OVP: Actor (2018)

OVP: Best Actor (2018)

The Nominees Were...

Christian Bale, Vice

Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born

Willem Dafoe, At Eternity's Gate

Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody

Viggo Mortensen, Green Book

My Thoughts: Oscar should always be a starting point when it comes to film & an appreciation of it.  Many classic movie fans use Oscar as a guide into this world, as he presents an overview of what the public & the industry thought was work worth highlighting in a given year.  But he shouldn't be taken as a grand authority on film itself, because there are times that he gets it so wrong as to be flabbergasted.  2018's Best Actor lineup is, for me, potentially the worst acting lineup in the history of the Academy.  With one exception, none of these are even good performances, much less award-worthy, and I have spent much of our 2018 OVP dreading having to get into these men & the ridiculousness of a lineup which could've been exponentially better.

We're going to start with Willem Dafoe not because he's noteworthy, but because he's the easiest of the quartet of lackluster performances to forgive.  That's partially because no one really thought this nomination would happen-Dafoe was cited by the Globes, but that felt like a "we love a celebrity" scenario more than anything.  Dafoe's work is rudimentary.  He plays van Gogh sensitively, but is lost in a gimmicky movie that had just had its gimmick utilized better in the animated Loving Vincent.  As a result, you leave wanting more from Dafoe, a terrific actor who otherwise has had solid runs with Oscar in terms of his nominations.  Let's just forget this even happened (I suspect Dafoe has).

It's harder to forget Christian Bale in Vice.  Bale as Cheney is a weird decision.  Obviously the handsome Bale doesn't resemble the Mr. Potter-villain that is Dick Cheney one physical iota, so you'd hope that Adam McKay would have seen something in Bale's persona that would lift Cheney, rather than just being a second nomination for the makeup team.  That's not the case.  Cheney feels like a cartoon, never really admitting the reasoning behind his ruthlessness, just that he happens to be ruthless-Vice is a sloppy movie, and Bale as its main player should hold a bunch of the blame there.  I still think this is mostly the fault of the writers, but he couldn't find a way to use his deep introversion onscreen to more impressive affect, and so I left lost as to the celebration of this man.

Viggo Mortensen, like Willem Dafoe, would probably prefer to forget this nomination even happened.  Eastern Promises and Captain Fantastic are both movies that I was middling on, but at least they are movies that have pockets of support around the internet.  Mortensen brings some physicality to his Tony, but there's not enough going on underneath, which is strange because Mortensen (like Bale) has made a career out of well-playing the strong, silent type into three-dimensionality.  If you know me at all, you know I'm not impressed by physicality as a rule, and that's not enough for me to get behind Mortensen even though he brings something to his character in a way a few of these nominees don't.

Bradley Cooper is the one performance in this lineup that is going to encounter "but what about's..." from anyone reading who sees "worst lineup ever" and protests.  Cooper is solid in A Star is Born, much better than his costars.  He does such intricate character work with mirroring the mannerisms of Sam Elliott (the true younger brother, trying to be his own idealized version of his hero), and the way that he plays Jackson as a man who has been famous for so long it takes genuine work for him to understand what is real & what is mirage as the movie continues.  He also, especially in the film's first half, has solid chemistry with Lady Gaga.  This is Cooper's best performance to date, and it's probably the performance that will win him an Oscar someday (even though it would've been easier had AMPAS just given him the Oscar here for the actual performance).

But instead they gave it to Rami Malek, a man who I wonder if he'd have preferred to have just lost at this point.  Malek's win is so maligned that it's easy to risk hyperbole, but I'll be honest-other than make George Arliss in Disraeli, you'd be hard-pressed to find a worse lead actor winner.  Malek doesn't do his own singing, so he starts out with a deficit, and then takes it from there.  A movie that seems hell-bent on condemning Malek's character despite him being the assumed hero, Malek can't ground him in anything-there's no understanding of Freddie Mercury's sexuality, of his drive, of his vanity.  Malek uses his expressive eyes as often as he can, but getting a look right doesn't give your character a soul.  The film is offensive, long, & gross...Malek's work as Freddie might not always cause those descriptors, but it adds another one: boring.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes of course break out their nominees between Drama and Comedy/Musical, so we have ten names from their ceremony.  Drama gave us the victorious Malek, beating out Cooper, Dafoe, Lucas Hedges (Boy Erased), and John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman), while Comedy/Musical went to Bale over Mortensen, Lin-Manuel Miranda (Mary Poppins Returns), Robert Redford (The Old Man & the Gun), and John C. Reilly (Stan & Ollie).  SAG also favored Malek, with an exact replica of the Oscar lineup except Dafoe is ousted for Washington, while BAFTA did a similar trick, having Malek on top and Dafoe beaten for Steve Coogan of Stan & Ollie.  In terms of sixth place, you have to assume it was John David Washington, inexplicably missing for BlacKkKlansman, though I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Ethan Hawke in First Reformed, which had a lot of buzz throughout the season even if it went nowhere.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: We will get to "My Ballot" next week, so I'm not giving away anything quite yet, other than to tell you to stay tuned, as I pick an entirely different lineup from Oscar (all five new names coming).

Oscar’s Choice: Malek won in a landslide, a win that even on the night looked like it would age poorly.  In a different universe they would've realized the error of their ways sooner & gotten Cooper the trophy they'll eventually be forced to give him.

My Choice: Cooper, and it's not a close contest (Cooper, for the record, will be my seventh place for 2018 showing just how far off I am from Oscar).  Follow him with Mortensen, Dafoe, Bale, & Malek, though really everyone other than Cooper has just earned embarrassment.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Are you joining me on Team Bradley Cooper, or does Malek still have his defenders?  Anyone have any explanation how Dafoe ended up here for a movie so few people saw?  And is this Oscar's weakest lineup ever?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Also in 2018: Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2018

Past Best Actor Contests: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019

OVP: Howl's Moving Castle (2005)

Film: Howl's Moving Castle (2005)
Stars: Emily Mortimer, Christian Bale, Lauren Bacall, Billy Crystal, Josh Hutcherson, Blythe Danner
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature Film)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I will (on occasion) get someone who will be stunned when I haven't seen a movie.  This gets old faster than you think (despite putting near daily reviews on this blog, I will admit that I don't actually get to watch a movie every day, and even at that rate, I still would have gaps in my viewing history), but there are movies that pop up enough that I know that seeing them is actually going to help me a bit, going from a look of fake shock to an unamused expression of "oh, John has an opinion on another movie."  One of those titles is strangely Howl's Moving Castle, the only major Miyazaki film that I haven't caught since the director "went mainstream" in the US with his studio's Oscar win for Spirited Away.  The fact that I loved the 2002 movie and didn't see his immediate followup at the time is a little odd, but I was in college, and was getting paid to see specific movies each week for my school paper (and if I wasn't paid to see it, I had to pay for it from my consistently empty wallet).  So here we are, fifteen years later, finally catching it as we start to put a close on the 2005 Academy Awards.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, like so many by Miyazaki, has a lot of plot, so stick with me for a second.  Sophie (Mortimer) is a young woman who runs a hat shop.  She is one day whisked across town (literally, they fly) by a traveling wizard called Howl (Bale), who lives in a giant floating castle. At the shop, she encounters the rude and cruel Witch of the Waste (Bacall), who puts a curse on her, turning her into an old woman (Simmons).  She goes to find Howl, but is forbidden from speaking the reasons or the why's of her curse to Howl, since he might be able to break it.  However, once she gets there she finds that Howl is a lost soul, someone who tries to stay away from the world rather than be brave, and is involved in his own curse with Calcifer (Crystal), who is a wisecracking fire demon (a thing, apparently).  Together, they go after the Witch of the Waste, but in doing so realize the true creature they must battle is Madame Suliman (Danner), another witch who has actually stripped the Witch of the Waste of her powers, and has been doing so to a depleting number of witches and wizards.  They end up doing so by essentially breaking all of the curses, and saving the kingdom in the process.

That last sentence takes about forty minutes.  One of the bigger problems with this film is that there's, in fact, too much plot.  This isn't always an issue, and especially with animation it's kind of a refreshing issue to have (in recent years, one of the bigger crimes of mainstream animated films has been creating ridiculously one-note supporting players that feel phoned-in by the writers), but it's there.  The film's thick story works for long stretches, but then randomly Howl is flying around as a monster or he's unnecessarily vain or we have to see the piles-of-flesh Witch of the Waste degraded yet again as she extends a thin tangent.  It needs trimming, is what I'm saying.

But otherwise I have little to complain about, as while this lacks the automatic magic of Spirited Away, it's visually splendid and filled with genuinely interesting performances.  Leave it to only Hayao Miyazaki to have two of the big headliners of 1940's cinema (Lauren Bacall and Jean Simmons) unite for the only team some fifty years after they regularly headlined pictures.  The film looks gorgeous.  I'm never a fan of the way that Miyazaki makes hideous imagery onscreen with select characters, and there's some problematic aspects to the way he depicts overweight people here, but overall his moving castle is a vision.  And like I said, the film's story works in large spurts.  The back story is complete, the characters well-drawn, and the conclusion pretty satisfying.  In the US, this would have surely required several movies to get through, but thankfully this is our one story with these characters.  As such, it's also the type of movie that we used to obsess over and recreate, in a world before prequels & sequels did that for us.

OVP: Ford vs. Ferrari (2019)

Film: Ford vs. Ferrari (2019)
Stars: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal, Caitriona Balfe, Tracy Letts, Josh Lucas, Noah Jupe
Director: James Mangold
Oscar History: 4 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Sound Editing*, Sound Mixing, Film Editing*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

A single movie is a cumulative product.  It is, when you're judging it, a combination of acting, editing, directing, cinematography...you've seen the Oscars before, you know the categories.  As such, as I write a lot of film reviews (I review pretty much every movie I see on this blog, and I see 4-5 movies a week), I always have to weigh the best way to tackle this cumulative achievement for a movie when one wheel of the picture goes horribly flat (I promise this article won't be all automotive puns).  This is the case with Ford vs. Ferrari, which is the kind of crowd-pleasing picture that people hit on a long Thanksgiving weekend, which definitely has enjoyable sections, but one particular Oscar category threatens to tear it limb-from-limb.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in the early 1960's, the film is about the Ford Motor Company, headed by Henry Ford II (Letts), trying to re-invent itself in the wake of declining sales and international competition.  One of his associates, Lee Iacocca (Bernthal, and weirdly the film never acknowledges that Iacocca would become a much more iconic CEO than Ford Jr. ever would when he moved over to Chrysler), proposes that they attempt to get into racing and take on Ferrari.  Ford reluctantly agrees, and they recruit former Le Mans winner Carroll Shelby (Damon) to help design the car.  Shelby in turn recruits his friend, the ill-tempered but talented Ken Miles (Bale) to join the racing team.  Another Ford executive, Leo Beebe (Lucas), wants to take Miles off of the project, and frequently sabotages Carroll's attempts to win his way.  Despite the interference, Carroll goes to Le Mans with Ken as the diver, but Leo take away Ken's win by forcing him to "tie" with the other Ford drivers, and in the process pushes Ken to second place due to a technicality. The film ends with Ken's death in a car accident just a little bit after the race, and Carroll coming to terms with Ken's passing.

There are good parts to Ford vs. Ferrari before I get to the unforgivable.  This is exactly the sort of movie that Matt Damon excels in-he's not a great heavy dramatic actor, and I find his comedic bits to be too reliant on mugging, but he's perfect for light dramas, and despite a heavy-handed third act, that's what this is-a fluffy, no-analysis-required drama.  Bale, whom I don't like to the same degree as Damon, hasn't been this watchable in years.  While he's obviously talented, it's delicious to see him sink his teeth into an over-the-top character and not just go for the intense; Ken is funny, hot-headed but charming, the kind of guy you'd love getting a beer with until he picked a fight with the bartender.  And the racing scenes, which I was worried would be a slog (I find watching car-racing to be perhaps the dullest sport on ESPN), is entertaining and the movie does a decent job of not going to the same style of high stakes for different intervals with Ken in the car.

The problem with the movie is that its script is BAD.  The lines that some of these men are forced to say are all pulled out of textbook cases of awful sports movie dialogue, and the way that its paced makes you realize everything coming at the beginning of the problem, with no actual stakes in the problem on the screen.  It doesn't help that they give Josh Lucas the worst role I've seen in a movie this year, playing a villain who is always wrong while Carroll & Ken are always right-it's basically Bugs Bunny & Elmer Fudd by the end of the picture it's so black-and-white between the two.  Tracy Letts is a fine actor, but you get the sense the film's creators want his Ford to be both a smart man (savvy enough to take valid criticism without lashing out), while also being a pompous idiot who falls for everyone of Josh Lucas's Leo's bad ideas.  It is such lazy plotting & writing that it honestly ruined the movie for me, and that's not even before we throw in the downer third act curveball of Miles dying in the final 15 minutes.  I know it's based on real life & if I loved racing I'd have seen this coming, but this is still a movie-what is the lesson here?  This is a movie that has a lot of great elements, but it's all thrown apart by a script that, like Leo, wants to step on anything inventive that it's hoping to achieve.  As a result, I'm going with a 1-star here because I adamantly disliked this movie, and every time they gave me something I might enjoy, the script comes in and takes it away.

OVP: Supporting Actor (2015)

OVP: Best Supporting Actor (2015)

The Nominees Were...

Christian Bale, The Big Short
Tom Hardy, The Revenant
Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight
Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone, Creed

My Thoughts: After over a year profiling this (I say this every time, but I mean it this time-we are not taking as long when we do the next year which I plan on starting in July), we are now arriving in the Top 6 of 2015, the big, iconic races that even lax Oscar fans might remember.  The Best Supporting Actor race of 2015, I'm going to admit right now, was never going to be a great race.  Unlike the female acting contests, which featured some of the best work Oscar had seen in a while, the male races were pretty underwhelming, and even if I was to replace it with my own choices, I wouldn't do that much better as it just wasn't an amazing year for supporting actors.

The best way to indicate that is to look at the actual winner of the Oscar race, Mark Rylance.  Rylance IS one of the great actors of his generation if you count his stage work.  I saw him in Jerusalem in 2011, and I still talk about the performance-it might be the single greatest performance I've ever seen on Broadway.  That said, this performance is fine.  It's admittedly pretty subdued, and he finds the quieter moments in Rudolf Abel, particularly the scene by his desk before he's eventually arrested, but there's not a lot there, particularly when he treads familiar territory with Hanks (and certainly for Spielberg) in the bonding period in the back half of the film.  It's the sort of performance that people applaud Oscar for recognizing since it rarely goes for introverts, but it feels like the sort of win that only happened because there wasn't an obvious, showy piece-of-work to go after.

Then again, there probably was a showy performance of sorts that Oscar could have gone for, but thankfully they didn't.  Mark Ruffalo has been on the outside-looking in with three Oscar races now, but he should have just been watching at home for his work in Spotlight.  Arguably giving the worst performance in the Best Picture winner (and I love Mark Ruffalo usually, so don't come after me in the comments), Ruffalo plays for the rafters with Michael Rezendes.  The giant speech "it could have been any of us" is meant to be a big coming-together moment, trying to unite the journalists with the victims of abuse, but Ruffalo goes so large, and is so bombastic it almost ruins the movie.  It's easy to see why this performance was nominated, but considering that Michael Keaton is nailing his role in the film and easily could have been cited instead, I don't think the "why" is forgivable with actually going through with nominating Ruffalo for one of his lesser efforts.

Tom Hardy is easier to forgive since this is his first time to the dance (I always struggle going too hard after a first-time nominee), and is considerably better than Ruffalo.  That's not to say that Hardy is doing something remarkable here, but there's more nuance in his performance than Leo is giving to his role, giving him more layers and a better trajectory for his character, relying on actual acting and the work of his eyes more than sheer physicality.  That said, he's stuck in a bad movie, and he's not given enough to be able to save it fully.  There's no actual interest in character development from the director, so Hardy's touches don't create something fully-fledged, just a more interesting personage than you'd expect given what the rest of the actors are doing.

Bale has a director who does care about his characters, albeit one whose idea of character development is simply stating "and now the character is like this" rather than growing the story through subtle changes in direction (Adam McKay is many things, not all of them bad, but he is decidedly not subtle).  Bale is also not a subtle actor, and while he is impressive in his ability to inhabit characters, he rarely finds time to grow them without big jerks, going in heavy on the tics that Michael Burry brings to The Big Short, but never finding reasons as to why he eventually has a change-of-heart about the corruption he's profited from.  Bale is hindered by McKay not really understanding the ramifications of the movie he's made (he is also a millionaire who might not be the best representative of the common man's struggles), but you can't blame the scenery-chewing on McKay-that's this actor's constant handicap.

Our final nomination is an actor that almost no one would put in the same thespian league as Bale, mostly because he's played the same character over-and-over for 40+ years, but Sylvester Stallone in Creed is proof that you can find new ways to reinvent a character you know by heart.  Stallone's performance gets the unfair advantage of nostalgia, something no other actor on this list has; there's a lifetime's worth of screen memories in his worn face, his expressions, the way that he has almost a boxer's beaten tenor to his voice at this point.  But there's also a knowledge here in the way he pushes out sentences that would be a struggle for a boxer in his twilight years (knowing what we know about the impact of concussions) and he brings such calm as he hands his baton to the next generation of fighters.  This is an actor who might have only had one truly great character in him, but he plays the part with such care you can't claim he's an actor of limited scope even if you might claim he's of limited range.

Other Precursor Contenders: This category actually had more room in the precursors than I remembered.  Stallone took the Globe, besting Rylance but also Oscar-skipped Paul Dano (Love & Mercy), Idris Elba (Beasts of No Nation), and Michael Shannon (99 Homes).  SAG, in what should have been an ominous sign dropped the Globe-winning Stallone, but stuck to Oscar's Bale & Rylance, also favoring Elba, Shannon, and Room's Jacob Tremblay, with Elba winning despite eventually missing with Oscar.  BAFTA skipped Stallone & Hardy, favoring Elba and Benicio del Toro (Sicario) for the nominations instead, and gave it to a third winner, Rylance.  In terms of sixth place, Elba has the most action headed into Oscar, but his nomination was clearly more of a "screw Netflix" rather than a "screw Elba" so I kind of want to guess Michael Shannon was sixth...Oscar seems to only like him when he comes out of nowhere.

Performances I Would Have Nominated: I'd probably throw out all but my winner here.  Sam Elliott was doing a better performance in Grandma than he would a few years later when he was cited for A Star is Born, while Michael Keaton definitely outdid Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight (plus, Oscar owed Keaton for skipping him in the obviously finest performance in Best Actor the previous year).  Oscar Isaac continues to be one of the best non-nominated actors currently working in the jaw-dropping Ex Machina (perhaps they felt that they had already cited Steve Jobs with Michael Fassbender, but they're both so good it's worth mentioning twice).  And lastly, Jason Statham is not a great actor.  He might not even be a good actor.  But if you're going to throw your persona for a loop in a comedy, I don't know that you could do it better than what he brings to his hilarious work in Spy.

Oscar’s Choice: Sentiment did not command the day with Oscar, as in an echo of Alan Arkin/Eddie Murphy a decade earlier, a quiet character actor in a Best Picture nominee took out an 80's icon who was trying to get an award he'd spent most of his career uninterested in winning.

My Choice: This feels so weird to say, but Sly Stallone totally deserved this Oscar.  He's so much better than the rest and had such a good narrative (and is reportedly a nice guy) I'm still flummoxed as to why he missed this trophy.  I'd follow with Rylance, Hardy, Bale, and Ruffalo.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Are you with me that Stallone missed a perfect (and probably his only) opportunity to take a trophy, or are you with the more traditional choice of Rylance?  Is Mark Ruffalo ever going to win an Oscar?  And who was sixth place-Shannon or Elba?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Also in 2015: 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 Supporting Actor Contests: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

OVP: Vice (2018)

Film: Vice (2018)
Stars: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Tyler Perry, Jesse Plemons, Naomi Watts
Director: Adam McKay
Oscar History: 8 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Christian Bale, Supporting Actor-Sam Rockwell, Supporting Actress-Amy Adams, Film Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling*, Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I had to double-check, but contrary to popular opinion (and by that I mean, the 3-4 people I actually would discuss such a film with), I didn't hate The Big Short when it came out.  McKay's filmmaking had its bumps, and I didn't love all of his decisions in the film, but the movie progressed nicely and had enough to recommend it that I gave it 3-stars when I first viewed it.  McKay, given the newfound respect of an Oscar & a license to make any film he wanted, could have focused on the sharper aspects of his big "critical" break, cleaning up some of his indulgences and giving us a specific, interesting follow-up.  Instead, he decided that he wanted to ratchet up his spastic storytelling contrivances, give us a heavy-handed, directionless look at a ruthless viper of a human being, and pretend that he can tie a giant bow on the top of it, guilt-free, as a result of being the guy who made the movie.  This results in one of the worst films I've seen all year, and (should it be nominated, as many including myself are predicting), will make it one of the worst films to ever contend for Best Picture.

(We all lived through it-we don't need spoilers, though perhaps they would have been handy at the time) The film follows the long political career of Dick Cheney (Bale), from his beginnings as a drunk driver who avoided the draft to his quick trip to Congress, staying under the tutelage of Don Rumsfeld (Carell), which led him to important roles in the Nixon, Ford, and Bush-41 administrations, as well as a ten year stint in Congress before he became Vice President.  The film mostly focuses on Cheney & his wife Lynne (Adams), giving little credence to any story arcs focusing on those around them, only adding in a few moments about their daughters Liz (Rabe) and Mary (Pill) toward the end to underline how callous and nasty they were in their drive to power.

Vice is going to be hard for any conservative to stomach, even if a lot of the actions of the Bush/Cheney administration line up with historical fact, even if it's not always obvious which actions the real-life Cheney actually perpetrated and which ones are McKay's imagination running-wild.  I'm not going to be here to defend Cheney, as some have, saying the film is a hatchet job.  Cheney is arguably the politician I like the least, and considering his views on torture, the poor, energy reform, and the way that his administration fleeced the American tax coffers for his own profit are inexcusable, and probably should have landed most of the administration in jail at some point.  It's a testament to how truly awful Cheney was that I listed eight things off the top of my head that he did while in office the film didn't have room for that any other biopic would've been the main headline-it takes a lot of time to name check every evil thing that Dick Cheney ever did.

No, my problem here is the way the film doesn't seem to have a goal, other than to make attempts at being clever and consistently condescending.  McKay's directorial choices are wacky (frequently having Seth MacFarlane-esque cutaways where Adams & Bale quote bad Shakespearean dialogue or a mid-film credits sequence where they make the Cheneys look like the Waltons).  These serve as distractions from the simple fact that McKay doesn't have much of interest to say of Cheney.  He does make an unusually poor idea for a protagonist, since he never changes (he's an oppressive thug for the entirety of the film, and the only thing that he ever alters his mind on is eventually cutting his daughter Mary loose to further his political ambitions).  He clearly wants there to be heroes in the Bush administration, and makes the likes of Bush (played by Sam Rockwell), Condoleezza Rice (LisaGay Hamilton), and Colin Powell (Perry) seem more sympathetic by making them just dumb.  This is lazy history, and tries to exonerate George W. Bush in a way so many critics do by making him seem less intelligent and less aware of what was going on in the administration than he obviously would have been (and even if you're going to say that Bush is dumb, you can't say the same for someone like Condi Rice, who is clearly Cheney's equal intellectually & knew exactly what was happening during this administration).  Thankfully he doesn't do the same for Adams' portrayal of Lynne, by all-accounts the more natural politician of the two, who seems just as power-hungry as he is, albeit thanks to sexism without the same avenues to achieve it.  About the only figure who should garner any sympathy is Pill's Mary, but McKay has given Dick Cheney (too much) credit for backing civil unions and glosses over how the vice president sold his daughter out to give his other daughter a leg-up in her failed bid for the Senate, making what should be a big betrayal of a scene feel too muted.

This would all be bad, all be just a gigantic mess of a movie, if McKay wasn't so damn smug about Cheney in his screenwriting.  Based on the politics of McKay's recent filmography, I think it's safe to assume he did not vote for Bush/Cheney, but neither did tens of millions of other people who protested against, campaigned against, and denounced this administration.  And yet he has the gaul to have Bale's Cheney pull a Frank Underwood and say "you wanted this, you wanted me to do this," as if to stave off the most virulent of conservative critics of the movie (did anyone else feel like he was ripping off that famous Sideshow Bob speech?..."but deep down you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican").  He also frequently states that voters were too stupid or too obsessed with mindless pop culture to notice that Cheney, Rumseld, and their ilk were committing war crimes without any repercussions, but that's simply not true (millions of Americans stood tall against Bush & Cheney, protesting and voting against their administration, and to say otherwise is an insult to all those whose work eventually led to the Obama administration).  Also, it feels pretty hypocritical for the man who spent the Bush administration making Anchorman and Step Brothers to suddenly be high-and-mighty about idiotic pop culture during a time of great trouble.

As a result, I can't get behind any of this movie, and I think it's an insult it's about to be hailed by organizations like the Golden Globes and (inevitably) the Oscars as a great movie when it's not only a terrible one, but one that maintains no sense of context.  Even the performances are questionably done-are you going to tell me that Dick Cheney, of all people, has no idea why he commited these monstrosities?  That Lynne Cheney has no real idea why she wanted more power? And yet this is the way that Bale & Adams play them, and no amount of convincing makeup and prosthetics can make up for a lack of center in these cinematic creations.  These are the sorts of people who would sell out their own daughter to gain some more respectable poll numbers, and yet I left Vice having no understanding why they even wanted to be in DC in the first place other than pure evil.  McKay's film lacks perspective and is a meandering dumpster fire.  Dick Cheney didn't deserve better than that, but the ticket buyers for this movie sure as hell did.

Knight of Cups (2016)

Film: Knight of Cups (2016)
Stars: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Wes Bentley
Director: Terrence Malick
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Entering the world of a Terrence Malick film, for me, is a religious experience.  No other director, save perhaps for Bergman or Kubrick, is such a guarantee of a visceral, gut-wrenching, provocative cinematic journey.  Malick's films are always unique upon themselves, perhaps wise, perhaps just pretty pictures, but as a deep, deep fan of his work I leave even his strangest or most limited of movies a different person, surrounded by the ethereal language of his storytelling.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is a fancy way of saying that I went into Knight of Cups with a bias that is probably not going to be easily assuaged, even though I had seen the reviews and was aware that even amongst the most ardent of Malick fans, the picture may have shown some signs of wear-and-tear.  Summarizing a Malick film into simply its plot and nothing more is a foolish, ridiculous thing, but suffice it to say we have Christian Bale as a Hollywood screenwriter enjoying intense success, but also with that a lascivious indulgence of sex, drugs, and most imperatively, gluttony.  Gluttony in every sense, as we see Bale, gorgeous, nonchalant, but ultimately shallow in his approach to life, have a dreamy, impossibly-blessed existence from which he and those around him derive little joy, even if they ultimately couldn't live without it.

In part I was reminded of the films of Paolo Sorrentino, whose near-perfect The Great Beauty has come the closest in the sea of Malick imitators in the past few years to achieving the sort of moving, profound visual dialogue with the audience that only Malick has been able to grasp in such a way.  Like Sorrentino's films, we see a world of decadence, gaudy and yet always beautiful.  Emmanuel Lubezki, three Oscars in, somehow will likely go without having ever won for a Malick film (it's hard to imagine him winning a fourth while Terry is still making movies), but man is the cinematography here on-fire.  The warehouse scenes and the sequences on an old movie lot are particularly jarring, seeing the phoniness of the world around a particularly plastic individual and the way that even human life doesn't seem to liven up the world around us.  Yes, the nature scenes are gorgeous, but I found the man-made structures, which Malick always frames in odd, almost alien ways (who can forget the Sonic station in To the Wonder and how it felt like it was encroaching on the natural beauty of the nature around it), to be the highlights visually.

The acting in his films is deeply hard to judge, partially because Malick is an unforgiving editor (lest we forget that Mickey Rourke, Rachel Weisz, and Michael Sheen were all A-listers that randomly got cut from his movies), and also because no actor, save for Bale, is given more than the tiniest smidgen of dialogue.  That being said, Blanchett and Bentley are the highlights for me, as Blanchett creates a woman that feels authentically of a world not just of Bale's imagination.  In fact, she is perhaps the only woman that doesn't feel like a part of his dream, while others like Freida Pinto and Natalie Portman lift in and out of the story to the point where you can't tell if they are just flights of fancy, so beautiful that Bale just added them to his mental aesthetic.  Bentley is equally as good as the disappointment of a brother, the one who knows the hold he has on Bale and his father, but who is too callous and perhaps even too middling to be able to do anything except prod.

The movie is not, it should be noted, anywhere as good as The Tree of Life or To the Wonder, the other two in what appears to be a biographical trilogy of Malick remembrances (early in his career, before he became a cinematic Thomas Pynchon, Malick wrote films for the likes of Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman so this is clearly that portion of his career).  The scope is too limited in focusing on the meaning of purpose rather than the broader meaning of life or meaning of love like his other more recent pictures.  There are moments in the film that feel a tad indulgent, and Bale doesn't have the prowess in his role that, say, Brad Pitt or Q'orianka Kilcher brought to previous work in Malick pictures.  That being said, this is judging on a curve and while his flights of fancy don't pay off, there are still relatively profound moments, especially with Blanchett and Bentley, that resonate far beyond what is happening just in the moments in a dimmed theater.

Those are my thoughts on this, Malick's latest for probably a while (I'll believe that Weightless exists when I see it)-how about yours?  Are you Team Malick, and if so, share a favorite film?  And where does Knight of Cups rank in his pantheon?

OVP: 3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Film: 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Stars: Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Logan Lerman, Ben Foster, Peter Fonda
Director: James Mangold
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Score, Sound Mixing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

When I make a list of my favorite filmic genres for people, the western is not usually on the top of the list, if I'm being honest.  Detective films, noir, romantic epics-these are what I usually gravitate toward, but there's always a caveat I throw on to this question, that if the genre is done well, I'll like pretty much any genre (even sports films, though that's admittedly a harder pill to swallow), and this is particularly true of the western.  Modern westerns, so rare compared to their heyday when they seemed to abound with an intense ease on the screen, are almost always made by a director who handles them with care, mostly because they had to beg to get them made, and films like Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James (my Holy Trinity of this century's westerns) are three of the greatest films of the past decade.  While 3:10 to Yuma never quite enters that territory, it is handled with immense care, bringing forth some really wonderful acting and action moments that sing onscreen, and reminds me why, at one point, we were so enamored with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Dan Evans (Bale), a man in need of money or he will lose his farm (the opening scene is of Evans' barn being destroyed by the men to whom he owes money, and there's an implication that next time it will be his family who is destroyed as a result).  He has a fractured relationship with his son William (Lerman), who sees him as a failure and someone to be ashamed of because he lives in shambles and cannot provide for his wife and children. While they are out on horseback, they happen upon a stagecoach robbery, where notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Crowe) and his gang, including Charlie Prince (Foster) are amongst the bandits.  This results in a series of events where Evans is hired to take a captured Wade to a 3:10 train to the Yuma Territorial Prison, in exchange for which he'll have enough money to pay his debtors.

All-in-all this may be the most western of western plotlines, and it's worth noting that this film is a remake of a classic 1957 film starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin.  However, the film never relies on its most rudimentary of plots for its strength, and instead does what great westerns do and rises above the expectations with flare.  Russell Crowe, at the time not quite the assured presence of a boring figure who used to be a movie star, was just about to end his reign as a major motion picture star, but you can see here why he became one in the first place.  Gone is the semi-seriousness of Les Miserables, but instead a wry sense of humor and a sheen of menace that makes his actions truly unpredictable-just when you think he's going soft he's willing to sacrifice someone to save his own skin, and only takes risks with himself in mind first.  Christian Bale's Evans, conversely, relies less on his later penchant for over-acting or overtly method style, and we see here simply a man trying to regain honor and his own family's fortune.  His son, played by Lerman who has always been a favorite of mine, is also distinctive enough that you can see why Lerman rose above the hundreds of random child actors who litter movies and instead actually became a film star in his own right.

Best of all is Ben Foster's Charlie Prince, it has to be said, someone who gained something of a cult following after this movie.  Ruthless to his core, he's also clearly a creature that we haven't seen in the western canon-a nasty, cruel man, but one who clearly likes the company of other fellas.  It's quite obvious that he's in-lust with Wade (not love, because I don't think Charlie Prince knows how to love, at least in a conventional way), but the way that he only is willing to take a gamble for someone is if it's for Wade spells out pretty clearly where Charlie Prince (or "Charlie Princess," as one man calls him before he dies) and his loyalties lie.  Overall, the cast is actually quite wholly outstanding, and though I didn't realize it while watching, it was actually nominated for the SAG Best Cast of a Motion Picture category, one of those rare times where they didn't just predict a Best Picture nominee and instead actually went for a film that deserves it.  After all, 3:10 to Yuma is a spry ride, and a very good movie.

Those are my thoughts on 3:10 to Yuma, a film I didn't expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did.  What about yours?  Are you as into the cast as I am?  Are you a supporter of its two Oscar nominations?  And what are some of your favorite modern westerns?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: The Big Short (2015)

Film: The Big Short (2015)
Stars: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo, Hamish Linklater, John Magaro, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Finn Wittrock, Marisa Tomei
Director: Adam McKay
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay*, Supporting Actor-Christian Bale, Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I reacted to The Big Short in the same way I did The Martian a few months ago when I first heard about it: "really, another one?"  Coming so soon after The Wolf of Wall Street (in the same way The Martian felt like a retread of Interstellar) I wasn't sure I wanted to once again get into the bro-tastic world of Wall Street and the financial crisis, even if Adam McKay had hired Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, and Finn Wittrock, the first two being two of my favorite actors working and the latter fast becoming one.  Then the shock of the Globes/SAG Awards happened, and suddenly The Big Short had gone from being a retread to a serious contender for the Academy Awards, and viewing it stopped being optional.  Thankfully for at least most of the movie I wasn't punished for my Oscar devotion, as The Big Short is largely quite watchable, and we get some game moments from almost every person on the cast sheet.  However, a third act that feels a little bit too self-righteous steals a lot of the fun and thunder of the first two-thirds, almost vanquishing the movie in the process.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about the housing crisis, and unlike The Wolf of Wall Street it gets technical, frequently throwing around terms that would normally have audiences reaching for the cell phones to look them up on Google, but thankfully Adam McKay found a way around it.  I don't know if other critics have found this gimmicky or not (I don't read other reviews before I see a film, at least once I've decided to see the film) but I loved the fourth wall breaking when it was done by celebrities.  Nothing quite topped Margot Robbie randomly appearing as herself in a bathtub, but later appearances by Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez were also hilariously on-point, and weirdly informational.  Note to politicians and professors-get celebrities to record your lectures and you'll get people to pay more attention.

This gimmick and the occasional fourth wall break sets the film apart in some ways (though if I recall correctly Leo did the same thing in Wolf of Wall Street-correct me in the comments if I'm wrong!), and honestly the film is highly watchable up until the actual collapse.  All of the male actors, even those who are overplaying their parts (namely Carell and Bale, both pretty lousy at reeling back their characters overblown tics) have at least one great moment in the film, and frequently seeing the ways that Wall Street/the financial industry (and the government is included in that) were rigged against even those who should have been profiting off of their stupidity is fascinating and frightening at the same time.  The film plays in some ways as a horror comedy, as we watch the foolishness of some people and the greed of others threaten to take down the entire financial system and the world economy.  It's staggering in hindsight, but even more staggering to see how infallible everyone seemed to the effects of the system, and one wonders if this was even underplayed to make the movie appear more believable.

The final third of the film, though, where everyone who has been trying to make an enormous profit off of this stupidity gets their payoff and suddenly grows a conscience, is weak.  We see characters played by Bale, Carell, and even Gosling lose their inner stamina and despite making a career off of the greed of others and winning big, they don't like the way that they made the money and try to be the moral police in all of this when in reality they become multimillionaires off of the anguish of the American populace.  They may have wished the system wasn't the way it was, but the system being broken made them richer than their wildest dreams, and the screenplay can't really reconcile that.  Still, up until that point it's a pretty fun ride, and I particularly loved Gosling (such a welcome presence back on the screen in his "I'm ridiculously beautiful and talented" sort of way), Pitt (the only believable moral police), and Wittrock (who is insanely watchable as a guy trying to find his way into "the game").  All-in-all, it's worth the price of admission but the awards love seems a bit much.

Those are my thoughts-how about you?  Did you like, but not love The Big Short, and if not, where did your opinion differ from mine?  Who was the best-in-show amongst the cast members?  And what'd you think of the celebrity cameos?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: Actor (2013)

OVP: Best Actor (2013)

The Nominees Were...

Christian Bale, American Hustle

Bruce Dern, Nebraska

Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street

Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave

Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

My Thoughts: Whew, we are going through these at a breakneck speed this week, but we’re now heading into the lead actor races, and seeing whether the five men in “an exceptionally strong year for Best Actor” (don’t you roll your eyes every time that chestnut is strutted out, since it’s brought out literally every year) actually lived up to the title.

I want to start out with two men who stand out in the list above the most to me, the clear leader throughout the year and the guy who just “showed up” randomly in the lineup.  The first is of course Matthew McConaughey, who won dozens of awards throughout the season for his performance as Ron Woodruff.  The McConaissance, as it has been termed, has been growing for several years now, and I will easily admit that he’s a much better actor than I think any of us who just thought he was hot in A Time to Kill or Contact (but man was he hot, so you can forgive).  And yet, Ron Woodruff wasn’t the moment to honor him with a heaping dose of approval.  His work here is okay.  He’s best in show, I’ll give him that (though that’s not saying much considering the competition he’s up against), but I don’t find that he gives the character enough layers and differentiation in his journey from a bigot to an advocate.  There’s too much selfishness and not enough acknowledgement of that from the actor.  Being sick doesn’t make you a good person, but that’s what I get from his work.  Also, and it has to be said when you’re competing for an Oscar, but Matthew McConaughey is not good at crying on-cue.  His crying in this film is awful.  This movie in general is awful, and we have talked about it way too many times for my liking…and I still have to discuss it one more time because it made the Best Picture race.

The other guy I want to discuss right away is Christian Bale.  Bale was the shocker on Oscar morning.  While everyone was debating whether it would be Leo or Robert Redford that got cut from the lineup, Leo made it and so did Christian Bale, causing the major upset exclusion of Tom Hanks despite this being his big comeback year.  Bale’s performance, sadly, is not particularly strong and seems to be more about Megan Ellison’s very strong Oscar game than an actual merited nomination.  Bale’s work is all bloated Brando impersonations and occasionally waking up from the monotony of his work to say something funny or protest.  His work doesn’t jive with the way the character, so cunning and smart, is projecting, and we are left with a wasted slot that could have gone to a number of better actors, not ones that are using their character as a way to show you can be brilliant even when you’re terrible (which he’s not a good enough actor to pull off-even Brando struggled in that regard).

Leonardo DiCaprio was the other on-the-bubble nomination in this crew, but thankfully with Leo we have a character that is genuinely stretching him as an actor.  For too long (basically since Titanic) we have seen the same Leo show up in all of his prestige films: haunted, quiet, a man of few words and fewer laughs, and though Leo is really good at this part, even for me this was starting to take its toll.  This may be because of Inception specifically and Gatsby only exacerbated the problem, but from a Leo devotee, I needed a bit of a change and Jordan Belfort was the perfect recipe.  Leo puts the charm he once showed in Jack Dawson into a morphed version of Jordan Belfort.  He manages to make you detest him and secretly root for him, in a way Michael Douglas did decades ago in Wall Street.  This is an actor who is obviously very posh and seductive in real-life (have you seen the women he dates?!?), and you see that come alive in this role, where he occasionally embarrasses himself, is vulnerable physically and not just emotionally, and you see someone who is just past the golden boy stage of his career playing someone who is just past the golden boy stage of his life.   A perfect combination, and a rare treat where Oscar notices a dramatic actor doing great atypical comedic work.

We’ll move on to Bruce Dern next, as Leo, Bruce, and Chiwetel have almost nothing in common and so there’s no clever way to segway them.  Dern’s work is not going to be put through the ringer like I did with Squibb.  It’s above the grade in that regard, though I still don’t see why it was “special.”  I loved the way that he delays some of his reactions or keeps some of his answers to questions (likely knowing that he doesn’t fully understand what’s being asked, but being aware of the ritual of giving an answer).  However, most of the film is just filled with blank stares, and I don’t feel like Dern gives enough of his introverted self to establish that the long stares and peers into the distance are anything more than him just not emoting-in order to prove that an actor is actually giving the range that a part gives it credit for, I need a bigger jump in the quality of the acting.  I don’t see that with Dern, and so he only gets partial credit.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is our final nominee, and probably the one who ended up in second place on Oscar night (though, honestly, McConaughey was so far in front that I’d believe all but Bale was the second place contender).  Ejiofor’s got a killer role, and there’s something desperate in his eyes as Solomon that instantly connects with the audience.  There are moments in this film that are so deeply felt that you almost want to give him the trophy straight away.  However, I do feel like Ejiofor is the weakest link of the main four actors, and this is primarily because I feel like the character is underwritten.  I’m aware he’s a real-life person, but in the way to make him near perfect, the writers stop him from being particularly interesting-all of the other members of the quartet (Paulson, Nyong’o, Fassbender), get layers-you can see the real-life attributes of their flawed but human portrayals onscreen.  Solomon is a saint, and perhaps he was in real-life, but realism doesn’t make great acting, even if physically the demands that Ejiofor is going through are brutal and there is tremendous promise from an actor to watch.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes of course distinguish between Comedy/Musical and Drama (though they lie through their teeth in genre fraud on the former), and in odd twist (again, thanks to the genre fraud) we had nearly an even split between comedies and dramas.  McConaughey won the Best Drama prize, beating Ejiofor as well as Tom Hanks (Captain Phillips), Idris Elba (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), and Robert Redford (All is Lost).  DiCaprio took the comedic prize over Bale and Dern, as well as Joaquin Phoenix (Her) and Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis).  Proving at the very least that the year had a lot of names, the SAG lineup was similar to Oscars (same winner), but they chose Hanks and Forest Whitaker (Lee Daniels' The Butler) instead of Bale and DiCaprio.  And since BAFTA had the good sense to skip Dallas Buyers Club, we saw Ejiofor take the trophy and Tom Hanks (surely sixth place) taking McConaughey's slot.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: I'm going to admit it-while no year is a particularly bad year when you take the five best performances (if you hunt enough, you'll find five great pieces of acting), this isn't my favorite year for acting either with Oscar's lineup or (comparatively) with mine, but I still could have come up with a stronger lineup than Oscar.  I'd definitely have included the soulful star-making of Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station, the lovelorn loneliness of Joaquin Phoenix in Her, the frustrated soul of Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis and the horny frustration of Ethan Hawke in Before Midnight.  Now THAT would have been a lineup worth spouting cliches over.

Oscar’s Choice: They cannot deny a movie star who makes good: McConaughey by a country mile (al'right, al'right, al'right?).

My Choice: The winner is going to be Leo, though to be fair he would have been fifth on my personal ballot (any of the men above I would have given the Oscar to most gladly, whereas Leo wins for a strong piece of work that I give the trophy to reluctantly, since I know he can do better-but that's the OVP; at the end of the day, it's simply about honoring the best nominee of the five).  I'd follow Leo with Ejiofor, and then McConaughey, Dern, and way in the back, Bale.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Is anyone else bucking the McConaughey express (or wishing he had won for Magic Mike instead)?  What is your favorite piece by Leo, and when (if ever) would you have given him the Oscar?  Anyone want to vouch for Bale being the best of the bunch?  And who was the best lead actor of 2013?  Share in the comments!

Also in 2013: Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score,  Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2013

Past Best Actor Contests: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012