Last weekend was the Oscars and a lot of people have a lot of thoughts about it. Mostly about how much film and cast of Everything Everywhere All At Once deserved/didn’t deserve their various awards. It’s not something I really want to get into right now because it is inevitably linked to the Asian American experience and things will get heavy quickly. What I will say is that I don’t understand anyone who says it’s a Best Picture winner that nobody will still be watching in 5 years. I couldn’t disagree more. Considering the Best Picture winners of the past decade, EEAAO surely has one of the highest potentials for rewatching. I mean fucking Green Book? Who the hell is watching that in 5 years time? The Daniels managed do something very few films have ever done and that is be massively entertaining and Oscar worthy. Something that the latest Top Gun movie also did. Tom Cruise might not have bothered to attend the awards show but I felt it only fair to finally watch the sequel to one of the greatest films of the 80s. And y greatest, I mean silliest and most homoerotic. Hopefully, we’d get more of the same in the sequel.
I was absolutely sure that I’d seen all of Cocktail before. It’s one of those infamous Tom Cruise films that I guess I just know so much about that I believe I’ve watched it. I’ve seen the beginning, I’m sure. I know that somewhere along the line I’ve sat and watched Tom Cruise chuck bottles of booze around. But, when rewatching this week, I realised that there is a whole lot more to this film than I’d remembered. I guess I just never finished it. It’s like The Sound of Music. Throughout my childhood, I don’t think I’d ever got beyond the Edelweiss scene. That means for a large part of my life I’d never seen the Von Trapp family hike over the mountain to freedom. It does leave me wondering how many other films I claim to have seen despite never making it to the end credits. Have I ever actually watched any film? Is my memory just playing tricks on me? Well, whatever the case is, I can now happily say that I watched an entire film about Tom Cruise pretending to be a sexy barman who can mix drinks with style. It’s not like it’s made my life better but it’s a fact.
There are some movies so iconic that you probably know about them without having to watch them. That’s how I always felt about Rain Man. Obviously, it wasn’t something I was going to watch when it came out on account of being/having just been born. I think the first time I became aware of it as a film was an episode of The Simpsons. It was referenced in the episode when Mr Burns opens a casino and we see the main characters at Homer’s blackjack table. I guess over the years I figured I knew enough about the film to not waste my time watching it and I’ve never seen a problem with it. Thanks to this Throwback Thirty project I’m finally getting a chance to see the supposed Best Film containing the Best Acting performance of the year I was born. It seems like the kind of thing I should be watching instead of the all the B movie crap that makes up most of my TBT jar.
Yipee ki-yay, motherbooker 