Cynical Cinema

I like Frances McDormand a lot. Ever since Fargo, I am willing to watch whatever she does, even if it’s Laurel Canyon or Johnny Skidmarks. So this week I watched Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, and once again I was impressed. Frances McDormand continues to be one of the best actresses working today. This movie, however, was clearly more of a vehicle for Amy Adams, who became a movie star with the Disney film Enchanted last year. While McDormand plays the Miss Pettigrew of the title, and holds the film together with her performance as a prudish but desperate woman who takes a job as a “social secretary”, whatever that is, for Adams.

I said during Enchanted that it would have been a way better movie if Amy Adams had been naked. And that’s pretty much what you get with Miss Pettigrew. Well, it’s partial nudity, of the bubble-bath-covering-the-good-bits variety. But it really is similar in that Adams is basically playing the same character she played in Enchanted. Well, this is not entirely true. She is really playing Holly Golightly, the character made famous by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. The parallels between the two characters are obvious from the very beginning. They are both charming, seemingly airheaded socialites with a youthful zest for life, a cavalier approach toward men, and they are both clearly pretending to be something they’re not.

And Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is clearly trying to be Breakfast At Tiffany’s for the new millenium. The film manages to capture the spirit of the films of the fifties and sixties, with the costumes and the parties and the upper crust people and the poor people in soup kitchen lines. It also shares a certain ethos that we don’t see in movies too often any more. If a man really loves a woman, he will pursue her to the end of the earth, fighting for her against the other men with whom she’s involved, even though he is only one of three men she is sleeping with. He doesn’t care that she’s basically a prostitute, as long as he’s the one who ends up with her. This just doesn’t happen in movies today. That’s why movies like Breakfast At Tiffany’s can seem very dated to an audience watching it now. It’s tough to watch the film now and not ask oneself - “why on Earth would George Peppard even want to end up with Holly Golightly? She’s irritating.” But, that was the tone of movies in those days. And it really works for Miss Pettigrew.

What doesn’t work for Miss Pettigrew is the last act. I really enjoyed the charm and whimsy and performances in the first hour, but the last twenty minutes really sagged. Of course, right from the very beginning of the film, we know who is going to end up with whom, and we also know exactly how it’s going to happen. It should come as no surprise when the movie ends. And it doesn’t. But watching everything unfold exactly as we know it will, with no surprises at all and no deviation from the end of so many similar movies, is rather disappointing. And even the stuff that IS a surprise is way too neat. The whole first hour of the movie has been setting up a major showdown where young Amy Adams will be forced to grow up and choose one man over the other two (we clearly know which one she will choose, right away). And part of that growing up process, we assume, will be to stand up, take responsibility, bite the bullet and break the hearts of the other two men. But at the last minute, both of those other men reveal themselves to be jerks, making the whole process incredibly easy for her. In fact, they make it entirely possible that she can, in the end, do exactly what she wants to do without taking any responsibility for herself or for her actions. She can just up and leave. Goodbye!

Despite the weak ending, Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day is very good. Frances McDormand and Amy Adams can play these roles in their sleep, but they both put a lot of effort into creating two memorable characters. I almost said “unique”, but McDormand is the only one who is “unique”. Adams, really, is playing Audrey Hepburn. This film is worth watching just for the facial expressions of Adams and McDormand. They are a treat. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day comes out Tuesday, August 19th, from Alliance Films.

Alliance Films is on a roll with their epic films. A few months ago, they released a magnificent three-disc Limited Collector’s edition of El Cid to DVD, one of the great but forgotten Charlton Heston epics. It came with cards and comic books and dozens of special features and booklets and all kinds of trinkets. Today, May 27th, Alliance is releasing the next in this epic series, a Limited Collector’s Edition of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. The three-disc set is almost identical to El Cid in terms of the goodies that come inside. And the two films are very similar as well, in that they are massive military epics with casts of thousands, enormous sets, and Sophia Loren. Starring with Loren in The Fall of the Roman Empire is Alec Guinness, one of the most under-rated actors in history, as the reasonable and wise Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He may well be one of the three greatest to ever live, up there with Brando and Olivier and Nicholson and DeNiro and Bogart.

The movie begins with Marcus Aurelius calling together the representatives of all the nations within the Roman Empire in order to secure peace and prosperity for the known world. Of course, this does not take place over the course of the film, and when it ends three hours later, it is with the Fall of the Roman Empire. This disaster comes about when Aurelius’ son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer), gets wind of his father’s decision to turn over the throne to his adopted son Livius instead of him. So Commodus decides to kill his own father in order to take the throne. And that leaves Rome in the hands of a childish, foolish man, who refuses to negotiate with his enemies or listen to other opinions, and thereby dooms the entire empire quite quickly. Well, in three hours.

This movie is famous now more as the movie that caused the fall of Samuel Bronfman’s cinematic empire, moreso than as a film. But as a film, it stands the test of time. The “Battle of the Four Armies” is as impressive a set piece as anything staged in The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. 8,000 soldiers and 1,200 horses were used for the production, which was shot on a massive plain in Madrid. And the detailed reconstruction of the Roman Forum remains, to this day, the largest ever outdoor film set. With set pieces and sets like these, it’s easy to see how the movie cost a massive amount to produce. And when it became a gargantuan financial failure, it took Bronfman’s empire with it. He had previously been responsible for some of the massive films of the era - El Cid, King of Kings - but after this one he never made another. It was more his business plan than the failure of this film, however, that did him in. He had spent so much creating the sets for these epic movies that he overextended himself, and owed millions of dollars when he became financially destitute and shut down operations.

The Fall of the Roman Empire plays a little fast and loose with actual, factual, history. But the tone, the costumes, the sets and the structure of the armies and the senate are all perfect. The Battle of the Four Armies, while an impressive scene, never actually took place. But the scene toward the end where the senators attempt to bribe the military into making one of them emperor is taken from historical fact. But in the end, you don’t watch a movie like this to learn specific facts about world history. You watch it to be entertained. And The Fall of the Roman Empire IS entertaining. Livius is played by Stephen Boyd, who does a terrific job in a role that was first offered to (of course) his Ben-Hur co-star, Charlton Heston. Sophia Loren is great as always, and of course smoking hot. The role of Commodus was only the third movie role for Christopher Plummer, and it’s the role that propelled him to stardom. And Alec Guinness is simply magnificent as Marcus Aurelius, a role that sadly ends halfway through the movie with his death.

There are many similarities to Gladiator in this film, and indeed a few people have suggested that on many levels Gladiator was actually a remake of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that is the case, but the stories certainly approximate one another. They occur at the same epoch in history, they deal with the same characters and the same downward spiral that consumed Rome in all her glory, and certainly the final scene is almost identical in both films. But Gladiator is a little more fanciful, and The Fall of the Roman Empire is way bigger in scale.

Now - while I certainly do recommend picking up this film, and this three-disc edition is wonderfully done, you might want to wait. For true rabid fans of this film, there is another edition coming out later, possibly as much as a year later. This edition features the standard two hour and 52 minute theatrical version that has been around for years. However, there was some lost footage that was discovered, too late to be included in this particular edition, that will be added to a later set. This will, though, likely be the only set with the poster-cards and the booklets that are included here. So perhaps, if you are a hardcore fan of The Fall of the Roman Empire, you could well do both. Like my nerd-buddy Dave, who owns all thirty-four different editions of the Star Wars trilogy. On VHS and DVD and LaserDisc and reel-to-reel and so forth. If only he had a laser disc player.

There is a bit of controversy over the shutout of American Gangster at the Oscars. It was not nominated for best picture, and both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington were shut out of the nominations for best actor. I understand the snub of Crowe. (Frankly, he deserves it more for 3:10 to Yuma than he does for this movie.) But the only reason I can think of for snubbing Washington is that he is too tailor-made for this part. You forget that he is an actor, because you’re watching Denzel Washington. As though it were a reality show about his life. If Denzel killed people and ran a drug empire and married Miss Puerto Rico, this would be exactly what his life would look like. The one role he has played to which I could compare this one was in Training Day, and he won the Oscar for that one. And here, he is better. That really is the strength of American Gangster, the performances.

Not just Washington, but Russell Crowe is reliably terrific as the cop tracking him down, and the supporting cast is remarkably good. The RZA, of the Wu-Tang clan, appears here, and as soon as I saw him I thought “oh, no! A rapper in a major role means this movie will start to hit Seagal territory in parts”. But the RZA is good. So is Armand Assante, who I love, and Josh Brolin as a crooked cop. Cuba Gooding Jr. is in the film also, and I absolutely hate Cuba Gooding Jr. However, he has maybe five lines, total, and wasn’t around long enough to irritate me. I also really like the inclusion of Clarence Williams III as Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. Johnson was a real-life legendary gangster figure in New York, and he was the subject of the under-rated 1997 movie “Hoodlum”, where he was played by Lawrence Fishburne in one of the best roles of his career.

In American Gangster, Bumpy dies near the beginning, and his right-hand-man, chauffeur and gopher, Frank Lucas, is left a little adrift. Frank is played by Denzel Washington, and he has few choices. Now that his mentor is gone, he can either leave town and go back to his family, or work for someone else, or take matters into his own hands. Of course, he chooses the third option and rises to power as the number one dealer, importer and gangster in New York. He manages to exist on the periphery, away from the other gangsters, the corrupt cops, and the good cops. One of those good cops is Russell Crowe, who has been blackballed by his police department for being a good cop. In a few scenes very reminiscent of Serpico, he is left hanging because the other cops in the department feel that if a cop won’t take money, then he of course would turn in cops who do. But of course, it isn’t black-and-white. Washington is not all bad, Crowe is not all good, which of course happens in any great movie. And a lot of bad ones.

What really sets American Gangster apart, aside from the fantastic actors doing fantastic acting, is the style. Ridley Scott has managed to make some of the most visually appealing movies in history. (Check out his early work, like The Duellists, or Alien). Sometimes that goes off the rails and the movie suffers for the stylish makeup - think Hannibal, or Black Hawk Down. But in American Gangster, Scott seems to treat the whole movie almost like a period piece. Of all his movies, this one feels the most like The Duellists, both in it’s theme and it’s style. It moves along at a crackling pace on the backs of Washington and Crowe, and although it runs more than two and a half hours, you never have a sense of the time passing. Tremendously engaging and fantastically done.

Becoming Jane is ostensibly the story of Jane Austen, considered by many to be the greatest female novelist of all time. Of course, we have to put the qualifier “female” in front of “novelist”, because it’s such a … well … novelty. Like “male stripper”. Never mind the fact that the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Margaret Laurence, Mary Shelley and Alice Walker have written some of the most enduring classics in literature, they are still “female authors”. And in Jane Austen’s time, being a “female author” was a pretty big deal. George Eliot clearly had to operate under a pseudonym (I actually have no idea what her real name was) because women couldn’t write stuff! Women cleaned and cooked and made babies! (It was a different time.) Now, as a big fan of Jane Austen and her novels, I know a good deal about her life. Enough to know how Becoming Jane ends. (I won’t tell you, in case you end up watching this film. And I hope you don’t.)

Becoming Jane, the DVD from Alliance Atlantis that comes out today, comes with a free coupon for Pennington’s. If you purchase 100 bucks worth of clothes, you get a 20 dollar credit - free! This should indicate something about the target audience for this film. Young women who just don’t know any better, apparently. Jane Austen, one of the towering literary figures in history, gets the Hollywood “bio-pic” treatment here. And like everything else in Hollywood, no great historical tale can possibly be told without cramming in a love story. No one in history was interesting unless they were in love with someone. Think Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and so forth. Jane Austen’s life was interesting only because of her love story, it turns out. You see, her family is trying to force her to marry a young, rich man so that they can have money and she’ll be happy, because marrying rich is a must, if it is possible. But Jane (played by Anne Hathaway here) has a MIND of her OWN, and SHE wants to marry for LOVE.

Wait…this is familiar. So Jane Austen had a life that almost perfectly mirrored that of several other movies I have seen? Movies like Titanic, The Notebook, The Princess Bride, My Man Godfrey, Van Wilder, Wedding Crashers, Sweet Home Alabama, Clerks II, and four hundred others I won’t bother listing? Of course she did! It’s a little known fact that Kevin Smith based his Dante character in Clerks II on the life of Jane Austen. OK, I made that up. All these movies have something in common. Or many things. The girl doesn’t want to be forced into a match, because she’s rebellious and independant and she has a mind of her own! The man she is being pressured to marry has money and property and wealth, but is either a complete jerk and cad no girl would ever like, or a simpering sissy no girl would ever want. Becoming Jane goes the “simpering sissy” route. The heroine then meets a lower-class, poor working man. Possibly a brutish sort who fights and drinks and doesn’t bathe or shave, but God help him he’s his OWN MAN! They hate each other straight away, but that hate quickly turns to love.

An aside - this is actually how I got together with my girlfriend. I didn’t bathe for weeks, I fought with everyone I met while in her presence, every time she saw me I was falling down drunk, and I called her many horrible names. I ran over her dog so we could start out on terms of “hate”, but I knew that that always leads to love, because I watch a lot of movies. Worked like a charm! At the end of most of these movies, the heroine of course marries for love. But we’re worried about her! How can she live so poor? She’s pretty, and pretty girls can’t be poor! So the guy usually ends up being incredibly rich, inheriting some money or winning the lottery or inventing a hilarious talking fish that proves to be lucrative. Now, she has the best of BOTH worlds! Thank God. She would really have regretted that whole “love” thing if she had to work for a living the rest of her days. She will be a princess after all.

These movies also suppose two things. First, that rich, high-class people are incapable of being fun and exciting without also being callous and evil. And poor people can never be intelligent and interesting unless they are also very good looking. In Becoming Jane, this interesting good-looking lower class peasant is played by James McEvoy (Last King of Scotland). The script wants us to know, constantly, that we are talking about JANE AUSTEN here, and so it makes Anne Hathaway into a rather irritating screen character. She speaks in gigantic words all the time, and is so condescending to everyone outside her immediate family that one takes an immediate disliking to her. It’s supposed to show her “rebellious, girl with a mind” nature, really it makes her officious and annoying. The seduction scenes between her and McEvoy are painful in their attempts to be dialogue-clever. I promis, Jane Austen did not talk like this in real life. And I wasn’t even there.

In the end, Becoming Jane is a movie every one of us has seen hundreds, maybe thousands of times (many of them with Anne Hathaway). It’s the oldest story in movies, and to pretend you’re talking about a real human being, a literary titan such as Jane Austen, is insulting to the viewer. And to Jane Austen. Are we to believe this romance shaped her entire life and gave us all her books? That she never existed outside the framework of this relationship? Remember - she’s a real person, we KNOW how this ends. Far more interesting would have been watching her attempt to become a writer! She is a woman, it’s 1795 - it’s going to be tough to get people to read her stuff, to publish her, to use her name, a female name, on the books! That would have been far more interesting than just taking the easiest story in Hollywood and trying to make a real person fit that story. Don’t watch this movie. Just read Persuasion and Mansfield Park and enjoy those.

It was the mother of Jesse James, in real life, who would select the words for his epitaph. “In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here”. The new movie, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, feels that Robert Ford’s name IS worthy to appear in their title alongside that of James. That the two men were equally important parts to the same story. It’s a story that has been told many times, in books, music, and of course movies. Jesse James has been played by Tyrone Power, Red Barry, Roy Rogers, Clayton Moore, Audie Murphy, Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson and Rob Lowe. Among others. The worst portrayal of James was Colin Farrell’s in American Outlaws - mostly because that movie was so very very terrible. The best may well be Brad Pitt in this film. Whose title I won’t keep typing for fear of developing carpal tunnel syndrome.

But Brad Pitt is outdone considerably in this movie by Casey Affleck. Yes, Casey Affleck, the kid brother of Ben, who has never appeared in any significant role in his life and yet all of a sudden finds himself in two of the biggest roles in two of the best movies of the year! And he is good. In both - it isn’t just his brother’s direction that makes him great, he is just legitimately an excellent actor. Robert Ford has been played by John Carradine, whose four sons became actors. Son David was later killed by Uma Thurman. He has also been played by John Ireland, and some guy on an episode of Little House on the Prairie. But the best protrayal is without a doubt Affleck’s in this movie, and he richly deserved his Academy Award nomination as best supporting actor. Although Brad Pitt is a Movie Star, and his public persona dwarfs his talent, people forget that he is an outstanding actor. Outdoing him in a movie is a considerable achievement.

Pitt at his very best reminds me a little of Paul Newman, and watching this movie reminded me of Paul Newman’s portrayal of Billy The Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958). He’s an outlaw on the edge of sanity, paranoid and almost childish in his outlook. He seems to be the kind of guy who has reached the end of his rope, and almost welcomes his own death. Death is his deliverance, and I think the title of the movie makes it pretty clear it happens, and as such this is not much of a spoiler. Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Mary-Louise Parker, and Sam Shephard are all excellent in supporting roles, and James Carville makes a bizarre appearance as the governor. Nick Cave shows up as a saloon singer, and Hugh Ross lends just the right tone to keep the story moving as the narrator.

Jesse James, in his day, was about the most famous person in America, outside the president, because his exploits were followed in the papers. He was a celebrity simply because he was someone that people had heard of, and there were not many of those around at the time. Even at the time, he was considered a hero in the west, because the papers protrayed him as an anti-establishment fighter on the side of good. But of course, he was really just a bandit and a murderer who happened to get good press. Che Guevara he was not. This movie captures the tone perfectly, Robert Ford being an idol-worshipping sycophant to James and his gang at first. He has been a die-hard Jesse James fan since he was a small boy, and now that he comes face to face with the reality of the outlaw, he becomes completely torn between his hero-worship and his desire for self-preservation. And the film has a surprisingly un-dramatic conclusion, given the subject matter contained so succinctly in the title. Like the best westerns of all time (and this is among the top 200 ever made) death is just something that happens as a natural course of living, whether it be because of the elements, sickness, or at the hand of other men.

Westerns have gone through many ups and downs in movie history. John Ford’s Stagecoach, in 1939, was the first movie to suggest that westerns could be real feature films, A-list movies, rather than continuing as it was in B-movie, black-and-white serials and the like. That was the golden age of the western, when John Wayne and John Ford were kings, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart were major stars, and films like The Searchers, High Noon, Shane, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were among some of the best ever made. There was a big resurgence in the western genre during the 70s, when the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood breathed some life back into the genre. Then it died again, until the 90s, when Unforgiven in 1992 became one of the greatest movies of all time, and quite possibly the best western. This resurgence led mostly to B-grade fluff, like Bad Girls and The Quick And The Dead, and nothing of substance. I sincerely hope now that films like 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford mark a more substantial return to significance in the history of the western, and that more movies like this one can be made. But even if not, the fact that this particular movie was made is reason enough to be happy.

Lust, Caution is the newest movie from the man who may well be the most over-rated director this side of M. Night Shyamalan. Ang Lee, the celebrated director of the magnificent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has followed up that triumph with three movies which, while decent, were decidedly over-rated. The Hulk, in which Eric Bana rips off his shirt and becomes giant and green, was a nice new take on the comic book genre, but it was far from revolutionary. Lee followed that one up with Brokeback Mountain, which scored far more points for it’s subject matter and for the guts it took to make the project a major Hollywood film, than it did for actual quality. A good film, but not as great as people seem to think. And now we get Lust, Caution. Another film that took guts, another film that pushes boundaries, but not exactly Earth-shattering. (I say he is less over-rated than M. Night Shyamalan, because Lee continues to at the very least make good movies. Shyamalan, since the Sixth Sense and maybe Unbreakable, has blown chunks. His movies have been downright rotten.)

The premise of Lust, Caution is that it is 1942, in the middle of World War II. The Japanese have occupied China since the late 30s, and the story takes place in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. Tang Wei plays a woman who used to be a college student, and is a part of the resistance fighting the occupation. This is now a collaborative occupation, with both Japanese and Chinese officials cracking down on the populace. Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) is an official in this oppressive government, a man who has risen through the ranks by being brutal and sadistic, torturing people and smoking out the reactionaries. One of those reactionaries is Tang Wei. Her assignment is to infiltrate the collaborationist government by becoming Mr. Lee’s lover. And she achieves that goal with considerable success. She is young and beautiful, and quickly catches his eye. Tang Wei is expected to be able to bring about a situation where Mr. Lee can be assassinated by the reactionaries, she is not expected to do it herself.

We do not see the atrocities being committed by Mr. Lee in the movie. Therefore, the only way Ang Lee chooses to show his sadism is through sex. And there is a lot of sex. Dirty, GRAPHIC sex. This film famously got an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, and while I almost never agree with the MPAA, this is one of the few times I actually understand them. The sex becomes the central character in the story, as Tang Wei begins the relationship reluctant to give up her virginity, and then the two graduate to more and more S&M flavoured relations. Mr. Lee begins to show more and more of his true nature, and as he does so, Wei begins to become more and more intertwined with him. She still hates him, but like the Brokeback Mountain cowboys, she can’t quit him. By the way, although the sex is graphic, and could possibly be titillating to some, it was not the sadistic quality of it that put me off, it was the bushy armpit hair. Tough to enjoy a sex scene when all you’re looking at is armpits.

At any rate, the film is, once again, quite good. But not great, not classic, not wonderful. As always, Ang Lee shows he is terrific with the camera. The shots he uses are breathtaking, and he has an eye for photographing sex with the best of them. But this movie is LONG. And by the time it is over, any connection we have built up with the characters has turned into something of a disconnect simply because of the length. And because there are so many sex scenes, and the sex is really what drives the movie, those are the main basis we have for even knowing the Mr. Lee character at all, and in large part knowing his mistress as well. And by the end, we really don’t know how to feel about Mr. Lee at all - we feel like we should hate him, that he is a sadist, but the only way we see that sadism is through sex. However, his mistress likes that bondage type sex. So if she likes it, how can we really be upset with him for it? Perhaps this is what Ang Lee is going for - this is exactly how Tang Wei sees Mr. Lee as well. But it means that there is very little emotional resonance in the final scenes, which ought to be far more powerful than they are. I like this movie, but it is no Crouching Tiger.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a sequel to Elizabeth, which was a very good movie from 1998 that netted Cate Blanchett her first Oscar nomination. I suppose Oscar feels as though they ought to nominate her again, if her first performance in the same role was Academy-Award-worthy, then so too must this one be, right? Wrong. Not that Blanchett is bad. But last year, Helen Mirren was exquisite in her role as this very same queen, Elizabeth the First. And Mirren showed exactly what that role should be. She defined it. And one of the main reasons is - and much as I hate it when actresses do this - they uglied her up. If history tells us anything through pictures about Queen Elizabeth I, it is that she was fairly ugly. Mirren put on a fake nose and made herself look less attractive than she actually is. Charlize Theron did the same for Monster, and that was OK too. They were both playing real people. Real, ugly, people. Cate Blanchett is not ugly. She is, in fact, striking and beautiful. That this is historically inaccurate is insignificant. But if she were to look like Helen Mirren did, it would add a certain weight to the role that is just not present here.

Oh sure, she’s good. In fact, she’s great, and has been in every movie in which she has appeared in her illustrious career. But deserving of an Oscar nod she is not. Aside from the occasional mood swing and enraged outburst, little is required of Blanchett here except to have a pale face and appear queenly. The movie itself is not that good either. The first one was a breath of fresh air, it looked like something fairly new when I saw it back in the 90s. But now this sequel feels like just another period piece, like Becoming Jane which was also just released, and countless others. “Period piece” basically means people dress up in old-timey clothes and talk old-timey talk and do stuff that must have happened in old-timey times. Some are magnificent, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is not. There is of course, the prerequisite love story, this one between Blanchett and Clive Owen, who plays the famous adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh. Owen is decent in that role as well, bringing charm and old-timey manliness to the role, and Geoffrey Rush is terrific as always in his supporting role, that of Sir Francis Walsingham. But the whole movie feels a little forced.

And when it finally ends, and there is a bit of action, it feels tacked on, and too-little-too-late. The rest of the film had just plain bored me by then, and I didn’t care what happened to our heroes. Elizabeth: The Golden Age does what a period piece should do - have great costumes and convey the feel of that time period. But it does little else. And so does Cate Blanchett.

I have been attempting to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies as possible in the week leading up to the Big Event, but I have managed only to see those that are on DVD. And I have seen everything that is on DVD so far that is up for an award. Which means I have still missed out on dozens of films. I have seen all the Best Actor movies except for the likely winner, There Will Be Blood. I have seen only two of the Best Picture nominees, No Country For Old Men and Michael Clayton. In point of fact, the only categories where I have seen all five nominees are Sound Editing, where one of them is Transformers, and makeup, where one of them is Norbit. And I have seen only three of the Best Actress nominees. So far, I am rooting for Julie Christie to win Best Actress for Away From Her, simply because it’s slightly better than Marion Cotillard’s job in La Vie En Rose. But really, I am hoping for Anyone But Cate Blanchett This Year. She will certainly win others in her career, since she has that Meryl Streep thing going for her - she will be nominated for every movie she does for the rest of time - and she may well win Best Supporting for I’m Not There (another film that I regret to say I have yet to see), but she does not deserve it for this one. At least there’s a category for Costume Design. Oh, the prestige!

Speaking of costume design, and by extension period pieces, here is a brief list of the ten best period pieces ever made (and by brief, I mean ten items long):

10. The Piano (1993)
9. Raise The Red Lantern (1991)
8. Once Upon A Time in America (1984)
7. The Seventh Seal (1957)
6. Rashomon (1951)
5. The Duellists (1977)
4. Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (2003)
3. Once Upon A Time In China (1991)
2. The Untouchables (1987)
1. The Seven Samurai (1954)

Hmm…two Robert DeNiro, two Harvey Keitel, two Toshiro Mifune. Maybe I need to diversify my taste some. But anyone who insists that Titanic should be on that list should be kicked in the leg.

My girlfriend watched the trailers for “Silk” and was very excited to watch it. I thought it might be good too - I like Francois Girard, the director. He’s done some quality films, like The Red Violin and Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. (The representative Canadian film, in that it stars Colm Feore as a Canadian icon.) And as Girard is a Canadian director, and he used Canadian people in the production, this film qualifies (yay!) as “Canadian” in the arbitrary terms that make a film eligible for a Genie. And when a film qualifies as “Canadian”, yet has international stars and opens to a wide North American release, it has a leg up in terms of the Genies. There are always five nominations for “best picture”, and if we’re lucky, two of those films will have been recognized outside their own province. This year, Eastern Promises and Away From Her are the two movies that were bigger than “Canada” that got Genie nominations. And Silk was bigger than “Canada”. It stars Keira Knightley, it has a much bigger budget than your standard Canuck flick, and it received international distribution.

This should have been a red flag for me. A movie that was actually seen? AND it’s Canadian? It should be a lock for the Genies! And yet…nothing. I’ve checked - it is eligible. But for a film like this NOT to get nominated for the easiest awards in film to win - it must REALLY suck. And it does. It REALLY sucks. At first I thought it might just be my aversion to Keira Knightley. I really dislike Keira Knightley, thanks mostly to her incredible chemistry-free performances with Orlando Bloom in them Pirates flicks. But I have always blamed this on Orlando Bloom, who is an actor I dislike even more than Knightey. In watching Silk, and Knightley’s profound lack of chemistry with Michael Pitt, I realized it may be more her fault than Bloom’s. But in this case, I blame Francois Girard even more so. The movie opens with Michael Pitt saying “boy, I sure love this woman” or something like this. I paraphrase. And that is what we have to go on. We don’t really see them falling in love, or even really being in love, we are just supposed to take this at face value. They are in love. OK? Now, proceed with the movie.

And the movie does indeed proceed. Slowly, languidly, as though it is building to something. And then it never gets there. 57 minutes in, and we still haven’t seen the things that made the trailers so interesting for my girlfriend. You see, Michael Pitt needs to travel to Japan, because his small village is dependant on silk. And there is some kind of disease wiping out the silk worms. So he must go to Japan to collect silk worm eggs, bring them back, have them hatch, and then they can begin the work of spinning silk again. Now, I’m no biologist, but it seems to me that if you have thousands of untainted silk worm eggs, and those hatch silk worms, could those silk worms not breed, and create more eggs, and thus be self-sustaining? Why would Pitt need to leave his wife for six months at a time and go BACK to Japan for more eggs every year? This is not explained. But it doesn’t matter. Because the silk worms are not the story. The journey is the story. The journey to Japan, and then the journey back again.

And that journey is explored. Again and again. With long camera shots of the countryside and the scenery all over the world, which are great. And then with long shots of hands touching other hands, hands scooping water, and the back of guys’ heads. Those are not OK. They are boring. Especially since there are so many of them. And they last so long. I guess that Pitt takes a lover in Japan - we are to assume this, although any actual contact with any woman does not happen until the movie is more than an hour in. In the meantime, we are supposed to believe that Pitt has fallen madly and obsessively in love with a Japanese concubine because she…smiled at him over tea? So, he continues to return to Japan, searching desperately for this woman because…it was really good tea? If you’re going to spend hours filming hands and heads and scenery, why wouldn’t you spend at least three minutes showing WHY this man decided to have an affair? Or showing that he actually loves his wife? Three minutes, that’s all I ask. One less picture of a horse, and you’re there. Movie stays the same length, and we might actually care about someone.

There is no sense of connection between ANY of the characters in this movie. Every time we got to one of those long camera shot scenes, and we knew the actual plot wouldn’t begin again for seven minutes, we were on the fast forward button. Toward the end of the film, a little bit of stuff starts to happen. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it action, but at least it’s…stuff. There is a really painful reading of a “sexy” letter from Japan, Keira Knightley falls ill. And we yell at the movie - “just die already”! But everything is so drawn out and slow that it takes another half hour of our life. This movie is painful, irritating and completely inert. There is no reason to watch, and no reason to enjoy it.

Atonement is the story of love between a sock puppet and a stick figure. The sock puppet is played by James McEvoy, who has become the go-to guy when you need a young, attractive, possibly rough-around-the-edges but with a heart of gold guy to appear in a period piece. Keira Knightley plays the stick figure, the female love interest in this period piece, which tells a tale of a time when food did not exist, and what food there was, was kept away from Keira Knightley.

The film starts out in a familiar way, in that different people watching the same events perceive them differently. That difference in perception stems from the innate bias each character brings to the scene, and becomes a difference in truth as well. Specifically, a couple of scenes between McEvoy and Knightley that are observed by Knightley’s younger sister, played by Saoirse Ronan. Ronan is fantastic in the role that won her a nomination for best supporting actress at the Oscars this year. Her character, Briony Tallis, is actually played by three different actresses, including Vanessa Redgrave, who is terrific in her three minutes of screen time.

The first hour of the movie is fantastic, an hour that accentuates the distance between the characters by placing them all at great distances from each other in the country mansion in which they live and work. Briony Tallis intercepts a letter meant for her sister from McEvoy, and that begins a series of events that will destroy lives and crush romance. (By the way, this movie, and that letter, make the best use of the “c” word I have yet seen in a film.) The younger Tallis accuses McEvoy of a heinous act, one that we all know he did not commit. It remains unclear whether Briony knows, herself, that he didn’t, but we definitely know that she did not really see what she claims to have seen.

The second half of the movie becomes more conventional and boring in a period-piece sort of way, as McEvoy is released from prison directly into the army during World War II. There are some obligatory period-piece army scenes, and the lovers pine for each other from a distance as he gets evacuated from Dunkirk while she works as a nurse in a military hospital. This part of the movie (the second hour) sags immensely, and loses a lot of momentum. This part of Atonement could have been inserted in Becoming Jane, mid-way through, and no one would have blinked or realized it was a different movie. But the last three minutes redeem the movie almost entirely, as Vanessa Redgrave is magnificent as the older Briony, now a best-selling author, telling her tale and explaining the final result of her lie. Which the movie, with a running time of two hours and three minutes, is 51 percent excellent.

Atonement was nominated for best picture at the Oscars, and I think it was the least-deserving of the picks. Redgrave was more deserving of a best supporting actress nomination over Ronan, but Ronan is very good, and the new fresh face in Hollywood, so she will always get the nod over an elder Hollywood stateswoman. Atonement is good, but it is not Oscar-worthy. It’s just a well-done, well-written, well-acted period piece that will likely be forgotten in ten years. A far better choice for a nomination would have been either In The Valley Of Elah or Eastern Promises, two films that will likely have staying power and relevance far beyond what this one will manage.