Here’s the Thing

We accidentally managed to see all 5 films nominated this year. Two of them have been bugging us since we saw them. So here we go.

No Country For Old Men.


2nd best trailer of the year. One of two films where people actually told us “you should see this movie.” We liked it plenty: great scenes of suspense before every murder, we couldn’t take our eyes of the screen whenever the killer Chigurh was on, and Josh Brolin is on one Hell of a run of great mustaches.

It’s classic Cohen Brothers, and the ankle-high shots of the killer walking toward his quarry, showing us his feet and the muzzles of his weapons, is reminiscent of the scene in Miller’s Crossing. We love that shot.

But the more time went by, the less blown away we were. The ending is what it is. But again we ask - what’s the big deal? It’s just a remake of the Terminator, set in 1980. A relentless, dispassionate killer with a funny accent who just won’t be stopped stalks an unwitting but resourceful prey. For all the fuss over this flick, it's nothing we haven't already seen.

Let’s run down the Terminator checklist, and see how No Country compares.

• Idiot roommate: Check.

• Killer has a chilling encounter with store clerk early on: Check

• Killer retreats to his motel room and repairs his wounds on his own: Check.

• Sympathetic police boss who offers to help, but is ultimately powerless to do anything: Check

• Arrival of someone who knows the killer, and explains everything to the prey: check.

• Scene where this new arrival informs the prey that "the killer can’t be stopped. He can't be negotiated with. He’ll keep coming." Check.

• Main character’s death occurs off camera: Ch- oh, wait, that’s just No Country for Old Men.

• Ending where character leaves us with his vision for a dark and more violent future: Check.

Next up: Juno


Best script of the year. Hands downs. The dialog was original, funny, and snappy. But…

It just felt like another assembly-line produced indie film. As one reviewer whose name escapes us said:

“The characters weren’t in wardrobes so much as they were in costumes.”

Oh, the irony abounded. People in red and green velvets, a girl talking on a phone shaped like a hamburger (and in case you missed the cuteness, there's even a line where she tells the abortion counselor on the other end of the phone:

"I’m sorry, I’m on my hamburger phone and it’s kind of awkward to talk on. It’s really more of a novelty than a functional appliance.")

As funny as it was, we can count on our left hand the number of times we laughed out loud. Most of the jokes were the kind you smile at. Relied on you to laugh at the fact that the characters referred to some middle-America product in lieu of a punchline.

Indeed, the movie had more name-checking than a P Diddy video. If the idea of a girl drinking a gallon of Sunny D makes you laugh, then this is the movie for you. And if you think a person being hit by a minivan is moderately funny, then hold onto your sides while Juno asks

“Did you hit someone with the Previa?”

The movie begins to fade pretty quickly from our memory once we left the theater. Best screenplay? Absolutely. Great dialog? Absolutely. Best use of language we've seen in a long time? Yup. But best movie of the year? To quote Juno herself, in the end we'd say it's ultimately more of a novelty than a functional appliance.

Clash of Civilizations Update:

The 6th Century is winning.

"Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries."

This is cowardly. According to the Hudson Institute:

"The number of books published in the Arab world, with more than 250 million people, is less than the titles printed every year in Greek, which is the language of only 16 million people.

Yet we're the one's taking media off our shelves, to accommodate an illiterate group of totalitarians.
Shame on Borders. Looks like we'll be shopping at Barnes and Noble from now on.

Meanwhile, Hitchens puts this whole cartoon foolishness into its proper perspective :

"The object of the (republication of the offending cartons) was to break the largely self-imposed taboo on the criticism of Islam and its various icons. The satire was wildly successful, in that it resulted in hysterical Muslims making public idols out of images they had proclaimed to be unshowable lest they became idols." via Slate.com

Here's a link to the Cartoons.

Writer’s Strike Is Over

“On the way to yesterday's (WGA East in New York) meeting, the writers passed Broadway theaters whose marquees still prominently display the names of playwrights. The notable exceptions are the theaters showing "The Lion King" and "The Little Mermaid," where in the ultimate expression of the Hollywood ethic only the Disney name is displayed.

At the cinemas, the most prominent names were of course those of the actors, followed by the director and the producer. You often need to squint to find the writer on a movie poster. As a reporter once noted, the rewards of being a screenwriter are money and oblivion.” Via Michael Daley.

After 3 months, the WGA Writer's Strike is finally over, but as the above excerpt indicates, the studio-writer paradigm remains unchanged. Writers now get a slightly bigger piece of the crumbs that fall from the pie. (The settlement just applies to screenwriters, however. The studios are still happily fucking over authors.)

We walked the picket line a couple of times. We’re not Guild members (yet) but we’re in LA, and it was the right thing to do. After all, we’re from Boston, a strong Union town where cops pull in $100K per year and firefighters are literally falling over themselves to cash out.

Each time we picketed our place of choice was Gate 2 at Warner Bros. Located just outside the WB Studio, this location offers wide sidewalks and a wide street that took a long time to traverse. It was an ideal place for a group of writers and SAG actors to walk back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, soliciting honks from passing cars (and the occasional enraged “FUCK YOU” from men in imported luxury cars.)

Keep it Moving
Why so much walking? In LA, only the homeless are allowed to live on the sidewalk. Everyone else, including picketers, must be in constant motion. Stand still, you're eligible to be cited for loitering. Sometimes, the writer in charge of pressing the Walk button forgot to do his job, and we’d stand there helplessly at the walk light, hoping a cop doesn't come by.

That’s it. We’d like to say it was more exciting, but not really.
Among the highlights:

• Is that Ken Ober walking with us? It Is!

• We met Quinn K. Redeker, one of the credited writers of Deer Hunter. He stopped by and walked with us for over an hour.

• There was also a newspaper vendor selling the Revolution newspaper. Of course, she was surrounded by film and TV writers, so the talk came around to what kind of movies she liked. Her pick: “Did you ever see Casualties of War? What a great movie.” To which we replied "Casualties of War? Why the Hell would she like…." Wait for it, wait for it…. She went on to say: “There's this scene in that movie where the American soldiers are raping a Vietnamese villager.” Sigh.
  

To pass the time, one of the other writing students we were stopping labor with introduced us to a game he likes to play. “What's the one movie that, when you hear someone likes it, makes you hate that person immediately?”

Some responses: Vanilla Sky and Magnolia. When it came to be our turn, we declined to answer on the grounds that the writer of that movie could be standing right next to us. So we moved on to other games.
There’s Got to Be a Morning After
So the Strike's over. What does it mean for you people? Means your shows should be coming back on, starting in about 4 weeks or so.

Well, almost all your shows. There's a rumor that 24 won't be coming back. “Not true” said one writer we walked with who worked at Fox. He told us 24 will be coming back, but in a shortened season. With only 6 hours to fill, they’ll be tackling smaller problems. This season, Jack Bauer investigates an unattended suitcase found at the airport.

In the end, the Strike wasn’t a total wash. It gave us :

• Conan O’Brien singing Sabotage. As Edith Bunker.

• Sarah Silverman telling Jimmy Kimmell that she's fucking Matt Damon

• Mike Huckabee crossing every picket line he could find

* (by the way, our answers: Babel , Bowling for Columbine, and Juno. )

Roy Schieder Dead at 73-ish

We were always fans of Roy Schieder. Yes, he was in Jaws, as well as French Connection and a bunch of other good films, but we first became a fan based on his performance as Frank Murphy in one of our favorite movies of all time, Blue Thunder.

The LA Times has the best obit on him.

The Only Thing We Hate More Than Urban Legends

is the talk about peanut allergies. Harpers breaks down the bullshit for us.