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| Marc |
 Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 8:13 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
Posts: 8424
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Karina Longworth writing in Vanity Fare:
With a month to go before the Oscar nominations are even made public, the victors in the acting categories have virtually already been decided. The best actor race isn’t much of one thanks to the consensus that Jeff Bridges is “due” an Oscar and Crazy Heart is the vehicle that’ll deliver it. Meanwhile, supporting categories are historically kind to fresh faces, and thus outsiders Mo’nique and Christoph Waltz have their two races on lockdown, without even showing up to campaign. That so much seems to have been preordained in the preseason takes a lot of the fun out of watching the races unfold. It also all but ensures that the two best performances of the year, committed to celluloid by two previous Oscar winners lacking the heat of the new or the weight of a long career sans trophy, are both likely to be completely overlooked by the Academy.
Tilda Swinton’s starring performance in Erick Zonca’s Julia has been a hot topic amongst arthouse watchers since the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival—which was way back in February 2008, before the actress won her Oscar for Michael Clayton. Recent Oscar winners rarely go as fully unhinged as Swinton does in her embodiment of the film’s title character, an aged party girl who bumbles herself into a kidnapping scheme which swiftly unravels into an international incident. Equally unhinged is Nicolas Cage’s starring role in director Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a loose remake of Abel Ferrara’s cult classic about a detective with a little too much in common with his criminal prey. Swinton and Cage’s performances are related in more ways than one. Both Cage and Swinton play anti-heroes who court sympathy while behaving extremely badly; both dance towards redemption but ultimately spectacularly resist it. In Bad Lieutenant, there’s a logic to the patented Cage intensity that’s been missing from much of his work since he won the Oscar for Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas. Herzog builds an environment for Cage’s wide-eyed excess that normalizes the actor’s performance as a drug-addicted cop in much the same way that Figgis’s treatment of Vegas felt like a natural habitat for Cage’s beyond over-the-top portrayal of a suicidal drunk. Julia has actually been compared to Leaving Las Vegas; the main difference between the two stories of rock-bottom alcoholics is that in the Swinton film, the red-herring harbinger of change is played by a kid instead of a hooker.
I’ve heard suggestions that this Herzog film could or should do for Cage what Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta: that is, expand his career options by reminding audiences of the star’s integral appeal while simultaneously showing off a kind of bravery usually inaccessible to celebrity actors at the height of their fame. The same could be said for Swinton’s performance in Julia. The problem with that argument is that, compared to Pulp Fiction, virtually no one will see Julia or Bad Lieutenant.
The latter film opened exactly a month ago, played at its peak expansion point in 96 theaters, and has grossed about $1.4 million. It’s not a flop, exactly—in its fifth week of release, it’s already the tenth highest grossing film ever released by its distributor—but it’ll come nowhere near to matching Pulp Fiction’s zeitgeist-dominating glory. If it grosses a tenth of the final take of the notorious Cage bomb The Wicker Man, it’ll be a minor indie film miracle.
Julia’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, has a strong track record of attracting Oscar attention for their high-profile documentary releases (they were behind last year’s winner, Man on Wire, and this year’s probably nominee Food, Inc.) but their business model, involving near-simultaneous release of their films in theaters and on Video On Demand, thus making the most of a single ad campaign, doesn’t allow for a separate best-actress push on behalf of a film that’s long been available on DVD. Cage and Swinton both give the kinds of performances that used to be able to propel a rough-edged indie into somewhere at least near the mainstream. These days, there is too wide of a canyon between the kind of release that most truly independent companies give their films, and the comparative budgetary fantasyland in which most Oscar-nominated films live.
Cage and Swinton each have ambitious projects coming up in 2010 that will likely attract more attention. Swinton spent seven years collaborating with Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino on I Am Love, a melodrama that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival to rave reviews, and will next be seen at Sundance. Cage stars in Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, an action spoof based on a comic book that drew raves last month when a rough cut was screened at the annual Austin film marathon Butt Numb-a-Thon. Both actors will almost certainly have other chances at Oscar glory before the end of their careers, but that doesn’t make it any less of a crime for these career-peak performances to be overlooked. |
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| ehle64 |
| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 9:21 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 7149
Location: NYC; US&A
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| Sacreligious -- putting Nicolas Cage and Tilda Swinton together in some feeble attempt at a film performance essay. *shudder* |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 9:57 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| If Bridges is due, what about Christopher Plummer? He's just received his first Oscar nomination at the age of eighty. He won't beat Christoph Waltz, but I hadn't realized Plummer figured in six films this year, including Dr. Parnassus and voiceover work in Up and 9, |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 10:10 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 8251
Location: Salt Lake City
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| Plummer's voice work in Up was top notch. I rather enjoyed his character. |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 10:17 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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Wade,
Cage and Swinton's performances in Lieutenant and Julia are both wildly nutzoid and insanely entertaining...and a bit scary. Get back to me when you've seen both pictures. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 11:30 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 12:44 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| Marc--I wish there was something we could do to undo the Best Actress Blanche nominations and put Swinton in contention. Just because Mirgun and I were a couple days late watching the movie seems cruel. |
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| Kate |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 12:46 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 1397
Location: Pacific Northwest
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| Irreversible. Holy shit, what a nightmare of violence. I will need 3 or 4 weeks to work through the visuals. God. What sadness. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 12:50 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Kate wrote: Irreversible. Holy shit, what a nightmare of violence. I will need 3 or 4 weeks to work through the visuals. God. What sadness.
I recommend that no one see Irreversible, ever. It's a sick movie with the single most unwatchable sequence I've ever watched part of. |
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| Kate |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 12:55 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Pacific Northwest
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billyweeds wrote: Kate wrote: Irreversible. Holy shit, what a nightmare of violence. I will need 3 or 4 weeks to work through the visuals. God. What sadness.
I recommend that no one see Irreversible, ever. It's a sick movie with the single most unwatchable sequence I've ever watched part of.
Billy - I was part of a panel that discussed the issue of whether it was exploitive porn or not. Still thinking. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 1:31 am |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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Quote: I recommend that no one see Irreversible, ever. It's a sick movie with the single most unwatchable sequence I've ever watched part of.
Irreversible is a great movie, a powerful movie, a movie that forces the viewer to re-consider and re-view their own knee-jerk response to the film. The ending is nothing less than spiritual.
And the end is the beginning. |
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| ehle64 |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 7:02 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: NYC; US&A
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I probably will end up seeing Bad Lieutenant II, it is a Herzog after all.
I'll definitely check out Julia (it's in my Netflix PS3 everbuilding queue).
I'll never like Nicolas Cage (with the exception of Birdy and Raising Arizona) and Tilda Swinton will always have a place in my heart from her friendship and work with Derek Jarman. To go from Jubilee to an Oscar still thrills me. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 7:27 am |
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| Marc, the movie does sound very much like your cup of tea. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I won't be seeing it. And please don't take this personally. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 7:38 am |
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| I always like Cage, even in the unabashedly silly thriller movies he's in. I think he's always fun to watch even if the movie (e.g The Rock), is a piece of dreck or (e.g. Con Air) is lots of fun. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 7:41 am |
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| The big difference between the two movies above that I mentioned is that unlike Con Air, The Rock actually takes itself seriously. |
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