Much Ado About Nothing

This lovely adaptation by Joss Whedon of the comedy by William Shakespeare is breezy and charming and has a playful, sexy spirit. An unusual movie for the director of monster blockbusters like The Avengers, and creator of TV shows like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, it's everything his bigger projects are not. In fact, it's everything most American movies are not. In elegant, if provocative, black and white, with mostly unknown (by me) television actors, unabashedly sexy (a true rarity) and featuring Shakespeare's unadulterated words. Mr. Whedon is some sort of freak.
He made this movie in his house in twelve days, while he was waiting to start post-production on The Avengers, (the third highest grossing movie of all time), feeling lost in the impotence of creating gazillion-dollar spectacles over which he paradoxically feels he has little control.
Without interference from studio blockheads and with his own money, he has made a delightful movie, with total command of tone and spirit. Choosing to transplant the Italian town of Messina to sunny, Mediterranean-looking Santa Monica, he liberates Shakespeare from the stuffiness of costume drama, moats and castles. As Shakespeare adaptations go, this the most laid back I've ever seen. The classy black and white cinematography by Jay Hunter makes it sexy and sophisticated, as leisurely as a luxury car commercial (this is a good thing). His uniformly good cast (with a special nod to the excellent Amy Acker) speak the lines as colloquially as possible, without sounding like Valley girls. In order to help those of us who don't always get Shakespeare's iambic drift, he resorts to good visual ideas and many welcome screwball moments. He has fun bringing Shakespeare up to date, where music comes from iPods, people get text messages announcing the arrival of some duke or another, and the meanies smoke pot. It really works.
The comedy itself is the usual Shakespearean romp. I won't give you the Cliff Notes, but two ornery antagonists, Beatrice and Benedict, set in their ways, impossible to woo and marry, are tricked to fall for each other. Meanwhile, Beatrice's cousin Hero is supposed to wed Claudio, but some bastard sibling of this noble family decides to ruin the wedding, as far as I understood, out of sheer malevolent spite. Whedon understands that there are real heartbreaking consequences in a bride's dishonor and when the play gets dark, he lets the pain really sting. Perhaps in our present time of Kardashian-style hos we don't easily understand that casting doubt on a bride's honor was truly tragic in Shakespeare's day. Hero would have tarnished the family name and she would have been untouchable, probably sent off to fester in a convent for the rest of her life. So the tears that flow are right. Same goes for Beatrice's deep frustration at being a woman living under male rules. There is nothing she can do to help her cousin in distress; her outrage at her own female powerlessness is authentic, and still resonant.
So for all of you who are bitterly complaining about how bad Man of Steel is, do like Joss Whedon, take a break from all the blockbuster madness, and give Shakespeare a try.

Star Trek Into Darkness

There are so many twists upon twists upon twists, so many fake endings, so many wasted minutes of mayhem in this incoherent movie that at a certain point (say, 15 minutes in) you feel like someone dropped you into the spin cycle of a washing machine. The filmmakers (I imagine armies of them, marshaled by commander J. J. Abrams) took "cut to the chase" to heart, actually starting with a chase. It goes downhill from there. There were a couple of fun action sequences among the 827 action sequences, programmed every second heartbeat, but I forget what they were. Movies in 3D are actually mostly about objects hurling through space and their plots are written with this in mind. How many objects can we hurl at the audience in 2 hours? This movie will wear you down, it may very well destroy you, if you are not a 15 year-old male with acute ADD.
I did not quite understand "the darkness" of the title: I was morally confused. There were vague echoes of 72 virgins, and foreign wars and a speech towards the end that admonishes the Federation that we can't become like the bad guys who want to destroy us, so I have a nagging feeling that there was some sort of Hollywood style liberal lip service bullshit embedded in there, but beats me -- and I challenge anyone to tell me -- what it was.
Between periods of induced somnolence, high-decibel anxiety, and utter incomprehension of the plot, these were the things that stood out:
Captain Kirk is played by pretty boy Chris Pine, who lacks both gravitas and insouciance, and makes you pine for William Shatner. In my view, this is a major mistake in the film. You need a believable captain, not someone who looks like he can commandeer a penny arcade.
I perked up when I heard a magnificent baritone speaking offscreen, thinking that Jeremy Irons had sunk even lower than The Borgias, but it was Benedict Cumberbatch; the one reason to sit through this Guantánamo of a movie. He plays the meanie as if he was doing Shakespeare, to his eternal credit. He is a bad guy that once was good, but turned bad because of a good guy that turned bad, but now he decided to be very bad again by feigning good. Oops! Spoiler! Too bad.
I was rooting for him.  With that voice, I thought myself capable of following his every protocol, no matter how despicable. Want to destroy humanity? Just say it and your wish is my command.
I deeply admire the acting crew of the Enterprise and everyone in the cast, in particular stalwarts like Bruce Greenwood and Peter Weller (as stiff as ever). It is a mystery to me how all the actors can utter the lines they are given with such professionalism and seriousness of purpose. I wonder if the shooting schedule allowed for actors to recover from laughing, wincing and rolling their eyes at lines like "I was trying to save your life" and "You don't respect the chair" (actually my favorite line this year, possibly ever). The three multimillion-dollar writers must have consulted the Encyclopedia of Hollywood One Liners, because you've heard most of them before. Once in a while, there is a little joke in there, but not frequently enough.
The volume was cranked up so high, this might be a new "enhanced interrogation" technique devised by Hollywood to force the audience to feel thrilled. The shamelessly over the top music by Michael Giacchino is so beyond epic, that I actually liked it. It telegraphed and punctuated everything as bombastically as possible. I hope the composer had fun putting everything but the kitchen sink in there. Sounds like he had a blast.
The production design and the cinematography were, to my surprise, truly cool. Everything is highly polished and reflective, everything gleams. To this day, nobody has been able to design a spaceship that is not a hand me down of the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but hey: Respect the chair.
I loved the futuristic versions of London and San Francisco (which, inevitably, gets smashed to a pulp).
Why do guys want to destroy cities so much? Just asking.
We should all wear those fabulous jewel-toned v-necks next season. The clothes are fantastic, though I object to the miniskirts: too old fashioned.
During the exhausting ricocheting of plot points, I wondered how many hundreds of people worked on the exquisitely detailed special effects, and how many of them got laid off, their workplace bankrupt, after spending months buffing pixels.
I loved that I could see no product placement anywhere. Loved it.
There is a Russian character (Anton Yelchin), whom they have the gall to call Chekov. He is the only incompetent person aboard the Enterprise. He should not have quit his day job.
Spock has a romantic relationship with Zoe Saldana, who is beautiful. I guess even in space women fall for emotionally distant Vulcans.
At some point, I thought, hey, wasn't Star Trek about exploration? There were always nasty aliens out there, but if I remember correctly, the point was to explore and be nice to the other galaxies, not to shoot and blow them up with weapons that look like glorified dustbusters. In this version, there is a lot of mayhem, a lot of spaceship malfunction (a trope of the series) and in between, attempts to humanize the proceedings by having moments of quiet and rest, mostly involving Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto) and his homoerotic frissons for Captain Kirk (and why not?).
Sadly, everything that is supposed to thrill or move you is so predictable, so calculated, and so cliched, and so loud, you just want to retire to a monastery when it is all over.
"Where shall we go now?" the question is asked at the end. Away from Hollywood, is all that came to mind.

Caesar Must Die!

This extraordinary film from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani may be the greatest screen adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and is one of the most magnificent films of their storied career.
There are no marquee names in this movie, no elaborate sets or costumes. The actors happen to be inmates of a maximum security prison in Italy. Some of them are members of organized crime, others are murderers, drug pushers, hardened criminals. The prison has a drama program and the Tavianis use the opportunity to tell a complex and movingly human story about pariahs who are considered inhumane. But Caesar Must Die is not a documentary. It is about the overpowering truth of art intersecting with the overpowering truth of reality. It is about truthfulness in fiction, and the freeing, humanizing power of art; it is about the genius of Shakespeare too, who has understood human nature through the ages like no one else. One keeps peeling layer after layer of meaning long after watching the film.
At the beginning, we see the end of the live performance of the play, the audience's applause, the elation of the actors after the performance. Then the Tavianis go back and introduce the players, their jail sentences written on the screen. At the casting call, Fabio Cavalli, the director of the play (who cowrote the script with the Tavianis) asks the inmates to state their names, the name of their father and where they are from, in two different ways. One, as if saying goodbye to their wives, and the other, angrily. He's trying to find out who has natural acting chops (surprisingly, at least among hardened criminals, many do).
Some of the aspiring actors are immediately transfixing, naturally at home with performing. Some are enormous hams, bursting with pizzazz. Just having to utter their names, where they are from and who their father is, puts these men in a highly emotional state. One inmate, reminded of these essential facts of life, cries so hard he can't even say his name. The director casts his Julius Caesar, his Brutus, his Cassius and other characters. Then the inmates go back to their cells. The opportunity to do the play has given these men a sense of freedom and possibility, but then they are reminded that they are not in imperial Rome and they are still locked up.
So far it looks like a documentary. But once the camera is allowed into the men's cells, we realize that this is much more staged than we thought. The directors use crisp black and white to show the rehearsals and their own staging of the play as a movie, whose backdrop is this jail. But they use color to record the live performance of the play.
Teasing our sense of reality, they also stage scenes with the actors that are not part of the play. The man who plays Brutus, a gifted thespian, is consumed with learning his lines correctly. He asks his cellmate to help him play a scene. This is evidently staged, as are other scenes where the men marvel at Shakespeare's ability to know their hearts intimately. These scenes are slightly jarring, for when the inmates are asked to play themselves, they seem much more self-conscious than when they are performing Shakespeare. There are scenes where the play reminds the men of the terrible deeds they have done, and they can't handle it. In some scenes, the cell doors are left open, further inviting the question of freedom into our minds. The choice of Julius Caesar is inspired: it takes place in ancient Italy, which the men can relate to, and it is about the capo di tutti capi, about a man abusing his extraordinary power. Murder, loyalty and revenge are topics that these men know too well. They are understandably blown away by Shakespeare, and they feel his words as their own.
In terms of filmmaking, the film is just magnificent. The cinematography is crisp and sharp and uses the prison as an epic, existential backdrop. The editing is masterful. The actors are extremely well directed and though the actual play is shortened and adapted, the Tavianis get to the marrow of the play. The inmates are more alive and compelling (in particular Brutus and Julius Caesar) than some professionals who can do Shakespeare in their sleep. It is their story. It's almost as if they don't need to pretend.
There is yet another fascinating layer to this movie, which is the social reality of the inmates. This transformational program is emotionally tough for the men, but it gives them something to excel at and it gives them dignity. A friend of mine was saying that this movie should be used to teach the play to high school students, which is the best idea ever. But I wonder if the drama program itself is something that could be applied in jails all over the world. It might seem to the merciless like it coddles criminals with artsy pieties, but in fact this role playing challenges the men emotionally and psychologically to face their own demons, while giving them back a sliver of humanity. It is profoundly healing, as evidenced by a postscript that lists the fates of the inmates and their progress after participating.
But it is the unwavering empathy, the profound wisdom of the Taviani brothers that makes this film a masterpiece. These two gentlemen, making such a brilliant gem at this stage in their lives, give me hope that as long as somebody uses the art of cinema to make films like this, movies will not have been been totally debased, and will be around to move us and change us forever.

Lincoln

Watching Steven Spielberg's film about Abraham Lincoln's political maneuverings to pass the amendment to abolish slavery, I was struck mostly by the sly and open resonance with our current times that screenwriter Tony Kushner achieves as he portrays this specific episode in Lincoln's life.
The movie opens to scenes of Civil War carnage. Steven Spielberg stages a writhing field of brutal violence where Americans fight against each other not only with firearms and blades but with their bare hands. 600,000 Americans died in this bloody conflict, which was, ultimately, about the moral essence of the country. One cannot help but ponder, whether in our day and age, now that the ideological differences of the two main political parties stand in greater contrast than they ever have (even if their allegiance to corporate interests is basically the same), if we will not reach a stage in which we may go literally to war over the kind of country we are meant to be. I personally am rooting for New York City to secede, and to hell with the red states. There is no small irony in the fact that Abraham Lincoln belongs to the Republican party and that the Democrats are the villains in this story. We should thank providence for TV and the internet, which keep enough of us numbed and misinformed, and mostly disinclined to violently eliminate the other side, even as they help raise the cacophony of mutual incomprehension.
Lincoln is a rich, intelligent history lesson on how change is achieved through politics, how compromises and negotiation are necessary in order to make giant strides. Kushner gives President Lincoln a free pass in trying to buy congressmen off in order to pass his amendment. By any means necessary is nice and even humorous when the end is lofty, but I'm afraid that's not how it works the other way around. This resonance applies to Barack Obama and the way in which he has tried, with various degrees of middling success, to make some changes himself. Obama is no Lincoln. No one is. My sense is that Kushner is instructing him to take a lead from Lincoln's playbook and slyly, whether by moving oratory or skillful maneuvering, enact the reforms that need to get enacted.

Spielberg directs the very wordy, literate material with his customary emotional force and splashes of comic relief; some of it a tad broad, if welcome. He frames Kushner's barrage of language with elegance and restraint, and keeps it moving along, slowly but surely. In this he is aided by an enormous performance by Daniel Day Lewis, who at this point is alone in his niche of playing greater than life characters by making them greater than life. To become Abraham Lincoln (he looks uncannily like him), he brings out his entire arsenal of acting wherewithal. The lumbering gait, the schlumpy clothes, a high pitched voice with a hypnotic musical cadence and what I imagine is a perfect Midwestern accent of the times. But as he fusses over the technical aspects, Day Lewis also provides a lively, sexy intelligence and emotional power in the soul of the character. His Lincoln likes to tell stories, has a folksy sense of humor, which he deploys to disarm, quotes easily from Shakespeare, thinks like a lawyer, is a good listener, asks people questions, and is warm and open, yet distant and inscrutable at the same time. Day Lewis is utterly convincing, compelling, and heroic. Thanks to this performance millions of people will develop a huge crush on Abraham Lincoln. He brings to pulsing life what nobody is ever going to bother reading in a wikipedia entry, much less in a history book. If I have one qualm, is that I would have liked to see something less avuncular, more flinty about him, but it is a towering achievement.
The cast is superb. Tommy Lee Jones kills as Thaddeus Stevens, the formidable anti-slavery advocate. He has some great lines to utter and he does it with precision and relish (I predict supporting actor Oscar nom). Sally Field is great as Mary Lincoln. I know people like her. She's a depressive, intelligent, intense woman with not a small chip on her shoulder at having to sit on the sidelines of history. Who is not happy to see James Spader, John Hawkes, Lee Pace, Tim Blake Nelson, Jackie Earle Haley, Jared Harris, Michael Stuhlbarg, and a bunch of other whiskered, wonderful character actors nail their roles? Women too: Gloria Reuben, Julie White, Elizabeth Marvel, S. Epatha Merkerson). It's a character actor dream cast.
Spielberg only veers into the maudlin fitfully. Soldiers reciting the Gettysburg Address to President Lincoln seems a bit ham handed at the beginning, but then the movie thankfully settles into political strategizing. The epic music by John Williams stirs the feelings of righteousness in the audience, but it's a bit too obvious in moments of levity. There is strained, unconvincing business about father and sons. Lincoln's young son is mostly there as a symbolic presence. His older son, played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, insists on going to war, even as he is confronted, in a wonderfully staged scene, with a cartload of severed limbs. In this instance, the political seems far more interesting than the personal.
The movie builds very slowly with rich and copious detail, painting a panorama of the historical moment, but by the time the vote comes to be passed, Spielberg stages it with great verve and tension. It's a cliffhanger.
I think it curious that Kushner and Spielberg refrain from showing Lincoln's assassination (I guess they don't want to give anybody ideas). But there is a scene where they tease the audience with it, which I don't think works. I am not an advocate of violence in movies, and there is no shortage of the violent face of war in this film, but violence is a particularly American predilection, and this demureness, although dignified, takes away from the political historical resonance that Kushner so skillfully embroiders. The murder of president Lincoln doesn't come as a shock, as it should; it comes as an afterthought. However, the characterization of Lincoln is so magnificent that it makes his assassination horribly tragic to contemplate, as close to the bone as when it has happened in more recent times to political figures like Martin Luther King or the Kennedys.

In the end, as we watch Lincoln, we cannot help but think that we just inaugurated a Black president's second term. Abraham Lincoln would be pleased. But this movie smartly avoids self-congratulation. In one scene, after the amendment is passed, Lincoln asks a Black woman if her people are ready for what is to come. He knows racial harmony is nowhere in sight. I did not understand her verbose response, but it is the question which we should ask ourselves again and again. Are we ready for what our rights and freedoms really mean, for keeping them, and defending them from those who hate them?
One cannot help but think after watching the thrilling crescendo of the results of the actual passage of the 13th Amendment, that it wasn't until the 1960s that Americans had to rise again to fight the deeply enduring racism of the South, and that even today we have racist taunts at our president and a society that still oppresses and profits unconscionably from Black, and now brown people, by sending them to jail in appalling numbers. Abraham Lincoln's work is not finished.

NYFF 2012: The Ones That Got Away

Yesterday was my last day at the 50th New York Film Festival and I was invigorated and not at all tired after 22 movies, perhaps because I saw mostly extraordinary films.
But, as is to be expected, there were some clunkers, all of which my instincts had correctly warned me against. There were no truly offensive movies, but the three French movies I saw (not counting Amour) were very disappointing.
Camille Rewinds by Noemie Lvovsky is a French remake of Peggy Sue Got Married that does not improve on the original. It is rambling and not very disciplined, although it has some funny moments.
About my violent impatience with You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, the latest outing by Alain Resnais, you can read here. It was the worst movie I saw in the festival.
Also disappointing was Olivier Assayas' Something In The Air, an autobiographical account of his radical high school days. Assayas is an energetic, exciting filmmaker, as he amply demonstrated with Carlos, but here he chooses to use sulking non-actors for the main roles and all the energy he puts into the staging, his untalented cast saps from the film, making it extremely tedious. They look the part of French students in the seventies but they are morose, and unintelligible young people without personalities. It's hard to care for their conundrums. Assayas has a great sense of atmosphere and has much to criticize of idiotic student politics, drug use and bad French taste in pop music. As in Carlos, a vastly superior film, he continues coldly skewering dogmatic ideologues with his refreshing lack of patience for antiquated leftist clichés. I'm glad I stayed until the end because the best scene in the film comes late in the movie and involves the shoot of a movie starring Nazis, a prehistoric bimbo and a dinosaur. But it takes Assayas way too long to get to the point; namely, that art and creativity and even working on the cheesiest film on Earth are a better, more genuine calling than being an aimless young French bourgeois toying with ideas of revolution.
Sally Potter, whose films I have never liked, did not disappoint with Ginger and Rosa, which is pretty bad. The only reason I bought tickets was the cast, which promised the great Timothy Spall, Annette Bening, and Oliver Platt, only to waste them in puny roles. The main roles are mostly miscast, with a truly awful Christina Hendricks playing Ginger's mom, Alessandro Nivola, misdirected, playing her dad and a good, lovely Elle Fanning playing Ginger. Why Potter couldn't find actual British actors to play these roles is beyond me, but you could feel the strain in the actors grappling with the accents (with Fanning faring best of all). The movie is an obvious and labored melodrama with artistic pretentions, whose beautiful cinematography reminds one of expensive TV commercials. Potter lets her actors flounder, can't direct her way out of a paper bag, can't stage a scene for the life of her, her scenes are mostly vignettes that end nowhere, and her thesis about a British teenager coming of age in the sixties while obsessed with nuclear annihilation is obvious and strained. The festival's organizers don't do Potter any favors by including such a mediocre, bumbling film amongst such quality company. There were first films by directors from Mexico, China and Israel that showed much more discipline and rigor than this half-baked exercise in melodrama. Ginger and Rosa is like a Mexican soap with fake British accents. Dreadful.
The Dead Man and Being Happy, an Argentinian film by Spanish filmmaker Javier Rebollo, is an interesting concept marred by way too much cleverness. It's a road movie starring an old hit man and a younger woman, who drive around Argentina as he waits to die from three inoperable tumors. There is fun observation of some of Argentina's most endearing quirks, like sheltering Nazis and being always on the verge of development or disaster, usually both at once, but it's all marred by a really annoying, mostly unfunny and unnecessary voiceover narration that aims for drollness but is redundant and pretentious. Still, there is something oddly appealing about the adventure, even if it is contrived. I guess it's the travelogue aspect of it. Nothing that Lucrecia Martel hasn't done a million times better.
Here are our favorite NYFF films top down:

Extraordinary
Amour Michael Haneke
Caesar Must Die!  Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Like Someone in Love Abbas Kiarostami
Beyond The Hills Christian Mungiu
The Gatekeepers Dror Moreh

Excellent
Barbara Christian Petzold
Tabu Miguel Gomez
Fill The Void Rama Burshtein

Very Good
Frances Ha  Noah Baumbach
Our Children Joachim Lafosse
No Pablo Larrain

Good
Final Cut Gyorgy Palfi
Here and There Antonio Méndez Esparza
Memories, Look at Me Song Fang
Bwakaw Jun Robles Lana

Disappointing
Something in The Air Olivier Assayas
Camille Rewinds Noemi Lvovsky

Annoying, but Interesting
The Dead Man and Being Happy Javier Rebollo
Room 237 Rodney Ascher
Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, Marina Zenovich

Dreadful
Ginger and Rosa Sally Potter
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet  Alain Resnais

Stay tuned for more reviews of the Festival coming soon.

Oscars: The Good News And The Bad News

Good news is, The Tree of Life made it to the Best Picture, and so did Terrence Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Also The Artist, which is the best movie this year except for A Separation. I'm rooting for it.
The Descendants is a perfectly decent movie, but for some reason I liked it much more as I watched it than afterwards. Afterwards, it became a little meh. The Artist should win this year, but it's a toss up because these people vote with their ass most of the time. They are entirely capable of giving it to The Help.
Bad news is that a movie that most critics hated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, inexplicably made the list. There is nothing more unpalatable to me that having Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks in the same movie. I can watch them both separately no problem, but together it's overkill. Bridesmaids is the much better choice. The Help utterly sucks. But the Academy members are a bunch of sentimental old farts who want the movie business to be bathed in corn and good intentions. Midnight in Paris is the best stuff Woody Allen has done in years, but I don't think it merits a best movie nomination.  Hugo is simply not good enough to be in this list, despite its good intentions.

Good news is, A Separation, from Iran, the year's best movie, also got an original screenplay nod. This is the movie that absolutely needs to win Best Foreign Film. And if it wins original screenplay too, for which it got a surprising and well deserved nomination, all the better. I'm very happy the academy did not nominate The Skin I Live In from Almodóvar (he's his own country now), because it sucks. 
Bad news is that Footnote, an annoying, overproduced Israeli movie, made the nominations too. Lars Von Trier's Melancholia should be here. Alas, he is now persona non grata. Miss Bala from Mexico stood a chance. But this category never really represents the best of foreign cinema, except in the case of A Separation, which is truly a spectacular film.

Good news is Demián Bichir made to the best actor noms (token Hispanic, maybe?). I have not seen the movie but I hear he is great. He's always been a good actor. Terrible, unbelievable bad news is that Michael Fassbender, who gave the performance of the year in Shame, was not nominated. Somebody read these people the riot act. I would substitute him for Gary Oldman, who barely appears in his own film (sorry, Cathy!). I think this one is between Dujardin and Clooney. And if so, let it be Dujardin.

Good News is that Kenneth Branagh got his nod for playing Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn. Good for Nick Nolte and Jonah Hill. Bad, incomprehensible news is that Viggo Mortensen did not get a nod for his believable, awesome Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method. Or Kevin Spacey in Margin Call. This category was rich with fine performances this year, and yet the Academy votes are most predictable. Where is Eddie Redmayne for My Week With Marilyn, Corey Stoller for his Hemingway in Midnight in Paris? Albert Brooks for Drive? Or Robert Forster for The Descendants? Boring.

Good news is they are all good. Good for Rooney Mara, good for Glenn Close, Aunt Meryl, etc. Bad news is that Elizabeth Olsen from Martha Marcy May Marlene should have been nominated, and Carey Mulligan as well for her work on Shame.  Also, terrible, terrible slight not to nominate the outstanding Kristin Wiig of Bridesmaids. She deserves to be here. This one is between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis.

Good news is Melissa McCarthy is in for Bridesmaids, and the rest of the category is solid. Bad news is Vanessa Redgrave, who gives the supporting performance of the year in Coriolanus, is not here (unless she counts for next year). Sissy Spacek was dead on perfect on The Help. Where is she? I'm not hazarding a bet, but Octavia Spencer is a possibility.

Good news is this is a good and worthy group. As far as I'm concerned, the two worthiest contenders are Hazanavicius and Malick, and if either one wins, I'll be ecstatic, edging towards Hazanavicius. Bad news is I'm down on Woody Allen, whose movie is very uneven. Asghar Farhadi, director of A Separation should be here as well.

Good news is go, Emmanuel Lubezki, as far as I'm concerned, absolute front runner for his astounding work in The Tree of Life. Bad news is Manuel Alberto Claro who did the cinematography for Melancholia should be here. I also loved the work of Sean Bobbitt in Shame.

Adapted screenplay I have no good news to report. I have only seen The Descendants and TTSS, and that screenplay seemed to me to be quite problematic. I'm hoping Coriolanus qualifies for next year, because it is one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare to the screen. Why is Jane Eyre not here? That was a solid adaptation. Carnage the film was so much better than Carnage the play. But Polanski is poison.
On Original Screenplay there is plenty of good news: YAY! Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig! Bridesmaids got a very well deserved nod, and so, surprisingly for a foreign film, did A Separation. The Artist is brilliant. Bad news is I think Margin Call is a terrible screenplay and Midnight in Paris could be better. Sean Durkin's script for Martha Marcy May Marlene was better than either one of them.

The good news is there are only 2 nominated songs! I will be happy when there are zero. Of course rooting for Brett McKenzie and his lovely Muppet song, because the bad news is the Rio one sucks.  As for the score, the good news is The Artist should win because it is the score of a movie without words and it is incredibly well done. The bad news is that I hated Alberto Iglesias' score for TTSS. Wrong choice of composer, the music sounded exactly like his last three Almodóvar movies. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross should be here for their effective work for David Fincher.
Let the griping about the Oscars begin!

Coriolanus

The first scenes are a bit of a shock as we watch a CNN-like news update about war between Rome and the Volscian nation. I thought for a second that this Ralph Fiennes directed movie (his first as a director) was going to be one of those unfortunate Shakespeare updates that try too hard to win over a modern audience. But as the movie conjures up this barbaric world of war, shot in ugly parts of Romania, it becomes clear that Fiennes and his wonderful adapter John Logan conceived this strange Shakespeare tragedy as a very powerful antiwar movie. What makes men go to war? What are the consequences of the notions of honor and heroism? Who is fit to rule a country? Isn't war primitive? It is not a civilizing force.
Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, whom Fiennes met when he worked in The Hurt Locker, uses a frantic hand held camera to capture the messiness of war. The fight scenes are chaotic, the colors are murky and washed out, and the entire aesthetic is brutal. This is not glorified combat. There is none of the stiff, symmetrical pageantry one sees in other films of Shakespeare. Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare's most compelling plays, but Fiennes' update is visceral, thrilling and extremely poignant; it happens to be one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare to the screen. Screenwriter John Logan uses modern newscasts to dispense with all the boring messengers that declaim expository info, and this smart device helps make Coriolanus' tragic flaws even more dramatic. Fiennes plays the title character, Marcus Caius, a renowned soldier whose brutal exploits make him a natural leader of Rome. Problem is, he refuses to pander to the populace, who perceive him as authoritarian, arrogant and aloof (he is). It is a one-note performance of sheer imperious stubbornness. He is a principled but inflexible man, so unwilling to give in to the ass-kissing that is necessary in a democracy, that he rather banish himself away from his family and his country, than court the people's favor. He is borderline insane. I felt that the character could have used a soft spot somewhere, but I'm always impressed with Fiennes' disinterest in being likeable or pandering to the audience. He was surprisingly charming in the Q&A at the screening I saw, but he always plays his characters with utter disregard to his own vanity.
Coriolanus is more than an antiwar pamphlet. There are some interesting notions about authority and democracy in this movie. The "people" come across as rather unsavory and obnoxious activists, who are nevertheless easily swayed by media and political manipulation by two wily tribunes (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson) who conspire to manipulate the masses against Coriolanus, with the curious consequence that you end up rooting for the autocrat. One must remember that in Shakespeare's day Roman democracy must have seemed bizarre, but him being the most modern writer who ever lived, he somehow foresees this tension on who is to have power and how easily it is to manipulate the masses.
There is one absolutely extraordinary performance in this movie, and that is Vanessa Redgrave's as Volumnia, Coriolanus' mother. It's a great character: a mother who wants her son to go to battle. She steals this movie in a way that I haven't seen an actor do in a long time. Her scenes with Fiennes are the best Shakespearean and the best screen acting you will ever see. She brought tears to my eyes a couple of times with her fierce conviction. Brian Cox, playing a trusty family advisor, a garrulous but clever politician, is also excellent. 
Logan and Fiennes interpret this play fittingly to our day and age. One cannot help but think about Bushie and his Mission Accomplished, about the lies we were told about nucular weapons in Iraq, and though the film comes with a bit of delay, (since  the media is not showing us anything anymore that might outrage us) as long as there are soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq, it will be a potent reminder of why we are still waging these destructive wars to this day.