Sounds Delicious

The free world is now in the hands of a reasonable man, and I feel pretty good about that.  So let’s talk about the fucking oscars.

I tend to stay away from current movies.  My excuse/reason for this is some half-baked pretense about avoiding hype and allowing the passage of time to weed out overrated movies (it is really annoying to watch an over-hyped movie in a theatrical setting), but deep inside I know that it’s easy, cheap, and convenient to watch other things at home on my couch.  Also there are enough older films out there to overwhelm me anyway.  The problem with this lazy approach is that every year I watch the oscars and I speculate about who probably deserved what, or didn’t.  Last year, for instance, I knew “There Will Be Blood” was slightly better than “No Country for Old Men”, but I had to presume that “Atonement” did not deserve its place among the best picture nominees - a spot that I think should have gone to “The Assassination of Robert Ford By the Coward Robert Ford”.

But this year two of everybody’s favorite films, “Wall-E” and “The Dark Knight”, did not win best picture or best director nominations.  ”Wall-E” has its own category, of course - ‘best animated feature’ - which it will win as Pixar movies always do.  ”The Dark Knight” was simply snubbed, ostensibly because it’s an action movie.

So here I went to the trouble of dragging myself out of my house to go to a crowded and noisy theater to watch two very different movies that literally everyone was raving about; two movies that gave more than what was expected; two movies that succeeded on multiple levels; two movies that somehow appealed to every member of a family; two movies that lived up to their boundless hype; two movies that I subsequently loved; and I will yet again be watching an Academy Awards ceremony in which I have not seen any of the nominees in the top categories.

My bitter presumptions are already piling up, for instance that I’m pretty sure Christopher Nolan could direct a better movie than “The Reader” with his eyes closed.  But I don’t know that for sure.  If “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” got a best picture nomination not for quality but because it is a certain type of movie - and if, conversely, “The Dark Knight” wasn’t nominated simply because it is a different type of movie - than winning an oscar should be equivalent to winning “Most Snack-alicious Bear Claw” at a vending machine suppliers convention.  But I don’t know that for sure.  Ghetto-izing “Wall-E” into a lesser category ignores how much the film transcends its own genre, and in ignoring “Wall-E” the Academy reveals itself as too rigid and pretentious to appreciate a minor revolution in the industry.  But I don’t know that for sure.  I need to check out what this Academy is raving about.  I need to see these movies.

In an attempt to - for once - know what I’m talking about, I’ve decided to attempt to see all the nominees in all the major categories (film, director, actor, actress, supporting, screenplays; if I have time I’ll watch the straw nominees in Wall-E’s category) between now and the oscars.  That’s 16 movies in 29 days.  I think I can do it.  

 Some of them are out on DVD, right?  And “Tropic Thunder” is actually supposed to be pretty good.

Alexander “Truly” Scrumptious 

Read about my progress here

 The new 90210 is off and running.

I watched the original series religiously for its entire run, so I’m having a hard time judging this new version.  The fact that, for me, it’s a mixed bag - as opposed to a crime against humanity - is pleasantly encouraging.

I like the fact that they are including original characters, sort of continuing the soap opera ten years later.  I like how hot some of the teenage girls are.  The new series is much more like what the old series became (a trashy, turbulent, incestuous mess, like its spinoff, Melrose Place) than Darren Star’s original concept, but a slower paced and character-focused “issue drama” like the first season of Bev-Niner is a delicate mix.  I wouldn’t expect anyone to even try to recreate that, much less do it well. 

I think many people (even true fans of the original show) forget that 90210’s initial popularity was not established through sleaze and scandal as much as good writing, good characters, and a frank, honest, and open-minded approach to real issues.  Sure, it was sugar-coated with rich, brooding dudes and chicks in turquoise bikinis, but it had a heart and a mind as well, an enlightened moral core that it eventually abandoned in favor of the more detached ’realism’ of a smutty soap opera.  Not that I didn’t eat it up with a big brass spoon.  But the characters that Star set up in that first season are what allowed it to endure.

This new show, I don’t know.  I like some of the characters okay, but it seems sort of like what happened to the Real World:  the first several seasons had all this bizarre, different people from all over the place dipping their fingers in each others’ peanut butter; now it’s just an endless series of identical, attractive, whiny college students.  I’m worried that these young, skinny (jesus they are skinny), flawless girls and their respective dudes are going to be just as interchangeable and replaceable.

My other concern is the pacing.  So far the show seems guided by a 30-second maximum for any given scene.  Obviously this is to keep the story moving and to stay up-to-the-minute with all the characters, but it also forces an unrelenting urgency.  There are very few scenes of casual dialogue, which is unfortunate, because conflicts matter less when you don’t know if you even like the characters. 

 But this is just the beginning, and it seems like it has plenty of room to grow.  There are some very likeable people, it’s entertaining, etc.  I just hope personality develops with the story. 

I watched a bootleg copy of “Wanted” the other day.  It was a gift, and not a very good one.  Not-a-very-good gift of a not-a-very-good bootleg of not-a-very-good movie.  It’s not horrible, actually; it was directed by that guy who did ”Night Watch” and ”Day Watch”, so as with those movies there is a sense of shameless abandon that makes the whole idiotic mess easier to swallow.  It’s the kind of movie you would make if “Star Wars”, “The Matrix”, and “Fight Club” were the only movies you had ever seen.  I know that last comment sounds more like endorsement than dismissal, and trust me, I have absolutely loved movies that were way shittier than this one.  But something rubbed me the wrong way throughout.  It could have been so enjoyable, so mindless, so silly, but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable with their choice of villain.  No, not that guy that they trick James McAvoy into killing, who turns out to be the worst father since Darth Vader.  And not Morgan Freeman, who I hope got paid pretty well.  The villain I’m talking about is me.  The guy watching the movie through some jack-off’s handheld camera.  Or you, sitting next to me, or next to that jack-off with the camera.  The main theme of “Wanted” seems to be that not killing people — a reasonable lifestyle choice for most of us — is somehow socially irresponsible, or at least lazy.  After assassinating Morgan Freeman with some kind of ancient whaling bullet at the film’s conclusion, our hero looks at the camera and says, “What the fuck have you done lately?”  

Given McAvoy’s incredibly meek existence at the start of the film — Oh, he’s an anxiety-riddled accountant who’s being cuckolded by his best friend, but you could have guessed that — it is a bit of a stretch to have him jump on the random-assassination bandwagon so quickly, and even more so when you factor in the initial training, which is just him getting beaten up over and over again.  Then consider his gullibility: at no point does he question something told to him by any admitted murderer, even one that just knocked him out, shot at him, or simply stands over him as he wakes up in a sweaty factory surrounded by frowning thugs.  This all leads to the deaths of countless strangers (presumably because they will someday cause some atrocity; you know, like what “Minority Report” was about, except here it’s seen as a good thing), the death of his father and of virtually every other person in the film.  Yet, as all this winds down and McAvoy stumbles down the street, broke, beat up, wanted by the police, he takes a moment to say something like, “I used to be a pathetic asshole, just like you.”  Now I know that sounds amazing on paper.  Irony so thick you’d need the entire cast of “Armageddon” to cut through it.  Perhaps that is why they managed to get so many apparent humanitarians involved: Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Common.  The fact that the finished film is purely cynical, self-righteous, and grotesque makes their presence puzzling if not entirely distracting.  All that potential for ambiguity and irony, and the closest thing Bekmambetov could muster was a kind of indifferent sarcasm.

As I’ve said before, I have worshipped trashier movies than this.  Most big movies are simply a vehicle for violent acts, in which the filmmakers weave some elaborate scenario that justifies Mel Gibson putting a gun in someone’s mouth while they’re chained to a moving bus.  But I found the whole attitude of “Wanted” distracting.  That combined with the fact that it really is not very good, I couldn’t decide if I had just spent two hours watching idiots portray assholes or watching assholes portray idiots.  Oh, and there’s an awful lot of cruelty to animals in this picture, most of it executed with perverse glee.  But oh well, as long as you’re living life to the fullest, eh?