Oscar Race: Argo, Best Picture of the Year

Bibi is a very discerning movie goer.  Don't even, not even as a joke, ask her about movies like The Hangover, American Pie, A Lot Like Love (Ashton Kutcher movie with a Butch Walker song in it),

It's all about Butch's voice 

the Twilight movies.  If you did ask her, you would deserve the look of pity and scorn you would earn for your tiny little effort.  (Butch has a gesture for that, below.)

And if you pushed Bibi on it, you would deserve the resultant mocking, belittling, totally wipe the floor with your half-wit butt rant that would ensue.  Bibi doesn't mind using her v-a-s-t vocabulary on these little exercises, but they are ultimately unsatisfying.  She'd rather talk about movies she likes and wishes more people would go see. 

For some time, Bibi has been dispirited over what passes as movie entertainment for the masses (see above for a short, incomplete list and see below for dispirited Bibi). 

For all her attitude about good movies, Bibi believes movies are for the masses, not an elite group of snooty know it alls.  The Oscar race throws this argument into the spotlight annually.  Making the best movie category larger doesn't make it a better race, it just gives more less than outstanding movies a shot at muddling the odds for the other movies.  In any case, the faithful readers already know Bibi's favorite (which has no chance at all),  Beasts of the Southern Wild.  This favorite seems to run counter to Bibi's claim that movies are for the masses, but that's because of the way movies are marketed.  Apparently, each movie must fit into a category: 

a) Drama
b) American Pie kind of movie    
c) Action/Adventure
d) Chick flick
e) Art movie

If the movie is marketed so that the intended audience isn't reached, it won't be seen by a large number of ticket buyers.  Too bad for Beasts of the Southern Wild.  It's such a good, unusual, market niche averse film, depicting a hard scrabble community and lifestyle unfamiliar to 99% of the American population.  Great characters, fabulously authentic capture of slices of their lives, piercingly poignant rendering of a lovely, enfant sauvage, so young, so exposed to fear and loss and so strong.  That said, really do not see how some of the other movies got a nomination.  We won't go there for specific undeserving films, but Bibi will say that Argo definitely belongs in the nominated group and should win Best Picture of the Year.

It's a Hollywood movie.  In all the best ways.  My film prof always began class by writing on the board:  Why are movies made?  Then, through the examples of films he would show, we would see why those movies were made (to make money, so you could make another movie, to make more money so you could make another movie, on and on ...) and how and why they might or might not be successful movies.  Argo hits all the marks. (It's like Ben Affleck was in the same classes with Bibi!  Or, he's absorbed all the best ideas on how to make movies by watching lots of great movies.)   It tells a captivating story in a familiar, very successful, way--first, this happens, which leads to this, and in an unusual, but plausible way, this happens, etc.  It builds our knowledge of a character and the events he's involved in, giving us insight into different worlds:  the CIA, US/Iranian history, movie making, and although the time line is straightforwardly linear, we experience an increasing excitement and tension up through the thrilling success of the caper. 

Every bit of information, visual or spoken, is essential to the story and the eventual ending.  The casting is superb and the actors are channeling:  just be the part, totally.  Success all the way around on this.  Production values are way up there, all the better to see the contrast between it and the purported movie-in-the-making, Argo.  The time period and the mindset of the time is excellently evoked.  Like any real Hollywood movie, everyone is attractive.  The scope and reach of the movie is appropriate to what the movie accomplishes. If there were a weakness, it might be that Ben Affleck is too young and/or didn't look tired enough to be Tony Mendez.  Our interest is piqued and then maintained through the end of the movie such that we rejoice with the characters' enforced silent pride of having accomplished the unexpected outcome:  the rescue of civilians trapped in Iran using a far-fetched plan.  We really want an occasion to mock snarl: Argofuckyourself!

Which might be what Bibi says by the conclusion of the Oscar awards presentation.  Hope not!

Zero Dark Thirty and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Zero Dark Thirty was a good movie--engrossing, exciting, good casting AND way too long.  It's refusal to take a stand on some moral issues:  torturing war prisoners, killing men and women suspected of harboring Osama bin Laden, making no attempt to capture bin Laden alive adds to its being a less than great movie, although it is a thought-provoking one.  (Liked The Hurt Locker way better.  It presented its case in a more succinct, focused way and gave the audience a clear idea of what the filmmaker thought about the concepts presented.)  Using the Jessica Chastain character as a stand-in for the number of individuals it took to gather and crystallize the information gathered into intelligence that could be used to search and find bin Laden did help to keep the movie from being longer and becoming tedious, and she's a good actor.  Bibi thought her guarded, unrevealing demeanor was effective in expressing the film's basic attitude:  here's what happened, how it happened--not adding a moral to it.  That's up to the viewer.  Also, could be that the blankness that character is effusing might be a stand-in for the general American public:  we don't know what to think about this (war) mess.  Kathryn Bigelow may have a strong sense of the brutality and pointlessness of torture as a means of eliciting information, she might have a strong dislike for the entire war on terrorism as it has played out, but for some reason, she's timid in expressing that outrage in this movie.  The last 20-30 minutes are the best part, the set up and carrying out of the raid. So, good, but not great.  B+ ish

Bibi has known for awhile is that she is almost completely assimilated into middle class life.  That has its good and bad aspects:  good in that I can afford to live in a way I find acceptable, pleasant, actually very good in most ways and am not a burden to anyone.  Bad because my life is in many ways so sheltered and narrow, I don't appreciate the value that others place on their different lifestyles or lifestyles choices.  Beasts of the Southern Wild gives a glimpse of a different way of living, freely accepted and desired by the people living it, mostly from the point of view of a six year old girl.  She's adorable, of course, as children in movies often are:  lovely, a wide-eyed seeker of warmth, love, meaning, making what she can of it, a marshland fauve. The community, the Bathtub, is on the edge of Louisiana levee life, a collection of misfits from civilization, who care for each other in a loose-knit, communal way, each person left to make their own decisions about their lives within the group.  Lots of drinking, eating, not taking baths, good times. We watch Hush Puppy explore her natural, if litter-strewn world, caring for pets and/or chickens and pigs.  She's fascinated by their heartbeats, attentively listening to them, a place of quiet assurance in her sometimes chaotic family setting.  There's no mother, although her father is mostly there, a committed drinker and forager who daily gives Hush Puppy lessons in self-reliance (she lives in a separate shack from her father) and the idea of personal strength required for living ("no crying" is a community slogan).  When a hurricane destroys the fragile community, Hush Puppy and her father struggle to find their scattered friends and rebuild, firm in their refusal to join civilization and the comforts it offers.

The movie is in color, but there are often some very effective gray/white scenes that made me wonder later, was the movie in color?  These scenes give palpable, sometimes terrifying life to Hush Puppy's take on the community teacher's explanation about cave men and the menacing, hugely malevolent aurochs who  destroyed as many big, strong cavemen as they could.  Hush Puppy equates the dangers in her life that could rip away her father, the community around her, maybe overwhelm her as snorting, snuffling, brutish aurochs, constantly on the prowl, looking for the weak to prey on.  

Loved this movie.  It has no chance against the heavy hitters like Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, Argo or  Django Unchained (like Quentin's movie has any chance at all.  Talk about a group of people who are the epitome of middle class--the voters in the Academy).  A