Not That Anyone Cares, But Why I'm Not Writing About the Oscars This Year

Meh. Not since 1995's ceremony - where, after winning 5 other awards, Forrest Gump won the Best Picture award competing against both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption - have I been so unexcited about an Oscars show. I mean, somehow Gump is back again... er, wait... I mean Benjamin Button... competing against some equally slight films. And it seems like it's a foregone conclusion that one of my least favorite movies of the year, the extremely overrated Slumdog Millionaire, will win a slew of awards (probably even the Best Picture award). So what's in it for me this year? Why bother picking any of the races, if I can't even muster the interest in the proceedings this year? Like I said... meh! So I'll skip the races I'm bored with and just bring up a couple of points of interest, so to speak. Best Actor looks like the most interesting one with Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke being the front-runners. While personally, my heart's with fellow Miami boy, Mickey Rourke, I fear that his overexposure this awards season may have worked against this man of mystique. So Sean Penn may run out with this one, which wouldn't be all bad since he gave a hell of a performance in Milk. And karmically speaking, maybe this is a reward for being one of the few directors to keep Rourke working during his low period in 2001's The Pledge. Kate Winslet should win for The Reader, only who knows why she was even nominated for that. Penelope Cruz and Viola Davis are another interesting race to look at for Best Supporting Actress (Taraji P. Henson, I loved you in Hustle and Flow, but I don't see what merited the nomination this year). Wall·E is a shoo-in for Best Animated feature. But honestly, it should have competed in the Best Picture category where it could have, and should have, easily won. The only upset of the night would occur if for some mysterious Academy-related reason, Heath Ledger would lose the Supporting Actor award. Posthumous nominations have a bad record at the Oscars. The technical awards this year? This one gets a "Who REALLY cares?" from me. When you have The Dark Knight - a movie that has a near-unintelligible third act - up for Film Editing, and Benjamin Button up for Best Makeup - when in fact, most of its makeup achievements are perked up by CGI - then what really comes to mind is how much the nomination process, and even the categories, are in need of an overhaul. With Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) named executive producer this year, the actual Oscar ceremony might prove to be the most interesting aspect of the evening. Hugh Jackman (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), a pretty talented showman when performing live, is the evening's host. Michael Giacchino (Lost) is conducting the orchestra. And they've even tried to spice things up a bit by keeping its roster of presenters secret. I'm hoping this all adds up to a surprisingly exciting evening. I usually make a day of this. Despite disagreeing with most of what is usually awarded, as a movie lover it still excites me to see a day in which my passion for movies is shared in celebration by others. But expect Slumdog Millionaire to sweep most of its nominations, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - though slight, still a bit of an underrated film - to lose most of its noms. If this happens, then predictability will still reign on another stale awards night. The 81st Academy Awards airs Sunday night on ABC at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight - Gotham Story: The Tragedy of Harvey Dent, or Part Two: The Actual Film Analysis

by Tony Dayoub



Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is the second act of the epic he started in Batman Begins (2005). It is now becoming clear that he is not satisfied in simply rehashing the familiar story of The Batman (Christian Bale). Slowly emerging from behind the vigilante's cape is a more ambitious crime saga that is really an examination of the corrupt, made-up city of Gotham. There are nods to other directors that have with equal ambition taken on the dissection of a crime-ridden burg. But Nolan has the advantage that Gotham is fictional, and its tale is represented in the tragedy of the movie's true protagonist, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).


The movie picks up shortly after the end of the first film. The Batman has inspired a wave of copycats that hinder more than help in his crusade against Gotham City's criminal elements. Mobsters like The Chechen (Ritchie Coster) and Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts) are uniting against this common enemy. Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) of the Gotham police has now formed a Major Crimes Unit staffed by his most trusted cops, some of which may have fallen to the corruption plaguing the town. All of this is just setting the stage for the introduction of two important players. The Joker (Heath Ledger), an element of chaos, is a psychotic who reflects the evil underbelly of Gotham. Harvey Dent, an element of order, is the new District Attorney. Though coming up through the ranks of Internal Affairs investigating some of Gordon's own MCU cops, he is not above bending the law as a means to an end, the salvation of Gotham City. Dent represents Bruce Wayne's best hope for stepping out from behind the mask allowing him to reunite with the love of his life, A.D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Together The Batman, Gordon and Dent form a powerful troika that is Gotham's best chance for vanquishing its criminals. But will the new unknown variable of The Joker disrupt the equation?

That all of these protagonists share the stage serves to spotlight that it is in this chapter that Gotham City emerges as the central character. It had been alluded to earlier, in Batman Begins, when Ra's Al Ghul (Liam Neeson) explained that his goal was to bring down the morally compromised Gotham. Thomas Wayne (Linus Roache), Bruce's father, had been at the opposite end of the spectrum, trying to save the city. Both served as metaphorical fathers to The Batman, the outcast with his finger in the dike, trying to keep the flood of evil from overtaking Gotham, but resigned to the fact that his battle may be a perpetual one.

Nolan took great care in the casting of the fictional Gotham. Perhaps it is no coincidence that he chose Chicago, a city whose past is rooted in corruption as well, to double for Gotham. It's geography serves Gotham well, with its elevated trains running high over the dangerous streets. Its prohibition era story of outlaws hijacking the law, as told in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) is obliquely referenced, when The Batman intimidates Maroni on a rooftop, and the response is laughing skepticism that The Batman would ever kill a criminal and break his moral code. This scene is a quote of De Palma's finale when G-Man Elliot Ness similarly threatens Capone henchman, Frank Nitti.

More explicitly referenced is Michael Mann's Heat (1995), in the film's opening bank heist scene. Loud, violent, and committed in broad daylight, like in the climactic bank heist of the previous film, the nod to that film is made more apparent by the appearance of William Fichtner. Playing a doublecrossing financial mastermind in Heat, here he plays a bank employee literally packing some heat, as a gun-toting bank manager protecting his mob employers' financial interests. And like in this movie, the crime saga Heat is an exploration of the moral decay prevalent at all levels of the law in a city, L.A.

Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker is haunting. I won't say much about it here, because it has been talked about plenty. But it does merit all the praise being lavished on it, and it is sad that it is Ledger's final role. The spectre of evil hangs over this Joker like no other one before. While Jack Nicholson's iteration of the role seemed to erase any notion of Cesar Romero in the part, Ledger's take on it reduces Nicholson's performance to a mere postmodern, hipper imitation of Romero's. Because the character bursts forth fully formed, that is with no origin story to tell you how he became The Joker; because Ledger so completely subsumes himself into the part; and because of Ledger's untimely death, there is a spooky dimension to the performance that so disarms the viewer, that the very appearance of the villain in the frame is cause to sit on the edge of one's seat.

The rest of the cast, from Christian Bale to the smallest cameo by Tiny Lister, is equally exemplary, without the added attention brought to their performances by an unfortunate death, as in Ledger's case. But Aaron Eckhart must be singled out for his ferocious, swaggering performance as Harvey Dent.

Dent is the "White Knight" to The Batman's "Dark Knight." He is the local boy, who rose up through the ranks of Gotham's corrupt political system the hard way. Not born to privilege like Wayne, not working outside the law like The Batman, Dent has had to play by the city's rules to withstand its evil influences. Fighting corruption from within, he shows a sardonic tendency to nonetheless be open to it. Bending, though not breaking, the law, he has been able to circumvent the city's decay, and emerges as a heroic option to take up the crusade started by The Batman, bringing it out of the shadows and into the light. So it is all the sadder when The Joker's metaphorical defacing of Gotham leads to the literal defacing of Dent himself.

Taking on the nickname given to him while at Internal Affairs, Two-Face, The Batman and The Joker now serve as the metaphorical fathers to Gotham's twisted new incarnation of fairness. Harvey "Two-Face" Dent now embodies both justice and vengeance, order and chaos. Trusting his two-headed coin - one fine, one scarred - to make all of his decisions, Dent now personifies the only system he's ever considered to be fair, random chance.

At the end of this film, it is on the edge of this two-headed coin that Gotham stands, precariously capable of falling to either side depending on whether The Batman's crusade succeeds or fails. Gotham's story... to be continued?

DVD Review: I'm Not There - Bob Dylan... Chameleon or Cipher?

by Tony Dayoub

Look up the definition of a cipher. The first definition on Dictionary.com for cipher is simply the word zero. Singer Bob Dylan has been anything and everything but a zero. However, as Todd Haynes illustrates in his paean to Dylan, I'm Not There, Dylan viewed himself as somewhat of an empty receptacle. As he used his chameleon-like abilities to create new personas he could hide behind, friends, fans, and particularly the press, would fill that receptacle with their own preconceived notions of who Dylan really was. Haynes found it so difficult to present Dylan in a straightforward manner, that he instead chose six actors to interpret many of his adopted personas. And if much of the stories told about Dylan or by him are apocryphal, then Haynes found the best way to tell the story. He took the advice of a character in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Among the personas appearing in the movie are the poet-like Dylan known as Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), Rimbaud being the poet whose quotation, "I is the other," is the central thesis of the film. Young African-American actor, Marcus Carl Franklin, plays the Woody Guthrie persona. Dylan had fashioned a background story for himself as a young folk-singing hobo, who spent his youth jumping on trains to travel cross-country, a story later found out to be false. Haynes casting of the 11-year-old Franklin is a wink to viewers, making it obvious that this kid could not possibly be a surrogate for Dylan despite his stories leading one to believe it so. Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) is the Greenwich Village folkie that we closely associate with Joan Baez (or in this movie, Julianne Moore's Alice Fabian). Bale also reappears as Pastor John, the born-again Dylan of the late seventies. Jack Rollins (Heath Ledger) is the self-absorbed movie star Dylan, who's crumbling marriage is symbolized by the trajectory America takes during the Vietnam war. Richard Gere is Billy the Kid, the Dylan that retreats from public view to live a quiet life in Riddle, a town populated by characters from his songs.

The most iconic and spot-on performance, in fact, almost a transformation, is Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, the defensive Dylan facing rejection from his folk fans after going electric. Her nomination for an Oscar is well deserved, for at no time are you consciously aware that this is Blanchett acting. You are transfixed by her charisma as the androgynous rock star at the height of his sixties-era confrontational posturing towards the press. Blanchett captures the Dylan that sees himself as a cipher, "One having no influence or value; a nonentity."

Haynes shoots each story in the style of cinema suited to the period and story being covered. For example, Blanchett's segment is reminiscent of Fellini's 8 1/2, and Gere's evokes the westerns of the seventies, like Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (which Dylan appeared in).

I was enthralled by the enigmatic film on a level that I can't quite explain. It certainly has an emotional effect on the most visceral level. But the enigmatic film resists any intellectualizing. Much of the explanations above were derived from a thorough survey of the special features included on the DVD, in stores now. I am a casual Bob Dylan fan so I did not have any reference points to lean on when watching the film. But the wealth of extras on the disc can serve as a crash-course on the singer's life and work. Special attention should be payed to the writings on the film collected under the title "An Introduction to the Film" on Disc 1. The point is that none of this should hinder enjoyment of the film, as long as you can accept its perplexing metaphorical nature.

"I is the other." As Dylan would say, I is not me... I'm not there. Haynes fractured biopic depicts the nonentity that characterizes Dylan. And perhaps his film consciously exemplifies yet another definition of a cipher, "[a private mode of communication] contrived for the safe transmission of secrets."

Still provided courtesy of Genius Products and The Weinstein Company.

Heath Ledger

by Tony Dayoub


Heath Ledger was found dead today. He was 28.

First coming to prominence in lighter roles, like in 10 Things I Hate About You, the first glimpse of deeper talent lay in his performance in the grim Monster's Ball. In it he played Sonny, son of Billy Bob Thornton's Hank, a son caught in the devastating cycle of psychological abuse that father unleashes on son after being victimized himself by his father before that.

And though one can argue that Brokeback Mountain is vastly overrated, Ledger's portrayal of Ennis Del Mar is not. He is the anchor in that movie and says significantly more in his depiction of unfulfilled love than his costar Jake Gyllenhaal in a far more understated characterization.

The legacy he leaves behind is incomplete for now. His final performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight will not be seen till summer.