Post-9/11

We (the royal "we" at this stage, but maybe some of you will be inspired to follow along) have now watched all post-9/11 Best Picture winners (BPWs). Conclusions? Well, A Beautiful Mind probably shouldn’t count, because it was surely in the late stages of post-production when the attacks happened. Chicago was probably also well underway, but it’s perhaps telling that 2002 brings us a film that takes a play that is essentially about the ugliness of humanity, and turns it into a glitzy feelgood movie. Looking at the winners and nominees from the early years of this decade, it seems inconceivable that something as critical of American society as American Beauty had won BP just a few years earlier. I mean, I love The Lord of the Rings movies, but the years between 9/11 and the Iraq War did give us a rather bloody trilogy about going to war against evil and people of Middle Eastern appearance (the evil men from elsewhere who ride elephants).

But then, as the decade and the war wore on, we can see a change from films almost exclusively set in the distant-enough past (Gosford Park, Moulin Rouge, Chicago, The Hours, The Pianist, Master and Commander, Seabiscuit, Finding Neverland, Ray…LotR being an extreme of this, not an exception), to films that are very, very close to home. Million Dollar Baby, The Departed, and NCfOM are all set in cruel, gritty, unforgiving American worlds. And another kind of film makes a dramatic comeback: Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, Babel, The Queen, and There Will Be Blood are all unapologetically political. Not all of these are necessarily examples of the left-leaning media finally being angry enough to make some movies. I can’t help feeling, for example, that if someone had just given Stephen Frears some pictures of Her Majesty, a box of tissues, and some alone time, we might have all been spared the horror of The Queen. But that’s beside the point. Everyone wonders why Crash won. Well I didn’t see that film until a few years later, but I remember the sheer joy I felt when I saw Good Night and Good Luck in 2005 (there’s a comma in the title, but if I put it in it would be confusing). The relief of feeling I wasn’t alone in a screeching, desolate, Republican-ruled world of fundamentalists of every religion. And the thrill of righteous anger, or just righteousness. Crash is secretly a feel-good movie – a very specific kind, the feel-good-about-feeling-bad movie. Swept up and carried by the liberal frustration and pessimism of the times, being aware of racial tensions has never felt so good.

So of course it seems a bit silly now, and I don't believe Crash would receive such high praise now, but whether or not it succeeded I think the film is attempting to do more than just make liberals feel good. Usually these sort of works succumb to the Crucible Effect. Glad you asked: it's basically what I was describing before - the pleasure of being the converted who is preached to. It's what makes high school drama departments feel the need to put on The Crucible so their audiences can bask in the righteousness and say "You're right! McCarthyism is bad!" which is obviously a very topical and important message to be giving audiences of 2009. Actually, I was reading something recently that suggested that by the time The Crucible was performed, McCarthy's popularity was in decline anyway, so it's always been preaching to the converted. But anyway, Crash doesn't demonise its characters, and it presents a lot of moments of beauty and hope. I can't decide if this means that there is something for us to take away from it in the Obama Age, or whether it just serves my contention that it won in 2005 because it leaves audiences feeling kind of warm inside. Regardless, in 2008 we have already seen the first of quite a different set of BPWs: Obama + recession = the first romance since Shakespeare in Love.

Sidenote: I was just looking at the Golden Raspberry Awards, and after I’m finished the BPs I’m tempted to watch all the Worst Pictures (there are considerably fewer). However, that will involve me watching The Love Guru.

And since the summer is almost officially over (Labor Day, rather than the Autumn Equinox, seems to be the indicator that summer is over in the US. Unlike Australia, where it is Tim Bailey on the 1^st of March erroneously telling us it’s the first day of autumn and everyone believing him. But if everyone says it’s autumn then maybe it is.), COMMA, I will tell you that the new movies I saw this summer were, in order of quality:

District 9

(500) Days of Summer

Public Enemies

Inglourious Basterds

Meryl Streep (formerly Julie and Julia, but let’s be honest)

Harry Potter and the Strong Desire to Claw Out My Own Eyes

Just because Julia and Julia was No. 5 does not mean it was bad. The fact that HP was No. 6…let’s just say that if it doesn’t win Worst Adaptation, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel at the Razzies this year, there will be no justice in this world.

A Beautiful Mind

I'm wary of "biopics." I'm not sure about that word either - it's a bit newspeak for my taste. The problem is that, while some minor reshuffling of events for the sake of telling a compelling story is, I think, acceptable and expected, films like A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator, and - dear Lord - Braveheart just make stuff up for two hours and claim to be "based on historical events." Alright, true, none of these films actually states this, but it's the assumption of everyone viewer that a film about John Nash will be about John Nash. "Based on" needs to have a different meaning when real people are being used. Anyone who expects a film adaptation of a novel or play to be 100% faithful is either deluded or Zack Snyder. A film adaptation, like a production of a play, needs to be an approach - a particular vision - and hence a discrete artwork. Good adaptations: Adaptation, The Dark Knight, Casino Royale. Bad adaptation: Watchmen, which you don't need to see, because the film adds nothing, so you should just read the book. This also means that people who gripe about the differences between the book and the film are missing the point, unless it's an interesting discussion based on the relative merits of the two versions' events, such as Spider-Man 3's shameful under-use of the Gwen Stacy character, the discussion of which got me into comics - always a good place to find interesting adaptations and reinventions.

But I digress. So, a work "based on" another work of fiction needs to make significant changes. A work based on historical events has to be a lot more careful. Apparently, John and Alicia Nash are the only characters that have any correspondence to real people, Nash never had visual hallucinations, and even events that seem to relate to the storylines that the film draws out - such as Alicia and John's divorce in 1963 and remarriage in 2001, and Nash going medication-free from 1970 onwards - were changed. I could see the film being better if these facts were accurately included. Clearly screenwriter Akiva Goldsman saw himself as writing a work of fiction based on the stories in Sylvia Nasar's book, but if that was the case then the film's protagonist should not have been named John Nash. A film about a fictional schizophrenic mathematician would still evoke John Nash - in the same way that The Departed has similarities to real events and people - without telling the world that John Nash had visions of Paul Bettany.

Universal, Dreamworks, 2001. Directed by Ron Howard. Written by Akiva Goldsman, from the book by Sylvia Nasar.

Chicago

Bloody musicals winning BP. I thought we were done with that in the ‘60s. Fortunately though, 2002’s Chicago moves at almost subliminal speeds by ‘60s standards. However, there are a few things that disturb me about this movie.

Chicago is about the media; how, by successfully manipulating it, one can get away with murder. That the people who are best at “razzle dazzling” the public are the ones who avoid hanging. Is no one else a little offended that the first War on Terror film is presenting that as wonderful and fun for all the family?

From what I can gather, the original stage production was a darkly comic vehicle for Bob Fosse’s self-loathing – knowingly and, apparently, scandalisingly immoral. But Rob Marshall’s version is, as the documentary on the DVD stated, is a love letter to showbiz. So the showbiz machine takes awful, self-serving, narcissistic people (except Amos) and makes them national heroes, and when we’re watching the movie we think that to be an excellent state of affairs. WE, the viewers, are duped in exactly the way Richard Gere dupes the reporters and the Chicago public. The film razzle dazzles us so much with pretty colours and sexy dances that we forget Roxie is a murderess and start cheering for her. Chicago pokes fun of people who do exactly what we’re doing by enjoying the film. This movie turns us into stupid puppet people! I don’t think this was intentional, but I think Rob Marshall was so concerned with over-sexualised jazz dancing and artistic use of cigarette smoke that he forgot he was directing a musical with an edge.

Actually, Gladiator does the same thing. Portraying as barbaric the practice of violence for entertainment is a very curious thing for an action movie to do.

That’s another thing. I know we’ve all seen Cabaret, but not everything in a Kander and Ebb musical has to be about sex! Several dance numbers or moments in the film were doused with completely unnecessary and often non-sensical sexuality. The worst example, in my opinion, is “If You’re Good to Mama.” When I first saw this film, it took me the entire number to realise that the favours Mama was seeking from the women were monetary rather than sexual. Yes, I know there’s a lot of rubbing together of fingers, but she asks them to pepper her raccoon, for Heaven’s sake. Again, concentrating on the story and the characters’ actual motivations and situations would probably have been a better choice.

Miramax, 2002. Directed by Rob Marshall. Written by Bill Condon, from the musical by Bob Fosse, John Kander, and Fred Ebb, from the play by Maurine Dallas Watkins.

The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King

Clearly, it wasn’t Return of the King that won BP in 2003, it was the trilogy. Both Fellowship and Two Towers were nominated, and despite the fact that The Two Towers could kick Chicago’s ARSE…yes, I want to see that. I want to see Gandalf beat up Richard Gere with his staff, Aragorn and Queen Latifah in a sword fight on horseback (either that or the two of them battling hundreds of orcs together), and Roxie Hart vs. four angry hobbits. And then Legolas and Velma Kelly could have a girl-fight. Maybe that’s unfair. I mean, Catherine Zeta-Jones is definitely a thousand times more bad-ass than Mr Bloom, but Orlando tries so hard that you’ve got to give him some points for effort. Or at least a weak, encouraging smile.

What were we talking about? Oh yes, DESPITE the military and cinematic superiority of Two Towers to Chicago, they obviously wanted to wait until the end to recognise the trilogy. So I'd never been to an "Oscar commentary" site, and given that I sort of have one now, I thought perhaps I should. I can't remember how I found this thing, or even what it was called, but it was the first on whatever list I was looking at. This site had a page of statistics documenting genre bias in the BPWs and nominees, and no prizes for guessing what the findings were. And yet virtually in the same breath, this site had LotR on their list of films that omg like totally shouldn't have won. Even a site that knows that action films will always have an uphill battle against "serious drama" can't help but question Return of the King's win. And I'm no saint: I haven't even seen Mystic River and there's part of me that feels that it has more right to a BP because it's set in Boston rather than Middle Earth. Being aware of it is not enough to counteract genre bias, because all we really have to judge a film are the purely subjective question of whether we liked it or not, the supposedly objective but actually totally arbitrary ideas of what is high and low art, and the technical aspects, which in a sense are so objective that they can't really tell you whether the film as a whole is good.

New Line, 2003. Directed by Peter Jackson. Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Million Dollar Baby

Hate on Crash all you want, but this needs to be said: Paul Haggis also wrote Million Dollar Baby. And Letters From Iwo Jima. And rewrote Casino Royale after those idiots Neal Purvis and Robert Wade tried their best. All the best bits in it that weren’t Ian Fleming’s were probably by Haggis, and…were there any good bits in Quantum of Solace? I can’t remember, I’m trying to pretend that film never happened, which is probably what Barbara and Michael G. should do if they want anyone to see Bond 23.

At the Something For Kate concert Dad and I went to in 2006, Paul Dempsey introduced their song “Cigarettes and Suitcases” with “This used to be a single, but thankfully it’s now just a song again.” When I saw Million Dollar Baby in Italy in June or July 2005, it was “just a movie” in that sense. In fact it was one of the most “just a movie” movies I’d seen for quite some time. I had never heard of it, and I was just there because it was the film they were playing in English that week. I’m not saying that that's how all movies should be seen. (In fact it’s quite dangerous, since for all I knew Million Dollar Baby was a ghastly “family” movie about a baby that becomes a millionaire, or is made bionic and costs less because it’s a baby.) What I am saying is that for this movie, in my mind, to go from the most extreme kind of “just a movie” to a Best Picture Winner, made me realise the inherent bias of watching all these films this way. Not only is it a BPW, but since I’m only watching BPWs it becomes film’s sole representative for 2004. And lucky it was a great movie that deserved to win over its fellow nominees, otherwise its very identity would be changed, like CrashBrokebackMountainshouldhavewon.

By the way, this is our first female protagonist film, although it could very easily be argued that MDB is more about Clint Eastwood’s character than Hilary Swank’s.

Warner Bros, 2004. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Paul Haggis, from the short stories by F.X. Toole.

Episode 2

Jamal, knowing he must fight Aegisthus for the money, convinces Clint Eastwood to train him. But a great darkness is coming, and Jamal must use his newfound boxing skills to travel to Mordor and throw the entire boxing ring into the fires in which it was made. Along the way, however, Jamal has a violent disagreement with that guy from The Wire, and is arrested for murder. But the love of Jennifer Connelly and the ability to light up letters and numbers with his mind allows Jamal to be released and continue his quest.