A MAN WITH A VERY GENERIC SET OF SKILLS

Ask me three months ago, and I'd have said it was no surprise at all that Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit would be the best action movie starring Kevin Costner to be released in the first quarter of 2014. Ask me right after I saw Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and I'd have said it was a goddamn impossibility. But here we are, and 3 Days to Kill exists, and boy is it ever a piece of shit.

As produced by Luc Besson's Parisian Thriller & Growling Papa Bear factory, it comes as little surprise to find that 3DtK features Costner as a spy with an ex-wife and a resentful teenage daughter, presently living in the City of Lights, under the never-clarified presumption that the ex is herself French, even though she kind of reads as American; she is, luckily, played by Connie Nielsen, the patron saint of people who are presumably European despite reading as American. The daughter is played by Hailee Steinfeld, whose post-Oscar nomination career is not going the way I imagine that she hoped for. In this particular instance, the spy is suffering from brain cancer that has metastasized into his lungs, and the prognosis is three to five months, though based on the coughing, the frequent blackouts, and the bloody noses, one gets the impression that his doctor was being kind. He - and to give him his right name, so we don't keep getting bogged down in pronouns, it's Ethan Renner - has quit working for the CIA in the wake of an epically botched attempt to capture an arms dealer and his hatchet man, respectively The Wolf (Richard Sammel) and The Albino (Tómas Lemarquis), and hopes to reconnect with the only people he ever loved before fucking it all up. But no sooner does he arrive in Paris than the CIA finds him, in the form of a sexy lady agent whose name is not an anagram of Satan only because even Luc Besson has heard of restraint. Played by Amber Heard with the sexual sophistication of a Nazi Panzerdivision, Vivi Delay is pitched as a literal devil figure (in one scene, she's standing in a featureless room bathed in blood red lighting), demanding that Ethan continue his quest to take down The Wolf and The Albino despite promising his ex, Christine, that he's done with that life. In exchange, Vivi can offer him a life-saving drug to allow him more time spent with his newly rebuilding family. So it turns out to be, as God is my witness, an adaptation of the Faust legend. Produced and co-written by Luc Besson. Starring Kevin Costner as a CIA agent. Truly, we live in blessed times.

The problem with 3DtK, or the creative genius, if you're of a mind to go there, is that it wants to be three genres all at once, but it only really has space for two. There is, most obviously, the traditional "super-tough badass storming through a European capital and punching righteousness right into a colorful assortment of ethnics" movie on the model of Taken; there is, only somewhat unexpectedly, a comically over-the-top parody of the same, with situations and characters too absurd to take as serious; there is also, dubiously, a sober family drama about a man trying desperately to regain his dignity and honor as a member of a functioning family even as The Life tries to pull him back in, in the form of Heard trying to eye-fuck him into a coma.

No, hold on, the problem isn't that the film has all of these things going on at once, the problem is that regardless of how many genres the script is trying to mash together in some kind of Gallic fantasia of guns and manly tears, director McG is only remotely interested in one of them, and so even when the film is attempting to serious and engaged with the central family dynamic - even moreso when it's at its most frivolously comic-seeming - he insistently manhandles it into the glowering action tones that can be mustered, despite the action movie leg of the film being, perhaps surprisingly, the least prominent of the three (frequently inserted with particularly crude abandon; there is a set piece in a delicatessen which ramps up so arbitrarily and suddenly that I legitimately thought that it was a dream sequence at first).

Even without being directed with no sense of proportion or finesse, there's plenty of idiotic dross in the script: a family of African squatters hiding in Ethan's Paris flat show up for no reason other than provide some immensely strained parallel narrative of fatherhood (something done to much greater effect anyway with a Serbian limo service operator played by Marc Andréoni, whose frequent beatings at Ethan's hands are always the occasion for some subsequent fatherly wisdom - this is the one part of the film where the comic underlayment manages to poke through enough that it's actually funny), insert not just one but a whole family of Magical Negroes into the action, and facilitate some remarkably self-loathing jokes about the French bureaucracy; there's an interlude at a tattoo parlor that serves no narrative function and plays like a scene from the straight people version of Cruising. And every time Agent Satan shows up, the film screams to an abrupt halt, puking and moaning, though how much of that is the character and how she's worked into the story, and how much is Heard's unfathomably bad performance, it's hard to say.

Some fringes of life try to force themselves out: Costner's gruff, craggy "lung cancer" voice sounds not unlike Christian Bale's Batman doing an impression of Walter Matthau, and his relentlessly sullen body language veers straight into So Bad It's Good territory, but at least that helps us see the outline of the warped dark farce that a better version of 3 Days to Kill might have been. Steinfeld tries real damn hard to put over a character who is half-prop and half-contrivance, recognising maybe that she only has so many chances to make an impression before she ends up in whatever dank hole claimed Saoirse Ronan's career. Some of the action scenes are good: the opening sequence especially, depicting a CIA sting gone bad, is well-choreographed, and feels like it takes place in a physical world where there are consequences to actions, something that absolutely does not happen again later, as Ethan chases his targets around in one of the most sleepily-edited car chase scenes in modern memory, where things are destroyed less to cause an impact and more to wake the viewer up.

It really is, all told, a truly dismal experience, a cold fish of a movie whose sense of comedy and energy are both suggest by its heavy reliance on the rousing chorus of synthpop anthem "I Love It" as a repeated, nominally humorous beats (it's Ethan's ringtone - takes too long to explain it). All in all, the film fails so completely on every one of the disparate levels it's trying to land on, and ends up being so much of a wandering, ill-tempered slog that even calling it a big dumb action movie promises something vastly more entertaining and pleasantly frivolous than we get.

2/10

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PREDICTIONS FOR THE 86th ACADEMY AWARDS

Shall we do this thing? Let's do this thing. It's the thing that American cinephiles get to do instead of caring about sports statistics, and I've had several weak years of predictions in a row, so I'm starting to get hungry to redeem myself.

Best Picture
12 Years a Slave
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
Her
Nebraska
Philomena
The Wolf of Wall Street

WON: 12 YEARS A SLAVE
Will Win: 12 Years a Slave
Spoiler: Gravity
My Pick: Gravity

Cutting to the chase: for anything but 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, or American Hustle to win would require an unprecedented break with all sorts of patterns, and American Hustle looks pretty damn weak. That leaves with a seemingly irresolvable choice between the film which is unquestionably going to win the most awards, but is also widely perceived to be a simple if well-crafted thriller, and the film of all nine nominees to trumpet its Grand Importance most obviously. There's only feeling your way through this one, not logicking it through. That said, I'm predicting that Importance is too much to pass up, and we're looking at at a Godfather/Cabaret-style split between the crowd-pleasing spectacle (though Cabaret is more overtly serious than Gravity) that can't quite pip the sprawling tour of American history for the wind. Heck, I think 12 Years even takes the Godfather hand of Picture, Adapted Screenplay and an acting award as its total haul.

That the Best Picture win is neck-and-neck between two movies I genuinely and significantly admire is a weird state of affairs that has not happened in my lifetime, and I pray does not happen again soon.


Best Director
Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave
Alexander Payne, Nebraska
David O. Russell, American Hustle
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

WON: ALFONSO CUARÓN
Will Win: Alfonso Cuarón
Spoiler: Steve McQueen
My Pick: Alfonso Cuarón

There is, at this point, no defensible reason to genuinely expect anyone other than DGA winner Cuarón, whose project is after all a hell of an achievement in visual storytelling and crafting an onscreen reality. That even 12 Years partisans seem content to say that it's not McQueen's best work - in fact, from a directorial standpoint, I even think it's his least - means there's no apparent urge to honor the man who is, let's be honest, a lot less likely than Cuarón to ever show up in this race ever again, unless he has a massive personality transplant before his next project enters production.


Best Actor
Christian Bale, American Hustle
Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

WON: MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY
Will Win: Matthew McConaughey
Spoiler: Leonardo DiCaprio
My Pick: Chiwetel Ejiofor

If there's going to be an acting category surprise - and there very often is, though not always - it'll be in this hugely overstuffed category, maybe the best of the whole lot (but then, it was an absurdly strong years for lead actors - you could make a top 5 entirely out of Oscar-friendly performances in mainstream American movies without including any of these nominees, and it would look just as great). McConaughey has been running the boards and has that whole "wow, you can act!" narrative, now in its second year, and that makes him hard to bet against. But anybody besides Bale has a fairly clear route to victory, if we're going to be rational about it.


Best Actress
Amy Adams, American Hustle
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Judi Dench, Philomena
Meryl Streep, August: Osage County

WON: CATE BLANCHETT
Will Win: CATE BLANCHETT
Spoiler: Amy Adams
My Pick: Cate Blanchett

Adams is the only nominee to have never won an Oscar, and this is one of the few places that American Hustle boosters can focus their energies on a win. but Blanchett has taken everything this awards season that wasn't nailed down, and she's considered due a "real" Oscar and not just a Supporting win, which makes no sense to me, but it's my favorite performance here too, so what do I know. There were a few hours back in January where it looked like the Woody Allen scandal might hurt her, but that was a long time ago and it self-evidently didn't take hold.


Best Supporting Actor
Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

WON: JARED LETO
Will Win: JARED LETO
Spoiler: Barkhad Abdi
My Pick: Michael Fassbender

I still don't see what's more than commonly special about Leto's performance, and I think Abdi's "from taxi driver to Tom Hanks kidnapper" personal narrative is, on paper, too wonderful to even think about passing up. And yet here we are, and while Leto's not as locked up as Blanchett, it would qualify as a massive upset for him to lose.


Best Supporting Actress
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave
Julia Roberts, August: Osage County
June Squibb, Nebraska

WON: LUPITA NYONG'O
Will Win: Lupita Nyong'o
Spoiler: Jennifer Lawrence
My Pick: Sally Hawkins

By no means 12 Years a Slave's safest category, but I think the consensus that even JLaw the Great and Powerful doesn't deserve back-to-back Oscars at age 23 - she's no Louise Rainer, for God's sake - has fully congealed, and Nyong'o's splashy breakthrough is safe enough that we don't need to debate it. Unless there's some massive groundswell of support for Squibb that nobody's even thinking about predicting; this is, after all, the only place that Nebraska could even conceivably win.

Incidentally, this is the only acting category for which I would, given my druthers, throw out everybody and start over from scratch. Sarah Paulson's absence genuinely pisses me off.


Best Adapted Screenplay
12 Years a Slave, by John Ridley
Before Midnight, by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, & Ethan Hawke
Captain Phillips, by Billy Ray
Philomena, by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope
The Wolf of Wall Street, by Terence Winter

WON: 12 YEARS A SLAVE
Will Win: 12 Years a Slave
Spoiler: Philomena
My Pick: Before Midnight, but not in this category

12 Years is too big an event film to win nothing, and this is certainly its safest berth. There are unconvincing arguments for Philomena (a BAFTA win, but that it had home court advantage there), but we'd have to assume that the Academy genuinely hates 12 Years for it to miss here.


Best Original Screenplay
American Hustle, Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
Blue Jasmine, by Woody Allen
Dallas Buyers Club, by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack
Her, by Spike Jonze
Nebraska, by Bob Nelson

WON: HER
Will Win: Her
Spoiler: American Hustle
My Pick: American Hustle

Best Picture is impossible to predict because it is capricious; this is, in my eyes, the actual hardest category to predict all night. WGA says we go with Her, and that's pretty damn telling; but this is also American Hustle's strongest play in any of its categories, and do we really want to predict that the nomination leader goes home empty-handed? There's precedent for it to go either way, but nothing to make you sleep soundly at night.


Best Cinematography
The Grandmaster (Philippe Le Sourd)
Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Bruno Delbonnel)
Nebraska (Phedon Papamichael)
Prisoners (Roger Deakins)

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Inside Llewyn Davis
My Pick: Gravity

The farther I get from the early hand-wringing about "oh, but it's digital!", the more I think that Gravity's cinematography can be compared to Avatar and Life of Pi only if we are using it as a stick to beat up on them. Emmanuel Lubezki still made all the decisions about lighting and movement, it looks in virtually every frame like something he shot, and the much-publicised "lighting Sandra's face" anecdote makes it clear that it was a shitload of work for it too look so casually flawless. Anyway, the argument that it's not "real" because he's not using a camera somewhat misses the fact that in any case, Lubezki isn't actually responsible for the mechanical actions that cause movie to be captured; he has a team of assistants to do the finagling for him (and with the long shots he favors, there's a lot of finagling to be done). In this case, they're using keyboards and computers to do their work instead of rotating dials on a lens; the creative work is the same either way.

All of which is my way of saying: Lubezki basically can't lose. I don't mean to tempt fate like that. But he basically can't.


Best Editing
12 Years a Slave (Joe Walker)
American Hustle (Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers, Alan Baumgarten)
Captain Phillips (Christopher Rouse)
Dallas Buyers Club (John Mac McMurphy, Martin Pensa)
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger)

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Captain Phillips
My Pick: Gravity

Almost as hard as Original Screenplay, and for not dissimilar reasons: Captain Phillips isn't winning anywhere else, and it's a Best Picture nominee and all. And it won the ACE award, which is telling, but not definitively so. For its part, Gravity is too close to taking the top prize for me to confidently discard its chances of winning a prize that so often goes hand-in-hand with Best Picture. I do not like this one, not one tiny bit. Incidentally, if any of the other three wins, it will be taking Best Picture along with it.


Best Production Design
12 Years a Slave (Adam Stockhausen; Alice Baker)
American Hustle (Judy Becker; Heather Loeffler)
Gravity (Andy Nicholson; Rosie Goodwin, Joanne Woollard)
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin; Beverley Dunn)
Her (K.K. Barrett; Gene Serdena)

WON: THE GREAT GATSBY
Will Win: THE GREAT GATSBY
Spoiler: American Hustle
My Pick: Her

I've squinted and pretended there's some way to justify arguing that Her might win (it won't), and toyed with wondering if the Cinematography and VFX locks for Gravity might help it here (nope). Outside of some potential that the much more realitistic and grueling locations in 12 Years, along with its Best Picture pole position, might nudge its towards a win, Gatsby is far too cleanly in line with everything the Academy has ever loved in this category: glitz, style, and scale.


Best Costume Design
12 Years a Slave (Patricia Norris)
American Hustle (Michael Wilkinson)
The Grandmaster (William Chang Suk Ping)
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
The Invisible Woman (Michael O'Connor)

WON: THE GREAT GATSBY
Will Win: THE GREAT GATSBY
Spoiler: American Hustle
My Pick: I have not seen all of the nominees

Costuming is already a significant aspect of the novel; Catherine Martin makes it damn near the overriding aspect of the movie. Gaudy or gorgeous, take your pick, but there's too much volume to ignore. 12 Years is too drably realistic; American Hustle is probably too recent (though I wouldn't be, like, SHOCKED shocked if it won), and the other two films are much too small.


Best Makeup & Hairstyling
Dallas Buyers Club
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
The Lone Ranger

WON: DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
Will Win: Dallas Buyers Club
Spoiler: Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
My Pick: Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa

A category that pretty much misfired in getting to the final three. None is objectively and by a vast margin better than the other two; in the absence of other pressures, Dallas is by far the least embarrassing outcome.


Best Score
The Book Thief (John Williams)
Gravity (Steven Price)
Her (William Butler and Owen Pallett)
Philomena (Alexandre Desplat)
Saving Mr. Banks (Thomas Newman)

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Saving Mr. Banks
My Pick: Her

Gravity is set to join the list of worthy winners for the wrong reasons: it has some fascinatingly unconventional orchestrations and electronic manipulations, but the bit that voters will be thinking about is the syrupy "YOU WILL FEEL WHAT I TELL YOU TO FEEL" gestures in the final act. Desplat has to win eventually, but not as long as the music branch keeps passing up his great scores for his mediocre and middlebrow ones at the nomination stage.


Best Song
From Despicable Me 2: "Happy"
From Frozen: "Let It Go"
From Her: "The Moon Song"
From Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom: "Ordinary Love"

WON: "LET IT GO"
Will Win: "Let It Go"
Spoiler: "Ordinary Love"
My Pick: "Let It Go"

If it was just U2, or just Pharrell Williams, we might even have a race on our hands. But if there is an anti-"Let It Go" contingent, it has no flag to rally around. And even a brief tour of YouTube will demonstrate that if there is an anti-"Let It Go" contingent, it is badly outnumbered.


Best Sound Mixing
Captain Phillips
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Gravity
Inside Llewyn Davis
Lone Survivor

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Inside Llewyn Davis
My Pick: Gravity

Musicals typically have a leg up here, and I am reminded when the under-nominated Letters from Iwo Jima won a sound award, apparently to send it home with some hardware. But honestly, you'd have to be pretty dim to suggest that Inside Llewyn Davis is in striking position here. The work done in Gravity is great, but a touch subtle; I would be likely to suggest it would be passed over if it didn't seem clear that the film is heading for a pretty major sweep.


Best Sound Editing
All Is Lost
Captain Phillips
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Lone Survivor

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: Captain Phillips
My Pick: All Is Lost

My single point of pause: loud action movies do great here, loud war movies not least. But I do not imagine that Lone Survivor was near the top of anybody's screener pile. The logic that leads to X-ing off Gravity in Sound Mixing applies to almost exactly the same degree here, though if it somehow manages to split the two with Captain Phillips, I should think that this is the ever so slightly more vulnerable category.


Best Visual Effects
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Iron Man 3
The Lone Ranger
Star Trek Into Darkness

WON: GRAVITY
Will Win: Gravity
Spoiler: I have no clue, and it doesn't matter
My Pick: Gravity

For the second consecutive year, VFX is the absolute, stranglehold lock of the night. I don't doubt that Gravity ended up with more votes than the other four combined.


Best Animated Feature
The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Célestine
Frozen
The Wind Rises

WON: FROZEN
Will Win: Frozen
Spoiler: The Wind Rises
My Pick: Ernest & Célestine

Lingering affection for the retiring Miyazaki aside, there are hits and then there are culture-devouring Zeitgeist monsters, and this strikes me as an absurdly easy waltz for Walt Disney Animation to finally snag its first-ever win in this category.


Best Foreign Language Film
The Broken Circle Breakdown (Belgium)
The Great Beauty (Italy)
The Hunt (Denmark)
The Missing Picture (Cambodia)
Omar (Palestine)

WON: THE GREAT BEAUTY
Will Win: The Great Beauty
Spoiler: The Hunt
My Pick: I have not seen all of the nominees

It's plainly a three-way race between the European films. And while The Hunt has Incredible Gravity and Seriousness on its side, the luxuriant spectacle of The Great Beauty feels more in-character for this category's tastes. The Broken Circle Breakdown is a little bit gritty and low-stakes for me to see it trumping either of the other two. But this is a "throw a dart and see where it lands" category this year if any of them are.


Best Documentary
20 Feet from Stardom
The Act of Killing
Cutie and the Boxer
Dirty Wars
The Square

WON: 20 FEET FROM STARDOM
Will Win: The Square
Spoiler: 20 Feet from Stardom
My Pick: The Act of Killing

The new rules that let anyone vote, regardless of whether they've attended sanctioned screenings of all five movies, gives the most popular and likable film a leg up on the rest, and that should just about seal it up for 20 Feet; but I can't help but feel that The Square is so unbelievably overt in its obvious historical importance that the voters - who do like to feel important - won't be able to pass it by. It's a hard call between those two, though. Cutie feels relatively trivial, Dirty Wars is obviously not going to get in over The Square for the "politics first" bloc, and Act of Killing has the problem of being impossible to describe without making it sound like a nightmare; I suspect that most members haven't even watched it.


Best Documentary Short Subject
CaveDigger
Facing Fear
Karama Has No Walls
The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall

WON: THE LADY IN NUMBER 6: MUSIC SAVED MY LIFE
Will Win: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Spoiler: Karama Has No Walls
My Pick: I have not seen any of the nominees

Let's be crude: The Lady in Number 6 - whose subject passed away just last week, at age 109 - is a Holocaust movie. It's been a little while since one showed up, but the short categories have been the last holdouts of the Academy's incredibly visible Holocaust movie fetish, and I see no reason to bet against that.


Best Animated Short Subject
Feral
Get a Horse!
Mr. Hublot
Possessions
Room on the Broom

WON: MR. HUBLOT
Will Win: Get a Horse!
Spoiler: Mr. Hublot
My Pick: I have not seen all of the nominees

The recent rule change that started last year - no proof is necessary that the voter has seen all five films - puts anything studio-related at an unfair advantage; it puts glossy films featuring madly iconic pop culture figures that were attached to massive Zeitgeist hits during their theatrical run at what I would tend to consider a prohibitive advantage.

Best Live-Action Short Subject
Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me)
Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything)
Helium
Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?)
The Voorman Problem

WON: HELIUM
Will Win: The Voorman Problem
Spoiler: Helium
My Pick: I have not seen any of the nominees

The category has been favoring English-language films lately, and only The Voorman Problem fits that bill of these five (bonus: it stars famous people, and it was using that logic that led me to my second-ever correct prediction in this category with The Shore a couple of years ago. Helium is about a dying kid,and for that reason can't be discounted; nothing about the other three on paper sounds like a natural fit for the Academy's established taste in this category (least of all Just Before Losing Everything, which I've fairly uniformly heard to be the best of the five).

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MOTIFS IN CINEMA: APPRECIATION OF LIFE

Motifs in Cinema is a discourse across film blogs, assessing the way in which various thematic elements have been used in the 2013 cinematic landscape. How does a common theme vary in use from a comedy to a drama? Are filmmakers working from a similar canvas when they assess the issue of death or the dynamics of revenge? Like most things, a film begins with an idea – Motifs in Cinema assesses how various themes emanating from a single idea change when utilised by varying artists.

-Andrew K, Encore's World of Film & TV

When I picked the theme "appreciation of life" as part of this year's Motifs in Cinema blogathon it was at least partially because it struck me that there was, in Gravity, a perfect candidate for the theme that was also one of my favorite films of 2013, and was furthermore something that just about everyone has seen and would thus make good discussing fodder. It was so perfect, in fact, that I couldn't bring myself to write about it. So off I went to look for other candidates, starting with the slate of Best Picture Oscar nominees, since any attempt to talk about film in America from a cultural perspective needs to be aware that the Oscars exist, and to my surprise I found that just about every one of the nine films found there fit rather well into to this theme, which suddenly snapped a disparate collection of stories and styles into a focused collection of movies. The obvious, Gravity, with its literal "she has learned to appreciate life" climax; and almost as obvious, Dallas Buyers Club and Her, in which, respectively, a physically sick and an emotionally sick man find ways to give shape and meaning to their lives again. There is the grave 12 Years a Slave, in which we in the audience, watching unbridled suffering, are made acutely aware of ho much better our lives are than the ones onscreen; the light Philomena and the melancholic Nebraska are both parables of finding ways to appreciate life even in its fading years, whether from the perspective of an old woman gaining closure and finding that even the most arbitrary events in her past have built up to something meaningful in its way, or the perspective of a son realising that this is the life we've got with our loved ones, and it needs to be spent well. Even The Wolf of Wall Street espouses a cockeyed sort of appreciation for life: life in a very wanton, warped register, to be sure, but a life lived hard and enthusiastically (I've got nothing for American Hustle).

But the film I decided to to focus on is the one that presents this theme in a strictly negative sense: Captain Phillips, a military procedural slash maritime thriller slash political essay which would not seem to have much to say about life at all, unless as a much reduced version of Gravity's theme: once you've been through hell, you appreciate everything else in life a great deal more. And that's not absent, but it's not the thing I have in mind. I am chiefly thinking about the film's already-iconic final sequence, so if you haven't seen the film - and I recommend that you do - skip head to the next paragraph, because here there are spoilers. Everyone ready? Okay, so I'm of course referring to Richard Phillips's film-ending bout of shock, so memorably played by Tom Hanks in a career-peak scene. It's a moment that the whole film has been building to, but it's chiefly triggered by two stimuli: first, the rescue itself, and the massive drop in adrenaline that naturally occurs when any of us are removed from a stressful situation; second, the excessive violence with which that rescue is enacted. The film has been accused in some circles of rah-rah American boosterism, which I find to be a frankly bizarre misreading (now I know what it feels like to have been on the other side of the Zero Dark Thirty torture debate, I guess), because the whole point of the sequence in which most of the pirates are shot is that it's profoundly useless and upsetting: to us and to Phillips alike, who spends literally the rest of the film rattled as hell, to the point of incoherence, and not least because he just saw people killed right in front of him. Screenwriter Billy Ray and director Paul Greengrass have played a game throughout the film of exploring the human side of Somali pirates (a phrase second only to "Arab terrorist" in its signification of immoral, inhuman Otherness to an American viewer, at least), explaining without necessarily justifying or rationalising what can lead to their behavior, and by the end of the film we are quite comfortable with regarding them as humans just as desperate and worn out as their victim. Their sudden death hits with one clear message: there is no value in ending any human life, and these people had aspirations and desires just like anyone, and now that's snuffed out. It leads us to the appreciation of life by demonstrating how brutally it can be ended; it's genuinely horrifying, with Hanks's meltdown making it clear that the movie itself expects and encourages us to be thoroughly knocked off-kilter by this moment.

That's a big ol' block of text, so let's move beyond the usual suspects of the Best Picture slate to find an Appreciation of Life in someplace complete different: noisy, generic, CGI-addled popcorn cinema. I refer to Iron Man 3, a film that seems to have evaporated from the cultural conversation with remarkable speed for the fifth highest-grossing movie in the history of the world-wide box office. And I'm not here to call that a sin against the art, though it is, by the corporatised standards of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of the more complex and thoughtful and psychologically alive films in its franchise.

Now, certainly, one doesn't go about willy-nilly accusing PG-13 blockbusters of undue appreciation for life; their very stock in trade is gleefully "fun" mass death (recall - or don't, it'll make you live a longer, happier life - the "Superman is a city-destroying psychopath" debate around Man of Steel). And to be sure, Iron Man 3 has its fair share of wanton, amoral destruction. But think of where it ends, won't you? After having saved the world (yawn) again, Robert Downey, Jr's Tony Stark finds that what he values and wants out of live is to live simply with the person he loves most, away from the high-pressure needs of superheroics and destruction. It is a summer action movie whose ultimate message is "embrace quiet domesticity", and that clear-cut admission that there is more joy to be gotten from eschewing the glamor and "cool" factor of superhero movies and their wish fulfillment is striking and rare. Of course, they're going to find a way to fuck it all up when the next round of sequels happens, but for one year, that was the emotional territory being staked out, and for one year, it is pleasing to think that there might be room for quiet appreciation in among all the booming and shooting.

"Appreciation of life" is something of a cornerstone theme of drama, so it's no surprise to see it popping up in all kind of random places in between the opposing poles of Oscar-nominated drama and glossy popcorn flick. It's the beating heart beneath the year's most ebullient, Zeitgeisty fad, for one thing: what else is "Let It Go" from Frozen if not anthem for being appreciative of what you've got? The obvious answer to that rhetorical question is that it's mostly about being true to your inner self, but I suppose my argument is that in the context of Frozen, they're the same thing. The film's first act depicts a claustrophobic, literally lifeless castle, all loneliness and hiding and trying to symbolically die away so that nobody knows you ever existed; the song that launched a thousand memes is about specifically repudiating that, embracing what's around you, and engaging with the world - none of which is, to be fair, entirely borne out by subsequent developments in the narrative, but that owes to Frozen's fuzzy script more than a song whose climax involves the singer greeting the rising sun, the hoariest and most noble symbol for refreshed and reborn life and vitality in the whole of human culture.

Since I've mostly paid attention here to some tremendously prominent films, let me wrap up with something small, low-key, and intimate. Set in the woods in the aftermath of a fire, David Gordon Green's return to pastoral filmmaking, Prince Avalanche, would have every excuse to ladle the "rebirth after destruction" metaphors pretty heavily, so let's be very thankful that it doesn't. It is, however, a film that's literally all about life; it is maybe the most open and complete embodiment of the "appreciation of life" motif in any film I saw in 2013. It is about one thing and only that: two men with complicated, messy, fast lives are put in a position where they must relax, open up, and listen: to each other, to themselves, to the natural world. It is specifically, but never explicitly, about the act of re-learning how to appreciate everything in life - not just one's own life, but life as a concept, life as the thing that is all around at every moment. It's not exceptionally sophisticated or even, perhaps, successful, but in drawing our attention to how we live every moment of our lives, it's the film that does the most thorough job of reminding us in the audience to slow down and breathe as much as it forces the characters to. And that process - slowing down, eyes wide open, paying attention - is the heart and soul of appreciating what it means to be alive.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1915: In which we learn that the history of women in the director's chair is older and more robust than one might suppose

In her day, Lois Weber was regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest film director in America, but unlike contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Charles Chaplin, her name has not survived to any kind of broad recognition among general film buffs or even those with a particular fancy for silents. This has a great deal to do with availability, the bane of the early cinema enthusiast: out of the 137 films that the IMDb credits to Weber between 1911 and 1934, the best estimate is that only 17 exist in full or in part, and of that much reduced list, only a mere two - 1915's Hypocrites and 1921's The Blot are even a little bit easy to lay your hands on. There's not much you can do to keep a director, even a very great one, alive in the hearts and minds of cinephiles with just two films to dangle in front of them.

And while I can't speak, obviously, to the 135 Weber films I haven't seen, "very great" is the absolute least we can say about Hypocrites, our present subject (The Blot is a fine, rich work, but not in the same league). If you'll indulge me in some wanton hyperbole that can't harm anybody, all these many years later, it's a flat-out masterpiece, maybe the most engrossing and sophisticated and all-round goddamn beautiful movie I have seen from that decade of American film (admittedly, I haven't seen all that much). If it's not quite as freakishly ambitious and accomplished as Griffith's The Birth of a Nation from around the same time (they premiered within two months of each other), it's certainly not simply because of the latter film's notorious racism that I find Weber's film to be vastly more watchable, and at 50 minutes long - less than a third of the running time of the Griffith epic - it still manages to cram in so much thematic density that I almost don't know what to do with it.

As is almost inevitably the case, given the film's title, Hypocrites is a work of social commentary. It fits into what has been reported to be a career-long obsession of Weber's with something that we might call moral evangelism: an earnest endorsement of Christian values that wasn't inherently connected, in the artist's life, with any particularly dogmatic Christian behavior. In fact, it's religious hypocrisy first and foremost that Weber looks to take down in this film, in the form of people for whom religion is totally unrelated to any code of ethics and behavior, serving instead a mostly social function. The film takes place in two parts: in the first, a local pastor (Courtenay Foote) finds that his flock has no interest in his or anyone else's exposition of Truth; after a certain time, he falls sleep or dies, and we are presented to an allegorical story in which a medieval monk, Gabriel (Foote also) is driven by religious passion to create a statue of Truth. When it is revealed in a grand event for the whole town that the statue is of a naked woman, Gabriel is hounded by the outraged citizenry, egged on by a venal abbot (Herbert Standing), who happens to look just exactly like the most prominent member of the community who finds the pastor's teachings too darn religious for church back in the present day story.

That's not even getting to the part of the film that literally gives up being a narrative in favor of a series of vignettes in which Gabriel and the ghostly Naked Truth (Margaret Edwards) pop in to comment on the venality of early 20th Century life. Hypocrites quickly reveals itself as a film heavy on symbolism and allegory, with a very clear-cut message to share with us all about how awful people are, these days or 400 years ago, doesn't matter which. There's absolutely no chance of missing out on Weber's polemic, particularly when she insists on putting in title cards like this one, in case you've missed all the nudity metaphors:

But just because Hypocrites is a lecture, that doesn't mean it can't also be absolutely scintillating cinema, completely and compulsively watchable. As I've said, it boasts a remarkably sophisticated level of technique for a film of 1915, using double exposures literally from the opening credits to literally layer its meaning on top of its narrative throughout. The incorporation of Edwards - fully nude throughout the movie - as a ghostly presence adds a jolt of surrealism that does not jive with the rather more sedate aesthetic of the film itself (though compared to a lot of mid-'10s cinema, Hypocrites is not beholden to the stagey tableaux-style blocking that makes earlier silents a rough sit for modern audiences: compare it to the previous year's The Squaw Man, and the vastly increased range of shot choices and use of camera movement to emphasise certain spaces and objects is immediately, and gratifyingly apparent), and this gives the film a very specific kind of freshness, even to modern eyes: it collides the old-fashioned with the weirdly timeless, and this gives it a visual energy that remains, to myself if no-one else, remarkably appealing. And that's setting aside the shots that are simply beautiful, including some breathtaking silhouettes against a river.

Anyway, to get back to the meat of it, Weber does an inordinately good job of using the images to communicate her message, making things like that "naked truth" title card doubly unnecessary; the contrast between Foote's presentational poses and the relaxed, casual crowd shots of his parishoners tells us in two images precisely what Weber thinks about the difference between the hard work of good behavior and real faith and the lazy reliance on fashionable activity. And it should be noted, I don't know that I agree with much of what Hypocrites believes about morality, but Weber presents it in such graceful, potent visual terms that I certainly want to.

It should be noted that the film itself was subject to the exact small-minded sniping that Weber herself indicts: the considerable quantities of nudity in the film angered the guardians of decency, who didn't care to notice the niceties of the metaphor about nakedness being true and thus beautiful that the film hardly attempts to make subtle. Hypocrites was thus bogged down in a lot of controversy, not helped by the fact that Bosworth Inc, the releasing company, was a new independent firm (Weber had left Universal in 1914 when it became clear that the larger studio had no sustained interest in feature-length stories, though the terminology would have of course been different; three- and four-reelers, as would have been said then). Eventually the argument that religious art - and this is such a thing, after a fashion - has a longstanding relationship with human nudes was enough to secure the film release, but by that point, society had made Weber's point for her: people are hostile and downright mean when you try to make them experience things outside of their comfort zone. At any rate, we're now far enough away, with nudity in cinema normalised enough (though hardly in silent film, and the film still feels taboo-busting as a result) to appreciate the haunting, poetic, and insightful film without the baggage of its initial release. Much of the technique and artfulness of the film would, in the passing years, be replicated or replaced and cease to seem so special, but the moral and intellectual boldness evidence by Weber here is as rare in Hollywood filmmaking a century later as it was at the time the film was brand new.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1915
-D.W. Griffith's infamous The Birth of a Nation codifies everything that cinema of the day could be capable of at its greatest causing virtually non-stop moral confusion for film scholars for the rest of history
-Theda Bara plays "The Vamp" and becomes cinema's first sex symbol in A Fool There Was
-A short biopic of Edgar Allan Poe is the first of many films titled The Raven to not actually adapt "The Raven" in any meaningful way

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1915
-Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen create the now-lost early horror film Der Golem
-Louis Feuillade's serial Les Vampires begins
-The Italian Assunta Spina is one of the first extant films to explore largely realistic narrative and acting techniques

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ASH AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE

The opening image of Pompeii is an extreme close-up of a body covered in the ancient ash that exactly preserved its shape, against a black background, the sinewy camera movements letting us see every angle and the 3-D camera accentuating and exaggerating all the crags and shapes in glorious detail, using the best and brightest new technology to reach unprecedented new heights in the art of ogling dead bodies. Says it all, really.

The other thing that says it all: before the opening credits have finished running - and this is a movie without a pre-title sequence, mind - we've already been treated to two entirely different top-down shots of a pile of dead bodies all tangled up with each other.

Not that Pompeii is death porn, or anything else that might be outrageous enough to make infamous instead of merely a pleasantly crappy CGI epic. I'm more amused by the perpetual re-occurrence of the peculiar sin of dramatic works set in Ancient Roman times, which is that on the one hand, the storytellers seem downright puritanical in their zeal to condemn the Romans as unforgivable hedonists whose taste for tasteless, extravagant entertainment extended so far as to make the violent death of fellow humans ready fodder for a pleasant day at the theater. And then, of course, the work of drama we're watching (it's a trend that's older than cinema) goes out of its way to make all of the licentiousness of Rome look really exciting and lush, and frequently - certainly in the case of Pompeii - gets much of its entertainment value out of making a spectacle of people die. Hypocritical? Obviously, but not in a way that's particularly rankling. You can't go around expecting truly dumb art to have a unified, coherent ideological thrust, and there's not much whose obvious dumbness comes as pre-sold to us as a movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the only filmmaker alive for whom his video game adaptations generally qualify as his aesthetic peaks.

But there's no reason to be snarky, when it comes right down to it. Anderson's films might be bad, including Pompeii, but they have a certain awareness of their own badness and refusal to live down to it, as it were. Compare it to fellow Class of '14 sword-and-sandal film The Legend of Hercules, if you want to see a genuinely awful movie with nothing to recommend it. Whatever failing he has a storyteller and chronicle of human emotions, Anderson at least knows from garish, indulgent CGI action; at the very minimum, he gives good 3-D spectacle, playing up everything that is splashy, kitschy and tacky in all the most glorious ways. We do not go the films like this for Gravity-style immersion; but there is much to be said for the direct, simple appeal of having somebody throw shit right the hell at your face, and there's not a lot of things that throw more shit with more gusto than an exploding volcano, after all.

Now, the caveat is that the actual eruption of Vesuvius and the subsequent destruction of the titular city that is pretty much the sole thing that anyone attending a film titled Pompeii is going to be interested in seeing, while pleasantly overbaked and noisy (in fact, I have to concede that the film has a pretty great if not necessarily surprising and imaginative soundscape), is buried at the tail end of a movie that is mind-blowingly dull, except for the director's zeal in staging scenes so that things are always very prominently in front of other things. The movie's nominal plot plays like a Telephone Game corruption of Gladiator: in the Roman-held portion of the distant Britannia, a venal general kills the living fuck out of a rebellious tribe of Celts; a young boy among them plays dead long enough to strike back, and is made a slave for his troubles. Years later, the boy, grown up to be a gladiator named Milo (Kit Harrington) but known only as the Celt, is the best pit fighter in Londinium, and it it in this capacity that he comes to the attention of Pompeiian gladiator promoter Graecus (Joe Pingue), away from the heart of the empire and hating it intensely. In no time at all, Milo is on his way to Pompeii, along the way catching the eye of young noblewoman Cassia (Emily Brown), daughter of civic leader Severus (Jared Harris). At this time, Severus is trying to make a deal with an important Roman senator, Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), who only has an interest in making leering, carnivorous faces at Cassia whenever she enters the room, and it just so happens that he was also the general responsible for killing Milo's family. In the span of just a day and a night, Milo meets, antagonises, and befriends master gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), meets Cassia a second time and falls deeply in love, and comes to the attention of Corvus, who will not even let a sea of ash and burning pumice stand between him and his desire to murder Milo in the most violent way possible and clear the way to rape Cassia.

All I can say is, thank God for Kiefer Sutherland. Which I'm pretty sure is a phrase I've never even thought of saying before. His unhinged, lip-smacking venality in the role of the melodramatic over-the-top bad guy is by an incredibly vast margin the best part of the human side of Pompeii, keeping the film situated securely in the tradition of gaudy theatrical extravagance where all the best Roman-era genre pictures tend to live. Certainly, the deck is stacked much in his favor, with Harrington (looking like a dollar store Eric Bana) and Browning (looking like somebody's out-of-control attempt to make a brunette Princess Zelda on deviantART) proving the most watery and unconvincing romantic leads since... well, I've already gone and reminded myself that The Legend of Hercules exists, so I have to cool it with the hyperbole. But they absolutely suck, and it's bitterly hard to deal with the movie in the long passages where we're expected to care more about them looking blankly at each other in what the keening score promises is lust than the surprisingly adequate staging of Pompetii, with its not-unconvincing costumes and surprisingly invisible CGI. To say nothing about the emphatic destruction of same, a sequence which Anderson and his team of writers insistently keep interrupting with dramatic interludes involving Corvus's surprisingly dogged pursuit of the lovers even as buildings are literally falling down on top of him. Not since Billy Zane ran through a sinking Titanic while brandishing a pistol has a disaster movie villain been so hellbent on being the one to kill his rival in the midst of an act of God.

All that being said, though, the film is mostly just silly and dim, with just enough awareness of where to hit us with a miniature earthquake to keep things from sagging too much. And while Anderson makes terrible films, he's much more adept than e.g. your Roland Emmerich at telegraphing his own awareness that the whole thing is kind of cheesy and idiotic, and keeping the tone light that way. Pompeii is not any good, please don't get me wrong, but it understands that it order to pay for not being any good, it has to scrounge up some good moments of kineticism and just enough visual pizzazz to catch your eye as you're looking for something on TV to put off doing real work on a Saturday afternoon. Meeting the most unbelievably minimal threshold to justify its own existence doesn't sound like much, and it isn't much, but when so many films in this mold can't even manage to do that...

5/10

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OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARIES I MISSED IN 2013: LATE SPRING

There is much about The Square that is admirable, and I don't want to interrupt myself once I've gotten going on about it, so I want to get my single biggest negative comment out of the way first. This documentary is fantastic journalism, but pretty run-of-the-mill cinema. As so many are. There is a test I run on every single "issues" doc that I come across, which consists in its entirety of asking "Would I learn just as much in just as compelling a way if this was a book on the same subject?" In the case of The Square, that answer is a clear-cut "no", but it does introduce a brand new question: "Would I learn just as much if this was a blog that I read at least weekly?" Which is an a theoretical "yes", but since director Jehane Noujaim doesn't have a blog and I concede that I probably wouldn't read it very often if she did, it's sort of immaterial. The Square exists, and not just our contemporary selves but future historians looking for firsthand documents of the fascinating ongoing period known as the Arab Spring have every reason to be grateful that it does. This is some heady, rich stuff, embedded reportage of a particularly high order of accomplishment.

The film picks up in the winter of 2011, by which point Cairo's Tahrir Square had become the gathering place for a massive protest against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian-born Noujaim and her camera arrived quickly to record as much of the activity of what was immediately recognisable as a history-making event as possible; what she could not have known any more than anybody was just how big this event would turn out to be. The revolution sparked by that protest took down not only Mubarak's regime but also, in evolved forms, the two governments (one military, one religious) that followed it, and by any reasonable definition, the events that Noujaim began recording three years ago are still quite ongoing. The nature of this project can be attested to by the fact that, after the film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2013, Noujaim continued filming and adding new material as Egypt continued to bubble and roil with unrest, presenting a new edit of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival the following September. I do not know if the TIFF cut of the film is the same as the one picked by Netflix to be the first feature film it would distributed theatrically and online; nor do I know which one was "officially" nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar. But that's for the bookkeepers. Much of what makes The Square essential, in fact, is that it's an organic process turned into cinema: a year from now, Noujaim could assemble an entirely new narrative by expanding the footage yet again, and I frankly hope that she does.

To give the overall movie shape - and perhaps this emerged only as a happy accident - Noujaim relies on three figures to be her guiding lights through the two and a half years that the film covers. One of these is Ahmed Hassan, a young democratic activist fighting out of stated humanist principles but mostly from the enthusiastic passion of youth; he seems drawn to the romantic ideal of a revolution as much as by its political possibilities, rather akin to a figure out of a '60s Godard movie. The second is Magdy Ashour, a devout Muslim and member of the controversial Muslim Brotherhood, the political/religious party that largely spearheaded the early stages of the revolution, but perhaps with an eye towards making Egypt an Islamic dictatorship, and not the beacon of Arabic democracy hoped for by other revolutionaries. The third is Khalid Abdalla, a Scotland-born actor with several English-language films to his credit who, The Square's version of things at least, became one of the main emissaries between the revolution and the Western media, owing undoubtedly to his rich facility with English and poise in front of a camera.

The film does not aim to be a psychological study, though Ahmed and Magdy especially serve as excellent conduits for Noujaim to explore the human side of the events being depicted. The gradual shift in Ahmed's perspective from sheer giddy enthusiasm to a somewhat bemused understanding that realpolitik must be considered gives the movie a shape and thematic thrust it might otherwise lack; meanwhile, the shocking change in his and Magdy's faces over the period covered, a fleet 104 minutes onscreen but 30 long months in reality, is all the argument Noujaim needs to make to show that despite the optimistic bromides of phrases like "people power" and "Arab Spring", the act of revolution is hard and wearying, with the pattern of so many hopes raised and dashed and raised again as one new strongman after another tried to remodel Egypt in his image carved onto the revolutionaries' increasingly rough faces.

Perhaps I need to roll back on my initial judgment, then: this is cinematic, for in an amongst all the talking heads and title cards, Noujaim has a fine knack for using visuals to tell us exactly what's going on: a helicopter shot of the third wave of protests, in which all of Cairo seems to be a scurrying anthill of activity with every available foot of pavement occupied by one of millions of protesters, is among the most dramatic single images relating political activity that I, for one, have ever seen. And the contrast between this and the frequent intimacy of scenes taking place in the corner of a room where passionate revolutionaries debate and shout and have their small panic attacks, not caring if the camera is there or not, presents a fine, all-encompassing portrait of how history is lived and made. The film is not analytical and it is not subtle in any way, but speaking strictly as a document - a record of events fully deserving of the recording - it is a wholly essential work of non-fiction.

8/10

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OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARIES I MISSED IN 2013: PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

Imagine, if you will, that one marriage you know that seems absolutely miserable and dysfunctional, the one that seems like it should have ended years ago, and nobody understands why it hasn't yet. And yet the participants are obviously committed to each with the ferocity of a rabid dog, making it clear by this point that if they haven't split up ten times over by now, they'll be together until the end of days. We all know that couple; and that couple is at the center of Cutie and the Boxer, a documentary about a fascinating and horrifying pair of human beings that feints at being a study of how artists live their lives. But really, it's not that at all; it is a very close and at times very uncomfortably intimate domestic drama that suggests, among other things, the terribly unstable mental place one must reach in order to want to be an artist in the first place.

The couple in question are Ushio and Noriko Shinohara. They met in the early 1970s, when Ushio was a struggling avant-garde artist who'd recently set himself up in New York; Noriko, an aspiring artist brand new to the United States, was quickly swept away by the authority and grandeur of the Real Artist in front of her, making representational sculptures from discarded objects and trash as a commentary on the artistic process itself. They fell in love, moved in together, and before a year had passed, Noriko was pregnant; and from that day till this, it seems from the film's evidence, there has been a bristling, rancorous division between them.

Director Zachary Heinzerling firmly associates himself with Noriko's perspective, not from any apparent motivation than that of an intuitive documentarian who knows where the story is coming from: Noriko, possessing clear artistic ambitions of her own, was rather quickly subordinated to the status of housekeeper, agent, manager, chef, and nanny, never getting an opportunity to express herself in the way she'd hoped for when she met up with Ushio in the first place. For his part, Ushio is a bit of a train-wreck all told: addicted to alcohol, incapable of handling money in any sensible way, prone to bold artistic gestures full of self-righteousness that would be somewhat dubiously admirable in an ambitious twentysomething, but are vaguely awful in a man of 80. But even though Noriko feels compressed and artistically silenced by a very lopsided marriage, she gives as good as she gets, sniping and pushing back with sometimes wicked candor.

The film is not about how the Shinoharas are miserable wretches. It is, in a rather more complex and interesting way, about how they're actually quite a successful pair of old marrieds: how, in fact, they completely rely upon each other. I do not know if the film necessarily does a great job of actually demonstrating that Noriko is better off with Ushio than without him: if there are benefits to her besides habit, comfort, and familiarity, they are buried well indeed. But that, to an extent, is exactly the point the film is arguing: habit, comfort, and familiarity are not terrible things, particularly when they can be nudged aside to accommodate a certain degree of flexibility.

Which is exactly what happens. Inasmuch as the film has a narrative - it emerges slowly, after a full third of the movie has been about nothing else than capturing the couple's dynamic - it's about Noriko finally taking decisive action to make her own work of art after all these decades. This takes the form of a series of autobiographical paintings in something like comic book form that recasts her marriage through two cartoon characters named Cutie and Bullie (the "boxer" in the title is from Ushio's present method of painting: wrapping his hands in foam pads, dipping them in paint, and punching his way across a canvas. Thus do the two halves of the title give each member of the marriage a chance to speak for themselves). It's largely in the form of the Cutie narrative, animated in Flash or something like it, that the story of the Shinoharas' life together is related, along with some home movies and videos; thus it is that Noriko's perspective dominates, though given his brusque behavior and habitual drunkness, it's not clear that Ushio would be able or interested in telling his half of the story. At times, he seems almost pleased to know that his wife has been pissed off at him for their entire life together, and would perhaps endorse her version of events anyway.

The two sparring partners are remarkably comfortable in front of Heinzerling's camera, giving Cutie and the Boxer a casual closeness that is not by any means common in documentaries about people going through their lives, and this is beyond question the best thing the film has going for it. There's a natural desire to watch from the shadows as messy people go about the details of their even messier lives - at the time Heinzerling was filming, the Shinoharas were just about flat broke, and only a fortuitous gallery show that shows up in the film's back half kept them treading water - and by all means, this film is fairly terrific at that, while showcasing the ineffable mystery of love and companionship in a relaxed way that doesn't telegraph what it's doing in capital letters. I have to be honest though: however interesting the content is, watching people only takes you so far, and the very neutral tone the film adopts, alongside the generic aesthetic vocabulary, left me feeling a bit undernourished. It's not that every documentary biography has to adopt the warped and manipulative mentality of a Werner Herzog film; but at the same time, I don't think it would be an awful thing if more films did it.

The one word above all that suggests itself is "satisfying": it is a totally satisfying movie in all ways. But "satisfying" is not the same as, and is perhaps even in direct opposition to "exciting". By all means, Cutie and the Boxer treats its unique subjects with an admirable degree of frankness and clear-headed journalism. It just doesn't do anything else, and even after only 82 minutes, I found myself doubting that I had any more interest in these people or a desire to revisit their story, as presented here, for any conceivable reason.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1914: In which the Hollywood feature film is born, alongside the career of a showman whose excessive style would later be regarded as an archetype of the form

There are old movies - really old movies, I mean, movies from the first 15 or 20 years of cinema, when the visual language and narrative structures were so different from any of the norms we've grown accustomed to in the intervening decades that it's virtually a different art form altogether - so self-assured and visionary and cunningly-mounted that the modern viewer has to make hardly any adjustments to fall into the rhythm of the thing and find it totally enjoyable on its own merits, without any need to mentally adjust to the psychology of a generations-dead viewer. The Squaw Man is not one of those movies. Despite being one of the major box office hits of 1914, the movie lover of a century later - even the movie lover with a particular affection for early silents, as for example the present reviewer - can only gawk at the thing a little unbelievingly, and conclude, "well, things sure as hell used to be different".

Yes and no. Even by the standards of a 1914 feature, it would be a stretch to call The Squaw Man an especially sophisticated piece of filmmaking. This is partially because it was made by unsophisticated filmmakers: the short version of a story that reeks of myth (but then, so many silent-era making-of stories have at least a tang of legend to them) is that an entrepreneurial group made up of Samuel Goldwyn (then going by the name Goldfish), his brother-in-law Jesse L. Lasky, Arthur Friend, and stage director Cecil B. DeMille, whom Goldwyn/Goldfish had worked with in the theater, decided it was time to break into the wild new movie industry, buying the rights to a fantastically successful play by Edwin Milton Royle to smooth that process out. DeMille proving to have not a lick of knowledge about making movies, short film veteran Oscar Apfel (though the short/feature distinction was much more fluid then than it is now) was hired on to serve as co-director, and by some accounts all DeMille really did was watch and learn. The production was set to take place around Flagstaff, Arizona; upon arriving, the crew found it much too unphotogenic for their needs, and so rode the train the rest of the way into Los Angeles, California. There, they made The Squaw Man in December of 1913 and January of 1914, having so little clue what they were doing that they ended up creating a print that couldn't be projected, and had to be jerry-rigged for the film's premiere. Which I've seen referenced as being on 15 or 17 February (post-production used to be a hell of a lot shorter in the medium's Wild West days), neither of which squares with the date of 23 February given in the press book, though perhaps that was merely a date after which it was available for sale.

The point being, no matter how much we want to strip out the romantic bullshit from the story, we still have here a movie made by, essentially, a bunch of well-heeled amateurs. It shows, though not consistently. The thing that surprises me most about The Squaw Man - a film that I've now seen twice, and I do not completely know why - is how erratic the whole thing is. Parts of it are truly wonderful, taking full advantage of the California landscape to eke every drop of production value out of what wasn't a very impressive budget by the day's standards: there is some truly beautiful location photography (the IMDb suggests that the cinematographer we have to thank for this is one Alfred Gandolfi; I don't know how far I trust that site on information for even American movies this old), including one particular shot on the top of a bluff that shows of the splendor of nature with a screen-devouring grandeur that reminds us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the 32-year-old making his cinematic directorial debut here would end up making some of the most ridiculously splashy, over-indulgent, costly epics in the history of the art form. And I also must admire the outlandish ingenuity by which DeMille and Apfel present the reality of a Western boom town: they simply built their main interior set right alongside a railroad track, and filmed the action as trains roared by, adding a priceless measure of verisimilitude.

On the other hand, there's so much of the film that's just plain wrong, outdated and clumsy by 1914's standards as surely as by ours. The worst is absolutely the way the story is paced: at 74 minutes, the film is less an adaptation of the play than a condensation, and several of the early scenes are flat illustrations of action that the viewer was presumed to already know. In introducing us to cousins James Wynnegate (Dustin Farnum, replicating his stage triumph and inaugurating a film career) and Sir Henry, Earl of Kerhill (Monroe Salisbury), the filmmakers are so eager to push through the exposition that they put up a title card explaining exactly what we're about to see, before presenting a wide shot of activity that we'd otherwise lack any context for. The kind of cinema in which the visuals served mainly as an illustration for the intertitles wasn't exactly dead by 1914, but it was certainly behind the curve. I would certainly get huffier about the notion of a film that's more interested in dramatising barely-connected scenes which only make sense to people who know the source material well if we were just a little bit farther removed from the Harry Potter franchise.

Worse than the clumsy structure of the story - and worse than the aching, dated melodrama, which finds James taking the fall for Sir Henry's embezzlement to spare the woman he loves, Henry's wife Diana (Winifred Kingston), from embarrassmen, sending him to America; he ends up in Wyoming, where he is rescued by and falls in love with a Native American woman named Nat-U-Rich (Red Wing) - is is how frequently clunky and generic the execution is. There are some lovely touches: a dream in which James sees a photograph come to life features a well-mounted double exposure, and there are a few unexpectedly smart close-ups to props, but these are going to mostly only impress film historians.

For everyone else, and even for the historians in great long chunks of the movie, The Squaw Man is full of weirdly unmodulated acting, particularly from Farnum. One would assume that a pre-WWI stage actor making his debut in a relatively primitive silent film would indulge in the most garish of histrionics, but the unbelievably strange thing is that he so consistently underplays, to the point that we frequently have no reason to know what he's thinking or feeling, or if we should care about it. The only credible acting in the film is courtesy of Red Wing, a Ho-Chunk actor with several years of experience at that point, and a relaxed naturalistic relationship with the camera that feels wildly anachronistic, but it works: both because her character is a somewhat exoticised Other, and because (separate from that), she's an emblem of care and warmth and All Good Feminine Things, and the simplicity of her acting is comforting.

In other words: aye, it's a problematic film, though its uncomplicated endorsement of a mix-raced marriage that results in a child feels like it must have been hugely progressive for the era, without even visibly trying (don't forget that the arch-racist The Birth of a Nation was still in the future). It is a film with simple concepts of what roles people fit into. That, and the blunt "Feel This! Feel That!" lurches in tonality (a bad habit DeMille never grew out of), are matched by an aesthetic that is trapped in endless wide shots of people standing in groups; truly dynamic cinematography was a few years out yet, but dynamic blocking wasn't nearly so rare, and the "people talking at people, then a title card" structure needs no desperate historical context. The film made plenty of money, so contemporary audiences must have found it charming, but compared to something like the Italian Cabiria, released only a couple of months later, it's static and dull. For all that it was the first feature-length film shot in Hollywood and thus the progenitor of so much cinema history, it's a blandly reactive, aesthtically conservative film content to trade on a brand name and try as hard as possible to avoid surprising its audience in any way, looking only to make a quick buck off comfort food, and... I've forgotten where I was going with that.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1914
-Charles Chaplin and his Little Tramp character debut
-Winsor McKay premieres the groundbreaking cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur
-The film serial The Perils of Pauline begins

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1914
-The Italian epic Cabiria introduces the tracking shot
-Director Fuat Uzkınay releases a documentary held to be the first Turkish film production
-In France, Louis Feuillade's serial Fantômas is completed

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1914-2014: A HOLLYWOOD CENTURY

Go far enough back into movie history, and you can't trust dates; or much of anything else, for that matter. Still, the best I've been able to come up with is that 23 February, 1914, was the date that The Squaw Man opened. And traditionally - Lord knows if tradition has much of anything to do with reality - The Squaw Man was the first feature-length film shot in the suburban wilderness known as Hollywood, California, a neighborhood of the growing city of Los Angeles.

Whether that's true or not, it makes for a convenient signpost. Let us call this date the centennial of the Hollywood feature.

(Of course, the short/feature distinction meant something very different in the 1910s, and were I honest at all, I'd be walking us through this conversation on the 100th anniversary of the first film shot in Hollywood: D.W. Griffith's In Old California from spring of 1910. The reason why I'm not is pathetically simple: I didn't think to research the dates until the autumn of 2011).

With that being the case, and with Antagony & Ecstasy being always up for arbitrary games and marathons, it pleases me to announce that 2014 is hereafter to be set up as an investigation, celebration, and critique of the Hollywood feature as it has changed and evolved for better and for worse over the 100 years of its existence. During that time, the American film as artform and industry moved from being centered in New York to being centered in Los Angeles; it grew from being one of several distinctly identifiable national cinemas in the 1910s and '20s to being the dominant template for narrative cinema throughout the entire world. This is not, by any means, an unambiguously good thing; nor even an ambiguously good one. But that makes it no less important to study the evolution of that style over the years and decades as it found its present shape.

Tonight begins a chronological survey, kicking off with the 100-year-old The Squaw Man itself; a survey that's necessarily arbitrary and limited in focus, but hopefully no less useful and interesting because of it. Every few days, without a set schedule (other than to have it wrapped up by Christmas), I'm going to step forward one year, and pluck up one example of Hollywood filmmaking from that period. Sometimes it will be a well-loved consensus classic, and sometimes a lost masterpiece. Sometimes an ill-made but important signpost in the course of mainstream cinema history, sometimes a forgotten piece of commercial junk food. Directors from the greatest auteurs to the most ignoble hacks (never more than one appearance each), and every studio of significance I can fit will show up along the way. I flatter, such a catholic approach to what constitutes representative Hollywood filmmaking will allow me to sketch a broader picture of how the industry has operated and how it has wished to present itself than a simple "greatest hits" tour could permit.

If my knowledge of certain periods, or mere availability of older films, makes it harder for me to avoid the obvious titles by the obvious filmmakers starring the obvious actors, I make no defense for my limitations other than to acknowledge that they exist. I also point out that this project is intended to be more about inspiring others to join in their own historical inquiries into the evolution of the Hollywood film, than about lecturing and presenting my own conclusions as definitive. We live in a world, after all, where from Los Angeles itself down to small towns on every continent, Hollywood's priorities dictate how popular cinema is made and experienced, and having a good idea of how those priorities came to be fixed is of utmost value for anyone who believes that the intersection of humans and their art is a matter of importance.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THAT GHIDDY FEELING

Even by the standards of a movie franchise whose immediate prior entry featured an 80-meter dinosaur spitting beams of nuclear energy at a giant carnivorous rose that was cloned from the dinosaur's own DNA, the 1991 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is really peculiar. Not, entirely, peculiar and bad. And I do not regard as a problem the single thing most often cited as a damned flaw in writer-director Ohmori Kazuki's script, that it doesn't get time travel right. As though time travel was something that has actual real-life rules with which we're all familiar. You want to know how time travel works? Close your eyes and say "Mississippi". I just sent you one second forward in time! But I digress.

By any rational definition, vs. King Ghidorah is a movie absolutely lousy with plot holes, though by the same token, it's pretty clear that the film isn't coming from a rational place. One could nitpick the thing to death - arguably, one should nitpick the thing to death - but that's tiresome and tedious. For my part, the only nitpick that matters is that the film's villains have taken the most absolutely ridiculous, long-winded path towards achieving their goal imaginable, particularly for people with a time machine. The only way to square the thing is to assume that they can literally only travel between 2204, 1992, and 1944, and are obliged to manipulate the timeline at those exact moments. Even that doesn't really let us square the behavior of one character whose motivation and characterisation never seems to be thought through at a deeper level than "what does she have to do in this exact scene to move the plot forward?" But once those big points are knocked out, all the other plot holes are just sort of collateral damage. The film is dysfunctional. So be it.

If the film leaves itself more open to complaints about its script than other Godzilla movies, that's largely because it spends such a titanic stretch of its running time stubbornly refusing to give us either of its titular monsters (Godzilla himself doesn't show up until an hour into the film). Which gives us plenty of time to dwell on the strange "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" mentality to the convoluted plot, in which three humans from the 23rd Century - Wilson (Chuck Wilson), Grenchiko (Richard Berger), and Emmy (Nakagawa Anna) - come to the 1990s to recruit some contemporary Godzilla experts to go back to 1944 and destroy the dinosaur godzillasaurus that has managed to survive for the millennia on an isolated South Pacific island, thereby preventing it from being around in the '50s when American nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll transformed that long-lost creature into the massive Godzilla we all know and love. In so doing, the Futurians - for that is their name - hope to prevent Japan from being utterly destroyed when Godzilla demolishes several nuclear power plants in the 21st Century, leaving Japan an irradiated hellhole. This is of course a lie - the technologically advanced visitors from another place in a monster movie never mean well - but it's creepy as shit that, minus Godzilla, we are apparently now staring down the barrel of the exact scenario they lay out.

The real plot is to introduce three genetically engineered superpets called Dorats, which look entirely too much like Fraggle Rock puppets to show up in a daikaiju eiga, into the path of those future nuclear tests, so that they might be turned into some kind of powerful monsters to be used, back in 1992, to destroy Japan for real. See, in 2204, Japan is the most powerful nation in the world, and the future-Americans and future-Russians don't care for it; and Godzilla, destructive though it be, simply can't do as thorough a job of razing a country as the thing created by the three Dorats fusing together and turning giant: a golden three-headed, two-tailed dragon that everybody in the film instantly understands is named King Ghidorah.

Fuck the film breaking the "rules" of time travel, my bigger problem is that both Godzilla and King Ghidorah are saddled with frankly dumb and unnecessary origin stories; I much prefer the implication threaded into a couple of scene that in such a nuclear-heavy time and place as Earth in the latter half of the 20th Century, atomic monsters like Godzilla are simply an inevitability. That's not an idea that very much gets done with (though it vaguely prefigures the "Godzilla as a force of nature" theme of the run of films produced in the 21st Century), because no idea is explored very much in vs. King Ghidorah. It is a movie uniquely full of ideas and apparent symbolism in the Godzilla franchise, all of which it completely bungles. Ohmori had ideas, I have no doubt, but it is not always clear what those ideas are. In the meantime, the film relies on what was then the 27-year-old narrative crutch of alien invaders (and for all intents and purposes, the Futurians might as well be aliens) trying to destroy Japan with their remote-controlled giant monster, a story that was fresh in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, still fairly zesty in Invasion of Astro-Monster, and increasingly wearisome in all of the 70 or 80 films where it was trotted out after those two.

The good news is that all of this only hurts the film so much. And not even just because the monster action is great; it's good indeed, but it comes awfully late to be a film-saving through. However, there are good effects throughout; the Futurians' time machine flying saucer in particular is a breathtakingly beautiful piece of work. True, there are too many dodgy laser effects, and an android (Robert Scott Field) that can run very fast through the magic of some appallingly awful rear projection for 1991. But the opening shot of the time machine pays for a lot of crap later on.

Also, Ohmori is a pretty talented visual storyteller, and it's sad to think that after just two movies, his tenure with the Godzilla franchise ends here. On the whole, vs. King Ghidorah isn't as impressive as vs. Biollante - the newer film takes place largely during the day, robbing it of the dramatic night imagery - but the directing never sinks below good and in many passages it's quite fantastic. A sequence set in 1944 during a pitched battle between American and Japanese forces leaps to mind as a great exercise in communicating a lot of action with a minimum of resources (it was also the subject of some controversy among American critics, unaccustomed to being reminded that countries besides the U.S. of A. had their own nationally-tinged experiences in that war); better yet, he manages to keep the early patch of the movie, before the Futurians are revealed to be evil, bouncing from beat to beat quickly enough that it's hard to get too bored.

The best parts, of course, do involve the monsters: Kawakita Koichi was beginning to really settle into his role as effects director, and despite a Godzilla suit that was still too limiting for Satsuma Kenpachiro to really exert himself, the action sequences are almost the equal to vs. Biollante, with sets very nearly as rich and detailed as the magnificent Tokyoscapes of The Return of Godzilla. And Satsuma himself, no matter his tendency to suffer blackouts from the weight and heat of the suit (which has, in this case, oddly beefed up pectoral muscles relative to its use in vs. Biollante), was really starting to gel with the character; his body language was starting to become quite expressive and nuanced without sacrificing the focus in the VS Series films that Godzilla was an animal, not a personality. He had to lumber a lot, which is a pity; but he lumbered with intention and purpose that's particularly dramatic here.

That being said, any movie with King Ghidorah in it is, for me, going to have Godzilla sidelined in interest; and doubly so when that monster is resurrected for the final act as a cyborg - Mecha King Ghidorah, easily the coolest-looking kaiju of the 1990s, from any studio. The climactic fight is, in fairness, not nearly as brilliant as the Godzilla and Biollante duel, but with a monster design like that, I frankly don't need it to be; doubly so when Ifukube Akira is back to score the thing with a mix of robust military themes and reorchestrations of his old motifs that work just beautifully.

Let me not overstate what the thing is: the good parts are wonderful, but they are backloaded and buried under a science fiction plotline that is interesting mostly because of how confusing it gets. And there's something sad about seeing a Godzilla movie forced to be a Terminator knock-off with quite the gusto that this film is in some of its android scenes (and in the same calendar year of T2, no less!). Every daikaiju eiga is graded on something of a curve, based upon its monsters, and vs. King Ghidorah is very much a film that needs a monster as fantastic as Mecha King Ghidorah to make up for all the flailing about that goes on before then, with all the thinly-described characters doing nothing of note - and I just realised that I have mentioned not one single main hero in the movie (Emmy becomes a hero, but doesn't start that way). Which is telling of the interest the film has for its human element and actors, none of whom are "bad" (though the American stars range from tolerable to brain-shatteringly vile), not that they get to do much but hang around as meat puppets in a film that does, honestly, take its damn sweet time in getting to anything that isn't vaguely stupid.

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