Are the Oscars relevant to anyone but Conde Nast?

Last night, the Oscars finally jumped the shark, with a televised ceremony in which the host, James Franco, looked as bored as the audience. Because, let's be honest, the Oscars have long-since been completely irrelevant for film-goers and an endurance test for television viewers - useful only insofar as you care about haute couture trends and selling advertising space in glossy fashion magazines.

The reality is that when it comes to rewarding good Cinema, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has always missed the mark. This is, after all, the voting population that gave an Oscar to Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas, and to How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane. But at least Kane was nominated. The Academy didn't even pay that respect to The Third Man; Brazil; Mean Streets; Last Tango in Paris; Easy Rider...The list goes on: iconic films that have become part of our cultural heritage, and all of them completely over-looked by the self-appointed arbiters of quality and success. Not only does the Academy have a shocking track record in rewarding quality, but they compound errors in judgement by trying to make amends in following years, further punishing that year's worthy candidates. The classic example of this would be Martin Scorsese, serially and criminally overlooked for his masterpieces - Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas - only to have those slights "put right" with a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award in all but name with his Best Director Oscar for The Departed in 2006. Too bad for Almodovar, whose Volver surely deserved recognition.

The cause of this shambles is threefold: age, actors and alternative votes. First off, the Academy voters are OLD. Once you are invited to join, you are eligible to vote for life, resulting in an average voting age in the late 50s. And, as ageist as this might sound, old people are inherently more conservative than young people. And in an industry where cutting edge, pioneering, radical art will be produced by the young - and mainstream blockbusters are designed to be consumed by teenage boys - the Academy voter is left out-of-touch with both art-house and mainstream sensibilities. This is why you end up with sentimental, populist pantomime like Driving Miss Daisy and The King's Speech cleaning up, while more edgy material is left unrecognised. And if one wanted to be even more damning, that's why a movie like Brokeback Mountain, featuring explicit gay sex, never stood a chance.

Second, the Academy voters - made up of the leading lights of all the industry groups that bring movies to the screen - is dominated by actors. And actors basically vote for films that contain Big Melodramatic Performances. This is a key reason why so many Serious Dramas win Best Picture while comedies - especially group ensembles - tend to be overlooked. That's why Hilary Swank won two Oscars before Sandra Bullock got a nomination - and why everyone's favourite "girl next door" actress had to choose an Issues Film before she finally got recognition. And don't even get me started on how genre films - you know - the type of movies most of us take to our hearts! - get overlooked. If the Oscars really represented the best of 2010/2011, then Toy Story 3 would've won Best Picture, not just Best Animated Feature, and Kick-Ass would've been nominated too.

The final nail in the coffin is the Alternative Vote system of voting. What basically happens is that each industry group gets to vote for its own award - so the directors vote for the Best Director and the editors vote for the Best Editor. But in the case of Best Picture, everyone can vote and they have to rank all ten (count 'em!) ten nominees. If a nominated film fails to get at least 10% of the first-choice votes, it gets knocked out, and all the people who voted for that film have their second choice added to the ballot. So goes the knock-out process until a winner emerges. What this means is that you can easily have a film win without a majority, or even a plurality of first-choice votes, so long as most people think it's basically okay and rank it somewhere in the top third of movies. And, you guessed it, that favours films that are basically pretty harmless and banal and are unlikely to offend anyone.

The upshot is that, thanks to Age, Actors and AV, the Oscars never were and likely never will be a place where great pioneering provocative cinema is awarded. But just because the awards on offer have no credibility doesn't mean that the TV show has to suck. In theory, one could imagine a scenario in which, while the awards were nonsensical, the ceremony was spectacularly entertaining. And for years this is exactly what the Golden Globes managed to pull off, with its slightly anarchic, shambolic air, fueled by too much booze and a sort of wry amusement at the anonymity of the hosts. This trend reached its apex with this year's ceremony, featuring Ricky Gervais as a kind of schlubby avenging angel, speaking Truth to Self-Appointed Power. Gervais said what everyone was thinking but didn't have the balls to say. And what's more, he said it to their faces. Never before have I seen such a glorious spectacle - such a brilliant skewering of ego. But, alas, hackles up, Hollywood is never going to allow that kind of bat-shit crazy career suicide again.

And so we ended up with the debacle that was last night's ceremony. The awards roster was, as usual, bloated with technical awards that no-one except the industry cares about (who, outside the obsessives, even knows what an Art Director does? - who even watches short features anyway?) The winners were all the odds-on favourites - The King's Speech cleaning up the main awards, Inception taking the technical awards, and The Fighter and Black Swan rounding out the roster. Even Melissa Leo's F-bomb came across as pre-scripted - her faux-naivete and excitement a calculated move to garner column inches and, hey!, I too fell for it. The only real shock was just how uninvolved James Franco looked - merely cementing his art-house credentials as the guy too busy reading Kerouac to give a damn.

And so the endless speculation about the winners is over, and the real Oscar conversation - who wore what - can begin. Glossy pictures of stars in ball-gowns will sell magazines and drive unique page-views to the TMZ. And in a world where print media is dying and advertising is leaking to the internet - where movie studios are struggling to fend off piracy - maybe we shouldn't begrudge them their annual shameless cash-in. Fine. But all I ask is that we stop pretending that the Ocars have anything to do with a real discussion about what was good and admirable in the last year's cinema.

DRIVE ANGRY 3D

DRIVE ANGRY 3D is a brilliantly crass grind-house movie.  If you want to see a hot chick beat the crap out of a naked chick who's just been caught fucking the first chick's fiancé, then this is the movie for you. Or if you want to see a bad-ass smoking a cigar, fully clothed, fucking a naked woman in a motel room, while simultaneously shooting six assholes dead, then this is your flick!  The plot is ridiculous - obviously. Nic Cage plays a dude called John Milton (Paradise Lost, people!) who escapes Hell to chase down a cult-leader called Jonah (Billy Burke) and save his baby grand-daughter from having her head ripped off. Of course! He is helped by a smokin' hot waitress played by Amber Heard, and is in turn chased down by a mean guy called The Accountant dressed in a Men In Black style suit and played by William Fichtner. 

I'm not sure if it makes any sense to seriously review a movie who's every component justifies an exclamation mark, other than to say that director Patrick Lussier and writer Todd Farmer (MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D) have succeeded in making a movie as ridonkulous and vulgar as CRANK.  It's great as far as it goes and I really loved it for the first hour, but after that, the relentless car chases wore me down. Still, in this age of post-modern detached cynicism, you've got to love any movie that tries so hard to have a balls-out good time.  And, from a technical stand-point, in an era of retro-fitted piss-poor 3D, you've got to embrace DP Brian Pearson's wallowing in the schlock-entertainment factor of the medium.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE is on release in the UK, US, Bosnia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Canada, Estonia, Lithuania, Malaysia, the Philippines and Poland. It opens next week in Argentina, Egypt, the Czech Republic, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria, India and Armenia. It opens on March 25th in Uruguay, Belgium, France and Turkey. It opens in April in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Panama, Venezuela and Singapore. It opens on May 13th in Iceland, on May 26th in Portugal and on August 6th in Japan.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE SWITCH

THE SWITCH is not half as bad as I thought it would be. From the marketing campaign, I'd written it off as one of those Hollywood romantic-comedies featuring an actress too old to really be playing the ditzy chick, given a new shot at features with plots featuring getting knocked up. (Think J-Lo in THE BACK-UP PLAN). Worse still, having been bitten too often by risible, banal Jennifer Aniston rom-coms - distracted by her botox and repelled by the smell of desperation coming off the screen - I was simply in no mood for it. But I have to say that, basically thanks to a rather restrained performance by Jason Bateman, I rather liked it! 

 Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (BLADES OF GLORY) the movie starts off as a crude frat-boy gross-out comedy but morphs into something altogether more thoughtful. The opening scenes take us through the mechanics of the set-up with a sort of knockabout humour that entirely failed to connect with me. Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) has a party to celebrate getting artificially inseminated by hunky Roland (Patrick Wilson). Her best friend Wally (Jason Bateman) thinks she's making a mistake, gets drunk, accidentally knocks over Roland's semen and replaces it with his own. Years later, Kassie moves back to the city with her little kid - an introspective odd-ball, and as Wally and Kassie tentatively rekindle their friendship, he starts to realise that he's the kids father. We then get what is actually some rather touching character-driven drama as Wally opens up about his own childhood to the kid, and breaks Kassie and Roland up. 

There's a lot of mono-dimensional character-writing in the film, to be sure. Poor Patrick Wilson has little to do except be buff - Juliette Lewis' balls-out craziness is entirely unused - and Jeff Goldblum is the cliché promiscuous but basically lonely older sleazebag. But somehow, underneath all that, we get Jason Bateman's character really baring his soul. And yes, I think on balance, watching this film is probably worth it for Bateman. 

THE SWITCH was released in Autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and own.

The Borrower Arrietty wins the Japanese Academy Prize for Animation of the Year

First time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi has won the Japanese Academy Prize for Animation of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards for The Borrower Arrietty (2010). Yonebayashi worked his way up at Studio Ghibli from the role of inbetweener on films like  Princess Mononoke (1997) to doing key animation on recent films like Ponyo (2008). I have not been lucky enough to see the film yet, but judging from the art in the book tie-in it will not disappoint. I can at least take solace in the fact that I live in Europe, where Arrietty will be released this year, rather than the States, where the release has been pushed back into 2012. No word yet on a Japanese DVD release date.

Other films nominated for the Animation of the Year included Colorful (Keiichi Hara, 2010) – which won the top animation prize at the Mainichi Film Concours, Doraemon The Movie: Nobita's Great Battle of the Mermaid King (Kōzō Kusuba, 2010), Detective Conan: The Lost Ship in the Sky (Yasuichiro Yamamoto, 2010), and One Piece Film: Strong World (Munehisa Sakai, 2010)

The Japanese Academy Awards have been given out annually since 1978. Despite the high output and quality of Japanese animation for many decades now, the Japanese Academy has only had an animation category for five years. Kiki’s Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989) and Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994) were given special prizes in 1990 and 1995. The wildly popular Studio Ghibli films also managed to win the Academy’s top prize – taking Picture of the Year in 1998 for Princess Mononoke and again in 2002 for Spirited Away (2001).

The Japanese Academy Awards modeled themselves on the Hollywood Academy Awards, which has also only had an award for Best Animation Feature since 2001. They have, however, been honouring animated shorts since 1931 – I am sure this is largely due to the influence of Hollywood-based animation studios like Disney and Warner Bros.

Animation of the Year winners thus far:

2007  The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

時をかける少女/ Toki o Kakeru Shōjo

Mamoru Hosoda, Madhouse

2008  Tekkon Kinkreet

鉄コン筋クリート/ Tekkon Kinkurīto

Michael Arias, Studio 4°C

2009  Ponyo 

崖の上のポニョ/ Gake no Ue no Ponyo

Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli

2010  Summer Wars

サマーウォーズ/ Samā Wōzu

Mamoru Hosoda, Madhouse

2011  The Borrower Arrietty

借りぐらしのアリエッティ/ Karigurashi no Arietti

Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Studio Ghibli

Related Posts:
The Animation Award at the Mainichi Film Concours
The Noburo Ofuji Award
The 14th Japan Media Arts Festival

This years nominees on DVD:

Doraemon: Nobita's Great Battle of the Mermaid King

Detective Conan "Case Closed: The Lost Ship in the Sky" Standard Edition

Colorful

ONE PIECE Strong World

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - GOING THE DISTANCE

Documentarian Nanette Burstein (AMERICAN TEEN, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) makes her debut feature with the like-able and sometimes authentic romantic-comedy GOING THE DISTANCE. Drew Barrymore and Justin Long - perhaps two of the most charming light-comedy actors currently working - play a couple who meet and have a fun fling knowing she's about to relocate from New York to San Francisco. Trouble is, they really connect, and so attempt to do a long-distance relationship. I love the honesty of it. Lots of scenes will feel familiar to anyone who's tried this. The financial strain of buying plane tickets - the jealousy of "friends" who are closer by - the justification to friends of why it's worth it - the struggle to weigh up career-choices versus life-partners. And the great thing is that Geoff LaTulippe's script handles it all very lightly. I can't say much bad about the script. It's well acted, contains consistent laughs and I genuinely cared about what happened to the characters. There may be a few rom-com cliché moments (do we really need the crude, OTT tanning salon scene?), but so many as to detract from the overall vibe. Basically, it's all good!

GOING THE DISTANCE was released last autumn and is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - GROWN-UPS

GROWN-UPS is an alleged warm-hearted comedy that utterly fails to entertain on any level. 

The conceit is that four school-friends, now grown-up, come together at the funeral of their beloved school sports coach, and spend the weekend together in a vacation home. Their lives have taken them in different directions. Adam Sandler's character has turned into a big name Hollywood name, and is married to a glamorous fashion designer (Salma Hayek). Meanwhile Kevin James' character has ended up a small-time employee, much to his own shame. The movie is meant to be about how these friends rediscover their friendship and what really matters in life. It's meant to be about how our kids have become spoiled by Tivo and video games and need to just run around in the mud sometimes. All laudable aims. 

But in terms of execution, the fact that this flick was directed by Dennis Dugan (YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, BIG DADDY, HAPPY GILMORE) and co-written with Fred Wolf (THE HOUSE BUNNY, LITTLE NICKY) tells you all you need to know about the crass humour and crude narrative arcs that the characters are sent on. I didn't invest in any of the characters, and so didn't care about their enlightenment. I didn't buy into the fashion designer ditching her Milan show - her heart melting with surprising ease. Even worse, I hated the so-called attempts at comedy. What happened to Maria Bello's career that she takes a part where her only job is to provide a "gag" about her toddler still drinking breast milk? Am I really meant to laugh at a grown man falling into mud? And what dirt do SNL has-beens David Spade and Rob Schneider have on Adam Sandler that he keep casting them in his films? 

 Still, it's far more watchable than COUPLE'S RETREAT. 

 GROWN UPS was released in summer 2010 and is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - COUPLES RETREAT

COUPLE'S RETREAT is a truly piss-poor alleged comedy starring Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Jon Favreau and Faizon Love as middle-aged men frustrated by middle-aged family life. So they and their wives (Malin Akerman, Kristen Bell, Kristin Davis, Kali Hawk)) take off for a tropical island and a weekend of intense marital therapy run by a spectacularly mis-cast Jean Reno. I just don't know where to begin in terms of reviewing it. It's a movie so devoid of comedic inspiration that it simply falls flat in every scene. I didn't care about any of the characters. I didn't find any of the verbal or physical humour funny. And I wanted the film to end. Quickly. Save yourself the trouble and rent Favreau and Vaughn's genius early pic, SWINGERS instead, and remember a time when they were able to create genuinely sympathetic characters and laugh-out-loud funny lines.

COUPLES RETREAT was released in autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and own.

TRUE GRIT

The Coen Brothers are, for me, film-makers who chronicle the absurd and the arbitrary. Their films feature ordinary folk living ordinary lives, taken up by Chance and led into crazy adventures.The protagonists may well be eccentric - and often, superficially, have crazy hair - but they have nothing on the people they meet and the circumstances they encounter. In the early films, Chance manifested itself in a kind of dark, absurd, comedy. The protagonists were put through the ringer but ultimately were set down back in their homes, happy and well. But of late, the Coen Brothers' films have taken on a darker tone, and become almost obsessive with the arbitrary nature of Chance. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, following directly from the novel, goes to black mid-sentence. The message seems to be that after all this cruelty, all this killing, there are no answers, no justice, no meaning. A SERIOUS MAN is similarly nihilistic. It's a film filled with search for meaning, typically religious meaning, but ultimately it holds no answers. A good, if complacent man, suffers the torments of man and nature. Why? There isn't a why.

It was, then, with some surprise that I learned that the Coen Brothers were adapting Charles Portis' True Grit for the screen - a novel whose over-arching theme is "You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another". For, at the most basic level, True Grit is a story about a young girl in late nineteenth century rural Arkansas, who hires a mercenary to help her get revenge on the thief that murdered her father. And at a more complicated level, it's a story about the sacrifices that those who seek to punish must make. The heroine, Mattie Ross, pays dearly for her single-minded obsession with revenge, but even her associates, Rooster Cogburn and LaBoeuf lead diminished lives as a result. Punishment is meted out to all, and in direct proportion to their crimes and faults. This is not, then, the world of arbitrary justice so often depicted in Coen Brothers films.

The Coen Brothers' adaptation of the book is faithful - as faithful as their adaptation of No Country For Old Men - and far more faithful than the 1969 film starring John Wayne, Glen Gampbell, Kim Darby and, in smaller roles, Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper. In this film, the voice of the narrator - Miss Mattie Ross - comes undiminished to the screen, and it's no surprise to see that it's Hailee Steinfeld, the young girl playing that character, who has the best of the dialogue and the pick of the award nominations. It's a gift of a role. In the book as in this film, Mattie is as particular as any Coen Brothers character. She's a teenage girl with a cool head for business, a strong religious sense of right and wrong, and a determination beyond her years. She weighs everything according to its cost and brooks no opposition. The funniest scenes in the film come early on, as we see wily adults try to fool her or dismiss her, only to be taken to the cleaners themselves. The lawman she hires, Rooster Cogburn (played by a wonderfully grizzled Jeff Bridges), comes to respect her after initially trying to shake her off. And even the vain Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (a wonderfully funny Matt Damon), overcomes his initial frustration and distaste to feel affection for her. But Mattie is warned early on by a local lawyer that she will pay dearly for this stubborn determination, and as we see the movie's final scene and epilogue we can see that that has been the case. But we get no sense that she regrets her actions. She knew the cost, and accepted it. Her sense of justice is as cool whether concerning herself or her father's murderer, Tom Chaney. And that's the message of the novel and the film. True Grit is to do what you feel is right, but to look unflinchingly at the consequences. And when it comes to steadfast courage, Mattie beats the men she hires hands down.

The resulting film is a work of the highest quality and quiet strength. It's not as superficially provocative or quirky as many of the Coen Brothers' films, and because of its thematic material and lack of spectacular haircuts, many reviewers have dismissed it as being "not a Coen Brothers film". My view on this is that the Coen Brothers have become so reknowned for delivering films with rapier-like dialogue, superb acting performances, stunning cinematography (typically from Roger Deakins) and great scores (here, Carter Burwell), that viewers and reviewers have become complacent. It's as if the machine is so well-oiled that it is taken for having been effortless, or even banal. To my mind, this is utterly wrong-headed. TRUE GRIT is a kind of pantheon film - a film in which every part of the whole - lead performances, supporting performances, photography, design, editing, dialogue - blend seamlessly into a profound and affecting whole. No individual component stands out and attracts attention in the way that Javier Bardem's character did in NO COUNTRY, but the completed work is truly a thing of great art and craft.

To my mind, TRUE GRIT is simply the best film of the cinema year 2010-2011, and has been woefully underplayed during the awards season. It is being drowned out by more populist or more self-consciously dramatic fare (THE KING'S SPEECH, THE SOCIAL NETWORK and BLACK SWAN). But, foolish as it is to make such predictions, I believe that TRUE GRIT will stand the test of time far better than those, still very admirable, films. Quiet quality does not often get rewarded, but look at any aspect of this production and tell me it isn't first class.

TRUE GRIT opened last year in the US and Canada. It is currently on release in Norway, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Brazil, Iceland, Panama, Poland, Spain, the UK, Venezuela, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Kuwait, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Finland, Italy and Sweden. It opens next week in Belgium, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. It opens on March 18th in Japan.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED

Ivan Reitman, of GHOSTBUSTERS, fame returns to our screens with the kind of contemporary social comedy more typically associated with his son Jason (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, UP IN THE AIR). The result is a movie that wants us to think it's edgy and honest, but when you cut to the meat, it's still the same old rom-com happy-ending bullshit we've been subjected to for decades.

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher play two emotionally bruised people who react to their wounds in diametrically opposite ways. The girl becomes emotionally repressed, running from anything that could turn sour and hurt her. By contrast, the boy becomes immensely open and vulnerable, rushing toward people who can't return his emotions. Not automatically the set-up for a rom-com, one might think. But hey-ho, this being Hollywood, the two star-crossed lovers meet cute and decide to have NSA sex. Inevitably, they fall in love. He pushes for a relationship and she runs. One suspects that if Jason Reitman had been directing the film that's where it would've ended. But no. Because, while this film tries to prove how modern and liberated it is with its explicit sexual references and a whole scene devoted to period cramps, essentially it is a conservative project. And this contradiction infects every scene. Thus, while there are some rather funny set-pieces, typically involving the superb supporting cast (Mindy Kalinga, Kevin Kline, Lake Bell, and a brilliantly ditzy Ophelia Lovibond), the movie as a whole just doesn't hang together.

Not only does the film not hang together, it also has the faint whiff of desperation about it. It's desperate for us to love it - for us to think it's cool. In fact, it's about as desperate as the scarily need mono-dimensionally good guy that Ashton Kutcher plays in this flick, not to mention last year's VALENTINE'S DAY. I am genuinely puzzled as to why Natalie Portman, darling of indie flicks since LEON, and soon to be Oscar winner for BLACK SWAN, decided to take a role in this film. And it's even more bizarre when you realise that she actually produced it. And perhaps most puzzling of all - what a bizarre and wasteful way to use Cary Elwes!

NO STRINGS ATTACHED was released in January in the USA and Canada. It is currently on release in Bulgaria, Belgium, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Portugal, Finland, Norway, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Singapore. It opens next week in Argentina, Greece, Brazil, Estonia and the UK. It opens on March 18th in Poland; on March 25th in Iceland and Spain; and on March 31st in Slovenia. It opens on April 1st in Sweden; on April 15th in Italy and on April 22nd in Japan.

JUST GO WITH IT

JUST GO WITH IT is an Adam Sandler vehicle directed by his long-standing collaborator, Dennis Dugan (HAPPY GILMORE, BIG DADDY, GROWN UPS).  It's based on a French farce, which means that you have to willingly suspend your disbelief as layer after layer of ridiculousness takes place. I don't mind a good farce, but one tolerates the nonsense plot in exchange for consistent raucous laughter. Sadly, JUST GO WITH IT  doesn't deliver. In fact, barring a few sly plastic surgery jokes, the movie is by turns dull, mawkish and plain embarrassing.

Adam Sandler plays an emotionally scarred plastic surgeon who avoids real relationships by shagging young birds while wearing a wedding ring. When he finally meets a girl he actually likes (Mrs Andy Roddic - Brooklyn Decker) he has to magic up an actual ex-wife, and persuades dowdy co-worker (Jennifer Aniston looking about as un-dowdy as, well, Jennifer Aniston) to pretend. Of course, when the girlfriend twigs that Jen has kids, she wants to meet them too - cue a massive extended family holiday in Hawaii.  The pretence gets even more complex when Aniston's character bumps into her super-successful college bete-noire (Nicole Kidman) and wants to pretend she's still married to Sandler, much to the confusion of his current girlfriend.

The problem is that a) Aniston doesn't look dowdy so her transformation into hot chick lacks punch b) Sandler's character is meant to realise that he should grow up and date a real women rather than a super-model. Except that he ends up realising the grown woman is for him because she turns out to look like a super-model - having your cake and eating it much?! c) the scene where Aniston and Sandler tell each other what they like about each other made me want to vomit d) the scene where Kidman gets on stage and tries to out-shine Aniston's character was probably the most embarrassingly unfunny thing I'll see on screen all year. 

JUST GO WITH IT is on release in the US, UK, Egypt, Israel, Singapore, the UAE, Canada, Iceland, Ireland and Mexico. It opens later in February in the Philippines, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway and Spain. It opens in March in Brazil, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Kazakhstan, France, Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Australia, Malaysia and Peru. It opens in April in Colombia, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Belgium, Portugal, India, the Netherlands, Panama, Venezuela and Argentina. It opens on July 1st in Paraguay.

14th Japan Media Arts Festival

This is the final weekend to catch the 14th annual Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo with its 170 exciting exhibitions, screenings, and live performances. This year’s call for entries attracted 2,645 entries from 49 countries. The Grand Prize in animation went to Masaaki Yuasa (Mind Game, Genius Party, Kaiba) for the Madhouse TV anime series The Tatami Galaxy (四畳半神話大系/ Yojōhan Shinwa Taikei, 2010), which aired April 22 – July 1, 2010 on Fuji TV. The series was adapted from the novel of the same name by Tomihiko Morimi. 

This marks the first time that a television series has won the Grand Prize at JMAF. The jury described the series as “overflow[ing] with expressiveness” and being a rare television anime in the way that defies the commercial limitations that are usually put onto such works. They were particularly impressed by the carefully researched use of Kyoto as a setting and the stylistic distortions Yuasa gave the animated spaces and characters of the series.  Available on DVD from cdjapan.

Excellence Prizes in Animation were awarded to:

Keiichi Hira for his feature film Colorful (カラフル, 2010). Hira is best known for his Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan films. His last feature, Summer Days with Coo ((河童のクゥと夏休み/ Kappa no Kwu to Natsuyasumi won the 11th Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize. Colorful was also awarded the Animation Award for 2010 at the Mainichi Film Concours last month. Trailer.  Available on DVD from cdjapan.

Sunao Katabuchi for his feature film Mai Mai Miracle (マイマイ新子と千年の魔法/Maimai Shinko to Sen-nen no Mahō, 2009). This is an adaptation of the biographical novel Mai Mai Shinko by Akutagawa Award-winning novelist Nobko Takagi. The animation was produced by Madhouse.  Check out the teaser trailer at Nippon Cinema. Available on DVD from cdjapan.

Hiroyasu Ishida for his hilarious short animation Fumiko’s Confession (フミコの告白).  Ishida will be screening his latest animated short next week at the Kyoto International Manga Museum. Read more about it and see a preview at the Animation News Network.

Atsushi Wada for his surreal short film In A Pig’s Eye (わからないブタ). The film also won the top prize at Fantoche last year. Read my interview with the artist: Art of the Absurd: An Interview with Atsushi Wada or check out my reviews of his films Day of Nose (2005) and Gentle Whistle, Bird and Stone (2005).  Available on DVD from CALF.

Korean-born, America-based animator Beomsik Shimbe Shim for his puppet animation The Wonder Hospital. This film has won recognition at festivals around the world including the Best Animated Short awards at the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Check out a clip from the film, a trailer, and other cool footage on Shimbe’s Vimeo Profile.

You can learn more about the Japan Media Arts Festival and past winners at their website. Unfortunately, their English webpages have been down since the festival started so you may have to check back later in the month if you can’t read Japanese.

Related Posts:
13th Japan Media Arts Festival
Sovat Theater's Elemi (2009)
Masaaki Yuasa's Mind Game (2005)

The Tatami Galaxy Vol.1 [Limited Edition]

Mai Mai Miracle

Walk, Don’t Run (歩け!走るな, 1966)

In 1964, Columbia Pictures decided to capitalize on the popularity of the Tokyo Olympics by using it as a setting for a romantic comedy starring the undisputed king of the genre: Cary Grant. Filmed on location during the Games themselves, Walk, Don’t Run (歩け!走るな, 1966) depicts Tokyo as a modern city with touches of traditional culture in the form of gardens and Japanese-style houses. 

Walk, Don’t Run is a remake of the wartime George Stevens comedy The More the Merrier (1943) starring Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn which poked fun at the unusual subletting arrangements that occurred during the World War II housing shortage in America. Charles Walters, who is best known for his musicals like Easter Parade (1958) and High Society (1956), directed the film.

Sir William Rutland (Cary Grant), an English gentleman who travels often to Japan on business, arrives in Tokyo two days early and finds that he cannot get a hotel room because of the Olympics. He heads to the British Embassy for assistance, and he discovers a notice from someone offering to temporarily share their apartment. When he arrives at the address, he finds it occupied by a young, beautiful English woman named Christine Easton (Samantha Eggar of The Collector fame). 

The opening credit sequence depicts Tokyo as a modern city.

Feigning ignorance at the impropriety of an older man sharing an apartment with a young unmarried woman, Rutland moves himself into the apartment while Christine desperately tries to lay down some ground rules in the form of a pedantic morning schedule. The character of Rutland is a rehash of the loveable rogue type character which Cary Grant had perfected in the course of his career in films like The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940) and North by Northwest (1959). 

Soon after moving in, Rutland meets the American athlete Steve Davis (Jim Hutton of the Ellery Queen Mysteries) who has also arrived in Tokyo early and is without lodging. Steve has a sarcastic, often abrasive, sense of humour which appeals to Rutland – it reminds him of himself when he was younger. Without consulting Christine, Rutland invites Steve to share half of his room with him resulting in even more awkwardness. 

Cary Grant demonstrates he has retained his To Catch a Thief (1955) skills.

Cary Grant is given a lot of great lines and physical gags in Walk, Don’t Run, but the film’s producers made a crucial error in not making Grant the principle love interest. Instead, Grant is relegated to the role of matchmaker for Steve and Christine. While Steve may remind Rutland of himself, Jim Hutton’s performance is actually much more reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart (possibly Destry Rides Again) – who gets a small cameo when an old Western of his dubbed in Japanese is shown on a TV. Any small spark of on-screen chemistry between Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton is overshadowed by Cary Grant’s charisma and charm. . . and the way in which Hutton’s intonation and body language evokes Jimmy Stewart just reminded me of how effortlessly Cary Grant stole Katherine Hepburn away from Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940).

It is an old Hollywood story that actresses are put out to pasture as soon as they reach middle age – relegated to playing people’s mothers instead of leading ladies. Studios are always desperate to reach the youth market, and in the process sell short the possibility that a good love story will win fans no matter how old the actors are. In the mid-1960s there were so many great comic actresses of Grant’s generation who would have made a great foil for Cary Grant from Katherine Hepburn to Ginger Rogers if the studio had only taken a minute to think outside of the box. The only bit of action Grant gets are the humorous phone calls he makes to his wife back home in England.

All is not lost; however, as there is much enjoyment to be had watching this film besides the plot. The scenes shot on the streets of Tokyo really give a great impression of what the city was like during the mid-1960s. Shot in vibrant colours with a Panavision camera the reds of objects like Japanese post boxes really pop on the screen. Some great sequences include Cary Grant unabashedly smoking a cigar in a sento, the ferry ride to Mikawa and the walk through the park there, Grant climbing the exterior of a traditional Japanese house with shops at ground level when he gets locked out in his bathrobe, and the race-walking sequence. 

Samanth Eggar, Tim Hutton, Miiko Taka, Teru Shimada and Lois Kiuchi

I was relieved to see that the film doesn’t indulge too much in cheap gags about Asians (ie. like Bill Murray in the elevator with short people in Lost in Translation). . . the few that are there are overshadowed by Cold War stereotypes about Russians and other Europeans. The Japanese characters are all portrayed in a positive light – perceptive viewers will notice from their body language that none of the speaking roles are actually Japanese. The producers may have gone with Japanese-Americans not only for better communication but also for having the actors available for shooting the non-location scenes and re-shoots back in Hollywood. The cast is packed with some of the best Japanese-American actors of the times including Miiko Taka (Marlon Brando’s love interest in Sayonara) and her ex-husband Dale Ishimoto (Battle of the Coral Sea), Teru Shimada (best known for playing Mr. Osada in You Only Live Twice), and even George Takei just shortly before his breakout role in Star Trek.

George Takei, Cary Grant, John Standing, Hutton & Eggar

The Japanese characters all retain their dignity and even though Grant’s character is shown to not particularly like Japanese food, he gives the impression that he likes Japan and its people. I was particularly stuck by the way Cary Grant would throw off the occasional phrase in Japanese in order to interact with Japanese extras in scenes. It would be interesting to find out whether or not this was in the script or something Grant himself improvised. I highly suspect the latter because he was known for having his ad-libs make it into the final cut of many classic films (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, etc.). His penchant for ad-libbing is pretty obvious in scenes where he whistles the theme songs to his previous hit films (An Affair to Remember and Charade). 

On the whole Walk, Don’t Run is an enjoyable film probably best watched at home (it’s long at almost 2 hours) with a group of friends and a few bottles of wine. Just make sure the friends are the kind who enjoy cheesy mid-century comedies à la Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Lover Come Back (1961) or Grant and Day in That Touch of Mink (1962).

Fun facts about the film:

• despite looking very fit and charming in this film, Cary Grant realized that the studios weren’t willing to give him the kind of romantic leading roles his fans wanted anymore and decided to retire from acting after this film. This disappointed Alfred Hitchcock, who had wanted him to play the lead in Torn Curtain (1966). The role ended up going to Paul Newman.

The race-walking sequence where Cary Grant strips to his underwear

.

• star Jim Hutton is the father of Timothy Hutton. His career was cut tragically short at the age of 45 due to cancer and his son movingly dedicated his 1980 Academy Award for Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980) to him.

• Walk, Don’t Run was a hit song for the Ventures in 1960 and again in 1964. The title of the film may have been influenced by the fact that the Ventures were (and still are) hugely popular in Japan. However, no Ventures songs were used in the film. The score was entirely written by Quincy Jones and Peggy Lee at the recommendation of Cary Grant himself.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Related Posts:

Penny Serenade (1941) starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant
Rankin/Bass Christmas Specials: Made in Japan
Dorris Dörrie’s Kirschblüten (2008)
Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Walk. Don't Run!

Cary Grant - Tanjo 100 Shunen Kinen Box 

[Initial pressing only limited release]