By Daniella Gibbs Leger

I knew this day would come. As expected, the great Viola Davis has been nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her starting role in The Help. And as expected, I am deeply conflicted about this. On the one hand, Viola has reached the rarified air of the very few black actresses to be nominated for the top role. A past best supporting actress nominee, Davis is one of the best working actresses out there, often doing so much with so little screen time. This is an honor she more than deserves.
 
But, and you knew there was one, she is nominated for playing a maid. Insert very large sigh. What is it with Hollywood and giving award nominations to black women who play a certain role? The maid, the abused woman, the whatever Halle Berry was in Monster’s Ball. There’s an underlying theme of victimhood that runs through all these wins. That’s not to take away anything from the actresses of the roles they played, but you have to wonder what affect this has on the way black women see themselves.
 
A new ground breaking study from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation released this week paints a complex picture of black women in America. Over all, they are happy with their lives, are concerned about racism and worry about providing a good life for their children. One area of concern was how black women were portrayed in media – both news and in pop culture. That’s not really surprising. Who would have thought that the ’80s and ’90s would be the heyday for portraying blacks in a variety of ways on both TV and the big screen? Movies ranging from Coming to America to Do the Right Thing to The Best Man showed a range of African American life that is missing now. As one of the survey respondents expresses in the Post, “black women are too often viewed as flashy, provocative, eye-catching – imagery that makes her cringe.”
 
One would think that as our country becomes more diverse, it would be easier to find diverse stories told in movies. But the exact opposite is happening. George Lucas has been vocal about how difficult it was to get Red Tails to theatres. And after the success of last year’s Jumping the Broom, you would think Hollywood would be clamoring to make more movies like that. Sadly, they are not. They are still most interested in finding the next comic book movie to make and maybe a Tyler Perry film here and there.
 
As I’ve written before, I have a complicated relationship with The Help. I thought it was a well-acted movie and was entertaining. The subject and substance ticked me off. But then Octavia Spencer’s Golden Globes acceptance speech was moving when she quoted Dr. King saying, “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance.” And for those reasons, I’m filled with mixed emotions about this nomination. Because for all of the problems with The Help, I have to acknowledge that it’s not like Hollywood is throwing leading roles to women of color on a regular basis, if at all. I hope Viola (and Octavia!) wins, but I also hope we get to see a future where black women get recognized for a greater variety roles.
 

No Robots, a movie by San Jose State University students YungHan Chang and Kimberly Knoll is lovely, sad, and ultimately redeeming. It’s also a great challenge to the way we normally use robots as metaphors:

No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.

Often, when we see robots in popular culture, they’re actually more powerful than we are. If the Cylons were a metaphor for, say, Irish immigrants to the United States, they’d be telling a story about workers rising up from the slums and engulfing us all in whiskey and potatoes. These metaphors tend to legitimate the fears of privileged class rather than debunking them. But a movie like No Robots has a different power differential. The shopkeeper is angry at a robot who is physically smaller than he is, who is annoying rather than intimidating. He commits an act of terrible violence against that much more vulnerable actor. And then he discovers that things he’s conditioned to want to protect and find adorable—kittens—are emotionally dependent on the robot, who has been stealing milk to feed them. It’s a narrative that questions the shopkeeper’s prejudices and assumptions, rather than suggesting he’s right to be angry and afraid of a new element in his environment.

(HT: io9)

After the bruising — and continuing — fight to pass and implement President Obama’s health care reform legislation, it might be tempting to take a break and claim victory. But the powerful new documentary Escape Fire, which I saw at Sundance, argues that the legal victory is only the first step on the road to a system that’s focused on patients’ overall well-being, preventative care, and breaking our dependency on prescription drugs. While none of the arguments Escape Fire makes will be unfamiliar to people who are intimately familiar with the fight over the Affordable Care Act or the larger cause, the movie may come as a real, and useful, shock to viewers who are more peripherally involved in its scathing portrait of deeply flawed economic incentives and treatment protocols.

There’s a lot of information, and a lot of storylines in Escape Fire. The two standouts are the journeys of Sgt. Robert Yates, who acts as an example of the dangers of overmedication, and Dr. Erin Martin, a promising physician who sees her career faltering under the pressures of a fee-for-service system.

When we meet Yates, he’s recovering from serious combat injuries in Afghanistan — mostly through an extremely heavy regimen of painkillers prescribed him by military doctors. On his flight home from the war to rehabilitation at Walter Reed, the doctors on his flight are shocked by the number and variety of drugs he’s been given, and the rate at which he’s consuming them. “These are all one person’s?” a doctor asks. Under their watch, he’s medicated himself to the point of insensibility, falling off his bunk, staggering towards the bathroom. At Walter Reed, he finally finds treatment that focuses on alleviating his psychological and physical pain through acupuncture and meditation. Yates admits he was skeptical, saying he was a “hold my beer while I shoot this gator” kind of guy. But the program works, helping him kick his drug dependency and get out of the wheelchair to which he’s been confined. “My very best friend from the war was on narcotics,” Yates tells us. “He overdosed…I lost him…I would rather be shot again than go through withdrawal from the medications.”

Dr. Martin, one of the many admirable physicians in Escape Fire is the kind of doctor Sgt. Yates — and the rest of us — should have regular access to but don’t. She quits one job because the demand that she shuffle through patients means she feels she isn’t adequately caring for them. A fellowship in Dr. Andrew Weil’s program (a real weakness of the movie is its failure to discuss the fact that some of Weil’s views lie outside the consensus of the medical community) at the University of Arizona revitalizes her faith in her profession and leads her to a job at a clinic that shares her philosophy. But even though the clinic is physician-owned, the iron hand of Medicaid reimbursements begins to make the way she wants to practice unsustainable, putting pressure on her colleagues who are willing to shave some time off of patient appointments to take on more work to pick up Dr. Martin’s share of the billing.

There are other stories here, too, ranging from an examination of the Cleveland Clinic’s treatment of a heart disease patient who is riddled with unnecessary stents but never got adequate health maintenance advice; to Dr. Steven Nissen’s discoveries about the dangers of diabetes drug Avandia; to the history of Dr. Dean Ornish’s preventative medicine programs for heart disease and prostate cancer patients. While this diversity will give almost any sympathetic viewer a story to latch on to, not all of the narratives achieve the same power as Yates’ and Martin’s, and the movie might have been better for streamlining slightly, blowing out their stories further and sacrificing others that make the same point. All the same, Escape Fire hammers home its point. The initial battle for health care reform may be won. But we’re far from the system — and the mindset — that we need.

This post contains spoilers for the January 23 episode of Alcatraz.

By David Liss

Last night’s episode of J. A. Abrams’s Alcatraz suffered from precisely the same flaws as the series debut last week, and very little changed to improve the plot and character mechanics, and yet – somehow – it actually seemed like a better show. The series still lacks the excitement and energy of early episodes of Alias and Lost, and the commercial for the new Star Wars online game did a better job of grabbing my attention than most of the scenes. There were also more than a few moments of clumsy cliché and even clumsier plot points, but even so, there are signs of life, some electric moments, and promises that there could be exciting things on the horizon.
 
No one who watched last week’s episodes will be surprised by the episode’s structure. The latest Alcatraz inmate from 1963 mysteriously appears in the present day, and it is up to our intrepid team of one police officer and one comic book “guru” to track him down. In this case, we get an added ticking clock, as the creep of the week is a child-abductor who follows a specific pattern: kidnap on the Friday and return the dead body on a Sunday. Madsen and Soto are on the case, however – even after their efforts are hampered by the even-yet-still-creepier Hauser, who cancels the Amber Alert on the abducted child lest the general public somehow get wind that psychos from the ‘60s are walking our streets – even if it is only one at a time. Get ready for the great cherry-pie-hunt.
 
Here’s what worked about the episode: (1) we get an effective ticking clock. Sure, we saw that last time around with the returned sniper, but now we’ve got a sympathetic child, a creepy psycho trying to make him have “fun.”  These moments where the kidnapper is attempting to force his victim to fish, enjoy a movie or eat cherry pie are almost unwatchably painful. The alchemy worked.
  Read more

One of the best movies I’ve seen so far at Sundance, the poignant gay love story Keep the Lights On, reminded of me of Shame, but with more emotional depth and less air of an art installation. It’s also a completely exceptional romance, one steeped in the realities of sex and intimacy, and with the acknowledgment that not all relationships, even the deepest and most intimate ones, succeed.

It helps, in both intensity and structure, that this fictional love story is based on the real-life relationship of Ira Sachs, who wrote and directed the movie, and literary agent Bill Clegg. Erik, the film’s main character, meets Paul, a semi-closeted literary lawyer with a girlfriend, on a phone sex chat line in 1998. What begins as a one-night stand evolves into a decade-long on-and-off romance, Paul and Erik’s cohabitation interrupted by Paul’s trips to rehab and relapses into a crack addiction. The men disappoint each other, Paul by failing to show up for the triumph of Erik’s long-gestating documentary about a seminal New York gay artist, Erik through indecisiveness and devotion that begins to feel like a weight.

Paul’s addictions, and the things it makes him do as a result, provide the movie’s obvious parallel to Shame, if the movie released last year was told from the perspective of someone Brandon perpetually hurt rather than Brandon himself. Erik undergoes an escalating series of worries and humiliations as Paul spirals deeper into his relationship with crack, panicking when the same lover who threw him surprise parties and gives him thoughtful gifts vanishes for days and winds up passed out in the hall of their apartment. In the movie’s most searing sequence, Erik refuses to leave the hotel room where Paul is holed up on a crack binge during a relapse. While Paul muses nervously about his weight loss, explaining “It’s the crackhead diet, I wouldn’t recommend it,” and promising he’ll return home tomorrow, Erik refuses to leave until Paul is ready to go home or to rehab. And he stays even when a hooker Paul’s ordered arrives. When Paul asks Erik not to leave, Erik sits on the bed and holds Paul’s hand while the other man has sex with Paul. It’s simultaneously a humiliation and a deeply moving statement of intimacy and love.

Sex in the movie isn’t all grim, though. Keep The Lights On features some of the better sex scenes I’ve ever seen on-screen. Erik’s periodic hookups before his relationship with Paul solidifies and when it’s in a lacuna are alternately funny and satisfying. When he and Paul go to bed, the sex they have is simultaneously tender and awkward — it looks real, which is vastly more than can be said for most movie sex scenes, and is vastly sexier as a result. In the decade after the emergence of the AIDS crisis, the syndrome is present, but not dominant. A scene where Erik panics on a payphone begging a clinic worker to give him the result of his latest HIV test even though she’s not supposed to tell him over the phone is a stand-out for star Thure Lindhardt.

And sex isn’t the only kind of intimacy in the movie. Throughout the rise and fall of Erik and Paul’s romance, Erik relies on his best friend Claire (Julianne Nicholson, who deserves to be known beyond her stint on Law & Order: Criminal Intent) for support. They discuss having a baby, and she’s one of the few people who can challenge him on his reticence. “I’ve been hiding crucial events of my life since I was 13 years old,” he tells her at one point, provoking a tough but loving reminder that “That’s no excuse!” As his relationship with Paul falters, Erik also makes a tentative connection with a young artist named Igor. And when he and Paul finally split for good, Igor’s promise “I’ll take you to dinner,” is a reminder that even when big relationships fail, there are always new beginnings.

Apologies for the lateness of this post, which contains spoilers through the January 22 episode of Downton Abbey due to Sundance-induced mania.

Ah, Downton Abbey. This week’s episode confirmed my suspicion that this show can be somewhat like its characters, endlessly mired in repetitive plots, but powerful none the less. I’m tired of seeing Thomas and Bates go at each other (though one would imagine Mosley’s disappointment will throw a wrench in that dynamic) and I hope (and suspect) Matthew and Mary’s state of denial will wrap itself up with some haste. But I appreciate Branson calling the question on Sybil, and Isobel calling the question on Cora, with two very different results.

Let’s take the latter first. I’m fascinated by the way Cora has undermined Isobel here, in just one of the many examples of how custom rules even in the unsettled atmosphere of wartime. Cora’s dug into her sense of herself as the lady of the estate, and is using that position to oust Isobel, who undoubtedly has more practical experience and better theories of management, from her post. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I wonder how much of Cora’s positioning here is about genuine interest in veterans and their recovery or the poor and their access to food, and how much of it is about maintaining that self-image, about power. When she tries to avoid a conversation with Isobel, telling her, “Please, can it wait? I have a mountain to get through,” she’s stealing a match on Isobel’s role as the woman with a profession. And her curt dismissal of Isobel’s distress, her declarations that “If I am not appreciated here, I will seek some other place where I will make a difference…I cannot operate where I am not valued,” are a neat co-option of the modern idea of women having meaningful work. Cora is pretending to care about the kinds of emotional needs Isobel introduced her to, even as she’s stripping Isobel of her ability to fulfill them.

In a subtler, and I think less intentional way, Branson does the same thing to Sybil during their second conversation about his love for her. “What work? Bringing hot drinks to a lot of randy officers? It all comes down to whether you love me. The rest is detail,” he tells her. It’s a nasty dismissal of her attempts to become more engaged and to find meaningful work to do. And it’s also part of him sidestepping a larger question about whether his family would embrace her. Branson really is putting a lot of pressure on Sybil, telling her that he’d have open arms for her family when they come around after she marries him, and linking his ability to join the struggle he’s convinced Sybil is important by telling her “Truth is, I’ll stay at Downton until you agree to run away with me.” There’s no question that Mary is wrong in telling Sybil that “That is why one talks to chauffeurs, isn’t it? To arrange journeys by road?” and Violet is being condescending when she warns Sybil about inappropriate wartime friendships. But I hope the show explores the ways in which Branson’s own ordeals are somewhat compromised in the way he’s treating the woman he loves.

And speaking of compromise, I’m curious as to what will happen with Mary and Sir Richard, whose courtship demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of an advancing new age. “This is your beau? A man who lends money then uses it to blackmail the recipient?” Violet asks, horrified, when Mary reveals the real source of Lavinia’s involvement with him. When Mary explains that Sir Richard lives in a “tough world,” Violet wants to know “And you intend to join him?” In a way, it’s a critical question for all three Crawley girls, given that Edith and Sybil have already ventured tentatively into that rougher world on their own terms, and Mary would be the last to join them. That way may lie independence, freedom from past scandal, and perhaps even love. But it does mean leaving things behind, whether it’s the conventions of the gentry, or a family one loves very much. Progress isn’t cost-free.

1. Most obviously, this is a deeply conventional list of nominees. Shame is a daring movie, but given its critical acclaim, Putting it somewhere in the mix wouldn’t have been so hard. The best director list is all dudes. And seriously, War Horse for best picture?

2. That said, if the Academy was going to take a risk with acting nods, I’m thrilled that it did so with Demian Bichir, whose performance as a immigrant father who risks deportation to get his truck and gardening equipment back after they’re stolen was one of the movies that moved me most deeply last year.

3. I’m glad to see the love for Bridesmaids, but frustrated by the lack of attention for Young Adult, which may lack toilet humor, but pushes into vastly different and more difficult places than the former. It’s very hard to watch Charlize Theron play the wildly selfish Mavis Grady, but she’s a much more daring and challenging so-called difficult woman than Lisbeth Salander or Maggie Thatcher.

4. Margin Call‘s Best Original Screenplay nod is fantastic news. It’s not just that this nervy, restrained financial thriller is a great, timely movie. It’s that the movie scraped forward on a combination of theatrical distribution and VOD, a triumph for a new model that could help more movies get to the audiences they deserve. Next to this, the nods for Ides of March for Adapted Screenplay is a disgrace.

5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes gets nominated in visual effects, rather than acting (not that it doesn’t deserve that nod, too) and Hollywood avoids a pressing question about its future yet again? At this point, I think another actor needs to give an undeniable performance in motion capture before the Hollywood community will come to consensus about how to define this new form.

What could have been a tense session at Sundance yesterday in the wake of the failures of SOPA and PIPA to advance, turned into a generally genial conversation between MPAA President Chris Dodd, National Association of Theater Owners president John Fithian, and filmmaker Christine Vachon, with occasional tough interjections from moderator and New York Times reporter David Carr.

“My take is that your industry vastly underestimated the intimacy and closeness of the relationships between tech companies and the consumer,” Carr told Dodd. “The people we want re-engineering the Internet are not your people or your old people.”

Dodd acknowledged that the protests against SOPA had been “a watershed event,” and said that the conversation would continue about legislation to address the problem of overseas sites that distribute pirated content. But he generally pivoted towards talking about the need for technology and content providers to recognize their common interests rather than dwelling on their differences. He pointed out that the same consumers who want content available on a wide array of devices are also the consumers who go to movies in theaters most frequently. “The person who loves technology loves content,” Dodd said. “They’re not the enemy of this industry at all. They’re the future in many ways.” He and Fithian also both emphasized the need to give consumers more choices in theaters.

“The screens in the film world got dominated by big pictures,” Fithian acknowledged. “We don’t need Harry Potter playing on 6 screens in our megaplexes. Maybe 4. And maybe we can pick up some independent movies.” He pointed to Open Road, the distribution company owned by AMC and Regal Cinemas as proof of the theaters’ intentions to begin acquiring independent movies and acting as distributors themselves. And Fithian said that the move towards digital projection will dramatically lower the cost of getting a movie in theaters from $1,000 per print to $100 for digital copies. In a reversal from prior approaches, Fithian suggested that NATO might reconsider offering Video On Demand sales in theaters so consumers could immediately get multi-device-capable copies of movies they’d just enjoyed.

And Vachon, who is at Sundance promoting her LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, which I’ll see on Wednesday emphasized that just as the MPAA and NATO are changing their approaches, so are filmmakers. “I think theatrical exhibition as the only means of measuring the success of a movie is changing, and fairly rapidly,” she said. “We are experimenting as much as we can with length, with format. We’ve always experimented with content…Our budgets have come down drastically, but the methodology of making a movie…that hasn’t come down…the creative margin is what has to be reconciled and reworked…we are constantly looking at different kinds of different distribution, ways we can directly market our work to the consumer.”