Friday, February 03, 2006
Oscar Smackdown
I find myself less and less enamored of the Academy Awards every year. Sometimes I think that an Oscar nomination can be a movie’s worst enemy. Year after year, fine films wilt under the overwhelming scrutiny that an Oscar nomination brings. Year after year, other fine films are neglected, forgotten and ignored for reasons who knows why?
The truth is, I find myself preferring the Golden Globes more and more. There’s something endearing about this utterly self serving, self congratulatory gathering where the participants get to drink and make faces at the winners. In its own way, it is far more honest than the Academy Awards. It reminds me of kindergarten field day, where everyone invited gets to go home with a prize, even if it’s for best penmanship. The qualification for categories seems to be ‘the more, the merrier’. This allows them to give Joaquin Phoenix an award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy (although Walk the Line was really neither) and Phillip Seymour Hoffman his award for Best Actor in a Drama. Given enough time and publicist energy, I imagine they could have added a Best Actor in a Western category so Heath Ledger could have his award too.
The most amusing example of this “wink wink”, hey we’re all here for the gift basket and the benjamins this year came during the presentation of the Cecil B. DeMille award to Sir Anthony Hopkins, god bless him. Gwyneth was on hand to do the honors, and she began her dutiful reading of the teleprompter as the screen showed the “This is Your Life” clips from Hopkins’ oeuvre. They started with The Lion in Winter, a madly great film where everyone involved got to gorge their way through the scenery like ravenous termites. Hopkins was fine in this film. Face it…do you remember either of his brothers in that film? There were three, but Hopkins is the only one to make any impression in the shadow of Hepburn and O’Toole.
They follow those scenes with a totally bizarre set of clips from a film called Magic which appears to be a C or possibly D film in which Hopkins plays a ventriloquist possessed by a dummy, or a dummy possessed by a ventriloquist. And they don’t just flash a scene, the clips go on and on, torturing us with Hopkins bouncing off the wall like a gibbon while screaming at a evil puppet. There’s a cutaway to Hopkins at some point, and you can even see his eyebrows crease…why the hell are they showing clips from…what the hell is that? Do I remember this film? Was that when I was drinking? Or was that the movie I made so I could finish the pool? Ultimately, they spend as much clip time on Magic as either Silence of the Lambs or Remains of the Day.
This was totally baffling, until I got to work the next morning and found in my inbox a packet of promotional material announcing… Guess what? Yes, the release of Magic on DVD…order now! Order soon! Order many! Before the end of the day, requests had begun rolling in and presto! A D movie about an evil puppet becomes an instant ‘classic’, and somewhere in Hollywood, a marketing flunky gets their wings.
But this is the Globes…no apologies. Crass. Commercial. An evening for Hollywood to get dressed up and say Yay, we’re all great and beautiful and rich, plus we get to go home with gift baskets containing choice swag the value of which is equivalent to the GNP of several third world nations. (Because if anyone needs free stuff, it's the rich and beautiful.)
But the Academy Awards are so freaking serious, and people treat the awards as if they mean something really profound. I know people who are still, still unhappy about the year that Shakespeare in Love got the award over Saving Private Ryan. But how can anyone possibly, realistically judge whether Shakespeare in Love is a ‘finer’ film than Saving Private Ryan, or vice versa. They’re both beautiful movies with strong stories and great acting. They are worlds apart in topic and tone. And they are both classics. I admired both of them. I enjoyed Shakespeare in Love more. The guy I eat lunch with swears the opposite. Who do you love more? Your mother or your father? Which is better? Chocolate or Strawberries? Please, sirs, can’t we have both?
One of the worst effects of this unnatural competition is the inevitable “Oscar Backlash”. The Shakespeare vs Ryan is a prime example, but it happens every year. Two years ago, Lost in Translation was the biggest victim. By the time Oscars rolled around, people were already muttering about how overrated it was. Nothing happens. What’s the big deal? I consider myself lucky to have seen Lost in Translation early, as soon as it was released and before it had been sucked into the shit storm of Oscar publicity. It’s a quiet movie…a true movie. Yes, it has funny moments, but it’s not a comedy. Bill Murray is great in it, but he’s not wacky Bill from yore, or even offbeat Bill from his recent film forays with Wes Anderson. After months of hype a gentle film like this will inevitably wilt underneath the hype.
Brokeback Mountain seems a likely candidate for the backlash this year, it has been so extatically praised, so obessively dissected. Heck, it even got it's own Oprah segment. I expect to start hearing the mutters soon. "What's the big deal about gay cowboys? Even the Village People had one. And these guys don't even dance." It's a fine film about love and marriage and friendship and parenthood. It's about fate knocking you ass over teakettle and never recovering your compass. It's about that life that happens to all of us while we're busy making other plans. But instead it becomes in shorthand "the gay cowboy movie", and by this point, anyone going to see it first time already has an opinion about it.
I will say that this year is unusual in that I think every nominee for Best Picture deserves to be there. Some expressed surprise that Walk the Line did not get an Oscar nod, but my personal feeling is that Walk the Line was a middling vehicle carrying two outstanding performances. I was frankly disappointed by Walk the Line, not by Phoenix or Witherspoon’s performances which were both out of the park homers, but by a story that did not do those performances full justice.
Those are my opinions though, and there are billions of others out there, some of whom can actually vote for winners unlike myself. I’ve given up trying to guess who will win or should win. Sure, I have my personal favorites, but their win or loss means very little. It doesn’t alter the initial impact the film had on me, or the memories of it that I get to keep.
The truth is, I find myself preferring the Golden Globes more and more. There’s something endearing about this utterly self serving, self congratulatory gathering where the participants get to drink and make faces at the winners. In its own way, it is far more honest than the Academy Awards. It reminds me of kindergarten field day, where everyone invited gets to go home with a prize, even if it’s for best penmanship. The qualification for categories seems to be ‘the more, the merrier’. This allows them to give Joaquin Phoenix an award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy (although Walk the Line was really neither) and Phillip Seymour Hoffman his award for Best Actor in a Drama. Given enough time and publicist energy, I imagine they could have added a Best Actor in a Western category so Heath Ledger could have his award too.
The most amusing example of this “wink wink”, hey we’re all here for the gift basket and the benjamins this year came during the presentation of the Cecil B. DeMille award to Sir Anthony Hopkins, god bless him. Gwyneth was on hand to do the honors, and she began her dutiful reading of the teleprompter as the screen showed the “This is Your Life” clips from Hopkins’ oeuvre. They started with The Lion in Winter, a madly great film where everyone involved got to gorge their way through the scenery like ravenous termites. Hopkins was fine in this film. Face it…do you remember either of his brothers in that film? There were three, but Hopkins is the only one to make any impression in the shadow of Hepburn and O’Toole.
They follow those scenes with a totally bizarre set of clips from a film called Magic which appears to be a C or possibly D film in which Hopkins plays a ventriloquist possessed by a dummy, or a dummy possessed by a ventriloquist. And they don’t just flash a scene, the clips go on and on, torturing us with Hopkins bouncing off the wall like a gibbon while screaming at a evil puppet. There’s a cutaway to Hopkins at some point, and you can even see his eyebrows crease…why the hell are they showing clips from…what the hell is that? Do I remember this film? Was that when I was drinking? Or was that the movie I made so I could finish the pool? Ultimately, they spend as much clip time on Magic as either Silence of the Lambs or Remains of the Day.
This was totally baffling, until I got to work the next morning and found in my inbox a packet of promotional material announcing… Guess what? Yes, the release of Magic on DVD…order now! Order soon! Order many! Before the end of the day, requests had begun rolling in and presto! A D movie about an evil puppet becomes an instant ‘classic’, and somewhere in Hollywood, a marketing flunky gets their wings.
But this is the Globes…no apologies. Crass. Commercial. An evening for Hollywood to get dressed up and say Yay, we’re all great and beautiful and rich, plus we get to go home with gift baskets containing choice swag the value of which is equivalent to the GNP of several third world nations. (Because if anyone needs free stuff, it's the rich and beautiful.)
But the Academy Awards are so freaking serious, and people treat the awards as if they mean something really profound. I know people who are still, still unhappy about the year that Shakespeare in Love got the award over Saving Private Ryan. But how can anyone possibly, realistically judge whether Shakespeare in Love is a ‘finer’ film than Saving Private Ryan, or vice versa. They’re both beautiful movies with strong stories and great acting. They are worlds apart in topic and tone. And they are both classics. I admired both of them. I enjoyed Shakespeare in Love more. The guy I eat lunch with swears the opposite. Who do you love more? Your mother or your father? Which is better? Chocolate or Strawberries? Please, sirs, can’t we have both?
One of the worst effects of this unnatural competition is the inevitable “Oscar Backlash”. The Shakespeare vs Ryan is a prime example, but it happens every year. Two years ago, Lost in Translation was the biggest victim. By the time Oscars rolled around, people were already muttering about how overrated it was. Nothing happens. What’s the big deal? I consider myself lucky to have seen Lost in Translation early, as soon as it was released and before it had been sucked into the shit storm of Oscar publicity. It’s a quiet movie…a true movie. Yes, it has funny moments, but it’s not a comedy. Bill Murray is great in it, but he’s not wacky Bill from yore, or even offbeat Bill from his recent film forays with Wes Anderson. After months of hype a gentle film like this will inevitably wilt underneath the hype.
Brokeback Mountain seems a likely candidate for the backlash this year, it has been so extatically praised, so obessively dissected. Heck, it even got it's own Oprah segment. I expect to start hearing the mutters soon. "What's the big deal about gay cowboys? Even the Village People had one. And these guys don't even dance." It's a fine film about love and marriage and friendship and parenthood. It's about fate knocking you ass over teakettle and never recovering your compass. It's about that life that happens to all of us while we're busy making other plans. But instead it becomes in shorthand "the gay cowboy movie", and by this point, anyone going to see it first time already has an opinion about it.
I will say that this year is unusual in that I think every nominee for Best Picture deserves to be there. Some expressed surprise that Walk the Line did not get an Oscar nod, but my personal feeling is that Walk the Line was a middling vehicle carrying two outstanding performances. I was frankly disappointed by Walk the Line, not by Phoenix or Witherspoon’s performances which were both out of the park homers, but by a story that did not do those performances full justice.
Those are my opinions though, and there are billions of others out there, some of whom can actually vote for winners unlike myself. I’ve given up trying to guess who will win or should win. Sure, I have my personal favorites, but their win or loss means very little. It doesn’t alter the initial impact the film had on me, or the memories of it that I get to keep.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
The Complaint Department
As the person responsible for selecting movies and music for my library’s collection, it is also my responsibility to respond to the occasional complaint that arises about said collection. I would like to say that these complaints are rare, but they are distressingly common and becoming more so. Last year I received 16 complaints, which might not seem like much, but that works out to more than one a month (see, I’m wicked smart at math too). The first year I had the job, which was 1999, I think, we had two. Less than one month into 2006, I have already received two.
I have theories as to why this is the case, which are backed with pure scientifically tested speculation and supposition. The numbers have increased every year since the current administration took office. That chill wind from the right you’ve wondered about? Not your imagination. Obviously there’s also the small matter of 9/11 which left a lot of people feeling helpless in a world gone mad. What possible connection could this have to complaints at the library? Well, maybe there’s nothing a person can do to keep terrorists from crashing into buildings, but dammit, they can sure as hell keep boobies out of the library.
And boobies do seem to be many people’s primary concern. Just as Janet Jackson’s suspiciously decorated bared breast brought network television to its knees last year, nothing seems to get some people so het up as the acknowledgment that underneath all of our clothes….we’re naked!! In seven years of responding to over seventy complaints, I can only think of two that were related to violence, and a small handful specifically unhappy about language. Most are unhappy about the naked. Notice, I don’t say ‘the sex’. The mere presence of a naked body, even in the most non-sexual of situations, is enough to cause much hysteria.
My favorite example of this are two separate complaints I received about Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900. The film is about Italy during the early 1900s as seen through the eyes of two boys, one a peasant the other from a land owning family. This particular period of Italian history is somewhat busy, what with the fascism and the communism and the wars and all that. There is a scene early in the film (early being a relative term in a four plus hour long movie) when the two boys, around the age of 8 or so, become acquainted. They hunt frogs. They wrestle. They swim in a pond. They compare equipment and engage in a pissing contest.
Now, anyone who knows anything about little boys knows that this is exactly how they act when left to their own devices. Anyone who has ever been involved in potty training a little boy knows how entertaining they find their own plumbing. My complainers did not see two little boys engaging in innocent and totally realistic fun, however. They saw child pornography at the worst and, at the very least, something no child should ever be allowed to see.
What made these complaints fascinating to me is that both spent a lot space describing in minute detail everything awful about the naked behinds of two 8 year old boys. Neither, however, made any notice of the massive amounts of violence in the film. Before we get to the offending scene, hundreds of extras die horrible deaths in various creative ways including one person getting pitch forked to death, which was a means of dying I had not yet had the privilege of experiencing, even on CSI. If I learned anything from watching 1900, it’s that frankly, Italy should be proud that there are people left in Italy.
This desperate desire to prevent children from being exposed to the naked body while maintaining a rather lackadaisical attitude toward violence is a sort of odd American thing. Four hundred years has not taken us very far from our Puritan roots, it seems. What I find so bizarre about it is that, thankfully, 99.9 % of the American public will never see a person pitch forked to death in real life. Most of us will never witness or participate in the violent death of ourselves or someone else. Most of us will, however, have sex at least once and a full 100% of us are, as I mentioned before, naked underneath our clothes.
I have theories as to why this is the case, which are backed with pure scientifically tested speculation and supposition. The numbers have increased every year since the current administration took office. That chill wind from the right you’ve wondered about? Not your imagination. Obviously there’s also the small matter of 9/11 which left a lot of people feeling helpless in a world gone mad. What possible connection could this have to complaints at the library? Well, maybe there’s nothing a person can do to keep terrorists from crashing into buildings, but dammit, they can sure as hell keep boobies out of the library.
And boobies do seem to be many people’s primary concern. Just as Janet Jackson’s suspiciously decorated bared breast brought network television to its knees last year, nothing seems to get some people so het up as the acknowledgment that underneath all of our clothes….we’re naked!! In seven years of responding to over seventy complaints, I can only think of two that were related to violence, and a small handful specifically unhappy about language. Most are unhappy about the naked. Notice, I don’t say ‘the sex’. The mere presence of a naked body, even in the most non-sexual of situations, is enough to cause much hysteria.
My favorite example of this are two separate complaints I received about Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900. The film is about Italy during the early 1900s as seen through the eyes of two boys, one a peasant the other from a land owning family. This particular period of Italian history is somewhat busy, what with the fascism and the communism and the wars and all that. There is a scene early in the film (early being a relative term in a four plus hour long movie) when the two boys, around the age of 8 or so, become acquainted. They hunt frogs. They wrestle. They swim in a pond. They compare equipment and engage in a pissing contest.
Now, anyone who knows anything about little boys knows that this is exactly how they act when left to their own devices. Anyone who has ever been involved in potty training a little boy knows how entertaining they find their own plumbing. My complainers did not see two little boys engaging in innocent and totally realistic fun, however. They saw child pornography at the worst and, at the very least, something no child should ever be allowed to see.
What made these complaints fascinating to me is that both spent a lot space describing in minute detail everything awful about the naked behinds of two 8 year old boys. Neither, however, made any notice of the massive amounts of violence in the film. Before we get to the offending scene, hundreds of extras die horrible deaths in various creative ways including one person getting pitch forked to death, which was a means of dying I had not yet had the privilege of experiencing, even on CSI. If I learned anything from watching 1900, it’s that frankly, Italy should be proud that there are people left in Italy.
This desperate desire to prevent children from being exposed to the naked body while maintaining a rather lackadaisical attitude toward violence is a sort of odd American thing. Four hundred years has not taken us very far from our Puritan roots, it seems. What I find so bizarre about it is that, thankfully, 99.9 % of the American public will never see a person pitch forked to death in real life. Most of us will never witness or participate in the violent death of ourselves or someone else. Most of us will, however, have sex at least once and a full 100% of us are, as I mentioned before, naked underneath our clothes.
