Movie junkie...

So, in the past several weeks, I've finally gotten around to viewing some of the more celebrated films of 2008, including Doubt, Changeling, Frost/Nixon, Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler. Quite a mixed bag, ranging from brilliant to merely interesting to... huh?

I'll try to offer some comments on each of them over the next several days. I like to save the best for last, so let's start with the shittiest.

Changeling

So, as it turns out, Angelina Jolie is actually a shitty enough actress to piss all over the fantastic story-telling of Clint Eastwood. On the flip side, she is also a fine enough chunk of tits and ass to get award nominations just for rolling out of bed in the morning. The worst acting perfomance to get an Academy nomination in my lifetime. Great tits, though.

The film tells a bizarre true story that is also an off-shoot of the even more bizarre true story of the infamous "Wineville Chicken Coop Murders" - a case so notorious that Wineville isn't called Wineville anymore. The story is compelling to begin with, and with Eastwood's hands on it, I expected better. I hated Jolie's character, and she was supposed to be the heroine. The real Christine Collins deserved a better portrayal. Jolie wasn't believable as a mother whose son has gone missing. She wasn't believable as a mother in the scenes with her son. She wasn't believable as an adult in the scenes where the police are pushing her around. An all around shitty performance. Because of old Clint's boner for Jolie and the money she can bring to the box office, we will never know how great a film this might have been with a less attractive woman who can act. I think Toni Collette would have made this a masterpiece.

The movie was at its best and most powerful when Jolie was not on the screen. Unfortunately, she was on the screen about 90% of the time. The new child actors playing each of the boys are exceptional, especially the 15-year old Sanford Clark (played by 15-year old Eddie Alderson) who finally explains the shocking disappearance of young Walter Collins. Alderson's performance in the scene in which he finally tells his story to the detective seeking to deport him to Canada is worth the price of the rental alone. It is in Eastwood's telling of the story of the tragic fate of those many children that the film shines, mainly because Jolie isn't there to fuck it up with her bullshit, "look at me, I'm pretty, I must be acting" approach.

For the rest of the film, here we have the absolutely true and infuriating story about a woman thrown into a mental institution by the police because she CORRECTLY pointed out that the boy the police returned to her was not her son whom had gone missing several months earlier. I was supposed to hate the police for what they did. Instead, I found myself agreeing with the police that Jolie's version of the mother was too stupid, emotionally devoid and disconnected and too annoying to be believed on this point. Fuck her. Next movie.