The truest sign of my indifference to Captain Marvel

The further I’ve gotten away from Captain Marvel, the less I like it/think about it. Actually, I can’t say I don’t think about it, because I’ve been listening to it discussed at regular intervals on my podcasts as each of them gets to it, or as I get to listening to them. And in fact, one particular podcast finally gave me the balls to admit what I should have admitted straight away: I don’t really think it’s all that great. Genevieve Koski of The Next Picture Show, who I tend to think of as a champion of responsible depiction of women at the movies, gave a number of reasons she didn’t love it, all of which I agreed with. If it’s okay for Genevieve to say she didn’t love Captain Marvel, it’s okay for me to say it too.

One of the things Genevieve and I agree on is the piss poor usage of 90s music in the movie. It’s not that the songs they choose aren’t good, because they are. It’s that they are applied so indifferently, so haphazardly, that they exist only as broad signposts of 90s nostalgia, nothing that feels organic to the movie or the scenes in which they are deployed.

There’s a weird extension of this problem that I never thought would have been a problem for me, because it involves my favorite band of all time.

For a good portion of the movie, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, Carol Danvers wears a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. It immediately put me in mind of the Public Enemy t-shirt the young John Connor wears throughout Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Whenever I thought of him wearing that t-shirt, I thought of it as a case of the two things mutually boosting each other up. The fact that he likes Public Enemy speaks well of John Connor, and the fact that the future leader of the human resistance against the machines wears a Public Enemy t-shirt speaks well of Public Enemy.

I should feel this – in fact, I should get a surge of pride – with Carol Danvers and Nine Inch Nails, as they are indeed my favorite band. But like many of the other signifiers in this movie, this one is pretty empty. Carol is, or at least thinks she is, an alien from another planet. Her choice of a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt is not based on an acquaintance with their music. It’s random and inspired by nothing other than its proximity to her at the time she was looking for clothing (they mentioned she grabbed it off a mannequin in the discussion on The Next Picture Show, though I don't remember that happening).

Whether Carol consciously adopted Nine Inch Nails as some kind of symbol or not should be irrelevant. If it’s not her endorsing the band, then it’s the movie endorsing it, and that should be good enough. But I treated Carol wearing a shirt emblazoned with the iconic NIN logo -- something that should have been aimed directly at me, appealed directly to me, and in all ways been an easy win for the movie to score with me -- with little more than a shrug. It doesn’t only represent her not making a conscious choice, but the choice feels just as arbitrary for the filmmakers as their choice of which music to drop in which scene that doesn’t go with that music.

I did like the fact that the movie endorsing it, and by extension Brie Larson endorsing it, was proof positive of what I’ve thought for ages: that Trent Reznor is a feminist. Larson has spent a good portion of the press leading up to Captain Marvel talking about gender equality and #MeToo-related subject matter, after all. Reznor, the lead singer and in fact entirety of the band, has written some really angry lyrics and music over the years, the type that could make a fan defensive. But the people who know have never confused that anger with misogyny, even though some of the lyrics could broadly be interpreted through that type of filter.

The thing is, Reznor received a pretty high endorsement of his feminist credentials a full quarter century ago. None other than Tori Amos asked him to join her for a duet on the chorus of “Past the Mission” on her album Under the Pink, this after including the words “nine inch nails” in her song “Precious Things” from her solo debut album Little Earthquakes. Her follow-up to Under the Pink contains the song “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” which name-checks Reznor’s own debut album, Pretty Hate Machine.

In other words, I don’t need Captain Marvel or Captain Marvel to tell me I have good reason to like Nine Inch Nails.

If I felt the character of Carol Danvers and the music of Nine Inch Nails were in some way in conversation with each other -- as I do with John Connor and Public Enemy -- then it might mean something. But alas, the character herself is as poorly defined, as poorly delineated, as the character's connection to whatever symbolism Nine Inch Nails is supposed to have for her, or for the movie.

And I'm not going to include a bunch of language here reassuring you of my own feminist credentials. I hope you know I support the idea of Carol Danvers, just not so much her execution in this particular film.

Hey, Genevieve Koski said it was okay. 

THX 1138, take two

Certain movies benefit from watching them when you are at your most conscious, without having had anything to drink, being too tired, or having a fan in the living room drowning out half the dialogue.

But with some movies, it's absolutely essential.

Which is why I did something I rarely do on Saturday night, especially given my busy and ever forward-pushing viewing schedule: I rewatched the first 45 minutes of a movie I'd started on Friday night.

That movie was George Lucas' debut, THX 1138, and if you've seen it you can probably imagine why.

It's not all that difficult to grasp what's going on -- if you are fully awake and can hear everything. But I mightn't have known this, or what was going on, if I'd just plowed forward at the 45- (actually 48-) minute mark when I resumed Saturday night.

Oddly, that was also the mark where the movie goes from ominously dystopian to kind of silly. Not fully silly, but silly enough that I started to lose a bit of focus anyway.

At least this time I made it to the end.

I've been on a bit of a run of 70s sci-fi/dystopia in the past few years, having watched for the first time the likes of Silent Running, Logan's Run and Zardoz, the latter two of which didn't work for me at all. I'm glad to say THX 1138 is a lot closer in quality to Silent Running, a film Lucas actually borrowed from when he made Star Wars (though THX 1138 predates it).

So I wanted to see it for its own sake, but the birth of some of his Star Wars visuals and concepts is the reason most people probably seek it out.

And that stuff's definitely in there. The chrome robot police force is obviously a kind of proto-stormtrooper, and the kind of spare and antiseptic hallways of the building where the title character works easily preview similar locations in the Star Wars universe.

But the biggest similarity I noticed was in the sound design. The slightly mechanical "chatter" we hear between various droids on the Death Star and in the headsets of the X-wing pilots definitely had its origins in THX 1138, and the sounds the actual spaceships make as they cut through the emptiness of space are pretty much 100% developed for the car chase that occurs near the end of this first film.

Being in the company of these early Star Wars ideas likely led me to rate the movie a little more highly than I might have otherwise done, but there's still a lot to like in here. The opening half of the movie is genuinely bizarre and discomfiting, though not in the comical fashion that starts to characterize the second half when Donald Pleasance's character becomes more involved in the story. Lucas achieves some excellent framing in the way he sets up this world of sedated, hairless workers living platonically with one another. In fact, I was taken enough with this particular shot to have grabbed a photo of it:

That's Robert Duvall's title character giving a confessional to a back-lit static image of Jesus that responds to him in a soothing AI voice that is clearly not listening to the particulars of what he's saying. (A couple times it asks him rather eerily: "Can you be more ... specific?") Occurring near the start, this was one of the images that drew me in and made me certain I wanted to watch the first half again, so that possibly my only time watching this movie wouldn't be a botched one.

I do wonder, however, if I've seen a "pure" version of THX 1138.

This was George Lucas' director's cut, which may or may not be the only version available for rental these days. (I got the DVD from the library.) And though director's cuts usually leave me wary -- especially when they're from George Lucas -- it's a bit of a different story when I've never seen the original version. I later learned that the movie was polished up and some additional scenes were even filmed for this 2004 director's cut, which mostly involved expanding crowd scenes and new special effects -- though it did increase the running time by two minutes, which itself feels a little ominous. And that does explain certain things, like the fact that some of it appeared too visually sophisticated for 1971. Like I said, though, having never seen the unadulterated version, I'm okay with seeing this version. It looked good, and I guess that's what's important.

One final bit about THX 1138 was that I realized for the first time ever that my favorite album begins with a sample from it. I never had occasion to learn before last night that the persistent whipping sound of a man being beaten that opens the track "Mr. Self Destruct" on the Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral (1994) was sampled from this movie. It's a television program THX 1138 is able to select when he's at home at night (when he's not masturbating to the hologram of a gyrating naked woman, another image that I suspect was enhanced for this version). You see a prison guard kicking and beating a prisoner with increasing frequency and some barely audible yelps from the victim. I thought "Hey, that sounds familiar!" and sure enough, googling proved it to be true.

So THX 1138 is a part of my all-time favorite album. Cool.

And that's something I only picked up on by watching those first 45 minutes a second time.

I think maybe I ought to start doing these "take two"s more often.

Second skins

On Monday, I did what in baseball terms would be called a "day-night doubleheader." I did in fact play two games -- movies, in this case -- but they weren't consecutive, as in a traditional doubleheader. Rather, they were separate admissions in the same venue, one held in the afternoon, one in the evening. There were not, however, any peanuts or crackerjacks involved.

I finally, at long last, caught Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin at 3:10, as part of an afternoon off to renew my passport at the U.S. consulate. It was cheap $6 Mondays at Cinema Nova, but in practical terms it was the most expensive movie I've probably ever seen, because as a contractor, I don't get paid for the time I don't work. So that was two hours of lost wages -- but having taken (and needed) the first two hours after lunch to do the consulate visit, it didn't seem to make sense to return to work for just two more hours. Especially when I could sneak in a trip to the movies.

Then I returned to Cinema Nova at 9:40 for Lenny Abrahamson's Frank. (I had hoped to see John Michael McDonagh's Calvary, but I was more or less too late for its 9:20 showing.) Two trips to the theater in one day would ordinarily be quite indulgent, but this also was taking advantage of a rare opportunity: borrowing the car from my father-in-law. If we didn't use the car to do things like take trips to the movies, what was the point of even borrowing it?

It wasn't until I didn't make it in to Calvary that I realized the resulting day-night doubleheader would be thematically appropriate. Both movies feature characters wearing disguises -- second skins, as it were. But they wear them for very different reasons.

Scarlett Johansson's extra-terrestrial in Under the Skin wears her disguise -- the skin of a near-dead woman of ill repute -- as a means of remaining hidden. In order to observe humanity for, well, whatever reason (it's never explained), she must look like one of them. She must wear this disguise to hide what she really is.

The title character in Frank is up to something a bit different. Sure, a psychiatrist would say that the reason he never takes off his mask is that he's hiding something about him -- a very essential part of him -- from the world. But Frank doesn't wear his disguise to hide who he really is. He wears it to become who he really is.

In both cases, however, the destruction of this costume could mean the end of who they are.

I wish I had more profound words about my theme, but instead I'll just say a couple words about each movie.

Additional substance to my ScarJo crush

I'm a heterosexual man. This means I find Scarlett Johansson attractive.

And yes, the knowledge that she appeared naked in Under the Skin certainly contributed to my interest in seeing it. Contributed only, though -- I am a massive fan of Glazer's film Birth (though I hate Sexy Beast -- go figure).

My affection for Ms. Johansson is more than skin deep, though -- as it were.

In fact, after a podcast I listened to recently, I kind of wonder if we're soul mates.

That podcast is The Dinner Party Download, and it's co-hosted by a guy I know. It's also been getting increasingly higher-profile guests over the three or fours years it's been in existence, probably none bigger than one Scarlett Johansson back on April 19th.

As I was listening to her talk to the other co-host, the one I don't know, I was disarmed by how down-to-earth she sounded, especially for someone who walks around knowing that she is commonly considered to be one of the sexiest celebrities in the world. She could totally get away with copping an attitude. Yet she sounds like someone who is modest and grounded and goofy. She loves to make a joke and offer a flirt. She is, pretty much, the girl next door.

But what made me fall in love with her, kind of, was her answer to a question that she herself volunteered. One nice aspect of the podcast is that the hosts ask the guests to tell them something that no one knows about them, which gives the guest the leeway to offer something as significant or as insignificant as they want, and have it be entirely on their terms.

Johansson apparently isn't afraid to court talk of her own romantic interests, because she offered to tell podcasts listeners about her own celebrity crush. "It would probably be Trent Reznor," she said. "That would be my 'meet him and faint,' I think."

She elaborated, "There's something about the bleeding soul that comes through -- this reluctance to do it, and then you do because you have to, because it's what you're good at and what feels good, but maybe it hurts at the same time."

Having already been seduced by this persona she delivered on the podcast, I sat up straight in my chair when she invoked the name of my favorite musician of all time. Just randomly out of nowhere.

If I didn't already know it, I realized that this is a person of substance -- and her recent role choices have confirmed that. All you have to do is look back on her filmography from the last, my goodness, five years I would say to see an actress making smart choices rather than just financial ones. Sure, she's a big part of the Marvel universe, and the paycheck can't hurt on that -- but those movies have also actually been received very well. Specifically, the string of Her, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Under the Skin shows a woman very deft at straddling two worlds -- the multiplex and the arthouse.

And this chick has got balls. You might peg her as a person who would shrink away from nudity, but Skin proves that she's willing to do whatever she needs to for her art -- including star in an inscrutable science fiction film that could have just as easily bombed as blown critics away. The fact that it did the later shows just how shrewd she is.

Acting without one's face

The one thing Johansson hasn't done yet is what Michael Fassbender does in Frank -- he takes a role that does not make any use whatsoever of his beautiful face.

If we were talking about challenging oneself above, we can kick that discussion into high gear when discussing what Fassbender is doing in this film. He's not only proving that he relies on far more than his good looks to get cast in films, but he's actually proving that you can give a good performance even when no one can see your face -- and when you actually describe your own facial expressions as one of the movie's running gags.

As the eccentric frontman of the band Soronprfbs (don't worry, the actual band members don't know how to pronounce it either), Frank wears his mask -- it's really more of a full head -- all the time. Even while he sleeps. Even while he showers. He eats through a straw, just so he won't have to let anyone know what he looks like.

Yet I really believe that the hype about Fassbender's performance is justified. There is something great about this performance, even though it is primarily composed of line readings and body movements.

I don't know precisely what it is, but there's something about how Fassbender carries the head that makes it sort of brilliant. There are a few moments when the character stares at another character, or an audience of people, or something that is temporarily overwhelming his ability to speak. And even though all you see is that unchanging, blank expression of the Frank head in the poster above, there's soul to that stare. There's something Fassbender's doing that not just any guy wearing a fake head could do. He's not just David Prowse walking around in a Darth Vader suit. He's also James Earl Jones, all rolled into one person.

And yes, he's proving that he doesn't need to be so handsome that it makes heterosexual males feel awkward to connect with us as viewers. He can just be a body, a voice, and the unblinking stare of a mask.

                                       ******************

Okay, I guess there was more thematic heft to my comparison of these two movies than I originally thought.

Hanna and her Brothers

The last six months have seen a number of high-profile musical acts take on the task of scoring a major motion picture.

First it was Trent Reznor, the erstwhile entirety of the band Nine Inch Nails, working with frequent collaborator Atticus Ross on the Social Network score. As you know, they won the Oscar for their work. There may have been no artist better suited to capturing Mark Zuckerberg's alienation.

Then it was Daft Punk tackling the very Daft Punkian-themes of Tron: Legacy. I mean, the guys actually wear space suits when they're performing.

Now it's The Chemical Brothers, scoring Joe Wright's Hanna, which opens today. Seems appropriate for a movie where a teenage assassin is being hotly pursued by shadowy government agents. There may be a lot of running.

However, Hanna is a bit different in the sense that it represents a heightened consciousness of the name recognition The Chemical Brothers bring to the project. Reznor's involvement in the Social Network score wasn't promoted at all in the ads. Daft Punk's involvement in Tron: Legacy was touted in the theatrical trailers, but not in the TV ads. Continuing the evolution, The Chemical Brothers' name appeared in the theaters and is now appearing on TV as well.

It's an interesting approach. Serious film fans and musicians would probably argue that music plays an integral role in films. However, to the average viewer, the importance of music is probably no greater than the importance of one of the lesser-known co-stars, in terms of how much they want to see the movie. It may be crediting the average viewer with more of a sense of purity than the rest of us have, but they just want to know if the story is good. (Whereas, implicitly, we film nuts fixate on details that may ultimately reveal our nerdiness more than they relate usefully to whether the movie is good or not.)

But even Reznor, in an interview about The Social Network, said that he only notices music in a movie if it's really good or really bad. I thought this was a strange comment to make, considering that he's a musician himself, and you'd think he'd always be attuned to what other musicians are doing -- especially since he'd worked on movie soundtracks and scores before. But even to him, the music is usually subordinate to the storytelling. He gets lost in the story and he doesn't notice it.

However, that could also be a criticism of his fellow musicians. Maybe by saying he "never notices" music in movies, he's really saying that there hasn't been much in terms of good movie music recently. Maybe that's what this recent trend -- and it may only be me who's calling it a trend -- is trying to change.

Speaking personally, I love it when a movie has a good score -- but like Reznor, I don't notice it if it doesn't. My favorite movies are the ones that assault me from all sides, visually and aurally. Can you even imagine a movie like Run Lola Run without the techno music? If it had a generic orchestral score, even an orchestral score that hit at all the dramatic notes at all the right times, it wouldn't be the movie it is.

I guess this is also revealing my fondness for electronic music. All the artists I've listed so far are either industrial (Nine Inch Nails) or techno (Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, and Tom Tykwer, who wrote the Run Lola Run score along with Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek). So yeah, it makes sense that I'd be excited about these movies.

And I am, in fact, excited about Hanna. I was excited before I knew The Chemical Brothers were involved, and their involvement only increased that excitement. I have all of their albums, and when I saw them perform live, it was one of the best shows I've ever seen.

I suppose it's not such a new idea anymore, a young girl trained to kick ass and take names -- we just saw Hit-Girl do it in Kick-Ass last year. Now, the training sequences with a bow and arrow in the tundra -- that's new. But it's a new enough idea, executed in an interesting enough way, that I think it has major potential.

I'm also interested to see director Joe Wright drive himself further outside the box. I thought I had him pigeon-holed when I first heard of him as the director of the Kiera Knightley Pride and Prejudice (which I didn't actually see). I figured him for a Merchant-Ivory type. That impression was confirmed when I saw his name connected to Atonement -- until, that is, I saw Atonement, and loved the unconventional things it did within the general constraints of a period piece. In his next film he jumped forward into the current day, but remained in the general realm of drama, with The Soloist, which I quite liked. Now, he's contributing what looks like it could be an exceptional action-thriller to the cinematic universe -- re-teamed with the talented Saoirse Ronan, who received an Oscar nomination for her work in Antonement. (That's pronounced "Sare-shee," and I may steal it if I ever have a female child.) I love directors who seem to be interested in evolving and changing, and Wright definitely fits the bill.

But I won't be seeing Hanna this weekend, because I'm bound for Mexico later today. That's right, five days in the fun and sun of one of those all-inclusive resorts. We're allowing ourselves the indulgence because it's timed to celebrate a landmark birthday for my wife (I won't say which one, but it's not 30 and it's not 50). Her birthday was actually back in February, but who wants to go to a resort when it's cold outside? The weather is supposed to be great in Puerto Vallarta, we got a really good deal, and even if we hadn't, well, her family contributed significantly to our costs, as a birthday present for her. Plus, we're staying long enough to get eight free hours of babysitting as part of our deal. Woo-hoo!

So I'll be back in action next Wednesday or Thursday. If you see me posting before then, please scold me. I should be out enjoying the sun.

My favorite Oscar of the night

Early on in last night's show, when we paused to prepare a cocktail, put an appetizer in the oven or put our son to sleep, my wife told me that she didn't feel like she had a horse in the race this year.

"I mean, there were a lot of really good movies this year," she clarified. "But there's no one that I'm really pulling for, like when Bill Murray was up for Lost in Translation."

I nodded my head at that one -- Murray's loss to Sean Penn that year is one of those things that still stings me when I think about famous Oscar misses. The rest of my response was kind of a non-commital affirmation, the kind you give you when you generally agree, but don't have anything more to add, or are otherwise distracted and can't be bothered to contribute a response.

But a few minutes later, thinking on it, I realized I myself had a horse in the race this year -- a horse I may have been pulling for more than any horse that's ever run in the Oscars.

When the Best Original Score Oscar came up to bat, I felt myself get nervous and jittery. Trent Reznor, the erstwhile Nine Inch Nails frontman, was nominated alongside collaborator Atticus Ross for the unforgettable score for The Social Network. I felt reasonably confident he would win, but as I heard snippets of the scores of films like The King's Speech and Inception -- composed by formidable talents like Alexandre Desplat and Hans Zimmer -- I got nervous. Since the conventional wisdom was that The Social Network had "peaked too early," I was told to fear its prospects in any and all categories -- especially those categories where frontrunner The King's Speech was also nominated.

All it took was the "Tr" sound to come out of Nicole Kidman's mouth, and I let out a little cheer for my boy Trent.

At this point I should probably give you a little background.

Two thousand eleven marks the 20th anniversary of my awareness of Nine Inch Nails -- and about the 19th anniversary of when I started calling them my favorite band. I heard NIN's seminal album Pretty Hate Machine in the fall of 1991, when I was a freshman in college. I bought the CD that Christmas, and as they say, the rest is history. I have been a die-hard fan of the band through all its ups and downs, its interminable periods of inactivity (it's taken as long as five-and-a-half years for Trent to release a new Nine Inch Nails album -- not once, but twice), its periods in and out of rehab for Mr. Reznor (which probably coincided with some of those periods of inactivity). Throughout all that, never once has any other musical act chipped away at the title of my favorite. For musical genius that seems to approach Rain Man status in terms of sheer outside-the-box complexity, Trent Reznor has been my musical hero for nearly two decades. I've seen him perform live five times, and I've purchased pretty much everything he's ever been involved with, even soundtracks for movies I have still never seen (David Lynch's Lost Highway).

So when Nicole Kidman said his name last night, and those six signature notes of "Hand Covers Bruise" (the Social Network "theme song") played as he got out of his seat, I was as thrilled as a proud papa. No longer the angry depressive and nihilist who burst onto the scene in 1989, Reznor was a dapper 45-year-old with facial scruff and a handsome tuxedo, proud but modest, embracing the ceremony without irony. To paraphrase Vince Vaughn from Swingers, I thought, "My baby's all grownsed up!"

When he got up there, he gave an eloquent, composed and grateful speech, one that never for a moment seemed self-indulgent. Not only that, but he allowed equal time for Ross, a collaborator who -- let's be honest -- Reznor probably didn't need in order to give birth to the haunting brilliance of the Social Network score. I may never know the quantity of Ross' contributions to the project, but I'll always know that Reznor gave him equal credit for their masterpiece.

And if you haven't listened to the Social Network score in its entirety, you should go do that. Yeah, it probably speaks a little more to a Nine Inch Nails fan like me than it would to a regular person, but not a lot more. The compositions are both beautiful and catchy, rarely containing any of the fury of Nine Inch Nails, but displaying all the craftsmanship and musical experimentation in the best Nine Inch Nails work. And the thing I was most amazed about, upon first listen, is that I didn't miss the lyrics. As a good preview for his work on Social Network, Reznor made a massive four-disc Nine Inch Nails album called Ghosts a couple years back, which is entirely instrumental. I think the music is really good, but I've only listened to the whole thing all the way through once. I'm sure that has something to do with the imposing length of the album (over 40 tracks), but it's also that without lyrics, you can't really "attach" to the specific songs. I thought I needed those lyrics to keep me involved -- until I heard The Social Network.

In addition to his own original creations, I also love that he reimagined Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" for the Winklevoss crew sequence -- which was also used in the show last night.

As much as I am happy for Trent Reznor the artist, I'm happy for Trent Reznor the person. Sure, being an emotional mess contributed to some of his most brilliant work. But even if it's taken some of the "teeth" out of his music (NIN had an album called With Teeth), I'm really glad Trent has found happiness in his life. In 2009 he married former West Indian Girl singer Mariqueen Maandig, who was with him at the Kodak Theater last night, and they are now collaborating on a musical project called How to Destroy Angels, whose first EP is quite interesting (especially the song "A Drowning," which gives me chills). The future seems bright for a happy Trent -- in an extremely intelligent podcast interview about this soundtrack last year, he told us to expect new Nine Inch Nails material and new How to Destroy Angels material in 2011. Not only that, but I just read something I should have known already -- he'll also do the score for Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, due out later this year. Could Reznor be a perennial Oscar contender, like Zimmer and Desplat? Could he one day become the Randy Newman of nominees, without all the sarcasm and mean-spiritedness in his acceptance speech?

Who knows. For now, I just want to bask in having seen my favorite musician honored at my favorite awards show, by the people who make my favorite passion.

I wanted to hear "Hand Covers Bruise" all night last night, most notably when best picture was announced. But it turned out that I heard it at the most important time, for me personally, to hear it, and that is more than enough.

A couple other isolated thoughts on last night's show, which turned out somewhat decent after a disastrous start. If you've read these observations elsewhere, you can rest assured that I haven't -- I didn't read anything else about the Oscars before posting this:

1) The disastrous start wasn't right at the start. Right at the start was great, with the opening pre-recorded bit of hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway going into Alec Baldwin's dream. Spot on stuff. And it was a delight to see the ever-wonderful Baldwin.

2) The disasters started about the time Melissa Leo won her Oscar. That acceptance speech took years off my life. It was an absolute train wreck. What made it so terrible is that it was already going so terribly before Leo dropped her now-famous f-bomb. That section of the show felt like it took a half-hour, in part because the pacing ground to a halt once Kirk Douglas took the stage -- it was a nice idea and I was really charmed by what he was able to accomplish, but I must admit it made me impatient (which was sort of the point, as he did that bit where he made the nominees wait in agony for the winning name). So then when Leo began her choppy acceptance speech which committed just about every sin a speech can commit, it felt like the show couldn't regain its pacing for the next half-hour. Other seeming casualties of the temporary bad vibe was the awkward banter between Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, which just did not hit.

3) And speaking of Timberlake, his joke about being Banksy -- which I actually thought would get more laughs -- was the only Banksy appearance of the evening, that I'm aware of. A little disappointing. But perhaps I should read one of those articles I haven't read yet, which would tell me where else he may have made his presence known.

4) Is it just me, or did Hathaway seem to be doing a lot more actual hosting than Franco? It was like she was taking the hosting duties seriously, and he was standing there with an awkward grin on his face, like he was playing his stoner character in Pineapple Express. Even putting on the Marilyn Monroe dress did not really "work." Franco didn't embarrass himself or anything, he was just kind of ... "absent." At least Hathaway picked up the slack, though her song about Hugh Jackman was the most obvious thing that could have been lifted out of the show -- it was done well, but it was lacking in context and seemed pretty insiderish.

5) Give it up for the two youngest nominees, Hailee Steinfeld and Jennifer Lawrence, who were both ten times more adorable than I thought they would be from their films.

6) As a guy who frequently has bushy hair myself, I loved that "I should have gotten a haircut" guy.

7) Why haven't we heard more about Florence from Florence and the Machine before now? What a voice. Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, looked constipated. I think the Tangled song should have won, and not just because I love Tangled so much. Zachary Levi and Mandy Moore reminded me that that song truly is special -- I would say easily the most strictly memorable of the four that were nominated. (Though I might have liked to see "Mother Knows Best," from the same movie, nominated as well.)

8) Christian Bale's acceptance speech was one of the highlights of the night for me. The tempestuous personality was all charm last night, and I loved his decision to thank people by first name only -- it was intimate and it felt special.

9) The auto-tune bit was one of my other highlights. It was such a good bit that I wanted to see it go on for five minutes longer. I love anything auto-tuned -- I think it's one of the great ways to use modern technology for high comedy.

10) I still love Billy Crystal. And the Bob Hope bit worked pretty well. How did they get "Bob Hope" to "announce" the next presenters?

11) Interesting choice to suppress the applause during the "In Memoriam" section. Without reading more about it, I don't know if that was done by shutting off the microphones in the audience during that section, or a sign that told people not to applaud. I agree that it must seem very sad for relatives/friends of the less famous dead people when no one applauds their person.

12) Sandra Bullock nailed it. Jeff Bridges was good, but Bullock nailed it. Class and humor, in one complete package. And then Colin Firth's acceptance speech was just what we've come to expect from him. Shouldn't he have been an Oscar winner already? Sure seems like it.

13) I loved the decision to do away with the periodic clips from the best picture nominees that run throughout the night. They did a good enough job incorporating that stuff into other pieces throughout the night, most notably what was probably the best highlight of the evening: The montage before best picture was announced, which was cut to Firth's speech in The King's Speech. That was expertly done and I had chills the whole time watching it. Even the words matched up perfectly to the images, such as when Firth says "enemies" and former best friends Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network give each other a steely look. Well played.

14) I loved Steven Spielberg's decision to put into context what it means to lose best picture -- that you now have something in common with Citizen Kane and Raging Bull. Great touch.

15) At first I was not sure about finishing the show with the elementary school kids singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," but I ultimately decided that it was nice not to have the hosts give just a few awkward words at the end before the credits roll. It was an attempt to have what my wife and I call a "Saturday Night Live clap clap" moment at the end -- you know, like at the very end of SNL, when everyone's out on stage and the music has this quality of reminiscing about the good times of the evening just passed. I'm not sure if it worked 100%, but it was better than the awkward alternative. (Also, loved that one kid who was totally over-emoting.)

I'm sure there's a lot more I could/should say, but I'm working without notes and going from memory only, so let's just cut it off here.

Besides, I have to go read all those Oscar stores I haven't read yet ...

Warning! This soundtrack listing contains spoilers!

And so does this post, so don't read any further if you don't want to know the ending of Man on Fire.

With every new Tony Scott film I see, the director's relentlessly jittery filmmaking style makes me more and more convinced he's a hack. Man on Fire was no different, and perhaps epitomized his approach as much as any film he's made other than the execrable Domino.

But I was never in it for the filmmaking with Man on Fire. I was in it for the soundtrack.

Specifically, I was geeked to see the movie -- well, geeked enough to see it six years later -- because of the Nine Inch Nails song that played in the trailer: "The Mark Has Been Made," from The Fragile. I already devoted a post to the use of my favorite band in the movies -- you can read it here. I neglected to mention Man on Fire in that post, probably because the rest of the movie did not look good enough to compel an actual screening. But I knew I would eventually see it. This must be the weekend for that, as I said the same thing about Running With Scissors yesterday.

I soon found out that there were at least snippets from a couple other Nine Inch Nails songs in the movie, but it was a different song that compelled me to go to IMDB to check out the soundtrack listing. Namely, there was an ethereal choral song in the first act that sounded to me like it was sung by Lisa Gerrard, an Australian singer whose songs sound kind of like the forlorn hymns I might associate with Ireland. I became aware of Gerrard's talents through another film, Henry Poole Is Here, where she sung a song that moved me so much, I bought it on itunes shortly afterward.

Now, most people would probably wait until the movie was over. But we film buffs are notorious for needing our curiosity to be satisfied immediately. Especially if I'm watching a movie by myself, and movie-watching etiquette doesn't enter into it, I'll pause to look up what other movies a certain character was in, etc. And just so I didn't forget to do it later on, I thought I'd check immediately to see if that was, in fact, Lisa Gerrard's voice.

I did find her name in the soundtrack listing. The name of the song she sings in the movie? "Creasy Dies."

I should probably tell you at this point that John W. Creasy is the character Denzel Washington plays in the movie.

So there I was, about 30 minutes into an interminable 146-minute running time, and I already knew the ending.

Not that this was some great surprise. Everything about the movie was setting it up to be a redemption tale of Creasy's character, for the "sins God would never forgive him for," which he mentions in the beginning (but are never elaborated on in the script). In movies like this, where a Charles Bronson type systematically kills every scumbug who had anything to do with some motivating atrocity, he's going to die smiling in the third act, having achieved some measure of vengeance or accomplished some heroic goal.

But did I really need the soundtrack listing to ruin it for me?

I never would have thought I needed to exercise the same type of caution with soundtrack listings as I do with DVD chapters. If I want to find where I was in the movie, I don't like to use the chapter menu, because often times, the very chapter names they choose will reveal some key plot element. If I'm watching The Crying Game for the first time, and am returning to it after a brief interruption, I really don't want to stumble across a chapter called "Dil's Penis," now do I?

What really gets me about naming that Lisa Gerrard song "Creasy Dies" is that the same song plays like four times in the movie, and only during the last time does the life actually snuff out of Washington's character. So not only is the song title an inexcusable spoiler, but it's too specific for the way the song is actually used in the film.

So yeah, that was the one reason I didn't like Man on Fire. (Please note my sarcasm.)

Before we leave the oh-so-interesting topic of Man on Fire's soundtrack behind, I thought I'd mention a couple other interesting things about it. IMDB lists no fewer than six Nine Inch Nails songs, when in fact I could only identify two. ("The Mark Has Been Made," like "Creasy Dies," was played about four different times.)

Then there was the fact that there seem to have been uncredited thefts from the soundtracks of other movies. IMDB mentions three uncredited songs from Changing Lanes, four uncredited songs from Abandon, and one from Against All Odds, oddly enough.

I'm easy

Just throw a little Nine Inch Nails in your trailer, and you've got me. Hook, line and sinker.

Take Terminator: Salvation, for example. They showed the trailer during last night's season finale of Lost -- an honor I thought was reserved exclusively for Star Trek during J.J. Abrams shows -- and I was reminded of the fact that Nine Inch Nails' "The Day The World Went Away" scores it.

I was going to see this movie anyway, but now -- whoa. Watch out.

I should say that Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band, so there is nothing purely objective about what I'm saying. But I also think there's a reason Trent Reznor's music is chosen for trailers. It increases the awesomeness factor by ten.

It did the same for me back when 300 came out. This trailer also gooses the excitement level with a little NIN, this time "Just Like You Imagined," also from the album The Fragile. I have no doubt the song itself contributed to my near-feverish level of desire to see that film, and therefore, also to my ultimate disappointment in its ability to live up to my expectations.

I've written at length about the power of trailer music, so I don't need to go into another dissertation here.

However, it would be useful to pause a minute to reflect on why NIN's stuff works so well in particular. It's those cinematic industrial soundscapes that Reznor is so good at concocting. In many a Nine Inch Nails song, you can hear the clanking, the mashing, the sound of one piece of metal scraping against another. These are highly effective sonic attributes when you've got something like a Terminator movie. If ever the world is going to be destroyed by machines, you want a Nine Inch Nails song to usher in the end -- even if "The Day the World Went Away" could be construed as a little on-the-nose in this case.

I will say that the use of a Nine Inch Nails song within the body of a film does not have a 100% success rate for me.

While scoring a cool-ass car chase through the desert with NIN's seminal "Closer" probably took the remake of The Hitcher up a couple levels for me, the same cannot be said of the use of "Every Day is Exactly the Same" in Wanted. In fact, you might say that's the moment when I realized Wanted was going to suck. "Every Day is Exactly the Same" is not a particularly deep song to begin with, but when it was used to demonstrate the daily drudgery of the existence of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), it was as obvious as being smacked in the face with a two-by-four.

Then again, that's not Trent Reznor's fault. It's Timur Bekmambetov's. His Wanted isn't much for subtlety in any respect.