The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released the poster for the 84th Academy Awards, and it’s… nice? I mean, Oscar looks sexy as ever, and all those foggy images of awards-night glories past recall both the champagne-fueled afterparties and the preponderance of white folks who take this hardware home every year. But isn’t something missing? Like, the host? After all that hullabaloo about Brett Ratner and Eddie Murphy that the Academy worked to deflect, and after all the lengths that the Board of Governors went to just to replace Murphy with an ultrasafe, ultrastable emcee, and after years of advertising hosts from Chris Rock to Jon Stewart to Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin to Anne Hathaway and Anne Franco, where is Billy Crystal? If I’m a casual viewer, I’m far likelier to take positive notice of the host than of the centrally positioned reminder that Driving Miss Daisy actually won Best Picture once upon a sad, sad time. Also: Can’t we get some more color in here? Sidney Poitier? Denzel Washington? Mo’Nique? If it has to be Best Picture alums, maybe Poitier and Rod Steiger from In the Heat of the Night ? Even Anthony Mackie and Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker . I’m not sure what this says about the young demographic that the aging Academy claims to covet; I doubt they’re watching Giant and/or The Sound of Music . Or maybe they are! Are you “young” and obsessive-compulsively watching Gone With the Wind on a DVD loop in honor of white, uptight, vaunted Academy legacies? Tell us in the comments! [via Awards Daily ]
On the bus home from a night out at a lesbian club, Fort Greene teenager Alike (Adepero Oduye) swaps her tomboyish outfit for earrings and a pink t-shirt, something clearly not of her own choosing, something selected to appease her mother. Alike is 17 and closeted, at least at home. Her mom Audrey (Kim Wayans) is uptight, religious and almost quivers with the effort of seeing her daughter as she wants her to be and not as she actually is. While Alike’s closer to her father Arthur (Charles Parnell), a cop, he’s chosen to step back from the tensions at home and in his marriage. Liking boys and makeup comes naturally to her younger sister Sharonda (Shamika Cotton) — our heroine is alone in her own personal form of camouflage, trying to blend into the background wherever she goes. What sets writer/director Dee Rees’s sensitive feature debut Pariah (expanded from her 2007 short of the same name) apart from the standard coming out story is that Alike is just as much an outsider at the club as at home, adrift and uncomfortable while her more outgoing best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) picks up girls on the dance floor. She hasn’t found the place in which she feels she can be herself. Alike knows that she’s gay, but her understanding and acceptance of that fact doesn’t mean she knows where she fits, in the scene or out of it — she doesn’t easily fall into the divisions of butch and femme, and she doesn’t seems to do any better at school, where she’s a good student in whose writing a teacher has taken a special interest, but other dangles outside the established social groups. Pariah is a coming of age story that’s uncommonly aware of just how heartbreakingly important the trappings of fashion, of music choices, of hobbies are when you’re young — they’re symbols of everything you think you are or aspire to be, even as they’re woefully inadequate shortcuts to establishing your identity. Alike’s journey take place in a larger landscape of shifting identities — just as the lesbian community isn’t a monolithic entity, neither is the black neighborhood in which the majority of the action is set. Her family has worked its way into the middle class, and Audrey’s consciousness of this achievement informs her stiffness around the coworkers she clearly feels she’s a cut above and her overall fussy propriety. It’s this sense of the type of people with whom her family belongs that leads her to insist Alike hang out with the daughter of an acquaintance from church, Bina (Aasha Davis), as if enough time in each other’s proximity would make a friendship inevitable. Alike begrudgingly walks to school with Bina and hangs out with her on the weekends, and finds a connection with the girl she never expected, one that blossoms into a possible romance when Bina gives our heroine her first kiss. Bina’s the opposite of Alike in many ways, bold where the latter is shy, but also uncertain where she’s fully decided, and the halting tenderness with which their relationship builds is tinged with the knowledge that Bina is probably going to break her heart. Pariah wouldn’t work without Oduye’s luminous performance, capturing the emotional nuances of a character not prone to letting her emotions show. She makes Alike’s vulnerabilities clear through her defenses — Alike’s convinced she has the world fooled, but isn’t anywhere near as in control as she’d like to believe. It’s a lovely, subtle portrayal that’s deservedly been getting a lot of attention for Oduye, who originated the role in Rees’s short and who may also be familiar as the grocery store clerk Louis C.K. awkwardly follows home to try to ask out in the first season of Louie . It’s a performance that good enough to smooth over the fact that the film’s gears grind as it arrives at an ending that feels neat, with Alike finally confronting her parents and encountering the results we’ve been primed to expect from the outset. Pariah is a small story of a painful, formative era in its protagonist’s life, and it sometimes feels roughly hewn to fit into an arc it doesn’t necessarily need. It’s the intimate, unforced details — an exchange between Arthur and his friends at a store, the way Laura chooses to shut Alike out after feeling betrayed by her new relationship — that speak volumes more than the film’s obvious butterfly metaphor, and that attest to a filmmaker and actress worth keeping an eye on. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There is a group of individuals whom Movieline would like to salute: The passionate, faceless people who lovingly record, in surprising detail and with confounding care, the full plot summaries for horrible movies on Wikipedia. Wikipedia movie plot historians, your day has come. I first recognized this phenomenon last month. While researching several pivotal roles in Kirsten Dunst’s career for the actresses’s 9 Milestones in the Evolution of… feature, I noticed (and greatly appreciated) that an Internet user had heroically outlined the entire plot of her long-forgotten and laughable 1998 television movie Fifteen and Pregnant . The plot summary is delivered in four straightforward paragraphs which remarkably do not acknowledge the ridiculousness of this poorly-scripted and self-righteous project. Here is just a taste… “The film opens with fourteen year old Tina having sex with Ray. A few days later Tina is sitting in the car with her mother and Tina’s mother asks her if she knows anyone who is sexually active at her age, or if she has ever been sexually active, and Tina nods her head yes, although her mother doesn’t know what she is admitting.” Granted, the person who was so moved by the melodramatic play-by-play of Fifteen and Pregnant that he/she rushed to his/her computer and tapped out a painfully accurate recap, is by no means a scholar. But skill or grasp of the English language is not the point here: The dedication is. For example, do you know how much you’d have to pay me to watch Troll 2 again and compose an entire 11 paragraph summary without a single critical inflection? (The most derogatory statement about the film in its Wikipedia entry is that it is “widely considered to be of poor quality.”) Do you know how severely you would need to threaten me before I typed out 1,000 words on the detestable Rob Reiner film North ? Do you know how many Target gift cards you would have to hire Woody Harrelson to strew onto a hotel bed Indecent Proposal -style before I agreed to not only view New Year’s Eve but to pen an earnest six-paragraph summary of this particular Garry Marshall’s holiday disaster-piece ? (The answers to these three questions are “a ton,” “very severely,” and “like, $10,000 worth.”) The heroic Wikipedia users who composed the above plot summaries may not have saved any lives. But they did save brain cells — brain cells that could have met a similar fate as the millions of those left to be swept up along with the neglected candy and self-respect on the floor of every Jack and Jill -screening multiplex auditorium in America last month. Because hopefully, some smart moviegoers elected to just read the Wikipedia plot summary of the film so that they could appropriately rag on it at the water cooler without paying for a partial Adam Sandler-performed lobotomy. Or maybe a few intelligent viewers decided against seeing the film after its detailed Wiki page informed them that the “comedy” would feature “cameos” from Bruce Jenner, Regis Philbin and Drew Carey. Or maybe that is all just wishful thinking and Wikipedia plot summary movie-going prevention is just a hope for the future. Either way, I am thankful for the bold Wiki user who dared to recount every minor plot twist in Showgirls so that I never have to re-watch the film to rediscover how much Cristal and Zach paid Nomi for a lap dance at the Cheetah ($500). So please, in honor of these Wikipedia movie plot historians, take a moment and scan through a few detailed recaps of your least favorite movies of all time. Recognize the effort, thank the faceless writers in whichever way you deem fit and maybe consider tapping out a few future plot summaries of your own. For without these loving recaps, human beings might actually have to sit through a screening of Gigli to fully recognize the film’s atrociousness. Follow Julie Miller on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
This past October, we looked long and hard briefly at the most pirated films of all time — a fairly predictable list that included blockbuster titles like Avatar , The Dark Knight and Transformers . Today, TorrentFreak has released a more current snapshot of the movie-stealing industry: A list of the top ten pirated films this year. Surprisingly, there are a few films on this list that you probably paid to see. Courtesy of TorrentFreak, the top five stolen titles of the year are… Fast Five (9,260,000 downloads) The Hangover II (8,840,000 downloads) Thor (8,330,000 downloads) Source Code (7,910,000 downloads) I Am Number Four (7,670,000 downloads) The first five films grossed over $100 million worldwide each and nearly $2 billion worldwide together. Head on over to TorrentFreak to see the complete list, which surprisingly includes one Oscar winner and one Oscar nominee. [via TorrentFreak ]
