Oscars Get It Wrong Yet Again

The Oscar nominations were announced today, and as a raving Dark Knight fanboy I feel it my duty to complain about the conspicuous absence of that film from the Best Picture nominees. I'm sure this same sentiment will be echoed in literally millions of places on the internet today. However, as misguided as the decision may be I can't say it comes as a surprise.

Sometimes the Academy nominate the best movies, but more often they nominate what I like to call "play-movies"--films that have important content and subject matter, sure, but whose stories lack the visual punch and over-the-top emotional involement that belongs to movies, making them more appropriate for the world of theater than film. (Indeed, Frost/Nixon originated as a play). Unfortunately, theater has almost vanished as a popular art form, and the only way these stories will ever get the attention they deserve is by being made into motion pictures. That's fine.

What worries me is that in honoring these stories as "the best" year in and year out, people begin to think that these movies are, in fact, "the best." Nothing is more ridiculous than giving awards for the arts, but we've been doing it since at least the Pythian Games so I can't really fault anyone for it. But these awards do affect the public conception--people begin to think that a DVD with "Best Picture" on the cover, whether they like it or not, is inherently better, or more important, than one without it. We all fall prey to this kind of thinking at one point or another.

Most people, however, didn't get involved with movies because of movies like The Reader. Personally, I like movies because movies are awesome. Not awesome like YHWH is awesome, but awesome in the silliest, most ridiculous, most explosion-filled sense of the word. Do I love sitting through 4 hours of beautiful cinematography, classical music, and upper-class 18th century decadence in Barry Lyndon? Hell yes. Do I love watching Perseus take on stop-motion Medusa in Clash of the Titans? Absolutely. Why do we then assign value judgments to movies based on the content?

Movies are about starships and lightsabers, time travel and monsters and superheroes and a ridiculous vision of love and romance, muppets, gladiators and robots, witches and vampires, kings and queens, zombies, and vampire puppet shows. Now I'm not saying we should worship every Michael Bay piece of manufactured excitement that comes our way. Not all movies are good. But there are excellent movies, year after year, in every single genre. Nothing makes one genre better than another, and the modern Academy really needs to get that through their skulls. People who really love movies love a ridiculous assortment of nonsense, and there's nothing in the world wrong with that.

The Dark Knight was the best movie this past year, and for me maybe the best movie of the last ten years. (Then again, I love a lot of movies from the last ten years). Heath Ledger should rightfully get his award for supporting actor, and I'm also very happy about Robert Downey Jr.'s nomination for such a wacky part. (Also, I think it'd be great if Frank Langella won for Frost/Nixon. Anyone who's played Skeletor deserves a bloody Oscar!) If I have to pick out of what's left, I'm going to go with Benjamin Button for Best Picture. It's a great movie, big, wondrous, and emotional, and I'd be happy to see it win.

But fifty years from now, 2008 will be remembered for The Dark Knight the way 1977 is remembered for Star Wars.

(And now the punchline: I actually think Annie Hall was just as deserving a Best Picture winner in '77 as Star Wars. Now Annie Hall vs. Empire Strikes Back? No contest.)

Inaugural Thoughts: There's Hope Yet

This is the first time in my lifetime I can remember people being this excited about an inauguration. As the Obamas walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, the sound of cheers from the huge crowd drowned out almost everything else. Even the news talking heads were forced into silence. It’s incredibly exciting to be here to witness this moment. My mind, like many others', falls back to the generations that have gone before—to the struggles of the Revolution and the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement—generations of people that were willing to put everything they had on the line to expand the ideals that America stands for.

It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of the moment, and today is rightfully a day of joy and excitement for most of America. But we don’t know what lies ahead. Obama could be another Jimmy Carter (a.k.a. history’s greatest monster.) Let’s not discount that possibility, or we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment. Things might stay exactly the same. They could get better. They might get worse. But today, what he represents is the ability of this country to reach for and achieve its own most deeply held beliefs.

Unlike many of the other countries in the world, America is not so much a set of boundaries or a specific culture or language as it is a set of ideas. The Declaration of Independence begins by spelling out those values, and the subsequent history of our country has been the struggle to attain and perfect those values. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

It has been a long, unending struggle to fulfill those lofty words, and it will continue to be a struggle. Because America is a set of ideas before it is a place, any violation of those ideas is a danger to the dream of this country. Every time we torture someone, every time we withhold their rights, every time we throw our power around and invade a country without reason, no matter the rhetoric used to justify such actions, we are turning our backs on everything that being an American means. Bush will tell you that he has kept America safe from another attack, but the utter abandonment and disregard for our founding principles he and his cronies have showcased is nothing if not an idealogical attack on the very existence of the United States. When the founders met in Philadelphia, they pledged their lives to protect the ideas put down in that Declaration. During the last eight years we watched those ideas slip away one by one by one, violating the very principles of our country in exchange for the promise of safety. Today Obama echoed the words of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin when he said

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

For me, what being a participant in this country boils down to is that freedom and liberty are worth more than safety. Those ideas are America. Let them go, and we’re just a bunch of McDonaldses and Taco Bells.

So I’m sorry, Sarah Palin, but reading dangerous terrorists their rights is what being a "real American" is all about. Jefferson was always afraid that we would lose our revolutionary spirit, lose the drive to risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor for the values of humanity, equality, and liberty. It’s taken 230 years, but when you hear speeches like Sarah’s it looks as though that’s exactly what has happened for some.

During the winter of 1777, during some of the worst months of the Revolution, John Adams wrote Abigail from Baltimore about the behavior of the British soldiers.

These incarnate Daemons say in great Composure, “Humanity is a Yankey Virtue. -- But that they [are] governed by Policy." -- Is there any Policy on this side of Hell, that is inconsistent with Humanity? I have no Idea of it. I know of no Policy, God is my Witness but this -- Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy.

Blasphemy, Cruelty, and Villany have prevailed and may again. But they won’t prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed the less they succeed.

Giving in to fear and cruelty are always dangers in a free society, but what the election of Barack Obama symbolizes is that in American, we have reason to hope that “piety, humanity, and honesty” will still guide our actions. Obama’s speech today seemed to echo those hopes.

The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

It has taken generations and generations to fight for that dream and to expand it. During the Civil War, Lincoln effectively rededicated our country to the pursuit of those ideals that spurred on the Revolution. Our country, he said, was formed on the “proposition that all men are created equal.” Even in 2009, we all must do our part to see “whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” The election of Barack Obama shows that we are continuing the work of showing that those ideas can and will endure.

The last eight years have been a struggle, and there were times when I certainly felt like giving up on our country. The excitement and optimism of the Revolutionary generation seemed worlds away. Our country had become just like any other. It’s easy to dip into hyperbole about the Bush administration’s failings. There’s plenty to say about it, and most of us could go on and on, but that’s not what today is about. Today is a chance for each of us to reaffirm our commitment to our country’s values. In Obama’s words:

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is a sentiment the Founding Fathers would certainly have agreed with as they put their names on a document that effectively identified them as traitors. Americans today have to be willing to fight for those ideas, even at the expense of our own safety.

In reality, we have never been that shining city on the hill that we hope to be. Perhaps such a goal is impossible. But it is not impossible to work each day towards the perfection of that ideal. There will always be debates about the minutiae of government, over how much responsibility the government has to help the common man, over where our taxpayers’ dollars are best spent, or just how much tax we should be paying. These arguments will go on and on.

What matters is that every day each of us has to do what we can in the efforts of perfecting our union, of spreading our values to the world not by force but by example. It’s impossible to see where we are headed from here, but I have reason to hope that our country will reaffirm the better angels of our collective nature. A job was begun in 1776 that must continue for each of us, day in and day out, to insure that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Happy Birthday, Edgar!

And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.

That’s a quote from “The Haunted Palace” by Edgar Allen Poe, who celebrates his 200th birthday today. It was later quoted in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Does it have any relevance to our current political or economic situation? Nope. Does it have some special relationship with what’s going on at my life at the moment? Not really. But it still gives me chills. It’s writing like this that likely inspired me on my ill-advised path to become a writer.

I’ve always been drawn to Romanticism (you’d have to be to name a blog after an Arthur Machen story, right?) and especially the Gothic Romance. There’s something about decaying castles, forgotten ruins, and other fantastic sights that hit just the right nerve. When I first read Poe in the forced readings of 7th and 8th grades, I thought I was reading the best of the best. The stories were enriched by their age—they felt like authentic slices of an archaic American past; even the very young country, it seems, had a place for ancient ghosts and decayed aristocracy. That first impression has never really changed, though I’m likely more of a Lovecraft man these days.

My early writing, then, was a mess of description and atmosphere. I would go on for pages and pages about a house or field, pouring out every word of description I could think of to bring the place to life. Nevermind that I had no idea who lived in the house, what happened there, or why anyone should care. It was enough to paint a picture with words. In the intervening years of searching for a writing identity, I’ve gone all the way from that flowery prose to free-verse poetry to clipped, dialogue heavy stories, back to overwriting again, on to stream of consciousness nonsense, and just about everywhere in between. But it was always, for good or ill, in the realm of heightened description and heavy sensory imagery that I felt most at home.

I’ve read some Poe recently, and what once seemed the very image of perfection now seems a bit stuffy, overburdened with ostentatious erudition, as Abigail Adams (Laura Linney) might say. Had I continued writing in that vein, I might have been very popular in the 1850s, but I doubt I would have much impact today. But in all that erudition there is a real sense of beauty and, oddly enough, joy in the world around us. People don’t write pages and pages of description anymore, but that spirit, the spirit of using writing to help transform the world into something magical that is the heart of Romanticism, is still alive and well.

In that way, I think, I’ve come to peace with the Romantic in me. Every book about writing will make a point of finding your voice, and that’s certainly relevant advice. The next challenge, however, after you’ve found that voice, is to embrace it and make it work for you. No screenplay will ever get read that has paragraphs upon paragraphs of description, of course (as it should be), but a well written, tight description of a place or person can go a long way towards creating an atmosphere. A screenplay, is, after all, a blueprint for images. “Like a rapid ghastly river…a hideous throng rush out forever…” is, in only a few words, about as visual of an image as you can get. It's not about running from your own writing style, then, in search of the "right" way to write. It's about finding ways to make that style speak to your audience, whoever they might be.

Edgar Allen Poe was born 200 years ago today, and with all the styles and writing philosophies and movements that have come and gone in those 200 years, his stories are still a blast to read. I can’t think of a better birthday present than to tell him thank you for making me a writer—a flowery, ostentatious, old-fashioned, Romantic writer. Really, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

(Actually a better birthday present may have been a cure for rabies, cholera, syphilis, or whatever it is that killed him at age 40. That would probably be more immediately helpful than knowing you inspired some dude living 160 years later. But I do what I can.)

(Unrelated note: Isn't this picture of Poe's mother the most frightening thing in the world? Seriously, right?! No wonder he was so odd.)

Sumer Is Icumen In....

So the other night I was trying to get to sleep, and this naked chick next door starts banging on the wall while singing a wild hypnotic song, asking me whether I’d like to come over and say “How do?”


Now for most men this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but for Edward Woodward’s Sgt. Howie, it is a moment of pure, undiluted terror. Woodward’s ability to make a prudish snobbish British police officer into a character of such sympathy is only one of the reasons The Wicker Man is such a fantastic horror movie. Instead of laughing at Howie for not rushing into the other room to fulfill the luscious Willow’s request, we are right there with him, stuck with the feeling that something is seriously, horribly wrong.

Most horror movies today rely on shock value and gore for scares (though there are certainly exceptions—The Orphanage comes to mind) but The Wicker Man takes time to scare us, slowly plunging us into a world that is at first a little quaint and backwards, then slightly off, then threatening, and finally just out and out evil. There is no blood (though there is plenty of sex—it was the early 70s after all), and things very rarely jump out to scare you, but trust me, you will be scared. The film’s final hopeless sequence of suffering is more frightening than any of the situations cooked up in the entire Saw franchise combined.

The plot deals with Police Sgt. Howie’s trip to the isolated Summerisle somewhere off the British coast in search of a missing girl. Howie is an upright, uptight Christian, who has gone so far as to keep himself a virgin until his upcoming wedding. Naturally, when the inhabitants of Summerisle prove to be sexually liberated nature-worshiping pagans, Howie’s stuffy British sensibilities are taxed to the breaking point. Eventually Howie comes to learn more than he ever wanted to know about the people’s pagan beliefs and practices.

It may be a product of our modern politically correct society more than the intention of the filmmakers, but at on my first viewing of the film I was totally on the side of the pagans. Sure, they were a little out there, but Howie comes off as an intolerant prig for the film’s first act. It only adds to the horror, then, as we slowly learn that these people are even worse than Howie’s worst fears. By the end of the movie I saw him as an unfortunate man who had walked into a nightmare from which he had no real hope of escaping. One of my all time favorite scenes in movie history (and there are many) has to be the moment when Howie crests the beautiful green hill in the film’s climax to come face to face with the Wicker Man. Never was there a more hopeless and heartfelt cry of dereliction than Woodward’s “Jesus Christ!” You can feel the pain and terror in every syllable, made all the worse by the joy of his captors and the film’s grim sense of inevitability. This is not a movie where the hero’s wits and strength come to his rescue.

Most of the film’s cast are Hammer horror veterans, most notably Christopher Lee in the role of Lord Summerisle, head of the island. Partly because of his long tenure with Hammer, Lee has a reputation for schlock that may be justified, but I just can’t get enough of the guy. He considers this one of his best roles, and it’s hard to argue with him. He gets to spread his wings a bit and go beyond his usual role of scary guy with a booming voice—though he of course is that, as well. Lord Summerisle takes a certain glee in the proceedings that remind us that Lee does have real depth as an actor that is often buried beneath lesser roles.


Another star of the movie is the environments themselves. This movie looks as though it was actually shot on location on Summerisle, and there are no outdated special effects to show the film’s age. Instead we are treated to a quaint British village, rolling hills, rocky cliffs, and a decayed cemetery. I’m not sure of the production history of this film or where exactly it was shot, but it is a breathtaking locale. Some of the photography looks a little dated and trapped in the 70s (yes, there are some zooms), but most of the film holds up remarkably well today. Even the music, which in any other context would perhaps date the film, sounds appropriately creepy for this out of the way British village. It has something of a 60s folksy feeling to it, but incorporates a lot of older musical styles to arrive at a very bizarre and unique sound. There’s a fabulous cover of “How Do” (the song I mentioned at the beginning of this post) by the Sneaker Pimps that is certainly worth a listen to get a sense of the enormous role music plays in this film. What’s a pagan island without lots of singing and dancing, after all? Not much of a pagan island in any capacity at all, that’s what!

There has been endless talk about a sequel to the movie, but it has been stuck in development hell since before development hell was a phrase, and though it has at various times looked as though something was going to happen with it, I’m not going to hold my breath. The idea would reunite Christopher Lee and the original’s director, Robin Hardy, but I feel like too much time has passed to revisit it now. (There was also the disastrous, unwatchable, heaven-cursed remake staring Nicholas Cage that I am only mentioning in the spirit of dire warning. You know you’re watching a bad movie when you are informed that a character’s legs are broken by his offscreen exclamation, “My legs, what are you doing to my legs?” Now imagine that line in a whiny, Nicolas Cage voice and you’ll understand just what level of travesty we’re dealing with here. But I digress.)

Unfortunately the film doesn’t quite survive in its original form. There are supposedly reels and reels of film worth of lost footage floating around in a basement somewhere. What remains is a short theatrical cut and a longer, 100 minute version that has all of the available missing footage restored. I myself have a spiffy two disc version of the movie that originally came in a numbered wooden box. I’m not sure if this is still available, but it has both versions and several good special features that discuss the process of discovering the missing footage and making the film. There is certainly a wooden box free version of the 2 disc set that is still available, which is definitely the way to go.

The Wicker Man is the kind of movie that would probably never get made today (and perhaps that’s for the best, considering the remake). It is slow, lacks a lot of action, and has no gore to speak of. It is also the rare horror movie that tries to go beyond the regular quick scares of the genre to something more substantial. It is a serious look at religion, it’s successes and failures, and in a lot of ways a criticism of the western idea of the victorious hero. Sgt. Howie ends up utterly doomed through no fault of his own, and for me those were always the best kinds of horror stories. The Wicker Man is an odd movie for sure, but the film’s final images will stay burned in your brain long after the DVD has been put away. It doesn’t get much better than that.