The Razzies Are Coming! The Razzies Are Coming!

Why so glum Christina?

"and you're in my mirror AGAIN?"

Oh right, you suspect that a Razzie nomination is coming your way for Worst Actress for Burlesque? Happily the movie, though, is not on the longlist for a potential Worst Picture bid.

Worst Picture Longlist:  The Bounty Hunter, Clash of the Titans, The Expendables, Grown Ups, Jonah Hex, Killers, The Last Airbender, Little Fockers, Sex and the City 2, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Vampires Suck and Yogi Bear.

Nominations will be announced on Monday, January 24th. You can still join up and be a voter for $25 [begging] but if you have $25 to throw around, I'd prefer you donate it to The Film Experience. I work hard for you all year and the Razzies only spring up once! [/begging]

The Razzies are rarely discussed in a serious way on the web as it's mostly an opportunity for free-form mocking. It's good that Burlesque missed this longlist. Burlesque is NOT a bad movie; it's fully aware of what it is and it's totally entertaining. If you get a good helping of entertainment out of a movie, it is not worthy of Worst Picture gong.

But in some ways, the Razzies reflect just as much laziness in groupthink voting as any of the "Best" focused precursors do year in and year out. Both actresses are on the longlists for Worst Actress. There is nothing about Cher, as an actress, that one could conceivably view as worst; she's fully aware of what she's capable of and she's totally entertaining (I'm sensing a repetitive theme here). More inexplicably, since Cher is an easy/visible/lazy target, is that Cam Gigandent is on the longlist of Worst Supporting Actor for his best performance to date... which is not saying much, but throw a guy a bone! If you can watch Easy A and Burlesque and think he's worse in the latter, you are probably missing your eyeballs altogether. (In which case: How are you watching movies, silly!?)

There Are 41 Songs (& Vids). There Is Only 1 CHER.

41 Songs were declared eligible for Oscar's least cinematically relevant prize a short while ago. Wheeee!

We only didn't share them yesterday because every single damn thing happens in the same week. I'd be more excited about this category if recent years hadn't seen the big show trending away from original performers singing their original songs. If I can't see Cher doing her Burlesque number(s) on Oscar night, someone is going down.

The Academy will choose up to 5 of these songs as nominees, depending on how their voting goes. I've included video accompaniment when available - listen (and watch up).



 Which are you rooting for?

Please god no. No more honors for this eyesore movie.

"Alice" from Alice in Wonderland

"Forever One Love" from Black Tulip 

"Freedom Song" from Black Tulip

 oooh, now this is more like it. Sadly, it's only a partial video.

"Welcome to Burlesque" from Burlesque

 

a Burlesque suite.

"Bound to You" from Burlesque 

"You Haven‘t Seen the Last of Me" from Burlesque

Despical Meusic Videos from Narnia

"There‘s a Place for Us" from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

"Despicable Me" from Despicable Me 

"Coming Home" from Country Strong 

"Me and Tennessee" from Country Strong
Country Strong has a YouTube channel but neither of their eligible songs are featured. Weirdness.
"Prettiest Girls" from Despicable Me

 

Jeg ♥ Sondre Lerche and not just because he's Norwegian, kjenner du.

"Dear Laughing Doubters" from Dinner for Schmucks

eat pray love & going the distance.

"Better Days" from Eat Pray Love 

"If You Run" from Going the Distance

demo version of Holy Rollers end credits and live Jónsi perf.

"Darkness before the Dawn" from Holy Rollers

"Sticks & Stones" from How to Train Your Dragon

There's no mistaking Bill Plympton's animated films for anyone else's

"Le Gris" from Idiots and Angels
 "Chanson Illusionist" from The Illusionist

God clearly hates me that I am forced to share that music video (to your left)

"Never Say Never" from The Karate Kid 

"To the Sky" from Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga‘Hoole

"What If" from Letters to Juliet

"Life during Wartime" from Life during Wartime

"Made in Dagenham" from Made in Dagenham (couldn't find a vid but here's a sample)

"Little One" from Mother and Child (no vid but sample - pretty song)

"Be the One" from The Next Three Days (no video -- why not Moby? You used to make good ones -- but here's the song)

"If I Rise" from 127 Hours (song)

"When You See Forever" from The Perfect Game

"I Remain" from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (no Alanis video but here's the song)

"Dream Big" from Pure Country 2: The Gift

"How I Love You" from Ramona and Beezus (no vid but here's the song)

Remember Landon Pigg from Whip It? His punishment for treating Ellen Page like crap is singing a Shrek song.

"Darling I Do" from Shrek Forever After

"Noka Oi" from Six Days in Paradise (no video but here's the song)

"This Is a Low" from Tamara Drewe 

"Rise" from 3 Billion and Counting

Two likely nominees from animated hits.

"I See The Light" from Tangled
"We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3

"Eclipse: All Yours" from The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (it's not embeddable which saves me from having to promote Twilight. Yay.)

I'm still kinda pissed that Justin Timberlake survived but Janet Jackson's career was demolished. Just sayin'

"Nothing" from Tyler Perry‘s Why Did I Get Married Too 

"A Better Life" from Unbeaten 

"Shine" from Waiting for 'Superman‘

"The Reasons Why" from Wretches & Jabberers (here's the song)

Name your preferred five songs in the comments. Or maybe you think they should just dump this category all together?
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Welcome to "Burlesque"

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Care for some turkey? Cher, XTina and gay filmmaker Steve Antin shall provide a succulent bird. If you’ve been looking forward to the new musical BURLESQUE, relax. I come not to disparage the movie, but to (mostly) praise it. Consider this a corrective protest. It will prove too easy a target for critics and haters, who often seem to despise girlie or flashy movies before they’ve even seen them, but it’s not truly a turkey. It’s more like a (hot) pink flamingo; the plumage is so colorful, you forget that it looks like it should fall over.

The basic plot of Burlesque is so typical as to be personality free: small town dreamer arrives in big city to make it big. Does. The End. But let’s backtrack. Christina Aguilera, referred to as “Ali” since she’s acting or “Iowa” since she’s just off the bus, chances upon the club “Burlesque” run by Cher. For some reason everyone in the movie keeps calling Cher “Tess" but even Cher knows she’s just playing Cher. Tess even gets an 11th hour power ballad "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me Yet" to remind you that she's Cher....

Read the full review @ Towleroad.

Links With Benefits

Journalistic Skepticism Oooh, it's a must read listen. Luke has collected the film scores this year. Which is your favorite and who do you think is winning the Oscar for Best Score?
Cinema Blend smart post about confusingly similar 2011 romantic comedies Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached. One twin thing that isn't mentioned: Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman, the female leads from the respective movies are sexually entanged together in Black Swan.
Towleroad A bit about Spielberg's Lincoln. Plus, my continued Harry Potter agnosticism . I don't even wanna see this one. Five hours to tell that book? And I've heard that they do spend lots of time moping in that tent. Argh. I don't even dislike the movies really (except the first two) but 9 years is more than enough for one series. Wrap that damn thing up already!
Austin Translation has some fun advice for future Disneyland travellers.
I.Z. Reloaded amazing Star Wars inspired art.
Vulture looks at the possibilities in a post Harry Potter world for Daniel Radcliffe.

Finally, have you read this great New York Times Cher profile piece? I particularly loved this bit about her surreal fame-filled life.

It’s an odd existence, Cher’s. When she recounted a late-night gabfest with two girlfriends in the bedroom of her Malibu manse not long ago, the gabbers in question were Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin. When she flashed back to a favorite exercise class in Beverly Hills decades ago, the fellow crunchers and squatters were Raquel Welch, Ali MacGraw and, to a more limited and grudging extent, Barbra Streisand, who “would go over, do two little things, and then walk around and talk,” Cher said.

She refers to most of these people by first name or nickname only, figuring you can fill in the blanks. Nicky is Nicolas Cage, Kurty is Kurt Russell, Mich is Michelle Pfeiffer and Nony is Winona Ryder, who starred with Cher in “Mermaids” in 1990 but suffered a career setback after a subsequent arrest for shoplifting.

“It’s such a drag that some crimes are cool and some crimes are uncool,” Cher said.

Ha. You know why that "snap out of it" scene in Moonstruck is so infinitely funny/resonant? Because loving Cher (in ridiculous proportions to how much you probably should love Cher) comes so naturally; you have to be slapped to break her spell!

True story: Last night I was supposed to meet The Boyfriend for an event and I got confused about where we were meeting. I ended up at that big wall-painting of Burlesque I shared last week (which wasn't where I was supposed to be). A minute later he showed up just as I was ringing him.

"How'd you know where I was?" I ask.
"I knew you'd gravitate towards Cher."
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Whither Karen Silkwood?

Tim here again-

"On November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood, an employee of a nuclear facility, left to meet with a reporter from the New York Times. She never got there."

And 34 years later, we still don't know exactly what happened to her, though anyone who has seen 1983's Silkwood probably has their suspicions. After all, the film brings the woman back to life in the form of Meryl Streep, at her most lifeforce-tastic, while depicting the manager whose lives she was making so difficult as a pasty, puffy, shifty sort of fellow, the kind who looks like he's constantly about to break into sweat. We don't have the slightest difficulty believing that he and his cronies are just the kind of people to take out a hit on a troublesome young activist, especially since Silkwood is always so engaging and easy to like, and darn it, just plain good, despite some troubling details about her personal life that keep creeping in, adding just enough ambiguity that we can't be absolutely sure that she wasn't maybe at fault for her supposed single-vehicle car crash.

I assume that everybody visiting this site knows why they, at the very least, ought to have seen Silkwood by now (I just finally did *cough* thismorning): Streep in one of the great performances of her early career (it netted her Oscar nomination #5), Cher's breakthrough as a "serious" actress, Kurt Russell's most nuanced dramatic performance ever. Certainly, the combined talents of those three actors, feeding off of each other and giving back so much intimacy, each member of the triangle driving the others to reach their peak, is enough to make Silkwood an excellent human-sized story; personal and observant in a way to make it far more than what the concept threatens to make it, another routine "social activist" picture in the Norma Rae mold.

Less obviously, but just as importantly, the film relies heavily on the careful handling by director Mike Nichols of Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen's fine script: Nichols was on his very best behavior here, opening up the characters through unstressed details and very delicate use of the camera frame to suggest the ongoing shift between the main characters, and their environment.

And it's that ending where Nichols does some of the best work of the film- nay, of his career. With the script rightfully refusing to conjecture what happened that night, Nichols finds an uncanny way to clearly indicate what he wants us to think, while steadfastly maintaining ambiguity. The tension-raising long shot of a car following Karen on a lonely road, which in one steady take shows the lights of that car slowly appear and then draw painfully near, suggests a lot, but it shows absolutely nothing, other than Karen's panic and paranoia. Or the quick insert of Cher's Dolly, Karen's best friend and possible betrayer (foreshadowed in another directorial coup on an airplane), silently crying: it tells the viewer nothing, but creates a feeling of intense foreboding.

Does Silkwood assume, for the sake of drama, that its heroine was murdered? Absolutely, and yet there's not a frame of the film that I can use to prove it. It's that same haunting ambiguity that made the circumstances of Karen Silkwood's death so compelling in the first place; and the filmmakers' ability to honor both her memory and the known facts at the same time is one of the surest reasons that this movie is one of the great true-story thrillers of its decade.

Cher Hits a Brick Wall

Over at Towleroad, I've done a brief review of 127 Hours.  I enjoyed a lot even if I don't think it's the masterpiece many are claiming. I also talk about the new dvd set Cher: The Film Collection. More on that collection later here at the blog. (I can't wait to watch these movies again.)

This is an actual cel phone snapshot from Soho here in NYC. They painted the Burlesque poster on a brick wall.
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The Greatest Halloween Moment in the History of the Movies

"RAAAAACHELLL FLAAXXXX!!!"

[img src]

Cher, Christina Ricci, Mermaids (1990)

If you dare to disagree, you'd better list an inspired trick or a whopper of a treat in the comments!

Oh and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

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Links: Cher, Cheyenne, Celestia, Carey and CQueen

Guardian good piece on Anne Heche, her not totally recovered career post-Celestia, and Hollywood's double standards about men and women with troubled souls.
After Elton first look at Cheyenne Jackson on Glee. He's replacing Idina as the Vocal Adrenaline coach. I guess that means he's off 30 Rock? But this'll be a better fit anyway. Yay for singing stars!
Lazy Circles speaking of Cheyenne...
Natasha VC makes a brilliant observation on the quality of Al Pacino's acting.
Broadway Buzz A Cher bio-pic style Broadway musical is in the works from director Andy Fickman (You Again)


Avengers Assemble have you seen these new YouTube shorts, the superhero team gathers to discuss business/politics. It's such a weird concept that I am forced to enjoy. They need to speed up line delivery a bit but each episode has a few good laughs.
Film Freak Central on Let Me In (I thought this review was interesting. Positive but definitely keeps the original in mind.)
Coming Soon Sacha Baron Cohen to play Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in a biopic. Filming starts in 2011. You know what's weird? The internet rumor mill spends so much time talking about pre-production and development that by the time something is official, one could swear it was official 7 or 8 months prior! and that it's totally old news.
PopWrap Carey Mulligan has been making surprise appearances at movie theaters in NYC to introduce Never Let Me Go. How cool.
Pussy Goes Grrr offers up a late "best shot", a minimalist one, from the wonderful Pandora's Box (1929)
/Film Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies) writing a new live-action version of Pinnocchio.
37 Posters by Jerod Gibson is a design project using movie quotes in the shape of the movie's iconography for new posters. Fun. The one for The Big Lebowski is probably my favorite.
Movie|Line Andrew Garfield sings "Bed Intruder". Wait, what? I have to post it here. It's just too funny/weird.



HELP. I'm curious as to what you all use for your blog reading? Do you click directly to the sites or do you use a blog reader? In the past I've always used bloglines which is where roughly 2/3rds of my link roundups are pulled from. I have hundreds of subscriptions... some of which I read and some of which... well, there's only so much time. Bloglines is shutting down as of October 1st so I'll have to rebuild elsewhere. I think I'll start from scratch so to as freshen up. Any suggestions?
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