Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 2007

The Contenders:

Juno (winner)
Lars and the Real Girl
Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
The Savages

The Rest is Foolish, Too

Film: My Foolish Heart
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Some actors fall into particular types of roles. That’s natural. With Susan Hayward, that role was of a woman fallen in some way. Hayward was nominated for five Oscars; she played an alcoholic in three of those roles and in a fourth she played a criminal. My Foolish Heart puts her in one of her most fallen roles of her career. It feels very much like a Susan Hayward role, a tough woman who has been kicked around by life, partly because of her own bad choices. Hayward gave the impression of someone knocked around a lot and still standing, almost by force of her own will. That’s certainly the case here, despite how damaged this character really is.

Before I get too involved in the movie itself, I feel like I need to discuss the problems I had watching it. I jumped at the chance to watch My Foolish Heart because it was on my list of films that I was having difficulty finding. NetFlix doesn’t have it, and evidently no lending libraries in Illinois attached to the database I use has it, either. I just discovered it online. Typically, I download files off YouTube and watch them later. In this case, My Foolish Heart was only available on DailyMotion. I’ll be blunt: DailyMotion is terrible. It’s glitch, required frequent restarts, and ads pop up every five minutes. This is a 99-minute movie that took well over two hours to watch. I do my best not to let things like this affect my opinion, but when it’s this rough, it’s hard not to let it affect things at least a little.

Wednesday Horror: Paperhouse

Film: Paperhouse
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Paperhouse is another one of those movies that isn’t really a horror movie despite being on the Fangoria list of unknown horror movies and in the middle of the pack of the They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They? list of great horror movies. Unlike some of the movies that have wound up on my horror lists, though, there is a section of Paperhouse that is very much in line with horror in terms of how it plays out. In that respect (and in pretty much no other), Paperhouse has some similarity to a film like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This is a fantasy film close to magical realism, but it clearly dips into horror for a section.

Anna (Charlotte Burke, in literally her only role) is a young girl on the cusp of puberty, possibly just starting puberty, since she shows a little bit of interest in boys and cosmetics, kind of. Anna seems like a bright enough kid, but she’s also a little bit of a troublemaker. She gets kicked out of her classroom for fighting with another kid, and then collapses in the hall. She claims to her mother (Glenne Headly) that it was just an act to get out of school, so her mother takes her back. Later, Anna collapses again and is discovered to have mononucleosis, more or less.

Off Script: The Curse of the Cat People

Film: The Curse of the Cat People
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’m all for a good sequel, but for something to be a real sequel there has to be a genuine connection to the original film. In the case of The Curse of the Cat People that connection is tenuous at best. We’ve got the same cast who are playing the same characters, which seems like it should be the sort of connection we need. Plot-wise, though, there’s absolutely no connection between the original film and this sequel. Evidently when the story was written there was absolutely no connection, but the studio wanted to build on the success of the low-budget first movie, and so the name was changed to become a sequel.

The Curse of the Cat People isn’t really a horror movie. It’s a lot closer to a film noir with some horror elements. It does a lot of things really well. In fact, it does just about everything well except make a solid connection to the film of which it is supposed to be a sequel. It brings up some very interesting ideas and goes in some fascinating directions even if it doesn’t all work completely.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1993

The Contenders:

The Age of Innocence
In the Name of the Father
The Remains of the Day
Schindler’s List (winner)
Shadowlands

Lyfe, Lyberty, and...

Film: The Pursuit of Happyness
Format: DVD from Rasmussen College Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I don’t really know why I haven’t warmed to Will Smith as an actor, given that Will Smith is more or less genetically created to be warmed to. I think what it comes down to is that I don’t always trust him as an actor. He makes some good movies and he’s capable of doing a solid dramatic turn; witness a film like Ali. But he also has a penchant for giant blockbusters, many of which (Wild Wild West leaps to mind, as does the product placement bonanza of I, Robot) are terrible. And some of his dramatic films are pretty terrible, too. So there’s a reason that The Pursuit of Happyness has been sitting on my desk for months until I finally got around to it today.

As with any biography, we’re going to be dealing with something that is partially true and partially cinematic foofery. In this case, what appears to be the case is that we’re not so much changing history as omitting things that don’t particularly reflect well on our title character. That character is Chris Gardner (Will Smith). Gardner sells a particular piece of medical equipment that is a little better than an x-ray machine but costs about twice as much. According to the film, he sunk his life savings into these machines, assuming that they would revolutionize the way x-rays were taken only to find that the machines were incredibly hard to unload. This is a problem, since he and his wife Lisa (Thandie Newton) and their son Christopher Jr. (Jaden Smith, before he became annoying and bent on convincing Twitter that he is either insane or some sort of prophet) are behind on taxes, rent, and just about everything else.

What the Dog Saw

Film: Reuben, Reuben
Format: Internet video on laptop.

There’s a specific genre of film that seems odd to me. It’s essentially a character study of an unpleasant person. Sometimes, these films merit Oscar nominations. The most recent I can think of is Blue Jasmine, but Reuben, Reuben is a film very much in the same vein. We’re going to spend a great deal of time with a man who is more or less forced to be interesting because otherwise we’d want nothing to do with him.

The name of the film has nothing to do, really, with our main character. That is one Gowan McGland (Tom Conti), a dissolute half-Scots, half-Welsh poet of both repute and disrepute. His poetry has made him famous, at least in circles that care a bit about poetry. Everything else about him has made him infamous. He’s a womanizer, taken to bedding the middle-aged wives who show up at his poetry readings. He’s a drunk. He’s also a leech, sponging off anyone who is impressed by his talent, going so far as to steal the tips in restaurants before leaving. Worst of all, at least in terms of his career, is that he’s lazy and hasn’t written a thing for five years.