1) The spliced feature at the start of the Oscars, showing Billy Crystal in scenes from various movies.
2) The part where he shows famous people on a giant screen and says what he thinks their favourite movies are. Examples include "Runaway Jury" for Martha Stewart and "Holes" for Saddam Hussein.
3) Another part of the show the cam focused on stars in the audience and he gave his opinion on what they were thinking. Eg: Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger: "Mrs Billy Crystal"
4) Edward Blake, of Pink Panther fame, is shot across the stage, grabbing the award from the hands of a bewildered Jim Carrey as he crashes into the scenery on the other side.
And yes, THE LORD OF THE RINGS RULE! The Fellowship of the Ring succeeded in destroying the Ring, after reaching the Two Towers, and managed to see the Return of the King. [Did I just sum up the entire trilogy in a sentence?] 11 Oscars outta 11 nominations!! [does a hobbit dance] This trilogy will be to us like Star Wars was to our parents. 20 years in the future: "Pwah! All the movies you kids watch today are rubbish, I tell you! Lord of the Rings, now THAT was a real movie!" "Yes, mah" This gargantuan of a movie fully squashed all the other movies there, prompting the recipient of the Best Foreign Film to remark, "We're so thankful the LOTR wasn't eligible for this category." Quite a pity, though, considering some of the other movies there were really good, but were trumped by LOTR in every single category.
Speaking of movies, I haven't done up reviews for the movies I've recently seen. So up first....
A House of Sand and Fog
A silently moving movie, whose direction and strength lies in its actors. Ben Kingsley plays an ex-Iranian general who was forced to flee to America with his family where they live a lifestyle they can barely afford, in order to "keep up appearances". Jennifer Connelly plays a woman who loses her house because on a tax error on the part of city hall. ["They said I didn't pay my business taxes, but I don't even have a business"] Before the mistake is rectified, however, the city has already sold her house to Kingsley. The rest of the movie follows how she fights, albeit in a rather psychotic way, to get her house back, and the tragedy that ensues.
To me, it struck me that this movie seemed to be about security, and the lengths man would go to in order to secure that security. [Duh....] The pain of Kingsley's wife, to have to keep moving from one house to another, "like the Gypsies". The loss that Connelly feels from losing her house, which her father left to her, and to see another family living in her former abode. What happens when you take away that which is a source of shelter and security to others? They go to amazing lengths in order to get it back. The interesting thing is that for all the people in the film, security to them comes in the form of material things, namely, the house of Connelly that lends to the title of the film.
But take another look at the title of the film. The House mentioned in it is "Of Sand And Fog". Immaterial, shifting objects, with no set shape or form. This should lead you to the main premise of the movie. Security is not found in material objects, and indeed, even solid objects can seem to be of unstable, shifting material. That is what the characters in the film realised. They go through everything in order to gain possession of what they thought they needed, namely the house, and in the end, when they lose their true source of strength, then they realise that their house was actually built of sand and fog and they are left with nothing.
Watch this for Ben Kingsley's performance. As the ex-Iranian general, he exudes a sense of nobility and power, even when he's a roughed up construction worker, or a convenience store clerk.
Big Fish? Small Fish?
A charming, fairy-tale-like movie about the ties between father and son, and fiction and reality. Edward Blum is dying, and before he goes, his son wants to know the truth behind the tall tales his father has told him ever since he was a child. The movie thus follows the life of Edward Blum as he leaves the town of Ashton, joins a circus, falls in love, and eventually marries. The tall tales infuriate his son, because as he's becoming a father for the first time, he wants to learn about what a man his father really was, so that he has something he can pass down to his yet-unborn son. However, all his father ever wants to tell him are the tall tales, and not the truth he wants to hear.
The charming thing about the movie is that you know that all that happened in his life were really stories, too incredible to be true, but yet you want to believe in them. As Blum's son remarks in the film, it's like having Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy rolled into one. The view of his son is that all these are children's fairy tales, not useful to him as an adult, but then again, what are? In his search for the truth, he missed out the little gems in his father's tales worth telling. Also, as his mother says, "not everything your father says is a complete fabrication". By resigning all that his father told him as tall tales, he chucks the truth with the stories, failing to separate the two. Even when he hears the truth, he learns that sometimes, people prefer the stories. After all, which would you want to believe in? The story or the truth? One would give you the bare facts. The other...... may give you a world of fantasy.
For stories are the stuff of dreams. And a man without a story is one without a dream. And a man without a dream... lives his life not.
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