I've been writing quite a bit about movies lately with award season in full swing. I'm in the midst of watching the three Best Picture nominees I haven't seen yet, and after I'm done with that I'll be writing the Top Ten movies of the year list as well as the Oscar prediction post. However, in the mean time, I figured I'd write another "...of the year" post.
I know there has been a lot of music released this year, and I've quite enjoyed a lot of it. Mumford and Sons came out with a new album that was just as good as the last one, Green Day unleashed a triple album of awesomeness, and The Lumineers released one of my favorite debut albums ever. But the biggest album of the year, regardless of what genre we all listen to, was definitely Taylor Swift's fourth studio album, Red. I'll readily admit that I enjoy Taylor Swift, but her recent departures from country-pop to producing straight-up pop music on Speak Now wasn't something I enjoyed as much. Speak Now disappointed in my opinion, but I was interested to see what she would do on Red - go back to her roots or continue to distance herself from country.
I think that on Red, Taylor Swift officially mastered pop music and captured pretty much all of the biggest elements needed for a successful pop album in 2012. Her songs were always catchy, which is why she's been successful. But on Red, she really brought her music to the next level. I'm not someone who dislikes pop music just because it's popular, and frankly, the songs on Red are all quite good. But one song, I Knew You Were Trouble, the third single, definitely sums up where we are in music today, and in my opinion is the song of 2012.
The first reason is its catchiness. As I said, Taylor Swift is a master of writing the catchiest songs ever. She didn't get lucky by being picked to sing a pre-written, formulaic song and become famous that way. She writes her songs herself and has helped to create the template for catchy songs as we know them. Taylor Swift has had a much bigger impact on music than is seen on the surface. Music executives are trying to capture her formula to put in other, less talented pop singers' songs. She is the spearhead of the industry. I Knew You Were Trouble, without even considering who wrote or performed it, is so catchy that after three listens, you can instantly sing the chorus. And unlike a song like Call Me Maybe, the song doesn't tire with repeated listens. This is because it's catchy, but it's also really, really good.
I Knew You Were Trouble isn't just the song of the year for it's catchiness, though. It's also Taylor Swift's foray into dubstep. Obviously, it's not a dubstep song, but it includes a bit of it to compliment the song. I took this as Swift's acknowledgement of the impact that dubstep has had recently in the music industry. It's an entirely new and revolutionary genre and even though I don't really enjoy it, I still know it has permanently impacted music. House music is so much different today than it was as recently as five years ago. Dubstep isn't a fad and it isn't going away, and I Knew You Were Trouble utilizes it better than any other pop song I've heard. It's a perfect harmony of pop and dubstep and frankly, if dubstep is used in this way more often, my opinion on it might change.
I think the powers that be will be trying to capture what Taylor Swift brought us with I Knew You Were Trouble for quite some time. But nobody can do what Taylor Swift does. She knows something we all don't. By the time they give us something that scratches the surface of this song, she'll have delivered something even greater. She's a step ahead. Taylor Swift is not going away, and I'm happy about that.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
The Best Director Paradox, and Why the Academy is Terrible
I was going to write a full reaction to all of the Oscar nominees, but since the nominees were announced some time ago and the Golden Globes have just passed, I feel that the only category I have anything else to say about at this point is the Best Director nominees. Don't be sad, because I'll be breaking down the other categories in the Oscar predictions post, which will come closer to the actual award show.
The reason I chose the Best Director category for this post is because it is a pretty accurate summarization of the year in movies, and gives us evidence of how strong criticism from outside parties have already affected the Oscar race. Best Director is also an extremely subjective award, and this year, more than any other year in recent memory, we have a shift from including five strong nominees to excluding fantastic films based on pre-conceived ideas about them. In addition, there are only five slots for a Best Director nomination, as opposed to a maximum of ten for Best Picture, which creates a maddening paradox.
Why is this so? Just take a look at history. Over the past 26 years, 21 films have won both the Best Director Oscar and the Best Picture Oscar. Since 1999, only three Best Director winners have failed to see their film win Best Picture. The recent exceptions were ones I agreed with. In 1999 Steven Spielberg won the directing award for Saving Private Ryan, arguably his finest film outside of Schindler's List, but lost Best Picture when Harvey Weinstein bribed the Academy to vote for Shakespeare in Love. The other exceptions include Roman Polanski's 2003 victory for The Pianist (Chicago won BP) and Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain in 2006 (Crash won BP).
Why does this matter? Because outside of five exceptions, the seeming definition of a Best Director winner is the person who directed the best film of the year (the Best Picture winner). They don't nominate the finest direction of a film, but rather the merit of the film itself. This is drastically unfair, especially in the past few years, when there have been more Best Picture nominees than Best Director nominees. We can basically cancel out the chances of an Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, or Les Miserables Best Picture victory because the Academy has already chosen their five best films for the Best Director nomination. The other three are included in the Best Picture category for entertainment purposes for the awards show itself, not because they stand any chance of winning.
The Best Director award is thus a severely flawed one for this reason. As I said, the films are not nominated for being finely directed, but for being good movies. Best Director should literally mean "Best Director", not "Person who's name comes last in the opening credits for the Best Picture winner". Let's look at Les Miserables. The movie had its problems, yes. It's been rightly criticized for bland in-your-face cinematography. But lest we forget, Best Cinematography is also an Academy Award. Best Director is an entirely different award. Tom Hooper took the risk of letting his actors sing live (which, in my opinion, paid off very well), and adapted the stage musical into a powerful, riveting film version. He directed this extremely difficult adaptation, something an ordinary director could not do. His ability to do so should have earned him a nomination.
The two most maddening and perplexing exclusions from the category, however, are those of Django Unchained's Quentin Tarantino and Zero Dark Thirty's Kathryn Bigelow. These exclusions did not happen because of concrete, technical issues like Les Miserables, but because of pressure put on the Academy based on the films' content. Tarantino's choices in Django Unchained (outside of letting Jamie Foxx play the lead) were all fantastic. Every element of the movie was absolutely sublime. He utilized the little things (soundtrack, staging, costumes, his own personal style) better than anybody in film this year. If not for the direction of Tarantino, Django Unchained would not have been as good of a movie as it was. However, it seems that the older, white voters of the Academy (average age in the mid-60s) didn't feel comfortable allowing Tarantino to be nominated for a movie about a slave killing slave owners. Tarantino is white, and made a movie that uses the N-word 109 times, and so he must be punished for it, plain and simple.
Last but not least, there's Kathryn Bigelow. My thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty and its exclusion have been made, but no words can really express how big of a travesty it is that she wasn't nominated (sealing the movie's fate for Best Picture, but that's beside the point). The movie was stunningly directed. I know there's a raging debate about the film's depiction of torture, but that doesn't matter. Frankly, a movie could contain nothing but a woman making grilled cheese sandwiches for an hour and a half, but if it's the best directed movie of the year, it should be nominated. And regardless of the subject matter, ZDT was brilliant. Federal lawmakers such as John McCain and Dianne Feinstein are taking the floor in Congress not to solve our fiscal cliff issue, but to criticize the finest film in a long while about it's torture scenes, which they HAVE NOT EVEN SEEN. And the Academy members are reading the "Does Zero Dark Thirty Promote Torturing Prisoners?" articles and have made the decision that they'd rather reward Lincoln, a three-hour self-congratulations for white people saving black people from slavery, than start a national controversy by nominating Kathryn Bigelow for the Oscar.
You suck, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and you should be ashamed of your cowardice.
The reason I chose the Best Director category for this post is because it is a pretty accurate summarization of the year in movies, and gives us evidence of how strong criticism from outside parties have already affected the Oscar race. Best Director is also an extremely subjective award, and this year, more than any other year in recent memory, we have a shift from including five strong nominees to excluding fantastic films based on pre-conceived ideas about them. In addition, there are only five slots for a Best Director nomination, as opposed to a maximum of ten for Best Picture, which creates a maddening paradox.
Why is this so? Just take a look at history. Over the past 26 years, 21 films have won both the Best Director Oscar and the Best Picture Oscar. Since 1999, only three Best Director winners have failed to see their film win Best Picture. The recent exceptions were ones I agreed with. In 1999 Steven Spielberg won the directing award for Saving Private Ryan, arguably his finest film outside of Schindler's List, but lost Best Picture when Harvey Weinstein bribed the Academy to vote for Shakespeare in Love. The other exceptions include Roman Polanski's 2003 victory for The Pianist (Chicago won BP) and Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain in 2006 (Crash won BP).
Why does this matter? Because outside of five exceptions, the seeming definition of a Best Director winner is the person who directed the best film of the year (the Best Picture winner). They don't nominate the finest direction of a film, but rather the merit of the film itself. This is drastically unfair, especially in the past few years, when there have been more Best Picture nominees than Best Director nominees. We can basically cancel out the chances of an Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, or Les Miserables Best Picture victory because the Academy has already chosen their five best films for the Best Director nomination. The other three are included in the Best Picture category for entertainment purposes for the awards show itself, not because they stand any chance of winning.
The Best Director award is thus a severely flawed one for this reason. As I said, the films are not nominated for being finely directed, but for being good movies. Best Director should literally mean "Best Director", not "Person who's name comes last in the opening credits for the Best Picture winner". Let's look at Les Miserables. The movie had its problems, yes. It's been rightly criticized for bland in-your-face cinematography. But lest we forget, Best Cinematography is also an Academy Award. Best Director is an entirely different award. Tom Hooper took the risk of letting his actors sing live (which, in my opinion, paid off very well), and adapted the stage musical into a powerful, riveting film version. He directed this extremely difficult adaptation, something an ordinary director could not do. His ability to do so should have earned him a nomination.
The two most maddening and perplexing exclusions from the category, however, are those of Django Unchained's Quentin Tarantino and Zero Dark Thirty's Kathryn Bigelow. These exclusions did not happen because of concrete, technical issues like Les Miserables, but because of pressure put on the Academy based on the films' content. Tarantino's choices in Django Unchained (outside of letting Jamie Foxx play the lead) were all fantastic. Every element of the movie was absolutely sublime. He utilized the little things (soundtrack, staging, costumes, his own personal style) better than anybody in film this year. If not for the direction of Tarantino, Django Unchained would not have been as good of a movie as it was. However, it seems that the older, white voters of the Academy (average age in the mid-60s) didn't feel comfortable allowing Tarantino to be nominated for a movie about a slave killing slave owners. Tarantino is white, and made a movie that uses the N-word 109 times, and so he must be punished for it, plain and simple.
Last but not least, there's Kathryn Bigelow. My thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty and its exclusion have been made, but no words can really express how big of a travesty it is that she wasn't nominated (sealing the movie's fate for Best Picture, but that's beside the point). The movie was stunningly directed. I know there's a raging debate about the film's depiction of torture, but that doesn't matter. Frankly, a movie could contain nothing but a woman making grilled cheese sandwiches for an hour and a half, but if it's the best directed movie of the year, it should be nominated. And regardless of the subject matter, ZDT was brilliant. Federal lawmakers such as John McCain and Dianne Feinstein are taking the floor in Congress not to solve our fiscal cliff issue, but to criticize the finest film in a long while about it's torture scenes, which they HAVE NOT EVEN SEEN. And the Academy members are reading the "Does Zero Dark Thirty Promote Torturing Prisoners?" articles and have made the decision that they'd rather reward Lincoln, a three-hour self-congratulations for white people saving black people from slavery, than start a national controversy by nominating Kathryn Bigelow for the Oscar.
You suck, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and you should be ashamed of your cowardice.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Zero Dark Thirty and the Politics of the Oscars
It's been quite some time since my last blog post. I haven't really had much to say over the past few weeks, and now that I'm back in Pittsburgh, I am settled in and ready to begin writing more stuff, especially with the Oscars coming up. I'm planning on an Oscar reactions post later this weekend, but I wanted to hold off on commenting on the nominations until I had seen Zero Dark Thirty. Normally, I would have been all over the nominations from the second they were announced, but I couldn't do that until I saw the highest-acclaimed movie of the year.
Highest-acclaimed. 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Universal praise from everybody, including Grantland writer Andy Greenwald, who said that ZDT made The Hurt Locker look like an episode of the Cleveland Show. So last night as I sat in my seat at the midnight showing, I knew this movie had to be incredible for me to like it, because I always have problems with my pre-viewing expectations. Especially with Kathryn Bigelow directing. I liked The Hurt Locker, but I loved about seven movies in 2009 and 4 of them are in or around my top ten films of all time. So going in I had the idea that Bigelow was overrated.
Well, I was wrong. Zero Dark Thirty is head and shoulders above every other movie I have seen this year. Everything about it was mesmerizing. From the opening scene, the viewer is dropped into the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and Bigelow does an outstanding job making you feel emotion with every bit of action. You end up feeling bad for everybody. The detainees, the CIA operatives, everybody. It's just such an engaging movie-going experience. One would expect to be rooting for Seal Team Six, but by the time the actual raid of Bin Laden's compound is happening, the intensity has been so encapsulating that there's no more emotion to do so. Instead, you're captured in the whirlwind of maybe the most visceral movie of all time, hoping that killing Bin Laden leads us to some sort of inner resolution. And after the final scene, which, in it's own right, contains the best final shot of any movie in recent memory, you're shaken to the core. I left the theater in stunned speechlessness and it took a solid ten minutes to put together a fragment of my emotions, which were left shattered in pieces on the theater floor, into words.
I would have no problems with Zero Dark Thirty winning every award it is nominated for. It is completely deserving of a landslide Best Picture, and Jessica Chastain should absolutely win Best Actress for the finest performance of any actor this year. But just as the Oscar race settled into a Lincoln -vs.-ZDT-for-Best-Picture affair, Kathryn Bigelow was shockingly left out of the Best Director nominations. Recent Oscar trends show that Best Picture and Best Director tend to fall hand in hand, and the Academy has seemingly made a statement that Lincoln will win both awards and sweep the Oscars.
I saw Lincoln a week ago, and didn't feel like I should write a blog post about it. It's just not my kind of movie. Daniel Day Lewis! Slavery! Freedom! It was boring to me, as I knew it would be when I sat down to watch it. It's a fine film, but it's pure Oscar bait, and frankly, I don't think it's that hard to make a great movie when you've compiled a bunch of A-listers debating over the most important events in American History. And I can see why people are loving it - because it's the kind of movie where you feel happy and accomplished at the end. That's the kind of movie that wins Best Picture.
Maybe it's the torture scenes, or that the events of May 1 happened too soon ago, or that Bigelow won the Best Director/Picture package in 2009. But simply put, Zero Dark Thirty was the best movie of the year. It was also the most important and the most engaging and frankly, I haven't had an experience like that in the theater for a long, long time. Five stars, and a pantheon-level movie for the ages.
Highest-acclaimed. 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Universal praise from everybody, including Grantland writer Andy Greenwald, who said that ZDT made The Hurt Locker look like an episode of the Cleveland Show. So last night as I sat in my seat at the midnight showing, I knew this movie had to be incredible for me to like it, because I always have problems with my pre-viewing expectations. Especially with Kathryn Bigelow directing. I liked The Hurt Locker, but I loved about seven movies in 2009 and 4 of them are in or around my top ten films of all time. So going in I had the idea that Bigelow was overrated.
Well, I was wrong. Zero Dark Thirty is head and shoulders above every other movie I have seen this year. Everything about it was mesmerizing. From the opening scene, the viewer is dropped into the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and Bigelow does an outstanding job making you feel emotion with every bit of action. You end up feeling bad for everybody. The detainees, the CIA operatives, everybody. It's just such an engaging movie-going experience. One would expect to be rooting for Seal Team Six, but by the time the actual raid of Bin Laden's compound is happening, the intensity has been so encapsulating that there's no more emotion to do so. Instead, you're captured in the whirlwind of maybe the most visceral movie of all time, hoping that killing Bin Laden leads us to some sort of inner resolution. And after the final scene, which, in it's own right, contains the best final shot of any movie in recent memory, you're shaken to the core. I left the theater in stunned speechlessness and it took a solid ten minutes to put together a fragment of my emotions, which were left shattered in pieces on the theater floor, into words.
I would have no problems with Zero Dark Thirty winning every award it is nominated for. It is completely deserving of a landslide Best Picture, and Jessica Chastain should absolutely win Best Actress for the finest performance of any actor this year. But just as the Oscar race settled into a Lincoln -vs.-ZDT-for-Best-Picture affair, Kathryn Bigelow was shockingly left out of the Best Director nominations. Recent Oscar trends show that Best Picture and Best Director tend to fall hand in hand, and the Academy has seemingly made a statement that Lincoln will win both awards and sweep the Oscars.
I saw Lincoln a week ago, and didn't feel like I should write a blog post about it. It's just not my kind of movie. Daniel Day Lewis! Slavery! Freedom! It was boring to me, as I knew it would be when I sat down to watch it. It's a fine film, but it's pure Oscar bait, and frankly, I don't think it's that hard to make a great movie when you've compiled a bunch of A-listers debating over the most important events in American History. And I can see why people are loving it - because it's the kind of movie where you feel happy and accomplished at the end. That's the kind of movie that wins Best Picture.
Maybe it's the torture scenes, or that the events of May 1 happened too soon ago, or that Bigelow won the Best Director/Picture package in 2009. But simply put, Zero Dark Thirty was the best movie of the year. It was also the most important and the most engaging and frankly, I haven't had an experience like that in the theater for a long, long time. Five stars, and a pantheon-level movie for the ages.
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