The National Board of Review yesterday named Up in the Air as the best movie of the year, and released a fairly good top ten list–which does not include Up in the Air, because I guess that’s just how they roll–to accompany it. As much as I hated (500) Days of Summer, any list that includes An Education, Inglourious Basterds, and The Hurt Locker is solid and eclectic enough to earn my respect.

No matter. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Roger Friedman (via Irin at Jezebel) thinks the list is racist:

What’s most upsetting this year: the absence of Lee Daniels‘ Precious. It’s not a total surprise. The NBR is not a multicultural organization. They completely ignored Dreamgirls in 2006. Snubbing Precious fits in with Schulhof’s track record perfectly. Let’s just say it: They do not like black movies, period.

To get the obvious out of the way, ignoring Dreamgirls is not indicative of not liking black movies. It’s indicative of not liking bad, horribly overwrought melodramas. The fact that a film with only one watchable scene was seriously considered during award season was a travesty, and good on NBR for resisting.

I can’t personally comment on the artistic merits of Precious, as I haven’t seen it, but clearly there are plenty of reasons short of racism to exclude it from a best-of list. Indeed, it’s more than possible to dislike it out of concern for race issues. Dana Stevens, for example, hated it precisely because she viewed it as exploitative of the experiences of its characters, “something uncomfortably close to poverty porn.” What’s to say that NBR did not share that critique? As Irin notes, the list also includes Invictus, a Nelson Mandela biopic, and a parallel list on documentaries highlights Good Hair. Assuming racial motivation in excluding Precious, then, seems more than a little hard to defend.

by Ian aka GayAsXmas

Unlike movies, where multiplexes on this side of the Atlantic are swarmed with American film (and where attempts to claim blockbusters as British can sometimes be a tad desperate), music has stood as one of the few areas of real cultural difference. And nothing highlights this more than the British obsession with dodgy charity records.

The biggest selling single this week in the UK is the BBC Children in Need medley performed by an admittedly pretty cool line-up of children’s cartoon characters (the video is charming and well worth watching).There are three of four of these types of records every year – major releases which sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They are often proceeded by weeks of hype and saturation radio play. Given how high profile these singles are, is there any reason for most of them to be so utterly crap?

I am not trying to be some wannabe hipster-Scrooge who thinks the idea is some kind of horrible blight on music. The singles are supporting worthy causes. But if I have to take the increased self-aggrandizing from over-regarding pop stars, I would at least like a little care taken with the end result. Almost all reek of cheap, rushed production, with artists squeezing in tired re-workings of standard classics in between the more important work of making their own millions. Worse are the artists’ own album tracks, which would have received a release anyway, but get a charity logo slapped on the front in an attempt to revive flagging album sales while piggy-backing on the goodwill of others.

The current Children in Need song mentioned earlier is a good example of how to get it broadly right – it was obviously a labour of love for comedian Peter Kay and his amazing background staff, and it has the feeling of a proper ‘event’ with a lot of thought and creativity gone into its execution. A prime example of how not to do it was the 2007 Comic Relief single which managed to take two iconic British pop groups, Girls Aloud and Sugababes, and emerge with version of Walk This Way completely drained of any of its raucous energy.

The rate of charity singles seems to be increasing – we have had about 10 of them in the last two years in the UK. Meanwhile, America doesn’t seem to have this problem (We Are the World being one of the more obvious exceptions). I can’t remember the last time I saw a charity single with a significant hold on the Billboard charts. Perhaps Elton John’s lazy and incomprehensible Candle in the Wind ’97 was the last. I would hazard a guess and say that the sheer geographical size of America, the atomised media environment and few national charities with the remit of Children in Need may have something to do with it. Either way, you should count yourselves lucky you never had to hear C-List reality TV stars doing a bad Michael Jackson cover.

The problem will inevitably be consumer fatigue. Without their ‘event’ status, charity singles will chart lower, sell fewer, and it is the charity themselves who will suffer. As a taster of how to get it gloriously right however, the 1997 BBC single Perfect Day would be hard to beat. Not only is there a truly dazzling array of vocal talent (Bowie, Bono, Emmylou Harris, Tammy Wynette, Dr John, Lou Reed for starters) but by using such a melancholy song, it helps to undercut the self-congratulatory ‘aren’t we having a laugh’ tone which bedevils much of this genre. The moment where the choir kicks in with “Reap…reap…reap…what you sow….” gives the song an air of almost biblical prophecy, whilst also being particularly apt for a inviting people to give something towards a greater good. It takes a beloved song and manages to re-contextualise it without dishonouring the original.

Image used under Creative Commons License courtesy of Kudumomo.

By Shani

SEK — super smart blogger and friend of the House of PostBourgie — writes at his place:

I feel vindicated by the revelation that Iron Man went into production without a shooting script, if only because now I know the reason Robert Downey Jr. had so few quality lines is that he and director Jon Favreau were making up the dialogue as they went along. This approach works when you can endlessly re-shoot uninspired or botched takes on the cheap, i.e. when you’re not filming a $200 million film on someone else’s dime. Favreau delivered all that could be expected working under such constraints: a serviceable plot that relies heavily on the many charms of its actors and the explosiveness of its explosions.

And I, in turn, feel vindicated by his post. But first, I must confess, I didn’t see all of Iron Man. I really wanted to, as I’d heard from many friends that it was an improbably good comic book adaptation. Plus, Robert Downey, Jr. is eminently watchable.

Or so I thought. I managed to get through the first 25 minutes on the sheer strength of Downey’s charisma, and I kept waiting for him to deliver a power line or start cracking wise. But when the script didn’t deliver, I found myself going through my RSS reader, watching with one eye. Eventually I abandoned the film to watch Gossip Girl (Chuck Bass’s eyebrows beat lame dialogue and explosions any day).

Iron Man was not good. As I said to a coworker the next day, it was essentially a lot of scenes of Downey building stuff, lots of fire, and way too much Paltrow, strung together with guitar-heavy music. There was no there, there — not even anything to disbelieve enough to warrant suspension.

What I do believe is that there’s some kind of magic in movie theatres, and popcorn and surround sound can turn a not-good film into a great experience. I suspect my dislike of Iron Man would have been different had I seen it in the theatre. Dark Knight is a similar film that I did see in the theatre. Aside from the bizarreness of seeing Heath Ledger in a new role after his death, the film itself was disconcerting, and, as SEK says, lacked any sort of coherent ideology. Honestly, I disliked it, but it’s clearly a good film, and a much better film than Iron Man. However, if I’d seen the latter on the big screen, I don’t know if I’d still be sure of that.