Review: Another Year

     I have come out as a pretty strong anti-realist in terms of cinema in many an article on this blog. I have explained my view that films are an unique art form where the use of controlling moving images along with combinations of other influences (music as one example) give an artist an unlimited tool bag to express their emotions and ideas, and by trying to capture some non-existent "real" of the everyday, the artist not only limits the potential of the medium, but fails to capture the overarching theme of life itself: emotions. The thing is though, while I steadfastly hold on to these beliefs, there is no genre that is in and of itself, by definition, bad. In general, one genre may have its weakness and I am okay with characterizing the genre as such, but a good artist is a good artist, and their are always ways to overcome any artistic challenge (such as amazing insight). My preferences though led me be somewhere quite significantly less than excited to see Mike Leigh's "Another Year", which from the trailers look to be a heavy-handed exercise in realist cinema, but to my pleasant surprise what I saw instead was an insightful character study of a certain type of lonely older-middle-age personality that is all too common in life.

If I Picked the Winners: Best Adapted Screenplay 2010

     The Adapted Screenplay tends to be where the heavy hitters are every year in the writing awards. If you look throughout the history of the Oscars, the Best Picture winner, and a fair share of the nominees as well, tend to come from the Adapted category, not the Original category. I'm not sure why this is. It just may be that coming up with a great original story is so much significantly harder than repurposing one already told for the sake of cinema, but whatever the cause, the Adapted race is usually where it is at in terms of predicting the Best Picture (not that they are necessarily better than the Original Screenplays though). This year's nominees is a fairly good slate, with some big names (including three past winners in the category), as well as a duet of newcomers. All of the scripts are from films I generally liked, although I was a bit disappointed with one of the screenplays. Even though I was not surprised it failed to receive a nomination, it was disappointing that the Academy did not make room for Laeta Kalogridis' adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel "Shutter Island". Lehane has served as one of the leading literary inspirations for filmmakers of the last decade along with J.K Rowling and that lady who writes the Twilight series (sorry, I don't care enough to look up her name, something Meyer I think), as his novels-turned-into-films such as "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone" helped set off the 2000's Boston Cinema Renaissance. Kalogridis' adaptation of "Shutter Island" may be the best adaptation of Lehane's work so for. In particular, the film's closing line, "Which would be worst, to live as a monster or die as a good man?", which was not in the book, puts a whole new interesting spin on the story. In my own personal ballot, I would have also included Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall for their wonderful adaptation of the comic book, "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World", but since I don't have a say, I guess it's all a moot point. This is a good slate of nominees though, so let's get to the ranking.

News: Top 100 Limey Films

     Given the popularity of my "Top 100" countdown, I take it that, as myself, most of you enjoy "Top #" lists. I thought then I should alert you to a list by Time Out of the "Top 100 British Films". They made the list by pulling together the Top 10 lists from many different people in the film industry, from actors to directors to producers to journalists. Unlike most of these type of lists, they also let you view each individuals ballot, which was something I enjoyed skimming through. There are a lot of films on the list I have yet to see, but there are a lot of good films as well, including two films in my own personal top 5, "The Third Man" (#2 on their list), and "Lawrence of Arabia" (#23 on their list, which is definitely too low in my opinion). I was disappointed that Edgar Wright's two British comedies, "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", did not make the list, but as time goes on hopefully Wright's films will grow in reputation among the film elite. Anyway, if you want to take a look at the entire list, as well as the individual contributors Top 10 lists, click here.

News: Oscar Rarity Tomorrow at 10:00 PM

     I just wanted to alert any Oscar obsessed people like my self that a rare opportunity will be available to you tomorrow at 10 PM on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Every Oscar season, TCM has its "31 Days of Oscar", in which the network shows only Oscar winning or nominated films for 31 days. As part of this great program, tomorrow at 10 PM, TCM will be playing the 1933 winner for Best Picture, "Cavalcade". The reason I mention this, is that "Cavalcade" is only Best Picture winner not to be put on DVD, making it extremely hard to see. In fact, it is one of the few films the Academy has awarded Best Picture that I have yet to see (there are 9 altogether, including "Cavalcade"), which is why, despite the film's supposed mediocrity, I am extremely excited to check it out tomorrow night. If you like knowing your Oscar history, don't pass up this opportunity tomorrow at 10 PM.

News: Two Writing Awards Weigh In

     It feels sort of sacrilegious to be writing about Oscar season in a weekend meant for total dedication towards football, but since there were a few more awards given out, I thought I should update anyone interested. First, the USC Scripter award for "the best adaptation of the printed word into film" went to Aaron Sorkin and Ben Mezrich for "The Social Network", which was adapted from Mezrich's book "The Accidental Billionaires". Sorkin also picked up another award this weekend at the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) awards for Best Adapted Screenplay (although these awards are diminished somewhat by the fact that so many film's are ruled ineligible due to the guild's ridiculous eligibility rules). With his unfortunate snub by the directors' branch of the Academy, I was also happy to see Christopher Nolan win something this awards season, as he won the WGA's Best Original Screenplay award for his script for the film "Inception". "Inception" was also the recipient of the Art Directors' Guild award for Best Art Direction in the Fantasy category. The guild's other two categories, Period and Contemporary, went to "The King's Speech" and "Black Swan" respectively. That's about the only award news this weekend, so I hope you had a great Super Bowl weekend, and congratulations to the Green Bay Packers on winning Super Bowl XLV.

If I Picked the Winners: Best Director 2010

     It might not be as fun or sexy as counting down my 100 favorite films, but to replace the countdown weekly column, I am bringing back the "If I Picked the Winners" weekly column. If you didn't read any of the previous installments in these articles, the idea behind them is that I pick one of the "big 8" Oscar categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay) in a year where I have seen all the nominees in that category, and rank them, from my least favorite to my favorite. The fun thing about this as a writer (and hopefully for you readers too) is that, given that the Academy's batting average is below 1.000 in my book I get to write about both films I really love, and films I can't stand. Now since we are currently in the middle of an Oscar season, I thought I would start off this reboot by covering all the "big 8" categories of this year's nominees. Admittedly, I still need to see a few films that are nominated in these categories (4 to be precise: "Animal Kingdom", "Another Year", "Blue Valentine", and "Buitiful"), but I am definitely planning to catch these films within the next eight weeks, so I think we should be set.

     For the first week back, and seeing how this blog is called auteurfan, I figured I would start with this year's Best Director race (which you can vote on at the poll to the left). Frankly, this year's Best Director race is just as much about who is not there as who is. In particular, for the second time in three years, the director's branch of the Academy somehow managed to leave out one of the leading auteurs in the business today, Mr. Christopher Nolan. Now I am not totally in love with Nolan's "Inception" like some are, I found it to rely too heavily on it's concept to do the heavy lifting, but even though it did not quite live up to my lofty expectations, it is still one of the better films of the year and Nolan deserved to be part of this group. You would think that, after the travesty of leaving him out of the Best Director's race in 2008 for the masterpiece that was "The Dark Knight" (which along with a Best Picture snub, caused the Academy to change it's nominating process and the amount of nominees in the Best Picture category), they might throw Nolan a bone and give him a nomination this time. Apparently not though, as the members of the director's branch of the Academy clearly have something about Nolan or his films that they can't embrace. I don't know if Nolan's films are too populace and not artistic enough for this crowd (they did manage to leave out Steven Spielberg of the Best Director's race in 1975 when he broke on to the scene with the all-time classic "Jaws"), but whatever it is, I sure don't understand it. At least Nolan is in good company this year though. Danny Boyle, who just received an Oscar for his last effort, "Slumdog Millionaire" (an overrated film in my opinion), was left out for his excellent work in one of my favorite films of the year, "127 Hours". Meanwhile, one of the all-time greats, Martin Scorsese, is also absent from this year's list for his under-appreciated "Shutter Island". Of course, there were many deserving nominated directors as well though, as this year's nominees read as a playlist of some of the most influential auteurs working in the business today. The question is then, out of all the big names, who is the most deserving of the award?

Notes: A Few Changes

     I just thought I would make everyone aware that, since the countdown of my 100 favorite films seemed to be really popular, I made a separate archive just for those articles. This way, if you ever felt like reading a write-up of one of the films again, or maybe if you wanted to rent one of the films but couldn't remember it's name, it will be easier to find and scan these articles. Also, I have added a poll to the left that I am planning to change about every week. This week's poll is on who you think should (not will) win this year's Oscar for Best Director, so go ahead and pick your favorite out of the five nominees.