Diana

Oy vey!  The dreary and unintentionally absurd Diana stars Naomi Watts as the People's Princess and chronicles the last two years of her life.  Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (who ventured into similar terrain with the Academy Award nominated Downfall about the waning years of Adolph Hitler) and scripted by Stephen Jeffries, Diana is a miscalculation from the start, with its made-for-trashy-television approach and unsubtle staging of the demise of one of the most beguiling and enigmatic creatures of the twentieth century.  The film begins with Diana dithering about in her Parisian hotel room, a sense of dread swells the soundtrack, as if she knew.  Well we know whats about to happen; it was one of the most historic events of the last thirty years.  As she careens down the hotel corridors, she stops, the camera stops to look back.  It's meant to be an artistic moment of reflection, but the effect is simply ridiculous.  Oh the foreboding!

Yet this is a love story, and the title cards bring us back two years earlier to another confusing part of the Princess Diana puzzle, just before the divorce heard round the world from Prince Charles became final and the world was as enraptured to the dramatics of the royal family in a more singularly trashy way.  Aware her marriage is but up, but in no position to call it officially kaput, the film posits that Diana had one last shot at happiness and romance with a dapper Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan (played by Lost actor Naveen Andrews.)  The two meet cute in a traditionally Hollywood moment at a hospital when a friend of the late princess falls ill and a grand romance develops.

Cinema Eye Nominations

Cinema Eye, alongside the IDA, honor the best in documentary features.  The Act of Killing and Stories We Tell appear at this juncture to be two of the most acclaimed of the year.  Musings and Stuff heartily approves of Sarah Polley's wonderful intimate portrait.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
The Act of Killing
After Tiller
Cutie & the Boxer
Leviathan
Stories We Tell

BEST DIRECTOR
Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing
Martha Shane & Lana Wilson, After Tiller
Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, Leviathan
Tinatin Gurchiani, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
Sarah Polley, Stories We Tell 

BEST DIRECTOR
Janus Billeskov Jansen, The Act of Killing
Alain Berliner, First Cousin Once Removed
Nels Bangerter, Let the Fire Burn
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, Leviathan
Francisco Bello, Our Nixon

Best Animated Feature

Nineteen films have been deemed eligible to compete for this years Best Animated Feature Oscar:

Disney's Frozen

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
• The Croods
• Despicable Me 2
• Epic
• Ernest & Celestine
• The Fake
• Free Birds
• Frozen
• Khumba
• The Legend of Sarila
• A Letter to Momo
• Monsters University
• O Apóstolo
• Planes
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion
• Rio: 2096: A Story of Love & Fury
• The Smurfs 2
• Turbo
• The Wind Rises

2013 Award Season Moment of Zen

Upstart A24 was serious, it appears, in its (adorable) efforts to get James Franco some awards consideration love for Spring Breakers.  A pleasurable folly, even though his delightfully bent Alien was one of the few watchable aspects of a largely unwatchable movie.  It does ask a question however considering how insanely prolific Franco is, when (if at all) the Academy will acknowledge him again?  This year alone he acted in the indie spring hit Breakers, the diametrically opposed spring hit Oz: The Great & Powerful, the summer hit This Is the End, Lovelace and the upcoming Homefront.  Not to mention directing the Sundance doc Interior. Leather Bar. (the bizarre re-imagining of the cut out footage of Friedkin's Crusing-- when will that ever appear?), the Cannes title Faulkner adaptation As I Lay Dying (which he also co-starred) and the Venice title Cormac McCarthy adaptation Child of God (co-starred again.)  He also appeared in the fall festival entry Palo Alto from next generation Coppola, Gia which was based on his own collection of short stories.  Whew!  Even if none of the product above is "awards baity" in the refined sense of the word, all he had to do to get his first nomination was saw off his arm.

All the power to A24 though--- while your at it, please contribute a little nugget of an awards campaign to your strongest 2013 title-- the sensitively and beautifully acted teen drama The Spectacular Now.

Dallas Buyers Club

The tentative but conventionally rousing Dallas Buyers Club tells the extraordinary true story of Ron Woodroof, a Texan good ol' boy who in the late 80s was given a death sentence when he became infected with the AIDS virus.  On the outset an unsavory, seemingly nasty character prone to homophobic, misogynistic and self-destructive outbursts all in the name of retaining his chauvinistic alpha male supremacy, Woodroof became an unlikely foot soldier in providing vital drugs and vitamins, as well as awareness at a time when the American consciousness was too busy piddling their thumbs as thousands of people died.  It's an important and significant story and chronicle of a not-so-distant past horror story, tackling a subject that Hollywood has for the most part been afraid and sketchy at best in telling despite all the red hearts that have so famously been adorned on some of the brightest and most beautiful movie stars in the last quarter century. 

In many ways, because of this and despite this, Dallas Buyers Club is a difficult movie to merely be judged on its own merits and tells a story too significant in recent American history to be ignored or deemed anything less than admirable even if the hopes, expectations and vitality of such a tale are far more deserving of something that soars rather than just exists.  Even more considering its been twenty years since Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia became one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to eve talk about AIDS.  Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y.) and written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, Dallas Buyers Club is a reverent by-the-numbers account of how Woodroof (played by Matthew McConaughey), a hick-ish electrician became one of the unwilling champions of a cause that was all but ignored by the medical and political machines of Reagan-era America.  Once contracted with the virus and given the thirty days left to live speech by doctors, Woodroof explored his options-- first by overdosing on AZT, the hazardous product being hyped up that was in the early process of being tested, then by exporting unapproved medications being sold south of the border and around the world.  Ingredients starts to click and slightly improve his condition and eventually he forms a membership club to his AIDS-afflicted neighbors.  By design, the film charts itself with the sort of muckraking elan of Erin Brockovich.