag by a real asshole.  He is tricked into being in another room while the asshole does this horrible thing.  Scrap puts on one boxing glove and raises his fists, inviting the asshole to fight ‘the old man’.  Of course, in a most satisfying way, he not only knocks the asshole out cold, you see a tooth roll out onto the mat.

But that scene was only a very small sub-plot.  It didn’t need to be there to make the movie what it was.  Freeman was up against veteran actor Alan Alda in The Aviator, Thomas Hayden Church in Sideways, Jamie Fox in Collateral and Clive Owen in Closer.  The only one of those films I saw was Sideways, but that was enough.  Church’s role allowed him to show off a greater emotional range and depth of character than Freeman.  But, the Academy apparently saw something I did not.

Aside from that minor little issue, I thought it was a good movie, though it wasn’t my favorite Best Picture winner.  Did it deserve the award?  Sure, why not?  But I’ve never been a huge fan of Clint Eastwood or boxing.  It moved pretty slow and had surprisingly few scenes that took place in the ring, which might have made it a little more interesting.  Well… they had some but they were very short scenes that were over very quickly, so I didn’t have time to get very excited by them.  One of Maggie’s problems as a competitive boxer was that she would knock out her opponents in seconds and win very quickly without giving the audience the chance to get into the sport aspect of the film.

But like I said, why not?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – 2003

OK.  This is one of the big ones – Maybe even the biggest one of all, because it is my opinion that this movie did not win the Best Picture award by itself. The Return of the King was the third movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers preceded it, and the award was for the three films together.  So, of course I had to watch the entire trilogy over again and not just the third installment that took home the Best Picture Oscar.

Of course, that being the case, that means it took around 12 hours of movie watching to complete the full epic.  The director’s cut of each film was roughly 4 hours long and if you are going to see the movies at all, you should really watch the director’s cut.  The films were shortened for their theatrical releases and were just fine, but the extended versions that were released on DVD simply enhanced the films into a more complete representation of the books from which they were made.

The original books were written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.  They are considered by most literary scholars and authors of fantasy books to be the sires of the fantasy genre.  It is the grand-daddy of them all.  It is from this universe that Tolkien created that most modern fantasy fiction comes from.  And it was long said that a movie adaptation could not be done.  It was far too complex a story to be done well.  The technology required to do such a monumental epic justice had not yet been invented.  It would be far too expensive.  The only other film adaptations ever attempted were animated.  A live-action version simply could not be done.

But director Peter Jackson did the impossible.  He spent close to seven years of his life in creating the three films that took the world by storm.  The sheer scale of the production was staggering.  The number of people involved in the making of the movies was incredible.  The meticulous attention to detail drawn from the source material was obsessive and mind-boggling.  The cast of actors was incredibly talented and were put through their paces.  Some of them like Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen, Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom were pushed to the limits of their skills as actors.  And they turned in some of the best performances of their careers.

Other actors like Cate Blanchett, Bernard Hill, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Karl Urban, Miranda Otto, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, John Noble, David Wenham, Christopher Lee, Brad Dourif and even Liv Tyler, daughter of rock legend Stephen Tyler, all did a fantastic job.

The casting could not have been more perfect.  Who but Ian McKellen could have played the role of Gandalf the Wizard as he did, with as much power and authority, and yet gentleness and compassion?  Who else could have played the iconic role of Aragorn with as much realism and enthusiasm?  Can you imagine anyone but Elijah Wood playing the role of Frodo Baggins, portraying the heights and depths of the unbelievable hardships that the character demanded?  If there was an Academy Award for casting, the team of casting directors would have had to win.

For anyone who has not seen any of the Lord of the Rings films, I will give a brief synopsis of the plot.  I will attempt to keep it short and just touch the highlights.  It will help in going over the performances of certain actors, the music, Peter Jackson’s directing choices, the cinematography, the costumes and the special effects.

In the distant past of the fictional land of Middle Earth, great magic rings of power were forged.  Three were made for the elves, 7 for the dwarves and 9 for mortal men.  But the evil demigod Sauron made one ring to rule over them all.  Into it, he poured his very life force so that even if his body was destroyed, he would live on through the ring.  And that is exactly what happened.  A man named Isildur killed him and took the One Ring.  But he lost it at the bottom of a river before being killed, himself.  There it lay for thousands of years.  Eventually it was found by a Halfling named Smeagol who found that it had the power to turn him invisible and prolong his life, though it also drove him insane and turned him into a fearsome and withered creature known as Gollum.  But eventually, after 500 years, he lost the Ring as well.

It was found by another Halfling, or Hobbit, named Bilbo Baggins.  He kept it for around 60 years whereupon he left it to his heir Frodo.  The good Wizard, Gandalf, learned of the Ring and its true nature of pure evil.  He sent Frodo and his gardener Sam to the house of Elrond the Elf.  Along the way, he meets Aragorn, the last of Isildur’s line, who becomes his protector.  He defends them against the ghostly shades of the Nine Riders, who are the bearers of the 9 Rings of mortal men, enslaved by the spirit of Sauron.

At Elrond’s home, a council is convened to determine the fate of the One Ring.  It is decided that Frodo must take the Ring to Mount Doom where the ring was forged, and destroy it.  As companions on his quest, Legolas the Elf, Gimli the Dwarf and Boromir the Human are chosen, along with Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf and two more Hobbits, Merry and Pippin:  Nine companions against the nine evil wraiths.

Along the way, Gandalf battles a demon and is lost.  Boromir is slain by orcs, and Frodo and Sam are separated from the group.  As they continue toward Mount Doom they meet Gollum who desperately desires to once again possess the Ring.  He agrees to be their guide, waiting for his chance to take it back.  But the plot also follows the remaining members of the company as they play their parts in the wars that the living spirit of Sauron unleashes upon Middle Earth.  Aragorn turns out to be the rightful King of the Country of Gondor and Sauron’s main enemy.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Frodo and Sam go through unbelievable hardships and eventually make it to Mount Doom.  However, Frodo succumbs to the power of the One Ring.  Instead of destroying it, it possesses him.  All would be lost if not for Gollum.  In his desire to get the Ring, he bites it off of Frodo’s hand, along with the finger on which it sits.  They struggle and Gollum falls into a pit of lava with the Ring.  With the One Ring destroyed, the spirit of Sauron dies and Middle Earth is saved.  Aragorn is crowned King of the world.  All the elves, along with Gandalf (who didn’t really die), Bilbo and Frodo leave Middle Earth on a voyage across the sea to the Undying lands.  The end.

Of course, that is just the barest bones of the plot.  It is huge and epic, complex, and at times, not easy to follow.  There are dozens of supporting characters and hundreds of extras.  And the whole thing was spearheaded by the incredible talent and dedication of director, Peter Jackson.  He brought the gargantuan project to life and was the main force behind its success.  He gathered some of the best talent in the industry and produced a trilogy of films so ambitious in scope and scale, that few movies are their equal.

First, the cast.  The main mover and shaker behind the events that take place in the plot is Gandalf, masterfully played by Ian McKellen.  He had the perfect look and the right temperament.  The character was just the right combination of hardness, compassion, power and humor.  McKellen was 63 years old when filming took place and yet the physically demanding role was played with vitality and energy.

Elijah Wood was incredible as Frodo.  To watch him go from a happy-go-lucky country boy to a burnt-out shell of a man, battered and bruised, was so heartbreaking and yet believable.  Wood really turned in an unbelievably good performance.

Interesting note:  In the extra documentaries about the movies included with the DVDs Wood commented that some fans of the films actually wanted to know how Jackson digitally enhanced his eyes to make them appear so large.  In reality, there was no enhancement at all.  Elijah Woods’ eyes are actually as big as they appear.

Viggo Mortensen probably had the most physically demanding role in the entire film.  He was a warrior, plain and simple, often displaying super human strength and endurance.  From what I understand, he performed most of his own stunts whenever possible.  He got so into his part that he often stayed in character, even when the cameras were not rolling.  Mortensen was incredible and made the character both bad-assed and yet, at times, incredibly introverted and spiritual.  He played the hard ranger and the noble King with equal skill and talent.  He really understood the character and turned in an unforgettable performance.

Both John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom were also perfectly cast as Gimli the Dwarf and Legolas the Elf.  They were wonderful to watch, though I have to admit to one minor complaint that is easily forgivable.  The problem had to do with the writing.  Gimli and Legolas were often turned into the comic relief of the movie, especially in The Two Towers.  But I didn’t mind that much because when it was time for them to be serious, they remained true to the characters and kicked ass with the best of them.  There was just no need for Jackson to turn to fart jokes.

One actor I have not mentioned yet is Andy Serkis.  He had very little actual screen-time, and yet he was one of the most memorable parts of the entire trilogy.  He played the part of Gollum.  Gollum was a completely CGI character.  He was made possible by a technology called motion capture.  Serkis acted the part with the rest of the cast, dressed in a full-body suit covered in motion sensors.  Those sensors fed information to a computer that tracked his every movement, giving the digital animators a perfectly life-like template to work with.

The animation on Gollum was flawless and frighteningly realistic.  The facial expressions and simulation of real emotions were done so incredibly well, that you very easily forget that it is a CGI image.  He even stood up to close scrutiny whenever the character had a close-up.  The texturing of his skin, the perfectly blended lighting and the realistic movement made him blend in seamlessly with the live footage in which he was placed.  Nothing like Gollum had ever been done before.

The music was written by Howard Shore and was so incredible in scale and scope that he was able to turn it into a Lord of the Rings Symphony that is performed in classical concert halls.  It was grand and epic.  It was perfectly written and blended into the film.  It was small and minimalistic when it needed to be and yet large and powerful when it was supposed to be.  Shore’s talent and dedication to Jackson’s vision really came through.

Now, when it comes to Peter Jackson’s directing, the first word that comes to mind is genius.  But the second word I think of is demanding.  He demanded nothing but the best from every last person who worked for him.  After watching the entire 12 hour director’s cut trilogy, I watched only 2 of the documentaries included with the DVDs.  But in one of them I learned that the final theatrical cut of The Return of the King was completed only 2 days before the World Premier in New Zealand, where the entire movie was filmed.  The third installment of the trilogy had more special effect shots than the first two movies combined.  Jackson pushed his people to the wire and pushed himself at the same time.  I can’t even begin to imagine the number of hours spent by all the people involved in making these three movies.  The statistic would be staggering.

Jackson’s grand vision was truly inspired.  Many have called these three film Jackson’s masterpiece.  It is a description that is truly deserved.  Every little detail was adhered to and nothing was left to chance.  Jackson really gave us a spectacle on a grand scale that had never before been attempted.

Something else that I have to mention as being outstanding was the cinematography.  As I mentioned, all the filming was done in the beautiful country of New Zealand.  I don’t think the world was fully aware of what a stunningly gorgeous place New Zealand really is.  But Jackson made full use of all its splendors.  The open fields of green, the mountains, the snowy peaks and valleys of dark gray rock, the deep forests and winding rivers of surpassing perfection, the pristine sunrises and misty mornings, all gave Jackson a pallet of such colors and loveliness that the world was just shocked by the spectacle of the landscapes.

Next is the costumes and sets.  The film’s art design was something special.  For each race, the costumes, the set designs and the props were all intertwined.  It was all meticulously thought out and beautifully crafted by a company called WETA.   Each race had its own style, its own aesthetics.  The elves were clothed in long flowing robes made of expensive looking silks and velvets.  Their homes and dwellings were likewise designed with long curving lines and delicate patterns.  They wore tiaras that resembled their architecture.  Their water jugs and bows, their armor and swords, the helms and their hair all had the same intricate designs.  When you see anything Elven, you immediately know what it is and where it came from.  Their style resembled the trees which all Elves love.

The Dwarf, Gimli, had weapons and armor designed with harder, squatter lines and patterns, much like the dwarves themselves.  They contained more straight lines and starker angles.  Their styles resembled stone and faceted jewels.  It was all amazingly detailed and just made the movie that much more real.  The Humans of Edoras and the Humans of Gondor each had their own distinct styles which were adhered to.  And, of course, the Hobbits had a style that was distinctly… Hobbitish.  Even the Orcs and Goblins had their own individual styles that were distinct and realistic.

And finally, I have to mention the special effects.  The special effects were unlike anything the world had ever seen.  The men and women who made up the special effects team for the film were able to achieve spectacular effects that had never before been attempted.  They made use of optical illusions when crafting their sets in order to make size differences between the different races of Middle Earth, a technique called forced perspective.  They used size doubles for some shots.  They made use of incredibly detailed miniature models and props.  And, of course, they used computer generated animation.  Some might say that there were too many special effect shots, that after a while it just became gratuitous.  But the quality was so top-notch and realistic that I just kept wanting more.  The special effects teams really knew their craft and were able to realize the fantastic dreams of Jackson.  They really made his vision come to life.

The first two films were both nominated for Best Picture, thought they didn’t win.  But The Return of the King not only made up for these losses, it took the Oscars by storm.  It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and it won in every category for which it was nominated.  It won for Best Picture, Best Director (Jackson), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score (Shore), Best Original Song, Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Make-up, Best Sound Mixing and Best Film Editing.  It currently holds the record for the highest Academy Award sweep.

If I am looking at the trilogy as one complete film, I have to say that it was one of the most complex, the most monumental and the most phenomenal projects ever attempted.  It was well worth all the attention and awards it received.  I’d even go so far as to call it one of the greatest films ever made.  Well done, Mr. Jackson!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chicago – 2002

It is nice to see that Hollywood can still appreciate a good musical.  The last musical to win the coveted Best Picture award was Oliver! in 1968.  Chicago surprised everyone on a number of levels.  First, the fact that a musical could once again grab the brass ring was unexpected.  Second, several actors that we all know and love proved that they could both sing and dance, which is unusual for most actors today.  Third, the musical itself did not get the best reviews on Broadway.

The plot centers around the fictional characters of Roxie Hart, played by Renee Zellweger, and Velma Kelly, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.  They are loosely based on the real-life criminals Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner.  They were each murderesses in the Cook County Jail in Chicago, and most of the plot follows them as they await their trials.  They have both hired Billy Flynn, the super-star lawyer who has never lost a case, played by Richard Gere.  The corrupt warden of the Women’s prison is a woman who takes bribes in exchange for cigarettes and other contraband, Matron Mama Morton, played by Queen Latifah.  Roxie’s husband Amos, played by John C. Reilly, is a weak willed man who everyone tends to either manipulate or ignore.  That is the main cast, though other notable actors appear such as Christine Baransky, Tay Diggs, Lucy Liu, and Dominic West.

Interesting note:  It is strongly implied, but never actually stated that Mama Morton also demands sexual favors from her inmates.  Just listen to the lyrics for the song When You’re Good to Mama.

The story is so outrageous that it is actually fun, despite the dark nature of the subject matter.  Velma is a nightclub performer who has murdered her husband and sister after catching them in bed together, “Doing number 17… the spread eagle.”  (the number representing the 17^th acrobatic stunt in her nightclub act.)  Roxie is a woman who is unsatisfied with her mild-mannered husband and dreams of being a performer on the stage.   She is having an affair with a man who promises to help her realize that dream, but she murders him when she finds out that he has lied to her just to get her in the sack.  Both women end up in jail under the watchful eye of Matron Mama Morton.

They meet the other women on murderess row and learn their stories.  Morton helps them by getting Billy Flynn to defend them in court.  Richard Gere did a good job and was very believable as the amoral and slick lawyer who knows how to manipulate the press and the jury with equal skill and success.  He had several musical numbers in which he gave very admirable performances.

That is the basic plot and the pace of the movie is fast enough to keep it interesting.  Director Rob Marshall, who also happened to be the film’s choreographer, did a great job of using the medium of film to tell a story that was originally written for the stage.  That is more a difficult task than it might seem.  Certain things work on the stage that do not translate well onto the big screen, and vice-versa.  For example, on the stage, scene changes and costume changes are not instantaneous and time must be allowed for these things to take place.  But in movies, these things must happen instantaneously to maintain the flow and pacing of the narrative.  Also, movies have the advantage of being able to switch back and forth between sets and costumes to enhance the story in ways that cannot be done on stage.

The movie actually won 6 Academy Awards after being nominated for 13.  In addition to Best Picture, it took home Oscars for Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Costume Design, and Zeta-Jones won for Best Supporting Actress.  However, Zellweger was nominated for Best Actress, Latifah was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Reilly was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

For me, the real stand-out member of the cast was Zeta Jones.  She was gorgeous, her singing was spot-on, and her dancing was incredible.  Granted, she and Gere had a history of working on Broadway, as opposed to Zellweger and Latifah who did not.  But Zeta-Jones really did such a fantastic job, far outshining her co-stars.  She had some of the most difficult dancing in the film, and she executed her moves with the sexy style and ease that her character demanded.

After all, the show was written to be a dance musical.  Bob Fosse, the famous choreographer, had worked with the show’s composer and its lyricist, John Kander and Fred Ebb on the original stage production.  The show was specifically known for its very stylized dancing and look.  The film had taken years getting from the stage to the screen, and unfortunately, Fosse died before that dream was realized.  Rob Marshall took over the choreography, saying that he didn’t want to copy Fosse’s style, but he did want to pay tribute to it.

The result was perfectly executed and the dancing in the film was fantastic.  The choreography was quite demanding of the actors.  In fact, Richard Gere had to learn to tap-dance for the film.  Zellweger had no dance experience at all and had to learn all her moves from scratch.  But I found that to be pretty obvious.

And honestly, that brings me to the movie’s biggest fault, in my opinion.  I didn’t like Zellweger that much.  I have never found her to be a terribly attractive woman and when the plot demanded that the world fell in love with her because of her beauty and personality, I just didn’t buy it.  I mean, I don’t want to assign too much significance to this than necessary, but she was very flat chested, which was very evident whenever she wasn’t facing the camera head-on.  Sorry, Renee, I’m just calling this one like I see it.  Not sexy.  And her dancing seemed forced, especially when put next to Zeta-Jones, who’s dancing seemed easy and natural.  Other than that, her acting was just fine.  And, I have to admit, I enjoyed her singing.  Her voice was especially good in the song Funny Honey.

In fact, the music in general was very well done.  Kander and Ebb’s score was intended to reflect the Vaudeville music of the 1920s, the era when the show takes place. The score is a memorable one.  Songs like All That Jazz, When You’re Good to Mama, Cell Block Tango, We Both Reached for the Gun, Mister Cellophane, Razzle Dazzle and Nowadays are all easy to sing along with and sit well in the ear.  Kander and Ebb had already proven themselves with another hit musical, Cabaret, and Chicago just cemented their place in musical theatre history.

Interesting note:  When Chicago originally opened on Broadway, the role of Roxie Hart was played by Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse’s wife at the time.  Five days before the show opened, she inhaled a feather from one of the costumes, causing her to have surgery on the nodes in her throat.  The show was in danger of closing before it opened.  However, Cabaret star Liza Minnelli stepped in, and after only 5 days of rehearsal, she performed the role until Verdon was able to take back her part.

One song in particular stands out to me as a great dance number that was incredibly well choreographed, masterfully danced, and wonderfully fun to listen to.  It was also one of the darkest numbers in the whole show: Cell Block Tango.  This is the song in which the murderesses tell their stories about the killings that landed them in the clink.

Now, in order to explain the genius of this, and several other numbers in the show, I have to explain the unique vision of the director, Rob Marshall.  The key element that allowed the stage play to be made into a movie was the idea that all the musical numbers were told through Roxie’s perspective.  She was portrayed as a woman whose greatest dream was to be a nightclub performer.  So, when bad things happened, her mind went to her happy place: the stage.

Many of the songs used both her fantasy, which had the gowns, the glitter, the glamour and the dancing, and the “real world”, which made use of gritty reality, drab prison costumes, disheveled hair and iron bars.  In Cell Block Tango, Marshall showed each woman in both lights. And the costumes and dancing in the fantasy was fantastic.  Each woman, of which Velma was one, had on sexy black clothing that resembled bondage gear, giving them a dangerous look.  As they told their stories, their deceased men appeared to dance with them in a tango, which in itself is a very erotic dance.

When each woman got to the part of her story in which she committed the murder, she would pull a red handkerchief out of a hidden place on her victim, corresponding to the particular death.  The woman who stabbed her husband pulled it from his stomach.  The woman who poisoned her husband pulled it from his mouth, and so on.  This dance was very cleverly choreographed.

Interesting note:  One of the murderesses is a Hungarian woman played by a Russian actress named Ekaterina Chtchelkanova.  She tells her story in Hungarian, but I actually looked up the translation online, which reads as follows:  “What am I doing here?  They say my notorious lover held down my husband and I chopped his Head off.  It’s untrue.  I am innocent.  I do not know why Uncle Sam says I did it.  I tried to explain at the police station but they didn’t understand what I am saying.”  I have always taken the position that she was innocent, just as she claimed, and that she was wrongfully executed.  It is a nice contrast to the guilty women who are trying to prove their innocence.

And I can’t finish this review without giving a special honorable mention to John C. Reilly and his wonderful performance.  He really understood that character he was playing.  Amos was not too smart, but he did have feelings.  He loved his wife and was willing to go to jail for her until he realized that she had been cheating on him.  His big song, Mister Cellophane, was staged as a Vaudeville number.  He was dressed to resemble Emmett Kelly’s character of the hobo clown, Weary Willie.  The song was brilliantly performed.  Great job, Reilly!

Interesting note:  There was a wonderful song called Class that was filmed but ultimately cut from the film.  It was a crass duet between Mama Morton and Velma Kelly, as they complain that nobody ain’t got no class no more…  However, the song was included on the film’s soundtrack.

Chicago was a very good movie that was fun to watch.  For me, Zeta-Jones really sold the movie, and it wouldn’t have been the same without her.  Marshall’s directing choices and choreography were incredibly well done.  This movie was a worthy winner of the Best Picture award in more ways than one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Beautiful Mind – 2001

Here we have another movie starring Russell Crowe, which makes two years in a row, in which he was in the Best Picture winning film. It just emphasizes the fact that Crowe is a very good actor. And he is versatile as well. The character of Maximus Decimus Meridius is like a polar opposite from the man he plays in this film.

He plays the genius level mathematician, John Forbes Nash Jr. The film is, admittedly, only loosely based on the real Nobel Prize Winner. The filmmakers over-dramatized the real events and characters, changed several key points, and left out a few important details.  I’ll explain.  But in order to do so, I first have to delve into the plot and characters a bit.

John Nash is a prodigy in mathematics. He goes to Princeton University and right from the beginning, he is bored with his classes.  He thinks that all the concepts being taught are unoriginal.  It becomes his goal to excel and succeed by coming up with a completely original idea that will blow everybody’s socks off.  His fellow students laugh at him and his teachers are disappointed in his performance.  He spends all his time in independent study and does not attend his classes.

He is socially inept when dealing with his peers, and is positively shocking when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex. But he perseveres in his personal crusade, despite the bad influence of his roommate, Charles Herman, played by Paul Bettany. Charlie gets him to leave his studies when he forgets to do things like take a break, relax or even eat. And eventually, the brilliance of his incredible intellect comes into focus.

Just when everybody is ready to give up on him as a lost cause, he finds his original idea and writes a paper for Professor Helinger, played by Judd Hirsch.  His paper is so revolutionary and extraordinary, a concept that flies in the face of a hundred years of theories and practices in the field of economics, that he is validated. Above all of his classmates, he is offered his pick of any job he wants. He even gets to name two fellow students to go with him as his personal team. He chooses two men, Sol and Bender, played by Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp, respectively, and they get jobs at MIT.

Eventually, he takes a consulting job at the Pentagon where he meets William Parcher, played by Ed Harris. Parcher gives him an assignment cracking codes, saying that the Russians are planning to detonate a bomb somewhere in the U.S.. Nash now thinks of himself as a reluctant spy. Meanwhile, Charlie comes back into his life. This time he has his niece, Marcee, with him, played by young actress Vivien Cardone.

And lest we forget, along the way, he meets and marries an MIT student named Alicia, wonderfully played by Jennifer Connelly. The big romance of the movie begins, and after difficult courtship, she agrees to marry him. But then we discover that the characters of Charlie, Marcee and Parcher, people he has known for years, don’t exist – at least not anywhere outside of Nash’s mind. It turns out that he is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Interesting note:  Something that never caught my attention in the film, but I discovered as an interesting little trick Ron Howard slipped into the film.  At one point the character of Marcee runs through a field of birds.  None of the birds move, proving that she doesn’t exist.  Clever and subtle, Mr. Howard.

OK, now, this is how the movie differs from reality. First of all, the real John Nash only had auditory hallucinations, not visual. To me, that seems like a pretty big one.  Second, Nash never had a job at the Pentagon.  Third, the movie skips over the fact that Nash fathered a child, John David Stier, out of wedlock with a woman named Eleanor Stier.  But after learning she was pregnant, he refused to marry her, thinking her below his status.  He abandoned her and the child.

The movie never mentions the fact that John’s wife Alicia divorced him in 1963 and remarried him in 2001.  The movie also fails to show his arrest for indecent exposure in Santa Monica, California in 1954.  In addition, the portrayal of the Nobel Prize ceremony is quite fictional.  The Prize ceremony is one without speeches.  Also, he was not the only man to win the prize that year.  He shared the honor with John Harsanyi and Richard Selten.

Interesting note:  There was another historical inaccuracy in the film on which John Nash, himself, commented.  In the film, the old (around the time of his Nobel Prize accolade) Nash mentioned that he was still taking newer medications to help control his mental illness.  In fact, this was not true.  The real Nash said that he no longer took any medication.  Howard defended the film saying that he did not want to encourage the notion that all schizophrenics can overcome their illnesses without medication.

But never-mind all that.  There were specific reasons why Director, Ron Howard, made the changes he did, and ignored several of the more unsavory facts of the man’s life.  Knowing that A Beautiful Mind was never intended to be a literal translation of the life of John Nash, I find the changes easy to accept.  I am not a purest, and neither has Hollywood ever been, though filmmakers are always persecuted when they make such changes.  It is a dramatized story of the man’s professional life and it was meant to adhere to a dramatic and sometimes romantic narrative, not literal reality.

So, putting all those historical facts aside, the story that Ron Howard told was incredibly well put together.  It was very dramatic, and yet realistic and emotionally engaging.  The romance between John and his wife Alicia was really played-up, making the socially inept character of Nash almost charming at times.  This was a very specific request that Howard made of screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman.

Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly were phenomenal in their portrayals.  I already knew that Crowe was an exceptional actor, and though I have only seen a few of the movies in which he has starred, I would venture to say that this was one of the finest performances of his career.  He really had an opportunity to get into a unique role and show his acting chops.  For me, he knocked this one out of the park.  I was both shocked and dismayed to learn that he did not win the Academy Award for Best Actor, though he was at least nominated.

And Connelly really surprised me along with most of Hollywood.  She was gorgeous and elegant.  She showed real emotional depth that the world had not yet seen from her.  Her performance earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.  She really was incredible, and a pleasure to watch.

Other actors whom I liked were Josh Lucas as Martin Hansen, a fellow classmate, the leader of those who taunted Nash at Princeton, and Christopher Plummer as Dr. Rosen, the psychologist who treats Nash when he is admitted to the mental institution.  Lucas, I must admit, has always had a face that naturally says, “jerk” to me.  But his character turned out to be gracious and sympathetic to Nash and I ended up liking him.  Well done, Lucas.  And Plummer also did a fine job.  His character was that of a doctor who truly cared about his patient, and did his best to help and comfort him.

When it comes to Ed Harris, I was rather unimpressed, but this was not the actor’s fault.  The character just didn’t stand out for me.  Harris did a good enough job as the mysterious government agent, but the role was just too one-note and uninteresting to allow Harris to do much with it.

The music for the film was written by James Horner.  Horner wrote a score that really tapped into the somewhat sterile precision of mathematics, while at the same time, enhancing the emotional content of the film.  He has written other such great movie scores as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Field of Dreams, Legends of the Fall, Apollo 13, Braveheart, Titanic and Avatar.  He really knows what he is doing and his score for A Beautiful Mind really caught my attention.

Another thing that was noteworthy about the film was the sets and costumes.  The movie covered Nash’s life between 1947 and 1994 – a period of 47 years.  All the sets and costumes remained quite true to their proper eras.  The clothing and cars from the 1940s all appeared authentic and well thought out.  Even the hairstyles of the students at Princeton University looked like something you would expect from that time in history.

And at the end of the movie, before the credits start, a little blurb is shown on the screen.  It says, “Nash’s theories have influenced global trade negotiations, national Labor Relations, and even breakthroughs in evolutionary biology.  John and Alicia Nash live in Princeton, New Jersey.  John keeps regular office hours in the mathematics department.  He still walks to campus every day.”  I like it when films give a little extra meaningful information like that at the end.

All in all, this was a good film.  The acting was phenomenal and the plot was engaging, if not historically accurate.  It is a movie that never fails to catch my attention.  I have come to expect a certain level of quality from any film directed by Ron Howard.  A Beautiful Mind did not disappoint.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gladiator – 2000

I will start off by saying that this is a highly enjoyable movie, but it has generally been my opinion that it should not have won the award for Best Picture. Now, there are several specific reasons why I think that. First of all, the dialogue was very poorly written. It was, at times, unnatural and forced, at other times too verbose and awkward. The actors did the best they could with what they were given, but it is often hard to polish dialogue that is poorly written.

Another thing about the film that I found lacking was the character development. Only one of the main characters had any depth, and even that was only for a short time. Most of the characters were very one dimensional. They started one way and remained that way, without any changes, until the end of the movie – All except for the character of Lucilla. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

Thirdly, it was up against some pretty good films like Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Chocolat and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Well, OK that makes me pause. The only one of those I would consider competition for Gladiator is Erin Brockovich. Traffic was simply too unmemorable. Chocolat was too confusing and had too little emotional punch. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was a good movie but was too gimmicky – like a fad. Erin Brockovich was good but even so, the it only succeeded because of Julia Roberts. Without her it would have been just an average movie.

So… Why not Gladiator? Gladiator certainly had a large and epic feel that transported audiences to an exotic and mysterious time in history that is known for its world changing people and events; a time of emperors, slaves and peasants. It is known for its cultural excesses and depravities, the extreme cruelty of some of its leaders, and yet also the incredible advances in art and science that helped to shape the world we live in today.

Ridley Scott was the director of this piece of historical fiction about a soldier in the Roman legions named Maximus Decimus Meridius. He is a skilled fighter who has achieved the rank of General. He is the kind of man who personally cares for each of the men under his command and has consequently earned unwavering respect and loyalty from his men.

Interesting note: If the name was actually said properly, according to Roman tradition, it would be Decimus Meridius Maximus. In fact there were enough departures from true history that at least one historical advisor who worked on the film resigned due to the changes that Scott made. Another asked not to be mentioned in the credits.

Maximus is played by actor Russell Crowe. I know that as a celebrity, Crowe has built himself a reputation as… to put it bluntly, an asshole.  But there is no denying that he is a very good actor. His character was a conglomeration of several historical figures, taking the best qualities of each of them and making one man. The trouble is, this turns the man into a saint. There was nothing human about him. He was good to a fault. He killed only when it was necessary. He was sure of his motives and unwavering in his morals.

Interesting note: The screenplay had to have a lot of rewrites, as Russell Crowe kept questioning every aspect of the script and actually walked off the set when he did not get the answers he wanted. In fact, one of the writers, William Nicholson, said of the overly-melodramatic line, “In this life or the next, I will have my vengeance,” Russell refused to say it. When he finally relented, he did so saying, “Your lines are garbage but I’m the greatest actor in the world, and I can make even garbage sound good.“

Opposite him was Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix. He was the bad guy. His every line, every action and every motive was evil. He was selfish, cruel, dishonest, manipulative and vain. He hadn’t a single redeeming quality, not a single virtue. Again, I have to call this poor writing. As the audience, we have no sympathy for him. There was no question that he needed to be defeated in the end and when it happened, we were just glad to be rid of him.

I think the plot, the emotional depth, and the engagement of the audience would have all been better served by making the two lead characters a little more human. Maybe they could have made Maximus a little darker or unsympathetic. Maybe they could have made him a man who enjoyed the all the violence and killing a bit too much. Maybe they could have made Commodus a little more sympathetic. Maybe they could have given him motives that were close to understandable or a past that made him seem misunderstood. Things like that would have made for deeper characters. It would have made for greater emotional involvement from the audience. But as it was, the characters were shallow, making the movie somewhat predictable.

Now, having said all that, I will reiterate, I enjoyed the movie. The action sequences were very exciting to watch, the sets and costumes were magnificent and grand, the music was intense, and the cinematography was wonderful. Even the predictable ending was somewhat uplifting.

General Maximus was head of the Roman Army under Emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris. Marcus Aurelius knows that his son Commodus will make a terrible ruler, and names Maximus his heir, charging him with restoring Rome to a republican form of government. Instead, Commodus murders Marcus before the announcement can be made. He seizes the throne and orders Maximus to be executed along with his wife and son.

Commodus’ sister Lucilla, played by Connie Nielsen, was the only character that wasn’t easy to figure out… at first. You weren’t sure where her loyalties were placed. She apparently used to be Maximus’ lover and still held a secret torch for him even though they had both married other people and had children of their own. Was she on her brother’s side or the handsome General’s?

But after the Emperor’s murder, she had no choice but to bow to Commodus. Her 8 year old son Lucius, played by young actor Spencer Treat Clark, was the next in line to the throne, since Commodus had no children. That put him in a position of danger, because Commodus wanted an heir of his own…. with his sister. But never mind that.

Either way, Maximus escapes his execution and is captured by slavers who sell him to a man named Proximo, played by Oliver Reed, who is barely recognizable as the same man who was in the 1968 Best Picture Winner, Oliver!

Interesting note: Oliver Reed actually died of a heart attack before filming was complete. In order to finish the movie, a body double was hired to play his remaining scenes and a 3-D image of Reed’s face was digitally added in post-production at a cost of 3.2 million dollars. This was done for 2 additional minutes of footage.

But the point I’m trying to make is – that is how Maximus becomes a GLADIATOR! And really, this is what we have all come to see. Just like the Roman citizens, we want to see people beat the crap out of each other. Why else is modern boxing and cage fighting so popular? We like seeing competition that has a combination of strength, skill, stamina and danger. And Maximus, having been trained as a soldier, excels at dealing out death. But he dislikes the killing, despite the fact that he is good at it. Remember, he must remain noble at all times. He only does it because he has to.

I have to admit that even I am excited by the violence and gore of the fighting scenes, though I don’t think my attitude would be the same if I knew that it was real. With my modern sensibilities, I would be disgusted with that kind of entertainment. But in the movies, anything goes!! Bring on the blood! Bring on the guts! Bring on the death! In spite of the underdeveloped characters, the movie had its heart in the right place. It understood what the audiences wanted to see and it delivered.

Crowe, Phoenix and Nielsen all did good with the script they were given, delivering the melodramatic dialogue as well as can be expected, though someone needs to tell the writer that putting an “Oh” before a statement does not make it more dramatic. It just makes it awkward because very few real people talk that way. “Oh, you should see the Coliseum, Spaniard.” “Oh, Sister. I wouldn’t want to be your enemy.” “Do they hear you? ‘Who?’ Your family in the afterlife. ‘Oh, yes.’” It just sounds unnatural to the ear.

I mentioned the great music earlier. Hans Zimmer wrote a score that was a study in mounting tension. The director spent a fair amount of time showing the lead-up to each battle sequence, allowing Zimmer to build and build the tension with his music. But I’m afraid we can’t really give all the credit for the score to him alone. What I mean is that the music for the action sequences was quite blatantly taken from Gustav Holst’s Symphonic Suite: The Planets. Specifically, there were passages that seemed to be lifted directly from the movement entitled Mars. But even if the notes are not exactly the same, they are very close. Still, this makes it no less effectively used, and no less enjoyable to listen to.

Another thing I’d like to give my opinion on is the costumes. Costume designer, Janty Yates, did a fantastic job and took home the Oscar for Best Costume Design. The Roman soldiers in their battle armor, the fancy robes of Commodus, the dirty and worn shifts of the slaves, and even the fantasy armor and helmets worn by Maximus in the gladiatorial arena were fantastic and so well done. I particularly loved the beautiful and colorful gowns worn by Lucilla. Yates really must have had some fun designing those fabulous dresses for Nielsen and she wore them very well.

The large sets were a combination of real sets and CGI. But most of it was done so seamlessly that it never even occurred to me that computers were responsible. As is often the case, the most effective special effects are the ones you don’t see. If you can tell that it is a special effect, then the film makers didn’t do their jobs right. For example, the crowds in the Coliseum were shown to be gigantic, made up of around 35,000 spectators. However, during filming, only 2,000 extras were used, a fact I would never have known if I hadn’t done my research. I wouldn’t have even considered the crowd at all. That means the CGI and computer enhanced compositing was done right.

There was another actor that I need to make note of who I think stood out above the rest of the supporting cast. Derek Jacobi played the part of Senator Gracchus. He had a very easy manner about him that made him seem natural. His character had a calm and placid surface, but a quick and calculating mind beneath. Jacobi was great. He had just the right amount of haughtiness in his performance to show that he had a bit of an ego, but not so much that you didn’t like him. Well done Jacobi.

All in all, I think I have changed my opinion about Gladiator. While it might not be the best film ever made, it was highly entertaining. I can guarantee that this is not the last time I will ever watch it. Considering everything, it deserved the Best Picture win just as much as anything else did. If only that pesky dialogue and the need for character development didn’t have to get in the way!

Interesting note: In 2009, details of a rejected sequel turned up on the internet. In it, Maximus would be reincarnated by the Roman gods and returned to Rome to defend Christians against persecution. He would then be transported to several other important periods in history, including WWII, the Vietnam War, and finally as a modern day General in the Pentagon. I think it is a cool concept for a movie or possibly even a franchise, but not as being associated with Gladiator. Look for the brilliant series of Casca books by Barry Sadler and you’ll get the same concept.