Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2010

The Contenders:

James Franco: 127 Hours
Javier Bardem: Biutiful
Colin Firth: The King’s Speech (winner)
Jesse Eisenberg: The Social Network
Jeff Bridges: True Grit

Misery Parfait

Film: Biutiful
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

When a movie like Biutiful shows up, I wonder why I pursue the films that I do for this blog. As evidenced by many of the horror movies I post, I don’t object to a crappy movie now and then, but Biutiful is something else entirely. I cannot say that it’s not a well-made movie. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu doesn’t make cheap or shoddy films. But it’s depressing to the point of making the audience suicidal, and that always gives me pause.

“Misery parfait” is the term I started using a number of years ago to describe movies where nothing good happens to anyone and instead, the entire length of the film is a spiral of one depressing thing to something even more depressing. It starts out with a lot of potential for terribleness from all sides and manages to fulfill all of the promise of every horrible thing that can happen by the time the end credits roll nearly 150 minutes later.