No Love at Oscar Time but Definitely Worth Watching

In my last article I went through my picks for the winners of the top five Oscar Categories: Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Picture. Those were solely my picks for who I thought was going to win. I am not too upset with Oscars choices this year, but I certainly have my own geek list of some of my favorite movies of the year to add on to their picks.

Watchmen:

It took more than twenty years to bring the story of a group of heroes that the world no longer needs to make it to the screen, and the end result didn’t exactly meet the standards of many critics, but Watchmen is a very solid film that was sold as a summer blockbuster, but really has a lot more going for it than explosions and giant, naked, blue colored super geniuses. There is a lot of social commentary going on in Watchmen, and while many have criticized the film for being so slavishly adherent to the original graphic novel, I see no problem with how the movie plays out. The original story is unwieldy and hard to grasp on the first reading, and the movie is as well, but like the novel, the rewards for keeping up with it are many. It’s too bad that the film didn’t even score a special effects nomination.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus:

Poor Terry Gilliam can never seem to catch a break. This former Monty Python member turned director has a black cloud hanging over him. Studios fear his name, for he has a reputation for making movies that are doomed from the get go. Brazil, his 1985 film about one man railing against an Orwellian society was famously recut by Universal studios and was almost never released (it went on to receive two Oscar noms).

Gilliam followed this up with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The Baron achieved notoriety for going millions of dollars over budget (it cost an estimated 47 million dollars in 1988) and then barely getting released to theaters. It did garner one major achievement though: it became one of the biggest flops in movie history with an 8 million dollar take at the boxoffice. Gilliam rebounded with some solid hits (The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys to name a few) but lately his reputation as a director of doom has hurt his ability to get financing for his grand visions.

He returned to the big screen in 2009 with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a classic tale of good vs. evil with a bit of a twist; the man representing good (Christopher Plummer as the crotchety Parnassus) has a bit of a gambling problem and just can’t resist betting the nasty Mr. Nick (played devilishly by Tom Waits) every hundred years or so. All of this wagering leads Parnassus to place a wager with Mr. Nick over the soul of the good doctor’s daughter. That is all I am going to say about the plot of the movie. See it for yourself and then thank me after.

Parnassus had it’s own production problems, the main one being the death of Heath Ledger midway through filming, but the way that Gilliam adapted to this tragedy I think actually helps the movie along. Like most of the director’s work, this movie was virtually unseen by American audiences upon its release, but do yourself a favor and try to see it while it is still playing on the big screen or find it on video this April.

Where the Wild Things Are:

How do you adapt a book that is forty two pages long and filled with only ten sentences? Well, first you hire Spike Jonze, the mad genius behind films like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Then you get the blessing of original author Maurice Sendak after proving that you aren’t making a commercial for Happy meals, but actually trying to bring his tale of a solitary boy’s unbound imagination to the big screen in a big, wondrous, and sometimes scary way.

It’s really kind of sad that Where the Wild Things Are didn’t get a little love this Oscar season. When it first came out this year I called it a children’s movie for adults. It’s about our fears and our dreams, and it was hard to sit through the movie without remembering the times when you were a kid, mad at your parents and wishing to get away to a place where you were in charge. Jonze really grasps the concept of Sendak’s story and expands upon it with such creative force that it is hard not to be taken in by it.

Black Dynamite:

Was the funniest film of the year The Hangover? You may think so, and I won’t disagree that it had a lot of laughs, but in my mind there is no funnier movie this year than Black Dynamite.

It’s the late 1970’s and our kids are under siege from drug dealers. They are all over the place and the only one who can stop them is Black Dynamite! He and his sidekick Bullhorn are out to stop the dope from reaching the kids and to avenge the death of Dynamite’s brother.

Michael Jai White, who plays the title character and also co wrote the screenplay has got his blacksploitation history down really well. Along with director Scott Sanders, White crafts a comedy that pays loving homage to classics such as Shaft and Superfly while also showing that he remembers the lesser known gems of the genre such as Black Gestapo. The results are a film that plays it completely serious (it even goes so far as to have scratches and dirt on the print ala Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse), and uses a great script rather than winks to the camera to garner laughs. It’s definitely smarter, stranger, and more laugh out loud funny than The Hangover could ever hope to be. I have no problem with putting this fantastically funny satire of a underappreciated genre of film on my top ten of the year list. It releases on DVD on February 16th and I beg you to please check it out.

(500) Days of Summer:

Rounding out my list of what I would have liked to see on the Best Picture Oscar list is (500) Days of Summer. I missed this movie when it was released earlier this year. I was probably caught up in the glut of big budget summer movies, but either way, shame on me for missing it then. Thanks to DVD I was able to catch up with it and be amazed at its greatness. The story of a young man’s pursuit of the what he thinks may be the girl of his dreams, (500) Days should be watched by today’s film students to see how to structure a complicated script for maximum affect. The movie moves through different times in this couples life and does it in a way that is not only easy to follow, but easy to relate to. The two lead actors; Jason Gordon-Levitt (the boy from 3rd Rock From the Sun) and Zooey Deschanel (Elf) are fantastic as the boy who thinks he’s found true love with a girl who doesn’t believe that true love exists. It’s got laughs, pathos, and a heart of gold. It’s one of those movies that comes along right when I thought I was done with watching romantic comedies and showed me that yes indeed, some of them can indeed be brilliant. Somehow though it escaped Oscar consideration for a screenplay nom (which is almost criminal), but don’t let it escape from your thoughts when your looking for a smart romantic comedy.

Are there more movies that I feel got the short end of the stick this Oscar season? Sure, I could go on a while about what I feel deserved more love, and if you want to discuss it further you can email me at rjustavick@gmail.com or just hit the talkbacks and bring up the movies you think got hosed by “The Man” this year.