Why Does Anyone Want the Job of Hosting The Oscars?

All That (85th Oscars) Jazz
The Big Night: Fun Arrivals, Winner's List, Jennifer Lawrence in the Press Room
The Look Back: Funniest Tweets, & Season Finale Podcast
The Fashions: Fifteen Men, The Ten Nominated Ladies, Goodbye Glamour

The Opening Monologue
As today's reviews will surely attest, Seth MacFarlane bombed badly last night in the unenviable host position. Why anyone would want the job is beyond me. Occasionally someone will get 'good job' reviews (Hugh Jackman, Billy Crystal, etcetera) but those positive reviews almost never come directly after the show but later in context once they're sized up in memory against newer worse hosting gigs. Nearly everyone gets mixed to negative reviews in the moment. Fact: people love to hatewatch the Oscars. To his credit (eep), MacFarlane understood this and even attempted to get out in front of the criticism by mocking it. In his interminable opening monologue (18 minutes!) he was visited from the future by Captain Kirk (William Shatner) - a joke more suited to the Emmys which he'd be a better host of given that he's a television personality -- who showed him the headlines from the next morning.

It was funny because it was true. But the gag continued. As the monologue progressed his reviews improved until he got somewhere around "mediocre". It wasn't funny because it wasn't true. [Editor's Note: The "worst" part isn't true. That title will obviously and forever belong to James Franco who couldn't be bothered to show (in spirit) though he undoubtedly cashed the check.] 

See, Captain Kirk was right. His jokes were "inappropriate and offensive" and we all DID wish it were Tina & Amy hosting instead (a weird shoutout to the Golden Globes, which were without question the highlight of this awards season as televised events go though Oscar Night usually plays "no comment" on that precursor). Worse than MacFarlane's fratboy jokes though was that the humor seemed entirely centered around HIM, as if we were watching The Oscars to send 3½ hours with MacFarlane and not with the biggest movie stars in the world. Oops. Somehow doesn't know why people tune in to the Oscars.

Each year the media and the producers and even the general public play a little complicit game of "OOOH, ____ IS HOSTING AND NOW WE'RE EXCITED". But it's never the hosts. It's the movies and the movie stars! Mostly the hosts do best when they show up for brief intervals and make a funny but stay out of the way so we can gawk at stars and remember the year's most celebrated pictures and, for the less devoted, make a mental grocery list of movies we want to see now. 

Perhaps Captain James T Kirk can tell us if any future Oscar Producers and Hosts figure that out.

The three most terrible moments:

1. That joke about Quvenzhané and Clooney. I've since blocked it out but I have a vague memory of being offended.
2. Flight reenacted with sock puppets. (Somehow there was a lot of laughter in the Dolby. Please tell me that was a laugh track and not actual enjoyment)
3. That weird flying nun / seducing Sally Field skit. 

So as not to be a total downer --  I enjoy the Oscars even when they're lame! --  here were a few things I think worked about Seth's performance.

1. He sings well. His love of musicals was obvious and gave us fun expected moments like Charlize Theron (originally a dancer) and Channing Tatum dancing together and even a kickline with Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Daniel Radcliffe who both have a song & dance man inside of them.
2. As stupid as that "we saw your boobs" number was -- it would have been much funnier if it were shorter -- the actresses who filmed reaction shots were good sports with solid comic timing and the Kate Winslet punchline was great. (Oh shut up, I bet she laughed from home). In an evening full of dumb jokes, inevitably some of them will land. 
3. Later in the show when he wasn't taking up so much space he was better. His introductions were sometimes amusing (loved the Channing Tatum / Jennifer Aniston intro) and I especially enjoyed the "needs no introduction" introduction for you know who, didn't you? I mean, she doesn't! 

Do you have against-the-grain kind words for Seth MacFarlane or are you already making a mental list of 500 celebrities who would have done a better job last night? (If so care to share a few of them?) 

And why does anyone want the job of hosting -- beyond the cash -- given that it's rather like having a worldwide target on your tuxedo'ed back? 

P.S. Don't forget to like The Film Experience on Facebook. Please and thx

Gangster Squad: Bullets and Boredom

Michael C here to kick off the movie year with my first review of 2013 for a movie I noticed had slipped through the cracks here at the Film Experience in the rush of Oscar Nomination Fever. But surely 2013 will get better than this! 

Gangster Squad is a film haunted by the ghosts of its superior cinematic ancestors. Some films do gain resonance from evoking earlier titles in their genre but Ruben Fleischer’s crime saga is such a creative void that it can’t wrestle the audience’s attention away from the specters of film noir past. So much more rewarding to occupy one’s mind with fond memories of Chinatown, than to watch characters we don’t care about exchange gunfire in action scenes we can’t follow for reasons not worth understanding. 

Penn vs. Brolin in "Gangster Squad"

The most obvious film intruding on Gangster Squad (2013) is The Untouchables (1987) - at times the new film borders on a beat-for-beat retelling of the earlier story with Al Copen switched out for Mickey Cohen... [more]

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Drowning in Oscary Waters All Over the World

It's less than 4 days until we're drowning in it! I was called to task a bit for the tsunami image from The Impossible that greeted my first "days until" Oscar nominations post a week ago. I understand the charge of insensitivity and I'll admit it was a weird judgment call. But I have been feeling not just metaphorically deluged. There is so much literal fear or water / drowning on screens this film season. Have any of you noticed? It didn't hit me at first since it's not a particularly visceral fear for me... I've always loved the water.

Let's recount each dive in this year...

If Steven Soderbergh had filmed Life of Pi this would be the entire color palette!

• Beasts of the Southern Wild -for Hushpuppy drowning is the end of the world, hurricanes as apocalypse. Those shots of drowned animals and her thoughts about them having no daddies? Heartbreaking. 
• The Impossible - tells a true story of survival from the 2004 Thai tsunami. I still think it odd that it's visual effects and makeup did not make the finalists list for Oscars.
• Skyfall -Adele's killer theme song kicks in just as James Bond plunges into the water, presumably to rest in a watery grave... or at least to sink into the trippy watery grave visuals of the opening credits
• Oslo August 31st - this critical darling drama about an addict in recovery basically begins with the protagonist going all Virginia Woolf by loading his pockets with rocks and walking out into the water
• Life of Pi - at the center of an ungainly expository drama, is a miniature visual masterpiece about a shipwreck and a tiger and boy sharing a boat alone in the vastness of the ocean
• Jeff Who Lives at Home - stacks its coincidences one on top of the other to lead to a drowning rescue scene
• The Dark Knight Rises -- death by exile (SPOILER) exile being an icy watery grave
• Rise of the Guardians -- begins with an icy drowning
• Moonrise Kingdom features a big storm and flood
• Amour - has flooding but in which context we shouldn't say
• Rust & Bone - Marion Cotillard loses her legs in a killer whale accident in France's Sea World and there is also a drowning terror sequence
• Zero Dark Thirty -the waterboarding torture sequence is what keeps everyone talking though it's a tiny part of the movie. But still: horrific.

Last night, the Film Society at Lincoln Center showed two of the foreign language finalists (sort of*), Iceland's The Deep and Norway's Kon-Tiki, a double bill that was the equivalent of being tossed into the deep-end of this reccurrent theme. Both are true stories about men surviving the unsurvivable on ocean journeys. 

Iceland's Oscar entry The Deep comes from Baltasar Kormakur (of 101 Rejkvjavik, Hafid/The Sea, and Contraband fame). It's both poetically moody and crudely matter of fact somehow. It's steeped in the inky blackness you'd expect from an ocean story at night. (I'm so pleased my screener didn't work because I can't imagine being able to see it at all outside of the movie theater). Hell, even before we hit the water we're in Iceland at night so you can image the darkness. We follow a group of fishermen around as they drink and drink prior to their next voyage. The awful shipwreck occurs relatively early into the movie and for such a simple reason it's surprising that any fishermen live to die from old age. The drowning sequences were, for me, horrific in their calmness, like watching people casually negated as the darkness envelops them. The Deep unfortunately loses its frost-bitten footing  post-ocean trauma when there's a surprising amount of the movie left and we move into a sort of barely there invegistave procedura. But I appreciated The Deep for being very Icelandic (memories of volcanic eruption and a harsh life on the inky sea inform the drama throughout) and as a sort of shoestring non-magical-realist counterpoint to Life of Pi when a fat man begins to converse with a seagull, his only company. B 

Thor Heyerdhal (the real version) and Thor Heyerdahl (the movie version) played by Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen Norway's entry Kon-Tiki dramatizes the once very famous balsa wood raft ocean voyage of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. I say 'once' because two of my friends in their 20s that I spoke to about the movie had no idea who he was or that it was a true story. I knew the whole story from childhood since my parents had a thing for National Geographic magazines (we had a huge collection) and PBS documentaries -- I think I must have even seen Heyerdahl's self-mythologizing Oscar winning doc Kon-Tiki as a child at some point since the story was so familiar.

I sat down all excited to see the most expensive Norwegian movie ever made about one of the most famous Norwegians who ever lived about a story I knew and was immediately disappointed when everyone began speaking in English -- even in scenes set in Norway or between an entire cast of Norwegians (and one Swede). We definitely got off on the wrong foot this movie and I. As it turns out the filmmakers shot each scene twice, once in Norwegian and once in English and the version that's hitting Stateside theaters is, in fact, NOT the Oscar-competing film but it's English-language doppelganger. So most of us will never get to see the film that Oscar voters saw.

I came for a Norwegian adventure movie and got a strange hybrid film that seemed like a big budget Disney movie that had appropriated a foreign story. Maybe the acting was better in its native tongue? There was something about the coloring book simplistic character arcs and super accessible Movie-Movieness that made this very true story feel artificial, negating much of its power. As eye candy, though, the movie is really something, with the amazing beauty of both the Ocean and towheaded shirtless Norwegians exploited throughout. (And just like The Deep it makes an interesting counterpoint to Life of Pi . As in Ang Lee's picture there are scenes featuring bioluminscent marine biology, violent animal deaths, and mass flying fish suicides on a boat). C+

Did You Gag on "Killer Joe"?

My screenings these past two weeks -- cram session! -- to complete year end business, have been like one wild tonal shift after another swinging as they have from meta rib-nudging (Seven Psycopaths) to the hormonally twee (Take This Waltz), severely depressed (Oslo August 31st) and on through the defiantly stiff and self-medicated (The Deep Blue Sea)... I can't possibly write about them all. But I did feel the night to blurt out (choke out?) a few sentences on William Friedkin's Killer Joe based on the play of the same name by Tracy Letts.

Friedkin and Letts aren't quite joined at the hip as collaborators go despite the Oscar winning filmmaker taking the cinematic reigns on both Bug and Joe. Letts most acclaimed play August: Osage County went to another filmmaker though it's fascinating to think what Friedkin might have done with the material. He is, after all, at least as willing as Letts to attack his material with edgy flair, wicked humor and artistic abandon... for better and worse.

[NC17 madness and two SPOILER images after the jump]

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Review: "Hitchcock"

This review was originally published in my column at Towleroad

The first thing HITCHCOCK gets right about Hitchcock is the humor. Director Sacha Gervasi's serio-comic adaptation of the book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" starts with a playful dodge, beginning not with a shot of that infamous house on the hill or the Bates Motel or even a Hollywood soundstage but in the rather humble yard of a Wisconsin farm. It's home to Ed Gein, the gruesome 1950s killer who inspired Psycho. The camera pans away from Gein's (fictional) murder to reveal the iconic plump suited figure of The Master of Suspense cooly observing him (Sir Anthony Hopkins in Sir Alfred Hitchcock drag).

Hopkins addresses the camera directly as if he's welcoming you to a very special edition of television's "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or recording a promo for his latest cinematic thrill ride. He'll break the fourth wall again to bookend this film with an even better visual joke that's absurdly hokey.

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