Month: February 2005

napoleon dynamite

anyone else seen this? watched it a couple of nights ago. don’t really know what to make of it, but i did enjoy it. like something todd solondz might make if he wasn’t a miserable git–skirts the lines between caricature, affectionate identification and satire, seems to cross them from time to time but never quite falls completely into any of those modes. i wish i had more interesting things to say about it.

i have now seen two movies made by people from idaho: this and “twin falls idaho”. that was a non-sequitur.

Oscar predictions again?

Oscars are coming up, don’t forget. Shall we take another stab at looking at the trends in this year’s nominations and discussing what folks can expect at the ceremony? Arnab started us with a few ideas. He’s under the assumption that because Scorsese has never won he’s bound to win this year. Is he using projection data? That is, is there something built into this whole process that makes it more or less predictable? Or is this a guessing game? Take, for instance, the documentary short nominee “Autism is a World.” Although I have not seen the film, I am quite confident it will win because autism has been in the news a lot lately. A cause celbre. Another example: I think Thomas Haden Church will win for best supporting actor. Although I saw “Sideways” and liked his performance very much, I am instead basing my prediction on the fact that Paul Giamatti didn’t get the nomination for best actor. The Academy likes to try and clean up after itself as much as possible by offering “concession” awards, so the nod will go to Church. Does the Academy try to distinguish itself from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? If that’s what you think, you probably expect that Hilary Swank will not win Best Actress, and that Jamie Foxx will not win Best Actor. Any thoughts? Any timeless trends worth pointing out? Joan Rivers scares me.

Million $ Dead Baby — or, Disabilities on Parade

Okay. A student just wrote me an impassioned defense of Eastwood’s “Million $ Baby,” deploring how its complex character study has been turned into mere politics. He makes a reasonable case, but I wrote him back a rant about disabilities on film and… well, I am curious how others might respond.

I’m too lazy to change much about my email to him, so cut/pasted:

Continue reading Million $ Dead Baby — or, Disabilities on Parade

festen

we dogme 95’ers never use the english translation of a non-english film’s title to refer to it, no sir.

i don’t know that i understand what all the dogme criteria are but this cheery little danish film about incest, child-molestation and cake baking (can you guess which one of those it’s not really about?) is pretty damn good. i don’t want to say too much about it yet. what would be cool would be if everyone watched it and then we could discuss it–as opposed to my completely dominating your experience of the film with my superior analysis (a state of affairs that would probably violate the dogme manifesto). so watch the film first and then i’ll dominate you with my superior analysis.

melancholy baby

Whenever I read Film Comment magazine, as I’m doing now, I feel particularly stupid. First it is unlikely that I will see the new retrospective of whatever at Lincoln Center, and second, I rarely know the celebrated Turkish, Georgian or Finnish directors who apparently have been turning out masterpiece after masterpiece during the last decade, while I struggle to catch up with the episodes of Futurama that I’ve missed. This experience leads to melancholy thoughts regarding “film culture” and “netflix:” what happened to seeing films “publically”–now it is only consistently possible in New York City and in some rare other locations (say San Francisco/Berkely where they have a major Film Archive or Minneapolis which has the Walker Art Center) to see a movie in a well-designed theater or even to see a movie in a theater at all. do people really wish to stay at home so goddamm much? on one hand, the bizarre corporate cineplex where I have to sit through a fucking half hour of TV commercials now (and then, like a bad freshman essay, they summarize what you’ve just seen–“we’ve taken a sneak peak at the big screen update of “Green Acres” and talked with its star Colin Farrell…) and on the other, the stupefaction of “home” where you can safely piss yourself while you slog through all 13 hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz. as peggy lee whispered to me during an amorous embrace, “baby, is that all there is?” To which I replied, “when the boundaries of public and private life are muddled, public life becomes the unsatisfactory adjunct of a private life that is nevertheless misshapen by “public” but inaccessible forces.” She slapped me and left with that cheap Sinatra-fake Jack Jones. I retaliated by copping a feel of Connie Francis, who had passed out over her most recent Gin Rickey.

oscar predictions?

we’ve barely watched any of the nominees in the major categories, but if “ray” is nominated for best picture it must mean it is a bad year. i’m currently going with “million dollar baby” as best picture and scorcese finally getting his best director. i think foxx will get best actor, thereby really pissing off both tom cruise and will smith. for best actress i think there will be an upset and the woman from the new mike leigh will win (and thereby assure herself a lifetime of roles in very un-mike leigh’ish quaint english movies made for the american arthouse circuit). the category that confuses me is best documentary feature as it appears, going entirely off of titles of nominees, that no holocaust or civil rights themed docs have been nominated (though i suppose “the story of the weeping camel” may yet turn out to be one or the other)–are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the academy’s approach to documentary award-giving?

but these are my current picks–as oscar night approaches i will doubtless fine-tune them before once again crushing all opponents in various online and offline pools.

watched but as yet unblogged

in reverse order of viewing:

1. “the business of fancydancing”–promoted this one after mike’s endorsement. we liked it a lot (maybe sunhee will post her thoughts as well). some of the acting was a little amateurish (a lot of first-time actors apparently) but the lead was great, as was the writing generally. structurally very interesting as well–it felt like what it was: a film based on poems rather than stories or a novel. i also liked how it avoided resolutions, not only of seymour and aristotle’s relationship, but also of the question of seymour’s relationship to the rez (in his life and his art).

Continue reading watched but as yet unblogged

Early-morning thread

Okay, instead of prepping class, as I should, a hello–this board has been a bit arid, of late.

But I haven’t seen much. “Ray” is in my queue, but dropped precipitously after Arnab and John chewed it up and spat it out. I watched “The Girl Next Door,” which was not as funny as I’d expected (wearing my “good-reason-for-watching” hat) nor as titillating (wearing my “reason-for-watching-that-will-get-me-in-Dutch” hat). Actually, I watched it to see Timothy Olyphant, because I am so fond of “Deadwood” that I’ll watch almost anything any of that grand cast ends up doing between seasons. And Olyphant was pretty good, even in a dull film.

I’m hanging on to “Stevie” and “Maria Full of Grace” for when I have time and inclination to see these darker things. Meanwhile, Kris and I watch “Freaks and Geeks” together. I like it, but…. three episodes in, I’m not stunned into worshipful muttering. Is that heresy? Amy?

Here’s a challenge–what’s strange in your netflix queue? Those things that will be cool but will take forever to move up, what with all the films about things blowing up that could precede. Me: Dr. Akagi, Mule Skinner Blues, Goin’ South, Tunes of Glory, 9 Souls, Touchez Pas Au Grisbi, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, The Yakuza Papers, Madigan.

ray

we watched this last night. i found it to be curiously uninvolving. the parts that worked best were the musical performances (with ray charles singing). the rest was mostly trite psychologizing, shuffling around questions of history, and the occasional quincy jones sighting (which i think was supposed to stand in for charles’ relationship with 50s/60s jazz). and apparently there is nothing to say about ray charles after the 60s. there’s been a lot of talk about foxx’s performance; it is mostly a series of very good ray charles impressions mixed in with some scenes of very good acting–but i thought the impressions distracted (though the big-time critics disagree). too bad belushi died before getting to do a joe cocker biopic.

since this has been nominated for a best picture oscar i am forced to rate it “overrated”.