Alison Stevenson has seen a lot of indie movies lately, and she’s sick to death of certain aspects of the ever-popular “quirky girl” character. As a real-life “quirky girl,” I thought Alison would be a perfect person to– ouch, ow, oh God, she’s hitting me! Her knuckles are so sharp! Okay, I’m sorry, I take back the quirky thing. Anyway, back to Alison.

I recently watched the new Noah Baumbach film, Frances Ha. There were a lot of things that I liked about it, but more things that annoyed the crap out of me. To me, the film was basically a long episode of Girls, but for some reason Adam wears a fedora. Not only does he wear a fedora, but he still manages to get laid—the f*ck? Anyways, what’s really pissing me off about this film, and also every other indie production with a “quirky” female lead, is how predictable these women become. The manic pixie dream girl is a tired character that has officially been done to death. As much as these women might deny that this is what they’re embodying, it totally is what they’re embodying. So with that being said, I give you some examples of the crap I’m sick of, and even offer some extremely clever alternatives because I am thoughtful like that. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever seen a Nicolas Cage movie, you’re probably looking at this article thinking, “Listen, pal. I’ve seen my share of Cage flicks. I already know how insane they are.” Yeah, maybe you have. Maybe you’ve seen Face/Off. Maybe you’ve seen Ghost Rider. Maybe you’ve even seen the infamous The Wicker Man. But here’s the thing. If you haven’t seen Vampire’s Kiss, you haven’t truly “stepped into the Cage.”

The entire movie is ridiculous, from the title screen to the credits. Cage drifts in and out of an unrecognizable accent, furiously recites the alphabet, and flails through the streets of Manhattan yelling, “I’m a vampire!” to no one in particular. But what happened behind the scenes was even more absurd than what what you see on screen.

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Oscar voters are out of touch, milquetoast, hopelessly middlebrow, and so old that they couldn’t even figure out how to e-vote, but it’s always been this way, and we still argue about it anyway. Even after Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, The English Patient over Fargo, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan, etc. The list goes on, and we should know better. In 2013, no one should be surprised that the Academy’s choices are two parts wrong and ten parts boring, but if we’re going to bitch somewhere, it might as well be here. I may be a lot of things, but allergic to money isn’t one of them. And hey, as bad as the Oscars are, they’re still a thousand times better than the Grammys and the Emmys put together. So here they are, the best and worst of this year’s Oscar nominations. KNIVES OUT, SHITHEADS! IT’S TIME TO END SOME FRIENDSHIPS!

(FYI, you can find my reviews and best-of list and Burnsy’s Worst list at these links. The full list of nominations is at the bottom below).

BEST PICTURE:

Best:
Django Unchained. After getting snubbed at the DGAs and WGAs, it’s nice to see Tarantino’s latest get some love from the Academy, even though the very things that make me love it instead of just like it – that it’s so gleefully vulgar and deliberately lowbrow – are the same reasons it won’t win and didn’t receive more nominations.

Worst:
Beasts of the Southern Wild, Les Misérables. I’ve already gone over in great detail why Beasts isn’t a great movie.  Even in terms of movies that appeal hard to pedantic white liberal fantasies, Life of Pi did it better, and in a much nicer way (not to mention, it had a carnivorous island full of meerkats).

Les Mis is just… God, it’s so predictable. You had the choice of nominating less than 10 (you’ll notice there are only nine nominees this year – here’s a refresher course on why), and Les Mis still made the list? I think of it like this: There are times in my life when I’ll be riding my fixed gear down to my local San Fran latte shop listening to This American Life on my iPhone; and other times when I’ll be eating chicken wings with my bros while we watch football and trash talk each other’s fantasy teams down at the sports bar. In both instances, I’ll think to myself, “God, I feel like such a stereotype right now,” and try to change something up. Oscar voters… never seem to have that thought. “A movie full of famous actors with dirty faces singing French songs about poverty and trying to f*ck each other? Oh hell yeah, more of that plz.” Les Mis would be insulting to Academy voters if they weren’t so dumb. Les Mis can derelicte my balls, capitan.

Snubbed:
No Magic Mike? Are you kidding me? But I’m not surprised. It was inevitable that the Academy voters would only see the guy pumping up his blurry dick in the foreground, and not the nuanced, melancholy story about trying to find a place in the modern economy that those blurry dicks were framing. Looper? The Master? Again, not surprised, but the fact that Les Mis got in but not the best original sci-fi in years and Joaquin Phoenix’s most watchable performance isn’t going to go unmentioned here.

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At times it can be nearly impossible to squeeze your reactions to a film into the narrow rubric of A through F, or on-a-scale-of-one-to-ten grades. What if I love the first 110 minutes of a film but despise the next 15? Do I try to score it round by round like the unified rules used by the UFC and Bellator, or just try to get a sense of it as a whole, like the Japanese model from the Pride days? Who knows, maybe I shouldn’t even try to apply MMA rules. Maybe diving or figure skating judging would be more applicable. But if so, how do I calculate degree of difficulty? Do I use the old Ukranian model, or apply the Bellman-Krzewszewski toe-loop differential? So many questions, friends, so many questions.

But in the end, we all know that questioning the end-of-the-year ranking system is what sissies do. We live in a hard world that demands hard quantification and I’m just the hard man to hammer you with my hard on. I’m going to make some bold choices here, because that’s what men do. I just tore a Chipotle burrito in half and screamed at it like it was a dead wildebeast. LET ME HEAR YOUR WAR CRY! KEEEIAAAIIIAAA! Which is to say, I’m not here to justify the existence of rankings, I’m manning up and offering rankings because the universe demands rankings. Besides, what’s the point of writing about movies if it’s not to start heated, unresolvable arguments over subjective, unquantifiable perceptions of make-believe? KNIVES OUT, SH*THEADS! IT’S TIME TO END SOME FRIENDSHIPS! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!

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“Who wants to kiss Abe’s Oscars?”

This post was originally pitched around the release of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s cinematic ode to that one They Might Be Giants album, and how its arrival heralds the unofficial beginning of Oscar-bait season. But Les Miserables shot that peg in the head, so to speak, and one-upped Lincoln with its musical misery trailer.

Either way: for the next few months, movie studios are going to pay millions of dollars, on top of the hundreds of millions they’ve already spent, to convince us and Academy voters that their films are subjectively better than other studios’ films. It’s depressing, really, but hey, *lights cigar* it’s Oscars season, baby. No matter how good they might be, both Les Mis and Lincoln look like they were made solely to win awards, as if no one at any point asked, “Does the world really need another Abraham Lincoln film?” No, it does not.

With all that in mind, here are 10 of cinema’s most obnoxious tropes that you see in Oscar-bait film after Oscar-bait film, with two entries dedicated solely to the most shameless award-whore movies in recent history. And neither is Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Yeah, they’re that flagrant.

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