Women's Pictures - Ava DuVernay's Middle of Nowhere

Is it trite to start a film review with a Langston Hughes quote? Near the end of Middle of Nowhere, after Rosie (Lorraine Toussaint) yelled out "Every year is next year for you!" I kept thinking of the Hughes poem Harlem: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Hughes offered several possibilities, but his final warning rings truest for the characters in Middle of Nowhere:

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Ava DuVernay’s second feature casts an empathetic eye on how the day-to-day particulars of supporting a spouse in prison - the hours of travel, legal battles, fees, bus rides and delayed desires - slowly, inexorably wear down even the most hopeful people. So what does happen for those deferred dream people who wait for next year?

Unlike I Will Follow, Middle of Nowhere is not based on personal experience. Regardless, the film feels intensely personal. It’s told from the point of view of Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi, in what would be a star-turn if there was any justice in the world). Ruby drops out of medical school and becomes as a night nurse to support her husband, Derek (Omari Hardwick, sullen in a prison jumpsuit or smiling in Ruby’s memories). He is serving an 8 year prison sentence for an initially unvoiced crime. Though Ruby supports Derek financially, legally, and emotionally, her own support system is thin - a doting but directionless sister (Edwina Findley), a mother (Lorraine Toussaint) whose good advice is undermined by poor delivery, and an amorous bus driver (David Oyelowo). The cast is extraordinary, and the film is shot by TFE favorite Bradford Young, but what DuVernay does with her raw materials turns the film from simple melodrama to subtle character study.

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Spirit Awards. Tape-Delay Blogging

I purposefully stayed off line so as to not have any awards spoiled for me tonight. Andy Samberg hosts. First things first, Andy Samberg's opening monologue is maybe a "D" at best but those Oscar Pistorius jokes are defiantly "F"...as is the segueway from a Michael Fassbender dick joke (in 2013 no less) to Quvenzhané Wallis. Errr. Inappropriate Segueway Inappropriate Segueway. But I love love love this faux trailer Bottlecap especially that "they're in f***ing everything" shout-out to two ubiquitous actors Ari Graynor and Chris Messina who can ubiquit all over me whenever they want.

Seriously, I ♥ them so much.

Public Service Announcement: Ari Graynor will soon be on TV weekly in the Cameron Diaz role in Bad Teacher and Chris Messina is available (all of him) in the romantic drama 28 Hotel Rooms which is out on DVD right now. I'll try to write something about that one soon.

And on to the awards!

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Best of the Year: Nathaniel's Top Ten

Previously: The Honorable Mentions

Often during the calendar-straddling list-making frenzy of "top ten season" a scene or a line of dialogue or even a whole film will refuse to dislodge itself from any internal conversation you may have with oneself about the year. That moment for me this year was Kylie Minogue's cameo late in Holy Motors when she arrives in a trenchcoat, like some lost Casablanca love, to sing:

Who were we. When we were. Who we were back then?

It'd be ineloquent bathos, too crudely and redundantly stated, if it weren't sung. But this heightened musical longing for a lost identity, lifts and soars with pathos instead. The year's best films kept reinforcing this most interior of questions as they wrestled with their past selves towards an uncertain future.

Nathaniel's Top Ten of 2012
From all movies screened that received US theatrical releases...

ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow)
Sony/Columbia. December 21st 

[SPOILERS FOLLOW] My favorite exchange in Mark Boal's dense script occurs between a government official and a CIA operative. "What the fuck does that mean?" "It's a tautology". I laughed at the wordplay in the film but wasn't expecting the widespread tautological eruptions that followed the film's premiere as everyone bent themselves into self-affirming pretzels to debate its portrayal of torture in the film's opening scenes as if there were only one way to look at the damn movie... as if torture were the only thing worth discussing about the film! To Zero Dark Thirty's credit, though I too was discomfited by its suggestion that torture yielded useful intel, there's nary a comfortable or pandering moment in the film. Like The Hurt Locker before it, ZDT attempts something like an apolitical stance though how successful that is (or ever can be) will be left to each viewer to decide. In my mind, Bigelow doesn't suggest that you're meant to enjoy torture or even embrace the mission's success, exactly...

more on Zero Dark and 9 more triumphs after the jump...

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Podcast Unchained: Top Ten Sneaks, Actresses of Color, Movie Gifts

Part 1 of 2
For this megamix conversation -- still shorter than most of the Best Picture Hopefuls! -- which is the last before the Oscar Nominations we ignored the act of "predicting" beyond a couple hazy hunches and dug into Quentin Tarantino's new slavesploitation western (which none of us like as much as the internet does as it so happens). But since this is the Film Experience we do love to meander through movie memories and Oscar digressions, Django Unchained is hardly the only film we visit in this 44 minute podcast. [With Nathaniel, Nick, Katey, and Joe.]

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Last minute Oscar hunches: Eddie Redmayne? Michael Haneke?
• Django Unchained
• Ann Dowd's self-funded Oscar campaign for Compliance
• Nathaniel's special Christmas Gift
• 1947 & 1991 Oscar Winner Flashbacks: Loretta Young and Mercedes Ruehl, anyone?
• Middle Of Nowhere's transfixing Emayatzy Corinealdi
• The power and powerlessness of physical beauty 
• Podcast Bingo

You can download the podcast on iTunes or listen right here at the bottom of the post. Join in the conversation by commenting! Did you get any movie related Christmas gifts? What's #6 on your (current) top ten list? 

Django Unchained, Top Ten Sneak Peeks

Cross Country Critics Champs

To some extent I've lost my taste for covering the critics awards -- at least in depth -- since there are more each year and more which do that coy "nominations first!" thing to try to drum up publicity (it works since the web always needs content... even if the content is the same as the day before as so many of these awards prove!). I'm not trying to be a killjoy -- I'm really not! -- but I guess I have anger issues with my fellow critics since they are all so willing to abandon anything they loved during the year once the year end Oscar movies hit. I challenge everyone to go back and read what critics wrote about Michael Fassbender when Prometheus premiered and then wonder why they can't be bothered with them now... even when they go so far as to announce nominations ?!? Oscar has a bias against genre performances but unfortunately many of the same media voices who complain about this share the same bias in their own year end honors! Someone will have to explain to me how Alan Arkin in Argo and Robert DeNiro in Silver Linings Playbook for example are more exemplary examples of Great Film Acting than Fassy in Prometheus. I'd wait but I fear the wait would be longer than the running time of 25 historical epics combined  since who in their right mind would try and justify this verbally even if they votes say differently?

But look at me flying way off track!

So grumpy, me, I apologize! All that said, this year has had a bit more variety in critical winners than some recent years and I do some love reading awards lists. So let's hit four cities and one multi-city stop after the jump and see what they liked most this week... The results are not uninteresting. MORE

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