Oscar’s List – 2009 Academy Awards

*Originally written as a Facebook post on the morning/night of the 2009 Academy Awards. Updated and reposted here, along with the winners, so we can all see how clever Fazil really is… 

Good morning fellow movie lovers,

So today’s the big day. As the Academy Awards is the most important event of the year for me, I have spent the whole of last week trying my best to watch every single film nominated for every category. This includes ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, ‘Frost/Nixon’, ‘The Reader’, ‘Milk’, ‘Doubt’, ‘The Wrestler’, ‘Rachel Getting Married’, ‘Changeling’, ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’, ‘The Duchess’ and ‘Revolutionary Road’.

Heavyweight – Frost/Nixon

So we finally saw one of the most anticipated political drama of 2008 yesterday, Frost/Nixon. In short, it’s a great movie if you’re into that genre. Fazil reckoned that its Best Film nomication at the Oscar is well-deserved. However, Fikri thought that while it is still an entertaining and well-made film, he wouldn’t necessarily place it in the top five films he saw in the past year or so. It is, however, a very ‘Oscar’ film, in the sense that it ticks all the right boxes (the right cast and crew members, the right people behind the camera, the right people doing the lobbying), and so Fikri’s not particularly surprised.

It’s quite surprising, because the film, in a lot of ways, is not really a film. It is an interview masquerading as a film, with plenty of behind-the-scenes footages for support. However, its construction as a film is such that the interview of a former president, though it had an intriguing subject matter at hand, managed to hold our attention throughout the whole film.

Hitchhiker – Film Ticket Price in Malaysia (Part 2)

I suffer from a lot of things. There is, of course, the proverbial lack of time at hand. It is a convenient excuse, one that is no doubt used and understood by many of those who read this blog, as well as those who don’t. Hence, the sporadic updates may appear to some that we’ve, in some way, lost interest in the continuation of this blog. That is not true.

You might also be tempted to see the both of us as incredible procrastinators. In that regard, you would be a lot closer to the truth. A bigger part of that truth, however, is my tendency to try and not to react immediately. I find that I have a difficult time separating the emotional from the logical with a reduced amount of reaction time. In this particular context, what this means is that I need plenty of time to sit down, research, think things through…

Blue Movie – The Paper Will Be Blue

I didn’t actually want to watch this film. In fact, truth be told, I was more interested in what came after the film. Bundled together along with the Romanian short film, ‘Megatron’, I was keen to check out what the best of the competition had to offer. After all, ‘Megatron’ is the multi-award winning international film festival juggernaut, one of the main films responsible for the ascendency of the Romanian New Wave to the top of critical international favour. Simply put, it sounds like the kind of film that I want to make.

But, as such programming goes, the treat that is ‘Megatron’ is scheduled together in a double bill. In a most nationalistic move, the first up is ‘The Paper Will Be Blue’. As it turns out, it is a story that revels in raw grittiness as much as the other Romanian film that I saw some time last year, ‘4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days’.