Academy Awards Wrap-Up

Dianne here: I haven’t been blogging much, but I have been going to movies because awards season has been upon us. Now that the Academy Awards have been given out, I’d like to quickly sum up what I thought about some of the nominations and wins:

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire

If you haven’t seen it, do so. It’s entertaining and enlightening and very deserving of its awards, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing – a Total of Eight Academy Awards (that I’m aware of).

Best Actress: Kate Winslet in The Reader

I ended up going alone to this movie because noone wanted to join me. It was much better than I thought it would be because it isn’t about an older woman having an affair with a younger man, like I thought. It goes much, much deeper than that, but for me to tell you would spoil the movie. Let’s just say that Kate Winslet’s performance was superb, but the story and the writing, directing, and everything else that goes into making movies were all excellent.

Five Nominations (that I’m aware of): Doubt

I went to watch this Sunday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised. Along with the serious nature of the film were some funny moments, plus the writing, directing, and acting were outstanding. I especially liked Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the priest – opposite of his spy portrayal in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007).

Best Actor: Sean Penn in Milk

Sean Penn was my favorite to win the Oscar since he was so different from who he is in real life and believable at the same time. The other award handed out to this timely movie is Best Original Screenplay, whose young writer gave an extremely moving speech at the Academy Awards. We truly must stop discriminating against people in our society just because they are different from us. We must adopt more tolerance and live with less narrow-mindedness.

Two Awards (that I’m aware of):  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Although nominated for nine other awards (that I’m aware of), this movie won only two – Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects. Although I enjoyed watching it, even though it is almost three hours long, it is not one of those must-see-agains. You either like it or you don’t. And even though Brad Pitt has proved himself more than just a leading man, an actor with range as he matures, if one goes to see Brad Pitt as himself, one has to watch a lot of him as someone else to get to those few “precious” scenes.

So that’s all for now. I’m going to rent all the other movies nominated, especially the foreign films and will let you know when I’ve seen one worth passing on to you, my readers.

DEFIANCE the movie, and bombing Afghanistan/Pakistan

In defiance to watching the Super Bowl, Liz and I took in the movie DEFIANCE yesterday. Daniel Craig is excellent as a smuggler turned hero in this up till now unknown story of Jews during WWII surviving against all odds. Directed by Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond) and also starring Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell as Craig’s brothers, DEFIANCE holds your attention from start to finish, although there are scenes you want to turn away from even though you’ve been subjected to movies and photos of this horrible period in human history many times before. There was one scene I did not expect, and that was the bombing of the forest where the Jews were hiding.

What made it worse for me personally was the knowledge that the United States under our new “Anti-Iraq War President” continues to bomb the Afghanistan/Pakistan border using drone jets rather than manned ones.  Supposedly, they are accurate in hitting their targets, terrorists, although there is still some collateral damage – meaning innocent civilians including women and children are getting killed. Since I had just found out about this via Bill Moyer’s Journal on Friday night, I was particularly sensitive to the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of bombing civilian areas during warfare. Historically, it has never achieved its mission. It didn’t work for us in Iraq – we still had to hunt down Hussein after killing many innocents – and it didn’t work for us in Vietnam – we lost that war.

Neither did the bombing of Germany work for Churchhill during WWII for the same reason it didn’t work for Hitler to bomb England. In fact, it worked against them as the people became stronger and more intent at winning. Thus is the result of Obama’s signing off on the continued bombing of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such action breeds more hate against the “Empire of the United States” and recruits more terrorists. As a supporter of Obama from the beginning, I am especially disappointed, no, shocked, as I thought he was against such actions, even though I knew he planned on building up our forces in Afghanistan. I thought that was to find and bring to justice Osama and his crew. As one of the guests on Bill Moyer’s said: 9/11 was not an act of war, it was a criminal act and its perpertrators should be hunted down and brought to justice.

So I’m confused about Obama’s telling the Muslim world that we will respect them at the same time we’re bombing them. I’m also confused why it is wrong to hold and torture suspected terroists in Cuba when it seems to be okay to outright kill them along with whomever else happens to be around in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is NOT CHANGE as promised. This is not looking forward, it is looking back to use the same techniques that did not work in the last century, the most violent one on record, I believe. Most of us who supported Obama believe that war should always, always be the last resort, especially when it wasn’t a particular country that attacked us on 9/11 and one of the countries we are now bombing has nuclear weapons. This is not just a slippery slope Obama is on, it is downright dangerous.

I for one am going to email the White House and urge all my readers to do the same to ask our new President to change his mind. Think how different things would be right now if the previous president had changed his mind on so many levels. As far as the movie, DEFIANCE, I give it a High Five. It shows us the wages of war and makes us not want to repeat our mistakes, while letting us see that the actions of a few people can save many. We owe it to those who have suffered so we can live in freedom to respect the rights of people everywhere to live without the terror of getting bombed. Just because no American soldier is involved, that the current bombing is taking place by remote control, doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do, not at all. Yes, the economy is bad but we need to pay attention to why we voted for Obama in the first place – he was always against the Iraq War.