I try to be a man of my word. I promised yesterday that after watching Inglorious Basterds last night, I’d have a throw down between it and The Hurt Locker. The challenge for me is to compare and contrast these two films without giving away some of the gems I have saved up for the Basterds IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! feature, which might not get up until next week since I have at least one special request that needs watching (You know who you are, and thank you). Believe me, there’s a lot I want to talk about, both in terms of reviewing the movie and discussing both where it belongs as part of Quentin Tarantino’s portfolio and among the ranks of this year’s Best Picture race. Not that it matters, at this point, but I’m entitled to my opinion, dammit.

The problem with comparing these two is that they’re very different animals. However, a comparison is likely to prove interesting – we just might not have any shots with folded chairs or pile-drivers happening. So, apologies in advance for having this be less of a throw-down and more of an argument around a pub table. Insert your own punching sound effects if you like.

Setting

There’s a war on in both The Hurt Locker and Inglorious Basterds, and both films take the armed conflicts that serve as their settings seriously. Hurt Locker is focused squarely on the gritty, tense and all-too-real atmosphere of modern warfare. The film’s emotion, humor and drive come from that realism. While the World War II backdrop of Basterds is slightly different at tone in times, and even verges on romanticism now and again, there’s an undercurrent of realism to it, as well. The fact that it’s an undercurrent in Basterds is the biggest difference in terms of setting. Hurt Locker is shoulder-to-shoulder with the soldiers of Bravo Company, while Tarantino keeps the Basterds at cameras-length from us at all times. Sometimes the camera is very intimate, and sometimes it’s pointing out how awesome something is.

Characters

Compare our two male leads.

Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant James is very much an alpha male. He goes about his business his way. He doesn’t like hearing the word “No,” and things going wrong upsets him a great deal.

Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine is also very much an alpha male. He does things his own way (the Apache way, it seems), hearing the word “Nein” makes him mad, and plans going wrong are problematic especially when he points out the flaws in those plans.

See where I’m going with this? At first these two seem like pretty much the same character, only each has a different sort of edge, in keeping with the different films’ settings. Renner makes no concerted effort to make James heroic beyond the simple nature of his actions and attitudes. There’s some cowboy in him, to be sure, but this come across less as macho swaggering and more as simple deflective behavior, putting on a certain amount of airs to avoid dealing with people around him in a way that might get him hurt. He wears his emotions and attitude the same way he wears his bomb suits. Aldo Raine, on the other hand, is meant to be macho, and Pitt plays him that way, from the smirk that comes from his affected drawl to the way he sneers at Nazis. He’s having fun, in spite of the seriousness of the situation, and by extension, so are we.

Theme

The Hurt Locker tells us that “War is a drug” and uses that as the central thread around which the narrative is woven. Inglorious Basterds has a few thematic elements, the strongest of which is its focus on films and film-making. MovieBob has already touched on this in his ‘Escape to the Movies’ feature and I plan on doing the same, though from a slightly different perspective since the Oscars have come and gone.

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So which is best? From a standpoint of watch-ability – ICFN spoiler alert! – they’re both worth your time, for different reasons. As for the rest… well, my thoughts on The Hurt Locker have already been documented, and Inglorious Basterds will get its turn.

I didn’t watch the Oscars.

Well, how in the living Hell can you expect to recap the Oscars if you didn’t spend five hours watching them, hm, hmm?

Simple. People blogged and tweeted the stuffing out of last night’s pop-culture Super Bowl. Which was another event I didn’t watch. And no, it had nothing to do with the fact that neither team that has anything resembling my attention got to the game, nor the fact that I didn’t feel inclined to go to anybody’s house under the pretense of watching a game in which I had no interest just to scarf down free snacks and beer. I would’ve felt bad for the false pretense just before devouring my first wing, I imagine. It’s been a while since I’ve had good wings…

What was I talking about? Right, the Oscars. No big surprises.

Before we get to “the little movie that could” as MovieBob called it, let’s not forget that one of my personal and probably all-time favorite animated films, Up, walked away with two Oscars – Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. The music in the film was instrumental in the storytelling and I’m glad that got recognized. I’m really looking forward to watching Inglorious Basterds tonight, provided the postman obeyed Netflix in bringing it speedily to my door, and I’m sure that tomorrow’s post will basically boil down to “How the fuck did people overlook this film?” if everything I’ve seen/read/heard is to be believed.

Kudos to Jeff Bridges (FINALLY!) and Mo’Nique for their awards, and Sandra – she’s very sweet. I like her as a person. Some of her jobs have been less than stellar, but it’s nice to see a nice person win an Oscar. Then again, maybe she’s a complete prima donna behind the scenes. I’ll probably never know.

So let’s talk about The Hurt Locker. I’m so glad it beat the stuffing out of Avatar. I had a feeling it was going to earn at least a couple of Oscars, but earning a total of six golden statues compared to Avatar’s three is, to me, a great victory for the proponents of substance over style. That isn’t to say that Ms. Bigelow isn’t without style, as there’s quite a bit in her films. It’s just that her style is far more understated and patient than the frenetic gee-whiz in-your-face nature of glossy 3D graphics and sexualized giant cat-people. However, I have no idea how Hurt Locker stacks up against Basterds, and as I’ve mentioned that’ll probably be something I discuss tomorrow. Maybe another vs. match as I did for True Blood vs. Twilight? In case you forgot, here’s how that turned out.

Anyway, other more learned folk have covered the Oscars and, since I was playing video games instead of sitting through lackluster performances and a truckload of adverts, I have little else to say on the awards themselves. Tomorrow will bring a challenge, as I don’t want to spoil the inevitable ICFN Basterds post in the throw-down. Stay tuned!

The Razzies are the antithesis of the Oscars, in that they honor the very worst in film-making while Oscar honors the best. Or at least the most lucrative. Anyway, Sandra Bullock classed up the joint by showing up to accept her award. She might do the same on Sunday at the Oscars, for an entirely different movie, but I like any celebrity who’s capable of laughing at themselves. So kudos, Sandra. You’re still aces in my book.

Unsurprisingly, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was awarded “Worst Picture of 2009″ despite its monumental box office returns, coming in just behind the blue-furry-powered Avatar. As kind as I was to the film in my review, a lot of that came from touches of nostalgia that help me return to the head space of a more innocent boy who hasn’t been exposed to things like collections agencies, unemployment and Uwe Boll. I acknowledge that it isn’t that great a movie, and some parts of it hedge on the terrible, but I still cannot completely chalk it up to bad writing.

In the article from Yahoo, something caught my eye that I felt bore mentioning:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” was picked as last year’s worst picture and won two other Razzies, worst director for Michael Bay and worst screenplay for Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Okay. Bob & Alex, I know. Well, I don’t know them personally, but apparently Bob’s been to this blog before. These guys worked with J.J. Abrams to bring us both Fringe and the new Star Trek film. Yet they were also involved in Revenge of the Fallen.

“How is this possible?” I often asked. “How are two guys who are distinguishing themselves as smart writers involved with something that, if I’m being honest, is a little dumb?” I think I have my answer.

Who is Ehren Kruger, and why did he ruin Transformers?

A little investigation may have yielded my answer. Apparently Mr. Kruger, before becoming involved with Transformers, adapted the Japanese horror Ringu for American audiences – that is to say, he dumbed it down. So he’s got a track record for making things worse than they had to be. But where did he start? What original works as he produced? Drilling down a little further I found my answer: Reindeer Games.

Suddenly, it all made sense. Now, I’ve only seen Reindeer Games once, during my university years, and I think I might have been hung over at the time. I don’t remember if I was more nauseous due to the previous night’s shenanigans or the awful, awful nature of this film. It’s one of those films that sits there and does absolutely nothing new. I wouldn’t watch it again unless someone asked me to. And gave me proper incentive.

Yeah, pretty shameless plug, I know. Click on those ads on the right while you’re at it, ad-clickers.

Anyway.

So the guy who shat out Reindeer Games and watered down Ringu for the fans of Jason & Freddy got involved with Orci & Kurtzman? That’s like having Gordon Ramsay and Morimoto-sama working together on a dish and inviting a hobo to come in and contribute whatever they want. Whatever delicious experimentation the two experts have undertaken is going to be completely overpowered by the rotgut, old anchovies and that shoe the hobo was chewing on before he got picked up. No wonder Revenge of the Fallen was such a mess. It all makes sense now!

Don’t read this as a diatribe against collaboration. Working with other people on a project often yields better results than going it alone. Peter Jackson could have worked alone to adapt The Lord of the Rings, but working with Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh made the films into masterpieces. Chuck Wendig wouldn’t have been able to blast his latest script draft in the face without the suggestions & input from people at Sundance. Well, maybe he could have, this is the Magic Talking Beardface we’re talking about.

All I’m saying is it takes one bad cook to spoil the meal. George Lucas insisted on so many things in the Star Wars prequels and had so much momentum behind him that nobody dared to question his decisions. I wonder if Kruger had Michael Bay firmly in his corner and pushed him to make changes to the screenplay after Bob & Alex were done with it. Other explanations make less sense. Bob & Alex, on their own, do good work. I just have to imagine that Kruger & Bay destroyed most if not all of the good they did for Revenge of the Fallen. Or maybe everybody was drunk. I think a couple of the cameramen certainly were.

Anyway, that’s what sprang to mind when I saw that third name on the list for the Razzie those guys won. This is just my opinion, I have no evidence to support it, rant rage etc. Nothing to see here, move along.

I’ll probably talk about the Oscars tomorrow. Not sure if I want to watch them, but I’ll be sure to talk about them. I have better things to do with my time. Like watch my lovely wife play the lovely Assassin’s Creed II. It certainly looks better than the first, which is a game I never finished.

More on that soon, too.

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Currently, the prevailing definition of the word “gamer” is “someone who plays video games.” However, the label has an older connotation. For years, gamers were people who populated the tables of college dorm basements, comic store back rooms and Mom’s dining room, one of them hunched behind a screen describing unspeakable horrors while the others rolled dice, complained about rulings and flung Cheetos at each other. Thankfully, that hobby is alive and well in the world of testosterone-charged first-person shooters and time-destroying MMOGs. With love in its heart and tongue firmly in its cheek, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising shows us how these “real” gamers live and play.

Produced by the Dead Gentlemen, Dorkness Rising is a follow-up to the original film called The Gamers. However, it’s not necessarily a sequel. The story centers on Kevin Lodge, a man struggling to create a unique campaign world for Dungeons & Dragons and writing up its first module. His regular gaming group, however, is frustrating him at every turn due to their shameless power-gaming rules-mongering ways. To fill the ranks of their small group, one of the players – arrogant, by-the-book Cass – enlists his ex-girlfriend, Joanna. It turns out that Joanna, like Kevin, is more interested than the story than the rules. The perspective shifts between the players and their characters, and as the adventuring party embarks on their quest to retrieve the Mask of Death from an evil necromancer, the gamers themselves begin to grow in their understanding of both their characters and the reasons they play these games.

At first blush, there’s a lot of similarity between The Gamers and Dorkness Rising. It has gamers rolling dice, yelling at one another and making off-color jokes at each other’s expense. If you’ve never sat down for a session of Dungeons & Dragons before, you’ll get a pretty good idea of how they tend to proceed. There are plenty of jokes about both the nature of table-top role-playing games and the people that play them. Some of these might fly over the heads of a general audience, but anybody who’s rolled dice to determine a hit against a goblin’s armor class can tell you they’re right on the money. Beyond the scenes and jokes themselves, the film’s probably been responsible for an explosion of conversations that begin with someone saying “Dude, something just like that happened to me when…”

The surprising thing about Dorkness Rising isn’t the humor, however. This film has got a lot of heart. It parodies the lives of gamers and plays up the hilarity of some of their arguments out of love rather than spite. The story has a lot to say about the nature of friendship, the way people immerse themselves in their hobbies and the process of storytelling itself. Despite the ways in which certain characters behave, the film never resorts to mean-spirited or blatantly gross-out humor to get a laugh. That isn’t to say that this comedy is high-brow, by any stretch – there’s bawdy jokes aplenty. But the jokes never really exist for their own sake. Like action that has the audience riveted in a well-directed film, the comedy in this story grows organically from character interaction and growth.

The only real drawback to this film is that it’s aimed at a very specific audience. A lot of the jokes, references and situations will be utterly lost on anybody who hasn’t ever played a table-top role-playing game before. And beyond that, there isn’t a whole lot to say about Dorkness Rising. Chances are, if you’re at all connected to table-top gaming, you’re aware of this film and you know if it’s up your alley or not. While there’s a lot to like about both of the films in The Gamers series, beyond their good-natured humor and the surprising quality of the storytelling in the second one there isn’t a whole lot to say about them. They’re funny and clever and aimed straight at table-topping dorks everywhere. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then by all means pick these up on your Netflix queue. But not everybody’s going to enjoy the same kind of thing. That’s just as true in the gaming world as it is when it comes to movies. I remember this one time I was playing a rogue in a Planescape campaign and…

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

Okay, ignore Vader in this one. I want to talk about Cleolinda’s Movies in 15 Minutes. Here goes.

*ahem*

GO READ IT.

Seriously. Why are you still here? I have nothing to say today. I have a complete and total lack of energy and the day’s not at all gone well. So go read something that’ll cheer you up instead of depressing you. That’s what I’m doing. Here, let me make some friendly suggestions:

See here it all began with Van Helsing in 15 Minutes (“Bite my patchwork ass.”)

Plenty of love for shippers in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 15 Minutes ( “OUTTA MY WAY, PLEBE, IT’S MY TURN ON THE HORSYBIRD!”)

Hop across the pond for V for Vendetta in XV Minutes (“What if my crazy gets you home safe and unraped?”)

Visit lovely SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAA with 300 in Fifteen Minutes (“Can you make do with a party hat?”)

Witness the horror, the HORROR that she isn’t making up in Twilight in Fifteen Minutes (No, really. She IS NOT MAKING THIS UP.)

Double the horror, double your fun in her latest, New Moon in Fifteen Minutes (“Warm your hands at my chestular fires, baby”)

So yeah. Read Cleo’s work, friend her on LJ, follow her on Twitter. She’s awesome. As for me, this day sucks, bring on another one with less suck, the end.