Frothy Ruminations

Okay, there you have it. How well did you do? I’ll note that I got the six major awards correctomundo!

Did you follow our live blog? No? Well, you can replay it.

Thoughts: Didn’t like the show overall. Martin and Baldwin were good hosts, but they had terrible, terrible writers. They were able to milk some laughs out of some really thin material, and they worked well together, so that’s something. But the jokes were just awful.

Second, way, way too much time was spent on a bloated dance number. I really can’t imagine why anyone would think an extended dance number would be better than what they used to do, which was have elaborate musical numbers for the nominated songs. Those were discarded because they made the show run too long. So instead we get this junk? Really?

Third, the Best Picture award was almost casually handed out by Tom Hanks at the end. Kathryn Bigelow, who had won for Best Director, had just left the stage. Hanks sauntered on, said something about the last time there were ten nominees was 1943, when Casablanca won, and then he rattled off the ten for this year, and in the space of about four seconds announced that The Hurt Locker had won. No setup, no indication of this being, you know, an important award. Yes, the most important award of the night was handed out as if it were an afterthought. Just really shoddy work there by the producers – and Tom Hanks, frankly. Awful.

Some of you like to tipple. That means drinking alcoholic beverages. Although how can a beverage be alcoholic, really? Does it have to go to AA meetings? “Hi, my name is Dr. P.” “Hello, Dr. P.”

Anyway, for those of you who like to take a swig of something – anything – when something specific happens, Film Drunk has come up with an Oscars-telecast game for you to play. Let’s see who passes out first!

So give these a shot:

Every time someone mentions Haiti, Chile, or earthquakes; take a drink.
Every time someone references the Na’avi, Pandora, blue people, Avatar, James Cameron, or 3D; take a drink.
Every time you see someone wearing a colored ribbon on their lapel; drink.
Every time you stifle a fat joke about Gabourey Sidibe; drink.
Reading glasses? Someone pretends to go off teleprompter? Drink.
Music starts to play before someone finishes their speech? Drink.
Fat guy with a beard on stage? Drink.
“I’m honored just to be mentioned with the other nominees.” Drink.
Someone makes a Meryl Streep joke; drink.
Random cut to George Clooney in the audience? Finish your beer.
Winner cries during acceptance speech? Finish your beer.
Meryl Streeps takes a dump on the stage? Take three speedballs and queef on a turtle.

If you thought that the Best Picture award was given to the movie with the most votes in that category, think again. That ain’t how it’s going to be done this year.

According to this CNN post, there’s a new scoring system in play this year. Each voter ranks the ten nominees in order of awesomeness, 1 being REALLY GREAT and 10 being only somewhat good. Then all the ballots with Movie X in the number 1 slot are counted. If no one film has a majority of the votes, then the movie with the least number 1 votes is eliminated, and its ballots are redistributed according to the number 2 slot. And so on.

Confused? Don’t blame ya. But the idea here is that a movie that most people really like will win over one that polarizes people – i.e., one in which half of the voters think it’s great and half think it stinks.

You might not know this, but the Oscars are tomorrow. I know, I haven’t posted much on them recently. But it’s true. And some of you are thinking, “Pfft, I don’t watch them [the Oscars]. I’ve never even heard of most of the movies!”

But that is no excuse for not voting for who you think will win! Think about the movies that have won in the past. Did anyone see them? Some of them were seen by maybe four people! I know this is true because it was on the Internet.

More to the point, the voters who vote on these voting things (the real votes, not the ones in our poll) don’t always see all the movies, either. They guess. Just like you! You’re like twinsies!

So click the link. Meanwhile, let’s see how the results look so far:

Best Picture: Avatar 5, Hurt Locker 4, Inglourious Basterds 3. Close.

Best Actor: Bridges 9, Freeman 4. Not so close.

Best Actress: Bullock and Streep, 8 each. Uberclose.

Best Director: Bigelow and Cameron, 6 each; Tarantino, 4. Uberclose.

Best Supporting Actor: Waltz, 10. So not close.

Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, 9 votes. Also so not close.

Other than the Actor and Supporting categories, we have horse races. Maybe FR readers will be prescient!

And don’t forget, you can go to Yahoo’s Oscars page and fill an actual ballot! Fun for the entire family.

In this reimagining of the Lewis Carroll stories, Alice returns to Wonderland after a ten-year absence and finds herself pegged as the savior for the mystical land, now ruled with an iron fist and bulbous head by the Red Queen (Helenda Bonham Carter). Tim Burton’s film is, as expected, visually stunning and imaginative but suffers from a predictable plot and 3D effects that feel sort of unecessary.

Alice (newcomer Mia Wasikowska) is now 19 years old and dreams nightly of her previous journey into Wonderland, but she has no memory of the actual visit. Her mother wants Alice to be married into a rich and powerful family, and at the beginning of the movie Alice and her mother appear at a posh to-do thrown by the parents of a snotty, dumb-looking suitor, who of course pops the question to her in front of a hundred simpering guests. But our Alice isn’t ready for such a committment to such a drip, so off she runs, comically falling down a hole in pursuit of the White Rabbit.

Once in Wonderland, Alice encounters several of the characters she met during her earlier visit: Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, the Blue Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the Dormouse, and the March Hare. It seems that the denizens of Wonderland have been awaiting Alice’s return so that she can free them from the Red Queen’s tyranny, something about a mystical calendar that prophesies Alice slaying the Jabberwocky.

As with most Burton films, this one is a real treat to watch. In fact, if you just turned the volume down and put your special glasses on, you’d be amazed at the jaw-dropping CGI. CGI gets a bad rap nowadays, as if it were always a short cut to actual acting. But here, I found the effects to be creative and wonderful to behold. Indeed, Bonham Carter and Depp have as much to do with their characters’ personalities as the CGI does.

It might be that the movie doesn’t lend itself very easily to 3D, but I think it’s more likely that the script wasn’t tailored quite enough to that technology. For example, the 3D Journey to the Center of the Earth, for all of its problems, was able to integrate 3D into the plot somewhat seamlessly, with boulders and birds alike flying toward the audience. Burton’s Alice in Wonderland doesn’t do that quite enough for the 3D to be really worthwhile. On the other hand, the pure animation of the movie is reminiscent of Coraline, and that’s a very favorable comparison indeed. Wonderland here isn’t meant to be some beautiful, pristine land; it’s a land damaged by the touch of the bitter Red Queen, and you get a real sense of ominous peril.

On the plus side, the acting and voicing is really top notch. JOhnny Depp is always a lot of fun to watch, in my estimation, no matter how goofy his hair may be (and it’s plenty odd here). Sure, he turns in the affected performance from time to time, like his Willy Wonka, but his Mad Hatter here is both vulnerable and heroic (something that perhaps Lewis Carroll hadn’t envisioned). But Bonham Carter is absolutely stunning as the Red Queen. She manages to be both terriftying and hilarious at the same time. The Red Queen, full of vanity but desperate for acceptance, is at once the most charismatic character in the movie.

Another down side is that it seems to take forever and a day for Alice to even get to Wonderland. I think Burton spends a little too much time with the so-called outside world, at both the beginning and the end of the movie. What Alice’s life is like outside Wonderland should be only of minimal importance to this story, I think. What matters to us is what happens to her in Wonderland, how she will persevere, who will she meet, and at which sizes will she be? It’s helpful to know that Alice is about to be married to a selfish brat, but we don’t need to spend 20 minutes on her outside-world situation.

A final debit is that the movie operates on two tracks: one is a fantastic voyage replete with beautiful and amazing creatures and things, and the other is a standard-issue save-the-downtrodden heroine plot thread. The latter could have been scripted by any number of minimum-wage screenwriters. It reminded me of all of those movies in which some plucky hero or heroine fights all odds (as well as a lack of strength and wits) and somehow defeats the evil menace. Alice is no Lara Croft; she’s not even a Red Sonja. She’s just a teenager who’s not even sure if she’s dreaming or not.

Alice in Wonderland does have its moments, but it tries to hard to mix a great children’s story with a mythology and magic and kidnapping and revenge and other dark themes. And beware if you take children to see this. Even though it’s a PG-rated movie, the film does contain a bit of violence, in particular a scene in which a baddie gets an eye plucked out.

Alice in Wonderland: **1/2

The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll’s story was released in – get this – 1903. It’s been recently restored by the BFI National Archive and can be viewed online free of charge.

Now, it’s only 10 minutes long, so don’t bother cooking up some popcorn. Maybe take a long sip of Chardonnay or something.

View it here!

Our Polls Are Still Open

We have less than a week before the Big Day. It’s sort of the Super Bowl for movie geeks, so forgive the extra posting. This is it! This is for all the marbles! Hey, if it helps, you can picture the nominees as if they were WWE wrestlers heading into the ring. Up would saunter in wearing some clown costume. The Hurt Locker would look like it was ‘roided up. Avatar would be computer generated. You get the picture.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the only awards show there is for movies. Golden Globes? C’mon. They just cover the same ground as the Oscars and the Emmys and the Grammys. The Blockbuster Awards? The People’s Choice Awards? Useless. The guild awards and critics’ awards are nice, because they hold a bit of niche prestige. But the Oscars are what it’s all about.

You can also head over to Oscars.com and complete a ballot. Go on, make your best guess. We’ll wait.

On Sunday, we’ll live blog the stuffing out of the show. Imagine! Minute-by-minute snark! Why, that’s something you can’t get anywhere else on the Internet, am I right?

UPDATE: I do not recommend using the Oscars.com poll. ABC makes you register before you can vote. Okay, you think, no big deal. But then even after you register, the site won’t permit you to vote unless you give them your address and phone number – and they’re not optional. Wow.

UPDATE II: Try Yahoo’s Oscar ballot!

Ricky Gervais plays a sad-sack writer in a world in which everyone’s completely honest with one another,until he discovers that it’s possible to say something that’s not entirely true. As a result, he finds his chances with a dreamy girl (Jennifer Garner) improve, but his life gets more complicated when he informs the world of the afterlife.

Mark Bellison writes for a company that produces lecture films, and Bellison’s films haven’t been entirely successful of late. Times are so bad that the company’s president (Jeffrey Tambor) is about to fire Mark – if only he can gin up enough courage to tell him so. Mark’s chief rival Brad Kessler (Rob Lowe), the firm’s most popular writer, is always putting Mark down and trying to sabotage him at every turn. But none of that matters once Mark goes on a blind date with Anna (Garner), who’s more interested in a mate who will be a good genetic match for her, thus helping her produce adorable, smart kids and not fat, snub-nosed kids but who agrees to date Mark only to get her gold-digging mother off her back.

Meanwhile, Mark’s mother takes seriously ill, and on her deathbed she becomes terribly afraid of what’s about to happen to her – as we all would be here, in our reality-based world. Instead of telling his mother that he really has no idea what’s to happen to her – which would, understandably, heighten her terror – Mark tells her that she’s going to a better place, a place where she can have her own mansion and be happy all the time. And this little white lie might not have been much of an issue, but the hospital staff overhears Mark and leaps to the conclusion that he has some inside information on the afterlife.

Gervais is perfectly cast as the schlubby writer. Gervais is one of those actors who can come across either as an effete snob (like Dr. McPhee in Night at the Museum) or just an Everyman, and it’s mainly because of his wonderful comic timing, which he perfected after years on BBC’s original The Office; he’s adept at playing the straight man or the condescending twit, in other words. (The man is a true wit; he also cowrote, coproduced, and codirected this movie.)

And he has a good cast to work with. Garner is appropriately cute, and she and Gervais make an excellent comic team. Anna is superficial, but no more so than anyone else in this fictional world. She’s not intentionally mean. It’s just that in that world, it’s okay to tell your date that they don’t really look great in that suit and that they aren’t expecting to have a good time on their date. Lowe sort of mails it in as the oily Brad, but it’s a role that fits him perfectly. Louis CK has a slight role as one of Mark’s buddies; Jonah Hill, on the other hand, steals his scenes as Mark’s downtrodden fellow tenant. There are also uncredited cameos by a couple of Oscar-nominated actors. Tina Fey makes a lot out of her tiny role as Mark’s secretary – she’s a real hoot.

But the movie has too many musical montages, which are generally used to pad out the running time of a weak movie. Montages like these don’t further the plot and are simply boring – they’re just a way to move things along with anything actually happening. In addition, there are a few moments in which the charm factor almost completely disappears, times when you’re suddenly not so sympathetic toward Mark, times when there’s an uneasy shift toward a more serious tone that simply feels out of place. And because the tone shifts so abruptly, it almost feels as if the movie isn’t quite sure what it wants to be for a brief time before it lurches back to being a comedy of errors. And when it does THAT, even though the tone is more fitting, the plot falls into rut of predictability. Let’s just say there’s no twist ending.

Gervais is a very engaging comedic actor and has been for some time. This was the first feature he’s directed, and it’s not a bad freshman effort at all. It’s just that the movie sort of jumps around a lot, unsure whether it wants to be sweet or sour. The good news is that the sweet parts are genuinely well done, and Gervais the actor does a great job of evoking sympathy for his plight, even when the situation is all his fault. The Invention of Lying is not without its charms, but its uneven pacing and attitude produce only sporadic – but sincere – laughs.

The Invention of Lying: **1/2

Oscar practically courts controversy. Sometimes it’s in the nominees (“What? Y didn’t get nominated”), but sometimes it’s behind the scenes stuff. Like in this latest example:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considering action against a producer of The Hurt Locker who sent multiple e-mails urging academy members to vote for his movie in the Oscar best-picture race and “not a $500 million film” — an obvious reference to close-competitor Avatar.

Essentially, the producer sent out emails telling people to vote for his movie instead of Avatar. Which is fine, except apparently it runs counter to an official Academy rule

against sending mailings that “attempt to promote any film or achievement by casting a negative light on a competing film or achievement,” according to academy spokeswoman Leslie Unger.

So it’s not that he was promoting The Hurt Locker, it’s that he was putting Avatar down a bit. (I think we can all agree that Avatar hardly needs more positive press.)

This is what you call a ginned-up controversy. Why? Because this kind of subterfuge happens all the time during the run-up to Oscar night. Agents and crew members send emails to their fellow voters, trying to sway them, and some of them say vote A instead of B. Big deal.

The only reason the Academy is considering taking steps against the producer is that Pete Hammond of the LA Times talked about it in a recent column, drawing (negative) attention to the practice.

The upshot of all of this is that because of this statement from the Academy, voters might be a little more reluctant to vote for The Hurt Locker for Best Picture and – shudder – more likely to vote for Avatar, a bloated CGI cartoon. Even if they don’t do anything, the measures they’re considering – removing the movie from Oscar consideration, taking Chartier’s Oscar tickets away – all seem like gross overreactions. The producer hasn’t been nominated before and might not have understood what he couldn’t do, but even if he knew it wasn’t cool, how his actions harm anyone is beyond me.

The Crazies, a remake of a seldom-seen 1972 George Romeo film, is about a small town whose inhabitants drink tainted water and become deranged. The movie is slick but still terrifying, relying not only on wacked-out effects but also on unadulterated suspense to really rattle your nerves.

At a Little League game in Ogden Marsh, Iowa, a man wanders into the outfield carrying a shotgun. When the man raises the weapon, Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) shoots him dead. But the man wasn’t drunk, he’d just gone crazy. Dutton investigates further, with the help of his deputy Russell (Joe Anderson), and discovers that a plane carrying a deadly cargo has crashed into a nearby creek, thus poisoning the town’s drinking water.

From there, events quickly get out of hand, as anyone who’d drunk water from their taps becomes first listless and unresponsive, then mumbly, then completely unhinged. But that’s only the beginning of the nightmare for the town, which is then surrounded by a military force bent on containing the virus by any means necessary.

This is only kind of a zombie film. I mean, no one’s dining on the flesh of their living compatriots, there’s no shambling, and mindless killing. (There’s plenty of killing, but the afflicted people still have the capacity for reason.) One thing I liked about this was that precious time isn’t spend trying to discover the reason for everyone’s behavior; attention is focused on the survivors and how they react to what’s going on. I also appreciated that at no time does anyone, even the sheriff, have this superhuman ability to know what must be done and how to do it. Dutton isn’t a superhero, he’s a sheriff.

Another thing that helps a lot is the pacing. Too often, things either move so quickly that you can’t figure out what’s being done to whom or too slowly so that the suspense angle becomes the boredom angle. This is crucial for a horror film, which basically trafficks in suspense. Director Breck Eisner keeps the action coming without holding up the story (e.g., no drawn-out standoffs when it would look implausible), and there are plenty of creeping-up-on-you moments to choke twelve cows.

Olyphant looks a lot like a younger Bill Paxton here, and he’s a good fit – Sheriff Dutton is a solid leader, but he’s not an improbable one. He’s the kind of guy who rises to the occasion, not surpasses it completely. If you’re looking for a movie where the hero is always armed to the teeth and subsequently never gets much more than a scratch on him, this isn’t for you. Dutton has to constantly fight with his own instincts and change his attitude during the course of the movie (save everyone, save his wife, save a few people, save himself).

People who make horror movies know they’re making them for a pretty select audience. Lots of people don’t like horror movies at all, and those who do are somewhat picky about them (particularly with so many big-budget ones from which to choose), so standards are high. It’s important to grab that core audience, show them something they haven’t seen or haven’t seen done particularly well, then smack them upside the head. Classic horror films used the horror of the unseen to great effect, and more-recent genre films try the same thing. (One reason for this is that we’ve become inured to in-your-face slasher films, because the anticipation of the slasher doing his slashing has largely been eroded. But that’s a digression right there.

Basically, if zombie movies in general are your bag, you should love The Crazies. (If you don’t like any horror films regardless, there’s no way you should see this.) The Crazies is effectively scary, mixing human emotions with raw blood and gore and endless edge-of-your seat thrills.

The Crazies: ***