CODSWALLOP!

I stopped my workout this morning to sit in the ladies locker room and watch the Oscar noms be read out this morning and, after it was all over, I was distracted from my quest for Michelle Obama arms (Yes, I know she went to Princeton and Harvard!) by my confusion about the love for Slumdog Millionaire and Ben Button while my rage at Dark Knight's egregious snub fueled my treadmill run. It is like The Academy has forgot every thing it learned last year with the Coen's brutal No Country... and proven itself to be truly short-sighted , with a weak stomach for dismay, angst and uncertainty. Slumdog's pat, insipid good-for-nothing seven-11 slurpee gets tossed down our gullets (with me the only person suffering from brain freeze, aparently) while The Dark Knight's complex, ambitious good-for-you veggie platter gets left to rot on the kitchen counter. Well, you know what? I like my veggies, damn it! I like my veggies with a dip of anarchy, hopelessness and painful humiliation! I am revealing far too much about my own dark recesses of the sould with this metaphor and not enough about my taste in movies, which I prefer to be dreary and morose, thankyouverymuch. Moving on...

I dutifully printed out my ballot and ticked off all the movies I have seen and taped it to my
fridge, where it will stay until the Best Picture winner is read. It is a work in progress, with many movies in the major catagories left to see (Doubt, Frost/Nixon) and more nominees to tick of as having viewed. Even though I am nonplussed about the noms, I cannot and will not
shake the hype surrounding them. My palms get sweaty carrying home my Vanity Fair 'Hollywood' issue, I skip to the mailbox to collect Entertainment Weekly's Oscar issue, I lovingly highlight the nominees I will be cheering for on the big night. I never enter any Oscar pools because I always choose with my heart rather than my head and, therefore, always loose. I say that sincerely. I'm excited. I'm excited for winners to get emotional, for Hugh Jackman to dance, dance, dance! I'm excited to be in the bosom of kith and kin, shouting at the TV, eating greasy food. I'm excited to appear in a state of dress and grooming that is in direct purportion to the ladies I am saying catty things about. I'm excited...
Anyways, my other stray thoughts:
*The technical awards always tickle me in that movies like Wanted are magically transformed into (Cinderella-like) The Academy-Award nominated Wanted. I wish the producers would let the winners from these categories thank their wives for a change.
*No screenplay, direction or supporting actress for Rachel Getting Married. It deserved more than just Hathaway. Incidentally, the pjs I will be wearing on Oscar night are labeled 'Lady Hathaways'. Foreshadowing? Will they be trumped by someone's 'Dame Winslet' bedroom attire?
*Micheal Shannon? Who the hell is Micheal Shannon? Somewhere, Michael Sheen went from the highest mountain top to the deepest valley when Micheal Shannon's name was read.
*I only need to see Frost/Nixon and I have seen all five nominees. I was resigned to Slumdog and Ben Button making it to the final five, but I would have rather seen Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler, or The Dark Knight (especially) as the fifth cylon, oops, I mean nomination rather than The Reader. Reader was good, but not outstanding. Same goes for the directing category and the lame cylon joke works a little better there. ('I'd rather see Jonathan Demme as the fith cylon?' Get it?)
*The Globe for Kate for Supporting for The Reader was asinine. SHE HAS TOP BILLING IN THE DAMN MOVIE! This nom is more appropriate.
*Finally, what I loved: Melissa Leo: Yay! Frozen River is excellent - ulcer inducing, but excellent. (Caught it at the Fest in the fall) Some love for her costar, Misty Upham, would have been nice. Leo has had a varied and busy career since Homicide: Life on the Streets and it is nice when a working character actor gets love. Same goes for Richard Jenkins! These two don't have to win at this point. I am just thrilled they made it this far.
*There are only three Best Original Song nominees this year and TWO are from Slumdog! The indignity of snubbing the boss! It is shit like this that makes me HATE Slumdog, not just be irritated by it. Again, Slumdog (CRUMdog PILLionaire?) is the slurpee that is being shoved down my gullett and I have brain freeze.

Welcome back, Mulder...

Rehab did you well. Compare with pre-rehab, X-Files: IWTB premier:

I wish you continued good health... my eyes cannot take it otherwise. Welcome back, Mulder, you bastard.

Anyways....

I taught my self to crochet last fall and have enjoyed most the satisfaction of planning, budgeting, carrying out and completing projects. So far, I’ve completed 2.5 original projects: 2 dishcloths, a scarf from a pattern, and a scarf adapted from a pattern. The last one is getting there… I completed it only to realize that the ‘contrast’ between two yarns was non-existent and a couple of the rows just looked plain ‘weird.’ Anyways, the best advice came from a cashier at Chapters. When I was buying a crochet magazine, we got to talking shop and when I told her that the scarf I was crocheting for my boyfriend turned out ‘weird,’ she told me, “I doesn’t matter what it looks like so long as he wears it!” True enough, but I have a good strategy to not make it look weird any more.

Anyways, my goal is become handy enough to be able to come up with quick and pretty presies for family and friends and to hand-stitch some cute sweaters for myself to schlep around in. Oh yeah, and to apply my skills in ‘deconstructing’ the corporate co-option of fashion, creativity and clothing by ‘adapting’ their designs into personal projects.

If this little endeavor keeps me out of the mall, then I’ll be happy. Next hobby is making my own clothes and more huge start-up costs. ‘Huge’ is an exaggeration. The hooks and the yarn were not that outrageous – some were, in fact, Christmas gifts – but, after spending approximately $14 on two new skeins of wool for my boyfriend’s scarf, I realized that it might have been cheaper to just go out and buy a new scarf. Oh well, the project has yielded so significant left-over wool that I can use for something else and I got to use up the remaining wool from a previous project so it works out.

My relief is that I am starting and finishing things. When Nana taught me to knit when I was a little girl I didn’t have the patience to follow through with my practice.

The Norbit Effect

At the movies this past weekend, the trailer for Anne Hathaway’s new venture, Bride Wars, appeared. It being January, the appearance of a trailer for a lugubrious romantic comedy is not uncommon - January is a storied dumping ground for films with a tired, witless marriage plot – but Bride Wars coincides with Hathaway’s (and Hathaway’s ‘people's’) push for the actress’ first Oscar nomination for Rachel Getting Married. Norbit Redux?
It may just be an urban legend, but if the fact that Norbit’s February 2007 release during the middle of Eddie Murphy’s campaign for a Supporting Actor Oscar for Dreamgirls and his subsequent loss is simply a coincidence, then the significance of the three following events is certainly hard to shake: in a few months, Murphy went from cinematic high with his turn in Dreamgirls, to lowest common denominator with Norbit, to loosing out to Alan Arkin on the Best Supporting Actor race. Did the nauseating ad campaign for Norbit, where a nebbish-looking nerd gets catches the eye of a grotesque giantess and Murphy plays both parts, damage Murphy’s credibility as a dramatic actor in the eyes of Academy voters? Will the Norbit Effect adversely affect Hathaway’s chances for a Best Actress trophy? Do I have anything to back this up?
Some examples:

• Could the early-January 2007 DVD release of Bandidas, where Penelope Curz and Salma Hayek play hot bank-robbin’ mamas, rob Cruz’s chances of a Best Actress Oscar for Volver?

• Mark Wahlberg became the only acting nominee of the ensemble cast of The Departed for his scene-stealing performance. Did early advertising for March 2007’s banal Shooter depart the Best Supporting Actor Oscar from him?

• Did Natalie Portman loose the Best Supporting Actres Oscar for Closer as revenge for the feeling of exhaustion with the Star Wars franchise and a lack of confidence for the final offering, summer 2005’s The Revenge of the Sith?

The prospect of Bride Wars would be insufferable if it were released any old time of the year, but the screeching sounds and dismal images emanating from the trailer cast a pall over what has been a period of revelation for audiences regarding Hathaway. To see her reverting into some harridan beast-bride is dispiriting. (Isn’t the female stereotype of ‘bridezillia’ just mind-boggling and disheartening in general?)
The Norbit Effect is by no means a quantified phenomenon like the Bradley Effect – the Academy does not do advance polling so determining sentiment in the lead-up to the ballot deadline for any category is not objectively possible. Bride Wars does not necessarily mean the death knell for Hathaway’s Oscar chances, but if she comes up short on the 22nd of February, it could be taken as proof that her work in Rachel Getting Married was the exception rather than the rule, unfairly disqualifying for the less-offensive films she is capable of doing.

Epilogue: Friday, 9 January: Richard Crouse, Canada AM's film critic, mentioned The Norbit Effect when discussing the timing of Bride Wars and Hathaway's Oscar chances. If a guy who pomades his hair talked about it on the television machine, then I can't be crazy.

The Last Word...

With The X-Files: I Want to Believe making an appearance on certain critics’ ‘worst of’ lists – critics like Canada AM’s usually amiable Richard Crouse and Aint it Cool’s Capone – and the new three-disk DVD neatly filed away on my shelf, I thought it was high time to offer my final word on the film. Critic and my pal Carsten Knox articulated the best reason for X-Files’ inclusion among the worst of 2008: the possibility of rebooting the franchise was so tantalizing, and the bar set by the original, early episodes of the TV series was so high that the inevitable end result of I Want to Believe was a crushing disappointment. Chris Carter and co. squandered a great opportunity.

What were my first thoughts as the credits rolled on July 25th 2008? I think I said out lout, ‘What? Is that it?’ That fact that what I saw looked like a later season episode (with due diligence given to the Mulder/Scully relationship as a distraction from stale storytelling) made the experience feel like at once a crushing disappointment and minimally satisfactory. Not the worst time spent watching The X-Files, but certainly not the best.

During the later seasons (seven to nine), I blamed Carter and producer Frank Spotnitz for being so blind that they didn’t realize the desperate need for earth-shattering change in the arc of the series. Even with the addition of new, somewhat likable (in the case of Robert Patrick’s John Doggett) characters, the dynamic never overcame the malaise of the post-Fight the Future hangover. Artistically speaking, there never should have been a season eight or a season nine – hell, I’d opt to dump season seven if not for the gut-busting Cops/X-Files mash-up ‘X-Cops.’

So with so many people turned off by the musty smell emanating from the series, the proposed film series should have been the perfect opportunity to bring fans back into the fold and get The X-Files back at the forefront of pop culture conversation.
How could this have been done? A few suggestions:

• New blood: Perhaps scripting or directing should have been handed over to a filmmaker or screenwriter outside The X-Files fold. Audiences needed to be reminded of why The X-Files was worth watching, but Carter and Spotnitz seem oblivious to this. An outside voice may have worked harder to appeal to more people.

• Old dog, new tricks: Scripting or directing duties could have been given to someone in the fold who had some success producing the better episodes of the series. Maybe David Duchovney could have been given the reigns or Fight the Future’s Rob Bowman could have returned for the second feature. Maybe Vince Gilligan or (if there was a God) Darin ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose’ Morgan could have kicked the script around.

• Let it die: In the darkest recesses of my soul, I think this movie was never meant to be. The X-Files could have remained dormant for a few more years and allowed for a wave of nostalgia to bring it back to consciousness, therefore remembering the series as it was, and not the limp specimen it became.

The deleted scenes on the DVD of I Want to Believe add nothing substantial to the film – they are, in typical X-Files-women-distrusting fashion, a scene of Scully crying and a scene of Amanda Peet dying – and the featurettes betray nothing revelatory about the film. A 90-minute documentary (90 minutes!) on the second disk goes into the joy of working in Vancouver again with most of the original TV crew and the crew’s satisfaction at keeping the filming a big secret from the prying eyes of press and spoiler-prone bloggers. Big frakin’ deal. Maybe if more people had known about the film and what it was about, then maybe more people would have been inclined to see it. The X-Files movie was not harbouring the secret of the last cylon or knew where Ben moved the island – you know, spoilers we actually care about! Carter and Spotnitz’s insistence on total secrecy is indicative of their delusion that the show is as relevant as ever, which, in and of itself is why they made no effort to spruce up their venture.

It was the episode 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' and the scene where Mulder happens upon a storage locker filled with tanks containing bodies in suspended animation that first caught my attention and hooked me onto the show. No such striking images were present in I Want to Believe, which is one issue, but the problem with the film is the profound difference of opinion between the producers of the show and the audience as to what the thrust of The X-Files was: Chris Carter’s ‘search for God’ vs. two lives (Mulder and Scully’s) on hold while pursuing unexplained phenomena. I wonder what a movie that took the fan’s point of view might have looked like.