The MacGuffin

Well, what a weak year it has been. Not that there haven’t been movies and performances that I have liked, but nothing is easy to point to and say: “this is a great piece of cinema that deserve accolades and will be talked about years from now.” The Academy has done little to help here, with many random—and, in some cases, dismal—nomination choices. But still, they have to give these awards to someone. So, here are my guesses and personal choices for the Academy Awards.

In Albert Nobbs (2011), Albert (Glenn Close), is a waiter in a hotel in 19th century Ireland, and is very good at his job. He is dedicated, polite, and knows his place. He is also secretly a woman and, if exposed, could ruin be ruined. When a visiting painter, Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), ends up staying with Albert, she discovers her secret. Albert is horrified—until Hubert admits that she too is a woman pretending to be a man, and even has a wife and a home. Nobbs is flabbergasted that this could happen, and when Page insists that Albert can also have a life and a wife of her own, she turns her attention to a young maid at the hotel, Helen (Mia Wasikowska).

Margret Thatcher is a controversial figure even to her admirers. She is the woman who stood up to the unions and communism. To her detractors, she was a brutal woman who put down workers and helped the rich get richer. Just on the history alone, this is a prime subject for examination in a film. So it is sad that there is so little to be learned about her in The Iron Lady (2011).

Awkward.

Near the end of 2011 I started perusing top ten lists to see if there was anything that I hadn’t heard of that might be interesting. On a TV list I had I saw Awkward., a show about a young teenage girl named Jenna (Ashley Rickards). Now, my first instinct was that this was simply a slightly more mature teenage show, still in the vein of teen shows on Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. In many ways it is, but a big difference is it actually addresses real issues.

Remember that one girl in school that everyone hated? She was the popular girl with the hot boyfriend that everyone felt was destined for great things? In Young Adult, Mavis (Charlize Theron) was this girl, and she has never really gotten over the high school life entirely. Her job is writing young adult books about a popular girl in high school, so she has been able to live this part of her life over and over in her head. Beyond that, her days are spent getting drunk and keeping herself beautiful and fit.

Nostalgia has been a major theme this year in films. With Midnight in Paris, about a man who thinks culture was at its peak in the 1940s, and Hugo and its honoring of an early filmmaker, this is the year of recognizing the past. Now there is The Artist, a silent film in black and white, about the silent age of film and what the onset of talkies did to those who did their best work in silent pictures. While it is a homage to silent films, it is also a reintroduction to how silent movies can work as a medium.

Television has been taking up much of my time, as I am still playing catch up with several shows, so these are the newest shows I have been trying out.

Hugo is a movie I wanted to embrace, but found difficult to do. Martin Scorsese is a favorite director of mine and he has an ability to take almost any story and make it feel engaging and as if time has not passed. In that, the film falls short of some of his current modern day masterpieces, but still has strong characters and, for the most part, a strong storyline that he is famous for.

There is much you can tell about a movie from its start, the music, the images, and the tone. In Steven Spielberg’s new film War Horse, everything you need to know is spelled out in the first three minutes of dialogue and scenes. We have an over the top image of the countryside with overly cheerful but semi-epic music, giving the sense of a journey but with no real danger. (To bring this point home, the music is repeated several times over the course of the film, doing nothing to make the movie more intense, and gets very repetitive.) This sequence goes on for a while and we get to see a boy, Albert (Jeremy Irving), watching a horse grow up, and him obviously dreaming of owning him. So when his foolish father buys the horse instead of a work horse, for reasons of vanity, Albert and his new horse Joey instantly bond, as Albert tries to train him to be a work horse.

Marilyn Monroe has been a mystery for me—mainly, what it was that made her leave such an impact on film. I have only seen two of her movies, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot, and in both she seems to be just simply a blond bimbo with little range, and based on what was said about her on set (that she had to have lines written on blackboards while filming) seemed to confirm that. I still do not get what her appeal was, but there is no denying that she captivated people and there were complexities and pain inside her. The new film My Week with Marilyn is not a biography of her, though. We are getting to see her closer than most, but there is still a distance to her.