Podcast: Oscar Switches, Summer Dreams

See?

We are trying to get weekly. We recorded the new podcast early this week (included at the end of this post) as today I knew I would be all wrapped up in a wedding. Well, attending one that is. But you know how time consuming they are. It was a lovely snowy Connecticut wedding and I'm just back. So here is the new podcast. There's a bit of a lull in Oscar happenings as we wait for the big night, so this week, Joe and Katey and I go a little more Off-Gold than usual. 

Topics include:

• Chris Nolan (Inception and a brief Memento cameo)
• The Jesse Eisenberg Show 
• Spirit Award Best Actress ballot. Could there be a Natalie Portman upset?
• The success of the Best Picture field at the box office
• Our individual least favorite Best Picture nominees (surprising results!)
• Toy Story 3. Is it a great movie or just a great 15 year narrative?
• Oscar Narratives. Reading purpose.
• Super 8 and Superbowl trailers
• Crushing on Michael Fassbender
• Nostalgia for Harrison Ford
• Reese Witherspoon: "Think about your choices, lady!"
• Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher

Join the conversation in the comments.

Podcast: Oscar Switches, Summer Dreams

Podcast: Now With Three Dream Layers

Actually it's just a reg'lar ol' podcast. But Nick, Joe and Katey are three and they're dreamy so that counts. My blog pals are back to discuss the Oscar race with me (if you're new I'm Nathaniel). Topics covered include...

• "Best of Sundance"
• Katey's interview with James Marsh
• Melissa Leo's personal FYC ads (see below -via)
• Just how many Oscars can The King's Speech win?
• Banksy for Exit Through The Gift Shop and other Docs
  
• The Social Network's editing
• David Fincher's frankness
• The Color Purple reunion on Oprah
• Toy Story 3 and the over-arching Pixar narrative
• Chris Nolan and Inception's Oscar hopes
• And more silliness...

Listen to podcast located at the end of this post. Join in the dreamy conversation in the comments.

wake me up. wake me uppppppppp

Melissa Leo's personal FYC ads

Podcast: The King's Kick

RIP Oscar Hopeful (Dec 2nd, 2010 - Jan 25th, 2011)

For the next month everyone including everyone here at The Film Experience will be fawning all over the twenty thespians lucky enough to be Oscar nominated as well as another few handfuls of people in various races that people will be honoring/discussing/interviewing. But snubs are what has to happen when Oscar goes gaga for the films they go gaga for in multiple categories each year. Quoth the Coen Bros this morning...

“Ten seems like an awful lot. We don't want to take anyone else's."
-Joel & Ethan Coen responding to the True Grit nominations.

So our condolescences to all the industry professionals whose hard work went unrewarded this morning. Not everyone can be nominated.

THE MAJOR SNUBS
And we mean "snub" in the sense of films or performances many thought would place. Qualitative snubbing is a different discussion with some overlap depending on one's own opinion.

Mila Kunis (Black Swan) joins Cameron Diaz in that rare list of beauties who've been Globe and SAG nominated but have not gone on to an Oscar nomination. Was it going down on that sweet girl Natalie Portman? Was it merely that the Academy just wasn't as into Black Swan as precursor voting bodies were? Was fellow Swan snubee Barbara Hershey also pulling a significant amount of votes away? Was it Black Swan fatigue? It has been omnipresent for over a month now.

How she could console herself: Her electric but relaxed life force in the movie -- as Nick recently observed how often does someone seem "casual" yet still impresses in an Aronofsky movie? -- will undoubtedly endear her to auteurs. She doesn't seem at all fearless, does she? And she's 27, the idealish age for actressy job offers.
Next up: Friends With Benefits (2011) another showdown of sorts with Natalie Portman given that Portman is in theaters right now with similarly themed movie.

Robert Duvall (Get Low) was, for some time, looking at his 7th nomination for playing an eccentric hermit who stages his own funeral party. Perhaps the mellow film t'was what undid him;  eccentric hermits should possibly come with more eccentric films? Perhaps it was the release date though I'm always loathe to suggest that every film should wait until late in the year too appear and the early release date sure didn't hurt Jacki Weaver or Toy Story 3 or The Kids Are All Right team. Maybe it was just too many men in the running and Jeff Bridges's blocking the Great American Actor establishment vote?

How he could console himself: nomination or no, he's still one of the most rewarded and legendary actors of American cinema.
Next up: Seven Days in Utopia (2011), a sports drama with Melissa Leo and his Get Low co-star Lucas Black

Christopher Nolan (Inception) is beloved by his peers in the Director's Guild but not beloved by the tiny percentage of his peers in the Director's Branch of AMPAS.  He's now won 3 DGA nominations (Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception) none of which were converted to Oscar nominations. This is a very uncommon situation though Rob Reiner must know how he feels after three similar golden cliff dives for Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men.

How he could console himself: He's still an Oscar nominee (Screenplay, though he's a better director than a writer so that's a bit...odd) and with his vast fortunes, he could probably buy the Academy and reshape it in his own image. Plus: If his populist appeal continues he's easily looking at a Steven Spielberg like trajectory with Oscar wherein as soon as he makes a film in a genre they love (World War II? Dramatic Story Without Genre Elements?) they will shower him with gold.
Next up: The Dark Knight Rises (2012) the casting for which we just discussed.

Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) provided his zeitgeisty movie with a beating everyman heart. But today it was life imitating art.

You're going to get left behind!

How he could console himself: Every little boy dreams of being a superhero but he gets to do  it; nobody else gets to be the new Peter Parker/ Spider-Man. There's that plus the multiple offers that will be coming his way after a meteoric rise these past two years with four films that greatly benefitted from his gifts (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Red Riding Hood, Never Let Me Go, and The Social Network)
Next up: Spider-Man (2012) though we suspect that he'll film something else right after it and see that released before the webslinger arrives.

Ryan Gosling (Blue Valentine) he may be the best actor of his generation but Oscar likes their Best Actor nominees to be closer to middle age. This year the field was already pushing the limits of their invisible age barriers with Jesse Eisenberg and James Franco both in the mix.

How he could console himself: Hey Girl, whenever he plays the romantic lead, his co-star gets tons of attention and great reviews (Kirsten Dunst, Rachel McAdams and Michelle Williams) which means that every actress in his age range wants him. I mean wants to co-star with him.
Next up: Crazy Stupid Love a romantic comedy with an all star cast, Drive a dramatic action flick with Carey Mulligan and the stage adaptation The Ides of March with an all star cast of Oscar nominees plus Evan Rachel Wood

poll by twiigs.com

Finally...

Though the following films were not really expected to place in a major way they came up with ZERO nominations despite a hefty presence involving one specific category or another in the discussions this year. The zero tally films:

• Conviction - had an outside shot at two acting races. Nothing materialized.
• Made in Dagenham -seemed like a supporting actress & costume option early on.
• Never Let Me Go -seemed like it had a shot at Original Score.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World -was never going to place but that's not for lack of worthiness, particular in the visual effects department where the artists had so much fun with the vidgame stylizations.
• Shutter Island -seemed like it could get anywhere from zero to 5 nominations what with its busy much lauded below the line talent. Zero was the correct answer.

Apart from these former hopefuls, who were you most sad for this morning?

all Oscar race posts
complete list of nominations

Distant Relatives: Solaris and Inception

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema.

Less human than human

It may seem hard to believe now but the original intent of science fiction wasn't mindless entertainment. These days, the intelligent sci-fi movie is rare enough that it needs to be noted, but back in a time before time, exploring issues of social awareness, philosophy, and humanity was the purpose genre. Inception is a film that's been criticized and accused of a good many things. It's been called too complex, and not complex enough, shallow, convoluted and cold. But in its best moments and in what it eventually narrows down to it hints at this question: In the equation of reality, how much is objective fact and how much is our own perceptions and projections? Should we and can we accept the parts of reality that may or may not exactly be real?

We don't know for sure if Andrei Tarkovsky, famous heady Russian filmmaker would find fault anywhere in Inception. But it's well known that his most famous film Solaris was a reaction to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he considered too cold and distant. That film follows Kris Kelvin, a scientist widower who travels to investigate strange occurrences aboard a the Solaris space station. Once there his wife reappears to him, although both she and he know that she is merely a projection of his psyche made flesh by the mysterious planet Solaris. After failed attempts to send her away (she keeps reappearing), Kelvin must decide whether he'd rather lose a lonely reality in turn for a world of fiction... but potential happiness.

Connections between the two films are immediately apparent. Both protagonists' wives are not only deceased, but of suicide, a plot device responsible for creating the most intense grief.  Both films present us with two states of being, either Earth/Solaris or dreams/waking and both protagonists must decide between the two of them.
 
In Inception, all of the business about implanting an idea in a man's head and corporate intrigue is almost a macguffin, a plot device which exists to place DiCaprio's Cobb deep into his own subconsious (represented by the Limbo). Here is a concept that Solaris does not share. There is no macguffin, no sideways entrance into the psyche. Tarkovsky doesn't wait long (by Tarkovsky standards) to put Kelvin into contact with his "wife".

You don't really exist

just reflections of real people

Each film's protagonist is a man in reality. When the film asks questions about humanity we experience it through him, his pain, his desperateness, and ultimately his decision to accept or reject reality. But to appreciate the questions raised it helps to understand the events through the prism of the deceased wives. Kelvin's wife Hari has consciousness and is by all standards an autonomous being but one who realizes that she is a construct of her husband's perception. Inception's Mal, as a projection of Cobb isn't necessarily a sentient being, but as we see her in flashbacks, as we know the real Mal, we see a woman who is constantly uncertain of whether or not the world around her is real or not, and struggles to knw how much of it is simply her creation. These women give us a good sense of how these films view the human condition, in both an active and passive sense. We need not be in a dream to wonder how much of the world around us is influenced by our own projections like Mal, nor do we need to know we're fictitous like Hari to recognize that the only understanding anyone can ever have of us is skewed by their own subjectivity. The world never exists in an objective state to us, and we never exist in an objective state to the world.
 
When Inception begins Cobb is already mimicing Mal's state of uncertainty at the reality of their reality. Cobb understands that dreams can be so convincing that one can become lost without ever knowing it. Conversely Kelvin doesn't fear getting caught in unreality and is always aware that his wife is, in fact, not real. But he fails to recognize the power of the dream and soon her unreality doesn't seem to matter as much to him.

'Tis better to have loved and lost...

would you give up reality if it never existed in the first place?

You mean more to me than any scientific truth. - Solaris

In comparing Inception with Solaris, it's easy to dismiss Inception as the big blockbuster for the masses that gives its medicine with a heaping helping of sugar while trumping Solaris as a highly-demanding work of art that isn't diluted by explosions and car chases. But that would be unfair. Nolan may serve up his philosophizing surrouneded by a buffer of entertainment but he's reached more people recently than Solaris, which wasn't exactly a big hit when it was released even among the idealized, Godfather and Nashville-going audiences of the 1970's. If anything, Inception proves that people aren't as opposed to complex films as Hollywood thinks. No, Steven Soderberg's Solaris didn't do so well, nor would Tarkovsky's today, though I doubt either of those men would have made changes for the sake of a bigger audience.

Which suggests that audiences will only go so far. Yes, Inception's insight isn't at the level of Solaris's, and yes Inception is often criticized for glossing over its climactic reality vs fiction decision. But like Solaris, the film ends on a vague suggestion that all along, the distinction between fact and fantasy may not have really made a difference. One great writer said of the film, "This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible." Of which film, you ask? Such is their similarity that it could be either. And I have to wonder, does the reality matter?

Purrfect Anne Hathaway Has Big Stilettos To Fill.

A horror movie serial is opening (at least) every month all over the internet for the next 18 months. It's called News and Rumors and Collective Freakouts Concerning Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. With each new chapter the internet will shiver and tremble, cry out or shake with alarm, fury, disbelief, fear and finally cathartic release. The latest chapter involves two official casting reveals from Nolan himself. The first is that Inception's Tom Hardy will be playing the grotesquely muscular "Bane" (who we last saw onscreen in the fiasco Batman & Robin, 1997) and the second is that Anne Hathaway, she of the backless gowns and "look at me, I'm fabulous!" nakedity in Love and Other Drugs, will be playing Selina Kyle. Selina is, rather famously, Catwoman's alter ego but given Nolan's two previous Batman films we have no indication that we'll actually get Selina as Catwoman, just that we're getting Selina. 

Julie Newmar (the first Catwoman) | Anne Hathaway (the latest)

Remember when Sam Raimi kept setting up Dylan Baker to play The Lizard in his Spider-Man trilogy and never delivered?

I'd say the most we can hope for is that Anne gets to let her bitchy freak side fly a bit. Rachel Getting Married minus the babbling and the "L'Haim!"s divided by Get Smart physicality? She'll probably use a weapon at some point but sadly, it'll probably be a plain ol' gun and not sewing machine claws. What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't exactly expect her to have nine mystical lives or suit up and throwdown with Christian Bale with pithy one liners and claws out. Maybe she'll get a whip if we're lucky. Nolan likes his female characters as dangerous window dressing or as damsels in distress and on either front Hathaway will be terrific. Or at least more terrific than previous Nolan women.

Believe it or not I don't consider the role too sacred to be recreated. (Someone will reinterpret The Joker before too long, too, even though everyone currently thinks that that'll never happen. It always happens. Trust.) Superheroes and Villians are just from that school of roles that are meant to be constantly reinterpreted, like uh.. .Shakespearean protagonists! Not that the birth of any new feline fatale will ever measure up to Michelle Pfeiffer and that snowy alley with pussies galore.

We'll always hear her roar.