Mickey Rourke is good at acting but is crazy as shit

As much as I thought Mickey Rourke deserved and was going to win the Oscar for best actor, doubts begun to creep in about the time I saw him lurch across the red carpet to converse with the dude from American Idol about the multiple bits of jewelry he was wearing featuring pictures of his dead chihuahua, Loki.

You want to think that these Academy dudes & dudettes are going to vote on merit, but they're human, after all, and if they're committed enough to vote, they're probably committed enough to not really savour the idea of a shambolic mess in a white suit and shades going on and on and on for five minutes about how Eric Roberts is the greatest working actor, as he did in his Independent Spirit award acceptance speech. Jesus Christ dude.

I ATE TOO MUCH AT THE OSCARS

Urrrrgghhhhhh the Oscars were last night which means that, as predicted by, like, everybody, Slumdog Millionaire won practically everything. Nice job, England and India. And good for Danny Boyle, who looks exactly like Morrissey. Mike and Vanessa had a little Oscar shindig at their place, which was a lot of fun (until I woke up this morning with what must be a torn stomach lining). Here's a quick re-cap of our night:

- The Oscar show was really trying hard not to suck this year! Good for them, even if they didn't completely succeed. Grouping all the similar categories together was smart and (mostly) well done, and having the acting awards presnted by 5 past winners was pretty cool. Hugh Jackman's opening music number was brilliant and funny, even though all signs pointed to "indulgent." Even the red-carpet stuff was actually not completely offensive, but merely laughable. What sucked was that it still, as it always does, had the stink of big Hollywood bosses trying too hard to not come across as out of touch. The montages, as usual, were not necessarily informative or well cut together (with the exception of the BEST PICTURE montage). And while the changes mentioned above were great innovations, they were still often carried out in a way that suggests that the people behind their execution were still of the stale, clumsy old guard. Cues happened at awkward moments, and the flow was often disrupted for the sake of clinging to some sense of out-dated traditionalism. But I'm nit-picking here. In their defense, it must be a huge, daunting task to actually pull off the Oscars without a hitch. It's a live show, so I guess they did their best. Overall, it was enjoyable in a way that past Oscar telecasts were not.

- I brought over some Delissio frozen pizzas, which, when prepared correctly, are absolutely delicious (hence the name). Too bad I'm an idiot and refuse to follow the directions on the box. If it wasn't for Mike's vast expertise in the frozen pizza arts, we would have been stuck only eating the other 84 things that were available. To name a few: chips (various), popcorn (delicious stove-top AND Smartfood), Smarties, Rice Crispie Squares (basically the best food there is ever hands down no erasies), a really smart shrimp dip thing, jube-jubes, beer, wine, and a glass of water. When we finally rolled up to our apartment, I was unable to fit through the door frame and had to sleep in the hall.

- Some people made some jokes while the Oscars were on and they were funny jokes. Like for example, we made fun of this one English Slumdog winner who started thanking random people from a list, and it seemed that all the names he gave must have been made-up. So wee were like, "Morbo Slazdon, Chompy R. Figgles, Rowena Blingo-Blongo..." Ha ha, right? Well, I guess you had to be there... Oh, and a joke was made about how when all 5 previous Best-Supporting Actresses came out and how they were, like, going to hold all their Oscars together and be like, I dunno, Power Rangers or something. Really, really funny jokes. Real clever....

- Barbara Walters has fine-tuned her question-asking ability over the years... She is now like a robot that is designed specifically to find out what kinda stuff you are sensitive to and then to make you cry like a baby (somebody should actually program a computer to do this for an art project... have a computer assess certain personal info from the user with a series of questions, and then finally point the questions right at the tear-making parts of their brain. It would probably be on the cover of the Arts section of your local paper, for sure. anyways...). I was out of the room at one point, but when I got back, everybody told me that she basically came right out and plainly asked Hugh Jackman if he was gay. And he never said no... And then he teared up when she asked him if his father, the strict disciplinarian, was now proud of Hugh Jackman. She's like a vampire that feeds on the fragile emotions of the most insecure people around: Hollywood actors. Good for her!

- Ben Stiller was really funny. Only, I didn't even get the Joaquin Phoenix reference until someone explained it to me! I didn't even know that Mr. Phoenix had a freak-out on the Letterman show recently. And I found it funny nonetheless! That means that Ben Stiller is a comic genius for being able to entertain both those of us who have a sense of humour, and those that read perezhilton.com (no, I'm not going to provide you with a link. That's gross).

Did you watch the Oscars? At a friend's place with a bowl of Nachos, or alone with your 17 cats? Tell me all about your 81st Annual Oscar experience!

OSCAR WEEK OH MY GOD I'M SO EXCITED OH MY GOD

HAPPY FAMILY DAY! We hope that all of you with families are thinking about them or spending time with them. And for those of you that don't or aren't, well here's a blog post just for you, from your surrogate family here at thesubstream.com. Now, go clean your room. Also, why haven't you done anything with your life?

Moving on...

Holy crap, only 6 more sleeps 'til the Oscars! That's pretty exciting. I've put my winter blahs on hold, I've been out to see a million movies I wouldn't otherwise ever give the time of day (I'm looking at you, Rachel Getting Married) and I've been scouring the internet for some decent Oscar-shaped cookie cutters with which I will make Oscar-shaped cookies while watching Joan Rivers and her daughter set a poor example for my species on la carpet rouge during the Oscar pre-show. Oscar, Oscar, Oscar! Oscar.

This week we were going to bring you a bunch of boring videos on choosing the proper page fasteners for your script, but I put my foot down. I was real firm. Not on my watch, nuh-uh, not during Oscar Week. No way. I said, "Guys, come on. It's the Oscars for crying out loud. It's like movie-geek christmas...". Then, after rehearsing that for an hour in front of the mirror, I got ready to send Mike a text about it but as it turns out, he was already busy making his Oscar picks and planning on delivering his predictions and guesses to you, his adoring public, through a special video series to be presented during thesubstream.com's nightly news broadcast.

Staring tomorrow and continuing DAILY (yes, DAILY) all the way through Friday, we'll be bringing you our special Oscar Week picks and predictions so that you can finally WIN that Oscar pool at work. Just think about it... No-one will ever tease you again for being so out of touch with pop-culture, you loser. And won't it feel good to show up all those know-it-alls at the office who seem so obsessed with politics and the latest human-rights whatevers? I mean, being 'up' on current events is fine and dandy, but really, these days, all that matters when you bump into someone at the water cooler is whether you think Hugh Jackman will be hilarious or not. And whether Mickey Rourke actually deserves to win, considering he looks a bit like a mutant. And winning the Oscar pool will probably get you a raise and a promotion, too... Everyone will want to talk to you and be your friend. That cute guy in marketing might even invite you to go watch an upcoming Raptors game with him down at O'Houlihans Chuckle-House. After winning your Oscar pool, the world will be yours for the taking. ALL BECAUSE YOU'RE SO OSCAR SMART. Or at least you will be, once you watch all our edutational and infomating Oscar Week videos.

So stay tuned to thesubstream.com throughout the week and listen carefully to our resident Oscar expert, Mike "The Greek" Cameron. He'll put you on the right track as you make your Oscar picks. And if guessing the outcome of things is against your religion, then at least he'll make you laugh, as he has been known to be a little bit entertaining from time to time.

As for me, I've got some Oscar picks of my own to make (If you can't tell, I'm picking my nose! ha ha). And maybe I should finally get around to seeing Frost/Nixon or Milk. I wonder how many families are out at the theatres today? Only one way to find out, I guess..

GO JOE

I kind of started losing that giddy excited feeling about all of the big summer remakes and movie versions of treasured childhood IPs around the time I saw the first trailer for X-Men: The Last Stand, and it was gone entirely about 10 minutes into the actual film. It's a common malady, expectation fatigue I guess. I'd been let down too many times. To be a fan of something nerdy like the X-Men is to invest part of your own self-worth into the thing itself. I mean, when I was a kid I was a huge fan of Wayne Gretzky, but to be a fan of his is different. He was clearly the best, everyone knew it. If he had an off game and got the shit beaten out of him by Neil Broten, fans of Marcel Dionne or Theoren Fleury or whoever the hell wouldn't look at you with that raised eyebrow, that "you cheer for this dude” look, that same silent look my girlfriend gave me 10 minutes into Brett Ratner’s shitty X-Men movie.
“Look, the original comic was better, you have to believe me, it wasn’t this stupid-“ – never again. Never again would I have to mewl and equivocate and bitch and whine about how badly they screwed up some part of my childhood cultural experience. If I didn’t get excited, I couldn’t be let down. If I didn’t freak out in front of my wife when I saw a trailer, I wouldn’t have to explain myself six months later walking all sad out of a theatre. It’s worked for me so far.
But.
They found it.
The last thing. My last childhood love. They bought the rights and they’ve made the movie and I am freaking out, and I’ve told my wife. GI Joe.
Snake Eyes is going to be in a movie. I am going to be so incredibly disappointed. And I don’t even care.

Go and see Coraline

I'll be posting a video review shortly, but in the meantime, hear me now - Coraline is fantastic. It's kind of for kids and it's kind of for girls in the weird way that a lot of Neil Gaiman's stuff is, but it's absolutely stellar. All the more so as it seems that we're going to be deluged by even more CG animated movies this year, and it's the little imperfections, the human fingerprints that make Coraline so good while the Pixar crop seem so antiseptic. Go see it!

Back on the WATCHMEN Band-wagon

I kind of made a decision about 8 months ago, when the first slo-mo Watchmen trailer came out, that it was going to be a terrible, terrible movie. It seemed like a fan-made trailer you find on YouTube for imaginary movies like Legend of Zelda, etc. Prior to this, I'd seen a bunch of promising set photos and costume designs, heard about how they planned to handle the tone of the film, learned about what would happen to all the supplementary story material that fleshed out the original, and I was getting ready to believe the hype. I was starting to think that perhaps the greatest superhero graphic-novel in all of history, previously deemed unfilmable by the likes of Terry Gilliam and at one point explored by Paul Greengrass (which would have been super-ultra-cool), was actually a) going to happen and b) be sort of good, maybe. We're talking about a comic book with the most realistic depiction of how actual, sympathetic characters would interact with each-other and the world around them if superheros were real and taken seriously. I hated 300, but was actually super impressed with Zakc Snyder's DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, with its excellent characters and decent performances. Hearing that it would be he who chose to defy the will of Alan Moore was enough to at least pique my interest. I was ready to give this WATCHMEN movie a shot, even though Nite-Owl II didn't seem as tubby as he is in the comic.

Then that trailer came out with that terrible, not-exciting-at-all Smashing Pumpkins song, with every single shot in slo-motion, featuring my first disappointing look at Dr. Manhattan (sure, a tough character to pull off in live-action, but come on... he looks terrible, IMHO). It seemed like, even though they may have gotten the tone right (which, with any adaptation is probably 75% of the battle), they weren't showing us enough in the trailer to convince me that it wasn't just going to be a stupid Hollywood guess at what "serious, intellectual superhero literature" would be like when transferred to the big screen. It was a terrible, terrible trailer, and, effectively, a terrible first impression. That was it. WATCHMEN as a movie was dead to me.

But then, that other trailer came out, with the Phillip Glass KOYANISQAATSI score, which was bang-on. I actually recall re-reading The Watchmen one afternoon about 10 years ago while listening to the KOYANISQAATSI soundtrack and thinking even then that it was a good fit for the epic nature of the story, so hearing it in the new, much better trailer was something that spoke out to me on a personal level. Also, as with any 2nd trailers, it revealed a bit more about how the film's non-action scenes would play out. Yes, Rorschach's voice is a bit much, and yes they refer to themselves as "The Watchmen" which is new and unnecessary, but all of a sudden you got the impression that the story is a multi-layered mystery-conspiracy that takes an entirely different approach to this ridiculous world of super-heroes, which is exactly what it should be. This second trailer gave me a bit more hope that come March 6, my eyes wouldn't be totally flooded with garbage.

And then people started talking about squids, which made my heart sink. But I'll reserve my opinion on this spoiler-ish detail until opening night.

Finally, as of last week, I was still not convinced that this movie's gonna be anything other than total ass, despite any hopes I had otherwise. I found myself combing the internet for any positive signs. Were these beloved characters actually going to come to life in the way I had hoped? Well, actually, maybe so, as it turns out:

http://watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com/

This is, hands down, the best promotional website for a film I have ever come across. The design is slick, but what's really cool are the profiles given to each of the main characters. There's just enough there to convince me that the people onscreen might just be believable after all. I just might give a shit about them, which, if you know the story, is super-exciting.

And now, like a sucker, I'm back to square one. Tonally perfect, sympathetic characters is what it seems were gonna get, even if they get a bunch of other "important" crap wrong. And, for now, that's enough for me. Am I setting myself up for disappointment?