It Takes Real Guts To See The Hopelessness.

There was an awful lot of hype and expectation in the lead up to the release of Revolutionary Road a couple of years ago. Too much. Enough to kill it. Not only was it the first time Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet had starred together since the biggest blockbuster (in unadjusted terms) up until then, but it was also the first time Winslet had worked with her husband, acclaimed director Sam Mendes. It was a period piece, set in the post-WWII American suburbs, it was Jack and Rose all grown up. Jack hadn't died, the Titanic hadn't sunk, and now they had to work out how to live together. The dream was over.

And then the film just... well, it didn't seem to gain the traction it should have. The reviews were luke-warm, the trailer just looked strange, it didn't look like the huge success it should have been. And that's probably because it was never going to be the next Titanic, it was never meant to be that way. It was a little quasi-indie adult drama, not the next fix for lusty teenagers. The expectation felt like Titanic 2 while the reality was something entirely different.

That being said, it's not a bad film. The beginning of the film sees Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) meeting at a party, and in no time they're married and living in a nice little house in the suburbs with a couple of kids. Frank doesn't like his job, April is trying to rediscover some passion in her life with an ill-fated amateur theatre company debut, and the cracks start to show in their marriage. April's feelings are that they have sold out on their ideals and dreams to move to the 'burbs with their kids and fulfill that expected American dream. Frank is working in a job that he hates, working long hours and taking bits on the side from a girl in the typing pool while April is languishing at home wishing she were anywhere but there. They fight and fight, and then they have a realisation - Paris.

Their decision to pack up and move so that April can take a well-paid government secretarial position while Frank stays at home to discover whatever it is he wants to do with his life puts a temporary patch on their marital issues, but quickly cracks start to appear, initially from around the edges where external factors start to niggle, quickly cracking through to the centre, letting it all fall in on itself. What kind of a man in 1950s America moves to Paris to let his wife support him while he sits around and reads? It's an assault to his masculinity coupled with a particularly (un)fortuitous moment at work and a sudden unexpected pregnancy, giving Frank an out he may have wanted all along.

I love the way Mendes directs his film. He was an acclaimed stage director before moving into film with American Beauty back at the turn of the millenium, and you can feel that stage influence, though not in the same way you get it with the likes of Rob Marshal's musicals. It doesn't really feel like the actors are on a stage and being shot flat, but the way Mendes utilises the frame and the space within it, often composing a number of people through distance in much the same way as one might in a theatre. He's not afraid to allow empty space to fill the screen with his actors on either periphery to enhance the feeling of distance emotionally in the scene, creating an aching longing in the viewer to close the gap. He's taken the best part of the stage and transposed it onto the screen, and it allows him so much more room to move.

The screenplay by Justin Haythe is great, the lines spoken (or, more often than not, screamed) are for the most part beautiful, poignant, scathing and real, even as they are many times somewhat verbose. The photography from Roger Deakins is beautiful, marrying in with Mendes aesthetic perfectly and giving that '50s America a slightly distant but wonderfully close-to-home feel. It was, however, the performances that won me over. Both DiCaprio and Winslet... it was amazing to watch them together again, because it was incredible to see how much they have both grown. It really was like watching children all grown-up and suddenly able to do things you'd only ever dreamed about. Watching them separately in other films, I'd always known that they had retained and improved on their talents, but seeing them together again, playing off each other like that, after, what, a decade and a bit was a terrific experience. And they were backed up by terrific supports from Kathy Bates as their estate agent Helen and Michael Shannon as her crazed son John, a role he nabbed an Oscar nomination for.

It's not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but, especially now thinking back to when I saw it a week ago, it is very solid. 4 stars.

It Seems Diplomacy Has Failed.

What else is there to say about the behemoth that is Avatar? It has recently become the fastest film to ever pass US$550mil at the US box office, is only the fifth film to ever take more than US$1bil at the global box office, and as of today (presumably, though definitely by tomorrow) it will have overtaken James Cameron's previous directorial feature film Titanic to become the highest grossing film of all time on the world stage. (Let's not start talking about adjusted grosses or inflated ticket prices for the 3D presentation, because that's all academic, and nor shall we bring in the fact that major markets such as China have greatly opened up since the time of Titanic. Just let the glory ride. After all, it was only a couple of years ago I remember reading an article stating that the honour of box office champion would remain with Titanic for many years to come due to the changing nature of film performance and blockbuster patterns, something that Avatar has just shot down.) It's also the first film to stay at number one of the US box office for more than five weeks since The Sixth Sense did it back in 1999. It's one of the most expensive films ever made (though the actual cost of it is impossible to find out.) And this is all purely fiscal. The film is also extraordinarily groundbreaking for its visuals - each frame of the CGI world took an average of somewhere between forty and fifty man hours to render. Each. Frame.

This film has been the subject of so much publicity for so many years that I'm not going to go into plot, I'm not going to touch on the politics, if you don't know it by now, you're obviously living under a rock. In fact, if you haven't seen it by now you must be living under a rock. And I'd strongly advise you to get out from under that rock and go and see it immediately in a large cinema with those 3D glasses on. It will take your breath away.


Cameron has acquitted himself quite nicely. This film could have gone either way. If the technology hadn't been up to it, the film would have been a disaster. There's no way one could get so involved with a world and a people unless they looked as good as they did. The landscape created for Pandora is phenomenally realistic, awe-inspiring. I want to all of the visual team Oscars, and then knight them all, and then marry them all. Weta and ILM were both responsible (the larger part, I believe, came from Weta) and no superlative does justice to the splendour witnessed on screen. And the film itself, reasonably basic and run of the mill as it is, managed to live up to years of hype and a month of incredible performance on everybody's lips quite nicely - I had such sky-high expectations that were not only met, but exceeded. Those scenes in the Hallelujah Mountains - breathtaking. It did, I think, owe some debts to the world created by George Lucas (without the CGI power of today) in the original Star Wars films. There were many moments I watched and had flashbacks to the many times I saw those films as children. But that was actually kind of touching - an homage to another blockbuster groundbreaker.

This totally doesn't do it justice. Imagine this image, but about a million times better. Or a billion!

Sigourney Weaver as the scientist in charge of the Avatar operation is fabulous, as always. I've long been a fan of hers, and lately she has been doing amazing things for me. How Snow Cake got ignored a few years back is beyond me. Giovanni Ribisi as the head of the company mounting the mining operation creating the conflict in the film is fantastic. I think he is a terrific supporting actor, though I've never seen him carry a film as a lead. Keep him in supporting and I'll keep turning out to see him. Stephen Lang pulls of the role as the head of the US Marine unit on Pandora with amazing style. It's a role that quite easily could have been overplayed and hammed up, but he kept it to the minimum amount of hamming he could get away with and leant his character an air of arrogance and determination the fits perfectly with the setting and story. Zoe Saldana as Neytiri, the prominent Na'vi character, does incredible work considering her character is all motion-captured. (And that motion capture! It's really them on screen! Really! You can see it in their faces! Their expressions! Holy shit!) Sam Worthington has never been my favourite actor, though I'll commend his efforts in Somersault, but he pulls off the role of Jake Sully fine, probably because he doesn't really need to do much. He plays a marine well, though he couldn't quite nail the accent. And maybe I've seen him in too many Aussie movies, because I kept expecting him to pull out that hysterical line in his broad accent from his role as Macbeth, 'Is that a dagger I see before me?' (you have to see the film to understand that hysteria, but I wouldn't recommend it as I just don't think it's any good.)


James Horner's score is a James Horner Score For A Major Motion Picture, which means it's sweeping and majestic and doesn't really try anything new. It suits the film, but I'm not about to go out and buy it. And besides, it's all about those visuals. Not to say the rest of the film doesn't matter (if the visuals had been that stunning but it was let down in story and performance, it would be a shit film), but it is definitely the major element. And I'm going to give James Cameron full credit and a hats off for managing to not only conceptualise it, but then to impart that concept to his team, reign in all the things that could go wrong and make it work, and then inject the humanity of the story and the truth of the performance.


Seriously, go and see it. I'm sure it's going to win a bunch of Oscars (though my pick for Best Picture and Best Director is still probably The Hurt Locker and Kathryn Bigelow, which is actually looking more and more likely as the days go on), and deservedly so. It's a mammoth blockbuster making packets of money that I'm not going to object to. It deserves its acclaim. Bring it.


5 stars.

Holy Blue Gemini.

If all estimates hold up, Avatar just became only the fifth film ever (with the others being The Dark Knight, the last Lord of the Rings, the second Pirates of the Caribbean film and Titanic) to crack through the US$1billion dollar mark at the global box office. Oh, did I mention that it's only just finished its third weekend in release?

That is FREAKING huge. After the biggest third weekend in the States on record (US$23mil more than the old title holder, Spider-Man) it's looking damn likely that the film will hit US$500mil in the States alone. I think it will probably crack The Dark Knight to become number 2, though a number of people think that's a risky prediction. It has a shot at Titanic's record, something I didn't think we'd be saying for a few years yet, on the domestic front, though I'm not going to really make a call either way until I start to see what it is capable of grossing outside of the holiday period. Once people go back to work and school it should fall pretty heavily, but if the January releases don't provide anything to really drag people into competing cinemas, Avatar could just get there.

Can it get another US$800mil worldwide to beat Titanic? That's going to be a big task for it. Though if I'm predicting US$200mil more just from the States, it could, theoretically, happen. Personally, at this stage, I think I'm going to say that it won't get there. It'll give it a red hot go, but I don't think so.

Meanwhile, everyone involved is basking in the glory of knowing they were right. And James Cameron is basking in the glory of pretty much being god.

Some Thoughts On The Big 4.

I just finished listening to a podcast from InContention.com where they touched on the 'Big 4' yet to drop in a serious way on the world, which have been variously considered possibilities of major Oscar news. They are, in no particular order, Nine, Invictus, The Lovely Bones and Avatar.

First, Nine. There have been some press screenings, with various elements of embargo in place, but people are talking about it. They're saying kind of what I anticipated, which I didn't really go into earlier, probably because I was tired. I think it will look incredible - just see the trailer and I'm sure everyone would agree. Rob Marshall knows what he's doing here - he was responsible for Chicago and Memoirs of a Geisha after all. But, like Chicago, I don't expect it to be a film that I'm head over heels in love with. I'm sure it will be entertaining to an extent, and the line up of talent means that surely it can't really go wrong (apparently Kate Hudson is the weakest link here - who would have thought?) But I just don't think it's going to hold up to some of the more powerful films of the year. I think it will be flashy, pretty, and fairly well irrelevant. That kind of seems to be what people are saying after these screenings. Its craft representation will be strong and in a pool of ten Best Picture nominees that might see it pull through, but I don't think it's going to pull of the heights that Chicago did with 6 of the pretty gold men including the big one.

Invictus. That's Clint Eastwood's new film. As I mentioned it only needs to be good to show here, I think. Early word on the film (embargo, embargo, embargo) seems a little mixed. Though generally what I've heard is that it is kind of flat, not Eastwood's best, not quite what it could have been. And that Matt Damon is out at a Supporting Actor shot, and Morgan Freeman is fine and perfectly cast - but will that be enough. Generally, it seems that the expanded Best Picture slot will be the film's saving grace, as it doesn't actually have a great deal else going for it. I think it will be a hit (and with the rugby setting, it could play bigger overseas than at home in the States), I think the reviews will generally be at worst kind of lukewarm, especially from the influential players, and I think it could be happy with a couple of noms. Whether it can play into the major category I just don't know. I wouldn't be surprised though. I mean, it's Clint Eastwood. Everyone loves him. Even if he does leave you a bit... cold.

The Lovely Bones dropped in London with a Royal Gala screening earlier this week, and has been doing some other press screenings (embargo again!) I personally think the trailer looks stunning, but it also looks like a whole film of that could be a bit over the top. Word is, again, mixed. Quite decisively mixed. And it seems to be lacking a major rave anywhere. People are saying Stanley Tucci and Saorise Ronan are very good, and apparently they put more Susan Sarandon in because the test screenings liked her character. People are also having different reactions based on whether or not they have read the book - I have not. This is Peter Jackson, and I think he has a fair bit of respect, so I think ultimately if the film plays well it could be in the picture. I think if the public like it it could just sneak in there. I definitely don't think it will win the majors (in fact, from what I'm hearing I don't think either of the three mentioned so far have a shot of upsetting the current favourites) but it may just sneak through with more than people anticipate IF the public get behind it.

Lastly, Avatar. No one has seen it yet. Except, apparently, for about forty people who James Cameron invited to see it because he wanted their opinions, because the film has not been tested at all. Word of one of these (this is coming from Anne Thompson on IndiWire) is the the film is fantastic. It's a really tough one to call. There are a few elements at play here. Firstly, let's not forget that Cameron's last feature film won eleven Oscars and is the highest grossing film ever (when not adjusted for inflation.) Obviously, the man can do that right. Secondly, the anticipation on this film from the filmmaking community is running white hot. How revolutionary is it? Can Cameron pull it off? Just what the fuck is it all about? Thirdly, will it make money, or at least pull in enough to not bankrupt people along the way. This is the toughest call. Apparently the tracking for it isn't great. I really want to see the film, but I haven't booked tickets yet. I figure I'll see it when I see it. I can't imagine the anticipation levels of my parents are particularly high - they're going to need people to say 'oh my god it's incredible you have to see it' before it registers enough for them to go out to it, I think. Younger people, sure, they'll see it. Families? Maybe. How dark is it looking? Too dark to take your kid to? Cameron said they can't afford to have a target audience (remember, word on the street is putting total costs for the creation and marketing of the film, including ancillary events, at close to half a billion dollars) and that they're banking on it playing to eight year olds and eighty year olds. Really? You really think an eighty year old is going to put this high on their list of things to do for this week? It'll open big (I don't think it'll open Twilight II big, but inflated Imax and 3D screening ticket prices might push it up there - though I still don't think so), so ultimately it comes down to word of mouth. If it holds around (as Titanic did, though that was in a very different box office era) then it'll be in for a shot. If this gets people talking it could be a formidable contender. I think the only shot this film has at being anywhere near as big in the Oscars as Titanic was is if it is spectacular. Groundbreaking in the truest sense of the word. Just merely being very good is not good enough. In fact, it'll hurt it. This film literally needs to lock its lips around yours and suck the air out of your lungs for the three hours I expect it will play for. You need to leave the cinema feeling like you have just witnessed the birth of christ. Without that, I think you can count it out of majors, though not the craft categories. Anything beneath leaving you in a state of hysteria will mean that the film, the buzz, the hype, everything Cameron has been telling you will fall short of expectation, and no film can survive that. Even if expectation is so damned high that it could still be an excellent film.

That was a bit of an Avatar rant, really. But they're my thoughts on the matter. Other things that could affect any of these films showing in the big ten are whether the voters take this opportunity to reward lesser known indy films because they feel the widening gives them that duty. They may think putting precious at the top of their list is enough, but they may also start to go with films like Crazy Heart, The Last Station etc. Basically, these films that could have been locks if they had lived up to anticipation are now maybes like everything else. When the embargoes are lifted and the public starts to get a feel for the films we'll know for sure, but at the moment... it's all get set for the last one to hit next month.