In one of the comments, Phil asked me for Oscar predictions. I’m not sure why, considering I lose those Oscar pools every year. I haven’t seen everything nominated (I never do), but I’d assume Million Dollar Baby will be taking home everything it’s got nominated for. I thought it was good even though it feels more and more like a movie of the week in my memory. My opinion aside, it’s the kind of movie Academy voters just lap up, made by a guy the Academy loves.

The only reason to watch the Oscars this year will be to watch Chris Rock insult all of Hollywood.

If anyone wants toss in their predictions in the comments, feel free.

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Wong Kar Wai’s sequel to In the Mood for Love is pretty, but kind of disappointing. The main crux of 2046 is Mr. Chow’s quest to leave his memories of Su Lizhen behind, by moving onto other women. Unfortunately, I felt a lot like Mr. Chow… no matter how much I watched of 2046, all it did was remind me of how perfect In the Mood for Love was.

Still. Very pretty.

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So Singles was on HBO last night and I watched it for the first time in years. I remember it being kind of mediocre and funny in parts but it was better than I remember. Campbell Scott is still too boring and there’s still long stretches of dull, but it’s a fun little nostalgia tour through grungyland. yay grunge.

Anyhow! The cameo list is tremendous. Xavier McDaniel, Paul Giamatti, Tim Burton, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Chris Cornell, Eric Stoltz, Jeremy Piven and that dude from Thirtysomething all pop in for really no reason other than to distract you. It’s fantastic. The weirdest moment came late in the film, when Victor Garber pops in for like 5 seconds with the most ridiculous moustache ever. I mean, just look at that thing! (Non-Alias fans may recognize him as the man who designed the Titanic)

Oh, and the soundtrack is still pretty mindblowing, unless you hate flannel and the music it brings… er, brought.

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Yup. I saw Life Aquatic and you didn’t. It was great too. The only bad thing was that I didn’t win one of them snazzy red Zissou beanies. The all-acoustic David Bowie in Portuguese soundtrack is particularly perfect.

The only other movie I’ve seen this year that I liked as much was Sideways, the bachelor road trip comedy that takes all the wrong turns for its protagonists. I’m not a big oenophile but I don’t think it matters when Paul Giamatti’s ranting and raving and guzzling spittoons full of merlot. Sideways also sports the best use of male full-frontal nudity in a film.

In terms of lesser lights, House of Flying Daggers was probably the biggest disappointment this year. The first hour is a wondrous pageant of iron and silk and then it really falls apart. It was like flipping on the international channel and seeing dudes with swords and pajamas and thinking there’s going to be this awesome fight sequence but they really just stand around and talk because it’s a low-budget soap opera. Then you’re just left sitting there saying “man, fuck the international channel.”

What else? Um, Incredibles was rad but not as good as Iron Giant, which is one of maybe five films that actually make me cry. National Treasure isn’t as bad as you think but it’s still pretty damn awful.

I’m heading to an Arcade Fire show tonight but the only thing I can think about is that I’m going to miss Amazing Race because I’ll be TiVoing Veronica Mars instead. How’s that for TV anxiety?

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You know, maybe Linus talked this one up a bit much, because Girl Next Door’s not really that good. It’s got charming leads and a spectacular turn by Tim Olyphant as a menacing porno-pimp, but there’s something along the lines of 20 endings, including one about a really annoying Cambodian exchange student, which make the last half hour completely miserable.

Other random things that came to mind during the viewing:

Why do porn actresses need saving anyway? This movie has a surprisingly narrow and naive worldview.

There’s a documentary called Girl Next Door about a housewife becoming a famous pornstar. That may have been better.

Repeating “What’s the craziest thing you’ve done lately?” and “The juice is worth the squeeze” five times rob them of any significance they may have (if any).

The music choices have no rhyme or reason to them at all, other than the director thinking the songs were good.

If I were a pornstar, my name would almost certainly be Bangkok Dangerous.

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Riding Giants was just another surf documentary about big wave riding. It’s less wide-eyed and naive than the Brown family movies like Endless Summer or Step Into Liquid, but it doesn’t have nearly as much breathtaking footage as Step Into Liquid either. I thought this was disappointing coming from Stacey Peralta, who put together Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is probably the funniest movie I’ve seen this year. It’s like Spinal Tap with a reality TV show twist, as you see Metallica run around with therapists and Gandalf and admit their gay love for each other while Dave Mustaine stands at the edges talking about how he misses smoking dirtbongs with his “little Norwegian friend” Lars. The band bills it as a document about how they overcame substance abuse and internal conflict to put together a landmark metal album. Everyone else can watch it to see rich, whiny, petulant egos wreck a metal legacy.

Bourne Supremacy bored me to tears. Seriously. There’s a few decent action sequences in it, but they’re barely watchable with the shaky camerawork. Without any partners or foils, the Jason Bourne character is just far too dull to carry the movie anywhere. That said, he still looks at road maps before he starts on a car chase, which I think is hilarious.

Garden State is supposed to be a melancholy character drama, but for the first hour it’s really a series of skits as b-actor Andrew Largeman, played by Scrubs’ Zach Braff, returns home to Jersey after his mother dies. It’s funny but aimless, saved by a super sense of mood and composition in Braff’s shotmaking and good use of two year old KCRW music. There is actually a plot after a while, and the movie becomes sweeter and warmer as Natalie Portman shows up more, even if some of the monologues ring false on occassion. As writer/director/actor, Braff’s first major motion picture is an understated and extremely likable piece of work.

Harold and Kumar’s not nearly as funny as I wanted it to be, but it’s always a pleasant surprise to see East and South Asians on screen together, getting fucked up as often as they show off their math skillz. I wish there were less dead spots, but the cameos by Neil Patrick Harris, a cheetah and an anthropomorphic bag of weed were all perfect. After the movie was done, I wanted White Castle so bad, probably because I’ve never had White Castle before and don’t know how sucky the burgers really are.

Collateral is a gritty little thriller made by Michael Mann, who apparently is trying to get back to his gritty little thriller roots after a shit load of three hour movies. The movie is pretty much a two man play in a moving set with Jamie Fox’s humble cab driver driving around Tom Cruise’s homicidal hitman around a high contrast, low light Los Angeles. I never thought I’d like a movie with those two in it, but Foxx builds admirably on his low key work in Ali and Tom Cruise plays an asshole, so that works out great! I think this movie works even better if you imagine Tom Cruise’s “Vince” character as the same “Vince” from Color of Money. Actually, it doesn’t add anything to the movie, but I just think it’s funny. Best supporting performance goes to Cruise’s hair, which is something close to ridiculous.

Takashi Miike’s Gozu is subtitled Yakuza Horror Theater, but barely lives up to its billing. There are certainly Yakuza, but it’s not particularly horrifying as much as it is kooky and weird. Transvestite diners and inns where lactating old ladies co-habitate with tonsil hockey minotaurs aren’t really scary as much as they are just fucked up for no real reason. There are a few brilliant moments, but for the most part Gozu is a bunch of bland non-sequiturs.

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Anchorman is, at times, pee your pants funny. The other parts go by fast enough that you can go back to peeing your pants in short order. There’s no plot to speak of, so I won’t pretend to speak of it. Look for producer Judd Apatow’s cameo during the “sex panther” scene. The other cameos are bit more obvious, although just as funny. While everyone in the movie pulls their weight, Steve Carrill’s portrayal of BRICK, Retard Weatherman, made my abs burn with laughter.

Control Room deals with news of a completely different sort. It’s a behind-the-scenes documentary about the Al-Jazeera broadcasting networking during the Iraq war. Content-wise, the documentary is fascinating. While it’s mostly based on Al-Jazeera and its controversial (well, in America at least) coverage of the war and occupation, it also covers CentCom in totale, where the military held its press conferences and doled out information to US networks, the BBC and Al-Jazeera alike. What you see isn’t really a traditional media outlet as much as constant game of propaganda, where the military played the press as much as it could. Some of the best parts of the doc are when they cover events like the Jessica Lynch episode or the Saddam statue toppling in the middle of the Baghdad square, and you get to see the backstage hustle of the reporters and military as they jockey for position and information. The big weakness of the movie is that it’s very dryly presented, little more than a collection of talking heads. The doc almost presents Al-Jazeera as a freedom fighting organization, a source of truth and justice. One of the lessons of the film is that there is no objectivity in war, so I wish they could have extended that thematically a bit more, rather than go for the more obvious presentation.

On a completely different sidenote: CentCom would make for a great workplace drama, with the different network reporters as characters. Braver souls could even shape it into a M*A*S*H like comedy!

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Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme

This documentary about freestyle rap is raw and unfinished (it barely clocks an hour), but what’s there is great fun. The movie spins its wheels when MCs talk but it comes to life when they suit up and do battle. The confrontations with Supernatural, Craig G and Juice are all worth the price of admission and director Kevin Fitzgerald scores gold with an old clip of a babyfaced 17 year old Notorious BIG on a street corner taking it to some kid so hard that the kid walks away in disgust, not even taking his turn. It’s not as polished as its hip-hop DJ counterpart Scratch, but hopefully it will get there. The only really bad part was after the movie I had to listen to my friends bust the absolute worst freestyles in the history of man.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Ehn. I’ve followed the news enough that I didn’t really learn anything, and Moore’s bias is still a bit off-putting. It also suffers from some poor narrative flaws, heavy handed narration and some wild shifts in tone. That said, the info’s good and it’s important that it gets widely seen, if only to keep the channels of discourse open. I just wish it were better, I wish it were more deftly handled. I WISH IT HAD INTERROTRON.

Spider-Man 2

It’s better than the first one, but in reverse. The saccharine tone worked for me the first time, but it felt a bit cloying this time. On the other hand, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus is perfect in every way. The physicality of the character is terrifying and brutal, and the design and choreography of his confrontations with Spidey are dead-on. The King Kong imagery of Ock climbing towers with Mary Jane in tow was probably my favorite part.

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I just realized that the last three movies I’ve seen were Mean Girls, Saved, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which means somewhere along the line, I’ve turned into a 16 year old girl. Keep your dirty jokes to yourself.

Mean Girls is a few problems away from being the superawesome teen movie of the year, but what’s there is still funny and smart and worth your time. It’s a glammed up and softened down version of Heathers, as a school newcomer infiltrates the most popular clique in school, the Plastics instead of the Heathers, and destroys them from the inside. While Heathers went off the deep end with staged suicides and school bombings, Mean Girls is relatively nice. The sabotage is mostly backbiting and protein bar antics, with virtually no body count whatsoever. This is, of course, one of the points of Mean Girls and its depiction of Girl World. Boys may beat the snot out of each other, but the girl-on-girl crime teenagers commit with their gossip and their betrayal leaves much gnarlier scars with nary a punch thrown. This keeps the film on a nice line between satire and realism, but it also feels oddly restrained too, with the movie jogging in place just when you think it’s about to take off. My other beef is that I thought Lindsay Lohan’s Cady was stunningly dull. She doesn’t really have any reason to start on her Plastics surgery, other than the goth girl and gay dude told her to, and she goes to the dark side so easily and quickly that I ended up rooting for Plastics to just kick her teeth in anyway. That’s just me and my boyish lust for violence.

Oddly, with Saved I found myself reacting to it with almost the exact opposite reaction. Saved is another teen comedy, the twist being that it’s set in uber-Christian American Eagle High School. With this kind of backdrop, you would think it would go whole-hog Jesus crazy, but it really doesn’t. Yes, there are rock’n'roll prayer assemblies, afterschool abortion clinic attacks and a towering Christ cardboard cutout above the school, but I have both TBN and the Angels network and I’ve seen Kirk Cameron handselling me the bible, so none of this seems outlandish at all. After seeing Minister MC Hammer late one night, the world of Saved seems downright normal. Anyway, back to the movie. Jena Malone plays Mary, a nice kid at American Eagle that starts “backsliding” to hell despite her best intentions. The plot is very afterschool special, without any particularly notable set pieces, but it’s held together with honest portrayals of likable, down to earth characters. Everyone in the movie seems like someone you know or could have known, even Mandy Moore’s nutty villainess, and that carries it through a somewhat bland and preachy finale.

Now, on to some devil worshipping with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I still haven’t read the books, so you’ll get no complaints or any particular insight from me. The third edition is legitimately scary, unlike the first two, and for the first time I really felt like people were in danger and there was something at stake. Cuaron directs with a fierce economy that wasn’t in place with Chris Columbus, and keeps things moving while still laying out the details for the clockwork plot. One of my complaints about the first two was that there were far too many red herrings that could have been excised, and that’s been remedied here. Of course, that means you can see the pieces fall into place, but I’d rather have that than half-assed magic explanations that come out of nowhere. The rules of the world are firmly established now, so for the first time I felt a sense of internal logic in the movies, which was nice. I still think Potter’s kind of a tool, and that Hermione does all the heavy lifting. The movie’s worth seeing just for Gary Oldman’s wanted poster.

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So I went to go see The Day After Tomorrow sometime last week (I think it was Friday). Before we saw the movie though, we went to go eat dinner. We find this great parking spot just a little bit down from the restaurant and pull into it. Once we park, we notice this car in front of us with his lights on and the driver’s gesticulating wildy with his arm. Dude gets OUT of the vehicle and proceeds to tell us that he was waiting here for the space and that it belongs to him.

Now, this is the classic pull-in vs. back-in scenario, but it wasn’t even that close. This wasn’t some simultaneous arrival deal like that episode of Seinfeld. We were parked in the spot, and if he was waiting to back into it, he sure took his sweet time. OK, so this guy’s out of his car and Kim’s giving him lip, because, well, she doesn’t give a fuck.

I kind of give a fuck, because I’m sitting shotgun and I’m not about to get in a fight with Mr. Roadrage. He eventually realizes we’re not about to pull out of a spot we’re already parked in and he goes to sulk in his car. He doesn’t pull off though, so we’re kind of like “what the fuck?” We leave anyway.

We actually end up in the same restaurant as Roadrage and girlfriend and dogs, which means he eventually found a parking spot, I guess. Unfortunately, nothing happened here. I figured he’d toss a crouton at us or something, but he never did.

We head back to the car and we’re expecting it to be burning to the heavens or possibly have a nice smashed windshield or a twisted fender. Nothing! So disappointing. WAIT! Not quite nothing! I checked the hood and there’s a nice scratch slowly drawn across the front edge of it. Mr. Passive-Aggressive had keyed the car! What a fucker. I would have respected him more if there was fire or smashed glass involved.

Oh, and then we went to movie. It sucked.

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