2013 Oscar Predictions

Tonight's the big night. What will get the glory? Will Harvey Weinstein buy out the awards again? Will Ben Affleck's film (if not his own direction) find itself joining the likes of Ben Her or Schinder's List? Can Lincon or Silver Linings Playbook defy the odds and do the most shocking thing in recent Oscar history: surprise us?

That's why cinephiles watch the show every year. I tend to throw a party with a betting pool to see who can guess the most correct winners after we fill out our ballots. Here's my predictions going into the night out of all the categories with what I think will win in bold. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments.

Podcast Episode 9

Here it is, in all its glory: click the link to download a free MP3.

Part One: (Star Wars, Will's News)
Part Two: (Founding Fathers, Hitler and Obama)

Thanks for listening, everybody!

Review: A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III

The mentality following the termination of a serious relationship has been the subject of countless pieces of art, but two films really brought film to new levels on the topic. Those films were Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In both cases, you got a well developed sense of the internal despair of a hard breakup and the mental inability to stop analyzing and going over what happened, what was right, and, ultimately, why it all came tumbling down. Charlie Sheen returns to theaters for the first time in nine years in Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. Coppola's most recent cinematic efforts include co-writing the screenplays for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom. Here, he attempts to add another story to the genre so incredibly well defined by Annie Hall or Eternal Sunshine.

Charles Swan III is a rampant womanizer, but he has been with a woman that he has really fallen for, but she has broken up with him following her discovery of a drawer filled with dirty pictures of his past girlfriends and hookups. Now, he is devastated and falling behind in his work as a graphic designer. Rather than deal with the issues, he is both stuck in the past and his fantasies of both the world and how the past could have worked. The film feel surreal from frame one, and never really gets to a point where the stylized universe it is set in is differentiated with some sense of reality. This style walks a fine line between style and substance. Woody Allen showed in the 70s how the two can actually mesh quite will. Roman Coppola, unfortunately, does not pay the same amount of attention to developing his characters as he does to their costumes or the soundtrack.

The New Podcast is Available

The Guilty Pleasures Podcast returns tonight on Spreaker Web Radio. Click on the links for a free MP3.

Part One: (Weird News, Ben, Cats, Green Day)
Part Two: (Jennifer Lawrence, Rap Music, 30 Rock, Oscars)
Part Three: (Obama Soundbites, Slavery, Lance Armstrong, Blood Doping)


Come back next Tuesday for another new episode!

The 2013 GP Movie Awards

Well, the Academy Award nominations have been announced. They're sort of underwhelming this year, so here is my alternative. Welcome to the First Annual Guilty Pleasures Movie Awards. Here are the nominees with the winners in bold. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments below. I'm sure my choices have just as much potential for disappointment as that group of old white men's.

Before we go too far, let me point out that our poll for what you, our readers, would have nominated for Best Picture has concluded with the following ten nominees: Argo, Moonrise Kingdom, Zero Dark Thirty, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Master, Skyfall, Lincoln, and the overwhelming number of votes went to Les Miserables, which we can claim as our victor for the reader awards.

Now, it's my turn.

My Favorite Films of 2012

It's the end of the year, and thus time for the Best Of lists. Seeing as I live in Omaha, Nebraska, I'm stuck with the unfortunate reality that no one here has seen Zero Dark Thirty and won't until mid-January, so that will not be eligible for this list. Other than that, it's pretty simple. This year, I had a very unique challenge when putting together this list. It was honestly very difficult to think of ten films from 2012 that I have passion for. As someone who sees hundreds of movies a year, it made me sad to think that we had such phenomenal filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino Whit Stillman, Woody Allen, Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, and many more all contribute to the year, only to find that most couldn't create the classics we expected. So this list is five films I liked, three films I really liked, and two that I loved. That's all I could muster. Let's hope 2013 goes better.

Top 10:

10. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Right way, I've probably lost some readers with this choice. No one seems to like this movie. I absolutely expected to hate it. Quite frankly, the previews for this looked dreadfully bland, as opposed to biting like the premise suggested. That being said, though this was not nearly as dark as I anticipated, I found myself frequently moved by its poignant emotional core. Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley gave surprisingly restrained performances, letting depth sink in in a much more realistic way than you would think.  The jokes did tend to run a little more broad and silly than they needed to, but the emotions of the film were absolutely in the right place and it's ultimately a wonderful film.

9. Hitchcock

Admittedly, there are certain films that are not really made for general audiences. The average moviegoer today may have some idea of who Alfred Hitchcock was and what kind of movies he made, but few would see this movie and be as completely swept away by it as true cinephiles. That's really who this was made for and it hits all the great notes. It is a stylized biopic that may not strike the realism chord, but it paints a very entertaining picture of one of the most important genre revolutions in cinematic history. What if someone good made a horror picture? Witness the way Alfred Hitchcock brought horror into the A-Picture club and changed movies forever.

8. Django Unchained

I really struggled with where exactly I wanted to place Django Unchained on my list. I have very mixed feelings about it, but ultimately I think it is a very creative and unique movie. Maybe if it had come out months ago, I'd have enough time to really digest where it falls on a list like this, but I've only had a few weeks so I'm sorry. Quite frankly, I find the first half of this epic blaxploitation spaghetti western to be amazingly perfect cinema and some of the most entertaining work I've seen all year. Enter the second half, which is when Quentin Tarantino really let his trademarks take over in place of his western setting and things get a little bit more murky and less successful as things take a dark turn, followed by a silly over the top epilogue. Django is more of a mixed bag when looking at the sum of its parts, but 4/5ths of its parts are pretty dang wonderful. It's not the genius level of Inglourious Basterds or any of his 90s work, but there's enough to like here that this really deserved a place on my list.

The Most Disappointing Movies of 2012

This list deserves a disclaimer: disappointing is not the same word as worst. Every year, people call me out for my choices on this list by saying the film wasn't that bad. Well, yes, I realize that. There's only one legitimately bad movie on this list. The rest, to my great disappointment, are artistic misfires that had unbelievable potential. This potential led me to think I was in for masterpieces that. In most cases, these were movies I thought would be my favorites of the year. Instead, they ended up here.

5. Cloud Atlas

I never wrote a review of Cloud Atlas because reviews, while they are literal tellings of one's subjective reaction to a piece of art, are not supposed to be written exclusively as a reaction to the biases one had walking into a film. With Cloud Atlas, I wasn't just watching an inventive new film; I was eagerly anticipating the adaptation of one of my favorite novels of all time. I absolutely adore David Mitchell's groundbreakingly original novel. It just reeked of genius and after watching the five minute long trailer for the movie, I just started believing that they'd somehow pulled it off. Before seeing the movie, I purchased the soundtrack and once again let myself think My God, they've done it. Never before have I listened to a soundtrack for a movie based on a beloved book and felt that the composers perfectly captured the tone of the novel, but Cloud Atlas did it for me. At this point, I was convinced that the Cloud Atlas movie would be my favorite movie of the year, maybe of all time.

Then, when I saw it, reality finally settled in. It was always going to be extremely difficult to fit all the things that make Cloud Atlas work into a 165 minute long movie. In fact, I'd argue that it's impossible, as proven by the movie. This needed to be a 6 hour long miniseries on HBO to really work, and hopefully someday someone will give me many millions of dollars to make that happen. Today however, I'm left with this strange hybrid of the novel that made a lot of artistic changes that worked well for some of the stories, but butchered my favorite one. The structure of the original novel was a large reason for why its multi-layered story worked, but the film becomes more disjointed and ultimately works so fast that you fail to get attached to these characters or feel the gravity of the situations they are in. The film has some beautiful acting and cinematography but it turns out that it's just too much to ask for someone to create a broad, short version of the breathtaking novel. All that being said, I still listen to the soundtrack on a regular basis.

4. Seven Psychopaths

There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh's followup to In Bruges, was going to be great. After all, Bruges is such a perfectly woven film with perfect nuance and attention to all the details that this guy had exhibited none of the qualities of a one-hit wonder. The movie, however, suggests he may be just that. Rather than make a movie, we have a collection of characters and skits and vignettes that have potential but never really pull together because, as the writer's block inflicted protagonist will admit, there was never any direction when writing the script. It came from writer's block and is about writer's block, but fails to make any real points about the subject we haven't seen handled with much more subtlety in works like Barton Fink or Adaptation. The acting here was all superb, so it was really a shame that nothing ever came together in the end here. Oh well, at least we got Tom Waits holding a bunny.

Django Unchained: Tarantino's Most Indulgent Film Yet

Only a handful of filmmakers have final cut rights in every contract they sign. What that means is that the financier or studio can make as many suggestions about what could be change or tweaked to the script, cast, or finished film, but the director has no obligation to listen to a single thing. In short, these directors have 100% control over what they're doing. As a concept, of course, this sounds like the ideal setup for making movies. After all, what do studio heads know about movies? They're businessmen, not artists, right? Quentin Tarantino began in the independent circuit and by the time his second movie (Pulp Fiction) was released to huge profits and acclaim, it was clear that this man was one of the rare artists who would forever get final say on everything he did from now on. In the beginning, he had final say over a series of low budget, low risk projects, but as the 2000s rolled around, the budgets grew increasingly higher and Tarantino became one of the even more extremely rare few who could make blockbusters and take no criticism from anyone giving him money.

Now, that is not to say there was no one giving him opinions throughout that time on how to improve his work, be it through pacing, what plots could be expanded on or taken out, or even music choices. From the very beginning with Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino got this valuable advice from a woman named Sally Menke, his editor. With Menke, Tarantino found a genius to shape his massive narratives into tightly woven, fatless products. That's not to say every project the two collaborated on was a masterpiece; I'd argue that their 90s work towers far above the post-2000 films with the exception of Inglourious Basterds. However, it was clear that Menke had the sensibilities that a studio head may not; she could take an objective look at what Tarantino made and turn it into the best product the story had the potential for. Tragically, Sally Menke died in 2010 at the early age of 56. A year later, Tarantino began work on Django Unchained, his most expensive project to date and ultimately his longest.

Happy End of the World, Everyone!

I figured it'd be a crime to not post something today for those of you convinced tomorrow is the end. Of course, on the show we've had just about every guest bring up opposing viewpoints on the 2012 issue. My take? Nothing's going to happen other than people freaking out. This post originally was going to be a countdown of my favorite apocalypse movies, but my criteria included the world actually ending in them. Anything where Ben Affleck saves the day was immediately disqualified. So that left about four movies I actually like, and no list just has four movies. If you're really looking for some quality apocalypse entertainment, you don't have enough time to read The Stand so let me suggest you pop in Dr. Strangelove or Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. Those are some solid movies.

If this is, in fact, the end somehow, thanks for reading and have a wonderful apocalypse.

The Hobbit: Three Hours You'll Never Get Back Again

I'm not really big into fantasy. Let me get that out there straight away. That being said, I'm certainly a sucker for great storytelling, compelling characters, and narratives packed with more than enough story to justify a long runtime. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey exhibits none of these qualities. It is, of course, inevitable to compare this latest film to The Lord of the Rings, a trilogy that I hardly fawn over, but can appreciate. Middle Earth has never fascinated me, but with The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson showed that well cast and developed characters can certainly make you buy all the silly bits in the story. Certainly with those films you cared about the overall goal. In fact, the story was pretty simple: if that ring doesn't get destroyed, we're all going to die. Okay, sure. I get it, I guess.

Enter the horribly convoluted "plot" of this first in the Hobbit trilogy, a prequel taking place 60 years before the story we all know so well. Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellan), feeling especially snotty, decides to barge in on Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) with 13 oafish, uninteresting dwarves looking to reclaim their mountain home. The Lonely Mountain was the dwarf kingdom before a gold-craving dragon named Smaug came in and snagged it for himself. Apparently the dragon wasn't much interested in using the gold to buy things for himself, because he's taken to just sleeping under piles of gold as a hobby. So, why Bilbo Baggins? Well, these incompetent and stubborn dwarves don't really get it, and neither do I. The group begins the journey and encounters endless chase scenes where danger is constantly around the corner and no one can ever save themselves.

Watch the First Trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth

Here, Kitai Kitai.

Is there anyone out there who still heavily anticipates every new M. Night Shyamlan release? If so, this is the movie you've been waiting for since you apparently loved The Last Airbender. I'm working on a much longer editorial on the rise and decline of M. Night Shyamalan, so I'll save that for the next few days when that gets posted. Anyway, here's the plot description for his latest, After Earth:

After Earth is set one thousand years after cataclysmic events forced humanity's escape from Earth and Nova Prime has become mankind's new home. General Cypher Raige (Will Smith) returns from an extended tour of duty to his estranged family, ready to be a father to his 13-year-old son, Kitai (Jaden Smith). When an asteroid storm damages Cypher and Kitai's craft, they crash-land on a now unfamiliar and dangerous Earth. As his father lies dying in the cockpit, Kitai must trek across the hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon. His whole life, Kitai has wanted nothing more than to be a soldier like his father. Today, he gets his chance.

That's right. The two main characters in After Earth are named Cypher Raige and Kitai. Now, onto the trailer!




After Earth gets released on June 7, 2013.

The Star Trek 2 Bad Guy Is. . .John Harrison?

(Left to right) Zachary Quinto is Spock, Benedict Cumberbatch is John Harrison and Chris Pine is Kirk in STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS from Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions.

I honestly don't like Star Trek including the original series, the spinoff series, or the movie series, with one notable exception: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Really, that's a great movie. If I taught a film seminar about that really rare occurrence known as "good blockbuster writing," it would be absolute blasphemy to do anything other than praise the first Star Trek sequel. That one really understood what it is that makes big movies so dumb. Most franchise films have no sense of danger (of course no one dies, right?), bland characters/dialogue, and are predictable beyond belief. Khan throws all the cliches of an extremely cliche-filled series out the window and brings a balls-to-the-wall thrilling revenge story to the series that is not afraid to kill off anyone as the ruthless Khan makes things much more personal and series than you'd ever expect.

Last year, as J.J. Abrams' then-untitled sequel to his 2009 Star Trek reboot/reinvention/sequel thingy began casting, we had no information about the plot other than Benicio del Toro had been approached to play the villain. Well, it didn't take long to throw out a few reasonable guesses about what villain Abrams could possibly want another Latino actor for, especially a Latino actor with a resemblance to Ricardo Montalban. It's KHAN! Things were lining up for a sequel that could potentially bring the franchise back to its, well, only high point. My interest went from apathy to excitement in a second. Abrams is no dummy. I trust what would essentially be a remake of the great sequel to him. Then, del Toro could not agree on a price so he dropped out of negotiations, only to be replaced by a lanky British fellow - Benedict Cumberbatch.

Be Curry-ous, Buy Curry

Experimentation can spice up your life in many regards, including in the culinary sense. Whether you normally cook for just yourself or for others, trying new things
in the kitchen can be extremely gratifying. And especially around the holiday season, it offers you all sorts of pronounced reactions that you’re looking for, as well as those you’re not: everything from “Mms” and puckered faces to flatulence and heartburn. So tread softly, friends.

Should I Give to Hobos?

Ahem. This question has often circulated within religious and intellectual communities, not that the two are at all mutually exclusive. Since people inevitably fall pretty nicely into one of the categories, (that is, their actions are governed either by rational thought and ethical principles or by rational thought and moral dictums) let’s explore both sides.

We’ll start with religious people. I've seen countless examples of industrious Christians asking if they should share their hard-earned dollars with beggars, and the overwhelmingly popular answer is no. With “charity” and Christianity being so closely associated, it is an interesting phenomenon. The argument is as follows. Some people think that since Christ often begged himself and performed generous acts, he was all for charity. He didn’t just hand out cedar walking sticks and try to teach lame men how to adapt, he actually healed them. Or I guess we could just go with the whole “Give a man a fish; he’ll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” expression, because he did that, too. Jesus gave people fish, okay? Yet others point out that saving that dollar bill handout is actually doing society more of a favor. Having that industrious Christian spirit and contributing instead to larger charities and institutions is promoting help for those who deserve it, who want to better themselves and will put the work in like the rest of us. The Bible stresses the importance of work to human existence and how staying away from idleness contributes to all people in society.

RIP Dave Brubeck (1920-2012)

Dave Brubeck, one of the leaders in the progressive jazz movement, died today at age 91. Jazz fans everywhere recognize the wonderful contributions Brubeck and the Dave Brubeck Quartet brought to the world. I know I play my vinyl copy of the album Time Out more than anything else in my record collection. Brubeck was truly a treasure to music in general. Here's the Brubeck family's statement:

Our much loved and revered father, Dave Brubeck, died of cardiac arrest today, December 5, 2012, one day before his 92nd birthday. He died peacefully with family present. The news spread before we even left Norwalk Hospital and our family is deepy appreciative of the phone calls, messages of condolence and continuing tributes in the media and those received personally, certainly a reflection back to us of Dave's powerful and positive impact on the world. He specialized in long relationships; married to our mother for 70 years, had few changes of personnel in his outstanding quartets or in professional management and many of his fans became personal friends he new for decades. We thank you all for your appreciation of him and the respect you have shown our family.

Darius, Chris, Dan, Catherine, and Matthew Brubeck.  

If you're not familiar with the wonderful tunes Brubeck brought to the world, you owe it to yourself to give him a listen or two. In fact, here's the quintessential Brubeck piece. A master has passed on, but his music never will.

A Fascinating Director's Roundtable Discussion

The Hollywood Reporter has put together this absolutely fascinating discussion between Quentin Tarantino, Ben Affleck, Ang Lee, Tom Hooper, David O. Russell, and Gus van Sant about the art of directing. Each filmmaker has a prestigious film that has either been released this year or will soon come out. It's really a great way to spend an hour if the craft of filmmaking interests you.

The Show is Cancelled Tonight, Sorry Everyone!

Guilty Pleasures Radio is cancelled for tonight, sorry everyone. A last minute scheduling mixup has prevented one of the hosts from being there so we will not be able to perform the show tonight. We should be back and running for our premiere next week. We'll keep you posted.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers/fans of the show. We really appreciate all your support and hope you have a wonderful holiday. For all our international readers, well, I'll feel bad now if I don't post something on some foreign holidays so you'll get some recognition, too.

Anyway, be sure to tune into our podcast when it returns next Tuesday as well as the return of Guilty Pleasures on KVNO really soon. I promise the official start date will get announced any day now.

Have a great day, everyone!

Sex Toys and Dolphins

Living in a household of phenomenally empowered and progressive women is a life experience everyone should have. In every discussion, from politics to religion, you get insights into the roles of gender, specifically women, as well as sex’s position in the issue. Whether it was during the presidential campaigns or a more recent trip to a sex shop, larger issues are always available upon which my roommates jump to elaborate and inform. While searching for bachelorette party gear at this particular store, we had the opportunity to engage in some particularly stimulating conversation. (And for fear of this whole entry becoming a succession of sexual puns, I will henceforth disengage from such colorful vocabulary… or at least try to.)

Lincoln (Or, Spielberg's Middle School History Lesson)

What do you know about Abraham Lincoln? In America, at least, middle school and high school tend to give off this mythical impression of the president that ended the Civil War and freed the slaves. There's generally some attention directed to the importance of the thirteenth amendment, as well as a basic understanding of the key players in the war. You know the generals, you know some of the politicians, and you know the political implications of Lincoln's actions. So, when Steven Spielberg announces he's making an Abraham Lincoln biopic starring Daniel Day-Lewis and a million other great actors, you're incredibly excited to see what the director of such biting true story films like Schindler's List or Amistad will bring to the table. At least, that was my reaction. This movie could teach me so much more about the depth of these incidents I've been learning about my whole life, right? Well, walking out of Lincoln, I honestly can't say I learned anything at all.

Does this mean Spielberg has failed to make a compelling film? Well, no, not really. In fact, there are parts of Lincoln that left me far more moved than I thought I would be and overall it does have a certain compelling quality to these historical scenes that are predictable, simplified, and ultimately tell you nothing new. The vast majority of the film details the courtroom drama of passing the thirteenth amendment to abolish slavery as the Civil War is moving towards closure. Spielberg introduces you to a wide variety of characters played by the likes of Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Sally Field, James Spader, and an absolutely wonderful Tommy Lee Jones. Each actor brings a great energy to their respective historical roles and helps bring them to life. The acting is often powerful and sucks your heart into the scenes that your brain is assuring you are silly in their overdramatization or oversimplification. Such is an issue I had many times throughout the two hour run time.

As far as the performances go, most are applauding Daniel Day Lewis for his effort, but I have to say this was one of the least impressive performances I've seen from him. Let me of course make the important distinction here that a not-as-impressive Daniel Day Lewis performance is still likely to be among the top ten performances anyone will see all year. What I took issue with was this high pitched voice Day Lewis affected for the role. In historical accounts, Lincoln was documented as speaking in a more shrill, high pitch, which Day Lewis does his best to create. It works for the most part, but his high voice never changes pitch and is never really able to capture emotion outside of inflection. Not everyone speaks at the exact same pitch at every moment with only volume and speed fluctuating, and every other actor demonstrates a wider vocal range than our title character. This certainly was a character, for its performance and the screenplay aren't interested in painting a flawed man. This is undoubtedly that mythical figure you've heard about since you were a child.

Who am I to say that Abraham Lincoln wasn't this fable-spewing social genius at all times? Well, I'm not to say that at all, but let me just say it didn't feel all too real. I'm not here to argue the history when something simply doesn't work in the film. These characters do their best to seem genuine when Tony Kushner's screenplay paints so many of them as simple caricatures. If you're a good guy, you show some mild range of emotions, are a Republican, and hate slavery with a burning passion. If you're a bad guy, you're a close minded Democrat who hates blacks. Lazy expositional writing keeps you constantly aware that you are, in fact, watching a scripted version of events that were probably not so conveniently constructed. If Lincoln was a play, its cinematic shortcomings might feel a lot more at home, but unfortunately, this is a freaking Steven Spielberg movie.

Where is the sense of shock at the depth of characters impacting history singlehandedly we were so wonderfully exposed to in Schindler's List and Amistad? Where is the bite this once great director was so famous for? Are we forever going to be stuck with these long, overly sentimental dramas like War Horse? What bothers me even more than just how safe Lincoln is was the moments where you can really sense Spielberg waking up and beautifully directing a scene to a well deserved impact. There are these great little moments in Lincoln that make you wish there was more to talk about, either historically or just in terms of his wide cast of characters. This should have been a thought provoking movie, but instead we are left with a simple middle school history lesson that would certainly bore the hell out of middle schoolers.

6/10