A Short Post about Nomenclature

The Academy, over the years, has changed its mind several times as to what to call its top honor. I've already written in the posts about Sunrise ("Best Unique and Artistic Production") and Wings ("Best Production") about the odd choice that first year to have two "Best Picture" honors. For the first two years of the Academy's existence, the award was (at times, retroactively) designated as "Outstanding Picture." From the 1929-1930 eligibility year to 1940, it was called "Outstanding Production." For three short years, 1941-1943, the Academy went with "Outstanding Motion Picture." The award became "Best Motion Picture" from 1944 to 1961. Since the awards for 1962 until the present day, it is simply known as "Best Picture." If I am consistent in calling it "Best Picture" for the sake of clarity, regardless of the year, I hope you will forgive me and understand.

Best Picture of 2008

The Winner: Slumdog Millionaire.

The Other Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and The Reader.

My Choice: I have to agree very strongly with the Academy on this one. As much as I loved and admired both Milk and The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire is just too great a movie. It has a story that allows viewers to maintain a sense of hope despite all of the dark paths that the narrative takes its lead character, Jamal, down. Despite its fairy tale romance, it manages to comment seriously on poverty and its varied effects on children. It was, from my perspective, the most technologically skillful film made last year, most notably in the areas of cinematography and editing. I loved the music, particularly the two songs that were nominated. And I thought all of the performances, especially given the tender ages of much of the main cast, were astonishingly good. When a film has all of that going for it, it deserves to be named Best Picture.

Gigi (1958)

Gigi, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1958, is an almost perfect example of the skill with which MGM made musicals. Producer Arthur Freed had, by this time, perfected the art of bringing together some of the most talented individuals to work on movie musicals. A long-time member of the so-called Freed Unit, Vincente Minnelli was the director for Gigi, adding to his list of triumphs such as An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, and Brigadoon. And, perhaps most important of all, the great Cecil Beaton oversaw the entire "look" of the production, from sets to costumes and everything in between. It's all rather sumptuous, even when we're supposed to believe that the title character's family lives in poverty. (All of the impoverished should live so well.) They knew how to make movies look good in those days.

However, despite all of the technical skill involved in its creation, Gigi is a rather slight confection. The story is a rather simple one: a young girl is groomed by her grandmother and aunt for life as a courtesan since she would have very low prospects for marrying well. Of course, this being 1958 and MGM, no such word as "courtesan" ever gets uttered on screen. You have to figure it out for yourself, but it's not that difficult. Gigi, played by Leslie Caron, is supposed to be a relatively naive French schoolgirl. She enjoys spending time with family friend Gaston, played by Louis Jourdan. He's a rich playboy who goes from one woman to another as casually as he travels from Paris to Monte Carlo. Everything is boring to him, except for the moments that he spends with Gigi, of course.

You can perhaps sense where the story is headed already. Yes, Gaston falls in love with Gigi after taking her and her grandmother to the sea for the weekend. Upon their return, Gigi's Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) sets her sights on Gaston as Gigi's future benefactor, and all of the pieces begin to fall into place. All of them except, of course, for Gigi's consent. She doesn't want to be a courtesan, not really. She wants to fall in love and marry the man she loves. She just doesn't realize it's Gaston, at first. Gaston, being a man of the world, initially agrees to "keep" Gigi as his lover, but eventually he too begins to re-evaluate his feelings for her. If you've seen enough MGM musicals from this era, you already know how it ends, so I'm not going to tell you.

Jeans gets some of the best lines in the film. As she tries to teach Caron's Gigi to be ladylike, she passes on the wisdom she has accumulated throughout her many liaisons with the wealthy men of Europe. Her reaction when Gigi guesses that one of her jewels is a topaz, for example, is priceless, as is her withering dismissal of another woman's pearls as "dipped." My favorite remark of hers, though, is when she tries to teach Gigi how to "insinuate" herself into a chair. The look on Jeans' face sums up just how poorly Gigi lives up to this standard.

I've also mentioned Caron and Jourdan already, both of whom are very charming here. But the real heart of the movie is the performances by the older cast members. Maurice Chevalier, as Gaston's uncle, Honoree, is a delight. Honoree is sort of a mentor for Gaston in the ways of being a playboy. The movie begins with his famous rendition of "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," and it's a charming way to start the narrative. It certainly gives you all of the insight you need into his character. (A short reprise of the song also ends the film.) The other great performance is by Hermione Gingold as Madame Alvarez, Gigi's grandmother. She's so much fun to watch whenever she's on screen, and her duet with Chevalier, "I Remember It Well," is such a lovely ode to lost love. I would have preferred to watch a film version of their adventures instead, but youth must be the focus, I suppose. None of the cast members were nominated for their performances, oddly enough, a rarity among movies that win Best Picture.

A good musical must be judged by its songs, and you don't get much better at choosing songwriters than Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who are no doubt more famous for their musical My Fair Lady. They made some fine music for Gigi as well, including "The Night They Invented Champagne" and the two songs I've already mentioned. My personal favorite is "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore," sung by Chevalier. It's a somewhat bittersweet song, but Chevalier brings to it a wealth of history. If there are any songs that don't seem to measure up, the one that stands out the most is the title track, which won the Oscar that year for Best Song. "Gigi" sounds to me like an obvious retread of "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" from My Fair Lady. Even the pacing of the song is very similar, not to mention the overall rhythm and content. Still, one weak song in the bunch is a pretty good average.

Gigi won nine Oscars in 1958, a record number at that time, and a lot of them were in the technical categories such as art direction and music and costume design. In fact, it won every Oscar for which it was nominated. It had some pretty interesting competition for Best Picture of 1958, a comedy (Auntie Mame) and three dramas (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones, and Separate Tables). I think it's really a testament to the Freed Unit that Gigi was the winner. It is all beautifully made, even if there is little substance to the story. There's no social message involved, no deep meaning, perhaps, just a bit of light entertainment set to a lovely score.

Best Live Action Short Film of 2008

Auf Der Strecke (On the Line), a German film, tells the story of a department store security employee who spends much of his free time (and quite a bit of work time) pining away for a pretty young woman who works in the book department of the store. He never speaks to her, of course, but watches her on the surveillance camera and even rides the same subway that she does so that he can continue to look at her. You begin to think that this is going to be a creepy film about a stalker, but then she boards the train with a handsome young man one night, and she and the young man begin to fight. After she abruptly leaves the train, the young man is attacked by three young thugs, who beat him to death. The security guard watches much of this, but he does nothing, perhaps jealous of the woman's affections for the young man. When the guard discovers that the young man is her brother, he tries—haltingly—to make amends. (Those German filmmakers and their sense of guilt...where would they be without it?) This film has an interesting story and some technical prowess, but I don't know that it would stand out to me in a field of hundreds of other short films of similar skill at storytelling and camera work and editing. This is the longest of the five films at 30 minutes, and it has the most fully developed plot.

New Boy, a film from Ireland, tells the story of a young boy from Africa who arrives at a grammar school in Ireland, only to be picked on by one of the Irish boys. Through a series of flashbacks, we discover that the young African boy has left his home country due to the military's arrest and probably murder of his father, a schoolteacher. The kids in his new class are an intriguing lot overall, most of them fitting pretty clear "types." The resolution of the story is charming, coming as it does on the heels of the most dramatic of the young boy's flashbacks to Africa. Again, this film is competently made, and it was fun to hear the Irish accents, but I'm not sure that it would stand out in a field of short films so distinctly either. It's the shortest of the five, clocking in at a brisk 11 minutes.

Toyland (Spielzeugland), is also from Germany, and it mines more familiar territory: the Holocaust. A young German boy is friends with the Jewish family downstairs; in fact, he and the son of the Jewish family play the piano together. When he learns that the Jewish family will be leaving soon, he wants to know why he can't go. When his mother tries to tell him that they are going to Toyland, that just makes him all the more excited to join them. What she can't tell him, of course, but what we all know is that they are on the way to the concentration camps; foolishly, she makes up a destination that only entices her son rather than discourages him. On the morning that the Nazis arrive to take the family downstairs into custody, the young German boy packs his suitcase and tries to join them. Much of the film is the story of his mother trying to locate him, even going to the train station and having the officers open the railcar that contains her neighbors. The payoff for this film is strong, but I won't spoil it for you on the chance that you might get to enjoy seeing it on your own some day. Like New Boy, Toyland uses a series of flashbacks to tell its story, but the German film is more emotionally engrossing, perhaps because of the more detailed knowledge we have of the cultural context.

Grisen (The Pig) is a Danish film about an older man who enters a hospital to have surgery; he has an abscess in his rectum, a fact which he shares with almost everyone he meets. At first, he is in a hospital room by himself. In his solitude, he notices a painting on the wall of a pig leaping into a body of water. He becomes intrigued by the picture and starts to feel like it is a good luck charm for him. He even likens the expression on the pig's face to the smile on the Mona Lisa. (Well, it is a rather enigmatic look. The pig's look, I mean.) He awakens after one of his procedures to see that the painting has been removed and that another patient has joined him in the room. It turns out that the other patient is Muslim, and his family has asked for the painting to be removed because it offends them. A series of misadventures follows, including the hanging of a picture of a moose as an alternative. Frustrated, the elderly man calls in his daughter, the lawyer, and asks her to become involved. It's all rather comic, yet each "side" still makes an intriguing case regarding the limits of tolerance. The way the plot is resolved is the most ironic of all five films, but it too should really be experienced firsthand.

Manon Sur Le Bitume (Manon on the Asphalt), a French film, is perhaps the most challenging in terms of its structure. It begins with a series of images of various people going about their day. Then the central character of Manon hops on her bike and rides to meet someone. She is struck by a car and, while she fades in and out of consciousness, begins to think about the various people in her life and what she last said to them and key memories of their times together and how they might react to her death. All of these people are, of course, the ones we saw in the opening sequence. The film ends with a series of images involving the same people, but I'm not certain that the narrative has been fully or satisfactorily resolved when that sequence begins. As intriguing as this film sounds, I'm not sure that it is executed as skillfully as it could have been.

Oscar Winner: Toyland. Perhaps it was the darker theme of the German short film that made it stand out more. It is the most resonant of the films in terms of its emotional impact.

My Choice: The Pig. It's sense of humor is charming, yet it manages to make some intriguing social commentary about tolerance and justice.

Best Animated Short Film of 2008

La Maison en Petits Cubes, despite the French title, was made in Japan. It's an intriguing story of a man whose home starts to flood, causing him to build another home on top of the existing one. Apparently, everyone does this, making the entire town a series of towers barely poking out of the water. When he drops his pipe into the water, he begins a journey back into his past as he stops at each level and reminisces about the time he spent there. It's a charming story, and (I suspect) it's also a parable about what we might be losing in the climate change the world is facing, what we leave behind when the world we knew starts to disappear. My only complaint is that this is the least visually appealing of the five nominees. The animation is a bit, well, ugly, frankly, but the story is a winner, the most fully realized of the five nominees. By the way, the title has been translated into Pieces of Love, Vol. 1, which I believe is a gross distortion of what the title actually means in French (something more like "the house of little boxes").

Lavatory—Lovestory is an unusual tale of a woman who oversees a public lavatory—she takes the "fee" you must pay to enter—and how she begins to realize that she has a secret admirer. A series of vibrant bouquets appear when she is not looking (which is often, especially when reading her magazine filled with fantasies for women), and she begins to wonder which of the men who come in and out of the lavatory might be attracted to her. This film is the simplest in terms of its animation, really little more than line drawings, and the only colors are the ones used for the different bouquets. Most of the production crew is Russian, apparently, but all of the words that appear on screen (such as the title of the magazine the woman reads) are rendered in English. This is a charming story, delightfully romantic, but a bit of a trifle perhaps.

Oktapodi is the shortest of these films at only two minutes, but it's a very rich two minutes. In this French film, two octopi (octopuses?) in love are separated when one is taken to be the special on the menu that night at a restaurant. The remaining octopus escapes from the tank at the pet store and begins a wild journey trying to retrieve his lover from the hands of the boy who has stashed her in a cooler to remain fresh until dinner time. The colors of this one are luminous and not a second of the short time is wasted. A real gem of a movie, and one that gives you the feeling that you'd like to watch even more of these two interesting characters.

Presto is the tale of a magician's rabbit who just wants a carrot. He keeps getting thwarted in his attempts to eat his lunch, a luxury that the magician has already enjoyed. If you saw WALL-E in the theatres, then you've seen this animated short. It's clever, as you would expect from the folks at Pixar, and very slickly produced. The film manages to find as many ways as possible to allow the rabbit to punish the magician for failing to feed him properly, and all with the use of a wizard's hat much like the one Mickey dons in Fantasia. (Yes, of course, I know there's an homage at work here.) While watching this one again, I was reminded of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he and the magician keep getting zapped by a magic wand. I suppose there are far worse comparisons that could be made, given the high standard that those Warner Bros. cartoons had.

This Way Up, an entry from the United Kingdom, tells the story of the most unlucky of undertakers on the most unlucky of days. After picking up the remains of an elderly woman, the two men (apparently, father and son) experience a series of mishaps, all triggered by a chain reaction the younger man starts in the woman's home. The Rube Goldbergian start to the film sets the tone for much of the slapstick that follows. The most intriguing of those mishaps involves the two men seemingly on a journey toward hell with the "ghost" of the old woman riding her coffin as if it were one of the boats at Disneyland's It's a Small World ride. Funny, if a bit macabre at times. I kept expecting even worse things than what did happen, but this one seemed to generate the most laughs from the audience of which I was a part.

Oscar Winner and My Choice: La Maison en Petits Cubes, It’s both the most ambitious and successful of the nominated films. As an aside, I also thought the speech by the director was entertaining, especially his shout-out to the band Styx.

The Reader (2008)

Nominated for Best Picture of 2008, The Reader is a Holocaust movie without the Holocaust. As a 15-year-old boy in the post-war Germany of 1958, Michael Berg begins an affair with an older woman who takes a moment to comfort him when he gets sick with scarlet fever. After this initial chance meeting, he begins visiting her apartment, and they begin having sex on a regular basis there. He even skips classes and leaves his friends to be with her, and he plans a biking holiday for them in the German countryside that the film showcases in beautiful cinematography. The catch to all of this is that the older woman, Hanna Schmitz, asks him to read to her each time they are together. Whether this is an act of foreplay or whether she is doing it for other reasons, the viewer does not know until later in the film. The summer they spend together, though, profoundly affects Michael for the rest of his life.

Hanna disappears one day, and Michael (who has fallen in love with her) has to wait until he is in law school in 1966 before he sees her again. She and five other women who were guards in a concentration camp during World War II are now on trial for their war crimes, particularly the act of letting hundreds of Jewish women die in a burning church rather than opening the doors to the building and allowing them to survive and perhaps escape. Hanna, in particular, answers all of the questions asked of her in court honestly, sometimes brutally so. She does not appear to be a woman who has thought much about the consequences of her actions, at least on the surface.

A third thread of the narrative deals with Michael's reconciliation in 1988 with Hanna after she has been imprisoned for many years. (No, I promise I'm not spoiling the ending here.) In this portion of the film, Michael is played by Ralph Fiennes, who had quite a year in 2008. He's good here, particularly because the role suits the kinds of tamped-down performance that Fiennes often gives. By the way, these different narratives are not told in strictly chronological order; most of them are intertwining remembrances that Michael has as he contemplates reuniting with Hanna, so you see Fiennes throughout the film. There's also a portion of the film that deals with events in 1995, as Fiennes' Michael prepares to meet his grown daughter for dinner.

Hanna is played beautifully by Kate Winslet. Winslet has become an even more expressive, powerful actress as she has matured. I loved and admired her performance a few years ago in Little Children, and this role manages to top that one. What makes her acting so remarkable here is the ability she has to contain her emotions. Hanna has reasons for not expressing herself, and Winslet allows us to see only slivers of feelings now and then, keeping us guessing until the revelation of Hanna's reasons are made clear. Another actress would not have been as subtle or effective. Winslet's acting here is among the best I've seen in several years from anyone, male or female, and no, I've not seen her work in Revolutionary Road yet, so save those comments until I am able to make the comparisons myself. Hanna could easily be one of the most evil of characters in less capable hands--she certainly seems emotionally rigid, even in the love scenes with young Michael--but thanks to Winslet's talent, just as we are about to dismiss Hanna for her actions or her behaviors or her attitude, we are given a small bit of insight into her character. It's never enough to make you "love" Hanna, certainly, but you do begin to comprehend her in ways that you wouldn't have thought possible. She manages to elicit a tiny bit of sympathy for a woman who might not fully deserve it.

I also want to talk about the young performer who plays Michael as a 15-year-old and then as a law school student. His name is David Kross, and he's an 18-year-old German boy. He's astonishing in his early scenes with Winslet. He has a depth and maturity to his acting far beyond what his age might suggest. I particularly admired how his face would light up each time he was with Winslet during the romantic scenes; there's a glow to him that suggests what being a young person in love for the first time is really like. Watch those scenes where they're on vacation together to see what I mean. He also is good at conveying just how painful it is when they are apart from each other. Admittedly, he's not as strong when he has to play a young man of about 23. I think that's the age he would be when he's a student if I've done my math correctly. He's perhaps just a bit too baby-faced to play that age convincingly. However, the scenes where he has to watch Hanna's testimony are still gut-wrenching. Both he and Winslet are at the top of their game in those courtroom scenes.

So why is this a Holocaust film without the Holocaust? There are no flashbacks to the camps, only stories about some of the events that took place there. We never to get to see directly what Hanna is accused of doing. The film never even shows us Hanna's life before she meets Michael on the train that day he is sick. It just jumps from the 1950s to the 1960s when Hanna is on trial, and it doesn't provide us with a great deal of exposition about any of those years in between either. Lena Olin, who's stunningly good here in two brief scenes as a mother and then her daughter, appears near the end of the film to give us a context for understanding all of those plays and books and other works (films?) about the Holocaust from the perspective of a survivor, and I think she's there primarily to remind us that this film should be examined for its take on the guilt that we carry or perhaps should carry for what we have done in the past. She tells Fiennes' grown-up Berg to go to the theater if he wants catharsis, a rather grown-up reaction to the subject matter.

The director of The Reader is Stephen Daldry. He's made three feature films: Billy Elliot, The Hours, and now The Reader, and he's been nominated for Best Director for each one. I don't know of anyone else who can claim such a track record. What stands out for me about his films, though, is how he seems to be very selective about the material he directs. Each of the three is, in its own ways, serious and literate and "adult." The Reader is a movie designed to make us ponder our own measure of culpability, our own decisions in life. It doesn't supply simple answers to what are truly complex and complicated questions, and that's why I think it's an admirable choice among the nominees for Best Picture of 2008.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Part of the joy of watching Slumdog Millionaire, winner for Best Picture of 2008, is the cleverness of its premise. A young man from the slums of Mumbai has made it to the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He is so successful at answering questions, amassing winnings of 10 million rupees, that he is taken into custody after the first day of his appearance on the show and questioned--well, tortured, really--about how he managed to know all of the answers. What follows is a series of flashbacks based upon his correct answers, allowing viewers to see the remarkable set of circumstances that has provided him with the knowledge to succeed on the game show.

Structurally, the film's narrative is told through that series of chronological flashbacks, which means that each of the three major characters is portrayed by actors at different ages. Jamal Malik, the contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, is the sensitive younger brother who witnesses a series of rather horrific events in his young life, including the murder of his mother, his brother's shooting of the man who once made them into beggars, even the abuse of the girl whom he has always loved. As the grown Jamal, Dev Patel is very solid, particularly in the scenes with Freida Pinto, who plays the grown Latika, the girl who was orphaned at the same time as Jamal and his brother and who has experienced her own series of misadventures.

I find it interesting that the last half hour or so of the film--no, I'm not going to spoil the ending for you--offers a rather dramatic shift in tone from the rest of the film. Some of the twists are movie cliches, to be sure, such as the part where the beautiful girl winds up in the clutches of the mobster, but the filmmakers have taken these kinds of moments with which we are familiar and given them new life by providing a different locale and a different set of characters for us to follow. I do believe that most of the praise for Slumdog Millionaire comes from the fact that, despite all of the serious events that occur throughout this film, there are also moments that allow us to feel a sense of hope. Don't be mistaken, though. There are some very gruesome moments depicted here, and more than a few of the patrons in the theater when I've seen this film have made their discomfort loudly known.

Director Danny Boyle, still probably best known for Trainspotting, has managed to coax some remarkable performances from his very young cast. Patel, who anchors the film, is only 18 years old, but he already seems destined for a long career. Pinto is quite effective as well, but as the victim throughout the film of many older men, she must convey more with her expressions than with her dialogue. As Jamal's older brother Salim, Madhur Mittal builds nicely upon the performances of the two boys who play Salim at younger ages. Boyle's casting director, Loveleen Tandan, has managed to find mostly nonprofessionals to fill these roles, and she deserves a great deal of credit for the success of the film, thanks to the energy that each of the nine young performers bring to Slumdog Millionaire.

I've seen this film twice now, once before Christmas and now again in the new year, and each time I have been swept up in the drama that unfolds on the screen. This is a particularly engrossing film. Anyone who tends to dislike films in foreign locations or non-American or unknown actors or a few subtitles here and there should be taken to see Slumdog Millionaire because I suspect it will change attitudes about all of those traits that tend to be seen as deficits. The editing is fast-paced, and the look of the film itself is rather spectacular. I must also mention the music by A.R. Rahman. The cast appears in a musical number entitled "Jai Ho" (a song you should download if you already haven't) that is straight out of any number of Bollywood films, and it's a highlight of the movie. The second time I saw the film, I paid more attention to the soundtrack and realized just how much it assists in maintaining the pace of the film.

Wall-E is still my favorite film of 2008, and Milk is still the film that I most admired, but Slumdog Millionaire ranks high on either of those lists ("favorite" or "most admired"). It manages to give us a view of a different world, one with which we are not familiar but one which quickly becomes intriguing to us, and it presents that most hackneyed of plot devices, the boy who will do anything to win the love of a girl, yet does so in a way that makes us care about the fate of the couple. It manages to provide us with a vision of the depths to which people sink when they are faced with poverty, but it also gives a sense that we are able to overcome that poverty, to make ourselves into better people than our financial situations would suggest. How intriguing that a film set in India and directed by an Englishman should represent those rather quintessentially American values.