Day: January 31, 2006

it’s a boy!

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.

elektra

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”.