OSCAR
SYMPOSIUM
with
your host Nathaniel
and six very special guests
February 2008
Our Seven Participants
day one / day two / day three
previous page
SASHA: The funny thing about love is that when we love something, or someone, we don't see the flaws. If you love it enough nothing else matters. Reading Tim's comments about No Country for Old Men reminds that it is a film, like all Coen brothers films, that can be picked apart if the desire is there to do so, just as any of them in the Best Picture race can be. It gets down to how much we love them, or not. If we could only love the movies we're supposed to love, and also love the mates we're supposed to love, life would be more harmonious and drama-free. I know my own experience this year would have been greatly improved if I had responded to There Will Be Blood the way 99.9 of the film community had.
What makes us fall in love then? Do we feel appreciative that someone gave us something new and interesting, or deep and despairing, complex or profound? Are we moved by characters we relate to? It is said that Oscar votes with His heart and thus, how is it that the two most popular films, for nominations anyway, are two that are more heady experiences than emotional ones? I couldn't stay composed while watching The Kite Runner, The Diving Bell and Into the Wild yet those films were curiously shut out of the Best Picture race. Could it be that things have shifted? And that the heart turns out to be the least reliable organ in predicting the Oscars? Atonement was almost the movie that made everyone feel something but it was, in the end, too intellectual an experience. That experience turns out to be the thing I most appreciate in a film; one that makes me think about the story. Films where the only context is in psychoanalyzing the filmmakers work because they are exciting in different ways, visually stimulating, from the eye of a genius: Stanley Kubrick, Hitchcock perhaps and now Paul Thomas Anderson to some.
The Coen brothers have made films I can't get enough of and ones I watch repeatedly. No Country for Old Men is different, though, in that we're on to Cormac McCarthy's ponderous thoughts on humanity. Very few films have it all, and to me this one does. So, while I can understand why some feel frustrated with the structure and the strange last act, it was food for my tired old soul in all possible ways.
BOYD: Nathaniel, sorry to shatter your dream of a non-existent fanbase for
Atonement on your own website but there is at least one Atonement fan in the house: me!I'm in love with Atonement as Sasha might say, with the slight difference that I do see its flaws but that I think they are minor flaws and I don't really care about them. I'm not sold on the tracking shot, which I think takes people out of the film just as much as that silly ferris wheel does, but on the whole I think it quite a British marvel.
Nick - the way I "read" Briony, to choose just one verb out of millions, was indeed as something of a blank slate, but I think that that is the whole point of the film. Briony is the character that is closest to the audience even though the audience doesn't know it yet (unless they've read the book). Even though her hairdo is as fixed as the coifs on Mount Rushmore, she's the most unreliable narrator of the year in all other respects, which makes her a lot more interesting than Juno et al.
The point of the picture postcard romance between the soldier in the poppy field and the lady in the green dress and all that writing is exactly what I think makes this story so exciting: it is not about it's surface story or stories but about stories in general. The way we use them, the way we need them. The way words can make things worse. The way words can make things better. Perhaps that is too intellectual an exercise of some, but for me it was love at first sight. I just wish Joe would've spent another ten minutes with Redgrave to give the audience the time to fully absorb what they've just learnt... otherwise it might indeed come off as just a silly rug-pulling exercise. (Full disclosure: I read the book about a month before I saw the film this summer.)
So, yeah: I love Atonement. It won't win, but then again, if you love someone, you don't care.
NATHANIEL: I love Atonement, too. It's a love-in. I'm totally OK with the haters on this one though. As long as they're approaching it from an honest place which surely our symposiumers (er...?) are. I was horrified to hear AO Scott comparing the film to Memoirs of a Geisha on At the Movies but then again, his audience was Richard Roeper so maybe he wasn't worried about being challenged for such a casually dismissive and wholly inappropriate case of the automatic Oscar-Bait-Hait. Just because something is pretty and springs from a novel does not mean it's the same qualitatively as another thing that is pretty and springs from a novel. In fact I can't think of a worse or lazier comparison. Atonement has a reason for its overt theatricality, ideas underline all of its steps (or its missteps if you will). It's about something beyond how beautiful it looks, you know?
But again. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and sometimes love is blind. I'll be the first to admit that it's not perfect. But I think a good deal of the backlash is a case of lazy sexism. It's the girly movie in a sea of brawn. (Juno excluded ---though Juno doesn't really know what kind of girl she is, therefore escaping overt girliness and the mandatory backlash which always follows the same)
KIM: Dennis, clearly I agree with your take (down) on Juno and thanks for understanding my respect for Christina in Black Snake Moan (naughty girls need love too, particularly ones who appreciate Fat Possum-inspired blues music). And Boyd, I hear ya on the misogyny angle -- I’m always getting accused of this too -- which is ludicrous. I love women. Especially when they’re chained to radiators clad in white panties and rebel flag tee-shirts. (Kidding…well, not really…and I would expand on that later if I had the room).
However, in Juno’s defense (oh god… I’m defending Juno…but only as a quick-witted youth), some teenagers are pretty damn informed and cleverly inventive. And thanks to the internet, they might actually know a thing or two about Soupy Sales, at least enough to find the name an amusing alliteration (When I was a young one, I always delighted in Moms Mabley’s name – how it rolled off the tongue -- still do -- which sounds kinda dirty considering her routines). But Moms aside, I’m all for a genuinely interesting, unique girl out-quipping all the squares and frankly, don’t care if she’s likable or irresponsible or not. Any well written, full-bodied, out of the ordinary girl on screen is worth watching. But as I practically screamed earlier, Juno isn’t this girl. And she as hell ain’t no Holden Caulfield. I hope I never hear that comparison ever again.
And Nick, maybe I read you wrong -- but did you pull out the Hillary card? For the record, I don’t fault Hilary for not being likable. I WANT Hillary to be a bitch, I want her to face those suits at Pepsi Cola and holler “Don’t FUCK with me fellas!” I don’t want some pandering, fake, forcibly “likable” lady who thinks laughing (constantly, and creepily, I might add) humanizes her. In this way, she does recall Juno by trying waaay too hard. Trying to be all things to all people -- Smart, forceful, funny, family values oriented, and one of the guys (you know, really cool for… a girl. Ugh!). Hillary’s a powerful woman, man, animal, or whatever Jungian anima/animus you'd like to apply. And she’s infinitely more fascinating than Juno – and probably a hell of a lot funnier, especially with a few martinis’ under her belt. I would love to be a fly on the wall every time she has to listen to McCain drone on and on…you know she’s got a verbal arsenal that would make Lenny Bruce blush. Alright, I’m devolving into Super Tuesday fantasyland here…
But back to Juno and its myriad problems. I’ll just get to one more, and this is a little quibble but I think a telling one regarding how poorly written such a “cool” character is: Any self respecting Dario Argento fan wouldn’t be swayed to prefer Herschel Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast over Suspiria. No fucking way. Lil’ Juno really disappointed me there.
NICK: Wait, Nathaniel, do you think there is no Juno backlash? Or is that more of a front-lash, since critical opinion has basically split along the same lines and issues since the movie played Toronto? And Tim, whaddya think?
To Boyd, about Atonement: I love the movie that Atonement's fans describe, and I see traces of it up there (along with plenty else to admire), but to me, Unreliability is there as an undigested idea where a character, Briony, is supposed to be. A beef that, obviously, starts with my take on McEwan. What you're saying about Redgrave is true, for me, about all the Brionies: we don't get enough of them, and we specifically leap past their most interesting stages (the between Saoirse-and-Romola Briony seems intensely interesting, in many ways the heart of the material). Unreliable narrators interest me because of what they betray in their specific biases and emphases and concealments, but I don't "see" Briony well enough to gauge any of this, in more than the broadest ways.
In an ironic switcheroo, that scene where Robbie is typing his letter and the film cross-cuts to those lovely, glancing, handheld shots of Cecilia making up her face and gazing in her mirror -- such that we aren't sure if Robbie *imagines* this casual, oblique, and beautiful Cecilia that we never see in quite this way anywhere else, or if she really "is" this way when she's alone -- is, for me, a more interesting and seductive moment of unreliable narrating than any of Briony's stuff. Because I know Robbie, and Cecilia, and I can sift this version through other versions, and I have a sense of what's at stake IF Robbie is fantasizing OR if the film is just showing Cecilia "objectively" in those moments. By contrast to which, there's so little "outside" of Briony's imagination, and so little that feels eccentric or personal within it -- beyond what Wright means, what could *Briony* possibly mean by that tracking shot? -- that her perspective is kind of a false lead. There in conception, but all but neutralized in execution.
Nathaniel, are you ready to kill us yet for taking so long to get to Linney, Ryan, Ruby Dee ..... ?
I'm not sure if the fact that I wasn't in the least surprised that he didn't get a Best Director nomination means I've started having my own private little Atonement backlash. Still, this year is odd with Atonement being the only film that "directed itself" but with only two of the Best Picture nominees also scoring Best Editing nominations. Makes you wonder how close a call those number four and five slots for Best Picture and Best Director really were.
And Kim: my own private pet peeve with regards to Juno's screenplay is the Orange Tic Tac gag. Paulie is always munching away on the buggers but as soon as he has enough Tic Tacs to last a lifetime falling out of his family's mailbox -- what if his dad had checked the mail on his way out to work? -- there is not a single moment in the film he's ever seen with even one Tic Tac (at least to my recollection). In simple language: gag worked, quirk can be disposed of. That is a lack of respect for your characters from where I'm standing. I'm not sure if there is Juno lash either back, front or sideways, but I do understand that journalists love to stir up the age-old Academy-is-out-of-touch-with-the-audience debate, and with Juno being the biggest moneymaker of the five and being a crowdpleaser, that card is easily played. Yawn!
And Nathaniel: bring on the ladies, indeed!
next page for DAY 3
the ladies (votes are split)
and a party challenge:
channel Ruby Dee and Hal Holbrook
