Day: January 2, 2009

On 12.29 Patrick bloggy-blog Goldstein wrote that “it’s painfully obvious that somewhere in the evolution of the Oscars academy members started rewarding movies not for their skill and craftsmanship but for their aesthetic and social importance. This has transformed the Oscars from a mainstream movie institution to an elite art society, leading to its increased marginalization both as a barometer of public taste and as a big-time media event.”

Marginalization be damned. And Oscar show ratings be damned also, if need be. It is the duty of any award-giving organization to honor the highest motion picture standards across the board — paying tribute to movies with some kind of vision of life on earth and the focus and craftmanship to make it whole, along with whatever aesthetic and social gravitas can be thrown in to provide a little art-house spritz.

A list of the ten most popular films of any given year makes it clear that average ticket-buyers only occasionally care about “high standards.” They mostly like movies that provide laughs, jolt rides, cheap cries and wish-fulfillment fantasies. Look at the recipients of the People’s Choice Awards. It”s like a vision of narcotized hell. This year the PCA’s have Queen Latifah as their spokesperson, for heavens sake.

Understand, then, that it is the duty of any award-giving organization worth its salt to — no offense, respectfully — spit in the eye of the moviegoing public. Is that clear to everyone, and Goldstein especially?

A group that really cares about movies needs to say to the public each and every year by way of its nominees and winners, “Look, you guys do what you want, enjoy what you want, eat your popcorn…fine. But we’re supposedly trying to reward the best films being made each year, and you guys just don’t care that much. You never have and you never will. AMPAS gets it wrong in many ways each year, granted. It’s way too political and sometimes embarasses itself (a la Crash vs. Brokeback Mountain), but at least it’s half-trying to keep the idea of passion and professionalism in mind when it divvies out nominations and Oscars.”

Goldstein thinks it’s possible for both camps to be made happy. His implication seems to be that the Academy needs to broaden — a polite term for “lower” — its standards.

“If we want studios to make movies that embrace both popular taste and deft artistry, we need to find a way to give out awards that reflect both kinds of aspirations,” he writes.

Indeed, the best films are the ones that manage to combine the two, but this happens once in a blue moon. You have to deal with the world as it is, and generally speaking it’s a good idea to pooh-pooh popular taste because of the cloying emotionalism and razzle-dazzle vulgarity that the public too often responds to and celebrates.

“If we put the Oscar movies in an Oscar ghetto of limited release in small pockets of urban America, we’ll end up insuring that they never reach a broader audience,” Goldstein laments.

Good! Mass culture is swirling downwards anyway, and those resisting this trend need to cling to the rim of the toilet bowl at all costs. Anyone who cares about real film art needs to ensure that the game is defined and controlled by denizens of those small pockets of urban America. Once an awards show starts taking into account the opinions of Average Joes in Fresno and Abilene and Trenton, it’s finished. Tennessee Williams wrote it 61 years ago: “Don’t hang back with the brutes!”

Donald Westlake, the prolific author and father of “John Dortmunder,” the character played by Robert Redford in The Hot Rock, and “Walker,” the money-reclaiming payback machine played by Lee Marvin in Point Blank, died Wednesday night on his way to a New Year’s Eve dinner in Mexico.

The finest film based on a Westlake crime novel was John Flynn‘s The Outfit (’73), which I’ve written about over and over for not being available on DVD. Warner Home Video has the rights. Will they please remaster and issue a no-frills DVD…please? It’s a genuine B-movie gem, as lean and hard-boiled as they come. (Except for the ending.) It stars Robert Duvall as Macklin, an ex-con of fee words, and Robert Ryan as a sinister-silky gangster. The costars are Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Timothy Carey, Richard Jaeckel, Joanna Cassidy and Sheree North.

A die-hard user of manual typewriters (he reportedly couldn’t stand the sound of the humming IBM Selectrics, and probably never even looked at a Mac Powerbook), Westlake was 75 years old. His final novel, “Get Real,” comes out in April.

Yeah, yeah, I know — “Walker” wasn’t the name Westlake chose. His literary character was called Parker. I like Walker better.

I’d like to be on a fly on the wall as Isabelle Huppert, jury president of the forthcoming 62nd Cannes Film Festival (5.13 to 5.24), steers the debate over Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds (Weinstein Co., 8.21). Except now that I think about it, Basterds — a surreal jape if I ever read one — is almost certain to play out-of-competition. Or am I being too straight-laced about this?

Isabelle Huppert; mock-art for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

After reading the Basterds script last July I called it a “categorically insane World War II attitude comedy on top of a quasi-exploitation film about angry Jews paying back the Nazis for their many atrocities. It begins and ends in QT’s movie-nut head, and is very entertaining for that.

“It is absolutely the most inauthentic, bullshit-spewing World War II movie that anyone’s ever written. Every other line is a howl or a chortle. It almost could have been written by some 15 year-old suburban kid who used to play pretend WWII games with his friends when they were 10 or 11. Four or five times I literally laughed out loud, and that’s rare for me. And every scene is pure popcorn, pure shit-kickin’ Quentin, pure movie poontang.

The script “flaunts its fakery and movie ‘tude to such a degree that it’s pure adolescent (i.e., teenage boy) pleasure. The Europe it depicts doesn’t exist and never will exist, and that’s fine. The German and French characters are so idiotically cliched they almost sound like the kind of material that a John Candy SCTV skit would use. But not quite. It’s actually kind of perfect that way. The balance, I mean.

“The film is going to seem loony-tunes to some, and that’s good. The Cinema Paradiso section (pretty young Jewish refugee running a Paris cinema, changing reels, not smoking for fear of burning the stored silver nitrate film reels) goes on a bit, page 50 to 100, give or take. A lot of bodies hit the floor from page 100 to 165. A lotta blood and bullets. The violent finale is wackjob. It’s either insane beyond measure or wildly imaginative in a good way, or both.”