Clint Eastwood's artlessness

I swear that when Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, he had more ability than the brute efficiency with which he makes movies now.

The latest example of this I’ve been exposed to is American Sniper, the best picture nominee from 2014. It’s not a bad movie, but it rarely clears the artistic bar of presenting a sequence of scenes in a particular order. Which is basically what Clint Eastwood is nowadays.

I swear it didn’t used to be like this. However, the next time I watch Unforgiven, which is one of my top 20 films of all time, I will make a note of whether I was wrong, and that’s really all he had back then – just a better screenwriter, cinematographer and editor.

Eastwood has been working with not great versions of those things recently, though I won’t haul out their names to shame them, especially since I’d probably discover that some of them are actually quite accomplished. Even the accomplished ones, though, are probably limited by Eastwood’s famous “cut-print” approach to filmmaking. He doesn’t do second takes, which is a limitation that is seriously exposed with a movie like last year’s The 15:17 to Paris, which starred non-professional actors. Though to be honest, the performance of Jenna Fischer stood out as needing a second take more than those of the non-professionals.

American Sniper is not without interesting things going on from a filmmaking perspective. To simulate the way that Chris Kyle’s four tours of duty in the Middle East were interspersed with his home life, Eastwood will occasionally go directly from a battle scene to a scene of home life – not because Kyle is thinking about his home life during that battle scene, but because the narrative has chosen to jump forward to that next scene without the traditional markers of leaving a tour of duty, liking climbing on a large military transport with a duffel bag over his shoulder. I applaud that idea, but because it’s Eastwood and because he has lowered my expectations, the decision strikes one as an artless transition rather than an intentional artistic choice.

The abruptness of Eastwood’s endings is what I’m starting to notice is bothering me, combined with their tendency toward corny, unironic patriotism. Even a film I really like, like Sully, struck me as stumbling at its very ending, as the characters chuckle about something inconsequential and the credits just start rolling. If you saw Sully, you probably know what I’m talking about.

The 15:17 to Paris and American Sniper are both pretty terrible in that regard. I don’t recall the exact contours of the Paris ending, since I saw that some eight months ago, but Sniper’s ending is of course fresh in my memory. And I’ll give you a small spoiler alert in case you haven’t seen this movie or aren’t familiar with Kyle’s story.

The last action of the movie involves Kyle (Bradley Cooper) meeting another veteran outside his house, with his wife (an unrecognizeable Sienna Miller) closing the door slowly and ominously with a foreboding she could not possibly have, but which movie characters inevitably have to lend extra gravity to a moment that surely didn’t have any. There’s a fadeout (that’s another artless and very old school technique Eastwood likes) and then you see a funeral procession starting with the words on-screen: “Chris Kyle was killed that day by a veteran he was trying to help.” The very next words, barely three seconds later, are “Directed and produced by Clint Eastwood.” It lands with the same kind of thud as “Poochie died on the way to his home planet.” I had to read up on Wikipedia to find out what actually happened to Kyle, and though Eastwood surely didn’t want to give any spotlight to the actions of Kyle’s killer, there was clearly a better way to do it. I was wavering on three stars for American Sniper until this dud of an ending reminded me of Eastwood’s weaknesses and convinced me that 2.5 was the more appropriate rating.

And as it does in most of his movies, that forlorn score, often composed by Eastwood himself, kicks in, reminding us of the sacrifices of good Americans or some such.

There are a couple problems with the perspective I’m currently offering. One is that Eastwood is my political foe, a true believer in Republican politics and likely all the things it stands for, though I’d like to think his time in Hollywood has given him a bit more social liberalism than most of his political allies. Another is that Eastwood is old. I should not be expecting a now 88-year-old man to be quivering with creative vibrancy, even if he was only 83 when he made American Sniper. Maybe he does those takes so quickly because he’s worried he will die before he finishes the movie. Still, Ridley Scott is 81 and he can still make movies where an obvious attention has been paid to camera setups, editing, and other important aspects of filmmaking as an art.

And it’s not like this has always been Eastwood’s MO. Although I’m listing myself as unsure on Unforgiven, as it has been about five years since I’ve seen it, I feel a bit more confident in saying that films like Letters from Iwo Jima and Hereafter show a considerably greater aptitude for craft (even though it’s been longer than that since I’ve seen Iwo Jima, and even though Hereafter is an actually bad movie – though it has a fantastic opening sequence). Although I haven’t seen Jersey Boys, I figure that since it’s a musical, it’s probably got some panache as well.

I guess part of the reason this is worth commenting on and writing about at all is because I think of Eastwood as someone who does have these instincts toward Filmmaking with a capital F. It’s one of the reasons I raise my eyebrow a bit in interest every time I hear there’s a new Eastwood movie coming out. But it may all just be a mirage, and maybe I need to start going into Eastwood movies expecting less.

I may not get many more opportunities, at least among movies that have not yet been released. Eastwood is rumored to be making a movie called The Ballad of Richard Jewell, but given that it’s midway through 2019 and is still only a rumor, at the very least it will represent an unusually long layoff for the prolific director (who made two films in 2018). He’ll be lucky if he gets it out before his 90^th birthday. Then again, if he decided to start making it tomorrow he could be done with it in three weeks.

There are plenty of Eastwood movies in the past I haven’t seen, and feel like I’m still interested in seeing. I still haven’t seen his most recent, The Mule, which is also supposed to be not great.  Then there’s Jersey Boys, and going back further, Flags of Our Fathers, Space Cowboys, True Crime, The Rookie, White Hunter Black Heart, Bird, Heartbreak Ridge, Pale Rider, Sudden Impact, Honkytonk Man, Firefox, Bronco Billy, The Gauntlet, The Eiger Sanction, Breezy and (breathe) Play Misty for Me. Whew. The guy has been making movies for a long time.

Hopefully some of those movies will showcase the art Eastwood has since lost.

When "it was a different time" just doesn't cut it

I had a far more negative reaction to Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter than I probably would have at a time we were all a bit less woke about gender politics in the movies. But I hope I would have had a pretty negative reaction to it even then.

We use the phrase "it was a different time" to excuse a lot of tone deaf treatment of women and minorities in films from decades past ... not to mention, I suppose, to excuse the behavior of Hollywood men who thought it was okay to massage the shoulders of production assistants and occasionally grab a little bit of their asses. We're moving past that second one I hope.

But I still don't understand what the hell Clint Eastwood was thinking in High Plains Drifter.

One of the first things his "man with no name" does in this film is rape a woman. Yes, you heard that right. When a woman comes up to him in the street and gets a bit sassy with him -- after he's just killed three men in the tonsorial parlor, mind you -- I at first thought he was going to be comparatively chivalrous and laugh it off. Even when she slaps the cigar out of his mouth, I figured his reaction would be muted. I mean, he's not going to hit a woman, is he?

Well, he doesn't hit her. He does something far worse.

He grabs her by the arm, hauls her off to a local barn, lays her down in the straw and forces himself on her.

Presumably because Eastwood had an instinct toward what he thought would preserve some of the sympathy for this character, he of course has her "get into it," of sorts, halfway through. I mean, she's a slut, and sluts like to get fucked, don't they? His character would have only done that because he could "see it in her eyes," right?

Ugh.

I was frankly aghast at what I was watching. Yes, this had happened.

I suppose you could say that Eastwood was making some kind of commentary about bad men, and including his own character in that group. This was considered to be a revisionist western even 19 years before the revisionist western he is most associated with, the best picture winner and true classic Unforgiven. You might even say it was bold and/or "brave" for him to throw away a good deal of the audience's sympathy ten minutes into the movie, assuming he had enough sensibility to recognize that an act like this would do that.

But I didn't think that. I just thought it was ugly. The "man with no name" (he really does never give his name, just like in those Leone movies) is supposed to be a badass and someone you want to emulate, and unless the movie is damning his actions in no uncertain terms, it's effectively endorsing them.

Interestingly, the movie does try to damn his actions in a way. The woman he rapes comes upon him in the bath at that same tonsorial parlor and takes about three shots at him at nearly point blank range, and later tells the sheriff that he raped her, even using that very word. But the film portrays this woman as idiotic and venal and weak-willed, a fool that it laughs at every time she's on screen. Never mind the way it makes her so incompetent with a gun that she fires three shots at him from like five feet away and can't hit him.

If the film's awful portrayal of women were limited to this one character that would be something. But the other female character in the movie -- there is literally only one other -- is the innkeeper's wife, a woman who appears to be of strong moral fiber. Until, that is, the scene immediately after Eastwood blows up the upper story of her hotel as an unnecessarily complicated way of killing them men who tried to break into his room and beat him in the dead of night.

In this scene she's understandably furious with him, as he has just essentially ruined her livelihood, not to mention blown up the very place he was hoping to sleep that night. (He had previously ordered the rest of the hotel to be cleared of guests so he could have the whole place to himself, part of the escalating price of defending the town against three miscreants who were just released from prison and are coming to kill anyone within range.) She lets slip that the only place that wasn't destroyed is "our room," meaning the one belonging to her and her husband. So Eastwood raises and eyebrow as if to say "I'll take that one, then."

So then he grabs her by the arm and escorts her down to the room, toward what end I can't say because he knows where it is, so he might as well just go there unaccompanied and make himself at home. When he suggests that he can't sleep with her because he needs a good night's rest, she's so enraged by his ego and his presumptuousness that she grabs a pair of scissors and comes at him where he's lying on the bed. You probably know where this is going. He grabs her wrist to prevent her from plunging the scissors into his neck, and twists this gesture into a passionate kiss. The next shot is of them awakening in the morning in bed together.

Now I'm really pissed.

It's one thing to suggest that women are attracted to mean who treat them poorly, an idea that has some unfortunate truth to it. It's another to have Eastwood essentially rape two of them and have them "start to like it" halfway through.

By the end of the movie I came to realize that Eastwood was probably not trying to hold up this character as a paragon of heroism. But the damage had been done by that point. Even if he has a righteous reason for putting this town in his sites and submitting them to this monstrous behavior -- a reason I don't totally buy, but okay -- you can't just go around killing people and raping people and making it seem cool because Clint Eastwood presents as a badass and he's the star of the movie. That's just irresponsible filmmaking.

Then there's just the inept staging of some of this material. The town is guilty of having been complicit in an event where the three miscreants whipped a local lawman to death in the town square, as none of them did anything to stop it, and in fact, they likely encouraged the act because the lawman was going to blow the whistle on some shady dealings that were helping prop up the town. The staging of the whipping, seen twice in flashback, is really shoddy, even though it was 1973 and they didn't perhaps have the ways of making it look convincing that they would have today.

But even this wouldn't have bothered me so much if Eastwood himself hadn't experienced one of these flashbacks. As he's falling asleep his first night he flashes back to the whipping death of this local lawman ... even though he was not present for the event. That's just lazy filmmaking.

This was only Eastwood's second directorial effort, so inexperience can be blamed for some of this. But the overall feel of the film is shocking and nauseating, and neither of those things in a good way. It feels as though he made Unforgiven almost as an apology for this movie. Will Munny had skeletons in his closet, dozens of them, and may have been guilty of worse crimes even than the "man with no name" of High Plains Drifter. But the fact that we don't see it is the right moral choice, and makes the same point more effectively.

Birthday rewatches

So birthday rewatches are officially a thing now.

It was my birthday on Monday, and I followed what I now recognize has become a new tradition: I re-watched a favorite movie.

Five of my past six birthdays have involved re-watching at least one movie I love -- I say "at least" because last year I re-watched a movie after midnight on the 19th, so it was really October 20th when I watched it, and then watched another during the regular evening viewing hours.

Probably the only reason I didn't watch a movie on October 20th of 2010 -- new or old -- was that my dad and his wife were in town to visit my then-newborn son, and we went over to a friend's house for dinner.

So I thought it was worth quickly recapping what I've chosen and why I thought my birthday was a good time to watch it.

2014

Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron)

Why now? It was meant to be Pulp Fiction, actually. I had wanted to join everybody else in reflecting on 20 years since the movie was released ... and probably nearly 15 since I had last seen it. The long running time (168 minutes) was daunting for a Monday night, but we would have pressed forward if the BluRay had worked. But Pulp Fiction became the second movie I brought from the U.S. that has not been able to play on our region-free DVD player. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was another option, but we opted for Children as the only movie under two hours. Which turned out to be key, because my wife had developed a sore throat, and was not expecting to last the length of even a 109-minute movie. That she did is a testament to just how good Children is.

Having seen Children of Men five times now, I consider it one of those movies where I start to get anxious if it's been too long since my last viewing. My previous viewing had been in early 2011, so it was definitely time.

Interestingly, this was the first time I actually watched my own DVD copy, which I have owned for at least six years now. My previous two viewings came at times when I already owned the DVD, but one was a random catch on cable where we started and couldn't stop watching, and the other was a friend's BluRay at his house on a big screen. So it was also the first time I sampled my DVD extras, specifically, the one that details what went into creating a digital baby that was so realistic-looking, I half-wondered if someone on set had actually birthed the child an hour before filming.

2013

The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) and Timecrimes (2009, Nacho Vigalondo)

Why then? The Social Network was an impulsive after-midnight watch on my computer on a night we had gone away for the weekend to celebrate my 40th. I was already half in the bag when I started watching, taking full advantage of knowing no children (only one at the time) were going to wake me up in the morning. I can't remember why I selected this over the 100+ other options in my Case Logic folder, as it was already my third time watching in barely three years since the movie had been released. I was just jonesing I guess.

As for Timecrimes, this was what we watched later that night when I got home. We had been wowed by Nacho Vigalondo's twisty little bit of low-budget time travel brilliance when we first watched it within a year or so of its release, and I'd been looking for another opportunity to see it. It was streaming on Netflix and I chose my birthday as the time to advance it forward for a second viewing.

2012

Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996, Mike Judge)

Why then? A little different story on this one. Like Social Network, this was an after-midnight viewing on Friday night/Saturday morning, another in which my wife was obviously not involved. The viewing was less about it being my birthday than it being a Friday night and me still having some energy to summon from somewhere. But I've always thought this was an underappreciated gem, having watched it twice before the year 2000 but never since. It was also streaming on Netflix so I said "What the hey?" Perhaps unsurprisingly, I did not like it quite as much this time. Still good, though.

Note: For the evening of my actual birthday, we'd had a long day out in Ventura and my wife was happy for me to just take myself to a double feature. So I saw Argo and ... (ahem) Alex Cross.

2011

Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood)

Why then? Unforgiven was one of a half-dozen BluRays my wife gave me the previous Christmas to celebrate having finally purchased a BluRay player a few months earlier. Most of them, however, were movies that were either long or heavy -- The Departed and The Proposition were two others -- meaning that they almost never seemed like movies you could casually slip in after a long day of dealing with a toddler. So I decided to specifically use my undisputed right to choose the movie on my birthday as a chance to get my first rewatch of my all-time favorite western (and one of my top 20 films on Flickhart) in at least 15 years. And yep, it was just as terrific as ever.

2009

Bound (1996, Larry & Andy Wachowski)

Why then? My wife was actually out of town for a work conference for my birthday in 2009, meaning that I got to live like a bachelor for a couple days. That meant having total control of the TV and which movies got watched. I rewatched about four movies while she was gone, but specifically saved Bound -- which I had rented from my Blockbuster through-the-mail account (that really dates it) -- for my birthday because I had built up its awesomeness to nearly mythic proportions, and had gone way too long without seeing it. I've since purchased the movie (I love it so much that I went to the trouble of ordering it from Amazon, something I almost never do) and have rewatched it again. It's my #20 on Flickchart.

There now, aren't you edified?

Would still like to get in that long-overdue Pulp Fiction viewing. Speaking of where I rank things on Flickchart, Fiction's all the way up at #4, behind only Raising Arizona, Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's streaming on Netflix, so I will have my chance -- we just didn't want to have to watch something on the computer for my birthday viewing. (Our cable that connects my wife's Mac to our TV is still on the fritz.)

And how do I feel about being 41?

That one's a bit more tricky. Let me get back to you. 

A fondness for inept criminals

Each week on the Filmspotting podcast, the hosts (Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen) end the show with a top five in some category -- top five movies about redemption, top five movies set in Los Angeles, even top five movie scenes involving bicycles. The top five is usually a tie-in to the new movie they're reviewing that week.

I'm always excited for the top five, but rarely satisfied once I've listened to it. The movies I would choose rarely seem to show up on their lists. Which I don't think is any reflection of my taste in movies vs. theirs. It's just an indication of how many movies there are out there to choose from.

This past week was an exception.

I first heard about it from my friend Don, who texted me on Saturday "Listening to this week's Filmspotting as I tend to laundry, and now I know that you like movies with well-done inept criminals."

The tie-in this week was Killing Them Softly, which I was a mere half hour away from seeing at the time I received the text. As soon as I saw the movie, I'd be free to listen to the podcast, which would reveal to me Adam and Josh's top five inept movie criminals.

And Don sure was right.

For starters, they called this alternately the "H.I. McDunnough Memorial List" and the "I'll Be Taking Those Huggies and Whatever Cash You've Got Memorial List." The purpose of "naming" the list is to acknowledge the one choice they consider most obvious, which they would theoretically both pick as their #1 if they didn't exclude it from consideration. Past examples include "The Overlook Hotel Memorial List" for the top five movies about hotels.

Right off the bat I knew they had "gotten" me, since Raising Arizona is currently listed as my #3 movie on Flickchart. Even though I secretly think it may be my favorite movie of all time.

And then:

Josh's top 5:

5. Jasper and Horace, 101 Dalmatians
4. Jacob, A Simple Plan
3. Professor Marcus, The Ladykillers
2. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo
1. Dignan, Bottle Rocket

Adam's top 5:

5. Sam and Eddie, Safe Men
4. Holland and Pendlebury, The Lavender Hill Mob
3. Virgil Starkwell, Take the Money and Run
2. Ken Pile, A Fish Called Wanda
1. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo

Of the nine different movies mentioned here (Fargo was mentioned by both), I've seen six. Of those six, four are among my top 300 movies of all time (A Fish Called Wanda, Fargo, A Simple Plan and Bottle Rocket), three in my top 100 (Plan, Fargo and Wanda) and two (Fargo and Wanda) in my top ten.

So yeah, I'd say I was pretty satisfied by this week's top five.

But as these things do, it also got me thinking: Am I drawn to movies about inept criminals?

If you had asked me that question without providing any of the evidence why you were asking, I'd have said "No, I don't think so. No more than anyone else, that's for sure."

But I wonder. Because those aren't the only favorites of mine that feature hapless hoods.

(And watch out for spoilers. If you see a name of a movie you haven't seen in bold, skip on to the next -- I may be spoiling something about it.)

Looking only at my current Flickchart top 20, you could make arguments for the following:

Pulp Fiction (#4). The guys eating their Big Kahuna burgers are pretty inept, considering that they got caught with their pants down, gunned down while eating burgers for breakfast. But then there's also the ineptitude of Vincent Vega blowing off Marvin's head because of a pothole -- this after he and his friend Jules forgot to check the back room for a gunman who should have killed them. And never mind the singular bone-headedness of Butch, whose unusual plan to screw over and subsequently escape the mob involves returning to his house when they're looking for him.

Glengarry Glen Ross (#11). When their priggish boss denies them the new Glengarry leads, Dave and Shelly decide to knock over their own office to steal them, planning to sell them to the competition. That plan is destined to fail in numerous ways, even if you remove the last part about selling the spoils of your theft in the same small industry where you already work -- where the police are most likely to look for it. 

Goodfellas (#12). Although you can't be inept and last in the mafia very long, in the end, everyone has a slip-up that results in their eventual whacking. Particular to this movie, however, most of the crew that pulled off the Lufthansa robbery gets whacked because they can't follow the simple instruction not to spend their newfound wealthy in showy ways that will attract attention.

Run Lola Run (#16). Mani blows an otherwise smooth and simple job to transport a bag of money when he leaves it on the subway, obeying an instinctive reaction to elude a pair of cops who aren't even looking for him. Later he walks into a grocery store to rob it without wearing anything that would conceal his identity. Meanwhile, Lola tries to rob a bank by holding her own father at gunpoint.

Unforgiven (#20). An old gunslinger goes on a mission to claim a bounty on a pair of thugs who beat and cut up a couple of prostitutes, but nearly dies from the flu because he got wet in the rain (and then beaten by the sheriff, but you kind of feel like the rain is what did him in). One of the two thugs is then shot to death on the toilet, a pathetic way to go even if it might not have been helped.

You could even argue that #19 The Shawshank Redemption contains a hapless criminal, because the actual killer of Andy Dufresne's wife boastfully confesses to the crime while in prison.

I guess you could say that almost any movie that has an element of crime in it has someone who isn't that good at it. So I don't want to stretch this too far.

But I can't help but notice all the titles of movies featuring hapless criminals as you continue down my list. Time Bandits (#21) might qualify. The Bicycle Thief (#26) definitely does. Though it does drop off after that. Maybe that's because #27 is Bound, and Bound contains a group of the smartest criminal types you've ever seen in a movie.

What to make of this concentration near the top of my list of movies about backfired criminal exploits?

I don't really know. Though it could mean I have a fascination with the best laid plans gone awry. Or maybe I just like watching people who have truly made a mess, comical or otherwise, of their lives, to remind myself that I needn't get too down on myself just because I don't know where I want to be in my career in ten years.

I'll have to think on it some more.

But this realization does partly explain why I'm so in love with Killing Them Softly, a film I seem to like more than anyone else on the planet other than Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman (who also rhapsodized over it). More than the criminal ineptitude that inspired this week's top five, though, Softly really demonstrates how all crime is destined to have consequences, even if the criminals carry it off with a decent amount of panache.

That and a bunch of stuff about Obama and the financial crisis, but we won't get into that right now.

Movies vs. music

There's a blogger I follow, whom I think I would follow a lot more if it weren't for one thing:

He/she (I know the gender, I'm just being purposely vague) blogs about music in addition to movies.

This is a perfectly valid creative choice for a blog, and I support it in the abstract. But when it gets down to the particular, I don't read his/her blog as much simply because I'm not that interested in sifting through the music posts.

I've been thinking about why this is. It's not because I don't like music. On the contrary -- music always has been and always will be an essential part of my life, even if I listen to more public radio and less music as I grow older. And what would films be without music? Music and movies inform each other intimately. We say that a particular song seems very "cinematic," either because it's grandiose or seems to tell some kind of story; likewise, we refer to films as "lyrical."

It stands to reason that a blog that combines both could be quite a brilliant read. And I'm not saying this blog is not. However, I wouldn't really know, because I don't give the music articles a chance -- I don't even read them in the first place.

Again, I've been thinking about why this is.

And it basically comes down to this: Movies are universal, while music can be very, very subjective.

Let's put it another way. I feel like I could recommend a great movie to anyone who likes movies. Great music? No way. Because my great music could be their crap. Where I hear brilliance, they may just hear noise. And we're listening to the same piece, it's just we're not fans of the same kind of music.

To be sure, movies can have the same kind of subjectivity. One person's brilliance can be another person's crap. I could show you the best western in the world (Unforgiven, for the record), and you might not like it because you don't like westerns. Actually, that's a bad example, because I love Unforgiven even though I don't particularly like the western genre.

But that's kind of my point exactly. Unforgiven speaks to me because I love film, not because I love westerns, and I think it would do the same for most people. I don't have to like that particular genre to like the film.

You can't say the same thing with music -- maybe even with books, or TV, or any other kind of creative endeavor, though I'd have to think about each of those individually before I could say for sure. The best hip hop song that has ever been recorded might sound like insolent fluff to a fan of classical music. Similarly, a hip hop fan may listen to a symphony and be utterly unable to distinguish it as something worthy of his/her time.

And what this leads me to decide is that films have an absolute value that music does not. Very few people will look at the world's greatest films and decide that they aren't at least somewhat good. Whereas, if you don't like U2, you don't like U2, and that's that.

It's for this reason that I have never been interested in the Grammys, the way I'm interested in the Oscars. Sure, some of that has to do with the fact that I'm educated about film and can both write and speak about it intelligently, whereas I'd be speaking in generalities if I tried to write about music on a regular basis. Simply put, I'm more passionate, per se, about movies than I am about music.

But I also have trouble with the Grammys because I feel like they're always comparing apples to oranges, and rarely do the winners have a true hold on the musical zeitgeist, because different people have such different tastes in music. (So, by extension, there may be no true musical zeitgeist.)

I think of the year that Steely Dan won Album of the Year for a record called Two Against Nature. It was 2001, and I didn't know a single person who had heard a single note off that album. But the rest of the nominees were pretty much a grab bag from across the musical spectrum as well: Midnite Vultures by Beck, Kid A by Radiohead, The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem and You're the One by Paul Simon. You might argue that Steely Dan should be the least likely to walk away with that award, given the musical temperature of the country at that time (though I don't know a word from the Paul Simon album either). If any album "should" have won in terms of its influence on culture, it would be Eminem's album. But there you have an example of an album that would polarize as many people as it would convert.

Not so, really, with the movies. When Slumdog Millionaire wins best picture, it's because that's the movie everyone's talking about. When The Hurt Locker wins best picture, it's because that's the movie everyone's talking about. Those two movies are very different from each other, but the same people can love them equally.

That could just be because movie buzz gets very loud, very quickly. And since that buzz is controlled by a relatively small number of entertainment outlets, it tends to coronate frontrunners pretty quickly, and get us all thinking on the same page. Or it could just be because movies are a smaller universe than music, where it's not apples vs. oranges, but Granny Smith apples vs. Golden Delicious. And where opinions of greatness -- or lack of greatness -- translate better from person to person.

And so to this blogger, who may have determined his or her identity in the course of this piece, but who is really only being used as an example who inspired me to a certain line of thinking: Your decision to combine music and movies on your blog does not work for me as well as it should, for the above reasons. It's hard to read a music recommendation the same way I read a movie recommendation. With music, I need to know where you're coming from; with movies, I don't.

But more power to you for trying. Music and movies do inform each other in more ways than we can even touch on here, and as I said, it's a good idea for a blog if you can pull it off. And I think you can.

I'm just not always going to be your most regular reader, because I like to keep my apples and my oranges separate.