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If you don't mind, I'm going to jump ahead for a minute to let you know I have three more years of alternate Oscar polls up and running — 2017, 2018 and 2019. The first is a final vote to pick the winners, the other two are to pick the nominees.
(Kudos to anybody who knows whose picture that is at the top of the page and why I've posted it.)
2017
2018
2019
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Same approach as before — vote for as many as ten movies for best picture, and up to five nominees in the other categories, I'll total the votes, and the top ten vote getters for best picture and the top five in the other categories will be the nominees for the 2017 alternate Oscars.
Oh, and remember, there are six categories, six polls ...
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Some day I'm going to write a 3000 word essay about the phenomenon known as the Hallmark Christmas movie, but not today.
The dog has been under the weather lately which means a lot of couch time for me and her. But what to watch while glued to the television? I've seen every rerun of every Law & Order there ever was or will be, and the Star Trek Channel (a.k.a. BBC-America) has worn me out. So flipping channels, I stumbled across the two Hallmark cable channels — Hallmark and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries — which show nothing but Christmas movies 24/7 from the week before Halloween through New Year's Day.
And not just any Christmas movies, but movies made by Hallmark for Hallmark. This year alone, Hallmark will wind up debuting thirty-three new movies.
So far, I've seen 24 of them.
Jeebus, do they turn them out on a lathe? As a writer and amateur movie historian, I had to figure this out.
After extensive research (passive bingeing), I can report that all of them can be distilled down to a single storyline: a damaged soul is made whole again through the redemptive power of Christmas and heterosexual pair-bonding.
There are lots of pretty young widows, single moms, career women, angels longing to be made flesh, soldiers returning home, children hoping for a second parent, burned-out writers in need of a Christmas goose and shop owners looking to sell out or stay put. Long lost loves meet again through a series of coincidences that would make Charles Dickens blush.
Santa Claus — the real one — shows up about one time in three, mostly to act as a matchmaker, but sometimes just to remind people that decorating an artificial tree can make all the difference.
Our heroine typically battles one of three great villains: cynicism, death and/or corporate capitalism, the latter a pretty interesting choice considering the source.
Spoiler alert: she will win with minimal fuss.
In the course of two hours, minus commercials, two good-looking B-listers will fall in love, kiss around the 1:58 mark and take that job or move to that small town that once seemed too quaint for words but turns out to be just perfect.
The movies star the likes of Mira Sorvino, Lindy Booth, Rachel Boston, Catherine Bell, Maggie Lawson and very occasionally a male lead as well-known as Dermot Mulroney.
Supporting work from everybody: Judd Nelson, Danny Glover, Joan Cusack, Shelley Long, Beau Bridges, James Brolin, Jewel Staite, Giselle Eisenberg, and on and on.
These movies are not in any sense great — there are no memorable lines or scenes or images or performances, and none of the emotions they tap into will resonate beyond the closing credits. In fact, they are so cookie-cutter, I image there's a template (or three) and the writers simply fill in new character names and a bit of explanatory dialogue and bang, done.
There's even one called A Cookie Cutter Christmas — how on-point can you get!
But like macaroni and cheese out of a box — or should I say sugar-frosted Christmas cookies hot out of the oven — predictable can be terribly comforting. Especially in terrible times.
Recommended, if you're in the right frame of mind.
An empty exercise in style, Baby Driver is a compilation of every heist movie cliche — the big boss, the last job, the loose cannon, the dream girl — set to a 4-star soundtrack.
Skip the movie, buy the record.
Director Denis Villeneuve takes a ninety-minute butterfly and pins its wings to a nearly three-hour running time. All the flaws of the original — minimalist storytelling, elegiac tempo — with none of the magic that made the original a classic.
I suspect even the people most closely involved with 1982's Blade Runner don't know why it worked so well.
Yesterday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I finally got around to seeing writer-director Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster, Dunkirk, in 70mm down at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland.
If you know your history, Dunkirk is a place name that conjures up one of the most pivotal moments of World War II, the evacuation of the British army during the fall of France in June 1940.
Surrounded on three sides by the advancing Nazi armies and on the fourth side by the sea, the British found themselves on the verge of annihilation. Rather than negotiating terms, however, thousands of civilians took to fishing trawlers, tugboats, and pleasure craft, crossed the Channel, and pulled 300,000 men off the beach to safety.
This "heroic defeat" rallied the British people to stand alone against Hitler's armies, a stand now rightly regarded as "their finest hour."
Dunkirk is not a typical history lesson, however, with Churchill and Hitler barking orders at the strategic level.
Instead, the tale is told from three very intimate points of view — a week in the life of a British soldier (Fionn Whitehead) stranded on the beach; a day in the life of a weekend boater (Mark Rylance) and his son sailing from England across the Channel to rescue said soldiers; and an hour in the life of a British fighter pilot (Tom Hardy) tasked with protecting sea and sand alike from marauding German bombers.
Each moment is observed in extreme close-up — that is to say, limited strictly to details within the character's immediate line-of-sight or concern — without any backstory, exposition, humor or any other traditional storytelling device to provide context or lighten the load. In that sense Dunkirk reminded me of the interstitial chapters in Hemingway's first short story collection In Our Time where a single paragraph served as a drop of water from which to extrapolate the existence of an ocean.
The movie crosscuts continuously between stories, but not on simultaneous action as you've been taught to expect since the days of Griffith, instead on simultaneous emotions running along converging narrative arcs.
It's an audacious storytelling device, but then Nolan has spent his entire career — from Following to Memento to Inception to Interstellar — playing with chronology and narrative.
The action is intense, the mood desperate. There is no respite, no breather. If you have a fear of drowning in a tightly enclosed space, either alone or with a hundred men screaming out their last around you, this movie may not be for you. If you have claustrophobia or abandonment issues, if you're afraid of heights or fire or the dark, stay home. If you don't like the idea of getting blown up or shot at, rent a nice rom-com instead.
Katie-Bar-The-Door found the experience relentless and a bit exhausting. On the other hand, my fourteen year old niece has seen it three times.
One question that kept buzzing around in my head before the movie, was why Dunkirk? Why now? It's not an anniversary, it hasn't been in the news. Afterwards, I added to that, why such a tight focus on a handful of nearly anonymous characters? Not that it doesn't work, but stripped almost entirely of its historical context, the story becomes an abstract outline — a compelling outline, but an outline nevertheless.
And then it hit me. An outline of huddled masses yearning to breath free, fleeing the horrors of war, hoping against hope for a rescue from across the sea. Stripped of the filigree, Dunkirk is at its heart not a war story but a refugee story. And what are there millions and millions of right now?
Refugees.
It's the great moral and humanitarian crisis of our generation, and our failure to act, our indifference, our outright hostility in the face of a tidal wave of desperation and human misery flowing out of the Muslim world threatens to crack the very foundation of the West as we know it.
Suddenly Dunkirk seemed to me very timely. Timeless, too. If you pull back even farther, you see not just the historical battle of Dunkirk, and not just a parallel to today's world, but the story of mankind writ large — the never-ending battle between chaos and culture, cynicism and compassion, cowardice and courage.
That Nolan can take such a grim story, tell it in such a radically experimental style, and still sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tickets, well, that's not just genius, that's art.
Dunkirk isn't a perfect movie, only, I suspect, a great one. Stay tuned, it just might be the best picture of the year.
While I'm a forgiving critic, I don't think I'm prone to hyperbole. So when I tell you that I think The Good Place might be the most ambitious comedy ever made for network television, I'm not one of those idiots who hail the latest as the greatest simply because I haven't seen anything made before yesterday afternoon.
All thirteen episodes of The Good Place are available for streaming at NBC.com, on demand or, I think, Hulu (I'm old — I don't get Netflix or Hulu or any of those streaming platforms).
Drop everything. Binge-watch it today.
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