74 Years Ago Today

A young, pregnant showgirl by the name of June Frances Nicholson, gave birth to a little boy.  She named him John Joseph.  Immediately upon being delivered, he looked up at the doctor, and said, "Wait until they get a load of me".  He then asked one of the nurses for a cigar, two fingers of scotch, and to refer to him as "Jack".

The rest was history.

Jack Nicholson is an actor that puts a little bit of himself in every role.  You never know at what point Jack stops and the character starts.  He has been superb in everything he has done.  As the most nominated actor in Oscar history, with 12 Academy Award nominations and three wins, he has set the mold for the American actor for decades to come.

Perhaps my favorite Nicholson movie of all times is 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.  In it, Jack plays Randle McMurphy, a trouble maker and criminal that hopes to serve out the rest of his sentence for statutory rape in a mental institute, instead of doing hard labor while in prison.  It's possibly the greatest performance of Nicholson's career, a role that earned him an Oscar in 1975.  I have seen the movie 20 times or more, and the final seen makes me cry every time I see it.  It's the epitome of friendship, love, mercy and compassion.  Happy Birthday, Jack.

The Four Best Moments Of This Year's Oscars

I was really looking forward to seeing this year's Academy Awards telecast.  I am a big fan of both James Franco and Anne Hathaway, and I was curious to see how they would handle themselves as Oscar hosts.  Sadly, I wasn't impressed.  It doesn't appear that many were.  I don't think it's right to fault Franco and Hathaway necessarily.  They had writers.  It wasn't all ad lib.  Heck, they had a hologram of Bob Hope introduce Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr.

In my opinion, this year's ceremony did have a couple of high points.  First of all, Christian Bale is a nice guy.  Who knew?  And get this....he's British!  I don't think anyone has caught him on camera using his actual speaking voice since 1987's 'Empire of the Sun'.  I don't know why it came as such a shock, like I was expecting him to give his Best Supporting Actor acceptance speech in his Batman voice, or with a Boston accent, but it was unusual to see Christian Bale as, well, Christian Bale.  And it sounds like he's a caring dad too:

Best speech of the night.  I got goosebumps again watching it as I was posting it on the page.  Well done, Christian.

Second highlight of the evening, and one that I have personally been waiting for for more than twenty years:  Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails wins an Academy Award.  The best part is that the award was not for Best Original Song.  So his Oscar legacy is not going to be with the likes of a bunch of singing mermaids and lions in Disney films, or that god awful 'Titanic' song.  Reznor won the Oscar Best Original Score for 'The Social Network'.  He beat out nine time Academy Award nominee, and this year's favorite, Hans Zimmer, and his work for the film 'Inception'.  If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend hearing, downloading, or purchasing the scores to both 'The Social Network' and 'Inception'.  They are both very unique pieces of work for film scores, and not your standard "over the top symphony" types of works.  Inception's score is, at times, unusually complex, and The Social Network's is dramatic and very subtle at times, while holding on to Reznor's industrial roots.  In 1989, when I first heard 'Pretty Hate Machine', I knew that Reznor would have a long, celebrated future in the music industry.  I never would have guessed that he would have been winning Oscars for film scores.  And, let me just say, the man looks pretty damn good in a tuxedo.  Am I right?

Yeah, that's his wife with him.  Her name is Mariqueen Maandig.  Some guys have all the luck.

The best parts of the evening, though, didn't happen during the telecast.  If you were watching the Oscars on ABC, you probably saw the first one a dozen times.  Unless you were actually sitting at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday night, you probably didn't even know the second event even take place.  ABC ran a commercial for their Wednesday night comedy 'Modern Family'.  I personally don't watch the show, though I know the premise. 

 The really attractive Latin woman is the dad's new wife.  She has a son that is about 9 or 10 years old, from a previous relationship.  Then you have the siblings in the family, which consist of this woman whose husband thinks he's cool, but is seriously out of touch, and her brother, who is gay, and has an adorable chubby husband.  They've recently adopted a little girl from China I think.  Based upon the commercial, the brother and his husband take Oscar night charades a little too seriously.  They're dressed up in tuxedos.  Between the Academy Awards and watching it on Youtube, I have probably seen this promo 20 times.  I still crack up every time I see it:

The best moment of the Oscars, that you probably have not seen, happened after the cameras were turned off Sunday night.  It was a musical performance from the choir of Staten Island, New York's, PS22.  They have been the darlings of Youtube for years.  Choir director Gregg Breinberg, started having the school's fifth grade students sing popular songs during choir practice since 2000.  Over the last 11 years, the students have garnered the attention of countless celebrities and musicians, as well as having nearly 30 million views on their Youtube page.  Sunday night, Oprah Winfrey invited them to sing Katy Perry's 'Firework', as well as a couple of other songs, for those in attendance after the telecast.  Unbeknownst to the children, a special guest was waiting backstage.  Take a look:

Right before the first chorus, Katy's voice comes in over the speakers, and you can start to see the confusion amongst the kids' faces.  Then the crowd starts to cheer, and everyone stops singing for a few seconds.  They're all turned around and in shock.  It takes them a moment to regain their composure, but as you saw, they kicked it up by the power of 10.  What a wonderful video.  Oprah is even teary eyed at the end of it.  Hell, I'm crying at the end of it.

All in all, it was one hell of a night.

An Oscar Night To Remember

Five years ago, on March 5, 2006, the 78th Academy Awards were held in the Kodak Theater, in Los Angeles, California. The favorite for Best Picture was nominated for 8 Oscars that evening. It was an independent film that the world had grown to call a "gay cowboy movie". The strange thing about it was, it didn't have one gay character in it.


The story is about two men, Ennis del Mar, played by Heath Ledger, and Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. They're hired to herd sheep during the summer of 1963 on Brokeback Mountain, in Wyoming. Over the summer, they fall in love. It's a love that lasts for twenty years.


During the span of those two decades, the men get married: Ennis to his long time fiancée, and Jack to a rodeo barrel racer he meets and falls in love with. Things change over the years for both men. Both couples have children. Jack and his wife teeter back and forth on the edge of divorce. Jack has an affair here and there with another woman. Throughout the years, two things remain constant: Jack and Ennis' affection for each other, and their regular "fishing trips" to Brokeback Mountain.


I won't give away any more of the plot or the story, just in case you haven't seen the movie.

The reception for the movie amongst the gay community was phenomenal.  Unfortunately, everyone seemed to forget that Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway played Ennis' and Jake's wives in the film.  Everyone called it a "gay romance", a "gay love story", (god, I hate this term) "that gay cowboy movie".


Regrettably, not one review of the film called it what it was, a bisexual love story.  Worse yet, at the time the movie came out, I can only find one article defending the movie as a bisexual picture (thank you Wikipedia).  It was an opinion piece by Amy Andre on December 16, 2005.  It was published on the National Sexuality Resource Center's site, nsrc.sfsu.edu, under the title "Opinion: Bisexual Cowboys In Love".  The opening paragraph made the most direct and passionate defenses of the movie to date:

"Brokeback Mountain is not a movie about gay people, and there are no gay people in it. There. I said it. Despite what you may have read in the many reviews that have come out about this new cowboy feature film, Brokeback Mountain is a bisexual picture. Why can't film reviewers say the word “bisexual” when they see lead characters with sexual and romantic relationships with both men and women?  I am unaware of a single review of Brokeback calling the leads what they are–a sad statement on the invisibility of bisexual experience and the level of biphobia in both the mainstream and gay media."

Other mainstream writers, although not using the term "bisexual", also acknowledged that this was not a "gay"movie.  In late 2009, Entertainment Weekly published an issued titled, "THE 100 Greatest MOVIES, TV SHOWS, ALBUMS, BOOKS, CHARACTERS, SCENES, EPISODES, SONGS, DRESSES, MUSIC VIDEOS, AND TRENDS THAT ENTERTAINED US OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS".  Sadly, I can't find where 'Brokeback' ranked in the top 100 list, but in describing the film, the magazine said:

 "Everyone called it "The Gay Cowboy Movie." Until they saw it. In the end, Ang Lee's 2005 love story wasn't gay or straight, just human."

Well said.


On Oscar night, 'Brokeback' won three of the eight Academy awards it was nominated for.  Ang Lee won Best Director.  The film also won for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score.  Ledger, Gyllenhaal, and Michelle Williams were all nominated for their acting roles, but lost.  The movie itself, surprising lost to the underdog 'Crash'.


If you haven't seen this movie, do what you can to see it.  It is one of the most real and heart wrenching love stories you'll ever see.  I am embarrassed to say that I didn't see it myself until within the last few months, and now I kick myself for not seeing it sooner.  This is a story of true love.  This movie had nothing to do with sex or with lust.  It's a story of a lifelong bond between two bisexual men that I, for one, will never forget.

Filmography 2010

With the Academy Award nominations coming out tomorrow morning, I thought it would be fun to post one of my favorite viral videos in recent months.  'Filmography 2010' compiles clips from 270, yes 270, theatrical releases from 2010 edited together into a six minute and three second clip.  The video is edited together so beautifully and seamlessly, that even the bad movies looked like they were worth seeing.

The filmmaker?  A young, female, aspiring filmmaker that goes by the name of Genrocks.  Her Youtube channel has a number of trailer re-edits on it.  My favorite:  The "sexy" trailer for 'The Watchmen'.  Pretty funny.  Enjoy 'Filmography 2010'.  It's fucking brilliant.



Looking at her Youtube channel, I love her take on 'Fight Club'.  From a girl's perspective, making it an alternate music video for Britney Spears' 'Circus'.  It's not my taste in music, but it's incredibly smart: