Losing

Alright, I suck, because I put off writing once again. But that's not important because I watched The Losers just now, and boy oh boy, is that one a treat.

Depending on whether or not you hate yourself, that is.

I kid, I kid.  But I also don't.

I oftentimes spend a lot of time thinking about films like this more than movies I just flat out like, because I find what I call "bad cinema" a little more interesting from an analytical standpoint. And The Losers is chock full of bad cinema.

Is it entertaining? I dono, kinda, not really. Are there a lot of explosions? Fuck yeah. Does it make effectively post-modern use of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing?" Absolutely it did.

If you're drunk, bored and watching HBO, are under the age of 16, in your twenties and haven't read a book since junior year of high school, it's definitely an enjoyable movie. But that's a lot of circumstance.
If you watch it as a 22 year old unemployed former film student who watched a lot of student films desperately striving to be "cool," not good, you kind of get annoyed.

But it's an interesting case study in bad cinema, because it uses every play in the bad action playbook. EVERY ONE. Hyper saturated overblown handheld cinematography, gratuitously long and mostly unnecessary sex scene, bad comic relief, strong silent type, scenery chewing bad guy played by a pretty good actor who is mostly underutilized but was obviously a character they were banking on to be popular... I could keep going, but I gotta go take a shower.

Anyway, I would recommend it if you're not a snob, or if you're a snob who thinks it's more fun to scoff at bad shit than talk about why Black Swan's adherence to the melodramatic style of ballet was brilliant, or something.

Canonized

I'm going to tell you this flat out: I bought a really fancy DSLR camera today, and I'm not posting any photos, because I'm lazy today and didn't figure out how to put them on my computer. Also, I had too much fun, you know, taking pictures. Deal with it. And by deal with it, I mean wait until tomorrow.

I bought a Canon 7D for two reasons: 1) I wanted to take nice photos of the towering star pine that is a landmark of my home that will be dismantled tomorrow and 2) I never wanted to have to buy a Mini-DV tape whenever I wanted to make something. Check and check. I hope I become more productive as a result.

To further help productivity, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind today. Holy gosh, I forgot how good of a movie that is. I forgot about how much I kind of liked it as a 10th grader eating Applebees to-go by myself while my friends were at their Winter Formal (it's cool, I was totally having a great time and don't need girls or socializing to be happy, so I told myself), but now how much I really like it as a 22 year-old who respects cinematic craft and sad-sack characters who can't make eye contact with women he hasn't met*. I'll probably write about it some time in the future with a little more depth. It deserves to be not glossed over, as it's one of the few films in recent history that really did something different. Cool stuff.

Anyway, tune in tomorrow for a very special blog: "Goodbye, Star Pine." Very special, in that I really like that title.

*Hey, me too, Jim Carrey! (Quick disclaimer: This is mostly a joke)

My Allegiances are Shifting

I oftentimes say weird and repetitive things to myself in an attempt to be clever. One I do at lot is, "Growing up means ________" followed by a self deprecating joke or something, or an honest observation.

One I came up with this week in that format was, "Growing up means developing crushes on women like Bonnie Hunt."

She was in the film I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With for a total of about fifteen minutes, and was quite possibly the most appealing woman I've seen on film in quite some time. But, still, it's weird to be attracted to a woman in her late forties that is by no means an age-defying beauty. That sounds wrong/bad, but I mean it in a good way.

But the thing is it's weird that I was attracted to her more than someone like that brunette girl from "Glee." I guess the shift to personality and likability over general hotness and stuff. It's weird, is all I'm saying.

But then again, I watched part of Doomsday in between napping and thinking almost constantly, good God Rhona Mitra is super hot. So maybe I'm not totally grown up.

Notes From Wednesday

Nothing big to write about, also got sidetracked during the day. Here's some random thoughts.

I've been contemplating buying a DSLR camera for a long while. They're those digital cameras that real serious-like photographers use, but with technology getting better, they also have the capability to record some stunningly awesome hi-def video, real neat shallow depth-of-field type stuff that I won't go into for fear of losing your interest (if I haven't already). This was important today because I went through the mental process of contemplating selling my Panasonic DVX, the outdated (yet still quite pretty in terms of image) video camera I first bought with my own money after saving up my money from working at a movie theater for around a year. It has sentimental value for those reasons, but I rarely use it. Still, I feel like it's a good token of the few times I've worked hard to buy something I really wanted. It's still the most expensive thing I've ever purchased on my own.

As you can tell, I already talked myself into keeping it, for two reasons. The aforementioned sentimental value, and the fact that every day I don't sell it, it's value decreases exponentially. But, really, it's mostly just because I love the damn thing so much, and I think about the good times I had just messing around with it and my friends on the few projects I did with it in high school.

This made me realize two things: 1) I am a packrat, and 2) I'm obsessively nostalgic. I'm not sure either of these are good things, though I'd like to think nostalgia, if viewed as a vice, is probably a better one than, I don't know, being a dick.

Also, I saw The King's Speech last night. If I had seen it sooner, I could have predicted its Oscar win ahead of time.

Not because of the fact that the Weinsteins are good at buying their Oscars (I guess they are, according to people who know these things), or that the movie was in fact one of the best pictures of the year (it totally is, though not sure it's the best but this is neither the place nor time to rant about Oscars).

It's the only film in the best picture categories that have corgis in it.

No one can resist corgis.

Here's a video of a corgi playing around a dock. It's wearing a doggie life preserver.



If you can resist that, I assume you've lost use of your soul, and you probably shouldn't be reading my blog or watching movies. You should go on a vision quest and find your spirit animal or something. Not sure how one really goes about regaining a soul.

Throwback Friday

Yesterday, I planned to go to the movies in my 85 Toyota Pickup while wearing clothes I would've worn (or actually did wear) in high school. As a fan of nostalgia, I thought this was a great idea; I have fond memories of the parts of high school where I was able to drive, and I was going to see The King's Speech, which I hear is good.

Then I misread the time, my stereo didn't work, and I'm pretty sure I almost crashed three times on the way there because the weather was so bad. So I ended up keeping my car in the Edwards parking lot while I waited for the weather to clear (hopefully) overnight. So instead of having a throwback Friday, we ended up going to TGI Fridays and then watching a few episodes of "Louie" before I fell asleep because I do not have the impressive insomniac skills my friends do.

Just goes to show that you can't go back to the good ol' days, no matter how hard you try.

But so as to not end this post on a negative note, there were some pretty good dunks in the dunk competition today. I thought it kinda sucked that Griffin won with such a pageant type dunk when he was so solid for the first few without gimmicks and whatnot, but it was also nice he got to dedicate it to his friend who died of cancer, which was a sweet button to the night. Either way though, it was a fun one.

An Odd Future Filled with Wild Things

I was going to dedicate this whole blog post to Odd Future, a precocious group of folk that what may well become my newfound obsession after two of them tore shit up on Fallon last night, but I realized that was the easy pitfall for a bored blogger to blog about today.

They're young, nuts, provocative, whathaveyou, Wu-Tang comparison, punk rock rap hybrid, do a whole lotta rape lyrics.  Ponderings follow, opinion.

There; I just summed up what most people will write about them today, or have written about them already. I'm kind of late on this game, so eff it.

What I will say is that it's almost annoying at how precocious their leader, Tyler the Creator, is. It's not annoying, just almost. He's a pretty interesting producer, an alright rapper, and apparently alright at graphic art. But the fact that he seems like he could be a pretty neat visual filmmaker or music video director, as evidenced by the video in the first link on this post (Note: it's kind of gross, on both visceral and thematic levels, just as a warning), makes me feel quite inept. But like most of this blog, that's more about me, and less about this dude.

On that note, I'm not writing much about them because I just found out that Where the Wild Things Are is apparently playing on HBO now, meaning two things: 1) I'm gonna have to make sure my parents don't catch me getting misty-eyed over giant monsters traipsing about and 2) watching it got me sidetracked on my blog again today.

I've written about it before after I first watched it, so I don't wanna repeat myself, but I will say that for as divisive as the movie is, I think it's probably the most accurate and perfect coming-of-age story you could ever make. Spike Jonze made more sense out of monsters on an island being a realistic metaphor for what growing up means than John Hughes or John Hughes high school flick-imitators ever could*. Imagination, confusion, and sadness-without-knowing-why all balled up into one flick about finally being able to reflect on what one does and how it affects others and how the world actually works versus how you want it to work is really an amazing thing, even if you think it's a bad movie. And plenty of people do think it's bad.

I think they're wrong, but mainly because this transformation is what I spent so much of my life going through. It's not unusual that Spike Jonze makes a movie that caters (in my mind) specifically to me. I walked around with my imagination taking precedence over what the physical world provided me, and when people weren't in on my games, I got sad for no reason, and pissed people off for reasons unknown.

I'm rambling too much about a movie that deserves not to be rambled about, but experienced and quietly reflected upon, so I'm switching the emphasis of this to my point. People seemed to not like it because they figured it should be a childrens' movie that kind of ended up catering to, well, me, or adults in general.

So what would it be like if I had watched this movie as a kid? Back when I was feeling those things, would I still feel a kindred spirit in Max and Jonze's flick in general, or would I hate it?

It's a question I'll never be able to answer, and I don't know how to feel about that: glad I'll never know and love it the way I do, or sad that maybe I could've figured out a little bit quicker that people kind of get what was happening in my crazy mixed-up brain of mine as a kid.

Alright, sentimentality over. I'm off to go download some mixtapes of strange shocking rap by precocious kids.

*That is not a knock on either of those groups; I love those movies, but they don't exactly provide the best template for what growing up should be, says the bitter late bloomer.

Sunset Limited

I watched almost all of the Tommy Lee Jones/Sam Jackson/Cormac McCarthy joint The Sunset Limited today. I hope to catch the first fifteen minutes of it quite soon, as it is really really neat.

Don't go in hoping for sunshine though. Expect a long conversation about mortality, life, and whatnot. Expect eloquence and gravity that is the exact opposite of a majority of my blog posts. But it's much more fulfilling and quality too. And that's not a knock on me, just Cormac McCarthy is really good, y'know.

Anyways, it's was interesting to me because it was an hour and a half of two actors talking in a single setting. Pulling off something like that is uber-impressive. I can't imagine making a single-setting movie, let alone a good one. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a good one like that too, as is Clerks to a lesser extent.

If anyone has mostly one-location movie recommendations, let me know. I'd like to see them and be wowed and whatnot.

Billionaires Makin' Movies for Funsies

As a young person who is not outrageously wealthy or easily successful, I spend a lot of my time getting angry at young people who are outrageously wealthy and easily successful. Although it'd be pretty lame of me to get all "class warfare" on my blog-reading populace, seeing as how I'm definitely nowhere near destitute or anything, I thought I'd mention something I literally just read about.

Some billionaire's daughter is paying Paul Thomas Anderson to make movies. She's 25, which is approximately three years older than me.

This causes a malfunction in my systems, like a robot given an illogical answer set and completely crashes mentally (those that have seen "Clone High" get what I'm talking about that).

I can't like a young person who basically comes from such ridonkulous good fortune that she can quite easily force herself upon Hollywood via gigantoid checks (notice how I used two made up words in one sentence; I'm patting myself on the back for that).

But she's also financing PTA's movies, the ones no one else would! This does not compute!

And what's more perturbing is she financed True Grit! And she's paying for a John Hillcoat movie about bootleggers in the 1920s starring Tom Hardy!

But then I realize I'm sitting here, blogging, because I don't have several million dollars or a marketable name. And I'll be damned if I'm going to actually work to get my foot in the door in Hollywood*. So then I get angry again at young successful people and blog about it.

*That part was a joke, intended to be read as sarcasm, in case that wasn't obvious. I do intend to work and stuff, so please don't panic family members who might read this or people in the movie industry. Realize the whole tone of this was meant to be satirical, kind of.

On the Topic of the Kids Who Spoon Awkwardly Outside my Apartment

When I walk and/or drive out of my apartment at around 2-3, I get a good look at the nearby park, and by extension of that, I get a good look at the schoolchildren canoodling in the shade.

I never take a long look or anything because, let's face it, even at my relatively young age me looking at high schoolers macking is probably a bit inappropriate, but today my vantage point when waiting to make a left turn had me looking straight at a couple with nothing to do but wait until I could actually turn. They were entwined in the grass, quite close to each other, and what was perturbing about that was that they were completely still.

Like, asleep still. This didn't sit well with me, as it looked like the most uncomfortable way to take a nap in the history of naps. It wasn't a standard spooning position or anything, either; it was as if they were trying the spooning thing but forgot to use two spoons put together visually as a point of reference, messed that up, then just went with it because I guess they wanted to act like adults in love or something.

I really can't do justice to how uncomfortable this looked. I'm sorry I didn't take a picture for you, but see paragraph two for my reasoning behind not taking one.

This is the topic of today's blog not because I was shocked by the discomfort these kids were forcing upon themselves, but because it made me flash back to my days as an adolescent. In case you didn't know me then, I can tell you I was as much looking on the outside in on teen relationships as I was today.

The difference is back then I thought I was missing out.

Nowadays, I see those kids every day, laying in that uncomfortable position for a long freaking time. I can't help but think how boring their afternoons must be.

This is something I can see in hindsight pretty well. When I was in school, I was slightly jealous of the people who spent the days macking away, feeling a slight tinge of sadness when I reflected upon why I as sprinting to my car to get back home by 2:30 to watch last night's Colbert Report alone, followed by some more television and probably a movie or two.

Now I realize that is how I prefer to spend my days. I wish I could spend every day like that, not having to worry about a job or anything, and reclining on my couch without having to awkwardly avoid breathing in the warm breaths of the person I'm incorrectly spooning with in a park because I can't have girls over at my parents' house*. My adolescent life turned out to be pretty sweet, looking back on it all.

But if my life was bitching, then why did I talk myself into developing an awkward sense of humor as a coping mechanism for being a total nerd?

Shit, I need to reevaluate the way I do things. I'm going to start by patting myself on the back as I watch "Party Down" all the way through for the second time in two weeks. All this time I thought I was supposed to be making fun of myself for that, and I just didn't talk it through to realize that's kick-ass, I guess.

*If I actually did a tally of all the non-relative girls that visited my parents' house my whole life, I think I could come up with five, maybe six tops. This could be because of the menacing "No Girls Allowed" sign I put up in my bedroom window (I never did that, really; that was a joke)

In Which I React to Award Nominations Again

The Academy Awards has to pull some weird, voodoo shit for me to make me angry about the Coen Brothers getting nominated for best director.

You don't get it. I love the Coens. Unhealthily, some might say. My therapist definitely says that (I don't have a therapist but if I did...).

I'm so convinced of the Academy's black magic, that I'm convinced that they put me and Spencer under a spell last night so that we got drunk enough to think going to a pool hall to drink even more than we already had was a good enough idea to call my mom to pick us up over, thereby giving me a hangover this morning and forced me  to reevaluate my life.

And then, at my weakest hour, they throw this shit at me.

What's weird is the nominations are actually cool. Jeff Bridges got nominated (won't win), Toy Story 3 got a best picture nom (also won't win), and the Best Supporting Actor category was comically weighted in the favor of the front-runners for the award (Jeremy Renner is great, sure, but did he really need a nomination for The Town? That joint was all Ben Affleck, man).

What sucks is that Christopher Nolan didn't get nominated for best director.

Again.

The guy that single handedly made talking about dreams cool again didn't get nominated for best director. Is there no justice in this world?

I tell myself every year I won't care about Oscar nominations, and every year I do this to myself.

But to be brutally honest, I think my head hurts more because of the hangover, not the Nolan snub, which I guess means I'm taking a step in the right direction.

I'll repeat what I said on my Facebook status. One, I hope that if Shia Labeouf has a stoner name, it's "Higha Lapuff." More important to this blog post though, is that Christopher Nolan will become the Alfred Hitchcock of our time in terms of making ridiculously solid movies and always getting snubbed.

The Comedic Packing-Peanuts Theory

In the three glorious months where I was considered an editorial intern for the film blog Screen Junkies, I started thinking about features I could pitch to write for that website. I had approximately one published, the sample piece I sent in when I applied for the job, mostly because I was scared to death of rejection, and also I didn't think many of them were that good.

One of them, however, I did think was good.

I hereby present to you that one good story, "The Comedic Packing-Peanuts Theory," and not a moment too soon (you'll find out why in a minute or fifteen, depending on reading speeds, I guess).

Quick. Name a romantic comedy that wasn't good. Who were the leads? Who were the leads' friends or coworkers in the movie?

You probably answered "someone blandly attractive and nominally likeable" and "funny comedians stifled by the script" to those last two questions. This, my friends, is the theory.

Well, not so much a theory, more just an observation, but theory sounds much better.

I noticed it first when watching the trailer for What Happens in Vegas (not the actual movie, mind you, but I gleaned enough so that it seems pertinent). Sure, Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz have some claim to being "funny," as they incited chuckles from us a long while ago, but no one would confuse them with the great comic minds of our time, especially when paired with a script that wasn't written by Dan Harmon, an associate of Harmon, or someone British*. They're put in a movie like that because they're pretty affable faces (objectively; subjective appreciation of them will vary wildly) who can put moviegoers in a theater.

But once the moviegoers are in the theater, the filmmakers feel a half-assed need to entertain them. Preposterous, I know, they already have the money, but they're compelled to nonetheless. This is where they enlist the help of popular comic personas who need the money because while they are quite hilarious, stand up isn't a lucrative living unless you've managed to time-travel back to when people cared about it and/or are part of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

That's why producers can pay folks like Rob Corddry, Zach Galifianakis, Jason Sudekis, and Andrew Daly to come in and make shit funny without a script. It's a time-honored staple of the 21st century romantic comedy to rely solely upon the fact that someone is funny in real life to make their movie funny.

You see, if Ashton Kutcher were a vase (pronounced "vazzze," not "vase"), Corddry, Galifianakis, and Sudekis would be the packing peanuts the filmmakers use to pad him in the box marked "Fragile" that is the bad romantic comedy. Hence, Comedic Packing-Peanuts.

What's even more interesting is the four mentioned in that movie can lead you down multiple rabbit holes of bad romantic comedy-dom illustrating the theory. For example, even looking at Andrew Daly's IMDB profile took me to Life as We Know It which itself featured Rob Huebel.

Rob Corddry was in The Heartbreak Kid, Failure to Launch, and some movie called Wedding Daze, which I can only assume fits the mold of what I'm talking about.

Galifianakis is a prime offender; he seemed to be ahead of the curve in this game, then got out because he lucked into being a pretty gigantic star. But before The Hangover, there was Heartbreakers and Out Cold, both significantly ahead of their time in being bad romances that tried to use auxiliary characters to make their films less bad.  Both released in 2001, they were the harbingers for the state of romantic comedies in the new era.

I saved Sudekis for last because it seems like he's going to become the new face of the Comedic Packing-Peanuts Theory. I say this because he was in the movie that I noticed recently that corroborated my theory, Going the Distance. Justin Long and Drew Barrymore are kind of likeable, but nowhere near as funny as they think they are, and the script for that movie is nowhere near as funny is it thinks it is. Enter Sudekis, Charlie Day, Jim Gaffigan, and Rob Riggle. Bam, movie saved by having funny people around (I actually don't know, I never saw the movie).

And it's timely that I'm writing this the day of No Strings Attached's release. Definitely not a coincidence ("Hey, what should I write tomorrow? Oh look! That same commercial for No Strings Attached I've seen fourten fu--gasp! I know what to write about!") This movie is bursting at the seams with comic packing peanuts, and, surprise surprise, stars Ashton Kutcher. It also stars Natalie Portman, but I don't really know how to assess that one; maybe she wanted to follow up really crazy sexualization in Black Swan with quirky mediocre sexualization to balance things out.

Anyway, there's an interesting inversion at play with this film, wherein the female lead gets the best of the comic packing peanuts.  Mindy Kaling is immensely funny on "The Office" and in general, and Greta Gerwig has a weird hybrid quality to her, as being someone who is funny but also gives the film (absolutely unwarranted) indie sensibility. Watch Greenberg and this will make a lot more sense.

But that isn't to say the Ash-man doesn't get his share of packing peanuts. Jake Johnson was really funny in that one scene in Get Him to the Greek where he has to break his cell phone, and I seem to be the only person that enjoyed the film Paper Heart, which featured him extensively. Then there's Ludacris, whose had funny music videos, and, let's be real here--if Diddy can be legitimately funny, I assume a rapper who has more of a built-in sense of humor can count for the packing peanuts theory.

And this isn't even mentioning Abby Elliot and Nasim Pedrad, resident attractive girls on "Saturday Night Live," or more classically trained funny older folk like Kevin Kline (wait, Kevin Kline is in this movie? No way!) or Cary Elwes (Wesley from The Princess Bride?! What?  I gotta see this--Ah, see, I'm falling prey to the theory as we speak)

You may be saying, "Hey, this is only a handful of examples, and some of them are tenuous at best! You're just bored and trying to waste my time with your theories that anyone who actually watches movies like these wouldn't give two shits about! And I don't even know half of the names you're blathering on about! To hell with you and your long-winded-albeit-conversational-in-tone blog!"

Well, you'd be absolutely just in saying so. But there are reasons for this sloppiness. One, I'm quite lazy, and didn't do much research for this, as it would have required me to watch the movies in question. Second, I could have made a lot more tenuous connections to blather on about, so just be glad I didn't go through Ashton Kutcher's full IMDB filmography.

Let's just put it this way: If Jason Sudekis, Rob Corddry, or any cast member of "The Office" is in a supporting role in a given movie, there's an 80% chance you have a romantic comedy with bland leads on your hands. It's not a perfect science, but it's better than anything the science community has given us regarding mediocre romantic comedy research, you must admit that.

*Those are the two qualifying factors for being a great comic mind in the past two years, as evidenced again by observation and nothing else.

In Which I Watched the Golden Globes (Or: It's 1977 Awards Season All Over Again)

Every single year, I usually end up in a huff about awards shows equivalent to a die-hard sports fan getting pissed off when their team loses prematurely in the playoffs (think of the entire New England region last night, probably minus a lot of inebriation because I was watching the show with my parents; otherwise, it would've been like looking into a much more effeminate mirror).  This year was obviously no exception. It's a damn vicious cycle.

To be fair, this year there were tons of things that I liked.  For one, I liked that the girl who played Mattie Ross in True Grit appeared several inches taller than Justin Bieber (probably heels, but I didn't see them, so the visual gag was great to me), which is a really petty thing for me to laugh at, but Bieber has a lot of money, so I guess me making fun of a teenager in that context is alright.

I also thought it great that Paul Giammati finally won a Golden Globe for a movie that I'm fairly sure no one has actually seen outside of those who received screeners of it (I think Rotten Tomatoes advertised its theatrical release this last Friday). Here's a facebook comment I made about that award, which I feel is pretty fitting:

"What's important is that Paul Giammati won for that one movie he was in. Seriously, I don't know   what movie he was in; if they had said "And the winner is Paul Giammati for 'Sorry We All Kinda Ignored You Re: Sideways'" it would have made a lot more sense. By the by it took me three times to post this with the proper usages of 'won' and 'one'"

I'll point out again I wasn't drunk during this broadcast or afterward; me not being able to use the proper usages of "won" and "one" is just a sign of my post-collegiate mental decline, I guess.

And finally, in non-snarky positive commentary, I really enjoyed that The Fighter got some performance recognition, as it damn well should have. Bale was an obvious choice for supporting, and my heart was torn like a parent who had two children up for the same award when it came to Melissa Leo and Amy Adams being nominated, so I was happy that at least one of them took the award. Plus, Melissa Leo's acceptance speech was one of the more exuberant of the night, which is always nice to see.

I was also happy that Toy Story 3 won, but it's become obvious that you never ever fuck with Pixar on awards night. So I kinda expected that my heart wouldn't be broken on that one.


You know what I didn't like about the show, though?


...No, it's not that they nominated really stupid movies like The Tourist, Burlesque, and Alice in Wonderland.


...No, it wasn't Ricky Gervais being overly acerbic. Celebs should learn how to handle that shit better; Steve Carrell did, and it was funny.  

What it was that got my goat was the fucking Social Network.


I get it, I get it, it's a good movie.  I won't dispute that; it's smart and makes a possibly uninteresting subject much more interesting. But for gosh sakes, it's so transparent that people are voting for it because they want to pick the most vanilla pseudo-entertaining, smartish and profitable movie on the ballot, as if their friends in the foreign press would make fun of them for voting for something like Inception.


Here's how I see it: The Social Network will prove to be the All of the President's Men of the 21st century, certainly at least 2010. A historical document-type film about an important event in American history that has reverberated and changed the way we think for a long while.


More importantly, it won't be watched by anyone who is not seeing it in their AP US History classes or by mega-film nerds who wanna be Fincher completists (not that that's a bad thing, he's pretty good).


To be fair though, while President's Men got nominated for a buncha Oscars, it only won a couple, screenplay being the biggest honor. You know what won most of the Oscars that year?


Rocky. You know, that movie that's really similar to The Fighter.


You know what movie won almost nothing? Taxi Driver.


I won't say that Taxi Driver is at all similar to Inception story wise, but I can make two bold-ish statements concerning their connection in an awards context. One is that both of the films are fairly challenging in terms of presenting a new set of ideas, be they in terms of cinematic language (Taxi Driver) or just somewhat complex story (Inception). Second, and more important is that Inception, like Taxi Driver, will be the one far more recognized by posterity.


And if I may be so bold, I believe The Fighter will be too, in comparison to The Social Network. Shit, Black Swan, even, while we're at it.


What I'm getting at is it gets annoying that awards are far less about the most deserving or interesting movies, nowadays, it's about people making the choice that they think they should to look good in front of their cohorts. There's a hype machine that seems to randomly pick one film out as the "smart pick" and dictates that Social Network's weird 80's horror film synthy bits of score should be ignored for the pretty piano noise that peppers the film as best score and that Inception's soon-to-be-iconic BRHAAAMMMM type score should go unnoticed.  


Anyways, I'm rambling. I'll stop talking and wait for about twenty years to say "I told you so."


...Also, where the fuck was True Grit?

Memory Lane

Talking about the Miami Vice trailer yesterday made me think of trailers that were similar (cool or douche-y, depending on how much you enjoyed the Duplass Brothers) that did not disappoint when the actual viewing of the movie was involved.

Sin City popped into my mind right quick.



I first saw this while watching a mediocre movie that I can't remember. I did that a lot when I was young because a lot of my friends were busy having social lives and girlfriends (and to be fair, that hasn't changed much, but Netflix has revolutionized the art of being lonely). I think part of the reason I don't remember the actual movie very well was because I was so jazzed about that one trailer for the next several hours, which became the next several weeks, which became the moment until the movie came out.

I got my first traffic ticket the day of the midnight showing. I was only sixteen, so getting a ticket for something I could barely explain (using the shoulder of a road to turn right, which at least 100 people do every day) was about as embarrassing as having to drag my mom to a midnight showing of a movie dedicated to violence and boobies.

But by the end of the movie, I did not care about any of that. I just cared about how badass it was, and how I could convince my friends to stop talking to girls and see the movie so I could see it again.

Not to sound corny, but movies can really do a lot to turn a bad day around. I won't use the word "transport you to another world," but you can infer that's what I'm getting at.

Overload

Before falling asleep last night, I fantasized about what my day would be like.  It went something like this:

You know what?  I saw that "Louie" was on Netflix, so I think I'm gonna watch a lot of that.  Man, that was a really interesting show; I really wanna watch it again because I suspect that the ratio of melancholy to funny is actually skewed a lot more in melancholy's direction than funny, and that's pretty bold for a comedian to do.  He's doing short Woody Allen films as delivered by someone really really angry. 

But you know what else?  I haven't watched "Northern Exposure" in forever.  God, that show is good.  I keep saying I'm going to re-watch that show and I still haven't.  Maybe it's for the same reason I haven't watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy again, it'd just be so time consuming to get through all of it.  But screw it; maybe I can get through "Louie" early in the morning (there are only 13 episodes, after all), then I can get on "Northern Exposure."

Oh shit, wait, I already have the third and fourth seasons of "Chuck" on my plate, too.  I kept saying I'd get caught up before Monday.  Gotta stay on that regiment.  So I'll watch that after "Louie."

Dude, thinking of TV makes me think of the True Grit commercial I saw today.  Good to see it's number one at the box office.  Should I see it a third time?  I kind of want to, but that seems silly, like something I'd do in middle school.  And I'm not in middle school anymore.

Ah crap, I just realized I still haven't seen Blue Valentine either.  And call me nuts, but I feel like I'm committed to seeing the Green Hornet, just because I'm so damn curious about that pairing of Seth Rogen and Michel Gondry for a movie like that.  I should see Blue Valentine first though, because that'll probably leave theaters quicker.

So maybe after watching all of "Louie," then a few more episodes of "Chuck," I can go see Blue Valentine tomorrow*.  That'd be a pretty good day, even though the end of it would involve me admittedly seeing a pretty heavy movie almost certainly by my lonesome, which probably wouldn't put me in the best mood in the evening, but oh well.  Good art is good art, I guess, and if I have a crummy night after a good day of media-watching, that's probably alright.  I can blog my opinions of these things too, which will be helpful, as I'm really quickly running out of ideas to write about.

Tomorrow should be awesome.

...As it stands, I watched two episodes of "Louie" and got my oil changed, which took like an hour.  Luckily, my oil change was free, so that was good.

Regardless, though, I think I need to temper my multimedia intake, and also take a long hard look at what I believe constitutes a "Good Day."

*Oh, and I should also listen to "The Wild Hunt" again by The Tallest Man On Earth.  That'd be a good thing to do to take a break or do while blogging.  Also, I should really try to steal more devices from the fifteen pages of David Foster Wallace stuff that I've read.  It makes me look a lot cooler, I bet.