Earlier this week, Funny or Die tried to answer the question I hoped would never get asked this Oscar season: Who had it worse, slaves or poor, single mothers driven into prostitution?
In a clever four-minute video, Samuel L. Jackson (Team Slaves) and Anne Hathaway (Team PSMDIP) campaigned for their respective sides in a “sad-off.” It’s a brilliant bit of movie promotion, with the actors selling their sad, sad movies (Les Misérables and Django Unchained, respectively) through comedy. “My movie is literally called ‘The Miserable,’” throws down Hathaway.
“Women get beaten in my movie,” boasts Jackson.
“Same thing happens in mine,” Hathaway counters.
“Guy gets his head blown off.”
“Same.”
“There’s a man ripped apart by dogs in my movie.” When Hathaway stays quiet, Jackson cackles in triumph.
The two Oscar nominees eventually get into the yuletide spirit by cheerfully agreeing, “Nothing says Christmas like slaves and whores.” That’s cute and all, but it also smartly points out the paradox of the holiday movie season, that magical time of the year when, between maxing out our credit cards and stuffing our faces like it’s the Mayan apocalypse, we dutifully assign ourselves to watch “serious movies” about “important issues.”
There seem to be way more of those this year, from the slavery-themed Django, the plebe-supporting Les Miz, the torture-approving Zero Dark Thirty, the dementia-sympathizing Amour, the insanity-forgiving Silver Linings Playbook, the FEMA-condemning Beasts of the Southern Wild, and the disability-sex-championing The Sessions. Looking at this group of politically weighty films, Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir stated last week that he’s looking forward to a “meaty” 2013 Oscars because of the “ideological…
Full Story »All right, all right, all right.
Awards season has officially gotten down in the dirt with a little bit of glorious stank. The New York Film Critics Circle, an august body despite three years of madness under Armond White’s leadership, has named Matthew McConaughey the year’s best supporting actor for his work in both Magic Mike and Bernie.
With this double-gun recognition, my guess is that the group felt this was a salute to McConaughey’s leading performance in Killer Joe, and all the forced fried chicken-sucking it included, too.
It’s quite a comeback. For years McConaughey served merely two purposes: appearing in dreadful rom coms like Failure to Launch and having a last name that drove copyeditors crazy. But we knew – we knew that beneath the skin of that shirtless Texan beat the heart of a courageous and unpredictable performer who could, when given a chance, deliver. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t been itching for an excuse to love this guy again.
McConaughey’s turn as Dallas, the “Den Father,” I guess you could call him, of the strippers in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, is now a genuine contender for the Golden Globes and the Oscars. (No diss to Bernie, but Magic Mike was a bonafide box office hit, has Warner Bros. behind it and, you know, ass chaps.) Plus he’s already gotten a nomination for it and Killer Joe at the Spirit Awards in the bag. Our suggestion to M-McC: just keep livin’. The rest of the world is now hip to how awesome you can be.
Of course, not everyone can recognize greatness when they see it. A sampling on Twitter shows jubilant critics (someone pass…
Full Story »With this season’s Les Misérables mania in swing, many a moviegoer has been obsessing over those familiar songs and weepy French revolutionary dramatics in anticipation of the Christmas Oscar pic. I’ve been thinking a lot about the classic Les Mis tune “On My Own,” about one girl’s unrequited love for a boy who loves another — but not as sung by Eponine about Marius and his beloved little songbird Cosette. I’m talking Joey Potter’s Miss Windjammer rendition from season one of Dawson’s Creek.
If you were a teenage girl growing up in the late ’90s, chances are you watched the seminal WB series. And if you had any sense at all, you identified not with wannabe Spielberg Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek), adorably feckless Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson), or the hot-but-troubled new girl in town Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams), but with the tomboyish girl-next-door, Joey Potter (Katie Holmes).
So when Joey reluctantly entered the local Miss Windjammer beauty contest (for college tuition money!) and warbled the Les Miserables ballad “On My Own” — prompting stupid Dawson to see past Jen and notice Joey for the first time ever — you LOVED EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF IT. Joey was the Eponine of Capeside, Massachusetts, and Dawson was her Marius, and this Eponine was finally getting her man.
I’ll admit with no small shred of embarrassment: I’ve probably seen Joey sing “On My Own” dozens of times in my life. As soon the Internet invented YouTube, I found it and watched it again. (There was that one lost evening when I fell down a k-hole of Joey-Pacey YouTube videos, but that’s another story.) I’d never seen Les Miserables onstage, so Dawson’s Creek marked my introduction to the soulful, wistful “On My Own” — and in the hazy…
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