And the final nominees are...

I dutifully took in two final multiple-Oscar nominees in a self-made double feature at Beacon Cinema, both highly competent translations to the big screen of interesting real-life stories, both including in the final credits footage of the real characters behind the stories, but neither of which is likely to make my Best of 2010 list. 

You have give credit to an exuberant director like Danny Boyle for taking on the challenge of such a constricted subject as 127 Hours (MC-82).  The title refers to the time Aron Ralston spent alone in a canyon crevice with his arm caught under a huge boulder, until he did what he had to do to escape with his life.  The first major hurdle is to find an actor with whom we would want to spend extended time up-close and very personal, and one could hardly do better than James Franco.  As it happened, I went to this film immediately after catching a few minutes of him as dropout Daniel in the short-lived but immortal tv-series Freaks & Geeks – that crooked smile charming even in 1999 as a high school student (and now a graduate student at Yale and RISD, not to mention co-host of this year’s Oscar ceremony).  Boyle gets things going with a burst of kinetic exhilaration, multiple images to a pounding beat, as Aron escapes the big city on a Friday night and heads for the canyon wilderness of Utah, for a weekend of biking and hiking, and penetrating the landscape.  Until he falls down the rabbit hole.  Boyle has the opportunity to interject hallucinatory imagery, but from then on, it’s just us and Mr. Franco in very close quarters.  There’s some gore, of course, more horrific than a horror picture, but the essence of this film is still its intimacy and its ratiocination, as Aron confronts his dilemma with the limited tools at hand.

Then I watched a few minutes of the Super Bowl on the big screen -- the Beacon showing it for free -- and went back to another screening room to watch The Fighter (MC-79).  The boxing film is firmly delineated as a genre, a tight box all its own, and it’s surprising to see a director as wacked out as David O. Russell work within the small lighted ring, so indelibly inscribed by a whole range of films, out of which Raging Bull stands as the peak.  Of course, he’s got Christian Bale to go all crackhead crazy for him, as the coulda-been-a-contender, who punched his one-way ticket to palookaville with drugs, but now fitfully tries to guide his younger half-brother to the success he never reached.  Mark Wahlberg effectively plays Micky Ward, and this project is his homage to a hometown hero, the Pride of Lowell.  Unfamiliar with boxing, I wouldn’t know that for three straight years after 2000, Ward’s bouts were hailed as the fight of the year, but this film deals with the decade before, when the craziness of his family – not just his brother, but his manager mother, the formidable Melissa Leo, and a Greek chorus of seven furious sisters – drove him out of the game.  It takes the equally tough and adorably foul-mouthed barmaid Amy Adams to return him to his dream.  All involved acquit themselves well, but in the end cannot escape the boxing movie formula, however true to life it may be.  While I wouldn’t say that The Town was a better film, Affleck’s Charlestown exceeded my expectations by about as much as Wahlberg’s Lowell fell short of what I expect from director Russell, a personal favorite.