Happy Thursday! Also in today’s edition of The Broadsheet: Remembering new Oscar producer Brian Grazer’s own “gay” controversy… The Criterion Collection comes to iTunes (but not without issues)… Clint Eastwood’s thing for Herman Cain… and more.
Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is neither the provocation nor the yowl of anguish that his last picture, Antichrist , was. For those reasons, it’s less effective and also far less of a workout: Antichrist was the first von Trier movie I genuinely loved, after a decade’s worth of railing against the sufferdome atmosphere of pictures like Dogville , Dancer in the Dark , and even the mildly bearable Breaking the Waves . Antichrist stunned and upset me, but it also filled me with compassion toward the man who made it, a feeling I’d never imagined I could have. The gift of Antichrist — with its horrific depictions of emotional suffering, its wailing-wind subtext of “Nature is everywhere, inside you and outside, and it is not your friend” — was that von Trier had surprised me. That is a critic’s greatest pleasure — or at least it’s mine.
It’s been roughly 13 minutes since Eddie Murphy departed as Oscar host, and already we have a strong frontrunner to replace Brett Ratner’s comeback kid: The Muppets. Supporters rallied on Twitter for their consideration, and now an official “The Muppets Should Host the 2012 Oscars” campaign has been launched on Facebook . We offered up the idea of a Muppet-emceed Oscars in our possible host roundup yesterday, but would the reality of Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo at the dais be as enchanting as we want?