Oscar Submissions: Japan, Sweden and Germany's "Pina"

Three more films have been announced for this year's foreign film Oscar competition, and all are from countries with a fairly large degrees of success with Academy's foreign nominating committee. Though the Academy always has a veritably orgy of films to choose from (usually sixty-plus) for its five-wide profile boosting arguably hit-making honors, they do tend to prefer European pictures. They also tend to prefer Japanese films to other countries when it comes to Asian cinema. Will they choose any of these three pictures?

JAPAN (12 noms, 1 win, and 3 honorary awards before the foreign category existed)
Postcard, an anti-war film about a soldier (Etsushi Toyokawa) returning home from World War II to see his family devastated, comes from the 98 year old director Kaneto Shindo. He has already stated that this will be his last film. 

SWEDEN (14 noms, 3 wins)
Beyond is the directorial debut of the actress Pernilla August (More and more actresses are making the leap: see also Vera Farmiga and we're loving it. Why shouldn't they?) The actor-centric heavy drama stars Noomi Rapace as the adult survivor of alcoholic parents in the 1970s. Noomi's real life husband Ola Rapace co-stars. Beyond opened at last year's Venice Film Festival but didn't premiere in Sweden until December 2010, placing it safely within the eligibilty period for this year's submission.

Wim Wender working on his documentary homage "Pina"

GERMANY (18 nominations, 3 wins)
Pina is a high profile 3D documentary on the work of the influential German dance artist Pina Bausch who died two years ago -- it was not intended, originally, to be a posthumous film. Dancers convinced the acclaimed filmmaker Wim Wenders to continue with the project which is now an homage to Bausch featuring several of her most acclaimed pieces performed by dancers onstage and outdoors.

Honestly dance is a great use of 3D if you must use 3D at all. Unfortunately the dance movies that have used it previously have rarely understood that to get 3D to work its spatial relations magic and what that means to choreography (a lot), you need to actually not cut every second to a different camera angle so that the eyes can observe the physicality, distance, and depth. I haven't yet seen Pina (very soon I hope) but I'm assuming Wim Wenders understands this in a way, say, the makers of Glee the 3D Concert Movie would not. Just a hunch.

This is not the first time a filmmaker has been inspired by Pina or used that inspiration to really heartbreaking affect. Remember the way Pedro Almodóvar used Pina to set the stage for the ineffable emotional pull of Talk To Her?

My guess right now is that the documentary Pina may have enough acclaim and novelty interest to make the finals (at least). But documentaries have a tough road for Oscar acclaim in any category other than Documentary. To my knowledge no documentary -- and at least one is submitted each year in this category -- has ever been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. (Unless you count Waltz With Bashir which you could; it strikes me more as an uncategorizable hybrid film.)

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R.I.P. Cha Cha

Raise your arms. Wave goodbye to Annette Charles aka Annette Cardona aka Cha Cha DiGregorio, "the best dancer at St. Bernadettes!" The former actress turned speech professor died Wednesday at the age of 63 of cancer. Strange that her death so closely followed Jeff Conaway's (Kenickie), her date to Grease's big "Born to Hand Jive" high school dance.

Her brief acting career consisted mostly of guest spots on 70s TV shows and two feature films but everyone associated with Grease (1978) will live on forever in the hearts of millions. Grease is still the word.

[Related: Here's a fine article from Clothes on Film on her Amazonian presence in Grease.]

DVDs. The greatest film I...

...almost never saw, or is it? Paolo here again. I'd normally be the first person to watch a movie that features attractive men wearing fedoras and Emily Blunt doing contemporary dance, but fate had other plans. But between The Adjustment Bureau's theatrical release and now, it was a movie that had a minor 'bucket list effect' on me. 

In one of its DVD extras 'Leaping through New York,' writer/director George Nolfi praises the city as an all around "magical place". But the film's visual version of New York is underwhelming and dour, since we mostly see colours like blue and grey and it seemingly takes place in perpetual dawn or autumn. That's how I felt the first time, although repeated viewings made me appreciate how the sunlight would hit on the upper half of the city's Metropolis-like art deco skyscrapers.

New York, as this film depicts is, makes its citizens feel anomic. We get this feeling specifically through the way the titular adjusters are depicted within the shots, as when four mid-level adjusters look out from a rooftop to countless windows in front of them. That image is essentially repeated when two adjusters Harry (Anthony Mackie) and Richardson (John Slattery) look out a window inside the bureau. A high angle long shot of the bureau's library before we see Harry thinking about one of his cases, David (Matt Damon) offers a similar feeling. The city is an overwhelmingly large frame for an internal and masculine struggle, as Harry becomes wary of how his job affects others. But maybe the film dwarfs the adjusters to highlight a part of their function, to have the least ripple effects, as invisible, microscopic, unnoticed.

David and his star crossed lover Elise (Blunt) are also lonely people without family...

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