Every year, Turner Classic Movies salutes the Oscars with a month full of classics and rarely-seen gems that were nominated for or won Oscars, not just for the acting and directing awards but for costume design, cinematography, and more. Today features three films about the same character — Robert Shaw, Charles Laughton, and Richard Burton all played Henry VIII in Oscar-nominated or awarded films. The most-nominated actor gets a special tribute. (Do you know who it is? Here’s a hint: “Five Easy Pieces,” “Terms of Endearment,” and “Reds.”) There’s also a tribute to the actress who had the most nominations without ever winning, Deborah Kerr. And there are enticing categories like “Oscar Falls in Love,” “Husbands and Wives,” and one for “Love at First Site.” Every movie on the schedule is worth watching, so get our your calendars and go through the whole schedule.
Sam Rockwell gives one of the best performances of the year as Kenny Waters, a man wrongly convicted of murder for eighteen years until his sister was able to prove that he was innocent and get him released. Betty Ann (Hillary Swank) and Kenny were two of nine children from seven fathers raised in a succession of foster homes. She was a high school dropout and new mother when he went to prison. She went back to school, graduated from college and law school, passed the bar, and with the help of Cardozo Law School’s Innocence Project, was able to prove through DNA evidence that the blood found at the crime scene was not his.
Rockwell is mesmerizing as a man whose kind heart and family loyalty sometimes suffer from his impulsively confrontational behavior. He conveys at every stage the weight of his experience in prison as we see him over the 18-year period. His frustration, longing, despair, his fear of hoping too much mingled with his unquenchable pride in his sister are all heartbreakingly evident. He shows us why he was one of the local police department’s favorite “usual suspects” but he also shows us why someone would spend her life working on his behalf, even after everyone tells her to move on.
Director Tony Goldwyn and screenwriter Pamela Gray do a fine job of shaping the material, giving us a sense of the characters’ past experiences, the strength of their connection, and the press of time. The cast includes the reliable support of Minnie Driver as Betty Ann’s law school classmate and loyal friend and Juliette Lewis, outstanding as a recanting witness.
Swank, who co-produced, is sincere and dedicated if not ideal casting for this role. She has gravitated lately to a series of heroic characters, though her best work has been in more damaged or fragile roles. A high school dropout in real life, she is drawn to characters who exemplify education and achievement. But she gives us no sense of school as anything but an obstacle course. Her learning is not tied in any way to expanded understanding; she seems to have no curiosity about the law and no passion for anything but freeing her brother. We see the impact of her single-mindedness on her husband and sons but not how their reactions affect her. The story is one of triumph that cannot help but move us, but as a real-life character who gives everything, Swank does not give us enough.
Five-time Oscar-winning composer John Barry has died at age 77. His music includes “Born Free,” and scores for several James Bond films, with perhaps “Goldfinger” the best-remembered. He could evoke a sensual, jazzy contemporary setting, romantic classicism, an intimate romance or vast adventure.
During the psychedelic 1960s, the scene with the caterpiller puffing on a hookah was popularly considered to be a reference to opium or hashish, possibly because the movie, like the book, has such a surreal and dream-like quality, but there is nothing in
Violence/ Scariness:
None
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
1951
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.
Roger Ebert says the case is closed on 3D — it can never work. He has some powerful support for his position, a letter from Walter Murch, “the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema.” Murch says that “horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.” He says our brains are not capable of processing 3D movie technology, because “the glasses “gather in” the image — even on a huge Imax screen — and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.”
I’m not sure I agree; I expect a glasses-free 3D technology is possible, for one thing. But I do agree with Ebert that there is a much less gimmicky and much more powerful enhancement — Ebert’s counter-recommendation — called Maxivision48.
Movies “move” because we see a series of still pictures so quickly that it fools our eye through something called “persistence of vision.” It’s the same technology as a flip-book, and it hasn’t changed much since it shifted from 16 frames per second to 24 when movies added sound (this is why silent films often seem jerky). Unlike current digital equipment, which replicates the 24 frames per second standard, Maxivision combines digital and film to eliminate wasted space and project at 48 frames per second to give the audience a fresher, clearer, more distinct image.
I love their tagline: “See What You’ve Been Missing.”
