DUELING DIVAS

Thousands cheer Bohemian Rhapsody. Could it win Best Pic?

For, oh, about 1000 years now, my pal and colleague, Christina Waters, and I have been talking movies. Once upon a time, we thought about mounting our own movie review program — Dueling Divas — but inertia always set in. But today's technology enables to finally realize our dream — no TV studio required! So here goes! Feel free to listen in:

CW: Hey there Lisa - well I have to say of this list of 8 nominees for Best Picture this year, I have seen only 5 (five).

Bohemian Rhapsody—kickass music and attitude; Roma—languid, real-time memoir; The Favourite—visceral history lesson with three powerful dames; Green Book—crisp storytelling with appealing characters; and Vice—gritty and ugly underbelly of politics.

Didn't see: Black Panther, A Star is Born, or BlacKkKlansman, all three of which left town before I had a chance to check them out.

So I'm going to be clueless about Spike Lee's long overdue Oscar nomination, as well as the Marvel Comics saga, and whether or not Lady Gaga is the star that was born.

Any comments about this lineup of nominees?

Black Panther and his team: Wakanda Forever!

 LJ: Black Panther was a helluva lot of fun (although my favorite Straight Outta Oakland movie of the year was the exceptional Blindspotting). (Actually, it's my favorite movie of the year, period.) I think the main thing you can see from this list is that Academy voters were trying to support diversity of themes, cultures, and styles in their nominees. Only A Star Is Born is the kind of old-fashioned mainstream melodrama that Hollywood always used to recognize with Oscar nominations —pretty much to the exclusion of any other kind of movie.

(Alhough I have to admit, I skipped this one, having aready seen the previous four versions. We're heading for a new Oscar category: Best Revival of a Stone-Dead Property We've Already Seen a Million Times.)

I too missed BlacKkKlansman, but if it has an iota of the wit and audacity of Lee's best (Do The Right Thing or She's Gotta Have It), it'll be a worthy contender.

Roma: the discovery of slowness

I loved Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen nut that I am, but I'm surprised it's getting so much year-end awards attention. (But not displeased.) It's probably my favorite movie on this list. Despite — or possibly because of — its slow beginning, Roma really touched me as a mood piece about stillness and observation and being present in the journey of life. Green Book was highly entertaining, thanks to well-matched co-stars Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, and I'll bet Vice is a riot, in its own weird way, although I haven't caught up with it yet.

The Favourite is the only nominee I question on the list. All three lead actresses were terrific, but I don't understand why Yorgos Lanthimos has a career, or what he's trying to do with it.

Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne, The Favourite: imperious vulnerability

CW: As I watched the very stylish, postmodern, and over-the-top The Favourite I realized quickly that I was watching Olivia Coleman win the Best Actress Oscar. Her daring, generous, and courageous performance, throwing herself into the least flattering situations and camera angles, all the while moving with lightening speed from despair to delight, was a tour de force. And while I agree with you that Lanthimos' filmography is beyond weird, the performances definitely held my attention. No holds barred as far as the three female characters/actors went.

LJ: I agree about Olivia Coleman; she was absolutely fearless in staying true to her cranky, sad-sack character, no matter how awful she looked onscreen — and that's the kind of anti-glam riskiness that wins Oscar votes. (Just ask Charlize Theron or Nicole Kidman.) She was also brilliant in creating the only character in this very mannered and peculiar movie viewers could possibly care about, in all her imperious vulnerability.

But let's not count out Glenn Close. After a high-profile career full of nominations, she has yet to be the bride. Whatever might be said about The Wife, it might simply be Close's turn.

CW: Yes, it's high time Close won, and her recent SAG award tends to point her toward an Oscar.

LJ: Also, pay attention to Yalitza Aparicio, who is living the Star-Is-Born dream in real life as an unknown getting the lead in Roma. If the multi-nominated Roma shows signs of sweeping, her chances are excellent.

CW: Can't agree with you about this performance. The director seemed to insist that we be impressed, and often with Roma I felt manipulated.

The Best Actor category seems more closely matched. Viggo Mortensen was fantastic as the loud, crude, decent blue collar driver—he embedded himself in this role and clearly had a great time with it. Showed Viggo's oft-overlooked depth as a resourceful actor. Willem Dafoe was obviously acting, and while I love him (or perhaps I should say I love looking at him, all teeth, and jaw, and wild eyes), he didn't convince me. Christian Bale was spot on as Dick Cheney, but I felt as though I were watching a reenactment rather than a creative interpretation, whereas Rami Malek, as Freddie Mercury seemed to illuminate the man, the insecure boy looking for love, and ultimately the consummate rock star.

Malek as Mercury: the year of the Killer Queens!

So Rami Malek gets my vote as winner. And there seems to be much momentum in his favor.

LJ: Rami Malek was outstanding; he inhabited Freddie Mercury right down to the prosthetic overbite! He will, he will rock me if he wins!

I love Willem Dafoe too, but the despairing angst with which he was encouraged to chew his way through the horribly misbegotten At Eternity's Gate will probably not be mistaken for a great performance by Academy voters. (Although, they gave Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar for two hours of grunting and panting in The Revenant, so who knows?) Besides, only 12 people in the world saw the movie, including you and me, and we're not voting. Meanwhile, Mortensen could cruise to gold as a genial, blue-collar shmo who disovers, and then rises above, his own racism in Green Book. (He also packed on 40 pounds for the role, the male equivalent of an actress deglamorizing herself, by Oscar standards.)

But I can't help but think that Academy voters might go for Christian Bale, a chameleon who physically remakes himself for every role. The politics of Vice allign with a large percentage of Hollywood and its Oscar voters. And who could resist Bale's acceptance speech at the Globes, where he thanked Satan for giving him the inspiration to play Dick Cheney?

Surprise nominee?

CW: Best Director: I realize there will be some serious momentum for Spike Lee for what is incredibly only his first nomination. Unfortunately he's up against auteur Alfonso Cuarón, whose Roma was a poetic memoir of his own childhood. The Academy loves that kind of stuff. He wrote, produced, photographed, and directed this black and white elegy, but I didn't love the film. Something missing, that something that kindles rather than insists upon my empathy. The film did not touch me. But I absolutely appreciate the scope of his ambition here. And I think he will take the Oscar.

LJ: I'm just tickled that two of the five directors are nominated for foreign-language films — unusual in Oscar history (if one is not named Fellini). Cuaron already has an impressive Hollywood track record (from Y Tu Mama Tambien to the third Harry Potter movie, to Children Of Men). So he might have an edge here, even though he already has a directing Oscar for Gravity.

Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski is a surprise nominee — but maybe not so surprising, if his Cold War (which I am jonesing to see; it just opened in Santa Cruz) is anything like his brilliant Ida of a few years ago.

Lee's chances are excellent in his first-ever directing nomination — far better than Adam McKay's for Vice, making an irreverent comedy out of the Bush/Cheney moment in American politics. And I continue to be mystified by the Svengali-like hold that Yorgos Lanthimos exerts over the moviegoing public, especially critics. I passionately hated his breakout movie, The Lobster, for its mean-spirited cruelty in the name of satire, and the smug, farcical, slapstick tone of The Favourite just eludes me. I don't get it.

(Next time we’ll look at the undercard — including Supporting Actors, Screenplay, and Cinematography. Stay tuned!)

FLAME ON

Santa Cruz media icon Christina Waters is a true Renaissance Woman.

A journalist whose newspaper stories on arts and culture have been entertaining readers for decades, she's been nominated for the James Beard Award for her food writing (Spirits, Wine and Beer category).

She's a classically trained musician who sings in the University Choir, an accomplished painter, an educator at UCSC with a PhD in Philosophy, and a world traveler always eager to jet off to Milan or Bayreuth for the opera, or London for the theatre.

Now Christina can add "Author" to her impressive list of credits. Her new book, Inside the Flame: The Joy of Treasuring What You Already Have, is out this month from Parallax Press, in Berkeley. Part memoir, part dispensation of accumulated tribal wisdom, it's a collection of punchy, short pieces that exhort us to live now, in the present moment, in the real world — and offers suggestions on how to make our sensual, intellectual and emotional experiences of life even richer.

Christina and I have known each other since the Late Pleistocene Age; we met in the lobby of the Nickelodeon when we were both reviewing movies for rival papers, and we've been friends ever since. But even I was surprised at the sheer variety of life experiences revealed in Inside the Flame, and the depth of her willingness to share them with her readers.

If you're looking for someone to give you tips on how to live life fully, Christina is the mentor for you!

Her thoughtful, often playful pieces have provocative titles, like "Perfume Tattoos," "Up High and Down Low," "Purposeful Wandering,", and "When the World Touches Back."  In "Freestyle Craftiness," she celebrates "the rule that you don't require rules," in the act of creation.

In praise of the rougher, less genteel surfaces found in nature, she writes, "Texture is the world's way of getting our attention." In the piece, "Swimming In the Rain," she turns a story about diving into a public pool in the middle of a summer thunderstorm into an erotic confession.

In these brief, potent vignettes, Christina Waters celebrates the deeper meanings lurking beneath everyday experience, and through a collection of memories and suggested activities, invites us to reimagine our own lives.

Christina will read from Inside the Flame, sign books, and supply witty answers to your questions Monday night, November 28, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. She's liable to have a pretty big cheering section, so get in line now!

DARK MAGIC

Baby critic in the making: media was always the message

40 years on the movie beat in Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz in 1975 was heaven for a fledgling film buff. The movies were great: Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather Part II, Nashville. Admission was around $2.50 for a double-bill.

Those were the days! Much has changed in the world since then—especially the movie scene, and the moviegoing experience, here in Santa Cruz.

My affair with both began in the summer of 1974. As a freshly-minted UCSC grad, I packed up my BA, and went to work nights selling tickets and popcorn at the U. A. Cinemas (now the Riverfront). It was the streamlined "flagship" of the United Artist chain of theaters in town (which at that time included the Del Mar, the Rio, 41st Avenue Playhouse, and Aptos), before the corporation lost interest in Santa Cruz and let its theaters crumble into ruin.

Fledgling critic ca. 1976

The flip side of this corporate mentality were independently owned mom-and-pop movie houses. The Nickelodeon, operated by Bill and Nancy Raney (one screen, with a vintage nickelodeon movie machine roped off in the lobby), was a popular venue for foreign films, maverick indies, and festival programming. (Like a brilliant French New Wave retrospective that my roommate, Jan, and I drank in like fine wine every Saturday afternoon for weeks.)

The family-owned Capitola Theater, and Cinema Soquel, showed less-than-brand-new double features. (Although, in a couple of years, Cinema Soquel switched to X-rated films in a desperate, but doomed attempt to stay solvent.) The Skyview Drive-In was still showing movies, but Gary Culver had not yet opened Scotts Valley Cinema, and the Cinema 9 was not yet even a gleam in the developer's eye.

In January, 1975, Rene Fuentes-Chao opened the Sash Mill Cinema, with 25-cent popcorn and double bills like A Streetcar Named Desire with Last Tango In Paris, Sunday Bloody Sunday with Persona, or Chinatown with Touch Of Evil.

It had poor insulation, no ventilation, and a corrugated metal roof that guaranteed patrons would freeze in the winter and roast in the summer; raindrops sounded like Taiko drumming. We loved it. Its program of vintage and recent films changed three times a week, and they published a poster-sized schedule every quarter, which everyone I knew had taped to their refrigerator.
  

Early GT promo (ca 1977) for its new full-time critic

The Sash Mill and the Nick catered to Santa Cruz's new identity as a university town. Programming was inspired and offbeat, prices were relatively low, and the sense of community was enormous—especially among students (and recent students) discovering David Lynch, or RKO musicals, or Japanese samurai movies together.

Jan and I went out to the movies with my brother, Steve, almost every night. And I wrote obsessively about everything I saw in my journal, long before anybody ever paid me to do it.

Enter Good Times, a 12-page entertainment weekly started in April, 1975, by Jay Shore. By then, I was working at Bookshop Santa Cruz, in the textbook room managed by Steve, and my nights were free. When GT film reviewer Christian Kallen advertised for an assistant, I hauled out my old (manual) college typewriter, hammered out a one-page review of some dreadful B-movie we'd recently seen at the drive-in, and mailed it in. Two weeks later, Christian called me up to tell me seven people had responded to his column, but I was the only one who'd actually written something. It must have worked; I became Christian's official stringer

I love to write, and I love movies, but the rest was strictly on-the-job training. When Christian left town, about a year later, I inherited the job.

In the lobby of the "old" Nick, ca 2004

One of the greatest perks of that job was the fabled Nickelodeon press screening. In big cities, films are screened early for the press, so writers can meet their deadlines and get a review out on opening day. The Raneys embraced this idea for a small, movie-loving town like ours. Their eclectic films needed attention right away; if a movie didn't get reviewed that first week and draw a house, it probably wouldn't last a second week.

For years, Thursday afternoon press screenings at the Nick became the place for the SC film elite to meet. It was like a private club for local scribes, where we all got to hang out together, whatever rivalries might have been going on between our papers.

I had known Buz Bezore slightly at UCSC, but the Nick lobby is where I first met Christina Waters, Tom Maderos, and Michael Gant, all of whom wrote about film sometime or other in the various incarnations of the Santa Cruz Express/Independent/Taste/Metro/Weekly. Bruce Bratton was a regular, as were Rick Chatenever and, later, Wallace Baine, from the Sentinel. I'm pretty sure I met Morton Marcus for the first time at the Nick, and probably Geoff Dunn, when he was making his first local history documentaries. UC professor and film historian Vivian Sobchak attended the screenings for years, and, more recently, Dennis Morton and David Anthony from the KUSP Film Gang.

My first GT review! Monty Python & the Holy Grail. October 23, 1975

In one sense, we knew we were all on the same team—the collective treasure hunt to discover great movies and spread the word. We saw the sublime, the ridiculous, and everything in between at those Nick screenings. And since we rarely agreed on which was which, debates were spirited as we filed back out into the (always unexpected) daylight.

Sadly, those press screenings are no more, much like film itself.     Movies are projected digitally. Vintage film reels are preserved as objets d'art suspended from the ceiling in the lobby of the Nick, relics as quant as that old nickelodeon machine once was. Today, movies assault you in 3D, seats rock or recline, theaters call themselves "cafe lounges." But it was never about all that stuff. All that really matters is the transformative magic of the movies.

MEET the (MOVIE) PRESS

We're ba-a-ack!

After a dithering-imposed hiatus last year (um, we forgot to book the venue), it's time once again for the annual Critic's Smackdown, where we ink-stained members of The Press duke it out over our favorite films of the previous year and offer our fearless and/or clueless predictions for this years Academy Award winners.

For many moons, Bruce Bratton, of KZSC and Bratton Online, Wallace Baine, of the Sentinel, and I commandeered the Nicklelodeon for this event. Regretfully, this year, Wallace has had to opt out; he's too busy covering every other arts and entertainment story in the county to see enough of the movies.

But Bruce and I will be joined by longtime local journalista Christina Waters, whose opinions on film and food appear in the Santa Cruz Weekly, and online at Christina Waters.com.

Also new this year, our act is booked into the Grand Auditorium, downstairs at the Del Mar. Showtime is this Sunday, February 23 (one week before the Oscars), at 11 am. And, yes, we WILL be in 3D, but no glasses required!

Our leader: Morton Marcus

This entire event began years ago as an outgrowth of Morton Marcus' bi-monthly Saturday morning film discussion groups at the Nick. Mort attracted such a large, loyal following of passionate local movie fans that one year, he invited Bruce, Wallace, and me to participate in one of his early January discussions to talk about our favorite films of the previous year.

Turned out the audience loved having not one, but four local critics in its collective sites with whom to spar over their most and least favorite movies of the year. Mort invited us all back in March, a week before the Academy Awards broadcast, to talk about all things Oscar, and a tradition was spawned.

Mort is no longer here to chime in with his colorful opinions and encyclopedic knowledge of film history. But we do our best to carry on without him on what is now our tenth anniversary.

And now that the Oscar show comes so much earlier in the year, my fellow filmies and I have downsized to a single yearly mash-up where we discuss our favorite films of the year AND the upcoming Oscar contest. Expect diverse opinions, but a clean fight; as Mort would say, no kicking, gouging or spitting.

But, hey, nobody wants to listen to the critics blather on and on. The success of this event depends on you, The Public, telling us your opinion of the films of 2013. This is an interactive event that depends on audience participation, and the Del Mar is huge, so bring your friends—it's free!

That's this Sunday, 11 am, at the Del Mar. This is your chance to let the critics know what YOU think!

TALKING MOVIES

Due to a perfect storm of participant inattention and scheduling conflicts at the venue, our annual pre-Oscar film critics' smackdown at the Nickelodeon will not go on this year.

This is the event in which, in days of yore, our fearless leader, Morton Marcus, used to lead guest critics Bruce Bratton, Wallace Baine, and myself in a roundhouse brawl—oops, I mean civil, intellectual discourse about the year's best movies, along with our views on the Academy Award nominees. Even after Mort moved on the the Great Screening Room in the sky, the three of us kept the event going in his honor.

This year, the show will still go on, but in a different format. Although we won't be making a personal appearance at the Nick, we'll be talking movies on Bruce Bratton's radio show, Universal Grapevine, on KZSC, Tuesday, February 12, at 7:30 pm.

Wallace has had to leave our merry band, since he's so busy covering the rest of the entertainment scene in Santa Cruz, he rarely has time to see movies any more.  But longtime local filmie Christina Waters, of the SC Weekly, has graciously agreed to step into the breach.

We'll be discussing our favorite films of 2012, likely Oscar winners (and losers), and anything else that pops into our brains on the subject. Tune into KZSC, 88.1 on your FM dial, and check it out!