Oscar Preview 2011: The Best of the Best Pictures

Last year I wrote an Oscar preview for Best Picture and outlined my reasons for doing so. This year I have done the same, and I'm glad to say that this year it was a much more pleasurable experience. The films are reviewed in the order they appear on the official nomination list.

1 - Black Swan - Black Swan started off combined with The Wrestler as one film; director Darren Aronofsky brings us the tale of young ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) and her transformation from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde. Black Swan is told from Nina's point of view: she is cast as the lead in a production of Swan Lake, and must portray the White Swan and the Black Swan. She is a perfectionist, and can play the White with ease, but she is criticised for her lack of passion when it comes to the Black. Portman puts in a truly Oscar-worthy performance as Nina, and her depiction of a young shy woman's descent into insanity is heartbreaking to watch. Mila Kunis plays Nina's main rival, Lily, whose motives are unclear, as paranoia is a huge part of our unreliable narrator's personality. Lily could be a conniving little bitch, or she could be a genuinely nice woman who is really happy for Nina's achievements. Kunis plays this ambiguity to a tee. Vincent Cassel plays what is unfortunately a clichéd character – the director of the play. He actually spouts of lines like “The only person standing in your way is you” and “you could be brilliant, but you are a coward.” Cassel's convincing pomposity is what ultimately saves his character from becoming a caricature. Barbara Hershey also adds realism to a character we've all seen many times before – the overbearing mother. Aronofsky in this film creates a tense atmosphere that just doesn't let up, even when Nina spends a night out with Lily, trying to let herself go. His use of CGI in this film - whether the viewer is aware of it or not - is quite simply amazing (video contains spoilers). Black Swan is an intense experience, with a slow build up to an interesting if not ultimately satisfying climax.

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Inception: Drawing Demons

Martin Schongauer, Anthony the Great plagued by demons, 1480sI wanted to respond briefly to Pete's excellent review of Inception.

   

I just finished watching Inception, and I wanted to get these thoughts on the film out quickly before I forget them (like a dream).  First of all, I think the film tells too much instead of showing or allowing the viewer to draw his own conclusions or fill in the gaps in his own understanding of the story and its world.  While it surely required some degree of imaginative power to conceive the world of the film, watching Inception for me was a fairly unimaginative experience, somewhere between walking to the nearest convenience store and listening to music on my iPod.

  

That's not to say my mind didn't wander pleasurably throughout the film, just that processing endless amounts of exposition left little room for speculation. (There is a reason science fiction is often called speculative fiction.)  As an aspiring neurologist, I found the subject matter particularly thought-provoking.  It was the story that was really bare-bones.  I prefer the vague weirdness of say THX 1138 to the logical funeral pyre of Inception.  The way the story was told reminded me a lot of the kinds of television shows made for twelve-year-old boys, where so-and-so character has this ability and so-and-so character can do this but can't do this.  I imagine Dragon Ball Z served as the main inspiration for the Inception writing team.  

  

As such, Inception is just part of a greater trend within our culture towards Simple Simon cinematic experience based upon layer and layer of nerd-knowledge scaffolding.  As Pete says in his review, Inception is a stale heist film in disguise.  Its warm critical reception draws on the fact that critics were so distracted by the film's smoke-and-mirrors that they failed to see what was right in front of their faces (a trend): that with enough money, anybody over age eleven could have made this movie.

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Inception: A Small Golden Nugget in a Mountain of Silver?

Spoiler Alert from Adam Quigley's /Film review of Inception:

Spoiling Inception is near impossible without writing out a manual to explain what those spoilers mean, but regardless, this review includes vague references to plot points that could be deemed spoilers by those who probably shouldn’t be reading reviews anyway if they really wanted to avoid finding out anything about the movie. You’ve been warned. -

Oscar season is approaching and Christopher Nolan's film Inception has consistently made critics's top ten lists.  Inception was Mark Kermode's favourite film of 2010, and it featured prominently on lists of two of the three hosts of /Filmcast.  Indeed, /Film's Adam Quigley has provided the most reasoned and measured review of Inception.  

I don't doubt that Inception is one of the better films of last year, but at times I think it has been overrated, by Mark Kermode in particular and elsewhere within the cranes and scaffolding of the Internet geekdom.  It was finally a comment from my brother on Facebook on the hilarious a capella version of the Inception trailer that summed up best how I too felt about the film:

Meh not bad - I have to say the more I think about Inception the less impressed I am. It's just too up itself for its own good. But maybe I should watch it a second time to see if it gets any better. Also the plot was nowhere near as cerebral as everyone made out. 

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