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Sunday, February 19, 2006

Brokeback wins BAFTA Awards
With the Oscar’s just around the corner, Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain seems unstoppable. Brokeback won big at the British Academy Awards this weekend, taking home awards for Best Supporting Actor (Jake Gyllenhaal), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director (Ang Lee), and the grand-daddy of them all, Best Film, besting out Capote, The Constant Gardener, Crash, and Good Night, and Good Luck.

In a surprise win, the animated film Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit beat out The Constant Gardener and Pride & Prejudice for the Outstanding British Film of the Year.

Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) won the Best Actor award. He was among an impressive cast of actors and performances, Ralph Fiennes (The Constant Gardener), Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line), and David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck.)

Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line) won the Best Actress award, besting the performances of these talented actresses: Judi Dench (Mrs. Henderson Presents), Charlize Theron (North Country),

Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener), and Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha).

Jake Gyllenhaal, winner of the Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Brokeback Mountain, beat out actors Don Cheadle and Matt Dillon for Crash, and George Clooney for his performances in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Syriana.

Crash came away with two awards. Brit Thandie Newton won the Best Supporting Actress award, beating out Brenda Blethyn (Pride & Prejudice), Catherine Keener (Capote), Frances McDormand (North Country), and Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain). Crash would also win the Best Original Screenplay.

Here are the other winners:

Best Cinematography: Memoirs of a Geisha - Dion Beebe

Best Editing: The Constant Gardener - Claire Simpson

Best Production Design: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Stuart Craig

Best Costume Design: Memoirs of a Geisha - Colleen Atwood

Film Music: Memoirs of a Geisha - John Williams

Best Make Up/Hair: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects: King Kong

Best Film not in the English Language: De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté

Most Promising Newcomer: Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice) (director)

10:10:33 PM | COMMENT [] |

Slaughterhouse Five
One of my favorite books is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I want to share with you my favorite scene. And it is, indeed, a poignant scene in which Billy Pilgrim gets out of bed in the middle of the night and decides to watch a war film backwards. He’s awaiting the return of the flying saucer that will take him away.

For your enjoyment, here is Vonnegut’s remarkable description of what Pilgrim was watching:

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

(Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse Five, Dell Publishing, New York, New York, 1991, pages 74-5.)

5:49:16 PM | COMMENT [] |