Sixteen Volts

In this Oscar night, I believe that I (or anybody reading this, for that matter) could with minuscule effort find five movies in the list of 2005 movies far more deserving to be in the Best Picture category than most of the movies that have been nominated Best Picture. And judging from the box office, some of my selections would even be movies that people actually wanted to see. The same goes double for the Best Actor and Best Actress categories, whose real selection criterion is so obviously transparent that it's not even a self-parody any more. Since no real money actually rides on Oscars, Hollywood doesn't even have to pretend that these main categories are about anything else than ideology. They should just make up new categories "Most Leftist", "Most Transgressive" and "Most Preachy" and be done with it.

Last night we watched the original "Sunset Boulevard" for the first time. I had never seen it, but have listened to the Webber musical soundtrack so many times that I'm familiar with the content. Even so, it wasn't until last night that I realized that the name of the film itself is a metaphor. Oh geeze. It was also strange to watch how utterly empty the old Los Angeles depicted in the movie was, compared to the mental model that I have acquired from the countless movies and TV shows made in the past few decades. I guess that back in the fifties a million dollars bought a lot more real estate than it buys today.

I noticed that they are turning the musical into a film version, and hopefully it won't suck as horribly as "Phantom of the Opera", in which the moviemakers couldn't decide whether they want the actors to do stage acting or movie acting, and the former looks really stupid when done in a movie. This movie also totally drove in the point that Joe Queenan made in his book "Red Lobster, White Trash, & the Blue Lagoon": the music of Phantom is basically a series of grandiose thuds more suitable for a movie trailer than an actual movie itself. The rhythm of the movie is also completely off: several times I hoped for some song to end and thought that it finally would, but no, it just started again from the next verse.

After we watched the new episode of SNL, I noticed that City TV was playing "Showgirls", and it was totally uncut as far as I can tell. The uncut version was basically no different from anything that you might see on Skinemax. It's actually pretty funny how Eszterhas and Verhoeven tricked some serious real actors to participate in this soft porno: the memoir of Eszterhas gives some additional background information about the production process. I find it hard to believe that Kyle MacLachlan really thought that he was making an art movie, considering the scene where buck naked Berkley was giving him a lapdance. But hey, I'm not complaining: as they said in The Simpsons, this movie is the greatest gift that a wife can give to her husband, and the wife can at the same time enjoy watching the friendship between the dancer and the seamstress.

I remember once watching bits of this movie when Spike TV played it with all nudity edited out: surprisingly enough, what remained after these massive cuts was still a full-length movie, and it was longer than the ten minutes that I would have guessed from my memory of the main character being constantly topless. Movies played on Spike TV and TBS are, of course, otherwise unwatchable for going to a commercial break every ten minutes.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 6:40 AM