So the Academy Awards were Sunday, and of all the Oscars in my adult memory, this was the one I paid the least attention to. I didn't actually know they were taking place until the next morning, when I saw a news item on Yahoo listing the winners. Goodie for them. I don't think I saw any of the nominated films or actor/actress performances, which is about par for my course. I did see Pan's Labyrinth, which was the favorite for best foreign language film. It didn't win, though it did score three technical awards, for art direction and set design and stuff like that. Hell I don't know, what am I, Google?
As for the show, I didn't see much talk about it. Ellen Degeneres was hosting, which meant nothing to me. It was kind of news some years ago when she came out on her unfunny sitcom, and I guess she's got a daytime talk show now, but I never saw the sitcom and I've never seen the chat fest. I did hear her voice in Finding Nemo, but thought her character was more annoying than amusing. Kids liked her short term memory fish, I guess.
I honestly don't know enough about her to really have an opinion, but what
James Wolcott said about the show kind of sums up Ellen's public personna. Edgeless.
And while I can understand making a big deal about not jokily alluding to Anna Nicole Smith, there's a wealth of material to be mined from this year's celebrity rehab follies (I don't see why the bizarro antics of Britney Spears should be off-limits) but Ellen DeGeneres was determined to keep everything sunny sexless nerveless pastel.
Academy Award indifference aside, I do have something to say about movies. I've lately found myself clicking past the ABC Family channel, and while I'd expect to be instantly repelled by its offerings, they do show a lot of middle-brown films that are somewhat worth watching. In the past week I've recorded Independence Day, Beetlejuice, and Harry Potter 3 off the channel, and more or less enjoyed watching them later. You have to watch them later, since the commercials on that channel are unbelievable. I haven't timed the length of the movie segments, but they seem to be around 8-10 minutes, broken up by solid five minute blocks of commercials for family-friendly crap like Olive Garden, paper towels, sugary fruit drinks, pull-ups diapers (for children) and mini vans. The really scary thing is that if I'd ever gotten my shit together with a career... I would be the target audience for that garbage, with my wife and young child or two. *shudder*
Adding to the movie fun, when I took a break from the website work I spent all weekend on to see if HP3 was over yet so I could turn off the VCR (you really can't estimate the length of anything on ABC Family since the 33-40% commercials turns every movie into an epic), I caught the beginning of Van Helsing on USA, or TNT, or one of those other cable channels that show bad, non-R-rated action movies every evening. So I ended up taping it after HP3 ended.
I said I enjoyed them, but as I was reviewing that list of movies earlier, I realized that none of them were really any good. ID4 I saw years ago in theaters, and I remembered being unimpressed then. It hasn't aged well; the special effects are much less impressive, the uninspired design of the aliens and their ships is even more noticable with the hype gone, and the stupidity of the writing and characters and plot is much more noticable.
Beetlejuice was much the same. I remembered really liking it when I was about 14, and thought Winona was so adorable as the little goth daughter, and Michael Keaton was amusing as Beetlejuice. Seeing it now his antics seemed forced, I have no idea what I saw in Winona, and the special effects were like webcam video on YouTube quality. I did enjoy the music and dancing and set design, though.
Van Helsing was awful. Malaya and I were dismayed by it in theaters a couple of years ago, but... wait. I just read
my review and it turns out we went in expecting horseshit and were pleasantly surprised to find at least most of a pony. Funny, I remembered thinking it was awful. Didn't age well in my memory. At any rate, it was awful when I watched it on tape yesterday. Nothing but endless special effect sequences with too many monsters doing too many dumb things, and idiotic, largely non-sensical plot choked by amazingly bad performances. Well, not so bad, but mismatched. The Dracula guy and his brides were so cheesy and over the top that they were often LOL bad. Intentionally, I thought, with their "Draan-sill-vain-ee-uhnnnnn!" accents that came and went, and their over-emoting, and their CGI-distending lower jaws and mouths full of pointy teeth that hardly ever bit anything. Igor was non-stop comic relief, the creepy old albino grave digger was amusing, Van Helsing's side kick was funny, and most of the random villagers were comic relief while being carried away by swarms of tiny vampire things.
The problem is that the leads thought they were playing Hamlet. Hugh Jackman was emoting up a storm as the grim hero with a torturd past, and if he smiled in the film I missed it. His performance was flawed by the random sarcastic side comments he constantly threw to his sidekick, most of which played like they'd been dubbed in during post production when some movie executive decided the movie needed more jokes. Beside him stood (On high heeled boots. In the snow.) Kate Beckinsale, who is about as good an actress as most other beautiful white women. She's a model, in other words, and if she has a facial expression or any sort of acting ability, they've yet to materialize in the screen. She doesn't have a personality either, so she's the same woman in every movie, but at least here her blandly-grim determination matched Jackman's in completely not fitting into the rest of the film.
The capper might be Frankenstein's Monster, who features in the opening, then turns up again halfway through as this tragic, noble, caring, doomed figure. Who happens to be 7 feet tall with one of those Shaper Image
lightning globes inside his skull. The Frankenstein monster as a melancholy, tragic, misunderstood figure works better when he's not obviously CG, and in any event, he blended into this cartoonish picture about as well as a clown at a funeral.
Of all the films, Harry Potter 3 was the only good one, and it still wasn't very good. It's the one where Sirius Black escapes from prison and comes to Hoggwarts in dog form, and they find out Ron's rat is the traitor in hiding and the ending has a bunch of ridiculous time travel shenanigans. It wasn't bad, and the performances and sets and special effects are all pretty good, but the movie suffers for being on commercial TV. You realize just how episodic and choppy the flow is when every sequence of scenes is broken up by 10 commercials for plug in air fresheners and frozen pasta dinners and and Comcast high speed internet service. Sure, I fast forward over them, but I'm using a VCR, not DVR, and it takes long enough that I can see what I'm missing, and long enough that I fade out of the involvement I felt with the film; especially since every time they return from commercial the movie has jumped forward several weeks in time, as it tries to cover a full school year and all of Harry's exploits in 120 minutes.
Anyway, complaints about film quality and commercial selection/lenth aside, I obviously didn't mind too much or I wouldn't have watched them all. I don't care enough to check the tv listings to see what's on tomorrow night, though. And no, I don't usually do movies, but I enjoy something to watch while eating, and I've been putting in very long hours on the computer (working, for a change) and it's nice to unplug my brain and sit facing a glowing box that's not internet capable.
Labels: commercials, harry potter, movies
