Damien wrote:IMDB comments -- oy veh! Sometimes when I need a laugh I read comments posted ther. You can find some of the stupidest statements ever uttered by humankind.
Ever been to Goldderby? I think they might have the edge on imdb for sheer stupidity. Not to mention people-who-seriously-need-to-get-laid. It's more than enough to make you appreciate the UAADB.
Damien wrote:Big, focusing on the ages of the actors in Liberty Valence is besides the point. It was not meant to be realistic -- everything about the film is mythic, including the iconic figures of Wayne and Stewart themselves. And it as much a movie about the changing of the guard in Hollywood as it is about the necessary changes that civilized the West. The Cahiers critics and their American counterparts (Sarris, Eugene Archer, Bogdanovich) got it, but Kael was too obtuse to look below the surface, and made an even bigger fool of herself by being condescending.
IMDB comments -- oy veh! Sometimes when I need a laugh I read comments posted ther. You can find some of the stupidest statements ever uttered by humankind.
Yes, I get it now, but as a 16 year-old in the summer of 1962 I didn't have quite that level of understanding even if I did like the film. Admittedly as an influential critic, Kael should have gotten it, but as we know she wasn't very deep. She never really got Ford at all.
Comments on imdb can be pretty stupid, but seven pages of them all the saying the same thing is a bit unusual. I did get a big laugh, though, when I read the one by the Ford "fan" lamenting that the film was shot in black and white without a single shot of Monument Valley.
Okri wrote:So, Damien's favourite film in the race is Juno. I wouldn't have predicted that at the beginning of the season, thats for damn sure.
Yes, I think Juno is the best in this bunch. Michael Clayton's also a good film.
Big, focusing on the ages of the actors in Liberty Valence is besides the point. It was not meant to be realistic -- everything about the film is mythic, including the iconic figures of Wayne and Stewart themselves. And it as much a movie about the changing of the guard in Hollywood as it is about the necessary changes that civilized the West. The Cahiers critics and their American counterparts (Sarris, Eugene Archer, Bogdanovich) got it, but Kael was too obtuse to look below the surface, and made an even bigger fool of herself by being condescending.
IMDB comments -- oy veh! Sometimes when I need a laugh I read comments posted ther. You can find some of the stupidest statements ever uttered by humankind.
Edited By Damien on 1203887450
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Interesting conversation, Damien. Of course I agree with some of what you guys had to say, disagreed with others.
I never thought I would be in posiiton to defend that old harridan, Pauline Kael, but I think it's a little unfair to pick on her for pointing out the age disparity of James Stewart and John wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, something that really bothered me when I first saw this at 16 after years of watching both Stewart and Wayne act their age and older. In fact just before seeing this I had seen Stewart in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation in which he effectively and amusingly played a grandfather. It was actually released two months after Valance, but I saw it first. Oddly enough, I had no problem with Stewart playing a young man courting Debbie Reynolds in the following year's How the West Was Won.
But it wasn't just me and Kael. The imdb has seven pages of user comments realting to the ages of the cast members, Stewart in particular, including this gem:
"The fact is during the flashbacks to the "early" days, EVERYBODY'S too damn old! Wayne, Stewart, Devine...the whole friggin' town's so full of 50-and-uppers it's practically a retirement village. Even virginal, unmarried 'girl' Vera Miles is around 35."
That said, the film has aged extremely well. It's a great film, to be sure. Now that I am older than Stewart and Wayne were when they made the film, it no longer bothers me but at the time it really required more than the usual suspension of disbelief for me to accept Wayne and especially Stewart in those roles.
Every year Oscar show producer Gil Cates announces various initiatives to speed up the show and make it more entertaining, and every year the running time is extended by long-winded speeches or self-congratulatory tributes to the majesty of film.
I wonder which one will be this year and what about the 80th anniversary?
(CNN) -- Many questions came to mind when the Oscar nominations were announced: Who's going to win best picture? Why wasn't "Once" nominated more than once?
But there was one question that, surely, Hollywood didn't want to hear.
Does anyone care anymore?
It's not the kind of question anyone in Tinseltown would ask aloud. However, the entertainment industry must surely be wondering if its biggest night has started, like the pictures in "Sunset Boulevard," to become small.
"The Oscars Should Die," headlined a Marc Peyser column on Newsweek.com, calling the show "freeze-dried." "[C]onsidering the anticipation and hype that precede the show every year, this is one pretty awful excuse for A-list entertainment," he wrote.
"[O]nce again, there are lots of films that most people haven't seen and don't care about," wrote Slate's "Hollywoodland" columnist Kim Masters after the nominations were announced. "Should commercial success figure into Oscar nominations? Of course not. But when it comes to generating big ratings for the telecast, this year's slate spells trouble." Interactive: This year's nominees »
Indeed, Oscar's TV ratings have been struggling -- though that's a relative term for a traditionally much-watched show dubbed "the Super Bowl for women" for its ability to draw large numbers of female viewers. Watch the stars gather for a lighthearted lunch »
Since 1974, only seven Oscar broadcasts have attracted an audience lower than 40 million viewers. Three of them have occurred in the last five years -- 33 million viewers watched in 2003, about 39 million in 2006 and 39.9 million last year.
Compare those totals to the 1998 telecast, the year "Titanic" was crowned, which drew 55.2 million viewers.
Peter Sealey, an adjunct professor of marketing at Claremont Graduate University's Drucker School and a former Columbia Pictures executive, acknowledges that the show has trouble when the nominees, however noteworthy, aren't big box-office successes.
"The show will have modest ratings this year," he says. "The nominees are not the kinds of films women go to see." (Of this year's best picture nominees, at least two -- "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men," the two favorites for the prize -- are downbeat, violent films lacking big stars. Only one, the sleeper hit "Juno," has pulled in excess of $100 million at the box office.)
Independent filmmaker and two-time Oscar nominee John Sayles observes that recent Oscars have also lacked star power. "Certainly, the TV show is happier with bigger celebrities rather than newcomers," he says.
He observes that one year, host Billy Crystal, noting the presence of relative unknowns, asked, "Who are you people?"
Still, says Sealey, Hollywood movies continue to have a global impact. "Movies are a central cultural force for the United States. ... The movies we make are the standard all over the world. They're a tremendous social force," he says. There's a reason, he implies, the Oscars are broadcast all over the world.
"The Academy Awards," he concludes, "still matter."
They matter as much for their marketing potential as their ability to draw a large television audience. After all, a movie that earns an Oscar nomination almost always gets a box office boost, assisted by those ads that blare how many nominations the film received. It's a shot of extra publicity for a film that may have died otherwise. (Sidebar: Turning prestige films into box-office gold)
The Oscars were always as much about marketing as art, another way to keep movies in the forefront of the public imagination. Louis B. Mayer and his industry pals created the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in early 1927 to improve the industry's image -- then under fire because of labor disputes and boundary-pushing material -- and honor its best work, Mason Wiley and Damien Bona write in their indispensable book "Inside Oscar."
Eighty years later, with the studios now in the hands of large multimedia corporations, the awards haven't changed much. Though the Hollywood studios would be pleased if mainstream blockbusters were nominated, they're just as happy with the low-budget "indie" films that earn awards -- since, for the most part, they all have their own "indie" branches, such as Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage, says Notre Dame film professor Jim Collins. (One of these indie branches, Warner Independent Pictures, is a unit of Time Warner, as is its parent Warner Bros. -- and CNN.)
"They see it as diversification," Collins says. "It's not like the Oscars have been taken over by a band of renegades. Virtually every studio has a summer popcorn movie and a fall prestige film. Each major studio developed an independent division to expand market share."
In the last three years, only four of the 15 best picture nominees have been from the major studios, he notes.
Audience tastes have changed as well. In the pre-"Star Wars" era, some of the biggest box office hits of all time were also best picture winners, including "The Godfather," which -- with its large, ethnic cast, rich dialogue, deliberate pacing, period setting and three-hour running time -- would almost certainly be an indie film today. (See box of top 10 hits, then and now.)
More recent bonanzas and best picture winners such as "Titanic" and "Lord of the Rings" are the exceptions that prove the rule: the former hearkened back to old-fashioned epic filmmaking, the latter equally appealed to fantasy-loving fanboys and art-house audiences.
"It used to be, come one, come all," says Collins. "But when you're dealing with sophisticated ways of calibrating audiences, [the studios] ask, 'How do we fill out the [demographic] quadrant?' "
So, given the realities of the marketplace, what can the Oscars do to boost viewership? Every year Oscar show producer Gil Cates announces various initiatives to speed up the show and make it more entertaining, and every year the running time is extended by long-winded speeches or self-congratulatory tributes to the majesty of film.
Sayles suggests that the awards go to an "American Idol"-style vote-off, or try a suggestion from the screenwriter William Goldman to make the voting transparent. With so many awards shows on TV, it's hard to make the Oscars stand out, he says: "It used to be that there were the Oscars, and that was it. There were no SAG Awards, or the People's Choice Awards." Even the Independent Spirit Awards, once an industry sidelight at best, is televised and features major names, he points out.
(Moreover, there's as much interest in celebrities and clothes as the awards: Collins says some of his students may watch the red-carpet specials "and then wander out.")
Or should the Academy do anything? Sealey observes that it's not just the Oscars -- network viewership is down across the board, a decline that has been going on for almost two decades.
Besides, he says, if the Oscars isn't the monster it was in years past, it's still -- next to the Super Bowl -- perhaps the most dependable audience event any network has.
In the end, the Academy can only hope that, mild-grossing prestige films or no, the Oscars retain their special aura. Writer Bruce Vilanch, a regular Oscar show contributor, was asked by Entertainment Weekly if he'd still watch if the honors were derailed by the writers strike and ended up in some truncated form.
"Of course. I'd watch the Oscars without sound," he said. "It's the Oscars."
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Thanks for the link cam. Feinberg has a link to the Newsweek Oscar Round-table discussion but it's way too slow and the quality isn't that great. If anyone wants to view it, here's the youtube link:
The guests are Angelina Jolie, Daniel Day Lewis, Ellen Page, George Clooney, Marion Cotillard and James McAvoy. Some of it is actually quite fun (mostly because of the humor of Clooney and McAvoy) I also like the moment in Part 7 where everyone fawns over a clearly embarrassed Day Lewis.
LMAO!! Musto is amazing! He packs so much humor into every line. Love it!
My favorites:
"Mathieu Amalric, The Diving Bell . . . (Blink if you liked him)"
"Ellen Page, Juno (the nomination poor Christina Ricci never got. And it's the rare edgy movie that can't offend anyone—the 16-year-old has the baby but doesn't keep it. Learn it, Jamie Lynn)"
"Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age (No one liked it, but it takes a very special film to unite the entire populace)"
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (He had to endure small-dick jokes and dialogue like, "Let me be your sidekick tonight so you can examine my grit and intelligence." Plus his piece, I mean his part, was way bigger than Brad Pitt's. In fact, the camera lovingly lingered on his dewy saucer eyes for 160 long minutes)
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Akash wrote:Keira Knightley, Atonement (She didn't have much to do except look snooty and get fucked against the wall, but she was great in Pride and Prejudice and she's really pretty).
HA!!! I love him!
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
