bbennett712 Blog

So I finally watched the fifth and final best picture nominee tonight...Good Night, and Good Luck.  Now that I've seen all 5, I can't for the life of me figure out how Crash won.  My guess is that they knew Brokeback Mountain wasn't good enough for the award, so they decided they really had to shock people and give it to the underdog. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Crash and thought it was an entertaining and fine film.  But it just doesn't feel like Best Picture material.  The same goes for Munich...another great movie btw, but not best picture.  For my money, I think Capote was the best film of the 5.  Then I would go with Good Night, and Good Luck.  I don't think the other three were anywhere near as good as these two.  Brokeback Mountain was okay, and no, I'm not homophobic.  My opinion is that it was a glorified Bridges of Madison County, and that film wasn't oscar worthy either. If you haven't seen Capote, you realy need to check it out.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is incredible and definitely deserves his best actor award. 

Anyone reading this...what are your thoughts?

I realized that the first two blog posts I wrote had quite the negative feel to them so I decided to make sure you guys don't think I'm a 75 year old curmudgeon (sp).  So here's a recent movie I did like: Hustle and Flow.  I can't really put my finger on why though.  It was a fairly predictable "bad boy makes good" type of story, but I still really enjoyed it.  Maybe it's the fact that I've been walking around for the last week singing "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" and "Whoop that Trick".  You definitely get noticed when you're a pasty white 30 something getting on Caltrain with your ipod while signing those two little diddies.  But they just stuck in my head and I can't get 'em out.  Kind of like Celine Dion after Titanic only this time I don't want to kill myself every time I bust out with one of the lyrics.  Back to the movie though.  Terrence Howard did a great job as DJ even if the first 15 minutes of the movie reminded me of Trainspotting in that I couldn't understand a word of what was being said.  Combine urban slang with southern accents and you get gibberish until your ears and brain adjusts appropriately.  After that, I settled in and really enjoyed the story.  Although I have a feeling that some of the reason was seeing the skinny dork from Road Trip working the sound board and smoking bowls...good stuff.

A conversation got started at work a couple of days ago about Clancy books that became films and who played he best Jack Ryan.  It was hands down Alec Baldwin and while we're on that subject, The Hunt for Red October was by far the best of all the Clancy book tranlsations.  Patriot Games was okay, but Clear and Present Danger deviated way too much from the book.  And as far as I'm concerned, The Sum of All Fears never happend as I refuse to recognize Ben "Gigli" Affleck as Jack Ryan.  It's just not right.  Now what I would really like to see is a film version of Without Remorse, the story of how John Clark entered the world of the CIA.  That was a fantastic book, but you just know they would screw it up by casting Vin Diesel or someone like that as Clark.  Russell Crowe would probably make a good Clark as he as the right mix of darkness, toughness, and star power.  Will likely never happen though as I hear Clancy has never been a fan of the film adaptations of his books.  Then again, if he would right normal 400 pg books rather than the 700-800 behemoths that he's so fond of, maybe studios would have an easier time with it.