Oscar Recap 2013

Well, how did everyone enjoy the show?

Personally, I really liked it (even if it ran over half an hour late) but I'm a big fan of movie musicals.  I thought Seth MacFarlane did a decent job as host and that most of the presenters stuck to the teleprompter instead of trying out their own material.  If it's okay, I'm just going to post my notes in between all the different categories whenever I had any major ones.

Best Supporting Actor:  Christoph Waltz
Best Animated Short:  Paperman
Best Animated Feature:  Brave

Let's talk for a second about the Worst Dressed people.  Brenda Chapman directed a story about a Scottish princess for Pixar and it won an Oscar.  That's awesome.  What's less awesome is her dressing like a Highland fairy godmother.  Leave the costumes for the Ren Faire.

Best Cinematography:  Life of Pi
Best Visual Effects:  Life of Pi
Best Costume:  Anna Karenina
Best Make-up:  Les Miserables

Again, I get that hair and make-up people are artists, legitimate artists.  However, you do not come to a formal event wearing hot pink tights under a mini-dress, Julie Dartnell. 

Best Live Short:  Curfew
Best Short Documentary:  Inocente
Best Documentary:  Searching for Sugar Man
Best Foreign Film:  Amour

I am a total sucker for a musical number and I thought Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jennifer Hudson did great jobs on their performances.

Best Sound Mixing:  Les Miserables
Best Sound Editing:  (tie)  Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall

It has been a long time since I've seen a tie in any category.  For a minute, I thought Mark Wahlberg was kidding.

Best Supporting Actress:  Anne Hathaway
Best Film Editing:  Argo
Best Production Design:  Lincoln
Best Original Score:  Life of Pi
Best Original Song:  Skyfall
Best Adapted Screenplay:  Argo
Best Original Screenplay:  Django Unchained

Tarantino is a huge narcissist.  Even when he was trying to praise his team, it came off as "look what a great job I did!"

Best Director:  Ang Lee

He should have gotten one for Brokeback Mountain.  I think this was just a "oops, we screwed you over previously, please take a trophy for whatever less offensive thing you created this year."

Best Actress:  Jennifer Lawrence

She tripped going up the stairs to accept.  I am not going to make fun of her for that because I think it's wonderful that she's so enthusiastic.  She's a great up-and-coming actress and seems to have a really decent sense of humor.  However, I think it was hysterical that right after that, Meryl Streep came onstage and made a comment about not falling even after she stepped on her dress.  Please tell me that I'm not the only one that remembers Jennifer Lawrence's acceptance speech from the Golden Globes:  "I beat Meryl!"  I would love it down to my pitted, rotten core if Meryl had said something like "I was going to trip on my dress but Jennifer beat me to it."

Best Actor:  Daniel Day-Lewis

He was surprisingly witty.  And creepy.

Best Picture:  Argo

Let's hear it for the little film that could!  Everyone dismissed Argo for not being serious enough, for making too much money, for Ben Affleck showing his abs.  Whatever.  This is one of the few times that I think they may have gotten it right.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay    Crazy people need love too.  That's probably the tagline but the poster's too small to read it.

It's hard to be the token romantic comedy in the Best Picture category.  I get that.  At least it's an acceptable subject:  mental illness.  Can't let people just have a movie that makes them happy, no, it has to have a "message".  Well, the message here is Take Your Medication.

Pat (Bradley Cooper) is signed out of a court-mandated stay in a mental hospital by his mother (Jacki Weaver).  Pat is bi-polar with delusions brought on by stress.  The reason he ended up in psychiatric care is because he almost killed his wife's lover after catching them together in the shower.  To be fair, that would be stressful.  Obsessed with the idea of winning her back, Pat attempts to reconnect with old friends Ronny (John Ortiz) and Veronica (Julia Stiles).  Along the way, he meets Veronica's sister Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a recent widow and depressive.  Tiffany agrees to be a courier for a letter to Pat's wife, violating her restraining order, but in return, forces Pat to be her partner in a dance contest.  Pat's father (Robert DeNiro), a bookie obsessed with his superstitions about the Philadelphia Eagles, doesn't approve and thinks Tiffany will screw up the Eagles' juju. 

As a depressive with no filter, I can readily identify with the awkwardness that comes from having your particular brand of crazy broadcast to the world.  What I liked about this movie was that everyone comes off a little crazy, no matter how normal they seemed outwardly.  Julia Stiles was a scene-stealer and Jennifer Lawrence is rapidly becoming one of my favorite actresses. 

Okay, the Oscars actually started 45 minutes ago so I should have enough time on my DVR to skip all the commercials now. 

War Witch (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Foreign Film    For a movie about child soldiers, this was surprisingly cute.

Komona (Rachel Mwanza) is a twelve-year-old when she is kidnapped and forced into the rebel army of her country.  Viewed as a witch by the rebel leader, she is safe as long as they keep managing to win against the government forces.  However, a boy known as The Magician (Serge Kanyinda) knows that they are in danger and convinces her to run away with him.  Over the next year, they get married and move in with his uncle, The Butcher (Ralph Prosper).  Unfortunately, they are unable to run from their past.

It's not as depressing as Pan's Labyrinth and I think Rachel Mwanza would have been much more deserving of a Best Actress nod than Quvenzhane Willis.  Mwanza had to convey a great deal more range than Willis.  It's probably not one that you could watch over and over but it's a great film and I would encourage everyone to at least rent it.

The Master (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress    This movie sucked.  It has to be one of the biggest wastes of my time I have had yet.  I'm really starting to dislike Joaquin Phoenix.  It's like he's trying to become Daniel Day-Lewis without the talent and just buckets of weirdness instead.

So, this is a thinly-veiled story about scientology.  An author and demagogue named Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) takes in a shiftless alcoholic (Joaquin Phoenix) after World War II and begins to "process" him through his past lives.  His wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), a true believer, has serious reservations about allowing this drunk moron into their Cause. 

It is awful.  There's no real story, no background, just a fucked-up bromance between a ne'er-do-well and a guy who is completely full of shit.  I have no idea why anyone thought this was a good film to make and I sincerely hope everyone nominated loses tonight as punishment for loosing this film onto the world. 

The Sessions (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Supporting Actress    Seriously?  This only got nominated for Best Supporting Actress?  No Best Actor?  No Best Adapted Screenplay?  Really?  That just seems wrong to me.

Not that Helen Hunt doesn't deserve a nomination.  For a 49-year-old woman, she showed a great deal of courage by willing to be shown naked on screen.  It helps that she still has the body of a 25-year-old but still.

But, holy shit, John Hawkes.  How has this man not won an Oscar?  Especially after Winter's Bone.  Everybody thought that was a shoe-in and here he is playing a quadraplegic and nothing?  Maybe it's like the Tropic Thunder curse.  You never go full Disabled.

Based on an article written by poet Mark O'Brian, this is the story of a man (John Hawkes) who decides to lose his virginity at 38.  Difficulty:  he is completely paralyzed by childhood polio and sleeps in an iron lung.  After discussing the situation with his priest (William H. Macy), he decides to seek the services of a professional sex surrogate (Helen Hunt). 

It's funny, it's sweet, and it's readily accessible.  One of the best of the bunch so far.

Speaking of, today is the day, people!  Tonight we get to find out who's walking away with what and who wore something stupid in a desperate bid for attention.  That's right!  Oscar Sunday, coming at you tonight.  Which means that I have until then to post as many nominees as I can find.  I was super-busy at work this week so I didn't get a chance to really watch more than this one and the last short.  So stick around because today is going to be a good old-fashioned movie marathon.

Maggie Simpson in The Longest Daycare (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Animated Short    Finally!  I can knock this one off the list.  I'm actually kind of pissed I had to go through so much trouble for it considering that it's only 4 minutes long and not really worth the effort.  If I had to run around to four different sites for Paperman that would have been different. 

Maggie Simpson is carted off to the Ayn Rand Daycare, which might be funny if I had actually read anything by Ayn Rand.  She just wants to play with butterflies but a creepily-unibrowed baby keeps smashing them.  She finds a chrysalis and does her utmost to protect it from Evil Unibrow. 

Half of what makes The Simpsons funny are the pop culture references but the other half are the voices and without any dialogue, this movie falls kind of flat.  Maybe that's an Oscar requirement, since none of the nominees had any speaking but I found it off-putting here.

Flight (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay    And people thought Lincoln was Oscar bait...

So this is a fairly straightforward morality play about a pilot (Denzel Washington) who saves a planeload of people from certain death but must face his rampant drug and alcohol problems in the ensuing investigation.  Aside from the spectacular crash sequence and Nadine Velasquez's boobs, pretty boring. 

So we're going to skip right past all of that nonsense and talk about John Goodman.  He is easily the most watchable character in the whole movie as Denzel's drug dealer.  Between this and Argo, I'm kind of surprised he hasn't been talked about more.  Of course, it's not like he's some obscure dude that no one's ever heard of but he's been out of the serious limelight since The Big Lebowski.  He's done a lot of voice and TV work in the intervening time but it's really nice to see him owning the silver screen again.

I had President's Day off so you get a bonus post!  yay!

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay    I seriously don't get what all the fuss was about.  Everything I've read said that this movie was basically the best thing since sliced bread and I just don't see it. 

Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Willis) lives with her daddy (Dwight Henry) on a small island in the Gulf of Mexico outside the levees that residents call the Bathtub.  She is surrounded by alcoholics and societal rejects and raised with the most minimal of care.  When her father contracts an illness and the Bathtub is hit by a hurricane, Hushpuppy can hardly be blamed for thinking that it is the end of the world.  Her imagination has the ice caps melting and prehistoric child-eating beasts awakening to ravage the land.  What's a six-year-old to do?  Go looking for her missing mother, of course. 

Honestly, minus the aurochs, this could have been a documentary.  If it were, maybe I would understand why people were all gaga over it.  As it is, it's not a great movie.  It's interesting, sure, and young Miss Wallis does a great job but Best Picture?  Not even close. 

Argo (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Adapted Screenplay    This is probably one of the most watchable of the Best Picture noms.  That probably means it doesn't have a shot in hell of winning.

Based on a true story, the movie is about the CIA-led extraction of 6 Americans from Iran during the 1979 Hostage Crisis.  As the embassy was being taken over, six workers fled out the back door and hid in the Canadian ambassador's (Victor Garber) house.  Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) is called upon to find a way to extract them before they are found and killed.  After watching a movie with his son, Mendez comes up with the idea to fly to Iran and take the Americans out by pretending they're a Canadian film crew on a location shot.  He recruits the assistance of a make-up specialist (John Goodman) and a producer (Alan Arkin) to help him fake the existence of a movie.  Since that's 90% of Hollywood anyway, they jump at the chance. 

This is definitely one of the most quotable of the nominees and, overall, I think it's a very good movie.  Alan Arkin is a scene-stealer and it's nice to see Affleck being a little more subdued.  I don't really know anything about the technical process of editing or mixing film and sound but I did very much like the intercuts of real news footage from the period and the attention paid to finding people who resembled their real-life counterparts.  The score was pretty and unobstrusive, which I'm pretty sure is what it should be. 

As a side note, I've been trying to work my way through the second season of Alias and I couldn't help but wish Jennifer Gardner had made a cameo considering that her fake dad was the ambassador and her real husband was the director of a movie about a CIA agent. 

Adam and Dog (2012)/Head Over Heels (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Animated Short    Thank God for rowthree.com.  They linked to all the Animated Shorts so I can check this category off completely.  Only one more week til the Oscars!  Are you excited yet?

This is a 15-min movie that tells the biblical story of the Fall from Eden from the perspective of Adam's dog.  It's interesting in concept and the animation is very pretty.  I feel like they could have cut it down slightly, though, as I got a little bored about halfway through.  There's no dialogue and barely any music, it's mostly just bird sounds and barking. 

  This short is super-cute.  Walter and Madge have been married a long time but have grown apart, to the point where she lives on the ceiling and he lives on the floor.  But when Walter finds the shoes Madge wore on their wedding day, he decides to try defying their opposite gravities.  Again, there's no dialogue but I found this more entertaining than Adam and Dog.

I take it back.  They don't have The Longest Daycare embedded, just the teaser.  I think I can probably get it on the DVD of the latest Ice Age movie, though.

Murder! (1930)

  I'm going to go ahead and post this one tonight because I'll be on the road back to Maryland all day tomorrow.  

Remember when I was doing all my Hitchcock movies and I told you guys that my mom is a huge fan?  (I actually don't remember if I said that or not and I'm far too lazy to go back and look it up.)  She's a huge fan.  So I asked her last night to suggest something for me to watch and she picked Murder!

It's about an actress named Diana Baring (Norah Baring) who is convicted of killing a rival actress and sentenced to hang.  She doesn't remember anything about the incident, but the evidence was overwhelming and a jury of her peers found her guilty.  Except that after the sentencing, one of the jurors, Sir John (Herbert Marshall) starts to think that maybe she was innocent.  So he recruits the stage manager of Diana's former troupe (Edward Chapman) to help him investigate.

This is another of those police-bungle-everything-so-only-amateurs-solve-cases type of "mystery" movies.  For one thing, Sir John is portrayed as having known the defendant, which would bar him from being on a jury.  This is apparently a departure the movie makes from the book, which simply had him as an observer at her trial.  There are other little things as well that make the movie seem more smug than suspenseful. 

Overall, I would say that it is very much a relic of its time and not nearly as classic as some of Hitchcock's other films. 

Hotel Transylvania (2012)

  I'm down in Alabama this weekend, visiting family but that's not going to stop me from watching movies.  My mother has been trying to get me to watch this one for several weeks now but I've been kind of busy with my Oscar list.  I don't really have access to all my stuff here, though, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

It's okay.  Not great, and I can see why it wasn't nominated for anything, but it's cute.

After a bad experience with humans, Dracula (Adam Sandler) builds a sanctuary hotel for monsters out in the middle of nowhere.  However, when his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez), turns 118, she decides she wants to see the world.  Terrified of losing her, Dracula builds a fake "village" staffed by zombie bellhops in human masks in order to scare her into staying home.  This seems to work until a random backpacker named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) finds his way into the hotel by following the shambling undead.  When boy sees Vampire Girl, they instantly click.  Dracula is less than pleased and spends the majority of the movie trying to keep his guests from finding out their greatest hunter is among them.

The movie features voice work from Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, Cee Lo Green, and David Spade.  Sadly, it also features some extremely lackluster musical numbers, especially the cringe-inducing final one over the credits.  The animation work is good but the story itself is mediocre and predictable.  I wouldn't be able to watch this repeatedly but it's good for a one-time use.

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

  After seeing Bullet to the Head, I was in the mood to keep seeing dumb but flashy things.  Christy and I decided on this one, since she owned it.

Try to contain your shock here, but I have never been terribly interested in cars.  Christy, on the other hand, has actually been involved in street racing when she was in high school.  Point being when she tells me something is a good car movie, I am forced to believe her.

This is a shitty everything-else movie, however.  Paul Walker has got to be one of the worst actors to ever think "I'm too pretty to do real work."  Maybe they could have made something compelling here but then they would have had less time to show suped-up cars and girls in skimpy clothes.  Priorities.

Ben (Paul Walker) is an undercover cop assigned to infiltrate the street racing sub-culture to find out who is using their mad driving skills to rip off semis full of expensive electronics.  So he starts hitting on the sister (Jordana Brewster) of one of them and then loses his car in a race.  Because he actually sucks at racing.  However, the brother, Dom (Vin Diesel) thinks it's adorable and adopts him like a pet bunny.  Ben sucks even harder at being a cop than being a racer and it takes him the entire running time of the movie to figure out who is actually pulling off the heists.  The movie ends with absolutely no resolution but does have a kickass stunt with a train. 

I don't know if I would ever watch 2-6 but it's not bad for mindless entertainment. 

Bullet to the Head (2013)

  This is an objectively terrible movie.  That should be obvious.  In no way is this a masterful tapestry of sight and sound brought to you by accomplished thespians. 

A cop (Sung Kang) and a hitman (Sylvester Stallone) join forces in order to get revenge for their dead partners by taking out a corrupt real estate developer (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), his lawyer (Christian Slater), and his mercenary (Jason Momoa).

That's it.

Sarah Shahi is in it and she gets almost naked enough to be worth the ticket price.  Almost.

I've never been a Jason Momoa fan.  Mostly because all I've ever seen him in is Game of Thrones and he didn't really speak.  I've heard that he's actually quite articulate and intelligent but I've never seen any indications of it until this movie.  He seems like he's having a really good time on-screen, stabbing people and generally being a psycho.  It actually reminded me a little of Brandon Lee, who I never really found attractive until he smiled.  It changed his entire face. 

Don't waste your money on box office tickets for this.  It will be on TNT in about a year and you can watch it then.

Mirror Mirror (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Costumes    I did not hear anyone with anything good to say about this movie.  All I ever heard was how shitty it was.  I would have seen it anyway, because I have seen every movie Tarsem has directed but I admit I was shying away from it.

Snow White (Lily Collins) is an orphan living in the palace with her evil step-mother, the Queen (Julia Roberts).  She manages to get away from the castle and visit the town, only to discover that the Queen has driven everyone to destitution paying for her lavish lifestyle.  However, Snow sees an opportunity in the visiting Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer), who would be able to provide her an army to take back her kingdom.  The Queen also has designs on the Prince, seeing as he is young, handsome, and above all, rich.  She has her Executive Bootlicker (Nathan Lane) take the young princess into the forest and dispose of her, but Snow is saved by 7 dwarves, bandits whom the Queen had previously driven from town for being ugly.  They teach Snow that sometimes you have to fight for the things you believe in.

This is a mostly-cute take on the fairy tale that I think was unfortunately portrayed by terrible trailers.  Lily Collins' eyebrows are the only really distracting things on screen.  I thought Julia Roberts did a great job as the bitchy-yet-fun Queen and you really can't go wrong with Nathan Lane in anything.  People made a big deal about the "Bollywood" number at the end, but it's playing over the credits so if you want to turn that off, you're not going to miss anything.

The costumes were beautiful, as I expected but I don't know if it will win, seeing as the costume designer, Eiko Ishioka, died in January of 2012.  It will not be the first time they have awarded a posthumous Oscar so we'll have to see.

Warm Bodies (2013)

  I've been waiting to see this since I first saw the trailer before the last Twilight movie.  It was cute but not necessarily a "drop everything and run to the theater" kind of movie.  Definitely worth a rental, though.

R (Nicholas Hoult) is a zombie who lives at the airport.  He and his friend M (Rob Corddry) don't really do much except shuffle around and occasionally venture out in packs to hunt fresh brains in the mostly-abandoned city.  That's where R meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), part of a recovery team in the city looking for pharmaceuticals for the remaining humans.  R knows there's something special about her but doesn't know what it is, even after he eats the brain of her ex-boyfriend (Dave Franco) and absorbs all his memories.  All he knows is that he's changing.  So, instead of letting her be killed, he saves Julie and takes her to his 747, hiding her from all the other zombies.  But can a living girl and a living dead boy ever find peace?

For me, Rob Corddry stole the show completely.  His character was hilarious. I haven't seen any of Teresa Palmer's other work but she seemed pretty decent.  Looks a lot like a blond Kristen Stewart, but with talent.  There are no real surprises in the script but it's cute and funny.  It's a decent date movie, if you're a little twisted.