Tag: Best Picture Oscar Nominee

Women in Sports Week: A Review of ‘The Fighter’

Movie poster for The Fighter

This guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on February 2, 2011.

The adage of “Behind every good man is a great woman” is worn out, particularly in the realm of boxing movies. You can reduce the entirety of Rocky to the battered Stallone’s anguished cry of “Adrian!” as he wraps up a brutal fight. We’re meant to believe that what kept him alive was passion, love, a desire to see life through to the closing bell. It’s a hackneyed way of suggesting that though Rocky pounds with his fists, he really leads with his heart. This is the kind of boxing movie that writes itself, and one that doesn’t really need to be seen more than once. Luckily for everyone, David O. Russell’s The Fighter is not that kind of movie. Instead of being a movie about masculine physicality and power, we get a subversive movie about the women that wage real battles outside the ring, the kind of battles aren’t cleanly won.

The sisters of The Fighter

The same idea is suggested in David O. Russell’s The Fighter, which tells the true story of boxer Mickey Ward’s comeback from next-to-nothing welterweight to one of the most admired fighters in the ring. Micky, as portrayed by that yummy hunk of Irish soda bread Mark Wahlberg, is a softie who finds himself losing fight after fight under the coaching of his half brother Dicky Eklund, a former boxer and current crack-addict (played by a wiry, skittish Christian Bale) and his domineering dye-job of a mother, Alice (the always wonderful Melissa Leo). Behind Dicky and Alice looms Micky’s seven sisters (the most foul-mouthed Greek chorus you could ever come upon), and beyond them the town of Lowell, a neighborhood that treats Dicky like the prizefighter he believes he once was. What defines Micky as a fighter is not so much his hesitation to throw a punch as his willingness to suffer them. In a fight shown early in the film, Micky is beaten so hard his cheek is punched clear through—a beating he takes because his brother and mother placed him against a much larger opponent, and one he takes because unless he fights, no one gets paid. Micky is punished as a boxer and as a son because he is obligated to his family—to his mother, a manager without any managerial tendencies; his brother, bossy in the ring but willing to jump through windows to escape being caught on the crack pipe. (Both sons seem more terrified of disappointing their mother than they do of getting arrested or beaten down.)

Alice the Mom (played by Melissa Leo) in The Fighter

And they’re right to fear her: with her steely nerve, Alice is as brazen a coach, Mama Rose in the boxing ring, Joey LaMotta in a push-up bra. When Micky goes absent from her immediate purvey, she shows up on his porch with the sisters in tow, posing questions that put him right back in the place of the apologetic son. “What’re you doing, Mickster?” she asks, her eyes all hard with disdain and disappointment. “Who’s gonna look after you?” Alice knows that mother love—and filial obligation—is one of the most powerful weapons she has. “I have done everything, everything I could for you,” she mutters. Her life is bound up in her children, and her coaching mantra is entirely one of maternity. When she catches Dicky sneaking out of a crackhouse, she shakes her head, on the verge of tears, and he has to sing to her like a little boy to pull her back to sanity.

Micky (Mark Wahlberg) and Charlene (Amy Adams)

It’s not easy being the son of such a demanding mother, and while Dicky gets to joke his way back into favor, all Micky can do is fight—fight and lose, but fight nonetheless. So it makes sense, given his messed-up family history, that Micky first starts to move out of the nest after falling for Charlene, a local bartender and the first person to call “bullshit” on his family-as-manager situation. (As portrayed by an utterly unglamorous Amy Adams, Charlene is one of the few college-educated characters in the film—due to an athletic scholarship for high-jump.) Charlene’s power in this movie is not as a love interest, but as someone who doesn’t treat Micky like a son or like a brother. She tells him he has to seize control of his career, toss Alice and Dicky off his team, and get serious with a real coach. We think she’s imagining him as a full-grown, self-sufficient man, but she also can’t help but place herself as an equal contender for the managerial job. She gives him a reason to go looking for new management, but she also seats herself decisively by the side of the ring. This is not a woman content to show up after the fight is finished—she is very much an active participant. “You got your confidence and your focus from O’Keefe, and from Sal, and from your father, and from me,” she declares, and there’s not an ounce of hesitation in what she says. It’s thrilling to watch the formerly meek mouse known as Amy Adams get to play someone so fierce.

Dicky (Christian Bale), Alice, and Micky in the ring

It’s when the instincts of the protective mother and the defensive girlfriend go up against each other that all hell breaks loose. Alice decides to storm over to Micky’s house with her daughters in tow, ringing the bell and banging on the door just as Micky and Charlene are doing the nasty. The bell rings and rings, and Charlene, furious at being interrupted, throws on a t-shirt and storms downstairs. Alice pleads with Micky to leave and come back home, but Charlene accuses Alice of allowing her son to get hurt, instead of stepping in and protecting him. In the midst of a boxing movie, what we get is a treatise on how women are the only ones that really know how to fight. Alice calls Charlene a skank, an “MTV Girl” (because clearly all MTV girls are hefting pitches of lager and fending off crude bar patrons), and Charlene lands a solid punch on one of the Eklund sisters. Her fists crunch into the girl’s face, red hair flying wild and legs kicking, and we know that none of these women can be fucked with.

Dicky is manic, and Micky is panicked, but it’s the women who are the real pillars of strength. Thus Micky and Dicky are forced to mediate through their female counterparts—Alice, who can’t stand to let her son give up, or Charlene, who forces Dicky into conceding some deeply held delusions. The dual strength of these women are what define the movie, what separates The Fighter from its fellow inspirational tales of athletic triumph, and what catapults it into a movie about athletic effort, and the force of will. And in the movie’s final joyous fight, we still get a triumphant romantic kiss…and it feels anything but hackneyed.


Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.

Fun with Stats: Best Actor/Actress Nominations vs. Best Picture Nominations

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Last year’s Best Actress and Best Actor Oscar winners, Meryl Streep and Jean Dujardin. The Iron Lady was not nominated for Best Picture. The Artist was nominated for and won Best Picture.
It’s February, which means it is the Dog Days of Oscar Season. So for this week’s post I’ve done what any obsessive fan would do: create a massive database to conduct some simplistic statistical analysis to which I will subsequently ascribe excessive importance and profundity!
Specifically, I decided to look at the Academy Awards’ 843 nominated performances for Best Actress and Best Actor over their 85-year history, and see how many of those were from films that also received a nomination for Best Picture. My hypothesis was that the movies that earn their leading ladies Best Actress nominations are less likely to be nominated for Best Picture than those films that garner Best Actor nods. I’ll speculate on some of the reasons why that might be in a bit, but first I will share the results I found:

Pie chart illustrating relationship between Best Actress nominations and Best Picture nominations
Out of the 423 performances that have been nominated for Best Actress, 153 were in films also nominated for Best Picture. This means that approximately 33.16% of Best Actress nominees were from Best Picture-nominated films.  In contrast, 229 of the 420, or 54.5% of the performances nominated for Best Actor were in Best Picture-nominated films.[1]
Pie Chart illustrating relationship between Best Actor nominations and Best Picture nominations
[1]Some minor notes on how I calculated these figures. These are incredibly minor quirks that only the hugest of geeks would care about, so push up your glasses. I counted all of the performances for which the nominees in the first year of the Academy Awards separately, even though winners Janet Gaynor and Emil Jennings were awarded for their cumulative work.  I did not include Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage in 1934, because she was not nominated even though she did come in third place through write-in votes. I separated films not nominated for Best Picture but nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the above pie charts but not in the calculation of data, because several foreign language films have received Best Picture nominations straight out (for example, this year’s Amour). You can check my work in my [Oscar Spreadsheet of DOOM, and you probably should, because my brain DID NOT want to accept the fact that The Reader was nominated for Best Picture, and that was only four years ago.
The disparity here is plainly evident but I did my statistical due diligence and ran a chi squared test, proving that the distribution of Best Picture nominations between the sub-groups of Best Actor and Best Actress deviates from what you would expect. The chi squared value here equals 28.634, with 3 degrees of freedom and a p<.0001. That's math talk for "something isn't right here." Basically, these figures offer proof of the statistical significance of Best Actor nominees more frequently appearing in Best Picture nominated films than nominees for Best Actress do.
Now let’s consider why this might be the case. Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress require more than a great performer: that performer needs a meaty role to play. What this data suggests is that the kind of movies that provide these great parts for actresses are less likely to be “Best Picture caliber” than the films that have Best Actor-worthy male roles. The films that yield Best Actress nominations are more often “small” (e.g. Frozen River, TransAmerica, You Can Count on Me) or “non serious” movies (e.g. Julie & Julia, Bridget Jones’s Diary) that aren’t as attractive to the Academy as Best Picture contenders.

2003 Best Actor  winner Sean Penn (for Best Picture-nominated Mystic River) with 2003 Best Actress winner Charlize Theron (for non-nominated Monster).

Notably, in the years where there were 5 or fewer nominees for Best Picture (1927/28–1930/31, 1944–2008), the disparity between Best Actors and Best Actresses appears even greater: 109 out of 348 (31.32%) Best Actress nominations were for Best Picture-nominated films; whereas 177 out of 347 (51.01%) Best Actor nominations were for films nominated for Best Picture. The chi squared for this data set is actually a smidge lower at 27.841, but that still indicates considerable statistical significance.
Conversely, isolating the years with an expanded list of Best Picture nominees (1931/32–1943, 2009–2012) finds no statistical significance in the disparity between Best Actor and Best Actress nods correlation with Best Picture nominees. Both Best Actor and Best Actress nominees see a significant bump in the chances of their film being nominated for Best Picture: up to 71.23% for men and to 58.6% for women. The chi squared is 2.565, df=3 and p=.4637, so these results aren’t statistically significant. Unfortunately, this data set is much smaller than the other ones I looked at, and makes the strange bedfellows of the last four years of Oscars and a set of nominees from 8 decades ago, so it may need to be viewed more skeptically.
To get a better idea of how these trends might have changed over time, I also split the data into two roughly equal blocks, everything before 1970, and everything after.  The good news is that the disparity had already started to narrow in the modern era even before the Best Picture nominations field expanded in recent years. When the data is split into these two groups, the earlier era gets a chi squared score of 20.037 (df=3, p<.0002), indicating extreme statistical significance; the newer data computes to a chi squared of 9.816 (df=3, p=.0202), which indicates statistical significance as well but less dramatically. 
But this does not mean there has been steady progress on this front over the years. These graphs show fluctuation over the years and decades for both genders of nominee, with men remaining slightly above women most years and more substantially above women in all decades: 

Charts showing disparity between Best Actor/Actress and Best Picture nominations over years and decades
To sum up: Academy Awards nominees for Best Actor have been nominated for films also nominated for Best Picture to a much greater degree than the nominees for Best Actress. In years that have a wider field of Best Picture nominees, the disparity between actors and actresses narrows to the point it is not statistically significant. The disparity has also decreased in more modern years but remains statistically significant. 
I believe, optimistically, that this is more of a problem with Oscar’s past than it’s present and future. With more (but still not enough!) women filmmakers active, we’re going to see more and more women in central roles in the Big Important Pictures that tend to get nominated for Best Picture, as we have this year with Best Actress nominee Jessica Chastain at the center of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Furthermore, the expanded list of nominees for Best Picture makes room for different kinds of films, so smaller, women-centric gems like Amour, The Kids are All Right, and Winter’s Bone are included in the Best Picture nominee club. In the future, I hope the sex of a nominated performer won’t be predictive of the Best Picture nomination of his or her film. While this is certainly only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Academy’s limitations in recognizing diversity in their nominees, I’m still glad we’re seeing progress here. 

LGBTQI Week: I Need a Hero: Gus Van Sant’s ‘Milk’

Movie poster for Milk

This guest review by Drew Patrick Shannon previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on September 21, 2011. 

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you,” yells a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn in a pivotal scene in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk (2008). Wearing a tight red and white shirt and form-fitting slacks highlighting a noticeable bulge, Penn unnervingly inhabits the body of a man who was never handsome, never pretty, but who exuded an eye-twinkling sexiness which led numbers of attractive young men into his bed. It’s a transformation that is not merely surface, not merely costume and hairstyle and what appears to be a slight prosthesis on the nose: like Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, this is a full-bodied immersion in a character. Penn, always something of a chameleon in recent years, loses all traces of his own physicality, and portrays Harvey Milk with a buoyancy, a loose-limbed lightness that I’ve never seen in him before. The process seems to have liberated him as an actor—he’s behaving with an unbridled exuberance. His co-star, James Franco, reported that after their first kissing scene, Penn called up ex-wife Madonna and said, “I’ve just kissed my first man,” to which Madonna replied, “Honey, I’m so proud of you.” So are we.
In a recent piece on the Criterion Collection edition of the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (directed by Rob Epstein, later to direct The Celluloid Closet and Paragraph 175), photographer Daniel Nicoletta calls the documentary “Harvey Milk 101.” It would be fair to call Van Sant’s Milk “Harvey Milk 102”—the two films, viewed in order, represent a progression in the course sequence, but they’re primers, neither qualifying you for an advanced degree in the subject. For that, one must turn to the late Randy Shilts’s book The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1983), which, to my mind, remains the definitive work on the man’s life and legacy. The Epstein documentary is primarily concerned with Milk’s political career; the Van Sant biopic fills in many of the biographical holes in the documentary and concentrates more on Milk’s personal life and relationships. My suggestion is that viewers watch both films—Times first, Milk second—and, if they yearn for more, to then turn to the Shilts book.
Milk begins with archival footage of police raids on gay bars in the 1950s and 60s, and is followed by Milk in 1977 reading his will into a tape recorder: he was convinced that he would soon be assassinated, a prediction that would shortly come true. Flash back to 1970, and Milk’s meeting with Scott Smith (Franco) in a New York subway, and the beginning of an on-again, off-again romance that would last the rest of Milk’s life. Dissatisfied with his grinding corporate-America job in New York, Milk moves with Smith to San Francisco in search of liberation and meaning. He opens a camera shop, becomes an exceedingly groovy bohemian, and ultimately becomes involved with gay rights and local politics, culminating in his election as a city supervisor—the first openly gay elected official in the United States. He is helped along the way by Smith and a band of friends and lovers who operate out of his camera store: Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), Jack Lira (Diego Luna), Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill), and Dick Pabich (Joseph Cross). Once elected, he finds a staunch ally in Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) and a nemesis in Supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). White, after a series of public humiliations, assassinates Milk and Moscone in City Hall (Dianne Feinstein’s famous announcement of the event appears in the film), and later pleads insanity by using the notorious “Twinkie defense.”
More than a mere summary of events, Milk seeks to illuminate some of the depths of Milk’s character, which are left mostly untouched by The Times of Harvey Milk. And Penn’s performance is a marvel. But I’m left at the end of the film still not entirely knowing what made this man tick. I’m slightly in awe of him, I’m humbled by his passion, I’m drawn to his politics, I’m certainly attracted to him and can easily see myself getting talked into bed by him without much effort, but I still feel separate from him, as though his core has not been exposed. Perhaps this is more than a biopic can do, but my sense is that this is the film’s goal, and on that count it doesn’t quite deliver. The fault is neither Penn’s nor Van Sant’s nor the script’s—my guess is that capturing someone as mercurial as Harvey Milk on film is an impossibility.
Lest this sound as though I didn’t enjoy the film, let me hasten to add that Milk brilliantly recreates a period when gay sex was fun and free and easy and the specter of AIDS was a few years in the future. The cast looks resplendent in its period costumes; it’s alarming that clothes I once wore as a child now constitute “period attire.” And, apart from Penn, the cast is uniformly superb, as we might expect from Van Sant, who, after all, delivered amazing performances from the non-acting teens in 2003’s Elephant. James Franco demonstrates the fearlessness that led him shortly thereafter to take on the role of poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, and proves why he’s one of his generation’s most interesting actors; his Scott Smith is sweet, sexy, charming, and loyal. Josh Brolin has the incredibly tough job of making Dan White a human being rather than the boogeyman of the piece. He looks uncannily like the real man, and he manages to imbue White with enough pathos that I was unable to hate him, or not entirely. Victor Garber is reliable as always as Moscone, and Diego Luna and Joseph Cross (the little boy from Northern Lights, with Diane Keaton) excel as bits of eye candy on the fringes of Milk’s world. Emile Hirsch has the gravitas to play the great Cleve Jones, whose activism continues to inspire today, and Alison Pill holds her own as the sole woman in this sea of gay men.
What struck me most about Milk at the time of its release was its celebration of the writer. The trailer proudly announced “Written by Dustin Lance Black” in huge blue letters, and the very fetching Mr. Black won a well-deserved Oscar for his efforts. His Academy Award speech, in which he pleaded for the acceptance of young gay men like himself, is already legendary, and in interviews with magazines like The Advocate, he chronicled his difficulties in getting the script written and his exhaustive research. Perhaps the best thing about his script is that it doesn’t venerate its subject: it would have been all too easy to turn Harvey Milk into a saintly angel in America, but he is instead presented by turns as charming and irritating, pleasant and cantankerous, open-minded and bull-headed. And despite the opening which announces his death, the film doesn’t belabor this inevitable trajectory: the focus of both the film and the characters is on the moment, or on a rosy future. Again, the film’s only flaw, to my mind, is that Milk still seems at arm’s length from me, and I craved a more intimate relationship with him. But perhaps this is the point.
I’m bothered by one last thing, completely apart from the film itself. In his bravura acceptance speech for Best Actor at the Oscars, Sean Penn drolly called the audience “You Commie, homo-loving sons of guns.” Perhaps, but we’re still dealing here with a film with a gay hero who dies. Is it significant that two other actors to have won Best Actor Oscars for playing gay men—William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993)—were killed off by gunfire and AIDS? As producer Jan Oxenberg remarks in Rob Epstein’s The Celluloid Closet, it remains to be seen whether or not Hollywood will embrace—and indeed, deem worthy of an Oscar—a gay character who lives.
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Drew Patrick Shannon received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati, and currently teaches 19th and 20th century British literature at the College of Mount St. Joseph. He is at work on a novel and on a non-fiction book examining the diary of Virginia Woolf. He contributed a review of the 1986 film, Working Girls, to Bitch Flicks, which appeared in a previous version on his blog, atleswoolf.

LGBTQI Week: The Kids Are All Right

Movie poster for The Kids Are All Right
This review by Staff Writer Megan Kearns previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on February 21, 2011.

I was so excited to see The Kids Are All Right.  I mean a film with not one, but two amazing female leads as well as a family headed by lesbian parents??  The feminist in me says sign me up!  While it exuded potential, I wasn’t so excited after watching the film.

The Kids Are All Right, directed and co-written by Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon, High Art) centers on Annette Bening (Nic) and Julianne Moore (Jules), a loving married lesbian couple in California who are parents to daughter Joni and son Laser.  Joni is a brilliant student about to embark on college; Laser is a confused teen experimenting with drugs and yearning for a male role model.  Laser begs Joni, as she’s 18, to contact their “father,” as both their mothers underwent artificial insemination, Mark Ruffalo (Paul) who happens to be the sperm donor for both kids.  When Joni and Laser meet Paul, they’re reticent to tell their mothers.  Yet they eventually do all meet.  While Jules and Joni are pleased to connect with him, Laser feels ambivalence towards him and Nic worries Paul’s arrival will drive a wedge between her and her family.  Complications ensue as Paul becomes ever more entwined in each of their lives.
This slow-paced, meandering film possesses some positive traits.  The performances, particularly by Bening and Ruffalo, are where the film shines.  Bening radiates as the rigid and controlling career woman who feels her world spinning out of control.   There’s a beautiful scene, one of my faves in the film, in which the background sounds of a dinner party fade to a muffled din as she sits, alone in her pain.  Bening perfectly conveys Nic’s frustrations and emotions.  Moore, whom I adore for her chameleon ability to seamlessly meld into a character (except her horrendous Boston accent on 30 Rock), while far from her best performance, does a great job as the flighty free spirit who’s never truly found her calling in life.  Josh Hutcherson who plays Laser is annoying; although teens often are so perhaps he does succeed!  Mia Wasikowska as Joni gives a solid performance as the teen yearning for freedom.  Ruffalo is fantastic as Paul, the well-intentioned yet fuck-up hipster.  He’s a pathetic character yet oozes charm in every scene, as he strives to find a meaningful connection.  But it’s Nic and Jules’ tender yet struggling relationship, that elicits the most fascination.  With its mix of bickering and affection, it feels so real.  Just as any couple has problems, so do they.  Jules feels she’s not desired anymore and Nic feels her family slipping through her grasp.
The dialogue is sharp and witty yet problematic.  For what I had hoped would be a feminist film, the script was littered with assloads of slut-shaming, whore-calling and homophobic F-word dropping.  And while these terms do get tossed around in our society, no repercussions or backlash existed in the film; as if no social commentary was being made.  Granted, not every film has to make some grandiose statement.  Yet I expected better here, particularly as it was directed and co-written by a woman.  Luckily, it does pass the Bechdel Test as Nic and Jules often talk to each other about their marriage or about their children.
Despite the great performances and (mostly) great dialogue, the film was mired with too many problems…particularly its plot.  If you’ve seen The Kids Are All Right or read about it, you probably know what I’m talking about: the affair.  One of the women enters into an affair…with Paul.  Yep, a lesbian has an affair with a man.  But not just any man…her sperm donor!
As someone who doesn’t consider themselves straight (but not a lesbian either), I truly believe in the fluidity of gender and sexuality.  I don’t believe in gender binaries, so I don’t feel that a self-professed lesbian sleeping with a man means she’s either/or: either a lesbian or straight.  Nor do I think it necessarily makes her bisexual.  But why oh christ why did a man have to be involved??  As it is, according to the Women’s Media Center, men comprise more than 70% of the speaking roles in films.  And while we’re starting to see gay men and couples in films and on TV shows, it’s even rarer to see lesbians (as well as bisexual and transgender).
So it pissed me off that a lesbian couple, shown with so much tenderness and depth, had to have their lives invaded by a man.  Even the porn film Nic and Jules watch during a sex scene is of two gay men.  It’s almost as if Cholodenko is saying all women crave a penis!  Perhaps I wouldn’t be so hard on the film if there were more movies made about lesbians.  But as this is one of the few films to show a lesbian marriage, I worry that people will judge lesbian relationships based on how they’re depicted here.
Inspiration for the film came loosely from Cholodenko’s life, who came out as a lesbian when she was 16 years old. As an adult, many of her lesbian friends were having babies via sperm donors. When Cholodenko and her wife decided to have a baby, they too sought a sperm donor. Interestingly, co-writer Stuart Blumberg happened to donate sperm in college. These two circumstances coalesced, forming the foundation for the film. Cholodenko also infused the script with anecdotes from her own life, such as the “numb tongue” story of how Jules and Nic meet in the film. 
“‘That Nic and Jules are a lesbian couple is important to the movie thematically because they are raising a family in an unconventional setting and are more anxious than some parents about how having two moms will affect the mental health of their children.  But it could have been the same thing with a divorced couple,’ she says. ‘I always thought we were making a movie about a family, and the threat to the wholeness of the family. It was not about politics. If there was anything calculated, it was how do we make this movie universal — how do we make this a story about a family?'”
Critics have lauded the film for its transcendence from an LGBTQ family into a universal tale about modern families.  And that’s one of the components I applaud; that Cholodenko’s message is not about a lesbian family, but of a family, period.  Yet I can’t escape the feeling of unease, that critics glossing over the unique experiences and challenges that LGBTQ parents face feels like a slap in the face at worst and negligent at best. 
While critics and many movie-goers loved The Kids Are All Right, the film infuriated many lesbians due to the affair. And I can’t blame them, it pissed me off too. Sheila Lambert at the Examiner writes, 
“‘Lesbians love it when a married woman has an affair with another woman on film, which is perceived as moving toward authenticity, but we’re not happy seeing a woman in a same-sex marriage have an affair with a man, which to them represents a regression. And raises concerns about whether it adds fuel to the notion that sexual orientation can be changed from gay to straight. Sitting in the audience, I found myself feeling concerned about that as well…'”
Professor Joan Garry at Huffington Post was one of the lesbians angered by the film’s plot. She astutely argues, 

“‘It boils down to this: I’m upset because I believe the takeaway from this film will be that lesbians and the families they create need men to be complete.'”

Our patriarchal society continually tells women that they need a man; that their lives aren’t whole or fulfilled without one.  But they don’t.  Despite the film’s misguided plot, the crux of the film resides in the strength of Nic and Jules’ relationship and their love for their kids.  My fave scene and quote in the film is when Nic and Jules attempt to explain to their kids why families fight.  Jules says,
“‘Your mom and I are in hell right now and the bottom line is marriage is hard.  It’s really fucking hard.  Just two people slogging through the shit, year after year, getting older, changing.  It’s a fucking marathon, okay? So, sometimes, you know, you’re together for so long, that you just… You stop seeing the other person. You just see weird projections of your own junk. Instead of talking to each other, you go off the rails and act grubby and make stupid choices, which is what I did.  And I feel sick about it because I love you guys, and your mom, and that’s the truth. And sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most, and I don’t know why. You know if I read more Russian novels, then…Anyway…I just wanted to say how sorry I am for what I did.  I hope you’ll forgive me eventually…'”
Raw and real; it felt as if Annette Bening and Julianne Moore were a real couple fighting to hold onto their family.  Usually, you see a film with two lesbians in an affair for men’s titillation, rarely to convey a loving, monogamous relationship.  Nic and Jules share a flawed yet devoted marriage, evocative of relationships in real-life.  There was simply no need to bring a man into the picture.  I wish the film had retained its focus on the couple and their family.  It’s such a rarity that we see films featuring lesbian couples let alone two female leads that I had high hopes for, expecting it to be empowering.  Sadly, the undercurrent of misogynistic language and male-centrism taints Cholodenko’s potentially beautiful story.
 
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Megan Kearns is a Bitch Flicks Staff Writer. She’s a feminist vegan blogger and freelance writer living in Boston. Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site she founded in 2010 which focuses on gender equality and living cruelty-free. She writes about gender and media as a Regular Blogger at Fem2pt0, a site uniting social issues with women’s voices. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Feministing’s Community Blog, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, A Safe World for Women and Women and Hollywood. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology from UMass Amherst and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy from UMass Boston. You can follow all of  Megan’s opinionated musings on Twitter at @OpinionessWorld.

Biopic and Documentary Week: The Blind Side, Take 1

This piece on The Blind Side, by Stephanie Rogers, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 3, 2010.

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The Blind Side movie poster

No. No to the over-abundant racial stereotypes showcased throughout the film. No to the kind-hearted southern woman as the Black man’s White Savior. No to the shallow, embarrassing, surface-level portrayal of class issues. No to the constant heavy-handed references to God and prayer and sexual morality. No to falling back on the tired tropes of wives as mommies and women as over-bearing and emasculating ball-busters. No to this film’s best picture nomination. Just … no.

imdb synopsis, as composed by Anonymous:

The Blind Side depicts the story of Michael Oher, a homeless African-American youngster from a broken home, taken in by the Touhys, a well-to-do white family who help him fulfill his potential. At the same time, Oher’s presence in the Touhys’ lives leads them to some insightful self-discoveries of their own.

Living in his new environment, the teen faces a completely different set of challenges to overcome. As a football player and student, Oher works hard and, with the help of his coaches and adopted family, becomes an All-American offensive left tackle.

The real synopsis, as composed by me:

The Blind Side depicts the story of a white woman who sees a Black man walking down the street in the rain. She tells her husband to stop the car, and he obliges—oh, his wife is just so crazy sometimes!—then, out of the goodness of her white heart, she allows him to spend the night in their offensively enormous home.

Unfortunately, she can’t sleep very well—the Black man might steal some of their very important shit! But the next day, when she sees that he’s folded his blankets and sheets nicely on the couch, she realizes that, hey, maybe all Black men really aren’t thieving thugs.

Then she saves his life.

There’s a way to tell a true story, and there’s a way to completely botch the shit out of a true story. Shit-botching, in this instance, might include basing the entire film around an upper-class white woman’s struggle to essentially reform a young Black man by taking him in, buying him clothes, getting him a tutor, teaching him how to tackle, and threatening to kill a group of young Black men he used to hang out with.

Click here to read the full piece on The Blind Side.

Biopic and Documentary Week: Women and Biopics–Where Are the Best Picture Nominations?

Women in Biopics
In November 2009, I wrote a brief analysis of the films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture between 2000 and 2010, ultimately asking the question, “What do these films have in common?” The answer is, of course, men. With the exception of Crash (which qualifies as an ensemble drama in all its racist glory), the Best Picture-winning films all center around men, with women either showcased as sidekicks or merely fulfilling one of the ridiculous tropes that drives the (male) narrative forward.
We’ve talked here before about the importance of looking at and analyzing pop culture–like the Academy Awards–even though we’re all well aware at Bitch Flicks that these types of ceremonies don’t actually honor The Best in Cinema. However, paying attention to what’s happening in pop culture helps us understand what society values as important. And according to the past 40 years or so of Oscar-nominated biopics, society thinks pretty highly of White Dudes.
Here is a list of Oscar-nominated biopics about men (since 1976), accompanied by critics’ ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Asterisks denote Best Picture Winners.

*Patton (97%)

Lenny (100%)

Bound for Glory (88%)

The Elephant Man (91%)

Raging Bull (98%)

Reds (94%)

*Gandhi (88%)

*Amadeus (96%)

*The Last Emperor (91%)

Born on the Fourth of July (89%)

My Left Foot (100%)

Bugsy (88%)

JFK (84%)

In the Name of the Father (95%)

Shine (91%)

*A Beautiful Mind (78%)

The Aviator (87%)

Finding Neverland (83%)

Good Night, and Good Luck (94%)

Ray (81%)

Capote (90%)

Milk (94%)

Frost/Nixon (92%)

The Fighter (91%)

*The King’s Speech (95%)

The Social Network (96%)

127 Hours (93%)

Moneyball (94%)

———-

Here is a list of Oscar-nominated biopics about women (since 1976), accompanied by critics’ ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Asterisk denotes Best Picture Winner.

Coal Miner’s Daughter (100%)

*Out of Africa (63%)

Elizabeth (82%)

Erin Brockovich (83%)

The Queen (97%)

The Blind Side (66%)

———-

So the only biopic about a woman to win the Oscar for Best Picture is Out of Africa, which–based on Rotten Tomatoes scores–critics disliked way more than any other nominated biopics within the past 40 years. 
I don’t have much analysis to offer here because it feels quite obvious to me that 1) Hollywood doesn’t care that much about women’s stories (gasp!) and 2) the stories that Hollywood does manage to tell about women often get much less critical praise. Is that because the films about women are just … worse? Or is it that, again–as is the case with everything from parenting to politics–we hold women to a much higher standard, imposing a level of scrutiny that makes it impossible to focus on women’s successes in the same ways we showcase the achievements of men?
However …
We love our women entertainers! I remember taking a class in college in which we discussed the dynamics of visibility in the patriarchy; we love women and minorities who sing for us, make us laugh, dance for us, play sports for us–but do we want them in leadership positions? Fuck no. And if one looks at a list of biopics in general (i.e. biopics that weren’t necessarily nominated for Oscars or other major awards), it’s easy to see the disproportionate number of biopics and documentaries focusing on women in the entertainment industry. That isn’t to say, of course, that entertainers don’t influence society in significant ways, but they’re less able to directly do so than, oh, women in high government offices, for instance.
I’m reminded of an important documentary, Miss Representation, which we wrote about here, and the astute tagline, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” We’ve got two Linda Lovelace biopics on the way. Wouldn’t it be nice to get, like, a Harriet Tubman biopic?

Oscar Best Picture Nominee: Hugo

Hugo (2011)

This cross-post from Scott Mendelson originally appeared at Mendelson’s Memos.
Hugo
2011
127 minutes
rated PG
Pardon my theoretical laziness, but I’m not in the mood to do a formal review for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. And frankly, since I went in knowing almost nothing aside from the general time period and a few of the actors, I suppose I should do my readers the same courtesy. But know this: Martin Scorsese has crafted the most impressive and beautiful 3D you’ve ever seen in a live action film. Since the film somewhat revolves around the early days of cinema (it takes place in 1930s Paris), Scorsese uses 3D technology to create a dreamlike visual palette that attempts to replicate what it was like for the very first moviegoers, the ones who allegedly jumped out of the way of speeding trains and ducked when the train robber fired his pistol at the screen. There are times when this live-action feature feels like a living cartoon, and I experienced a kind of fever-dream sensation that I haven’t felt since Coraline. If ever there was a movie to justify that 3D ticket-price bump, this is it. 
As for the movie, it is a most curious sort of family film. It is certainly appropriate for children and its two main protagonists are indeed kids, but it also serves as a passionate plea to respect and preserve not just cinema, but all forms of art that enthrall and captivate audiences of all stripes. The film builds pretty slowly, with most of the first hour devoted to set-up and the friendship between its young stars (Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz). But if the first hour almost qualifies as ‘slow’, the pay off is more than worth it. Ironically, the film has more in common than you might think with The Muppets. Both films deal with nostalgia. But while The Muppets deals with how our generation clings to the entertainments of our past to deal with the disappointment of our present, Hugo presents characters who refuse to look back because it hurts too much to compare what was with what is. Both films build to (completely earned) stunningly powerful finales, and I’d argue that Hugo wins a point for actually ending on said high note instead of having a couple false endings.
That’s all you really need. Just know that Hugo is one of the best films of 2011, one of the best films Scorsese has made in the last twenty years, and easily a new high-water mark for 3D filmmaking. 
Grade: A-
Scott Mendelson is, by hobby, a freelance film critic/pundit who specializes in box office analysis. He blogs primarily at Mendelson’s Memos while syndicating at The Huffington Post and Valley Scene Magazine. He lives in Woodland Hills, CA with his wife and two young kids where he works in a field totally unrelated to his BA in Film Theory/Criticism from Wright State University.

The Descendants: Oscar Best Picture and Indie Spirit Best Feature Nominee

The Good Patriarch: The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne

This is a guest post from Stephanie Brown. 
The Descendants is a movie about patriarchy, about husbandry and fatherhood as verb and action rather than noun and abstraction, about stewardship and responsibility. It implies that being a responsible and engaged and aware man is the key to being a responsible citizen and human being. It’s an important film that is very much of the current zeitgeist, but its ease and perfection and touches of comedy (very much like the persona of George Clooney himself) may mean that its depth is missed amid the excellent casting and the light touch of director Alexander Payne. The film is based on the book of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings, who was raised in Hawaii by her mother and step-father. 
In The Descendants, Clooney’s character, Matt King, is the key decision maker for his family’s trust. Their family has lived in Hawaii for generations, part native Hawaiian and part white. They own a large undeveloped tract of land on Kauai. As the movie begins the family is in the process of selling the land to a developer and the group is poised to profit handsomely. His many cousins, also heirs, are portrayed as decent people, “good guys” who like to drink and hang out: contemporary landed gentry, enjoying their wealth and comfort in paradise. As decision maker for the fate of the fortune for a whole slew of cousins/subjects scattered around the islands and mainland, Matt is aptly named “king,” and he is affable, fair and aims to please. At the same time his wife, Elizabeth, has been in a water skiing accident and is now in a coma. Like many fathers and husbands, he is not very involved in his children’s lives and doesn’t know them very well, and is not really that knowledgeable of his wife’s life either. Soon after he retrieves his older daughter from her private boarding school (she is drunk when he finds her) to return home with him, he discovers from her that his wife has been having an affair. The movie is about the slow unfolding of this secret that has been kept from him by friends and family, and the slow strengthening of his bond with his daughters, especially his oldest daughter, Alex, played by Shailene Woodley. It’s a great performance by Woodley, who is utterly believably as an intelligent and strong but betrayed and angry teenager. She alone knows the exact nature of both her parents’ flaws but is powerless to make them change. Instead she causes problems as school and acts bratty and disagreeable. She is also shown schooling her younger sister in teenage survival skills, and while her methods and language are crude, one knows that this is likely the only practical advice the younger daughter has gotten from anyone. The movie is taken up with a road trip of sorts, actually jaunts between islands and neighborhoods therein, with Alex, the younger daughter Scottie (Amara Miller), and Alex’s friend Sid (Nick Krause) providing the comic relief. Matt and Alex search for and find the man with whom Elizabeth has had an affair and end up awkwardly befriending him and his wife (Matthew Lillard and Judy Green) as they move toward the conclusion—to finalize the sale of the land, and to see if Elizabeth will live or die. 
Recent radio ads for The Descendants are comparing it to Terms of Endearment. I’m not sure Alexander Payne’s subtly crafted movies, Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways, while critical favorites, have become all-time-favorite-movie blockbusters in the way that Terms of Endearment has. I’m betting that the strategy of this comparison is to try to push it into the blockbuster box office realm. Will it ‘play in Peoria,” though? The Descendants does have an emotional death scene, where George Clooney says what is in his heart to his comatose and dying wife, but, like Payne’s other films, scenes such as this are restrained and Clooney’s soliloquy never veers into melodrama. By this point in the film, I didn’t like the wife and I was not sorry to see her die. I did not feel that the scene’s intention was to make me cry in an emotionally cathartic way. I don’t think the comparison between films works, and I think viewers who are expecting a Terms of Endearment will be disappointed. They may, however, see the powerful film that it is and come away awakened by its point of view. Think of the difference between Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment and Jack Nicholson in Payne’s About Schmidt. Schmidt’s character’s sad, reticent and somewhat baffled personality is naked and embarrassing to his daughter, and it’s a fine and restrained performance from Nicholson, who, like Clooney, is a masterful comedic actor. Both have elastic faces and trademark voices, and Payne’s direction keeps them true and honest in these depictions that move from comedic turns to profoundly honest portrayals of wounded American men. 
The Descendants has many facets, touching on wealth and its effects on people and the history of the islands of Hawaii themselves, among other things, but to my mind, the most interesting theme in the film is the examination of fatherhood and manhood that is revealed via the relationship of Elizabeth to her father, Scott Thorson, played with frank ferocity by Robert Forster. Like a God, like Thor, Mr. Thorson has thunderous opinions and never wavers in them. We also know that he is wrong and pigheaded and the kind of person who is impossible to live with. He is certain that his daughter was a perfect wife and mother and that her accident could have been prevented if only Matt had bought her a safer boat to use rather than have her rely on her friends’ boats. Like his daughter, Mr. Thorson’s wife is shown as non compos mentis. She is in the throes of dementia and unaware of her surroundings. I do not think this is a coincidence. The only way to endure a man like this is to retreat into silence and passivity symbolized here as states of dementia and coma. His wife never speaks but she smiles. Mr. Thorson is an archetype of a Korean War-era father, all manliness, certainty and uncomplicated self-assurance. He has indulged his daughter and rejected his son—and he is not fond of his son-in-law. It is also clear that Mr. Thorson does not even know his daughter beyond superficial platitudes that he can shout about her being a good wife, mother and athlete (that she might be too much of a risk taker is ignored). He extols that she was a faithful wife when she was not. His fulsome praise has probably inflated his daughter’s ego and created a monster. Mr. Thorson is the figure of a crippled manhood that can exist only by rejecting deep feelings and hard truths about people, a style of fathering that may extol specialness, but rejects complexity and imperfection. Matt resembles him, unfortunately, in his own benign neglect of his children. Matt, whose style is more graceful and contemporary than Thorson’s, is of the generation that seeks to be seen as a “good guy” like his cousins—happy to take a profit and enjoy life, happy to live as a detached “back- up” parent (as he calls himself) who can easily just not pay much attention and not see any pain and suffering his children are feeling. They live in paradise and are quite wealthy, after all. It would never occur to the cousins or Matt to preserve the land for future generations; it is seen as inevitable that it must be sold and profit shared today. Benign neglect. 
In the end, Matt decides not to sell the land but to preserve it. It is not a popular decision with the cousins. It is, however, the right decision. Matt uses his power for the first time and he risks not being popular, affable, or liked, and he is not. That is what it means to be a father and a steward and a patriarch, however. It means thinking about the future beyond current gain and comfort. It means thinking of future generations, accepting responsibility and using it reasonably and well. It means choosing not to be part of the rather dissolute landed gentry and not encouraging your children in this direction either. As I watched the film and saw him choose to preserve the land for future generations, it occurred to me that this decision would not have been believable if the film were released ten or twenty years ago. I don’t think I myself would have agreed with the decision. I would have thought, development is inevitable so why not let these decent people profit from it? But it has been released in a very different economic and social climate, where we are questioning the realities of profit and gain run amok. What is the result of all the wealth that we acquired and lost in the last twenty years? The culture tried to live like landed gentry. We exported our jobs and we exported our pollution in order to create our crap without regulations, and we sought to live like the cousins, expecting a good deal to come our way and to continue to come our way. The Descendants got me considering these truths. If one is a patriarch, one should accept it and be a responsible one. One should father and husband as a verb. And that goes the same for matriarchs and mothers and wives. If Mr. Thorson was our father, we need to wake up and pay attention and change the traits that resemble his. We need to be stewards of our families and of the earth for our descendants. 
I was talking to friends one night and I mentioned that I had seen this movie and Lars Von Trier’s movie Melancholia during the same weekend, and that I liked both of them. Von Trier gets at the gnawing dread that I think we all feel about the world being destroyed. I felt grateful that an artist had made this film, because it forced me to think about my own hopelessness in the face of that destruction. But I added that I felt that The Descendants was just as powerful of a film and just as profound, even if the tone is lighter. In the last scene, Matt and his two daughters are shown sitting on a couch together, eating ice cream and watching TV. We can hear the movie’s narrator, Morgan Freeman, and after a while one realizes that they’re watching March of the Penguins. As my husband pointed out to me as we walked out of the theater, the male penguin is the one who cradles the egg, who protects it and keeps it safe from danger until it hatches. Like the father who has learned to father in film.
Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

Oscar Best Picture Nominee: ‘Moneyball’

Brad Pitt stars in Best Picture nominee Moneyball
This is a guest post from Robin Hitchcock.
I didn’t know until the end credits that Aaron Sorkin had a writing credit on Moneyball. This is good, because I semi-irrationally hate Aaron Sorkin, and I wouldn’t want that bias to have influenced my take on the film. I’m frankly astonished I made it through the movie without recognizing Sorkin’s handiwork given his very specific, very stilted style. I’m not sure if that is a credit to the acting, the directing, the influence of also-credited writer Steve Zallian’s earlier draft, an uncharacteristic bout of restraint on the part of Mr. Sorkin, or a combination thereof. Sure, the dialogue is sharp and clever, not so aggressively sharp and clever that you feel like you’re being stabbed in the throat with wit. The snazzy dialogue is more there to entertain the viewer, instead of demonstrate the genius of the writer, which is pretty much the opposite of how I usually feel about Sorkin’s work.
While I didn’t know about Sorkin’s contribution to the script when I watched Moneyball, I did know I’d be reviewing it for Bitch Flicks. So I watched with my feminist glasses freshly cleaned and firmly planted on my nose. Which was tricky, because this is not a movie about women. Professional baseball is about as much of a man’s world as you could ask for, plus there’s the whole “based on a true story” business to validate keeping all the major characters men.
Which is fine! There are stories, stories worth telling, that are just about men. [Likewise, there are stories worth telling that only involve women, but its hard to get Hollywood to bankroll those.] Telling a story about men in a men’s world isn’t inherently sexist. But I think it is fair to subject whatever scraps of portrayal of women we get in these male-dominated films to a slightly higher scrutiny.
Moneyball becomes pretty cringeworthy when you do that. The film has a runtime of 133 minutes, and by my rough count women “characters” are featured in slightly less than 8 of those minutes. That’s 6%. [This whole “math” thing is kind of a double-edged sword, eh, Moneyball?] In those 8 minutes we see three wives/mothers, two daughters, three markedly cheerful and helpful secretaries, and one bitchy sports reporter. Yep, that’s right, the only woman in the movie who isn’t in a family or subservient relationship to the male characters is established as pushy and mean in a scant ten lines of dialogue.
Casey, played by Kerris Dorsey
The only even remotely well-rounded female character is Billy Beane’s twelve-year-old daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), and the character is only as well-rounded as a dented egg. She’s your standard shy-yet-precocious pre-teen on the brink of womanhood, a favorite stock character of lazy male writers. [See also First Daughter Lucy in Sorkin’s The American President]. Casey feels a bit shoe-horned into the movie, to soften Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and give him some scenes where he’s not flipping tables or arranging complicated player trade deals, all the better to bait that sweet, sweet Oscar honey. The other reason for Casey’s character to exist is to provide an explanation of Beane’s decision to reject a lucrative offer from the Boston Red Sox to become the best-paid GM in the game. I have no idea if Real Life Billy Beane stayed in Oakland to be near his children (although this Sports Illustrated piece from the time suggests as much), but I am sadly reminded of Aaron Sorkin’s “but you guys remember Rooney Mara, right!?” defense against the feminist criticism of women in The Social Network. When you’re only including women in your story because they motivate the men in the story, it’s not enough to win you any points with feminists.
The other women in the film (aside from an entirely wasted Robin Wright as Beane’s ex-wife) are all presented as service-providers to men. On top of the cheerful secretaries, we also see one of the player’s wives bring out coffee for Beane and his associate when they invite themselves into her living room to recruit spurned former catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) to play first base, and quickly scoop up her and Scott’s young daughter when she toddles her way through this important meeting between the menfolk. I was so distracted by the antiquated gender dynamic playing out in that scene I had to watch it a second time to pay attention to the plot advancement.
Antiquated gender dynamics mar Moneyball
A later scene leads me to believe that the strange emphasis on women as helpmates was intentional, hopefully trying to say something about the old-fashioned hyper-masculine world of baseball. When Beane meets with Boston Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard), his cheerful and helpful secretary cheerfully and helpfully serves coffee, prompting this exchange.
Henry: You know, it’s her birthday, and I need to get her a present, but she’s usually the one that does that for me. So, do you have any ideas?
 
Beane: Uh, scarf.
 
Henry: You mean like wool?
 
Beane: No, I meant, uh, what women wear with, uh… decorative.
 
Henry: Where would I get something like that?
After which Beane cuts him off with something like, “I have no time for such frivolous lady issues! Let’s talk about serious matters of vital importance, like BASEBALL!” I believe this exchange is in the movie to highlight the strangeness of the general absence of women in this universe and subservient roles the few present women are in. At least, I hope that is what is going on, because otherwise I get the sinking suspicion that Sorkin wrote all these helper women in the movie as a deliberate fuck you to those who criticized the portrayal of women in The Social Network. Or worse yet, he thought by making all these helper women so markedly cheerful and polite, and by not having anyone snort coke off their bodies, that he was course-correcting. But that’s all wild speculation, given I don’t know the content of Sorkin’s contributions to the script.
Regardless, its inarguable that Moneyball does no favors for women in cinema. Aside from that, it’s a perfectly fine movie, not something I’d generally consider in the echelon of Best Picture nominees, but well worth watching nonetheless. All the same, I wish there were more movies with virtually all-female casts to counterbalance all the Moneyballs I’ve seen over my lifetime.
Robin Hitchcock has previously reviewed The Descent and Michael Clayton for Bitch Flicks. You can read her movie reviews at her blog HitchDied and other feminist pop culture commentary at her blog The Double R Diner.

Oscar Best Picture Nominee: An Oscar for Oskar? ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,’ the Surprise Nominee

Thomas (Tom Hanks) and Oskar (Thomas Horn)
This is a guest post from Jennifer Kiefer.
Potential viewer beware: the trailer for this film is awful. Terrible. Even worse than Alexander’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. But that’s because this film deals with, as young Oskar dubs it, “the worst day.” When I first saw the trailer, I hated it. I thought it would be an overblown, sentimentalization of 9/11. But it was way above that. (For the record, I hated the trailer, loved the book and film.) Even so, it would be immensely difficult for anyone to make a two-minute-or-less trailer of any film including the events of 9/11, because to not disclose that the event is involved would be to hoodwink and outrage viewers when they discovered this upon viewing the film, but to include it in such a short duration automatically leaves the impression of emotional warfare. Even the tagline is horrible, perhaps a desperate attempt to grab the potential viewer by the collar and shout, “Don’t you see! This film is not about September 11! It’s about every day after!”
A better tagline: “A boy’s search for his father.” Even: “Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.”
Of course, any piece of art (perhaps excluding documentaries) more than mentioning 9/11 will endure endless criticism, regardless of the usage or the piece’s merit, and this film is no exception. As opposed to a film like Remember Me, which uses the event really as a surprise ending—sorry if I spoiled that incredible film for you—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is, as the tagline pleads with you to believe, not necessarily a story about the events of the worst day. Yes, Oskar’s dad dies in the World Trade Centers. Yes, they show the buildings, but ninety percent of that is actual footage shown on television screens, and never once do they show a plane tearing into the building. In fact, the most exploitative thing about the movie’s portrayal is hazy shots of a man falling from the building, and only then because Oskar wonders whether that could have been his own father. “The other kids probably see their dads, too,” he says.
Thomas Horn as Oskar
EL&IC is about Oskar’s journey to deal with his father’s death, to analyze the artifacts, to constantly question why or how someone could or would kill thousands of people he did not even know, but also about Oskar’s connection to the people of New York City as he searches for the missing lock which fits the key Oskar found in his father’s closet a year later. For a young boy who possibly has Asberger’s (“The tests were undetermined,” Oskar says), his father was his best friend. They look in the New York Times for mistakes together, they practice karate techniques and have oxymoron wars in the living room. His father created “Reconnaissance Missions,” which forced Oskar to talk to other people, which he says is hard for him to do. In the tragedy of his father’s death, he creates his own reconnaissance mission, even larger than anything his father could have imagined, proving that even in tragedy there is community.
Perhaps Oskar’s precociousness (some argue over-precociousness) and grieving sentimentalized his father’s death—the film can be very emotional in this young man’s personal tragedy (played beautifully by Thomas Horn, but more on that later), but it is also humorous and honest. But why shouldn’t a smart, questioning nine-year-old boy be sentimental, even overly so, about his father’s premature, sudden death? Any death of a parent at that age would be devastating, even a year or two afterwards. The film is most moving and honest in the scenes where Oskar remembers or simply misses his father, resulting in fear, explosive anger, and solitude. 
But still, some people have called this the “worst movie ever.” First, that’s not possible because films like Absence of Malice and Open Water exist. Second, I would be surprised if these opinions were based on more evidence than “the film is about 9/11” (or “the kid’s demeanor annoyed me.”). It is such a recent wound for Americans that even a sensitive, well-made film such as EL&IC will invoke backlash and extreme criticism. It is surely a gutsy and risky topic.
Some have argued that the film would not be that changed had Oskar’s father died in another way, say an automobile accident. Sure, the story would still be honest and heart-wrenching and beautiful, but it wouldn’t be as meaningful. Here’s where I go English Major on you.
Oskar is constantly trying to make sense of this tragedy and his father’s death. One of the most moving and emotional scenes pits Oskar against his still-living mother, crashing the kitchen, yelling for her to make sense of it. But she cannot, and he tells her, “I wish it had been you.”
Oskar and his mother, Linda (Sandra Bullock)
The tragedy of 9/11 holds much more meaning and complexity than an accident. What would it have shown about the human condition if his father died in a crash? Shit happens? Humans are really bad drivers? Bad luck? Oskar is conflicted, because the events of the worst day seem to prove that people are horrifying and everything is an unsafe target, yet in his search for the lock, his only clue being an envelope labeled “Black,” he finds that people can also be generous and surprising. Even though a very, extremely tragic event, 9/11 did unite the residents of NYC. Oskar similarly connects with this city a year later in his search, emphasizing once again that tragedy breeds community. Everyone Oskar meets, as he says, “has all lost someone,” sometimes sharing Oskar’s tragedy and sometimes not.
Oskar’s father wasn’t a regular worker in the World Trade Center—he was a jeweler who had a meeting at a popular coffee shop there on a higher floor for the view. Rather than being “emotional warfare,” (a term I have tossed in before) this serves to prove how the worst day affected everyone and anyone.
Not as much discussed in the film, the Renter, an unspeaking man living with Oskar’s grandmother, is a survivor of the Dresden bombings. The juxtaposition of both atrocious events confirms the inevitability of war and the violence of human nature, both events being essentially “pointless” in that both incidents killed innocent civilians for political purposes. What was that about a car accident being the same?
And simply plot-wise, other types of death would have made the artifact of the answering machine, with messages from his father on the worst day trying to reach someone at home, which Oskar replaces and hides, “Just like nothing ever happened,” more difficult, if not impossible, for Oskar to have.
This film is so gorged with symbolism (the food of English majors) that even each of Oskar’s little facts serves a deeper meaning—a story of a researcher who played recordings of dead elephants’ calls to relative elephants who recognized the calls, the eight minutes of light that would remain on Earth even if the sun went out, ad nauseum. I didn’t even attempt to process the symbolism of the name Black in the midst of everything else.
The Renter (Max von Sydow) and Oskar
I promised you early on that this film incorporates humor. Jonathan Safran Foer is a pro at quirk, wherein some of the humor lies, though genuine. In his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, the main character is named Jonathan Safran Foer. The first and many chapters of the book are written in a broken translation of English by Alex, both funny and poignant. The driver believes he is blind. The novel EL&IC includes photographs, blank pages, pages with one sentence, pages blacked out from overwriting, and a flipbook in the back. The character of the Renter is typical of Foer’s signature quirk (can you have a signature on your second novel?)—he is a survivor of tragedy who has lost his words and cannot speak. He writes everything down in a daybook and even has “yes” and “no” tattooed on his palms. 
Max von Sydow, as the Renter, has great comedic timing in his nonspeaking role. The people Oskar meets, his interactions with his father, the brief lies Oskar counts (“Why aren’t you in school?” “They said I know too much already.”) all produce genuine laughter, even after moments of potential, authentic tears. (Was it Vonnegut who said that laughter is a response to overwhelming tragedy in an essay about his own experiences in Dresden?)
Thomas Horn, in his first-ever role, carries the film with wonderful wit and beautiful pathos. Subtleties make his performance—his expressions during unspoken moments, his over-enunciation even when speed-talking (a quality of his possible Asberger’s?), the fear in his eyes as he rides the subway (an easy target in his eyes). The panic in his demeanor as he decides whether or not to cross a bridge. Sticking his key absently into stray locks at the locksmith shop. His performance is so good I was honestly surprised that this was his first role—Oskar is a complex, emotional, challenging character, and would be a difficult feat for any actor. Horn is honest and pretty amazing throughout, particularly convincing in the most affecting, most difficult scenes—pinching himself to cause bruises because he feels guilty, screaming because he has lost his father and cannot understand why, telling his mother that he wishes she had been the one to die. Though he was not nominated for Best Actor (why don’t they have a Breakthrough or Best Young Actor award?), his performance surely landed the film its nomination for Best Picture, which could not have been fueled solely by Max von Sydow.
Oskar and The Renter
So, will it win the Oscar? Probably not, though for my money it deserves it, and the Academy did previously award the also-controversial Crash. It would be a tremendously exciting surprise, but don’t bet your house on it. Max von Sydow has a chance, perhaps based on his age—Alan Arkin said after his win for Little Miss Sunshine that he thought it was because he was getting older (though both are great performances).
If none of this has convinced you, if for no other reason, you should rest assured that this is a beautiful, premium film because my father, who is notorious for falling asleep in the darkness of the theater, stayed awake for the entire film during at 9:55 PM showing.
Jennifer Kiefer holds a BA in Creative Writing from Western Kentucky University. She currently resides in Louisville, Kentucky where she is using her former movie theater employee discount and waiting to hear back from graduate programs.

Oscar and Indie Spirit Best Picture Nominee: The Artist: "Peppy Miller, Wonder Woman"

This is a guest review by Candice Frederick.
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You know what they say—behind every man is a great woman.
And that’s made evident in the 1920s nostalgia-soaked silent film, The Artist. Although the movie beautifully captures the difficult fall of silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) from Hollywoodland heavyweight to Hollywoodland has-been, the movie’s heart lies with his heroine, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo).
We first meet Peppy as a face in the crowd, scrambling to catch a glimpse of the one, the only George Valentin on the red carpet. Amid the glitz and glamour of the paparazzi swarming Hollywoodland’s biggest star, we see a “regular” girl. In fact, it’s Peppy’s ambiguity that sets her apart from said crowd. While all the other female fans are elbowing each other to get a chance to see their idol strike a pose on the red carpet, Peppy works her way to the front of the pack and just watches George, studying him. It’s like she sees the man behind the star, a man hidden from everyone else. A man she knocks off his feet.
That’s the thing about Peppy—it’s her authenticity that charms audiences. Unlike George’s man-made celebrity, which seduces his loveliest fans, Peppy’s unflinching compassion for those around her downright enchants the audience.
In that way, Peppy becomes George’s guardian angel. When his career begins to slide downhill, and his once marqueed name can’t even fill up a full row of seats at a theater, Peppy is the only one by his side, his number one fan when he has no one left. She picks him up when he hits rock bottom, when his pride stunts his career from forging ahead. As their careers see-saw one another, it is Peppy who remains the emotional compass throughout the entire film, the one who gets what George refuses to get.
This natural clairvoyance propels her own film ambitions. Peppy’s career skyrockets into superstardom, but, with the exception of one significant scene where she tries to play up her career by essentially downplaying those who came before her (like George), she remains unaffected by the Hollywood allure. It’s fascinating to watch a charismatic leading lady remain grounded even after her career takes off.

And it’s even more interesting to see her come to the rescue of her masculine counterpart, even if he did become a washed up star by the time of his rescuing. That’s something that would have never happened during the era the film is set in. In fact, Peppy would have more than likely have been drawn as a mere shallow competitor to George’s steadfast—however delusional—career. Since she was not written that way, it gives this wistful film the modern boost it needs to stand out.
But The Artist doesn’t just paint Peppy as George Valentin’s superhero. Peppy is also a trailblazing woman on her own. Much like many George before her, she knows how to play to a crowd and to the hungry paparazzi. She became such a power player in Hollywood that she was able to negotiate George’s reacceptance into Tinseltown after threatening to drop out of a project herself. That’s major move for a film actress, a bold one her part (that ended up paying off).
Peppy is that person you want in your corner—a bubbly (but not annoyingly so), impossibly adorable, smart, caring person with a good head on her shoulders. She never gets involved in any overblown scandal in order to get her name up in lights. She doesn’t sleep her way to the top of the Hollywood food chain. She never had to. All she was interested in was being a good friend, becoming an actor like her idol George, and spreading happiness to everyone along her path.
This all plays to the deep complexities of her character, which go far beyond uplifting the lead male character. Peppy is a strong character by herself, without even relating to George. They are both equally rounded characters who supply the substance in a movie that’s heightened by their stories and the actors who play them. Their relationship helps stack every layer of this film, therefore elevating it past its seemingly cursory exterior.
While we never really learn much information about Peppy’s background (she remains mostly anonymous on that front throughout the entire film), somehow we still feel as though she gives us a window to her soul. You relate to her, you empathize with her, and you cheer for her each time she steps in front of the camera. In short, Peppy has that likability factor that fans crave. How can they not? She practically waltzes from scene to scene and, before we know it, we’re smitten by her magic.
Although this season’s awards race may have you under the impression that Peppy is indeed a supporting character, Bejo’s performance of her will have you believing differently. Bejo brings out all the key qualities of Peppy in a performance that’s not emotionally powerful, but emotionally resounding nonetheless.
Even in silence, you hear the tapping of her shoes, the pep in her step, and her infectious laugh. How can a film with no words emit such a roaring character? Put Bejo front and center and she becomes one with the music. Every sympathetic look, impossibly happy reaction and playful gesture becomes a full fledged sympathy with Bejo. She doesn’t need any words, because the audience just knows. And, you know what, she and us are right here.
Too often people equate a good performance to one that’s grandiose, a powerhouse portrayal. Though some of those performances are in fact riveting, Bejo’s performance isn’t less so. She sparkles as Peppy, bringing out her magnetism as the gargantuan starlet she becomes, while also humanizing her and keeping her grounded. In other words, you take Peppy out of the City of Angels and she’d still be the same Peppy, girl wonder. Superhero to George Valentin, fallen star.

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Candice Frederick is an NABJ award-winning print journalist, film critic, and blogger for Reel Talk. She is also the co-host of Blog Talk Radio’s “Cinema in Noir.”


Oscar Best Picture Nominee: The Tree of Life


This is a guest review by Lesley Jenike.

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I saw Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life in a tiny, packed theatre in my hometown on my birthday last year. Of course I’d read around about the film before going to see it, and I fully anticipated its more “controversial” elements, but I wasn’t really prepared for the experience itself—the frankly theatrical experience of sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers who simultaneously felt (I imagine) a strange mixture of joy, embarrassment, frustration, and awe. People walked out. I heard someone whisper to his friend, “Oh my God.” Someone else laughed quietly to herself when the first dinosaur ambled onto the screen. But those of us who stayed left the theatre 139 minutes later dazed and puzzled, but weirdly connected to one another; I don’t doubt we all saw some of ourselves in the film. I even furtively searched faces for any discernable response, as if to ask in a Malick-like subconscious whisper, “What was that?” 
Yes, what is The Tree of Life? Well, it’s a movie, a great movie that fully embraces its own nostalgia. It’s a movie that presents its narrative as only movies can: through exquisite mis-én-scene and shrewd editing. You see, the Tree of Life doesn’t try to wow us with jarring, frenzied cuts, nor does it present shocking images meant to scandalize and titillate. On the contrary, many of the images you’ll find in the Tree of Life are so familiar they become new again, thanks to context and Malick’s wholly realized filmic world. The real genius of Tree of Life is its complete and utter mastery over its own medium—and that may very well be the reason for all the hoopla. By cinematically juxtaposing two modes of discourse that rarely meet except in conflict—the scientific and the spiritual—Malick has created for posterity a years-in-the-making meditation on the very nature of existence. Whoa. 

We begin with a quote from the Book of Job, a breathy voiceover, and, at the darkened screen’s center, a single sliver of light. And then—oh and then—image after image washes over us, sensual and earthy, specific yet universal, while a female voice—a voice we connect with a redheaded child who soon morphs into a bereaved mother grieving a son lost to the war in Vietnam—talks to us about the difference between “nature” and “grace,” a philosophical dichotomy that operates as the film’s central conflict. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) seems to represent “nature” in the Darwinian sense. His drive to survive and succeed causes him to behave (often without intention) cruelly toward his family. Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), on the other hand, represents “grace,” or a sense of humility and kindness derived from a spirituality that, in Malick’s world, seems to operate beyond organized religion. 
“Grace” is represented in the film as a sense of interconnectedness and empathy. In other words, Mrs. O’Brien is more of a quality than a character, a sort of angel whose sensitivity as a woman and mother seems almost otherworldly. While I’m perfectly prepared to call out Malick for inventing an unrealistic, two-dimensional, adolescent’s dream of a mother in Mrs. O’Brien, I must stress how specific the film’s point of view is and how completely invested we are as viewers in the oldest son’s (Jack, played as boy by Hunter McCracken and as an adult by Sean Penn) subjective perspective. We can feel the grass on our own hands when he touches it and we get a shiver of pleasure when he’s tucked safely in bed at night and his mother switches off the bedside lamp. If Mrs. O’Brien is a romantic ideal, it’s because Jack sees her that way. She even floats in the air at one point, her skirt billowing in the wind like the ever-present, rustling curtains we see in shot after shot.


Mr. O’Brien, on the other hand, looms as the big Other, creating law and doling out punishment; even his predilection for classical music suggests the very soundtrack of the O’Brien boys’ collective childhood is both beautiful and aggressive, tender and menacing. However, once Jack is aware of his father’s humanity and we begin to see Mr. O’Brien’s suffering through Jack’s eyes, Mr. O’Brien (beautifully played by Pitt) develops as a character despite few conventional, dialogue-heavy scenes. His past actions, like the harsh play-boxing match with his two older sons, is re-contextualized to suggest his cruelty doesn’t come from malice, but rather from his own pain and disappointment.


So what does this mean—a sorrowful, transcendent Madonna for a mother and a real human being for a father? Malick has given us a boy’s life and boys, in Malick’s world, must go the way of “nature.” Their propensity for violence and cruelty is discovered in their play, mirrored by the natural world, and ultimately enacted in war and in the workplace. Once their fall from “grace” is complete, they look back at their innocence with nostalgia, regret, and pain, idealizing their mothers and recognizing in themselves the foibles of their fathers. I saw much of my own childhood in The Tree of Life, but ultimately it’s a boy’s world, and Malick suggests a boy can never fully know the female “other.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. All of the above hinges on the adult Jack O’Brien’s (Sean Penn) portions of the film in which he wanders through some random city’s steel and glass and contemplates his brother’s senseless death, as if trying—even in Earth’s chaotic, violent beginnings–to understand the nature of his own life and the lives of his family members. Where did he go wrong? Can he pinpoint the moment he betrayed his brother’s trust or turned his back on his mother’s “grace?” In Jack’s mental wanderings, we sometimes alight on some semi-relevant information (he’s breaking-up with his significant other; he’s done well for himself career-wise), but mainly we follow him through his own personal symbology (a Gulf Coast beach for a kind of Heaven; an underwater door meaning birth). These sequences are stunningly beautiful and terribly confusing at turns, but the truly ambitious cinematic move on Malick’s part is the lengthy sequence of cosmic configurations, interstellar explosions, and hot lava that finally create life. Life then becomes two dinosaurs in a riverbed that in their Darwinian struggle to survive, later mirror Jack and his younger brother who roughhouse down by what we take to be the very same river. In Malick’s contemporary worldview, a nebulous sense of spirituality rubs elbows with science’s rational explanation for creation, and this convergence is honest, weird, and often hard to reconcile. 
I could spend pages on the folly of Malick’s choices here, but he’s embraced the totality of his medium so completely, he reintroduces us to what film is capable of in all its overwhelming, destructive glory.
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Lesley Jenike received her PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. She currently teaches poetry writing, screenwriting, and literature classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Her book of poems is Ghost of Fashion (CustomWords, 2009).