Friday Films: I Really Hope "Avatar" Doesn't Sweep the Oscars

This week, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year's Oscars. There were a few surprises, and one big twist: ten nominees in the "Best Picture" category. Now, before I share my opinions on this wide category (and the resulting four-hour ceremony), I want to say: I really hope "Avatar" does not sweep the nine categories it's nominated in.

I don't begrudge James Cameron for making his epic and his two billion dollars, not at all. I think technological innovation in movies provides a lot of space for directors to try new techniques, etc. But I don't want a future of bloated 3-D space epics. I don't want to see a rash of 3-D movies, where acting and story and characters are less important than rendering. Let those movies win visual effects, let them win every technical award. But don't let them win Best Picture.

As you may know, I read a book a few months ago called "Pictures at a Revolution," about the 1968 Academy Awards. What happened in the 60s was this: "The Sound of Music" made a lot of money and all of the studios rushed bloated musicals to theaters. "Paint Your Wagon." "Doctor Doolittle." And you know what these movies did? They bombed. They nearly bankrupted the studios. They broke the studio system, in place since the dawn of the film industry. And I don't think they learned a damned thing. If "Avatar" wins, we're going to see half a decade of utter shit, cranked out with the newest technologies and completely lacking anything resembling a soul. We're going to see young, educated viewers flocking away from Hollywood.

That said, some of the nominees do give me hope. "Up in the Air" was a really great movie about characters who I felt invested in, completely lacking in tech-wizardry (actually, a major theme was the danger of machines replacing human interaction) and with a great deal of relevance to the current economic crisis. "Up," nominated in both Best Animated Feature and Best Picture, was incredibly moving and engaging--a bold departure from the celebrity-voiced animated films that we've been seeing so much lately. But ten nominees is just too many. "The Blind Side"? I will quote author Colson Whitehead: "Is that one of those movies where a white person teaches a black person how to use a fork?"

Finally, I'm glad to see Kathryn Bigelow nominated for Best Director. In a year where all of the major book awards seemed to snub women, it's good to see a female nominated in such a typically male-dominated category. I haven't seen "The Hurt Locker" yet, but I've heard great things and it would be interesting to see her win some Oscars for it.

I'll be watching the ceremony, however long it stretches into the next day. The theme this year seems to be bloat: two hosts, twice the Best Picture nominees...If that's the narrative they've chosen to present (and let's not kid ourselves: what wins is determined by what kind of story Hollywood wants to tell about itself, whether it's "We Care About Poor People," "We Don't Support Proposition 8," or "We Feel Really Guilty About Never Giving an Award to Scorcese"), "Avatar" should have a great night.

Musical Wednesdays: Some New Bands You Might Like

Sometimes when I listen to the radio, I feel a lot like a crotchety old man. I change the station whenever Passion Pit comes on, I don't really enjoy Beach House, and I pretty much swear at the radio when Vampire Weekend plays (Seriously, three different stations playing songs from their new record? Egregious!).

But I don't want to give the impression that I'm somehow opposed to new music. I love new music. There's nothing I like more than when a band I've never heard really impresses me on the radio, and I'd like to share some new bands that I have been liking lately.

1. Surfer Blood: Surf rock by way of Pavement? Yes, please. Definitely check out "Swim to Reach the End."

2. The XX: Not at all a typical pick for me, but "Heart Skipped a Beat" is really great. There's this great drum effect in the beginning that sounds like an irregular heartbeat and the rest of the song lives up to it.

3. The Antlers: I heard a song off of their album, "Hospice," called "Kettering" a few months back and was really struck by it. Of course, the first thing I thought of was Sloan-Kettering hospital, and it turns out the album is about losing a loved one to cancer. It's really powerful and I recommend checking them out.

That's all for today, but if there's anything else you think I should check out, feel free to leave a comment!

Fiction Mondays: Getting Back to Short Stories

The past few months, I haven't worked on short stories at all. I've been working on everything else, and the whole time I've missed the format and the challenge of short stories. I haven't sent much out, haven't revisited anything I worked on and set aside. That's all over now.

Maybe I just wasn't feeling inspired--not that I didn't have ideas, just didn't have to focus or energy to execute them. But last night, I remembered a story I began writing a long time ago, about a guy who meets a girl who spends her time dumpster-diving. They meet a guy sleeping in a dumpster who believes the guy is some incarnation of Mercury. I liked the idea, but I just didn't know what to do with it. I now have a clearer idea, and I'm really excited to tackle it.

So this is just an announcement that my short-story mindset, dormant for several months, is kicking back on. Expect announcements on the process.

Finally: I am thinking about getting another tattoo, of the dove pierced by an arrow from the cover of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything that Rises Must Converge." Here's the image:


I'll need to tinker with the image and see if I can find a full version without the clipped-off wing, but I think it's going to go near the rib I broke a few years ago and the arrow will be red. It's a symbol for O'Connor's idea that violence precedes Grace (the dove is the Holy Spirit), which is an idea that really influences my writing.

Friday Films: Getting Lost

This Tuesday, ABC's "LOST" returns for its final season. I will be sad to see it end. What show has provided more discussion, more speculation, in its lifetime (okay, maybe the X-Files, but I didn't watch that)? The big mystery is: which questions will be answered? Which ones will be left at the end of the season? And most pressing: how will the season open? Usually the season premieres begin with someone going through their morning while a catchy pop song plays--who will it be this year, and what will the big twist be leading up to the title card?

I do have a big unified theory of LOST, but I'm not going to share it right now (and not because I'm afraid typing it out will somehow make me realize all of the holes in it). I will save that for geekier venues than this blog (they exist, I swear). But I will make a big prediction: the final episode will have a flashback, but it will be the Island's flashback--centuries of strife and war leading to the final confrontation. Whether this will be a big apocalyptic "The Stand"-like confrontation or a smaller one, I don't know.

So is everyone excited? I am. The show is like a big puzzle, and it's going to be interesting to see how the solution unfolds.

I'm going to wrap things up with two videos. One is the Thermals' song, "Now We Can See," which I think is about the show ("We were born on an island," "We still take the pills," "Our history was damaged"). And the other is a clip from LOST, of a brainwashing room called "Room 23." Note the similarities.






Spooky, right?

Friday Films: Man on Wire

Like I mentioned on Monday, I recently watched the documentary "Man on Wire," about Phillippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. I didn't realize until later this week that it won the Oscar for Best Documentary, but now that I know that, I'm almost even more impressed. Not because it won the Oscar, but because as far as documentaries go, it's different from most that I've seen. What distinguishes it from other documentaries is its format: it's presented like a caper film.

The film opens with a shot of a calendar showing the date of "Le Coup," followed by a reenactment of Petit and his crew loading their vehicles, setting out toward the towers. It's all very fast-moving, the reenactments filmed like French New Wave films, cutting quickly to interviews with the participants looking back on the event. As soon as the filmmakers set up the central event, they jump back to its conception, Philippe Petit reading about the towers in a doctor's office in 1968, and then to his first major walk, between the towers of the Notre Dame cathedral.

It's really interesting to see the participants, now in their 50s or 60s, look back at their youths. They talk about how they knew what they were doing was illegal, but it wasn't mean, wasn't hurting anyone or doing any damage. It's all extremely innocent, and I think that's what the filmmakers intended. There's never a mention of the 9/11 attacks, but they're kind of in the subtext during the whole movie. From the moment they show the crew get into their vans to sneak into the building, your mind can't help but contrast it with the months of preparation and falsifying documents and training that would go into perpetuating a terror attack. It's strange that it makes you think about that, but I don't believe for a minute that it's accidental.

In the interviews with the participants, they talk about how Petit, when he saw the towers, knew that they were meant for him. They were built for him to walk between. So in their memories of the event, there's this undercurrent of sadness, which I took as some combination of nostalgia and a sense of loss for the towers themselves. The walk between was accomplished just once, and can never be done again. One of the co-conspirators actually begins to cry as he talks about it, and the effect is really moving and sets a tone for the rest of the fim.

The movie ends with a shot of Petit practicing walking in his backyard in Woodstock, NY. He's older now, but still incredibly talented. The rope across the yard is a long walk only a few feet off of the ground, and the final image is a kind of mix of memories: it's simultaneously the meadow Petit practiced in through his youth and the wire between the towers. The image of his feet on that wire lingers for a long time after the film ends.

Musical Wednesdays: Two Announcements

I thought about doing something to tie in with Monday's post and my upcoming post about "Man on Wire," but the more I think about it, the thinner that hypothetical post would be. So I'm going to veer away (someday I'll manage to complete a week-long theme, I swear) and instead I will use today's post to say two quick things and then get out of the way.

1. There's a new Spoon album out this week, "Transference," and it's available on vinyl and as an mp3 download over at Amazon (or at your local record store). Spoon is consistently great, and I definitely recommend checking out this album.

2. This week, legendary singer Kate McGarrigle passed away. In addition to being an incredible folk singer, she was also the ex-wife of Loudon Wainwright III and the mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright (probably the most musical family currently in existence). So here's a video to remember her by:

Fiction Mondays: Let the Great World Spin

This week, I've been reading Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," which is not a story about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. That event is central to the book--the story opens with a large crowd watching his walk on an August morning in 1974--but the novel itself is about a large cast of characters who witness the event. I'm not very far into it at this point, but it's beautiful. I think it's supposed to be read slowly, because the language in every sentence is so well-chosen, so perfectly constructed, that you want to make sure you take every word in.

Since I'm not very far in, I'm not going to talk much about the plot other than to say the opening section, about a religious man named Corrigan struggling for his soul when he moves to New York, is one of the most interesting character studies I've read in a long time. It's narrated by Corrigan's brother, who finds himself in a Bronx tenement, surrounded by prostitutes, thugs, and addicts, and is incredibly compelling. There's something I've noticed about Irish authors, though: instead of quotation marks, they use dashes to denote speech. Not in the first section (I think because it's a flashback), but later on. This is something I noticed when I read Roddy Doyle, and seeing it again made me wonder where it started. I cracked open "Ulysses" and saw that Joyce uses dashes as well, but was he the first? Did Irish authors pick this up as a kind of tribute to Joyce? This was how he did it, so this is how Irish writers do it? I'd be interested to know.

I picked up two books after Christmas, this one and Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project," both of which I've been meaning to check out for some time. Oddly enough, these two writers have an excellent conversation in the new issue of the Believer. Check it out here. They talk about art, about the role of literature, and about something I've been wondering about: what happened to literary feuds? I mean the real, fisticuffs kind of feud. Like Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. It reminded me of my favorite part of "The Savage Detectives," when Arturo Belano challenges a critic to a duel on the beach--where is that passion anymore?

Related to this book, I also watched "Man on Wire," the documentary about that same walk, Saturday night. I think this week's "Friday Films" will be about it, which makes this something of a theme week. The only question is: is there a song about this event? Maybe Wednesday will be a mini-essay on the Decemberists' "The Gymnast, High Above the Ground."