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Albert Nobbs

We are all disguised as ourselves

Directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of Colombian Magic Realist author Gabriel Garcia Marquez) the extraordinary film Albert Nobbs see Glenn Close play the title role along with an equally impressive performance by Janet McTeer as the mysterious painter Hubert Page. Both Glenn Close and Janet McTeer give startlingly brilliant performances as Nobbs and Page respectively and deservedly garnered a 2012 Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Close and Supporting Actress for McTeer.

The central tenet of Albert Nobbs is that of woman being disguised as men so that they can survive economically in 19^th century Ireland and is set in the plush Dublin hotel Morrison’s with Mrs Baker being the hotel owner, played with a dramatic panache by Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine). Nobbs as a waiter has aspirations of owning his own tobacconist shop and when he meets the brash painter Mr Page who show him that despite their disguise, they can achieve their dreams. Mr Page even shares a home with his ‘wife’ Kathleen and shows Nobbs that the possibilities are endlessly disguised.

At a time when homosexuality was reviled and Oscar Wilde would soon be sentenced to two years hard labour in 1895 for sodomy after the public exposure of his affair with Lord Alfred `Bosie’ Douglas by Bosie’s father the vile Marques of Queensberry as elegantly told in the 1997 film Wilde, Albert Nobbs shows a different side of homosexuality, lesbian women who cannot be themselves financially, sexually and socially especially in 19^th century Europe and have to disguise themselves as men in order to survive.

All the extraordinary complex relationships which the Morrison’s Hotel have are gradually revealed as the film progresses and even the one so called traditional relationship between Helen, the Hotel maid played by Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids are Alright, Jane Eyre) who falls for the charms of the rough boiler maker Joe played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson(Anna Karenina, Savages) is steeped in deceit and disloyalty. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers makes a brief appearance as Viscount Yarrell whose preferences when staying at Morrison’s is for inter leading doors to his male lover in the adjoining suite.

At the centre of Albert Nobbs, director Garcia really emphasizes the plight of women, whether they are abandoned by an ambitious lover after becoming pregnant or having to disguise themselves as men to survive financially in a patriarchal society which stifled any form of female freedom, not to mention lesbian women who have to hide their homosexuality behind a mask of conformity even if that means dressing as a man.

Albert Nobbs is a brilliantly told film featuring a superb performance by the ever versatile Glenn Close (Dangerous Liaisons) as a gaunt and cautious waiter saving up his pennies to one day fulfil his dreams, and how those dreams through a series of events are tragically thwarted leaving a rather unusual scenario by the films close. This is an exceptional and thought-provoking period film, commenting not just on the period of the late 19^th century but on the costumes which define the characters and the disguises people hide behind in order to survive and how those disguises define who they are.

76th Academy Awards

29th February 2004

Oscar Winners at the 76th Academy Awards

Best Picture: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Best Director: Peter Jackson – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Best Actor: Sean Penn – Mystic River

Best Actress: Charlize Theron – Monster

Best Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins – Mystic River

Best Supporting Actress: Renee Zellweger – Cold Mountain

Best Original Screenplay: Sofia Coppola – Lost in Translation

Best Adapted Screenplay: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh & Philippa Boynes – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Best Foreign Language Film: The Barbarian Invasions directed by Denys Arcand– (Canada)

Best Documentary Feature: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Errol Williams and Michael Williams

Best Original Score:  Howard Shore – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Best Cinematography: Russel Boyd – Master and Commander: The Far Side of The World

Best Costume Design: Ngila Dickson and Richard Taylor – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Best Film Editing: Jamie Selkirk – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Best Visual Effects – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/76th_Academy_Awards

75th Academy Awards

23rd March 2003

Oscar Winners at the 75th Academy Awards

Best Picture: Chicago

Best Director: Roman Polanski – The Pianist

Best Actor: Adrien Brody – The Pianist

Best Actress: Nicole Kidman – The Hours

Best Supporting Actor: Chris Cooper – Adaptation

Best Supporting Actress: Catherine Zeta-Jones – Chicago

Best Original Screenplay: Pedro Almodovar – Talk to Her

Best Adapted Screenplay: Ronald Harwood – The Pianist

Best Foreign Language Film: Nowhere in Africa directed by Caroline Link (Germany)

Best Documentary Feature: Bowling for Columbine directed by Michael Moore

Best Original Score: Elliot Goldenthal – Frida

Best Cinematography: Conrad L. Hall – Road to Perdition

Best Costume Design: Colleen Atwood – Chicago

Best Film Editing: Martin Walsh – Chicago

Best Visual Effects: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Source: – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/75th_Academy_Awards

74th Academy Awards

24th March 2002

Oscar Winners at the 74th Academy Awards

Best Picture: A Beautiful Mind

Best Director: Ron Howard – A Beautiful Mind

Best Actor: Denzel Washington – Training Day

Best Actress: Halle Berry – Monster’s Ball

Best Supporting Actor: Jim Broadbent – Iris

Best Support Actress: Jennifer Connelly – A Beautiful Mind

Best Original Screenplay – Julian Fellowes – Gosford Park

Best Adapted Screenplay – Akiva Goldsman – A Beautiful Mind

Best Foreign Language Film – No Man’s Land directed by Danis Tanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Best Documentary Feature: Murder on a Sunday Morning directed by Jean Xavier Lastrade and Denis Poncet

Best Original Score – Howard Shore – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring

Best Cinematography – Andrew Lesnie – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring

Best Costume Design – Catherine Martin and Angus Strathie – Moulin Rouge

Best Film Editing – Pietro Scalia – Black Hawn Down

Best Visual Effects – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring

Source – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/74th_Academy_Awards

73rd Academy Awards

25th March 2001

Oscar Winners at the 73rd Academy Awards

Best Film: Gladiator

Best Director: Steven Soderbergh – Traffic

Best Actor: Russell Crowe – Gladiator

Best Actress: Julia Roberts – Erin Brockovich

Best Supporting Actor: Benicio del Toro – Traffic

Best Supporting Actress: Marcia Gay Harden – Pollock

Best Original Screenplay: Cameron Crowe – Almost Famous

Best Adapted Screenplay: Stephen Gaghan – Traffic

Best Foreign Language Film: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon directed by Ang Lee (Taiwan)

Best Documentary Feature: Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport  directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer

Best Original Score: Tan Dun – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Best Cinematography: Peter Pau – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Best Costume Design: Janty Yates – Gladiator

Best Film Editing: Stephen Mirrione – Traffic

Best Visual Effects: Gladiator

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/73rd_Academy_Awards

72nd Academy Awards

26th March 2000

Oscar Winners at the 72nd Academy Awards

Best Film – American Beauty

Best Director: Sam Mendes – American Beauty

Best Actor: Kevin Spacey – American Beauty

Best Actress: Hilary Swank – Boys Don’t Cry

Best Supporting Actor: Michael Caine – The Cider House Rules

Best Supporting Actress: Angelina Jolie – Girl Interrupted

Best Original Screenplay – Alan Ball – American Beauty

Best Adapted Screenplay – John Irving – The Cider House Rules

Best Foreign Language Film – All About my Mother directed by Pedro Almodovar  (Spain)

Best Documentary Feature – One Day in September directed by Arthur Cohn and Kevin Macdonald

Best Original Score – John Corigiliano –  The Red Violin

Best Cinematography – Conrad L. Hall – American Beauty

Best Costume Design – Lindy Hemming – Topsy Turvy

Best Film Editing – Zach Staenberg – The Matrix

Best Visual Effects – The Matrix

Source – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/72nd_Academy_Awards

85th Academy Awards / The Oscars

24th February 2013

Oscar Winners at the 85th Annual Academy Awards

Best Film – Argo

Best Director – Ang Lee – Life of Pi

Best Actor – Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln

Best Actress – Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook

Best Supporting Actor – Christoph Waltz – Django Unchained

Best Supporting Actress – Anne Hathaway – Les Miserables

Best Original Screenplay – Quentin Tarantino – Django Unchained

Best Adapted Screenplay – Chris Terrio – Argo

Best Foreign Language Film – Amour directed by Michael Haneke (Austria)

Best Documentary – Searching for Sugarman

Best Cinematography – Claudio Miranda – Life of Pi

Best Editing – William Goldenberg – Argo

Best Sound Editing – Per Hallberg, Karen Baker Landers – Skyfall

& Paul N. J. Ottosson – Zero Dark Thirty (tie for this Oscar).

Best Original Song – “Skyfall” by Adele – Skyfall

Best Original Score – Mychael Danna – Life of Pi

Best Costume Design – Jacqueline Durran – Anna Karenina

Best Production Design – Rick Carter, Jim Erickson – Lincoln

Source: http://www.oscars.org/

A Good Day to Die Hard

Yipee Ki-Yay not another one!

Bruce Willis’s fifth attempt to resuscitate the Die Hard franchise 25 years after the original Die Hard, is very thin on plot and big on action. A Good Day to Die Hard features an explosive and riveting car chase sequence through the streets of Moscow and is perhaps the film’s only redeeming feature. The rest of the film through a very light story line attempts to reconnect Willis’s bad-ass New York cop character John MacClane with his slightly inexperienced son Jack MacClane  played by Jai Courtney last seen in the Tom Cruise thriller Jack Reacher.

A Good Day to Die Hard is pure action and lacks some of the witty one liners or plot twists of the previous Die Hard films, most notably Die Hard and Die Hard 3 failing to make the most of its best asset that of the location of Moscow in Russia, the first film to be set outside the United States.  A Good Day to Die Hard also does not feature a convincing villain and if the success of Skyfall is to go by, an evil villain really makes a truly successful hero.

Unlike Alan Rickman (Die Hard) or Jeremy Irons (Die Hard: With a Vengeance)  playing notable villains in the previous Die Hard films, this Russian mastermind Komarov played by German actor Sebastian Koch bent on robbing Chernobyl of a stockpile of uranium is entirely implausible. The only character to cast in depth of feeling is MacClane’s daughter Lucy played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but her part is minimal as the main focus shifts to explosive father, son male bonding enough to make Mother Russia cry as buildings, cars and half of Moscow are randomly destroyed.

Bruce Willis looks a bit old to be flying off exploding buildings and carry enough artillery to wipe out a small Caribbean nation, but then that said that is half the appeal for him appearing in such films as Red, The Expendibles 2 and the upcoming G I Joe sequel, GI Joe: Retaliation. Jai Courtney is marginally good as a CIA operative who is caught way out of his depth in a Moscow prison hostage negotiation which go completely awry.

The narrative gaps are just too great to make any real sense of what the purpose of making A Good Day to Die Hard other than milking an already average Die Hard Franchise way past its expiry date. This is baseless action, which is albeit entertaining but not deeply meaningful and should be treated as a great popcorn sequel, an inevitable money spinner that Hollywood is good at churning out despite the diminishing appeal by Willis as the main character John MacClane.

A Good Day to Die Hard is an idiots guide to making a sequel, with an obvious visual clue of MacClane leaving an American airport with a travel handbook, the Idiots Guide to Russia boarding an Aeroflot flight for Moscow. This film is only for real action fans and will definitely appeal to the male teenage target audience.

Zero Dark Thirty

Superb Tradecraft

Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliant yet riveting film Zero Dark Thirty is a masterful film, held together by a central performance by Jessica Chastain as CIA Intelligence Operative Maya and a superb script by Mark Boal, who also collaborated with Bigelow on the equally impressive The Hurt Locker.

This complex film opens with the flight recordings of the United 93 plane that crashed in Pennsylvania during the September 2001 US Terror attacks sparking an obsessive and frustrating hunt for the Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden by the CIA and specifically Maya initially from the hostile environment of Pakistan then based at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The narrative charts a veritable timeline of terror that has characterized the first decade of the 21^st century, from 9/11 to the London Transport bombings in July 2005, to the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad in September 2008 to the suicide bombing at the American military base, Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan in December 2009.

Zero Dark Thirty is a brilliant spy thriller and unlike Argo, is deadly serious in every respect and is grounded in much historical research and investigative journalism, noted in the detailed script by Mark Boal. As in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow once again casts her central character in a completely hostile and extremely dangerous environment and the petite Maya as the tenacious CIA operative who skilfully leads the hunt for and final execution of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind many international terrorist attacks, most notably 9/11 and the 2005 London bombings.

Bigelow as a director takes on a larger canvas than in the Iraq War in The Hurt Locker and shows that the decade long hunt for America’s most wanted enemy was an international affair from Pakistan to Poland to Kuwait involving CIA black sites, detailed surveillance and lots of political wrangling.

Tradecraft

A notable narrative shift is from the film’s first half set under the Bush administration where torture, rendition and revenge were the CIA’s chief instruments of capturing Al Qaeda terrorists to the second half set after November 2008 under the Obama administration where detailed surveillance, dedication and  almost positive certainty of terrorist tradecraft which ultimately lead to the riveting  elimination of Osama Bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011, Zero Dark Thirty is deadpan in its presentation of one nations hunt for a master terrorist and the extraordinary sacrifice and lengths these CIA operatives went to in finally achieving their goal.

Jessica Chastain performance is simply superb and has already garnered a 2013 Golden Globe Award and truly shows her talent and diversity in the role of Maya but also points to Kathryn Bigelow ability  to bring out the best performance ever in her leading actors, as was the case with Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker. The final sequence involving the storming of the Abbottabad compound, believed to be Bin Ladin’s hideout by elite American soldiers is truly nerve-wracking cinema, shot with Bigelow’s trademark directorial detachment cut through with absolute documentary styled realism.

Zero Dark Thirty has a great supporting cast including Jason Clarke as the CIA torturer Dan, Kyle Chandler as CIA Pakistan operations chief Joseph Bradley along with Mark Strong, Jennifer Ehle and James Gandolfini, but it is really Chastain’s obsessive portrayal of CIA Operative Maya, a woman battling to gain respect in a male dominated espionage arena, that shows her true talent. The pace of Zero Dark Thirty is fast and yet measured enough to show the time involved assisted by an original score by Alexandre Desplat and with cutting edge sound editing, the audience is immediately immersed in a deeply fascinating portrait of America’s covert hunt for that nation’s Enemy Number One. Highly Recommended and definitely Oscar worthy.

Django Unchained

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Don Johnson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Bruce Dern, Kerry Washington, Robert Carradine, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, James Russo

Django Unchained can be compared to a three act Southern Opera and whilst Tarantino’s distinctive style comes through, his real intention is to invert the Cowboy myth so associated with the American Wild West, channeling spaghetti Western Sergio Leone films and tackling a very prickly subject of slavery prior to the American Civil War without much sensitivity.

Django Unchained, loosely based on the 1966 Sergio Corbucci Western Django, starts off in Texas in 1858, two years before the outbreak of the American Civil War and features the eloquent and unorthodox Dr King Schultz played with superb panache by Christoph Waltz, who won a Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for 2009’s Inglourious Basterds who frees Django from a chain gang as he needs him to identify three brothers which have a mortal bounty on their heads. Jamie Foxx (Collateral, Ray) is wonderfully cast as Django and throughout the two and a half hour film really displays his range as an actor complimenting the always competent Waltz as the German speaking bounty hunter.

Together Schultz and Django go in search of Django’s entrapped and estranged wife, oddly named Broomhilda, as she was bought as a slave by German immigrants. Broomhilda is now the possession of sadistic cotton plantation owner Calvin Candie, played with flourish by Leonardo di Caprio whose Mississippi plantation aptly named Candieland provides the final act in an utterly bizarre and bloody showdown between Django, Schultz and Candie.

For sheer originality, Tarantino’s films are always enjoyable and never dull, but like Inglourious Basterds and his most famous film Pulp Fiction, along with profanity there is a serious dose of vicious bloodshed. Django Unchained lacks some of the brilliance of the first two films, but the startling sound effects, outlandish scenes and revisionist plot is enough to make Django Unchained Oscar worthy especially the two central performances by Waltz and Foxx. Two criticisms’ of the film is the overuse of racist profanity which the plot revolves around especially being set in the Slave trade of the Deep South and also the film’s considerable length.

Django Unchained has some startling scenes but one got the sense that because of Tarantino’s previous successes, Harvey Weinstein has given Tarantino free reign. Free reign on the subject of the America’s Deep South from Texas to Mississippi and their sanctioning of slavery as a form of economically binding both master and slaves into a hideous socio-geograhic relationship of brutal proportions demonstrated in the cotton and tobacco plantations below the Mason-Dixon line.

Django Unchained has a fantastic musical score and soundtrack along with brilliant sound effects and sound editing especially noticeable in the showdown at Candieland. Tarantino’s old favourite Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) is wonderfully cast as Calvin Candie’s butler Stephen and look out for Don Johnson as Big Daddy and of course the versatile Kerry Washington (The Last King of Scotland) who undergoes all sorts of torture as enslaved Broomhilda, Django’s estranged wife. Watch out for a brief appearance by Jonah Hill (Moneyball) as part of inadequate group of Ku Klux Klan members.

Warning this film is not for sensitive viewers and Django Unchained could be Tarantino’s most controversial film to date especially as he recasts the mythical American cowboy as a sharp shooting freed slave from Texas. Yet Quentin Tarantino won the 2013 Golden Globe  and BAFTA Awards for Best Original Screenplay for Django Unchained so his talent is definitely acknowledged in both America and Britain.