The need for a Smackdown between writer/director Alexander Payne’s earlier effort About Schimidt and his Oscar nominated The Descendants is so obvious that we just can’t let the final days before the Academy Awards go by without making it.

After all, both films are anchored by a central character who’s lost or is losing his wife and comes to realize that the woman he’s spent his married life with had gotten away with cheating on him without him knowing it (and probably deserving it). Both set out on quests to try to make meaning of this adultery, end up confronting the cheaters (because they can’t confront the wives) and forgive them, and try to re-connect with the daughters they’ve ignored.

These are pretty significant performances we’re talking about — Jack Nicholson playing Warren Schmidt and George Clooney playing Matt King. They’re both troubled guys, standing at the crossroads, full of regrets, realizing their mistakes, and hoping for a dose of redemption.

Both films are chock-full of voice-over about those feelings. About Schmidt uses Schmidt’s insanely honest-sounding dishonest letters to an African child Ndugu he’s sending $22 a month to while The Descendants uses King’s excessive and obsessive inner thoughts. Honestly, both films could probably have done nicely without them.

Payne talked about his characters this way in an interview with The New York Times.

I’m getting a lot the question, ‘Why are you so interested in flawed protagonists?’  I scratch my head at that, because I think: Aren’t all protagonists in literature and cinema flawed? The interesting ones, anyway? Oedipus. Othello. Michael Corleone.

Being brutally honest here, Schmidt and King are never going to have their names uttered in that company again by anyone other than the director of the films they’re in.

Our own Art Tiersky wrote a great Smackdown between The Descendants and The Boys Are Back and had this to say about this year’s nominated Payne effort:

Whereas, The Descendants, I’m pleased to report, is quite deserving of all the hype it’s getting as one of the year’s best films. It’s also a welcome return for director/co-writer Alexander Payne, who tends to take his time between features, this being only his fifth in 15 years, but the results have generally been worth the wait (2002’s sluggish and mean-spirited About Schmidt being the sole disappointment). This one is arguably his best yet.

A couple of years earlier, Sherry Coben wrote this wonderful insight into the Schmidt character in her Smackdown between The Visitor and About Schmidt:

He’s looking for all the right things in all the wrong places – in his rear-view mirror and in a cloak of unconvincing self-deception. Stubborn, judgmental and essentially closed-off, his quest circles like a a carousel ride or a dog chasing its tail. He’s a bull in every china shop, incautious and something of a boor, and he’s fated to land very near the place he started. Less a character than an indictment of the middle class’s unquestioning embrace of the empty American Dream, Schmidt knows he’s missing something, and while he never fully gains the consciousness he desperately seeks, he makes a valiant attempt, mouthing all the right words of epiphany, talking the talk, sleepwalking the walk, until the final frames of the film.

As you can probably infer (although you should read both Smackdowns for their sheer literacy), Payne got out of his two cage matches here with a split decision.

But how about Payne versus Payne?

About Schmidt has its moments, for sure. Re-watching it, I found more to like than the first time, but there are few laughs, really, and they don’t come until Kathy Bates hits the screen. Neither film is about the laughs, of course, but The Descendants feels looser, like the slack-key guitar vibe of its Hawaiian setting. This year’s film from the House of Payne is just way, way more commercial for reasons of setting, youth and Clooney charm.

The way I see it, About Schmidt was Payne’s dry run in this thematic world, and it’s not good enough to beat the good, but not great, The Descendants. And neither of those movies is better than his other films Election and, particularly, Sideways.

The real question, however, is whether The Descendants can win the ultimate Smackdown with The Artist on Sunday night. I don’t think it deserves to, and it’s not likely that it will.

Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have their way of picking movie winners; we have ours.

We’re not gonna say Movie Smackdown’s way is necessarily better than its Oscar competition, although clearly, our critics are more diverse. According to a new study by the Los Angeles Times, Oscar voters are 94 percent white and 77 percent male, with only two percent under the age of 40. Movie Smackdown has a much more representative age, race and gender mix.

Both our site and the Academy Awards telecast are seen all over the world, with the Oscars usually pulling in between 35-40 million live viewers, and Movie Smackdown attracting… something less than that. Still, we both soldier on.

The 84th annual Academy Awards will be airing Sunday, February 26, announcing the Academy’s movie winners to the world. We’ve already Smacked all the major Oscar contenders and made our choices—the links to those reviews are currently displayed on the right side of our homepage—but we haven’t yet Smacked them against each other. So here, we do just that.

Making this task slightly difficult (thank you, Academy management!) is that there are nine nominees this year, so there’s no way we can pair them off cleanly. Instead we’ll do the next best thing and choose six films, match them up randomly, and top that off with a three-film battle royale for the final match.

We’ve also Smacked five other top categories—Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. We’ve done these in the same, free-for-all, battle-royale format we used for the final Best Picture entry. In these categories, we’re analyzing and predicting winners, rather than choosing personal favorites.

Smackster Eric Volkman does the honors.

Round One:
The Artist vs. War Horse

The early decades of the 20th century weren’t happy ones, by and large, particularly for the protagonists of these two films. War Horse‘s title character Joey (played by a stableful of different mounts) is shipped off to combat at the dawn of World War I to the great dismay of his best friend Albert (Jeremy Irvine). Determined to reunite with his buddy, Albert enlists in the military and spends the rest of the war looking for him. Hopefully neither will meet their end in combat.

The Artist‘s George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a suave actor at the top of the Hollywood food chain circa 1927, is also the right animal at the wrong time. Talking pictures are about to render the silent films he stars in obsolete, and when he starts getting turned down for roles, his desperation mounts. Will the misguided, self-destructive George find some way to punch through the darkness and resurrect his career?

Of the two, The Artist has the richer period flavor. It’s also, despite its dark subject matter, presented in a light and breezy manner, as a quick, easily digestible piece of remember-when entertainment. Since War Horse is aimed at kids (it’s adapted from a young adult novel), director Steven Spielberg has to exercise restraint in showing the horrors of a horrendous conflict, so the authenticity suffers. Although the movie is otherwise well directed, it feels draggy here and there and could have used a few more chops in the editing room. So for pacing, period feel and general entertainment value, The Artist wins this bout.

Round Two:
The Descendants vs. Midnight in Paris

It’s a battle of alienated white guys in this mini-Smack. Rich yet aloof Hawaiian Matt King (George Clooney) of The Descendants becomes a single parent to his two daughters after Mrs. King suffers a boating accident that knocks her into a coma. Matt has to simultaneously connect to his daughters, manage his wife’s recovery and, against his nagging conscience, administer the sale of ancestral land belonging to him and a pack of greedy cousins. Good luck to him.

In Midnight in Paris, writer Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) finds himself in the city of the title. One night while drunkenly wandering the streets, at the stroke of midnight he sees an antique car pull up to the curb. He gets in and voila! he’s suddenly transported back to the early 1920s, where he meets the city’s most celebrated expatriates like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Gil loves the atmosphere of that time and place, so he keeps returning. But before long, he discovers the past isn’t what it used to be.

Both movies are solid entertainment. However, Wilson’s main character, a disheveled, hopeless romantic, is more engaging than his counterpart. Who among us hasn’t suffered such an itch for another time and place? Matt isn’t as interesting a personality, nor is he as deep and as aching. Additionally, the theme of Midnight in Paris (don’t glorify the old days!) is stronger than the fairly standard maturing-through-adversity backdrop of its rival. Lastly, Allen does a good job layering his theme lightly and simply on top of a fun story, without beating the audience over the head about it. Midnight in Paris, then, is our winner.

Round 3:
Hugo vs. Moneyball

Unlike Gil, we remain in 1920s Paris with Hugo. The film follows the title character, a boy (Asa Butterfield) with under-appreciated talents, meeting an old man who turns out to be under-appreciated cinema pioneer Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley). Each works a grunt job in different areas of a Paris train station. They are adversaries when they first meet but are soon drawn together after Hugo discovers who the man really is. The boy then begins a Quixotic quest to solicit the recognition he feels Méliès deserves, and to save the old man’s films for posterity.

If Hugo were to somehow catch Midnight in Paris‘s antique car time machine and drive across not only time but space to northern California in the early 2000s, he might just end up as Billy Beane, the general manager of baseball’s Oakland A’s. After all, like Hugo, Beane is a smart, ambitious guy who’s under-appreciated by nearly everyone around him until he implements a new, numbers-based system to staff his team’s roster. Against prevailing sports wisdom, Beane uses his system to find inexpensive, overlooked players. After a bad start, the A’s begin a historic win streak, make the playoffs and earn a chance to advance to the World Series.

The talent arrayed for these two movies is certainly not under-appreciated: director Martin Scorsese collaborates with writer John Logan (working from Brian Selznick’s book) on Hugo, and Capote helmer Bennett Miller, working with ace screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin to give us Moneyball. None of them, however, are at the peak of their abilities here. Hugo is gorgeous to look at, with the best 3D cinematography in movie history; it’s too bad the film is so leaden. The brilliant Scorsese’s somewhat heavy touch weighs down what should be lighter fare, turning it from a childhood discovery story to a piece of Georges Méliès hero worship, and for anyone who doesn’t think the Frenchman was deserving of sainthood it becomes a slog to watch. Moneyball is flat and suffers from the use of tired Hollywood shortcuts, but at least we get to go behind the scenes to watch the business of a pro sports team, which is interesting and different. Neither of these films is the masterpiece it wants to be, but Moneyball is more involving, so it gets the victory.

Round Four:
The Help vs. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
vs. The Tree of Life

We’ll be scoring this three-in-one bout according to how well each movie did according to the Smackdown refs who originally rated them. In the first corner is reclusive auteur Terrence Malick’s rumination on human existence, God and other frivolous water cooler conversation topics, The Tree of Life. That film’s first opponent is underdog drama The Help, which like most of the other nominees is a period piece, this time set in the segregated South of the 1960s. Unlike its rivals it concerns the struggle for civil rights as experienced by a young white journalist and several African-American women who work in menial household jobs. Finally, there’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a story of a curious young boy who loses his father in the 9/11 attacks. We liked the first two movies, enjoying the vision of the first and the passion of the second. EL&IC fell short, however—we considered it phony, overblown and underwhelming.

Out of the two remaining films, we found The Tree of Life to be thought-provoking and involving. We couldn’t quite drape the same adjectives on The Help; despite the obvious gusto with which it was made and acted, it couldn’t quite escape the old Hollywood underdog-triumphs cliches and as such we thought it predictable. It falls in the end, making The Tree of Life our battle royale champ.

BEST ACTOR

Several big-name Anglo-American stars go against a pair of character actors from Elsewhere in this year’s contest. Frequent colleagues Brad Pitt and George Clooney appeared in prestige movies last year, and their celebrity usually ensures them special consideration from the Academy. However, although their films, Moneyball and The Descendants, got good reviews, neither made a lasting impression on moviegoers. The same could be said for their performances, so we don’t expect either man to come to the stage for the prize. Demian Bichir won extraordinary praise for his work in A Better Life, but since few people saw it, he probably won’t take the statue. Although Jean Dujardin is a massive star in his native France, among this pack he’s still a relative unknown. If The Artist goes on a roll, Dujardin could be swept to victory, but we’re going with Gary Oldman, who’s been getting a lot of press not only for his fine, understated performance as the quiet English spymaster George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but for the fact that he’s never taken home an Oscar for any of his roles in numerous popular films.

BEST ACTRESS

Did you know that Meryl Streep holds the record for Academy Award nominations for an actor? Yep, 17 is the grand total for this grand lady of the screen, with only two victories to show for her efforts. The movie she’s nominated for this year, The Iron Lady, doesn’t have the gravitas of a Sophie’s Choice or the popularity of a Kramer vs. Kramer, so in an unusually strong year for women’s leading roles, Meryl will likely come up short again. Glenn Close certainly deserves her first Oscar at some point, but probably won’t get it for Albert Nobbs, which underwhelmed critics and audiences. Michelle Williams did a fine job portraying screen legend Marilyn Monroe, but is unlikely to triumph when Monroe’s work itself is so iconic. Viola Davis is a favored contender for breathing life into The Help’s by-the-numbers story, but we’re guessing castmate Octavia Spencer’s strong work as Supporting Actress, could divert some of Davis’ mojo. Instead, we’ll make an offbeat pick here: fast-rising Rooney Mara, who did a good job playing a high-profile role in a tentpole movie, The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo. Mara is young (and the old coots in the Academy love youth), she’s good at her craft, and she has a habit of landing in quality projects, all traits greatly appreciated by the Academy.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

In a way, this is probably the most interesting set of candidates for any award. Save for relatively new arrival Jonah Hill in Moneyball, the men in this category are all well-respected character actors who’ve toiled for decades but have never taken home an Oscar. Hill, a young actor who got his start in comedies, is the odd guy out and 99 percent certain to go home empty-handed. But which of the remaining four veterans—Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Nick Nolte or Kenneth Branagh—will hoist his first Academy Award in the air? Since all appeared in not very popular movies, we can’t handicap the results according to box office. So we’ll make our pick based solely on longevity and ubiquity in North American productions. In other words, we peg that sturdy and reliable Canadian, Christopher Plummer for the win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

If we went by pure audience buzz alone, scene-heisting Melissa McCarthy of Bridesmaids would easily win this category. But the Academy is not audience buzz and has a habit of picking away from comedy and comedians—particularly when the competition includes a Big Issue movie, as in this case. The Help tackles, albeit in a rather Hollywood way, the malignant racism of America in the 1960s. This is a slightly more weighty matter than the obstacles and politics encountered in arranging a wedding, or the travails of a fading movie star (The Artist, whose lead actress Bérénice Bejo is nominated here), or even the nature of sexual identity (Albert Nobbs, represented by Janet McTeer). So the winner will probably be a cast member of The Help, and since Hollywood may possibly have felt  some  backlash over Jessica Chastain’s Caucasian character carrying the burden of social injustice for all the long-suffering African Americans of The Help, we expect a little diversity to creep in here. As such, our pick for this one is the well deserving Octavia Spencer.

BEST DIRECTOR

If it were up to us—and somehow, again this year, the Academy hasn’t called—we’d hand Best Director to Woody Allen in a microsecond. Midnight in Paris is the most entertaining, the warmest and the funniest of all the films whose directors earned nominations. But the Academy, as previously noted, does things its own way , and is more likely to go with a director who’s actually in attendance (unlike Allen, who typically shuns these spectacles), and who’s made a well-received film that did good box office. For whatever reason, Malick’s Tree of Life and Scorsese’s Hugo just didn’t connect with audiences, and The Artist’s Hazanavicius is too new and too, well, we’ll say it, foreign, to win his first time out. We don’t consider The Descendants to be Alexander Payne’s best work, but he fits the above criteria, so we’ll put our money on him to grab the Oscar.

]]> http://www.moviesmackdown.com/2012/02/oscar-week-at-the-smack.html/feed 1 http://www.moviesmackdown.com/2012/02/oscar-week-at-the-smack.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MovieSmackdown/~3/vN6skeQSacU/this-means-war-vs-how-do-you-know.html http://www.moviesmackdown.com/2012/02/this-means-war-vs-how-do-you-know.html#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:23:52 +0000 Movie Smackdown http://www.moviesmackdown.com/?p=2521 Continue reading →]]> Share/Bookmark

Seriously, why do studios think that men are standing in line to fight over Reese Witherspoon’s affections?

Do the greenlights come from male executives who have a thing for Reese, or do they come from female executives who just think men have a thing for Reese? We’re not really sure (meaning we don’t have the time or energy to truly investigate this beyond its rhetorical boundaries); we just know that somebody thinks so.

Otherwise, following the box-office bomb that 2010′s How Do You Know turned out to be with Reese in the middle of it all, nobody in their right mind would have greenlit This Means War a year and change later. But they did. And it’s in theaters now. Sure, Reese is cute and all, and she’s done some great work, occasionally even in movies that were worth seeing. But if this is how she’s trying to make us forget Water for Elephants, she really needn’t have bothered. Most of us have already forgotten.

This Means War

THE HIGH CONCEPT:  Two top CIA operatives (played by Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) wage an epic battle against one another after they discover they are dating the same woman.

It looks to us like if you’ve seen this trailer you pretty much know what the movie is about. The film actually did pretty well in nationwide sneak previews for Valentine’s Day audiences. But will they return for opening weekend?

We think if you really want to see a good CIA movie, you should go check out Safe House with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds, an incredibly good action thriller where the agency dudes actually look like they should be on the front lines saving America rather than the guys who see counter-intelligence as a chance to hit on women.

How Do You Know

THE HIGH CONCEPT:  After being cut from the USA softball team and feeling a bit past her prime, Lisa (Reese) finds herself evaluating her life and in the middle of a love triangle, as a corporate guy in crisis (Paul Rudd) competes with her current, baseball-playing beau (Owen Wilson).

According to the people who saw this film, its alternative title should really have been Why Should You Care? 

Despite the fact that it had Jack Nicholson in it and came from writer/director James L. Brooks, it was like throwing a party that nobody came to. It was shamed at the box office.

What Do You Think?

As we said, we ran through the roster of Movie Smackdown critics, and while some may have been willing re-arrange their schedules to go see This Means War, no one could be bothered to watch or re-watch How Do You Know, and so we are left with a lot of great artwork and no conclusions.

We leave it up to you. How well does Reese walk the line between these two triangle films? Which one wins your election? Let us know and we’ll alert the media.

The Smackdown

Prior to Harry Potter, Mary Norton’s cherished, 1952 novel The Borrowers was a prime example of a children’s book that had as much to say between the lines as in them. For those new to that original work and the books and movies it spawned, the Borrowers are tiny people who live in homes owned by what they call “human beans” and survive by “borrowing” things from these much larger and more menacing creatures while keeping their own existence a secret.

A version of The Borrowers that Disney would have been proud of hit the big screen in 1997. It was over the top, loud, full of special effects, chases and close calls, and featured enough slapstick for fans of The Three Stooges. The Borrowers was actually made by the British companies, Working Title and Polygram, but Hollywood was paying close attention. Disney in fact went out and bought distribution rights to The Secret World of Arrietty, the Studio Ghibli anime version of The Borrowers that was very successful in Japan, where it was made in 2010.

So, how does a non-Disney film made in 1997 stack up against a Disney-distributed movie in 2012 made by Japanese Studio Ghibli? That’s the kind of challenge one of the tiny people would be able to appreciate best, so I went out and borrowed one — my nine-year-old son, Jack, a bona fide member of both films’ target audience — to view them with me and help give them the Smack they deserve.

The Challenger

The Secret World of Arrietty opens with a young boy, Shawn, who suffers from a serious heart condition, coming to his grandmother’s home to rest before a life-changing operation. Tiny Arrietty is discovered by Shawn, who only wants to help her. But she tries desperately to avoid Shawn, because, as a human bean — a race of people (us) who are forever trying to destroy the borrowers — he will only bring disaster upon her family.

It’s Shawn’s caretaker, Hara, voiced by Carol Burnett, the closest thing to a villain in this film, who causes havoc among Arrietty and her family by trying to capture and eradicate them from the house, only to be thwarted by Shawn, who ultimately helps them escape to a new home. Along the way, Arrietty gives Shawn the courage to face his operation with a strong heart, and Shawn shows Arrietty that not all human beans are beasts. A valuable lesson always.

The Defending Champion

Young boy Pete Lender (nothing subtle about the name Lender to distinguish him from the Borrowers) discovers and befriends Arrietty. He is amazed to learn of the existence of a tiny family living under the floorboards of his house. [I could see that my son loved this concept and mirrored the wonder of our screen hero, Pete. So far so good.]

At the same time, lawyer Ocious P. Potter (John Goodman, a perfect foil) is trying to hoodwink the elder Lenders out of their large English house so he can replace it with a 1997 version of a Trump-style condo completely devoid of style or environmental sensibility. Apparently, the Lenders’ aunt, who promised to leave the house to them, left no will, so the house goes to Potter.

Over the course of the film, Arrietty finds the will, the elder Lenders try to relocate themselves, and young Pete Lender tries to relocate the Borrowers, all while, at a machine-gun pace, Potter finds Arrietty and gets the will. But then — stay with me here — Arrietty and her family retake the will, only to have Potter find them again, seize the will, and try to “cheese” the Borrowers to death by dumping the stuff on top of them in a cheese factory until other Borrowers come to save the day.

The Scorecard

I could see my Jack loving all the mayhem, knick-of-time rescues, and the big guy getting his comeuppance in The Borrowers. He liked that it had real people, cool special effects and a great story — saving your house — that probably rings even truer in this economic climate than it did when the movie first came out. He especially appreciated all the close calls and, as he put it, “the very different situations all the people got into.” His favorite scene was when all the Borrowers banded together to save Arrietty’s house. According to Jack, it showed how it doesn’t matter how small you are if you have teamwork.

Jack said watching the film made him feel like being on a great ride at an amusement park. Enough said. That’s exactly how I felt, too — like I’d just been on a wild, Disney ride.

When we discussed the new release, his entire tone changed. The plot of this Arrietty version of The Borrowers is so simple, it’s impossible not to wonder how, in this day and age of Pixar epics and kids’ rollicking special-effects films, it ever got released in America at all. Much closer to the original book than our defending champion, it has a melancholy and meditative tone to it right from the beginning.

Rather than go for cheap thrills, Arrietty ably demonstrates what it must have been like for human beings before they became spoiled couch potatoes, when life meant surviving by our wits and living with an understanding of the balance of nature. In the book and the films, the “human beans” are stand-ins for the threatening beasts that people, as the weaker species, once feared. The metaphor extends to how children must feel in the adult world today.

Jack wondered what it would be like to be a Borrower because everything looked so fun and hard at the same time — kind of like life before searching Google. Which is exactly why The Secret of Arrietty harkens back to some of the original Disney animated films, like Snow White, Pinocchio, and Lady and the Tramp. People took their kids to these movies because the plots were simple, the characters beautifully drawn, and the pace slow enough to allow the beauty and humanity of the stories to sink in. Like Arrietty, those were movies, not theme-park rides.

The Decision

Jack enjoyed the 1997 version of The Borrowers and was torn when he watched The Secret World of Arrietty, a film covering the same subject matter in a very different way. When he decided he preferred the simplicity of Arrietty to the fast-paced excitement of its predecessor, I was genuinely surprised. And then I realized why he liked it as much as I did: It left time for him to breathe, to contemplate each character’s situation in life, and to absorb the real dangers of tiny people navigating a world larger and more treacherous than their own. The slower pace actually created tension and a real danger that could be felt.

For me, as the resident adult male in our family of movie-goers, the  task of picking a winner was much easier. Though The Borrowers launched us on a pretty good thrill ride, Arrietty takes us deep into our own hearts and makes us appreciate the value of our lives and the people who enter into them. You won’t need seat belts to keep you and your kids riveted, as this gentle, mesmerizing story unfolds. My clear winner, with Jack’s support, is the The Secret World of Arrietty.