Chunk White's "Bet the Ranch" Oscar Picks

OK, let's get past all the Driving Miss Daisy wins / Do The Right Thing isn't nominated, Scorsese and Hitchcock and Kubrick never won stuff. We all know the Oscars are useless, and we all know exactly where we'll be next Sunday night. So as a public service, we abandon the Mondo Complexo for one entry and let 'er rip, as follows:

Best Picture - In a perfect world, maybe Good Night and Good Luck would win, and there's a chance it still might. If Crash (aka Magnolia X) wins, I'm moving to Peru to raise vicunas, and I'll send everyone a nice knitted cap every year. Capote isn't big enough, and as for the regrettable Munich (see my first entry), the less said the better. I know that there's a Brokeback-lash afoot, but I still think it has enough of the elements to win--and then to become the Cimarron of the new millennium, never to be heard of again

Best Actor - Tough one, because although I didn't love Brokeback, I thought Heath Ledger was a marvel of minimalism--how nice to see someone actually living up to his hype. He's the only real competition for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but I think the latter will win for Capote. Hoffman is the Claude Rains of his time, someone who has never given a bad performance in anything from a cameo role to a star turn. He will win for his performace, and all the brilliant work he's done in the last decade. Sorry, Heath--your time will surely come.

Best Actress - The easiest choice this year, if only because there are so few decent parts for real actresses these days. No one saw Judi Dench or Keira Knightley, and Charlize has already won. It's possible that all the desperate housewives and the men who love them will sneak Felicity Huffman in, but I think it's Reese all the way this year. Like Mr. Hoffman, she's also been doing great work in all kinds of films for many years, and deserves the prize. Besides, having Huffman and Hoffman win would be just plain silly.

Best Supporting Actor - I'm tempted to do the old Bill Murray bit and just toss all the nominees off the board because no one really cares. But this is a really interesting race, with some memorable performances. There's no way Matt Dillon's going to win, but everyone else has a shot. William Hurt's performance in History of Violence was completely out of left field, and it was riveting, even if it felt as though he had wandered in from another movie. Clooney will win someday, and he almost gets the nod here for nearly saving the mess that was Syriana. My bet is that his first Oscar will be one for directing, perhaps even this year. So many people think that Paul Giamatti was robbed for Sideways last year that he'll get it this year as a consolation. That would not be a disappointing result, but I think it's going to be Jake by a nose, since I think voters do want to reward the film but won't give it to Heath Ledger.

Best Supporting Actress - No one saw Junebug, Frances has her Oscar for Fargo, and Rachel Weisz is not quite there yet. Michelle Williams (the non-Princess Diaries wife in Brokeback) has an outside shot, but I think it's Catherine Keener's year. It will match nicely with Hoffman's Oscar, and it's about time that this thinking person's heartthrob gets her due. Hell, she should have won for Malkovich...

Best Director - My wife astutely observed the other day that Ang Lee is a master of stillness. Now, he ain't exactly Ozu or Bresson, but she does have a point: beautiful, almost transcendental stillness is a lost art in film these days. My cousin referred to his work in Brokeback as "landscape porn," but that's what the voters love. And although Lee has been uneven, I think he'll get the award here. The only outside shot is Clooney, because as Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner and Robert Redford will tell you, auteurs usually need not apply for this one. Good Night was a small picture, and although I thought it was a much better film, it doesn't have the epic feel. Capote is an actor's film. And if Spielberg or Paul Haggis wins, it's hola vicuna para mi.

Screenplay (Original) - According to the Mrs., it should be Squid and the Whale, but I think that Clooney might get his Oscar here for Good Night.

Screenplay (Adapted) - Capote here, unless it's a Brokeback sweep.

Elsewhere - Loved Corpse Bride, but I think Wallace and Gromit will win Best Animated Film, especially since Miyazaki has won so recently. Hopefully, Paradise Now will get the nod for Foreign Film. It's far from perfect, but it surely stays in the memory. Hopefully, they'll get Ann Reinking or someone to sing "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," the nominated song from Hustle and Flow. All this, and the Sorry-You-Never-Won-And-Now-You're Going-To-Die-Award to Altman. And who'd have ever thought that the South Park- inspired Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding would have done so well...

Cache, Crash and Gus the Polar Bear: Towards a Definition of "Complex"

The dictionary defines the adjective form of complex as "consisting of interconnected or interwoven parts." And if that definition establishes the boundaries of the Mondo Complexo, than we have no choice but to allow recent films like Crash and Syriana into our little world. Both of these films are indeed composed of many interwoven strands, brought together in the end to make a grand point, in the manner of Robert Altman and his disciples, both successful (we're still waiting for another Magnolia, P.T.) and less so (any Alan Rudolph sightings lately?). However, "complex" has become such an overused word that, like "freedom" and "terror", it has become meaningless. At this juncture, however, a bit of etymology might be instructive; the word comes from the Latin complexus, the past participle of complect, which means "to entwine." What's interesting, of course, is that "entwine" has such positive and negative connotations. We go to the movies to become entwined, to become completely swept up in a world of the filmmakers' creation. Yet if we become entwined in "complex" films like Crash or 21 Grams, we find ourselves bound and struggling to unravel puzzles whose facile and mechanical solutions do not validate our effort.

Where to begin with Crash, the Grand Canyon of the new millennium? People, including Academy members, saw it as a thoughtful meditation on the state of race relations in America today. But has there been a film in the last few years that has felt so clunkily overwritten? It's like one of those medieval allegorical plays where each character represents Something in a clumsy attempt to convey a Message. From Don Cheadle's opening monologue (where the only way we can have any contact is to CRASH into each other. GET IT??), to dialogue straight out of a high school sophomore's entry in a creative writing contest about racism, to the overwrought ironies and ridiculous coincidences, to characters changing 180 degrees in a matter of seconds, the success of Crash, to paraphrase Tony Scott in the Times, says more about the impoverished state of our discourse on issues like race than anything else. Roger Ebert defends the film by saying that great authors like Dickens and Shakespeare often trafficked in such implausibilities. Well, is Roger going to run out and buy a Brittney Spears album of jazz improvisations and defend her by saying Coltrane did the same thing? Invoking Dickens to support Haggis merely strengthens Scott's point about how far we've fallen. Crash reinforces the queasy feeling that the only thing more dangerous than having no dialogue on race at all is to smugly believe that we're having one when we're not.

Soon after seeing Crash, I got a chance to see Michael Haneke's Cache. This is a far from flawless film, and I was uncomfortable as I usually am with his gleeful torturing of his bourgie subjects. Yet in so many ways, Cache embodies the kind of complexity we're looking for here at the Mondo. In the most superficial sense, it is wonderfully reminiscent of the great Godard films of 1964-1966, where the politics was omnipresent yet never in a harsh spotlight: on the radio, on a TV in the background, in a newspaper someone off to the side is reading, or, as in Masculin Feminin for example, in a brief digression. The subject of Cache, just below its glossy Hitchcock-like, videotape-paranoid suface, is nothing less than the legacy of the Western subjugation of the Muslim world. A crucial plot point hinges on a historical reference to an infamous incident from the late 1950's, when hundreds of Muslim protesters decrying the French presence in Algeria were set upon by the Surete; hundreds were killed and injured. As our upper middle class Parisian protagonists go about their evening routine, images and sounds of the current Iraqi conflict come from the TV in the background. Cache soon evolves into an exploration of how the political becomes the personal and vice-versa, and how the scars of oppression never simply disappear when the oppression itself ends. It all comes together in the strange, unexpected concluding shot of the film, which actually runs under the closing credits. It's a moment that suggests both the idea that we pass our sins on to our children in an endless cycle of violence and retaliation, as well as the possibility that our children may be the ones who will actually end the cycle. The beauty of Cache is that unlike films like Crash, none of what I've just described is even alluded to by the characters in the story, let alone clumsily underlined in writing that insults its audience's intelligence. Yet it's all there, in its complex glory, insisting that we puzzle it out for ourselves.

In a sense, the perfect metaphor is the famous story of Gus, the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo. A few years back, his keepers noticed that Gus was listless and blue for no apparent reason. An animal psychiatrist was brought in, and after some study, it was determined that Gus had lost his zip because he was by nature a hunter, yet he was being handed his food in a bucket every day. Without a challenge, Gus had lost his sense of purpose. The prescribed treatment was simple and ultimately effective; they now fed Gus his fish frozen solid in a bucket of ice, so he had to work a bit to get his meal. Thus, a film like Cache is a crisp bucket of frozen sushi, while Crash and its ilk are more like dead herrings in the moonlight, to quote Billy Wilder. But then again, you didn't need me to lay that all out for you, did you...

For No Particular Reason, 12 Great Overlooked American Films of the '90s

12. Donnie Brasco (Newell,1997) Let's put it this way. About a half hour into this one, my wife, who's a huge Johnny Depp fan, asked me who was playing the title character. That's how far Depp dives into this character, and he's not even the best reason to see the film. That would be Al Pacino, for once not playing Al Pacino. His moving performance as a loser who pays the price for trusting the wrong person is among his best, and that's saying a lot.

11. City of Hope (Sayles, 1991) Along with Linklater's Slacker, this is the missing link between Nashville and Magnolia. Sayles' epic tells the story of the death and potential rebirth of a New Jersey city (based, presumably on Newark). The film features many of Sayles' stock company (David Straithairn, Joe Morton, Vincent Spano) in their ususal fine form, and is an object lesson to Stephen Gaghan, Paul Haggis and their ilk on how to balance social commentary with a multiple-character storyline.

10. Falling Down (Schumacher, 1993) OK, so this is not exactly an unknown film, nor is it without some significant flaws. But there are some beautiful individual moments here from both Robert Duvall and Michael Douglas, especially in their final confrontation on the Santa Monica Pier. Unfortunately, this was marketed as a Death Wish- style answer to Rodney King-induced racial paranoia. For all its brutality, it's much more subtle than that. With the possible exception of Stone's NBK, it is Hollywood's most accurate portrayal of America struggling with the terrifying possibility that in the post-Cold War era, we'd have no one to turn the guns on but ourselves

9. Devil in a Blue Dress (Franklin, 1995) This is a film that you look back on and wonder how the hell it didn't become a huge hit with a boatload of sequels. For my money, Franklin (whose One False Move should be on this list as well) does a better job of capturing 40's style L.A. noir than Curtis Hanson did in the much more successful L.A. Confidential. Featuring a perfect match of character and actor in Denzel Washington's portrayal of Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins and some brilliant characterizations by Tom Sizemore and others, the film is perhaps most memorable for Don Cheadle's explosive performace as Mouse. Has there been as electrifying a film debut since?

8. The Rapture (Tolkin, 1991) A one-of-a-kind film, truly complex in the best sense of the word (and the spirit of this blog). Mimi Rogers gives an astonishing performance as a really bad girl who suddenly finds the Spirit and changes her ways. When her husband, a former hitman who has also seen the Light (David Duchovny, in his one passable movie role) is murdered, she and her five year old daughter head out to the desert to await the apocalypse. What happens to them out there must be seen to be believed. Compelling then, the film holds even more power in our latest Age of Awakening.

7. A Simple Plan (Raimi, 1998) For my money, this is the best American film noir of the 90's, or at least the film that best captures the spirit of noir 1.0. A simple premise--four buddies out hunting in the frozen woods come across a crashed small plane with no survivors and a briefcase containing several million dollars. What to do? Betrayal, double-cross, triple-cross and assorted mayhem ensue, all made plausible by Raimi's steady hand and a group of strong, subtle performances (hell, even Bill Paxton comes to life here). Unfortunately, this film will go down in history as the Fail-Safe to Fargo's Dr. Strangelove, which I think accounts for its weak showing in its initial release. But in its own serious way, it is brilliant at capturing the claustrophobia of the wide open space, creating its own sub-genre, film blanc.

6. Henry Fool (Hartley, 1997) For me, Hartley's first three films (Trust, The Unbelievable Truth and Simple Men) were the essence of early 90's indie film. More deadpan than Wes Anderson, with dialogue as stylized as Mamet and incredible comic timing, these films were like Beckett on the 5:11 to Mineola. What separates Henry Fool from these early works, and from Hartley's subsequent efforts, is its ambition. Here, Hartley deals with some major issues like identity and the creative process, but not in an obtrusive way. A slow, quiet masterpiece, with a brilliant central performance by James Urbaniak.

5. State of Grace (Joanou, 1990) Where have you gone, Gary Oldman? You can keep Joe Orton, Sid Vicious and Vlad the Impaler--for my money this is Oldman's best performance, and one of the best performances of the last two decades, period. Classic gangster fare, with betrayal and violence in a Westies-style Irish gang of New York, this film had the misfortune to be released in 1990, the annus mirabilis of the gangster film (seen Goodfellas and Miller's Crossing, anyone?). And what a cast! Ed Harris, Sean Penn, Robin Wright, John C. Reilly, John Turturro...but it's Oldman's unusual twist on the classic violent psycho role that will stay with you.

4. Fresh (Yakin, 1994) Talk about falling through the cracks. This film had a double misfortune, in that it came out (and was lumped in with) the spate of gangsta films that followed Boyz 'n' the Hood, while it was also released around the same time as another, much more comfortable film with chess as a central theme, Searching for Bobby Fischer. It's a real shame, because this is so much more than a gangster picture or a feel-good chess story. Young Sean Nelson is wonderful as the main character trying to survive a rough family situation, deal with the accidental schoolyard shooting of a girl on whom he had a crush, and rescue his sister from the clutches of a slimy drug dealer. What saves him is chess, and the strategy he contrives to solve his problems is worthy of any grand master.

3. Rosewood (Singleton, 1997) Remember when John Singleton was the West Coast Spike, when he wasn't doing crap like the Shaft remake or 2 Fast 2 Furious? (OK, Four Brothers wasn't too bad). Sure there was garbage like Poetic Justice (almost saved by Pac) and Baby Boy, and there was Higher Learning, where his reach just barely exceeded his grasp. But there was Boyz, and there was Rosewood, a forgotten masterpiece and Singleton's only attempt at a historical film. It is a straightforward retelling of the destruction of an all-black town by its white neighbors in 1923, a crime that the state of Florida didn't even acknowledge until 50 years later. Outstanding performances by Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle (there he is again) and Jon Voight, but what makes this film truly special is the way in which Singleton brings to life a long-lost world. This was the world that Zora Neale Hurston explored literally and in her fiction, the self-sufficient, prosperous towns created by freed slaves in Georgia and northern Florida a century ago. And by the way, did you notice that there are a lot of African-American-themed films on this list (see #1)...?

2. A Perfect World (Eastwood, 1993) After winning the Oscar for directing Unforgiven, Eastwood made this surprising, mournful, funny yet ultimately tragic story of a criminal on the run who, almost accidentally, takes a young, fatherless boy as hostage. This is Kevin Costner's last great performance, the end of his run which began with The Untouchables; Waterworld and The Postman were just a gleam in his eye. As the film morphs into a road movie, with the two of them being chased by Eastwood's bumbling cop, his relationship with the boy deepens and grows in the most moving and believable way. As he has always done, Eastwood pulls off the miracle of telling a straightforward, all-American story while subverting and challenging the nature of American myth at the same time. A wonderful, unfairly forgotten film; I'll take it over Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby any day.

1. Beloved (Demme 1998) I have never gone into a theater so ready to hate a film. First of all, it's my favorite American novel of the last 50 years. Second, it's a completely unfilmable book. Third, its director had abandoned his iconoclastic, goofy/violent work of the 80's (Something Wild, Married to the Mob) to make important pictures like Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. Fourth, it was going to be another Color Purple, right? Oprah was going to Spielbergize it and make it a happy negro story. Finally, I frickin' hate Oprah; who the hell was she to bring Toni Morrison to the screen, let alone play Sethe? But there I was: myself, and the 20 or so kids in my NYC high school Advanced Placement Lit class. They had read the book, so I figured I owed them one, and off we went into this three-hour plus epic of slavery and infanticide. I expected the worst, but let me tell you something. My kids did not even move. I don't think anyone went to the bathroom. I didn't even hear anyone breathe. For the entire term, I had been preaching to them about the transformative power of art. When we walked out of the film, I think they finally understood. Where to begin? Oprah's astonishing incarnation of Sethe? Danny Glover, perfect as Paul D? Thandie Newton, terrifying and pathetic as the title character? Kimberly Elise who, like her character Denver does in the book, ends up walking away with the story? The glorious Beah Richards as Baby Suggs? The fact that Oprah and Demme don't compromise an inch, that the film features multiple narrators and an achronological storyline? Remember, Beloved was panned, ripped and demolished by the critics upon its release, more so than any film on this list. Was it an anti-Oprah backlash? Was it too serious and too long for people? Well, the good news is that the film is starting to show up on TV more and more, and I am convinced that it will take its place among the great American epics of all time. In fact, I'm going out on a limb to say that aside from Ford's Grapes of Wrath, Beloved is the greatest film adaptation of a classic American novel. Ever.

Boomers: Fight the Real Enemy

"...a noted (Tory), who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! give me peace in my day." ...a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

Thomas Paine, The Crisis #1

Like many of my peers (I'm 40), I grew up mourning the fact that I had not been born 15 or 20 years earlier. The late 70's and early 80's were, in so many ways, such a dead and sterile time, the era of Iranian hostages, Battle of the Network Stars and Mark David Chapman. And so my friends and I would sit at home, listening to Pepper or Forever Changes or Blonde on Blonde or Piper at the Gates of Dawn and bemoan the emptiness of our own time (Sad, no?). We imagined ourselves at Monterey, marching in Chicago, being street-fighting men, making a difference in the world. As the Reagan era began, we wondered if we had missed our chance completely. We idolized and envied that generation, ignoring the truth that the objects of our veneration had already begun the insidious process of turning their revolution into a marketing tool for their peers and their children. (Led Zep for Cadillac, anyone?).

The message was finally driven home for me back in 1992, when many of the Boomers' idols gathered at Madison Square Garden to pay tribute to Bob Dylan on the 30th anniversary of the start of his career. The mood was mellow, warm and nostalgic; all that was absent was Wavy Gravy announcing that there was some bad antacid going around. And then Sinead O'Connor took the stage. You will recall that a few weeks before the Dylan concert, she had ripped up a picture of the Pope on SNL, exclaiming,"Fight the real enemy!" after an a capella rendition of Bob Marley's "War." And how did the 20,000 assembled, whose answer was blowin' in the wind, whose times were a-changin', who apparently, like Judas Iscariot, had God on their side, respond? They booed Sinead off the stage in support of that counterculture icon, John Paul II. I had been a little slow on the uptake, but now I got it. That generation's message to me was, "We've had our revolution and it's the only one that matters; you can't have yours."

Now, with the publication of Leonard Steinhorn's The Greater Generation, the inevitable wave of nostalgic Boomer self-congratulation has officially begun. Steinhorn's argument is that while the Brokaw/Spielberg-anointed "Greatest Generation" won WWII and saved the world from tyrrany, they failed to carry through on the promises of freedom at home once they returned from battle, and were content to hunker down for the conformist '50's. Rather, it was their children who struggled to bring that promise to the disenfranchised; Steinhorn sees this struggle as an even greater one than the one their parents fought, because it was a fight that that they chose, rather that one that was foisted upon them. Here's the problem, though; while there are many Boomers out there today still working and struggling to live up to their ideals, it turns out that for much of that generation, social conscience was an outfit to be worn to occasions and then put in the closet, like those suits who'd put on Hippie clothes and head down to Washington Square Park to score with the chicks on weekends.

That the Boomers accomplished much in their day is beyond debate; the problem is that for all their rhetoric and passion, they have first supported and then presided over the backlash to end all backlashes. All I see is nearly three decades (minus the Man from Hope) of uninterrupted, disastrous drift to the trickle down Right. And while the Boomers can look forward to a comfortable retirement, it is their children who will be picking up the tab financially, in terms of resources and in terms of spiritual malaise. So, viewed in the light of Paine's judgement of his Tory drinking pal, the Boomers emerge as what they really are: self-righteous, self-indulgent narcissists more in love with the abstract concepts of how their "Revolution" helped "The People" than with bothering to leave the planet in any sort of decent shape for their kids. It don't take a weatherman to see that the world that the Boomers are leaving for their children looks a whole lot more like Altamont than Woodstock.

The New World: Inness, 1491 and the Return of Silent Films

In his landscapes of a century ago, George Inness captured the vanishing agrarian way of life in America in the most subtle and poignant way. It's always the same theme--a bucolic landscape, but way, way in the background, we see smoke rising from a distant factory or steam from an approaching locomotive. We marvel at the beauty while we project ahead to the strip mall this field will become. In his usual poetic way, Terrence Malick tries a similar trick in the visually brilliant but ultimately disappointing The New World. And if you are someone who might relish the idea of staring at an Inness landscape for two and a half hours, this is the movie for you.

In the film, Malick tries to create a visual correlative to the world beautifully described by Charles Mann in his recent book 1491. And at the beginning, he succeeds spectacularly, with a montage of images of "virgin territory." The beautiful stillness of the images is soon disrupted by the English boats slicing through the water as they approach the Virginia coast. It's as close as Malick, always the most impressionistic of filmmakers, gets to painterly images. From the moment anyone opens their mouth, however, the movie goes straight downhill and becomes a meandering, inadvertently comic and seemingly endless mess. This is not the fault of the actors, although Colin Farrell spends most of the movie pouting and looking wounded. The ever-reliable Christian Bale almost saves the film, and Q'orianka Kilcher is beautiful, touching and always believable as the curiously unnamed Pocahontas. It's Malick's desire to show us pretty pictures rather than actually tell a story that ultimately makes the film so tough to get through. After seeing this film and Thin Red Line and Days of Heaven, one almost wishes that Malick would simply fulfill his apparent destiny and get a job with Discovery Channel.

So Malick can paint with all the colors of the wind, but the result is almost anti-cinematic, in the sense that his elborate composition and technique are not used to advance the story or create a mood; rather, they are there to show off his incomparable sense of composition and technique. But fear not--I have a solution. While I was watching the film, I experienced something I never have seen in a movie theater before. Within the first hour, I could hear four or five people around me snoring, but I heard something else as well: someone was listening to their iPod. I realized that The New World, as with all of Malick's features save his brilliant Badlands, would be much better off as a silent film. Think about it--we could all bring our Mp3 players and create our own soundtracks, and perhaps even make up our own dialogue a la Mystery Science Theater 3000. Without intending to do so, Malick may have created a whole new form of interactive cinema; how ironic that would be for a film that is so emotionally uninvolving and distancing.