Category: Entertainment

10 Serious Academy Award Blunders

oscarsThis weekend, I’m going to watch the Academy Awards.  Why?  Nostalgia, I guess.  Frankly, over the years, Oscar’s record for picking good movies is hit-and- miss, at best.  And at worst, he’s made some horrible blunders.  For example, here are 10 incredibly good films that never even got nominated — for anything — not even the crappy awards nobody cares about, like Sound or Cinematography.

Modern Times
Charlie Chaplin was at the height of his powers.  This is his best movie.  Unfortunately, Hollywood didn’t like Charlie’s politics in those days.  However, political fashions change, and  these days, Chaplin is a genius again.

To Have and Have Not

I don’t need to say anything else.

The Lady From Shanghai
The only person snubbed by Oscar more often than Orson Welles was Alfred Hitchcock.  Think about that for a moment.

Kind Hearts and Coronets
Oscar didn’t even notice.  Fortunately, ordinary people love this movie and it’s been playing the dusty, funky little film theatre circuit ever since.

Paths of Glory
One of the greatest anti-war films — ever.  Paths of Glory was released at the height of the Cold War, ten years before Vietnam made anti-war fashionable.  And if Hollywood is anything , it’s fashionable.

Touch of Evil
Here’s that Orson Welles fellow again, and this time he’s with Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Akim Tamiroff and even Zsa Zsa Gabor and Marlene Dietrich.  How groundbreaking is Touch of Evil?  Any film nerd will tell you the opening scene is one of the first and finest “continuous takes” in cinematic history. (Hitchcock tried it in Rope, with limited success.)

Mean Streets
Martin Scorsese is the Rodney Dangerfield of movie making.  For 50 years he’s been making great movies, such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Good Fellas, and on and on and on.  However, he only has one Oscar to show for it: Best Director, The Departed  (2006)  Mean Streets is just one of the first times Martin made a movie and Hollywood looked the other way.

Miller’s Crossing
Hollywood didn’t get on the Coen Brothers’ bandwagon until the Bros were impossible to ignore.  As a gangster flick,  Miller’s Crossing is worthy of anything by Scorsese — uh — oops!  Since then, though, the brothers could put their names on the Burbank Telephone Directory and it would be Oscar bait.  (I’m looking at you, True Grit — 10 nominations? — I’m laughin’.)

Heat
Al Pacino AND Robert DeNiro.  And this in a year when Nicholas Cage won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In The Mood For Love
The most sadly sensuous movie of the 21st century.  If this thing doesn’t make you cry,  you’ve recently died.

 

6 Really Tired TV Trends

tvI just noticed that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has produced a new TV series called Pure.  It’s a scripted drama about (and I’m not making this up) a Mennonite family of drug dealers.  A Mennonite family of drug dealers!  Now, there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.  But I digress.  So — uh — wow — a television series about a dysfunctional crime family.  What a novel idea!  (Sometimes I wish sarcasm had a font.)

I hate to say it folks, but the fantastic days of glued-to-the-sofa television are over.  The Sopranos, Band of Brothers, Dexter, Deadwood and Breaking Bad are all gone — and they ain’t comin’ back.  There are a few leftovers from that 20-year entertainment banquet (notably, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead) but, in general, TV has gone back to the same old crap.  Why?  ‘Cause studio executives are beating audiences over the head with really, really, really tired ideas.  For example:

Cop Shows — There have been so many cop shows on TV recently that half the population of Hollywood has worn a badge at one time or another.  There were at least three NCISs, four CSIs, and God only knows how many Law and Orders.  People, it’s the same program!  All they do is change the skyline in the opening credits.

Paranormal Everything — Ever since aliens got the jump on agents Mulder and Scully, television producers have been trying to recapture those ratings — and, believe me, they’ve tried everything.  The litany of ghosts, trolls, witches, mutants, aliens, vampires, werewolves, angels, demons, superheroes and telekinetic, super-powered, extraordinary beings reads like an Aleister Crowley nightmare.  And have you ever noticed these programs never actually come to any conclusion?  They just keep going sideways until you’re so pissed off you could scream.

Talent Competitions — The format hasn’t changed since The Original Amateur Hour debuted on the DuMont Television Network in 1948, but since the 80s, there have been a ton of talent hunt programs like Star Search and American Idol on TV.  The problem is last year the market got so saturated that, for the first time in television history, there were more contestants than there were viewers!  OMG! Andy Warhol was right.

Cooking Shows — No, guess again; they’re Game Shows.  Cooking is now a competition, and any way you slice it, the formula is basically the same.  Several teams are given a bag of weird ingredients and told to make dinner (or dessert) before the third commercial break or get kicked to the curb. It’s basically Beat The Clock with butcher knives.  The only deviation is that sometimes a celebrity chef gets to swear at the competitors.

Quirky Ensemble Comedy Shows — And it came to pass that MASH begot Cheers and Cheers begot Seinfeld and Seinfeld begot Friends and Friends made piles of money, and so Friends begot How I Met Your Mother, Community, 30 Rock  and every other sitcom that’s looking to become the new Friends.

And finally:

Celebrity “Real TV” Reality Shows — If this were a more civilized time, the purveyors of these programs would be dragged from their homes and horsewhipped through the streets.

Shrek Killed Eddie Murphy

shrekRemember when Eddie Murphy was funny — and not just regular funny — Axel Foley funny?  Ya ever wonder what happened to Eddie Murphy?  I’ll tell ya what happened to Eddie Murphy.  Shrek happened to Eddie Murphy.  Yeah, Shrek!  Now, I’m as huge a Shrek fan as the next over-the-hill heterosexual male, but the truth is Shrek is the biggest career killer since Rebel Without A Cause bumped off James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.

Let’s look at the facts:

In the Shrek universe there’s Shrek, Fiona and Donkey — Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy.

Mike Myers — He’s the guy from Saturday Night Live.  The guy who was Wayne Campbell from Wayne’s World and Dieter from Sprockets.  The guy who went on to become Austin Powers and Dr. Evil.  Mike Myers was born to play Shrek.  He brings that perfect balance of testosterone green and 21st century sensitive to the animated screen.  He turned a stereotypical ogre into a multi-layered personality, tough but tender, an ogre for the ages.  But what has he done since then — a 30 million dollar lawsuit and The Cat In The Hat?  The Cat In The Hat!  In 2003, Golden Raspberry created a special award for “The Worst Excuse For An Actual Movie” and gave it to The Cat In The Hat.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was a fly-by in Inglourious Basterds — but nobody cares, and these days Mike Myers is just another used-to-be funny Canadian.

Cameron Diaz — Let’s face it, Cameron Diaz is not a very good actress.  She has her moments, but I don’t see her playing Lady Macbeth anytime soon.  The thing is, at one time, her films were cute and sometimes, through no fault of her own, they even made money.  Then she did Shrek.  Since then, despite one last kick at the Charlie’s Angels cash cow, Diaz has been in so many trash movies she’s earned — earned —  a hazardous waste warning from the EPA.  In 2014, she received not one but two Worst Actress Awards (in the same year!) from The Golden Raspberry — and then … she did Annie.  Honestly, suicide bombers have brighter career expectations than Cameron Diaz.

Eddie Murphy — Now, there was a funny guy.  He made us laugh on Saturday Night Live.  He made us roll off the sofa and pee our pants when he did his red leather Eddie Murphy Raw shtick.  Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop (1, 2 and, slightly, 3) The Nutty Professor, Doctor Doolittle — these are all funny movies.  Then Shrek and Fiona hove up on the horizon (for the record, Donkey is Eddie Murphy’s best role — ever.)  Unfortunately, since then, his career has gone down the toilet.  Take a look!  Since 2001, Eddie Murphy has given the world Pluto Nash, I Spy, Daddy Day Care, Norbit, Imagine That and A Thousand Words (a movie Rotten Tomatoes refused to rate above 0!)  This isn’t a creative slump — it’s a tsunami of godawful.  In 2010, The Golden Raspberry named Eddie Murphy The Worst Actor of the Decade (coincidentally, he beat out Mike Myers for that honour.)  Personally, I’d invest in Kodak, Enron and Blockbuster before I’d put my money into an Eddie Murphy movie.

Obviously, you don’t have to be Jerry Bruckheimer to figure out what’s going on here.  Shrek is cursed.  Clearly, Dreamworks has disturbed the Fairy Tale gods, and now Shrek, Fiona, Donkey and their real life personas must pay the price.  That’s what happened to Eddie Murphy.  Hollywood is cruel.