Picture: The King’s Speech
Actor: Colin Firth
Actress: Natalie Portman
Supporting Actor: Christian Bale
Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo
Original Screenplay: The King’s Speech
Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
Director: David Fincher (The Social Network)
Animated Feature: Toy Story 3
Visual Effects: Inception
Cinematography: True Grit
Editing: 127 Hours
Score: Inception
Song: “We Belong Together” (Toy Story 3)
Sound Editing: Inception
Sound Mixing: Inception

Some wishful thinking in the above. I have a suspicion that The King’s Speech will win more than I have above, and Inception probably won’t get the Score and Sound awards.

How does a movie about a man spending 5 days pinned by a rock avoid being painfullly monotonous? Some of the success of 127 Hours (but only a little) comes from our knowledge (um, spoiler alert) that it is the true story of Aron Ralston and his ultimate escape by amputating his own arm. But that also poses a challenge for maintaining the suspense: the audience already knows the climax and outcome of the story. The screenplay by director Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, based on Ralston’s book, is excellent (but will probably lose the adapted screenplay Oscar to Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network). Through judicious use of flashbacks and visualizations of Aron’s inner dialogue with himself, the movie maintains tension and interest. In one clever scene, Aron imagines himself on a talk show with his altar ego on the phone describing what an idiot he is. Boyle’s direction also makes ingenious use of the cramped space. We are taken, for example, inside Aron’s water bottle to see the final drops of water disappear. And then, horribly, to see it emptied again of urine, a scene I found in some ways more painful than the climactic amputation. It is impossible not to wonder, when watching this, what you would do in that situation. Would you be able to carry out the amputation to save your life? One wonders also, had Aron Ralston been asked that question before he faced the awful decision, what he might have thought.

SPOILER ALERT

Hilary Swank may be trying to corner the market on portrayal of tortured characters based on real life. Conviction, at least, unlike Million Dollar Baby (to pick just one of many examples from the Swank oeuvre), has a happy ending. You will enjoy the movie more, however, if you refrain from researching the actual story until after you see the movie. It tells the story of what is by now hundreds of cases of convicted murderers and and other violent felons who have been shown to be innocent of their crimes by DNA testing. Given the difficulties of obtaining DNA evidence from old cases, one can only wonder in sadness at what must be a huge number of people who spent their lives in prison for crimes they did not commit, and more nauseatingly, those who were executed. Had Massachusetts had the death penalty, Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell, excellent), would have been executed for a crime he did not commit, and we would never have been the wiser. The case, taken on by his sister Betty Anne (Swank), appeared to be solid. Kenny was a notorious ne’er-do-well, and his ex-wife and girlfriend testified that he had confessed the crime to them. Betty Anne put herself through college and law school in order to be able to fight for her brother’s freedom. Without her devotion and also some amazing luck, Kenny would never have been exonerated.

Christian Bale is a shoe-in for his first Oscar, in spite of his infamous rant, thanks to a transformative performance as Dicky Eklund, the crack-addicted older half-brother of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg, also very good) in The Fighter. Dicky is a manic crack addict and is also Micky’s trainer. He is scrawny, an attention hog, and constantly hamming for the documentary film crew that is following him for (he believes) a movie about his comeback. It is difficult to believe it is the same person who played The Dark Knight.

Micky is a struggling up-and-comer who may actually be on his way down and out. Dicky’s claim to fame is once having fought Sugar Ray Leonard and gone the distance with him. Micky’s manager is his mother Alice Ward, played by another likely Oscar-winner, Melissa Leo, in another unrecognizable performance. Alice is surrounded by a herd of seven or eight (really) carping harpies at all times, and it took me the better part of the movie to realize that they are her daughters and the sisters and (I guess) half-sisters of Micky and Dicky. They spend most of the movie, along with their mother, telling Micky’s girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams, very blue collar, and still very cute) to shut the f— up. They appear to all be about the same age, and none of them seems to have a life other than interfering with their brother. Charlene, as the intellectual of the movie, recognizes that it might be a good idea to have an actual training program instead of a trainer who spends the day at a crackhouse and a manager who sets him up in fights against boxers in heavier weight classes.

The movie has the classic underdog appeal tacked onto a true story. It is a compelling portrait of people struggling with their own (vast) imperfections to achieve their full potential.

(It is also fun to see the real Micky and Dicky in the closing credits.)

Colin Firth is a shoe-in for his first Oscar for his role as King George VI in The King’s Speech. He plays an English monarch (roles the Academy adores (see, for example, Judi Dench‘s win for 7 minutes on screen as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love)) with a disability (also beloved by the Academy). And he delivers a brilliant performance. Albert (“Bertie” to his family) does not expect to ascend to the throne because his elder brother Edward is first in line. But Edward’s infamous abdication of the throne to wed the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson thrusts the stammering Bertie onto the national stage on the eve of World War II. His wife (played by Helena Bonham Carter in an uncharacteristically straightforward role) sets up speech therapy with Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a drama and speech coach.

Logue is not only a commoner, he’s originally from Australia, and his insistence on a frank and open relationship with Bertie (who chose the name George as his royal moniker from his long list of names) is a source of great irritation to Bertie. But Logue recognizes, unlike the crown-sanctioned doctors, that Bertie’s stammering has a psychological root, not a physical one. And he is able to make Bertie see that as well. Firth makes us feel the pain and pressure on a man who has to speak on the radio as King to millions of his subjects, but who has neither the desire to fill that role nor the ability to perform it as expected. The shots of Firth facing the microphone as he struggles to get the next syllable out are agonizing. But Bertie is not a victim either. He has a quick – and sometimes unfair – temper and the arrogance of the aristocracy. Logue perseveres, as does Bertie, in a fascinating story of a friendship and a struggle between two men to overcome the prejudices and predicaments of a reluctant King.

(Fans of the BBC Pride and Prejudice mini-series will note an on-screen reunion of Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Logue’s wife.)

Blue Valentine is billed as a love story, but it sure doesn’t feel like one. The movie takes place during one 24-hour period in the marriage of Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) with flashbacks to their meeting and courtship. Cindy and Dean have a 5-ish daughter whom they adore. Cindy works as a medical technician; Dean paints houses. When Cindy suggests he might explore developing some of his talents rather than getting drunk every morning (he plays the ukulele; other talents are not divulged), he counters that his job is perfect because he can get away with getting loaded before he goes to work and continue sipping Buds and chain-smoking when he gets home. Charming.

Director Derek Cianfrance, who co-wrote the screenplay, barely gives the audience a break from extreme close-ups during the first half of the movie. Thank goodness Cindy and Dean have good personal hygiene, because we spend a lot of time looking up their noses and in their ears. It is oppressive and claustrophobic, perhaps by design, but that doesn’t make it any less unpleasant to watch.

Jerry Seinfeld in his TV series once joked that people get married because they don’t have anything else to say to each other. That certainly feels true about Cindy and Dean. They definitely don’t have anything interesting or consequential to say to each other. Cindy, who comes from a dysfunctional family, wants to help people and become a doctor. She has, in other words, some aspirations. Dean, on the other hand, is thrilled to simply exist with his wife and daughter (and his can of Budweiser and ever-present cigarette). That’s pretty boring to be around. Blue Valentine made me think of Leaving Las Vegas, a movie about a man, played by Nicolas Cage in an Oscar-winning performance, determined to drink himself to death. Cage was very good. But why exactly to I want to watch someone drink himself to death? I don’t think I learn about the human condition from that exercise. Williams and Gosling are also very good (and Williams is nominated for an Oscar, though I suspect Natalie Portman will win for Black Swan), but they are – Dean, especially, to be fair to Cindy – completely unpleasant and mostly uninteresting. Why do I want to spend 2 hours with them? Oh yeah, I don’t.

One has to question the judgment of director Ivan Reitman for choosing not to use an establishing shot that prominently featured my daughter as an extra in the final cut of No Strings Attached. Reitman works from a script by Elizabeth Meriwether that is pleasant enough, but whose primary purpose seems to be to act as a vehicle for Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher to be cute together. The gimmick of this particular RomCom is that Emma (Portman) and Adam (Kutcher) decide to have a purely sexual relationship. It would be the opposite of a platonic relationship, except that they are also friends and like each other a lot. (One might be tempted to ask: if they are so friendly and fond of each other and are physically intimate, what, exactly, are they not doing together? The answer, apparently, is that they don’t hold hands in public or have breakfast together.)

Emma’s nominal excuse for keeping Adam at a distance is a lifetime of being the one in control and a fear of the messy complications that go with relationships, not to mention the risk of emotional pain. But in the (Aylia Colwell-less) opening scene we see that Emma is like that even as a teenager, before she has had any life experiences to make her wary of boyfriends. Stranger, though, is her attachment to Adam (and, to be fair I suppose, his attachment to her). While it’s a bit of a cliche in these movies, the traditional montage, set to music, of a couple having fun doing various outdoor activities does at least establish that the couple gets to know each other and enjoy each other’s company. In No Strings Attached great sex seems to be the only thing they have in common. Not once do they talk about her life (as a medical resident) or his (as an aspiring television writer). Both avocations are pretty interesting, but not, apparently, to Adam or Emma. Adam wrestles with some complicated issues from his retired famous father (Kevin Kline, bringing some sparkle to the movie), but this is not shared with Emma. Some expression of interest by one in the life of the other would have gone a long way toward making the characters more believable, interesting, and likable.

At some point during Black Swan, perhaps during its famous sex scene between Natalie Portman‘s Nina and Mila Kunis‘s Lily, I lost the last remnants of my interest in the movie as a story. The movie is technically beautiful, and both Portman and Kunis deliver strong performances, but ultimately it feels self-indulgent. Nina is striving to be cast as the lead in Swan Lake, a dual role as both a sweet white swan and a sinister black swan. The white swan suits her, the black swan – not so much. As she struggles to find her inner meanie, she unravels under the pressure of the cutthroat world of professional ballet, the competing aspirations of black-swan-natural Lily (she even has black wing tattoos on her back!), and her overbearing mother (played frighteningly by Barbara Hershey). “Only you are standing in your way”, the ballet director (Vincent Cassel) tells Nina with meaning. Fancy a little self-destruction?

Perhaps I am projecting my feelings about ballet, the art form at the center of the movie, onto the movie itself. In my view, ballet is to dance what The Westminster Dog Show is to dogs: an artificial aesthetic imposed on something that is probably a lot more fun without the artifice. Who had the idea to make women stand on the tips of their toes, tuck their butts in, and rotate their legs outward in unnatural and painful ways? Could it be the same person who decided on the asinine haircut on a show poodle? My antipathy made it hard to care about Nina’s success or failure in the ballet. But the movie does little to make us care about Nina or to know her as anything other than an overwrought perfectionist.

Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play the parents of a four-year-old boy who died eight months earlier. It is not so much a movie about them trying to put their lives back together as it is about whether or not such a thing is even possible or worth attempting. The screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on his own play, does not wallow in the parents’ grief. Instead it portrays them going through the necessary mundane activities of life, punctuated by unavoidable guilt and sorrow. Both Kidman and Eckhart give completely convincing and moving performances, as does the rest of the cast, including Dianne Wiest as Becca’s (Kidman) mother who had her own parental tragedy. Never maudlin or exploitive, Rabbit Hole is gently moving and surprisingly uplifting.

I saw the original TRON when it came out in 1982, a year or two before I got my first computer (a Commodore 64 which had 64 kilobytes of memory). Computers were primitive then, and the futuristic depiction of an alternate reality inside a computer in TRON was primitive as well. TRON: Legacy revisits that world with 21st-century computer generated imagery. The problem is that it is revisiting that primitive computer world of the Commodore 64 era. In the meantime, we have been introduced to the computer-generated world of The Matrix, which is not only richly imagined and visually dense, its rules of operation were explained in the movie. The world of TRON, on the other hand, still looks like a 1980′s computer game, just with higher resolution.

Jeff Bridges revisits his role from the original film, Kevin Flynn, and also, with some impressive digital work behind the scenes, plays an evil version of his younger self – Clu, the analog of an agent from The Matrix, but more jocular. Kevin reminisces to his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund (cute, according to my daughter)) how he had created a perfect world in the computer, but flashback footage shows a dark and foreboding world without much to recommend it beyond fast motorcycles. Kevin is protecting Cora (whose name is actually spelled Quorra, confirming her exotic nature), played by Olivia Wilde (also cute), an “Iso”. Isos are some sort of new life form that Kevin wants to get out to the real world, but just what an Iso is, how one differs from the other inhabitants of the TRON universe, and just how an Iso might exist outside of the computer program join the long list of things that are left unexplained.

The action sequences are also less than compelling for the same reason. We don’t know the rules of the world in which the chases and fights are taking place, and the semi-translucent nature of everything makes it hard to visually track the action. The best moment in the movie is when Bridges channels the Dude from The Big Lebowski to let his rambunctious son know that he is messing with his Zen.