Author: Adam (Page 138 of 224)

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?

Cliffs Notes II

Movies from 2001 better than any of the Best Picture nominees, except for LOTR:

Series 7
Mulholland Drive
Vanilla Sky
Ghost World
Princess and the Warrior
The Royal Tenenbaums

I guess this wasn’t such a bad year for movies after all. Too bad the Academy can’t see beyond the standard homogenized Hollywood fare (again, except for LOTR, the exception that proves the rule).

Adam’s Oscar Cliffs Notes

The good: Halle Berry, Randy Newman
The bad: Jennifer Connelly, Best Picture and Director to “Beautiful Mind,” Gywneth Paltrow’s chest.

More (much more) tomorrow.

Arthur has moved give love:get love, and Tuesday has a new design for hey man, who ate my pizza? Stop by and tell them I sent you. Blogspot is down as I write this (what a shocker), so you may have to come back to Tuesday’s site later. Interesting, because Arthur used to be on Blogspot too, but just moved after the latest outage.

I hate to repeat myself, but why is hosting such a difficult task? Keep the computers running, and have at least some decent customer service, and you’re a hero. Not many heroes out there.

So new Arthur Andersen apologist Paul Volcker says if the federal government dismisses the indictment against the document-shredding accountants, and caps its liability from the Enron scandal, they’ll clean up their act – everyone will get religion and start dedicating themselves to ethics and clean business practices.

Yeah, that’ll happen.

It infuriates me that Volcker is basically saying, don’t punish us for what we’ve done, and we’ll do all these wonderful reforms that we’d have to do anyway if we’re going to stay alive. What major concessions. Sounds like the kid who promises to clean his room right now to avoid being grounded for not cleaning it.

To add insult to injury, Andersen is also staging employee rallies, where the future unemployed can trot out their cute kids for the sympathy vote. “My dad needs his job.” Nice. When you start using the kids, for me the “Pure Evil” needle goes straight up to 11.

I say let them crash and burn, and we’re all the better for it.

Our big worry in Wisconsin right now is Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), which causes deer to waste away and die before the hunters can shoot them. (!) Emergency hunting permits are being issued so authorities can ascertain how widespread this problem is. Hunters can keep the deer meat – assuming they’d want to. And people in public wooded areas are being urged to wear blaze orange while the investigatory hunt is on.

We live in weird times.

“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. I know it is not logical — but it is frequently so.”
-Mr. Spock

I changed the weblog tagline to something else, but I love this quote so much that I just had to repeat it here.