The 94th Academy Award Winners

Well, it was more eventful than last year's show.

They gave eight awards out ahead of time, then edited the acceptance speeches into the show. A little awkward, but I didn't hate it as much as I thought I might. This led the producers to think we had enough time for two musical numbers from Encanto.

The three hostesses (Wanda Sykes, Regina Hall, Amy Schumer) juggled comedic duties. I thought Hall's bit about privately testing the singles actors like Bradley Cooper and Tyler Perry backstage for COVID was funny, and Schumer had some good lines in her own monologue. ("Being the Ricardos is like if they did a Michael Jordan biopic but only showed the bus rides between games.") Sykes's pre-recorded detour of the new Hollywood museum should have been cut in half or dropped.

But the one they're going to be talking about is the Will Smith altercation. Chris Rock poked fun at a couple celebs but then joked about Jada Pinkett Smith preparing for G.I. Jane 2. At first Will laughed along but then he saw the look on Jada's face. Some back-story: Jada has alopecia. Smith marched up to Chris Rock and gave him a full slap on the face. American audiences didn't see the next ten seconds but clips from other broadcasts have gone viral to show that Smith stayed upset ("Keep my wife's name out of your f---ing mouth!") Rock then introduced the nominees for Best Documentary.

And then a half-hour later, Will won. It's quite something to behold his speech. He did ultimately apologize to the Academy, but not to Chris Rock. I'll be fascinated to see what tomorrow's headlines are like.

The winners:

BEST PICTURE - CODA

BEST DIRECTOR - Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog

BEST ACTOR - Will Smith, King Richard

BEST ACTRESS - Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Troy Kotsur, CODA

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Ariana DeBose, West Side Story

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY - Sian Heder, CODA

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY - Kenneth Branagh, Belfast

BEST ANIMATED PICTURE - Encanto

BEST DOCUMENTARY PICTURE - Summer of Soul

BEST FOREIGN PICTURE - Drive My Car (Japan)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY - Dune

BEST COSTUNE DESIGN - Cruella

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS - Dune

BEST ORIGINAL SONG - "No Time to Die", Billie Eilish

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE - Hans Zimmer, Dune

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN - Dune

BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING - The Eyes of Tammy Faye

BEST EDITING - Dune

BEST SOUND - Dune

BEST ANIMATED SHORT - The Windshield Wiper

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT - The Queen of Basketball

BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT - The Long Goodbye

Dunkirk - Movie Review

Starring Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Jack Lowden, James D'Arcy, Tom Glynn-Carney and Barry Keoghan.
Written & Directed by Christopher Nolan.

★★★½

Nolan's WWII movie doesn't have a signature battle scene. It has men just trying to escape. We never see a Nazi's face. We just get the you-are-there experience of soldiers stranded on a beach, trying to survive from being sitting ducks.

Nolan has made an ensemble, but he's given the main roles to relative unknowns. Harry Styles is pretty famous, but this is his first real acting job, and he's very good at it. The kid has a future. The Jim Caviezel breakout here is Fionn Whitehead as Tommy. It's through his eyes we see the bleakness.

Some of Nolan's ensemble show up for support. Tom Hardy once again spends most of his screentime with his face covered like he did as Bane. Cillian Murphy shows up as a shellshocked soldier, a lone survivor of a sunken ship. Michael Caine's voice makes a cameo. Kenneth Branagh (Conspiracy, Valkyrie) plays a composite character, the admiral in charge, there on the beach with everyone else. Oscar winner Mark Rylance is one of the British citizens with small boats who sail across the channel to rescue however many they can.

The dialogue is sparse. I saw this in IMAX, the way it's meant to be seen, and it is an immersive experience. The viewer is there, standing on the beach, or flying in the plane, or sailing on the ship, or whereever Nolan takes us. He also does an interesting non-linear experiment with time. The Whitehead-led beach scenes take place over a several days. The Rylance-led boat scenes take place over a one day. The Hardy-led aerial scenes take place over an hour. It can create some confusion but all of the timelines meet in the end.

This approach also prevents it from becoming a masterpiece. Other than the flawed bookend Spielberg tacked on Saving Private Ryan, that's a classic that will survive for decades more to come. Nolan sacrifices narrative for immersion, and if he'd managed to throw in some better storytelling on top of everything else he'd provided, that could have been his best film to date. As is, I'd still put Memento, The Dark Knight, and Inception ahead of it.

I also like how Nolan kept it PG-13 so I could take my sons to it.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Movie Review

Starring Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Kenneth Branagh, Keira Knightley and Colm Feore.
Directed by Kenneth Branagh.

★★★

This is the epitome of the standard, competent spy thriller. Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) is a Cold War hero moved to the 21st century, where Russians are still the main bad guys. This doesn't reignite the franchise any more than the Ben Affleck-led Sum of All Fears in 2001.

But it is in the hands of director Kenneth Branagh, who has shown he knows how to add a little fun to tentpoles. Ryan's origin, recruitment and training are all handled efficiently. When we get to the main case, when a lot of the suspense is happening on computer screens and thumb-drives, the pacing and direction are still tight. Branagh's got that Putin dead-eye stare down, and Costner's a fine mentor for Pine.  I didn't have a problem with Keira Knightley's acting but her character didn't feel consistent.

Pine's good, and I wouldn't mind seeing another installment, but based on the box office, I think that might not happen. It needed to gross $170 million worldwide to justify a sequel and today is when it passes $100 million.

Random Movie Stuff - 3/27/12

- Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass, Hugo, Dark Shadows) has been offered the title role in MGM's remake of Carrie, based on the classic Stephen King novel about a shy girl with telekinetic powers who has the worst prom ever.  Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) will direct.

- Chloe Moretz has also joined the cast of The Drummer, a biopic about Beach boys drummer Dennis Wilson, who died in 1983.  It stars Aaron Eckhart, Vera Farmiga and Rupert Grint (Harry Potter).

- Kenneth Branagh (Thor) will direct the next Jack Ryan movie.  The reboot would star Chris Pine, who'd star after filming on Star Trek 2 is complete.  Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck have played Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan in movies past.

- Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis have been offered the leads in Jupiter Ascending, the next sci-fi movie from Andy & Lana Wachowski (The Matrix).

- Melissa Leo (The Fighter) has joined the cast of Oblivion, a sci-fi thriller from Joseph Kosinski (Tron Legacy).  It stars Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones).

- Greg Dean Schmitz's Upcomingmovies.com was one of my must-visit sites about 10 years ago.  Yahoo bought his site awhile back, and now he's the main news guy for RottenTomatoes.com, a site I currently can't go a week without visiting.  Here's some news tidbits from his Weekly Ketchup column, which gives his top ten movie stories of the week (be they fresh or rotten):

1.  Michael Bay's producing a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, now titled Ninja Turtles, as the plan to have them actually be aliens.
2.  Brett Ratner's name has been attached to direct Midnight Run 2, a sequel to the 1988 hit with Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin.  DeNiro's expected to return but not Grodin.
3.  Jessica Biel will play Vera Miles in Alfred Hitchcock & the Making of Psycho, starring Anthony Hopkins (Hitchcock), Helen Mirren (his wife), James D'Arcy (Anthony Perkins), Scarlett Johansson (Janet Leigh) and Michael Stuhlbarg (agent Lew Wasserman).
4.  Ron Howard's production company Imagine Entertainment is developing another big-screen treatment of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

My Week with Marilyn - DVD Review

Starring Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Judi Dench, Toby Jones, Julia Ormond, Jim Carter, Dougray Scott, Dominic Cooper, Derek Jacobi and Zoe Wanamaker. Directed by Simon Curtis.

★★★

Never saw The Prince & the Showgirl, and I think my enjoyment would have been enhanced if I had. This movie is about the experience of filming that movie through the eyes of the third assistant director (Eddie Redmayne), a young man who enjoyed a week of a flirty relationship with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) on the set.

Monroe had a rough time on the shoot, clashing with co-star/director Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). Olivier was king of the non-Method, and Monroe had to feel and believe her character's motivations for her star power to shine through.

The reasons to see this movie are Williams and Branagh. Williams captures the vulnerability and allure of Marilyn. Branagh was born to play Olivier and doesn't disappoint. The supporting cast have fun in their roles too, like Julia Ormond as Vivian Leigh. I was a little disappointed that Emma Watson (Harry Potter) didn't have much more to do than play the plain girl that our protagonist neglects.

Williams and Branagh were both nominated for this movie and deservedly so. It just happened to be in the year that Meryl Streep and Christopher Plummer were in the mix.

Thor - Movie Review

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Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson, Idris Elba, Clark Gregg, Rene Russo, Jaimie Alexander and Colm Feore. Directed by Kenneth Branagh.

I was going to say I'm a sucker for superhero movies, but I realize I'm pretty much a sucker for any genre as long as the movie's good.

Managed to catch this in 2D (yay!) and Thor did not disappoint. It had the grand special effects, the clashes of titans, the character journey, the Girlfriend and many of the tropes you'd expect. But they still have to be done well, and for the most part, yeah, it worked.

I find myself wanting to address my problems first. Many of the actors aren't given anything to do. Rene Russo is barely there as Thor's mother. The Warriors Three seem like a merry band I should want to hang out with, but I never cared about them. Idris Elba was cool as the gatekeeper, to the point that I wished his part was bigger. Stellan Skarsgard just has to follow Natalie Portman and fill in exposition points. The Hawkeye cameo was poorly executed and should have been cut entirely. The New Mexico town the Earth action takes place in is clearly one giant shooting set.

But I liked that it was family-friendly. I liked Chris Hemsworth as the central character. It's not a revelation or anything, I just find myself looking forward to his Thor bouncing off Downey's Iron Man or staring down the Hulk. Coming Summer 2012 - The Avengers Part VI: They're Finally Together! (Iron Man was Avengers I, Incredible Hulk was Avengers II, Iron Man 2 was Avengers III, Thor is Avengers IV, and we have Captain America in July...) I liked the unknown Tom Hiddleston as Loki, a complex villain that has more going on than at first revealed, and we're therefore not distracted by Famous Name playing him.

I liked the Asgard stuff. Done poorly, it could've generated Chronicles of Riddick flashbacks, but it had a solid design and I liked walking down its halls and flying over its towers.

Portman's Jane Foster as written isn't more than The Girlfriend, but she was able to get a couple moments out of her, like her self-surprised reaction to when Thor kisses her hand.