My tweets of the last week:
Archives for February 2010
(not my) Best Pictures
I love and hate media awards ceremonies like The Grammys and the Emmys.
What are they measuring, really? Whatever is “Best”? Best how? Most commercial? Strongest technically? Most likable?
Voters of the various academies aren’t any more interested in thinking hard about the merits of “Best” than the guy that sat next to you on the bus. They nominate and vote for what they like, and they like what they know.
Does that occasionally highlight the best work in a year or coincide with the zeitgeist? Sure. But one look at the Golden Globes and the Grammys tells us that’s not necessarily the case.
The Oscars are the one set of awards that can still excite me. The one that at least nominates the most worthwhile performances and works, even if some genre fare slips through.
However, equal to that excitement, the Academy Awards also introduce skepticism to my film diet. I love a great many event movies, serious movies, and indie movies, but I have a contentious history with Best Picture nominees. It’s a good year if I like 2/5 of them.
Maybe it’s because I already pre-judge movies pretty harshly – before they get heaped with incongruous praise. If I haven’t seen a movie before it gains steam as an Oscar front-runner I become commensurately more skeptical that it’s actually any good. I enjoy being proven wrong (The Queen, Juno), but more often my prophecy is fulfilled and I’m either ambivalent (Michael Clayton) or I hate the movie (The Wrestler).
In this year’s field of ten (of which I’ve only seen the pair of sci-fi flicks) that movie is The Hurt Locker. It may be great; I haven’t seen it. However, my sneaking suspicion is that it will be a tedious movie about THE REAL WAR (TM).
I guess I’ll see. Eventually.
(Seeing only the sci-fi flicks in cinemas is characteristic, as I hardly ever pay theatre prices to watch talking heads. I can safely say neither were best.)
(Okay, maybe Avatar, but not the heavy-handed, lazy bullshit of District 9. )
What should win? I’ll tell you next year, when I’ve seen most of them.
What might win? If Avatar doesn’t neatly sweep it will be splitting heavily with Hurt Locker, leaving an outside shot for one of the smaller films which isn’t too similar (i.e., District 9 and Up are both splintering Avatar votes just on genre/style).
What am I rooting for? I already know I universally despise Coen Brothers movies, and I could care less about Push, so of the remaining films I suppose I’m pulling for Tarantino, even though I suspect I won’t like his movie very much. I suspect I’ll like An Education the best of them all.
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For what it’s worth, this was my take on 2008:
– Benjamin Button, my favorite director and lead actors, but it was shitty, pointless, and overlong.
– Frost/Nixon, a decent documentary that was really a movie.
– Milk, stunning, beautiful.
– The Reader, still avoiding, sounds soul-crushing.
– Winner, Slumdog Millionaire, a middling crowd-pleaser.
Comfort Films
I’ve been watching Star Wars for days.
Lest you wonder, “You mean, instead of going to work?,” allow me to explain: I’m home sick for the second day in the row – a relative rarity for me.
I’ll spare you the details and state simply that I’ve been relatively couchbound for over forty-eight hours, aside from when the constant heavy knocking on doors up and down my block (which I have begun to attribute to daytime drug deals), drove me to sloth up to the bed (there only having to contend with barking dogs).
My non-sleeping couch time has been spent watching Star Wars: A New Hope. Not the ooky remastered version. No. The original, unretouched theatrical cut that comes as a bonus in the box set.
I haven’t made it through it awake a single time, yet.
When I was home sick as a child – as sick as I have been this week – the Beta machine was my only comfort. On it my mother had amassed copies of every possible children’s show or movie shown on VHF, UHF, or HBO from 1981 forward. Muppet Movies, The Last Unicorn, Flight of Dragons, Here Comes the Grump, Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, and many more that I can’t remember at the moment.
And Star Wars
Being sick in college wasn’t the same. When you’re sick you just want something you like. You want comfortable clothes, comfort ford, and comfort films. I’ve seen hundreds of movies since then, but none really qualify (save for maybe Lord of the Rings – we did have a tape of The Hobbit, after all).
Having heard my stories of being home sick, E started buying me those movies on my first birthday when we were dating. We’ve continued to fill in the gaps over the years. Having just recently acquired the Star Wars Original Trilogy, all that remains outside of my grasp are the Muppet Movies.
I know this is ridiculous, but I don’t think I would have gotten better so quickly without Star Wars. It kept me couched and calm, intermittently napping – just like it did twenty years ago. Only now in my more mobile state am I interested in modern fare.
Do you have any comfort films?
Take Me To Vegas, Baby!
1. When I first bought the most recent Kings of Leon album – Only By Night – upon its release, the song I immediately gave five stars was “Use Somebody.”
2. In September after two weeks of the NFL season I declared (to no one in particular) that the Superbowl would be between the Saints or the Vikings from the NFC against the Colts or Denver for the AFC.
3. When Blogger.com launched Blogspot I reasoned (and frequently blogged) that Blogger was moving away from its core users that had previously driven word of mouth and feature development to appeal to a wider audience, and that eventually they would phase out the core users entirely. Today Blogger released an email stating that FTP support for domain blogs would end on March 26.