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I've been watching a lot of screeners lately, and some of them are quite swanky. It's the stuff that I missed in theaters cause it just didn't seem "big" enough to pay the money to see it projected large. But swank often comes in small packages.
De-Lovely is the umpteenth film I've seen lately about a real person's life, and it was - - as you might expect from a story about Cole Porter - - most swanky! It got around being a straight bio-pic in a very clever way by using the conceipt and gimmick that it was all vignettes of Cole's life as they flashed before his eyes in the moments before death.
That way, they could present the story in a less literal way, sometimes realistic-seeming and sometimes not. More important, they could feature Cole Porter's amazing songs prominently, and out of chronological order. It was a wonderful device that made the film work in a surprisingly effective way. I think the respective recent paradigms of 'Chicago' and 'Phantom of the Opera' have demonstrated that you can't just have people break out into song in musicals anymore; there has got to be a method for the numbers to work more seemlessly in modern film musicals, and "De-Lovely" tackled this problem nicely. Sweet performances by Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd as well.
I also recently saw 'The Aviator,' which was simply a straight bio-pic. Not bad, but neither was it the type of film that I thought deserving of an Oscar nomination blitz. It was only swanky, and only came fully to life, in the section about Hughes' love affair with Katherine Hepburn. Cate Blanchette was marvelous in that role - - and you simply cannot go unswanky with a good portrayal of Kate Hepburn on the screen.
The other screener I found most swanky was Closer. I think I ought to rent more Mike Nichols films. This was a fascinating tale of messed up love affairs between four well-drawn characters. Clive Owen certainly deserves his Academy Award nom, and there were surprisingly great performances from actors who've certainly turned in their share of drek over the past few years. Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Natalie Portman were flat-out terrific. The clever dialoge and dead-on sexy situations made this a pretty good swankfest. In the end, I was taken by how much the clever dialogue really revealed about these characters with some good acting ladled over the script. A brutal story of hurtful love among four of the more well established movie characters I've seen in quite a while.
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