OSCAR 2011 PREDICTIONS: Lead Actress

I am usually much more enthusiastic regarding this particular race, because the women so often transcend the talent of their male counterparts in the top categories. Not so much this year, which only really yields two good performances. Does that mean that I count Michelle Williams, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close as bad performances in their respective films? Absolutely, yes. "Albert Nobbs" contains nothing appealing to an entertainment or quality seeking audience, and it ultimately serves to give Glenn Close this nomination. Same goes for "The Iron Lady", and it seems like these films are only created now to give Meryl Streep these catapults towards awards.

And amongst the two films Michelle Williams has done this year, it's her more obvious performance that is getting the massive portion of the heat. Something as dry as the work she does in "Meek's Cutoff" isn't likely to gain many supporters in the Academy. So that leaves Viola Davis and Rooney Mara, and I'll admit that I won't be too ornery about Viola Davis winning. She gave a strong performance that had me invested from the start of "The Help", even if the film didn't match up. Although, her endurance throughout her career doesn't change that I'd be absolutely ecstatic if Rooney Mara won for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". It was a performance that solidified her place in this business, as I know it would when I was already a fan of her a year previous for "The Social Network".

For Your Anticipation: I Am the Context

I'm not entirely sure if I posted something back in its initial run in December, but "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is being "officially released" this weekend, whatever that means. I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't have officially released it back in December, but I'll quell my own frustration. You're no doubt aware by now of my deep love for Lynne Ramsay's domestic-horror flick that paints the crevices of Tilda Swinton's tormented mother as she deals with guilt, fear, and frigid loneliness as a by-product of her son. If there is a "Black Swan" of 2011, I'd be willing to make a case for this film. It made me feel very much similar to the way Aronofsky's film haunted me last year.

AWARDS 2011: San Francisco votes up "Tree of Life"

Is anybody else getting severely tired of these critics awards? I need a long break to regain my sanity after being numbed by repressive output. If nothing else, San Francisco made a great deal of more than just solid choices for their branch of critics. Sure, "The Tree of Life" reminded us once again of how blindly supportive its followers are, but in the film's defense there is heart to it. It's just buried under a heap of misguided non-narrative detour. Other than that, specifically in the performance branches, they get a lot of things right. It's nice to see Gary Oldman finally pick up an award, and it's even nicer to see Tilda Swinton continue on her march to the Oscars.

BEST PICTURE: “The Tree of Life”

BEST DIRECTOR: Terrence Malick, “The Tree of Life”

BEST ACTOR: Gary Oldman, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”  

BEST ACTRESS: Tilda Swinton, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

For Your Anticipation: An Acquired Taste

I haven't been much in the loop of things this week, hence the four clip posts in a row with no other news published. It's not that nothing's going on. It's that I've been painfully busy with other things this week, and will get back into the loop of things next week. I did want to give a second to raise interest for one of the greatest films of this year, which I caught during Telluride by the Sea in September, and shortly later gave one hell of a plug for. Chances are unlikely that you'll catch "We Need to Talk About Kevin" this weekend, for whatever reasons. The brutal subject matter or the lack of availability. In any case, the film is gaining speed with the awards circuits, particularly for Tilda Swinton.

AWARDS 2011: DC Critics go for the odd nods

With the awards season in full swing, it's expected for things to start to form in unexpected manners. The DC critics have continued that trend which started at NBR, and we're really starting to consider which films are genuinely the main players of the season. Until "War Horse" garners a genuine win, I think it's becoming more and more plain that maybe it's not the frontrunner we all thought it would be. Perhaps it's just a lower tier player, as it wasn't able to even scratch past "Win Win" or "Drive" in the DC circuit. It's odd enough that Nicolas Refn's film was in there, and that alone sparks another fire in this awards season that's in much need of some personality.

"Win Win", on the other hand, I wouldn't give too much attention based on this nomination alone. If AWARDSit's a trend that continues on to other awards, we'll definitely take it into consideration. After all, if "The Help" is getting buzz, then we can more than expect to see more light indie flicks like this to rise up. You could categorize "Win Win" right along with "50/50" in that respect. A few more pleasant notes are that Fassbender made it into his first Best Actor field for his performance in "Shame", Elizabeth Olsen and Tilda Swinton continue to be of strong presence in Best Actress, and Andy Serkis and Melissa McCarthy are genuinely getting buzz for the supporting categories. In review, we need more critics awards to tell if DC is not completely off their rocker.

BEST FILM

- "The Artist"

- "The Descendants"

- "Drive"

- "Hugo"

- "Win Win"

AWARDS 2011: National Board of Review throws "Hugo" into the race

If we were shrugging in a somewhat disgruntled manner when the New York Film Critics Circle announced their winners on Tuesday, the National Board of Review managed to inject a bit of personality into this race. How so? Well I don't think people were quite on board with "Hugo"s Best Picture chances until just now. With Scorsese and his film taking the top prizes from NBR, which was highly expected to go to "The Artist" and Michel Hazanavicius, it feels like there's new blood in there. What gets me even further buzzed is that Tilda Swinton took the Best Actress prize for her amazing performance in "We Need to Talk About Kevin". Fingers crossed that at least this one sticks.

The wins for "The Descendants" and "Beginners", on the other hand, were pretty predictable and within the grain of what we expected. The wins for "50/50" and "Margin Call", on the other hand, are just plain silly. Their top ten are considerably more interesting than I had originally diagnosed this season, but I don't imagine this bunch will all make it to the film list, least of which "Drive", "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", and for entirely different reasons, "J. Edgar" and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2".

BEST FILM: "Hugo"

BEST DIRECTOR: Martin Scorsese ("Hugo")

BEST ACTOR: George Clooney ("The Descendants")

BEST ACTRESS: Tilda Swinton ("We Need to Talk About Kevin")

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christopher Plummer ("Beginners")

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Shailene Woodley ("The Descendants")

"We Need to Talk About Kevin" Trailer

I think it goes without saying that I was mad in love with "We Need to Talk About Kevin" when I saw it just more than a month back. I maintain those gut feelings about, and in so many ways it's methods are too brilliant to work in a simple trailer. Meticulously made from the first to last shot, and I still have to revisit it when it comes out in December. This trailer works more than decently, but you never really get a feeling for how nightmarish an experience it is until you live it. But this'll do just fine. And that ticking sound is a lot less formulaic than it sounds. Trust me on that one.

Carpet-Bagging: Actress Heavyweights Steal the Focus

I'm getting severely sick of the lack of activity on this site, mostly on my own part. It's just that nothing's been happening enough to talk about. It's not until November that things are truly set in motion, though I admit that things seemed to get going a lot sooner last year than they are currently. I guess it's a contrast that's telling of this year, at least in my own opinion. So I decided to get back in the game of guessing, though I've still neglected posting up a full predictions page. There's just so little confidence in the pot, it feels too facetious to make locked in guesses, especially with so much still likely to change, as candidates fall in and out of the race.

However, at least the way things are stacking up currently, the Best Actress race seems to be banal and dismal. One of the new writers at Film Misery, Casey Chapman, recently did his own sizing up of the field, which really drowned my spirits. The field is dominated by performances in films I have little to no interest in seeing. I admit to being delightfully surprised by "The Help", but I hardly feel like Viola Davis is either the strongest performance of the piece or the main focus. She'd have a stronger campaign for Supp. Actress, but it looks like they're pushing the far less likely Octavia Spencer for that field. Don't get me wrong, as I like both performances really well, but they do not belong in shortlist.

And then there's those who don't need to show anything necessarily strong in their films to be considered candidates, those being Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. I think I've earned the right to be more than just skeptical of their films' merits and strengths, not just in terms of their performances. In the first trailer for "The Iron Lady", I was frankly annoyed by Steep's overly fantastical impersonation of Margaret Thatcher. On any given year, I'm railing against her automatic nomination. And Glenn Close has been away for a while now, taking great confidence in this "Albert Nobbs" of hers. Yet her work just seems cold, uninteresting, plain, and dull.

Film Review: "We Need to Talk About Kevin" (****)

 

I was in a noticeably uncomfortable position in the earliest hours of Sunday morning in Portsmouth, NH. Waiting by a harshly lit streetlamp for a solid two hours after "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a position I'd not wish amongst many, if any at all. To say that Lynne Ramsay has made her return with a vengeance would be a gross understatement. In that mystified delirium where the experiences I had been made witness to were drunkenly shooting straight through my mind, the only response I could relate to twitter was this: "I was not prepared for what was beyond the curtain."

That statement was perhaps not the most informative to send out to the uninformed masses of twitter, but I doubt I could have formed anything more coherent for my mindset in that moment. The first image we see of the film is this ethereal white curtain wavering aside an open window. It's a relatively tame image at the time, and the immediate decoder in me is dumbly thinking, "Oh, they're pulling back the curtain to show us what it's veiling." As simple as that sounds, it is in a way true. It's significance is not wholly known at the start, but once you're past it, there's absolutely no going back. You're there to the grim end. It's the only warning the audience is going to get.

"We Need to Talk About Kevin" Poster

GOD FREAKIN' DAMN! I'm sorry, but it's one of those moments when every single other lesser piece of filmmaking is shown up for what it couldn't do. This is one of the poster highlights of this year, and that is not an exaggeration. Strongly evoking some of the 60s/70s era horror posters, with an obvious tip of the hat to Roman Polanski, this makes it clear that it's not the cheery indie of the year. I was already getting massively excited for "We Need to Talk About Kevin", but even more so now than ever. If the French trailer was a bit soft, this certainly isn't. Take a look at the full poster after the jump!

"We Need to Talk About Kevin" French Trailer

In the pile of films I can't wait to see this year is We Need to Talk About Kevin, which has calmed down quite a bit since its bolt-from-the-blue Cannes premiere. In the weeks leading up to Telluride, I get an idea in my head for what films I hope play there, and which films I hope come to Portsmouth, NH for Telluride by the Sea. This is certainly amongst the lot, but I can't get my hopes raised too highly.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN - bande annonce by diaphana

Cannes Coverage 2011: "We Need to Talk About Kevin"

I've been dying to talk about We Need to Talk about Kevin after its debut at Cannes yesterday. I woke up and everyone was humming with praise for the film I'd barely heard of. All I knew was that it starred John C. Reilly, and the name made it sound like something of an indie comedy in the same vein as Cyrus. After pulling up a few clips from the film, I realized pretty quickly that wasn't the case, and John C. Reilly isn't close to the main focus. The film stars Tilda Swinton as the mother of a sociopath who just murdered several classmates at his local school, and is now trying to come to terms with her own guilt. It's the sort of gut punch you expect of such a great festival, but so rarely receive. Every review I've read has made me all the more interested in seeing it, and I hope that it arrives sooner rather than later. Not too soon, though, because I want the chance to see director Lynne Ramsay's first two films before seeing her third.

Guy Lodge (In Contention), ****: "Lionel Shriver’s 2003 bestseller 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' is a rare pop novel indeed: a nippy, low-comfort social essay that lures readers into messily untied arguments on topical subject matter the talk-show circuit would have far less trouble resolving. It might have made for a cluttered, stentorian film about things, particularly as the novel’s candid, epistolary format — a series of unreturned letters from an emotionally paralyzed wife and mother to her absent husband — lends itself to reams of dense, subtext-securing voiceover."

14 Actors Acting

On the ninth day of December, The New York Times gave to us... (Follow the links to see the videos. Some are fantastic. Some are just good. The music is phenomenal.)

Javier Bardem's angry. He's breaking lots of china.
James Franco is awesome. Guess that's because he's sexy.
Natalie Portman's a ho, but she's really sexy.
Chloe Moretz is evil, but her lips are sexy.
Matt Damon is crazy. Too many disappointing movies.
Michael Douglass is contemplating. His hair looks so goofy.
Jennifer Lawrence is screaming. She's also out of focus.
Noomi Rapace is smoking, and she's also singing. She's gonna get lung cancer.
Vincent Cassel is dancing. He's actually pretty fantastic.
Anthony Mackie's running. There's something behind him. He should get off that treadmill.
Robert Duvall is shaving. So long creepy hermit.
Lesley Manville is phoning. Must be a telemarketer.
Tilda Swinton's crying. Not an Oscar this year.
Jesse Eisenberg has a gun! BUM. BUM. BUM.

Three Years Ago Today: Michael Clayton

When I first saw Michael Clayton nearly three years ago, I didn't really understand it at all. I have to be honest in saying that I couldn't successfully put it all together. It's a very complex film, and I wasn't able to fully comprehend it until the night after I first saw The Dark Knight. It was a "point of clarity" for me, when the threshold that had been keeping me back from truly understanding what the Academy saw in the films they nominated was torn down. The greatest films require attention and devotion, not just from the cast and crew behind it, but from the audience in the theaters.

I always appreciated Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, and George Clooney's performances, but only because of the reputations they carry around with them. It's amazing how different the film feels, now that I can look deeper into their characters. Tony Gilroy puts multiple devices at work here to advance the quality of his film. Is it as good as the frontrunners from that year? Of course not, but it holds up perfectly in repeat viewings, unlike a great deal of films that grow less seasoned with time.

A