Subjective Best Picture Nominees

The Artist: Severe sound problems, but a sound story nonetheless. Considered a lock because it's a silent, black-and-white French film.

The Descendants: Trouble in paradise. George Clooney plays a native Hawaiian of a more marketable complexion, and finally a role sans his signature disarming charm and good looks. It’s a nuanced movie about family and heartbreak, my favorite of the nominees but not of the year.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close:  The only one I missed. But with a dismal 47 percent rating on rottentomatoes.com, what did I miss?

The Help: The softer side of Mississippi bigotry, systemic racism with a woman’s touch.

Hugo:  A movie that finally answers the question - What if Martin Scorsese grew up not a sickly asthmatic in Little Italy but an orphan inside of a train station clock in Paris?

Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen comically exposes the Golden Age of art and culture as a fraudulent lie. Then again, what fun is time traveling without a DeLorean?

Moneyball: Adapted for screen by Aaron Sorkin, so it’s good. Understandably though, baseball fans might not relish seeing the magic of America’s pastime turned into a frigid algorithm.

The Tree of Life: The best documentary the Discovery Channel never made. Gorgeous and cerebral and I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.

War Horse: Steven Spielberg makes a World War movie not about II. Battle scenes were dirty and gritty, the most climactic of them reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach opener, though better fit for the family. Good enough to make me want to see the play.

And to finish out Black History month, here's Glory

Freed slaves fight to free slaves.

Based on the true, truly noble story of the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment, “Glory” is the Oscar-winning 1989 film by Edward Zwick honoring one of the first official black units of the American Civil War. It’s the soldiers’ battles off the field that measures their valor.

Equally precise, “Glory” is based on actual wartime letters of the comparatively naïve Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick,) the son of an aristocratic New England family and accidental commanding officer of the 54^th. Following the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation the 23-year-old officer was ushered into the position, a rich boy abolitionist out of his element, leading a nascent regiment of untrained but unafraid freedmen.

So then it is fortuitously appropriate that Broderick, trying to shake off the goodhearted mischief-maker type, often appears uncomfortable and unsure in a role so mature. It isn’t often a film benefits from an underlying sense of insecurity in its lead actor, “Glory” is an exception.

When fatherly soldier John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) is promoted to rank Sergeant Major, he privately lets Shaw know of his secret uncertainty about accepting the honor. “I know exactly what you mean,” replies Broderick/Shaw.

The levelheaded Rawlins is one of four principle soldiers in the 54^th, and each of these characters is notably unique in temperament, personality and background. The differentiation is refreshing, these men fought for the same cause and had the same color skin, but screenwriter Kevin Jarre took lengths to ensure they’re not one single-minded person.

Jupiter Sharts (Jihmi Kennedy) is a bumbler, a stutterer, a kind soul, grossly uneducated but handy with the rifle. That juxtaposition against Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher) is starkly wide. Searles is an intellectual raised free, a childhood friend of Shaw, but a dainty soldier who some fear could be a liability.

Then there is the defiant Trip (Denzel Washington, who for this earned the Academy’s Best Supporting Actor prize,) who is angry at everything, distrustful of white people and perhaps with good reason. When by the end of a whip he was wrongly punished for supposedly deserting, his shirt was torn off to reveal a scarred lifetime of brutal punishment.

As he took his lashing he stared unblinkingly at Shaw, never arguing, never grimacing. But his anguish and feeling of betrayal is clear behind his haunting stare and single tear. A white soldier would’ve received a trial, what is he really to the Union?

He was a member of an exploited unit, one being withheld uniforms and good boots (Trip didn’t desert, he was looking for protective footwear,) being used solely for manual labor, one being paid $3 fewer each month. But when the soldiers refuse to take any pay but full pay, Shaw joins them in solidarity.

“Glory” is a loose adaptation of the real events, but the basic facts hold true. Shaw had to fight his own commanders just to get his men out of ditch-digging duty and on to the battlefield. It turned out most advantageous of the North, before the end of the Civil War 180,000 black men fought for the Union.  

An early effort for Zwick, the film succeeds in showing that an epic war movie, and “Glory” is one of the best about this most pivotal American theater, can be accomplished on a relatively modest budget. The few fight scenes were explosive and gritty, but never terribly graphic. Though never vulgar it doesn’t shy away from the real parlance of the times, whitewashed of the you-know-what word like some unfortunately edited copy of “Huckleberry Finn.”

In that sense the film makes a good learning tool for students, and is age-appropriate even for the young teen.

War is ugly. Racism is ugly. “Glory” is beautiful.

In honor of Black History and Oscars month, here's "The Help."

There’s inherent danger should a white homeowner permit their colored maid, or any of the help, to use the indoor facilities. It’s not only a breach of etiquette it promotes unsanitary conditions, colored people carry unfamiliar diseases, think of the children.

This was Mississippi 50 years ago, in reality the nicer side. Decidedly racist white Jacksonians pretending Southern hospitality is a virtue as they send the help to the outdoor facilities, even in the most unforgiving elements.

That bathroom issue, it was a recurring conflict in Tate Taylor’s 2011 “The Help,” the quick adaptation of a 2009 Kathryn Stockett novel. The film, which examines the friendship built between one young white woman and two working black maids just as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining traction, is up for a slew of Oscars this year, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Viola Davis and two Best Supporting Actresses for Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain.  

As evident in the bathroom dilemma, which is a spot trivial when in 1960s Mississippi civil rights activists were being executed on shadowy dirt roads by local police, the film takes a noticeably non-violent approach to the tumultuous crossroads. Not even a mention of the Ku Klux Klan, the use of the notorious N-word was all but scrubbed away.

Aspiring young writer Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (a nearly unrecognizable Emma Stone) returns home from the University of Mississippi with the radical notion she may forego a husband for a career in writing. This being a time when people could get jobs at newspapers, she soon lands a local column on housekeeping but defers to her family maid, Aibileen Clark (Davis, in her second Oscar-nominated performance) for guidance.

An unlikely, seemingly unheard of, relationship is forged. Stories of keeping house turn to stories of a black person keeping a white house and raising white kids for a family of ingrates, indignity is in the job description. Soon sass-mouthed Minny Jackson (Spencer, Supporting Actress nominee,) recently fired by villain Hilly Holbrook (a rather unintimidating Bryce Dallas Howard,) offers a host of terrible tales to accompany.

More stories from more maids surface, enough to publish a book, yet it’s curious just how taken aback Jackson-raised Skeeter is by these omnipresent injustices. We’re only left to assume that college opened her eyes in ways she couldn’t before thought possible, suddenly the world she grew up in was never one she knew.

Aibileen is a woman of constant sorrow, her friend Minny is the brash type, the kind that can steal the show and trick prissy Hilly into eating some of the most disgusting pie (think of the bathroom issue.) For Davis and Spencer, their performances are bold enough for respective Oscar nods. The other Best Supporting Actress nomination for Jessica Chastain playing Celia Foote, a bubblehead mistress and unwitting outcast in the white social order, is a happy but unmerited gesture.  

Otherwise performances were gripping, the core three characters anchored a movie fragmentally gentle with the atrocities of institutional racism. It’s also a shame Sissy Spacek’s little discussed performance as Mrs. Walters, the senile (maybe) mother of Hilly, went overlooked by the Academy.

With the help of Taylor her timing is impeccable, a woman falling into dementia is at times comically inappropriate, but it’s easy to laugh with Mrs. Walters when even she takes pleasure in seeing her nasty daughter get her just desserts.

  

You're Listening, But Are You Hearing?

Stop talking about a so-called lack of definition muddling the Occupy Wall Street message. These protesters, who purportedly make up nine and nine-tenths of every 10 Americans, are not a band of kidnappers. They do not come with a list of demands stitched together from magazine cutouts.

Do you really expect a concise mission statement from a vastly aggrieved collection of people frustrated by a culture of institutional inequity? Even if they could compose one, they don’t even have a megaphone to voice it.

I understand the purpose of the movement is blurry through the mainstream media lens. Truly, it is. But then, maybe that’s the point.

“Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message,” stated Dahlia Lithwick in a recent Slate article. “It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists.”

It’s all too weighty to be a sweet sound bite, Brian Williams.

Ken Krayeske, a 2010 Green Party candidate for Connecticut’s First District, scolded me when I asked if the overall impreciseness hurts the movement. As he sees it if the whole thing was pared down to a three-word catchphrase fit for a bumper sticker, “Tax the Rich” perhaps, it would hinder a long overdue conversation about the perils of unfettered and deregulated capitalism.

 “I think it’s great,” said Mr. Krayeske about the Occupy Wall Street approach. “They are forcing us to have a discussion.”

If still confounded, consider this. The protests born out of a modest park in Lower Manhattan in September went global within weeks not because of some indiscriminate butterfly effect, but because it resonates with a very clear and relatable theme: economic justice.

That’s a subjective term, for sure, when I strolled through Zuccotti Park earlier this month I soon learned the myriad ways people see economic justice. They may not define uniformly, but everybody defines it. Regardless the placard, nobody was off-message. In New York City and Oakland and Danbury there’s a newfound Constitutional Convention.

Union champion Paul Armstrong, in from Los Angeles with a hard hat and everything, saw the lack of jobs in 9-percent-unemployed America as the foundation of our problems. On the opposite side of the park, Democratic presidential candidate Harry Braun gave an exhaustive presentation on the possibility of solar hydrogen energy, the jobs it would mean.

The young man that held the “Healthcare, Not Warfare” sign likely understands that the price of privatized medicine is inversely proportionate when compared to personal wealth. Rich people enjoy inexpensive, quality healthcare, poor people get sick and go bankrupt.

The gentleman holding the sign “New Laissez-Faire: Hoarding the Profits, Socializing the Risk” was clearly making a statement about bailing out corrupt financial institutions on the backs of American taxpayers. How Christian we are, to help out those far more fortunate.  

Can anybody sum up the Tea Party in three words or fewer? If it is about citizens frustrated with an overspending congress, please explain the fervor illustrated in placards over illegal immigration and gun rights?

Yet rambling as it is the Tea Party proved powerfully persuasive, enough so to effect change in the 2010 elections and restore some semblance of balance to government. As the 99 percent has gone international in recent weeks, it would be foolish to think Occupy Wall Street won’t have impact felt in November 2012.

Then we’ll all know what they’re talking about.

I Didn't Barf For a Good Cause

Approximately 1500 calories and about 80 grams of fat, that’s the accumulation of six hot dogs plus buns, with only a pitcher of dipping water for condiment that this afternoon I devoured in seven very long, steamy, noxious, punishing minutes.

I took a bite of a seventh, but its taste was just so putrid. To anyone else it probably would’ve been fine, but to me it was a tepid and rubbery bar of concentrated beef-and-stuff juice.

With meat sweats beading on my brow, and with time left being counted in seconds, I spat that final mouthful of skinless all-beef Boar’s Head Frank into a bucket already filled to the two-inch mark with regurgitated wiener. Frankly, the mixture blended together disgustingly perfect.

Anyway, after 10 days of training (last week I could only finish four in seven) that was all I could do. At the Third Annual Hot Dog Eating Contest at Leo’s Restaurant, a benefit event that raised a still undetermined amount for the Special Olympics, out of six contestants I placed fourth.

It wasn’t good weather for overindulgence. The air was slippery since a storm blew through about an hour before leaving a steam bath in its wake. And the contest went off in haste since another electric storm was audibly closing in.

That didn’t deter Fred Colgan, eating under the name “Sugafree,” who for the first time took the trophy with 10 dogs consumed.

He could barely speak at the end, succinctly describing the feeling as “full, very full.”

The previous champion, John Artes, who last year ate 14 in seven minutes and then to break a tie ate another three in 10, placed second this year with nine.

There was some protest, complaints the franks were a little bigger this time, a point Leo’s owner Bob Moniz conceded. But this wasn’t Coney Island, and nobody came close to world-class competitive eaters Joey Chestnut (official record holder with 68 dogs in 10 minutes) or Takeru Kobayashi (unofficial but actual record holder with 69 dogs in 10 minutes.) It was simply a good way to raise good money for a good thing.

“This is a fast, fun way to raise money for a good cause, and to have a couple of laughs,” said Mr. Moniz. “The winner goes away just as happy as the guy who eats only one.”

Nobody ate only one, though one ate only three. One young man, “Big Red Dog,” put down eight before he turned green, and I don’t mean with envy.

Unfortunately, the rules say “visible sickness” is grounds for disqualification. And his sickness was quite visible, and elicited a uniform roar from the dozens in attendance.

As for the runner up, who also helped organize the benefit, he promises to come back next year for what was once his.

“He doesn’t stand a chance,” said the Meat Train of Sugafree. “I’ll be training all year.”

Of course, so will I.

Man-Dog Bites Hot Dog

Instead of offering 30-second sound bites on the sorrowful unemployment rate, reckless government spending, or the imminent wholesale takeover of our judicial system by Sharia Law, the next Republican Party presidential debate should have the primary candidates in seven minutes eat as many hot dogs as possible.

After all, is there anything more American than frankfurters or overindulgence? Consider Brooklyn’s Coney Island annually hosts the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, the premiere competitive eating extravaganza indelibly linked with Independence Day and freedom.

Though it would be quite beguiling to see how well DOMA proponent and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum can stomach a whole bunch of wieners, don’t look for the debate format to anytime soon turn into a gorge-fest. Oh well, it would’ve been a ratings bonanza.

Anyway, it’s of note that last Thursday, the same day Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced his intentions for the presidency, I announced my intentions to engage in a hot dog eating competition at Leo’s Restaurant in Southbury.  

Meant to benefit the Special Olympics, it will be three fewer torturous minutes than the one in Brooklyn, which this year had five-time consecutive champ Joey Chestnut pound 62 in 10, (he officially set the record in 2009 with 68 in 10.) There is some controversy here, as simultaneously at a remote location former champ and banned competitor Takeru Kobayashi ate 69 in 10, actually but unofficially elevating the high water point.

This is the third year Leo’s will host the event, the record there is only a few more than a dozen. My goal is six.

I’ve been abiding a strict-ish training regimen since Thursday, consuming fibrous, stomach-stretching foods such as watermelon and cabbage. Fasting is amateur. It only serves to contract the stomach. The pros prepare by packing it in.

My first trial run was last Thursday. I put down three-and-a-half dogs in three minutes, a rate faster than my taste buds could initially process. It caught up to me though, that great revulsion, as powerfully and suddenly as a flashflood of frankfurter-flavored water. What I was doing was wrong and unholy, my body compelled to stop, and though I fought the rising tide in my stomach it took another four minutes to finish another half.

It was a dismal showing, only four in seven minutes. Shame, paranoia, nausea and self-loathing took control. All I could do was remorsefully imagine the raucous crowd, a mound of endless hot dogs in front of me, gluttonous porkers sucking up links like spaghetti, the banners for the Special Olympics staring me in the guilty ketchup-smeared face.

People are sponsoring me and my company is sponsoring me, all on a per-dog basis. And here I’ve bitten off more than the Man-Dog can chew.

I suspect my trouble was that I foolishly ignored the advice of professionals, that night I consumed in the traditional dog-in-bun fashion. So when I entered round two Saturday evening, I employed the space-saving and taste-mitigating “Solomon method,” separating the dogs from the buns, dipping both in water, maybe some ketchup, then eating.

In a much more valiant and confidence-boosting showing I improved markedly from four in seven to five in five.

With a little more confidence last night I tried to better my position. And I did, but marginally. Could I keep up the one-per-minute pace of last weekend, do seven in seven? The reality of it, even with the stomach-stretching regimen, my gastric capacity is fixed.

I stopped at five-point-five, couldn’t make it to a full six knowing one more bite would’ve been disastrous. The rules explicitly disqualify a person for “visible signs of sickness,” which is kind of funny since a person who volunteers for an event this noxious can’t be healthy.

Slightly ashamed, but I’m certain six is still achievable. Maybe the support of the people will guide me, it’s for a good cause, weighting myself with sodium-and-nitrate meat rolls packed into an intestinal casing for the benefit of an athletic competition.

I’m not a big man, only 132 pounds in fact. After this Sunday, at 4 p.m. at Leo’s Restaurant, we’ll see.

Psalms 115:16 is Just Alright with Me

“The heavens are the Lord’s heavens; but the earth He has given to the sons of men.” 

Whatever that means.

On this particular Earth Day, nestled this year in a most high Christian holiday weekend, I choose the environmentalist interpretation: God expects we be stewards of His creation.

Even the most casual Christians know the Genesis story. In the beginning there was nothing, then God made the heavens and the earth. Immediately thereafter, seeing a planet without form, God summoned the light, and He saw the light was good.

I mean, it’s right there on page one.

But looking down now, I wonder, would He still feel the same?