An unsurprisingly disappointing Academy Awards evening….

The Oscars were last night and those of you who know me (I say that a lot) know how huge of a fan of the cinema I am. So it might surprise you to hear that I barely watched the Academy Award telecast last night. Maybe 15 minutes. Naturally, I checked the MSN liveblog after the thing was over and I read a few reviews. As you might imagine, it was nearly-universally agreed that the entire show was an awful bore. It’s a frustrating paradox that so many fantastic films can be released every year just for the industry’s annual award show to be little more than smarmy, self-interested pats on the back between soulless and bored millionaires.

Even still, I almost always watch the Oscars, but this year I just couldn’t be bothered. Leora and I turned it on an hour after it started, watched a couple of the weird documentary awards or whatever, and then moved into the bedroom to unwind after a long day. Our weird “backup” TV in our room wouldn’t tune in the channel the Oscars were playing on. Leora asked me if I wanted to go back into the living room to continue watching, and I said “nah”. That might be due to this year’s award winners nearly all being slam dunks. No drama, no upsets, no point in watching.

The very first blog post I made on the Schadendude (if I recall) was a short little blurb about how the Academy increased the Best Picture nominations from 5 to 10 for this year’s program. If they thought that doing so would also increase the chances of the winner being a mystery, they were way off. As it was in the days of 5 nominations, this year there were only two movies with a real chance of winning – Avatar and The Hurt Locker. Thanks to being the movie with the latest buzz or Oscar “push”, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture last night. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m really not interested. I’ll tell you who HAS seen it, though – a lot of Iraq War veterans who, almost down to the last man, say that the so-called “hyper-realistic” war movie is laughably unrealistic in several vital spots. But it won Best Picture anyway. Huh.

Not to say that I necessarily thought Avatar deserved Best Picture either. Yes, the visual effects were the best I’ve ever seen, and it won that category, as it deserved to. But a film isn’t supposed to be all about eye candy. You can gussy up a movie with pretty landscapes and thrilling fight scenes all you want, but if the story isn’t up to par, there’s no way it should be considered for Best Picture (*ahem* Transformers 2 *ahem*). To be clear, Avatar is a billion times better than anything Michael Bay has ever touched, but when I’m watching a movie and can see plot points directly lifted from Ferngully, The Secret of NIMH, Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Last Samurai, and I’m not even TRYING to notice the DIRECT similarities, that’s a problem. Great movie, but not Best Picture.

So who should have won? Well as far as I’m concerned, I was all for a couple of the nominees who didn’t have a prayer. Most glaringly, District 9, which was spectacular, (especially considering that both the lead actor and director were working on their very first feature film) had zero chance of winning. I don’t get as much chance to get out and watch movies as I used to, but I saw most of the big ones last year – Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Star Trek, Avatar – and I probably enjoyed District 9 more than any of them. But let’s be honest – if the Academy hadn’t increased the nominations from 5 to 10, District 9 would clearly have been shut out. It’s almost more insulting that it WAS nominated because it’s pretty obvious that the Academy put it up as a pity nomination to try to change their image of only nominating dour and depressing dramas. That’s also why Up was nominated, another great movie that had no chance of winning.

My other favorite of the year was Up in the Air, which had early buzz pushing it to the top. Unfortunately, that fizzled out a couple months ago, to the point where it was completely shut out of its nominated categories. I would have been hard pressed to decide between District 9 and Up in the Air if I had a vote, but I think I would have ultimately gone with Up in the Air. I think its story was phenomenal and one for our present reality – an independent contractor who travels all over the country and fires people for a living, hired by managers hit hard by the recession who don’t have the guts to do it themselves. Who can’t relate to that these days? In what was literally the ONLY real surprise of the evening, Up in the Air lost Best Adapted Screenplay to Precious (another movie I have no interest in seeing). So it won nothing, evidently due to rich, white Academy voters experiencing pangs of white guilt and voting for the movie with the big, fat black girl who regularly gets the sh*t kicked out of her by her crazy mom. Yeah, that sounds like a GREAT time at the movies. And the only Oscar that Up in the Air had a realistic chance of winning goes…well…up in the air.

I was pleased that Jeff Bridges won Best Actor for Crazy Heart, which means Flynn from Tron and The Dude is now an Academy Award winner. Way overdue there. And Sandra Bullock won Best Actress, which makes her the first person ever to win a Razzie for WORST Actress (All About Steve) and the Oscar for BEST Actress (The Blind Side) in the same year. Weird!

But when it all comes down to it, I can’t get too annoyed by it all. To be honest, the Oscars are more about politics and Hollywood execs scratching the backs of the voters than they are about what movies really deserve to win the awards. When a movie portrays itself as showing a realistic view of the War in Iraq and veterans of said war say that it contains a myriad of glaring mistakes, should it still win Best Picture? Well, it did, so what does that tell you? When the obvious runner-up has a copycat plot that contains elements of at LEAST a half-dozen prominent feature films and barely has an ounce of originality, should it still win Best Picture? Well, it almost did, so what does THAT tell you?

I read a piece online yesterday by a guy who was a Corporal and served a 2-year stint in Iraq up until a couple years ago. He specifically listed 4 or 5 different instances in The Hurt Locker where a military character or group of characters did something that would NEVER happen in a real combat situation, either because it was monstrously stupid, expressly forbidden by regulations, or both. The interesting thing about the piece (besides outing The Hurt Locker for being unrealistic, counter to its claims of being “hyper-realistic”) was its tone. The author wasn’t being funny or smarmy or sarcastic. He was angry, angry at Hollywood for badly botching a real situation and misrepresenting contemporary war. Don’t get me wrong. I’m really happy for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar for her work in The Hurt Locker. Talk about an overdue achievement. But the fact that she won for what has been outed as a wildly imperfect film is a little oft-putting.

The troubling thing about all of this is that this either shows the declining quality of cinema or the declining relevance of the Oscars. When the Best Picture is a war movie that gets the “war” part wrong and the runner-up borrows nearly its entire plot from other movies, does that mean that movies are getting worse? Or is the Academy now so overrun by company hacks and self-involved executives that they wouldn’t know a good movie from a bad batch of caviar? Considering the fantastic movies that just didn’t have the political clout to come out winners last night, I’ll go with the latter.

Adidas’ 2010 Star Wars line of footwear are only about 10 years too late

Hello all. Gabe here, figuring that a 3-month hiatus is long enough and gee, maybe it’s FINALLY time for a blog post, eh? So let’s do it up right with a Star Wars story. Never a bad idea.

Thanks to wildammo.com, interested consumers now have a sneak peek into Adidas’ planned line of Star Wars shoes that will be released a few at a time throughout 2010. Variations include the ‘TIE-fighter’ style —

— the ‘X-wing pilot orange’ style —

— the ‘Stormtrooper’ style —

— the ‘Darth Vader’ style —

… and a few others, including a Yoda style, Han Solo style, and an AT-AT style. Looks like the shoes will be roughly $100 a pair, give or take a few bucks.

As a longtime Star Wars fan, this is great. Look at those TIE fighter shoes, yo! Got the TIE pattern on the sides and everything! Fantastic. What a great line of shoes!

And also puzzling. I mean, let’s think about this from a marketing standpoint for a second. Looking at these shoes, who are these (and for that matter, the vast majority of shoes) marketed towards? Kids. What KID is going to look at those orange numbers up there and think “Oh, I’ve GOTTA have those!”? Not really sure, because if memory serves, Return of the Jedi was the last Star Wars movie to show anyone in those orange jumpsuits and that was 1983. So the only people that those shoes are going to hold any meaning for are the 35+ crowd.

Then there’s the “stormtrooper” ones. I don’t mean to unleash my inner SW nerd, but what am I looking at here? What’s I’m looking at is a couple of SANDTROOPERS who have been airbrushed to look like a couple of burnt marshmallow troopers and then here’s a couple of pearly WHITE stormtrooper shoes. Something doesn’t jive there. Yeah, those shoes are pretty spiffy but who else is starting to get the idea that the guys in charge of marketing these things don’t know the difference between a Star War and a Star Trek?

That’s nothing, though, compared to the supposed ‘Darth Vader’ line that look suspiciously like a pair of black sneakers that you could buy at the local Payless. Am I blind? I’m sitting here looking at them and I don’t see a single distinguishing characteristic that screams ‘Darth Vader’. What am I missing? Just because they’re black doesn’t turn them into Darth Vader shoes. Ok, I think the tongue might have a pic of Vader on it, as I sit here squinting, but the angle in which they were photographed is so terrible that I can’t tell. Isn’t that something that the marketers might want to make obvious to prospective buyers? You know, that they can SEE what it is they’re ordering? The Force is not with these guys.

I think the real problem here, besides the fact that the marketers clearly ran out of ideas so they had to make a quick Target run and pose some $4.99 action figures with their $100 shoes, is that half of these selections are totally lost on their key demographic. Sadly, 9-year-olds who are all into Star Wars right now only know the feeble prequel trilogy and the abysmal Clone Wars cartoon. They don’t know a Han Solo from Pokemon. There are no AT-AT’s in the prequels, no orange jumpsuits, no TIE fighters. So at least half of these shoes are really only going to be bought by 30 to 40-year-olds trying to get hip while living out some nostalgia at the same time. And since my generation is wise to George Lucas and his never-ending merchandise cash grab, I can’t see this turning out too well. Also, let’s face it – the mere existence of the Prequel Trilogy and laughably-atrocious Clone Wars cartoon have sucked much of the cool out of Star Wars. Episodes I-III didn’t build upon a great universe. They filled it full of stupid. If these shoes had been released in the late 90s, when Lucas re-released the original trilogy in theaters, they couldn’t have put enough sweatshop children to work quickly enough to meet the demand. Now, these shoes will probably come out to a resounding ‘huh, those are pretty cool….I guess…”

That being said, I’ll take a pair of the TIE fighter line, size 11s. 🙂

The 10 Worst Movies…that I Own

Several months ago, I was having one of those days where the time was reaaalllly dragging by. So to pass some time, I decided to count how many DVDs that Leora and I owned. I seem to remember that it was something like 240 or so. So, yeah, I like movies. We haven’t bought too many new ones lately, just a couple here and there. So I’d say we probably have maybe 260 or 270 by now.

I’m pretty picky about the movies that I buy, as I would figure most film lovers are. I’ve either seen the movie and loved it, or I’ve gotta be pretty positive that I’ll love it. But every now and then, you see that $5 bin of movies at the Best Buy or Wal-Mart and the super-cheap price causes you to pull the trigger on a movie that you wouldn’t have even looked at if it was $15. So yeah, maybe not EVERY movie I own is a great movie, or even a good movie, or even a movie with any redeeming qualities at all. 😉

Anyhow, I went through my DVDs today and here are the worst selections from my collection…(disclaimer: I have intentionally NOT included any movies that Leora owned before we were married. We agree on a lot of movies, but we don’t agree on everything. And it wouldn’t be fair to include some of her movies here that I might not like. The intention here is to make fun of myself and some crap movies that I, for some reason, own. It’s not to belittle the wifey for her movie tastes. So even though WE own both of the Alien vs. Predator movies, I won’t list them here. Wuv ya, baby! lol)

On to the list…

10. The Quick and the Dead (1994 – 67% Rotten Tomatoes (RT) rating) – The Quick and the Dead is a spaghetti western directed by Sam Raimi. The direction is awesome. And the movie features such stars as Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, and Leonardo DiCaprio, among others. One of those others is Sharon Stone…and she’s god-awful in this. Unfortunately, she’s also the main character. Sharon Stone’s character is a revenge-seeking gunslinger out to destroy Gene Hackman’s evil sheriff character. He killed her father, blah blah blah. There was no need to cast Stone in this role, a role she probably made a decent amount of money from. Raimi could have put anyone in that role and told them “never change your facial expression from ‘seething hatred'”. Hackman is awesome, although often overdoing the whole “evil” aspect. The other actors are alright, but the story sucks. And did I mention that Sharon Stone is ridiculously bad? It’s kinda fun to watch, but no amount of awesome camera angling and editing by Raimi can save a movie from a horrible acting performance. Note that this movie was given fairly good reviews, but Sharon Stone-face’s boring “revenge” character kinda ruined it for me.

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9. Kingdom of Heaven (2005 – 39% RT rating) – This is a big crusade epic, directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner), one of my favorite directors. It starred Orlando Bloom, who really isn’t bad in this, Ed Norton, and Jeremy Irons. It’s also supremely boring. I remember watching this in the theaters, thinking that the battle scenes and sets and acting was all really quite good. But the exposition in this movie is soul-crushing. Scenes where nothing happens besides people sitting around and talking for minutes on end are all over the place. The story, once you muddle through tedium, is cool, especially for a history buff like me. But I’ve seen this movie once, now own it, and have never had the urge to see it again. One of my close personal friends, Sean, has told me that the Director’s Cut is rumored to be a vast improvement in pacing and plot, but I’ve never seen it, so I cannot say if that’s true or not…

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8. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002 – 67% RT rating) – You can see on my blog’s header, of all places, that I’m a “Star Wars math geek”. But I don’t have a blind devotion to the franchise. This movie was horrible. And I don’t even own Episode I. I’ve seen it, several times, and have never had the urge to spend $10 or $15 on a movie that I am quite familiar with and already passionately dislike. If I did, it would be on this list. I DO own Episode II, thus its inclusion here. To say that Attack of the Clones is better than Phantom Menace is like saying that I’d rather have just one arm cut off instead of both. Neither is a good thing, but one is a slightly better alternative over the other. How it has a 67% RT rating is honestly beyond me. I think what you’re seeing there is Star Wars geeks giving a bad movie a break because it has “Star Wars” in the name. This was not a 67% good movie. It was bad, really bad, with one of the worst “romances” I’ve ever seen put to film. Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman have zero chemistry. The playful, romantic “banter” is vomit-inducing. Anakin’s descent towards the dark side is portrayed more as an extended temper tantrum by an insufferable, self-important brat. The hands-down BEST part of the movie, the lightsaber duel between Anakin and Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) is ridiculously short, so that George Lucas could concentrate more on the duel between Dooku and the suddenly-whirling spaz Yoda. Just another piece of evidence that shows Lucas’ irritating tendancy to favor flash and dash over real drama. Awful movie.

(Honorable Mention: Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. Every scene on the Death Star – awesome. Every scene on Endor – painfully bad. Han Solo is a pasty, lazy, wisecracking dope (not helped by the fact that Harrison Ford totally phoned it in, waiting for the next Indiana Jones movie). And let’s not forget those f**king Ewoks.)

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7. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004 – 72% RT rating) – I’m probably going to catch flak about this one, as it received good reviews and was really groundbreaking in its effects and visuals. But from what I remember, the story was pretty bland. It’s one of those movies that had a lot of money and effort poured into its look and not so much poured into, you know, an interesting plot. I saw the movie a few times, and I really couldn’t give you any kind of plot summary, but I could tell you a lot about how it looked. That’s not a good sign. I literally can’t remember hardly one damn thing about plot development in that movie. If I saw it a few times and could tell you that it looked awesome, but I can’t remember jack about what actually happened, how good could it be? I’m sure there are others who think it’s great stuff, but I’m putting this one on my list.

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6. Nacho Libre (2006 – 39% RT rating) – There are people who love Jack Black, no matter what he does. And there are people who can’t stand the guy. I happen to like him. I also happen to know that he’s not one of the great actors of his generation. I also, also happen to know that this movie is just not very good. Black is fun to watch, what with his manic energy and goofy spaziness. But it does get old sometimes. This was Jared Hess’ first directing credit after Napoleon Dynamite (another movie that I like, because it’s stupid and it’s aware of its own stupidity). This is a weaker endeavor here. It’s kinda hard to put my finger on why. While a loose and bizarre plot worked in Napoleon, it doesn’t work here. There wasn’t much of a story in Napoleon and it suited the story better. Hess is trying to tell a more coherent story in Nacho and it just feels disjointed. Plus, half of the jokes don’t work. One might say that when some jokes don’t work, it just makes the ones that do feel funnier. Personally, the funny jokes just remind me of the ones that fell flat. I’ve seen this movie several times, but when it comes on TBS or something and I’m too lazy to change the channel, I know to expect only a mildly funny experience instead of a truly funny one.

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5. Just Married (2003 – 20% RT rating) – I actually didn’t much mind this movie the first time I saw it. And that’s probably why I bought it. Then I saw it much later and was shocked at how much it irritated me. Maybe I was drunk or something the first time. Ashton Kutcher is marginally funny, more proof that when Ashton is given a good script, he can be genuinely funny, but when he’s not, he’s a horrid blight on society. It’s a cliched plot of “opposites attract – misunderstanding – culture differences – everything works out at the very end”. The only kinda-funny parts are when Ashton’s and Brittany Murphy’s characters are fighting, literally fighting to the point of trying to physically harm each other. Why I find that funny might be the subject of a different post down the road. But when somebody spills scalding coffee on his girlfriend, ON PURPOSE, and it’s just about the only time during the whole movie that you laugh, it both points to you being messed up and the movie being a big suck-o-rama.

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4. Matrix Revolutions (2003 – 37% RT rating) – The first Matrix movie was one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the 1990s, compared in some ways to Blade Runner and other classic dystopian science fiction tales. But because Hollywood and big movie studios can’t frigging leave well enough alone, they had to make the story into the requisite trilogy. I honesty don’t think the Wachowski brothers planned on that. Matrix Reloaded was pretty cool, although not as good as the first. I liked the inclusion of the Merovingian and Keymaster and the increasing power of Agent Smith. Not to mention that phenomenal Freeway Chase scene. Fantastic! Of course, there was also the jaw-droppingly-awful Zion orgy scene. Still, the movie felt bigger, but not TOO bloated. Yet. That’s what came with Matrix Revolutions, the Wachowski’s desperate attempt at wrapping up one of the biggest trilogies in movie history. If you try real hard, you can still smell the flop sweat. What an epic disaster that movie is. The guy that can do a Smith impression gets cast as the Smith in the real world, Neo gets blinded, Trinity dies, the attack on Zion feels about 17 hours long… You know what made the first Matrix movie so great? All the time they spent in the Matrix. Watch Revolutions again. You might be surprised at how little time the characters are actually IN the Matrix. Ugh.

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3. Wagons East (1994 – 0% RT rating). (Note on the rating: Wagons East came out before Rotten Tomatoes’ start-up, so only 8 reviews were ever compiled and added to its profile. All 8 were negative.) Wagons East is best known as John Candy’s final movie role, before dying of a massive heart attack just before the movie wrapped. It is also a 107-minute long “comedy” that contains about 2 genuine “laugh-out-loud” moments. Candy is enormous in this movie and in many scenes it is clear that he is just going through the motions. There is scant evidence of the “old” John Candy anywhere in this movie and it’s a damn shame that this was his last work. Co-stars Richard Lewis (Robin Hood: Men in Tights), John C. McGinley (Scrubs), and Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager) gamely try to pick up the comic slack, but the script is uninspired. Many jokes come barrelling right at you in the old “set up to punch line” routine. You see them coming at you a mile away, you know the ultimate intention is to make you laugh, and it never enters into your mind to so much as snicker. Because it’s not funny. A disappointment and a sad send-off to one of the greatest comics of the 1980s.

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2. Reefer Madness (1937 – 46% RT rating). I hesitate to put this on the list, but believe me – this is a BAD “movie”. I think its 46% rating has been artificially inflated with people who thought that it was so bad, that it was hilarious. No critic worth his/her salt could honestly say that this was a well-done movie. And the fact that this movie wasn’t done for laughs, but was a genuine, fearmongering exploitation film, designed to scare a nation of teenagers straight, earns it a spot here. A high spot (or low spot, depending on how you look at it). Now, I’m sure you all have your opinions on marijuana and its level of danger. But I seriously doubt that any of you think that by taking one puff of marijuana smoke, you are turned into a crazed, wild-eyed maniac. Well, that’s how it’s portrayed here. I have this movie. Not only that, but I have the colorized version, complete with scathing commentary by Mike Nelson (Mystery Science Theater 3000). It STILL sucks. There are some movies that no amount of sarcasm can save. Watching purple puffs of smoke wafting in the air while heretofore normal citizens have been turned into mindless, anarchic monsters is funny at first, but then it gets annoying. And then you start thinking about how many people bought this propoganda hook, line and sinker. And then you just end up shutting it off.

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1. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989 – 21% RT rating) – This movie deserves the top spot on my list for a few reasons. First, saying that you shouldn’t expect greatness from a Star Trek movie is a cop-out, seeing as how Wrath of Khan was incredible, and Search for Spock and Voyage Home were pretty strong. Then Final Frontier comes along, a massive drop in quality. Second, the special effects were horrible, bordering on Original Series levels. Third, the forced “comedy” throughout the movie was feeble and awkward. Fourth, the two villains of the film, the fake “God” alien and the douchey little Klingon commander, were uninteresting. Spock’s half-brother and his creepy “I can feel your pain” pseud0-religion was painful to watch. I read an interview where Shatner said he was kinda sticking it to religion with that character. Well, I love sticking it to religion and that was a pretty weak way to do it. There’s been a lot of controversy about this movie, with a lot being said about Paramount screwing with the Shat throughout production, giving him stupid deadlines, interfering, and not giving him enough money to make the movie that he really wanted to make. But no matter how much of that is true, the final result was the worst film in the series and one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But since Leora and I bought the whole Star Trek movie boxed set a couple years ago, we own it. Guess how many times we’ve watched it? 😉

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There’s my list. Hope ya liked it. Feel free to comment on what I got right and what I’m totally wrong about. I look forward to hearing your opinions on this. 🙂