The 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards
January 12, 2009
The Globes were pretty lively for an awards show, an antidote to the stuffy Oscars, and a welcome return after last year’s bizarre press conference held in the wake of the WGA strike. Rourke’s speech was one of the highlights, as he was an obvious crowd favorite, and the only A-list star in attendance who would thank his dogs. As a contrast, Colin Farrell, winner for the underrated In Bruges, made a point to thank his lawyer, for obvious reasons.
A looser atmosphere allowed for some genuinely funny moments in the midst of the traditionally canned banter from presenters. Ricky Gervais’s admonishment of audience members’ failure to shut up during his presentation was a highlight, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s barb at Madonna ex Guy Richie would have killed had he not been cracking wise to a room full of insiders. And if Barack Obama’s election wasn’t good enough on its own merits, now it’s been revealed that the Obama win means that Tracy Morgan gets speak on behalf of 30 Rock at all future awards shows. This is a change I can believe in.
As for the awards themselves, the Globes were kind of a mixed bag. I don’t really understand all the love for Slumdog Millionaire (which won four awards, including Best Drama). Slumdog is a decent film, but for most of its running time feels like an exercise in craft and a highly calculated tug at the emotions than a real narrative. It was a relief, however, to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button go home empty handed.
The film acting winners seemed to be deserving for the most part, with Rourke and Farrell (whose co-star Brendon Gleeson was equally deserving) taking the Best Actor awards in Drama and Comedy, respectively, and Heath Ledger’s turn in The Dark Knight expectedly winning the Supporting Actor trophy. In the Actress categories, Kate Winslet took home both awards for which she was nominated (for roles in The Reader and Revolutionary Road), while the (for once, actually) deserving Meryl Streep was denied for her role in Doubt, the first evidence in years that Streep is really the foremost actress of her generation.
On the TV side, Mad Men and 30 Rock took the series prizes, and being that those are the best two series on television, you’ll find no debate from me. 30 Rock‘s Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin cleaned up the Comedy acting awards for the second year in a row. The acting prizes on the Drama side were questionable to say the least. Jon Hamm (last year’s winner for Mad Men) was denied in favor of Gabriel Byrne of In Treatment, which, rightfully, no one but the Hollywood Foreign Press Association even bothered to watch.
The biggest bonehead call of the night, though, goes to Anna Paquin’s win for True Blood. This despite the fact that Paquin’s performance is a major weak link in a series that, despite early evidence to the contrary, proved to be a solid, if horribly flawed, addition to HBO’s roster. Paquin, though she’s a recognizable name, was not a safe pick like Byrne was. The safer picks in the Best Actress category would have been Sally Field (for Brothers and Sisters) or Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer). Paquin’s choice was bold and unexpected; it was just wrong. The mentos and manatees house favorite in that category is, of course, January Jones of Mad Men, who it seems will never get her due.
All things considered, though, the Globes were a better watch than the Academy Awards figure to be. Thanks to Aronofsky, we’ll probably be watching that show on a ten second delay.
Summer Movie Suicide Mission No. 20: Mamma Mia!
July 28, 2008
In which one man attempts to view every summer blockbuster for the entire season, regardless of taste, genre, or Remington Steele trying to sing.
The so-called “jukebox musical” is a relatively new and pretty lazy form of entertainment. It’s kind of mindless, stuffing an already beloved piece of art into a new medium. And it’s worked, at least on the stage. Plays like Jersey Boys, Movin’ Out, and others are hits, and have fit in pretty naturally into the Broadway landscape, making money, winning Tonys, and packing in huge crowds over long runs.
The idea is making its way to the big screen. And they’re not even all bad. Last year’s Across the Universe and Romance and Cigarettes were both surprisingly pleasant, though flawed, films. There’s something to be said for lazy packaging when the contents are worth the price of admission.
I came to this same conclusion when I saw Mamma Mia!, the ABBA musical, on stage. When the actors performed the songs, the play works as delightful, escapist fare. When the show attempts to advance its plot, it mostly fails. Good thing the plot is so knowingly paper thin that the writers don’t see fit to dwell in it too much.
There are probably a hundred reasons why Mamma Mia! borders on great as a stage play but disappoints so spectacularly on screen, but I’ll only bother with a few of them. There is, of course, the discussion to be had about the suitability of musical talent. In a stage musical, actors are cast with their singing voices as the main showpiece, with their acting ability a secondary concern. In movie musicals (or at least in recent ones), the face and the name are far more important than the voice. In Mamma Mia!, this couldn’t be more evident. Sure, the audience gets to see Pierce Brosnan star as one of Amanda Seyfried’s potential fathers, but they soon get to see Brosnan embarrass himself trying to sing “SOS,” one of the film’s intended showstoppers. Meryl Streep, who plays Seyfried’s overbearing, hotel owning mother, has a nice enough voice (as shown in A Prairie Home Companion), but she can’t really rise to the material here. And thankfully, Stellan Skarsgard (who, with Brosnan and Colin Firth, rounds out the trio of daddies) didn’t have to sing much of anything. Seyfried herself has a beautiful voice, but, despite the fact that she’s really the lead character in the story, her role was minimized in the film version.
Besides casting, there’s another fundamental difference between stage and screen. On stage, the pure spectacle of the musical number is enough to engender a great deal of goodwill in the audience. A theater audience is much more likely to overlook silly plot points, as long as they don’t come at the expense of that spectacle. Audience motivations are different. On screen, a musical performance, even a great one, will never rise to the level of a real live performance, which strikes an audience on a visceral level that film can’t attain. The real thing is so much better than the substitute. Film, obviously, can do things a live performance can’t. It needs to play to those strengths. Without a plot deeper than something a four year old could carve onto a sheet of construction paper, the vocal performance can’t do much.
In an era where the Hollywood sheen can make a phony genre like the musical seem even phonier, a successful movie musical needs to go in one of two directions. Either make a play at realism, or go impossibly big. There are good recent examples on both counts. Once, the Irish musical which one an Academy Award in 2007, went the earthly route, keeping its production minimalist, setting the action in a recognizable, real cityscape, and weaving its music seamlessly into the narrative. Across the Universe, a Beatles themed jukebox musical, went the other way, providing an unabashed fantasy with elaborate production numbers that could never prove functional in any other medium.
Mamma Mia! stays so close to its source material that it doesn’t allow itself any room to operate. Granted, it would be impossible for a story like this one to go for a realist structure, but it certainly could have gone for overblown fantasy. I would have like to have seen this film not take itself seriously at all, but it felt alternately too weighty and too thin.
Ed. Note: I thought about ending this post with some real zinger of an ABBA pun, but decided to cut my losses. You can thank me later.
Film: Mamma Mia!
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Stars: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski
Viewing Situation: Only gentleman in a half full audience; digital projection
Rotten Tomatoes Average: 53%
My Grade (Out of 10): 4
Next Up: The Dark Knight
>> Jukebox musical [Wikipedia]
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