M. Night Shyamalan had a two-minute-long AmEx ad on the Oscars telecast tonight (watch or download — thanks, Arzan and Sonia). The ad was lots of fun, a riff on Shyamalan’s odd worlds. Manoj Night was all slicked out in necklace, fitted suit and fancy haircut. Ennis Del Mar would approve.

I heard there was a short Ismail Merchant clip in the obituary montage. Sajit adds that Aishwarya Rai’s L’Oreal ad was shown at the end.

Out of the nominees, here are my personal should-have-beens (see also the complete list of winners):

Picture: Munich (winner: Crash)

Director: Steven Spielberg for Munich (winner: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain)

Actor: Joaquin Phoenix for Walk the Line (winner: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote). It’s a travesty that Reese Witherspoon won her Best Actress award for Walk the Line, while Phoenix, the movie’s heart, was jilted for his dark, intense performance.

Yes, Hoffman disappeared entirely inside that role like a good interper, in a way you rarely see any more. But the faults of the rest of the movie bleed over. Capote was so slow and aggressively anti-stim, so sensory isolationist, it literally almost put me to sleep in the theater, slower than watching paint dry. As Anthony Lane wrote about a different film, it had ‘the touch of mummification which wins awards’ and an elegiac tone that was stultifying.

Crash blindly jabbed your emotional buttons. It was a race drama by the guy who wrote Million Dollar Baby, and about as subtle, i.e. not at all. It felt as pointlessly corrosive as downing a bottle of Tabasco sauce, making it upsetting to sit through, every key character spewing racist invective. It felt like reading Usenet: messy, undirected, didn’t go anywhere. You’ve got my time, now make a point.

The movie was way too pat, like feature columnists in small papers in the ‘burbs. Everyone just happened to bump into everyone else in the L.A. urban sprawl. I’ve seen that narrative structure before, but it wasn’t used well here — it was utterly contrived. The carjackers were like scholars. The Latino dude who lived in a ghetto barely had any accent. If you’re going to deal with race, be accurate. This movie veered into Lifetime schmaltz often, as mawkish as much of Bollywood. Continue reading →

The new Samuel L. Jackson/Julianne Moore film Freedomland opens with Aasif Mandvi’s perpetually startled face, looking more and more like Orlando Jones. Mandvi plays a doctor in this movie, a cross between a crime drama and Do the Right Thing. He gets five minutes of good screen time before he’s deep-sixed. From pizza guy (in Spiderman) to hospital Hippocrates is from stereotype to stereotype, but positive nonetheless.

The rest of the movie, an Amber Alert child kidnapping drama, is a jumble of Moore as junkie, Jackson as old fart community cop and Crown Heights-style race riot. The racial politics are from a Nickelodeon after-school special, Jackson was better as an elder Jedi, and cornhole-in-chief Ron Eldard, that blue-eyed devil more robotically evil than Robert Patrick, wears the official cornhole chin-beard usually sported by French gendarmes.

The Chariots of Fire-like score, the simplistic life lessons and the low-glam Moore makeup make the movie seem like some kind of Oscar bid, but instead it winds up lost in Schmaltzland.

The NYT sniffs:

This week’s contribution to our national slag heap and an early candidate for worst film of the year is Freedomland, an inept, lethally dull drama… about a white child who may have gone missing in a New Jersey public housing complex, where the residents are all black. [Link]

Related posts: Ga-ching-a-ching-a-ching, Cereal Cyrano, Aasif Mandvi in ‘Spiderman 2’

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