OVP: August Rush (2007)

Film: August Rush (2007)
Stars: Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Robin Williams, Terrence Howard
Director: Kirsten Sheridan
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Raise It Up")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Sometimes the Oscar Viewing Project has been a rapturous delight.  Films like What Price Hollywood? and Before Sunset have become favorites of mine, delights that I wouldn't have uncovered were it not for the project and for that I shall continue to trudge ahead, even if occasionally the Oscars decide to throw a cruelly sour and saccharine bone my way.  That's the way I felt with August Rush, a film that got a fifth slot Best Original Song nomination a few years back and was during that brief period of time that Freddie Highmore was a movie star (kudos to him for skipping the drugs-phase of his child actor career and heading over to the Bates Motel).  The movie is the sort that at best looks like a Disney feel-good in the commercials, and at worst it could turn into an out-and-out tragedy of film-watching.

(Spoilers Ahead) Terrible.  This movie was terrible.  I don't even know how to sugarcoat it, because there's really no sugarcoating such a travesty of cloying and false morality and idiotic characterizations. I honestly don't even know where to begin except to tell you I took a nap about halfway through and had to restart the movie because it was so bad.  The film follows Evan/August (Highmore), a savant-style child with an uncanny ability for music, who is searching for his parents Lila (Russell) and Louis (Rhys Meyers), who had a one-night stand for his conception but somehow fell in love and were torn apart because he was a common Irish guitarist and she was a Daddy's Princess Juilliard student who had never lived a day in her life.  August runs away from his parents and is taken in by a man named Wizard (Williams), a Fagin-style figure who coordinates child street performers around the city to play music.

The plot already sounds like a series of cliches, doesn't it?  It's not just that the writing is bad, it's that it takes literally every moment that you know is coming and makes it as heavy-handed as humanly possible.  There is a scene where Terence Howard (who plays a social worker of some sort looking for August when he runs away) asks Lila why she wants her son now.  The correct answer is she didn't know he existed until very recently since her father had told her that her son was dead, but she answers "I've always been looking for him."  It's one of those moments where you just feel the vomit rising up to your eyeballs-was this movie written by Kirk Cameron or something?  The film gets unnecessarily religious about halfway through which steals away from the central theme of music bringing people together and instead wants to throw God in the mix as well (I'm all for religion and will be attending church in about fourteen hours, so don't give me that look, but there's a time and a place artistically and this was not it).  However, at that point in the film we've stumbled into so many cliches it's easy to see that coming up in the rearview.

Seriously, it's hard to put into words how much I struggled with this film.  I think part of the problem was August himself.  Highmore's maturity for an eleven-year-old is too advanced for him to be so naive as to consistently see that Wizard is using him or for the film to feel so completely based in an era pre-internet or pre-cell phone.  August is smart enough to be able to compose sonnets at a moment's will and count days in his head, but he isn't smart enough to realize that Wizard's blackmailing him is manipulative and not true?  It's one of those convenient plot points in films, because it is trying to have its cake and eat it too, but I think that's the worst kind of writing and it irks me to no end.  It doesn't help that Highmore's performance is not good (I will admit that I never got him as a child actor-he was always too vanilla and too charisma-challenged as a child performer), and that he reads every line as if he's talking to the camera and not to the person sitting in front of him.  None of the actors are particularly good, though.  Keri Russell is heavy-handed and her part is so severely-underwritten that we have absolutely no clue as to her opinion of music, her father, or her life, or why she continues to live such a vapid existence.  Robin Williams is a brilliant performer, but he doesn't know how to tone down Wizard's Snidely Whiplash-style villainy, and as a result we get yet another late-career miss from him.  Arguably the only person halfway watchable in the crew is Rhys Meyers', who at the very least precludes himself mostly from the sugar-soaked dialogue and while his character is also truly underwritten, he at least finds some charm in it.

Overall this is one of the worst movies I have seen in recent memory.  Even the Oscar nomination seems wholly undeserved, as the song that was nominated has little resonance to the plot and is barely even sung in the film (and sounds so generic it's hard to imagine how anyone noticed it was an original).  A true disappointment, especially in a year like 2007 where pretty much the whole catalog of Oscar nominees were doing marvelous things.  The Academy would have been better off picking another song from Once.  And then I could have had my afternoon back.

Robin Williams (1951-2014)

The internet and blogosphere is surely going to be filled with these today, but I cannot help but put in my two cents about such an amazingly talented man.  As I'm sure many of you have heard, Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams died yesterday at the age of 63.  This is a tragic end for a man who inspired a generation of actors and comedians, and was once one of the most recognizable movie stars on the planet.

Though he would be noticed by AMPAS in more traditional, serious roles, I will always remember him most from my childhood in two very specific performances.  First, of course, is Mrs. Doubtfire, which came out when I was in elementary school.  My parents were pretty strict about the PG-13 rating, so I want to say I saw this on VHS rather than in theaters, but it doesn't matter as my brother and I quickly memorized it anyway.  I actually don't think first of Williams when I recall the movie, but instead the way that Pierce Brosnan pronounces, "Mrs. Doubtfire" (my brother and I would try to imitate him with limited success).  However, Williams was the true attraction in this comedic gem, constantly finding the humor in the broadest of circumstances, and infusing it with that trademark Juilliard aplomb.  He was so rapid fire, so sure and spectacular in what he was doing onscreen, and always willing to go for every laugh that the script had to offer (and, more than likely, a few that it had neglected).

You can see that in, in my opinion, his finest work (though I've neglected a few of his Oscar-nominated roles, so I clearly have some gaps in his filmography that I shall catch up on through the OVP), as the genie in Aladdin.  I wrote about this a while back when I called it one of the finest animated performances ever, but truly this is a wonderful role of a lifetime.  Williams oozes from the screen and his charm, panache, and dead-on timing are small miracles.  If ever Oscar decided to start honoring animated work alongside live-action, this would be a prime reason to do it.

I could spend this entire post rattling off random memories of Robin Williams (remember the time he was sporadically on Friends?!?), but I think that I shall defer to him here.  He was always the greatest at rattling on a series of excellent though tangentially-connected thoughts, and I cannot compete.  I will simply bow my hat.

However I cannot let something go that's been irking me since I was reading the obituaries.  Amongst the lovely posts on Twitter from his colleagues and admirers are truly misguided people trying to sort through their emotions, particularly in regard to the way that he died.  While we still are not 100% sure what the medical examiner will conclude, preliminary evidence indicates that this was a suicide.  Suicide is a difficult concept for a lot of us to get our minds around, particularly since evolutionarily and pragmatically it stands in the way we think, the way we want to survive.  And that confusion occasionally makes us (or Todd Bridges) say ignorant things, one of which has become a cliche regarding suicide that I would like to correct.  People frequently say that in the wake of a tragedy it's not the time to discuss heavy matters, but I think that that is the best thing we can do, in hopes of preventing tragedies in the future.

Suicide is not, as so many people have stated, a selfish act.  This is something that feels true because when someone we know commits suicide (and sadly, too many of us know someone who has committed suicide), we want more time with them and cannot think how they could do that to us.  It is not a selfish act, though, but an unspeakably tragic one, because as another cliche correctly states, it is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.  And that temporary problem is the anguish that comes from depression.  We as a society don't treat depression as an illness, but it is one in the same way that cancer or heart disease are. It's time we stopped treating it as something as so taboo and started encouraging, rooting for people who suffer from it to get the help and therapy they need to get better.  Because the truly selfish thing here is that we don't want to encourage people to get better.  We want them to keep their problems under a rug so that others don't know, and that is wrong.  It's time we as a society started to realize that we are incredibly close-minded and prejudiced about mental illness and start encouraging people to seek help.  Because tragedies like Robin Williams death don't need to be something we encounter too often.  People who suffer from depression and consider taking their lives do it because they no longer think the light can come through the darkness.  It's time for us to start opening our minds and making it easier for that light to shine.  Then lights like the Genie's, like Mork's, like Mrs. Doubtfire's and Garp's and John Keating's and Armand Goldman's...lights like that of the incomparable, wonderful Robin Williams won't go out too soon.

The Top 10 Best Animated Performances

Recently, I've been thinking about Oscar and his relationship with animation.  On the one hand, he's been relatively ungenerous with animation-animated movies have only thrice been nominated for Best Picture (and only one of those was in one of the five-wide years), and despite bravura work, animation never makes it in for a category like art direction. On the other hand, since 2001, the field has had its own category at the Oscars, which means that the films in the genre are amply rewarded, even if that means that they are likely denied clearance to other categories (one nomination is more than almost all films released in a year, after all).

The thing that riles up film fans the most, however, is the fact that not a single animated performance has been nominated in the acting categories.  There's a few reasons for this, not least of which is that I'm not 100% certain animated performances are even eligible for an Oscar nomination.  Vocal actors don't have the same range of tools at their disposal when they're not onscreen.  We don't get to see their faces, their eyes, their quivers and their reactions.  Even with stop-motion performances, it's difficult to figure out what is the actor's work and where the animator or visual effects artist is responsible for that tug of your heart or that lump in your throat.

This isn't to say, of course, that animated work can't be excellent, and perhaps even Oscar-worthy.  It's just that you're grading on a curve.  This has led some people to foolishly state that we should have a separate category for animated vocal work, as it is in some ways a different beast than physically acting onscreen.  To this, I scoff, again for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it would be too easy to watch big stars take roles in large-scale films from Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks to score an easy Oscar nomination (Oscars shouldn't just be handed out willy-nilly).  Secondly, there isn't enough great work each year in this category.  Even in a year like last year, with a relatively strong animated film race, there were no vocal performances that came close to what Jessica Chastain was doing in Zero Dark Thirty or what Jennifer Lawrence was commanding in Silver Linings Playbook.  Every category you add to an awards show takes away the honor of winning that award, and so I vehemently oppose adding this category (really, any category outside of something to recognize Stunt Work, I'm against for Oscar).

But on to the show here-I wanted to chronicle the ten best vocal performances in animated films.  I'm not going to say whether someone should have received an Oscar or not for that year (I haven't seen all of the acting nominees in the categories for most of these)...except I will say that I have a hard time believing the Top 2 shouldn't have been included.  I'm also not going to include motion capture work (because we all know that Andy Serkis would win, and that takes away my suspense).  These are the best pieces of vocal work I've seen in animated films, period.

10. Teri Hatcher (Coraline)
Yes, you read that right, but hear me out if you haven't seen the film and are basing your reaction on a low opinion of Hatcher.  Hatcher, best known as Lois Lane and Susan Meyer, is definitely a good actress (her work on Housewives occasionally got a bit stretched or "annoying," but she had some wickedly awesome moments as well, says someone who actually watched the full series instead of just stopping watching after the first season and then complaining about how it's not as good as it used to be even though you hadn't watched the final six seasons).  Her Other Mother is creepy, manic, and the casting director deserves recognition for finding someone who has such a thin, tight voice that comes across with both menace and maternal instincts.  Hatcher's work here is amongst the best of her career, and in a year brimming with great animated films, outshines every other animated actor.

9. Cliff Edwards (Pinocchio)
In the best film Walt ever created (Snow White obsessives, the comments section is just a click away), Jiminy Cricket is a conundrum of a fellow-ornery, cranky, morally upstanding, and totally smitten with the comely Blue Fairy.  He helps the Blue Fairy mostly due to his crush, though also to become a true conscience for the soon to be real-boy Pinocchio, and as a result, becomes our own guide through the film.  Edwards beautifully singing during "When You Wish Upon a Star" lands him a spot in my top ten, but his comic timing and great, quick turn of phrase adds to the richness of this character.  There's a reason Disney so willingly adopted him as one of their chief mascots.

8. Brad Bird (The Incredibles)
Is the basis Mary Quant?  Is it Lotte Leyna?  Is it Edith Head (probably)?  Whomever it is, Edna Mode transcends imitation and becomes something all-her-own with Brad Bird behind her, guiding her quick wit and flares for the dramatic.  I love the way that he keeps what is easily the best part of his film on the skirts of the movie (Bird being both director and an actor in the film), with only a pinch of Edna Mode's deadpan delivery and never finding the ridiculous in her comments serving as a brilliant, full meal.  Edna is not someone to be trifled with, but she's also not stand-offish, and in a good message to children watching, Bird lets her passion come through.  It may seem ridiculous, but she never succumbs to it being silly, and as a result she is someone to be admired, as well as comic gold.

7. Kathleen Turner and Amy Irving (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)
I'm cheating a teensy bit here, both by having two people for the price of one character (thus further illustrating the complication of an Oscar for this genre, which frequently has multiple actors playing the same part) and by allowing a film that isn't entirely animated, but it's clearly not the same deal as motion capture.  Jessica Rabbit is one for the ages, and I can't decide whether it's Turner's deadpan delivery (why doesn't she get more vocal work with that Bacall tenor she sports around) or Irving's Peggy Lee-style introduction to the woman that makes her more than just drawn that way.  Combined, they give a rich, delicious character her iconic status.

6. Betty Lou Garson (101 Dalmatians)
"Anita darling!"  You know you just thought it.  We've (or at least I've) walked around a room trying to be her (sans the puppy-killing, obviously), thrusting around an extended cigarette and a martini glass like I'm a cross between Miranda Priestly, Wallis Simpson, and the Cryptkeeper.  Garson's work makes you both enchanted with the villain and terrified of her-to see her is to take a certain chill, indeed.  Due in no small part to Garson's successful work, that magetism of the villain, that they aren't just a foil to our main protagonist but really the central attraction, is a Disney formula that has been used with much success by everyone from Geraldine Page to Jeremy Irons to, most recently, Donna Murphy.

5. Samuel E. Wright (The Little Mermaid)
Wright's vocal work is truly a triumph in a film brimming with them.  Sebastian the Crab is that assistant you always wanted-loyal, quick with advice, hard-working to a fault, and constantly putting his neck on the line, even if it means he may end up as an appetizer.  His finest moment in the film is his "Kiss the Girl" song ("Under the Sea" is blissful, but the fact that it won the Oscar has always seemed strange to me, considering it's the fourth best song in that movie, much less for the entire year), where he sets the mood and makes you believe in love, and that they will kiss, because who wouldn't want to with Wright serenading you while you're "floating in a blue lagoon?"

4. Angela Lansbury (Beauty and the Beast)
Lansbury's Mrs. Potts is partially this high due to sentimental reasons, as I both adore this film more than all other Disney pictures and I adore her more than almost all other actors.  But still, her work is warming, as her great big number (there, the Academy correctly identified the best song in the movie).  It may have been fairly easy for Lansbury, but that doesn't mean she doesn't nail the part, the way that she believes in love before almost any other characters, but remains weary of staying in her position forever (think of the tenuous way she handles the Beast as opposed to her coworkers).  This is an actress who could push around John Iselin like nobody's business, and she can also be the maternal grandmother we all want to tuck us in at night.

3. Robin Williams (Aladdin)
Don't give me that look, you know I'm right!  Williams commands the screen in Aladdin, and while he may have been borrowing from this same schtick for the next couple of decades of stand-up, that doesn't negate that this performance was so alive, so full of energy and humor, and is absolutely wall-to-wall funny as only Robin Williams can command.  The character was clearly meant to always be played by Williams, and while typecasting is oftentimes dismissed as lazy, perhaps we should rethink such a practice when it's clear that from 1989-95, when Disney was perfectly casting its characters rather than striving for "stuff-the-film-with-stars," a practice Dreamworks made popular, it worked so well.

2. Ellen Degeneres (Finding Nemo)
Degeneres's Dory owns the entire movie the moment she arrives.  Comic acting always seems to be the best template for animation, and Degeneres's timing has always been her greatest asset as a comedian and an actress (and a talk show host, for that matter).  She can convey the late in the film confession with Marlin ("I look at you, and I'm home") without giving up any of the character's sense of whimsy or memory loss.  She takes every moment to sell her lines, and to sell her character, and for that, she deserved an Oscar nomination, just like the woman who is in Number One...

1. Pat Carroll (The Little Mermaid)
I have yet to see a performance that has made me rethink that Carroll deserved the Oscar in 1989 (the nomination, I'm convinced, should have been a done deal).  Carroll's work is so iconic-imagine ANY other actor taking on Ursula, and you would have had someone who was too comic, too dark, too toothless.  Instead, her Ursula is someone you can be suckered in by-she's seen it all, she knows what she wants, and she has the resonant basso profondo to get her point across.  She has that terrific laugh at the back of her throat, but she only employs it when she needs to really instill a sense of fear or foreboding in the audience.  The Little Mermaid has been borrowed from and stolen from so many times that few people today can make successful retellings of classic fairy tales without trying to be hip or cool or throwing in a pop culture reference or a bunch of sight gags.  They keep forgetting what a menacing diva Ursula was-Carroll plays her as a woman who has found her shot, and knows this is the moment to seize (a timeless maneuver).  And "Poor Unfortunate Souls"-try not bellowing "what is idle prattle for" while listening to Carroll sing.

And that's my Top 10, but I want to hear yours-what are the best animated vocal performances?  Do you think any of them should have been honored by Oscar?  And which ones?  Share in the comments!