Babel (2006)

Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikuchi, Boubker Alt Ed Caid (his first film), Said Tarchani (his first film),Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho, Mohamed Akhzam (his first film), Satoshi Nikaido, Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Summary: Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families

Other Nominations: Director, Supporting Actress (Barraza), Supporting Actress (Kikuchi), Original Screenplay, Original Score*, Film Editing

I didn’t think I would review a movie for this project that in the first 30 minutes featured a Moroccan kid jacking off in the middle of the desert and a deaf Japanese schoolgirl taking off her panties and angrily flashing a bunch of guys at a club, but here we are. More seriously though, Babel is an occasionally great but ultimately disappointing movie with four somewhat concurrent, semi-connected stories on the theme of communication problems across languages along with constant of tragic fate and misery in each. Structurally, the movie makes the smart decision of not cutting between the stories too often, so that everything is easy to follow along with and so that the audience can (potentially) get invested in each segment when they come up. The big problem is that the whole enterprise doesn’t quite add up and none of the plot lines feel strong from start to finish, especially with their endings. Even the Japanese segment, which in my opinion was easily the strongest of the four and featured a fantastic performance from Kikuchi, petered out about ¾ the way through; ironically, the segment involving by far the biggest actors in the film, Pitt and Blanchett, was by far the weakest, although it probably had the most satisfying ending. Babel is a movie that looks good, has a well-structured screenplay and every once in awhile approaches greatness, but is unfortunately never able to put everything together into a fully cohesive package that would have made it something really worth watching.

Rating: C+

The Departed (2006)

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin

Director: Martin Scorsese

Summary: An undercover cop and a mole in the police attempt to identify each other while infiltrating an Irish gang in South Boston.

Other Nominations: Director*, Supporting Actor (Wahlberg), Adapted Screenplay*, Film Editing*

One of the most pure fun movies I’ve had the pleasure of watching for this project. I have not seen Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong movie that The Departed is a remake of, but they did a great job translating the story to an American audience and I have no complaints about it being 40 minutes longer than the original was because it never feels like we hit a dead spot-it’s thoroughly entertaining and interesting with loads of twists and turns and the movie has a real energy to it that never lets up. The cast is outstanding with DiCaprio giving what is my favorite performance from him I’ve seen, Nicholson being a giant ham in the best way possible and Wahlberg playing the glorious of shitheads where even though he’s technically a good guy, you still hate him because of how much of an asshole he is. It reminds me of L.A. Confidential or The Maltese Falcon in story, tone and energy, and that’s high praise indeed. The Departed was a worthy Best Picture winner, and in my opinion the best BP winner since Schindler’s List (although Million Dollar Baby and Chicago aren’t too far behind).

Rating: A-

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Starring: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura, Hiroshi Watanabe

Director: Clint Eastwood

Summary: The story of the battle of Iwo Jima during World War II, from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers who fought it

Other Nominations: Director, Original Screenplay, Sound Editing*

Letters from Iwo Jima is an interesting one, developed as soft of a companion film to the much bigger movie about the Battle of Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, yet it actually made more money on less than a quarter of the budget because it did huge business in Japan. It only got made because of Clint Eastwood, a legendary actor/director whose patriotism couldn’t be questioned by conservative outlets, and is the extraordinarily unusual Hollywood war film that’s exclusively from the perspective of those fighting against the Americans. It depicts the General in charge of the Japanese troops, Kuribayashi (Watanabe) as a sort of Robert E. Lee-type figure (or at least what Lee had mean mythologized into): a decent and honorable man who harbored no ill will towards the enemy and didn’t particularly buy into the nationalistic rhetoric of his side, and was an excellent general who ended up fighting for the wrong side because of the circumstances of his birth. Furthermore, it sees the average soldier in any war as basically the same, someone who just wants to survive and get home, and the average Japanese soldier as maybe just more prideful and that their military conduct standards (like with ethics and “discipline”) as different, but that mainly comes from the top-down. Basically in any military structure, there are decent and honorable people (such as Watanabe’s character) and there are shitheads and the latter can have an outsized impact on everything. For a Hollywood film to be as sympathetic to the soldiers who were fighting against us as this movie is, and especially one from the guy who later made American Sniper, is downright remarkable; the value of that approach can be debated, but in my opinion showing how similar people the people drafted into wars tend to be across cultural borders is a healthy mindset.

As for the film as a whole and not just what it stands for…it’s pretty good, but wasn’t anything particularly memorable for me. From a story standpoint, the crux of the movie after the first 30 minutes ends up being that defending Iwo Jima is a suicide mission for the Japanese and everyone there knows it, so at that point, what do you do if you’re there? This is a fairly interesting premise for a part of a movie, but it’s not enough to sustain about 2 hours of movie and it gets dry after a while. Furthermore, this is a really dull movie to look at-they used an extreme amount of color desaturation (with the notable exception of the color red) to the point where it looks like one of Zach Snyder’s DC films. Movies like Saving Private Ryan have done this too, but not to this extreme and I don’t know why they didn’t just film the movie in black and white instead which would have looked much better. Ultimately, the movie has its heart in the right place and I liked Watanabe, but other than its basic concept didn’t do anything especially worthy of praise.

Rating: B-

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Starring: Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin, Bryan Cranston, Dean Norris

Directors: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris (Their first film)

Summary: A family determined to get their young daughter into the finals of a beauty pageant take a cross-country trip in their VW bus.

Other Nominations: Supporting Actor (Arkin)*, Supporting Actress (Breslin), Original Screenplay*

This was a shockingly disappointing film for me. Everything is so goddamn quirky and every character in the main family feels like a “character” instead of a character-they feel less like they’re written and more like they’re engineered, it feels artificial. This is the indie-ist movie that ever indie’d in the worst way possible, from the characters to the score to the tone and message of the movie and it all gets really grating and predictable really quickly, although I will say it gets a little better after the first half hour or so which was just awful, and the ending at the beauty pageant is great and exposes the hypocrisy of that subculture. The only thing that makes the movie somewhat palatable is the cast. Everybody is very capable in their role even if I thought Arkin was a very uninspired choice for an Oscar winner. Still, this isn’t enough to save what is ultimately a script that annoyed me to no end in so many different ways. If nothing else, at 101 minutes it’s short.

Rating: D+, although I would say it’s better than any of the other film’s I’ve given a D+ to; let’s call it **/*****

The Queen (2006)

Starring: Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Helen McCrory, Alex Jennings, Roger Allam, Sylvia Syms

Director: Stephen Frears

Summary: After the death of Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth II struggles with her reaction to a sequence of events no one could have predicted

Other Nominations: Director, Actress (Mirren)*, Original Screenplay, Original Score, Costume Design

This was a much more compelling movie than the premise or the first 30 minutes or so would have led me to believe and it touches on some interesting topics. The film centers on the conflict between how the public at large, Charles and their kids viewed Diana vs. how the Queen, her husband and mother did and Tony Blair as a new PM figuring out how to mediate the two and a major shift in values and how important outward appearances are often more important than reality with public figures. That shift is symbolized by Diana, without the airs of the aristocracy, outgoing and out there in the public doing both good things while also showing the uglier side of herself, compared to the Queen from the older generation who values being stoic and strong, keeping her problems and emotions to herself, upholding her duties but also secluding herself behind the iron gates of Buckingham Palace and distancing herself from her people. Queen Elizabeth II is perfectly portrayed by Helen Mirren who is always great playing strong, hardened women (like in the TV series Prime Suspect or in Gosford Park), but also does a good job being vulnerable to her own character’s faults, like the Queen’s jealousy over the outpouring of grief over Diana’s death that was far greater than her own will be some day. This is a good example of a movie portraying a relative small incident but using it to explore some interesting themes about generational shifts. A quality nominee.

Rating: B

2006 in Review

Other Notable Films from 2006

The Prestige

The Lives of Others

Pan’s Labyrinth

Casino Royale

Dreamgirls

The Last King of Scotland

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Idiocracy

The Wicker Man

Borat

Children of Men

An Inconvenient Truth

2006 Nominees in Review

The Departed: A- (Won Best Picture)

The Queen: B

Letters from Iwo Jima: B-

Babel: C+

Little Miss Sunshine: D+

The Departed was a very worthy Best Picture in an otherwise undistinguished field that included a movie I disliked far more than I expected to, Little Miss Sunshine. I am surprised Dreamgirls, the film that actually had the most nominations (8) of any movie from 2006, was not nominated though, although I guess I shouldn’t be considering it was shut out of nominations from any of the Big Five categories. Children of Men (three nominations including Best Screenplay and Film Editing) would have also been a very welcome nominee to watch for this project.

For 2007: This film made use of every single U.K. WWII military ambulance that still exists; Diablo Cody wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for this movie in the Starbucks section of a local Target store over the course of seven weeks; The only Best Picture nominee to have a Neon Genesis Evangelion reference in it (figures of Unit-02 and one of the MP Evas are on the desk of the main character’s 8 year old son, which either makes him the worst or best father ever for showing the series to him at that age); and these two nominees, both considered some of the best of the decade, were filmed at the same time almost right next to each other-in fact, one of them had to shut down filming for the day when the other’s set created a giant cloud of black smoke testing out pyrotechnics for the movie.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Linda Cardellini, Kate Mara

Director: Ang Lee

Summary: The story of a forbidden and secretive relationship between two cowboys over a period of 20 years

Other Nominations: Director*, Actor (Ledger), Supporting Actor (Gyllenhaal), Supporting Actress (Williams), Adapted Screenplay*, Original Score*, Cinematography

Back in the day, Brokeback Mountain was fairly groundbreaking and extensively talked about, as it was one of the first mainstream American films to focus not just on gay characters, but on a gay relationship in a respectful way. So with the benefit of the passage of time to distance myself from the fervor, I have to say that it still holds up on its own merits really well.

What strikes me about the movie are the choices they made. It’s easy to make a “star-crossed lovers” story about two gay men whose love was doomed by societal norms; it’s more interesting though to make a story about how that kind of relationship isn’t just tragic for those directly involved, but also how sad it is for the women they’re married to, who will never be the true object of desire for their husbands. In many ways, the women come off as more sympathetic than their husbands a lot of the time, especially in the case of Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams-making the gay/bisexual(?) characters as flawed, often unlikeable and human as they did is a bold choice that elevates the story from merely a tragedy into something that is often times exceptional. The other choice that lept out to me was one that says a lot about Hollywood and the MPAA operates: that a movie about two cowboys in a gay relationship only has female nudity; male nudity has always been treated differently than female nudity in film (in terms of MPAA ratings and it reminded me of a lot of things they talk about in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated (which I recommend).

Besides that, the performances are what makes the film really shine, specifically those from Ledger and Williams. For the latter, I don’t really have much more to say other than that Williams is good in everything and she is again here with an effective and subdued performance. Ledger unfortunately mumbles to the point where, before I got used to it, I considered putting on CC-he sounds like Boomhauer from King of the Hill. However, ignoring that his facial expressions and body language throughout are brilliant and he would have been my choice for Best Actor over Philip Seymour Hoffman.

As for what didn’t work for me, there are a couple of things. First, I liked how they slow-played the relationship for the first 30 minutes (which makes sense considering the people involved, the time and the place), but then the relationship goes from 0-100 in an instant without enough of a real buildup for me. Second, the middle third drags a bit and got dull at times. Still, this is a really solid piece of filmmaking that held up to the hype.

Rating: B+

Capote (2005)

Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bob Balaban, Bruce Greenwood, Amy Ryan, Mark Pellegrino

Director: Bennett Miller

Summary: The story of Truman Capote and the writing of his novel “In Cold Blood”

Other Nominations: Director, Actor (Hoffman)*, Supporting Actress (Keener), Adapted Screenplay

When Capote came out on DVD back in the day, I rented it on Netflix and gave up half an hour in; after watching it fully this time, I can understand why I did that a decade ago, but I can also now understand why the movie was acclaimed. The movie’s biggest failing is that it starts very slowly-the first 40 minutes or so aren’t really about the murder, but they also don’t really let us get inside the head of its subject all that much-it’s not exactly a crime story or a biopic, but somewhere unsatisfyingly in between. However, the movie starts to shine once we start focusing on the relationship between Capote and one of the subjects of his novel, convicted murderer Perry Smith. Capote feels a sort of kinship with Smith due to their shared intelligence and similar backgrounds despite their very different paths (“It’s as if Perry and I grew up together in the same house and one day he stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front”). Over the course of the rest of the film, Capote’s feelings get more complex as he has some darker motivations of his own and the film adds up to a remarkably strong portrait of a man who created a groundbreaking novel, but at what cost?

While the script is good, Hoffman puts on a great performance and he does a lot to make that last hour so memorable. Besides just looking and talking almost exactly like Truman Capote, Hoffman also delivers on both the superficial easy-going nature of the man as well as the darkness and sadness that lies beneath. Besides the slow start, the only other complaint I have is that they gave Harper Lee (played by Keener) plenty of screentime (which makes sense, she was his friend and was part of the research for the book), yet left the person as much a blank slate as they started with-why Keener got a nomination, I don’t know, there was almost no material for her to work with here. While this, along with a slow start, prevents Capote from reaching levels of real greatness, the last hour of the movie is so well-executed and Hoffman’s performance is strong enough that it’s still a worthwhile watch.

Rating: B

*Crash (2005)*

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Howard, Ludacris, Thandie Newton, Michael Pena, Ryan Phillippe, Larenz Tate, Shaun Toub, Bahar Soomekh, Ashlyn Sanchez (her first film), Keith David, Tony Danza

Director: Paul Haggis

Summary: Los Angeles citizens with vastly separate lives collide in interweaving stories of race, loss and redemption

Other Nominations: Director, Supporting Actor (Dillon), Original Screenplay*, Original Song (“In the Deep”), Film Editing*

Is this the worst Best Picture winner ever? Well, no: it’s not as mind-numbingly boring as Chariots of Fire, it’s not as hideously antiquated as The Broadway Melody or Cimarron, and it’s not the kind of pointless, episodic mess that Cavalcade or Around the World in 80 Days were. However, it’s up there and easily the worst of the five nominees of 2005.

Everything about it feels either overly simplistic or bizarre and wrong-headed in planning or execution. What’s striking is how many deeply unlikeable assholes there are (basically, every significant character besides Pena, Sanchez and Soomekh)-it’s like they thought “well, we want to make this movie feel even-handed, but we don’t know how to impart depth and nuance, so let’s just make everybody a jerk instead.” There are some fine character arcs here (like with Dillon, Cheadle and Howard), but overall the screenplay feels contrived in a way that a very similar movie, Traffic, did not: every situation seems perfectly set up to deliver some big moment or character-altering epiphany. While it does explore some issues that other films about race often ignore and the idea of there being such a fine line between a “good” person and a “bad” person when it comes to racism, many times it doesn’t explore its issues very well, or there’s a major misstep. Also, for a film about racism in Los Angeles, it glaringly lacks a legitimate Asian-American perspective. It’s a flawed film that features good acting (Pena and Dillon giving my favorite performances) and some good ideas, but ultimately doesn’t really conjure up a lot of meaningful thought for the viewer afterwards and pales in comparison to the better films there are on race.

Rating: C-

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Starring: David Strathairn, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Tate Donovan, Ray Wise, Alex Borstein

Director: George Clooney

Summary: Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow looks to bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy

Other Nominations: Director, Actor (Strathairn), Original Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography

The subject of TV’s power and potential to either educate or influence in dangerous ways was clearly a subject near and dear to George Clooney: he wanted to do a live TV broadcast version of Network around the same time (he didn’t because according to him, the younger audience he showed the original to failed to recognize it as satire). What he did do was this film, which doesn’t tackle the subject as effectively as Network, but still an admirable effort nonetheless. The movie is focused and keeps a small feel, detailing how Edward R. Murrow (expertly played by Strathairn) helped put some of the final nails in Joseph McCarthy’s coffin and how even in the infant days of TV, perceived “bias” in the media and corporate interests influencing content were already issues. It also gives a proper context that some other films would have overlook: Murrow correctly states that McCarthy “did not create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it” (meaning that he was just the most obvious face of a much bigger problem, which is true), and the focus is on how unconstitutional McCarthy’s methods were rather than the issue of Communism itself being good or bad or even whether McCarthy was right or wrong about Communists infiltrating the government and media (which to an extent, they did). Finally, it harkens back to a now sadly bygone era where you had nationally trusted journalists with credibility across the whole general public and spoke with a remarkable clarity and eloquence-someone who regardless of partisanship, could potentially change your mind about an issue or at least have you look at it in a new way.

There are a number of good aesthetic decisions made here as well, like making the film in black and white, which not only harkened back to the era of TV depicted, but also allowed them to depict McCarthy entirely with actual archive footage so that the film’s portrayal of the man himself could not possibly be considered inaccurate or hyperbole. Overall, while other films have tackled these themes better (such as Network and The Insider), it’s a solid look at how different and how much the same our relationship with the media has been since the advent of TV.

Rating: B