Month: March 2002 (Page 1 of 5)

I just watched “Donnie Darko.”

Can someone explain it to me?

(Or maybe I wasn’t meant to understand.)

Some quite interesting talk on MetaFilter recently about the terms “black” and “African-American.”

At lunch today my brother described a recent fishing trip where he struggled with a 100-pound fish for an hour and a half. Since the fish was too big to mount, and not good to eat, once it’s given up and you could haul it into the boat, instead you let it go.

Somebody please explain to me why this is fun. (It’s certainly not too fun for the fish.) At least with traditional hunting, you either get some meat or a trophy to hang on the wall – or at least a creepy photo of you holding up the dead deer’s head by its antlers. Fishing, especially the kind my brother described, still baffles me totally.

I’ve been thinking a lot about political labels recently. Not that I relish agreeing with Politically Incorrect’s Bill Maher, but I agree with what he said recently about hate crimes – people should be prosecuted for their actions, not their thoughts. If someone is assaulted or killed, prosecute them on that basis – not on the basis of why they did it, if we can even presume to understand that.

So I guess I agree with conservatives on that point.

But I’m also agree with libertarians about the so-called “drug war”: I think all drugs (all) should be legalized and regulated. Don’t fill up prisons with drug offenders, who only become more likely to commit other crimes after they emerge from prison. It’s just bad public policy, whatever stern moral view we may take about drug abuse.

I think political labels sometimes stop us from considering each issue on its own merits – not to mention the complexity of other people’s opinions. Do you consider yourself a conservative, liberal, libertarian, or something else? And why?

Tonight “The West Wing” hit it out of the park again with another fantastic episode. It’s the best show on TV right now, and I challenge anyone to come up with a better one. They manage a delicate balance between character, comedy, tragedy and policy that’s amazing to watch. I also enjoyed watching the fictional brainiac president Bartlet deride his potential Republican opponent (a conservative governor from a southern state, no less) for being an intellectual lightweight.

“If he’s going to be in charge of making policy, we think he should at least understand it,” says Josh Lyman.

On top of everything else, they get top-flight guest stars like Laura Dern tonight, who gave an Emmy-worthy performance as the U.S. Poet Laureate.

This show is why we shouldn’t all chuck our TVs out the window.

So I was going to write this post about the woman who stood in front of me in line at the grocery store for about 10 minutes (it was the express line, of course), then watched as her three items were scanned, then chatted with the clerk, then fished through two, not one but two, purses to find her checkbook, then laboriously wrote out a check, asking the name of the freaking store she was standing in in order to fill it out, and didn’t realize her luck that I didn’t take a can of soup and beat her to death with it.

But then I thought, the world doesn’t need another fake-Seinfeld weblog post about grocery store lines. So I’ve moved on.

After watching “The Business of Strangers” with Stockard Channing tonight, I’ve hit on why independent movies are often so much better than Hollywood productions: ambiguity.

It’s this single quality that often means the difference between an OK movie and a good one, or a good one and a great one – at least for me. Hollywood wants to explain everything to you at every turn, and then wrap it all up in the final reel, neat and tidy. Well, I don’t want everything handed to me on a silver platter. I want to listen. I want to decide for myself what happened and why the characters did what they did.

After all, life is nothing so much as ambiguous. Nothing is black and white – everything is shades of grey. Everything. And that’s what makes it interesting.

And while you get the basic idea of “Strangers” in the first few minutes, how it unspools itself is unpredictable and, yes, ambiguous. Combine it with great performances by Channing and Julia Stiles, and you have at least a temporary antidote to “A Beautiful Mind” and its ilk. Highly recommended.

Now Dave Winer is talking about a directory of weblogs, the Yahoo for weblogs. That’s my idea! I need to get working on that.

Ron Howard is so mainstream it makes my teeth hurt. He has become the undisputed master of the inoffensive, safe, middle American, focus-group-tested blockbuster. And this Oscar will assure (if the box office of his films hasn’t already) that he’ll be churning out this pap for the next 20-30 years. This is not something to look forward to.

“A Beautiful Mind,” in addition to employing Jennifer Connelly, made its fortune by filing off the edges of its subject until nothing was left but a Ron-Howard-shaped blob. Show John Nash in all his difficult, prickly, brilliant glory – now there’s a movie. Just not this one. (And no, like most schizophrenics, Nash did not just see benign people who weren’t there. He had a lifelong struggle with a debilitating illness, which is much harder to depict than smiling little girls who appear and disappear.)

I’ve already listed several movies that should have been on the Best Picture list. As often happens with the Oscars, they managed to pick the worst one of even the list they had to choose from.

I remember when “Silence of the Lambs” won director, picture, actor and actress. The editorial page editor at my paper in Michigan wrote a long piece about how shocking it was that this amoral, ugly movie should be so honored. Well, it may have offended middle America, but it was a masterpiece. For once they got it right.

Which leads me to Peter Jackson. He managed a 16-month shoot for all three LOTR movies, ran the effects through his own effects company, and created a sweeping epic that thrilled both hardcore Tolkien fans and the totally uninitiated. If that doesn’t exemplify what it means to be a movie director, I don’t know what does.

Ron Howard – take a risk next time. Give it a try and see what happens.

After four hours and 15 minutes (5:45 including Barbara Walters and the pre-show) of “celebrities” and “pageantry,” a lot of things occurred to me while watching the Oscars. So here’s my unranked pop culture braindump.

-The beginning interview montage was fun, and worlds better than the Rob Lowe-Snow White type thing they usually do. But in the middle of it, I was already thinking, “OK. Let’s get on with it.”

-The Supporting Actress win for Jennifer Connelly was a shocking travesty – any of the other four women deserved it, she did not.

-Pop culture truth: Nicole Kidman is a star because of her marriage to Tom Cruise. (Sadly, this didn’t work out for Mimi Rogers.)

-My friend Paul dubbed Nicole “the mannish Nicole Kidman,” for her giant Klingon-sized forehead last night.

-If Uma Thurman turned too quickly to the right or left, she was going to put somebody’s eye out with those things. (that’s Amanda’s line – thanks, Amanda.)

-On the flip side, I covered my eyes during Gwyneth Paltrow’s stint as a presenter. If you watched the show, you know what I mean. Scary.

-They wuz robbed: Ian McKellen, Peter Jackson, LOTR. Nuff said.

-Best acceptance speech: Halle Berry, followed close on by Randy Newman. “I don’t want your pity.” Good stuff.

-The Barbara Walters special was one of the more interesting ones in memory. Halle Berry’s story (other than the “I just don’t remember the accident” stuff) was thought-provoking and told from the heart.

-Tom Cruise is gay. Get over it and move on.

-Best line written by an Oscar flack for a presenter: “Without makeup, actors and actresses would all look like people in documentaries.” -Ryan Phillippe

-Why wasn’t Will Smith in his seat when his category was being announced?

-It’s great that they have a category for Best Animated Feature now, but I’m disappointed on the flip side that that means everyone acknowledges that something like “Monsters, Inc.” will never be nominated for the “regular” best picture. Which it clearly should have been.

-Loved the little animated inserts they did for Shrek, Monsters, etc. Especially the “applauding sheepishly after losing” sequence for Sulley and Mike.

-Whoopi’s best line (not a lot to choose from): “We’ve had a national tragedy. But we’ve recovered….Mariah Carey’s already made another movie.”

-Why did so many men dress like they were playing Darrin Stevens on Bewitched for Halloween? All those black coats, plain white business shirts and plain black neckties. This is the Oscars, not a board meeting.

-Cameron Diaz looked like she just rolled out of bed in her dorm room at Clown College. And then walked into a hurricane.

-Ron Howard and “A Beautiful Mind” deserve their own separate rant. Coming soon.

All in all, it was a lackluster, long evening. What did you all think?