Tuesday, June 05, 2007

The post-Oscar lull ("Namesake" and "The Host")

Ross here -- I'm in Boulder right now, at a physics summer school. I'm giving a talk on Thursday, which means that tonight I'm finally going to make time to update the blog. Yes, it's long overdue.

As your'e probably aware, there's a post-Oscar lull in the film world. Clearly, if you even hope that your film will be "considered", you don't want it to be a full year old when it's time to hand out statues, so that lends a particular flavor to the movies available in the last few months. Did I say "few"? That's one of the flavors. Kate and I have also been up to our ears in grad school, so our movie viewing has been less vigorous than usual.

Anyway, "The Namesake" is one of the few films that we managed to see. It's better than the generic identidrama that the trailers make it out to be. Rather, it's a biopic covering two generations of an immigrant family. In order to do this in a timely fashion, the film shows snippets widely separated in time. Since I've got physics on the brain more than usual right now, I'll say that the film has two phases, and that the order parameter is "who stars in the movie."

In the first phase, the lead actors are Irfan Khan and Tabu, who are both incredible to watch. In this part of the movie we're as likely to get a snippet of daily life as we are to see a Major Life Event. Importantly, the actors are both strong enough to give the sense that the characters exist off the screen as well as on, and I felt like the snippets were giving me a glimpse of their "whole lives." It's a hard thing to do, and they should be commended.

In the second phase, the guy from "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle" is the star. Frankly, he's dull. At this point, the movie becomes a highlight reel. Since the lead actor has a hard time conveying the internal life of his character, it's hard to believe that the character exists off the screen, and at this point the movie basically falls apart.

In the end, it's worth seeing, but you should probably wait for the DVD. As great as it is to watch the grown-up actors, their junior partner is eminently skippable. How does this tie in to this post's theme, "post-Oscar lull"? Well, it ran for many, many weeks at the Michigan. The only recent films that I remember having similar runs are "March of the Penguins" and "Brokeback Mountain." Both of those are much better films than this was, and the only reason that I can think of that it would run this long is that there was nothing to take its place.

"The Host", on the other hand, is out of the Oscar running for two reasons: it is a foreign film (ok, there's a category, but it's tough, right?), and it's terrible. Of course, I say this as a round-eyed-devil, so you probably shouldn't take me too seriously. This film cannot claim to be shot in an interesting way, have a vaguely novel premise, or even have an interesting monster. On top of this, it's pretty blatantly racist. In a roundabout way, this is the film's only real merit -- it provides an interesting testing ground for our views of racism. Will we tolerate racism if it comes from an exotic source? Will we even recognize it if the victims are white Americans? And how does the "Imus rule" (it's only racist if it's not funny) apply if the humor might have been lost in translation?

Of course, this ties into the post-Oscar lull in an obvious way -- why was it run at all?

-R