Oscar Thoughts
I explained my overall beef with the Oscars last year.
This year, I'm simply baffled how America Gangster didn't get nominated for best Cinematography. The lighting in that movie stands out. Very odd.
As for the Best Picture...I can't make predictions because I'm always wrong. I can talk about how I would vote, however...
Easily, the movie I've talked about most with a pretty impressive variety of different people is No Country For Old Men. A month ago, this would have been my easy choice for best picture. There Will Be Blood has a similar appeal to many filmgoers, but the moral/ethical questions raised by No Country, to me, far surpass the those in TWBB. The filmmaking, in both movies, is heavy-duty work by some of the finest filmmakers of our generation.
That being said, the film I've THOUGHT most about is Michael Clayton. I don't talk about it a lot. In fact, I wasn't entirely excited about seeing the movie. It seemed a rehash of themes Soderbergh explored years ago. Yet, I heard it was good, and overheard a cocktail party discussion where some women were complaining about how the Tilda Swinton character behaved. The movie sticks with me and I saw it again last night.
There are all sorts of things I love about Michael Clayton. I'm going to list them because I don't know if I can compose a narrative.
-The character, Michael Clayton - a fixer, bagman, a man in between. Great.
-Simple camera work
-Sydney Pollack's performance
-The time when scenes take place. I realized this only on my second viewing, scenes tend to take place "in between." We start late night at the law firm when everyone ought to be asleep. The big explosion takes place in early morning - at dawn. When auctioning his restaurant off, it takes place around 11am when no one is at a restaurant.
-The final shot, the opening sequence
-use of out of focus
-the color palette...desaturated and blue
-the narrative pacing. Not too fast and not too slow. Good for a thriller.
I just like the movie and am favoring it now because I'm surprised by how much I think about it.
1 comment:
I've been thinking about this movie most of the day. The cinematography is really good, really narrative. There are a couple of shots that are pretty simple, yes, but so elegant and useful in terms of story. The steadicam shot when they kill the Tom Wilkinson character was so great: surprise, procedure, hustle, (little moment of shock),more procedure and only once it's done and he's dead do we get to register what just happened. All one shot. There's a lot of really great economy in the movie that is the mark of good storytelling. I also liked the scene in the jail between Tom W. and George where he flips to a shot across the line. Such a simple little trick and works so well. And the time of day is a really good one. It's like he took his outline and when he was ready to write, sat down and said, how can I pick a time of day for certain key scenes to give them that extra atmosphere? Another good trick. It's a movie that very definitely could have felt too much like a play at many many points, but managed to escape that for the most part.
No Country has that same really impressive economy, especially considering that the same people who wrote it and shot it cut it. For me, though, No Country has thematic and moral resonance that nothing else this year comes close to. It's talking about stuff that we just don't see movies made about. Michael Clayton is a pretty great movie, and it has some story elements that are intriguing, but ultimately we've seen this kind of thing before.
What were people saying about hating the way the Tilda Swinton character behaves?
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