The Real Best Picture

I watched the Oscars the other night, and I was greatly disappointed that The Dark Knight did not even receive a nomination for Best Picture. The Academy has determined that there are certain qualities a movie must have in order for it to qualify for Best Picture, which I would place under the blanket term "artsiness." It must have "good directing," and "good editing," and "good acting," and a "good soundtrack." Oh, and it also must have no basis in action whatsoever.

The Dark Knight was 2008's Best Picture.

I only watched two of this year's candidates, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire. Of the two, my personal preference was the former. Brad Pitt's acting was very good, the plot was interesting and quirky, if unnecessarily verbose, and the effects were also impressive. The latter was a pretty good movie: a "rags to riches," coming of age, and romance story all rolled into one cohesive ball, set against the backdrop of the TV show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" I have to say that the acting, especially by the young children in the cast, was quite good. The plot itself was good, and if it was accurate, it was a rather informative picture of the impoverished in India.

(Spoiler Warning: plot details follow.)

Yes, Slumdog Millionaire was a good movie. However, I would not go so far as to call it a stellar movie. I would give it about 75 on a scale of 100 points. I did not find it altogether very compelling. The concept, from what I heard prior to viewing, sounded like it had great potential. A boy wins big on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," and is subsequently accused of cheating; the movie shows how it is he came to know the answers to the questions. That description is only partly accurate.

A good portion of the flashbacks also deals with the main character, Jamal, searching for his childhood-companion-turned-love-interest Latika, as well as his relationship with his (later in life) estranged brother Salim. What I quickly discovered was that the plot was not anything terribly original, nor was it altogether compelling or plausible. Sure, it's kind of cute and fuzzy to call it fate, but the way the love story and the answers to the game show questions fell together very conveniently was quite transparent. The ending was predictably happy (not that it was a bad ending, just visible from half an hour away). Salim ended up redeeming himself as well, after some of the less respectable acts he committed. There was a bit of suspense towards the end, as the movie began before Jamal had actually won the entire sum of money possible from the game show. Altogether, it was a pretty decent movie, but the intense amount of hype that preceded my viewing left me disappointed. I did enjoy the dance number at the very end, although it was slightly incongruous with the rest of the movie. Apparently it's an Indian thing.

Now, I claim that The Dark Knight deserved the Best Picture award over Slumdog Millionaire, because The Dark Knight was a phenomenal movie, while Slumdog Millionaire was only a decent movie. First of all, having a low budget should not give any movie any kind of additional merit in regards to its quality or worthiness to win. Because The Dark Knight had a greater budget, it was capable of having a better team, better effects, and a more experienced cast. All these things give a movie a not unfair advantage over a movie with a lower budget.

That said, both the cinematographic and literary/thematic elements of The Dark Knight were superior. And there were solid thematic elements in that movie. It had a romantic subplot that tied heavily into the main plot. It had great characters. Bruce Wayne/Batman was an icon of heroism, giving up what he wanted for what he though would better serve the people. Harvey Dent was an idealist, a good-hearted man who refused to compromise on his vision of a better world. Yet he also became a model of the fallible man, who has a weakness to be exploited and can become corrupted and fallen. The Joker was an embodiment of chaos and evil, an example of the selfishness of a solitary person and the results of living in a world composed of such individuals. He sought to bring to ruin order and justice as we know it, and "prove" that the hearts and souls of everyone are truly black.

While perhaps exaggerated, these are three very realistic characters. The theme of fall and redemption, corruption and purity, and mercy towards those who may not deserve or appreciate it was heavy in all parts of the film, and I found that it resonated within me more than any movie I've seen in a while. Batman continued to protect a city that feared and hated him, even though it meant giving up a future with a girl he loved. The Joker was proven wrong when even a boat full of convicted and hardened criminals refused to blow up another boat; conversely, the boat of supposedly "innocent" people refused to condemn those criminals to death simply to save themselves. In the end, Batman took the fall for the atrocious acts of Harvey Dent after becoming Two-Face, in order that the people could have hope for a brighter future. And these are only the main points. The list goes on.

In short, it was a movie laden with instances of compassion, honor, heroism, and love (not romance, but love). It was a classic story of good versus evil, yet on so many levels and in different ways as to render it intensely meaningful. You should note that none of this takes into account the movie's awesome action sequences, great special effects, and otherwise super hero coolness. And it's certainly not as though the acting was bad, either. This is clear from Heath Ledger's Best Supporting Actor award, though he was by no means the only good actor in the film.

And yet, all these factors are overlooked because it is a "comic book" or "super hero" or "action" movie. Some of the deepest movie material is overlooked on the basis of a preconceived notion that comic books, their characters, and their stories are somehow too shallow to be considered worthy of the Academy's attention. It's just like that post Andrew Clark wrote about comic books recently (http://mythicether.blogspot.com/2009/02/in-defense-of-comics.html) which was part of the motivation behind this post. The Academy, in its supposed artistic enlightenment, has failed, has passed over some of the greatest art to have had a place on the movie screen in years.

What a shame.

Topic-less

I am without a topic. It's the story of my life. I have no direction whatsoever. I feel like an amorphous blob, dictated completely by my spur-of-the-moment whims. One such whim was writing a new blog post, right this instant. As a result, I am rap-tap-tapping away while the sonorous melodies of Metal Gear Solid 4 emanate from the television a scant eight or so feet away. Boy, is it annoying. This weird banshee-like voice keeps saying "SNAAAAAAKE!" I'm getting quite sick of it. I remember when Dolch played through the whole game before Christmas break. Actually, to call it a "game" is a bit of a misnomer. It's more like a collection or 20+ minute cutscenes (or rather, cinematics; cutscenes are usually short bridges between gameplay) with a few bits of actual play time in between. I don't know what the big deal is. From what I've seen and heard, the writing is pretty bad and the story is nothing to write home about.

I can't escape across the hall, either, because they're playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl (my goodness, that is a quite a mouthful). That's basically all they ever do. That game isn't even that much fun, but it's not like I understand anybody's taste in anything (to include movies and music).

Well, I took a brief hiatus to attempt to help Meg fix her CD drive (to no avail), and to fix my Daemon tools (to avail). In order to accomplish the latter, I had to restart my computer, and while it was taking its oh-so-pokey time booting up, I sat down at the new Guitar Hero drum set to play a few songs. Boy howdy, I still do not like that drum set. It feels real squishy and it does not respond well. I must at least lay part of the blame on the lag. HDTVs are far, far less than ideal for Guitar Hero. In fact, I almost never play on our living room television because the lag drives me insane.

I suppose to continue on my impromptu discussion of video game merits, I started playing Tomb Raider 3 last week. I have to say I'm enjoying it more than I expected to, although it is a bit disjointed. However, it has one huge drawback: in order to access the bonus level at the end, every secret in the entire game must be collected. Since levels can't be replayed, this means that I must find them all on my first run-through. Given the utter absurdity of some of the secrets, this necessitates the use of a walkthrough, which takes a good portion of the fun of exploring out of the game. Not to mention is a gigantic pain to have to minimize every thirty seconds or so to make sure I'm not missing that secret that will doom me for the rest of forever. And I'm sure not anticipating the final boss, who is most assuredly ludicrous, if rather cool looking.

Enough about video games. Today was free pancake day at IHOP. I went with the rest of the Thompson crew (well, most of them) and waited for a goodly while before sitting down to wait another goodly while to get my somewhat meager short stack of pancakes. I ordered a side of bacon that never came ("THE BACON THAT NEVER COOOOOMES!" (that's a Death Magnetic joke, folks)), and Justin and Alex suffered similar grievances, with chocolate chip pancakes and corned beef hash, respectively. We left only a ten percent tip, because I admit the place was pretty flooded, but we didn't get our food.

Afterwards the Studbuckets engaged some Air Force ROTC basketball team and suffered a 42-30 loss. Our defense was quite solid at most points, but we still lacked the necessary offensive fervor of a winning team. Our record is 0-8 lifetime, or 0-9 counting the game that was officially stricken from the books because Jon got hurt and play had to be suspended. At least he has a cool scar to show for it. And at least we now have a uniform of sorts. And heck, I committed an epic foul by throwing my entire body at one of their players while he was attempting to score, thoroughly knocking him out of bounds.

I think I want some bacon now, to make up for that which I did not receive earlier. As an added bonus, it will now be thick-sliced bacon free of additional charge. w00t.

This post brought to you by Battlestar Galactica Lara Croft.

President's Day

First, a word from Wikipedia:

"All across America, President's Day is used as an excuse to sell mattresses and beds. Many stores advertise special Presidents Day Mattress Sales and Presidents Day Mattress Events."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_day#Mattresses; that's right, it has its own section title.)

This President's Day, I'm off from school. In fact, I'm off from school every Monday. Conveniently, though, since apparently we are required to have the same number of each week day in every semester, I also have Tuesday off. You see, we had Martin Luther King Jr. Day off in January. Strike a Monday. Now, we have President's day off. Strike another Monday? Now we have two less Mondays than every other week day. Solution: make Tuesday a Monday class day, and strike a Tuesday. Since I have no classes on Monday class days, I now have a four day weekend. (In case you care, the Wednesday is taken care of during GM Week, for student government elections, and the Thursday and Friday are given as reading days just prior to finals week.)

Now, when I was in Nashville at the very beginning of 2009, I bought this neat little blue journal with a velvety-feeling cover. It's actually bound with real binding, so it's not like your average little notebook, which makes it completely awesome. I picked up writing in there as a pretty much daily process, just to get a little practice and ensure that I wouldn't become completely illiterate here at RPI. The thing is, I'm actually an aspiring writer myself, although a bit more directionless. I've had many ideas cross my mind that could be developed into novels eventually, but I often focus on specific scenarios and details rather than an overarching plot, so what I really come up with is single scenes that play in my head like movies. I see exactly what happens, and its potential significance to a greater whole, but I don't know what that greater whole is yet.

Anyway, I started this journal just to practice my writing. It worked really well. To be honest, I prefer to type because I find it easier to keep my words at pace with my thoughts. Writing with a pen on paper forced me to slow myself down a little bit, and was an interesting exercise. The only thing was, while it was just great for putting down thoughts I want to keep to myself, it was impossible to broadcast any thoughts I might want other people to know. I actually wrote a few "blog posts" in that journal; things I would normally have gone and put online.

While I still love that journal, I now have an outlet for those random things that I want to make public. I can still use my little blue book to write down other stuff that isn't fit for public viewing (I order your mind out of the gutter, IMMEDIATELY). And yes, I am quite familiar with the blogging realm. I have come and gone many times since I was but a junior in high school. This time, I'm going to try and get something off the ground.

I apologize if I dashed your dreams of reading a blog about President's Day to itty bitty fragments. I am guilty of entitling my posts in misleading ways. I suppose if I were ever to write songs, it would be the same way (although I wouldn't make them rambling epics, like some bands do).

CLOSURE!

Why is this blog entitled "256 Colors?"

Well my friends, back in the day some computer games (such as those in the "Madeline" series) would only run in 256 colors. Sometimes games will inform you that certain conditions must be met in order for them to run, but they're just helpful suggestions to improve your experience. Other games, however, insist that they will only run in 256 colors. They force you to go into your display properties and actually change your color settings. It's like a visual downgrade.

Well, let me just tell you that this is in no way metaphorical or analogous. It just happened to pop into my head. Okay, even that's a lie. I'll tell you why I really thought of it. Earlier I was downloading Tool's "Lateralus" at Andrew Clark's prompting, via the wonderful services provided by Demonoid. Now, Demonoid only lists music files up to 256kbps; anything higher is listed as "over 256kbps." Thus, wanting the best quality music file I could find, I used the handy Ctrl+F find feature that Firefox provides (much better than most Find commands, let me tell you) to search for "256" on the page. I eventually located a worthy file; however, I never closed the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. As a result, all day it has been sitting there in my browser, displaying "256" from my previous search. Whilst pondering a blog title (this went on for less than 15 seconds, to be honest), I spied the number and remembered the old games and their insistance on running in 256 colors.

And a blog was born.

The funny thing is, "Lateralus" was insiting on taking about 12 hours to download. I eventually just listened to it on YouTube. I didn't like it. BUT DARN IT, I TRIED IT!

Oh yeah, a few minutes ago I cooked the perfect piece of bacon. In appearance and taste, it was positively beautiful.

From left to right: Anastasia, Cinderella, and Drizella
(Anastasia and Drizella were still quite delicious)

In order to bring this post some closure:

CLOSURE!