I promise, new stuff soon!

Hi all.  Which is really just, like, 3 of my friends and my parents. :)

New stuff coming soon, I promise - like my thoughts on the Globes, the SAGs, the Oscar nominations.  Also, stuff I've been reading/watching/noticing lately, random thoughts, my January playlist... and why my dad is the best predictor of what crappy movies will be #1 at the box office (c'mon Pops, you know it's true).  Things to look forward to for your weekend!

The Globes Are Coming...

Tomorrow kicks off a huge and sacred time of my year.  Tomorrow officially kicks off awards season.  

Ahhhhh yes, can you smell it?

I love awards season.  I'm totally the kid that gets up and watches ALL of the coverage.  Yes, the crap they put on at E! tomorrow at noon that they call "awards coverage" but is actually just clips of all last years' shows compiled together - I watch that.  Gleefully.  Like a little kid giggling.  I can't even go to Oscar or other award show parties because 1)I actually want to hear the speeches and interviews, and 2) (the much more sad one) I don't want to miss anything during the time I would have to commute somewhere.  Yup.  I'm a huge huge nerd. 

 (As a side note - shout out to all my sorority gals who remember me manufacturing fake "get out of chapter free" passes just so I could sit around in my sweatpants and watch these things... because every year on award days, I get an email or Facebook message from at least one of you still making fun of me.)

I can't exactly place my finger on the exact reason I love them.  I know they are self-indulgent, and very rarely do the people who deserve to win things end up with the award.  But it won't stop me from watching.  And it won't stop me from predicting the winners either.  Last year, I felt quite undereducated when it came to the movies that were nominated, so I took many steps to rectify that this year.  Actually, I only took one step - I saw a freaking lot of movies.  Here's my take on the nominated movies (drama... because, lets be serious, these are the big boys), the performances, TV shows... and whatever other rambling opinions I think of while writing about those things. :)

BEST PICTURE - DRAMA

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire

A conversation between a friend and I recently turned to the Globes.  I told him that, out of all the nominated films, Button made me think the most.  His retort was pretty much perfection - "Slumdog made me feel the most."  It made me think - a combination of those two things is a sure guarantee of recognition come awards time.  Sure, a movie can make you think.  And a movie can make you feel.  But one devoid of the other... well... that's not gonna get you far.  

Movies are supposed to be a time to get away, to feel what someone else is feeling, to forget about life.  If a movie can't make you feel, if you're not invested in the characters and their particular plight, then it's probably not worth making, and certainly not worth watching.  But every movie does this - it's why rom-coms are so popular.  Because at the moment when Girl puts herself out there, only to be denied by Boy and have her heart broken, you sympathize with her.  You want them to work it out.  The mark of an award-worthy movie is one that makes you think during.  And after.  Once Boy and Girl get together, the movie is done, and I don't care anymore.  An awards movie stays with you after you leave the theater.  It follows you to dinner, it pops up in discussion, it changes the way you view things.

So to be a great, you need both.  Feeling and thought.  That's what I'm talking about.

While I really enjoyed all five of these movies, think that this race comes down to Button, Rev Road, and Slumdog.  For the first time in a very long while, I have no clue who is going to win this.  Which, in my eyes, is a good thing - because it means lots of good movies came out this year.

I feel The Reader is out, as not many people saw it, and it comes across as more of an art film than anything else.  PS that's totally not said as a bad thing - I totally loved this movie.  The cast was brilliant, especially newcomer David Kross (in a role for which he learned English... sheesh...) and the always-perfect Kate Winslet, and the story is very evocative.  The word I keep thinking about this movie is "gutsy."  Another really impressive thing was that the cameras first rolled on this film in the Summer of 2008 - and it was in theaters by December.  Talk about turn around.

The other film I'm "eliminating" is Frost/Nixon.  I walked into this movie expecting to have to "suffer through it."  Needless to say, historical dramas aren't really my thing.  Surprisingly, I really enjoyed F/N.  It was way more humorous than I thought it would be.  Michael Sheen (I like him.  I just watched The Queen and he stole that one, too) and Frank Langella (more on him below) were both wonderful, and Ron Howard's directing skills were at their best.  My one complaint about this movie might be sort of silly, but here it is.  The whole premise of the movie is Frost trying to get this interview with post-Watergate Nixon.  Once he gets it, it's all about getting Nixon to say he did wrong.  Well, because of the way this movie was marketed, EVERYONE had already seen the moment where Nixon admits to XYandZ.  It made that moment so anti-climactic for me.  Granted, because this is a true story. we all know that Nixon was going to do it - but I knew the dialogue that would go with it.  I knew the camera angles.  There was no surprise to the moment, nothing new and shocking.  Because I had seen that moment in the commercials and trailers, I feel like the movie didn't earn it as much as it could have.

So that leaves Benjamin Button, Rev Road, and Slumdog.  The first two have been on this list since they were greenlit.  The other is the little movie that could.  It's for this reason that I might give the slight edge to Slumdog.  Everyone loves the underdog... and this movie about an underdog is no exception to that.  Personally, I found the first half to be phenomenal - it was heart-breaking, humorous, and truthful all at once.  The second half turned way to schmaltzy and predictable for my taste.  But it's topical, taking place in Mumbai, it's a cast of unknowns, and is the only one of the three that (spoiler alert) has a happy ending.  Awards voters eat this stuff up.

If the decision was purely dependent upon which was my favorite, Button would walk away with the Globe.  I laughed, I cried, I oogled over Brad Pitt.  Sounds like a pretty fantastic day at the movies to me.  This one gets my vote, if only for how it made me feel about 20 minutes after the movie was over - like every second of my life counts, like I can be a completely different person, like timing in life is everything and I can't rush things that need to happen on their own schedule.  

Rev Road was a little repetitious for  my liking - "who made these rules?" for about two hours was more than I needed.  I wonder what this movie would have been like had Sam Mendes not directed it.  I think too often, I found my brain wandering off to American Beauty parallels instead of focusing on what was going on.  What saves this movie, and makes it worthwhile, are the performances.  Seeing Rose and Jack (or Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio, as they are known in real life and not to my 13 year old self) back together again could have taken me out of the movie faster than you could say "Iceberg, straight ahead!"  But the two master actors take you to a completely different world, where their former alter-egos never existed.

So, overall, I'm saying Slumdog takes it home... but for the first time in many years, I can't put a definitely on it.

BEST ACTOR - DRAMA

Leonardo DiCaprio - Revolutionary Road, Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon, Sean Penn - Milk, Brad Pitt - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

I'm giving the edge to either DiCaprio or Langella for this competition.  It's surprising that someone who started his career on "Growing Pains" is turning out to be the best of his generation.  Leo's performance in Rev Road had me mesmerized so much that his cute babyface couldn't snap me out of it.  His character, Frank Wheeler, goes through the gamut of human emotion, and DiCaprio plays it flawlessly.  Langella hands in a pitch-perfect Nixon - changing his voice, wearing prosthetic jowls (never thought I'd ever type that EVER), changing his mannerisms, etc.  Globes voters often reward these types of performances.

Pitt and Penn are on my "B list."  Pitt is great as Ben Button, but I feel like he didn't bring much to the part that some other A list actors couldn't.  The same evaluation goes to Penn, who brought gay politician Harvey Milk to life (as un-PC as it sounds, the entire time I was walking Milk, I was wondering why Penn's performance in this reminded me so much to his performance of a mentally-handicapped man in I Am Sam... yikes...).  So while both were great performances, I don't think they didn't quite become the characters as much as they needed to.

Haven't seen The Wrestler, but I'd say overall I'm opposed to giving any kind of award to a usually out-of-work performer trying to resuscitate his career for playing a usually out-of-work performer trying to resuscitate his career.  Case closed.

Conclusion: I say Langella for the win... but will secretly be rooting for Jack Daw...err... DiCaprio.

BEST ACTRESS - DRAMA

Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married, Angelina Jolie - Changeling, Meryl Streep - Doubt, Kristin Scott Thomas - I've Loved You So Long, Kate Winslet - Revolutionary Road

Honestly, I've only seen two movies.  And really I'm just using this as a space to talk about Doubt.  Oh Doubt, what high hopes I had for you.  And it wasn't that you were a bad movie - it's just it was so incredibly clear that you were better as a play.  Because it was a play, it's a fabulous character piece that highlights raw acting talent.  Meryl was awesome... as if we expected anything different... I mean... it's MERYL for goodness' sake.  I'm going with her for the win here.  I'll be rooting for Winslet - I'll root for her in anything she does, even if it's peeling a banana with her feet on screen - but I feel that since she is nominated in both the Lead Actress and Supporting Actress categories, it will, unfortunately, split her votes (I also thought she was better in The Reader than she was in Rev Road).  I feel like Jolie's nom is just a formality.  I've never even heard of the Kristin Scott Thomas film.  I wouldn't mind Hathaway taking the award either (girl's had a rough year - maybe an award could make her feel better after her thieving boyfriend left her and went to jail, right?).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Tom Cruise - Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr. - Tropic Thunder, Ralph Fiennes - The Duchess, Philip Seymour Hoffman - Doubt, Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

I'm gonna put it out there - anyone under the age of 30 is rooting for Mr. Ledger on this one.  And, as I am in that age range, so am I.  

It's easy to forget just how good his performance was, as the movie itself seems to be overshadowed in many ways by the massive (holy moolah Batman!) amount of money money the film made, the tragedy of Heath's death, the weird string of battery-related incidents Christian Bale had, etc.  And it's easy to chalk up any awards he receives to the same correlated events.  But Heath Ledger was The Joker.  The blurring of the line between the two was just creepy in such a delicious way.  It was never "hokey," but purely just frightening.  Especially after a lot of the snubs I thought I received for his performance in Brokeback Mountain, I'm really hoping he gets this one.

My runner up is PSH.  Man, he's great in everything, right?  Again, Doubt served as a great vehicle for all it's actors, regardless of a slightly unfulfilling plot.

I haven't seen Tropic Thunder... but I have a hard time thinking that Tom Cruise could win any sort of award right now.  *Shudder.*

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams - Doubt, Penelope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Viola Davis - Doubt, Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler, Kate Winslet - The Reader

This will be quick - Viola Davis for the win, because any actress who has one scene in a movie with Meryl Streep and somehow manages to steal the entire movie while snot runs unabashedly down her face SHOULD win an award.  Winslet deserves some recognition too for a controversial and tough part.

And onto Television...

BEST TELEVISION SHOW - DRAMA

Dexter, House, In Treatment, Mad Men, True Blood

Oh, Dexter.  How I love thee.  You make me root...nay... love... a serial murderer.  That being said, your chances here are unfortunately slim.  I think Mad Men is just too strong of a contender right now - it's been picking up speed for about six months now in Criticland.  Not saying it's undeserved, as it's a pretty fantastic show (I've only seen the first season, so I can't comment on the season that is nominated).  I just with everyone loved the killer as much as I do.

BEST TELEVISION SHOW - COMEDY

30 Rock, Californication, Entourage, The Office, Weeds

While all that know me know I'll be rooting for The Office, I'm pretty sure 30 Rock's got this wrapped around its little finger.  I watched every episode of the show that is available to the public (which is all of them... thank you NBC.com) over Christmas break, and I see what the hubbub is all about.  It's one of the truly, simply funny shows on TV - its gags aren't complicated, but they are FUNNY. 

Others I'm rooting for... 

-Michael C. Hall for his work on Dexter - as far as I'm concerned, he's been overlooked three years in a row... and also just got married to the girl that plays his sister on the show (SCANDAL!)

-Tina Fey - cuz us nerdy, brunette, glasses girls gotta stick together.

-Steve Carell - if only to see the acceptance speech... and if he doesn't win, hopefully he'll get the award anyway (take THAT, Ricky Gervais)

-Neil Patrick Harris - don't get me wrong, I love me some Ari Gold.  But Piven hasn't deserved awards since the second season of Entourage, while NPH is still making me pee my pants every week on How I Met Your Mother.

Well... that's about it.  It's about time for bed - I've got a big day tomorrow!  I'll be back tomorrow night with running thoughts of the show, the fashion, etc!  Woohoo!

Here goes nothing!

Well, hello there!  Many of yall know me.  Many of you don't.  Either way, welcome... and if you don't know me, seriously, what are you doing here?  Wait...wait... what am I doing here?  I suppose I should explain...

My name is Susan.  I'm from Chicago.  And I love pop culture.  I mean LOVE it.  It's one of the only things in my 24 years of existence that has continually made me happy, and will continue to make me happy.  And because my parents have probably know this for a while, my dad told me that I should start blogging about it.  now, while I suspect that part of this is because he wanted to prove how cool he was by using the world "blog" in a sentence, the more I thought about the idea, it sorta sounded cool.  I mean, even if it ends up just being me babbling (yes, yes, I know that this post will be used as exhibit A, right?) about the movies, TV, music, and "celebrity" that I've been ruminating about, it'll still be a fun little experience.  And force me to digest all of the random pop cultural items floating around in my head.

I sat down to start this about 15 minutes ago, when i realized that coming up with titles is certainly not my thing.  Or awesome witty titles, at least.  As I write this, I also realize that correct punctuation is probably not my thing either.  Anywho, what I kept coming back to was "As Yet Untitled."  When a production is underway and hasn't been named yet, that's what they "in the biz" (so I'm told) call it... like "the as yet untitled insert director of choice film."  I thought it was fitting - because not only do I not really know the direction of this blog, but I'm at a point in my life when I'm not really sure about the direction of that either.  Take that for some pondering!

So, here you go, Dad.  It should be an interesting one! :)