Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Are You Not Entertained?

Every good cinephile remembers the 2001 Academy Awards as a disaster. Chameleonic actor Russell Crowe won the best actor award for monosyllabic he-man Maximus, a blatant makeup award for his failure to win in 1999's The Insider. The daring, provocative film Traffic, made by genius auteur Steven Soderbergh, failed to win best picture, as Crowe's Gladiator took that honor as well en route to winning the night.

The only problem with all this is that it's wrong. Soderbegh sucks, and Traffic is probably his worst film. And Gladiator, well, Gladiator is epic filmmaking done right. Please, head on over to Film for the Soul for the latest entry in Counting Down the Zeroes, that website's extensive look at 00s cinema. You'll find me singing Gladiator's praises: http://filmforthesoul.blogspot.com/2009/04/year-2000-counting-down-zeroes.html

3 comments:

David Bishop said...

Hey, I really enjoyed reading what you had to say on Gladiator. You're not alone.

Joel Bocko said...

Interesting. I respect Soderbergh for his facility and productivity, but I find it peculiar that for the size his oeuvre he has not yet crafted a great film or even one that goes beyond "good" and "well-done." Then again, there's still several I haven't seen.

So why do you despise him so? Do you reference this in your review? Am I going to kick myself for being too lazy to check before writing this? Am I going to come back here to offer a mea culpa for posing this question when I could have just read your piece before instead of after writing this comment?

movie collections said...

Wow..It is really interesting thing about Gladitor. I enjoyed reading from starting to last. The concept of article is very interesting.