good weekend, so far; Oscar night tonight

[fflo]

I feel a little like a sucker watching the Oscars, objecting to what scores with The Academy & all, but I do like to tune in. Hope Chris Rock is fun, and transgressive in ways that I smile at. This year I've seen a number of movies with nominations; may zip out & catch Finding Neverland 'tween now & then---but prob'bly not, cuz I'm enjoying putzing around the house, and if I go out again I think it'll be for the gym.

Caught The Aviator Friday night w/bigfinedaddy. I'll tell ya---I didn't expect much, to tell you the truth (and for some reason I'd gotten it in my head that it was directed not by Scorsese but by Oliver Stone), but I've gotta thumbs-up it. It had pretty sound dramatic structure, and certainly an evocative visual environment, in many different sorts of settings. Cate's Kate didn't strike me as caricature so much as it did a folding in of the sort of "on"/creating-personality/acting-all-the-time thing HH accuses her of (and her different selves elsewhere echo); Leonardo was willing to get good and ugly in his part, and I think pulled it off, with how much help from director/editor I dunno. Moreover, the OCD and germ-aphobe stuff came off pretty uncomfortably realistic. That's what's staying with me most. My companion & I have been quoting his "show me all the blueprints" (no small feat of elocution there) with (possibly poignantly) maniacal glee.

Now that I think about it, the film may present a certain implication, in the depiction of the Hepburn family as well as that of HH's life, that the seeds of mental illness may actually get a little extra fertilizer in circumstances of financial privilege, as in those of celebrity. And of course we all know about the overlap of having a screw loose---a screw that doesn't necessarily remain in one place---with being a freak, outside the mainstream, operating outside of convention. That freedom, too, may include/induce a psychological freedom that may be dangerous for sanity.

Of course I'm talking out my ass here.

Decided not to go see Million Dollar Baby this weekend after hearing a clip from it on the radio (NPR piece about dialect ---with a guy from U. Kansas, actually) in which Hilary Swank's character cites, among other horrible conditions from which she comes & which she is of course desperate to escape through boxing, the fact that her mother weighs 312 pounds. Fuck you, Million Dollar Baby! I hope you lose! Go to hell, Clint Eastwood! (I spare you here my elaboration on why it's even worse that it's 312, vs. 300 or 350 or whatever.)

Also w/bigfinedaddy yesterday: dominoes, Master Mind, checkers, Chinese checkers. Woulda done backgammon but I can never remember the set-up & was too lazy to get online & look it up. All I remember is that there's something counter-intuitive about it, as a fair number of your thingies are already almost finished with the big lap you're trying to make.

So. Getting a bunch done today, though never enough. Breathing pretty regularly. Saw homovegetarian. Just had neighbor at the door with baby. (Such a sucker for babies am I.) Finished up cat-sitting for other neighbors. Dinner out with another neighbor next week.

Thoughts of H. (So what else is new.)

Comments

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

That's the least of the problems with Million Dollar Baby, actually... Don't bother with it. That line made me uncomfortable too, though. (Furthermore, the woman who plays her mom in the film probably weighs, like, 200 lbs. tops.) You're not missing anything by skipping it, I promise. I like Hilary Swank an awful lot, but she can't save that train wreck.

There was a similar moment in Ray, which I watched this morning, where there's a "hilarious" "funny" moment in which you see Ray Charles feeling assorted womens' wrists to see if they're "good looking." There's a quick montage of him feeling a bunch of slender women's wrists and then he goes and screws 'em, and then he gets ahold of a substantially pudgier wrist and totally recoils. Oh, the humor! The funniness! Even the blind can tell that fat people are unlovable! Ho ho! That bit pissed me off too. (Again, no need to see that one, if you haven't yet. It's basically a VH1 Behind the Music stretched to two and a half hours. It's solid for what it is, but... it's still just a Behind the Music episode.)

Nonetheless, I am stoked for the Awards as well.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Ah, Will. . . For a guy who's not exactly, uh, "portly," you have a helluvan internal fat activist.

Wish I'd talked to you before paying for Ray... I cringed at that bit, too, of course, and I'm with you on the rest, too. Of course it might have the "cripple" Oscar boost. You know, Tom Cruise must have been REEEAAALLLY acting to play somebody in a wheelchair, cuz that's so utterly different from what he, & the rest of us, are usually like. But maybe I've ranted this rant at you before---possibly in conjunction with dissing Rain Man.

I had a blind friend once who used to ask his brother if the women he was interested in were good-looking. That struck me as especially funny in that his brother's take could be based on some bizarro fringe personal fluke taste. Not to mention, of course, that it's as much as admitting that you care what other people think about your ability to get a good-looking girl, even when you can't see her at all yourself.

I cut him a break on that issue, though, and was actually starting to get to be friends with him until I found out he was freaked by queerness. I could only take so much.

[groovesinorbit]

I'm tempted by The Aviator, I must say. Although I can't imagine anyone doing Kate Hepburn justice. Does DiCaprio look anything like Hughes? Hughes was like two feet taller than Leo, wasn't he?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

He doesn't look like him in the basic physical ways, but then Cate doesn't look like Kate, either. I'm more familiar with the later Hughes, and I must say: I really recognized something about him in Leonardo's depiction starting 3/4 of the way in when he's testifying before the Senate. There was something about his facial expressions---and by then his hair was the way I remember it.

I actually kind of like that the feeling of "accuracy" is more in the emotional characterization of someone in the circumstances the script lays out, vs. being a body/face double for a historical figure---though I do sympathize when people report finding a significant dissimilarity distracting, and I suppose I would too if it were extreme, or of a sort that hit me personally strongly, for some reason.

[groovesinorbit]

It all depends on the actor and their ability. Who knew Anthony Hopkins would be perfect as Nixon? Well, obviously the casting director, but not I. A pleasant surprise, if a rather old example.

If the actor isn't up to it, though, I'm easily distracted. Of course, that's the truth whether s/he is playing a nonfictional character or not.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Well I can't be sure, of course, and sometimes our takes on movies differ wildly, but I'd bet you'll be impressed w/DiCaprio, wet-behind-the-ears though he may seem. Much of the tone setting in the movie has to do with his being a wildcat dreamer nut with youthful enthusiasm & vision, and lots of money to blow, so it starts out taking advantage of his youth. And his illness is related back to a (frustratingly simple) glimpse of his childhood, so there's that, too. I think he manages to age in the part well enough, and then even when he's playing much older & nuttier, he suddenly looks more like the actor who plays his child self.

But I should hold my tongue a bit since you still haven't seen it. Who knows---you might hate the Hepburn. I know bigfinedaddy is more of a lover of KH than am I, and she wasn't disappointed.

[groovesinorbit]

The Hepburn portrayal is the one I'm more nervous about, but what the hell.

I didn't know anyone was more of a KH lover than you.

movies, games

[squirrelykat.livejournal.com]

i didn't get to see too many movies this season. i think my mom saw most
of the nominated ones.....i did like the comments Chris Rock made about
the Shrub in his opening monologue, though!
wish i remembered backgammon too! i played all the time i college and won
many dorm tournaments! lets get back on that scene!

Re: movies, games

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Good idea! Let's see if we can't arrange a backgammon evening.

[maffick.livejournal.com]

I didn't see Million Dollar Baby either, but from what my mom told me about it the other day, I don't want to. My mom liked it. But she was telling me about the end, which I guess I can tell you about since you don't want to see it either. She winds up with a broken back and is paralyzed from the neck down. She tries to kill herself and fails. So she asks Clint Eastwood's character to kill her and he does. I am always going on about how Hollywood movies always have to have a happy ending *yuck*, but I'm sorry, this one seems to go for the jugular. Especially with Christopher Reeves all fresh in the memory and the more than depressing reality of current events making it not such a bad time for a little uplift, I think that the movie would have ended better had they made her survive. Showed her using her brains instead of her braun (sp?) as a motivational speaker or something. I guess there was a big thing right before the Oscar's where people were talking about this and saying that the movie was all about euthanasia, which I don't think is the case, but I think it was wrong of them to make her a quiter like that. Plus, I'm disgusted with how Clint Eastwood just seems to be this dream child of the motion picture industry. Can they give Marty a break for once?? shish.