12 Years a Viewer: THE MUNG HOUR 2014 OSCAR WRAP-UP

Two things have returned from the dead, THE MUNG HOUR and the massive sucking sound of Hollywood ego, as it roared onto our TV sets this past Sunday, following the rain and thunder of LA's Storm Watch 2014! 

The aeronautics community's uproar over Gravity's Sandra Bullock in her tight little Ellen Ripley panties instead of Depends is relevant, as we all could have used adult diapers watching hour upon hour of last night's Oscar telecast. The show was nearly as long as Frodo Baggins' farewell to the Hobbits. Offering a safe, pedestrian and soporific evening, we must applaud Ellen DeGeneres for hosting the stage alongside those damn ghosts of Oscar hosting past. (If you look closely and squint, you can see a few who photo-bombed her selfie.) 

The highlight of the night (and yes it is like picking on the disabled kid) was everyone's favorite dead badger-wearing Sweathog, John Travolta. We applaud him for introducing to the stage, the newest toast of the Palestinian pop scene, Adele Dazeem.

Known for her keen observation, the always sensitive-to-discrimination Mrs. Portia De Rossi righteously called out a party-crashing female impersonator, who was taken into custody at the break. It's bad enough security allowed a potential Islamic terrorist like Adele Dazeem to perform onstage, but this oversight was intolerable. So, we're glad this helmet-headed sham artist in blue is now undergoing the CIA's notorious Clockwork Orange torture of enduring all three Transformers movies in one sitting.

 

Roses are red, Oscars are gold,

But plastic is always reserved for the old.

It's hard not to notice those under the knife,

But look at the crowd, it's a lot of folks' life.

And though it's all easy to gawk and to stare,

Kim's face ain't got nothin' on Matthew's hair.

Last night's awards ran the gambit of science-fiction to slavery to brutal cold and flagrant greed, just like a Weinstein Company staff meeting. Yet the list of winners seemed fairly by-the-numbers. Despite the variety of nominees, the non-stop siege of awards shows like the S.A.G. Awards and the Golden Globes tend to make the Oscars a bit like the hotel room after prom night. You've already spent a fortune on the tux, dress, flowers and dinner that it's a forgone conclusion you're gonna get lucky after the dance. The only real surprise of the night seemed to be an endless parade of Gravity-defying love that crashed like Sandra's escape pod as a film about America's dark history took home the big prize.

 
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It was a sad night for bigots, racists, and Bible-thumpers when heads exploded in Texas, Arizona and other red states as they watched a Mexican, a black man named Steve McQueen, and two hot leading men portraying AIDS patients take home Oscars. Our hearts go out to them all, and we can only hope that Kirk Cameron can be up there on stage someday praising the Lord above, instead of that traitorous Texan, Matthew McConaughey. 

Speaking of Matt, while he thanked nearly everyone including his childhood hero, himself, and his future hero, himself, he regretfully forgot to thank his day-to-day hero, himself. Fortunately, at the post-awards press conference, he heaped deserving praise on his shadow. 

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Jared Leto does it junior-high style in his bid to win Anne Hathaway's affections.

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Oscar's Wall of Death struck the right cords and perfectly timed the bathroom break for the audience and viewers with the vomitous Bette Midler, performing that song which was officially banned from ever being sung by maids-of-honors at weddings again. 

 

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The "Burt Reynolds Award For Looking the Most Pissed-Off At Not Winning" goes to Leo, who took out his disappointment at the Vanity Fair after party, by re-enacting the opening scene of Wolf of Wall Street for charity, kind of like a kissing booth. Yeah, kind of like that. 

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The winners for Best Makeup were impressed to learn that Samuel L. Jackson is the "What's in your pants?"guy from the commercials.

We cheered as the blonde wonder from Down Under finally won a Best Actress Oscar. Even more impressive has how she nearly hid the fact that scarfing lunch at Hometown Buffet after 3pm was a terrible idea.

 

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And Harrison Ford wow'd the crowd by breaking his own Guinness Record for the biggest bong hit followed by the longest exhalation of Best Picture nominees in one breath.

Summer's Shiny Objects Sound the Death Knell For Filmgoer Dignity

I'm not going to pretend that I have no blood on my hands regarding the pervasion of shiny objects that adorn our film landscape and clog up the studio coffers preventing good films from being made. I just paid for The Avengers. A fun and well made movie but a shiny object on many levels. But for me at least, Battleship represents the worst of shiny objects, Hollywood at its most greedy and cynical. There is no doubt in my mind that this very film premise was literally a joke in the back rooms of real movie executives 15 years ago. All those parody films from SNL, Mad TV and booze-soaked parties are actually being made as big budget films now. There is no parody anymore. This is real.

At least when 1996's Independence Day came out, it took a time-worn premise of alien invasion and melded it with the theatrics of Star Wars and patriotism of Top Gun. Like the Indiana Jones films, it took the premises of other genres and created its own take on it, effectively inventing a new kind of summer action film (that has been copied many times since).

Battleshit (no, that's not a typo) is filmmaking at its most utter laziest. Studios have long been guilty of harvesting known properties that they either own previously or license from. It's that 'safe bet' that they can pitch to their corporate overloads, since we haven't been in the days of filmmaker owned studios since the early 1980. But at least The Avengers is based on stories that have characters. There is a history there that is being translated through actors and live action. Hell, I will even go slightly out on the limb and defend the craptastic Transformers movies, taken from cartoon toy commercials in the 1980s, as at LEAST deriving from characters with names. Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, etc. The shiny objects have a voice and a history.

But Battleshit? I mean, where do I begin? Let's just state the hilarious obvious: it's a board game with pegs and plastic ships. There are no characters, there are no stories. They just looked at the toys lying around their office or their licensed partner's offices and said, "What's plastic grid with round red and white dots on it? Screw it. Let's make a movie about that. Here's $150 million." Was this whole project a dare by some drunk execs out on the town seeing who would actually greenlight a movie out of the dumbest premise?

Regardless, it's a tentpole for a studio, and it's laughable. And sad and pathetic. Worse, there are likely good scripts out there sitting in dustbins. Films that would have had a shot at consideration 15 years ago, hell maybe 10 years ago even, but will never be made now. All that development and production money going to Hasbro's toy collection. And all because the once great Universal Studios is a shadow of its former self, a loathed stepchild handed down from corporation after corporation, trying to please its masters by vomiting out anything that maybe will make money. (And now I hear they're even rebooting their horrific Van Helsing, a nail in their classic monster coffin if ever there was one.)

I'm very glad that there are no WWII heroes left who will likely see Battleshit. Remember when Hollywood would make war movies? We are so cushioned now from real movies about real war that we rely on videogame Calls of Duties and alien invasions to stir any notion of what soldiers do. It's really a pathetic trend. One could make the argument that our mighty military no longer has real-life villains worthy of Tom Cruise and Will Smith to fight in their jets and submarines, but studios don't even try because they know their audience is so dumbed-down now, so schooled on video games and CGI battles, that it's pointless to bother. Leave that stuff to HBO. This modern audience prefers the XBox version of war. Hell, I don't think we'd even get a Tony Scott film like Crimson Tide or John McTiernan's The Hunt For Red October greenlit again. The suits would balk at the lack of aliens and giant robots. And cardboard heroes. There was a time when summer gave us the depth of leading men like Sean Connery and Denzel Washington. Now we get Shia LeBeouf and Taylor Kitsch.

With each film like Battleshit that does makes money, film loses its sense of artistry, and yeah, we're all culpable to some agree. True film snobs want to blame three decades of Luca$ and $pielberg dominance for the soul-sucking of cinema, furthered by their proteges, the Bays, Emmerichs and Ratners of the world. But now, it just seems really, really worse since the appearance of Jar-Jar Binks 13 years ago. We're just setting ourselves up for the inevitable critical mass needed for Mike Judge's Idiocracy to come to fruition. Next up, "ASS: THE MOVIE". Just a big ass on screen. Farting and launching CGI missiles.

Oscars 2012: Everything Old is New Again But Will Be Just Plain Old Soon ... Again

The Mung Hour sucks. Nothing for a year? This site is Terrence Malick's career. Long stretches of nothing in between blips of bloated, overrated, nonsensical, intellectual masturbation. And 'intellectual' is being kind.

Sunday night, Hollywood celebrated how better things were yesterday. They hired a former host to lord over previous winners who honored mainly old and unknown people who created films about their grandparents' childhoods. Hard to tell if that huge sucking sound was the absence of youth in the Kodak Theater or Tom Cruise, holding a straw to the souls of every audience member, replenishing his life force like the Vorvon on Buck Rogers. You all know that Tom Cruise is really 94 years old, right?


After last year's pants-fillingly poor hosting duet, what the telecast needed was A Few Good Mensch. Or just one. What Billy Crystal is to the Oscars, James Franco is to pot. An old, reliable ally. After thanking Michael Keaton for lending him his Pacific Heights hairpiece, Crystal flew into the Kodak Theater in an FX extravaganza shot on an HD P2 card, not celluloid. Suck it, Kodak. Actually, out of the 84 jokes Crystal lobbed at the destitute camera and film company tonight, that's the one thing he didn't say. Seeing the nine-time Oscars host back in the saddle (please GOD, no City Slickers 3 because of that last word) was like seeing your old roommate pop up on Facebook. Great to share some laughs and greater that to see he's more bloated and corpulent than you are. 

But enough one-armed pushups. On to the show itself.

Gwyneth Paltrow - right on "ssshedule". Sweetheart, drop the UK shit. Tom Hanks needs to shout at her in his best Woody voice, "You--are--an AMERICAN!" She's like one of those former classmates you see at Christmas break after one term at Texas A&M sounding like J.R. Ewing. Do you think Gwyneth and Madonna have 4pm tea together and try to out-Brit the other? "Ohhh bullocks, I left my kid's nappies in the boot of the bumper," as their servants gag themselves on their fingers and piss into their cups when they're not looking.

Emma Stone, meet Ben Stiller. Ben Stiller, meet Emma Stone's kneecaps. Is Emma really a stilt-walker, or was Stiller outed tonight as Billy Barty's grandson? 

Ludovic Bource, the Frenchman who won for The Artist’s score “has no formal training in composition.” That’s just what the other four accomplished composers want to hear in the auditorium after they lost to the guy. Why not add, "and he composed the film's music on his son's Leapster after a six-pack of Miller Lite while watching Pawn Stars."



Sorry, Cameron Diaz fans. The hot chick from The Mask now looks like one of the Joker's Smylex gas victims from Batman.


"If I had them, I'd lick them." Hey Billy, Tilda Swinton called. She wants her bumper sticker back. 

We all wanted Gary Oldman to win Best Actor. Not because he deserved it, but because it would be awesome if he got up and said, "I want to thank everyone." (Everyone, Gary?) "EVVVERRYYYONNE!!!"
 

Glenn Close has inherited Nick Nolte’s Burt Reynolds I-Can’t-Believe-I-Got-Fucked-Out-of-An Oscar crown. There really is nothing more pure to witness in life than an actress's forced smile after losing to her rival more times than Shaq choked at the foul line.

Speaking of Nolte, it was obvious the thought in his head as he lost was, "Three Pink’s chili dogs and a four beers probably wasn't the smartest thing to force down prior to taking my seat. That's ... gonna stain.”

Congratulations, Monsieur Dejardin for your Best Actor win. Somewhere in Italy, Roberto Benini is humping a couch in your honor. 

 

Oscar Dress Changes - Hathaway: 5, Franco: 1

For those of you who stayed awake long enough to Windex the bronzer off your television screen left by Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Sorkin tonight, ABC aired a two and a half hour telethon for the American Stroke Association.

No, we're not talking about Kirk Douglas' spot-on Bette Davis impression. Rather, tonight's awards show was an eye-bulging contest for how frustratingly badly paced, poorly written and lazily put together the Academy Awards could be, as expressed by the person sitting next to you on the couch bellowing, "I CANNOT BELIEVE HOW BAD THIS IS!". Everyone please have your blood pressure checked. No point was ever so poignantly illustrated as when Billy Crystal himself walked on stage to remind us all how well a show COULD be hosted. Sadly, his appearance was not a hand-off.

Next year, I nominate Charlie Sheen to host the Oscars. It will be memorable. (The Mung Hour just got handed a fine of $275 for the tired use of a Charlie Sheen joke. It's off-limits like Christopher Walken and Jack Nicholsen impressions.)

If you missed tonight's telecast, here are some highlights:

- Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis took one last swig of James Franco's bong water and came out onstage to marvel about how one cell in their fingernail is like one tiny little universe. Cue Donald Sutherland.

- Russell Brand and Helen Mirren reminded us of that big, fat dump they took on the hilarious 1982 film Arthur. Said defecation arriving this spring to a theater near you.

- Batman joined the dearly departed Joker with possession of a golden statue.

- ABC told us to watch 20/20. No, they told us they have the Oscars until the year 2020. The same number of people giving a fuck about this blog post give a fuck about ABC having the Oscars until 2020.

-Nicole Kidman got a call from Ken's lawyer asking for the playhouse, the Corvette and sole custody of Malibu Skipper.

- Two films with one-armed endings were nominated for Best Picture. Figured that out all by myself.

- Hugh Jackman got pwned by Anne Hathaway.

- Anne Hathaway got pwned by the fly that landed on my television screen.

- Sandra Bullock revealed she is Spock's sister and abruptly left for her Pon Farr ritual back on Vulcan.

- Annette Bening wins this year's "Nick Nolte & Burt Reynolds I Can't Believe I Eff'ing Lost Award" for feigning enthusiasm after losing to that trollop, Queen Amidala.

- Warren Beatty wins this year's "Warren Beatty Staring At Anyone But My Wife Award" for ogling the cans of the pregnant chick who beat out his wife.

- Kathy Griffin sang the Dido song from 127 Hours.

- Contrary to appearances, Hillary Swank was not there to talk about her inspiration, Secretariat.

- The guy who wrote "I Love L.A." defied Kodak Theater security and snuck in to win an Oscar for his tenth cover of "You've Got a Friend In Me".

- Reese Witherspoon ditched her boyfriend and brought her forehead as her date.

- Charlie Sheen did NOT make this year's Wall of Death and --- key-bo--rd -- ot workkkkking --- shouldn'tttt have -- done tirrred Sheen --joke. Apol - ogieeeeees.

Why The Social Network Should Win Tonight But Won't

We all know that the Oscars haven't always been about merit. Many a film has been critically praised and financially successful yet still ignored by the Academy (The Dark Knight comes to mind). As we look back on nearly a century of Best Pictures, the first thing that comes to mind as to what an Oscar-winning film should be is relevant. Not necessarily relevant in the sense that people talk about it, although that helps, but the film should define the time in which it's set while examining the era in which it is made. Most importantly, it should reflect upon its targets. I can't think of a better example, in many years in fact, of a film that does just this than David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network.

Typically a 'relevant film' we agree on is about our country's wars - WWII, Vietnam or the Middle East (Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, Three Kings, The Hurt Locker). Or it will deals with the modern family (American Beauty, Mystic River). This year we finally had a film that stared into the face of an entire decade, illustrating the monster of technology and its fiendish conspirator, ambition and greed. At the same time, it presented us with a true film of the modern college experience and with only one vomit gag. More than that, it showed us the true fragility of friendship and the choices we make in life.

So why won't The Social Network win Best Picture? Well, obviously it's complicated by nine other films in the category. And it's not a safe film. It doesn't easily fit into a particular genre. Nobody dies, nobody goes to war, nobody dresses in period attire, nobody loses a child and most importantly, nobody overcomes a crippling disability. Every other year or more, there seems to be a need for the warm comfort of a crowd-pleasing historical film, replete with affable dialog, cozy scenes of non-fictional retrospect and of course, the touching performances of British thoroughbreds.

We're talking about The King's Speech. It has the vibe of Howard's End as well as The Queen which gave Helen Mirren her first Oscar, and it will be the same with Colin Firth. While no doubt deserving on every level, Firth (and perhaps Bonham-Carter and Rush) should be winners in this film. It is a thespian's film, but not a story-driven film. It's just not a film that we'll look back on as a defining film. It's Rocky with studdering. It's The Karate Kid with studdering. It's a feel-good movie, one where every beat hits its perfectly played-out note. You never doubt that the good Duke is going to triumph over his tongue-tied torment.

The Social Network, on the other hand, does not play to the grandeur of a world on the bring of war. It does not deal with the triumph of the human spirit, nor does it contain a single British character (just a few very talented young British actors). For those of you who keep score, Oscar loves it some Brits. Just ask Harvey Weinstein, who knows when to play the Union Jack card come campaign time in January.

What Fincher's film does is draw the curtain on the young 21st century mind and its unabashed pursuit of creating an idea that nobody else can touch. We can barely crack the surface of how the internet has changed modern society, let alone the impact Facebook has had on how we communicate and represent our daily lives to one another. This film explores our love affair with success, technology and Faustian complexity while still delivering grade-A entertainment. And in doing so, the film delivers 2010's finest dialog, cinematography, a rapturous modern score by Trent Reznnor and Atticus Ross, starmaking performances by fresh actors and a window into America when a few group of young minds changed the face of modern communication. These young upstarts did all of this under the noses of the wealthiest businesses and greatest educational institutions in the world. Shakespeare by way of Pinter and Mamet. In this case, Sorkin.

Decades from now, people will remember The Social Network as a generational film, the way they remember The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, All the President's Men. (Sheer coincidence those three films all star Dustin Hoffman!) They will remember The King's Speech as the well-done Oscar winner of 2010.

Game Show Kid Turns Actor in Sandra Bullock Comedy

By not being a 'wizz' kid and soiling his pants on television like the character from 1999's Magnolia, whiz kid Tom Horn, who won $32,000 on Jeopardy, has landed a starring role in an upcoming Sandra bullock film.

Full story here.

Cruisin' for a Bruisin'

By special Mung Hour contributor, Double-S

Why do they even have to spin the fucking box office receipts? Just print the fucking list and shut up.

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org/toy-story-3-sandler-are-hot-tom-cruise-not-ap

I don't know why I give a fuck, probably because I liked the Cruise movie and simply do not find Sandler and his cronies funny. Just never have.

I'm not saying the couch trip didn't hurt Cruise's career. To blame a weak opening on it is unfair. As I've already noted, the release date was stupid and so was the last minute change to Wednesday. Other factors played into the weak opening too.

• Cruise is almost fifty and his leading lady is almost forty. They're twenty and thirty years older than the stars of Eclipse respectively. People simply cannot expect teens to want to see films featuring actors as old or older than their parents.
• Tastes have changed. Audiences expect super heroes from May through July now. if you're doing the kind of film studios have been doing since the eighties, release it in August.
• Everyone knew going in that Cruise had PR baggage. The painfully forced attempts to make him look 'normal' in publicity efforts failed four years ago, so why try it again? Look at how much fun Tom and Cameron are having on set! He's so normal! I'd have tried to get the guy to do some type of mea culpa. The guy could've gone back on Oprah and fixed it in five minutes.
• Stop spending $120M on films that don't need to cost $120M. Iron Man needs expensive effects. Neither K&D or A-Team can say that. When films like Death Race, Taken, and the first Bourne movie had more compelling action sequences at a third to half the budget. Point is, the cost of the film elevated expectations to an unrealistic level.

This has been the weakest summer in decades from both a commercial and content perspective. Lots of marginal films underperforming. And by 'marginal' I mean worse than the films we used to decry for making money despite being shitty.

If I'm Cruise, and I'm not, I try to push the Les Grossman thing through then try to focus on more artistic stuff. People talk a lot about MI4 being in danger as a result of this film. It likely is unless Paramount's already sunk too much into prep and would owe too many people (Abrams) for pay or play contracts if they pull the plug.