Ntuple Indemnity

I will preface this with that rare, hard-earned endorsement of a fellow blog; several in the immediate University of Alberta circle popped up earlier this week. There are few that completely win me over as a regular reader within the first two or three posts, but Lycée Stephen Potyondi is one of them. Now give the guy an audience as a sign of positive reinforcement so I don’t have to wait another month for his next substantial post.

As was the case last year, I will now proceed to offer my eleventh-hour endorsements and commentary on the golden statuettes to be awarded tonight.

Actor (Leading): Incredibly, Paul Giamatti got screwed out of a nomination for the second year in a row. Even judging only by American Splendor and Sideways, he has already established himself as the best everyman actor since the pre-superstardom Tom Hanks. The Academy has also always been loath to recognize Jim Carrey, even though Joel Barish in Eternal Sunshine was probably his most engaging role since The Truman Show seven years ago. No matter; this year, the award should and will go to Jamie Foxx. His portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray was not just the most compelling performance of 2004 – it’s one that only comes about once every few years.

Actor (Supporting): Of the final selection, my personal preference is for Thomas Haden Church for his embodiment of testosterone gone awry in Sideways. Pundits are calling this a race between Clive Owen for Closer and Morgan Freeman for Million Dollar Baby; I did not see the former, and as for the latter, I think while Freeman portrayed a very interesting character, it was as much a typical Morgan Freeman performance much like how Clint Eastwood pulled off a typical aging post-Unforgiven Eastwood performance. It was very, very good, mind you, but almost a bit too constrained within the typical Freeman mould. On statistical grounds I predict Owen, but Freeman could take it just as easily.

Actress (Leading): Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby. Case closed, though an Eternal Sunshine upset by Kate Winslet would be awesome. It won’t happen, though, and given that I consider Swank’s performance in Baby to be worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of great movie boxers, this is hardly problematic. I did not see Vera Drake, but word is that Imelda Staunton is the closest in contention.

Actress (Supporting): Please, please, please give it to Cate Blanchett for being as perfect a Katharine Hepburn as you could imagine (aside from the distinctive Blanchett look) in The Aviator.

Animated Feature Film: What’s the thoroughly mediocre Shark Tale doing here instead of The Polar Express, which – while entirely a surface-level visual experience and not that great of a narrative – was, well, not irritating? As for the win, I think it’s pretty obvious where I stand. Shrek 2‘s box-office clout is the only worry here, but I find that Pixar will win the day this year whereas it did not with Monsters, Inc. back in 2001.

Art Direction: This category presents an incredible lineup, and one hardly notices that missing in action are Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and, more significantly, The Incredibles. I have never quite understood why animated films get no recognition here, but that may be partly because this prize rewards set construction just as much as it does concept art. As much as I love the lavish opera house in The Phantom of the Opera, I seriously think this should and will go to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I never posted a complete review of that film, but it really is a Brett Helquist illustration come to life, equal parts Gothic, Victorian, and vintage 1920s. Count Olaf’s tower, Aunt Josephine’s house on Lake Lachrymose – gorgeous to behold, and it’s a pity that the film did not achieve a similarly extravagant replication of the wit and substance of the source material.

Cinematography: Yet another strong category, though I favour Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is strangely absent here as it is from so many other categories. That aside, this should go to House of Flying Daggers, though none of the others can truly be ignored. In terms of light and colour, A Very Long Engagement presented itself as an older, darker Amélie bathed in yellow, and the end result is the same mix of beauty and melancholy as is present in the movie itself. One should not ignore that for better or for worse, this award will be consolation for two foreign releases that did not make it into the Foreign Language category.

Costume Design: Where’s The Phantom of the Opera? That said, give it to A Series of Unfortunate Events. The look of the film exceeded my expectations, even if the rest of it did not.

Directing: It is a crime, a crime, that Michel Gondry is not on the shortlist for his work in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; if you see it, you would understand. That said, I really think Scorsese should take home his first Directing Oscar for his breadth of imaginative acumen he displays in The Aviator. I can name shot after shot from that movie that I want to frame, and scene after scene that I envision I will cite in future cinematic discussions for some time to come. Gangs of New York sputtered and died in its final act; The Aviator didn’t. But all this aside, I just have a sinking feeling that Clint Eastwood – who, after all, some may feel was ignored last year for Mystic River (not me, as the real travesty in my mind would have been to ignore Peter Jackson) – is going to pull an upset here. That would be no surprise, either, as the intimacy of the character work in Million Dollar Baby is something to be treasured.

Documentary Feature: I’ll pass on this one, having seen none of the nominees, though two of them – Super Size Me and Tupac: Resurrection – have high profiles on their side. Not as high as, say, Fahrenheit 9/11, but its disqualification here was Michael Moore’s own doing.

Documentary Short Subject: Pass. They really need to start screening these once nominations are announced.

Film Editing: On one hand, we have Ray, with the lasting image of its record-label transitions and tactfully-inserted watery flashbacks. On the other, we have The Aviator, with its superimpositions over Howard Hughes films, spectacular aviation sequences and Hughes caressing Kate Hepburn one moment and his baby aircraft the next. I err on the side of the latter, and once again, bemoan the absence of Eternal Sunshine (and to a lesser extent, House of Flying Daggers).

Foreign Language Film: A Very Long Engagement was not in the running for deadline-related reasons, but there is absolutely no excuse for the absence of House of Flying Daggers; both would have been prime choices to take this one home. It will instead go to The Sea Inside.

Makeup: A Series of Unfortunate Events will take this one, once again for the work done with Jim Carrey as Count Olaf, which is every bit how I expected him to be handled. It is interesting that The Passion of the Christ essentially got a gore nomination, which is appropriate, because damn, it was gory.

Music (Score): Where’s Giacchino for The Incredibles? Where’s Williams for The Terminal? Where’s Rolfe Kent for Sideways? I think the score to Azkaban is easily Williams’ best and most original of the three, but traditionally, Williams only wins if he knocks one out of the park in comparison to his already impressive oeuvre, as he did with Schindler’s List. Kaczmarek delivered some very gentle, sentimental incidental music for Finding Neverland, and will likely win. I quite enjoyed Thomas Newman’s work in A Series of Unfortunate Events, but it was stylistically too similar to his win for Road to Perdition and moreover, his amazing compositions for Finding Nemo last year.

Music (Song): Perennially the silliest category to keep around given that the original movie musical is extinct, I can’t even see Phantom winning it with the new “Learn To Be Lonely” motif, which was basically stuck in the movie in a bid for this award, and even sounds extraneous. The Globe winner, “Old Habits Die Hard” from the Alfie remake, isn’t even in the Oscar shortlist, so there is not point of reference. That said, I will in fact go with “Vois Sur Ton Chemin” from Les Choristes, which I haven’t even seen, but intend to. This one is anybody’s game, and irrelevant nonetheless.

Best Picture: This is between The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby, with the latter suddenly becoming the talk of the town at the expense of the former over the past few weeks. Baby is the tighter, better-paced and more emotionally engaging film, albeit at the expense of novelty. Remember, this award isn’t about winners or losers so much as it is about what people will come back to rediscover years, even decades from now. Given its scale, ambition and overarching sense of fun – not to mention the best senate commission hearing scene since The Godfather, Part II – I am rooting for The Aviator. I do not in any way consider Baby to be an “inferior” film; it takes a wholly different approach to storytelling and does some things much better. But on a holistic level, and looking at a film as a complete production in terms of both the whole and the parts, The Aviator would be my pick. (Well, no – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be my pick, and I also think it a shame that Phantom got killed by the press before it even made it into the lower nomination slots – and let’s not get started on A Very Long Engagement, which would be a contender if it were not French, which it cannot help being.) My wavering prediction of who will actually win is a split: The Aviator will take Picture, Clint Eastwood will take Director.

Short Film (Animated): Let’s hear it for Ryan!

Short Film (Live Action): As with all the other categories recognizing shorts, they really need to screen these every year after nominations are announced, so I can actually begin to comment. Word is that Wasp will take it, but I can neither confirm nor deny.

Sound Editing: Perennially almost as bogus a category as Original Song, but the nominees this year are not quite as bogus as in the past few years. I see a Spider-Man 2 sweep of the technicals as a distinct possibility, but the more Oscars The Incredibles wins, the better.

Sound Mixing: As before, this will likely go to Spider-Man 2, though by this point my predictions are pointing to an Aviator near-shutout in the minors, and that does not bode well statistically for its Best Picture chances when Million Dollar Baby scored three acting nominations.

Visual Effects: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow got the shaft, but after watching more DVD features and reading articles on the effects pipeline of this year’s visual powerhouses, I am convinced that Spider-Man 2 should win this one. The blending of old-fashioned mechanics and newfangled computer wizardry to create Doctor Octopus is alone worthy of recognition.

Writing (Adapted): Traditionally the writing awards have been recognized as a sort of consolation prize for the small-scale films that do not have the grand, epic production values clout of the heavyweights, but it is usually well-deserved, given that the small films rest on the strength of their screenplays and principals anyway. In other words, Sideways, though a Million Dollar Baby win is not out of the question, nor would it be undeserved.

Writing (Original): Can it be? Can it be Eternal Sunshine‘s one gasp of air, one moment of recognition this Oscar night? One can only hope. I am already elated that Brad Bird was recognized with a nomination for The Incredibles. Then again, The Aviator needs to pick up what it can, or it will undergo the biggest nomination-to-win drop since, well, Gangs of New York (zero for ten). That would be unfortunate, because unlike Gangs, The Aviator was consistently fun to watch, and it boasts a screenplay full of moments worthy of study. But seriously – please give this to Eternal Sunshine.

This is probably the closest year since 2000, so the race tonight will be a fun one to watch. Keep your eyes peeled for Marlon Brando being featured in the annual obituary clips, and whatever it is Chris Rock comes up with in his first turn as the host. Quite frankly, I’ve never been too impressed with the guy, but let us see what he comes up with before we start evaluating.

As was the case last year, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, where “aid” consists of making sweeping recapitulative generalizations and comparative value judgments, and “country” refers to films classified as 2004 releases that caught my attention.

I will first begin with an identification of some of the major trends and overarching themes that characterized 2004 as a film year. Consider this an exercise in completing the sentence, “2004 was the year of…” – as in, “2001 was the year of preposterously explosive opening hype-driven weekends and precipitous second-week plummets,” or “2003 was the year of The Lord of the Rings and not much else.” So, 2004 was the year of the following:

The episodic bio-pic: This year saw a collective, synchronized movement to reduce the genre of the dramatized biography to a series of unfortunate events, to borrow a phrase. Initially there seems nothing wrong with this – after all, isn’t biography just the story of someone’s life? – but what separates a dramatization from a documentary is its engagement in the act of interpreting the life of its subject into a cohesive, selective narrative that makes decisions about what to focus on.

De-Lovely forgot about this and ended up being a lot of pretty pictures and good songs – great scenes, but not much of a movie. Ray fared considerably better, but it is a film that I would put on the shelf next to A Beautiful Mind, alphabetical considerations notwithstanding; both consist of visionary representations of their subjects’ talents and limitations, but fall victim to an episodic structure proceeding from event to event without an eye for priority. Superb filmmaking, yes, but with an asterisk. Alexander… well, we all know how that turned out.

The Aviator is a remarkable case study in that it, too, takes the conventional episodic approach complete with an abundance of title cards, but there is something to be said for the effect of title cards that read “Hell’s Angels, Year Two” and later, “Hell’s Angels, Year Four.” The events themselves are disconnected as we proceed from Howard Hughes, the filmmaker to Howard Hughes, the titular aviator to Howard Hughes, the openly obsessive-compulsive recluse – but what makes it all click is that everything feels like it lends itself to a consistent revelation of who he is, and who the film says he is.

It seems like the only high-profile bio-pic to break the one-event-after-another curse was Finding Neverland, which steers clear of being the Life and Times of J.M. Barrie and instead focuses on his relationship with a specific family and relatedly, a specific work of literature for which he is known.

The good sequel: I keep hearing people in both the critical community and the filmgoing public complain about what a bland year 2004 was. Well, for films that bodies like the Academy would actually consider awarding, that is to some extent true. But unless you are Francis Ford Coppola or Peter Jackson, you accept that sequels just don’t get a lot of recognition; justifiably so, most of the time, on the grounds that relative value judgments like awards, star ratings and Lettermanian decuples should generally offer a handicap for novelty.

This is a shame, as three of the very best films I saw in 2004 were, in one way or another, sequels. Spider-Man 2 is, hands-down, the best comic-book superhero movie I have ever seen (aside from The Incredibles, but that’s an equine of a different pigment). It’s smart, funny, and involving – and the fights are great. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was underage wizardry finally done right, and everyone from John Williams to Steve Kloves to Emma Watson churned out their finest work in the franchise. It only took them three tries, but as Alfonso Cuaron hadn’t stepped in yet, I guess the first two don’t count.

And then there’s Kill Bill, Vol. 2 – not a sequel so much as the quieter half of a deeply schizophrenic movie, where one half cannot exist without the other (at least, not very well), but the two are in so many ways completely different. On its own, Vol. 2 does not stand up, but it justifies the first part, which justifies it back in return. Taken as a whole – and at some point, I should like to see the two parts cut together – I consider Kill Bill a career-best for Quentin Tarantino.

The Mad Genius archetype: In no other year has the Incredibly Talented Crazy Person been treated with so much respect by so many films, each of which have something unique to say. There’s Otto Octavius in Spider-Man 2, who, unlike the Green Goblin, is a character and not just a bad guy on drugs. There’s the Phantom of the Opera in a little film curiously entitled The Phantom of the Opera, whose disfigurement and isolation drive him to a misdirected self-consciousness, a heartbreaking denial of the love he seeks, and a penchant for nooses. Then there’s Syndrome from The Incredibles, who fails to recognize the special ingenuity that resides within himself and applies it to weapons of mass destruction as if they were a necessary equalizer. We don’t see much of Totenkopf in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but in him we see the convergence of the man-machine dynamic.

The most thorough take on the Mad Genius was what Scorsese and DiCaprio did with Howard Hughes in The Aviator, but that is because after a very lengthy sit-through clocking in at almost three hours, one really comes to know the ins and outs of how a character is portrayed. We really do get a complete picture of the young Hughes, and the film says enough about him that I shall not repeat it here; go check it out for yourself.

Snow: Last week I watched the DVD restoration of the Vincente Minnelli classic Meet Me In St. Louis starring Judy Garland, which is a generally great movie with a major distraction – that being how in the Winter vignette, the snow is really, really, really fake. Considering that this is the film that gave us the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” this is a big deal. But it does give us a sense of how far movie-snow has come in the past sixty years, and not just when it comes to how real it looks, as in the Caradhras sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring.

In 2004, snow wasn’t just real – it was beautiful. Some of the most memorable and downright gorgeous scenes of the year involved snow. The Phantom of the Opera spun high romance on the rooftops with little flakes of snow in “All I Ask Of You,” and then painted a breathtaking cemetary in “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again”; the latter was as perfect as perfect gets when it comes to staging an Andrew Lloyd Webber number, and I wouldn’t change a frame of it. The Prisoner of Azkaban not only harnessed snow to show off the Invisibility Cloak in a way we had not seen before, but squeezed a great scene out of it in Hogsmeade upon Harry’s discovery of the truth behind Sirius Black’s connection to the Potters. The Polar Express was an hour and a half of lush animated snow with a movie buried somewhere underneath. Perhaps the very best scene in Alexander is when an endless expanse of snow-capped mountains presents itself as something even Alex the Great could not surmount. And one would be remiss to neglect the signature shot in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of a couple lying on the frozen Charles River; which, I might add, I will have to try sometime.

If there were an Oscar for Best Snow, though, the clear winner would be House of Flying Daggers. It delivered the fluffiest, puffiest snow you can imagine, but more than that, it highlights the brutal emotional anguish of the finale; autumn turns to winter with a ferocious blizzard, and it captures a certain mythic poetry of a fight that lasts from one season to the next. This, my dear readers, is great snow. Andrew Adamson, take note: when Lucy wanders into the wardrobe and steps into Narnia next December, I want to see snow this lovely.

Now, without further ado, let us move on to the lists. As always, I find ranking movies in an enumerated fashion to be far too discriminating and always in flux, even as someone who is willing to call some movies better than others. So, in an effort to offer some compromise between relative appreciation and subjectivity, I will delineate films into tiers.

Instant classics built to last: For the past few years we have been spoiled with life-changing landmark films that will identify this decade in the history books and more importantly, have earned a permanent place in my heart as a total movie geek – The Lord of the Rings, for instance, or Finding Nemo. This year was lacking in masterpieces that would contend for positions in the upper echelons of my all-time favourites, but I did manage to identify two for which I harbour a boundless love: The Incredibles and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Must-sees both, and the best films of 2004.

Reservations are negligible at most: These are movies I enjoyed and will probably continue to treasure once I have them on high-quality DVD, if I don’t already, and can watch them over and over again. You should watch them too, and stand in awe of what they achieved. I had an absolute blast with Spider-Man 2, A Very Long Engagement, House of Flying Daggers, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Garden State, and I remain in awe of how good they are. They are in plentiful company, but good company.

In my opinion, terrific: The following have certain properties that make them open for some very valid criticisms in the eyes of their occasional detractors, but on balance, those alleged flaws either did not detract from the piece on the whole or did not appear for me at all, and what I saw was an astoundingly good movie. They are The Aviator, The Phantom of the Opera, Million Dollar Baby and Kill Bill, Vol. 2.

The ones that didn’t make the above: Funny how when you start naming a bunch of films at once, it doesn’t feel like such a bad year after all. Nevertheless, I feel it necessary to artificially extend this discussion so Steven Spielberg doesn’t get left out, and mention that I saw a lot of films in the past year that demonstrated some very skillful movie magic at work, though ultimately, I do not consider them to be what I expect I will remember most about 2004. There’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – stupendous fun from beginning to end, but in the end just a diversion; Ray, a marvelous but sometimes unfocused achievement that I assessed in the above discussion of episodic bio-pics; The Terminal, because even when Spielberg tries to be as standard and mainstream as possible, he does a good job of it; The Passion of the Christ, which is so commendably good at hurting the audience that I never want to see it again; and Finding Neverland, which legitimately earned its Best Picture nomination but is really nothing revolutionary.

And now, for the ancillary mentions:

Worst film I paid to see: In retrospect, I let The Punisher off easy. Aside from the origin-story killings that set the plot in motion and a good performance in a sea of dreck on the part of Thomas Jane, there is nothing about it that I can recommend. On the upside, maybe it’s setting itself up for a Most Improved Sequel prize a few years down the road, which Marvel has a knack for doing.

Most Improved Sequel: Spider-Man 2.

The Holdover Prize: This is awarded to a film from recent years that I did not or could not see until this year, and I give it to 2002’s Hero. Miramax finally got its act together, and in spite of the extraneous prologue and epilogue text that was tacked on for the North American release, we got to see what I think will be remembered as a true wuxia classic.

I don’t get it: I have a feeling that I will fall in love with Sideways when I am forty and divorced. Right now, I am neither, and while I found it to be a highly enjoyable and smartly-written character comedy, I am befuddled at how the vast majority of critics in professional circles have stopped just short of calling it the Second Coming. Most overrated by the general public, as reflected by box office returns, was Shrek 2. Cute, funny, and full of visual gags, but the first one was so much more than that.

Nobody else got it: Well, most of the lay-audiences I have spoken to got it, but it would be hypocritical of me to cite them now when most of the time, I let them eat cake. That said, The Phantom of the Opera was clearly the most underrated movie of the year, and it continues to astound me how so many others decided to pick on it at once. Having read most of the negative reviews in an attempt to understand where the detractors are coming from, I have come to the conclusion that they either have no affinity for the music (a sentiment with which I absolutely cannot empathize) or like the musical, but want Michael Crawford to reprise a role he played on stage fifteen years ago.

It could have been a contender: I desperately wanted both Alexander and De-Lovely to be among the best times I have ever had at the cinema. As it turned out, I was asking for a bit much, and instead of great movies I got a bunch of great scenes scattered about here and there. A ho-hum expedition like Hidalgo can fizzle out like it did and be excused and forgotten, Troy can be evaluated with severely lowered standards and dismissed with a “What did you expect? Besides, the fights were great,” but Alexander… what a shame.

There you have it, folks. Still to come, time willing, is a pre-Oscars assessment of this year’s nominations, what they mean, where they went horribly wrong, and where they will in all likelihood go horribly wrong when the awards are announced on Sunday. Then it is time to pull out the calendar and start booking off weekends for the major releases of 2005, and by golly, they’re numerous. Somewhere in between I may even sneak in a Constantine review, but I make no promises.

Mid-February is a special time in that it is when filmgoers who do not have the fortune to catch early limited runs in Los Angeles, New York or Toronto ring in the new year. ‘Tis the season to write year-end summaries and forecasts for the season ahead.

I will do just that with the 2004 harvest in good time, as I have now left that year behind (aside from never having gotten around to the likes of Collateral and Hotel Rwanda) and seen the first theatrical release of 2005 worth mentioning, Ong-Bak.

On the surface, everything that happens in Thailand’s signature hit film is old and tired by what we have come to expect in North America. Tony Jaa plays a country boy who goes to the city, finds his former country-boy cousin turned urban gambler, fights in an underground boxing ring in a quest to recover an artifact of value from a drug kingpin, gets involved in an explosive car chase, and has a climactic final showdown with a baddie hopped up on steroids. We’ve seen it before, we might think.

That is, until we realize that the country boy comes from the villages of rural Thailand and ends up in Bangkok, a city of nine million – a disparity that really has to be seen to be understood, should you ever get the chance to visit the region; the underground boxing ring doesn’t feature just any boxing, but the ancient art of Muay Thai; the artifact of value is a sacred Buddha image of paramount importance to the villagers; the explosive car chase is on tuk-tuks – tuk-tuks! – and the final showdown makes for one hell of a good fight scene.

The novelty of Ong-Bak can be identified thus: can you name another Thai action flick you’ve seen? Didn’t think so. And what makes Ong-Bak interesting is that it is a celebration of all things Thai short of the blues compositions of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. I mean, a tuk-tuk chase!

In all seriousness, the thing that this movie will be remembered for is that it fills a gaping void in modern martial arts cinema, in that we really, really needed a Muay Thai superstar like Tony Jaa to burst onto the scene. Someone of his calibre is long overdue, and very welcome. Ong-Bak unreservedly exploits all of the distinctive characteristics of Thai boxing, particularly its emphasis on pummeling your opponent with your joints, not just your fists and feet of fury. Elbows land on skulls with an audible crack. Knees land on, um, people, with a sickening crunch.

The film sells itself as being free of CG and wire-work, but that’s just one of many ancillary benefits of an ethnic fighting flick being produced outside of the American studio system. The one that really shows is the length of the action sequences. It is rare nowadays to find continuous action sequences, rip-roaring urban chases and extended duels that comprise the majority of a movie without being repetitive, and nigh on impossible to spot this ever happening in an American-made product. Comparisons to 1980s Jackie Chan are entirely accurate, aside from the lack of slapstick comedy and Sammo Hung.

In terms of storytelling, everything of significance is flat-out obvious, but it is still worth noting. The obligatory string of one-on-one fights against increasingly burly Anglo-American thugs in the underground fight club are a prideful demonstration of the superiority of Muay Thai; if you follow martial arts cinema at all, you probably know that the superiority of the hero’s discipline is a recurring secondary theme whenever foreigners are present. (Or final-fight foes hopped up on steroids, for that matter.)

Then there’s how the evil mob boss atop the chain of command is a wheelchair-bound tracheostomy patient who speaks with an electronic device and smokes through his throat, but deifies himself as a god; recall that the plot revolves around the recovery of a stolen Buddha head, and you have a neat little parallel motif of headless idols going on.

And there’s a tuk-tuk chase!

Now, for some criticisms: like I said earlier, the premise of the film is about as standard as you can get from a modern action flick. Without the undercurrents that are distinctly Thai, which are thankfully almost ubiquitous, Ong-Bak would not be much of a film at all. There is only one reason to watch this movie – a very good reason, mind you – and that is to see superstar Muay Thai combat committed to celluloid. It would be nice if eventually, Tony Jaa is cast in something of real cultural significance and mythic quality; Thailand has a rich tradition to draw from, a tradition that is underexposed in the Western corpus.

The editing is tight for the most part, but one particular device grows tired very quickly due to overuse: the preponderance of sportscast-like instant replays of every particularly impressive stunt. I realize that the filmmakers may have been very impressed with certain takes, but for the sake of continuity and pacing, it is customary to pick your best angle and stick with it. Using such a device is excusable if done sparingly, but there are so many ooh-inspiring hits in Ong-Bak that the filmmakers just couldn’t get enough of it. Well, I did.

The last issue, and one that is actually an impediment to some of the fights, is that some scenes are shot in lighting that is so dim as to obscure the action. Yes, underground boxing clubs should be dark, but the thing about movies is that even in darkness, the audience can still see. Here, that is sometimes questionable.

There is a minor problem with the Magnolia Pictures edit that is in release here in North America, and that would be the addition of music that feels very much out of place. Dan Kaszor, who as I’ve remarked on many occasions is one of the few fellow U of A students whose knowledge of film I vouch for and trust, says in his Gateway review that the original music was none too great either, but one has to wonder if it were perhaps more tonally consistent. Personally, I don’t think foreign films should ever be tampered with upon local release, but I have the disadvantage of not being a major studio boss.

But these gripes aside, I recommend Ong-Bak for its offering of what is currently a one-of-a-kind experience in some respects. If it leads to the explosion of a burgeoning Thai boxing film industry of which the international community is aware, with Tony Jaa as its headlining celebrity, the world will be all the richer.

Predictability is an accusation of unpredictable relevance. When applied to literature, and film in particular given its inherent linearity and tempo, you often hear it used as a pejorative term. Apparently, stories are no fun if you can see the ending a mile away. Sometimes this is the case: the appeal of M. Night Shyamalan’s terribly overrated The Sixth Sense rests so completely on the wallop of its final revelation that for the perceptive types who pay attention to the clues before them, the movie is over as soon as they figure it out.

We like it when movies creep up behind us and smack us upside the head. We like it when gaps are filled in ways that surprise us. For recent examples, see Memento, Minority Report and A Very Long Engagement. For classic examples, see Citizen Kane and The Empire Strikes Back. But we remember these movies for their crazy twists not because of the shock value that comes of each successive discovery, but because every twist makes the story all the more compelling. You can go into Kane knowing full well what Rosebud is, or Empire knowing that Vader is Luke’s father, as I’d wager almost everybody does nowadays given how those epiphanies have become a part of our cultural consciousness – and the curious thing is, the film is all the better for it.

But that does not give us adequate grounds to say that predictability is necessarily something to avoid; again, it’s not about shock value. If you take a look at film adaptations of popular material, the most difficult thing to get over the first time through is what you can’t predict: deviations from a story with which you are already familiar. Here, we seek the comfort of a story we already know.

My point is, you can’t open a can of plot twists, sprinkle it all over a story and call it compelling. Sometimes you get an otherwise masterful film like House of Flying Daggers where the plot twists feel like chores that have to be done in order to lay out all the necessary elements of understanding that make the character dynamics work. When everything is on the table, it all makes sense; but here, unpredictability is not the source of causation. The film becomes compelling; the twists do not make it compelling.

I argue above that it cannot be universally considered a fault for a story to let the audience outpace it within reason, and nowhere is that clearer than in Million Dollar Baby.

If you have watched a lot of movies, boxing or otherwise (and truth be told, even if you have not), you will anticipate every single thing that happens in this movie. You will know exactly who wins every fight, who lands every punch, and every outcome of every critical decision the characters make, well before it happens. Part of it may be because the boxing movie has become such a defining subgenre of American film that we are all well aware of its techniques – not just how the director and editor time the punches, but how they build up to them in little spurts of tension and release.

How is it, really, that a boxing scene makes you, an audience member, feel like you are “part of the action”? I would posit that it involves a lot more than how visceral it is, how close the camera gets, and how resonant the bone-crunching sound effects are. To be a part of the fight, to be part of the experience of the boxer, also involves a replication of a certain anticipatory spider-sense. And in Million Dollar Baby, this is what happens both in and out of the ring. The sense of anticipation extends to the overall narrative flow.

But if you can see everything coming, how does the film keep you hooked?

Well, there’s the rub. You can see everything coming, but as a passive filmgoer in a darkened theatre, you are absolutely powerless to do anything about it. And in much of the film – particularly its final act, which is very much about helplessness – you can see it heading somewhere very uncomfortable. Here’s a movie where everything follows the natural progression of events that you should and do expect. You cheer for Maggie as she delivers a first-round knockout match after match, because she does what you expect of her, and more. You cringe as you perceive just how much harm is about to be done to her, but have no way of warning her of anything.

At the same time, that makes Frankie, Clint Eastwood’s character, an easy elicitor of audience sympathy. He is very much the same familiar character that Eastwood has defined for himself in his self-directed period, the William Munny archetype of an aging senior haunted by regret and seeking repentance. Like boxing, you’ve seen him before. But there are moments in the film where, as the cutman in the corner, he is just as helpless as the audience. Great storytelling, or what?

It is difficult to pinpoint how Eastwood pulls off this anticipatory elegance. Maybe it comes from a natural technical aptitude for foreshadowing. Maybe it comes of experience. In any case, Million Dollar Baby presents a curious contradiction – everything about it feels so familiar, every element feels borrowed (which is mostly the case), but the story draws you in anyway.

Curious, too, that in spite of its apparent predictability, I have been reluctant to speak of it in terms that are anything less than vague. But go discover it for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.

Evidence, as it were, that Toy Story is quotable to the ends of the earth.

You will notice that there has been a marked lack of updates for almost two weeks now in spite of all sorts of dramatic and interesting happenings, from UBC students having the sense to elect Spencer Keys as their new Alma Mater Society President to this year’s round of Oscar nominations.

On the subject of the latter, I do have plenty of analysis on the backburner, but I am holding off on jumping to any conclusions until I have seen Million Dollar Baby, which opened in Edmonton this week. The reason is because there are already plenty of people out there making qualified, statistically-founded inductive judgments on the “will-win” question – Kris and Sasha at OscarWatch, for instance. As much as I feel confident in declaring that nothing can stop The Aviator this year, Tapley figures in his 31 January post that the post-nomination media-killing is setting it up for an upset.

And, well, we all know what media-killing did to my beloved Phantom.

But let’s not make judgments yet. In spite of the nominations being neither insipid enough to denounce or surprising enough to remark upon, there are a number of interesting inclusions and omissions to discuss. That’s where my personal brand of punditry comes in – the “should-win” discussion, you might say. Eastwood’s contender aside, I have caught up with film 2004 to my personal satisfaction. Catching up with writing about it is a different matter, and will probably not happen; paragraph-long capsule summaries will not do justice to the likes of Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Sideways, Finding Neverland and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They deserve commentary of a more rigorous and piercing character. Thankfully, some of them have been sitting around long enough that there is little for me to add from a discursive standpoint, which means I have less to do.

The 2005 film season begins for real with a foreign release, that being Ong Bak starring Tony Jaa. It opens in Edmonton on 11 February. I am unfamiliar with the distributor, Magnolia Pictures, but I assume the release will be subtitled (which, in an ideal world, should be a given when it comes to any foreign release); if this is not the case, I welcome a correction. For those of you who are unaware, Ong Bak is the first major Muay Thai action picture to find its way here. Speaking as a Muay Thai aficionado of sorts, and one who has made the requisite Bangkok boxing ring pilgrimage that implies, this is a big deal.

With that postponement of any and all discussion of recent film out of the way, let us proceed to what this post is actually about, which is Scrabble.

This weekend was, if anything, a recovery. A 8-6 record in the annual 14-round Winter Tournament in Calgary earned this here writer $40 and a possible trip back into the 1300 zone, ratings-wise. Then there was the $10 for QUASHING (a game-winning 122-point out-play in a spectacularly risky endgame), and the $10 for JAVA (an 88-point TWS with the J on a double and some fortuitous parallels). Jeff Smith took the divisional Bingo Ace prize with twenty-one of the coveted suckers; I fell one short, playing twenty.

Strange things happen when you deal with words, especially when they are flowing out like drops of rain into a paper cup, as a certain famous twentieth-century poet would say. Prior to Round 2 I passed the time by reading the sixth Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator, which sees the Baudelaire children end up in the custody of Jerome and Esmé Squalor. In the game that followed, Mike Ebanks played SQUALOR on me for 104 points. Well, that hurt. It held up as the High Turn for my division until Al Pitzel slapped me with AZOTISE for 121 a few rounds later. Of course, I gave that record a sound QUASHING.

The QUASHING play – and more importantly, the endgame move leading up to it – was such a convergence of strategy and undeserved luck that to attempt to describe it without a board diagram would be to do it injury. Unfortunately, the same goes for a crazy, stupid, game-losing play in Round 14 that was about as close to ritual suicide as one can possibly get in a game of Scrabble. There are reasons why you should never suddenly lapse into rank amateurism and play off your remaining vowels, in particular the last U, and draw to an all-consonant final rack with a Q on it. (Until the OSPD4 introduces QI*, anyway.) You should especially avoid doing this with a word like PURGE when there is a perfectly good triple word score behind ESTATES on A9 inviting a back-hook on 8A, that being an R. Or a G, but there weren’t any left. Or a T, but I didn’t know that one.

Paying attention to the board and not making stupid endgame plays is usually a good idea. I’m still not over this one. The overwhelming magnitude of self-defeating recklessness exhibited in that single play, PURGE on an enticing triple, defies proper description short of a reconstruction of the board position. I’ll not do that for the time being.

What I will do instead is close this post, one that a frequent reader would not be wrong to classify as a transitional potpourri – the recitative between the arias, you might say – with a mention of today’s Gateway. You might call this one the video game issue. There’s yet another review of Resident Evil 4; regular readers should be aware by now that I see positive exposure of the GameCube as a very good thing. Dan Kaszor warns the general public of the PSP defects – nothing new to anyone who has actually been following the handheld wars, but the same implicit affirmation as before: if you are the type to buy a portable system, buy a Nintendo DS instead. (Once there’s more than a game and a half for it, anyway.)

There’s also a review of Uwe Boll’s film of Alone In The Dark, which employs a bit of a faulty metonym in claiming that “you could say that 32-bit technology just doesn’t translate well to the big screen” when every cited example predates the 32-bit era. The point still holds, though. If you haven’t read The Foywonder’s interview with Uwe Boll, go take a look.

As much as I would like to see video games develop a reputation as being a substantial storytelling medium – a characteristic that finds reflection in adaptability – it really is quite amusing to see Uwe Boll define himself as “a machine that acquires rights to video game properties and converts them to utter dreck.” I am in a position to laugh because from everything I have read about Mr. Boll, his video game tastes – which, by no coincidence, largely revolve around blood, gore and not much else worth mentioning – are so distant from my own that I scarcely need to worry about him ever coming anywhere close to any franchise I actually care about.

But that’s only because I’m a snob, and he’s not. And for a measure of which camp ultimately comes out on top, I remind you that he is the one in B-movie hell.

I should add, though, that I can see why video game publishers are so eager to sell movie rights to this guy. First, he’s willing to buy them. And as in the case of the horrid misunderstanding of The Avengers back in 1998, an atrocious adaptation can draw attention to the superiority of the original material (where applicable). The murder victim in all of this is the viability of anyone in film, producer or consumer, ever taking video game adaptations seriously. But as a game publisher, why would you care?

The last thing I will point to in The Gateway is Ian Keteku’s debut in the Opinion section. While the article itself is not all that remarkable (especially from the point of view borne by this here zealot who thinks true black culture is Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, not this overproduced contemporary riffraff), my fellow Churchill alumni are always a welcome sight. The literate ones, at any rate.