It's Time for Oscar! (Part 2)

Need help with your Oscar pool? Here are my predictions for who will take home Oscar gold tomorrow night.

Who Will Win (to my best guess):

Best Picture: The Artist

Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Best Actor: Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Best Actress: Viola Davis, The Help

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, The Help

Best Original Screenplay: Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

Best Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, The Descendants

Best Animated Feature: Rango

Best Animated Short: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Best Documentary Feature: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

Best Documentary Short Subject: The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

Best Foreign Language Film: A Separation

Best Live-Action Short Film: The Shore

Best Original Score: Ludovic Bource, The Artist

Best Original Song: “Man or Muppet,” The Muppets

Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life

Best Art Direction: Hugo

Best Costume Design: Hugo

Best Film Editing: The Artist

Best Makeup: The Iron Lady

Best Visual Effects: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Best Sound Mixing: Hugo

Best Sound Editing: Hugo

It's Time for Oscar! (Part 1)

Well, it's that time of year again.

It's time to break out the champagne, butter up the popcorn and place your bets in time for this upcoming Sunday's telecast of the 84th annual Academy Awards.

2012 may be that rare year where the Grammys garner a larger North American audience than the Oscars. Nearly 40 million people tuned into the music industry's celebrations on Feb. 12, merely 24 hours after Whitney Houston's death became international news. Last year's Oscar telecast only drew in an audience of 37.6 million, quite low for the Academy's standards.

What makes the outlook more dour this year? Well, there are very few bona-fide blockbusters competing for the top prize. Only one of the nine Best Picture nominees for 2011 grossed over $100 million at the U.S. box office, and that was The Help.

Meanwhile, the frontrunner in that category, The Artist, has grossed about $30 million so far (about one quarter of what 2010's winner, The King's Speech, had made by Oscar night last year). While that is a formidable number of receipts for a silent, black-and-white film, it would become the second lowest-grossing winner upon its likely win on Sunday night (or early Monday morning, depending on how the networks pad the timing this year).

But... you still have two days left to check out any Best Picture nominees that you missed. Here are snippets from the reviews I wrote for this year's nominated films.

Although I didn't write a review of The Help, I gave it an honourable mention in my year-end Top 10 list. It's a solid ***1/2 and features the finest work by an ensemble cast of any film from 2011.

Hugo: ****

(nominated for 11, including Best Picture and Best Director)

"A visually wondrous and deeply sentimental adventure that ranks as one of [Scorsese's] richest and most accomplished works... Adapted from Brian Selznick’s whimsical bestseller The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the film feels timeless from the first frame."

The Tree of Life: ****

(nominated for 3, including Best Picture and Best Director)

"An audacious, glorious symphony of sound and image, and an endlessly fascinating coming-of-age tale. It is a daunting but glorious work of art that beckons to be seen and seen again."

Midnight in Paris: ***1/2

(nominated for 4, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay)

"A film that’s as dreamy and delightful as anything [Woody] Allen’s ever made, a film with plenty of Oscar caliber behind it that’s also the sunniest piece of summertime escapism to hit theatres so far this season."

Moneyball: ***1/2

(nominated for 6, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay)

"A film that does not invigorate the love of the game but deconstructs it. It is a sad reflection of America’s pasttime at the current moment, and it explores this with nuanced performances and spare but powerful direction."

The Descendants: ***

(nominated for 5, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay)

"With a relaxed, languid pace, this is Payne’s sunniest and most romantic film... Clooney is magnificent: bitterly sharp as usual but with a piercing vulnerability cruising underneath. Hollywood’s favourite bachelor hasn’t played many fathers during his career, but now that he’s starting to look and sound like one, he captures the strain of raising a family with aplomb."

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: ***

(nominated for 2: Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor)

"More streamlined in its transition to the screen... Daldry’s adaptation succeeds in covering a breadth of emotionally charged terrain with insight and honesty."

War Horse: ***

(nominated for 6, including Best Picture)

"As a battle picture, War Horse is more heartfelt than harrowing... [but] with a magnificent beating heart at its centre, it’s a perfectly sincere piece of holiday feel-goodery, and a terrific tribute to the bygone days of boundless Hollywood epics."

The Artist: **1/2

(nominated for 10, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay)

"The film sometimes takes its experimental gimmick for granted... for all of its charm and “artistic” ambition, [The Artist] becomes simplistic in its storytelling as it progresses. Hazanavicius’s film handles the tribute to silent black-and-white Hollywood with an original style, but without much originality elsewhere."

A Certified Original

A Separation

**** out of ****

Directed by: Asghar Farhadi

Starring: Peyman Moaadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini and Sarina Farhadi

Running time: 123 minutes

As Iran’s unsavoury military maneuvers, nuclear suspicions and execution deals fill newspapers, the Middle Eastern nation may be the least desired place for moviegoers to escape to.

However, rejecting the Iranian drama A Separation – the Golden Bear winner at last year’s Berlin Film Festival – would also shun one of the most gripping films to emerge from any country in years.

Also a front-runner for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, it begins with an intense argument between Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) husband and wife of an upper-middle class Tehran family.

Simin wants to separate from Nader so she can take their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), abroad to live with the rest of her family before her visa expires. However, Nader argues that he cannot abandon his father, who is dying from Alzheimer’s.

While Simin’s divorce application is rejected, she moves out of the family apartment. At his wife’s behest, Nader hires a house cleaner named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to look after his father and keep the apartment in order.

But Razieh isn’t the ideal candidate for the job: the long commute to the apartment fatigues her and the sick father’s needs go against her religious accordance.

To dissolve further into the growing tension between Razieh and Nader, which stems from lies, deceptions and other misunderstandings between the two, would be unfair. That could ally this reviewer to side with one party. The strength of this drama comes from having to constantly rejudge the situation as new details are introduced and character motivations are revealed.

Nearly every scene from the midpoint on emerges with the velocity and intensity of a wired negotiation between bitter rivals. The pointed words, fiery and direct, create friction and Farhadi’s piercingly honest screenplay allows words to fling and dialogue to overlap without ever settling for one dominating stream.

It’s a richly nuanced piece of writing that deserves study in screenwriting classes, and is only heightened further by Farhadi’s objective eye as a director. Farhadi lets doubt and ambiguity simmer, letting the camera tighten on the faces and catch each character’s unblemished outrage.

Each scene comes equipped with the fragile, flawed characters coming to grips with their own humiliations and irresponsibility. The motivations of the characters are always clear, their impervious sentiments toward the escalating events fascinating to watch and brought to life with nuanced performances.

Meanwhile, the short scenes linking the negotiations are set in cars as the characters, rushing and embittered, navigate the twisty streets of Tehran. The lanes are close, the drivers are impatient and one just waits for a collision. These exterior scenes have the same intensity as the indoor confrontations.

The cast is uniformly compelling, although Peyman Moaadi deserves major notice for his commanding portrayal of a deeply frustrated father trying to teach his daughter how to negotiate when he is failing to do the same.

A Separation is a gut-wrenching pressure-cooker and an astounding human drama that shows simple characters trying to deal with a complicated situation.

Chronicle

*** out of ****

Directed by: Josh Trank

Starring: Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, Alex Russell, Michael Kelly and Ashley Hinshaw

Running time: 84 minutes

Just when you thought that the found footage genre and tales of average Joes turning into superheroes could not salvage a scrap of original material anymore comes an innovative merge of both trends.

The sharply titled Chronicle begins as a filmed account of the life of Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan), a shy high-school senior who eats lunch by himself and is pummelled outside of homeroom. His alcoholic father (Michael Kelly) continues the bruising at home, while Andrew’s mother shrivels up from an unknown illness. The teen buys a camera to record the abuse and beat-downs.

But when Andrew, his obnoxious cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and cocky quarterback Steve (Friday Night Lights’ Michael B. Jordan) find a glowing, crystalline vessel in a hole in the ground outside a rave, they are transferred superhuman abilities.

Andrew’s camera records him and his pals exploring newfound powers of flight and telekinesis. Since our protagonist can move the camera with his mind, first-time director Josh Trank creatively works around the genre’s handheld limitations by letting the camera float in midair.

Their powers of invincibility are up for debate, though, as these teens are resistant to air pressure changes and can be flung into metal buildings without much injury.

The seniors, untouched by the heavy moral fortitudes of other young superheroes in the Peter Parker canon, decide to have fun with their abilities. They play pranks on wide-eyed shoppers and try to impress cute girls. However, they abuse their powers at great lengths and to poor means.

Chronicle’s screenplay and original story come from Max Landis, son of director John of Blues Brothers and Animal House fame. Not only does Landis’s dialogue capture the casual cadence of teenage conversation, but his story revolves around a compelling protagonist.

DeHaan, with a grave face and perturbed demeanor, hooks you in, walking a fine line between sweetly vulnerable and maniacally dangerous. Andrew is flawed and miserable, with an intriguing emotional arc, and his decision-making is often frustratingly irrational. His unpredictable impulses make Andrew identifiable even when his heroic armour is hard to spot.

This is an atypical superhero film, as the monster comes from within the protagonist and not from a heavily costumed, world-domination-seeking entity in the outside world. These superteens are mischievous, and in Andrew’s case, disturbed.

At moments, though, Chronicle's found-footage gimmick becomes contrived. If each scene relies on the untampered naturalism of raw footage, why are there frequent jump cuts? Regardless, Trank has a sharp eye, and utilizes the most of a $12 million budget with grand visual effects work, especially in a thrilling battle-in-downtown-Seattle finale.

Anchored by a strong young cast, Chronicle is not just a dazzling mould of science-fiction, found footage and high school drama, but also a compelling glimpse into teenage social behaviour.

And The Ship Sails On

Pina

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Wim Wenders

Starring: Dancers from the Tanztheater Wuppertal

Running time: 103 minutes

German choreographer Pina Bausch is a towering influence in modern dance, even since her death in June 2009. Director Wim Wenders, also German, had been preparing a film about Bausch to begin production that summer.

After her passing, the dancers from her Tanztheater (“dance theatre”) in Wuppertal, Germany, decided to move ahead with the film as planned, but as an expressive eulogy to their late friend.

And, what a striking and wondrous eulogy it is! Structured around several of Bausch’s most dazzling and physically demanding pieces of dance theatre, Wenders’ film – now up for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar – is a thrilling tribute to all things Pina.

The first dance, Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), is performed on a stage covered with peaty dirt. In this Eden-like fable of sexual discovery, the female dancers dress as silk apparitions while panting, muscular men thump their way across the stage in a tribal nature.

Another memorable dance is Café Mueller, her most notable creation. Those who have seen Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her will recognize this riveting composition of movement.

In it, the deep stage is a room of chalky greys, with chairs and tables strewn throughout. However, the challenge comes from the visual impairment: the dancers moving through this obstacle course have their eyes closed.

In his attempt to cover as much creative ground lay by Bausch within a 103-minute running time, Wenders weaves his camera through indoor and outdoor locations – from bare stages and monorail cabins to street corners and swimming pools – as the Wuppertal dancers fret about.

The performances in Pina are never short on pure, kinetic energy. The dancers show a graceful fragility in one scene and impulses of strength in the next number. Up close, Wenders captures the expressiveness of the dancers' movements as they colour the evocative images Bausch created for them.

Breaking up the performances are personal odes from members of the company to their revered teacher, giving the audience an insight into her creative genius.

During a few of these quick intermissions, however, there is a yearning for more context of who Bausch was, as opposed to how her accomplishments helped to shape the world of modern, expressionist dance.

Nevertheless, as soon as the curtain rises again, immersing into sensual, liberating, boundlessly imaginative works of performance art, you cannot help but let the dances, completely alive, speak for themselves.

Author’s note: Pina is presented in 3D at many theatres, but even that format’s strongest detractors are praising how Wenders uses the extra dimension to capture the vitality of the dances. I did not see Pina in 3D and cannot tell you whether I stand by these accolades. However, I can imagine a director of Wenders’ intelligence knows what he’s doing.

Six Boroughs of Separation

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

*** out of ****

Directed by: Stephen Daldry

Starring: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max Von Sydow and Viola Davis

Running time: 128 minutes

Oskar Schell (played by Thomas Horn) is a precocious nine-year-old who is petrified of public transit, rattles a tambourine whenever he is nervous, and would rather communicate with Morse code than pick up a phone.

He is coming-of-age in uptown Manhattan a year after the 9/11 attacks. Oskar calls that tragedy “the worst day” since his father, a jeweller named Thomas (played in flashback by Tom Hanks, loving and lovely), died in the World Trade Center that morning.

However, upon re-entering his dad’s closet, Oskar finds an envelope marked with the word “Black” inside a blue vase. Within that envelope is a key, but Oskar doesn’t know what it opens. The boy believes that finding what the key opens will answer some important questions about his father. Oskar proceeds to track down the 400 or so New Yorkers with the last name “Black” to, ahem, unlock the mystery.

The film version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, from director Stephen Daldry, arrives in theatres with the same baggage that besieged the best-seller. Many readers intensely admired the novel, while some critics slammed Foer for using the 9/11 tragedy as a plot point.

More streamlined in its transition to the screen – an entire sub-story of tender correspondences between Oskar’s grandparents told in flashback is gone – Daldry’s adaptation succeeds in covering a breadth of emotionally charged terrain with insight and honesty.

The two finest performances in Extremely Loud come from entirely different sources: one newcomer and one recognizable screen veteran.

The new kid is Thomas Horn, in his film debut. As the shelled-up, hypersensitive protagonist, Horn rarely becomes cloying. The idiosyncratic protagonist is a true original, and Horn envelops the character’s quirks to create a steady naturalism. Even with a skinny frame, an unsteadily squeaky voice and beamy eyes, Horn carries the weight of every scene he’s in.

He tackles dense, emotionally shattering material with a quiet fortitude. He perfectly fills the character’s “heavy boots,” a term coined by Safran Foer, and has the dramatic weight to wear them proudly in every frame.

The other actor is Max Von Sydow, who plays the mysterious, unnamed renter who lives across the street from Oskar’s apartment. He accompanies the boy for a few choice excursions around New York City. The renter, however, cannot speak, and has the words “yes” and “no” tattooed into his hands.

Von Sydow’s pantomimed expressions are vivacious, even though the great actor’s face is worn and his baritone one of the most recognizable in cinema.

Beyond that, the film's 9/11 sections are overwrought and kitschy. Images of bodies falling are tasteless while Oskar’s reiterations of the events from that day become forced and mawkish after the first retelling. The book handled these tragic moments with less cacophony.

Thankfully, these sections only comprise about a quarter of the film’s running time. Elsewhere, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an often illuminating and deeply moving journey about trying to heal from that aftermath.

Out of Sight, Out of Its Mind

Haywire

** out of ****

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Starring: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum and Michael Douglas

Running time: 93 minutes

Here’s a tip for directors willing to put an unvetted personality as the star and selling point of their latest feature: make sure she has what it takes to carry a scene and sell a line of dialogue with conviction.

Unfortunately, one of the directors who didn’t test these attributes is Steven Soderbergh. Coming off Contagion, his best film in a decade, Soderbergh settles for straight-to-video production values in Haywire, a poorly acted, derivative and misguided revenge picture.

Mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano plays Mallory Kane, a covert spy for the American government. Even though Kane’s throttling strength – drawn from Carano’s own physical finesses – single-handedly takes down baddies during a mission in Barcelona, she is still assigned petty tasks, such as being arm candy to a suave British agent (Michael Fassbender).

However, things go awry when that agent tries to kill Mallory. He sadly miscalculates her velocity. Our salient heroine turns rogue to figure out why she was a target and track down those who tried to eliminate her.

Carano’s got a face and a body that works for a poster and perhaps a 30-second spot, but her monotonous line readings make it hard to feel for her vaguely outlined character.

Surprisingly, the middle-school level performances also stretch to more accomplished actors. Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas, all present for 10 minutes or so, seem actively disinterested in their slight parts.

Haywire is a stale thriller that recycles the trope of the lone-wolf assassin pursuing their own form of payback with mixed results. These problems could have been avoided if given a competent action director who knows how to set-up, frame and shoot mano-a-mano combat.

Soderbergh, however, is not the right director for the project. Although the lack of a soundtrack during the fight scenes highlights attention to the raw brutality of the violence, poor editing choices burrow the energy and momentum while the director's static camera simmers the intensity.

Carano has muscle and stamina, but Soderbergh doesn't have a clue on how to approach a fight. When the protagonist and her team go for the kill in Barcelona early in the film, the lead-in to this sequence is composed of jarring colour and tonal shifts, moving from slow-motion to regular speed and from colour to black-and-white.

Not only are these aesthetics, which look like Run Lola Run if directed by Jean-Luc Godard, distracting, but the sequence has no momentum due to the lack of clarity from shot to shot.

From the disjointed story structure to the enigmatic protagonist to the showdown at a house in the hills, Haywire can boast similarities to The Limey, an earlier Soderbergh film also written by Lem Dobbs. But while that 1999 film was a slice of old-school cool, Haywire is a shrugworthy effort.