Tues Top Ten: The Year in Dance Scenes

Michael C. here. Over at Serious Film I've been handing out awards for 2012, but when I tried to name the dance scene of the year I realized 2012 was too packed with great contenders to choose only a single champion. So here is a more comprehensive list of the best scenes where characters couldn't fight their dancing feet.

Honorable Mentions

I consider Holy Motor's accordion scene more parade than dance otherwise it would surely top this list. Likewise I don't know quite how to classify Philip Seymour Hoffman's disturbing performance during The Master's nude party fantasy although it certainly impossible to forget. As for Magic Mike all the movie's dance scenes blended together in my memory, so maybe some Ladies of Tampa can enlighten me in the comments as to which one was the standout. 

 Top 10 Dance Scenes of 2012 

10. Take This Waltz 
I wasn’t as in love with this infidelity drama as many were, but it had a handful of great scenes where I could see what everybody else was so excited about. The finest was a house party where the secret life of Michelle Williams’ character threatens to spill out into public view on the dance floor to the tune of Feist’s terrific cover of Leonard Cohen’s Closing Time. 

9. Silver Linings Playbook (and 8 more films after the jump)

Click to read more ...

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Easter Parade"

If you have yet to join in the "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series we urge you to participate next week on April 11th when we look at a movie you've surely seen: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). Last time we did an animated film we had a super turnout. All you have to do is 1) choose your favorite shot 2) post it on your blog, tumblr, site or pinterest page before next Wednesday night and 3) let me know. Presto, The Film Experience links up. The first step, choosing your best shot, is the only hard part.

This week's film is EASTER PARADE (1948).  

I love a perfect title. Easter Parade promises exactly what it delivers. The Judy Garland / Fred Astaire musical features two actual easter parades which form a through line on which the film can hang its gowns and musical numbers. In the first Nadine (Ann Miller), Don Hewes' (Fred Astaire) ex-girlfriend and ex-dance partner, stops traffic with a smashing gown and the chic accessories that are her show dogs.  Hewes, still hurt over the breakup promises his new partner Hannah (the immortal Judy Garland) that a year from then she'll be the one that no one can take their eyes off of. But the title offers more than just these two holidays. The movie is an easter parade all by itself. The whole movie doubles as one big lavish procession of color. It's got all the yellows, greens, whites, blues, pinks and purples you could possibly expect from an easter movie and every other color in the rainbow, too. Like many real parades it's alternately amazing and garish but there's always something to gawk at for better and worse.

The "worse" would be a hateful brown and pink gown (gag) that may well be the ugliest thing I've ever seen on Judy Garland. The "best" might be the white into hot pink gown that Nadine just floats in near the climax when she attempts to take Don back from Hannah.

The two shots that thrilled me the most both exploded by focusing on only one particularly saturated color. The first of these was Ann Miller's bright yellow gloves and bright yellow tear away skirt in her jaw-dropping toe-tapping solo "Shakin' the Blues Away". 

Keep dancing (and reading)

Click to read more ...

Tues Top Ten Pt 1: Takeaways from the 84th Oscars

We love to do top tens on Tuesdays and more of them will be coming your way soon. Today's top ten is not strictly ascending, some of these moments I loved and some I decidedly did not but they're ten things that I'm thinking about today and that I imagine will always come up when I think of the 84th Oscars.

TOP TEN TAKEAWAYS
Things to remember, for better and for worse, from the 84th Oscars

10 Direction is Everything With Dance
When I first heard they were doing a Cirque Du Soleil number at the Oscars, I groaned. Not that I don't enjoy the odd acrobatic but why at the Oscars? If you want it to be a variety show, stop being so inexcusably high and mighty about the Original Song category (that music branch and those rules. sigh) and start nominating 5 songs each year like in every other category. There are several songs this year that might have made for great ceremony moments. But when it began with that graceful, hypnotic liftoff via North by Northwest, my spirit lifted off with the twinned Cary Grants And then crashed back down to earth when I realized that the guy in the control booth had ADD and felt it necessary to show me closeups during big elaborately choreographed acrobats, which made for entirely confusing moments. Sometimes you couldn't even tell what film clips they were dancing to.

There's a certain cross-section of film critics that have been so cynical and mean spirited about our Best Picture, The Artist, that you'd think it was directed by Ed Wood, Alan Smithee or Michael Bay. They've been so weirdly hyperbolic about their hatred that it's been hard to actually hear an argument within the bile. But the Cirque Du Soleil number only served to illustrate how wise Michel Hazanavicius was with the physicality of The Artist, especially in its last glorious continuous take moments where you could see (wait for it) ENTIRE BODIES DANCING. This is quite possibly the simplest visual performance concept of all, that to understand / absorb / fully enjoy a dance, you have to see the body. It's such a simple concept that 96% of the (modern) time, directors screw it up. Well done Hazanavicius. Should the Oscars choose to ever have musical numbers again, please hire a control booth with less panicy "ohmygodthey'llgetbored" insecurities. It's hardly ever boring to watch great dancing / acrobatics / performances. It's only boring when you can't see them and are forced again and again to look at one particular detail at the expense of the whole.

09 David Fincher's Oscar Stride
With Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's semi-surprise win in film editing for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (I predicted it as the "spoiler" should there be one and now of course I wish I'd just gone for it fully) they achieved an Oscar miracle: it's the first back-to-back editing Oscar since 1935/1936 when Ralph Dawson took home prizes for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Anthony Adverse. Baxter and Wall won last year for The Social Network and though they really are superb editors, what this most definitely illustrates (along with the great guild showing for Dragon Tattoo) is that David Fincher has really hit his stride with the Academy. It took them a long time to get there but now that they're there expect every one of his films to win nominations in some category or another. It was hard not to view the clip selection for Rooney Mara as the Academy own cheeky response to Fincher's preemptory quipping about his movie's AMPAS fate.

There's too much anal rape in this movie to get nominated."

08 Leggy Angelina
Angelina has always felt a bit like a cartoon version of a movie star, so overripe, so perfectly visual. The best part is that she knows it. Her strut to standing hip swung leg out pose was so deliciously diva that it must be celebrated (and mocked by the next Oscar winner) immediately thereafter.

07 Movie Stars Talking About Movies Is Love.
King Kong Morgan Freeman talking King Kong. Brad's amusing description of The Gargantuans. Adam Sandler talking James Bond and Sean Connery's chest hair and saying "can i please do that?" (um which part?) And most of all Gabby Sidibe marveling over "My Left Foot" (who knew?) we love this sort of thing.

"Nader & Simin" watching Farhadi accept the Oscar

06 Art is Global. Art is Political. Art is Good For the World.
Asghar Farhadi and cast were present and Iran won its first Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Farhadi got political in his speech and we're glad he did. Though some of the sentiment was lost in his English, we appreciate any reminder that respectful discourse and rich cultural exchange is possible and admirable, especially in the face of so much lowest common denominator politics. So many politicians these days play on people's worst instincts toward hostility and resentment for all, never thinking through the effects of war mongering rhetoric.

But back to the movies. We hope that A Separation marks a turning point and the category that used to give us the Bergmans and the Fellinis of the world will return to its roots and start giving statues to the masterpieces again. What a great start.

FIVE MORE TO GO - from Jessica to Emma Stone.
But what's your take on these five topics?

A Quick Exchange With "W.E."'s Andrea Riseborough

I don't normally attend roundtable interviews since there's little you can do about every other article on the person having the exact same quotes but to finally meet Madonna (on the W.E. campaign trail) it was worth it. When we were done with the Queen, Andrea Riseborough breezed into the room. It's been pretty clear on the promotional trail that Andrea and Madonna get along famously. (Andrea describes their relationship as "artistically complicit.") She's one of those actresses that totally seizes your attention onscreen, but you might actually walk right by her on the street without noticing her. She's a tiny slip of a thing who comes fully alive on the screen through some sort of magical alchemy with the camera.

Andrea and Madonna, artistically and sartorially complicit at the Globes

Not that she isn't engaging in person. The thirty-year old rising star was erudite, thoughtful and talked a mile a minute, each question setting off a flurry runaway train of thought. Upon entering the room a reporter bizarrely asked her who she was wearing though no red carpet was anywhere in sight. Riseborough, rolling with the odd start, spun her head a bit as she took her seat.

"You almost made me do that thing in Death Becomes Her where she turns her head around," she said bemused. (Alberto Ferretti if you must know.)

She talked a lot about the film's aesthetic, Wallis Simpson's own aesthetic, humorously blaming Wallis for being one of those women who forced actresses into near androgyny with expectations of rail-thinness. "'You can't be too rich or too thin' was such an honest statement but also she was sending her own frivolity up. But also she had terrible stomach ulcers. Work with what you got. Make the absolute best of what is there. Because really you can work a lot. And at times she had very little. She looked virtually anorexic. She was ill really. So she made it chic. She was very pragmatic in that way."

After the jump: Andrea on the Oscar nominated costumes and answering my question about dancing FOR Madonna...

Click to read more ...

10 Word Reviews: The Ides of Miss Pina Bala's March of Shame

I think you'll agree that we've had our best festival coverage ever with our NYFF write-ups (thanks to Kurt & Michael for their continued input) but even with the speedy pace of full reviews that we've been hitting, it's all too easy to fall behind. So here are super short notes on films seen recently during the festival and outside of it since we can't get to full reviews yet (or ever probably in some cases). After the ten word reviews I'm adding Oscar Thoughts since all four of these films have golden dreams.

Shame (Steve McQueen)
Fucked up siblings Michael Fassbender & Carey Mulligan self-destruct in New York through sex & despair.
10 WR: Brilliant sense of ghostly city, personal demons. But too obvious. B+ (B?)
Oscar?: Frighteningly committed acting but will voters see it? It'll surely be NC-17

Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo)
A beauty pageant contestant falls prey to drug cartel in escalating war.
10 WR: Easy indulgent nihilism elevated by smart construction and thematic visualizations. B-
Oscar?: The things it does very well are easy to see/love (or overpraise depending on how you see it). Will almost certainly make the pre-nomination finals in Best Foreign Language Film.
P.S. Michael reviewed this one and liked it much more than I did it. 

Pina (Wim Wenders)
A performed documentary on Pina Bausch, the late legendary German choreographer.
10 WR: 3D amplifies choreography's spatial genius. Bit noncommittal: Performance? Doc? Decide! B
Oscar?: Unless you count Waltz With Bashir, Oscar's foreign committee has never nominated a documentary. But this one is very very easy to enjoy (the dancing is like heaven) and could be a novelty exception to "rule". 

Ides of March (George Clooney)
Clooney adapts the stage play about dirty politics and betrayals of spirit, body, and ideals
10 WR: Involving and handsome but few great scenes. Weird "scene-change" pacing. B
Oscar?: Seems very likely on several fronts but particularly Supporting Actor (Clooney, Giamatti or Hoffman, though?) and score (Desplat's work gets a lot of "air time" if you will.) Though Evan Rachel Wood (major role) and Marisa Tomei (minor role) are both marvelous, Supporting Actress seems less likely for a wide variety of reasons.

Quick takes. Finis! In short it's been a good run of super enjoyable or at least interesting movies lately. Other than that Abduction fluke. Your turn in the comments.