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Best Picture Wrap Up
Feb. 22nd, 2009 03:58 pmAfter watching all the films up for Best Picture, I think Slumdog Millionaire will take the award, but I'd rather see Milk get it.
Besides those two, I really liked Frost/Nixon, but while that was good, and Frank Langhella was pretty amazing as Richard Nixon, it doesn't have the steam of Oscar behind it the way either Slumdog or Milk does. Now, that's nice, actually, since it's not striving for Oscar the same way, but it won't have the votes to put it up and over.
The Reader just bugged me a lot. I felt it went for the emotional manipulation where the horrors of the Holocaust and the guilt of post-war Germany really were powerful enough to speak for themselves. Also? Godwin's Law. No, seriously: unless you're Pol Pot, you can't be more guilty than a Nazi. Of, like, anything. All guilt is not the same. Even if that particular Nazi wasn't so bad, that person was still a Nazi. (And this woman was not one of the nicer ones, just one of the slightly less offensive ones.) I hate that. I hate, hate, hate false equivalences.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was harmless. Not great, not terrible, just what it was. It shouldn't win any of the umpteen billion awards it's up for. I'm not blown away by the CGI/make-up aging effects. (Better than The Reader's, though.) I have a larger problem with its loaded subtext as regards the framing of the tale, however. To my mind, there are certain events that are really charged, and it's a disservice to the movie to include them without addressing them. ( Possible framing spoiler and thoughts on magical realism. )
I didn't hate Benjamin Button, I just feel that we've already covered this ground. I'd like to see film retrospectives of multiple decades start revisiting the "modern" decades that are, nevertheless, some twenty-thirty years old now. (1990 was almost 20 years ago, wtf!?) I mention history class under the cut, and it seemed to be a feature of most American history classes that people I was talking with took: we sort of stop at WWII. You might go into the 1960s, but that's about it. American history lessons are very biased on the first 180 years of the United States' existence (and the hundreds of years of colonization before that). This is a problem of WWII being the loaded war (also discussed under that cut: events that warp a story, of which WWII is an example)--it is that last war that anyone fought with any confidence that it was "right." Regardless of why--because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; because the US economy pulled itself out of the Depression; because of the Holocaust--it was a war that no one looks back and thinks should not have been fought. (Not fought in a specific way, perhaps, or should have been avoided by not penalizing Germany for WWI, fine. But not fight WWII? Unthinkable.) Since then, we've just never had that certainty. We've fallen into a predictable cycle of people making wars as pressure release of tensions (Korea/Vietnam during the Cold War; the "war" on terrorism now), but we recognize as a result that wars should be last resorts (and aren't effective against new enemies).
So history stops at WWII. You get some Civil Rights Era reviews because most of us living today can't imagine how we went from Donna Reed and invisible minorities post-WWII to the assumption (if not realization) of equality we have now. Otherwise? Who the hell went into the Carter years in history? Reagan? Those years, except for movies set in them, don't really get included in retrospectives. We jump past them into the present. (I'll grant that maybe it's too soon to tackle the 90s, but I don't think they're off-limits either. We've certainly had time to process them.) Did nothing happen in the 1980s worth remembering? Don't we owe it to ourselves to re-examine that period, especially since Reagan is almost deified by conservatives these days?
An interesting thing I noticed about the films, besides their tendency to skip around "modern" decades was their focus on the 1970s. Frost/Nixon and Milk couldn't help but be set in that decade, but all the other films at least visited the 1970s. Isn't it curious how all the films up for best picture have some element of the 1970s to them and that two of the films are specifically about the fears/agitations/news/people who were infamous then? I think I'm seeing the connection because of Nixonland, a book that drew parallels to our modern electorate from the one Nixon carved out in his return to power. We've been in several crises not unlike what was fomenting in the 1970s of late. Does that explain the attraction to that period in the Academy?
Besides those two, I really liked Frost/Nixon, but while that was good, and Frank Langhella was pretty amazing as Richard Nixon, it doesn't have the steam of Oscar behind it the way either Slumdog or Milk does. Now, that's nice, actually, since it's not striving for Oscar the same way, but it won't have the votes to put it up and over.
The Reader just bugged me a lot. I felt it went for the emotional manipulation where the horrors of the Holocaust and the guilt of post-war Germany really were powerful enough to speak for themselves. Also? Godwin's Law. No, seriously: unless you're Pol Pot, you can't be more guilty than a Nazi. Of, like, anything. All guilt is not the same. Even if that particular Nazi wasn't so bad, that person was still a Nazi. (And this woman was not one of the nicer ones, just one of the slightly less offensive ones.) I hate that. I hate, hate, hate false equivalences.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was harmless. Not great, not terrible, just what it was. It shouldn't win any of the umpteen billion awards it's up for. I'm not blown away by the CGI/make-up aging effects. (Better than The Reader's, though.) I have a larger problem with its loaded subtext as regards the framing of the tale, however. To my mind, there are certain events that are really charged, and it's a disservice to the movie to include them without addressing them. ( Possible framing spoiler and thoughts on magical realism. )
I didn't hate Benjamin Button, I just feel that we've already covered this ground. I'd like to see film retrospectives of multiple decades start revisiting the "modern" decades that are, nevertheless, some twenty-thirty years old now. (1990 was almost 20 years ago, wtf!?) I mention history class under the cut, and it seemed to be a feature of most American history classes that people I was talking with took: we sort of stop at WWII. You might go into the 1960s, but that's about it. American history lessons are very biased on the first 180 years of the United States' existence (and the hundreds of years of colonization before that). This is a problem of WWII being the loaded war (also discussed under that cut: events that warp a story, of which WWII is an example)--it is that last war that anyone fought with any confidence that it was "right." Regardless of why--because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; because the US economy pulled itself out of the Depression; because of the Holocaust--it was a war that no one looks back and thinks should not have been fought. (Not fought in a specific way, perhaps, or should have been avoided by not penalizing Germany for WWI, fine. But not fight WWII? Unthinkable.) Since then, we've just never had that certainty. We've fallen into a predictable cycle of people making wars as pressure release of tensions (Korea/Vietnam during the Cold War; the "war" on terrorism now), but we recognize as a result that wars should be last resorts (and aren't effective against new enemies).
So history stops at WWII. You get some Civil Rights Era reviews because most of us living today can't imagine how we went from Donna Reed and invisible minorities post-WWII to the assumption (if not realization) of equality we have now. Otherwise? Who the hell went into the Carter years in history? Reagan? Those years, except for movies set in them, don't really get included in retrospectives. We jump past them into the present. (I'll grant that maybe it's too soon to tackle the 90s, but I don't think they're off-limits either. We've certainly had time to process them.) Did nothing happen in the 1980s worth remembering? Don't we owe it to ourselves to re-examine that period, especially since Reagan is almost deified by conservatives these days?
An interesting thing I noticed about the films, besides their tendency to skip around "modern" decades was their focus on the 1970s. Frost/Nixon and Milk couldn't help but be set in that decade, but all the other films at least visited the 1970s. Isn't it curious how all the films up for best picture have some element of the 1970s to them and that two of the films are specifically about the fears/agitations/news/people who were infamous then? I think I'm seeing the connection because of Nixonland, a book that drew parallels to our modern electorate from the one Nixon carved out in his return to power. We've been in several crises not unlike what was fomenting in the 1970s of late. Does that explain the attraction to that period in the Academy?
