“We really weren’t expecting to be here in America at all at one time so it’s just amazing to be standing here.” As you probably know, the HFPA doled out the Golden Globes last night, with Kate Winslet, 30 Rock, and Slumdog Millionaire the big winners of the evening. (Heath Ledger also picked up a much-deserved posthumous award for The Dark Knight.)
The highlights of the evening: Best Actor winner for The Wrestler and comeback kid Mickey Rourke giving credit where it’s due: ““It’s been a very long road back for me…Sometimes when you’re alone, all you got is your dog and they meant the world to me.” (Amen, brother.) The out-of-left-field Tracey Morgan riff referenced in the post title. (“I am the face of post-racial America. Deal with it, Cate Blanchett!“) And Ricky Gervais, pint in hand, riffing on Holocaust films — “See, Kate? I told you!” — and deftly skewering the whole process. “I can’t believe I’m not nominated. What a waste of a campaign. Today is the last time I have sex with 200 middle-age journalists. It was horrible. Really. A lot of them didn’t even speak English. Europeans with wispy beards. The men were worse.“
As far as the GitM 2008 write-up goes, it’ll be a few weeks yet, as I’m still waiting for Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler, and Revolutionary Road to open here. But, sorry, y’all — I’m taking a pass on Slumdog Millionaire. I’m sure it’s as wonderful and uplifting as everyone says, but that game show, for reasons I’m not going to go into here, conjures up very specific memories of one of my more painful break-ups, and I know enough about the film to know that at the moment, much like Sideways or Punch-Drunk Love, I’m just going to end up tremendously irritated by it.
Besides, when it comes to works of fantasy, I tend to prefer stories of elves, superheroes, vampires, and the like to tales of ordinary people-like-you-and-me achieving stupendous, wildly unlikely victories against the odds. Because, at least in the former case, you won’t usually leave the theater thinking elves and vampires might actually exist, while tales of improbable good fortune, imho, tend to encourage misguided notions about the world. In other words, see enough movies about ridiculously lucky people (however tempered, as I hear it is in this case, by Mumbai back-alley nightmares) and your expectations about life will get all kinds of screwed up. I’m just not in the mood for it.