For Your Consideration: Interstellar

It may seem like a bit of stretch that, even before Interstellar, Christopher Nolan has six directing credits in IMDB’s top 110 (The Prestige, you’ll be amused to discover, is apparently the 51st best film ever made). Even though half of those were chalked up by a single bat, a new Nolan simply can’t be ignored – neither by IMDB fanboys or the Academy.

Interstellar (2014)

To hear that Interstellar is an epic-lengthed philosophical, inter-deminesional science-fiction flick set, for the most part, in space, is to know that it is an obvious fit into the genre that Nolan seems to have single-handedly invented – the arthouse blockbuster.

In this one – surprisingly only his ninth film – he imagines a not-too-distant-future earth on its last legs. Wheat and other crops are a thing of the past, having been smote by the same dustbowls that also ravage young lungs. A concern on two fronts for Coop (Hollywood’s man of the moment, Matty Mac), a farmer and single father to two teenagers.

He also used to be a hotshot military pilot and so the obvious choice to man a spaceship (I said obvious, alright) as part of a NASA expedition to find a new habitat for mankind. If GCSE astronomy taught us anything, it’s that there are no such planets anywhere near our patch of the galaxy. But luckily, as you’ll recall from GCSE quantum physics, we can always find the nearest wormhole and dive through that to hopefully find a conveniently located human-friendly planet in the neighbouring dimension.

For Your Consideration: Ida

A decade and a half after making his debut feature, a fifteenth of a century that included the superb My Summer of Love, Pawel Pawlikowski has made his first movie in Polish, the visually stunning Ida – and it’s his home country’s submission for next year’s Best Foreign Language film Oscar.

Ida (2013)

Like Elton John and Snickers bars, the eponymous Ida in Pawel Pawlikowski’s late 50s/early 60s small town Poland, spent her formative years under anther moniker. We greet her as Anna, a devout catholic dwelling under the stern silence of her convent mothers superior.

With her vows imminent, Anna’s simple god-fearing existence is rocked by a letter from her Aunt Wanda – a respected old Commy prosecutor who sent dozens of fascists to the gallows in a post-second work war frenzy of retribution. With forthright matter-of-factness, Wanda explains that catholic Anna is actually Jewish Ida, and the rest of their family were the victims of anti-Semitic murder during the war. The two endeavour to find out who killed their relatives and what became of their bodies.

For Your Consideration: Gone Girl

With the hype glug turned up to overdrive and a myriad of posters wallpapering the country’s public transport, you’d be forgiven for concluding that Gone Girl (the movie) is this year’s Gone Girl (the novel).

Gone Girl (2014)

I sometimes think that Ben Affleck actually likes being the centre of attention. Like the proverbial moth to the hackneyed flame, he goes from insanely high profile insane marriage to the nut from the Bronx, to directing some actually decent cinema, before signing up to play the world’s favourite bat (Batfink fans, you’re in the minority – deal with it).

I suppose choosing a vocation in acting is a bit of a giveaway too. And now it’s spreading to the characters he plays. Nick Dunne is castigated on every cable TV station in America when his ostensibly perfect wife goes missing from their Missourian home on their fifth wedding anniversary. As we see Dunne being dragged through the mire, flashbacks paint the picture of a marriage with the same trajectory as Mickey Rourke’s career; cool and sexy turning ugly and violent. But is he really any more guilty of uxoricide than I am of using online dictionaries?

Gone Girl is the celluloid equivalent of a literary page turner. Even despite its close-to-epic running time, it’s never anything other than compelling. Gillian Flynn has crafted a screenplay from her own novel that moves at pace without damaging the vital levels of suspense. And having David Fincher at the helm – a man who could direct as high quality thriller as this in his sleep – prevents any sense of a complacency that would condemn the project to the mediocrity that so often mars adaptations of crazy selling books. Fincher has been vocal in expressing his determination not to simply appeal to the prefabricated mass audience, and it shows in the quality of this polished, tense product.

For Your Consideration: Two Days, One Night

Next to René Magritte’s bizarre surrealism and Marouane Fellaini’s even more bizarre bounce, the Dardenne brothers are undeniably Belgium’s most important cultural export. Will Two Days, One Night finally allow them to add an Oscar to their two Palme D’Ors and make Mrs Dardenne the proudest mumsy in all of Liège…?

Two Days, One Night (2014)

The Dardennes have been so indefatigable in their pursuit of realism during the course of their 30-odd year career that the very mention of science fiction must bring them out in a sweat as cold as a seriously refrigerated bottle of Hoegarrden. Those familiar with their oeuvre will be immediately accustomed with the style (single handheld camera) and tone (relatively bleak everyday Belgian working class life) of Two Days, One Night.

What may confound complacent viewers however, is the appearance of a bona fide star harnessed into the lead role. Marion Cotillard is the emotionally and financially fragile  Sandra who, after a long stress related lay off from her employ at the local solar panel factory, is given her marching orders. But she has a longshot of a lifeline – if she can convince more than half of her 16 colleagues to agree to forgo their €1,000 bonus, she can keep her job.

For Your Consideration: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Nope…unfortunately not a documentary feature about Jennifer Saunders’s comedy partner’s job in a new and rather emphatically named monkey zoo, but a sequel to 2011’s surprisingly critic and consumer pleasing franchise reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

I think we can all agree on one thing…Rise of the Planet of the Apes was far better than any of us expected. Right? Happy? Good. No need for any discord here. It’s a friendly, happy blog where we all concur that our fears of another off-target reboot (ala Tim Burton’s) were compounded by a plot that provoked thoughts almost as effectively as the 1968 original, alongside some smart visual effects and Andy Serkis’s patented man being an animal/fictional werido from Middle Earth shtick/brilliance.

And yet, when creative differences goaded ROTPOTA’s director Rupert Wyatt away from the sequel, the angst returned. Luckily, Cloverfield’s Matt Reeves stepped up to the big budget plate and refused to drop the mixed metaphored ball.

Review: Key Largo

In 1948, John Huston made not one, but two celluloid classics starring Humphrey Bogart. One had a title that was far too long to fit into this introduction and did much more handsomely at the Academy Awards, and the other was Key Largo.

Key Largo (1948) (1 win, 1 nom)

You know that feeling when you’ve got two beautiful daughters…beautiful on the inside that is, naturally – I care not a jot for physical appearances. Anyway, these two hot daughters are both looking for a man. And then the slightly better daughter (there’s always one) meets a guy called Oscar and they get married in Los Angeles in front of millions of people. And you feel bad for the other daughter because she’s still pretty ace and hot but hasn’t found a husband.

Well that’s kind of definitely exactly how John Huston presumably felt when the nominations for the 21st Academy Awards revealed that his true masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre scored a deserved four nods including Best Picture, while yet another classic in his canon Key Largo managed only a measly, solitary nomination.

For Your Consideration: Her

Her (2013)

“It’s marmite.” God, there’s a phrase that’s become nauseatingly ubiquitous. That thing that some people like and some people don’t like; well, that’s marmite that is. Yea, that thing that definitely isn’t a disgusting yeast-extracted savoury spread, that thing that most certainly isn’t Marmite, well that, that’s marmite that is. That’s marmite. It’s marmite. Marmite. Do you see?

And I’d wager the measly value of all that I own (which, by the way, doesn’t include any jars of that blacker-than-black work of the devil) that somebody somewhere has described the very notion of a Spike Jonze movie set in the not-too-distant future about a recently divorced man falling in love with a computer operating system, as ‘marmite’.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoneix) is down. But, unlike me, it isn’t because everybody keeps using an annoying pseudo-synonym for the word ‘divisive’, rather its because his divorce has left him without a companion and without purpose. He downloads an operating system, Samantha, to help organise his life, which he luckily gets on with like a homepage on fire. Luckier still, it comes complete with the foxy vocals of Scarlett Johansson. Now that’s lucky.

This is high-concept sci-fi-lite stuff, but unlike something in the same bracket such as The Truman Show, it delivers fully on its promise.

For Your Consideration: Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Finally, the Hollywood plot that the world’s been waiting for. You know, the one about the Aids-riddled homophobic bucking bronco rider. Starring Matthew McConaughey. And Jared Leto. In a dress. Finally.

And yet Jean-Marc Vallée’s biographical-ish account of Texan Ron Woodroof’s affliction avoids most of the traps that you might imagine it leaping straight in to. It lacks the mawkishness, insensitivty and ‘freak’ voyerism that I, for one, had expected to be showered with.

In fact, any preconceptions about this being a weekday afternoon human interest story about a terminally ill man hitting back at the medical industry that’s failing him, are thwarted within the first ten minutes. Woodroof’s seedy world is a suffocatingly nauseating place to be thrust into; unctuously sweating over with unprotected sex, casual drug taking and the odd smatter of fisty cuffs.

The Last Week Ends: Backing Singers and Old Sports

Huzzah! A whole week in this year’s Oscar run-up without a single Oscar themed death. Well done Hollywood and beyond…you’re true blue lust-for-living troopers.

Unless, conversely, you’re one of those mean-spirited old miseries who insist that Stephen Fry died on stage at the Royal Opera House last Sunday evening. Personally, I thought his Bafta presenterage lived up to the heights of his usual effortless brilliance in the job. And anybody who believed his hostmanship to be found wanting, I suggest they compare it directly with that oaf Corden’s massacring of the Brits.

Steve McQueen picking up the Best Film Bafta for ’12 Years a Slave’

At this stage, it’s looking like the results in most of the big categories will be more than likely carbon copied this time next week. 12 Years a Slave must be hot favourite with Cuaron picking up the consolation prize for directing. Blanchett and Lawrence are looking good for the lady trinkets and warp in those two Bafta-unnominated gentlemen from Dallas Buyers Club and that will probably be the set. David O. Russell should pick up his first Oscar by replicating his win for Best Original Screenplay and I’ve been pulling all along for Adapted winners Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope for Philomena, although it seems doubtful that the Academy will look any further than John Ridley for 12YaS.

But for all the excitement of the Baftas now being the last service station on the way to destination Oscar, I find it a dreadful shame that it’s no longer an utterly bias Anglophile love-in. The one-sided British bonanza that allowed Four Weddings and a Funeral to win Best Film and Director, and gave leading actor nods to Robert Carlyle for The Full Monty and Pauline Collins for Shirley Valentine. Under the old less showy regime, Dench, Fassbender, Hawkins and McQueen would all be walking away with those ghastly statuettes.

For Your Consideration: Nebraska

Nebraska (2013)

Perennial Oscar favourite Alexander Payne’s black-and-white tale of an alcohol riddled geriatric returning to his childhood town en route to collecting a fortune that doesn’t exist, bagged Bruce Dern the Best Actor award at Cannes and has been a big hit with the Academy, garnering six nominations.

Some things just sound better on paper. Like Lampard and Gerrard playing in the same England midfield, ham and pineapple on a pizza, and France. Actually, that’s not fair…I love Hawaiian pizza.

So the notion of Alexander Payne making a humour tinged piece on an elderly Bruce Dern in the first throws of Alzheimers making a thousand mile voyage with his son to collect a phoney million-pound jackpot, has all the signs of a good thing. With the promise of self-reflection, contemplation and brutal home truths to be discovered along the way, there are all the makings of an Oscar favourite.

But alas, Nebraska falls a country mile short on almost every level. The director has delivered a painfully broad cartoon of a movie, jam-packed with laughable caricatures and a script that should never have seen the light of day.