My 2012 Oscar Picks

IMDb listing

Previous/Other years
 

I've been somewhat ambivalent this year about giving Oscar predictions because I really did see a lot of movies this past year and thought a lot of films and performances were very good and deserved praise.  So I even created a "Denny Awards" to underscore the films and performances (male and female) that I thought deserved recognition.

On the other hand, the annual Oscars is one of the largest shared experiences in the United States.  So I'm quickly typing a list of Oscar picks now and will be better about this next year.

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
WILL WIN - Christopher Plummer (Beginners)
SHOULD WIN - Christopher Plummer
DESERVING OF A NOMINATION - John Hawkes (Martha Marcy May Marlene) 

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
WILL WIN - Octavia Spenser (The Help)
SHOULD WIN - Octavia Spenser
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter), Judy Dench (J Edgar)

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
WILL WIN - Jean Dujardin (The Artist)
SHOULD WIN - Jean Dujardin
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Dominic Cooper (The Devil's Double), Leonardo DiCaprio (J Edgar), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), Antonio Banderas (The Skin I Live In), Martin Sheen (The Way)

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
WILL WIN - Viola Davis (The Help)
SHOULD WIN - Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady)
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), Khomotso Manyaka (Life Above All)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREEN PLAY
WILL WIN - The Artist
SHOULD WIN - The Artist / Midnight in Paris
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Future, Another Earth, Take Shelter, The Way

BEST ADAPTED SCREEN PLAY
WILL WIN - Hugo
SHOULD WIN - The Descendants
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Higher Ground, Carnage

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
WILL WIN - Hugo
SHOULD WIN (AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED) - Melancholia (!),
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Take Shelter, The Skin I Live In, Like Crazy

BEST DIRECTOR
WILL WIN - Martin Scorcese (Hugo)
SHOULD WIN - Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) / Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)
DESERVED OF NOMINATIONS - Pedro Almodóvar (The Skin I Live In), Clint Eastwood (J Edgar)

BEST ANIMATED PICTURE
WILL WIN - Rango
SHOULD WIN - Rango
DESERVING OF A NOMINATION - The Adventures of Tintin

BEST PICTURE
WILL WIN - The Artist / The Help
SHOULD WIN - The Artist


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Russian Reserve (orig. Русский заповедник) [2010]

MPAA (Unrated)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing

Russian Reserve (orig. Русский заповедник), directed by Valery Timoschenko is a Russian documentary which played recently at the at the Peace on Earth Film Festival held at the Chicago Cultural Center between Feb 23-26, 2012.  The documentary is about a Russian Orthodox priest, Fr. Victor Saltykov living in a remote Russian village, which he notes is statistically "the poorest village in the Russian Federation."  Yet it becomes clear that seen through the right lens, it is an absolutely idyllic place to live -- fields, orchards, lakes, rivers, a nice white Russian Orthodox church in the center of town.

Many thoughts came to my mind as I watched this film.  

I recalled, for instance, that the Servites, members of my religious order, from my Order's Mexican Province, made a similar choice some ten years ago to accept a missionary assignment to one of the poorest municipalities in all of Mexico -- in Acatepec in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico among the Tlapaneco (Mephaa) people living there (video presentation of the Servites in Acatepec (Tlapa), Guerrero; interview, in Spanish, of Fr. Ruben Torres, OSM, one of the founders of the Servite Mission there).

I recalled my trips (3 each) to both the Servite mission in Acatepec as well as to the Servite mission in Acre, Brazil (in the Amazon) [2].

And I recalled my Slavic roots.  My dad's mother was from a similarly idyllic little town, Obdenice in southern Bohemia (Czech Republic).  My mother's father was Russian from the Kuban region of Russia.  

The spirituality of the Russian Orthodox church is very well expressed in this film.  It idylizes the life of the poustinik or pilgrim/hermit, who gives up everything to follow Christ.  He/she lives simply, in the countryside, depending quite literally on what God gives him/her.  A great book on the subject is Catherine De Hueck's Poustinia.  Another great book is an anonymous text coming from 19th century Russia called "The Way of the Pilgrim."

In the film, Fr. Viktor, besides sacramental functions, tends cows, tends bees, instructs visitors how to cultivates potatoes.  He notes that he has a special house setup for city dwellers coming out to visit him, noting that it takes a few days for "city dwellers" to get used to village life.  With a smile he further notes that he had a couple visiting him some years back in which the wife initially demanded that her husband take her back home when they arrived.  "Now she's the happiest (repeat) visitor here ..."

One then also recalls the Leo Tolstoy and the Tolstoyan Movement, recalling that even Mahatma Gandhi was influenced by this movement to celebrate simple, agrarian life.  

At the end of the film, Fr. Viktor, who saw his little community (and others like it) as "little Noah's arks," summarized his philosophy in this way:

You don't have to save Nature, because it will outlast us,
You don't have to save the Church, because it will save us,
You don't have to save Russia, you just have to love it,
You don't have to save "the village,' you just need to live in one.

What a great and thoughtful film from a part of the world that most Westerners would know next to nothing about.  

ADDENDUM - 

The two books that I referred to above are both available on Amazon:

Catherine de Hueck-Doherty, Poustinia
Anonymous, The Way of the Pilgrim  


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Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1 [2011]

MPAA (unrated) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing

Nuclear Savage (directed by Adam Jonas Horowitz) is a pointed and poignant documentary about the pacific islanders of the far-flung Marshall Islands where the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the late 1940s-though the 1950s.  The documentary played recently at the Peace on Earth Film Festival held at the Chicago Cultural Center between Feb 23-26, 2012.


The accusation of the documentary is that the U.S. government purposefully used these Pacific Islanders as de facto human guinea pigs to the study the effects of nuclear contamination on people.

The accusation is based on a protocol (Project 4.1) written-up six months prior to a massive nuclear test (Bravo) in the Marshall Islands.  The protocol outlined a procedure of how to study the effects of radioactive contamination on people.  Six months later, the Bravo test did, in fact, contaminate the Rongerik Atoll of the Marshall Islands along with its residents.  The U.S. Navy then took its time, several days, to evacuate the residents of this Atoll by which time the residents were already thoroughly contaminated by the radioactive fallout.

The U.S. government has always maintained that the contamination of the Rongerik Atoll and its population was "an accident," the result of a sudden change in wind-direction in the hours just before the test.  The islanders and their advocates have maintained that by the U.S. weather service's own records the U.S. government knew of the change in wind direction and made the decision to go along with the test anyway.

My own sense would be that while _perhaps_ the irradiation/contamination of the residents by the blast was nominally "an accident," it was one that was more or less obviously foreseen by the U.S. government that eventually there would be such an "accidental exposure" of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and hence why the government already had a protocol to "study the victims" of such an "accident" even before it occurred.  That is to say that even if the islanders had not been irradiated and contaminated by that particular nuclear test, then probably _others_ would have been irradiated/contaminated by another one...

In any case, the effects of the irradiation and contamination were devastating.  Surviving islanders interviewed in the film described bouts with cancer, leukemia, and horrendous, horrendous birth defects -- "My first child was born looking like a sack of grapes.  My second was born without muscles or bones.  He was like a jellyfish.  Both died within a day of birth," reported one woman.  Another reported giving birth to a child whose appendages "looked more like the fins of a sea turtle than arms or legs."  Another reported giving birth to a "child who you couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, but had a tail."  All died early.

Worse, in 1957, the evacuated residents of the Rongerik Atoll were forced to return to live on the island even though the government knew it remained highly contaminated. And the cancers/birth defects continued.  The Islanders were finally evacuated in the 1980 a second time -- by Green Peace -- but as of 2011 they were being forced (under the current Obama Administration)  to once more return to their island to live there or risk have their compensations cut off.  Needless to say ... the Islanders don't want to go back.

What a nightmare and what terrible things happen when sin occurs "far away," "in darkness," when "no one is looking".

A note about the title, Nuclear Savage.  The title is taken from actual language used by U.S. scientists in 1950s era newsreels describing these poor people who had their islands blown-up and contaminated by American nuclear tests while _nobody_ except Christian missionaries actually cared about them.

Indeed, most of those "Savages" (1) contaminated by the Bravo test and evacuated sometime afterwards, (2) forced later to return, (3) evacuated once more, and now (4) being forced to return again to the contaminated Rongerik Atoll WERE CHRISTIANS ALL ALONG.  Among the ruins on the contaminated and abandoned island are the ruins of a Christian church and a Christian cemetery....


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Tyler Perry's Good Deeds [2012]

MPAA (PG-13)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1885265/

Good Deeds (written and directed by Tyler Perry), is a very well-written/crafted movie, both gentle and pointed, that's certainly about our times but which chooses to be positive. 

The film is about two people: Wesley Deeds (played by Tyler Perry) and Lindsey Wakefield (played by Thandie Newton).

Wesley is a 30-something gentleman, 5th generation Ivy League graduate, who now heads his family's investment business from its high rise headquarters in San Francisco's business district.  He has both the temperament and the capability to lead the company well and thus be a good steward of the family's fortune for another generation.  But he's also unhappy.  A good son to his mother Wilemina (played by Phylicia Rashad), a good future husband to his fiance Natalie (played by Gabrielle Union), and a good/competent leader of his family's firm, he's nonetheless going through the motions.  He's good because he's always met expectations, done what he's supposed to do (and done so quite well).

Lindsey turns out to be a cleaning lady in the Deeds' high rise.  Behind on her rent, behind on her bills, alone, with an 7-8 year old daughter Ariel (played by Jordenn Thompson) in tow, she's constantly fighting to "keep it together" even as she's obviously terrified that she's one step away from final disaster. 

Even though Lindsey works for Deeds, the two "meet" for the first time when Lindsey cuts off Wesley in the Deeds' Building's parking garage to park in his reserved spot right by the elevator.  Wesley is annoyed.  His more problematic and certainly more hot-headed younger brother Walter (played by Brian White) is furious.  Lindsey, ever in defensive mode, doesn't care, calls both names and runs up to the building's maintenance office to pick-up her check.  She needs the check to cover her rent.  From this initial encounter, much ensues ...

There are many things to like about this movie.  Yes, the dialogue remains at times a little "stiff/unnatural"  It's obvious that the characters represent "types" rather than complex individuals.  Yet, Perry uses his characters and his film with purpose.  He's both challenging his viewers (and perhaps even the larger society) and doing so in a positive way.

It becomes obvious in the film that Lindsey had no idea of who she was actually working for.  When she runs into Wesley sometime later, having been transferred to the evening shift (Wesley habitually stays late working in the office), she has no idea that he actually runs the firm.  She assumes that "Deeds" who owned the firm had to be some "old white guy."  When she starts getting to know Wesley, it doesn't even enter into her head that she's talking to the CEO of the firm and that he's not even a "flash in the pan" / "upstart" but had inherited the firm from his father who inherited it from his.

On the other side of the coin, at a time when so much anger is being expressed at "the top 1%," both in film (Inside Job, Margin Call, Tower Heist, In Time, Man on a Ledge all good to very good films BTW...) and in society (with the Occupy Wall Street Movement), rather than condemning "the 1%," Tyler Perry (himself a theater mogul) offers "the 1%" a good example in Wesley Deeds.  Wesley uses his money and his power to get involved in Lindsey's life.  And as he does so, he finds himself.  He becomes "Good Deeds."

What a nice, nice film!


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Gone [2012]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1838544/

CNS/ USCCB Review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv026.htm

Gone (directed by Heitor Dahlia, written by Allison Burnett) is a rather uncomplicated if quite well played genre piece -- a paranoid/psychological thriller -- about a young woman named Jill (played by Amanda Seyfried) living in Portland, Oregon who had survived a traumatic ordeal.

Jill had been abducted by a man, thrown into a pit (dug by the abductor) somewhere deep in the forests surrounding Portland and survived to escape and tell the tale only because she was able to drive piece of a bone left from one of the other girls who had been abducted, presumably raped and then left to die in the pit before her.  Disoriented after she emerged from the forest to safety, she was unable to lead authorities to the pit.  After a couple of weeks of increasingly half-hearted searching the authorities apparently concluded that since they were unable to identify/capture her attacker or find the pit, she may have simply invented the story for reasons unknown.  Indeed when we meet Jill in the film, we see that she is on a fairly strict regimen of medication needing to take several pills several times a day.

Film begins about a year after Jill's ordeal.  It's clear that she at least has not given-up on finding the hole in the woods of the protected forest in which she had been held.  Still, viewers get a definite sense of the vastness of the woods in the area and the difficulty of finding the hole especially if one's memory of the events was necessarily imperfect/clouded by trauma.

Still, Jill had survived her ordeal.  This was something that was clearly significant not only to her as a survivor, but also to her abductor:  She would be the only person who could presumably eventually find the pit (with the remains of the other abducted and killed women) and perhaps even find and identify him.  So the film becomes not just of Jill trying to prove her story and capture her abductor, but also about the abductor trying to "tie up loose ends" (his own words, we find out).

So one night while Jill was at work and having borrowed her sister's car rather than driving her own, Jill's sister Molly (played by Emily Wickersham) disappears.  Jill's immediately convinced that she was abducted by her abductor.  The police, of course, think that she's crazy, noting that there could be any number of irrational / irresponsible reasons for a young woman like Jill's sister to "not be home" one morning, even if "she had a final exam that next day" and Molly's boyfriend "didn't know where she was either."  One of the police detectives who had worked previously on Jill's case asks her "Did you ever think that your sister could have had a second boyfriend?  Just saying, it happens..."

So Jill's convinced that Molly's been kidnapped and in immediate danger of being killed and the police is convinced that Jill's disturbed.  Much ensues...

A genre film like this often depends on good writing and dialogue.  I have to say that I found Jill's talking-up of various potential witnesses to the abduction of her sister and then of people who may have known something about the potential perpetrator to be very well done.  All in all, for what the film was -- a paranoid/psychological thriller -- I thought it was quite well done and probably a lot of late teens and young adults would enjoy watching it.

Parents should note that while nothing is every shown, the film assumes as a matter of course a young adult sexual morality (immorality...), mostly heterosexual but at least in one case homosexual, that would make an R-rating for the film more suitable than PG-13.  Indeed, due to subject matter alone -- after all it is about abducting and terrorizing young people -- an R-rating would probably have been more appropriate.  Sometimes, I simply don't understand Hollywood's rating decisions, but parents just take note.  This film, while certainly a pretty good young adult "date movie," it's not really "for the little ones."


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Ghost Rider - Spirit of Vengeance [2012]

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Fr. Dennis (1 Star)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review

I found Ghost Rider - Spirit of Vengeance (directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, story and screenplay cowritten by David S. Goyer along with Scott M. Gimble and Seth Hoffman based on the to be a monumental disappointment on almost every level.

A sequel to IMHO the much better film Ghost Rider [2007] based on the Marvel Comic Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze), it was clear to me that the makers of the current film made a decision to "go darker" with Johnny Blaze (played in both films by Nicholas Cage) who in the first film was arguably sympathetic.  Johnny had made a deal with the Devil (played by Peter Fonda in the first film) only to save his father from cancer.  (Shortly after signing his own immortal soul over to the Devil to save his father from cancer, the Devil turns around and kills the father in a motorcycle accident ... YOU GOTTA FEEL SORRY FOR JOHNNY THEN ...).

In this film, Johnny Blaze comes to enjoy way too much the Ghost Rider "job" that the Devil has condemned him to: Periodically, Johnny, a stunt motorcyclist (a "dare devil"...) would become possessed, turn into a flaming skeleton in a smoking leather jacket on a really, really hot, indeed FLAMING bike ... and speed-off to capture some really, really bad-guy (some true Evil Doer [TM]) -- usually by bringing him down with a HUGE red-hot metal chain that he'd throw at him, knocking him down and tangling him in it.  Then Johnny Blaze (aka The Ghost Rider) would step off the bike, bring the Evil Doer close, look square in his terror stricken eyes, declare the charge and sentence "YOU PREYED ON / CHEATED / KILLED THE INNOCENT..." suck the Soul out of said terrified Evil Doer and send said convicted Soul straight down to Hell [TM].  Since the people that Johnny Blaze / the Ghost Rider sent down to Hell this way were generally truly awful people and Johnny was doing all this as "a cursed biker," one could feel sorry for the guy in the first film.  However, in this film once possessed he seemed to enjoy this work way too much.

Then the plot of this film is far more confused.  It's set not in the United States anymore but "in Eastern Europe somewhere" (where Johnny Blaze has apparently run-off to in hopes of somehow escaping the Devil there).  There he finds himself trying to save a child named Danny (played by Fergus Riordan) of a young Gypsy woman named Nadya (played by Violante Placido) who the Devil named Roarke (played by Ciaran Hinds) wished to enter in order to do more damage on the Earth.  This battle between Good and Evil comes to involve a strange Evil-looking traditionalist "Catholic-looking" religious Order (less DaVinci Code [2006] evil than Name of the Rose [1986] evil...) that wants to kill the boy before the Devil could enter him and a "hip" and very heavily armed "rouge Priest" named Moreau (played by Idris Elba).  Fr. Moreau reconciles Johnny Blaze back to the fold of the living (or at least the non-cursed) by a Rite that looks vaguely like Confession, only to find to the horror of both, that he "reconciled him too soon" to be able to protect the boy.  Guess what Johnny does then to save the boy ...

I think I've had my fill of gun-wielding priests over the past year.  I was relatively kind to the sci-fi thriller Priest [2011] (based on a South Korean comic book series), then chose to ignore the film Machine Gun Preacher [2011], but because I liked the first Ghost Rider [2007] made it a point to see this film.  But I think I'm done.

Finally, I actually did see this film in 3D, and have to report that THE 3D WAS AWFUL.  It added virtually NOTHING to the film.  The vast majority of the flaming CGI special effects that perhaps could have been really really cool in 2D looked absolutely ridiculous in 3D.  Yes, Ghost Rider originated as a comic book.  But even in the comic book genre, if the comics are poorly drawn, they don't sell...

So this Ghost Rider sequel (1) turned an arguably sympathetic (if cursed) character into a much less sympathetic one, (2) featured gun-wielding priests and vaguely Evil and certainly misguided Medieval-looking "Catholic-looking" religious monks, trying to kill a kid "in order to save him," and (3) did this utilizing hyper-expensive 3D technology to produce a monumentally disappointing (even visually, even buying into the 3D technology) product.  If there is a Ghost Rider 3, I do hope that it will be done better than this.


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Journey 2 - Mysterious Island [2012]

MPAA (PG) CNS/USCCB (A-II)  Roger Ebert (2 1/2 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1397514/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv018.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120208/REVIEWS/120209983

Journey 2 - Mysterious Island (directed by Brad Payton, story by Richard Outten, Mark Gunn and Brian Gunn, screenplay by Mark Gunn and Brian Gunn) is the latest film adaptation, this time in 3D, of Jules Verne's 1874 novel Mysterious Island (French orig. title - L'Île mystérieuse).  Jules Verne, of course, was a pioneer in fantastic / science fiction writing and has been a perennial challenge to film makers since the invention of moving pictures.  The recent movie, Hugo, was largely about the pioneering French film-maker Georges Méliès who was already putting together cinematic adaptations of Jules Verne's novels on the screen in the Silent Film Era.

So how does the present adaption go?  The film begins with Sean (played by Josh Hutcherson), a teen struggling with and perhaps reacting to his mother Liz' (played by Kristen Davis) remarrying and thus the presence of Hank (played by Dwayne Johnson), Sean's new step-father in his life.  Seeking to defend  himself against this change, Sean seeks to keep alive memory of his dad's family's values and traditions.  Specifically just as his grandfather and his father before him, Sean's become something of Jules Verne fanatic.  His father deceased, and his grandfather (played by Michael Caine) "long gone" on account of this irritating interest in Verne and "proving" that Verne's books were "about real journeys" that Verne had taken, Sean's "hobby" comes across Liz and Hank as disruptive (and perhaps even delusional) as they try to build a new blended family together and get everyone, including Sean "on board" with the new reality.

One night, Sean becomes excited because he thinks that he has detected a radio message from his long lost grandfather, and that he may have found Verne's "Mysterious Island."  What to do?  Liz remains annoyed, but Hank, who apparently has some money, decides to try "to bond" with Sean by playing along.  Together, the two decipher the coded coordinates that Sean's grandfather apparently had sent in his radio message and when they discover that the coordinates map to a location somewhere near the island of Fiji in the South Pacific.  Then, they decide to "give it a shot" and fly out to Fiji to see if there's something to the story.

Out there in the South Pacific, the two rent a helicopter operated by a local tour guide named Gobato (played by Luis Guzman) and his teenage daughter Kailani (played by Vanessa Hudgens).  They find out that the coordinates correspond to a part of the ocean nearby that's perpetually covered by clouds and stormy (hence why almost no one ever goes there).  But Sean convinces everyone to try anyway.  Once they arrive, (and even the journey is fraught with much danger), many further adventures ensue, including linking up with Sean's grandfather, who indeed did send that radio signal to the outsider world from the island during apparently a very brief break in the weather. 

The story is obviously a fantasy, but so was Jules Verne's original.  I do think it makes for a very nice story for pre-teens, perhaps indeed as a "father-son" or "step-father son" outing especially if a family were experiencing some "bonding issues" at home.  Though I saw the movie in 2D, I would imagine that 3D would probably work well as well.  (I still think that 3D is both needlessly costly and gimmicky ...) All in all, it's not a stupendous film but one that preserves and adapts, quite well actually, the legacies of both Jules Verne and the attempts by early film makers like Georges Méliès to put Verne's fantastic stories on film.


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