So Many Mexicans: An Oscar Story

Oscar Nominations
Not good enough for Best Picture apparently, Pan's Labyrinth (the all-time best movie I've never seen) has picked up six Oscar nominations just days after breaking the language barrier and successfully expanding into the wider U.S. market. For all the nominations, if you missed them everywhere else and got all sweaty and anxious and stumbled here by chance during your frantic search for answers, click HERE to where IMDB's given them all a very nice layout I could never hope to emulate on a blog page that rarely posts my pictures in the right place and makes gigantic gaps between paragraphs that make me spend up to four whole minutes correcting them everytime I post.

As you can see, the nominations are largely as was expected. Of course, there's always something (or usually many things) worth griping about, and I'll pick Borat's nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Okay, it was a funny movie, and that constitutes creative comedic writing. But COME ON. There wasn't even a proper script for the whole movie, probably just a "plan of attack" in terms of narrative and I doubt scripting exceeded funny ways of questioning participants and, later, voice-over (something which should never alone constitute Oscar-calibre writing no matter how clever or funny). Alas, it was Borat's only nomination, so perhaps they simply wanted to not snub it entirely for fear of getting shat on by the press, as would have been inevitable. In fact, forget "perhaps", I'm willing to bet that's EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED. Because the Academy does this every year to some poor movie, throwing in a sympathy vote while not really wanting it to win a damn thing out of fear of... whatever. Last year they had to go a step further and give Brokeback several nominations and even the sympathy Director win (which it deserved anyway) just to make it seem like they were being fair in snubbing it for Best Picture. Everyone watching knew what they'd done, they just couldn't prove it.

So sure it happens all the time, it's just that this Borat case seems to have exposed many Academy members as apparently not knowing what a screenplay is. Odd really. But given Poseidon made it to the big screen, not entirely surprising.

As Before
An unoriginal topic (already covered last week), but worth mentioning twice because this goes beyond discussing just the quality of the show. Basically, Heroes is killing me. I'll get to that in a minute.

First of all I'll ask: how the hell is ths such a popular hit over in the States? It's not that I can't see why people would watch it, which may seem to contradict my previous sentence, but rather the show is, if Monday's episode is anything to go by, moving at the pace of a snail. You know Lost last year? How nothing ever actually happened? Okay, well Lost progressed more in a single second-season flashback than Heroes has in its first three episodes so far, and the most recent episode was, in that respect, completely ridiculous. Oh, and only 39 minutes long, which may have contributed (ever so slightly). But yeah, at the moment it's all just a bunch of disconnected threads waiting way too long to get tied together (which will obviously happen eventually to some degree) meaning we get maybe six or seven minutes of each character's story per episode. And meaning nothing happens unless they force it in ridiculous ways. And boy oh boy do they force it in ridiculous ways. Just because someone can survive absolutely anything, doesn't mean they'd die every fucking day under normal circumstances. For fuck's sake. Claire, who possesses this power, has (in the space of three episodes) head her entire neck twisted around when accidentally hit by a football tackle (uh-huh), and has now had her neck impaled on a spike during a sex attack by a character who made no sense and made one of the shallowest, most stereotypical turns to evil-doer in TV history. What was I saying? Oh yeah: why is show so popular? Well we've established that nothing happens, there are nearly more ads than minutes of show, we barely spend enough time with characters to learn their names and that the show finds ridiculous means to force things to happen to make otherwise dull story threads interesting. What I don't understand is why millions of people have been happy to wait week after week for more of this. But they have. Last night in the States 24 barely beat it in the ratings. And in 24 shit happens all the time. 24 should be Bauer-ing Heroes.

Sound like a show-quality rant? Well it is and it isn't. My question about why the hell so many damn people have to be watching Heroes stems from my frustration at having millions of people see, and subconsciously commit to memory, a plot device I came up with two years ago (when it was original and innovative) which is getting butchered in the interests of shallow Hollywood entertainment. I've often mentioned, here and around, that man-in-a-bear-costume movie I want to make someday. You know, the one that I told you about while you stood there nodding and smiling and thinking to yourself Yeah, good luck with that, or maybe I hope this nutter hasn't got a knife. I'm well aware I'm the only person in the world who thinks this can be a good movie, and that's enough support for me. But anyway, in Heroes the Japanese guy (whose character and story are the only decent parts of the show so far) finds a comic book in the first two episodes (I forget which, they were played back-to-back here) which shows him himself and what's going to happen to him. When the comic book was introduced I was hoping that was it. It didn't seem to have too big a place in the show beyond making the guy want to contact the comic's author and, yes, I thought that was it. Never to be seen again. I'll explain why that left me relieved in a second. But then this third episode aired and took it further. He saw something in the comic book: a girl getting hit by a truck. And he used the book to find the location, find the girl and save the day. Pretty cool plot device.

Yeah, well I've had basically the same thing happen in the first act of the bear movie since April 2005. Main character, we'll call him Bear for now, is a bear wandering the streets of a big city and who essentially (eventually) amounts to a superhero. He stumbles upon a poster in the window of a comic book store. The poster depicts a superhero: a bear in a big city, like him, only our Bear isn't a hero just yet. He goes inside, buys the comic and in the early hours of the next morning is reading a page in which a man walking by on his cellphone gets into an argument with a lady screaming at him from an apartment window several floors up. Then THIS EXACT THING HAPPENS in front of Bear in real life. Next in the comic book: a young woman is followed at a distance by a man in a car, just across the road from the argument moments earlier. In the comic book, the superhero bear character tails them and finds the woman being attacked in an alleyway around the corner, and he steps in to heroically save the day. Bear then looks up from the comic and sees the woman and the car, sure enough, just across the street, and doesn't hesitate in tailing them, convinced that she's in trouble as depicted in the thus-far believable comic book. He find the woman and the man in the alleyway and saves the day. Thus, a hero is born. Of course there's a little more to it than that, and it plays out much less damsel-in-distress-ish than it sounds. You need to understand these events in the context of the character at that point - it's not as shallow, straightforward and simple as I described it, but the other details are beside the point for now. On top of that, the comic book device also forms both a symbolic and physical link to that other film I blogged about a couple of weeks back, Paris. It wasn't just something that happened that could be replaced if someone else did it in the meantime. It was a crucial element. And now the intrigue that goes with seeing such a device play out for the first time, drawing the audience into what amounts to the film's inciting incident, has been royally fucked in the ass by having Heroes expose millions of people to such a plot device already. I'm not saying millions of people would ever see my bear movie, just that enough will have seen Heroes such that my use of the device will be labelled as a rip-off. I can handle coming up with something that I think is original and interesting and then finding out someone else did it forty years ago. Wasn't so original afterall perhaps. But to come up with something, search the net and find no trace of it having been done anywhere, and then have some hack making a shit show, but nonetheless in a position to actually execute the ideas he has, use the same thing a year later in an emphatic wasting of potential is, yes, somewhat frustrating.

Fortunately, Heroes is walking in all the right directions right now toward setting itself up for homage. The main themes of my film, which admittedly took 18 months to figure out and meant the film was for a long while written on instinct, put it in a perfect position such that the comic thing can act, for anyone who's seen the show, as an homage to Heroes to in turn further the themes its trying to explore through contrast. Or something. But I think it can be done. So that way people don't look at the comic device and say "thief" but rather wonder what point's trying to be made. Of course, I'd rather I didn't have to do that and had people think I'd come up with something original and innovative, but it's not an awful second prize I suppose. Maybe. I'll sob for a couple more days and then get over it.

Lemontree
Been down to Murvale Reserve on Monday and had a quick look around the Macleans fields yesterday to figure out how I'm shooting my "forest scene," and I think that while I might need to rely a little on coverage at times just in case, I can probably shoot most of the shots I had planned, which is awesome. So enough worrying about a movie that's years off if I even get to it at all, the news is all good so far for a current, relevant project at least. So far. I won't breathe a sigh of relief yet until certain casting-related things are sorted out. No pressure. Ahem.