On DVD: “Brand Upon the Brain!”

Dir. Guy Maddin
(Not Rated) ★ ★

I had heard a lot about Guy Maddin, mostly from Roger Ebert, who has long been an admirer of the Canadian director. But Brand Upon the Brain!, from 2006, slipped further and further out of my grasp. I watched at first with fascination, but as the minutes wore on I found myself pushing back against my chair, leaning away from the film. It inspires great interest until it tumbles so deep down the rabbit hole of Maddin’s imagination that it finally inspires indifference. It raises a “Keep Out!” sign for an audience that ventures near.

The story is about a man named Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs), who I hope is not an autobiographical character or else there should be a sweeping investigation of Canadian child-care services. The making-of documentary on the DVD is called “97 Percent True,” describing the story’s psychological and emotional veracity, but where to draw the line between Maddin’s life and his fantasies I can’t say with confidence. As told by the film, his parents ran an orphanage out of their lighthouse and were guilty of deplorable crimes against the children: the mother is a grotesque tyrant, and the father is a scientist performing human experiments. Guy (played in childhood flashbacks by Sullivan Brown) and his sister Sis (Maya Lawson) were also subject to their parents’ abuse.

The movie is made in the style of silent films; the stark, high-contrast black-and-white footage appears as though the stock has survived decades of age and neglect. The editing is choppy; staccato images flash across the screen to eerie effect, further elevated by Isabella Rossellini’s evocative narration and Jason Staczek’s score. Rossellini’s is only one of nearly a dozen narrator tracks available on the DVD, but I confess to only having had the strength to sit through one.

The adult Guy returns to repaint the lighthouse at his mother’s request, and the place reignites memories of old traumas; I find that films about memory are best told in unconventional ways (Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir), and Maddin’s antiqued, silent-film approach conjures the fearsome specters of childhood anxiety, early sexual curiosity, and claustrophobic dread.

But then the film finds the deep end and goes off it. From the intriguing material of childhood repression, Maddin’s screenplay, co-written by George Toles, drifts like a plastic bag in the wind to reanimation, youth potions, trances, androgyny, and at one point I think maybe cannibalism. It’s a headlong rush into unmitigated weirdness, and there came a point where I couldn’t follow him any further.

Brand was distributed uniquely, as a national tour; the film was not only shown but performed, with the orchestra, narrators, and Foley artists accompanying it in exhibitions across the country. I suspect a large part of its appeal is the live experience, which is lost in the private solitude of a DVD viewing. In a theater setting, it’s not only a story in the style of silent films, it’s a time machine transporting the entire audience to another era, an era that never existed in quite this way.

Ebert’s review sums it up well: “In a sense, you will enjoy Brand Upon The Brain! most if you are an experienced moviegoer who understands (somehow) what Maddin is doing or a naive filmgoer who doesn’t understand that he is doing anything. The average filmgoer might simply be frustrated and confused.” I consider myself an above-average filmgoer, but there you have it. Those of you who are more closely attuned to films of this sort probably already know who you are. For those who aren’t, you may want to take my word for it.

In Honor of Gene Siskel

Friday, February 20, marked ten years since the death of Gene Siskel in 1999. On February 23 of that year, I began to write film reviews. I remember because I’ve held on to all my writings and wisely dated them for posterity. That first review was of She’s All That; I was fifteen years old when I wrote, “After the heavy-handed Oscar-reaching material like the tepid The Thin Red Line, She’s All That is an excellent change of pace and an altogether well rounded picture.” Not long ago, I came across the film again on cable and it’s not very good at all, but that’s what ten years of moviegoing will teach you. I don’t know if I would hold the same opinion of The Thin Red Line, but I think I got that one right.

I had written reviews before February 1999, here and there, but it wasn’t until Gene Siskel’s death that I decided to do it regularly. It was my private tribute to the man who, along with Roger Ebert, introduced me to the movies. Watching their syndicated Siskel & Ebert program, I wanted to share an experience like the ones reflected in their glinting eyes when they discussed their mutual adoration of films like Fargo and Hoop Dreams.

And I did. There was no going back after Dark City and Saving Private Ryan, and over the years have come more and more elevating experiences: American Beauty, Wonder Boys, Angels in America, A.I., Million Dollar Baby, No Country for Old Men, WALL-E, and more. Siskel did not live to see any of those films. How I wish he could have, if only so I could know what he would have thought of them. I am better written, better spoken, better informed, more compassionate, more worldly, wiser, and wittier for having loved the movies. I do pretty well on Jeopardy! too. I owe Gene Siskel a great deal.

After his death, his seat on the balcony was filled by Richard Roeper, who to be honest is no Gene Siskel. After Ebert fell ill two years ago, his seat was filled by revolving critics, and now the balcony is occupied by Ben Mankiewicz and Ben Lyons, who to be honest are no Richard Roeper. On AtTheMoviesTV.com, you’ll find an invaluable archive of Siskel, Ebert, and Roeper’s televised reviews going back to 1986. I visit them regularly. As long as that precious resource is alive, the balcony will never be closed.

REMEMBERING GENE SISKEL, Part 1

REMEMBERING GENE SISKEL, Part 2

REMEMBERING GENE SISKEL, Part 3

Academy Awards 2009: Oscars in Review

How did you do in your Oscars pool? My guess is very well. Like the rest of us. I made predictions for every category except the short-film races, which I knew little or nothing about. Of the categories I predicted, I was correct on every race but two: Sound Mixing (I picked The Dark Knight, the winner was Slumdog Millionaire) and Foreign-Language Film (I picked France’s The Class, the winner was Japan’s Departures). Was the Oscar telecast predictable? Resoundingly so. Was it boring? No.

Host Hugh Jackman, who seemed on paper to be an unlikely choice for the gig after a string of comics like Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, and Steve Martin, proved an inspired choice for the role. His experience as a song-and-dance man — he’s a Tony winner for the musical The Boy from Oz and an Emmy winner for helming a Tonys telecast — served him well and indeed served us well, beginning with a comically downsized opening number that he filled with his outsize personality. His interaction with the audience was inspired, from serenading Kate Winslet to dueting with the winning Anne Hathaway. He was more than the match of Beyonce Knowles in a Baz Luhrmann-produced tribute to movie musicals, which featured teen idols Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens lending support rather than hogging the spotlight.

He guided us through a presentation of awards that was refreshingly relevant, walking us through the stages of filmmaking. It was perhaps wise to bunch some of the technical awards together to keep the show moving at a brisk pace, and even more inspired to give us presenters who breathed unexpected life into the usual patter, like Tina Fey, Steve Martin, Jennifer Aniston, Jack Black, and Will Smith.

However, the performance of the Best Original Song nominees was slightly muddled. The two nominated Slumdog tunes sandwiched Peter Gabriel’s WALL-E song, “Down to Earth,” sung by John Legend, but there was a moment where Legend sang his song over A.R. Rahman’s “Jai Ho,” as if they were engaged in a sing-off. I half expected Legend to change the lyrics “We’re coming down” to “You’re going down.” Actually, it might have worked better that way.

The acting awards — they were distinguished not just by the winners but by the presentation of the winners. Breaking from the usual format of naming the nominees and showing clips, the categories were introduced by a quintet of winners in each category, who warmly and graciously singled out every nominated performance for praise. To watch the faces of the nominees as they were honored by their anointed peers and then for one to be welcomed by them into Oscar history was an ingenious choice. Certainly a lot better than a couple of years back, when they trotted all the technical nominees on stage like victims for a firing squad to save time.

Oscars were awarded to Slumdog Millionaire, eight in total, and other films settled for whatever was left. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button won three (art direction, makeup, visual effects), The Dark Knight won two (supporting actor, sound editing), Milk won two (lead actor, original screenplay), and The Reader and Vicky Cristina Barcelona won an acting prize each, for Kate Winslet and Penelope Cruz respectively. The documentary feature award went to Man on Wire, the lovely film about daredevil tight-rope walker Philippe Petit. The Best Animated Feature was WALL-E, which in my estimation was the year’s best film, period.

Did Slumdog Millionaire deserve to sweep? It’s hard to begrudge the film and the talented, hard-working artists who made it. It’s effective, well made, a successful picture. But I have made no secret of not loving it as much as most critics did, and while it earned prize after prize I thought about all the great film achievements that were being ignored — those that were nominated and those that weren’t. I thought about the remarkable cinematography and editing of The Dark Knight. The lovely music from WALL-E. The terrific scripting of Doubt, Revolutionary Road, Snow Angels, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. The remarkable visuals of The Fall. The great score from Waltz with Bashir. The brilliant songs from Hamlet 2, The Wrestler, and Gran Torino. To watch the Oscars, you would think Slumdog was the only film of merit released in 2008. Not so.

The acting winners were satisfying, and so were their speeches. Heath Ledger’s family stoically accepted the late actor’s well deserved award for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight. The typically serious-minded Sean Penn cracked a grateful smile upon winning his second Oscar, for the biopic Milk, for which he accused Oscar voters of being “Commie, homo-loving sons of guns.” … And proud of it. I was rooting for Mickey Rourke for his extraordinary career resurrection in The Wrestler, but Best Actor was a category with no bad options, and Penn’s transformation into slain gay-rights activist Harvey Milk elevated the biopic into something special.

Winslet won lead actress for The Reader. I thought she was better in Revolutionary Road, but I’m glad she won for one of them. 2008 was a remarkable year for her, and after five previous nominations, she was overdue. At only 33 years of age, she has enough years ahead of her to one day be overdue again, and I suspect she may be the one to eventually catch or even surpass Meryl Streep’s ever-growing total of nominations.

A deeply touching speech was made by original screenplay victor Dustin Lance Black, whose winning Milk script was the first he has written. The openly gay writer was inspired by Harvey Milk and expressed his desire to one day be able to fall in love and get married.

Who were the best and worst dressed? Browse the many, many photos on the web and decide for yourself. I have ceased to be interested in dissecting gowns and designers. When Tilda Swinton won her Oscar last year for Michael Clayton, why was all the attention on the dress she accepted the award in, rather than on the performance that earned it? And why was she judged so harshly for it? Women are held to unfair standards, especially when some men fail to even comb their hair. Winslet looked beautiful. So did Penelope Cruz. And Anne Hathaway. It’s hard to come up with a Hollywood star who didn’t look beautiful. Mickey Rourke went rogue with an open collar and white jacket, but I think the picture of his late dog Loki he wore around his neck will mean more to him than anything Tim Gunn has to say about his attire. As it should be.

On DVD: “The Duchess”

Dir. Saul Dibb
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★

The Duchess features lavish costumes by Michael O’Connor, extravagant production design by Michael Carlin, and a handsome score by Rachel Portman. The screenplay — by Jeffrey Hatcher, Anders Thomas Jensen, and director Saul Dibb — is less ambitious. It presents British history with a dash of romance-novel feminism in the same vein as The Other Boleyn Girl. In this case, it’s the story of Georgiana (Keira Knightley), the Duchess of Devonshire, who is trapped in a loveless marriage and decides, “If my husband can take a lover, why can’t I?”

Her husband, the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), is appropriately loathsome. He rapes Georgiana, beds her best friend, shows her no affection, and disapproves of any child she bears that isn’t a male heir. There are shadings of shy insecurity in Fiennes’s performance that at all times threaten to add dimension to the underwritten role, but he sticks mostly to his prescribed role as villain. Her lover, Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper), is appropriately virile. He also does what his role demands: flirts with his bedroom eyes, demonstrates sensitivity in Georgiana’s time of need, bounds into her mansion in a grand romantic gesture to sweep her away. The film opens with a physical contest to prove his manliness; no word on whether the comparison to a horse is apt.

I kid, I kid. True, the film favors its less interesting subject: under the romance is a fascinating study of Georgiana as a proto-celebrity that should be the focus rather than the background; with her extravagant fashion and popularity to the tabloids, she is the Paris Hilton of her day. But Knightley and director Dibb achieve a dignity that elevates the material above crass melodrama. As I write it, this review seems more derisive than I intended it to be. So be it. I wouldn’t say I’m exactly a sucker for this kind of film, but it worked for me. I liked The Other Boleyn Girl too.

The Unsung Heroes of 2008

Highlighting those overlooked performances from 2008 that deserved greater accolades.

ASIA ARGENTO
The Last Mistress

Set in 19th Century France, Catherine Breillat’s film is not about love — it’s about addiction. Because as played by Argento, Spanish seductress Vellini is not a romantic heroine but a creature of obsessive need and hunger. The actress shows ferocious commitment in a performance that ventures into some of the ugliest realms of human desire. She is frequently nude, but it is her emotional nakedness that distinguishes her.

KATE BECKINSALE & SAM ROCKWELL
Snow Angels

As Annie and Glenn Marchand, Beckinsale and Rockwell inhabit an estranged marriage with great attention to detail, from the frazzled disappointment in her voice to the desperate fumbling of his religious faith — he’s going through the motions in the hopes that things will get better, and, well, so is she. A terrible event shakes them to their core, and the actors bravely follow their characters down a dark, dark path that is chilling in how inevitable it all seems.

STEVE COOGAN
Hamlet 2

High school drama teacher Dana Marschz, he of the unpronounceable name and indefatigable enthusiasm, is at the heart of a ribald film that threatens at every moment to spin out of control, but Coogan anchors it with a performance of such giddy comic abandon and unflagging sincerity that we come to admire him and root for him, no matter how ill-conceived his endeavor.

MINNIE DRIVER
Take

With tremendous urgency, Driver plays Ana, but really she plays a dual role: the Ana before her son’s death, a lioness who fiercely defends her developmentally challenged child, and the Ana after, cold, cynical, and subdued as she travels to confront his killer. As the film cuts between the two time periods, she poignantly expresses the deep-seated anger and anguish of her struggle to reconcile her past with her present, in the hope of clearing a way to the future.

EDDIE MARSAN
Happy-Go-Lucky

The best scenes of the film are the ones in which Marsan spars with Sally Hawkins’s unflappable Poppy. He plays driving instructor Scott, the yin to her yang, who is as hopeless about the world as Poppy is hopeful. Their conflict culminates in one of the best acted scenes of the year, in which Marsan reveals Scott’s wounded soul. His cynicism, we see, is not a stubborn choice, but the result of a long-suffered pain.

EMILY MORTIMER
Transsiberian

Mortimer’s placid, angelic face is the ultimate misdirection of Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian. She plays Jessie, a good-girl Christian missionary who conceals some sinister bad-girl inclinations. The actress’s performance is cagey, suggesting an inner wickedness, and she revels in Jessie’s dark, ambiguous psychology. We’re never quite sure whether the angel or the devil on her shoulder will prevail.

LEE PACE & CATINCA UNTARU
The Fall

The Fall would be just a pretty picture if Pace and Untaru weren’t able to bring such emotional resonance to it. As a depressive Hollywood stuntman and an injured fruit-picker, respectively, Pace and Untaru develop a natural rapport through heavily improvised scenes, creating a friendship that is at first based on deception but eventually turns towards redemption.

JASON SEGEL
Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Segel’s performance as sad-sack Peter Bretter, a composer recently dumped by his TV-star girlfriend (Kristen Bell), is uncommonly endearing in the current comedy climate, which favors mean-spiritedness, but it’s his screenplay for the film that deserves special notice. Attentive to character instead of to formula, he has written the funniest and most emotionally true film to come out of the Judd Apatow factory since The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

HANNA SCHYGULLA
The Edge of Heaven

We don’t notice her at first as Susanne (pictured, left), a disapproving German mother whose daughter has taken an immigrant lover, but in the third act she becomes key to the film’s themes of culture shock, grief, and compassion. When she meets a man connected to her daughter he tells her, “You’re the saddest person here.” We recognize it too, but there is also a tremendous warmth in her that rises to the surface when we least expect it, and it fills us with hope.

JESS WEIXLER
Teeth

Mitchell Lichtenstein’s graphic satire doesn’t quite live up to its lead performance, but Weixler, as Dawn O’Keefe, a devout Christian horrified to discover that she is afflicted with vagina dentata (“toothed vagina”), gets to the heart of the primal sexual anxiety of adolescence. Addressing an abstinence group after discovering her condition, we see in her wide, disoriented eyes the mortal terror of standing under the light of God’s judgment.

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
Wendy and Lucy

We know that Wendy is traveling from Indiana to Alaska to find a job to support her and her dog Lucy. We don’t know what she’s running from or why she’s placed all her hopes on the distant north, but in this small-scale drama we see her tenacity. Williams gives a mostly internal performance that nevertheless conveys the toughness of living hand-to-mouth. The only breach in her resolve comes when she makes a crucial decision about her dog, who I suspect is the only creature in the world she loves with her whole heart.

The Best Films of 2008

The Academy Awards announce their choices on Sunday. These are mine.

TAKE

Directed by Charles Oliver • When I saw it at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, I thought Minnie Driver would be nominated for Best Actress and that writer-director Charles Oliver would be greeted as an exciting new voice in cinema. However, in July 2008 Take was released to no fanfare and poor reviews — it deserves better. It’s an elegantly constructed drama about two lives that intersect in a moment of tragedy and intersect again in a kind of forgiveness. Its ending has been criticized as an anticlimax, but it’s not a film about an explosive catharsis. It’s about carrying the weight of the world, and in a moment deciding whether to hold on to it or let it go.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

Directed by Errol Morris • Detailing the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, Morris’s documentary is a lacerating indictment of pass-the-buck politics told through interviews with the so-called “bad apples” responsible for the scandal, a group of young scapegoats who posed for the pictures that showcased the abuse. Not all of them are blameless innocents, but it’s clear that the crime they were punished for was not the one committed against the prisoners; no, they went to jail for publicly embarrassing the military leadership and the Bush administration, who beyond the infamous photographs were guilty of far greater crimes they will never be held accountable for.

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

Directed by Fatih Akin • It tells three stories that are really one: a survey of the growing pains of globalization as seen through the eyes of characters exchanging love, death, hope, and forgiveness across borders between Germany and Turkey. As the world shrinks, cultures collide in messy variations, but this isn’t a dry lesson in geopolitics. Writer-director Akin tells his story on ground level and achieves intimacy through characters who cannot see how intricately their lives interconnect, but we can. Hanna Schygulla has the pivotal role, as a woman who learns firsthand how tragedy can result and shows us that redemption is equally within reach.

YOUNG @ HEART

Directed by Stephen Walker • Aging is a subject of dread for many, or contempt, or ridicule. Walker’s documentary, which follows an elderly rock chorus as they rehearse new songs for a concert, instead favors compassion. Promoted on the basis of its humor — old fogies sing edgy rock tunes! — it penetrates deeper to explore the singers’ thoughts and feelings about mortality. It becomes a full-hearted tribute to those who age gracefully despite their physical frailties and contains music that sounds altogether richer through their voices. Listening to Fred Knittle perform Coldplay’s “Fix You,” I felt as though I only then understood what it meant.

THE DARK KNIGHT

Directed by Christopher Nolan • I seldom get excited over superhero movies, but then this isn’t really a superhero movie at all. The Caped Crusader is a welcome guest in a drama that excites some of the same thoughts as the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Nolan, whose films from Memento to The Prestige have explored the theme of men at war with their shadow selves, explodes that notion to explore how the war shapes us all. Batman and the Joker (the unforgettable Heath Ledger) converge on a battlefield of the soul to determine if we are moral creatures or if indeed our inner heroes give way to villains when we are pushed to our limit.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

Directed by Jonathan Demme • Jenny Lumet’s remarkable screenplay is the centerpiece of Demme’s drama about family dysfunction, unfolding layer upon layer of pain in the subtlest, purest of ways. Upon her discharge from a drug treatment facility, black sheep Kym Buchman (Oscar-nominated Anne Hathaway) is thrown immediately back into the emotional murk that has shaped her destiny as an addict. The Buchmans’ lives have been driven by a loss that took place several years prior, and the actors, writer, and director are so attuned to the nuances of the family relationships that every word and gesture feels unerringly true.

SNOW ANGELS

Directed by David Gordon Green • It begins with two gunshots and then unfolds in an agonizing slow-burn towards tragedy. Written and directed by Green, from a novel by Stewart O’Nan, it establishes its small-town setting with perfect detail and pulls back gradually to show us more and more, until the story comes full circle and reveals itself with complete clarity. Starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale as the estranged parents of a young daughter and Michael Angarano in a breakthrough performance as a teen in a budding romance, the film presents characters we come to know so well they break our hearts.

THE WRESTLER

Directed by Darren Aronofsky • Mickey Rourke gives the performance of his career in the year’s best character study. With tender vulnerability and powerhouse physicality, he plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a Hulk Hogan-esque pro wrestler whose ‘80s glory days are long over. His story, which moves with the trajectory of Greek tragedy, is set against the backdrop of the underground wrestling circuit, which Aronofsky shows with an unsentimental eye — the broken bodies and faded careers, the injuries both emotional and physical, with Randy as its focal point. He’s got only one thing in the world he’s good at, but it may not be enough anymore.

THE FALL

Directed by Tarsem Singh • It was more a quest than a movie production. Singh flew his actors to extraordinary locations in two dozen countries, composed shots of unimaginable logistical difficulty, and with editor Robert Duffy assembled them into a narrative of peerless imagination and grace. It’s revolutionary filmmaking in how old-fashioned it is: no green screens, no digital effects, just the camera capturing images from untold corners of the world. But what elevates the film to greatness is the story at its core, about a young girl recovering in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s and the man who hopes to make her an unwitting accomplice in his suicide by telling her the story that incorporates the magnificent imagery. By the end, I felt grateful to have seen it. Sometimes they do still make movies like they used to.

WALL-E

Directed by Andrew Stanton • One of the decade’s great achievements in cinema art, it is the rare animated film that can take its inspiration from Charlie Chaplin and 2001: A Space Odyssey and earn them. It is composed of shots so expressive, so eloquent, so elevating in their effect that I was nearly moved to tears.

I will never forget the shot of a lighter’s flame reflected in the eyes of lonely robot WALL-E, or the celestial dance between WALL-E and the more advanced robot EVE, with whom he falls in love. I marveled at the opening third of the film, which with a precious economy of words expresses a profound criticism of a culture of mindless consumption. I felt sadness for those gelatinous blobs in the automated chairs, oblivious to the beauty around them.

There was no better romance last year than WALL-E, and no satire more incisive. It is an unqualified masterpiece and the best film of 2008.

________________________________________
THE SECOND STRING
The runners-up — consider this a five-way tie for eleventh place.

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS
Directed by Alex Holdridge • Inspired by Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, writer-director Holdridge’s film follows Wilson and Vivian (the terrific Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds) in their search for someone to kiss when the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s. The dialogue is so good and the characters so winning that I wanted scenes to go on and on; it was bittersweet to bid them farewell.

MAN ON WIRE
Directed by James Marsh • A joyous documentary about Philippe Petit, the daredevil who walked along a high wire between the towers of the World Trade Center. Marsh wisely avoids any mention of 9/11; he understands that it isn’t a story about terror or loss. Simply, it’s about a remarkable event that happened under unlikely circumstances because a small group of people wanted to create something in the sky.

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY
Directed by Bharat Nalluri • Underneath a delightful screwball romance is a surprisingly trenchant look at women in 1930s London who adapt to survive. Failed governess Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) refashions herself as a social secretary. American country girl Delysia (Amy Adams) styles herself into a high-class singer and actress. And all around them a nation hurtles blithely towards its entry into World War II and the loss of a generation’s innocence.

RECOUNT
Directed by Jay Roach • Detailing the legal battles that followed the 2000 US presidential election, Roach’s HBO docudrama has dry subject matter — lawsuits, countersuits, statutes, precedents, and those infamous hanging chads — but as shown through the eyes of Gore advisor Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey) it has the exhilarating momentum of a thriller. It expresses outrage but is leavened by humor — political upheaval as an absurd comedy of errors.

TRANSSIBERIAN
Directed by Brad Anderson • Anderson channeled Hitchcock to co-write and direct one of the best pure entertainments of 2008, about a young missionary couple (Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson) who encounter danger on a train. It works so well because Anderson’s script (co-written by Will Conroy) demonstrates a great understanding of how to generate and sustain suspense throughout a story. It should be studied in screenwriting classes.

On DVD: “Blindness”

Dir. Fernando Meirelles
(R) ★ ½

What a gifted filmmaker Fernando Meirelles is! … I’ll let this one slide.

I have developed a reliable barometer for the quality of a film. There comes a point during a bad one where I push my hands back through my hair in aggravation. If I begin to pull at it, we’re venturing into one-star territory. While screening Speed Racer, I kicked the barrier of the mezzanine and motioned as if to choke myself. If there had been ejector seats during Bratz: The Movie, I would still be in orbit.

Blindness achieves the first stage of aggravation. And as I mussed my hair I yelled at characters to behave as I would behave — indeed as any right-thinking adult would behave. I squinted my eyes; with cinematographer César Charlone, Meirelles works to convey a sense of his characters’ titular condition, but he succeeds only in giving us ugly vision. His images are overexposed, glaring, garish. Most of the characters are afflicted with a kind of blindness where all they can see is bright white. One character retains healthy vision. Those of us in the audience, however, are made to suffer a kind of sight where our eyeballs can’t make up their minds.

But the real problem is the screenplay by Don McKellar, or perhaps even the novel by José Saramago, which I haven’t read. It presents an inexplicable series events following a mysterious outbreak of blindness in an unnamed city that is an amalgam of Toronto, Canada; Montevideo, Uruguay; and São Paulo, Brazil. The blind are rounded up and interred in a facility not unlike a concentration camp, which has little infrastructure and zero supervision. Apparently, no one in charge has considered the drawbacks of holding a hundred or so newly blind people in a tightly packed, unfamiliar location with no one to tell them where the bathroom is. These must be the same people who were in charge of FEMA trailers in New Orleans.

It’s no surprise, then, that a small group of opportunists takes control and demands payment in exchange for food, first in the form of jewelry and then in the form of sexual currency. Here’s the wrinkle: one person in the facility, played by Julianne Moore, still has her sight. She faked blindness so that she could join her husband (Mark Ruffalo), who was infected, and she keeps it a secret from everyone but him. He is adamant that they not fight back, lest they begin a war in the facility.

Let us pause for a moment to consider his logic. When a team of sadists is forcibly raping your friends and neighbors with no guarantee that you will get food in return, would you be worried about starting a war? Perhaps the victimized women can explain to him when the war really began.

His position might be reasonable if he didn’t know his wife could see, which is such a tactical advantage that it wouldn’t be much of a war. The tyrants have possession of only one firearm and no one to aim it. How will she hope to avoid injury from the person wielding it? Take a small step to the left — war’s over. I am reminded of the final battle in X-Men: The Last Stand where the underlings engage in futile hand-to-hand combat while disproportionately powerful mutants like Magneto and Storm watch from above. If the underlings were smart, they would have sent Magneto and Storm to duke it out on a private island out in the Pacific. The winner would fly back and decide the future of mutant-kind. You would save countless lives, not to mention the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Julianne Moore character is Magneto. Her opponent is Mr. Magoo. Her inaction is baffling. But the screenplay simply accepts it, and so does Meirelles, whose direction of Moore’s performance suggests no such conflict. I don’t know if the novel is written in the same way; if it is, I have no desire to read it. The story does not survive it.

The film seems to be a study of human society collapsed as the result of great crisis, but none of the human behavior is credible. There is the Moore character, who refuses to take simple action to avert gang rape and exploitation. There is the Ruffalo character, who urges her not to do so. And there are the tyrants, who are not characters at all but variations of Snidely Whiplash. They are not Evil with a capital “E.” They are EVIL — all caps. At one point, one of the villains (Maury Chaykin) describes what he might do to a victim’s nipples, and the dialogue is both queasily ridiculous and wretched.

Eventually, the story leaves this facility and moves to the streets, which seem lifted from the bleak dystopia of Children of Men, a much better film about the collapse of civil society. These later scenes are better than what came before, but by this stage the story has lost me and isn’t getting me back. Blindness doesn’t have much of value to say about society, except that emergency facilities for the blind should be better operated and that a person with sight should not wait so long to do what is obvious. It says little about the human condition other than to demonstrate that prolonged exposure to over-lit photography can be irritating. What it says about filmmaking is that you should watch Children of Men instead.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Winners (Picture and Director)

BEST PICTURE:
Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Frost/Nixon; Milk; The Reader; Slumdog Millionaire

BEST DIRECTOR:
Nominees: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire); Stephen Daldry (The Reader); David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon); Gus Van Sant (Milk)

Winner of Both: Slumdog Millionaire
Both director and picture have the same five nominees, and since they will have the same winner, we may as well consider them together. Slumdog Millionaire has won virtually every award it has been nominated for: Golden Globe, WGA, DGA, PGA, SAG, BAFTA — possibly also the KGB, QVC, and ASPCA. It’s a feel-good drama with the underdog spirit of other Best Picture winners like Rocky. It’s a critical darling. It’s not the most nominated film of the year (Benjamin Button leads with 13 to Slumdog’s 10), but you won’t be hearing late-night talk show jokes about how long and boring Slumdog is. Slumdog Millionaire will win — count on it.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Winners (Acting)

BEST ACTOR:
Nominees: Richard Jenkins (The Visitor); Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon); Sean Penn (Milk); Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

Winner: Sean Penn
After Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and delivered his touching speech, it appeared that momentum might have been shifting away from early favorite Sean Penn to the Comeback Kid. Penn’s victory at SAG put him back out front, but this is a tight two-man race.

Penn has other factors working in his favor. First, he plays a real person. Oscar is a sucker for stars transforming themselves for lofty biopics: Forest Whitaker (Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland), Helen Mirren (Elizabeth II in The Queen), Marion Cotillard (Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote in Capote), Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles in Ray), Adrien Brody (Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist), and so on. Second, Milk has widespread Academy support that The Wrestler doesn’t have: eight nominations, including Best Picture. But watch out for Rourke if voters decide that it’s too early for another coronation for Penn, who won this award just five years ago for Mystic River.

BEST ACTRESS:
Nominees: Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married); Angelina Jolie (Changeling); Melissa Leo (Frozen River); Meryl Streep (Doubt); Kate Winslet (The Reader)

Winner: Kate Winslet
Both Streep and Winslet won SAG awards for their performances, but Streep won as a lead actress and Winslet won the supporting race. Winslet was campaigned as a supporting actress for The Reader, hoping to earn a Best Actress nod instead for Revolutionary Road, but Oscar voters thought differently, so it’s tough to know which tea leaves to read.

Read these: Winslet is a six-time nominee and has never won. If she loses this year, she will tie the record for the worst Oscar shut-out among actresses. Her Golden Globes acceptance speech was one of the touching highlights of the night, and Academy voters may want an encore. Now her film is nominated for Best Picture, so in a race that never had a clear frontrunner it appears she is poised to finally have her moment.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Nominees: Josh Brolin (Milk); Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder); Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt); Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight); Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road)

Winner: Heath Ledger
It’s dangerous to call anyone a lock, especially in circumstances as uncommon as these, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine Ledger losing this prize. His Joker is widely considered an iconic screen turn. If he were alive today, voters might give themselves permission to let their snobbish biases lead them to a more traditional candidate (i.e. someone other than the comic book villain), but knowing that this will be the last performance of the actor’s tragically unfulfilled career, they couldn’t get away with checking off any other name.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Nominees: Amy Adams (Doubt); Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona); Viola Davis (Doubt); Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler)

Winner: Penelope Cruz
Is there a more confusing category than this? Kate Winslet won both the Golden Globe and the SAG Award for The Reader, but since Oscar nominated her for lead actress, there’s no way to be sure who their favorite is among these five. A case can be made for any of them.

Viola Davis’s 11-minute performance in Doubt had massive impact, and brief, impactful turns have won before (Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love, Beatrice Straight in Network). But her co-star Amy Adams has more screen time and is a Hollywood star on the rise; she was nominated three years ago for Junebug, and though she wasn’t nominated last year for Enchanted, she performed on the telecast for that film. The Academy is clearly fond of her.

Marisa Tomei’s upset victory for My Cousin Vinny is one of the most talked about in Oscar history, so she can never be ruled out, but The Wrestler is more a showcase piece for Mickey Rourke and Tomei’s role may be too subtle in comparison.

Taraji P. Henson has an advantage the others do not: she is in a Best Picture nominee, which means her film has Academy-wide support. And though her performance is relatively slight, it is more or less a version of the kind of role that won an Oscar for Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind.

Last is Penelope Cruz. Her comic turn in Vicky Cristina Barcelona did well among critics, earning awards from the New York and Los Angeles critics’ groups, but if critics were a direct indicator of Oscar Sally Hawkins would have been nominated for Best Actress. Still, the Academy has a history of affection for Woody Allen’s muses (Mira Sorvino, Dianne Wiest x2) and an even greater history of awarding sexy starlets. She just won Best Supporting Actress from the British Academy (BAFTA), which is as close to an indicator as we’re going to get. My money’s on her. But hedge your bets.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Winners (Writing)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
Nominees: Frozen River; Happy-Go-Lucky; In Bruges; Milk; WALL-E

Winner: Milk
A category with little suspense. Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay for Milk just won the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) Award. It’s the only WGA nominee also nominated for an Oscar. Most important, Milk is the only original screenplay this year nominated for Best Picture. If there is a dark horse, it’s WALL-E, which was ineligible for the original screenplay category at WGA. But despite several nominations this decade, no animated film has won an Oscar for writing, and if WALL-E couldn’t overcome Academy bias to get into Best Picture, it likely won’t prevail here.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Doubt; Frost/Nixon; The Reader; Slumdog Millionaire

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire
Almost a foregone conclusion. Slumdog seems to have unstoppable momentum in this Oscar race. It won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, and it was honored by the Producers’ Guild (PGA), Directors’ Guild (DGA), and Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay, based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, was awarded by WGA. It’s close to a slam dunk.