Oscar Predictions 2016

After months of campaigning, coverage of lesser award shows, and countless interviews in which certain people talk about how fucking tough it is to shoot in the snow, the 88th Academy Awards are upon us, which means it's time for me to try and figure out what will win and what should win on Sunday night. My track record over the last couple of years has been pretty woeful, and I'm sure that this year will be no different. My only hope is that I will manage to get more than 50% of them right, which is a pretty low threshold but one I would be more than happy to meet.

Let's start off with a few predictions for the ceremony itself, which I feel a little more confident about pre-judging than I do the awards:

• It will run long by between 30 minutes and two days.
• Chris Rock will be a great but underused host, and will spend much of the broadcast fighting against the inherent unwieldiness of a bloated awards show.
• Related: there will be lots of jokes about the lack of diversity which will be met with uncomfortable silence.
• If Quentin Tarantino gets up to speak at any point, that will be a good time to go and grab a drink, make a sandwich, or read twelve chapters of War and Peace.
• There will be at least five montages, two of which will be completely inessential and will leave the audience wondering why they couldn't cut them and include performances of the two nominees for Original Song which were left out due to "time constraints".
• The In Memoriam segment will lead to worldwide exclamations of "oh, right, he/she died this year" and will probably include slightly more of David Bowie's work than might be expected given how limited his filmography was.

Below are my predictions for all 22 categories, so let's put on our suits and gowns, suffer through awkward musical numbers, and be blinded by how incandescently white everyone is!

Shot/Reverse Shot: 115 - Cinemagoing

This episode is packed to the gills. In addition to the normal business of commenting on the week's news, which is unsurprisingly dominated by Star Wars and Back to the Future, because apparently we live in the '80s, Matt and I answer some viewer mail and pay tribute to Dr. Clifford Shaw, a legendary figure in Sheffield's film culture who passed away this week.

Then, we play an interview with Professor Melvyn Stokes of UCL, which was conducted by my friend Dr. Patrick Glen, who talks about a project he is spearheading to collect memories of people who went to the cinema in Britain during the 1960's. That in turn sets us on a discussion of our own cinemagoing habits, and ultimately the question of what the future holds for cinema as a communal experience.

If you think that you or someone you know would be interested in the UCL study, then please visit www.ucl.ac.uk/cinemamemories and complete the questionnaire. It'll take about 30-45 minutes to complete, and you can help contribute to a fascinating sociological study.

Shot/Reverse Shot: 114 - Obsession

In this episode, Matt and I talk about the idea of Obsession, how it is depicted on screen, and how the fascinations of individual artists can manifest in their work. We also talk about the colossal failure of Warner Bros. Pan and wonder why people keep trying to make Peter Pan movies when almost all of them have been complete duds, and try to come up with a non-awful story for the proposed Die Hard prequel. We do not succeed, but I'm willing to be bet that we came up with a better alternative to whatever version actually gets made.

Movie Journal: September

This was a month of illustrious firsts for me, as I dipped my toe into the filmographies of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Abbott & Costello for the very first time. In both cases, I have been aware of their work for a long time, but never made it a priority to check them out, though for very different reasons. In the case of Pasolini, when I first got into film I only knew him as the director of Salo, a film with such a daunting and unpleasant reputation that I kind of assumed he was just a director of self-consciously extreme cinema. Rewatching (and then reading) Mark Cousins' The Story of Film convinced me that I was deeply mistaken, and I look forward to working through the rest of his work in the future.

As for Abbott & Costello, I knew them for "Who's on First?" but little else, and assumed they were minor league compared to The Marx Brothers. Listening to Glen Weldon talk about them on a recent episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour made me doubt that assumption, and with good cause, because their films are both funnier and more visually sophisticated than I had anticipated. They are also, pound for pound, a lot more entertaining than your average Marx Brothers vehicle, because they don't have to grind to a halt to let one character play a harp. I ordered a collection of their Universal films - all 28 of them - on a whim and I'm hoping for a lot more laughter in the near future.

In total, I watched 24 films this month, all of which were new to me. There were two films which I would consider the worst that I saw, and I have divided them into the categories of Bad, But Entertaining and Bad And Boring. The title of BBE goes to Fateful Findings, which I've already written about at (arguably too much) length, so I will just reiterate that it is a hugely enjoyable film with pretty much no redeeming qualities.

BAB goes to John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is a film that should be, at the very least, watchable. Huston was a great director, working from great source material (Carson McCullers' novel of the same name), and with a cast of ringers like Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and a "young" Robert Forster. (I use quotation marks because Forster has the sort of craggy features which mean that he has looked more or less the same age for fifty years.) Yet the thing is completely inert, and fatally undermined by Brando's attempt at a Southern accent, which has the effect of making him even mumblier than usual, and borderline incomprehensible for most of the running time. The cinematography is interesting, and the decision to shoot everything so that it looks golden makes it a striking watch. However, that means that you can get pretty much everything you need from the film by looking at stills, Jesse Eisenberg in The Squid and the Whale-style.

Anyway, here are the ten best films I watched in September, 2015.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 111 - Autumn/Winter 2015 Preview

Autumn means a number of things. The leaves are changing colour, kids are back in school, and movies are about to get good again. A tradition as old as time itself, or at least as old as 2012, this episode finds Matt and myself talking about the films we are looking forward to between now and December 31st. In addition to big hitters like The Martian, The Hateful Eight, and Oscar Isaac and Domhnall's Gleeson's follow-up to Ex Machina, we take some time to talk about smaller offerings like Room, Bone Tomahawk and Carol, offer our thoughts on upcoming TV shows, and try our hardest not to get sidetracked by proposing sequels that Ridley Scott could make instead of one for Prometheus. We are at least 60% successful in that endeavour.

Incidentally, I can't be the only one who is disappointed that Bone Tomahawk and Carol are separate movies, right? Who wouldn't want to watch Cate Blanchett and Kurt Russell team up to hunt cannibals? Communists, that's who.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 109 - Star Wars

In the wake of Force Friday, a day in which people lost their collective minds over toys for a film that won't come out until December, Matt and I decided to sit down and discuss the current state of Star Wars. In addition to trying to come to terms with the way the series may change now that it isn't being driven by the idiosyncratic vision of George Lucas, we also talk about our personal experience with the films, and the crazier parts of the Expanded Universe.

Aside from the main topic, we also talk about Straight Outta Compton, Matthew Weiner's ill-fated attempt at feature film directing, and the upcoming Russ Meyer/Roger Ebert biopic.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 108 - Evolution

This episode finds Matt and myself talking about the ways in which artists evolve over the course of their careers, and how that can affect the ways in which an audience relates to the artists' work. Building on that theme, we also discuss the ways in which our own tastes have changed over time.

Film Review: Trainwreck (2015)

While a lot of romantic comedies are about the battle of the sexes, Trainwreck is a battle of sensibilities. Written by its star, Amy Schumer, its script bears the hallmark of her work as a standup and on her sketch show Inside Amy Schumer. It's incisive in its understanding of the (often sexist) ideas and tropes underlying a lot of popular media, and it seeks to subvert them in ways which are clever, funny and, where possible, dirty. An early scene, in which Schumer's character, also called Amy, has a one-night stand then pretends to fall asleep after receiving cunnilingus, leaving her partner to complain about his needs not being met, is a typical example of something Trainwreck does very well. It takes an established trope - i.e. men are inherently selfish when it comes to sex - then turns it on its head.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 38 - Adulthood

Following a summer hiatus necessitated by Joe going off and getting hitched, Shot/Reverse Shot returns with a vengeance this week with one of our leanest, most focused episodes to date. Continuing our journey through the Ages of Man, one begun in Childhood and which then struggled through the awkwardness of Adolescence, we now turn our attention to Adulthood. Along the way we tackle the post-collegiate funk, crises both quarter- and mid-life, and the class consciousness of Adam Sandler's work. It's an episode as varied as Adulthood itself, and a surprising solid one considering we haven't done this for quite some time.

As always, you can stream the podcast using the link below, or preferably (from our point of view) you can subscribe using iTunes. If you choose the later, please rate it and leave a review because it helps us to get more listeners, and also gives us something to obsess over. Speaking of which, you can also Like us on Facebook, assuming that you do.

Things I Learned From Movie X: Home Alone 2: Lost In New York

I've been meaning to launch myself back into writing the Things I Learned From Movie X columns for the last few weeks, but with my new job and having to prepare for Christmas, it fell by the wayside. With the big day looming, I decided that the best way to kick off my new commitment to the feature would be with a review of a "classic" Christmas film that isn't terribly good, and I found plenty of material in the ugly and mean-spirited Home Alone 2: Lost In New York. It was equal parts fun and dispiriting to revisit the film since I loved both of the original Home Alone films as a child, so revisiting it to discover that I didn't like it at all was kind of sad. On another level, the resulting column is one of the funniest things I've written, so it all balances out.

The Cove

"I spent ten years building this industry up, and I've spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down"



I wasn't quite prepared for The Cove. I wasn't prepared for it to be quite as exciting as it is, nor was I prepared for how much of an emotional impact it would have on me, bringing me to the verge of tears several times during the course of the screening I attended.

The Cove is a truly harrowing documentary about dolphin hunting in the town of Taiji in Japan. Every year from September to March hunters spend day after day capturing dolphins, some of which are chosen to be taken to be put into captivity in parks all over the world, but most are taken to a secluded cove where they are slaughtered. The film follows Ric O'Barry, who in the 1960s more or less created the dolphin trade through his work on the Flipper TV show, as he and a team of dolphin enthusiasts try to get footage of what takes place in The Cove. What follows is equal parts passionate nature documentary and heist film, as O'Barry and the director, Louis Psihoyos assemble a team of experts to place hidden cameras in the cove and expose what goes on there to the world.

The triumph of The Cove is its ability to be a number of different things simultaneously. On one level, it is a documentary about the dolphin trade and the damage that it does not only to the creatures themselves but also to the eco-system. We are shown many scenes of dolphins languishing in captivity as O'Barry and a host of experts lay out for us the abuses of the trade and the harm that it does to these majestic creatures. In order to best illustrate how the dolphin trade works, the film dissects the I.W.C. (International Whaling Commission), the body which is intended to protect cetaceans from being overhunted. Early on we learn how toothless the organisation is - thanks to a loophole in its charter, dolphins are not protected so Japan has been allowed to increase dolphin hunting as their whaling has been curtailed - as well as the extents to which Japan will go to try and get the ban on whaling overturned; we learn that the Japanese government has been paying off bankrupt countries that have no stake in whaling so that they will join the I.W.C. and vote with Japan. The film paints a picture of a paranoiac industry full of conspiracy, intimation and, on some occasions, murder, with O'Barry citing two specific examples of his colleagues being killed for trying to stop whaling in countries such as Russia. This part of the film is frustrating, passionate and powerful.

The other way in which the film works is as an exhilarating caper movie. In order to get footage of the cove in Taiji so that they can expose what the fishermen are doing to the world, and with no legal means of doing that, Psihoyos and O'Barry are forced to use illegal means, i.e., placing hidden cameras and recording equipment in The Cove at night. To accomplish this they have to bring together a team of experts, from divers to engineers who can construct fake rocks for them, and plan out how they are going to achieve their goal. The hostility of the villagers to any incursion, coupled with the sheer terror of breaking into a secret compound at night, adds a palpable sense of dread to the raids and makes their eventual success all the sweeter, even though the results are so very bitter.

The scenes of the slaughter are unsurprisingly devastating, but what shocked me was how beautiful some of the other moments of the film are. It's easy to be blasé about dolphins since we have seen them so often in nature documentaries before, but the footage of dolphins in the wild, complimented by interviews with members of the team in which they talk about swimming with dolphins with pure beatific joy and contrasted against footage of them in captivity, adds a power to the film that I was not anticipating and which ultimately makes the violence at its core all the more terrible.

At the heart of the movie is O'Barry, whose guilt and remorse are palpable. He has dedicated his life to trying to save dolphins because he played, or at least he believes that he played, such a large part in bringing about the current level of slaughter. We learn that O'Barry has been arrested numerous times for trying to free dolphins and has become a sworn enemy of the very industry that he helped create. He is a tragic figure who may very well never achieve his dream of stopping this monstrous practice in his lifetime, but his efforts and willingness to put himself on the line are awe-inspiring.

A passionate, brave and dangerous piece of film-making, The Cove is absolutely stunning and deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. If it affects you as deeply as it did me, visit these websites and see how you can get involved.

http://www.takepart.com/thecove/

http://www.opsociety.org/

Funny People

You always wanted too much from me, and I'm very mad at you.


Before reviewing Funny People, it's best to consider it mathematically.

Funny People is two-thirds of a good film, in that the first two thirds are really strong and the last third is knuckle-chewingly terrible, but the opening two-thirds are riddled with problems which in turn make them only two-thirds good to one third bad, whilst the final third does have enough redeeming features in it to make it about one-quarter good. So, we have two-thirds of two-thirds, which is 44%, and 25% of one-third, which is 8.33(recurring). Add this together, and we can conclude that Funny People is 52.33% good to 47.67% bad.

Let's consider the good two-thirds. The relationship between Ira (Seth Rogen) and George (Adam Sandler) is fascinating, largely thanks to Sandler's ability to play an embittered and angry rich man isolated by his wealth and confronted by his own mortality and his profound existential loneliness. He needs Ira in order to get by on a daily basis, yet he hates having to depend on someone so there is a constant sense of antagonism in their friendship that frequently veers from joking into abuse. It's a relationship that feels very volatile and real, something that could only have come into being during such heightened circumstances as George facing his own death.

It also works as an examination of Adam Sandler, albeit through the cypher of George Simmons. The parallels between the two men are manifold, from their level of success to the types of movies that they made their money with (I could easily see My Best Friend Is A Robot, co-starring Owen Wilson, being made as a Sandler vehicle) and the film even opens with real footage of Sandler making prank phone calls when he was younger (keep an eye/ear out for super-young Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller and Judd Apatow). I don't know how aware Sandler was of what Apatow was doing with the story, but the fact that he is prepared to be so thoroughly unpleasant and to utilise so many of his usual tricks (you want annoying voices? He's got 'em!) to that end suggests that the two of them were in cahoots when it came to deconstructing Adam Sandler, the comedy icon, though I think that one or both of them did mediate it to prevent it getting too dark, which is more the pity.

The film represents a crossroads for Apatow as he moves into dramatic territory that he has dabbled with in previous films but never to such an extent. Rather than wholly embrace that ethos and strike out for something new(ish) and make what he clearly wants to make, a James L. Brooks weepy mixed with a Hal Ashby subdued comedy, he relies on his standard dick-and-fart jokes as a crutch. However, rather than propping up the film they frequently trip it up. Whenever things get to serious or interesting, someone will swear or say something stupid, not so much cutting the treacle as burning the whole cake. It's very, very frustrating.

And that's without even getting on to the stand-up in the film which, for a film with 'funny' in the title, is painfully un-so. Often this is intentional, with comics like Randy (Aziz Ansari) serving to illustrate what Apatow considers to be bad stand-up, but that practiced by Ira and George isn't much better. There are some good routines in there, but most often they're just crass and dumb. Maybe it's just my taste in stand-up but I for one found it really tough to sit through so many routines that had so little impact.

The number of celebrity cameos in the film is also incredibly distracting, to the point that you end up with a scene in which George gets life lessons from Eminem, who then proceeds to scream abuse at Ray Romano. A sequence that is delirious in the moment, but really has no place in the film.

The number of routines and cameos showcases the other problem with the film; its general lack of focus. When the film was announced, many people seemed to think that it had the potential to be Judd Apatow's Annie Hall, the film that took him from being just a comedy film-maker to a film-maker of substance. Sadly, it isn't his Annie Hall, it's his Anhedonia. At two and a half hours, the film is way, way, way too long and there are so many bits that do nothing to enhance the story. Subplots such as a romance for Ira with another stand-up, footage of the sitcom that his roommate (Jason Schwartzmann) is on and the entire final third (in which a long-lost love plot is introduced) only serve to distract from the central relationship. You can't help but think that if Apatow had had what Woody Allen had, i.e., a really tough editor who could say ''this is terrible. Cut in half, get rid of the murder mystery and focus on the relationship with Annie'', then he could have delivered a film which was so much more potent and focused, not muddled and indigestible.

I think that people should see Funny People since, if nothing else, it boasts some great performances (I've not mentioned Eric Bana because he's only in the awful final third but he is great and is the only reason that that part of the film could be left in) and, for all its frustrations, it remains above all other things a very interesting failure.

Ed's Top 10 of the Year (so far)

Okay, I know what you're thinking; why are you doing a top ten of the year when the year isn't even through, and why are you doing it two-thirds of the way through the year when halfway through would make so much more sense, isn't that kind of stupid? And to that I say, ouch, that hurts. Why would you think that, it's just a mean thing to think. You know what, I'm not going to bother. No, you can't get me to continue, you've hurt my feelings. Fuck you.

Okay, I'm back. Anyway, the reason I'm doing this because when I usually do top 10s for the end of the year I invariably leave out something I watched in the first half of the year and slap myself on the forehead when I see them on other top ten lists, so this is kind of a midway point so that, if the rest of the year is a bust, I'll at least have this list to fall back on to remind of how good the first 7 months of the year were. And I'm doing this now for two reasons; 1, I originally planned to do this at the end of June, but The Dark Knight and WALL-E would both be released in July and they were my two most anticipated films of the year, so I put it off until I'd seen both; and 2, I just got lazy and didn't get around to writing this up after I'd seen them.

So, without any further ado, here's the list and my reasons for them.

10. Iron Man - It's not the best comic book adaptation ever made, it's a bit too stupid for that and if you even begin to think about the morals of it then it starts to resemble something co-written by a 5-year old with a tenuous grasp of how the arms trade works and an indecisive 20-something having an argument and constantly backtracking. That aside, it's a fun piece of popcorn entertainment that is firmly anchored by a great performance by Robert Downey Jr. and manages to be interesting for a full hour before descending into Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots territory for the last half an hour, at which point it gets a bit tiresome.

9. Cloverfield - Say what you like about the direction, the unlikable characters and the sheer stupidity of their actions (who climbs a building that is about to fall down for no good reason? How can someone who has had a FUCKING GREAT BIG PIPE through them survive for another couple of hours?) it's still a visceral experience that had me gripped enough not to notice all the problems with it until after I'd left the cinema, and that first viewing alone is enough to warrant a place in my Top 10.

8. No Country For Old Men - Bleak, nihilistic brilliance played out over the vast expanse of Texas and New Mexico, it's a taut thriller and an interesting discussion about the nature of the world and humanity in general. Javier Bardem is brilliant but Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones are his equals and the whole package is great.

7. Lars and the Real Girl - A funny, sweet film that makes the most of its own subject matter and manages to follow it through to its logical end, something that a lot of films with interesting ideas in them fail to do (Hello, Stranger Than Fiction). Ryan Gosling proves himself to be one of the most versatile actors of his generation and his Lars is one of most lovable misfits you'll see in any film this year.

6. The Mist - I'm a big admirer of Frank Darabont's work and this was no different. A relentlessly bleak film about the willingness with which people will tear each apart that also packs in plenty of B-movie thrills. The ending is a bit of kicker as well.

5. Enchanted - I grew up during the American Animation Renaissance, a period which saw Disney awaken from two decades of creative stupor after the death of Walt Disney to produce some of their best work and Enchanted is an affectionate, playful tribute to the films I grew up loving and those that preceded them. Amy Adams is beautiful and naive as the Disney princess transported to real-life New York, the songs are great and it's got Timothy Spall in it.

4. There Will Be Blood - For the longest time, this was at Number 1 on the list, but a couple of late entries and a rewatch of another candidate has shoved it down the list a few places, but that's not to take away from a visionary work from a great director. It's a masterpiece, for sure, and one of the most daring and unique filmic experiences that I've ever had. Sadly, it didn't quite worm its way into my heart and brain as much as...

3. WALL-E - I'm a Pixar fan boy, again, that stems on from my childhood love of Disney and animation in general, and it's rare that a year that sees a new release from them goes by without that film winding its way into my top ten, and this one really deserves. A funny, painfully sad and sweet film with more heart than its robotic stars would lead you to believe it had.

2. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly - This is the older candidate I alluded to earlier that, after I rewatched it, displaced There Will Be Blood, and I stand by that. Julian Schnabel's adaptation of a story that was previously thought unfilmable is technically impressive, as the director takes us inside the body and mind of a man all but totally paralysed, but it's also a breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreaking story of the imagination and hope.

1. The Dark Knight - You know, I may watch a lot of so-called 'art house' films but at heart I'm still the 7 year old who saw Jurassic Park because it had dinosaurs in and loves a big old blockbuster, so to see a film which marries those two sensibilities is a rare pleasure. Or it would be had Christopher Nolan not already done it once before with Batman Begins. I don't really need to add anything else to the review I wrote before, other than I loved it from beginning to end and hope that that creative team can reconvene to make a third one and that it's even half as good as this one.