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PGA winner: The King's Speech
DGA winner: Tom Hooper for The King's Speech
SAG winners:
Ensemble: The King's Speech
Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, The Fighter
TIFF's audience winner struck again! The King's Speech steamrolled ahead, sweeping the "picture" category for all the guilds leading up to the Oscars (February 27th, mark thy calendar!). And guess who's backing the film? Harvey Weinstein. Make no mistake, the company has done horribly over the years. But when it comes to pushing for Oscars gold, it would seem that Weinstein is still a force to be reckoned with. Of course, it helps that The King's Speech is very much a feel-good, populist film that should do well with a general audience - if they find it. The table is set for the King comes Oscars night.
PGA, DGA, & SAG winners are King
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"Technology enabling trust between strangers" - social currency & reputation capital
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"The internet is forever" is a warning for foolish behaviour. In the near future, this stubborn internet character is going to be a tool for a new currency: social currency, built on "reputation capital." Rachel Botsman explains how it can be used for the new age of collaborative consumption (a TED talk):
VIFF 2010 Mini Reviews: Poetry for The Sleeping Beauty
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La Belle Endormie (The Sleeping Beauty; Catherine Breillat) France. Princess Anastasia was cursed by a wicked fairy when she was born; as a result of her guardians' attempt to "protect" her, she was bound by a spell that would make her fall asleep for a hundred years when she reached age six. She would then spend that dreaming time traveling in her dream before coming to her 16 year old body a hundred years later. From the moment one of the guardian fairies claimed that "childhood takes too long," the film began to build a case against it. For certain, Anastasia - without a proper childhood experience - came to her teenage time as a child, even less self-possessed than ever before. Her tenacious, vivacious personality at age six gave way to a moody, uncertain teenager. Having aged in her dream while not really having actual growing up experience, she was a woman child who was not quite of any time. Childhood seemingly consists of frivolous things, and it may have led to the belief that it is "too long" ("for what it consists of," was what they really meant - 10 or 12 years of your entire life would not be nowhere near the time spent in adulthood). It was rather uncharacteristically unwise of god fairies to believe that - it would seem to reflect a precocious, impatient child's view of childhood rather than an immortal's. Childhood seemed, from the film, to be an important self-esteem learning period. It would've been a really good time to learn the ways of the world so Anastasia could come to the adulthood transitioning time (teenagehood) a bit more ready. By trying to shorten it in reality, they may have inadvertently cursed her with an unfinished childhood that may prevent her from growing up - and growing old - like she should. Anastasia did get some kind of deal for her hundred years of lost childhood (and so did we): her dream scape was hypnotic and magnificently beautiful, brimming with adventures and intense adolescent heartache. It was an interesting film, but, like Anastasia's childhood, remained a road meandering and unresolved.
Poetry (Lee Chang-Dong) Korea. (Cannes 2010 Screenplay winner). Mija lived with Jongwook, the grandson that her daughter had left in her care. While he worked out his angst in isolation and detachment, she sought meaning in the remain of the days by joining various classes and groups offered in her community. She stumbled her way into the beauty of poetry and found her creativity flowing unexpectedly in the tail end of her life. When a girl from Jongwook's school committed suicide and he was implicated in the process, Mija was torn between the sense of duty to protect him from the law and her sympathy for the young life lost. The hopelessness that led to the senseless death contrasted her own struggle for meaning in a beautiful scene in which Mija visited the suicide site, her familiar hat flown off in the rain. Jeong-hie Yun was an irrepressible spirit as Mija, her femininity enforced by her inner strength. Lee Chang-Dong deftly tackled the delicate subjects of meaning and mortality with much more humour and poignancy than you would expect. It would be worth your time to take a closer look at the script that won at Cannes last year.
Tiger mother rebuttals, fun is good, yada yada
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Not much else is new - "they don't have fun for themselves, oh noes!" - but I rather like how pretty sounding this is (via BigThink; this is the best part so feel free to ignore the rest):
Self-celebration is bad because it corrupts an important part of public life: It says people's shared sense of reality should be distorted in the name of good feeling. But self-acceptance is different. It says you exist apart from the evaluations and opinions of others. If you don't have this feeling then you're only as good as the next test.It's true - if you measure happiness by public success, then you'd need continued public success to maintain that happiness. If you measure happiness by pleasure, then you'd need continued pleasure to maintain that happiness. If you measure happiness with a mixture of both ... you get the idea. Rocket science, it is not. Problem is, public success depends on "doing" rather than "being," and on other people accepting our goods as, well, good. It also comes to most people in smaller intermittent doses. It takes time and effort to get people to agree with us on our 'goods,' and we love for our happiness to be imminent and easy. So what a culture that emphasizes the individual's happiness advises its members to do to achieve and sustain this ideal? Self-pleasure and entertainment! To wit:
All misfortune, said Pascal, comes from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.That's the secret to keeping a democratic, "godless" society relatively riots-free. If you can't self pleasure, you'd be a lot less happy than you are now. We sell fun because it keeps the mass in check. At least, that was the plan. But fun without a social component stagnates the group's progress, which decreases collective public successes. And then the Amy Chius complain because there's less public success to measure happiness according to her. It's a rather knee-jerk reaction, but what else do you expect in the age of Snooki?
The meaning of Burlesque
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Fascinating and all that, but I'm even more curious about the speaker's background. I had no idea that a. a university professor can officially be a burlesque performer b. you can officially get credits for taking your clothes off c. you can get a PhD in burlesque d. you can name yourself Dr. Lucky and be hired by the academics and e. performative was a word. I must be in the wrong profession.
Burlesque Performer, NYU Professor
