Movies Features

The Unseen Movie Review: Award Season

By Robert Dixter Mar 4, 2010, 20:43 GMT

Oscar statuettes in various stages of completion sit on a rack at R.S. Owens in Chicago, Illinois, USA, 18 February, 2010. EPA/KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI

It's that time of the year again, when everyone else has handed out their film awards and now the Academy Awards steps up to the plate in an anti-climactic fashion to hand out the big ones.  So why not one more online whiner who watches a lot of movies?  The only difference is I’m not offering a meal and free booze to the already overpaid Hollywood players.  Here's my list of awards for the 2009 movie year.

The Most Anticipated Movie award goes to Watchmen.  This film has been buzzing around the internet for years with every comic loving nerd salivating as it jumped from director to director over the years.  It finally landed with Zack Snyder who did a great job and was extremely faithful to the source material (except for the end).  So why was this not the biggest comic adaptation of all time?  Because only nerds understood the story!  If you've read the graphic novel it is extremely layered and every frame contains information that propels the story forward.  It is very hard to cram that into an understandable film in two and a half hours.  They should have gone with a miniseries on HBO.

The Repeat Yourself award goes to Roland Emmerich.  He destroyed the Earth (extreme pause) again (snort) in 2012.  He has now destroyed our planet more times than Eminem and Kim Mathers have married.  Can't he come up with a new idea?  Go read a book or play a videogame.  That's how everyone else in Hollywood greenlights films.

The Future Is Near award goes to Avatar.  Leave it to James Cameron to not only use a new technology but use it correctly.  The idea of employing 3-D should only be used to enhance your storytelling technique, it's not there to BE your storytelling technique.  Once again Cameron does it first (see The Abyss) and does it right.
Best Mall award goes to Paul Blart Mall Cop.  Here's what happened, Kevin James was feeling sad that his film wasn't nominated for anything even though the movie is a bigger pile of dung than you would find on an abandoned farm.  So we made up this award (as opposed to the rest) and made Paul Blart the only nominee.  Now Kev, please stop calling.

Until The End award goes to Terminator Salvation.  Like most films directed by McG, I don't expect much (kind of like my dates in high school).  But as I was watching Terminator Salvation I was enjoying it more than I expected. The story was ok, nothing close to Cameron's work, but it held my attention which is all I usually ask of a summer blockbuster, until the end.  I won't give away the final moments if you haven't seen it but this film has more cheese on it at the end than my nachos from the concession stand.

Restore My Faith award goes to District 9.  I walked into this one not knowing much other than it was produced by Peter Jackson.  I walked out of the theater with my faith in film completely restored.  District 9 was quite possibly the most original film of the year with excellent acting, great effects, and a budget that says "Hey Hollywood, you don't need huge stars and tons of dough to make a summer blockbuster."  One of the top five films of the year.

Finally, we get to Best Director.  Now normally I would just hand this one over to Jimmy Cameron for Avatar but hear me out on my choice before you tear me apart in the comments.  I'm going with Stephen Sommers for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (I can hear those insults you're yelling at the screen).  Let me explain. 

It is the Director's job to tell the story the best way he can.  If you watch G.I. Joe, it grabs you from the start and Sommers doesn't let up for the entire movie throwing every action sequence he can think of at you.  The flow of the film is amazing and there are no slow spots.  The story is ludicrous and moronic (a suit that accelerates you?  That’s just dopey).  The acting makes Kareem Abdul Jabbar's cameo in Airplane look like Oscar material (and yes, I realize it is the director’s job to get great performances out of his actors).  But Sommers succeeds in making G.I. Joe do what it set out to do. 

 The film was made so you could turn off your brain for an hour and a half and watch crazy action being thrown at you with such speed that Usain Bolt would stop and say “Wow, that was fast.”  It's a rollercoaster ride that grabs you from the start and doesn't stop until the end, although it's a crappy old rickety rollercoaster that makes you want to throw up while you're on it.