Best Supporting Actress

I’m surprised there was still any New England scenery left after Melissa Leo, playing boxer Micky Ward’s ferocious Mommie Dearest, got through chewing it up and spitting it out in The Fighter.  It’s a mammoth, attention-getting performance (with an architecturally impressive bleached blonde hairdo straight out of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to match) that has won many of the precursor awards.  Unfortunately, the talented Ms. Leo, unlike last year’s winner in this category, Mo’Nique, refused to have the performance alone speak for itself, and instead took out trade ads that had her posing in glittery pantsuits and fake fur, sort of like Liberace on Vegas opening night, in an effort to get noticed by Oscar voters.  This silly, ill-advised hijink may turn off Academy members who like their nominees to be desperate yet dignified, and may vote for any one of her fellow nominees instead.  I personally prefer The Fighter co-star Amy Adam’s earthy, multi-dimensional performance  as Micky Ward’s sassy, headstrong waitress-girlfriend (I was screaming like a Green Bay Packer cheerleader when she took on Micky’s seven bitchy sisters single-handedly without getting any holes in her fishnets), but I think Academy voters will most likely pick Hailee Steinfeld’s  impressive, indelible film debut (and even more impressive category hijack since it’s unquestionably a leading performance) as the young girl who hires a cowboy to track down her father’s killer in True Grit. 

Predicted Winner:  Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale’s performance as Dicky Eklund in The Fighter is scary, funny, maddening, heartbreaking, and wondrous—a performance so lived-in that it is unlike any other performance I’ve seen this year. In the scene when he visits his druggie friends carrying his birthday cake after being spurned by his brother to be his trainer, he is devastating.  In a world where people don’t remember your on-set breakdowns yelling at lower-paid crew members, and don’t begrudge your headlining of a superhero blockbuster hit every other summer, Bale will win the Oscar hands-down, with no competition and no questions.  But, in that world, my dinner is cooked and served by a shirtless Ryan Reynolds every night while I’m wearing a baby tee and skinny jeans as well.   I think Bale’s complicated Hollywood baggage may take him down several notches in the Academy’s eyes, which may then wander over to his very deserving fellow nominees.  Although my personal favorite is  Mark Ruffalo’s beautifully understated but complexly layered performance as the sperm donor trying to claim a place in his offsprings’ lives in The Kids Are All Right, I think Geoffrey Rush’s dryly sympathetic one as the Duke of York’s speech therapist in The King’s Speech (an essential complement to Colin Firth’s) may be the possible spoiler.  

Predicted Winner:  Christian Bale, The Fighter

Best Actress

For the first time in years, the category will be quite the nailbiter, with two exceptional performances that have an equal probability in winning (though most likely for reasons other than it’s the best performance).   Nominees Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lawrence,  and Michelle Williams can sit back in their couture gowns, raise their legs and smoke a cigar as they watch Annette Bening and Natalie Portman duke it out FTW.   Bening turns in a marvelously nuanced, vanityless, incredibly vulnerable performance as one-half of a middle-aged lesbian couple struggling with marriage and parenting in one of the best films of the year, The Kids Are All Right.   Who can forget that scene in the bathroom when she confronts her wife (the excellent but unnominated Julianne Moore) for being unfaithful – her face registering anger, tumult, betrayal?  She’s Hollywood Royalty, an Academy Governor, and ripe for a career Oscar after four nominations and no wins (two of which she lost to Hilary “@@#!#!!!” Swank—a crime against film aficionados’ humanity that the Academy will never live down).  On the other hand, Portman’s perfectionist ballet dancer Nina is iconic, timeless, larger-than-life, and already the stuff of pop-culture legend with the crazy Jim Carrey parody on Saturday Night Live. She has a swoon-worthy death scene to end all drama queen death scenes, and the impressive physicality that Academy voters like to reward—Portman rigorously trained for the role in order to perform the ballet scenes herself (the physicality in Bening’s performance is limited to singing along off-key to Joni Mitchell).  She’s also young and beautiful, a pregnant fashionista who continues to wow the jaded red carpet watchers, a formula Catherine Zeta-Jones milked like a grass-fed cow when she won her Oscar in 2003.  I’m a big fan of Portman’s performance, but I think Bening will finally get her due.

Predicted Winner:  Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right

Best Actor

Do any of the Best Actor nominees actually have a chance against Colin Firth’s showy turn as a stuttering King who conquers his disability in the overrated The King’s Speech?  Not Jeff Bridges, although funny and engaging as the drunken cowboy/bounty hunter in True Grit (plus he just won last year).  Not my fantasy hot-tub companion, Oscar show co-host James Franco, although he impressively holds the audience’s attention for more than an hour with nothing but his dimples and a boulder to work with in the tiresome 127 Hours.  Not Jesse Eisenberg, my personal choice for the best performance in this category, although he magnificently layers an imperious, cut-throat persona with a little-boy-lost empathy to create an indelible fictional characterization of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.  Not Javier Bardem, whose film Biutiful I did not see. Firth, who has won most of the precursor awards, gives a technically proficient and, at many times, touchingly poignant performance as the Duke of York, later King George VI, who overcame his debilitating stutter to effectively rule Britain during wartime. It’s a performance that closely adheres to the royalty-disability-inspiration formula for Academy Award-winning roles (although, for me, King George’s stutter rates only slightly higher than Frida Kahlo’s unibrow as a disability, and Salma Hayek didn’t win for that performance).  It’s a good turn, but not quite a great one, definitely subordinate to his Oscar-nominated performance last year for “A Single Man.”

Predicted Winner:  Colin Firth, The King’s Speech

Best Director

I will be rabidly infuriated like a Justin Bieber fan after the Grammys if David Fincher’s masterful, energetic, visually textured work in The Social Network loses to anyone this Sunday, even if it’s to Darren Aronofsky (someone I’d gladly volunteer to be caught in a wrestling headlock with ever since I attended his talkback at the Chicago Film Festival a couple of years ago for, you got it, The Wrestler), whose audacious story-telling and innovative visual style in Black Swan I really admired a lot.  I will be mega-ticked off if Tom Hooper, winner of the Director’s Guild of America award, wins for his pedestrian, old-fashioned, sentiment-button-pushing direction of The History Channel meets Hallmark Hall of Fame Best Picture front-runner, The King’s Speech,  film direction that would not have been out of place, in say, 1947 Hollywood.  Fincher’s work is bold, brash, but also thoughtful, giving a film about privileged Harvard college students an immediacy and a relevance that it could otherwise not have had, heads above everyone else’s work this year.

Predicted Winner:  David Fincher, The Social Network

Best Picture

I have stocked my house with various kinds of vodka, gin, wine, beer, and tequila to make sure I have booze readily at hand to guzzle every time The King’s Speech wins (it’ll probably walk away with most of it’s 12 nominations, including the Big One, Best Picture, so I’ll be pretty soused).  It’s a very well-made movie, don’t get me wrong, but how different it is from a very well-made TV movie that one can see on PBS, or on HBO, or on Lifetime?  It’s emotional, inspiring, beautifully-photographed, competently-acted…but it’s also stultifying, old-fashioned, and irrelevant.  Really, in February 2011, where the world is a complicated, restive, ambivalent place, why would I care about the story of a British King who overcomes his stuttering?  It’s like giving Best Film to a movie about a Bikram Yoga instructor in LA who gets over his aversion to, uhhmm, heated rooms.  And especially this year, where there are several deserving nominees, all strong contenders and probable winners in other years:  the brilliantly original Inception, the wacky but visually arresting Black Swan, the heartwarming, empathetic The Kids Are All Right,  the exceptional Greek tragedy masquerading as a boxing genre movie The Fighter, the grippingly-plotted and visually lush Western True Grit.  Then, there’s The Social Network which is so contemporary, so intelligent, so visually and aurally fresh, a film that will be as influential as, yes I dare say it, a Citizen Kane or a Taxi Driver on future film-going generations.  Unfortunately, there is a reason why the word “Oscar-bait” was coined:  the people voting for Oscars are easily “baited”, generally voting for movies that are safe, sentimental, and middlebrow.

Predicted Winner:  The King’s Speech

Other Categories

Animated Feature Film:  Toy Story 3

Art Direction:  The King’s Speech

Cinematography:  True Grit

Costume Design:  The King’s Speech

Documentary (Feature):  Inside Job

Documentary (Short Subject):  Poster Girl

Film Editing:  The Social Network

Foreign Language Film:  Incendies (Canada)

Make-Up:  Wolfman

Music (Original Score):  The King’s Speech

Music (Original Song):  “If I Rise”, 127 Hours

Short Film (Animated):  Madagascar, a Journey Diary

Short Film (Live Action):  Wish 143

Sound Editing:  Inception

Sound Mixing:  The Social Network

Visual Effects:  Inception

Writing (Adapted Screenplay):  The Social Network

Writing (Original Screenplay):  The King’s Speech

The Housemaid/Hanyo (South Korea) – A remake of a classic Korean film from the 1960s, Im Sang-soo’s Cannes stunner is the best film I saw at this year’s Festival.  A young woman takes a job as a nanny to a wealthy family and strikes up an affair with the husband (the mega-hotness that is Lee Jung-jae), which of course pits her against the pregnant wife and her conniving mother.  Standing over them all, playing all sides, observing every single betrayal, is the bitter, long-time housekeeper (Youn Yuh-Jung, magnificent in an emotionally complex performance, one of the best I’ve seen this year).  Histrionic, outsized, dealing in gargantuan emotions, the film, though, makes shrewd and biting observations on Korean feminist politics, class warfare, and Western cultural adoption (I love the fact that the husband plays Beethoven every morning before breakfast).  The female characters are always jockeying for and exercising control, subtly, determinedly, and at times menacingly, over this family (it’s interesting that Lee’s character is the sole male character in the film, and he is portrayed as primarily a sex hound and an above-average pianist).  I particularly love Youn’s omnipresent housekeeper- angry at being subservient to her rich employers, she, nevertheless, uses them to elevate her status in a highly socially-stratified society (the mother-in-law pulled strings to have the housekeeper’s son appointed as a government prosecutor, an important, seemingly lucrative job that requires connections and patrons), and is both grateful and hateful at the same time.  The settings are stunningly opulent, and wonderfully evoke the lifestyle of the Korean upper class, but Im’s masterful directorial technique, full of rigid, formalized images, indicative of the class strictures and protocol in such a status-conscious society, is just breathtaking.  The wacky epilogue is perplexing but memorable.

Erratum (Poland) – Hands down, the worst film I saw in the year’s Festival, and come to think of it, in the past few Festivals.  What I initially thought was going to be a Twin Peaks meets Bela Tarr artsy mystery in the Polish countryside (thanks to the Festival’s crackerjack festival catalog writing crew who seems to have a way of making films sound much better than they are) turns out to be as artsy, as mysterious, and as interesting as a Jiffy Lube oil change.  A man, on an errand in his hometown for his boss, inadvertently runs down a homeless guy, and he decides to stay in town long enough to get his car repaired, the police investigation closed, and old, festering wounds with his father and his best friend re-opened.  The screenplay is a headscratcher:  why is the guy drawn to unearth the homeless victim’s past?  Why does he have so much animosity towards his father?  Why did he leave the town in the first place?  What the heck is this movie doing other than serving as an alternative to Lunesta for its film-weary audience?  Director Marek Lechki has a strong visual eye for composing beautiful, memorable, but ultimately empty images. Polish actor Tomasz Kot is hot in a young (before those cell-phone pics!) Brett Favre kind of way, but gives a performance so stoic and monotonous, the only thing I could think about while I was watching him, was, man, wearing that same undershirt for five days straight kinda really, literally, stinks!

R U There (Netherlands) – I’ve used the virtual technology, Second Life, in my day job to attend global conferences (in which I unsuccessfully tried to make my avatar into a strapping, 6’2, blonde hunk in a tight muscle tee), so I was curious to see David Verbeek’s film, shown at the Cannes sidebar, Un Certain Regard, earlier this year. The film is about a competitive gamer, in Taipei for a gaming convention, who meets a Taiwanese “hostess” (whatever that means the film doesn’t really make very clear), and emotionally connects with her in the Second Life virtual world, but is socially awkward and inarticulate with her in the real one.  It’s an interesting concept, but very lightweight and not really that insightful. People’s online selves are different from their real ones (and as a jaded veteran of online dating sites, I’d say also their height, weight, age, hair color, ability to carry a conversation, and, ahem, select body part measurements), so tell me something I don’t know, right?  After Avatar, any animated technology will look low-rent, so the Second Life scenes, for me, are less interesting than the real-world ones.  Unfortunately, the real-world scenes are broad, shallow sketches rather than fully-fleshed out ones, so nothing really sticks after you see the film.  The two leads are very attractive, but their characters aren’t multi-dimensional.

The Days of Desire/A Vagyakozas Napjai (Hungary) – This is another one of those moody, atmospheric Eastern European films with pretensions to saying something profound, which unfortunately is still stuck in the filmmaker’s head. Jozsef Pacskovszky’s drama about a dysfunctional married couple who hires a mute housekeeper and then starts treating her like their dead daughter is beautiful to look at, but again, is inarticulate and hollow.  The maid falls in love with a grocery store clerk who immediately dumps her when he finds out she’s just the maid and not the daughter of the wealthy couple.  I thought there was a missed opportunity in the film to reflect on contemporary Hungarian twentysomethings’ changing values (more materialistic, more status-conscious, less tied to the recent memories of Hungary’s past), and when I asked Pacskovszky about it in the Director’s Q and A right after the screening, he looked like I was giving him an enema instead of asking a pretty valid, thought-provoking question.  Seriously.

Leap Year/Ano Bisierto (Mexico) – Laura is a twentysomething business journalist in Mexico City, transplanted from rural Oaxaca, whose life is comprised of long periods of being alone, of making up stories of a fabulous city life to tell her mother and brother back home, and of going to bars and picking up men for one night stands.  One of these men, Arturo, becomes her lover and she gradually acts out her most extreme sexual fantasies with him, leading up to a shocking act she wants him to perform on her on February 29, the death anniversary of her father. It is an intriguing, riveting, disconcerting, highly uncomfortable film, a film that stays with you days after seeing it, not least because of the depiction of graphic sex scenes which are unheard of in mainstream cinema.  Howe, more importantly, creates a searing, palpable story of a person weighed down by intense loneliness and lack of human connections, set against a cutthroat, indifferent urban milieu, helped greatly by the meticulous, thoughtful yet unobtrusive cinematography by Juan Manuel Sepulveda and a great, landmark performance by Monica Del Carmen as Laura.  It’s a performance that is harrowing, authentic, committed beyond belief, a performance much better than any recent Oscar Best Actress winners and nominees.  Other than the sex scenes, there’s really not a lot of action in the film but Del Carmen rivets us with every glance, every tiny gesture and action, every scrubbing of a dirty plate, every push of a grocery cart, communicating so much loneliness, pain, longing, and scarring, that you’re left wondering is this acting?  I’m a little perturbed by the fact that the film again presents another actress being “brutalized” for the sake of art, but part of me wonders how successful this film could have been without the frank sexuality.   But Del Carmen is also terrific in the more joyful scenes-the short reunions with her brother, the post-coital snuggling with Arturo- and she memorably delivers the best line reading I’ve heard in the Festival this year.  When Arturo (played by Gustavo Sanchez Parra), after the infamous golden showers scene, asks her how it feels like to get pissed on, Del Carmen responds simply, artlessly, wondrously, “Warm”.

We Are What We Are/Somos Lo Que Hay (Mexico) – The other memorable film I’ve seen so far this year is from Mexico as well, and it was also a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival.  There’s no pissing or strangling this time, but there’s bloody biting and chewing in this existential story of urban Mexico City cannibals who must try to survive after the death of their father (from indigestion after eating a prostitute – that’s why always be careful of what you put in your mouth!).  Writer-director Jorge Michel Grau treads similar ground to Howe by portraying Mexico City as an unforgiving place of urban dislocation, where slum kids live under a bridge, prostitutes swarm an entire street, and the cannibals can’t make an honest living fixing watches in an open-air market, because they keep on getting thrown out.  What’s more fascinating, though, for me, is the breakdown of group dynamics once the father dies:  the inability of both the mother (crazy and tortured) and the eldest son (closeted gay and tortured) to step up to the plate as leaders, and the conniving of the youngest daughter which ends up dividing the family (and ensuring her survivor status after the bloody carnage at the climax of the film).  Ultimately though I didn’t really understand what this film was all about, but I was quite riveted and entertained.  The performances are terrific, especially Carmen Beato as the histrionic mother and Paulina Gaitan as the steely youngest daughter.

Heartbeats/Les Amours Imaginaires (Canada) – After the two Mexican films, which make you feel like you’ve been run over by an oil tanker, this airy confection from French-Canadian wunderkind director Xavier Dolan is a breath of fresh air.  I wonder if the folks who gave this film a standing ovation at Cannes sat through Leap Year and We Are What We Are back to back and needed a sugar high.  I don’t really think it’s applause or ovation-worthy – it’s a youthful, hipster, unambitious film, chronicling the shallow rivalry between sensitive, cute gay boy Francis (played by director Dolan) and his fabulous, stylish fag hag Marie, over a sexually ambiguous curly-haired hottie, Nicholas.  There’s a lot of drama queen posturing, confident hauteur, slow-mo sashays, a painfully hip soundtrack (including a wonderful Italian version of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang”), fashionable outfits, and amazing blasts of color:  turquoise blue, beet-red, tangerine orange, lavender, maroon-brown-gourd is all over the screen.  It has an endearing, good-naturedly pouty, puppyish gay sensibility.  But the film doesn’t really say anything new or insightful about relationships, and the self-absorption of the characters (especially Marie) is ultimately tiring. 

A Screaming Man/Un Homme Qui Crie (France/Belgium/Chad) – Instead of A Screaming Man, this snoozer from Mahamet-Saleh Haroun should have been called A Sleeping Man.  Or better yet, A Sleeping Audience.  I’m flabbergasted that this won the third-place Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.  The story of a hotel pool attendant who is demoted to gate-opener and replaced by his son, told against the backdrop of the impending Chadian civil war, was so slow and unengaging, I was running Top Chef marathons in my head just to keep awake.  I would have liked more exploration of the Chadian political and socio-economic structure that would have made a demotion such a heartbreaking act.  But instead, Haroun peppers us with slow, lingering shots of nothing interesting going on (at least in Leap Year, you are continuously riveted by Monica Del Carmen’s performance).  Lead actor Youssouf Djaoro gives such an inscrutable performance that you don’t really understand, or ultimately care about, his character’s pain or humiliation, and what drives him to give up his son to the Chadian army in order to get his old job back.

The Chicago International Film Festival goes into its second weekend at AMC River East, 322 E. Illinois St.  Check out the festival website for the schedule.

The Sentiment of the Flesh/Le Sentiment de la Chair (France) – A doctor and an anatomical artist meet over a chest X-ray and fall in love.  It’s definitely not your typical Katherine Heigl rom-com.  However, it is your typical pretentious, nonsensical Euro-trashy pic full of lengthy, silent, lingering takes, graphic lovemaking, and never-ending foolishness.  Of course both of the very attractive leads turn out to be batshit crazy, and they decide to push their obsession with each other’s bodies into more than intense, non-stop sex.  First, there are the surreptitious MRI scans so the doctor (a gorgeous but stoic Thibault Vincon) can see deep into the artist’s (an equally gorgeous but listless Annabelle Hettmann) living, breathing internal organs.  Then there’s the wacky shock ending which allegedly left audience members at the Montreal Film Festival puking.  I’m less bothered by the ending (I’ve seen a ton of crazy stuff at the Festival over the years) but more by the fact that this film is so dull and muddled.  Director/writer Roberto Garzelli never paints any clear motivation as to why these two are obsessed with the insides of their bodies.  What’s the trigger?  What are the demons that they’re fighting?  Why should we care?  And by the way, for an erotic thriller to have a character say he’s in love with her beautiful renal pelvis is like having him say Christine O’Donnell looks hot dressed up as Elphaba in Wicked. Mega-buzzkill!

Sasa (Germany) – I really need to see another gay teen coming-out story like I need to grow another rib (now I’m using anatomical metaphors thanks to you Roberto Garzelli!).  This is a very cute, but forgettable film about a closeted music student who falls in love with his super hunky piano teacher.  Sasa is a Montenegran immigrant in Cologne, and unfortunately his family full of butch, brawling Balkan males won’t have any of this gay stuff.  Writer-director Dennis Tarovic makes some interesting observations about immigrant culture (Sasa’s best friend and fag hag Jiao, who’s Chinese, comes from a family of immigrants as well) but overall it’s just not really substantial.  The actors are warm and attractive (especially Sascha Kekez in the titular role and Tim Bergmann as his object of manly desire, who is often shot in flattering, lush, radiantly soft angles like a DNA or Attitude magazine cover model) but they don’t really have enough to do in the slight script.  Zeljka Preksavec, as Sasa’s protective, controlling mother who sees her sons as the fulfillment of her immigrant dreams, gives a wonderfully nuanced, affecting performance that is so much better than the material deserves.  When she plays the piano in shadows in Sasa’s empty bedroom, you can feel the palpable pain and disappointment.

Blame (Australia) – Michael Henry’s taut, crisp, engaging psychological thriller is pretty good, despite the fact that it’s probably not as adventurous or as envelope-pushing as I would expect a film festival entry to be.  Five teenagers coming directly from the funeral of their friend exact a revenge plot on the hot male piano teacher who they think caused her suicide (what is the deal, by the way, with hot male piano teachers this year at the film festival – suck it, Isabelle Huppert!).  Their plans unravel and he turns out to be quite a formidable psychological and physical antagonist (despite the fact that they drug him, then leave him bound and gagged in that sealed garage with the carbon monoxide).  Henry’s screenplay somewhat explores the drivers for and extent of group think, and the ambiguity of moral choices, but I admire him more for his assured direction.  I like the fact that the first two thirds of the film occur indoors, in the confines of the teacher’s remote farmhouse, evoking the claustrophobia of the teens’ guilt and hesitations.  On the other hand, the scenes leading up to the climax occurs outside, in the wide open meadow and river of the property, which accentuates the potentially open-ended outcome.  Will the group be found out and charged for a crime?  Will they turn on each other?  How will this story end?  The performances are superlative, with riveting turns by Sophie Lowe (who was the runner-up to play Lisbeth in David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Mark Leonard Winter as the more morally ambiguous members of the vigilante team.

Caterpillar/Kyatapira (Japan).  Lead actress Shinobu Terajima won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at this year’s Berlin Film Festival for her role as the long-suffering wife of a soldier who returns home from the Sino-Japanese War of 1940 unable to speak and without any arms or legs.  And she is magnificent, both in the loud, histrionic, Greek-tragedy like scenes (such as when she breaks down after feeding her insatiable husband) and in the quieter scenes (such as when the townspeople come up to her praising her for standing by her husband who is now considered a living “War God”,  her face full of ambivalence and guilt).  The film, though, directed by Koji Wakamatsu, is quite tedious- obviously, repetitively hammering its point that war is bad and pointless, and that everyone is a victim, including the soldiers’ loved ones left behind.  The theme has an unnerving topicality to our world today, but the film itself goes on and on without anything insightful to say.  That’s probably why Wakamatsu, a well-known director of Japanese “pink” films (a genre of softcore porn in Japan that had it’s heyday in the 1970s), felt the need to include numerous scenes of graphically-depicted amputee sex between Terajima and lead actor Shima Ohnishi (whose film image was digitalized, his Berlin Film Fest photos show him with all his limbs intact) to jolt sleeping moviegoers. 

Check out the film festival website for the schedule of films until October 21.  All screenings at AMC River East, 322 E. Illinois St.

Aronofsky, whose The Wrestler was one of the highlights of the 2008 Festival (and whose endearing Q and A at the end of the screening made me want to pull every hair out of Rachel Weisz’s scalp), is back this year, anchoring a surprising group of high-profile, Oscar-bound films with his much-talked about The Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman as a prima ballerina descending into madness.  Danny Boyle’s much-buzzed 127 Hours is also screening.  It blew audiences away at the Telluride and Toronto fests, with its real-life story of a trapped hiker who saws his hand off to save himself, starring actor/performance artist/Francis fantasy love slave, James Franco.  Other high-profile fall and winter releases that are making their Chicago debuts in the Festival include Doug Liman’s Fair Game, with Naomi Watts as outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and Sean Penn as her whistleblowing husband Joe Wilson; Tony Goldwyn’s Conviction, with the woman-whose-name-shall-not-deface-this-blog, two time Academy Award winner (uggh) HS (ok, Hilary Swank) as a feisty lawyer who tries to free her wrongfully imprisoned brother;  and Julie Taymor’s sure-to-be-idiosyncratic version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with the fabulous Helen Mirren as a female Prospera.  I’m not going to any of these since I’m waiting for their upcoming commercial releases, but if you’re going, you better get your tickets now because these films are sure to sell out.

I’m ecstatic that several of the much-talked about films in the festival circuit are being shown in Chicago this year.  One of my cinematic goddesses, the beyond-brilliant Juliette Binoche, won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award for her role as a gallery owner on a road trip to the Italian countryside with a writer in Abbas Kiarostami’s elusive Certified Copy.  Binoche and Kiarostami working together?  Hard-core cinemaphiliacs are salivating.  I’m also intrigued by Australian director Michael Rowe’s Mexican film Leap Year, which was a succes d’scandale at Cannes with its graphic sex and violence, and of course promptly won the Camera D’Or prize, given to the best first feature film at the festival. I’m on the fence about seeing School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum Apitchang Weerasethakul’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, since the last film of his that I saw, Tropical Malady, nearly made me catatonic.  I’m definitely seeing other much-buzzed about Cannes festival entries, namely, Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid from Korea, about, well, a housemaid who has an affair with her married employer, with a supposedly must-see explosive ending; and Mahamet Sateh Haroun’s A Screaming Man from Chad, about father-son conflict set in a country club with the country’s impending civil war in the background.

The great pleasure of the Festival for me is unearthing all these intriguing gems from filmmakers around the world which may not have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a commercial Chicago release.  Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek’s R U There supposedly combines film and the 3D social networking application Second Life (which I have used in my day job to hold and attend meetings, interesting). Koji Wakamatsu’s Caterpillar from Japan has been making the festival rounds as well, and it’s based on a short story that was banned in Japan because of its objectionable subject matter, about the tortured life of a quadriplegic war veteran and his bitter wife. Roberto Garzelli’s French film, The Sentiment of the Flesh, about an obsessive, gruesome love affair between an anatomical artist and a surgeon, allegedly had people puking in the aisles during its Montreal Film Festival screening (it won an award, though).  Classy.  And Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, possibly my most anticipated film in my festival schedule, is about a family of working-class cannibals who must survive in a recession- and poverty-wracked urban environment.  Does Glenn Beck make a cameo as an hors d’oeuvre?

Finally, I’m very intrigued by two entries getting late-evening screenings due to their subject matter.  Japan’s Takao Nakano takes the Japanese pink film genre to beyond-cosmos levels with Big Tits Zombie about strippers battling zombies, in 3D.  France’s art-house darling Christophe Honore has gay porn star Francois Sagat in his latest film, Man at Bath, about gay lovers who break up and then throw themselves into anonymous sex with other men.  Fabulous.  3D busty zombies and gay porn stars in a film festival?  This year’s Festival is going to take us on a wild, bumpy, rollercoaster ride, and I can’t wait!

Check out the Chicago International Film Festival website  (http://www.chicagofilmfestival.com/)  for all screenings  at AMC River East 21 from October 7-21.  Check the website as well for ticket prices, packages, non-film activities, and a pretty cool sounding Festival Filmmakers Lounge in Lucky Strikes where filmgoers can rest their weary or blown-away or euphoric or all of the above selves in between screenings.

Di Pietro updates Schnitzler’s daisy chain of sexual partners – the play starts with an encounter between a male hustler and a closeted soldier in a cruising park, the next scene has the soldier picking up an uptight graduate student in a locker room, and so on it goes, until eight pairings later, an older famous closeted journalist hires the hustler from the first scene for a sleepover in his mansion.  Despite some memorable one-liners, there’s really nothing in F**king Men that we haven’t seen before – it’s like Queer as Folk warmed over in a hotdish.  There’s a closeted movie actor, a bisexual college student, a long-term gay couple in an open relationship, a porn star looking for love, among others, and lots of hot, male-on-male action (well, until the older journalist arrives – hey Joe Di Pietro, seniors have sex too!).  These boys are horny, lonely, conflicted, horny, deceitful, self-absorbed, horny.  Some themes that I thought should have been given more play, such as when does one reveal his HIV-status to his sexual partner or why people agree to stay in long-term open relationships, are brought up, then glossed over.  The gay Looking for Mr. Goodbar writing is trite; the relationships superficial without any honest resolutions; the characters tired archetypes.  Director Tom Mullen makes the most out of the sub-par material:  the pacing is tight, the scene-changes and lighting shifts unobtrusive, the blocking well-thought out (although I’m not too sure why the gorgeous Beau Forbes, playing the closeted actor, displays his wang in a scene that is supposed to be played with the actors’ backs to the audience).  The cast is solid, with the always interesting Ryan Lanning a standout once again as the neurotic, flamboyant playwright who hooks up with both the porn star and the actor (really, some of us have all the luck).

The Kids Are All Right starts off with what seems to be a gay premise:  the teenage kids of a lesbian couple seek out their sperm donor and invite him into their lives.  But gay filmmaker Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Bloomberg addresses broader, compelling, provocative themes:  What constitutes familial bonds?  What are the emotional and moral implications of having the sperm donor participate in the child’s life, when the very nature of the donor act calls out for both anonymity and distance?  In the light of all the polarizing debate around gay marriage, how does one define family within our 21^st century context?  What is the best way to rear children in that context?  The film isn’t as weighty as The Hurt Locker, for sure, but The Kids Are All Right is as relevant and as reflective.  Although Cholodenko and Bloomberg tackle important issues, they also write scenes of such sincere familiarity and truthfulness that the film is a genuine pleasure to watch.  Scenes such as the Moms (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, both brilliant) awkwardly trying to figure out if their teenage son (a wonderful Josh Hutcherson) is gay; the sperm donor (an effortless Mark Ruffalo turning in a very complex, multi-dimensional performance; he is my early pick for Best Supporting Actor at next year’s Oscars) meeting the kids (a luminous Mia Wasikowska plays the older child) at his restaurant for the first time;  Moore and Bening having a fight during dinner with their close hetero pals- these are scenes that make you stand back and say whoa!  That’s totally me, or my friends, or my family members up on screen, dealing with the complexities, the inarticulateness, the anxiety and disappointments of everyday life.  And whether my friends, my family members, or I are gay or not.

Cholodenko works with this dream team of an acting ensemble brilliantly.  If there is justice in the world, Bening will finally win her Oscar (wait, I hope there isn’t any arggheeke@@#!! Hilary Swank arggheeke@@#!!  Awards-bait movie coming out later this year!).  It’s a riveting, beautifully nuanced performance – the scene when she confronts Moore with her infidelity with Ruffalo’s character is amazingly, painfully played.  Moore is her peer- beautifully and heartbreakingly capturing her character’s search for validation and accomplishment.  Wasikowska and Hutcherson are so warm, funny, truthful, and luminous, that you’re left highly impressed with great talent at such young ages.  But Ruffalo is the standout for me here – his Paul is both seductive and smug, reckless and thoughtful, initially perplexed at encountering children he has never known and then bravely, almost desperately, embracing them and the ready-made lives they’ve brought with them.  Oh, and I never thought anyone can raise my temperature (ahem, among other things-!) when they say “swiss chard”!

The Kids Are All Right is, in my view, a must-see for everyone, gay and non-gay alike.  It’s a film that allows for conversation and reflection; unlike F**king Men, for example, it doesn’t reinforce preconceptions or heighten dissimilarities with the “straight world”.  Being gay, ultimately, isn’t about being different; it’s about being the person you’re meant to be.

F**king Men is at Theater 773, formerly the Theater Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave., until August 8.  You can catch The Kids Are All Right at the Landmark Century, 2828 N. Clark St., or other select theaters in the Chicagoland area.  It’s set to open wide in the next few weeks.

Best Supporting Actress

Are we even talking about anyone other than Mo’Nique to win Best Supporting Actress?  No tsunami, no earthquake, no worldwide economic meltdown, no swine flu will get in the way of Ms. Mo’ being awarded a golden statue this Sunday.  When I first saw Precious last Fall, I was gut-punched by her terrifying, unforgettably etched Mary Jones, the mother from Hell who made Joan Crawford look like a Carmelite nun. I wanted to scream: Stop the voting, FedEx her that Oscar already!  It’s a brilliant, unnerving, boundaryless, multi-dimensional performance – one of the best I’ve seen in the past ten years.   Only the two Up In the Air nominees, Vera Farmiga, wonderfully understated as a worldly business traveler, and Anna Kendrick, excellent as a wound-up young consultant with a heart, come close as worthy contenders in this category.   The nominations of last year’s winner Penelope Cruz (dear Pe:  I love you darling, but why did you sound like you were chowing down on some pork chicharones while singing one of my favorite numbers from Nine, the usually very witty, but now unintelligible, “Call from the Vatican”?) and Maggie Gyllenhaal in a pretty reactive performance from Crazy Heart, were as perplexing as a flash-sideways storyline from an episode of Lost.

 Predicted Winner:  Mo’Nique, Precious

Best Supporting Actor

Are we even talking about anyone other than Christoph Waltz to win Best Supporting Actor?  No tsunami, no earthquake….ok, you get the picture. Waltz’s Oscar for a giddy, menacing, inventive, multi-lingual Nazi colonel in Inglourious Basterds would be one of the most richly deserved in a category that often has winners who win because the Academy thinks they’re going to croak soon or because some make-up/consolation prize had to be given.  The only other competition (if you could call it that) is Woody Harrelson’s tour-de-force as a military officer tasked to inform the family of dead soldiers in The Messenger, a funny-sad, heartbreakingly authentic performance.  I wasn’t exactly sure what got nominated in Matt Damon’s unmemorable rugby player in the equally undistinguished Invictus?  His flawless Afrikaans accent?  His obviously well-worked out thighs, which looked so deliriously sexy in those rugby player boy shorts?  His perfect chest wax and classy blonde dye job that looked more expensive than Sandra Bullock’s in The Blind Side?

 Predicted Winner:  Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Actress

What does Meryl Streep, now on her 16^th nomination, the most of any performer in the 82-year history of the Academy Awards, have to do to finally win her third Oscar and second Best Actress trophy?  Perform Lady Macbeth while Nordic skiing?  Film a one-woman version of “War and Peace” while blasting off in a space shuttle?  Replace Tobey Maguire in “Spiderman 4” and do her own stunts?  Although I think Meryl’s Julia Child in Julie and Julia was a little too lightweight given all the other roles that she didn’t win an Oscar for, it was a wondrous, mesmerizing, incredibly detailed performance, very much worthy of a third nod.  I am flabbergasted that many Oscar pundits have been pounding the Sandra Bullock drum since The Blind Side came out late last year.  Really, SaBu as Best Actress?  For a performance that was taken from the Julia Roberts/Erin Brockovich/miniskirt-high-heels-push-up-bra playbook?  For acting that was so calculated you could almost see Bullock count to ten before she raised an eyebrow or flared a nostril?  For a blonde dye job so heinous it made the Real Housewives of Orange County’s bleached big hairs look as natural as morning dew on a leaf?  Although SaBu seems to be well-liked in Hollywood, let’s see if that Razzie nod for Worst Actress for All About Steve doesn’t wreck her chances.  For my money, it’s Gabourey Sidibe, devastating and unforgettable as the abused Precious who actually gave the leading actress performance of the year.

 Predicted Winner:  Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia

 Best Actor

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that Jeff Bridges will get his Lifetime Achievement Award masquerading as an Oscar Best Actor statuette this Sunday.  I love Jeff Bridges (hey, he’s The Dude, for crying out loud!), but his drunken, puking, slurring, gut-exposing, sweaty-armpit, broken down country singer in Crazy Heart is a serviceable performance.  Ok, he was touching in some scenes, he did his own singing, and yes, he bravely agreed to look like he didn’t use conditioner, deodorant, or a nose hair trimmer, but there were three other superlative performances in this category.  I’ve never been a big George Clooney fan, but his melancholy, touchingly resonant Ryan Bingham in Up In the Air was a masterpiece of lived-in acting.  I thought Jeremy Renner’s Sgt. James in The Hurt Locker was layered, intense, emotionally powerful.  I especially loved Colin Firth’s beautifully wrought and delicately nuanced lonely, suicidal, gay professor in A Single Man (that scene at the beginning of the movie when he first heard about his boyfriend’s accidental death was heartbreakingly great).

 Predicted Winner:  Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

 Best Director

I am quietly savoring the fact that one word will describe the Best Director category on March 7, and that is “Historic”.  For the first time in the 82 year history of the Oscars, I’m pretty confident that a female will win Best Director, the last bastion of exclusive white-male privilege (no African-American or Hispanic director has ever won, and only one Asian, Ang Lee, for Brokeback Mountain, has).  I think it’s a significant milestone, definitely, but I think it’s also undeniable that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was the best directed film of the year.  It was gripping, harrowing, heartbreaking, with a great story, fantastic technical work (the editing alone is unbelievably stunning) and exceptional performances; the best film about the incomprehensibility of war that I have seen since Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Yes, Jim Cameron might have broken cinematic ground with all his technical hoo-hah in Avatar but it was, ultimately, a run-of-the- mill film with a barely-there storyline hiding behind all the technological razzle-dazzle.  In my book, a director needs to be able to tell an engaging, articulate narrative, and Cameron failed to do that with his Wii-game disguised as a three hour movie. 

 Predicted Winner:  Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Best Picture

The Academy’s decision to increase the Best Picture nominees from five to ten this year is up there in inanity toxic levels as high as The Bachelor Jake’s decision to propose to Vienna over Tenley.  What did having ten nominees actually accomplish?  Well, it got the kind of movie that NRA members and Christian conservatives love, The Blind Side, a Best Picture nomination.  Sigh…Moving on…I actually think that this is a two-horse race, what many Oscar pundits have dubbed David vs. Goliath, small indie vs. most profitable movie ever made.  The Hurt Locker was the best film of the year for me – it brought to very vivid, uncompromising life a world that I was unfamiliar with and struggling to understand, the psychological, physical, and emotional life of soldiers in Iraq.  It was provocative, intelligent filmmaking that was also viscerally exciting, the trademark of the best cinematic experiences.  I think it’s a deserving Best Picture winner, and I have faith that the majority of Academy voters will think it is….but then there’s, ummm, Avatar. 

If Avatar is the future of film as many critics and fans have said, then I actually would be better off going into a cloistered Tibetan monastery and never seeing a film again in my entire life.  Sure, the technology and visual effects were literally out-of-this world, and Jim Cameron should be commended for his risk-taking and vision.  But technology doesn’t make cinema, it enhances and complements it, and overwhelm it.  Film is, ultimately, about stories, and Avatar told a clichéd, one-dimensional, appealing-to-the-least-common-denominator story (that Na’Vi birthing ritual/forest rave scene, for one, was execrable!).  It’s a movie that refused to allow its audiences to think and process – it’s like watching COPS but with better visual effects.

 Predicted Winner:  The Hurt Locker

 Other Categories

 Adapted Screenplay:  Up In the Air

Original Screenplay:  The Hurt Locker

Cinematography:  The Hurt Locker

Film Editing:  The Hurt Locker

Art Direction:  Avatar

Costume Design:  The Young Victoria

Original Musical Score:  Up

Original Song:  “The Weary Heart” from Crazy Heart

Sound Editing:  The Hurt Locker

Sound Mixing:  Avatar

Visual Effects:  Avatar

Make-Up:  Star Trek

Foreign Language Film:  El Secreto de sus Ojos (Argentina)

Animated Feature:  Up

Documentary Feature:  The Cove

Documentary Short Subject:  The Last Truck:  Closing of a GM Plant

Animated Short Film:  A Matter of Loaf and Death

Live Action Short Film:  Kavi

 Best Picture

(500) Days of Summer

Avatar

The Blind Side

District 9

An Education

The Hangover

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

Precious:  Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

Up In the Air

Next to the existence of John Edwards’ alleged “personal video” with ex-mistress Rielle Hunter, the Academy’s decision to expand the Best Picture nominees from five to ten is probably the wackiest piece of news I’ve heard in the past twelve months.  Where are they going to scrounge ten films to nominate when there were past years that the Academy could barely find even five worthy films to honor?  I’m planning to cleanse my system of anything liquid for the next twelve hours to avoid puking up brown matter in case critically-derided box-office hits such as The Hangover and The Blind Side are called tomorrow (which are very likely).  I’m also hoping though that the welcome result of this crazy, possibly medication-induced decision is that films with passionate followers such as District 9 and (500) Days of Summer, my two “No Guts, No Glory” picks are given the recognition they deserve.

Best Director

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

James Cameron, Avatar

Lee Daniels, Precious

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Jason Reitman, Up In the Air

I think this is a pretty solid line-up (it’s the nominees list of the Directors’ Guild of America Award, which Bigelow won over the weekend), but there is always some out-of-left-field nominee that can crop up in this category.  I am not ready to make a “No Guts, No Glory” prediction since these directors all have been acclaimed and buzzed-about throughout the year for their work and their back stories, but one of them can be supplanted by the great Michael Haneke for The White Ribbon or Neill Blomkamp for the unexpected summer critical and commercial hit District 9.

Best Actor

Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

George Clooney, Up In the Air

Matt Damon, The Informant!

Colin Firth, A Single Man

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Bridges, Clooney, Firth, and Renner have all been nominated by various award-giving bodies.  Matt Damon had two noteworthy performances in 2009.  His South African soccer player in Invictus, all smooth barechest, muscular legs, sexy Afrikaans accent, and blazing blonde hair, has been getting the awards attention in the Supporting Actor category, but the Academy LOVES physical transformations as the primary indicator of an actor’s craft (just ask Charlize Theron, Felicity Huffman, Robert de Niro, etc.) so I think it’s his other performance, as the pudgy, middle-aged, mustachioed, beige slacks-wearing (horrors!) corporate drone in The Informant! that will bring Damon his second acting nomination after his career-making one in Good Will Hunting twelve years ago.  It’s my “No Guts, No Glory” pick for this category.

Best Actress

Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

Helen Mirren, The Last Station

Carey Mulligan, An Education

Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia

I don’t think there will be any surprises in this category, other than if Sandra Bullock (SaBu to us mere mortals), in all her blonde highlights, high-heeled, Texan twang, Julia-Roberts-as-Erin-Brockovich-channeling glory, doesn’t get nominated.  This will only happen if Lady Gaga decides to shoeshop with Susan Boyle…which is, like, highly unlikely.

Best Supporting Actor

Brian Geraghty, The Hurt Locker

Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Anthony Mackie, The Hurt Locker

Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones

Christoph Walz, Inglourious Basterds

I actually think the Supporting races are the more wide-open ones this year and will most likely yield the buzzworthy nominations tomorrow morning.  With its recent Directors Guild and Producers Guild Awards victories and its Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination for Best Ensemble, I think there’s widespread respect for The Hurt Locker.  Jeremy Renner is deservedly getting the awards attention for his incredible lead performance but Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie as the other two members of the bomb unit turn in memorable performances as well, so my “No Guts, No Glory” picks are the two of them securing slots in this highly-competitive category (and if I have to pick only one, I think the vote will go to Mackie who turned in more restrained work).

Best Supporting Actress

Vera Farmiga, Up In the Air

Anna Kendrick, Up In the Air

Diane Krueger, Inglourious Basterds

Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds

Mo’Nique, Precious

I would argue that Inglourious Basterds is more radical filmmaking than Avatar.  It might not have the technological razzle-dazzle of the latter, but it has the screenwriting, directing, and acting chutzpah to invert our traditional conceptions of war genre films.  I think actors, who make up the majority of Academy membership, will want to reward a film that has juicy roles all around.  Christoph Walz is a shoo-in for Supporting Actor, but I think his two female co-stars, the gloriously scene-stealing Diane Krueger and the more heartfelt Melanie Laurent, will also get their names called tomorrow.  They’re my “No Guts, No Glory” picks for this category.

Let’s see how I do tomorrow morning!  (The announcement is usually carried by the networks’ morning shows, CNN, and E! at 7:35 am central time).

 The title refers to the, well, ribbon, that the strict, unforgiving pastor of a remote German village in 1914 forces his children to wear publicly for any perceived infraction against purity and goodness.  Children are not only publicly humiliated in this strongly authoritarian feudal community, they are also physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by the adults – who are also either morally dubious (the village doctor is having an affair with the midwife, the pastor acts morally superior but is willing to lie to protect his family) or socially ineffectual (most of the farmers are grudgingly beholden to the Baron who owns the lands they work in; the schoolteacher is not taken seriously by others probably because of his youth). But there are more violent things happening in the village as well– two children are found badly beaten, one of them to near-blindness, a suspiciously placed wire trips the doctor’s horse and causes the doctor to break his collarbone, a middle-aged female laborer dies after falling through loose floorboards in a barn, which later in the film is mysteriously burned down.  In typical Haneke fashion, he never tells you who the culprits are and why he/she/they did what they did (you’re left to draw your own conclusions, especially after seeing the final scene) but he does tell you, via voiceover remembrances of the now-elderly schoolteacher that the events of this year in this particular German village may clarify what happened in the country years later.

 Many reviews of The White Ribbon, and even Haneke himself in his interview with Le Monde, talk about the film as portraying the roots of Nazism in Germany.  These abused pre- and pubescent children (who would be in their 20s and early 30s twenty years later, in 1934, during the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party), because of their early experience with fear, intolerance, dictatorship, and violence as a way of life, will become more prone to turn into fanatics who will use these same things to embrace and advance a heinous ideology.  Even if they do not participate directly, they will turn into silent conspirators, who will look the other way, as most of the German population did during that period (very powerfully brought home by the scene in which one of the girls insists she dreamt of one of the children’s beatings, proclaiming premonition and denying receiving any foreknowledge of the event, even under threats and loud slaps from the town police).  For the most part I get it – environment drives behavior.  But tantalizingly, I think Haneke also makes a point that people, even children, have an intrinsic meanness and propensity to do wrong in them.  There’s the doctor verbally abusing his mistress, the midwife, for no apparent reason; there are the steward’s sons who nearly drown the Baron’s son because he is able to carve a whistle on his own and they couldn’t.  Malice and brutality is in our blood and our core nature, and that potentially some cultures may tend to surface this core nature more than others (the German national culture in this case), due to it’s social strictures (a feudal landscape, a deep Protestant religiosity, a generation-defining event such as World War I) – an intriguing, cynical inference, and highly polarizing. 

 There are so many other rich threads in Haneke’s screenplay that I can’t even begin to parse.  The midwife who has a mentally challenged son and who is emotionally maltreated by the doctor is seen by the villagers as paying for the “sins” of the generations that went before her (what these sins are, of course, Haneke doesn’t say…hey this isn’t Avatar’s screenplay where everything needs to be slowly…explicitly…pointed…out).  If this is seen as Haneke’s commentary on German cultural guilt and complicity, then he seems to be saying that the German population will never be freed of the remembrances of the Holocaust for years and generations to come, regardless of what they do.

 Christian Berger’s black and white photography is breathtaking (actually Haneke shot in color and used a process to drain the colors away) with many scenes looking like black and white images of Flemish paintings (the workers in the field, shots of the town covered with snow, the burning barn, etc.).  The night scenes have an impressive quality of dreaminess and malevolence, which heightens the more mysterious and more chilling aspects of the narrative.  The period design is flawless, the music evocative, the acting strong.  It’s the children though, all uniformly excellent, looking and acting like they all came from a casting call for a bizarre performance piece combining Children of the Corn with a kids’ version of Dogville mixed up with traces of Bad Seed, who are haunting, captivating, and utterly unforgettable.  Without any artifice or exaggeration, the young cast of The White Ribbon subtly yet firmly bring to life Haneke’s thesis on the capability of people for collective evil.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a career transition counselor, who crisscrosses the country to terminate employees on behalf of their managers.  He’s also a part-time motivational speaker, who speaks to groups of people very similar to those he fires.  There are layers of interesting irony in the writing, which Clooney, with an impressively nuanced performance, brings to clear, emotionally walloping life.  How can a man who has no time for meaningful relationships (except for no-strings-attached dalliances with fellow road warriors such as Alex, played with a surplus of smoldering intelligence and craftiness by the excellent Vera Farmiga) be able to empathize with someone’s anguish on breaking the news about job loss to his or her loved ones?  How can a person who makes a living out of breaking people’s identity and self-esteem, so significantly tied in our day and age to our jobs, help people feel better about themselves and their lives? Clooney is terrific in the role, both sympathetic and confidently unapologetic about his character’s contradictions.  Bingham is also focused on achieving the singular goal of becoming only the 7^th person ever to become an American Airlines’ 10 million mile flyer, a goal that is nearly jeopardized by a young, brash colleague, Natalie, brilliantly, ferociously played by Anna Kendrick, who has convinced the company’s CEO (a hilariously slimy Jason Bateman) to conduct all termination meetings over videoconference instead of in-person, effectively grounding all career transition counselors in the company’s, gulp, Omaha headquarters.  When Bingham protests, the CEO forces him to take Natalie on the road so she can truly understand what it takes to do the job.

There are so many perfectly written scenes throughout the movie as Bingham gradually discovers an ability to build relationships and deal with complicated feelings:  he takes on a coaching, paternalistic attitude towards the eager-to-learn Natalie on the mad ways of business travel; and he starts thinking of Alex as someone more than his girl-in-every-other-port distraction.  Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner’s lines are zippy and sharp as a pointed knife and the scenes themselves are so true to life, BFF Debra and I wondered whether they hired a management consultant to work with them.  (The tips on who to avoid and who to get behind of in an airport security line? Yep, I have those as well.  The ridiculously hilarious IT conference sequence which ends with people running through the lobby in their bare feet?  Yep, reminds me of conference shenanigans from a couple of years ago which ended in a conga line through the lobby of the Miami Intercontinental at 1 am.  The hotel bar flirtation between Clooney and Farmiga that begins with comparing each other’s airline, hotel, and car rental elite statuses and ends in something racier than a Hertz mid-size car?  Uhmm, ahem.)  I love the writing, so polished, so unmelodramatic, so biting but at the same time provocative.  I especially admire Reitman’s and Turner’s ability to vividly and honestly paint lives within the framework of our current economic fears, without either being jaded cynical or bleeding heart sentimental.  Reitman’s use of recently-laid off non-actors to play some of the terminated employees, and having them speak in their voice and words on how they would have reacted to their firing, is powerful and memorable.  It’s a confident and bold directorial choice.

I’m not a big Clooney fan (and I thought his Oscar-winning performance in Syriana was overblown), but I think he gives a strong, fully-inhabited performance in this film. (When he tells Kendrick that he has made a “lifestyle” choice to never settle down and have a family, I feel my throat choking up, because I recognize a part of myself, and of many people I’ve know in 10 years of management consulting, in Clooney’s delivery and expressions).  But he has two co-stars that play at his exceptional, upped game, as well.  I liked Farmiga a lot in The Departed, but she is fantastic here as a woman “married to her career”, ballsy and strong-willed, but also willing to show flashes of vulnerability and regret.  When she tells Kendrick’s Natalie about what kind of guy and life a woman wants to have in her mid thirties, she is superlative.  It is Kendrick, though, who almost walks away with the movie.  I’ve known many colleagues like her Natalie, extremely competitive, almost cutthroat in the eagerness to impress and one-up others in the room, but Kendrick’s achievement is in infusing the character with an additional, complicated mix of self-doubt, masked naïveté, and emotional pull.  She is riveting in her big breakdown scenes (such as when a fired employee tells her that she’ll walk out of the room and throw herself off a bridge; or when her boyfriend breaks up with), but genius when she plays it small (such as how she deals with a middle-aged man’s breakdown over video conference or her subtle reactions when Ryan wouldn’t let her run the meetings).  It’s a first-class performance which is a shoo-in for an Academy Award nomination.

Critics and bloggers alike have criticized the film for its “limited ambitions” or for being “mildly challenging”, as if those are artistic capital crimes.  I admit Up in the Air does not have the emotional heft of Precious or the socio-political relevance of The Hurt Locker.  But it is a film that tells a real, unvarnished story of our times, a story that reflects the alienation and lack of joy that has been created in many of it’s audiences work lives, brought about by the way their jobs have been structured and the companies they work for have been run, and the lifestyle choices they’ve been forced against the wall with.  It isn’t a story about abuse and poverty in the projects or a story about soldiers in Iraq, but it is still a story that needs to be told, and Reitman, Clooney, et al, tell it finely and thoughtfully. It’s an executive platinum of a movie.

Up in the Air is going into wide release in Chicago this weekend.