From Malick-esque to Malick?

A lot seems speculative at this juncture, but there’s a report today tying Brad Pitt, fresh off The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, to Terrence Malick’s next film Tree Of Life. This has The Cooler excited, not because of Pitt’s involvement (though the Cooler King likes Pitt) but because any news about progress on another Malick movie is good news (the Cooler King loves Malick!). The story from IGN.com calls Tree Of Life “long in development” (aren’t all Malick movies?) and says Sean Penn is attached to the project as well.

Of course, when it comes to a Malick production, acting in the movie and being in the movie are two different things. Adrien Brody’s part in The Thin Red Line was written and filmed as a starring role, only to be slashed down in the editing room to a supporting part. Similarly, Thin Red Line supporting player Ben Chaplin wound up with hardly more than a row-by in Malick’s most recent picture, The New World.

But regardless of who ends up in front of the camera, Malick fans should be happy to know that New World cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Children Of Men) is among the production crew listed on the film’s IMDb profile. According to IMDb, the project is slated for release in 2009, but knowing Malick’s less than swift pace, I’m thinking late 2010 sounds more realistic.

81st Oscars: There Will Be Blockbusters?

The 81st Academy Awards are a year away, but apparently it isn’t too early to predict the films that will vie for Best Picture. Your nominees will be: The Dark Knight, Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, Star Trek and Something Animated By Pixar or Dreamworks.

At least that’s what’s going to happen if you buy into any of today’s doomsday analysis of the dismal Nielsen ratings for Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony. With only 32 million viewers, the 80th edition of the Academy Awards had the smallest audience of any Oscars ceremony since 1974, when the Nielsen folks began tracking the numbers. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Sunday’s show drew the lowest household rating since the program’s national television debut in 1953. Ouch.

Lisa de Moraes’ story in The Washington Post details the reasons the broadcast bombed, while also nitpicking faults of the ceremony that likely had nothing to do with the low viewer turnout (excuse me, but if Americans were such snobs about writing, 24 would have tanked in its first season). Pretty much, it comes down to the reality that this year’s Oscars were “dominated by films no one's seen” while starring “actors no one's heard of.” “No one” being all the folks who wouldn’t come to “The Cooler” and who strive to keep Nicolas Cage an A-lister.

The question nobody seems to be asking however is whether the low viewer turnout is such a bad thing. I think we can all agree that, even beyond all the political reasons that certain performances or films are recognized or ignored from year to year, the Academy Awards are more about Hollywood selling itself than celebrating itself. The Oscars, and all the hype that comes with it, is a marketing event, and we movie fans are happy to be putty in Hollywood’s hands because, in the long run, movies – all movies – are better off with an annual awards show that everyone talks about than without one.

But if in 1998 the Academy Awards racked up 55 million viewers thanks to the masses who had helped Titanic rake in almost $500 million at the box office to that point, what did those monster Nielsen numbers do for the movie industry? Certainly there were gains. For example: Folks who fell in love with Kate Winslet that year saw her performance validated by an Oscar nomination. And, though she didn’t win an Oscar, we all got to see her look like a Hollywood icon as she walked down the red carpet and sat in the front row. Heading into 1997, Winslet was a someone “no one knew,” but by the end of the Oscars she was a star, and the Academy Awards exposure contributed to that evolution. And maybe, years later, more people went to see the unsettling Little Children than would have otherwise because they liked the actress in the lead. The trickledown effect is hard to measure exactly, but certainly the Oscars gave Winslet some celebrity mojo.

But that’s only part of the effect. True, compared to Titanic’s epic box office haul “no one” has seen No Country For Old Men (still closing in on $65 million domestically), but it stands to reason that more moviegoers who gave it a pass in theaters will give it a chance on DVD now that it carries a “Best Picture” stamp of approval. Thus, I’d argue that while the movie industry marketed itself to fewer people this Oscar night, it marketed itself more effectively (read: more profitably).

As just one piece of evidence, consider that Wild Hogs, starring familiar faces John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H Macy, received a paltry 15 percent favorability rating among critics at RottenTomatoes.com but finished 13th in the 2007 domestic gross rankings. The big-star movies sell themselves no matter how terrible, no matter how hyped. Thus, Hollywood gains more by bringing Javier Bardem out of the proverbial art house and into the living rooms of mainstream America, even if his image makes it into fewer living rooms, than it does by flaunting already-established stars. And the benefit for those of us who wouldn’t even consider watching Wild Hogs is that we might get more Bardem in the future and less Cage & Co.

In general, I loath this kind of discussion. You’ll rarely see such concepts discussed at “The Cooler” because I don’t care a lick about box office tallies or Nielsen numbers. I just want to be entertained, and I want to see cinematic art (both the highbrow and the lowbrow). Still, it’s a subject worth discussing because it’s crazy to think that the poor viewer turnout for this year’s ceremony won’t impact ceremonies to come. It’ll start with a change in hosts (something tells me they’ll offer Billy Crystal whatever it takes to have him host in 2009), but you can bet that it will also influence future slates of Oscar nominees. Next year there will be at least one Jerry Maguire in the field that the masses can rally around.

So we should care that a celebration of movies drew a lackluster reception on TV because the unusually just Academy Awards of 2008 could go down as a glimpse of Halley’s Comet rather than a sign of things to come. Hollywood will be determined to see that the Oscars stay relevant to the mainstream, and that probably means a return to pandering to the masses, at least for a while. So enjoy the memories of this Academy Awards season for as long as you can, because the fact that a lot of people didn’t watch the Oscars this year has a lot to do with why those of us who did felt so abnormally happy about what we saw.

The 80th Academy Awards: The Day After

So what did you think of Oscar night? Here at “The Cooler” we sure had fun. And thanks again to all of you who stopped by and joined in the live-blogging good time.

My only regret is that I didn’t invite Tom Shales of The Washington Post to pay a visit, because, wow, that home-skillet sure wasn’t digging last night’s doodle. Not even close. In his grumpy-old-man review of the festivities, Shales indirectly refers to the broadcast as at least nearly “The Worst Oscars Ever in the History of Hollywood.” Yikes.

That’s quite a statement. So let’s see what he didn’t like …

Shales’ primary complaint is that the show was “overstocked with clips.” And I can’t disagree there. The Oscars ceremony has always been fond of clips montages and pre-recorded bits, but this year’s abundant crop was dishearteningly dull. The all-digital opening was flat. The 80-years-of-Oscar-highlights montage soon after that took itself about as seriously as George Clooney took the act of announcing it (which is to say, not at all). And then there was the montage of all the Best Picture winners, presented chronologically and with their titles attached. That one really got on my nerves because every year I look forward to the mental exercise that comes with trying to identify as many films as I can within a given montage’s visual assault. This time there was no such thrill of the hunt.

It didn’t help that the presentation of these montages was so unimaginative, or that the duds came on the very same night that host Jon Stewart presented the “Binoculars and Periscope Montage” parody. Meanwhile, Jerry Seinfeld proved yet again that his Bee Movie humor is only cute as a concept. So, yeah, the clips reels sucked. But, on the other hand, we didn’t have to suffer through a single interpretive dance number. And that’s something.

The only insufferable portions of the show were the three tiresome musical numbers from Enchanted (I’m sure they’re cuter in the actual film). But Shales doesn’t take issue with any of that. Instead he contends that “there were hardly any emotional moments from winners on the stage.” Really? Well, let’s see: Marion Cotillard practically wet herself when her name was called for Best Actress and went to rubbery-legged pieces in a way that seemed totally genuine. Daniel Day-Lewis, in winning Best Actor, was gracious and succinct. Diablo Cody blubbered out a final thanks to her parents after winning Best Original Screenplay. Marketa Irglova made good of her unique post-commercial-break second chance at the microphone with some thoughtful words after she and Glen Hansard took Best Original Song. And Javier Bardem delivered a message to his mother in Spanish, which Shales must have enjoyed because the critic gets crabby with Stewart for openly declaring Bardem’s special speech “a moment.” “As if we were all too dumb to figure that out for ourselves,” writes Shales.

Based on the above, I suppose what Shales wants from Oscar winners is spontaneous combustion, or at least some Cuba Gooding Jr antics, or some Julia Roberts “stick man” foolishness. But what Shales obviously doesn’t want is more Stewart, whose performance last night he grades at “fair-to-middling … mostly middling.”

Actually, I thought Stewart was better than average. No, he didn’t deliver a single memorable one-liner. But he was affable, respectful and inoffensive, and that’s at least half the battle. When Stewart called Bardem’s message to his mom “a moment,” it wasn’t because he thought we missed it, it was because he knew that we didn’t. Stewart noted it because we were all thinking the same thing and weren’t quite ready to move on yet. And so he acted as our representative at the Kodak Theatre and gave us a voice. Stewart would do the very same thing later, in the best moment of the night, when he – like us – noticed that the orchestra had unintentionally played Irglova off the stage before she could speak. So he brought Irglova back on stage to let her have her moment in the spotlight. That’s a great host, folks!

I haven’t even mentioned yet that 14 different feature-length films took home awards last night. It was hardly a runaway bore as provided by Lord Of The Rings or Titanic. So even though the ‘favorites’ mostly won, yeah, the awards race was interesting right to the end. I also saw it reported this morning that this year’s Oscars marked the first since 1964 that no American won an acting award. And that’s at least somewhat interesting, right?

So I’m savoring last night’s Oscars. But not without a few parting shots:

1. Javier Bardem is an enormous talent who more than deserved his recognition as Best Supporting Actor. But the most painful part of last night was seeing the look of dejection on Hal Holbrook’s face. Remember how terrible you felt for Holbrook’s Ron Franz when the drifter he loves like a son decides to drift again in Into The Wild? Seeing Holbrook lose last night was that heartbreaking and then some. I don’t want to say that it can’t happen, but the look on Holbrook’s face said: “It ain’t gonna happen.” He isn’t going to win an Academy Award before he joins the ‘Those who left us…’ montage. And poor Hal had to digest that bitter pill while looking up on stage and seeing “Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson.” Ouch.

2. Another guy you’ve got to feel for is Paul Thomas Anderson. Look, I’ve got some problems with the third act of There Will Be Blood. And we can all agree that to consider that movie a masterpiece you must first buy into the genius of Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance, and some people don’t. So, that said, it was nice to see There Will Be Blood pick up Oscars for Best Actor and Best Cinematography. But Anderson has earned Oscar nominations as a writer and/or director for three different pictures: Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. And he’s oh-fer on little golden statuettes.

Like Martin Scorsese before him, Anderson’s films are dark and often genuinely unsettling and that’s part of the problem. Neither Scorsese nor the picture he directed won for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or GoodFellas (to name three). But he eventually got his Oscar, and I think Anderson will, too. However, if not up against the stiff competition of the pretty-darn-dark No Country For Old Men, Anderson might have prevailed this year with what is certainly his most ambitious project to date (if not my personal favorite). I just hope he doesn’t eventually cash-in with something as pedestrian as The Departed.

3. Finally, if you haven’t seen this yet, I’m sure someone will be e-mailing it to you soon. Friend of “The Cooler” ARoss texted news of this event just after it happened last night. But here on the East Coast the Cooler King was foolishly tuned into Barbara Walters at the time and hadn’t yet fired up the live blog, so he missed seeing it and reporting on it.

There are three lessons to be learned from this clip, kids: 1) Stay away from drugs and use alcohol in moderation. 2) Stay away from Gary Busey at all times. 3) Add the 2004 stuntwoman documentary Double Dare to your Netflix queue to enjoy some high comedy as Busey (perhaps even sober; it’s tough to tell) attempts to sweet-talk Zoe Bell at a party. Now that’s a cameo that deserves an award!

This, well, it’s just uncomfortable: for Jennifer Garner, for whatever woman is trying to wrangle Busey and even for Busey himself. Not that he realized it at the time.

Celebrate Oscar Night: There's a party going on right here ...

Live-blogging the Academy Awards …

11:50: Over already? Wow. That actually went by pretty quickly for this blogger. Thanks to all of you who stopped by! And feel free to keep the comments coming tonight! I’ll be sure to follow-up with thoughts tomorrow. But for now this blogger (who has his alarm set for 5:03 am) needs to head to the after-party known as bedtime.

A wonderful night for celebrating a terrific year at the movies! Thanks everybody.

11:45: No Country For Old Men wins Best Picture, and I’m a happy camper. I’ve seen this film three times and it becomes more extraordinary each time. I believe it will go down as a genuine American classic. You know, I rooted for Gladiator the year it won (a down year) and for American Beauty before that (though my heart was and is still very much with Magnolia). But this is the first time since The English Patient that I wholeheartedly feel like the actual best picture of the year won the honor of Best Picture.

How are the rest of you feeling? Leave some thoughts in the comments section!

11:44: In a comment that will make even more sense next week (trust me), “This is it…!”

11:43: The Coens take Best Director, and I hope this is a sign of what comes next. Joel tells us that he and his brother have been making movies since they were kids. Would it be possible for Ethan to film his acceptance speech and post it on YouTube? Might be more expressive. Great filmmakers, awkward fellas.

11:40: I’m still pissed that Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award had to come for the crummy and over-praised The Departed.

11:35: Daniel Day-Lewis, who I believe has been wearing the exact same tux all awards season, kneels for the queen after getting the Oscar win for Best Actor that we all knew was coming. What a gracious man, and what a forceful performance! I have no objections to this win, but I have a hint of sadness for Tommy Lee Jones, who finally played restrained in the all too unwatched In The Valley Of Elah, and for Viggo Mortensen, who in Eastern Promises is just as bold as Day-Lewis without even approaching camp.

In his acceptance speech, Day-Lewis called his wife “enchantingly optimistic and open-minded.” Well, she’d have to be to wear that dress, wouldn’t she? See 8:13.

11:30: Is there anyone who doesn’t like Helen Mirren? And I said it last year and I’ll say it this year: she’s still bringing it!

11:25: Diablo Cody didn’t win Best Original Screenplay! Jane of the Jungle won! Wait, no. That’s Cody. Or whatever her real name is (honestly: does her husband really call her “Diablo”?). Hey, I’m a fan of Juno. It’s an original. But let’s hope it stays that way. Diablo: Is this a hint at your potential or the extent of it? Time will tell, home-skillet.

11:24: You’re down to a few more seconds until a former stripper is an Oscar-winning writer...

11:18: “Let’s move away from the dark side and back to the light,” says the Oscar-winning director of Taxi To The Dark Side, your Best Documentary winner. I loved No End In Sight and it’s a shame it goes home a loser. But, if you haven’t read it yet, I argued this week that a Taxi win could have a more significant effect on our present and future. Let’s hope so. See this movie, folks.

11:09: Atonement wins Best Score, and it could have gone no other way. Props to Dario Marianelli who had the balls to say, “I’m going to come up with a romantic score and add the sound of a typewriter to it ..." And he made it work. Brilliant!

11:05: We just paid our respects to all the movie artists who have left us this past year. Here at “The Cooler” we must give extra respect to Bud Ekins, who performed the famous motorcycle jump of Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape. Movie magic!

11:00: There Will Be Blood takes the Cinematography prize. It’s hard to top a burning derrick. A deserved win, and I'm happy to see this film get some love. Still, I have tremendous respect for the daring and transportive approach of The Diving Bell & The Butterfly. And this makes Edward Copeland calling The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford “the best Terrence Malick film that Malick didn’t make” all the more appropriate, because – like a Malick movie – it didn’t win.

10:59: Wow! Best Cinematography! Tough field. Can we go for a five-way tie?

10:58: Stewart brings Irglova back on stage to give the acceptance speech the orchestra didn’t give her a chance to deliver. That’s class. That’s what you want from a host! Well done!

10:50: Once wins for Best Original Song! Justice! Want to be enchanted? Look into Marketa Irglova’s eyes during this movie. Meanwhile, if you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know this, Irglova and Hansard are a real-life couple...though the story about how he’s known her since she was 2 and he, um, wasn’t, is a little bit creepy. In fact, let’s crawl under the rock together and forget all about it, shall we?

10:49: New rule: If we have to suffer through performances of each song during the Academy Awards ceremony, then only one song per movie can be nominated. I’m done with Enchanted!

10:35: Robert Boyle picks up the honorary Oscar. Anybody who designed sets for Hitchcock is fine by me. In Cold Blood (I know; not Hitch) and North By Northwest: now I understand art direction and production design!

And this is one of the neat things about the Academy Awards: I go into tonight having never heard of Robert Boyle, and I leave feeling touched by the Academy’s recognition of his career. Cool!

10:30: What is Nicole Kidman doing with a chandelier hanging around her neck?

10:29: Bourne Ultimatum picks up its third win of the night, this time for Best Editing. A great pick here. I’m not a fan of the Paul Greengrass unsteadycam, but those fight scenes are amazing achievements in editing (and stunt choreography).

10:20: “Falling Slowly” from Once! Simply beautiful. Beautifully simple. Is it possible to watch Once and not fall in love?

10:13: Marion Cotillard wins Best Actress. And this isn’t her first award for this film, but I’m still calling this an upset. To beat the legendary Julie Christie and the hot thing of the moment Ellen Page is truly something. I haven’t seen La Vie En Rose (dammit), but I love Cotillard in Big Fish (a movie that reduces me to tears every damn time I see it). Good for her. And what a charmingly sweet acceptance speech!

Props, by the way, to Christie: I finally saw Away From Her and she’s nothing short of tremendous in a tricky role.

10:05: Appropriately enough, this Jonah Hill-Seth Rogan routine about who is more like Halle Barry feels almost as if it’s written by the supposedly brilliant Judd Apatow: mildly funny at first, then sweetly familiar, then tedious and interminable.

9:55: “That’s how you know…” is the refrain in the second song from Enchanted to be performed tonight. I love Amy Adams, and so I nearly went to this kid-targeted flick. Can’t say these songs are making me feel any remorse for missing it.

9:47: No Country For Old Men gets its second win of the night, this time in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay. Little Coen (Ethan) can’t come up with anything better than “Thank you.” Think Cormac McCarthy can scribble out an acceptance speech to adapt before Best Director comes up?

9:39: Tilda Swinton looks legitimately surprised to win Best Supporting Actress. Maybe that’s why she’s wearing a satin graduation robe with a sleeve missing.

9:18: Javier Bardem wins Best Supporting Actor. Deservedly so. His Anton Chigurh is the most memorable monster since Hannibal Lecter. And if you haven’t seen The Sea Inside, put it in your Netflix queue right now. An amazing actor.

By the way: Remember that nanosecond when folks thought the “friendo” line was too quirky? Bardem has a certain milkshake to thank for that line evaporating from the over-scrutiny forum.

9:14: Best Supporting Actor montage includes "The Cuba Gooding Jr Moment." He got a standing ovation for that acceptance speech. And now he’s selling Hanes underwear. Draw your own conclusions.

9:11: Sweeney Todd wins for Best Art Direction. I’ve got to admit, I don’t quite understand the criteria of this category, but Sweeney Todd sure sounds like a deserving winner. Tim Burton’s films are always feasts for the eyes with tremendous ambiance.

9:08: The Golden Compass wins for Best Visual Effects. Amazingly four white guys we’ve never heard of before and will never hear from again each manage to speak before getting played off stage. Well done, fellas!

8:57: They’ve been calling Katherine Heigl the beautiful woman next door for months now, and I’ve never gotten it. Women who look like that didn’t even live in my neighborhood. But the trembling voice thing as she read the nominees for Best Makeup was endearing and very non-polished Hollywood. I still don’t buy her and Seth Rogan in Knocked Up, though. Not for a second.

8:54: Ratatouille wins the Oscar for Best Animated Film. Very deserving. It’s the best animated film since The Lion King. A masterpiece!

8:47: George Clooney, who always looks delicious, even to me, introduces the night’s first montage. It’s supposed to be a collection of 80 years of special Academy Award moments. Instead they mostly feel like outtakes. Bummer.

8:45: We’re at the first commercial break. To anyone following at home, let’s get that comments section going. If you could pick just one category tonight to ensure its winner, what would you pick? Which category matters the most to you tonight?

8:43: Elizabeth: The Golden Age takes Best Costume in the first award of the night. Well of course is does! I mean, were there even actors in that movie?

8:39: Stewart quips that usually when a woman or a black man are president that an asteroid is headed for the Statue of Liberty. Black-president remark is followed by a cut to Spike Lee and Wesley Snipes. It’s like a Republican National Convention.

8:36: This could go down as the line of the night. Stewart on Norbit, nominated for Best Makeup. “Too often, the Academy ignores movies that aren’t good.”

8:34: Stewart on the dark themes found in several of tonight's nominated films: “Does this town need a hug? ... All I can say is thank God for teen pregnancy!”

8:32: Got our first obligatory Jack Nicholson shot of the night. Remember last year’s Academy Awards, when Jack was bald and we thought he’d lost his last marble and had truly gone insane, but it turned out he’d shaved his head for a role in The Bucket List, which was universally panned? I’d say advantage insanity, wouldn’t you?

8:30: Jon Stewart is back as our host tonight, and that makes me happy. His efforts to bring Daily Show shtick to the ceremony two years ago didn’t go all that well, but his taped introduction that concluded with him waking up in bed with Halle Barry and George Clooney was hilarious, and he’s a genuinely funny guy without an overbearing personality.

That’s what I want out of a host: someone who can open funny, give us at least one good adlib and generally keep the show moving along without annoying the piss out of me. Selecting my ideal hosts from the past 10 years, I’d go with Steve Martin No. 1, Billy Crystal No. 2, Jon Stewart No. 3 and Anyone Who Isn’t Whoopi Goldberg No. 4.

Which brings us to this… Anyone have any memorable host adlibs from recent Oscar ceremonies? I’ve got to go with the time Sean Connery wore that pirate-esque/Seinfeld-esque puffy shirt under his coat and Martin quipped that while some were wearing Armani, Connery was wearing “Red Lobster.”

8:27: Regis let’s us know that Javier Bardem goes by “Xavier.” Thankfully this boo-boo caps off the red carpet program. Time for the real deal!

8:23: Hillary Swank looks wonderful. Somewhere Chad Lowe is sobbing.

8:22: More stupid red carpet questions for a Best Actress nominee. To Ellen Page: ‘Your birthday was a few days ago, did you celebrate?’ Well, no. I figured I’d celebrate my birthday a week after it. You know, like everybody.

8:20: We’re at commercial, so it’s my chance to tell the West Coast peeps that they can pass on Barbara Walters’ interview with Ellen Page. Here’s what we learn: we don’t know anything about her. Thanks, Babs!

8:16: Regis Philbin asks Cameron Diaz about Daniel Day-Lewis’ habit of staying in character throughout a movie shoot. To illustrate what that looks like, Diaz stays in character as someone who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

8:13: Can someone explain to me why Daniel Day-Lewis’ wife is wearing a hood ornament on her chest?

8:08: We go to commercial with a shot of uber stars Marlee Matlin and Steve Guttenberg, who will compete on the upcoming season of Dancing With The Stars. Hmm...is that an ABC show or something?

8:04: This just in: Edith Piaf, subject of La Vie En Rose, died in 1963, and Marion Cotillard played her anyway! Wow! Let’s just hand her the Oscar right now.

8:00: So, let’s see: I’ve been to two movies today and I’ve suffered through the Barbara Walters interviews. But I spy a red carpet, and I’m high on double-chocolate milano cookies (with a fresh bag nearby). So I guess that means it’s go-time!

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I dragged my feet on starting a blog until I could drag them no more. And then once I started blogging (albeit just a few weeks ago) I wondered why I’d dragged at all.

Which brings me to this: against my better judgment, tonight "The Cooler" will be live-blogging the Academy Awards (that means running commentary, blog neophytes; it doesn’t mean I’m at the Kodak Theatre). It’ll be punchy, it’ll be sloppy and it could be a one-time experiment for this writer. But it’ll give us something to do during those commercial breaks.

So get your favorite red-carpet attire from the dry cleaner or throw on your favorite pajamas. Either way, I’ll see you tonight!

Drowning Our Integrity: Taxi To The Dark Side

Let me begin with full disclosure, which is really at the core of everything that will follow. Of the five films up for Oscars this year in the category of Best Documentary, I’ve seen only three. And so it is with a hint of shame and sincere apologies to Operation Homecoming: Writing The Wartime Experience and War/Dance that I make the following not-entirely-informed proclamation: If there’s any justice in the cinema world, Sunday night No End In Sight will win the Academy Award for Best Documentary, bringing deserved recognition to a film by Charles Ferguson that’s notable for its thorough, critical and awesomely accessible account of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq. But if instead of cinematic justice you’d like to see some real justice brought to the world, I suggest you spend Sunday night rooting for Taxi To The Dark Side.

Like An Inconvenient Truth before it, Taxi needs to be seen by as many people as possible. The subject of the film is America’s policy on torture. No, wait. Scratch that. As high-ranking members of the Administration That Can’t Leave Fast Enough have repeatedly insisted, America doesn’t torture. So I guess that makes this a documentary about the infliction of extreme pain or physical punishment on prisoners in U.S. custody. And, whaddya know! That synopsis happens to include the definition of torture. What a coincidence.

Directed, written and narrated by Alex Gibney, Taxi opens with the tale of an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar, who was arrested under suspicion of shelling U.S. troops and died a few days later at Bagram prison. The Army medical examiner ruled Dilawar’s death a homicide. The cause of death was related to blood clotting induced by the repeated implementation of supposedly non-lethal disciplinary techniques. Better put, U.S. military personnel kneed Dilawar in the legs until his limbs were, in the description of the coroner, “pulpified.” Had Dilawar survived, his legs would have required amputation.

What was Dilawar’s crime? There were two, actually. The first was being suspected of an offense he didn’t commit. The second was failing to confess to that crime or to turn over valuable information about Al Qaeda or the Taliban that he didn’t possess. In other words, Dilawar’s sins were being arrested and being innocent. For that he lost his life. And that’s tragic enough, don’t get me wrong. But the brilliant thing about Taxi is that it looks beyond Dilawar’s specific case and asks an equally important philosophical question: What has America lost?

In the least, we’ve lost perspective. The Bush Administration has thrived on “Us vs. Them” messaging that casts America as Luke Skywalker to Islamic terrorism’s Darth Vader, and yet it’s more than rhetoric to say that America’s white robes have been stained with innocent blood. Taxi proves it. It demonstrates how the pressure to produce results (in the form of confessions or other intelligence) at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay created a system that valued quantity (the number of details) instead of quality (the factuality of those details). Thus we get the 2002 case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose admission under waterboarding of a Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda link was used as justification to invade Iraq, though the CIA would later rule the information bogus.

Which brings us to another topic covered in the film: the unreliability of information produced under harsh interrogation (torture). Waterboarding is the technique that draws the headlines, but Taxi makes a case that some of the more innocuous techniques may be more harmful than they seem. Loud music? Hooding? Forced standing? They don’t sound too bad, until you hear that these techniques used together could cause significant psychological trauma within 72 hours. After that, chances are slim that detainees would recall or be able to express valuable information, even if they had it. Remember the snapshot from Abu Ghraib of the hooded detainee standing on a box, wires wrapped around his hands, believing that he’ll be electrocuted if he moves? Taxi gives the impression that electrocution might actually be more humane than a combination of supposedly Geneva-approved techniques.

But according to Bush & Co, part of the problem is that the rules are so gosh darn “vague.” Really? According to the Supreme Court the following prisoner abuses qualify as war crimes: “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture … outrages upon human dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Seems pretty straightforward to me. Vague to nonexistent would be the guidelines presented to American servicemen about what they could and couldn’t do to detainees in the effort to extract information or simply disquiet a prisoner. By establishing policy implicitly instead of explicitly, government leaders were able to see that America crossed over to the “dark side,” as Vice President Dick Chaney called it, while leaving room to slip out the back door of a PR disaster like Abu Ghraib by tossing out the “bad apples” and pleading ignorance. “It was only the night shift,” then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reasoned in typical Bush Administration anti-accountability. How’s that for supporting the troops?

In interviews with Gibney, the men directly responsible for Dilawar’s death – that is to say the knee-ers – sure don’t come across as bad apples. Instead, they seem like well-intentioned, dedicated soldiers who got stuck following immoral orders that they couldn’t refuse. The echoes of A Few Good Men’s morality play are surreal, yet this story is all too true. And that’s why you might want to root for Taxi to win an Oscar. No End In Sight is nothing less than extraordinary for the breadth and precision of its exposé, which brings clarity to a story that the national media missed or downright ignored as it was happening. But while No End In Sight has a maddening yet gratifying “told ya so” quality to it, it also arrives like a page of history that has already been turned. Taxi, on the other hand, has the ability to influence history as its being written. In a documentary full of horrific truths, the most upsetting one is this: without significant changes to our nation’s interrogation practices, Taxi may someday have a sequel.

Of course, Bush Administration defenders will tell you that if we tie the hands of our interrogators we will put our soldiers at risk, and maybe even ourselves. Then, as Taxi cleverly portrays, they’ll resort to an extreme scenario right out of 24 and ask what we’d want Jack Bauer to be able to do to a terrorist holding information about a time-bomb set to go off in Times Square. But all of that hypothesizing will overlook a key truth, as expressed by one of the film’s conservative talking heads, former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora, who notes that we shouldn’t strive to just save American lives but also to protect our principles. Watching Taxi, it’s hard to believe our government remembers what the word means anymore. Perhaps an Academy Award would help remind them.

Crude Bubbler: There Will Be Blood

[With the Academy Awards approaching, this week The Cooler is posting reviews of the Best Picture nominees, written upon the films’ release in the author’s pre-blog era. Feel free to use the comments section to argue why your favorite nominee should win or why any of these films didn’t deserve to be nominated.]

Tension runs beneath the surface of There Will Be Blood like the oil that bubbles up from the ground and consumes its main character. The title of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth film is a promise, and so every moment of the 158-minute picture is saturated with a sense of ominous premonition. Very loosely based on about 100 pages of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, Blood is a flawed but fascinating snapshot of the American West at the turn of the 20th Century, a time when an anonymous man could still literally climb up out of a pit in the earth and reinvent himself as a tycoon.

All that such a man required to succeed was the single-mindedness of purpose to do so. And in Blood, Daniel Plainview certainly has that. At the beginning of the film, which goes some 10 minutes without dialogue, we find Plainview digging in the ground for silver. As quickly as he finds a piece of glistening rock big enough to celebrate, he falls down his mineshaft and snaps his leg. For a few seconds afterward, we watch Plainview huffing and grunting as he strains to climb out of his mine without the use of his mangled limb. And when he reaches sunlight, we realize that his ordeal is just beginning: the camera pans to show nothing but open plains and craggy hills. No sign of a wagon or a horse to pull it. The one-legged Plainview is all alone and miles from civilization.

While those sweeping shots of vast nothingness provide the first example of the magnificent cinematography exhibited throughout the film by Robert Elswit (Anderson’s usual director of photography), the next image is a credit to editor Dylan Tichenor, and probably also to Anderson, who is a meticulous filmmaker. From the isolation of the California desert we cut to the interior of an assayer’s office, where Plainview lies on the floor, his leg now in a splint, waiting to be paid for the silver that he managed to haul out of the desert along with himself. There isn’t a word spoken about how Plainview made it out and over those fortress-like hills, as if an explanation isn’t required. And that explains everything: Plainview got out because he wanted to, and nothing was going to stop him. Simple as that.

And so the rest of the film unfolds, in grander scale, in greater length and with more nightmarish foreboding, but never more to the point. Plainview will become wealthier, cockier and, eventually, more maniacal. He will find an earthen treasure more valuable than silver – oil – and follow it until he runs out of land fit for drilling. He will develop rivals and, one way or another, defeat them all. He will take in an orphan boy who he first intends for a prop and then comes to love and then reduces to a prop again. He will trust in a man he’s never met before, and for the first time feel like he belongs to something. He will graduate from the makeshift manor of an entrepreneur most at home in his oil fields to a magnificent mansion befit for only the most prosperous of men. But Daniel Plainview will never evolve. He will remain throughout the same man who crawled out of the desert on a broken leg, consumed by a thirst for fortune.

If that makes it sound as if Blood is a one-note symphony, I’ve both nailed it and misled you. To be sure, Anderson’s film isn’t as epic in narrative as it is in appearance, length or performance: the man Plainview becomes is entirely foreseeable because the film’s dramatic arc is reserved for its American setting instead of its protagonist. Anderson’s film is in many ways a commentary on capitalism, opportunism and greed rather than a character examination. But at the same time, Plainview is an always arresting centerpiece, and it’s refreshing to encounter a protagonist who doesn’t evolve so much as snowball and who doesn’t devolve so much as deteriorate. It would be overstating things to call him an entirely original character, but it’s accurate to call him an individual.

Plainview is played by Daniel Day-Lewis in a much buzzed about performance that’s likely to be long remembered. Reportedly, Day-Lewis is the actor Anderson had in mind when he began to write Blood, and one can easily understand why: what better choice is there to play an intense, single-minded oil pioneer than the actor known for pouring himself so deeply into his parts that he often remains in character throughout a shoot? Day-Lewis’ portrayal falls somewhere between his work in My Left Foot (astounding for its physicality and metamorphosis) and Gangs Of New York (notable for its blend of sincerity and showiness). He wears a crooked nose, a thick mustache, a limp from the mineshaft mishap and an accent that many critics have pointed out is a spot-on impression of John Huston. But what overwhelms about Plainview is his squint of unwavering determination. Day-Lewis makes him an unstoppable force of nature.

Perhaps it’s well and good then that Blood ends as it does; the aftermath of a natural disaster is often harder to endure than the event itself. Still, the third act of Blood isn’t nearly as fulfilling as the first two. Anderson’s film thrives early as Plainview’s oil empire takes shape in Elswit’s panoramas: a barren landscape becoming a single oil derrick and then a field of them. The groaning strings of the noisy score by Johnny Greenwood bring to mind the shift of tectonic plates as Plainview divides and conquers this remote California land as if the blow from his pick had fractured Pangaea. All the while Paul Dano provides an interesting point of reference as Eli Sunday, a young preacher trying to build his Church of the Third Revelation who realizes that wealth and celebrity can be mined from more places than the center of the earth. Like the vibrations of a derrick before a gusher, these elements suggest a forthcoming explosion, but it never arrives.

When it runs out of things to chase, Blood, like its main character, loses its sense of self. The movie is at least a restaurant scene too long and a shrieking Dano too absurd. The ultimate destination of the story – though sure to be loathed by many – is defendable, but its implementation as a perfunctory epilogue is not. For two hours, this picture moves with purpose. Then it settles for ordinary. Anderson has here a near masterpiece that I’m afraid I’ll remember more for its eccentricities than its genius.

Shot to Thrill: No Country For Old Men

[With the Academy Awards approaching, this week The Cooler is posting reviews of the Best Picture nominees, written upon the films’ release in the author’s pre-blog era. Feel free to use the comments section to argue why your favorite nominee should win or why any of these films didn’t deserve to be nominated.]

The movie begins with the rich cinematography of Roger Deakins and the sun-baked Texas landscape. On screen we see gentle plains, modest bluffs and acres of unforgiving brush. Save a rusty windmill in the distance and a modest barbwire fence in the foreground, there’s not a sign this land has been touched by man. And yet it’s exactly the kind of landscape that we sense has seen it all. To these visuals is added the voice of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones with a husky Southern twang and saddlebag eyes that look as if they’ve seen too much. Bell tells us that his father used to be a lawman, too, like his father before him. He tells us that the “old timers” never used to carry guns, sounding every bit the old timer himself in the process. The year is 1980, but it feels like it could be 1880. No Country For Old Men is a modern Western with classical roots made with classical filmmaking techniques by modern filmmakers who have never been better.

That last point will be passionately debated. The auteurs behind this movie are Joel and Ethan Coen, whose previous works include critical darlings like Blood Simple, cult classics like The Big Lebowski and movies that qualify as both like Fargo. The Coens’ films tend to be distinctive and daring – even in failure, as with their misguided remake of The Ladykillers – and they are adored for their unique brand of earnestly foolish humor. But the same skill that has won the Coens so much praise sometimes seems to hold them back, miring them in the offbeat or the surreal. The difference in No Country is that they refreshingly go for the jugular. Oh, make no mistake: this film isn’t always serious. It’s peppered with that deadpan Coen humor. But you won’t leave this picture giggling about any wood chippers. This Coen effort, adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy, is an experience that puts the audience through the wringer instead.

No Country is a triumph on nearly every level. The acting is good, the writing is good, the cinematography is great and the editing (for which the Coens are also responsible) is spectacular. The story is divided into three subplots that are never far apart but that rarely share the same room. Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a plain old country boy who happens upon the remnants of a drug deal gone wrong. This puts him in possession of a satchel holding $2 million, and the dead bodies littering the ground tell Llewleyn that he’d best take the money and run. Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is the bounty-hunting, murderous psychopath that Llewelyn is running from, but it’ll be a while before Llewelyn knows that. Meanwhile, Jones’ Bell is a few steps behind and on the trail of both men, but it’s Llewelyn he wants – not to nab him but to save him from Chigurh. That Bell would sooner avoid a fight than seek to arrest a monstrous criminal tells you everything about him that you need to know. Certainly Bell is nothing like Jones’ Marshal Samuel Gerard from The Fugitive. But you’ll need to pay attention to catch that.

And so it is with the entire film. No Country isn’t impenetrable, it isn’t even elusive, but it isn’t overt either. And by today’s standards, in which plot developments tend to be advertised in blinking neon, lest we dummies in the audience miss them, this makes No Country seem a bit vague. Even ambiguous. But it isn’t. All the pieces we need to put the puzzle together are there on the table for us. And if the finished picture includes some patches of shadowy uncertainty, well, it’s supposed to be that way. But this is a movie that requires active movie-watching, a movie in which the bow that wraps up the story is handed to us before the rest of the gift, in the form of Bell’s opening narration. But if you appreciate a film that haunts you and worms its way into your thoughts for days after seeing it, this is your movie. No Country clings to the imagination like a barb.

Then again, No Country has the power to overwhelm even the casual observer. In a film that’s truly about fate, destiny and evil, the business with Llwelyn, Chigurh and the money is nothing more than a MacGuffin. But it’s one hell of a MacGuffin! Except for Danny Boyle’s superb sci-fi hit Sunshine, no movie this year comes close to matching No Country’s tension and gut-wrenching gravity. For roughly the first 90 minutes of the 122-minute picture it seems something is always happening or is about to. Its suspense is Hitchcockian. Its adrenaline seems prescribed by Michael Bay. And yet here is filmmaking as straightforward as you’ll ever find. There are no Paul Greengrass quick-cuts (Bourne Ultimatum). There are no showy Alfonso Cuaron extended sequences (Children Of Men). It’s just Deakins’ patient cinematography: each shot showing us just enough and never too much.

Film is a visual medium, but few movies are actually this visually effective (or this affective, for that matter). Show this movie to someone with the sound turned off and I guarantee they’d more or less follow the plot, including its intricacies. But I wouldn’t recommend that. No Country may unfold without a score, but it’s alive with sound: the crunching of boots in the dirt, the serpentine hiss of the air tank that powers Chigurh’s weapon of choice, the sound of a phone ringing off the distance and, yes, the pregnant scream of silence. That a movie can be this suspenseful without the added music cues is a credit to the Coens’ craft. And yet No Country might be too pulse-pounding for its own good. Movie-goers who get so wrapped up in the exhilarating MacGuffin that they miss the story’s larger themes will be at least nonplused if not even thoroughly disgusted by the movie’s admittedly flat final act.

But No Country’s shortcomings pale in comparison to its strengths. What lingers are the characters: Bell’s haunted premonitory gaze; Llewelyn’s in-over-his-head grit; the loving concern of Llewlyn’s wife Carla Jean (played affectionately by Kelly Macdonald); and perhaps most of all the animalistic detachment of Chigurh. Bound by a perverted moral code only he understands, Chigurh is an enigma, and Bardem’s deliciously obscure portrayal adds layers to the riddle. Maybe not since Hannibal Lecter has a villain been this simultaneously menacing and captivating. And never before have the Coens made a film so deeply satisfying. The true letdown is that it ever has to end.

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Related: Searching for Chigurh