Tonight's Golden Globes snoozer of a press conference was apt. In one hour, they wrapped up one of the more boring years in cinema. If the writers' strike continues and the Academy Awards suffer the same fate, I will not be disappointed.
The fact that Atonement won the Golden Globe for best picture should say something. It should say that Hollywood has completely lost the plot, pun intended. Atonement was the biggest pile of garbage I have seen in a movie theater since, well, since Gone, Baby, Gone, another of this year's "must see movies."
Haven't seen Atonement? Fine, skip this paragraph. But here's my take on the "best movie of the year" (I didn't write a review on it because I wanted to immediately cleanse it from my mind): a guy gets falsely accused of molesting a teenage girl. He goes to prison, but then goes to war in France. He misses his sweetheart (who presumably dumped him when he got charged with touching a teenager). He wanders around with three buddies in war-torn France for a while, but he doesn't carry a rifle, and doesn't know where he's going. It doesn't matter, because there's no enemy soldiers around, anyway. He's evacuated at Dunkirk. He meets his sweetheart again and boffs her brains out. They shack up in a crummy apartment, and life is pretty good.
Ooops. It was all a dream! The guy actually died during the war, his chickie was killed in the Blitz, and the last two hours of what you've just seen never happened. It's the non-molested girl's book. She's 70, and she felt bad for accusing the guy of being a molester. So sixty years after defaming him, she wrote a cute book about what his life with sweetheart would have been like. That's the "atonement" of the title. She feels bad, she writes a book, she feels better.
Yes, that is what passes for a great movie in Hollywood these days. A Dallas episode.
Michael Clayton was on the crummy list of this year's best pictures, and it should have won hands down. It was a very good movie, far better than the rest of the drek that rolled into theaters near you.
Or did they? There Will Be Blood was also on the list, but it isn't even in wide release yet. Thank goodness the Globes didn't have a real show this year, or else half the TV audience would have been saying, "There Will Be Blood? Huh, I need to see that. Guess it's pretty good."
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