Don Jon

I have to say that I am sort of irritated by how, well, not good Joseph Gordon-Levitt's first feature is.

I don't even think I have a lot to say about this film except that it is basically Ted except for instead of an amusing (well, not that amusing) talking bear, JGL's version of the man-child who doesn't want to grow up has a laptop and some pornography to keep him company.

One thing that Ted has on Don Jon, too, is that Ted has a woman at its center who is actually correct about how to improve the man in her life. Don Jon's version of that is a shallow, idiotic rich girl who literally doesn't approve of speaking out loud about purchasing cleaning products in Target in case someone hears you. I mean this film hates its central female character.

Don Jon isn't without its merits. JGL is hard to dislike. How could anyone? He is clearly a lovely performer, and the picture is decently made – it is his first, and its a lot better than, well, other actors' first features.

And the film makes some really good points, too. Carl's Jr. ads really are pornographic, and this film calls them out on it. Romantic comedies, too, get some women off in the same way that pornographic films get some men off. It is a pleasing comparison: one that basically erases the history of oppression and misogyny to which women have been subjected through the dehumanization of pornographic imagery, but not incorrect.

Here's the deal: this is a film with the tagline There's more to life than a happy ending. A pornographic pun, to be sure. And the film promises to be irreverent, to be relatively sexy/pornographic, and then to end without a happy ending: something at the very least non-normative. But it doesn't know how to do that.

There is not more to life than a happy ending in this film. It is a film with a very earnest message that made me want to throw something. It purports to know how to have sex correctly – the true way to enjoy sex with someone (in case you weren't aware) is really to see someone else, to share something, to make love. I mean, look, I'm glad that is good for some people, and I am not saying that that's, like, a bad way to have sex or anything, but to behave as though the way that you like to have sex is somehow the correct way to do it, seems... well, I'll be generous and say: a bit short sighted.

And Don Jon is totally invested in its main character learning exactly this lesson. In fact, like other recent comedies about grown men turning into adults and leaving their childhoods behind (Knocked Up, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, Ted), Don Jon links growing up or "becoming a man" to something very specific that the film argues is "what adults do". In the case of Don Jon, "what adults do" is watch less porn than they did when they were teens/kids/whatever. And they make love with the women with whom they have sex: they don't simply engage in "one-sided" sex.

This is all fine, I suppose. I jut don't relate to this kind of thing in any way.

Maybe I need to grow up and start having sex the "right" way. Paging Dr. Freud.

Why I Still Care about the Oscars

This was the most exciting Oscar year in recent memory. So many of us had no idea who was going to win what, and as it turned out there was even a tie. I was all about it. My friends and I drank heavily, ate brownies and cheesecake, and spent a lot of time criticizing Anne Hathaway's dress (which, in case you hadn't noticed got worse as the night went on because of all of the creasing that fabric did around her midriff.) When I woke up after the Oscar ceremony on February 25th, however, everyone was trashing the Oscars.

• Andy Griffith wasn't in the "In Memoriam" tribute (with all of the people who passed away last year).
• Lupe Ontiveros wasn't in the "In Memoriam" tribute.
• Michelle Obama shouldn't have handed out Best Picture.
• Ang Lee shouldn't have won for Best Director while places that do visual effects go bankrupt.
• Seth MacFarlane was racist and sexist and not very funny.

So much griping! It almost ruined the good time I had while watching the Oscars. I don't want to say too much about all of this, but what I find most irritating about all of the criticisms of the Oscars is that people are mad that the Academy of Motion Pictures didn't do what they wanted the Academy to do. I love Lupe Ontiveros and I love Andy Griffith (I watched Matlock every day for five years, actually), but who cares if they are included in the Academy's tribute to the recently deceased? As Howard Beal says in Network, what's that got to do with the price of rice? There are more interesting things to complain about if you're gonna complain about the Academy than that Whitney Houston (she was left off last year) or Lupe Ontiveros or Farrah Fawcett (she was left off in 2010) didn't make the In Memoriam slideshow.

People are also complaining about Seth MacFarlane. He was racist and sexist and irritating. Um... I know these people saw Ted because it got an Oscar nomination, so I also know that they expected MacFarlane to be all of those things. I find him annoying at all times, but I was there for the awards and the stars, not Mr. MacFarlane. (The truth is, everyone trashes the Oscar host. Every single year. And so there was no way MacFarlane could win with this one. Though I prefer my entertainment to be less racist and sexist as a rule.)

Charlize is pissed!

As for the awards, I am always hearing, well so-and-so should have won that award. We want our favorites to do well. Understandably. Imagine, though, that there are 10 of us together in a room and we all attempt, together, to come up with the best movie of the year. It's true, perhaps, that Argo would not be at the top of our lists – maybe a few of us. But, then, our choices would probably be really contentious. My favorite movie of the year was Beasts of the Southern Wild. My friend Matthew's was Compliance. Julie's was Zero Dark Thirty. Michael's was The Master. Now, I pretty much hated Compliance, though I really liked the other two. But my friends are equally negative about my favorites and each other's favorites. Of course they are.

Turns out, people don't all like the same things.

So, Best Picture is always going to be a film that people can agree on. A likeable, fairly good film, that a majority of people can get behind. Your typical winner is The King's Speech or Chicago or Slumdog Millionaire or Braveheart. None of these films is particularly brilliant. None is particularly heinous. My point is that The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men and Silence of the Lambs are outliers. They are the exception not the rule. The rule is Titanic and Forrest Gump and Gladiator.

But I love the Academy Awards. I love them because they make a list of some of the important films that captured the popular year in film. I love them even more because they work like a kind of baseline against which to make our own lists. They draw attention to specific aspects of film. During the Oscars, some friends and I were griping about the film scores that we were nominated. Dayne didn't like any of them except Dario Marianelli's Anna Karenina score, a score I thought was sort of boring. My response was: The best scores of the year are The Master, Skyfall, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Lincoln, and Cloud Atlas. These are facts.

I think my point is that what the Oscars do is give us a frame for choosing our own favorites – for sharing these favorites with each other (sometimes heatedly, I will admit), and more importantly, for seeing other movies.

But I don't care if my favorites win the Oscar or not. I am happy when they do, of course; it means all sorts of pay raises and awareness, etc. But a good film is still a good film.

The bad part about this year's Oscars was that there weren't as many films in total nominated as usual. More films and more actors need more attention, and the Academy focuses that attention every year, so they need to spread that love around!

A little perspective. I live in a small city in New Hampshire at the moment, so I don't have much access to films as they come out. I'm catching up on 2012 right now: last night I saw Ann Hui's quiet, beautiful film A Simple Life and a day or two ago I saw a cute Flemish romantic film with two teenage boys called North Sea, Texas and last week I finally got to see Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Kid with a Bike. These films are all pretty excellent, and all got great reviews, but they're not in our multiplexes (they don't come to Hanover NH) and so fewer people see them than see the big bad behemoths like Les Misérables. If we want to talk about the Academy ignoring films or actors or directors, we ought to start with the excellent cinema coming from places around the world that are not the United States. There are some awesome films out there that aren't even on the Academy's radar.

I've started to ramble, but what I want to make sure I say is that the Academy is going to get it wrong. Of course six thousand odd people aren't all going to agree with you. This is a surprise?

I try not to spend time hoping they'll agree with me. I prefer to compare my own tastes to the Academy's. Like I would with any old friend.

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 11 of 13

Hitchcock

1 Nomination

• Hair & Makeup

Director: Sacha Gervasi

Cast: Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Danny Huston, Scarlett Johannson, Toni Collette, Jessica Biel, James D'Arcy

Apparently no one in the Academy liked this picture, because although Mirren looked like a shoo-in for a Best Actress nomination, she was beat out by five actresses, none of whom is as famous as she. Mirren already has an Oscar, of course (the year The Queen came out no one talked about anyone else), so the other five needed their nominations much more than she, and I can't feel too sorry for her, especially since her role really isn't that interesting here. Truth be told, the acting really isn't the showcase in Hitchcock, and Anthony Hopkins (despite being an Oscar-winner himself) was apparently on no one's radar as a Best Actor candidate. Now, I liked this movie. I thought it was charming and quite funny in a totally unrealistic, whimsical sort of way that the film cultivated. But I thought the prosthetics used to make Hopkins look like Hitchcock were decidedly unsuccessful and did nothing but look like prosethetics. I didn't believe them for one second, and indeed found Hopkins' look so distracting that I couldn't take even his serious scenes seriously. And though the Academy has often nominated the people-in-fat-suits look for Best Makeup (Norbit, Click, The Nutty Professor), those films rarely have gone on to win the Oscar. Don't expect Sacha Gervasi's film to take home a little gold man either.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #38 out of 65

Chasing Ice

1 Nomination

• Original Song: J. Ralph

Director: Jeff Orlowski

Cast: James Balog, Svavar Jonatansson, Adam LeWinter, Louie Psihoyos, Kitty Boone, Orlowski

This is one of the only nominees this year that I haven't seen. I guess I'll see it eventually, but Chasing Ice has not been released anywhere near where I live. If you haven't heard the nominated song, you should click here to hear it. It's a song about – well, actually, I am not quite sure what it's about (maybe growing old before one ought to?) – anyway its melody is quite beautiful. It is also sung by Scarlett Johansson, who goes quite flat on the low notes, but whose voice is lovely when it is in range.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not Ranked - Documentary

Ted

1 Nomination

• Song: Seth MacFarlane & Walter Murphy

Director: MacFarlane

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel McHale, Patrick Warburton, Patrick Stewart, Jessica Barth

I really disliked this movie, but I should perhaps start by saying that I love Mark Wahlberg. I love Mark Wahlberg so much that I think his movies are worth seeing just because he is in them even when they are terrible movies. Still, Ted made me pretty irritated. The Oscar-nominated song in the movie, which plays over the opening credits, is charming enough, I suppose, if unmemorable, but I really want to just take this moment to voice my complete bafflement over the exclusion of John Legend's awesome "Who Did That to You?" from the Best Original Song category. Seriously, that song is so good and it comes at a crucial turning point in Django Unchained that is instantly memorable. My companions and I all left the theatre talking about that song. With Ted I left the theatre talking about Giovanni Ribisi.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #56 out of 65

Teddy Bears and Fantasies

Ted is an interesting little movie, although I think it is more interesting to talk about than it is to watch. I must confess to not liking Seth MacFarlane's debut film very much.

Now, I know Ted is a nostalgic fantasy movie that is more than a little preoccupied with the 1980s and what it means to have grown up in that decade, and I know that because of this I probably should have liked the movie, but the truth is, I just didn't believe it.

But there's a talking teddy bear that has come to life, you'll say, you'd have to be crazy to believe it. The thing, however, that I didn't believe is that Mila Kunis could ever have spent four years – and want to spend any more – with a guy like the main character in this movie (played, with his usual, admirable pluck, by Mark Wahlberg).

But honestly. This is a completely predictable movie about a grown man who refuses to be an adult. In case you've missed all of them, this is also the subject of each and every one of Judd Apatow's movies, and numerous other films – the Zac Efron vehicle 17 Again comes instantly to mind. The thing that is different about Ted is that instead of the usual bevy of friends who are bad influences (often played by Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, etc.) Wahlberg's John Bennett has only one bad-influence amigo and that's his childhood teddy bear, who has come magically to life, smokes a lot of pot, throws an amazing party, knows a ton of celebrities, and has sex with hookers.

What Ted is really about is the nostalgia that men in their thirties feel for having had to give up all of this fun in order to have a job, pay the rent, keep their girlfriends happy, and stay out of county lock-up. Ted traffics in the destruction of all of these societal rules. Instead of being the responsible adult his girlfriend wishes him to be, John screws up again and again, and all because of Teddy. Teddy (it's a little obvious, so forgive me) is a symbol for this inner adolescent that John's girlfriend is asking him to give up.

But that's not how Ted is framed. Instead, the filmmakers treat the image of a man giving up on adolescence as equivalent to a man being forced to give up his best friend. The girlfriend is asking him to do something that really ought not to be done. She is asking him to choose between his best friend and her. It's a win-lose situation, and in typical bros-before-hoes fashion, John chooses his friend (and his fun) over the girl he loves.

Ted is a romantic comedy, however, and of the most sentimental variety. So in the end, John gets both his friend and the girl. The girlfriend decides that actually she loves him because of his childishness, his indecision, and his lack of ambition and not in spite of those qualities. She decides she'd rather have him, warts and all, than be without him. And this is the part of the tale I just couldn't buy. It's fine for grown men to wax nostalgic about the childhoods they gave up when they got their day-jobs; it's fine for us to miss the good old days when we could sleep until eleven and then wake up and smoke pot and play video games for the rest of the day; I also think it's fine (admirable even) to attempt to relive those glory days of youth – be that by taking long vacations with lots of drinking or by quitting those day-jobs and going off to live a life off the grid.

But you can't also expect to get the girl.

To give John the girl at the end is a fantasy I just can't believe in the least. You can wish to relive your college years but you can't also wish to have a beautiful grown woman with a career on your arm while you do it. Pardon me, but grow up.

One last thing: Giovanni Ribisi is in this movie and he's great. The film thinks of him primarily as a kind of cartoon character, but Ribisi fleshes him out and makes him into a total weirdo. I loved him.