1988: The Year that the World Was Introduced To a Man of Shocking Genius, and Dustin Hoffman Played One Too

The first genius I'm referring to is, of course, myself. Coincidentally, I was actually compared to the title character of 1988's winner at dinner tonight. And it's pretty accurate, although I'm obviously more suave than he is (and pretty much everybody). Overall though, I was pretty disappointed with this year of films. This was my birth year people! And there were a grand total of two good movies that got nominated. That's like an all-time low. The Academy and I were at war since before I was born. I think I just quasi quoted a movie, but I'm not sure...I probably did since I'm not sure I say much of anything that's not from something. I looked it up almost a week later, as I'm finishing this and the movie I was quoting was Terminator Salvation. Boom.

But I certainly wouldn't quote much of anything from this year of nominees, especially not The Accidental Tourist. Talk about a movie that started off as being somewhat interesting and ended up as redundant drivel. I get really tired of these movies where it follows the pattern: dude with a character flaw meets girl who's crazy, they fall in love and she fixes him, he walks away from her for about twenty minutes to get some canned drama in there, and then they reunite at the end (completely forgetting about all the problems he had at the beginning of the movie of course). The beginning of this movie actually reminded me of Up in the Air, it's about a guy who hates traveling but who travels a lot so he can write travel guides. And the Clooney one was about a guy who traveled a lot because he didn't really have anything else to do. Those are wonderfully twisted ideas, and in the beginning I actually thought I'd like this movie. But once it falls into the category I described earlier it gets boring. The same thing happened in As Good As It Gets wherein the crotchety guy gets fixed only to discover that his non-distorted self is horrendously not interesting. And the love interest for this movie is Geena Davis, who I find mildly frightening (especially in eighties getup). She won the Academy Award for this role! See now, the girl in Clooney's movie was Anna Kendrick and she is adorable. Geena Davis, not so much. I'm starting to think a lot of these movies are just mob-backed or something and they force the Academy to give them awards. Because I knew the Academy was pretty dumb, but this is just ridiculous. And I haven't even gotten to the year's worst offering yet! It was a rough year. Somewhere in there he gets back with his wife for essentially no good reason, mostly because the movie needed to fill up an extra half an hour I suppose. Well next time these people should just have a movie that's an hour and a half. If nothing else, it would've been 30 fewer minutes that I had to endure the torture.

Now's the part where I'd like to chime in with how the next movie on the list is at least marginally better, but sadly it is not. The film is Dangerous Liaisons and though it sounds like a spy thriller where stuff blows up, guns get fired, and other exciting things happen, nothing could be farther from the truth. I actually completed a previous blog entry while the movie's last 30 minutes were playing because it was pretty boring. The film is essentially about some French people who...well, does it matter? Much like myself, you're probably already disinterested because it's about Frenchies. But I'll blather about it anyway, these two French aristocrats basically start playing some mind games with some other aristocrats by sleeping with people's lovers, and telling other people that other people were sleeping with their lovers. Why do they do this exactly? There's really no reason, except that they're rotten and bored. So we're watching rotten and bored people bore us. The casting is kind of all over the place with the film, because Glenn Close and John Malkovich are the stars, but Keanu Reeves is in it too. He actually says the words, in his Keanu voice, "sublime, don't you find?" in response to an opera he just viewed. How could anyone take a movie seriously that contains that piece of dialogue? And to be honest, Glenn and John aren't particularly great either. Which is unusual for them, but I think it shows that directors are a big part of an actor's performance. If the director doesn't connect with the actors all that well, then performances may suffer. Everyone in this movie speaks as though they're on stage, and not in a good way. In an "I've said this line so many times it's horrifically boring for me to get the words out because I'm in a 3rd grade production of Hamlet" way. My rule about rotten characters is that they either have to be simultaneously hilarious when they're terrible (a la Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) or they have to be interesting characters with a deep back story (like all five of my Favorite Villains I wrote about a while ago). And on top of that, even if I were to go along with the story as it is, these two people are seducing younger and more attractive people left and right. I don't know about you, but if any actress is going to seduce me away from my spouse it's probably not going to be Glenn Close. And I can't speak for the ladies but John Malkovich, really? So there you have it, the movie pretty much falls flat on every level. The overall story was probably a lot better in the original book because then I could imagine the characters however I wanted (probably George Clooney and Natalie Portman, just saying).

Mercifully, I actually liked Mississippi Burning. It doesn't do anything that's completely interesting or original, but it's a really solid and well-done film. It centers around the true story of three murders that happened in Mississippi in the Civil Rights era of the 60s, and the subsequent investigation. It's really a two-man show of a movie between Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, both of whom are their usual excellent. Gene plays the old-time cop who is more of a Dirty Harry type guy (or more specifically a Popeye Doyle I suppose) and Willem plays more of the type of guy that Dirty Harry thinks is useless. He's all by-the-book and idealistic and such. Until near the end of the movie of course when he sees that he's getting nowhere. As I said, it's a pretty straightforward film but the pacing, supporting cast, and atmospheric direction are all excellent. It provides the usual commentary you'd expect on Southern racism (as the three who were killed were Civil Rights activists and one of them was black), but not in a blatant way. Or perhaps, not in a protesty way. It instead shows us the entire situation from an investigative point of view, and how the law is hindered by witnesses with a strong bias, as well as by local law enforcement and politicians. Nobody in town wants to talk to the FBI agents conducting the investigation, and as such the viewer is frustrated along with the characters. This is an effective tactic, because if you start out saying "Gene Hackman is too extreme, I'm glad the cops aren't like that" as Willem first believes, by the time it's the end of the film you see the merit in how Gene wanted to do things. And thus we see another example of the "slow progression." In other words, you end up with a different mindset at the end of the movie due to a specific set of frustrating events. This is one of my favorite filmmaking tactics because it allows the viewer to see how characters in both fiction and real life become the way they are. No one starts out extreme, they're made that way. All of this culminates in an excellent interrogation scene which isn't exactly violent, but it's potent and it's a breath of fresh air after an hour and forty-five minutes of nonsense from the townspeople. So there you go, the movie doesn't too anything too outstanding but it's solid. And it's easily the second best film of the nominees for this year (not that it's up against much, if Any Which Way But Loose came out in this year it would've topped the other crap).

And yes, I barely even know what that last movie is that I referenced. If you really care, you can find it online. In fact, you should have Wikipedia open at all times when reading my work. Because my brain is like Wikipedia...on crack-soaked speed. I learned about those drugs abstractly in class. I learned about them firsthand when I was driven to drug abuse by Working Girl. Had I been around a bridge, I'd have jumped off. I haven't watched a nominee in a week and a half and this movie is the reason. It actually broke me. It broke my mind and it broke my soul. It's...horrible. You can actually take the slew of movies I've referred to as "horrible" in the past and now label them "not so bad." We actually live in a world where John Ford's The Searchers wasn't nominated for Best Picture and this movie was (Spielberg called that his favorite film of all time). We live in a world where a poorly-written, over-acted piece of crap like this actually had a shot at being called the best film in a single year. I usually don't endorse time travel, because you never know what you might change and how the world will be worse off, but I am now going to devote efforts to creating time travel solely so I can stop this movie from being nominated. If that destroys the world, I don't care. Because whatever world we live in now has clearly gone terribly wrong. It's the Mirror-verse from Star Trek with goateed Spock. It's the alternate timeline from Back to the Future Part II where Biff is married to Marty's mom. I'm convinced, and I'm going to go to that other universe where people can keep their fishtanks, their cars don't get hit by tires, and they aren't awakened in the middle of the night by the people above them playing Coldplay's "Speed of Sound" on the piano (horribly). Right then, now that that mini-blog is done with, here's the plot (such as it is): girl gets taken under the wing of her company's CEO, CEO gets injured and leaves girl in charge, girl takes CEO's boyfriend and her job. Not even kidding. They make the CEO look like a serious villain because she passed off the main girl's idea as her own. SO FREAKING WHAT? She also left the main character in charge of the company, so if she had gone through proper channels she probably could've had the woman's job eventually anyway. And she stole the CEO's boyfriend! And he was played by Harrison Ford, so that had to hurt (only one man is man enough to survive the worlds of both Star Wars and Indiana Jones). I know we're asked to cheer for this girl because she's the main character and because she's Melanie Griffith (who I don't find attractive, certainly not in nasty 80s getup. When I saw the cast listing I got her confused with Kathy Griffin, who I actually think would've made the movie better in a bizarre way). Even if the movie was done well, and it isn't, it would still be (at best) a glorified chick flick. And people were nominated for acting Oscars in it too...ridiculous! Sometimes I wonder if what I perceive as bad acting and poor dialogue is simply a byproduct of being too used to television dialogue and acting that I see once a week for years and thus grow accustomed to, no matter the quality level that it was at the beginning. But I recently had to sit through a scene from this movie again during a game of Scene-It, and a good friend of mine who is an actress looked as though she was about to gag. So I'm vindicated, the movie sucks. Anyone interested in donating time or materials to my "risk tearing the fabric of the universe to prevent this film from being nominated" foundation can please post a comment on the blog.

Well now that everyone reading this probably wants to go back in time and stop my blog from existing, I guess this next part doesn't matter. But I'll write it anyway, because it's for an actually great movie that came out and won in 1988: Rain Man. It's tough to say a whole lot about the movie (although I'm sure I'll find a way) because what makes it so good is very simple. But that's often what makes for the best movies. The plot of the Lord of the Rings films really isn't too complicated, but it's the delivery and the full package that's so excellent. This movie is simply about a man whose father dies and he discovers that a portion of the inheritance belongs to a brother he didn't know he had. That brother, of course, is the quirky genius played by Dustin Hoffman. Apparently they originally wrote him as an autistic man who was very friendly and outgoing, and that would've made the movie mediocre at best. It was Hoffman himself who wanted to make him a stand-offish, OCD idiot savant. If he had been friendly from the beginning then the character would have nowhere to go. Instead, the story goes exactly where you'd expect: Tom Cruise becomes less of a jerk because of his relationship with his brother, and his brother gets to go and experience things he never could before because of the roadtrip that encompasses the movie. Predictable, but touching. And it ends in not quite the manner you'd expect. It's overall a happy ending, but not quite as stereotypical as you might think. Though it's somewhat predictable, the writing and the acting are so good that you don't care. Tom Cruise is even pretty good in the movie, lending creedence to my "the younger he gets the more talent he has" theory. Maybe it was all of those negative whatevers that the Scientology people zapped out of his brain. I'm not sure what any of those things are actually called and I won't look them up to dignify their existence, so let's just say that what the Scientologists zapped out of his psyche was "talent." Anyway, it's certainly a movie everybody should watch at some point. It goes a little bit deeper than just a "feel good" film, but it achieves the same purpose wonderfully.

So that's it for my birth year. Nonsensical crap, bending the rules, and an oddball genius. Sounds like my life. How apropos, anyone doubting that The Truman Show is actually the film adaptation of The Domenic Show which I live through every day, can look at my catalogue of blog posts and decide for themselves. I prefer to think that the wacky things that happen to me are the result of lazy writing/May sweeps. You can read about it in my autobiography I'll write someday entitled "Refusing to Color: The Story of a Man Too Smart for His Own Good." Where does the title come from? I'd love to tell you, for just $19.95. Until then, you can continue reading the condensed version on the blog. Next time around (if I am able to keep watching the nonsense) will include more buying that Glenn Close is a home-wrecker, Nicolas Cage and Cher in the same film, and 2 hours and 45 minutes of nothing happening within China's "Forbidden City." Umm, yeah the escapade would stop here if I wasn't so bored because that all sounds terrible.