Perhaps all we CAN do is to PURSUE happiness

I finally got to see MY movie of the year.
MY best picture...the darn oscars just don't get what it takes for a movie to outshine the rest. If they did, they would have recognised Pursuit of Happyness as a winner.

Before I delve into the actual movie.
I want you to consider this...and perhaps I may be stretching my imagination a bit.
But why is it that Haile Barry (having acted in so many movies) won best actress for a movie portraying a black woman in a negative light.
Why is it that Denzel Washington (having acted in so many movies) won for best actor in a movie that portrayed a black man in a negative light.
Why is it that Forrest Whitaker (having never been noticed) won best actor in a movie that portrayed a black man in a negative light.

These aren't sour worms about Will Smith not winning. Will will win an oscar in the future - and watch what character he would have been portraying when he wins that oscar.
And ask yourself why not Ali, and why not Pursuit of Happyness.
Everybody knows Muhammad Ali. Few will know Chris Gardner, whose life story The Pursuit of Happyness is based on.
His life story is remarkable, of how at one stage he was homeless and living at a shelter with his young son and later triumphed to become chief executive of his own brokerage company.
I won't delve into the story too much because I don't want to spoilt it for you. But the movie makes you think about your own passion, your own resilience, your own drive...or lack thereof.

For me it was the lack thereof. It made me think about whether I've ever pursued something with all my might and gotten it. Something substantial, something that changed my life. And I couldn't think of any such thing.
I want to feel what Gardner felt having put all his soul into something that he believed in. Having lost everything in the process. And then getting that thing that he wanted. That he worked his ass off to get. That he deserved. I want to feel what that's like.

It wasn't the acting so much that moved me, the story was just amazing.
Apparently this Gardner dude is making some big investment in SA. But that's herese for now.

It's a shame really

You know, just because Martin Scorsese was overlooked for so many years, they decide to over do it this year. Sure he deserves best director but best picture? Any way, here are the winners:

Best Motion Picture: The Departed
Lead Actor: Forest Whitaker, The Last King Of Scotland
Lead Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Directing: Martin Scorsese, The Departed
Foreign Language Film: The Lives Of Others, Germany
Adapted Screenplay: William Monahan, The Departed
Original Screenplay: Michael Arndt, Little Miss SunshineA
nimated Feature Film: Happy Feet
Art Direction: Pan's Labyrinth
Cinematography: Pan's Labyrinth

Sound Mixing: Dreamgirls
Sound Editing: Letters From Iwo Jima
Original Score: Babel, Gustavo Santaolalla
Original Song: I Need to Wake Up from An Inconvenient Truth, Melissa Etheridge
Costume: Marie Antoinette
Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth
Documentary Short Subject: The Blood Of Yingzhou District
Film Editing: The Departed
Makeup: Pan's Labyrinth
Animated Short Film: The Danish Poet
Live Action Short Film: West Bank Story
Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Jean Hersholt Award (Oscar statuette): Sherry Lansing.
Honorary Academy Award (Oscar statuette): Ennio Morricone.

My money and my crossed fingers are on Little Miss Sunshine

Okay, so I have now watched all the best picture nominations and they are:

Babel
The Departed
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen

The only movie that stands out and should win I think, should be Little Miss Sunshine. It is certainly lighter than the others, it does not have heavy weights like Stevin Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and Stephen Frears behind it. But it is the deepest and most universal and least ambitious and least phony artsy. It is what it is and that is my best motion picture pic for the year.

Having said that, I was watching a show on how much butt kissing and PR and advertising these movies need to do to be considered for an Oscar nomination. If you don’t get your movie out there and promote it, you simply do not have a chance of being nominated for an Oscar or any other award. It just makes me feel so cheap to know that I am going to see these movies because they simply got the budget to get themselves noticed.

Letters from Iwo Jima

So it’s a World War 2 movie told from the point of view we don’t get to see very often, the Japanese side. For the first time we get to see that the other side also has emotion, personality, and most importantly that they are not so keen about death, that it is not so easy to choose to die for one’s country even if you are Japanese.

I could not help thinking that I was watching Saving Private Ryan (before the credits came up) but from the other side. This is the only bad thing about the movie, whikch is very significant. It is American and tends to give American tributes to a foreign culture. It has that American way of telling a story (with its main characters, that you have seen a million times before in other formulaic American movies) that makes the movie less than what it could be.

Overall it is worth watching. It is gripping and you will connect with the characters even with the sub titles.

Babel

If I was a voting member of the academy, then I would not vote for Babel.

We’ve had this before, so… so… often before. I just want an easier movie to watch!

I saw Traffic and I hate to bring it up in the same blog as Babel. They are just very different movies and have absolutely nothing in common!!! Except the Mexican border maybe.

But I just feel these short story types wound up into a movie where the characters have something in common are just done to death. Give me a story that tells a story from A to Z, not fro Z to T to B to Omega!

It was gripping and I enjoyed seeing Brad Pitt not throwing his hands around like a mad man. But I am sick of these movies. Crash won, this style of film making where the audience has a job to try and see how the characters are connected before the movie ends is just very tiring for me.

So, so far, I will be voting for Little Miss Sunshine (if I had the vote that is) to win the Oscar on Monday!

Watch Babel, it is good and all and all…

Give it 3 spoons.

I can only watch one other movie before Oscar night and not sure what it should be, The Last King of Scotland, Clint Eastwood, Dream Girls? Oh to be me!!!

Syriana...BOOOOOOooooo!

Is it me?
The first time I rented this movie - I fell asleep.
I thought I'd give it another chance so I rented it on Saturday and guess what happened?
I fell asleep.

George Clooney and a bad movie make the movie that much worse.
I will only rent this movie a third time, if somebody convinces me that I'm wrong either about him, or the movie.

FYI: A politically-charged epic about the state of the oil industry in the hands of those personally involved and affected by it (I had to google that).

I am jaguar paw

In my mind, Mel Gibson is a genius. Move over Steven Spielberg.

For some reason I imagined Apocalypto to be about Gods. So I thought I'd be seeing Gods. Don't ask me where I got the idea, but from what I'd read about the movie (seemingly very little) I got a sense that the movie was about one man fighting for the survival of humankind. Fighting the Gods themselves actually.

Perhaps that's an idea for another movie.

Apocalypto was long but absolutely brilliant.I mean apart from some of the camera shots that made the movie look cheap...specifically when the characters were running - just didn't work for me. They tried to make it look like the characters we moving at exceptionally high speed, so effectively to the viewer it looked like say - what a camera would capture when trying to take a picture in a fast moving vehicle. A blurred shot that looks like it's in motion.

Anyhow, I thought the acting was just brilliant.I think I'm tired of seeing the typical Hollywood movie, with the typical Hollywood stars...it's just boring. It's nice to see some new faces.

The lead, Rudy Youngblood, who plays jaguar paw (pictured above), is fascinating to watch.

Even though you kinda know what's going to happen pretty much throughout the movie, from the moment another Mayan (by the way this movie is based on the Mayan civilization) from another far away village passes through jaguar paw's village says 'our village was ravaged. We are looking for new beginning' - it's still great entertainment.

Don't want to spoil it for you...so I won't go into detail really. But go watch it. Watched it with the lover this evening and he reckons there will definitely be a sequel.

reviewers

Today I heard and read the review on the Pursuit of Hapiness and I got crushed. Heartwarmer, you have been building this movie up for me for so long that I was looking so much to it. And then today, I listened to Alan Swirdler (sp) and Barry Ronger and read Finance Week review and they are not so flatering over the movie. Maybe I should be reading and listening to other reviwers! But they are somehow now killing it for me. So I am making this promise that I will go and see it with an open mind!!!

Click and Adam Sandler

A lot of people see Adam Sander and they run the opposite direction. But with me, I don't know what it is about this guy he just entertains me. I love Adam Saddler and I will watch what ever stupid movie he has made because? I think he gets me and I get him. He has a way of pointing out the obvious that does not make you feel like an alien. Take movies like 'Spanglish' and 'Punch Drunk Love' and even '50 First Dates'. Now these are a little above average movies. He has a way about him that I like.

Now Click was pushed as am simple 'what would you do if you could....' type movie. But it goes beyond that and explores family relationships, and mortality and etc, etc... i am not saying that it is one of the top movies ever but as I was watching the end I could not help but think about the other scene in a great movie. @It's a Wonderful Life'. That scene when George Baily gets his life back and realises that it's not so bad, and goes around the town screaming that hey, its not so bad, I love my life and I love my family and those inconvenient moments. Zuzu's petals, zuzu's petals, yeahhhhhh! Now that was a film.

Click tries to capture that and it does not do too bad a job! That scene when he realises that he was dreaming and gets up and says to the weird guy: 'You want a friend, I'll be your friend' and he picks the weird guy up and throws him on the bed. That is classic! So here is another feel good movie with a twist. Get it! if you are a happy Madison fan you will enjoy, and if you are not, you will also enjoy.

It even got a lump on my throat which I did not expect. Out damb lump!

This is a fun movie, you should just enjoy!

How many poeple have come and gone?

How many people have come and gone in the world. How many hearts have been broken and how many have suffered?

How many souls have discovered the hereafter, how many have not.

How many more??? How much more???

What is the point? What is the purpose?

Pain can not get destroyed, like energy, it just gets transferred from one form to another. Is this the balance that occurs then? For all the pain there is now, in a distant future, this becomes something else, we choose.

But that does not comfort, thinking about all those who have come and gone. How many have there been? Is it even possible to fathom?

My heart hurts

Three colours trilogy – Krysztof Kieslowski

Whenever I am out of ideas of movies to watch, when the thought of taking out some teen romantic movie or a stupid thriller leaves me spending hours in the video shop trying to figure out which crappy movie I should take, I turn towards the international movies.

A few of years ago, almost a decade, this was not second choice, foreign films were my first choice, I sought the foreign films because for me, then, they contained more depth and intrigue than your Hollywood movies.

I specifically remember the three colours trilogy. I was in Grahamstowns and I had no choice but to see every single movie that went through the Odeon and His Majesty’s. Three Colours was one of those movies, Queen Margot and Indochine and the like were others that I thought were just fantastic.

What I like and don’t like most about these foreign films is that I could not really identify that much with the characters. In Hollywood movies, you get use to being spoon fed how you are supposed to feel about what you are seeing, nothings left to personal interpretation. With these flicks one could sit back and figure it out from one’s own context what you should feel.

I watched all three colours this weekend again, the boss bought the trilogy overseas and was kind enough to loan it to me for the weekend. They come with the director’s commentary and I was saddened by all the bits he pointed out that me as the audience am suppose to pick up on but did not. I have a very bad memory and so I could not remember what the stories were about. All I could remember was that I was mostly touched by Blue and there was some kind of connection between the three movies.

Watching it now I struggle to figure out what the connection is. They say as you get older you become more stupid, or your brain loses the capacity to learn new things. Is this what has happened?
I could follow the stories and I could probably give my interpretation of it if I was pushed to do so but it was not as enjoyable as I thought it would be. The only time when I was emotionally touched was during blue and I have to say that music transcends language or culture and almost everything. The music that was being composed for the unification of Europe was beautiful. Set to the words of ‘what is love’ (I think this is a bible verse) it has that operatic thing to it but it does not alienate, it draws you closer and you want the music to go on and on. Beautiful!

If you are feeling for something different that will take you out of yourself and give you a different perspective on film making the order that movies are suppose to take, go get this one.

And if there is someone out there that can engage me on these movies, speak out!

Little Miss Sunshine

There are not a lot of good movies out there. In fact, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your gem and this is such a gem!

It is not about the people in it although Gregg Kennear, Toni Collett and Alan Arkin were fabulous. It is not about the cinematography or costumes or the score. It is about the feeling you are left with when you walk out of the cinema house and think… now that was not a wasted 2 hours of my life.

Little Miss Sunshine, although a little innocent and simple (I think this is some of the characteristics of a satire) in its portrayal of family dynamics is one of the best feel good movies I have ever seen. (satire – spoof, lampoon; this is more for me than the reader, just so that I remember what it means)

I am not a good story teller I just prefer sharing what I think about flicks, but!, there is this cute but not so pretty little girl that has entered a beauty pageant (EVIL) and she gets to go on to some of regional finals by default. The whole family has to go because of scheduling re arrangements and it therefore is this road movie. The family consists of Olive who is the beauty queen, the older son who has taken a vow of silence until he gets accepted to flying school, grandpa who snots coke, dad who is trying to make it in the self help-motivational speaking market and mom who is just mom who is just mom. OH, and how can I forget, the uncle who tried to kill himself because his lover went with his nemesis.

If you are looking for a nice feel good intelligent yet somehow flawed movie then go see this one if you can. The Labia is still showing it but not sure which other cinemas are.