Hollywood

Last night I watched the free screener the producer’s of Crash sent to all members of the Screen Actor’s Guild. I finally got to see if it was better than Brokeback Mountain which was its main competition for the Academy Award as Best Picture. Well I think the voters of the academy made a mistake. Crash for me was a 1 layer movie. Every character gets a chance to show his or her prejudice. It was so obvious; I found it laughable at times. I think some of the performances where great, but I felt like I was watching some sort of instructional film on the dangers of prejudice.

I recently bought and watched CRASH on DVD and I can see why Will was so impressed with the movie. It was an excellent movie that should spark a lot of discussion. As a matter of fact, my friend /co-worker and I had a discussion about the movie ourselves. He thought that the white folks in the movie came out looking better than the black folks. He felt that the feelings expressed by Sandra Bullock’s character were the feelings felt by most folks watching the movie.

though he does look like he’s trying too hard. or maybe that’s how the thinking man’s actor should pose- you know, with an air of pretension. jamie foxx might want to take some lessons from gael in the art of celebrity modeling.

Tonight Peter invited me to see Mrs Henderson Presents. I hadn't heard of it, but with a 7.1 rating on the Internet Movie Database I can expect it to be good. Generally I expect anything with Judi Dench to be good, and even though I liked The Chronicles of Riddick it wasn't the type of movie I expected to see her in. (I wanted to see Vin Diesel, he's very hot, and plays Dungeons and Dragons too, in xXx one of his tattoos was an elf character "Melkor" he plays.)

Katie Holmes should be having her baby any day now. What is she doing walking by herself at night? Probably trying to escape from Tom. Katie’s baby shower was held that day. What could someone buy the TomKat spawn? The poor child will have everything it every wants…and Scientology. I would hate for Tom Cruise to be my father.

Set against the futuristic landscape of totalitarian Britain, V For Vendetta tells the story of a mild-mannered young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) who is rescued from a life-and-death situation by a masked vigilante known only as “V.” Incomparably charismatic and ferociously skilled in the art of combat and deception, V ignites a revolution when he detonates two London landmarks and takes over the government-controlled airwaves, urging his fellow citizens to rise up against tyranny and oppression. As Evey uncovers the truth about V’s mysterious background, she also discovers the truth about herself - and emerges as his unlikely ally in the culmination of his plot to bring freedom and justice back to a society fraught with cruelty and corruption.

Enter: the MyHeritage Face Recognition program. This AJAX-based program actually analyzes the facial features of any frontal face shot you submit and returns a list of celebrities whose features best match yours. Check it out, it’s pretty sweet. And for the record, I now have a strong similarity to Brendan Fraser. Huh.

What’s interesting about all this, to get back to Laya’s original comment, is that Jewish involvement in everything from social change to pornography doesn’t tend to highlight the particular characters jewishness. If anything, many of them are quite hostile to religion. Trotsky never advertised being a jew (for obvious reasons), Betty Friedan never connected Judaism and feminism per se, Chomsky (!) certainly isn’t one to go about connecting his Judaism to any of the various social action movement he is a part of, and Traci Lords never billed herself as a Jewish porn star (Lidsey Voulu seems to be an exception, as she mentions being a jew frequently in articles and even debated Shmuely Boteach!). Members of the Kibbutz movement were anything but religious. This makes one wonder if the religious aspects of Judaism have anything to do with alleged Jewish over-representation in these various groups and industries.

Lots of people have been commenting on the South Park - Scientology issue. I. like many, are eager to see what awaits Scientology on Wednesday when the new season of South Park begins. LDSLF has up a discussion of the boycott issue of Tom Cruise films. I want to ask a different question. Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars someone raised a very interesting parallel between the Scientologists and the Mormons. Allow me to quote him.

To see the celebrity results I got on my photo, click here. Of course, part of the reason I’m touting this technology is because it says I most resemble Kiera Knightley. But then again, it also says I resemble Cole Porter….. AND Billy resembles Haley Joel Osment and Hilary Rodham Clinton (what the….!!!)…. Joy resembles Ashton Kutcher, Christy Turlington and Billy Idol (and apparently both of my children also resemble Kiera Knightley), and best of all…..Ronny resembles Halle Berry!

Everyone wants to win an Oscar. But remember, winning an Oscar does not mean your film is any good (Titanic) or that it will help your career (Halle Berry). So, for Moviedrome #4, here are two seminal films that were snubbed for the Oscar, despite being much better than the films that won (in parentheses):

In other news, I did not watch the Oscars, but I do have an Oscars-related anecdote. I saw a poster the other day for a showing of the movie Croupier (which is a pretty cool movie, by the way) and this was the advertising blurb they had printed under the title: “It was almost nominated for an Academy Award!” Is it me, or this a crazy and meaningless claim? How can they know for sure? Couldn’t any film say something similar? “Come see Wedding Crashers – Vince Vaughn’s name was at one point mentioned for Best Actor!”

The frustrations and travails of everyday life are manifested as racist attitudes, and yet when you scratch deeper, it’s much more than that. Everyday life and the blows it deals to people take its toll. These people who then go out into the streets and need someone else to take it out on. It portrays how race comes into the way of interactions and prevents people from seeing the actual person in front of them. Sandra Bullock for example, thinks the man fixing her lock is a part of a gang who will sell duplicates of the keys, and is especially rude with her Asian househelp. “I’m angry all time. I wake up in the morning and I’m feeling angry,” she confessed to a friend. In the end though, it’s the help who comes to Bullock’s aide when she has a nasty fall.

We’ll be honest: we had no interest in seeing The Island until liberals started trashing it. Not for its artistic shortcomings, mind you – most of them admitted it was cleverly plotted, well-acted (by Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson), and chock-full of director Michael Bay’s high-octane action sequences. No, the problem was that all this cinematic skill was at the service of a message that was … pro-life!

George Clooney’s Oscar speech also created a stir at America’s Shittiest Website™ a/k/a “The Corner,”where JPod and his doughy albino playmate Iain Murray are busy adducing examples of how Hollywood hasn’t been so nice to black folks. Never mind National Review’s own racist history. And never mind that no black people are allowed to play with the white kids at the Korner. For JPod and Murray to call Hollywood racist is rather like the super-sized JPod calling Michael Moore fat (which, in fact, he just did in this post). These people have no shame.

Instead of casting pretty boy hillbillies and highly trained and efficient soldiers, how about casting everyday people. When Werner Herzog needed a crazy dude to play Kaspar Hauser, did he just hire some sexy German dude? No, he got himself an actual crazy dude. That’s the way action-adventure movies should be made. Instead of people like Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon, it should be people like me starring in action-adventure movies. I think I would make a dynamic action hero. I am beguiling, enthralling and beloved by rocking teen combos throughout Central Jersey. And I work for sandwiches. What’s not to like? I’ll admit my acting experience is limited (I’ve performed as Obi-Wan Kenobi in a German version of The Empire Strikes Back and I played six different roles (4 speaking) in a German version of Back to the Future) but I’m a quick learner. And I can’t be any worse an actor than Brendan Fraser or AntiChrist Affleck.

not a fan of the oscars? go check out their “award archnemesis” the razzies. Nominees for worst picture include “the dukes of hazzard” (which I slept through on dvd, even) and the classy “deuce bigalow: european gigolo”, and there’s an epic showdown in the worst actress category between the esteemed tara reid and jenny mccarthy. winners announced 7:30 pst tonight!

Presenters: Jack Nicholson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Eric Bana, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Stiller, John Travolta, Ziyi Zhang, Hilary Swank, Jamie Foxx, Morgan Freeman, Jessica Alba, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves, Will Ferrell, Queen Latifah, Terrence Howard, Meryl Streep, Will Smith, Steve Carell, Nicole Kidman, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Uma Thurman, Charlize Theron, Naomi Watts, Lily Tomlin, Reese Witherspoon, George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek

Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford) is a security expert working at a major bank devising firewalls that prevent thieves from stealing money online. Bill (Paul Bettany) comes with a proposition to the bank, which eventuates as a more personal one to Jack. Bill, along with his gang, kidnap Jack's wife and two children and hold them hostage. Jack is forced to electronically transfer funds from the bank for Bill, who knows what matters to Jack most. A battle of wits ensues between the men in which only one of them can come out alive.

This is my first annual Oscar predictions column, for which I am uniquely qualified by not having seen a single one of the movies nominated in any category. I’ve never even watched an Oscar ceremony, except once when a friend called me 35 minutes into Halle Berry’s acceptance speech and I managed to catch only the last 20 minutes of it.

In the realm of tech-heavy novels I much prefer, say, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October where out main characters all have history and back story and motivation. (Ramius feels the Soviet Union was ultimately responsible for the death of his wife and that détente requires that nether side get ahead of the other in an arms race. Jack Ryan was basically an academic who found himself dropped into the middle of a very dangerous, very tense situation and told to prevent a war — all he really wanted to do was get home to his wife and daughter and get back to writing. It wasn’t until the later books that Ryan became a super hero and Harrison Ford had to take over the role.) However, that’s just the way I remember the books. Before I’d trust myself to write more than one paragraph on the topic I would have to read them again.

Actor Jamie Foxx picked up the first major award for his musical endeavors during the 37th Annual NAACP Image Awards, taped Saturday at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

So, that’s why I cast my vote for Indiana Jones as the greater character, overall. However, of all the actors who have portrayed James Bond over the years, Sir Sean Connery is, by far, the greatest. No actor, not even the mighty Harrison Ford, will ever outshine the man who played the original James Bond.

- Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love winning out over Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth for Best Actress in 1998.

We saw Firewall, a thriller with Harrison Ford and Virginia Masden. I figured, how bad could this be? This is a movie about a big-time network security guy, so it had some geek interest for me. They did a nice job with the technology stuff, even using what appeared to be an actual Cisco router terminal screen in one close-up. Lots of Windows XP screens and Dell servers in racks, but the effort to make it look high tech was pretty convincing.