John Judy’s Blog

This show is haunting me I think.

Not long ago I blogged a musing about the process of cannibalistic elimination on “The Isle” and tonight I just watched the video I’ve embedded below.

Stairway to Gilligan\’s Island

Now I’m thinking of how sad the story is and how I’d do the movie version if I had an unlimited budget and absolute creative control.

My cast would be:

Gilligan: James McAvoy

The Skipper: John Goodman

Thurston Howell III: Jon Voight

Lovey Howell: Christine Baranski

Ginger Grant: Christina Hendricks

The Professor: John Malkovich

Mary-Ann: Keira Knightley

And they’d never get off the island…

(Jesus, is “Lost” just a darker version of “Gilligan?”)

I received an invitation to become a “Life Coach” from one of my FB friends I’ve never met.

It got me thinking: What would I throw together if somebody offered me $10,000 dollars to put down my bus tub and go on for them at the Marriott because they were too drunk to stand?

That led to “Ten Points to the J-Squared Method of Livelier Living” which I am just making up now.

1.  Always pay cash, especially to me!  Things like checks and credit cards imply a belief in a future which does not yet exist.  We make our own futures with J-Squared and the future is brighter when I (and by extension you) have lots of cash.

2.  Liquidity is Destiny.  (See Point 1.)

3.  Debt equals Enslavement.  That’s why I don’t take IOUs.  Why would I want to enslave You to Me?  Okay, role-playing, fine or maybe as a form of barter if you’re a little tight, but in general see Point 1.

4.  Never say Always.  Always.

5.  God asks you for Faith and Trust.  I ask you to see Point 1.   Who’s asking you for more?

6.  Okay, Point 5 was a trick.  I’m not asking.

7.  Never ask.  Always.

8.  I want you to imagine all your bank accounts and all their PIN numbers and all your credit cards and all their verification codes in your mind.  Now to each one of them I want you to add the Special Trust that exists between you and me.  See that Special Trust.  Now I want you to make that Special Trust real by opening a Special Trust with both our names on it with my name as Sole Executer.  Once you have done that you will have made something real that once existed only in my mind.  Cool, huh?

9.  I may need your signature on a few things.  That’s not money or emotional commitment.  That’s just ink.  It’s all just ink.

10.  If you make it through all ten points, maybe you are ready to attempt the next Ten Points.  (See Point 1.  Always.)

I could do this….

I just cast my votes on-line after reviewing all the DVD screeners the producers bothered to send this year.  For the record there were five of them: Up in the Air, An Education, Julie & Julia, Precious and Inglourious Basterds.

The film nominees whose producers couldn’t be bothered to spend an extra hundred grand or so promoting their movies numbered twelve and included Crazy Heart, A Single Man, Invictus, The Hurt Locker, The Blind Side, The Last Station, The Messenger, The Lovely Bones, Nine, Public Enemies, Star Trek, and Transformers 2.

Fortunately, I’d seen Star Trek in the theatres.

And of course none of the Television nominees sent so much as an e-mail.

So, having seen six of the movies featuring nominees and a couple of the TV nominees, I gave it my best shot.  I showed clear favoritism to performances I’d actually seen, actors I liked and movies that paid me to be in them.

You’re welcome, stunt ensemble who worked for J.J. Abrams.

Have I established my lazy, whorish cred yet?

Well, watch this:

For Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role I picked Clooney for Up in the Air.  I like all three other nominees I’d heard of.  (Sorry, Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner.)  However, Clooney sent me a DVD of him being awesome yet again so he wins.

For Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role (Why can’t we say “Actress” anymore?) I picked Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia.  The only other performances I’d seen were Gabourey Sidibe for Precious and Carey Mulligan for An Education.  Sorry, Helen Mirren and Sandra Bullock.  No DVDs from you.  Sidibe deserves credit for bravery but she’s never acted before and I found Precious to be torturous.  Mulligan was good as Smart Girl Comes of Age but not on the same level as Streep.  No doubt we’ll be seeing Ms. Mulligan again though.  She’s good at this.

Supporting Actor goes to Christoph Waltz both for being great in Inglourious Basterds and for being the only nominee I’ve seen.

Supporting Actress was originally going to go to Vera Farmiga for Up in the Air.  I did see and enjoy Anna Kendrick in Air and Diane Kruger in Basterds but not as much as Farmiga’s dissolute middle-aged traveler.  Never saw Penelope Cruz in Nine.  No DVD, blah, blah, blah.

And I did see Mo’Nique in Precious.

If you had told me I would ever in my life vote to give Mo’Nique an award for acting I would have told you them’s fightin’ words and hit you while you weren’t looking.  But god-dammit if you judge by the difficulty of the role, how well the role was performed and the degree of improvement from everything else I’ve ever seen her in….  I voted for Mo’Nique in a movie I will never watch again.

Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture:  Sorry Public Enemies and Transformers 2.  Star Trek cut me a check and put me in its promo material.  I’m sure you all fell down very nicely though.  Star Trek wins.

Outstanding Performance by the Cast of a Motion Picture.  I didn’t see Hurt Locker or Nine.  Basterds was a guilty pleasure, Mr. Waltz’s performance notwithstanding.  Precious was less a movie than an assault.  By process of elimination and by having some great performances by Mulligan, Alfred Molina and Emma Thompson, An Education gets my vote.

Okay, Television nominees were trickier.  I haven’t seen or heard of many of these so I just chose the actors I tend to like or the few I’d seen and found worthy.

Male TV Movie: Kevin Bacon for Taking Chance.  Only one I saw and he was great.

Female TV Movie: Jessica Lange for Grey Gardens.  She will always be better than Drew Barrymore and Grey Gardens was the only one on the list I saw.

Male TV Series: Jon Hamm for Mad Men.  Always superb and the only one of the nominees I watch.

Female TV Series: Glenn Close because she’s my favorite actress among the nominees, even though I’ve never seen any of their shows.

Male TV Comedy: Alec Baldwin for 30 Rock.

Female TV Comedy: Tina Fey for 30 Rock.

I almost left the above two categories blank because my favorite sitcoms were snubbed.  Better Off Ted and Big Bang Theory are vastly superior to crap like Curb Your Enthusiasm and New Adventures of Old Christine.  And how the hell does Larry David keep getting nominated for acting awards by people who should know better?  We’re a union of actors, dammit!

And stunt people.  I did skip the TV Stunt Ensemble category because I haven’t watched Dexter or Heroes in a long time and I’ve never seen 24, The Closer or The Unit.  And none of them paid me or sent me a DVD.

Hey, are we ever  gonna have a Best Extra category?  Because that would be really great!

For Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series I picked Mad Men because it is bloody fantastic and the only one of the nominees I watch.  I stopped watching Dexter after the first season because I didn’t want to be the creepy guy who watches the show about the creepy guy who is no doubt a big hero to actual practicing serial killers.  Also, I looked at Dexter’s body count and technique and just couldn’t buy that he kept getting away with it.  Never watched The Closer or The Good Wife.  And True Blood is worse than a guilty pleasure.  It’s a guilty pleasure that’s badly done.

Outstanding Comedy Ensemble.  I voted for Modern Family because my wife and I watch it together even though we both see the overly cutesy nature of it.  I really, really wanted to vote for Better Off Ted, Jay Harrington, Portia de Rossi and just the whole amazing Ted writing/acting ensemble.  Best sitcom I’ve seen in years.  Of course it’s not nominated and is in danger of cancelation because God is dead.

Okay, none of this matters to anyone except a few thousand industry pros and fans but at least it’s out of my system.

And what’s the use in having a puny single vote’s worth of power in this world if you can’t squander and misuse it?

I should be in Massachusetts.

I’ve spent two nights of my life forcing myself to watch the movie “Precious” from beginning to end.  SPOILERS FOLLOW.

On Facebook I noted it was the hardest movie I’ve had to sit through since “I am Sam” but now I’d like to modify that.  ”Sam” was just a horrible, embarrassing movie that was really the first one at which I had to make myself not leave the theatre.  ”Precious” is a different kind of pain.

“Precious” is “Leaving Las Vegas.”

“Precious” is a story of unrelenting doom, but one  that doesn’t acknowledge the fact.

And that pisses me off even more than the brutality of the story.

Short-form: It’s 1987 and a young girl lives through horrific physical, emotional and sexual abuse.  In one year’s time she goes from being illiterate to reading at the 7th grade level.  She’s known nothing but abuse her whole life but manages to be a loving and protective mother to her two children by her own father.

Let’s grant that huge stretch of credulity.

She learns she’s HIV positive.  In 1987.

The movie ends with her walking away from her surviving abuser, determined to go to college.  She is triumphant.

And HIV positive in 1987.

Roll credits.

Set today, 23 years later I suppose it is possible that Precious could go on and live out all these dreams.  AIDS is treatable and can be managed for decades.  A real cure or vaccine may even be a reality someday.

But I was there in 1987 and I can assure you with a certainty I have of few other things that if you were HIV positive in 1987 you were dead by 1990.

If you want to show me a movie about Precious going down fighting, trying to discover, live and die with dignity, that’s cool.  I’ll watch that movie.

If you want to set it in 2005, as they could have done, and shown Precious learning her humanity along with her drug regimen and triumphing over all her crap, yeah, I’ll watch that too.

Hell, if you want to show me her grown child in 2009, reading the diary of his long dead mother and what she tried to do to give him the chance she never had, I’ll respect the hell out of that movie.

But don’t end this movie with swelling victory music and implied dreams coming true when the truth is Precious dies a miserable death and her kids get put in the system that allowed the abuse that killed her.

You don’t make me watch this kind of explicit human suffering in the name of Truth and then end with a lie.

“Leaving Las Vegas” showed Nicolas Cage drinking himself to death in a way that smacked all the teen party movies and “charming star in rehab” flicks in the face.   For all its artistry and hard truth it left me with a headache.

“Precious” left me nauseated and unenlightened.  It assumed I didn’t know that poor, obese, dark-skinned, abused illiterate girls with babies live in Hell.

Fine, maybe there’s an audience out there that needs such things explained.

But “Precious” also assumed I’d go along with the idea that a bit of intervention would breathe life into a soul that had been smothered in infancy.

And stave off death from AIDS in 1987.

That kind of flippant Hollywood dishonesty is what I abhor.  I can watch hard movies, but don’t make me witness the true inhumanity of this girl’s life and then try to sell me a false happy ending.

See it through.

Otherwise all you’re doing is a Lifetime blaxploitation movie.

So the tumult surrounding NBC’s nighttime schedule has finally distracted me enough to warrant a blog entry.

For the record, I feel no great pity for anyone starring in this drama.  They’re all middle-aged white millionaires and will never know want of any significance again.  Absent serious health or legal problems they should all be deliriously happy until they die.

I feel bad for the collateral damage to their staffers, crew and part-timers, two of whom I know, both of whom deserve better than it looks like they’re getting.

This last part got me thinking, though, “How many people do I know, just among my Facebook friends, who could do a competent-to-outstanding job as host(ess) of The Tonight Show?”

I thought it through more than I should have and refined the question.

“How many of my Facebook friends, who are, to one degree or another, Performers, given the same staff and resources as the current late night bunch, possess the following combination of desirable traits similar to those of the late Johnny Carson:

1. Nice or at least able to fake it for the camera

2. Smart

3. Accessibly funny

4. Decent-looking to very attractive

5. Comfortable in their own skin or at least able to fake it for the camera

(Johnny was by many accounts a horribly insecure man, but you’d never know it from watching him.)

(Question mark)”

Short-form, my answer was “52.”

Longer-form: “52 total (35 guys, 17 women) ten of whom I would rank as capable of doing a far better job than what I’ve seen in evidence lately.”

I also found three friends who could do Doc Severinsen’s old job, except for the trumpet solos.

Note to NBC: Call me.