While Watching the European Film Awards...

For those who think the Golden Globes are awkward, the European Film Awards' ceremony would result in the strangest beast of them all.
I had never seen them until yesterday afternoon and while the European Academy hasn't gained the worldwide recognition the Cannes, Venice and Berlin Film Festivals have, they have been doing some remarkable work for the past two decades.
Their picks in any year make AMPAS look like they're rewarding high school productions, alas still nothing in the world compares to the glitz and glamor of Oscar so let's move on...
These are things that caught my eye about the ceremony:


Danny Boyle, who's still collecting awards for "Slumdog Millionaire" looked so confused the whole evening!
I mean it's understandable when the ceremony has no real official language-there were speeches in at least four different languages, with no subtitles-and Boyle seemed like he didn't even know when they were talking to him.
When "Slumdog" won People's Choice, he was applauding excitedly until someone pointed out to him that he should be onstage accepting the award...

David Kross, who was nominated for Best Actor in "The Reader" embodied that sort of effortless, I-hate-you-for-it sexiness that people in our continent work so hard to achieve.

Kate Winslet won Best Actress for "The Reader" and since she wasn't there, director Stephen Daldry accepted on her behalf.
I hate when nominees don't attend ceremonies. The Actress category featured Winslet, Penélope Cruz and Charlotte Gainsbourg, none of whom attended. Even the host made a joke out of it pointing out how they were such terrific actresses they could even play invisible women.

The weirdest part of the whole thing was how instead of an orchestra they featured a band called Bauhouse who used film clips, music and words to create completely new musical pieces.
The campiest of them all featured Marlene Dietrich, with whom they created a trip-hoppy, oddly sexy piece of post modernist music.
This use of classics: sacrilege or genius?

Isabelle Huppert got a World Cinema Award and upon starting her speech and wondering what language to speak in she declared "cinema is the language of Europe".
She's perfection!

David Kross, and his iPhone, looked so good...

Look at the nominees for Best Director! Michael Haneke won for "The White Ribbon", but just wow!

The Europeans are not afraid to show explicit stuff on TV. They even go for full frontal in the clips featuring the nominees.
Can you imagine that ever happening at Oscar?
The FCC would implode!

Anthony Dod Mantle who won Best Cinematographer for "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Antichrist", wasn't in the ceremony and sent a weird taped speech.
However after the clip ended, they still went ahead and called Danny Boyle to accept the award for him. Danny of course had no idea what was going on...

Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" swept the awards. Gotta love the look on the presenters' faces as they obviously don't understand his speech.

When AMPAS fears anything Sean Penn has to say (tape delay was invented just for him) the EFA's went ahead and featured a commercial starring him!
It didn't happen during a break, they actually announced they would air a commercial in the middle of the ceremony and gave path to Penn's World Food Program ad which criticizes the bail outs and the Iraq invasion openly.
Then they proceeded to cheer it.

Why aren't all screenwriters as handsome as this one?

See what I mean about Kross?

Michael Haneke accepting the award for Best Film.
I really can't wait to see "The White Ribbon".

How to Win a Best Actress Oscar:

Featuring Jane Wyman in "Johnny Belinda".


Play a character who has a disability.
Or better yet two.
Be kind to everyone and smile like a saint.

Have a baby out of wedlock.
Better yet if the baby was conceived from a violent, but secret rape from the town villain.

Go to trial for killing a man.
Even better if your disability makes it impossible for you to defend yourself and your life hangs by a thread throughout the film's last ten minutes.

It also helps if the actress has just undergone a personal tragedy of her own and needs to feel embraced by her peers (see Ronald Reagan divorce and death of infant daughter).

(Gotta love how Lars von Trier plays with this cliché concept in "Dancer in the Dark", the man's a genius...)

Where Is Her Oscar?

The Blind Side *1/2

Director: John Lee Hancock
Cast: Sandra Bullock
Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Lily Collins, Jae Head
Ray McKinnon, Kathy Bates

The phrase "based on a true story" becomes a warning in this movie.
A warning that the events we are about to see are pimped versions of a person's life, tampered with so that Hollywood will continue its crusade for establishing middlebrow conservative values as the status quo.
It grabs the story of NFL player Michael Oher (Aaron) and deforms it to turn it into an "old fashioned" account of how good sportsmanship, strong family ties and money can help overcome any adversity.
Born and raised in the projects of his hometown in Tennesse, Oher is a big, silent teenager who is accepted in a Christian school (after the coach, played by McKinnon, sees his potential and manipulates the board by suggesting taking him in is the Christian thing to do).
But Michael feels out of place in a school where he's the only poor, black, taller than the average student, he even writes an essay about it, proving to his teachers that he can write and read.
Things change for him when he's taken in by the Tuohys a good, wealthy family who feeds him, clothes him and teaches him about football.
Mom Leigh Anne (Bullock) is the family, and the film's, center, her husband Sean (a charming McGraw) is there for moral support and their kids Collins and S.J. (Collins and Head) serve for comic relief mostly.
The thing with "The Blind Side" is that as it indulges in its own sense of morality and joy, it works like a 1940s movie minus the age factor.
This is no longer the day and age where Bing Crosby could get away with singing a song and fixing divorces, alcoholics and evil landlords. Try as it may, the movie's "all American goodness" is in fact racism hidden under Bullock's perkiness.
It has to be said that her performance is a surprise because the actress has rarely shown this maternal, Earthy side.
But her charm and star power aren't enough to justify the fact that this woman had the nerve to star in a movie that has the guts to say that even an eight year old kid can do better reasoning than an eighteen year old black man. Of course they use it as comic relief and Head is a charmer, in the right doses.
But as the white characters fend accusations of "white guilt", this is in fact precisely where the movie falls.
Oher is compared to "King Kong" and the screenplay tries to fix this by making reference to the Jessica Lange version, to prove that these people are too ignorant for the original.
And even when sassy tutor Ms. Sue (Bates) compares Oher to a Charles Dickens character, the intended uplifting plays out like disdainful condescension.
Oher is reduced to the role of the "magical negro" and the worst part is that the movie is so blind that it thinks it's actually doing good to him.

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

4. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

A few years ago in film school I was asked to do a paper on one movie and dissect its influences. I approached the professor and told him I was doing "Far From Heaven".
When he told me to pick another subject and stay away from fluff like this, I knew I'd taken the correct decision.
Todd Haynes misunderstood masterpiece is the kind of movie that was dismissed by the masses when it was released, in the same way the movies it pays tribute to were seen as just "women's pictures" during their era.
A clever study of how little things have changed since the days when Douglas Sirk directed Jane Wyman in glossy, gorgeous pictures, "Far From Heaven" was never about the past or just a "remake" of sorts, it was a full out critique to a system that in the United States particularly, was becoming more and more conservative.
The Army's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy was cleverly shown in how Frank Whitaker (Dennis Whitaker) has to hide his homosexuality from his town and reminds me of another wonderful movie that dealt with the same period.
In "The Hours" Julianne Moore played a quiet housewife who's become an ornament in her home, when one day she asks a neighbor (played wonderfully by Toni Collette) about heir own fears, she just replies that all she knows is that their husbands deserve them, they went to the war and everything after all...
In Haynes' delicate work of art Moore again plays the 50's housewife coming to terms with her own inner demons (she played the "same" character in the exterior in both movies, but couldn't have made each of them more intimate and distinct if she'd had facial reconstruction).
"Far From Heaven" dealt with the Bush administration in a way few movies dared to, it questioned values that Americans had been carrying for generations and simply had chosen to name "tradition".
It helps that the movie is a wonder to behold (and to listen-it features the great Elmer Bernstein's last film work) with Haynes and crew recreating every single aspect of a production circa 1950's-and on a indie budget!
When the time came for me to get working on my paper I didn't just choose Sirk as a source of inspiration, I concentrated more on the works of Norman Rockwell, who also suffered from an utter underestimation of his work based on its looks.
A few months ago I read a wonderful profile on Rockwell and history is beginning to appreciate him for the brilliant artist he was.
He got away with paintings that contain layers and layers of disturbing symbolism and hid them under lovely family scenes.
I'd like to think that we live in an era where artists no longer have to codify what they're trying to say in order to avoid repression.
That's not always true and "Far From Heaven" will forever be a proof of how ideas wrapped in the prettiest packages might just be the most subversive.

Vincere ****

Director: Marco Bellocchio
Cast: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi
Corrado Invernizzi, Michela Cescon, Fausto Russo Alesi

History has a way of forgetting people and events that don't fit into their books. One of these people was Ida Dalser (Mezzogiorno) the woman who married and gave birth to Benito Mussolini's (Timi) first son.
She's the subject of Marco Bellocchio's "Vincere", a rousing operatic masterpiece which narrates the story of a country through a single character.
When the film begins Dalser is the wide eyed ingenue who falls in love with Mussolini's enormous presence. She stares at him full of pride as he defies God in front of a Socialist party assembly and then submits to his powerful sexuality which overcomes her body but remains distant from her heart.
He thrusts into her, perhaps thinking of his Napoleonic dreams, while she moans and softly whispers "I love you".
When Dalser sells all her belongings to get him the money to start a newspaper, she clarifies "it's not a sacrifice, it's a joy...I love you".
He takes the money and declares he will pay back, never returning the affection. It's not a surprise then when he marries Rachele Guidi (Cescon) and disowns both Ida and her child who she named after his father.
The surprise, to Ida at least, might be that he also disowns his leftist past and his marriage and new family are his way to try and please the Catholic church which he once repudiated.
She moves to her hometown where she's kept in practical imprisonment by the Fascists who send her to a mental asylum and take her son away from her.
The movie then turns into this woman's quest to regain her child and the sanity she never lost to begin with, but "the Church is the only mother fascism stills fear" she learns as the years go by and her claims are drowned between wars and political upheaval.
Carlo Crivelli's overpowering score serves to give the film a disquieting, haunting mood. Sometimes you're almost expecting Mezzogiorno to burst into a heartbreaking aria as the emotions accumulate.
Her performance of heartbreak and pride are the film's anchor, watching the way she modulates her emotions feels like a privilege.
History made an effort of erasing most proof of Ida's story, but the actress brings her to urgent life; her passion is evident in erotic scenes and in more quiet moments when she sees her whole world crumble within her.
But Mezzogiorno does more than that; she fully embodies both the woman and the symbol as the film offers various readings.
There's the biopic of impotence and sorrow, but there's also the other one in which the actress embodies Italy throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
With a stunning mastery of his craft, Bellochio-who also wrote the screenplay-makes sure that whichever way we watch the movie we will be witnesses of the specific and the general.
During the first hour or so he let's us see why Ida fell in love with Mussolini (Timi's work is majestic) as he presents himself with the charm and tenacity of a hero.
When he speaks of Napoleon we do not see the eventual insanity of the Emperor, but the nationalist idealism which got him started.
Ida, like the rest of the country, falls for Il Duce (although she later reminds us she came first) only to have him become a monster.
Bellochio cleverly makes Timi disappear from the film's latter half, as Mussolini became a figure of power.
When first we saw him in meetings, street protests and intimate encounters, he's later represented as an icon of epic proportions.
"I saw Mussolini today" says Ida to a surprised listener, but she clarifies "on the movie screen, he looks different, like a giant".
How did the man she loved become like a deity is something she asks herself, but also Bellochio's reminder to us that every political current came from a single tiny point.
During the rest of the movie we only see Il Duce through stock footage (although it's a compliment to Timi's splendid work that we might wonder if it's not him under disguise at times) as he addresses Italians and later Nazis.
Bellochio also provides us with a more benevolent look at the Italy that took in the dictator; he asks us if like Ida, in a latter scene, the country wasn't just lying and going with the current to protect itself from Fascism's tortures and horrors?
This also offers an option for what results one of the film's most profound examinations, which is the role of the media in creating history.
This isn't only obvious from the historical footage the director uses, instead it's what we don't see what lingers the most.
Would Italy have welcomed a man who sent his wife to a mental institution, would Mussolini's pact with the Vatican even have happened if this had become a known fact?
Because Mussolini is on film and Ida never was, Il Duce could make up his own public profile as he wished and we are left only with what Bellocchio offers.
No disservice to the director, because his film provokes the audience to look beyond propaganda. It's certainly ironic, or maybe not so much once you think about it, how the filmmaker recurs to violent, clashing images to edit his work.
"Vincere" is comprised of cuts that recall Eisenstein's most powerful work and can also be used as a compendium of how cinema evolved in its earlier ages (from Monumentalism to Chaplin, Bellocchio shapes his film after known works of the era).
Some of the first scenes occur inside theaters where a single piano accompanies the action on the screen. In one of the most striking scenes, the audience begins to react to what's going on in the movie and the room becomes divided into the two predominant political thoughts.
As they go beyond booing and actually begin to fight, cinematographer Daniele Ciprì shoots them against the light and they too become shadows projected in the movie screen.
Notice how the accompanist never stops playing the piano-establishing there might no difference between the reality on the screen and the reality in the movie we're watching- stating that we can never know for sure what will eventually be deemed important enough to become immortal in the medium.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans ***

Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes
Val Kilmer, Jennifer Coolidge, Fairuza Balk, Brad Dourif
Michael Shannon, Shawn Hatosy, Denzel Whitaker, Xzibit
Shea Wigham, Irma P. Hall, Tom Bower

Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Cage) is the kind of man that would drive a car from New Orleans to Biloxi, to deliver his father's (Bower) dog to his prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Mendes) while taking care of a young crime witness (Whitaker) and snorting cocaine.
He is also the kind of man who gives Nicolas Cage the opportunity to ensue in the kind of deranged brilliance few actors can achieve like he does, when he's given the chance.
His performance is an exercise in excess and contradiction: while investigating a massacre Terence seems more frightened of a couple of iguanas than drug dealing thugs armed to their teeth.
He roams the Big Easy with a hunch (due to a spinal condition that keeps him in constant pain) and tells everyone to fuck themselves if they come in between him and his plans, which usually involve getting drugs or money to pay his bookies.
At one point his superior reminds him "you can not get away with that cowboy shit anymore", emphasis on the anymore as Herzog contemplates how the always decadent, but once glorious city fell under the wrath of Katrina and became a boiling pot for crime and corruption.
He's not talking about New Orleans exclusively but about a whole world that is becoming known for the evils that lurk in unexpected places always pushing the boundaries.
A world that's saying to us "think I can't get away with this?".
It's because of this world that an authority figure like Terence can get away with raping a girl while threatening her boyfriend with a gun and a drug lord (Xzibit) is suspected of trafficking but not murder.
Herzog fills his movie with red herrings that hook us as we become fascinated by Terence's behavior.
With Cage, the German iconoclast creates one of the funniest characters to come out in the past decade, all while paying tribute to a genre that's dying precisely because we know now that the good guys and heroes rarely come in uniforms.
Their vision of the world might not be optimistic, but sometimes we just have to take them in whatever shape they come in.