Hosting the Oscars is one of the highest-pressure jobs in show business. It is also one of the most thankless. Hosting the show requires months of preparation and the ability to ad lib on the spot. We expect Oscar hosts to be funny without insulting anyone too much. And we tend to blame them when the show is overlong and dull, as it inevitably is.
The hosts are usually people who performed as stand-up comedians, and the most popular have included Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and Billy Crystal. The announcement today that instead of a comedian this year’s hosts will instead be two young actors, James Franco and Anne Hathaway. Both are possible candidates for awards themselves — Franco’s role in “127 Hours” is likely to get a Best Actor nomination and Hathaway might get a Best Actress nomination for her role in “Love and Other Drugs.”
Both have proved themselves hosting “Saturday Night Live,” showing poise and comic timing. Most important, they have both shown that they can project an instant likability at the same time as real star power. I think it will be a great show.
Enjoy this peek at one of the best films of the year, a sexy, touching, whip-smart romance with Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Hank Azaria, and Oliver Platt, written and directed by Edward Zwick (“Glory,” “thirtysomething,” “Legends of the Fall”), opening next month.
Almost 150 years ago Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson published his wildly imaginative story about Alice’s adventures down a rabbit hole. And now the wildly imaginative director Tim Burton has brought Wonderland to the 3D movie screen. It is less faithful to the original story than many of the previous dozen or so movie versions, but I think Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, would approve of Burton’s bringing his own take to the classic characters.
He brings his own story as well. Carroll’s Alice is a little girl bored by her sister’s dull book, and her journey is episodic and filled with wordplay and references to Victorian society that fill the annotated edition of the book with witty footnotes.
To make the story more cinematic, Burton tells us that all of that has already happened in what young Alice thought was a dream. This is her return visit. Alice is 18 years old and has just been proposed to by a dull but wealthy lord with no chin and bad digestion. As she meets up with the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter, she is not the only one who is confused. Characters seem puzzled and unsure about whether she is the real Alice. The Mad Hatter peers at her perplexedly. She may be Alice, and yet not quite completely the Alice they are looking for. “You were once muchier,” he tells her. “You’ve lost your muchiness.” In Burton’s version, Alice’s adventures are about her finding her “muchiness.” Her visit to Wonderland is a chance for her to understand what she is capable of and how much she will lose if she makes her decisions based on what people expect from her. As in the Carroll story, she is constantly changing size, and Burton shows us that she is really finding her place. She believes she is once again in a dream but increasingly learns that it is one she can control. By the time she faces the Jabberwock, she knows that she is in control — and that her courage and determination can create the opportunity she needs to follow her heart.
Johnny Depp brings a depth, even a poignance to the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter is utterly delicious as the peppery red queen, hilariously furious over her stolen tarts. There’s a thrilling battle, the visuals are dazzling, with references to classic book illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, and the 3D effects will have you feeling as though you are falling down the rabbit hole yourself. The frame story bookending the Wonderland/Underland adventure is tedious and, oddly, less believable than the disappearing cat and frog footmen. But Burton’s re-interpretation of the classic story is filled with muchiness and the result is pretty darn frabjuous.
Movies thrive on smackdowns. “Clash of the Titans.” “Alien vs. Predator.” “Freddy vs. Jason.” “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Rocky vs. Apollo Creed. And now, Bridezilla vs. Bridezilla. Kate Hudson (who co-produced) and Anne Hathaway play BFFs who are sweetly supportive of each other for two decades, linked in part by their shared obsession with the perfect wedding, until they both get engaged. At first, they are delighted and agree to be each other’s maids of honor. But when the only available spots at their dream location of The Plaza are at the same time, their brief attempt to resolve the conflict quickly escalates to armed combat.
Hudson plays a lawyer named Liv, a hard-charging, keep-it-all-together type with severe bangs and black-rimmed eyes that are supposed to make her look severe but just look raccoon-ish. Hathaway is Emma, a sweet-natured teacher who gets pushed around by everyone. But when it comes to her wedding, she decides to push back.
The promising premise and surface gloss are entertaining and Hudson and Hathaway just about own the adorable category these days. But this story has a sour taste and a hollow heart. The men in the story are disposable accessories, never consulted or considered, barely remembered. Not only is there no suggestion that they or their families might have some role to play in planning the wedding, there is almost no suggestion that they might have some reason for being there after the honeymoon. Weddings are like some huge supermarket sweep of frantic me-me-me events. Both women have to shanghai substitute maids of honor. They engage in an embarrassing dance-off at the bachelorette party to see who is sexier. Co-screenwriter Casey Wilson (of “Saturday Night Live”) shows up as another bride and the regal Candace Bergen appears as the most sought-after wedding planner but here is not one woman in the story who shows any consideration or affection for a man. A friend of Kate’s and Liv’s who gets married at the beginning of the film is already planning her next wedding by the end. The only love story that matters here is the one between Kate and Liv. No one ever asks if any of this madness serves any purpose other than one-upmanship. This is not a story about people getting married — this is a movie version of playing with Barbies.
Fiction is usually very linear, just because of the limits of time. The longest epic and the thickest novel don’t have enough scope to encompass extraneous detail. In real life people can’t find parking spots and fumble for correct change, but in movies everything usually moves with aerodynamic directness except for the elements of the particular muddle the characters are facing and we are attuned to expect that when a character says he has never done something that by the end of the film he will and that when a character gets a nosebleed by the end of the film he will probably be gone. Movie stories happen in the center of the frame, but real life happens around the edges. Move stories lay things out for the audience but real life is messy. Jonathan Demme’s brilliant new film is messy the way life is messy. Its power sneaks up on you. But by the time it is over, you will find that its characters and story have become real to you in a way that a crisper style of story-telling could not convey.
Kym (Anne Hathaway) is a substance abuser who has been in and out of rehab many times. As the movie opens, she is waiting to be picked up by her father, Paul (Bill Irwin), so she can go to the wedding of her sister Rachel (“Mad Men’s” Rosemarie DeWitt).
Filmed in an intimate, documentary style with a hand-held digital camera, the weekend unfolds like a home movie. The only music we hear is the music of the wedding, as musicians rehearse and perform throughout the weekend. When Paul jokingly tells one of the groom’s cousins, a young serviceman, to stop filming everything all the time it is possible to imagine that what we are watching is the footage he has been taking. Demme takes some audacious risks, letting scenes run on much longer than we are used to. It seems out of control, even self-indulgent until it becomes clear that Demme is utterly in charge and there is not a wasted frame.
Kym is defensive, hypersensitive, contrite, and very needy. She is a master of attention judo. Even in the midst of her sister’s wedding, she manages to turn the subject to herself. At the rehearsal dinner, after loving toast after toast, filled with affectionate jokes, Kym stands up and goes into a long, embarrassing speech about her need to make amends. She has impulsive sex with the best man. She displaces the maid of honor. And nothing is ever enough.
This is not another in the long series of awards-bait movies about substance abusers, going back to “The Lost Weekend” and “Come Fill the Cup,” through “28 Days” and “Clean and Sober.” Although at times it seems she is trying to grab our attention, too, Kym is not the focus of the story though at times she seems to be the manifestation of all of the rest of the family’s repressed feelings, while Paul keeps offering everyone food and pleading with them not to fight and the girls’ mother Abby (Debra Winger in a performance of controlled ferocity), superficially benign but always just out of reach. We see the scars before we hear the stories of the wounds as we meet the second spouses of Paul and Deborah and see how the family talks around certain areas.
But there is enormous generosity of spirit in this family. It is wonderfully diverse, with both Rachel and Paul married to African-Americans and a wide assortment of friends and family. The music that surrounds them is nourishing and inspiring. But there is also enormous pain as we only come to understand so gradually that we feel it before we think it. This masterful film is a quiet treasure, profoundly enriching.
