A friend is boycotting the Academy Awards because his favourite film of 2015, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, didn’t make the Oscar’s Best Picture list.
The awards, he says, aren’t relevant because they ignore genre movies and in this particular case, have snubbed the most financially successful film of the year. In fact, the old canard that the Academy doesn’t honour genre movies with Best Picture nods has been shot down this year with nominations for The Martian and Mad Max: Fury Road.
The Oscar folks also gave The Force Awakens five nominations and in recent years Inception, Avatar, District 9, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Django Unchained have all earned top nods with LOTR taking home the gold.
Genre movies do just fine with the Academy. No need for C-3PO to cry little metal tears. To the Academy’s credit, not recognizing the year’s box office behemoth while giving Room, a modestly grossing movie, Best Picture, Actress, Directing and Adapted Screenplay nods, actually suggests the Academy will not be wowed by wheelbarrows of cash.
Perhaps the truth is that the Oscars, and awards shows in general, are only as relevant as you want them to be. Are they as important as the Republican debates? It’s all just show biz, so maybe. Ultimately, unless you’re an actor, a director or a shareholder in a nominated film the Oscars are probably not extremely significant to your life. I pay attention to them as a function of my job, and I enjoy them, but this year I’m on board with my friend but for different reasons.
I’m disappointed in Oscar’s failure to acknowledge diversity. For the second year in a row all 20 acting nominations went to white actors. To be clear I’m not implying the Academy is overtly racist. There are too many voters for there to be a conspiracy to keep actors of colour out of the headline categories. Have you ever gone to a restaurant with more than 10 people and tried to get everyone to agree on an appetizer for the table? It’s nearly impossible. Now imagine trying to arrange collusion between 6,000 members of the Academy. Totally hopeless.
So if it’s not a conspiracy why were stellar performances from Creed’s Michael B. Jordan, The Hateful Eight’s Samuel L. Jackson, Sicario’s Benicio Del Toro, Beasts of No Nation’s Idris Elba or any of Straight Outta Compton’s top line cast not nominated? I think it’s a combination of studio decision makers, who tend to be white, male and older coupled with the same demographic of voters at the Academy.
It’s a systemic issue being addressed by Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs’ effort to mould the Academy’s membership to be more in line with the population.
Until the Oscars represent the full width and breadth of the best in Hollywood, regardless of race or gender, they will continue to slide toward irrelevancy. My guess is that the most interesting part of this year’s ceremony won’t be who wins Best Actor but host Chris Rock’s opening monologue, which, if the movie gods prevail, will address the situation in no uncertain terms. It’s a speech I’m predicting will be just as entertaining and provocative as any of the nominees, Star Wars: The Force Awakens included.
The last time we saw Benicio Del Toro on screen he was starring in Sicario as a mercenary who collected a handsome paycheque while quenching his thirst for revenge against drug cartel leaders.
He was vicious and malicious, a supreme badass doing the right thing for the completely wrong reason.
That movie’s dark and gritty examination of the drug-fuelled Mexico-U.S. border war stands in stark contrast to his new movie, the optimistically titled A Perfect Day.
“I do believe there is hope in A Perfect Day,” he says. “I agree with you that Sicario is hopeless but in this one there is hope. I was finishing A Perfect Day when I went into Sicario. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Sicario was interesting, because it was the dark side of the coin.”
Set in 1990s Balkans, Del Toro plays Mambrú, a misfit aid worker whose team (played by Tim Robbins and Olga Kurylenko among others) begin their day in the former Yugoslavia trying to remove a bloated corpse dumped in a well to contaminate the water.
The task is complicated by United Nations bureaucracy and the lack of a strong enough rope forcing the crew to navigate not only landmine-ridden roads but their own complicated relationships in search of a solution.
Director Fernando León de Aranoa calls Del Toro the centerpiece of the film, adding, “Working with him means working with a creative partner.”
“There are some ideas that can come from anywhere that are golden,” Del Toro says on improvising on set. “I would like to say that I wish I could recognize good ideas when they are out there whether they come from another actor or they come from myself.
“If there is a good idea I do believe that if you don’t take advantage of it while you are making the film it’ll be gone forever. If there is a good idea I am game to explore.”
Del Toro, who is currently filming Star Wars: Episode VIII, says the script appealed to him because, it was about, “people trying to do good and just how complicated it can get, but with elements of humour…. It was like a riddle to solve,” he says.
“Can the movie balance these two things? I think it does. The darkness of the war and the job with the humour.”
One point of reference was Robert Altman’s black comedy M*A*S*H about medical personnel stationed at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War.
The actor says he discussed the 1970 movie, “with the director and Tim Robbins a little bit but the other film we talked about was No Man’s Land by Danis Tanović. It takes place in that part of the world and deals with the comedy and the darkness. The comedy in a ridiculous way.”
More importantly, he met with his character’s real-life counterparts.
“I had met some aid workers and I will tell you, they all have a good sense of humour. They tell you some dark stories but they do have a sense of humour. It’s a way of dealing with the darkness of their experiences and the pain.
“At the end of the day when you do a movie like this you learn about how valuable these people are. How courageous they are. Aid workers. Doctors Without Borders. How much energy and compassion for humans they have.”
“Triple 9” is set in Atlanta on the side of the tracks where it’s not that hard to tell who the bad guys are… because pretty much everyone is some sort of villain. Including the cops.
The film begins with the first of several heart pounding action sequences. Unshaven tough guys— ex-special forces agents Michael (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Russell (“The Walking Dead’s” Norman Reedus) along with Russell’s ex-cop brother Gabe (Aaron Paul), and a pair of dirty cops Marcus (Anthony Mackie) and Jorge (Clifton Collins Jr.)—use their connections and tactical training to pull off a brazen hold up Atlanta’s First City Bank and steal the safety deposit box of a wealthy Russian gangster.
It’s a special ordered by the elaborately coiffured Israeli mob boss Irina (Kate Winslet) who then demands the men do another job before any money changes hands. The second heist involves breaking into an unmarked homeland security building and stealing the computer files that contain the key to getting Irina’s husband out of jail. It’s dangerous, time sensitive—“The house is burning and the clock is ticking,” she says.—and damn near impossible. Completing the task calls for strong measures. The baddies decide to stage a triple 9, cop slang for a fallen constable, in the hopes that an “officer down” call will attract every police officer in Atlanta, leaving them free to do as they please across town. Their intended victim is a new by-the-book officer Chris Allen (Casey Affleck) but matters of family ties, loyalty and even a hint of ethics complicate matters.
“Triple 9” is perfect for those who like their cop stories tinged with nihilism. Cut from the same stained cloth as “Training Day” and “Street Kings,” it’s a down-and-dirty story where severed heads are a plot point, a lead detective smokes more dope than the people he’s arresting (and he’s one of the good guys) and tough guys say creepily poetic things like, “It’s quiet as a mother’s prayer.” The scent of testosterone hangs heavy in the air but director John Hillcoat embraces the dirty cop clichés but allows the actors to wallow in the filth in interesting of ways. Woody Harrelson’s sleazy-but-righteous cop is a ton of fun, the Collins Jr.’s Jorge is sheer b-movie evil and Winslet’s Irina is a villain ripped out of the pages of a pulp fiction novel.
We’ve seen it all before, and frankly, seen it better before, so while Hillcoat doesn’t reinvent the wheel he does point the wheel to a menacing underworld and doesn’t take his foot off the gas till me gets there.
“Eddie the Eagle” is not a feel-good movie. Like Eddie, the English skier whose ambitions to compete in the Olympics made him a star, the film sets its sights high. It’s not content to simply be a feel good film, it’s aspiring to be a feel GREAT movie.
When we first meet Eddie it’s 1973 and he’s a cute English kid with leg braces and a dream of entering the Olympics. Unfortunately his bad knees prevent him from taking part in most of the tradition sports so he wants to use his skill at holding his breath to win the gold.
Cut to his teen years. The braces are gone and he home trains himself in pole-vault and (not-so) long jumps in hopes of taking a shot at the Summer Olympics. His father (Tim McInnerny) isn’t as hopeful. “You’ll never be Olympic material,” he says. Bloodied but unbowed, the now twenty-two year old Eddie (Taron Egerton) switches his focus to winter sports, specifically ski jumping. With no facilities available in England he heads to Germany to train. Trouble is, while he has spirit, he has no trainer or knowledge of the sport. “How do you land?’ he wonders after one disastrous jump.
After a rough start—cue the wipe out montage—he meets Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), once an Olympic champion, now a drunk who maintains the jumps. Peary doesn’t think Eddie has a shot, but the young man’s enthusiasm wears him down and soon he is training Eddie for the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. Ski jumping, he says, “is not just a sport, it’s an art. It’s spiritual.”
What Eddie lacks in technical skill he makes up for in determination. Because the Olympic rules hadn’t changed in 52 years since the last British ski jumper competed in the games, all Eddie has to do, basically, is show up and he’ll be guaranteed a spot in Calgary. First, however, he has to learn to jump without breaking every bone in his body.
Like Kendall Jenner or a YouTube cat video “Eddie the Eagle” is unashamed to flaunt its cuteness to appeal to viewers. Egerton, best known for his swaggerific role in “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” hands in a performance that makes Benny Hill look nuanced. With thick, ill-fitting glasses, he’s all doe eyes and determination, a stiff-upper-lipper who wants to be part of the Olympics to prove everyone who told him he wasn’t good enough wrong. It’s an underdog story of such epic proportions it makes “The Bad News Bears” and all other underdogs look jaded by comparison.
The movie’s tagline is, “Two underdogs, one dream,” so be assured, it doubles down on the long shot vibe. Jackman’s Peary is a man who once had it all, lost it and knows what it is like to be written off by everyone. He and Eddie are two peas in a pod and their dual ‘doing your best is the greatest reward’ message is the movie’s lesson. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Eddie the Eagle” is not an ambitious movie. It sets out to do one thing—make Eddie an underdog for the ages—but I couldn’t help but think of the words of the founder of the International Olympic Committee, Pierre de Coubertin. “It’s not the triumph,” he said, “it’s the struggle.” The film may triumph in that its modest goals are achieved but the struggle to tell a truly interesting story devoid of manipulation was too much for director Dexter Fletcher. “Eddie The Eagle” lands with a bit of a thud.
It’s been quiet on the Michael Moore front of late. The Oscar winning documentary filmmaker has been keeping a low profile but keeping busy making a movie he describes as “epic.” Shot quietly in several continents “Where to Invade Next” is his look at how and why the United States keeps the military industrial complex alive. It’s a documentary but it plays like a follow-up to his lone narrative film, “Canadian Bacon.”
The concept of “Where to Invade Next” is pretty simple. Moore “invades” Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Tunisia and Norway to basically illustrate how much better the citizens of those countries have it compared to his fellow Americans. He learns Italians get a month paid leave, a “thirteenth month” set aside for enjoyment. Also, France has great food and an unsurprisingly open attitude about sex education, Finland has the best food and Norway’s legalization of drugs and saw a drop in addiction.
The tone of “Where to Invade Next” is a little different. No, he hasn’t suddenly joined the Republican party. This time out he says he’ll be “picking flowers, not weeds.” In other words, he’s looking at the bright side for once.
The material is presented with Moore’s usual amiable everyman persona. His fans will expect his brand of awe-shucks amazement, but for the first time in one of his documentaries it feels like a performance. It seems as though the movie, while entertaining, had its thesis firmly in place before the individual invasions. Moore’s idea is to illustrate how progressive ideas can lead to happier populaces and it appears he has tailored the material to fit his premise. It is a message perfectly tailored for Moore’s audience—he’s preaching to the choir on this one—but it appears to be more a treatise than a documentary. As treatises go it’s an entertaining one but the information feels too cherry picked to have the impact I’m sure Moore intended.
Touched with Fire stars Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby as two poets with bipolar disorder. It’s the work of Paul Dalio who wrote the screenplay, directed, edited and even wrote the musical score.
“The film was kind of a metaphor for my story,” he says. “It was my struggle to come to terms with all this beauty that I found in this thing and all this horror I found in this thing. And how you reconcile that. It took the form of these two lovers who each represented a different aspect of it. As these two lovers pursue their love, it goes back and forth between agony and ecstasy. They have to come to terms with it.”
The idea for the screenplay came from a conversation with his wife Kristina Nikolova, a filmmaker he met while studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The pair were in Bulgaria nearing the end of production on her movie Faith, Love and Whiskey.
She asked him to write a story for her to direct and as she remembers he said, “How about two crazy people meeting in a psychiatric hospital and they have to basically choose between sanity and love?” She said, “Wow, that’s a great idea, but it’s your story,” and the seed for Touched with Fire was planted.
Dalio’s issues with mental health began when he was in his undergrad years for Dramatic Writing at New York University.
He describes breaking into a “hypomanic state when I was experimenting with marijuana,” which he used as a “creative catalyst.”
“I didn’t know at the time (that) if you have the bipolar gene and you smoke marijuana it actually pushes your mind into a hypomanic state,” he says.
“It makes you temporarily more creative with a quicker mind. At first it was thrilling. It got to the point where my fingers couldn’t keep up with my mind. I had to use a voice recorder. Then my thoughts started overlapping and my mind couldn’t keep up with my thoughts. I would go for runs with the voice recorder to try and speed my mind up to keep up with these overlapping thoughts.
“For a while my professors started to really praise my work, saying it was brilliant, which they never had before. I felt like I was tapping into some kind of divine illumination. I started to think I was experiencing God. Visions from God.”
Soon the creativity that once seemed like a gift “took the form of a demon that was inside of me. Possessing me, laughing at me and my mistakes.”
Dalio spent four years gripped by suicidal thoughts and manic behaviour until realizing, “I couldn’t put my family through that anymore so I had to resign myself to living numb on medication and just getting by.”
A meeting with author Kay Redfield Jamison, whose book Exuberance: The Passion for Life, explores the mind’s pathologies convinced him that he could live and work creatively on his medication.
“She said she experiences exhuberance all the time and I absolutely will if I am patient. She also said she doesn’t know one artist who isn’t more creative after bipolar than before bipolar, as long as they are on the meds.
“It changed everything, It gave me hope. I had something to fight for then.”
In the film Race, Toronto-born actor Stephan James plays the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history. But, when he was approached about the part, James wasn’t sure exactly who Jesse Owens was.
“When I got that call that they’re making a Jesse Owens biopic I scratched my head a little,” the 22-year-old says.
“He won those gold medals, right? How many did he win again? I didn’t know how many he won or where he won them or under what circumstances or when this all took place.”
He quickly learned about Owens’s early career, the Ohio State races that made him a legend and how an African American runner stared down Hitler by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
“After reading the script and researching his life to find out the backstory I was literally blown away. Blown away that this had taken place almost 80 years ago.”
The film documents 28 turbulent months in Owens’s life, from just before he enrolled in university to the Olympics where, ESPN would later say, the runner “single-handedly crush[ed] Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.”
Jason Sudeikis, who plays Owens’s college trainer Larry Snyder, says he wanted to make the movie because “it didn’t lean on any one thing. It was bigger than just a sports film. It wasn’t pontificating, we didn’t treat Jesse with kid gloves and only as an icon. We can’t have all our heroes with giant hammers and capes. While that is good at the box office and for people with stock options I don’t know how good it is for little boys and girls who think that is the only way they can become a hero. We got to show the humanity behind him, we see him warts and all. You see his petulance, you get to see his indecision, you see him make horrible missteps as a husband and father, and yet all through that adversity he has the humility and integrity to correct those mistakes. That is just as heroic as whipping Hitler’s buns for four gold medals.”
James, who was recently seen as civil rights leader John Lewis in the critically acclaimed Selma, felt the weight of playing a legend on screen.
“It is one thing to be leading your own film,” he says. “To be number one on that call sheet, to know you have the biggest workload, to know that there are millions of dollars and ideas on your head. It’s another thing to play Jesse
Owens, the icon, the man, the myth, the legend. A guy who is not only a pivotal person in American history but world history, so I knew I had my work cut for me. The pressure was there. Obviously he’s not alive but his family is and have been very much involved since the beginning. There is a certain responsibility to play a real character, of course, but the great Jesse Owens is a whole other thing.”
After starring as Owens in Race, James has his sights set on playing another kind of hero. “I want to play Spider-Man,” he says. “I think that would be dope. I’ve always wanted to play a superhero but Spider-Man is so cool, so unassuming. I think I can relate a little.”
In 2006 Entertainment Weekly rated The Passion of the Christ — Mel Gibson’s gritty and gory account of Jesus Christ’s final 12 hours leading up to his crucifixion in Jerusalem — the most controversial movie of all time.
Its detractors noted historical and biblical inaccuracies and accused the film of being anti-Semitic and excessively violent. Despite the cries of critics, the film became the top-grossing Christian movie ever.
In fact, it was something of a miracle at the box office, earning $611,899,420 worldwide in its original release.
Since then there has been a trickle of films aimed at a Christian audience, some successful, some not, some controversial, some not.
Passion had a great marketing strategy coupled with enough controversy to get people interested to see what all the fuss was about.
It’s been hard to capture that kind of lightning in a bottle again, which is why we haven’t seen a cavalcade of biblical epics in mainstream theatres.
This weekend Risen looks to the bible for inspiration. Playing like an unofficial sequel to Gibson’s film, it tells the tale of the Resurrection from the perspective of Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), a Roman Centurion commanded by Pontius Pilot to quell reports of a risen Messiah and thwart an insurrection in Jerusalem.
The film, directed by Waterworld helmer Kevin Reynolds, appears to have skirted around controversy by telling the story from the point of view of a fictional and non-believing character.
The studio is quick to note, however, that the script is a “faithful scriptural treatment of the story.”
The secret to success for a Christian themed movie lies with the filmmaker’s ability to translate the scripture to the screen.
“Christians like a well told story,” War Room director Alex Kendrick, who, with his brother Stephen have been labelled the “Steven Spielbergs of Christian cinema,” told just after his movie toppled Straight Outta Compton from the number one spot at the box office last year.
“What we don’t like is when our saviour’s name is abused or taken in vain or our morals trashed, so that keeps us away from many movies. It’s amazing to me that if Hollywood knew how many movies we stayed away from on purpose because of some of the offensive aspects they would change because it means much more money for them.”
Recently Noah, starring Russell Crowe as the arc-building prophet, angered some Christian groups for not being reverent enough. Director Darren Aronofsky called it the, “least biblical biblical film ever made,” and a studio press release admitted, “artistic license has been taken.”
The Christian community has met other films with open arms. Catherine Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story drew on the gospel of Matthew for the story of the Immaculate Conception and while it wasn’t the box office bonanza that made Passion headline news, it made money and skirted around controversy.
In 2004 Christian films were popular enough to garner a category at the irreverent Mexican MTV Movie Awards. Up for Most Divine Miracle in a Movie was the water into wine sequence from The Last Temptation of Christ; Passion’s Christ healing Peter’s injured ear scene; and the part in Bruce Almighty where Bruce causes his girlfriend’s chest to grow several sizes. Mexican audiences voted and Bruce Almighty’s miracle took the prize.
“Risen” is an odd movie that sits somewhere in between pious and pop culture. Not since “Jesus Christ Superstar” fused the bible with a backbeat has a Christian film mixed-and-matched the spiritual with the secular in such an audacious manner. Part bible story, part police procedural, for much of the movie it plays like “Law & Order: Jerusalem.”
Told from the point-of-view of nonbelieving Roman centurion Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), the action in “Risen” really begins three days after the crucifixion of Christ (Cliff Curtis), in the days following the Resurrection. Judaea prefect Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth), concerned that the recently crucified Nazarene’s followers have stolen his body and will claim he has risen from the dead, orders Clavius to “find the corpse of the cursed Yeshua before it rots.”
Clavius is a hard-bitten warrior, growing weary of the fight. He dreams of a “day without travail; with peace.” Maybe so, but before that time comes he must launch a “CSI” style investigation into Yeshua’s disappearance with Pilot’s words—“Without a corpse we might have a messiah.”—ringing in his ears.
His relentless search uncovers several unexplainable clues—he writes off the Shroud of Turin as an imprint left by “sweat and herbs”—that eventually turn him from someone who “sees delusions to keep a crusade alive” to a follower of Christ.
“Risen” works best when it is in procedural mode. Like “The Robe” and other biblical films that use scripture as a backdrop for a different kind of story, “Risen” feels like two different movies. The first half is a thriller, a detective story complete with interrogations and observation of suspects. When it changes into a more traditional faith based story, however, it becomes less interesting. It’s respectful to the source material and Fiennes is fine in both roles—the dutiful soldier and early adopter of Yeshua’s teachings—but it feels frontloaded in the first hour.
“Risen” isn’t exactly a religious movie. It’s more a spiritual story about a man who learns how to find the peace he has always craved through Christ’s teachings. The messaging is strong, but this is more the tale of a man’s change of heart set against the backdrop of the beginning of Christianity than it is a bible story.
It’s about faith and the strength of belief, but is flawed by inconsistent dialogue style—it ranges from sword-and-sandal formality to modern day vernacular—and the limitations of a low budget that prevents any truly miraculous visions.
