movie

Worst Best Picture: Is Rain Man Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. All posts should be considered to have a blanket “spoiler alert” on them. Today’s installment is the 1988 winner Rain Man. Is it better than Crash?

Rain Man is complicated.

Even if you haven’t seen it, you’re no doubt aware of Dustin Hoffman’s character on a basic level. He plays Raymond “Rain Man” Babbitt, the autistic brother of Tom Cruise’s Charlie Babbitt. It’s an iconic performance that locked up 1988’s Oscar in a way that few individual efforts before or since have.

Rain Man is terrific, but Hoffman’s performance is what really sticks with you when you watch it 25 years later. He sells the distress and the panic and the wonder of the condition so totally. It’s a full figure of a person just as much as “Rain Man” is a shorthand for the condition of autism itself. It’s a delicate topic — many Oscar-winners are about delicate topics, but few are about something like mental illness — and it’s handled in a way that holds up a quarter century later. This is an accomplishment all by itself, and it struck me as similar to the high points of the much-earlier Gentleman’s Agreement‘s handling of race.

In Rain Man, Tom Cruise’s character is forced to reunite with a brother he doesn’t know he has. It combines the classic “road movie” tropes with the “long-lost person” ones as Cruise drives Dustin Hoffman across the country to LA. Along the way he learns a little bit about autism and even more about himself. That sentence feels sappy and reductive, but it’s the high school book report summation of the “feelings” in Rain Man.

Most of the supporting roles have suffered with the passing of time — it’s especially strange to see some scenes where people appear to have never acted in their life just delivering bland line readings — but Cruise and Hoffman play the two sides of human experience so perfectly. Cruise is an interesting choice for a villain here and honestly, a mostly-evil protagonist is an interesting choice overall. It works because there are so many sad pieces to connect in Rain Man. “Meet your brother and try to earn back the three million bucks from Dad’s will” is a pretty fantastical plot, but “learn to live with your family and your place in it” is something much simpler to understand and believe.

The Best Part: The reverse arcs of Tom Cruise becoming less worldly and Dustin Hoffman becoming a bigger part of the outside world are excellent. It’s the exact kind of obvious development that feels terrible when it’s over-messaged. There aren’t moments where people look into the camera and explain the pain and the difficulty, so they feel less like plot points and more like actual, impactful parts of a life. I always think of the worst version of this: In Man on the Moon, Danny DeVito is forced to say “You’re insane… but you might also be brilliant.” Rain Man is never that insulting.

The Worst Part: Surprisingly, it’s the iconic casino scene. It may be the only one you’re sure to know if you haven’t seen it. Tom Cruise takes his brother to Vegas and exploits his autism to count cards at blackjack. The scene starts with them testing it out on the back of a car. As soon as Cruise is satisfied it will work, they loudly peel out with the cards fluttering in the wind and the dust. The next scene opens with a full montage of both of them getting suits and haircuts. It’s full 80s in the worst way, and it’s ridiculous out of time. It’s bonkers and it immediately dates what is otherwise a really powerful, timeless story. Seriously, watch it.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It is better. I’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s wrong with Crash as a Best Picture winner. Crash is an awkward, meandering few hours of cinema by itself, but it’s when you compare it to the great accomplishments of the artform that it really looks bad. Tom Cruise in Rain Man and Matt Dillon in Crash have similar character arcs. Both men have lives where they can choose to either become better parts of society or continue on in their own ways. Both choose a form of redemption after decidedly not choosing redemption, but Dillon comes off much worse. Rain Man is about bettering yourself for your family, Crash is about needing a miracle just to care about the world at all.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Image source: Oscars.org

Worst Best Picture: Is The King’s Speech Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

The toughest job The King’s Speech has is convincing the the audience that it’s rough out there for the King of England.

The premise is amazingly simple: The king has a stutter, but he has to give a speech to rally England against Hitler. This is a movie that was up against Inception for Best Picture in 2010, and it’s hard to imagine two movies farther apart on the “complicated” spectrum. If anything, The King’s Speech feels even simpler than that boiled-down plot. It doesn’t always suffer from starkness, but it’s almost entirely devoid of supporting characters, solo scenes, or anything else that would distract from the absolute brass tacks of one man teaching another man to enunciate.

King George VI (Colin Firth, who won an Oscar for the role) starts the movie as just a mere prince, and the movie opens with him speaking to a massive assembled crowd. He cracks and can’t do it, and thus a conflict is born. He understands the importance of public speaking, but his brash older would-be-king brother is next in line anyway. His brother ascends and descends the throne, and there’s your ballgame: George has to learn to speak publicly.

His wife (played by Helena Bonham Carter, who was also Oscar-nominated for the role despite really not getting enough to do) enlists the Australian Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, nominated as well) to work a miracle. I mention the “‘Australian” there because it’s always remarkable how often a movie about high class British society has to remind the world that you can turn anything into an excuse to belittle someone.

Firth said after filming the movie that it was somewhat of a challenge to fully return to normal speech after affecting the stutter for the role. It’s a remarkable performance, to be sure, and it really sells the “journey” of the character. Rush is mostly there for Firth to bounce off of, and everyone else in the movie is barely there at all. There’s a particularly — this is the only word for it — distracting performance by Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill which just comes off as intensely weird. Firth is intense and Rush is light-hearted, but that’s all we’re sure of. The movie isn’t always sure what to do with everyone else.

The movie’s “awesome” in the way that all movies about British royalty are big and flamboyant. A lot of the criticism for The King’s Speech centers on how the movie doesn’t deal with Britain’s role in appeasement with Germany leading up to World War II, but aside from the two main leads, it doesn’t really take time to do much of anything. It’s hard to see where they’d find the screentime.

The Best Part: The final, titular speech is great, sure, but the real gem is the lead up to that. Just as King George VI is finally finding his voice, Logue is found out to be a self-trained speech therapist. Their conversation in Westminster Abbey is superb. I don’t know what kind of person would take my word on this but just watch one scene, but if that’s you, get to it.

The Worst Part: At one point Helena Bonham Carter (when she’s still just a duchess) appears to Logue to ask for his services. She wants to be discreet about asking for treatment for the Duke of York, and he clearly has no idea who she is. Later in the film — though at this point she is the new queen, I suppose — Logue’s wife is speechless upon running into her. In both scenes Carter’s character is who she needs to be in the moment, but in neither scene is the movie interested with why characters react that way to her. It’s a slight complaint, but it’s the kind of thing that makes the characters so strange in this movie. No one cared enough to spend time on those little details, which is odd. Maybe I just love Helena Bonham Carter?

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Yeah, this one passes the test as better than Crash. It’s a powerful movie even the second time around. It made me consider this, as well: What movies will be remembered as “the greats” from this era? Everyone will always list The Godfather and Casablanca as legends of a previous era, but what does the 2010s have? It already feels weird that this and The Artist made that list. I have to think that 30 years from now if someone asked about The King’s Speech someone would remember it as a “powerful” movie more than a “great” one, but there’s certainly no shame in just being something worthy of note.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Image source: Daily Mail

Nymphomaniac is Five Hours of Lars von Trier Trying to Offend You: Should You See It?

Jonathan May

In our rarely-running kinda-series Should You See It? we talk about movies that just came out. You can figure out the rest of the premise from the title of the series. That’s right: We talk recipes. Should you see Nymphomaniac?

“Beneath the gazes, beneath the hands, beneath the sexes that defiled her, the whips that rent her, she lost herself in a delirious absence from herself which restored her to love and, perhaps, brought her to the edge of death.” —from The Story of O

Parenthesis in Greek means ‘put in beside’ so it’s only fitting that the title of Lars von Trier’s latest film includes an empty set (it’s stylized as “Nymph()maniac“), a nothing story inside a nothing story. The story operates on the frame tale level; that is, our protagonist Joe relates her tale of sexual deviance from childhood forward to the eager ears of Seligman, an older male virgin (which later becomes important) after he finds her in an alleyway, obviously beaten up.

The main problem with the film is that Joe is constantly interrupted in her telling by Seligman, an obsequious listener if there ever was one. The film must center safely back around to its frame at the end, which deflates what’s at stake for the viewer. And center around it does; this was the moment of unexpectedness though. What transpires between Joe and Seligman in those final moments completely derails the film and its message, but I will not be the one to spoil it for the reader.

What I will take umbrage with is the fact that the more “salacious” aspects of the film (the erect penises, the S&M, the graphicness of the presentation, Joe screaming “Fill all my holes”) are not nearly as “offending” (though I’m very hesitant to use this word) as the moral statements made by the director through his characters. It becomes very obvious when Joe is talking and when Lars von Trier is talking through Joe. Von Trier all but preaches about how we should not silence aspects of our vocabulary for fear that we silence ourselves; but then he launches, through Joe, into a tirade about how pedophilia is like any other sexuality and how the 96% of pedophiles who don’t act on their urges should be “given a medal” for bravely squelching their desires. I take huge insult to these claims. Pedophilia is learned behavior, not innate. Not acting on desire or lust is not commensurate to bravery. Once again, von Trier sacrifices in terms of actual filmic development to focus on his status as a provocateur. Unfortunately this game is tired and boring, especially coming in the middle of a combined five-hour romp. I feel like I was constantly being prodded into offense; luckily for me, I’m offended by very little. But I still felt like the whole story amounts to nothing more than a way for von Trier to poke a stick at his audience. What he loses in this, of course, is the sincerity of Joe and her story. She unapologetically owns her sexuality at several points throughout the film. To have her become nothing more than a soapbox is typical of von Trier’s treatment of women.

Should you see it?

If you want original story, see the film Salo by Pasolini or read its precursor, The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Or you can read The Story of O by Pauline Reage. If it’s a good Lars von Trier movie you want to see, try Melancolia or Dancer in the Dark. But you can safely pass on Nymphomaniac.

Jonathan May watches too much television, but he’s just playing catch-up from a childhood spent in Zimbabwe. You can read his poetry at owenmay.com, follow him on Twitter at @jonowenmay, or email him at owen.may@gmail.com.

3 Days to Kill is Two Hours of Kevin Costner Acting Ridiculous: Should You See It?

Brent Hopkins

3 Days to Kill stars Kevin Costner as Ethan Renner, a CIA agent who is the best cleaner in the business. He is in the middle of a job when he gets a notification that it is his daughter’s birthday. Being the awesome dad that Kevin Costner is, he decides to take a break from killing everyone to call home. As CIA operations are wont to do, things go south quickly and he ends up going head to head against bomb smuggler “The Albino.”

You can tell he’s a bad guy, as he has no hair or eyebrows. Ethan has The Albino dead to rights and then he suddenly starts coughing and bleeding from the nose. End scene, and the next time we see Ethan he is told that he only has a few months to live due to a terminal illness.

This leads Kevin to retire from the business and go to his family, a wife and daughter in Paris, to reconnect, as he has been a vacant father and husband for a few years. He goes to his separate home and comes to find a full African family squatting in his place. They have redecorated and rearranged everything, and he reacts about as crotchety as you would expect old Kevin Costner to react. He chooses not to murder the whole lot — there are more than a few children and a pregnant girl — and we see the grinch in him slightly melt. He chooses to make amends with his final months but gets a new lease on life when a CIA operative Vivi Delay (played by Amber Heard), asks him to help kill quite a few people (namely The Albino and The Wolf) in exchange for an experimental drug that will keep him alive, 50,000 dollars, and a million-dollar life insurance policy. The twist is, of course, that there are side effects to the experimental drug that keep rearing their ugly head at the worst times for Ethan.

There are the requisite awkward family reunions that take place with Ethan trying to pick up as if his daughter hasn’t aged a bit and their worlds collide fittingly. That is actually what the whole movie feels like, multiple worlds slamming into one another and never quite aligning properly. This movie is all over the place and it is definitely a bad film. The thing is, the movie is so scatterbrained that it comes off as aggressively fun as opposed to just hours of wasted time.

The violence is graphic but never really that excessive. The daughter-father story is brown-sugar sweet, yet I found myself chuckling at the ridiculousness of their interactions more than anything else. The bad guys are named The ALBINO and The WOLF, the former being a creepy lunatic and the latter being anything but a wolf. Vivi Delay is supposedly equal in skill to Ethan, but for the life of me it felt like a showcase of how much sexier Vivi looks than everything else in Paris.

Also, smoldering seriousness is a must.

This is a bad movie. Kevin Costner places this corpse of a script on his back and carries the whole thing. Without him this movie would be worth walking out of in the first 15 minutes, but there is something about Costner in this film where I actually felt like he thought the whole thing was as ridiculous as it actually is and just ran with it. There are so many moments in this film that left me saying “Well, that is not what I expected from Hollywood.” Costner takes it in stride and constantly makes this face… and I love him for it.

I have no idea what’s happening either, folks.

Should You See It? Yes, if you are not a film snob, this movie was bad but quite fun. It takes the Taken premise but removes most of the stress from the plot and replaces it with quirky scenes.

Images: Film School Rejects

Worst Best Picture: Is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Better or Worse Than Crash?

Frodo_and_Sam_at_Mt_Doom

Alex Russell

You’re not supposed to read comments online. Everyone knows that. I try not to, but I had to see what people hated about one of the most decorated Best Picture Oscar winners of all time.

There are 15 negative reviews for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on Rotten Tomatoes. One review says that the epic story of orcs, hobbits, and elves lacks “believability.” One calls it racist. One says it “lacks substance.” None of these are actually reviews of the movie, they’re reviews of the book masquerading as movie reviews. They are all written from a perspective wherein the reviewer either isn’t aware of the wildly popular source material or doesn’t care. All 15 are varying degrees of mad at Peter Jackson for supposedly making “The Lord of the Rings” idea up, and they all seem to believe he shouldn’t have bothered.

Whenever you can’t stand something that everyone likes it can be easy to entrench yourself. All 15 reviewers there saw a movie that made a billion dollars and tied Titanic and Ben-Hur as the most decorated Academy Award-winning movie of all time. They saw this movie, they hated it, and they demanded the world know of their hate. Awards and box office totals aren’t the only measures of a good movie – Crash won three Oscars and made nearly 100 million dollars and the entire point of this series is to prove that it is a very specific kind of awful movie – but it is easy to see how those 15 people had to swing for the fences.

The final Lord of the Rings movie went up against Lost in Translation for its Best Picture award. The contrast there is interesting, and I have to wonder if there’s a bigger possible disparity between “loud” and “quiet” in two movies. The Return of the King was a slam dunk in many ways, especially because its award seemed like destiny after A Beautiful Mind and Chicago beat the first two installments.

It’s a strange experience to rewatch it in 2014. It’s very hard to avoid the Lord of the Rings movies in our world. There has to be some broadcast law about one of them being on TNT or FX every single day. I sat down and watched it again and was left with a feeling of great contentedness. I was glad to see that a movie I remembered as a masterpiece held up. It’s strange at times and wonderful in unexpected ways at others, but it is a mammoth achievement of filmmaking that deserves the accolades it gets.

I also briefly considered exploring how Faramir’s attempts to earn his father’s respect parallel the attempts of Terrence Howard’s character in Crash, but then again, life is way too short to think about that even long enough to finish this sentennnnnnnnc ugh ugh ugh ugh.

The Best Part: The fight at Minas Tirith feels huge and important, and the shifting perspective from inside and outside the castle walls makes it feel more like a fully realized fight. There are multiple “starts” to the fight that all allow for different discussions of heroics and bravery. There’s nothing to not like about how the whole thing is handled, and the most fascinating part of it is just how early it happens in the movie. There’s an entire hour of “climax” after Minas Tirith, but it’s in that battle that the movie won its Oscar. Watch something like Troy try to do the same thing and you will gain more respect for it.

The Worst Part: It’s tempting to call this the length – the unextended version is well over three hours – but it’s more just the ending itself. The movie is great at pacing until it absolutely is not, at all. This is especially telling because the actual end to the novel has even more than the movie does. It seems like if they had already decided to cut off a big part of the ending, then what’s the harm in going even farther?

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Crash has no hobbits in it, so of course it is a lesser movie. No, but really, it’s possible to consider The Return of the King an oversized popcorn movie or to judge it on length. It’s also worth discussing to question if it represents the source material completely; there’s a lot left out that some viewers might see as worthy of inclusion. Whatever stones you turn over to try to pick apart the best of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, though, you will not find a problem that helps you compare it to Crash.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Image source: Oscars.org

Worst Best Picture: Is Platoon Better or Worse Than Crash?

1987_iconic_picture_platoon

Alex Russell

If someone asked you to see a movie about the evils of war and the dual nature of man with regard to good and evil, you might be on board. If someone told you that movie had Charlie Sheen at the center, you would need to ask what year it was.

Charlie Sheen’s career is a curious one. A few years back people were going to Charlie Sheen live shows just to see what he’d do. He went crazy in public and everyone gawked at it because mental stability is razor-thin. Everyone is afraid to lose their mind. Everyone is fascinated to watch it happen to someone that, apparently, no one really wants to help.

Tiger blood and whatever aside, Platoon is Charlie Sheen in Oliver Stone’s manifesto about how war is hell. He joins a huge cast that also includes Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, John C. McGinley, Keith David, and Tom Berenger all yelling at each other about how best to handle being left in Vietnam with no clear purpose. It’s certainly about Vietnam, but it’s also about how adversity changes a person. The titular platoon is divided into two camps. One follows Dafoe’s by-the-book approach of not murdering and raping people, the other sides with the crazed Berenger and his apparent plan to save the village by destroying it.

This may sound odd, but there’s an awful lot of actual war in this war movie. People who watch Full Metal Jacket for the first time are often surprised that the entirety of the scenes and quotes they know all happen in the first half hour or so. All of Full Metal Jacket‘s cultural cache happens before they even get to the damn war. Not so with Platoon. Oliver Stone makes a deliberate choice to keep the camera on the violence. Over and over, the cast is thrust into the jungle to get shot at again. It’s a two hour movie and at least a full hour of it takes place with gunfire in the background.

The effect is very real: War is everywhere, and when you are at war, doubly so. It makes for an uneasy viewing that constantly drills home what Oliver Stone wanted to say: Do not ever romanticize this. He’s said that he made the movie because he felt that too often audiences were only presented with positive and heroic portrayals of war.

Platoon is a brutal movie. When McGinley’s character saves himself during a firefight by hiding under dead bodies, it is both frightening and sad. The Vietnam War is never an easy subject to discuss in American history, but the general consensus seems to be that it was at the very least a damned shame. Platoon is essential viewing to understand the American experience, and whatever you think of Oliver Stone’s personal politics, this movie’s only agenda is tough to debate.

The Best Part: For sheer memorability, the scene where McGinley covers himself with a body to survive stands out. The firefights are so arresting that even 30 years later they still create a sense of anxiety and dread. Forrest Gump‘s ‘Nam is very similar, but it doesn’t feel like it matters. This feels real — too real — and the movie hums because it scares and depresses the viewer.

The Worst Part: Berenger’s character is a brutal villain. War movies often only show one side of a conflict, so it can be tough to discern a “villain” in the classic sense. In this movie, it’s definitely him. He tries to sow dissent through violence and threats. He reacts to someone saying that he should cool down by burning down a town. He’s the violence in all of us wrapped up into one scarred up guy. If there’s an issue with him, it’s that he’s never really explained. He’s left as this uber-asshole, just a guy who wants chaos for chaos’ sake. Those people assuredly exist, but he could be deeper with some motive.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It can be tempting to just say that Platoon is good and Crash is not, but it’s about the why. Platoon stirs the pot by forcing Americans to watch one of their greatest nightmares on camera. Crash stirs the pot by demanding that present day is worse than we admit. War and racism are both complicated and both bad, but we’re on board for that. The challenge is to find something new to say, and Platoon does. The “good” guys in Platoon are still burning down a town and at war. They’re still racists and violent lunatics — they’re just less so than their counterparts. Platoon introduces shades of grey into what war does to a person. Crash suggests that shades of grey are just what we pretend exist because we won’t open our eyes. Both are negative messages, but one is without hope, and that’s just not interesting. It’s not the pessimism that dooms Crash, it’s how damn happy to be “right” about its message that does.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Image source: Oscars.org

Noah is about Vegetarianism, Religion, and the Nature of Man: Should You See It?

noah

Brent Hopkins

I watched Noah a week ago in theaters and I must say I was completely caught off-guard by what I witnessed. To start, I am not a particularly religious person but I have beliefs and I took the smallest bit of them and my fuzzy knowledge of Old Testament scripture with my girlfriend (who is more Buddhist than anything) to the theaters to see the latest Bible film.

Right from the opening scenes you know that this is not going to be a bright and sunny telling. There is the hunting of an animal for its meat and the immediate comeuppance from Noah (Russell Crowe) showing that hunting animals and consuming them is bad for your health because he will murder punch you into seeing his side of the story. This gives a slightly Gladiator-esque feel to the movie, but instead of fighting Rome, Crowe is now pitted against the fallen of humanity. This is an even more epic scale and the film does a good job of portraying this.

The film is relatively visceral, as much of the Old Testament is, but there are definitely a lot of modern day problems brought up by director Darren Aronofsky. The one that kind of turned me off the most was the heavy handed message that eating animals and general lack of conservation is the stem of humanity losing itself. One of the first things you hear Noah tell his sons is why the humans are hunting animals for meat. He tells them it is because humans are ignorant and think that the meat gives them strength. That was such an in-your-face advertisement for vegetarianism that I felt like I got hit with a Whole Foods ad. This theme is the main thread that continues throughout the film and each time it rears its head I just wanted to scream “I GET IT! ANIMALS ARE SACRED.”

Noah has always been a story about a boat big enough to hold two of every animal. The logistics of this have always been fascinating to me and now that technology and computer graphics have advanced enough to maybe handle this I was intrigued to see how Noah would build this thing and keep all the animals from massacring one another. The world Noah lives in is completely barren of vegetation and animals for the most part. Humans have ravaged the land and nothing is really left. Noah finds a workaround for this by planting a seed that gives him plenty of treesources (get it) to build his Ark. Even still, this would be an impossible task for just Noah and his family (three male children, his wife, and a girl they saved) so Noah gets more physical labor help from The Watchers. These guys are stone-covered golems who have been punished for going against The Creator’s (“God” is never used in the entire film) wishes by being bound to terra firma as opposed to being allowed to fly freely as they once could. They were mostly slaughtered by the evil humans but the remaining ones decide to help Noah as he is the only person they have met to have contact with God in a very long time.

The Ark is built over the course of a few months and the way the animals are dealt with is a huge letdown. They just quietly come in groups of two, they don’t really fight, they don’t really do anything, they just go inside then get put to sleep with a concoction Noah’s wife creates. This is a bit of a copout and I felt like it ignored probably the biggest characters in the Noah story.

Now this would be a pretty boring movie if there was no conflict and well, this is a blockbuster film, so revenue must be made. The conflict comes from Cain, the other side of the human coin. He is the king of the humans and when he notices that all this forest has sprung forth and all this meat is traveling to one location he takes the right amount of interest in the situation and has to see what the deal is. Cain is a savage man who has no qualms with killing animals, humans, and everything in between. He feels The Creator abandoned humans so he is just making do with what he has left. Noah says the people aren’t welcome on the Ark and Cain lays down the gauntlet by saying “when this deluge comes to end humanity I am going to come and take this Ark from you and The Watchers and we will eat all of the animals.” You know he will keep his word and the story gets its big action conflict.

This would have made for a good film but this take pushes the envelope in a great way by focusing on Noah as a human. The Creator has said that animals are the innocent on Earth so Noah takes this extremely literally and makes the jump that he must kill himself and the rest of his family must die as well. You watch the deconstruction of a righteous man over the entire course of the film and the pressure that is placed on a family when going against a higher being. Noah becomes a person you grow to somewhat despise over the film, and by the time he and his family are on the Ark it feels less like a new beginning for the world and more like a suspense thriller. You know something is going to have to give but you don’t know how Darren Aronofsky is going to take the story.

Should You See It?

I would have to say yes. This is not the best film I have ever seen, but I will say it raised a lot of questions for me and really makes you think about the story of a human dealing with a superhuman situation. You never think about all the people that Noah has to knowingly leave to perish or how a person would have to deal with unclear directions from The Creator. I have had more conversations with people about this film than many others I have seen over the years, and it has something for religious and non-religious persons alike. I can see why this caused controversy among a bunch of different factions because it is not a movie to please one group or the other, it is merely an adaptation of a story that does have some open-endedness to it.

Image source: Daily Mail

Worst Best Picture: Is A Man for All Seasons Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: the guardian

Alex Russell

Country music is an unbeatable source for stories about divorce. Tammy Wynette sang the classically-sad “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” in 1968, a song about the then-revolutionary idea that women also experience sadness in a divorce.

It must have been going around, because just two years earlier two films obsessed with divorce were nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Man for All Seasons. The former is the better movie. Woolf? is a rager of a film, the story of four people’s lives finally going over the falls of madness and sadness at the same time over one night of debauchery and delusion. The latter, A Man for All Seasons, is the quiet story of a man sticking to his principles up until the point that they send him to his death.

A Man for All Seasons is the story of the end of Sir Thomas More, the man who refused to sanction Henry VIII’s divorce… mostly because it involved Henry VIII usurping the Pope and creating a new religion for the entire nation. More stands his ground as the last reasonable man of God in his world, and he’s pretty much right. His only crime is refusing to give the King what he demands, but in his day that’s about the worst you could do.

It’s the story of principles and the lack thereof. More is played as a saint right up until the end. His antagonists scream at him and threaten him and call him an idiot. More takes it all in stride — though he does imply that they’re all going to Hell, so, well, maybe let’s put “stride” in quotes — but he really handles it well until the court scene at the end. He refuses to give a slimy guy named Richard Rich a job in his court over and over because he sees him as disloyal and opportunistic. When Rich perjures himself to send More to death and More loses his damned mind on him, it’s really a popcorn moment in a pretty dry drama about principles and honesty. It’s weird, but it’s awesome.

I’m just going to come out and say that this movie did not blow me away at first. It feels capital-I Important, for sure, but it doesn’t really get going until the second act. The closing court scene is rousing, but there’s a ton of setup to get there. Everyone is very serious — I mean, the King’s killing folks — but even in the context it gets to be a bit much.

Paul Scofield, though! I’ll admit to not being up on my Paul Scofield knowledge, but he’s apparently in rarefied air: He died one letter short of the EGOT. His performance in this movie is amazing. He earns the hell out of his Best Actor award in 1966 for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More, and beats Richard Burton, Alan Arkin, Michael Caine, and Steve McQueen for the honor. If you aren’t going to invest the full two hours to watch Scofield’s fall, you should do some YouTubing for the courtroom scene at the end at the very least. He shines extremely brightly in a movie that’s not necessarily one for the ages.

The Best Part: A crazy, drunk-off-his-ass looking Orson Welles! He plays Cardinal Wolsey, the brief boss of Sir Thomas More. I say brief because he has two scenes: He shows up and yells at More and then gets hauled off to die immediately in prison. The movie’s cast may be largely unknown to the average modern viewer, but it’s impossible to miss Orson Welles. He looks enormous in Cardinal robes and it’s impossible to imagine that he lived for two more decades after this performance. It’s amazing.

The Worst Part: The setup of the story of Sir Thomas More’s undoing is an interesting part of English history, but it’s not a very fascinating thing to watch. This thing wakes up like it doesn’t want to go to school in the morning. It’s almost 40% of the way into the movie before anything “happens” in a sense.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s absolutely not an unremarkable movie, but it feels like an odd choice for Best Picture. Crash seems a ridiculous choice. It seems absurd that it would even be thought of in a positive light in the first place, much less the most positive light. A Man for All Seasons maintains all of the gravitas that won it Best Picture all those years ago, but it doesn’t feel essential. It does feel good, though, so it’s several magnitudes better than Crash.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Image source: Oscars.org

This Looks Terrible: The Preview for “50 to 1”

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Alex Marino

In “This Looks Terrible” we look at previews for upcoming movies. We… probably look too closely.

My brain hurts from trying to understand the rationale behind making a movie about an event that people only care about for three days a year and forget about two days after the event. The movie is called 50 to 1 and it’s about Mine That Bird’s improbable Kentucky Derby win in 2009. Oh, you don’t remember Mine That Bird? Well maybe the star-studded cast of Skeet Ulrich, Christian Kane, and William Devane will draw you to the theaters. Oh, you don’t know who they are either? I’m hoping their marketing strategy involves a TV trailer that includes rave twitter reviews, otherwise maybe 100 people will see it.

This trailer NEEDS you to know that they have cowboys in it. Ulrich and Kane are just two REG’LA COWBOYS with one last shot at making it. It actually contains a scene where there’s a fight at a saloon and a guy goes through the front window like in every shitty western you saw on AMC as a kid. They might as well have used the Benny Hill theme for the first half of it.

And it doesn’t matter that they had Calvin Borel, one of the hottest jockeys at the time, riding the horse. Mine That Bird was a longshot! Except that after the Kentucky Derby he got second and third in the Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes, respectively.

But let’s not be too picky. Just know that this film is in the trusted hands of a company called Ten Furlongs. While I thought making a movie about a sport no ones gives a shit about was a bad idea, some idiots decided to make a production company dedicated to it. They spared no expense in getting their visual effects from a company named “Great FX”,,which sounds like the film equivalent of getting dinner from “Solid Restaurant.” With a production budget of $10 million there’s a chance this film will make its money back, but it won’t be with any of mine.

Image source:

Worst Best Picture: Is The Artist Better or Worse Than Crash?

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Alex Russell

There are 228 reviews of the 2011 Best Picture Oscar winner The Artist on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. 224 of them are positive. The people have spoken: The Artist is apparently fantastic.

It’s also a slog to watch, and not just because it’s a silent movie made in the last five years. There’s no problem with the artistic choice to make a silent movie the better part of a century after the end of the artform. That much is ambitious and that much is why Moneyball and The Help and everything else that year had absolutely no chance against it.

It’s not “boring,” though that criticism might show up on a lot of personal reviews of The Artist. It’s the story of a silent film star on top of the world who gets dethroned by a young, unknown starlet. They coexist at the top of their game for a while, but she is willing to make movies with sound and he decidedly is not. Sound comes, audiences leave silent films in the dust, and our poor hero refuses to change with the times. Oh, and there’s about 75 minutes of dog tricks. For real.

The Artist made me feel like a teenager in an art gallery. It gave me the feeling of being able to recognize that something is “important” but not being able to pry out why everyone else is fawning over it. The grandeur of the silent film era and the nostalgia for a time gone by is easy to understand. The film pours this on thick as it opens with the cast waiting for an audience to clap after watching a zany sped-up silent film. Everyone loves it, silent movies are just movies, and time is frozen in the Greatest Generation of cinema.

The switch from silent films to “talkies” has a nice effect in the film as the main character starts to actually hear sounds in his life. It’s a neat element of the “silent film about the end of silent films shot after the end of silent films” movie, and it’s a bright spot in a movie that doesn’t take any other risks at all.

The climactic scene of the silent film star burning his original reels carries some heft to it, but it’s almost impressive how slight the entire film feels. This is one of film history’s greatest shifts — and there are scenes where a guy tries to burn down his house and shoot himself — but it embodies the campy feel of a silent movie so strongly that no one ever gets a chance to matter. No one learns any lessons, though they do grow. They grow for no intended reason, however, so the moral is apparently something akin to “just wait and life will work out, even if you try to burn down your house.”

Even if you buy it into it as a period piece (which you must, apparently) it is just such a slow movie. It’s only 100 minutes long — insanely short for a Best Picture winner — but it drags from start to finish. Almost all of the film is in the window dressing, and so if you don’t get into the aesthetic you certainly won’t be wowed by the plot. You’re far better off with All About Eve – just about the same story just a few decades later in time with much, much, much more venom. You might recognize that movie as the way people really behave.

The Best Part: It’s surprisingly sweet at times. There is a very sweet moment where the leads exchange fleeting glances as the silent star walks down a staircase out of the movie studio and the young starlet ascends it. For how hamfisted most of the mugging is later in the movie, this image will persist long after the film is forgotten.

The Worst Part: There was a campaign around the release of the movie to nominate the dog for Best Supporting Actor. I love dogs. In the spirit of a piece where I compare pieces of cinema, this would mean equating Robert De Niro with a dog.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? I would not suggest that it’s worse, but a lot of that has to do with genre. It’s impossible to compare a movie about the end of an era with a movie like Crash, especially because Crash insists that “post 9/11” is the era of today, tomorrow, and the century after that. The Artist is about growing out of your notions about the future and learning to adapt in a way that you still feel valid. Crash is about how any growth or development is a myth that should be responded to with distrust. You have to change in the world of The Artist. You never can — even if you try, which you shouldn’t — in Crash. How is a movie about the end of a loved artform more hopeful than anything?

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Image source: NY Times

Reading at Recess

A blog about things we do when we're supposed to be doing other things.

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