Filed under: Academy Awards, Upcoming Movies | Tags: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
I skimmed Sasha’s writeup, not wanting to spoil too much of the film for myself. Button’s going to be an interesting animal. You know all too well that I’m an unabashed Fincher fan, but for much of the year, I couldn’t help thinking that Button could be this year’s Sweeney Todd. Remember last year, how you were certain that Sweeney would be a big-time Oscar player, and I was going “Wait–I know Tim Burton’s a very well-liked director, but since when have any of his films been big Oscar players?!?”. Well, we all know how that one turned out, and while Fincher’s movies do generally snag a nomination or so, his name is hardly the guarantor of an Oscar contender. On top of that, virtually nobody has actually SEEN this movie–Sasha’s review is one of the first I’ve read. But now that news is trickling out, it looks like you might be right. Eric Roth is also pretty reliable, and has churned out a couple of my all-time favorites, so I see no reason he can’t do it again.
Still, I’m going to exercise a little caution optimism on this one. Remember, Sasha always goes batshit-crazy over some movie, guaranteeing us all that it’s a flat-out BP shoo-in. She did it for “King Kong” in 2005, and “The Dead Girl” (THE DEAD GIRL!) last year. Let’s let this chicken hatch first.
[Eitan]
Sasha Stone’s extremely eloquent write-up of Benjamin Button this evening got me very, very excited for the film. I usually hate setting things up as a constant parallel to past years, but it’s inevitable. I flat-out think that Button is going to be this year’s There Will Be Blood — a perplexing, highly literary period piece by a director who is known for creating dark, quiet epics and underrated works of pop intellectualism. I don’t think it will have the same sort of instant cult masterpiece following the way Blood did, but that’s partially due to the fact that Daniel Day-Lewis held There Will Be Blood together in a way rarely seen these days and the fact that it was truly weird in ways people weren’t expecting.
So even though buzz around it has slightly petered out as a lot of people have started stacking their list with some combination of Milk, Doubt, Slumdog, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, and The Dark Knight (which will play out as this year’s great big question mark up until the very end, depending on what happens with the guilds), expect Button to emerge as the weird cult fave pushed by the same people who loved Blood last year.
Filed under: Academy Awards, Commentary | Tags: Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon, Richard Nixon, Sam Rockwell
[Elliot]
Because I’m a masochist, I walked straight down the hall after my 3-hours-and-change screenwriting class tonight to catch the 2-hours-and-change “Frost/Nixon”.
Overall, it doesn’t strike me as being a serious Oscar contender. It’s roughly what you’d expect from the Ron Howard/Peter Morgan pedigree: a very capably-made film that covers all the basics but fails to really hit home on the emotional level that’s really required for a BP nom.
What works:
Frank Langella, whose Nixon starts out as just a good impression, but in the second half he really has the opportunity to explore this character and get at what makes him tick.
The basic story, which is interesting enough to more than hold our interest; the film never dragged, kept you on your toes and all that good stuff.
What doesn’t:
Most of the supporting performances and characters, which are not only painted too thinly in relation to the eponymous Two, but are also pretty universally ho-hum in terms of performances. The usually-great Michael Sheen is on autopilot, Sam Rockwell gives the worst of the three performances I’ve seen him give this year, and Kevin Bacon and “Vicky Cristina”’s Rebecca Hall get throwaway roles.
There’s a really lame expository technique used here that I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen in any other movie, probably because it’s so inherently stupid. During the first act, we are treated to a series of talking head interviews with key players in the story in which they set the historical scene. Only, instead of an actual interview with Frost researcher James Reston, Jr., we get a mock interview with Sam Rockwell, who plays him in the film. The interviews are shot like a real interview, with dialogue made to sound ad-libbed and with care even taken to make the film look like typical 1970s stock, so it’s disorienting to see Sam Rockwell claim to BE the character even in an interview setting, particularly considering Reston is still alive. Howard ought to have taken a page from George Clooney’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and interviewed the actual figures. It’s hard to explain why this technique feels so wrong, but it really does–there were audible titters in the theater the first time Rockwell came up. This stopped after the first 15 minutes or so, so I was ready to move on, figuring that our long opening credits nightmare was over, but they came back to it several more times over the course of the film.
The treatment of Nixon himself was nuanced, and allowed the man a chance to give us his side of the story, but I would have liked more. The problem is that for the story to work, Nixon has to be the antagonist, so for dramatic purposes, Morgan COULDN’T have written him too sympathetically, but after seeing how sympathetically Oliver Stone was able to portray W in “W.” (and because I’m just a big Nixon apologist) I would have liked to see the man as something more than just the Face of Watergate.
Overall, it’s a fascinating film for the raw information it gives you and for Langella’s work, but don’t expect to see more than a nom or two at this year’s awards. I give it a Metacritic 70.