Those Left Behind III: The Ignored Actors and Actresses (pt. 1)

Well, the Oscars are a week and a half away, and still no one feels any better about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close being nominated. Last weekend, sixteen times as many people went to go see a movie that came out thirteen years ago. Hugo, The Descendants, and The Artist – all of whom were released in November – all did better. Whatever vague chances that movie had at any Oscars have now faded entirely. Sorry, Max Von Sydow.

I don’t know why I keep picking on this movie. I haven’t even seen it.

Since I spent a whole post talking about the movies passed over for Best Picture, and another whole post talking about those snubbed for Best Song, I guess I’ll have to move a little faster, since the Oscars are almost here and I still have to get through all the other categories.

Let’s start with the only other categories people care about: the acting categories.

Best Actor and Best Actress

The eventual winners of these categories will be George Clooney, Christopher Plummer, Octavia Spencer, and either Meryl Streep or Viola Davis (probably Davis). Could The Artist dominate all categories on their way to a clean sweep? They could. But everyone else in these categories is an also-ran and knows it. There’s no real reason to get bent out of shape at a lack of recognition in a nomination slot. The Academy Awards is just one more award show to go to where you’re not making a trip to the podium (and there are – this is no exaggeration – several dozen you’re supposed to attend. There’ve already been more than sixty this year, including the BAFTAs last night, where most of the nominees were expected to show). I imagine one gets bored awfully quickly.

As for the rejects: the Academy only handed out one award for “strong and silent” this year, and it went to Gary Oldman (I’ll discuss his performance whenever I review Tinker Tailor), so Ryan Gosling’s out of luck for Drive. Michael Fassbender got well and truly naked for Shame, and while most Oscar watchers have suggested he was shut out because he has a sizable penis, I think we can all agree that this is a pretty stupid idea. In reality, it just seemed like Shame was a pretty divisive movie, and a lot of people just didn’t like it that much. Not to mention, Fassbender had a few different performances for voters to chose from this year, and at least some of them must have preferred him in A Dangerous Method. Or even X-Men: First Class, maybe (don’t laugh. If you’ve seen it, you know he’s great in that).

I think most were surprised that Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t land a spot for J. Edgar, a movie that will always be remembered for having makeup so bad even the movie poster looked unconvincing. Because people hate celebrities, there’s been some snickering that his “desperate” bid for an Oscar nomination came up short; which shows a total lack of understanding of who DiCaprio is as an actor.

Look, DiCaprio doesn’t care about Oscars. He just doesn’t. He likes working on interesting projects, and he likes working with top-notch directors, and that’s the sum total of Leo’s movie-selection process. In the past ten years, he’s worked with Martin Scorsese (multiple times), Stephen Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Baz Luhrmann, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Sam Mendes, Ridley Scott, Ed Zwick, Todd Field, and Danny Boyle.

That’s a hell of a list, and the amazing thing about it is that I didn’t leave anyone off. He didn’t do a single paycheck role anywhere in there. Even his big, crowd-pleasing hits are risky movies (Inception springs to mind). Even Titanic was a fairly interesting historical study that finished with everyone drowning in icy water, so he's never had a nose for standard Hollywood fare. As much as I love Clooney’s commitment to small films, he’s still willing to take a paycheck role every now and again (this is unfair of me. I love the Ocean’s movies and would be thrilled if Clooney did nothing else). 

Tilda Swinton lost her Best Actress slot to Glenn Close* for playing the mother of We Need To Talk About Kevin, and while I feel for her, it’s not like this hasn’t happened to her before (remember all the buzz when she wasn’t nominated for I Am Love? Anyone? Just me? Okay, never mind). It’s tough to be centerpiece of a movie that divides critics that much, and I think she got shuttled to the side the same as Fassbender did. It’s just no one’s made the penis excuse for her (yet!).

* If you’re a woman playing a man, you get nominated. It’s a rule. With the exception of She’s The Man, of course. If you’re a man playing a woman, you get gutted and possibly tarred and feathered by the press. With the exception of Dustin Hoffman, of course.

The 17th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Like Crazy

I wanted to love this movie more than I did.

I’d been entranced by the trailer, which (aside from a brief bit of awkward plot summarization in the middle) is an entrancing bit of earnest indie sadness, propelled by the two leads’ mostly improvised dialogue.

I got my hopes too high. Seeing the movie was an adventure in mild disappointment. Because, for the most part, the movie works. The photography is naturalistic and simple,

the story refreshingly small. It’s a relationship split by the chasm of an ocean, but the divide never feels that wide, it lacks the sweeping scope of the bigger-than-life love stories Hollywood’s trying to sell us on. It’s no Cold Mountain, nor An Affair To Remember. It’s not even Sleepless In Seattle. It’s just two young college graduates, ignoring their own good sense and the data fees for international texting to try to make a relationship work. Their bullheaded certainty that their love can bear the strain of distance and the U.S. immigration system (as if anything could) could melt a moderately cold heart. And when the reality of their lives slowly crumples the foundation of that love, it’s hard not feel the pain of it almost as deeply as they do, even if you saw the knife coming in well before they did.

I’ve always liked Anton Yelchin, and he’s well cast here – he’s so open and likable and easy to bruise. But Felicity Jones, the then-unknown cast in the lead opposite him, is a revelation. She’s garnered festival acting awards right and left since the movie’s release, and all of them deserved. From the opening frame, she is so blindly, wholeheartedly in love, a shaking doll of porcelain emotions. She chips and falls apart, then pulls herself together, only to collapse again. This movie was too small to garner any Oscar love, but I’ll guarantee that we’ll be seeing her name bandied about in that conversation in years to come.

But how small a movie is too small? Our leads fall in love, are separated by distance, develop other relationships that don’t work out, and struggle to decide whether they should be together or not. And while I’m invested enough to follow along, I’d prefer that they maybe did something else interesting with their time while I was watching. But instead they sit and mope, have dull conversations with their parents, build hipster chairs and write unseen blurbs for fashion magazines. I was bored silly by Cold Mountain, and at least in that movie, Jude Law spends a lot of his time getting shot at.

The problem with realism, of course, is the banality of it. The second ends up feeling a bit like watching an artfully shot version of my own life, though I (unfortunately) don’t have Jennifer Lawrence as my live-in girlfriend. I feel for these two, but I’ve got my own problems. If I want to spend two hours watching young people stare glumly at their phones, I’ll just go to the mall.

The 18th Best Movie I Saw This Year: The Help

This will be less a review of The Help and more a statement on why Viola Davis should win Best Actress in a couple weeks. Seeing as The Help came out six months ago and you’ve had plenty of time to form your own opinion of it, I can’t imagine you’ll mind.

We’re entering an Oscar season where very few of the films nominated are hits of any kind. This happens a fair bit these days, now that indie films have come to dominate the awards landscape. But there amidst Tree of Life ($13 million) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ($27 million) is The Help, a film about racism that is a certified box office success at $169 million. To have a film that is both an Important Movie as well as a Successful Movie? Bound for Oscar Gold.

Or not. The problem with The Help is that for a movie that deals with such a dark and difficult subject matter – exploring historical racism in the deep South at the dawn of the Civil Rights era – it is an astonishingly shallow movie.

From the very outset, the story exudes falsehood. Our hero, a young girl (Emma Stone) named Skeeter (a chestnut from the treasure trove of Endearing Protagonist Names), returns from college and is shocked – shocked! – to find that all of her friends and family are deeply racist. She gazes wide-eyed at their backwards attitudes, as if this behavior had sprung out of nowhere, unbidden, while she was eating lunch at the school cafeteria. She decides to write a book telling stories from the point of view of the help: a story no one has ever dared write. A story no one has ever imagined.

I’ll skip to the end. The book is finished, gets published, and cures the South of racism. I’m pretty sure it’s a true story, too, so we’ve all got to feel pretty good that Skeeter managed to solve that problem for us.

Oddly, innocent Skeeter is the least cartoonish of the character. There’s a trampy Jessica Chastain and a bug-eyed Octavia Spencer, doing all they can to sell you on their poorly realized characters. Bryce Dallas Howard is handed a villainess role so two-dimensional that she’s probably doomed herself to become some sort of ginger Glenn Close for the next ten years. Remember when she played dear, sweet Gwen Stacy in that Spider-man movie? By the end of the movie, Emma Stone has managed to take even that from her. The resolution is so ham-handed that four (four!) different characters, on four separate occasions, have to inform Howard they know her deep, dark secret to keep her from continuing to wage her bizarre, angry war against them. Her character is so unappealing that the movie spends most of the last act watching her get her comeuppance. It’s like a snuff film for people who hate prejudice.

And yet this film is nominated for an Academy Award, and I have no issue with that, because Viola Davis singlehandedly makes this movie into Oscar material. Every movie critic who’s reviewed The Help has said the same thing, but I’ll say it again because it’s impossible to come away from the movie with any other conclusion: Davis appears to be acting in her own movie. And it’s a movie much darker and more layered than The Help, and yet whenever she’s on screen, she makes the movie around her rise to her level.

I’ve seen actors out-act movies that they’re in, and I’ve seen them fail to match up to the depth of the film on which they’re working, but I’ve never seen an actor who changed the movie around her like Davis has. And that should win her the Oscar.

Her main competition is the always-otherworldly Meryl Streep, and while everyone is unanimous that she’s excellent as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (and when is she not?), everyone is equally unanimous that the movie doesn’t do nearly enough to meet the standard she’s set.

This is no slight on Streep, but maybe we should honor someone who refused to let that happen.

Those Left Behind II: Reviewing A Very Sparse Original Song Category*

*I workshopped a Left Behind II: Tribulation Force joke for about five minutes for this post before finally giving up, mostly since there’s no joke I could make about that film that anyone would get. I tend to be a little inside baseball, I know, but I’m not that inside baseball.

There was an announcement the other day that the Academy Award producers had decided the show would not include live performances of the two songs nominated in the Best Original Song category. While one part of me was sad that there would be no Muppets singing on the show, the other part of me (there’s only two parts of me) thought “well, it would seem pretty odd to have musical performances, but then only have two of them.” Because there are, as you might have guessed, only two songs nominated in that category.

That’s not hyperbole, or anything. I’m not saying “it’s a neck-and-neck race!” There are literally only two songs nominated this year.

I don’t understand the voting system in place for this category, nor do I care to. I understand that there are often not even five good original songs most years. Sometimes there’s not even three. The Age of Loggins is over.

But I’m perfectly fine with the Academy saying “we’re gonna have five songs nominated every year, and some years most of them will be terrible.” You know, like we do in every other category.

This year, voters will have a choice between a Muppet song that isn’t even the best in its own movie (“Man or Muppet” is great, but it doesn’t really compare to “Life’s A Happy Song”), and a Sergio Mendes song from a forgettable kid’s movie.

Both songs feature one or the other of the two members of Flight of the Conchords. It is not surprising to me the Oscar producers didn’t want to showcase the songs – it would just have made it more obvious how silly the category is this year.

The Golden Globes managed to nominate five songs this year, from movies like The Help and Albert Nobbs and from musicians as varied as Elton John, Chris Cornell, Brian Byrne, Mary J. Blige, and Madonna, and none of those songs were nominated in this category. The Academy made 39 different songs eligible this year, including tracks from Jonsi, Robbie Williams, and nineteen-time Oscar nominee Alan Menken. Evidently there just wasn't room for artists of such limited talent or films of such little credibility.

I mean, after all, this is a category that has nominated such legendary performers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Three 6 Mafia, Eminem, Shel Silverstein (!), Janet Jackson, the dude from Fountains of Wayne, and the South Park guys. Randy Newman has been nominated twenty times. "Chim, Chim, Cher-ee," "I've Had The Time of My Life," and "You Light Up My Life" all won this award at one point. But evidently we can't have Elton John about mucking the place up.

Fix the category, Motion Picture Academy. But don’t feel the need to jam those songs into the Oscar ceremony every year. Because for every this…

 …there’s also this. This song won the Oscar that year.

Not to mention this. Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler was apparently not enough of a big name to sing at the Oscars, so the producers decided that a performance from Antonio Banderas and a possibly-hungover Carlos Santana was in order.

Why Eli Manning Is Nowhere Close To As Good As Everyone Says.

It’s Super Bowl week, and the desperate hunt for narratives continues. Some of these are interesting ones (“here’s how the Patriots defense has been secretly improving all year”), some are a bit unknowable (“the Giant’s defense – is it in Brady’s head?”), and some try to answer The Big Questions (“what would a win for the Giants really mean?”). I have tolerance for most of those – it’s two weeks in between games, after all, and there’s only so long we talk about Rob Gronkowski’s ankle – but I get annoyed when the media latches onto a Narrative, and refuses to let go no matter what the actual facts are concerned.

The Narrative in question? “If Eli Manning wins a second Super Bowl, does he surpass his older brother Peyton as the best Manning?” Or more worryingly, “How elite is Eli Manning? Is he the best quarterback alive?” Is he "A guaranteed Hall of Famer"? Apparently, if he wins tomorrow, it's a lock.

Slow your roll, talking heads. I recognize that Eli is “tough.” That he’s “just a winner.” That he won that NFC Championship Game “like a man.” That he has “the look.” That he’s playing “hotter than any other quarterback in the league right now.” That you’d “prefer him to Brady, yes, I said it!”

Let’s take a look at these questions with statistics. And yes, I know that Peyton Manning only has one Super Bowl win. And I also know that every quarterback with two Super Bowl wins other than Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, and Jim Plunkett is in the Hall of Fame. But just for fun, let’s use other statistics for a change. Not even advanced statistics, that measure his eyeline or quarterback rating in muggy weather. Just regular statistics.

Elisha Manning (I just found out today that’s his real name. Fun, right? How have we not been making fun of him for this?) entered the league in 2004 with the New York Giants. The Narrative goes that after a weak start, Eli turned it on and became a top-flight NFL quarterback. But that’s just not true.

Eli has led the NFL in interceptions twice, including 2007 (the year he last went to the Super Bowl), and last year. He’s never led the NFL in any other category. Since becoming a starter, he’s thrown 129 interceptions in 119 games, while throwing for only 27,579 yards and 185 touchdowns.

Alright, but what does that mean? Let’s put those numbers in perspective.

If you average together Eli’s numbers and create a standard Eli Manning season, it would look like this:

Average Eli Manning Season:
522 Att, 58% Cmp, 3,677 Yds, 25 TDs, 17 INTs, 228 Yds/game

Good numbers. A very solid quarterback line. So, how does that stack up against some of the other quarterbacks in the league? Let’s start with his matchup on Sunday, Tom Brady.

Average Tom Brady Season:
532 Att, 64% Cmp, 3,997 Yds, 30 TDs, 11 INTs, 248 Yds/game

Wow. That is dramatically better. Brady has him licked. Let’s compare Eli to his older brother, who he supposedly supplanting.

Average Peyton Manning Season:
555 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,217 Yds, 31 TDs, 15 INTs, 264 Yds/game

Well, that’s not close. Let’s compare him to Aaron Rodgers.

Average Aaron Rodgers Season:
514 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,259 Yds, 33 TDs, 9 INTs, 280 Yds/game

Ouch. Okay, Drew Brees, who was once released by the Chargers, after all.

Average Drew Brees Season:
548 Att, 66% Cmp, 4,072 Yds, 28 TDs, 15 INTs, 265 Yds/game

Well, okay, so he’s not as good as some of these other quarterbacks, it seems. But how does he stack up against some of the more average quarterbacks?

Average Ben Roethlisberger Season:
473 Att, 63% Cmp, 3,797 Yds, 24 TDs, 14 INTs, 233 Yds/game

A little less aggressive, but with better effectiveness. Now, Tony Romo.

Average Tony Romo Season:
540 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,285 Yds, 31 TDs, 15 INTs, 267 Yds/game

Romo is apparently much better. Okay, Matt Schaub.

Average Matt Schaub Season:
512 Att, 64% Cmp, 4,098 Yds, 22 TDs, 13 TDs, 256 Yds/game

Okay, when even Matt Schaub has a more effective average season than you do, I think that a second Super Bowl means almost nothing historically. Eli Manning is not The Greatest Quarterback Alive. He is not The Greatest Manning Alive. He is not even a top-ten quarterback in the NFL.

Give up The Narrative, guys. Can’t you guys just spend some more time talking about Ron Gronkowski’s ankle?