My Favorite Movie of the Oscar Picks

I should be honest and say upfront that I have not seen all of the Oscar nominated movies.  Okay, I've only seen two of the Best Picture nominees: her and American Hustle.  But I've seen a smattering of other movies that have nods in other categories: Cutie and the Boxer (documentary), 20 Feet from Stardom (documentary), August Osage County (acting nods), The Croods, Despicable Me 2, a number of others.  I will see Captain Phillips and Inside Llewyn Davis and likely Frozen before the awards come around.  But I get excited because my husband gets excited because his twin (who was a film major and loves film film film) gets excited and there's lots of talk about who should win and why.

I should also be honest and say I don't really care who wins.  Giant celebratory awards ceremonies for honoring millionaires for being the best at a job that they adore. . . Nowadays?  Seems a little tone deaf.  But film is still good and moving and important.  And so my pick for Best Picture, simply because it was my favorite film of the year, hands down, is Spike Jonze's her.

Looking at reviews online, it seems like people either love or hate this movie, but I just thought it was beautiful.  When I was a kid, loads of movies about aliens were positive--Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Starman--and writers and directors made space for a vision of alien life being gentle and curious.  That's incredibly rare now. Even Spielberg's aliens are angry and violent now, and it makes me a little sad.  It feels like a lack in our vision, and likely a lack of wonder or generosity or hope. Artificial Intelligence--the other Sci-Fi bogey man--has rarely ever been anything other than terrifying.  Machines become smarter than us, and they immediately set to work enslaving or killing the entire human population.

But not so in "her".  A.I. starts as a personalized OS system that begins its life and learning getting to know individual people, and as a result, it loves us.  It's such a hopeful take and I hope more likely than The Matrix or Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey or even the ridiculously morose A.I.

Beyond the Sci-Fi genre thoughts, her is also, primarily a story about love.  How do we love?  What constitutes love?  Does romantic love happen in your mind or does it have to also be physical? How do we learn that we are loved or even lovable?  What constitutes a human connection and has that been changed by the influx of technology into our personal lives?

It's a pretty thought provoking movie, with the bonus of also being uplifting as well.  In 2014, my year of pursuing love and quiet joy, her was undoubtedly a quiet joy.



Also, I would totally kick ass at Twombly's day job.

Cloud Atlas Trailer

You read a few perfect books in a lifetime, I think. . . And David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is one of those books.  It is ambitious and expansive and big.  Truly.  It's about big things all of which are difficult to explain--and none of which I want to, because you ought to get to experience this book without spoilers.  But it's made up of 6 connected stories, though I'm not sure they're actually connected so much as sitting inside one another like Russian nesting dolls.  Except by the time you finish the novel, you find that the smallest doll within the set is also the largest and contains the other stories, just as much they contain it.

And the Wachowskis have gone and made a film version.  The preview makes it looks impressive and the Wachowskis have no end of talent at creating impressive visual effects. 


But I admit to being disappointed that Tom Hanks and Halle Berry are the leads.  I think this particular movie would have been better served with less well-known actors.  And also that rather than adequately create connectivity between the stories, they have used a trick of repetitively using the same actors throughout.  That could simplify this and make the story about reincarnation--which I neither believe in, nor think the original novel was about.  The novel was about the actions--no matter how small--of one man in time rippling out to create the world we end up with hundreds of years later.  Strangers affecting strangers lives not just today, but forever and ever, across time, for good and for ill.

And nevertheless, I can't wait until it comes out.  I'm super excited.  If it's even half as good as the book. . .

Martha Marcey May Marlene

I cannot stop thinking about this movie. D and I watched it just this past Tuesday. It has legs. I don't want to say much about the plot. The plot isn't the point and I don't want to ruin a bit of it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. It got a lot of attention when it first came out--a movie about a young woman who joins a cult and then is rescued by her estranged sister.

What's so disconcerting about this film for me is that the setting of the whole film reminds me of huge happy swathes of my life--my family's farm in Cleves, OH, the seven years I spent in Athens, OH, vacations in Maine. And so much of the film could be happy and has all of the markers of usual summer splendor--sun glinting off a lake, having a beer on the back of small speed boat, reading in adirondack chairs at the edge of a pier, the slant of sunlight through dust kicked up while working in a barn, young folks long-limbed and attentive listening to their friends playing acoustic music, skinny dipping in a wooded creek, everything green on green as far as the eye can see rustling in a warm wind. It's the summer I've been dreaming of ever since I first started having to work all year round.

And despite all of that, it's a horror movie. And that was a sense I didn't have until it was over, as if while watching it, my mind kept trying to resolve the story, kept trying to fix the narrative to go with the sensation that the visuals of the movie were giving me. But it's a horror movie, and the first one that I have ever seen that is 99% psychologically horrifying. There's almost no blood whatsoever and there is certainly no gore.

Four days later, I haven't been able to shake it. I keep thinking about who I am and if there's any way that I could have been the lead character, Martha. I don't think so, but it's hard to know. . . and frankly, in the end, I don't want to. I'd just prefer to stop thinking about it.

Rent this movie immediately, just please don't watch it with anyone under the age of 13. This would be a rough one to explain to young people. . . though probably a good one to explain to young women sometime in their teens as a cautionary tale. *shudder.



Written and Directed by Sean Durkin and starring Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes and Sarah Paulson.

It's a Terrible Week for Singing

So, a friend at work shared this with me today and it brightened my day considerably.

A bunch of industrious musically-minded film students at Columbia College Chicago have gotten together with the hopes of putting together a 90-minute musical film about a puppeteer whose life seems to be going from bad to worse.

If the video they created introducing their idea and asking for donations to help fund the film is any indication of what the full-length film will be, I'm in.

How bout you?

It's a Terrible Week for Singing from Evan Mills on Vimeo.

If you want to help these young folks out and donate to their film, click here.

Address Is Approximate

Holy cow. A friend (the incomparable Jill Huntsberger) showed me this video.

Completely beautiful.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Created by the U.K.'s Tom Jenkins of the The Theory. Thanks so much for this uplift today, Mr. Jenkins.

Good Thing Sixteen: Beginners

My favorite film of the year. . . because despite centering around a guy who is so quiet and so cut off from his feelings--or, at the very least, his ability to express them--it's a movie entirely about love in all of its forms.


Romantic love. Familial love. Love of animals and their returned affection. Love of the world and history and mysteries. In my world, creativity and its expression is also love.

And while having a bad year, Beginners felt like it was commiserating with me. But I was also jealous of how much time all of the characters had to explore each each other and themselves. It was like a fantasy of what life should be like--taking the time to know your parents, taking the time to fall in love, getting to take your dog with you everywhere you go.

I've been letting work eat me alive now for years, and I think Beginners has reminded me to slow it down. Beginners may be my only New Years resolution in 2012.



Thank you, Mike Mills. Really. I mean it.

Louder Than a Bomb

This past week, a bunch of my co-worker buddies and I went to the Siskel Center to see the new Louder Than A Bomb documentary. . . and it was sooooo great. Seriously, if it ends up in theatrical release near you or is eventually available through Netflix, you have to see it.

There are so many docs out right now about educational sadnesses in the States, but this is not one of them. It's nothing but good news--a movie about young people becoming more themselves and more humane and more centered and powerful through poetry. They find families in one another through Chicago's biggest poetry slam youth competition "Louder Than A Bomb"--an event near and dear to my heart because so much of it has taken place on Columbia's campus and because a bunch of those kids end up in HSSI (the arts program I ran) year after year.

Bonus! Here are two haikus I photographed the same night, written by Columbia students and then put up in the Harrison Red Line stop. It's poetry and so thematically linked.