MADness—the Blog

I don’t imagine I’m the first to say this, but if Tom Ford, the first-time director and long-time fashion designer, had taken less interest in making A Single Man look so pretty, he’d have had a better movie.  I sat through a good part of the film feeling it was all very neatly arranged, but beneath the surface I wondered if anyone I was watching had a detectable pulse.

The movie comes alive—suddenly—in a scene midway through.  George and Charley, played by Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, spend an evening at her house, and for the first time I believed these were real people, with real lives and real emotions, not mere models posing for the camera.  The rest of the film is fine, and at times, exquisite.  Which seemed odd, since it took such a long time for the film to engage me at first.

The fault wasn’t in the performances.  In fact, the acting was terrific, especially Firth, who plays the English professor who’s lost his lover and whatever reason he had for living.  The film, however, felt overdirected, underwritten, and out of balance.

Leaving the theater, I heard someone laugh.  Without saying too much, I’ll just say that’s not the reaction the filmmakers would have expected.  I didn’t expect it either.  At that moment, I felt a great compassion for Firth’s character.  I hadn’t been sure what I felt, but then I knew.  So the movie worked for me.  A little less pretty and it may have worked even better.

Hendrik Hertzberg has this week’s Comment at the New Yorker with an interesting piece on the new voting procedures for Best Picture.

To forestall a victory for some cinematic George Wallace or Ross Perot, the Academy switched to a different system. Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

What’s it all mean?  It means we need to bring back the Electoral College!  (Oops.  That’s a different sort of voting.)  It means the Academy system now favors a consensus pick for Best Picture and with Avatar a more polarizing film than The Hurt Locker, the Iraq War drama should have at least one edge to counter the many other advantages the sci-fi flick has going for it.  That’s what Hertzberg thinks. 

Me?  I dunno, really, but I’m willing to believe anything that gives the advantage to what I think is the movie of the year.  I don’t get to vote, but because of the mighty clout this website has with thousands of Academy members, I’m throwing my full support behind the Kathryn Bigelow film.  C’mon, folks, vote The Hurt Locker!  Even if you don’t make it your first choice, make it your second.  That ain’t so hard, is it?

 Ever think about a movie to see and then you get this?

1814.6 miles?  Mmm…maybe if I hurry I can catch the 10:05 show.

It’s probably a good time to note that a big screen version of Gunsmoke is in the works.  Someone will have to play the Dodge City marshal, and I think the actor featured on our front page today would be a good fit for the part.  Not only that, it would be a fun promo to see:  “Matt Dillon is Matt Dillon!”

In case the game’s a blowout at halftime, or if you just can’t get enough football action, here’s your guide to the Super Bowl on film.

• Black Sunday (1977):  John Frankenheimer’s thriller features the Steelers and Cowboys in Super Bowl X.  A Palestinian terrorist group plans a suicide bombing to kill as many people as possible (a film ahead of its time).  Uh-oh, watch out for that blimp.
• Heaven Can Wait (1978):  Warren Beatty is quarterback for the L.A. Rams (you know it’s old if there’s a team in L.A.), who’ll play the Steelers in the Super Bowl.  Before the big game, he dies in a car accident.  Now that’s bad luck.  No worry, though, he’s got an angel on his side, and he returns to the living in the body of a recently murdered millionaire.
• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994):  Snowflake, the mascot for the Miami Dolphins, is kidnapped two weeks before the team is set to play the Eagles in the Super Bowl.  How can those manly men ever play football without their pet dolphin!?  Ace Ventura to the rescue.
• The Sum of All Fears (2002):  Not a film ahead of its time, and except for some Cold War intrigue similar to Black Sunday.  This time a terrorist bombs the game in Baltimore, hoping to set off nuclear war between the good guys and the Russkies.  Jack Ryan saves the president.  Too bad about Baltimore though.  The Colts, luckily, had already moved to Indy.  (A lot was changed in adapting Tom Clancy’s novel, like any reference to the “Super Bowl,” for one thing.  But we know what the big game is, whatever they want to call it.)

I was on the road this week and am now getting to a few items I had meant to post about earlier, one being some reflections about the site.

When minaday.com launched five weeks ago, it was an experiment.  I had no experience managing a daily website.  I didn’t know if I would run out of time, or ideas, after three weeks.  I didn’t know if there were three people in the world who’d be interested in reading anything I had to say. 

If you’re reading this I don’t need to tell you:  I’m still here.  I’ve survived some busy times at work, squeezed in a weekend getaway, a few birthday parties—and of course, several trips to the movie theater—yet still managed to keep to the schedule at Minute A Day, with at least one new post daily (either at the front page or the blog).  (On the other hand, I have not kept up my training schedule for a marathon in April.  Ten weeks to go.  Better get moving.)  Anyway, I’m still working on the routine, but so far, so good.

The numbers on the site, if you’re interested, for January:  50 posts total (21 Movie Minute posts on the front page, 29 blog posts at MADness).  Readership info (growing from 0, since the first content went up 1/1):

I suppose the Pages/Visit number above accounts for this: 

Number of visits: 2673 - Average: 613 s

Perhaps I should rename the site to Ten Minutes A Day About Movies.

Almost all the traffic comes from the U.S., but visitors from dozens of countries have stopped by. 

A couple of oddities:  The only search engine I had to submit the site URL to was Bing, yet it’s still the only search engine that seems not to have sent a spider or bot (Google and Yahoo lead the way).  The favicon.ico hits at about 57%; I still don’t see it on IE8, but Firefox, Chrome, and the Mac all are fine.

Feedback:  It’s been fun hearing from readers.  For whatever reason, people tend to send me email (I’ve gotten my share of phone calls too), but few commenters are using the comment box at the end of each post.  I don’t know why that is.  Please don’t be shy.

Patrick Goldstein:

Both the recording and motion picture organizations are made up of respected industry professionals, presumably eager to reward the best work in their respective fields. Yet the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences almost always opts for seriousness over comedy, artistic heft over youthful innovation.

On the other hand, the Recording Academy has increasingly given itself over to mainstream commercial taste.

[...] the Grammy telecast was a glimpse of the future, not just for the Oscars, but for all awards shows.

God help us if that’s the case.

The Oscars are far from perfect and I’m sure I could come up with a list of things I’d like to see done differently.  But I find it very odd that anyone would suggest the solution for the movie awards is to be more like the music awards.

The awards are supposed to be for artistic merit.  That’s not the way it always works, but it’s at least a pretense worth preserving.  It would be a disaster to abandon quality for commercial considerations.  There was rebellion a year ago when At the Movies tried Ben Lyons as host.  I think that says something.  Movie fans want to hear from people they can trust.  They want awards to go to the best work, not just the most popular.  The movie industry is not the music industry.  Patrick Goldstein, please wake up.

I believe it’s a mistake to think The Hurt Locker is apolitical, as A.O. Scott does, because it doesn’t ostensibly take sides on whether we should or shouldn’t be in Iraq.  The film, as I’ve said before, offers a better—and more damning—explanation of the reasons for the war than hours of political debate ever would.

If you missed yesterday’s post, the solutions to the MAD Launch Contest puzzles are now available.  See the answers page for the detailed solutions to the puzzles.  The three Final Answers to the puzzles, along with some comments, are below.

WINNERS

Yes, we have winners!  
     1 — Grand Prize of $50:  Peter J. Saputo
     1 — Pretty Good Prize of $25:  Marcia Rose
     1 — Pretty Good Prize of $25:  Robert Hartford
     10 — Official Minute A Day About Movies Coffee Mugs:
               - P. Abide
               - Garo Sassouni
               - Laura Dove
               - Andrew J. Ries
               - Alene
               - Jerry
               - Mary Ann
               - Bob Fitzpatrick
               - A Braunsdorf*
               - John & Lisa LaFianza*

     * If you see your name and haven’t yet responded, please send an email with your mailing address.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all of you who took time to solve the puzzles and enter the contest. 

CONTEST ANSWERS

MMX Crossword Final Answer:  MOVIE MOVIE

If you’re a regular crossword solver, this was more likely the easier puzzle.  In fact, good crossword solvers could probably crack this one without knowing much about movies.  It was much tougher, though, even if you were a major movie buff but didn’t have a lot of experience with crosswords.  Some notes on the puzzle:

MMX—The title seemed fitting since the launch of this site was concurrent with the launch of 2010.  That led to the theme, ten (X) movie-related names or titles with initials M.M.  From that came the final answer to the puzzle.  A couple of M.M. answers had to be in the grid, I figured:  MARILYN MONROE and MICKEY MOUSE.  With others I had some flexibility.  Since MARCELLO MASTROIANNI and MERCEDES MCCAMBRIDGE were each 19 letters long, that led to the logical size of the grid being 23×23. 

MARILYN MONROE—The clue [About whom Clark Gable said "She makes a man proud to be a man"] may have led you in a different direction if you hadn’t yet caught onto the theme.  As one solver noted, CAROLE LOMBARD is another 13-letter answer that fit in the grid.  Lombard, of course, was Gable’s wife and the love of his life, from whose loss he never quite recovered.  (I hadn’t intended that misdirection with the clue.  It just happened that way.)

[E-cars] and [Scare]—Anagrammed clues, yes, but their answers, EDSELS and AWE (at 94- and 99-Across), were not at all consistent with the ten theme answers.  At least one solver noted the anagrams, but no one mistook them for the final answer.

["Toy Story" or "The Women," e.g.] and ["The Omen," "Toys," "Troy," or "W.," e.g.]—I had the idea early of using anagrammed clues for signaling the meta (i.e., final answer), but I left writing the actual clue till the end.  It was much trickier than I expected.  As I have mentioned, I’ve had dozens of puzzles published in papers.  I’ve written thousands of crossword clues.  For whatever reason, no other clue has ever taken me as long to find as this one.  I was pleased with the mix of movie titles in the end.

MOVIE MOVIE—The duplicated 5-letter answers that crossed in the center should have been a giveaway.  Like the clues, it wasn’t meant to be overly difficult.  I aimed for “satisfying.”  That seemed to be the case from the comments I received.  Even if you weren’t familiar with the movie—a Stanley Donen musical comedy starring George C. Scott—you shouldn’t have had any doubt about the final answer if you were able to solve the grid.

FilmFest 101 Final Answer:  HAPPY NEW YEAR

I wanted to provide a contest option that tested movie knowledge rather than crossword-solving skills.  I wasn’t interested in a simple quiz (there are lots on the internet but I often lose interest after five or ten questions).  I was happy to get the idea for this puzzle, essentially a process of elimination, which, I hope, was novel and more fun for solvers.  Apparently, it was more challenging too—it tripped up a few contestants.

The level of difficulty varied by screening, from easy (the two-M titles) to diabolical (Monty Franklin Pierce Statton), but there were hints for solvers, no restrictions on using external references, and the final acrostic was workable even for solvers who didn’t identify all 100 movie titles.  Overall, I think the puzzle was fair enough.

The final answer was “timely,” especially for anyone solving at the beginning of the month.  One challenge with selecting the twelve films for the Final Screening was coming up with titles that are well-known today.  For those very early decades, few movies are household names.  The film that may have been the least known was the earliest of all.  It was a scene that’s been filmed countless times over the years—two doting parents (Auguste and Marguerite Lumière), one adorable baby (Andrée Lumière), not a lot of action (Louis Lumière was behind the camera).  It was the original home movie.  If you’d read the first Movie Minute at this site, published the same day as the contest, you’d know the Lumière brothers screened ten films for their first paying audience in 1895.  Repas de Bébé was one of them.

You’ve come a long way, bébé.

Favorite Film

Here are the votes of contestants for favorite new film of 2009:

5 — The Hurt Locker**
4 — Inglourious Basterds**
3 — Avatar**
3 — Up**
2 — District 9**
2 — The Hangover
2 — Precious**
2 — A Single Man
2 — Up in the Air**
1 — The Blind Side**
1 — An Education**
1 — Pirate Radio
1 — Public Enemies
1 — The Secret in Their Eyes
1 — A Serious Man**
1 — Skin
1 — Summer Hours
1 — Where the Wild Things Are
0 — All About Steve

** Academy Award nominee for Best Picture.  (Each of the ten nominees got the vote of at least one contestent.)

Thanks to all of you who participated in the MAD Launch Contest.  The answers to the contest puzzles are now available.  You can find the answers here. 

Hope you had as much fun solving the puzzles as I had making them.

Coming soon…I’ll have another post either Friday or Saturday with news about the winners and some additional comments.