Best Picture 2015 Reviews

This weekend is the Academy Award so I had to hurry and watch every movie nominated for Best Picture to give a brief review of each.
These were the movies:

American Sniper
The Imitation Game
Birdman
Selma
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Whiplash
The Theory of Everything 

I don't know what the rules are for nominations are but there can be between 5 and 10 nominees. This year there are 8 and I watched them all as the Internet quality finally recovered here in Latin America. I could buy all these on bootleg DVDs on the street, costing maybe $1 each, but that seems old fashioned  and all the dialogue would be in Spanish. So I watched them all on various streaming services although efforts are being made to shut down these sites because, well, it's blatant copyright infringement. But that's a topic for another day. Right? People are nuts! Christians believe a virgin mother gave birth to the son of the creator of the universe. This man was crucified and then came back to life, not as a zombie, but as a superhero with magic powers of levitation. A woman reports a rape and the same people turn into the world's biggest skeptics and act like she's reporting a UFO abduction. Moses, who lived 120 years, parted the 1700ft deep Red Sea, but 7 billion people driving cars can not affect the climate.  Grown adults are saying, "We should be able to insult all religions equally." and religious zealots promise to kill anyone who insults their religion...and this is somehow confusing for people. There is no predicting human behavior but there are many ways to dramatize it with film.

Film is an approximation of human experience and mostly films fall far short of authenticity. Their reach exceeds their grasp, market research both helps a film find focus and also drains any kind of originality from it. Traditional film theory and traditional story arcs rule cinema in 2015. Veterans like Clint Eastwood and Rookies like Ava DuVernay are almost indistinguishable from one another because all films are boiled down to a common totality. I can hear sweating producers asking, "Where's the Oscar moment?" and the editors scurrying to create one. This is at once required to maintain world order but it also has reduced cinema to an approximation of an approximation, which makes me an approximate pundit of an approximation of an approximation.

These 8 film reviews follow. Spoilers will only be omitted by accident:

City Council Meeting

The Santa Cruz City Council meeting attracted all the flies to the kitchen of despair. The Meat of Democracy was rotting in the sun, all concerned parties filled the city council chambers with blood in their words, one even wore a Roman Toga to draw attention to the ridiculous formal dress of the Council members. The weighty  "Hegemonic Fashion Dictator" insult was hatefully directed at the Mayor as he walked into the chambers followed by cheers and smug nodding on the part of frustrated street zealots. Only the Meth Kingdom was not represented at the meeting because the junkie emissary had been delayed at the railroad trestle. As preliminary introductions were being recorded this emissary was smoking in dreamy bliss from a glass pipe in the shadows of a pile of creosote dipped railroad ties. He was content, even triumphant, the potent smoke made his eyes bulge and his lips swell but his pride transformed from a wriggling worm in the mud to a muscular werewolf on the run, leading the furious pack through a moonlit forest, chasing prey boldly, gnashing at the bony legs of fear, enveloped by lust. His head fell against a sticky wooden railroad tie but he felt nothing but his claws sink into quivering flesh during the foggy hunt.

Wolf Quest Part III

Slightly Better Map

I hate to spoil the story but this map kind of implies I never arrived at the destination of Ellesmere Island, I did not save or even see an Arctic wolf in the wild, and furthermore, I was trying to scribble a route across North America to the Arctic and ended up in Central America. So you might ask what went wrong...and that's the main point of my tale which I will begin again now.

A quest like this is only accomplished with allies, surprise help when I least expected it and while I did have a few scenarios like that I have to admit that it was mostly the opposite, mostly at the critical stages obstacles increased and allies all fled for the hills. Instead of picking up speed with the wind at my back it was more like patching a leaky boat from the moment I hit the water. And every leak I patched was replaced by ten more leaks. And instead of meeting allies who united with my quest to save the wolf I met men who wanted to freebase cocaine in dirty basements, crippled diabetic clowns, dying indigents. I found work in an aluminum factory and was fired two days before Christmas. Christmas Eve did not end with me magically meeting a wildlife biologist at a bar and making love in front of a fireplace. No. Instead, I slept on the street in the van in 0 degree weather. The battery died. I got a parking ticket. The tires all wore down to the metal radial and no one magically appeared to replace them. Instead, I went to NTB Tires and put two new tires on. The old tires disintegrated a day later, the rear wheel bearings seized...and the shitty alignment I bought actually destroyed the two new tires...so I was worse off than before. As soon as I reached the point of no return my battery fell apart, the exhaust system fell apart and the transmission broke. I could go on, but you get the idea. A quest of this magnitude requires a perfect alignment of events to assist me in my goal and I actually had a perfect alignment of events to absolutely prevent me from reaching my goal. I received support, but it was in pursuit of a different goal. One of the critical steps is getting into Canada and I was barred entry into Canada by the border police. That's a pretty serious setback and shortly after that I was stranded in a northern Maine snowbank.

Part Wolf - Part Oggy

This epic beard took a few years to grow so I don't want to give the impression that I left Mexico with a huge beard. No.

Oggy in a Mexican DIY garage

I left Mexico and drove north believing that there was no way I would cross the entire continent without either changing my mind or else convincing at least a handful of people of the importance of my quest. Let me remind you, the climate has destabilized and epic changes are in the future that will be catastrophic for everyone. I believe Mankind will get what he deserves and I have no sympathy for him, but the wolf is totally innocent and I felt something had to be done to raise awareness. So, armed with this argument, I suspected I could not drive the entire distance of North America talking about imperiled Arctic Wolves without gathering a team...and I believed a team could reach Ellesmere Island. And if I failed to assemble a team, or even one other person, then the wolf would not be saved by myself alone and I should resign myself to a world without wolves. Or I could be totally wrong about everything and this quest was merely a projection of my fear and self-loathing. One of these latter scenarios proved to be the reality. The plight of the wolves was not gripping enough for anyone I met.

But what are the details. Of course no one reading this is moved by the plight of the wolf so your only interest will be in the human element, the psychology behind the quest, the obstacles, the pain, the depression, the people involved. If I did not meet one person who was interested in joining me then what kinds of people did I meet?

The year was 2009 and the economy had imploded, mostly because it is a global Ponzi scheme, but specifically because the housing market is exactly as corrupt as everyone suspected, built on a cancerous tumor of manufactured promises and baffling chicanery such as mortgages becoming intangible commodities that are traded amongst nations in an effort to launder exploding debt from metastasized military expenditures. It's ludicrous, everyone knows it, but it's the current paradigm so people go along with it. From 2004-2008 I was living in a decaying house near Venice that was valued at $1.25 Million dollars, purchased for $875,000 a few months before I moved in, and worth $275,000 about 5 years earlier. I went to a  seminar in El Segundo, "How to Buy A House With No Money". I'm not joking. In 2006 I was offered a mortgage on a house worth $650,000 in Venice and I was an unemployed screenwriter...with a car I couldn't drive due to expired registration. 

I said, "I don't know if I can afford that kind of mortgage. What are the payments? $6000 a month?"
The seminar speaker oozed evil and he slicked back his greasy hair and his teeth were so artificially white that I was blinded when he spoke, "No, no, we'll make a plan that you can afford. Don't worry Oggy. This is the perfect time to buy a house."

In 2006 this same line of bullshit was being swallowed all over California and Florida and honestly, it's not dumb. California law prohibits banks from suing home owners if they default on their mortgage and the foreclosed house sells for less than they owed. Maybe Florida has the same prohibition. Some states don't have this prohibition so you might want to do some research before abandoning your mortgage. So, at worst you will simply pay rent, trash a house, and move out when it suits you. Treat all the mortgage payments like wasted rent. My rent was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2500/month, and I had to collect every penny every month to send to the owner, so I could conceivably "buy" a $650,000 house and SAVE MONEY, which explains why so many people did just that. Do I need to explain further to justify my claim that the whole housing market is diseased?

This backstory is important because I was planning to cross the United States in a 1969 Ford Econoline van during a economic depression in the first year of a new President's term. Banks and investment cartels had been revealed to own everything under the sun. All the dirtbags who expected to die before their scam was exposed ended up being invited to the Washington to sort the mess out. The pirates were in charge of the royal jewels and there was nothing anyone could do because decades of counter-insurgency programs had succeeded in creating a castrated citizenry who would call for the blood of anyone caught cheating in sports but would shrug and change the channel when those responsible for bankrupting entire states are given luxury hotel rooms during their time in Washington. Are they in Washington because of grand jury indictments? No, far from it, they are in charge of the show, they have politicians by the balls. These scumbags got caught but could not be punished, they kept their jobs, kept their salaries and America got fucked. People's priorities aren't messed up, but their self-trust has been completely eroded by government propaganda and corporate lies up the ass. So, the default action is to do nothing.

Oggy in his San Francisco plumage, Probably drunk...recruiting warriors for the wolf quest. Who wouldn't follow this guy to Baffin Island?

That's the political climate I was reentering and it occurred to me that this was a historic journey, like wandering the West during 1933 Dust Bowl. It also occurred to me that I was one of the legions of destitute gypsies since I had no money or job but that has always allowed me to blend in. People on the street don't necessarily like me, but they don't distrust me. They open up to me and I listen. I hear the stories of the men on the ground and whether they believe these stories will be remembered or not I think the human tendency to share oral history is still strong. The computer illiterate generation will soon all be dead and my kind of observation will be less important because digital confessions will replace the campfire story. Perhaps the destitute have chosen a life that satisfies a primal need to smell smoke, to recount families lost and trails walked on. Or maybe the destitute have no other way of being remembered so they tell their story to everyone and hope that one of them will send it to the future.

Thus, early on in the quest I saw a parallel quest concerning the status of Americans. I can't say that my research was exhaustive, but it was honest and the lack of concern Americans had with the wolf was compensated by the concern Americans have for their integrity. In that respect, my quest became America's story so I will respect that.

No mention of wolves.

Here are links to the installments of the Wolf Quest

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Part VIII

Part IX

Part X

Part XI

Part XII

Part XIII

Part XIV

Part XV

 

1977-1980?

Once upon a time*...Oggy was not a disdainful grump.

I really can't be sure when this was taken but it was between the years of 1977 and 1980. Rumors suggest it could be 1974. It's odd that I do not recognize my own age in pictures. I look about 7 years old but I could be off by 3 years either way. Note to parents: write dates on the back of pictures. Of course everything is digitally time stamped today. I do recognize my beloved zip-up reindeer sweater. I think I tried to buy a similar sweater at a vintage clothes store recently but it didn't fit. I'd pay $100 to see what kind of pants I was wearing in this shot. Please let them be pinstripe bell bottoms! OR plaid polyester. Or maybe red denim to match my sweater.

This one I know was 1975

This has to be the only time my hair was clean...so maybe I was living with my mother in Boston. That would be 3rd grade. After I moved back to NH I stopped all hygiene.This period of time was carefree, I played a game where I'd toss a ball against a wall and catch it for hours. I tap danced impulsively and thought I would be a stand-up comedian or Broadway actor. I idolized Don Knotts.

1976?

Is the child the father of the man? Probably. We never stray too far from our roots.

"MY HEART LEAPS UP WHEN I BEHOLD"

          My heart leaps up when I behold
              A rainbow in the sky:
          So was it when my life began;
          So is it now I am a man;
          So be it when I shall grow old,
              Or let me die!
          The Child is father of the Man;
              I could wish my days to be
          Bound each to each by natural piety.

---Wordsworth 

Dear god, a comic book shirt?

*The consensus is 1977 or 1978 and this may have been taken at a Sears photo counter, not for school photo day. That would explain why I don't look like a drug addict.

Whiplash

I really wonder why I did not receive one recommendation to see the recent movie Whiplash. Maybe no one I know or has ever read anything I posted here saw the movie either. That's possible since it's not a widely distributed movie, nor widely read blog. But did not one person even hear about it after it was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture? Was no one curious about it and even read the synopsis? When I see a movie or even a commercial I think someone else find interesting then I send them a link to it. I had to find out about this movie when I was reviewing all the nominees and let me tell you that student jazz band movies are not something one finds every year. I can think of Mr. Holland's Opus (school orchestra/band)...Drumline (marching band) and that's it. Two other movies that are remotely related to student jazz bands. And now Whiplash. I don't want to lie and say it's the best movie I've ever seen but this particular topic, jazz bands rehearsing Cherokee, is so rarely dramatized that you'll likely not find another example.