skimpole
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Posts posted by skimpole
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How about replacing Tippi Hedren with Monica Vitti?
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Great quotes from 2013
The Wolf of Wall Street
I'm a former member of the middle class raised by two accountants in a tiny apartment in Bayside, Queens. The year I turned 26, as the head of my own brokerage firm, I made $49 million, which really **** me off because it was three shy of a million a week.
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It's striking that though Moreau's performance in Jules et Jim was one of the most admired of the sixties, her profile dramatically fell in the seventies onwards. Certainly Hollywood had little interest in her, now that she had passed forty. Fans will be aware that one of her most famous films was La Notte, where she stars with Marcello Mastroianni as an unhappily married couple. They are much less likely that thirty years later they appeared together in another film. "Together" is a bit misleading, since although they play a couple, they have actually separated before the movie begins and never really are together. The Suspended Step of the Stork is a movie by the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. It is the first of his trilogy of borders, dealing with the immigration crisis that began with the end of the cold war. Mastroianni plays a politician who abruptly drops everything and flees public life, including his wife, played by Moreau. Their leading role in the credits is a bit misleading: their roles are clearly supporting and their prominence is designed, unsuccessfully, to get foreign interest in the movie. Mastroianni in the movie associates with the various refugees and immigrants and Moreau works with the journalist protagonist in trying to find him.
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Here are my choices of the 75 films I've seen from 2013 for…
Best Actor of 2013
No juvenile performance this year?
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I saw 12 movies this week, but I reviewed the first six of those back on Tuesday. Love Letters is a romance between Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, which is striking because just the year before she was the teenager with a crush on her mother's friend. The romance isn't that much, and it has a contrived solution. More substantial is Since You Went Away which TCM Canada finally showed. It wants to be a big serious epic, a sort of black and white wartime at home Gone With the Wind. The obvious comparison is with The Best Years of Our Lives. Well Colbert and Cotten are arguably better than March. But Loy is better than those two, and Wright is better than Jones. And come to think of it, so is Mayo. And the latter movie is more serious and takes a tougher line on the postwar period.
Outrage is distinctive as one of the first movies about rape to be directed by a woman, in this case Ida Lupino. On the good side, there is a well directed, and understandably tasteful, assault scene. On the other hand, the victim's response is a bit overmuch (fleeing from the scene and temporary insanity are not usual responses.) But on the good side again, there is a minister who falls in love with her, helps her overcome matters and still doesn't get it. Cobra Verde lacks the symbolic power of Aguirre or the obsessive power of Fitzcarraldo. And Klaus Kinski is an odd choice as a Brazilian bandit. But the story of him sent to try to reopen the slave trade, only to find himself inside a Dahomean civil war is fairly striking and has its own power.
Night on Earth consists of five segments of taxicab confessions in the United States and Europe I like Jarmusch's movies, but these extended anecdotes are only just OK. The Dresser is a movie that certainly appeals to actor, more so than the viewers. Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay's performances are more ostentatious than subtle. I suppose they were nominated in 1983 as lifetime achievement awards, and if they hadn't been running against Robert Duvall and Michael Caine they might have won. But there were better actors that year.
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Actor
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street
Leonid Yarmolnik, Hard to be a God
Tony Leung Chiu-wai, The Grandmaster
Joaquin Phoenix, Her, The Immigrant
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Runner-ups: Robert Redford (All is Lost), Christoph Waltz (The Zero Theorem), Vincent Lindon (Bastards), Tom Hiddleston (Only Lovers Left Alive), Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis), Ali Mosaffa (The Past), Mathieu Amalric (Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Tahar Rahim (The Past), Benecio del Toro (Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Shane Carruth (Upstream Color), Toni Servillo (The Great Beauty), Conner Chapman (The Selfish Giant)*, Shaun Thomas (The Selfish Giant), Tom Hardy (Locke), Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station), Bruce Dern (Nebraska), Will Forte (Nebraska), Tom Hanks (Captain Phillips), Louis Garrel (Jealousy), Lee Kang-Sheng (Stray Dogs)
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Actress
Adele Exarchopoulos, Blue is the Warmest Colour
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nymph()maniac
Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin, Her
Runner-ups: Marion Cotillard (The Immigrant), Berenice Bejo (The Past), Sandra Bullock (Gravity), Kristin Bell (Frozen), Idina Menzel (Frozen), Julie Delpy (Before Midnight), Agata Kulesza (Ida), Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida), Brie Larson (Short Term 12), Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color), Judi Dench (Philomena), Anna Mouglalis (Jealousy), Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim),
Supporting Actor
Wu Jiang, A Touch of Sin
Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Patrick d'Assumcao, Stranger by the Lake
Matthew McConaughey, The Wolf of Wall Street
Runner-ups: Jeremy Renner (The Immigrant), Stellan Skarsgard (Nymph()maniac), Josh Gad (Frozen), Stacy Keach (Nebraska), Luo Lanshan (A Touch of Sin), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug), John Hurt (Only Lovers Left Alive, Snowpiercer), Christian Slater (****()maniac), Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips), Chang Chen (The Grandmaster), Michel Subor (Bastards), Alec Baldwin (Blue Jasmine), George Clooney (Gravity), F. Murray Abraham (Inside Llewyn Davis), Jean Dujardin (The Wolf of Wall Street), Elyes Aguis (The Past), Benedict Cumberbatch (12 Years a Slave), Paul Dano (12 Years a Slave)
Supporting Actress
Lea Seydoux, Blue is the Warmest Colour
Zhang Ziyi, The Grandmaster
Uma Thurman, Nymph()maniac
Zhao Tao, A Touch of Sin
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
Runner-ups: Mia Wasikowska (Only Lovers Left Alive), Chiara Mastroianni (Bastards), Amy Adams (Her), Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave), Stacy Martin (Nymph()maniac), Tilda Swinton (Snowpiercer), Lola Creton (Bastards), Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street), Carey Mulligan (Inside Llewyn Davis), Joanne Lumley (The Wolf of Wall Street), Pauline Burlet (The Past), Sarah Paulson (12 Years a Slave), Li Meng (A Touch of Sin), Alison Pill (Snowpiercer), Julie Bataille (Bastards),
Not seen: August: Osage County------I'm not sure who my supporting winner with the shortest run time, but I suspect McConaughey is my shortest nominee.
------A rather weak supporting actor field this year, especially compared to supporting actress.
------Also a distinct gap in the movies that got major releases this year, and the movies that I believed worthy to nominate.
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Comparing oscars to our choices, zeroes edition
Supporting Actress
Harden no votes
Connelly tied 2-2
Zeta-Jones winner 3-1
Zellweger, defeated 2-1, seven way tie for 2nd
Blanchett, no votes
Weisz, defeated 2-1 six way tie for 2nd
Hudson, no votes
Swinton, defeated 2-1, four way tie for 3rd
Cruz, 1 vote, seven way tie for 1st
Mo'Nique winner 3-1
Supporting Actor
Del Toro 1 vote, nine way tie for 1st
Broadbent defeated 2-1 for LEAD ACTOR, eight way tie for 2nd
Copper, 1 vote, eight way tie for 1st
Robbins, defeated 3-2
Freeman, defeated 2-1, five way tied for 2nd
Clooney, 1 vote, seven way tie for 1st
Arkin, no votes
Bardem, tied 2-2
Ledger, won 3-2
Waltz, tied 2-2
Actress
Roberts, defeated 4-1, five way tie for 2nd
Berry, defeated 4-1, five way tie for 2nd
Kidman, no votes
Theron, winner 4-1
Swank, defeated 3-1, two way tie for 3rd
Witherspoon, no votes
Mirren, winner 3-2
Cotillard, winner 3-2
Winslet, defeated 3-1, five way tie for 2nd
Bullock, no votes
Actor
Crowe, no votes
Washington, no votes
Brody, defeated 3-2
Penn (1), no votes
Foxx, 1 vote, seven way tie for 1st
Capote, tied 2-2
Whitaker, 1 vote, seven way tie for 1st
Day-Lewis, winner 5-1
Penn (2), no votes
Bridges, 1 vote, seven way tie for 1st
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Here are the films from 2012 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet.
Like Someone In Love with Tadashi Ukuno, Rin Takanashi and Ryo Kase
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty with Terence Nance
Tabu with Ann Moreira, Teresa Madruga and Laura Soveral
To the Wonder with Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem, Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams
Like Someone in Love was the last movie made by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Rin Takanashi won my Best Actress for 2012, playing a call girl. Tadashi Ukuno, who had been a lifelong extra, and had up to this point had never spoke a line on screen, plays the retired professor who apparently just wants someone to talk to Ryo Kase plays the jealous boyfriend. The movie consists of conversations among the triangle of characters. To quote from Nico Baumbach's essay for the Criterion Collection: "Kiarostami generates, as perhaps no other filmmaker has before him, a moral relationship with what we are seeing. By a moral relationship I mean not one of moral judgment over what we are seeing but the opposite, the deeply moral encounter with the world that is experienced only by having one’s moral prejudices suspended. The viewer is implicated from the start by her own assumptions and expectations, but unlike, say, Michael Haneke, Kiarostami never uses the viewer’s implication as a device to indict her, to expose her guilt. He puts the spectator in a relation of mutual implication with the characters on-screen and with the filmmaker as spectator."
"This enigmatic last scene is perhaps best left undescribed and uninterpreted, but I’d like to suggest that it is a response to everything that has led up to it. To try to close the gap between being and appearance is the ultimate violent act. The working title of Like Someone in Love was The End, also in English. Kiarostami has said that he pictured the words on the screen at the end like in an old Hollywood movie. A Hollywood ending, we know, means resolution without ambiguity, the end of conflict, and, as is frequently the case, the united couple living “happily ever after.” In contrast, the shock we experience at this abrupt ending seems to tell us that when the subject is love, violence is the only possible result if we wish for “The End”—an end to semblance, to likeness, to the hesitation or ambiguity that allows us to discover that we, like the characters we are watching, are not fixed identities and through an encounter can open up to a new sense of ourselves."
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty was one of my favorite movies of 2012. But it's not a conventional drama. It's more an experimental film as Terence Nance, the director, tells the story of how one Terence Nance tries unsuccessfully to have a relationship with a series of beautiful, intelligent African-American women. To quote from Ina Diane Archer's review from Film Comment: "A multimedia hybrid of narrative and documentary that employs experimental techniques, Oversimplification has the feel of a journal or sketchbook. Private notes, doodles, photos, and drawings morph into illustrated titles and remarkably varied animated sequences (Nance collaborated with several different artists), the visual manifestations of Terence’s dreams and emotional states. The motif of analog technology—images of pausing and switching cassettes and the mixtape/needle-drop soundscape, also created by Nance—further reinforces the impression of a handcrafted texture, as does its epistolary nature with much of the “story” framed by letters, texts, and phone messages."
Tabu is a Portuguese movie. This black and white movie starts in the present, and Madruga got a supporting actress nomination for me as her characters, a middle aged socially conscious Catholic who encounters the elderly Soveral. Eventually Soveral, who used to live in Portugal's African colony of Mozambique, comes close to death, and Madruga's character encounters an old man. The body of the picture is the story of the love affair he had with Soverall half a century ago, now played by Anne Moreira. To quote Jonathan Romney's review from The Independent: "The romance...could be another ancient movie melodrama, like the one that opens the film – or perhaps this is just how film-lover Pilar imagines the story as it's narrated to her. But Tabu isn't a straight pastiche of silent cinema. For one thing, Miguel Gomes plays fast and loose with his soundtrack, erasing people's voices (their lips move, but we never hear them), while being selective about background sounds. In one scene, people dive into a swimming pool, but we never hear a splash, although we do hear birdsong.'
To the Wonder is the first of Terence Malick's "Weightless" trilogy, followed by Knight of Cups and Song of Song. In my view the trilogy is one of the great cinematic achievements of the decade, though for most critics the trilogy is as good an excuse as any to stop caring about Malick. Through images of stunning beauty, the movie tells the story of the unhappy marriage of Affleck and Kurylenko. McAdams is a former friend of Affleck that he has a relationship with. Bardem plays a priest who witnesses the proceedings. To quote Richard Brody of the New Yorker: "'To the Wonder' looks like no other film—almost every shot features a wandering, floating, probing, tilting camera. Its attention to light is unique, and Malick’s way with his story is equally distinctive. Most of the moments in the film are interstitial; the story is conjured and suggested rather than shown, and the emotions are evoked and induced rather than performed. Malick’s very idea of character and action is as radical as his vision and, for that matter, as his philosophy, and that comes through in even the barest attempt to summarize the plot."
"There is perhaps no film in the history of cinema that reveals such attention to light, which seems to suffuse the space of every frame and to imbue the characters with its moral and spiritual element. Malick treats light as something of the main substance of the film, even the main subject of the film, as well as its crucial (and deeply conceived) metaphor. Anyone who has been to the northern coast of France should have exulted in the quality of the light, and Malick—who establishes the movie’s thematic harmony early on with a crucial scene in which the man and the French woman visit Mont Saint-Michel—makes the contrast between French and American light, between the coast and the heartland, between the cathedral and the town, the fundamental tonality of the movie, a sort of cinematic music from which the action unfurls and to which Malick recurs, brilliantly and joltingly, with a sure and assertively audacious editing sense."
"Malick suggests, evokes, hints—and some extraordinarily significant elements of the plot (or of whatever the plot might be) zip by in flicking, fleeting images that would likely leave a viewer to wonder what had happened. It’s as if the entire movie were filmed in the conditional mood; like a fable of actual life, it’s not a movie about what happened, but about what could have happened—yet the uncertainty isn’t that of the characters, whose own power of perception or memory isn’t in question. The sense of possibility implicit in the elusive story is also a second possibility—a spiritual possibility, of sanctification in pain. Things don’t necessarily end happily in \To the Wonder,' but they possibly end well. For the anguish and the ruin that he saw in 'Days of Heaven,' there may be a redemption—and, all the more remarkably, it may not even emerge from anything like faith, but, simply, from seeing the light."
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Perhaps it could be clearer which years movies are supposed to be from. It's clear for many of the oscar winners, but many critical favorites premiere well before a widespread release. Three of my Best actress nominees for 2013 only got a larger release in 2014.
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More great quotes from 2012
Django Unchained
Stephen: I count six shots, ****.
Django: [pulls out a second revolver] I count two guns, ****.
Cosmopolis
I wanted you to save me.
Skyfall
Chairman, ministers, I've repeatedly heard how irrelevant my department has become. Why do we need agents, the 00 section? Isn't it all rather quaint? Well, I suppose I see a different world than you do, and the truth is that what I see frightens me. I'm frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map, they aren't nations. They are individuals. And look around you - who do you fear? Can you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No, our world is not more transparent now, it's more opaque! It's in the shadows - that's where we must do battle. So before you declare us irrelevant, ask yourselves - how safe do you feel? Just one more thing to say. My late husband was a great lover of poetry, and um - I suppose some of it sunk in, despite my best intentions. And here today, I remember this, I think, from Tennyson: We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Ordinarily I give my movies of the week on Sunday, i.e, once the week has actually been completed. However, I've already seen six movies this week, and plan to see six more, so I've decided to do the first half now. Jupiter Ascending is a science fiction movie with an enormous amount of money devoted to it, and no actual brains. It borrows a lot from Dune, but with much less imagination or even the imagination of previous Wachowski movies. It's high point has Channing Tatum rescuing Mila Kunis from one evil kingly brother, and then repeating the whole plot point over again with another evil one. Edge of Tomorrow is much more effective, and is occasionally amusing it its Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers. It's competent, but it could be more clever.
Cesar is so far the best movie I've seen so far this week, and more sophisticated than one would think from early sound movies. I wish I had been able to pay it more attention and if the local TV system hadn't overestimated its length by half an hour. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 was probably less interesting than the previous installment in the series. It's clearly been padded, with the middle third, almost an hour, being especially redundant.
Atomic Blonde is a movie with pretensions to style. It has a euro-pop and eighties soundtrack, but oddly not from the time it takes place, early November 1989. Whatever admiration one might have for a movie with competent fight scenes drains away as the movie becomes more and more vicious. It suffers from too many revelations and some obvious plot holes. (Such as why would the good Stasi officer trust his life to one of the Westerners when he knows that person's double agent status?) How to Murder Your Wife is directed by Richard Quine, from a script by George Axelrod, and starring Jack Lemmon. All have been in better stuff. It's a battle of the sexes comedy which plays very badly today. On the one hand, Lemmon has no real right to complain, the movie suggests, because his wife is so hot. On the other hand, his wife has no character aside from being a bimbo, and the movie looks as if no one involved had actually met a woman.
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Harold Russell would be a good choice. He actually had a very minor role in two later movies, decades after The Best Years of Our Lives.
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I saw four movies last week. The most interesting thing about The Swarm is that the first few minutes are surprisingly competent. Then it rapidly goes downhill. Unfortunately, few of the lines are as silly as "And I never dreamed, that it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friend!" Given the many disasters that follow from Michael Caine and Richard Widmark's actions, one wonder why the authorities tolerate them. The more thinks about it, the more the movie falls apart. The Big Sick is amusing, but it has a weakness as a love story. Zoe Kazan spends most of the movie in a coma, and as a result Holly Hunter does a better job as the future mother-in-law.
Raintree Country does not work very well. It's a sort of lacks a point aside from hoping people will mistake it for Gone with the Wind. Many didn't like the previous Clift/Taylor combination A Place in the Sun for wishing that Shelly Winters would break her neck falling down a flight of stairs. It's not very pleasant that this movie has the same eugenic impulse, which deals with mental illness by having the sufferer "selflessly" killing herself for the good of the family. So the movie of the week is Childhood of a Leader, a sinister, subtle, understated movie about one of the scarier child sociopaths in this story of the origins of a potential fascist. Berenice Bejo and Liam Cunningham are good as the less than warm parents.
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Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Robert Downey, Jr., The Avengers
Runner-ups: Tadashi Okuno (Like Someone in Love), Terence Nance (An Oversimplification of Her Beauty), Jean-Louis Trintignant (Amour), Ben Affleck (To the Wonder), Jared Gilman (Moonrise Kingdom), Daniel Craig (Skyfall), Robert Pattinson (Cosmopolis), Jamie Foxx (Django Unchained), Martin Freeman (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), Dwight Henry (Beasts of the Southern Wild),
Actress
Rin Takanashi, Like Someone in Love
Judi Dench, Skyfall
Olga Kurylenko, To the Wonder
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha
Runner-ups: Emanuelle Riva (Amour), Quvenzhane Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild),* Kelly Macdonald (Brave), Kara Hayward (Moonrise Kingdom), Saoirse Ronan (Byzantium), Gemma Arterton (Byzantium), Sabine Azema (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet), Ana Moreira (Tabu),
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Supporting Actor
Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Ryo Kase, Like Someone in Love
Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained
Paul Giamatti, Cosmopolis
Javier Bardem, To the Wonder, Skyfall
Runner-ups: Bruce Willis (Moonrise Kingdom), Ralph Fiennes (Skyfall), Tom Hiddleston (The Avengers), Jeremy Renner (The Avengers), Michael Fassbender (Prometheus), Albert Finney (Skyfall), Mathieu Amalric (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet), Ian McKellan (The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey), Edward Norton (Moonrise Kingdom), Ben Whishaw (Skyfall), Sylvester McCoy (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), Christian Vadim (Night Across the Street), Bill Murray (Moonrise Kingdom), Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln),
Supporting Actress
Edith Scob, Holy Motors
Naomie Harris, Skyfall
Amy Adams, The Master
Rachel McAdams, To the Wonder
Teresa Madruga, Tabu
Runner-ups: Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers), Kylie Minogue (Holy Motors), Laura Soveral (Tabu), Samantha Morton (Cosmopolis), Emma Thompson (Brave), Kerry Washington (Django Unchained), Cobie Smulders (The Avengers), Anne Consigny (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet), Isabelle Huppert (Amour), Sally Field (Lincoln), Juliette Binoche (Cosmopolis),
Not seen: Flight, The Impossible, The Sessions--------Kiarostami gets his third leading performance from me, and each one was in a different language. (Actually Juliette Binoche spoke in three languages in Certified Copy.) That may be some kind of record. Francis Ford Coppola directed the same character to an oscar, who spoke different languages in each. Steven Soderbergh directed oscar winners in the same year who spoke different languages (Julia Roberts and Benicio del Toro). The one possible rival with three is Luis Bunuel, who I've awarded one award in Spanish (for Tristana), nominated several people for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, which are in French, while his sole actual nomination from the Academy was for the English language version of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
--------There are several years where I could have nominated Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark. But I chose this year.
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Here are the films from 2011 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet.
Bellflower with Evan Glodell, Jesse Wiseman and Tyler Dawson
The Deep Blue Sea with Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale
Faust with Johannes Zeiler and Anton Adasinsky
Margaret with Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Jean Reno, Jeannie Berlin and J. Smith-Cameron
A Separation with Sara Bayat, Sarina Farhadi, Peyman Moaadi, Shahab Hosseini, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, Leila Hatami, Kimia Hosseini and Babak Karimi
Bellflower is a delirious independent movie, which I liked, and which others found misogynistic. Evan Glodell is a young man who with his friend dreams up post-apocalyptic devices, like a cool car armed with a flamethrower. He's also involved with a relationship with a beautiful young woman (Wiseman) which does not show a surfeit of good sense on either side.
The Deep Blue Sea is an adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play by Terence Davies. If your previous experience of Rattigan on film is Separate Tables, don't worry, this is an infinitely better movie. "It begins with an act of despair as Hester, 40ish estranged wife of reserved, 50ish high court judge Sir William Collyer, attempts to commit suicide (a crime in those days) by gassing herself. This action is dictated by the callously offhand behaviour of her lover, the 30ish Freddie Page, a handsome, feckless, sexually vigorous ex-Battle of Britain pilot. The play ends symmetrically beside the same fireplace, but this time the gas is lit – an unforgettably simple gesture, an act of almost heroic resignation." according to Philip French of The Guardian. Weisz was my runner-up for best actress, behind Kirsten Dunst for Melancholia.
Faust is Alexander Sokurov's take on the German legend, with Zeiler as Faust and Adasinsky, who I chose for best supporting actor as the Mephistopheles figure. From Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: "Sokurov's signature visual style is present: the sepia-soft cinematography creates a "magic lantern" effect, and the director appears, as ever, to have overdubbed the dialogue in the studio, as well as created a whispery-inner-monologue voice....This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear. It also plays out like a single, seamless, continuously morphing scene (a little like Russian Ark, his single-take tour of the Hermitage) in which Faust drifts about encountering different disquieting figures....This film moves in an eerie trance of disquiet." It also won the top prize at Venice that year.
Margaret stars Anna Paquin, who came in third behind Weisz. The second movie of Kenneth Lonergan, its release was delayed for years. I saw the three hour version that's available on the blue-ray as a normal DVD. Paquin plays a privileged New York high school student who selfishness and flightiness causes a fatal accident which she tries, very imperfectly, to rectify. I thought it was a rich, complex drama of someone the movie did not necessarily try to make more sympathetic. Berlin plays the best friend of the woman who died in the accident, and who helps Paquin try to get compensation for. J. Smith-Cameron plays Paquin's mother, who I gave a nomination to. Damon plays a teacher Paquin has a fling with. Reno plays the boyfriend of Smith-Cameron's character. "Margaret" isn't actually the name of Paquin's character, nor that of her mother nor of any of the other characters. It comes from a poem by Hopkins read by a teacher played by Matthew Broderick:
Márgarét, áre you gríevingOver Goldengrove unleaving?Leáves like the things of man, youWith your fresh thoughts care for, can you?Ah! ás the heart grows olderIt will come to such sights colderBy and by, nor spare a sighThough worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;And yet you wíll weep and know why.Now no matter, child, the name:Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressedWhat heart heard of, ghost guessed:It ís the blight man was born for,It is Margaret you mourn for.
A Separation won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as prizes at Berlin. Mooadi, who won my best Actor for that year is in a difficult situation. His wife. played by Hatami, wants to leave Iran for the sake of their daughter. Mooadi, however, has to look after his ill father. To make things worse, an accident occurs involving the nurse he hires, played by Bayat.
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Another Earth is a science fiction film. The earth turns out to have a twin planet. Brit Marling plays the accidental heroin who comes into contact with her alien doppelganger.
She sounds like an extremely unsympathetic protagonist.
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Here are the films from 2010 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet.
Certified Copy with Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel
Mysteries of Lisbon with Adriano Luz, Ricardo Pereira, Joao Luis Arrais, Afonos Pimintel, Clotilde Hesme, Maria Joao Bastos and Lea Seydoux
Poetry with Jeong-hi Yun and Lee David
Certified Copy got my best actress award for Juliette Binoche. The movie takes place somewhere in Tuscany. Shimmel is giving an art lecture and Binoche is one of the spectators. They meet afterwards and they end up spending the day together. As it goes on are the two pretending to be a couple, or are they actually a couple pretending they aren't? One of the most romantic films of the decade, and as it happened the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's penultimate film. From Godrey Cheshire's review for the Criterion Collection:
"Like many Kiarostami fictions, Certified Copy opens with the matter-of-fact air of a documentary. The camera stares deadpan at a table that stands before an antique stone mantelpiece and contains two microphones, a bottle of water, and a copy of a book titled Copia conforme. At length, an Italian man comes in and sets up for the event that is to follow, a lecture before a small crowd in a hall in the town of Arezzo. Running late, the lecturer arrives. James Miller (William Shimell), a handsome, dapper English scholar, apologizes and thanks the crowd for their interest in his book, which he ruefully notes has been more appreciatively received in Italy than in England. From what we can tell of the book by his comments, it challenges conventional thinking about artworks by asserting the value of copies in relation to originals. But we hear no more than the opening of Miller’s lecture because our attention is diverted to a woman in the audience, who scribbles something on a piece of paper and hands it to the author’s translator, then follows her teenage son out of the hall and to a restaurant.
"The interrupted lecture is typical of Kiarostami, whose films follow narrative pathways full of detours, diversions, and interruptions, some felicitous, others more jarring. The same is true of the emotional itineraries of his characters, as we are reminded when Miller, the following day, visits the antiques shop of the woman seen earlier (played by Binoche, she is never named but referred to only as Elle, or “She”). He has only a few hours before he must leave Arezzo. She would like to show him her shop, but he prefers the outdoors, so she offers him an excursion to the nearby town of Lucignano, famous as a site for weddings.
"From the first, their conversation evinces an odd mix of attraction and antipathy. She seems dressed and primed to seduce, and has bought six copies of his book, but is also testy, cross, and quick to disagree with him. Cool and a bit distant, Miller remains polite but doesn’t refrain from verbally sparring with her. Once they’re in Lucignano, however, his greatest displeasure comes not from her but from the sight of young married couples, whose happiness he dismisses as an illusion sure to be cruelly burst in time.
Then, when the couple stop in a trattoria for coffee, something strange happens. After Miller steps outside to take a cell phone call, She begins a conversation with the woman running the café, who mistakes the two foreigners for a married couple and begins to offer comments and advice about the wisdom and necessity of marriage. In a shot where the woman leans over to whisper something (we never learn what) to She, and completely blocks the camera’s view of her, it may be said that the film goes through the looking glass. We become aware of this shift moments later, when the two main characters resume their conversation, and now speak to each other as a couple who have been married fifteen years. For the rest of the film, they maintain this relationship, as they wander through the town, dredging up old differences and disappointments, before ultimately finding their way to the hotel where they spent their wedding night and now make a touching but unsuccessful attempt at re-forming their original bond."
Mysteries of Lisbon as it happens was also a penultimate film, this one of the director Raul Ruiz. It is certainly my favorite movie of 2010. It is based on a 19th century Portuguese novel about a boy of illegitimate birth who wants to know the secrets of his past. The movie, which was originally a television serial, is four and a half hours long, and consists of a series of interlocking stories as we learn more about the characters and their connections to each other. From Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian: "At the story's centre is Pedro de Silva, a young orphan in Lisbon, played as a boy by João Luís Arrais, and a young man by Afonso Pimental. This boy is taken under the wing of the orphanage's director, a priest of shrewd, enigmatic severity and reticent wisdom, wonderfully played by Adriano Luz. Father Dinis is to reveal to Pedro, little by little, the extraordinary story of his origins. The boy is to become acquainted with his mother Ângela (Maria João Bastos), the story of her unhappy marriage to the tempestuous and unfaithful Count of Santa Bárbara (Albano Jerónimo) and the disreputable brawler and merchant Alberto de Magalhães (Ricardo Pereira), who is to defend her honour. In the second half of the movie, Father Dinis himself is to reveal more of his own extraordinary career that preceded elevation to the priesthood: a master of disguise, a libertine, a soldier, a man about town, and, like Pedro, an abandoned child."
"There are many bizarre touches. An affray in the street is glimpsed, incompletely, from behind Father Dinis's coach, the priest himself seen in profile, gazing alertly straight ahead. Ruiz has many conventional "ball" scenes in which bewigged and powdered nobles prattle and gossip and scheme: it is a staple of period drama, but odd things happen here. In one sequence, a lady gasps and faints to the floor, an event that induces a catatonic silence among everyone else. Surrounding people will laugh in eerie unison and suddenness at some raillery. In another scene, the characters, shot from the waist up, glide with absurdly obvious smoothness, as if on rollerskates, or indeed like the cutout characters in Pedro's toy theatre."
Poetry got a best actress nomination for me for its star, Jeong-hi Yun, returning to the screen after she had retired after a long, admired career in Korean film. She plays a grandmother who faces two serious problems. First, she learns she is beginning to suffer from dementia. Second, she finds her wastrel, ungrateful, lazy grandson has been involved in a contemptible crime with some other schoolboys, and their fathers are bullying her to help cover it up. It is a restrained, subtle drama, as she tries to find some consolation by taking a poetry class. Again, to quote Bradshaw, "If it could be reduced to anything as prosaic as a formula, this mysterious and beautiful film from Korean director Lee Chang-dong might be expressed as Ozu plus … what? It is a picture of something inexpressibly gentle and sad, something heartbreaking and absolutely normal, but something stirred up by a violent, alien incursion. Something lands with an almighty splash in this calm millpond of melancholy regret."
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The 2011 Berlin International Film Festival winners were…
Best Actors
Peyman Moasi, Shahab Hosseini, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, and Babak Karimi, A Seperation*
Best Actress
Leila Hatami, Sareb Bayat*
"Sareb Bayat" isn't the name of a film. Sareh Bayat is one of the actresses in A Separation. Both the actors and actresses got ensemble awards.
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Here are the films from 2009 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet.
About Elly with Golishifteh Farahani, Sabar Abar, Peyman Moaadi, Taraneh Alidoosti, Shahab Hosseini and Arash
The City of Life and Death with Fan Wei and Qin Lan
The Limits of Control with Isaach de Bankole, Bill Murray, John Hurt, Paz de la Huerta and Tilda Swinton
Red Cliff Part 2 with Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi, Chang Chen, Tony Dawei, Zhang Jinheng, Zhao Wei and Lin Chi-Ling
A Town Called Panic with Stephane Aubler
About Elly was directed by Asghar Farhadi, better known for his next movie A Separation. The movie is about a number of middle class city people who invite one of their children's teachers, the eponymous Elly, to go to the beach with them for the weekend. Since the movie is Iranian, the women have to wear the conservative clothing that the characters likely wouldn't wear at home. At any rate during the vacation Elly mysteriously disappears. Actually what happened to her isn't that big a mystery, The drama is about how the characters react to this news, along with further revelations about Elly. We also learn about the class tensions between the middle class characters and the more pious people they're renting the weekend villa from, as well as from Elly's boyfriend, who turns up later in the movie. Below is Golshifteh Farahani, who I nominated for Best Actress.
City of Life and Death is about the 1937-38 Nanking massacre, where as part of Japan's invasion of China, it entered the then Chinese capital and slaughtered prisoners of war and civilians as well as engaged in mass rapes. Possible victims ranged into the six figures. One aspect of both the actual massacre and the movie was that a German civilian, and a Nazi party member, John Rabe, helped set up a safe zone that saved uncounted lives, notwithstanding Japanese incursions into it. Fan Wei and Qin Lan play a couple where the husband works for Rabe, and made my runner-up lists. Here is the trailer:
And here is Fan Wei
And here is the actual movie, which is not likely to be available on Netflix or smaller video stores, if they still exist where you live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFZXkWB8Gpg
The Limits of Control is a 21st century noir directed by Jim Jarmusch, and I was immediately blown away by its cool. Other people loathed it. To quote Philip French's review in The Guardian: "The Limits of Control is a picture people will love or loathe, though no one could fail to be impressed by the haunted, surreal atmosphere that is rendered by the brilliant Hong Kong-based Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle. I was riveted from the moment I read the epigraph from Arthur Rimbaud's 'Le bateau ivre': 'As I descended into impassable rivers/ I no longer felt guided by the ferryman.'" Isaach de Bankole, who I gave a best Actor nomination, goes around Spain and has a number of meeting with people. The conversations are brief, cryptic, involve the exchanging of matchboxes. John Hurt and Tilda Swinton are among the people he briefly meets. It doesn't took too much to guess that de Bankole's conduct is not entirely legal, as we see in his climactic meeting with Bill Murray's character.
Red Cliff Part 2 is, not surprisingly, a sequel to Red Cliff Part 1. If you, like me, were underwhelmed by John Woo's Hollywood films, this is a striking return to form. The movie is based on a famous incident in Chinese history, which has actually been the base in one of China's most famous novels. The scene is the early third century of the common era, where the Han dynasty will soon fall. Zhang Fengyi plays the corrupt and tyrannical prime minister who is seeking to crush all opposition. He got a supporting actor nomination from me. Two nobles agree to work together to resist Fengyi's naval armada at the eponymous Red Cliff. Tony Leung and Takeshi Kineshiro play, not the nobles, but their lieutenants, who are the stars of the movie. Leung got an acting nomination from me and Kineshiro was a runner-up. Zhao Wei plays the sister of one of the nobles, who bravely goes on an undercover operation among Fengyi's men. She got a supporting actress nomination from me.
A Town Called Panic is a crazy stop-action French animated film, starring three plastic toys and the chaotic adventures that occur when the 50 bricks one of them orders to make a barbecue actually ends as 50 million. From Roger Ebert's review: "The most frequent line of dialogue in this enchanting world is 'Oh, no!' One strange thing happens after another. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how Horse, Indian and Cowboy all end up perched precariously on a rock slab above a volcano at the Earth's center, or how they get from there to the middle of an ocean and the North Pole, or how they happen upon a mad scientist and his robot, named Penguin, or the excuses Horse uses on his cell phone to explain to Madame Longree why he hasn't turned up for his piano lessons. Or why it rains cows."
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Out of curiosity, if you didn't choose The King's Speech for best picture or for the best performances, why would you choose Hooper as best director?
Both Brokeback Mountain and Born on The Fourth of July won Best Director without winning any of the other prizes that you mentioned.
There's also these examples:
The Awful Truth
A Letter to Three Wives
A Place in the Sun
The Quiet Man
Giant
The Graduate
Life of Pi
Gravity
One reason the Oscars might disagree in their choice of Best Picture and Best Director is because they're chosen by different people: only directors for director, everybody for Picture. That, I suspect, explains the vote for Ford and for Giant. I suspect the directors thought themselves superior to the Box Office extravaganzas that won that year. But otherwise you would choose a director different from the best picture because you thought he (and it's almost invariably he) offered something distinctive to the movie. One might think of the distinctive witty tone that Mankiewicz and Nichols provides, or the stylistic pyrotechnics that Stone, Lee and Cuaron provided, or for being a better movie than Crash. One might prefer The Thin Man to The Scarlet Empress, but agree that the success of the former depends on the chemistry between Powell and Loy, and that von Sternberg offers more than van Dyke did. But if you don't think The King's Speech is the best movie, and that it didn't have the best performances, why would you think Hooper was the best director. He makes popular entertainments, he doesn't have a particular stylistic touch.
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I saw three movies last week, all of them disappointing. None But the Lonely Heart got Ethel Barrymore a supporting Actress Oscar and was one of two movies where Cary Grant got an oscar nomination. And perhaps if you had patience you might find something valuable in this story of a young Cockney man who tries to do the right thing amid the ambient criminality of his London neighborhood. But notwithstanding Grant's own lower class origins it's awkward seeing him in this role, and Odets does not do a good job with the screenplay which is laboured and has awkward exercises in poor uplift. Blossoms in the Dust got Greer Garson an oscar nomination for her role as a Texas woman who seeks to help orphaned children. But I can't say much for the Garson/Pidgeon relationship. At least Mrs. Miniver the reserve worked better given the middle class British setting and in Madame Curie the two were actually working together. Pidgeon soon leaves the film and there is some shameless cute shots of babies. (There's also an annoying Negro servant.) Nocturnal Animals got Michael Shannon an oscar nomination as a driven, careful sheriff who keeps his cards close to this chest. At least he's much better, but the imaginary story that is the centre of the story is both psychologically and emotionally awkward and ends implausibly, while the love story that supposedly surrounds it is unconvincing.
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Actor
Peyman Moaadi, A Separation
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Johanes Zeiler, Faust
Michael Fassbender, A Dangerous Method
Thomas Doret, The Kid with a Bike*
Runner-ups: Ralph Fiennes (Corolianus), Ryan Gosling (Drive), Evan Glodell (Bellflower), Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Janos Derzsi (The Turin Horse), Andre Wilms (Le Havre), Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible--Ghost Protocol), Owen Wilson (Midnight in Paris), Christoph Waltz (Carnage), Brad Pitt (Moneyball), Asa Butterfield (Hugo), George Clooney (The Descendants), Jamie Bell (The Adventures of Tintin), John C Reilly (Carnage), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), Muhammet Uzuner (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia),
*Juvenile Performer of the Year
Actress
Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea
Anna Paquin, Margaret
Sareh Bayat, A Separation
Erika Bok, The Turin Horse
Runner-ups: Cecile de France (The Kid with a Bike), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Jodie Foster (Carnage), Jessie Wiseman (Bellflower), Kati Outinen (Le Havre), Keira Knightley (A Dangerous Method), Kate Winslet (Carnage), Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Viola Davis (The Help), Elizabeth Olson (Martha Marcy May Marlene), Lola Creton (Goodbye First Love),
Supporting Actor
Anton Adasinsky, Faust
Hunter McCracken, The Tree of Life
Ben Kingsley, Hugo
Colin Firth, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Viggo Mortenson, A Dangerous Method
Runner-ups: Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life), Albert Brooks (Drive), Ezra Miller (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Shohab Hosseini (A Separation), Kiefer Sutherland (Melancholia), Sean Penn (The Tree of Life), Simon Pegg (Mission Impossible--Ghost Protocol), Tom Hiddleston (The Deep Blue Sea), Simon Russell Beale (The Deep Blue Sea), Tyler Dawson (Bellflower), Jeremy Renner (Mission Impossible--Ghost Protocol), John Hurt (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Jeremie Renier (The Kid with a Bike), Egon di Mateo (The Kid with a Bike), Vincent Cassel (A Dangerous Method),Jonah Hill (Moneyball), Matt Damon (Margaret), Bryan Cranston (Drive), Benedict Cumberbatch (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), John Goodman (The Artist), Jean Reno (Margaret), Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Paul Jesson (Corolianus), John Hurt (Melancholia), Max von Sydow (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)
Supporting Actress
Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia
Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life
J. Smith-Cameron, Margaret
Leila Hatami, A Separation
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Runner-ups: Jeannie Berlin (Margaret), Marion Cotillard (Midnight in Paris), Chloe Grace Moretz (Hugo), Paula Patton (Mission Impossible--Ghost Protocol), Carey Mulligan (Drive), Lea Seydoux (Mission Impossible--Ghost Protocol), Penelope Ann Miller (The Artist), Charlotte Rampling (Melancholia), Shailene Woodley (The Descendants),
Not seen: A Better Life, The Iron Lady, Albert Nobbs, My Week with Marilyn, Beginners, Warrior, Bridesmaids-------Notwithstanding their agreement for best actor, this is a year where Cannes' judgement is better than the Oscars.
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2007
- There will be Blood
- 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days
- Away from Her
- Persepolis
- Zodiac
- Michael Clayton
- Ratatouille
- My Winnipeg
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
- Paranoid Park
Runner ups: Eastern Promises, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon
2008
- Ponyo
- Wall-E
- A Christmas Tale
- Hunger
- Synecdoche, New York
- Of Time and the City
- Happy Go Lucky
- Waltz with Bashir
- Gomorrah
- Red Cliff, Part One
Runner-ups: The Beaches of Anges, Lorna's Silence, Summer Hours, Ballast, Wendy and Lucy, Rachel Getting Married, 35 Shots of Rum
2009
- The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
- Fantastic Mr. Fox
- Red Cliff, Part 2
- Up
- Inglourious Basterds
- The Limits of Control
- The Hurt Locker
- Micmacs
- In the Loop
- City of Life and Death
Runner-ups: A Town Called Panic, About Elly, Up in the Air, A Prophet, Bright Star
2010
- Mysteries of Lisbon
- Toy Story 3
- Certified Copy
- The Ghost Writer
- Uncle Bonmee who can Recall His Past Lives
- The Social Network
- Inside Job
- Black Swan
- Winter’s Bone
- Carlos
Runner-ups: Blue Valentine, Film Socialisme
2011
- The Tree of Life
- Faust
- Melancholia
- A Separation
- The Kid with a Bike
- Hugo
- The Deep Blue Sea
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
- Bellflower
- The Turin Horse
Runner-ups: Mission Impossible--Ghost Protocol, Margaret, Le Havre, A Dangerous Method, Midnight in Paris, Carnage, Corolianus, This is not a Film
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Last week I saw a surprisingly large eight movies. Kingsman: the Secret Service asks the question whether you would watch a big budget action movie in which Colin Firth plays a super hero based on a composite of his most popular roles? (As well as, less surprisingly, Samuel L. Jackson playing a villain based on a composite of his roles.) I would honestly say I've seen worse ideas for an action movie. But the violence is done in ways that become extremely distasteful, such as a scene where a church congregation are manipulated into massacring each other, and later when dozens, possibly hundreds of people have their heads explode and the scene is played for laughs. That the first massacre is based on an extremely bigoted congregation (so that makes it all right) and we don't see the children (who would of course be there) be murdered, which shows the corrupt manipulative mind behind the film.
The Suspended Step of the Stork is the first and least known of Theo Angelopoulos' trilogy of borders. It stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau together. Except they're not really together in the supporting roles they play. Surprisingly topical, although it deals with a refugee crisis more than a quarter century old, it is an intelligent, thoughtful film made in Angelopoulos' distinct style. Poetry is a Korean woman about an old woman who faces two crises: she realizes she is beginning to suffer from Alzheimer's and her lazy grandson whom she is rearing has been involved in a violent contemptible act and she is conscripted to help cover it up. The protagonist look to poetry to find some kind of consolation. The movie is intelligently made, with a good emphasis on Korean male sense of privilege, although the combination of troubles isn't entirely convincing. But the lead performance is very good and I nominated her for best Actress in the Your Favorites alternate best performances.
I saw two movies as part of Ricardo Montalban day. Border Incident is the better of the two, with Montalban and George Murphy working together to stop illegal immigration and the corrupt growers who use them. This is actually an effective movie from Anthony Mann, more so than the more overrated Reign of Terror/The Black Book. Howard DaSilva is very good as a calm, quietly cunning villain, it's noticeable that several characters notice that Montalban's character is too soft to pretend to be a bracero. It's also violent in a useful way, one is genuinely concerned about the fate of the characters. Battleground is one of those World War II movies were a multi-ethnic group of Americans is tested in battle, in this case the Battle of the Bulge. Except this movie was made in 1949, and nominated for Best Picture It's hard to say it deserved it. The movie focuses on the characters and less on the battle, and that in itself is OK, particularly with the snowy misc-en-scene. But the characters themselves are ordinary to the point of triviality: one would think the extra four months would add some frankness, but it seems to have subtracted it.
The Strange Case of Angelica is a little whimsical film, about a photographer who becomes obsessed with the image of the corpse of a young bride he photographed. But it's too understated for my taste. Finally I saw two Rosalind Russell movies where she was nominated for best Actress.
Auntie Mame is the more famous of the two, and Russell that gives a performance that is right of the boundary between outstanding and overwhelming. Ultimately I'm inclined to outstanding, and I can see why other people are attracted to the movie. At the same time Russell does tend to suck up all the oxygen in the movie. Granted that she doesn't have a full opportunity to raise her nephew, it's not as if how he turns out is the best advertisement for her. My Sister Eileen actually strikes me as a perfectly good screwball comedy, with Russell playing the Ohio-born journalist who finds herself the only sane woman in New York along with her conventionally prettier sister. I suspect its relatively low reputation for that year, maybe because it didn't have a leading director (Alexander Hall, instead of Billy Wilder and George Stevens), a lower caliber male lead who Russell has less romance with (Brian Ahearne, instead of Ray Milland and Spencer Tracy) and perhaps too many signs of its origins as a stage play. But it's perfectly enjoyable all the same with.
Your Favourite Performances from 1929 to present are...
in Your Favorites
Posted
Stranger by the Lake asks whether you would be willing to have great sex with a serial killer. I suppose I'm not the sort of person who has a lot of sympathy for this basic dilemma. But trying to be open-minded, I have to say I wouldn't keep doing it. The movie is a French one which takes place by a nude beach where homosexuals meet and have flings. The movie does include explicit homosexual sex. But it also has Patric d'Assumcao in a good supporting role who watches the events with a careful skeptical eye.
d'Assumcao on the left, Pierre Deladonchamps on the right, who really should have better taste in men.