Oscar Predix for the Four Majors

We'll see how right I am in the morning...

Best Actor

• Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino
• Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
• Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
• Sean Penn, Milk
• Zac Efron, High School Musical 3

Best Actress

• Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
• Camilla Belle, 10,000 BC
• Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road
• Meryl Streep, Doubt
• Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky

Best Director

• Andrew Stanton, WALL•E
• Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino
• Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
• Jon Avnet, 88 Minutes
• Jon Avnet, Righteous Kill

Best Picture

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• The Dark Knight
• Gran Torino
• Slumdog Millionaire
• The Spirit

Golden Globes

Okay. So this means that Slumdog is a shoo-in, right?

The Golden Globes, a party thrown by the old biddies of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, has come and gone and bestowed upon one of the most appalling films of the year its stamp of approval. And so it goes. . . Me? I'm still high from the Oscars getting it right last year with No Country for Old Men.

So - comments on the nods last night - or the show? I didn't watch it.

And predictions for Oscar noms in a few days?

True Blood on the Towelhead

Towelhead was the worst film of 2008.

If IMDb is to be trusted, Alan Ball said, “We can make movies like 'There's Something About Mary,' using semen as hair gel, and it's a huge hit--but to show a bloody tampon is considered shocking. I think that says a lot about our culture's attitude towards women and towards female sexuality.” He seems to be ignoring the fact that There's Something About Mary is a comedy, and shock has always been more welcome in comedy than in drama, but that's not the only thing he's ignoring.

Bloody tampons aren't interesting. Bloody tampons aren't funny. Blood isn't funny. Semen isn't funny. Semen in Cameron Diaz's hair was a little funny. If Towelhead had included a character accidentally putting a bloody tampon in someone's hair, it probably would have been funny if Ball had figured out a way to have the idea make some narrative sense, and that method would have been interesting. But my question is, “Are bloody tampons an example of female sexuality?”

I think that's an important question when discussing Towelhead, because Ball seems not to have made a film, but rather an informational video for Health class. Every scene is as hopelessly determined to dramatize an aspect of the puberty and sexual awakening of a young girl as every scene of Crash was hopelessly determined to dramatize an aspect of racism. From memory, Ball fits in masturbation, orgasm, accidental orgasm, sex, contraception, pregnancy, shame, predators, porn, pubic hair, periods, and breast development. Oh, and two of the male characters are fixated on Jasira's hymen. In density of issues, it's perfect for school, though the girls in the class will probably want to know whether to define their period as an aspect of their sexuality or a bodily function. Towelhead doesn't try to answer that question, but it does give other helpful hints. Near the end and right after its only scene that isn't awful (the scene in which the adults figure out what's going on and some conflict is resolved), Jasira and her boyfriend discuss what's been going on, and Jasira proceeds to explain to him the difference between good touch and bad touch. Disappointed that I wasn't able to slap a movie scene in the face, I started fantasizing about finding a copy of the shooting script, finding out where Ball lives, and leaving those pages on his porch under a burning bag of bloody tampons--not as an act of vandalism, but as an excuse to ask him if being shocked by bloody tampons is an indication of his attitude towards women or female sexuality.

I'm not disgusted by the thought or image of a bloody tampon, and one odd effect this movie has had on me is to make me wonder if that makes me weird. I understand from Breillat films (mostly Anatomy of Hell, or at least its title) and the internet that men are supposed to be scared or disgusted by the vagina, or at least the aspects of the vagina that we don't simply love or desire. I tend to think this fear or queasiness, if it exists, isn't much of a problem--would men be more receptive to the idea of a penis bleeding occasionally in secret? I doubt it. But even if this is a worthy issue, does a bloody tampon sharing a shot with a repulsed, offended father and a terrified, embarrassed girl really help the problem? I think Breillat considers her film a comment on this issue, while Ball thinks of his as a comment and a cure, at least not a regression. So in the spirit of the worst of a particular year being a “real” movie that fails spectacularly, Towelhead is a clear winner. For an actual review, try Ebert and then AJ's capsule for two different, interesting pans. But I have an ulterior motive. I think Alex's capsule review of this film is very good except for one sentence, and here it is:

...I find it typical of Ball's liberal naivety that he can't seem to conceptualize how traditional Islamic standards of modesty can help give value to female sexuality.

What does value mean in this context, and no matter what it means, why should female sexuality have value? Should male sexuality have value? Is it the same kind of value? Before he answers, I won't say much about this issue, but if my interpretation is correct, this troubles me. I'll move on for now, except to say that Towelhead isn't really about the concept of value in female sexuality, but that an interesting film could probably be made on that issue.

When I watched Towelhead a few weeks ago, I hated it. But the reason it stayed fresh in my memory was because I had just finished watching the first season of True Blood in essentially two sittings. True Blood is, easily, my favorite new television show since The Office and I think it's probably better than it otherwise would have been due to the involvement of Alan Ball. And the interesting thing is that every common element between Towelhead and True Blood sings on TV while it failed miserably in the feature. Towelhead is fixated on sex because it's a textbook; True Blood is fixated on sex because every word, every glance, every tree or door or sudden gust of wind, is sexual and rightly so. All men are patronizing or horny in Towelhead because every scene has to have a warning, a message, and a lesson; all men are patronizing or horny in True Blood because Sookie can hear their thoughts and the men in her town disappoint her. Towelhead is about a girl making sexual choices so it can argue--with no one--that a girl can make her own sexual choices; True Blood is about a girl making sexual choices now because she's previously had too much information to want to make them.

One of the stock romantic comedy plots is for a guy to win a girl's heart by learning secrets about her that he wouldn't normally know. The methods are different and the sexes are sometimes reversed, but it's always inside information that wins the day. By “reading her mind,” he's able to impress her or make himself look like a better match for her. The girl always finds out he “stole” her secrets, and she breaks up with him temporarily--wouldn't it be interesting if she didn't find out or simply didn't care--but they always predictably get back together. In True Blood, Sookie can hear thoughts, so her ideal match is someone whose thoughts she can't hear. She wants equality--mystery too, sure--but also equality. She wants him to have secrets. The show is sexy and funny and devastating and charming and it's not afraid to have an unconventional pace. It also has a great theme song. Ball certainly can't take credit for all or even most of those things, but I believe his presence is felt and not in a bad way. My assumption is that freedom from the need to turn your obsessions into a message allows you to let them breathe and live. Towelhead is about blood because Ball thinks menstrual blood disgusts us; True Blood is about blood because it's about vampires.

Does anyone disagree with me about the quality of the show?

Can anyone think of a “B story” from any show with more weight than the Stephen Root stuff from True Blood?

Can anyone think of a “message movie” that isn't terrible?

In the year 2009...

There's all sorts of things in the air for the coming year - I'm predicting right now that Inglorious Bastards is in my Top Ten about 360 days from now - but what about Star Trek and the new Harry Potter(s)? And there's a new Miyazaki floating out there; a couple of Miikes; a new Kim Ki-Duk as well - I'm intrigued as hell by Trick 'R Treat and Sly's gonzo The Expendables. Of course there's Watchmen if it ever clears litigation and what about Wes Anderson's foray into the animated medium? The trailer for 9 looks fucking amazing and call me an idiot, but I'm sweatin' for Terminator 4 with Christian Bale. . .

I can't wait for Coraline; the new Tom Tykwer; Pixar's Up; Spike Jonze's amazing looking Where the Wild Things Are; Benicio as the Wolf Man and Guy Ritchie's Robert Downey Jr.-starring Sherlock Holmes.

There's going to be a sequel to Donnie Darko (that looks dumb as a bag of hammers) and Peter Jackson does Lovely Bones. Biggest news? James Cameron's Avatar.

Red Cliff at last? The Road with Viggo? Nispel's Friday the 13th reboot?

What're you waitin' on? What're you dismissing sight-unseen?

Other Lists

So with the Top Tens on the horizon - how about a few other lists? Like a bottom ten, for instance, or a ten auteur flicks that failed, or a ten worst film moments in 2008?

Consider that for worst it's best to avoid stuff that's obviously atrocious like Mamma Mia or Mummy 3 or, really, 90% of Universal's output. What's the point, really, of going after those targets? Better choices are things like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or Defiance or, gasp, Valkyrie...

For failed auteurism, factor in the heartbreak of movies by filmmakers you couldn't wait to see their next film and then, their next film was. . . Pineapple Express? Or stuff that played like self-parody like Spirit or Paranoid Park or that Harmony Korine movie about Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe.

And for ten worst film moments. . . the last fight in Revolutionary Road - any five minutes from Mamma Mia - the 2001 steps in Wall-E?

Go get 'em.

Winners of the Orange Prize

Hey, everyone—

Honored to be invited here as a guest-blogger. For a first shot, I thought I'd try picking at some ideas currently stuck to a brain too desk-like already with gum and graffiti. (That I was only able to wrap this post up by Christmas Day suggests I’ve got all the timing of a young Jon Heder.) Let's say the class started when I caught the new Britney Spears video.

The biggest shock initially was the extent to which it rips off "Never Again", the video for Kelly Clarkson's single from last year. Apparently, they are directed by the same guy. (I mean, of course they are.) Both tell the story of a hound pursued by a fox, where being caught means being tossed back in with the bathwater. Both videos also employ suites of images which are pretty much identical. They’re alike in every way, except for their ideological content, which is strictly opposed. The lesson learned here, I guess, is that you don't have to squint your ears very hard before Ibsen starts sounding like Strindberg.

The difference begins with the evidence against the defendant, and ends with a message about what constitutes a female exemplar. The target in the Clarkson is a genuine malefactor, whose guilt finds proof both in the witnessed act and in the remorse-flavored mental pudding he becomes. It is also for the most part a localized triumph. Clarkson's heroine and the blonde interloper fail to forge the dread female dichotomy, as there is simply too much talented and solitary about the one and too much doubt about the other. What is commendable about Clarkson's character ultimately is her critical faculty. Compare that to the Spears. Her mark does nothing worse than check his planner at breakfast; that he flirts with Spears as she’s got on different wigs is less sinister than her own plot, as she's out to burke him. It’s the decision to have Spears play all the women that’s the drag, and what makes the video’s politics something mustier than the slang of the title, itself disinterred from the abandoned disco hall that had been its tomb.

By making Spears their proxy, “Womanizer” implies that women are psychopaths, whose sole path to empowerment rests in acting sexy in public, luring a man around until he’s in the bedroom, where he can be made into toast. It's a joke which begins in a kitchen styled after a Korova Milk Bar and ends in the molestation and deletion of some nameless catalogue model: the only plausible way to market Spears now is as a crazy thug; the only way to market her as a crazy thug is by attempting to normalize the idea that women are crazy thugs; and that, as a seriously arrested person addicted to fame and lacking a meaningful conception of privacy, her moral agency may as well begin and end at the fact of each performance.

Basically, it is important that Spears be marketed, as it is the view of the consensus that that is the only time she acts rationally. Her compromised state should be considered a sign of grave damage, not that we’ll ever know its true extent or all those responsible, as that would lead to hassle and diminished profits. Too bad, as I think her profiteers likely committed some real atrocities against her, a suspicion that stirs with the Rolling Stone article and other anecdotes. One example is my music instructor’s explanation (backed up by Wikipedia) that the Spears vocal coaches taught her as a teen to sing in a way designed to sound "sexy," a method that was guaranteed to ruin her voice. What do you even call that, the vocal equivalent of foot-binding?

In context, the whole idea of Spears’s comeback makes a similar impression as the Kubrick version of Clockwork: endless violent childhood followed by a period of distinct suffering, followed by society offering the reward of doing it all over, with the caveat that what offended be done next time with more discretion. Meanwhile, there's nothing left in the body to make you an adult, and no help in that direction either. It’s us failing, again, to mark the difference between civility—which are manners—and decency—which are morals. (See here, for the popular explanation by Blumenthal, or here, for an example of it being put to important use.) The distinction is important, because it necessitates the concept of private space: the domain for behavior that is regarded as decent, but which cannot usefully be made civil. In the same way, abolishing privacy (say, by a lifetime of perpetual fame, or by a belief in a particular conception of G-d) can lead to the conflation of the two concepts. See also how privacy is eroded by consistently attacking a group's moral agency.

When I consider the difference between the concepts of public and private space, I can’t help but think the answer might involve the idea that only one of them contains children. It would make sense, as motherhood has always appeared to be an important trigger for confusion about female agency. Sarah Silverman got in trouble for a joke she told at the VMAs in which she says that the Spears kids "are the most adorable mistakes you'll ever see." (The gossip at the time was that Spears had told her kids they were mistakes in a flash of anger.) The word “mistake” in that lexical category should offend, as it impugns the worth of guiltless people based on choices made by a second party, thus implicitly endorsing the removal of that choice, to protect the lives of the innocent. It’s sexist. What should happen afterwards but that the routine be scrubbed from youtube to protect Spears’s two children: an act which essentially neutralized Silverman’s agency to tell a joke targeting a term that endorses the neutralizing of female agency, so as to protect Spears’s two children. It’s quite funny, and makes me wonder if it was Spears who used her agency to call for the scrubbing, though I doubt it, as the universe has not yet committed the final headdesk of collapsing in on itself.

Another trigger, I’d argue, is the act of performance itself. Walter’s review of Jesus is Magic has always bothered me, mostly for his assumption that there’s some ambiguity regarding the artifice of Silverman’s persona (there is??), and his ire in response to a character break:

"Yet protesting her innocence defuses her subtext, doesn't it? In this mad desire to not be taken seriously, suddenly Silverman comes across as ignorant and run-of-the-mill crass. It might be in that shift in paradigm that her jokes are suddenly toothless, replaced by uncomfortable silences and bursts of nervous laughter."

My problem, I guess, is that I don’t understand what exactly separates Silverman from that other popular comedian who says horrible things, and who also happens to break character all the time, to the enormous and obvious delight of his audience. Without that distinction clearly expressed, all I’m left with is a queasy feeling I associate with bearing witness to the act of confusing art with nature. (It’s a feeling that's become familiar, ever since the Emmys decided that the actors on The Wire don't deserve awards because they all must truly be drug dealers from Baltimore, even Elba.) It particularly disturbs me because it’s also something I’ve been guilty of, thinking this counted as the most tolerable of Spears’s output and not the most heinous. That it manufactures such a plausible posture for Spears results in me forgetting all the evidence that Spears doesn’t actually regard fame with anything resembling a jaundiced eye. In its deftness, it has me denying her performance, even as I suspect that's all she's got. What an asshole, right?

But more thoughts on Sarah Silverman later.

Question for the Readership

Is anybody seeing the latest update at the mothersite? (Step Brothers and The Heartbreak Kid.) The site was recently moved; my own ISP hasn't found the new DNS servers yet, so I'm still seeing "last updated: 04:15 PM(EST)" and starting to get concerned.

UPDATE: Back in business. Fuck yeah!