Contradicting Popular Opinion:
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
Awards!
The Golden Globes just happened. The Golden Globes is this odd award show where TV people and Movie people get really drunk and are handed statuettes from the foreign press. It’s the novelty of seeing the cast of Scrubs, Clint Eastwood, and (the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as)Prince in the same place that makes it the perfect thing to watch during 24‘s commercial breaks. Now, for the Oscars I like to make predictions. The Golden Globes are different though; I’d like to make predictions after the fact.
Okay, so maybe that makes them postdictions.
At any rate, let’s evaluate who won, what won, and why who and what won did win.
Best Picture – Drama
Babel
Why it won: While I didn’t see any of these pictures, Babel is the only one on the list I would actively avoid seeing. To put it eloquently, I’d rather stab myself in the junk than sit through Babel. When in doubt, always bank on the winner being the thing that brings me the most pain.
Best Picture – Musical or Comedy
Dreamgirls
Organizations hate giving awards to comedies. The other nominated films are comedies, therefore Dreamgirls won. It isn’t necessarily a tragedy. Despite notions to the contrary, Little Miss Sunshine was nothing special. Thank You For Smoking invested too much energy on being hip. The Devil Wears Prada didn’t make it through my wife-filter. (i.e. she said it sucked; I didn’t bother with it.) The semi-documentary format of Borat most likely scared away some potential votes.
And the Rest
You thought I was going to cover other things in detail? Nuts to that. The Oscars are boring enough. The only entertainment that comes out of Oscar Lite is in seeing which celebrities get the most schnokered.
This year the races went 3 ways, give the award to the Black nominee, the British nominee, or the old standard. By doing this thing, the Golden Globes can show how classy they are. Seriously. Who wins? Forest Whitaker, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson, Helen Mirren, Helen Mirren, Sascha Cohen, Bill Nighy, Hugh Laurie, Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Scorcese, etc. Plus, Clint Eastwood wins for best Foreign Language film. I’m not saying that these wins aren’t deserved. I’m just saying that it makes for a predictable show.
The only exceptions to this rule occur in television series categories. TV doesn’t offer much in the way of good roles to African-Americans, so no non-white folk were even nominated here.
The Award that Really Matters
Results to the first annual MLK Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence:
Jury Prize: Future Troma Film
From: Salem Indiana
My movie would be called “Gladiawhore” and would be set in Rome.
Lots of hot chicks and maybe one older Rip Torn-like character for no reason
other than to say “Gladiator? More like Gladiawhore!”The main character’s name would Yabbos Maximus.
Jury Prize: Future Cult Film
From Mark B.
Our movie centers around the exploits of a man (I’m thinking something along the lines of a young Bruce Campbell, perhaps a Nicholas Brendan?) who has a bit of a problem: he kills people. Under normal circumstances he’s a reasonably nice guy with no problems, but when someone sets him off he just obliterates them. As he’s not been caught yet (as he tends to kill people no one really likes very much), and he has a rather nice job, he’s pretty happy, but his life is turned upside-down when he is introduced to a new co-worker that he falls head over heels for (no specific actress comes to mind, but ideally it would be someone who is attractive in a girl next door sort of fashion instead of being a bombshell).
Between the urgings of her and his best friend (a Jason Lee-esque sidekick sort of actor), he forces himself to lay off of the wanton acts of homicide, but when her obsessive ex-boyfriend, who also happens to be a cop (here I’m thinking “smarmy dick”, ALA Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors) starts harassing him and her as revenge for being dumped, will he be able to keep himself under control?
I’m thinking one part slasher flick, one part romantic comedy. I don’t really have a title for it yet, but I was thinking something along the lines of “Violent Love” or something along those lines.
Our Grand Prize
After some deliberation, I have decided to award the grand prize to Sgdragoon for his rapid-fire series of pitches, culminating in an odd Harlan Ellison-ish softcore porn flick.
I was going to suggest a movie wherein the protagonist commits a crime, but then hides it by claiming to investigate it and misleading people with conjecture and correlations passed off as causality. Then I realized that The Usual Suspects has already been filmed.
1. A BBC4 serial production of Captain Britain, on par with Dr. Who?
A movie based on the newsroom from Dawn of the Dead. It should have a modest budget to keep it from becoming a vehicle for pretty explosions, and concern itself with telling the story of the breakdown of human interaction and communication over the course of a zombie outbreak. Broadcasts always made for a good background, in Night, Damn, and Day, and even in Shaun. What I really want is a movie about that newsroom and the one-eyed guy from Day of the Dead.
A film version of “Harrison Bergeron”.
A revenge flick, but get this… the person getting revenge is an orca! Wait, they already made that.
If it wasn’t for that Black Sheep movie, I would say some “man vs. nature” flick, but with an improbable creature, like killer deer.
What I really want to see is a monster film where the monsters are solar powered, or reactive, or something, so they only attack during the day. Anything that is opposite of the “safe during the day, hide at night” flow of films. They did a good job of that with Day of the Triffids and some other films, and I’ve heard that it was done well with The Host.
Snakes on a Plane vs Mongooses on a Dirigible! A ruthless air war of epic proportions!
…
How about this:
A man opens up a porn shop in small town Cobb county, GA, only to be met with resistance. However, he manages to placate some and keep others quiet by using psychic powers to figure out what sort of smut they secretly want.I call it “The Pronosticator”.
Kudos! The prize will be in the mail tomorrow! (Pictures of the Award will be in next week’s column.)
