March 2010
Oscars rehash: ’06, Year of Horrifying Accidents
Crash is a simplistic, Hollywood pat-on-the-back look at race relations that manages to confirm all the worst stereotypes while at first seeming to contradict them. It's two hours of sometimes interesting performances and cross-pollinating stories that nearly makes you go hmmm at the end, only to forget everything you saw 10 minutes later. It is Robert Altman or P.T. Anderson as done by a freshman high school class in Brentwood. This movie is not the end of the world, it's not the worst movie ever made. It's just in no way the Best Picture and possibly the best proof that in the end, these awards mean nothing.
Oscars rehash: ’07, Year of Finally
Martin Scorsese tried, tried, tried, tried, tried and tried again before finally winning an Oscar for Best Director and/or Best Picture, and he managed to do it with his first movie in a long time that didn't seem created specifically for that purpose.
Oscars rehash: ’08, Year of Perfection
Sometimes everything works out. The best picture won Best Picture; all the acting awards went to strong, risky performances from actors who are outside the Hollywood mainstream -- Daniel Day Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton; Best Original Song went to the sweet ballad from Once rather than any of the trio nominated from Enchanted; Best Original Score went to Atonement, where the music was a nearly breathing character itself; even three of the technical awards went not to the biggest, loudest, brightest action movie of the year, Tranformers, but to a quality thriller in The Bourne Ultimatum, which won both sound awards and editing.
Oscars rehash: ’09, Year of Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda
What might turn out to be the final year of five Best Picture nominees was one of the best arguments for expanding the field. Two quality box office successes -- WALL-E and The Dark Knight were left off the list while the field was made up of movies that earned their nominations based on expectations (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, (Frost/Nixon) or marketing (The Reader) rather than critical reputation (Slumdog Millionaire, Milk). Ten nominees might have changed the winner.
Oscars rehash: ’10, Year of Not Feeling Blue
Avatar not winning Best Picture is a dream come true, but like dreams, the accompanying joy is a fleeting, misty feeling that has nearly dissipated. The Hurt Locker was a historic and flawless, but was it really the Best Picture? What is the definition of a Best Picture anyway?
What's wrong with newspapers?
As much as I have been encouraged by the democratization of news the internet has brought about -- anyone can report on anything at anytime -- I believe in paid content. You get what you pay for. If you want your news for free, you're going to get news of little or no monetary value produced by just anyone at anytime. Free news is good news, but news with a monetary value is better news. What I have said a few times during the past year as I was involved in attempts to create paid online news sites -- and even been quoted a couple times saying it -- is that the great myth of this age of journalism is that newspapers' free online content is actually free. It's not; it's subsidized.
Amazing tales of a zombie newspaper
Someone, somewhere, now owns the Rocky Mountain News intellectual property. But because all the archives have been donated to the Denver Public Library, what someone owns is really just a name. What could that person, place or thing really accomplish by trying to raise the dead now? You could rehire the entire staff of the Rocky Mountain News and put it to work on a newspaper called the Rocky Mountain News and even that wouldn't be the Rocky Mountain News.
District 9 redefines aliens by making them human
Finally got around to seeing District 9 this past weekend. It's difficult to describe how moving this movie was without giving away its story. But after the first third of the movie, which was mostly what I expected, it takes such a stark -- and ironically humanistic -- turn that caught me off guard. It's a shame that a movie like Avatar (which was just fine the first time, when it was called Dances With Wolves, and had no need to be remade in 3-D) got so much attention when District 9 was out there.
A trailer worth a thousand movies
Found this thanks to Jim Emerson's Scanners Blog. This "trailer" is far better than most of the movies it mocks.
What's wrong with sports columnists?
The answer isn't quite as simple as "Woody Paige," because he is only one of many blowhards pretending to be journalists these days. But he's as good a place as any to start an investigation.
The party of an emphatic No
It's been an awful two years for most Americans. Even those who managed to hold on to jobs have felt squeezed and have been operating out of fear since early 2008 -- if not sooner. Speaking from experience -- laid off twice in two years, wife laid off, having to hunker down in a condo we couldn't sell for as much as we owed and turning my back on the only profession I've known -- it feels good to feel good about things right now. It feels good to look ahead a few months and see possibility rather than another disaster looming, even if there is, in fact, another disaster looming. The most underrated aspect of the political process is the ratio of optimism and pessimism in the country at any given time and what each party is selling.
Baseball is nearly fixed; time to finish the job
The Minnesota Twins' signing of Joe Mauer completes Major League Baseball's journey back from the brink of contraction. Baseball is starting to grumble about realignment, which is long overdue for a sport that has one division with six teams and another with four. But ideas being bandied about like a dynamic realignment that can change from year to year based on teams' expectations or wishes, are even more ridiculous than the league's attempt to contract nearly a decade ago.
Still better off with Better Off Dead
It's at least encouraging that comedy writers have moved beyond gross-out humor and funny things being done to people and have begun to let the characters be funny and know they're being funny. Hot Tub Time Machine was a fine movie -- and yes, the '80s were awful; we get it already. But while I was hoping to find a movie that would live up to the comedies of my youth, it may actually have ruined some of them.
