GNABG VOL LXVI
Just read what I found to be an interesting article. I will post it as the first comment (and will try to remember not to get excited when I check and see that this post received one comment).
I like independent, serious movies. I've seen none of the five nominated films, but I have seen two of the movies spotlighted in this article.
That reminds me, when I was in third grade or so, my friend Glenn Kaye taught me a game that he made up and we used to play it during recess. The idea was for one of us to follow being someone else and copy their walking, etc, while the other one watches, judged, was entertained. Glenn was ahead of his time and age, and maybe I was too as his best friend. He got me into Jean Shepherd at age 9 or so, lending me In G-d We trust, All Others Pay Cash, long before I got the joke of the title.
Excerpt of an email from a dear friend: I miss your blog. I do. I miss the "you" in it. Sigh. Shudder.
I am hopefully moments from sleep. Good Night and G-d Bless.
Behind the cloud, the sun is still shining - Abraham Lincoln
posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 11:43 PM
3 Comments:
February 13, 2009
In Praise of Oscar Long Shots
By DAVID CARR
For the Oscar-obsessed, there is a tendency to fix our gaze on the lustrous aspects of the event — the frocks, the megastars wearing them, the dramatic walk to the dais — but in doing so we often miss out on the more charming, demure pleasures of the ritual.
More to the point, when some people say they are thrilled just to be nominated, they really mean it, and we should be thrilled along with them.
Don’t think of the people who aren’t favorites to win as also-rans; these lesser-known nominees are still among the exalted few, given the hundreds of movies made and the tens of thousands of people who make them. And even if they don’t get a shot at thanking their agents and their moms, we can all be grateful that the spectacle-rich Oscars actually have the collateral effect of elevating impressive work that was conceived and somehow made far from the studio lot.
Beyond the obvious — “The Wrestler” has been lifted into public consciousness by the nomination and back story of Mickey Rourke — there are a number of movies and actors that provide a rich and sometimes enriching subtext to the awards season, including Melissa Leo in “Frozen River,” Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor” and Michael Shannon in “Revolutionary Road.”
Playing the lead in a film about people on the edges of the culture and the country, Ms. Leo brought dignity to the struggles of those who live in the trailer parks we pass on the way to somewhere else. It’s remarkable that in passing up the movie star conventions of soft lighting and careful makeup to play a hard-luck woman who is pulled into human smuggling, Ms. Leo will get all dolled up for the Oscars on Feb. 22 as a nominated lead actress.
Courtney Hunt, the writer and director of the film, will also be walking the carpet, nominated for her original screenplay. Ms. Hunt spent a great deal of time on a Mohawk Indian reservation and came up with a narrative that was rendered first as a poem, then as a short film and finally as a feature. To get the movie made, she ground out independent financing of less than $1 million, found talent willing to work for nearly nothing and shot it quickly. (There are scenarios in which she could win, by the way.)
For all the cynicism and motives observers assign to the motion picture academy, it is refreshing that the voters saw value in this little movie about big things. At the Screen Actors Guild awards last month, in between interviewing Kate Winslet and Penélope Cruz, I spotted Misty Upham, Ms. Leo’s co-star. A member of the Blackfoot Tribe, she was fresh off a double shift at the laundry where she works. We chatted a bit about reservation life, the movie business and the fact that she was more used to laundering precious garments than wearing them to an awards show. I asked her if she was enjoying herself, and she paused, looking down at the red carpet she was standing on.
“How could I not?” she said.
The tendency to wear all the pomp as a loose garment, as a bit of a lark, is fun to watch when someone pulls it off. Mr. Jenkins, nominated as best actor for his work in “The Visitor,” in which he plays a lonely university professor who finds purpose in a chance encounter, has seemed to be having a better time of it than most. When the women from “The View” had him on recently, Whoopi Goldberg asked him about his shot at winning.
“Not a chance in the world,” he said, to uproarious laughter from the studio audience.
In a sense Mr. Jenkins has already hit the jackpot. A movie, again about people who live on the edges, could have ended up in the dustbin of well-intentioned films, but instead is now part of the cinematic conversation.
It could be argued that everyone is an also-ran in the supporting actor category because Heath Ledger’s Joker in “The Dark Knight” is expected to carry the evening. But many of us were pleased that Mr. Shannon’s turn as a mental patient with a propensity for blurting out unspeakable truths snagged a nomination.
Although he is not always in the lead of the films he works in — “World Trade Center,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Bug” — the camera tends to be drawn to Mr. Shannon, in part because he is tall, and in part because he is inordinately talented. Beyond that, “Revolutionary Road” is going underrecognized this season, so partisans of the movie can take satisfaction in his (and its) presence in the finals.
Sometimes it’s not the actors who pull us — and the academy — into films, but the films themselves. If you were invited to see an animated documentary about one soldier’s memory of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, would you be itching to go? Probably not, but now that “Waltz With Bashir” has been nominated for best foreign-language film, maybe you’ll pay attention to all the critics who have been raving about It.
Ditto for “The Class,” a French film about a teacher coming to grips with what diversity really means in a modern polyglot classroom.
“Trouble the Water,” a blended documentary of amateur and professionally filmed footage about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, made a big splash at the Sundance Film Festival, but the riveting personal story it tells might have been a curio for documentary cinephiles were it not for the Oscar recognition. And “Encounters at the End of the World,” another nominated documentary, reminds us anew that Werner Herzog is among our time’s most spectacular storytellers, regardless of the form.
Of course the riches on the margins of the film business are always there for the plucking, if the moviegoer takes the time and effort to go beyond the multiplex. But for those of us who are either too busy or too lazy, the Oscars, of all things, can serve as a frame on the wonders we might otherwise miss.
'Excerpt of an email from a dear friend: I miss your blog. I do. I miss the "you" in it.'
Interesting how everything is relative. To this reader, your blog is unique and seems to have a lot of "you" in it. Jean Shepard, Torah, the Kinks, psychology, movies, Debra Winger to Pirkei Avot and that's just the tip of the iceberg. But your friend knows you personally and sees what isn't there. I guess it's tough to walk that fine line between blog and diary.
P.S. As for Jean Shepherd, now I'm sorry I didn't become a radio fan earlier in life.
Thanks escquapades. That friend is a friend through the blog and is speaking about the blog present versus the blog past as he/she sees it, more than about the blog me versus the life me. Back when Miriam was Mirty I said here that I sometimes don't reveal myself but just write a dvar Torah or post a link - she commented wisely (as you have now similarly stated) that there is much revealed in Torah and links too. Yes. A blogger, like everyone perhaps, reveals while hiding, hides while revealing. A sharp aquaintance of mine once told me that my way of being closed is through being open, which is interesting because I think that maybe her way of being open is by being closed...
Blog or diary?
Rabbis, mentors, colleagues, friends:
So many thin lines
We walk as best as we can
Are we each Phelip Petit?
Re: Jean Shepherd, I think audio of the radio is available on line, every now and then on the regular radio his old stuff is played.
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