In the Numbers

Really?!

If I were to be totally cynical I would say that the Academy Awards (Oscars) are more of a film industry convention than a ceremony to award works of cinematographic art.  You're probably thinking that if not the cynical in me, it’s the resentful, given that my favorite film, Amour, took home only one Oscar.

But, I’ve been reflecting on the outcome of Sunday’s Oscars and I don’t think it’s just resentment.

It is no secret how much the members of the Academy are “wooed” by the big studios to earn their votes. Not because these studios are great lovers of art, but because this too can be part of revenue enhancement and a great marketing strategy to earn more money for their films. And earn they do. An article I read put in numbers: from nomination day through the week before the Oscars, this year the nine Best Picture nominees increased their domestic box office grosses earning over $305 million dollars. Quite a boost just to be nominated!

If we look at the winners in Sunday’s Oscar ceremony, specially the few “surprises”, to see if there is a correlation between Oscars won and dollars grossed by the films, we just might discover, from the economic perspective, that the Academy voted right on target:

Django Unchained , the homage to the spaghetti Western (the Academy’s words, not mine) won two Oscars, more than the far superior Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook!  Christoph Waltz won Best Actor in a Supporting Role over the heavy weights and previous Oscar winners Robert De Niro, Philip Seymor Hoffman, Tommy Lee Jones and Alan Arkin, all of them in stellar performances. Jean Louis Trintignant and Dwight Henry (Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild supporting actors) weren’t even nominated, despite having won prestigious film awards for their fabulous acting. And I won't even go into Anne Hathaway's win. Where is the logic? It’s there, from the industry’s point of view.

Another surprise was Ang Lee’s win for Best Directing for Life of Pi over the amazing Michael Haneke.  Lee is a wonderful director and I have enjoyed many of his films, but Life of Pi was not his best work. It has been, however, the best grossing film of all the nominated making $583 million dollars last year. So Life of Pi, the top grosser, took home 4 Oscars, the most earned by any one film, followed by Les Miserables that grossed $394 and won 3 Oscars and Django Unchained that grossed $380 million and won 2 Oscars.  Amour made a “measly” $18 million and took home one Oscar, and Beasts of the Southern Wild that only made $12 million consequently took home….zero.

Amour has won all the major film awards that exist outside the United States and many here as well. It not only won the Palme D’Or, the top prize  at the Cannes Film Festival, but it swept the Césars taking home Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Editing and Best Cinematography; it also cleaned up at the European Film Awards, wining Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Screenwriting. So it is really surprising, to say the least, that it took only one award at Sunday’s Oscars.

What makes it shameful is that Amour won less awards than Django Unchained, Les Miserables and Life of Pi, films that even here in the United States were not given the greatest of reviews by the top American film critics. Going by numbers again: the aggregate of the top American film critics gave Amour a 98%; Les Miserables a 55%, Django Unchained a 76%, and Life of Pi, while better, only got an 88%.

Astoundingly enough, Amour took home less Oscars than Skyfall! And while I thought Skyfall was a great James Bond thriller, it is not a work of art. That this action movie would win more Oscars than Amour makes economic sense when you realize that Skyfall grossed over 1 billion dollars worldwide.  But what should weigh in the members of the Academy’s votes: how much a film grossed or how valuable it is as a work of art?

The film industry (including all its branches) generates over 80 billion dollars a year; certainly not negligible. It’s no wonder that it can put on a show where the First Lady of the United States shows up to hand out an award. Has the scale tipped a little too much in favor of the industrial side of movie making and away from the artistic? The cynical side of me looks at all these numbers and the sorry result of Sunday’s show and thinks it does. Is this something new? I guess not really, but there have been years where it hasn’t felt as dishonorable. And I don’t think it’s just the resentful cynic in me writing. It’s in the numbers.

 

Film	Worldwide Grosses (in millions of dollars)	Oscars
Life of Pi	583	4
Les Miserables	394	3
Django Unchained	380	2
Lincoln	224	2
Argo	206	3
Silver Linings Playbook	159	1
Zero Dark Thirty	104	1
Amour	18	1
Beasts of the Southern Wild	12	0
Skyfall	1,108	2

 

 

 

Predictable Oscars?

Tomorrow's the night, for those of you that are interested in the Academy Awards. I've posted my comentary (see The Oscars tab) and am hoping it will be a night of surprises!

The Masterful Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke, Emmanuel Riva & Jean-Louis Trintignant

When the lights came on at the end of the film Amour, a good half of the audience remained seated; some in silence, others quietly talking or drying up their tears. It’s true that this was an art film house audience and many were silver-haired couples, getting closer in age to the one whose drama had unfolded on the screen; none the less (or all the more) few movies elicit the gasps, sobs and ultimate stunned stillness that does this new piece of art from the masterful Michael Haneke.  

In Amour we are spectators to what awaits us all, if we live long enough: the natural and inevitable, yet somehow still unjust betrayal of our bodies as they succumb to old age and disease. At the same time we witness one of the most beautiful love stories a screen has held, in all its humanity and realism. Haneke does so in his style of brutal naturalism. No music score necessary to add emotion to each scene.  We are not told how to feel, we are just shown life in all its difficult and many times disturbing facets.

This director can bring out the amazing in the actors he works with.  The diabolically chilling acting by Arno Frisch as the psychopath Paul in Funny Games alongside the equally remarkable Susanne Lothar in the same movie, both so very hard to watch because  we know how true they are, and the truth can be so shocking. In some films his cast consists of a few in closed in situations and places, as is the case in Amour or Funny Games; in others, where the cast is extensive, like in The White Ribbon or Code Inconnu, each of the supporting actors, even in the most minor of roles, is captivating to watch. When working with actors that already have a career in the fabulous, Haneke allows them to take us into realms of awe. Such is certainly the case with the remarkable Emmanuel Riva in Amour, and the no less so Jean-Louis Trintignant as her love painfully dealing with her suffering. Every actor in Haneke’s films has to transform themselves into ordinary people in extraordinary situations. They don’t act, they are.  Juliette Binoche  and Daniel Auteuil in Cache, or even Annie Girardot as Auteuil’s mother in that movie; Isabell Hupert in The Piano Teacher… the list is as long as this auteur’s movies.

 Amour has already won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. It most probably will only take home one of the five Academy Awards for which it has been nominated (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Foreign Film and Best Actress for Emmanuelle Riva), although it should win all five of them, in this cinephile’s humble opinion.  Not that Haneke makes films to win awards, but a great movie should be given awards so that many more people will see it. It is not unusual that the Academy will give a film like Amour only the Best Foreign Language film (which Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon should have won back in 2009) instead of the Best Picture award that it deserves. The Academy shies away from great films that depict life at is it. Last year the French film The Artist won precisely because it is a film that distracts from life, not one that embraces its realism.  Films like The Artist or The King’s Speech leave us the moment the lights turn on. Amour and Michael Haneke’s many other marvelous films not only keep us in our seats at the theatre past the final credits, they haunt us as we go on with our lives as we know we’ve just seen them on the screen.

Love, in all its Strangeness

Strange Days, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Some Kind of Wonderful

Romantic movies are a genre that encyclopedias could be written about, so I won’t even try to go into them extensively, more so because if there is a genre where subjectivity is dominant it’s this one. But who can resist a good romantic film on Valentine’s Day? So I’m going to write about some of my favorites; just some, for I confess that I am a sucker for romances. And I won’t talk about the heartbreakers, even though there are many great romance films of this type, all the way from George Cuckor’s Camille (Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor) or Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (Bergman and Bogart),  to the more recent Blue Valentine, by Derek Cianfrance or Away From Her by Sarah Polley. So many dimensions of heartbreak! Such beautiful movies!

 I’m going to talk about the happy ones (love can be happy).

Among this type of romantic films, my preference is for those romances where there is a strong and longstanding relationship between the protagonists (so no “love at first sight” ones).  In the romance films I prefer, it’s usually the case that there is a strong bond between the two main characters, but there is also romantic love and passion from one of them towards the other, but this passion is not corresponded; at least not for a while. The movie will then take us through the slow process in which the protagonist who is loved comes to the realization of his love or falls romantically in love with his friend.  Love flourishes, passion blooms and all is good.

There are quite a number of films of this type, and they usually have other things going on, so they’re never dull. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days is a futuristic, science fiction action movie with this romantic undertone; Angela Basset adoring Ralph Fiennes through danger and addiction until he realizes his passion for her (and if I were to vote for a passionate kiss on film, the one between these two would be at the top of the list).  

On the other end, totally realistic and very dramatic, is the love that Antonio has for Luciana in Ettore Scola’s beautiful film about love in all its dimensions: C’eravamo Tanto Amati  (We All Loved Each Other so Much). In this great Italian film, it takes Luciana almost a lifetime to realize her love for Antonio, through the awe inspiring acting by Nino Manfredi and Stefania Sandrelli.

On a lighter tone, there is the teen love movie Some Kind of Wonderful by the wonderful  himself John Hughes, a master at understanding teens and their relationships, very specially this one where Mary Stuart Masterson is the best friend and the prom chauffeur to Eric Stolz, though she finally gets her due (and the diamond earrings!).  As for romantic comedies of this sort, there is Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally, probably Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal’s best acting to date, which is also about the ins and outs, ups and downs of long standing friendships, where love finally emerges.

But I’m going to end this post with  Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , for in all its creative fiction, this movie so very clearly shows love in all its strangeness; its beauty, its heartbreak, its waning and even (for a while there) vanishing, but ultimately, its persistence. Now that’s love.

 

 

Harmless Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh has been talking about retiring from making feature films and there is speculation that Side Effects will be his last film. Seems he will be moving on to television and other artistic ventures. Soderbergh is a good filmmaker and will certainly be a boost to television. It might be a medium that fits his style more.  Not to say he hasn’t made some good films. He has won prestigious awards for some, including the Palme D’Or for Sex, Lies and Videotapes and a Best Director Academy Award for Traffic – quite his best films in this cinephile’s opinion.  But he has made many more films that, while entertaining and good money makers, are really pretty innocuous. Films like the Ocean’s trilogy, Contagion, Magic Mike, and others that, while entertaining, are also quite forgettable.  A great film auteur he is not.

This is not to be taken to mean that Side Effects is a bad or boring movie. It is entertaining, well-constructed and Jude Law is great in it. But it is also a movie that just skims the surface of some very serious issues like mental illness, the ethics of psychiatrists and pharmaceuticals, marital relationships, without delving into any of them emotionally or even rationally. Things end up being quite implausible, which is kind of a characteristic of many of his films. The main characters in Side Effects are all exceptionally beautiful and their situations and lives quite distant from most of ours (who would be so horribly dissatisfied and resentful to “end up” in a nice Manhattan apartment, working at a New York ad agency?). Soderbergh keeps them at a distance, because that’s his style, the characters in his movies are quite flat. So while it’s fun to watch them, there is really no empathizing or feeling with them. They basically don’t ring true. (How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?)

 

Side Effects certainly holds some interesting twists and turns, but it leaves you wishing that the director had not turned so much and gone deeper into some of those tough issues we face today. It ends up as a good murder mystery with gorgeous people (who wouldn’t keep going to sessions with psychiatrists Jude Law and Katherine Zeta-Jones?). So: fun to watch and “easy on the eye”, but that’s it. And maybe that’s why Soderbergh is turning to television.

Ode to Austen

 

There is no doubt in my mind that Jane Austen would be thrilled with some of the movies that have been made from her novels. I have turned to Austen’s novels much like I’ve read that British soldiers did during World War I, in the trenches and as therapy to re-establish a sense of “order” to a world seemingly gone askew (Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Janeites” delves into Austen as wartime consolation). So she’s an old favorite, as are the movies her work has inspired. Some of these movies have not only captured the spirit and content of Jane’s novels, but are time machines into the period in which she lived.

Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and Adrian Shergold’s Persuasion stand out the most in this respect, although most movies and television series based on the novels have taken great pains to be true to the time period. There are scenes in these movies that are veritable tableaus of life in Austen’s time. The breakfast scenes in the Bennet family’s dining room, with these dogs that walk through the house, breeds that one would think only existed in Austen’s time; the first dance, in the village, where the Bennet girls are introduced to Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, where the space and lighting are not only true to the time period, but also most decidedly romantic. The story telling is very modern, so the pace is quicker than the novels, but they do justice to the stories.

Above all, these movies, in particular the ones mentioned above, build upon the different relationships present in the Austen novels. While it is true that the romantic relationships are at the heart of the stories, the heroine in Jane’s works has other just as important relationships that are thankfully captured as primary in the movies, and great female actors have been brought in to develop them. The magnificent Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet have the best scenes in Lee’s Sense & Sensibility including the heartbreaking one where Marianne lies dying and Elinor pleads ”do not leave me alone!” The great Toni Collette working alongside Gwyneth Paltrow on the exasperating relationship between Harriet and Emma in Douglas McGrath’s Emma, or the brilliant Sally Hawkins as Anne Elliot in Shergold’s Persuasion being ensnared by Alice Krieg’s Lady Russell. They are a delight to women, since we know that our female relationships are this strong and decisive in our lives.

Austen’s writing is so durable that even male film directors can channel the fortitude of the female characters in Jane’s novels in the romantic relationships they establish with the always moral and faithful male characters she develops. These are, ultimately, a romantic’s view of love. They are full of the hope of the endurance of love, made beautifully manifest in Captain Wentworth’s love of Anne, or Mr. Bennet’s response to his wife when she reproaches him for not having compassion for her nerves: “You mistake me, my dear. I have the highest respect for them. They’ve been my constant companions these twenty years”, never said better than by Donald Sutherland playing Mr. Bennet to Brenda Blethyn’s  wonderful portrayal of Mrs. Bennet.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published 200 years ago this year. It is a testimony to this wonderful writer and her female characters that the women in the films based on her movies today are still so fabulous and certainly constitute an ideal to women today. They are intelligent, resilient, moral, caring women with a drive and love of life and its challenges, never deterred and never corrupted. When Elinor asks her sister if she is comparing her conduct to that of  Willoughby, Marianne responds much like this Austen admirer would do today: “No. I compare it with what ought to have been. I compare it with yours”.