Cultural Learnings

January 22, 2007 · 9:26 pm

Talkin’ Oscar with the Elder: And the Nominees Are…

In a tradition that was established in August, and has now grown to the point of being a dual blog event, I bring you Talkin’ Oscar with the Elder. The Elder in question is my brother Ryan, whose own blog McNutt Against the Music has been running strong since last summer, and between us we know a bit too much about Award shows. While I may have the edge in TV, we’re about even in terms of cinema, so it makes for an interesting battle.

In preparation for Tuesday morning’s Academy Awards Nominations (To be read @ 9:38am), we decided to chat about who we think will make the cut, and who will find themselves crying into their pillow tomorrow morning.

And now, in a brilliant piece of Crossblog Manipulation, here are the predictions. In order to see what Ryan predicted, head to his post in order to get the full details. Similarly, in order to see mine, you’ve got to be here on Cultural Learnings. It’s manipulativve, and I love it.

Without further ado, let’s Talk Oscar.

Ryan says:

Alright, so before we get to the categories, any thoughts on the “Oscar Race” in general this year?

Myles says:

Mostly from reading the buzz, and from following the various precursor awards, the story has been the inability of any film to rise above the others, and the striking ability for this to occur within the acting races.

Ryan says:

For me, I always find it weird how time and time again I get so easily caught up in the politics of it all. It’s really quite depressing when you look at it from a distance: it’s journalists not talking about whether or not a film is good, but whether or not it can win. While artistic quality matters somewhat, it’s held at an arbirary distance. It’s almost depressingly cynical at times….

Myles says:

There’s no question that this is the case, especially when it comes to the guilds and the critics, and their apparent differences in terms of logical thought patterns. And really, the biggest political aspect of the awards this year was the reality of the deadline. It resulted in films like “Children of Men” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” being too late in the season to be seen by enough voters.

Myles says:

Oh, and stop being so idealist. Pfft, quality? The Oscars have never quite been about quality, as much as we might consider them in that context purely for being superior to the Golden Globes. You’re dreaming.

Myles says:

It’s a nice dream, though.

Ryan says:

I’m not saying that I expect quality from the Oscars…but when so much of the campaign is influenced by journalists and writers, I wish more of them would take the opportunity they have and champion films that need/deserve the attention…i mean, how many “The Academy is going to LOVE Dreamgirls” articles do we need?

Myles says:

17, clearly.

Ryan says:

I guess it just bothers me that people like you and me, who haven’t even SEEN all of the movies in contention, can make damn good educated guesses as to how things are going to turn out on Oscar nomination morning

Myles says:

Meryl Streep hit on this in her Golden Globes speech, about a variety of foreign films that people deserve to see because they’re good. But, in the end, the people voting haven’t seen them. And, the people with this information, the educated “Oscar experts”, are indeed then in charge of making those educated guesses. And we as consumers of those experts can therefore make our own.

Animated Feature Film

Ryan says:

So let’s start at the bottom and work our way off. Unfortunately for everyone, due to Arthur and the Invisibles being disqualified, there wasn’t enough animated films in 2006 to allow for five nominees for Best Animated Feature.

Ryan says:

So since Cars and Happy Feet are a given, who’s the third?

Myles says:

Damn you, Freddie Highmore, for being human and not animated. You ruin everything yet again. And really, in terms of the third film, it’s a three-way race between Flushed Away, Monster House and Over the Hedge. All three received average reviews, with Monster House perhaps receiving the best, but Over the Hedge was a clear box office leader.

Ryan says:

Funny, because I actually am going with Flushed Away for my third choice, based purely on residual Wallace & Gromit love. It’s much more likely to be one of your choices (Monster House is my alternate), but hey, go big or go home.

Myles says:

I think it’s really an issue of what people are looking for in an animated film. Do they follow the pedigree (Aardman, creators of Flushed Away), the big business (Dreamworks’ Over the Hedge) or the ever-present title of Monster House’s “Executive Producer Steven Spielberg”? I’ve got Monster House, personally, they’ve got to get Spielberg in there somehow.

Ryan says:

that’s true, with Eastwood’s films falling out of the picture a bit (but we’ll get to that later). Onto Screenplays!

Myles’ Predictions for: Best Animated Feature Film

Cars

Happy Feet

Monster House

Alt. Over the Hedge

Continue reading →

Cultural News Bytes – January 22nd

Television

Perhaps as the column on the right suggests, tonight is an interesting night for TV. NBC has created quite the phenomenon in Heroes this season, and they’ve done quite a good job of establishing it as event programming. However, for better or for worse, they’ve decided to leave it in its timeslot. The result? A one-on-one confrontation with Jack Bauer.

This is ballsy stuff from NBC, really. From what I’ve been witnessing on message boards, Heroes is going to have a tough time maintaining their entire audience with 24 in its timeslot. Regardless of Heroes’ success, the reality is that 24 is both riding momentum from last week’s four-hour extravaganza and offers a consistently large amount of drama. Although Heroes is returning from a lengthy hiatus, its “cliffhanger” was more of a prognostication of the future than an actual cliffhanger, and I don’t think it will be enough to defeat the realities of nuclear holocaust.

Let’s look at each side’s advantages

– Riding success of last week’s premiere.

– Recent media coverage has been supportive of its storyline.

– Provides a bit more weekly drama, less slow episodes.

Heroes

– Returning from hiatus with strong marketing.

– Has the better lead-in (Deal or No Deal w/ Heroes preview vs. Prison Break)

My prediction: 24 takes the ratings win by a slim margin. I think that, though, any sign of a weakening storyline on 24 could reverse this trend. Either way, it’s a big story to watch for tomorrow. Us Canadians, however, don’t have to worry about it, as Global is airing both shows. Huzzah for the 49th Parallel!

Cinema

Just a quick note and link for the purposes of saving something for tomorrow’s major piece. Newsweek, every year, puts together a roundtable of people related to the Academy Awards in order to look back at the past year in film and understand who its major players were. Last year was a feature on a series of directors (Spielberg, Haggis, Ang Lee, etc.) whose films were all very dark and full of depth. Coincidentally, their films were all nominated for Best Picture. This year, they decided instead to look at some of the actors and actresses (including a good number of the front runners).

The Lineup: Brad Pitt (“Babel”), Forest Whitaker (“The Last King of Scotland”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“The Departed”, “Blood Diamond”), Cate Blanchett (“Babel”, “Notes on a Scandal”), Penelope Cruz (“Volver”) and Dame Helen Mirren (“The Queen”)

The result is a fascinating and humorous conversation that maintains a light hearted feel while really getting into some interesting discussions with these actors. Brad Pitt is in particular quite funny, as we could perhaps expect, and I think that it’s really interesting to note that they put them in front of an audience. Really, this is just one giant “Inside the Actor’s Studio” done for Oscar season, which I think serves its purpose well. In Awards season, these people become names on a ballot, not really allowing them to establish themselves as anything more. While someone like Pitt or DeCaprio might not feel this, someone like Forest Whitaker isn’t a celebrity to most people, and I think interviews like this one rightly balance the star hungry populace and those who want to learn more about the people who are being awarded by their peers.

Give it a read, it’s worth your time. And, tomorrow, myself and the elder McNutt will be previewing the Oscar Nominations in Cross-Blog Extravaganza, so stay tuned for that early tomorrow before the nominations go out.

Video Games

So, here’s a short story. The new Nintendo Wii connects to the internet, where you can surf the web and download classic Nintendo games…oh, and check the weather! It’s a really neat feature that I tried out while home for the holidays, and one my brother continues to enjoy. There’s just one problem, you see: I can’t access it here at Acadia.

It’s really quite tragic. We’re not allowed wireless routers in residence, and my little USB Dongle thing that Nintendo released has a neat habit of crashing my computer into a blue screen of death. As a result, I am without a connection to the internet. Why do I lament this today? Because, sadly, today one of the classic games I would most definitely purchase has been released onto the Virtual Console.

Alas, it is true! The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of those games that I never got to really play, and one that while I started in emulator form (Evil, I know) I never finished it. As a result, I want it quite badly, and sadly have no internet connection with which to acquire it. Curses!

To help soothe my pain, and everyone else’s, here’s a YouTube “video” clip. Really, it’s just the game’s logo, but it contains perhaps my single favourite piece of video game music of all time, the theme to the game’s Dark World, in all its MIDI glory.

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January 20, 2007 · 10:27 pm

Cultural News Bytes

A Look at the news of Today in Short Form

Television

A little memo to the CW: I appreciate you renewing Veronica Mars, but I really wish you’d stop piling on the obstacles to the show getting a fourth season.

“Reality series Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll, in which nine women compete for a spot on the hit singing group, will air for eight weeks starting March 6, Tuesdays at 9 ET/PT. Veronica Mars, which now airs in that spot, will take a breather then return for five non-serialized episodes — a first for that series — to finish out the season.”

Now, we knew the hiatus would be happening, but the “non-serialized” part scares me. I think the show can work without a serial plot, but I’m going to look in the direction of Alias on this one. Its fourth season was designed to be less serial, and it suffered greatly for it. I really hope that they at least apply enough personal drama to make the episodes work individually, and it should be an interesting challenge, but it’s clear that the network is not entirely behind the show. They already cut the episode order to 20 from 22, and now they’re testing out to see if it’s the serial nature of the show that’s the problem. Let’s hope, whatever happens, it survives.

(Also of note: Worst. Reality. Show. Ever. And I have no idea how they think it’s going to survive out of the Gilmore Girls lead-in,)

Box Office Update

Wooo! Man, my first weekend taking a stab at box office predictions and I don’t do half bad.

Friday Box Office Estimates (c/o BoxOfficeMojo.com)

1. Stomp the Yard – $3.75 Million
2. Night at the Museum – $3.050 Million
3. The Hitcher – $2.8 Million
4. Dreamgirls – $2.25 Million
5. The Pursuit of Happyness – $1.93 Million

None of the major box officer predictors were putting Stomp the Yard in the #1 spot, so go me! The Hitcher just wasn’t resonating with audiences in my mind, and I felt that Stomp the Yard would follow the lead of films like ‘Step Up’ and continue to perform well over multiple weekends. My predictions will likely be a tad bit too high for The Hitcher, but my placement should be fine.

As far as limited releases go, Pan’s Labyrinth performed extremely well in limited release with $1.3 Million. I really need to get out and see that, especially since Meryl Streep liked it.

Video Games

Quick note on Wario Ware: Smooth Moves (Wii) that just came out this week. I spent some time with Lucas’ copy on Wednesday, and “beat” the game in about 4 hours.

I’m glad I didn’t buy it, in the end. I think it’s a whole lot of fun, contains some moments of brilliant game design, but there just isn’t enough here. I am hideously disappointed in multiplayer, also. They killed Survival: One miss and you’re out? What the hell is that? It kills any chance of casuals getting into the game any further, and even the Lifeline mode that allows everyone to play never gets as hectic and the “winner” is quite random.

Speaking of which, where the frack are my stats? Does Nintendo have something against competition here, if they’re seriously not letting us keep our stats of how often we win in multiplayer?

The single player was solid, definitely quiet ingenious (The Dancing is every bit as amazing as YouTube promised), but nothing that got my overly excited. But really, compared to MegaParty Games, there isn’t enough depth to multiplayer (Although Bungie Buddies is a lot of fun). You have to have people of comparable skill level for Bomb/Balloon/Survival to work, and that just isn’t possible in a party game.

A little underwhelmed overall, but it’s definitely something I’ll go back to for multiplayer when people are around and Lucas is willing to part with it. It represents a solid step towards solid Wiimote functions, and I think it is therefore a solid addition to the Wii Lineup.

However, to get back to that dancing video, let’s head to YouTube to check it out. You play as the dancer in the back, and you have to follow all of the dance moves involved. Yes, all of them. It is insanely fun. And totally ridiculous.

A Night at the Cinema: ‘Brick’

Four hours. From the time I left my residence to the time I returned, four hours passed by. In that four hours, a rainy spring day turned into an icy winter wonderland. We survived two projector unspoolings, resulting in a good hour and a half of no film. A refund was offered, but myself and a fair few others didn’t mind waiting and stuck it out. This wonderful experience was the conditions in which I saw ‘Brick’ at the Al Whittle Theatre on Friday evening.

I was asked to attend as part of my Politics of Mass Media class, but I had been intrigued by the film before that point. I knew that it was an attempt at recapturing the film noir stylings of the mid-20^th century, and I knew from my brother’s experience with the film that it was a lesson in style over substance. And in the end, both of these things are what make Brick a film to watch and experience, and also ones that make it very interesting to engage at a level of mass media analysis.

Because really, as much as there exists power relationships and human nature, this is purely visual filmmaking. The plot is straight-forward and blunt: characters enter and exit without anything even close to a story, and even when the plot is summed up in about a minute at the end of the film it contains no deep answers, only surface ones. We get a sense of a narrative loosely running through the film, but this is not a film about its substance. Where we might in a mob film get an indepth view of The Pin’s thugs we get to see only one in any great detail. We hear about drug deals, about gangs, about family trees of hatred, and yet we see almost none of it. No one ever seems to be entirely in control, and no one is without their vulnerabilities.

There are a few things I want to focus on in terms of the film’s style that make it resonate with the viewer in a way that is quite profound and interesting. I want to look at the film’s depiction of violence, its use of lighting, as well as its reliance on its film noir construct. It is through these means that it manipulates the viewer, and eventually gets its message (whatever it is) across. And, they are what make the film compelling. Continue reading →

Thursday Night TV Club – January 18th, 2007

Thursday is clearly the biggest TV night of the week at this point; no three hours of primetime offers nearly as many worthy programs, and the variety is truly stunning. Starting in February you’ll have a dose of reality (“Survivor”), a pinch of drama (“Grey’s Anatomy”), some procedural seasoning (“CSI”), and a huge helping of comedy (“The Office”, “Scrubs”, “30 Rock”, and “Ugly Betty”). That’s a whole lot of TV, and sometime it’s even a little bit daunting. Despite this task, I want to try to take it on, and will try to highlight three of them every Thursday that features new programming.

The episodes I choose may not be the best ones, but rather the ones worth commenting on. For instance, no matter its quality, I would have commented on last night’s Scrubs Musical episode. Similarly, I will very rarely comment on something like CSI unless I happen to decide to watch it, as it doesn’t do much week-by-week. Therefore, I’ll try to mix things up, and avoid covering the same show every week. Sometimes, however, this might be difficult.

Last night was one of those nights, so let’s run down some honourable mentions first:

– First off, I’m squarely on Team Pam, but I feel bad for Karen on The Office. She clearly didn’t know what she was getting into, following Jim to Scranton, and it’s got to be tough when she’s battling off against a receptionist with little else to do. This week’s episode was a bit too over the top in terms of Andy’s behaviour, I’d say, but it remained humorous throughout, and I wish more Staples employees were like Dwight.

– Well, sorry Mr. O’Malley! I know I said yesterday I wanted your storyline on Grey’s Anatomy to end sometime soon, but I really didn’t mean for you to die on us. Everyone’s laundry has now been washed, hung out to dry and then taken off the line, so Grey’s get a bit of a fresh start at this point in its season. Should be interesting to see where they head from here; according to the previews, some Chief-succession drama. I’m all for naming Burke “Caesar” and Derek “Brutus”, btw…and lets face it, Caesar’s totally a homophobe, he’s gone extremely soon.

– I’ve been a bit disappointed in The OC’s fourth season lately; the entire French husband thing was a stopgap and nothing more, and it’s hard to believe that there is only 5 episodes left for them to wrap things up. The episode was fine, as most have been this season, but it’s missing the carefree attitude I enjoy most about the show, and its own episode-ending creepy character note (I’ll get to the other one in a second) was downright abysmal. Here’s hoping for a quick resolution and then some OC soul searching to lead into a proper finale.

And now, to read onto the big three: Continue reading →

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January 18, 2007 · 3:55 pm

A Lesson in Post-Superbowl Programming

So, one of the most coveted slots in television is the hour that follows the Super Bowl each year. (Full History of the slot on Wikipedia)It has been used in the past to launch shows into the ratings stratosphere; it has recently been used to launch Survivor: All Stars, perhaps the greatest episode of Alias ever created (“Phase One”), and last season’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy that fully established it as the phenomenon it now is. It’s a way for networks to emphasize new shows, or existing shows, and there are usually a lot of benefits behind it.

It was therefore no surprise when CBS chose to highlight Criminal Minds, probably the most important show on its network at the moment. Facing a challenge from American Idol (Which we’ll see the resuls of later today), and having succeeded at toppling Lost in total viewers numerous times in the fall, Criminal Minds has been a strong performer in a tough timeslot, and CBS wants to keep it that way.

Mind you, I can’t personally condone such an action. The show bores me, almost to death. Watching Mandy Patinkin (“The Princess Bride”‘s Inigo Montoya he is no longer) stand around and talk about serial killers isn’t interesting, or really even that dramatic. The show’s characters are lifeless, their killers never overly compelling. It’s the epitome of everything I dislike about the procedural drama, which is perhaps why I was kind of intrigued by the prospect of their Super Bowl episode. The writers knew their responsibility, and might well step up to the plate to provide something worth watching. Right? Right? Continue reading →

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