a head of my own: March 2010

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Sinbad

Up until now I was convinced this was a Disney movie, but it’s really a DreamWorks production from 2003. It’s in 2D, which is probably what threw me off since that studio usually works with digital animation, but thinking back at the script, I can actually see the less innocent and more grown-up-pleasing tilt that’s typical of the boy-on-the-Moon studio’s fare.

Sinbad is a decent production that’s enjoyable and funny, but certainly not memorable. Being rated PG, the kids liked it quite a bit, since the jokes and the humor were more up to their age bracket. However, I will likely take a nap the next time it gets picked.

As is often the case nowadays, the cast that voices the characters features tons of A-list stars (Brad Pitt, Joseph Fiennes, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Michelle Pfeiffer to mention a few) but that’s certainly not the reason I would watch this kind of movie. I actually never fell for the big actor voice hook with animated features, because it’s the story itself that must be interesting.

I really don’t care who’s narrating or interpreting a character, because I usually get lost within the movie and forget who is voicing who. Only when the credits start to roll and I realize the big names involved do I take notice, but by then it’s too late and even if I saw it ahead of time, I wouldn’t be listening in for a particular character’s voice because of whose voice that is.

Just a few months back I saw Fantastic Mr. Fox, which features my beloved Meryl Streep, but she wasn’t the reason I went to see the movie and I barely remembered throughout the evening that she was voicing that particular character. I really do think that the studios are wasting their money hiring expensive talent when there are a ton of good actors and actresses that would cost a lot less and could also get a chance to break through.

Anyway, the film per se is passable.

Grade: 6

Saturday, March 27, 2010

The Lovely Bones

Adapted from a successful book, The Lovely Bones is Peter Jackson’s latest project and the main reason I watched this movie. The end result is, alas, underwhelming, which is disappointing given the pedigree of those involved.

Besides Jackson, who shares writing credits with his wife Fran Walsh and their longtime collaborator Philippa Boyens, the cast includes the likes of Stanley Tucci (very good and nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for this role), Rachel Weisz (very good), and Susan Sarandon (who plays more a caricature than a character). The role of the hero is played honorably by Mark Wahlberg, an occasionally decent actor that is very easy on the eyes.

The story takes us often to a sort of limbo that often feels too artificial, even though the visual effects are excellent. The suspense grips the viewer often, but there is always something missing or vague that in the end leaves you less than fully satisfied.

I haven’t read the book, and adapting a novel for the screen is always very challenging, but I would have expected more from the team that brought us the spectacularly good Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Grade: 6

Friday, March 26, 2010

A Quote By

Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham in an editorial about their proposed legislation for comprehensive immigration reform that would award green cards to immigrants who receive a doctorate or master's degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics from a US university:

“Ensuring economic prosperity requires attracting the world's best and brightest. It makes no sense to educate the world's future inventors and entrepreneurs and then force them to leave when they are able to contribute to our economy.”

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Post Oscar 2010

A few days have gone by and I’ve read quite a few articles about the recent Academy Awards ceremony that it warrants a quick recap.

Apparently I am not alone in thinking that the ceremony itself was just average. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did an honorable job, but the night felt both rushed and slow at the same time, as well as aseptic. Its ratings might have been much higher than they’ve been recently, but it wasn’t a night to remember.

Only afterwards did I realize that they did not award a career Oscar, or at least not at the ceremony itself. Yes, I agree that the winner’s speech is oftentimes quite long winded, but with all the people involved in that business and only one of these awards handed out yearly, is it really wise and necessary to put it off, perhaps to shave 20 minutes from the telecast? Robert Altman and Sidney Poitier are just two of the recent winners who would beg to differ.

Another thing of note missing was a tribute to the late Farrah Fawcett during the In Memoriam montage. I hadn’t realized it until my dear friend Vittorio pointed it out, and it was all the more puzzling since I did remember them including Michael Jackson, who was more of a music icon then a movie star. Then I read on Entertainment Weekly that the reason the producers gave for not including Fawcett was that “We can’t include all of the notable people who pass away,” which felt insulting even if I wasn’t a big Fawcett fan. I clearly recall this year’s montage including a publicist among the “notables.” Now, I don’t want to sound disrespectful to publicists, whose jobs are part of the Hollywood machinery as much as those of directors, writers, and actors, but if you had the time to include a publicist whose name no one outside of the Kodak auditorium ever heard, you should definitely include an iconic figure like Farrah Fawcett. That omission was quite unforgivable.

That same article also mentioned the horror genre tribute, which I loved, but a friend of Ray told him how it came on quite early in the night, when his kids were still watching. Our kids were in bed already, so I fully enjoyed the montage, but I would have freaked out too if they had been sitting by my side. Perhaps the producers should have thought about timing a little more carefully, especially considering that it was only about 6.30 PM on the West Coast, which means that kids were all still wide awake (especially after seeing that montage…)

One last question that article answered was about the presenters pronouncing “and the winner is” rather than the customary “and the Oscar goes to.” Apparently this is what the producers responded: “I always thought it was overly polite. I wanted a sense of tension on the show. We thought of [the Oscars] as the most well-dressed reality competition show in the world.” Where to begin. First off, what’s wrong with being polite? Second, hearing the words “and the Oscar goes to” just before your name is announced as the winner must be the most invigorating and fulfilling feeling in the world. Third, haven’t we had enough of reality competition shows? Fourth, this is the fracking Oscars you’re handing out; they’re revered the world over for what they represent, the pinnacle of excellence; is it really necessary to reduce them to an overlong episode of The Bachelor?

Given the higher ratings and the fact that producing the Oscars is a rather ungrateful task (you are critiqued no matter what and you have to call in countless favors in order to set up a nice show), the current producers are likely to come back again next year, but from the few things I ratted off, I wouldn’t mind seeing some change.

As for the bitterest moment, when Meryl Streep was once again robbed of the most prestigious award in the acting profession, I feel less sanguine now. Sandra Bullock did give her best performance ever in The Blind Side, and she certainly deserved her accolades. She also happens to be a very likeable and bankable star who has a good sense of humor and navigated the Oscar campaign tactfully and with grace. It is just unfortunate that the “let’s spread the wealth” mantra led so many to vote for who they liked to see win rather than for the woman who had indeed given the best performance of the year, a performance, frankly, unmatchable. Let’s just hope Streep will be offered many more great roles and that soon enough she’ll be able to clutch Mr. Oscar once again.

Finally, a note on the top prize of the night. I recently saw The Hurt Locker (but haven’t reviewed it yet) and I’d give it 8/10 on my grading scale. That grade would put it below Avatar’s 9, its biggest competition for the Best Picture Oscar, but I’d like to point out that that 9 is swelled up by some of the best visual effect I’ve ever seen on screen. In terms of pure cinematic art, The Hurt Locker runs circles around Avatar. That is why I was glad to read this passage recently:

“The irony, of course, is that this time Cameron’s gigantic movie lost. Even with 10 nominees this year, it was the small indie film with no stars and a plot about the Iraq war that ended up getting the gold. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either depressing proof that the Academy is full of snobs totally out of touch with the tastes of ordinary moviegoers, or an encouraging sign that, even today, simple cinematic excellence can triumph over razzle-dazzle spectacle.”

I happen to believe, firmly and proudly, that the second statement wins out. For all of Avatar’s razzle-dazzle spectacle, The Hurt Locker was more deserving in terms of pure cinematic excellence, and I’m pleased that it won, especially at a time when big and flashy blockbusters suck up the vast majority of investment dollars and quality movies are often left in the dust, or on some movie studio storage shelf.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Two things attracted me to this movie. First, I was curious to discover this immortal Jules Verne’s story. Second, I like fantasy movies. Other factors were the curiosity of watching in 2D a movie that was meant for 3D viewing and the always wholesome Brendan Fraser.

Verne’s story is very intriguing and it’s clearly perfect for the cinematic medium. Modern visual effects allowed the filmmakers to create believable monsters and lush environments, and although the experience would have obviously been better in 3D, it still worked in 2D.

And yet, in spite of decent visual effect, a great concept to boot, and passable acting, the movie still doesn’t work well in the end. The screenplay is likely to blame, since it tries to jam too much stuff in the same cauldron (a deep brotherly love, a lifelong quest to realize one’s dream, a budding love story, a broken uncle/nephew relationship, a bad guy that threatens to junk our hero’s career, and more).

Such efforts usually flounder, and this time is no different.

Grade: 4

Friday, March 12, 2010

Scary CAT!!

Who wouldn’t want a little furry friend like this?

Thursday, March 11, 2010

This Too Shall Pass

This video is so totally cool!

Monday, March 08, 2010

The 82nd Academy Awards

This year I decided to blog the Academy Awards ceremony live, during the commercials, so here we go.

I usually skip the “red carpet” pre-show because all they do is ask what everyone’s wearing, which after a while becomes tiresome, but mostly because the interviewers will inevitably ask stupid questions or make mistakes or gaffes the are quite unforgivable. Case in point, one woman tells Miley Cirus that she’s looking forward to seeing her performance, when Cirus isn’t supposed to perform anything at all.

The show begins. The lights go down and the stage is filled with tonight’s Best Actor and Best Actress nominees. Why? Have the clips of their performances, shown when their awards are given out, been scrapped? I certainly hope not. And if they haven’t been scrapped, then this stunt only wasted some of the precious time that the Oscar producers always try to trim down.

Anyway, once the applause dies off and they are seated, the lights go up and the stage looks great. Neil Patrick Harris comes out singing and dancing and he looks great too. How long before they ask him to host? Not too long I hope!

Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, tonight’s hosts, follow him with a series of jokes that at times work, but others do not. They’re funny, but they also look like they’re trying too hard. Personally, I didn’t find Martin that engaging the other times he hosted, while I really like Baldwin’s sense of humor.

Penelope Cruz is the first presenter of the night and she looks stunning as usual (is she dating Javier Bardem?! – Jealous!!). As expected, she hands the first Oscar of the night to Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor, whose speech is simple and to the point.

Next up is Best Animated Feature, and Up, as expected, triumphs. It’s well deserved. Up was by far one of the best movies of 2009 and the best in this category.

Follows the Best Song award, which, no surprise here, goes to Crazy Heart. The producers this year decided to scrap the performances of the songs, mostly because they don’t climb the charts and aren’t widely known, but not showcasing them will only reduce their popularity further won’t it? I’m uneasy about this cut. I always enjoyed the performances, whether I knew the songs beforehand of not, and can you imagine missing out on Celine Dion’s performance of “My Heart Will Go On,” or Madonna’s “You Must Love Me,” or Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” just to name a few?

Tina Fey and Robert Downey, Jr. present Best Original Screenplay and their prepared dialogue is witty, funny, and well delivered, which is a rarity. They pretty much kill! The winner, which I predicted, is The Hurt Locker. Will this be the beginning of a sweep? We’ll see.

Follows a tribute to John Hughes, a beloved director that passed away last year. My reaction is a big, WTF?! Ok, I don’t really know Hughes and his very popular body of work, especially because his movies are quintessentially American, which makes it harder for someone not born and raised here to fully get them. But a huge tribute for him instead of the usual inclusion in the In Memoriam montage seems excessive, especially since they always try not to go overtime.

My next prediction miss is for Best Animated Short (Logorama), but I’m happy that they prefaced it with speeches by now famous directors that got their start in Hollywood by winning in this category, some over two decades ago. They all explain how important this prize is because it can mean the launch of a successful career, which is very enlightening for an audience that sees this and a few other prizes as boring and useless.

Follows Best Documentary Short (Music by Prudence) and the winners’ speech is the first to be abruptly cut short tonight. It’s never pleasant to witness such a dissing, but it feels even more discordant because of the little speech those filmmakers just gave about the importance of these “minor” awards.

I miss again for Best Live Action Short (The New Tenants), and their speech is cut again. These categories really don’t get any respect, no wonder the audience feels like they should be removed from the ceremony altogether. If the industry itself snobs them, why should we be expected to care?

Ben Stiller comes onstage to hand out the Best Makeup Oscar and he’s all made up like a Na’vi from Avatar. He is funny and the joke feels right until we start feeling sorry for him and feel like he’s been onstage way too long. And just when it looks like he’s finally done, he adds another piece to the skit. Ben, get off that stage now!! Thankfully, Star Trek wins and they have a good excuse to show the gorgeous Chris Pine a couple times.

I realize that no presenter is saying “and the Oscar goes to” anymore. They all say “and the winner is,” which is odd. Is there a reason behind all this? I mean, the Oscar is the It award, and has always been introduced as such. Why the change? I don’t like it.

Next is Best Adapted Screenplay and Precious wins. It’s tonight’s first upset, since Up in the Air was widely expected to at least take this prize, and another miss for me. The speech is very heartfelt and the guy looks genuinely blown away.

Now Mo’nique goes up onstage to receive her Best Supporting Actress statuette and, although I haven’t seen the movie yet, the short clip they show blows me away. She seems to really deserve this. Her speech is short but touching. Good for her.

The gorgeous Sigourney Weaver presents the first award of the night to her Avatar, for Best Art Direction, one of the few Oscars for Avatar to which I would strongly object, given that the entire movie was created digitally while the other nominees physically recreated their environments. Like Sigourney herself pointed out, when she worked on the set for Alien she was amazed by the sets the production had built for the actors. That didn’t really happen for Avatar.

Next Oscar: Best Costumes. The Young Victoria’s Sandy Powell wins her third Oscar and in her speech dedicates it to all her colleagues who don’t work in period piece movies but in more contemporary films, which are perennially overlooked by the Academy in this category. That’s the 800-pound gorilla that no one wants to acknowledge and it feels so right coming from her, who just won again and for a period piece. It’s like telling the Academy, “Wake up, old, fancy gowns are not all there is to costume design!!”

Martin and Baldwin present a skit about last year’s surprise hit Paranormal Activity, and it’s a good one. It introduces a montage of famous horror movies that are a genre perennially overlooked by the Academy. Horror is in good company however, since the Academy snobs Science Fiction, Comedy, and Musicals with the same frequency. You really need to be a Drama if you want to be taken seriously for an Oscar.

Next up are Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. The Hurt Locker wins both, which means two misses for me. The best thing about this though is the introductory clip that explains, finally, the difference between the two, which is unknown to anyone outside the industry.

Now Avatar picks up its second statuette for Best Cinematography, another miss for me. The winner is Italian, and he salutes Italy in his native language as well. That’s nice.

James Taylor sings a wonderful song over the In Memoriam montage, which is always very touching, even though this year it feels a little less interesting, in spite of the good number of celebrities that left us.

Jennifer Lopez and Sam Worthington are now onstage. She looks totally unbalanced in a very unflattering gown that will surely end up on the worst dressed lists of many magazines. He looks and sounds amazing. It feels like the temperature in the room just went up 20 degrees. They introduce the dance number that’s supposed to accompany a short selection from the five Best Score nominees. The dancers are amazingly talented, but I don’t like the choice. Somehow the choreographies don’t make justice to the movies’ soundtracks. I prefer to see a montage of images from the movies themselves. There’s nothing more powerful to judge the effectiveness of a score than to see it accompanying the images it was written for. As expected, Up takes the prize, which makes it even more unforgivable that neither presenter knows how to pronounce the winner’s name!

Best Visual Effects goes to Avatar, to no one’s surprise. It would have been a travesty otherwise.

The Cove, as predicted, wins Best Documentary, and the winners’ speech is cut once more to underscore their secondary status. How terrible.

The Hurt Locker wins for Best Editing, a very well deserved prize since one of the strongest points of the movie is its ability to keep the viewer on the edge of his seat, which the editing has a lot to do with.

Martin and Baldwin seem to have found their footing and are getting better and better as the ceremony progresses.

My last miss comes with Argentina’s win for Best Foreign Picture (El Secreto de Sus Ojos). Entertainment Weekly had rightly projected this upset of the German favorite, The White Ribbon. I wish I had gone with their pick.

It’s time for the top four awards of the night. Best Actress should be up next but it’s the actors time instead. It’s the first time ever they make a switch, which underlies how the Best Actress race is the only one left with any real drama. Five people who have some connection with each nominee are brought onstage for a collective love fest that’s about ten minutes long. Whatever happened to trying not to go overtime? Just a short while ago I had thought the ceremony might actually end on time this year, which would have made all the cuts worth it. And then they do this, whose length can’t have come as a surprise to the producers. The introductions are nice (and Michelle Pfeiffer even brings tears to Jeff Bridges’ eyes) but also a bit overblown. A presenter with a collection of clips of the performances would have done the job. Anyway, Bridges wins Best Actor, as he was widely expected to do, gets one of the many standing ovations of the night and starts off on a speech that seems to last forever.

The same setup is used to award Best Actress, for which I’ve been anxious for months. I so want Meryl Streep to win, even though the favorite has been Sandra Bullock for a while now. The individual presentations seem to last even longer than those for the guys, to the point where I start to really dislike the format (even though Stanley Tucci’s intro for Meryl is great). At the end, Sandra wins and I’m heartbroken. She was great, but Meryl in Julie and Julia was out of this world, in a league of her own. It’s a clear injustice. I’m actually curious to see if Bullock will ever get nominated again now.

No more commercial breaks. I guess they realized they’re running so late, they might even break a record! Barbra Streisand is called upon to award the Oscar for Best Director, which this year could go for the first time ever to a woman or a black guy among the five nominees (even though the race has really been between James Cameron and his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow for weeks now). She is hard to read when she opens the envelope, but when she says, “The time has come,” everyone knows it’s not Cameron’s win, which means it’s Bigelow’s. She’s very excited and gracious in her speech, and sounds incredibly emotional.

Finally, Tom Hanks comes onstage to award Best Picture and doesn’t even bother repeating the ten nominees (I don’t like that at all). I guess they’re really freaking out about ending the telecast now. The winner is The Hurt Locker, a well deserving movie that was fought hard to make. Bigelow is back onstage and is handed a second Oscar for co-producing the movie that ends up collecting 6 Oscars out of 9 nominations. Clearly the big winner of the night.

The big loser is Up in the Air, an early favorite that unfortunately goes home empty handed, but other big names like Inglorious Basterds have to make do with few statuettes and even the almighty Avatar only scores in three technical categories.

I got seven wrong, for a grand total of 17/24 correct predictions. I can’t complain.

Goodnight!!