More me

3 Comments

• Nathan Duke says:

  January 19, 2010 at 9:55 am

  If the Oscar nom­in­ees are any­where near as lame as the Golden Globe win­ners (Christoph Waltz, excluded), then I might not be watch­ing for the first time in years. I’ll still check out your pre­dic­tions, though.
  On anoth­er note, I’m not try­ing to get you to break any New Year’s res­ol­u­tions, but did you see Ben Shapiro’s post at Big Hollywood? I stumbled upon it through The House Next Door. Shapiro lists his 10 most over­rated dir­ect­ors of all time and says he’s had a dif­fi­cult time get­ting through most of their films. That list would include Hitchcock (who was #1), Scorsese, Lean, Aronofsky, Tarantino and Lynch. I’ve tried to reas­on that this was writ­ten as some sort of satire, but appar­ently not.

• Jaime says:

  January 19, 2010 at 9:59 am

  Is it just me, or is Oscar fore­cast­ing becom­ing less and less chal­len­ging with each year? Maybe the ‘net has just made the pas­time more…unavoidable. Or maybe I’ve become cyn­ic­al in my view that the peri­od extend­ing from mid-May of one year (Cannes) and Feb/March (Oscars) of the fol­low­ing year is really just a “year of becom­ing entrenched in our dif­fer­ent views of canon-worthy films of the year.” The pub­lic debate, in the name of con­veni­ence, is ulti­mately reduced to two or three films. This year it’s AVATAR and THE HURT LOCKER. Last year it was SLUMDOG, BUTTON, and THE DARK KNIGHT. Year before that, Coens v. PT Anderson. And so on… Not to dis­par­age these films (I liked Fincher and PTA a great deal), but…a year rep­res­en­ted by 2–3? Or a gen­er­ous 10? Hmmm.
  I hope you don’t con­sider *me* boor­ish by plug­ging my ongo­ing Unexamined Essentials pro­ject (click my name), which – among oth­er things – attempts to restore the oxy­gen to the dia­logue regard­ing the must-see films of a giv­en year. (Even if someone tells me a film is half-great and half-bad, it means more to me than read­ing yet anoth­er review of AVATAR.) Call it an attempt at fight­ing back against the essentializing/reducing func­tion of the con­ven­tion­al film debate. Instead of push­ing for a small group of win­ners – already a los­ing game – I hope to inspire people to con­sider more choices. More choices than they can man­age, really. Not con­veni­ent at all. Just the opposite!
  Thanks for the soap­box, Glenn, I’ll return it now!

• John Svatek says:

  January 19, 2010 at 5:40 pm

  How does it feel to fol­low Christgau to MSN? Judging by their smarts in hir­ing you two, whomever recruits writers for the site should be put in charge of the whole com­pany. Good luck, I’m head­ing there now.