DGA Winner = New Oscar Front-runner?

The Director's Guild of America announced its winners on Saturday night, and the feature film winner made history. Kathryn Bigelow, director of the extraordinary The Hurt Locker, became the DGA's first ever female winner. Wonderful. Well-deserved.

But it comes with potential to alter the shape of this awards season. Going into the weekend, most would have predicted James Cameron, King of Everything and director of Avatar (Bigelow's ex-husband, by the way), would walk off with the DGA prize and thus be further cemented as the odds-on favorite to win Best Director at this year's Oscar ceremony. But now, with Bigelow winning DGA, the race becomes interesting once again.

Let's look at history. The DGA has been the most accurate Oscar predictor for decades. In the last 61 years, the DGA winner and Best Director Oscar winner have corresponded all but six times -- astounding accuracy no other awards entity can come close to matching. Further history would reveal that the best predictor of the eventual Best Picture winner at the Oscars is he who wins (or maybe, finally, she who wins) Best Director. The Best Director and Best Picture winners have corresponded all but 12 times in the last 60 years of Oscar ceremonies (the last three of which, it may or may not matter to note, have taken place in the past decade). Put the two stats together, and you might have the makings of a momentum surge in favor of The Hurt Locker.

It is still too early to make any huge leaps in judgment, or to deviate too far from the conventional wisdom -- that the highest grossing film of all-time, both domestic and worldwide (which Avatar will be well before Oscar night), would lose Best Picture to a low-budget indie war drama that was made for roughly $11 million, never played on more than 535 screens, and only managed to haul in a little over $12 million. But the momentum has shifted. In the next few weeks, we will see how the story changes. By how much will Avatar beat Titanic? Which film will manage the best media campaign? Will people further tire of Avatar Mania? Will Oscar voters value the power of a film or the power of a film's phenomenon? Will the true passion for The Hurt Locker be enough to push it to an eventual BP -- and BD -- win?

Thanks to the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild, the next month will be much more interesting than expected.

The Disappointing, 2009

There were far more 2009 films that were just plain bad, rather than merely disappointing. But in a way, the disappointments sting worse than the bad movies. Most of the time, when walking into a bad movie, the badness is expected. But disappointments are a different beast. Expectations are elevated, hopes are high, and the possibility for greatness is tangible. And then, for whatever reasons, hope fades and the greatness evaporates.

The lists that follow commemorate the 2009 films that coulda, woulda, shoulda...but didn't. Here are films whose ambitions were high, whose intentions were virtuous, whose potential was unquestionable, but who couldn't quite deliver.   ~ J and K

Presenting the Most Disappointing Films of 2009, with analysis to follow:

He Said:

The disappointments were crushing in 2009, and they came from a large group of some of the our finest filmmakers. Any knowledgable film lover must enter the year expecting a fair share of near-misses, but 2009's group stung especially badly, since films with such intriguing subjects, extraordinary performances, and powerful, important intentions never quite accomplished their lofty goals.

Brothers, in my view, was unquestionably the year's biggest disappointment, tackling complex family issues and deep moral quandaries of our nation's military and adding some of the year's most astounding acting work from Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and young Bailee Madison. But the film gives away all its powerful secrets, and ends when the real story is just beginning.

Lars Von Trier's Antichrist runs in a close second, a film of staggering beauty in which von Trier inches ever closer to openly discussing his twisted gender issues, and yet the film descends into a jumbled mess of purposeful confusion. And Precious, that film of such great literary pedigree and unending cinematic potential, lands with such an overwrought thud in the third slot.

Rounding out my sad list of 2009 disappointments, Richard Kelly's The Box is another pretentious-yet-intriguing mind-bender that becomes unintentionally laughable; Capitalism: A Love Story is the first time Michael Moore seems to be following the trend of the times rather than defining it; Michael Mann's Public Enemies is a sprawling crime epic but isn't ever that involving; Nancy Meyers' It's Complicated has a message that was too complicated and a plot that was oh-so-simple; The Girlfriend Experience is a failed Soderbergh experiment; Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock takes the build-up and payoff of the greatest concert of our time and makes it tepid and boring; and Away We Go, directed with sincerity by Sam Mendes and acted with subtlety by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, is enjoyable but not totally fulfilling.

She Said:

There were quite a few movies this year that did not live up to the grand expectations I had for them. Whether it was the over-indulgence of Nine, the irritating blandness of Invictus, the sleep-inducing A Christmas Carol, the gloss-over, boring Taking Woodstock; the pretentious and too-weird Antichrist, the surprisingly not-so-powerful Capitalism: A Love Story, the annoying and cloying Away We Go, the nauseating drivel and one-dimensional  He's Just Not that Into You, the laughable, simplistic characterizations and dialogue of Avatar (not to mention its hypocritcal message of peace while simultaneously engaging in a 30-minute bloodbath), or the sheer inanity and beffudlement of The Box, the films on this year's list all exhibit one common trait -- they could have been and should have been so much more. So much more.

When a movie earns a spot on the worst list, it's not typically painful. It is what it is. But this list is different. When you have the amazing caliber of actors, directors, writers, and producers, when you have the sorts of ideas, concepts, and technology that these movies possess, it is all the more heartbreaking to know that this potential is squandered.

The Bad, 2009

2009 was a disastrous year for the cinema. We try to stay optimistic, but years like the one that just passed slowly drain us of said optimism. We are ever grateful for the handful of wonderful films that were released in 2009 and are happy to report that we will save the best for last, discussing and celebrating the best films of 2009 in the coming days. But for now, we focus on the films that defined 2009: the bad ones.

In attempting to compile this list, we came up with approximately 30 titles to fill 10 slots. Yikes. It was a great year for terrible movies -- one of the best years for terrible movies in recent memory. Amazing. Bad sequels, bad original films, bad horror, bad comedy, bad sci-fi, bad animation, even bad indie drama...it was quite an eclectic year for crap.

What follows is a final warning, a final goodbye, a final dagger in the heart of 2009's awful films. We hate you, and we hope to forget you soon. --J and K

The lists, followed by commentary:



He Said:

If not for a few truly wonderful saving graces, 2009 would go down as the worst year for movies in the decade that just came to a close. What a way to go out, Movies of the 2000s. There are films to celebrate, and so I can't wait to move forward to discuss them. For now, we must pay tribute to the horrible films of 2009, and there were so many it was difficult to select only 10.

I Love You, Beth Cooper was clearly the year's worst, a revolting comedy that simultaneously wanted to court Superbad fans and the Home Alone crowd and was actually appropriate for neither. Speaking of Home Alone, the film was directed by Hollywood's Worst Director, Chris Columbus, who apparently thinks it is sweet and funny to depict sluts running wild with a creepy man-child and falling prey to ridiculous pratfalls and uncomfortable sexual situations. Fun!

It says something that any movie could top Land of the Lost, which is the tackiest, ugliest, most awkwardly unfunny and entirely inappropriate film Will Ferrell has ever made. Awful from top to bottom. Ferrell's career is not dead, but it is now on life support after that unmitigated disaster.

And rounding out the top three (bottom three?) is another heinous would-be comedy, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which is a simpering, stupid, unsavory load of celluloid refuse featuring Matthew McConaughey as an idiot womanizer (accurate enough, I guess) who is visited by annoying "ghosts" (even though most of them aren't actually ghosts) who guide him through the folly of his life. Each subsequent joke falls flatter than the last, and the film's transparent attempt to moralize at the end is shameless and revolting. And Michael Douglas' extended cameo as the lothario grandfather is just gross.

As for the rest, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was the comedy classic of the year, Serious Moonlight debased Adrienne Shelly's legacy, Spread attempted to trick us into thinking its vapid nastiness was somehow profound, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, by far the worst sequel I've seen in years, was ridiculous, overblown, overlong macho porn, Love Happens was an utterly disastrous romantic comedy, Knowing should have been blown up with its brooding characters, and Astro Boy set new standards for uncomfortable ugliness in animation.

*******

She Said:This year's worst movies for me fell into two categories: banal retarded nonsense or atrocious misogyny masquerading as comedy. Well, sometimes said movies achieved such awfulness as to manage to hit both categories.

This year's spread of bad movies made even more clear that the limits of PG-13 are bursting at the seams. Such raunchy, offensively tacky and woman hating films as Beth Cooper, Land of the Lost, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Fired Up, and Transformers 2 proved we need another restriction between ages 13 and 17. Or, perhaps movies like those previously mentioned could just not be greenlit at all. From boob mugs, scorin' contests, and "stabbin' wagons" to preening porn postures and "facials," most of the films in my worst list are not just the worst but are shameful and repugnant.

Toothless

If there is any positive to take away from Tooth Fairy, it's that now I'm pretty sure that I only have to find nine more movies to place on my "Worst of 2010" list. Thanks, Dwayne Johnson.

The positives end there. Tooth Fairy is a heinous would-be comedy that is intended to put a creative twist on the legend of the tooth fairy, but the result is more painful than a root canal -- and before you roll your eyes at my use of bad humor, I must say that I can't help myself, and that the movie is even worse. This is a pale imitation of a mediocre Disney movie where the humor isn't funny, the fairy tale isn't magical, and the actors are all so hapless to stop the disaster that it barely seems like they are participating. Here is a film that literally seems to evaporate as you watch it.

The Decades: 1970s

The 1970s was a decade of giants. This is the decade where the great directors stretched to deliver some of the greatest work the cinema has ever known. Big ideas, important themes, daring stories, brilliant performances, and filmmaking that set the bar so high that no decade has ever quite reached. The 1970s was, perhaps, the greatest decade in the history of film.

Check out filmcritic.com's collective list of the decade's best films.

And without further ado, my personal list:

How did Avatar happen?

I'm not talking about the impetus, or the many years Cameron spent waiting for the technology to advance, or the long, complicated production. I'm talking phenomenon. Avatar is the highest grossing film worldwide of all-time. In the coming weeks, it will become the all-time highest domestic grosser as well, surpassing Titanic, which seemed unthinkable for over a decade and was still unthinkable even as Avatar was released. How far the film will surpass its behemoth predecessor is still unsure. It could raise the stakes by $150 million or more.

So I pose the question: how did Avatar happen? How did it climb this high? And why this movie?

There are, in my estimation, a few simple answers.

Oscar Nomination Predictions, Round 1

Getting a late start with the Oscar charts this year, but several updates will be forthcoming, a few of them even coming before nominations are announced in just over a week. The chart is ever-evolving, even though most of the eventual winners are all but set in stone.

The announcement comes February 2nd at 5:30am, Pacific time. And by the way: nominations closed over the weekend. Nothing to do now but mull over the possibilities.

Over the Weekend: SAG and PGA...what do they mean NOW?

Screen Actors Guild Award Winners:

Best Ensemble: Inglourious BasterdsLead Male: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Lead Female: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Supporting Male: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Supporting Female: Mo'Nique, PreciousProducers Guild of America Award Winners:

Producer of the Year Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures:
THE HURT LOCKER, Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier, Greg Shapiro
Producer of the Year Award in Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures:
UP, Jonas Rivera
Producer of the Year Award in Documentary Theatrical Motion Pictures
THE COVE, Fisher Stevens, Paula DuPré Pesmen

I go on and on every awards season about how a lot of these awards mean absolutely nothing in terms of actually influencing the Oscar vote, but this year I have noted a strange phenomenon. This is the year of the affirmation. It was a year without a huge front-runner, a season in search of its star. Then Avatar showed up with its technology and its box-office numbers and its King of the Universe, and then it all seemed to lock into place. The year-end awards (actually, in the case of the major presentations, the "year-beginning awards for the previous year"), then, took on a slightly different role than usual: they acted as the Yes Man, the affirmation to the developing logic. Globes winners seemed, rather than influencing the Oscar favorites, confirmed them...

And the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar goes to...

The White Ribbon. Yep, it's all over, folks. Of course, that is the buried lead. The actual news:

AMPAS has whittled down the contenders for this year's Best Foreign Language Film category, a process they engage in every year. The landscape has been reduced to a nine-film shortlist, all in contention to fill the five slots in the category. Over a three-day period, voters will view the films and then make their determinations. The five nominees will be announced, with the rest of this year's Oscar field, on February 2nd.

The shortlist:

A New Webb-slinger

News that just dropped yesterday: Marc Webb, director of 2009's "indie" phenom (500) Days of Summer, was signed by Sony to direct the re-vamped, Raimi/Maguire-less Spider-Man. Rumors circulated about Webb's hiring ever since Raimi dropped out of the project, and this time they turned out to be entirely accurate.

The reaction? Overwhelmingly excited, if we are to believe Sony. But in truth, it's sort of a question mark. (500) Days was a very clever idea executed with an abundance of style, and that style is a result of Webb. His visual sensibility seems about the right fit for what this new Spidey is trying to be.

His aptitude with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of big studio visual effects, however, is a big unknown.

One thing is for sure: they wanted a guy with sense of fun, a cheeky sense of winking humor, and a decent style set. On the basis of his first film, it seems like they got what they wanted. A newer, younger Spider-Man, directed by a newer, younger filmmaker. The entire enterprise is a question mark, and Webb's hiring does nothing to dissuade my pending sense of doom about the project as a whole. But it's not a bad hire in the slightest.

Lovely

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones is a wonderful film. It plays the emotions in a very special way. It is not merely a special effects film; to the contrary, Jackson uses his mastery of f/x to create a vivid world that gives life to Alice Sebold's best-selling novel in a way no other filmmaker could adequately envision. The film has failed to gain traction in the awards season in spite of the Academy's expansion to ten Best Picture nominees, which is an odd omission, since Jackson is stretching his ability to tell a story of great emotion. The film is not perfect, but in that imperfection it finds a sort of messy sublimity.

The story will be quite familiar to readers of Sebold's 2002 book: Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) narrates from beyond the grave, telling the story of her murder in 1973 and its aftermath in the subsequent years. Susie is part of a loving family, with a mother (Rachel Weisz) and father (Mark Wahlberg) who care deeply, and she is entering into the years of budding sexuality, with a deep crush on an older classmate. Her life is just beginning...and then she stops to talk to her neighbor (Stanley Tucci), who invites her preview his new bunker for the local children to play. She cautiously accepts...and that is the end of Susie's life.

The conceit is that when Susie dies, she enters the "In-Between," a celestial area between this world and the next. The In-Between is wondrous and beautiful, sure, but it is also perilous. It is not a final resting place, but rather a reflection of the hopes and fears of its inhabitants. In general terms, Susie had -- to borrow a cliched colloquialism -- unfinished business. The In-Between becomes a reflection of Susie's inner turmoil, even after death. As she gazes upon her family, each member grieves in a different way. Her father gets pro-active, overtly so, in his obsession with tracking down a killer whom we know lives just across the street. Her mother, meanwhile, reverts inward, quickly tiring of her husband's antics. Their relationship crumbles as a result of their grief.

We simultaneously follow Susie's journey through the afterlife and the growing tension back here on Earth. Wahlberg's driven father becomes consumed by his investigation while Weisz's traumatized mother leaves and Susie's grandmother (Susan Sarandon, in a role shockingly overlooked for a shoo-in Oscar nod) comes to take care of the household. The parallel stories are a lot to juggle, and as a result the narrative sometimes feels messy, as if all the content overwhelms its purpose. Nonetheless, the heart of each story is compelling both separately and together.

Jackson is a filmmaker of great ambition and also great sensitivity. His version of The Lovely Bones -- derided by many as too sentimental, or inappropriately lofty, or castrated from the novel's graphic depictions of violence and teen sexuality -- is actually a more ambitious undertaking, in my opinion, than even his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yes, his take -- scripted by Jackson with longtime partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens -- focuses more on an intense emotional journey than did Sebold's novel. The film is a meditation on the grief of both those affected by death as well as the deceased, and a story of the undying celestial connection between loved ones. There is no graphic violence or bloody details, but why should there be? This film is not a police procedural or a raw psychodrama, but a lilting pondering of, more than anything, love. The search for love, the loss of love, and the discovery of new kinds of love. Jackson asks the audience to suspend their disbelief and engage their hearts. The leap is not one many wanted to make, obviously, but the experience is powerfully immersive if the viewer is open to it. The Lovely Bones the movie is different than The Lovely Bones the book, but that's okay. It is its own individual piece, a uniquely cinematic burst of emotion. Be open to it, and let it flow in.

I See the Beauty

A Single Man might just be the most downbeat film ever made about finding the beauty of life. And yet its tragedy, its stunningly dreary depiction of a lovelorn English professor as the color fades in and out of his world, it finds a beauty worthy of great literature.

Indeed, the film is based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, and the adaptation, written by David Scearce and celebrated fashion designer Tom Ford, and directed by Ford in the year's most extraordinary feature debut, captures that feeling that is so distinctly literary: the fading of glory, the flickering of one's life force, the sad, beautiful demise of one's soul. And yet Ford's film is also uniquely cinematic, a visual experience unlike any other in 2009, one that would be beautiful in snapshots, but with the addition of camera movement, orchestral scoring, and amazing performances becomes painful in its subtext and vivid in its exploration of life.

Colin Firth plays George, a professor who suffers quietly through every day. George lost the love of his life, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a car accident, and ever since the color has faded from his world -- literally. Now George has made a decision: this is the last day of his life. He enters the day as any other, counseling himself, preparing himself to "become George," as if his life force was killed alongside Jim in that car crash. "Just get through today," he tells himself in the mirror, knowing that when today is over, he won't have to wake up again.

The film follows George throughout what he intends as his last day, in 1962 Los Angeles. He unburdens his soul to his students, who stare at him dumbfounded. He makes plans with his best friend, Charlotte (Julianne Moore, in another incredible performance), without telling her that he means tonight to be their last private party. He arranges his estate and leaves a gun in his desk drawer, in anticipation of the final moment. But as George moves through the day, with the knowledge that he will no longer witness the world around him, a funny thing happens: he begins to pay attention. For the first time, he begins to see, in acute detail, the beauty of the world around him. The innocence of the little girl next door, the impeccable physical beauty of the male prostitute who attempts to pick him up outside a convenience store, the snapshot of a smile, the blink of an eye -- for the first time since Jim's death, perhaps for the first time in his life, George sees the intricate beauty of the world. He sees life. The color returns, ever-so-briefly, to his world.

Firth's performance is extraordinary, reaching depths of emotion he has never before attempted in his career. George is a character of brutal pain who finds brief hope in the snapshots of life, and Firth exudes the subtlety of the dualing forces in George's world: the power of his depression versus the beautiful world that calls for his participation. As his platonic soulmate, who has lived patiently under the delusion that one day her friend would become her lover, Moore embodies the tragic naivete of a 1950s ingenue who, as the 50s ended and 60s began, her life force was left behind. Her only desire is to have George love her, but he can't. Even though she knows, she purposefully puts it out of her mind. The futile quest for George is all Charley has to cling to. These are people whose glory has faded, and the lights are dimming, and all that's left is a shell. But George begins to see the life that's left to live; Charley only sees the hope of what can never be.

Tom Ford has been one of the fashion world's most venerated designers for years, and as a filmmaker he seems to peel back that glossy, artificial wall between fashion and its subjects. Fashion photography functions more like high-end art that reflects a silent pain, and A Single Man takes those images and adds the layers of cinema to cast a spell unlike any other 2009 film. Ford's command of the frame, and his audacious attempt to bust out of the frame and touch the soul, is phenomenal. He is a virtuoso, and his film is a bleak, intimate, gorgeous masterpiece.