Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2009

The Contenders:

Jeff Bridges: Crazy Heart (winner)
Jeremy Renner: The Hurt Locker
Morgan Freeman: Invictus
Colin Firth: A Single Man
George Clooney: Up in the Air

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Film: Klaus
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on the internet machine.

Watching a Christmas movie in May is perhaps not the strangest thing I have done. It’s not even the strangest thing I have done in the last couple of months. That said, when the Oscar list includes a holiday film, I knew I’d have to get to it sooner or later, and tonight seemed like a good time. The movie in question is Klaus, an animated film from NetFlix, which means that it’s streaming and probably will be streaming for the rest of time, so Christmas film or no, you’ll be able to watch this whenever you feel like it.

Like a number of Christmas films that come before this one, Klaus is more or less a Santa Claus origin story. We’re going to see how the legend started, but in this case, it’s going to come from the point of view of someone else. We’re also going to get some elements of classic drama here. It’s interesting that IMDb classifies Klaus as a comedy. Certainly there are some comedic elements here, but I think it’s far closer to a drama. The humor isn’t really front and center.

Bleak House

Film: The Reflecting Skin
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television

I wasn’t sure what to expect with The Reflecting Skin. I knew this was classified as a horror movie, but this is not the standard sort. There aren’t supernatural monsters seeking to devour the flesh of the innocent. There are no zombies here, no ghosts, and no creeping undead. That there is instead is sort of tawdry human evil the runs through the entirety of this film. There isn’t so much a sense of corrupted innocence here as there is of a world where there is nothing innocent, where even those we would normally call innocent are tainted in a way that was beyond their control, like people trying to live on a toxic waste dump. The world of The Reflecting Skin is one of banal evil, where everything is awful simply because everything is awful. It’s a depiction of the real world if the real world were somehow transported to Hades.

The Reflecting Skin is absolutely a horror movie despite the lack of supernatural boogey men. In fact, there is a mob of serial killers involved in the film, but they are not the focus of the story. What we have, in effect, is a confluence of events and ideas where the absolutely wrong thing happens in absolutely the right way for the worst possible outcome for everyone involved. The Reflecting Skin is a fever dream of fantasy, misinformation, miscommunication, and murder.

I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper

Film: The Lighthouse
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on basement television.

I use the phrase “fever dream” a lot, I’ve realized, but sometimes there is simply no better way to describe what it is that I’m seeing. The Lighthouse is probably most easily described as that, a sort of slow but onrushing descent into insanity. Everything about the film is designed to enhance that feeling. The story, ultimately, feels like H.P. Lovecraft attempting to tell his own version of a Poe story like “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I have no other way to explain this movie, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t really want to try. This is a film that touches something deep and primal and not easily put into words.

At the same time, I’m reminded of a Ray Bradbury story called “The Fog Horn” about two men in a lighthouse. One night, the fog horn attracts a primal creature from the depths of the ocean that has seemingly fallen in love with the noise that the lighthouse makes. Frustrated, the creature eventually knocks the lighthouse down, and then is despondent over the death of the thing that it loves. There’s a deep sadness in that little story, a weird longing and a primal ache, and a little bit of the madness that drives a film like The Lighthouse.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2018

The Contenders:

Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book (winner)
Roma
A Star is Born
Vice

Tapeworms

Film: Parasite (Gisaengchung)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on basement television.

I imagine there is a great deal of competition among the general streaming services. Netflix nabbing the streaming rights to one thing, Hulu to another, Amazon another, and so on. After all, what you’ve got streaming is how you attract people to your service. Hulu managed to nab Parasite, the first non-English winner of Best Picture at the Oscars. While that might not be much of a win for the average person, for movie nerds, it’s a reason to take Hulu seriously, or more seriously.

Parasite (Gisaengchung, which evidently translates more accurately to something more like “tapeworm”) topped a hell of a lot of “Best of” lists from 2019, and while it was a surprise that a non-English language film won Best Picture, there were a lot of people rooting for it. It’s been on Hulu for a couple of weeks, but because of work issues, this was the first chance I had to sit down and watch it.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1967

The Contenders:

Cool Hand Luke
The Graduate
In Cold Blood
In the Heat of the Night (winner)
Ulysses