Category: Eleanor Ringel Cater

Oscar nominations are out and probably the only thing Oscar addicts enjoy as much as second-guessing the eventual winners is second-guessing who got nominated and who got snubbed.

Here are some random thoughts on last Tuesday’s naming names:

Best Picture

“The Artist” “The Descendants” “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” “The Help” “Hugo” “Midnight in Paris” “Moneyball” “The Tree of Life” “War Horse”

With the Best Picture category expanded to anywhere between 5 and 10, you’d think there wouldn’t be any snubs. And there weren’t…well, yeah there were.

About “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close…”

The title alone is like a sitting duck.

It becomes “Extremely Dumb and Incredibly Cloying.” Or “Extremely Self-Absorbed and Dangerously Moronic.” Or…well, I’ll leave it to you.

The superb new movie, “The Iron Lady,” which stars Meryl Streep as the (in?) famous former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, is about a lot of things.

That said, one thing it isn’t especially about is Mrs. Thatcher’s famously (in?) conservative politics. Yes, her decisions — on everything from taxes to the

“What do women want?” Sigmund Freud once famously asked.

Well, this particular woman does NOT want “A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s surprisingly tepid and disappointing about Freud and his colleague/rival Carl Jung.

Where is the Cronenberg of yore? The envelop-pushing genius behind such creepy cult classics as “The Brood,” “Dead Ringers” and “Videodrome?”

Based on John Le Carre’s 1974 best-seller, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy,” takes place in the mid ‘70s, when the Cold War is still in its Big Chill stage.

So, with a mole deeply burrowed into the inner circle of “The Circus” (as British Intelligence is called), something must be done to keep the Commies at bay. The Circus’s ringmaster, if you will, — code-named Control and played by John Hurt with a heavily furrowed brow and deep rasping voice — knows this. But he doesn’t know who said mole is.

I feel as if I’m committing film-critic heresy, but here goes:

I preferred David Fincher’s American re-boot of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” to the original Swedish version.

I didn’t think I would. After all, we critics are ALWAYS supposed to prefer the foreign version of anything (I think it’s written down somewhere in a secret code, like the DaVinci Code).

According to Jean-Luc Godard, “The cinema is truth 24 frames per second.”

According to Martin Scorsese and his wondrous new film “Hugo,” the cinema is dreams 24 frames per second.

Not, perhaps, what you’d expect from the man famous for such down-and-dirty pictures as “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets” and “Goodfellas.”

But it is absolutely true of “Hugo,” Scorsese’s astonishing valentine to cinema that’s also the best Film 101 you could ever imagine (or dream of…?)

Everyone wanted a piece of Marilyn Monroe.

The Kennedy brothers, who used her like frat boys.

Arthur Miller, who married her, divorced her, then shredded her in several of his works.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

In many ways, “The Descendants” is a descendant of “Terms of Endearment.” New terms and new endearments for a new century.

But some things are forever…like families and the bonds that not only tie but also choke.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

The mortality rate in “Immortals” is a mile-high, and I wondered for a while if, perhaps, I might’ve enjoyed the carnage more if I had opted for the 3-D version.

Or even the 3-D IMAX version.

But I’m pretty certain that there’s nothing that could improve this disastrous mish-mash of vaguely mythological references, rendered with blood-spurting splendor by director Tarsem Singh. A specialist in Omigod over-the-top visuals (remember “The Cell,” starring Jennifer Lopez in her first incarnation?), Singh may have been aiming for the next “300.”

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

The last time Clint Eastwood tried to make up for the implied homophobia in his Dirty Harry character, it was a stumbling, ineffective adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (though, to give Clint a break, the book is stumbling, ineffective and false, false, false in its claim to be non-fiction).

A more mellow, more awarded, more experienced Eastwood has another go at it with “J. Edgar,” his ambitious, richly filmed and ultimately unsatisfying take on J. Edgar Hoover, the founder and, for almost 50 years, head of the FBI.

What Eastwood and his star, Leonardo DiCaprio, try to do is reconcile the at-odds aspects of Hoover’s character.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

“Martha Marcy May Marlene” is a curious tale of multiple identity.

Unlike “The Three Faces of Eve” or “Sybil,” in which the protagonists’ different personalities came from within, the young woman — brilliantly played by Elizabeth Olsen — in Sean Durkin’s impressive debut film, lets her identity be defined by others.

The film begins with Olsen sneaking out of a commune-like settlement in upstate New York (these details are filled in later).

By Eleanor RIngel Cater

The recent trend in horror has become so vulgar and bloody (“Saw 12” anyone?) that we’ve almost forgotten the satisfying shiver of less obvious scares.

Say, the eeriness of a terrific haunted house movie.

I recently saw the new prequel “The Thing,” (a fabulous film that offers a variation on the Haunted House theme) and that may have set me thinking.

So, as Rod Serling might say, consider these unhappy habitats.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

If someone had told me there was going to be a remake of an early ‘80s dance movie with a one-word title that starts with “F,” I would’ve guessed, without a second’s hesitation, “Flashdance,” starring a very sexy Jennifer Beals (and her body double) as a dancing welder in Pittsburgh.

I would’ve been wrong.

Instead, Hollywood has hired the once-mighty Craig Brewer (“Hustle and Flow”) to direct an almost scene-for-scene remake of “Footloose,” the movie that — along with “Diner” and a few others — launched Kevin Bacon’s career.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

Oh, for the good ol’ days of a strong economy. The days when a Hollywood disaster movie was about a meteor or a volcano.

No such luck in “Margin Call,” a small-budget film with an unexpected deep impact.

The year is 2008. The place: a brokerage firm, somewhere on the top floors of one of Manhattan’s shiniest towers of finance, that’s about to be hit by today’s equivalent of a volcano or meteor: an economic meltdown.

We begin with a staff-slashing bloodbath. “Better not to watch,” veteran Paul Bettany tells newbie, Zachary Quinto, as two automatons in expensive heels wander through the office, dispensing their nothing-personal kiss of death.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

“The Ides of March” doesn’t deserve burying.

But it doesn’t exactly deserve praise, either (thank you, Marc Anthony).

The title is somewhat misleading. Anyone who knows the “Julius Caesar” reference, “Beware the Ides of March,” will be expecting something dire done to the movie’ main politico — a Pennsylvania governor named Mike Morris (George Clooney) who’s in a tight race for the Democratic Presidential nomination. The battleground: a make-or-break Ohio primary.

Then again, anyone who really knows Shakespeare’s play also knows that Caesar is more of a supporting character. The focus is on his underlings — here embodied by various campaign managers, strategists and media advisors.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

I think I know what’s wrong with “Moneyball.”

Unlike what happens on screen — Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane computerizes his way to a winning team — the stats don’t add up.

For those who don’t live and die by the boys of summer, here’s a better explanation of what Beane (well-played by Brad Pitt) did. He hired a computer whiz (Jonah Hill) to apply “Sabermetrics” to building a team.

Translation: nothing about a player mattered to Beane except for how he came across statistically. As in, his ability to get on base.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

Am I the only one who’s noticed, but is “Moneyball” turning into a kind of “Moneybomb?”

Bomb isn’t really the word. The film — based on the true story of Billy Beane who resurrected the Oakland A’s by using computer-generated stats — has gotten good reviews. Especially for Brad Pitt who plays Beane.

And the movie has made decent money. Last weekend, it pulled in $12.5 million at the box office. But it’s still No. 2.

Opening weekend, it came in behind a kids’ movie featuring a lovable animal. This weekend, it came in behind a kids’ movie featuring a lovable animal.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

“Drive” made me car sick.

The sort of super-sleek cheese that Michael Mann used to do in his sleep, it profits — immensely — from Ryan Gosling’s iconic rendering of an iconic role: the strong, silent loner who just happens to be better than anyone else in the entire world at one thing.

Gosling can drive.

A movie stuntman who moonlights as as a getaway-driver-for-hire, he’s a stone-cold hero for a stone-dead post-9/11 world.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

By the time I was done with “Contagion” — or, perhaps, by the time “Contagion” was done with me — all I wanted was good shower.

And maybe a gallon of hand sanitizer.

As you may have guessed from the title, “Contagion” is about a contagious disease. A virus, you might say. Or a plague, to get biblical about it.

Tag, you’re it. And now you’re dead.