Tonight I watched a movie called "The Favourite" (2018), which you may know and might have seen yourself. It received a whopping 10 Oscar nominations and won four, including the Best Actress award for Olivia Coleman, and Best Original Screenplay for whoever it was that wrote it. I checked it out from The Libe on a recommendation from Grimsley, who remarked that he "doesn't usually like costume dramas" but he loved this one.
Knowing Grim, that should have been enough warning for me to stay away.
Yikes was this ever a bad movie. I mean, we're talking spectacularly bad, folks.
It's like if you took Masterpiece Theater and dragged it through the mud, staged a wrestling match in the mud puddle and then tipped over an Andy Gump on the participants, just for good measure.
I know it is en vogue now for up-and-coming "directors" (and I use the term loosely) to show how edgy they are by adding gratuitous violence, language or sexuality into the mix. A year or two ago, I turned off a movie called "Three Billboards Something Or Other" (another Oscar Darling) after just 40 minutes or so for this very reason. It was just pure violent garbage with foul language and extremely unlikeable characters. This is the new style of "arty" motion pictures, which is why I don't watch new movies any more. Almost all of them either suck - big time - or are made for kids with the same generic CGI effects that morph from one thing into another and all look cheap and the same.
Not trying to be a curmudgeon here, just stating my opinion, but it's the same kind of deal with the decline of popular culture and the arts in general. Folks today will equate rap "music" with the exponentially more substantial and creative real and actual pop music of the 60s through the 90s, and they will say that "it is defining the times" or "speaking to the feelings of youth" or whatever.
Nothing is said about the lack of articulation of said feelings, or the non-existent music. It is praised because it is "edgy" - meaning that someone is talking foul or tough - and it is praised because it comes "from the streets", even if some of the guys that make such "music" now live in mansions, or in the case of Jay-Z, he is now a billionaire. It's not art in any way, shape or form, it's just ugliness, and on top of that it's fake because the so-called "artists" don't even mean it. It's just a way for them to get noticed.
So, the idea of "edginess" is 100% phoney baloney, and is an excuse for lack of creative talent, period and end of story. It's not me who is being a curmudgeon, it's the music and motion picture industry who are either too lazy or unable to find the kind of true creative talent that made both industries so great and inspiring to people like me prior to about the year 2000 or so.
Regarding the motion picture industry, it's only in recent years - perhaps the last five or so - that things have gotten so bad that I don't even bother to catch up on the Oscar nominated films anymore, once they have been released on dvd. To be fair, I am sure there are a few good films each year. "Roma" was supposed to be one of them, and I have no doubt it is good. But is it great? Is it tremendous?
That is the standard I set, because I am used to it, from watching so many truly great films from the past. Don't tell me a film is great just because it won an Oscar in 2019, and don't tell me a film is a masterpiece unless it can stand with true masterworks from cinema's incredible past. Sorry, but that's just how it goes. I wouldn't get so teed off, but I am sick of lowbrow stuff like "The Favourite" getting praised to the hilt. It's the opposite of a great movie.
This is why I cannot be accused of being merely a curmudgeon, because I do know movies, and I do know rock music, and I know both of those arts through and through, back to front and vice versa.
And it depresses me to see a movie like "The Favourite" get so many accolades, because the movie industry can do so much better. One of the Oscars this movie won was for Best Screenplay. Watch for yourself and see if you think it deserves the award. I was thinking the opposite, that it was a terrible script, one that substituted numerous "C-words", "F-words", other body part words, toilet humor and silly sexual situations (as opposed to meaningful ones) for actual plot and story structure.
Now you know why I rave about the screenwriters of the Golden Era (1930s through 50s). They knew how to write an actual story, one that involved you as a viewer. Think of it this way : who do you think is funnier, a comedian like Andrew Dice Clay. who runs off a string of four-letter words to tell crude sexual jokes, or a guy like Jerry Seinfeld?
Well anyway, I have expended too much time on "The Favourite". It was not my favorite, and the only reason I didn't turn it off early on was because of the genuine talent of the three actresses involved : Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and the aforementioned Olivia Coleman. Still and all, their work is wasted here, and in the end I only stuck it out and endured the movie just to be polite.
It was That Bad.
But I'll be accepting no more recommendations from Grim. He likes a lot of crude stuff; I don't.
I just don't have time for anything crummy, and until modern movies show me different, I'll not be watching. ////
Sorry about the downer review, haha. I did have a nice hike up at Aliso, and I did also watch an incredibly awesome episode of "Tales Of Tomorrow", in which a doctor, down on his luck, purchases a Black Bag from a pawnshop. You know black bags, of the kind doctors once carried when they made house calls. Anyway, he soon finds that the surgical instruments inside the bag carry a patent inscribed from the year 2450, five hundred years in the future......
Holy Smokes and My Goodness Gracious, how in the world could that have happened? Well, no matter. He starts curing people right and left and gets his own life straightened around. But then his wife gets visions of sugarplums dancing in her head. She sees millions of dollars in their future, but the black bag has a warning label inside - that the medical instruments are not to be used unethically.
Man, what would you do if you bought a black doctor's bag from a pawn shop and it turned out to have been manufactured 500 years in the future?
No need to answer right away. I'll be sleeping on that one myself.
Tomorrow morning I go back to work. It was a good few days off.
Tons of love in the meantime, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Tonight was a little bit of a bust because I spent the evening waiting for the arrival of a long time friend, who is in town from Arizona (his home for the past few years), but he never showed. Grim was with me, as he wanted to see the guy too. We've known Ryan since 1977, when he was just six years old. He is now 48 - my goodness - and he is a legendary figure who was part of the infamous Burton Street household in the mid-1990s that also consisted of me, Mister D, and my Dad. That was a foursome for the ages, I'll tell ya, and Ryan was an equal player in the chaos in every respect. He and I are the only two of the Burton Street gang still alive, and there were times a dozen years ago when I wasn't sure he would make it.
But he hung in there, cleaned up his act somewhat, and moved to Arizona about five years ago. Tonight he was scheduled to meet Grim & I at my place, but he never showed. Ahh, well.....
Maybe tomorrow night. Or maybe not. I love the guy but I'm not thrilled with flaky behavior anymore.
I don't wanna live like it's still the 80s or 90s, and I really don't wanna be One Of The Boys anymore.
Really, really I don't. I just wanna get married and live a normal life, like everybody else
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