Oscars 2013: The Morning After

As you must know by now, the ceremony was deemed sexist, racist and offensive by a lot of people.  For the most part, it was.

I’m loath to join the "can’t take a joke" bandwagon. What offends me the most is that Seth McFarlane’s humor was petty and mean spirited. It was vulgar, lowly TV humor, rather than something fit for the ocassion. He tried to be too Hollywood with snide, unfunny inside jokes. As Captain Kirk said, intending to be ironic, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler should host everything. Ain’t that the emess.

When you watch a ceremony live, you want to like what you are seeing. It takes a while for the smarm to sink in. That was the case with that stupid boob song. The more I think about it, the more inane and inappropriate it seems. That stupid bear talking shit about Jews was immediately appalling and really unfit for an audience of billions (who probably already believe in a Jewish conspiracy anyway). Using a little girl to joke about George Clooney's sex life, sleazy.  

There were some highlights. Mostly provided by women.

I know I have tirelessly campaigned for the excision of musical numbers from the show, but Shirley Bassey belting Goldfinger was one of the greatest highlights of all time.  So was the inimitable Babs singing  The Way We Were and looking younger by the minute. The evening got off to a lovely start with Charlize Theron expertly dancing with Channing Tatum a la Ginger and Fred. These were the only moments with class. The rest was humor devised and intended for that famous demographic so coveted by Hollywood, 15 year-old males. At least the suits got a taste of their own medicine.

For a four hour ceremony, there were too many irrelevant moments. I love William Shatner, but he is beyond irrelevant. The Oscars are not about TV, they are about the movies.  But we are in an age of small screens, so this is what we get. Smallness. 

Chicago? Whatever the fuck? Utterly irrelevant.

The singing cast of Les Miserables was a giant clusterfuck, just like that movie: a supernova of dreck.

The obits were the best part, as usual, but us Latinos are extremely pissed that Lupe Ontiveros, the quintessential Latina maid, was snubbed. We won’t forget.

There were some righteous wins. Anne Hathaway’s was not one of them. But Ang Lee’s was,  so was Tarantino’s, so was Amour, so was Jennifer Lawrence. The best supporting actor category was a tough one, and Waltz was as right to get it as any of his peers. Daniel Day Lewis once again comported himself like the King of Class. He happens to have a sense of humor, plus nobody wears a tux like him.  

If there was justice in the world, Beasts Of The Southern Wild was utterly ignored and so was Zero Dark Thirty. They are simply bad movies. Is Argo a Best Picture? No. That award should have gone to either Django Unchained or Amour, which is at another level of artistry altogether. But well crafted, competent Argo won because it is about Hollywood. They love nothing better than self-congratulation.

Jimmy Fallon would have been a delightful host. Michelle Obama dancing with Fallon to advocate against obesity, ultra cool. The White House getting in bed with Hollywood in such an overt fashion, reeks of starfucking from the Presidency and is totally tasteless, inappropriate and wrong. I’m secretly enjoying whatever fallout is happening in the White House over this ridiculous decision that got her, who has done no wrong so far, associated with a sexist, racist and offensive telecast. 

Dress-wise: Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence and Robin Roberts were stunning. Everybody else looked like a chandelier from Vegas crashed on top of them.

See you next year. 

2012 Best and Worst And Everything In Between

This was a good year for movies. These are films I saw during 2012. As I recall them, some of them have made an indelible impression while others, even as I loved them coming out of the theater, fizzle out in memory. Some gain in estimation, while the hatred I have for the ones at the bottom of the barrel has not abated.
Some of the following films have not been released yet. I am missing several major ones, opening this week and next, which will be added in the coming days.

Extraordinary

Amour. Michael Haneke

Rust And Bone. Jacques Audiard

Caesar Must Die. Vittorio and Paolo Taviani

Beyond The Hills. Cristi Mungiu

Like Someone In Love. Abbas Kiarostami 

The Gatekeepers. Dror Moreh

Very Good

Django Unchained. Quentin Tarantino
Bernie. Richard Linklater

Life Of Pi. Ang Lee
Alps. Giorgos Lanthimos
Argo. Ben Affleck

Robot And Frank. Jake Schreier

Celeste And Jesse Forever. Lee Toland Krieger

The Queen Of Versailles. Lauren Greenfield 

Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry. Alison Klayman

Polisse. Maïwenn

Headhunters. Morten Tyldum

Monsieur Lazhar. Phillipe Falardeau

Tabu. Miguel Gomes

Good

Lincoln. Steven Spielberg

No. Pablo Larraín

Hitchcock. Sacha Gervasi
Silver Linings Playbook. David O. Russell 

Moonrise Kingdom. Wes Anderson

Frances Ha. Noah Baumbach

The Bay. Barry Levinson. 

The Cabin In The Woods. Drew Goddard 

Fill The Void. Rama Burshtein

A Late Quartet. Yaron Zilberman

The Dictator. Sacha Baron Cohen
Wanderlust. David Wain
The Woman In Black. James Watkins
Skyfall. Sam Mendes
Barbara. Christian Petzold
Our Children. Joachim Lafosse

Good but Flawed

The Master. Paul Thomas Anderson

Sound Of My Voice. Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij
The Sessions. Ben Lewin 
Footnote. Joseph Cedar 

The Deep Blue Sea. Terence Davies 

Bachelorette. Leslye Headland
How To Survive A Plague. David France

More Flawed Than Good
Zero Dark Thirty. Kathryn Bigelow
This is 40. Judd Apatow 
This Must Be The Place. Paolo Sorrentino

Annoying

Flight. Robert Zemeckis
Anna Karenina. Joe Wright

We Have A Pope. Gianni Moretti

Magic Mike. Steven Soderbergh

Dark Horse. Todd Solondz

Cosmopolis. David Cronenberg 

Something in The Air. Olivier Assayas
The Impossible. J.A. Bayona
Cloud Atlas. The Wachowskis, Tom Twyker
Goodbye, First Love. Mia Hansen Love

Arbitrage. Nicholas Jarecki

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. John Madden 
Take This Waltz. Sarah Polley

Killing Them Softly. Andrew Dominik

The Pits

Beasts of The Southern Wild. Benh Zeitlin

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet. Alain Resnais 

Les Miserables. Tom Hooper
Holy Motors. Leos Carax

Ginger And Rosa. Sally Potter

Out and About

Yours truly is happy to collaborate with Out.com writing about, what else, Movies!
Here's my first dispatch about 5 great movies you may have missed this year and five more coming down the pike.  I am happy to report, my post, which appeared today, is no. 6 in the most popular list! Enjoy!

NYFF 2012: Amour

Do not be fooled by the romantic-sounding title of the latest Michael Haneke film.
Amour, a masterpiece, is as tough and devastating as any of his other films, and then some. It is an intimate look at the end of life, the ugliness of illness and death, and the devotion of love.
An epic movie that takes place mainly in one apartment, with just a handful of characters, Amour is a film from which it is very hard to recover. Haneke has a streak of the stern educator, who insists on showing the darkest aspects of human nature, as clearly, ruthlessly and devastatingly as possible, in the service of opening our eyes. So Amour, which is about love, may sound like Haneke has softened his stance, or allowed his gimlet eye to cloud. Never fear. He pulls no punches in telling this most universal of stories, the one narrative thread that comes for us all.
Amour's depiction of the bonds of love is beyond touching, it is emotionally devastating.
There is not one scene in this movie that seeks to make it easier for the characters, much less the audience, to deal with the terrifying prospect of decay and death. This is above all, a movie about human dignity. After all, isn't dignity the end result of love? This is borne by the clarity, intelligence, and the profound sympathy with which Haneke depicts the difficult rite of passage of his characters towards death. Yet he refuses to sentimentalize, cheapen, ingratiate, mythify, or gloss over the subject. I'm offended by movies in which people with terminal illnesses decide to have the time of their lives while they wait for death to come. I find them preposterous, deceitful and naive. There may be a lucky few who die in their sleep with a dreamy expression on their faces; most people are painfully conscious of their illness as a terrible burden for their loved ones. Most people are too sick to decide anything, to frail to be in peace. The loss of their capacities, their impotence against their own demise, is a source, not of expectant bliss, but of anger, depression and shame. Amour is a cleansing experience. It redresses the cinematic fallacies of death in the movies, and it ennobles us through the heroic determination of its  characters to cling to their human dignity. It is also, probably, the best anti-Hollywood film of all time in the sense that it subverts the cheapened definition of heroism in movies. You want heroes? You can find them here -- far more heroic and larger than life than any guy in tights -- in two impossibly elegant, beautiful octogenarians, transcendently played by Emanuelle Riva and Jean Louis Trintignant.
The astonishing opening scene shows firemen forcing open the door of an elegant apartment where a death has taken place. Doors and windows have been sealed with masking tape. It's been days, so everyone covers their faces from the stench. An elderly woman's body is found, blue and withered, her pillow strewn with flowers. Next comes a long take of an audience at a concert hall, mirroring us. What we are about to see is a reflection of our own life. Among this audience sits an elegant couple, alert, waiting for the music to begin. They come home bantering courteously. After all these years, he still finds a bon mot to tell her. Georges and Anne are a refined Parisian couple. They have devoted their life to teach music. They live surrounded by civilization: books, art, Paris. They are warm but quaintly formal towards each other, and they quietly enjoy their long lived company.
But Anne has a stroke. The first movement (in this movie the acts feel like movements in a sonata), takes place at the beginning of her illness. At this point, Anne is still lucid, yet paralyzed on one side. It's a scary nuisance, but she is fiercely independent and refuses to be condescended to. She has been to the hospital and makes Georges promise he won't send her back. The movie is about how he keeps this promise.
In the second movement, Anne deteriorates, losing her ability to speak and do things for herself. However, her mind is still painfully intact, and Anne, the most elegant and dignified of women, cannot stand her dependency and the loss of her physical integrity. She is depressed and angry. Throughout, Georges soldiers on, taking care of her by never losing sight of the woman she has always been. He is an intelligent, articulate man, dry and loving at the same time, who honors his promise without complaint, without self-pity or aggrandizement, and without expecting applause, yet with great tact and delicacy towards his wife. No words suffice to sing Riva's and Trintignant's praises. Haneke is not one to spare his actors the discomfort of portraying the most unvarnished truth. Riva and Trintignant rise to the occasion with extraordinary intelligence and generosity, without a trace of pandering sentiment or manipulative emotion. At their age, to portray these characters with such commitment, artistry and dignity is simply epic.
There is a daughter (Isabelle Huppert), who waltzes in from time to time, cries and expresses concern, but is no help at all. Georges hires a nurse who, like many nurses, is equipped with miraculous kindness. But as Anne deteriorates, he needs to hire a second nurse. This nurse is not kind. She combs Anne's hair like a child abusing a doll. She then forces Anne to look at herself in the mirror, patronizing her like a child, falsely insisting that she is beautiful. This incident is appalling: an intelligent, independent woman, trapped in an unresponsive body, at the mercy of an ignorant, indifferent and slightly sadistic nurse. It is a banal kind of sadism, and therefore all the more cruel, since it pretends to pass as care. Georges fires the nurse, and she accuses him of meanness, which is the height of injustice after what he has done for his wife. She also squeezes him for more money. It is revolting, and an example of the kind of harsh emotional violence that Haneke likes to inflict on the audience. But in Amour cruelty is tempered by the grace and thoughtfulness of George's care, by the defiant dignity of Anne, and by the equally unflinching look at the bond between Anne and George.
In the end, Anne's suffering becomes unbearable for both of them. A shocking, violent act of mercy is delivered both by Georges and the director bluntly, but with deliberate care. It is both brutal and civilized, harsh and tender; a beautiful, terrible scene. And so, throughout Amour (as in life, perhaps) we cling to the small yet enormous moments of grace that float like buoys amid the unforgiving waves of suffering. In his last two films, Haneke has allowed mercy and tenderness to take root among his usual explorations of depraved indifference. It started in The White Ribbon, and has fully bloomed in Amour. He happens to be as masterful and unflinching an observer of love as he is of cruelty. Amour is a transcendent film.

For Your Halloween Consideration

Don't want to dress up as Michelle Bachmann or an OWS camper this Halloween? Watch a movie instead!

Here's a list of spooky movies for your viewing pleasures. And some new additions below.  I'm in the camp that humans are far scarier than zombies, ghosts, vampires or ghouls, so much of what you will find below qualifies as horror in my book. 

Now Playing:

Martha Marcy May Marlene. I think this is a horror film. Period. And a good one too.

On DVD:

Requiem. A German movie about an exorcism, based on a real story. No turning heads or day-glo vomit, but creepy and disturbing nonetheless.

Eyes Without a Face. A beautiful French horror classic. Almodóvar's new film borrows liberally from this one. And this one is much better.

La Ceremonie. Evil unleashed in the form of a maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her nasty girlfriend (Isabelle Huppert). Pretty much anything with Isabelle Huppert will make your blood curdle, so consider watching The Piano Teacher as well. 

The Butcher. Another disturbing little film from Claude Chabrol, a master of social horror. 

The White Ribbon. The budding seeds of Nazism in a small, creepy German town. Gorgeous and frightening.

Dogtooth. This Greek movie will weird you out. I promise.

Black Swan. Relive the anorexic nightmare. I actually saw it a second time on a plane, and it held up. 

Taxi Driver. Saw it again recently. Pretty horrible in the best way possible.

The Room should be required viewing every Halloween. You get to see the mind of a deranged person who thinks he has made a movie. Really scary.

The 2009 New York Film Festival needs Prozac

I agree with A.O. Scott that this year's selection for the Festival has been the most dismal in years. I didn't buy as many tickets because the list of movies was scary. I usually buy for films that don't seem to have distribution, or films that are cinematic events, like The White Ribbon. My tastes are decidedly middlebrow. I run away from the overintellectual, but refuse to see crappy schlock. This year, the selection was overwhelmingly European and obscure, the American movies chosen not exactly a barrel of laughs, but more than that, it was made as if by depression.
I am an enthusiastic misanthrope, but that doesn't mean that I tolerate endless gloom in movies. But what is even sadder is that, except for the sold-out Haneke film, every screening we've been to has been plagued with empty seats. I could tell something was wrong when I ordered the tickets and I promptly got excellent orchestra seats. This meant that people were not in a buying frenzy. And who can blame them? We can ascribe this to a tightening of the belt with our economic situation. Quite frankly, many of the films, you can see a couple of months later for $8 less. But I'm sure the unappealing roster is to blame. Who needs three French film makers with a marked tendency for the insufferable (Resnais, Breillat and Denis)?
The festival is an event, the renewed theater is lovely, the projection quality magnificent, and people should feel excitement to see movies, not dread. Last year at the Ziegfield the energy was great. Movies like Gomorrah and Hunger gave the festival great buzz. This year, there is no buzz. The opening night selection may be wonderful, but it is a French film by octogenarian Alain Resnais (not my cup of tea), not the most electrifying choice in the world. And closing night is the new flick by Almodovar, which perhaps should have been opening night. I saw it France and didn't like it (stale and self-referential, like most of his movies before Volver), but at least it is gorgeous to look at and has Penélope Cruz in it. Wattage.
One cannot accuse a film festival of elitism. The point of this kind of festival is precisely to show films that are below the radar, or that challenge the sad state of affairs that is our national film industry, which makes increasingly stupid movies. But it is also to create excitement, anticipation and passion for films.  This year, there's plenty of sordidness, or intellectual European filmmakers, or obscure stuff that is not very appealing.
Having said this, so far, the movies we've seen have all been excellent: the intense Israeli film Lebanon, Sweet Rush, a lovely film by Andzrej Wajda, a very interesting German movie called Everyone Else and the Haneke movie. 
I hope they learn their lesson and next year give us, not more lowbrow stuff, but more excitement.

So Excited about Michael Haneke Tonight!

I loved Anthony Lane's article on him, splendidly titled "Happy Haneke". And I can't wait to hear Haneke talk, hopefully about why he is such an elegant, disturbing little sadist. And then I can't wait to see The White Ribbon, the movie that won the Palme D'Or at Cannes this year, and according to Lane, Haneke's best film.
Here are my favorite Haneke movies:

Caché

The Piano Teacher. I will never forget Ice Goddess Isabelle Huppert putting crushed glass in the pocket of an aspiring piano student. Never.

Code Unknown

I could not sit through the original Funny Games, one of the few films that have personally offended me. I do not wish to be a filmmaker's guinea pig, that's all. I find Funny Games feels superior to its audience and that bothers me.

My Special Olympics

At New Directors New Films I saw "My Special Olympics", the short that won the jury prize at Sundance.
It is made exclusively with footage of home movies; a confessional family documentary (in the vein of My Architect or Capturing the Friedmans). We hear some slacker voiceover nasally intone about his mother and her family problems and how his dad was a US Army chaplain was abducted in the Munich Olympics together with the Israelis and then released. The film is lazy, self involved and deeply uninteresting.
At the end of the film, there is a Q&A with the young director, who explains that, in fact, the "documentary" we just saw is not a documentary, it is pure fiction. He made it all up. His aim was to investigate, I don't really know exactly what, the fictionalization of real events. He had the temerity to tell disgruntled audience members to think about Holocaust movies like Schindler's List or that aberration of a movie, Life is Beautiful. But the difference is that none of those movies pretend to be a documentary. Whether one likes them or not, they are clearly fictionalized stories set in a historical context. Schindler's List is based on a NOVEL about a real character. Life is Beautiful is pure, obscene fantasy. They do not pretend to be fact. They do not try to trick the audience.
I am an audience member, not a guinea pig. I don't like to be experimented with. Filmmakers who do this are intellectually dishonest, and come across as supremely arrogant. This is the reason why I loathed the first version of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, an exercise in punishing the audience for their curiosity. Anthony Lane's review of the second version pretty much sums up my feelings about the first. This is what bothers me about this kind of cinema in a nutshell:

Yet the movie itself is hardly free of exploitative tricks, and what seemed, a decade ago, like an unprecedented exposure of our viewing habits now verges on a gruelling condescension.

It seemed so sadistically condescending to me a decade ago, I actually turned it off.
The short that won the prize at Sundance is not to be compared to any of the films mentioned in this post. It has none of the depth or intellect or insight. Whether as a documentary or as fiction, it feels like lazy, sophomoric, self-absorbed homework.

But this brings me to the current topic of futzing with the truth. I am in the camp of wanting to know what it is exactly that I am reading or watching. If it is a commercial, I want to know its a commercial.
If it's a memoir, I expect it to be reasonably based in the facts of the real life of a person, obviously with their very subjective point of view. If it is a documentary, I am not that naive to expect it to be objective, but it should not be fabricated. If you use your actual home movies to invent a story, this is valid and even interesting, but the audience needs to know it. Otherwise, it is called lying.

Yet Another List of Bests and Worsts of 2005

This is still work in progress because my neurons are so damaged from so much use (what did you think?) that I can't remember what movies I saw this year. I don't think it was that great a year, frankly, and that is why it's all a blur to me. But I couldn't wait one more day to post it.
Enjoy, agree; even better, disagree, and let me know if you do.

BEAUTIFUL:
• The Forty-Year-Old Virgin: The best AMERICAN movie of the year.
• Downfall: Probably the most terrifying film about the Nazis ever made. And there is not a Jew in sight.
• The Beat My Heart Skipped: The great director Jacques Audiard (Read my Lips) takes a crappy American movie (Fingers, by that overgrown baby, James Toback) and remakes it into a class act. It's the revenge of the French, who must be tired of Americans taking their good films and turning them into instant crap.
• Look at Me: A great, dark comedy from Agnes Jaoui
• The Holy Girl: The second film from amazing Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel. The first, La Ciénaga, is even better.
• Good Night and Good Luck: Clooney shows class.
• King Kong: Long, spectacular and moving.
• Caché: Another splash of frigid water from Michael Haneke

ALMOST GREAT:
A History of Violence
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
40 shades of Blue
The Best of Youth
Friday Night Lights
Munich

INTERESTING FAILURES:
Jarhead
Breakfast on Pluto
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

WAY OVERRATED:
The Squid and the Whale
Crash

SO BAD I WANT MY MONEY BACK:
Syriana
My Summer of Love
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Match Point

DIDN'T BOTHER:
March of the Penguins
Harry Potter IV
The Producers
Wallace and Gromit
Anything with Jennifer Aniston
Aeon Flux
North Country
Cinderella Man

GREAT MALE ACTING
Bruno Ganz as Hitler in Downfall
Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line
Tommy Lee Jones in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Rip Torn in 40 Shades of Blue
Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote
Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence
Peter Sarsgaard in Jarhead
Romain Durys in The Beat My Heart Skipped
George Clooney in Syriana
Paul Rudd in the 40 Year Old Virgin

GREAT FEMALE ACTING
Roberta Maxwell in Brokeback Mountain
Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain
Maria Bello in a History of Violence
Catherine Keener in Capote
Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line
Juliette Binoche in Caché