No more

This blog is dead. What began as a travelogue through the Middle East has entered languishing redundancy and then some. It will revive once Almost Runaways begins its festival circuit as the journal of the struggle between lover and maker.

A Sundance Better Late Than Never

Belated thoughts on the five Sundance movies I say nigh on a month ago.

Cold Souls (dir. Sophie Barthes)

Cold Souls plays like a Charlie Kaufman hybrid. A little bit of Malkovich-ian metaphysical angst, a little persona trickery a la Adaptation.. Paul Giamatti plays himself as he prepares for a theatrical performance of Uncle Vanya, but cannot fully connect with the part. So he is recommended a quiet operation that divests a client of his or her soul, leaving them soulless for the time being.  As Giamatti prepares for a truly soulless performance of Vanya, a Russian "soul-trafficker" carries Russian souls back to America and vice-versa as she becomes increasingly compromised by "soul fragments". Cold Souls plays its Kaufman-esque metaphysical conundrums with the ennui of Wong Kar-wai and ultimately feels a little lost by its end. I tend to enjoy movies that stage fantastical happenstance as exploration for the human condition and in spite of its flaws, Cold Souls has a one-up on Stranger than Fiction and at least three on Benjamin Button. It's a very promising debut from writer/director Sophie Barthes.

Grace (dir. Paul Solet)

It starts with the image of a married couple having sex. Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) curls her legs up to assist with conception. She has miscarried before but she is trying again, and it will be the most agonizing experience of her life. After a car accident, she loses her husband and child, and decides to come full term with it only to find that it nurses against her breast. Grace plays like a Vegan Rosemary's Baby as Grace struggles to keep this hungry child alive despite pestering from her mother-in-law (a funny and grossly unflattering Gabrielle Rose) and outside forces. This film is something short of outstanding, a truly subversive and entertaining horror movie that alternates between awkward humor and gruesomely baroque infant imagery. This movie is unnerving in how it bounces from humor to gruesomeness. It's a shame that the cinematography is so poor.

Moon (dir. Duncan Jones)

Despite the fact that Moon does not fully exploit its subject matter, the film's hush-hush central conceit is one that I've wanted to see explored for years and when it comes up, it is a straight-up Whammy. Likely the impact of this surprise will be ruined by future trailer-ing, but my jaw was on the floor. Sam Rockwell is excellent as Sam Bell, a solitary technician aboard a moon-based station and who has been mining Helium 3 for the past three years. In discussing more than this would be unfair, but while Duncan Jones (né Zowie Bowie) doesn't mine Moon for all of its theological ambiguities, he comes close and it's a very strong first feature operating as mood piece and mind-fuck.

Mystery Team (dir. Dan Eckman)

This is the first feature from the comedy group DerrickComedy of the viral sensation "Niggerfaggot". I was expecting them to bring the same joyously inane sensibilities to Mystery Team, but I wasn't expecting a fairly affecting portrait of arrested development and preadolescent preoccupation lingering long past sell-date as Jr. Detectives Jason, Duncan, and Charlie prepare for graduation on two fronts: high school, and their first major mystery. The film is overlong, messy, and badly shot, clearly the first film of a bunch of guys who don't entirely know what they're doing. But it was in a way the most endearing feature I saw at Sundance, and one of the most beguiling depictions of adolescence I've seen in some time. Mystery Team never forgets to be funny, but is also empathetic to these characters even whilst poking fun. Donald Glover stands to breakthrough for his inspired performance as the gruop's Master of Disguise Jason.

Peter and Vandy (dir. Jay DiPietro)

IFC's decision to distribute certain festival features immediately online stands to benefit films like Peter and Vandy, a movie that is fairly affecting if destined for limited audience. Peter (a scraggly Jason Ritter) and Vandy (a terrific Jess Weixler) are a couple that Meets and Fights Cute as they struggle to stay together. Writer/director (and nice guy) Jay DiPietro playfully slices their relationship up chronologically so that certain revelations make sense later, like Eternal Sunshine... without the Memory Erasure impetus. This is an immediately relatable feature that I found a little slight if only because I never entirely got ot spend time with this couple just hanging out. There's no center to Peter and Vandy and it starts too overtly neurotic for my tastes, but picks up strongly. I don't think that Peter and Vandy is a very good film but it's one that a lot of people would relate to...were it picked up.

Quick Predictions

Check out my Oscar predictions with Andrew Alex Dowd over at wildlines.blogspot.com

BEST PICTURE

Winner - Slumdog Millionaire

Should Be - Milk

BEST DIRECTOR

Winner - Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire

Should Be - Gus Van Sant, Milk

BEST ACTOR

Winner - Sean Penn, Milk

Should Be - Sean Penn, Milk

BEST ACTRESS

Winner - Kate Winslet, The Reader

Should Be - Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Winner - Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Should Be - Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Winner - Viola Davis, Doubt

Should Be - Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Winner - Milk

Should Be - WALL*E

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Winner - Slumdog Millionaire

Should Be - N/A

BEST SCORE

Winner - Slumdog Millionaire

Should Be - WALL*E

BEST SONG

Winner - "Jai Ho" ~ Slumdog Millionaire

Should Be - "O Saya" ~ Slumdog Millionaire

BEST ANIMATED FILM

Winner - WALL*E

Should Be - WALL*E

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM

Winner - Departures

Should Be - haven't seen Revanche or The Class yet.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Winner - Slumdog Millionaire

Should Be - The Dark Knight

BEST FILM EDITING

Winner - Slumdog Millionaire

Should Be - The Dark Knight

BEST ART DIRECTION

Winner - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Should Be - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Winner - The Duchess

Should Be - Milk

BEST MAKEUP

Winner - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Should Be - Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

BEST SOUND MIXING

Winner - The Dark Knight

Should Be - The Dark Knight

BEST SOUND EFFECTS

Winner - The Dark Knight

Should Be - WALL*E

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Winner - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Should Be - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Masturbating to Soft-Core w/ Shoah on in the Background

"Billy Get Laid!"

The Reader interprets the Holocaust as a wet dream that a grown man can never wake up from. The only issue I have with this is that it's not an especially profound wet dream, it doesn't deepen as it goes along and there's nothing lingering from dream for our protagonist to decipher later on. Film has been used as such a fascinating exploration on the nature of memory that when something as surface as The Reader comes along, it sadly almost feels like escapism. And it is there that I find my chief issue with The Reader. For something as allegedly psychologically damaging,  The Reader doesn't seem half bad - even if it is essentially masturbating to soft-core with Shoah on in the background.

Stephen Daldry is not the filmmaker to bring you into The Reader. His style of filmmaking is akin to watching check-out lines at the grocery store and pointing towards the shortest line. You will get to the end of that line faster because there are fewer people. It's that kind of insight that made The Hours such an interminable slog. Although The Reader is far superior to that film (seeing as how thin Billy Elliot was, this is likely his strongest film), it's because the way he cross cuts AROUND actually telling a story this time is a simpler feat. It's harder to Not Tell a story in The Hours than The Reader. There is really no rhyme or reason to any of the Memory Cuts outside of efficiency. Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine points out that memory doesn't really work the way it is portrayed in The Reader and I agree. Memory is associative. In The Reader, it is convenient to the narrative.

That being said, there are quite simply scores of scenes in The Reader that make no sense in their context and where the dialogue they deliver feels obtuse and strange. There is a sense where Michael reads to Hanna and she weeps openly in his arms. In reading on the page - HANNA CRIES IN MICHAEL'S ARMS AS HE READS TO HER. - there is no thought as to how silly openly braying might appear in lieu of quiet devastation. Often times it's said that the stigma of the Writer/Director is that a writer will be incapable of bringing fresh interpretation to the set. That is the Stephen Daldry Promise: what you see (on the page) is what you get (on the screen, regardless of stilted pace or performance).

It's entirely possible that Kate Winslet is the most beloved Actor of our generation. Heath Ledger was our Tragic Virtuoso, but Kate Winslet's career has an ebb and flow that few can claim, making the most tasteful choices until Titanic superstardom and then back to what she was doing before as we criticized her weight. The tragedy of Winslet's career is her reliability. Roles like Little Children, Finding Neverland, and Iris are footnotes when held up against something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: something different, new, and Oscar-worthy. Her work in The Reader only looks Oscar-worthy. If what she does in Revolutionary Road feels like cake, then The Reader is something of a rushed meal. There is so much more to this character than Winslet's naked beauty and elderly makeup, and nobody seems terribly invested in it. In her encounters with Michael, there is zero consistency in her conceptualization. How old is Hanna, literally and figuratively? A movie like Summer of '42 (RIP Robert Mulligan) brings the viewer into the voyeurism of young love while still paying attention to the seducer. There is a devastating performance in The Reader done disservice by myopia.

Like Marc Forster and Sam Mendes, there is something fundamentally boring to a Stephen Daldry film. Forster and Mendes operate as Journeyman empowered by script or franchise aspirations. Stephen Daldry seems to be defined by his pairing with writer David Hare and it's a menopausal one at that. There has been no joy of performance since Jamie Bell first busted a move, nor joy of eroticism, of visual or music composition, or of message. If it's perhaps premature to tag Stephen Daldry on the basis of his two collaborations with David Hare, Scott Rudin, and the Weinsteins, it certainly seems like he's going to be making this boring-ass movie again and again for years to come. Just as Michael Bay makes action movies into trailers, Stephen Daldry makes trailers for Oscars.

Bad Mood Rising: or - The Year in Review

"A Hero Will Rise..."

Thus spoke Maximus some eight years ago in the zeitgeist film amidst another "bad" year for film...and otherwise. Just as exceptional as last year was, 2000 had the misfortune of following P.T.A., Jonze, Fincher, Payne, Pierce, Russell, and those endlessly inventive Wachowski Brothers. It was telling that the best film of the summer would foretell the coming eight years: Chicken Run. Yet as always, the nooks and crannies hid the boldest treasures: not Almost Famous, High Fidelity, Requiem for a Dream, and Wonder Boys, but Terrence Davies' The House of Mirth, David Gordon Green's George Washington, Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, and on the festival route such tiny films as Amores Perros, In the Mood for Love, Memento, and Yi Yi (A One and a Two...). It was a bad year if all you watch are Oscar nominees and summer blockbusters, but such is true for every year.

As George W. Bush ascended to throne, there was a toga-clad Russell Crowe. In 2008, we have Dev Patel. Eight years ago, an enslaved warrior rose to lead a revolution against godless oppressors. Eight years later, we have a thin, bright little man in the spotlight whose unlikely beginnings and endless guile captures a nation's love. I can only pray that the parallels between Barack Obama and Slumdog Millionaire prove less indicative of the coming years as the simplistic jingoism of Ridley Scott's Oscar-winning epic. A more progressive hero rising can be found in The Dark Knight as coconspirators aiming to take down a fugitive terrorist are punished for their ill-thought nobility, their city taken hostage, and their loved ones meant to pay. Or in Frost/Nixon and its nostalgia for retroactive vindication of a corrupt official, no matter how irrelevant. Or in Milk and the same battles against semantics and definitions going on thirty years later. Or in the failed chain of information throughout Burn After Reading, and the defining dialogue exchange of the year:"What did we learn about all this?"

"We learned not to do it again."

Or how for whatever reason, every comic book superhero movie was mystifyingly good. Guillermo Del Toro did One For Them and used Hellboy 2: The Golden Army as an endearingly ramshackle paean to freaks everywhere. Robert Downey, Jr. launched Marvel's superhero saturation bomb with Iron Man, the most leisurely enjoyable blockbuster in ages with relatively progressive politics. Through sleek genre craftsmanship, The Incredible Hulk restarted a series from remnants as dead as Batman & Robin. And The Dark Knight validated nerds everywhere by making a comic book movie so foreign from the pulpy paradigm that the Caped Crusader almost seemed out of place.

Good years require effort, research, and viewer prejudice. Beyond this, as George W. Bush unlike any other United States President lowered the public's perception of the office to that of mere figurehead while we thirsted for the leadership Barack Obama would provide on the horizon, while strikes damaged the industry and threats of such provided harbingers of the unfounded, this was not a bad year but one we simply wanted to end, to coast through like Senior year as quickly as possible. Before we take one last look back at the lessons worth learning, a quick mea culpa for classes I for one reason or another missed: Ballast, Body of Lies, Chicago 10, The Class, The Duchess of Langeais, The Edge of Heaven, Encounters at the Edge of the World, Elegy, In the City of Sylvia, Kung Fu Panda, The Last Mistress, My Winnipeg, Redbelt, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, The Secret of the Grain, Snow Angels, Standard Operating Procedure, Stop-Loss, and Woman on the Beach.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR

1. WALL*E (dir. Andrew Stanton)

The single most indelible image in WALL*E is of a glorified trash can and a trigger-happy stealth retrieval unit dancing in space, chasing each other playfully regardless of make or model - or the fact that Earth has been a distant memory for seven hundred years, so foreign from the minds of the remaining refugees that we may have been myth to begin with. And yet with this morbid future history and these two robots, there is a parentage of rebirth and generation, the progressive belief that the future is birthed from any form of love. Similarly, this is the future that PIXAR has birthed and it is one powerfully in love with film. Although director Andrew Stanton successfully adopts Chaplin-esque and Tati-esque pastiches and loving references to Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is a love of musicals - specifically a lonely copy of Hello, Dolly! - that sparks the gender role-play between two androids that will repopulate planet Earth.

The mold that broke thirteen years ago ushered in an incalculable cascade of pretenders and offenders such that the only guarantee ultimately is in that mold-breaking label you can trust in an era of cynicism, weary, and doubt: PIXAR. With an unbroken track record of wizened beauty untouched by pop culture snark, they are hip to be square in their pursuit of unadulterated wonder and joy long since left under the bed like so many forgotten toys by the rest of us. In an age where cinema tethers digital artifice, PIXAR (and especially WALL*E) details a happier future where even the most desolate planets and antiseptic of space crafts feel as three dimensionally "home" as any flesh actor, as any film strip. To say that WALL*E is their finest since Toy Story is like praising Hitchcock for Psycho after his 50's output. But beyond simple declarations of masterpiece, WALL*E is an act of pure good: as deeply humanist and steadfast in belief in the opportunity for change no matter how many hundreds of years of (de)evolution of the human frame.

2. Reprise (dir. Joachim Trier)

It's about the future imperfect. Whether looking forward to a tomorrow of celebrity of recreating an old relationship from idealized scraps, both Erik and Philip are so focused on the idea of writing (Lord knows, we never see their pen-to-paper process) that like so many self-absorbed, self-proclaimed artists, they never afford themselves breath to live in the moment. Trier's Reprise is a tribute to their respective future imperfects, beginning and ending with dizzingly edited pro- and epilogue that comparisons to the French New Wave are inevitable. Beyond its inspiration in film history and unlike its lead characters, Reprise very much knows its footing as a work of passion and immediacy, a movie for sick puppies who love movies and idealize love a little too much.

3. Let the Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson)

She tells him she's not a girl. Is it because she's a castrated boy and has been so long before his grandparents were born or because she's a vampire? At first, Oskar doesn't believe her, but eventually he could not care less. The title is a direct reference to the Morrissey song "Let the Right One Slip In" but really Let the Right One In is about invitations and the most fascinating aspect of vampire lore: they must be invited in. The vampire is the lethal gentleman, the person whose nature is that of the seducer bearing invitation. We have not seen one quite like Eli, nor the nature of the invitation on such sadly open display. There is an overwhelming melancholy to Alfredson's vampire coming of age story that a lesser film would fetishize, but the greatness innate in Let the Right One In is the acknowledgment of the cycle: the world before and the one to come. Oskar will not be the first to care for Eli and he will not be the last. There is a Darwinian harshness to this tale and by the end of their courtship, the decisions made are of eyes wide open towards a life chosen by and for as if product of daydreamed destiny.

4. Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman)

In his directorial debut, it is no great shakes to learn that Charlie Kaufman indeed is just a little person as his puppy dog stand-ins have loved and lost in love for almost a decade. Yet Synecdoche, New York eschews meta-virtues and Darwinian bugaboos for the agonizing literal astonishment of strapping a prototypically Kaufman-esque artiste to the rocket ship of life, lighting the fuse, and watching him hurtle towards the oblivion of obsession and death. No more or less cockroach than Gregor Samsa of Metamorphosis, his life and indeed the movie itself inexorably shifts from one Brechtian extreme to another such that you wonder just how the hell you would up this person, this moment, this life, this different. In doing so, Synecdoche, New York offers that rare thing of the human experience warts and all, a cinematic Yom Kippur as occasion to meditate on the gulf between being and non from its most ingenious conceptual purveyor today.

5. Chop Shop (dir. Ramin Bahrani)

Ramin Bahrani makes foreign films about America. There is a sense of verité in Chop Shop that is so rare in American films, but that only scratches the surface of what makes that film such a devastating experience. It's the American Dream persevering in the most foreign of corners, in young Latino street orphan Alejandro's sad quest to purchase a taco station ot sustain his runaway sister in the middle of the Iron Triange. Bahrani eschews the theological depths of the Dardenne Brothers and instead uses his neorealist aesthetic to capture every scene with single deliberate shots that seem to capture life rather than convey it. And this life in particular is one that Bahrani refuses to sentimentalize and only deliberately reveals Alejandro as an all-too irrational child prone to outburst and ultimately delusions of adequacy as he watches his dreams fizzle with morning.

6. Paranoid Park (dir. Gus Van Sant)

Unveiled like notebook paper falling from a binder, Gus Van Sant gave us his strongest work as an auteur combining his love of physical celluloid with horrifying incident wrapped around mundane aimlessness and vice-versa. A young boy (myspace discovery Gave Nevins) writes notepad circles around his involvement in an unintentional murder and in the effortless loop-de-loops played around his day-to-day life, Gus Van Sant allows his protagonist to circle death rather than the other way around, creating a celebration of life moving forward. And careers. In lesser hands, Paranoid Park would equate death with irrelevance, but this rare film in Van Sant's career equates it with adolescence, passage, and almost hope, that life transcens incident rather than abruptly halts. It's an endlessly playful, ironic, and sincere work, the true time capsule of the filmmaker's career.

7. The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan)

"Tonight, you're all going to be a part of a social experiment."

Build the city up. Watch the city burn. Everyone in The Dark Knight is struggling for control except for The Joker, a manic Boogeyman who thrives on turning free fall into an aimed razor, and as Gotham's Three Knights (one of law, one of politics, and one of the shadows free of such constraints) conspire to put him down, they are made to pay the dearest price of all: women, status, city, and hope. The messy mythology that Christopher Nolan built up in Batman Begins was merely prelude to the monumental distillation he accomplishes here. Over a bleakly unprecedented two-and-a-half hours, Bruce Ways thoughts will range from resting the cape and cowl forever to the panic of never taking them off again. Through Christopher Nolan's labyrinth of bait, switch, and twitch, he will evolve from a symbol of copycat, hockey-pants vigilante justice to the scourge of the city he will secretly protect. The Dark Knight's narrative overreaches in ways the polite fear to start by incorporating our post-9/11 fears into an exercise in Domino Terrorism as we watch the coup against the Joker result in the collapse of one security after another to the laughter of mad men.

8. Milk (dir. Gus Van Sant)

Just as impressive as Van Sant's control over nihilism in Paranoid Park is his control over studio mandate in his chronicling of the last decade in the life of Harvey Milk. In adhering to Dustin Lance Black's biopic screenplay, Van Sant refuses to allow for an artless announcement of open sexuality and allows for a casualness that is as brave as anything the filmmaker has ever done. The margins of every frame in every scene of Milk brim with detail: sex, laughter, love, and life. There is not a performance that doesn't feel in synch with everyone else on the screen, least of all Sean Penn's charismatic Harvey Milk who provides orbit for his movement and the film entire. Awash too long in methodic angst, Harvey Milk is the indelible creation of Penn's career whose verisimilitude to the man is spooky. It's a great performance in perhaps the best classically Hollywood film of the year.

9. Happy-Go-Lucky (dir. Mike Leigh)

The surprise blockbuster of Mike Leigh's career is an insightful lark that grows in memory. One moment to another, it ricochets joyously between allowing this glorious supporting character a movie of her own in which to run rampant with sharp social commentary on the dangers of unfiltered niceties. Sally Hawkins' Poppy is a teacher as is everyone else in the film. Some fail at leaving their baggage at the door in direct contrast of their teachings, and others (like Eddie Marsan's driving instructor from hell) adhere to law far too much. Especially in following what is clearly a new beginning in Poppy's life, the penultimate scene in Happy-Go-Lucky reads all the more painful for anyone who takes or has been taken the wrong way no matter how correctly.

10. Burn After Reading (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen)

I could just as easily have picked the new Aronofsky, Demme, or Desplechin, but months following their imminently respectful Oscar night triumph, the Coen Brothers saw fit to release a companion piece to No Country for Old Men. Whereas their somber Western preaches that the horizon brings a death that whisks off-screen forever, Burn After Reading says that the men in black serve papers of change: in occupation, in love, in sex. And for the goony middle-aged clowns in Burn After Reading, change is a prospect much scarier than death. There is a lot of misinformation just waiting to be misunderestimated and the Coen Brothers have nailed post-9/11 incompetence more adeptly than any Iraq War film, perhaps so uncomfortably that many were all-too ready to dismiss Burn After Reading as simply a lark.

HONORABLE MENTION

The Band's Visit (dir. Eran Kolirin)

I keep coming back to the word "charming". This is such an effortlessly charming story of and Egyptian band lost by way of typographical error in the remote Israeli town of Beit Hatikva instead of Petah Tiqva where they are supposed to perform and spend an evening with the locals which plays quirky-dry as many like Napoleon Dynamite try to mix with heart but come up short. That they find their common language in English saw it excluded by the Academy's foreign branch which it sorely needed to become the kind of foreign crowd-pleaser that rarely do crossover.

A Christmas Tale (dir. Arnaud Desplechin)

The cinema of Desplechin is overstuffed in the best possible way. Every scene is so packed with insight, discourse, and just plain character that calling it "stuffed" barely does it justice. Desplechin dissolves and vignettes more liberally than any other filmmaker today in his attempts to get to the meat of the Vuillard family reunion on this sad but joyous search for a bone marrow donor. Like all Desplechin films, every scene is a stand alone miracle of manners and eccentricities; unlike any of his other films, it doesn't end so much as stop, whereas I could have feasted for hours more.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (dir. Cristian Mingui)

Almost as courtesy to those in my top ten list do I delegate this 2007 film (released nationwide in 2008, and watched by my lazy ass two months ago) to the Honorable Mention List, for how does one weigh the virtues of this exemplary Romanian film against the likes of Happy-Go-Lucky? 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days concerns itself with the worst day in a woman's life and her decision to take part in a rebellion that will see it never repeated, the rare film that serves as both essential Time Capsule Cinema and timeless in its universal cries of "Enough!"

In Bruges (dir. Martin McDonagh)

Destined to fall somewhere between overrated and forgotten, Pillowman-playwright McDonagh's first feature begins in a Euro-Q.T. Pulp-pastiche and becomes a sweet, funny story about redemption for those who find it as inconceivably foreign as Bruges itself. All hysteria and hysterical, Colin Farrell gives the best performance of his career as a hit-man marked for the results of a wayward bullet in a church. He's matched by Brendan Gleeson as the epitome of maternal camaraderie, so sweetly convinced of his friend's redemption than the man himself. The film has its detours here and there but it reads as a treatise of stray bullets and damnable humanity.

Iron Man (dir. Jon Favreau)

A savvy superhero movie that takes its cues from the most successful portions of others, Iron Man plays like the always more-enjoyable first half of a movie stretched out to feature-form where the Declaration of Self concludes the entirety of the thing. Robert Downey, Jr. has essentially played the same motor-mouthed charmer since his lauded return, and while it has yet to really begin to tire, in Tony Stark he finds a comically traumatized suit finding strength in his debilitation. Almost reflective of our own thirst for post-9/11 vengeance and culpability, he finds the culprits closer to home than he would like. Iron Man is an unmessy blockbuster with progressive politics.

Man on Wire (dir. James Marsh)

Perhaps a bit overrated in the lingering mysteries innate in its subject matter, the deification of a clearly independently wealthy eccentric who can afford such acts of insanity, but Philippe Petit is a very entertaining case study. A knowing mash-up of Errol Morris recreation and Werner Herzog whack-job, Man on Wire is at its best a graceful balancing act of time capsule and adventure.

Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)

To watch Rachel Getting Married is to live it, and to enjoy it is to relish such ineffable pleasures as music performance, casual multiculturalism, and hard earned beginnings. It's a manic, joyous film that refuses to pull its punches or dumb down the coming together of two families for the most spoon-fed of flies on the wall in this exploration of a family that struggles so desperately to love each other that it hurts.

Shotgun Stories (dir. Jeff Nichols)

One of the year's most potent debuts was the story of two families by the same father and the chain of violence following his death. This is the uniquely American movie that serves as metaphor for the Middle East but really any number of cultural sagas, and whose pleasures operate naturalistically and never didactic. Shotgun Stories preaches that peace can only be attained when a shovel is made a tool to bury the hatchet instead of the weapon it can all too readily become.

Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman)

In many ways, the oddest film of the year: an animated documentary on dissociation. As filmmaker Ari Folman searches to understand and remember his role in the 1982 Lebanon War, he arrives at the harrowing equation of inactivity to Nazism. As a personal essay, this is confessional of unequivocally Jewish guilt that operates best as understanding of the Israeli mentality rather than mea culpa. It is personal essay filmmaking on the exhausted burden of those who remember not to remember, and which states that a passive link the chain of violence is a link nonetheless.

The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky)

In which Indiewood creates the Hollywood movies Hollywood doesn't make anymore. What could be as mainstream and American as WWF? As Randy "The Ram" Robinson, Mickey Rourke has already reclaimed iconic status as a wrestler with an ever-wearying heart of brass struggling through his day-to-day, that one last shot at glory forever in the fading distance. But it's in Aronofsky's strong choices that The Wrestler becomes something close to what its champions herald: to follow Randy as if on the way to the ring; to show the truth behind the fights, but never dismiss them as anything other than agonizing; and to push as much Midwestern America into every frame as possible, to give them what they want, and to show them enjoying it as they are.

Oscar Fuck (Pt. 1)

Rather than blogging extensively about the nominations, I'll just say as tersely as possible that the ball was dropped by the Academy in a way different than before. Not twelve months ago, I was wrong-headedly predicting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Into the Wild over Atonement and Juno. This year's omission of The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of a Stephen Daldry/Harvey Weinstein collaboration is nonsense of Grammy-ian proportions, which is not to mention the thirteen nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

It would have been so easy this year for a respectable crop of nominees. Not the best of the year, as I can think of several off the top of my head better than The Dark Knight, but respectable and indicative of the year's populist timbre. Do people care about these movies? The movies that truly struck a chord this year were The Dark Knight, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, WALL*E and anywhere between The Wrestler and Iron Man. The most you can hope for is the boost a nomination can bring to those who need it the most. Good for Melissa Leo. Shame about Sally Hawkins. Good for Michael Shannon. Shame about Eddie Marsan. Good for Courtney Hunt. Shame about Jenny Lumet. Good for Martin McDonagh. Shame about Charlie Kaufman. Good for Richard Jenkins. Shame about Rosemarie DeWitt.

Doubt (dir. John Patrick Shanley)

Philip Seymour Hoffman may be the most simultaneously repulsive and revered actor working today. The gay mouth-breather of Boogie Nights. The tightie-whitie-clad obscene phone-caller of Happiness. The paint-huffing widower of Love Liza. He may have earned Oscar's respect for giving the most enormous-sized Truman Capote performance in history but he's more at home in Charlie Wilson's War under a grotesque moustache and hairdo grumbling as if he's on his way to a prostate exam. So why is it so hard for me to believe him as a child molester? I don't believe the film is concretely painting him as one for it could just as surely go the other way, but this is Philip Seymour Hoffman and I must believe that he is halfway capable of touching a child for this movie to work all the way.

For most of the way, I was convinced that Doubt was a very shrewd if overly-literal theatrical adaptation of Shanley's acclaimed play of the same name with understandable cinematic translations along the way, most notably the cast. Meryl Streep plays Sister Aloysius, the dragon nun of the parish who witch-hunts the charismatic Father Flynn (Hoffman) on something less than a hunch. Hoffman telegraphs his responses to Aloysius rather obviously but it's clear there is more to this story. For much of Doubt, the very act of witch-hunt is a captivating experience as both Aloysius and Flynn go head to head in a post-9/11 metaphor-off. Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius is a broad characterization but a very funny one. I cannot attest to the quality of Cherry Jones' performance but Streep's sister-minded and very aware pursuit of the truth as an extension of her own insecurities is the actress' strongest work since Adaptation., and if not outwardly successful in the final stretches, it's not hers necessarily to bare the brunt but the screenplay itself. From the moment Viola Davis emerges with the weight of a larger world on her shoulders, the film is cast into a more "important" light and though Davis is certainly very fine in her role, whatever relish can possibly be sucked from this film vanishes. Which would be fine and good were this the film's third act but it's not. It feels like the turning point in the film's second act.

This is an issue with Frost/Nixon as well. By the end of Doubt, I had seen a ninety minute play and a very good one but one that awkwardly transitions. The intrusively dramatic Howard Shore score and some theatrical metaphors that are left wanting don't help, but mainly Doubt feels like an unsatisfactory cinematic narrative. I want the film to continue to snake forward, I want Father Flynn to fight his case, I want to feel like something worthwhile has been fought rather than the inevitability of a cog being transferred to another machine.

Frost/Nixon (dir. Ron Howard)

At the end of the first disastrous taping conducted by Robert Frost, a cameraman remarks that were the election today that he would vote for Richard Nixon. Clearly, this is not what Frost is going for but neither is the film. In the spectrum created between Anthony Hopkins' tragedian and Dan Hadeya's satiric goofball in Dick, Frank Langella's Tricky Dick doesn't register as fish or fowl. It doesn't help that he doesn't look or sound like Richard Nixon until late in the film, or that Anthony Hopkins had far freer range under such constrictions. Peter Morgan really has nothing to say about either Frost or Nixon. The former is the easier coup. As played by Michael Sheen, he's a callow showman eager to forward his career until his game is upped for him by way of a drunken phone call, the only time in the film where we see past Nixon the Horse for Nixon the Hoarse.

It's fitting then that Frost needs the kind of oomph that can only come from a community college screenwriting class, not a playbook by a two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter and Tony-winning playwright; because Lord knows if Cambodia won't do it, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The film glosses over the two parts of the film that I care about: 1) the research into why this is being conducted which is shrewdly wrangled into montage, and 2) just how disastrous were those tapings? Because veracity is serum to all, there is no rise or fall between act two and three in Frost/Nixon in lieu of dramatizing the third taping ever so slightly and show a difference in Frost's attempts. This is a fucking Ron Howard movie; and despite being his best since Apollo 13 will not serve as history. If Slumdog Millionaire's Jamal can leave his seat during a pivotal Millionaire question to take a piss, then surely we can mix it up a little here, no? Entertain me so that I seek history out, because the primary function of Frost/Nixon is that old Dickensian adage: comeuppance. At long last, fast after its relevance, roll it along your tongue. I don't know how many years it will take before George W. Bush connects with a shoe, but we're an Old Testament nation with an Old Testament thirst for justice. So there's something undeniably entertaining about the proceedings in Frost/Nixon, shortcomings be damned. I can't think of a nomination on the planet it deserves, but we should have twenty or thirty of this film a year because it's not hard. the boldest choice made was also its laziest: direct translation from Broadway, cast and all. A little montage here, a little testimonial there...y'know, to make it a movie. 

Revolutionary Road (dir. Sam Mendes)

At the end of every scene that Michael Shannon storms into, there is a desire for the camera to slowly push away from stoically icy Kate Winslet and ignobly angsty Leonardo DiCaprio and follow that nutbag out the door with his coddling mother and father. There is a fantastic movie to be seen between Michael Shannon's warped suburban sage and Kathy Bates perennially squawking "He's not well!" No fucking shit. This is as hoary a story device as ever has been written but what Shannon is on to is a performance of such funny and eccentric intensity that he doesn't simply up everyone else's game, he shows the movie up as the Oscar-baiting pageantry that it is.

There hasn't been a movie that tightropes less easily between satire and drama since Little Children, a movie I also don't especially care for but can't bring myself to entirely dismiss. Revolutionary Road is made of far stronger stuff than Little Children but its lack of ballast is of personal choosing. What's the adage for adapting a novel? Cut out all the dialogue and see how it stands. To demonstrate on Revolutionary Road would be as follows:

INT. WHEELER HOUSE - NIGHT

Frank & Alice fight.

EXT. BEACH - NEXT AFTERNOON

Frank and/or Alice reveals something unsettling. Frank or Alice storms off quietly.

INT. WHEELER HOUSE - THAT EVENING

Frank & Alice fight.

INT. OTHER LOCATION - NEXT AFTERNOON

Repeat as necessary.

When they fight, they spout fairly devastating truth bombs squarely aimed at the lies of suburban America but the problem with Revolutionary Road front and center is that it's very difficult to pull back the curtain while simultaneously trying to shit all over it. It's an awkward thing to behold and what made American Beauty the far better (if still overrated) spectacle was the counterbalance between Ball's bitchiness and Mendes' staginess. Like Stephen Daldry and Marc Forster, Mendes brings an overwhelming competence to the table with his actors yet he does not have much by way of insight into cinematic ebb and flow. He's like Mike Nichols in that way: only as good as his project. Nichols had better taste in what he could do.

It's nobody's fault that Mad Men shows up the callowness of Revolutionary Road at every single minute as the emotional tug of war between Frank and Alice is admittedly a worthwhile and still-relevant one or that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet repairing a decade or so after they survived Titanic overload. But it's worth considering that the two were never entirely suited together in the first place, that what made Titanic's love story engaging in the first place was the artifice in the two star-gazing performance, an artifice that I don't see repeated. They have two very different styles of acting and they do not cohere together or with their parts then and now, DiCaprio with his baby-faced angst and Winslet with her instinctive glow. And in blowing their tops from minute one onward, there is difference not in caliber but in transcript, which is to say: Revolutionary Road must read well. I'm sure it does.

Wendy and Lucy (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

The best parts of Wendy and Lucy could have been stripped directly from her superior Old Joy. Most specifically I'm thinking of an evening spent between Wendy and some fireside companions as they impart some found knowledge onto her. Shortly after, Wendy will find herself stripped of her car, dog, and dignity by forces outside her: namely, director Kelly Reichardt. What worked so well in Old Joy was how the film refused to portray the last vacation between these Will Oldham and Daniel London with anything forced or didactic, even its message a product of inconspicuous rambling that would eventually get to the point as if in real life. To contrast when Lucy is taken into the back room for theft, we are subjected to close ups of a cross on a hypocrite's chest and forced condemnable statements like "If a person can't afford dog food, then maybe that person should not have a dog."

What works in Wendy and Lucy is the milieu that Reichardt is clearly enamored with. As with Old Joy, she seeks to immerse the viewer into a specific time and place. And face. Reichardt lingers on Michelle Williams' face for the entirety of the film and watches her internalize every square inch of bad road on the way to Alaska. Its' a fine performance (truly: how could it not be?) but therein lies the film's drawback: the entire film, like Williams, is too proud to cry, beg, scream, anything. It's a deification of individuals valiantly thriving through the post-9/11 economic collapse, which is to say a not-too terribly interesting movie about the individual, and damn near fetishistic in its portrayal of valiant suffering. To contrast, this year's Chop Shop is a movie about children who have both their socks with nary a hole to piss in and shows them as people amidst the struggle, how their poverty affects their decision making, and never for a second succumbs to preaching.

If Wendy and Lucy is of interest, it's because few filmmakers seek to film short stories as Reichardt does. But if it also feels like nobody else is doing this, it's because Ramin Bahrani has yet to become any form of household name.

The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky)

It's embarrassing really. How much everything pretty much goes right in The Wrestler. Which is not to say that it must have been easy for Aronofsky to knock this one out of the park, but that his instincts are shrewd enough to follow Mickey's Randy "The Ram" Robinson around as if perennially on the way to the ring. When he is chopping up deli-side meat, when he is getting the keys to his trailer from his landlord, when he is going up to his estranged daughter's house...he isn't A Wrestler. He's THE Wrestler. And this is a portion of his life following the ego-thrills of his 80's WWF career that can only be described as humbling.

There is nothing as thematically devestating as Aronofsky's previous work but if any indication from The Wrestler, he is a workerman for hire par excellence. The details he brings to this film, the sheer Americana in location and extras is unparalleled this year in American film outside of Rachel Getting Married. The Wrestler is a great American film about a world that kept going after that pussy Kurt Cobain showed up (cry me a river, Ram.) which coincides with Mickey Rourke's career rather shrewdly. There aren't many performances in mainstream-to-middlebrow American film that allow for inhabitation like Rourke's in The Wrestler nor that content themselves to follow him episodically around with such pleasing naturalism that when it adopts convention or leaves him out of frame for a moment, it can't help but qualify as some form of a letdown. All letdowns should be this satisfying. Beyond any mythologizing that could take place, The Wrestler is entertaining as all hell.

Oscar Predictions

A year ago, I was in on a train going back from Haifa to a hostel and realized that I hadn't seen a bevy of films eligible for the Oscars and made a series of gaffes in my predictions. Chief among them that after citations from the Producer's and Director's Guild of America The Diving Bell and the Butterfly would squeeze out Juno for the final Best Picture nomination. Had I seen Schnabel's film, I might not have made such an assertion, but while I have as little explanation as how Atonement registered before Into the Wild did, nor why I would have honestly thought that the screenplay for Knocked Up could have made it in before Ratatouille.  Considering how foretold every nomination was, I consider my predictions rather mezzo-mezzo. This year...

BEST PICTURE

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight

Frost/Nixon

Slumdog Millionaire

WALL-E

Ah, consensus! When The Dark Knight and Milk snagged citations from the Producer's and Directors' Guild of America, the lineup seemed entirely cut and dry, and despite Ron Howard's inclusion like one of the most eclectic assemblages of voices in ages. And yet, if I had been told a decade ago that I would be bummed to see Danny Boyle and David Fincher compete for the top award, I'd recommend a prescription for an anti-psychotic. Indeed, all the heavyweight front-runners appear somewhat archetypal of the Academy's embrace. The most heavily-weighted of heavyweights The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire are the expensive romantic  epic and the crowd-pleasing underdog respectively, while Frost/Nixon engages the post-9/11 liberal with a fight they can win even while structured like a Red State football movie. Gus Van Sant hasn't made as square a movie since Finding Forrester even as Armond White points out its chicken-hawking element, and only the margins of this Great Man Biopic represent anything earth-shattering. And if The Dark Knight has survived Comic Book Movie-prejudice for becoming a more universal phenomenon, it wouldn't be the first genre film to be recognized as more than just a blockbuster (The Fugitive, Gladiator, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense...).

The Oscar voting system is weighted in a points system wherein one votes for favorites first and down sequentially, which is why I am predicting a not-so out-of-nowhere vote for WALL-E because quite simply: it is everyone's favorite movie this year even more so than Slumdog Millionaire and that for the annual griping about a reason why a PIXAR movie cannot be nominated it seems like there truly is none. But what to fall? Basically the same movie for their oversights, Slumjamin Buttionaire is pretty safe. Frost/Nixon is more "liked" than loved. The Dark Knight is perhaps too successful (even whilst weighted, the biggest movie of the decade). And then there's Milk which reminds us that Prop. 8 did indeed pass, and that Crash did defeat Brokeback Mountain and perhaps for a reason...

SHOULD BE - Let the Right One In, Paranoid Park, Reprise, Synecdoche, New York, and WALL-E

BEST DIRECTOR

Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire

David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon

Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight

Gus Van Sant, Milk

As I've mentioned, it's hard to remember a year featuring a more eclectic group of talented if-not cutting edge storytellers nominated in one category. In 2009, not just the first but the second feature shot on HD will be nominated for Best Picture and both in very different fashions. Slumdog Millionaire may be a glorified music video but joyously so, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's astonishing visual effects meld seamlessly into its Chanel ad decor like some form of technical milestone if an inert one. On the other hand,  The Dark Knight boasts the quietest visual effects of the year as well as the largest exhibition screens of an Oscar contender in perhaps a decade. with its IMAX formatting. And in the decade since his nomination for Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant rose from the ashes of his own creation to reinvent himself as the last bastion American purveyor of pure celluloid with his "Death Trilogy" and this year's Paranoid Park, such that Milk is his straightest movie in ages. If I prefer Paranoid Park's playfulness, Van Sant's contributions in keeping the casually uncloseted homosexuality of Milk so honestly casual cannot be discounted as it remains one of the most typical and atypical Hollywood movies of the year.

Ron Howard's boldest directorial moves are usually that of a producer. In 2001, he allowed himself the freedom to film A Beautiful Mind in sequence, and this year he resisted the urge to recast the film with stronger draws much as John Patrick Shanley failed to do with Doubt and retained Langella and Sheen on board. If so, honor him as a producer and make way for a true craftsman like Darren Aronofsky, Jonathan Demme, or Mike Leigh? In this race, Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road), Stephen Daldry (The Reader), and Clint Eastwood (Racist Jackass) seem a bit old school and one remembers that if Ron Howard could wrestle an Oscar from a similarly eclectic lineup of have-it-their-way craftsmen as Altman, Jackson, Lynch, and Scott, then he can certainly do it again.

SHOULD BE - Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In), Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky), Andrew Stanton (WALL-E), Joachim Trier (Reprise), and Gus Van Sant (Paranoid Park)

BEST ACTOR

Clint Eastwood, Racist Jackass

Richard Jenkins, The Visitor

Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon

Sean Penn, Milk

Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

On-camera or off, this will go down as one of the lineups most riddled with assholes. The last time Sean Penn was in competition for this award, he faced off with notoriously anti-Hollywood Bill Murray. This year, it's Mickey Rourke who made it a point during his comeback to call Perez Hilton a fag in an interview double-digit times. It's doubtful that a bigger asshole will be nominated in some time than Rourke who recently wrestled the Golden Globe from Penn for his equally brilliant performance as Harvey Milk. Transformation vs. Inhabitation? Genius vs. Genius? Frank Langella will have to content himself with his Tony win and his all-but assured first career Oscar nomination as uber-asshole Tricky Dick.

Who else? The race comes down to four bad boys: Benicio Del Toro (Che), Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road), Clint Eastwood (Racist Jackass), and Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). While WALL-E's weighted number one votes will push it over the top in Best Picture, I fear that Del Toro's scantly-seen Che just hasn't been seen enough. DiCaprio and Revolutionary Road can't seem to compete with John Hamm and Mad Men, the preferred Nuclear Era suburban dystopia. And while Brad Pitt received both Golden Globe and SAG nominations, there's something so palely polite about his Benjamin Button. Forrest Gump was retarded. What's your excuse, Ben? Too much has been made of Pitt's age in the film and not experience. As Chad from Burn After Reading would say: "Appearances can be deceptive." And while nobody has anything but kind words to say about Clint Eastwood, has he ever played a bigger asshole that Walt Kowalski in Racist Jackass? Walt may have fought for his country but his road to redemption is littered with enough ethnic slurs to make Melvin Udall blush. My issue is that they're not funny but exhausting and that is not the point. We're invited to laugh at his lack of political correctness but there is as much gracelessness to the film's profanity as its casting, acting, and execution that one mourns for Eastwood's graceful shoulda-been swan song performance in Million Dollar Baby. Eastwood failed to nab Golden Globe or SAG nominations but the same thing happened with Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby so he's probably in.

That leaves the biggest asshole of all: Richard Jenkins. What a fucking dick this guy is? Learn to play piano when your wife is alive, dip-shit! Man, is there anything worse than a guy who lives his life out of a Screenwriting 101 class? Fuck that guy. Although I prefer his sweet performance in Burn After Reading before he and the movie quite literally gets its third act axed away, nobody can say anything bad about this forty year veteran actor who may never get another opportunity in the winner's circle for the quietest path to redemption this year.

SHOULD BE  - Sasson Gabai (The Band's Visit), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Synecdoche, New York), Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight), Sean Penn (Milk), and Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

BEST ACTRESS

Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married

Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky

Angelina Jolie, Changeling

Meryl Streep, Doubt

Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road

With Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, and Kate Winslet locked in, the field is wide open for two nomination slots. For a short while, Kristen Scott Thomas gave the performance of the year in I've Loved You So Long, but shortly before that Melissa Leo gave another quietly devastating performance in Frozen River. Their leads were substantially cut when Sally Hawkins began to pick up every award on the planet and deservedly so for Happy-Go-Lucky. For every person that despises Poppy's interminable pep, there's another devotee. A Golden Globe win secured her enough. That Thomas and Leo are in small films that now also have to contend with Wendy and Lucy's Michelle Williams splits their votes even more. That leaves The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's Cate Blanchett whom the Academy may never tire of but there certainly is enough of her in this film to last a lifetime, but I think the Academy will nominate Angelina Jolie for the same reason that Hawkins will. For every person who wants her to shut the fuck up, there's another that's impossibly moved by her screaming for her son. Last year, she was screaming for her husband in A Mighty Heart, so this year may be different. Or maybe - hopefully - she and Brad will have no choice but to stay home and watch cartoons with the brood.

SHOULD BE - Ronit Elkabetz (The Band's Visit), Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), Lina Leandersson (Let the Right One In), and Meryl Streep (Doubt)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Josh Brolin, Milk

Robert Downey, Jr., Tropic Thunder

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt

Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky

It's not just that Heath Ledger is going to posthumously win here for The Dark Knight, it's that he deserves to win Best Actor for The Dark Knight. Bale's Batman is such a subliminal presence in the film that Ledger Hannibal Lector's the shit out of Nolan's "social experiment". It's a great performance that is as close to a lock as anything this year or last. The only question is who will play pallbearer in wake of Ledger's victory? Philip Seymour Hoffman is becoming an Academy favorite and though he was as far superior this year in Synecdoche, New York as he was last year in The Savages to his nominated-turn in Charlie Wilson's War, he should have no trouble getting in for Doubt. Likewise, Robert Downey, Jr.'s "colorful" performance as a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude in Tropic Thunder seems to survive its comedy handicap, and that he IS Iron Man, the most newly-revered franchise since...well...Batman...can only help. And though he was snubbed the Golden Globes, Josh Brolin has picked up almost as many mentions for his troubled assassin in Milk as Ledger's killer. His well-regarded turn in W. as well as last year's watershed Brolin-ssaince should help him shoulder past costars Emile Hirsch and James Franco.

The Golden Globes may have ignored Brolin but they further mucked things up beyond their Annual Supporting Wanker Nomination (Will Ferrel in The Producers? John Travolta in Hairspray?) in citing Tom Cruise for Tropic Thunder, but also for nominating Ralph Fiennes for Keira Knightley's latest bomb The Duchess. The Screen Actor's Guild nominated Brolin, Downey, Jr., Hoffman, and Ledger alongside Dev Patel as his film's titular slumdog, an example of categorical "slumming" even more unforgivable than last year's supporting mention for Casey Affleck. At least Jesse James came first in the title, but without Patel you don't have a movie...which is fine by me. His pale protag has certainly impressed some people out there but it's impossible to divorce his performance from the fact that nobody knows who he is or whether or not he is simply playing himself. That leaves rageaholics Michael Shannon and Eddie Marsan. Shannon is the best actor that nobody knows about but Revolutionary Road's star is significantly falling and his two scenes may not be enough, especially considering how much meatier Marsan's are. He's riding Happy-Go-Lucky's critical momentum and Hawkins. Those who love Poppy will love to hate Marsan and that Mike Leigh is against all odds becoming an Academy darling bodes well for the thespian, even if "En Ra Ha" doesn't have the same catchphrase iconography as "Hit me!"

SHOULD BE - Robert Doweny, Jr. (Tropic Thunder), Emile Hirsch (Milk), Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky), Brad Pitt (Burn After Reading), and Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams, Doubt

Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Viola Davis, Doubt

Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

Kate Winslet, The Reader

In 2001, Rudin and Weinstein collaborated on David Hare's adaptation of Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours. It was directed by Stephen Daldry and pushed back a year so as to fully complete reshoots and post-production and as not to compete with Kidman's great year of The Others and Moulin Rouge!, the latter of which got her the first Oscar nomination of her career. Her arguably supporting performance would nominate for lead the following year and win her the Oscar. They did it again this year with the Hare-penned, Daldry-directed co-production of Bernard Schlink's The Reader, which though only competed principle photography some months ago and containing as much a heavyweight lead performance here as in Scott Rudin's baby Revolutionary Road. Despite Scott Rudin's pleas as to not compete with Road, Weinstein pushed ahead an is jockeying Winslet for supporting. One has to imagine that on some level, he must be regretting this movie as The Reader's showing has been somewhat anemic for a Holocaust film. And while Winslet's lead hasn't been cut by playing double-dutch as evidence from her two Golden Globe victories, Weinstein will be likely watching as closely as he did after promising to win Martin Scorsese his first Oscar for Gangs of New York.

If Winslet loses, it will be to another Weinstein film: Penelope Cruz's batshit jeenyoos artist in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The actress has won almost every single critic's prize for her genuinely supporting turn, and in every single race Viola Davis has appeared as the runner-up for her one indelible scene in Doubt. All three actresses have been nominated for Golden Globe and SAG nominations, as has Amy Adams whose performance in Doubt has been mildly criticized as too milquetoast even by her pale standards. She is one of three other contenders vying for the final two spots. Taraji P. Henson was cited by SAG but no the Golden Globe for Benjie's Mammy in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and while her role would seem to fit all criteria, she doesn't have one showy scene or even a close-up to push her over the top. Tomei fares better as a single-mother stripper in The Wrestler and despite not having SAG mention to go along with her Globe nomination. And while there's no reason why Rosemarie DeWitt should have come up empty-handed this season as the shrewd, titular Rach, she gives the kind of honest, performance on the margins of every scene that desperately needed the critical bolstering that always goes elsewhere. Tomei and Adams.

SHOULD BE - Hiam Abbass (The Visitor), Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married), Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler), Viktoria Winge (Reprise), and Alexis Zegerman (Happy-Go-Lucky)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Woody Allen, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Dustin Lance Black, Milk

Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky

Tom McCarthy, The Visitor

Jim Reardon & Andrew Stanton, WALL-E

Apparently, Woody Allen isn't just hot again...he's hot. The antiquated dirty old man has been replaced by a wizened sexual seer not unlike Marquez. How can you explain how he foudn the insight to write a bi-curious kiss between Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz? He just gets women. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is bollocks but it's the filmmaker's biggest hit in ages and should grab the writer his astonishing fifteenth nomination along with his nineteenth WGA nomination. Cited along him by the Guild are Dustin Lance Black for Milk and Tom McCarthy for The Visitor. The former is something close to a lock whereas McCarthy's second directorial ode to friendship should grab the actor-turned-filmmaker the nomination he was denied for The Station Agent.

The other two nominees were Robert Siegel whose conventional screenplay for The Wrestler seem to be least belove dpart of the package, and last year's winning weirdo's The Coen Brothers for Burn After Reading. As with all their comedies, reception has been sharply divided. Instead, voters may go for Jenny Lumet's script for Rachel Getting Married although Jonathan Demme has been getting the lion's share of attention, or Nick Schenk for Gran Torino and the unlikeliest catchphrase of the year: "Get off my lawn!" Or they could welcome Pillowman playwright Martin McDonagh in with his directorial debut In Bruges. Instead, I chalk of their respective absences to the fact that they lack Guild membership and predict PIXAR writing team Jim Reardon and Andrew Stanton for WALL-E and Mike Leigh for Happy-Go-Lucky. Whither Charlie Kaufman? The Academy, taking a cue from Woody Allen, prefers his earlier, funnier films. And what could be more ridiculous than Vicky Cristina Barcelona?

SHOULD BE - Burn After Reading, Happy-Go-Lucky, Reprise, Synecdoche, New York and WALL-E

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire

John Patrick Shanley, Doubt

Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon

Christopher & Jonathan Nolan, The Dark Knight

Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

It's time to lay the Comic Book Movie bullshit to rest. It's not just that The Dark Knight is no more a comic book movie than Ghost World, but that without its inclusion, this category is pretty much worthless. The Nolan Brothers' Gotham was home for the most thematically rich screenplay of the year and shames the competition. Both Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button have bupkiss-zero to say about Destiny Love or the meta-quandaries of aging backwards. They commit cardinal sins of Screenwriting 101: know thy theme! Worse so in a way if only because they are far more egregious are Morgan and Shanley whose non-adaptation of their Tony-winning plays feel both narratively anemic and overly-stagy respectively. Plays are not movies.

Both The Reader and Revolutionary Road could take a stab at them if they were more liked. David Hare's screenplay is less a source of blame than Haythe's adaptation of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, is is likely to take the fifth spot should Christopher and Jonathan Nolan fail to make the cut. Simon Beaufoy is almost guaranteed to win.

SHOULD BE - The Dark Knight, Let the Right One In, Paranoid Park...God, there are so many more great Original Screenplays that won't be nominated like A Christmas Tale and Rachel Getting Married that I didn't cite in the previous category.