Oscar contenders

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up with all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, and while none would be my pick over The Social Network or Winter’s Bone, most were worthy in their own right (and better than The Kids Are All Right in my book). 

My friend suffers from a family affliction, a half-ironic obsession with the Royal Family, so she was eager to see The King’s Speech  (2010, MC-88) as soon as it came out, even before its large haul of Oscar nominations.  And why not?  With Colin Firth as Bertie, destined to be George VI, and Helena Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mother, and Geoffrey Rush as the idiosyncratic speech therapist who helped the king-to-be to assume his duties as head of state, all directed by Tom Hooper, whom I’d noted for last year’s Damn United – what could go wrong?   Not much did, and I liked the film more and more as it went on, as it got past the jokey byplay featured in previews, and really deepened into a study of an unlikely friendship.  I wasn’t blown away, but was thoroughly entertained, and as moved as an anarchist can be by the personal travails of royalty.  I liked the little girl who played Elizabeth too, and thought about her growing up to become Helen Mirren in The Queen.

I’m not sure what surprised me more about True Grit (2010, MC-80) – how purely entertaining this old-fashioned Western proved to be, or how little of the Coen brothers’ quirky personalities came through?  Nonetheless it was immaculately made, with superb performances from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as “LeBeef”, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, the stalwart young girl who recruits the other two to track down her father’s killer.  But the true star of the film was the dialogue lifted directly from the Charles Portis novel, in an archaic diction that achieved the same unlikely self-contained believability that the harsher dialect of Deadwood did.  (I caught up with the John Wayne version on AMC, and while the Duke had his iconic portrait readymade, plastic smoothie Glenn Campbell and the Disneyesque Kim Darby are not a patch on the remake’s other pair.  How did the Coens follow the original so closely and yet make it so much hipper?) 

An even bigger surprise was Toy Story 3 (2010, MC-92), which more than overcomes the stigma of a sequel.  Like Up, this Pixar animation is fit to play with the big boys, and definitely deserves consideration as one of the best films of the year.  Andy is going away to college, and has to decide what to do with Woody, Buzz, and the rest of his long-disused toys.  The film is both hilarious and effectively tearjerking, as the toys experience a variety of possible fates -- including a garbage truck and a preschool that is not the utopia it seems at first glance -- before finding a safe haven.  The standout among the new characters is a Ken doll, who has as much surprising personality as the dog in Up, though a sinister huggy bear and a discarded baby doll also make a deep impression.  Despite being a cartoon and a sequel, this is certainly among the most powerful cinematic experiences of the year.  It made me go back and check out Toy Story 2, which I had skipped in a prejudice against films with a number at the end of the title, and found it almost equally charming and eye-popping.

Last and certainly least of Best Picture nominees (aside from Inception) is Black Swan (2010, MC-79).  Darren Aronofsky’s intense direction kept me involved till the Grand Guignol turned silly, and Natalie Portman’s performance, both as ballet dancer and crazy person, was better than I expected, but in the end I found this an empty-headed horror film, relying on shrieking chords and shock cuts instead of meaningful characterizations.  A puppet show rather than a genuine backstage drama, this film’s pretension to follow in the steps of The Red Shoes or All About Eve is totally overblown, a traducing of cinema history.