So the news came out recently that the folks who bring you the Oscar awards will tweak how the nominees for the Best Picture award are created. As the story linked above states…
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has voted for a new system which will now result in anywhere between five and 10 nominees, with the exact number not being revealed until all the nominations get announced next January.
Say what you will about what the Academy is attempting, but at least they are trying something new. This risk-taking behavior would be new to the movie industry, a thought I wrote about in a ceditra entry on April 10 of this year when my ultra-secret (and never rebooted) method for randomly selecting a topic to write about landing me the Arts section of The Washington Post and my finger rested on…
….An advertisement for the movie Soul Surfer….
I’m a broken record, but I’ll go ahead with this iteration of the skip.
Soul Surfer is the movie about the real-life story of a female surfer who survived a shark attack, lost an arm, and then…try not to be surprised here…gets back on the surfboard and triumphs over adversity.
Yeah…it’s a feel-good movie. Like tens of thousands of other feel-good movies that have preceded this flick.
Honest to goodness, what is new here? What is new about a stirring story about a person who suffers a setback and then, through gobs of hard work, grit, determination, and support manages to triumph over it. We just saw the same story in 127 Hours last year.
Are these movies supposed to inspire us because we have ben taught from Day One by our parents and relatives to simply give up? Please, can someone tell me what part of my modern culture is instructing me to pack it in, roll over, and give up?
Do you want to see a truly original movie? Have a story where a person suffers some tremendous setback (i.e., injury, disease, loss), works hard to overcome it through hard work, pluck, determination, faith, pain, and support and then…FAILS!
Do you know why Rocky was such a great and memorable movie? Because Rocky Balboa, the underdog we have been rooting for since the start of the movie loses the title fight against Apollo Creed at the end of the movie.
Back to June and yesterday (June 16) was the 41st anniversary of the debut of Psycho. That, like Rocky, was a truly original movie. Ah, where have those days gone?