This is the only vaguely amusing poster in an otherwise crude and sophmoric series. I don’t know why I’m even posting this. I guess because this was more or less my basic reaction as I watched Life of Pi. CG paintbox, typhoon, lifeboat, Bengal tiger, CG paintbox, high seas, flying fish, faux-spirituality, CG paintbox.

From my Cannes Film Festival review of Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires (Weinstein Co., 3.22): “A healthy portion is cool, snappy, rousing, well-cut and enormously likable. (And dancable.) That would be the first 40%, when the true-life tale of an Aboriginal Supremes-like group assembled and took shape in Australia in 1968. This 40-minute section, trust me, is definitely worth the price.

“But the main reason the film delivers overall is Chris O’Dowd‘s performance as Dave, a charmingly scuzzy boozer and Motown fanatic who steers the four girl singers (played by Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell) away from country and towards soul music, and then takes them to Vietnam to entertain U.S. troops. Dowd’s manner and personality are a total kick — an absolute hands-down winner and the best reason to see The Sapphires, even when it turns sketchy in the last half or so.

“I was saying to myself during the first 10 or 15 minutes, ‘Whoa, this is pretty good…not as high-throttle razzmatzzy as Dreamgirls but I like it better.’ And then it kept on going and hitting the marks for the most part. Blair is a talented director who knows how to cut and groove and put on a show. [Even during the parts] when it’s not really working The Sapphires at least keeps the ball in the air with reasonable agility and sass. The analogy, come to think, isn’t really Dreamgirls as much as Hustle and Flow and The Commitments, at least during those first 40 minutes.

“The soul classics are delightful to savor throughout. The music put me in a good mood right away and kept me there.

“The script is by Aboriginal actor-writer Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson, and based on Brigg’s 2004 stage play, which was based on his mom’s true story (as the closing credits infom).

In this “ask Joe and Jane Schmoe about the Oscars” bit, Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg wisely avoids questions that would point out public apathy about the Academy Awards, as former “Carpetbagger” David Carr used to do in Times Square. Instead he gets them to act out famous lines from Best Picture nominees.

The only funny part? When they repeat a line from Michael Haneke‘s Amour: “I want to die.”

But is this a line from Amour? Or is it a line that people think they’ve heard spoken by Emmanuelle Riva‘s character? In other words, is Amour‘s alleged “I want to die” line analogous to Casablanca‘s “Play It Again, Sam”…which also was never said?

Today Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a really nice summary of the dips and twists and cruel turns of the Best Picture race. It’s a real campfire story with good guys and villains (myself among them) and baah-ing lambs and hungry wolves and Sasha’s poor victimized Lincoln getting the worst of it. But it’s a good compelling yarn and I take my hat off…seriously. You can’t just tell the tale. You also have to throw in some irony, preferably bitter. Which Sasha does.

Here are four portions:

Great opener: “Starting as far back as October with the systemic and relentless takedown over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Lincoln could not catch a break. The top pundits in the field like Steve Pond and Dave Karger knew in their bones Lincoln was ‘too boring’ to win, that too many people ‘didn’t like it.’ It didn’t pass the ‘kitten in a cup’ test. Their predictions flew all over the map as the result. They knew what couldn’t win but they didn’t know what could. They’d seen Argo and written it off as a fairly bland choice to take Best Picture. It was good but not good enough. When Zero Dark Thirty came out it especially seemed to take away much of Argo‘s luster.

Plot Thickens: “But then Zero Dark Thirty was taken out by a continual debate, [and then] the blowback of continual debate. Kathryn Bigelow was called Leni Reifenstahl and took the kind of hard fall you can only really take now, with the news cycles in fast-motion and a hungry beast that needs continual news, preferably scandal, to keep it going at such high speed. We feed the beast because the beast must be fed and Zero Dark Thirty was the perfect sacrifice: not one, but two women set to take a fall, both the film’s director, headed for her second Best Director nomination in three years, and the film’s star, who was and is the only female lead in the Oscar race that isn’t defined by her male co-star.

Demonic Congressman, Obliging Canadian, Mean Columnist: “Add to this witch’s brew an October surprise by Affleck groupie/Congressman Joe Courtney out to really hit Lincoln as hard as possible on the one hand, and a tamped down Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor keeping mostly quiet about the “who really cares in America” detail that yeah, that whole Argo thing? It was kind of Canada, not really the US. But Courtney waited until the peak of Oscar season (as any good politician knows, timing is everything) to really try to shame that mean ol’ Spielberg who was attempting to paint Connecticut on the wrong side of history. [And then N.Y. Tmes columnist] Maureen Dowd piled on hard. Blood in water, sharks circling. Not just satisfied to be aiming at Spielberg she had to paint screenwriter Tony Kushner as defensive and arrogant. Her commenters picked after her crumbs happily. No one noticed because all it did was drive the ‘anything but Lincoln‘ meme further along.

ZD30‘s Fall Seals Deal for Affleck/Argo: “But it was only after Zero Dark Thirty‘s fall that the critics realigned behind Argo. And when Affleck was left off the Oscar Best Director list — it set into motion the one thing people will remember from Oscars 2012: the Affleck snub. From that point on, Argo could not be stopped. It seemed to be the perfect film that wasn’t Zero Dark Thirty — the CIA guys are good! They aw-shucks their way into Iran and aw-shucks their way into Hollywood and then Hollywood aw-shucks its way to saving the hostages. Funny, light, cute, nice. Everything turns out well in the end. Argo is satisfying enough to win the Oscar these days when satisfying and non-controversial is what matters most.”

One question: what’s a “kitten in a cup“?

MSN has a poll running about seat-reclining on commercial flights. Here’s my most recent posting about same.

Within the next half-hour or so Hollywood Elsewhere will begin to re-direct traffic away from Softlayer, the ISP that I’ve been with since ’06 or thereabouts, and move everything over to Liquid Web, which I’m going with at the urging of Sasha Stone. And then four or five days hence I’ll shift over to WordPress as my staging software, and finally abandon Movable Type 4.0 now and forever more. Exciting!

This will presumably make things faster and easier for me to work and fewer problems for commenters trying to post, and it will make an HE re-design (which I’ll be doing within a month or two) easier. I may be the last name-brand columnist to have adopted WordPress. It took me long enough, but better late than never.

There may be a problem or two in adapting to the new ISP (there always are) but they’ll be smoothed out before long.

Check out the website for Gjelina, a hot Venice restaurant (1429 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, CA 90291). You’ll notice that the links (including the main restaurant logo) are movable. They can be pushed or flipped around or made to do somersaults with the cursor; they can be nudged around the screen with your finger if you’re using an iPad. The site was designed by Babak Badaei of Hemaka. He says he used a gaming engine to achieve this effect. This kind of movement will eventually find other expressions.

Congratulations to Word Theatre maestro and longtime Hollywood Elsewhere ally-pally Cedering Fox for landing the coveted live announcer gig for this Sunday’s Oscar telecast. Currently the voice of Reelz TV’s Double O Movie Movie campaign, Fox was also the announcer for the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver.

Cedering Fox

Fox is the founder and honcho of Word Theatre, “a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring a love of language and literature by presenting live performances in America and England of contemporary short stories featuring renowned authors and actors.” I’ve written about Word Theatre several times.

Yes, Virginia — during the first few years of the 21st Century there really was a thing called 1.85 fascism. For a while there it seemed as if non-Scope movies of the ’50s and early ’60s were going to be compressed and trapped inside severe 1.85 to 1 rectangles. But that scenario is finished now, and the fascists, while not fully discredited, will never have the same authority again. Sincere thanks to the Criterion Co. for cutting them off at the knees and particularly to this five-minute essay, produced and edited by Issa Clubb.

On 2.4.13 I ran an audio clip of this essay as part of a piece “Despair Time for 1.85 Fascists“:

“There’s a five-minute visual essay on Criterion’s new On The Waterfront Bluray called ‘On The Aspect Ratio.’ It explains why Criterion went with three aspect ratios — 1.66 (the preferred default version), 1.33 and 1.85. Here‘s the narration. I’m warning the 1.85 fascists right now that they won’t like it. This is the end of the influence of this rogue cabal. Henceforth the 1.66-ers and the ‘boxy is beautiful’ gang will have the upper hand.

“Update: Some of the commenters are shrugging and saying, ‘Uhh, so these Columbia films were framed for 1.85 but protected for 1.33…so what?’ The “so what” is that the Criterion guys, the ultimate, high-end purist dweebs of the digital home-video realm, explain in this essay why they chose 1.66 as their default a.r., and how severely and pointlessly cropped 1.85 is and how open and accepting and all-encompassing 1.33 is. The essay basically says ‘if you have any taste at all or have any regard for aesthetic elegance and balance, it’s obvious that 1.66 or 1.33 is the way to go. You’d have to be a troglodyte to prefer 1.85.'”

The unpleasant LAX experience of Oscar-nominated 5 Broken Cameras director Emad Burnat vaguely overlaps with Mira Nair‘s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (IFC Films, 4.26). But you have to admit that you chuckled when George Clooney said “five words — randomly selected for additional screening” in Up In The Air….right? The kind of rueful laughter that says “yup, shitty as it is for Middle Eastern guys, that’s what airports are like.”

This morning Film Jerk‘s Edward A. Havens alerted me to his tenth annual Oscar Handicap assessments, category by category. I went right to the Best Picture section and was stunned by this opening statement: “There are basically two camps for Best Picture this year: those who think Lincoln has the best chance to win Best Picture, and those who think Argo has the momentum.”

Wells to Havens: Thanks, Edward, but you’re kidding with this, right? Did General Santa Ana have the “momentum” as his troops surrounded the Alamo? I don’t know of a single soul (or at least one who’s not on meds) who believes in Lincoln at this stage, and you’re telling me there’s an actual encampment of “Lincoln has the best chance to win” believers? You sound like Karl Rove talking about the Ohio vote tallies on Fox News. Even the die-hard, true-believing Sasha Stone doesn’t think Lincoln has any kind of shot at winning Best Picture, much less the “best chance.” It’s over, man.

Zero Dark Thirty, Zero Dark Thirty, Zero Dark Thirty and I don’t care…going down with the ship. David O. Russell despite the odds, David O. Russell despite the odds, David O. Russell despite the odds. Daniel Day Lewis…duhhh. JLaw, JLaw, JLaw. Robert DeNiro, Robert DeNiro, Robert DeNiro. Anne Hathaway, Anne Hathaway, Anne Hathaway.

I suppose I should have filed a formal copyright claim on the term “mood pocket” when I invented it four years ago in Oxford, Mississippi. Yes, I realize that might be a presumptuous thing to say. The term may have been floating around and I just didn’t know it. But I’m saying for the record that I believe the term is mine until somebody proves otherwise. Either way it’s now part of the lexicon.