Quickie: Jump Jump

Jumper (2008). Directed by Doug Liman. Starring: Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson. -- About 10 minutes in, Michael Rooker enters the scene as the Jumper's deadbeat dad, and instantly creeps me out as the spitting image of Heath Ledger 25 years from now, four months ago. Because the film itself is an incoherent piece of shit (with 2 good minutes from Diane Lane), I spent much of my time slightly unnerved and awed by this seeming film presence from the once future Heath Ledger. I cannot recall ever seeing a film featuring an actor who looked exactly like a dead actor, but aged several years past the age when the late actor had died. Substitute "dead actor" with "dead love", add in a touch of obsessiveness on the part of the keen viewer, and you have the germ of an intriguing story.

Liveblogging - The Oscars

9:06 a.m. (Manila Standard Time). Good morning and welcome to the 109th annual Age of Brillig Academy Awards live-blog. Be warmed of my utter apathy towards fashion. Otherwise, I'll try to make this a fun romp.

I fully expect No Country for Old Men to sweep best picture, director and the writing awards, and it won't be an undeserving choice, my qualms aside. But I'd be as smug as a pimp on the last day of income tax filing if There Will Be Blood pulls off the upset. Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem are locks, while there seems to be a real race in the actress and supporting actress categories.

9:20 a.m. For the first time in memoriam, the live Oscars telecast is not on RPN9 (it's on Velvet). It was a moment of glory when RPN9 first did the live telecast around 15 years ago (before then we had to wait around 2 weeks or so before they finally aired here), so one could actually host a live Oscar party with friends (which I did for a few years, serving up Worcestershire-drenched Salisbury steaks). But within years, the RPN9 telecast was an embarassment, with its excessive padding of commercials lengthening the show to an even more unreasonable length than it already is. With the advent of the Internet, it became possible to learn the winners a full thirty minutes before it aired on the allegedly live telecast on RPN9. Because Velvet is a cable channel, the anticipation is the show will be only 4 hours long, instead of the 6 hours that had become the norm.

9:27 a.m. "Eck-savier Bardem?" Fuck off, Regis.

9:31 a.m. That was a pretty schlocky introductory sequence. A lot of I see dead people.

Jon Stewart. I love The Daily Show, not so much his first Oscar gig. For whatever reason, the monologue seems rushed and unleisurely, as if Stewart will be played off by Bill Conti if he spiels on too long...But in the end, it was just as long. Good line about black presidents and asteroids hitting the Statue of Liberty.

9:43 a.m. Best costume design for the 16th century finery of Elizabeth: The Sequel Nobody Really Asked For. And they call Hollywood "progressive". It'll be the day when they give out this award for a post-1978 wardrobe.

9:50 a.m. One of those same-old best clips from best Oscar shows where they show wheelchair-bound Christopher Reeve to signal empathy and Roundtree playing Shaft to signal modernity.

9:53 a.m. - Best Animated Feature to Ratatouille. I haven't seen Persepolis, though it's probably as great as advertised. But I loved Ratatouille, so no complaints here.

10:00 a.m. - Amy Adams performing Happy Working Song from Enchanted (sounds like a Maoist advocation call and response). A crime she wasn't nominated for Best Actress for a sublime performance in Enchanted.

10:07 a.m. - SNL in search of a Barack Obama regular impersonator. Maybe they should consider Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

10:08 a.m. - Golden Compass wins an Oscar, definitive proof that Hollywood hates God.

10:14 a.m. - Scenes of Best Supporting Actors past. A world of wonders that award did for George Chakiris. I admired Casey Affleck's perf a lot, but Friendo would certainly kill me if I didn't publicly support it. Friendo is a sure thing. And he wins, averting a cattle gun massacre at the Kodak Theater.

10:24 a.m. - methinks Jesus-loving Jennifer Hudson just had to die a little having to give out an award to what just may be the most Satanic performance to ever win an Oscar.

10:28 a.m. - Owen Wilson, in what must be his first public performance since the earlier drama.

10:31 a.m. - oh yuck, the traditional cringe-inducing animated figure up the podium. Jennifer Garner must have felt edified "co-presenting" with Mickey Mouse some years back. The bee montage is actually quite funny though.

10:34. If this is truly a celebration of 80 years of Oscar, they are short-changing the first 30 years or so with the absence of the film clips of the announcements of the winners then. Best Supporting Actress, probably the most wide-open category. Tilda Swinton. Wow. Haven't seen Michael Clayton, but her White Witch was the best thing about Narnia. And her giving props to Clooney and his Batman just made her even worthier.

10:47. The screenplays are earlier than usual. Unsurprisingly, No Country takes Best Adapted Screenplay. He's followed by the Academy President, who introduces a pointless and unfunny explanation of the voting process. Poor Alfred Molina, selling out his soul for the Academy. John Travolta, yes, but Alfred Molina?

10:52. Miley Cyrus is a television star. She is not, by any estimation, a figure in the film industry, yet here she is on the Oscar telecast. Louis B. Mayer must be retching over at hell. Meanwhile, Kristin Chenoweth performs in one of those typically bad Oscar performance numbers replete with inappropriate prancing. Though considering the context of the song from Enchanted she's performing, the choreography is quite apt.

11:01. Funnier than the false introduction Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill as Dame Judi and Halle? The embarassment of the old geezer who had started his one-person standing ovation before realizing the joke.

11:07. Best actress already? But they haven't done the musical scoring awards yet. Or the In Memoriam yet. (wouldn't it be great if the show ended not with the Best Picture award, but the In Memoriam clip instead?)

11:10. Marion Cotillard. A friend of mine has just remarked, again, no American women winners. Might it be part of the anti-Hillary backlash, the war against the American woman? Otherwise, that was a fantastically short speech by Ms. Cotillard. I remember thinking as I saw Geoffrey Rush receive his Oscar, there's the F. Murray Abraham for the 1990s. I was wrong then. And besides, about Ms. Cotillard, I could say, as Barack did, she seems likeable enough.

11:22. Jack Nicholson presenting something. I hope its Best Documentary Short. Oh, the Best Picture Montage, the res ipsa loquitur of Oscar craptitude. The Great Ziegfield. The Life of Emile Zola. Mrs. miniver. Going My Way. Gentlemen's Agreement. The Greatest Show on Earth. Around the World in Eighty Days. My Fair Lady. The Sound of Music. Oliver. The Sting. Rocky. Ordinary People. Chariots of Fire. Gandhi. Rain Man. Dances with Wolves. Forrest Gump. Braveheart. Titanic. Gladiator. A Beautiful Mind. Million Dollar Baby. Crash. (And isn't it great that Oliver was actually succeeded as Best Picture by Midnight Cowboy)

11:29. The Bourne Ultimatum, by my count, now leads the total Oscar count with 3 wins.

11:32. I'm actually pleased with the honorary award to 98-year old Robert Boyle, an old Hitchcock-hand. The crows looks properly appreciative. I don't know though the medical (or aesthetic) value of the shawl on the shoulder for Mr. Boyle. Uh oh, looks like he'll thank a lot of people, whom he'll remember after a while. Will the orchestra play him off? According to IMDB, among Mr. Boyle's credits is Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. A fact worthy of Wikipedia.

11:42. Penelope Cruz, who seems to have survived having failed her audition with Tom Cruise, presents Best Foreign Language. Nobody seems to care about this award this year, controversy and all.

11:45. This telecast seems rushed rushed rushed, as if it were the post-9/11 awards show, an indulgence that just has to be gotten over with.

11:41. Nice to see the folks from Once win. Much as I liked Enchanted, the songs were meh. "Make art! Make art!" is just a great summary of the best aspects of the Oscars, or of film-making in general.

11:57. In a show of gallant chivalry, Jon Stewart brings out the lady who won Best Song to give out the speech the orchestra did not allow her. He wins applause from the audience, but is now probably banned from ever hosting the Oscars again.

11:59. Best Cinematography, the only reasonable chance for an award for There Must Be Blood other than Best Actor. Let's hope. Yes!

12:01. In Memoriam time. The most commented-part of the Oscars. Boy, that was an awfully long list this year, and its good they acknowledged the great Ousmane Sembène. I'm guessing they bumped off Ingmar Bergman at the pimp spot to give way for Heath Ledger.

12:08. Awkward for them to reference the musical theme from Jaws, minutes after having snubbed Roy Scheider from the death reel. Best musical score, they snubbed There Will Be Blood over some technical issues, so I don't care.

12:12. You'd think after Tom Hanks profaned God in that Da Vinci Sin, he'd lose all cred to perform such patriotic duties as introducing the troops.

12:15. Michael Moore-nerd-with-the-big-embarassing-speech-at-the-prom time. Oh, he lost. No!! I want my big fat awkward moment!

12:23. The Coronation of Diablo Cody, though Ratatouille at least had a smarter script. She's dressed as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. To her fellow nominees, "I'm learning from you, everyday." She'd better.

12:28. Best Actor. There had been talk of a last minute surge for George Clooney. That would be interesting to see. But it just has to be Baron Daniel Day Lewis. And it is. Does cutesy with Dame Helen, calls the Oscar as "the handsomest bludgeon in town". His daddy was Poet-Laureate of Britain, y'all hear?

12:36. With two Best Actor Oscars, Daniel Day-Lewis joins the lofty rank of Hillary Swank as the only living actors with 2 legitimate Best Acting Oscars (as opposed to the illegitimate Best Supporting in an Acting which fatally taints Jack Nicholson).

12:42. Coen Brothers win, so I guess that No Country is inevitable. Frances MacDormand, seemingly texting as hubby Joel speaks on.

12:44. No Country, of course. Imagine if two years ago, someone told you that a film with Josh Brolin as the leading man would sweep through the major Oscars. Gotta eat now, more thoughts later.

Quickie: Country of No Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2007). Written and directed by the Coen Brothers, from the novel of Cormac McCarthy. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly McDonald. -- Imagine if in Fargo, fresh from the wood chipper, Peter Stormare was able to fiddle with the locks of his cuffs as Sheriff Marge prattled on about how she just couldn't understand it all. Then he kills her of course. Thematically defensible, logical even perhaps, the film still being all about evil, yas's notwithstanding. But still a bummer. Well, No Country for Old Men is for their Coenheads and film fans who felt Fargo fatally flawed by its bonhomie.

No Country is technically impeccable, like a Swiss clock or Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Those merits will probably win the film its Oscar Best Picture award in a few hours. And it isn't without joy, if one finds such a thing in the tics and ironies sputtered by a hapless extra unknowing of his imminent death (SPOILER ALERT: Not a woman is slain onscreen. Chivalry perhaps). But the thought I grappled with all throughout the film was whether this was ultimately but the most proficient slasher film ever made, with the quirk of eschewing nubile teen victims for nameless Mexicans and ancient Texan truck drivers.

But people die in the slasher flick for the perverse thrill of the viewer, while people die in No Country for the perverse thrills of Fate, if one believed, or for no meaningful reason at all, if one didn't. No Meaningful Reason (Chirgurh) is portrayed in the film by Javier Bardem, who physically resembles Caligari's monstrous Cesare, monodrones as if in sleepwalk, kills with certainty any obstacle, and kills with discretion any incidental encounter. It is one of the all-time great movie villains, and early on, I learned to assume for my piece of mind that if anyone else showed as much a pinkie finger on the same screen as Bardem, that person was surely going to die.

Ostensibly, it is the chancy "noble" impulses (Josh Brolin returning with the drink of agua, the Mexican in the suit helping Kelly McDonald's mother) that sets of the machinery of death, setting proof to the truism that a good deed will not go unpunished. But because deaths in the film are plainly animated by Chirgurh's will, it is he, utterly evil he, rather than any fickle finger of fate, that dictates the fate of the people in that movie universe, guided either by the depth of his proximate causation or by the coin in his hand. It is a universe where Godly good is helpless, humanists are neutered by the delusion that the world is merely absurd, while evil steals away a cool two mill, plus plus lives.

No Country is, in a fundamental way, the anti-Schindler's List. The latter featured an unflinching smorgasbord of death at the hand of evil, yet ended on a note of uplift for evil was conquered and many were saved from martyrdom by an act of good. In No Country, evil voluntarily exeunts from the dirty deeds, held together by a sling made from the shirt of an innocent child. One may applaud the audacity of it all, and it is a film I will probably see again but with no joy in Mudville. They kill Casey with a cattle gun, you see.

(Note: I'll be liveblogging the Oscars in a few hours.)

Quickies: Juno and the Blood

Juno (2007). Directed by Jason Reitman; Screenplay by Diablo Cody; Starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney. -- Juno may feel like a great movie, if only because it's storyline is certainly sophisticated with the shifts opportunely timed, and it concerns themes of greater immediacy to our own experiences (rather than, e.g., the soul-sucking megalomania of rich oilmen). That said, the dialogue is woefully second-rate, unworthy even of The Gilmore Girls, and very irritating in the first 30 minutes or so. Turns well for the better in the second half, the moment the characters start thinking smart and stop speaking smart (save for Jennifer Garner's Vanessa, whom Ms. Cody evidently considers too boring to deserve even just a sip of that trademark "sparkling wit"). But really, the whole enterprise is woefully overrated. Ellen Page, in a star-making turn as the sassy but not yet as savvy Juno, is fine but does not hold up a candle to Caroline Dhavernas in the criminally neglected Wonderfalls. Rest of the cast is apt, though it was 'haps more than one way too cute to cast Jason Bateman and Michael Cera - father and son in Arrested Development - as Juno's two persons-of-interest.

There Will Be Blood (2007). Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano. -- Especially in his dotage, Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview somewhat channels Michael Palin's land-hungry King of Swamp Castle ("One day, lad, all this will be yours!") Get past that or whatever reminiscences you can draw from Mr. Day-Lewis's slightly over-mannered shtick, and you have an unambiguously great movie, certainly leagues better than any Oscar Best Picture winner of this century (or at least since Schindler's List, and a case could be made up until The Godfather, Part II). It feels too short at over 2 hours, 40 minutes, and it has the best non-hummable musical score I have ever heard (by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood). What I find especially admirable is how it only pinches at the surface of all its big themes (i.e., capitalism, religion) so as not to be coerced into asserting the hoary big-picture symbolisms (greed equals capitalism, etc.) that inflate many a less-judicious epic. Instead, there is breathing room to appreciate the more human aspects of the story, as well as the overall ambiguities in the larger themes. I never thought they'd ever make another movie similar to Dovzhenko's Earth (1930), but here it is, minus the naive Marxism.

Quickies: The Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). Written and directed by Andrew Dominik. Starring: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell. -- Two points against: (1) The mannered patois, which seemed to me as authentic as a Simpsons spoof episode, particularly this one. (2) The transparency of the attempt to convert the Robert Ford-Jesse James story to modern day equivalents such as Mark David Chapman-John Lennon or Yolanda Saldivar-Selena.

But I ended up liking it ultimately, 2 hours 38 minutes notwithstanding. It is a tour-de-force for Casey Affleck (who incongruously is Oscar-nominated only as a supporting player), who plays up the deep burn of an awkward loser who slowly learns that revenge is not as dandy as it may seem. An awfully thin moral perhaps, but this is one of those films where the lesson is not as much the point as the journey. I'm also a fan of naturalistic portrayals of centuries past -- costume dramas where they do show the toilet -- and Assassination has aplenty of choice scenes Currier and Ives they ain't.