Detroit (2017)

Film: Detroit (2017)
Stars: John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore, Jason Mitchell, Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever, John Krasinski, Anthony Mackie
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Rankiing: 2/5 stars

The films of Kathryn Bigelow have always been a slow burn for me.  Upon seeing both The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty I had little time for them, but as the movies grew in my mind the films themselves improved in my memory, anchored by two very strong lead performances and a moral ambiguity that I really enjoyed.  As a result, though I'm behind on a number of reviews, I considered it something of a blessing that I had to percolate on Detroit for a bit, as I wondered if my initial dislike of the picture would start to wear off, but it hasn't.  Detroit is not in the same class as Bigelow's other two movies, a failed attempt at trying to deal with an unforgivable chapter in our nation's history, hurt principally by a detached script and underwhelming performances.

(Spoilers Ahead...though this is a real story, so you know, you should know what happens) The film takes place in the heart of the 12th Street Riots, one of the deadliest and most disturbing chapters in American history (resulting in over 2000 arrests and 43 deaths, it was the largest event of its kind until the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles).  The movie is centered around real-life figures, similar to Zero Dark Thirty, but like that film most of the people in this film are not well-known in real life (in fact, the only person who would become famous outside this incident featured in the picture is a young Rep. John Conyers).  The movie principally focuses on a long interrogation scene between a racist young officer Philip Krauss (Poulter), who is intent on finding who fired a gun into the night (it was, in fact, a starter pistol so the officers weren't in any danger, but they assume someone in the house fired at them), and they continue to berate, terrify, and illegally intimidate a house filled with a number of young black men and two white women, eventually resulting in the deaths of three people whom they kill at point-blank range.

The film, in comparison to the injustice that has been shown in relation to the deaths of African-Americans like Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and Michael Brown, is jarring in its immediacy.  This is not, as much as we'd want to believe it, a dusty chapter of American history, but instead something immediate and a necessary discussion.  The Black Lives Matter movement is an important one in the United States, and considering the continued injustice of some of the jury verdicts that have taken place in recent years, Detroit could have been a major milestone, the sort of rarity where art and conversation combine into a meaningful dialogue, the way that say, Milk or In the Heat of the Night managed to mirror political discourse at the time.

The problem here is that while Detroit's subject is important, the film itself is not particularly good.  Bigelow's editing is far too fat, with the movie dragging on in spots where some trimming up would have done us some good (the arrest scene of John Boyega's Dismukes, for example, is like five minutes when it could have been a thirty second shot), and the script is clunky, frequently backtracking or repeatedly underlining points that have already been made.  Bigelow's usual benefit is utilizing her actors with sparse dialogue and letting the audience understand her message without making it expository, but here she seems unsure of herself as a director and wants to make sure we know, consistently, what a heinous person Dismukes is, for example.  Combined with a series of acting that is very all-over-the-place (Anthony Mackie in a limited role and Algee Smith as an aspiring singer are the standouts, but the rest are too wooden and unknowable).  John Boyega and Will Poulter, both getting their first major lead roles after floating in the sidelines of major films for a couple of years, don't show any sense of understanding of their characters.  I left only knowing what was on the page-they added no kind of backstory or insight into what these men were like when they aren't onscreen.  It's a pity that such an important chapter in American history gets cooked into a hammy picture, but a moment of clarity for me like Bigelow's last pictures never really arrived.  Detroit just isn't very good.

Those are my thoughts on this late-summer film, one that seemed to have been part of the poor Box Office of August, but what about yours?  Do you agree that this is the least of Bigelow's "major director" period of pictures, or does the film have its defenders?  Who do you think was best (and worst) in show?  Share your comments below!

OVP: Picture (2009)

OVP: Best Picture (2009)

The Nominees Were...

James Cameron and Jon Landau, Avatar

Gil Netter, Andrew A. Kosove, and Broderick Johnson, The Blind Side

Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham, District 9

Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey, An Education

Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier, and Greg Shapiro, The Hurt Locker

Lawrence Bender, Inglourious Basterds

Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness, and Gary Magness, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man

Jonas Rivera, Up

Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman, and Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

My Thoughts: All right-after months of off-and-on writeups chronicling the 2009 Oscars, it's time that we get to the big enchilada, the big kahuna, the top prize.  Best Picture.  If you're new to the blog, there are links at the bottom of this article to all nineteen of the past contests in 2009, as well as as the past three OVP Best Picture races.  If you've been waiting patiently for this write-up and want to see where I rank this list, then let's start right now.

2009 was the first year in the revived expanded Best Picture field, and so there are quite a few films in this race that you wouldn't normally see, perhaps most glaring being A Serious Man.  Though the Coen Brothers are frequently nominated for Oscars (they would get a bevy of Oscar nominations the following year for True Grit and at the time were coming off of a major win in Best Picture two years prior).  However, A Serious Man is one of the oddest films I've ever seen nominated for Best Picture-the tale of one man's life falling apart, causing him to question his faith isn't what you'd call a bad movie, though I do feel that the Coen Brothers meander far too frequently and occasionally decide to just be quirky for the sake of it.  This film lacks the near perfect structuring of a previous movie like No Country for Old Men, and though it has the biblical allegory thing down pat (we get it, he's Job), I just couldn't help but feel that this was more a technical achievement than an overall great film.  The Coen Brothers seem to be showing how brilliant they can be behind the camera, which is considerable, but the film lacks the cohesion and narrative to drive their brilliance home, and this is Best Picture, not Best Director.

I feel like if there's a forgotten film in this lineup, it's probably An Education.  When I was listing out the ten films nominated, I remembered A Serious Man even though it was clearly in tenth place, but An Education feels like that film that was probably on a lot of ballots, but rarely in the top five.  I'm a bigger defender of this film than most, though, and I love the central performance so much from Carey Mulligan.  Lone Scherfig's film always finds Mulligan's Jenny at the center, but I like the way that the world keeps moving around her-the Rosamund Pike character in particular stands out to me as one of those touches that makes the rest of the film seem more meaningful than it could have been.  Her Helen is Jenny after a few years, persistently trying to find meaning in a life that doesn't seem like it can possibly result in any.  That's the magic of An Education-it keeps holding Jenny's life up to other character's lives as a mirror.  It wouldn't work if Mulligan weren't superb as the central woman-you need someone who can both define her character and make sure she's open enough for the audience to project onto, but performances are a component of this race.  Personally, of these ten films, I would have been one of the ballots finding room for An Education in my Top 5.

Since we're already discussing a Best Actress nominee, it seems fair to head on over to one of the others, and I'll go with Precious.  Here, again, you need a main character who is a little bit of an audience proxy onscreen, but Precious has more solidly-embedded characters, particularly Gabby Sidibe in the title role and Mo'Nique as Mary Jones.  The film itself is above average, but it never quite has the standing that the lead roles can achieve-this is a monstrous acting duet, but the film and plot can't quite get to the point where they're equalling the acting.  Think of the way that the story meanders with Precious's daydreams and her "too good to be true" relationship with her teacher.  This isn't particularly compelling cinema, but it's brought that direction by the two lead actors.  Like some of Lee Daniels' other films, there are flights of fancy that just don't work, but he's so great at casting perfect actors to play interesting characters that you can feel yourself forgiving him.

District 9 is kind of an in an opposite camp in this regard.  Sharlto Copley is also a fairly blank protagonist, more so than even Jenny or Precious, and the film itself is entirely driven by its concept, rather than dialogue or acting.  This isn't to insult the film (it's a good movie), but it is to say that the film is really more an idea.  It's fascinating to look at District 9 now and see how much of a shadow that it has cast, with the rise in popularity of dystopian worlds in the years since (anyone see the connections between The Hunger Games and District 9?), and the actual on-paper plot is great.  The film has some pacing problems (it takes too long to get to its eventual conclusion, particularly since we know the conclusion near the beginning of the film), but the movie understands humanity, and this was a worthy and unexpected film that certainly wouldn't have been honored in the Top 10 had it not been for the expanded field.

Up also would have been on the sidelines in a five-wide field (I'm not 100% convinced that Toy Story 3 the following year couldn't have pulled off the nomination, though).  I have soured a little bit on this film the more I write about it, mostly because there's such a large imbalance between the first ten minutes of the film and the rest of the movie in terms of quality.  Every critic points this out, but the first ten minutes of the movie are sublime, looking at the way that we quickly live our lives and in particular how meaningful small moments become as we get older and realize all of the dreams we let pass us by.

The remainder of the film can never compare, though.  It's like it's two different films, and while the rest of the film is nowhere near a bad movie, you cannot help but judge it in comparison and find it lacking. In particular, I hated the need for a common enemy in the final third in the Christopher Plummer character-why couldn't they have just made it to the Falls and realized that life has to move on, rather than having them be attacked by some random old man chasing a bird?  It cheapens the rest of the film's complicated questions, and I don't care if it's a movie for children-when Pixar was at its peak (and from 2007-2010 it was), Up could have been on-par with WALL-E, and not just Monsters Inc. (which, to quote Marge Simpson in surprisingly apt context, "is still pretty good!")

Avatar is another film that occasionally falters in the face of its own promise.  The movie, like a lot of James Cameron films, never quite has the dialogue that it should, and the plot can be seen from a mile away (Stephen Lang's Miles Quaritch also falls into the unnecessarily evil villain camp, though at least his character is necessary to the rest of the movie).  However, I cannot help but be enamored with this movie in a way I couldn't possibly be with Up.  The film is epic in its scope, and truly marvelous in creating a new world.  There's so much ambition here, and most of it ends up being realized.  The script aside (which, admittedly, is a larger than usual aside for me), there's really no flaws-the film's art direction and visual effects are absolutely spellbinding, and not for nothing, but it's rare that a director has the guts to create an entirely original world onscreen in the same mold that George Lucas did with Star Wars.  I suspect, with three more films coming in this series and the mountain of money this film made, that James Cameron's ingenuity will payoff at a similar rate to Lucas's (financially, though hopefully less so creatively).

Cameron's main competition on Oscar night was The Hurt Locker, though at the time of the Oscars it had become less a coronation than a competition, and like any film that's on a warpath to Best Picture, it got nominated enough that I've discussed it to death at this point, though I have to admit that unlike The King's Speech, The Artist, and Argo, my opinion of this particular Best Picture winner has improved throughout all of these write-ups, which should hopefully bode well for 12 Years a Slave as we start up 2013 this weekend.  The greatness of Kathryn Bigelow lies in the way that she builds tension onscreen-the way that she manages to get truly inside her main character, watching hin falter and succeed in small doses.  She's at her best when the vision is directly on her main character of William James-the rest of the cast, while admirable and occasionally good, never lend themselves as well as James to the overall conflicted nature he has toward war.  The film is crisp, and though I didn't feel it in the way that I did Avatar it's hard to argue its technical merits, and it has a stronger central force than something like the Coen Brothers' technical achievement does that year.

Up in the Air is a film that is probably forever more a product of its specific time than it will be in years later when it is revisited (think The Graduate or Midnight Cowboy).  Made at the height of the Great Recession, the film showed how damaging to your psychology being laid off can be, and how detached from life George Clooney's Ryan Bingham became by constantly pulling the dreams out from under people.  The film does a lot of things right, not least of which is finding that sweet spot between Clooney's charm and the lost nature of his public persona.  Clooney makes this movie what it is, and I still think it's his best big screen work to date.  That said, the movie also has a bit of a balance problem (we're quibbling here, but this is for a Best Picture Oscar so the small matters), as it never gets the emotional balance in Clooney's relationship with Vera Farmiga right (it seems so tacked on and gimmicky the way it plays out), and it cannot possibly match the cold harshness of watching people lose their jobs.  Being fired is a bit like being told you have cancer (psychological studies back me up there), and the movie has trouble finding emotional resonance that can match those moments where Bingham ruins people's lives and dreams.  Still, there's so much truth and such strong work from Clooney here the film can be forgiven for never quite realizing the emotional zeniths it reaches in certain scenes as it does in the scenes it wants to prioritize for the sake of the main character.

Inglourious Basterds is a film that should have more balance problems than it does, but alas this is that rare Tarantino film where every little interspersing scene is glued-to-the-screen incredible.  I love the way that he just moves with such confidence onscreen in all of his films, certain that this next scene will be just as engrossing and mesmerizing to the audience as the last.  This confidence is not without risk (see the pacing problems of Django Unchained for an example), but here it's wonderful.  The movie does have high points (the opening, the card game, and the "Cat People" sequence), but those don't steal away from basically every scene being crisp, necessary, and lively (there's a reason I gave this the Editing OVP trophy).  I still think that the penultimate and ending scenes seem a little bit much, even for Tarantino, but overall this is the perfect crystallization of what Tarantino's later films have become: bawdy, stylistic, and jaw-dropping.

I usually write this Best Picture lineup and whichever film lends itself best to the next paragraph gets their moment in the sun, so I'm not sure if I am saving the worst for last with The Blind Side, but it definitely stands out in the sense that it is nothing like the other films on this list.  I would go so far as to say, however, that The Blind Side was probably the closest of any film here to disrupting the "real five" nominees.  It's a massive hit, a feel-good one at that, and has its lead headed toward an Oscar stampede-those are the sorts of things that get you a surprise nomination in Best Picture.

The film itself is not good, and there's no sugar-coating that fact.  It's not Doctor Doolittle level of bad for a Best Picture nomination, and as I've mentioned before, Sandra Bullock has enough movie star charisma and personality to make the film watchable, but the rest of the cast is making an ABC Family movie, and that's really what this feels like-the racial angle of the film seems too simplified for a film that claims to have something to say, and while I think there should be a place for conservative cinema (I really do), I don't think that you can gloss over key points you're trying to make with an "and that's the way it is" sort of attitude, which is what the film does with its script and its larger point about race and economics.  Still, Bullock is insanely watchable and so while I cannot condone this nomination, I get it.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes of course split their nominations between Musical/Comedy and Drama, so while the usual five (The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, Up in the Air, and the victorious Avatar) competed in Best Drama, you had five new names to the list in Best Comedy: (500) Days of Summer, It's Complicated, Julie and Julia, Nine, and in a surprise win, The Hangover.  The BAFTA Awards went with most of the usual five, cutting Inglourious in favor of the far more British An Education, and giving their top prize to The Hurt Locker.  Finally, there's the Producers Guild Awards, which also had a lineup of ten, but cut A Serious Man and The Blind Side in favor of Invictus and Star Trek.  One of these two films surely were competing for eleventh place, and my gut says that though Star Trek would have a bigger presence with Oscar that year, Invictus and the afterglow of Clint Eastwood probably put that film in the "just miss" category.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: Surely in a field that is ten large the Academy could have found room for at least one great foreign language film.  The Foreign Film Oscar race made room for A Prophet and The Secret in Their Eyes, and both are considerably better than a lot of these films, but The White Ribbon is the movie that, with its eery command over the audience, most deserved to pick-up this nomination, and quite frankly, may have even deserved the trophy.

Oscar’s Choice: Though it was probably a bit closer than Best Director, there was just no stopping The Hurt Locker stampede once Bigelow's Oscar train started rolling.

My Choice: We'll anticlimactically start with me giving the trophy to Avatar, with Inglourious Basterds coming in behind it.  The rest of the lineup is tough, though, but I think it should look something like: An Education, The Hurt Locker, Precious, Up in the Air, Up!, District 9, A Serious Man, and The Blind Side.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Do you favor AMPAS's selection of The Hurt Locker, my choice of Avatar, or one of the other eight?  Who do you think was in sixth and eleventh place?  And what film was the best movie of 2009?  Share in the comments!

Also in 2009: Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Film, Animated Feature, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2009

Past Best Picture Contests: 2010, 2011, 2012

OVP: Director (2009)

OVP: Best Director (2009)

The Nominees Were...

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

James Cameron, Avatar

Lee Daniels, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

My Thoughts: The thing I remember most about the Best Director race of 2009 was how uniformly locked-down it was.  I find it absoulely bizarre that the year that they launched the Top 10 system for Best Picture was one of those years EVERYONE knew who the true Top 5 were.  In years since, you couldn't quite feel out the split (since usually one director didn't get a Best Picture nomination), but here there was no quibbling over it-these five grabbed the five biggest Academy movies of the year, and just sort of ran with it.

There's something deeply claustrophobic about the films of Kathryn Bigelow's career renaissance.  Both The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty are desperately reliant on building a closing wall around their principle characters.  I love the way that she tightens the scope throughout the movie, frequently having us get inside of the characters shifting worlds.  We've discussed this film to death I feel at this point (I realize this every OVP, but the Academy as a general rule over-nominates certain movies and as a result other interesting work in different films gets left in the cold), but I haven't talked too much about the way that Bigelow builds tension.  There's something very clean and clear about this movie-every scene isn't revolving around escalating drama with rising music and "the next big fight with the bad guy," but instead it's getting inside of our slowly deteriorating main character.  Bigelow juxtaposes quite wonderfully William James with the action around him, making tension rest in how we handle war and not simply what happens next to the character.  It's a neat trick, and something she used to even better effect three years later with Zero Dark Thirty.

Everyone in the known universe with a magazine, blog, or newspaper commented at the time about Bigelow fighting against her ex-husband, and so I will do that right now as well (mostly because we'll almost certainly never see something like this ever again), and the real fun was that even though Bigelow was winning in a blow-out, Cameron was certainly her biggest competitor.

Cameron's films frequently suffer from stilted dialogue and occasionally the overindulgence in editing, but from a director's perspective, he has few equals.  The way that he handles some of the action scenes (like Jake's first flight), so well-timed with the music and perfectly shifting the camera angles, it's a complete thrill ride.  Cameron also has the good sense in Avatar to know when to pull back on the love story (this is really a story about Jake's (and our) immersion into the world of Pandora, and not quite about him falling in love, though that's the catalyst), and the visual spectacle of the film has no equals-the film hasn't aged particularly well in the collective pop culture memory (very few people talk about it today in a way you'd expect for the highest-grossing film of all time), but it's an absolutely stunningly paced, well planned movie, mostly because of Cameron behind the wheel.

Quentin Tarantino, like Cameron, has a distinctive style that few could confuse with any other filmmaker.  You always know when you're watching a Tarantino film, and while his movies are always insanely watchable, he frequently needs to find a balance between what he is so good at (crisp, vivid characters, extended conversations filled with rich dialogue, elaborate action sequences) and what he can't balance (putting himself in the movie, too much tongue-in-cheek, annoyingly elaborate action sequences that take you out of the movie).  Tarantino's best film will probably always be Pulp Fiction, which is different than most everything he's done since, but in the new world of his movies, Inglourious Basterds reigns supreme.  I love the way that this film always feels essential-there are no scenes that aren't well thought out, and each act seems to link quite nicely to the next, while always having its own distinct flavor.  There isn't a lot of excess (the penultimate scene in the theater aside being the only exception), and he keeps his actors from washing each other out with over-the-top performances.  There's finesse in what he's doing, but unlike something like Django three years later, there's restraint there too-the only major scene with indulgent violence happens in the theater, even though there's opportunity for it in most other scenes.  It's a film that takes a drop from early Tarantino but mostly focuses on his larger-scale later work.

Jason Reitman also suffers from the occasional over-winking at the audience.  Think of something like Thank You for Smoking, a clever film that has something legitimate to say about the tobacco industry, but occasionally finds itself a bit over-in-love with its own script.  That's not the case with Up in the Air, a movie that could quite easily fall into the trap of just oozing adoration for George Clooney's Ryan Bingham, but instead decides to say something a bit bigger about the culture of layoffs and how much of our love and soul go into our careers.  Reitman's work isn't quite as revolutionary as some of his competitors, admittedly; there's nothing here that's particularly cool or outstanding (the empty offices seem to probably be the most jarring thing you see in the film, but that's not a directorial choice that anyone else would have made), but I do like the way that he treats his characters, particularly Ryan, never giving us over entirely to liking them but still making us invested that they are in fact people.

Lee Daniels is occasionally ridiculous (this really was a sea of five directors who have a sharp vision in their films).  Watching something like The Paperboy is a lesson in what-the-fuckery, with excess shooting out from every angle the film (that movie, while fascinating, was in desperate need of a better editor).  Precious, in the light of The Paperboy and The Butler, seems hauntingly restrained and though I love the idea of Lee Daniels, his later films haven't worked for me so I still cling to the tight, trapped Precious.  The movie's best asset is Mo'Nique as Mary, and Daniels is smart enough to make her a true supporting character, shoved away at the sidelines for scenes at a time (he knows that, like Precious, she stays and haunts us even when she's not onscreen).  He also knows when to puncture the film with a gut punch (think of the scene where Mary tells Precious that she doesn't have HIV because they never had anal sex-I remember the entire audience gasping at her ignorance), and to keep the film grounded in reality even when the performances seem so large and almost Shakespearean.  It's a wonderful way to find a balance between the excesses of the film and the hauntingly brutal and life-inspired moments of the movie.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes love themselves an actor-turned-director, particularly if your name is Clint Eastwood, and so he managed to score the only change in the Oscar lineup here over Daniels (it's worth noting that James Cameron ended up winning and not Bigelow if you thought you remembered her blowing out the entire field).  The DGA Awards, like the SAG Awards that year, were completely in-line with Oscar, both with the five nominees and the eventual winner.  The BAFTA Awards also skipped Precious (apparently Lee Daniels was in fifth place), but also Reitman's very American Up in the Air (instead, they went with the far more international Neill Blomkamp for District 9 and Lone Scherfig for An Education).  Kathryn Bigelow won the award, however.  This now begs the question of who was the sixth place finisher.  Common sense would dictate the AMPAS-friendly Eastwood, but Invictus missed in the Best Picture race, showing it had a lack of support.  The Coen Brothers are normally a good bet, but A Serious Man was obviously in tenth place in the Best Picture race.  John Lee Hancock is too cookie-cutter, Lone Scherfig probably too little known, and animated films don't get Best Director nominations for some reason.  Therefore, I'm going to guess that it was Blomkamp, who could have been in a Paul Greengrass sort of position here, but missed due to the solidarity of the main five nominees.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: It's worth noting that there's not a "bad" nominee in this bunch-all things considered, Oscar put together a pretty strong list of achievements.  I would have substituted in Michael Haneke, though, for sure, with his brutal and chilling White Ribbon, and I was SO onboard with the excess that was A Single Man that I think I would have put in Tom Ford on his feature film debut.

Oscar’s Choice: I think that Barbra Streisand was going to give it to her no matter what it said in that envelope, but no matter who presented the trophy, there was no denying that Kathryn Bigelow, glass-ceiling shatterer, was winning that Oscar.

My Choice: I'm going to side with the Globes here and give it to Cameron.  There's a lot of great work here and something to appreciate for all five, but Cameron's towering achievement is the most impressive of the bunch.  I'll follow him with Tarantino, Bigelow, Daniels, and finally Reitman.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Where did you stand on the Bigelow v. Cameron battle (or did you side with the other three)?  Do you also think it was a year that would have been a 5/5 matchup with Best Picture?  Who was the sixth place finisher?  And what was the best directed of 2009?  Share in the comments!

Also in 2009: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Film, Animated Feature, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2009

Past Best Director Contests: 2010, 2011, 2012

OVP: Picture (2012)

OVP: Best Picture (2012)

The Nominees Were...

Margaret Menegoz, Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, and Michael Katz, Amour

Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, and George Clooney, Argo

Dan Janvey, Josh Penn, and Michael Gottwald, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, and Pilar Savone, Django Unchained

Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, and Cameron Mackintosh, Les Miserables

Gil Netter, Ang Lee, and David Womark, Life of Pi

Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Lincoln
Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen, and Jonathan Gordon, Silver Linings Playbook

Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, and Megan Ellison, Zero Dark Thirty

My Thoughts: And so now we have come to the end of the line, the top of the heap, the cream of the crop-the nine films that received nominations for Best Picture.  Each of these films we've spent the past summer dissecting, looking through, and now it's time to figure out which one I (and you, if you post in the comments) most supported for the top prize.

I'm going to start with Silver Linings Playbook, because I feel I need to find some peace with the film. The movie is oddly good and terribly bad, and I think that I should first try and explain what I do like about the film.  The movie tries to cover a topic that is oddly underutilized in film: mental illness affecting normal, regular families.  Jennifer Lawrence, when she was doing all of the awards press junkets, frequently talked about ending the stigma of mental illness, and if this film did that just a little bit, that would have been a noble cause, if not necessarily one that deserved an Oscar nomination.  I think that the cinema does have that power to change the national conversation about a particular topic (look at movies like Brokeback Mountain for example).

But Silver Linings Playbook doesn't do that, because in real life, without some sort of medication and persistent work, mental illness is not cured by the love of a good woman.  This is not the doldrums of being dumped-Bradley Cooper's Pat has a real medical condition, and while his life going better may momentarily change his state of being, it won't permanently do so, as the ending implies.  David O. Russell, and I've said this several times, wants to have his cake and eat it too.  He wants to have a story that's about something pressing in the national dialogue, but also something that's cute and fun and a great date movie.  Both of these topics can be the source of excellent filmmaking-anyone who poo-poos this film because it's a romantic comedy doesn't get the point at all, as we are in desperate need as a cinematic audience of strong romantic comedies.  The problem is that these two don't cohesively meld in the way that Russell hopes them to, and as a result, you get a fine, enjoyable, but unsuccessful film.

Les Miserables will go next (because the two films have so many things in common, obviously).  I just checked my list of my rankings of all of the 2012 films, and I have this one oddly low compared to some of the others (including the two films trying desperately to take the top prize).  I think the biggest fault with Les Miz is that it has so many ups-and-downs.  You are given such a great start with Anne Hathaway's character and performance, easily the best part of the film-Hathaway's Fantine is a tragic, heartbreaking creation, and she sells it to the rafters.  Part of what makes a movie musical so appealing is that the sky is really the limit-you've already forgone reality by having people randomly sing in the streets, which, much to my chagrin, no one does in real life.  As a result, you can have a dramatic moment with this woman and believe that such a good person can have such a rotten life.

But the film never recovers from her leaving.  This isn't necessarily the baser story's fault: Jean Valjean, Javert, Eponine, Marius-this is a musical with a lot of interesting characters, but the performances are so all-over-the-map that when you don't have the unstoppable force of Hathaway's performance to distract you, you are pulled in many different directions.  The only work in the movie that equals Hathaway's is Eddie Redmayne's.  Sometimes I even feel that Redmayne, with that lyrical quiver in his voice (I just took a ten-minute break to listen to "Red and Black" and sing Don Ju-An multiple times) might be a better fit for the film that Hathaway.  But he can't save it when you have two lead performances that are bad for the story, and everyone else having too-limiting of characters.  The film is great for the stage, where these sorts of small character developments are more easily forgiven, but in a film they're fatal flaws that obscure the movie too deeply, even though there are definitely things to recommend seeing the movie.

Django Unchained is in a similar situation, with a lot of great pieces that don't seem to fit together.  I think the problem with Tarantino films at this point, and it's a growing problem, is that he's starting to lose the ability to shock and even surprise the audience.  No longer are we stunned when he puts together a brilliant song-score, or when he willingly kills off most of the main characters, or when the entire screen is doused in blood (it'd be a nice change if he went back to the nastiness of his first couple of films instead of the Sergio Leone-obsessed nature of his later films, at least for a picture or two).  His movies are too good to ever be called bad, but when a director can no longer thrill the audience, he needs to develop some new tricks (even Woody Allen has learned this, though he occasionally forgets it for years at a time).

What we're left with is a film that has razor-sharp dialogue, a few solid performances, but drags ferociously in the final third (why the hell does Tarantino keep casting himself, when he's seemingly the only person he can't get an improved performance out of?), and frequently finds offensive things to say without enough substance behind it.

Life of Pi has became one of the movies that, along with Silver Linings Playbook, was a punching bag throughout this OVP series of write-ups.  I have a harder time with this, because A) I like Ang Lee better than I like David O. Russell and B) there are moments in Life of Pi that are sheer bliss.  The visual effects in the film are of a caliber you rarely if ever see, coming as close to that "change the industry" sort of quality that you saw in Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Avatar as you can get without fully pulling the trigger (I was very happy to give it the OVP for Visual Effects).  The movie is beautiful, and the whales and islands and whimsy that comes from the film are all terrific.

But the film gets a sucker punch from the ending.  I know that the book ended largely in this way, with you forced to encounter reality in such a harsh avalanche, and normally I like a sprinkle of melancholy in my movies, but here it reads as a slap to the viewer.  It's not just that the police decided to believe his tiger story, it's that we all know he was lying, and they just went along with him to make everyone happy and to neglect the ugliness in the world.  That's probably the point of the story, but it seems so artificial and lazy to have so much magic dashed.  The ending of this movie has ruined my opinion of this film-when you have months and dozens of articles to write about a sole picture, its flaws and high points come further into focus, and that has forever marred my opinion of Life of Pi.

Amour is that rare film that has done neither for me.  My opinion of Amour has stayed stunningly neutral for a movie with some things to offer and that critics lapped up with a spoon.  It might be that I don't connect with the film in the way I'm supposed to, and I don't think that's because I'm sixty years younger than the characters (I have seen what it's like for one spouse to be affected by a stroke and the other to have all of their faculties).  It's just too clinical for me, it's too matter-of-fact.  The little touches are what I loved in the film-the Haneke touches.  I'm still stunned by the final scene, with Huppert walking through the apartment: the loneliness and foreboding in that scene is stunning.  Huppert doesn't give an Oscar-worthy performance, but her character is perhaps the most interesting in the movie.  She hasn't stored love for the future.  If there would have been more of that biting attitude, I probably would have sunk into the film more.  As it is, it is to be admired, but not necessarily to be interacted with, and doesn't quite hit me.

Lincoln is the film of the bunch that I wish I liked better.  It's grown on me slightly-the way that they combine all of these great Spielbergian staples; the man has one of the best tech crews in the business.  But like Amour, I just cannot connect with the source material in the way I'm supposed to, and here I know why.  I just don't buy characters that are saints, and not just because saints don't exist in real life, it's also because saints aren't very interesting.  Day-Lewis is far too strong of an actor to not give a quality performance, but I see in his work a legend that also happened to be a person, but he doesn't disrupt a saint that also happens to be a flawed person (Lincoln was only human, of course).  I also hate whitewashing history (couldn't David Derickson have at least shown up at some point), but I more so hate when history has been retold dozens of times while other just as interesting stories lay on the back-burner.  From a director as important as Spielberg I suppose this film will remain the definitive Lincoln, but couldn't we have picked a subject that has been less covered already in cinema?

Beasts of the Southern Wild, of course, is the bravest and probably most unique film of the bunch, and that is always something to celebrate.  One of the interesting things about the nine or ten wide Best Picture races is that you get a film like Beasts (or Tree of Life or District Nine or Up!) to compete when they otherwise wouldn't be able to (I maintain that 2012 would have been that rare year like 1995 or 2001 where we would have gone 3/5 for the directors, and Les Miz and Argo would have completed our nominated set).

The film works so well because Benh Zeitlin allows us to get lost in the world of Hushpuppy, a world that is both real (we all can tell that this is Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana) and of her imagination, and true to the wonder of cinema, Zeitlin never lets us know which is fact and which is fake.  Zeitlin's newness behind the camera is evident when he spends too much time on rebuilding the father-daughter relationship (and relying too heavily on first-time actors, a tactic which does give you a great freshness, but also gives you too many staged emotions, particularly from Dwight Henry).  The movie is a promising start to a hopefully interesting and long career, and I'm glad Oscar made the investment.

Finally, we come to Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, the two films that I've championed the hardest throughout this process.  Except, have I?  I don't feel like I've given enough credit to the excellent Argo.  Perhaps this is because Argo is the sum of its parts-it's similar to the gymnast who can't win a gold in any of the individual competitions but grabs it in the all-around.  The film just works-the humor, the acting, the suspense-Affleck may take some historical liberties, but he at least tells us a story we didn't already know (are you listening, Mr. Spielberg?), and pushes a political narrative without ever sacrificing entertainment.  That is a difficult task to undertake, and the film is littered with terrific scenes-that great finger-biting scene in the airport, for example.  It takes a lot to get a jaded and movie-educated audience to succumb to the idea that this group won't be successful.  I feel like Argo is going to be maligned a bit in Oscar history because it won the trophy for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a super movie that deserved to be amongst the best of the year.

I recently reread my review of Zero Dark Thirty to understand why I gave the film four stars rather than five stars, because some of its best parts (Chastain's performance, the exhilarating final third of the movie) have improved my opinion of it so dramatically.  I do feel correct in stating that the side characters in the film, Jennifer Ehle and Jason Clarke in particular, don't give us enough background.  Maya is supposed to be a universally, abnormally, almost psychotically driven force-of-nature, and she doesn't need a background, but Ehle's Jessica and Clarke's Dan don't have that tunnel vision.  We should learn more about what keeps them going back for more; this would, if nothing else, give us a contrast to Maya's determination.

But that being said, Bigelow has created the darker flip side of Argo here.  They are oddly similar stories, with both focused on a single person going up against political bureaucracy to succeed in a seemingly impossible task (and both had reluctant Democratic presidents who took a major risk that paid off).  Bigelow's version is more of a Dante-like descent for her character, while Affleck's is an uplifting tale of the human spirit.  It depends on which direction your specific cinematic passions swing that makes you cast your vote for one or the other, but I maintain these are the two best nominees of the bunch.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes, having split their categories into Drama and Comedy, didn't find room for Amour or Beasts of the Southern Wild, though they did fit in Moonrise Kingdom, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and in one of the oddest moments of the 2012 awards season, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Les Miz and Argo won).  The BAFTA Awards, which still maintain just five nominations, put their winner Argo over Les Miz, Life of Pi, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty.  And finally, the PGA Awards skipped only Amour (which did win the Palme d'Or, so don't feel too badly for it), giving their final two nominations to Moonrise Kingdom and Skyfall (handing the trophy over to Argo).  It's a hard tell over what was in tenth place.  I know historically people will scoff that a James Bond film could get this close to the top trophy, but I think if we had had the mandatory ten-wide field, we would have seen Skyfall stunningly top Moonrise Kingdom, The Master, and Flight.
Films I Would Have Nominated: I've discussed at length my desperate need for The Master and Magic Mike, both films that continue to grow every time I view them, to be included in this field.  However, neither was my favorite film of 2012.  Nor was Argo or Zero Dark Thirty.  My favorite movie of 2012 was the little hidden sapphire that was The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I cannot tell you how I, who favors the epic scope when picking my favorite film of the year, went with a movie about teenagers, but Stephen Chbosky's tale about such realistic youths, trying to find their way through a period of their lives when they think they know more than they do, and somehow also know more than they think, is a challenging and wonderful opus, with three superb performances from Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, and our hero of heroes, Logan Lerman.  It's a wonderland of a movie, and my 2012 favorite.

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar loves a bandwagon, and it was very easy to jump on the Argo train, considering they had a movie star's face to put on the snub.  Lincoln was likely in second (though Life of Pi could also have been there), and it's still worth mentioning the massive success of this lineup of films: six of these movies made $100 million domestically, and we didn't have to include a superhero film to do it.  Thanks for showing adult dramas and comedies can make money still, America.

My Choice: Obviously a race between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, and I'm going to succumb to my gut and give this to Bigelow's tale of war and obsession.  In third place is Beasts, followed by Django, Lincoln, SLP, Life of Pi, Amour, and Les Miz.

And that, my friends, was 2012.  It was a long, great journey, so I'm going to leave it to you-what was the best film of 2012?  What OVP wins did you most (or least) agree with?  What AMPAS wins did you most (or least) agree with?  And with six films remaining to be viewed by moi for 2009, whose ready to encounter that race later this month?

Also in 2012: Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Animated Short, Live Action Short, Previously in 2012

Past Best Picture Contests: 2010, 2011