Qualities of mercy

Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, program A

Crit

• Body Team 12--Heroic, patriotic Liberian Red Cross workers--with a particular focus on the deeply religious lone woman on the team--whose task it is to remove Ebola victims from their homes, sometimes against the violent wishes of their families, and take the remains to the crematorium. 
• A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness--So your daughter marries the boy you approved of until your brother persuaded you to give her to his brother-in-law; what to do? Well, you put a bullet through her head and dump her in a river, of course, because, this being Pakistan, the legal system, while condemning your crime, gives you an out if you can obtain family forgiveness, and since the community elders pressure your son-in-law's family--oh, and your daughter, who survived (her theory: because the perpetrators had sworn on the Qur'an that they wouldn't harm her, Allah preserved her)--your ass goes free. I couldn't make this shit up.
• Last Day of Freedom--The rare animated documentary, an interview with one Bill Babbitt, who went to Sacramento police with his suspicions that he beloved younger brother Manny had committed an unsolved murder. Police told him that Manny's PTSD from his stint in Vietnam would shield him from the death penalty, but a politically ambitious DA and a drunken and incompetent public defender effectively conspired to make Bill watch his brother die. Brutal.

For the rest of the nominees, click here.

Which film should win? I have to go with the scaldingly infuriating Girl in the River. What will win? Never bet against the Holocaust-related film.

Through chemistry

Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, program B

I have a complaint. Well, maybe more a plaint, sans com. In past years the Criterion has devoted both of its small screening rooms to the shorts, and shuffled the showtimes from day to day, creating options for seeing all 4 programs without, say, having to stay up way past my bedtime fighting off the drowsies during the annual Holocaust documentary. This year they're using just one screening room, and only the popular animation program gets more than one time slot. So there I was for 2 of the 5 nominees in this category at 10pm. Have I ever mentioned how hard it is being me?

Crit

• Chau beyond the Lines--When we first meet him, Chau lives in a camp in Ho Chi Minh City for victims of Agent Orange; as for most of his cohort, his body is warped into a shape that invites unwelcome thoughts of Tod Browning. But he gets around on one relatively normal leg, another bent so far under and behind that is seems foreshortened, and two short arms with semifunctional hands. He gets around, and he sketches, and he dreams. "I've had a lucky life so far," he says.
  
• Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of Shoah--This is actually a meta-Holocaust film: given 2 years to make a film no longer than 2 hours long, Lanzmann spent 5 years assembling his material and another 5 wrestling it into the 9½ hours of Shoah, all the while lying to his producers about how close he was to finishing. Fascinating, sad, unexpectedly funny, awe-inspiring. I guess after all this time I really need to watch the film behind the meta.

For the other nominees, click here.

Busy being born

Oscar-nominated live-action shorts

An odd and terrifying momentum to this program.

Crit

• Ave Maria--Wacky Israeli family (man, his mom, and "that woman you shacked up with"), racing through Arab territory to get home for Shabbat, drive into the statue of the Virgin in front of the convent of the silence-bound Sisters of Misericord. Hilarity ensues; it must have been hilarity, because others in the theater were laughing. Struck me as cheap shtick.
• Shok--More obvious sentiment: childhood friends, Serb-oppressed Albanians, a bicycle, betrayal, violence, memory.
• Alles wird gut (Everything will be okay)--But here things get real: a divorced father kidnaps his daughter, set on spiriting her away to the Philippines. What begins looking as if it could be a comedy reaches an excruciating climactic intensity.
• Stutterer--A romantic interlude, but not without its own harrowing pain.
• Day One--And finally . . . well, if the thought of cutting a dead fetus into pieces in order to save the mother pushes your squirm buttons, you might consider stepping out early. But don't.

What should win? With little hesitation, I'll say Alles wird gut, but any of the last 3 could, depending on voter moods. Unfortunately, depending on voter shallowness, so could either of the first 2.

The book of love has music in it

Anomalisa

Crit

So in the animated feature Oscar race, it's going to be the film that rehabilitated sadness vs. the film that made it a raison d'être. Charlie Kaufman again takes us on a weird, squirmy journey to the emptiness at the center of our lives, and makes us like it. I expect Inside Out to win, not because this isn't an excellent film but because the voters in this category aren't going to elevate such bleakness. It would be a lot more difficult choice in Best Picture, for which both films have cause to bemoan their snubs.

Trailers

• The Little Prince--Actually, more like Le Meta-Petit Prince.

The envy of all the dead

Oscar-nominated animated shorts

Crit

Geez, even the animated shorts exhibit a dearth of people of color. There are, in fact, more animals than nonwhite humans. That said, the nominees are almost uniformly excellent.

• Sanjay's Super Team--Indian-American father tries to overcome his son's passion for superheroes. Story is pretty routine, but the visuals are colorfully gorgeous.
  
• World of Tomorrow--Even if I hadn't been a Don Hertzfeldt fan for ages, this weird futuristic conflation of adorable innocence and sobering fatalism would probably be my pick. Simply brilliant.
  
• Historia de un oso (Bear story)--A heartbreaking parable of pogrom and slavery designed to make you never want to go to a circus again, and also a smart metastory that sometimes makes you forget where you are. The second- or third-best of a strong field.
• We Can't Live Without Cosmos--And this is the other second- or third-best nominee, a Russian The Right Stuff with a much stronger love story.
• Prologue--Most notable for being shown last, after the unnominated films always included to pad the animated program, with a caution to parents about nudity and violence. Two Athenians, two Spartans, Tarantinoesque bloodflow, the least good of the bunch.

Unlike most years, none of the extra films was good enough to make you wonder why something else was nominated instead: If I Was God, a rather banal memoir; The Short Story of a Fox and a Mouse, a standard cute-animal fable, very stylish and very French; The Loneliest Stoplight, which you can probably imagine from the title; and Catch It (no link found), which raises the question, Can meerkats climb trees, and if not, what are those supposed to be?

Birth of a notion

Dear White People

(2014)

My favorite film of its year, and I was tickled to see that not only does it hold up on second viewing, but the rough edges didn't bother me at all this time. The one downer is going to writer-director Justin Simien's IMDb page and finding no second feature even in production.

Had the pleasure of showing introducing my bud April to this, and lazy reviewer that I am, I'm going to ask her to check in with a comment.

We bombed in New Haven

All About Eve

(1950)

Imagine my surprise to discover that my buddy April, in town for interviews with the Yale and Brown drama schools, thus obviously a devotee of the thay-a-tr, had never seen this film. Long story short, I bullied her into watching it, with an opt-out clause after 15 minutes. She loved it, we watched the first hour, then retired in anticipation of a blizzard adventure next day, got home next day from said b.a., and watched the rest (ahead of the Illini game).

So regaling my thay-a-tr devotee daughter with the stunning news that her protégée had never seen this classic, I was gobsmacked to discover that . . . oh, anyone who's ever seen a third-rate comedy of errors can guess how this sentence ends.

Anyway, I have nothing to say about the film, but I'm hoping April will check in with a comment. And Jen too, once she's actually seen it.

Undiscovered country

The Revenant

Crit

Oh, sure, you think you're having a hard time, 'cause you're nice and cozy in the horse carcass you've scooped the entrails out of when the dripping from the melting icicles on the tall pines above wakes you before the alarm goes off. But let me ask you: how many grizzly claw- and toothmarks can you count on your body? How recently have you seen your son stabbed to death by the guy who then proceeds to bury you alive? How many raw fish and bison organs have you had to eat just to stay (barely) alive? I'm guessing Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio, doing more and better acting per line of dialogue than he has ever done before) has you beat, and he still has a lot of abuse left to take after the equine sleeping bag scene.

About 14 months ago, I was being disappointed by Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, which, if memory serves, did pretty well on Oscar night. Well, I could happily see this take home a half-dozen or more statuettes--best pic, best adapted screenplay, best director, best actor, best supporting actor (Tom Hardy as the villainously pragmatic Fitzgerald), best cinematography, best sound . . . much as I hate the e-word, it's hard to talk about this film without calling it a revenge epic, a survival epic, an epic of the West. This is the film Tarantino might have made if he hadn't had to stop every couple of minutes to play with himself.

Had I seen it two weeks ago, my top ten list would look different at the top; the only question is whether it would have been at the very top, and there's something warped even having a discussion that includes both this and Inside Out. And speaking of top ten lists, my friend and colleague Tom Breen invited me to come on his excellent radio show Deep Focus, along with longtime Madison Art Cinema owner and curator (and long-ago manager of the late lamented York Square Theatre, until the idiot owners drove him away) Arnold Gorlick to share our thoughts on the best of 2015. Uh, I, uh, don't speak, uh, in public much, and it shows, but if you can stand my poor delivery, you can also listen to the much more articulate Tom and Arnold by clicking here.

Trailer

• Deadpool--A spoofier-than-most Marvel comic spinoff.

All the commissioner's men

Concussion

Crit

The story of the immigrant Pittsburgh pathologist (Will Smith, with conviction) who discovered why so many former NFL players were going nutso, and of the league's predictable response: "Protect the shield." Nothing surprising, nothing even particularly angrymaking for anyone already made angry by knowledge of the story, but a useful primer for those who hadn't paid any attention--except, of course, that they won't pay attention to this either.

Trailer

• Risen--Crucifixion and a body disappeared, through the eyes of a Roman soldier; has the potential to be thought-provoking or risible, and I tend to think the latter more probable.

He said, she said

The Danish Girl

Crit

Eddie Redmayne pads his credentials as the sovereign of the existential challenge; upcoming roles are presumably as Santa Claus and God. Here he even faces up to the formidable challenge of being more beautiful than Alicia Vikander, and though that may be a cheekbone too far, Lili is a beauty, make no mistake.

This is a warm and sensitive film that probably is as complicated as it can be, given the constraints of narrative and time--and to be fair, the evolution of the relationship between Vikander's Gerda and Redmayne's evolving character is what director Tom Hooper does best. But apart from a few strokes of silk stockings and satin dresses and a visit to a voyeurism booth, we don't really get a feeling for the trauma of displacement that Lili felt as Einar.

Trailers

• Midnight Special--Trailer says it's a film by Jeff Nichols. "Who?" I wonder. Then the elaboration: writer-director of Take Shelter and Mud, which made my best-of lists for 2011 and 2013, respectively. Oh, OK then!