With Matt King's wife in a three-month-long coma that we come to find out is a permanent condition and triggers a living will order to remove life support machinery, the family must shortly come to terms with certain dealings. Among them, the fact that Elizabeth had been having an affair before her accident. A revelation like that, as one could imagine, delivers a real body blow to the grief process and we watch as these people struggle with how to feel and how to interact with family and friends who don't need to know the details. It's vexing when they can't have a conversation where Elizabeth tries to explain why, shows remorse, or even demands a divorce. There's not going to be any kind response, because the spark of life is gone. But that's not entirely accurate because their daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley, who put in a very good performance here), had spotted her mother during a tryst some time before the accident and it had been a bone of contention between them. Elizabeth apparently continued with the affair, and Alexandra evidently took to recreational drinking at her boarding school. So there was a chance for everyone to come clean and work things out, but it wasn't taken.Matt King, despite being the head of a landed well-to-do family (they descended from Hawaiian kings, literally), works as an accountant and holds dear to the Warren Buffett ethos of living simply but comfortably (even though Buffet's plea to have taxes for "the rich / the 1%" is a hypocritical crock of shit ... but we're not here to talk about Warren). He has loads of money, but doesn't use it to laze around and spoil his family. Isn't that so often the dichotomy with movie characters --- they had or have tons of money but for the general public to be able to identify with them, they need to live the lives of working stiffs --- by choice. (At least Jane Austen had an excuse when she used this meme so often.) Anyway, Matt's cousins are more or less a bunch of hedonistic do-nothings living off of trust funds and who wish to sell the family land to a developer --- before some kind of usage deadline runs out in 7 years --- to get their portion of the windfall and be done with it. And so, it's two problems in Matt's life that are confounded by legal documents that designate a certain end date. What do you do with the time you have left?
Matt and Alexandra (joined by her stoner-type boyfriend of sorts, Sid) decide to try to find the man Elizabeth had been having an affair with, to give him the chance to say goodbye. Just so happens, this man turns out to be a real estate agent connected to the fore-mentioned developer and stands to make a ton of money if Matt approves the sale. I'll stop myself here because I don't need to get into every nook and cranny of the plot --- go see it for yourself! --- but there are a few things to mention. When Matt wakes in the middle of the night and goes by Sid on the couch, the entire audience just knew Alexandra would be there. She wasn't. Instead, there was a glimpse of Sid's humanity and a reason why Alexandra may want him along on this journey. We don't live in a world where everyone is all good or all bad, we're just left to try to understand and sift through the consequences when someone we love makes bad decisions. Some of us will blame the dead, some will take it out on the living, some will internalize it for a time. But eventually, you have to not try to understand anymore and simply let go.
I'm not sure how George Clooney got an Oscar nod for this other than as a sympathy f--- from Hollywood as a way to promote the sense that the town still has some vestige of the glitz and glamor of the '50s and '60s. In my opinion, that's what they have Lifetime Achievement Oscars for, and that's where I believe he is headed. His hasn't been a bad career, he makes a ton of money, but it's hard to separate his characters from himself when you see his face up on the screen. A lot of the time, I'm seeing scenes with him primarily as an actor who is acting, which spoils things a bit. On Oscar night, you're asking, 'Does he deserve this... or is he getting it for being George Clooney?'
● "Midnight in Paris" is one of those movies whose fantastic cover art, concept and wonderful atmosphere / scenery / cinematography are besmirched when it adds in the people actually playing the parts. I have to admit to not being an Owen Wilson fan because every character he plays is fundamentally the same. Many of the other actors have nice resumes and yet this piece didn't come together in that area. They came across in the dialogue as stuffy and pretentious and revoltingly stereotypical --- these are not firsts for a Woody Allen film. This had a lot of Romantic and nostalgic potential and it struck out swinging for me. (Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of films out there that strike out not swinging.)
● On that note, let's move on to "Moneyball." I honestly didn't walk into this movie expecting much but I came away really impressed. Brad Pitt in the role of Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, worked past the problem I had with not being able to easily separate Clooney from the character. Maybe it was a combination of the lighting and his look being different from how he's appeared in the media over the past several years. Pitt re-invents his style.
For any fan of sports, there are visualizations of what it would be like to work in a front office of a favorite team. Where we get these mental images and imagined scenarios from depends on our sports coverage source, I guess. But for anyone who thought that every team even since just 10 years ago is filled with suit-wearing executives fresh out of a fraternity house, "Moneyball" dispels that notion, picks it up off the floor, smacks it around and tosses it against the wall. It is the gritty reality reality of big-market versus small-market teams, the haves and the have-nots. The clubs that can afford to sign any player they could possibly want to multimillion dollar deals and those that have to scrounge every penny and hope to compete with players who have more heart than talent. Beane was among the few who came to believe in the statistical approach to determining a player's worth to a club; rather than a vague evaluation by scouts, everything gets put to numbers. It changed the game of baseball and how front offices worked. Pitt did a great job displaying the attitude of someone who knows he's bucking 150 years of history and facing resistance at every turn (including Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe, a manager who refused to play the guys Beane wants in the line-up until his hand is forced by Billy trading away every other player at the position) and Jonah Hill brings it as the quiet numbers guy, Peter Brand. Both are up for individual acting Oscars in their respective categories.
As a longtime fan of the Buffalo Bills, I nodded wistfully when Billy says "The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us. It's an unfair game. And now we're being gutted, organ donors for the rich." The failure of baseball to have a salary cap is one of its biggest problems in terms of parity of competition. I mean, a small-market team can undercut the big boys for only so long. Once the statistical method became de rigueur around the league, the advantage from that was pretty much gone. And yet, the A's are often still in the running late in the season....
I shouldn't really be surprised about this movie, given that Aaron Sorkin had a part in writing the script. As I've read, it was a weird process where several people worked on it, and the script Oscar nomination being termed "Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin" means that Sorkin's writing came in after Zallian's script was finished, rather than "Steven Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin" which would mean they co-wrote in a team. However it was achieved, a big part of the film's success comes in scene pacing, and the at-times subtle and at-times no-holds dialogue in the script. It was fun to watch. I know it's kind of weird to say that about a movie, but it's a pretty rare occurrence for me with all the dreck out there these days.
● I had heard good things about "Hugo." I heard that it was visually fantastic like "Amelie," that its story was simple enough for kids to follow but interesting enough for adults to be entertained. Also noted were that Ben Kingsley gives a great performance (not really news) and Sasha Baron Cohen showed a surprising dramatic ability.
It's tough to gauge how the Academy will receive this film. Movies that have children as a primary audience don't have a strong track record when it comes to taking home Best Picture Oscars. And with two of the main characters being so young, a win there would surely be a surprise, but anything could happen. If it doesn't win in that category, I could see Scorsese winning for Best Director if voting members want to spread the gold around more than they have in recent years. That remains doubtful, and wins for any of its 11 nominations will likely be coming from the artistic side of the awards (e.g. cinematography, art direction, sound editing). With the tour de force of the Harry Potter series having come to its end this year without major recognition from Hollywood, it's saying something that "Hugo" got these kinds of nominations.
Otherwise, the story follows a bit of meta-film-making by bringing in Kingsley's character of Georges Méliès, one of film's first visionaries... but a director whose studio had failed, whose movies were lost, and whom no one really remembered. Scorsese must have loved making this little love note to one of his medium's true pioneers.
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