the groundhog day project

I don't imagine that I have much to say, if this were a review, about Ready Player One that would sway anyone either way. See it, don't see it. If you want to see it, you will likely enjoy at least some of what's up there on the screen. And, as I used to end my actual reviews on YouTube, if you don't want to see it, see something else; there's always something worth seeing out there . Also, if you don't want to see it, you should probably not let your friends drag you to see it, because it is long and your enjoyment will depend quite a lot on how much you buy into the gaming aspects or the nostalgia aspects of the film. The plot is so slight, you have to be there for, what one Twitter user called, quite aptly, "an overload of metaphorical nerd fantasy porn". I didn't read the book. I read a sample of it on my nook app and it didn't grab me. As I grew up in the 80s, have loved movies since before I knew what they were, and make a habit, her...

Today: a deconstruction of this year so far in film... for me. I saw Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri this morning--and loved it--and got to thinking about the little movies that not enough people see. Take for example this list of things that bother me (an incomplete list in not particular order): War Christian rock Factory farming Racism People leaving spreading knives in the sink, you know, because they're so damn hard to clean Sexism Domestic abuse Self-indulgent filmmakers who are not also clever, or who were once clever but turned out to be one-trick ponies Tax breaks for the rich Donald Trump People saying it's a bad year for movies when they've seen maybe two, and those only because they were playing on a few thousand screens, and they make no fucking effort at all to seek out better movies, more movies That last one. Bugs the crap out of me. Especially in a year in which one of the biggest films at the box office-- Wonder Woman was also pretty good. E...

Opening shot of The Revenant : Hugh Glass and his Native American wife and child. That's one white guy, and two people of colour. Suck it, Jada Pinkett Smith. Or, you know, watch the rest of the movie, which focuses quite a bit on the white guys. Plus, that wife and kid are soon dead. But, that sort of anecdotal evidence is all the rage among the... Whatever you would call the anti-#OscarsSoWhite crowd. Republicans? There's a list going around among the crazy conservative groups I follow on Facebook, a list of something like 56 people of colour who have won Oscars in the past 16 or so years. I went after the list on Facebook with some math pointing out that 56 out of 1840(-ish) nominations-- And that thought got interrupted by the opening battle sequence in The Revenant . If Inarritu wins the Oscar, this is why. Not the somewhat gimmicky thing of only using natural light so his shooting time per day was reduced but a sequence like this, dozens of actors and extras, practical...

Outside of the #OscarsSoWhite problem, there's always folks labeling the snubs. Not just Will Smith for Concussion or Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation or Kiana Kiki Rodriguez for Tangerine but, you know, what about Tom Hanks or Mark Rylance for Bridge of Spies , or Helen Mirren for Trumbo ? People talk about Samuel L. Jackson for The Hateful Eight but no Walter Goggins? Not Kurt Russell? Michael B. Jordan for Creed but no Jake Gyllenhaal for Southpaw ? How about Oscar Isaac for Ex Machina ? And what about Gunes Sensoy for Mustang or Geza Rohrig for Son of Saul ? Why must the role spoken in English to matter? And, where's Ex Machina in the Best Picture list? Hell, where's Krampus in the Production Design category? Where's It Follows for Cinematography? Those last couple might seem silly, but that's my point. The nomination process is not only complicated but subjective to start with. If all you saw this year were the Marvel movies and The Revenant , of c...

Robin Thede made a point I liked last night on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore ; she said, referring to black people of course, "You can't say in one breath how proud we are when Hale and Mo'Nique and Denzel and all those people win but then when we're not in there say that we don't care." On the one hand, I agree, it's a little two-faced. On the other hand, they should care all the time. And, so should we. So should everybody. As I said yesterday , the racial makeup and the racial prejudices in the Oscar nominations and the Academy membership do matter. Mary McNamara explains it well--and this was why I didn't get into critiquing her yesterday. She writes in the Los Angeles Times : ...a growing chorus wants to know why anyone really cares. With all the troubles in the world, do we really need to worry that a bunch of relatively rich and privileged filmmakers are mad that their movies didn't get an Oscar nomination? So what if the nominees ...

#OscarsSoWhite continues. Jada Pinkett Smith (married of course to Will Smith, who is one of the oft cited actors of colour who could/should have been nominated for an Oscar this year) put out a few tweets and then a video about boycotting the Oscars. Spike Lee joined her. So did Michael Moore. One person that specifically spoke out against Jada was her husband's old costar from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air , Janet Hubert. But, she had to go and start with a somewhat sexist-- I'm getting ahead of myself. How about Jada's tweets first, set some context beyond just the fact that in the past ten years worth of acting nominations (just to narrow it down to one field), the Academy had only nominated 26 people of colour and 174 white people. Colourless people, if you will. Because the Academy was last reported as being 94% white and 54% over the age of 60 (with an average age of about 62), so this is an organization of, you know, old white men. Anyway, Jada's tweets: At th...

A new angle for the next week (then I mean to get back to Charlie Kaufman to end out the month): the Oscars. I talk about them off and on anyway. And as I have seen most of the films nominated, I am inclined to express opinions about them. Plus, this past week I set up my own Oscars-specific page on Facebook. I intend to get into, and probably rant for many hundreds or thousands of words about, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, but may not get that far today. So... the plan: One best picture nominee a day, starting with Mad Max Fury Road today. I've already seen each of the eight films and wrote in detail about a few of them in this blog already, but I might get so sidetracked by Oscars business and bigger Hollywood politics--and societal standards on race and gender for that matter--that I might say very little about the films themselves this week. Not one per entry anyway. Mad Max was headed toward the storm before I even started typing today. That might be the only specific ...