Bet you guessed all the Oscar winners, right?

Was there a single surprise in last night's Oscars, other than how mediocre the hosts were (A Hathaway at least had a lot of spunk and spirit)? I wish I'd been in a betting pool; I would've got all the major awards right - but then again, who didn't? King's Speech was so obviously the winner all along - but I do think that coming late in the year really helped it; people forgot how much they enjoyed and admired The Social Network. The two screenplay awards were absolutely the only right choices: KS and SN both fully deserving scripts, sharp, surprising, realistic, and daring in narrative style. Some of the therapy scenes with Firth and Rush were among the best-written scenes ever, I think. First deserved the award for sure (Eisenberg was good, but Firth's role much more challenging). Who can object to Portman? - though Benning's portrayal was more subtle and of course got overlooked. True Grit fell by the wayside, and I think that's about right - though I enjoyed the film a lot, it wasn't real groundbreaking movie - though I thought H. Steinberg (?) had a chance at supporting (mostly helped by the Coen Bros daring decision to lift dialogue right from the book - you'd think it would sound wrong but it sounded and played great - actually it was truly a lead role, not supporting). The two best supporting roles, both from The Fighter, are pretty much inarguable, though many liked Jackie Weaver in Animal Kingdom. Those were all pretty easy to pick - but did anyone guess all the animated features? Best song? Best trailer? Best closing credits?

For fans of Black Swan : Check out the real thing, Polanski's Repulsion

For fans of Black Swan, I suggest you check out the source, the ur-Black Swan, and watch Roman Polanski's "Repulsion." For others, go there if you dare - for it's truly a repulsive film and also a great film, in its way - you have to have the stomach for it. Much like Black Swan, it's the story of a beautiful very young and very vulnerable woman (Carol, Catherine Deneuve) who is - we gradually understand - seriously delusional and repulsed by sexuality. In Repulsion, she's living with her older and domineering sister (similar role to the mother in Black Swan) and working in a salon, where she's bossed around by everyone. She's French, living in London, so always a bit alienated; we learn almost nothing about her family except that she seems troubled by a family portrait with her as a young woman. The film strongly suggests that she has been the victim of rape or abuse (or both), but whether by a family member or a stranger - or whether it happened at all - is left undetermined. What we do see for certain is that she pushes away from the attentions of any man and, as it becomes increasingly impossible for her to work (and her sister is traveling with her boyfriend), she stays at home and lets her apartment fester in squalor - and increasingly suffers from weird delusions: cracking walls, hands reaching our for her. Many images of repulsion, including notably a skinned rabbit left on a plate to rot. Ultimately (spoiler here) Deneuve kills at least one man (probably two - some ambiguity on that) - not a happy ending, but a great and memorable depiction of a woman in desperate need of help, a victim. Of course this portrait is all the more haunting when we think inevitably of how it was a foreshadowing of the tragedy in Polanski's life.

The Greatest Show in Swansea : Providence Newspaper Guild Follies

Last night totally enjoyed the 38th annual Providence Newspaper Guild Follies (of 2010). Thanks, all for putting on a great show! Usually old-timers and former cast-members (e.g., me) gather around and grouse about how nothing's as good as it was in the old days - but not when it comes to the Follies. After-show conversations were filled with admiration for how the show continues to get better. The songs were always good I'd say, though years back you could barely make out some of the clever lyrics - pearls before swine, as director Andy Smith used to lament. Now, well, the sound's way better - and the lyrics are in the program, very cool. Not to take anything away from past emcees and monologuists (e.g., me again), but Frank O'Donnell brings a pro's sense of timing and ability to interact and ad lib that we never saw in the older shows. Most of all, the "spectacle" of the show continues to amaze me: the costumes (the Lady Ga Ga # killed) and hair have risen to a new level - probably better than the Oscars which will boringly be on tonight. Used to be a costume was basically a football jersey or a seersucker jacket, and you did your hair in the motel up Route 6 before the show. If the audience could ever see the cramped quarters in which all this takes place back stage they'd be stunned! Though I'll always miss the great Lioce-Mulligan-Kerr-MWilliams writing and performances of yore, the Follies continues to be the Greatest Show in Swansea (or anywhere else on the last Friday in February). Great job Andy and everyone else!

Terrorist on the run : The Fall of Carlos

If there were any remnant of sympathy you might have had for "Carlos" during the first two parts of the miniseries, you're pretty much sure to have no sympathy at all for him in part 3 and at the conclusion; in a pattern fairly typical of stories about the rise and fall of a criminal mind or criminal enterprise (think of the 3 parts of the Godfather), but the third part, the declining arc of the story, the protagonist - Carlos - becomes narcissistic (he even undergoes liposuction), paranoid, physically decrepit, and extremely violent, his worst traits exagerrated as his actual power wanes and his better traits obscured. Carlos no longer seems to be fighting for a cause, but only for himself and his ego. The third and final part of the miniseries follows his from country to country in exile - even his former Arab backers, happy enough to use him when he was in his prime - have no use for him any longer. He's horrible to his (various) wives and indifferent to his cadre. Perhaps most telling - if there was any virtue at all in his earlier acts of terrorism it was because he, in his warped way, believed he was fight for the oppressed and because he was willing to put his life at risk in service to the cause. Late in his career, he reverts to the completely craven behavior of planting car bombs and suitcase bombs, that detonate with no warning in fact - no bravery there, just pure cruelty. And there is little talk of any cause other than revenging slights and affronts. Still a totally powerful and captivating series, but hardly a heart-warmer.

Tough questions: Do you identify with Carlos? Do you admire him?

Part 2 of "Carlos" is equally, maybe more, exciting than part 1 (3-part mini-series version), especially the first half or so, which is a detailed and brutal depiction of a hostage taking, Carlos and three fellow-terrorist storm an OPEC meeting (today, impossible) and take the entire roomful of OPEC ministers as hostages, ultimately freeing some and taking off by plan from Vienna to Algiers. Many things go wrong with the plan, and we're with Carlos every second as he deals with every obstacle and condition - truly one of the most visceral movie segments ever done. One strange question for any viewer is: do you identify with Carlos? Do you sympathize? Part of the excellence of this miniseries is that you do, kind of - you admire his panache and even his idealism (he's no mercenary - he's a true believer), and you have to catch yourself, or at least I did, and remind yourself at times that he's a cold-blooded killer, and that, though I may have shared some of his left-wing ideology at one time and probably still do to an extent (though no great sympathizer with radical Arab causes, obviously), I never condoned the kind of actions he takes on: killing of innocents, attacks on civilians, terror at the barrel of a gun. He's horrible and scary and, though an idealist himself he works with some who are morally corrupt (the Stasi, Arab thugs) - buut it's hard not to watch him and be fascinated about how he goes about his chilling work.

Waiting for Clark Kent: What Waiting for Superman gets wrong

I think I was, officially, the last person in the education field in America to see "Waiting for 'Superman.' " Already, it feels a little dated - at least in my state (Rhode Island) where we've taken major steps at the state level to right some of the obvious wrongs in the education system: teachers who are not evaluated and who are guaranteed jobs for life regardless of performance. The film makes it very clear that bad teachers are harmful to students and that good teachers can advance student learning in any environment, regardless of poverty. There are a few things the film misses, however. First, it's obvious that poverty does present special challenges, which the film does not address at all. Second, the film finds a single cause for the dismal performance in American schools: teachers' unions. Yet the highest-performing states are the most heavily unionized, and the lowest-performing are nonunion states (mostly in the South). Management is as much at fault or more so. Third, the film builds a very nice drama by following 5 kids in their quest to get into charter schools by lottery, but this falsely leaves the impression that charters are the answer. No doubt there should be more charters, but far more important - there should be more innovation in traditional public schools. The filmmakers simply write off traditional public schools as intractable, partly because Michelle Rhee couldn't move the needle in DC - which is mainly because she was so confrontational that ultimately she had no support or trust. Anyway, a provocative film but it falls victim to a short-sighted view of school reform and to a simplistic narrative arc that tells a good story but misses the mark.

Idealism, solidarity, sex, philosophy - and contempt for human life : Carlos

"Carlos," Part one of the 3-part TV miniseries (it also exists in movie version) is powerful and exciting and chilling, very fast-pace account of the rise of an ideological terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, in 1970s Europe - film begins as a young Carlos offers his services to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, at HQ in Beirut, is assigned to an underling job in Paris, shipped to London for an assassination that goes wrong, and then he's off onto bigger and more dangerous jobs, including airport attacks, hostage-taking - ultimately, at end of part one, someone rats him out and he shoots 3 French detectives and takes off. The pace is rapid and keeps you totally riveted to the action, which is relentless. Maybe it's a little too fast a pace - we learn about Carlos entirely from the outside, from what he does, and very little about who he is and what he thinks and what made him the way he is, he never reflects and there's no back story - which is kind of confusing at times, very difficult to keep straight his many relations with various women. Maybe that's the point - he's rootless. He's not a "hired gun," however (unlike the namesake in The Day of the Jackal); he's ideologically committed. M. wondered whether this kind of film would glorify terrorism, but I think the depiction is so brutal and vulgar that it's unlikely to do so. The terrorists here aren't heroes, even if their cause may at times be just - they're thugs, and their lives are awful. It also captures the era very well - the idealism, the odd mixture of solidarity and sex and folk art and philosophy and contempt for bourgeois values, strangely juxtaposed with contempt for human life.