Why Wasn’t Conviction a Best Picture Nominee? (Missed Movies)

Conviction (2010) had a lot going for it. The movie is a compelling true story and an inspiring tale about family love. It features a murder mystery. One of the characters is a real-life famous lawyer. It has outstanding actors. Why was the movie not even mentioned at Oscar time? Why did it flop at the box office, ranking 150th in box office for 2010 after its October release?

Conviction Hilary SwankMovie marketers often face a dilemma. To get people to see their movie, they have to tell potential viewers enough about the movie to create interest (or in the case of comedies, the best or only laugh lines — as I recently experienced while watching Cedar Rapids (2011)). But then, potential viewers may feel they do not need to see the movie unless there are other compelling reasons to see it. Plus, true stories are often already familiar. One recent excellent movie that had the familiarity challenge was Conviction (2010), starring Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell. But the movie is still worthwhile viewing.

Conviction follows the true story of Kenny Waters, who was sentenced to life in prison for a murder. His sister Betty Anne Waters believed in him so much that to prove him innocent, she earned her G.E.D., graduated from college, went to law school, passed the bar exam, and became a lawyer. It is an amazing story featuring hard work and a lot of luck.

The reason that Conviction did not do better at the box office may have been that the story was too predictable (although 127 Hours faced a similar challenge), or maybe the story was too conventional. Or maybe the fascinating story lost something when converted to a 107-minute movie. The story is incredible because of the years the sister labored to free her brother while he was in prison. But it is hard to convey time in a movie, and to do so may have required a longer movie. Would it have been a better movie if it were longer, and would people have gone to see a longer movie?

Or maybe the movie was just cursed. There is a tragic ending to the story not shown in the movie. Other actors (Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly) dropped out of the lead male role, and sixteen hours of crucial footage was ruined by an airport x-ray. Meanwhile, some family members were not happy with the final movie.

But even if you know the story, should you see the movie? It is still entertaining, due largely to the fine acting by Swank and Rockwell. The movie also features Melissa Leo, who recently won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work The Fighter, and an excellent performance in a small role by Julliette Lewis. It is unfortunate that more people did not see Conviction because the story shows something that happens in the criminal justice system more often than we would like to believe.

Conclusion? Although this review points out some problems, these criticisms are an attempt to determine why such a compelling story with great acting did not translate into a big box office or a more perfect film. Conviction still is very good and worth viewing. But if you plan to see it, do not watch the trailer below. Conviction is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

You may know how the story ends, but in case you do not, I will not ruin it. If you want more information, you may watch a local news story about the case and the release of the movie. Also, see the Chimesfreedom review of 127 Hours about how another movie faced the familiarity problem.

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    Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

    Client 9: Rise and Fall of Eliot SpitzerThe documentary Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010) is a fascinating portrayal of the former New York governor and his downfall. The movie follows Spitzer’s fast rise from a state attorney general heralded as “the sheriff of Wall Street” through his presidential aspirations to his even faster fall following the discovery of his use of prostitutes.

    Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, directed by Alex Gibney and now available on Blu-ray and DVD, does an excellent job of showing all sides of the story, featuring interviews with Spitzer as well as with several of Spitzer’s enemies. The story gives one a new perspective on the major players. Among other revelations, one learns that the woman featured in multiple covers of New York tabloids and interviewed by Diane Sawyer had only one encounter with Spitzer. As a result of the media attention, she is now a columnist for the New York Post, while the actual woman who met Spitzer frequently avoids the spotlight.

    The story of a powerful man who falls has been around for ages. In a famous quote from the Bible, Jesus asked a question that one might recall while watching Client 9: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” The movie reveals that the beam in Spitzer’s eye included his hubris and pride, which led him to make numerous enemies and few trusted friends. While Spitzer admits he caused his own descent, and that is true, his downfall is much more complicated. Some of the people who had past run-ins with Spitzer — including legislators and those he prosecuted as Attorney General — played interesting roles in the drama.

    Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer does not let Spitzer off the hook, but it also portrays the man and the scandal in its complexity. Spitzer, who now has his own television show on CNN and who may eventually return to politics to run for mayor of New York City, was one of the first leaders to reveal the problems on Wall Street that later led to the most recent recession. But he lacked empathy in his encounters with other people. He was a man who was driven to reform government because he saw the flaws in others, but who then fell because he could not see the flaws in himself.

    Has Spitzer learned from his mistakes and become more humble? What do you think? Leave a comment?

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    Lenny Bruce is Not Afraid

    Lenny Bruce Carnegie Hall

    On February 4, 1961, Lenny Bruce performed before a full house at a midnight show at Carnegie Hall. Outside that cold night, a blizzard was blowing through the city, and there was also something powerful going on inside.

    The Carnegie Hall Performance

    Although Lenny Bruce’s career had been slowly building, the performance at Carnegie Hall launched him further into a career of breaking comedy and language barriers that would bring fame, legal troubles, and ultimately his death on August 3, 1966.

    Below is the beginning of his performance at Carnegie Hall.

    Persecution and Death

    Before the end of the year, Lenny Bruce was arrested in San Francisco for obscenity for one of his performances. Although he was acquitted in that case, police officers in other cities began monitoring him more closely.

    Here is part 2 (and you may continue listening to the concert on YouTube):

    The close scrutiny led to other similar arrests and arrests for drug possession. In 1964 after a performance in New York, Bruce was again charged with obscenity. This time, he was sentenced to four months in a workhouse.

    While out on bail during the appeals in 1966, he died of an accidental overdose. Phil Spector said it was an “overdose of police.”

    Five years after Lenny Bruce’s death, a similar story would be repeated. Another star would face an indecency conviction, dying while the appeal was pending from an apparent death by drugs: Jim Morrison, who died in exile in Paris on July 3, 1971.

    It would be almost 50 years after Bruce’s death before New York Gov. George Pataki pardoned Bruce in 2003.

    Lenny Bruce’s Influence

    Lenny Bruce influenced many performers who came after him. Richard Pryor said, “Lenny changed my life,” noting that “[i]t was him who said comedy wasn’t about telling jokes – it was about telling the truth.”

    George Carlin has often discussed how Lenny Bruce was his hero. One may see the Bruce connection to Carlin’s famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Bruce also has been mentioned in a number of songs, including R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” and Bob Dylan’s “Lenny Bruce” from his Shot of Love album:

    They said that he was sick ’cause he didn’t play by the rules
    He just showed the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools
    They stamped him and they labeled him like they do with pants and shirts
    He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts
    Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.

    A bio-pic about Lenny Bruce was made in 1974 starring Dustin Hoffman, who gives an excellent performance. Lenny, which was directed by Bob Fosse and was based on a Broadway play by Julian Barry, appears to be out of print on DVD, but you may watch it streaming on Netflix.

    Although Lenny leaves out some background about Bruce’s tragic life, the movie is a good introduction to Bruce.  And Hoffman presents what Bruce’s “shocking” performances were like.

    It amazes me that Lenny Bruce was constantly harassed and faced prison for using words we hear all the time today. But I still remember seeing the Dustin Hoffman movie when I was a kid when we first got cable in our house.

    I had never heard anyone speak like that. My education on movie profanity would continue with Al Pacino’s performance in Dog Day Afternoon. But Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Lenny Bruce was quite eye-opening. Many of Bruce’s intelligent points about censorship have stayed with me throughout my life. So, thank you Lenny and Dustin (and Richard Pryor and George Carlin).

    Bonus Website: The Official Lenny Bruce website, approved by his daughter, also sponsors a link to donate to Lenny’s House, a non-profit charity for women recovering from drug and alcohol abuse.

    Bonus Quote and Movie Reference : One of the Lenny Bruce quotes on the website is: “Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers, will allow you to satirize it which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.” In one of Woody Allen’s best movies, Crimes and Misdemeanors, a character played by Alan Alda says, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” Allen was a supporter of Bruce and even signed a petition on Bruce’s behalf after an arrest, so I wonder if the line was inspired by Bruce?

    What do you think about Lenny Bruce and his influence? Leave a comment.

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    Our Great Recession & “The Company Men”

    Works of art must struggle to be able to say something about major historical events close in time to the events. While the events are occurring, we lack perspective, so movies often fail to give us much insight into our own time periods.

    Company Men

    For example, although the United States was involved in escalations in Viet Nam since at least the early 1960s, the first great Viet Nam War movie was 1978’s The Deer Hunter (and to some extent Coming Home from the same year), which came out about three years after the fall of Saigon. Apocalypse Now (1979) came out a year later, but most other excellent movies about the period came another decade later: Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). One of the few movies we remember that was released during the war was The Green Berets (1968), a movie that has a much different perspective than the later movies.

    Similarly, we have not yet seen great movies about the events of September 11, 2001. There are capable movies, like World Trade Center (2006) and United 93 (2006), but those movies do not give us much new perspective on the events. My favorite movie about 9/11 is not really about 9/11. Spike Lee’s beautiful 25th Hour (2002) is about a man in his last day before he has to report to prison. But the film is set in New York not long after the 9/11 attacks and does an outstanding job of showing indirectly what New York was like in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

    A few movies have had some success showing their own time period. Best Years of Our Lives (1946), while not above criticism, does seem to fairly reflect the lives of American men and their families when the men returned after World War II. I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) shows the terror and suffering of the Depression while that economic crisis was still ongoing. But such movies are an exception.

    The Company Men (2010), like 2009’s Up in the Air, attempts to show America during the current recession. The film’s perspective is through the eyes of three men struggling after their corporate employer lays them off in massive downsizing. The movie features some excellent actors, including Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, and Kevin Costner — who has a small role but almost steals the movie in every scene where he appears. The movie shows how the layoffs impact the men because, like many of us in the modern world, their identities are connected to their jobs. So, they struggle to find meaning in their unemployed states, while also struggling to deal with bills and family relationships.

    One may criticize the movie for focusing on high-level corporate workers instead of the many working class women and men who have lost their jobs in the last several years. The movie wants us to feel sorry for Ben Affleck’s character because he has to sell his Porsche after getting laid off, making us wonder if the film-makers are that disconnected to the suffering of most people during this recession. But the Porsche-selling serves a purpose in showing how the character tries to hold onto the various status trappings even as the rest of his world falls apart. Also, I suspect that part of the reason for focusing on corporate workers was to show them directly interacting with the corporate owners who are making the decisions. But there is something too simplistic about the movie to focus on the bosses being evil caricatures, while the other main characters have somewhat predictable story arcs.

    Still, the drama is entertaining, and one must give the movie credit for attempting to show some of the human costs of the Great Recession. Although movies about current historical events often fail, we need help in processing the meanings behind those events. While relative failures like The Company Men, The Green Berets, and United 93 are not going to be remembered as great movies about their respective time periods, I am glad these movies were made and that I saw them. In many ways, they make way for the great movies to come by testing the waters and raising the questions that will be addressed later.

    A great movie has yet to be made about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, but there have been many more attempts on those subjects than has been made about the Great Recession. And each movie about the wars start to tell us a little more about those events and about ourselves. And because those wars have been around longer than the current recession, there are some good movies on that topic, such as The Hurt Locker (2009) and In the Valley of Elah (2007). So keep trying Hollywood. You will get it.

    Conclusion? The Company Men is an entertaining movie. Although it is not a great movie and is somewhat predictable, the high quality acting and realistic story about current events is worthwhile viewing.


    What do you think of these movies? Leave a comment?

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    The Leopold & Loeb Trial and Alfred Hitchcock

    On January 28, 1936, Richard Loeb was killed in prison. Loeb was half of the infamous murdering pair Leopold & Loeb.  The two men and their crime inspired both the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rope (1948) and a later film, Compulsion (1956).

    In 1924, the media focused on the issue of the death penalty due to the high-profile crime and the “trial of the century.” Two young students from the University of Chicago — Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – were charged with the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks.

    The Crime and Trial

    It was a ridiculous crime. Leopold and Loeb were intelligent, but fashioned themselves as superior to everyone else.  So, they wanted to see if they could accomplish “the perfect crime.” They couldn’t. Police soon found them because Leopold had dropped his rare type of glasses next to the body.

    Clarence Darrow Clarence Darrow, the attorney for the two students, turned the murder case into a referendum on the death penalty after Leopold and Loeb both pleaded guilty. When the 67-year-old Darrow argued for the students’ lives, the local paper reported that a mob “fought like animals to . . . hear Darrow speak.”

    In Attorney for the Damned, Arthur Weinberg explained that several newspapers from around the country published Darrow’s twelve-plus hour plea in whole or in part. The attorney was successful. The two were sentenced to life for the murder and ninety-nine years for kidnapping, but no death penalty.

    After the Sentencing

    Loeb was killed in prison after nine years of incarceration.  But Nathan Leopold lived to be paroled in 1958 at the age of fifty-three. Leopold apparently was quite remorseful for the murder and tried to give something back to society.

    While in prison, Leopold volunteered to be infected with malaria for a study of the disease. After parole, he moved to Puerto Rico, worked at a church-operated hospital helping others until his death.  He eventually married and earned a master’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico.

    Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope

    Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rope (1948), which was originally a play, has parallels to the Leopold & Loeb crime.  But the movie is highly fictionalized.

    Rope features two students who murder another student to show they are superior intellectuals. They hide the body in a trunk.  Then, they use the trunk as a table for a dinner party as a way to show how they are more clever than everybody else.

    The movie stars Jimmy Stewart as a teacher who attends the party. Do the boys get away with murder? I am not going to ruin it for you.

    Alfred Hitchcock filmed the movie in a unique style with extended takes between cuts.  Ultimately, though, he referred to Rope as a failed experiment. Jimmy Stewart was not happy with his performance either.

    Rope received mixed reviews. It also faced problems as some cities banned it for perceived homoerotic content. Today, though, many critics, like Roger Ebert, praise the movie and argue it is underrated, especially for the way the movie was filmed.

    Filmmakers do not make cheesy trailers like this one anymore.  The trailer for Rope features one of the actors in character talking directly to you about the movie. I wish they still made trailers like this one.

    The trailer for Rope sort of ruins the ending of the movie, so be warned.

    Compulsion With Orson Welles

    The movie Compulsion (1956), directed by Richard Fleisher, also was loosely based on the Leopold & Loeb case. In the movie, Orson Welles played defense attorney Jonathan Wilk, a character inspired by Clarence Darrow.

    Below is a video featuring the defense attorney’s argument before the court. Wilk’s argument is much shorter than Darrow’s 12-hour speech.

    Because modern movie directors think we have short attention spans, the 10-minute speech here is probably longer than you would see in most modern movies, which is a shame. As Darrow knew, it sometimes takes some time to tell a moving story.

    What do you think of the movies Rope and Compulsion? Leave a comment.

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