| | No surprise about the low ratings.
Consider this: if we combine the 2007 box office gross of the 5 "best pic" nominations and think of it as one big film, it would still rank fourth in the year's totals (about $313M). Clearly, there's a disconnect between what the average movie watcher understands by the term "entertainment" and what the Hollywood establishment understands it to be.
And yes, the Coen brothers are Hollywood establishment; they have been for a long time. I gave up on them long ago when I noticed that they began "referencing" (as in directly copying) whole scenes from Preston Sturges films. Personally, I loathed "No Country For Old Men." I did manage, however, to see three other films that were even worse, all by major filmmakers: "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead" (dir. Sidney Lumet); "Cassandra's Dream" (writer/dir. Woody Allen); and "Youth Without Youth" (dir. Francis Ford Coppola).
I also watched "The Great Debaters", which should have been a great film, but fell flat for a very good reason: no dramatic conflict (unforgivable in a drama). The movie (produced by Oprah Winfrey, by the way) is based on the true story of Wiley College, a small black college in rural Texas in the 1930s, which managed to assemble a top debating team. The team had an unbroken record of wins and (in real life) managed to debate, and beat, an all-white college: University of Southern California. In the movie, USC wasn't a big enough name, so the writers made the final debate and triumph be against Harvard. The major flaw in this movie is that all the conflict is in watching actual debates; the winner has been predetermined for the viewer because he already knows that Wiley College won all the debates; and, additionally, the debating topics are all far-left talking points; e.g., "Resolved: Capitalism is immoral"...etc. The casting and the performances were very good, but Denzel Washington, in his directorial debut, appears at times not to know what to do with the camera. For example, in the final quarter of the movie, when the Wiley team is debating Harvard, the director has the camera aimlessly rove around the debating hall, no doubt to mimic the swooning feelings of the small-town Texan debate team members on the dais of such an august venue. Unfortunately, what the audience actually sees is simply an aimlessly roving camera (lesson 1: cameras can't photogaph feelings or subjective states; only objects and actions). The film deals with an interesting bit of social history -- it's a docudrama, really -- but fell far short of what it aimed for, and what it could have been.
The best movie I saw in 2007 was the brilliant Pixar animation "Ratatouille", written and directed by Brad Bird. Perhaps not as action-packed as his 2004 film "The Incredibles," it's nevertheless just as good, and perhaps, a bit more urbane. (It's about a rat who can cook, and, befriending a human -- well, a Frenchman -- becomes the greatest chef in France.)
Like "The Incredibles," "Ratatouille" has to do with identity, achievement, and the overcoming of obstacles imposed by those who believe that one must keep to a prescribed station in life. The dialogue is witty; the characterizations, sharp; and the story, compelling. The technical aspects of the 3-D animation are (as usual from Pixar) stupendous.
The only other films I liked this year were "Charlie Wilson's War" (mainly for Philip Seymour Hoffman's sharp performance as a rogue CIA agent) directed by Mike Nichols, and "The Bucket List", with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, and directed by Rob Reiner. The latter movie was actually the best written of all the live-action features, and despite being about dying, it's quite humorous and uplifting. The chemistry between Nicholson and Freeman occasionally reached the same heights as that between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
|
|
