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The Righteous Prick 2012 Oscar Breakdown

The 2012 Oscar Nominations were announced for what I believe was the worst year in movies since 2005 (Crash beat Brokeback Mountain while Munich, my favorite movie of that year, never had a shot despite being nominated).  Well this year has been the movie of the overrated and the boring.  I have some positive things to say about some of this year’s nominees, but that wouldn’t be as much fun so I will try to keep the positivity to a minimum.  For reference here is my recap of 2011 films (before I saw the excellent We Need To Talk About Kevin):

https://jlcauvin.com/?p=3180

BEST PICTURE

In my movie wrap up of 2011 I rated Hugo as the most overrated film of the year and The Tree of Life in the top 5 most overrated films of the year, as well as the most pretentious film of all time.  Both nominated for best picture.  Awful.  And Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is nominated.  It is the only film of the ten nominated that I have not seen.  And I have no intention of seeing it.  Not because of any 9/11 movie fear or discomfort (United 93 is one of the greatest movies I have ever seen, but the academy only had the courage to nominate it for Best Director back in 2006, not best picture), but because I find the child actor so irritating in the commercials and previews that I am glad he lost his fictional father.  That is how annoying I find him.

I have no problem with the other nominees and generally found the films to range from adequate to enjoyable.  However here are the movies I think are clear snubs: The Ides of March, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, 50/50, We Need To Talk About Kevin and my long shot, but personal favorite Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  The fact that WNTTAK and 50/50 were completely shut out is a travesty.

But thank goodness Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Drive were not nominated for Best Picture.

BEST ACTOR

When is Joseph Gordon-Levitt going to get some goddamn respect?!  500 Days of Summer shut out in 2009 and then 50/50 shut out this year.  It makes me like JGL more to think that he is being stiffed by the industry because he does not play politics.

The nominees are fine I guess with that one omission.  And I am surprised Michael Fassbender did not get nominated for Shame. Or that his penis was not nominated for best supporting actor.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jonah Hill gets nominated for playing a fat quiet guy.  The fu*k out of here!

Kenneth Branagh should win this, but Christopher Plummer has earned it (and his performance as Mike Wallace in The Insider was not nominated at all in 1999 – my top snub I can remember)

BEST ACTRESS

To quote Bill Burr, “Rooney Mara had to be fu*king Daniel Craig and if she wasn’t she deserves an award for best pantomiming of fu*king a guy.”  Agreed.  She looked great, she was great. I think she should win.  Normally I bet Meryl Streep against the field because she is better than everyone, but The Iron Lady was not good.  Like not good enough to tear her chances down.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Jessica Chastain was in 147 movies this year so she deserves this. And she was great in The Help. And I think it would be funny if the only award for the The Help went to a white woman.

BEST ANIMATED FILM

They all sucked this year.  Seriously, every animated movie I saw this year sucked. What a disappointment. Shame on you Pixar and shame on you Kung Fu Panda 2. I expect better from you guys.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Rise of the Planet of The Apes – it needs to win something dammit!

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Really good category except Tinker Tailor is nominated.  Really – a good adaptation? Was the book long, boring and dreary also or was that the gift of the screenwriter?  Hugo can go fu*k itself.  I think Moneyball wins simply because it was a great book about statistics that was made into a solid (but not great in my opinion) film.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Bridesmaids got nominated for best original screenplay?  So I guess making a slightly less funny Old School/Hangover (I, not the lazy II) is now original!  I’d like to see The Artist win because it would be weird to have a film with 10 words of dialogue win a screenwriting award.

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Movie of the Week – Bridesmaids (Plus Two Awful…

Yesterday I went to see Bridesmaids.  Before reading reviews of the film I was convinced that given its all-female cast (including Kristen Wiig, who has managed to be in a record-setting 117% of all Saturday Night Live sketches) and Judd Apatow association, the movie would be unfunny and extremely long.  Allow me to say I was wrong on the first part.  It was solidly funny.  Not great, or classic or even in the class of The Hangover or Old School (for my money the absolute best of the frat-ensemble style comedies of the last decade), but there were plenty of funny moments.  Sadly, many of the funny moments seemed Apatow-ish in the inability to leave the audience wanting more.  Several scenes, including one in which two friends compete in outdoing each other’s engagement party toasts, exhibit an inability to stop at three funny jokes and instead go for nine.  Like microcosms of Apatow movies which always seem to go on about twenty-five minutes too long, the scenes demonstrate that there can be too much of a good thing.  I won’t spoil the film, but I will say that it is a funnier movie than it is a quality movie which, for a summertime comedy, is probably more important.

But rest assured, just because I was not given enough from Bridesmaids to be angry about doesn’t mean that my movie going experience was a total wash.  I saw two previews at Bridesmaids that represented a new low for Hollywood.  The first was for a new film called Warrior.  Here is the trailer:

Every sport was around for decades before inspirational movies came out about it.  Rocky was 100 years in the making, Hoosiers was 40 years, but MMA gets its Rocky approximately 7 weeks later (rough estimate).  But given its rich tradition of 3 pay-per-view events and some backyard brawls on YouTube they are ready for their close up.  Granted, the movie is a genius marketing strategy (why wait for the sport to earn the movie, we’ll make the movie and bring movie people to the sport), but it is also obvious that the movie has to be a piece of sh*t.  Here’s why:

1) It tells you the entire story. Any movie that tells you the entire plot in the preview is a bad movie.  This is an ironclad rule that has been 100% accurate ever since the preview for Macaulay Culkin’s “Ritchie Rich.”

2) MMA is not inspiring.  Sports that take about ten minutes time to end do not have the requisite time build up for inspiration, no matter how heavy-handed the soaring violin music is in the preview.  Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman doing the soundtrack for Bloodsport would not have made it The Natural.

3) Lights Out Syndrome – The movie looks exactly like someone copied the plot of the FX series Lights Out.  Although I liked Lights Out, copying a series that got cancelled after one season does not seem like a blue print for success.

The other notable movie preview was just flat out insulting.  It was for the new Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake tour de force – “Friends With Benefits.”  Here is the preview:

You may recongize this as a remake of a movie that came out 4 months ago:

Which was inspired by part of a movie that came out two months before that one:

Most geeks thought it absurd when The Hulk was re-made/re-booted a mere five years after the Ang Lee disaster.  Well, apparently the romantic comedy audience appears much more tolerant.  These movies pretend to flip the romantic comedy on its head and make it more modern, but it is the same story over and over again with the same happy ending (the modern exception being 500 Days of Summer, the best romantic comedy I’ve ever seen and the only known antidote for the poison that is the three above films).  I guess my weekly movie advice would be two things I did not expect to write: go see Bridesmaids, but skip the trailers.

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The Hangover Effect

If you read this blog you belong to a few select groups of people:

1) You are a comedian that enjoys a well-worded stream of misery.

2) You are a regular person that enjoys a well-worded stream of misery.

3) You are my mom.

One of the things I have taken both pride in and offense to is how fellow comedians have characterized my blog.  A friend repeatedly tells me that my blog makes him feel better about his comedy, basically because I represent the floor of human emotion when it comes to comedy.  Another comedian told me that when he reads my blog, it feels like he is reading the words of a man alone in a cabin on top of a windy, snow-capped mountain.  And then it dawned on me, comedy has so many bad things about it that I may have to be done with it, in spite of my pleasure in writing and telling jokes.    Comedy is like the best sex in the world with the worst person on Earth.  Ladies, it would be like finding out the greatest sex you ever had was with Adolph Hitler.  Men, it would be like the greatest sex in your life being with Kathy Griffin.  I will try to keep this under 5,000 words, but if I don’t, just pretend it is an article from the New Yorker on what it is like being a no-name comedian in NYC.  So here are the things that are crushing my love of comedy.

Comedy Is About Characters, Not Comedy

I have dubbed what I see in comedy as “The Hangover Effect.”  The 4 main comedic elements of the Hangover, were as follows:

  • The crazy man – Alan (Zach Galifianakis – the guy with the beard)
  • The nerd – Stu (Ed Helms)
  • The cover boy/douchebag (Bradley Cooper)
  • Ethnic Goof – Ken Jeong

The Hangover was wildly successful (not to mention very funny), but it either culminated or represented a dangerous trend (at least in my opinion) in comedy: the increasing compartmentalization of comedy into different archetypes.  Every ensemble comedy cast (not to mention each episode of Live At Gotham) appears to have a bearded wild man (spouting non sequiturs or off the wall comments a plus), a nerd, someone telegenic (often a good place to squeeze in a female comic) and some sort of ethnic grab bag that often, but certainly not always, feeds into Middle America’s sensibilities.

Now I am all for diversity of style and voice in comedy and I believe ethnic (and to a lesser degree, gender) diversity will flow naturally from that desire to hear different voices and styles.  But more and more I get a feeling that movies like The Hangover have ushered in a new development for what people want (and what they will be given) in comedy in general (not just comedy films) – funny will get trumped by type.  This does not fit for the already established acts in comedy, but for up and coming comedians I think it may apply.  As a test – check the upcoming  Summer movie “Bridesmaids.”  I’m sure it was pitched as “The Hangover for women!”  but like the WNBA, women may dig that, but most men will not.  But, if by some minor miracle, it is a success, look for that to become the barometer for female comedians.  There is a fat, overly sexed character featured prominently in the preview.  If the movie is a success and that character is the break out character/actress then I suggest all the female comedians start stuffing their faces with food.

Social Media

Being in comedy, means having to dive headfirst into the emotional wasteland of social media.  I use it to post jokes, post info about gigs or comedy videos I have done and occasionally on issues of some social relevance.  But being a comedian immersed in social media is like showering in prison – you have to do it, but you constantly feel violated.

I honestly believe that how many likes and comments you can consistently generate is inversely proportional to how intelligent you and your friends are.  I don’t mean for things like “I’m on The Tonight Show” or “I got married,” but rather for things like “My dick just murdered Lady Gaga.” (LMFAO).

Beyond comedy, my wing of the Social Media Prison, I think the amount of people incapable of keeping feelings to themselves is downright frightening.  I once posted a joke on a woman’s comment to which she responded, “I don’t know what that means, but seriously today is not the day!”  Ok, well here is a suggestion – keep your feelings to yourself – if they are so powerful and important why are you posting them on the same place where you describe “yummy salads” and pop songs you like?  Facebook is like a club where I thought people went to have fun, but half the people are on the dance floor only to feel like someone cares about them.

And if you are friends with comedians you probably receive 50 invites to shows a week.  When I invite people to my monthly show I do it individually (takes a lot longer), but to ensure that the only people invited (unless I make a mistake) are in the city of the show and either performing on the show or non-comedians who may show up as audience.  But that is the professionally courteous thing to do, which, like basic social graces, is something foreign to many comedians.

And lastly, I know I write a blog and I tweet, but I am a good writer and capable of funny remarks.  Given the sheer volume of bloggers and tweeters I am in the minority in both.  And without fame credentials I am merely lumped in with the rest of the no-name illiterates out there.  As Groucho Marx said, “I would never want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member.”

Comedy – The Most Hypocritical of the Arts

Comedians are the first to bash awards shows for being pretentious, self-congratulatory and useless.  And yet, every time you turn around there is a new awards show for comedy or comedy related matters.  And the pandering for these things is relentless and like the MTV Awards or Wrestlemania, time will simply bestow a legitimacy on the awards that they never deserved.  It reminds me of an “alternative (barf)” comedian who I was recently reminded of that will say “I’m not going to say I look like a combination of blank and blank.”  Now the laughs he receives are not for his meta-approach to comedy, mocking anyone who has ever made a look-a-like joke but rather, are for the resemblance itself.  But the comedian will entertain the fantasy that people “get what he is about.”

Comedians love to talk about art and pretending like they are all Bill Hicks disciples that would never sell out.  But if you have ever attended an open mic where a comedian with some heat is doing five minutes the ball-licking laughter is unbearable.  Comedians cannot wait to attach themselves to the “next hot thing,” just like any desperate actress in Hollywood would.  But somehow no one has misconceptions or undue respect for the actress and what she does to get ahead.

Then there are the comedy journalists, who remind me of famous sports journalists.  When a journalist is too close to the subjects or wants to be part of the world they cover (or at least have access to that world) they are no longer a journalist and are now just a cheerleader.  It is sort of like a reporter’s equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – once you get too close to a subject you can no longer effectively report on it.  For example, I am a huge fan of Michael Wilbon of ESPN, except when he is discussing certain athletes.  In those cases he becomes a fan and is no longer credible, which had deleterious effects of his coverage of Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger and Michael Vick, to name a few.  But imagine if Wilbon’s access to ESPN events was contingent on him being only positive about everything in sports and only covering the already industry-approved stars and trends.  Then you would have the comedy writers.  When access, and not truth is your main objective then a lot will be left out.  Never a word about bringers, open casting calls or any other myriad of fraudulent practices in comedy.  How about something about how feature acts have been getting paid the same thing for about 20 years now – is there any other business where an employee’s pay has not been adjusted in 20 years?  Or about the fact that one of the major industry showcases is skewed towards searching “character” based comedians (I don’t think The Hangover Theory is that off)?  Off course not, because criticism of these thing might mean fewer free tickets.

Good Things Happen To Bad People

I remember in 6th grade seeing some students cheat on a quiz and I was not a snitch (because in wealthy private schools “snitches get… fewer rides in Mercedes Benz cars from their friends’ parents”), but I remember complaining to my mom.  And she told me a terrible lie.  She said “eventually it will catch up to them.”  Anyone who knows someone who works in finance knows that this is a horrible lie.  In America if you are rich and you flaunt the rules, you often times, just get richer.

Several years ago (I think it was about 34 years ago), I had booked Craig Ferguson and told a more established comedian this.  My thinking was not one of arrogance because the other comedian was much further along in their career and accolades, but it was sort of a response to a comment.  Well, a few minutes later this comedian was bashing me to some other comedians (that I knew and respected) behind my back (my girlfriend at the time overheard).  Well that comedian, with his insecurites and ill will is now a pretty big deal.  And I am still touting Ferguson as my only substantial credit.  I feel like Woody Allen could write a movie about it called “Way Too Late With Craig Ferguson.”

Comedy Leaves You Lonely

Of all the highs and lows that I have had from comedy over the last 8 years, the lowest may have occurred last Friday.  I was at the wedding of my oldest friend (known him 26 of my 31 years).  This is a guy who visited me in college,only to see me ride the bench for a basketball game.  This is a guy who visited me in law school down in DC.  This is also a guy who had the guts to voice concerns (and speak to my family) that my engagement of a few years ago was a disaster waiting to happen (it was the relationship equivalent of the financial collapse of 2008 – and he saw it coming a mile away).  But ever since moving back to NYC from law school, more and more nights, that could have been spent socializing were spent in basements writing and telling jokes for a profession that is, in many ways, dying as hard as print journalism.  Eventually I stopped getting asked to do 95% of stuff and my requests for comedy support went largely unanswered until I found myself at the miscellaneous table at the wedding of my oldest friend.  And worst of all, for someone who enjoys complaining and finding the wrong in others, I have to own up to the fact that I have made the choice to pursue comedy ahead of other things that should matter more and the blame lies with me.

So like a degenerate gambler I continue to double down on comedy, but now it is clear that I don’t have much left to gamble with.  So I will keep writing and complaining and performing, but for the first time in 8 years I am genuinely looking for something else to do with my life besides comedy.  Maybe I will start a rock band.  That can’t be too difficult.  All I need is a Mac, an autotune machine and some angry, real musician to bitch about how I am ruining music.