Aw-scars

...And new shit is here.

I remember I was about 15 or 16 years old when Titanic won Best Picture at the Oscars. Now, my high school years, up until about the end of my senior year when I really got into Tool, is a period in my life I commonly refer to as my "awkward years", or the years that "I had no standards", meaning, I listened to that boyband shit and I watched fucking terrible B-rate shit-flicks with no semblance of guilt in my chest.

Nowadays, I'm someone whom I'd like to consider as having standards, that is, in taste in movies, books, music, and politics (moderate-to-left-leaning Democrat ftw). You know, the stuff that matters. I am a product of the decadent 80s, where Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reigned supreme, my values and senses engendered by the mid-90s, where The Smashing Pumpkins were, at one point, considered by and large to be the biggest band in America, and I am currently feeding off the residual noxious fumes of the Myspace and Pitchfork generations, straddling a love-hate divide for these things that so actively promote this notion of "individualism" but frowns upon true creativity and expression. Naturally, I'm a difficult person to please. And my taste in movies is no different.

Cinema is one of the laziest hobbies/quasi-passions I have. By "lazy", I mean the amount of effort expended in savoring said hobby. Oddly enough, or rather, not odd at all, living in China has provided me a cheap means of watching almost every single Oscar-nominated movie that's received any kind of mention in popular entertainment outlets. I love bootleg DVDs. This is quite possibly the first time I've been able to do so, as I was previously unable to due to work, school, as well as the prohibitive price of buying a movie ticket.

So far, I've seen Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Revolution Road, The Reader, Doubt, Changeling, Frozen River, and etc, etc., all in the comfort of my own home, to boot.

My summation of all these movies in one fell exasperation? Meh.

Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed, to a degree, and obviously some more so than others, almost all of these movies. But I can also say with no irony that I've seen The Rock, the movie that unfortunately put Michael Bay on the proverbial map, about seven times already, and I've enjoyed it every single time I've watched it.

Maybe it's a combination of me being too jaded for my own good, or maybe I've seen too many good movies in the past that my personal scale has been skewed, but I remain unimpressed. Once again, that's not to say these weren't good films. But Oscars?


I think my lack of interest in this year's Oscar Awards might be entirely and subsequently unfairly directed at one film in particular: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This might've been the film I enjoyed the least out of all the movies I watched, and this includes the sometimes-misguidedly preachy but ultimately enjoyable The Visitor, because, and I say this politely, the movie fucking meanders.

Let's get some things out of the way: Brad Pitt is really good in this movie. So is Cate Blanchett. The best acting job in the movie probably goes to Taraji Henson, very much deserving that Oscar nod. What people tend to get mixed up, though, is that good acting does not necessarily make the movie itself good. Benjamin Button strikes me as one of those movies that is so in love with it's own premise, production values, quality acting, soundtrack, and set design, that it feels content in simply swaggering about the room, with it's mighty wang of quality swinging to and fro pendulously like a grandfather clock. And swagger it does, at almost three hours of cinematic pacing that feels like an extended series of unrelated vignettes and montages.

Essentially, the titular character, who so heretofore be referred to Ben, has this weird condition where the older he gets in years, the younger his body becomes. Okay. So, he's born in the form of an old man, and that comes with all the frustrations and difficulties one might face. He's small in stature, naively innocent to the point of (gasp) senility, and he faces difficulty in walking. Alright, I see the parallel. As the movie progresses, Ben starts to become more and more spry, young, and oh-so-dreamy. Based on the logic of the condition Ben has, it's easy to guess what happens when he reaches the almost-predetermined age of 80+ years. Okay.

At the end of the movie, when the (spoiler alert) infantile Ben of 80 years closed his eyes one last time and then faded away into a slumber of death... I'll be honest, I shed tears. Appropriately enough, I cried like a baby. Because I don't like seeing babies, in their infantile state, shuffling off their mortal coil, their span of life equalling the chronological equivalent of a whisper. That makes me sad on a very base level. But my outpour of emotion wasn't based on what I had seen in the film. This brief five minutes was probably the only moment I truly connected with what I was seeing, and this was more based on the fact that I'm a softie at heart. Again, unrelated to the movie.

So, my problem with the film is, what's the point? I hate, hate, hate it when authors and writers leave their works open-ended and make that bold lazy, prententious statement that, "my work can mean whatever the viewer wants it to mean." No, no, no. As an author, it is your job to provide us with context, with some kind of palpable direction. As an author, you are obligated to provide some kind of emotional, if not satisfaction, then closure to the audience who has paid you both time and money to immerse themselves in your work. I can't stand it when people hide behind that all-encompassing badge of "post-modernism." It's lazy and unconstructive.

Now, I don't need someone to spell out the theme or meaning of a movie for me. Nor does any average filmgoer in America today. We as an audience are so familiar with the tropes commonly employed by filmmakers that we are mentally and emotionally prepared for what the filmmaker has to show us. And I say show, because a good director, like any author or artist, shows rather than telling. At the risk of sounding ignorant by comparing two vastly different films, let's take a look at No Country For Old Men as an example. No Country was a movie that I felt warranted a repeated, back-to-back viewing. I knew there was something, hidden beneath the narrative layer, that the Coen Brothers, or rather, Cormac McCarthy, wanted to say. I could feel it in the select choice of camera angles, the lines of dialogue at the end, and (quasi-spoiler) the sudden change in character focus in narration that stems from Josh Brolin's character's untimely demise. The second time I watched the film, the underlying message of the movie hit me faster than a nerd at an anime convention rushing towards the stand of free energy drinks.

Benjamin Button neither shows nor tells. I earlier stated that the movie ultimately feels like a series of unrelated vignettes, and that's what it is. The movie hopes we make some kind of connection with Ben, but how can we? We can feel sorry for an earthquake survivor, or a refugee who has just lost his or her entire family, but we cannot for a second fathom the amount of pain and hardship they have just experienced. The only thing we have are our shared experiences, namely the pain of losing loved ones, or the harrowing tugs of survivor's guilt. Likewise, we can feel sorry for Ben in the movie's final moments, but we cannot connect. The movie is told in a series of montage-like, Forrest Gump-esque sequences that show the experiences Ben has with his strange condition. But there are no shared experiences. We can marvel, but we're spectating from a distance.

Is this intentional? Is Ben meant to be a blank state in which we infuse with our own fears and hopes? Maybe Ben desires, above all things, to live a normal life as hinted at in his relationship with Cate Blanchett's character, but this is never explored nor explained either through narrative or dialogue. Watching the movie, it feels like Ben's just going by the numbers. He does one thing, moves onto the next, and then so on. Nothing is ever explored nor explained in the movie. What's with the Katrina connection? Why Katrina? Something that could've been thematically powerful ultimately ends up becoming a gimmick, most likely exploited for some kind of critically prententious acknowledgement of skillful obfuscation, which, it isn't. The only thing I gathered from this movie is that the film itself is a meditation on life and death, but I mean meditation in the strictest sense, meaning you just think and, y'know, kind of think about it. "Live life to the fullest"? Maybe that's the message, but do we need a three-hour movie to tell us this?

I wanted to like this movie so much, I really did. Brad Pitt, as I said, is excellent in the film, and Alexandre Desplat's score is one of the best I've heard this year. But, in this case, the parts do not add up to a whole.

Now, mark my words, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will win the Best Picture Award. It is destined, written in the stars. It will win. Do not dispute this fact with me, because I'm right, and you're wrong.

I'm still on the fence on whether or not I want to watch the Oscars in all it's edited glory (remember, the broadcast will be shown on China Central Television, an organization that prides itself on "harmonious programming"). I really thought this would be the year that a comic book movie, ie. The Dark Knight, would win or at least receive an Oscar nod, but it looks like that ain't happening anytime soon. If not The Dark Knight, then probably never. Ah well.

In comic book-related nonsense, Mr. Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, will be hosting.

On second thought, no longer on the fence. Boycott in full procession. Unless Hugh Jackman pops out a set of REAL adamantium claws and proceeds to reenact a "Wolverine Vs. Sabertooth" stand-off with Mickey Rourke, then that position ain't changing. "Street Fighter IV" on Oscar night it is, then.