Jingus

So in other words, you don't have a real answer? That... has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion here. I'm not talking about any random old song which is tossed into the movie playing in the background. I am talking, very specifically, about songs which had been written before, but were performed anew for the film. If a movie is adapted from a Shakespeare play, it's still able to win a Best Screenplay award, even if the dialogue hasn't been changed one tiny bit. So why is a new cover of an old song somehow considered to not be worth merit?

Okay then, why does it have to be Best Original Song and not just Best Song? Or why not a Best Adapted song too? Especially since it's not like they'd be giving out awards to long-dead musicians, all these examples I'm talking about are ones where the actors in the movie did their own new original performances of the material. Yeah, Sondheim may have written Sweeney Todd years ago, but Johnny Depp didn't sing it until the movie version.

By the same artists who wrote the original scores, right? For movies which were, otherwise, note-for-note copies of the Broadway originals. Well, not entirely. What if a song was altered for the movie version? How many notes, how many words would you have to change before it's kosher? I'm sorry, I don't see the distinction of why one song is worthy of consideration for an award of artistic merit and the other is not. What's the point? If a song is in a movie, and it hasn't been in a movie before, and it was specifically written for the script which the movie adapted into a cinematic property, and it's a great song... seriously, what's the justification here? Who's getting fucked over if Broadway musicals are allowed into this category?

But that's... just... dumb. How many Broadway musicals are made into movies now, anyway? I see the point of this rule if it's just to stop possible retarded decisions like nominating a movie cuz it had a great Beatles song in it or something like that. But for original musical numbers which were very specifically written to go with this script, I don't understand what terrible injustices they're trying to prevent by banning those from contention. And hey, wasn't Chicago nominated for Best Song a few years back, anyway? ::checks IMDB:: Hey yeah, it was. And so was Phantom of the Opera. So how does that rule work, exactly?

Yeah it was a great song, but it's retarded that Sweeney's songs were inelligible. The Academy has so many bizarre little rules in its various subcategories, like the early deadline for the foreign language flicks that kept Let the Right One In from a seat at the table. Or the weird documentary strictures which say that you have to see all five of the nominations in special Academy-only screenings in order to vote for them, or whatever dumbass rule kept Hoop Dreams from being elligible a few years back.

Oh. Nevermind. I thought she was black. Learn something new every day. It's not unusual for the Best Song category to be a bit wacky; double-dipping is pretty common here. Like Enchanted picking up three different nominations in that category last year, while Sweeney Todd got zero. For me, the weird part is that they only nominated three songs total this year, instead of the usual five. (For the record, I did think Slumdog probably had the best soundtrack I've heard from 2008.)

The Weinsteins (2 of 'em, Harvey and Bob, brothers) were the guys who made Miramax into the "independent" prestige-picture powerhouse studio, and a couple years back they left that company to start their own. They've helped start many people's careers, and as executive producers have provided the funding for everything from Pulp Fiction to Lord of the Rings. They're also infamous for being persistent lobbyists in going after the Academy to get their company's movies on the voting ballots, although ironically they only have one actual Oscar of their own, Harvey's for producing Shakespeare in Love. You referring to the hip-hop singer chick? No, that's not her. The nominated girl is an Indian musician.

Huh? If you're talking about the storyline, absolutely, Phillip K. Dick used to whip up stuff like that in his sleep. But I was referring more to the style of action, with all the bullet-time special effects and watching superpowered folks doing gun-fu fights in super slow-motion. If there's an earlier movie which did that shit quite like Matrix did it, actually watching the lead fly through the air and combining a mobile camera shot with intricate CGFX work, I haven't seen it. And Wanted's action scenes did indeed lean on that style pretty hard.

I know the Academy them some Weinsteins, but I don't think Winslet is that much of a deciding factor. If she was, she would've won an Oscar by now. (And if you haven't seen her riff on that subject in her episode of Extras, watch it yesterday.) (And hey, if she does happen to win here, that proves her theory stated in that show was correct!) She just happens to pick a lot of projects which are the exact kind of movies the Academy gets erections for: historical dramas with lots of period costumes and mostly unhappy endings. Yeah, amazing that movies are still shamelessly ripping off The Matrix a full decade later. Plus, it was one of those dreaded comic book movies which they fucked around with so hard during the adaptation process that the finished movie bears absolutely zero resemblence to the source material. And the next good action flick I see starring Angelina Jolie will be the first one.

That is true. ...well I have no idea who Jenkins is and I haven't seen Frozen River, admittedly. But I'm an old fan of Leo from Homicide, Werner Herzog rules the fucking world in everything he ever does, and Michael Shannon was the only part I really liked about Revolutionary Road. Reading various critics and websites, the consensus seems to be: "The fucking Reader? REALLY?"

In the words of my favorite amateur blogger critic: "I knew the Oscars were going to be boring this year, but I didn't realise they were going to be boring and shitty."

Yeah, Brody, this is not the type of show you can watch without already having seen, uh, pretty much every single other episode. Preferably two or three times each, in order to keep track of the massive cast of various people it expects you to remember. And you gotta have nearly infinite patience for unanswered questions and just not care that many of them probably will never be answered. No. It's Fionnula Flanagan, one of those old veteran actors, the type who's shown up once on every different series of Star Trek as a different character.

Hey hey now, let's not go TOO overboard here. If I were forced to choose between either Winslet&Blanchett or the Academy Awards vanishing from the earth tomorrow, bye-bye Oscars. Think they stacked up each category enough with the same seven or eight flicks? The sentence "the Academy Award-nominated film Wanted" just sounds dirty and hateful. At least Wall-E got a few nods. Since nobody's bothered here yet, the full nomination list: EDIT: damn you, CBright! Mine was better, I rearranged it into "which awards we actually give a fuck about" order.

I did like how they just completely went and explained stuff with Dr. Dharma's appearance at the beginning. "We're here to control time travel stuff, for the money/power/etc". I'm all like, cool, they actually came out and told us something. And then Faraday shows up in a hardhat and DAMMIT back to more questions. As usual, I liked the parts with Hurley the best. Couldn't stop cracking up during his incoherent retelling of the whole plot up til this point. The cast of supporting characters is too damn big. At least two or three times there was some moment where the show obviously expected me to go "Oh, it's That Guy!" and I had no idea who the hell it was. Unless you either are going back and watching all the old episodes on a regular basis or you've just got a photographic memory, I don't see how you're supposed to keep track. Did the commercial breaks seem unusually short to anyone else? Felt like every time I left the room during the commercials for whatever reason, by the time I got back I'd already missed half of the next scene.

Probably just a set-dressing fuckup, then. Those kind of mistakes happen all the time, where the production happens to build something wrong. That's the sort of thing you often hear on DVD commentary tracks: "And yeah, Charlie probably could've swam right out that window, but let's just ignore that part, k?"

I actually liked the John Williams song. A little more subtle and classical than his usual fanfare, and of course having that all-star quartet play it helped a lot. Aretha sounded a bit off, but between her age and the reported frigid cold up there I can't blame her. Did Obama have a couple of teleprompters hidden up there? He clearly wasn't using notes, but he kept looking back and forth in the same two directions over and over again. Christ, that poem went on forever. I could've recited The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock twice in the time it took her to mumble out all that banality. I saw the NBC stream, and it reminded me how horrible a host Olbermann is for this kind of stuff. He keeps trying to Cronkite out some kind of memorable quotes while he's narrating the whole thing.

Was the window big enough to swim out of, anyway? Didn't look like it. Charlie's a skinny fellow, but the porthole only looked like it was about a foot across.

I know, it doesn't entirely make sense. Then again, none of us have actually seen the movie, so who knows exactly what the details of this scenario are or how they'll play out. It might end up making sense, or it might suck ballz. Just wondering: why do so many people seem to be insisting that this movie is gonna be equal or superior to Dark Knight in terms of "The Comic Book Movie That Finally Forces Everyone To Take Comics Seriously"? I mean, the choice of director doesn't exactly scream Oscar Quality here. I liked his Dawn of the Dead and 300 as disposable action flicks with cool visuals, sure. But Watchmen is much more based on plot, characterization, and dialogue than anything Zack Snyder has ever done. Plus, it's not like Hollywood's never fucked up an Alan Moore book before. I'm hoping that it will end up being a worthy adaptation, but I'm not betting on it.

Huh? To quote Rorscharch:

I'm not a big fan of Rent, but I thought Dawson did just fine in her role there too.

I'm not gonna get over it, because it's a stupid decision to change it in the first place. It defeats the entire commercial purpose of adapting a currently-existing property. Why do you adapt or remake something that already exists into a new movie? Because you want to draw upon that pool of fans of the original product which is already out there. It's a ready-made audience whom you can count on to see your movie. But, when you change everything that these fans liked about the original product, what's the point of seeing the film? Why intentionally fuck with the product in order to piss off the fanboys, when the entire reason the movie was made is because you want those fanboys to buy tickets? It is possible to adapt something, make changes, and still remain faithful to the spirit of the material. The Dark Knight is a horrible example for why adaptations should include a lot of change, since they barely changed anything from the comics. Compared to every other Batman movie ever, it's the closest to the original inspiration. And hey guess what, people liked it! Same thing with Lord of the Rings. Sure there were some minor changes, there have to be in order to get it off the page and onto the screen. But they were minor changes, the least amount of changes they could've possibly done. And hey guess what, people liked it! "It's a movie, it's gonna be different" is bad reasoning when there's no reason for it to be different. How many movies have you seen which were made from comics or video games which radically altered the material and still ended up being any good? The cinema's recent history is littered with trash ranging from Super Mario Bros. to Ghost Rider, crap which got made that way due to the mentality of "it's just comics/games, kid's stuff, nobody cares". It's an arrogant and contemptuous attitude towards the very people they're theoretically marketing these movies towards. It's the exact operating theory of one Uwe Boll. And really, do you wanna share thought patterns with Uwe Boll? (All this being said, "a live-action Dragonball movie" already sounds like a spectacularly bad idea just on paper, and I couldn't imagine Spielberg, Scorsese, or anyone turning it into something watchable. Some properties were not meant to be adapted.)

It'd be hard to say that The Art of War isn't worth reading considering how small its word count must be, but you won't find anything that isn't useless and obvious in it. Eh, it depends somewhat on which translation you get. Some are far superior to others. Editions with a bunch of footnotes and supplemental info tend to be the better ones, usually, though not always. Regardless of all that the book is always pretty short and does indeed include several Captain Obvious moments, but it's got some interesting stuff in there too. But if you ever wanna throw some time away on a REALLY overhyped "classic" treatise on medieval warfare, look no farther than The Book of Five Rings. You could make a drinking game out of it: take a shot every time the book tells you to meditate deeply on the meaning of something in order to understand it, rather than just explaining to you what the fuck it means.

That's the one saving grace here. Since when has Ejiofor ever been in a really fucking terrible movie? The dude has a great eye for which projects to choose. Of course, nobody's perfect... Dragonball still looks like easily the biggest bomb coming down the pipe, but it's not the only one. I'm sure Uwe Boll and those Date/Epic/Disaster Movie faggots are sure to have at least a couple movies being released in 09 as well.

Aw, shit. I was a loyal EGM subscriber way back in the early 90s, so this is kinda painful to hear. Not unexpected, in this modern internet age, but it still sucks. I remember EGM back during the glory days, when they'd drop this War & Peace-sized phonebook in your mailbox every month. Anyone else a fond old fan of Sushi X? Hell, I read this magazine so damn long ago that I never even saw Seanbaby's tenure there (though I did like reading his stuff on his website, several years later). A sad final gravestone for a proud old era.

I agree with everything you said except for Revolutionary Road being "quite good". I thought it was a fairly standard "the American Dream turns to shit as a married couple self-destructs in the Hell of suburbia" type of flick. But yeah, everyone totally needs to see Let the Right One In, fucking AWESOME flick.