Notes on a Scandal-less movie season

At my 25^th birthday party this week, I knew I must be turning some nondescript adult age as in my kitchen, 5 people were discussing grad school, by the dining room table, 2 guys talked about the recent Seahawks loss, between the two, my friends Dan and Aaron wondered about the real estate future of a new townhouse in Phinney Ridge. So it went. During the week I turned 25, I had a chance to get caught up on movie watching – the Oscars this year essentially predetermined anyway (you heard it here fifteenth! This year’s best picture race will be: The Queen, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, Babel, and Dreamgirls!), it made sense to try and watch some of the movies doomed to being nominated.

Because movies of this kind come with a storm of press and expectations these days, it’s difficult to make objective judgments about them. At least on first glance, or for those paying attention. The end of this past year wasn’t marked by much ceremony for me – I happened to work 16 hours on Christmas Day, 60 the week between Christmas and New Year’s. My yearly sojourn with Entertainment Weekly’s Best of the Year issue was delayed, and if it weren’t, I still would have likely felt disconnected with the year that saw Grey’s Anatomy, a show I don’t care for much, turn into a phenomenon and, as such, find itself and its cast named the Entertainers of the Year by, and thus appearing on the cover of, Entertainment Weekly’s Best of the Year issue.

The thing that drives me nuts about Grey’s Anatomy is something that would likely not have bothered me 5 or 6 years ago. It’s a show with a hint of bravery in that its characters are always seemingly making terrible decisions, as people do. But it seems like bad decisions of its type are more proscribed than they used to be – more “sexy” and made-for-TV salacious, grandly melodramatic, and irritatingly devoid of life. There is, for example, none of the silent gestures employed by the cast of its brilliant timeslot competitor The Office – a show that I wrote had entered sitcomville and headed for death three months ago, only to find itself beyond reinvigorated in its branch closing/ merger with Stamford plotline, becoming something like the most riveting and honest television on the air. Allegedly taking place in Seattle, it has nothing that resembles anything of the life of a person in Seattle. There is, for example, none of the expressway-and-bird-shit-on-strip-club-signs specificity of The Sopranos’ New Jersey, the hide-behind-the-Lincoln-Center marquis cleverness of the far soapier Sex And the City. Grey’s Anatomy annoys twice as often as it succeeds, but more importantly – and this says more about me than it – it just represents too much of a false reality while claiming to comment on the behavior of actual people. When I watch it I see its designer sweaters and elegantly rehearsed brattiness passing off as personality.

What I missed in the convocation of Grey’s Anatomy is the same thing I tend to miss around Oscar time these past few years – a shared knowledge of the obvious conclusion. Each year of the revamped Oscar schedule, the ones that occur in late February as opposed to Spring Break time in March, Oscar voters are required to submit their choices for nominations a week into the new year, meaning that by sheer amounts of time available, only the already-hyped movies will get seen, perpetuating the same myths of what the year’s best work was. These conclusions lead in odd directions – George Clooney’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year, for example – directions I never feel particularly inclined to agree with. So, I saw some of those movies that, until recently, were just names in Oscar Hopeful articles. Each one had something of a surprise involved.

Notes On A Scandal: It’s pure sensationalism – a teacher fucks her 15 year old student! A crazy spinster older teacher uses it to enact an obsession with the teacher! The plot that should be pure kitsch, though, is something else – with Judi Dench as Barbara, the older, obsessive, note-taking teacher, it becomes a puzzled, fascinating study of loneliness. In voiceover, Dench says, in one scene, that the younger teacher, Sheba, played with Grey’s Anatomy flightiness by Cate Blanchett (a good thing, in this case, as the character demands it), has “never known the long term sting of loneliness… She’s never known what it’s like to arrange one’s weekend around a visit to the launderette.” The image shown during this monologue is Barbara in a bathtub, smoking. The face Dench shows us is embittered, wrinkled, completely free of hope or possibility. What I love most about Dench’s performance is the way that as the movie erupts into histrionics, her brave depiction of loneliness at its coldest makes the chaos seem like a natural reaction. May none of us be forced into the type of desperation that creates that face.

Children of Men: Declared by Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times as a masterpiece weeks before it was released, what Children of Men is to me is a damn bitter breath of well created recycled air. It is rather shapeless paranoia – what are we supposed to determine from this bleak future, a future done in by the impending end of humanity (it is about the year 2027, 18 years after women on the planet became infertile). The director, Alfonso Cuaron, proves himself a magnificent orchestrator of chaos and paranoia, tapping into a sense of dread never even hinted at in his other movies – even the good ones like The Others or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Thinking about Children of Men, I like it more and more. Watching it, though, I don’t actually remember enjoying it, and I think that’s because I never really bought the premise the way it was sold – people get desperate, people do each other in, and that’s about the extent of what it says, which makes it morose for the sake of being morose.

Little Miss Sunshine: You know you’re in quirky Sundance sitcom hell when there’s a character who doesn’t talk, but limits all communication to hilarious asides on notebook paper. Speaking of not buying premises, the idea that chunky little Olive was ever in and prepared for a beauty pageant is a tough swallow. I think I’m supposed to find Little Miss Sunshine endearing because all of its so clearly flawed family members are alright with who they are at the end of the movie (for glum, mute Paul Dano, it’s convenient his sister picked up an eye chart so his oh-so-believable dream of being a pilot could be dashed in a timely manner), but I disliked every false minute of it… that is, up until the raucous “Superfreak” dance number at the end. Even I couldn’t resist.

Pan’s Labyrinth: I admit I shouldn’t watch movies after long days of work, so it might not do me much good to comment on the first 45 minutes or so of Pan’s Labyrinth as my viewing was so often punctuated by bouts of narcolepsy. However, Pan’s Labyrinth strikes me as the most fantastically assembled movie of the year – a gruesome fairy tale contrasting with a far more gruesome reality. It follows a young girl named Ofelia as her magical world becomes increasingly related to revolutionary Spain. What works about it, and especially about Guillermo Del Toro’s direction, is the way that the queasiness never seems to end – inside her mind, the good and bad creatures alike are horrifying, allegorical creatures of suspicious allegiances. Outside, the violence becomes rapt and overwhelming – a note on this one, for viewers used to the most violent moments of torture and violence shown in film, there will be an expectation that the camera will cut away, leaving things to your own queasy imagination, but this one will, shudderingly, not give you such an option. See it anyway.

Dreamgirls: I had heard that some 7^th place finisher of American Idol is about to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and that Eddie Murphy, her counterpart in the movie, was about to win an Oscar too. Crazy, eh? That version of “I Am Telling You I Am Not Going” is iconography already, and Jennifer Hudson, that 7^th place finisher of American Idol, tones down the stuttery, passionless delivery of her AI days and acts with a ferocity I couldn’t possibly believe she could conjure. I find Dreamgirls second hour a little miserable, very much a let down after its blast of glitz for its first hour. As soon as the movie turns on the sainthood of Beyonce’s Deena, I began to check out. Still, Bill Condon knows how to work with actors – beyond Hudson, beyond an eerie and astonishing Murphy, Foxx holds his own, and Beyonce herself proves an actress capable of an understanding that her Deena, a whitewashed and uninteresting version of Diana Ross, doesn’t need.

The Trailer for Inland Empire: Of all the movies I’ve seen this Winter, nothing quite compares to the 1 minute that is the trailer for David Lynch’s Inland Empire. And by nothing comparing I mean no other minute inside the cinema will require you to ask the question with such vehemence. That question? What the fuck was that? Reading about it recently, I discovered that Inland Empire started as a 14 page monologue for Laura Dern that was meant to be released online only. The other story about Inland Empire lately? My brother took a date to see the movie with him at a movie theater in Manhattan. That she sat through all three mind-narcotizing hours with him makes me wonder when the wedding will be. I haven’t seen the movie, but anything whose minute of pre-release press makes me long for the clarity of Lost Highway must be… well, something.