Oscar noms

[Marlow]

All the usual suspects are there, regardless of the actual quality of the cinema they made (yes, you, DeNiro, and yes, I'm sorry, Steven, the movie is very 'interesting', and yes DD-L should win, but it is not a great movie overall), but I am particularly galled that neither Skyfall nor Dark Knight Rises are there, which, box office completely aside, we're two of the best-MADE movies of the year!!!!

[gh]

Banner headline across the top of my paper's entertainment section this morning:

"A Spineless Snub Of Zero Director"

The story (interestingly enough, the headlines between paper and online version never match in the SF Chron):

http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Os ... 183181.php

[mcgato]

Doesn't Marlow do this pretty much every year? A complaint that some of the highest grossing movies of the year didn't get nominated for an Oscar.

[Marlow]

There are many (many!) box-office smashes that have no business being nominated, and there are likewise many that I loved, but are just what I like, low-brow tho they may be, but I'm talking about 'great cinema', which Skyfall and DKR definitely were! Durango Unchained?! Oh pleeeez, trash movie-making at its sensationalistic worst. Might as well include Texas Chainsaw.

[Marlow]

Sorry . . . 'Django' . . . So bad I couldn't even remember the name.

[kuha]

I saw Les Mis last night. I could swear that it was at least 9 hours long.

[jeremyp]

Banner headline across the top of my paper's entertainment section this morning:

"A Spineless Snub Of Zero Director"

The story (interestingly enough, the headlines between paper and online version never match in the SF Chron):

http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Os ... 183181.php

The snub of Bigelow is shocking. How can you snub a movie that has been rated by almost everybody who matters as one of the two top movies of the year? Also snubbing Afflek was a major disappointment. It's now a lock for Spielberg who they used to ignore-until "Shindler's List."

[Pego]

I saw Les Mis last night. I could swear that it was at least 9 hours long.

The only Les Misèrables that were worthy of Victor Hugo was the Jean Gabin's version from the fifties ( I don't recall the director or the rest of the cast).

[mump boy]

I saw Les Mis last night. I could swear that it was at least 9 hours long.

Flumpy just saw it he said it's one of the worst films he's ever seen, in the same league as Mama Mia !!

[kuha]

I saw Les Mis last night. I could swear that it was at least 9 hours long.

Flumpy just saw it he said it's one of the worst films he's ever seen, in the same league as Mama Mia !!

I'm honestly not sure how "bad" and "just about unbearable" correlate. In many respects it was reasonably well done (the theatrical set "look" had its moments), but.......it just seemed endless.

[Marlow]

The standard joke is, of course, that the title does not refer to the characters, but the audience.

[Flumpy]

As I wrote on another forum......

By definition a movie musical on this scale has to be cinematic. It needs grandeur and spectacle, to sweep you away into a place where you can suspend your disbelief and accept the fact that everyone is singing when it would be much easier just to speak. Not two and half hours of grimy close up and tight camera angles so as not to expose the obvious fact that it was all being shot on a tiny set. On the few occasions that they actually did wide shot or we finally saw some sky you felt like gulping in fresh air to stem your claustrophobia.

Tom Hooper was about as good choice to direct this as Tarantino would have been to direct 'Amour'.

The cinematography is appalling. People keep going in and out of focus, the whole colour tone changes throughout. Within the same scene people are lit differently so you cut back and forth between characters who look as if they were filmed in completely different rooms. Sometimes it looks like it's been shot in Cinemascope at others as if Ken Loach was in charge. I've seen better lit Dogme films.

It would have helped of course if Hugh Jackman's singing wasn't so painful to the ears, or they could have introduced a slight dash of colour to proceedings, or the songs weren't all do bone crushingy dull, or they'd decided on a style and stuck with it, or the story wasn't so idiotic, or it didn't look like a filmed stage production, or you believed a single one of the relationships, or they hadn't minimised the comic relief, or they hadn't rushed through every plot point in seconds, or the barricade hadn't been the single most laughable protest since Sacheen Littlefeather's, or Tom Hooper had seen 'Oliver' even once.

It felt like the whole thing had been directed by 3 different people then all stitched together in the edit. Gone With The Wind it ain't.

Why was everyone singing directly into camera? Why was there no proper sense of time or place? Why wherever people lived over the course of 30 years did they only have to turn a corner to bump into the exact people they never wanted to see again? What exactly were the students protesting about?

Back to Jackman. He actually gives a very good performance but there is no getting around how atrocious his singing. I kept wincing throughout. To give you some idea. Imagine if Ethel Merman an Australian man. Then have her singing turgid, melodramatic choral music in your face at the top of her lungs for nearly 3 hours!!! Yes it really is that painful.

The worst film I've seen in a cinema since 'Mama Mia' (Officially the worst film ever made) only not as much fun. I've seen films I've hated more (Inception), I've sat through films that I've detested (The Dark Knight). But I haven't seen one as all round incompetent since Christine Baranski did 'The Robot' on a beach in Greece.

[jeremyp]

Flumpy you obviously know music and musicals. But I, a mere mortal, loved the theater version and the movie version of Les Miz. Probably because I was not looking at and listening to all the detail you were focused on. Today I go to see "Zero Dark Thirty" a movie I have anticipated eagerly for months. I know the subject matter quite well, having read 3 books on it, so I may be doing what you (maybe) did in Les Miz: looking too much at detail and not at the big picture. It's sort of like a track afficionado wincing at the network and announcers.

[gh]

......
It felt like the whole thing had been directed by 3 different people then all stitched together in the edit. Gone With The Wind it ain't......

You have unintentionally created one of the best movie-trivia laugh lines of all time.

Would you care to guess how many different directors GWTW had? That's right, three!

[Conor Dary]

......
It felt like the whole thing had been directed by 3 different people then all stitched together in the edit. Gone With The Wind it ain't......

You have unintentionally created one of the best movie-trivia laugh lines of all time.

Would you care to guess how many different directors GWTW had? That's right, three!

Yes, but in those days, with some obvious exceptions such as John Ford, the producers, such as GWTW's David O. Selznick pretty much controlled production. So whoever the director was sort of irrelevant. Directors came and went often in those days.

[Flumpy]

......
It felt like the whole thing had been directed by 3 different people then all stitched together in the edit. Gone With The Wind it ain't......

You have unintentionally created one of the best movie-trivia laugh lines of all time.

Would you care to guess how many different directors GWTW had? That's right, three!

That wasn't unintended.

[gh]

silly me for underestimating your historical acumen (not to mention sly sense of the pointed jab)

[Flumpy]

I'm just glad you got it

Of the biggest shockers in the Oscar noms was Best Director with Hanneke, Russell and Zeitlin getting in over Bigelow and Affleck.

Tom Hooper and Tarantino were also snubbed.

In 25 years of Oscar watching I can't remember a more unexpected result.

[jeremyp]

Just back from "0dark30." Amazing movie and Bigelow's snub is, for me, a huge clanger. My main concern and interest in this movie was the detective work that went into getting to Abbotabad, There were a lot of players to get to that point and much discussion, and different stories, about how the intel was gained. At least in what I've delved into. Bigelow focuses on the torture (oops I mean enhanced interrogation) too much, but I think her purpose was more the practicality of a director interested in drama/tension than political. Filming torture is more dramatic than stitching together a scattered framework of intel. The main thing it got right was the fact that UBL's demise came because of intense focus on the right lead and the work of many unknowns. Maya, the CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain ("you go girl" my wife kept whispering) is real but whether her role is as depicted we may not know for a few decades. Although I did read that the real "Maya" sent out angry e-mails about people honored for the raid who she thought had long ignored her point of view.

The last half hour of the raid is done pretty much in real time and appears very real. I wasn't a fan of "Hurt Locker" but Bigelow knocked this one out of the park.

[bad hammy]

Sorry . . . 'Django' . . . .

Marlow, maybe a dumb question but did you actually go and see this movie? Based on past posts this would seem to be one you might have passed on - kinda surprised you went.

As one who has Pulp Fiction at the top of my all-time-favorite-movie list, Django is a mixed bag. It is a really great piece of story writing and film making that is somewhat sidetracked by Tarantino's need for over-the-top gore (several large orders of magnitude worse than Pulp Fiction) and the constant hammering of the n-word. Guy needs to grow up.

[jeremyp]

Django showed me what I figured out after "Pulp Fiction," and that was that Q.T. would only pull off his genre re-boots successfully if he wasn't too full of himself. He didn't succeed. "Look at me" he crows in all his subsequent movies, "let's see how outrageous I can get." He has a schtick, and an audience, what he lacks is self discipline, but if he got that he'd lose half his audience who go to see over the top movie making. I saw it with my 14 year old grandson whose giggles throughout told me what I already knew. Q.T. appeals to the small boy in his audience.

[Marlow]

Sorry . . . 'Django' . . . .

Marlow, maybe a dumb question but did you actually go and see this movie? Based on past posts this would seem to be one you might have passed on - kinda surprised you went.

Oh no, of course I didn't go - just like I didn't go to Texas Chainsaw. The trailers seemed 'interesting', so I was wavering in my resolve to boycott anything by QT. But then I saw a preview package on TV and saw how egregiously stupidly QT had managed the plot, so I stayed away. He has some technical skill in directing, but he has no eye for real character development and the plot always devolves into gratuitous violence.

[kuha]

Just back from "0dark30." Amazing movie and Bigelow's snub is, for me, a huge clanger. My main concern and interest in this movie was the detective work that went into getting to Abbotabad, There were a lot of players to get to that point and much discussion, and different stories, about how the intel was gained. At least in what I've delved into. Bigelow focuses on the torture (oops I mean enhanced interrogation) too much, but I think her purpose was more the practicality of a director interested in drama/tension than political. Filming torture is more dramatic than stitching together a scattered framework of intel. The main thing it got right was the fact that UBL's demise came because of intense focus on the right lead and the work of many unknowns. Maya, the CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain ("you go girl" my wife kept whispering) is real but whether her role is as depicted we may not know for a few decades. Although I did read that the real "Maya" sent out angry e-mails about people honored for the raid who she thought had long ignored her point of view.

The last half hour of the raid is done pretty much in real time and appears very real. I wasn't a fan of "Hurt Locker" but Bigelow knocked this one out of the park.

I also just saw this. I thought it was very done, but it's not an easy movie to watch. There is something rather weird about turning the raw wounds of recent history into any kind of "entertainment," although I know this isn't the first or last time it will happen. I thought the build-up and "research" phase of the film was pretty well done, although the "interrogation" sequences were tough to watch and (I thought) a bit too prominent or frequent. The stuff from the time the helicopters take off is superb.

[Marlow]

Going to see OD30 today, but the producers are in a world of hurt now. They advertise it as a 'true story' as in "see the REAL back story", but then they knowingly make s**t up to suit their 'historical fiction' dramatic purposes. You can't have it both ways!!! People seeing this movie, having not read the accusations against it, have a reasonable expectation to think this is how it all went down, when that's simply not true.

[kuha]

Going to see OD30 today, but the producers are in a world of hurt now. They advertise it as a 'true story' as in "see the REAL back story", but then they knowingly make s**t up to suit their 'historical fiction' dramatic purposes. You can't have it both ways!!! People seeing this movie, having not read the accusations against it, have a reasonable expectation to think this is how it all went down, when that's simply not true.

I'm pretty sure that the credits at the very beginning are something like "Based on real events..." or something to that effect, which has the proper amount of conceptual wiggle room. I do have a major problem with our willful confusion of facts/history with entertainment stories/fictions of various kinds. Truth is hard enough to get to without having to work in the fog of popular culture simulacra.

At any rate, I'll look forward to your thoughts on the film.

[jeremyp]

Going to see OD30 today, but the producers are in a world of hurt now. They advertise it as a 'true story' as in "see the REAL back story", but then they knowingly make s**t up to suit their 'historical fiction' dramatic purposes. You can't have it both ways!!! People seeing this movie, having not read the accusations against it, have a reasonable expectation to think this is how it all went down, when that's simply not true.

I've read 4 books on this and saw one (made for TV) movie and they all have differing information. The Maya character is a CIA agent and so I have to guess she might be a real person with stitched on events, and the Dan character is clearly a composite, all to protect the real individuals. The "made up" stuff doesn't detract from the basic truth of the intel search and pursuit and execution. Her pursuit of the "courier" makes sense. I had an outline for a story in my head, circa 2006, in which UBL was tracked down by following the courier.

I was also interested in the "mistakes" made by the Seal team and the courier, one of which almost cost lives and another which did. I won't spoil it until more folks have seen the movie.

[Marlow]

The Maya character is a CIA agent and so I have to guess she might be a real person with stitched on events, and the Dan character is clearly a composite, all to protect the real individuals. The "made up" stuff doesn't detract from the basic truth of the intel search and pursuit and execution.

I didn't have a problem with Argo, because it was obvious that the script was playing fast and loose with what must have really happened (a lot more boringly). There was no cop chase down the tarmac at the end of the real! But, and here's where OD30 has gotten in trouble, the waterboarding for viable intel was BS. The 'real CIA' acknowledges that waterboarding almost always results in lies and confusing the real facts. I'm sure waterboarding did happen in Gitmo (or even in-country), but it got us no leads (according to everything I've read (disinfo?!)).

I'm off to the flicks!

[jeremyp]

The Maya character is a CIA agent and so I have to guess she might be a real person with stitched on events, and the Dan character is clearly a composite, all to protect the real individuals. The "made up" stuff doesn't detract from the basic truth of the intel search and pursuit and execution.

I didn't have a problem with Argo, because it was obvious that the script was playing fast and loose with what must have really happened (a lot more boringly). There was no cop chase down the tarmac at the end of the real! But, and here's where OD30 has gotten in trouble, the waterboarding for viable intel was BS. The 'real CIA' acknowledges that waterboarding almost always results in lies and confusing the real facts. I'm sure waterboarding did happen in Gitmo (or even in-country), but it got us no leads (according to everything I've read (disinfo?!)).

I'm off to the flicks!

Obviously torture can lead to actionable intelligence, most humans will crack, but so can traditional interrogation. The issue we have to face is then: why torture? The argument made by the pro torture crowd (I mean the pro enhanced interrogation crowd) is that it's faster, and if traditional interrogation isn't getting anywhere why not use torture and see if it does. The argument from the anti torture folks, especially the FBI interrogators like Ali Soufan, is that better and more intel comes from treating prisoners humanely than inhumanely.

[Marlow]

So . . . lots of conflicting thoughts here (no spoilers):

1. The torture scenes are nothing that didn’t go on, and the info gleaned does NOT lead to ObL, but does give our heroine (Jessica Chastain, VERY good, representing some mid-level CIA analyst who just happened to guess right on how to get to ObL) the seeds of her obsession to find him and does show us the nature of her resolve.

2. The movie is ‘important’ and fascinating, but the first 1.75 hours are problematic. Much of what we see is tedious, which represents how tedious the hunt was (TEN years), but does not make for much entertainment or even necessary exposition. In this regard it mirrors Lincoln.

3. The last 45 minutes (yeah, at 2.5 hours, it is too long) is $MONEY$, but it’s vaguely dissatisfying, since we know virtually nothing about the ST6 members who are the real heroes (and ironically, anti-heroes) of the movie.

4. Of all the millions of ways this story could have been told, this treatment seems rather mediocre, given all the hoopla. Bigelow should get kudos for the effort (just like SS in Lincoln, but the story could have been much better.

5. It (like Lincoln) is a must-see movie, just because the subject matter is so important, but I left the theater underwhelmed. This is the odds-on "Best' of the O-noms?

[kuha]

OK, I'd agree with all that. We DID see the same movie!

[jeremyp]

So . . . lots of conflicting thoughts here (no spoilers):

1. The torture scenes are nothing that didn’t go on, and the info gleaned does NOT lead to ObL, but does give our heroine (Jessica Chastain, VERY good, representing some mid-level CIA analyst who just happened to guess right on how to get to ObL) the seeds of her obsession to find him and does show us the nature of her resolve.

2. The movie is ‘important’ and fascinating, but the first 1.75 hours are problematic. Much of what we see is tedious, which represents how tedious the hunt was (TEN years), but does not make for much entertainment or even necessary exposition. In this regard it mirrors Lincoln.

3. The last 45 minutes (yeah, at 2.5 hours, it is too long) is $MONEY$, but it’s vaguely dissatisfying, since we know virtually nothing about the ST6 members who are the real heroes (and ironically, anti-heroes) of the movie.

4. Of all the millions of ways this story could have been told, this treatment seems rather mediocre, given all the hoopla. Bigelow should get kudos for the effort (just like SS in Lincoln, but the story could have been much better.

5. It (like Lincoln) is a must-see movie, just because the subject matter is so important, but I left the theater underwhelmed. This is the odds-on "Best' of the O-noms?

Absolutely not surprised by your comments or your perspective, and couldn't disagree more. You seem perplexed by movies that don't go bang or have masked super heroes in them. I know that's a bit testy but I can easily say it's the best movie from 2012 that I've seen, along with "Argo" and "Lincoln." All based on historical events, so much more interesting than fantasy.

[Marlow]

You seem perplexed by movies that don't go bang or have masked super heroes in them. I know that's a bit testy but I can easily say it's the best movie from 2012 that I've seen, along with "Argo" and "Lincoln." All based on historical events, so much more interesting than fantasy.

Testy? Not at all.
Misperceived, ignorant, dismissive, condescending, pompous . . . yes, all that.
You simply haven't been paying attention. Yes, I typically like many 'fantasy' concepts, but most I don't. And I love non-fiction (sic) movies that are INTERESTINGLY made. 0D30 had its moments, but it also had long stretches of unnecessary 'exposition'. Argo was fun, because Affleck made it so. Lincoln was deadly in the first hour and then Tommy Lee Jones started eating up all the scenery in sight, which was fun, and SS/DD-L got down to bidniss, and that was fascinating. Bigelow was MUCH more effective in The Hurt Locker. This time she chose a canvas too large for what she wanted to paint.

[jeremyp]

You seem perplexed by movies that don't go bang or have masked super heroes in them. I know that's a bit testy but I can easily say it's the best movie from 2012 that I've seen, along with "Argo" and "Lincoln." All based on historical events, so much more interesting than fantasy.

Testy? Not at all.
Misperceived, ignorant, dismissive, condescending, pompous . . . yes, all that.

I'll accept the 1st, 3d,4th,5th adjectives, but not the 2d.

[Marlow]

Testy? Not at all. Misperceived, ignorant, dismissive, condescending, pompous . . . yes, all that.

I'll accept the 1st, 3d,4th,5th adjectives, but not the 2d.

I don't mean ignorant in a general sense (far from it, actually); ignorant of what I do and don't like. As to the others, I'm sure you can understand why I might take exception to your remarks. There's absolutely no need for that kind of sentiment here.

[Conor Dary]

Going to see OD30 today, but the producers are in a world of hurt now. They advertise it as a 'true story' as in "see the REAL back story", but then they knowingly make s**t up to suit their 'historical fiction' dramatic purposes. You can't have it both ways!!! People seeing this movie, having not read the accusations against it, have a reasonable expectation to think this is how it all went down, when that's simply not true.

Steve Coll, who probably knows as much about this subject as anyone, gives a big thumbs down.

‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading’

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... tpage=true