I am updating my Oscar nominations post, scratching out films as I see them. (and I’m crossing my fingers that Austin makes the 50 city cut for Magnolia and Shorts International’s distribution on February 15th.) I am trying to see these films in the theater as time/availability permit, but (I’m old and) weeknights aren’t really good for movie-seeing, so many of these are coming down from the meta-web-pipes. (My sister says I should make my own version of an I Pirate Movies t-shirt — which is totally unfair since I own 650+ DVDs — warning 3.6 MB — and average about 1.5 movies per week.) Here’s a quick set of reviews for what I’ve seen so far:

• Atonement – a beguiling downer of a story with excellent cinematography — and I’m not just talking about Keira Knightly soaked head-to-toe in a slip with no other undergarments. James McAvoy is a beautiful man, too, but the camera work, scenery and direction almost outshine the leads. The artistic pinnacle of the film is an uncut 10 minute segment that is a clear homage to the scene in Alfonso Cuarón’s Chlidren of Men where Clive Owen is escorting the pregnant girl through the wreckage of conflict, only this scene is an attempt at an accurate portrayal of the evacuation at Dunkirk. As for Atonement‘s actual chances for Oscars? Best Musical Score is their only hope as the film is generally just good enough to be nominated but not good enough to win. The use of typewriters as musical instruments may be challenging for Oscar voters, but if there is a category that is most open to experimentation, this is the one.
• The Assassination of Jessee James by the Coward Robert Ford – the legends in our family of a traceable relation to Jessee James or Cole Younger are too thick for me to be truly objective about this film. Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt and so does a passable job at portraying Jessee, but it is the script and direction that I think do an incredible job of portraying the real James as he has never been portrayed before (and in his picture heavy review Eric James, relative of Jesse James and the President of the “James Family Preservation Trust”, agrees with me.) The two parallel characters in this story of two very different kinds of crazy are powerful enough that the first cut of the film was rumored to be over 4 hours (although the director admits that the length was unwarranted.) Pitt is the paranoid manic but it is Casey Affleck as the sycophant Robert Ford that first shifts the film into Academy territory. His mannerisms and affectations are so amazing that it is hard to imagine him as anything else. I can’t imagine how they determined he was a “supporting actor”…maybe before the cutting room massacre his role was relatively smaller. (It is odd that the wonderful Mary Louise Parker has such a small role when her presence is so distracting.) The way this film was shot is flawless and the artistic minds that assembled it have created a heart-achingly gorgeous set of celluloid. Oscar chances? No, sadly Affleck and the Cinematographer made an award-worthy film the same year as No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.
• Eastern Promises – another predicament of illegally downloading movies is that you may miss important subtitles. We don’t know exactly what was said during the Russian scenes of this hardcore film about the intersection of a nurse’s desire to give a better life to an orphan baby and the Russian mafia, but Viggo Mortensen had us believing that he was the real deal. If mob movies are your thing, you should rent this. Oscar chance? Again, I feel sorry that Viggo had to make a film the same year as Daniel Day-Lewis.

sidebar #1: I have now seen four of the five Cinematography nominees and it is a great year for cinematography. I can’t wait to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly since any film that sits in the same bin as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood has to also be beautiful.

sidebar #2: The studios have finally taken a good approach to DVD screeners. Most the ones you will find online are 1.33:1 (instead of the original film versions which are usually 1.78:1/widescreen or 2.35:1/even-wider-screen) and flip occasionally in/out of black and white. It’s enough to give a good sense of the movie, but encourages movie fans to seek out real copies.

Last night, sometime between 7:00 and 8:00, while I was playing Assassin’s Creed,
my Xbox 360 emitted a horrible grinding noise from its optical disk drive. The game gave a couple of audio glitches, but the drive quieted down and everything seemed fine, and I was happy to pretend like I wasn’t in for another repair process.

Today, on starting up the console, the drive made several funny noises and refused to read the disk or any other disk. I logged on to the Xbox support site to request a repair and got this:

Oh the consumer rage.

It was short-lived though. After calling the support center, I was told that my repair would still be covered under warranty. I will believe it when I see it, but I will never again scoff at a “the warranty must have just expired” joke.

Growing up in B/CS, TX my family would often hang out with a few other families whose parents all taught at the local university. I haven’t really kept in touch with anyone, but have vaguely kept an eye on the set of brothers who happen to make films here in Austin. Their new movie, Goliath, is playing at Sundance and is getting some national press. From the trailer, David Zellner plays a working man’s William H. Macy, who is having a break down over the loss of his cat. The trailer has convinced John that we should be making full length films, and it’s convinced me that I should keep better track of childhood acquaintances in case they get all famous.

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