Damien wrote:Can't we spread these polls out more. Magilla used to have the perfect schedule for them. I believe it was Monday and Thursday.
It was supposed to be Tuesday and Friday but I usually put them up around 9 P.M. Pacific time the night before (around Midnight Easern time).
If people are looking for something to do between polls I suggest going to OG's main site and participating in the polls there. There is a trivia game that goes up on Friday that gets very little participation and another one on Thursdays in which he asks for recommendations on films to watch. We then rank the suggestions the following week and he watches the top vote getter and posts a review the week after that. This week we are ranking horror films and recommending epics for next week. He has a reference page in which he lists the films he's seen. Check them out:
I'm still rather surprised that Clint Eastwood didn't score a nomination for Gran Torino. I personally think it's just a terrible film and a truly lame career capping acting performance by such a fantastic actor, but it was an incredible box office smash and an interesting conservative counterpoint to what one must consider one of the most liberal-gasmic Oscar winners in recent memories. But instead, they nominated Brad Pitt for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I'm even more surprised by the success of this film, one that follows closely in line with such relative white elephant "hits" as The Aviator where I don't think audiences really liked them that much and just felt somewhat badgered into viewership. I've since come to appreciate the film a little more than when I first saw it. What David Fincher does in the film is eradicate conventional dramatic beats in exchange for a Chanel ad vibe which (coupled with Alexandre Desplat's almost spooky score) creates an interesting distanced approach. That's why I find the film's relative success so perplexing. How can one be moved by this? Especially considering what a passive creation Benjamin Button is! Personally, I don't want Zemekis to be directing Benjamin Button, and while the film is not emotionally successful, it is at least partially an aesthetic extravaganza. However, Brad Pitt's performance is all mannequin, and considering that this was during an up-to-current era where he was producing such career best performances as The Assassination of Jesse James... and Burn After Reading, this is especially dispiriting. Benjamin Button is a dubious Oscar contender (13?!?) and I don't understand why Pitt was nominated.
Next up for me is Richard Jenkins. I really wanted to like The Visitor, and like Win Win I will give it props for being a very well-meaning film with some lovely moments. But his emotionally constipated widower who comes out of his shell is all very obvious stuff, and he's overshadowed by the exceptional ensemble. But he gets the kind of big scene where he voices the anger of so many people, the kind of vitriol that will stay potent for a very long time, and it's such a gift that it's hard to begrudge him his nomination. This is Richard Jenkins, and who doesn't love him? I was a bigger fan of his work in Burn After Reading that year.
About on the same wavelength, possibly a little lower, was Frank Langella, who I just didn't buy as Richard Nixon. A lot of this was how he was used in the film. Frost/Nixon just isn't a very vibrant film. It's a lot of fun but it's incredibly limited in its cinematic narrative scope, and only intermittently was Langella given opportunity IMO to truly inhabit the character. This close, I just saw calculated mannerisms.
It's between Rourke and Penn for me and really everybody. It's an act of expert chameleon impersonation and heartbreaking distillation of established persona. Normally, I'm all about the latter. I love being given something familiar and seeing a new shade of it, and in the case of Rourke this is clearly the performance of a lifetime. The same is true of Sean Penn though. It's just not his lifetime. It's Harvey Milk's. And goddamn if I didn't think I was watching Harvey Milk the entire time. I wrote someplace else that Sean Penn probably gives my favorite Best Actor winning performance ever. To watch Milk is to watch the complicated righteous greatness of this man. It has a lightness missing from Sean Penn in decades, and like with Mickey Rourke I felt like I was watching something beautiful. But how Penn managed to nail this performance is an act of alchemy that I don't understand. Coming off of impersonations like Jamie Foxx and Philip Seymour Hoffman, this is the real deal.
My Choices
1. Sean Penn, Milk
2. Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
3. Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges
4. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Synecdoche, New York
5. Mathieu Amalric, A Christmas Tale
(When I first made my list, I considered Heath Ledger the lead in The Dark Knight. In retrospect, he's probably not. But if he were, I'd rank him number one.)
