Musings as we kick off that Big Fat Movie Weekend

So this is Film Fan Superbowl Weekend (or Chick Superbowl, or Gay Superbowl, or insert your own non-white-male-Republican-analogy here) -- a bacchanalia of too many hours spent in front of a TV screen, eating too much, drinking too much, and staying up too late watching one of the must stultifying three hours of television of the entire year.

I myself am having a cinematic midlife crisis. After seven years of reviewing movies fairly consistently, I just lost my mojo last year. Much of the problem can be attributed to this here little blogaroo. A blog that's a one-woman show requires a fairly high level of commitment, and with a full-time job and a need for sleep, it's nearly impossible to sustain an active blog and a full-blown film review site. Even my blogbrother and reviewing partner ModFab has fallen off the movie wagon for the most part. For me at least, part of the problem is that when you spend time documenting the atrocities of the Bush Administration and his grinning, mindless, foul minions, talking seriously about movies just seems, well, trivial.

It seems kind of a shame to take a seven-year investment and toss it out the window, so we are putting Mixed Reviews on indefinite hiatus and leaving the archive up until and unless we decide to go back to it at a later time, if and when sane people assume the mantle of government and we can once again spend time drawing parallels between Jet Li in Unleashed and Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms.

That said, I'll be at Full Frame Fest again this April, this time on a paid pass instead of a press pass, because since I didn't write much last year, I decided to stop being a freeloader. I love this festival. It's all documentaries, so it's a lovely marriage of film and politics. It's held in and around the lovely Carolina Theatre in Durham. It isn't lousy with celebrities, so I don't have to feel like a total dork. Documentary fans tend to be a pretty friendly bunch. The weather in Durham in early April is lovely. I get to crash at my sister's house, spend some time with my mom's getting mauled by her 120-pound Rottweiler, and succumb to the siren song of Foster's scones on the way to the festival every day.

But until then, it's Awards Weekend. This year the tension is palpable, with talk of late revolving around whether Crash, a film that felt to me as if it had been sitting on the shelf since the release of the Reagan era Michael Douglas LA vigilante flick Falling Down, can Save Christian America from the Big Fat Gay Onslaught of Brokeback Mountain. Last December, I would have guessed that the Academy Awards would be the Jews and the gays duking it out with the marvelous Munich and the equally marvelous Brokeback. But instead, Paul Haggis' self-indulgent, preposterously interweaved, talkfest Crash is having a last-minute surge, triggered by the ensemble award the film won at the SAG Awards.

I don't know who Erik Lundegaard of MSNBC is, but he's a breath of fresh air as he too feels that Crash is ridiculously overrated:

I want to like “Crash.” It’s a film about how race and class blend together — but mostly don’t blend together — in modern Los Angeles. That’s a great subject for a serious film. And while “Crash” sees itself as a very serious film, it’s not a good film because it’s false from the beginning.

What do we talk about when we talk about race? We don’t talk about race. I would argue that this is the big problem with race in America. Our tendency to ignore it. Our tendency to pretend otherwise. Our tendency, in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s words, to “wear the mask that grins and lies.”

What is the big problem with race in the Los Angeles of “Crash”? That everyone enunciates every racial thought they have. So the Asian woman complains that “Mexicans” don’t know how to drive and the “Mexican” mocks the Asian woman’s pronunciation (“blake” for “break”), and the white gun store owner calls the Persian man “Osama” and blames him for 9/11 and the white cop mocks the black woman’s name (“Shaniqua. Big f---ing surprise”) and the black cop calls his girlfriend “Mexican,” as the Asian woman did, even though — she informs him — her mother is from Puerto Rico and her father is from El Salvador, to which the black cop makes it up to her by asking her why all of her people park their cars on their lawns.

“Crash” is saying “How horrible that we're all this way” when most of us are not only not this way but the exact opposite of this way. We may think these thoughts but we rarely enunciate them. Sure, racism still exists, but at its most potent it's usually silent. It's opaque. It makes you wonder “Is this happening because of race?” You suspect but you have no evidence. “Crash” not only gives us evidence it manipulates the evidence.

So count this viewer as another one hoping for a win for Brokeback or even Capote over Crash.

Tonight's Independent Spirit Awards broadcast on IFC may seem like a dress rehearsal for the Academy Awards tomorrow, but in reality it's like one of those parties where the food might not be as lavish and the booze isn't top-of-the-line, but the people are a lot more fun to hang with. This year there isn't a whole lot of difference between the ISA nominees and the Academy's picks, but the journey is always fun.

Of course, for us sociopolitical types, the biggest question about the Academy Awards tomorrow night isn't even how hideous Gwyneth Paltrow's dress will be this year, or whether Ryan Phillippe will have a Norman Maine moment, or whose face will be the most immobilized by Botox. It's what Jon Stewart is going to do with this most fake of fake news "events".