Entries in the Category "star trek"
Osssssssscars!
I am reading all these bloggers who’ve pledged to see all the Best Picture nominees, or all the films with a non-technical nomination (that’s Sarah Bunting, and she almost did it). Some of them spent two Saturdays in a row parked in a movie theater seat watching five wannabe Best Pictures back-to-back. My major regret going into Oscar night is that I haven’t seen enough of the nominated movies. Living virtually across the street from a limited-release haven like the Cedar Lee, just about every one of these movies has crossed my path (not something I could say back when I was living in Lansing, Michigan--sorry Lansing). I went to an Oscar party in which the crowd was generally well-versed in movies—not just the big ones, but independents, foreigns, documentaries—and I wished I could have given more opinions instead of continually saying, “That looked really good. I heard that was good. I was going to see that. Everything I’ve read online says that was overrated, actually.”
The real problem is this whole being-in-grad-school thing, which will be over soon enough. I’ll be a cultural civilian again by May, and then it’s seeing movies all the time, reading books all the time, just because I damn well want to. And maybe next February I’ll plan my own Oscar film binge.
This year, I had to content myself watching the Oscars having seen only Inglourious Basterds, Up in the Air, Julie and Julia, and one-third of The Hurt Locker. I'm catching up on the other movies at my usual snail’s-pace rate. (Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning movies I have seen in the past few months: Valmont, Mrs. Brown, Frozen River, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Gangs of New York.)
Anyway, here are my totally uneducated thoughts on the proceedings.
Continue reading "Osssssssscars!"
Extras is extra funny
Today, I braved the snow for five minutes to hit the library and pick up some books I had on hold. I wandered into the DVD section browsing for a TV show on DVD that I could use as background noise while I worked on my grading.
In that sense, I failed. I picked up the first season of Extras, the show Ricky Gervais made after putting a conclusive point of punctuation on his original series, The Office (that's the UK edition, of course). Though the show was, in fact, hilarious, I lost four hours of my afternoon to it. Too much funny! Could not concentrate on anything else.
But I can highly recommend the show! In fact, I will surely be hitting the library tomorrow to pick up season two. (What's awesome about Gervais' series is that they're never longer than six episodes. Even though I fritter away my time, it's not really a huge loss.)
The premise is that Andy, a pale, paunchy dude who has crossed the threshold of middle age, thinks that he has what it takes to be an incredible actor. The only work he can get, however, is playing the guy in the background. So, he sucks up to the famous actors he meets in hopes that he will make connections.
In this clip, Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame regally outlines his script idea for the befuddled Andy.