Oscar Best Picture Reviews, Part IV, and Oscar Predictions

● Yesterday I wrote that I wasn't expecting to like "The Kids Are All Right." I was wrong. Now, I'm not ecstatic about it and don't plan to buy it on Blu-ray or anything, but it was a nice little piece with a new take on the old romance and "other man/woman" themes.

At this point in Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules' (Julianne Moore) same-sex marriage, things have died down a bit. They almost inexplicably watch male-male pornography for arousal (well, it is explained that they don't like watching lesbian pornography because its stars' attachment is inauthentic. So, we're put off the notion that these women are together because they hate the phallus; they're together for love.

And then one day, one of the kids, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), decides that he wants to meet his --- and his sister Joni's (Mia Wasikowska, who played the title character in last year's "Alice in Wonderland") --- sperm donor biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). This precipitates a major transition in each person's life.

Nic, the clinical control-freak must learn that control isn't enough to sustain a family or relationship; Jules, a career-drifter, must find something to do now that the kids are getting older; Joni is a repressed (not just sexually) 18-year-old who's heading to college soon; Laser (seriously, who chose this name?) is struggling to find male role models as he comes of age.

After snorting drugs with his "Jackass"-type friend, Clay, then being asked to re-evaluate what he's getting out of the relationship with this friend, Laser asks newly-18-year-old Joni to find out whether they can meet their father. Paul is a fairly successful restaurateur / organic farmer, and before getting this call from the sperm bank, apparently is happy with a life of casual sex with women who work for him. After he meets Laser and Joni, and subsequently hires Jules to redesign his backyard to kick-start her new business, Paul undergoes a progression toward acceptance of this instant family being dropped into his life. When he starts having a sexual relationship with Jules and it is discovered, he seems to think he can slink right in. Is it just me or did it just seem wrong that I didn't feel too badly when Jules and Paul started with mutual kissing and then several quite graphic sex scenes? If Jules were cheating in a heterosexual marriage, it would not get the kind of audience reaction it did, and the ending as it stands would not sit well. Is cheating within a same-sex marriage somehow less morally wrong? With no substantial classic Hollywood-morality-tale repercussions for Jules besides an aching back from a few weeks sleeping on the couch, it would seem so. Like many heterosexual couples who "stay together for the kids" is it enough from this relationship that "the kids are all right"? Is it enough of a reason for them to stay married because they're "too old" as Laser's closing lines suggest?

We're not shown the resolutions to the transitions. Jules and Nic have to re-build their relationship; Mia had kissed an equally-repressed male friend and rode on Paul's motorcycle (breaking one of Nic's major rules); Laser parted ways with his jackass of a friend, who wanted to urinate on a stray dog (it seems he picked up a sense of "this isn't a good idea" from Paul), but he still doesn't really have a male role model.

Paul created a major obstacle for the moms. But for Laser and Joni, it seems like he planted a seed (this time, a figurative one) that will help them come through their transitions. Maybe it was enough. And in that sense, the kids are all right. The grown-ups, on the other hand....

Mark Ruffalo was enjoyable in his role as Paul. There's a wonderful play on the way he grows his vegetables organically, versus his role in the artificial creation of the kids. He realized that the casual sex lifestyle wasn't enough for him, but his attempt to be a family man by trying to cut into this situation was something that put them all in straits. As Nic delivers one of the more poignant lines of the film, Paul needs to start his own family, not invade one that he was an anonymous part of 18 and 15 years before.

-----

With the Academy Awards ceremony tonight, I'll posit my own list of who should win and who will win in the major categories. Many years, I didn't watch at all, or flipped to it between commercials of whatever other show I was watching. This exercise of watching the Best Picture nominees and writing reviews has made the anticipation to watch tonight somewhat increased, even with my general disdain for awards shows.

Best Picture
     Which should win: "True Grit"
     Which will win: "The King's Speech"

Best Actor
     Who should win: Jeff Bridges, "True Grit
     Who will win: Colin Firth, "The King's Speech"

Best Actress
     Who should win: Natalie Portman, "Black Swan"
     Who will win: Natalie Portman, "Black Swan"

Best Supporting Actor
     Who should win: John Hawkes, "Winter's Bone"
     Who will win: Christian Bale, "The Fighter"

Best Supporting Actress
     Who should win: Hailee Steinfeld, "True Grit"
     Who will win: Melissa Leo, "The Fighter"

Best Director
     Who should win: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, "True Grit"
     Who will win: David Fincher, "The Social Network"

Best Original Screenplay
     Who should win: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg, "The Kids Are All Right"
     Who will win: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg, "The Kids Are All Right"

Best Adapted Screenplay
     Who should win: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, "True Grit"
     Who will win: Aaron Sorkin, "The Social Network"

Best Animated Feature
     Which should win, "The Illusionist"
     Which will win, "Toy Story 3"

(Photo © TopNews.in)

Oscar Best Picture Reviews, Part III

We're fast closing in on the deadline for Oscar reviews, so without further ado:

● It's been a while since I watched "Inception" but I am thankful to be blessed with a very good memory.*

Christopher Nolan wrote and directed this deeply psychological thriller that explores nuances of the dream world in a way only he would. Nolan is known for bold casting choices, but I won't spend much time discussing this aspect other than to mention that this film followed too close from "Shutter Island" for Leonardo DiCaprio. The actors are less important than the story of a team who can crack into people's dreams and influence their lives once they awake, and the goal of the haunted main character Cobb (DiCaprio) to be able to get back to the United States so he can see his kids after a years-long exile as a fugitive. We go through the process of how dreams are infiltrated and the rules the team has to follow to avoid being trapped in a dream, which has an exponential time element the further one goes into the subconscious. Then, the story converges --- Cobb is offered an end to his legal trouble if he will implant a thought into the head of a young heir whose father has died. The plan is to create a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream scenario, in order to implant the idea deeply enough. Gun-play and annoyingly slow slow-motion shots ensue. As with any psychological film worth its celluloid, the ending shot implants into our own minds the nagging thought that we just wasted over 2 hours of our lives question of whether anything we saw was itself a dream, or just another mind game that we need to backtrack to figure out.

Nolan certainly doesn't like making films in the linear fashion. As with "Memento," this is not a movie where one can sit back, turn off the gray matter and simply be entertained. It requires audience thought. I'm not knocking it for these qualities --- after all, I watched LOST religiously. And like LOST, one of the biggest themes is letting go of the things that hold one back. But whereas Jack and Hurley deal with their reality as it has been determined by an unknown something (God/The Island/Fate/Destiny/Time itself), Cobb's dreams about his wife's suicide (because, as a result of the dream-toying, she didn't think the real world was real, and thought it would wake her up. And she may have been right) and her rage, keep him from being able to move on. Nolan has said that he left his ending slightly ambiguous, but he prefers to believe that Cobb was reunited with his children and that's all that matters. Whether this reunion is real is secondary. Overall, "Inception" was an enjoyable film that inspires thought. And it was a blockbuster, raking in an estimated $160 million, according to an industry figure. Psychological thrillers, in my view, have a tougher row to hoe to be worthy of the Best Picture Oscar, and this didn't do enough.

● "The Fighter" is a story of boxer Micky Ware and his half-brother, Dicky Eklund, who acts as his trainer, in mid-'80s Lowell, Mass. While boxing is at the core of the film, the story focuses on their Irish-American family issues and the crack cocaine addiction of Dicky, the former "pride of Lowell" who knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard --- but lost the fight --- years before. Christian Bale, who has garnered a Best Supporting Actor nomination as Dicky, displays his usual physical commitment to the character, dropping a considerable amount of weight to show Dicky's cocaine-ravaged body. The main conflict is in the brothers' vie for attention from their family, mostly their mother, Alice, played by Melissa Leo, who earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for the role.

There are many times where anyone who hasn't lived in the northeast might wonder if people like Micky's sisters really existed. And the answer is, yes --- and there are quite a few of them still around. Same 'Big Hair,' same defensive cattiness, same purposelessness. They really didn't have to look very hard for location shots, as the tract apartment buildings of Lowell still provide that '80s sense of lower-class living conditions.

The prevailing thoughts I had while watching "The Fighter" was of slapping all of these people upside the head and screaming, "WHAT THE F--- ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?!!? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING?!" In many ways, the family dynamic is commonplace as a rougher version of the "Beverly Hillbillies" meme, where testosterone and estrogen flow in the air, people seem to think that arguments are won by whomever is loudest, and the leader of the show is the most-organized, chain-smoking, control-freak buffoon of the bunch who appoints herself as manager of the books.

Micky, for a reason perhaps only those who live in the situation can explain, doesn't want to abandon his family even though doing so would bring him a greater chance at success. But there are many characters with this same almost inexplicable devotion to family --- mostly Alice, who refuses to face Dicky's addictions even after finding him twice 8jumping into garbage bins out of the back of a crack-house where he has holed up with his drug-addled friends. There's a poignant moment where she appears ready to burst, before Dicky starts singing a weak rendition of the Bee Gees' "I Started a Joke" and pathetically emphasizing "but I couldn't see / that the joke was on me."

As the story progresses, Dicky's incarceration forces him to get clean and sober, but he also wants to do this because he finally realizes the effect of his drug use on his son when he sees it through the lens of an HBO documentary. There is a lot that the cocaine has taken from Dicky that he will never get back, but he still has a sense about boxing.

This had a lot more going for it than I expected at first blush. As a period piece, it captures the '80s brilliantly. "The Fighter" still doesn't beat out "True Grit" for me, but it's occupying a respectable place as No. 2 in my ratings of the 10, so far.

All that remains is "The Kids Are All Right." I've got until tomorrow night to sneak it in. I'm not generally a fan of Annette Bening or this type of neo-rom-com, but you never know....

* Except for roads, which is a little weird, considering that my father's nickname is "Rand McNally." You can literally call him and say "Hey, I'm totally lost in Hartford. There's a big red building with silver numbers 237 over the door and I need to get to the federal court for jury duty." Without a pause, he'll reply with something like, "OK, bang a left onto Columbus Boulevard and you should be coming up on a yellow newspaper box on the corner of Main...." It's no exaggeration. This was done about 10 years ago by my brother, with his friends in the car assuming that my dad somehow had a video feed. And he knows this for every town or city he's ever been to... and some he hasn't.

Beyond the Borders

Some people seemed genuinely surprised when retail bookstore Borders announced last week that they were filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closing about 200 stores nationwide.

In an article on NewsBreaks today, there is much ado over how the company has not reacted fast enough in the past 10+ years as the book market changed to an online dominion and more recently in the move toward e-books available on portable electronic devices. I'm sure that didn't help, but it was a business sense that shouldn't have been unexpected.

All one really needs to look at is Borders' pricing. I was recently looking at The LOST Encyclopedia, and decided to check in the store. The book's jacket price was $45. Border's price was $45. Even in their online store, Borders has this title listed as $45. Using the simplest of online searching, other online outlets have this title listed for as low as $15 (granted, from a site with a disputable reputation) and average between $25-$29, with no tax and no shipping cost. Using this example, Borders' bankruptcy should come as no surprise. Gouging potential customers when other outlets offer as big a selection of titles at deep discounts is a fantastic way to put oneself out of business.

This is what happens to a company when there is too much management and not enough people who have an interest in the long-term viability of a company. If I knew better, I'd hazard to say that management didn't care that their prices were from 20 percent to 25 percent higher than their competition --- that the income from people paying a higher price (either out of ignorance or loyalty) would make up for the business lost by customers who chose to purchase elsewhere at a lower cost. Eventually, especially in times like these, that merry-go-round stops.

Borders announced that they will continue business at their remaining stores, and this is an opportunity to make over their corporate structure. The NewsBreaks article quotes an Axis white paper that "a crisis situation like this allows a company to ‘unfreeze’ the organization’s traditional slow process of change to implement decisions more quickly and make the company more agile and responsive." Unless that plan includes slashing prices to become competitive, any reorganization will be, to excuse the trite expression, "like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic."

There is some speculation that the Barnes & Noble chain might be interested in some degree of takeover. They're no gems in the pricing arena either, at least in their 'brick and mortar' stores. As I found out when I went to get my nephew a fun pop-up book titled "Moon Landing: Apollo 11 40th Anniversary" two Christmases ago, there is a great disparity even within that company's entities --- it was full-price ($30) at the store and had a discount of about $8 at B&N.com. Amazon.com had it listed at about a $13 discount, again with no tax or shipping.

Care to guess where I ordered it?

"All good dogs are a little loopy. Otherwise, they'd just be like [mobile] furniture." 

--- G. Will Eggers, English 110W instructor at UConn

"That's all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up – look at the respective piles. There's nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man's condition, as Montaigne says."
--- Logan Mountstuart, in "Any Human Heart" by William Boyd

Oscar Best Picture Reviews, Part II

I promised to review all the 2011 Academy Awards Best Picture nominees, and I aim to make good on that over the course of this week.

● I wasn't expecting much from "127 Hours," as I've learned from many previous efforts that were "based on a true story." The real-world event was a much-publicized story a few years ago when Aron Ralston (James Franco, pictured at left), a backpack thrill-seeker, cut off his forearm after he was trapped by a falling boulder in a Utah canyon network. As such, we already know the ending, which puts a lot of onus on the narrative structure and acting to carry audience interest. In the first shots I was a little worried at the tri-split screen showing unrelated pictures and video news footage, thinking the cinematography was going to be of the "24" variety. That was a fleeting concern.

Having worked with stone a lot over the last 7 years, I knew right off when he was trying to chip away at the boulder from the bottom that anything he was doing there --- and with a dull multi-tool, it wasn't much --- would just make the boulder jam even tighter. But I guess we'll try anything when there is a possible alternative to what Aron eventually has to do to get free.

The camcorder messages that Aron records, knowing that he is probably going to die in the canyon is very touching and I wonder if they used the actual words from that tape, or whether it was written up to a great extent. I suspect that Hollywood put its touches in, but the fact that I'm asking this question means that the dialogue was very believable. Otherwise, the narrative spins around some of the relationship choices Aron has made, mostly regarding a nameless love interest and his family from which he keeps a certain distance. The poetic bits are not lost, then, that it took Aron cutting off his arm to stop cutting himself off from others and keeping his loved ones at arms' length.

This film invites a comparison to another based-on-real-life story, "Into the Wild," which features Emile Hirsh as a young man who rejects much of society and his family, going through a sort of breakdown after learning that his father had another family (or rather, that his own family was the "other" family). In isolation, the characters each come to realize the mistakes they've made in their approach to family relationships. I really thought Hirsh deserved more recognition than he got for hid acting range and the physical devotion he had to put into that role. There have been several basically one-actor movies in the past several years (which seemed to start with "Cast Away" exploring the theme of alienation even as our society becomes ever more electronically connected) and Franco holds his own with any of them. With a setting and storyline that could easily have started to drag on a viewer, Franco kept it moving. 

One question I had: when Aron was rewinding the camcorder to the part where he's canyon-diving with the two girls, and he paused on Kate Mara's chest.... What was that exactly? It was debatable to me whether he was shivering or engaging in some... shall we say, extracurricular activity.

All told, the most important thing to take from this film is the last line. Always leave a note or make sure someone knows where you're going, especially if you're doing something with the potential of danger.

● "Toy Story 3" is ostensibly a last goodbye in this series about a group of toys and their owner's path to maturity. Andy is headed to college, and the toys are facing an unknown future. Will they be relegated to the attic, the garbage or donation? As the previous animations showed, toys can be an obsessive lot --- always worrying about being damaged, misplaced, unloved or outgrown by their owners. Again, we're treated to the gang's adventures while figuring out their loyalties to Andy and to each other. My only gripe, and a small one at that, was in the furnace scene late in the movie. It lost a lot of its potential poignancy with the up-tempo music choice. It took a few moments before I got that they were all resigned to burning and after all the arguing, decided to go out holding their friends' hands. A slower Michael Giacchino-type score would have worked much better there. The ending was a great way to send out this franchise.

● I've been a fan of Arron Sorkin's script-writing since "The American President" and "The West Wing," even though I don't agree with very much of his political ideology. In "The Social Network" Sorkin and director David Fincher portray a fictionalized account of the beginnings of Facebook.com, the social networking Web site that has changed everything from retail marketing, to the course of human relationships, and across the Middle East in the past months, political revolutions.

The script borrowed heavily from details of the legal proceedings in lawsuits over the business side of the origins of Facebook. The film is necessarily bogged down with scenes of sworn testimony to flesh out the Winklevoss twins' portion for having the bud of the idea for the site, and how the buddy relationship between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) turned sour after they became business partners and outside elements started to exert their influence. I cannot say that "The Social Network" was very entertaining, so much as it simply tried to tell the story of a service that a lot of people use. Much of time, it was like reading a long, though well-written, Wall Street Journal column. As much as Zuckerberg facilitated virtual friendships around the globe, the film's basic intimation is that he is not at all good at facilitating his own friendships in the real world --- highlighting the closing shot where he is pathetically clicking the refresh button on his ex-girlfriend's Facebook page over and over. Eisenberg plays his part with a quiet, terse, social awkwardness that really invites a viewer to place Zuckerberg somewhere on the autism spectrum. A lot of people have him pegged as their favorite for Best Actor. I remain unconvinced that playing a pretentious, arguably back-stabbing prick is that hard of an acting job.

● "Winter's Bone" caught me very off guard with its brutal treatment of a girl forced to keep her family afloat amid the scourge of methamphetamine and its consequences in America's heartland. It was relatively shorter than most of the other films in contention, but nevertheless I'm still ruminating on it. The ending was left wide open as to who killed Ree's father --- her uncle, played by John Hawkes, says at the end that he knows who did it --- but as a simple vignette piece, it has the richness of a Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen Crane short story. Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for Best Actress and I can't disagree on that score. The downward spiral of meth is an all-too-real life for way too many people in this country.

● I went into "The King's Speech" wondering what it has that wasn't in Masterpiece Theatre's treatment of the same subject with "Bertie and Elizabeth" (2002). Besides all the therapy swearing, and the star power of Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter and Geoffrey Rush.

It was a fairly good showing and I think Rush as the formally-untrained speech therapist will remain the most memorable part, especially that scene where he does the opening lines of "Richard III" for his children. I have an inclination to not like Ms. Carter --- I can't really explain it, but there it is. Colin Firth was very good, just as he's been in many roles (he is the best Mr. Darcy ever captured on celluloid in the 1995 version of "Pride & Prejudice"). Certainly two thumbs up, but it loses points with me over how reductive it was with the story, and how it put Rush's speech therapist at the heart of the political intrigue of the time. It conjoined those elements for the sake of time, but it did a great disservice to the reality of what happened. It also wrongly attributes the cause of and cure to stuttering as a purely psychological trauma.

As I wrote above, I'm not sure it broke much new ground from "Bertie and Elizabeth." And that film was able to go a little deeper into the succession crisis. "The King's Speech" placed a lot of the narrative on Rush's character to both egg on and shoot down the notion of any "vaulting ambition" on Bertie's part. And the politics of Edward VIII's abdication was much more complex than what they papered over in this new treatment, while also showing the progression through the war until George VI's death and Elizabeth II's coronation. James Wilby really personalized Bertie much more than I got the sense of from Firth. There is something to casting a lesser-known actor in a biographical film, as a viewer can stay behind a thicker veil of ignorance and isn't distracted by a well-known actor's face. All I saw here was Firth and Bonham-Carter. I'm sorry, I just don't need star power to be wowed.

All right, that's five of the Best Picture nominees reviewed right there. That's half of them! Add in the ones I wrote about in my last post... [carry the two, add four, divide by one]... and I only have "The Kids Are All Right," "Inception" and "The Fighter" left to recap. I'll try to get to them before Sunday's award broadcast.

(Images are © of their respective films. I have used official movie posters or publicity stills used elsewhere in the mass media)

Catching Up on Some Movies & Oscar Best Picture Reviews, Part I

In the past several weeks I've been doing a lot of catching up on movies I've missed in the past 15 years or so. While in university and after, I hadn't the time or inclination to sit down in front of the teevee* and spend a couple of hours watching a story be told. All of the snow here in the northeast, as well as one of the worst big-four network line-ups in a long time (the greatest void coming with the conclusion of ABC's "LOST" last May) conspired into the design to finally see what some of these films had going for them.

At its most egregious, my movie ignorance included the Star Wars prequels released from 2001 to 2005. Admittedly, I had seen "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" once a few years after it came out. I remember dozing through it at a cousin's home shortly after a 6-hour drive out to WNY one summer. I had grown up with Star Wars. Like an old friend one hasn't seen in a while, the changes wrought in the Special Edition by George Lucas were a little jolting at first. Like a lot of people, I'm not sure Lucas can ever be forgiven for giving the world Jar Jar Binks, Hayden Christensen, or the 5th-grade dialogue of the screenplay. But then, I relaxed back into the story and to be honest, I was always more tuned to the series' visual qualities. At the end of "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" my Star Wars journey was essentially complete, the story known, the mystery solved. The prequels generally instilled an overarching sadness that hadn't been there for the original movies. The breakdown of Padmé's spirit by Anakin's vaulting ambition was something hinted at in the originals but portrayed with a larger degree of pathos by Natalie Portman. Visually, it was weird going from the modern look and CGI to the '70s hairstyles of Han, Lei and Luke (I'm not sure if Chewbacca can be described as having '70s hair). The series is finally scheduled to be released in the fall of this year on Blu-ray. Unlike all of Lucas' previous incremental releases designed to draw as much money from the franchise as he could from its devotees, I may be tempted to pick it up for Christmas.

● On its heels, I started watching many of the films mentioned in the Oscar discussion. "Black Swan" again featured Ms. Portman in an equally saddening meltdown, this time of her own accord. It's artistically dreary. The mise-en-scene throughout tattoos black and white into your soul --- especially the decor of stage director Thomas' (Vincent Cassel) apartment --- in the opposite way of how "Amelie" revived the screen immediately post-9/11 with super-enhanced reds, greens and blues. In director Darren Aronofsky's world, everything takes on a shade of black or white.  The world is a polarity of perfection in which the perfect black swan seductress also must be the perfect white swan innocent, raising the specter of the academic Madonna/whore feminist argument. We live in a world that prizes beauty and purity, but also paradoxically craves trashiness and unbridled lust. These things are mutually exclusive, and yet, our culture simultaneously demands them both from women. In Aronofsky's conceit, this demand to be two opposites in one body throws Nina into schizophrenic episodes of real and imagined self-destruction.

Another "Black Swan" theme is that anything that is not 100 percent must be thrown away. For instance, the cake that Barbara Hershey's character brings home is beautiful and huge (really, they make smaller cakes!), but when her ballerina daughter says she can't have any because of her upcoming role, the mother threatens to throw this beautiful creation in the garbage. Also, the older dancer, Beth (Winona Ryder), is no longer young and innocent, and is retired by Thomas, then apparently throws herself in front of a car. This is a thoughtful criticism of our times, when people have become less complex creatures the more society seems to demand that its inhabitants be totally engrossed in this or that world. Anything less than total dedication to that purpose is failure. Gold medal or bust! I suppose this has arisen out of the need for identify with something as a way to stand out from 6 billion other souls. But as a cost of this decrease in complexity and well-roundedness, people have become more shallow as their descriptors and interests are honed like a piece of broken mirror on a dressing room floor.

● At almost the opposite spectrum in character complexity, though, the Coen brothers' "True Grit" remake won me over. The only way Jeff Bridges does not win the Oscar for Best Actor is if the Academy is loathe to present it to him two years in a row. The Coens' movies are characteristically dark, but take on a Shakespearean Olde English kind of quality from their precise scripts and demand for careful annunciation (think George Clooney's turn in "O Brother Where Art Thou"). I am not denigrating this tactic, where the characters can seem somewhat wooden. Many of the Bard of Avon's characters have this same wooden quality yet are among the best in all literature. And yet, Bridges, as Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn, delivers these clunky lines with a natural ease in a hardened western accent. I am less convinced that Hailey Steinfeld's performance as a girl seeking revenge for her father's murder was of her own ability than it derived from the Coen machinations, but I greatly admire the gusto she puts into the film and the energetic and wise-beyond-her-years spirit she imbues Mattie with. I'm not normally a fan of Matt Damon, but he turned in a great character piece as a by-the-book Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (which they pronounce as "LaBeef"). I didn't pay much attention during the opening credits and it took me several minutes to realize it was indeed Ben Affleck's other half.

One note that I wanted to include was the theme of snakes. I've never read the book this was adapted from, which was written by Charles Portis, but they represent a bit of propriety. In many works, after an audience-friendly character kills someone unlawfully, even someone who we feel deserves it, there's a moralistic reaction --- whether it's the character throwing up, facing charges and being cleared, or by some other method where peril must be faced and judgment rendered. In "True Grit," after Mattie kills Tom Chaney (played by Coen-favorite Josh Brolin), she falls down a pit, where she is bitten by a snake and faces death. Through the movie, we see Rooster Cogburn lay down a circle of rope around himself when he sleeps by a campfire that ostensibly keeps snakes from coming close. Rooster is immune to the moral reckoning of the snakes because his actions --- as we're told, he has a history of killing his quarry in questionable circumstances of self-defense --- are done behind the star of a U.S. Marshal. 

In the concluding section of the movie, we find out that Mattie lost the snake-bitten arm. Mattie was only saved by Rooster's quick treatment and breaking the limits of a horse Mattie had impulsively bought when she was negotiating a refund of her father's original dealing with the broker. One sees that Rooster has come to admire this girl's own true grit. That is why he didn't ever collect the $50 remainder owed to him.

I've watched quite a few more titles but, again, I don't have the time or inclination to write about them at the moment. I will try to get in reviews of all 10 Best Pictures nominees before the Oscars air on 27 February.

* I know it's not AP Style or anything, but in private writing, I spell it like this in homage to "Willy Wonka..." 

(Images are © of their respective films. I have used official movie posters or publicity stills used elsewhere in the mass media)