Translate

Search This Blog

Friday, January 27, 2012

Oscar nominations for Best film


The Artist
It may be 2012, but this homage to the era of silent movies by director Michel Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo was a breath of fresh air in a climate of extravagant productions. With 10 nominations, this black and white movie has already made its mark this year. It takes place in the late 1920s where Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a handsome silent movie star, who helps a talented young woman Peppy Miller, played by Bérénice Bejo, rise to success only to see his own career fade as she rises. It’s a touching ode to the pitfalls of love, fame and tragedy intertwined beautifully with the movie industry’s paradigm shift from silent movies to the “talkies” as a backdrop.
The Descendants
Easily one of George Clooney’s best performances, this comedic drama by Alexander Payne, of Sideways fame, is set in Hawaii. It’s a movie that incorporates humour and tragedy with equal dexterity. George Clooney plays Matt King, a husband and father of two girls, who tries to make sense of his life after his wife suffers a boating accident and goes into a coma. The film does a great job at showing that life isn’t black and white, it’s a spectrum and what Payne has done best, is given all the characters a sense of realism that is relatable.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
This was one of the surprises of the lot. A movie panned by critics and reviews for the most part — Rotten Tomatoes is currently rating it at 48 per cent. Director Stephen Daldry’s fourth film revolves around the performance of a 13-year-old Thomas Horn, with no previous acting experience, whose father played by Tom Hanks dies in the World Trade Centre attacks. Horn discovers a key hidden in a vase in an envelope labelled “Black,” and embarks on a journey to find out what the key leads to and perhaps receive one last message from his dad.
The Help
Based on a novel of the same name written by Kathryn Stocket, the film takes place during the Civil Rights Era. Emma Stone plays Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, an aspiring journalist, who decides to write about the daily trials and tribulations of two black women working for white families in the suburban south of America. The best part of The Help is that it refrains from caricaturing anything. Every character on screen is relatable and three-dimensional without over-doing anything. It’s a strong movie that has its weaknesses but is held together with a kind of saucy humour balanced by great storytelling.
Hugo
Probably the leader of the pack for taking the Oscar home, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a sublimely made love letter to the magic of cinema. The opening sequence of Hugo is probably the best use of 3D technology since James Cameron’s Avatar. Hugo played by Asa Butterfield, had an uncle who was in charge of the clocks at a Parisian train station. His father’s dream was to complete an automated man he found in a museum, but he dies before completing it. The boy grows up hiding himself in the maze of ladders, catwalks, passages and gears of the clockworks themselves, but then he encounters a cranky toy shop owner named Georges Méliès played by Ben Kingsley. In essence, the story becomes the story of filmmaking itself, and no one other than Scorsese could have made it.
Midnight in Paris
One of my favourite movies of 2011, Midnight in Paris is vintage Woody Allen. This charming comedy is about a couple on vacation in Paris. Gil played by Owen Wilson and Inez played by Rachel McAdams are officially in love, but Gil’s real love is Paris itself. A struggling screenwriter from Hollywood, Gil dreams of writing the great American novel in the hope of joining the likes of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald as a literary hero himself. At midnight Gil finds himself transported back in time to the legendary salon presided over by Gertrude Stein where he meets the Parisian cultural elite, such greats like Picasso to Dali. It’s a beautifully directed film, were the city of Paris plays a character in itself.
Moneyball
When you’ve got Aaron Sorkin writing your screenplay, it’s almost certainly going to be a spectacular script. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball’s conventional wisdom is wrong. Beane is forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget and thus he partners with Ivy League grad Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill, to recruit players on the cheap. Brand devises a system to find players all of whom have the ability to do the basics right i.e. get on base, score runs, and win games. It’s a revolution, and one that purists aren’t pleased with.
War Horse
It seems that Steven Spielberg is Oscar hunting again and with a Best Picture nomination, he seems to be on the right track. Based on both, a children’s novel set before and during World War I, by British author Michael Morpurgo as well as a 2007 stage production of the same name the movie is set in rural England and Europe during the First World War. While the jaded among us might assume this movie to be just another movie about the bond of a young man and his horse, it really is much more. It follows the journey of the horse, having been parted with his trainer, as he moves through the war, changing and inspiring the lives of all those he meets — the British cavalry, German soldiers, and a French farmer and his granddaughter — before the story reaches its emotional apex.
The Tree of Life
Starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, it’s a story of a Midwestern family in the 1950s. The film follows the journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). The story deals with life’s most profound questions of meaning and faith. It is Terrence Malick’s labour of love and it shows. Tree of Life is a movie that stays with you long after you see it. It is a film, which whether you like it or not, has a way of getting inside you and it’s not unlikely for parts of it to surface up to your mind at odd times of the day.

'Less troops, more drones is new US defense policy'


The plan, to be unveiled by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday and in budget documents next month, calls for a 30% increase in the U.S. fleet of armed unmanned aircraft in the coming years, the Wall Street Journal quoted defense officials as saying. It also foresees the deployment of more special-operations teams at a growing number of small "lily pad" bases across the globe where they can mentor local allies and launch missions. The utility of such tools was evident on Wednesday after an elite team—including members of Navy SEAL Team Six, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden—parachuted into Somalia and freed an American woman and Danish man held hostage for months. The strategy reflects the Obama administration s increasing focus on small, secret operations in place of larger wars. The shift follows the U.S. troop pullout from Iraq in December, and comes alongside the gradual U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, where a troop-intensive strategy is giving way to an emphasis on training Afghan forces and on hunt-and-kill missions. Defense officials said the U.S. Army plans to eliminate at least eight brigades while reducing the size of the active duty Army from 570,000 to 490,000, cuts that are likely to hit armored and heavy infantry units the hardest. But drone and special-operations deployments would continue to grow as they have in recent years. At the same time, the Army aims to accentuate the importance of special operations by preserving light, rapidly deployable units such as the 82nd and the 101st Airborne divisions. "What we really want is to see the Army adopt the mentality of special forces," said a military officer who advises Pentagon leaders. The new strategy would assign specific U.S.-based Army brigades and Marine Expeditionary units to different regions of the world, where they would travel regularly for joint exercises and other missions, using permanent facilities and the forward-staging bases that some advisers call lily pads. Marines, for example, will use a new base in Darwin, Australia, as a launch pad for Southeast Asia, while the U.S. is in talks to expand the U.S. presence in the Philippines—potential signals to China that the U.S. has quick-response capability in its backyard, defense officials said. Yet many of the proposed bases will be secret and could temporarily house small commando teams, the officials said. There are going to be times when action is called upon, like Tuesday night, when it will be clearly advantageous to be forward deployed," a military official said, referring to the Somalia operation. "On the other hand, most of the time it will help you to be there to develop host nation or regional security." The Pentagon still will invest in some big-ticket items, including the F-35 stealth fighter, as a counterweight to rising powers, including China—although the department is poised to announce this week that it is going to slow procurement of the new plane, said defense officials.

Australian PM stumbles before rowdy protest crowd


Riot police helped her force a path through a crowd of rowdy protesters following a ceremony to mark Australia s national day Thursday. She appeared distressed as she was pulled away from the protesters but was unharmed. She later remarked that she was made of "pretty tough stuff" and commended police for their actions. Some 200 supporters of indigenous rights had surrounded a Canberra restaurant and banged its windows while Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott were inside officiating at an award ceremony. Around 50 police escorted the political leaders from a side door to a car. Gillard stumbled, losing a shoe. Her personal security guard wrapped his arms around her and supported her to the waiting car, shielding her from the angry crowd. The protesters had been demonstrating for indigenous rights nearby at the so-called Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a ramshackle collection of tents and temporary shelters in the national capital that is a center point of protests against Australia Day. Australia Day marks the arrival of the first fleet of British colonists in Sydney on Jan. 26, 1788. Many Aborigines call it Invasion Day because the land was settled without a treaty with traditional owners. Abbott appeared to be the target of protesters, who chanted "shame" and "racist" outside the restaurant. The Tent Embassy celebrated its 40th anniversary on Thursday. Abbott had earlier angered indigenous activists by saying it was time the embassy "moved on." Gillard was unharmed and later hosted another Australia Day function for foreign ambassadors at her official residence. "The only thing that angers me is that it distracted from such a wonderful event," Gillard told reporters. "I am made of pretty tough stuff and the police did a great job," she added. Reaction from protesters afterward was mixed, with some saying police assaulted them and that Gillard and Abbott were never in danger. They also made conflicting claims over who had Gillard s shoe a Midas high-heeled blue suede and if it would be returned.