I can’t wait until the Academy Awards. More precisely, I can’t wait until the Academy Awards end. If I have to see one more “news” item on who plans to wear what designer’s dress to the ceremonies, or read one more so-called definitive list of the sure winners in each category, or hear one more Leonardo-DiCaprio-disguised-himself-as- a-Hasidic-diamond-dealer-to-escape-seven-hundred-screaming-twelve-
year-olds story, or watch one more commercial touting the nominations of Good Will Hunting and showing Minnie Driver and Matt Damon kissing when in real life Big Matt dumped Minnie on her ass as soon as he realized that the success of the movie brought with it hundreds of willing starlets with whom he could frolic and try to forget that the woman on whom he based Minnie’s character dumped him on his ass and married the drummer for Metallica – if I have to endure any more Oscars hype, I think I might have to buy a gun, bring it home, load it, aim it at the television, and fire repeatedly. I love movies – I probably watch five or six movies a week, either in the theater or on video – but I despise the Academy Awards, because they puncture the delicate escapist bubble that surrounds the movies. I know that giant egos lurk behind the sets of even the most wonderfully crafted films; I don’t want to see those egos tricked out in Versace, dedicating their awards to Princess Diana if they win and earnestly telling that chick from the E! channel that they just felt honored by the nomination if they didn’t win. The Academy should just notify the winners by mail and spare all of us the agony of Sharon Stone’s mysteriously poor public speaking skills.

Of course, I’ll end up watching the damn ceremonies anyway. I always do. If I don’t, I might miss a golden opportunity to make fun of something. Unfortunately, I won’t really know who deserves to win and who doesn’t this year, because I haven’t seen most of the Best Picture nominees – I somehow ended up watching really sucky movies instead. I don’t know how the best films of the year compare to years past, but the crappy movies made a sucking sound louder than Luciano Pavarotti getting out of a swimming pool. My Best Friend’s Wedding, for example. I have already delivered a full-bore rant on the subject of this movie, so I will confine myself to remarking that Julia Roberts – an actress with a range of exactly two facial expressions, lips trembling joyfully and lips trembling despondently – cannot carry a movie, especially when the plot of said movie requires her to fall in love with Dermot Mulroney, who not only stands about a foot shorter than she does but also looks like a raisin bun that someone stepped on. I will also note that perhaps the producers should not have used Ray Charles as their lighting designer, since the entire film had the fluorescent glow of a dormitory bathroom.

Of course, they could have made worse mistakes. They could have used a script written by Eric Bogosian. Unfortunately, someone else beat them to it and made SubUrbia. Apparently intended as an edgy commentary on society and its deleterious alienating effect on kids today, SubUrbia combined a murky and uncompelling plot, stiff performances, non-dimensional characterizations, and some of the most miscalculated and dated dialogue since Lloyd’s father told him to “mellow off” in Better Off Dead. In the eighties, when he wrote the play from which the movie derives, Bogosian had something to say, but the outsider’s bile he spewed during the Reagan decade doesn’t play anymore. In the beginning of the film, one of the main characters previews her feminist performance-art piece for her friends; shortly thereafter, the audience meets another central character, the disturbed Desert Storm veteran. These elements, obviously ported over from the previous decade, don’t make sense in a movie of the nineties – the performance artist incorporates the phrase “fuck Reagan” into her routine, and the vet probably served in Vietnam in the original draft. The essential vacuity of the art world and the psychic pain inflicted on survivors of the Vietnam conflict long ago stopped functioning as relevant dramatic subjects. Other filmmakers have already done them, and done them to death. The addition of a murder, presumably to give the movie some sort of point, serves only to emphasize the basic flaws in the film’s conception – as does the presence of Parker Posey, a quintessentially nineties actress whose ironic eyebrows don’t belong in a film this hopelessly self-important.

Posey might have fit better in Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen’s latest defensive maneuver, in which he – or some surrogate for him – manages to nail some of the best-looking babes in show business. Some critics hailed Harry as bracingly honest and wickedly funny; others rolled their eyes and dismissed it as more of the same. I can see both points of view – I found Demi Moore’s turn as a devoutly Jewish psychiatrist hilarious, and Billy Crystal turned in an understated performance as Harry’s nemesis – but overall, the movie sucked. In the past, Woody presented his compulsions more deftly; he wove his neurosis into the story. In Deconstructing Harry, the neurosis becomes the story, and Woody seems to have lost the ability to convert his “issues” into sympathetic humor. What fans of the film saw as a caustic comment on the life of a public figure seemed to me like the snarl of a bitter old man, and frankly, watching an increasingly wizened Woody put the moves on a succession of much younger women – successfully – made my skin crawl. This has nothing to do with “the Soon-Yi thing” – it has to do with his failure, after thirty years of variations on a theme, to get over himself and move on.

Mike Myers needs to get over himself and move on as well. I like his brand of comedy, and I still use lines from Wayne’s World in conversation, but I hated Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery. Wayne’s World worked because it had a story and other characters; Austin Powers really didn’t, and the joke – not terribly funny to begin with – got old after about ten minutes. Throughout the movie, I would sit through the set-up of a gag, expect a certain punchline, and then get a limp one-liner and more frantic Myers mugging. Saturday Night Live skits have a tendency to go on about twice as long as they should; the cleverness of the premise inevitably loses its strength as the writers run out of things to say, and the same thing happened in Austin Powers. It would have made a brilliant recurring skit on SNL, but as a feature-length movie, it bit. And Elizabeth Hurley should stick to modelling and browbeating Hugh Grant.

Half-Baked suffered from the same problem, although in this case the one joke might have held up in the hands of more competent writers. The movie had a few brilliant moments, but I got the distinct feeling that the script came from someone that had never smoked pot. I have long since wearied of stoner stereotypes in film – the vast majority of people that smoke pot can in fact cope with their lives, without resorting to excessive giggling and ill-advised tie-dye experiments. Half-Baked showed the best parts of the movie in the previews, of course (one hilarious bit from the previews didn’t even make it into the final cut of the film), and although I didn’t expect much going in, I felt that the writers missed a lot of opportunities. I think they tried to hard to appeal to the non-stoners in the crowd, and they would have done better with a Cheech and Chong-type approach – in other words, identify your audience and play to them. People who have never toked won’t go to a film like Half-Baked anyway, so they could have just cut it loose and taken better advantage of the built-in humor attached to getting baked. (Confidential to my mom: I used to smoke pot. USED TO. Don’t worry.)

I wish I had sparked a fatty before watching Chasing Amy. Then I might have found Joey Lauren Adams’ helium voice funny instead of irritating. I love Kevin Smith – I adored Clerks and I even liked Mallrats. Jason Lee did a lot with thin material in Mallrats, and he threw himself into a sadly misconceived role with the necessary abandon. Unfortunately, not every actor can get away with Kevin Smith’s dialogue, and both Adams and Ben Affleck struggled to carry it off. If the actor gives himself up to the stylized conversation, he has a better chance of convincing us that “real people” talk this way. But I could tell that Adams and Affleck didn’t believe in their own lines; Affleck in particular read his part instead of acting it. (Whit Stillman’s dialogue works the same way, but he shrewdly casts actors that don’t feel self-conscious, and you don’t notice the artifice until the next time you hear “real people” talking.) Affleck turned in solid, seamless performances in Dazed & Confused and Good Will Hunting, but his characters in those films had more organic dialogue; alas, his character carries the plot here, and he never quite entered the character. The plot itself didn’t do much for me, either; I found myself wishing that Smith had taken more risks with the story. The go-for-broke style of Clerks made the movie; he didn’t care if we bought it or not, he just put it out there. At several points during Chasing Amy, though, I could feel Smith checking himself – much the same way that Affleck kept checking himself. He could have made a lovely movie with this story, but the self-consciousness got in the way. The lines got more and more abstract, and by the time Silent Bob delivered his speech towards the end, I had lost interest.

The movies I have just discussed sucked big-time. I tried to address them intelligently because I know why I hated them; they disappointed me. I expect better from a film than these delivered, and I felt cheated. True, a movie has to work hard to impress me, but I like “bad” movies too, as long as they present themselves with conviction. Take Youngblood, for instance – pure crap on many levels, but it does what it sets out to do and doesn’t aim too high. I enjoy ironic deconstruction of kitsch and crap as much as the next girl, but when a filmmaker – or a writer, or a visual artist, or a musician – approaches the creative process with cynicism, it ruins the experience. I can tell they don’t care. I don’t want to start a big digression on movies and commerce, or the necessary compromises of the artist, or what have you, but I must confess to a certain purism when it comes to entertainment.

And now, furrowing a much lower brow, some of the most hilarious movie titles of 1997:

Dykes on Death Row

Head Cheerleader, Dead Cheerleader

High Noon Pie

I Went Down

Live Nude Shakespeare

Me and My Hormones

My Sister, My Spouse

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

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