the games we play

Needed some physical activity, needed to be out of the office but also off the couch, so I dragged Jerry and Tom to Midway in St. Paul this afternoon for bowling. I'm not much of a bowler, my "form" is laughable, both of them are way better bowlers than I am, but it felt good to knock down some pins.... I've been bowling maybe two times in five years, but it turns out that Midway is cool on a Sunday afternoon... Join us next time.

Cards last night vs. Tom and my niece Ruthie, and we finally beat them. Then we switched over to a game of Racko.... First time for that game in many years.. We had to read the rules for a refresher!...

... mindlessly watching the "red carpet" show now before the Oscar telecast... Lots of games there too before the big competition inside the auditorium ---"winners" and "losers" as the Academy voters compare incomparable cinematic achievements... and for the moment only the PriceWaterhouseCoopers guys know how it turns out... (I always wonder how much they get paid for counting the votes -- I'd do it for free)....

acting and directing

Some more Oscar chat, but be patient, it will be over soon.

My preferences to win the acting and directing awards tomorrow night, keeping in mind that there were some nominated performances in the more obscure movies that I didn't see --

The acting awards --

Best actor (or officially, "Actor in a Leading Role"): Colin Firth in The King's Speech, with big honorable mentions to Jesse Eisenberg and James Franco. Colin will win, I'm sure.
Best actress: Annette Bening in The Kids Are Alright. She is great as Julianne Moore's "other half". But Natalie Portman will probably win this category for Black Swan.
Best supporting actor (or officially, "Actor in a Supporting Role"): Christian Bale in The Fighter. He should be a shoo-in, but don't be surprised to see Geoffrey Rush win for The King's Speech.
Best supporting actress: Melissa Leo, the outrageously pushy mother in The Fighter. She's probably a long-shot to win, but she was perfect.

Best director: David Fincher for The Social Network.

OK. I'm done.

ranking the Oscar nominees

OK, I've never made a movie and "they don't make movies like they used to", so what do I know? But I haven't missed watching the Academy Awards in more than 40 years, and I try to make it a point to see all of the Best Picture nominees ahead of time (now 10 nominees instead of 5), which isn't easy, so my opinion is as good as the next guy's. So here is how I rank this year's 10 Best Picture Oscar nominees, "most deserving to win Best Picture" to "lesser deserving", based on nothing other than my own personal tastes and limited knowledge of film-making excellence!

1. The Social Network. Jesse Eisenberg is a natural playing Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg. Interesting story, fictional or not.
2. The Fighter. Loved this movie. Superb acting by all those actors playing the family members.
3. The King's Speech. This one will win the Oscar, which is okay, it's a fine movie. The Academy always approves of these British monarchy stories.
4. 127 Hours. This is one of two films on the list that I didn't want to see but saw anyway and ended up liking it a lot. James Franco is great.
5. Black Swan. Scary stuff backstage at the ballet. Was a little disappointed but was still impressed by this movie. Loved the Swan Lake music, of course.
6. Toy Story 3. The other movie that I resisted seeing, but we watched all three Toy Story movies and loved them. We liked 2 the best.
7. The Kids Are Alright. This is the most fun movie on the list. Annette Bening is very convincing!
8. True Grit. You know I love the Coen Brothers, and this movie is okay but no Fargo or Big Lebowski. Drags some of the time. Jeff Bridges is cool, of course.
9. Winter's Bone. An interesting, relatively low-budget movie. Very suspenseful story about meth use in the Ozarks. Wouldn't make you want to go there on vacation.
10. Inception. Not a bad movie. Just not my cup of tea.

The Academy Awards will be on TV this Sunday night.

Tomorrow: Acting awards.

speech or no speech

A fun evening last night. We stopped at the Saloon for Happy Hour, then walked down the street to see Oscar-nominated, maybe Oscar-favorite The King's Speech. A good movie, but my expectations may have been a little too high, and you know how that goes. Colin Firth will probably win (and deserves) an Oscar for his portrayal of King George VI (Queen Elizabeth's dad), a sort of accidental king overcoming a stammer to inspire England through World War II.
*****
I'm not sure who it is that is inspiring the Egyptians through their current, mostly non-violent Twitter Revolution -- who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, who are we rooting for? It constantly amazes me that with all the 24-hour news coverage we have available to us that we know so little about anything outside the borders of the United States. Who knew that President Hosni Mubarak was such an oppressive tyrant or that he somehow made himself some 40 billion dollars on the backs of the Egyptian people? And why did his vice president have to be the one to announce Mubarak's resignation? The dude was too busy to make his own resignation speech? Maybe he was scrambling to hide all the money that was way too much to hide under his mattress.

the shortest month

Gotta have at least one entry in February... It might be a disjointed one, just like February was...

There are still several weeks ahead of us before we move into the condo... (Contractors suck)... Am really tired of the temporary living situation -- and anxious to put some new things into play, like the new TV that we have bought (plus blue-ray and all kinds of things that I've never heard of) -- but won't set up until we are moved. Need some permanency again.

Work is relatively permanent, as in it feels like 24/7. Might drive out of town one of these days just to get some perspective.

Still fighting the winter. So sick of cold temperatures.

Seeing some of the Oscar-nominee movies before next Sunday's Academy Awards. They sure don't make movies like they used to.

After working some late nights, I must say it's been refreshing to be able to come home and watch some Winter Olympics. Sad to see them end... And I've learned to love Canada's national anthem -- O Canada! It's a catchy one!

#100

I realized that this is my one-hundredth blog posting since starting Et Maintenant? in August of '07. As I sit at my computer here on Blogger.com, often with a blank brain, I still try to keep in mind the book Jon gave me, Nobody Cares What You Had For Lunch, and make an effort not to be too mundane or at least to keep the mundane relatively interesting. Sometimes I get reactions, often I get silence.

At my book group this past week (which I hadn't attended in a couple years but was happy to get back to at least for a visit), there was some discussion of blogging. My friend Barb was putting in a good word for my blog, and others were saying they can't imagine putting thoughts in blog form for the whole world to potentially see.

What the heck, I enjoy it anyway. I doubt that many strangers stop by this blog site and pay much attention to it.

The site I don't really understand is Facebook. I do have a Facebook page, due to peer pressure I guess, but I don't get the overall point of it, especially the "What are you doing right now?" part. Barry, in the book group, said his wife is on Facebook and must have too much time on her hands because she puts things on there like "Right now I'm having a Coke".... and of course that comment goes out to all her Facebook "friends", who I'm sure are thrilled that she is having a Coke....

Others are very into Myspace. My sister Joan (who is recuperating nicely from her ankle break, thank you) has favorite Myspace sites that she checks almost day, like Lindsay Lohan and other celebrities and controversial characters. I don't do Myspace. You can only read what a Myspace member has to say if you are accepted by them as a "friend".. and I'm sure I couldn't emotionally handle a rejection if I asked to be somebody's Myspace friend and got no response!

So I stick with my blog, which is apparently there for the world to see, friend or not, and I'll head into the next hundred posts. Try to contain your excitement.
****
Our book group selection, by the way, was The White Tiger (the 2008 Man Booker Prize winner) by Aravind Adiga, which we all liked. It's a novel about India, life in the lowest of castes, definitely not a book that would prompt you to buy a plane ticket to India however. For me, reading it was a good companion experience to seeing the excellent new movie, Slumdog Millionaire, also about dirt-poor Indians, which, unfortunately, no one else in the group had seen yet. (I'm on my annual mission to see all five of the Best Picture Oscar nominees -- have so far seen two of the five.)

another acid flashback

Yeah, I'm kidding, I never dropped acid. But I do find it easy to time-warp back to 1968 as if there'd been no in-between times. The past week, I was reading Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris, a new book about the dramatic changes in American filmmaking in the 1960s. It makes its points by focusing on the five 1967 Best Picture Oscar nominees from each of their conceptions several years earlier to Oscar night in April 1968. Two of the nominees, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, were cutting-edge masterpieces, nothing like Hollywood had seen before. Two, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Doctor Dolittle, were more standard, old-Hollywood stuff. One, the eventual winner In the Heat of the Night, was somewhere in the middle. This book, Pictures at a Revolution, was great, one of those books that I honestly didn't want to see end, a book made only for time-warp freaks and history-of-film buffs. Because it pitted old-Hollywood against new-Hollywood, it was one of the most interesting Oscar races ever, certainly the one that I've ever had the most interest in, and I remember it well -- being so disappointed, in my case, when The Graduate didn't win. Looking back, ah - April 1968 - it seems like a fine time, a "more innocent" time, as they say - hence my time-warp tendencies. Then I realize that the Oscar ceremony that year was just a day after Martin Luther King's funeral and only a couple weeks before I was drafted into the Army for two years, facing an immediate four months of intense jungle training and Vietnam potentially looming over me. Maybe not such an innocent at all. Maybe there are no innocent times.

can't decide

Well, we saw the last two Best Picture nominees, and I have to say I've never had this much trouble deciding on a favorite. These last two, Atonement and There Will Be Blood, both of which I had low expectations for, were very good movies, so I'm thinking that any of the five nominees could win Best Picture and I'd be okay with it. I usually have somebody to at least root against. OK, let's see. Maybe I'll pick Juno, which I enjoyed the most and would see again, as my favorite, even though it's the kind of small movie that is generally just happy to be nominated. Then there is Atonement, which to me was way better than the Ian McEwan novel (and when have I ever preferred a movie version to the book?). And of course I like the Coen brothers. And George Clooney. :-(

My other (selected) picks: Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood; Best Actress: Julie Christie for Away From Her (I love Julie Christie); Directing: the Coen Brothers for No Country for Old Men (they should have won for Fargo); Best Supporting Actor: Tom Wilkinson for Michael Clayton; Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton; Best Original Screenplay: Diablo Cody for Juno (she wrote it here in the Twin Cities at coffee shops); Best Cinematography: Atonement.

Anyway, I'm glad that self-imposed pressure is off for a while. No more movies for a while. But I might be seeing three plays next week.

no movies for old men

In our annual quest to see all five Oscar Best Picture nominees, we went to see Michael Clayton the other night and No Country for Old Men last evening. They were both pretty good (as all Best Picture nominees should be), but is it me or are movies getting harder to watch? My mind might be going, but it seems like so many movies are not so easy to follow. Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, what the heck is going on? No Country for Old Men is also super-violent, in a Coen Brothers sort of way, but after you see a few people get shot in the throat, you learn when to look away from the screen. Neither of these are movies to relax to.

Two more to go.

Juno, Junot and Juneau

Mainstream movies have generally gotten so bad, or at least not suitable enough to my taste, that movies aren't really as much a part of my life as they used to be. One thing I try to do, though, for which I have no good explanation, is see the Academy Award Best-Picture nominees before the Oscars are announced. That gets a little harder every year, but I keep doing it. So when the Best Picture nominations were announced a couple weeks ago, I was a little dismayed that I had seen none of the five, which means I have to see all five by February 24th... Plus the event might be really a letdown if no stars show for the award show because of the current writers' strike. Oh well!

So Jerry I went to the see the first of the five the other night -- Juno, which turned out to be a wonderfully funny and well-written little movie.. I say "little", meaning no stars, very little budget, so no chance of winning the big prize... But see it! You'll like it! The other films to see before the 24th: No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, and Atonement. Stayed tuned!

Meanwhile, when not working or going to the movies, I've started reading a very good 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I've found very few goods novels the last couple years, so this one is a good find (although, actually, I'm only on page 60 so far).

and I hate to do something so stereotypically Minnesotan as mention the weather again, but this morning after walking (somehow surviving) to work this morning, I checked the temperature and it was -13 with a -32 windchill. At that same moment, it was 9 degrees in Juneau, Alaska, with a -6 windchill. Sounds like a vacation spot to me!