Lincoln/Skyfall Discussion

For whatever reason I forgot to write a Skyfall review last month, not sure why. Despite this site traffic has increased immensely; again no idea why. But I will likely write an Academy Awards post this year predicting from the films I've seen (I'll see one or two more) since it's not a dreadful year like the last. So, Lincoln is a very impressive film and makes for a very interesting historical impression of how congress used to operate. Maybe a bit more like parliament where people insult each other with regularity and say "HOW DARE YOU!!" in the most amusing fashions. Also lots and lots of excellent facial hair styles. Skyfall is an extremely good Bond movie and just about as good as Casino Royale.

I think Joseph Gordon Levitt should win an honorary Oscar or a composite actor oscar for being in every damn movie made this year. A true hero and following Liam Neeson's example. Despite my praise for either film they both have flaws and somewhat similar strengths. Back in 2007 No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood came out and it was easily the closest competition for Best Picture in quite some time; Javier Bardem won Supporting Actor and Daniel Day Lewis (the man himself, Bill the fucking Butcher) won Best Actor. The Academy fucking loves DDL no matter what so he might well win it again; Bardem is sort of an outside candidate but I think he will be nominated.

Skyfall is basically the Dark Knight in Bondsian (you know, the 2nd or 3rd best player of all time that won't be elected to hall of fame; I digress) terms, it follows the plot very closely except for the odd ending sequence. Javier Bardem is the Joker with different makeup and a passion for weird extensive revenge plots. He's all powerful in the film more or less but for some reason chooses not to finish his objective or fails so the plot can follow a happy-acceptable-by-mass-audiences ending; and that's something that happens in movies with excellent villains and hell it even happened in Othello. Iago loses; who the hell knows why as everyone else was a dipshit manipulated to his every whim. The biggest issue with the film is the exclusion of Sean Connery in a cameo, which would have solidified that role and probably made the ending sequence a fair amount more awesome.

Lincoln is a Spielberg historical documentaryish film like Saving Private Ryan. Daniel Day Lewis is incredible as Lincoln and it would have been amusing to talk to him on the set I imagine as he told many random tales from his character's childhood. He only works like once every four years though and thus does not deserve a Joe Gordon oscar, but he'll probably get best actor. Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader deliver awesome supporting performances. The biggest issue is Spielbergian mistakes like having the film drag on for another 15 minutes when it could just end or including entirely irrelevant proceedings that are famous and identify-able to a larger audience (doing this once is fine to immerse the dumber folks; don't need to do it 5 or 6 times for sure). It's still probably the best Spielberg movie since Saving Private Ryan so that's something.

For some reason the Osama movie Zero Dark Thirty is getting universal praise and love and is probably going to snake Best Picture, I'll see it and let you know what I think. To take a guess it will be like the Social Network; an excellent film but about a terrible topic so it is inherently inferior to just making a different film with the same cast and director. However there is some potential for me to be wrong in this.