There doesn’t seem to be another actor who can do the things Nicolas Cage can do. Maybe it’s better said that there isn’t another actor who is crazy enough to, first of all, come up with the ideas Nic Cage employs on a regular basis, and second of all, think of them and say “yeah, that’s something I should probably try.” His choices are uniquely his own, for better or for worse.
I’ve come to terms with Argo being declared by a number of governing bodies including the oh-so-prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the Best Picture of 2012. It’s ok. I watched it again, and it’s fine, whatever. A well told story that’s engaging throughout and has a conclusion that stretches the definition of “true story” but is fairly well conceived and executed and all that. It’s good. It’s fine.
Sometimes it seems as though the gods created Brad Pitt specifically as a check to keep self-conscious guys from becoming overconfident in themselves. This isn’t a bad thing. Dudes could stand to be taken down a peg from time to time. Everyone laments, and rightly so, the fact that women are constantly being compared to utterly impossible ideals, and that’s unlikely to stop any time soon. To even things out, maybe it’s just that we need more images in our culture that present men in ways that make us dudes feel like we can never measure up. That may present a host of other problems, but at least there’d be a more level playing field. This path toward equality is aided by movies like Magic Mike and stars like Brad Pitt. Maybe.
Game of Thrones is back. After the long wait, and countless quips from fans about winter coming and the night being dark and full of terrors and oh my god how have you not read all one million pages of the books, the first episode of Season 3 finally premiered this past weekend, to big numbers. As expected, the season premiere was wholly satisfying, with reviews and reaction ranging from really good to really excellent.
It takes a while for some shows to reach the tipping point where they break through the cultural conversation and get talked about in a serious way. Most recently this occurred with Enlightened, Mike White's fantastic half-hour comedy that just wrapped up its second season on HBO. This breakthrough came for shows like Breaking Bad leading up to its third season, Girls and Louie before they started but even more so as they began their second seasons, and Arrested Development just as it was concluding/being cancelled. Nearing the end of its third season on Showtime, Shameless has yet to break through this ethos.
This past month has provided a perfect sample of the man, the myth, the enigma, the bizarre riddle that is James Franco. We’ve been given Oz the Great and Powerful, which for many demonstrated the limits of Franco’s charm. The character of Oscar, aka Oz, is meant to be some sort of redeemable sleazebag, but Franco makes him pretty much all sleazebag, and this makes the witches’ shared infatuation with him more than slightly implausible. I can handle a fantasy land with munchkins and magic but the notion that Franco as Oz is remotely likeable was too much.
Professional critics like to give review aggregation websites enormous flak, claiming things like they are bad for criticism, degrade the quality of discussion surrounding movies, reduce the quality of a given movie to a calculation, and so on. These are the same types who will decry even the notion of applying a star rating or letter grade to a movie because you can’t evaluate art that way, people!! I actually agree with them to an extent. Grading films like you’re marking a math test, looking for evidence in the work of the “right” course towards the “right” answer, is a little dumb. It doesn’t work like that. Summing up a movie’s merits by saying it’s an 8 out of 10, for example, cheapens it a little, and doesn’t do justice to the depth and nuance any movie inherently possesses.
I was raised in a Christian family, going to church every week, but somewhere in my high school years my enthusiasm for church diminished greatly and my passion for movies awoke. In thinking about this transition, I’m not sure it was entirely coincidental. There’s an inherently spiritual component to movies, and all art but movies in particular for me, in that it stirs up a certain emotional response and a feeling of connectedness to another person and other people. It’s not unusual to experience an epiphany of some sort at a movie, spawning out of the ideas and images laid out before our eyes.
There’s no shame in a movie not working for you. This is something I've come to terms with over the course of my movie-watching career. Very few movies, or anything that ultimately often comes down to taste preferences, are universally appreciated. This isn’t a flaw to the system; it’s how the system works. It’s how taste works. Different strokes for different folks and all that. It takes all kinds, etc. etc. I have no beef with people who simply don’t dig a movie or show or whatevs that I care deeply about. There’s plenty of stuff that others think is great that I’m not into for one reason or another.
St. Patrick’s Day isn’t exactly a day associated with movies, as opposed to say Valentine’s or Halloween. It’s of course much more closely linked to drunkenness, debauchery, and drunken debauchery. And, to some extent, Irish stuff. I guess.
