For me the Oscars are my Super Bowl. I look forward to them every year. I know they're meaningless but somehow I still look forward to them. Plus, I love to see the films nominated that I've missed seeing during the year.
I’m with you, Drew. Award shows make me nauseous. Anyway: my John Wayne rewatch fest continues (it’s research) and I stumbled across one of my favorite JW movies yet, a coal-mining movie called PITTSBURGH. JW was always at his best when playing villainous.
I watched Saturn 3 for the first time because of Kirk Douglas’s passing. I had an absolute blast. Between the nude wrestling and the robot having a metal ass, I can’t wait to get a nice Blu-ray copy for the shelf. This week I’ve also been obsessed with Fallout 4, despite the game crashing like the Hindenburg every few hours. I hope Parasite wins and that I get an Oscar envelope in the mail with a refund for the $12 I spent on Joker.
I’ll go to bat for the Oscars. I attended the Animated Features panel at the Academy today and it was really inspiring to hear the directors and producers talk about their nominated films. It takes all the cynicism and snarky/fashiony nonsense out of it and reminds you these are artists, often surprised they’re possibly getting awarded for something they’d gladly have done for free because they love it so much.
And it got me really excited to see I Lost My Body.
Since last week I've watched Castle In The sky and really just dug on it. I think the only real ding I could throw at it is that it is too long but man, by the time the credits rolled I didn't care. Just another fantastic, patient, thrilling, poetic fantasy movie. I know Totoro is gonna be a shift in a different direction but I think I'm in all the way. With Nausicaa and Castle, I love picking up the very clear elements that are about Hayao wrangling with the effects of living in a post-war Japan. Manages to be very clear if you know to look for it, but never annoyingly didactic about it.
Birds of Prey worked like gangbusters for me. Margot will go down as one of those lightning in a bottle casting choices like Heath as Joker or Downey as Stark. Like Deadpool, I have never been the biggest fan of Harley in the comics but this pairing of actor and character on the big screen has won me over. Like Deadpool, when it comes to Harley I'm all in for the movie version.
Gretel and Hansel didn't totally work for me. I loved the tone and the feel of it, but ultimately I felt like it was maybe a little too distant for its own good. I really dug Blackcoats Daughter, but didn't dig Pretty Thing In The house. Maybe this will grow over time for me but I left feeling a tad disappointed, like I saw a lesser version of what Eggers did with The Witch in its way of being a very dark and off-kilter pro-feminist movie.
Finally got around to Hard Eight and I thought it was a solid enough debut. I liked it when it was the Las Vegas gambler version of The Color of Money, but when it shifted into crime mode I kinda lost interest. Maybe my least favorite from PTA but I still enjoyed it enough. Felt like a subplot from Magnolia than a complete feature.
Gonna watch the Oscars just bc it's a show about movies, even though I know it's not important.
Watched Takeshi Kitano's Scene by the Sea last night and wow, what a sweet and beautiful movie. Amazing to see how much emotion can be wrung out from a film with such minimal dialogue. Made me wish there were 80s/early 90s US teen movies like this.
I just watched the film I Lost My Body and really enjoyed it. Definitely an out there film, but the animation is solid, the score is fantastic, and the film as a whole is very sweet. Also, done with BoJack Horseman and I need more shows to follow. Any recommendations?
So my big in theater watch this week was GIMME SHELTER which I somehow had avoided seeing for most of my filmgoing life up until now. It's one of the best music docs I've ever seen. I can't believe it took me so long to finally watch it. I've seen it on TV and blown past it so many times. I think it was sitting on a DVR for years without my watching it. I often go through this polarizing love and hate thing with The Rolling Stones so that may explain why.
It's amazing watching this film go from being just another music doc about a band at the height of its powers to something tragic when they capture what happened at Altamont. This would make a great double feature with ONE CUT OF THE DEAD.
First off, people in 1969 make people who go to concerts today look like Romper Room. They brought their dogs, they were mostly naked and tripping their faces off. I can't even imagine being packed into that mass of humanity when the shit starts to hit the fan. I once experienced horrible claustrophobia trapped in a mass of humans with nowhere to escape in an attempt to see the Rockerfeller Christmas tree and thankfully no one was flipping out or on LSD...at least to my knowledge.
A few other takeaways:
- The shots of Mick Jagger in his stage clothes holding his Uncle Sam hat by himself backstage (I think in MSG) while professional people and police are around him doing their jobs made him look like a little kid in his PJ's playing dress-up in his parents living room. It's a subtle thing, but I realized how silly rock & roll stars can appear when they are not on stage in comparison to people just out there doing normal jobs around them.
- Charlie Watts is like a Marx brother. I'm not surprised they lingered on him so often in the film. The guy should've been a silent film actor.
- For fans of the movie ZODIAC we get an in his prime Melvin Beli in this film and it's glorious.
- The performance footage is exceptional. The Stones were at their peak and basically were able to cause an audience to erupt at any time. There is no other frontman like Mick. I was kind of floored with that crowd already fighting and beating up Jefferson Airplane, Mick and the boys walk out and open with Sympathy For The Devil which they openly admit often causes problems in the crowd. Then the solution was a toned-down Tumbling Dice that was building into a crescendo that riled everyone up again. Mick was determined to do his show that night. Even the dog walking across the stage didn't throw him.
If for some reason you haven't seen this, watch it. I love THE LAST WALTZ but this is better in so many ways.
As for the Oscars, I'll be watching THE OUTSIDER tonight. We're hooked on it. Also planning to dive into LOCKE & KEY.
Watched the Director's Cut of DOCTOR SLEEP and man is it incredible. I loved the Theatrical Cut but this is something different altogether - it might be Flanagan's masterwork, and that's saying a whole hell of a lot.
Is there a way to structure the season so there are not 400 awards shows before the Oscars. Now with 24hr news cycles, social media, net etc the exposure to these awards makes it all seem meaningless and hard to maintain focus for.
I got snowed-in here in Atlanta today (four days ago it was 70-degrees and I was wearing shorts and flip flops... love these Southern winters!) so no BoP for me until next weekend. Word of mouth has me feeling good about my prospects for liking it, but it seems as if, unless some things turn around, this weekend wasn't kind at the BO.
I don't like the Oscars for what they've become. I grew up watching them with Billy Crystal hosting and they used to be fun. The best films and performances and technical artisans generally "won," whatever that means, unless you're of the frame of mind that people like John Williams or Tom Hanks should have more Oscars than fingers and toes. However, within the last 20 years or so, the Oscars have become "important" to the business of making and releasing and watching movies in a way they weren't before. With that comes the political maneuvering to get "prestige" films seen by the right people and put up for awards and gifts are exchanged and marketing is created all to help films that many "regular" people don't see anymore to win Oscars.
I guess I began to lose interest in the Oscars when the cliché and formulaic Titanic "won" Best Picture. Then for the next year, when Shakespeare in Love, a nicely acted piffle of a movie "beat" one of the greatest films I have ever seen in Saving Private Ryan, I decided the Oscars were crap. This belief was cemented when A Beautiful Mind, the weakest Ron Howard film ever nominated for Best Picture, "won" over The Fellowship of the Ring, the best movie of that year by far and the best film in the LOTR Trilogy. Then again the next year when Chicago (Chicago!?!?) did the same to The Two Towers. That The Return of the King got the Best Picture nod (among many other Oscars) the next year was inconsequential. This idea that the Academy was waiting to reward the trilogy as a whole while letting lesser films take home the big award the two previous years finally had me give up on this dog and pony show for good.
I mean when you think about it, really... awards for art? Isn't that kind of antithetical to the purpose of art in the first place? Making movies isn't anything like sports where a champion is crowned on the field. Filmmaking and what makes one film "better" than another is completely subjective. I just don't care anymore. I like what I like and love what I love, and if the movie I liked the best this year doesn't win an Oscar, I honestly don't care and haven't for awhile.
Right now, I have the Ultimate Badass, Pvt. Hudson freaking out in the background from one of the greatest movies ever made, a film or director not nominated at the 59th Academy Awards even though, even subjectively, Aliens and Cameron should've been.
I pretty much just consider the Oscars entertainment and don’t attribute any real credibility to who ends up winning. They consistently get it wrong. This year’s best film is “Parasite” for me, hands down. It isn’t really that close. But it will not win because it is is a foreign film and they have another category for that, which it will win.
I finally got around to watching Fast Color this week, which was slight but fun. It felt very much like the great indie films from the 90s and scratched an itch for me that rarely gets any action these days.
I watched Dr Sleep (theatrical cut) yesterday, and I can’t stop thinking about it, flaws and all. The first two thirds are masterful, moving, horrifying and magical - Flanagan gets the FEELING of reading a Stephen King book. I think it’s the best performance Ewan McGregor’s ever given, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Rose the Hat is immediately one of my favorite villains of all time. The Jacob Tremblay scene is up there in the pantheon of greatest horror moments. And then that final act is so strange and jarring in its sudden crashing into Kubrick’s movie, and though it took me out of the story in the moment, as it settles I think it might be a possibly brilliant meta-textual imagined conversation between King and Kubrick where they discuss authorial intent & adaptation and Flanagan brokers some kind of strange peace. Gonna watch the director’s cut next, and everything else of Flanagan’s I’ve missed, because this is one of those imperfect but bold swing wonderful movies that just hits my movie sweet spot completely, and got deep into my bones.
I worked in post on a film that had an Oscar nominee as it was announced and it was...a strange, transformative thing in how we approached the nominee's character's screen time and how the halo of the nomination made things far more serious for our production. They didn't win it in the end, but for a while it was fun to have a proverbial horse in the race.
As for non-award stuff, I've been cutting current releases (Come to Daddy, Birds of Prey)with obscure stuff on Amazon Prime (Gog, Doctor Blood's Coffin). It's been a wild whiplash in styles and tempos, plus the sobering amount of mid century, dreck-tier material on Prime that rarely sees the light of day for good reason (Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, anyone?).
Am I the only one here that didn't dig Harley Quinn? I thought Margot was terrific (and Ewan & Chris Messna)...but the movie around them, though containing brief flashes of fun and mayhem, felt more like a bad 80's/90's New Line film, almost as if the movie was julienne'd up in the editing room like a salad. For the record, I don't like dogging on a movie, but I was surprised by how much it didn't work for me. Curious to know how you guys felt...
Just rewatched Vondie Curtis-Hall’s “Gridlock’d” to review on my site.
1) That film feels like it’d play really well today with how it illuminates the struggles of addicts to get help past the bureaucracy of the social safety net.
2) Tupac would have been a tremendous talent on-screen now if he were still alive. He’s so naturally charismatic in that role.
3) That movie should have been a Sundance film that got platformed into release rather than just dumped in January. I think it would have been a sleeper.
For me the Oscars are my Super Bowl. I look forward to them every year. I know they're meaningless but somehow I still look forward to them. Plus, I love to see the films nominated that I've missed seeing during the year.
I’m with you, Drew. Award shows make me nauseous. Anyway: my John Wayne rewatch fest continues (it’s research) and I stumbled across one of my favorite JW movies yet, a coal-mining movie called PITTSBURGH. JW was always at his best when playing villainous.
I watched Saturn 3 for the first time because of Kirk Douglas’s passing. I had an absolute blast. Between the nude wrestling and the robot having a metal ass, I can’t wait to get a nice Blu-ray copy for the shelf. This week I’ve also been obsessed with Fallout 4, despite the game crashing like the Hindenburg every few hours. I hope Parasite wins and that I get an Oscar envelope in the mail with a refund for the $12 I spent on Joker.
I’ll go to bat for the Oscars. I attended the Animated Features panel at the Academy today and it was really inspiring to hear the directors and producers talk about their nominated films. It takes all the cynicism and snarky/fashiony nonsense out of it and reminds you these are artists, often surprised they’re possibly getting awarded for something they’d gladly have done for free because they love it so much.
And it got me really excited to see I Lost My Body.
Since last week I've watched Castle In The sky and really just dug on it. I think the only real ding I could throw at it is that it is too long but man, by the time the credits rolled I didn't care. Just another fantastic, patient, thrilling, poetic fantasy movie. I know Totoro is gonna be a shift in a different direction but I think I'm in all the way. With Nausicaa and Castle, I love picking up the very clear elements that are about Hayao wrangling with the effects of living in a post-war Japan. Manages to be very clear if you know to look for it, but never annoyingly didactic about it.
Birds of Prey worked like gangbusters for me. Margot will go down as one of those lightning in a bottle casting choices like Heath as Joker or Downey as Stark. Like Deadpool, I have never been the biggest fan of Harley in the comics but this pairing of actor and character on the big screen has won me over. Like Deadpool, when it comes to Harley I'm all in for the movie version.
Gretel and Hansel didn't totally work for me. I loved the tone and the feel of it, but ultimately I felt like it was maybe a little too distant for its own good. I really dug Blackcoats Daughter, but didn't dig Pretty Thing In The house. Maybe this will grow over time for me but I left feeling a tad disappointed, like I saw a lesser version of what Eggers did with The Witch in its way of being a very dark and off-kilter pro-feminist movie.
Finally got around to Hard Eight and I thought it was a solid enough debut. I liked it when it was the Las Vegas gambler version of The Color of Money, but when it shifted into crime mode I kinda lost interest. Maybe my least favorite from PTA but I still enjoyed it enough. Felt like a subplot from Magnolia than a complete feature.
Gonna watch the Oscars just bc it's a show about movies, even though I know it's not important.
Watched Takeshi Kitano's Scene by the Sea last night and wow, what a sweet and beautiful movie. Amazing to see how much emotion can be wrung out from a film with such minimal dialogue. Made me wish there were 80s/early 90s US teen movies like this.
I can see it being a repeat of last year. Roma didn’t win best picture, but won foreign and director. I can see that happening to Parasite.
I just watched the film I Lost My Body and really enjoyed it. Definitely an out there film, but the animation is solid, the score is fantastic, and the film as a whole is very sweet. Also, done with BoJack Horseman and I need more shows to follow. Any recommendations?
So my big in theater watch this week was GIMME SHELTER which I somehow had avoided seeing for most of my filmgoing life up until now. It's one of the best music docs I've ever seen. I can't believe it took me so long to finally watch it. I've seen it on TV and blown past it so many times. I think it was sitting on a DVR for years without my watching it. I often go through this polarizing love and hate thing with The Rolling Stones so that may explain why.
It's amazing watching this film go from being just another music doc about a band at the height of its powers to something tragic when they capture what happened at Altamont. This would make a great double feature with ONE CUT OF THE DEAD.
First off, people in 1969 make people who go to concerts today look like Romper Room. They brought their dogs, they were mostly naked and tripping their faces off. I can't even imagine being packed into that mass of humanity when the shit starts to hit the fan. I once experienced horrible claustrophobia trapped in a mass of humans with nowhere to escape in an attempt to see the Rockerfeller Christmas tree and thankfully no one was flipping out or on LSD...at least to my knowledge.
A few other takeaways:
- The shots of Mick Jagger in his stage clothes holding his Uncle Sam hat by himself backstage (I think in MSG) while professional people and police are around him doing their jobs made him look like a little kid in his PJ's playing dress-up in his parents living room. It's a subtle thing, but I realized how silly rock & roll stars can appear when they are not on stage in comparison to people just out there doing normal jobs around them.
- Charlie Watts is like a Marx brother. I'm not surprised they lingered on him so often in the film. The guy should've been a silent film actor.
- For fans of the movie ZODIAC we get an in his prime Melvin Beli in this film and it's glorious.
- The performance footage is exceptional. The Stones were at their peak and basically were able to cause an audience to erupt at any time. There is no other frontman like Mick. I was kind of floored with that crowd already fighting and beating up Jefferson Airplane, Mick and the boys walk out and open with Sympathy For The Devil which they openly admit often causes problems in the crowd. Then the solution was a toned-down Tumbling Dice that was building into a crescendo that riled everyone up again. Mick was determined to do his show that night. Even the dog walking across the stage didn't throw him.
If for some reason you haven't seen this, watch it. I love THE LAST WALTZ but this is better in so many ways.
As for the Oscars, I'll be watching THE OUTSIDER tonight. We're hooked on it. Also planning to dive into LOCKE & KEY.
Watched the Director's Cut of DOCTOR SLEEP and man is it incredible. I loved the Theatrical Cut but this is something different altogether - it might be Flanagan's masterwork, and that's saying a whole hell of a lot.
Is there a way to structure the season so there are not 400 awards shows before the Oscars. Now with 24hr news cycles, social media, net etc the exposure to these awards makes it all seem meaningless and hard to maintain focus for.
I got snowed-in here in Atlanta today (four days ago it was 70-degrees and I was wearing shorts and flip flops... love these Southern winters!) so no BoP for me until next weekend. Word of mouth has me feeling good about my prospects for liking it, but it seems as if, unless some things turn around, this weekend wasn't kind at the BO.
I don't like the Oscars for what they've become. I grew up watching them with Billy Crystal hosting and they used to be fun. The best films and performances and technical artisans generally "won," whatever that means, unless you're of the frame of mind that people like John Williams or Tom Hanks should have more Oscars than fingers and toes. However, within the last 20 years or so, the Oscars have become "important" to the business of making and releasing and watching movies in a way they weren't before. With that comes the political maneuvering to get "prestige" films seen by the right people and put up for awards and gifts are exchanged and marketing is created all to help films that many "regular" people don't see anymore to win Oscars.
I guess I began to lose interest in the Oscars when the cliché and formulaic Titanic "won" Best Picture. Then for the next year, when Shakespeare in Love, a nicely acted piffle of a movie "beat" one of the greatest films I have ever seen in Saving Private Ryan, I decided the Oscars were crap. This belief was cemented when A Beautiful Mind, the weakest Ron Howard film ever nominated for Best Picture, "won" over The Fellowship of the Ring, the best movie of that year by far and the best film in the LOTR Trilogy. Then again the next year when Chicago (Chicago!?!?) did the same to The Two Towers. That The Return of the King got the Best Picture nod (among many other Oscars) the next year was inconsequential. This idea that the Academy was waiting to reward the trilogy as a whole while letting lesser films take home the big award the two previous years finally had me give up on this dog and pony show for good.
I mean when you think about it, really... awards for art? Isn't that kind of antithetical to the purpose of art in the first place? Making movies isn't anything like sports where a champion is crowned on the field. Filmmaking and what makes one film "better" than another is completely subjective. I just don't care anymore. I like what I like and love what I love, and if the movie I liked the best this year doesn't win an Oscar, I honestly don't care and haven't for awhile.
Right now, I have the Ultimate Badass, Pvt. Hudson freaking out in the background from one of the greatest movies ever made, a film or director not nominated at the 59th Academy Awards even though, even subjectively, Aliens and Cameron should've been.
I pretty much just consider the Oscars entertainment and don’t attribute any real credibility to who ends up winning. They consistently get it wrong. This year’s best film is “Parasite” for me, hands down. It isn’t really that close. But it will not win because it is is a foreign film and they have another category for that, which it will win.
I finally got around to watching Fast Color this week, which was slight but fun. It felt very much like the great indie films from the 90s and scratched an itch for me that rarely gets any action these days.
I watched Dr Sleep (theatrical cut) yesterday, and I can’t stop thinking about it, flaws and all. The first two thirds are masterful, moving, horrifying and magical - Flanagan gets the FEELING of reading a Stephen King book. I think it’s the best performance Ewan McGregor’s ever given, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Rose the Hat is immediately one of my favorite villains of all time. The Jacob Tremblay scene is up there in the pantheon of greatest horror moments. And then that final act is so strange and jarring in its sudden crashing into Kubrick’s movie, and though it took me out of the story in the moment, as it settles I think it might be a possibly brilliant meta-textual imagined conversation between King and Kubrick where they discuss authorial intent & adaptation and Flanagan brokers some kind of strange peace. Gonna watch the director’s cut next, and everything else of Flanagan’s I’ve missed, because this is one of those imperfect but bold swing wonderful movies that just hits my movie sweet spot completely, and got deep into my bones.
I worked in post on a film that had an Oscar nominee as it was announced and it was...a strange, transformative thing in how we approached the nominee's character's screen time and how the halo of the nomination made things far more serious for our production. They didn't win it in the end, but for a while it was fun to have a proverbial horse in the race.
As for non-award stuff, I've been cutting current releases (Come to Daddy, Birds of Prey)with obscure stuff on Amazon Prime (Gog, Doctor Blood's Coffin). It's been a wild whiplash in styles and tempos, plus the sobering amount of mid century, dreck-tier material on Prime that rarely sees the light of day for good reason (Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, anyone?).
Am I the only one here that didn't dig Harley Quinn? I thought Margot was terrific (and Ewan & Chris Messna)...but the movie around them, though containing brief flashes of fun and mayhem, felt more like a bad 80's/90's New Line film, almost as if the movie was julienne'd up in the editing room like a salad. For the record, I don't like dogging on a movie, but I was surprised by how much it didn't work for me. Curious to know how you guys felt...
Just rewatched Vondie Curtis-Hall’s “Gridlock’d” to review on my site.
1) That film feels like it’d play really well today with how it illuminates the struggles of addicts to get help past the bureaucracy of the social safety net.
2) Tupac would have been a tremendous talent on-screen now if he were still alive. He’s so naturally charismatic in that role.
3) That movie should have been a Sundance film that got platformed into release rather than just dumped in January. I think it would have been a sleeper.