The Class

The Class feels like an assignment that requires serious concentration. This French film won the top prize last year at Cannes and competes for the Foreign Film Oscar Sunday night. The Class opens in an exclusive engagement at the River Oaks Three this weekend.
Imagine To Sir With Love but where the teacher embodies the same son of a bitch tendencies as the students. The Class (Entre les murs) doesn't tread the path of Hollywood school themed films, there's no glint of Stand and Deliver or Dangerous Minds. As directed by Laurent Cantet the action vacillates back and forth as a contest of wills between Mr. Marin and his students. The story unwinds with the in-your-face mood of a documentary and there's a reason why. Cantet shot the film throughout the span of a school semester using the author of its source material (François Bégaudeau) as the teacher and wisely casting a diverse group of teens to play the students.
Although the central Paris setting with an ethnic range of students gives added subtext to the simplicity of the story (the French title translates as Between the Walls) you can imagine the story itself unfolding in any metropolitan city. At first the script seems like a series of vignettes strung together set in the same class but the dialogue carries that thought a step further. The individual scenes are long and talky but reveal nuances of all the characters. A shorter number of scenes are set in the teacher's lounge and conference room. The Class captures the short depth of confined spaces in keeping with its confrontational moods.
As the semester progresses the drama gets specific and we focus on whether one Asian student's mom being deported affects his learning curve or the disciplinary action taken against another student from Africa. At the same time everyone has grown or more correctly achieved an arc. Mr. Marin actually gets quite testy towards the end. When he calls one obnoxious girl a "skank" the drama escalates to new heights. The Class never overwhelmed me but I had to respect what the director was saying about education and about people. Fortunately there's no quiz at the end.

Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy makes for an easy review if you just want to talk about what happens. Girl loses dog girl finds dog. Nothing happens, Wendy and Lucy rejoices in exploring all the nothing moments between a girl and her dog. Michelle Williams dresses down and stars while director Kelly Reichardt seeks the small moments of joy that occur in life.
Wendy follows the path of a different drum. Driving her compact car in route to a summer job with dog (Lucy) riding shotgun Wendy is laid back but poor, easy going but living week to week. When her car breaks down the situation goes from sleeping in the car to save motel money to wondering if there's enough money to fix the car and finish the trip.
Just when things look bleak Wendy shoplifts a couple of dollars worth of junk food from a supermarket and gets popped by the nerd checker/security dude. In the time it takes to pay bail (there goes the car repair cheese) and return to where she left Lucy tied outside the store the dog has gone missing.
Wendy and Lucy plays like an art film, the emphasis rests on emotion and the performances of Williams with a little Will Patton (as the car repairman) thrown in for good measure. Wendy and Lucy plays like a quiet festival film, there's not a wealth of action other that looking for the canine. Wendy is an everyman (or everyperson) for our times. Her economic reality mirrors what everyone else presumably is going through. Her mental equilibrium consistently vibrates with all the bad buzz but she maintains a quiet grace throughout her ordeals that you have to admire and relate to on some level.
Wendy and Lucy will play in a single theater (opens Friday at the downtown Angelika) and be gone before you know it, but now's the time to focus on Williams. She may very well pick up Heath Ledger's Oscar on Sunday (not etched in stone but fairly certain) as she is the mother of their daughter, and while not legally married still the closest thing to a wife and thus legal guardian of said award.
Williams as Wendy looks uncombed and non glamourous throughout much in contrast to her previous role as the supermodel in I'm Not There or even her appearance in Synecdoche, New York. Williams easily channels the kind of common sense and fair play that Henry Fonda used in his homestyle portrayals of working men. For Wendy it's just a series of bad breaks that have left her homeless along the uncharted roads of America.

John Lennon / Yoko Ono interview

An interview with John and Yoko from the website Wolfgang's Vault

Oscar Talk

Are the Oscars A) about the television presentation of the ceremony or B) about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences view of the event, or C) neither?
Everybody has an angle when they prognosticate about the awards ceremony, which is voted on by 5810 voting members of the Academy. Aren’t we just donut dunkers in the coffee of another organization’s ideals?
I want to answer many questions you may have about the Oscars. Why are there only three songs nommed? Why wasn’t Sally Hawkins nominated? Why was Brad Pitt nominated? Why aren’t the Oscars the people choice awards? Why does the televised version have to be so long?
Have you ever heard anybody complain when a concert goes on, encore after encore for four hours? Have you ever seen people feel gypped when a sports event goes into extra innings or sudden death?
Yet the general consensus is that the Oscars should be some kind of short, sweet show that is over before it begins. Personally I like the down moments, the boring parts that allow the viewer time to consume massive amounts of libations, as well as the before and after coverage that adds two to three hours to the spectacle. Do you realize that a single stylist employed by the studios to assist a nominee makes as much as 10K a day?
Part of the allure of watching the show is for it to be fresh but for the last few years in particular and over the last generation in general so much emphasis has been placed on second guessing the winners or revealing aspects of the ceremony. Only last week Peter Gabriel sent a letter to the Academy stating he was withdrawing as a performer because his song “Down to Earth” from WALL-E (co-written by Gabriel with Thomas Newman) was to be part of a three-minute medley with the other two songs nominated for Best Song. That’s certainly more than I needed to know but it doesn’t really affect my desire to watch.
It’s an indication that the producers of this year’s show (producer Laurence Mark and executive producer Bill Condon, the pair previously worked on Dreamgirls, and Condon helmed Kinsey and Gods and Monsters) want to make changes to show how hip the program is, but were the Academy Awards ever hip? Certainly as a cultural barometer the AA charts the mindset of any given year, yet each and every year contains films that are bona fide classics that are overlooked by Oscar. By the way if you win an Oscar you sign a release that states that you won’t resell said award without first offering the statue back to the Academy for $1.
Most categories are filled with nominees chosen by the various members from those specific branches (for instance the art directors branch chooses the nominees for Best Art Direction). Of specific interest are the awards for Animation, Documentary, Foreign film and Short films because these categories have rules that differ from the other categories. Committees are formed for each of those categories and the members who join the committees have to watch the choices theatrically. In the case of Animated Film if there are 16 or more animated films to choose from there will be five nominees otherwise there are three. Even though all nominees are chosen by committee or by members of the various branches the final voting, with the exception of the previously mentioned categories, is open to all active and life Academy members.
For Best Song the Academy music branch members will screen clips of the songs in contention and vote on a scale of 6 to 10 with half-steps (like 8.5). Only songs that score 8.5 or higher will continue to the nomination level and no more than five or less than three are then chosen.
Best short subject live action or short subject animated films can qualify by playing for three days in a theater in L.A. or win a best-of category at a film festival specified by the Academy. There are literally hundreds of film festivals in the world yet the Academy has a list of less than 60 that will qualify a short film for this category. Interestingly the Austin Film Festival has been on that list for a while and this year the SXSW Film Festival also joins that list.




For a look at each Oscar category use this link:
http://www.oscar.com/nominees/?pn=nominees