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It was recently announced that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to expand the nominated films in the best picture category from five to ten. President Sid Ganis stated that this decision does not correlate to last year’s snubbing of such critical and popular films like Wall•E and The Dark Knight. Ganis insists that this decision was made in order to return the Oscar ceremony to its early roots.

Perhaps they should have gone all the way back to nineteen twenty nine, when there were three films nominated for best picture and three films nominated for best unique and artistic picture. F.W. Murnau’s expressionistic masterpiece Sunrise won the latter award. Apparently it met some criteria of being arty by using projection screens and innovative use of title cards, but wasn’t good enough to compete with best picture winner Wings. Needless to say the once popular Wings is now so aged and inauthentic in its representation of human emotions that it’s rather unbearable to watch. So you get three standard fan favorite films for best picture. Films like The Dark Knight and Titanic fill out this category. Then you get three art films for the other award. Films like Synecdoche, New York and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford make up this category. Everyone is satisfied. The mass market movie audience gets their award and the cinephiles get theirs. Unfortunately in nineteen twenty nine winners were announced in advance. There’s so little suspense in the awards as it is, why spoil who wins best art direction.

Instead the academy could go back to the second year of the ceremony, nineteen thirty. The Great Depression had just occurred sixth months beforee, so it would be rather prescient to return to this form. Now this was the only year where only winners were announced. Who needs nominees anyway? This would prevent lobbying from the major studios along with their over-extended marketing campaigns. The telecast ratings would skyrocket. It would be the most star-studded event in Oscar history. Everyone would be there, because anyone might win. Hell, I’ll go. I might be nominated. Perhaps the academy got hold of that student film I starred in. I played a mute bi-sexual in a future world where true love is forbidden. They didn’t announce the nominees, so you never know. And I’d kick myself if I ended up winning and didn’t attend. Stranger things have happened. If Marisa Tomei can win for My Cousin Vinny then anything can happen. Then again, under that system The Broadway Melody won. Remember that musical? I didn’t think so.

Okay, how about nineteen thirty-one and thirty-two, when there were five nominees. Yes, there were five nominees before there were ten, Mr. Ganis. Perhaps you missed that day of Academy president training when you were producing Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo. Only in nineteen thirty-three did the Oscars expand the list of nominated films to ten. Then in nineteen forty-two it was shorted back to five. Perhaps that year’s president wanted to return to the Academy’s roots.

Whatever Sid Ganis would like the movie going public to believe, this decision is made with wholly populist intentions. The Dark Knight was not nominated; ratings were slightly up from two thousand seven’s record low, but nowhere near nineteen ninety-seven when Titanic received eleven awards. Unfortunately for Mr. Ganis, I believe that this will allow for even more smaller films to be nominated for best picture, and perhaps even some foreign films.

I admit that the Oscars are rather silly to begin with, but I’m sucked into the freak show every year. Its harmless fun, so I don’t see the expansion as sacrilegious, just making the freak show freakier.

-Jason Bardin

What’s the only thing worse than a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh?  The answer might be a comedy that’s so fixated on setting up the next joke that it forgets to establish any normal semblance of “story” or “character development.”  This movie is not just unfunny; it is downright boring.  I felt myself squirming with boredom far more than I’d be had I saved the trip to the theater, instead opting to sit on my back porch watching plants sway in the wind.  I’m sure some might be quick to peg me as someone who simply doesn’t “understand” the ever evolving genre of comedy.  The one so jam-packed with irreverent pop culture references that it only takes a break from those to flash you one of the main character’s asses.  Are these actually movies?

The film starts with four friends on their way to Vegas for a bachelor party.  Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), Alan (Zach Galifianakis), and Doug (Justin Bartha) each have a rather one-dimensional problem in their respective lives: Phil is a dismissive and money-laundering school teacher who comically hates his wife and kids.  Stu is a dentist who has been dating a one-dimensionally evil woman, and is planning on marrying her when he gets back from the trip.  Alan is hilariously a registered sex offender.  And then there’s Doug: the character not on-screen long enough to have any established problems with his life.  It’s ironic that the least developed character is the one we’re expected to care so much about after he mysteriously goes missing.  The rest of the movie is a painfully witless odyssey while these three friends trace their steps (á la Dude, Where’s My Car?) to try to recover Doug in time for the wedding.  (For awhile, they even hypothesize he might be dead!  Boy howdy, wouldn’t that have been a riot?)

In good comedies, entertaining vignettes can exist, but characters must connect them if only with subtle expressions of growth or lack thereof (i.e. Fellini).  Instead of accepting this fundamental approach to storytelling, this movie sets up scene after scene as if it were a crappy MadTV sketch, where the only constraint in writing was the number of characters with which to alternate giving marketable catchphrases.  Take the story and the characters and put them in situations where their reactions fuel the humor (i.e. The Big Lebowski, Superbad).  Alternatively, lazy or ignorant comedy writers can instead take stock characters and put them in stock situations and throw in completely sophomoric clichés.  Don’t expect any more than the latter from this movie.

Continuing to spiral out of control, The Hangover runs around in circles until the writers simply run out of “ideas.”  At which point, the characters make a convenient realization, and all in the world is right again.  Sadly, after an hour and a half of alternating juvenile one-liners and men’s asses, the last thing I wanted to see was a feeble attempt to have all the characters learn a lesson.  What I thought was just a setup turned out to be an attempted frame story.  This movie never tries to be anything, yet still fails wholeheartedly.

My thoughts walking out of this movie turned to some simple math: The Hangover has already made over $150 million.  If we assume people are paying roughly $10 a ticket, then that works out to 15 million tickets sold.  At a running time of 100 minutes, mankind in general has lost 25 million hours on this movie.  That’s almost 3 millenia of time people have already spent watching The Hangover.  I pose to you the question: was it really worth it?

-Paul Brinnel

At first I didn’t think that I could be sympathetic toward the plight of three wealthy siblings who have the onerous chore of deciding how to dispose of their extensive inheritance, which consists of a house and art collection that once belonged to a successful artist. While most of us leave behind heaps of junk headed straight to a garbage dump, nearly everything that Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob) leaves behind, down to the smallest vase, has a potential home waiting for it in a museum or private collection. The sensible thing to do would be to donate a few major pieces to museums for posterity’s sake, keep a few personal items for sentimental value, and sell the rest. As she anticipates her death, Hélène not only wishes, but knows that this is how things will play out. After all, people are much more motivated by economics than by art or memory.

To Hélène’s son Frédéric (Charles Berling), the inheritance isn’t just beautiful and valuable, but allows the family to remember and to re-live the house’s past summers as a Romantic oasis, where life is ruled by artistic considerations, and not economic ones. As desperately as Frédéric tries to convince the public, his family, and himself that people are not beholden to economic laws, his case is untenable. His brother Jérémie’s (Jérémie Renier) utility would be maximized by using his share of the inheritance to support his career in international business by starting a new life in China, complete with a new vacation home in Bali. While his sister Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) does have an affinity for art, she prefers the contemporary variety, and needs cash to bolster her career as a designer in New York. Even Frédéric finds that his seemingly infinite love for two paintings has a price tag associated with it.

But is it really the things themselves that are so important to Frédéric, or the activities that surround them? He can visit some of his mother’s most prized possessions at the Musée d’Orsay (which produced the film) whenever he wants, and all of the public can enjoy them with him. The problem with the museum is that it is calm to the point of lifelessness. The objects of art are behind glass, the sunlight shines unceasingly through the skylights, the tourists quietly walk through unmoved, and the music (very important in this film) is mellow. Frédéric not only wants to save the house, but he wants to prevent it from turning into a museum. It is not just the objects that make the house, but the fact that children are playing in the garden (with a frantic camera emphasizing their activity), vases are filled with flowers, and the whole family sits down to lunch together.

I was most struck by this film when I realized that it wasn’t about economics, art, or the struggle between the two. I will even be bold enough to say that the film isn’t really about memory either. The film is about how we must play our own roles in life, and how, in a Walt Whitman sense, there is a beauty and dignity to nearly every activity, as long as we do something and, as the cliché goes, are true to ourselves. From the beginning of the film, Hélène realizes that her role as a woman at the end of her life is to contemplate to herself and to get out of her children’s way. Jérémie does what a man who wants to get ahead in business and raise a family should, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We cannot condemn Adrienne for trying to advance her career and begin life with a new husband. We can only go so far in chastising Frédéric’s daughter Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing) for her nonconformist boyfriend, cheap liquor, pot, and bubble gum pop. After all, she is a teenager. Frédéric will never find peace until he realizes that he is a father (it was easy both for him and for the viewer to forget over the course of the film) and economist, and not an artist or art collector. He must allow himself to see that he can behave rationally without betraying his family heritage.

If, as I hope, you enjoy Summer Hours, keep on the lookout for a possible sequel dealing with Adrienne’s life in New York. It will be interesting to see what she does with her mother’s tea set.

-Robert Henderson

It’s a good thing Billy Wilder released Sunset Blvd. in 1950.  Another three years, and chances are he would have had to have the following sit-down with his producer:

“Now Billy, the guys and I were thinking.  The market being what it is, these kids are coming to the movies expecting certain things out of their movies.  Well, I’ll cut to the chase.  Wouldn’t the ending be all the more spectacular if we could get more of a jump from the audience at certain moments?  Just imagine.  The kids are already on the edge of their seats and then, BOOM, old Norma pops out to within an inch of their face and they all scream, and then she screams: ‘All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,’ then we see her stare ya straight in the eye!”

Not a single great film of the 1950’s (a.k.a. Golden Era of 3D) is in 3D.  Great artists for whatever reason chose not to utilize the day’s gimmicks to supplement their already great movies with cheap thrills.

I saw Up in Disney Classic 2D followed a week later by Disney Digital 3D.  It was absolutely breathtaking both times.  3D is never used as a gimmick and is never in the way of the experience.  Nothing ever flaunted the 3D, and there were long stretches during which I stopped even thinking about it.  It maybe took 15 minutes to get used to the slight motion blur inherent in 3D.  (I assume if I were to watch more films in 3D I would eventually cease to notice said motion blur.)

My final conclusion is that it really doesn’t matter how you see a film.  As long as it doesn’t need 3D to support any gags or gasps, then it’s really just one more frill the theater can charge you for.  Undoubtedly, it’s also another subtle way to combat piracy.  If the pirates don’t have 3D cameras, then it’s pretty hard for them to pirate said experience.  At the end of the day, a great artist can create great things.  When movies operate at this level, nothing can stand in their way.  Now let’s give James Cameron a chance to prove me otherwise.

-Paul Brinnel