Sarah D. Bunting – Page 6 – Press Play Video Blog

OSCARS DEATH RACE: HELL AND BACK AGAIN

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey the Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

Sgt. Nathan Harris took a gunshot in the hip during an ambush in Afghanistan in 2009. Hell and Back Again tells you this without delay; Harris, back on U.S. soil and trying to rehab his way back to active duty, takes care of telling everyone else, compulsively — Wal-Mart greeters, prospective landlords, fellow Marines. He can't help it. His shattered leg has become his world, and his medications send him spinning away from other topics despite himself.

Hell and Back Again cuts back and forth between the present day and the ground operation that brought Harris to harm, between Harris's attempts to manage his pain and his civilian life and the platoon's attempts to manage the mission, and civilians, in Afghanistan. In the quieter moments, the film is too pointed in showing us that this isn't a war to be "won," and the overlapping style of the sound design — by J. Ralph, and I'm probably the only one who remembers that he did the song for that VW ad where the guy who looks like James Spader is late for a wedding and trapped behind a freight train — can feel gimmicky. We don't necessarily need an elbow to the ribs and a stage-whispered "PTSD"; we can see the man's face. And we can see his wife's face, reflecting Harris's intermittent disappearances into confusion and rage.

A gimmick will usually work at least once, though, and the layering of the sound of battle over the mild aggro of a complicated drive-through-menu order does create tension. The level of access to Harris's unit, and the extent of the footage (not least during firefights, during which I genuinely cannot conceive of NOT dropping the camera and sprinting to…let's say Germany), is remarkable. Also remarkable: Harris himself, a smart, tough, funny man, gentle at bedtime, boyishly romantic about his pistol, who looks a little like John Travolta and sounds a lot like Lucas Black. He looks like fun. He looks like hell.

It's a solid enough doc, but I'm not sure how this gets a seat at the table when Project Nim and The Interrupters didn't. What you think of its chances depends on how cynical you want to get about subject matter in the category as a determinant. More on that when I complete the category.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: A CAT IN PARIS

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

At first I couldn't understand how A Cat In Paris had nabbed an Animated Feature nomination with animation this crude. In fact, at first I couldn't understand A Cat In Paris period. For reasons that don't bear explaining, I watched it without subtitles, and my French doesn't go much farther than cheeses, swears, and synonyms for "hurry up."

But after a few minutes, I realized that the animation isn't crude, exactly. It isn't realistic; an IMDb commenter remarked on the "incredibly tiny triangular feet which seem always to be drawn from the same angle no matter which way the rest of the body is pointing," which are rather distracting, especially on stairs, and the animation renders bare feet at an accurate size and shape…?

Yet the drawing is evocative enough to delineate the characters, and most of the plot. I picked up a word here and there in the dialogue, but primarily I got the story from looking at it.

Said plot (I…think; feel free to correct me in the comments) is more or less centered around the titular feline, Dino, who spends his days keeping a little girl, Zoé (Oriane Zani), company and bringing her tiny lizards he's caught; at night, the cat accompanies an art thief, Nico (the soothingly sexy voice of Bruno Salomone, who apparently plays in a parody band with The Artist's Jean Dujardin!), on his rounds. (This brought to mind that wonderful Samurai Jack sequence in which Jack apprehends a cat burglar and finds that the thief's sack is full of…actual cats.) Zoé's mother, Jeanne (Dominique Blanc), works all the time, and Zoé doesn't care for the heavily perfumed housekeeper she's often left with. Jeanne has her reasons; she's a detective who's trying to bring gangster Victor Costa (Jean Benguigui) to justice for, among other things, killing Zoé's father. Costa has also stolen a hoard of priceless artworks, and it's via all the stealing and re-stealing (and also the heavy perfume) that the characters eventually converge.

As I said, I don't entirely know the specifics, but I didn't need to. At just over an hour long, it gets you right into things, and while the rendering is sometimes off — everyone has giant pants and the aforementioned tiny feet, like Babe Ruth — the movie gets the bigger picture right every time. The vertiginous angles of the Parisian rooftops during the numerous chase sequences; the yappy-dog gag, paid off wonderfully thanks to a snowfall at the end of the film; the way Nico seems to wave like water through his scenes; and particularly the movements of the loyal cat and his frequent and judgmental cracking open of a single eye…it's suspenseful, clever in various workarounds, and at times breathtaking. Realism in animation is impressive, up to a point, but there are different kinds of accuracy, and I would rather see this kind, that understands the quality of light at sunrise, than a perfect shoe.

I haven't seen the other nominees in the category, but I have a feeling this will remain my favorite — and, like The Illusionist was last year for me, a hopeless horse to bet come Oscar night.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: A BETTER LIFE

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

I wanted to love a movie that, in the first five minutes, had a teenage girl march up to a schoolmate and get right in his face all, "Give my boyfriend his money back or I'm-a have you killed." Ruthie (Chelsea Rendon) has gangster uncles, and she doesn't give a shit.

But A Better Life doesn't do anything with Ruthie after that, really, and what it does do is disappointing and timid. The center of the story is Ruthie's boyfriend, Luis (José Julián) — or rather his father, Carlos (Damián Bichir), and his struggles to keep Luis in school and away from bad influences like Ruthie's Uncle Celo (the charismatically tattooed, and underused, Richard Cabral). Carlos can't do much, though, because he works all the time and Luis's mother is not around. But when Carlos borrows a whack of money from his sister to buy his friend's landscaping truck (and by extension the business), he lets himself begin to dream bigger for himself and Luis, about more money, a nicer apartment, a safer school. Maybe even his citizenship.

(Spoilers ahead.)

This is a mistake, and the audience realizes it the moment the camera shows us Carlos dropping the truck's keys onto his jacket and preparing to climb a very tall tree. Carlos's new partner would like a truck of his own, so he steals it, in a sequence that's genuinely tough to watch — your stomach drops along with Carlos's as he gives vain chase, and then the film takes an intriguing turn as father and son team up in an almost buddy-movie sort of way to track the truck down. Forced to engage with one another for the first time in a while, Carlos and Luis knock on doors, chase leads, and try to solve the mystery, and that section of the movie is fun. The pacing is brisk, Julián kicks his acting up a notch, and because everyone in their world has to operate in the same cash-only, no-cops shadows they do, the story has an anything-goes feeling.

But like Carlos's big dreams, that doesn't last. If director Chris Weitz had stuck with that movie, the buddy movie? If the script had had Carlos and Luis keep finding the truck, then losing it again, finding it, losing it, climbing fences, occasionally yelling at each other, and then Carlos got by with it in the end? That is a snappy story about the sixteen different knife edges the hardworking immigrant has to balance on in this country without cutting himself to shit. Instead, we get After School Special nonsense like Carlos physically cringing when he witnesses a fistfight in a parking lot, or dismayed reaction shots from Bichir and Julián when Carlos and Luis find themselves in an apartment where fellow Mexicans bunk eight to a room. Thanks for the PSA, but a live-action Wikipedia stub about immigration policy should have something new to say.

And it should do it with professional actors. Bichir isn't actually great; he's fine, but he makes a handful of lazy or weird choices, and the fact that he's head and shoulders above the rest of the cast reeeeeally isn't saying much. Woody Harrelson should have had Bichir's spot instead, for Rampart, but…you know. The Oscars. This might just be one of those "Crash — no, we toooootally get it!" things with the Academy that you just have to let roll off.

The way that the movie is not good, and then almost good, and then not good again some more, is maddening. Non-completists may drive through.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: WARRIOR

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is an entry in Oscars Death Race, Sarah D. Bunting's yearly quest to see every movie nominated for any kind of Academy Award. To view a scorecard, click here.]

Current Score: Oscars 45, Sarah 16 / categories completed: 1

Warrior is a lot of stories — which is unfortunate, because it should have picked just one of them, or two, and we've seen pretty much all of them before regardless. Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy and his splendiferous saddle of neck muscles that has its own post office), a veteran whose departure from the armed forces is initially somewhat mysterious, returns to his hometown of Pittsburgh, looking to get back into mixed-martial arts. He's also looking to confront his estranged father and former coach, Paddy (Nick Nolte), about the crappy childhood he had to endure before Paddy got sober.

At the other end of Pennsylvania, Tommy's brother Brendan (Joel Edgerton), a physics teacher in Philly from whom Tommy is also estranged, is upside-down on his mortgage and supplementing his income with MMA fights in parking lots. What luck, then, that the MMA's World Series is coming up in Atlantic City, with a five-million-dollar winner-take-all purse! Gee, do you think the brothers will end up having to fight each other?

So, you've got a little Rocky going on with the scrappy underdogs; you've got a little The Fighter going on with the intra-fraternal resentments; you've got a little Million Dollar Baby over heeeere with the father figure trying to redeem himself, and a little Lights Out over theeeere with the wife who knowingly married a fighter and then made him promise not to fight ever again (Jennifer Morrison, doing what she can with the customary "I won't watch you fight AND ALSO DESTROY THIS FAMILY" scene). I really cannot abide that trope; if you don't want to marry a boxer, don't marry a boxer, but if the violence and the six-pack turn you on, take the good with the bad and stop trying to change the guy. Could one of these movies or TV shows please write the lady so she's with the fighter program? "Dang, the champ fucked your eye all up. That sucks, honey. Let's open a bottle of pinot and talk footwork."

…Rant over. (That one. For now.) The story also features the obligatory expositional voicing-over by various sports commentators and newscasters, to bring us up to speed on MMA rankings, why Tommy really left the Marines, and so on, and the movie is too long, too interested in dialogue shortcuts that don't work for the characters, and too reliant on cellos to make sure we know what to feel. After his big for-your-consideration scene, Nolte is functionally done in the movie; pacing-wise, it's somehow messy and also too neat.

But by the time we reach the climactic fight, the story has (excuse the pun) fought through the clichés and the overtaxed good-guy signifiers to arrive at some bracing stuff. The acting by Hardy and Edgerton is outstanding, which helps, and their final face-off gets at a raw truth about sibling relationships, about how much inchoate joy and hate they can simultaneously contain. Nolte's isn't the performance I'd have nominated, and I wouldn't say it asks anything new of him, but it's solid, even when he's obliged to pay off a heavy-handed reference to Moby Dick.

And Frank Campano (Frank Grillo), Brendan's second, is an interesting character; with his Beethoven and his mantras, he starts out like a gimmick, but the script sticks with it and doesn't forget what he is, and in the fight scenes, he's an island of calm and compassion. The Death Race has its unexpected pleasures, like an actor finally getting something good to do and doing the hell out of it, as Grillo does here.

It's not a great movie; it's not even good, really, if you add up all the parts. But by the end — thanks to Hardy's second above-and-beyond performance of the film year, and to the story he and Edgerton tell together about the painful, sweaty, homecoming hug that is a family, sometimes — the sum of those parts is intense and worthwhile. Give it a look.

OSCARS DEATH RACE 2012: The adventure begins . . .

Hello, and welcome to the Oscars Death Race. I'm Sarah D. Bunting, the head rodeo clown at Tomato Nation; the Oscars Death Race is pretty much what it sounds like, a quixotic attempt to watch every single nominee in the Academy-Awards categories that appear on the broadcast.

Why do I do this to myself? Well, the intellectual-glamour answer is that it's important for me as a writer, a storyteller, a citizen of filmmaking culture to testify to all of the work presented, good or bad. And I do believe that it's critical for someone, anyone to give a damn, or try to, about the lesser-lauded categories like Sound Editing and Live-Action Short.

The real, no-bullshit answer? I started the ODR in 2010 as a distracting lark, because it seemed like less masochistic drudgery than the house renovation I was enduring at that time — but I didn't finish the Race that year, so I had to do it again in 2011, and I didn't finish it then either because, among other things, I failed to drive to Bangor, Maine to see goddamn Country Strong. Fucking Gwyneth. Perhaps you're beginning to see the breadth of the folly here, but if not, let me brass-tacks it for you: Buntsy is stubborn and doesn't know when to quit and she will keep Death Racing until she beats this beeyotch.

Third time's the charm, though, or so I've chosen to believe, and I feel good about my chances in 2012 — not least because the Press Play brain trust is providing me with critical support this time around. (There may or may not be an "unlimited rotgut" clause in my contract. I'm told I can't discuss it.)

So! Here's how it's going to work. This is the landing/HQ page for the 2012 Oscars Death Race, where you can find:

–   links to the complete list of eligible nominees;
–   links to the nominees I've already watched and capsule-reviewed over at the historic birthplace of this mishegas, TomatoNation.com;
–   links to more recent reviews, which the PP gang will publish; and
–   a little progress widget that lets you know how close I am to the finish line.

As the ceremony gets closer, stay tuned to Press Play (as well as to Press Play's Twitter, @PressPlayIW, and my own, @TomatoNation) for category-prediction overviews, should-win/will-win balloting, and more. (Please note that I have never done worse in my Oscar pools than since starting the ODR. Knowing the films doesn't do squat for you, trust me. More on that in February.)

If anyone wants to join me in an ODR sidecar, I'm torn between "that's awesome" and "ohhh no no no no don't do that," but I hope you'll hit the comments, discuss on Twitter, and cheer me on. With…rotgut.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity and has written for, among others, Glamour, Time Out New York, New York Magazine, and Yahoo! Shine. She's also the head lab tech at the North American Field Guide to Revolting Snacks. Please send booze and Cow Tales c/o Press Play.