At The Movies, With Bullets!

Normally, I don’t like writing in bullet-point format. However, I have some thoughts about the holiday movie season, and I don’t really feel like weaving them together to make some broader point while maintaining the beautiful prose you’ve become accustomed to on this blog. As a result, you’re getting bullet points.

1. Oscar Buzz Makes Me Nauseous: For whatever reason(s), producers with aspirations of their film winning awards all try to get them released around the holidays. I’ve never really understood why, but that’s just how it is, and I’d estimate that about 60 percent of Best Picture winners were released after Election Day. The silliest thing about this process is that films start getting talked about as Oscar contenders before anyone has even seen them. Seriously, I’ve been reading about “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” and its Academy Award potential for months. Now it might be the greatest movie ever (I haven’t seen it yet), but why don’t we wait until it comes out before we start giving it the “Citizen Kane” treatment? Incidentally, I saw one review refer to it as "original." I don't know everything, but I do know that movies adapted from 87-year-old short stories are not original. Also, how did a movie based on a short story turn out to be 160 minutes? If you make a movie that long, you better be damn sure it's good. I plan on seeing the film because my girlfriend loves the short story, but the kind of "buzz" the film has received reminds of why the Oscars so stupid. It’s completely about hype, and never about the best movies. A perfect example of this phenomenon is . . .

2. The Dark Knight. It Was Stupid: The story had huge holes in it. The metaphors were heavy-handed. It was needlessly violent. The dialogue was moronic. It was just a bad movie, and I don’t get why it is receiving so much hype. In fact, just writing about it is reminding how much I despised it. If Heath Ledger hadn’t died, it wouldn’t be getting talked about for Oscars.

3. Marisa Tomei Is the Benjamin Button Of Movie Stars: A friend of mine was telling me about "The Wrestler," and he commented about how good Marisa Tomei looked, even as an over-the-hill stripper. That's the thing about Tomei, as the years pass, she just looks better and better. When she first emerged as Denise Huxtable's roommate on "A Different World," she was cute in a spunky New Yorker sort of way. That spunky NYC vibe was played up much more effectively during her Oscar-winning performance in "My Cousin Vinnie," and I remember thinking, "I never noticed it during 'A Different World,' but Marisa Tomei is kind of hot." And the recently-turned 44-year-old(!) just seems to be getting hotter.

4. Sean Penn Can Act: Another aspect of the Oscars that I don't like is that it's clear the best actors are not chosen. It's basically a pool of really famous people who got a big break at some point who happen to be in the right Oscar-type movie in a given year. There are hundreds of actors out there who are as talented (or better) than movie stars, they just never got that break for one reason or another. As a result, I never feel like movie stars are actually the best at what they do in the world, so it seems silly to heap even more unnecessary praise on them by giving them awards. Sean Penn is an exception to this.

I saw "Milk" last week, and he is simply exceptional. Unlike pretty much every other movie star this side of Meryl Streep, when I watch Sean Penn I feel like I am watching someone in the 99th percentile of actors in the world. The one major criticism I will make of the film is that the Jack character (played by Diego Luna) makes nails on a blackboard seem pleasant. But then again, the character is based on a real person, so maybe that is how he is in realy life. If that's the case, I wonder what Jack's reaction was to the film was. It's pretty clear that when Milk's friends spoke to the screenwriter, they did not speak kindly of Jack. If it were a work of fiction, I would say the writer should have left him out, but I guess they can't pretend Harvey Milk's long-time boyfriend didn't exist in a biopic about Milk's life. It's really a shame, because he brought nothing to the table.

***After writing this, I was reminded that Jack killed himself in the movie, so there was no way for him to react to the way he was portrayed. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the fact that he was dead emboldened the other people in Milk's life to talk shit about him.

5. Tropic Thunder Was Disappointing: To channel "David Spade's Hollywood Minute," I liked it better the first time I saw it, when it was called "Zoolander." Both are co-written and directed by Ben Stiller. Both feature a self-involved celebrity played by Stiller who doesn't realize he is past his prime and whose nemesis is another high-profile person of the same profession. One tries to spoof modeling (Zoolander), the other spoofs the movie business (Tropic Thunder), so a lot of the celebrity jokes are the same. Both feature a number of celebrities. Both have appearances by Christine Taylor, Stiller's wife. As an aside, besides playing Marcia Brady, has she ever been in anything when Stiller wasn't involved? She was once on Seinfeld, but Jerry Stiller was on that, so it doesn't count.

Unfortunately, "Tropic Thunder" is not nearly as successful of a parody as "Zoolander." For the most part, it was basically just a pointless action movie that wasn't even a parody of anything. There was great word-of-mouth about this film, but it was a let down for me.

6. I Rarely Like A Movie: I say this with full recognition that it's extremely difficult to make a really good movie that is successful in what it is trying to accomplish. As a result, I find myself truly enjoying about 10% of movies I see. In case you care, the only films I enthusiastically endorse from the past year are "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." Slumdog was a well-paced romantic adventure on par with "The Princess Bride." FSM was smartly-executed comedy that was both clever and amusing. Take that, Gene Shalit.