Ah, yes. Today is the day. The day they -the Hollywood elite- hand out the noms for the Oscars. What do we think? Good? Bad? The same-ol-same? More to come…
So I case you’ve been living under a rock here’s the list:
BEST PICTURE
The Artist
War Horse
The Descendants
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
Midnight in Paris
The Help
Hugo
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
BEST DIRECTOR
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
BEST ACTOR
Demian Bichir, A Better Life
George Clooney, The Descendants
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
BEST ACTRESS
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Margin Call
Midnight in Paris
A Separation
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Descendants
Hugo
The Ides of March
Moneyball
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
A Cat in Paris
Chico & Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
A Separation
Footnote
In Darkness
Bullhead
Monsieur Lahzar
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Pina
Hell and Back Again
If A Tree Falls: The Story of the Earth Liberation Front
Paradise Lost 3
Undefeated
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Artist
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
The Tree of Life
War Horse
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Adventures of Tintin
The Artist
Hugo
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
War Horse
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
"Man or Muppet" from The Muppets
"Real in Rio" from Rio
BEST EDITING
The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Moneyball
BEST ART DIRECTION
The Artist
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
War Horse
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Anonymous
The Artist
Hugo
Jane Eyre
W.E.
BEST MAKEUP
Albert Nobbs
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
The Iron Lady
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Hugo
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
BEST SOUND MIXING
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Moneyball
Hugo
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
BEST SOUND EDITING
Drive
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
War Horse
BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Dimanche/Sunday
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
La Luna
A Morning Stroll
Wild Life
BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT
Pentecost
Raju
The Shore
Time Freak
Tuba Atlantic
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement
God Is the Bigger Elvis
Incident in New Baghdad
Saving Face
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom
There you have it. The entire list. Some you know, but I’m betting that most you of don’t. I have feeling that most of the audience for the Oscars doesn’t really care about best Foreign Film or Best Editor. But hey, what do I know.
Looking at the list, and surprise, surprise no Leo DiCaprio. Snubbed it seems once again by the academy. I don’t know what he did so long ago to raise the irk of those that pick who get’s that little golden phallicsqe statue, but whatever it was I think I would hire someone to look into it, and maybe send that person some love in the form of Arab Harem like call girls… but I digress.
Another no brainer was the fact that “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was left off the list with the exception of Rooney Mara who I believe should get the Oscar for her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander. But for the movie itself I think it was way to rough and hard core for the Oscar granters, and unfortunately for a large amount of the American audience which is sad because “Dragon Tattoo” was the best movie I saw of all of 2011. While I knew the film wouldn’t get the top nod I am saddened that Fincher wasn’t. Hats off to him for not pulling any punches.
But no surprises with the likes of Clooney , or Pitt for that matter. One if not both always seem to be on that list time and time again. I did have a little Huh? moment when I saw Jonah Hill’s name on screen.
So here’s my picks for I want to see or think will win:
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT: Incident in New Baghdad
BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT: Raju
BEST ANIMATED SHORT: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
BEST SOUND EDITING: War Horse I think will but want to see Dragon Tattoo
BEST SOUND MIXING: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Hugo
BEST MAKEUP: Albert Nobbs
BEST COSTUME DESIGN: The Artist
BEST ART DIRECTION: The Artist I think will win but want to see Midnight in Paris
BEST EDITING: The Artist
BEST ORIGINAL SONG: "Real in Rio" from Rio
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: The Adventures of Tintin
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Artist I think will win but want Dragon Tattoo
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: Paradise Lost 3
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: A Separation
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Rango
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: The Descendants
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Midnight in Paris
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Octavia Spencer, The Help
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
BEST ACTRESS: Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
BEST ACTOR: Jean Dujardin, The Artist
BEST DIRECTOR: Woody Alan, Midnight in Paris
BEST PICTURE: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Well those are my picks. I’m probably mostly wrong but whatever.
Until next time…
The Amityville Haunting is another sad attempt to bring this franchise back to life.
This rendition of the famed New York haunted house where in 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo murdered his entire family and then made famous again in 1975 by the Lutz story which was turned into the original “Amityville Horror” in 1979. Now this time around, the movie is shot entirely in POV style and of the “found foot-age” genre that has been a growing trend in the realm of horror films.
The movie starts out with a group of teenagers, doing what teenagers do best with empty and somewhat abandoned homes with beds: breaking in. Three of the four know the story and reputation of the house and as the movie opens one of the boys of the group lays down the story of what has supposedly gone on in the house.
As the teens stand in the front of the entrance their camera picks a partial silhouette at the top of the stairs that goes unnoticed except for one, but by the time everyone looks it’s gone.
The camera cuts and when it comes back we find that the teens have spit up. One pair is of course in the upstairs bathroom videoing themselves having sex while the other pair is in the kitchen.
As the camera videos the couple in the bathroom the camera starts to blur and cut out (a trick that will be WAY OVER USED through-out the movie whenever the ghosts appear)only to just capture as the boy is yanked out the door, blood spraying on the wall as the girl screams. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the other couple in the kitchen of what is taking place to their friends, we cut back to the kitchen as the couple is making out. The camera shows the girl look behind her boyfriend, and as a look of shock comes across her face the cuts to black with screams.
We next open on the house as the Benson family meets the realtor in charge of the property. The son, Tyler, who is making a documentary of his family, films them going through the home. (Immediately fans of the previous films can see that this isn’t the house or even the same style of home used before. Where the original kind of sat away from the road and neighbors this one your basic, run-of-the-mill suburban home) Here we find out that the Benson family is on hard times financially and emotionally. The father, Doug, is an ex-marine sergeant and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who has some issues with civilian life as he treats his family like they were serving in the corps. The mother is your basic doughy-eyed woman who most of the time seems to be on a valium cocktail, but she does pose reservations to moving into their new home. But the father is adamant on living there since it has the right number of bedrooms and he’s tired of moving his family place to place because (we later find out is eight times in fifteen months) because of the older daughter’s discipline problems that are, unfortunately, never truly addressed.
As the Benson tours the house with their realtor Tyler’s camera starts with that annoying cutting out because a ghostly presence that we can only really here as voices seem to float up from the vent when he is left on his own for a while.
The realtor leaves the Benson’s alone to discuss what they want to do, and goes outside. And when they family goes out to tell her that they will take the home they find her lying dead in the driveway. I don’t know about you, but I think at this point any reasonable person with a half of a brain cell would not be looking to buy the house anymore. But, needless-to-say the Benson’s do.
After they find the realtor in the drive, the camera cuts to the move in day. Tyler is once again filming the day’s proceedings as the movers take in their belongings. Tyler doing his documentary thing talks with the movers and asks them if they had ever heard of the Amityville house and that this was it. The movers have somehow have never heard of the story and laugh it off when Tyler tells them that the house is haunted. Also we find out the invisible friend is back -only this time his name is Jonathon- and he has befriended himself to the youngest daughter. (later we find out that Jonathon was a victim of the DeFeo killing spree) But as the movers finish up their day, Tyler catches on tape one them falling down the stairs and breaking his neck (again we have that annoying cutting and blurring of the camera). You would think that, again, would be reason enough not to live there, but Doug persists that it was no big deal.
The next day, Doug has found that the back door has been left open and he suspects the oldest daughter of sneaking out. After the two get into an argument, Doug seems to have a change of heart and tells the family that they should go to the movies, and that he and Tyler will stay behind and finish up the unpacking.
As the rest leave, Doug takes advantage of their absence and buys and installs a security camera in the living room that has a view of the front and back doors, and while they do we see a ghostly figure outside the window when the camera is left to operate on it’s own. Tyler also happens upon an iPhone that the kids in the beginning were using to video each other in the kitchen. And when Tyler is finally able to charge the battery and show them that something supernatural is going on the his parents can only focus on the couple and their relations. He also installs an alarm on the doors as well that goes off when the back door mysteriously opens by itself. Leading to yet another argument with the oldest daughter.
Through out the week the Benson’s stay in the house, Tyler makes little vignettes about the days events and the supernatural goings ons.
As the week continues, Doug starts to unravel mentally, his wife grow more adamant on leaving when she’s not valiumed out, and the growing dependency of the youngest daughter and her new friend. But when a chance real break-in of the local teenage stud and the oldest daughter trying to hook up with him gives Doug the excuse that what has been going on is in fact the daughter. And when he chases the boy out the door by gun point, Tyler follows him, only to catch him as he is being dragged off by an unseen force.
The police finally get involved when Doug can’t find trace of the boy after Tyler yells for him. The responding officer pretty much confirms Doug’s earlier thoughts of what is going on is real, telling him that they know all about this kid ands how he hooks up with all the girls on the block, but since he can’t find any trace of him in the dark that he’ll be back in the morning. Upon the officers arrival he discovers a large pool of blood but no body and enlists the help of a detective who lays out the larger story of the house and how nobody that has ever lived there has stayed more than two months.
At this point, Doug, not certain of anything anymore contacts a war buddy, (named) Cut, who comes over and installs more cameras through-out the house. While Cut is making sure that everything works he catches a brief glimpse of a ghost behind but when he turns around nothings there. But as Cut leaves via the backyard the power line above falls down on him, killing Cut. This begins to really drive a spike mentally into Doug as he now believes that there IS something supernatural going on and tries to find a way to combat it.
The last day begins where we finally see (via Cut’s security camera) Jonathon at the table with Tyler and his younger sister and that he wants her to stay with him forever and how she wishes she could as well. Later in the day Doug’s mental brake goes into high gear as he starts reliving moments from the service and waves around his pistol. And for what ever the reason his wife doesn’t just get up and leave with the children and instead says that they are going to her sisters in a couple of days. The night progress with a ramped supernatural problems leading most of the family to spend the night in the parents room. That is except for the oldest daughter who spends the night in hers.
As we watch her sleep via the camera her father had installed in her room we see as she awakes and then we see her get attacked by something unseen. The camera does it’s usual cut out stuff and when it comes back it shows only her legs on the bed and blood on the walls.
Somehow the rest of the family has failed to hear her screams, but after a while the mother awakes and heads down to the dinning room for no apparent reason other than to do so. But as she nears the kitchen she pulled away from the camera view. Her screams awaken Tyler who then follows her downstairs and into the kitchen. He sees nothing on his first pass through but when he goes to turn around he finds his mother on the floor dead and looks to have been burned. Something then grabs his attention off screen but as he turns around he gets grabbed himself and his camera goes dead. The youngest daughter at this point gets up out of bed, the camera cuts and then she standing next to her father who she then stabs in the heart as he is about to get up.
The camera cuts to black a final time but we are able to her the daughter talking to somebody and how she is happy with where she is going to go.
While Amityville Haunting had a decent idea (I’m also a fan of the found footage genre) it lacked quite a bit. The trailer had me sucked in but that was about it when it came to the movie which was a real let down. The parents constant assholeness and complaining and arguing was a real distraction especially when it was combined with the overly used camera flashes and cutting out which was more headache inducing as was scary. However, the old tried and true basic scares that have worked well with other films in thins genre worked here when used and in my opinion would worked far better if used more than the camera work. I would names of the people that played the characters, but IMDB has this movie not coming out until next year sometime and only listed one person in it.
I give Amityville Haunting one and half severed heads out five. Just take a pass on this one because it doesn’t really fulfill the wants of the fans of the franchise or that of the found footage genre.
After watching this film I have to wonder two things. First, what the hell goes through Tom Six’s brain, or should I say his subconscious, that allows him to dream of these concepts of grotesquery, and two, who the hell is giving him the money to bring these films to fruition. It’s not like the films he (Tom Six) has created, or his directorial style can be compared to those, say, the suckfest that is Uwe Bol. Far from it. At least the two films that I have seen by Six have kept my interest and his film technique is impeccable.
The film I’m referring too here is “Human Centipede 2 (The Full Sequence)”, Six’s follow up to the much hyped and overly bizarre “Human Centipede (The First Sequence)”.
“Human Centipede 2” follows a man named, Martin (played by Laurence R. Harvey), a middle aged, mentally disturbed loner, with not much to say (Martin never actually speaks in the film. His complete communication solely along the lines of pig like squeals) who lives with his mother in a bleak housing project, as he works the night shift as a security guard at a local parking garage. Martin passes the time away in his little booth watching and fantasizing about the first film and fetishizes over the meticulous surgical skills of the gifted Dr. Heiter, whose knowledge of the human gastrointestinal is unparalleled. Martin is so obsessed with the film he keeps a scrapbook about it, and at one point he masturbates with a piece of rolled up sandpaper around his penis while viewing the film for the umpteenth time.
Martin’s life in this Lynchesque world takes a further dark turn as he begins collecting his own specimens, stealing them from the very place of his employ. Hitting them, usually, in the head with his trusty crowbar, then dragging their lifeless bodies off to his weird little minivan that reminds me of a cross between -as said- minivan and an American El Camino that has a cover on the back.
Martin of course needs a place to conduct his rabid little plan, so he decides to rent a warehouse space. Upon viewing the space, Martin ends up killing the rental agent as he tries to subdue him for his experiment. He will just be the first in what will become a long line of killings by the end of the film. As Martin’s collection grows (among his victims are a neighbor, a businessman, and a man and his very pregnant wife) he becomes more and more fascinated with the fact that he could somehow get the three originals actors in the first “Human Centipede” to be the show pieces of the next sequence. So he begins telephoning the three actors from the first film, pretending to be Quentin Tarantino's casting agent, and tries to lure them to London. Only, however, one, Ashlynn Yennie (portraying herself, in yet another nod to the meta-narrative), does so. And why she decided to reprise her role from the first is beyond me. Most of the first hour of the film shows how Martin attacks, beats, and kidnaps his victims, and once Martin has his victims, he severs the tendons in each person's legs (shown graphically and on screen) to prevent them from fleeing. He then uses a hammer to knock out their teeth one by one, (again shown) putting his fingers in their blood-filled mouths to fish out their teeth so they will not swallow and choke on them in a suicide attempt. He slices open the buttocks of 11 of the victims (also graphically depicted on screen), and then lacking any surgical equipment, or knowledge for that matter, uses a staple gun and duct tape to attach each person's face to the next person's anus. Like somehow that was all it takes to recreate Dr. Heiter’s plan.
The last act has Martin, who is clad only in his underwear at this point (a sight which can only be seen) as he becomes more and more sexually aroused by the desperation and travails of HIS "human centipede." And while wanting the full effect from the first film (and obviously one of his favorite scenes from it), Martin administers an excessive amount of laxative to his creation, forcing each individual in the chain to explosively evacuate their bowels into the mouth of the person behind them. When one of his victims chokes to death on their own vomit, Martin again breaks down in tears.
It’s not like the original “Human Centipede” is a master piece of film work (far from it) but the unfortunate fact of this film is that Six decided to forgo any real plot and instead just went for over-the-top grotesque. At one point in the film the pregnant women escapes and while she is in the process of doing so is also in labor. As she runs down the hall towards the door blood shoots from between her legs and when she finally does make it to a parked car (that of the rental agent that has been left there the entire time) she gives birth, the baby falling to the floor as Martin bangs on the window trying to enter. The women is finally able to get the vehicle started and crushes her newborn’s head as she steps on the gas.
However, the film is beautifully shot in black and white (a fact I think because of all the gore so Six could get around the sensor board), with deep lush darks and shadows. And the camera work is equally well down. And for the reason alone is why I’ll give the “Human Centipede 2 (The Full Sequence)” one and a half severed heads instead of just the half the story rightly deserves.
