Here are my three best movie pick guesses for the 2009 Oscars: Best Foreign: Waltz with Bashir; Best Animated: Wall-E; Best Movie: Slumdog Millionaire. All fine movies, to be sure, but together they present as bleak a panorama of humanity’s failings as I can ever remember: greed, squalor, mindlessness, fatuity, slaughter. Collectively, they conjure up Bushie II and his meretricious, greed-motivated, hallucinatory, soulless eight years: Gitmo, Bernie Madoff, waterboarding, New Orleans, (Anyone notice that, at the Inauguration, Vice-President Cheney, in his wheelchair, looked strikingly like Dr. Strangelove?) Even though Bushie’s been gone less than a week, he already feels ancient history.
Here’s my point: Wall-E presents a portrait of a planet, devoid of life, suffocating in its own garbage; Slumdog Millionaire’s hero lives forever in Mumbai squalor. Waltz with Bashir’s Israeli soldiers have blocked out all memory of their role in Phalangiste massacre of Palestinians, in an infested Lebanese refugee camp.
In seeking out a movie to start the movie club, I had tentatively penciled in Feb. 22nd, Oscar night, for our first day, thinking we might dissect one of Oscar’s possible winners. Yet Hollywood movies this year conjure up - for me - dismal sniveling Detroit, unable to turn out a competent Chevrolet, and yet – hat in hand - groveling for compassion and understanding. No Hollywood oeuvre made my own top ten list for best movies of 2008. Even Oscar’s also-rans are unlikable exposés of such triviality: The Reader (you’re asking me to shed a tear for an implacable Auschwitz guard who seduces a teen?); Frost/Nixon (You mean Tricky Dick was lying to us???); Doubt (A Bing Crosby priest may have been diddling one little boy? Surely not!) Milk (Bigots killed a gay activist? Is that what you’re saying?) Dark Knight (Great! Another comic book vigilante, making the world safe for all of us.)
So I anticipate Feb.22nd and Oscars 2009 with the same fervour I would the Detroit Chamber of Commerce awarding craft statuettes: Best tail fin; Best turn-signal indicator; Most humungous gas-guzzler.
And yet, away from Hollywood, thoughtful, talented moviemakers gave us a 2008 cornucopia of movies treats: remember those two wonderful tales of lives thrown into disarray when illegal immigrants were deported: (Edge of Heaven and The Visitor); and two felicitous wedding movies (the Danish After the Wedding and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married); the compassionate Latimeresque story (Il y a Longtemps que je t’aime), the shimmering Mike Leigh-Sally Hawkins offering (Happy-Go-Lucky). These movies were wondrous, albeit not honoured at the Oscars. Tant pis for the Oscars. I could (and will some time in the future) go on.
So we are seeing more and better movies than ever before (check my posted blog, A as in Anticipated below, for upcoming 2009 movies). President Obama talks forever of a shimmering technological future. And, when it comes to movies and their future, I believe him. We now see movies, thanks to a bountiful Montreal video chain, Boîte Noire; we get them delivered to our door through the mail, thanks to a website delivery service, zip.ca, or for the technically adroit, we download them directly off the Internet through bit torrents.
Take heart, Cinephiles. Great movies are out there in abundance. They may not be celebrated with golden statuettes, but we’ll find them, screen them, admire and discuss them.
peter
Here’s my point: Wall-E presents a portrait of a planet, devoid of life, suffocating in its own garbage; Slumdog Millionaire’s hero lives forever in Mumbai squalor. Waltz with Bashir’s Israeli soldiers have blocked out all memory of their role in Phalangiste massacre of Palestinians, in an infested Lebanese refugee camp.
In seeking out a movie to start the movie club, I had tentatively penciled in Feb. 22nd, Oscar night, for our first day, thinking we might dissect one of Oscar’s possible winners. Yet Hollywood movies this year conjure up - for me - dismal sniveling Detroit, unable to turn out a competent Chevrolet, and yet – hat in hand - groveling for compassion and understanding. No Hollywood oeuvre made my own top ten list for best movies of 2008. Even Oscar’s also-rans are unlikable exposés of such triviality: The Reader (you’re asking me to shed a tear for an implacable Auschwitz guard who seduces a teen?); Frost/Nixon (You mean Tricky Dick was lying to us???); Doubt (A Bing Crosby priest may have been diddling one little boy? Surely not!) Milk (Bigots killed a gay activist? Is that what you’re saying?) Dark Knight (Great! Another comic book vigilante, making the world safe for all of us.)
So I anticipate Feb.22nd and Oscars 2009 with the same fervour I would the Detroit Chamber of Commerce awarding craft statuettes: Best tail fin; Best turn-signal indicator; Most humungous gas-guzzler.
And yet, away from Hollywood, thoughtful, talented moviemakers gave us a 2008 cornucopia of movies treats: remember those two wonderful tales of lives thrown into disarray when illegal immigrants were deported: (Edge of Heaven and The Visitor); and two felicitous wedding movies (the Danish After the Wedding and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married); the compassionate Latimeresque story (Il y a Longtemps que je t’aime), the shimmering Mike Leigh-Sally Hawkins offering (Happy-Go-Lucky). These movies were wondrous, albeit not honoured at the Oscars. Tant pis for the Oscars. I could (and will some time in the future) go on.
So we are seeing more and better movies than ever before (check my posted blog, A as in Anticipated below, for upcoming 2009 movies). President Obama talks forever of a shimmering technological future. And, when it comes to movies and their future, I believe him. We now see movies, thanks to a bountiful Montreal video chain, Boîte Noire; we get them delivered to our door through the mail, thanks to a website delivery service, zip.ca, or for the technically adroit, we download them directly off the Internet through bit torrents.
Take heart, Cinephiles. Great movies are out there in abundance. They may not be celebrated with golden statuettes, but we’ll find them, screen them, admire and discuss them.
peter
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