Oscars 2013: The Morning After

As you must know by now, the ceremony was deemed sexist, racist and offensive by a lot of people.  For the most part, it was.

I’m loath to join the "can’t take a joke" bandwagon. What offends me the most is that Seth McFarlane’s humor was petty and mean spirited. It was vulgar, lowly TV humor, rather than something fit for the ocassion. He tried to be too Hollywood with snide, unfunny inside jokes. As Captain Kirk said, intending to be ironic, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler should host everything. Ain’t that the emess.

When you watch a ceremony live, you want to like what you are seeing. It takes a while for the smarm to sink in. That was the case with that stupid boob song. The more I think about it, the more inane and inappropriate it seems. That stupid bear talking shit about Jews was immediately appalling and really unfit for an audience of billions (who probably already believe in a Jewish conspiracy anyway). Using a little girl to joke about George Clooney's sex life, sleazy.  

There were some highlights. Mostly provided by women.

I know I have tirelessly campaigned for the excision of musical numbers from the show, but Shirley Bassey belting Goldfinger was one of the greatest highlights of all time.  So was the inimitable Babs singing  The Way We Were and looking younger by the minute. The evening got off to a lovely start with Charlize Theron expertly dancing with Channing Tatum a la Ginger and Fred. These were the only moments with class. The rest was humor devised and intended for that famous demographic so coveted by Hollywood, 15 year-old males. At least the suits got a taste of their own medicine.

For a four hour ceremony, there were too many irrelevant moments. I love William Shatner, but he is beyond irrelevant. The Oscars are not about TV, they are about the movies.  But we are in an age of small screens, so this is what we get. Smallness. 

Chicago? Whatever the fuck? Utterly irrelevant.

The singing cast of Les Miserables was a giant clusterfuck, just like that movie: a supernova of dreck.

The obits were the best part, as usual, but us Latinos are extremely pissed that Lupe Ontiveros, the quintessential Latina maid, was snubbed. We won’t forget.

There were some righteous wins. Anne Hathaway’s was not one of them. But Ang Lee’s was,  so was Tarantino’s, so was Amour, so was Jennifer Lawrence. The best supporting actor category was a tough one, and Waltz was as right to get it as any of his peers. Daniel Day Lewis once again comported himself like the King of Class. He happens to have a sense of humor, plus nobody wears a tux like him.  

If there was justice in the world, Beasts Of The Southern Wild was utterly ignored and so was Zero Dark Thirty. They are simply bad movies. Is Argo a Best Picture? No. That award should have gone to either Django Unchained or Amour, which is at another level of artistry altogether. But well crafted, competent Argo won because it is about Hollywood. They love nothing better than self-congratulation.

Jimmy Fallon would have been a delightful host. Michelle Obama dancing with Fallon to advocate against obesity, ultra cool. The White House getting in bed with Hollywood in such an overt fashion, reeks of starfucking from the Presidency and is totally tasteless, inappropriate and wrong. I’m secretly enjoying whatever fallout is happening in the White House over this ridiculous decision that got her, who has done no wrong so far, associated with a sexist, racist and offensive telecast. 

Dress-wise: Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence and Robin Roberts were stunning. Everybody else looked like a chandelier from Vegas crashed on top of them.

See you next year. 

Magic Mike

I have a newfound respect for Channing Tatum, hero, producer and inspiration of this uneven film by Steven Soderbergh. He is a charming, confident actor and he can bust a move (who knew?). The story goes that he used to be a male stripper and this film is based on his experiences. Good for him.
He is chiseled to perfection and gorgeous to look at: All-American Beefcake Extraordinaire. He could be the offspring of Tommy Lee Jones. He reminds one of actors like John Wayne, or even Gary Cooper. A real guy. A man's man. Not a hipster wallflower, this one. In my fantasies, I see him as a Marine, or an officer in the Yankee Army, who comes in uniform to sweep me (Scarlett O'Hara with glasses and no Tara) off my feet. American movies today need intelligent, sensitive, sensible beefcake like him. We've had a shortage of his kind for years. He is eminently likable, he has personality, unlike some of the other beefcakes Hollywood tries to foist up on us, such as Taylor Lautner or Taylor Kitsch, good examples of pumped up human nothingness.
Magic Mike belongs to a hallowed category of American working class stiff movies like Urban Cowboy, Saturday Night Fever, and An Officer And A Gentleman. It is no coincidence that Soderbergh uses the Warner Brothers logo from 1972 to 1984, the period when some of the aforementioned movies were made. Like these films, Magic Mike is about what American people have to do to make a decent living. Except in this case, the working class heroes are male strippers in Tampa, Florida. This, of course, is a big exception.
Those expecting something darker, a jaundiced view of American entrepreneurship along the lines of Boogie Nights (working stiffs, no pun intended, in the American porn industry), will find Magic Mike a much more conventional film, a straight-laced morality tale, not about sex, but about work ethic. I'm not sure if it intends to be radical by delivering so conventional a story (feebly written by Reid Carolin), but Magic Mike somehow misses the opportunity to make a stronger statement about a number of interesting themes.
It makes much of the guys' need for money. These are people who earn each and every dollar bill they make. Money comes to them in fistfuls, a dollar or five bucks at a time, depending on pelvic thrust. They happen to live in Florida, world capital of financial hubris. For all the hard work Mike does, (he has more than one job and builds furniture), he lives in a pretty nice house steps away from the beach. Still, he can't get a loan to start the business he is passionate about, which has nothing to do with stripping. His is the story of achievement through honesty and hard work, not easy money and deception.
The other salient topic is the selling of sex, in this case, male to female. There is one scene where the love interest (played by nonentity Cody Horn) watches Mike's routine at the club. Like all of us in the audience (comprised mostly, the night I saw it, of excited young females), she is spellbound by his physical glory, his sexiness and his talent as a stripper (these men work hard to put on a show). There is sexual longing in her gaze, but there is also disgust. How can these guys stoop so low?
We are used to seeing women perform in strip clubs in real life, films, and cable TV, and nobody finds this uncomfortable, even though the female version of stripping is by now almost completely devoid of romance, fantasy or narrative, and it has become mostly hardcore smut. But show dudes pleasing women's libidos by stripping and undulating, and a frisson of discomfort, embarrassment and thoughts of homoeroticism rise to the surface. In real life, how many male stripper clubs exist today in comparison to "gentlemen's clubs"? Must be one in thousands. This is a disparity that goes right to the core of the profound inequality between the sexes. The movie only hints at it by training the camera mostly at the male bodies.
The first scenes of the strippers, both in their dressing room and in their choreographed routines are bracing, exciting, and fun. It is shocking to watch men unabashedly bump and grind at women. The club, as these clubs are, is a safe place for women to let out some steam. It's perfect for bachelorette parties, girls celebrating their passage into legal drinking age, girls' nights out, etc. The stripping dance routines are fueled by fantasy (firemen, detectives, policemen, construction workers, soldiers, doctors, etc), and there is something fun and lighthearted, almost innocent, about the whole scene. Soderbergh spends a lot of time on those male bodies and shows little of the club's clientele's reactions, to the point that the women become just blurry backdrop. I wish there was more of their titillation, their elation and their desire. More of the female gaze.
The movie has no time to dwell on this fascinating topic, preferring to focus on melodrama; the trials and tribulations of Mike, a decent, hardworking, talented guy who likes to make furniture from discarded debris and is wary of relationships. He helps Adam, (Alex Pettyfer), a dropout and slightly shady 19 year-old he meets at the construction site where he works by day, by introducing him to the world of male stripping. They are polar opposites. Mike is hardworking, has principle and straight ambitions, even if he loves threesomes (always with two women: all the strippers in this movie seem to be militantly heterosexual). Adam is blinded by the easy money and the easy sex. Adam's sister, Brooke (Cody Horn) is the ornery love interest who chafes at the thought of her brother and Mike belonging to this crazy circle of strippers. Matthew McConaughey, finally remembering he has always been a solid comic character actor, chews the scenery as Dallas, the flamboyant, fickle owner of the club. Their story is interrupted many times by dance routines at the club. After three or four dance scenes, the routines get boring. They stall the story. At the same time, the earnest, shoddily written story stalls the fun. The result is a movie that feels both long and undercooked, a fact that is not aided by mostly asinine, unimaginative dialogue that seems to have been lifted directly from Mumblecore. Some scenes feel like hack work, others are very effective. A particularly fun scene is when Adam undresses in front of the audience for the first time. The embarrassment, the mettle, and the churlishness he displays by being totally artless are what makes his stripping sexy. And there are a couple of funny moments delivered by good comic timing in editing, particularly involving McConaughey. But I have a feeling that Soderbergh's heart is elsewhere. There is a fuzziness, a lack of focus that feels distant and uncommitted, particularly compared to other, much more polished work from him. Some of the story doesn't make sense, as when Adam clearly betrays Mike and in the next scene they are hanging out as if nothing happened. I also don't believe Mike forgives and helps Adam for love of his sister Brooke. Mike slowly comes to regard Brooke as relationship material, but Cody Horn is so uncharismatic that her presence actually zaps the movie of life. This is the kind of creative decision that turns a decent movie into hack work. Brooke is a big, juicy part that should have gone to a better actress. But Horn happens to be the daughter of Alan Horn, the ex-Warner Brothers studio chief. Maybe she came with the financing. Ah, the things one has to do to make an honest living in America...