bmp started sending me all this stuff he’s been digitizing from the cassette tapes he has at home. A lot of the stuff is old, I mean, 10+ years old which means it’s from high school. I talked to Nathan last night, and he asked me if I was going to our high school reunion. I told him I didn’t know, and asked if he was. His response? “Pay money to see all those douche bags? Hell, no.” I imagine bmp has some of Mr. Smithe’s (the ‘e’ is silent) stuff lying around, but for now, here’s Harvey’s smash hit, “Dr. Han Uberman Does Funky Hippy.” And Jason, I know you’re not affiliated with the RIAA, so don’t even bother trying to get me to take this down.

So, I didn’t do so well, huh? My main complaint is that I was too cynical and for the most part, the things that I wanted to win, but didn’t pick, actually did win. I tend to do that. I’m glad, like everyone else in the world, that The Departed won Best Picture, and really, I should have known because Scorcese was a shoe-in, that The Departed would win. How many times in history has it been that the director and film didn’t sweep? It doesn’t happen that often, though it’s happened quite a bit in the last few years. Changing trend? Who knows. Winners BOLD.

Best Picture - The Queen / The Departed

Best Director - Martin Scorcese

Best Actor - Forest Whitaker

Best Actress - Helen Mirren

Best Supporting Actor - Mark Wahlberg / Alan Arkin

Best Supporting Actress - Cate Blanchet / Jennifer Hudson

Best Adapted Screenplay - Children of Men / The Departed

Best Original Screenplay - Babel / Little Miss Sunshine

Best Cinematography - Iwo Jima (Ha! This wasn’t even nominated for cinematography. Boy is my face red. I think I meant to pick Children of Men, which I only picked because word of mouth was that it was beautiful) / Pan’s Labyrinth

I’ve got some special posts coming up soon, but I just need the time to get them ready, but I think you’ll like them. Stay tuned!

Okay, I know they just started right now, but here they are before we get any further:

Best Picture - The Queen

Best Director - Martin Scorcese

Best Actor - Forest Whitaker

Best Actress - Helen Mirren

Best Supporting Actor - Mark Wahlberg

Best Supporting Actress - Cate Blanchet

Best Adapted Screenplay - Children of Men

Best Original Screenplay - Babel

Best Cinematography - Iwo Jima

Kind of flubbed those last few, but we’ll see, right?

It’s obvious to most of you that my pick for Best Picture is going to be The Departed, but The Queen is a serious contender for the title. Comparing the two is pointless, since they have so little in common — A gritty crime drama versus an English comedy? The latter is so unfamiliar to me — Everything I know about England is from Guy Ritchie, Ricky Gervais, and The Young Ones — hardly royal material.

Unfamiliarity with the intricacies of the Royal Family and the workings of government, the story was intriguing and beguiling. It’s unfathomable that Mirren not win the Academy Award for her performance, not simply because the Academy favors tempered performances, but because her stoicism is sublime. Michael Sheen also created a convincing Blair, though admittedly one not necessarily the same that was so visible during the early days of the Iraq War.

Finding a niche between modernism and tradition is an issue far less likely to fall upon an American administration — It’s almost uniquely British, and to navigate between the two with a pair of political figures as large as the Prime Minister and Queen is a hard balancing act. The treatment of each character is interesting: While the audience bonds over the humanity in Blair and the desire for any display of emotion from the Queen, Blair’s defense and respect or her is appallingly selfless, and the Queen’s obvious despise of Blair is a stark contrast to her stone face, her hubris feels like one of the most common human emotions. The interplay and detail in these two characters, anchored by the performances, but built upon a solidly crafted screenplay make the film work so well.

Josh told me that all the Queen’s scenes were filmed in 35mm and everything else in 16mm — Avid corroborates on the film technique — Everything shot on Downing Street and with Blair is on handheld Super 16. I’m not going to pretend I noticed this overtly, but in retrospect, there is a certain regalness in the shots with the Queen and energy with those on Blair in his home with his family.

The more I think about this, the more I think Best Picture is going to be a hard call. I think this film is more of a favorite than The Departed, mostly because of the political and cultural cache it holds, like Babel, but as pure cinematical experiences go, The Departed still takes the cake.

Pardon the delay in getting the last two film reviews out before Sunday’s show, but I spent pretty much all day yesterday at the Post Office at Cadman Plaza waiting to get my passport application handed in. It was pretty excruciating, but done, and I don’t know how much more I can whine about it. We also went out last night to Floyd, and I woke up with a heavy head this morning.

I’ll be finishing up before the day is over, so check back.

The Academy undoubtedly loves Clint. Since Unforgiven, he’s gotten consistent recognition for his directorial efforts, much more so than, say, Martin Scorcese. Eastwood definitely makes a great effort to diversify his work in genre, and any amount of empathy that Americans can attribute to its “enemies” in this day and age is worthy of applause.

That says a lot about our political climate, with the catastrophe of the current war, Letters from Iwo Jima is humanizing the enemy while the talking heads condemn Iraqis for fighting amongst themselves. This is problematic though, because I just don’t feel like the film is anything more than an anti-war war movie, except with a gimmick: Let’s look at it through their eyes. This is a common confusion and the pseduo-extrication that the Japanese need an American to humanize them is troubling (In the case of Last Samurai, Tom Cruise would have trouble humanizing anyone, no matter how good an actor he is).

While the depiction of the Japanese army is diverse and varied; the heroes of the film are singled out as those that were exposed to American culture. While Saigo is clearly enamored with life, he identifies with General Kuribayashi only in their desire to live — The general to fight another day, Saigo so he can just go home and be a baker again.

The entire genre of war films is the act of reliving the battle (according to Abbas’s, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance for one). It’s been happening for years, and the reinvention is nothing new — Bruce Lee’s refighting in the Boxer Rebellion, Hollywood’s reinterpretation of events in Vietnam during the 70’s and 80’s (it will happen again, soon with this war, and to a lesser extent already happened with the first Gulf War with Jarhead), and now this, the attempt to empathize with an enemy that hasn’t been humanized before. Now, is my chief complaint of the film that Eastwood isn’t a viable messenger? Perhaps, but it’s possible the problem still lies with the message.

Without delving into political and cultural histories, the story just feels incomplete and without the complexity that war deserves. It wasn’t a bad movie by any means, it was painful and tense, but you can only push the “stress-me-out” button so many times before it just starts to wear on you. This is the same complaint I had about Babel, but I significantly enjoyed Iwo Jima more, maybe for its clear focus and intelligible message, however watered down it came out.

I heard someone describe this film as a pastiche of all the indie movies that came out in the past year. I think that it deserves more credit than that, not because it was a better movie than a lot of indies (it is), or because of the talent of the husband/wife directorial duo, or because Alan Arkin plays a coke-sniffing grandfather without a bullshit filter (though that is a good reason to see the movie). I appreciated the performances more than anything else, of Toni Collette, who has had a special place in my heart since About a Boy, and Steve Carrell, who apes the meek persona of a sarcastic ghost quite well.

Forget about the melodrama of Paul Dano as Dwayne, and his explicable link between the Air Force, Nietzsche, and a vow of silence. The film starts to feel unnatural by the time they arrive in Redondo Beach, and the beauty pageant seems too awful — are we to take the rest of the film as if it were as satirical as this? For all I know, it isn’t an exaggeration at all, it could really be that bad, but it left a divide in the film. Regardless, the all-out dance routine at the end is bizarre and endearing.

The bus is a spectacular MacGuffin, serving for a million metaphors about how this family gets to where it’s going because at least it’s running. The dysfunctional card has been played out as well, and I think the performances are all their own. I do, however, think that one of the strengths directing music videos and VW commercials (Farris and Dayton did the Nick Drake “Pink Moon” cabrio commercial) comes in handy when you’re making a movie like this: Targeted montage marketing.

The whole discussion of crass commercialism in song usage is another subject entirely, but I know there’s some serious ambivalence when I see that commercial and am struck with abject horror that it’s worked me over so well. Still, it takes a certain amount of intelligence and restraint to work up to moments and then have them effuse so cleanly. That’s where Little Miss Sunshine was most satisfying: viscerally. And that’s really just a two-dollar way of saying that it’s a feel good movie. Not only that, it is also a comedy, which are rarely nominated for Oscars, and once in a blue moon actually win them.

No, I don’t think it will win, nor should it, but it has its moments. And I really like those moments.

Fair warning: I hated this movie. I’ve seen movies like this before, and I call it The Simple Plan syndrome. Everything basically starts out bad or close to bad, and simply gets worse until the end of the movie provides some poor miracle that tries to wrap up loose ends. I’m not a stickler for tidy films, I enjoy an open-ended mess as much as the next guy, but please: Let me take something from it.

The pacing was absolutely tedious; while we move from place to place in the world, I get the feeling that we’re supposed to find some commonalities between the geographies and the people — The entirely-too-long rave scene in Japan and the wedding celebration in Mexico; the stark deserts in Morocco and Mexico — I get it, but it’s still irrelevant, because it wasn’t even compelling at all. I wanted it to end an 1:45 in because I was bored and didn’t care about any of the characters — I was suffering and I felt it, as I’m sure Innaritu wanted, but for all the wrong reasons.

I understand that the film wants to be about language — yes, yes, the Tower of Babel and all, but it fails in delivering any complex message about mis-communications. Everything in the film happens through stupidity and bad decisions, not through misunderstandings. And if you’re going to have different stories happening all over the world and they’re going to be connected, don’t bring in every problematic detail of their lives with it unless it directly impacts the story. Syriana did a much better job of revolving a cast of characters around a single subject, but Babel just sunk under the weight.

The characters were all flat and static, the only one with redeeming qualities was the translator in Morocco, and he was in the movie so little that if he was in it five minutes longer, we would have found out that he beats his kids and sells babies on the black market. Every action is reactive, and attempts are made to pull at strings that never existed.

Further, if we’re talking about Babel as being a reflection of different cultures, then we’re still talking vacuity, because the depictions are just as empty as the characters.

I don’t know much about the break between the writer and director, but it will be interesting to see who the true talent amongst the two is once they’ve moved on. Babel itself was a mess, and I understand that the Academy had a thin flock to pick a complex political and cultural oeuvre, but it certainly doesn’t deserve the recognition it’s getting.

It finally happened, but the snow here is weird — Owl got it right, it’s a little like sand. I’ve never seen snow so small and frozen. Unfortunately, now I have to go move my car, since the city still thinks that street sweeping is imperative.

A couple of weekends ago we went and saw Jonathan Richman and Kiko Veneno. Jonathan is as great as ever. I thought maybe a live show or two of his would be online at archive.org, but no such luck. They did, however, have el UFO man. Great stuff.

Someone posted this on my listserv for school. I think it’s pretty great.

There’s plenty more at indexed.