The Oscars. Like, who cares, right? Well, clearly we all do, because there are still billions of electrons devoted to talking about them every year. It’s funny how important the Oscars are sometimes and how completely forgotten they are the rest. Like, “OMG Emma Thompson has an Oscar for writing!” or “Jeremy Irons, Oscar-winner.” Of course, Hilary Swank has two Best Actress statues, for all the good they’ve done her. Most people have never heard of her.

Anyhow. This year’s nominations were announced this morning. (By the way, Oscars people: your site completely sucks in look and layout. Look into this, would you?)

Since I haven’t been posting about the movies we’ve seen this year (something I want to change, because after a while I can’t remember what I thought of a movie, and it’s fun to go back and look), I’m going to look at the movies nominated for Best Picture and say a few words about the ones we saw (listed in alphabetical order, since that’s how I got them off of the site).

The Artist

Between The Artist and Midnight In Paris, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m seeing the same cuts of film that everyone else is. People seem to be going batcrap insane over The Artist and I’m like…”Wha’?” Yes, lovely, it’s a silent film made today. It has gorgeous set design and the two main actors, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo are extremely charming. But…but… The Artist the story of a major silent film actor (Dujardin) who loses everything when sound comes into movies and the Great Depression hits. A young woman who’s been a big fan of his for years becomes a big star but still cares deeply about this man when he becomes a washed-up, self-destructive alcoholic.

That’s right, folks: we have yet another movie where the woman exists to make the man feel better about himself. Bérénice Bejo’s character has no existence other than to make life better for Jean Dujardin. True, unlike most movies today, she did get more speaking lines and she didn’t have to have sex with him in order to prove he was heterosexual. But what we have here is not an improvement over that kind of crap.

Rated: Did. Not. Like.

The Descendants

We liked The Descendants a lot — hey, the cinematography convinced us to give Kauai a try, you know? The Descendants tells the story of a man (George Clooney) whose wife enters an irreversible coma after a boating accident, whereupon he has to get to know his kids again and he gets to know his wife more than he did when she was awake. Among other things, she was having an affair, and George decides he needs to track down her lover.

It’s much like Alexander Payne’s other work (Election, Sideways, About Schmidt) — it’s pretty low-key, and pretty realistic in terms of reactions. What do you do when you’re in the situation? Movies would have us believe that people operate at the peak of their emotions all the time. It’s so low-key, though, that it feels minor. What are we supposed to get out of all of this? I don’t know. A subplot involves Clooney’s extended family owning one of the last large parcels of land in Hawaii and planning to sell it for half a billion dollars. I don’t know about you, but when I start hearing numbers like that my understanding of the problems involved goes way down. Oh bummer, to whom do you sell you land for outrageous sums of money? Several of the questions Alyssa Rosenberg of Think Progress raises in this entry occurred to me too while I watched this movie.

And, honestly, I can’t believe George Clooney is up for Best Actor for this. He’s good — hey, he has us believing that George Clooney’s wife would cheat on him — but I’m kind of stunned at the accolades he’s gotten.

Rated: Good. Not stunning.

Hugo

Hugo is the story of a boy who lives in a Parisian train station and changes the lives of everyone around him. He’s completely alone…yet manages to create a family out of the strangers he meets and change many lives. It’s a very charming film, with fabulous cinematography (funny how you don’t think cinematography really matters, until you see a film that uses it to its utmost) and great performances (too many to list, but I liked just about everyone in this movie). It really does transport you (heh) to another time and place.

It’s also a good family film. We all enjoyed it, on different levels. And man, is that really difficult to do these days.

The downside of Hugo is, as Darin put it after we saw it, that a huge part of the emotional payoff comes from the characters’ love of movies. I can’t quite explain that without recapping the entire film, but trust me on this. And…well…we love movies. I love movies so much I moved Darin to LA so I could go to film school! There’s nothing I’d rather discuss all day long than movies!

And I’m not as invested in film as these characters are.

So I’m left a little cold by the ending, which should instead fill me with emotion and sentimentality and the rest.

(My friend Otto, who loves film as much as I do (more, probably), succinctly summarized the problem with the climax of Hugo with “that end had moments approaching ‘this is the part of the awards show where Scorsese’s acceptance speech talks about the importance of film preservation’” and he is dead on correct about that.)

However: the performances are great, the look is awesome (the rare movie that needs to be seen in 3D), and I did feel completely transported to another world and time.

Rated: Excellent

Midnight in Paris

Okay, this is the movie from last year that completely sets me off.

This is the one that makes me wonder if I’ve seen a bad print of the movie.

Because this movie annoyed the hell out of me and I rant about it at every opportunity.

Screenwriter Owen Wilson is in Paris with fiancée Rachel McAdams and her unbelievably annoying parents. He is wondering whether he should pursue financial success as a screenwriter (check out the hotel room they’re in) or follow his first passion, novel writing. Owen discovers a portal back to 1920s Paris, where he meets the amazingly hot Marion Cotillard and hangs out with the social circle of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald and the whole Lost Generation crowd. And of course Owen Wilson fits right in with them.

Ken Levine is totally right with his Pet Peeves About The Dialogue – the dialogue in this movie is oh-my-god fake. The tensions and conflicts are horrifying fake and 1980s sitcom-level (not a compliment). The intellectual pretensions (mostly in the scenes with Michael Sheen, but all of it, really) made me grit my teeth — it’s not a remarkably intelligent conversation if I can spout all the same nonsense several lines ahead of you. And the direction? Holy crap. There is one scene where Cotillard and Wilson are walking along the street where it looks she’s spending all of her concentration searching for her mark, finds it, stops, turns, and says her line. It was the most amateurish thing I’ve seen in a movie in a while, and believe me, I’m not blaming the actress for that one.

And all of the women in this movie…that’s right, we have a winner! They exist to prove to the man that he’s worthwhile. Because that’s what we do, apparently.

I can’t even tell you about whether the acting was any good or not. I was so overwhelmed with the rest of the crap in this movie. The only thing I remember liking unreservedly was Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali. Hilarious. Also, about two minutes total on-screen.

Rated: UGH. <STAB> HATE.

Moneyball

We saw this whenever it came out (checking with IMDb…September? Really? That’s usually a dumping ground for movies, but…okay). I still remember it positively, perhaps amazed by the dialogue, which was delightful, and the fact that somehow the screenwriters (among them, the ultimately credited/nominated Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, but others got in on the action too) managed to make a business book about baseball a pretty good movie about what little teams face when competing against the big guys. How thinking different can actually pay off…well, until the big guys start thinking that way too, and then you’re screwed.

I don’t know whether Brad Pitt can act or not, but he certainly is a movie star: he is completely comfortable on-screen with what he’s doing, and he’s always interesting. I don’t think that means Best Actor though.

Rated: Very good.

As for the other movies on the list:

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: I haven’t heard anything about this movie. I’ve never heard of a major motion picture that so completely doesn’t exist on anyone’s radar. Maybe it’s just been overwhelmed by other movies during December, I don’t know.
• The Help: I’ve heard this book is the best thing since sliced bread and the performances in the movie are great. Nevertheless, it really looks like another “story about black people focusing on the white main character” tale and that’s just tiresome now.
• The Tree of Life: All I’ve heard about this is “Terrence Malick,” which is enough to make me not go. I guess that makes me a Philistine. Well, okay.
• War Horse: If we see this, it would be with the kids, I guess. I don’t know enough about it. I don’t know anyone who’s seen it, either.

John Le Carré caused a big stir with his books about British spies, precisely because his spies didn’t cause a big stir: James Bond was nowhere to be seen. Le Carré’s spies got up in the morning, drank tea, read dispatches, talked, drank some more tea, tried to find assets on the other side who’d give them information, and finished it all off with a honking glass of scotch at the end of the day.

The new movie version of <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i> is set in the early 70s, when things were really grim: Britain was on the verge of being declared a Third World country (it was too, people, you can look it up), the Cold War was at its height and seemed like it would never end, and office politics at the headquarters for the British spies, called the Circus, seems more centered around who’s sleeping with whom and who’s got the good expense account instead of, you know, fighting the good fight for freedom and liberty and etc etc.

Several assets on the Soviet side have gotten word out that British Intelligence has a highly placed mole (as, in fact, it really did). George Smiley (Gary Oldman, practically unrecognizable) had been let go by the organization as part of a shake-up and is now brought back in, sub rosa, to find the mole, who is one of Smiley’s contemporaries: four middle-aged men who’ve carved out their piece of the pie.

Both Darin and I had heard about this movie that you have to pay careful attention, because the important stuff will go by without anyone calling it out. Perhaps I have the attention span of a gnat, but I didn’t find this to be true. What is true is that the movie doesn’t hold your hand and it’s not drawn in gigantic day-glo colors, the way most movies are these days. In fact, the main color I remember from this movie is gray. Everything is so deeply, morosely gray. The story doesn’t have tiny details you have to follow, anyhow: it’s not like the solution is some horribly shocking thing you should have been able to put together yourself. This is the story of professional men doing their jobs, and it just so happens that it’s as bureaucratic as it is deadly.

While I enjoyed the change of pace from the usual cinema fare with its loud soundtrack and moronic dialogue, I didn’t feel the rapturous experience a lot of reviewers felt watching this. (Although…getting such a change of pace is so refreshing!) The acting is very good. The best part, for me, was the portrayal of early 70s Britain. The hairstyles, the glasses, the cars, the political tensions… does anyone feel nostalgic about anything from that time?

The rest of what I have to say may come off as damning with faint praise, so let me say up front: I had a blast watching this movie.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a very fun, very stylish action flick that has that rarest of all elements, a story that’s fairly easy to follow. I’m not going to say the story makes any damn sense, but you always know what in the hell they’re doing and how it’s all going so terribly, awfully wrong.

Tom Cruise is back as…what the hell, you know the drill: secret government ops, betrayals, spies, sale of nuclear secrets. Amazingly beautiful on-location cinematography in Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai. Tom Cruise has three assistants: Simon Pegg (the nutty computer guy), Paula Patton (the cool, beautiful agent), and Jeremy Renner (who’s just an analyst…or is he?). The four of them all have things to do (hey, Cruise is pushing a still-in-very-good-shape 50, he can’t do everything) and together they take down the bad guys. Amazing stunts and action work — the scene on the Burj Khalifa is pretty amazing, even if you don’t see the film in IMAX (which we didn’t).

Every action movie — and I say this as someone who WUVS the genre — suffers from the “Wait…what?” problem. You know, you’ll be watching a movie and they’re doing X, Y, and Z and you find yourself saying, “Wait…what? Why are they doing that?” I’m not even talking about stuff like how the Mission Impossible team is stranded and alone in a train car in Moscow…and then suddenly they’re fitted with matching Armani suits and gliding into a hotel in Dubai. No, we can buy that — they had secret Visa cards or something. No, I’m talking about when something integral to the plot happens and you’re like, What the hell? The most famous example of this that comes to mind was when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep and asked novelist Philip Marlowe who had killed Owen, the chauffeur, and Marlowe admitted later, “They sent me a wire … asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either.”

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol moves so fast and gives you so many things to watch that eventually pay off (watch and learn, action movie makers, the overall story has to make sense, even if it isn’t realistic) that it’s not until the movie ends that you realize they had an awful lot of cool elements and scenes that don’t hold water at all. And you don’t care! Because it was cool! And it felt like it belonged! It wasn’t until we were walking out that we said, “So who were the guys with the guns on the quay in Moscow?” (Are packs of guys with AK-47s allowed to roam in Moscow like that? Not to mention…who shot the US Secretary? And…a US Secretary being assassinated right after the Kremlin got bombed wasn’t enough to tip off the Russians that, oh, I dunno, something major was going on?)

There’s other stuff like that — including an extended scene in which a highly trained operative turns out to be someone else…who wouldn’t be expected to have those mad skills. So…what what the point of having the highly trained operative involved in the first place? This particular plot point led Darin to say, ”This movie is super villain cosplay.” If I hadn’t been driving the car — again, the nonsense of that plot point didn’t dawn on either of us until we were on the way home — I would have tweeted that line right then.

Like I said, it sounds like the movie was a mess, but this is actually very fun, very put-together stuff.

Other Notes:

• Am really glad they didn’t do the obvious thing with Jeremy Renner’s character.
• Am really glad that all of the IMF agents were competent — I was deeply afraid they were going to make Simon Pegg bad at doing anything except computers, and all that does is call into question the standards of the IMF organization.
• Tom Cruise needs the Russian cop (or whatever he was) there at the end because…?
• I kept really hoping that, in the final scene where Cruise was talking to Renner, that everything Tom told him was a complete lie. But that was probably one level too deep for this flick.

Anyhow. Not a bad way to spend two hours in a theater, and the cinematography is definitely grand scale stuff.

We’ve been living in the rental house for a year now (yeah, the remodel will be done any minute now), so it’s probably time to check out how our experiment of dumping a cable connection is going.

Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.

Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.

Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.

When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.

Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.

I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.

True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.

We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.

Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”

Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.

Hi Hollywood. I know you don’t care about me on so many levels—I’m over 25, I’m a woman, I’m married, I have children, I don’t like vampires whether sparkly or not—but Jesus, you aren’t even trying any more, are you?

It’s JULY. That is MIDSUMMER, for those of you who never leave the office and have no idea. SUMMER is peak movie season.

There is nothing for us to go see. I mean, I’m digging deep here, people. I am putting everything on the possibles list, and it’s still slim-to-no pickings. And Darin and I are almost willing to see anything.

Yes, I said almost. The Twilight movies are RIGHT OUT, okay?

(By the way, for anybody out there who still reads this blog and may have a small girl child of your acquaintance who may be interested in reading Twilight in the future…I beg you to read this book NOW, so you may know of what you speak when you trash this book as hard as it needs to be trashed. But that’s an entry for another day.)

What have Darin and I already seen this summer? Let’s see:

• Knight and Day: we saw this last week. It’s pretty silly, but it revels in its silliness—the montage where we only see little bits and pieces of how Tom Cruise gets Cameron Diaz out of a series of harrowing situations is hilarious. And while Tom always comes off as batshit-insane to me, he is absolutely the best thing in this movie: he’s funny as hell, and wow, is he comfortable being a movie star. Both Darin and I were really impressed by how amazingly charming Cruise was in this.
• The A-Team: Yes, we saw this. Best thing by far: Sharlto Copley as Murdock, the crazy helicopter pilot—man, that guy is good. Worst thing: there’s a whole plot point about Man of Violence BA Baracus becoming a Man of Peace…and we know that all is right with the world when he becomes a Man of Violence again. Hoo-yah! Also: hard as hell to tell what is going on in some scenes because of the action editing. Does anyone choreograph any more? Am I showing my age?
• Toy Story 3: Saw this with the kids. Thought it was great.
• Get Him To The Greek: Okay, I admit: I thought this was hilarious. It was completely stupid and yet: freaking hysterical. “Stroke the furry wall!”

Mind you, I had to look at a list of movies currently playing to remind me what I may have seen in the past few weeks (with the exception of Toy Story 3, which I remember seeing just fine).

Yes, we’ve skipped The Last Airbender, MacGruber, Prince of Persia, Shrek Forever After (the kids saw that one with their Grandpa), and Sex and the City 2.

We’re planning on seeing Despicable Me with the kids this weekend, so that’s out.

What are our current choices for a movie to go see on date night? Cyrus, I Am Love, and Predators.

Any of these may, in fact, turn out to be a great movie-going experience. But none of them appears to be a must-see movie-going experience. I have high hopes for the upcoming Inception, but one movie out of…how many?…that might turn out to be not completely mind-numbing and shallow.

Jesus, I don’t know where the love of movies is going to come from in the next generation. It’s dire out there, Hollywood, and frankly, I’m blaming you for it.

Oh yeah, and 3D? Kiss my ass.

A few months ago I saw the Kick-Ass trailer and I thought, “Wow, that looks pretty cool.” I didn’t know it was based on a comic. (Although that should have been obvious.) In the last few weeks, several of the blogs/tweeters/sites I follow either highly anticipated this movie or had already seen it and loved it.

The first review I read of it, however, was Roger Ebert’s, and he loathes this movie:

Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.

Do you know what you have to do to get Roger Ebert to loathe your movie? Wow, I thought.

(Btw, if you haven’t been reading Roger Ebert’s personal blog, do yourself a favor and hie there now. He really is one of the best writers going at the moment—he was a great writer before his illness, and now he has just brought it to a whole new level. Whether you agree with him or not, you always know where he stands, and if you’re going to disagree with him, bring your A game.)

Then we got Entertainment Weekly, where our favorite movie critic, Owen Gleiberman, gave Kick-Ass a B+:

Kick-Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake), is an enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described — in spirit, at least — as reality-based. When Dave, in costume, gets out into the world of grungy criminals, he discovers that putting a stop to evil is no picnic. A showdown with parking-lot thieves puts him in the hospital, and the fact that he bleeds real blood is part of what hooks you; the movie never makes it too easy for him. But it doesn’t mock him, either. Standing there in his silly/noble outfit, brandishing a pair of ninja batons, he looks just crazy enough to be a little scary, and when he chases off a pack of muggers and the exploit gets caught on video, it becomes a Web sensation. The legend of Kick-Ass is born.

We love Gleiberman so much that anything he gives over a C is an auto-see for us, so clearly we had to go see this one. I mentioned to Darin that Ebert was diametrically opposed to Gleiberman on this one and Darin said, “Ebert is the better writer, Gleiberman is the better reviewer.”

Well, you’ve probably guessed by now, but when we walked out of the theater we were each pretty much convinced one of those critics was right: Me, Ebert; Darin, Gleiberman.

Kick-Ass is the story of a 17-year-old comic book geek who decides he wants to be a superhero. So he buys a costume via mail order, throws a few punches at a mirror, and then goes out into the mean streets…where he promptly gets his ass kicked, hard. He gets a few mini-powers as a result (the ability to withstand pain, because his nerve endings are messed up…but, uh, you know that the body still suffers the injury, right? The writers conveniently skip over that fact in subsequent scenes), and continues to go out, where he becomes an Internet sensation.

Once the movie has set up that superheroes don’t exist in the real world, it throws into this mix a dad who’s training his daughter to be a superhero! And heck if it doesn’t seem like she has some serious superpowers. She bounds! She can throw a punch! She has the most amazing ability to aim, shoot, and absorb recoil from a gun ever! The actress who plays Hit Girl is fabulous young actress named Chloë Grace Moretz—I think we’re going to see a lot out of her. There is nothing Hit Girl can’t do.

You then have uber-powerful bad guys (the Mafia, natch), and shit happens. Really violent shit. Really violent over-the-top Diane-has-her-hands-over-her-eyes-for-minutes shit.

Where I’m coming from when I tell you my reaction: I saw Kill Bill and I loved it. I saw Inglourious Basterds and I loved it (even if I did close my eyes for the head-bashing scene). If given a choice between a rom-com and an action movie, Darin doesn’t even bother mentioning both movies because he knows which one I’m going to pick. I write action and violence. My reaction to this movie is not about violence. It’s about what the hell the filmmaker was going for.

If we’re in the real world (ie, all of Act I), then Hit Girl really is killing all of those guys and psychopathically walking away with nary a blink. If this isn’t the real world, then what the hell is the point of this movie? Kick-Ass changes the rules on us mid-stream, and it leaves me waving a flag saying, “WTF?”

This movie wants it both ways: it wants us to think violence is real and does some actual damage, and it wants us to think it’s cool.

When the hero dispatches the bad guy with a bazooka and uses a goddamn cheesy Eighties-style sendoff line first, the movie wants us to think that’s cool. When the hero gets some serious fucking damage done to him in an extended torture scene and then walks away with nary a stutter in his step, the movie wants us to think that’s cool. I don’t care if his nerve endings are shot and he has metal replacements in his body; if he’s supposed to have his internal organs rearranged, he’s going to be puking up blood, not wondering how to help Hit Girl kill some people. And when we see Hit Girl moving through a warehouse with night-vision goggles picking off big scary men first-person-shooter style, we’re supposed to think that’s cool.

And then there’s simply what we see on screen, which is often an 11-year-old girl blowing guys’s heads off with a gun as big as she is, or conversely getting her scrawny butt kicked. You can’t watch that and say, Well, it’s just a comic book. My eyes are watching it happening.

My biggest question when leaving the movie theater was, Did director Matthew Vaughn call up Mark Strong (the actor who plays the big bad guy) and say, “I have a script here. The climax is you beating the shit out of an 11-year-old girl,” and did Strong immediately respond, “Okay, I’m in”?

And then, of course, there’s the standard (and yet: still necessary) complaint, which is, “Jesus H Christ, am I tired of the portrayal of women in these things.” You have your dead/comatose women (the moms (of course!) of Kick-Ass, Hit Girl, and another superhero, Red Mist), and you have your fucktoys (the English teacher, the hooker in the apartment, and the girlfriend). That’s it. That’s what women get to be.

Oh, and then there’s Hit Girl, but since she’s 11 or 12, I’ll cut her some slack. She has about 6 years before she’ll be someone’s fucktoy.

The guy who posted he wishes he could take his daughter to this movie, but she’s too young? Dude, you have some serious rethinking to do.

Anyhow. I’m clearly not a fan of this movie. I understand why Darin likes it—he doesn’t flinch at movie violence the way I do, where I seem to experience every punch in real time—but I am not feeling the love at all.