Review - Everest

The Himalayas are an astonishing sight (or so I assume – never been there), and Mt. Everest reigns supreme. Drawing climbers from around the globe with the tantalizing challenge of standing at the very top of the world, Earth's highest mountain inspires awe, but what it deserves even more is reverence.
Beautiful things can be deadly, and this is no place for those who fear death.

It was a tragic lesson learned in the spring of 1996 when two commercial mountaineering outfits became stranded on the summit in the midst of a ferocious blizzard. Everest dramatizes this catastrophe extensively, cobbled together from what survivor accounts could be disseminated.

Unknown director Baltasar Kormákur was probably the least expected name to oversee a big-budget fall studio project with a large, starry cast. Accordingly, the movie he's delivered is not quite what you'd expect either. In fact, it's harder to peg down than ropes to an ice face in whiteout conditions.

My Award Nominations: Best Actress

People are always moaning about this being a weak category. Every year it seems. I don't know about you, but I had a hard time deciding who to leave off this ballot. There are just as many worthy contenders missing the cut here as there are in the Best Actor race.

I'd love to shine my light on more of the under-recognized actresses of 2014, but these five (a handful of them already Oscar-nominated) were tops for me. Herewith, my Best Actress nominees:

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

For casual Oscar viewers, it's all about the acting categories. The chances to glimpse five famous faces squaring off against each other for a minute's worth of acting clips followed by a 45-second acceptance speech are often the only moments of excitement John Doe gets to experience over the course of a 3-hour telecast full of craftspeople he's never heard of and movies he's never seen.

But to those of us who actively follow the awards season in its entirety, the acting categories are usually the most boring of the night, whereby the winners are so firmly established before final ballots are even submitted that it hardly bears discussion.

Such is the case, as ever, in Best Supporting Actress, which has been dominated by one name and one name only since August! But even if the awards narrative feels stale and predictable by this point, at least we can find some satisfaction in the fact that the performance itself is actually quite an atypical Oscar winner, with the more "obvious" Oscar roles relegated to also-ran status.

Let's start with some of those "obvious" roles...

Review - The Imitation Game

“Are you paying attention?” a blank movie screen asks it audience in an austere British accent. “Good. This is going to go very quickly now. If you are not listening carefully, you will miss things. Important things.”

The voice belongs to Alan Turing (by way of Benedict Cumberbatch), the subject of The Imitation Game. The preeminent mathematician and number theorist is widely regarded the 'Father of Computer Science', but his other claim to fame – which this film dramatizes – is that it was he who cracked the Germans' mind-boggling Enigma Code during WWII, thus turning the tide in the Allies' favour.

I thought it might be fitting to encrypt this review, but since not everyone is as proficient at deciphering garbled letters as Mr. Turing was, good old fashioned English will have to do. Come to think of it, 'good', 'old fashioned', and 'English' are probably the three best terms to describe The Imitation Game.

Yes, the film is very English, like an episode of Masterpiece Theatre that's slightly too good to be relegated to the telly. Yes, the film is old fashioned, mounted with a classical absence of style that your grandmum would love. And yes, for any sniping about how flagrantly it's been groomed to win over Oscar voters, the film is indeed quite good.

Sunday Top Ten: Last Minute FYCs

Hard to believe that in a mere five days, Oscar ballots will be in. I'm sure there are no Academy members reading this, but it's still fun to bang the drum for one's favourite awards hopeful. Here are ten long shots (very long shots) that I feel would make inspired nominees:

Review - Anna Karenina

With numerous adaptations of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina already dotting the cinematic timeline, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard can at least be considered justified in wanting to stir the pot with this newest rendition of the titular adulteress' tragic fall from grace. Yet in attempting to strip the romance down to its emotional essence, their bold experiment misses the mark; a dazzling yet seemingly arbitrary exercise in stylization.

In 1870s tzarist Russia, Anna (Keira Knightley) is afforded all the luxuries and status that her marriage to Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) allows. That means lavish balls, dinners, theatre outings, the works. But when her eye catches the dashing regiment officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), her hidden desires prove too tempting to ignore. We watch as she destroys herself for forbidden love, spiraling from envied socialite to reviled pariah.

Review - Never Let Me Go

As based on the acclaimed novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go tells the story of three young people who grew up together at an English boarding school with a “special” purpose, and the strained love/hate triangle that form between them.

Taking place in an alternate reality between 1978 and 1994, the film (adapted from Ishiguro's text by Alex Garland) is technically a science-fiction, whose details I won't explain here although they've been made pretty apparent by the film's trailer. Romanek is wise to not dwell on any genre trappings, but instead to focus solely on the three central characters; Kathy (Carey Mulligan), a sensitive and compassionate girl who harbours feelings for Tommy (Andrew Garfield), an awkward but soulful misfit, and Ruth (Kiera Knightley), the jealous one who snatches him from under Kathy's nose. As they grow older, the relationships between these three people shift and evolve, leading them to reconciliations and revelations.

I found myself more admiring of Garland's script than the movie as a whole. It somehow failed to really move me. Perhaps it has something to do with the literally chilly atmosphere Romanek paints, or that Rachel Portman's score (which is quite lovely, in and of itself) is mixed in too often and blatantly. Nevertheless, I could certainly detect – even if I couldn't feel it – that the passion was there on the page and in the performances, especially Mulligan's, who is the film's greatest trump card and one of the best female leads I've seen this year. Garland's script works in themes about the intangibility of love, and how, in the grand scheme of things, the amount of time we spend on this earth cannot quantify the lives we lead.

In a thick Best Actress field, I don't expect Mulligan's campaign to gain much traction, as the movie has been largely forgotten. Portman's score could find room, though. It's the delicate, elegant kind of music we've seen the Academy honour countless times before.

*** out of ****