#faux-scars

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Faux-scars: Best Picture

Probably no surprise, but it's 12 Years a Slave for me. It was the bravest, most vividly realized, moving, painful movie I've seen in a long, long while and I doubt that I will be forgetting it anytime soon. I think it is an important movie that people need to see. Not because no one knows about slavery or that it was a horrific, violent, cruel, dishonest system that existed a long time ago. People need to see it because the scars of that experience and what followed it can be seen today, but we have this strange amnesia, this almost 'get over it' or 'My family never enslaved anyone' mentality that keeps us from reckoning with its role in the birth of our nation, to keep from realizing how the practices learned in that system have been recreated and expanded since then. We have this strange idea that we need to get over some stuff, like colonialism and slavery, they're not relevant today. But there are things we're not allowed to forget, 9/11, the Holocaust, etc. Having the right to remember, to be allowed to still be traumatized is privilege at work, they say that certain people's suffering is worth more than others, others don't have the same right to real recognition or reconciliation or, heaven forbid, something approaching restoration. There are so many more stories to be told, not just about this, but what happened before and after, what's happening now, how it connects and I think we need those stories. Not just to be more honest with ourselves, but to acknowledge the things we have never recovered from and the possibility we will never truly move forward till we have bigger, more open, more honest conversations about big, scary, complicated, fraught things. I know this is painfully earnest, but this movie evoked that for me and for that alone, it was a marvel.

Gravity was beautiful. Her caught my fancy more than I expected (and had me dreaming of what the LA metro could be). Dallas Buyers Club at least brought some attention back to the largely buried (but ever so relevant) AIDS epidemic. Captain Phillips had me at the edge of my seat. The Wolf of Wall Street made me laugh (and despair). American Hustle was totally overrated but had its moments. They join a list that includes The Place Beyond the Pines, Stoker, Beautiful Creatures, The Sapphires, Kon Tiki, Warm Bodies, Before Midnight, Much Ado about Nothing, You're Next, Short Term 12 (among a buttload of others including some amazing documentaries) of movies that made me took me places I'd never been all in the space of a year. But none are, none did, none meant what 12 Years a Slave does.

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Faux-scars: Best Actress

This one was a little tough for me, not that the ladies weren't bringing it this year. They always do. But I skipped Blue Jasmine because I don't pay for Woody Allen movies anymore. I heard August: Osage County was a downer and the timing never seemed right to go to a downer that few even enjoyed.  I thought Sandra Bullock did great in Gravity and she certainly was in almost all of it, but it wasn't blow-your-brains-out amazing.

So here's who did manage the blow-your-brains-out level of amazingness. First, Julie Delpy in Before Midnight. I'm a big fan of all of these movies, they're on the list of movie so affecting, so romantic while feeling real and authentic (which doesn't necessarily mean realistic because Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is near the top of said list). For a couple as outlandishly fated as Celine and Jesse, this final chapter (at least I think it's the final chapter, but who knows with this trio) is the most difficult balancing act. The wild adventure and twists of fate that animated the first two movies has been replaced with responsibility, routine and the inevitable drama of tolerating someone else and their peccadilloes and imperfections. It could have been a depressing slog, but they still have such an ear and an eye for the shared memories that pull a smile out of you, even when you're fighting. The tensions that were easily ignored when they were travellers on a train or star-crossed lovers reunited by fate and chance have become the stuff of repeated marital tiffs. The movie doesn't pull punches and neither does Delpy's performance. There's an electric fight scene and she's topless for most of it. Her performance is natural, subtle and, more than anything, she fully realizes Celine, not just as an update on a character we've met before but as a actual woman dealing with the real conflict and boredom endemic to sustaining a marriage and balancing the many competing forces in her life.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus also turned in a very strong performance in Enough Said. There's a continuity between neurotic masseuse Eva, neurotic Vice President Selina Meyer on Veep and the neurotic character that made her famous, Elaine Benes. But the movie was sweet and affecting and it had a lot to do with Louis-Dreyfus. It was kinda... white (I really don't know how else to put it, it's about a seriously privileged white world with almost no people of color in it) but if I let that keep me from enjoying movies, I wouldn't ever be able to go out to the movies.

Finally, as much as I want to steal her boyfriend, Eva Mendes, was pretty damn awesome in The Place Beyond the Pines. I don't know if it falls into the supporting or the lead category, but in a fair world, she'd be a nominee.

[this movie was seriously good]

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Faux-scars: Best Actor

Chiwetel Ejiofor takes the cake on this one, no question. Beautiful performance- he managed to portray so much even as, a matter of self preservation, he was forced to present an impassive face to the world. I don't know if he's going to get the award, but I think he's the best, especially out of the field of nominations.

Another performance I really enjoyed this year was Miles Teller in Spectacular Now. Outside of the excellent supporting cast in Short Term 12 (I forgot about it when I did the Best Supporting Actor post but Lakeith Lee Stanfield was just tremendous, among a number of excellent performances) Teller's performance was one of the nicest treats from someone I'd never heard of before. There is something just dazzling about his charm, especially considering that he doesn't fit the physical type of most Hollywood leading men. Spectacular Now was more memorable looking back than it seemed in the moment and a lot of that came from Teller (and a strong supporting cast including Kyle Chandler, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jennifer Jason Leigh).

The last Best Actor contender for me was Ali Mosaffa in The Past. The Past was another excellent story from the writer/director behind another fantastic feature from/about Iran/ians, A Separation, Asghar Farhadi. Another finely-drawn drama of a splintered household, The Past chronicles Mosaffa's character, Ahmad, returning to Paris to finalize his divorce from Marie, who he left when he left for Iran. Though absent for many years, Ahmad enjoys a good relationship with Marie's children and she asks him to help her reconnect to her eldest daughter, Lucie, who is not taking her relationship with her new partner well. Mosaffa's performance shares a lot with Ejiofor's, subtle, self-contained, speaking volumes with small gestures and looks.

I'm really bummed about it, but I didn't catch Fruitvale Station while it was out in theaters and I haven't watched it yet though I think it's out on video. Its highly likely that Michael B Jordan is as good in it as I've heard and his name would go on this list.

Oh, I totally forgot about my baby, Ryan Gosling. He was seriously unforgettable in The Place Beyond the Pines. His performance actually took my breath away- a combination of vulnerability and swagger, pride and shame. There's a scene where his character, Luke, sits in the back of a church as his biological son is being christened and the emotion, the tight control he tries to exercise over it, his utter failure all came together into something unbelievable. There's a reason Gosling isn't just a teen beat crush, he has a way of inhabiting his character that is unparalleled in my opinion. I am probably alone in this, but I also thought he was great in Only God Forgives. Frankly, I really liked that movie and Vithaya Pansringarm, who played Gosling's adversary/foil was pretty damn amazing in it too.

[you introspective sumbitch]

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Faux-scars: Best Supporting Actress

This is an easy one, I just don't think there's anyone that did what Lupita Nyong'o did in 12 Years a Slave. I traded in some airline miles that were sitting around for magazine subscriptions and one that made the cut was Entertainment Weekly. It's fun to get a new magazine every single week and it's even better when it's about most of the stuff you're already obsessed with. Most of the reportage is of the soft variety, but they do have a way of capturing what's going on with stuff like "the Academy'-the mostly old, mostly white, mostly dudes that decide shit like the Oscars. They did a few articles about 12 Years a Slave and how word in the academy was that it was intense and all those sweet, sensitive academy members didn't want to subject themselves to that. So, yes, it's possible, if not likely, that already over-rewarded and -adored moppet Jennifer Lawrence will win another one (don't get me wrong, she seems funny and chill but there's something about how everyone just loves her that rubs me wrong. I'm just a hater like that, I guess) or Julia Roberts, or maybe even the broad in Nebraska. But that would be a travesty IMHO. Now I'm not saying that movies about slavery are or should be the only kinds of movies with African American characters. But when a movie so effectively brings to life the contradictions of slavery-era America, the labored leaps of justification it requires to keep up the pretense of legitimacy or fairness or decency, the outright cruelty and violence we seem all too ready to forget or sanitize, when someone finds a way to bring all of that to life, in an authentic, lyrical, fleet piece of film like 12 Years a Slave, well it deserves recognition. And if not recognition, then it at least deserves consideration. Nyong'o's Patsey is heartbreaking, vulnerable, strong, willful, violated, dignified and so much more. Her 'master' takes out his lust, his greed, his shame, his hypocrisy, his jealousy, all on her body, her mind and her soul. Strong and industrious, she is the pride of her master's slaves. She is the object of his guilty idolatry. She suffers at the hand of his jealous, vengeful wife. There aren't words for what she endures, and Nyong'o invested her with unimaginable grace, heartbreaking dignity. There's been some chatter about a different scene, but this was the one that seared itself into my memory. 

A tie in my book would be Melissa McCarthy in The Heat. She's pretty funny all around in my book, though sometimes she does seem pigeonholed into the funny fat lady genre, which is a shame because she's clearly got chops. As usual, though, she was able to mine the depths beneath the jokes. The Heat was a generally awesome movie, McCarthy and Sandra Bullock had really great chemistry and I like that, while there were plenty of laughs, the movie discussed sexism in the workplace in a meaningful way. I can't think of another movie that came out last year that was focused solely on two women and their careers and not their boyfriends or their crushes or their feelings about one of them having a boyfriend, etc. Anyways, McCarthy gets my vote for hitting it out of the park and bringing what might seem like an absurd character to vivid, compelling life.

Now that some time has passed, I've realized I missed some awesome people in these categories. Someone who I think put in a best supporting actress caliber performance was Kristin Scott Thomas in Only God Forgives. A demented caricature of Donatella Versace by way of the Real Housewives, Scott Thomas was deliciously, perfectly vicious as the wolf mother from hell.

[go see this movie right now!]

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Faux-scars: Best Supporting Actor

I was talking to my bestie a few months ago while we were waiting for Dallas Buyers Club to start about how few movies there were about the AIDS epidemic or what's happening now both here and around the world (cuz y'know, 35.3 million people living with HIV around the world in 2012 with 2.3 million new infections that year). Philadelphia is one of my favorite movies [SIDE NOTE: just looking for the trailer to link it made me want to watch it again, what a sublimely wonderful movie]. The way it dealt with the emerging epidemic (it wasn't quite emerging in the US at that point I think, but in Saudi Arabia where I grew up and other parts of the world, it doesn't seem like people were really grasping the scale of the epidemic), the misinformation and fear surrounding the virus, the loneliness and isolation forced upon the infected. Everything about the movie was a masterstroke. Jonathan Demme's direction. That soundtrack. Tom Hanks, Denzel, shit, Antonio Banderas rocked it. That scene with the opera. Beautiful.

Anyways, other than Angels in America I can't think of any other movies or movie-like stories about AIDS and HIV. So on one level, it's a good development to have a movie out in theaters drawing attention to the ongoing epidemic. On another level, I wonder if, like how race in movies tends to get relegated to feel-good sports movies/civil rights-era dramas that somehow always end up privileging the perspectives of the heroic white folk, a movie that chooses to explore the craziness of the early years of the AIDS epidemic through the perspective of a wild-living homophobic straight cowboy might not be as much of a victory as it seems. Half of McConaughey's performance was the simple impact of the weight loss. Jennifer Garner was quite moving, trying to help her patients while fighting a seemingly unmoved medical establishment more interested in quick fixes than engaging deeply with the scale of the epidemic and what it was doing to the people it infected. But her role was tiny. Now Jared Leto, he impressed me. As Rayon, the transgender HIV-positive sex worker (I believe there was an implication that she was a sex worker but, fair warning, I might be wrong/reading into it incorrectly), he became another person entirely. I used to be obsessed with My So-Called Life as a teenager, so I'm very, very familiar with that face of his, that lopey way of moving, that penchant for heavy eyeliner and trademark Jordan Catalano slacker profundity. To have someone whose features and ways you've seen so much disappear into a character is something to witness. It's not just the voice and the mannerisms, the softness in his gaze was different. So I was on the Jared Leto train (outside of the intrinsic question about why a transgender person wasn't playing the character) till he said some assholish things about it. And the other excellent point that they don't seem to give any fucks about the ongoing AIDS epidemic or using any of the attention they're getting to shine a light on it, so that's shitty too.

Previously the tie, the winner in my book is Barkhad Abdi in Captain Phillips. I know it's a Tom Hanks flick but I'm still somewhat impressed that he got an Oscar nom though I highly doubt he has much real chance of winning. Which is a shame, because he was excellent. As Muse (pronounced like Musa, which is the Muslim pronunciation of the name Moses), the ringleader of a band of Somali pirates hijacking a freight ship, Abdi is electrifying, I couldn't tear my eyes away. In one of the Entertainment Weekly pieces about the movie, the director, Paul Greengrass, described how he kept the actors playing the pirates away from Hanks so the meeting on camera would be authentic. He was worried that they might be cowed or starstruck, but he called 'Action' and Abdi launched right into this speech. It's a little taste, but he does this over and over in the movie, a mix of power, posturing and recklessness. He gave a truly striking performance, I sincerely hope he's able to forge a career as an actor. Frankly, all the previously non-professional actors playing the Somali pirates were great, pretty much blows away anything Bradley Cooper's been able to muster up the last few years.

[hell of a performance, though[

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Faux-scars: Best Directing

The real oscars (boo!) are coming up, which was driven home to me when I tried to return a rental today only to find Hollywood and Highland completely blocked off. Guess it takes this long to put everything up, but thanks for slowing down the pedestrian traffic, guys.

Directing is a funny category for me- some movies seem like they're the unfiltered vision and work of the director (Quentin Tarantino flicks come to mind), but so many other feel like a big melange of influences, the writer, the underlying source material in this day of YA novel and comic book adaptations, the studio, the producer, the popular visual flourishes of the day, etc. I think it really depends on the project and the people. Even when we're talking auteurs with highly developed aesthetics, they usually have a team of regular players who help them bring it together. Baz Luhrman always works with, among others, his costume designer extraordinaire wife Catherine Martin. Christopher Niolan tends to write the scripts for his projects with his brother Jonathan. The examples go on and on but you get the idea- best direction's a bit of a misnomer. The director has a big part to play in determining how or what their movies look, sound and feel like, but it's almost always necessarily a group effort.

If I'm completely honest, best director for the past year was Guillermo del Toro for Pacific Rim. PR didn't get much love from the critics, but it was, bar none, the best time I had at the movies last year. I don't know how del Toro does it, but he finds a way to inject the emotional punch of someone who clearly loves movies into his direction. He glories in the details, he giggles along at the little jokes, he paints the world like someone who's having the time of their life. When I saw the first preview for Pacific Rim, I thought it looked a little goofy but promising. I thought the Hellboy movies were pretty enjoyable, wry, sweet, sensitive without being treacly and unexpectedly funny (I had never and am yet to read any of those comics). Pacific Rim impressed me early by flipping the story I expected onto its head. It wasn't a story of what happened when alien creatures started popping out of the Pacific Ocean. That would have been interesting, but the direction they went was supremely richer- what happens when alien monsters start popping out of the ocean and we figure out a way to beat them back with big-ass robots we build with the rest of the world and then decide we want to stop building those robots because we'd rather build some walls/lie to ourselves. All of this happens right at the beginning so you can get right into the robot vs. monster scuffles. The acting in the movie was a little uneven. Charlie Hunnam was adorable on Undeclared but I haven't followed his evolution into musclebound jock. He was pretty cute but wooden as the main character, but that's alright because the movie doesn't need him to be. Idris Elba's the fearless leader, Rinko Kukuchi's the cute but competent love interest, Max Martini's the honorable grizzled old timer and Robert Kazynski makes you want to punch him he's so good as the cocky antagonist. Charlie Day, Burn Gorman and del Toro regular, Ron Perlman, have a nice subplot as scientists and a relic hunter trying to study the monsters from the deep. The monsters are cool, the robots are cool, the fights are cool, but the part that got me- details, like how the robots looked dinged up from years of fights. Its hard to put down in words why this movie's so great, why every person I talked to that had seen it instantly had a smile on their face when we started talking about. How about this delicious detail? The robot operators hole up to plan for their last stand in one of the remaining robot construction and maintenance stations in Hong Kong. And what are these stations called? Shatterdomes. That's just... perfect. Doesn't it just send a thrill up your spine?

It's a real horse race this year because both 12 Years a Slave and Gravity were powerhouses and the work of auteurs hitting their stride. I have to give the tie to Alfonso Cuaron and Gravity. It was just... another world. The immediacy, the visual punch of it, I couldn't think about anything else for days. I've never been a huge Sandra Bullock fan, though she always seemed to have a pretty good sense of humor, and I found the ending a little laughable. But the movie brought its idea to life- the isolation, the floating emptiness of being adrift in space, the way that physical desolation reveals that you've actually been adrift other ways. Cuaron didn't just think of the whole story (and write it with his son, Jonas), they came up with a whole new way to rig up the actors and film them to capture the feeling of floating in space. And that sequence in the Russian Space Station where everything's slowly burning? Haunting. Now that's what I call directing.

[this is from the gag reel, but it's an accurate representation of the smile this movie will put on your face]

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Faux-scars: Best Original Score

Not every movie leaves an impression, but the ones that do tend to do so along a dimension- their visuals burn themselves inside your eyelids and you end up dreaming about them (have you seen Atonement? It's pretty amazing and the part that stuck with me most was Joe Wright's sublime eye for composition. All the shots of Keira Knightley in one of those magical epic movie dresses, epically, vividly green, getting ready to meet someone she might have inadvertently, unconsciously fallen in love with, running into him in the library, wordlessly whisked into an amorous clutch, rudely interrupted and finally, achingly, clutching herself as the draft of police cars pull out of the driveway with her beloved blow her dress into the cold wind) or the costumes are so vivid and fully realized you get completely caught up (I was no fan of American Hustle but damn if they didn't nail that nexus between character and constume- Christian Bale fussing with his combover, all that Amy Adams sternum cleavage) or, in the case of what should qualify one for the Best Original Score, the sound and music giving you a sense of place so strong, your memories of the movie inevitably has a soundtrack. Beasts of a Southern Wild was like that for me last year, not aggressively scored, but the movie found a way to match music to moment when it counted. For me, this year's leading pick for original score was Her. Like many people my generation, I think Spike Jonze is the shit. Helmed iconic videos for unimpeachably cool bands and artists? Check! Put out a bunch of smart, vivid movies with the perfect dose of meta humour? Check! A series of romances with oh-so-cool age-appropriate [maybe not so much with Jen from Dawson's Creek, but the rest of them] hipster godesses? Check! But I was very hesitant about Her. Was it Joaquin Phoenix? Nope, I love his crazy ass and the last thing I saw him in, The Master, was uh-mazing. Was it the concept of deep, enveloping relationships with technology? Nope, I only pretend ambivalence about my off-the-charts facebook addiction. Nope, my problem is an overly long-named faintly Scandinavian container of boobs and stuffy noses that rhymes with Fartlett Dohanssen. I don't know if I'm completely alone in this, but I have this set of people, usually actors and actresses, but sometimes safely in the semi-famous category, that just chap my ass. It could be their mannerisms, or an elaborate, half-formed fictional personality I've concocted for them that annoys me, whatever it is, they bother me and, unless faced with them being irretrievably awesome, I'm going to irrationally hate them for life. And not only do I dislike Scarlett Johansson, but she replaced Samantha Morton, who I think is just the cat's pajamas. I hate to say it, especially in light of Ms. Johansson's shitty politics as they relate to the SodaStream controversy (and, y'know, the ongoing travesty that is the Israeli occupation), but she was rather good in Her. The character is complex, she needs to be lifelike and realistic but also wildly intoxicating and inventive. It wouldn't make sense without Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Theodore, the repressed loner recovering from his heartache that falls in love with Johansson's Samantha. But neither of them would have been believable, their world of near-future not nearly as indelible without this score. This is a movie about exploration, how relationships allow you to wander within yourself, discover new parts and old parts you'd forgotten about or tried to hide away. And they showed it with not just what I would call the most intoxicating  prospective subway system I could dream for my awesome city, but also by nailing the heady feeling of exploring recent-future LA. My former home subway station featured in a rapturous montage that's as much about what it's like to wander around this crazy city as Theodore and Samantha's deepening attachment. I think Arcade Fire is passe now, but I jammed pretty hard to Afterlife and I utterly fell into the world of Her thanks to their score.

12 Years a Slave had a pretty gorgeous score too, more comfortable in silence and whispers than any other but devastating in its shared cadence with Solomon Northrup's tumultuous journey and emotions.