Hi guys!
Pada nonton Ordinary People ga semalem di MetroTV? Atau malah pada nonton final Liga Barbar…:D

Anyway, abis nonton Ordinary People bikin gue semangat lagi utk ngikutin Oscar thn ini. Spt kita udah tau, film ini menyabet Best Picture dan Best Director utk Robert Redford dan 2 Oscar lainnya (Timothy Hutton dan Adapted Screenplay) tahun 1980 lalu. Oscar thn itu cukup melegenda krn, sekedar utk menyegarkan ingatan kita semua, thn dimana Martin Scorsese dan Raging Bull-nya ditaklukkan, yg menghasilkan kutipan abadi dr Marty yg mengungkap posisi seorang filmmaker spt Marty di ‘the Hollywood system”:
"When I lost for Raging Bull, that's when I realized what my place in the system would be, if I did survive at all--on the outside looking in."

Menurut gue Ordinary People bukan film yg jelek, cuman biasa-biasa aja, quiet good, sort of, but but not great. Dan gue ngga akan bohong kalo gue sempet juga netesin sesuatu dr mata gue di beberapa adegan :D. Tapi memang film spt Ordinary People adl salah satu tipe film yg disuka AMPAS members, yaitu ttg kisah drama kalangan menengah atas kulit putih Amerika yg menekan semua sisi emosional sampai ke payoff ending-nya. Tahun sebelumnya, film drama serupa, Kramer Vs. Kramer juga meraih Best Picture. Hal lain yg membuat Ordinary People juga lebih friendly buat Oscar, adl krn Robert Redford, sutradaranya, adl seorang aktor yg jadi sutradara, yg banyak mendapat dukungan krn mayoritas anggota AMPAS adl aktor. Tidak mengherankan juga, Kevin Costner, Ron Howard dan Clint Eastwood yg juga aktor/ mantan aktor, film yg disutradarainya pernah ngedapetin Best Picture. Ironisnya, Scorsese pernah berhadapan dgn 3 sutradara ini dlm bersaing di Oscar. Selain Redford, dgn Costner thn 1990, dan blm lama ini dgn Eastwood.

Gue ngga ngomentarin apa mereka ini layak atau tidak ngedapetin Best Picture, toh Million Dollar Baby dan Unforgiven adl termasuk film favorit gue. Gue cuman mengangkat lagi topik ini dlm rangka menyambut Oscar 2005.

Kalo yg pengen tau bagaimana resepsi kritikus thn itu thd Ordinary People, mungkin review Pauline Kael bisa sedikit menghangatkan suasana... :D Gue tdk menganggap Kael sbg the best film critic, tapi Kael adl satu dr 5 kritikus Amerika plg penting yg pernah hadir di arena film criticism. Salah satu tulisan Kael favorit gue adl saat Kael me-review A Clockwork Orange.

Ordinary People - "The Iron-Butterfly Mom"
The New Yorker, October 13, 1980
by Pauline Kael

You know you're in for it when you see the solemn white titles against a black background--and in silence. Is it going to be Robert Bresson cauterizing your funny bone? When the discreet classical music starts--a piano, first just one hand and then the other, on Pachelbel's Canon in D--you know it's going to reek of quality, and that it's going to be an attempt at the austere manner of Kramer vs. Kramer and Scenes from a Marriage. Movie stars who become directors sometimes seemt to choose their material as a penance for the frivolous good times they've given us. Paul Newman made Rachel, Rachel, and now Robert Redford has made Ordinary People, which is full of autumn leaves and wintry emotions. It's an academic excercise in catharsis; it's earnest, it means to improve people, and it lasts a lifetime. The story is about the Jarretts, a Protestant family living in an imposing brick house in Lake Forest, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. Conrad (Timothy Hutton), a high-school student, has the shakes, and dark circles around his eyes, because he can't sleep, and we soon learn that he has only recently emerged from a psychiatric hospital, where he spent four months and had electric-shock treatment, following a suicide attempt. His mild, ineffectual father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland), who is a successful tax lawyer, is worried about him but can only make inane, formal attempts to reach him, and his control-freak mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), whose chief interest is golf, expresses little feeling for him beyond polite aversion. It boils down to Strother Martin's sick joke in Cool Hand Luke: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." There is so little communication in this family that the three Jarretts sit in virtual silence at the perfectly set dinner table in the perfectly boring big dining room; it's a suburban variant of American Gothic. From time to time, Calvin, with a nervous tic of a dimpling smile--it seems to get stuck somewhere in his cheek muscles--tries to make contact with his son, and urges him to see the psychiatrist recommended by the hospital.

Conrad begins to have sessions with this psychiatrist, Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch), whose office is pleasantly grubby, cluttered, and warmly inviting. Dr. Berger is not a monosyllabic Freudian who waits for the patient to bring up what's bugging him (or the movie would last many lifetimes). He's a free-method activist who grapples with the problems; he talks to Conrad, he prods and yells and emotes. And he's the model of what this uptight Protestant kid would be if he were cured: Jewish. (But then why do so many Jews go to shrinks? An, that's a different story.) With Dr. Berger shouting "Feel!" at him, Conrad soon begins to have breakthroughs: he learns what you knew as soon as you heard he had an older brother who was accidentally drowned when they were out sailing together on Lake Michigan--his mother, who loved the brother, blames Conrad, and he feels guilty because he survived. (You knew because it's the standard TV-style explanation; you're consistently ahead of the storytelling, the way you almost always are when you watch a prestigious TV movie--which this really is.) Moving along on the road to recovery, Conrad starts speaking up and expressing his feelings at home, becomes more outgoing, and begins to date a pretty girl (Elizabeth McGovern) who has a deep, purring voice and a funny, understanding manner. But the loosening of his emotional tensions opens up a can of worms in the family. His seeing a psychiatrist makes Beth rigid with disapproval, and when Calvin, talking to a friend at a party, mentions that the boy is going to a doctor, Beth's face twists with anger. (This is the kind of movie in which the mother keeps the dead boy's room intact--a shrine that probably has its own cleaning lady.) Calvin, who realizes the cruelty of his wife's rejection of their son, goes to see Dr. Berger in order to explain what Conrad is up against at home, and after hedging and fumbling he finally comes out with it and says that he guesses he came to talk about himself. At this point, the movie cuts away. And it's at this point, if you had any doubts before, that you know the movie is going to be a cheat.

The way Ordinary People is structured, if Conrad's brother hadn't been accidentally drowned everything in the family would have been hunky-dory, neat and happy, and there wouldn't be a picture. Obviously, the film means to get at something much deeper and widespread: it means to get at the harm that repression causes, and to suggest that orderly patterns of polite living can make it almost impossible for people to express their feelings except by an explosion, like Conrad's attempted suicide. But everytime Ordinary People comes close to anything messy or dirty or sexual it pulls back or cuts away. What is Calvin's relationship with Beth based on, anyway? (It's not likely that she turns into a hot pixie at night: there are military-looking pinstripes on her bathrobe.) How did Beth's love for the son who was drowned--a love that, in the one flashback glimpse we get of it, appears to have been flirtatious--affect her and her husband? Did it make Conrad hate his brother? There's a nasty, almost conscious incestuousness lurking in Beth and never brought to the surface, and even at his most neurotic Conrad is still a "nice boy." (There are no drugs in this picture, and no teen sex; he meets his girl at choir practice.) The movie is just as sanitized as the fantasy of upper-middle-class life it sets out to expose. And it's just as empty and orderly: Calvin has the possibility of becoming a decent, whole person, because he is willing to open himself to Dr. Berger, but Beth, who rejects Calvin's plea that she also go, is too proud to admit to any weakness or need; shaking uncontrollably at the thought of her life collapsing, she still rejects help, and she is doomed to freeze-dry.

As this Wasp witch, whose face is so tense you expect it to crack, Mary Tyler Moore also seems to be doing penance for having given audiences a good time. Her idea of serious acting seems to be playing a woman who has a mastectomy (First You Cry, on TV), a suicidal, bedridden quadriplegic (Whose Life Is It, Anyway?, on Broadway), and this self-deceiving woman who cares more for appearances than for her husband and son. Are fine comediennes still to be called courageous for giving performances as locked in dreariness as Carol Burnett's were when she went through her overage-bachelor-woman pregnancy in The Tenth Month and lost her son in Friendly Fire? As Beth, Mary Tyler Moore holds her pinched seriousness aloft like a torch. The fault isn't just in her acting; it's also in the writing and in the directing. She has been made into a voodoo doll stuck full of pins. This movie is Craig's Wife all over again: Beth is the compulsively neat, dedicated-to-appearances, unloving Harriet Craig, the perfect wife. But this time as a mother. She is so completely Harriet Craig that I didn't believe it for an instant when she left the house at the end. Even within its own terms, the film goes wrong here. The impersonal, ice-palace house is what Beth is married to--the house is Beth. It's not for living, it's for show, and it's her proof that everything is just as it should be. Beth would have stayed in her house, like Harriet Craig, and the men would have left. What are they going to do with it, anyway? Invite Dr. Berger to mess it up and make it homey?

continue....



Ordinary People delivers on the promise of that silent opening--a certificate of solemnity. The pace is unhurried, and as a director Redford doesn't like to raise his voice any more than Beth does. Like many other actor-directors, he doens't reach for anything but acting effects. The cinematographer, John Bailey, lights the images well enough (though the only lighting that's at all arresting is in the high-school swimming-pool scenes), but Ordinary People has that respectable, pictorial, dated look that movies get when the director has a proficient team of craftsmen but doesn't really think in visual terms. Redford shows taste and tact with most of the actors, and there are well-observed moments. Yet every nuance seems carefully put in place, and the conversations are stagy, because there's nothing in the shots except exactly what we're supposed to react to, just as there is nothing in Beth's character or in Calvin's except what's needed to fit a diagram of suburban suffocation. Redford's work is best in the light, funny scenes, when Conrad gets a chance at byplay with kids his own age. Alvin Sargent, who wrote the script, which is based on the popular 1976 novel by Judith Guest, wrote some bits of sharp repartee for Conrad. Mostly, though, the dialogue is intelligent in an over-modulated, point-making way, and often it's psycho-babble in full bloom. (Calvin to Beth: "I don't know who you are.... I don't know if I love you anymore, and I don't know what I'm going to do without that." Beth's only response is to look stricken. Who wouldn't be stricken listening to this crap?) The movie is not above shamelessness: surely we could have been spared the symbolic broken dish and the information that this monstrous woman wouldn't even let her sons have a pet? And when Conrad tries to hug his mother, she sits as straight as a plank of wood, with her eyes wide open in the timeworn manner of actresses demonstrating frigidity. In general, the more emotional the scenes are, the worse they play.

Casting Timothy Hutton, the nineteen-year-old son of the late Jim Hutton, as Mary Tyler Moore's son was astute; he matches her physically, in a very convincing way. (And casting the beautiful Meg Mundy as Beth's mother was also a shrewd decision.) Hutton appears to be phenomenally talented whenever he has a chance at a light or ironic bit, and he has strangely effective moments, as in a scene when a girl (played by Dinah Manoff) whom he wants to talk to leaves him and his eyes look miserable and haze over. But he loses conviction at times, and he has an awkwardly staged scene when he has to accept his father's love and put his head on his father's shoulder. (Sutherland doesn't seem to know what to do with that head resting on him; he isn't allowed to grab the boy and hold him, the way Dr. Berger does when the promiscuous kid hugs him.) Sutherland, who slides into stillness and passivity almost too easily, gives a rather graceful performance, considering that Calvin isn't a character--he's just a blob created to be tyrannized by Beth. Sutherland has only one scene that's really all his: in Dr. Berger's office, when Calvin doesn't quite know what he wants to say, Sutherland uses his wonderful long hands to express more than words could. Judd Hirsch's role has the juiciness of burlesque, and Hirsch uses his terrific comic timing; he gets laughs and manages to pick up the pace, but he's just doing wise, warm Jewish shtick. According to this movie, if Wasps can just learn to express their emotions they'll be all right. The point of view seems predicated on the post-Second World War Hollywood idea that Wasps don't know how to suffer. If you want suffering, get Jews or Italians, because when Wasps suffer, it doesn't show on the screen. (Hollywood Jews and Italians know how to act at dinner tables, too: they scream and quarrel.)

Why is this tragic view of the death of the Protestant family ethic drawing crowds? Maybe because the movie is essentially a simpleminded, old-fashioned tearjerker, in a conventional style. People weep for Beth, who can't change--who can't let herself change. We are given to understand that she would like to come out of her shell but she can't. She trapped in the pride and discipline and privacy that she was trained to believe in. She was bred not to say what's on her mind. And the movie, which treats her, finally, with sympathy yet holds out no hope for her, makes her seem rather gallant. She seems the last standard-bearer for the Wasp culture that the film indicts. With its do-gooders' religion, Ordinary People says that the willingness to accept psychiatry divides people into the savable and the doomed. Yet maybe because the film's banal style speaks to the audience in aesthetically conservative terms, this movie about the hell that uptight people live in somehow turns into a nosegay for Wasp repression. Beth will go down with the ship: she will never "communicate."

Dan sekarang bagaimana dgn Oscar thn ini?

Setelah Toronto FilmFest berakhir, ada beberapa hal yg mencuat sbg front-runner Oscar, salah satunya Brokeback Mountain karya Ang Lee sbg favorit kuat utk saat ini (gue kebetulan baru mau baca cerita pendek sumber filmnya diadaptasi karya Annie Proulx). Musim Oscar masih panjang, dan gue saat ini masih tetep menjagokan The New World-nya Terrence Malick sbg calon kuat peraih Best Picture dan Best Director sampe ke Best Original Score oleh James Horner. Pd awalnya gue lbh milih Hans Zimmer, tapi mungkin si Horner dipilih Malick krn score-nya utk The Missing, yg ada motif musik Indian-nya cocok utk The New World. Kita tau gimana selera musik Malick di Thin Red Line yg memasukkan unsur Melanesian utk menciptakan nuansa mistik yg alamiah. Yg bisa menghambat The New World, selain kualitas film tentunya, adl box office-nya.

Thn ini juga George Clooney akan merilis film keduanya sbg sutradara Good Night and Good Luck, cuman kayanya ngga akan sampe dpt nominasi Best Picture spt Ordinary People, krn filmnya lbh ’arty’, dan kalo film pertamanaya adl indikasi style Clooney di film ini. But then again, who knows? Yg lbh mungkin adl nominasi Best Actor dan Best Screenplay.

Ga perlu komat-kamit lagi, langsung aja prediksi nominasi Oscar gue utk saat ini. Dan jangan terlalu dianggap serius, krn ini baru awal aja...


Best Picture
The New World
Walk the Line
Brokeback Mountain
Memoir of a Geisha
All The King’s Man

Best Director
Terrence Malick – The New World
Ang Lee – Brokeback Mountain
David Cronenberg – A History of Violence
Sam Mendes – Jarhead
James Mangold – Walk the Line

Best Actor
Joaquin Phoenix – Walk the Line
David Straithrain – Good Night and Good Luck
Heath Ledger – Brokeback Mountain
Philip Seymour Hoffman – Capote
Sean Penn – All the King’s Men

Best Actress
Reese Witherspoon – Walk the Line
Judi Dench – Mrs. Henderson Presents
Charlize Theron – North Country
Diane Keaton – The Family Stone
Zhang Ziyi – Memoir of a Geisha

Best Supporting Actor
Bob Hoskins – Mrs. Henderson Presents
Peter Sarsgaard – Jarhead
Paul Giamatti – Cinderella Man
Christopher Plummer – The New World
Barry Pepper – The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Best Supporting Actress
Shirley MacLaine – In Her Shoes
Maria Bello - A History Of Violence
Gong Li - Memoirs of a Geisha
Patricia Clarkson – All the King’s Men
Frances McDormand – North Country

Best Original Screenplay
The New World
Match Point
Walk the Line
Crash
Good Night and Good Luck

Best Adapted Screnplay
All the King’s Men
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
In Her Shoes
Walk the Line

Best Cinematography
The New World
Jarhead
Brokeback Mountain
Memoir of a Geisha
Good Night and Good Luck

Best Art Direction
Memoir of Geisha
Brokeback Mountain
The New World
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe
King Kong

Best Film Editing
The New World
Munich
Brokeback Mountain
Jarhead
Memoir of a Geisha

Best Costume Design
Cinderella Man
Walk the Line
Memoir of Geisha
Mrs. Henderson Presents
Pride & Prejudice

Best Make Up
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe
Memoir of a Geisha
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory

Best Original Score
James Horner – The New World
John Williams – Memoir of a Geisha
Harry Gregson-Williams – The Chronicles of Narnia
Thomas Newman – Cinderella Man
Gustavo Santaolalla – Brokeback Mountain


Sementara segitu dulu….

weh... mbah dukun katanya pensiun tapi nongol lagi di WG... yipeee

wah semua film yg disebut gue belum nonton SEMUA nya !!
krn sebgian besar belum diedarin dan juga gue belakangan lagi jarang ke bioskop!

*tapi selamat datang lagi buat Mithrandir

Memoir of Geisha akhirnya yang main Zi Yi? Kok bukan orang Jepang..

All the King's Men sounds familiar....dari novel yah?

Originally posted by GrandTheftAero
weh... mbah dukun katanya pensiun tapi nongol lagi di WG... yipeee
you're mistaken me, mate! I'm retired from KG, not from internet boards in general...:D

Originally posted by aleks75012
wah semua film yg disebut gue belum nonton SEMUA nya !!
krn sebgian besar belum diedarin dan juga gue belakangan lagi jarang ke bioskop!

*tapi selamat datang lagi buat Mithrandir
thankie, monsieur!

dari hasil investigasi toronto film festival, hampir semua filmnya yg dtp review positif menjanjikan, tapi masalahnya film yg kita antisipasi biasanya cenderung lbh bagus dr yg kita bayangin drpd the actual film...

Leks, kalo hanya ada satu film yg hrs ditonton di bioskop, make sure it's The New World...:D

Originally posted by morningstar
Memoir of Geisha akhirnya yang main Zi Yi? Kok bukan orang Jepang..
bung GTA pernah menjawab pertanyaan ini di forum laen,
tapi yah persoalan utamanya adl krn ga ada aktris Jepang saat ini yg sepopuler dan memiliki 'well oiled publicity machine' spt Ziyi Zhang...

Originally posted by DarkStar
All the King's Men sounds familiar....dari novel yah?
yah, tepat sekali! dan film ini sempet dibikin thn 1949 dan ngedapetin Best Picture Oscar. Jadi film yg sekarang ini adl remake, dan seinget gue blm ada film remake yg ngedapetin nominasi Best Picture. But there's always the first time, right?

Originally posted by Mithrandir
thankie, monsieur!

hmm, masih sesama orang Indonesia
panggil saya "dik, pak, oom atau mas" ajah :haha


Leks, kalo hanya ada satu film yg hrs ditonton di bioskop, make sure it's The New World...:D

oh, Terrence malick ya...
gue akan coba liat deh.
minggu lalu liat "Thin red line" di TV. krn gue gak mood atau filmnya emang lamban dan gue berhalusinasi ya ? :hehe

Originally posted by aleks75012
hmm, masih sesama orang Indonesia
panggil saya "dik, pak, oom atau mas" ajah :haha

iya deh, pak! hahaha

oh, Terrence malick ya...
gue akan coba liat deh.
minggu lalu liat "Thin red line" di TV. krn gue gak mood atau filmnya emang lamban dan gue berhalusinasi ya ? :hehe
enak yah, acara TV-nya nayangin film kaya Thin Red Line :D
Baiknya sih nontonnya uninterrupted, jadi ga keganggu selingan.
Tgl rilis The New World akhir desember di Amrik (limited), ga tau juga kapan masuk Indo-nya, mungkin sekitar akhir februari/ awal maret mungkin deketan sama Oscar.

oh untung TV umum disini (kecuali channel 1 dan 6) kalau acara berlangsung tidak ada interupsi iklan!

memang film bermutu sering koq diputar, apalagi channel 5 (Arte) khusus menyajikan film2 arthouse atau independen.

Oscar tahn depan gue sama sekali belum ada bayangan
tapi "The March of the penguin" kayanya gue hampir yakin masuk nominasi best documentary !

Originally posted by aleks75012
Oscar tahn depan gue sama sekali belum ada bayangan
tapi "The March of the penguin" kayanya gue hampir yakin masuk nominasi best documentary !
Hehe Pak Aleks ini agak chauvinistik juga ya, mentang-mentang yg pertama kali bikin gerombolan si Pinguin ini adl orang Perancis yg sukses mendulang emas box office di Amrik (walau agak di’sesuaikan’ utk versi Amrik-nya)

Tapi emang bener kok, dokumenter ini calon terkuat kalo bisa lolos persyaratan, krn kategori dokumenter terbaik termasuk yg ribet syarat-syaratnya dan ada tahap eliminasi sebelum masuk 5 besar.

Dan sekarang ini March of the Penguins adl film dokumenter terlaris kedua (setelah F 9/11) mendepak Bowling for Columbine!