No Boundaries

The Big Fella

Today’s the big day. I just love the Oscars. This, because I love the movies and am drawn to thought-provoking film; over-represented in the Oscars. Let me preface by saying that I haven’t seen either of the two films which are going to sweep the whole shabang. These being: Precious and The Hurt Locker. The first deals with the subject of incest which is a topic that I just don’t want to visit. I’m sure it is a splendid film that I would benefit from seeing. But it’s just not my cup of tea. Not a place where I’d enjoy spending any time. The second deals with men who deal with explosives, and I’ve spent a fair amount of my life as a professional dealing with explosives, and this is a place that, for personal emotional reasons, I don’t want to revisit.

So, having said all that, here’s my take on this evening’s proceedings:

• Best Picture: District 9,
• Best Actor: Colin Firth,
• Best Supporting Actor: Matt Damon,
• Best Actress: Meryl Streep,
• Best Supporting Actress: Maggie Gyllenhaal,
• Best Animated Feature: Up,
• Best Art Direction: Avatar,
• Cinematography: Avatar,
• Best Directing: Avatar,
• Best Documentary Feature: The Cove,
• Best Writing: District 9,
• Best Original Screenplay: A Serious Man.

All of that goes out the window, of course, because some combination of Precious and The Hurt Locker is likely to steal the show.

There are a few gross oversights, I think, in the omission of the films Sunshine Cleaning (entirely) and Julia & Juliet (from most categories).  I would have tossed nominations to Sunshine Cleaning for best picture, writing, supporting actress and supporting actor, and Julia & Juliet should have gotten nods for best picture, writing, directing and supporting actor.   I would have gone with Sunshine for taking best writing and Stanley Tucci for best supporting actor (in J&J). He is brilliant in this picture and out-shows even Meryl streep, who is a tad overdone (pun intended). There are also a whole passel of documentaries that I think should have received greater consideration, as a lover of that particular genre.

I give District 9 more credit than it is due because I think it a courageous film, in unusual ways and on many levels. I’m curious with the inclusion of Blind Side and Inglorious Basterds in some of the categories.

When viewed through the prism of the Oscars, this past year in film was perhaps a bit of let-down. There are many good films but nothing outstanding. Avatar complicates this because it is absolutely brilliant when considered technically and fairly mediocre when considered otherwise. This is another year and, with tomorrow, we can all look forward again.

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Because Sundance constitutes an onslaught upon one’s thought capacity, I decided it might be good to post here and there throughout rather than wrapping things up at the end. By the end it is difficult to remember what one was thinking at the beginning.

My first day brought me to to a day-long seminar on the marketing of independent film via the various tools, social and otherwise, that constitute the “new media”.  With the exception of one gathering of the mega-webites, the seminar was not well attended which was a bit of a surprise.  The event, organized by Jigsaw Global, was nicely put-together and informative, if only skimming the surface, very lightly, of the subjects at hand.

Presenters included the director of i-Phone gaming for the Adult Swim Network (something to do with after hours programing on the Cartoon Network I think) on building film/television related aps for the i-Phone, a web consultant on the general makings of a new media marketing strategy, and the Microsoft queen of twitter who unveiled a new Windows 7 twitter utility called Look.

There were also two impressive panel discussions: the first was arbitrated by Kara Swisher, of the Wall Street Journal’s allThingsD.com, and involved the content potentates of most of the new media powerhouses including Oprah, Youtube, Facebook and mySpace as well as a token filmmaker and the fellow who did the social media marketing for last year’s Indy films’: “The Cove” and “Food Inc”.  The second panel involved what I would call a PR procurement chain that began with a filmmaker in this year’s festival extending through various obscure new media functionalities to a actual real-life new media designer at the bottom of the food chain.

A few thoughts:

Things are not well in the movie business.  This is not a surprise but things are particularly terrible in the Indy movie business.  This was made most cogent as one filmmaker shouted from the crowd: “People won’t finance our films if they can’t sell them”.  The malaise appears to extend even into the iPhone realm where downloads of film studio aps are falling far short of expectations, and the number of available aps is swamping the potential for any given ap to achieve profitability.  Throughout this presentation I kept thinking: wait until Flash hits the iPhone ap market in the middle of this year.

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A flawed film that changes everything.

OOh OOh I am so excited.  I’ve lost some of my love for the concept of winter. We all fall prey to this moment at some point in life and my time came a while back.  So I could gladly toss my last shovel-full of driveway fluff  (although for some reason or another fluff is in extremely short supply in Park City this year). I’ve also never been much for the holidays. So the one thing that makes winter for me these days is the Sundance film festival and it is just around the corner.  I’ve lucked out again and landed a very high spot in the local’s ticket lottery, allowing me my choice of flicks.  And, there is to be a nice digital presence (seminars on the making of movie marketing with social networks and the new internet) which I intend to check out.  Fourteen films and as many seminars as I can get into should keep my mind whirling.  Which, of course, is my favorite condition of the human condition.

I’m especially interested in Howl (Ginsberg deserves more credit for his influence on everything that came after), Freedom Riders (my journalist parents were part of that whole scene), and films covering John Lennon as a pup and Jean-Michel Basquiat as … (well, you know).  My eldest daughter is forcing me to attend a 3D flick about toads that take over Australia.  Her taste in films is of notorious ill repute.

Since my last post I’ve seen Avatar in 3D and think that everyone who enjoys cinema owes James Cameron a good deal of thanks.  I’m not a Cameron fan per se, having seen only one of the Terminator movies and not having seen Titanic.  On many levels Avatar is bad film.  The plot is tired and clearly directed at reconsideration of American involvement in Iraq.  I have been against that particular war from the get-go, but think the standard progressive take on it (that we did it for the oil)  is almost as lame as the standard conservative take (that we did it because Sadam was a bad bad man and we are a moral country). The answer can be found in a quick gander at the French conflict in Algeria in the early sixties I suspect.  But that is a bit off topic.  Also the aliens are aesthetically lacking.  Many have compared them to smurfs, I think gumby is a better match.

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