Reader Appreciation Month wraps on Thursday but I hope y'all know The Film Experience appreciates you year round. We'll have Weekly Reader Spotlights for April because I'm having too much fun with it to quit at the moment. Today Victor in Brazil.
Nathaniel: Do you remember your first movie?
VICTOR: First moviegoing experience I actually recall - my mother told she had taken me before, but I don't remember - is Aladdin, when I was 8. I really think it kind of had some deep effect in me, because if there are two things that I love they're musicals and animated films. I still know the lyrics of almost every song in in Portuguese and in English.
I can sing The Little Mermaid in Norwegian and English, so I feel you.
I grew up with the Disney musicals from the late 80's and early 90's. But First Movie Obsession, with capital M and O, was Moulin Rouge!. And that led me to The Film Experience.
Yes, we were all "Truth, Freedom, Beauty, but above all things Love" CRAZY for awhile there with that Bazmark classic. What's an Oscar injustice topic that gets you riled up?
Where can I start.... in general, I kind of hate every single Oscar that comes with "SORRY, YOU ARE GREAT AND WE ARE LATE!" written on the plaque, because every Oscar given as a career achievement award or a "sorry, you lost last year" award just increases the problem. Its like a freaking logarithmic progression, because every time they award someone for the wrong reasons (every reason other than "best perfomance") they make the situation 10, 100, 900, 3000, 50000 times worst.
It always comes back to certain years, right?
Giving Nicole the Oscar in 2002 for The Hours, because they liked her so much in Moulin Rouge!, makes Julianne Moore a loser for the crown jewel of her career. And Renee Zellweger, who lost in 2001 and 2002 and was snubbed in 2000, who we liked so much in Bridget Jones and Chicago, just shows up in 2003, gives the worst supporting performance of the year (or maybe the decade, or maybe ever?) and walks away with an Oscar just because she lost. See how it grow exponentially worst?
The math is perplexing, I'll grant you that.
Did Jessica Lange really won her 2 Oscars for Tootsie and Blue Sky, or did she win for Tootsie because she couldn't win for Frances and won for Blue Sky because she had lost several times and they didn't want to give a 3rd one to Jodie Foster in less than 10 years, before she was even 35. I could give you a hundred examples.
It is perplexing math, always snowballing. What does your moviegoing diet consists of these days: theater? dvd?
Theater not so much, because its wasteland season in Brazil; the Oscar movies have come, gone and I've seen then all and the summer movies haven't arrived yet. Right now in Brazil, the biggest hit in theaters is called Bruna Surfistinha, the story of a middle class girl that becomes a low rate hooker, than a high rate hooker who blogs about her "job" and latter publishes a book, her memoirs of her life as a former prostitute. NO THANK YOU! - but I have to admit, i read the book.
So nowadays I'm most on a DVD diet. Recently bought and still sealed, all on the line to be rewatched: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Rose, Some Like it Hot, All About Eve (special edition), Moulin Rouge! (definitive edition), Nightmare Before Christmas, Death Becomes Her, Dogville, American History X and Beauty and the Beast (special edition with soundtrack!).
You're quite the collector. Okay. Five movies you think ought to be required viewing for all people of the Earth. Go!
Five. Just Five? I'll go by genre, ok. Musical: Cabaret; Comedy: Some Like it Hot; Drama: Sunset Blvd. ; Horror: Rosemary's Baby; Biopic: Amadeus. Sorry, really sorry to leave you out: Michael Nichols combo Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?/The Graduate and my beloved Moulin Rouge!