It's complicated

For three decades, Nancy Meyers has been churning out good old-fashioned romantic comedies. Starting with Private Benjamin, as writer, she's been consistently successful, occasionally nominated for awards, and little-honoured by her peers. It's Complicated is par for her course.


Romcoms had a better reputation when they were well-crafted vehicles for Tracy and Hepburn, the other Hepburn, Hudson and Day, Stewart (Jimmy), Monroe, Grant (Cary, not Hugh) and many other crowd-pleasing actors. Meyers works in an unfairly-scorned field where Billy Wilder and other talents created comic masterpieces. Give her three trusted old-style stars and she couldn't go wrong, could she?


She really didn't, not for audiences prepared to indulge in prettily-set escapism featuring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin as a divorced couple having another fling together while Steve Martin, also a divorcee, tries to get in on the action. That's all, folks, It's Complicated is simply not.


Pre-opening publicity was engendered by convenient protests about the trio of stars (and Meryl's son-in-law) toking singly and together on-screen, with amoral glee. My concern is that crowds of youngsters, forced to see the movie on family outings, could be led to believe that just one stick of grass could cause such cost-effective joy. Life's not that simple, Ms Meyers, is it? If it is, can I go to your parties too?


There are several gently comic strands in her script, including Baldwin's bitchy Latino second wife and manic stepson. Less amusingly, the three blandly prim children of Streep's bakery-owning character appear unrelated to her or Baldwin, while Martin is incredibly (for him) self-effacing as the architect designing Streep's home extensions.


It will be mildly interesting to watch Baldwin and Martin co-host the 2010 Oscars show. They're morally obliged to mention that Ms Meyer's latest movie gained three Golden Globe nominations (because Globes have a separate comedy category) but no Oscar nominations?


Will they rejoice that Ms Streep has a chance of gaining her second Best Actress Oscar, for Julie and Julia, this time because she's not competing with herself again, as happened at the Globes to the advantage of Sandra Bullock?


Yes, I couldn't believe it either. Ste Meryl of the Voice has only been allowed to win one Supporting Actress Oscar (Kramer v Kramer, 1979) and one Best Actress Oscar (Sophie's Choice, 1982). Go figure. That's what Baldwin/Martin should tell their Hollywood audience.

Baaria

I really should find out how the Golden Globes organisers choose their nominees. Especially their Foreign-Language Film choices. Then I might know why they thought Baaria was one of the best five non-English-language movies of 2009.

The Oscars organisers have a system. Each non-English-speaking country/territory in the world (even North Korea, perhaps) can offer its national favourite of the year to Hollywood. There are restrictions regarding the sources of production funds, amount of non-national talent employed, theatre screenings, and, one can guess, various etcs that enable all concerned to keep out global cinematic riff-raff.

The manner in which each country chooses its candidate is undoubtedly as Byzantine as Olympic Games committees. Many classics of global cinema have been spurned because their directors or producers were out of favour with the decision-making mafiosi of their nation's movie industry.

Oscar's self-chosen clique of Foreign-Film academicians then decide which five options they think should be offered to the Oscar segment's electors. These include only the academy members who reportedly promise to see all five candidates. Even non-Byzantine conspiracy theorists will detect lots of opportunities for a Hollywood version of race-fixing.

Once upon a time, for a very long time, most of the Academy members able to make the effort of going to see five sub-titled movies must have been retired and old. Most of them would have been migrants, or post-War relatives of migrants, from Europe. They were all sentimentalists.

I have not yet proved my contention by tedious review of the facts, but I suspect that the off-balance demographics of the Foreign-Film electorate led to woefully predictable nominees and victors. "And the winner" would often be a schmaltzy movie with a cute pre-pubescent child or two, heart-warming grand-parental or avuncular figures, left-wingish anti-authoritarian attitudes, generation gaps that melt in the glow of fond memories and cherished dreams, and an entertainment industry connection.

That is possibly how the 1989 tale of a rustic Italian movie-house, Cinema Paradiso, won the Oscar (and the equivalent BAFTA award in the UK). It didn't hurt its chances when its old star died soon after production (or was that another Italian multi-award-winner about a rustic postman and poet? Or another dead actor's final appearance?). More research is needed : how many dying actors soon rested in peace under Foreign-Language tombstones?

Finally, back to Baaria, whose only connection to all the above is its director, Guiseppe Tornatore, who also created Cinema Paradiso. He's Sicilian, and that island's sons have the same right as anyone to make embarrassingly saccharine confections. In Baaria, he clearly wanted to produce an epic tale covering his life span, the history of his once self-contained town (now a suburb of Palermo), three generations, local fascists and communists, and a lot more.

The movie takes well over 2 hours to present a very confusing pageant of different generations of bambini and over-excited crowd scenes. Thousands of extras and massive Sicilian urban settings (recreated on location in Tunisia) are remorsefully presented in idolatrous golden-glowed wide-screen hyper-activity. Cameras run hither and thither, like the fidgety townsfolk. Ennio Morricone's over-loud music is similarly sensually offensive, and everybody on every set constantly screams and shouts in the OTT troppo way excitable Sicilians are supposed to, if that's what their auteur likes.

Were all Italian movies so histrionic and high-pitched? In fairness to a nation of people who, though vociferous, actually communicate, and very delightfully, with their hands and eyes, real research was needed. First of all, via Rossellini, who is another story.

Blind mountain

The cultural overlords of China do not want to be seen as mere propagandists protecting the Communist Party's image. They seem aware that some flowers, albeit never 10,000, should be allowed to blossom even if they do not emit healthy communist aromas. An occasional movie with gritty reality is very acceptable for showing at overseas film festivals, showing the make-believe world it can believe that China's artists operate free of censorship.

Movie-makers can portray something wrong in the Chinese garden if the wrong is caused by pre-Communist weeds such as feudal traditions and evil human exploitation. Blind Mountain (aka Road Home) is a depressingly bitter depiction of the widespread traffic in young women. They are kidnapped and sold to rural peasant families in need of hard-working, obedient and fertile bride-servants for their unmarried sons.

Babies and children have long been traded too by traffickers, and the implementation of the one-child policy in China created even more demand for an ancient practice. Writer-director Li Yang looks at the issue through the case of a naive young university graduate tricked into taking a work trip into a rural mountain boondocks in Shaanxi Province. Drugged and sold to a village farmer with a very lumpen prole of a son, the city girl tries resistance, flight and guiles to get out of her captivity. Her unsympathetic mother-in-law urges patient acceptance, and so do the village's other kidnapped brides.

The only educated man in the village, the schoolteacher, dare not help, nor can the isolated area's pair of impotent policemen. The girl is doomed to drudgery, rape, child-bearing and abuse. One of her pleas does get out of the village, and her father arrives from the city, but he too cannot beat the system. The old village ways seem amorally all-powerful until the girl accidentally takes the law into her own hands, in the only way the old world can understand. The movie depends on its only professional actor, Huang Lu, to make the girl's plight credible, and she does. The Taiwanese cinematographer, Jong Lin, endows her and the setting with a sad, harsh beauty.

I'm glad I saw the dvd made for the international market. Li made various closing scenes. It was depressing to find out the state-approved one, for the domestic market, gave the useless policemen an unreal success.

Li is creating a good track record for making documentary dramas, which he also produces and edits. In Blind Shaft, China's privately-owned coal mines are the setting for institutional and human horror shows, when a cheerfully gullible village boy is the next chosen victim for a pair of murderous blackmailers gaining compensation for miners killed in engineered pit accidents.

Gripping stories, good scripts and acting, bleak rural life -- Li's works could be set in Russia or post-War Italy, South America or India. Anywhere. And his movies would be recognised everywhere for their unsentimental, horrifying credibility.

Avatar

What can anyone say about Avatar that won't have already been said in triplicate? The world's most expensive movie earned the world's biggest box office gross. It raised its creator, James Cameron, onto a new pedestal raised above his old pedestal (Titanic). Does anything else need saying?

Maybe no one's noted that some contrarians, and moviegoers with queasy stomachs or eye problems, prefer the 2-D version. Has anyone else also remarked how shrewd Cameron was in developing a 3-D format that would also play immaculately on 2-D screens and therefore transfer well to the lucrative dvd market?

After three viewings in one week, twice in 3-D, my admiration for Cameron's technical aplomb expanded. He's amalgamated so many of the best tricks in his cinematic repertoire, from giant lift-loaders with robotic arms (Aliens) to the mesmerising beauty of undersea creatures (two 3-D IMAX documentaries and The Abyss). Fellow-Canadian Sigourney (Ripley) Weaver re-appears, as a Greek tragic figure and the traditional anti-Establishment heroine in a Cameron script -- and Wikipedia's review of his life and work suggest that Cameron often felt he was the unjustly scorned outsider in the cliquish worlds of Hollywood's producers, "talents" and production crews.

The slights he perceived in Hollywood might well have buttressed an innate anti-US attitude in him. His movie scripts, even for fun-filled True Lies and maudlin Titanic, often weave in valid pot shots at the American political, social and military systems. The decision to make Weaver's scientist a nicotine addict was clearly a deliberate provocation to the PC caucus. The gratuitous character trait's retention is just one sign of Cameron's power of persuasion, or bullying. He may be a prima donna, but he's also a proven premium dollar generator.

Maybe Hollywood itself helped to create its latest little-loved genius, by trying to cold-shoulder him. Hollywood worships Spielberg, grudgingly respects Scorsese, didn't like Hitchcock, Orwell or Chaplin, and really detests Cameron? We're lucky he, like other real talents, was so offended that he beat Hollywood at its own games : creating blockbusters and winning awards.

Little traitor

Every nation's film industry is entitled to a nationalist phase. It would usually arise soon after the land's most recent revolution or military campaign. Heroic figures appear centre stage, full face and overlit. Peasants find cause to dance in the streets or frolic in fields. Political issues and internal disputes are invisible, airbrushed or rewritten in line with the victorious party's platform or leadership egos. The resultant self-image of proud new nations is displayed ingenuously in many state-sponsored movies. Even in Israel's The Little Traitor.

It is such an old-fashioned cliche-splattered piece of stagy film-making that a 21st-Century movie-goer might assume it was produced around 1950, soon after the creation of Israel. The movie covers the last year of the British Mandate, as seen by an 11-year-old sabra (locally-born) boy in Jerusalem, "Proffy". It's hard to warm to the precocious, egocentric, would-be anti-British terrorist and frustrated killer, even though his young actor (Ido Port) smiles nicely at times.

His migrant parents are lovingly harsh, preoccupied with providing nocturnal safe passage for Jewish refugees from Europe. Consequently, believe it or not, his best adult influence will prove to be a middle-aged British army sergeant (Alfred Molina valiantly coping with a preposterous plotline and script). The Brit is studying Hebrew, he's bewitched by the second Book of Samuel, and he invites the clever boy to visit him at the army hotel for mutual exchanges of vocabulary. The man's army mates see nothing odd in his behaviour, which could lead a modern viewer to chuckle at the naivete of military men and their security systems back in the 1940s.

Maybe they were. The script, by producer-director Lynn Roth (a New Yorker and veteran US TV series producer) is supposedly based on a book by Amos Oz, an Israeli author Ms Roth claims is "world-renowned". The movie's final scene indicates that his book was based on the experiences of a possibly real Zionist professor called Avi Liebowitz. He met his British mentor in London, 30 years after the sergeant left Palestine and little Proffy had overcome charges of treachery for fraternising with the enemy.

By then, the sugariness of the fable had become life-threatening. Maybe none of the managers of Israel's film industry funds were younger than 70 when they met Ms Roth. Somehow, she persuaded them that their nation needed a 90-minute spoonful of schmaltz, celebrating the foundation of their nation with peace and goodwill to all, especially the nice Brits who left (unlike the evil Nazis) and the nice Arabs who sat around the marketplace smiling (the only Arabs to be seen) and the nice UN delegates who approved the establishment of Israel (unlike nasty Saudi Arabia etc).

Believe it not, this movie was released in 2007. It's reported that it won an award at a Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival and another in Palm Beach. Now, that I can believe.

To live/die in Mongkok

Few memories remain of To Live and Die in Mongkok. Sadly, that's often the problem with Hong Kong movies. At the time of watching them, one admires the technical excellence of the production. Every aspect, except a few crucial ones, will be more than competent. Rarely are there reasons to pooh-pooh the editing, cinematography, lighting, costumes, make-up, music, or even the acting (unless market considerations required that lead roles were assigned to talent-challenged TVB contract artists, that season's over-hyped pop vocalists, or miscast Taiwanese and mainland starlets). Too soon after, the shallowness and/or incredibility of the plotline and script provide the overwhelming recollections.

The writer-director of this Hong Kong thriller was Wong Jing, who gave himself a brief cameo role in his tale of a triad gang's internal politics and warfare. Nick Cheung starred as the anti-heroic central figure with a huge psychological problem (a frequent problem for triad characters). He's a schizoid. He's released from prison after serving a long sentence for mass, hit-man-ly slaughter in Mongkok, usually accompanied by his Imaginary Friend, who is himself when he was a young killer. Naturally, nobody else can see the IF, but he's the one who goes ballistic when the ex-con seems to do so. So that means our anti-hero can, conveniently, still be seen as a nice guy.

His younger self had been captured because a trainee policeman had shot him in the back, and the policeman is now a detective stationed in the same district. No surprise there, or in him also having personality flaws. The ex-con's childhood pal, who's suffering from a wilder variety of evil complexes, is nastier than anyone else in the manor, even the university-educated rival attempting to grab the triad leadership. The gang's old-timers want to keep their power, but why any of them would back their dead leader's maladjusted son's claim would be puzzling to anyone who hasn't heard of North Korea.

Meanwhile, in order to introduce female interest to the plotline, there's a heart-of-gold prostitute (the only type allowed to be seen in Hong Kong movies) from the mainland, with a retarded young sister who's just been abducted. The anti-hero must save them and their nice middle-aged pimp. But can he save himself from his belief that Mongkok is a cage from which he can never escape? The script shows us the anti-hero seeing that image quite a few times, to be sure that we get the melodramatic point.

There's a bunch of potentially interesting secondary characters, especially the Imaginary Friend who cannot believe what's happened to his old Mongkok haunts, but the movie depends crucially on the confused character of the anti-hero. He was an ambitious dramatic device, but lacks a script that would allow a viewer to sense why a nerdish middle-aged ex-con would be a revered icon in modern Mongkok. Nick Cheung stares distractedly, mutters politely and is a total gentleman in a prostitute's bedroom. He clearly could never survive in Mongkok, and why should we care?

Fish tank

The critics love it (88% on the RT roster). It won a Cannes Jury prize (2009). Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold's second feature film, confirms the promise of her first, the award-winning Red Road. It's nominated for BAFTAs in 2010, and one of them would be a worthy companion to the Oscar that Arnold won for her 2005 short feature, Wasp. She's a former British children's TV performer who has made a very successful quantum career leap.

The problem for any movie buff of my age is that gritty social realism was done, and done so well, way back when Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and other politically motivated directors ploughed the field. Following their lead, Arnold has written and directed a modern working-class immorality tale, but is it different enough from the older generation's work to become a classic too?

It could and should. Especially if it's always screened with English subtitles. That will mean spelling out a heck of a lot of expletives, but it will have the crucial benefit of helping non-Essex audiences follow plotlines better in a coming-of-age dramedy set in profanity-drenched flatlands. Arnold clearly enjoys dialect challenges, and didn't let her work on the Glasgow-set Red Road discourage her from tackling another.

It's made depressingly clear that no sensitive person would choose to live in Essex, where scruffy council flats (even duplexes with balconies), stark wastelands (even when edged with marshes and a stark wind turbine), characterless suburban bungalows (especially when flanked by industrial chimneys) and grey shopping streets fill a social and moral quagmire. The movie's anti-heroine, 15-year-old Mia, has few hopes in Hell of finding a way out, and newcomer Katie Jarvis is gloriously credible as a foul-mouthed, mean-spirited child yearning for love, especially self-love. Like the old horse she yearns to set free, Mia seems chained to her place in society.

But she seems doomed to follow her single mum into an adulthood of boredom relieved only by disco music, drink and sex. As so often in British movies, the secondary characters are depicted impeccably. Above all, Michael Fassbender presents a mesmerising portrait of the conflicted emotions in Mia's mother's too-good-to-be-real boyfriend. With further juicy roles like this, the German-born Ireland-raised London-based actor (triumphant in Hunger and professionally understated in Inglourious Basterds) could become an international star a la Day-Lewis and Depardieu.

Ms Arnold's scripted solution to Mia's dead-end existence avoids the socio-political morbid-cum-merry melodramatics of earlier Brit movie realists. Mia abandons family and home, accepting without any enthusiasm a chance to escape from the flatlands. Wales can't be worse than Essex, can it?

The final scenes of the movie are heart-wrenching shrugs, with an inspired dance routine from a family of females united in repressed screams. The modern British Generation Gap is shown to be brutally short.

Whip it

Drew Barrymore has the makings of an all-American icon. She inherited the surname of a renowned acting dynasty. She wowed audiences very young, in ET. She grew up in Hollywood, apparently without ill effects. She made a wise investment in, and high returns from, transforming an old TV series, Charlie's Angels, into a snappy action movie franchise co-starring herself. She's gained awards and kudos for serious acting in TV movies such as Grey Gardens.

Now she's directed her first feature, Whip It, successfully in the eyes of critics (83% per Rotten Tomatoes). It's a charming, fun-filled romp about a Texan girl (Ellen Page) who joins a roller derby team. That makes it a chick flick on skates. So why did it fail at the box office, grossing less than US$19 million? I'd guess its producers hadn't found a target audience. Who goes to roller derby carnivals in real life? Not so many, I guess. Then the producers (including Barrymore) picked the wrong lead actress.

Ellen Page is a winsome little actress (who gained attention with Juno) without a wide fan base. She was miscast as a small-town nobody finding herself and a vicious streak on the roller track. The role needed a credibly tough bully-girl to fit into the rough contact "sport". Anyone who tries to look tough alongside team-mates like Juliette Lewis needs to look much older and wickeder than Ms Page. She looks lost on the track, in ensembles, and set beside Lewis and other ageing pros (including Barrymore herself, playing a dumb-belle).

The producers obviously wanted a family-friendly censors' rating, so there aren't even any shower or locker room scenes to attract male teen interest. Everyone in Hollywood should know that a sports movie without semi-nudity isn't very sporting.

In order to appeal to moms and pops, the movie offered them recognisable faces -- Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern as the girl's confused parents, Jimmy Fallon in a one-note role as a comic manic roller derby emcee. Unfortunately, everyone involved got very recognisable cliched characters and dialogue.

Ms Barrymore's debut as a director could be seen as promising; she's crafted a competent effort. Does that sound as if I'm damning her with faint praise? No, I don't damn her, but I do hope she gets a meatier script and clearer cinematic vision next time. How else is the USA to gain a worthy successor to Shirley Temple as a national icon?

House of the devil

There are many reasons why many horror films are made by movie industry tyros. The reasons are called dollars. Apart from angst-filled documentaries and angstier gay coming-out mini-melodramas, horror movies are the cheapest genre in which young directors can work. Small casts. Unknown actors. Few sets. Limited dialogue. Low lighting. Splurge the budget on special effects (in the 21st Century, gore must be seen to be showers of spurting gore, not mere splodges of ketchup).

Horror films also have a better chance of getting a mainstream distribution, and they can generate critical buzz at film festivals. Think Spielberg, and remember The Duel. Recall Henry, the Serial Killer. Roger Corman leaps to mind? And Hammer Films in the UK. Think of low-budget box-office triumphs of recent years and wish you'd had a co-producer cut on the net take for The Blair Witch Project, various European blockbusters such as Let The Right One In, the Hostel and Saw series, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity [PA].

The last-named B&W movie utilised the Internet well, as low-budget films (and non-Republican political campaigns) must in order to get their heads above the expensive media ramparts. I thought it was a technical and dramatic mediocrity while I watched it. Now I know it was. I've seen a meaningful comparison, and the best-crafted horror movie from a newcomer this season is surely The House of the Devil [HoD].

PA rated at 82% on the Rotten Tomatoes register, and grossed US$110 million in North American theatres. Its creator, Oren Peli, has already been optioned by Spielberg, the Peli PR machine boasted. Although HoD received less than half as many reviews, because it only managed to be given a very limited distribution, it rated slightly better at 86%. Watch them both if you can, and weep and gnash over American movie distribution systems and mass media critical standards.

HoD is technically perfect and in vibrant colour. Its writer-director-editor, Ti West, uses most of the tricks in the film academy guidebook for horror movies, and does so effectively, rarely ostentatiously. His virgin heroine is a breakout role for Jocelin Donahue. She's backed up by a trio of horror movie stalwarts in engagingly evil supporting roles. At times, admittedly, there are longueurs, when West froze on just a few too many closed doors or window panes. Overall though, the tension builds as it should (relentlessly), and is punctured violently only when least expected. The ending settles on a note that could have led, but won't, to a sequel called Sam's Baby Omen.

One last thought about the clear cineplex appeal of horror movies. Market research undoubtedly shows that blokes merrily invite birds to them, and birds cheerily agree to go, because social custom allows them all to squeal, grasp and comfort each other in a dark venue. But what about groups of bird-less teenage blokes? I suspect the only acceptable way for them to sit through horror movies is to make mock squeals and pretend to grab and poke each other. On the arms only, boys.

Thirst

Why do so many otherwise normal people like to imagine having their blood sucked out of them? Just thinking the thought gives my skin a faintly thrilling frisson, and I'm definitely otherwise as normal as can be. Except for my fetish for wordplays like the effing one in the previous sentence. Its proper name might re-enter my memory momentarily, maybe ...

Be that as it may, the Korean box-office champion of 2009, Thirst, deserves serious attention (and its 2009 Cannes Jury award). It's a simple tale of a Catholic priest, a fairly common character in Korean life and movies. This time he's an orphan, and volunteers as a guinea-pig for a medical clinic testing vaccines for a deadly virus. The sole survivor, he returns to his Korean parish to discover that his leprous outbursts can only be repressed by drinking human blood. French cineastes will smell a Zola novel being re-worked.

Give such a standard vampire scenario to a good director (Park Chan-wook), scriptwriters (Park and another) and lead actor (Song Kang-ho) though, and a remarkably successful exercise in dramatic surreality and black comedy is created. There is a supporting cast of Grand Guignol, yet credibly human, characters who take the doomed priest into their home and hearts -- an evil-natured megalomaniac schoolmate and his doting dressmaking mother, woefully-abused and morally-challenged wife and their household's innocent Filipina amah.

The storyboard cuts from incongruity to illogicality, comic horror to thwarted love, always surprising its audience with unexpected camera angles and shocking character insights. Dead people re-appear, a paralysed woman stares melodramatically, suppurations blossom and fade. Everyone thirsts for something extra, for mahjong wins, divine touches and eternal love.

As vampire-movie cognoscenti know, the sun always rises. Brilliantly, dramatically, black-comically, in the parched scenes of Thirst's startling ending.

[Back at the beginning, in case you didn't know before I did -- I'd mislaid "alliteration". I've often found that when I play with words, I lose at least one ...]

Up in the air

It was noted in a commentary, probably in Salon, that writer-director Jason Reitman had looked daggers at James Cameron for winning Best Film and Best Director, probably at the Golden Globes. The suggestion was that Jason had reckoned he had a good chance of snagging one or both of the awards for his Up In The Air.

There must be more than met the commentator's eye. All Hollywood professionals are undoubtedly self-trained to be "good" losers, to smile at award-givers' slings and arrows, and be seen to "play the game". It would be easier for Jason than for many others in the industry because his father is an industry writer-producer pro.

First clue? The elder Reitman may well think that he was appreciated insufficiently by his peers. Or maybe his son thinks that, reckoning that Daddy's Gremlins did more for the art of cinema than anything created prior to the son's arrival on the sound stages. If so, it's that George Bush syndrome. It cannot be called a "complex", as it's far from that.

Maybe Jason thought Avatar was grossly inferior to Up In The Air? Possibly. Artists, especially Hollywood professionals, are expected to have above-average egos. Cameron does. But it would be unprofessional for Jason to show such disdain?

Can there be any relevance in the fact that the Reitmans and Cameron are Canadians? To lose to an American would have been preferable? To lose to Cameron's American ex-wife (Kathleen Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker) would have been almost a pleasure?

In reality, the Oscar voters have probably done Jason an enormous favour. He'd already gained industry and critical respect, and decent box-office returns, for Juno and Thank You For Smoking. Up In The Air had big buzz in this year's awards races, and he could have jumped far too prematurely to happy conclusions. And then Cameron finished his magnum opus and won almost everybody's accolades, and Jason's wittily cute Up In The Air no longer looked quite so special. We can surmise that Jason is not a happy Canadian bunny.

That means, like any talented super-achiever, he'll go on making better and better films until Hollywood recognises his genetic heritage. Sadly, when it does, Jason will probably still be merely the second most successful Canadian movie auteur of all time. Quelle chagrin, as they probably don't say in Quebec.

Tropical malady

I got round to seeing the gay Thai Cannes-award-winner, Tropical Malady. Did it waste my time? I'm not sure. Anyone who has patient Thai-speaking friends could ask them to listen to the director's soundtrack commentary on the Thai dvd version and find clues as to what you should be seeing/thinking.

I could only watch the subtitled 10-minute to-camera comments Apichatpong Weerasethakul grudgingly made for the international dvd. I gained few insights. The bespectacled auteur appeared to think that "Film" needed to find new ways to express truths or it would become redundant. And that centrifugal "Thailand" was wiping out minority cultures. And that his films blend his and his actors' "memories". I wondered how he persuaded a clutch of European producers (Swiss-French names, mainly) to back him and provide various other European-named production and technical advisers. And why they let his final edit keep so many non-dramatic blackouts and long long-shots.

Other scenes were illogical, puzzling, maybe deliberate mysteries. At the film's beginning, a Thai border patrol team find an unidentified male corpse, naked and later not naked. There is a pseudo-climactic end to the movie's first half (a tale of a soldier's thwarted day-lit homosexual love somewhere in the mountainous north), when the viewer cannot be sure what a couple of quickly masked snapshots reveal. Throughout much of the wholly different second half (a ghost story with a tiger and a tattooed man trailing the soldier figure in jungle at night), the collage of shots is frustratingly non-linear/logical.

The movie begins as a tantalising, sensitive and semi-credible Thai-language counterpart of Brokeback Mountain. Much of that's worth watching. But it is hard to sense why the handsome soldier is gay and why he'd fallen in love with a somewhat gormless peasant lad who likes to be looked at by girls. A Thai Heath Ledger, he definitely is not

The director says he found one of his two lead actors (the somewhat gormless one, I guess) by handing out fliers in Silom to disco-goers, and the other one used to be a video cameraman he knew. He made them share a bedroom so they'd develop appropriate feelings in their acting. That may well explain the thwarted plotlines.

Julie and Julia

Having watched Julie and Julia twice, I have decided that Nora Ephron, the film's writer and director, ended up disliking the thoroughly modern Julie Powell. I also believe that Ms Ephron wanted me to end up feeling the same way as she did.

The dislike didn't manifest itself after one showing, because it's very difficult to dislike Amy Adams. She is a very charming gamine, whose honeyed voice and twinkly eyes could seduce anything on two legs or four. Even a millipede would purr. It is impossible to watch her in Enchanted without purring with a giggle, and she was far from overwhelmed in her supporting role by the on-screen mastery of Ste Meryl of the Voices in Doubt. As Ms Powell, she conned me into respecting her at first sighting.

The second time around, the details can be examined matter-of-factly. And Ms Powell is/was, clearly, as her character admits towards the movie's end, a very self-centred psychologically needy bitch (and inadequate worker and wife). Ms Child, by comparison, is seen as a total lady, albeit a jolly giant of a gentlewoman no one could fault for anything, as Ms Powell acknowledges.

They do not meet, of course, and Julie gamefully tells us that the nonagenarian doyen of cookbooks didn't want to meet Julie, a 30-year-old blogger whose self-proclaimed claim to fame was creating in 365 evenings all 500-plus recipes in Julia's renowned 1960s cookbook of French cuisine. Julia told a reporter that Julie's blog antic was "disrespectful".

It also demonstrated changing times and ethics. Julia took at least eight years to co-create, translate, re-write and multi-edit her magnum opus. Julie took a more year to use it up in her blog, adding nothing creative. Julia happily received an advance of US$1,500. Julie's overly patient husband anticipated a jackpot of US$100,000-plus for the book of his wife's blogs in Salon.com. There were other comparisons that were not all that odious.

Ste Meryl should, in a fair Hollywood world, win yet another Best Actress Oscar. She captures the astonishing vocal range of Julia Child, and the unique ways she chorkled, smoked, loved her diplomat husband, adored food and coped with her childlessness and freakish height. Sandra Bullock was great fun in Speed, awfully screen-hoggish since then, and she'll have to bowl me over in The Blind Side so completely that I'd allow her to defeat Ste Meryl. I'm prepared to apologise to her. Movie critics, like boy scouts, should always be prepared. Even for absurd situations.

I'm sure Ephron is a fiery liberal. She slips three anti-Republican jibes into Julia's conversations. Julia and her adorable husband (Stanley Tucci shining in a role of modest passivity) were clearly liberals in the old-world sense. They were American aristocrats, and Ephron couldn't help revering them. The Powells are nouveaux riches, who never talk about politics or anything other than themselves, and Nora Ephron didn't admire them half as much.

Education

There are many Tacit Rules of Oscar awards. One to note within all four Acting Categories is simple: There shalt always be at least one Total Outsider [TO] who hath not a chance in Hell of winning but whose nomination doth demonstrate the artistic integrity and far-seeing range of AMPAS members.

Thus in 2010, acting members will celebrate Sandra Bullock's success at the box office with The Blind Side (and The Proposal). One of her TOs is an ingenue from the UK in a BBC co-production of a very British period piece set in 1962. There's another ingenue this year, an obese black girl playing the title role in Precious. The two other nominees for the 2009 Oscar are past winners who won't be suicidally disturbed by their inevitable failure. Fortunately for Ms Bullock, the black girl doesn't have to win in order to show that Hollywood's so luvably PC and pro-minority, and that's because Bullock's blond-haired character provides semi-maternal TLC for an enormous black sporting hero in his boyhood.

There's another reason the young amateur actress playing Precious is a TO. The older actress playing her mother, a daytime TV minor celebrity called Monique (with an apostrophe somewhere, don't ask why, maybe to give the impression that she does have a family name, of Que) is a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress. She's black, ergo the Academy doesn't have to collectively honour another unknown black actress. Ms Apostrophe is, it must be admitted, very good as the evil mother, but that will be no consolation to the four TOs nominated alongside her.

The chances of Carey Mulligan winning the Best Actress award for her fabulous charismatic breakthrough starring role as a 16-year-old schoolgirl in An Education are therefore nil. Minus nil, in fact, because the British film dares to go where no Hollywood movie dare go.

It's bad enough on PC grounds that it depicts a despicably charming Jewish seducer (Peter Sarsgaard with an acceptable accent and a role that finally suits his somewhat spooky eyes). When did anyone last see a despicable Jewish character in a Hollywood movie (and Oliver! doesn't count as it was, of course, a British film). As if that was not unacceptable enough in an era of Defiance and Inglorious Bastards (proper spellings must be preserved whenever possible, ie when they're not a marketing trick), the British movie's scenario includes a handful of snide mildly anti-Jewish remarks from two lead characters (the schoolgirl's self-deluded father, neatly caricatured by Alfred Molina, and her headmistress, a cameo etched starchily by Emma Thompson).

The action's based on the real-life memoir of British journalist Lynn Barber, it's set in the period she deliberately lost her virginity in (1962), and the movie's chances of getting a wide circulation in the USA are almost as TO as Ms Mulligan. (I hope she'll forgive me if she's actually of Irish origin. Nobody's perfect.)

The scenario is a tidy piece of work by Nick Hornby, and the direction is equally clipped. Lone Scherfig is a Danish woman director whose earlier top-rated movies obviously need to be viewed -- Italian For Beginners [2002] and Glasgow-set Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself [2004].

She deftly stages the brittle and amusing serio-comedy of 1960s manners. Ever since the Merchant-Ivory triumphs, and Ang Lee waltzing so confidently through Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility, the British movie industry has never worried about entrusting well-written period pieces to foreigners.

Remarkably, Hornby's script was not tailored for overseas or youthful audiences. There's a scene showing the philanderer and his pal doing secret business with a man called "Rachman", and another in which the girl's father rides in an elite limo and chuckles that it feels like "Eamonn Andrews". Any potential movie-goer who knows who those chaps were, and can still remember them, will savour the aspic-like flavour of this period piece. And be cheered by the knowledge that Ms Mulligan is sure to win an Oscar in later life, just like James McAvoy, Anthony Garfield and other Great Brit actors who are doomed to be too-young TOs in Hollywood for a few more years.

Prophet

The main French winner at the 2009 Cannes fest, A Prophet, is a nominee for the foreign-language Oscar. It won't win, of course, because it's up against the Austrian entry, The White Ribbon, which has triumphed in all contests so far.

Praised as a parable foretelling Austro-Germanic readiness for National Socialism, that black-and-white tableau could have been a masterpiece if it had known how to end meaningfully. That's another story, though.

It's A Prophet's ending that bothers me now. It also maims a potential masterpiece, by craftily constructing a feel-good finale to a tale of a descent into moral Hell.

The anti-hero starts out as an insignificant Arab teenager in a French prison dominated by a clique of Corsican gangsters. President Sarkozy's decision to move most Corsican convicts closer to their home island changes the prison's power game. The Muslims have a chance to assert themselves but the anti-hero decides to stay alongside his old Corsican mentor. The cast of criminal characters expands, both in the prison (adding a Gypsy drug dealer, an Egyptian operative and token blacks) and outside (where an Italian gang and a released prison pal with testicular cancer are drawn into the plot strands).

Clearly drawn from real-life experiences, the film becomes a complex onion of a semi-documentary, discreetly dressed with telling details. However, there is a fantastic quality in the development of the Arabic anti-hero, convincingly portrayed by a newcomer who deserved his Cannes Best Actor nod. He transforms himself from an invisible Arab gopher into a hitman, a Corsican-speaking henchman taking advantage of day-long paroles to build his own drug operation on the outside. He grabs a position of power inside, as a multi-cultural wheeler-dealer getting in-house sex and drugs.

In a cliched movie, he'd spin out of control a la Scarface or mature melodramatically a la Godfathers. Instead, he walks into a sunrise with an inherited wife and son, followed by a respectful retinue. Or is it meant to be viewed as a cortege? No, I'm sure it's deliberately hopeful. He's become a prophetic figure, and audiences are left to prophesy his future. It all appeared too pat to be truly credible. So did the village at the end of The White Ribbon.