Now Playing: Air--"Ce Matin La"
First, the Oscars (late, I know)? Whatever. Actually, seeing those YouTube flicks made me much more critical of the Best Animated Short awards--simple, dreamlike, deceptively innocent fables of life and love have no chance with me as long as I know that there are clans of rock-stupid, perhaps ironically mush-mouthed, sexually voracious Bill Cosby clones on YouTube who probably deserve it more. My friend Lou came over to watch the show with me, marking the first time I've ever actually had any of my Ann Arbor friends over to my present house (and I've been there for over two years). I rather like the place, to be honest, but it's not exactly the best venue for entertaining company: a dingy, quasi-student hovel (as I suspect it was largely redesigned). It was very much the opposite at my old place (our parties became so heavily populated that the cops were called once by our cartoonishly nimby next-door neighbor). It was a pretty fun night (although I was a little exhausted by the earlier part of the weekend), so maybe I'll have people over again. The Departed was my Best Picture pick (saw it a couple of weeks ago) and it was wonderful to see Scorsese win (too bad about Pan's Labyrinth, though). Even better is the fact that Forest Whitaker now has an Oscar!! I hadn't seen The Last King of Scotland, but... I mean, it's Forest Whitaker, one of the most reliably cool (the fact that he directed Hope Floats, weirdly enough, actually makes him cooler) and taken-for-granted actors in Hollywood--this must be what it would be like it, say, Jeff Daniels ever won (or hilariously enough, Alan Arkin--and so it happened twice!). Oh God, why do I take this crap so seriously? Maybe because of the fact that three of the acting winners had been beloved cult favorites of mine for nearly two dcecades. I can't remember the last time that happened, and so I'll just savor the fact that they got a few right for a change.
I read a notice in the Ann Arbor Observer that there would be a free sneak preview at the Natural Sciences Auditorium of the new movie 300, the CGI-heavy Thermopylae movie, with Gerard Butler in (I imagined) the role of Leonidas. I'm not sure why I was so sparked to see this; I'm not the biggest fan of CGI by any stretch (one of the only movies in which it's really been successfully deployed is Shaun of the Dead, probably because they used it for the little touches) and 300 was supposed to involve massive gobs of it. If memory serves, I'd promised myself to try and get back in touch with the current cinema this year, and this was kind of an opening salvo. Lou had gone to see a sneak preview of Children of Men there some time back (and now I wish I'd gone with him, as I heard it was awesome), and he mentioned a large number of people, so I decided to get there early. On finding the Natural Sciences Auditorium, I found a rather morose-looking girl with a promotional shirt on who was supposed to be handling the passes (in fact subbing for her friend who worked for the production company). "Passes?" I asked, thinking "uh-oh." She told me that there had been about two thousand passes sent out to students for this thing, none of which was mentioned in the Observer. Of course, it was a dicey proposition that anyone was going to see 300 there, as some teacher was already showing, of all things, The Wild Bunch. I peeked through the window and saw Ben Johnson and Warren Oates going apeshit among the winecasks at the hacienda, so I knew they weren't planning on leaving anytime soon. I had just bought a Dr. Pepper from the Diag Party Shoppe, and so figured I'd wait a bit and see what happened, investigating the building (the hallway facing the library looks like it could be part of a medieval fortress--or the Atlantic Wall, for that matter). We chatted a little, I read some more of Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, a very good history of the Iraq War, and... two somewhat wispy models in very tiny skirts of the kind I thought had gone out of fashion, oh, on the arrival of winter (and who, it turned out, had let me in the building in the first place) and a woman doing promotions showed up. The night had become sufficiently bizarre to "repay" my time even if I didn't get to see the movie (I still hadn't finished my drink anyway, and I wasn't taking it out into that weather). What these people had to do with the movie I had no idea, but then the promotions woman took out two garish red leather jackets and told the models to take them to the restroom and wash them. They walked up the stairs, I somehow managed to keep my eyes on my book, and a number of phone calls were made to people in the know who then revealed something about Angell Auditorium A. I knew the foreign students' association showed movies there, and it made sense. I offered to show the production company girl where Angell was, and so we trudged across the Diag and through the frigid weather to Angell. It turns out I had the auditorium confused with one of the large classrooms where the Chinese students used to show movies, but we eventually found the place, as well as a couple of poor pastards who were still trying to get in, but couldn't, because it was filled to capacity. We found this out from the shushing house-motherly woman who answered the door. I would have laughed if everyone hadn't looked so sad (I'd totally given up by this point), and they weren't letting the girl in either (it didn't help that one of the guys was trying to pretend he was with the production company, too). My time was up, really, so I patted her on the shoulder with my scarf and wished her luck. Walking back, I met the other three coming out of the Nat. Sci. Building, told them the way, and browsed through Borders for a while before going home. There I discovered, looking at my calendar, that it was clearly marked Angell A. How I'd arrived at the Nat. Sci. Auditorium is really beyond me (because they had too, after all). I mean, what the hell? After that, maybe seeing 300 would just be anticlimactic, no?