Saturday, February 16, 2008

It's Oscar time! Grab your tux and slit your wrists!


This year's Oscars: there will be nothing but blood

To fully enjoy this year's Oscars, I went out and watched all five best-picture nominations. Now I regret it. I had plenty of warnings that this year's picks were both depressing and disturbing, but I ignored them all and naively trotted off to the theater. The experience not only soured me on the Oscars but also nearly changed me into an evangelical conservative.

Tonight I saw No Country for Old Men, by the Coen brothers, who grew up right here in St. Louis Park. In the past, the extreme violence in their films was always made tolerable by their bizarre humor and their twisted sense of irony, but without it, this movie is a black, mindless bloodfest on the order of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It may be a long time, if ever, before I see another of their films.

Last week I saw There Will Be Blood, a gory, hopeless tale of a defective human being who destroys all the people around him. The grimness dragged on endlessly and with utter predictability. Scratch that one off your list too.

Atonement was a touch better, although just as depressing. Everybody in it ends up completely fucked. And the storyteller has deluded herself into thinking she's somehow atoned for ruining other people's lives by telling their love story that might have been. Not a ray of hope, only delusion and death to the bitter end.

Michael Clayton
, on the other hand, was a brilliantly written and acted story—my hands down, no-one-comes-close favorite, even though it too had darkness aplenty, and Juno was at least entertaining, although I'm not sure what makes it Oscar material—maybe just a lack of competition. Perhaps my enjoyment of it was heightened by my distaste for everything else I'd seen this year. I'd forgotten it was possible to go to a theater and laugh instead of come out looking for the razor blades. Maybe the ushers should just start handing them out as people leave so we can all dispatch ourselves in the parking lot. That does seem the intent of filmmakers these days.

While I'm at it, let me mention Sweeny Todd, not a best-picture contender, but Johnny Depp is up for Best Actor. When did we all decide that slitting throats was entertaining? Funny? Artistic? What amazes me is that we keep paying to get mugged at the theater. We never learn. Yes, it's well acted, beautifully filmed, blah, blah, blah, but that's like putting a turd in a fine silk jacket and oohing about the fabric.

I'm not sure where all the focus on blood, pain, and violence these days is getting us. Someone might argue that art is merely reflective of life and that film today is the canary in the coal mine telling us our air is poison, and there's more than a little truth to that, but it's equally true that life reflects art, and to immerse yourself in blood every time you go into the theater is perhaps to tolerate and expect it in your daily life. Hell—you might even come to enjoy it.

No comments: