No Country For Old Men versus There Will Be Blood versus Juno versus...Ratatouille?

Oh, sigh.  Oscar season is officially over, leaving us with seven months of throw-away spring releases and brainless summer blockbusters until the official start of the festival/awards season in September.  As someone who writes and transcribes movies for a living, I unfortunately did not have the energy to see all of this year's contenders.  I am, however, quite satisfied having only seen the four I saw: Oscar favorite "No Country For Old Men"....the unfathomably epic "There Will Be Blood"...."Juno", a movie that got me where it hurts despite its hideous dialogue....and "Ratatouille", dear dear "Ratatouille".  

Did the academy get it right with "No Country"?  Many people say yes.  Eh, I say no.  Sure, "No Country" was a better movie than "Juno."  I'll give it that.  The suspense the Coen Brothers created was unrelenting and Javier Bardem was fascinatingly evil.  But it was a crime movie, a thriller, maybe a modern western.  A genre film.  It was great in spite of what it was at the core of its story - crime fiction.  

"There Will Be Blood", on the other hand, was an energizing look at the life of an evil yet vaguely likable man set in an era I have never been interested in yet found completely fascinating throughout the film.  It was sprawling and ambitious, yet totally focused and clean.  That ending!  Man, that ending.  The reception by the academy of P.T. Anderson's catalogue is beginning to make me think that Anderson truly is the next Altman.  Nobody knows what to do with him, what to make of him.  He's creating exactly what he wants to create and not exactly playing the game and because of that, great films are being overlooked for safe, familiar stories.  

But did I think that "There Will Be Blood" was the best picture of 2007?  Non, monsieur.  It's a shame that the Academy created the Best Animated Feature category (and it's also a shame that "The Simpson's Movie" didn't even get nominated.  Surf's up!).  I don't recall any film causing me to feel the way I felt after seeing "Ratatouille".  It was an absolutely flawless movie.  It was fun, it had a great point of view, the production values were exceptional (have you ever heard food SOUND as good as when the final dish of ratatouille was plated?  Never!), and the story was incredibly, incredibly well-written.  Best screenplay "Juno"?  Give me a break.  Brad Bird made a story about rats in a restaurant both inspiring and hilarious.  Then he made that story look like a Parisian dream baked inside a chocolate souffle.  And because this gem was created in a virtual environment, it can now only be appreciated in that box.  Thanks, Academy.

Not that any of this matters in the long run.  How many of the Best Picture winners are actually still revered as Great Movies?  Time will reveal the real best pictures of 2007.  

-Jenn

Filming Sketches

This morning I went to the Little Brown Church in the valley at 7am to assist in the filming of some sketches featured in my recent sketch show, Zombies, Whores and Puppets.  Going into this weekend it appeared that this experience would turn into a fiasco - equipment put on hold was suddenly unavailable, one of the actors got a callback for a Gatorade commercial which would take place in the middle of our shoot, etc.  Somehow, though, everything came together.  And although I couldn't actually see my sketch being filmed (my glasses were procured as a prop), I could tell that everybody was having fun - there was a really positive energy about the whole day.  

After my sketch was complete, a fellow writer and I were cast as extras in the next sketch we planned to film.  We dressed as if we were inhabitants of a third world country and mingled among our talented actors.  I was worried that I wouldn't know what to do when the director yelled action, but I actually found that I enjoyed the freedom of making choices.  I'm so used to things being choreographed, what with all the experience in dance, that to be trusted to do something appropriate for the scene was kind of liberating.  I really enjoyed it.  We're shooting more of that sketch tomorrow and hopefully I'll get to contribute some more.  

And we're off...

This is something new to me.  Blogging, that is.  I've avoided it since its inception because it seemed like a fad, or just really lame - perhaps this century's "You should check out my screenplay,"  a statement I've heard from far too many people in Hollywood whose main occupation is definitely not writing.  And for a few years I was one of those non-working writers, frustrated with the fact that I definitely did not move across the country to coordinate travel for "talent" or plan parties for washed-up producers of hit 80's sitcoms.  I left my family, my cats, my boyfriend of the time (eh, I needed an excuse to break up with him anyway) for Hollywood because I knew that if I wasn't going to be the next tap dancing sensation, the only other alternative was to be a screenwriter.    And after four consecutive years in college without dance, well, I had to choose B.  

I'm now working from home,  transcribing movies for foreign subtitling and dubbing - a sweet, well-paying part time gig that should allow me plenty of time to further my career.  However, I'm having an impossible time focusing on due to the abundance of other people's blogs to which I'm addicted.  Jezebel, Consumerist, other people's myspace pages, Defamer, Go Fug Yourself, Deadline Hollywood Daily, Curbed L.A., Eater L.A., Gridskipper, Salon's Broadsheet and Machinist, argh.  It's gotten to the point where my husband needs to turn off the internet in order for me to get any work done.  I'm not completely useless; I have some of my own projects in the works.  But too much of my time is spent staring at a computer screen, ingesting other people's opinions about what's going on in the world today. 

So really this blog is all about increasing productivity, using my brain, putting in an effort, etc.  We can't spend our entire lives absorbed with what other people are doing, so if by some chance you're not me and you're reading this, don't stick around for too long.