I Pretend to Be Intelligent By Reviewing Some Oscar Winners.
February 27, 2008First things first, let’s make one thing clear:
That’s Daniel Day-Lewis. And Daniel Day-Lewis was THE FIRE in this movie. I mean man, the guy was just incendiary. (Add a third sentence referencing his acting and flames and such.) And he sounded exactly how a mustachioed oil man from the 1900s should sound like. Believe me, I know from experience. I was just waiting for that mustache of his to stretch out its robot mustache legs, reveal itself to be a robot mustache creature from the future, and fly off his face. It’s like it had a life of its own. But I swear, the name Daniel Plainview will be etched into my memory until the day I die. And so will the words: "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! I DRINK IT UP!"
I’m serious. It was that good.
So the Best Actor win was well-deserved, but I was surprised to find out that Paul Dano wasn’t nominated for his performance as Eli Sunday. Normally, I’d also feel peeved about certain aspects of a film, whether they be the run times, the anachronisms, or plot holes among other things, but I finished the movie and had absolutely no complaints. I feel that this should have won over No Country For Old Men for Best Picture. Which brings me to:
Don’t get me wrong, I really liked this one too. It had "Holy intensicles!" written all over it. But There Will Be Blood eked out the moral victory in my humble opinion, courtesy of Mr. Plainview and his mustache. But Javier Bardem and his snazzy ‘do, given more screen time, could have given Day-Lewis a run for his money. Oh and once again, first things first:
That’s Bardem as Anton Chigurh, another name that will forever be carved in memory as one of the most badass villains of all time. Next to Darth Vader, Saruman the White, and Sinbad in Good Burger, of course. Josh Brolin was fantastic (I even read that he sought help from Rodriguez and Tarantino to audition for this film), and the Coens did an amazing job of setting a unique pace for the film. There were some unexpected LOL-worthy moments too. Just watch out for a mariachi band, and the uttering of the word "FRIEND-O." I’ll start calling everyone FRIEND-O from now on, if that’s okay with you guys.
I know, I’ve written about this film before. Sure, parts of it I wrote as a goof, but that doesn’t discount my opinion that the movie didn’t deserve the acclaim it was getting.
But with Diablo Cody winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, I felt like giving Juno a second chance. I may have missed something, difficult as it (and by "it" I mean "missing something in a 90-minute movie written by a former stripper") may seem. So I press "Play," fast forward through the gratuitous fancy schmancy opening credits, and eventually give up at the part where the burger phone makes an appearance, which I think is 8 minutes into the film.
So I haven’t seen the rest of the nominees for Best Original Screenplay, but come on, there has to be at least one that was written better and simply didn’t garner enough interest to earn votes, because there was this stripper-turned-writer who was strippering up all the attention, who wrote this strippery movie about some pregnant kid, presumably with her stripper pen and stripper pad, maybe even typed it into her personal compu-stripper, somewhere in her stripper home on Valle del Stripper-o.
Which, by the way, is down by Stripper River.
Don’t worry, it’s okay to allude to her former strippering ways; after all, she did meticulously chronicle it on her blog (unstripperily called "The Pussy Ranch") and even wrote a book about it. And she kinda, sorta mentions it every time she opens her strippery mouth. I know how to use Wikipedia! Yay!
