Oscars 2019

i saw precisely one of the BP nominees, blank panther, and thought it was mediocre.

the number of people i know dunking on green book has become so large, the reaction so seemingly reflexive, that i'm inclined to want to like it (or give it a try) just to be ornery.

that said, i don't know why anyone is bothered by a shitty movie winning best picture, it's a grand tradition!

wait, i lie. i did see the favourite. so that's two of the nominees.

that said, i don't know why anyone is bothered by a shitty movie winning best picture, it's a grand tradition!

― affects breves telnet (Gummy Gummy), Tuesday, February 26, 2019 12:18 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still sucks every time. and Oscars winners/losers have a material effect on the industry. When bad films or bad filmmakers win, they'll get to make more, and with more money.

yes, otm

There was a good Green Book discussion on CNN tonight between Kierna Mayo and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Get Out was not deep. Its best scenes were the social embarrassment stuff, not the horror.

speaking of horror and of best endings, I thought First Reformed had a spectacular resolution, and as insane as the film was I thought Suspiria also had one of the great final moments of any film this year

Its best scenes were the social embarrassment stuff, not the horror.

These are not discrete elements of the film.

Sorry i can't let this go but this is an atrocity and should be called out in advance of its inevitably shitty full length version so people can avoid it.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/oscar-winning-short-film-skin-review.html

But even in a lineup of nominees in its category that this year included a child slowly sinking to his death in quicksand and another film that reenacted the kidnap and torture of a toddler, Skin was the pièce de résistance, an idiotic parable about racist violence so breathtakingly vulgar that the audience in the theater where I saw it laughed out loud in incredulity when the lights came up.

slate synopsis edited for brevity/clarity:

Skin opens with a portrait of a father, a mother, and their young son, attending backwoods shooting sessions and joyriding a couch tied to the back of a truck. At first, the film reads as an affectionate portrait of a particular flavor of blue-collar whiteness. Then one night at the supermarket, a black man in line smiles at the son, and when the white father sees this, he fires off a racial slur, and the two men exchange words. The father and his white power gang then brutally beat the black man nearly to death in the parking lot as his own wife and young son watch, screaming, in a nearby car.

Some time later, the Nazi father falls for a trap in the road and, as his son looks on, is kidnapped and thrown in the back of a van. He’s brought to a garage, where a group of black men - pointedly including the young son of the man the skinheads beat - cut off his clothes and hook him up to an IV. Then one of the men fires up a tattoo needle. After a long, smoky and creepily lit tattoo session, the group dumps the Nazi in the street, and we and he realize that his entire body has been tattooed pitch black. The man then goes to his house, where his young son shoots him dead. The end.

https://deadline.com/2019/02/oscars-best-live-action-short-skin-guy-nattiv-news-1202564333/

“I don’t think we were trying to make a political statement necessarily. In the short, we explored [how] what you teach your children is going to influence the next generation,” Newman reflected. “I think the beauty of Guy as a filmmaker is he doesn’t pound anything over your head. [It’s like] ‘I don’t have the answers, but these are the questions.’”

I think I want to be in that world
― Dan S

omg that synopsis!!

Distant xpost, but for a remake of a remake of a remake "A Star Is Born" is far from boilerplate and worth seeing. Or at least, not worth aggressively resisting, like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Green Book," both of which seem like cheeky parodies of '80s Oscar bait reborn as made for TV movies. Anytime I see even a still from "Bohemian Rhapsody" I think of the VH1 Def Leppard film. Hell, give that one an Oscar for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEIMfrFVFpg

bo rhap has parts that feel like hollywood made a pg-13 blockbuster out of fox and his friends... and other parts that are exactly as you describe.

i saw Bohemian Rhapsody and Can You Ever Forgive Me on the plane last night. BH is a great plane movie and I like the woman from Sing Street in it. I had low expectations.

Boremian Hhapsody

I just got off a ten hour flight and posting about the movie Restoration Hhapsody was very pressing.

my resistance to the new Star is Born comes out of a real lack of interest in bradley cooper as leading man/director and - much moreso - a decade of deep-seeded antipathy toward Gaga's voice, persona and schtick. i'm not stubbornly prejudicial against too many pop artists but she's an exception.

BorHap: Cultural Leanings of Oscar for Make Benefit Glorious Actor of Mister Robot

“I don’t think we were trying to make a political statement necessarily.”

This is incredible (if that synopsis is accurate.)

I thought Mr Robot was good in the movie despite the flippers. I don't get Bradley Cooper at all. If soaps were still popular, his career would've landed there.

xp that synopsis (which, again, i tinkered with for clarity based on my recollection of the film) is dead accurate.

Lmao

What an insane movie

It seems like the feature version is a completely different story, a biopic of an ex-skinhead. That's confusing.

Nattiv went on to direct a separate feature, also called “Skin,” about a former skinhead (played by Jamie Bell) who had a change of heart and went on to have all of his white-power tattoos removed.

that sounds like a more reasonable and potentially interesting project

“I don’t think we were trying to make a political statement necessarily.”

in traditional hollywood speak this translates literally to , "please give me an oscar."

that said, i don't know why anyone is bothered by a shitty movie winning best picture, it's a grand tradition!

― affects breves telnet (Gummy Gummy)

my concern about green book winning is not about the movie - i haven't seen it and can't say first hand whether or not it's shitty - but the way it caters to the fragility of its older white target audience and the way in doing so, it serves to perpetuate a lie which is, ultimately, unsustainable

my objection is this: who are the audiences who flocked to "green book" going to vote for next november?

having asked that question i suspect that in many, if not most, cases the answer will be "the democrat". my mom, who hates trump as much as anybody, probably really enjoyed green book. we haven't talked about it because i quit talking to her after she told me that racism is a problem on "both sides".

Nattiv went on to direct a separate feature, also called “Skin,” about a former skinhead (played by Jamie Bell) who had a change of heart and went on to have all of his white-power tattoos removed.

this sounds like an entirely unnecessary dramatization of the documentary "Erasing Hate"
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2011/06/22/skinheads-story-redemption-help-splc-be-told-msnbc-documentary

I saw it when it came out and it's watchable though hardly essential... useful if you're unfamiliar with the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center and/or you're really into redemption stories. If the concept sounds particularly of interest to you, skip the sure-to-be exploitative narrative film and watch the doc instead
https://tubitv.com/movies/310496/erasing_hate

isn't Green Book one of those movies that you know sucks just from watching the trailer?

fwiw, Harry Belafonte is a fan of Green Book. I wonder if he and Spike have conversed about it.

xp but honestly, i dunno why you'd wanna give too much amplification to a guy who spent a decade and a half doing recreational hate crimes and came around to being a human being. doc didn't bother me so much as a slice-of-life but the instant you add dramatic tropes, you come perilously close to making his story - and not the stories of the very many lives he clearly disrupted, damaged and destroyed - the hero's story.

sorry to take over the oscars thread with this, but i'm finding one of the winner's films and the concept for their next work viscerally repugnant, so it's relevant i suppose.

apt Vice critique

well, i appear to have been right about the nature of the next film:
https://www.indiewire.com/2018/09/skin-jamie-bell-neo-nazi-tiff-2018-1202001233/

When this is your lead actor's take:

"Going into this movie, I was always afraid of, are we letting him off the hook? Are we letting these people off the hook? Are we kind of letting this whole thing fall by the wayside and saying, ‘It’s a film, and he has to have his third-act moments, where he realizes that he’s done wrong’? So I was hesitant as hell to do a lot of the scenes.”

xp but honestly, i dunno why you'd wanna give too much amplification to a guy who spent a decade and a half doing recreational hate crimes and came around to being a human being. doc didn't bother me so much as a slice-of-life but the instant you add dramatic tropes, you come perilously close to making his story - and not the stories of the very many lives he clearly disrupted, damaged and destroyed - the hero's story.

sorry to take over the oscars thread with this, but i'm finding one of the winner's films and the concept for their next work viscerally repugnant, so it's relevant i suppose.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Tuesday, February 26, 2019 10:39 AM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

apt Vice critique

― Rhine Jive Click Bait (Hadrian VIII), Tuesday, February 26, 2019

thought he meant Bryan Singer and BR.

pick your poison, i guess. who do you suppose they'll get to play Bryan Singer in the 2028 biopic?

xp lol

for a remake of a remake of a remake "A Star Is Born" is far from boilerplate and worth seeing

I saw 102 new releases last year, and 85 older films (1932-2016) in theatres. Happy to remain sceptical that A Star Is Born 4 has value that would have warranted bumping any of those.

I'd like that 2+ hours back personally

A Star is Born > Darkest Hour

also better than The Post

but looking over 2017's nominees really highlights what a shit group this year was

my concern about green book winning is not about the movie - i haven't seen it and can't say first hand whether or not it's shitty - but the way it caters to the fragility of its older white target audience and the way in doing so, it serves to perpetuate a lie which is, ultimately, unsustainable
my objection is this: who are the audiences who flocked to "green book" going to vote for next november?
having asked that question i suspect that in many, if not most, cases the answer will be "the democrat". my mom, who hates trump as much as anybody, probably really enjoyed green book. we haven't talked about it because i quit talking to her after she told me that racism is a problem on "both sides".
― the scientology of mountains (rushomancy), Tuesday, 26 February 2019 15:02 (three hours ago) Permalink

so is the problem what green book reveals about certain americans or what it does to them? if the former, well it's not like we didn't know any of this. if the latter, my sense is that films play a teeny tiny if any causal role in actually perpetuating any of this stuff. which is why i just can't bring myself to care all that much if a movie was made and seen that takes a stupid, blinkered view of race relations. i mean, maybe i'm wrong about that; it can only ever really be a hunch given that it's not really possible to prove the magnitude of a film or tv show's influence.

my concern about green book winning is not about the movie - i haven't seen it and can't say first hand whether or not it's shitty - but the way it caters to the fragility of its older white target audience and the way in doing so, it serves to perpetuate a lie which is, ultimately, unsustainable

this is also the demographic that goes to multiplexes, not streams things at home. Hollywood knows.

actually i think younger people go to movies in the theaters more often than older people these days.

"In 2016, 18-24 year olds went to the movies an average of 6.5 times over the year, up 0.6 from 2015. This was the largest increase of any age group. Per capita attendance was next highest for 12-17 year olds (6.1). Per capita attendance also increased for 25-39 year olds and 50-59 year olds compared to the previous year."

https://ptpimg.me/c22n50.png

source:
www.natoonline.org/data/

that doesn't actually say how often older people go

that doesn't mean films aren't made that target the "grey dollar"

https://ptpimg.me/2x821y.png

all i'm pointing out is that older folks aren't a disproportionate share of the moviegoing public. if anything, young adults are.

and as far as race goes, af-ams and latinos are actually overrepresnted as frequent moviegoers relative to their share of the US population.

fwiw, Harry Belafonte is a fan of Green Book

And, as I indicated last night, so is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. His point was basically that the film--however out of step it might be with the world today; he was not oblivious to this--contains a basic truth that he lived through himself (in his case, as it related to John Wooden): that Wooden needed to be taught, through his time with Jabbar, the perspective of someone African-American. (Kierna Mayo, not a fan of the film, argued the more current "It's not up to us to teach white people anything--they need to figure this out for themselves.")

I know Jabbar's view is very old-fashioned. I understand exasperation with the film. But he’s someone I’ve always respected a lot, and far be it for me to say “Oh no, you’re wrong.” He’s speaking about his own life.

Here's the piece he wrote that sparked the whole discussion:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-truth-green-book-controversy-1175540