Rushfield Babylon

“Only one star over 50 (Helen Mirren) has won the Best Actress prize in the past 20 years.”

source

Been lucky enough to have the time to see a lot of the seriousy year-end movies multiple times this year and it has been interesting what has improved on repeated viewings, and what hasn’t. 

I saw Melancholia twice. I loved it the first time and was completely bowled over by it the second.  But it’s a daunting experience, watching the film.  It requires a lot and takes a lot out of you, even more the second time.  I hope to see it a third time soon but have to wait until I have the time and emotional resources available to dive in.

Young Adult I saw three times. I liked it better with each viewing.  There were so many subtle elements to the performance, the script and the construction of the film that on the third time around I was still noticing new things.  A lot of films you spend the first viewing just trying to figure out what kind of movie this is, and when it doesn’t conform to any clear genre - as with Melancholia and Young Adult - that can take up most of your brain power on the first go around. On repeated viewings, knowing what you’re getting into, you can take in the details you missed while puzzling things the first time.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy keeps you busy just trying to follow the plot the first time around so the second time you can really just luxuriate in the atmosphere of the thing - an atmosphere the director said smelled like wet tweed.

Seeing The Artist was a battle against outrageous expectations.  The first time I went into it having been told it was the best film of the year and came out completely flummoxed at how anyone could think this trifle was the best film of any year.  Having walked through that, the second time I was able to watch the film itself, not its reviews and I was able to say, well, it’s still a slight film with a familiar story, but it’s intelligently made and it is actually trying to tell a story, not just playing cinema games. So I came out still not head over heels with it but very accepting and ready to join the backlash against the backlash of which I had lately been a part.

Tonight, I saw War Horse for a second time.  The first time I thought - this is exactly what Steven Spielberg should be make- totally straightforward, earnest, schmaltzy middle of the road quasi-epics.  I thought that as essentially a children’s movie about war and animals, it did just fine.  My second time seeing it, my opinion is exactly the same as it was the first time.  The thing about Spielberg is, there are no hidden depths. He’s not a hack; he thinks his shots and scenes through and there’s intelligence to it.  He’s not just phoning it in and he’s not Michael Bay just asking how do we make every frame BIGGER. However, every thought or notion he has is right there on the surface and he takes no chances that anyone in the audience would miss a single beat.  Every emotional current is triple underlined by the gigantic sweeping John Williams score and wacky goose reaction shots.  Which is all fine - there are far worse things to be than a big middle American schmaltzy tearjerking epic. It’s not a film that poisons anyone by seeing it; it carries no toxic text or subtext.  Your synapses are not fried for life after sitting through 20 minutes of it.  But once you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it forever.  Have no fear that there were subtleties you missed out on; I guarantee there weren’t.

But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep thro’ every nerve.

- Robert Browning

In 2010 it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, that we’d reached the apotheosis of awful.  Then 2011 came along and showed us we had not yet begun to be grossed out.  Here at the end of 2011, it seems as though the collapse of civilization is not just at hand, but nearly complete.  We are clearly not at the beginning of the end, but somewhere past the middle of the end.  

Looking at our society today, it would seem that we’ve filled the cup of retarded to the brim.  But the joys of 2012 will no doubt show us how puny were our 2011 dreams of what retarded could be.   Here then are my lessons of the year past, which if put to use will see you through this weak piping time, hopefully alive.

• If you offer people a chance to hear themselves speak, they will take it.

• Once people get a chance to hear themselves speak, they will never want to hear anything else.

• In the short run, being young and attractive and blogging about your sex life beats all.

• There is no long run.

• In the shorter run, animated 30 Rock gifs are even better.

• You can fool all of the people all of the time if you get the art direction and hair right.

• Everyone is now too young to actually remember what happened in the 80’s so it’s alright to just go ahead and steal it.

• Old reality show line not to cross: Suicide
   New reality show line not to cross: TBD

• People now feel they are entitled to not only to get all their services for free but feel those services that are giving them things for free are morally obligated to do it in a design that they like.

• In 2012, people will feel entitled to pick the uniforms of people who bring them free pizzas and will become enraged when a delivery guy shows up wearing hoodies and sneakers that clash with their throw pillows. 

• The hashtag was invented because we can no longer count on anyone to understand what we are saying without an explainer appended. 

• Sooner or later gravity catches up with us all, even Hollywood PR-whore stunt couples.

• 140 characters is now too demanding on the human attention span.  By year’s end we will communicate only in emoticons and acronyms.

• With the advent of TLC’s Extreme Couponing, we are running out of human grotesqueries to mock. Next we will have no choice but to make freaks of the average. Scrapbooking Monsters and Minivan Babylon are at hand.

• By the end of next year everyone will talk half the time like a drunken carny midway hooker/barker and the other half of the time like an eight year old who is sad that he didn’t get more crayons.

replied to your photo: Remember journalism?

Bananas or GTFO.

Excuse me.

When I first saw The Artist, my reaction was largely reaction to the reaction, to the people who were declaring it an instant masterpiece and Oscar frontrunner.  While I enjoyed it, the idea that familiar and two-dimensional plot merited it the Best Picture prize seemed insane.

Saw it again last night and I’m feeling a bit kinder to it this time.   The plot is still two-dimensional and has still been done better before.  I still wouldn’t put it on my top ten of the year.  But taken on its own, it’s intelligently made and the lead performances are pretty flawless.  There are nice, clever little touches throughout and the movie is a fun play on period conventions on every level.  The scene where George watches the almost empty theater watch Tears of Love is incredibly poignant while underplayed by Jean Dujardin, and the movie ends with a great punchline.

The Artist is now all but a lock to win the Best Picture prize. In a world of any standards, that would be madness.  But in the world we live in, where Oscar is apt to bestow his favors on all kinds of sentimental drek, I can live with this.  If the trophy goes to an intelligently made, well intentioned little formal experiment, life could be much worse.  Seeing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close reminded me how much worse it could be, and with a couple decent gusts of wind in the wrong direction, that toxic sludge could easily take the prize.  Compared to that, The Artist is positively enlightened and we really have no business complaining.

If anyone is up at this hour who has read this, please contact me at once.  My world is in turmoil. Night is day and day is night I don’t understand who we are anymore.  What is happening here?!  Will no soul in the darkness take my hand?

I was always a supporter of the Golden Globe awards, not because they are smart, or interesting or insightful or have anything worthwhile to say about arts or entertainment.   I supported them because in the strange shadowland of people who have strong opinions about awards shows that I inhabit, people who are against the Globes always try to claim they are not a “real” awards show like the Oscars, but a made up fake event just hyped to get ratings for another banquet; sort of like the celebrities who were celebrities just from playing celebrities on the Match Game.

That distinction always struck me as idiotic.  Every one of these awards shows is a “made up” PR event, starting with the Oscars 80 years ago.  Even a century of age doesn’t make it less of a whore.  And the idea that because Oscars are given by people who work with and are friends with the nominees somehow makes them more legitimate is the kind of thinking you can only have if you spend too much time in Hollywood - the only real hype is the hype we create about ourselves, everything else is fake hype.

Anyhow, I liked the Globes because they were less pompous, more brazenly brassy than the stuff old Oscars.  Having attended both for work, I can say the Oscars are an uptight nightmare to attend that you have to be removed from in a stretcher when it finally crashlands after seven hours and the Globes are a great time.  I hate the annual speculation about who will be the next host to get up in a tuxedo and flop with some lame awkward jokes half-ribbing the industry.  I hate the annual attempts to young it up.  I hate post-show outrage and shock that once again it proved to be an elephant in a tutu.  I hate the punditcizing that pretends there is any correlation between Oscar’s choice of Best Picture nominees and what was the Best Picture of the Year.

Compared to that, I love the idea of the Globes: Let’s get a bunch of daffy, semi-senile foreigners in mink coats and floor length evening gowns to throw a big party where everyone gets drunk and they give a few trophies to whomever has the best smile.  What’s not to like?

Well this year, they went too far.  With ten acting slots to hand out, passing over Kirsten Dunst for Melancholia is inexcusable.  I know it’s a very serious dramatic film - challenging even, but no one expects you have to actually watch it.  Showering trophies on the tepid Ides of March and the horrendous My Year With Marilyn and Carnage..while passing over Young Adult, Patton Oswalt, Melissa McCarthy…It would be hilarious if it didn’t hurt so much, if it weren’t such a desperate marketplace for decent films to try and eke out just a tiny bit of oxygen to survive.  

Okay. I guess it is still funny. They think Ides of March is a great film!  But shame on you batty bizarre people, all the same.

Over at the Daily Beast, I have done my Oscar  prognosticating and explain what all this means to you.  Please study this as a concerned citizen.

1. Caturday
2. TLDR 

1.Toldja

2.Um, no

3. Not so much 

4. Gosling

5. Adorkable

6. Adore

7. Hot Trailer

8. Just saying

9. Meme

10. Fail

1.Drive 2. People who come to Venice on weekends 3. People who text in movies 4. Everyplace I’ve ever worked 5. Twitter 6. The traffic on Venice Blvd between the 405 and Robertson and how it is only so bad because people drive at 15 miles per hour in the left lane. 7. Vitamins (fraudulence of) 8. Idiot kids/young bloggers 9. Acid Reflux 10. Don’t people have anything beter to do than getting themselves all worked up and outraged about ______. (Not including me)>

Best (In Chronological Order)

Bad New Bears
Fast Times at Ridgemont High 
Risky Business 
Repo Man  
The Breakfast Club 
River’s Edge 
Heathers 
Say Anything 
Singles 
My So Called Life (not a film but still counts) 
Office Space 
Fight Club 
Trainspotting
Adventureland 
Young Adult 

Worst Xploitations of the X Generation In Film (in no order

Every other John Hughes film
Rules of Attraction
Reality Bites
Pump Up the Volume
High Fidelity
Mallrats
True Romance
Girl Interrupted
Kicking and Screaming 

Accidentally Great Documents of Generation X

The Lost Boys
Less Than Zero
St. Elmos Fire
Red Dawn
Real Genius 
Class 

Went to a lunch thrown by Focus Features for the cast and some crew of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the director, perhaps my favorite director working today Tomas Alfredson who also did Let The Right One In.  (Very big thumbs up review to follow.)

The film’s DP Hoyte Van Hoytema told that Alfredson’s primary instruction to the T2S2 team was that the film should “smell like wet tweed.”  

A more ingenious, precise, evocative direction I can not think of.

I asked Alfredson what Let the Right One In smelled like, and he paused to think for a few moments before replying, “snow,”  He looked at me very seriously and said “Snow has a smell, you know.”

At Grantland, the sagacious Mark Harris seems to have ignited the nascent Descendants backlash.   He admits that his objections may come off as arrogant and pissy, raining on others parade.  And he sets a very decent rule for one and all in a season of overstatements and a time when every movie either has to be AMAZING or HORRIBLE.  He pledges to, “ try to be arrogant about movies that I love, but humble about movies that work for everybody else but not for me.”

So given all that, I take his objections to The Descendants on good faith.  But he is still missing the point of the film.  He wrote a week or so ago:

Perhaps some of you objected, as I did, to (mild spoilers follow) voice-over narration that is at first overbearing and then, mysteriously, gone. Or the TV-pilot-ish subplot about whether George Clooney’s character is going to sell a beautiful piece of Hawaiian land to rapacious developers, which takes two hours to go exactly where you know it’s headed the second it’s introduced. Or the movie’s irritating habit of introducing characters by showcasing their worst qualities — the teenage girl is an angry brat, the teenage boy is such an insensitive dolt that you’re happy when he’s punched in the face — only to turn around and say, no, you’ve judged them too hastily, they’re actually good, rock-solid, sensitive people, after which the movie never returns to or acknowledges their problematic sides again. In other words, The Descendants makes them look like clichés only so that it can then claim they’re more complicated than they look. Anyway, I, frankly, don’t see what all the fuss — wait, where’d everyone go?

My responses to these points:

• The voice over is a little bit much and then it disappears. Complaining about both those points is a “The food here is terrible. And the portions are so small” sort of objection. I will give him that the voiceover is a bit heavy handed (although I didn’t find it unbearable.)  So when it went away, I didn’t miss it.  Doesn’t the voice over pretty much disappear in Sunset Blvd by the mid-point?  I can’t recall for certain, but I think it does.  Dostoevsky’s The Possessed switches from first person to third person half way through without explanation. It’s a little startling for a moment but if the perspective works, a minute along no one complains that you didn’t observe official literary device rules.

* The real estate plot.  The point wasn’t to guess what decision Clooney was going to make.  You know how it’s going to end up at the start because Clooney knows what he wants to do from the start, he just doesn’t have the confidence to do it.  The drama is not about him trying to make up his mind but about him finding the strength to do what he knows is right.

• Introducing characters as stereotypes only to soften them later.  Really only Sid fits this mold, and I think you’re allowed one of those a film if you do it well, which Payne does with Sid making him genuinely loathsome at first but without changing his character, giving information that suddenly doesn’t soften the character, but makes it make sense what he is doing there; lets you see him as part of a picture that was bigger than you know.  The teenage daughter’s teenage obnoxiousness lasts all of a dozen or so lines and are pretty mild at that.  

If that flimsy case is the worst Mark Harris can make against the film, its path to Oscar is assured.

Descendants for Best Picture!