Hmmm...

What do you think these two talked about?
I choose to think Pe was asking Sigourney for sci-fi heroine tips to use in "Melancholia"...
Sigh.

Quick Oscar Predix.

I wasn't planning to sit and write mine down (not my fave Oscar year...) but my OCD won and here are my short takes on each category.

Best Picture
Will win: "The Hurt Locker"
Personal preference: "The Hurt Locker" (only because "Up" stands no chance in hell)

Best Director
Will win: Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker"
Personal preference: Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker"

Best Actor
Will win: Jeff Bridges for "Crazy Heart"
Personal preference: Jeremy Renner for "The Hurt Locker"

Best Actress
Will win: Sandra Bullock for "The Blind Side"
Personal preference: Carey Mulligan for "An Education"

Hey, I figured if we all predict Sandra, maybe we'll jinx her?
Probably not happening though. Meryl winning would thrill me but it's Ms. Mulligan who should have this in the bag. Best nominated performance.

Best Supporting Actor
Will win: Christoph Waltz for "Inglourious Basterds"
Personal preference: Christoph Waltz for "Inglourious Basterds"

Best Supporting Actress
Will win: Mo'Nique for "Precious"
Personal preference: Penélope Cruz for "Nine"

I'm perhaps the only person out there who isn't head over heels about Mo'Nique's performance, she sure was the best thing in the very flawed pic but something about her performance fails to transcend into the human for me.
She's merely a prop for Lee Daniels' disturbed vision of violence and consequent redemption.

Best Original Screenplay
Will win: Mark Boal for "The Hurt Locker"
Personal preference: Quentin Tarantino for "Inglourious Basterds"

Best Adapted Screenplay
Will win: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for "Up in the Air"
Personal preference: Nick Hornby for "An Education"

Best Cinematography
Will win: "Avatar"
Personal preference. "The White Ribbon"

Best Editing
Will win: "The Hurt Locker"
Personal preference: "The Hurt Locker"

Best Art Direction
Will win: "Avatar"
Personal preference: "Avatar"

Best Costume Design
Will win: "The Young Victoria"
Personal preference: "Bright Star"

(although who can complain with Sandy Powell having another Oscar?)

Best Original Score
Will win: "Up"
Personal preference: "Up"

Best Original Song
Will win: "The Weary Kind" from "Crazy Heart"
Personal preference: "Take It All" from "Nine"

Apparently country=instant Oscar (unless your competition is a hip hop song about pimps) and it's a shame that AMPAS has completely forgotten about the power of showtunes.

Best Sound and Best Sound Editing
Will win: "Avatar"
Personal preference: "The Hurt Locker"

Best Documentary Feature
Will win: "The Cove"
Personal preference: "The Cove"


Best Foreign Language Film
Will win: "The Secret in Their Eyes"
Personal preference: "The White Ribbon"

Ah what a category!
Two new masterpieces of world cinema (including my favorite movie of the year), a superb genre flick, an avant garde take on Latin American history and even the usual "important" entry is better than you'd expect.
If there was any justice (read if this were the 1960s) Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" would have this one in the bag!
It's such a remarkable film that works as political essay, complex sociological study and even whodunit. Of course it's too heavy and intellectual for the way this category has gone in the last decades so expect Juan José Campanella's excellent "The Secret in Their Eyes" to win.
The movie isn't only fun and romantic it also includes mild political subtext that make it seem important without being harrowing. Also Campanella lost in this category and they might wanna make him justice.
I wouldn't be upset about this win, although I'd be ecstatic if "The White Ribbon" took it.

Best Documentary Short
Will win. "China's Unnatural Disaster"
Personal Preference: N/A

Best Animated Feature
Will win and Personal preference: "Up"

Best Animated Short
Will win: Logorama
Personal preference: N/A

Best Live Action Short
Will win: Kavi
Personal preference: N/A

Ajami **1/2

Director: Scandar Copti, Yaron Shani
Cast: Fouad Habash, Youssef Sahwani, Ibrahim Frege
Ranin Karim, Eran Naim, Scandar Copti, Nisrine Rihan, Abu George Shibli

"Ajami" is a well intentioned film that tries to say more than it can grasp. Its fractured storytelling and docudrama qualities try to evoke the way in which gritty subjects have been discussed cinematically for the last decade or so but because of this the film's themes come off as forced and cliché.
The extensive plot of the movie can be divided in four different stories that eventually intersect.
There's Omar (Kabaha) a young Muslim Israeli Arab who becomes the target of Bedouin gangsters who threaten to kill him unless he pays them fifty thousand dollars. Malek (Frege) is a young Palestinian working illegally in an Israeli restaurant to pay for his mother's surgery. Dando (Naim), a Tel Aviv cop trying to find the Arabs who murdered his brother and Binj (Copti) a modern sort of Palestinian who does drugs, techno and Jew girls.
Their lives and many others interconnect in the Ajami neighborhood in Jaffa where life is worth a penny and people hate each other because it's tradition.
Co-directors Copti and Shani, a Jew and a Palestinian themselves, are able to convey this sense of multiculturality that one would find in such a place and there are intimate scenes with Arab and Hebrew dialogues spoken at once that resonate because they seem firsts on film.
However with their tiresome techniques of flashbacks and multiple points of view, the movie makes it obvious that for the directors it was never about empathy but about delivering the same message we've heard a thousand times before.
Not that the message is bad (for who supports the Middle Eastern conflict?) but by now it should be clear that the ways in which it's been tried to be solved have proved completely unsuccessful.
Why for example are the characters at the film's center essentially good but morally inclined to wrong others?
Whatever happened to the notion of the existence of people who are immoral and have no humane reasons to justify their behavior? It's these kinds of people who should be studied in "Ajami".
Copti and Shani even attempt to introduce a Romeo and Juliet like story-complete with severe parents who unwillingly provoke death-that still never help the movie seem more than a modern take on an old story.
To top it all off there's also a sense of confusion that prevails over the film not because the filmmakers planned it this way but because it's their debut film and they still have details to polish. The running time isn't only too long but there are lots of loose ends, sloppy edits and unnecessary twists which make the characters hard to connect to and also fail as detached microcosm studies.
"Ajami" has some stirring moments and others that break your heart but as a whole it's as thematically disconnected and confused as the people it talks about.

(My) Best of 09: Picture.

10. Where the Wild Things Are (read my review)

You can be the biggest cynic on earth and you will still let out a big "aww" the second Karen O's enchanting score appears accompanying the studio logos which Max (Max Records) has scratched and made his own.
When seconds later we meet the hyperactive child we can't help but fall in love with his ambition to make the world his own. As he travels to the island of monsters unaware of the creatures he will meet we're reminded of times in our childhood when nothing made us afraid and life was an adventure waiting to be conquered.
How Spike Jonze made a film that penetrates the armor of childhood while examining the bittersweetness we carry on to adulthood is a wonder upon itself.
An exercise in nostalgia that still manages to refresh our days in unimaginable ways.


9. Police, Adjective (read my review)

Like Steve McQueen's "Hunger", this Romanian film might become known for a bold setpiece that has the camera fixed while three characters talk inside an office.
Police officers Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and Nelu (Ion Stoica) sit in opposing chairs while Captain Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) questions them about the ongoing case they've been working on.
Up to that point in the film Anghelache has only been a ghost who Cristi tries to avoid and when we meet him we understand why.
With a single sentence Anghelache shatters Cristi's idealistic methods and questions Nelu's stoicism, then in the film's most controversial moment dedicates more than ten minutes to a dictionary entry!
But then and there director Corneliu Porumboiu establishes that his film is not the pretentious nod at academia it often seems to be but a dark comedy that mocks the power language has obtained in our societies.
Its examining of the absurd however has utterly terrifying repercussions.


8. Antichrist (read my review)

Despite Lars von Trier's efforts to make "Antichrist" something everybody would squirm, cry and complain about, the film might very well be the most moving and personal work he has done to date.
Those willing to see beyond the mutilation, bloodied genitals, talking foxes, poetic deaths and medieval allegories will find themselves peeking at the psyche of a man who likes to call himself the greatest director in the world but is filled with as many doubts, insecurities and problems as the rest of us.
The obvious facade of "Antichrist" perhaps is saying that he might be all bark and no bite, but take the time to peel its layers and you will see a courageous attempt at dialogue with the divine.


7. Bright Star (read my review)

Watch how Jane Campion turns this...

"I almost wish we were butterflies
and lived but three summer days
three such days with you
I could fill with more delight
than fifty common years
could ever contain"

...into cinema.


6. The Hurt Locker (read my review)

Before it became an awards juggernaut and the center of ridiculous claims, "The Hurt Locker", like some of the best films of 2009, was a small picture that reminded us of the power that lies in genre.
Action flick expert Kathryn Bigelow refreshed our notions of the war action film as something that can be profound without losing its thrills.
In the process proving Michael Bay, Clint Eastwood, chauvinism and war mongers were all wrong.


5. Broken Embraces (read my review)

Who knew Michelangelo Antonioni's infamous tennis ball could take on the shape of Penélope Cruz? Apparently Pedro Almodóvar did and in "Broken Embraces" he uses his muse to break our hearts and open our mind's eyes to the notions of what's real and what's not.
Unlike the cold Antonioni, Pedro proves that intellectual stimulation can also be warm and affective as he frames his theories in a melodramatic plot that recalls "Notorious" and "Voyage to Italy".
The film's title is an homage to neorealism but its structure and reach couldn't be more postmodernist if they tried.


4. Vincere (read my review)

What's the best way to tell a story that deals with rumors about the life of a historical figure? To answer this question Marco Bellocchio looked back at art history and came up with three influential movements that used aesthetics to dig into larger truths.
"Vincere" therefore is a romantic melodrama inspired by silent films, expressionist opera and Eisensten-ian editing.
Bellocchio is able to keep these currents from clashing and succumbing to their own grandiosity, like a masterful conductor using a storm to make music he makes "Vincere" thunderous and big but keeps it from sinking under its own weight.


3. A Prophet (read my review)

Speaking of genre as a way to connect to more profound subjects, Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet" may look like a gritty gangster flick at first glance-and it sure works like one-but the underlying themes of racial empowerment, spiritual search and criminal coming-of-age at its center are worthy of discussing with your shrink your social worker and your priest.
But the movie is never as "Officer Krupke" specific as that description, Audiard makes the story of Malik (Tahar Rahim) mean something different to whoever's watching and while some will be inspired to call it the best thing since "The Godfather" others will be more intrigued with figuring out the theological meaning of the title cards Audiard inserts throughout the film.


2. Up (read my review)

An adventure film in the very essence of the word, Pete Docter's "Up" is another winning entry in the Pixar canon that makes the studio the most consistently brilliant factory in Hollywood or a good luck streak waiting to crash.
The creativity in this film makes it seem more like the former though, especially in the way the screenwriters and director make the oddest elements work like magic.
Beyond its obvious homages to classic cinema, Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones, "Up" owes its most precious moments to the machinations of old studio Hollywood where people seemed to sit around a desk, throw things inside a giant pot and come out with a film that had romance, drama, comedy, adventure and even room for various analytical readings.
"Up" is the rare kind of movie that still happens to have it all.


1. The White Ribbon (read my review)

If "The White Ribbon" is the year's coldest film, it-ironically- might also be the most inviting. Long gone are the days when going to the cinema was an interactive experience in which the filmmakers and the audience made the movie together.
We have grown used to sitting in the dark, munching on our pop corn and leaving all the problem solving and idea digesting to the people up on the screen and behind the camera.
Leave it to Michael Haneke to bring this sort of event back with a film that might seem like an over analytical allegory at first but also happens to be the most delicious mystery of the year.
One which we're invited to participate in because it reaches beyond the film.
The strange crimes occurring in the German village are enough to keep our brain working throughout the movie looking for clues and suspects but Haneke makes sure we also have fun on the way back home from the theater and makes us see that despite our universe being in true color, it might just be an extension of the black and white world we've just left.
The burning of that barn we saw might be that mysterious explosive that just blew an Afghan building halfway across the world and the bullying of a young disabled child might explain why certain kids grow into violent adults that solve everything with violence.
"The White Ribbon" might work as a prequel to every movie Michael Haneke has ever made but it also works as warning to the world we've yet to see.

(My) Best of 09: Actress.

5. Giovanna Mezzogiorno in "Vincere" (read my review)

Love is the devil for Ida Dalser (Mezzogiorno), her devotion to Benito Mussolini is such that she sells her goods to support his newspaper and when he refuses to acknowledge the existence of their son and sends her to a mental institution she assumes he's just testing her love.
Few actresses would convince us this insane looking behavior would be real and Mezzogiorno does so with enough inspiration that we even find her plea romantic sometimes.
Her eventual realization that the man of her life might be the monster the rest of the world thought him to be is heartbreaking as few things you've seen.


4. Charlotte Gainsbourg in "Antichrist" (read my review)

Seeing how she plays an archetype more than an actual character, it's remarkable to see what Charlotte Gainsbourg does in "Antichrist".
As a woman grieving the loss of her young son she embodies some of the most heart wrenching pain put on screen (watching her physical reactions to sadness makes your blood cold and punches your gut).
And when she goes all von Trier on Willem Dafoe's ass-and genitals-in the controversial ginocyde chapter she is so convincing that we can't just judge her for her actions.
Few actors commit themselves so fully to their performances in the way Gainsbourg does in this film. Despite the horrors she subjects herself to her work is a thing of beauty.


3. Penélope Cruz in "Broken Embraces" (read my review)

As the obscure object of desire in Pedro Almodóvar's "Broken Embraces", Penélope Cruz gives the most mature performance of her surprising career.
She plays Lena a secretary/actress/mistress/lover/muse that sets the film's labyrinthine plot in motion. Considering how she represents something different to almost every character in the movie, Cruz's ability to maintain a definite personality for Lena is magical.
Pedro often concentrates on her beauty and her look in the movie has often been compared to Audrey Hepburn. However the essence of her performance here is owed to another classic beauty, the great Ingrid Bergman who the movie refers to more subtly than Hepburn, but in the end becomes the moral, aesthetic and emotional axis for Lena.


2. Tilda Swinton in "Julia" (read my review)

Once every couple of years comes a performance with the kind of raw energy that the movie around them becomes elevated to the point where it makes the film seem much better than it actually is.
In 2009, awards groups decided to acknowledge this element to the more conventional choices and have all shown unanimous marvel for the work of Sandra Bullock and Mo'Nique.
Sadly it's the thunderous work of Tilda Swinton in "Julia" that should have gotten this recognition. Unlike Bullock's one note performance-and probable one time awards opportunity-we already knew Swinton could act, the only surprise here being that she could push herself even further and use genre in her favor.
And unlike Mo'Nique who made a big deal about the ugliness of her character, Swinton's Julia is the kind of monster that's never merely a prop like something out of a Spielberg blockbuster, but an actual human being who happens to lack any morality and sense of decency.
It's a shame her performance went by so unsung but Julia probably wouldn't give a damn about what others thought of her.


1. Abbie Cornish in "Bright Star" (read my review)

If you have never been in love you will want to have the kind Fanny Brawne (Cornish) has in "Bright Star", tragic ending and all.
And if you have been, you'll doubt the nature of your own feeling upon seeing the intensity of the one Ms. Brawne has for John Keats (Ben Whishaw).
She has the kind of movie love that doesn't even require physical intimacy but still convinces us of its overwhelming spirit.
But perhaps more marvelous than her love for Keats, is Fanny's love for herself. Cornish plays her like a free soul ages ahead of her time-the kind which Jane Campion has always specialized at-but the actress makes Fanny appropriate for her time as well.
There is not a single anachronistic detail in her revolutionary methods; her clothes, her designs, the forward way in which she addresses people she dislikes, her equality with John...all are time specific yet timeless.
It helps of course that Cornish has the ability to make harshness seem delicate and part of Fanny's charm is how she sees herself as more mature than she actually is. But Cornish succeeds in all the unexpected moments, she pulls off a butterfly sequence with enough innocence and airiness to make us sigh with her and later in the film she provides a moment of grief with emotional pain that overflows into the physical.
Abbie Cornish gives in to Fanny's romantic whims with such conviction that you never doubt she inspired Keats.

(My) Best of 09: Actor.

5. Filippo Timi in "Vincere" (read my review)

Filippo Timi is so effective as Benito Mussolini, that when the actual historical footage of Il Duce is shown on the movie, you will wonder for a second or two-despite your best knowledge-if this isn't the actor playing him.
Timi may not really look like Mussolini and he plays him during a part of his life from which few records exist but he does so with such an overpowering energy that you don't dare disbelieve his choices. Whether it's Benito's violent love making or his tempestuous mood swifts, Timi owns the man.


4. Ben Whishaw in "Bright Star" (read my review)

As British romantic poet John Keats, Ben Whishaw has the difficult job of transforming an introverted, sickly man into the ultimate sort of romantic hero.
For how can a man write some of the most breathtaking poetry in English literature and not be a dashing lad the kind of which Laurence Olivier would've played?
Whishaw takes the exact opposite road we would've expected and makes Keats almost as subtle as his work. He wraps himself in the excessive romance Keats wrote about and becomes a figure worthy of Thoreau who is at his best surrounded by nature. His face lights up amidst vast flower fields and he becomes one with a tree he climbs.
His scenes with lover Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) contain such delicateness that it's impossible for us not to sigh without falling into the lustful desire we often attribute to muse/artist duos.
Whishaw's sensitive approach makes you believe that Keats was perhaps too beautiful to remain for long in the mortal world.


3. Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker" (read my review)

"The Hurt Locker" is a wonderful thriller that also happens to be an insightful character study and judging from the raw performance of Jeremy Renner we wouldn't have it be otherwise.
His work as Sgt. William James is so powerful that you don't know if to be more scared of the bombs he works with or his very own explosive nature.
As the kind of smartass who lives by his own rules he becomes a charming jerk but it isn't until we see him lost in a supermarket that we finally begin to see him as a human being as lost and scared as anyone else.
How he manages to go through a whole movie rarely showing sensitive emotion to have him all of a sudden pull the rug from under our feet is a remarkable feat.
That he becomes a mystery anew seconds before the film is over is just mindblowing.


2. Joaquin Phoenix in "Two Lovers" (read my review)

The first time we meet Leonard (Phoenix) he jumps into the bay at Brighton Beach to see if he dies. When he doesn't it's curious to detect a sarcastic disappointment in his face, as if he's saying "next time I'll succeed".
He reaches his parents' house where his mom (Isabella Rossellini) looks at him disapprovingly but used to this sort of behavior. Like a ten year old boy Leonard goes straight to his room as if he knew this was the thing to do when he misbehaved.
In a few scenes Joaquin Phoenix gives us the complete history of this man-child who moves through life propelled by inertia until his existence is defined by his love for two women.
Phoenix, who rarely has been so moving, evokes Dean and Brando while coming up with an internal conflict the kind of which most young actors would only dream of.
If his announcement to quit acting after this film is true he delivered the kind of swan song every artist would dream of by teasing us with all the potential he had stored within.


1. Tahar Rahim in "A Prophet" (read my review)

Story goes that director Jacques Audiard met Tahar Rahim almost by accident when they ended up sharing a car on a movie studio. The director saw something so special in the young man that he cast him as the lead of his planned prison saga and in the process a star was born.
Rahim who is as far from being a movie star as Audiard is from being a commercial director, imbues Malik el Djebena with such naturalism that the raw power of his performance truly takes us by surprise.
Even if he's in almost every scene of the film, he tries not to be there, the actor is like a chameleon who we notice only when he wants us to. He gives Malik all these details and nuances that we fall into that awful way of measuring brilliance and ask ourselves how much of him is in the character.

A Prophet ****

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