Cramming for the Oscars

When the Oscars start tonight, I will have seen seven of the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture, thanks to a late push. I saw four of the nominees in the last week.

Tonight, I sat through (most of) Inception with a friend. It manages the not-rare-enough feat of being both utterly incomprehensible and supremely dumb. I didn't like director Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, but that was more in a this-movie-is-silly-and-overrated-but-still-kind-of-a-joyride way. My reaction to Inception was more of a this-is-one-of-the-worst-movies-I've-ever-seen-and-when-can-I-go-to-bed? kind of thing. We watched much of the last hour in fast forward, which provided about as much intellectual stimulation and emotional engagement as watching it the regular way.

To thoroughly dissect the idiocy of Inception would take far more time than I'm willing to devote to it. Days and days more time. Perhaps months. For one thing, I was offended as someone who has had at least five or six vivid dreams every night for as long as I can remember. The movie seems to have no clue — or interest — in what dreams really are, or what they might represent. But I don't mean to say that's the movie's biggest flaw. They all seem equally big.

This afternoon, I saw Black Swan. I expected to either hate it or be surprised by its greatness. Instead, I thought it was well made but too predictable, and a bit sillier, in spots, than even its self-consciously campy approach warranted. The notion of good girl Nina (Natalie Portman) needing to shed her virginal White Swan personality and get in touch with her inner Black Swan is explicitly set up in the beginning on a kindergarten reading level, and then played out with just enough panache and horror-movie touches to keep things interesting. But until the last several minutes, when things get genuinely creepy and suspenseful, there's a too-regular cycle of scenes: Now she's going to have a bad interaction with her mom. Now she's going to rip off one of her finger- or toenails. Now she's going to feel humiliated by her director. Rinse and repeat.

Earlier in the week, I saw True Grit and The Social Network, both of which I expected to enjoy because of what would be called their connections in horse racing. The Coen brothers are just national treasures, plain and simple. I don't think True Grit is their best, but that leaves it an awful lot of room to be damn good, and it is. How they make such beautifully crafted movies in such quick succession is beyond me. I guess it helps, man-hours-wise, that there are two of them. I was a little worried early on, because Jeff Bridges was borrowing more than a little from Carl of Sling Blade for his voice work. But he reined it in a little, and gave a hammy-but-affecting performance.

David Fincher was a brilliant choice to direct The Social Network. In movies like Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room, and Zodiac, he's proven that he can make stylish, creepy movies even if the source material isn't world-beating. And Aaron Sorkin may be removed from the demographic that habitually uses Facebook, but he's great at what he does. Between his snappy dialogue and Fincher's ridiculously fluid movement between two depositions and the past and present, the movie is a glossy gem. Debates about its realism (and the importance or irrelevance of that) aside, it's top-notch moviemaking.

The three movies I haven't seen that are nominated are The Fighter, The King's Speech, and 127 Hours. Of the seven I've seen, I enjoyed five quite a bit, and I would rank them like this:

1. The Social Network
2. True Grit
3. Toy Story 3
4. Winter's Bone
5. The Kids Are All Right
6. Black Swan
379. Inception

Reconsidering Hitch

(Illustration by Ryan Tym)

To prepare for the movie mania coming soon to these parts -- a list, in installments, of my favorite 100 movies (there will also be various posts by guests) -- I’ve been rewatching some movies and watching others for the first time. (Because I’ve been rightfully teased about the delay, and because I may never start without a deadline, I’ve set January 18 as the start date for the festivities.) Psycho was one of those classics I had never seen, and I rectified that a couple of weeks ago. It will definitely make my list, for reasons that I’ll get into (and are probably obvious) when the time comes.

It was part of a mini Hitchcock run that also included The Birds, which I’d seen a couple of times as a young kid. I was curious about how it would hold up. The results were mixed. On the one hand, Hitchcock does his usual brilliant job of building suspense. There’s that great scene in which Tippi Hedren sits outside the schoolhouse while crows slowly, quietly gather on playground equipment behind her. But the end of that scene is indicative of the film’s biggest weakness, which is effects: The children run away from the school as birds that were clearly added to the picture afterward chase after them. The attack scenes in general are pretty silly -- with the exception of the final one, in which Hedren is bombarded inside the house. That scene is exhausting and chilling, in part because her attackers are real. Hedren says that handlers with large protective gloves “alternately hurled [the birds] at me for five days.” There are plenty of creepy scenes in the movie, but I think it falls short of Hitchcock's best.

For an interesting look at the film’s originally planned ending, see here.

"Actors were hired, lights set up, meals catered."

My friend Dez just wrapped up his list of favorite movies. (The top choice isn't a shocker, given the name of his blog.) A few days ago, he also had a post asking people for their worst movie of all time. (His was The Phantom Menace.) It can be an overwhelming question. It probably takes most people much longer to think of their worst-ever movie than their favorite movie.

Last month, The Morning News asked its writers and readers a related (but different) question: What are your favorite worst movies? (Italics mine.)

The contributors produce some spine-tingling sentences, like the following:

Starring John Larroquette as a sex-starved motorcycling bartender...

Like all truly great movies, a trained bear cub—who is arguably the protagonist—follows the man throughout.

The film is, admittedly, a mess of plot, character, and interminable (but highly entertaining!) phantasmagoria culled from Chinese folklore.

Then there's Jon Roig's take on a certain rapper and his Hollywood debacle:

“Drop that zero and get with the hero.” Some writer got paid to pen that line for Vanilla Ice. Somebody funded the creation of Cool as Ice (1991). Actors were hired, lights set up, meals catered. This is no cracker-jack production. If the central thesis of the Great Bad Movie theory is a terrible idea executed to the height of ridiculousness, then C.A.I. is one of the central texts.

Lauren Frey is the only contributor who mystified me. She seems to be arguing that Better Off Dead is a bad movie. Huh? Distinctly '80s, sure. Goofy, yeah. But come on.

The person clearly after my own heart is Heidi Armstrong, who chooses Deep Blue Sea, which would probably be my answer to this question as well. What's more, she singles out Samuel L. Jackson's death scene as "the pinnacle laugh-out-loud moment." (This clip cuts off the full absurdity of his preceding speech, but you get the idea.) I love that scene so much that I once strenuously worked it into a review of an entirely different Jackson movie.

Along similar lines, searching for "best death scene" on YouTube is fun. It leads to clips like this and this and this. Oh, and I always like any excuse to post to this.

In a World . . .

IFC gathers what it considers the best 50 movie trailers of all time. ("We know them as trailers, but they don't trail anything; they play before the movie, not after it. The name dates to their earliest incarnation, when they actually did follow the feature.")

No methodology is given, but how methodological could it be, anyway? It's a great list to peruse. Each of the clips has its own page, and what I love/hate are some of the comments it attracted. Like:

Seriously? We have to click 50 times just to get the damn list? No thanks.

Good god. Let's hope we never face any land wars for our very existence anytime soon. People can't click 50 times? What, will that mean too much neon Cheetos dust on your touchpad?

What was I saying? Oh, right, the previews. The one for the documentary Comedian is pretty funny. The one for the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There (one of the few movies by them I haven't seen) is certainly stylish. The one for Texas Chain Saw Massacre puts today's sleek horror movies to shame. (In fact, don't watch that one.) Likewise, today's scary-movie trailer-makers could learn a little somethin' from The Shining. Well, in fairness -- and jeez, sorry to hit the horror note so heavily -- they do include the one fright flick of recent vintage that really got its trailer right: The Strangers.

OK, OK, enough with the chills. I'll leave you with one of my favorites embedded below, and you can go here to see the whole list.

Four Flicks

While we're on the subject of movies, I've been catching up on some oldies recently. In ascending order of enthusiasm:

I recommend My Favorite Wife, a 1940 screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. The plot involves a wife (Dunne) returning from a desert island after seven years presumed dead. The husband (Grant) has remarried the very morning she returns. Hijinks ensue. A lot of the action is corny -- in a Three's Company kind of way -- but there are some genuinely funny moments. And most of all, did I mention Grant and Dunne? They have more charm than 98% of today's actors combined. This isn't one of those classics that has aged very well, but it's a perfectly enjoyable treat. I fell madly in love with Dunne in this, but she's been dead for 18 years, so that's probably not going to work out.

I strongly recommend High Noon, which, like the next movie below, isn't exactly a trailblazing pick. Gary Cooper is a little dull for my taste, but Grace Kelly and a young Lloyd Bridges are both terrific. It's a simple story, but it generates a lot of drama by playing out in more or less real time.

And I don't have enough words to recommend His Girl Friday. No idea why it took me so long to see it, but Grant (again) and Rosalind Russell have insane chemistry. Like All About Eve, this is one in which dialogue hasn't really aged. The plot twists might be patently "zany" in a way that's extinct (in good movies, anyway), but the script is brilliant. I fell madly in love with Russell in this, but she's been dead for 32 years, so that's probably not going to work out.

What do these vintage movies have in common? Their running times are 88, 85, and 92 minutes, respectively. The Dukes of Hazzard was 106 minutes. I am here to tell you that, nine times out of 10, less is more. This is a lesson Hollywood hasn't just forgotten -- it's covered it in gasoline and set it aflame.

Lastly, there's Marty, also lean (91 minutes), and the 1955 Oscar winner for Best Picture, but not as essential. It stars Ernest Borgnine, who won Best Actor, as a lonely, good-natured 34-year-old bachelor living with his mother in the Bronx. When he meets Clara (Betsy Blair), a plain 29-year-old with equally few prospects, the two hit it off. Borgnine is perfect for the role, there are some charming black-and-white images, and Marty and his friends engage in a couple of funny, Diner-like conversations. But the story is so sweet that it's almost inert. It's not bad, but a little boring. Perhaps worth seeing in the long run, but no rush.

Marty did have striking posters in Russia and Poland:

To Err is Human (and Zombie and Vampire and Troll and Moon Beast)

Another lesson in how blogging slowly wastes one's life: A few days ago, just to tack on a completely irrelevant (and not particularly funny) joke to a post, I went to IMDB and found a movie called Carnosaur 3. I then had the great luck of noticing a funny goof listed on the movie's trivia page. This, already, was a significant waste of time.

But I wasn't done. I realized that such goofs were a gold mine. Goof usually means something dull but unprofessional like, "When Alex gets out of his car, he's wearing a tie, but when the camera cuts back to him at the front door, he's not." But when you focus on horror movies (especially low-budget horror movies), you get more entertaining fare, like this small gallery that I've put together for your pleasure:

Zombie Nation: Several of the zombies are shown clawing their way out of the ground, yet when they have finished, there is no dirt in their hair or on their clothes.

Track of the Moon Beast: When Paul is suffering from his Moon Beast illness about halfway through the movie, the camera zooms in on the full moon, only it's obviously a photo of the moon.

Hell Comes to Frogtown: When Captain Delving falls off a short cliff, he lands on padding that pops up after he hits it. Also, a pillowy noise is clearly audible.

The Horror of Party Beach: As the monsters emerge from the water to pursue the heroine you can very clearly see that the second monster has a human head sticking out of its neck.

Troll 2: When Creedence grabs Joshua by the neck and hoists him up, he very obviously is stepping up on some kind of stool.

I like that last one, but whoever it is who listed the Troll 2 goofs was clearly too obsessed with pointing out every last flaw in a movie that I'm imagining is 98% flaws. Then, there are the real sticklers:

Way of the Vampire: About 46 minutes into the film, a voice-over describes vampire behavior. The narrator says "It would be different if they were like wasps, one sting and they're dead, but instead they come back again, and again, and again." Wasps can sting as many times as they wish. Bees, on the other hand, sting one time and die.

Well, excuse the makers of Way of the Vampire. And this is probably my favorite, from the 1980 smash hit Alligator:

In the first shot of the alligator’s eye, the whole crew is reflected in it.

Synecdoche, New York

I was going to start this post by quoting E.M. Forster on Gertrude Stein, and how experimentalism can be admirable even when doomed to failure, but this movie doesn't deserve that level of discussion. Writer (and here, first-time director) Charlie Kaufman is that tightrope walker, the artist known for his Stunning Imagination. This means that critics and audiences attend his movies with some expectation of being confronted with dazzling complexity (or at least superficial complexity, which might be a more accurate term for what Kaufman traffics in), and it also means that many will find that complexity, damn it. But even though a smattering of the people in the packed Brooklyn theater where I saw the movie clapped at the end, and several critics have praised it, I'm here to tell you it's a dud. And worse, it's devoid of imagination.

The first hour or so is average Kaufman, churning out just enough off-kilter humor and odd-universe details to keep you alert, but not approaching the unique plots or visuals of Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In the second half, as Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gets lost in the massive, interminable play he's producing, the movie becomes an effective soporific. The conceit -- for those who don't know -- is that Cotard's play is based on his own life and experiences, and reality and fiction become increasingly entangled as the decades (yes, decades) pass. The two big problems: 1) A mind-bending premise like this -- alone -- is not that imaginative. It could be generated by anyone familiar with Borges, to name one mind-bending trailblazer, and Borges died 22 years ago. 2) That leaves it up to execution, and Kaufman uses the premise mostly to write -- in a way that alternates between flat and juvenile -- about the impossibility of love and the fear of mortality. Fine themes, but not if you approach them like you're the first to think of them.

The performances are uniformly good (especially Samantha Morton as one of Cotard's muses), but to make another short list: 1) Hoffman needs to seek out some fresh roles, stat. To paraphrase the person I saw it with, haven't we seen enough of him sitting forlornly on the edge of a bed in his boxer shorts? 2) I really like Catherine Keener, but I suspect her range is between 0 and 0.01. She could have been digitally dropped into this movie from others.

The Host

It seems like a crappy horror movie is released every other day. With the exception of 28 Days Later, which was mostly terrifying (and the sequel looks worth a viewing, too), most decent entries in the genre these days are of the twisted scary-funny model that's probably been around a lot longer than Scream, but not in such a mainstream way. This model may have reached its peak with Shaun of the Dead. The Host is also very good, though its laughs are often so oddball that they stem more from strangeness than humor.

Because I pride myself on having plugged-in readers (except for three of you, and you know who you are -- good lord, you three, get a clue), I'll assume you know most everything about this movie already. You've probably seen it four times. You might have a bed sheet with the monster on it.

The monster is the problem for me. (Well, the monster and the editing. The Host would be even stronger minus about 20 minutes.) There's a moment very early on that's one of the coolest and creepiest I've seen in a while, as a group of South Koreans (the movie is set in Seoul) watch from a distance as the titular beast hangs from the underside of a bridge and then slowly drops into the river. Eventually, we see the monster -- repeatedly -- up close. And it's well made -- it looks real, but only in the way that Nerf products are real. Despite all the advances in technology, monsters and otherworldly villains and deep space seem to be getting harder to believe. Think of Star Wars -- yes, the first movie, which had all the visual sophistication of an Atari 2600 game, looked silly. But I honestly think it looked better than the perfect but completely sterile backdrops of The Phantom Menace. I guess I'm more distracted by excess perfection than excess crudity. After all, the world is far more crude than perfect, so why that shouldn't be reflected on the screen?

That very brief scene on the bridge is terrific. And there are many beautifully framed moments throughout, and the closing shot is gorgeous, and overall I'd recommend that you see it (for the fifth time; and buy the matching pillowcase). But after the creature disappears from sight, it next shows up bounding along the banks of the river in all its glory (very close behind the people pictured above, as you may have guessed), looking like the love child of Godzilla and Jar Jar Binks. I liked the view better from afar.

Pan's Labyrinth

Good God. I saw Pan's Labyrinth tonight, having wanted to for some time, and I have to say I'm torn. On the one hand, it's a stunningly filmed, deeply moving, and even (in the end) deeply moral experience. In many ways, it was easily one of the best movies I saw in the past year, considering a "movie year" one that spans from Oscars to Oscars. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it is the most brutal viewing experience I've ever had. I will admit that the movie caught me at a vulnerable time, but friends had tried to prepare me for more violence than the preview had suggested.

They didn't prepare me enough.

It's impossible to summarize things without giving too much away, so I won't. But if you're uncomfortable with realistic violence -- both emotional and physical -- committed by humans against humans, I strongly urge you to watch this in the comfort of your own home when it's released on DVD. There were a handful of times when I felt that I would have to leave the theater.

A good deal of that violence feels gratuitous, and for that I have to take points away from the project. But the horror also accrues in a way that is put to use for one of the more devastating climactic sequences that I can remember. I believe it's the first time I've ever left a movie in need of a drink, to fend off the existential nausea. The film has enough strengths that it doesn't deserve such an off-putting, unnerving encapsulation, but it's the truth. The friend who was with me could testify -- the only humorous moments all night came when he looked at me during certain scenes and laughed at the way I was shrinking from the screen.

The story has clear -- in my mind -- religious connotations (ethical connotations, at least), but considering another, very long post that I'm working on, I don't have the energy to get into that. If you want to discuss it over a drink sometime, I'm more than game. You know where to find me. Well, most of you know where to find me.

I'm supposed to see The Lives of Others with another friend tomorrow night, and while that looks like a very serious effort, I'm convinced it will seem like Meet the Parents compared to tonight's fare.

Children of Men

I knew going into Children of Men that I wouldn't love it as much as its biggest fans, because futuristic, dystopian movies tend to leave me a little cold. For starters, though they're not technically sci-fi movies, they often share with that genre the creation of a hypothetical world that doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. Children of Men mostly gets around this problem by not getting into much specific detail -- it's essentially one long chase, with a few very well executed getaway scenes. Clive Owen is great, as he always is, and so is Michael Caine. Julianne Moore's role, mercifully, is very limited. (Spoiler immediately ahead: To put a blunt, impolite point on it, I've never been more relieved to have a character killed early on in a movie. With the knowledge that she wouldn't be on screen anymore, I felt freed up to enjoy the rest.)

In short, I think it's definitely worth seeing, even if my genre prejudices keep me from hailing it as one of the year's very best. But for an alternate take, I thought I'd turn things over to my dad, who makes me look like an unapologetic freak for all things sci-fi/dystopia. He wrote the following to me during an e-mail exchange about the movie last week:

I will give you points for the first street explosion but the rest of the fighting was boilerplate stuff and the car chases, in my opinion, are kid stuff compared to The French Connection, Bullitt, and any Bond flick. The escape from the farmhouse challenged my Hall-of-Fame suspension of disbelief when Clive (who I agree is great in anything) starts pushing the car uphill in mud. Critics are awed by the soldiers gaping at the squalling baby, but what would they expect? The first kid born in 18 years!! Why wouldn't they gape? And how about the gender issue? No one mentions the disappointment when the bad guy finds out it is a girl. He wanted A.P. Indy, but he got Ruffian instead. He should have been tracking down the father of the baby ... now there is a key guy, given the movie’s circumstances. Anyway, I think it’s weird -- the kind of flick where everyone feels like they need to find something profound rather than simply standing back for a minute and saying "this is really a bunch of crap." The photography was excellent in keeping with the dreary and hopeless state of the world. The one shot of the barren field with the sludge pouring out of the pipe was terrific, but to what end other than to further depress the viewer? Come to think of it, that is the point...

Will You Still Feed Me, When I'm Sixty-Four?

Yes, Harrision Ford is 64. And in relating the news that the fourth Indiana Jones movie is set to start filming this spring, Pajiba's Dustin Rowles notes (wisely) that Sean Connery, who plays Indy's dad, "looks 10 years younger than Harrison Ford now." Indeed.

He also offers a working title for the project:

Geriatric Jones and the Search for Depends (with the Occasional Nap)

A reader follows that with:

Indiana Jones and the Search for Someone Who Still Gives a Rat's Ass

I pride myself on having funny readers. (Well, a few of you, anyway. I won't say which ones.) So, fire away. Any good ideas for a title? Here, I'll get you started with mine:

Indiana Jones and the Search for...What Did He Come In Here For, Again?

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Budget

Admittedly, I'm a bit far behind on this one, but earlier this year Pajiba published its list of the 10 worst blockbusters of all time. And it's funny and smart. To take two examples:

Meet the Fockers may not represent the first time that two of the greatest actors of any generation -- Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro -- have shared screen time, but it’s certainly the worst, and that Barbra Streisand would trade in her Hollywood wattage for a role where she essentially plays Mrs. Roper with a psychology degree is just plain embarrassing.

Ultimately, not a single thing in Armageddon is emotionally honest, from the animal crackers to the melodramatic martyrdom. Bay’s close-ups of plaques honoring fallen Apollo astronauts are cheap echoes of a kind of nationalism he can never adequately sell; it’s almost like he wants to be Frank Capra, but he’s too cynical to know the difference between American sentiment and making a buck.

To narrow down the candidates, they used this chart of movies that have grossed more than $100 million at the domestic box office. It got me to thinking of my list, because I'd only seen three of their selections (Meet the Fockers, Titanic, and The Phantom Menace). So, without further ado, here are my selections, with only the top (or bottom) five ranked, with each film's box-office rank in parentheses.

Titanic (1)

The actual sinking of the ship provides a few thrilling moments and great visuals, but that doesn’t make up for the rest of the movie. One of the few times Kate Winslet couldn’t save something for me.

Twister (43)

I saw this with a few friends the night before our college graduation ceremony. A final exam in my toughest class couldn't have given me the kind of pounding headache the movie did.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (65)

The first Austin Powers movie was funny (enough), but entirely because of the fish-out-of-water joke. In this sequel, though, the fish jumps back into the pool of the swinging ‘60s. Boredom ensues. Needless to say, I didn't see the additional sequel ("Goldmember"); you know the old adage inspired by the American movie industry: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seventeen times, shame on me.

Back to the Future Part II (248)

There are definitely worse movies (see below, for starters), but this one shattered my 15-year-old heart and taught me a hard lesson in how the world was capable of treating the things I loved. (I had a relatively cushy childhood.)

Vanilla Sky (344)

Cameron Crowe has made some entertaining movies (Say Anything, Almost Famous). He's also used the silver screen the way a bad dog uses the new carpet. As he did in this case.

5. Hulk (192)

Ang Lee might as well have taken all of my vintage Hulk comic books, which represent one of the formative steps in my love of reading, piled them up in front of my eyes and set them on fire. In short, he made Hulk fans angry, and you wouldn't like us when we're angry.

4. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (5)

It's bad enough that my generation feels compelled to go through life defending the pretty schlocky (in retrospect) original trilogy as if it were a work of total genius, but Lucas had to come back and spit in our faces. Sitting through this dull nightmare had only one thing to recommend it: It guaranteed I wouldn't sit through the next two.

3. The Break-Up (246)

This is easily one of the worst non-special effects/action/thriller movies I've ever paid to sit through. I might be ranking it so high just because my anger is fresh (it was the most recently released of all these choices), but I don't think so. In a world that's capable of producing scripts like The Philadelphia Story, Annie Hall, and Sideways, the writers of The Break-Up should be considered war criminals.

2. Forrest Gump (15)

I caught a few minutes of this on TV the other day, and it still amazes me that any sentient creature could take it seriously, much less so many sentient creatures. The fact that Hanks won an Oscar for it, instead of a Razzie, is a joke.

1. Con Air (339)

Taking into account all categories of suckitude -- comically bad plot twists, the differential between the talent of the cast and the humiliation of the material, and Nicolas Cage's accent -- this remains the worst movie I've seen in a theater. But it might be the reason I've avoided this kind of crap for the past nine years, so maybe I should be thankful. ... Nah.

***

There is the occasional good blockbuster, of course, so it's only fair to give you my favorite 10, too (only in order of box office rank, not my preference, and with much less commentary).

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (9, 13, 18)

All three movies were pretty high on the box office list, and I enjoyed all three, so I'll just combine them here. (The third was probably my least favorite; that last half hour was interminable...but it did provide fodder for some great MST-like riffing by my girlfriend's brother, who was with us, so there was that.)

Jaws (34)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (42)

Back to the Future (62)

Toy Story (77)

Saturday Night Fever (157)

Good Will Hunting (174)

The Godfather (185)

Doctor Zhivago (278)

The Graduate (315)

And some honorable mentions. Some of these are guiltier pleasures than others, but I'll leave that for you to sort out (here's one hint: Mr. T) -- Monsters, Inc. (35), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (74), Grease (90), X-Men (130), The Silence of the Lambs (195), Rocky III (228), Terms of Endearment (292), Chicken Run (300), Kramer vs. Kramer (306), and Collateral (357)

So, feel free to visit the comments and let me (and my millions of international readers) know your favorite and least favorite blockbusters.

A Night at the Movies

I finally got around to seeing Little Miss Sunshine last night. It's easy to see why it was this year's word-of-mouth success. Despite an unforgivable screwball plot twist halfway through and some formulaic indie quirkiness throughout, it's charming, easily digestible (in a good way), and often very funny. The cast is phenomenal, too. Steve Carell is subtle and great, Toni Collette is reliable as ever, Greg Kinnear makes a potential jerk pretty sympathetic, Paul Dano manages to make a character vivid without speaking, and Alan Arkin is as funny as he was in Grosse Pointe Blank, but he gets more screen time here.

It's ten-year-old Abigail Breslin as Olive, though, who steals the show. The movie's most definitely a comedy, but there were two or three scenes where Breslin had me crying, and I'm not a big crier at the movies. It's the best performance by a child actor in many, many years. In fact, I see no reason why she shouldn't be nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

But that movie's old news, so I won't dwell on it. Let's dwell on the future, shall we? A future of dilapidated barns, presumably on other planets, watched over by Billy Bob Thornton. In an astronaut suit. On a horse.

Perhaps funnier than anything in Little Miss Sunshine (and that's saying something) was this movie poster, which I saw on my way into the theater (click on image to enlarge):

Little Children

This is a much-delayed, tepidly felt, hastily written review of Little Children. Sound good? Let's go...

I read the book a few years ago, and despite being hyped by some reviewers as literary on the level of Flaubert, I found it pretty bland. There was nothing offensively bad about it (I know and respect several Tom Perrotta fans), but there wasn't a single sentence or paragraph I would have marked in order to one day find my way back to it. It read, in many ways, like a fleshed-out screenplay, so the existence of the movie isn't shocking.

The movie (which Perrotta helped write) has it all over the book, though a couple of glaring flaws keep it from soaring. It's sumptuously filmed, capturing suburbia in a slightly satiric way, but more interested in expertly capturing actual details (the change in the air before a thunderstorm, the distant sound of crickets at dusk that accompanies the power-walking conversation of two women in the middle of the street) than in turning the locale into a parody of itself. (I'm sure it's not, but wouldn't it be great if the lazy genre of Suburban Cartoonery was dead?)

OK, so it's sumptuous. As are its actors. You know you're dealing with a seriously attractive cast when Jennifer Connelly is playing the wife who’s being ignored. She’s being neglected for Kate Winslet, who everyone seems to agree you can find attractive while feeling virtuous, even though she is, empirically, hot.

Like the book, the movie suffers from fairly shallow themes (prosperous-but-vaguely-dissatisfied modern adults banging into each other, metaphorically and, in the case of one scene on a washing machine, not so metaphorically). Those themes are easier to put over in the movies, I think, with the right cinematography and the right talent, but while Little Children has both of those in spades, it’s saddled with one terrible choice, which is a third-person voice-over that occasionally narrates the action as if it were a novel.

This technique goes from annoyingly unnecessary (in the early scenes when Winslet meets Brad, the male lead played by Patrick Wilson) to actively problematic (it swoops in to annotate and destroy the more-than-sufficient work of the actors after a great moment in which Connelly begins to suss out what’s going on) to ludicrously bad (in the very final minute or two, which would make a list of the worst closing moments I’ve ever seen).

The second flaw is also a strength -- a subplot involving Ronald James McGorvey, a man recently released from prison (he served time for exposing himself to a minor), who moves in with his elderly mother in the neighborhood and is treated with grave suspicion by fearful local parents, and routinely harassed on a much more severe level by one man in particular.

That strand is a strength because both McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley) and his mother (Phyllis Somerville) are terrific, but the lessons it forces the characters to learn are heavy-handed. It’s indicative of the movie’s larger problem -- well acted, well shot, sometimes well written but essentially content to keep its characters two-dimensional, it devolves into a compressed series of pat epiphanies.

The Good Movie Club

It's been a while since I've resorted to a list of favorites, which is always a handy way to take up some space and get all of you chattering. So, here are 26 (to embrace randomness) movies I love. They're in no particular order, though the top 10 are pretty much in their appropriate place at the bottom of the list, ending with my favorite. I've added some good/memorable lines from some of the choices for illustrative purposes. Feel free to make fun of me in the comments for not having enough foreign films (I've seen my share, but always have trouble choosing my favorites), or for having too many comedies, or for ignoring The Godfather (I'm not going for historical accuracy here; these are just the movies I would put on a loop if I had to narrow things down).

Hud

Ferris Bueller's Day Off
("Here's where Cameron goes berzerk.")

Withnail & I

Glengarry Glen Ross

Badlands

Kicking and Screaming
(Noah Baumbach, not Will Ferrell/Mike Ditka)

Before Sunrise

Four Friends

Doctor Zhivago

Empire of the Sun

Sideways

Of Mice and Men

The Breakfast Club
("PB&J with the crusts cut off.")

The Princess Bride
("But, you've also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal...")

Swingers

Diner

The Best of Youth

Manhattan
("Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.")

Bottle Rocket

Back to the Future

Sherman's March
("You've got to kid yourself and you've got to kid her and then you'll both believe it.")

Broadcast News
("I've never seen you like this about anyone, so please don't take it wrong when I tell you that I believe that Tom, while a very nice guy, is the devil.")

This is Spinal Tap
("David, Smell the Glove is here.")

Raising Arizona
("I'm already home, Glen.")

You Can Count On Me
("But I don't want to believe in something or not believe in it because I might feel bad. I want to believe in it or not believe in it because I think it's true or not.")

Annie Hall
("What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!")

Pretty Fluff

Nacho Libre is not a particularly good movie. It's better than The Break-Up, but so is contracting cholera. Jack Black is a genius of some type, though, and his physical insanity is worth several good laughs, especially during the first few wrestling scenes, during which I laughed out loud.

For such a silly exercise, the movie is strangely beautiful. Its locations and color schemes and soundtrack create a pleasing aesthetic experience, and as I've said a thousand times before, I think we have Wes Anderson to both thank and blame for this. (His influence is in almost every frame, not to mention the use of music and the pseudo-emotional-heaviness wafting through the entire hollow escapade.) We seem to have lost a certain kind of absurd comedy plainly packaged -- Caddyshack and Stripes come to mind -- and this development is a mixed bag. It means we have much more attractive fluff, but that very attractiveness raises our expectations of the material, which rarely rises to meet the sophistication of the bells and whistles. Even Anderson, whose first two movies were brilliant, reached the level of well-decorated pointlessness with The Life Aquatic.

Meanwhile, Jack Black is interviewed in today's New York Times Magazine, and I got a kick out of this exchange:

And how did you end up as the lead singer in a comedy band, after studying Shakespeare and Brecht and serious drama at U.C.L.A.?

Comedy seemed a lot less pretentious to me. There is something about acting, about believing it is real, about Strasberg and "Feel the coffee cup, feel the coffee cup, it's real." It's all just so touchy-feely.

And 101 Dalmatians Was Really About Korea

Very little irritates me more than the strained application of political explanations to every last product or phenomenon on the planet. Cars, the new movie about talking cartoon automobiles, has everyone referencing some very non-cartoony global issues. Here's Anthony Lane in this week's New Yorker:

The animation of the inanimate has been a staple from the dancing brooms of “Fantasia” right up to the talking clock in “Beauty and the Beast” and the remote-control car in “Toy Story.” ... Now, in “Cars,” we have the rise of the machines, and it comes at a peculiar time. With the price of oil gurgling upward, and even the President conceding that the nation’s fuel consumption could use a trim, Pixar has produced a hymn to the ecstasy of driving. The entire film dreams woozily of a chrome-bright past, and especially of the glory days of Route 66...

Is a dreamy paean to the ecstasy of driving ever really untimely? That notion shocks me. (Forget about the fact that current disillusionment would make such backward-gazing wooziness more explicable, not less; less "peculiar," not more. It pains me to point out uncharacteristic sloppiness from Lane, who I unrepentantly worship.)

Granted, I live in New York, and so don't have to worry on a practical level about the price of gas, but I constantly miss driving. And when I was in Texas last month, I happily fed my credit card to the pump in order to buy my time on the highway. Just in the past week, in discussions completely unrelated to computer-drawn cars that break out into songs penned by Randy Newman, I've had two Manhattanites tell me how much they, too, miss getting behind the wheel. The point is, I don't know anyone who confuses their political thoughts or frustrations about petroleum prices with their occasional overwhelming desire to roll down a window and listen to their car stereo.

Much more politically absurd and strident (surprise) is Charles Mudede at The Stranger (Seattle's alternative weekly). After quoting someone else's analysis of Cars' relatively lackluster opening at the box office, which cited, among other sensible reasons, "a glut of computer animated films this year," Mudede writes:

The length? Too much competition? Creative exhaustion? How about this, guru: A whole lot of us are (in) no mood to celebrate —- to laugh at, to laugh with -— the very machines that have turned Iraq into a death factory. Disney should have stuck with cute toys and lovable animals -— cars can never be anything but political.

After reading that, I think the more apt conclusion would be that Charles Mudede can never be anything but political. He must be fun at parties. ("I would partake, but guacamole can never be anything but political.") A Stranger reader responding to the piece beat me to my comment, and put it more succinctly than I would have:

My God, you hippies come unglued for the most ridiculous reasons. How about this theory: what if the movie just sucks? Naw, what was I thinking. It must be a massive geopolitical entertainment revolt centered around the war.

But now I'm reading that the movie might not suck as much as I feared. I think I have to see it -- not only to give it a chance after loving every other Pixar movie, but also to counteract Mudede's overly earnest boycott. Come to think of it, maybe everything is politically motivated.

Favorite Screen Turns

Premiere Magazine has come out with its list of the 100 greatest performances in movie history. The list is posted in a super-annoying-to-navigate format on the magazine's site, so I haven't even read the whole thing. I know that Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein cracking the top 10 seems more than a bit generous (though he was hilarious in that).

What are some of your favorites? Here are the ones that pop right to mind for me: Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count On Me, Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, Paul Giamatti in Sideways, Paul Newman in Hud, Owen Wilson in Bottle Rocket, Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon and Glengarry Glen Ross and the first two Godfathers, Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, Hunter and Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona, Christopher Guest in This is Spinal Tap, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich in Of Mice and Men, Ed Norton in Rounders, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon...

(Via Pop Candy)

Crash (Reprise)

I hate to beat a dead Best Picture choice, but the response to the Oscars has been such that I feel a need to clarify my stance.

Crash sucked.

No, no, not that much clarification. Let's zoom back a bit...

Matt Zoller Seitz was a writer for the Dallas Observer when I lived down that way, and he's now writing film criticism for New York Press and making his own films. He is also, as anyone with a shred of dignity is, blogging. I bring it up because he has strong feelings about Crash, which he vents at considerable length here. I want to draw particular attention to one part of this post, where he writes:

"We're all racist," the movie proclaims, "except when we're not."

Exactly. The movie wants to say everything about racism -- it certainly wants to make everything about racism -- and thus ends up, cliche of cliches, saying nothing about it.

That's my problem with the movie's intentions (they're absurd). My problem with its method is that it meticulously engineers neat situational reversals for every one of its seemingly thousands of characters. Do you think Matt Dillon's character is a racist asshole? Don't worry, he loves his ailing father. Plus, he'll save a black person from a fiery car wreck. Think Ryan Phillippe's character is too naive and idealistic? Don't worry, he'll be held up at gunpoint by a crazed black man. Think black men who wave guns are all nihilistic thugs? Nope, this one, played by Terrence Howard, is a model of success by any of society's standards. (SPOILER ALERT: OK, I didn't want to do this, because it covers the end of the movie, but I have to. If you haven't seen it, make your way to the end of the parentheses in an orderly fashion. Phillippe's character also wrongfully kills a character played by Larenz Tate, thinking that he's pulling a gun when he's actually reaching for a religious token. This is the apotheosis of the movie's perverted vision for us, causing one deeply decent character to off another simply to convince us that there's a little bloodthirsty racist in all of us.) On and on it goes. If you've seen it, you know this procession also features an Iranian, a Latino, the rapper Ludacris, a tony white couple, and Tony Danza.

Dezmond, who performs nightly in ASWOBA's Comments Lounge, argues that these neatly tied packages are necessary to reflect the movie's themes. I've argued to him in the past that an inveterately racist cop saving a black woman from a fire is no different, in terms of character-building, than the hooker with the heart of gold, the oldest trick in the book (terrible, terrible pun intended). Those building blocks are trite enough, but when they're utilized for Every Character Without Mercy, they become even more Utterly Predictable, and where's the Artistry in that?

Oscar Blog

8:00 -- I feel an overwhelming amount of gratitude at this moment to whoever invented the blog. I can't believe I get to annoy all of you as if you were sitting in my living room with me. (OK, I live in New York, so that's a bit flowery: as if you were sitting in my room other than my bedroom with me.)

Not sure quite how this will work, but it should be fun. My opening thought is that, if there's any moral justice in the universe, when we collectively turn in for the night across the planet, no one stares at their ceiling with a hotter-burning sense of self-hatred than Billy Bush.

Let's do this.

8:10 -- Is Keira Knightley there with Jack Nicholson? If so, I'm going to spend the rest of the night trying to determine if that's disgusting or impressive. Or both.

8:14 -- Stewart's scoring, in my book, at least. His joke about L.A. being an "atheistic pleasuredome" was great, and this gay cowboy montage is killing.

8:18 -- As I suspected, Bad Movie Club is going to be way more productive than me tonight, and Jason is doing what he said he would -- listing movies in which you can see presenters and nominees naked. He's a national treasure, he is.

8:19 -- Best Supporting Actor. Jake Gyllenhaal has to win this award. Anything else would be absurd. Drumroll... Clooney. Good lord. This could be a long night. Although, it sounds like they've started the music to boot him off the stage before he's even started his acceptance speech. So that's pretty good.

8:22 -- Clooney's been gracious and funny. Now he's turning political. Pass the Maalox.

8:26 -- Personally, I like when hosts beat a dead horse all night (I even liked Letterman's Oprah-Uma deal), and if Stewart's is going to be how Clooney gets laid more than he does, I'm all for that.

8:29 -- Hey, didn't they used to start the show with Supporting Actress rather than Actor? What's going on? And is this a gain or a setback for feminism? Discuss.

8:31 -- Ben Stiller's shtick as a presenter is almost a perfect microcosm of his last 20 movies: Funny for 30 seconds, then incredibly painful. (Oh, the award he presented is some technical thing that King Kong wins. A few stone-faced middle-aged nerds take the stage to accept.)

8:34 -- In accepting the award for Wallace & Grommit for Best Animated Feature, Nick Park gives a shout-out to Helena Bonham Carter, who was a voice in the movie. He just defeated her husband, Tim Burton, in the category. (Burton was up for Corpse Bride.) I think this might set up the first brawl at the Governors' Ball later tonight, if either of them seemed capable of throwing a punch.

8:37 -- Does it strike anyone else as odd that Dolly Parton is singing the song nominated from a movie about a woman who becomes a man, accompanied on stage only by her national-monument breasts? Also, the song seems to be composed of pleas to God and Jesus, punctuated by several series of "ooo wee ooo"s.

8:46 -- Celebrated playwright Martin McDonagh wins for a short-form film. There's an article about him in this week's New Yorker, but it's not available online. So I can't be as usefully interactive as I'd like.

8:50 -- Really, they're starting the background music as soon as winners get on stage. Ignoring the Tom Hanks joke about it earlier, I'm curious to see how they'll mark the moment when people should wrap it up. I'm hoping the quiet orchestration gives way to an auditorium-rattling "Back in Black."

8:51 -- Jennifer Aniston comes out to present for Best Costumes. That's the kind of demotion you get when you make lame movies based on something sacred like The Graduate. I used to love her so.

OK, fine. I still do.

8:52 -- Oy, this costumes woman can't speak. Where's the AC/DC, people?!

8:56 -- They're showing a montage of famous people, and actors who have played them on screen. It's not fair to just spring Lou Gehrig's "luckiest man" moment on me like that. A guy's got to be prepared.

9:00 -- The latest Star Wars movie (The Revenge of Indifference, or something) is up for a make-up award. This movie can't be honored in any way, can it? Drumroll... no, thank God. Chronicles of Narnia wins it.

9:03 -- Stewart makes fun of Russell Crowe. Then he acknowledges it will get him "pummeled later tonight," so I don't have to.

9:04 -- Wow. In introducing Rachel McAdams, Stewart makes a subtle joke about her recent refusal to appear on Vanity Fair's cover in the nude. Media nerds (aka, Gawker fans) must be excited. McAdams is beautiful, but boy, off screen she seems to have the charisma of bowling shoes.

9:06 -- Ah, Best Supporting Actress, my first strong opinion. Oh, wait, my second. Amy Adams, please. Though Michelle Williams was really great in Brokeback. Drumroll... (Wait, Frances McDormand looks nervous, as if she has a chance to win for North Country. That's cute. Oh, and Rachel Weisz is obsession-worthy.) Ok, drumroll... Rachel wins. She was good, she was. But still. See Junebug, if you haven't. Adams is great in it.

9:09 -- I'm not retracting my "obsession-worthy" comment about Weisz even though she just described someone as "brimming over with humanity." That's saying something.

9:14 -- I was about to make a crude joke about Lauren Bacall, but now she's having trouble (a lot of it, it seems) reading her lines, so I'll abstain. I've also hit the mute button, because it's too painful to hear. I'm listening to "Homeward" by The Sundays instead.

9:19 -- This series of fake attack ads by Best Actress campaigns is awesome. A touch of the Daily Show during the Oscars -- thank you, Mr. Stewart.

9:21 -- I'm with Jason at the Bad Movie Club, who earlier tonight suggested that theaters show these decorated short films (documentary and fiction) before features, in place of mind-numbing commercials. But it's WAY too good an idea to take hold in that industry.

9:23 -- Charlize Theron just asked, "What is truth? What is fiction? What is memoir?" and pronounced memoir, "mem-wah." She sounded like the priest from The Princess Bride. She's introducing Best Documentary. Grizzly Man was robbed out of a nomination. Penguins has to win, right? It does. The crew takes the stage holding stuffed penguins, and then tries to make a serious statement about preserving Antarctica. Choose one, guys.

9:26 -- J. Lo's description of Crash before its nominated song is performed perfectly capsulizes what was facile and annoying about the movie. Good job, J. Lo.

And this song. Eek. Between this and Parton's number, the category isn't wowing me. It's being sung by a woman who looks familiar. I need to do some quick research...

Ah, it's actress Kathleen York, but she sings under the name Bird York. I'm not kidding. Here's an excerpt from an online interview with her:

Music can be a less linear expression than film, though, depending on the part. The stranger the character or role, the better, and the more I find that I can get very creative expressing what I see as the "human condition." I have found that a lot of directors, and especially TV producers, want non-threatening versions of people, especially the female characters. I personally think that everyone is crazy, in one way or another (I actually have a new song called "Everybody's Crazy")...Anyway, I love any form of communication. I could be making a mosaic out of salt and pepper and paper napkin pieces on a restaurant table, and it could compete with the feeling of expressing a character or writing a piece of music. I don't see any separation in the forms of communication. It's all my heart hurling itself through the third dimension.

Kathleen "Bird" York, ladies and gentlemen.

9:35 -- I think Keanu Reeves is going to look really creepy as an old man. Just a passing thought.

9:40 -- We're in full self-congratulation mode now, with a weepy montage of scenes from "message movies" -- To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pianist, Born on the Fourth of July, and numerous others. It builds to a liberal-orgiastic crescendo!! And it also includes, much to my delight, a clip from The Day After Tomorrow, a popcorn-fueled cheesefest that involved the glacier ice caps melting and flooding New York City in the span of about 20 minutes. I wish they would include -- and Jason knows what I'm about to say -- a clip from Volcano, a movie in which Tommy Lee Jones and others stop the flow of volcanic lava through downtown L.A. by knocking down skyscrapers and leaving their wreckage in its path. By far the best asinine plot twist I've ever seen from Hollywood.

Awesome. Stewart caps the montage with: "And none of those issues was ever a problem again." I'm giving him an A so far, especially given the nature of the task.

9:48 -- Salma Hayek just seems to get hotter and hotter, and less and less proficient in English. It's a remarkable trajectory to witness.

9:51 -- Best Score, and John Williams is up for two of them. I'm just saying. But really, I think Brokeback deserves this. And it gets it.

10:03 -- It's past 10 o'clock, and we're only up to "Sound Mixing"? I need to work in the morning, people.

10:04 -- Jessica Alba just pronounced "memoir" the same way Theron did. What the hell is going on? Can someone please make an announcement to the crowd that the R at the end is not silent?

10:08 -- Quick note to my mother, if she's reading this: Mom, don't visit Jason's site. Please.

10:08 -- It's almost impossible to tell if Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are: a) performing a complicated written comedy bit, or b) coked up to their eyeballs.

10:10 -- They're honoring Robert Altman. I haven't seen it in years, but I remember thinking The Player was one of the most over-rated movies I've ever seen. I've liked some of the rest of his stuff, though I Netflix-ed McCabe and Mrs. Miller recently, and thought it was a snoozefest. I write these criticisms as everyone at the Oscars gives him a standing O. The power of the blog!

10:22 -- Thousands of bloggers worldwide just simultaneously discovered that there's nothing to add about the performance of "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" on the Oscars.

10:30 -- Jennifer Garner nearly trips on her way to the mic. Does it make her less adorable? No. No, it does not.

10:31 -- King Kong wins for Sound Editing, and I think we're almost done with all but the major awards. One hopes. One desperately, desperately hopes.

10:32 -- Clooney's introducing the "In Memoriam" montage. This is always good. Mr. Miyagi...I'm welling up already. They end with Richard Pryor. Nice.

10:42 -- Jon Stewart is awesome.

10:43 -- I take it back about getting to serious awards. We're on Film Editing. Crash seems like a lock here, to me. (Weak) drumroll... Yep. Crash. Hmm, might this thing actually win Best Picture? So far, no real Brokeback momentum. More on my feelings about this movie (Crash) later.

10:46 -- Wow. Best Actor. Snuck up on me, as much as something can sneak up on me over the course of three hours. Hoffman was so, so good in Capote, but I've talked myself into rooting for Ledger. I'm sure in vain. Drumroll... Hoffman. Predictable, and he was great. I can't complain. Too bad for Ledger, though, who would have won in another year, I think. (No one really talked about Joaquin Phoenix in this category, but he was phenomenal.)

10:52 -- Going to commercial, they just announced that John Travolta and Jamie Foxx are "standing by" to appear. That would normally be my cue to "run for the hills," but I can't miss the big awards. How many entertainers have outworn their welcome faster than Foxx? Have you seen his music video? Egad. I knew I was conflicted about getting cable for a reason.

10:57 -- Cinematography absolutely has to go to Brokeback. Nope. Memoirs of a Geisha. I have a bad feeling about Brokeback's chances for the big prize. Maybe a big surprise win by Capote?

The cinematographer winner just thanked his son, Axl. Must be a big G n' R fan.

10:59 -- Best Actress, presented by Mr. Foxx. It's easy to make fun of Keira Knightley, but I've heard she's actually really good in P&P. (Don't get mad, LFW.) Plus, she's flat-out gorgeous. I don't like Felicity Huffman, even though she was on the great, short-lived TV show, Sports Night. I think Reese wins this one, deservingly. Drumroll... She does.

She's very pretty, but that is the weirdest dent in the middle of her forehead. OK, that's an unfair thing to focus on at this moment. I'll focus instead on her bizarre insistence in her speech that June Carter was "a real woman" -- is this a dig at Felicity Huffman's character?

She profusely thanks Joaquin, which is nice. Then she thanks her husband, the B-team player in the marriage, Ryan Phillippe.

Oh, God. Now she's really prattling on about "trying to matter." Reese, you were great in the movie, now get off the stage.

11:08 -- While we're at commercial, just a thought about Crash. I'm not too worried that it will win Best Picture, because Matt Dillon didn't win (and if it wasn't going to be Gyllenhaal, it might as well have been Dillon). I'm actually starting to think it might be Capote. Anyway, the problem I had with Crash -- which I've probably written about before on this site --

(Interjection, sorry -- almost no one annoys me more, off screen, than Dustin Hoffman. What an insufferable jackass.)

-- my problem with Crash is not that it's a self-satisfied, pious piece of racial manipulation (though it is, at times), because I actually enjoyed watching it. But in the end, it's hard to swallow the ridiculously contrived coincidences that the filmmaker, Paul Haggis, relies on to push that piety. The performances were great, and the cinematography was impressive, but the total result was just too silly too often.

11:13 -- Brokeback wins Best Adapted Screenplay. If it hadn't won that, it would not only have been denied Best Picture, its nomination might have been rescinded.

11:16 -- Crash wins for Best Original Screenplay Full of Contrivances. There's still real drama building here for Best Picture. I suppose Best Director might tip the Academy's hand. That's up next.

11:22 -- Best Director. Drumroll... Ang Lee. Whew. That's a good sign. The guy's a genius, despite how he butchered my favorite comic book with The Hulk.

11:24 -- OK, they're bringing out the big guns for Best Picture -- Jack Nicholson. Drumroll... Oh, dear. Crash. I think that will look quite silly 10 years from now. But that's so often true of the Oscars, which somehow suck me into caring every year, despite their inherent absurdity. Oh, well -- Crash wasn't a terrible movie, but it was a deeply flawed and overly ambitious one, and I suppose there are worse things. Plus, now Dezmond can smugly crow in the comments section. Congrats, Dezmond -- you've been vindicated by the same group of people who honored Titanic.

I think that's a wrap. Stewart -- who, along with his Daily Show colleagues, was great -- will come back and say goodnight. He should do this every year, without doubt. Me, I'm not sure. I hope there were a few enjoyable nuggets for you. See you again tomorrow with regular blogging -- less real-time, but just as inconsequential.