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I wish more people understood this simple fact!
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The Americans
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The Televerse TV PODCAST #78- Caprica with Chris Piers/Spotlight on The Vampire Diaries and Spartacus
Thanks to the number of interesting TV episodes to discuss, the podcast this week is on the long side, perhaps inspired by the Oscars. After briefly previewing Tuesday night’s CBS pilot Golden Boy, we kick off a strong week in TV, including the Tuesday Comedies (New Girl, Mindy Project, Cougar Town), the Cult pilot,Justified, part one of the Top Chef Seattle finale, Southland, The Americans, the Thursday Comedies (Community, Parks and Rec x2, Archer), the Oscars telecast,The Amazing Race, Girls, and the winter (read: season, perhaps series) finale ofBunheads. Then, for the first time since episode 11, two shows share the episode spotlight- Spartacus: War of the Damned and The Vampire Diaries. Afterwards, we keep the genre talk going by welcoming Chris Piers of Television Zombies to the DVD Shelf to help us break down the flawed but intriguing Caprica.
Absolutely Gorgeous Oscar-Inspired Poster Series - click here to see more
‘Les Misérables’ finds Tom Hooper and his cast severely out of their depth
Verisimilitude can be a terrible trap. Film is an inherently contrived medium, one nevertheless capable of insinuating itself into realms real, imaginary and psychic through cunning, trickery, and time-honored craft. But, for better and (usually) worse, the existence of the medium’s hidden powers doesn’t stop some contemporary filmmakers from tweaking established conventions in the hope of creating a more “realistic” experience.
Take Britain’s Tom Hooper, for instance. Given any chance, he’ll extol the virtues of his new filmic adaptation of the musical version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. He’ll doubtlessly mention that it features live, in-camera vocal performances, forgoing the standard film-musical practice of utilizing studio-honed vocal performances that are then synced to the actors’ filmed performances. (Or, heaven forbid, hiring professional singers to handle that aspect.) His directorial style, which makes use of copious Steadicam and extreme closeup and Dutch angles, seeks to emphasize the presentness of said performances. This is to be a bold new vision of the movie musical. (Nevermind that the notion of the film’s purported “realness” doesn’t exactly mesh well with its status as an English-language musical set in France with a mostly-British cast.)
The trouble with his Les Misérables is that neither Hooper nor (most of) his cast is remotely up to the much-trickier-than-foreseen task; they’ve skipped straight to attempting to reinvent the wheel without any indication that they actually understood just how the damn thing actually worked in the first place.
Sound on Sight Podcast #340: ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and ‘The Sessions’
Josh Spiegel swaps in for Ricky D, joining Simon Howell and Julian Carrington to discuss two late-year fest darlings – which, of course, also makes them Oscar hopefuls. First up is David O. Russell’s bipolar rom-com Silver Linings Playbook, with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert de Niro; next is the John Hawkes vehicle / bio-pic/ would-be tearjerker, The Sessions. Up for discussion: the MPAA and penises, the TIFF Audience Award track record, and whether it’s better to over-direct or not to direct at all.
Oscar Injustice: 4 Great Performances Ignored by The Academy
With the Oscars finally concluded and cleared up for another year, with familiar lessons learned and perturbing trends set for the rest of the year, time comes for evaluation and discussion, thoughtful or otherwise. And one thing is clear: if there was predictability to be had in 2012, it came in the acting categories.
Although precious few will dispute the merits of the Dujardins, Streeps, Plummers and Spencers of the acting world, or even protest their victories, more talk comes about who didn’t win (Gary Oldman, and I will not pipe down about this), and those who weren’t even nominated (Hunter McCracken; Again, not letting it slide).
On various occasions throughout the years, an actor has given a truly outstanding performance in film, one that deserves all the plaudits and riches in the galaxy. And often, for varying circumstances, this same performer has had to settle with a simple, often grudging acknowledgement, a nod of recognition. But sometimes, mystifyingly, they get nothing, at least none from the guys at the top of the pile. While merit noms are sprayed left, right and centre, true class too often doesn’t catch the shrapnel.
Here are four such outstanding acting performances that were snubbed.
Post Oscar Thought: Grown Up Films – An Endangered Species?
“When I was a child,” film reviewer Stephen Whitty wrote in “What Happened to Grown-Up Films?” for New Jersey’s state paper, The Star-Ledger, on the day of the Oscars, “most of the big hits in movie theaters were aimed at adults. Now that I’m an adult, most of the big hits in movie theaters are aimed at children.”
Earlier this month (“Why Can’t An Oscar-Winner Look More Like a Hit?” posted 2/8/12), several of us on this site were discussing what turns out to be the heart of Whitty’s article: the divergence between the acclaimed and the popular. With respect to my SOS colleagues, none of us put it quite as eloquently or made as substantial a case for the how’s and why’s behind that schism as Whitty does. His piece is worth a read and you can find it here.
The part of Whitty’s article which really brought it home for me – since he and I are about the same age – was his now-and-then contrast of box office toppers:
“In 1971…I was 12 and just getting seriously interested in films. And that was easy. Because back then, the top 10 domestic grossers were, in order, Fiddler on the Roof, The French Connection, Summer of ’42, Diamonds Are Forever, Dirty Harry, Carnal Knowledge, A Clockwork Orange, Klute, The Last Picture Show, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks…
“In 2011, the top 10 movies included two films based on young-adult novels, two more based on toys or amusement park rides, two superhero films, one sci-fi flick, one cartoon, one raunchy comedy and one over-the-top action picture…not one was a drama.”
Watch The Academy Award-Winning Best Animated Short Film, ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore’
This past Sunday I took part in my yearly Oscar poll carefully selecting who I thought would win in each category. While I usually come away the big winner I’ve never once been able to correctly guess the winners of all three categories for short films (documentary, live action and animation). That all changed this year. While just about everyone had placed their bets on Pixar’s La Luna, but I made the wise choice in picking The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg. While Pixar may seem like a safe bet, they rarely win. In fact out of the 11 years since the Academy introduced the award, the studio has been nominated 8 times but have only won once. Luckily I had the opportunity to see The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and was completely blown away, thus the reason I selected it in my Oscar poll. Now it seems everyone else can now watch the film online via YouTube.
Here’s the film’s description from its official site and below it you can watch the short. Enjoy!
Oscar mistakes: ‘Departures’ winning over ‘Waltz with Bashir’
In 2008, there was one film out of all the Oscar nominees that had a birthright claim to what film critics love to call “inventing a new cinematic language” or “creating a universe of its own”, and this was not endearing and cutesy Slumdog Millionaire, or minority-rights conscious Milk or tastefully prurient The Reader.
The film that existed in a genre of its own was of course Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s mostly animated documentary on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre during the 1981 Lebanon war. The first mistake was the sole nomination it garnered for Best Foreign Film. Its genre-defying character could have as rightfully landed it into the Best Documentary or Best Animation categories. Only a very taxonomically-challenged Academy could have NOT nominated Folman’s crew of animators, their four years’ toil and minimal use of special effects. Instead, the Best Animation category’s infantilism was compounded by three ‘industrial’ big-studio nominees: Wall-E, Kung-Fu Panda, and Bolt. A bored trans-galactic robot is more original, one has to concur with the Academy, than Palestinian
