Oscars

[akashiver]

I didn't Oscar out this year as I have previously. But I will say that I thought THE ARTIST was a deserving winner. It's a wonderful movie. You should see it, preferably without having seen any trailers or footage from it. All you need to know is that it's a film about a silent-movie film star at the dawn of the era of sound. And it's lovely.

THE IRON LADY was the film J. EDGAR aspired to be: a clinical examination of a person who pursues, then loses, power. Like J.EDGAR, this film is not a political history. It's not out to educate you. Instead it wants to take a famous political figure and strip away their defensive shell, showing us what might drive a person to excel at the blood sport of politics. J. EDGAR did this clumsily; IRON LADY does it with skill and nuance.

Streep gave a fine performance, but I'd have rather Davis won for THE HELP. THE HELP was a fine movie, with a strong ensemble cast. It was hurt because it came out during the summer, and by the time the Oscar voting began it had faded in voters' memories.

HUGO was immensely overrated, imo. It looked lovely, and I loved its recreation of silent movie sets, but the story clunked. The pacing in the last third of the film was off, and events seemed to drag rather than fitting neatly together. I also have to say that I didn't engage with the main character. The actor (who will be donning the mantle of Ender Wiggin in ENDER'S GAME) was competent; but the character remained a surface to me. I think one of the problems may have been that it took so long for the film to reveal why Hugo was stealing clockwork, etc. If you keep a character opaque, you up the mystery but lose out in audience identification.

So anyway. Some folks seem to have loved HUGO. I wasn't one of them.

And that's it for me and the Oscars this year.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I liked Hugo well enough (and wow, is it a Changeling movie), but I agree about the pacing. And the beginning of the movie made it too much a mystery about Hugo himself, rather than about Georges -- which meant that when the movie started being about Georges instead, it felt unsatisfying.

You're the only person I've heard praise The Iron Lady that way, though. Mostly I've heard people complain that it's too much about her senility in later years and her husband's sadness as he copes with that, rather than being enough about Thatcher as a politician. Which may be what you mean about political history vs. the personal story, but it sounds like the personal story isn't enough about Politician!Thatcher, either. (This is all hearsay, though. I haven't seen the movie yet myself.)

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

>>it's too much about her senility in later years and her husband's sadness as he copes with that,<<

Eh. He can't be all that sad, given that he's dead. She's imagining him as present.

I heard many of the same complaints, though, and I think I was helped by my low expectations. For what it's worth, my mother had decided to give it a wide berth after the unimpressive trailer and poor reviews. She decided to go see it after my recommendation and ended up liking it too.

IMO, "The Iron Lady" has suffered because it's not the movie people were expecting it to be. It's not a biopic. It's a movie about old age. It's about defeat, and the inevitability of defeat. And that inevitability is made more poignant because the person raging against the dying of the light is a woman famous for refusing to give in.

Put differently, this is a movie about a senile old woman who happens to be Margaret Thatcher. From a writer's perspective, I think their use of Thatcher is smart & justified: the iconic figure of the "iron lady" fits the story they are trying to tell. Problem is, the story they're telling isn't the one their audiences is expecting.

If you can accept the movie on its own terms, I think it's quite good. That's not to say it's your cup of tea, of course. And that's not to say that there isn't a really interesting Maggie Thatcher biopic waiting to be made. But I think it's a movie that will grow on critics when they rewatch it.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a plausible argument.

Possibly it would have been easier to take the movie on those terms if there had already been a big biopic about Thatcher -- something to scratch the itch of wanting to see her political story. But there hasn't been, so of course when people see a trailer/movie poster/whatever like this, they assume that's what they're going to get, and feel frustrated when the movie decides it wants to be personal rather than political.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

>>too much a mystery about Hugo himself, rather than about Georges-- which meant that when the movie started being about Georges instead, it felt unsatisfying<<

That! Thanks. You put your finger on something that had been bugging me. I definitely remember feeling an "and now what?" sensation after the Hugo mystery was solved. It seemed like some of the energy went out of the film, and you've helped me understand why.