For What It's Worth

Get Me To The Greek (2010) -vs- Almost Famous (2000)

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The Smackdown. Okay. So. Here's the thing. I'm a middle-aged woman. I'm not cool. I'm not hip. I probably never was. I don't drink or use drugs myself, and neither do my two daughters. Our straight-edge sobriety is not a decision based on religious convictions, I assure you, but I'll reserve my reasons for a more private forum than this one. My life has not been untouched by the ravages of drugs and alcohol. I have seen many lives destroyed, waylaid, and laid waste. While I've not had to wage any personal battles with personal demons, I've watched close-up as others struggle mightily to overcome theirs; many have lost the war. People I love have died, and I've witnessed the long-lasting repercussions of that profound loss on their families and friends firsthand. My record collection includes many examples of the blissfully enhanced and otherwise enlightened by-product of countless musicians' flagrant experimentation, immersion, and even tragic self-destruction. I'm grateful to have been spared myself and always saddened when another bright light bites the proverbial and inevitable dust. Here's the bottom line. While drugs, drink, and rock make up the very same Venn diagram, I'll just take the rock, thank you very much.

 

The Challenger. Producer and purveyor of the popular Zeitgeist Judd Apatow adds another crowd-pleasing link to his unbroken chain of box office behemoths with this unsubtle sequel to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." Forgetting "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" was easy for me, but forgetting "Get Him To The Greek" will prove a lot harder to do. A record company junior exec (Jonah Hill) accompanies rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) to a comeback concert at Los Angeles' Greek Theater. There's a great movie somewhere in this rambunctious, raucous, high-spirited, heartfelt mess, and I'd love to recommend it, but it's buried in a terrifically disturbing pile of thoughtless, casual, careless, sloppy, dopey, drugged-out, barefaced evil.

I ♥ UK: The BAFTA Nominations

Did you ever get the feeling that you woke up on the wrong side of the bed? I can top you. Every day, I wake up on the wrong side of the world. 

A longtime (perhaps even lifetime) Anglophile, I've always preferred Britcoms to sit-coms, the BBC to ABC. Cary Grant and Hugh Grant light my proverbial fire. I wouldn't want to face a movie world without my dear Merchant-Ivory, Richard Curtis, and Mike Leigh. Without Monty Python, Blackadder, The League of Gentlemen, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, AbFab, Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Simon Pegg, and other comedy geniuses too numerous to list here, life would be a darker and far less entertaining slog. 

Still, I've made my peace with my circumstance. My ancestors left the steppes of Russia for the promise of American freedom, and I accept that. I do. But then I read this year's list of BAFTA nominees.    

It's official. I do not belong here.  

 

2010 BAFTA Awards

Winners to be announced on Sunday, February 21st.

Best Film Nominees:

Avatar (2009)

An Education (2009)

The Hurt Locker (2008)

Precious (2009)

Up in the Air (2009/I)

Oscars Schmoscars

Sherry Coben is 2009's leading contributor to Movie Smackdown! Read all her reviews here.

You certainly don’t need my personal predictions and picks. They’re not much different from all the others you can read elsewhere, although I should confess to a creepily savant accuracy, especially on the night. Call me psychic or cynic. Whatev. (Slumdog, Rourke, Winslet, Cruz or possibly Ms. Henson, Ledger, Boyle, WALL-E, etc. Benjamin Button will win some awards for effects and makeup, Frost Nixon will get shut out, Milk will win for screenplay in the Academy voters’ too-little-too-late apology for Prop 8. Slumdog will sweep a bunch of categories even though no actors earned a nod. Sean Penn could beat Mickey Rourke…except that Penn already won, and Oscar loves a phoenix rising from the ashes of his own trashed life. Plus Rourke’s dog died this week. But I digress.) I am possessed of two fairly aardvark, useless, yet impressive talents: predicting awards and recognizing people from a glimpse of their hands or any part of their face; baby pictures and even the grainiest high school photo reveal the adult to me. In some alternate universe, I could perhaps make a living doing one or both, but it’s not a universe I suspect anyone else would enjoy.

I don’t much care who wins. That’s not why I watch. Most of my favorites aren’t nominated, and I’m not going to get all tied up in knots sweating over it; Academy Awards rarely award the truly excellent for reasons I’ve come to accept over the years. Just scan a list of Best Pictures sometime and put it up against a list of your personal favorites; there’s precious little overlap. When you list all the amazing actors who never won recognition, you come to realize it’s a pageant-style contest aimed squarely at the middle and a show designed to promote studio product and rarely much more than that.