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The opening title card informs us that Public Enemies takes place in 1933, which is apparently the golden age of bank robbery. After reading this note we know what we’re in for. Michael Mann is bringing us back to the Great Depression. Not to a time when hardworking families suffered and the honest man couldn’t get a break, but when bandits ruled America, robbing banks in style, wanting to rule the world. And if it wasn’t for the annoying antics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we might still be privileged to live in a world with great men like John Dillinger. As played by Johnny Depp, Dillinger is the essence of cool. He wears pinstriped suits, perfectly shaped fedoras, and rose tinted glasses. Behind those glasses is a pair of eyes that views the world as his for the taking. They fail to see the boundaries of right and wrong. Behind his eyes is a brain. Maybe. I’m never quite sure what Dillinger is thinking. I know he likes movies, fast cars, whisky, and the dopey hat check girl Billie Frechette. He states these pleasures to Billie in a spurt of dialogue that is delivered with confidence and fluidity. In fact, all of the dialogue is spoken this way. What are meant to be scenes of conversational dialogue, even intimate scenes between Dillinger and Frechette, come across as historical figures in a high school debate. It’s not that Dillinger isn’t thinking, it’s that he was written not to have or need a brain. He’s like the scarecrow without the admirable ambition. When he meets with his associate Frank Nitti (Bill Camp) who used to help him hide from those men with badges who keep chasing him for some reason or another, he finds that Nitti is now running a lucrative bookmaking organization. Nitti attempts to explain that what Dillinger makes from an entire bank heist, Nitti makes every day. Dillinger looks angry and confused. He doesn’t get it. He would realize that he doesn’t need to stick up bank tellers to steal money, if he only had a brain.

I’m not quite sure what director Michael Mann wants me to take away from this version of Dillinger’s story. There are various allusions to Dillinger as a folk hero. He robs from the bank, but makes sure that the civilians receive their money. Is Dillinger making some social statement against the corrupt powers of the government? Well if he is, he never admits as much. Perhaps he just likes being a celebrity and realizes that if he treats civilians with respect he’ll be better liked. He blatantly tells Billie, “I rob banks.” However, Dillinger is lacking the motivation or general purpose of that line as it was proclaimed twice in Bonnie and Clyde. The eponymous gangsters of that film declared that statement as if it were an honor. They were counter-revolutionary figures, living off youthful exuberance, fetching nervousness, and a distinctly proclaimed social conscience. Dillinger, instead, echoes a different gangster in his proclamation to want to be, “top of the world,” conjuring up the image of James Cagney screaming his lungs out, and about to be burnt to a crisp in White Heat. Mann is just referencing other gangster movies, bringing with him nothing new, besides the fact that this film is shot in a high definition video, and what we’re left with is a protagonist without any ambitions or purpose for existence.

Being a Michael Mann film, showing the gangsters in not enough, we also need a grotesque portrait of the FBI. Mann is obsessed by opposition, whether it be cops and robbers (Heat), Colonial and Native American (Last of the Mohicans), or professional boxers (Ali). Unfortunately, Mann doesn’t spend the time developing both stories as he did in Heat. Instead, we’re left with a portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) as a neurotic mess. A man in a tight-fitted suit, with greasy hair, filled with nothing but rage. His star pupil is Melvin Purvis, who focuses all his efforts on capturing public enemy number one, John Dillinger. Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, or more appropriately delivers his lines forcefully. Bale, as previously shown in The Dark Knight, possesses the uncanny ability to diminish a co-leading role into a marginal supporting one. Little is revealed about Purvis besides that he wants to get Dillinger. Dillinger and Purvis first meet after Purvis initially catches Dillinger, who escapes from two prisons in this film, although Mann never shows him coordinating these plans. They say a few words; Dillinger gets the last laugh, end of story. The next time they meet is in the film’s centerpiece, an elaborate ambush on Dillinger and his associates in the woods. Among Dillinger’s associates include Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), presented to justify the plurality of the title. Nelson is less developed here than he was in the Coen Brothers surrealistic musical, O Brother, Where Art Thou? At least in that feature Nelson was allowed to indulge his inner killer by shooting cows on the side of the road.  In this film he’s barely a presence; more talked about than seen. Overall, the shootout in the woods doesn’t work. The exterior scenes are too chaotic to follow, and the interior scenes in the cabin are just poorly photographed. Mann uses source lighting, allowing the room to be coated in orange, which makes these fearless gangsters look like oompa loompas.

One character, very drunk, makes just about the worst James Cagney impression I’ve ever heard. That’s what this movie is. It’s a Universal film pretending to be a revisionist rendition of the Warner Bros. Gangster films. It’s a bad impression of William Wellman’s film The Public Enemy, starring Cagney. If only it had been more homage than revision. This film could have used the other’s gritty realism, instead of the fantasy world in which Public Enemies comfortably resides. I also wouldn’t have minded if someone had shoved a grapefruit in Billie Frechette’s face when she began to cry.

-Jason Bardin

Woody Allen’s new film is called Whatever Works, which is supposed to be the lead character’s mantra. Although the title is perhaps more appropriate as Allen’s methodology concerning filmmaking than as a life philosophy. The character who utters those two words of wisdom is Boris Yellnikoff, a former physicist who sees the glass as empty and water as nothing more than a theoretical probability. However, Larry David plays Boris without a hint of intelligence. Boris’ dialogue is mainly comprised of loud spurts of pessimistic adjectives. The dialogue is more or less line reading as performed by David. Boris is more of a caricature than a character: neurotic, New York, intellectual, pessimistic Jew.

Speaking of New York, Whatever Works marks Woody Allen’s return to his city after a rather unsuccessful tryst in Europe. Allen’s back in Manhattan! Literally, as the plot for Whatever Works calls for Boris to fall in love with a woman nearly forty years younger than he is, in a relationship scenario eerily similar to that of Woody Allen’s own Manhattan. However, the young women in both films are different, to say the least. Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), the young ingénue of Whatever Works, is nothing like the Muriel Hemingway character in Manhattan. That character was an intellectual student who was more mature and self-confident than the protagonist played by Allen. Melody is a ditsy beauty pageant contestant from the South who is probably too stupid to know that people have ages and that Boris is older. And despite her name, she fails to appreciate the classical music that Boris attempts to expose her to, opting instead to attend concert performances by bands called Anal Sphincter. Meanwhile Allen once again provides a Dixieland jazz soundtrack, which is beginning to make it feel like he’s making a parody of his own films. If the relationship doesn’t appear to work on paper, that’s because Melody and Boris don’t exactly ignite sparks on the screen either. They have nothing to say to each other. No conversation, no common interests, and not even a few shared laughs. And then they’re married.

Allen doesn’t have much for these characters to do. Every scene is just the two of them eating in a different location in New York. Whatever Works hardly feels like a film at all. It’s more like a play. In fact, who needs these visuals at all? Although without the images as distraction, one might discover how vacuous the script is. And why does Woody Allen insist on working with the best contemporary cinematographers? This time Allen hired Harris Savides, whose work on films like Elephant, Zodiac, and Milk has established him as a craftsman of profound beauty and sensitivity. Here he does his best to make sure everyone is well lit and in focus.

Needless to say the characters run out of things to say, so halfway through a whole new crop of actors enter the picture. Patricia Clarkson comes in as Melody’s mother, who transforms into a Bohemian love goddess. Following her is Ed Bagley Jr. as Melody’s father. This character is so underdeveloped that it’s rather just a waste of time when we discover that he’s a closet homosexual. Allen’s point here is to provide further examples to justify his title, perhaps because Boris doesn’t really follow his own mantra. He says it to the camera every once in a while, but his life is really nothing more than being upset at everything, which really doesn’t work for him.

And in the end what are we left with? A happy ending that proposes that everyone can get along if we all do whatever works, which justifies Charles Manson’s existence, I suppose. There is a point when Boris talks to the audience and questions whether anyone is even in the theater. If he had addressed the audience as the suckers we are, members of a diminishing society, vainly hoping that Woody Allen will return to making films that deal with complex themes about the nature of life and realistic portrayals of relationships between men and women, then Allen would have made at least one insightful comment in this film. Anyone remember the days when Woody Allen made films concerning themes a bit deeper than a two word alliterated title?

-Jason Bardin

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

It’s a beautiful day. Flowers are blooming, birds are singing, and houses are flying. Summer has arrived, and with it comes an array of loud films filled with explosions and your favorite comic book characters. ’Tis the season when studios make their money by unleashing sequels and prequels of their cherished franchises to an all-consuming, fanboy public. Adults are busy hibernating until the fall. While continued franchises like Star Trek, Transformers, and Terminator compete with each other on a level of pure cacophony, Pixar Animation Studios presents yet another film that is more quiet and emotionally authentic than just about anything we’re liable to see this year.

The tenth Pixar film Up is the second by director Pete Doctor, whose prior effort was the charming buddy comedy Monsters, Inc. Like last year’s Wall-e, which brought us into the lonely world of the last robot on earth, Up brings us into the lonely world of septuagenarian Carl Fredericksen (Edward Asner). In his youth Carl was a balloon salesman and married to his childhood sweetheart, Ellie. The two were attracted together through their love of adventure and living life to the fullest. Their life together is presented in a silent, elegiac montage, set to Michael Giacchino’s beautiful score. In this sequence, Doctor manages to capture both the tragic unpredictable moments of life, and the human comedy of a relationship as portrayed in the couples buoyant perseverance and eternal love for each other. Now that Ellie has died Carl has receded from life into a grumpy old man. Then, to stave off going to the nursing home, and in obligation of an unfulfilled promise he made with Ellie, Carl straps thousands of balloons to his home, which lifts the multicolored house from it’s foundation into the air. The sight of the house soaring through the air, once again accompanied by Giacchino’s fine score is a fresh, breathtaking image. The flying house is headed toward Paradise Falls in South America, where Carl and Ellie’s childhood hero, adventurer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), used to travel to in his zeppelin, in search of exotic creatures. Accidental stowaway and young wilderness explorer Russell accompanies Carl to South America. The relationship between the two is the centerpiece of the film. Russell (Jordan Nagai) at first seems annoying. He’s an average kid who whines when he’s tired and has no reservations of saying what’s on his mind. Russell unintentionally forces Carl to come to terms with his own fears and helps him to rediscover the meaning in his life after Ellie.

While being deeply emotional and visually beautiful, Up is extremely funny. The age gap of the main characters fulfills its expected potential for comedy. Meanwhile there is absurdist humor with a giant colorful bird, whose neck movements alone provide a wonderful array of endless sight gags, along with dozens of anthropomorphic dogs, which somehow feels naturally integrated into this fantastical story. And while I praise the film for it’s moments of quiet, there is plenty of action. However the action is filmed fluently, without a lot of fast cuts or quick movements. Doctor has respect for the aerial action, not to mention the human eye. The only aspect of Up that doesn’t quite hit the mark is when Russell goes into exposition explaining his unfortunate family situation. These conversations are not only abrupt and manipulative, but also unnecessary. This is Carl’s story, and it’s a good one.

-Jason Bardin

On the surface, Carey Fukunaga’s directorial debut, Sin Nombre, comes across as a serious exploration on the parallel themes of the struggles of illegal immigration into the United States through Mexico and the violence and barbarity of the local Mexican gangs. The honorable intentions that I’m sure were brought to this film have been lost to a dominating, clichéd, melodramatic love story. What could have been the Mexican equivalent to City of God, instead settles for a story filled with conventions and contrivances, along with three stock character protagonists, all of which equal a nice, formulaic film that would conveniently fit quite well in Hollywood.

The protagonists in question are Smiley (Kristian Ferrer), Casper (Edgar Flores), and Sayra (Paulina Gaitan). Smiley is a child of about ten who is being initiated into a local gang. This initiation mainly consists of the gang beating him up. Every member of the gang has a nickname and a bunch of tattoos. Apparently the higher up one is in the gang the more tattoos he has. The leader’s nickname should have been Queequeg. Casper is obviously another member of the gang, but after a mishap between his girlfriend and his superior gang member, followed by a similar incident between him and the same gangster, he wants out. He winds up on a train housing hopeful illegal immigrants headed for the U.S./Mexican border. Sayra, a reluctant, exhausted, Honduran teenager is on board that same train. She’s heading for the land of opportunity, specifically New Jersey. Naturally she falls in love with Casper, as all proper girls do when they see a violent gangster hoping to evade an entire gang who wants to kill him. How does Casper know that the gang’s after him? He gets a text message.

It’s the relationship between Casper and Sayra where the film becomes like countless others. Within a day and a fortnight they become eternal lovers. Romeo and Juliet were given more time than that. But what’s really peculiar in this relationship is Casper. What the hell does she see in him? Flores plays him like the totality of Brando’s wild one and Dean’s rebel. Except he strips the character of all personality, so what’s left is an excess of blank stares and shrugs.

It’s the violence in this film that’s truly disturbing, precisely for the reason that it’s not at all disturbing. When the gang first beats up Smiley I didn’t care. The camera angles prevented me from being affected. Apparently Fukunaga did not want to upset anyone watching his film about Mexican gangs. There are indeed three scenes of considerable bloodshed, but in each instance the character dies instantly, so there is no real pain, no suffering. There is even a scene that mirrors one of the most devastating scenes from City of God, a film that deals far more honestly in terms of the relationship between human nature and violence. The scene involves Smiley being forced to kill someone as part of his initiation. In City of God the similar scene was primarily about the pain of the victims, showing exactly what it means to murder someone. The incident in Sin Nombre is rather quick and painless. Smiley even gets a bit of help pulling the trigger.

Overall the film doesn’t have enough energy to keep up any level of suspense or momentum, which should be more prevalent in a story where a group of people is trying to illegally immigrate, while an allegedly vicious gang is hunting one of those persons. The score, which is one of the more generic, and deliberately manipulative scores I’ve heard in awhile, served to compromise for the film’s tonal shortcomings.

What’s the point of making a film outside of Hollywood if your only going to adhere to its basic formulas? I wouldn’t be surprised if Fukunaga’s next film is for a major studio.

-Jason Bardin

Life isn’t easy for Coraline Jones. Her relationship with her parents is not humbling. They have moved her from the post-economic collapse, poverty-ridden Detroit, to a barren woodland landscape out in Oregon. They’re busy working. They have no time for their daughter. The mother (Teri Hatcher) in particular is short tempered with Coraline (Dakota Fanning), and while the father (John Hodgeman) is congenial enough, he too is under his wife’s strident demands. Coraline can often be temperamental, and she does not see the big picture. When she is shopping for her school uniform with her mom, she wants a pair of vibrant, orange gloves to contrast with the drab outfit. Her mother refuses and Coraline is left miserable. She does not realize that they are shopping for her uniform on the day when school uniforms are on sale for half-price. Yes, her mother yells at her and is impatient, but she is the same way with her husband. She’s trying to get him to focus and keep Coraline out of the way, so that the book they’re writing can be finished and sold. The parents have plagued Coraline in other ways. Through some genetic mix-up Coraline inherited strikingly blue hair, and through a lack of foresight, her parents decided to scramble the vowels in her name. She has to correct every one from saying Caroline. Only the mice seem to pronounce her name properly, but they only communicate through Coraline’s upstairs neighbor, Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), and he believes that they’re pronouncing it incorrectly. The cat gets it right too. Wait. Blue Hair? Communicating mice? Verbose cat? No, Coraline is not a straight domestic drama, concerning poverty amid a dysfunctional family. It’s a 3D, stop-motion, surrealistic extravaganza from that madman of animation, Henry Selick.

At first, everything seems normal. The slow pacing and lilting music in the first third of the film is soothing, as we follow Coraline, bored and lost in her own home. Too many animated films of recent years, particularly ones produced at DreamWorks, are geared toward a constant peak. Those films do not build. It’s high energy and high action, all the time, in a candy-colored palate. Coraline breaks these kid-motivated credentials. The colors are bleak and appropriately reflect Coraline’s condition. The opening scenes are of Coraline walking around the house, counting windows, meeting neighbors, fighting with her parents. Then she finds a portal. It’s a knee-high door, in an empty room of the house. When she opens it there is a long, circular tube that leads to the other end. When Coraline crawls through it, she does not spend fifteen minutes inside the mind of John Malkovich. She is led to an alternate reality, where the atmosphere is brighter, and her parents are nicer. Her father takes on the persona of Bing Crosby, which gives him a silky voice, a smooth demeanor, and the ability to organically burst into song. Her mother becomes Martha Stewart. She cooks, she cleans, she compliments. An added benefit to this universe is that no one ever loses a button, because they’re stitched to every one’s eyes, with no exceptions. humans, mice, toads, and Scottish terriers, all see through four-holed button vision. The adventures in this universe are sizeable. But it is only after things go awry and Coraline begins to fear this alternate existence that we are treated to a true spectacle. As she wanders away from the house, in conversation with the aforementioned cat, the pieces of the universe are removed as if the whole world were a puzzle. What is left is the white, blank expansion of nothingness. As she continues to walk, she returns from whence she came. It’s like the insulated world in Pleasantville, except lonelier and even more artificial. It is here that Coraline realizes that it would be better to live in a world of mistreatment than an isolated existence, where the world does not expand to fulfill the requirements of a curious, growing, young girl. That, and she would have to have buttons for eyes.

An animated film of this caliber can only exceed in the same manner as a live-action film succeeds. It requires the sure-handedness of an auteur at the peak of his or her abilities. At Pixar there is no secret magic formula that makes theirs films unique. They allow a single director with an artistic vision to create the film that he or she wants. Because animation is bounded only by the vision of its director, the films are made uncompromised. These then are true auteur films, and through animation some of the greatest directors have emerged. Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird are the best of the visionaries from Pixar; Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata cultivated the auteur theory applied to animation before them at Studio Ghibli. The director in question here is Henry Selick. Selick’s first two films The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach are often wrongly attributed to director Tim Burton, who served as producer. However, it can be seen through the style of those two films, which continues through Coraline, a director with an individual vision: dark, fantastical, grotesque, and fluid. The characters he creates are often emphasized vertically, like Mr. Bobinsky, who leaps into the air, as if refusing to believe in gravity.

Selick is not a pioneer in the art of stop-motion animation, but its life support. In the Hollywood of yesteryear, masters of stop-motion, such as Ray Harryhausen, were kings, and were needed for the big special effects films of those days. Now CGI is king, and stop-motion has seemed to lose all-purpose. CGI, which is fake, looks real, while stop-motion, which uses real clay figures, looks fake. There is a beauty to stop-motion; it can be quirky and stylized. Selick’s animated work of the colorful and exotic aquatic life in The Life Aquatic, contributed greatly to Wes Anderson’s bizarre, pastel shaded, deadpan universe. He revived stop-motion animation with The Nightmare Before Christmas, and in Coraline, has directed the first 3D Stop-motion animated film. I’m usually averse to 3D. I find the process pointless, the image to be darker and not as sharp, and the glasses to be a nuisance. The new glasses design, a black, plastic frame, presents the image of the national convention of Woody Allen look-a-likes gathering to watch a movie. Of course it will never be one of his movies. 3D seems to be for animation and oversized live action films, like last years cartoonish rendition of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Here, however, I do not necessarily reject the third dimension. I still maintain the process is unnecessary, but at least it did not taint the film as it did for Disney’s Bolt, which was already tainted by cliché character development and an overdose of cuteness. Story and style can sometime win over excess technology.

Unfortunately, the story does not win over enough, as Coraline sails through into the third act and comes to what after the first hour would seem unthinkable: predictability followed by cliché. Coraline, in a series of incidents that has all the complexities of a video game, challenges her alternate reality mother, her “other” mother, to a challenge. If she can find the three sets of eyeballs of the ghosts of three children, and then find her real parents, she can return to her world. Hercules had twelve heroic tasks to prove his might; Coraline has a scavenger hunt. She faces a foe at each location. She beats the boss, collects her prize and moves on to the next level. She could be Super Mario. There are some rather nice visual flourishes at this point, but they’re mostly the blank expanse of a universe in decomposition that we have already seen. The tagged on happy ending is more artificial than the alternate reality. Selick lets the audience off the hook, and allows them to leave the theater thinking everything is all right with the universe, as if we should forget the first hour of the film, the hour we so desperately want to savor.

-Jason Bardin

The Academy Awards was certainly a night to remember. Rare is it that the Academy is brave enough to not only nominate, but also actually present the grand prize to the proper recipients. My favorite of course was Charlie Kaufma n, winning best screenplay. He seemed very humbled and appreciative, thanking the community for embracing a film that is not inherently marketable.

There was a lot of love for Che that night. Soderbergh received Oscars for best director and cinematography. His only thank you for the latter award was to his Red camera, while he seemed to be a little more appreciative to the greater community on receiving the former award, in a surprise upset over Andrew Stanton. Benicio Del Toro walked away as the expected favorite for Che, as did Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky.

The most memorable acceptance speech was the funniest. Heath Ledger riffing on front row favorite, and former Joker, Jack Nicholson. Priceless.

My favorite part of the show was the performance of Little Person from Synecdoche, New York. The song beat Bruce Springsteen’s ballad from The Wrestler, which was the presumed favorite.

The rest of the show went more or less as expected. Wall-E picked up best sound mixing, and Samantha Morton went home with best supporting actress. And even though he received every precursor award, Werner Herzog did not fail to entertain, picking up his award for best documentary for his film Encounters at the End of the World.

Unfortunately I fell asleep before they announced best picture, and I have not bothered to look up who won. I’m sure the Academy chose the right film.

-Jason Bardin

I’m not quite sure what the Academy Awards represent. This year in particular they have failed to nominate the films and performances that were truly daring and artistic, and have instead chosen to acknowledge films that lack passion or insight into the human condition. In effect, the academy made an effort this year to nominate films that will not live on in history, and will surely be looked back as one of those years in Academy Awards history where the general public wonders what in the world the academy was thinking, ignoring such films as Synecdoche, New York, which at that time will finally be appreciated as a proper masterpiece, and other films like Happy-Go-Lucky and The Dark Knight, choosing instead static films like The Reader and Frost/Nixon.

Now I will not get upset. The Academy Awards do not really mean anything. There is no best of anything in art. I wish more people, actors in particular, would take a stand against the Awards circuit, like George C. Scott, who refused his Oscar and returned it to the Academy. His honorable declaration was that he did not believe to be in competition with other actors. They should have given him an Oscar for such a proclamation…oh wait. I suppose now, actors in particular, have obligations to promote their film to ensure financial success. The Academy Awards help fuel such lucrative prospects. I suppose if I view the show as one enormous publicity machine, instead of an offering of artistic merit, than the show becomes more enjoyable. Denial helps.

The Academy Awards have been around since 1927. At the first ceremony one of greatest of all silent films, Sunrise, was not given the top prize, which was given to the mightily inferior Wings. Sunrise was given some bullshit award for artistic merriment. The title Wings is now more associated with an 80s television sitcom than an academy award winner for best picture. Sunrise is still remembered and cherished and will live on as one of the truly great artistic achievements in cinema. The Academy got it wrong from the start; I see no reason why they should start awarding merit now.

The Academy Awards began at a pivotal time in film: the birth of sound. The Jazz Singer was awarded a special award at the time. However, there was no award for sound. Today there are two, but they are generally seen as a burden to the viewers, the producer of the show, and the winners whose long journey to the stage is subtracted from time in their speech. I am particularly fond of these two categories, as they award a difficult, thankless job of skill and expertise. However, in keeping with the zeitgeist, I have fitfully ignored those categories.

Anyway, I will now go through the arbitrary process of choosing my preferred winners alongside my predictions of who will actually win. Why do I do this? I suppose it’s because of tradition. I’m still swept up by the aura of this whole damn freak show.

Best Picture

Only two films pass a simple litmus test for this category: Are the films any good? Milk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are the only films that have a justifiable reason to be nominated for best picture. They are good films. However, it is fait accompli that Slumdog Millionaire will win this trophy. While that might be fine for now, I believe that a win for Slumdog Millionaire will actually hurt its popularity. Benjamin Button is an under-appreciated, great, and profound film that will become better appreciated, and will be looked back as the film that should have won best picture. Slumdog Millionaire will not be viewed as an independent entity. Just as Robert Redford’s Ordinary People is the film now best known as the one that beat Raging Bull at the Oscars, so will Slumdog Millionaire be known as the film that beat Benjamin Button.

All I can say for The Reader is that Satan is designing a special section in Hell where Harvey Weinstein will be forced to watch The Reader, Chocolate, and Il Postino on a never ending loop. Frost/Nixon, which is here due to another egregious producer, Brian Grazer, is a film made purely out of the notion that it could be a good film. Ron Howard holds no opinions on Nixon. He fails to bring the passion that Oliver Stone brought to Nixon. His film was made without passion or purpose and is dead on the screen. Meanwhile, Milk was written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by Gus Van Sant, two homosexual filmmakers who care a heck of a lot about Harvey Milk. They bring passion and energy to what could have been a standard biography; they embellish with a lust for life mentality to the story of civil rights.

Best Director

It’s rather shocking to see this category match up five for five with best picture. Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire, has probably already cleared space on his shelf for that little, naked man. Boyle made the flashiest film, with the most editing and stylized cinematography, which corresponds to him looking like he did the most directing. Meanwhile, Fincher had the hardest challenge in his attempt to tell an epic story, spanning the twentieth century, on a personal scale. Stephan Daldry is back in the race again securing a third nomination for his third film. Based on that unprecedented statistic, one might imagine that he was the hottest director in Hollywood, not some impersonal director whose last two films have been stale, emotionless prestige pictures. And Ron Howard’s a popular guy, I guess. Oh that’s right, he had the daunting task of transitioning the material from the stage to the screen. He failed.

Leading Actor

Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke are the two principal competitors in this category. Penn plays Harvey Milk in Milk, as a gay rights politician who spends most of the film losing elections until he finally breaks through and wins. Rourke plays the affable Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler. His fights are all fixed. Both performances are extraordinary. Penn shows a congenial persona not present in his work since his great performance in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. Penn becomes Harvey Milk. I can’t say the same for Rourke. Rourke as Randy is both the character and himself. The emotional speeches he gives to Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood are poignant because we know that Rourke is simultaneously repenting for his own selfish arrogance. I think Penn will win his second Academy Award, deservedly, and I predict that he will specifically call out to Mickey Rourke in his acceptance speech. Everyone wins. Almost.

The other three nominess can just enjoy the show. Richard Jenkins gave a wonderfully minimalist performance as a bored, psychologically lost professor in The Visitor. Brad Pitt gives an equally minimalist performance on a grand scale in Benjamin Button. As for Frank Langella, I dearly hope he was well paid.

-Jason Bardin

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire simultaneously wants to be a profound film about poverty and social degradation in India, while providing the most fun you’ll have at the movies this year. Into what category do I place such an ambitious effort? If it were a Bildungsroman, it would be titled: Slumdog Millionaire: being the urban education, perilous adventures, and romantic entanglements of one Jamal K. Malik, Mumbai born. However, the film is not interested in the development of the this particular young protagonist, and its large ambitions seem to have been replaced, assuming they existed, with a series of sequences that are constructed purely with the aim to manipulate the audience.

Our protagonist, Jamal, is a contestant on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” We know from the first frame that he is going to win. This knowledge eliminates a would-be suspenseful sequence toward the end of the film. Why does he win? Throughout the film we’ve been taught to believe that Jamal can find sanctity and sanity amongst terrible poverty. This message is sacrificed as Jamal simultaneously wins ten million rupees and secures the love of his life. His brother also dies, but it’s as a martyr in slow-motion, so the audience feels more elevated than upset. Does he need the money? It can be argued that he never wanted the wealth or fame, only Latika, the obligatory object of his affection. The theme of this movie: love conquers all.

The game show also serves as the frame for a series of flashbacks that correspond to each question. Flashbacks are an interesting convention in film. In Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, the flashbacks construct a fractured narrative, providing multiple perspectives of the leading protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. The narrative serves as an exploration into the mysteries and ambiguities of a public figure who was a secretive man. The film does not succeed without the structure. However, in Slumdog Millionaire the flashbacks are all in chronological order. Altering back and forth between present and past becomes tiresome and predictable, without providing any deeper meaning into the lives of the main characters. Jamal, in theory, has led an eventful life, but the film would suggest that the events in his life have only happened so that he can answer a series of questions.

There are indeed some spritely moments to Slumdog Millionaire. I particularly enjoyed the sequence involving theft at the Taj Mahal, but I found that the treatment of poverty was condescending. Once upon a time, neorealism, was used to explore the nature of poverty and depravity in a damaged society. Those films were characterized by a minimalist style in a realistic setting. Slumdog Millionaire’s stylized cinematography, with its sweeping shots of Mumbai, and its rapid paced editing, fail to illuminate the day to day struggles of those who suffer from injustice in India. The Bollywood style ending dance sequence was perhaps the most insulting aspect of the film, as it clearly celebrated an industry that chooses to ignore the struggles of its country by marketing fabled, romanticized entertainments. Now I’m not against fun and escapism, but I am offended when it pretends, and fails, to be politically motivated and socially conscious.

-Jason Bardin