it’s official: oscar is a boy. unlike hurricanes, who now get the gender-neutral treatment, oscar remains firmly and solidly a member of the male sex. this is an extremely fast comment, which probably is unfair given it is the first comment on the oscar nominations! so please, pace arnab, feel free to open a whole new thread about the nominations and all that. all’s i want to say is that, as i scrolled down my screen to read who got nominated for what, i realized none of the actresses is a) in any of the best pictures, b) directed by one of the best directors, (with one exception) c) acting with one of the best actors or even d) acting with one of the best supporting actors! and i haven’t even heard of two of the movies in which best actresses are nominated!!!

this is the year of boy movies, for sure.

despite beginning like a bad comp paper–”since time began there has been a battle between good and evil”; yes, even in the proterozoic era cyanobacteria were divided into these two camps–elektra is not at all a bad way to pass 97 minutes and is certainly better than the piece of crap (daredevil) it derived from. very little backstory, and what little we get is incomplete, incoherent and best of all, highly silly. but somehow i didn’t care that none of it made much sense–it felt like picking up a superhero comic in the middle of a story arc, not knowing what had come before or why people were fighting each other. jennifer garner is adequate as some super ninja assassin who from time to time fights in red bondage genie garb that must surely make twirling through the air a dicey proposition–then again she probably gets her underwiring from the same shop that makes her cool long daggery thingies. terence stamp shows up as a blind super ninja assassin trainer, but mostly looks like he is auditioning for the role of a vampire elder in the next underworld movie. (yes, this film continues the tradition of western action movies in which white people are generally better at eastern martial arts than people actually from the east, who are naturally villains.) and there are some cool action scenes. and a lesbian life-sucking death-kiss from an arch villainess named typhoid. and the dialog is so generic that at key moments i was anticipating exact lines. in short, good fun.

yes, yes, i know i should have put this under “enjoyable crap”.

We watched Wedding Crashers yesterday, and looking back Jeff had mentioned it positively lo those long Summer months ago, but nary a word since. I thought it was fine–a few fine laughs here and there, but less interesting than 40-Year-Old Virgin and far far less funny than Anchorman. (In fact, when Will Ferrell makes the inevitable cameo at Crashers‘ end, he made me laugh almost harder than the rest of the film. Which perhaps invites a bit of self- and world-categorizing about the kinds of people who find Anchorman’s surreal silliness funnier than the more conventional romance-bound comedies cited above, but:)

But I digress: I want to return to a point about Vaughn that Jeff made: he is indeed a god. (more…)

i thought about putting this in the “fascist insect” thread:

last night, for lack of something better to do, i watched starship troopers for the second time (ondemand will be the end of me). i’d first watched it when it was first out on dvd/vhs and while i think i’d enjoyed it then i really enjoyed it a lot more this time around. perhaps because i wasn’t entirely sure the first time if it was satire or not. (michael will now remind me that this was made by the same person who made robocop.) this time i was struck by two things: 1) how this is like a negative of full metal jacket–where kubrick analyzes what the military does to the self by going deep into how it dehumanizes and regimentizes (is that a word?) the world, verhoeven sticks with the surfaces, the military’s ideology of itself; 2) how this now seems so eerily prescient of the war on terror.

there was a sequel, right? do we find out what they do with the brain bug? if you don’t want to talk about starship troopers maybe we can talk more generally/specifically about the military film as genre or about other military films.

critics seem to be crazy about match point: check out the rave reviews. unfortunately, i don’t have enough knowledge of woody allen’s work to be able see this film in the context of his career, nor a special fondness for the guy.

i have no idea what he was trying to do in match point. if the idea is that life is 10% talent and 90% luck, er, okay. if the idea is that scarlett johansson and jonathan rhys meyers are gorgeous, i’m with you, woody, though i have to say you have always creeped me out, and scarlett is TWENTY, for fuckssakes!

i don’t know, dude. affairs are hard to get out of, the high life is hard to throw to the winds, passion leads us to dark places, and babies have a nasty way of popping up if you fuck enough. thing is, none of this interests me very much. or maybe it’s just the way you present it, woody. (more…)