Oh, BTW... the Oscars

For Best Picture:

Call Me By Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Get Out
Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The rest.

Wow, where to begin?

I'm no longer as hung up on the Oscars as I used to be, so when I saw The Post last week (my post on The Post, as it were, is coming, promise), I was convinced it would dominate the nominations. I forgot how gaga everyone was over Water, which I thought was just good, not great, and besides, genre movies never get anything but technical nominations, right?

The definition of "Oscar movie" is changing big time. That's something I'm still getting used to, but ultimately it means now there's room for movies you wouldn't ordinarily think would get a place at the table.

I still underestimate stuff, though. I passed on Get Out because it looked like a Crash rip-off; I passed on Call Me By Your Name and Phantom Thread because they looked boring to me; Dunkirk was boring; I thought Lady Bird wouldn't get anything more than a screenplay nod, and while I certainly thought Sally Hawkins was a legit contender, I thought Water would settle for below-the-line nods.

So you can imagine how surprised I am right now.

Seriously, though, it's good that we're getting new blood in the ranks; films I had never even heard of, nominees with names I can't pronounce; it's exciting in that sense. Will it entice me to follow the Oscars again? Ask me in about five years.

So I guess Netflix is no joke, huh? I'm still unsure why they qualify as Oscar-caliber movies instead of well-done TV movies, but I guess that's how it is now, so... yay Dee Rees for this movie Mudbound. I'm sure it's quite good. I knew she had the right stuff after I saw Pariah years ago.

No Andy Serkis for Best Actor? Oh well, that was always a long shot anyway — but I still say a performance-capture acting nomination is a possibility, sometime in the future.

I guess Mother! was too polarizing to get any recognition, which is certainly understandable, though I think Darren Aronofsky should have gotten a Director nomination anyway. It will be very interesting to see how this movie is regarded in twenty years or so.

I finally saw Logan, a few weeks ago, and I did like it; it felt quite different from the usual long underwear fare and was a fitting farewell to the character (though I'm sure they'll find a way to revive him somehow). Kudos to James Mangold and his partners for the Adapted Screenplay nod.

Yay for Greta Gerwig for joining a very exclusive (for now) club. Yay for Loving Vincent for the Animated Feature nod. I sure hope it wins. And yay for The Disaster Artist for their Adapted Screenplay nod. If ABC is smart, they'll get Tommy Wiseau to be a presenter!

Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens NY

If you know me by now, you may be able to guess what my favorite scene was in Darkest Hour. England had the Nazi wolves howling at the door, the government was all set to negotiate for a surrender, and Winston Churchill was the only official left who still wanted to fight. He decides to talk to the people, get their opinion, so what does he do?

He takes public transportation.

Did this moment really happen? Who cares? It makes for good drama; indeed, it's not unlike Henry V walking among his troops on the eve of battle. Churchill mentions he had never taken the subway before — believable, given the kind of life he had led prior to that moment — yet he understood this was where he could take the pulse of the people. True, he could have gone into a pub, but he chose the subway, or the underground, as the Brits call it, and the people told him what they wanted: to fight. More to the point, he listened.

It goes without saying that we're currently experiencing a leadership void in Washington, but here in New York, there's another lack of leadership taking place, and it, too, involves the subways.

We have a governor, who controls the administration that operates our subways, who has also ridden the rails to talk to the people, only it's usually for things like ribbon-cutting ceremonies for a new station (usually delivered late and over budget).

Meanwhile, the trains themselves fall behind schedule, suffer derailments (my train had one the day I went to see Hour; I had to take a second bus and walk a long way), operate with ancient signals, and keep more and more passengers late for their appointments. The buses are little better.

In this election year, the governor finally claims to have a plan to get transit the money it needs to not only update the system, but to simply keep it functional, although this is the same guy who, in the past, raided the transit coffers for his own ends.

In Hour, Churchill knew enough about the value of the subway to go there and engage the people in a dialogue during a time of crisis. Twitter overflows with stories of our broken trains, tweeted directly to the governor, the same guy who declared a state of emergency on the subways last year, but his silence has been deafening. Which man looks more like a leader to you?

Anyway, back to the movie: these days we take this period in history for granted in the sense that we say, of course we had to fight the Nazis; no question about it, but at the time, in England, it wasn't so obvious. No one knew for sure how far Germany would go, and negotiating a peace with them must have made sense to a lot of folks because who the hell wanted them to come in and kick England's ass arse? Churchill, however, saw more to the situation than that.

Joe Wright made this film in a way that, ironically, reminded me of a German expression, "Sturm und Drang:" bombastic music, extremes of light and shadow, dramatic camera angles, heavy on the emotion, yet it never feels too melodramatic or over-the-top. And do I even need to go into Gary Oldman's towering performance, in all that prosthetic makeup, no less, one which should FINALLY get him the Oscar he has deserved for so very long?

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Related:

Dunkirk

The King's Speech

Five classic film chicks (and one dude) in glasses

I've worn glasses most of my life, going all the way back to grade school, in different shapes and colors. I can't say exactly when I first became conscious of how I looked in them. I had my high school yearbook photo taken without them, so it was probably sometime when I was a teenager. Even today, I prefer being photographed without them, so yeah, I guess that makes me a little vain — not that I look like a movie star or anything without them.

I remember when Jen got contacts because she said her husband preferred her without the specs, but I always thought she looked better with them because her eyes are small and glasses make them look bigger. Most of the time, I tend to not have a real preference when it comes to chicks, unless the glasses themselves look ugly.

Four-eyed movie characters are not uncommon throughout film history, but for a long time they were a sign of nerdiness and/or unattractiveness (even if it was only Hollywood Homely), especially the ladies, and you can be damn sure they were often meant to make the lead actress more glamorous.

No other movie drives this portrayal home more, to me at least, than Vertigo, featuring the patron saint of four-eyed movie chicks, Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge. Every time I see this movie, I think the exact same thing: why, oh why, was Jimmy Stewart so blind to her? She dug him (Zod knows why) but she was in the wrong movie. She should have been in a late 30s romcom with him instead!

The specs were like a bright shining neon sign above poor Midge's head that said "number two," "consolation prize," "bridesmaid," but give her credit for having the audacity to paint her portrait in a fancy 19th-century dress — with her specs! That takes a certain level of self-confidence, folks.

Vertigo is an all-timer, but I wonder how it would look if Kim Novak was the "plain Jane" — as much as it was possible to have made her look ordinary, anyway? Would Jimbo still have pursued her the way he did?

Anyway, I wanna show some love to a few more bespectacled beauties from the good old days of film — plus one token guy:

Time is on your side in the Time Travel Blogathon!

I'm very excited to do this year's blogathon with someone who has pretty much become an expert at it: Ruth from Silver Screenings — and we've got one we think you'll dig for sure!

Time travel movies include more than just the Terminators and Back to the Futures of the world: think of A Christmas Carol or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Brigadoon. We're sure you can find similar movies from throughout all of film history, and we wanna see them in our Time Travel Blogathon. (Here's a list.)

You know what to do: let either Ruth or myself know what movies you want to write about and we'll collect all your entries on the weekend of March 9-11. Your banners are here (so nice to have great looking banners for a change, thank you Ruth!).

Ruth will write about one called Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea, while my film will be Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah!

New year's links

Dan Talbot

For the second year in a row, I spent New Year's with Sandi and her choral friends. They performed their annual show in Manhattan and we went out to a dinner party afterwards.

This year's show included, besides classical music selections, a James Bond medley, a Beatles medley, songs by Coldplay and Adele (imagine, if you will, hearing "Rolling in the Deep" sung by an operatic diva in an orchestral arrangement — in a church!), and even "Bohemian Rhapsody"! I teased Sandi about it afterward because she has no love for rock music, though she didn't think it was a bad song — she just couldn't understand what the lyrics meant.

On a sadder note, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas owner Dan Talbot died over the New Year's weekend. I wasn't aware of how deep his roots in the indie film market were until his name came up in relation to the sale of the theater; he did much to support independent and foreign cinema from a very early time period.

Unfortunate as it is to say, his death leaves us with very little hope that the Lincoln will be saved, but stranger things have happened — and while this closing is supposed to be for repairs, no one knows for absolute certain what the plan is if and when it reopens. This is why my movie posts include the theater I saw it in, folks.

Meanwhile, the plan for the novel is to start revising this month. It's more of a mess than I realized, but they say that's not necessarily a bad thing at this point. It may have taken me four years to reach this stage, but at least I haven't gotten tired of it yet. My fear is that I will get sick of it before it's finished, but I think this means more to me than that. Anybody want to be a beta reader?

Your links:

Silver Screenings Ruth examines Casablanca from the perspective of the bit players who were actual European refugees.

Le looks at the long and distinguished Hollywood career of that noted comedic thespian, Porky Pig.

Monstergirl is back with another epic post, this one about the Bronx' own Martin Balsam.

Even if the Lincoln Plaza reopens, what will happen to films already booked there?

My prediction came true much sooner  than expected: meet the documentarian who unraveled the secret of Tommy Wiseau.

Another piece of Cecil B. DeMille's buried Ten Commandments set has been excavated.

Here's an early review of a forthcoming movie written by Greg Sestero and featuring Tommy Wiseau in a supporting role.

Want your own portrait of Jennie?

How cable TV, specifically TCM, rescued certain Christmas movies from obscurity.

What did critics of the day think of How the Grinch Stole Christmas when it first came out?

Come back tomorrow to find out the theme for this year's blogathon!