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Peo­ple always com­plain about the Acad­emy Awards show; it’s too long, it’s bor­ing, it has all of those lame musi­cal numbers

But whether it’s Rob Lowe and Snow White danc­ing to “Proud Mary” or Savion Glover tap-dancing to the music from Schindler’s List, the musi­cal num­bers do serve their pur­pose. Imag­ine you’re the one sit­ting in that giant the­ater wait­ing for your name to be called as one of the hon­ored few in your cat­e­gory. You’re crowded next to your co-stars and the pro­duc­ers, you kinda need to use the restroom but the lines are incred­i­bly long and just at that moment the pro­duc­ers of the show have shined their tim­ing wis­dom on you and start show­ing a dance ret­ro­spec­tive from the past eighty years of Oscars.

And all of those peo­ple that make the movies, most of them are the lit­tle guy, the guy you’ve never heard of that did some­thing really cool with the spe­cial effects from Iron Man or The Dark Knight, shouldn’t he be hon­ored too? Yes, he’s crammed into the bor­ing part of the show, the part of the show that every­one watches just to see what the goofy cos­tume designer is wear­ing and what bizarre polit­i­cal rant they’re going to go on dur­ing the Best Doc­u­men­tary award.

The Acad­emy is made up of TONS of peo­ple, and they all want their moment in the sun.

What if you were that lit­tle guy? The guy that won Best Live Action Short? Wouldn’t you want your moment?

So stop com­plain­ing dur­ing the bloated, overly-long Oscars. Let’s win one for the lit­tle guy.

In last week’s issue of Time mag­a­zine their film critic Richard Corliss wrote a rather lengthy arti­cle on why he thought that all of the best movies this year were block­busters. Some of his favorites from the past year were Iron Man, Speed Racer, WALL-E and The Dark Knight, and while I agree with two of his choices, Speed Racer didn’t appeal to me (so I didn’t see it) and, hate me if you will, and if you loved it you prob­a­bly will, but I didn’t care about see­ing WALL-E. At all. I’m a big fan of the Pixar pic­tures, but WALL-E just didn’t inter­est me.

But I have to agree with Corliss on his sec­ondary point; being the end of the year this is the time for awards-caliber films, and this year is look­ing pretty lame. Early on I was inter­ested in see­ing Gran Torino but then my inter­est fiz­zled out for no per­cep­ti­ble rea­son even though I love Clint East­wood. The Reader sounds so bor­ing and Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire deals with under-aged pros­ti­tu­tion so they’re out in my book.

But Corliss doesn’t bring up the biggest glar­ing omis­sion that he made about the two films that we do agree on. The Dark Knight was directed by Christo­pher Nolan who did the fan­tas­tic Memento¹ sev­eral years back and John Favreau directed Iron Man. Favreau started out in indie films (Swingers, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Cir­cle) and then moved on to direct­ing (Will Ferrell’s sec­ond most under­rated per­for­mance — Elf² ) Indie direc­tors tend to focus more on story and plot than, say, Michael Bay or that dufus McG³ because their bud­gets are usu­ally in the high hundred-thousands or the low mil­lions. What’s been great about Nolan’s and Favreau’s careers is that they so far have kept the indie ethic of sto­ry­telling first and just tack­ing on the spe­cial effects to aide the visuals.

I doubt Iron Man or The Dark Knight will get nom­i­nated for the big awards, other than Heath Ledger, but the were enjoy­able and inter­est­ing films that deserved the crit­i­cal acco­lades, and the piles of money, that they earned.

1. And the awe­some The Pres­tige. [↩]
2. Most under­rated? Stranger Than Fic­tion. [↩]
3. Why doesn’t he just use his real name — Joseph McGinty? [↩]

I’m a fre­quent reader of Ain’t It Cool News, the grand­fa­ther of all movie rumor sites that was started by rotund Aus­ti­nite Harry Knowles in 1996. If you want to know some­thing, any­thing, about an upcom­ing movie that’s sci-fi or arty or action related it’s the place to check out first. More than likely that movie you care about has already held a pro­mo­tional screen­ing and some­one has writ­ten in to the site say­ing if it was good or not. On top of that they put to print many movie rumors such as upcom­ing projects, scripts that are in the works and what par­tic­u­lar peo­ple in Hol­ly­wood are going to be work­ing on next. It’s an amaz­ingly com­pre­hen­sive site for the movie nerd like me.

And so I was perus­ing it the other day and came across a head­line, writ­ten with, as usual for AICN, with too many excla­ma­tion points -

Lucas Talks INDY 5!!

Wha…? More Indi­ana Jones movies? Isn’t Har­ri­son Ford get­ting too old (Of course, it’s not the age, it’s the mileage.) to do this kind of stuff any­more? Shouldn’t he be the lov­ing father in a San­dra Bul­lock or Kate Hud­son movie? Why not an arty drama, Har­ri­son, like the Michael Dou­glas role you turned down in Traf­fic?

But then again George Lucas has never seen a bad oppor­tu­nity to return to the well too many times. The sec­ond Star Wars tril­ogy was enough to prove that and once again Lucas is bring­ing the anger to him­self. From AICN, quot­ing a Fox News article -

“I haven’t even told Steven or Har­ri­son this,” he said. “But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf)) the lead char­ac­ter next time and have Har­ri­son [Ford)) come back like Sean Con­nery did in the last movie. I can see it work­ing out.

“And it’s not like Har­ri­son is even old. I mean, he’s 65 and he did every­thing in this movie. The old chem­istry is there, and it’s not like he’s an old man. He’s incred­i­bly agile; he looks even bet­ter than he did 20 years ago, if you ask me.”

Come on, George! Leave. It. Alone! It was bad enough that you guys had to make just one more Indy film, we might have another 2 or 3 films where Indy is hob­bling around while his son is the hero?

Good God, man, when are you going to know when to say when? Stop it! Just stop!

I like the Jason Bourne movies because they’re gritty and real­is­tic (kinda)¹ and Matt Damon is much bet­ter as a CIA assas­sin than I thought he would be. When I first saw the pre­view for The Bourne Iden­tity I was so-so with it, but in the years fol­low­ing that first knock-out punch I’ve been hooked like a zom­bie on fresh, deli­cious human brains. The two films so far have been great, but there are a few things I’m not excited about with this third one.

1) Damon has said no more Bourne films after this one.

I under­stand what he’s doing here. He wants to be iden­ti­fied with some­thing else besides Jason Bourne², but that doesn’t make it any easier.

2) The amaz­ingly cool Brian Cox is gone.

I love Brian Cox. He’s one of the great char­ac­ter actors of his gen­er­a­tion and see­ing his char­ac­ter Abbott kill him­self in The Bourne Supremacy was heart­break­ing for me. I was very dis­ap­pointed when he turned out to be a bad guy because up until that moment that he stabbed his lackey he was just a great amoral character.

3) More shaky cam­era fight scenes.

One of my big crit­i­cisms between the first and sec­ond films was the way hand-to-hand com­bat scenes were filmed. Doug Liman filmed the scene in Bourne’s Paris apart­ment from about 10 feet back, allow­ing you to see what was going on with the knife/pen fight­ing. Paul Green­grass shot the fight scene inside of the house in Ger­many way too close to the action and with far too many edits for my taste. French direc­tor Jean-Luc Godard³ said “Every edit is a lie,” and it’s true. I would have pre­ferred a more con­tin­u­ous feel to the com­bat than a shaky pile up of visuals.

4) No more Franka Potente.

Unless some mir­a­cle hap­pened in that Indian river, Marie’s not com­ing back. That’s too bad.

And unless there’s a huge plot change, this is how it will all go down — the CIA will find Bourne some­where and try to dis­pose of him. Bourne will rely on his train­ing and smarts and will out­wit all of them and over­come his adver­saries. In the end he will be more para­noid than ever.

I’m sure it will be good, though. We’ll see.

1. If you can say any­thing about these movies it’s that they reignited the James Bond fran­chise. Daniel Craig is no Pierce Bros­nan in Casino Royale. He’s one mean SOB. [↩]
2. Maybe he shouldn’t do any more of the Ocean’s movies then, either. [↩]
3. If you don’t know him, Godard was one of the most influ­en­tial mem­bers of the French New Wave move­ment in film. The New Wavers exper­i­mented rad­i­cally with edit­ing, visual style, and nar­ra­tive, and the move­ment has been claimed to influ­ence many movies, from Arthur Penn’s Bon­nie and Clyde all the way to Quentin Tarantino’s Reser­voir Dogs and Wes Andersen’s The Royal Tenen­baums. [↩]