The real reason why, left to myself, I wouldn’t watch the Academy Awards is that it is wearing to cry for three hours. The tears began pouring when Morgan Freeman took to the stage, at the very beginning, and intoned pious words about why we all love the movies. I didn’t particularly share his sentiments, nor did I agree with the darklighted movie stars (Edward Norton, Julia Roberts, et alia) who shared what it means to go to the movies, but I wept all the same, because the movies are sacred. They’re sacred because they’re humane, incredibly humane: they show us what it looks like to be good and to be bad (when nobody’s looking), and they make overpowering suggestions about what it feels like to be in love. We didn’t know ourselves very well before the movies; we had to make the best of philosophers’ dull plausibilities. So of course I am moved to tears when I connect with the movies. Usually, it’s five or ten minutes in a dark theatre. Three hours, and in spite of Billy Crystal, is exhausting.

Billy Crystal needs work. Surgeons ought to undo the facelifting that has so far made Billy Crystal look like the real girl that Lars outgrew in that movie. Mr Crystal ought to look more like Jack Benny, as you’d agree if you were old enough to remember Jack Benny. And speaking of Ryan Gosling, why didn’t he win something last night? He turned in three excellent performances last year, each quite unlike the other two. (In Drive, he was almost as silent as Jean Dujardin.) And where was Rachel McAdams? When will Ryan and Rachel make another movie together, this one directed by Woody Allen?

I’ll have to check this out with pen and pencil, but it seemed that, if I had seen a movie in any given category (Sound Mixing, for example), then the movie that won the award was one that I’d seen. This was largely owing to Hugo‘s sweep of production-value awards, but it still felt odd. This meant that the three Best Picture nominees that I hadn’t seen didn’t win a thing. And five of the six that I did see each won at least one award, the exception being Moneyball.  

***

Still to come: Dianne Reeves and Rose Macaulay. I just need a little while to wonder what Limitless 2 is going to be like with Jean Dujardin.

***

And Wanderlust, too. I saw it on Friday morning, largely because I was desperate to get back on schedule. I expected it to be worse than it was; the surprise was the sharpness of its jabs at American barbarism. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Mike Judge had something to do with it.

Take the horrible brother, Rick (Ken Marino). No aristocrat of the ancien régime believed himself more entitled to behave rudely, or to engage in ostentatious displays of contempt, than this pig. It’s almost too obvious and literal to be symbolic that Rick has found success in the portable toilet business. When his wife (Michaela Watkins) decides that she can’t stand him anymore, you smile an all’s-right-with-the-world smile. You’re still chuckling over her introducing her margarita maker as her best friend.

Then there are the daytime newscasters on a local Atlanta station. They, too, are pretty swinish, although they’re much better-humored than Rick. They’re also pretty dumb. Between their juvenility and the architectural nightmare of Rick’s gated community, Atlanta is rendered as a fairly unattractive town.

Then there are the hppies at the commune where most of the movie is set, persisting in behavior that was kind of exciting for twenty minutes in 1967 but which most of us, even those who weren’t aven alive — whose parents were wee bairns in 1967 — have spent the past fifty years recognizing as socially obnoxious. This is the part of the movie that triggers complaints about predictability: Wanderlust may just be the last movie in which the counterculture is satirized. It comes across as fairly excruciating here, bearable only because of the trials that it presents to George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston), a maxed-out, arguably mismatched couple.

You can imagine George and Linda agreeing to give marriage a try, just as they give New York a try and making documentaries a try and living in a “microloft” a try. Linda is especially big on giving things a try. But in future I would advise the actors to play siblings, not spouses. Their wiring is utterly different. Ms Aniston has always made things look easy, even enduring the heartbreak of Brad; the contrast of Mr Rudd’s eagerness to please makes her look inattentive, if not insensible. Not that I’m complaining. Their failure to connect is tragic, another one of the dark things about this movie. George and Linda are probably going to stick it out for life, bless ’em. But when they’re not laughing they will always be on different pages.

Then there’s Malin Akerman. How did her agent let her take that part? Very pretty blondes with open, guileless faces ought never, ever to let the subject of free love be entertained in their presence, much less bring it up themselves. When they do, you think: do her parents know about this movie? I’m surprised that Linda Lavin (who’s dandy as a Manhattan realtor) didn’t intervene. And while we’re on the subject of parents, poor Joe Lo Truglio’s! Our son, the nudist winemaker/novelist. I almost forgot. Wanderlust forgot, hurls a generous handful of broken glass at the publishing industry.

Alan Alda replays, with somewhat diminished vigor, his part in Flirting With Disaster. I didn’t recognize Justin Theroux, the seducer and snake who gets to pronounce the flower child’s motto, “I love you all, but I love me more.”

***

Rose Macaulay, whose astonishing Towers of Trebizond has the most surprising, quite gut-wrenching ending — imagine Barbara Pym’s coming up with a “gut-wrenching” finale, infused with the absurd disastrousness of Evelyn Waugh — will have to wait. I will say this: I can’t imagine anyone under forty enjoying the book. I’m having lunch with a friend, in a day or so, who read the book when it was new, in 1956 (I was eight at the time, and not reading much beyond the Hardy Boys). I can’t imagine what she made of it, so I wasn’t surprised to hear her say that she didn’t remember a thing about it. How, decorously, can I suggest that, just perhaps, she’s old enough for it now? 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2012 at 8:40 am.