Purple State Of Mind News

2010-03-07 23:03:59

KATHRYN BIGELOW: She Wins! Best Picture, Too!

Filed under: Movies, Pop Culture
Posted by: Purple State of News

It’s the final image of The Hurt Locker that seals it. War movies have ended in lots of ways, but that shot of a man in a bomb suit walking down the street into a heavy metal dream feels like something new. With this vision, Bigelow and her team have added to the vocabulary of the war movie. For that alone, they deserve their Oscars.

Now people will actually see the movie.

Here’s my review from last summer.

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2010-03-07 19:31:42

DINNER TABLE: Oscar wrap–Putting the Hurt on Avatar

Filed under: Featured, Movies
Posted by: Purple State of News

kathryn_bigelow_oscar

JOHN: I have to say it one more time. I love the fact that Kathryn Bigelow got nominated, but it doesn’t heal the wound of seeing Jane Campion get passed over. Bright Star was a thousand times better than An Education, for instance, the year’s most overrated film, and it should be one of the ten.

Does anyone else FEEL MY PAIN?

I can only think that the lack of a strong male lead killed its chances with audiences, and it wasn’t the kind of critical darling that overcomes all obstacles. It was also a period film from another era, and it was ostensibly about a poet who died young after spitting up blood.

But enough about my pet peeve. My sympathies lie with Bigelow for best director, but Avatar is clearly one of those medium-changing events that deserves to win best picture. I loved Inglourious Basterds, which seems to have a whispering campaign on its behalf, and I think Quentin should win one for the sheer amount of pleasure he’s given movie audiences, but it will feel anti-climactic and weird if it actually happens.

Didn’t see The Blind Side, but I hope Bullock wins because she looks scared to death, and because from the trailers she appears to have nailed the Southern accent. Also, Streep doesn’t need another one. Everything else is a given. Bridges is a go, right?

The real question has to be Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Can they do it? Craig?

CRAIG: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin delivered one of the classier Oscar telecasts. They got out of the way, keeping the focus on the presenters, the nominees, and the recipients. They were true winners.

As usual, the song and dance routines came off flat. What works within the venue itself so rarely translates to the home viewer. But the dance sequence in the middle of the telecast provided a convenient bathroom break.

The biggest surprise of the night were the OSCAR WINNERS! Sure, we expected Christoph Waltz to dance away with the Academy Award as Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds and Mo’nique definitely deserved the prize for playing such a horrific mother in Precious. It is so much easier to both write and play evil than good. But these two villains will live in screen infamy for a long time. Nobody foresaw Precious winning for Best Adapted Screenplay. Perhaps the voters unease with the contentious shared writer credits for Up in the Air undercut its chances. It might have made for as strange and ugly an acceptance speech as the winner for Best Documentary short. How cool to see a writer like Geoffrey Fletcher struggling to find the words to express his appreciation. Is he the first black man to win an Oscar for screenwriting?

I was thrilled to see Sandra Bullock win Best Actress. So few comedic actresses get the credit they deserve for making things look easy and natural. And Leigh Anne Tuohy is an amazing real life role model. So kudos to all the creative team behind the surprise hit, The Blind Side.

And then, finally, what sweet and unexpected revenge for The Hurt Locker. Barbara Streisand wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to present the Oscar for Best Director to the first woman. Despite Hollywood’s liberal credentials, when it comes to sharing Oscar gold, the Academy has been woefully behind the times. Much has also been made about Kathryn Bigelow besting her ex–James Cameron. But to have the all time box office champ beaten by the most criminally underseen Oscar champ of all time is quite a shock. Despite the Academy’s efforts to broaden the field (and thus the ratings), the smallest indie film walked off with the most Oscar glory. A relative upstart distributor like Summit triumphed over Fox, Disney, Warners Brothers, and Paramount. A film that no studio wanted best all the major distributors–huzzah!

Frankly, almost all the big winners were really independent efforts. Crazy Heart was headed for the Country Music channel until Fox Searchlight saw an opportunity to repeat (and perfect) their reclamation campaign for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. The Blind Side was financed by Fed Ex money in Memphis. Precious was financed by a couple from Colorado. Inglorious Basterds found financing in Europe. Hurt Locker turned to France for funds to tell a story about Americans serving in Iraq. Jordan provided the backdrop. Yes, the best work is made despite the Hollywood studio system.

What surprised or delighted you, Johnny?

JOHN: Not Baldwin and Martin. Honestly, by the end, I was saying to myself that it would be my last Oscar telecast. They weren’t embarrassing, but they were tired, and the whole production felt that way to me, except for the the best actor and actress nominations, where the artists came out and gave testimonials to their colleagues. Great idea.

But who cares about the telecast in the end? I wasn’t surprised or delighted by much, because the results were fairly predigested, but it made me extremely happy to see Bigelow get her due, both because this gender barrier should have been broken years ago, but also because the movie is superb, that rare work of art on the Oscar podium deserving of the accolades. By and large, for me, the list of Oscar winners from year to year bears little or no relation to my tastes in movies.

I thought Bullock and Bridges came off as the class acts of the night, and it was startling to hear that he was first nominated in 1971 for The Last Picture Show. It’s highly possible that he was nominated the first year that I ever watched the broadcast of the Academy Awards, so it took most of my life for this great actor to be recognized.

In general, I would say that it turned out to be an exceeedingly conservative year in which several of the main recipients were given awards for lifetime achievement, as opposed to just one performance or work. I would put Bigelow, Bridges and Bullock in that category. They are all stalwarts of the industry. My wife thinks Avatar should have won, hands down, given its achievement and probable future influence, and as much as I love The Hurt Locker, I do see the merits of the argument.

But let’s drop the pretense and get to it, as Kris Kristofferson says in Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. The comment against Craig and The Hurt Locker below is filled with the familiar rage of the era, and while I don’t want to respond with disrespect or try to refute every point, I’m going to have to disagree with virtually everything in the post.

Some soldiers, yes, have come out against The Hurt Locker. Many other veterans have praised it. It doesn’t present all soldiers as psychopaths, or even one soldier as a psychopath. That’s not the story. It examines the extent to which war is an addiction. It examines the pleasures of war, and it demonstrates amply the conflicted feelings that plenty of members of the armed forces have publicly uttered about the work.

For every soldier who never wants a hint of negativity to creep into depictions of the military life, there will always be another who wants to see warts and all. In any case, Bigelow and Boal didn’t make the movie described below. Had they done so, the outrage would have been loud and clear through the Oscar race. It wasn’t. It was deployed rather in Swift Boat fashion, i.e. cynically and with the very clear end of discrediting an Oscar bid.

Finally, the attack on Craig leaves me slightly baffled. Could the writer be more specific? What has Craig precisely done to demean Christians? In general, the post confirms my sense that he’s doing the brave thing and taking on the nastiness of tone and crudity of sentiment expressed constantly on the blogosphere and echoed again in the post below.

Craig, you want to weigh in here?

CRAIG: Alas, no time today. Full slate of stuff. Maybe tonite…

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2010-03-05 09:05:25

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: Obama Punts, Turkey in Huff

Filed under: Genocide, International
Posted by: Purple State of News

In the grand 20th Century tradition of democratically elected politicians backing away from the term genocide, Obama has sent signals to a House Panel that he is not in favor of applying it to the Turkish mass murder of Armenians during World War I. That panel yesterday approved the use of the word.

Today, the Turkish government withdrew its ambassador and threatened worse to come, calling the issue a matter of “honor”, according to the Associated Press.

In the history of genocide, when we’re talking about the Armenian issue, we’re talking about original sin. The 1915 massacre of more than a million Armenian men, women and children by Turkish troops is believed by many historians to have inspired Hitler in his thinking about the extermination of the Jews, and it was this killing, rather than the Holocaust, that led to the coining of the term, which means, roughly, the systematic murder of a race.

An observer at the Atlantic believes Obama’s response is the right one for all concerned, but even if it is, the history of governments refusing to acknowledge genocide, before, during and after it occurs, is one of the disgraceful chapters of world history, and realpolitik notwithstanding, the president’s choice is disappointing.

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