And I am.

Golden Globe Update

Despite much moving and shaking in terms of prediction buzz, I'm sticking with all my Golden Globe predictions. It doesn't seem fair to hedge on any of them just because I'm hearing rumors that this film is up and this film down, etc. - especially since the point of doing them early was to avoid parroting someone else's predictions. So even with Avatar continuing to tear up the foreign box office, and voting being carried out the Hollywood Foreign Press, I'm sticking with Up In The Air for my Best Drama pick.

Last time I checked, (500) Days of Summer had reached 10/1 odds against winning Best Comedy/Musical, with Nine heavily favored, while I said over and over that Summer was clearly the superior movie and should win the award. Now other critics are joining me in this prediction, including Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger, who I questioned on Twitter about his belief that Nine was a sure thing when reviews were so poor. He responded to my tweet and later that day wrote an article recanting his support and questioning whether perhaps long shot (500) Days of Summer might have a chance to win the award - hitting, I should point out, most of the same points that I did. Now, he's picked Summer to take the Globe this Sunday. It would be far too much post hoc ergo procter hoc to assume that he did it in any way because of me, certainly the odds that he clicked over to my Twitter page, found my Globes predictions, read the (500) Days of Summer entry, took it as a valid viewpoint and copied some of its ideas are outrageously slim.  I'm merely content to point out that these events happened in this order. I may ultimately be wrong, but dammit, I got there first. 

If you were in my shoes, you'd feel strange too.

A few years ago, I spent the fall in Los Angeles at a one-semester film program, where I got the chance to intern at a major Hollywood director's film company. I can't describe how important I felt when I discovered where I was going to get to work.

Of course, my internship there was glamorous in name only. The director was out of the country shooting a film most of the time I was there, we only met a few times. I spent the semester doing normal internship duties: reorganizing files, photocopying scripts, getting coffee, getting lunch, running errands around town on my bike, and making 6,000 phone calls to CAA and ICM to ask whether Alexander Payne or Roberto Orci might be available to do a rewrite on an unnamed screenplay or not. I spent the rest of the time surfing the net. It was not the most exciting job I've ever had. The food was pretty good, though.

Still, occasionally (very occasionally: in my four months at the company, I think it only happened three different times) I got to do what's called "coverage;" where I'd read a book or a script no one else felt like reading and write up a short summary and recommend whether or not the company should consider doing it. If I liked the script, someone else might end up looking at it, if i didn't, it probably wouldn't get looked at again.

One of the pieces I read was Aron Ralston's book, "Between A Rock and a Hard Place", the memoir of the hiker who had his arm trapped by a falling boulder in southeast Utah and was forced to saw his own arm off. It was a fascinating read - Ralston isn't the world's best writer, but it's certainly gripping reading to hear someone talk about what it was like cut off their own arm. Still, I recommended against adapting it for a movie for a number of reasons:

First and most importantly, it's not that interesting a story. There's the one money scene, where Ralston cuts his arm off, but the rest of the time, he's just a guy lying against a rock. He lies there, trying to extricate himself. He tries to find a comfortable position. He tries to stay warm at night. He listens to a Phish CD. He drinks his own urine. It's interesting to hear about, it's not all that exciting to watch.  It's like Castaway, only without a volleyball to talk to and and, y'know, Tom Hanks stuck under a rock. It's not all that exciting.

That means that most of the movie has to become about flashbacks, and whenever you hear someone say "most of the action will take place in flashback," red lights should be flashing all over. Plus, I don't know what you'd flash back to - there's no love story, nor is there a period of time in Ralston's life that he would think back to in order to figure out how to escape. He lies there until his arm dies, then he cuts off his arm. And... scene.

Second, while there's other interesting parts to the story, there aren't many. After Ralston cut off his arm, he returned to hiking, but he doesn't spend a lot of time on it in his book, and I don't blame him. Not to make light of his injury, but losing an arm below the elbow doesn't seem like it would be a gigantic disability in hiking (though it doesn't sound fun), and it's not like anyone reads that and says "well, that's just incredible!" A blind guy hiked the Appalachian Trail. If someone wanted to make a movie about that, I would certainly approve.

If you've read this far, you've got to be wondering what it is that made me bring all this up, and the answer is that apparently not everybody agrees with me. Danny Boyle's next film will be 127 Hours, which is the Aron Ralston story. He's working on the screen play with his writing partner, Simon Beaufoy (they wrote Slumdog Millionaire together), and James Franco has been cast as Ralston.

First of all, let's admit that if you were going to have a director to tell this story, it would be Boyle. He's capable of making almost sort of film - his resume includes such wildly varied movies as Millionaire, Millions, Trainspotting, Sunshine. A survival story in the desert would be cake for him. Plus, the man just won the Academy Award for Millionaire, a movie built entirely around flashbacks, so this should be right up his alley. So it's not impossible that 127 Hours ends up being a very good movie.

Though naturally, I'll be rooting against it. I've spent my time as a blogger perpetually being one of those voices complaining about how movie executives are short-sighted, passing over good stories to make crappy movies, because, I dunno, they're stupid and tasteless people or something.

There's a story from a couple years ago about how at one point or another, one movie studio had managed to pass on all five of the Best Picture nominees for that year: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Sideways, Ray, and Million Dollar Baby. I wonder what it was like for those executives as that story broke. Everyone thought that they were idiots, people who ignored cultured, intelligent stories to make raunchy comedies and bad horror flicks. Probably some of them don't have jobs now as a result.

But really, how interesting does the story of playwright J.M. Barrie actually sound? Why would you ever think that it would be a moneymaker? The life of Howard Hughes doesn't seem like a winner either - a guy who built airplanes but eventually locked himself in his house and pissed in jars doesn't seem like the feel-good story of the year. Sideways is the story of two guys who go on a pre-wedding trip to wine country. Million Dollar Baby is a sports movie that you come out of feeling sad. None of these sound like movies that audiences would flock to see (and, as it turned out, none of them were). Maybe I'd have passed on all of these, too.

One way or another, I have a feeling that I'll be watching 127 Hours closely over the next year or so. If it succeeds, I'll feel humiliated, if it fails, I'll feel vindicated. As if this film somehow represents everything I understand about moviemaking. Maybe it does.

Claire pointed out to me that even if the movie's a success, my choosing not to recommend the book might still have been the right decision. If I'd written a glowing review of the book and pushed for the company to do it, and for some reason the company had chosen to listen to me (highly unlikely), who's to say it would've ended up in as good a situation as it did? Even if both Boyle and Franco had signed on, four years ago their careers weren't as high-profile as they are now and there's a considerable less chance that this movie gets made. Four years ago, I was just a guy who read a book and thought it wouldn't make a good movie. My opinion didn't matter than, and it doesn't matter now.

Though if 127 Days ends up being a failure, you can count on me to be just insufferable.

Why Avatar shouldn't win (but probably will anyway).

I've started hearing rumblings that, despite the Academy's controversial move from 5 nominees to 10 , the Oscar for Best Picture has been sewn up. When the Oscars are presented - more than two months from now - it is apparently all but assured that Avatar will walk away with the award.

A month ago, before I saw the film, I would have found the idea hysterical. Two weeks ago, after I'd seen the film and had time to digest it, I would've thought it highly improbable; Oscars aren't given to movies like Avatar, they go to gritty films with handheld cameras and movie stars wearing minimal makeup. A week ago, I'd have argued - forcibly - that it was extremely unlikely, saying there are more deserving and more prestigious films in the running, and Avatar will be swept aside, forced to be content with a possible Best Director win for James Cameron.

Today, I'm forced to concede that there's no stopping momentum. It's not just that Avatar's box office has reached obscene levels, it's done so at an unparalleled rate in movie history. The film was released on December 18th, and this Monday - 18 days after its release - Avatar became the third highest grossing movie in world history, with over a billion dollars. In terms of box office, that's just an impossible rate of revenue.

Let me put that in perspective for you. As a teenager, I became a giant Star Wars fan.

(I'll pause to let you to all gasp in shock)

Thank you. Now, every Star Wars fan who came of age in the 90's knows this one fact: that while Titanic is the highest-grossing film of all-time, if you adjust for inflation, Star Wars moves ahead of it. This piece of information rights the world of Star Wars fanboys.

Unfortunately, it's only half the story - Star Wars isn't the only film that moves up, and even though it does move ahead of Titanic, Gone With The Wind moves ahead of it. So there's no getting around the fact that  a love story set in the background of a historical epic where lots of people needlessly perish is the top movie of all time no matter how you slice it.

(Side note: the adjusted box office is a fascinating list to peruse. Titanic drops all the way to sixth, behind The Sound of Music, E.T., and The 10 Commandments, and the #2 movie on the list, The Dark Knight, drops all the to 27th, behind, among other films, Doctor Zhivago, The Exorcist, Snow White, The Sting, The Graduate, Fantasia, Mary Poppins, Grease, and Thunderball. It's also behind Star Wars: Episode I, a movie that - despite being released in 1999 - has an adjusted box office of $623 million, versus an original box office of $431 million. I found that mind-blowing.)

Soon, all of that isn't going to matter, because in 18 days, Avatar blew all of that out of the water. The #2 movie on the international box office list, Return of the King, opened in December and closed in May. Titanic opened in December and closed in September. These movies had legs and that's how they made their money. And in 18 days, Avatar was only one spot behind.

That's why it's a lock that Avatar is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture. No voter wants to seem out of tune with the rest of the world, they despise being labeled elitist (they don't mind actually being elitist, of course, but the accusation bothers them regardless). Avatar is a cultural force, and you don't go against cultural voices, not even for unsettling war movies or George Clooney's gravelly introspection. Not even if you think that it shouldn't win the award.

And you know what? It shouldn't win. It shouldn't even really be in discussion.  It's a great movie, and deserves all the accolades it's receiving for cinematography, for imagination, for being a groundbreaking piece of cinema. You could even argue that those are the same reasons we value Citizen Kane and name it the finest movie in American history. But Kane wasn't just the next step in film history from a technical perspective, it was groundbreaking in terms of story structure and narrative. No one had ever made a movie that told a story quite like that before, and the cinematography, the tecnical breakthrough, they all enhanced that. And sure, a dragon-taming sequence would probably have livened up the film, but there's no reason to point fingers at this stage of the game. It was a film perfectly conceived and precisely executed, a textbook lesson in smart, incisive filmmaking.

You can't say that about Avatar. For all its innovation, the film employs the most straightforward, unoriginal script ever to be a serious Oscar contender. It's been called out for being nearly identical in story to a number of environmentally-conscious films, including Dances With Wolves (which won a Best Picture Oscar) and Fern Gully (which did not). Just for fun, you can check out this piece some wag wrote comparing the Avatar script to Disney's Pocahantas, which turned out to be more damning than when Spike Ferensten made "The Curious Case of Forrest Gump."

I saw the film as it was meant to be seen - in an IMAX theater, in 3-D, with a crowd of people - and someone asked me later that night what I thought of the movie. I replied that I had, that in fact I'd loved it, but with reservations. Avatar is a film about scope, it's a film to be experienced in the darkness of a giant theater, it's a movie that imposes on you its sheer magnitude. But if I'd never seen it or heard about it, and ten years from now I was to stumble on it on cable late at night, without any previous knowledge of the film or the technology it took to bring it to the big screen, how soon would it take me to change the channel? Ten seconds? Fifteen? Would it even be that long?

(side note: when I turned the question around on the guy who asked me what I thought, he told me he'd loved it and thought it was fantastic. "And you know why?" he asked. "It's because of the great character development." I loved that answer - not because it was right, but because it simply couldn't have been any more wrong)

It's a funny comparison because in 1977, there was a movie called Star Wars (hey! We're back here again!) that dominated the movie landscape and broke all the box office records. But when the Oscars rolled around, it didn't win Best Picture - that award was won by Woody Allen's Annie Hall, a tiny romantic comedy few people had seen in theaters. Fortunately for Annie Hall, we were right on the cusp of widespread consumer of acceptance of cable, so many voters had a channel called the the "Z" Channel, which had gotten the rights to broadcast the movie and simply ran it into the ground. And that one channel swung an Oscar race.

Prior to Avatar's release, I read an interview with Cameron where he mentioned this very battle. "I remember being outraged when Star Wars lost to Annie Hall," he says. "I thought, 'Well, that's ridiculous. Star Wars changed the face of filmmaking, and Annie Hall's a nice little film.' I like Annie Hall, but I thought that was outrageous."

It's quotes like this that make me understand and like Cameron more, because to him the Oscars aren't about acting and storytelling and emotional impact, to him the awards go to the films that are game changers. And Avatar is certainly that. But movies like Avatar are what we mean when we call something a "popcorn" movie. It's not an insult, there are some movies worth plunking down in the theater with a lukewarm, greasy bucket of the stuff, there are some movies you don't have to see on a date or to learn about issues or to be deeply emotionally moved by, some movies are just fun.

And that's really what the cinema's about, right? We go to enjoy ourselves.

But that's not what the Oscars are, at least to me. The Oscars honor the best movies, the movies that change minds (or at least soften up the ground a little bit), that give us stories that last for generations, not movies with stories we've seen a million times before and know what's coming long before it comes. Not movies with special effects that will lose their glamour as computers improve, until the site of them makes us giggle fondly and say "remember this?"

Not movies that pale in comparison to films like The Hurt Locker, which so unsettled me that I called my Marine brother that night just to  talk to him about it, and discovered that I simply wasn't emotionally capable of discussing it with him. I didn't know how to put words together about it, I just knew that I didn't want him to go to Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere he'd have to live like that.

Not when we have a chance to honor substance over style.

Not if the voters have any guts.

Not this year. I hope.

Top 5 Movies I'm Most Conflicted About In 2010

The through line here is that I'm simply not sure whether these movies will turn out to be awful or the best movies of the year. Based on the trailers, though, I'm more than willing to give them a shot.

Youth In Revolt
It looked mildly awful until, a minute into the trailer, it suddenly it took a turn into Awesomecrazyland. My goal for 2010 is to make "I've decided to create a supplementary persona named Francois Dillinger" into a catchphrase. Plus, two Michael Ceras for the price of one.

Daybreakers
I would also accept "we're the folks with the crossbows" as a catchphrase, if it comes to it. This film has some real shades of Children Of Men, though it seems like it'll feel a little more Hollywood than that. Still, judging by its scope and cast, I think it's worth a gamble.

Hot Tub Time Machine
This trailer has "little comedy that could" written all over it, mostly because it - bereft of all logic - stars John Cusack in a nonsensical frat comedy.

Book Of Eli
I've got almost nothing to work with here. The trailer tells me little except that it's going to have a lot of cool fight scenes and panoramic shots of people walking under a dead sky. Other than that, we're not working with much here, outside of a vague hint of some sort of theological bent to the narrative. We'll have to wait and see.

Legion
I've got mixed feelings about this trailer and its bizarre, backwards theology, but it looks to be loads of hardcore angels-fighting-demons action in the midst of a lonely American desert, and I'm always on board for that.