OVP: Actress (2015)

OVP: Best Actress (2015)

The Nominees Were...

Cate Blanchett, Carol
Brie Larson, Room
Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

My Thoughts: Despite some people's protestations, there are good years and bad years for films.  This is particularly true when you look at field-after-field of nominees from a given year for the Academy Awards.  The Best Actress race of 2015, however, is a really good year, and just staggeringly better than Best Actor, to the point where I wonder if this might be the biggest gap in quality ever amassed between the two fields.  Case in point, the least of these five nominees would place at least second in the men's field, and the remaining four would knock my Best Actor choice (Michael Fassbender, see links below for that race and a whole host of other 2015 contests) out of the field.  This might not be the best field of actresses Oscar ever assembled, but it's (in my opinion) the best field of performances we have yet to profile in this series after nearly a decade of write-ups, beating even 2010's Best Actress.

We'll start with, therefore, the woman who actually managed to win in such a field, Brie Larson.  Larson's work in Room is the type of performance that would win in most Oscar seasons.  Robbed of vanity for the first half, she has remarkable chemistry with young actor Jacob Tremblay, essential since they're the only two people they've seen other than a violent kidnapper in years.  Larson's best parts of her performance, though, come in the back-half of the movie, when she encounters the perverse celebrity of a kidnapping victim (the scene with the television interview, made necessary by her legal & medical bills, is unflinchingly hard to watch), and has conversations with her mother (played by Joan Allen) that she's been bottling up for years, not able to express them to anyone as she tried to create a world for her son.  It's a towering achievement, and a worthwhile winner in such a field.

On the opposite end of the "Oscar newcomer" list is Charlotte Rampling, 43 years Larson's senior but also enjoying her first nomination in 2015.  Rampling's work in 45 Years is (I'm trying really hard to avoid hyperbole but failing here) one of the truly great acting creations of this young cinematic century.  The way that she unfolds a thoughtful woman who never really pondered the beginnings of her relationship is stupendous, as is the way you can tell what she is thinking from the slightest of shifts in her gaze or the rearranging of her hands.  It's a soft, subtle performance, one filled with mystery (what will she do with her life?), but Rampling plays all of her cards.  One of the finest actors of her generation, she is that rare person to get an "old age" nomination for the best performance in their career.

We continue on this list of "best she's ever been" with Cate Blanchett, someone whose two decades of fame affords her lots of competition for that title.  But Carol (and Carol) is Blanchett firing on all cylinders.  The line readings, the way that she seems to be saying goodbye to the love-of-her-life from the moment they meet, is magical.  Carol is a romance with a ticking clock, but it's the rare one where the leading actress clearly knows that there will eventually be an ultimatum, because she's been there before.  Blanchett brings a layered calm to her Carol, knowing that she must speak in code not only for her own safety but also because she doesn't want to scare Therese away.  The scenes with Chandler & Paulson, where she lets some of her guard down and you see what's real and what's just there to entrance is brilliant.  It's the sort of role that potentially no actress of her era (or any era) could have played so well, and Blanchett never scenery-chews in order to steal a scene.  Flawless.

Saoirse Ronan is probably not giving her career-best work here (I'd give that nod to Lady Bird two years later in her young career), but that shouldn't be confused with her not giving a truly seismic piece-of-work in Brooklyn.  Given an introverted character still inclined to study the world, her Eilis is the rare character study at the center of an epic.  The way that she falls in love, first with Tony & then with Jim, is pure joy.  Perhaps the best scene of the movie, and one that only works because of what Ronan has done before, is when Eilis is confronted by her nosy neighbor over her marriage to an Italian-American even though she's been seen with the local Irish boy.  The way she states that she's proud of her husband, but leaves a shred of doubt in her voice (that perhaps, given the chance, she might just pick Jim to stay in the country she loves), is devastating and a tour-de-force of acting.

Which brings us, finally, to Jennifer Lawrence.  Lawrence got a lot of ire from me that year (and a lot from a lot of people in the wake of this nomination...worth noting she hasn't been back since) considering that there were better performances to cite that year rather than a 25-year-old getting her fourth Oscar citation.  However, her work in Joy is good, it's just not up to the level of any of these other women (or Lawrence's past nominations).  The scenes with Bradley Cooper are splendid, and I loved the ways that Lawrence hinted at the eventual magnetism that Joy Mangano would bring to her TV personality.  The script is more at fault than Lawrence, giving us a host of one-dimensional side characters and a meandering plot that should just be focusing on Joy's rise, not the inherent need to continually take her down.  But Lawrence is good, and this performance is better than you remember.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Golden Globes of course split their nominations between Drama and Comedy/Musical, but even with that split we still are missing one of the eventual nominees (Rampling). Larson took on the Drama field, besting Blanchett, Ronan, and Oscar's Supporting Actress nominees Rooney Mara (Carol) and Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl), while Lawrence took the Comedy/Musical over Melissa McCarthy (Spy), Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), Maggie Smith (The Lady in the Van), and Lily Tomlin (Grandma).  SAG took a weird tactic with a rich year by putting Helen Mirren (Woman in Gold) and Sarah Silverman (I Smile Back) for bad movies alongside Blanchett, Ronan, & the victorious Larson, while BAFTA also went with Larson, but substituted out Ramplin & Lawrence in favor of Smith & Vikander.  All-things-said, unless Alicia Vikander's The Danish Girl was in sixth place, my money is that it was Smith, who was at the height of Downton fever at the time, had just had massive hits with the Marigold Hotels, and normally gets in when she's a contender.  In 2014 or 2016, she almost certainly would have gotten her seventh nomination.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Perhaps no year is better to illustrate the "snub" problem than 2015's Best Actress field.  Every year magazines will proclaim a field of "snubs" which are really just actors that were floated as potential nominees, rather than finding people you'd put in in place of someone else.  Melissa McCarthy, Alicia Vikander (Testament of Youth) & Blythe Danner (I'll See You in My Dreams) are definitely worthy of an Oscar nomination, but as they aren't better than these performances save Lawrence, I couldn't include them since I'd have to put in Juliette Binoche (Clouds of Sils Maria) as an aging, mourning actress in a complicated relationship with her assistant in the Top 5.

Oscar’s Choice: Larson won easily.  Second place probably would've been Ronan considering Lawrence & Blanchett had recently won (and Rampling's political comments had made giving her the trophy at the time impossible), but no one was beating Brie Larson.

My Choice: I have to go with Rampling, giving possibly the best performance of the decade.  Blanchett follows, with Larson, Ronan, & Lawrence at the back (but there are no losers here).

Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours!  Are you with me on Team Rampling or are you staggered I didn't follow the crowd with Brie Larson?  Despite being good work, anyone actually want to defend Lawrence's nomination being one of the year's five best?  And if not, who would you throw in her place?  Sound off in the comments!

Also in 2015: Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Production Design, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Documentary Short, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Previously in 2015

Past Best Actress Contests: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

4 Mini Reviews

As I mentioned yesterday, we will be doing three days of mini reviews as I catch up on the movies I saw in 2018 (and today one FilmStruck movie I never got around to reviewing) in an effort to wrap up 2018 before we will start doing OVP's from that year in the next few months.  As a result, here are four additional films I saw in 2018, that, while interesting, I will be giving an abbreviated review to rather than a full one as I'm a bit behind & am tired of being behind on my film reviews.

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven't seen Smallfoot, Red Sparrow, Paddington 2, or 1961's Victim, please skip over those sections & come back later when you have!)

Smallfoot (dir. Karey Kirkpatrick)

Yes, yes, we're all aware that Zendaya is Meechee, but the better question is-is this movie any good?  The question is hard to answer, as there are moments of charm in this kind of dismissible animated feature that, like seemingly all animated features, still grossed over $200 million.  Centering on the unlikely friendship between a Yeti (Channing Tatum) and a documentarian (James Corden) trying at first to exploit his new friend & then protect him, it's cute that they focus on this from the Yeti's perspective, having the humans be the "imaginary creature," but the joke gets old after a while, and no one in the voice talent is particularly good in their role, with Tatum's earnestness being the best fit for the role.  The songs are lackluster, and there's too much plot for a 96-minute movie, making the entire Percy-redemption storyline feel a bit combed over.  (Ranking: 2/5 stars)

Red Sparrow (dir. Francis Lawrence)

Jennifer Lawrence had been taking an interesting tact post-Oscar win, using her massive celebrity to greenlight movies like Joy and Mother!, which got a wider audience than they ever could have hoped to get without her face across the posters.  There's unfortunately nothing noble about her Red Sparrow, though, as this is a completely commercial play, and not an enjoyable one (or that successful of one).  The spy thriller moves along at a glacial pace (it's 140 minutes long, and could have dropped a half hour without any speed bumps), and is easy to see coming.  All of the twists are apparent to anyone who has seen a movie like this before, and the film relies heavily on extreme violence and sex to titillate the audience, but it just feels gross after a while.  Even with actors as pedigreed as Jeremy Irons & Charlotte Rampling filling out the supporting class, there's little to redeem here and Lawrence's considerable movie star charisma can't save such a dud.  Here's to hoping that she either works with better blockbuster directors going forward or returns to the arthouse soon. (Ranking: 1/5 stars)

Paddington 2 (dir. Paul King)

The best movie on this list by a country mile, Paddington 2 takes the lovely, calm tone of the first film and perfects it, with a better villain.  Hugh Grant made my personal ballot for Best Supporting Actor in 2018, and with good reason-he's marvelous as a vain, conniving washed-up actor who is desperate to find a hidden treasure by way of a pop-up book (a beautifully constructed sequence).  The film fills out the cast with a cavalry of Royal Shakespeare Company actors, but it's Grant and Ben Whishaw's Paddington, so calm, so of a different era, yet totally at home in such a film that makes this movie special.  I'd say "they don't make them like this anymore," but clearly they do, and it's refreshing & a bit shocking to find out that a movie like Paddington 2 has an audience.  Bravo to Paul King, who manages to avoid what could have been pablum and pulls together a sweet tale without ever making it sugary. (Ranking: 4/5 stars)

Victim (dir. Basil Dearden)

Considering the landmark position Victim has in LGBT cinema, it's kind of crap that I am not writing a full review on this one, but let's be real here-this is a basic suspense film that's only proper calling card is featuring a gay main protagonist.  The film, centering around the blackmail scheme of a barrister who has had a romantic (but non-sexual, cause heaven forbid he get laid) relationship with a man twenty years his junior.  The barrister is played by Dirk Bogarde, who famously was well-loved in Britain but never became proper star in the United States (probably because he was gay in real-life & didn't downplay this to the degree that would have been acceptable in 1960's Hollywood, making this film all-the-more-shocking), but I wasn't blown away at all by his work here-he plays his repressed homosexual as a constant reassurance to the straight audience that he "isn't like" the deviants that are immediately coming to mind.  This is my way of pointing out that while this was aggressively progressive at the time (it's the first English-language film to use the word "homosexual"), it has aged poorly, to the point where you really have to focus on the non-gay elements to see if it works...and it doesn't, as the suspense is marred down by antiquated politics & a thin plot.  I try to grade based on the era, rather than our current one's, but even by that metric this is just 2/5 stars.

Mother! (2017)

Film: Mother! (2017)
Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I am sitting in an airport right now, desperately trying to fight off jet lag (I never got used to my new time zone, so the next three hours of my life could be rough as I’m not good at being tired, and I’m already starting to fade).  That being said, I am going to try and keep myself awake while writing film reviews, and boy-howdy is it hard to sleep when you’re thinking about something as strange, controversial, and genuinely confusing as Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!.  So, let’s give this a shot.

(Spoilers Ahead…and genuinely, avoid spoilers if you are planning on seeing this movie at any point, as the punch isn’t going to work if you don’t) The film focuses on Mother (Lawrence-all of the characters are unnamed in the picture), a beautiful young woman who is refurbishing the house she shares with her husband, creating something from nothing as he fruitlessly works to create something great from his writing (he is the Poet).  One day, a strange Man (Harris), shows up at the door, dying but clearly enamored with the work of the Poet.  He is soon joined by the Woman (Pfeiffer), his wife, who prods at Mother over why she hasn’t had children, and continually shows misguided scorn toward her.  The film unfolds with the two being intensely rude guests, breaking a stone that at the beginning of the film had transformed the house, and having sex after Mother tries to throw them out.  When one of their two sons kills the other one, an impromptu funeral unfolds, and at the end after taunting the Poet, Mother becomes pregnant and the Poet is suddenly inspired to write as a result.

This may sound a bit strange, but honestly-this is the normal part of the movie.  In the second half of the film, utter madness ensues.  While we have lost the Man and Woman, the Poet is worshiped by hordes of increasingly lecherous intruders, ripping the floor apart and destroying the house that Mother has so cared for, and eventually even killing her baby, breaking his neck and eating his remains.  The movie eventually has her burning the house to the ground, giving her love to her husband in the form of a hardened crystal similar to the beginning of the movie, and then being reincarnated as a different fair-faced young woman, seemingly doomed to repeat the same scenario over and over again.

The film is, for its many, many faults, quite ambitious.  Aronofsky is not pulling any punches here, literally having a baby die during a crowd surf and then being eaten whole by a mob of people.  The movie, at least in its first half, is a pretty clear biblical metaphor, with Adam & Eve represented in the form of Man and Woman, with their sons being Cain-and-Abel (the elder kills the younger after learning that his inheritance was to be tossed aside), and the Poet is a god of some sorts, while Mother represents the Earth prior to humanity.  The similarities here are too direct to not clearly be alluding to the Bible, though one could argue the film also has an environmental message, is an allegory for social media, or even is as direct as the destructive nature between artist/muse.  But for me, the first half feels pretty similar to a biblical story.

This means the second half fails, in my opinion, quite miserably.  The idea of reincarnation of the planet seems more at home in other religions (Hinduism or Buddhism), than a Judeo-Christian one housed in the first half of the picture.  The movie also loses all direction when there isn’t any goodness or misunderstanding in some of those who ravage the house, the planet that Mother so deeply cares for-is Aronofsky’s view of humanity so bleak that he doesn’t have room for goodness?  It doesn’t help that it’s obvious by the film’s midway point that the only thing that we can’t predict is how disgusting the imagery is willing to be (oh, and Kristin Wiig-genuinely didn’t see her cameo coming as I didn’t realize she was signed up for the film-if the religious allegory works, she seems to be some sort of opportunistic religious zealot, trying to use the Poet while caring little for his muse, perhaps like a politician who claims to be Christian but then destroys everything that his God holds dear).  Pretty much any interpretation of the first half of the picture doesn’t work with the second half-Aronofsky is trying hard for a provocative metaphor, but metaphor only works if you make it consistent.  Otherwise it’s just shocking, which is what I feel like the second half achieves.  It’s an interesting failure, but a failure narratively-speaking.

The acting, though, is at least worth recommending.  Lawrence has never done a part like this before, and it’s fascinating work even if it isn’t always successful; her movie star charisma is shelved in favor of a blank loveliness, passive to the point of frustration, and naïve to the point where the audience was laughing at certain points of the picture, but she does the trick.  It’s nowhere near her best work (still think that’s American Hustle), but it’s miles away from the boredom of Passengers, so she’s at least recovered in that regard.  Her male costars are underwhelming-Bardem in particular feels too all-over-the-place, playing a role that at once feels almost typecast for him and yet one that he doesn’t uncover much of its heart within, playing everything surface-level.  The best of the bunch, though, is Pfeiffer, who gives the film some heat where it seriously would have lacked it otherwise.  She is knowing, specific, and anchors the movie’s scarier tendencies before Aronofsky completely discards the picture you were promised in the trailers.  If the film were more accessible, I suspect we’d be hearing about a comeback fourth Oscar nomination, but I have to wonder if AMPAS voters won’t stop the film an hour in, wondering what they’re being subjected to from Aronofsky.

Those are my thoughts?  Anyone want to share theirs?  Anyone else wishing they’d seen the film that they’d been promised in the trailers, or is this bizarre jumble up-your-alley?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: Passengers (2016)

Film: Passengers (2016)
Stars: Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne
Director: Morten Tyldum
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Production Design, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Trailers are meant to want to get you to a movie.  I mean, that's kind of the point-put the best parts of the movie into the trailer, and hope for the best, right?  It's weird, however, to go back to see trailers to movies you know by heart and see snippets or line readings that aren't actually in the movie, that clearly were part of a last minute editing decision that sliced a slower scene that might have had one snappy line out of the movie.  This is fine.  What's not fine is when a movie completely sells you something that isn't remotely what you signed up for, particularly when doing so also resulted in you knowing how the movie was going to end.  Thus is the case with Passengers.

(Spoilers Ahead) On the surface the film is a relatively simple love story.  You have lovable Jim Preston (Pratt), a sweet engineer smitten with a beautiful author named Aurora (Lawrence).  They are stuck on an intergalactic cruise ship to another planet, but they can't get back into their hibernation pods because the ship never planned for them to not work (which feels like a huge insurance issue, but whatever), and therefore are stuck for ninety years essentially spending their entire existence on a ship where they'll die before they reach their destination.  It's a cool concept for a story-Gravity meets Titanic, in a way, and we learn as the film goes on that there's something wrong with the ship that caused Jim to wake up.  It's not Celine and Julie Go Boating or anything, but it's a giant blockbuster starring two well-loved movie stars in space.  I mean, what's not to like?

Except, there's a problem here ("there's always a problem with you lately, John" says the world).  Jim woke up unexpectedly, unfortunately, but Aurora didn't.  It was only his pod that malfunctioned-hers was fine until he, after stalking her for months (you can't send a message that won't take 55 years, but somehow you have access to the entire back catalog of Wikipedia), decided to jimmy open her hibernation pod so that he would have companionship, essentially murdering her for his own selfish reasons.  In the trailers, this is not indicated, as it seems more like it's just the two of them that have woken up from this century-long slumber, but in reality he steals her for his own out of loneliness and hormones, and the movie never properly addresses this.  I mean, yes, she's upset when she finds out, but she still chooses to stay with him for eternity and forgives him extremely quickly even though he stole her life.

It's hard to recover from that without the movie feeling like it has deeply uncomfortable sexual politics.  For starters, it sort of forgives him for being lonely and desperate, and there are worse things in the world than getting stuck on a deserted island with Chris Pratt, but when he actually puts you on the deserted island, essentially robbing you of all of your dreams-it's hard to find a way to look at this in a feminist way and not want to smack him.  Honestly-I struggled pretty furiously with this in the back half of the movie, and there was really no way that this felt okay, particularly when she decides to spend her life with him (also-side note, was anyone else worried they were going to get pregnant and we'd meet when one of their kids when Andy Garcia showed up, wordlessly, in the final moments?).  What he did was unforgivable, and she was still incredibly angry at him right up until she changes her mind about spending eternity with him.  There is tons to dislike about the movie, quite frankly (there's some gaping plot holes in knowing that a ship can take 240 years to get to Earth and back, for starters-how many voyages has this thing taken that they have pictures of the planet-what year is it, exactly, that they still have journalists and the Pulitzer Prize?), but none is as creepy as the central one that Jennifer Lawrence spends eternity with her murderer.

The film received two Oscar nominations, one for Best Art Direction (which is actually really cool-I loved some of the touches they made, crossing an elegant spacial experience with a luxury liner) and one for Score (ehh, but it's Thomas Newman so I should have seen it coming), and none for Visual Effects, which was probably a miss as they're actually interesting, even if the only really "wow" moment is Lawrence nearly drowning in a pool of suspended water.  But it's a pity that messed-up sexual politics and an abysmal finale wasted what could have been a fun blockbuster starring two of our more charismatic working movie stars.

Those are my thoughts-how about yours?  Were you like me, unable to separate the creepiness of Pratt's character to get behind what otherwise could have been decent escapist fare?  Or are you a fan regardless?  And what do you make of these two Oscar nominations-any chance it scores a win?

OVP: Joy (2015)

Film: Joy (2015)
Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert de Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Iasabella Rossellini, Bradley Cooper
Director: David O. Russell
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Jennifer Lawrence)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Watching Joy, I was reminded of the fact that I grew up in the 1990's, when the Miracle Mop was advertised on television all of the time.  I even wanted one, and I was a teenage boy who thought the only housework worth doing was re-organizing our family movie collection.  It was this that made me, as the film progressed, more excited to see how things turned out, as Joy Mangano, the woman who created the mop, as well as Huggable Hangers and Forever Fragrant (if you haven't heard of these products you've clearly never been single, eating ice cream, and watching HSN on a Saturday night like the rest of us), was a solid choice for a biopic as she's someone most everyone can recognize (or at least her products), but we don't know much about, and her story is interesting to say the least.  Unfortunately, in the arms of David O. Russell, the film's quirks and occasional ridiculousness make Joy something of an oddity.  While I shouldn't question the idea that someone make a biopic that thinks outside of the box (since I'm typically begging for such a film), Joy much like a lot of Russell's recent endeavors, tries to have its cake and eat it too.  It is a film that functions both as the story of Joy, but also on Russell wanting to regain some of the oddity that made his films so compelling years ago with products like I Heart Huckabees.  The result is a movie that satisfies no one, not people wanting a classic rags-to-riches story nor those wanting an art house film, and as a result it's his most disappointing film in years.

(Spoilers Ahead) The problem with the movie may be the fact that we never really get to understand Joy herself.  We are told from the opening narration that Joy is special, and that seems pretty darn true if you look at real life.  An employee at an airline company who was divorced with a couple of children becoming an entrepreneur and creating items that have become essential in the homes of much of Middle America is very special, and on occasion we see that in the film.  The best scenes of the movie are toward the center, when Joy meets Neil Walker (Cooper), a QVC producer whom she has to actually challenge and who realizes her potential.  Cooper and Lawrence have chemistry to the hilt, something we've learned through now three of Russell's pictures, and you can sense Russell knows that a lot of what we came for was these two together (Cooper is only shot from the waist down when he is first introduced to delay our satisfaction, though he's wearing khakis so it's not as thrilling as I just made it out to be).  When Joy, after being maligned and casually torn to shreds by her family for an hour, finally has some success and sells nearly 50,000 mops in her first hours on the air, it's electrifying and perhaps the only feel-good moment of the film that reads as genuinely earned.

The rest of the film, though, we don't really get to know Joy.  We can tell she's brilliant and supposedly tough, but the film is constantly contradicting this idea.  She's someone who holds the family together-her mother (Madsen) is basically an agoraphobic invalid addicted to soap operas (casting real-life soap stars Donna Mills, Susan Lucci, Laura Wright, and Maurice Bernard was a nice touch for the soap scenes, only beaten by Melissa Rivers playing her mother Joan in a fascinating "wait, is that really her?!?" cameo), her father is a passive aggressive failure in life and business (de Niro), her husband is a sweet but unsuccessful singer (Ramirez) and her sister is an awful, petulant, jealous two-year-old (Elisabeth Rohm).  None of these actors are particularly good (Ramirez is the best of the bunch, but it's judging on a steep curve), but Rohm's awful performance as her sister is truly misguided, and sort of hinders Lawrence.  The script doesn't give her the moment where our heroine actually tells off her father, his girlfriend (Rossellini) or Joy's sister for the horrible treatment they've dealt at her through the years, and the audience was begging for it.  The closest we get is a moment where Joy essentially finds herself signing off on a bankruptcy, and tells her sister that she is not to represent the business ever again, but it's too little.  Russell fills the cast with cartoons, people who couldn't possibly function as such horrible individuals in real life without being punched in the face on the regular, and Joy just sits there and takes it, while she's more than willing to challenge television executives and multi-millionaires?  This seems extremely doubtful, and we never get a sense of Joy's devotion to her family and what causes it since they are intent on ruining her life.  It's a fatal flaw in the script, and one that Russell can't help but absolve.

Lawrence at the center of the film is getting the bulk of the awards attention (she nabbed a Globe nomination), and while her magnetism occasionally shines through, it's this script problem that holds her back (not to mention, and I know this is the broken record for people talking about David O. Russell's collaborations with her, but it's bizarre how she's basically been cast as someone whom she is at least ten years too old to be playing onscreen-someone in their mid-thirties like Elisabeth Moss probably would have been a better choice, and could have grounded some of the moments that need a more lived-in actress).  However, even correctly casting the lead part wouldn't have saved the film.  What we have here is a great idea, poorly executed in almost every department, and one that should make Russell sincerely question whether or not he can find projects still that jive his directorial oddities with serious awards bait.  Considering that she's so young and such a compelling movie star, it'd be a pity to throw a fourth nomination toward Lawrence, both because it would clearly be the least of her nominated work and because this year's Best Actress field is so much better than this movie ever approaches.

Those are my thoughts-how about yours?  Did you like Joy and what Jennifer Lawrence did with it, or were you hoping for something better like I was?  Which member of Joy's family did you most want to scream at from your seats?  And have you ever bought anything from HSN or QVC?  If so, share in the comments!

Everybody's Linking for the Weekend

I had a bunch of family in town this past weekend, so I didn't get a lot of time to do much writing (though I had a marvelous time-planning your fun ahead of time makes for ease and relaxation, something I'll get into in a later post this week).  Anyway, here's a quick link roundup even though I should probably be working right now.

In Entertainment...

-The Hollywood Reporter got in front of the inevitable controversy that was bound to spring up out of their annual Actress Roundtable, a long-standing tradition where they assemble eight white women competing for the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Oscars this year, and while I truly wish I could shame the Hollywood Reporter for not including an actress of color this season, I just can't, as there are no women of color who are in serious contention for an Academy Award this season, at least for acting.  Names like Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Concussion), Phylicia Rashad (Creed), and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (Tangerine) are all in movies that may be in the Oscar conversation, but you wouldn't dream of putting them even in the Top 10 most likely contenders, and they would stick out compared to women like Brie Larson, Jennifer Lawrence, and Kate Winslet as someone who clearly is being added just for tokenism as part of the Oscar conversation.  The reality is that this is on Hollywood, and in particular the film industry (television and Broadway have gotten the joke on this front), and they need to step it up for fear of being thought out-of-sync with the growing diversity of film audiences.

-Zayn Malik's continued push to condemn One Direction was all over the news this week, with Malik calling 1D's music "generic" and basically bashing his time in the band.  Here's the deal-Malik is still big news until his new album comes out at least, and I get the coverage and he was my favorite member of the band prior to their break-up too, but he's been kind of a tool lately.  He has every right to quit the band, but let's not pretend he didn't become wildly successful from this group, and I am sick-to-death of celebrities coming out and berating past success when they clearly were fine with it at the time.  The same thing happened a few months ago when Natalie Portman bemoaned her Oscar even while she was campaigning constantly for it when she was nominated.  Being too cool for something after it's made you millions of dollars isn't really genuine, so stop pretending.

-I am not going to weigh in on the Jenny McCarthy/Charlie Sheen feud that is raging right now in social media, as I can't really stand either of these two, and I am sick-to-death of the media giving McCarthy's views on medicine more publicity.  However, I was curious about Entertainment Weekly's surprisingly solid overview of where Charlie Sheen's career goes from here, because it was kind of tanked before he announced he was HIV+.  I think they are dead-on in terms of the two avenues he really has here, career-wise: tell-all memoir or reality show (or probably both).  Sheen's erratic behavior after a decades worth of success (yet another actor who made millions, or in Sheen's case tens of millions of dollars and then bemoaned the quality after cashing the checks) and essentially throwing away his wildly successful television career is not going to be forgotten anytime soon, and I suspect no one's going to work with him again, particularly after he turned down the ability to do a final scene in Two and a Half Men's finale.  The HIV announcement isn't going to change that.  However, it's impossible to deny that Sheen still demands public interest, and this week showed that, and either a reality show or a tell-all both would be places where Sheen's erratic behavior would be a benefit.  I suspect he does at least one, if not both.

In Politics...

-While my relatives were in town this weekend, and when we weren't soaking up the cultural highlights of the Twin Cities, we were discussing a wee bit of politics, and of course that meant Donald Trump (and the fact that like a lot of moderate, occasionally fair weather Democrats, Hillary Clinton is not eliciting much excitement with the Baby Boomer set on my family tree).  Trump has had a marvelous week the past week, even if it may be at the expense of common decency, and the New York Times points out how much trouble Republicans might be in soon, as Trump continues to dominate in New Hampshire, which is generally the voice of GOP reason to those much more caution-to-the-wind Iowans.  It's worth noting that Trump is still ahead by a country mile in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and the elections are getting closer and closer.  The last candidate to win the nomination of a major party without taking either of those two states was Bill Clinton, and in that case Iowa and New Hampshire still picked different candidates (Tom Harkin and Paul Tsongas, respectively).  The only time that a candidate won both of these two races and eventually lost the nomination is Edmund Muskie in 1972, and that race is an absolutely bizarre one where comparisons are hard to make (the campaign included a candidate who wasn't running but still got the most total votes, a candidate who survived an assassination attempt, and a forged document that was part of the other party's candidate's eventual downfall and resignation).  As a result, if Donald Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, the Republicans are going to have to either push hard for the guy who got second place in those races (read: Ted Cruz) or potentially get "huge" (or grumble for four years of a Clinton administration).

-Rep. Jackie Speier, 37 years after the fact, recalls surviving the Jonestown Massacre, a really riveting read about the only confirmed assassination of a member of the United States House of Representatives, her then boss Leo Ryan.  It's a riveting read (I don't know if I've ever seen Speier, who ran for Ryan's seat and lost after the trip, but then many years later won a seat of her own in Congress, discuss the events so thoroughly).  It's a riveting read, particularly if you aren't familiar with this aspect of US History.

-Roll Call also had a conversation with the only two Muslim members of Congress (Reps. Andre Carson and Keith Ellison), discussing language and getting their thoughts on the rather racist and xenophobic lines of rhetoric from the Right that have come up in the wake of the Paris attacks.  I have to admit that I haven't written about the attacks at length yet (I still might-I need to give myself some time to give it a proper due and my day job has not allowed that lately), but I am alarmed by the rhetoric used by multiple people running for Congress, and in particular Donald Trump, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz, and I am frustrated by the number of governors who have denied refugees into their states (and yes, Maggie Hassan, that D behind your name doesn't excuse you from my disappointed glare).  I am not going to get more into this in a link roundup, but if I have time later this week I will probably devote an article to this conversation.

-Attorney General Kamala Harris, currently the frontrunner to take Sen. Barbara Boxer's seat in California, is apparently struggling on the campaign trail.  She's not fundraising the way she was expected to, and isn't great on the stump.  This doesn't actually surprise me-anyone who saw her DNC speech in 2012 will be aware that she's not the great speaker that President Obama is (the two are frequently compared for their seemingly meteoric rises to the top), nor does she have Barbara Boxer's retailing skills.  I am curious how this race goes if, as some have speculated, it will be both Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez in the general next November (Republican votes are splintered, and Democrats have only two real options, so it's possible that two Democrats will land in the general in California's odd new open primary system).  Without the risk of the seat exchanging hands, Harris vs. Sanchez could be a generally interesting debate, and it's hard to see organizations like the DSCC and Emily's List (which did technically go with Harris but has endorsed Sanchez in the past) spending any money on a seat the Democrats are guaranteed to win when other races in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are actually going to win back the Senate, and both are progress elected officials with long ties to the national party.  If that's the case, Sanchez could gain as she seems to be doing extremely well amongst Hispanic voters, who may be moved to get a Latina elected statewide in California.  If the race is Harris v. Sanchez, though, the real winner would be the DCCC, as Hillary Clinton would surely be dominating statewide and with a vested reason for Democrats to get out in the Senate race and almost no reason for the Republicans to get out and cast a ballot, the DCCC could be able to pick up and hold even more House seats from disproportionate turnout.

Shameless Self-Promotion of the Week...

-I'm aware that I haven't discussed Louisiana-all in good time this week.  But know that I'm excited about the Democrats' new favorite silver lining, John Bel Edwards.

YouTube Video of the Week...

-Prank videos make me physically uncomfortable, but this is Smosh's tenth anniversary, and in this case it was Anthony and Ian getting pranked by none other than Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, so I'm cool:

Just One More...

-My favorite story of the week from a makes-me-smile angle was surely my beloved Andy Murray's mid-match haircut, where he attempted to hold back Rafael Nadal (it didn't work at the ATP World Tour Finals) by cutting his hair mid-match, as he claimed it was in his eyes.  The link has a video of the event.