Best Picture Wrap Up
Feb. 22nd, 2009 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenAfter 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. The Holocaust is one of those--you can't just throw it in there without addressing the fallout (which, to be fair, The Reader did do even if it overdid it). With Benjamin Button, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
viridian pointed out to me, there was a theme of storms and water throughout, so I don't begrudge the frame taking place in a hurricane. That's thematically fine. But they made the hurricane into a specific hurricane--Hurricane Katrina. I'm sorry, but that is still a really loaded prop to use as a crutch but never, never, never ever address. It's the loaded gun in Act I that never goes off. It warps the film--you're looking for it to be important, and it really isn't. It's just...there. But Katrina can't just be there. You can't set a film on September 11, 2001 without that casting a pall on the events for the same reason--either you want to use that foreboding sense to cast the events of the film in some light or you don't. If you don't, then what's the point? Why not just set it on any other day? It's bad writing to exploit tragedy by inference and then assume you can ignore the fallout in favor of your writing. Life is stranger than fiction and often much, much more interesting. Balls to that.
Also, I didn't like the stretching out of the time period. It's like high school history class--we don't know what the hell to think about American History past WWII, so all the best dramatic revisits of the 20th century have to cover the period from WWI to WWII and then gloss over the 1950s, 60s, 70s and so on. But the farther we get from the start of last century, the harder it is to have characters who survived over than entire period. People just don't live that long most of the time. In this case, it was stretching, but still plausible. I wasn't happy, but no one else complained, so it's not entirely impossible and some people bought it. In another five years? Forget it. I won't accept it. (Unless something very specific is made of the fact that a person living through that period would be about 100, sort of like Mother Abigail in The Stand--her age is important and not just hand-waved.) To my mind, when doing magic realism that exists in a world that is otherwise unaware/unaffected by that specific existence of something out of the ordinary, you owe it to the audience to provide a framework that is, aside from that one thing, otherwise ordinary. You can totally blow away all the rules, or you can have this one instance being different in an otherwise similar real world. That helps ground the story and lets the audience buy the conceit. I get kind of annoyed by people who'll go, Oh, you can buy a guy aging backwards, but not that a woman in 1960 being pregnant (for the first time) well into her forties is okay. Because I accepted the element of magical realism when I went into the theater, but nothing else was supposed to be or was presented as fantastical--it was all supposed to be tragically real. When you start warping that, it gets a tad irritating.
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. The Holocaust is one of those--you can't just throw it in there without addressing the fallout (which, to be fair, The Reader did do even if it overdid it). With Benjamin Button, as
viridian pointed out to me, there was a theme of storms and water throughout, so I don't begrudge the frame taking place in a hurricane. That's thematically fine. But they made the hurricane into a specific hurricane--Hurricane Katrina. I'm sorry, but that is still a really loaded prop to use as a crutch but never, never, never ever address. It's the loaded gun in Act I that never goes off. It warps the film--you're looking for it to be important, and it really isn't. It's just...there. But Katrina can't just be there. You can't set a film on September 11, 2001 without that casting a pall on the events for the same reason--either you want to use that foreboding sense to cast the events of the film in some light or you don't. If you don't, then what's the point? Why not just set it on any other day? It's bad writing to exploit tragedy by inference and then assume you can ignore the fallout in favor of your writing. Life is stranger than fiction and often much, much more interesting. Balls to that.Also, I didn't like the stretching out of the time period. It's like high school history class--we don't know what the hell to think about American History past WWII, so all the best dramatic revisits of the 20th century have to cover the period from WWI to WWII and then gloss over the 1950s, 60s, 70s and so on. But the farther we get from the start of last century, the harder it is to have characters who survived over than entire period. People just don't live that long most of the time. In this case, it was stretching, but still plausible. I wasn't happy, but no one else complained, so it's not entirely impossible and some people bought it. In another five years? Forget it. I won't accept it. (Unless something very specific is made of the fact that a person living through that period would be about 100, sort of like Mother Abigail in The Stand--her age is important and not just hand-waved.) To my mind, when doing magic realism that exists in a world that is otherwise unaware/unaffected by that specific existence of something out of the ordinary, you owe it to the audience to provide a framework that is, aside from that one thing, otherwise ordinary. You can totally blow away all the rules, or you can have this one instance being different in an otherwise similar real world. That helps ground the story and lets the audience buy the conceit. I get kind of annoyed by people who'll go, Oh, you can buy a guy aging backwards, but not that a woman in 1960 being pregnant (for the first time) well into her forties is okay. Because I accepted the element of magical realism when I went into the theater, but nothing else was supposed to be or was presented as fantastical--it was all supposed to be tragically real. When you start warping that, it gets a tad irritating.
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?
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 09:03 pm (UTC)The problem is, what we would say about them is completely lopsided. It could properly serve only to completely invalidate one major noisy (and VERY wealthy) body of American political thought. Reagan won't be discussed because he's deified by conservatives, and if we admitted what an awful person and President he was, we'd have to go toe-to-toe with the Olin Foundation et al. So don't expect to see that in the history books until enough time has passed that we can slap a coat of varnish on it and chalk it up as some stuff that happened, rather than something that remains powerfully relevant in modern politics.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 09:19 pm (UTC)It's so sad that that's true. Like we were saying on the day, it's killing me that the activism we saw in Milk got set back. Of course, there's not the movement's fault; AIDS and the panic related to it really derailed the movement.
It's so hard to believe we haven't been able to really dissect Nixon yet, though. I mean, Reagan lives on in zombie conservatism, but Nixon? Haven't we pretty thoroughly flogged that horse dead again?
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 09:42 pm (UTC)Ford is an interesting problem. History has determined that his pardon of Nixon was the right solution. Today, we're debating whether or not to prosecute another president's administration. (I doubt we'll actually take Dubya himself up on charges.) I suppose that explains a lot about how we haven't been able to put Dick Nixon to bed just yet.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 09:35 pm (UTC)