Bridges and Bullock at the Bat

Review: The Blind Side + Crazy Heart

It's their turn, common wisdom says. Jeff Bridges has attended the Oscars four times before. Sandra Bullock's running on the Whaddaya-Know card. Tonight, they will likely take home statuettes for their 2009 work. At least for part of it; Bullock just picked up a Razzie for her other film last year, All About Steve.

Sandra Bullock hocks DVDs of All About Steve in person at the 2010 Razzies.

Be reassured: both are fine in their nominated performances. If commerce and marketing had less pull over the Oscars, Michael Stuhlbarg or Jeremy Renner would take Best Actor, and Meryl Streep or Carey Mulligan Best Actress. But I won't denigrate the gravy train they're riding. Bullock, in particular, is the saving grace of her film: an inspirational but inert "true story."

The Blind Side sticks closely to the journey of rags-to-Ravens football star Michael Oher; sometimes life works better as life than art. Actual reported dialogue, as seen in this excerpt from Michael Lewis's book, makes it onto the screen, but every line, lifted or invented, comes across with the manufactured sugar of a Fruit Roll-Up. "You're changing that boy's life," says a sweet, suspicious Memphis wife. "No," Bullock responds. "He's changing mine."

Country singer Tim McGraw has screen presence to spare, and Bullock musters up enough spit-and-vinegar to ride through the saccharine. Taking in over $200 million at the box office, The Blind Side has become the highest-ranking sports movie yet. So why doesn't a compelling life story translate better to film? We never see Michael as a character, for starters. The great biopics manipulate true-life events in search of subtext, of a person's inner workings. Michael has all his decisions made for him by rich white restaurant-chain owners: the suburban Christian elite. His path seems entirely based on the kindness of strangers, not any passions or emotions of his own.

In Crazy Heart, Bad Blake's passions are more immediate: booze, broads, and ballads. Cue every down-and-out wunderkind film of the last twenty years. The Wrestler comes to mind; with all due respect to Mickey Rourke, we expect great work from Jeff Bridges. Crazy Heart, which fought for a distributor, has gained everything from awards season; and good for it. Best of all is T-Bone Burnett's surefire score, and the actors corralled into singing (Bridges, Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall).

Crazy Heart feels more indie, less Hallmark, than The Blind Side, though both were made on tight budgets. But you can check off the familiar landmarks the film drives by: Washed-up musician. Scruffy motel room. Music journalist in lust. That one song that paves the way to recovery. Sunrise, sunset. The women in these male comeback sagas never get much to work with (Walk the Line being one recent exception), but Maggie Gyllenhaal does her darnedest. Bridges and company find a gentle rhythm and don't tug too hard on the heartstrings. It's a movie we've all seen before, but hey, it's Jeff Bridges's turn. Unlike Bad Blake, he's still in his prime.

Now Available on Amazon

As seen in the picture, Deluxe Jesus (clearly better than run-of-the-mill Jesus) performs two miracles: 1) Turns water into wine. 2) Feeds the thousands with two fish and five loaves.

The key section of the product description: "this wonderful Jesus character stands 5 1/4-inches tall and features glow-in-the-dark hands!" Ah, yes. Luke 23:46. "Father, into your glow-in-the-dark hands, I commend my spirit."

Billy Boy McRobert "Billy Boy," reviewing this action figure on Amazon, writes how Deluxe Jesus turned his son's G.I. Joe toys into pacifists. Mojo points out that Deluxe Jesus is waterproof. Fleaman "Welcome to your doom!" is, as his avatar implies, not a fan of action-figure Jesus. And J.H. Barnard suggests Deluxe Jesus is unsafe for pets and small children.

Deluxe Jesus sells at the retail price of $16.64.

Happy National Grammar Day!

I'd like to propose a toast to National Grammar Day. One day a year when it's acceptable, even encouraged, for me to correct others' poor usage and mechanics. (We'll celebrate spelling on September 30.)

As you can see, I use fragments and parentheticals at whim. Splitting your infinitives or ending with prepositions are kosher, too: sometimes necessary tricks to simply* get your point across.

Oh, and yes, I care a lot about the Oxford comma. The serial, series, or Harvard comma; call it what you will. The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, strongly recommends it in published books. Have a merry time with your AP-style newspapers; trade books don't lie and die by word (and character) count. It always helps clarity, never hurts, and usually looks better.

She went to lunch with her parents, the president and the vice-president.

Not so clear, is it? An Oxford comma would negate the chance Barack Obama and Joe Biden are her fathers. (Which is best; they'd have some explaining to do.)

Other commas I'd like to stand up for: the two surrounding an appositive. If I tell you that my first memoir, The Life and Times of America's Next Superhero, hits stores the first day of summer, which comes in June, there better be commas everywhere. So many people forget to close the appositive off; the technical term for this practice is apathy. You can't argue appositives.**

May I say a few more words?

• Therefore and thus are not conjunctions. Semicolons before, commas after, please.
• Sorry, Strunk and White, but hopefully can mean I hope. Hopefully you can live with that.
• "It's I." Technically, yes. But when you're not lighting gas lamps in Victorian England, go ahead; say "it's me" with confidence.
• If I were a Spanish teacher, I wouldn't tell my students there's no subjunctive in English. If that were true, it would require that this sentence vanish before your eyes.
  

*If we moved simply to the end of the sentence, it would mean with ease rather than merely, as I intended. Placing it before to get gives it unnecessary emphasis, I feel.
**Though I will concede it seems silly to set off The Life and Times... above. If I took out the word first, there would be no commas, hence no appositive. The phrase memoir would be nonrestrictive, and the title a clarification that identifies rather than just additional information.

Born to Be Wild

Review: The Hurt Locker

Thirty-eight days left in Bravo Company, and the explosives men are cracking wise. But when the bomb they set off takes out one of their own, in steps Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), a renegade with 873 diffused bombs to his credit. He stores parts from memorable explosives under his bed, one from the U.N., another that almost killed him. Right away, his recklessness gets on Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who plays by the book.

Nerves run high enough in Iraq after the 2004 invasion; director Kathryn Bigelow wisely does not turn The Hurt Locker into a maverick-versus-status quo narrative. She and screenwriter Mark Boal realize that a great war film targets no enemies beyond that inevitable, any-day-now feeling. For Sgt. James, war is adrenaline, the only way to experience life. Diffusing an explosive-laden car, he removes his safety gear ("If I die, I want to die comfortable."), striking with the bomb an intimacy he knows nowhere else.

A few cameos, some foreshortened, keep the stakes high. For James, the journey is less about endurance than addiction; he can't love his family back home in the same way. Despite the day-to-day responsibility as an insurgent, Sanborn envies his partner's risk-taking. Mackie offers strong support in the film, notably in his quiet desperation at the end: "I'm done. I want a son. I want a little boy, Will."

The Hurt Locker rides on Renner's shoulders, and he swings between wild and sedate with ease. As James ebbs in and out of paranoia, his inner turmoil flares up and recedes quickly, like bits of shrapnel piercing his surface cool. Lest I make this sound too serious, it's really a knuckle-biting action movie. Bigelow captures the electricity of each new bomb, within the grim streets of invaded Baghdad. The film can be a disjointed series of episodes; rather than building to one singular climax, it takes a near-documentary approach to the humor and anxiety with which these men pass each hour. The threat of death looms, but never as heavily as the fear of survival.

We Know That There's Always Tomorrow

Review: Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire

All the hype, the Sundance cred, the Oprah-Tyler Perry stigma. Precious may be based on a novel, as noted by the insistent subtitle, but it’s a visceral movie experience. Ten minutes in, during the first of many eviscerating verbal beat-downs by Precious’s mother Mary (a devastating performance by Mo'Nique), I worried I wouldn't be able to watch more.

Lee Daniels deserves credit for imbuing the grimmest of urban tragedies with occasional flashes of an exterior world. Precious, sixteen and pregnant again by her father, steps away—or maybe toward—into a fantasy world: swashes of parties, red carpets, autograph signings, the latest couture. The film charts a course of transformation via Precious's imagination. When more and more weighs her down (and believe me, the heaviness never lets up): through writing, her teacher and nurse (Paula Patton and Lenny Kravitz, both on their game), the birth of her son.

I don't know if Gabourey Sidibe will sustain a career in acting, but she's very affecting here. Her taciturn face and mumbled speech form a blank slate on which she registers every hardship with tenacity. In the final scene, a tremulous showdown between Mo'Nique and Sidibe, each actress holds her own without lapsing into sentimentality.

Precious invokes many emotions, but is never maudlin. Some musical cues (gospel ballads at the end of a fight, for example) feel shoe-horned in, as if Daniels needed all the levity he could muster. It's amazing how this film has taken off since its Sundance premiere; though it's easy to blister at the horrors within, there's more than urban welfare critique. Precious, like the title character, feeds off a strain of possibility, just below the surface, that almost proves redemptive for character and audience.