Best new favorite album: Goldfrapp, Black Cherry Best new favorite band: Gnarls Barkley Best new favorite album by an old favorite band: Cornelius, Sensuous Best website: Netvibes Runners up: Tumblr, Facebook, Pandora Most overrated website: Second Life Best print magazine: Washington Monthly Best online magazine: Slate Best bay area hike with dogs: Phoenix Lake Trail, Mt. Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA Worst natural disaster: SoCal Wildfires Best short-film compilation DVD series: Wolphin Best new favorite nonprofit organization: The Long Now Foundation Best new hobby: Skiing Best board game: Polarity Best major life change: getting engaged Best photo:
I finally got around to uploading another video to my YouTube channel. If you haven't seen my goofy student film Stalker! (although that's a slightly redundant description...I imagine every film I've ever made could reasonably be labeled "goofy" in some way) here's the embed:
And while I'm on the YouTube stuff: One fricking star? What's up with that?
All right, no more blog deadlines. You think I would have learned by now, but...no. I've got a two-page love fest for Capote that I'll finish up sooner or later, but blogging about the Oscars is like, so three weeks ago. Besides, I don't really have much else to add to the discussion. But I will say this: Crash? Ok, I didn't comment about this back on March 6th, because – confession time again – I never even got around to watching the movie until just last night. Now that I've seen it, though, for the record...you've got to be kidding me. Munich wasn't great either, but at least it had some decent action scenes. Crash?!? Nice cinematography, fine editing. Also, piece of crap. Possibly the worst screenplay of any movie I've watched in the last year. That's my review. Barf.
Anyway, I've just gotten back from a week in San Diego, where I caught the semifinals and final of the first-ever World Baseball Classic. These pictures are just over a week old, but since I forgot my SD card reader I had to wait until I got back to SF before I could post them on the blog. So here we go, fashionably late as usual:
The Cuban team visits the mound in their semifinal game against the Dominican Republic. In this photo, those little people-shaped-dots show Dominicans Miguel Tejada on second, Albert Pujols at first, and David Ortiz at the plate, wating to bat. For those of you who don't follow baseball, just trust me that you're looking at something very, very cool. From several hundred feet away. (Click the photo for a slightly larger rendition.)
Later that evening, at Korea's semifnal game with Japan. This photo features me doing my passable impersonation of a Korean baseball fan (you can't see it here, but I've got a beer in my left hand). I think I was the only white guy in the stadium rooting for Korea. I did notice, however, several dozen whiteboy anime fans, apparently all taking a break from hanging out in comic book stores to show up and cheer for the Japanese. Incidentally, none of them were with girls.
Boyne patriotically waves his Korean flag, even as a series of Japanese homeruns literally causes the PETCO Park scoreboard to burst into flames.
After Japan wins the final 10-6 over Cuba, the Japanese contingent takes the field. I don't have anything to say about this photo except...see those little pieces of confetti-looking stuff all over the diamond? That's what's left of the Cubans. Seriously. These Japanese guys were out to win. Also, that's a big flag.
Ok, I give. It looks like I bit off more than I could chew with this Oscar blogging thing. I'll go ahead and post the write-ups on the next three movies as I get them finished; going by my current pace, that should take me about a week. In the meantime, if you're planning on watching the show tomorrow night, do me a favor and root for Capote.
Me? I'll be driving back from Tahoe. Impromptu ski trips are way more fun than the Oscars.
If all you’d ever heard of Brokeback Mountain was gleaned from listening to the opening monologues of late-night talk show hosts, you’d have to be forgiven for thinking it’s some kind of western-themed gay porn flick. Considering the context of the film’s release – a mainstream film about two homosexual cowboys, made by a high-profile heterosexual director with a likewise cast, crew, and screenwriting team – it’s really not surprising how quickly Brokeback Mountain became a shorthand reference for closeted guy-on-guy action.
It’s a caricature, of course, and one that gives a predictably misleading image of the film’s intentions; Brokeback isn’t really about “gay cowboys” at all, at least not in the sense you’d expect from listening to the pop culture fallout. Instead, Brokeback comes off as a fairly conventional Hollywood love story, albeit one set in a highly unconventional circumstance (i.e., between two guys in 1960s Wyoming).
In building their script around a type of unrequited love story that we’ve seen so many times (change a few names, places and genders and Brokeback Mountain easily changes back into its spiritual predecessor, Romeo and Juliet), screenwriters Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry deftly take the focus off of the novelty of their two gay leads, instead allowing the powerful emotional relationship between Ennis and Jack to take its place at the center of the film. The result is a heartfelt and character-driven story, and one that communicates its social commentary in a vastly more effective way than a film with a more pointed, patronizing tone could ever achieve. Actually, this last bit is perhaps the most unexpected – and greatly appreciated – aspect of this very good film: it doesn’t follow the typical “message” movie formula, constantly beating you over the head with a moral issue about acceptance.
As a side note, straight guys who might be wary of watching two other men get it on for two hours can relax. I’m paraphrasing something I heard on a Mick LaSalle podcast, but the reason Brokeback Mountain is so unique lies not in its subject matter, but in its context: Yes, it’s a mainstream film about homosexuals, but it’s one made almost entirely by straight people and intended for a straight audience. To that end, there’s only one sex scene between Jack and Ennis, almost comically short at around 15 seconds and lacking any nudity. There are plenty of bare breasts, however (provided by Anne Hathaway and Michelle Wiliams). That’s right, Brokeback is a film about two gay cowboys with more shots of boobs than of naked men. If that’s not a clue that this film is intended for straight audiences, I don’t know what is.
Brokeback is a very solid film that gets everything just about right. That’s par for the course for Director Ang Lee, but he’s particularly on his game here. The performances are almost all excellent, but I have to admit that I’m not entirely sold on Heath Ledger’s much-lauded portrayal of Ennis. Ledger has been racking up accolades for his work in Brokeback, and while I think he’s fine for the most part, I’m not ready to jump on that bandwagon; there’s something inexplicable about his character that just didn’t ring true for me, and the problem’s not in the screenplay. On the other hand, Jake Gyllenhal has been receiving as much derision as Ledger has praise, but I think he plays Jack with a natural ease that is lacking in Ledger’s Ennis. Another minor issue for me is in the way the characters in Brokeback age – or rather, the way they don’t. The movie spans something like two decades, and with the exception of Jack’s grey hair and paunch, the characters just don’t show it. (Note to the makeup crew: slapping a blond wig on Anne Hathaway while she puffs on a cigarette isn't going to do a lot to give her an extra 20 years. Just saying.) In a film that gets so much else right, you have to wonder about a misstep this obvious, even such a minor one as it is.
Good Night, and Good Luck. Plus: I Don't Watch the Oscars, I Just Blog About Them
I don’t care about the Academy Awards. Even causal observers realize that, for any given year, the nominated films and performances aren’t necessarily the best among contenders. This is largely because official selections are determined as much by multimillion dollar advertising campaigns, paid for by the studios and specifically targeted at a few hundred Academy voters, as any notions of critical merit. I also don’t care for the self-important pomp of Hollywood studios pretending that the ultimate measure of a film’s success is anything other than its bottom line. While I do believe that most studio types have aspirations towards making quality films, this element is always, always, held subservient to the net gross. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that; movies are a business, after all, and they cost a shit ton of money to make. But the Oscars – and the annual September - December deluge of studio-produced faux-indie Oscar-bait films that precede them – are nothing more than a result of Hollywood trying to affect its own measure of artistic credibility. It’s a farce enabling the movie industry to perpetuate the fantasy that, in the end, it’s something above all the dollars and cents. It’s not. Sorry, Hollywood, I’m not buying into your shameless orgy of self-deception. You’re a bunch of money-grubbing corporate whores, and one night of manufactured pomposity isn’t going to change any of that. So it is for these reasons that I never watch the Academy Awards. I tend to avoid pretty much all discussion of them, and whether or not a film has won or been nominated for an Oscar generally has no influence over whether or not it’s one I’m going to add to my Netflix queue.
[Insert big sigh here.]
Until this year. No, this year I’m going to try to care. It’s not because the movies are better (always debatable). It’s not about my man-crush Jon Stewart hosting the telecast, which I’m probably not going to end up watching anyway (I had thought about watching last year when Chris Rock was the host, but copped out when I remembered that I’d still have to put up with all of that ridiculous Oscar crap in-between Rock’s emceeing).
No, this year it’s different. Because this year, folks, this year…it’s about having a blog. It’s about me not having anything else to post about on that blog. It’s about this idea I have about writing a separate post reviewing each of the five of the Best Picture nominees, and doing it before the show airs on Sunday.
Yes, this year, it’s about setting goals. Goals like, “I’m going to blog about 100 movies this year.” Except that it’s not, because this time I’m going to do better than living up to only 4 percent of that goal. Also, the Olympics are over, and I have nothing else to do with my free time.
“Now wait just a damn minute,” you may be saying to yourself. “Five reviews in six days? Good lord, he only wrote four over all of last year! Is he crazy?” I reply: Perhaps. But just as the Academy Awards are Hollywood’s attempt to perpetuate the fantasy of its own artistic relevance, blogging about the Best Picture nominees perpetuates my fantasy that people actually read my blog. And thus, like the Oscars, as an exercise it is absolutely vital. To that end, I begin:
Oftentimes, films rooted in historical fiction, such as biopics, or those depicting a certain event, suffer from too much sexing-up. Artistic embellishments of the kind added for dramatic effect by writers, directors, and producers to make a story more appealing to an mass audience can sometimes result in material that is out-of-touch with its subject, or that is so unbelievable as to lose its credibility as a realistic account. With Good Night, and Good Luck, the story of legendary CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow’s on-air clashes with Senator Joe McCarthy, as seen from the point-of-view of Murrow and his news staff, I’m wondering if the opposite isn’t true: the filmmakers had so much respect for their subject – and communicating its topical messages – that they forgot to make the film dramatically suspenseful.
That’s not to say that the drama isn’t there – there’s certainly loads in the source material, and screenwriters George Clooney and Grant Heslov manage to parcel out plenty of well-played tense moments along the way, such as when Murrow (played the excellent David Straithairn) and his co-producer, Fred Friendly (Clooney), first make the decision to take on McCarthy. In the end, though, the action never reaches a boiling point; there’s really no dramatic climax to the film. I hope I’m not giving too much away here plot-wise (this is a matter of historical record, after all, but if you really don't know anything about this movie and really hate spoilers, you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph), but a typical example of GNGL’s dramatic shortcoming occurs when Murrow’s staff finds out about McCarthy’s pending investigation by the Senate, an event that will eventually lead to McCarthy’s censure and the end of his own investigation. All of the real action of this scene happens off-camera; instead, we hear the news via a telegram read out loud in the news room. This exposition via a secondary source is all we ever get of this event ever occurring. Instead of dramatic payoff, we only see the result: the relieved smiles, the joyful back-slapping among the reporters – but the moment itself, the humiliation and the eventual downfall of Senator McCarthy, all happens miles away, in another location.
Part of the reason for these shortcomings may be in GNGL’s use of archival footage to present public figures of the day, such as McCarthy himself. While this technique does a fine job in setting the period of early 1950s America, immediately transporting us back in time in a way that a digitally manipulated recreation could never achieve, in retrospect this decision may have been the rope the filmmakers were using to bind their own hands. In giving us all of this great archival footage of McCarthy, his witnesses and his colleagues in the Senate, the filmmakers ensure that fictional representations of these people are impossible. For that reason, these characters, so critical to the dramatic development of the film, are forced to remain peripheral; we can’t be present with McCarthy when he hears the news about his pending investigation, because there is no archival footage of that event happening. Instead, we as the viewer have been locked in the newsroom with Murrow and Friendly, while the most important events in the story happen outside its doors. With this in mind, the filmmakers may have been better off leaving the archival footage, fascinating as though it may be, to the DVD extras. (Incidentally, I just thought I’d mention that test audiences’ chief complaint about the film was that the “actor” portraying Senator McCarthy was “too unbelievable.” If you’ve never seen footage of McCarthy in a full anti-commie fervor, he’s something to watch.)
One other beef with the film: GNGL is in fact one of those constantly beating-you-over-the-head “message” movies. In a year when an arguable four of the five best picture nominees are overtly liberal “message” movies, GNGL is not a standout for pressing an agenda. I don’t have a problem with any of that, per se, but GNGL is not a subtle film. Unlike, say, Brokeback Mountain (which I will get to later in the week), GNGL states its message, or rather multitude of messages, in finger-wagging snippets of dialogue ostensibly spoken to other characters, but clearly aimed at the audience. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a huge problem, and frankly I think it’s easier to get away with this sort of thing in a historical fiction than in a straight-up fiction fiction (I have no doubts, for example, that Murrow actually spoke in the terms he conveys in the film). But blatant statements of the BIG MESSAGE of any film via dialogue spoken by the characters always comes off as a little clumsy, and GNGL has several of these moments.
Bonsai Kittens, and the Dark Underbelly of Olympic Curling
Something I thought I would mention over the last week but never got around to: Christy would like me to point out that the Bonsai Kittens website I linked to several days ago is, in fact, not real. Well, when I say Christy would like me to point that out what I really mean is that after the idea of Bonsai Kittens sent Christy into a hyperventilating fit I thought it might be a good thing to mention. So everyone calm down, nobody really keeps little kittens alive in jars as decorative objets d’art. Bonsai Kittens are a notorious Internet hoax. But they are also very funny.
I also thought of another reason to love Curling yesterday while watching the US Men’s team’s heartbreaking Semifinal loss to the Canadians: American skip (team captain) and Minnesota pizza-parlor entrepreneur Pete Fenson looks exactly like a younger David Lynch. I shit you not! Click the links!
I think this is kind of cute. Since the grand old age of Hollywood, it's been cliché for producers to judge a movie's mainstream appeal based on whether or not it will "play in Peoria." In the Jan 30 - Feb 5 weekly edition of Variety, Ben Fritz puts the old maxim to the test by checking box office receipts at the lone Peoria, IL theater showing Brokeback Mountain, a film derided by conservative pundits everywhere as being too far outside the mainstream to ever be a hit outside of liberal metropolitan areas.
So, were they right? Not if Peoria audiences can be any indication. The movie earned $15,695 its opening weekend, surpassing national top-earner Underworld: Evolution to become the theater's most popular movie.
I’d thought about doing a top ten of 2005 list like a lot of movie-writin’-about folks are doing around this time of year. Unfortunately, as soon as I started to plot this llst out I was forced to confront a harsh and embarrassing reality about myself: I don’t even think I watched 10 movies last year that were actually released in 2005. Here I write a blog that’s at least 70% ostensibly about movies, and I don’t even fucking watch movies. Well THAT sure bummed me out. Stupid goddamn blog.
It’s been a dirty secret of mine for a while now that I don’t actually see all that many movies. I’ve been doing better recently, but the thing is that once I started film school, watching movies became sort of like homework. Even if whatever I was watching wasn’t for a class, I’d inevitably end up writing out three or four pages of notes, because I felt like I should be doing stuff like that. The obsessive analysis just got too be too much work, and it stopped being fun. Why do anything you don’t enjoy anymore if you don’t have to?
So this is embarrassing for a lot of reasons, obviously, considering the profession I claim to be trying to break into. I tried doing something about it on my old blog when, back around this time last year, I made plans to watch at least 100 movies in 2005, and afterwards post a short review of each one. A year later, my grand total for reviews written in 2005…well, it was four. I wrote reviews on four movies. Out of 100. And the really sad thing is that, even leaving the reviews aside, I didn’t watch 100 movies last year. Nowhere close. I wasn’t really keeping track, so I can’t be sure, but I probably didn’t even see half of that.
But here I am with my stupid list, which I decided to draw up anyway. Sort of. I guess you could say I kind of half-assed it. In fact, I kind of really half-assed it (one-quarter-assed it?!?). Not only are several of the movies on this list not actually from 2005, there are at least two movies on this list that I didn’t even watch in 2005, but since they were released last year I’ve included them anyway in order to make the list at least marginally relevant (ha ha!).
So here we go: In descending order, a list of the 10 best movies I watched in 2005, regardless of whether or not they were actually made in 2005, or frankly whether I even got around to watching them in 2005! Thanks a lot for reading the blog. I’m going to go slam my head in the refrigerator door for a few hours.
(I’m in the middle of a personal Woody Allen retrospective right now, so there are a few of those on the list. For films not released in 2005, I’ve indicated the appropriate year in parenthesis after the title.)
My ten favorites:
Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) Capote Grizzly Man Bananas (1971) Brokeback Mountain Interiors (1978) March of the Penguins A History of Violence Love and Death (1975) Supervixens (1975)
A few honorable mentions:
War of the Worlds Play it Again, Sam (1972) Winged Migration (2001) Harry Potter and the Whatever It Was This Year The Aristocrats
I'm leaving for Missouri in the morning for a couple of weeks. If anybody over there wants to get in touch with me, I have an awesome movie you need to see.
So...yeah. Obviously I'm kind of new to this naming-your-blog-post thing. Did anyone else ever see Wagons East? God, that movie was terrible.
It’s Something Special is done. Finished. Complete. In the can. Kaput.
So to speak. The sound is still a preliminary mix, so that needs to be worked on. And of course I’ll need to see how this thing screens before I’m completely satisfied that I’ve got the funniest possible movie I can put together (because, you know, when you’ve watched the same group of scenes 500-something times, it becomes a little difficult to tell if the jokes still work). So there’s all that. But barring any last-minute crises arising from any of that crap, I’m confident in saying that, for all intents and purposes, It’s Something Special is finally, incredibly, done.
I’m feeling pretty good right now. It’s been almost two years to the date that I started working on this ridiculous movie, and god DAMN am I ready to put it behind me. I’m also satisfied with the final cut. I think it really is a good film. A good student film, to be sure, but I think it holds its own even when taken outside of that context, and it’s also pretty damn funny. At any rate, I’ve certainly gotten a lot more out of this material than I expected to back in April of 2004.
Anyway, here’s a question: Over the next few weeks, I’ll be screening ISS for as many people as I can hook up with, but since I know most of the friends who might be reading this are spread out all over the country, there’s no way I’m going to be able to get in touch with everybody who wants to see this movie. So I’m wondering, should I put a copy online for download? I’m only asking because it would be a huge file, probably around 80 – 100 MB, so you’d have to have a pretty fast connection in order to be able to watch it that way (and also because I’d vastly prefer showing the film in person). I could also stream the video, but I don’t have a lot of experience doing that, and anyway I’m always frustrated with the quality of streaming media. Or, I don’t know…I guess I could even mail out copies of the DVD. I’ve already got a decent DVD layout put together, so that might be the best option to go with...
Well, what do you guys think? Should I put a copy of the video online, or mail out DVDs, or…what? If anyone reading this just can’t wait to see my bad-ass new movie in person, and has a preference for how they’d like to get a copy from me, send me an e-mail or leave me a comment below. I’ll figure something out.
(Off topic, but my original title for this post was going to be, "Ken Burns Can Suck My Dick." I changed my mind at the last minute. He still can, though.)
I finally got around to seeing Walk the Line a few days ago, and it got me to thinking: What is it about big-budget biopics about famous musicians that seems so formulaic? Is it the obligatory scenes of the musician, hunched over a [piano / guitar / notebook], conscientiously divining the first [notes / lyrics] of their eventual smash hit single? Or is it the history of [childhood trauma / poverty / lifelong racial prejudice] enabling these tourtured but brilliant souls to fill their music with such naked honesty? Or what about the musician’s struggles to cope with [said traumas / sudden fame / a bad marriage], inevitably leading to a downward spiral into [drug addiction / alcoholism / a love / hate relationship with their own inflated ego] and thus subsequently setting up their own [ephiphany followed by triumphant redemption / death]?
I think there's only so much you can do to turn a real-life person's life into a three-act narrative, but It’s hard to watch Walk the Line and not think of last year’s Ray, a movie so like this one that it’s like seeing two screenwriters’ variations on the same sheet of “Hollywood Mad Libs." Unlike Ray, however, this film has the relationship between June Carter and Johnny Cash – a real-life Hollywood love story if there ever was one – to anchor the film, relegating Cash’s struggles with drug addiction to subplot status. For that reason, Walk the Line has more focus than the meandering Ray, making this the better of the two movies. (Other close matches include any film about Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Richie Valens, Eminem or any other musical celebrity, ever, with the possible exception of this one.)
Other notes: the musical numbers require somewhat of a suspension of disbelief, because right off the bat, it’s clear that Jaoquin Phoenix can’t sing like Cash. His chin tucked into his chest and his eyes bulging out of their sockets, you can actually see the man struggling to hit those low notes and it’s not pretty. Reese Whitherspoon, on the other hand, tackles the June Carter numbers – and her character – with total conviction. Both Phoenix and Witherspoon may have gotten Oscar nominations, but Witherspoon's is the better performance.
(Yes, that's a real mascot.)
Hope everybody had a great year.
