On the eighth day of Christmas, holiday movies gave to me (hey, it's Dec. 24, I don't have time for 12 days):
8 Actors Dancing … Horizontally. Somehow, 'tis the season for - let me put this as delicately as possible - the kind of oral sex that begins with C. Mila Kunis performs it on Natalie Portman in Black Swan. Ryan Gosling does it to (for?) Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. Stephen Dorff starts to do it with an anonymous party girl in Somewhere. And Julianne Moore gets down with Annette Bening, albeit under the covers, in The Kids Are All Right (which I'm counting as a current movie because it's hot on DVD and appears on many Top 10 lists).
It's encouraging to see this act incorporated into mainstream movies, including A-list awards season fare, as it may signal a more adult turn in American film, and I'm all for that. Still, it must be noted (spoiler alert) that most of these fireworks don't have finales: Bening and Moore get distracted, Gosling and Williams are overcome by marital resentments, and Dorff, amusingly, passes out between his paramour's thighs. Only Portman, in Black Swan, is permitted to feel pleasure, and only briefly, since she's probably crazy and the whole event a hallucination.
Interestingly, only one of the four films, Blue Valentine, was threatened with the strict NC-17 rating. (That's the kiss of death in the United States, because many theatres, newspapers and retailers won't exhibit, run ads for or sell films with it.) Its producer, Harvey Weinstein, fought back and eventually won it the R rating - 18A in Canada - it deserves. Yet neither the comic scenes in Kids and Somewhere nor the fairly graphic scene in Black Swan raised a ratings eyebrow. It seems that the American board isn't as threatened by soft-core girl-on-girl action as it is by realistic-looking hetero sex. That's an old chestnut we should roast in the new decade.
7-plus Swans a-Dancing (sorry, couldn't resist) in Black Swan's beautifully shot ballet scenes. (And the sweet white/nasty black Ariel doppelgangers played by Ben Whishaw in The Tempest would fit right into the corps.)
6 Stars a-Learning. James Franco became a credible rock climber for 127 Hours. Colin Firth studied stuttering for The King's Speech. Gwyneth Paltrow didn't even know how to hold a guitar, much less play one, when she signed on to strum in Country Strong. Elle Fanning took daybreak ice-skating lessons for months for a scene in Somewhere; ditto Natalie Portman with ballet for Black Swan. And Mark Wahlberg trained for five years to play the title character in The Fighter. Actors can earn exorbitant salaries, but these really worked for theirs.
5 Golden Globe nominations are especially egregious this year, even for the craven Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Clearly, they'll stoop as low as it takes to get the cool kids to come to their party. Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie are both nominated for dreadful performances in The Tourist. Depp is also nominated for the other worst performance of his career, in Alice in Wonderland. The HFPA reclassified The Tourist so they could include it on their Best Picture-Comedy list. (Is it supposed to be a comedy? That would explain a lot. Except it still isn't funny.) And Burlesque is also up for best comedy, and why? Because its studio flew HFPA members to Vegas to see Cher's show. These embarrassing high jinks make the other, credible nominees look like jokes, and make us into fools for paying attention to this ludicrous organization.
4 Massachusetts Accents. The Town, The Fighter, The Company Men and Conviction are all set in spittin' distance of Bahston, giving Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Hilary Swank, Minnie Driver and others a wicked good excuse to crack open a beah and cheah fuh the Sox with their accent coaches. The Commonwealth, with its mix of high hopes and low-lifes, has become Hollywood's go-to locale for embodying the broken American dream - though I don't think they'll be putting that slogan on their licence plates.
3 Jail Breaks. According to this year's movies, when a woman wants to get her brother out of jail (as Hilary Swank does in Conviction), she spends 14 years becoming a lawyer and following legal procedures to the letter. When a gay con man wants to get his lover out of jail (Jim Carrey in I Love You Phillip Morris), he poses as a lawyer. But when a hunky hetero husband wants to get his wife out of jail (Russell Crowe in The Next Three Days), he just busts her out and runs. This should keep Gender Studies in Media courses busy well into 2020.
2 Eliot Spitzers. I fear that people aren't going to the excellent documentary Inside Job because they think it will feel like homework. I promise you, it doesn't. It's one of the fiercest, most furious pieces of filmmaking this year. ( Fair Game is another.) And one of the most animated talking heads in it belongs to Eliot Spitzer. The guy explains the financial meltdown so clearly, and sounds so reasonable, credible and smart, you chafe at how no one listened to him, and how he self-sabotaged his career with sexual peccadilloes - all of which are thoroughly detailed in another current doc, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. The fact that Spitzer had the stones to participate fully in the latter film, and sound equally sane in it, makes his demise that much more heartbreaking.
And a 1-Syllable Epiphany. Two of my favourite moments in film this year centre around the utterance of one word. In 127 Hours, the trapped rock climber played by James Franco tries to keep himself together by interviewing himself on his video camera. When he asks himself how he could have been so stupid and arrogant as to go hiking alone without informing anyone where he was going or when he should return, his only response is "Oops." Then, in The Social Network, the Facebook inventor played by Jesse Eisenberg is being hounded by prosecutors whom he clearly believes he outclasses in brain power. When they ask him how he could have co-opted an idea originated by their clients, he utters the same answer: "Oops." That Franco can infuse that one little sound with regret, self-loathing, fear and sadness, while Eisenberg can invest it with sneery superiority and defensiveness, is the reason that these are my two favourite performances of the year.
I also think Oops is a pretty good metaphor for 2010's movies in general. If you want to know why, you'll have to read my Top 10 list next week. Until then - to quote a movie song this time - let your hearts be light.