Best Picture

Nominees: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

Will win: Avatar
Should win Inglourious Basterds.

The 10 nominee thing is dumb because the Best Director category reveals who the real ‘top 5′ are. But now District 9, which was a pretty great movie, gets a “Best Picture nominee” sticker on its DVD case. So there’s that.

I haven’t seen An Education, Precious or A Serious Man yet. Of the remaining choices:

• I am a fierce defender of Avatar as being a film that’s nearly flawless in execution. Sure, the story is kind of dumb as fuck, but everything else just works so well. It wasn’t my favourite movie of the year, but I’m not opposed to it winning. It’s an achievement that deserves recognition.
• The Blind Side was, come on, just dumb. One of those movies that I’d be quite happy to regard as a nice little bit of holiday season fluff, except now it’s got award buzz so I have to actively dislike and root against it.
• District 9 was totally great and a lot of fun. I liked both the accents and the metaphors. And that gun that blew stuff up.
• The Hurt Locker was a great movie. Well-paced and well-acted. This kind of movie isn’t really my thing, though. I almost wrote that I don’t like war movies, but I’m about to heap a bunch of praise on Inglourious Basterds, so that wouldn’t really be accurate. There is just something about this kind of war movie that doesn’t totally work for me. But whatever. Well made! An achievement!
• Inglourious Basterds was kind of like Avatar in that I was pretty sure I was going to dislike it but ended up with a grudging respect for it about mid-way through. But where that grudging respect only went so far with Cameron’s movie, Tarantino made me a believer. This was totally and completely great. It’s too bad they had to make the Brad Pitt-and-friends stuff the focal point of the marketing, because the real story in this one is the French cinema plotline. The ending with the fire and the shooting is absolutely the best thing I saw this year.
• Up – delightful. As always with Pixar flicks. But I did feel like it kind of came out incredibly strong out of the gate and then never really lived up to that promise, especially with the silly second half where the dogs fly airplanes and such. It’s a mid-level Pixar movie, behind The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and maybe one or two others for me.
• Up in the Air was great filmmaking, and there’s a sequence toward the middle with the hotel party and the karaoke and the dancing that is phenomenal, but there was something about this that felt a little bit incomplete to me. It still might be my second favourite movie of the year, but it didn’t quite feel whole to me.

Best Director

Nominees: James Cameron (Avatar), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Lee Daniels (Precious), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), Quentin Tarantino (Inglorious Basterds)

Will win: James Cameron Should win: Quentin Tarantino

I feel like the Best Picture and Best Director categories should generally go to the same film, so I’m sticking with that this year. Even though I think Tarantino is a tremendous douche.

Best Actor

Nominees: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart), George Clooney (Up in the Air), Colin Firth (A Single Man), Morgan Freeman (Invictus), Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)

Will win: Jeff Bridges Should win: George Clooney

I haven’t seen Crazy Heart but neither have most of the people voting for this category, and they’ll vote for Bridges because he is old and likeable and deserves to win for his whole body of work. It’s kind of lame reasoning, but it’s nothing new. And I do genuinely like Bridges so I’ll go with it.

My ‘should win’ pick with a toss-up between Clooney and Renner and I liked Clooney’s movie better so there you go.

Best Actress

Nominees: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side), Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)

Will win: Sandra Bullock Should win: Meryl Streep

It’s Bullock as a lock to win. Which is a blah choice but kind of fits with the whole phony idea that Hollywood will seem less sexist if they honour the few women who turn 40 and still get regular work.

Meryl Streep doesn’t need more awards but I actually thought her half of Julie & Julia was really good and almost made up for the other half being mind-numbingly awful.

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees: Matt Damon (Invictus), Woody Harrelson (The Messenger), Christopher Plummer (The Last Station), Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones), Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Will win: Christoph Waltz Should win: Chirstoph Waltz

There’s absolutely no doubt here. He clinched this in the first 10 minutes of the film.

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees: Penélope Cruz (Nine), Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart), Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air), Mo’Nique (Precious)

Will win: Mo’Nique Should win: Anna Kendrick

Mo’Nique is another virtual lock to win, as none of the other nominees have much momentum. I’d give it to Kendrick as I thought her character was great and she did a good job acting like she was drunk. Plus I think she’s really attractive and that counts.

The Rest

• Best Original Screenplay should and will go to Inglourious Basterds
• Best Adapted Screenplay should and will go to Up in the Air and the acceptance speech will be hilariously awkard as the two credited writers hate each other
• Best Animated Feature will and should go to Up because no one else is yet in Pixar’s league when it comes to animated films
• Best Foreign Language Film is a wild guess with The White Ribbon
• Documentary Feature goes to The Cove

The rest are irrelevant, really – Avatar will win all the effects and sound categories (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Art Direction, Cinematography). Make-up goes to The Young Victoria. Costume Design goes to Nine. The song award probably goes to Crazy Heart. Best score goes to Avatar because why not. And no one watches short films, animated or otherwise, but I’ll pick Logorama and Miracle Fish for animated and live action, respectively.

Erin and I watched two movies this weekend. Burn After Reading was a nice reminder that, even after the Coen Bros win an Oscar and direct a movie that connects with audiences, they’re still incredibly dark filmmakers with little-to-no inclination towards crowd-pleasing. Burn was pretty typical, and likely would have gone over better if it hadn’t come on the heels of No Country and had a red-band trailer that pretty much contained all of the straightforward “funny”. The rest is just bureaucracy and people getting murdered.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno was probably better than Kevin Smith’s last two movies, but nowhere near a triumph or anything. The first twenty minutes are actually pretty solid — right up to the high school reunion scene — but then it descends into dullness as soon as the titular porno comes into play. Plots always seem to ruin Kevin Smith movies.

Also, and this is standard with Smith flicks, but the Mary Sue self-insertion in the script was ridiculously over-the-top. Overweight bearded slacker dude wins over attractive woman with his magic penis? Come on.

I’m in full-on winter hibernation mode these days, as nothing about going out on weekends really appeals to me at the moment. It’s cold and it gets dark before five o’clock. That’s bullshit and I won’t even tacitly support it. My protest will be in the form of staying at home and watching movies.

I started playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on my new iMac. I played through the original and Vice City, but never got around to this one. It’s all right, though kind of a bit too much like The Sims with drive-by shootings. I have to go to the gym, visit my girlfriend, eat food and buy clothes? Jesus Christ. It’s hard out here for a pimp.

This week: a hopefully quieter week at work. Oh, and we’ll probably have a new Prime Minister tomorrow. How cool is THAT? The rest of the world will be so confused as we’ll magically have a new leader without so much as an election. Parliamentary democracy is the best.

More later!

Seriously. You’re not going to believe me, I know, but this was a great absurdist comedy. It’s like a Christopher Guest movie except a little but dumber. But where Guest’s mockumentaries take more of a subtle, consistently-amusing tone, Hamlet 2 is a bunch of rapid-fire attempts at big, giant laughs. Some of the attempts miss and just come off as stupid. But some of them are totally awesome. And that makes all the difference.

Steve Coogan is great. (His American accent holds until the very end, where he does a quick impersonation of Jeremy Irons and you’re like “Hold on — you’re British!”) The music is phenomenal. “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” is going to get all the attention, but “Raped in the Face” and the awesome version of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” deserve kudos as well. It looks like this movie is going to make about four dollars at the box office, which is really a shame. So go see it. Do your part.

A million stars.

Hancock: Want to see a decent concept that’s clearly been beaten to death with studio notes? This is the movie for you. Will Smith still has charisma out the ass, and there’s something appealing about his lazy superhero character. But then thirty minutes go by and a bunch of crazy shit starts to happen for no reason. And there are massive continuity errors and gaping plot holes. And it feels so much like at least an hour of this movie was cut out. I’d feel like it was more of a waste if it didn’t all just feel so inevitable.

The winner? Wanted is way better. Go see Wanted. Skip Hancock, but watch it on TV or whatever — it’s an interesting mess.

Heath Ledger is great. He’s legitimately good in the role. Of all the actors who’ve played the character — and, yeah, I include Jack Nicholson in this — only Ledger and Mark Hamill have gotten it right thus far. Some of his scenes, specifically the interrogation room sequence and the hospital thing, are just mind-warpingly good.

Flaws? Sure. Christian Bale still insists on growling all his lines as Batman, which is such a weird thing to do. Despite the running time, the huge amount of plot packed into things makes it all feel a bit rushed. And, of course, coming out of things knowing that Heath Ledger will never be able to return to the franchise is a huge downer.

But overall, this is great. Right now it’s a toss-up between X-Men 2, Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight as to which is the best super hero movie of all time. Assuming The Dark Knight ages well — and I think it will — it’ll probably take the top spot.

I’m not saying anything about the overall quality of these films or the filmmaking behind them. Some are great and some suck. But the scenes, for whatever reason, stand out.

From Dan in Real Life (2007)

From Grosse Point Blank (1997)

From About a Boy (2002)

From L.A. Story (1991)

From The Rules of Attraction (2002)

Anyway, the movie: I’m not one of those people that hated Ang Lee’s Hulk, but I appreciate their need to ‘reboot’ the franchise. Lee’s version was pretty damn well-crafted, especially from a technical standpoint (Comic book panel-style editing? Cool!) but the plot was kind of ridiculously overwrought and not the kind of thing you should put into your would-be summer blockbuster.

So they redid it. With Edward Norton. Who is kind of an odd choice if you want to go the pure-popcorn-blockbuster route with your franchise. And, maybe as a result of that, the movie is just okay. Not great, not terrible — just okay. There’s not a lot about it I’m bound to remember in a week.

There’s some good stuff — the effects are great. It’s CG done so well that internet nerds probably won’t even complain about it. Which is really the best yardstick for measuring quality CG work. Tim Roth is hilarious and awesome when he’s in human form as the bad guy. The fight scenes struck me as really well choreographed. The bits tying into Marvel’s big “movie superhero universe” were as awesome as they were in Iron Man.

And the bad stuff? There’s a fair bit of that too. Liv Tyler is fundamentally untalented, and seems to be regressing as an actress instead of getting better. Edward Norton looks bored most of the time, and doesn’t really land a single funny line in the whole movie, except for maybe his “oh shit” at 20,000 feet. In one scene it just starts raining out of nowhere, purely for emotional resonance, which is kind of a douchebag move on the creative end. The final fight scene kind of just ends, as if the screenwriter wrote himself into a corner and then realized he was writing about two giant green monsters fighting on a roof so he just gave up.

But, regardless of all of that, I just left kind of feeling like maybe The Hulk is a really difficult character to base a film franchise around. He’s neither a hero nor a villain — he’s just a scientist in a shitty situation. And I find it difficult, for whatever reason, to relate to scientists in shitty situations. I think the character works better as a shades-of-grey character when he’s coupled with other heroes. Which means he’ll probably work a lot better in the future Avengers movie. Boy, that sounds nerdy.

In any case, it’s maybe a 2-star movie. Definitely worth seeing if you know the City of Toronto, because there’s so many “Hey, that’s that!” shots your head will spin. (Sam the Record Man! UofT! The Gardiner Expressway!) Otherwise? Catch it if you’re looking to go to the movies, but don’t break your neck for it.

There’s been a lot of hoopla over the new Indiana Jones movie over the last couple of weeks. And why shouldn’t there be? It’s Indiana Jones. He’s the best. Of all the awesome iconic movie heroes the 1980s brought us — and there’s a lot of them; it’s an era defined best by its iconic male loner hero characters — Indy is by far one of the coolest.

I remember loving the original films when I was a kid. I haven’t seen any of them in years. Sometimes I consider rewatching all three, but I don’t think I ever will. I love the memories I have of these films — the whole pulpy, action-packed, hilarious lot of it. Actually sitting down and going through them again, as the literate douchebag with a critical eye I am now, could have the unfortunate side-effect of overshadowing those childhood memories, thus killing them.

I don’t want to kill them.

I love these movies as I remember them: badly. Here’s a quick summation of all three:

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
I was pretty disappointed that Noah’s Ark never appeared on screen. That would have been a more intriguing premise for an eight-year-old because, well, where the hell would they hide it? In a mountain cave was my guess.

Movie starts out with Indiana Jones screwing up and getting chased by a boulder. There are also snakes in this scene (in the background) and a part where Indiana Jones swings on a rope. This is probably the best part of the movie. After that there are a bunch of boring talking scenes that go on for a while and, then, MORE action! I don’t know the sequence of events, but I do know Indy a) comes face to face with a KING COBRA, b) Shoots a sword guy, c) hides on a boat and d) drives a plane on fire through a city street while a bad guy stands on the front of it!

Most of the movie takes place in Africa. At the end, a guy with a monocole gets his face melted off by a very bright light. Indiana Jones then kisses his girlfriend which is so gross.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Dan Ackroyd is in this and I knew him from Ghostbusters. He disappears really quickly, though, replaced by an asian boy. I really don’t remember much else of this because my mom wouldn’t really let me see it (too scary!) so I had to watch it in bits and pieces at friends’ houses. I know that a dude gets his HEART RIPPED OUT OF HIS CHEST, which meant I had NIGHTMARES FOR YEARS. Then they all went on a mine cart ride like in Donkey Kong Country!

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
My favourite and always will be. Sean Connery is Indiana Jones’ dad! River Phoenix is young Indiana Jones! We learn why Indy hates snakes (reason: he fell into a pit of snakes once!) and has a scar (reason: he cut his face!) and likes to wear that hat (reason: a bad guy gave him a hat!). There’s also a scene where Indy is on a boat and it is raining a lot and I never really knew what was going on because I watched the movie (always) on an old TV that didn’t show dark scenes very well.

Anyway, this movie has a lot to do with religion which, like, whoa — I don’t know why. Indy’s dad is looking for the holy grail but can’t find it anywhere he is looking. I think he looks primarily in Austria for some reason. But he gets kidnapped so Indiana Jones chases after him, first on a plane and then on a SPEEDBOAT. Then the father and son get tied together in a burning room and it’s hilarious. Then they go on a blimp which either crashes or a dude gets thrown out of? Maybe both. I remember Sean Connery operating a mounted machine gun around this part. And also scaring some birds with his umbrella.

Indiana Jones has to fight a tank and then loses. Well, it’s sot of a tie. They both go over a cliff. Everyone thinks Indy is dead but he’s not. He just fell off the cliff. They then finally go to some cave somewhere, I think after seeing Hitler in a giant convention hall. I didn’t know who Hitler was the first time so I asked my mom. I think “Mom, who’s Hitler?” is a big loss-of-innocence moment, if answered honestly.

They get to the cave — the cave with the holy grail in it! Indiana Jones has to pass a bunch of tests to prove he is religious. The only one I remember has him stepping on a bunch of tiles to spell the name of God. The name of God, I was blown away to realize, is not ‘God’. It started with an ‘i’.

Next: Sean Connery gets shot! But Indiana Jones makes it to the grail where some old knight is hanging out and has been for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. The knight tells Indiana Jones and some bad guy Nazi that they need to choose from all the cups on the table — only one of them is Jesus’. The bad guy chooses first, and picks one with gold and gems in it. He burns to death! Indiana Jones picks the wooden one because, duh, Jesus was a carpenter. Then he goes and fills it up with Coca-Cola from a big pot and drips some on his dad’s bullet wound which magically heals.

Then the ground opens up and a bunch of dudes fall in. Bad dudes, only, though! Everyone else is okay.

The point
See? I can’t imagine losing those memories.

The new Indiana Jones movie, by the way, is kind of bad. Like, it’s fun and all, and I don’t regret paying to see it, but there’s no way this is a classic by any means. I thought returning to Indiana Jones would mean Spielberg would finally be able to do a decent end to one of his flicks again, but he managed to… not do that. He did the opposite. Everything from Shia LaBouef befriending monkeys onwards was kind of unfortunate, really.

But Indy is still awesome.