Now that the Oscars are over, we all get to look back and defend our choices and continue to bash those that we felt were undeserving. But the truth is, often times when it comes down to an awards show like this, the actual movies and the work that they’re showcasing get overshadowed. Wouldn’t it be spectacular if the Oscars aired every single movie over a couple week period so everyone would be free to watch them and vote however they wanted? Since that’s not really a possibility for most of us, we have to rely on other people who have seen them all, like Daniel Walber did over at Film School Rejects. See how he ranked them all.

Without being able to see all of the competing movies from any year, sometimes it’s up to us to put in the little extra effort to find out what exactly they’re voting on. Quentin Tarantino won for Best Original Screenplay, but have you actually read the screenplay? You can now, plus 29 other screenplays which submitted for the competition.

And finally, the Oscars are quite a spectacle when you’re watching at home, but I’ve never really thought about what goes on behind the scenes. So there aren’t just popcorn and soda machines out in the lobby?

Based on a “Best Books of 2012″ list on LitReactor (a great writing website which is associated with everyone’s favorite Chuck Palahniuk), I recently got into the graphic novel series, Locke and Key. While I don’t generally read a whole lot of comics, I took a chance and picked up Volume 1, then proceeded to read it in about an hour. The story moves. The characters all have so much depth, and the art is incredible. I ordered 2-5 over the next weeks, and found myself waiting for the FedEx guy to arrive with each new volume so I could speed through it. This stuff is like crack!

Locke and Key follows the Locke family after their father is killed by a maniac, and they’re left to go to the only safe place they know of until the man is caught: Keyhouse, an old house which has been in the family for several generations. The children of the family soon find out that it’s not just a clever name, but there are actual keys hidden around the house, and each one unlocks a different door, each giving them a different magical power. As the series progresses, the story gets deeper by giving more of the backstory, going as far back as the revolutionary way, yet it still manages to relate directly back to the family which we’ve grown to love.

It’s Lost meets Lovecraft (a name referenced several times throughout the series), except it doesn’t hold back on the gore, which is fitting, since it was written by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son. It really does run in the family! However, it never forgets that it’s a comic book, which means it’s free to have some fun, as evidenced by the first book in Volume 4, which portrays its characters and pages as though they were created by Bill Watterson for a Calvin and Hobbes series. I don’t know how, but it just works.

While the stories sometimes dive headfirst into the fantasical, the series is firmly rooted in the personal lives of the family members and the history of the house. It’s an incredible mix of drama, fantasy and mystery, with each element playing into the next. The drama drives the fantasy, just as much as the fantasy drives the drama. Just check out some of the art below.

Rather than having a character explain how they’re feeling in thick exposition, the author and artist literally give you a look into the child’s mind through the use of one of the magical keys. One picture has said everything you need to know.

That’s when I started thinking about the cinematic opportunities that a series like this presents. There’s no big-name superheroes, and they don’t wear costumes. These are real people, something rarely seen in comic book movies anymore, as much as the studios try to make them gritty and realistic. It has all the makings of a great movie. Given the right direction, the story is as absorbing as any thriller or mystery that’s come out in the last couple years and the stylistic groundwork that’s been laid could lead to a really mind-blowing cinematic experience.

The series wraps up in June, at which time it might just waste away in obscurity, but it would be great if it got a shot at the big screen.  If you have any interest in comic books, or even enjoy mind-bending stories like Lost, this is definitely something that you should give a try.

*Not to say Scott Pilgrim and Kick-Ass weren’t appreciated, but they didn’t get the attention they deserved, nor were they looked at as a revolution in the way that comic book movies can be adapted to the screen. Their effects and style don’t reflect the modest budget and lack of studio support that each had. Much like Sin City, they embraced the comic-bookiness of the source material and used the medium to enhance the experience, rather than trying to turn the storylines into large-scale action dramas.

In my mind, there should be a level of Hell devoted to movies that are so bad that they have absolutely no redeeming qualities. They’re offensive. A Good Day To Die Hard is one of those movies with a big fat exclamation point on the end of it that it would probably wear as a badge of honor. $92 million dollars have been wasted by the American film industry, and all of it probably went straight to the Russians. What the hell were they thinking?

To be fair, I should’ve known. I didn’t read reviews before I went, but I almost never do. Reviews for a movie like this are superfluous. It can’t be reviewed. If you like action movies, and if you’re a big fan of the series, then someone could probably tell you “this movie is so bad that it has absolutely no redeeming qualities and is offensive to every one of my senses” and you still might go see it. You might even be MORE likely to see it. No matter what a review score says, unless you get into the meat of things, you won’t learn that this movie has no discernible plot, horrible repetitive dialogue that sounds like it was written by a speak-and-spell and that at no point of the movie does anyone’s actions make sense. Bruce Willis could have stopped the entire movie and said “Hold on a second, guys, I gotta take a leak”, and at least then I would have had some platform for empathy of a character.

Was that a light in the shot?

Why was that guy just screaming at someone screen left, then immediately get shot by that guy from screen right? Who was he really screaming at? What the hell is going on?

Why is no one trying to capture the second most wanted man in Russia?

It was missing an entire act for crying out loud!

Please don’t see this movie. If you’re looking for a Die Hard fix, read this article. At least it can string together words, thoughts and ideas into a cohesive and intelligible whole.

My connection to Rodriguez is almost thinner than my connection to The Invisible War if it wasn’t for the fact that I got to see him play live at the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival in Australia in 2007. If you’re ever in Byron Bay (extremely specific, I know… but you should make the trip!) then I highly suggest you check out this festival. Just look at this year’s lineup (Rodriguez included)! Needless to say, it’s worth every ridiculous penny I spent.

But when I saw him play live, I had never heard a single one of his songs and had no idea why I had even wandered over to see him, but I’m really glad I did. He has a really timeless sound (you know, that timeless sound that was most prevalent in the late 60’s) and has a lot to say with his music. Like they say in the embedded trailer below, he was almost heard of in America, which is really a shame since I think he fit into the entire feel and movement of the time when the album Searching For Sugar Man was released.

So anyways, it’s a three step process:

1. Watch the trailer below.

2. Watch the movie. The DVD was released in January, but I’m not sure what all avenues it’s available through.

3. Check out Rodriguez’s music. Searching For Sugar Man (1970) is essential listening, then Catch The Light (2005) and Coming From Reality (2009) are just him being awesome after he was rediscovered in 1998.

Here’s the trailer:

Then, I also just found his website which explains a little bit more about how the two guys went about making the documentary and the search for Rodriguez which ended with him making a comeback. Pretty cool.

If you check out his music or movie (or maybe you’ve been a fan since 1970), let me know what you think.

Corrections: All of the information I got for his music was from Spotify. “Searching for Sugar Man”, which it says was released in 1970 is actually the soundtrack to the documentary, while Cold Fact (1970) and Coming From Reality (1971) were his studio albums in the early 70’s. Meanwhile, Catch The Light might just be some other guy with the name Rodriguez (I figure there’s only about 4 million of them).

I loved my 160GB iPod Classic. It was silver with a black and yellow stripe down its back that I taped on there. I treated it rough, but took good care of it. One slip was all it took to send it to the ground. It was the first and last fall that it would ever take, but it was enough to start it on a long decline towards its imminent doom. First, it started skipping. 15-30 seconds of the start of each song was all you got, but only up to the “K”s. Everything else worked. So you take it in to iTunes to restore its settings, thinking it will be a routine operation, but that’s when you find out that it’s much worse than you thought. It starts slipping away before your eyes. Songs don’t want to be loaded back on to the hard drive. CLEAR! Restore again! We’re not getting anywhere. It’s struggling to get 200 songs on the HD and then it freezes. CLEAR! It won’t even mount now. The computer has turned its back on your old friend Chet and won’t even talk to him anymore. I don’t think there’s anything else we can do for him… There must be some mistake. He was just right there.

Stay with me. I’m getting to a point.

Filled with a sense of adventure and grief, I went to the local Best Buy shelter since they were having (not-much-of) a sale on Nanos and I thought it would help me get back in the game. Working out isn’t the same when you don’t have a friend there motivating you. So I did it. I bought a little yellow nano and brought it home to meet my computer. Turns out, they are NOT compatible. My computer is getting a little older and slowing down. But I put the two in the playpen together, and right off the bat, the computer is letting me know, “Huh uh… you’re not putting this young whippersnapper in here with me. Your iTunes shots are out of date!” They didn’t let me know this at the store. So I try to update my iTunes, but no! I would have to update my OS first! This is a problem I’ve run into several times before. Since I have some… less-than-legal software on my computer, I can’t update my OS or else it will cause me to reset the software, but since it runs ok, I don’t worry about it. Either way, turns out that I would need to buy a completely new computer in order to get my nano to work. So I took it back.

That’s the point I’m coming to (and sorry it took me so long to get there… I really loved that damn iPod). Although we all know that technology will eventually become obsolete, the idea of technology will never really die. Something will always be there to replace what we have when one thing breaks. This is comforting, but it also comes with the negative aspect that everything we own, no matter how awesome it is now, will eventually suck. If you look at the infinite futuristic timeline of technology, then you’ll see that the next generation iPod nano to come out (the 8) already sucks, because it won’t be as good as the 9, which is farther in the future, but is just as obsolete as the next. “First world problems.” No wonder kids in America are so depressed. They’re surrounded by $5000 worth of electronics which suck and they’re busy (not) working jobs that they hate so that they can save up enough money for the next POS to grace their shelves.

So why is this being posted on a film website? Because the same thing is happening in digital filmmaking. While digital has helped revolutionize the way that we make and watch films, the undercurrent of the industry is no longer focused on the craft, but is constantly focused on the technology. What camera was Citizen Kane shot on? Who knows. What film stock? It doesn’t matter. The people that needed to know that information were the ones that shot the movie, and that’s all that it needed to be. Do you need to know how many RPMs the potter’s wheel was when the artist crafted that pot in the corner? What exact colors were used to paint Washington Crossing the Delaware?

If you look now at an Andy Warhol painting, people don’t talk about how perfectly the Campbell’s Soup can is replicated, and you might not even realize or care that it was created using screenprinting techniques rather than traditional painting, but the point is that the method isn’t relevant to the conversation. Sure. They’re nice replicas of the real thing, and there’s a base knowledge of art, but the meaning isn’t derived through the technology. Still, while Warhol’s ideas about art and culture were revolutionary, think about what the art world would be like if every artist replicated his work and worked with the same techniques that he did. Now imagine if every film used 3D. Or 48 fps. While there is a place for it (I will admit), without the variety of classical techniques, portraits, landscapes… everything becomes monotone. When studios stop making the decisions that are the best for each individual film, they’re monopolizing the industry into conformity based on what they think will make the most money, even if that’s not what film needs to have happen to continue evolving as an art. (As another example, look at a film like La Jetee. You don’t talk about it in terms of frames per second. If anything, it’s seconds per frame, but what you can talk about is the way that it is able to create emotion and character through still images; and the cultural impact that this short film has had on time travel science fiction is immeasurable.)

The 3D you watch now will pale in comparison to that of the future. The 4K cameras and projectors will look like crap when you can watch a pure 400K image projected straight onto the moon from your roof every night.

Film was never supposed to be about this. On one side, it’s cool. I will admit. One of my big regrets if there were to be the apocalypse tomorrow would be that we wouldn’t get to see the full potential of technology. It’s incredible what we’ve done in the past century, and it’s impossible to think that such huge leaps could be made again at any other point in the future, but I’d love to see it happen. But film, if it’s to be taken seriously as an art can’t get caught up in this space race that the modern daily consumer has gotten involved in. A camera is just a paint brush. Which type, it doesn’t matter, as long as you know the proper technique.

If you don’t know him, Bill Simmons is a pop culture and sports writer over at ESPN, but he also has a website of his own called Grantland, where Chuck Klosterman (another excellent writer) collaborates quite often. Check it out.

But while you’re over there, check out Bill Simmons’ review of the new Fast and Furious 6 trailer which premiered during the Super Bowl but got an extended edition just a few days later. It’s hard to tell how much is sarcastic and how much is genuine, but I think like most Americans, he has a genuine appreciation for the age-old pasttime of watching stupid action movies. Enjoy.

Also, as an added bonus, be sure to read all the way to the end where he uses a modified SSSS (Sitzman Sinema Scoring Scale).

Be warned, there is a lot of bad language, but if you’re cool with that then I suggest you check it out. Plus, as an added bonus, if you really like it then you can see Adam (the hairy cop) on Conan tomorrow night.

However, the acting is what has been mentioned the most this Oscar season with both Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and Wink (Dwight Henry) giving incredibly powerful performances, especially considering neither of them had acted before. Wink’s desperate portrayal of a controlling father trying to teach his daughter the ways of life before he passes gave a fresh look to the archetype, rather than letting it slip into the often used “strong but silent” father figure or the “crazy drunk” dad like a lot of movies portray. Even though Wink is intensely violent at parts and still a drunk, the audience feels sympathy for his cause because he always plays it off with a deep hidden love for his daughter, even when the world starts driving him mad.

What you might have missed: Ray Tintori was the second unit/special FX director. Who is Ray Tintori, you ask?

Overall Score: 16/17 (And would have easily made my top ten list of 2012 if I had seen it at that time)
The Raid: Redemption
The Raid was fairly well known as it made its way through the festival circuit, but it never got the full acclaim that it deserved due to the fact that it was a foreign film, made in the Philippines. If you haven’t seen it, what are you missing? Lots and lots of action. The film centers around a team of elite SWAT-type agents who are raiding (so it’s not just a clever name!) a 30-story apartment complex which is run by one of the most dangerous men in the city. Of course it’s not just him, however! He’s also been housing some of the worst criminals there so that he can call upon them when he needs them. Well, a police force raiding his complex would be a pretty good time!

Fortunately, The Raid makes up for a fairly uninspired plot (almost like Die Hard but with swarms of bad guys on every floor) with some dazzlingly inspired action. While most action movies feature only guns or swords or hand-to-hand combat, The Raid is able to combine all of these, and more. Although the movie sometimes slows down at points for extremely intense personal battles, its best when the action set pieces actually become part of the story line, with characters moving through walls and floors based off of where they need to get to accomplish their mission. And yes, walls, doors, floors. Everything is destructive and they’ll use anything in their fight to stay alive.

What you might have missed: The Raid was shot on Panasonic AF100s, possibly my least favorite camera ever.

Overall Score: 12/17
Overall Action Movie Score: 17/17
Safety Not Guaranteed
I don’t think we’ve talked about this on the blog yet, so I thought I would mention it. I did actually watch it before I did my best of 2012 list, and while I really enjoyed it, there was a lot of stuff that bothered me about it.

The premise behind Safety Not Guaranteed is pretty great, and the fact that it’s also based off of a real newspaper ad makes it even quirkier. The Premise: a man puts an ad in the newspaper saying that he’s looking for someone to travel back in time with him. This ad is picked up by a newspaper team who goes to investigate and see if the guy is just crazy or super freaking crazy, and, of course, they comes to see the humanity in someone who is, well, a little bit of both.

What the movie did well was in the script. It’s a great concept with some interesting characters, but some of the characters also fell a little flat by not really behaving believably and creating unneeded obstacles for their own team members. Also, it didn’t help that the direction and the acting sometimes fell flat and wasn’t able to bring enough variety to all of the characters. Fine, to name names: Aubrey Plaza. This was supposed to be her breakout role, and while she was sometimes able to emote, I can think of about 4 dozen actresses off the top of my head that could have pulled off her character more effectively. I didn’t hate her, it just wasn’t her role, and she didn’t own it as much as I wanted her to.

Overall, it was a good concept that could have been great if it had a different group of people behind it.

What you might have missed: Aubrey Plaza smiling

Overall score: 10/17
Sound Of My Voice
This is probably the least well known of the group since I’m not even sure if it came to theaters here, but I’m sure it made the festival circuit.

The film centers around a filmmaking couple who goes to investigate a cult whose beautiful leader claims she is from the future. The way it plays out is slow and cathartic and fairly plain, but it tries to let the characters carry the story, always leaving a sense of a) tension of the filmmakers being found out and b) wonder as to whether or not the cult leader is who she says she is. While these two things are consistent and do a good job at parts to entirely carry the scene, there wasn’t always enough variety between scenes and the stakes weren’t always raised high enough to merit an entire scene devoted to a single cause.

However, the acting was solid and the end helped pay off a lot of the questions that we were left with throughout… come to think of it, this is almost the same movie as Safety Not Guaranteed! Hm… Maybe we should just switch up the actors and try them both over again. Aubrey Plaza would make a great pseudo-alien from the future.

Overall, Sound Of My Voice told a simple story effectively and never tried to overstep its bounds as an independent film.

What you definitely didn’t miss: Nicole Vicius has the most oddly shaped nose ever

Overall Score: 12/17

If you’ve seen any of these, feel free to chime in on the conversation.

Photo Credit: nextmovie.com

Aside from my time with a tiger on a lifeboat in 2006, SLP is the most easy to relate to my own life, which is probably why it can still stand up to several of the juggernauts that have come out this Oscar season (although I’d have to say that the chances of it winning any major awards are slim-to-none this year).

Like any romantic comedy, the thing that draws the audience into the story is the main couple; what keeps them together and what keeps them apart? Where most rom-coms resort to cheap gimmicks (mistaken identity, love interests compete against one another for the same prize, etc…) or societal archetypes and cliches to keep their characters from falling in love, SLP makes its characters their own worst enemies. It’s clear from the beginning that there is chemistry between Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, though it’s more lust than love, and within the first 30 minutes after their meeting, they announce that they’re in to each other. Bam. Awesome. Done. No beating around the bush, no missed connections. Here’s two people that are completely blatant and unapologetic about their feelings, and as an audience member, it’s pretty relieving. We don’t have to suspend our disbelief because the movie never asks us to.

Instead, David O. Russell allows the two characters to do one of the most romantic things imaginable: help each other become better people, no matter how much they can piss each other off. It’s almost like a real relationship!

Without going to far into it, this simple notion is what makes Silver Lining Playbook stand out from the rest of the romantic comedy pack. It’s blunt and it shows its relationships (not just between the two leads but also those with other family members and even sports teams) as we experience them from start to finish. There’s no (too) wacky twists and turns to distract us. It lays out the characters flaws first thing, and then it lets the other characters choose whether they want to still love that person or not. It’s logical, it’s smart and it’s incredibly fun to watch two messed-up characters trying to figure it all out.

Overall, the script was great and very funny and the characters played it off well with great chemistry. Even in some of the more forced situations in the film, De Niro, Cooper and Lawrence were able to keep things moving. I wasn’t really a huge Jennifer Lawrence fan before this mostly based off of Hunger Games, which I hated, but that wasn’t really her fault. I think she had a really great screen presence in this, and she played the character to just the right degree of “she’s really pretty, but she’s crazy, but she’s not SO crazy that I would think twice about going out with her” that I was still able to connect with her. Perhaps she just hit it too close to home in comparison to some of the girls I’ve seen in the past. Hm…

Overall, I’d give Silver Lining Playbook a 14/17 on the Sitz-o-meter. The script could have been tighter, the cinematography could have been better (although for a rom com, it’s not as important), but the acting and direction gave an honest feel to a sometimes over-the-top genre. In a busy and weighted Oscar season, don’t forget to check this one out as well.

I get a lot of movies recommended to me, but it’s extremely rare that I ever watch any of them. Even more so when they’ve been recommended by more than one person. I don’t know what it is. I like movies, and it’s not that I don’t trust the recommendations, it might just be that by the time I’ve heard about it for the second or third time, I feel like I’ve already seen it. Let me give you a little bit:

Guy: Have you seen this movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
Me: No.
Guy: It’s about this guy…
Me: I’m guessing his name is Jiro.
Guy: Yeah.
Me: And he dreams of sushi.
Guy: Shut the hell up, douche…. Yeah… it’s about this guy Jiro, who, like, owns a sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station, but he’s pretty much the best sushi chef in the world. He’s worked just about every day for the last 75 years, just making this badass sushi.

At this point in the conversation, pretty much everything about this movie has been revealed. I would have called it a spoiler alert, but it’s all in the logline of the movie, which is what makes it pretty damn charming. Like the little old man behind the counter making the sushi, the beauty of this movie is in its simplicity.

As you might have overheard when my friend and I were talking before, Jiro is 85 years old and has been making sushi since he was 10.  You could say he’s a perfectionist of the highest order. And this is all that drives the story. The search for perfection. Isn’t that enough? Or is it not perfection that will make us happy, but merely the search?

This is the main point which I began to think about while watching this film. It’s been said many times before in one way or another: “It’s not the destination, but the journey,” but it’s as true now as it’s ever been. And what this film brings to light, and why so many people seem to have taken to it as a sort of new-age guru is precisely because it shows a man who has committed himself to the journey towards perfection and has never wavered. Although Jiro often finds fault in his work, it just gives him another reason to come to work tomorrow and try it again a different way, to constantly evolve and improve. But in the end, even though he has reached for perfection his entire life, he seems to be a man who realizes that perfection doesn’t really exist, which means that there is no stopping point.

Pride is one major ingredient that’s missing from America today, and it might be in this: we only take pride in the things that we’ve fully accomplished, not always in the things which we strive for.* We’re proud of ourselves when we get a raise, but not always in the work that we’ve done to earn it. We’re proud of ourselves when we cross the finish line, but we often consider every mile leading up to it as a little piece of hell. Something that we relish only because we look forward to the final result. This is why we all have something to learn from Jiro. 

Much like “The Art of War” isn’t really about war, Jiro isn’t really about sushi. In fact, for someone that loves sushi and would like to learn more, I learned very little about sushi in this movie, besides how incredibly pretty it can look in slo-mo. But there’s plenty more to learn here, and that’s why if you have need a minute away from everything to unwind and recharge for your next day at work, I suggest you watch this movie.

Like I said, a lot of businessmen have attached themselves to this movie for motivation, thus it’s only appropriate that some of the best words I’ve read about this movie have come from a business site: